Here Be Dragons (15 page)

Suddenly Elena didn’t want to be in the lounge anymore. But it wouldn’t do for the crew to see the Chief leave before the polls had even closed.

Vijay took a spot behind the bar—of course—and Demyan Yukovych saluted lazily from his stool, a glass of something clear and cold in his hand. Marco Montessori sat on a couch at the center of the room and held court among the deck crew. Europeans were still relatively rare in the Space Agency—now that the Gulf Stream seemed to have returned for good, many of the more adventuresome among them chose to stay on the Continent and rebuild the old cities. Only the Russians and the British joined up in great numbers, following the footsteps of Avramovich and Azzam.

Over the next thirty minutes Elena managed to make the rounds with every member of her crew present, as well as a few of Erdogan’s people.
Gabriel
would depart on the trial cruise in a few days, and the leisurely attitude of port would pass with her. But for now, she could enjoy their presence.
Gabriel
was virtually unmanned at the moment, and there were only three faces missing—Rivkah Golus, Ikenna Okoye, and Pascal Arnaud.

She finally took a seat next to Hassoun, who was the only person in the room beside herself not holding a drink. He nodded a little too sharply, and she could see his Adam’s apple bob. His smile seemed to have been painted on his face, badly. At their first meeting a few weeks earlier, her new communications officer had looked ready to swallow his own tongue. She smiled back and remained quiet, so as not to force him to speak and embarrass himself again.

It was almost 8 pm in Cairo, and the final polls were closing in the last time zone. Erdogan had given Vijay the honor of hosting the festivities, and from the bar he controlled the enormous screen which took up most of one entire wall. There was some brief skirmishing over which news channel would be chosen—the left-wing
Transnational,
the right-wing
Nile
, or the moderate
Lunar Times.
Vijay made an executive decision to choose the
Times,
over the protests of most of those assembled.

Up on the screen went the
Times’s
map of the Earth’s continents, rendered as a patchwork of red, blue, gold, and white, against gray seas. At the bottom, where Antarctica would be, were the handful of seats allotted to the off-world colonists. The
Times
didn’t bother to display the two dozen or so independent nations at all. Instead they were colored the same slate gray as the oceans, as if they didn’t exist.

Every citizen of the Global Union was represented by at least one of the districts contained on that map. Three out of every five seats were either red or blue, for the Socialists and Conservatives, and here and there were a few lonely green dots that represented the small parties, mostly religious and linguistic minorities. Liberal gold and Sovereigntist white held the balance.

At the right side of the screen a running sidebar displayed feature stories by the
Times
staff. Vijay selected one and enlarged it, and a cheer arose for Helena Dixon, the Prime Minister of the Global Union. Elena watched her cut the ribbon at the brand new Station, back during her first term. She had always been a good friend of the Agency, and if any single person could be said to responsible for the
Archangel
Project, it was her. Back then, her hair had been almost as black as her skin. But the woman who’d gone global on the net a few days before to categorically deny the creation of a nuclear weapon had hair as white as her teeth.

Dixon had fought for the American resistance while still in her teens, and moved on to local politics after the fall of Cheyenne Mountain. A decade later she had become mayor of her home city, her country’s capital. She had stayed in Atlanta for another twenty years as a Senator and President of the American Republic, and then come east to Cairo to serve as the head of her party in the Global Assembly. Her administration had taken a hard line towards the independents and championed an aggressive policy towards the outsiders, and she had been elected Prime Minister three straight times, a record that would almost certainly end tonight. A four decade carer, cut down in four days.

Three other major candidates were competing, and after tonight one of two of them would take Dixon’s place. Elena recognized her opposite number, a former Defense Minister named Sir William Campbell-Azzam. His picture inspired even more cheers than Dixon had garnered. His martyred father had inspired the foundation of the Global Union itself, and was now the namesake of the Space Agency’s new headquarters. Campbell-Azzam had worn an unmatched five battle stars on his dress uniform own forty years of service had ended only when lymphoma had forced him out of the service uniform and back to his mother’s ancestral home in England. But Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen had taken himself out of the running the day before, and his party had reached out for a leader that all of Earth could rally behind.

Elena also recognized Liang Lanying, the longtime leader of the Alliance for Sovereignty, now running for a fifth straight time in her trademark thick black eyeglasses and bun piled high atop her head. Now that the Cantonese legislature had voted for independence, this election held immense personal importance for her. If the Alliance won—and Liang had about as much chance of becoming the next Prime Minister as Elena herself—a nation would exit the Global Union for the first time since its formation.

But the final hopeful, a white man of indeterminate nationality representing Liberal International, was completely foreign to her. His party of moderates favored stronger ties with the independent nations, and had actually spent more time in government than either of the hardline parties, though they were currently on the outside. But it was always as the junior partner, never the senior—the Liberals had never won an election outright, and were as anonymous as they were ubiquitous. Elena had never heard the man’s name in her life, and forgot it almost immediately.

The timer rolled over from 20:59:59 to 21:00:00. Immediately, the votes began to pile up. A running tally hit seven figures almost instantly, and then eight. It would end the night with ten digits. By law, there had been no opinion surveys published in the last five days of the campaign—coincidentally the only five days since Overstar-12—and the exit polls would not be released until midnight. Until then, all they had was raw data.

It was over an hour before the
Times
began to call individual races, those which were beyond a reasonable doubt. There were cheers and boos for each new result, mostly the latter. Hassoun remained quiet, speaking only when she did—maybe he was remaining circumspect in front of his commanding officer, or maybe he cared as little for politics as she did.
Gabriel’s
records had shown that forty two votes had been cast by the crew. Ikenna Okoye lacked Union citizenship, and Elena was one of the abstainers, but she would never ask if Hassoun was the other.

Elena watched as, one by one, the red and blue dots on the screen turned gold. In a four way race, it didn’t take much of a swing to flip a seat. The left and right wing strongholds, in America and Russia and India and Manchuria, would remain loyal to their party. But nearly every swing seat was going for the Liberals, and they were going to shatter their previous best showing over a decade earlier. The depths they had reached in the aftermath of the Nuclear Crisis were now just a memory.

At the bar, Vijay was playing the
Times
channel like a piano. He took the photo of the Liberal leader and enlarged it until the man’s face took up the entire screen. It would be a good night for the man with the weatherbeaten face and salt and pepper hair, and the gathered officers provided polite applause for the man who appeared almost certain to be their next commander-in-chief. The caption said that he was Dr. Jacob Erasmus, of Bloemfontein, South Africa.

Her bracelet vibrated. Vijay wanted to speak with her.

Elena excused herself to Hassoun and a slightly tipsy Second Officer of Erdogan’s who seemed untowardly interested in her political opinions. Hassoun smiled and nodded as she rose to leave. He had not had a drop all night.

Vijay was slouched on a stool, his pad on the counter before him. Marco leaned next to him. There were three drinks sitting on the bar.

“That one is for you,” Vijay said.

“I don’t drink on active service, Vijay,” Elena said. “You know that.”

“You will want to tonight,” Marco said.

Vijay pushed the pad over so that she could see. “I haven’t put it up on the board,” he said. “But Marco and I have been examining the races that have yet to be called. And we have been doing some math.”

“And?” Elena didn’t really need to ask. She knew what he was going to say.

“The
Times
is going to hold back until every country reports its results fully. The
Transnational
and the
Nile
will not say it either. But the Liberals will finish as the largest party, with a little over three hundred seats. And the coalition has collapsed. The Socialists and Conservatives will both drop to under two hundred.”

“Five hundred and one are needed for a majority.”

Vijay nodded.

“The Alliance for Sovereignty will nearly double its number of seats. To just about two hundred.”

“Madre de dios.”

“Foxes in the henhouse,” Marco said, and drained his drink. Mathematically, the Liberals only had one possible coalition partner.

The Treaty of Jerusalem did predate both the Union and the Agency, and the way Elena saw it, she owed it her loyalty first and foremost. She had sacrificed Helena Dixon willingly, but she hadn’t counted on who would take Dixon’s place. And now some of the highest chambers of the Global government would be filled by those who had vowed to destroy it. If Vijay was right, Elena had walked into the Alliance’s trap, and dragged her planet with her.

Through the windows at her feet, the Earth shone serenely. She took her drink and swallowed it in a single gulp.

Fata Morgana

E
lena awoke in her stateroom to darkness and thunder once more.

“Alert stations, alert stations. Warning yellow, captain to the bridge.”

“Lights, goddamnit!”

She rolled and kicked herself out of the hammock, and launched straight for the door. It was still early morning according to her bracelet. At least she was already dressed this time.

Her stateroom was only two compartments away from the bridge, and she had thought she had beaten the others to it. But Hassoun was already there, and sitting at the watch chair. That was odd—Officer Chung was the third shift officer of the watch, and Hassoun was scheduled to go on duty with her only two hours from now.

“Situation?”

Ikenna answered from the flight station.

“All due respect, Captain, but I think we should wait for the rest of the staff to arrive.”

“This is an alert! Are we taking fire?”

“Not at all, Captain,” Ikenna said. He rose from the chair, and she slid in behind him. “In fact, enemy fire might be the last thing we need to worry about right now.”

Vijay hit the bridge next, with Demyan just behind him.

“You three are dismissed,” Vijay said. “Get to your alert stations.”

“Stay here, Mr. Okoye,” Elena said. He hovered next to the bulkhead behind her, with nowhere to sit. “I want you to explain why the hell you sounded alert stations if there’s no threat.”

“I actually think that Mr. Masri can explain that better than I,” Ikenna said.

“I spent the evening, as ordered, working with the scope record of the energy burst we saw yesterday,” Hassoun said. Elena nodded. Neither mentioned that she had ordered him out of this room less than twenty four hours before. “It was a single pulse, duration two hundred forty two milliseconds. It originated some five million kilometers away from our position at the time, and terminated within Io’s orbit, at more or less the same distance. Full-spectrum analysis indicates that it was a…lightning bolt, for lack of a better term.”

Hassoun brought up a video image of black space. Surrounding Jupiter, and now only half a million kilometers distant, was the enormous red band of the Io plasma torus, plowed up by the moon as it sizzled through its orbit. The energy within it seethed, even though the flare had passed. The Agency had always assumed that the outsiders avoided flying within it whenever possible, just as humans steered clear of the Van Allen radiation belts in Earth’s orbit.

A thin bolt of red, millions of times hotter than anything else in sight, gathered within Jupiter’s atmosphere and shot into space, as if it knew exactly where it was going. It pierced the torus just as Hassoun paused it the image, and the jagged lance hung frozen in the sky. This was the energy discharge that had led him to issue a false alert the day before.

“It hit something.”

He zoomed in, and the entire holo became a wash of red. The heat and radiation inside the torus were dazzling, and hid everything within it from view—except for a cool black spot at the very tip of the lance, much cooler than the space around it. The hollow was shaped like a gemstone, its lines straight, its proportions perfect. It was an outsider ship, and it was cold and dead in space.

“What were you saying about building a brig?”

The rest of the shift had proceeded without incident, and she and Vijay were back in the stateroom. Ikenna had joined them this time, but Vijay hadn’t complained. If ever they needed a tactical officer, it was now.

Elena made coffee for herself and Vijay—Ikenna had refused—and thanked God that she had shut off the avram when the flare hit. As far as they could tell, the derelict had kept its own avram active, and turned itself into a lightning rod for the charged plasma in orbit of Jupiter. The solar flare had provided the spark.

“The incident was over twenty four hours ago,” Ikenna said. “If they lost power, then their life-support system have been offline for an entire day. Unless their crew is very small, they would have exhausted their air supply by now.”

“Oxygen gardens?” Vijay asked.

“Useless in zero gee without forced ventilation,” Elena said. “There’s no way to clear your own carbon dioxide from your nose and mouth. They’d be poisoning themselves with every breath.”

“And without power, their ship will continue to radiate heat until it freezes,” Ikenna said.

The derelict had drifted out of the ring of fire, and
Gabriel’s
sensors had confirmed the presence of gossamer thin cooling sails that projected from the edges. They gave the outsider vessel an uncanny resemblance to a masted sea ship soaring in three dimensions.

“Auxiliary power?” Vijay tapped the glow tube, filled with mildly radioactive gas. “We use isotopic batteries, after all. They could still have heat and life support, even if they whatever they use for a power plant has been knocked offline.”

“Our batteries run on plutonium,” Elena said. “Do they have even have nuclear reactors? Or the uranium to feed them?”

“We have never found any traces of nuclear material in recovered debris,” Vijay said. “Let alone a detonation.”

“The Avram Corporation landed automated survey vessels on all the Galileans, in the 2040s,” Ikenna said. “Precursors to colonization. It’s possible some of the moons may contain ore, but most of the company’s records disappeared after the Storm.”

“Along with Avramovich himself,” Elena said. “And we’re sure that ship never broadcasted?”

“I went over the data a dozen times,” Vijay said. “It has been cold and quiet ever since the discharge.”

“Could someone else have spotted it?”

“Not from the moons,” Ikenna said. “We timed our approach well, they’re still on the other side of the planet.”

“The Galileans are on the other side,” Elena said. “But what about the others? Jupiter’s up to how many moons now, seventy five?”

“Most of those are no bigger than an asteroid,” Ikenna said.

“That never stopped us,” Vijay said.

“We just assumed that they colonized the Galileans because that’s what we would have done if we had gotten there first,” Elena said. “Just like we’re assuming that they breathe oxygen, or can freeze to death.”

In her head, the outsiders nearly always had two arms and two legs, and stood conveniently between five and seven feet tall. It was easier to imagine what she already knew. But Elena had no reason to believe that they looked anything like that. They could be amphibious creatures from the oceans of Europa, or silicon-based life from the lavas of Io. Or a race of intelligent plants, or self-aware machines. The derelict, sixty meters from point to point, could be the personal vehicle of a single outsider, or a colony ship housing millions.

They knew absolutely nothing about the outsiders. And she could change that.

“What’s our ETA?”

“We should rendezvous and match velocity in less than six hours,” Vijay said.

“Then in six hours, we board it.”

If either of them realized that history had been made yet again, they didn’t show it. Perhaps they had become too used to it.

“Who shall go?” Ikenna asked.

“Dr. Golus.” Vijay raised an eyebrow, and Elena continued. “If anyone over there is still alive—or whatever they are—then maybe she can help.”

“I don’t believe that the Geneva Conventions apply, Captain,” Ikenna said.

“Maybe not. And they’re probably all dead anyway. But she’ll know what she’s looking at better than anyone else will.”

“We should want a technical expert, I imagine,” Vijay said.

“There’s none better than Marco,” Elena said. She turned to Ikenna. “Please debrief them both.”

“I presume that Chief Nishtha will lead them?”

“No. You will.”

She had expected Vijay to fight her, but he nodded and sighed. Ikenna saluted, and left.

“I was afraid that you would nominate yourself,” Vijay said, once the door had closed.

“If I thought you would let me get away with it again, I would.”

“Ironic,” Vijay said. “We came all this way to blow those things to hell. Now we have a sitting target, and we hold our fire.”

“This is the intelligence coup of the century, Vijay. Whatever we can get from that ship is more valuable than killing its corpse,” Elena said.

“More valuable than this ship? Than the lives it carries?”

“Yes.”

Vijay stood and floated over the her desk, and stared at the prints above it. He put his finger on Jupiter and let it linger. The star map was so old that the Galilean moons had yet to be charted.

“What would we do, if one our own ships were disabled but not destroyed, and all hands were lost?”

“Recover it,” Elena said. “Tow it. Give the dead a proper burial.”

“And if it were lost on the outside? Would we attempt a salvage?”

“Perhaps not. It might not be worth the risk.”

“I would leave it,” Vijay said. “As bait.”

“You think the outsiders are lying in wait?”

“I know is that if my enemy were near, but I could not find him, there would be no better way to draw him out. Destroy that ship, Captain. That is what we came here to do.”

She stared over Vijay’s shoulder to the map on the wall behind him, with its heavenly figures and hellish monsters.
Gabriel
had come to hunt dragons, and found nothing but their bones.

“Not until we’ve picked it clean.”

Elena had stood the crew down for a few hours to get them some rest, but they were now back at alert stations. Demyan hunched over his desk on the bridge, across from her. He hadn’t looked up from his screens in well over an hour, and she wondered if he ever remembered to blink.
Gabriel
needed to shut down her avram at precisely the right moment to synch their orbits. The computer would do most of the work—the window of opportunity was measured in microseconds—but Demyan was watching carefully for any slight variation in either body’s velocity that would throw off the calculations. Elena felt the urge to look over his shoulder, but trusted him to do the job right. She watched his face instead.

At exactly the right moment, he broke into a grin.

“Pyaty ballov! It’s done!”

The bridge staff applauded as Demyan beamed. Elena had never known him to look so happy.

Vijay put the visual up on the holo so that they could see the derelict clearly. It hung in space like a teardrop that had crystallized at the exact moment it fell. Elena could tell that it had once been white, but transit of Io—and the tons of sulfur that the moon belched out of its atmosphere and into orbit every day—had stained it a dull gold. The tarnish made it look to be very old indeed, and she wondered if this had been the ship that had killed Anwar Azzam and the
Solstice.

“Maybe they were Egyptian,” Demyan said quietly, as if he had heard her thoughts. No one laughed. The ship bore an odd resemblance to a golden obelisk.

“Should we try to talk to them?” Hassoun asked.

“Does anyone aboard speak outsider?” Vijay said.

“Give them a few laser pulses, evenly spaced,” Elena said. “Let’s see if they can talk back first. Then we can move on to the digits of pi, or whatever the protocols call for.”

Hassoun sent the signal. There was no response.

“They’re all dead,” Demyan said.

“Or bashful,” Vijay said.

“They’re going to socialize whether they want to or not. Tell Ikenna it’s time.”

She watched from the bridge as her boarding party leapt the gap from
Gabriel’s
port hull to the outsider ship. They were laden with tools, and once there they would hunt for an airlock door to cut through. But it was over a kilometer between the two hulls, and the journey took several minutes.

“Impact in ten seconds,” Hassoun said.

A trio of tiny shapes appeared at the edge of the image, and Vijay zoomed in on the landing party as it hurtled towards the outsider hull. They struck one after another and bounced off, but not far. Her crew jerked to a halt a meter or so above the hull, and slowly descended once more until they could grab hold of the ship.

“Clean landing,” Hassoun said.

“Give me their visor feeds.”

The holo split into three, one view for each of the boarding party. Elena tried to keep track of all three simultaneously, and found that she had one too few eyes for the task. Lines of static drifted across the screens, and clouds of yellow dust drifted past the cameras. Their feet were stirring up the sulfur caked to the hull.

“Vijay, how’s visibility?” She did not mean the visors.

“Beg pardon, Captain, but it is damned bad.”
Gabriel
and her ghost ship were in Io’s orbit, just outside the torus, and the interference was raising hell with her systems.

“Try squinting.”

“I shall. On a totally unrelated note, Mr. Masri, I have a last will and testament I would like to transmit.”

“Ignore him,” Elena said.

As Vijay opened his mouth to speak, an indicator light flashed rhythmically on her watch screen. Someone was tagging
Gabriel
with laser pulses.

“Jesucristo, are they talking back?”

Vijay traced the pulses back to their source.
Gabriel
appeared on the holo, facing the derelict. The laser beams fired from behind her, from what they had thought was empty space.

“Flash alert, warning red!”

“Firing solution, now!”

Elena damned herself for not destroying the derelict from afar, and braced for an impact that never came.

“Shots fired?”

“Negative, Captain,” Vijay said. He sounded as confused as she felt. “Laser lock only. Firing solution ready.”

Her ship was still in one piece. Harmless laser pulses bounced off her hull at a staccato rhythm. Someone had gotten the drop on
Gabriel
, locked her in, and held their fire.

“Weapons hold,” she said.

Even Demyan looked up at that, but Vijay held his fire. Elena saw now that the pulses it fired were of the exact wavelength and frequency used by
Gabriel’s
own rangefinders. But these were irregular and graceless, not the continuous beam characteristic of a targeting system. And they were coming on a constant bearing. Whoever this new ship was, it was making no effort to evade. Vijay could just aim along the beam and shoot.