Another Word for Magic

by Mackey Chandler

  “In theory, any Derf male could put the axe to the Mothers. But the clan would surely look askance at any doing it multiple times. I’d much rather wait upon one of them who is not active military to do so. It is too easy for soldiers to appear like they feel violence is the solution to everything. With all due respect, I think I’ll leave that custom to Humans.”

  “I’m not recommending it. It was just fresh in mind from reading it. Do you have anywhere secure handy to the hotel where we could store my aircar?” Lee asked. “Then maybe you can free up the two guarding it.”

  “I could probably get away with parking it in the courtyard of our safe house once. If we flew it in mid-day,” Strangelove said. “Even going middle of the day, if we kept going in and out, the neighbors would surely complain about the noise.”

  “It’s silent,” Lee said.

  “I’ve heard the Earthies have quieter ones now but Derf are still very sensitive to noise and would complain about anything louder than a ground car.”

  “No, I really mean it’s silent, not quieter. Why do you think I’m building an aircar instead of just buying one? It’s very special. Revolutionary is not too strong a word.”

  Strangelove’s eyes got big thinking of everything that a security team could do with a truly silent aircar. The insertions, the surveillance.

  “You’re yanking my tail,” he said.

  “Strangelove! Do all soldiers have to be vulgar?”

  “Yes,” he affirmed, surprised she had to ask.

  “Alonso has to do some work on it still. In a few days, he can fly it to your safehouse, or I can go back out and get it. Either way, your men can ride back on it.”

  “It will lift three Derf? That’s impressive,” Strangelove said.

  “Yeah. It’s designed for two Derf and two Humans. It’ll probably handle like a pig with three Derf but it will do it. I’m not sure it would lift four. Alonso would have to try it low and slow for sure. Don’t forget, we have a party with Jeff and April tomorrow.”

  “Yes, I’m keenly aware. I supplied the bartender and server,” Strangelove said. “If you have Alonso instruct one of my men on flying it then he can take it to the safehouse and ferry it to Alonso anytime he wishes to service it, or drop it off right in front of the hotel and take a car back to our facility. Both my men there already know how to fly a standard aircar. How hard can it be to be shown the different controls?”

  Lee chewed her lip and thought. She didn’t want anybody flying her aircar, but realized that was irrational. It would be a real convenience.

  “Alfonso did indicate he wants it out of there, and he’s going to charge me storage fees. Go ahead if you’d trust one of your guys with your life flying and Alfonso agrees.”

  “They’re both superb soldiers or they wouldn’t be there. I’ll call now,” Strangelove said.

  Chapter 17

  Dakota brought the Earth envoys into Heather’s apartment. They looked uncomfortable. Perhaps they expected a throne room and a court. Instead, they found a modern apartment without any of the ostentatious fittings associated with royalty. There were no paintings or ornate gilded furniture. Heather didn’t crave chandeliers, marble floors, or glitter covered ceilings. An antique Waterford bowl on a central table held hard candies wrapped in colorful paper. That was the only decorative item. Heather was dressed casually and sitting relaxed in a chair. She had on pants that were frowned upon for women once again in North America, but then the lady from India was wearing them too.

  There was a rather large man sitting in another chair beside her but nothing about him said relaxed despite how still he sat. Heather didn’t introduce him. Dakota didn’t leave but went to work on her pad ignoring them.

  The male envoys were so alike they might all have the same tailor. The lady, Heather noted, had enough high karat gold on to buy a country estate, and her embroidered outfit must have taken a month of man-hours to make. Yet Dakota hadn’t commented on that.

  “Seat yourselves any way it pleases you,” Heather invited. “If you have any particular rank or one of you is spox sort it out or switch seats when you take turns. I’ve asked my housekeeper to make coffee. If you’d rather tea or something cold she can fetch that.”

  There was a silent round of glances and barely noticeable nods. The India lady and the French fellow took one couch and the Brazilian and Australian the other across the table.

  “The others intimated they like my voice,” the Brazilian said. “Gerald here said I should narrate audiobooks. I’ll keep that in mind as a backup career. We aren’t ranked for this endeavor. The purpose of having four of us is to demonstrate to you a genuinely wide interest in our inquiry. But all of us can speak equally if you wish to quiz us. If we’d sent one spox we feared you might question if he was truly speaking for the others, not of his nation. There are several others interested in determining your will in certain matters, but we didn’t want to descend on you in a mob.”

  “Good, I’d have to entertain a large crowd out in the audience hall you came through. It would be a lot less comfortable. I don’t even have seating for a crowd. I suppose I’d need amplification to be heard. House, can you amplify my voice in the background without an echo or feedback?” Heather inquired.

  “Try speaking now and advise me if it is sufficient,” the house computer invited.

  “Amy, would you also bring some cookies or pastries with our coffee, please?”

  The sound level ramped up as she spoke.

  “Yes, I will,” Amy called from the kitchen. “That sounded strange. You usually just yell and I can tell where you are. That was like it was coming from the ceiling.”

  “You can turn that off, House. It worked well but about half the end volume is sufficient.”

  “That was interesting,” Heather said. “Just in case I do need it sometime. Now, do you want to identify the other interested parties and what you wish to know?”

  “The Swiss, Germans, Russians, Confederation of South Africa and Argentina were all willing to send representatives but deferred to us to represent them. The United States of Central America is interested in what we learn but have no assets affected yet. There were five areas claiming authority over China expressing interest, but none would agree to join us unless we denounced all the other factions.”

  “Good,” Heather said. “We’re safer as long as they are divided.”

  “It is not the official position of my government,” the Brazilian said, “but many of Earth’s governments find a diminished China less threatening.”

  “It is the official position of my government,” the Indian lady said. “If we can divide them further into smaller states at each other’s throats all the better.”

  “It’s safer for them too,” Heather added. “A renewed China might be tempted to do something foolish. I once had to destroy a fleet of Chinese ships in lunar orbit and they still managed to drop a large fusion weapon on the center of my domain. It took years to backfill the crater, reestablish the streets and clear the tunnels near the surface. If that looked likely to happen again, I’d feel compelled to make sure they permanently returned to being a third-world agrarian society.”

  “Most of us are glad your current dispute with North America doesn’t seem to be aimed at making them such a preindustrial society,” the Brazilian said.

  “We just want to be safe,” Heather said. “There is nothing they need from space that can’t be had through the rest of you. They tried to murder about two-thirds of the population of our allies and friends. They are fortunate we didn’t return the favor the same day. I do hope you all know we are physically capable of that? Is that what your visit is about? We do realize that if it becomes necessary to reduce North America’s population and industry to the level of the early eighteen-hundreds it will adversely affect the entire Northern Hemisphere. The climate would be cooled for several years. I’d hate to do that.”

  “I don’t think anybody doubts that is possible at present. Your forbear
ance in not automatically initiating an equivalent counter-strike is appreciated, but not the subject of our visit. The removal of North America as a space-faring nation is pretty well accomplished. I imagine you will engage in some… maintenance, to keep it that way.

  “We are not here to persuade you to change that. Indeed, if you said they may restore their infrastructure and have access to space again today, the damage to Earth’s economy is immediate, increasing, and something we all share. North America was the chief sponsor of the Claims Commission and the Commission is destroyed. The fact the North Americans haven’t withdrawn their representative is a farce. The majority of other member nations have recalled their people even though they haven’t formally renounced their membership.”

  “What do you want me to do about that?” Heather asked. “The Commission was one of the few things you ever did that made any sense to us. The spox from North America, Love, put it into one of many discarded treaties they made with us. We never discouraged it other than trying to dissuade you from flooding out among the stars armed to the teeth. Even that got reduced to just the point of the spear, the explorers, being limited to defensive weapons.”

  “The historians have never been clear which lines of the treaty were from Love and which were from Singh,” the Brazilian said.

  “That’s because they sat and hammered it out verbally in one short session,” Heather said. “They didn’t reduce it to interim documents passed back and forth a hundred times until every pronoun was nailed down in a final version. It wouldn’t surprise me if Jeff couldn’t remember who suggested what or in what order. He’d probably ask why we care?”

  “We assume any clause favors the author,” the Australian said.

  “I’d argue plenty of seemingly brilliant provisions come back to bite their authors on the butt,” Heather said. “In any case, not too many years later they gave us the choice of engaging in total war or letting them arm their national military vessels. In the end, yielding didn’t save us from being attacked. The entire strength of the Claims Commission was, in my opinion, that it was voluntary. Nations joined because it was to their advantage not under threats. I don’t see how you can restructure it to work now with two huge Earth powers absent from it. And the way it defaulted on paying explorers recently means that nobody will trust it again anyway. Reputations are easy to damage and difficult to repair.”

  “Yes, yes. We agree with everything you are saying,” the Brazilian said. “We’re not here to try to fix that which is irreparable. We’re here to volunteer again.”

  “Huh?” Heather had no idea what he was talking about and wasn’t ashamed to show it.

  “We are keenly aware your ally in the Derf and the Leader of the Little Fleet stated her intent to form a separate Commission when their attempt to register claims was rejected. We are interested in voluntarily joining this new association. We need such a service so we don’t revert to the every-man-for-himself chaos the original commission avoided. The fact an entire alien civilization immediately jumped on board was very persuasive.”

  “OK, this is making more sense to me,” Heather admitted.

  “Nobody wants to publicly admit you have a superior star drive. That has been kept from the general public, though so many retired military and government officials know it that it is slowly leaking out. The media is still enjoined from discussing it. We assume that even though these allies haven’t displayed such tech visiting Earth that you are the power behind their public face. They could not be assuming such authority from a position of weakness. We also saw transit times from adding up the numbers after the fact to indicate either they are hiding equivalent tech or you are providing quick transit to them freely when they need it. You explicitly said their system is a protectorate. Are we in error or are there other factors of which you could apprise us?”

  “You have the sense of it,” Heather admitted. “The situation is quite fluid and I think it would benefit us all to bring you up to speed on recent events.”

  They all perked up and looked interested.

  “I recently sent a peer and technical expert to Derfhome to freely offer our entire drive technology to Lee Anderson. She heads the exploration society that operates the Little Fleet. They were very close to making the technology work for themselves. There was a significant hazard that in testing it they could have done damage and endangered lives. At the worst, they might have destroyed the Derf capital city. I was just informed by the last vessel from Derfhome that they intend to test their version of the drive when my peer returns. This alliance has already proved beneficial. The drive we now have incorporates improvements over our old designs. You should expect to see the Little Fleet and Red Tree with drives equal to ours.”

  Amy came in and deposited a coffee service on the table taking the candy away.

  “May I ask if that will include Fargone, New Japan, or the alien races?” the lady asked.

  “I haven’t been informed of such plans. I’d discourage that still,” Heather admitted. “You should know that both Lee Anderson and her father Gordon are now citizens of Fargone, so you may presume they would offer speedy transportation to them even if they don’t share the enabling tech.”

  “Very interesting,” the Brazilian said. You could see he was thinking furiously, trying to incorporate the new data before saying any more. Heather poured and he welcomed the break to give him some time.

  “Be aware. Central has not joined this new claims registry,” Heather told him. “We’ve been invited, urged to do so, but the principal benefit is joint protection. We’ve felt our own protection was sufficient. However, if our allies have equivalent drives, they can shoulder the burden of protection as equals rather than putting it off on us. So, you need to discuss this with them at Derfhome and see what sort of accommodation can be reached. I have no idea if they will welcome you into their association. Not just because they have better drives. Their alien allies after all have the slower style drives. But their volume of interest seems to be aimed away from Human space to that side. I’m just guessing here but if you join them, are you going to want to register older claims that were registered with the defunct commission?”

  They all looked back and forth between themselves.

  “That was an important aspect of it,” the Brazilian allowed. “Indeed, with reduced exploration and the resulting shrinking economy, the value of extra-solar holdings reachable by our slower drives goes up the closer they are to us. We want to avoid conflict over them. Which of course was the intent of the original commission.”

  “If you speak to Lee, I’d be forthright about that,” Heather counseled. “For such a young person she is very quick and perceptive about follow on consequences. She’ll think you have given it some depth of thought if you present some of the potential negatives too. Better yet if you cite them and ideas to overcome them. Think of some positives to make it worth needing to police the nearby stars. They are after all, more distant for the new commission to deal with. Perhaps you can carry some of the policing burdens or at least carry on a watch over those claims and just call them in if they are needed.

  “It’s a danger still, even with normal drives. One of the reasons we don’t welcome a widespread possession of the superior superluminal drive is that it makes interstellar conflict and crime much more likely. A ship could conduct a raid at the far end of the Human sphere of exploration and be gone anywhere off into the Beyond by the time anyone could respond.”

  “While there are so few nations with these more advanced drives, I think it would be hard to hide acts of piracy,” the Australian said.

  “It’s not just piracy,” Heather warned. “You may have outright war again like Red Tree brought against North America. It would be much worse with fast drives. Also, Home issued letters of marque during the war. The starship Snoopy owned by a partnership of Homie billionaires departed Home as soon as it arrived at Derfhome for the Fargone system. I’m not a gambler, but if I were, I’d bet they are excha
nging their limited and suddenly obsolete explorer missile systems for modern Fargoer weapons.

  “The Claims Commission cut the owners of the Snoopy off from their payments for several claims. It gives them legal justification to seek reprisal against North America for their losses. They are entirely within their legal rights to act as a privateer. I seriously doubt the Assembly of Home will rescind those letters out of love for North America so soon after they tried to kill them.

  “Since I learned of that from Derfhome, a relayed messenger drone from Fargone has informed me the Snoopy jumped out on a heading that likely takes them to a distant USNA starbase at system 4803 where my forces reduced the base and ships with the loss of one of our ships.”

  “Why would they do that?” the Indian lady asked. “They probably don’t have any way of knowing you destroyed it, do they?”

  “No, but that is both good and bad. They likely intended to appear from behind their star and attack the base and capture a warship or two. That’s how I’d do it. They’d capture more missiles with a variety of warheads than they could afford to buy at Fargone. There would be fuel as the base is a fueling system and even after attacking it, the base would have salvageable supplies. Fargone sells radiation-enhanced weapons making such an attack to gain property much easier. That the goods are a little hot for a few months isn’t too difficult to deal with. The way we attacked it left less to salvage but some nevertheless.

  “The good news is my force destroyed the drive spaces of the ships in orbit. They won’t be recovering usable ships to make their own fleet. It’s unlikely there are enough pieces or parts at the base to create a working ship. The bad news is they didn’t obliterate them so their weapons and systems are recoverable. There was also a vessel that escaped and we have no idea if it was jump capable or if it might still be there.”