Reborn, page 23
Joie found that she did not. Looking around, nobody else did, either.
“I agree with Kehoe,” she said. “You need to do this immediately. Otherwise, they might make as many more as they can, expecting to fight some guerrilla war like a bad alien invasion movie.”
Ernesta snorted at that. Humans always managed to win a war against aliens who came down to invade with sketchily-explained motives. If you could travel among the stars, monkeys with machine guns shouldn’t be a threat.
And Tanerhald only had to blow up a number of key satellites, while preventing their replacement, to do a lot of damage. More if he took out a few, specific nodes of the global communications network. It was far more fragile than anybody on the outside ever understood. Whole nations could be blacked out in the blink of an eye.
“All or nothing, Joie?” Tanerhald asked now, glancing around at the others.
“I would need to see more of Mitch’s research,” she hedged. “And go deep on Kehoe’s logic. At the same time, they are among the best I know at that sort of thing, so I think we can take it at face value. The war isn’t over, for all we’ve managed to win a couple of key battles against Bouchard. Losing a queen in chess isn’t terminal, if a good player can recover. And there are a lot of smart folks on the other side. Plus, if they know any element of the truth, they might get desperate, for all the reasons Kehoe mentioned.”
That sort of killed the conversation. They’d danced around the topic, but never really confronted it directly.
What would it take to neutralize Humanity as a threat to the Brakhua and everyone else?
Secrecy was no longer a guarantee of success. If anything, it was more a promise of failure.
Things you didn’t know meant you made what would be seen as bad choices in retrospect.
“If they decided to get stupid, could you survive a nuclear detonation?” Carter asked.
“Our shields are sufficient for anything in anyone’s current arsenal,” Tanerhald replied dryly.
“Which suggests that there were things that could be done, if Humans decided to get even more stupid,” Joie pointed out. “And they might, if threatened. All the more reason to move now and force the bad guys in this situation to give way.”
“Define bad guys,” Kehoe said firmly.
“The entire United States Government might qualify,” she replied coldly. “Considering what I, Romana, Freya, and Carter have been doing for however long. Mitch could probably get you a fairly accurate body count of the number of people we’ve collectively killed. At the time, in the line of duty, but how many of those terrorist organizations were the result of US meddling in somebody else’s affairs? Or overthrowing popularly elected governments we didn’t like? It’s not like this is a new thing either. How popular is the Marine Corps in Central America, even today?”
“Throw in the Russians, the Chinese, and however many else,” Ernesta spoke up, in her role as the sole true civilian present. Even Sifu spent too much time around soldiers. “How much of the current mess of things are the big players getting pissy and not letting everyone else decide how to live their lives?”
The soldiers all grimaced, almost perfectly in unison. For God and Country broke down if you started thinking about how you would feel to be on the receiving end. Terrorist is just a freedom fighter for the other side.
Didn’t that describe at least the entire twenty-first century in international relations? And however much longer, if you wanted to talk about British Empires before the American one? Or Russian Empires, to say nothing of European colonialism?
“Would it work?” Tanerhald asked. “To just leave everyone alone?”
“It has never been tried,” Mitch laughed. “So it could not make things any worse than they are now. Personally, if you folks did come down and start explaining that there were big, bad aliens out there, at least half the governments in the world would probably collapse overnight. And not the good half. Not sure where the US falls on that spectrum. I suppose it depends on how much of what I’ve learned over the last few months you wanted to put on a front-page somewhere.”
“Sunlight cures many ailments,” Kehoe said. “I can tell you how many I’ve been involved with. The rest of you are nowhere near as guilty as me, that’s for damned sure. I like the thought of a painful year now. The casualties are likely to be in the thousands as people freak out, but it offers them something entirely new in the twenty-second century.”
“What’s that?” Joie asked.
He turned to her and smiled.
“Hope.”
Joie nodded. She had learned the power of such a thing the hard way.
CHAPTER 64
Valmy was in a room.
He had already explored the limits of it. Transparent walls that had resisted any blow he could unleash with his hands or feet. His pockets had been emptied at some point, stripping him of all potential weapons.
He was still not sure how he had gotten here.
One moment, he had been face down on the cold concrete, having been surprised by Daring and her friends. The next, he had been standing here, with only a flash of intense, white light separating the two.
It had to be the aliens.
He knew they existed. Had met at least three in his time. What were the limits of their technology?
Or their power?
Valmy did not know. He did know that they had hidden a starship. Had made it vanish off tracking radars specifically intended to see such things.
There had been a second ship. It had captured the first. Then vanished again.
Except capture was the wrong word. Daring had been on that ship. And had somehow found him in Colorado, penetrating a secure base and capturing him.
Valmy would have said that was impossible, but Captain Daring was the best in the world at such a thing. Even against her own kind.
So he was in an invisible room.
A door appeared now. Outlines lighting up in the wall and something disappeared.
Daring was standing on the other side, along with the woman he recognized as Wěn Cōng Mǎ, the martial artist who had been training her. Dangerous woman.
More dangerous than Daring? Possibly. Two of them meant that they wished to control the situation. For him to understand that physicality was a second choice, presumably after talking.
Two others followed. A tall man and…
Yes, that was an alien. No way about it. Short. Tiny, but it gave the impression of control. A leader.
Light purple skin. Almost leathery. No hair. Eyes the wrong size and shape.
Humanoid, but that was about it.
Daring and the Cantonese woman took up positions in front of the two others. Guarding.
“We have a problem, General,” Daring spoke first.
Valmy did not roll up onto his toes to attack. Considered it and discarded the notion as quickly as it had come.
He had been radically upgraded by his scientists. Daring had, as well. Perhaps more. Wěn just made it obvious that he could not expect to win a physical confrontation.
Ergo, talk.
“Go on,” he replied.
“There are people out there watching Earth,” Daring said. “They are freaking completely out at what you have started doing. Project Herakles was a combination of cyberware and genetics, so they didn’t pay as close attention as they probably should have then. Project Cybernaut was purely electronic. What you’ve done to yourself, Chelsea, Garrison, and however many others, threatens galactic society.”
“They weren’t supposed to notice,” Valmy retorted. If she knew that much, she probably knew more than he did.
Not many openings left he could exploit.
“Bandi was pretty good at hiding things,” Daring smiled. “He’s had a change of heart and told Tanerhald here everything.”
That would be the small, purple alien. The one in charge, obviously, from the way the other three deferred to him. Bandi had been the one in charge in La Plata.
Bandi Algom. Alien agent. Working for some alien Party intent on overthrowing things out there with the help of humans.
Little had he known. Or had Algom come to realize that he’d lost control of the situation and decided to save the rest of the galaxy before Valmy and his army could escape Earth? That made the most sense.
If so, he was also smarter than he had appeared.
None of which did Valmy one bit of good.
“Now what?” Valmy asked.
“They scanned you when the beam grabbed you, General,” Daring said. “So we know that you and the others are not fertile. That had been their greatest fear. Those of us who were upgraded to stop you are also unable to have children, so we only represent a threat to the present.”
“The present?” Valmy asked, confused.
“You will live some three hundred years, General,” she said with a smile. “At least according to scientists who have been trying to understand how dangerous humans are. If you could have borne advanced children, that’s a new species on top of everything else. That, they will not allow.”
“What will they allow?” he asked.
“Exile, Human,” the purple one spoke now. Authority. Unbending command of the situation. Commanding General sort of voice. “You will be permanently removed from Earth. Others of your kind as well, plus those with the knowledge to make more. We will cause the remaining information to become corrupted, and will monitor your world to make sure that nobody else picks it up later.”
Valmy could not hide his grimace. At the same time, he had laid out all those options at the beginning and calculated his chances.
Not every gamble wins.
“Just like that?” he asked, turning back to Daring.
“The alternative was a Carrington Event as only angry aliens could manage it, Bouchard,” she growled at him. “I’m trying to save our entire species from extinction.”
Carrington Event. 1859 CE. A solar flare so powerful that it induced magnetic fields in telegraph lines on the ground, causing some to catch fire. Northern lights visible as far south as Mexico.
Today, it would be utterly devastating. Yes, that might threaten the species, if they did it right.
Valmy felt defeat grip him by the back of the neck. It was one thing to gamble his own life and that of his soldiers, all of them volunteers.
It was something else to kill his world with his arrogance.
Because that’s what it was.
Joie Daring had just turned out to be better than he had ever imagined.
“Why are you telling me these things?” he asked, concerned.
Were they going to just execute him anyway?
“We need to kidnap and remove several hundred Americans, General,” Daring replied. “Scientists and their families. People who know enough to be a threat. My friends would like to you contact the key players in DC, both in Congress and the Pentagon, and explain to them that all such research will be permanently curtailed. And why. What did you call the operation, anyway?”
“Project Carpenter,” Valmy said automatically. “You’re taking everyone away? Just like that?”
“There has been conversation about offering a similar exile to other Humans,” Daring smiled. “Enough to make it a small slice of home. Humantown, as it were, instead of Chinatown or Little Saigon like we have in so many American cities.”
Valmy was shocked to hear such an option. Take everyone away and put them on a reservation somewhere?
Would it work?
Could he foment more revolution from the inside, or would they be watching him so closely that he just ended up getting himself killed later?
With three hundred or more years, how much could he see out there?
“Why aren’t they demanding anything harsher?” he asked Daring.
“I convinced them that just removing the bad players was enough,” she said. “That continuing to remove anyone who decided to try again would be sufficient threat to keep people honest. Personally, I think that we are less than a year from a starship appearing in the skies over DC and other places to introduce themselves and explain to everyone that the time has come to behave. I’m looking forward to it, even though I won’t be there.”
“You won’t?” he asked.
“Everyone who has been modified must leave forever, Bouchard,” Daring explained. “Everyone who knows how it is done joins them. Anyone trying later gets the same punishment. It was much better than the alternative. And that will hang out there like the Sword of Damocles until such time as Humanity is developed enough, polite enough, to be admitted to that greater civilization without us being a threat to everyone. Like you intended.”
“So they will watch me like a hawk?” Valmy demanded.
“You especially,” the purple alien stated. “Joie has asked for leniency in your case, and that of a few others who would normally be executed for your crimes. We have honored that. For now.”
“He means you have a pardon for past behavior, Bouchard,” Daring continued. “Anything you do after today likely gets that revoked and they put you in the ground. I don’t think you deserve that sanction, but it was a close discussion with a lot of people. Don’t make me regret going to bat for you.”
Valmy nodded, surprised.
He’d seen Daring as his enemy. Set her up that way years ago when he ordered Kehoe to send her after Mithras, then burn her when she’d succeeded. Or when he’d ordered Kehoe to reactivate the woman, adding her as another game piece to a complicated board, just to see who else might show up.
He had not been expecting the rest of the aliens. Not this early.
And he wouldn’t have given her the same benefit of the doubt.
Something more he needed to meditate on, when he got wherever it was he was going.
How had he screwed up this badly?
“And now?” he asked.
It felt like endgame here. Time to roll the credits and call it a day.
“And now, you will assist us in contacting everyone who needs to emerge from inside those shields Bandi gave you,” Daring said. “That way, we can get them all with a minimum of fuss. Plus, we probably need to kidnap a few Senators, if we were able to understand some of your recent conversations. Since that’s going to cause a shitstorm, we need to brief the President. And others. Or rather, I do, so I would appreciate you telling me everything I need to know to keep a lid on things.”
“We can’t do this in secrecy?” he asked.
“There will be no more secrecy, Human,” the man thundered. Tanerhald, though he wasn’t sure if that was first name, last, or species. “Joie is going to save Humanity from what you’ve done. Or not. That decision is yours.”
Valmy gulped. As Good Cop/Bad Cop games went, he’d hardly ever seen better.
What made it worse was that neither of them was bluffing. He could tell that.
Anything he did now risked everything he had spent a lifetime in service of. And everything else.
“Okay,” he said, letting go of a heavy breath. “This debriefing will take a while.”
CHAPTER 65
Joie sat quietly in the mess hall with a mug of hot chocolate of unknown provenance. Just like all the rest of the food. Maybe she could point them at a few of the uglier crime cartels to steal suitcases of money from? Two birds, one stone, as the narcotics trade had always been a thing of cash on the barrel. LOTS of cash.
She grinned. The door opened.
Ernesta.
“That look is pure evil,” the woman said, stepping close and grinning back.
Joie shrugged.
“Thinking about people we could rob,” she offered. “Folks who deserve it, so that Yormevs has real money to spend on buying supplies. Easier, I suppose, than just selling off gold bars here and there. Or printing their own.”
“Ha,” Ernesta laughed and sat across from her. “That might be fun. Not that I’ve ever done anything like that in my career. Pinky swear.”
Joie supposed that she had. Ernesta had been on the wrong side of the law her whole life, born and raised in a criminal syndicate family politely at war with an incompetent Mexican government.
At the same time, both them and the US government were probably entirely wrong here. Ethically wrong. Legal just meant whatever laws you could get passed, including slavery, which Mexico had done away with long before the US.
Hell, the entire point of Texas was white settlers rebelling against the Mexican government because they wanted to keep their slaves. A lot of people had died over wanting to do something that was legal, and wrong.
“Now you’re sad,” Ernesta said, watching.
“Exhausted,” Joie said. “And angry. I’ve spent twenty years serving my country, one way or the other. Doing everything I was told without question. That got me a job in a coffee franchise in DC, no friends, no life, and no hope.”
“We’re going to make it right,” Ernesta said.
“I know,” Joie said. “But a lot of people will get hurt in the process, because they will adamantly refuse to admit that they might have been wrong in the first place, regardless of the evidence put before them.”
“At least we know enough now to start them on the road to recovery,” Ernesta said. “Your President is known to be a pretty smart guy. Mexico probably collapses for a while. Hopefully, there isn’t another Pancho Villa out there, just itching to cross the border to get back at Americans.”
“Same,” Joie agreed. “That would just be the frosting on the cake.”
“Personally, I think Costa Rica has the right idea,” Ernesta continued. “They don’t have an army. And they have a government that has always been focused on social justice, rather than the oligarchies of their neighbors. All of their neighbors.”
“Part of me wishes I could be here to see what happens when the Brakhua and others do come down,” Joie snickered. “Just to watch the entire economy flip-flop as everyone in power is suddenly junior varsity again. And can’t just buy their way into power again.”
“A few will want to go to the stars, just to see what’s out there,” Ernesta nodded. “That South African guy who started the car company and then got into rockets almost a century ago. That was always his dream. Pity he died before he could see this. But there will be others.”
