“Commodore Giannovi, out.”
The image froze and Isaac considered Giannovi’s frozen picture for a few seconds before hitting Record himself.
“Commodore Giannovi, your report has been received,” he said formally. “Construction of the two-fifty-six force intended to rendezvous with you in Hearthfire proceeds on the accelerated schedule. We are currently thirty-two days from deployment and an estimated one hundred and ten days from arrival in Hearthfire.
“There’s a prepared package attached to this recording, including all of Captain Catalan’s reports. It’s looking better than we were afraid of, but the situation on the surface of Vista is still chaotic.
“By the time you arrive, roughly one million people should have been evacuated. That’s barely a drop in the bucket of what needs to be done, but your task group doesn’t have the resources to change that.
“Your orders remained unchanged.”
Isaac paused, relaxing so that Giannovi knew this was no longer the formal part of the message.
“Be careful, Lauretta,” he told her. “Catalan has one ship. The odds of the Matrices showing up are increasing every day, and the chance that they’ll arrive after you do and before I do is damn high.
“I wish we could have sent more ships with you, but you’ve got everything we could spare of the active fleet. We need you to hold that planet. I trust you to know how far to go when you get there.
“I also trust you to make the right call on live-fire tests. I know we need them, but we can’t afford to lose even a single particle cannon before you get to Hearthfire.” He chuckled at himself. “Though that is Dad worrying that everyone is out on their first trip without him.
“I trust your judgment,” he repeated. “I’ll hear from you in a week and we’ll see you in four months. Godspeed, Lauretta.”
Leaving his groundside office, Isaac slipped down the corridor to the biggest office on the top floor of Government Tower. Two Marines trailed him, and two young women in suits flanked the door he approached.
To his knowledge, there was no threat to any member of Exilium’s government. It still seemed unwise to let the leaders wander around unescorted—and even more unwise, given the Confederacy they’d been exiled from, to let the military be responsible for the President’s security.
The two Presidential Security Detail troopers had been police before they’d volunteered to protect Amelie Lestroud. They’d then gone through training Isaac would freely describe as brutal at the hands of his Marines and the surprising number of ex-Special Forces operators who’d ended up in the rebellion.
The trainers had washed out half the class, but they’d been left with thirty-four men and women, all in their early thirties, who were probably the best close-quarters combatants on the planet.
Isaac knew his wife thought the whole thing was ridiculous, but the entire Cabinet had backed him. She had the best bodyguards the Republic of Exilium could produce. Some of them would follow her when she became President-Emeritus, but most would remain to protect the next President.
“Admiral,” the senior of the two Detail troopers greeted him. “ID, please?”
He presented his tattoo-comp and she quickly scanned it. The process validated his ID papers and checked his DNA to make sure he wasn’t someone else who’d undergone surgery to look like Admiral Isaac Lestroud.
“She’s waiting for you,” the Detail trooper told him after the scan. “Marines, coffee station is two doors down to the left.” She smiled. “You know which one. Bring me a cup back?”
Protocol and procedure had their place, but every member of Isaac’s Marine security detail and the Presidential Security Detail knew each other by face and name at the very least.
Amelie looked up as he stepped through the door and gave him the same bright smile she’d shown every time they’d met since she’d proposed. He wondered, some days, how much effort it had taken to hide that smile before the two of them realized no one else cared as much as they’d thought.
“Isaac, come in. I assume my terriers have given you the headache already?”
“Scan checks out; he’s Admiral Lestroud,” the Detail trooper said with a chuckle. “Mr. Faulkner would want me to remind you that you have a meeting with Minister James in seventy-three minutes, ma’am. He’s not on site, so you’ll need to get moving in about forty minutes.”
“I know, Morrigan,” Amelie replied. “Thank you.”
The door closed and the President of Exilium embraced her Admiral.
“Anything to worry about in Lauretta’s report?” she asked.
“Nothing. It’s the longest trip we’ve sent a group of one-twenty-eight ships on so far, but the warp cruisers have made the same kind of journey without problems.” He shook his head. “I just hope we don’t find any more unexpected surprises.”
“We’re going to find some,” she replied. “We don’t know enough about what’s out here to avoid surprises, Isaac.”
“Pulling everyone back and hiding until I have a fleet of dreadnoughts is tempting,” he told her. “Every time I turn around, I keep wondering if my new threat assessment is as wrong as the previous one was.”
“We can’t know.” She hadn’t let go of him yet. “And we have to work with what we know, don’t we?”
“Agreed.” He snorted. “Speaking of, do we know who’s taking over from you yet? Less than a year left.”
She poked him in the stomach, reasonably gently.
“I spent a lot of effort making damn sure we only had a thirty-day election cycle, you know,” she reminded him. “A lot. When my term is up in, yes, a little over eleven months, I call the election. I stand as caretaker for thirty days while my successor is decided, and then I retire to a nice, quiet cabin somewhere.”
“A cabin?” he asked. “Really?”
“Well, I lose the Residence, and I think a cabin is sufficiently stereotypical,” Amelie told him. “We’ll hold everything together for a year, Isaac. After that, it can’t be my problem anymore. I need to step away from government at that point.”
“In a year,” he agreed. “Until then, you’re the President, and you wouldn’t be doing your job if Roger Faulkner hadn’t briefed you on who the likely candidates are.”
Roger Faulkner was Amelie’s aide, a former government minister in the Confederacy. He was reliant on cybernetics to breathe and see after a brutal beating when the Confederacy Secret Police had learned of his participation in the rebellion, but he still saw more clearly than many people Isaac had met.
His wife kissed him and pulled away, stepping over to look out at the city.
“You know, I really did try to get him not to,” she admitted. “I don’t want to face a situation where I might be tempted to make sure I’m in place to guide the next government. Guiding never lasts. I won’t be a dictator, rotating titles to remain in power until my dying day.”
“I know,” he told her, taken aback by her reaction. “But we need to make sure there’s a continuity in terms of plans and projects. The Republic can’t change course on a dime when the election finishes. Evacuating Vista is going to be a multi-year project in the best of cases, though the Matrices’ promising to build the Vistans ships helps.”
“It’s going to be Nyong’o,” Amelie said flatly. “My Cabinet has had quiet discussions behind both my and Emilia’s backs. If she runs, none of them will. There’s a couple of other Senators and one of our newly-fledged industrialists that are putting together resources and planning quietly, but if the Cabinet steps aside in her favor, the job will be hers.”
“Is that even allowed?” Isaac asked. The Cabinet picking the new President was a bad precedent from what he could tell.
“They can’t endorse anybody, no more than I can,” Amelie replied. “We don’t have a lot of major public figures with the kind of presence necessary to run. What this might do is create a tradition that no one serving in the Cabinet when the election is called can run.
“It might n
ot be a good thing in the long run, to be honest, but I think the Republic needs Emilia Nyong’o.”
“You know she’s my cousin, right?” Isaac asked. “Linking every damn President to me is a little worrying.”
“I might care if she was your sister,” Amelie said dryly. “But since I only barely comprehend the familial relationship between you and Emilia, I don’t think anyone is going to care.”
He chuckled. Both he and Emilia Nyong’o were from New Soweto, a colony founded by South Africa and its neighboring countries. The familial and clan structures of New Soweto’s populace were occasionally confusing to even a native who’d spent his adult life in the Confederacy Space Fleet.
They mostly just called people cousin when trying to explain it to people from anywhere else.
“Poking at potential problems, not arguing, my love,” he told her. “I’ll follow the orders of whoever is President, but I’ll be a lot happier with one I know will keep the promises we’ve made to the Vistans.
“There’s a billion people depending on us.”
“And there are four million people I swore an oath to protect and take care of,” Amelie replied. “Numbers aren’t everything. The Republic has to be more important to me, no matter how little I want to leave the Vistans to their own fate.”
“I know,” he conceded, stepping up to join her at the window and looking out at Starhaven. “These people are our first charge. We will keep them safe. But so long as we can help, I think we have to.”
“We do,” she agreed. “Emilia thinks so, too. Just don’t expect a blank check for some grand crusade, Isaac.”
“I don’t have the hulls, the crew or the firepower for that,” he told her. “Though I won’t pretend that cleaning up the mess that is the Rogue Matrices has no appeal.” He shrugged.
“Lacking that fleet of dreadnoughts, though, we do what we can with what we know. And today, that’s make sure we can save the Vistans.”
She tucked herself against his shoulder and he smiled at her reflection.
“Which means I need to convince the Senate to give them a lot of exotic matter.”
22
For the first time in weeks, the datasong in Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters’s command pool was calm. There were no alert icons, no cities in ongoing riots, no warning signs for strange ships wandering around the outer system.
That calm was true, but it also brushed over a vast amount of work being done. The coastal cities were all under the Shining Spears’ control now, most of them with assistance from local military and civilians who had answered the Great Mother’s call.
There’d been no real fighting, thank the warm waters. Entire militaries had declared for the Shining Mother when given the choice. Arriving formations had been greeted with cheering—though Sings was cynical enough to suspect the cheering had been directed toward the trucks full of food instead of the trucks full of soldiers.
There were two question marks in the datasong, areas where the data feeding to the Star-Choirs was incomplete. The first covered three-quarters of Vista, the areas where no radio transmissions or energy signatures survived. The shores that had been wiped clean.
Iron Peaks wasn’t the only landlocked nation on Vista, but the Impact had destroyed everything within hundreds of kilometers of the shores it had reached.
Four of the precious aircraft carriers were now in the wider waters, outside of the two sheltered seas that held the survivors of their people. The datasong told Sings what the turnaround on their recon sorties was looking like, and she tried to control her emotions, to keep her chirping from revealing her distress.
Each of those carriers was launching twice as many sorties as they should have been. It didn’t matter if that was because they’d crammed on more planes or were taking insane risks with the planes they had; they were going to lose aircraft and pilots at this rate.
Sings could have ordered them to slow down, she supposed, but they wouldn’t listen. Those aerial surveys were the only hope for anyone who’d survived the Impact. It was possible that people had survived forty days on their own, but the skies were permanently dark now and the air was growing colder.
Anyone they didn’t find soon was doomed. She didn’t have much hope for their mission, but she agreed with Sleeps-In-Sunlight that it was desperately needed.
There were one hundred and thirty-two days left in the half-orbit they estimated people might be able to survive without massive technological intervention. Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters had looked into the details of that calculation now and truly understood what the analysts had meant by that.
In a little less than one hundred and thirty-two days, Vista’s oceans would start to freeze. No one on the planet would survive outside of the specially built survival domes already starting to go up along the coast.
The second of the two question marks in her datasong was Iron Peaks. She had no idea if the landlocked nation was going to survive the storm to come. They had survived many things the coastal Vistans had not—they were the only Vistans to ever encounter what the humans called snow—but their refusal to speak to the Shining Mother or to Sings herself left them with little information.
They had to focus on the people who had come to them for protection, but there were ninety million people in the Iron Peaks. Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters couldn’t leave them to perish, regardless of their leaders’ choices.
“First-Among-Singers,” a voice interrupted her contemplation. “Look!”
One of the icons she’d been keeping an “eye” on had finally come close enough for the datasong to show her more details. The first of the orbital habitats the Matrices had promised to deliver was entering orbit.
“Check its course,” she ordered. She didn’t truly believe these Matrices would try to finish the job their Rogue cousins had begun, but it would have been far too easy.
“Velocity vector is correct,” her analyst reported. “They will enter a stable orbit at one hundred and twenty-one thousand kilometers.”
The construct was immense, larger than any station or ship the Vistans had assembled. Even the habitats they were building themselves were only about eighty percent of its size. It had begun as an asteroid, hollowed out and partially melted by pulse-gun fire, then spun out to form a perfect cylinder eleven kilometers long and three across.
It was already spinning, a carefully calculated rotation to give it a pseudogravity equivalent to the surface of Vista. From the data Sings had, its critical systems were contained in a section with artificial gravity, based on the same systems her human allies used.
The habitats the Vistans were building didn’t have that luxury. A trio of those would come online in the next ten days, along with five more Matrix-built habitats.
Each would hold roughly two million people. The Matrices had promised six a week, and her own people would scale up to producing three a week within the next few weeks.
They were still building the construction facilities for their habitats, and it was taking them three weeks to build each one. The Matrices only needed a week.
They’d need to continue scaling up. At an average of nine habitats a week, they’d still only get a third of the survivors into orbit before the oceans froze.
Worse, the habitats didn’t have the kind of self-sustaining ecosystems that would provide food and oxygen indefinitely. In time, they might be upgraded to that, but right now, the focus was on getting people off the planet. Food stockpiles would buy them time, but they needed to get as many people to the final refuge as possible.
Everything was predicated on a careful balance, and Sings still wasn’t sure she saw a safe ending for all of her people. A safe ending for enough that her people would survive, yes—a second shipment of two hundred thousand volunteers had left for Refuge the day before, after all—but not a course that would save everyone.
She needed to find that course. She’d failed ninety percent of her race. She wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she failed two-thirds o
f the ones who’d survived.
“First-Among-Singers,” her Voice-Of-Speakers reported. “The Shining Mother wishes to communicate with you.”
Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters chirped sharp acknowledgement and gathered herself.
“I will speak with her in my office,” she replied.
Duty called. She had a species to save.
The water was shallower in Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters’s office, set to her own particular requirements. Some water surged in from the main command pool, but not enough to be a concern to either room.
The water was warmer there, too, tailored to the equatorial waters of her now-flattened home. Even knowing the call she was in there for, the warm water around her legs helped calm her nerves as she settled in behind her desk.
Neither the desk nor the chair much resembled the strange contraptions the humans used for equivalent purposes. The chair was a narrow arc, cut to her exact proportions, designed to hold her long torso and support it at every point. The desk was a semicircular affair covered in small three-dimensional icons.
Most Vistan computer control was by voice. More precise control required the four hundred and two three-dimensional characters of the Vistan “script,” and that meant keyboards easily four feet long wrapped around the user.
Right now, the important factor was the high-fidelity speakers at the top of the desk’s arc. Once Sings was seated, they started emitting the datasong to create an image of Sleeps-In-Sunlight…now the unquestioned ruler of ninety percent of the remaining Vistans.
“Shining Mother,” Sings greeted the Mother. “How may I assist you?”
The title would probably change soon enough. The younger female was no longer merely the Great Mother of Shining Rivers, after all. She would be unlikely to dodge the ancient title of her current role for much longer.
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