City of Leonard
Darius Gamma
Darius System
“Lucky you.” Gail Weiss leaned over Zachariah McBryde’s shoulder and planted a kiss on his left ear. “Wish I got to work at home.”
“That,” Zach replied with a grin, never looking away from the display in front of him, “is because you are a lowly peon, toiling in the tactical fields, while I am a lofty superintendent of strategic imperatives.”
Gail smacked the top of his head.
“That’s just a fancy way of saying I know what I’m doing and you’re whistling in the dark,” she informed him.
“Well…That’s putting it a little strongly. The ‘whistling in the dark’ part, I mean.” He frowned as he studied one of the items on his display. “Right now, I think ‘whistling past the graveyard’ might be more appropriate.”
“That bad, huh?” She straightened up, and for a moment the hand which had delivered the head slap gently caressed his shoulder. She was tempted to ask him what was causing him problems, but the temptation fled as soon as it arrived.
Partly that was because Gail had only a very general feel for Zach’s occupation, which was quite unlike her own. She was a specialist, whose line of work was tightly focused. Zach was just the opposite: a generalist who spent his time organizing others to develop projects, the specific nature of which he himself often understood only partially. He seemed to be a combination of supervisor, counselor, gofer, and ombudsman.
Think of me as the Spanish Inquisition and you won’t be far off, he often said. Given that he was obviously well-liked by those of his coworkers Gail had met, she took it as a joke. Mostly.
But the main reason she didn’t inquire was because she’d realized, in the six T-months since they’d arrived on Darius Gamma, that the Alignment’s surveillance of its citizens was not only extensive, but intrusive. She was quite sure they had no privacy even in their own apartment.
The personal aspects of that surveillance didn’t particularly concern her. She was far from a prude, and, in any event, whatever AI program monitored them would be quite indifferent to their sex life. The real problem was that the Alignment took what it called “Security” very seriously, and its definition of the term was…expansive. The end result was a regime that, while not a police state in the usual sense, she was certain would be quick to intervene if it felt its citizens—who were also its employees—had wandered too far from their assignments and proper interactions with other citizens/employees.
So instead of asking him what he meant, she simply headed for the door.
“I may be home later than usual,” she said over her shoulder. “There’s a rumor going around that I’m being given a new assignment. You know how that usually goes.”
“Yeah,” Zach grunted, still not looking away from the display. “I sure do. Welcome to your new glorious undertaking. First, we have to figure out what it is. That may take a while, but as soon as we do…”
She smiled as she stepped out the door into the corridor beyond. The corridor was wide enough to allow for a slidewalk down its center, but Gail stayed close to the wall. Slidewalks were always tempting, but she preferred to maintain a brisk stride as a way to keep fit. Many, many things had changed since human beings left Old Earth, but one thing remained fixed and certain: exercise was good for you.
✧ ✧ ✧
Zach tried to concentrate on his work after Gail left, but he found himself too restless. He rose and went to the huge window—one entire wall of their apartment, really, programmable for anything from transparency to complete opacity—and looked out over the Darius System’s capital city.
It was a beautiful city, although it looked very little like any other city he’d ever seen.
He’d once visited Old Chicago, the capital of the Solarian League, which was universally considered one of the most majestic cities in human-settled space. He found no reason to dispute the opinion.
To begin with, it was enormous in every respect—down, as well as up. Chicago’s labyrinthine subterranean regions were often called the Fifth Wonder of the League, and only partly in jest. Zach had spent the better part of two days in those depths. He’d been completely lost within ten minutes, and he’d remained so for the entire length of his stay. The supposedly state-of-the-art navigation app he’d been given for his uni-link had proved just as useless as he’d been warned it would. Fortunately, the man who’d warned him had also served as his personal guide, so the visit had gone smoothly enough, even if he had never known precisely where he was.
The city spread horizontally, as well as vertically. The boundaries of the vast urban stretches west and south of the city couldn’t be seen, even from Chicago’s tallest edifice, the Aspire. But Zach hadn’t spent much time gazing at that landscape. He’d been far more impressed by the man-made archipelago that reached out over Lake Michigan. Kilometer after kilometer of structures: towers, residential and commercial; parks; marinas—everywhere. The enormous towers’ foundations were fixed in the lake’s bedrock, but square kilometers of the spaces between them were filled with more modest structures, many of them floating on the water, instead. Only a civilization with counter-grav architecture could have built and sustained such a place.
Still, that urban beauty had really been beauties—the things in the city, more than the city itself. Chicago was ancient, and like all such human-created places, it was also a mishmash. A gorgeous and superbly designed upscale residential tower might find itself sandwiched between two shorter, squatter towers that could most charitably be described as “functional.” And the farther one got from the lake, the…lower-scale stretches of the city became as more and more people were shoehorned into increasingly “affordable” housing.
Not so, Leonard. Leonard was a unitary whole, planned and designed from the very beginning as a single work of art. Its layout was totally unlike the Solarian League’s capital, because Old Chicago had risen from the grid pattern of pre-space, pre-counter-grav, Ante Diaspora history. Leonard was untrammeled by that ancient legacy. More than anything else, it made Zach think of a gigantic snowflake.
Mesa’s capital city, Mendel, where Zach and his family had spent most of their lives, had begun with a similar design—albeit on a less ambitious scale. But the centuries had battered Mendel’s original geometric precision. Battered it badly as slaves became the majority of Mesa’s population, and then battered it still worse once a large number of manumitted slaves became second-class citizens. Throughout human history, anywhere and at any time that such rigid inequalities had arisen, they were inevitably accompanied by slums and tenements. They might be cleaner and less dilapidated slums and tenements on a planet like Mesa than they would be in the Verge or Fringe. But they’d still be slums and tenements. Any comparison with what they might have been only underscored that reality.
But Leonard was…perfect. And the longer Zach spent here, the more oppressive he found that perfection. No, worse than oppressive. Leonard—the whole of Darius, had begun to frighten him.
Badly.
The fact that the entire system population was comprised of proud and open Alignment members—nearly four billion of them—should have been exhilarating. And, in some ways, it had been. There’d been no need any longer to maintain the secrecy he and his brother Jack had lived with for so many years, hiding their true affiliation even from their own family. Every one of the McBrydes had thought of themselves as loyal members of the Alignment. But what only Zach and Jack had understood was that the “Alignment” their parents and sisters belonged to was a shell, a façade hiding the real Alignment from sight.
He’d never known Darius actually existed…not until Operation Houdini pulled him and Gail off of Mesa. He’d known something like it had to exist, if only because his position on Mesa had required him to deal with and assimilate R&D which was obviously being conducted…somewhere else. But if there’d ever been something legitimately covered by the Alignment’s iron “need to know” protocols, Darius’s location, its organization, even its true function had to be it.
Now he’d learned a great deal about it—rather more than Gail, in fact. Most importantly, perhaps, he’d also learned of the existence of the star system called Galton, as well. He’d had to because of what he did for the Alignment.
The vast bulk of the Alignment’s research and development, what Zach thought of as the “heavy lifting,” was done not in Darius, but in Galton. Yet the very best of the researchers and engineers Houdini had snatched from Mesa had come to Darius, just as Zach had. At least twelve of the scientists he’d worked with back on Mesa, however, were in the Galton contingent, and Zach was certain that just as he’d known nothing about Darius—or Galton—before Houdini, none of them had learned a thing about Darius, even now.
Zach McBryde’s function, what he was best at, was his ability to…enable research teams. He wasn’t a researcher himself, and he was far too much of a generalist to grasp the true intricacies of any of the cutting-edge specializations which drove the scientific—and technological—frontiers ever outward. But what he did have, partly as a result of the McBryde genome’s improvements, were a phenomenal memory; an ability to…mentally encapsulate the conceptual hearts of theories and hypotheses and evidence, to put “handles” on them; and an intuitive ability to recognize where those “handles” intersected. He couldn’t really describe how it worked, even to himself, but that combination of abilities made him incredibly valuable, because specialists didn’t speak one another’s languages. They needed an interpreter—no, they needed a matchmaker, and that was Zach McBryde.
He was still doing that interpreting and making those matches, but the process had changed. Everything that any of “his” teams—the ones he was assigned to coordinate—produced came to him. Some of it came from people working right here in Darius, and that part of his daily routine was comfortingly the same. But even more came to him from Galton. From people with whom he no longer had—or had never had, in most cases—personal contact. That lack of contact, that inability to sit down with a cup of coffee and bounce ideas back and forth, made his job far harder, and he felt less effective. He also suspected that the memos he produced on the basis of the Galton datastream were thoroughly sanitized before his suggestions and observations went back to Galton. Because none of those people in Galton knew about Darius.
It was an incredibly inefficient way to use his talents, which were most valuable because they increased efficiency, but he’d come to understand why that was how things were done. Everything produced in Galton came to Darius, where it was evaluated and integrated into a database and research programs which both paralleled those of Galton and also headed in completely different directions. As just one example, the streak drive had been developed in Galton, but the spider drive—which he’d had no idea even existed before Houdini, although he suspected Gail had, given her own stratospheric area of expertise—had been developed in Darius and never shared with Galton. That was because only a tiny amount of traffic went to Galton from Darius. And much of what originated here and did go to Galton went only because Zach had tagged it as useful for one of the Galton programs he oversaw.
No one had told him why that was, and he didn’t expect them to. But the problem with not explaining things to smart people was that they tended to keep mentally picking at the non-explanations.
And sometimes, they figured it out for themselves.
He still wondered how the traffic from Darius was inserted into the Galton effort once it got there. Given everything else he’d observed, it had to be done in a way which erased any hint that it had originated outside Galton, though. He knew it did, because he’d figured out at least one thing no one had told him.
Galton was expendable.
Zach didn’t for a moment think anyone in Darius wanted Galton to be destroyed. His own knowledge of the system was extraordinarily limited, outside the programs he was dialed into, but it was obvious from some of the “sideband” information in the reports he saw that Galton’s industrial base—and possibly its population base, as well, though he was less confident of that—were both far bigger than anything in Darius. Something that valuable had to be preserved.
Yet, ultimately, one of Galton’s most vital functions—indeed, perhaps its single most vital function—was to die in Darius’s stead if worse came to worst. It had to be that way, because Darius was the basket in which the Alignment had hidden away its most precious eggs. The best of its scientific thinkers. The true records of its genetic lines. And, especially, the highest echelon of its leadership. If Galton was the heart of the Alignment’s presence off Mesa, Darius was its brain, but Galton didn’t even know the brain existed. And so the Alignment could have its very heart cut out, yet survive.
And even without Galton, Darius’s industrial base and research programs were more than sufficient to eventually regenerate everything Galton brought to the Alignment.
Zach McBryde had always known the Alignment thought in concentric terms, like the ancient Russian matryoshka dolls his mother had collected. Secret hidden within secret. Defense nested within defense. Yet the thought of a leadership that could conceive of an entire star system as an ultimately expendable deception chilled something deep inside him.
On the one hand, it made perfect sense. There was no conceivable way the Alignment would deliberately lead an enemy to Galton. It was far too valuable for that, if nothing else. Galton could only be threatened—far less “expended”—if the enemy had already discovered its existence and its whereabouts despite everything the Alignment could do to hide it. So building yet another fallback position behind Galton, and ensuring that there was no trail of breadcrumbs past Galton to Darius, was completely logical. No more than reasonable. Might even be called simple prudence.
But on the other hand…
Fanaticism, he thought. That was what chilled his heart. The fact that the movement to which he’d given his entire adult life was fanatical enough to think in those terms under any circumstances. To cold-bloodedly plan how best to use the deaths of millions—even billions—as an acceptable price if it preserved its core leadership and its purpose.
Because if it could think in those terms about an entire star system, then no matter how benevolent it might appear, no matter how comfortable it might make its adherents’ lives here on Darius, it was equally well prepared to sacrifice any individual. Any group of individuals. If that suspicion, that awareness, had occurred to him once he came face-to-face with the realities of Houdini, what he’d learned about Galton since had absolutely confirmed it.
He wished it hadn’t. That he’d never been allowed that peek behind the mask, that glimpse into the innermost chamber where decisions like that were made. But he had, and that meant Darius could never be the refuge he’d expected it to be in those long-ago, pre-Houdini days.
He’d wanted it to. He still wanted it to. He wanted to shake free of the secrecy which had been so much of his life for so long. Knowing that anyone he met was part of the cause to which he’d devoted his life since he was sixteen years old should have been a heady elixir. But that elixir had been bitter on his tongue, and not just because he’d learned about Galton. Indeed, once upon a time the realization of how the Alignment saw Galton, the recognition of its ability to think in such…heart-chillingly cold-blooded terms, wouldn’t have bothered him. Oh, he would have regretted it, but it wouldn’t have filled him with fear. No, that had required something else—something more. A sharpened mental vision. A heart that had learned to question all he’d ever believed about the Alignment.
As he gazed out over that magnificent cityscape, he tried to decide exactly where that quiet, persistent, mercilessly questioning voice had first been born.
Probably with Jack’s death, he thought. He’d vehemently denied the possibility that Jack—Jack!—could have been a traitor. He’d known his brother too well to believe that for an instant. The very idea was ludicrous! But he wondered, now, if the reason he’d been so vehement, so absolutely certain, had been to convince himself of that even more than his superiors. Because he had known Jack, known his unshakable integrity. And if Jack could have turned “traitor”—if Jack could have blown up the Gamma Center, been part of the Green Pines Incident, killed so many of the men and women with whom he’d shared his devotion to their cause—then what had his brother discovered about the Alignment that Zach hadn’t?
But his faith had weathered Jack’s death, wounded yet still strong. After thirty plus years of commitment, of that burning sense of mission, it would have been astonishing if it hadn’t. But then had come “Operation Houdini” and his forced extraction from Mesa. He’d been highly enough placed in the Alignment’s hierarchy to know Houdini existed, just as he’d known something like Darius—or Galton—must exist. But they’d been only a remote fallback contingency he’d never expected to be used, and he’d never once considered what the Alignment’s leaders might do to conceal Houdini’s true purpose from its enemies. The possibility of such slaughter, so many deaths, had never even occurred to him. Not really. They should have, perhaps, yet they never had. Then again, he’d been an office nerd, what Jack had teasingly called a “tech weenie,” and never a field agent. If he hadn’t, if he’d had a little of Jack’s experience, perhaps he would have known better, would have realized how murderous a beast something like Houdini must be…and the horrors he’d experienced after his abrupt removal from the only life he’d ever known would have been less shocking.
And maybe they wouldn’t have, he told himself with ruthless honesty. He’d always known about many of those horrors, after all. Only intellectually, perhaps, but he’d known. Yet the knowledge had been abstract, accepted as unfortunate—even terrible—but unavoidable. Much as a civilian who’d never seen a battlefield might contemplate with equanimity the “collateral damage” that must inevitably accompany great causes and struggles.
Collateral damage.
That protective euphemism had been shattered for Zach aboard the slave ship Prince Sundjata, part of the Houdini pipeline that had eventually brought him and Gail to Darius Gamma. And what had shattered it—and Zachariah McBryde—was the question he’d asked his shipboard guide as he was escorted through an interlocking series of cargo bays. They were smaller than those of most freighters, yet they were fitted with enormous hatches that seemed oddly disproportionate to the holds they served.
So he’d asked about them.
And the crewman had told him.
“These? Well, sometimes we use the bays just as cargo holds. For dead cargo, I mean. But when we’ve got live cargo—” Zach had already learned that was the euphemism for slaves “—these are our safety valves in case we find ourselves being tracked by a Manty or Havenite warship.”
The crewman had stopped and shaken his head.
“Those bastards—they catch you with live cargo, they’ll likely just kill you on the spot.” He’d used his chin to indicate the bay in which they stood. “This is where we dump the cargo. We flood their living quarters with a gas—strong stuff that’ll drive anything ahead of it. They got nowhere to come but here, and then—” once again he’d used his chin to indicate the huge hatches “—pop goes the weasel. Out they go.”
Then he’d turned and pointed to a series of tubes Zach had wondered about.
“Makes one hell of a mess. Puke everywhere, and there’s always some that get mangled up on the way out. Those pipes’ll flood the area with a high-pressure cleaning foam that blows everything out and leaves the bays bright and shiny. Spick-and-span, like nothing ever happened.”
The man had shrugged, then resumed walking toward the far end of the bay once again.
“Doesn’t always work, though. Does against the Sollies. They can’t do a thing unless they can catch us with live cargo on board and prove we’re carrying. No cargo, no harm, no fault. Some of these Manties, though—and Havenites are even worse, some of ’em—they’ll just pitch us out of the same bays. All they care about is what they call the ‘equipment clause.’ They see this—” he waved at the bay again “—and they don’t care whether or not they caught us with live cargo. Don’t even bother stripping us out of our suits, those who’re wearing one. What difference does it make if you’re floating in vacuum half-naked or wearing a suit with air that’ll run out in a few hours? Probably better to be half naked. At least for the cargo it’s quick.”
Zach had been on the verge of vomiting himself by the time they’d reached the exit. He’d had the image of a terrified child—a girl, maybe five years old—being flung out of the ship as the bay depressurized. By then, she’d have already emptied whatever little had been in her belly—her bowels, too, most likely. The vacuum would simply finish the business.
Maybe she’d have been held by the hand by an adult who died with her. It was the only small mercy Zach had been able to imagine.
And it had been all he could do to extend mercy to the crewman ahead of him. He’d struggled with the urge—the need—to smash the man’s neck with his fist. Again and again and again…until all that remained of his vertebrae were splinters.
But he’d realized even then that that would have been sheer hypocrisy. Because, in the end, he—and Gail—were part of this, as well.
✧ ✧ ✧
Perhaps what he’d learned about Galton wouldn’t have concerned him even now, if not for that moment aboard the slave ship. That instant in which God—or some greater power, at any rate—had reached out and rubbed not his nose, but his soul in the vileness with which the Alignment would compromise—would create and use—in the name of its lofty objective. Nobility of purpose, the splendor of the cause, were thin, cold comfort against that moment of transcendent reality.
And yet, as the weeks passed after they’d arrived in Leonard, he’d slowly come to realize that his…disenchantment had acquired another cause. One that went beyond the slave ship, beyond Galton. One that, in some ways, was even more powerful. It was certainly more frightening, since he’d always known he would never actually share the horrifying fate which had overtaken so many genetic slaves over the centuries. There was little chance that he or Gail would ever be directly brutalized by the Alignment. They might be executed, yes—it did happen, rarely. But the Alignment would do it quickly and painlessly. They’d probably never even realize it was happening to them. Nor was it remotely likely that they would be sacrificed as Galton might be, because they were in the innermost, safest matryoshka doll.
Yet there were other, deeper fears than mere death. Or even the icy fear of Gail’s death. There was the dawning recognition that he and the woman he’d come to love weren’t trapped in what was simply the galaxy’s most gilded and inescapable cage. No, they were imprisoned at the heart of a great, darkly savage, beautiful, ruthless, and unstoppable beast. They were part of it…and there was no way out. No escape.
As he gazed out over the geometric glory of Leonard, he found himself considering once more—for the first time in sharp focus—his brother’s last few weeks of life. What had he missed in those weeks? What had happened to Jack without his ever noticing? For himself, the breaking point had been that evacuation bay on Prince Sundjata, but what had it been for Jack?
He’d never know. He knew he would never know, and much as it grieved him, he’d discovered he could accept that. Because he did know this: his brother had found an escape. Not one that let him live, but an escape from the trap which had closed upon Zach. From the trap of being part of the beast. An escape, he knew now—knowing Jack as he had, seeing through eyes that were clear—in which Jack had struck back against that horror. He’d made his death count…because his brother would not have died any other way.
Fierce pride and satisfaction burned through him at the thought, and yet there was no way he could emulate Jack. Not on Darius Gamma. Death? Yes, that he could find. But redemption, the chance of actually accomplishing something, that was another challenge entirely.
He stood gazing out over the city for another moment, then turned away from the view and went back to his desk. There was still work to do, and he still had no answers.
And now he had Gail to think about, as well.
✧ ✧ ✧
The message light blinked from Gail’s desktop com when she reached her office. She grimaced and pressed the acceptance key.
“Solange wishes to see you,” a computer-generated voice said. “She awaits you in her office.”
That was it. No explanation of why, and no one to ask, so Gail simply shrugged, headed back out of the door, and went down the long corridor to her supervisor’s office.
The door was open when she got there, and she walked through it without knocking. She and Solange got along quite well.
“What’s up, boss?” she asked.
The woman behind the desk was as diminutive as Gail was tall, although their complexions were very similar and they shared almost exactly the same eye and hair color. Like her, Solange was one of the Alignment’s most capable military planners and logisticians.
Now she looked up at Gail’s question and shook her head.
“The rumor’s confirmed. You’ve either really pleased somebody, or really pissed them off. Not sure which.” She gestured toward the screen on one corner of the desk. “Word was waiting when I got here this morning. You’ve been reassigned.”
“Where? And why, for that matter?”
“The ‘where’ is TA-3. The ‘why’ is a question I’m nowhere nearly stupid enough to answer. Even try to think of an answer for.”
Gail stared at her. The innocuous sounding “TA-3” was…
Well, not quite notorious, but awfully close. The “TA” part of it stood for Tactical Analysis. Nobody knew—nobody Gail knew knew, anyway—where the “3” came from, since there seemed to be no “1” or “2.”
The only thing generally known about that department—division, section, whatever you called it—was that it handled the most highly classified military projects. The sort with “burn before reading” security classifications.
Which made the news exciting and…a little nerve-racking.
“Eek,” she said.
✧ ✧ ✧
Gail tried not to stare too obviously as her uniformed escort led her into the huge, circular complex of offices that was apparently TA-3’s headquarters. Office space was available in copious quantities in Leonard, but the Alignment was almost obsessive about fitting space to the actual need of whoever—or whatever—occupied it. Which meant…
They turned down a lengthy, curving corridor—one, she realized, that wrapped around the central core of the building. The outer wall, to her left, was composed entirely of one-way windows, while the one to her right was lined with closed doors. They walked at least fifty meters before they reached—eventually—one of those closed doors. There was no signage Gail could see, nothing to indicate what lay beyond that anonymous door, but her escort pressed his palm to a reader and the door slid open.
“Here you are,” he told her, waving her through it, and she found herself in a large, tastefully furnished office.
The cheerful looking man who rose from his desk chair as she entered came as close to obese as any Alpha line she’d ever met. He just about had to be an Alpha line to hold a supervisory position here on Darius Gamma, she thought, as she extended her hand, but he was certainly the…plumpest one she’d ever encountered.
“I’m Gail Weiss,” she said.
“Well, yeah,” he replied as he gripped the proffered hand. “We’re not likely to mistake someone’s identity here. Besides, your reputation’s preceded you.”
“Reputation for what?”
She managed not to frown as she asked the question, and he grinned.
“Tactical wizardry,” he said. “Of the variety you’d expect to get from a civilian, at least.”
He turned toward an interior door, gesturing with his hand for her to follow.
“Come on. I’ll introduce you to the team.”
The team was clearly meant to be pronounced Team, she thought.
“I assume,” he said, over his shoulder, “that you’ve already figured out that security on this project goes with terms like paramount, supreme, absolute—I believe ‘drawn and quartered’ is in there somewhere, too.”
“Yes. Does ‘security’ include your name?”
The man stopped and turned around, his mouth slightly agape. Then he shook himself.
“Oh. Sorry. I forget stuff like that. I’m Antwone Carpinteria.”
“And my new supervisor?”
“Not…exactly.” He shook his head. “You’ll find that TA-3 isn’t much given to hierarchical arrangements.” He headed for the interior door once more. “Just don’t forget the drawn and quartered part. You can ignore the Iron Maiden, though, because it’s off in a corner. But don’t trip over the rack.”
The passageway beyond the door was short…and opened into a chamber that explained the building’s architecture. It, too, was circular, and it bordered on the gigantic. It had to be at least eighty or ninety meters in diameter, and one of the largest holo projectors she’d ever seen was mounted in the center of a ceiling at least twenty meters above the floor.
Two people awaited them, both in the maroon and green uniform of the Darius System Navy: a captain and a lieutenant commander. The captain was female, on the burly side, with very dark skin and blond hair cut rather long for a naval officer. The lieutenant commander—he seemed quite a bit older than his superior, oddly enough—was male, with the sort of unremarkable face and build that legend ascribed to top espionage agents.
Carpinteria waved a hand at them. “Captain Bernice Augenbraun. Lieutenant Commander Vergel Suarez.” He jerked a short, pudgy thumb at Gail. “Gail Weiss. Civilian analyst.”
Both officers nodded politely to her, and she nodded back. Then Carpinteria clapped his hands, and the grin was back on his face.
“And now, let’s have the show,” he said. “Back behind the lines, please.”
He pointed to a twelve-centimeter-wide yellow line. It paralleled the chamber’s walls, three meters out from them to enclose the holo display’s area. He waited till they were all safely outside the hologram’s display area, and then clapped his hands.
“Avanti!” he said, and the chamber was plunged instantly into darkness. But that darkness was the black-velvet background for a breathtakingly perfect hologram of a star system, and as her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she began discerning its details.
It was dominated, using the term loosely, by the orangey brilliance of what was clearly a K-class star. There were at least five planets, but only one of them, the fourth from the star, lay within the liquid-water zone and showed the cloud-swirled blue of a world with atmosphere. As if to compensate, there were two asteroid belts. She was pretty sure the outer one, which was exceptionally dense, lay outside the primary’s hyper-limit, and the tiny fireflies of what were clearly resource extraction ships swarmed through it. Tiny as their icons might be, those ships were grossly out of scale, or she would never have seen them with her naked eye.
The outer belt might supply the raw materials, but the platforms which used them were much farther in-system, tethered to the gravitational anchor of the habitable planet and safely inside the hyper limit. There were at least a dozen artificial habitats, some of them downright huge, as well as a dense flock of what were clearly orbital refineries and an enormous bevy of orbital shipyards. Dense blocks of alphanumeric characters floated in the hologram, pegged to specific features. There were…a lot of them, and no doubt they contained tons of information, but most of them were too far away from her present viewpoint for her to read.
She had no idea where that system might be, but it was obviously a major industrial node.
“Welcome to…let’s call it System Alpha,” Carpinteria’s voice said out of the murk to her left. “Your job is to help us figure out how to defend it against a massive attack. Unless we’re wrong, if it has to be defended at all, the graserhead MDMs are going to be a key element in our tactics, and you’re our leading expert on them.”
Which was true, Gail reflected. She wasn’t a physicist, but she was a topflight naval analyst, and she’d led the teams which had evolved tactical—and strategic—doctrine for the new graserheads. But why was Carpinteria talking about just the MDMs? Why not the torpedoes, as well? She could think of several stealth applications for them right off the top of her head. Were they…off the table, for some reason? If so, why? And what was “Alpha,” and where—?
She shook that thought—all those thoughts—off. The less she knew about anything they didn’t want to tell her about, the better.
“You said ‘massive,’” she said instead. “How massive?”
“Really, really, really massive, most likely,” Carpinteria replied cheerily. “With everything the Grand Alliance has in its toolkit. On the other hand, you may spare no expense in its defense. Well, almost.”
What the hell is going on? Gail wondered.