Stardust Page 4

  MacAdams raised an eyebrow. "That was fast."

  "Turns out the guys we bumped into had been doing our job for us. Remind me to go by their graves and thank them some time."

  MacAdams spent a minute skimming through the offices for anything Webber might have missed, but he found nothing. They went back to the bathroom window and grapplered their way down to the ground. MacAdams jogged north along the river bank until they were concealed under a copse of mangroves.

  "What do you think?" MacAdams said. "Should we get the gear over to Dark Solutions?"

  Webber was breathing hard and fixed him with an incredulous look. "What do you mean, should we? Why else did we go up there, to try to get killed for the ninth time today?"

  "They sent us up to the palace. Where we immediately got shot at. Are we sure they didn't walk us into a trap? If we'd been killed by those goons, then there's no one left down here who knows DS was behind the assassination. They can walk away with clean hands."

  "Do you have any idea how paranoid you sound?"

  "I haven't even got to the point where I suggest the people we just shot were DS' own people."

  Webber stood there a second, then shook his head, looking tired enough to crumble into a pile of dust. "Man, I'm so exhausted that if DS shows up and shoots us dead I'd consider it a favor. We don't have any friends down here. We have to trust someone."

  "Then I'll make the call." He pulled up his device and put in for a connection.

  "Speak," their contact said.

  "We made it into Cannel's quarters. One problem: we weren't the only ones there."

  "Palace security? Were you able to deal with them?"

  "I don't know who they were. But they were after the same thing we were."

  "Do you have the files?"

  "We got everything that was there. That was our end of the deal. You ready to uphold yours?"

  "What is your current location?"

  "River bank. Quarter mile north of the palace."

  "Stay where you are. We will send relief shortly."

  The connection closed. MacAdams lifted his brows at Webber. "Let's hope they ain't about to drop a bomb on us."

  "If they do, I get to hide under you. You're bigger."

  MacAdams grunted and scanned the sky, watching for an incoming plane; with how clogged the streets were, there was no chance of making it out by car. Two minutes after he'd made the call, something began to hiss. Not in gusts like the wind, but in a steady stream. And it was getting louder.

  "What the hell!" Webber backpedaled from the edge of the water, pointing out into the river.

  MacAdams whirled. Eighty feet out, the surface churned in a long stripe of bubbles. MacAdams drew his gun and got behind a mangrove, steadying himself on the umbrella of roots. Within the bubbles, a black leviathan broke the surface.

  Webber broke out laughing. "They sent us a submarine?"

  "Smart move. The ocean's about the safest place you can be right now."

  "Well I'm going to steal it."

  A small craft detached from the side of the sub, purring across the water. MacAdams kept his gun in his hand until the skiff crunched into the gravel on the shore. The boat was empty, a drone. He and Webber climbed aboard.

  The skiff shoved itself off, gliding across the surface and stirring up a smell of fresh water that made MacAdams realize just how smokily acrid the city was. The bubbles had cleared from the water, exposing what there was to see of the sub.

  "That thing's huge!" Webber said in a hoarse whisper. "I've been on cargo freighters shorter than that!"

  MacAdams nodded. "Military-grade."

  Its body was a featureless cylinder, so utterly black that it looked less like a physical object and more like the physical absence of matter. The skiff piloted them to its side. A hatch opened near the top. The skiff entered a watery room, the ceiling so low MacAdams was obliged to lie down; the hatch closed and motors whirred into action, the skiff lowering as the water was pumped from the room.

  They came to rest on the floor. A door opened in the wall, revealing a guy in a black suit with a mask over his face.

  Webber looked him up and down. "If I'd known you guys were ninjas, I would have joined up years ago."

  The man gave no indication he heard this. "You have the files?"

  MacAdams narrowed an eye at him. "What assurance do I have that you won't shoot us the second we turn them over?"

  "The fact I haven't done so already."

  MacAdams gazed at him a moment, then slipped the pack from his shoulder. The man took it and left, door closing behind him. MacAdams thought about what he would do if they started refilling the chamber with water.

  The door reopened and the man reentered. "Follow me."

  They followed him down a black-walled corridor that smelled like metal. He opened a door on their right and pointed them in to a tight cabin with two bunks.

  "Sleep. If you need food or water, ask for it."

  Webber folded his arms. "This is the thanks we get? You're not even going to tell us what's going on?"

  "You look like a pair of old rags. You will be briefed once you've recovered."

  "Argue against this any more," MacAdams warned Webber, "and I'll put you to sleep myself."

  The man left. MacAdams stripped off his suit. Concerned that the sleep he was about to fall into was so deep that he might roll out of his bunk, he chose the lower one.

  He slept so long that he woke up three times before he got up for good. He sat on the edge of the bed for a while, letting himself remember everything that had happened so that he could understand it hadn't been a dream.

  Webber got up not long after. Within minutes, a guy without a mask showed up to offer them a shower and food. MacAdams felt sore and spent, and after eating he was ready to do nothing but sit in one place and feel the vibrations of the ship as it slid through the ocean, but duty called, like it always did, and he and Webber were summoned to the bridge.

  Like everything on the sub, it was tight, even more so than on a spaceship. Banks of screens showed cities burning around the world. Others showed Earth orbit. A few UDL ships hung above the world, though far fewer than before, and most of the survivors were battered and scorched. But something was missing.

  MacAdams' tongue felt thick. "Where are the Lurkers?"

  "In retreat." A very short and wiry woman stood from the command station, white hair cut shoulder-length. She'd barely moved, but there was a quickness to her, like a dragonfly in flight. "After losing a quarter of their forces."

  "Don't tell me that was enough to scare them off. We've barely got enough ships left up there to defend a henhouse."

  "Yes, I'm reasonably sure they knew that as well. My assumption is buttressed by the fact they didn't fly away until your friend found and assaulted their weak point."

  "Rada? Is she still alive?"

  The woman nodded, white hair swinging forward and back. "And quite lucky to be so, except that when someone keeps getting that lucky, the reasonable thing to do is conclude that it isn't luck at all."

  "Well that's a relief," Webber said. "Where'd the Lurkers run off to?"

  "We don't know yet, but I'm sure they'll let us know soon enough. Now. If you'd like to take a seat, then you should take one, and if you don't, then remain standing until you change your mind."

  MacAdams grabbed a stool at the shiny white strategy table. So did Webber.

  The woman sat across from them. "I, quite obviously, know who you are and who you work for. You know who I work for, and I'll tell you that my name is Loris, which may or may not be true. Where should we begin?"

  "Yeah." Webber lifted his index finger and made a broad circular motion. "Why do you guys have a submarine?"

  "For this."

  "What, the alien apocalypse?"

  "Yes."

  "Hold on, you knew the Lurkers were coming long enough ago to get yourself a military-grade submarine? You might have said something to the rest of us!"

/>   The woman tilted her head back and to the side. "We had no foreknowledge of this particular alien invasion. But we have been preparing for an invasion for a very long time. Laying the groundwork so that if and when this day came, we would have some resources in place to help us deal with the difficulties."

  Loris gave them both a disappointed, almost disgusted look. "Really, it was insane of the rest of you to not be preparing. Everyone has known for a thousand years that there are aliens out there and that some of them will be hostile. Why wouldn't you expect that one of them would come for us again some day?

  "This isn't a rhetorical question, but don't be frightened, I already have the answer for you. It's that enacting such projects would have frightened people, and when you frighten people, that makes them less likely to lead orderly, placid lives that allows you to sell them things, convince them to pay taxes, and pursue productive careers. We betrayed the knowledge and conviction of our ancestors in exchange for easy and carefree lives. It's almost enough to make you want to let all of humanity die as punishment."

  Webber and MacAdams exchanged a look. Webber said, "Uh, are we doing that?"

  "I said almost."

  "Was all of your work theoretical?" MacAdams said. "Or did you know that the Swimmers were still watching us?"

  "We were aware. We had moles in FinnTech."

  "So you knew about FinnTech beforehand, too? Ever give any thought to helping us stop them from conquering the System?"

  Loris tilted her face forward like an actor looking over their glasses in a movie about bygone times. "We don't care which particular humans rule the System. All we care is that they are human. Getting involved in your squabbles would only have exposed us, which would in turn have undermined our ability to act in times like now."

  "Did you know the Lurkers were out there, too?"

  "We had some information that contradicted the conventional wisdom that it was the Swimmers who were preventing us from leaving the System, but we possessed nothing concrete enough to act on. We had no indications that there was an invasion on the way."

  Webber leaned back in his chair. "Sounds like you weren't doing such a great job."

  Loris gave him an unreadable look, then offered a one-shouldered shrug. "It's quite possible that this is all for the best."

  "You dedicated your life to preparing for an alien invasion, but now that it's here and threatening to completely exterminate us, you've suddenly decided that maybe it's okay?"

  "In order to present the most effective strategy against invasion, we make long-term sociopolitical observations and attempt to forecast the future conditions those observations will result in. This is mostly done through immensely complicated software models, but in this case, the coming clash was so obvious that no one dared to think about it.

  "Two hundred years ago, the Settlement Era began in earnest. Everyone who no longer felt welcome or interested in Earth packed up their bags and spread across the System. This was a new frontier. Until roughly eighty years ago—or as recently as fifty, there is argument about this amongst us—all of the new colonies and stations remained a frontier.

  "This was an ideal system: those who enjoyed the comfort and security of Earth could live on Earth, while those who preferred the freedom of the frontier could live on any number of stations. But this situation wasn't stable. The frontier's influence kept expanding until it was no longer a frontier, but a second pole of power. One that's already threatening Earth's status as de facto ruler of the System.

  "Our prediction models felt it very unlikely that Earth would simply shrug, wait for the stations to outgrow it, then peacefully pass the torch of power to them. Instead, we believed that Earth would enact every measure they could to neuter the stations' freedoms. If that wasn't enough to bring them to heel, they'd start crushing individual stations while embracing any stations that caved, attempting a divide and conquer strategy.

  "Unless Earth began this process within the next decade, we projected that the stations would actually win this fight: Earth has more people, but it spends an even greater proportion of that wealth to support those people. And any fool can see that Earth's people loathe discomfort and sacrifice while that has been the stations' default condition from the start."

  MacAdams rubbed his upper arms. "If the stations had won this fight, what then?"

  "Well, that would depend entirely on how brutal Earth had been during its attempted suppression of the stations. But I was always of the belief that it would be brutal beyond imagination." Loris waved a hand airily. "Alien invasion might be just as savage, but at least it has the chance to shake up the power structure and reunite us as a species, averting our destiny of gruesome civil war."

  There was a pause, possibly to pay respect to the passing of the future of the System. This hypothetical conflict had never crossed MacAdams' mind, but now that he'd heard it, it felt as though it would have been inevitable.

  "We'll be sure to thank the Lurkers once we're done genociding them," Webber said. "We brought you Cannel's storage. Did you get what you want from it?"

  "A lot of it, yes."

  "Why'd you even need us for this? Didn't you write his entire software platform? Including backdoors?"

  Loris smiled, her canines peeping from beneath her upper lip. "Yes. However, the president was paranoid enough—correctly so—to run some storage devices on other software, and to keep others disconnected from any network whatsoever."

  "So what'd we bring you?"

  "Oh, mostly a lot of intelligence that would have been administration-crashing a few months ago, but is now about as valuable as yesterday's banana peels. But there's some treasure mixed in with the trash. The number of nations who privately opposed the UDL's plans to surrender was larger than we thought. We ought to be able to slap together a pretty good coalition. That means we're going to get manpower and we're going to get ships."

  "Assuming they weren't all vaporized by Lurkers," Webber said.

  "These days, that's a qualification that has to be amended to everything. We've already begun the process of getting these nations in contact with each other to organize a defense. It won't be as big as we'd like—every country on the planet is currently using most of its resources to stop itself from collapsing—but Earth will not surrender itself again."

  "I still can't believe they ever did that to begin with."

  "There are always groups that side with the people invading them," MacAdams said. "Such as the French government in the last significant war before the Panhandler. Or the devil Anson, who tried to sell us out to the Swimmers. Some of these collaborators are opportunists. But mostly it's people trying so hard to survive that they give up on trying to win."

  "That's enough to make you want to laugh in Cannel's face. Except I already shot it off. And then the Lurkers blew it up."

  MacAdams motioned to Loris. "We brought you what you asked. I'd say that's earned us a flight out of here."

  She turned up her hand in accommodation. "We can find you your own ship, if that's what you'd like."

  "I think I'd like that better than sticking around and waiting for them to come back and bomb us some more."

  "Well yes, if I was in your situation, I suppose that would be my opinion of things, too. Except I'm not in your situation, because I have information that you do not."

  MacAdams folded his arms. "That being?"

  "You brought us the devices from the team you shot. That's good, because it would be nice to know who else was looking to get their hands on the president's files. Unfortunately, there's nothing in their data nor metadata to identify them directly. But they did leave one thing behind. Travel logs."

  "You mean to say they went places?" Webber said. "Those monsters!"

  Loris pressed her lips together and looked away, eyes slitted, like she was stoically enduring a spasm of bowel pain. "Most of the logs are to various cities scattered across the UDL, especially Liberation. But there is one spot that's very curious for more than
one reason.

  "The first reason is that it's in the middle of nowhere: Tandana, a jungle island in the Bagata chain. The second reason is that Tandana is supposed to be uninhabited. The third reason is comparing public satellite images of Tandana to Cannel's files show that the public files were edited to remove any pictures of the slight infrastructure that's been recently built there.

  "The fourth and final reason is as follows: shortly after the advance fleet's initial bombardment of Earth, there were hundreds of rumors concerning alien activity on the planet's surface. Our investigations didn't turn up a shred of proof for any of these rumors. But do you know what one of those rumors was? Of course not, so I'll tell you: that a Lurker vessel landed somewhere on the Bagata Islands, stayed for three days, and then departed."

  MacAdams shifted on his seat, banging a shin into something underneath the table that wouldn't be there in any environment where you didn't have to make every cubic inch count.

  "You think Cannel's got a secret outfit there," he said, rubbing his shin. "One that was working with the Lurkers. To do what? Set up a ground invasion?"

  "I don't have the foggiest damn idea whatsoever, they're inscrutable aliens who could have been up to anything. But I do know that I would like to know if this outfit is still operational, and if so, what exactly they're operating towards."

  Now it was Webber's turn to look like he was suffering bowel pain. "Why us? How is it that a clandestine conspiracy group that's been operating for like a century doesn't seem to have a single agent to assign to stuff like this?"

  "Because nearly everything is in the midst of being destroyed, which is putting a serious strain on our available resources. You are here and you have proven yourselves useful. Do you want to be useful again?"

  "Hell no. But I will anyway."

  "Excellent. In gratitude for your service, I'll tell the historians that you accepted this responsibility with much more heroic words. Oh, and I'll even let you choose how to enter Tandana. Would you rather be airdropped? Or swim ashore?"

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