Date Point 10y2m2w1d AV Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches
Charlotte Gilroy
Charlotte and Ben had landed on their feet with the move to Cimbrean. As the only qualified midwife in town, not only was Charlotte busy but she was well-paid. Ben meanwhile had quickly and easily fallen in with the city planning department, and had been instrumental in devising an approach to utility infrastructure that should hopefully mean that Folctha’s roads would never need to be dug up to access the sewerage, cables and pipes that ran alongside rather than beneath them.
Cheap housing, decent salaries and rapid promotion? Folctha was a graduate’s fantasy.
Except when it resulted in Charlotte’s best friend slumped inconsolable over her kitchen table, of course. There was little they’d been able to do for Ava except keep up a steady supply of tea and comforting words and contact.
Eventually, she sent Ben and Sean on a walk to go get some takeaway, from the good Chinese place on the far side of town that didn’t deliver. That earned her an hour of alone time for some girl talk.
Ava certainly seemed to appreciate it. At least, she muttered “…thanks…” as soon as they were gone.
“Darling, you’re going to have to come up for air sooner or later.” Charlotte told her.
It had the desired effect. Ava laughed—a thin, delicate, slightly hysterical laugh, but a laugh nonetheless—and finally unburied her face from her arms. Instead, she rested her elbows on the table and combed her fingers into her hair. “Sorry.”
“For being upset? I think you have a right…”
“It’s my own stupid fault though…” Ava sighed. Her hands dropped to the table and she sat back to stare up at the ceiling instead. “What was I thinking?”
“Which bit?”
“Hmm?”
“The bit where you did it, or the bit where you were caught?”
”…God, I don’t know.” Ava looked around the room. “I just… I don’t know.”
The clock ticked for them a good ten seconds or so before she sagged and gave Charlotte a pleading look. “What do you think?”
Charlotte took her hand. “You know… that’s the first time you’ve asked for my opinion on this.”
”…It is?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh…” Ava blinked at their hands. “…you’d have told me not to do it, wouldn’t you?”
“I would have.” Charlotte agreed.
“Why didn’t you?”
“You didn’t ask.” Charlotte gave her an apologetic facial shrug. “And… I don’t think you’d have listened, either.”
Ava paused, then nodded and shut her eyes. “You know why I did it though, right?”
“Darling? You did it because you were lonely and horny and Sean’s hot and caring and he’s a good match for you.” Charlotte asserted. “Don’t over-think it.”
“But that’s just the problem!” Ava exploded, tugging her hand out of Charlotte’s grip to gesticulate. “I didn’t think about it enough! Or… or I thought about it trying to convince… trying to…”
She gripped her hair again “I don’t know where I went wrong.”
“Maybe the bit where you cheated on your boyfriend?” Charlotte suggested. Not unjustifiably, Ava glared at her. “No, darling… maybe it really is that simple. Maybe you should have either… asked him for permission, or broken up with him. Treated him honestly.”
“You’re taking his side?” Ava asked
“You’re not?”
Ava hesitated, then swallowed, sighed and rubbed her face. “I’m sorry.” She said. “You’re right. I should have. I… he said it himself, he was separated from me too.”
“Working relationships are about honesty.” Charlotte told her. “If you ever have to hide something, if you ever have to lie about something… maybe it’s not working.”
Ava nodded, miserably. “And it wasn’t working for a long time. Right from the moment he decided to sign up.” she said.
“Don’t blame him.” Charlotte cautioned.
“I don’t! I… I don’t. I just… He was doing what he had to. But I should have told him then that I wasn’t happy with it. Maybe if I’d done that…” Ava sighed, and shook her head slowly. “It’s done. Can’t change it. I can’t bring it back, just like I can’t bring Sara back, or home, or… or anything. I wish I could, but I can’t.”
“So… what are you going to do?”
Ava flapped her arms in a resigned shrug. “Move on. I can’t stay here, not with Adam and Gabe, I’m not… I won’t be able to…” She paused, exasperated by her own lack of eloquence, then stood up. “The boys’ll be back in, what, an hour?”
“Give or take…” Charlotte agreed, as Ava shrugged her coat on and headed for the door. “Why, what are you-?”
“I’m going to say goodbye to Dad.”
Date Point 10y2m2w AV Byron Group Exploration Vessel 8 “Creature of Habit”, The Border Stars, Proximal End.
Kevin Jenkins
“Hey Jenks, we’re coming up on RS-449!”
The Byron Group had sunk billions of dollars into starships, and the first few had all gone missing. As had the one sent to find out what happened to them. Byron Stellar Exploration’s working theory was that they had all suffered some kind of technical failure, and as such the Group’s starship-building program was on hold until they figured out what that failure might be.
Number 8 therefore was a Dominion-built vessel, custom made by the assembly gantries at Irbzrk Shipyards after a substantial bribe. It stuck in the craw to rely on alien tech, but at least it was alien tech built to the customer’s exacting specifications. It was, in the shipyard’s estimation, the ugliest thing they had ever built, and they had described it in contemptuous terms that translated to something like “throwback”
It wasn’t hard to see why. BGEV-8 was shaped for atmospheric re-entry, water landing and seaworthiness, all of which had put constraints on her physical properties and dimensions which had completely forbidden the Irbzrkian designers from flexing their creative muscles, especially when the clients had insisted on redundant steel bulkheads throughout and that every single component in the ship be A: modular and B: accessible at a moment’s notice. She looked more like a seafaring relic than a modern spaceship
There had been plenty of technical challenges to during the design phase, long before the commission had been sent to Irbzrk. For starters, a ship’s top superluminal speed was in part a function of its sublight power-to-weight ratio and acceleration, and in part a function of power to the warp engine. While BGEV-8’s power-to-weight ratio was excellent, disguising that the order had been placed by a human organisation had required ditching the capacitors and WiTChES, and relying on the Dominion’s preferred convention of a big reactor of some kind. This had limited the available power.
The result was a stately top speed of thirty kilolights. Enough to reach a nearby star in about two hours, but still decidedly pedestrian, and this had brought the supply problem into effect.
Humans needed nutrients. LOTS of nutrients. A crew of seven could chew through two hundred pounds of food in a week, and at thirty kilolights BGEV-8’s exploration missions were expected to take months.
Months worth of supplies would have made the ship heavier. Making the ship heavier would have hurt its power-to-weight ratio and slowed it down, meaning that it would need to carry even MORE supplies, which would have slowed it down further… and so on. While the equation did eventually balance itself, the end result was a much larger, much slower, and most importantly much more expensive ship than Byron had wanted.
The solution was stasis. Everyone’s bed doubled as a stasis chamber, and the ship did a pretty cunning job of making sure that you went to bed, you got a good eight or nine hours of sleep, and just as you were waking up fresh and ready for a new day, time stopped working for you until the duty officer decided you were needed again.
Naturally, nobody wanted to be effectively alone for subjective weeks at a time, so in practice there were always two duty officers, and things were carefully mixed up so that everybody worked with everybody else at some point in the rotation.
Today was Kevin’s second day awake. He’d put Joe Gibbs to bed last night, and this morning had woken up to find Mitch Hamilton preparing breakfast for him.
He liked Mitch the best out of their crew. Mitch could fix a decent coffee and breakfast, though everyone agreed that Kevin was the best cook on board.
Kevin was also the best general odd-jobber, inventory-sorter, cleaner and handyman on the crew, which was why he was its quartermaster. Everybody else might have had the assorted skills that went into flying the ship or surveying whatever interesting planets they stumbled across, but Byron had quite correctly decided early on that every ship needed somebody whose job was to keep everybody else comfortable, clean, well-fed and, ideally, well-advised.
Sure, being a glorified custodian wasn’t exactly glamorous, but the pay was even better than he’d been bringing in at Scotch Creek and there was just… something about being back out in the galaxy again. Something about the thrill of knowing that for better or worse they were doing something real, contributing to taking some of humanity’s eggs out of a single, vulnerable basket.
And, if he was honest, something about the thrill of danger. He wasn’t a vagrant in a galaxy unaware of and unprepared for the human race now: he was a ship’s quartermaster
“Gotcha. I’ll wake ‘em up.” he called.
Waking the other five was as simple as hitting the touchscreen on the wall as soon as he entered the room and selecting “wake all”. Instantly the black haze filling every bunk faded, and his five colleagues—friends one and all—were sitting up and looking around.
“Station day?” Jennie asked. She was their biochemistry expert, a specialist whose job revolved around examining whatever organic compounds and weird alien life forms they turned up. It was a good thing she was just as capable with keeping the ship in peak condition, because their most recent circuit hadn’t turned up even a single Temperate world, a fact that made her tenure on this first survey vessel increasingly tenuous. Why waste crew resources on somebody who could be better used in a follow-up expedition?
It would be a shame to see her go.
“Yup. Mitch is shaking hands with them right now. Today’s Friday, fourteen-thirty ship time. Coffee?”
Everyone nodded eagerly and promptly set about their morning ablutions. Three years of working together had sorted out a few kinks and sticking points there: When everyone was awake, nobody got to soak in the shower or meditate on the shitter: you got in, you did your business, you cleaned up, and if you forgot to take your clothes or towel in with you, too bad for you. Modesty was a luxury, and not one that the rest of the crew were obligated to engineer on your behalf.
Everybody was grabbing cups of coffee with wet hair in short order.
Mitch, however, was frowning when he stuck his head round the hatch to the flight deck. “Yo, they’re refusing us docking.” he called.
Everyone exchanged glances, and Monica and Derek—co-pilot and flight engineer respectively—squeezed into their seats, leaving the three scientists and Kevin to eavesdrop.
“Did they say why?”
“Nope, not yet… uh, Resupply Station four-four-niner, Byron Group Echo-Victor Eight again. We’d sure appreciate an explanation. Why are being denied permission, over?”
“Because we’re human. Why else?” Kevin murmured rhetorically, quietly enough so the three on the flight deck wouldn’t hear.
“You think something happened?” Their resident astronomer, Charlie, asked him in a whisper.
“Yup.”
“Like what?” Jennifer asked.
“Swarm of Swarms. Bet you.”
“No bet.” Ryan grunted. He was their geologist and, as such, by far and away the most profitable member of the crew. He liked to joke that the job of the other six was to get him to someplace where he could dig up something valuable.
“Yeah, never go against Jenks’ nose for xeno politics.” Charlie agreed.
“Never go against his nose for politics full stop.” Jennie agreed.
“Jesus, they’re launching fighters.” Derek announced. “They really don’t want us docking.”
”…Woah there, take it easy Four-four-niner, you can plainly see we’re holding position. May we at least synchronize comms?”
“Remind them they have to under Article Seven of the-” Kevin began to tell him.
“I know, Jenks.” Derek snapped.
< p>”…Okay.”
“Yowch.” Charlie muttered.
“It’s cool, he’s just stressed… I’ll get the big screen turned on.”
Ryan frowned at him. “Why?”
“Because there’s gonna be a message from Byron waiting for us.”
He was right. No sooner had Derek bullied the station into grudgingly allowing BGEV-8 to synchronize with the interstellar communications relay than the ship was announcing a priority message for all eyes.
Monica put a few tactful light-minutes between them and the station and they went dark in interplanetary space before relaxing enough to gather in the ship’s common area—a circular lounge with furniture that folded into the deck to make room for the gym mat—and load the message.
Sure enough, their billionaire employer’s frowning visage was the very first frame of the message.
“If I’m any judge, you’ll have an inkling something’s gone wrong by the time you get this. If I know nonhumans, they’re probably in the grip of a panic again. Enclosed is footage which explains why in detail, but I’ll make it short: The Swarm of Swarms attacked Capitol Station. Destroyed it, in fact. Some kind of human spaceborne special forces called the SOR got involved and… ah, it’s all in the video briefing that follows these orders.
“Come back ASAP. Carter, Brown, you’re clear to use the emergency recall. I want the seven of you at our policy meeting. See you shortly.”
“Emergency recall?” Kevin asked.
“You heard the man, Mitch.” Monica said, and tugged the chain that she’d had round her neck from day one out from inside her vest. Mitch Carter produced something from his pocket and together they slipped into the bridge.
“Emergency recall?” Kevin repeated.
“Little something the Group gave us after losing all those other ships.” Monica replied.
There was a subtle sound, a little like somebody had thumped a bulkhead with their fist and caused the whole ship to give a dull ring. Interplanetary dark space was gone in an instant, replaced to one side by a grey and cratered horizon and, rising above it…
“Oh no.” Kevin moaned. “That stupid son of a bitch.”
“What?” Ryan asked.
“He’s had an open jump beacon to Earth this whole time?”
“Our emergency recall, yeah. What, is that a problem?”
Kevin spun on his heel and headed for his locker. “That’s between me and Moses Byron.” he replied.
Date Point 10y2m2w AV Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches.
Gabriel Arés
Jess paused and looked up from her desk. “Doorbell? Are we expecting Ava tonight?”
“I’ll get it.”
Despite time and physiotherapy, Gabe’s old injury was getting progressively worse, and hauling himself up out of his chair was still difficult. Which was why he made a point of doing it every time he had an excuse—he might be on a one-way trip to a wheelchair, but he was damned if he was letting it take him without a fight.
Besides, letting Jess do something as simple as answer the door for him would have made him feel like a cripple, and he hated that.
It was Ava alright, wearing her oldest and favorite jacket, the simple, rugged one that she and Adam had got together before coming to Cimbrean, with the “From Ashes” patch on the sleeve.
She gave him a tiny, sad smile that made him hesitate mid-greeting. “…Hey Dad.”
”…Hey.”
“Adam found out.”
Gabe let out a long-contained sigh, stepped forward and gave her a hug. “I’m sorry, Ava.”
She hugged back, tight and shaking, and mumbled something he didn’t catch.
“What was that?”
“I said I’m sorry, I… I didn’t see. I was so stupid, I…”
“Shh…” Gabe just held her a bit longer.
Eventually, she pulled away. “I’m… gonna go back to Earth.” she announced. “Try and, and… Try and be somebody. Somebody who isn’t a complete fuckup.”
“Hey, for what it’s worth…” Gabe began “like I said, you’re a daughter to me nowadays. I won’t lie, when you told us I was… kinda disappointed in you. But I love you anyway, okay? I know you’ll do okay.”
“I don’t know…” Ava sighed and leaned against the wall. “I can never seem to figure out how to do the right thing.”
“Want some advice?” Gabe offered. She looked up at him, waiting. “Well, okay, it’s more of a story…”
When Ava’s expectant gaze didn’t change, he nodded and told it. “There was… back in San Diego, there was this woman, a Private Investigator. Terri Boone. I met her… about a year, year and a half before the bomb went off. She’d shot an intruder in her apartment. He was on her couch, had a gun, had no right to be there… open and shut case of self defense.”
“Anyway, Boone claimed that the guy she killed was working for somebody else, and that they’d just try again. Which, that’s a serious claim, we took it seriously… nothing came of it. Nothing we could follow up on, anyway. There were… nothing we could legitimately find, nothing admissible, pointed to this guy working for anybody but himself. Right?”
Ava nodded, listening.
“Well… my whole job was about what was admissible. Building a case that’d stand up in a court of law and not get thrown out on a technicality. Procedure, procedure, procedure, right? That’s the nature of police work, and it’s like that for a good reason. So, I found myself stuck. I believed Boone, but I couldn’t continue the investigation because I’d have strayed outside of procedure. Can’t do that, so I had to drop it.”
He sighed. “A few months later, she was dead. And… She was tied up in the bombing of the city. I can’t go into it. But sometimes I ask myself if I could have done anything differently. If maybe had I just been lax on procedure that one time, maybe those two million people would still be alive. It’s possible.”
He held up a hand as Ava started to speak. “Or. Maybe they could have blown up three cities. Or ten. Or maybe the whole world would be bombed flat from orbit by the Hunters by now. I don’t know. And that’s kinda the point. I regret not doing more for her…But I can’t think of a single thing I’d do differently. You see what I’m saying?”
Ava thought about it, then nodded slowly. “You can’t do more than what seems like a good idea at the time.” she said.
“Right. You screw up, you move on, you learn, you screw up again.” Gabe gave her a wry smile. “Some of us screw up worse than others, but… There’s no secret. You’ve just got to forgive yourself and move on.”
“Learn from your mistakes…”
“Right…” Gabe nodded. “Do you regret…what you did?”
“Yeah.”
“You gonna do it again?”
“Hell no.”
“There we go, then. You’re a better woman than you were yesterday.”
Ava managed to laugh at that, though she sobered again quickly. “…I’m going to miss you, Dad.”
“I’ll miss you too. Come back, okay? When you’re ready.”
“When I’m ready. I promise.”
They hugged again. “Goodbye, Dad.”
“Goodbye.”
He watched her down the stairs, then let himself back into the apartment. Jess took one look at him, stood and gave him a hug. “Are you okay?”
“How much did you hear?”
“All of it.”
Gabe sighed. “I’ll be… I’ll just learn from my mistakes and move on, like I told her to.”
“That’s easier said than done.”
Gabe just shrugged, and shrank down into his chair again, rubbing his face. “Esi es la vida.”
Date Point 10y2m2w1d AV Byron Group Head Offices, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth.
Kevin Jenkins.
“Look, Rachael, I’m telling you this is important.”
Kevin had dealt with his employer’s personal assistant before. Byron had a policy where literally anybody in the company could arrange a meeting with him, and crewing one of his ships was one of the positions that earned you a place in the short queue for those meetings… but there was still a queue. The idea that somebody might want to meet with him urgently apparently wasn’t in her briefing. “And I’m telling you that Mr. Byron sees people with appointments.” she repeated.
“And how long will an appointment take to arrange?” Kevin challenged her.
“If it’s really that important I can fit you in for tomorrow at-”
She was spared Kevin’s frustrated lambasting by her phone ringing, and Moses Byron’s voice on the speaker. “Rachael, if you don’t let him in I do believe I’ll just need a new door anyway.”
“Yes, Mister Byron.”
She gestured to the door for him.
Byron’s office was just as calculated as everything else about the man, in Kevin’s opinion. He had pretty much instantly pegged Byron as a self-interested bastard who had his head on straight enough to spot that public opinion was a more valuable currency than mere dollars, and everything the man did as being part of that philosophy.
The office wasn’t large, and you’d have been forgiven for mistaking it for that of a high school principal or a junior manager, rather than a man whose personal wealth eclipsed anything that Kevin could have imagined earning in several lifetimes. There was nothing either ultra-modern or obviously antique on display, just a few small bookshelves, some framed family photographs, a nice view. You had to look closer to spot that the desk was a bespoke piece in pale oak, see the hand-stitching in the office chair, or notice that the coffee next to the machine in the corner probably cost more per hundred grams than the ones Kevin had served in his bars had cost per thousand.
It all spoke to a fondness for the benefits of a billionaire’s life while keeping up a pretense of frugal moderation.
“Got to hand it to you, Kevin, not many people demand to see me.” Byron told him, standing up politely. He was like that, always polite and engaging even if he was obviously nettled.
“Yeah, well, not every day I learn we’ve had a back door open around the moon for… what, five months?” Kevin told him.
“And?”
“Mister Byron, that’s like the worst idea since… It’s a really bad idea.”
Byron’s head inclined slightly to one side. “Why? You know something I don’t?” he asked.
“What, besides the Swarm of Swarms? You sent us that video, boss man.” Kevin told him. “You think if they can do that to Capitol Station, they’ll struggle with us?”
Byron pushed his chair out of the way and stepped over to the wet bar in the corner. “The Hunters” he said “Don’t have a dang thing anywhere even close to Sol.”
“And how do you know that?” Kevin asked him.
“Oh, that’s easy.” Byron said. “All we needed was a Hunter’s corpse. No shortage of those about, didn’t even have to send a fightin’ Homo Sapiens out to grab one. Just put in a call to the right people. Once the eggheads had its communication implants, engineering a sensor that could pick up their chatter was simplicity itself. They assure me there are no Hunters anywhere near Earth. Drink? I ain’t no bartender but I mix a decent Creole…”
“And what about other threats?” Kevin asked, declining the offer with a hand gesture.
Byron paused in pouring a drink for himself. Kevin noted idly that although he’d offered a creole, what he was pouring for himself was actually a Shirley Temple. “You mean to tell me you know about some other threats?” he asked, quietly. “What, you were involved in strategic intelligence briefings while you were cleaning tables at SCERF?”
“One of the NDAs I’m under forbids me from telling you how many NDAs I’m under nor for what reasons.” Kevin shot back. “We’re talking serious felony stuff here. But fuck, if it’s serious enough and if I have to, I’ll break every last fuckin’ one and go to the pen knowing I tried to avert disaster.”
Byron arched an eyebrow at him.
”…Though I’d take it as a personal favor if I didn’t have to.” Kevin admitted.
“That serious, huh?”
A new voice entered the conversation. “More than you might guess, Mister Byron.”
Kevin and Byron turned to the door. A slim, trim woman in a dark suit gave them a slim, trim smile and invited herself in. Of Rachael, there was no sign. “Mister Jenkins. I’m pleased to see you have this well in hand. I’ll pretend the bit where you mused about sharing classified information was purely speculative.”
“Special Agent… Williams, right?” Kevin greeted her, dredging the name up from memory. They hadn’t met since the Hierarchy debriefing at Scotch Creek, back before the San Diego blast. “Pleasure to see you again, always nice to see my tax dollars walk in the door wearing Armani.”
“Good memory.” Williams acknowledged him.
“How’s your partner? Hamilton, right?”
“He’s at his daughter’s Bat Mitzvah, thank you for asking. I was invited but, well… there was a serious incident involving an unknown, unshielded and only barely encrypted jump beacon orbiting the moon. Lucky for you that ship you rode in on was broadcasting Moses Byron’s name everywhere, or you’d have been dead within seconds of arriving.”
Byron cleared his throat. “I’m not used” he declared “to being ignored in my own office.”
“Where are my manners?” Williams asked, smoothly producing and opening her identification. “Williams, CIA.”
Byron glowered at the seal she was showing him for a good few seconds as if expecting it to be so cheap a forgery as to fall apart in her hands. When this failed to happen, he grudgingly put his drink down and extended a hand. Williams didn’t shake it.
“So.” Byron sat down to cover the snub. “Would either of you care to indulge me as to why in the good gosh-darn the Company just walked into my office and my PA is nowhere in sight?”
Williams turned a hand palm-up, inviting Kevin to speak. Kevin’s caution briefly warred with his desire to launch into a full-blown rant at Byron, and won. Somehow, he suspected he was being tested here.
“There’s… let’s call it the Big Bad. Out there.” he said. “Bigger and badder than the Hunters, that’s for sure. It wants us all dead, it might use the Hunters to get what it wants… and it’s old. Old like you’d laugh me out of the office if I told you.”
“How Lovecraftian.” Byron drawled, swirling his drink. He had that look Kevin had seen on several men in his time, the intense one that spoke of furious calculation going on silently while the face remained impassive.
“I’d almost prefer Lovecraft.” Williams said. “Mister Jenkins has put it with supreme delicacy, so allow me to be blunter: we are, in real terms, no more militarily powerful on the interstellar scale than we were ten years ago. Forget Cimbrean, and the Firebirds and the V-class destroyers. Forget the Hephaestus LLC and your own accomplishments, forget even the panicky politics of the Dominion. In real terms, the human race collectively is still very much insignificant. But so is a grain of sand, and if you’ve ever got one of those in your sock, Mister Byron, you know just how irritating a grain of sand can be, and how badly you will want to scratch it.”
She flashed that slim, trim smile again. “Except that in our case, scratching is for now impossible thanks to the system containment forcefield that you violated.”
Byron took a sip and set his glass down. “This seems” he observed “like the kind of critical information that a man in my position, doing the things I was doing, ought to have been told.”
“You were, and still are, judged to be a dangerous personality.” Williams told him. She stepped forward and, uninvited, put her briefcase on Byron’s desk. “Given that you had the information to know that your stunt with that beacon was a bad idea and went ahead with it anyway, that judgement stands.”
“And you figured that an ignorant dangerous personality was less of a problem than an educated one?” Byron retorted. “Extinction ain’t exactly in my business plan. Had I known that was on the cards…”
“Spare me.” Williams interrupted. “We know that Governor Sandy hinted about a danger with neural implants to you in private. Anybody with your resources can’t possibly be ignorant of just how aggressively the SOR and JETS were formed, nor of the huge sums of government money that went dark at the same time. And if you were somehow oblivious to all of those, I defy you to look me in the eye and tell me that San Diego escaped your attention.”
Byron’s expression didn’t change, but he did draw a long and slightly indignant breath as he listened.
“You already had all the information you needed, Mister Byron.” Williams scolded him. “And still you proceeded unwisely. I shudder to think what you might have done had we filled in the detail for you.”
“Shoulda co-opted me, then.” Byron grunted.
“Maybe.” Williams agreed. She turned to Kevin. “Mister Jenkins, I appreciate your involvement here, and I’m sure you could contribute in all sorts of ways, but this conversation between the United States of America and Mister Moses Byron is not for mortal ears. I’m sorry.”
Kevin knew better than to argue. Williams held all the cards here.
“Arright.” he agreed. “But before you lay into my employer…?”
Williams nodded and made a gesture of invitation.
“If there’s a learning point in this whole clusterfuck, it’s that we really shouldn’t be keeping our people in the dark, arright? That goes for you too, Mister Byron. Briefing only two members of the crew about the recall meant I never got the chance to warn you it was a bad idea.”
Williams and Byron frowned at each other, then both made a conceding nod. “There’s a fine art to secrecy.” Williams agreed. “Errors in judgement may have happened all round. We intend to address that.”
Byron just nodded again. “Fine.” Kevin told them, breathing a little easier. “You two godly folks have fun talking over the mortal’s head. I’ll see ya at that policy meeting, Mister Byron.”
“I’d be grateful if you would shut the door please, Mister Jenkins.” Williams said. She produced a phone from her pocket, and tapped at it as Kevin crossed the room.
Kevin couldn’t resist just a little eavesdrop as he closed the door. Before it clicked softly shut, the last he heard was “It’s me… Yes, he’s right here Mister President…”