Future Shock, page 13
“Sir,” he said. “Permission to speak freely?”
Garland spoke without looking at his peers. “Granted.”
“We can’t force the future fleet to do a damn thing it doesn’t want to,” Hamish said. “The gap between us is just too wide. They have missiles that can fly at FTL speeds, hitting our ships before they get any warning of their approach, and sensors that can pick up our vessels and defensive platforms no matter how artfully we try to hide. They can send signals at FTL speeds, coordinating operations across interstellar distances, and microjump so precisely they can hop from one end of the system to the other without getting lost. If we try to fight them, they’ll beat us effortlessly. Imagine a Roman Legion facing a modern marine division. That’s how bad it will be.”
He paused. “They’re ... not like us. They do have a certain ... softness ... from what I have seen. But they’re not weak. They have the advantage. And they know it.”
There was a pause, an awkward silence. The third officer broke it. “Do you expect them to turn hostile?”
“No, sir,” Hamish said. “But I don’t expect them to give up and hand everything over to us either.”
“They could cause a great deal of disruption just by existing,” the third officer mused. “Your records, the future history files, describe you as a war hero. What about the villains of our future? The ones who haven’t committed crimes ... not yet ... and are branded as criminals because the future records say so, even when they haven’t committed the crime? What do we do about them?”
“That’s a problem for the government,” Garland told him, rather tartly. “Our principal concern is the military aspects of this ... affair.”
He looked at Hamish. “Do you think they’ll continue to support us?”
“I believe so,” Hamish said. “However, they’ll need time to rebuild their technical base. A great deal of their technology cannot be produced in their machine shops, from what they told me, and it will take some time before they hammer out a modern – futuristic – tech base.”
“More like build it up from scratch,” the third officer said.
“Quite,” the uniformed officer agreed. “Is there any immediate threat from ET?”
“The Diyang,” Hamish said. Their enemy had a name now. Boswell had handed over those files without being asked, everything from the enemy’s fleet lists to data that could be used to target cultural blind spots. The Diyang thought themselves the masters of the universe. They’d only changed when they’d learnt, the hard way, that there were bigger and stronger forces than themselves out there. “The future records suggest not, but it is hard to be sure. They did manage to get a scout out before it could be killed.”
He felt an uneasy flicker of admiration. The Diyang had had no idea what they were facing. They hadn’t realised they were engaging an enemy years in advance of themselves, they hadn’t even known they were being engaged until it was far too late ... and yet, they’d managed to get a scout out before it could be killed with missiles they’d considered impossible. It wasn’t clear how much information the scout had managed to get out, either. The officer who’d ordered the ships to run had killed himself, after vaporising the private datacore. There was apparently no way to extract information from a dead brain.
“So they will be adjusting their tactics,” the uniformed officer said. “What’ll they do?”
“Unknown, sir,” Hamish said. If he were in their shoes, he would be considering surrender. But he wasn’t. “Their homeworld will get word soon enough and then ... they’ll do what they consider they need to do.”
“I see,” Garland said. “How do you suggest we proceed?”
The uniformed officer snorted. The third officer showed no visible reaction.
Hamish understood. He might be a commanding officer, and the de facto commodore of the multinational squadron, but he was hopelessly outranked by all the brass in the room. They would sooner ask him to fetch the coffee than ask for military advice, let alone political and diplomatic recommendations. And yet, he was the senior American who’d seen the future folk. He had insights no one could match.
But I am also all too aware of my own ignorance, he reminded himself. I am a child inching into an adult world, unaware of the dangers of moving too far too fast ...
He shivered, then spoke. “There are two issues to consider. The first is that they have no sentimental attachment to us, let alone the rest of the Great Powers. It would probably be better to treat them as another faction, rather than expect them to bend the knee to us, and deal with them as we’d deal with another Great Power. They’re foreigners in the truest sense of the word, and pretending otherwise will cause all sorts of problems, further down the line.”
The words hung in the air for a long moment. “The second is that they were fighting a war themselves, against an enemy far more advanced and dangerous than the Diyang. They’re not just foreigners, they’re refugees. And refugees tend to have trauma ...”
“They also tend to bring problems from their homelands to their new homes,” the third officer snarled. “How many problems will these newcomers bring?”
“At least they can pay their way,” the uniformed officer said. “That’s more than can be said for most refugees.”
Hamish winced, inwardly. Attitudes had soured towards migrants and refugees over the last two centuries, decades of emotional blackmail and short-term thinking poisoning the well and ensuring few, if any, refugees were truly welcome, no matter what horrors they were fleeing. Any migrant who committed a minor crime was likely to be sent back home immediately, and if it led to their death ... well, no one cared. The major criminals were executed without much of a trial. It would have horrified him once, and in a way it still did. He understood it too.
“These people are not illegal immigrants,” he said, quietly. “And they have a lot to offer in exchange for sanctuary.”
“And if we let them set up their own homeland,” the third officer asked, “how many problems would it cause?”
“Too many,” Hamish agreed. “But not accepting them will make it worse.”
“And their enemies might come after them,” Garland said. “Will they?”
“Boswell thinks they made it clear,” Hamish told him. General Donegal would have put that in his report, surely. “They do intend to prepare to meet their Killers again.”
“And what if Boswell is wrong?” Garland scowled. “If these ... Killers ... do show up early?”
Hamish hadn’t given the matter much thought. It had struck him as fundamentally pointless. The Killers had crushed the Federation Navy, a navy that deployed starships bigger than the Death Star and wielded weapons that could take out entire star systems. The handful of surviving ships could no more hope to defeat the Killers than the USN, if the Killers arrived and opened fire. He understood Garland’s concern, grasped his fear of the Federation-Killer War spreading into their time, but there was nothing to be gained by worrying about it. If the Killers arrived, they’d all be dead.
“They will crush us, sir,” Hamish said, bluntly. “Kill us all. If they do, we’re dead. It is as simple as that.”
There was another uncomfortable pause. “Thank you for coming,” Garland said, “and we will consider your words. The guard will escort you to the next debriefing chamber. Please answer all questions as carefully, and as thoroughly, as possible.”
“Yes, sir,” Hamish said.
He stood and allowed the guard to lead him out of the chamber, into a maze of corridors that terminated in what was very clearly an interrogation room. It was empty, save for a table and a pair of chairs. The officer, a young woman wearing a decidedly non-regulation uniform, stood to greet him. Hamish shook her hand and kept his eyes firmly fixed on her face. He was too tired to let himself get distracted, even though he had nothing to hide. He wondered, as he took his seat, how many eyes were watching them. The walls were bare, but there could be any number of sensors embedded within the metal.
“I’m Commander Jody,” the officer said. “I’m afraid I have to ask you some questions.”
Hamish nodded, reminding himself the young woman was only doing her job. “Go ahead.”
He might have felt sorry for her, if she hadn’t been so damn good at her role. She bombarded him with questions, sometimes changing the topic to make it harder for him to keep his mind straight and then jumping back to go over the old topic time and time again, rephrasing the questions to make lies difficult. He knew what she was doing, and he wasn’t trying to tell her any lies, but it was still annoying. He didn’t try to hide his yawn as she went on and on, or his increasing irritation. God, he wasn’t even sure what time it was. The starship lag was a killer.
“You were scanned repeatedly when you entered the chamber,” Jody told him. “You definitely match up with your medical records.”
Hamish snorted. “Do you think I’ve been replaced by a shapeshifter?”
Jody shrugged. “There’s no telling what’s possible right now,” she said. “For all I know, you’re a telepathic alien reading my mind to figure out how best to answer my questions.”
“Charming.” Hamish tried not to roll his eyes. He understood their fears, but at some point their precautions would become mindless paranoia. They might have already crossed that line. “Didn’t the x-ray tell you anything useful?”
“You appear to be you,” Jody said. “But ...”
She shrugged, again. Hamish yawned. It was late and, if he was any judge, the next few days would be little different. Jody’s team would review everything he’d said and use it to put together the next set of questions, and the next and the next until he was drained of everything he knew. It wasn’t that much, he admitted sourly. If they expected him to have the technical data to construct a starship like John Birmingham, they were going to be disappointed. There had been very little technical data in the files he’d been allowed to review.
Knowing something is possible is half the battle, he told himself. But that doesn’t make it any easier to figure out how the trick is done.
Jody stood. “I’ll have a guard escort you to your suite,” she said. “And I’ll see you again in the morning.”
“Of course,” Hamish said. He asked a question, more to test the waters than out of any real enthusiasm. “Can I write a letter to my relatives?”
“Yes, but keep it bland.” Jody met his eyes. “There’s no agreement on how much of this ... affair ... will be released to the media, not yet. The censors will check your letter first, so don’t do anything stupid. Please.”
“I won’t,” Hamish said. “I guess a video call is out of the question?”
“I’m afraid so, at least for the moment,” Jody said. “We’ll arrange something later, once there’s some agreement on how to proceed.”
Hamish sighed, inwardly. The navy and the government needed answers, and they needed to check they weren’t being tricked in some way, but ...
“See you tomorrow,” he said, tiredly. “Goodnight.”
Chapter Fourteen: UN Compound, 2308
The past is a foreign country, Ethan mused, as he was shown into the conference chamber. They do things differently here.
He kept his face under control, somehow. The banquet in his honour the previous evening had been a farce, from the tables groaning under the weight of the food to the mind-numbingly boring conversation and the dubious entertainments. The food alone was obscene, when there were thousands starving on the streets outside; the remainder of the evening wasn’t much better. He found himself deflecting a dozen different offers of alliance, from the subtle to the blunt, and eventually pleaded tiredness in order to escape to his suite. The whole affair was a grim reminder he wasn’t in his own era any longer. The rules were different here.
And this is what gives birth to the Terran Federation, his thoughts mocked, driven by horror and the grim awareness the Killers were still out there, waiting for their chance to strike. How did we build our society on such fragile foundations?
“Please, take a seat,” Secretary-General Mbonambi said. The man spoke with quiet authority, odd for a person who lacked anything resembling formal power. “We have much to discuss.”
Ethan nodded, allowing his eyes to wander the room. The chamber was surprisingly elegant, compared to the dining hall, with a wooden seven-sided table, a set of comfortable chairs and glasses of water laid out in front of them. He recognised the five other men – ambassadors from the Great Powers, including Wentworth – as he took his seat. It wasn’t designed to configure itself to ensure he was properly comfortable, he noted wryly, but it was comfy enough for all that. He’d been in worse places.
“There are no formal procedures for such a meeting,” Mbonambi continued, “so we’re making them up as we go along. How do you think we should proceed?”
I wish we had a diplomat with us, Ethan mused. He was uneasily aware of his own limitations in such affairs. He wasn’t used to living in an environment where self-interest trumped everything else. Or someone more used to hashing out an agreement than serving in the navy.
He leaned forward, putting the thought aside. “I am a serving officer in the Terran Federation Navy and a citizen of the Terran Federation,” he said. “That’s true of all my crew and passengers” – apart from the Zargana, he added silently – “and we have very little attachment to the United Nations here, or any individual nation. I trust you all read the briefing notes?”
There were nods. He’d supplied a certain amount of information on the Terran Federation, from its history to its inner workings, although he’d tried to ensure he hadn’t given them anything they could use against him. It was hard to be sure he’d succeeded. There were just too many issues that needed to be considered, particularly when dealing with people more used to a political snake pit than himself.
“I understand that some of you want us to effectively fold ourselves into the Multinational Fleet,” he continued. “We disagree. Quite apart from the compatibility issues, there are political issues too. The MNF isn’t properly integrated by your standards, and given our victory in the recent engagement, may never be. There are also risks involved in giving you full access to our historical records, as well as technical data. We are prepared to work with you to safeguard the future of the human race, but we are not prepared to compromise our values or freedoms.”
“Many have said they will never compromise, only to find the rules flexible when they face a serious threat,” Wentworth noted. “You do realise that we won’t provide support for nothing?”
Mbonambi leaned forward. “We have a proposal,” he said. “We will turn a large island over to you, one fairly neutral in global affairs. Your refugees can settle and rule it how they like, while your naval personnel work to update our ships and prosecute the war.”
Ethan looked back at him. “An island will be too restrictive,” he said. “We need a world.”
There was an odd little ripple around the table, a faint sense of relief. He wondered if he’d made a mistake, or if ... they might have wanted him to request a world all along. The data they had was very limited, true, but they had to be aware of the risks of allowing even limited contact between the future refugees and the locals. Who knew what would happen when the locals started demanding the same rights and freedoms?
“A world,” Mbonambi repeated. “Do you really need so much space for a few hundred thousand refugees?”
Ethan’s lips twitched. “You underestimate the scale of the problem,” he said. “We have millions of refugees, their patterns uploaded to the datacores and held in suspension until they can be reincarnated in new bodies. It is our intention to proceed with the reincarnation process as quickly as possible. We need far more space to grow.”
Ambassador Yung stared at him. “You are going to reincarnate your lost millions? How?”
“It is possible to back-up a human genetic and mental code,” Ethan said. He hadn’t really wanted to discuss that, not when the technology had caused all sorts of problems when it had first been introduced, but he had no choice. “If something happens to the original, the body is cloned and the mental back-up is reincarnated within the new body. From a legal point of view, the clone is the same as the original. Life goes on.”
There was a long pause. Wentworth broke it. “But ... how can you be sure the clone is the same as the original?”
“I have been reincarnated twice,” Ethan said. The memories were oddly disjointed. One moment, he’d been backing himself up; the next, he was being helped out of a cloning tube. He knew he’d been killed, and how it had happened, but he had no direct memory of his deaths. It felt more like a nightmare than something real. “I am the same person, merely in a new body.”
“I see.” Mbonambi sounded stunned. “This is something we must consider. And quickly.”
“The technology should be kept under wraps,” Wentworth said. “There are just too many ...”
He shook his head. “What else can you do?”
“A great deal,” Ethan said. Hamish would be being debriefed by now, everything he’d seen or heard on the future ships being dragged out of his mind and studied by his superiors. There was no point in trying to hide what Hamish had already seen. “FTL missiles and communications, microjumping ... there’s a great many technical tricks we can teach you, relatively quickly, as we struggle to build a modern technical base.”
“And yet, you’re unwilling to integrate with our society,” Wentworth said.
“Our societies are too different,” Ethan countered. There weren’t many local societies that came close to the Terran Federation, save perhaps for a handful of libertarian colonies, and they lacked the technological base they needed to secure themselves. “You can’t take care of our people, and you’d find them ... disruptive. We will work with you, Ambassador, but we will not submit ourselves to you.”
“That is understandable,” Mbonambi said. “Which world do you want?”
