21


“Catch me up,” I ordered, dropping into the captain’s chair and typing frantically on the key screen of my workstation.
“I have detected a significant amount of fuel already loaded and ready for interstellar transport. There are, in fact, several fuel, water, food, and other raw material haulers prepped for departure,” Jelly said. “As Elise informed you, there is a large-scale evacuation underway. My analysis has concluded there is no possible way everyone on the planet can be evacuated, despite the impressive size of their fleet.”
“How did they see through our stealth cloak?” I asked, knowing I wouldn’t like the answer.
“Elise ordered me to lower it,” Jelly said.
“Elise…” I growled. “What the hell are you thinking?”
“We detected chatter on one of their public communications channels,” Elise explained. “There are conspiracy theorists discussing anomalies detected by civilian astronomy facilities. They have been talking about alien invasions and the end of the world. I decided to make contact with the planet through official channels before things got out of control.”
“You should’ve woken me up,” I said.
“We tried,” she answered shortly.
“Why are they evacuating the planet?” I asked.
“Now that is interesting,” X-37 said. “Some claimed monsters were going to kill them all, but others argued aliens would get them first. There is a twenty-three percent chance there has been a translation error regarding their meaning of aliens.”
“We couldn’t get a straight answer,” Elise interrupted. “The actual word they are using is Alons, which could be a race or an ethnic group—or even something else—but Tom and Jelly think they’re having problems with a nuclear reactor. It’s a very primitive power source and filthy with barely contained radiation. That’s the most likely reason they are making a run for it.”
“It’s unclear if the reactor is fission or fusion, but either way, it seems they believe their entire civilization is in danger,” Tom explained. “A total meltdown could punch a hole through their atmosphere, but also cut deep into the planet’s surface.”
“Have we had any indication that the Bold Freedom has made contact with these people?” I asked.
“No,” Elise said. “Their security chief, General Karn, referred to us as the first new contact in human history.”
“Great, now we’re aliens,” I muttered, rubbing my temples to clear my head. “Jelly, get Karn on the line.”
“Hailing their defense platform now,” Jelly said. “His official title is the Grand Warden of Wallach, Defender of the People, their Freedom, and their Liberty.”
“Wallach, huh,” I said, formulating what I would say to this man with the big title.
“It means homeworld as best as I can translate, or perhaps second homeworld,” X-37 explained.
“Good to know,” I said.
A man appeared in the holo display. His uniform was similar to the administrator we’d first spied on. The fabric was better tailored and adorned with badges and patches I suspected denoted high rank. The fabric was dark blue, the high collar and sleeve cuffs striped in wide bands of gold embroidery.
He wore a slug thrower on his hip that looked brand new and unused despite its ancient design—or he was a fantastic about cleaning, oiling, and generally maintaining the weapon. The bridge of his space station was crammed with officers, most seemingly in their prime and similarly armed.
“My name is General Karn, Warden of Wallach,” he stated, his hard face unmoved by the surprise of our appearance. “Protocol prescribes that I inform you that you are operating an unlicensed vessel in restricted space, but from what I can see, this is a senseless and irrational dialogue.”
“I think you’re going to like this guy,” X-37 said.
“I’m Halek Cain, Captain of the Jellybird. This is my crew,” I said.
“Jellybird?” he asked. “Interesting. I should warn you that our scientific community is alarmed that you exist, much less that you are here.”
“I wasn’t expecting civilization this far out,” I said.
“Out from what?” Karn asked.
X-37 whispered several suggestions in my ear, each rated on a scale of one to ten for believability. I decided to wing it. “There are two political forces where I come from, the Union and the Sarkonian Empire.”
“Are you an outlaw, Cain? Should I take you into custody?” he asked.
“I am. And I wouldn’t recommend it,” I said despite Elise glaring at me and X-37 giving me three or four better options.
“Which of these Empires has branded you persona non grata?” he asked.
“No one actually likes him,” Elise said.
I shot her a look.
“Maybe I should talk to her, Cain,” Karn probed.
“I wouldn’t recommend it. She’s a teenager,” I said, not sure why I was provoking Elise at this particular moment.
“I have three,” Karn said. “They keep me honest.”
“I bet,” I said, wishing X-37 would suggest where the guy was going with this. One thing was certain, he was confident and relaxed—stern as any general I’d ever met, but unconcerned with the consequences of this first-contact scenario.
He considered me for several moments. His crew remained silent and attentive in the background. The man didn’t fidget or look away. I recognized the look of a soldier in his eyes.
“You’re honest and cocky,” he said. “There are worse characteristics. Let me ask you an unrelated question.”
“You’re the boss,” I said. “I won’t bullshit you. There’s a reason I came here, and I’m on a tight schedule.”
“I wouldn’t trust anybody who said they came through the galaxy without a reason,” he said. “How do we speak the same language? There’s the delay that shouldn’t be there when we talk and your accent is strange. Do you have a language computer?”
The word “computer” took some time to translate, but X-37 figured it out and whispered in my ear.
“You guessed it. We have a translator. If we met face-to-face, I’d be the only one who could talk to you in real time,” I said, purposely limiting contact to myself. Elise would ruin it, but if we could keep them focused on one person, this would go faster. “I’m not the most diplomatic person. Sometimes that’s a problem.”
“I’ve already determined that by looking at you,” Karn said. “Tell me, Cain, will I regret trusting you?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
“Outstanding. An honest answer from a dangerous man. Let’s not play word games. We are conducting the largest evacuation in history. It’s hard to convince people to leave everything behind. Our president has promised we try one last time to stop the meltdown,” Karn said. “You won’t be allowed to hinder my mission or endanger my people.”
“It looks like you don’t have enough ships for a complete evacuation,” I said, studying what looked like cities, transportation networks, and industrial complexes.
“Look closer and you’ll see many of those are without power,” Karn advised. “Negotiating with aliens and other first-contact scenarios are part of my training, although we all laughed about it in the academy. My job is to make sure you don’t harm my people. If you make me nervous, I have authorization to blow you out of the void. My mission is everything.”
“How about we skip the part where you shoot at us? We’re here because we received a distress call from a ship full of people. They’re out of fuel and stranded in a quadrant of space directly in the path of a comet. We need fuel and we need it fast,” I said. “I don’t know what we have to trade, especially given the fact that your entire planet is going to hell right now, but if you name a price, I’ll pay it.”
“I have to say, Cain, your directness is refreshing,” Karn said. “But I still have a job to do. Are you a scout vessel? Did you come alone? Be careful how you answer, because we already know your ship has some serious firepower.”
I suppressed a laugh. “I need to check our translation software. I thought you just described our weapons as dangerous,” I said.
“Your nonchalance on this subject is alarming. I know you’re not a simple explorer, so don’t jerk me around. The only reason I might believe that you’re not a military scout is that you already admitted to being an outlaw,” Karn said.
“I like you, General. So, I’ll tell you that the people coming after us can probably take out your entire fleet and system defenses in a day,” I warned. “And that’s not even an invasion force.”
“I don’t understand that last part,” Karn said. “Are your people conquerors?”
“Not my people,” I said.
He frowned. “You know what I mean.”
“The first fleet you will see from the Union is a fraction of what they will send later. A man named Vice Admiral Nebs is after me and my crew. He has three small carriers full of ships designed for insurgency type missions,” I said, realizing he basically understood what I was talking about. “I have some problems with the way they operate, and they’re going to silence me.”
“They sent a fleet after you? That doesn’t make it sound like welcoming you would be a good idea. How can one man be that dangerous?” he asked.
“I suggest caution,” X-37 said. “The only explanation he is likely to believe is that you have information a large military organization can’t allow to go public. Once you tell him this, it will become important for him to learn this information. That will likely lead to your incarceration and torture—which will delay us far beyond the expiration of our own mission clock.”
“Is there a problem, Cain?” the general asked.
“There are lots of problems,” I said, then stalled.
“It’s a personal vendetta of some sort, I gather. My superior won’t be satisfied, but I think we’re at a reasonable starting point for discussion. As it happens, my superior may have an offer for you,” Karn said. “Regardless of who wants you dead. If she grants you asylum, we will keep you and your people safe.”
“He’s going to ask you to do something impossible that will likely get you killed,” X-37 said. “My analysis suggests that infiltrating and stealing one of their fuel tankers already in orbit would be a superior choice to further negotiation.”
“One moment,” I said to the holo view of General Karn, then muted the conversation as I turned away. “What are the odds that your ship-stealing plan could work, X?”
“Nearly three percent,” X-37 said.
“That’s it?” X-37 had given me a lot of ridiculously bad odds in the past, but this was just insulting. This was like my limited artificial intelligence was telling me to go fuck myself. “That doesn’t even give me a real choice.”
“There’s always a choice,” X-37 said. “Some are better than others. The other option is that they want you to perform a task so daunting that they have prepared to evacuate as many people as possible from their planet in case it fails.”
I turned back to the holo view of General Karn. “I’ll take your boss’s offer as long as I can do it in six hours and be on my way with enough fuel to power a freighter in less than an additional two hours. Can I contact your boss remotely? That might speed things up.”
“Solving our nuclear problem will require your presence on the surface of Wallach,” Karn said. “I’ll prepare a shuttle, but that will take some time.”
“I’m really wishing we hadn’t ditched our shuttle,” I said to my crew. “All right, general, we better get cracking, then.”
He made a confused expression. “I’ll assume you’re trying to tell me you want to hurry. I’m sending you my chief squad leader, a man named Locke. He’s good at his job, so try not to get him killed.”
“Fingers crossed, no one dies,” I said.
This caused a lot of confusion amongst Karn’s people.
“I suggest you avoid metaphors and euphemisms in the future,” X-37 said. “I can tell you from my own experience, they are not helpful.”