Date Point: 12y6m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Technical Sergeant Martina Kovač
The tree was a Terran import, a dioecious “female” Ginkgo Biloba selected specifically for the fact that it wouldn’t release potentially allergenic pollens that could endanger Folctha’s nonhuman residents. It had been imported as a young adult and was already as thick around as Marty’s torso, a promise of incredible girth to come when it was fully matured.
Adam’s fist left a dent in the coarse bark, drawing blood and surprised gasps from bystanders. Ava’s exhibition had practically emptied as she had rushed out of the gallery and across the street to do an emergency piece to camera for ESNN on the ambassador’s assassination, but even that fascinating diversion was secondary to Adam punching a tree with enough force to break the turf behind him as its roots flexed.
He looked up, grumbled an apology, and skulked around the tree to nurse his bloody hand. Considering how much narrower than him its trunk was it didn’t offer anything much in the way of privacy, but at least it was a barrier of sorts.
Marty stopped watching Ava doing her work—and it was good work, she had to admit—and joined him. He was picking splinters out of his flesh.
“…He refused security,” she reminded him gently, after a tactful interval.
“I could have saved him!” Adam snapped. “Hell, I’ve done that same thing before! If I’d just been there-!!”
“He refused!” Marty repeated herself. “Dude, you can’t protect people who don’t want protecting.”
“It’s just so fucking… why?”
“Maybe he went up there expecting this to happen,” Marty pointed out. “…Hell, Hussein was ninety. When my great-grampa hit ninety, he started getting real upset that everyone was looking after him. I reckon he’d have killed to be able to do something useful with his death. The Mission, you know?”
Adam unwound a bit. “Yeah… but Hussein was a civilian, and your great-grampa hit the beaches at Normandy, right?.”
“Right. Military family. Double-Grampy served, Grampy served, Dad served, I’m serving… But not everyone who serves is military, ‘Horse.”
“Maybe, but the whole point is-”
“I know what the whole point is,” Marty assured him. “It’s to protect people’s right to live their lives their way.”
Adam nodded glumly, and licked his knuckle by way of fixing it. Bloody knuckles were a constant among HEAT men, they were generally ignored until the next routine Crue-D dose came along and repaired them.
“Still don’t feel right though, huh?” Marty put her arm as far around his waist as she could.
“Nuh.” Adam shook his head, and buried her under his own return hug. “Shit, what’s gonna happen next? Are we just gonna let this slide? Are the Guvnurag?”
“What’re they gonna do, glow at us?” Marty asked. “We have bigger fish to fry.”
“I dunno, Marty. They’re still a long way ahead of us tech-wise. If they really put their heads to it…” Adam glanced around and lowered his voice. “It ain’t them I’m worried about exactly. What happens if they figure out a weakness in our shit and you-know-who picks up on it?”
“Come on, do I gotta tell you that we just do the job in front of us?” Marty asked. “Those kinds of questions are for the brass, poor assholes.”
“Ours not to reason why. Right.” Adam nodded and finally managed to purge his frustrations with a sigh. A thought seemed to strike him. “…Is that Kipling too?”
“Tennyson.” Marty looked around the tree. Or rather around Adam, the tree being kind of an afterthought once he was out of the way. “I think Ava’s winding up her report. Wanna invite her to go grab a burger?”
“Sounds good…“ Adam, spurred by the promise of food, sprang upright. “Since when do you get on well with Ava?”
“Since she’s your sister?”
“Dude, she’s not exactly my sister…”
“I know, but she’s your family and… I dunno.” Marty shrugged. “Firth can grumble all he likes, I think there’s somebody worthwhile there. And you do too, or you wouldn’ta mended that bridge.”
“Ain’t bridges that worry me. I mean, she’s never bugged me for an exclusive or whatever, but this is a big story. And we ain’t authorised to go talkin’ to the press…”
“What, don’t you trust her?”
“Not really.” Adam paused. “Well… Yeah I do, Maybe? Depends on what. I trust her to keep a secret, at least. She respects non-disclosure.”
“So just tell her we can’t talk about it. Hell, I’ll bet my burnt ass she’ll nod and say okay and that’s an end to it.”
Adam grimaced. “Major Powell doesn’t trust her.”
“Major Powell can’t stop you from going for a burger with your girlfriend and your sister,” Marty pointed out. Adam was always painfully worried about what the old man would think. Marty, meanwhile, was much more experienced at knowing where the boundaries really lay. “Worst he’ll do is say ‘fook’ at us a lot. Besides, isn’t public affairs one of your extra duties?”
“Under close supervision and with a very specific brief, yeah, but-”
“‘Horse, we aren’t doing a public affairs thing. We’re grabbing a burger with your sister.”
“With my journalist ex-girlfriend. That ain’t the same thing.”
“You have breakfast with her at your dad’s place every week,” Marty said. “And… I love you, and your dad’s awesome? But you really learned how to cram the rulebook up your ass from him. It’s fine! The worst case scenario here is the old man clears his throat and Rebar has to find a way of ’motivating’ the both of us that isn’t disproportionate.” Marty shrugged. “And if I get one of those ‘red, white and blue’ burgers from Best Brioche out of it? Worth it.”
Adam’s stomach growled audibly. The Red White and Blue burger was a Cimbrean celebrity built from half a pound of medium-rare steak mince with back bacon for the red, ranch dressing for the white and blue stilton, all of it local produce right down to the bun. “…You’re a fucking seductress.”
“Hey, he finally noticed!” Marty grinned at him. “Now, are you coming or not?”
Adam glanced back in the direction of the base for a heartfelt few seconds then caved. “This is gonna throw my macros off for the day…”
Marty folded her arms at him and felt her grin get wider. “That ain’t a no.”
“…Damn you.”
Victorious, Marty made eye contact with Ava and managed to somehow convey through an uncomplicated impromptu sign language that they were going for a burger and she was welcome to come with. To her credit, Ava looked pleased at the invitation but immediately looked to Adam for confirmation and practically radiated delight when he nodded.
“Just so we’re clear,” Marty told her once Ava had retrieved her dog and escaped from her colleagues with promises to bring them back a box of sliders and donuts, “Please don’t ask us about Hussein?”
“You can’t confirm or deny anything and wouldn’t be at liberty to discuss it, whatever ‘it’ may or may not be. Something like that?” Ava asked, looking amused.
“Something like that,” Adam agreed.
“That’s okay,” Ava promised. “And don’t worry, I’m never going to interview either of you about anything. It’s a bad idea to mix business and family. Besides,” she added with a rare smile, “I probably know more than you do right now.”
“No comment,” Adam grunted. Ava drove an affectionate elbow into his ribs.
“¡Tranqui, gordo! I just said you’re permanently off-limits.“
Adam caught Marty’s eye, and she finally saw him relax. Ava didn’t miss it either, but rather than seeming disappointed she smiled and patted him on the arm. “It’s okay. Trust takes a long time to build. It… means a lot that you both are giving me the chance.”
She reached down and her fingers brushed through Hannah’s fur for reassurance after she said it. “Though, uh… word of advice? Us journalists are tricky. Just saying that up front makes me feel like maybe you DO know something I’d find interesting. You shoulda kept your mouth shut until I asked you.”
“But we’re off-limits,” Adam sniped, with a touch of the uncharacteristic bitterness that only surfaced when Ava was involved.
“Which is why I’m warning you, you-!” Ava glanced down at the dog, took a deep breath and reined herself in. “…Change of subject.”
“Yeah,” Marty agreed, feeling foolish. She’d been so keen to assuage Adam’s concerns that she’d blundered into a basic error. “But, thanks.”
”De nada. Uh… Oh! Hayley said Jack’s doing well?”
“I thought she didn’t really approve?” Adam asked. “Military ain’t exactly in line with their peace-and-love lifestyle.”
“Well yeah, but you know what she and Mark are like.” Ava smiled fondly. “You remember Mark’s tattoos? ‘An it harm none, do as thou wilt’? They always were keen on a permissive upbringing. So long as Jack’s doing what he really wants to do, they won’t fight him.”
“That ‘permissive upbringing’ got Sara murdered,” Adam growled.
“No argument,” Ava agreed. “…But it was also what made her so beautiful to know. Wasn’t it?”
Adam didn’t reply.
“…Besides,” Ava continued. “Hayley’s like any half-decent mom. So long as her boy’s happy, she’s happy, and so long as he’s a success she’s proud.”
“He’s a success alright,” Adam said. “We turned him ‘round good.”
“Hell, no wonder he was playing up at school,” Marty volunteered. “No way it was challenging him properly. That boy could turn out to be smarter than Baseball.”
“Or you,” Adam added, loyally. Marty felt the modest urge to demur that Baseball was smarter than herself, but the fact was that they had different kinds of intelligence. ‘Base, if and when he retired, was going to wind up authoring the next generation of books on trauma medicine. Marty was ‘merely’ an extremely talented aerospace engineer who’d been destined for NASA until the SOR came along. Comparing a brain surgeon to a rocket scientist wasn’t exactly fair, especially when considering the fact she was going for burgers with a sports and nutrition expert who had an unrivaled practical working understanding of the human body, and a woman who was making increasingly prominent waves both as a journalist and as an artist with every passing week.
Marty kept herself grounded on the certainty that, past a certain threshold, there was no such thing as an absolute spectrum of ‘more’ intelligent and ‘less’ intelligent. Her motto was “There is no such a thing as a stupid person—just people who haven’t yet figured out what they’re smart at.”
“I hope so”, she said. “Means I taught him right. I mean-” she cleared her throat, “Cimbrean schooling is damn good, but he really needed the one-on-one time.”
“Pretty much all we got was one-on-one time in the early years,” Ava recalled, looking around. “And dirt roads, prefab housing, no entertainment… Now look at this place.”
“Hell, it’s changed just since I got here,” Marty agreed. “And you two are first-gen colonists. I can’t even… Musta been something special.”
Adam and Ava glanced at each other before Ava spoke for both of them. “It was…We were still kinda reeling from… I mean, we lost our home!” she managed. “My family, Adam’s mom, all our friends, the only city we’d ever lived in…”
“We shoulda been in that, too,” Adam agreed. “Pure dumb luck we weren’t.”
“It was just…” Ava looked down at her hands, and only stopped wringing them when Hannah whined and licked her fingers, prompting a grateful scratch behind the ears. “…Weeks and months of feeling numb, like I was gonna wake up screaming from a bad dream any second no matter how much I knew I wasn’t. Every night, I had this dream where I woke up in my own bedroom and everything was okay and Rosa was making breakfast, and-”
“Rosa?”
“She cleaned and cooked so mom and dad didn’t have to. Rosa Vialpando. God, she was… She had three grandchildren and she treated me like I was one of them and I could be such a bitch to her sometimes…” Ava wiped away a tear. “I know I was fifteen, but still… I wish she’d been around a few years back. Things maybe woulda turned out differently.”
“You’re beating yourself up again,” Adam told her softly. Ava nodded, and visibly backed out of Bad Memory Alley and returned to Memory Lane.
“…Stepping through the jump array that first time was like waking up. Just… a blast of cool air to the face and my new best friend tripping over herself to run up and say hi, and…”
“And when Sara started talking, nothing stopped her. Sometimes she’d keep talking while she was breathing in,” Adam recalled. Ava giggled.
Marty nodded. “She’s really special to both of you.”
“Oh, she could be a brat,” Adam laughed. “And she had the biggest crush on me. And I think a bit of a one on you too, Ava?”
“Maybe… But, yeah. I’ll never forget her. Hell, if I ever have kids, my first girl is gonna be Sara.”
“No way, I call first dibs,” Adam grinned.
“Yeah?” Ava grinned at Marty. “Are you two…?”
“Uh… not yet.” Marty balked.
“That ain’t a no,” Adam teased her with her own words.
“Well of course it ain’t a no!” Marty faced him. “Hell it’s a yes, probably. Just, not soon.”
That got the intended result. Adam blushed and stammer-grumbled himself silent while Ava folded her arms behind him and shot Marty an approving grin.
“Burger’s waiting,” she pointed out. They’d been standing outside Best Brioche for nearly a minute.
“I’ll, uh… three RWBs?”
“And a diet coke,” Ava said.
“Marty?”
“Sprite.”
“Right.” Adam vanished into the shop, still red around the ears.
Marty and Ava stepped aside to let the shop’s current customers exit, squeezed out by Adam’s sheer size. He had a way of doing that.
“I really enjoyed the exhibition tonight,” Marty said.
“Thanks. And… thanks for inviting me. This is nice.”
They had a moment to clear the air, and Marty decided not to let it go. “Ava… I mean, you’re real important to him. I hope you’re not jealous about us, or…?”
Ava shook her head with surprising vigor. “Absolutely not!” she said. “And he’s real important to me, too. I just want him to be happy, and you make him so happy, so… No, I can’t be jealous. Especially not of you.”
Touched, Marty gave her a hug. It caught Ava off-guard, but she returned it with sisterly affection after only a moment’s startled hesitation.
“So… seriously, how do you see the things you see through that camera?” Marty asked, letting her go.
“Uh… practice, mostly. I dunno, at first I was always thinking about things like light and depth of field, aperture size, shutter speed… Nowadays it’s more intuitive. I look at something, think ‘Yeah, I can work with that,’ and my hands do it all. You know?”
“Not really,” Marty shrugged, and tapped her forehead. “My job’s all up here. Millimeters, pH balance, PSI, Bartlett’s Law…”
“What’s that?”
“Uh…” Marty recalled how she’d explained it to Jack. “So, Kinetic Pulse weapons would be stupidly lethal if we could just get them to fire a shaped field with a sharp edge, right? Like, they’d just cut us in half.” When Ava nodded, she pressed on. “ But, the power draw of a field is proportionate to the curvature in an…interesting way.”
“Meaning it’s really fucking complicated?”
“Right. Bartlett’s law is the equation that describes that relationship. So, big flat planes, boxes, cylinders or neat spheres? Nice and easy. Something sharp enough to cut, though…”
“Yeah, I couldn’t do your job,” Ava agreed.
“Good, because there’s not many of my job to go around,” Marty smiled. “Besides, the world needs photographers and journalists, and gourmet burger chefs.”
“Amen, sister,” Ava giggled. “But… okay, if making a flat plane is easy, why can’t you just throw it sideways-on like a playing card?”
“Oh man, so that’s a complicated one,” Marty enthused, warming to her subject. “It has to do with something called ‘Fractal boundary indeterminacy’ and that’s just-”
“Ah shit, you got her started,” Adam interrupted, emerging with two paper-wrapped bundles and a couple of cold metal cans on his arm, which he handed out. “Bad idea.”
“Hey!”
Adam grinned and kissed her. “True though.”
“Where’s yours?” Marty asked, taking her burger and drink.
“He’s makin’ them for me now,” Adam replied, handing Ava hers. “And that box for the news crew.”
“Lemme guess. Three for you?” Marty asked
“Yup.”
“Orale!” Ava shook her head. “I remember how you complained about having to eat so much in Basic.”
“Well, I wasn’t used to it then,” Adam shrugged.
Ava snorted and tore into her burger like she’d been taking pointers from him but she spared a slice of bacon for Hannah, who was practicing her very best ‘Sit’ by Ava’s ankle and staring soulfully upwards. “It’ff gowwa be a wong night,” she explained, delicately wiping an escaping squirt of Ranch dressing back into her mouth before swallowing. “I’d better eat up and get back to the crew. Editor’s gonna want a report ready for the morning show and sync with Earth.”
“I bet. You’re gonna be busy next few days, huh?” Adam asked. Ava nodded with her mouth full.
“Thiff if…” she paused, frowned at herself, and finished her mouthful before replying. “It’s gonna be big. The GRA can’t ignore this, they have to do something.”
“Do what? That’s the question.” Marty pointed out.
Ava grimaced. “I have some ideas. But it’s gonna be about the gesture at this point, rather than punishing the people who are, ‘yknow, actually responsible…”
“Ava… be careful what you say, alright?” Marty advised.
“Back atcha. Don’t worry, if anything classified leaks it won’t be me.”
Adam nodded solemnly. “Good. We don’t wanna visit you in prison.”
She gave him a complicated look that Marty read as gratitude that he was still concerned for her well-being blended with mild and well-controlled irritation, and stuffed the last of her burger in her mouth. She dusted her hands off and pointed indoors to indicate that she, Ava, really ought to pay for the snack boxes for her crew and get back to work.
Adam nodded and went back inside to retrieve it for her, and when he emerged with the boxes and his own burgers Ava was chugging down the last of her soda.
“When did you learn to eat that big?” he asked.
“I eat a lot of my meals al desko nowadays,” Ava shrugged, and took the boxes. “I told you, it’s gonna be a long night. See you at Dad’s on Sunday?”
“Yeah. Take care.”
She gave him a smile, and one for Marty too, and high-heeled away with Hannah trotting smartly along in her wake.
Marty waited until she was around the corner to speak. “…Is she okay? I mean…She’s working awful hard…”
Adam gave a complicated shrug. “She throws herself into her work. So do I. So do you!”
“Well… She’s good at it,” Marty conceded. “You’ve seen her on TV, right?”
“I don’t watch much TV, remember?” Adam pointed out, correctly. His daily regime really didn’t allow any time for it.
“Well, she’s good,” Marty repeated. “You watch. Whatever goes down with GRA, I bet you Ava will have called it…”
Date Point: 12y6m1w AV
Global Representative Assembly Headquarters, Cape Town, South Africa, Earth
President Arthur Sartori
The White House had been home to a bewildering variety of First Families over the years, though America was still waiting for a female or openly gay President to furnish the history books with their first “First Gentleman.” Sartori, however, had not furnished Pennsylvania Avenue with a First anything. He was the sixth president in a list that began with Thomas Jefferson to have entered the White House as a widower, and his marriage to the late Emily Sartori-Brown had been childless. He had never remarried.
To his surprise, that fact had generated sympathy rather than difficulty during his election campaign. The nation by and large saw him as a man remaining faithful to his wife’s memory, and they weren’t far wrong—Emily would have loved to tease him about how much he hated flying. He might have the most famous aircraft in the world at his beck and call, but Sartori still loathed leaving the ground.
Unfortunately, Air Force One was the only practical way to get to Africa on short notice. So, he’d put on his big-boy pants, boarded the plane in a serious bustle, taken a half dose of diazepam and caught up on his much-needed sleep. Unconscious was the only way to fly.
Besides. It was always best to look sharp and well-rested when addressing an emergency meeting of some of the most powerful people in the world. The Global Representative Assembly had precious little political power on Earth, but it was the voice of authority when it came to extraterrestrial matters.
…Assuming it ever developed a unified opinion on anything, of course. In the years since its foundation, the GRA had yet to take a strong unified stance. By and large, it had been too riven by the hangover of the past few decades of religious conflict, economic turmoil, political bickering, the Pacific trade wars, and now the massive technological and social upheavals of the interstellar era. The will had simply never been there to properly align behind a single cause.
Perhaps that would change today.
Scratch that. That was pussy-foot thinking. That would change today. The time had come for the rest of the world to get with the program or get out of the way, and if the assassination of the GRA’s own ambassador wasn’t catalyst enough then nothing ever would be.
Much thought had gone into the GRA HQ building. Its construction had begun with the creation of an artificial tidal lagoon just north of a Cape Town suburb with the incongruously Welsh name of Llandudno, a wealthy spot that had for several years been looking for an excuse to go even further up-market than it already was.
That lagoon provided several benefits. It generated power from the tide, created a protected beach ideal for safe recreation, provided habitat for several native species, and made the GRA building surprisingly secure just by itself. The only overland routes to the building were narrow, closely-watched roads laid with several hundred retractable reinforced bollards. Any car bomb, van full of gunmen or other suspicious vehicle was doomed to be brought to a violent halt even if it did get past the checkpoints.
All of the security measures were similarly invisible. Between the forcefields, the reinforced glass, the shutters and the panic rooms honeycombing the building’s interiors, GRA HQ was a fortress that looked like an elaborate sculpture in glass and granite.
The Assembly chamber itself was simple and to-the-point. Serious wooden furniture underpinned by miles of cabling and support infrastructure. There were more seats than were technically needed, in anticipation of the future growth and political independence of offworld colonies, and all of them were arranged in a horseshoe around the speaker’s podium and looking out through tall windows onto the waters of the Atlantic.
Appropriately, those waters were choppy today.
So was the mood. The report into Ambassador Hussein’s assassination was detailed and thorough, and while every man and woman in the room was used to the interminable pace of these things it seemed that everybody was itching to leap to their feet and say their piece. Sartori had enjoyed ample time to jot down his own notes on the report, compare them with those of his advisors, send the most pertinent details away for analysis and then read the digested summary on the monitor in front of him.
All of which was fine… except that the preliminary investigation was clearly unaware of, and would have been unable to mention, DEEP RELIC. The Hierarchy’s existence was not known to most of the nations represented in the Assembly chamber and was being kept that way.
Option number one, right at the top of Sartori’s list of possibilities, was correcting that today. He had the authority to declassify DEEP RELIC with a pen-stroke if he chose, and a passionate but civilized debate was raging quietly on his screen as to whether that was the correct course of action here.
Sartori watched the debate with interest. As far as he was concerned, official and full revelation of the existence of the Hierarchy would be an open invitation for some crazy bastards somewhere on the planet to try and ally with the genocidal aliens. The Earth had some breathing room thanks to Operation EMPTY BELL, but that breathing room could vanish fast if somebody with any influence or power pulled a Quisling.
On the other hand the whole problem was escalating in an enormous way, and so far the human race was still figuratively fighting with one hand tied behind its back. Sooner or later, that handicap was going to take its toll. They needed to start getting some more resources, some more talent and some more humanity on board.
And that just wasn’t going to happen, and anybody with more political perspicacity than a stunned puppy knew it. Not without both a kick in the nuts and the promise of some actual benefit on the horizon. And in any case, when it came down to it the resources of two planets just wasn’t going to cut it, especially when one of those planets had a total population that wouldn’t even put it in the top three hundred American cities.
So far, one of his senior advisors had been silent, and the time was approaching where he needed her to speak. Margaret White was in the habit of offering her opinions last after everyone else had spoken, and it was generally a valuable habit, but right now he needed her to weigh in.
She got the message just from the way he turned and looked at her and sat forward primly in her seat to whisper.
“We need to acknowledge that there is a threat…” she offered. “Without going into specifics. Infer the presence of enemy action from the forcefield, San Diego, this…”
“Paul reckons we need to throw a bigger bone than that,” Sartori indicated his screen. Paul Nicholls was another of his advisors, and was safely back in Washington offering his insights from the comfort of his office.
“A closed session, maybe?” Margaret offered. “If we share some of the details of that Egyptian business…”
“That’ll piss off the Egyptians…” Sartori mused. “Not that we can’t handle that, but…”
“Needs must.”
“We didn’t share much with the Egyptians, either. This would anger them doubly so.”
“Again, Mister President, needs must. The only question as I see it is how far we go.”
Margaret was an old friend and colleague. She only called him ‘Mister President’ when she was deadly serious.
“…Right.”
Sartori filed a request to speak in a closed session with the Assembly’s Speaker, who had the unenviable task of not only overseeing the discussions and points of order, but also of managing precedence and etiquette. In theory every nation at the Assembly was on an equal footing, but diplomatic reality of course was more sophisticated. The seniority of the supplicant, the political importance of their nation and the relevance of the comment they wished to make were all factored in.
When the POTUS promised to contribute something highly relevant, Sartori knew, he was pretty much guaranteeing himself the first place in the queue.
The remaining minutes waiting for the official report to wind to its conclusion were spent quickly assembling the key points of what he was about to say, a process streamlined immeasurably by the involvement of his chief speechwriter, five senior advisors and the Secretary of Defence. Sartori and the speechwriter did the actual writing, the other six added notes in the figurative margin, and within five minutes he had everything he needed.
Sartori stood and tugged at his cuff to straighten it as the Speaker opened the floor, and as expected was immediately given the first comment.
“May I request a closed session, Mister Speaker?” he asked, politely. The etiquette of the chamber was respected.
There were disappointed noises from the public galleries as press and tourists alike were quietly ushered out. The windows dissolved into gray blandness as the privacy fields came online, the cameras were shut down. No doubt the thrust of his words would leak through one of the present dignitaries and functionaries, but the important part was that it would all be second-hand, and thus deniable.
The last door closed, the lights dimmed, and Sartori found himself spotlighted.
He looked down at his hands and brushed them lightly across the desk in front of him before speaking.
“I want to begin by acknowledging the human cost here,” he began. “Ambassador Hussein’s family are grieving today and it would be remiss of us to forget that. But they are not the only grieving families. After all, we are at war.”
He looked up and around. ”At war,” he repeated. “Not should go to war, nor are we debating the validity of today’s casus belli. I want to argue that we have been at war for several years now, and it is the bloodiest we have seen since the nineteen-forties. Millions are already dead, billions of dollars of war debt has been accrued, good men have lost their lives in combat operations…We. Are. At. War.”
It would have been better if the words had rang, but the chamber’s acoustics were not designed with dramatic effect in mind. In fact, they were designed for his fellow dignitaries to listen to real-time translation, and so his words were swallowed by dead sound and the white noise of the forcefields. It was a shame: A shoddy orator could stand on good acoustics. A decent orator could fly on them.
Sartori was an exceptional orator. He didn’t need acoustics at all.
“Our species is imprisoned, and we have done nothing. Our people were thrown to the wolves, and we did nothing!” He angled a sharp glance around the chamber, saw allies nodding and others listen solemnly. “Galactic nations tear each other apart and blame us, and we don’t even object! Our good green Earth is permane ntly scarred by an antimatter bomb, millions have perished, our economy is laboring… and our response is to act as though life continues as it always did? When it’s now clear that a force out there wants us all dead?”
He shook his head. “No. This Assembly may have been content to let the litany of injustices continue, but America and our military allies have not. When San Diego burned, we hunted the party responsible. When an alien ship invaded our sky to inflict the most sickening cruelties on innocent civilians, our jets swatted it from the Egyptian sky!”
He paused, adjusted his cuff again and shot a glance at the Egyptian table to gauge their reaction. When he read nothing he could use in their expressions, he sighed wearily for effect. “Let me tell you a little of our Enemy. I can’t say much because even now, even here, they are listening and they will seek every advantage. So I shall cover only the basics.”
He took a sip of water and raised a hand to punctuate his words with gestures. “They are old. Vast and ancient beyond the reckoning of our civilization. They are cunning. Many others have fallen to them, and the peoples no longer here to enrich our Galaxy number in the hundreds—that we are aware of. The body count is in the trillions, the measure of loss, the suffering and the retardation of the sciences and the arts… incalculable. They are subtle. Their influence has shaped Galactic society and passed unnoticed. They are cynical, pitting team against team, nation against nation, Dominion against Alliance. ”
He paused again, partly for dramatic effect and partly to reel himself in. That last part had perhaps been a bit too revealing but he needed the emphasis.
“And they are not afraid of overt action, either,” he added. “San Diego was their work. Egypt was a reaction to our rooting out the last of their Earthbound force. They are ruthless, willing to use even the Hunters as a weapon if it will suit their ends. But the worst, by far…”
He took a deep, nasal breath and allowed his volume to dip again. Like good music, the loud and the soft needed to dance. “The very worst part of our Enemy is that they are callous. Like our own Earthly terrorists but on a scale we have never seen, they hide among the innocent and hold those innocent lives in the most negligent contempt. For our defiance, billions of innocents have been slaughtered and we are made to take the blame. Our Ambassador, murdered, and as we all heard the last he asked of them was what we could do to make things right.”
He paused a third time and took another sip of his water. The room was stone silent. “Why do I speak of this now?” Rhetorical oration was one of Sartori’s guilty pleasures. “Because it is now clear that there’s no sympathy to be had out there: we are trapped. We’re a small island in a vast cruel sea, valiantly fending off a numerically superior foe…” he glanced at the British table “…but there is no help from abroad coming this time. If we’re going to get out of this hole, then we need to dig our way out by ourselves. We need to get our eggs out of this single basket, as a matter of survival.”
He glared around the room and repeated that last word. “Survival. That is how high the stakes are at this table. That is what we are playing for—the right for our children to see tomorrow. We can keep turning the other cheek, we can forgive those who trespass against us… But then what? Do we go quietly into the night? Do we join the hundreds before us and allow hundreds more to come after us?”
He looked around, attempting to convey with a single sweep of his gaze that he had singled out everyone in the room for his personal attention. “…Or has the time come for us to show the galaxy that we are not the monsters here? Has the time finally come for us to acknowledge that we are at war… and that we are not willing to lose?”
Somehow, those last words managed to ring even in the dead air of the assembly chamber, buoyed by the silent susurrus of rapt breath. Sartori allowed himself a satisfied nod and stood up straight.
“The good news,” he said, “is that our strategy doesn’t rely on sacrifice, but on opportunity. There are worlds out there waiting for us, untouched paradises shunned by other species as unusable ‘deathworlds’ and our best minds—scientists, engineers, even artists—have been devoting themselves to the task of unlocking those new promised lands.”
“The way isn’t open yet,” he shook his head, and let the volume fall again, until he was speaking almost as though conspiring quietly with all of them. “But I invite you all to imagine your culture, not just mine or those of our military allies, walking the stars, leaving your mark, writing yourselves into the future of mankind. Does that sound like sacrifice to you? Does that sound like war?”
He looked down at his hands, and absent-mindedly touched the gold wedding band he had never taken off. “Make no mistake. It will be war. It is war. Quite probably a bloody and difficult one that will last lifetimes and rob us of our best and bravest time and again. We will ask ourselves, ’will it be worth it?’ We will ask ourselves, ’how far are we willing to go?’ I don’t know. Maybe this won’t even be a war we can win. Maybe we’ll only win it by becoming the monsters they claim we are. If so, maybe it would be better to die with our souls untarnished, but…”
He paused for one last time, and shook his head.
“…But I have faith.”