Scarcity (Special Forces: FJ One Book 1) (4 page)

“Those who remain here in the colony will have a hard winter.” The Captain knew better than to ask the Hierarch to assist them. The Best Seed Prevails.

The Hierarch nodded. That made perfect sense. Those who could not adapt, died.

“And will you still be leaving us soon, Captain?”

“Yes, Majesty. I am needed elsewhere. I have treasured our conversations and your company, and will yowl mightily with loss when I think of you.”

They made their ceremonial goodbyes, and were ushered out in as much state as they had been ushered in. The lieutenant was still spit at, and felt a paw or two swipe at him as he passed; his status was still Low until the moment he was Elevated to a captaincy.

“Captain,” Lieutenant Orlov asked him after they were clear of all the pomp. “Do you think it’s advisable for FJ One to leave now? This sort of thing with the colonists, none of us saw it coming, and I’m not sure that…”

Chen mounted the slider, and turned to his subordinate. “Lieutenant, do I need to put a paw on your head to remind you that I have the utmost faith in you? Oh by the way, that promotion to Captain? It’s a permanent one, it won’t be revoked when you rotate out. You’ve done great work here.”

Orlov blushed. “You’re like a big brother to me, sir. I…”

Captain Chen smiled. He reached out and grabbed the other man’s forearm. “Matunde Orlov. What are we?”

Orlov grabbed Chen’s forearm in an equally firm grasp. “Fuckin’ Jedi, sir.”

“Fuckin’ A we are.”

Some of the
Fallschirmjäger
, the Captain knew, didn’t think of Civil Affairs as their equals, since they only saw combat in dire situations. But it took as much steel, if not more, to walk unarmed into a room full of sharp-toothed, sharp-clawed, and sometimes short-tempered Tiamatans, and not get yourself, or your people, killed in the process.

He saluted first, and gave Orlov the standard farewell among this band of brothers and sisters, who might not work together again for years, or decades, or ever. “I’ll see you in Hell.”

Orlov snapped back the salute. “I’ll save you a seat.”

The Captain was on his way to the corn fields to see what could be salvaged of the remaining harvest when his earpiece whispered. “Incoming highsec from HM.”

“Five minutes,” he replied, banking the slider away from the fields and towards the FJ base.

On most planets, the unit would move into the natives’ city, blending in, becoming part of the community, before introducing the idea of more of their species coming to take up residence. With ambassadorial status, the Captain and his lieutenant had to maintain a city household of appropriate state and splendor.

But the social requirements of the High Tiamatans meant that the more members in his household, the larger, and more expensive, would be the mandatory retinue of butlers and chamberlains and footmen. Scarcity could be bent to the cultural need for two men to live in state, but not six.

So instead their HQ was a few miles out of town. It was a comfortable manor on a small estate, a gift from the King. There was no need for servants here – even the High Ones, their solitary cat natures rearing their heads from time to time, wearied of having so many other creatures around them. So the culture discreetly allowed its members to set aside the trappings of rank and state when they were at their country homes.

Sergeant Hewitt was reloading his medical kitbots, which had been depleted tending to the wounded colonists. Sergeants Kaplan and Cruz were huddled with Marcus, the computer whiz kid, who was eagerly explaining how he’d committed his many felonious actions.

Hewitt pointed at the Captain’s desk with a half smile. “You lose something?”

The Captain saw it and laughed. Someone had recovered his “Best Captain Ever” coffee tube.

“Thank you, Sergeant. I would have gone after it myself, eventually.”

It was Sergeant Archambault’s turn to cook, he was glad to see.

“I don’t smell corn today,” he said.

She raised a spoon in salute, but military formality was dispensed with in here, unless there was serious team work being planned. “I think we all smelled enough burning corn today, don’t you?”

“Yes.” He didn’t mention the smell of burning corpses that had gone with it, but when he peeked in the pot he saw that she was making a vegetable ragout. Which probably wasn’t a coincidence.

“Gotta phone home,” he said, spinning up his secure display unit.

“She’s up to date,” Archambault said. “Excluding your conference with the Hierarch.”

The Captain nodded. His Comms sergeant had written and sent the report on the day’s events while he was in the city. Like anyone on his team, he trusted her implicitly to do her job without any micromanagement from him.

He did his three-factor verification (retina and voice scans, and a pinprick of blood to both verify his DNA and scan for foreign nanites), and the message opened.

As always, Huizhong McAllister’s text message was short and to the point. Longer messages took up more memory, which required bigger chips, which meant more weight in the pouch, which meant more energy to push the pouch through flashspace, and more time for it to arrive at its destination. That brevity was part of how she’d acquired the nickname “HM.” It was her name clipped to her initials of course, but it also harkened back to Britain’s royals, where HM meant “Her Majesty.”

EO tran cap 20 - FJ1 2 6C ASAP ASAP - Pig EO 2 Cal

The first part of the message was surprising. She’d authorized an exorbitant expenditure – a transport ship was en route, capable of carrying up to 20 colonists to Eden One. She wanted to send a message, loud and clear, to every other colony: Not only would the ringleaders be punished, but a significant number of their followers as well.

But it was the second part that was shocking. He’d never received such an abrupt summons – he and his whole team were to depart Tiamat and return home ASAP. He knew his boss better than anyone, after working with her for sixty years now. And for her to double her “ASAP” for emphasis like that? She wasn’t one to waste a single bit repeating herself.

He tapped the keys and wrote back.
Or El 2d.
The lieutenant’s Elevation ceremony was two days out. To just toss him his Captain’s bars now and skip the ceremony wouldn’t give him the status he needed in the role as Ambassador. He pressed Send, transferring the message to the pouch, hovering in orbit above him. A millisecond later, the tiny object would be in flashspace, and would be back on earth in an hour.

He could have taken a nap while he waited for the reply. He really, really needed another one. But the adrenalert was still pumping through his system, and the last thing he needed to do was take a counteractive and be groggy when HM got back to him.

He skimmed the bookshelves, and picked up a paperback copy of William Dalrymple’s
The Last Mughal
. FJ members had a fondness for paper books; paper was a tech that rarely failed. Even the first International Space Station had been supplied with a locker full of paperbacks. Anybody who’d spent six days after an EMP hit, waiting around for a resource ship to bring new tech, had learned to use some of their precious weight allowance on old-school content delivery systems. The paper used to print books these days was Bible-thin, of course, thanks to Scarcity, which helped lighten the load.

He knew the book well, and its lessons. The British Empire had moved into India with great success, thanks in part to the members who had “gone native,” some of them even marrying the natives and converting to Islam. In the 18
th
century, Rome had been Britain’s model, and its appropriation of the wealth of India had allowed the Indians to go on living and worshipping much as they wanted, even keeping their local rulers (ruling in appearance if not in fact).

Then in the 19
th
century, the worst possible thing happened back home – the rise of the Evangelical movement. This meant a sudden influx into India of self-righteous, short-sighted, bigoted and fundamentalist officers, diplomats and, worst of all, missionaries. Suddenly Britain was on the “civilizing mission” previously confined to fanatical Catholic nations like Spain. And civilizing the savages meant “saving their souls” from their heathen religions. The masters of the British Raj began to live apart from the people they governed, creating “Little Britains” where one could go for years with no contact with any natives other than servants.

When missionaries began converting locals to Christianity, and trumpeting their “victories” over Satan, things began to boil. Then the native soldiers, a cornerstone of the Raj, were issued gun cartridges greased with pig fat – an offense to the Muslims – and cow fat – anathema to Hindus. Since using the cartridges involved biting the ends off, well, that was the last straw, and they revolted.

The bloody rebellion that followed wrecked the city of Delhi, and killed thousands of British and Indian civilians. It was put down by an overwhelming British force that arrived seeking, and taking, bloody vengeance. The days of peaceful, somewhat benevolent rule were over. The conquest of the country was doable, when its citizens were used to being ruled by one conqueror or another, but the attempt to conquer the culture had been an epic disaster.

The second the pouch returned from flashpace, it beeped him. He confirmed and opened the message.

ASAP. EO tran ETA 12

And a period for emphasis this time…

He shut the book and jumped up. “All hands, action stations.”

Everyone dropped what they were doing and stood up, ready for orders.

“We’ve got 12 hours to figure out who gets transported to Eden One. Do you have a shortlist?”

Sergeant Cruz nodded. “We’ve got the ringleaders’ names from Marcus here, sir. About a dozen prime movers.”

The Captain looked at Marcus closely. The young man was brilliant, no doubt. Was he honest, though? He was a criminal, after all. Would he give extra names just to settle old scores?

“Weapons, Engineering, your take?”

They looked at each other, nodded, then Sergeant Kaplan spoke. “The kid’s on the Asperger’s spectrum, sir. Too precise about facts to make shit up.”

“List approved. Get them to the landing pad. We move out when the transport lands. We’ll piggyback on it to Caladan and then transfer to a ship home from there.”

“Yes, sir,” they said in unison, springing into action. There would be time for questions later. Nobody complained about getting so close to the Pleasure Planet only to use it as a hopping station home.

“I need you to divide up my closeout tasks. I’ve got to run to the city.” He left it to them to figure out how to distribute the added duties and ran out the door.

He opened a comm channel as he kicked the slider into motion. “Captain Orlov, get into your dress uni right now. There’s been a change of plans.”

At Tiamat Station, they’d been slipped into their tubes, each one just long enough for its occupant. The tubes were bundled and inserted into the transport.

The transport dropped them at Caladan station, somewhat cruelly giving the condemned colonists one last look at Paradise before they arrived in Hell. The squad didn’t even get out to stretch their legs at Caladan, and their bundle was quickly transferred to a craft just large enough for the five of them. FJ One should have been dropping downline to the planet for some well deserved R&R, but nobody complained. Captain Chen had communicated HM’s urgency to the team.

The Captain used the transport time to catch up on Earth news, dialing up a tape delay program on his contacts. Reaction to the events on Tiamat had been swift and, as usual, splenetic.

There were two talking heads on a split screen, both of whom he recognized. Charles Fitzhugh was one of HM’s lieutenants, and the other head belonged to Martina Abubakar, the leading proponent of what was euphemistically called “Hastening.”

“The colonists didn’t only attack the natives, Martina. They hijacked, let me repeat that, hijacked FJ technology and used it against
our own people.
”

“I’m not arguing about their methods, Charles. It was certainly inappropriate to…”

“Inappropriate? You call a baker’s dozen of Class 1 Felonies inappropriate?”

“Inappropriate to take matters in their hands so drastically. But this is a reflection of how people are feeling, all over Earthspace.” That was a dog whistle, a code word – subtly trying to make people think of all the habitable worlds as belonging to Earth, to humanity. “Time is running out, and more people are dying every day. The H7N9 plague in China, the black lung in India, E. Coli in the Basic Diet in Detroit…”

“And your answer is to hit all the new worlds like a plague of locusts, to overwhelm them with our numbers…”

“Of course not. It’s not possible to ‘overwhelm’ them, Charles. We don’t have, and everyone knows it, enough resources to get everyone to a new home. But we can save more people if we enact a Hastening strategy that lets colonies expand faster, drill and mine and exploit the resources of our new homes, bring those resources home so we
can
build more ships, so we
can
get more people off of Earth…”

It was hard to argue with her logic, from a purely human viewpoint. People had bought into the “Avatar Principle,” that we had more to gain from working with the natives than against them – but only as long as denial was the common reaction to the end of the world.

Science had come up with one patch after another, buying just a little more time each time. Cures for at least some of the cancers being caused by environmental poisoning; the creation in a lab of the subsistence-nutrition Basic Diet; yet another advance in renewable resource exploitation to keep the lights on one more day.

It had taken Collapse to finally defeat the Kochists, who had blocked serious investment in renewable energy for over a century. After all, nobody could own the wind or the sun or the waves, and the real money and power was in the control of limited resources.

But the tipping point had been reached – all the renewable energy in the world couldn’t turn back global warming now, or the rise of the poisoned oceans over the coasts. And denial wasn’t an option anymore.

On a grim sort of bright side, world population had dropped by two thirds since Collapse, which, brutally but efficiently, had eased the strain on the remaining resources.

300 miles above the Earth, the transport opened to release the pod bundle, and a shuttle grabbed them for the ride down. As the shuttle descended towards Berlin, he could see the cranes hard at work, dismantling disused skyscrapers so their steel bones, their copper wiring, their pipes and their glass, could be repurposed in the building of arkships.

The old city still stood, the stone and concrete useless in outer space. They landed inside the gates of Charlottenburg Palace, the home of Department 6C. At first, it had seemed like a good idea, moving the Department into a building of historical importance, sending the message that “Preservation” was what colonization was all about. But as resentment built among those still here against those who got to leave, having someone referred to as “HM” running the operation from a palace became political fodder for the Hasteners.

The once-magnificent parks and gardens behind the Palace were gone now. The trees had fallen victim to blights, and the water in the lake’s lazy channels had evaporated in a drought, never to be refilled. The desolate space was filled now with VTOL pads and shipping containers full of scrap metal, waiting for transportation to the arkshipyard in orbit.

Huizhong McAllister came down the steps of the Palace as soon as the tubes were deposited on the ground. She was dressed in her usual sensible but flattering tan suit, which complimented her white hair and sharp green eyes.

She smiled and shook the Captain’s hand. “Dieter. So good to see you.” Like a seasoned politician, she made the rounds of the rest of the team, inquiring after their families by name, and offering them the hospitality of the Department showers and cafeteria.

She and the Captain walked the confection-like halls of the Palace, avoiding the workmen stripping the precious gold off of mirror frames and cherubs.

“So why the urgency?” he asked her.

“In a minute,” she replied. “What’s your take on Tiamat? Will the colony regroup? How did the Hierarch react?”

He told her what he thought as they walked towards a more secure area. She had the facts; she wanted his analysis, the information he wouldn’t embed in a transmission that could be intercepted.

They did their three-factor authentication at an incongruous heavy steel doorway, a portal from the 17
th
century to the 22
nd
.

“Something you should know,” she said as the doors closed behind them. This room was impenetrable by any signal or pulse, and had no electronics in it. There were two comfortable chairs, and a bar. HM was of the Churchillian persuasion when it came to how much liquor a leader could imbibe in one day and still do the job.

“Drink?” she said, pouring herself a hundred-year old Scotch from a ninety year old bottle.

“Laphroiag? Yes.”

She handed him his glass and they settled into their chairs. “The doctors tell me I should give up drinking hard liquor. That it only brings my next Lazarex date closer.”

“I say if you’ve lived to, is it a hundred and forty nine, now?”

“I just hit an even 150. While you were on Tiamat. I forgive you for not sending a card.”

“Happy belated birthday, then.” He raised his glass to her, and they each took a celebratory sip. “If you’ve lived that long, I’d say it’s time to enjoy what’s left.”

“I got a call from a contact of mine in the Ministry of Finance. An alarm went off in their systems. Someone shorted stock in the Tiamat CC, just before the attack. The minute the word of their insurrection came in on the pouch, the stock crashed, the trade was executed, and then the money vaporized.”

The various colony corporations allowed the earthbound to invest in the success of a colony. They were long-term investments, and any profits they could reap were years or decades away at best. But it gave people hope, including the hope that a windfall could be exchanged for a ride off earth. Money wasn’t a factor in Selection, of course. Ideally, anyway.

“And there’s no trace of it?”

“No. I would almost say it was done by an AI.”

The Captain shook his head. “Impossible. There are no highfunc AIs anymore.”

“Not that the government is aware of,” she said. “But. That’s not the real news. You know we still had a dozen Contact ships out there.”

The Contact ships were probes sent across flashspace to look for new habitable worlds. They did disappear from time to time of course, hit by asteroids or solar flares or sucked into black holes.

“We ‘had’ a dozen?”

“We lost three in the space of a week. In the same sector.”

He thought about it for a moment. “It could be coincidence. Space is big and mean. There could be more radiation in that area, or…”

“A week after that, FJ Seven was out scouting Bradbury for its colonial potential, when they saw…ghosts. Irregular blips on their scans. Which got increasingly rare, until they were gone.”

“And what’s your thinking on this?”

She sighed. “Call me crazy, because this is my intuition talking…”

“You think we’ve made contact.”

“Yes. With a civilization bigger, stronger, and faster than ours. I ran a probability forecast through a NAI. Its conclusion was that, positing that if it was aliens, that they had captured the Contact ships in or near their own space. From that tech, which is already ten years out of date, they learned how to avoid our older detection systems. Apparently they can travel across flashspace much faster than we can, if that’s even their technology. They might even have something better.

“At any rate, that’s what they did. They entered our sphere of influence a hundred times faster than we got to theirs with the Contact ships. Of course, FJ Seven has the latest and greatest scanning systems, and sort of saw them. So the aliens had to relearn how to disappear, which they did in a matter of hours.”

“Well, you’re the closest thing to an AI that I know, so I’m not surprised the NAI agreed with you. Friend or foe,” he mused. “Either one could drive that. They didn’t assault FJ Seven, and if their tech is that advanced, then maybe they don’t want us to find them, maybe they want to be left alone, or don’t think we’re advanced enough for them yet.”

“It could be.” She got up and refilled both their glasses before finishing. “But the blips had a pattern, before they stopped. They were headed on a course that could easily be one that would take them here, to the solar system.”

“I have to say,” he said, hastily emptying his glass, “I can’t help but go into operational mode when I hear that. In case it’s foe and not friend.”

“That is what I was hoping you’d say, Captain.”