A Sword Into Darkness (11 page)

Sykes grunted and snatched another toothpick from the small open jar among the condiments at the center of the table.  He was just about to angrily spear an olive yet again when Gordon Lee’s smug voice behind him caused him to snap the pick instead.

“Imagine my surprise!  After being persona non grata in this town for the past 16 years, suddenly, people are accepting my calls.  Suddenly, the whispers that I’ve got one foot in the loony bin quiet down a bit.  And if that wasn’t nice enough, I suddenly get myself a personal invitation to the Beltway Bandits’ own secret dinner club.  Whatever could be the reason for this startling reversal of fortune?”

Sykes looked back and saw Gordon Lee, shedding an expensively tailored tan trench coat and straightening his jacket and tie, a tie, he noted, that was covered in little Flash Gordon-style rocket ships.  Sykes shook his head and said, “Maybe Christmas arrived early this year.”

Gordon’s smile became tighter, more vicious.  “Somehow I doubt that.”  He approached Lydia’s side of the table and bent down to squeeze her hand and gave her a kiss on the cheek.  His lips were cold from the chill wind blowing outside, but his eyes were warm with the embers of their past.  “Lydia, you are lovelier than ever.”

She canted her head to one side and gave him a saucy grin.  “And you are a manipulative, gloating liar, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.  How have you been, Gordon?”

“Lonely … and angry, but excited, too.  I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff to show you, both of you, stuff that you’ll never believe.”

Sykes smiled.  “Something of a habit for you isn’t it, Lee?  Showing off things no one in their right mind would ever believe in?”

Lydia held up a hand to forestall the barb Gordon was about to fire back.  “We have things to show you as well, Gordon, but first let’s get the important stuff out of the way.  Drinks?”

Unobtrusive waiters dressed all in black, with long, dark green aprons appeared.  Within a minute, Gordon proceeded to banish the last of his chill with a cut crystal tumbler half filled with straight single-malt highland scotch.   Lydia had taken the liberty of ordering for each of them already.  Gordon’s tastes were known and she figured the Gumbo Room would be a special treat for him.  Sykes was a bureaucratic insider with a lifetime of government service in war, in peace, and in the special infighting peculiar to the Pentagon and the Washington Beltway.  Second in command of the nation’s defense or not, all he would care about was getting a free meal.

By the time the servers backed away, they had all had their drinks freshened, and steaming, spicy cups of Cajun gumbo had been placed in front of them.  Different from the Creole gumbo Gordon was used to, he used his spoon to break up the ball of white rice in the center of the cup, mixing it with the dark brown soup and the plentiful shrimp, onions, and celery settled below the surface.  Savory, piquant heat radiated out from the first spoonful, and Gordon smiled broadly to his hostess and friend, acknowledging her good choice.

Gordon wiped the corner of his mouth with his napkin, and caught their eyes with his own.  Sykes stopped endlessly stirring his gumbo and devoured another martini-dipped olive.  Lydia wiped her own mouth and looked back at Gordon.  The head of Windward Tech and the man she had helped to ostracize years ago grinned tightly.  “So, what happened?  Why the turnaround?”

She responded by reaching down to her purse and extracting her suite.  Lydia laid it on the table between them and extended the screen from the side.  Displayed on it was something he’d grown very familiar with over the years:  the constellation Pavo.  A familiar, chillingly enigmatic blue star shone next to the position of Delta Pavonis.  This picture appeared to be recent—the separation between the blue light and the star it came from was the most pronounced he had seen, parallax making the approaching light oscillate wider and wider across its origin.

Gordon looked up at her again.  “That’s not really any more compelling than the ones I showed NASA originally.  I believe they downgraded it to a ‘stellar fragment’ and me to a nut-job crank.”

She nodded.  “True, unfortunately, but how about this.”  She tapped the suite and the image changed.  Now, instead of all of Pavo, it zeroed in on Delta Pavonis and the blue light.  Another tap and just the blue light filled the screen, fuzzy and indistinct.  Another tap and the blue light shrank away, the fuzziness sharpened to distinct threads of light and optical glare, but there was something else there as well.  It was a broken halo, something reflecting reddish in spots around the star of pale blue.

Gordon leaned in and she tapped the suite again.  The picture became artificially sharp, a false color image designed to bring out the details in the captured blobs of light.  At the center was a sharp circle of bluish white, the scintillating edge of the alien photon drive.  Around it, an equal distance from the center and arranged in a somehow familiar fashion, there were four reverse shadows, the edges of four immense objects surrounding the drive flare, illuminated with a red brilliance and spots of blue bright enough to obscure anything else from view.  Gordon’s heart hammered excitedly within his chest.  He looked back up to Lydia.  “What the hell is it?”

She shook her head.  “We don’t know, but it is structure, and it’s definitely not a rogue fragment ejected from a star.”

Gordon grinned.  “I’ll tell you what it is.  It’s my damned aliens!  This is it!  Proof, incontrovertible proof that they’re coming here, just like I always said.”

Sykes shook his head.  “Hold on, Lee.  It’s ‘something’.  Whether or not it’s proof of your pet aliens is another matter entirely.”

Gordon shooed his hands at Sykes, dismissing him and focusing on Lydia.  “How did you get these shots?  What are they from?”

“Optical interferometry.  They’re from the Solar System Baseline Array.”

“I tried to get my astronomers tasking on the SSBA since it became operational, but we always got the brush off.  They told me it was because the ‘fragment’ was a low order priority, but I always figured it was just another sign of the box I’d been put in.”

Lydia frowned.  “You’re closer to right than wrong, but not everyone who believed was isolated like you were.  You had more than a few supporters within the community.  Eventually it became more suspicious to reject their requests than it was to let them get their pictures.  No one in the administration ever imagined it would reveal something like this, though.”

Gordon’s eyes narrowed slightly.  “And which side were you on, Lydia?  Were you one of the believers or one of the ones blocking them?”

She returned his glare steadily.  “The administration is my administration, Gordon, for better or worse, but I also have faith in my friends.  I’m the one that authorized the re-tasking of the SSBA.  Is that good enough for you?”

He nodded, his expression softening.  “I’m sorry.  It’s just been a long time out in the cold is all.  I’d become of the opinion that I didn’t have any friends left out there anymore.”  Gordon shook his head and smiled again.  “But what are we doing here?  We should be planning our press conference!  We have to get the word out as soon and as wide as possible.”

Neither of the others said anything.  A hint of a smile touched the corner of Sykes’ mouth.  Gordon looked from one to the other and then sat back, dismayed.  “You’re still not going public, are you?  You have pictures of the damn thing and you’re going to sit on it?”

Lydia’s voice pleaded for his understanding.  “We have pictures of something, something that backs up your original assertion, but it’s still not proof.  The images we have come from a new satellite constellation that most people don’t understand, and that brings with it some doubt.  We only arrive at a final image by mathematically combining the images from space based telescopes positioned in different orbits all around the solar system.  For most people, that brings in even more doubt, some degree of un-believability.  And to get the final image of the … object, we had to process it even further.”

Sykes cleared his throat, inserting himself in the conversation.  “That picture doesn’t really exist, and it won’t exist.  It’s a computer-manipulated image from an unproven system that backs up the claim of an industrialist most people regard as nuttier than Howard Hughes in a straightjacket.  No one is going to publicly stick their necks out to support you, and they’re certainly not going to give you a budget to assist with your little science fiction crusade.”

“So we work harder to convince them!”  Gordon downed a slug of scotch.  His expectations had grown so high in moments, and now they had been sent crashing.  His nerves were a mess.  “We support some pretty screwy shit in this country with no justification whatsoever, and now that we have something real and verifiable to show people, we’re just going to say that it’s too risky?  That there’s not enough there to back it up?

“This could be either the best thing to happen to the human race in its whole history, past or future, or it could be the end of our history, the end of everyone, timid politicians and innocent soccer moms alike.  Either way, people have to be prepared.  By the time we have the type of evidence that will convince the administration to go public, we won’t need it, because everyone will be able to just look up and see the aliens in orbit!”

“Oh, get off your soapbox, Lee.  You had the chance to go public years ago as well, right after you got the brush-off from the government, but you didn’t do it.  Where were your press conferences then?”  Gordon said nothing, so Sykes continued.  “No, you didn’t go forward with telling everyone because you knew that the standard for convincing people about aliens is higher than it is for other things.  It’s higher than some weird kinematics off a bunch of telescope sightings, and you know that it’s higher than some doctored photo of a bunch of red and blue blobs that look nothing like our concept of a spaceship.  You stayed underground and let the evidence exist as some internet rumor because that’s as far as you could go until you had more to show.  We’re the same way.  We can’t go forward on the basis of this photo.”

Then Lydia smiled.  “But maybe we can stop holding you back.”

Gordon looked at them both sharply, but they said nothing.  The servers returned with food and fresh drinks, whisking away their half-eaten cups of gumbo and replacing them with steaming, sizzling dinner plates.  Sykes was served some sort of squash risotto alongside an immense blackened porterhouse, a dollop of butter melting on top.  Both Lydia and Gordon were each served shrimp.

In this case, shrimp was an oxymoron.  These were prawns, three grilled, butterflied tails apiece, each one four inches long, spiced with flakes of red pepper and herbs, lying atop a bed of sticky white rice, drizzled and surrounded by a rich crawfish étouffée, and topped off with a sprinkling of lump crab meat.  Gordon looked down at it and smiled.  He glanced back up at Lydia.  “For this, I forgive you of nearly half of the crap you’ve pulled.”

“My, my.  That much?  And we haven’t even gotten to coffee or the desserts yet.  I just might be back in your good graces by the end of the night.”

“Don’t push your luck.”  Gordon sliced off a forkful, making sure he got a piece of everything.  He tasted it cautiously, but as the myriad spices, sauces, and meats inundated his senses, he began to chew with gusto.  No one flavor or spice stood out.  It was an exercise in exquisite balance, with the resulting mélange of flavors nothing less than arthropodic bliss.

In so far as it is possible to define a person in simple terms, Gordon Lee was a man of great drive but little philosophy.  One of the few beliefs he held, aside from an almost religious devotion to preparing for the Deltans, was that there was a definite moral equivalency to being part carnivore.  If an animal had to die for his dinner plate, he felt that it should have an honorable death, and that its passing should result in something greater than just the filling of his belly.

Fast food, for the most part, was simply wrong and the vast majority could be replaced surreptitiously with Vegan fare without anyone noticing a thing except for the drastically improved health of the nation.  On the other hand, a really good burger could represent a sublime ascendancy, placing a simple cow in the bovine equivalent of Valhalla.  For a bacon cheeseburger, the moral cost was correspondingly higher, the dish then involving the lives of two farm animals, including one that was arguably more intelligent than a dog.  For Gordon to feel good about it, it had to be
really
good bacon and on a
really
good burger.  If one of them failed to measure up, the whole thing was in a moral deficit.

Gordon had had more than one ethical crisis over club sandwiches.

Though crustaceans were pretty far down the sentience/morality ladder, having three different varieties on the same plate was still more than enough to raise the equivalence bar pretty high.  That Gordon dug in with relish and without any sort of soul searching or sense of existential guilt was testament to just how good Lydia’s choice had been.

They passed more than a few minutes without saying a thing other than to comment upon the food.  Sykes, who did not share any of Gordon’s philosophies toward meat, merely grunted in seeming agreement, cutting off bite after bite of bloody, seared steak.  Eventually, Gordon began to emerge from his culinary fugue and looked down at the remains of his dinner with equal parts satisfaction and embarrassment.  He permitted himself another bite and then carefully laid down his knife and fork.  He enjoyed another bit of scotch and then bid his hosts’ attention with a look from one to the other.

Sykes and Lydia caught his look and paused a moment in their dining as well.  Gordon smiled, but there was a hint of menace in it.  “So, aside from plying me with good food, how exactly is the administration going to help me?  Or was that ‘obstruct me less’?”

Lydia smiled back, but it was somewhat cagey in response to the less than friendly nature of his own expression.  She wiped the corners of her mouth with a cloth napkin and then demurred, “Oh, I think we could probably swing a little of both.  The thing we can’t give you is overt support.  There’s just not enough good evidence to sell the Deltans to the nation … or the world.”