By Other Means (2 page)

“Admiral Ruger,” A man nodded from behind a desk, “We’ve been waiting for your report.”

Mathew Ruger took a moment, looking around the room, and then curtly nodded in return, “It’s good to be back in human controlled space.”

*****

“Ambassador, please take a seat.” Gil Hayden said, nodding to the free space at the large conference table.

They were in one of the standard gravity sections of the station, using a room with a large panorama of Hayden’s orbital space and the curve of the planet itself was clearly visible beyond the thick glass. The Ambassador nodded to those around the table as he took his seat.

“It’s good to see some new human faces,” He admitted with a bit of a wry smile. “You get used to the oddity of the Alliance species, but coming back is like a breath of air you didn’t know you were missing.”

“I’m sure, Ambassador.” A man smiled, mostly politely, “We’re here for your report, since it seems unlikely that you’ll have time to head back to Earth space.”

“Right,” Ambassador Keane nodded, unsurprised.

He’d known well that his new assignment was likely to be a long term one, with years spent away from his home. That felt more like an adventure when he’d accepted it, but he wasn’t one to complain.

“Well, first thing,” He said, “And this is all covered by my written report, is the political structure of the ‘Alliance’. By our standards, they’re really something of as Commonwealth, centered around a formerly imperial species that we’ve not yet directly contacted.”

“How many species are there in the Commonwealth?”

“A hundred and nineteen, as best I can determine,” Keane answered, “spread over fourteen hundred lightyears. We’re located near one of their expanding frontiers and, as we’d guessed, we control several key stars that are blocking their movement into the Orion Arm of the Galaxy.”

“Hayden being the primary,” Gil Hayden said sourly.

“That’s correct, Sir.”

“You said that we haven’t encountered the main species of this commonwealth?” Another man asked.

“That’s right,” Keane nodded, “They’re known as the SturmGav, and a few hundred years ago they were pretty prolific and expansionist. They carved out a significant empire, across almost a thousand light years.”

“What stopped them?”

“In a word?” Keane shrugged, “The Alphas. They call them the Ros’El, incidentally. The Sturm and the Ros butted heads for a few decades, and then it all blew open into full fledged warfare about three hundred years ago. One of the reasons the Commonwealth is expanding right now is because of the sheer devastation of that war, between the two, entire star systems were rendered not only barren of life but utterly uninhabitable by any means available to the Alliance.”

“And now they’re working together?”

“Time heals all wounds,” Keane said, “That, and I suspect that the Alliance likes to keep the Ros where they can see them.”

Several of the assembled people snorted.

“From a long goddamned way off too, I’ll bet.” Another man added.

“Essentially, yes.” Keane said, “There’s little love lost there, but the Ros are too active to ignore, too powerful to destroy, and too useful not to make some kind of use of. That said, one thing I was able to find out, it’s highly unusual for the Ros to be assigned any kind of border work. The Parithalians in particular were deeply puzzled and disturbed by the fact that the Alliance had authorized the Ros to expand along the borders.”

“Excuse me, the Parithalians are who?”

“Sorry, the Pari are a long limbed species that are descended from avian stock, best I could tell. They’re the Deltas by our classification. They originally opened communications with Earth, after the Valkyrie incident, but we didn’t have the translators then to put a proper name to them.” Keane said. “Noted shiphandlers in the Alliance, they manage the largest chunk of the Alliance Fleet on our side of things.”

“Gave our squadrons all kinds of hell during the war,” A Navy Commodore added, “they know their way around a ship, that’s for sure.”

“Most of the species I was able to speak with were of the same opinion,” Keane pointed out, “There was some word of an investigation into their border corporations, attempting to determine who authorized the Ros to open up new territory.”

“So that’s their official stance then?” Gil asked, somewhat sourly, “It was a rogue operation?”

“No,” Keane said, “They’re clear on that, it was a fully authorized expansion, they just don’t know by who or why. Not entirely unusual, apparently, even with FTL communications the Alliance is too large to maintain easily checked records. Once they file with the central authority, it can take months or years to access the information again.”

*****

“Well Admiral?”

Ruger looked around the room, a windowless hole filled with more people than the scrubbers were designed to handle. That probably explained the smell, but there wasn’t much he could say or do about that. He was the least senior man in the room.

“The Alliance is a fractured government, Sir,” Ruger said, “Most similar to a funhouse mirror of the British Empire after it broke up. In many ways it’s an operating commonwealth, but there are undercurrents of disaffection with the Alliance and the central authority.”

“Good, we can use that.” The man at the head of the table said, “How much intel were you able to gather on the closest Alliance worlds?”

“A fair amount, nothing classified, of course.” Ruger said, “We haven’t had time to infiltrate any sort of Humint, or its equivalent.”

“What about intercepts?” A reedy looking man leaned forward, “specifically, were you able to find out why we never detected any sign of this culture on long range scans of the sky? SETI and other groups have been looking for over a century…”

“They’ve been looking for electromagnetic signals more than anything else,” Ruger answered, “Signals that the Alliance doesn’t broadcast. They communicate using gravity based devices or hard line and tight beam transmitters. Like ourselves, the Alliance probably only transmitted coherent signals into space for a few decades before they stopped wasting energy that way. SETI was doomed from the start, what they were looking for didn’t exist.”

“That figures.”

“Did you detect the signal?”

The room went silent as everyone looked back to the head of the table and Ruger stiffened before shaking his head.

“No sir.”

“So, they don’t have an operating system within several dozen lightyears…”

“More like several hundred,” Ruger offered, “I don’t believe that the Ros have a time warp system at all.”

“Well, that’s something I suppose.”

“Yes sir.” Ruger said, “If we can detect the warp in spacetime caused by Aeon, however, you can bet that they can. Until we know more, I do not believe it safe to reopen the facility.”

“Agreed.” The man at the head of the table said, “You’ll need to go back with the next Ambassadorial mission.”

Ruger nodded, “I Understand Sir. Do I have any secondary orders?”

“Yes, look for anything we can do to keep the Alliance distracted. Don’t
start
anything, certainly nothing that can be traced back to us, but the governments back home want options on the table if these aliens start looking in our direction again.”

Ruger frowned, considering, “That may not be too difficult.”

“Explain.”

“The Alliance always seems to have a few scores of border disputes, planets in revolt, that sort of thing,” Ruger said, “nothing quite on the scale of our recent problems, but certainly large enough to pull resources away from other areas.”

“Those sorts of things can usually be… expanded, with the right encouragement.” An Army general who had been quiet to this point said.

“As long as we don’t get ourselves embroiled in any of that,” The man in the suit growled, “We don’t have the resources to throw down that pit right now, even if some of our defense firms would love to try.”

“Unlike the aliens, none of our worlds have different species,” The General said calmly, “or significantly different cultures. We may have that problem in the future, but it’ll be a long damn time before Hayden or another of our colonies is in open revolt.”

The men around the table murmured for a bit, but were in general agreement on that at least.

Ruger nodded, “I understand. In that case, I’d like to request a specialist to consult with, someone who is more familiar with those sorts of operations.”

“Do you have anyone in mind?”

Ruger shook his head.

“Major Aida.” The General spoke up.

“That name is familiar,” The suit frowned, obviously scouring his brain for why that was so.

“She’s the Mustang who brought in the Alien portal ship at the end of the war,” The General said, “she also has more combat experience, face to face, with the aliens than anyone. She’s Special Forces, an insurgency trainer and cultural expert. She’s someone you can drop behind enemy lines with nothing but the clothes on her back and by the time a year is out the whole country is on its knees in the middle of a civil war. I’m not exaggerating, she did exactly that once.”

“That sounds… terrifying,” Ruger admitted, more than a little discomforted by the notion of one person pulling that off, “but also exactly what we need. How long will it take to get her from Earth?”

“You can have her today,” The General scowled, “She’s on the station.”

Living on a tether counterweight had a lot of things going for it, Sorilla decided as she wrapped up her work out. You could sleep, and do other things, in low gravity but when it came time to sweat for other reasons there was always the upper levels of the tether, where gravity could hit as high as one point five of Earth normal.

She stepped off the track and walked over to where her towel was hanging, briskly patting herself down. She liked to think of herself as reasonably self aware, so she knew that her friends and superiors were worried about her. She even knew why, and didn’t disagree with them really, there was something wrong in her head.

Sorilla didn’t really know if she wanted if she wanted to fix it. She didn’t know if she wanted to go back out there again, to lose more people. She barely knew most of the people she should have died alongside, and that felt obscene to her. Too many dead, too many anonymous faces and faceless names in her dreams.

Too many failures.

Sorilla tossed the towel into a hamper and pulled a shirt on over her head, she didn’t know what she was going to do and it was possibly the first time in her life she’d felt so lost. Her earliest memories were looking for her father to come home in his uniform and swearing she was going to grow up just like him.

Now, after everything that had happened she felt… well, lost.

It wasn’t a feeling that she was used to.

She’d been in the middle of jungles, on alien planets no less, and felt more at home than she now did on a space station filled with people she knew and cared for. The question of what to do with her life had never before been in question, and yet now she found herself wondering just that. She’d even considered going home and finding a plot of land down the road from her father, becoming a gentleman farmer had worked for him when he was retired.

Sorilla firmly pushed those thoughts aside for the moment as she finished slinging on sweat clothes and headed out of the small gym.

She headed back to her quarters via the lift and got cleaned up, then redressed to go out. Even she knew that she’d spent too much time in her quarters recently, not counting the time spent with Alexi. That sort of shut in time wasn’t something to complain about, after all.

Still, Jerry and Tara had left her several messages that she’d ignored over the past few weeks, a small rudeness that had become normal enough to be a rather large rudeness actually. Sorilla sighed and made her way to the common areas, to see if either of them were around. She’d rather not meet them in their own quarters, that might lead to personal questions and discussions she’d rather avoid.

The lounge was fairly crowded, people milling about and congregating by the observation section. The windows here were the largest and least obstructed views from anywhere on the station, overlooking the curve of the planet and, perhaps more importantly to the crowd, also the alien ship floating out in the distance.

Since the aliens sent a diplo team to Hayden, Sorilla had not once seen them, even from a distance. This wasn’t surprising, she supposed, since she wasn’t exactly the sort of person the government would send with a diplo team unless they needed a combat extraction perhaps, and the aliens themselves weren’t exactly safe walking around the humans here on Hayden.

On Earth, they probably would have been safe enough, not that there was any chance of the Solarian Organization letting them near Earth… but not Hayden. Too many people lose their lives during the war, and most of the dying had happened either on the ground or in the skies of Hayden’s world.

Those were memories that weren’t about to die anytime soon.

Sorilla tried not to let them burn her up, she knew that war was seldom personal. She should, she’d fought enough of them, had more than enough kills on her own ledger to know that you did what you had to do. She’d known people who made it personal, everyone knew someone like that, but those people came to a bad end. It never failed.

“Sorilla!”

Shaken from her reverie, Sorilla plastered a smile on her face that was only about half fake as she recognized one of the colonists approaching her.

“Kim,” She said as the woman approached, “How have you been?”

“Better, and worse.” The woman answered, laughing softly. “But you know that.”

Sorilla nodded, recognizing the reference to her first mission on Hayden. Kim had been one of the refugees in the original camp she’d been taken to after her spectacularly failed infiltration mission. Times had been tough then. They had their good moments, but food had been tight and everyone had been worried about the enemy.

“Yeah, I know that.”

“I didn’t know you were still in system,” Kim answered, her tone sounding almost relieved. “We thought that you’d gone back to Earth months ago.”