MAARUUR
It is important to establish dominance immediately upon awakening.
The first ten minutes are crucial.
Quarantine Manual
109-350
Aboard BB Ikaniil Orbiting
Core 0707 Maaruur B694987-9 Hi In Sa Tu
I was awake, my eyes still closed, standing rather than reclining, and so I knew this must be the start of a new activation. The wave of disorientation passed, and I opened my eyes.
Before me was an expansive bridge, the transpex allowing me to see the curve of a world below. Twenty or so officers and spacers all stood at a respectful distance, waiting for me to begin, wondering what I was going to do.
“Who here is senior?”
“I am, Admiral Gonchan. We have . . .”
“Who is the senior marine?”
“Me. Sergeant-Major Joslin.”
“Come here.” Joslin took a few steps forward.
“I need a mirror.”
Joslin turned and directed, “Dinsha, run to your locker and bring us a mirror.” One of the marines dashed off.
“Show me your comm.”
The screen was unfamiliar to me. “Activate it.”
I now took it and selected a familiar double eye icon and felt it click. As this happened, I spoke to the group in general. “Who is the briefer?”
“I am, Commander Arlian Huffler, Sensops.”
“Please stay your briefing until I am ready. It will be a moment.”
I now examined the unfamiliar image: a young, reasonably handsome Naval officer. Brown eyes, brown hair. Tall. A strange line to his chin, perhaps Cassildan? No, not tall enough. No matter. The pips on his collar said I was a Naval sublieutenant.
I returned the comm to the Sergeant-Major. “Thank you.”
The admiral now spoke, his tone betraying his impatience. “We have activated you so that you may advise us on our current situation. Commander Huffler, you may begin.”
While he conveyed impatience, I suppressed my own feelings of annoyance.
As a realtime image of the world below appeared on the screen, the briefer began conveying information. “Maaruur, Core Sector oh seven oh seven. Maaruur is a cold, medium-sized far satellite on the outer fringe of the habitable zone, with a diameter of 9,880 kilometers and a circumference of 31,030 kilometers. It has a dense atmosphere with a tainted, exotic gas mixture and a pressure of 200 kilopascals at . . .”
I interrupted. “Skip the planetology and fast forward to the statement of danger.”
The screen changed to a display in a standard format as the briefer continued his narrative, essentially reading and elaborating on screen text. The headline was Danger-10. Someone, or some committee, or some computer, had evaluated this problem as potentially reaching the whole of the world below. There followed a less-than-brief statement of the problem: a mass of grey text in small type. The image confirmed what the briefer was saying in far too many words.
“Now show the statement of the threat.” The new screen was headlined Threat-6, perhaps a hundred thousand actors, apparently very determined, parasites of some sort. Codes said they were confined to the northern continent, with some reports of presence elsewhere.
There was an obscure code appended to the report: the parasite hijacked the host’s consciousness and intelligence. They were able to act in concert. Even one or two on a ship out of the system would be disastrous. How could anyone not see the depth of the danger?
“Show the Risk Assessment.” The screen changed again: three numbers 4, 4, and 0 adding to a larger 8. They were all subjective: how probable, how severe, how imminent the Danger was. The action point was usually 9 or 10.
Images changed and the briefer droned on about resources, activating protocols for containment, provisions for contingencies, anticipated exceptions, and a timeline for completion.
From the corner of my eye, I saw the marine appear at the entrance to the bridge, genuflect perfunctorily at the captain’s chair and step forward to the Sergeant Major with a mirror, who took it and passed it to me.
I motioned to the briefer. “Pause please.”
The reflection confirmed what I had seen on the comm, and I moved it around to see more detail at different angles.
“Why am I in this specific host?” I was curious why he—I—was a junior lieutenant.
The admiral spoke. “You overlay Sublieutenant Patel. Our report to sector generated an internal interim requirement to activate Quarantine.”
“How many volunteered?”
“Patel.”
“Anyone else?”
“I didn’t think we needed more than one volunteer.”
“Have you stopped traffic in and out of system? On and off world?
“There isn’t a need yet. We’re monitoring traffic.”
“Admiral, is there some reason you have not yet shut this system down?”
“The threat is contained on the northern continent. You were activated as a precaution. We have the situation in hand.”
I unconsciously raised my hand in a pause gesture and turned my attention to Joslin.
“Sergeant-Major, do you know me? Personally?”
“Casually, sir.”
“Who am I?”
“Sir, you are Sublieutenant Patel. Supply officer. You’ve been here for about five months. Sir.”
“Am I any good?”
“Sir?”
“Your experience with Patel: is he any good?
“Average. Good at PT and sports. A little slower than some at assertiveness.”
“I need a sidearm. Make that two, one non-lethal. Are these your men?”
“A couple are women, sir.”
“Yes. Arm them lethal-non-lethal as well. You are under my command. I also need a flight jacket. Make it say Agent on the back over the Imperial Seal.”
“Yes, sir.” The Sergeant-Major turned and gestured to several troopers.
“Agent, you will address your comments to me. And show some respect. I recognize that you may be momentarily disoriented, but I won’t warn you twice.”
“Admiral, have you read Imperial Edict 97?”
“I have.”
“Do you understand it?”
“Certainly.”
“Tell me, in a sentence, what it says.”
“You are impertinent. You are activated as a Quarantine Agent to advise us on our current Danger and Threat levels.”
“Sergeant-Major, have you read Imperial Edict 97?”
“Yes, sir.”
The Admiral interrupted. “Agent, you will stand silent.”
I ignored him.
“Sergeant-Major, do you understand it?”
“Certainly.”
“Tell me what it says.”
Joslin recited rote. “It requires assistance,” he hesitated and restated, “unlimited assistance, to the holders of specific documents, written, oral, or electronic, without regard to rank, privilege, station, protocol, or security. Holders are the equivalent of the Emperor himself.”
“Am I a holder under the edict?”
“Yes, sir you are.”
Two marines stepped forward with a jacket and a weapons belt with two holsters. “The rough red handle is lethal, sir; the yellow smooth is non-lethal.”
I took the flight jacket, looked at the back to check the markings. It said AGENT in thick black marker; I had sometimes seen it spelled AJENT. I reached to my collar and removed my rank pips, then put on the jacket. The weapons belt strapped on easily.
“Are the recorders on?” A nod from Sergeant-Major said they were.
“Who is Captain?”
“This is my ship; I am Captain Argent.”
“Suspend all traffic. No lift-offs. No landings. Divert incoming traffic to the outer system at the very least. Allow no jumps for any ship that has been on-planet in the past seven days.”
The Admiral intervened. “My patience is at an end. Security, take that man off the bridge.” And then “Patel, whoever you are, you will be silent.”
I spoke to the Sergeant-Major directly. “Shoot him.”
“Sir?”
“In the knee. Shut him up.”
We all heard one shot. The Admiral dropped to the deck, howling, spewing a variety of ill-chosen words.
I raised my voice for all to hear. “I am Agent Patel of the Quarantine. I act under Imperial Edict 97. Imminence is advanced to Now. This situation has escalated to Risk-14. Comms, call up the Edict File and make sure it’s recording. Captain, get started on my orders. Sergeant-Major, take the Admiral to his quarters.”
An hour later, I visited the Admiral in his suite. The Sergeant-Major dismissed the medic tending to the wounded leg.
“Get out! Get out!”
Calmly, ignoring the outburst, “Admiral, why did you select Sublieutenant Patel?”
“What? You shot me. I’ll have your head.”
“Answer my question.”
“You’re crazy. This is impossible! Intolerable!”
“Do I need to kneecap your other?”
“Sergeant-Major. Do something.”
But he didn’t.
Deliberately. “Answer. My. Question,” with a hand on the red grip of my lethal option.
“You. Patel was available. The crisis already needed every available resource, and then in the middle of it all, the stupid computer required we activate a Quarantine wafer. It gave a list of wafer-slots, and I picked you. Patel.”
“You have no wafer-slots on your staff?”
“I needed them for the crisis. We could do without a supply officer for a week; your petty officer can handle things.”
“Your staff gave no objections?”
“My staff does not object to clearly logical conclusions.”
“Do you have a wafer jack?”
“Certainly not.”
“I see.”
I turned to leave and spoke to the air, “Fit him with a wafer jack.”
Admiral, now Agent, Gonchan, stood on the bridge before his staff. Stiffly; his leg still healing.
“I am Agent Gonchan of the Quarantine. I act under Imperial Edict 97. Let’s get to work.”
034-336
Core 2118 Capital A586A98-D Hi Cx
I worked in an obscure office in the Ministry of State. After a basic education and a fairly ordinary university degree, I spent a term in the Imperial Star Marines. That may sound romantic, and it certainly sounds active, but in reality, it was mundanely bureaucratic. My comrades wear their battle scars proudly and they display their particular badges of service that tell those who recognize them that Enn fought in the Assault on Greer, or that Ank served with the Emperor’s Own Imperial Guard.
If I had such a badge; if there were such a badge, it would say that I served at the scheduling desk of Imperial Reaction Force Zalaa deciding which regiment would interact with what world at when point in time. I learned valuable lessons that have served me all of my life, but they are not the stuff of stories that entertain friends.
As my term of service neared its end, one of the offices with which I worked invited me to interview. Although initially I had dreams of travel with one of the megacorporations, in the end I received rather few offers in response to my inquiries, and so I visited with the Office of Appeals at the Imperial Quarantine Agency. They liked my answers to their questions; they confirmed I was suitable because they had direct access to all of my Marine service records; they offered me a job doing much what I had been doing in the Marines, albeit with more money.
At the time, the Quarantine was a semi-autonomous force within the Imperial Navy. Fully a tenth of the Navy’s fighting ships carried the mission modifier Q: crewed by Quarantine officers, trained in Quarantine doctrine and policy, and dedicated to protecting the Empire from the strange and deadly threats that the universe creates from time to time.
It became clear to me that the Navy disliked the Quarantine for reasons too many to list. From the inside, I heard the justifications for Quarantine’s existence and structure, and I adopted them as my own, partly because they made sense, partly because they supported the existence of my own employment, and partly because I never looked deeper into the controversy.
The Office of Appeals, my particular assignment, was an obscure component of the far larger Quarantine Agency. Once a world was Quarantined, many interests arose: business, noble, economic, political, family, ancestral, moral, civil, scientific, cultural. All of those concerned registered their objections or affirmations, to be heard by an agency magistrate who had the theoretical power to change the designation. The process took years, decades, even centuries. Appeals covered not only current designations, but also labels applied long long ago.
A smooth-running bureaucracy needs an institutional memory to ensure its decisions are both correct and consistent. It fell to me to maintain that memory, some of it in the computer, some of it in my brain. I spent my entire adult life dedicated to my particular part of the overall whole.
I began as a lowly clerk and steadily rose up climbed the bureaucratic ladder: senior clerk, supervisor, senior supervisor, assistant manager, manager, senior manager, and ultimately Assistant Director for Appeals, reporting to the Director himself. Since the Director changed with the whims of the faction currently in power, I was effectively in charge of my own petty empire. I enjoyed my life, and my job. I was good at it. I could even say that I loved it.
It all changed in an instant.
At my annual physical, the doctor told me I had incurable, terminal cerebral degeneration. I would be dead within five years. There was no hope. This was an area of medical science for which there had been little progress made and little knowledge gained. He said I had time to get my affairs in order, plenty of time, actually. I could expect a good year or two, and then an inevitable decline.
When I arrived at work the next day, my console showed a new meeting flag: The Director himself wanted to see me later that day.
The Quarantine Agency has a bifurcated control structure. The ships in the fleet are commanded by Quarantine officers with a rank structure parallel to the Imperial Navy: Lieutenants, Commanders, Captains, and Admirals. The titles are the same; the loyalties merely reach the Emperor along slightly different paths. The administrative structure, on the other hand, consisted of several Offices: Personnel, Research, Training, Appeals, plus a few others.
The current Director of the Quarantine Agency was Lord Nam Aankhuga, Count Mishaar, a tall red-haired politician installed as Director when the Orange Party became ascendant in the Moot some six years before.
As his assistant ushered me in, the Count rose and offered me a seat, at the same time telling me how sorry he was to hear of my diagnosis and prognosis. After some awkward comments, he came to his agenda item.
“Jonathan.
“The downturn is taking its toll on the economy.” He paused. I was sure at that moment that they were going to cast me aside without a thought and he saw that in my face.
“No. Jonathan. Your retirement is secure; your support package is substantial. You have no worries, except, of course, for your prognosis.
“This is something different.” He called up a display with some graphic quantity charts and started to explain them.
“The capital ship hulls of the fleet are nearing the end of their design life. Our quarantine ships are doing only little better.” He explained that the tension between the Navy and the Quarantine had come to a head; that a ship-building budget that would stoke the economy was being considered; that powerful political figures did not see the need for devoting a tenth of the fleet to Q-mission ships.
“Their solution is simple, so they say: make all ships Navy; in Quarantine emergencies give temporary situational command to a designated Quarantine officer with full authority to do anything required. The Emperor, Anguistus himself, backs this plan.”
As part of me listened to this disclosure of the inner policy workings of the Imperial bureaucracy, I wondered why I was being told these details even as my tenure with the agency was coming to an end.
The Count continued with a few more comments, and then made his proposal.
“Jonathan, you know as much about this agency as anyone. You know our procedures, our policies. You know how important the right decisions are. You know the devastation that can follow a wrong decision. More than that, you have seen the right decisions being made; the wrong decisions being avoided.
“We have a process that can capture all of that knowledge and use it to enable our Quarantine Agents in the field under this new scheme.”
He leaned forward, “We can capture your personality and implant it temporarily in a naval officer to manage quarantine emergencies. With all your knowledge and experience, it is a better solution than training officers for a situation they may never face.
“But, there is a problem.
“The scanning is destructive. You will die during the process.”
110-350
Aboard BB Ikaniil Orbiting
Core 0707 Maaruur B694987-9 Hi In Sa Tu
Time was important, the operation needed to start even as I scheduled planning sessions. I called up console imagery myself because I knew what I wanted to know; it took less than minutes. I turned to the assembled staff officers.
“Intel.”
“Yes, Agent.”
“Go over the details of this world.”
He tapped his controller and the screen in front of me brightened. Titles appeared, “Maaruur Core 0707 B694987-9.” The officer decoded it aloud, “Moderate size, tainted dense atmosphere, less than average water. Billions of people, bureaucratic government, reasonable law, comfortable tech, although it lags the mainstream.” He tapped again and a new screen appeared. These codes were denser, “8 billion people, a third are mostly Vilani dating from the Third Millennium. The rest are indigenes: Shingans. Bilateral bipeds about as far from the Human template as they can get. Hairy exoskeletons. Graspers instead of hands.
“It’s an industrial world; that explains some of the taint in the atmosphere. Satellite of a gas giant. Cold, a lot of the terrain is marked tundral, thus short growing seasons. Apparently much of the food comes from vats.”
“Wait.” I had a habit of raising my hand to pause an interaction. “Personnel.”
“Yes, Agent.” This was an older Human woman.
“Do we have any Shingans, or Maaruurans with us?”
“No, Agent.”
I was relieved; one less issue to deal with. Back to Intel.
“Get me a census of who is on the Highport.”
I work by heuristics: close enough without spending a lot of time on it. Barring problems, my ships could get anywhere in the system in a day. They can get started crafting kinetics in a day. The kinetics can start hitting in a day.
“Operations?”
A tall Cassildan (that description is redundant, they are all tall) responded. “Yes, Agent.”
“Put three of the capitals in equidistant stationary orbit. Dispatch the other two as siege engines to the planetoid belt. Get some pickets there at high speed to help locate what they will need.” A pause for breath. “Put marines in place on the Highport control center. Am I being redundant? I want this world on interdict. No one, nothing in or out. Cut comms and links. How long?”
“Yes, sir. Interdict is already in place. Four hours for the Highport operation.”
“Come back to me before you execute.” My knee hurt. There was a stab of pain.
“Medical. Get me a pain pill.” I didn’t wait for a reply. “Logistics.”
“Yes, Agent.”
“The siege engines will start building kinetics tomorrow. Are they properly stocked? Tell me the foreseeables.”
“The critical path constricts on flash chips. Everything else can be lasered and makered. They did an exercise last season with excellent results. The chip stockpile is full; that’s just a commodity. We have more than enough.”
“Confirm all that and come back to me with specific numbers.”
I turned to the Captain. It was time for some semblance of social connection. “Captain, you have an excellent crew. Everything I see is competent. I commend you.” Since I was speaking with the voice of the Emperor, I hoped this would keep him in check.
“Thank you, sir. My duty is to serve the Empire.” What else could he say?
I talked to various officers until Operations and Personnel came back. Sensor protocols. Competencies. Exception responses. Morale. Notifications to sector flag.
“Agent.” Personnel waited for me to respond.
“Yes?”
“Highport has thirteen hundred personnel. Half are transients, passengers, crew. The rest are staff, clerks, functionaries.”
“How many are Shingans?”
She looked down. “A third.” She didn’t see where I was going, and I had to ask gender proportion. “Seventy-Thirty.” That was consistent with the sophont gender census.
“What ships are in port?”
“Just four. Not counting us, of course. A Jumpliner. Three traders.”
I touched a nearby console and asked it for similar worlds nearby. It showed graphics which I tapped. 1901 Zaniin had room. 2624 Idas was a hellworld, so no. 0302 Khaam was close, empty, and similar; it could actually use some people.
“Tell the marines that I want every Maaruuran,” my mouth twisted on the word, “Shingan, Human, whatever, on that jumpliner and bound for Khaam. Brook no questions, but use non-lethal force. I don’t think they are going to understand. Set up a resettlement program for them.
“Activate any reservists over there and bring them on board here. Load everyone else on the traders and get them out of the system. Make that penultimate priority.” Priority and security classifications use the same scale: Ultimate (Last), Penultimate (Last but one), Antepenultimate (Last but two), and Preantepenultimate (Last but three), and Propreantepenult (Last but four). In practice, the terms after Penultimate are technical terms within the bureaucracy; they devolve into Ante, Pre, and Pro.Ultimate priority would have authorized lethal force; I didn’t want to lose any of them.
“Yes, Agent.”
“Operations? Can the marines handle all that? Are you ready?”
“Yes, Agent.”
“Then execute.” I turned to my next task.
Scrubbing a world takes a lot of planning, a lot of work, a lot of attention to detail. I delegated to the captain the positioning of the ships and the details of the attack. Some of the rest I delegated to my other self: Patel. I assigned tasks and responsibilities to others as well; no one person could do all that had to be done. It would be three days before the true scrubbing began, but we started immediately. We tilted Highport out of orbit to impact the largest city. The dreadnoughts emped the world from three sides, repeatedly. Civilization below evaporated.
What few comms survived the emps called frantically and repeatedly. There was an instant information vacuum: were we pirates? invaders? rebels? anarchists? luddites? sociops? usurpers? No one below knew and we stood silent. Several ships tried to boost to orbit; we knocked them back. A couple of feeble grav carriers tried as well; their efforts to climb out of the gravity well would take them hours and we blasted them. It was a gift.
Our siege engines reached the belt ahead of schedule and started work immediately. The ships extended their rail guns and prepared for a long campaign.
They harvested FeNi chunks, peeled them of their outer husks, then sliced them into manageable pieces. Lasers engraved them with textures to help them plunge through atmosphere.
Makers processed the shucks into thrusters that they spot welded into place.
In a last step, crew swarmed over the newborn kinetics and inserted their brains: flash-programed chips that knew where and when to strike. Then they launched.
Streams of thousands followed pre-determined paths. Some looped far afield to arrive later; others proceeded more directly.
We had divided Maaruur arbitrarily into thirty thousand cells: map locations a hundred kilometers across. Ten waves of three thousand kinetics were supposed to be sufficient to sterilize the world. The first wave was probably enough to kill everyone; the rest were just insurance.
The first wave arrived at the end of day four. The impacts were designed to overlap. For that first wave at least, we had to watch. We couldn’t not.
The brownish globe that was Maaruur hung before us, bright in sunlight, part cloaked in shadow. Sensops was a droning background narration as we watched. The kinetics had six-digit names; she gave up reciting the entire string and gave us one- or two-digit identifiers. “Four-four to impact. Now. Set Seven approaching. Group One impacting now.” A bloom of bright, then another, then a dozen, then a hundred flared in the planet’s night, a neatly drawn line from pole to pole. We knew without asking that the ground beneath was burning beyond recognition; that impacts were crushing everything on the surface and then fracking the bedrock; that winds and blasts were destroying all in their paths.
Scattered other impacts shattered the perfection of the flowing glowing line as stragglers hit their targets and special mission nukes seasoned the air.
Comms’ job was to monitor. She listened to multiple pleading transmissions from below, shifting in no particular order from anger, to bargaining, to despair, and even to acceptance. I moved to her console and put my hand on her shoulder. “Turn that off. You don’t need to listen anymore.”
One of the specialty cooks, a tripod with striped skin and booming voice collapsed. Personnel said it was unusually sensitive to emotions; the death throes overwhelmed it, even at 50,000 kilometers. A later update told me it died.
Over the next two days, there were scattered impacts: specialty target strikes where sensors saw life or movement or emissions in various spectra. We launched ten waves of kinetics total: we hit every possible location on the world, some twice, some three times. Special targeting boiled parts of the seas and sloshed hundred-meter waves across shorelines. Strikes hit fault lines and shook the continents to their very foundations: no subsurface structures could possibly survive those quakes. Repeated drops awakened volcanoes from their slumber and they spewed out angry ash that turned the skies blacker yet.
My remaining sleeps dwindled to a handful as our mission moved toward its natural end. Some of our ships would remain here for decades. I wouldn’t be here to see it. I would be dead again.
I addressed the ships’ crews: I told them that they had served the empire well and that the Emperor himself would know of their service and dedication. I told them that by their service they had saved a trillion lives and that I was proud of them. Some were moved by my words; I could see the tears in their eyes.
I admit that I felt a similar pride. The Emperor had chosen me to do his will, and I had again proven myself competent. I went to sleep that night satisfied.
090-336
Core 2118 Capital A586A98-D Hi Cx
I arranged for my own funeral. My wife was already dead, my children long-gone. I had few friends; I had poured myself into my work.
For reasons I accepted but did not fully understand, my family had rejected the commonplace full cremation and adopted the custom of sampling: we, that is, my family, could point to specific stone crypts that held pieces of us going back six generations. It was a source of continuity, of comfort to us, to me. When I was dead, I would have a place with my ancestors.
Keeping a whole body, however, was nonsense. Too big. Bulky. A sample was enough: humility and family tradition dictated that it be the least significant digit of my non-dominant hand.
I arranged for a monument in the Bilanidin—that was our name before we anglicized it to Bland—family memorial section in rural Intell. The stele was black granite with swirls of grey, standing as twice as tall as I, as wide as I. I eschewed any decoration; there was no one to appreciate it. Incised on its base was my name in both Anglic and Vilani:
Jonathan Bland
301-277 / 102-336
Chonadon Bilanidin
My sample, my left little finger, suitably preserved for the ages, was to be deposited in a sept carved under the stele’s base.