Previous Chapter

“What’s the situation, Sargent?” Captain Yang returned his salute as she crouched down with him behind the embankment.

“Enemy’s point defenses are still active at all points on the building previously reported, ma’am,” Lang said, sending her AI a ping to dump the relevant files. “We scouted around most of the old parking area and we think we can secure the plasma guns there.”

“Will that give us a good angle to take out their mag field generators?” Yang asked as she started scrolling through the data he’d just given her.

“Not unless these guns can arc plasma like kinetic shells,” Lang said. “But we can hit the main building from here.”

She paused mid scroll. “What does that accomplish? I’m not looking to cause a catastrophic containment breach of an active fusion reactor, Langley. That doesn’t help anyone.”

“Technically it does short out their planetary defense network in this region but I see you point, ma’am.” Lang twitched a few commands and sent his proposed plan to her tablet. “What’s interesting about the Earthling’s chosen weapons in this situation is how incredibly clunky they are. Nanotech, by nature, is about doing small things. Blowing them up to a large scale is very inefficient and the fact that they seriously took this approach to warfare shows how unaccustomed UNIGOV is to the whole process…”

“You’re not filing a flight plan, Sargent,” Yang said. “You don’t need to give me the specs and background on all the tech involved. Just give me the highlights.”

“You can’t use disassembler fields indoors, ma’am. They’ll just disassemble the building and you’ll be outdoors again, which isn’t ideal for a bunch of reasons, thus you don’t deploy any of the fields indoors. So if we want to avoid the plant’s defenses…”

“Blow open a wall in the main building and run inside.” Yang smiled. “Simple and direct, just like all the best plans. Have you determined the best places to breach the walls?”

“I wasn’t sure what your operational goals were so we made our best guess at the spots we thought would be near an emergency shutdown of some sort.” With a flick of the fingers Lang highlighted those spots on her map. “Unfortunately the plans for this kind of plant aren’t on hand and it didn’t exist before the Departure so all we’ve got are assumptions to go on.”

“Not much but it’s a start.” Yang looked the map over and added a few notes to it. “I’m going to check in with the other groups and see if we can get an angle on any other potential points to breach. Impressive work, Sargent. The Remote Operations Group think they’ve located the plant’s command room based on infrastructure on site. I’m adding that to the list of potential sites to breach and I want you to take point on that team.”

“Me, ma’am?”

“You’re the Earthling expert, remember?” Yang gave him a wry smile. “I know making peace isn’t exactly your specialty but you’re pretty good at thinking around their plans and you’ve got a handle on their temperament. Find and neuteralize their leadership. Offer them unconditional surrendure before you slag them, and let me know if they make any counter offers I’m not looking to wipe them out, but don’t be afraid to force the issue if they’re recalcitrant. I’ll send Priss along to keep you in touch, okay?”

“If you insist ma’am.” He pulled up the map on his own tablet. “Where are we making our entrance at?”

“You’ll be staging from upsilon-2, moving out in ten minutes. Stay on your toes, Sargent.”

---

Upsilon-2 was just behind a large cherry tree. Unlike most of the plant’s overgrown garden beds this tree stood on it’s own with no other obvious landscaping around it. Lang wondered if it was originally intended for that spot or if it had sprouted on its own. He’d hunkered down there with Priss and his picked up team of ground pounders just in time to see the opening salvo come from Fresh Face and his gun team.

In his long career with the Spacer Corps Lang had seen a lot of plasma bombardments. He’d seen the utter devastation left by the Minervans on Newton, the chilling spectacle of atmosphere venting from Minervan domes over Galileo and the heart stopping shock of the orbit ship Great Red Spot breaking apart under focused fire from the Dianan fleet. Each and every kind of bombardment was horrible in its own way. But after watching the Second Galilean War from the cockpits of landers and rescue craft in space Lang had figured he was used to the sight of plasma guns at work.

He’d forgotten that in atmosphere they also made noise.

When the guns blew up the first section of the plant’s outer walls there was just a brief flash of light from their emplacement in the parking lot, followed but a brighter, sharper flash and a huge plume of smoke from the building. Then a massive clap as super heated air rapidly cooled. Finally a bone shaking boom and a pressure wave that hit like a slap in the face. Lang sucked in a breath and shook himself once. That hadn’t even been a big strike, nothing compared to the kinds of shipboard plasma weapons and missiles the Tranquility could bring to bear.

Harry laughed. “I take it you’ve only done space work until now, Sarge?”

“If you don’t count escaping after being grounded in hostile territory twice, yeah.”

“Nothing like the first time you see a big heat gun in atmo,” Keys said. “Hopefully we won’t be down here long enough to get used to it.”

Priss crossed herself and said, “Amen to that.”

“Check you’re gear,” Lang said. “There’s one more team going then it’s our turn. I don’t think we’re going to get ripped up by nanotech once we’re inside but someone on team Earth has gotten creative and nasty so keep your eyes peeled and call out anything that looks off. If they surrender to you give them full privileges under the Borealis Convention.”

“Although be aware that they probably won’t reciprocate,” Priss added. “Most of them don’t know the Convention exists.”

“What if they want to negotiate terms?” Keys asked.

“Then I talk to them,” Lang said. “But Priss is right, they don’t have much cultural or structural support for these kinds of situations so you’re going to have to treat them a little differently.”

“How so?”

“It’s likely they haven’t disciplined themselves against violent impulses ever in their lives. If it looks like they’re about to hit you or shoot you with a weapon they’ve recovered or dump a load of nuclear waste on your head that’s probably exactly what’s about to happen.” Lang made sure to make direct eye contact with Keys as he spoke. “If you believe they’re about to attack you, shoot them. UNIGOV discourages all communication with us martians anyways, so negotiations are unlikely.”

Keys looked uncomfortable at that but he nodded. “Understood.”

A second blast shook the air and Fresh Face’s voice came over the comms. “Stand by, group Langley. We’re making your entrance now.”

“Final check in now,” Lang said.

“Keys here, exo is green, all gear checks out.”

“Yancey, EMGs are running, all other gear…”

---

The six of them piled over the super heated hole in the plant’s concrete wall and into another world. If the streets of Los Angeles were deserted and overgrown the halls of the plant were chaotic and full of death. Yang had picked a spot she thought was near the plant’s command center. They’d found the building’s cafeteria. The wall had blown in and thrown slagged concrete and burning insulation across tables and diners who had probably been enjoying breakfast moments before.

Or maybe they’d just been trying to choke down a few bites while wondering what all the alarms were about. Either way, they’d died just the same. Bits of people poked out from some of the rubble and dead or unconscious bodies were strewn against the far wall like leaves. His AI datafeed, projected on the inside of his helmet, estimated there had been two dozen people in the area. It marked three as still conscious and moving. None of them were carrying weapons.

Harry and Keys had already flagged them as low priority threats and were moving towards a stairway leading up over the dining area. Most of the stairs were intact although some rubble smashed a few steps. At the top a balcony overlooked the cafeteria and a sign hanging there announced that medical and reactor access were to the left, administration and reactor control to the right and personal lockers straight ahead. He took off after Keys.

The stairway proved sturdy enough to hold their weight in spite of the damage and, with assistance from the exoskeletons, they were able to jump the damaged sections without trouble. At the top Harry hesitated. “Do we trust this sign?”

“Why would they put up a sign with the wrong directions on it?” Yancey demanded.

“I dunno, maybe they expected they’d be invaded?”

Lang pushed past them and took point as he turned to the right. “In that case we’ll just double back the other way. But I doubt they’d just change the signs to confuse us, UNIGOV only reactivated this facility recently and their own people are just as likely to get confused by it.”

“If you say so, Sarge.”

Truthfully it wouldn’t have taken long to confirm the sign. Not more than ten or fifteen feet down the hallway a bank of windows looked out over a wide room full of tihn dividing walls, creating a grid of small, eight foot rooms with desks covered in dust. Lang guessed it was the administration room, now out of use. Another twenty feet on the hall ended. Just before the end there was a glass door into the administration room on the right and the hall itself ended in a metal door.

Harry slipped forward and tried the metal door, finding it unlocked. Yancey gave a thumbs up after checking his EMG scanner and then the two of them slipped into the room, guns up and moving in the arcane patterns of the trained infantryman. Lang followed along behind them when they gave the all clear. They found a locker room.

The locker room had achieved it’s final form long before space colonization efforts began so it was a pretty familiar place. Banks of lockers, banks of toilet stalls, individual shower cubbies and textured ceramic floors. The rubber soles on Lang’s boots gripped it well enough but those who’d stuck with mag boots slipped a bit as the smooth, metal soles slipped on the slick surface.

Progress slowed until they reached the end of the locker room and arrived at the next door. Once again Harry and Yancey went through first. This time the door swung shut behind them on its own and before anyone could grab the handle and pull it back open a deep thunk sounded as the door locked itself behind them.

Previous Chapter

The tower was both less impressive and less coherent up close. Less impressive because it became clear it’s red color was not a uniform coat of paint and rather an mix of rust and red leaves on vines that seemed locked in perpetual autumn. The leaves were particularly strange as Brian couldn’t recall seeing any other signs of the season in the city. Then again, the air could be quite chilly and he wouldn’t notice. The fugue state didn’t provide the clearest sense of temperature, just one of many sensations that the technology didn’t really communicate well.

Of the dozen or so towers he’d seen on arrival the closest was squatter than most, a wide structure with a number of arching balconies and smaller spires giving it the appearance of a fan or brush reaching towards the sky. The base of the tower wasn’t really any different from the other, shorter buildings around him. A low, arched stone door frame jutted a foot or two forward from the side of the building leading into a dimly lit lobby with plush benches running around the outside walls. There was a counter for a concierge but it wasn’t manned.

The doors to the lobby weren’t locked either. Brian let himself in, cautiously looking around the lobby, wonder and anxiety warring in the pit of his stomach. He was expecting an elevator or another antechamber leading into the bottom floor of the tower. Instead the only exit from the lobby was a set of double doors on the far side of the room. None of the fugue’s faceless people were present so the building had a very lonely, desolate vibe to it.

“Baker? Any new information on the towers?”

“Not yet. We don’t have any information in our archives on plans to construct anything like what you’re seeing but that doesn’t necessarily mean there weren’t any. We’ve messaged the Sarajevo Vault but no response yet.” Baker’s voice went a little distant. “We’re going to try and show a concept sketch to one of the Light of Mars people we woke up.”

Brian paused, his hand hovering over the handle to the double doors. “Why would you do that?”

“We’re hoping it will do something to jog their memories or at least stabilize their minds so they can tell us something about what happened in there.”

“Not a bad idea. Let me know if you find anything important but if you don’t turn up anything or it doesn’t seem important wait until I check in. I need to focus.” He grabbed the handle on the door and pulled it open. The door swung open and for a brief moment Brian caught a glimpse of the shadow that had haunted him through the city in the reflection on the door’s metal face. He ignored it. So far the night terror hadn’t lived up to its name, just crept into the corner of his vision from time to time so he was training himself to ignore it.

Then the door opened fully and ignoring it became a lot more difficult.

The inside of the massive tower was a ten story tall glass tank full of shifting shadows contained by a heavily reinforced set of bronze or brass bands. The whole scene reminded him of something he’d seen on the cover a book from the 1920s when he was perusing the Vaults during his training. Unlike the shadow person that had stalked him through the streets there was no clear figure in the tank. But he caught glimpses of other things.

Most of them were structures. Tall spires, forests of antenna and weblike networks of cables peeked through the darkness for a second or two then vanished again. Occasionally a ten foot long hand might appear for a moment. Once Brian thought he saw an eye peering out of the tank although it didn’t seem to be focused on anything in the tower in particular. For a moment it felt like the eye focused on him. For the first time he could remember, Director Brian O’Sullivan felt like he was completely out of control of his circumstances. Then the eye continued on its way, vanishing into the shadows after another few seconds.

When he got his breath back he whispered, “Baker, stand by for an emergency shutdown.”

“Are you okay, Director?” She asked, her voice laced with concern.

“The entire fugue, Baker, don’t just shut down my pod turn the whole server off and wake up everyone else still stored here. Find the people as soon as they wake up and keep them under strict observation.” Brian forced his feet to take a tentative step forward.

“Tell me what’s wrong, Director.”

“Begin the procedure if you hear me say ‘bucolic’ regardless of what else happens. Don’t wait for confirmation, just shut it down. Do you understand?”

“Director-”

“Stop talking, Baker. Let me concentrate.”

She made a very annoyed sound but stopped talking.

The hundred foot tall tank dominated the room for obvious reasons but it wasn’t the only thing there worthy of note. A ring of computer monitors ringed the outside of the room. They showed pictures and diagrams that meant nothing to Brian and the text they displayed had that strange, gibberish quality you’d expect in a dream. That set off a silent alarm in the back of his brain, since he’d read everything else he’d seen in the fugue without trouble.

Well, everything written in English.

The mystery of why the text on the monitors was unreadable wasn’t the most important thing in the tank room, however. The most important thing was the man in front of the tank.

Brian had gone through the list of people Shutdown from the Light of Mars project. Most of them were accounted for already. A few were left in Shutdown because they filled supplementary logistical roles in the original project, roles that UNIGOV already had well covered in the present and who would thus be redundant. Only five people in the R&D arm of the Light of Mars had gone unaccounted for. One lead scientist turned up dead of heart failure during the initial Shutdown, a fact that got noted in the Sarajevo Vault but never forwarded to Bakersfield when the project was revived. A second lead scientist had been removed from Shutdown and assigned to a large scale construction project in Asia forty years ago and died a natural death twelve years later. Three assistants had simply never come out of the fugue.

In profile the man in front of the tank bore a striking resemblance to the man who had died of heart failure. His name was Georgi Jaksic and one of the missing assistants was his son. Brian wasn’t sure if he was the elder or younger Jaksic. People from within the fugue stated that they thought of themselves as aging but the algorithms had a hard time generating an idea of what that looked like. It was possible the program gave Georgi’s son, Lazar Georgi Jaksic, his father’s face as a shortcut.

Brian approached Jaksic and a slow and careful pace, alert for any change in the man’s attitude. There was no sign the other man even realized Brian was there until, without even looking up from his work station, Jaksic said, “I was starting to wonder where everyone went. You don’t look familiar. Did they send you from one of the other towers?”

“Not exactly.” Brian wavered for a moment then decided he was as close as he wanted to get at the moment. “I’m here on behalf of Doctor Vincent Vesper, he’d like you to join him on his current project.”

“Vesper?” Jaksic finally glanced away from his work just long enough to give Brian an incredulous look. “Isn’t he working on field frequencies? What does he want me for? Field generation architecture is my field of expertise, much more hardware and much less software.”

“Of course.” Brian desperately hoped that wasn’t some kind of trap question. “I’m just the messenger here, I’m afraid, you’ll have to hammer out the details of all that with him.”

“Tell him I’ll be over to his tower in a couple of hours. I need to finish these simulations.” Jaksic gave him a thoughtful glance out of the corner of his eye. “Of course it would go faster if I could have the rest of my team back long enough to finish this round of testing. I’m guessing Vesper grabbed them all up for another one of his major infrastructure sims.”

“In a manner of speaking, although in this case it was more that he and his personnel were assigned to a new round of more practical tests.” Brian eyed the mystery Jaksic as he considered what he should tell him. He had clear brown eyes, heavy facial features and a scowling brow, not exactly what one thought of as a welcoming expression. But it was a face nonetheless. Whatever this person was he wasn’t one of the faceless projections or night terrors that populated so much of the other parts of the fugue. “What are you running, if I may ask?”

“Power use simulations. We’re going to need a huge amount of energy to get the Light of Mars working and my job is to simulate the changes in load on the grid as the project boots up. I’ve identified a number of places where Sarajevo’s grid will need major overhauls in order to make it work.”

“Interesting.” Brian peered over Jaksic’s shoulder at the meaningless squiggles on his monitors. “How would one go about helping you with this?”

For the first time Jaksic pulled his attention away from his work station and turned it Brian’s way. When they made eye contact a shiver went down Brian’s spine. They didn’t focus on him, in fact calling it eye contact would have been a terrible misstatement of what occurred. It would be more accurate to say Jaksic pointed his eyes in Brian’s direction. “You’re new here, aren’t you?”

The question could have been addressed to the tower at large. Brian was only sure Jaksic was talking to him because there wasn’t anyone else around to talk to. “It’s my first day, believe it or not.” Brian found the dark mass in the tank distracting and tried to keep his attention focused on the other man. His subconscious kept telling him there were things watching him in it, which didn’t make that easy. “I don’t know much about large scale power grids, I’m afraid. Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Of course.” Jaksic turned and pointed at the glass tank and, to Brian’s horror, something within pointed back at him. A hand the size of a normal man’s torso formed out of the black and pointed straight at Jaksic for the duration of the man’s following explanation. “We’re in the middle of the collective unconsciousness here, so we use our own subconscious mind as part of the logic system that drives forward the discovery process.”

“You what?”

“It might be faster to show you. Here.” Jaksic pressed a control on his panel and a small, hand sized tube emerged from the base of the tank. “Put your hand in this and you can join your mind to ours so we can get to work.”

“I don’t think-”

Without waiting for permission Jaksic grabbed Brian’s hand and shoved it into the tube. A small, rubbery sleeve wrapped around his wrist but gave before his hand, sending the appendage all the way into the tank where it touched the shadows within. Brian’s body became paralyzed again and he saw the shadow that had followed him from the beginning of his Shutdown slip past him, onto the glass of the tank, then through the glass to join the mass within.

Two eyes within opened, the depths of their pupils lit with a blindingly bright light that saw past the shadows, past the glass, past the limits of Brian’s very skull and into the depths of his mind. With his mouth hanging open but his body paralyzed Brian found himself unable to say or think anything. Not even the word he’d told Baker. Which was a shame because at that moment what Brian really wanted, more than anything else, was to scream…

Previous Chapter

Carrington stormed into the room and tossed a tablet down on the table in front of him, causing Mond to jump. “I’m a busy man,” the Admiral snapped, “so I really hope this isn’t a waste of my time, Director. In fact, let’s start by seeing if it’s worth my while. What were you people mining under the Antarctic ice caps? Based on the approximate mass and spectroscopic data we’re putting cobalt and nickle in the top spots but there’s a bunch of exotic stuff down in the lower spots and you could make a couple of gamblers very happy if you can clear it up for us.”

“Antarctica was well outside of my jurisdiction, Admiral,” Mond said, his typical neutral attitude struggling to reassert itself. “I’m not sure I ever saw anything detailing what we mine there. I presume it’s comparable to resources in Australia and the extremities of South America, I understand they’re very similar, geologically speaking.”

“I’ll pass that on.” Carrington took a seat and stared at the other two empty spots at the table. The room was empty save for himself, Mond and the Earthling’s two guards. “So why did you ask me here?”

“I wanted to talk to you and, if she agrees, the young lady from Mars.” Mond fidgeted for a second. “You see, I’ve been thinking for the past few days and there’s something I feel I should say.”

“Well, better late than never, I suppose.” Carrington eyed the other man, trying to figure him out. He’d spent more time with this man from Earth than anyone else, Sergeant Langley included, but getting any kind of a solid read on him had proven difficult. The admiral suspected Mond was reserved by nature and Earth culture, for all it supposedly fostered communication and understanding, only seemed to make people more withdrawn and less likely to explain themselves. Add the impenetrable jargon they couched everything in and Mond was a natural enigma. “Did someone let Miss Bertolini know?”

“We did, sir,” one of the guards said.

Mond reached out with one of his prosthetics and carefully, deliberately moved the tablet over so it was directly in front of him. “Why are you asking about the Antarctic mining operations?”

“We sank one of your freighters hauling goods back from there about an hour ago.”

“Sank?!” Mond looked horrified. “Why? They’re entirely automated at this point and those mines are hardly our largest suppliers.”

“Curiosity and general strategic doctrine.” Carrington touched his fingertips together as his hands rested on the table, studying Mond’s reaction. “We wanted to know what you were carrying. Disrupting the transportation of materials in enemy territory is a very basic strategy that has existed for at least seven hundred years. If I told you we were forming a superluminal corridor between Earth and Copernicus to flood your planet with troops how would you react?”

Mond considered it. “Honestly, Admiral, after all the things I’ve heard, seen and done in the last month I can’t say with certainty anymore. That’s… that’s part of why I’ve asked you here.”

Carrington’s AI pinged his tablet causing a small, pulsing green light to appear in one corner. He flicked a finger to answer the ping and room’s comm switched on. “Admiral?” Major Bennet’s voice rose from the tablet. “I’ve brought the Malacandrans, as requested.”

“Send them in, Major.”

A moment later Naomi and Teng were back, both looking a little flushed and windswept. Carrington wondered what they’d been doing. Hopefully nothing that would risk an interplanetary incident, otherwise he was going to have to make a note in Bennet’s official record. “I’m surprised,” Naomi said as she took her seat. “I hadn’t expected a sapiens to be interested in a second discussion with one of the dreaded martians.”

“A fair expectation,” Mond replied. In the last meeting between the two he’d been badly off balance, clearly unprepared to face the namesake of UNIGOV’s preferred boogeymen. Now he appeared more in control of himself. “Particularly given that when we last parted I never wanted to see you again.”

“But you asked me to come here.” Naomi leaned back in her chair, doing a terrible job of hiding the look of scorn on her face. “Why should I listen to you?”

Her derision wasn’t missed by the Earthling across from her. “We could start with fairness.”

“Fairness?” If that was meant to make Naomi more receptive to him it wasn’t working.

“Yes. You gave me a very clear idea of where you and the people of Mars stand, what you hope from us and why. I gave you a very poor response.” Mond leaned forward on his elbows, shining metal hands folded in front of him. “I’d like to try to correct that now.”

She studied him through narrowed eyes. “What brought about this change in heart?”

“Since our last meeting I’ve been trying to discern why you wanted to return to Earth beyond the obvious. It didn’t take long to work out.” Mond pointed one finger at Naomi. “You don’t have space for all the martians in Shutdown on Mars.”

This time Naomi did a better job of hiding any reaction she might have. “What if we don’t?”

“It was just the first step of logic that led me to ask you here. The second step came when I considered that you were the Eldest Malacandran. If Malacandrans only spend their first twenty years outside Shutdown it raises a question. How long was there between any two of you leaving for the vault? Five days? Ten? How long were you the Eldest, Miss Bertolini?”

“Twenty days,” she said. “Bottletown was maintained at a constant population of two thousand, one hundred and sixty people. A few dozen die a year of illness or in accidents, so there is a larger gap between changeovers than you might think.”

“But it removes most of the continuity in leadership that stable societies rely on.” Mond gestured towards himself. “For example, my tenure in the UNIGOV directorate lasted thirty years before I met Mr. Langley and was brought here. If that hadn’t happened I could easily have remained there another dozen years. On Earth, a leader can easily expect to lead his community for twice as long as you’ve been alive.”

“That’s very impressive, Director-”

“I’m not boasting, Miss Bertolini,” Mond said quickly, “although I understand it may seem that way to someone who hasn’t lived the life I have. I’m trying to impress on you the difference in our experience. As I said before, the sapiens life is dedicated to first understanding ourselves and one thing I realized as I struggled with that this week is that I have lived in a society far more used to stability than to change. That was probably true even before the final split between sapiens and martians.”

“You don’t know?” Carrington asked. “I thought the whole point of a Vault Director was to keep track of all those bits of information that were taken away from everyone else.”

“It is. But it’s difficult to do that without the necessary tools at hand and even if you let me use your computers I can’t access the Vaults from them so what am I to do?” Mond chuckled and shook his head. “Sadly, sociological history was not something that I specialized in so I’d have to do a lot of reference work to say anything about what things were like on that front two hundred years ago.”

“What is your specialty?” Naomi asked.

“Music history, believe it or not.” Mond whistled a bar or two of music that meant nothing to Carrington or anyone other than himself, from the looks of the others in the room. “I see you’re not versed in the classics yourself, Admiral. Jailhouse Rock, by Elvis Presley. A tune that has been on my mind for the last week for obvious reasons.”

“Not surprising,” Carrington said, twitching a finger to flag that for later followup. He didn’t think listening to Mond’s favorite music choices would give him much insight into the man’s mind but you never knew. “Why do you think stability is such an important factor, Director?”

“I think the stability Earth has enjoyed has created a blind spot in us, Admiral. I never understood the need for uncertainty.” Mond flattened one hand on the table with a metallic clunk. “The purpose of a sapiens’ introspection is to create an unshakable foundation before action is taken. The care in understanding our surroundings allows us to avoid culpability in actions that harm others. However, all of this leaves us quite low to the ground.”

Naomi nodded. “Trapped in Vaults, in fact.”

“As you say.” Mond drummed his fingers once, then again, before lifting his hand to stare at its fingertips. “The last few days I’ve been thinking about unknowns.”

“How very martian of you,” Carrington said dryly.

“Indeed.” Mond pressed his fingertips together. “And yet, until I did so I didn’t know myself. I didn’t realize how important it was to face the unknown and make it known. UNIGOV exists to bring the stability and self actualization necessary to create a sapiens society. I wonder if our focus on that has been so myopic we’ve actually created our own instabilities. If we haven’t wronged others just by trying to prevent unforeseen wrongs.”

“That’s a very basic problem many philosophies grapple with,” Carrington admitted.

“Perhaps one we should not have forgotten so willfully,” Mond replied. “Regardless, I have reached a decision. I will try to serve as intermediary between UNIGOV and your fleet, Admiral. And your planet, Eldest.”

Carrington sighed. “That’s an encouraging step, Director, but one that I wish you’d made sooner. I’m afraid that history tells us once these conflicts escalate to this level they’re much less likely to be bottled away again. Besides, we still can’t talk to the rest of your Directorate, so there’s not much we can do to open negotiations right now.”

“Well, that depends.” Mond turned his full attention to Naomi. “I don’t have access to the Vault’s records anymore and I’m sure most of your records were taken when Borealis was put into Shutdown. However if you have a working Vault under the colony there are a few things that may open doors for us. Does it have a working crystal storage mainframe?”

Naomi tilted her head to one side, thinking. “Is that the large blue-green crystals in the electrified saline pool?”

“Exactly.

“Then yes, we do.”

Mond smiled. “Good. Here is what I need you to do…”

Previous Chapter

The ship’s hull ran aground with a spine shivering scrape that Lang felt from the pit of his stomach up into the base of his skull. Priss and Harrigan slammed forward against the straps of their chairs, bracing their hands against the panel. Lang stood at the pilot’s controls with no restraints, no seat and nothing but the front windscreen to stop him if he pitched forward off of the bridge. He grabbed the throttle in a death grip and threw his weight back.

For about three seconds this gambit worked and he leaned back over the deck at a sixty degree angle. Then the ship came to a stop and he flopped back onto his ass. “We’ve made landfall!” He called down to the main deck. He wasn’t sure what the appropriate nautical phrase for landfall was but hopefully Yang wouldn’t hold it against him. As he scrambled back to his feet he added, “Harry, Priss, head to your ground units.”

Priss, a veteran of many of the same rough landings he was, instantly hit her quick release and vacated the bridge. Harrigan was a little slower and less certain on his feet but he was gone fast enough. Lang scrabbled to his feet and hit the emergency shutdown command on his screen. Then he followed up by grabbing the physical shutdown lever and pulling it and set the ship’s computer to standby.

It was pretty doubtful the Fleet would want to recover the good yacht Armstrong but energy conservation discipline was a habit one could lose in a single moment of negligence so Lang waited just long enough to confirm the ship’s systems were, in fact, dormant before he left the bridge. The decks below were a mess.

Hard impacts were a part of space warfare just like any other kind of warfare but they were a lot rarer on a ship the size of the Sea of Tranquility. The spacers who’d come down in Lang’s group were mostly off of that ship and even those who had seen combat still weren’t used to the kind of shock that came with running aground. They lay scattered around the deck, struggling to get back to their feet and into fighting trim. Except for Captain Yang. She strode across the deck, bracing her armored exoskeleton and hauling other spacers to their feet like a Valkyrie rallying troops for Ragnarok. It would’ve been inspiring if they weren’t on the deck of the most luxurious ship Lang had ever seen.

Still, his evaluation of the captain went up a notch.

“Go, go, get to ground,” she snapped, pushing spacers towards the side of the ship. Inflatable slides, which were apparently some kind of emergency measure, were expanding off the decks towards the ground and a few adventurous souls had already slid down them and were securing the landing area around the ship.

Lang walked up to the captain and saluted. “Ma’am. The Armstrong is secure, or as secure as we can make it. Once engineering has the reactor shut down we’re ready to abandon ship.”

“Any chance we can reuse her?” Yang asked, doing a visual sweep of one of the yacht’s interior cabins.

“I have no idea without knowing how bad the hull damage was when we ran aground or how hard it will be to get her back into the water. This isn’t my area of expertise.”

“Understood. Get in an exo and grab your gear, then. You can be my expert on UNIGOV. I’ll meet you at forward observation point theta once the boat’s empty.”

“Yes ma’am.” Another salute and Lang hopped down a slide and hustled over to the staging zone which was beneath the world’s most overgrown willow tree.

As expected, the decorative plants lining the river bank and grown wild for decades since their abandonment. Towering shrubs, thick stands of decorative grass and three disheveled willow trees hid the Los Angeles Nuclear Fusion reactor building from view. Most of the company’s gear was already there. His AI pinged the equipment that the quartermaster had earmarked for him and the lights on one of the self propelled cases there flashed blue.

Lang opened it and an exoskeleton driven armored suit immediately began unfolding out of it. Unlike the exo he’d used on his last trip to Earth, this was not a powered suit intended to boost his carrying capacity and ability to run without tiring. That suit had just been a collection of servos and load bearing metal bars. This suit included ablative ceramic plates covering his torso and upper limbs, heat dispersing plastic mesh gloves and heavy, rubberized magnetic boots. The heavier armor could withstand four direct hits from most plasma rifles in service through the Triad worlds. The boots and gloves were rated for two. There was also a small internal air tank and filtration system.

All in all, it was overkill for raiding a UNIGOV facility unless they had small scale versions of the disassembler field on hand. Then it was just inadequate.

As the exo stood up to full height Lang grabbed two grips on the inside of the breastplate and pushed them up. The suit unfolded even further and slipped the plate over his head. Then he pulled down and the whole mechanism began the process of automatically folding itself around his body. Other spacers, part of the Tranquility‘s boarding and security divisions, were doing the same around him. Lang saw they were moving slightly so that the exo’s mechanisms locked around them faster but he didn’t understand the process well enough to duplicate it so he just stood perfectly still and let the machine do it’s job.

Thirty seconds later he slipped his hands into the gloves and patted himself down. Everything felt like it was in place. The extra bulk from the armor was distracting but the suit’s servos were stronger to compensate for the weight so it didn’t feel any harder to move in than what he was used to. The biggest difference was the helmet, which included a heads up display that projected information from his AI when necessary. Lang found it distracting so he muted the function.

He’d just slung a plasma rifle over one shoulder when Priss and Harry turned up. He frowned, pretty sure they’d been assigned to a different ground unit and they were already in their suits. “What are you guys doing here?”

“The bridge over the secondary bypass sluice is out,” Harry said. “South group is now moving with center group and the major until we clear the building we think holds the seawater pumps.”

Lang had been so busy with the yacht and the landing that he hadn’t paid much attention to their plans for once they reached shore. He wasn’t entirely sure what buildings Harry was referring to so he just nodded. “What was wrong with the bridge?”

“Looked like they tried to drive something heavy over it recently,” Priss said. “The intact portion of the bridge was pretty overgrown but the place where it was broken looked fresh so we think it happened when UNIGOV tried to reactivate the plant.”

“Lovely.” Lang slotted his rifle’s spare power cells into his belt and closed up the equipment locker. “Guess their little accident buys them some time, at least.”

Harry was looking down at Lang’s feet. “Aren’t you going to wear your boots?”

“No point. UNIGOV facilities are, at base level, usually concrete walls and floors. There’s nothing metallic there for the magboots to grab onto so they’re not very useful for trick maneuvers and we’re planet side so there’s no chance the artificial gravity will go out.” Lang tapped the toes of his regular boots on the ground. “These babies are lighter and more comfortable than the magboots and the exo’s heels fit either one just fine.”

Harry nodded, his expression suggesting he understood Lang’s logic but didn’t approve of it. “Suit yourself, Sergeant.”

The use of the rank was a subtle acknowledgment that there wasn’t anything Harry could do about it and simultaneously a pushing of responsibility for anything bad that happened to Lang off of the poor, put upon enlisted man. It was the kind of thing Lang had done plenty of times himself. He also didn’t really care if Harry liked his approach or not. He didn’t plan to change it even if the Captain herself thought it was a bad idea.

“I’ll do just that, Private.” Lang gestured through the brush ahead of them. “I’m under orders to meet the Captain at point theta which is right along your new route. Get the rest of your detatchmet together and we’ll head that way.”

“You got it, Sergeant.”

Harry scampered off to do as instructed but Priss hung back to shuck her mag boots and put her normal footwear back on. Sitting on one of the equipment crates she asked, “You’re an S6 now, that means you rate an EMG scanner in your load out, right?”

“I… dunno.” He tapped his helmet and brought his HUD back then opened the crate’s inventory to look it over. “I guess so. That’s surprising. I didn’t think they’d issue that kind of equipment to grunts like us, especially since I’m supposed to fly landing craft not slog around in gravity.”

“Lucky for us. Bring it with you in case the Earthlings decide to boot up another disassembler field, that way you can pick it up ahead of time.” Priss wiggled her dainty feet back into her standard issue boots. “Something like that will get you half way towards another promotion and we can start calling you Master Sergeant.”

Lang grinned. “Not if I properly credit the forward thinking initiative of people like Corporal Hu. Maybe you can look forward to a promotion to Lance Corporal.”

Priss had her helmet on already but from the set of her shoulders she was cringing in distaste. “Okay, I earned that one. I yield, I yield.”

“It might be better if I recommended you to OTC,” Lang continued, assuming an exaggerated thinking pose. “Then you could earn your butter bars and-”

“No, no, no!” Priss threw her hands up over her face. “Please, anything but officer training! I want to stay an honest girl and work for my living!”

“Yeah, Sergeant,” Harry said, threading his way through the supplies with four other men in tow. “Don’t do your girl dirty like that!”

Lang gave Harry a blank look, wondering what he meant. With a helmet in the way it was lost on its intended recipient because Harry just came to a stop and introduced the rest of his team. “Sarge, these are the rest of my boys – Barton, Keys, Yancey and Ramone.”

Ramone was a corporal, like Priss, but the rest were Privates or PFCs. “Pleased to meet you gentlemen. Today we’re going on a quick stroll from here to point theta, where we’ll go on our separate ways. Corporal Ramone, I take it you’re in charge of south group?”

“You got it, Sergeant,” Ramone said. He was a hair shorter than Lang but incredibly stocky, like a brick wall got up to go for a walk. “You going center?”

“I’m going with the Captain wherever she chooses to wind up.”

Ramone nodded sagely. “OBS duty.”

“After the month I’ve had, officer babysitting will be a dream come true,” Lang said. Although he wasn’t sure that was true, given that the officer in question was Captain Yang and she didn’t seem the type to take things easy. He fished his EMG scanner out of his equipment crate and held it up. “Anyone here familiar with how to run one of these? I’m afraid I only use the kind built into landers.”

Yancey raised his hand. “EMG was my secondary specialty in advanced training, Sarge. We had to run a standard orienteering course with one of those as part of our final qualifications.”

Lang slapped the bulky sensor package into the PFC’s hands and said, “Congratulations, Yancey. You’re now in charge of watching out for the enemy’s primary weapon’s system.”

“Aye, sir,” Yancey said, securing the EMG scanner to his armor’s forward hard points across his chest. “I’ll let you know the moment I pick up any sign of an anomalous magnetic field. Just be aware that we may need to go slow. The fusion plant itself puts out a monstrous mag field. It’ll take a couple of seconds for the sensor to pick through that kind of background noise as we advance.”

“Speed is worth more than safety in this situation,” Lang said, “although I’ll take all I can of both. Just tell me if you see anything out of the ordinary. Let’s go boys.”

As it turned out they got around the brush patch and halfway to point theta before Yancey found anything. They were cresting a low hill that formed an artificial bowl around the reactor, probably intended to channel any major leaks from the reactor buildings out to sea and away from the city, when the private announced, “Magnetic spike, Sarge. Six and a half Teslas of force, originating from the direction of the reactor building.”

“It’s growing?” Lang asked.

“Not right now,” Yancey said, tapping on the EMG rig to make some kind of adjustment. “But it wasn’t there before. The signal just popped up out of nowhere, it’s not something the sensor sorted out of the background noise.”

“Maybe the hill was blocking it?” Keys suggested.

“No, if the hill was made out of something that could block a magnetic field the reactor’s signature would’ve lost strength as we got closer to it. This field wasn’t there a minute ago, so somebody just turned it on.”

“Got it.” Lang tapped Harry and Barton on their shoulders. “Head up and peak over the hill, bring me a report.”

Two minutes later Harry was back, leaving Barton to watch the reactor building as he withdrew. “Definitely a disassembler field, Sarge. We could pick up the glittery effect plain as day. It might have been different if the sun got up higher but since we hit them so early in the morning the sunlight is still at an angle to really refract off the nanotech.”

“So they’ve got some kind of defense for the reactor facilities,” Lang mused.

“But not comprehensive,” Harry said. “We only saw signs of the field around the freight entrance on the southern building. We can probably advance to point theta safely.”

“Unless they can expand the field,” Lang said.

“Yes. Unless that.”

Point theta was a large road structure which the AI identified as a ’roundabout,’ a circular patch of road with another ornamental garden bed in it, according to the map. If it held to pattern there would be another large patch of shrubs they could use for cover there. However cover was only meaningful if it kept them from view; if UNIGOV already knew they were present it wouldn’t mean anything in the face of an expanding disassembler field. Point theta wasn’t a good place for them to rally anymore. They’d be safer in among the buildings of the complex itself than they would along the roads connecting them.

“Priss. Call up the Captain and inform her that point theta is compromised and suggest a new meeting place.”

She started working her comms unit before Lang even finished working. “What should I suggest as our new rallying point?”

“That depends. Did Lieutenant Fresh Face pull the deck guns off the Armstrong yet?”

Previous Chapter

“Admiral, you’re not going to believe what the Isaacs want to try now.”

Carrington looked up from his personal holodisplay where he’d been trying to catch up on the reports and paperwork that were the constant price of good administration. Naomi and company were off on some thing with Major Bennet. It gave him a few hours away from the dignitaries to try and get caught up on his other duties and he really, really wanted to to do anything else. The baffled look on the comm officer’s face promised him something far more interesting. “I take it they’re asking for more than another change in the fleet’s overall formation?”

“They sent over a presentation.”

The Newtonian’s ideas just became a lot less interesting. “Can you summarize?”

“One of their fighter pilots thinks he’s a space pirate now.”

“Does he want to join the Minervan spacers or something? I don’t think the Remus has facilities to service an OF-28, much less the desire. Is he qualified on their gunboats?”

“I don’t know, sir, but he’s not actually looking to defect to the Moonies. He wants hijack a freighter.”

Carrington rubbed his chin, wondering where that idea had come from and why a fighter pilot, of all things, would want to try it. Copernican pilots generally liked challenging flight tasks. Capturing freighters, space bound or otherwise, didn’t really qualify. He’d discussed the movement of materiel on Earth with Ollinger before but he didn’t think that conversation was widely discussed through the fleet. Then again, it was foolish to underestimate the intelligence gathering abilities of bored spacers. “Very well, Lieutenant, I suppose we should look at the presentation. Let me have it.”

Five minutes later he was laughing as he signed off on their proposal.

---

“The Admiral gave it a go,” control announced, “with a couple of modifications that they’re working into place now.”

“What kind of updates are we looking at?” Bubbles asked.

“For starters, we’re moving Point Break squadron into high orbit over your descent vector. You’re going to have the fleet’s destroyer screen to backstop your approach as well, just in case there are any more of those ground emplacements that we haven’t smashed yet.” Bourne’s display updated with the new projected locations for the ships in question. “Tranquility BASIC projects they’ll be in place in forty minutes.”

“Take your time,” Bourne muttered, watching the freighter’s progress and timing its progress.

“Not too much, though,” Bubbles grumbled. “That fucker’s faster than any aquatic craft I’ve ever seen and if we want to get down to it before it reaches the safe zone around Australia we need to do it soon.”

“Fair point,” control replied. “But the last time you made a descent without a backstop in place only half of you came back.”

“Also important to consider,” Bourne admitted. So they waited.

It took a total of forty two minutes for the fleet to get into position once it was all said and done. At it’s current pace the freighter was one hundred and seventy six minutes away from the Australian ‘safe zone’ where they’d determined ground based projectors could create disassembler fields. The techies still weren’t sure whether the freighter could survive if the field switched on. They’d have to operate on the assumption the disassemblers would shiled the freighter from attack once the ship was in rnage. The descent would take Bourne and Bubbles a total of seventy two minutes from orbit to intercept, giving them almost two hours of padding to deal with any problems that arose.

Either way, Starstream flight was under orders to abandon the raid if UNIGOV tried to play any new tricks. What constituted a ‘new trick’ was pretty vague.

“Prepare to deploy airfoils,” Bourne announced, “check mechanisms and report in.”

“My wings are ready to go,” Bubbles said as soon as he was done. He was just as eager to hit atmo as Bourne was.

Bourne’s lights were also green. “Deploy airfoils and prep jets for atmo, we’ll hold the reaction mass for a quick boost back to orbit.”

“Still think we should do a thruster burn to match rotation, Leader.”

“Your objections are noted, Bubbles. We’ll stick to the plan.”

Bubbles wasn’t a fan of their landing trajectory. Due to their starting over a pole their fighters had very little velocity relative to the planet’s rotation and they were going to have to spend a lot of time catching up to it in order to intercept their target. When plotting their descent Bubbles had suggested a prolonged burn in high orbit to match the rotation followed by a rapid descent to intercept. The whole sequence would take about fifty minutes.

The problem was they would have to burn a lot of reaction mass on inefficient maneuvers in order to match velocities. Burning reaction mass was always a problem. Maneuvers outside of atmo all required some reaction mass but really long, hard burns could empty their tanks in less than two hours. It was much different from the kind of short, sharp bursts employed in dogfights. That was why standard space fighter design theory integrated jet engines and aerofoils for atmospheric flight – it allowed for aerospace operations without spending onboard mass. The pattern Bubbles proposed would have emptied anywhere from one fifth to one quarter of their fighter’s reserves.

The speed gained wasn’t inconsequential. Thrusters were the fastest drive available to the OF-28 and shaving twenty minutes off the descent time gave them more breathing room. At the same time, thrusters were also the safest way to make a fast escape. If they burned mass to match the orbital velocity and then had to do it again to escape Earth’s gravity well they’d be down to about ten to fifteen percent of their starting thruster fuel. And they’d be back in orbit, where thrusters were the only maneuvering option.

So Bourne had insisted on making a slower descent in atmosphere, relying on jets for all maneuvering purposes. The problem was the disassembler fields. During the second part of their intercept course they’d be low enough that they could potentially get caught in one so they had to snake their path around Earth’s major landmasses just to be safe. Thus a much slower descent.

However even with all potential problems in timing of their intercept, control was right. Bourne didn’t want a repeat of his last attempted landing. He was going to take all possible precautions and if that meant poking along via jet engine, so be it. All descending orbits went by faster than you thought anyways.

---

Starstream Flight had been away for less than twenty minutes when a voice in BASIC called out, “Bogie one has altered it’s course. Advice Principia control that their fighters may be spotted.”

Carrington frowned at that. UNIGOV was many things but interested in what happened above them wasn’t one of them. In fact, the sapiens of Earth actively avoided watching the skies. Furthermore, the freighter’s change in course was plotted in the holotank and it didn’t look like it was taking evasive action. It hadn’t sped up or added zigzags to its route. It was just carving a long, lazy arc through the ocean that turned it away from its original course for no apparent reason.

“Principia control wants to know if they should recall Starstream Flight,” comms announced. “General Ollinger says he’s against it.”

That was acknowledged with a nod and, although Carrington was inclined to agree with his counterpart by instinct he wasn’t sure it was the right choice. It was a bit extreme to risk two lives just to possibly learn what a single freighter was hauling. Still, attacking supply lines had toppled many mighty nations in the past and could easily do the same for UNIGOV.

He racked his brains to try and explain the ship’s odd behavior. It could have been the prelude to another bizarre gambit from the Earthlings but the sapiens had such distorted priorities that he couldn’t be sure. After a moment he commanded his AI to search all his discussions with Stephen Mond for certain terms. Ocean, freighter, shipping and a few other nautical terms.

A few seconds later the AI brought him the solution. “They’re maneuvering around reefs.”

“Sir?” The officer on watch in BASIC gave him a confused look.

“UNIGOV is obsessed with the condition of Earth’s environment, albeit in very strange and often ineffective ways,” Carrington said. “You’d think they’d just implement some terraforming projects. Instead they tiptoe around a bunch of places like they’re going to break the biosphere if they touch the wrong thing. Mond mentioned one of the things they try to do is avoid corral growths at all costs. Look at the course plot.”

The ship’s AI had a constantly updated projection of the freighter’s most likely destinations in the holotank and its change in heading hadn’t really changed any of them. “We don’t have a good map of Earth’s coral beds, no surprise there, so we can’t be sure. But it doesn’t look like their course changes are actually taking them anywhere and they aren’t erratic enough to be evasive. For now, we continue as is.”

“Understood,” the BASIC officer responded. “Advise Principia that they should not recall Starstream Flight but should advise them that their new heading puts them in the path of a significant weather event.”

---

“What are we looking at, Typhoon Earthling?” Bubbles asked.

“Aren’t you optimistic?” Bourne snorted. “It’s just a tropical storm, Bubbles, calm down.”

The towering storm clouds swept towards them as their fighters swept across the Atlantic Ocean on their penultimate breaking orbit. The atmo was still thin that high up. That didn’t keep the angry winds from screeching across their hulls as the nose of their craft cut into the tops of the funnel cloud.

“Our hulls aren’t rated for this kind of crosswinds, Chief.”

“That kind of rotation isn’t rated for our kind of acceleration, Bubbles. Steady.”

“Starstream, Principia control. You know you’re about to fly through a hurricane, right?”

“Tropical storm!” They both replied in unison.

---

Carrington abandoned the main holotank in order to loom over the BASIC consoles where a handful of human overseers double checked the ship AI’s efforts to reconcile the dozens of streams of information from the ships in the fleet and the screen of fighters. BASIC was a vestige of old days, before AI made many of the watch stations of the Battle Space Information Center redundant. Now it was basically a secondary comms center. The officer on duty was clearly not used to having the admiral’s full, direct scrutiny.

“Where are the ships in Starstream Flight?”

The man on duty – Lieutenant Gerard according to his uniform – tugged nervously at his collar. “We’re working to reacquire them, sir.”

“Work harder, please.”

“Yes, sir. Principia control insists they told Starstream Flight to detour around the storm system but the flight commander apparently ignored them.”

“How long would the detour have taken?”

“The Newtonians say it would’ve added twenty minutes to the flight. Not enough to lose the freighter, especially with the way it’s acting now, but it would have definitely have cut things close.”

Carrington grunted, not impressed. Lots of pilots would choose risky flying over risky timing and he understood the impulse, to an extent, but it was a bad command decision. There were more opportunities than just the one in front of you. That was true in war and life in general. “How long until the fighters clear the storm clouds?”

“Six minutes? Maybe seven? Depends on how bad the wind slows them down.”

“Well. I suppose we wait.”

---

“Got a minor hull breach,” Bourne said, double checking the seal on his helmet. “Flight cabin’s pressure is dropping. My suit integrity is fine so it shouldn’t be an issue for the return flight but I’ll try and get a patch over it before we boost to orbit anyway.”

“My wing motors are locked up,” Bubbles replied. “We’ll see if things shake loose now that we’re out of the worst of the wind but if necessary I’ll leave them out for space flight. Not like I need the added integrity if we’re not going to be dogfighting up there.”

“All right, then. I have a bead on the freighter, looks like it’s about ten kilometers off projected intercept, we’ll adjust to catch it. Get ready to spook some Earthlings.”

The basic principle of what they were doing was simple. Earth freighters were fast. Really fast, especially when compared to the water they displaced. If they could get one moving fast enough the physics of the hydroplane could potentially lift their bow part way out of the water – assuming the ship was unloaded. If it was loaded, the ship’s waterline wouldn’t move at all.

Starstream Flight came in low over the freighter’s deck, jets howling in the morning air, plasma guns firing superheated, ionized gasses that shot through the air with a perpetual thunderclap pursuing them. They fired a barrage of plasma all around the freighter to spur it forward and knocked out its primary radio antenna just to be on the safe side. Sure enough, the freighter put its best foot forward to try and escape them but an aquatic ship was no match for a space fighter and they kept pace easily. It took less than three minutes of harrying the boat to get their answer.

“Principia control this is Starstream Leader. The ship is definitely loaded to the top with something heavy.” Bourne looked out the side of his cockpit at the ship and considered his options. Whatever was on there, it probably wasn’t something they wanted the Earthlings to have. “Do you want us to sink it?”

Previous Chapter

“Control, this is Starstream Flight. We are in position over the South Pole, orbit is nominal, standing by at your convenience.” Bourne switched his comm channel over to the squadron frequency. “Look sharp, Bubbles. There’s a whole lot of ice down there and we gotta make sure it doesn’t do anything scary.”

“What do we do if the glaciers get uppity? It’s not like the both of us can do a whole lot if a continent decides it’s pissed at us.” Bubbles sounded a little out of sorts. Bourne couldn’t blame him, given that the two of them were floating in space less than a week ago and the medics let them leave sick bay just yesterday.

The other three survivors of Starstream squadron were still there.

“How’s your new wings working for you, boss?” Bubbles interrupted Bourne’s oncoming brooding session with his unexpected question. “Since all nanofactured stuff is built using the same master file I figured our 28s would be the same as the last ones but I swear the controls on this thing are less responsive.”

“That’s because these are right out of the vats,” Bourne said. “The Principia‘s fighters were pulled from a couple of decommissioned escort cruisers that were headed back to the spacedocks to get scrapped. They’d been flown a bit before we got them. It loosens up the hardware mechanisms and lets the navigation software build up some predictive algorithms. That’s what you’re sensing. I went through a couple of OF-21s during the war and it was the same every time.”

There was a long moment of silence as they cruised lazily over Earth’s southern oceans. “I didn’t know you got shot down, Captain.”

“One out of every five Newtonian pilots in the war lost at least one set of wings.” The reality of that was even worse than the statistic implied. The opening days of the Second Galilean War had taken a horrible toll on Newton’s interceptor pilots as they worked around the clock to repel wave after wave of small Galilean gunboats and fighters trying to wipe out Newton’s ground defenses. Some days as much as twenty percent of fighter craft that sortied got shot down. “Just be glad that vacuum suits are better armored now than they were at the start of the war.”

“Yeah, I hear you. I had a Type 33 flight suit when I was in flight school.” Bubbles laughed. “I felt like I was going up into space in my underwear.”

“Did you fly in combat?” He knew, he’d read all his squadron’s files, but there wasn’t much to do on this kind of overwatch mission and Bourne didn’t want his wingmate dwelling on their previous outing.

“No. I got issued an OF-25 and put in a squadron guarding the space docks once I got my commission. I was there six months then we signed the armistice.” He made a couple of popping mouth sounds. “It is what it is.”

“You didn’t miss much,” Bourne said. “We had all the waypoints through the Galilean rings nailed down by that point. There wasn’t much work for interceptors in the last six months of the war, we’d already done all the nasty stuff.”

“Were you a part of the Ring Campaign?”

“…yeah.”

“What was it like?”

It was like spending hours and hours sitting in a fighter hidden in a small crater on a midsized asteroid orbiting a gas giant waiting for something to happen. Occasionally, they would ambush passing Galilean warships. Newtonians getting to play the space pirate on occasion was a delicious reversal of the usual roles played by their respective planets. However even those encounters were more trouble than they were worth. You had to constantly split your attention between your flight canopy and your instruments, trying not to clip a piece of rock large enough to compromise your fighter’s hull and leave you sucking vacuum.

More than once Bourne had watched good men die after losing their wings because flight conditions made it impossible for anyone to get close enough to assist them in time. If he ever had to fly another combat mission in a planetary ring it would be too soon. Yet with that said, he’d only flown a dozen of them himself. Most of his time on deployment over Galileo was spent on combat space patrols outside his carrier ship. “It wasn’t that different from now. We just had older fighters.”

“Right.” Bubbles didn’t sound entirely convinced.

“What do you know about this naval traffic objective they gave us?” Bourne asked more to fill time and keep his mind active than out of a desire to hear about ocean going transports.

“Just that the brass think the Earthlings are moving something down there and they want us to phone in anything in the cargo transport size we happen to see.” A light on Bourne’s control board flickered and he twitched a couple of commands, bringing up telemetry that Control was collecting from various elements of the fleet and piping in to them. “Personally I don’t see much interesting down there. Word on the decks is they’re trying to isolate where UNIGOV is sourcing their materials for the nanotech they’re using. Lots of rare earths in the kinds of generators you need to project a field that far.”

“Where are they expecting them to come from?”

“Disputed, although smart money says Africa or Asia. The old land surveys say a lot of the neat stuff is in the mountainous parts of those continents.” A finger sized red dot appeared on Bourne’s display, presumably following a path Bubbles was tracing for him, presumably pointing at mineral deposits or somesuch.

“That’s very practical.” Bourne frowned and set his fighter in a very slow spin around its forward axis. Earth gradually filled up his canopy as the top of his fighter rotated to face straight ‘down’ then vanished back beneath him as he completed the spin. It was a situational awareness habit he’d picked up during the Ring Campaign. He hadn’t been flying in situations where that kind of 360’360 awareness was necessary in a while but he still performed the maneuver on occasion just to hang on to the habit. “How in touch with the word on the deck are you, anyway, Bubbles?”

“I am the word on the deck, Captain.” He sounded almost hurt. “Why do you ask?”

“How do we know what’s in the mountains down there? Is it something brought back by the surface teams or what?”

“It’s all from the archives, Leader. I guess the colonists took a full copy of the planetary geological surveys with them when they left. Not sure why.”

“Probably in a historical archive somewhere.” Bourne let his roll bring him all the way around to face towards the planet again then killed the momentum. “Do you think it would be in the historical archives or somewhere else?”

“I… dunno. Is it important?”

“Don’t ask me. I need to look at the data to tell for sure.”

“Hold on, let me call up Hannah.”

“Does this go official if you loop in your latest Comms girl?”

“What makes you think Hannah works in Comms?”

“Bubbles. Focus on the task at hand.”

Bubbles sighed. “If I ask really nicely and say it needs to be a secret between us she probably won’t tell anyone. Why not go through official channels?”

“I just don’t want anyone thinking I’m after a white whale. I’d rather not get grounded.”

“We’re down a ship over a hostile planet six months from home. I don’t think anyone’s eager to pull qualified fighter pilots off duty.”

“Maybe. Can Hannah get us info on the sea lanes, as well? I want to know what shipping’s looked like since we got here.”

“Well I can tell you that one now. We don’t have any data on what Earth’s shipping lanes looked like until three days ago.”

“What?” Bourne yanked his attention away from his flight canopy and down to his mic. Not that Bubbles could see him through that. “How is it possible that none of it got tracked?”

“The AI discarded all records of vehicle traffic on bodies of water after twenty four hours. No one caught the oversight until the Admiral decided to track cargo ships.”

Bourne fought the urge to smack his forehead, his helmet would take the hit anyway. The biggest pitfall of working with an AI assist was how deeply it ingrained preconceptions into the feedback it brought you. Of the Triad Worlds and Roddenberry, only Roddenberry had more than 20% of its surface covered in water and even then, not by much. Large scale transport by ocean or river had never been practical there. Most water going vessels were private recreational vehicles with the occasional survey or maintenance ship mixed in. As a result, military AI just ignored stuff it saw in bodies of water to save on storage space and processing power.

A perfectly fine and normal approach to the waterways of the Triad Worlds. A glaring oversight on Earth.

“Okay, fine,” he muttered. “It probably wasn’t relevant anyway.”

“What?” Bubbles was curious now, probably looking for a new bit of gossip to share with his girl in Communications.

“I just noticed a freighter moving north from Antarctica. I know the polar regions of Earth were left alone for a lot of reasons in the pre-Departure era but if UNIGOV changed that policy after they took over and wanted sneak some resources past us now they might try taking them from the continent that was covered in ice when we left. It’s not a place we’d naturally expect them to get supplies from.”

“Well, you got one thing in your favor,” Bubbles said, sounding a little skeptical. “There wasn’t any extensive survey done of the continent’s mineral resources before the Departure. Something about the snow and ice. But, in spite of the concerns about the climate both then and now, it doesn’t look like the ice has gotten much thinner in the years between.”

“Still. With the right nanotech and a big enough power plant and mag generators you could mine straight through the frozen layers of the ground. I’m pretty sure there’s places they do just that on Diana.”

“Maybe.” Bubbles’s skepticism deepened. “Be that as it may, I’m going to guess it doesn’t matter to us right now. That transport could be down there for any reason. It looks like it’s bound for Australia and, according to the records, that’s where most of the research outposts on Antarctica source their supplies so it may just be a food run or something.”

“Awful big coincidence, our being out here right as they make a run to the grocers.” Bourne drummed his fingers on his control panel, trying to decide on a move.

“Why don’t you just call it in? We could have the Principia or the Spiner go over the place with a hires EMG scan and see if there’s any power signatures indicative of a big power plant down there.”

Bourne began carefully maneuvering his fighter’s nose, where all the good scanners were, down towards the planet while keeping his orbital trajectory more or less the same. “The problem with only having two ships with good scanners on them is everyone wants them to look at something. I suspect the Admiral will want more before he details one of his best eyes to stare at giant chunks of ice for the next couple of hours.”

He was glad to see that Bubbles was matching his maneuvers with equal precision. “Probably. How do we get it for him?”

“Thinking.” For a long moment Bourne was silent as he considered some ideas and then ran numbers through his nav AI. Then he replayed Starstream’s last attempt to land on planet. Finally, he compared some numbers from the botched mission’s after action reports to the numbers his AI was giving him. “Tell me, Bubbles, have you ever gone water skiing?”

Previous Chapter

Time was one thing the ground team did not have in abundance. The surprise that UNIGOV achieved when they deployed the disassembler field was near total and the Copernicans had been forced to abandoned their position with very little of their resources in hand. The biggest shortage was food. They’d deployed from the Sea of Tranquility with two weeks of food stores on hand. The initial plan was to build up to a full month’s supply on the ground over the course of the next month but the landing crews had only brought down enough supplies to keep up with demand before they were cut off. Other supplies had been prioritized.

Then the disassembler field came through and wiped out their camp and took half their on-hand food stores with it. The loss of weapons and heavy construction equipment was unfortunate but with their plans so thoroughly disrupted by the field itself the loss of that materiel wasn’t as severe as it might first appear. The fleet could always nanofacture replacements from materials on the ground if it had to. Food was a much stickier problem.

Of course there were ways to acquire food that didn’t require drawing off of the fleet’s reserves. Earth was the Homeworld, after all. It was almost purpose built to sustain human life and, before UNIGOV closed down most of the cities in the area, the region they’d landed in was apparently a major food producing area. The problem was integration between AI and human required a lot of specialized enzymes and electrolytes which the average spacer’s diet was designed to replenish. The standard Earth diet wouldn’t refresh the brain’s supply of these things as quickly. If they were forced to rely on it then the Copernicans could expect to lose 80% of AI functionality in another four days. That was one of their primary advantages gone.

All of this meant that, less than twenty four hours after Captain Tsukihara declared the newly rechristened Armstrong completely refitted and seaworthy, Lang found himself carefully maneuvering the ship out of dock. They’d done exactly one test drive of the yacht before loading everyone on and heading out. As he ran up the throttle Lang tried to ignore the feeling that they were about to run aground on some unseen reef and find themselves flailing in black water as they drowned within sight of land.

“Did you know they used to call combat spacers ‘space Marines?’” Private Harrigan chuckled at the absurdity of the notion. “As if there were liquid water in space.”

“As if we’d want to be anywhere near it if there were,” Lang muttered. Harrigan – or Harry to his friends – was the man Lang settled on as his navigator and spotter. He wasn’t particularly sharp eyed or used to navigation but he was a pretty decent code cracker and with all the things they still didn’t know about the Armstrong‘s computers it seemed wise to have someone like that on hand.

It turned out Harry was also a wealth of trivia on historical interpretations of space travel. He’d apparently taken a course on it because he thought it would be useful in understanding the Genies but Rodenberry’s vision of the future turned out to be a minor part of the coursework, relatively speaking. “I don’t think the off kilter title bothered me as much as the fact that most of them didn’t fight in space,” Harrigan went on. “They fought on the ground! Space marines were always hopping off their space vessels and slopping around in the mud for some reason. Didn’t they think we might have a regular army for that?”

“Yeah, well, I’m sure they didn’t think about the intersection between food supply and artificial intelligence either,” Priss said. She’d practically volunteered herself onto the bridge crew when she heard Lang was putting one together. He wasn’t sure if it was because she was qualified and interested or because her duties would be relatively light and she was looking to take a break from running messages all over the sewers.

“They didn’t think about all kinds of things,” Harry replied. “It’s kind of mind boggling. You wouldn’t believe how many stories have spacers shooting at each other aboard ships. Shooting! Like you aren’t about to decompress the compartment you’re in. Half the time boarding crews weren’t even issued vacuum proof armor. And don’t get me started on how often ships located and fought each other in deep space!”

“To be fair, we didn’t put together the Orbital Theory of Battle until the last war, Private.”

Harry and Priss snapped to attention and Priss sang out, “Captain on the bridge!”

Once again Captain Tsukihara had managed to sneak up on her bridge watch, something that Lang worried was going to become a habit. Since he had a deathgrip on the controls he settled for nodding to her and saying, “Ma’am.”

“How is she handling, Sergeant?”

“In my expert opinion, she’s responsive for her size but the weather isn’t exactly with us.” He tweaked the yacht’s heading just a bit when a large wave struck them side on, proving his point. “The water’s getting higher every hour and I think we’re in for rain.”

Tsukihara glanced over the side of the boat and watched the waves for a minute. “I believe the technical term for it is choppy seas. Regardless, is this going to slow us down?”

“That all depends.” He eased the throttle forward some as they cleared the protruding docks and headed further out into the open bay. “For starters, we have no idea how much debris, reefs or unfinished underwater construction may be between here and our destination. My brief reading of the sailing manuals we brought says wave action makes those kinds of obstacles even more dangerous.”

“I was told we did manage to restore the sonar system. Shouldn’t we be able to navigate those kinds of obstacles?”

“In perfectly calm waters, I’d give myself 60-75% odds of doing it safely but if the waves keep getting bigger those odds will keep dropping. Plus there’s the dips themselves.” He pointed to the low point between two waves. “Look, that’s about three feet lower than the surface of the water already. That’s three feet closer to any underwater obstacles that may be lurking there and, believe you me, three feet is a lot closer on a boat like this one.”

The captain studied the troughs of the waves as her teeth worried at her lower lip. “Are you sure it works that way?”

“No, Captain. I’m a pilot, not a sailor. Do you want to take the risk?”

“No, I suppose not.” She clasped her hands behind her back and turned her attention back to him. “However I do want to run some drills once we get out of the bay. We’ve set up the deck guns and tied them into the navigation computer but we haven’t tried firing them yet and I don’t want to head into a potential combat situation without doing so.”

Lang nodded. “That’s why you’re the boss, ma’am. Do you have a place in mind for these drills yet?”

“Between the maps the ship had onboard and what we got from the teams sent to pull charts off the other ships at dock we have a pretty good idea of what the water around here was like forty to sixty years ago.” She showed him what she was talking about on his computer display as she spoke. “There should be a string of buoys about half a kilometer outside the bay, along here. They’re a good size for target practice and there’s enough open water around them we can run at them from several directions.”

“Do you want to start stationary or try a strafing run right off the bat?”

“We’ll start from a standstill and test the deck guns from each side, fore and aft. Then we’ll take a few strafing runs on the rest before we return to course. Hopefully the whole exercise won’t take any more than two hours.” She cleared the screen and looked back at him. “Questions?”

“I don’t know enough about weather to speculate on whether the delay will make it better or worse but that is something I’m concerned about.”

“We still don’t have access to the fleet’s orbital scans so we can’t really predict that,” Tsukihara admitted. “We’ll suspend the drill if things turn really bad and we can throw an anchor down for the night if it comes to that.”

“Right. About that.” He pointed to the timepiece on the yacht’s control panel, another anachronism shaped like a disk with numbers around the circumference rather than a simple digital readout. “If we spend two hours on your drills and lose another half an hour of travel time to weather, which seems about right based on what’s happened so far, we’ve got another problem to think about. We’re going to arrive on site about twenty minutes before dusk.”

Tsukihara frowned. “It’s already that late? Load in took longer than I thought.”

“Ma’am, we can make a landing directly on the beach by the plant. But I’d prefer to proceed about a few hundred meters upstream and leave the yacht there rather than abandoning it out by the ocean. Going upstream while losing the light is going to be tricky.”

The captain pulled up the power plant on the charts. “I don’t see as that gets us any closer to the plant, Sergeant. What do we gain by that?”

Lang pulled his hands off the boat’s controls long enough to point to a little strip of green a dozen meters or so back from the river that ran along the southern edge of the plant’s plot of land. “Do you see that?”

“Yes. What is it?”

“Based on what I saw on my first visit to Earth and again on the streets of Anaheim I believe it was once a decorative patch of shrubbery. Bushes, flowers, maybe a couple of willow trees.”

For a moment Tsukihara just looked back and forth between him and the map, as if this would somehow reveal his secrets to her. Finally she said, “Don’t keep me in suspense, Sergeant.”

“The thing is, no one’s maintained these beds for decades. Remember the hedges outside the townhouses we crashed in, Priss?”

Priss started when he pulled her into the conversation but she quickly caught on to what he was thinking and nodded vigorously. “That’s right. They’d way overgrown their beds and gotten a lot taller to boot. Eight or ten feet in most places, completely blocked your view of the street.”

Tsukihara’s eyes widened as she understood what he was saying. “You think this will give us some cover on our approach.”

“Yes, ma’am. If we use it right and if UNIGOV didn’t cut it all down when they moved in.”

“They wouldn’t,” Priss said. “One of the ideas they cling to is restoring most of Earth to a state of ‘nature’ so the planet can heal. If they thought it was a matter of life and death they might cut down those plants but I don’t think they’d do it just to secure their sight lines.”

“A good thought, Sergeant.” Tsukihara clapped him on the back. “How early tomorrow morning do you think you could get us behind this cover?”

Any number he could think of seemed totally arbitrary given all the unknowns at work so Lang just picked a time out of thin air. “0800, ma’am. If we shoot for that it will give us a little more time to run drills tonight then we can head most of the way to the power plant, drop anchor and turn in early.”

“Good thinking, Sergeant. We’ll make that our official plan. Corporal, I want you to set up a burst transmission back to base camp updating the Major on our plan.” She turned to Harry. “And I want you to try and learn a little about piloting this thing from the Sergeant. We need more than one pilot for it in case something happens to him. Questions?”

There weren’t, so the captain sent them off to their individual assignments before heading off on her own way.

Before leaving Priss tapped him on the elbow and, when he pulled his attention away from the vast expanse of water around them, she told him, “You know that thing where you make officers think you’re a planner and leader?”

“Yeah?”

“You did it again.”

She left the bridge laughing at his infuriated cursing.

Previous Chapter

Over the last month Carrington had seen and heard more strange things than he had in his entire life up until that point. The meeting between Stephen Mond and Naomi Bertolini was the strangest yet. Wrinkles lined Mond’s face and graying hair was taking over his head; he sat uncomfortably in his wheelchair and his prosthetic arms lay awkwardly on the table in front of him. He avoided eye contact with most of the people in the room. So far the only other people he’d directly acknowledged were the guards who’d brought him in.

Naomi sat ramrod straight in her chair. Her lips were pressed together in a firm line, creating a tightness around her eyes and mouth, but otherwise her youth was evident all across her face. Yet she bore herself with more maturity. She kept her attention on Mond most of the time but she found a moment to whisper something as an aside to Teng. She was tense, he thought, but otherwise her mood was unreadable.

After a lot of bickering back and forth Carrington had decided it wasn’t fair to let too many people dogpile Mond and sent everyone but the two guards, Naomi and Teng out of the meeting room. He took a chair beside the Director, trying to put himself in the mindset of a lawyer. That got dark very quickly so he stopped and switched to trying to think of Mond as a friend, or at least someone he didn’t hate. That was a bit more achievable. “Thank you for agreeing to this meeting, Director Mond,” he began. “I’ve asked you here today at the request of one of our other guests who’s expressed an interest in meeting you. Director, this is Naomi Bertolini, the Eldest Malacandran. Mrs. Bertolini, allow me to introduce Director Steven Mond of Earth’s Unified Government.”

“Good afternoon, Director,” Naomi said, offering him her hand.

Mond hesitated for a second before accepting it, studying her face carefully as she grasped his prosthetic. “Hello, Miss Bertolini. How are you feeling today?”

“I must admit I feel a little unsettled to be speaking to you, Director Mond,” Naomi said, studying his prosthetic with a clinical eye. “Are you well? You look like you had an accident recently and a pretty nasty one at that.”

“I made the mistake of handling a dangerous piece of hardware while I was… unstable. This is the consequence of that.” He gently pulled his mechanical limb back and put both his hands in his lap, out of sight under the table.

“I hope you have a speedy recovery.”

Once again Mond looked down at the table, refusing to meet her eyes. “Thank you, Miss Bertolini. I was more fortunate than the other man involved so I consider myself lucky.”

“The oyarsa was undoubtedly-” Naomi caught herself and blushed, the first crack in her armor so far. “You have been blessed by Maleldil, the most high, no doubt.”

Mond managed a wan smile, some of his usual self-confidence managing to reassert itself. “I do doubt, actually. On Earth there are no higher rulers than the sapiens ourselves.”

Naomi nodded once. “Yes, we have heard that the oyarsa of Earth has become bent and turned its back on its people and its purpose. You have our condolences.”

“I’m not familiar with the word ‘oyarsa,’” Mond said. “Does it refer to a god of some sort? Or perhaps one of his angels, since your Maleldil is most high he would logically fill the role of diety.”

Carrington cleared his throat, causing both of them to jump. Apparently they’d gotten so fixed on each other they’d forgotten he was there, which spoke to their interest in each other or his own lack of presence, he couldn’t tell which. Once he was sure they were both paying attention to him he said, “To save some time hashing this issue out, the Malacandrans have a unique vocabulary for some common concepts from Earth history. An oyarsa is the rough equivalent of a guardian angel and they believe every planet has one. Malacandra is the name they give both Mars and its guardian, Thulcandra is their name for Earth and it’s guardian. My understanding is that Maleldil is, in fact, their name for a monotheistic god.”

Naomi nodded. “That’s a fair summary of how I would define the words, as well.”

“Thank you, Admiral,” Mond said. “And with the pleasantries out of the way, may I ask what the agenda for today is?”

“I’m afraid I’m the wrong one to ask.” Carrington gestured to Naomi and said, “We offered the Eldest an opportunity to visit the Homeworld but due to circumstances we already discussed our visit has been postponed. When she arrived this morning she asked to speak to you so here we are.”

There was a moment of strained silence as the Director and the Eldest stared each other down across the table. “May I ask you something, Miss Bertolini?”

“Of course, Director, so long as I can ask something as well.”

Carrington caught a smile tugging at the corners of Mond’s lips before he hid it again. “How did someone your age manage to become the Eldest of Mars?”

“When a Malacandran reaches seven thousand, three hundred and five days old they must pass out of the colony dome and into Silence.” Naomi recited the facts in a half chanting tone of voice. Her eyes were distant and her expression blank, like she was recalling facts she had committed to memory long ago. “Since the dome was too small to support a constantly growing population the oyarsa was given charge of the excess. We lost all our people with the knowledge to expand the colony when Thulcandra struck us centuries ago. So we had nothing else to fall back on. We could only hold fast to what little we had left, hope that seventy three cents of days would be enough to leave a legacy for the future and trust that the oyarsa would bring us through Silence into fellowship once again.”

All trace of amusement was gone from Mond’s face. “Miss Bertolini, that’s a wonderful sentiment and many have clung to it in the past. But surely you realize at this point that people don’t come back from the dead.”

“Director,” Carrington murmured. “While the word Silence can mean death in the broad sense, when the original Borealis settlers scraped together the few books and files UNIGOV left in their possession and sorted out how to go forward they gave it a double meaning. If a Malacandran lives their full seventy three cents they don’t technically leave the dome. It turns out there’s a Vault under Borealis City, too. So when people on Mars grow old enough to count as adults they go to that Vault and they’re put into Shutdown – into Silence – so they can wait until the dome is expanded enough to accommodate them.”

Naomi’s chin tilted up a few degrees in pride. “I am seventy three hundred and twenty four days old, Director Mond, and one of the first to come out of Silence and back into the fellowship of my peers.”

“I see.” Mond’s mouth was open just a sliver, his shoulders rising and falling with shallow, rapid breaths and his eyes staring wildly at nothing. “There were still people on Mars after all. When the colony was put into Shutdown the people retrieved didn’t match the official roster and we never did discover what happened to all of them. Most of you were children without medical systems, yes?”

“Yes…” Naomi leaned forward to get a better look at Mond’s face, clearly concerned. “Are you unwell, Director?”

“None of the colonists who were brought out of Shutdown would tell where the missing children were,” Mond said, ignoring her. “The missing had to be left in the dome and the colony abandoned. Even though it was inhumane – even though it was unsapiens to do such a thing we had to leave them behind. And now here you are. Every outward thought we meant to leave behind, on our doorsteps once again.”

Something profound was happening between the two planetary leaders and Carrington didn’t want to interrupt it, whatever it was. At the same time he was aware of an odd tension in the air and it put him on edge. When Naomi got up and walked around the table to Mond he almost made her go back to her seat just to be safe. But there was a pleading written on her face, a crease of her brow and a light in her eyes, that convinced him she just wanted to make her case to the other man and he decided he could let her go a little longer.

“Director Mond,” she said, cocking one hip up onto the table and reaching forward to rest a hand on his shoulder, “I’ve passed through Silence not once but twice now. First Volk and others brought me back to my family. Then they brought me here, to meet you and the Admiral, to discuss how we can break the Silence with the Triad Worlds and with Thulcandra – with Earth. Both Volk and the Admiral tell me you’ll resist changing your ways. I want to know if that’s true. Are the people of Malacandra really so abhorrent to you that you will not speak to us even now?”

“No, no, no,” Mond whispered, “I can’t. You don’t understand.”

“How can I?” For the first time Naomi’s youth slipped out of her control as her voice turned wheedling, almost whiny. “How can I understand if you won’t bother to explain?”

“We can’t go,” Mond went on, his voice rising steadily with no sign he even heard Naomi’s question. “We must stay. We cannot speak, we can only listen, we cannot assume we must always learn from what is. That is the sapiens way.”

Exasperated at hearing the same general sentiment time and again, Carrington demanded, “But what does it accomplish, Director? What can possibly be the point?”

“To know ourselves!” Mond practically exploded out of his chair, arms waving frantically. “Don’t you see? The martian way is to flail about wildly, going everywhere, taking everything and yelling all the while without a care for what they are doing or who it hurts. They know everything about the world around them but not one thing about themselves. Sapiens are driven in the opposite direction. We make the foundation of our society ourselves and without self realization nothing in sapiens society society can function!”

“Why can’t you know yourself and us as well?” Naomi asked, clearly taken aback by Mond’s sudden vehemence.

“Because you question and you analyze and you change,” Mond snapped. “How can we be ourselves if we are constantly under attack by outsiders who make demands of us, who doubt us, who require change of us? If a martian society is always on our doorstep we will be forever changing! There will be no secure foundation for sapiens.”

Carrington managed to bring his gaping mouth back under control. “Director, the Malacandrans based their society on a book intended as fiction published over four hundred years ago but they manage to get by. You base your society on a book you deliberately rewrite whenever it suits you. If you’re telling me sapiens are struggling to find a secure foundation to build on let me suggest that you start by not rewriting it whenever is convenient to you.”

With a chopping motion that nearly upended his chair Mond dismissed the admiral. “No, no, no. We rewrite Schrodinger’s book because there are constantly new martians among us, polluting our tranquility and forcing us to start the process of self-discovery anew. We just need to be left alone. If you martians would only oblige us maybe we wouldn’t have to go to such extremes but as it is we must do what we can!”

“I see.” Carrington would have expected anger or accusation from Naomi but to his surprise her voice held nothing but regret. “Mr. Mond, I don’t know much about sapiens or self realization. I do know that when your world is constantly shrinking, when being alone is the one thing you aspire to, you’ll get there eventually. I didn’t care much for my time in Silence, Director, I pray the sapiens will enjoy it more. Thank you for meeting me today.”

With that Malacandra’s Eldest waved across the table, collecting Teng, then walked out of the room, leaving Carrington and Mond with the guards. Mond stared at her as she left then shook his head. “What was that all about?”

“I’m sure you’ll have plenty of time to figure it out, Director, once you’re left alone like you asked. Guards? Please take Mr. Mond back to his room.”