As the months piled on, Eugene found the accumulated pressure of work took progressively longer to leak back out again. His “retirement” from teaching had proven more strenuous than even the worst parts of his old life. There were times he found himself wishing to return to the days of grading an entire lecture hall’s worth of doctoral theses, just for the rest it would represent compared to the last year.
Wrestling with politicians added greatly to his frustration. Eugene had taught political science for two decades before moving on to AESA. He thought he had a pretty good handle on the political environment and the dangerous species that inhabited it, but detached study was far different from direct interaction. Like the difference between watching lions prowl in the zoo and listening to them prowling outside your tent in the dead of night.
In spite of this, Eugene was not immune to the infectious enthusiasm permeating his group of brilliant shut-ins. He found he possessed more energy than he’d had in years. He came home exhausted, but slept deeply and awoke rejuvenated, often with enough exuberance to give his wife a proper rise-and-shine before going back to work.
Most important, progress was being made. Felix’s reverse-engineering team had yielded tangible results. They’d already developed an advanced gravity projector both smaller and more efficient than traditional designs. Simulations estimated a vessel fitted with them could reach 0.55 c, a 10 percent increase, which would cut months or even years off round-trip journeys to the colony worlds, and time equaled money.
The ARTists had set up a shell corporation to hang the new patents in. Venture capital flowed into the company accounts, supplementing the project’s AESA black budget and swelling their ranks further still. There was a real risk to such maneuverings. Anyone nosy enough to take interest could see the shell for its true nature, and they still hadn’t identified Harris’s secret admirer from nearly a year ago.
But neither had there been any repeats of that performance. Harris must’ve scared whoever it was off the trail. Still, curiosity tended to trump fear over the long run, and there were always others to take up the torch.
Eugene glanced at his watch. It was an antique mechanical piece, a gift from the university upon the end of his tenure, and quite valuable to the right collector. Feeling a little ancient himself, he wore the anachronism proudly, even though it had taken over a year to get used to reading the hands. He still couldn’t do it at a glance, which forced him to look a second time: 7:48 P.M.
That was enough for one day. The rest of what people continued to call paperwork, despite not containing any paper, would still be there in the morning. In fact, if past experience was any guide, it would find a way to fornicate and multiply.
Eugene locked down his computer terminal and placed his tablet in his coded briefcase, genetically tagged to him. It acted as a sort of reverse fire safe. Should anyone else attempt to open it, the contents would be thoroughly incinerated, without damage to anything outside the case. The flammable mixture contained its own oxidizers, allowing it to work underwater and even in a vacuum. Eugene felt this was overkill, as, if he found himself floating in space, document destruction wouldn’t be his most pressing issue.
Eugene was about to extricate himself from his disarmingly comfortable chair when he saw shadows lurking through the frosted glass of his office door. He tensed for a moment, until he recognized the squirrelly tenor of Mr. Fletcher. Did that kid ever leave the lab?
Eugene pressed the stud to open the door. “Come on in, boys. No sense waiting around to ambush me in the hall.”
Felix and Jeffery rushed in like a river through a burst levee.
“Professor, I’ve just heard that—”
“I’ve figured it out! It’s not a—”
“They’ve finished transl—”
“It must be a—”
“Slow down, guys,” said Eugene.
“Quit interrupting.”
“Can I finish?”
“I was here first!”
“Yeah, but—”
“Stop!” Eugene gave them both a simmering look. The two men went silent and had the good sense to look penitent. “Thank you. Now, then, one lunatic at a time is all that I can handle at my age. So, in no order of importance, Felix, please proceed. Jeffery, you may go second.”
“Sorry, sir. What I was in a hurry to tell you was I think I’ve killed two birds with one stone.”
“I hope you had the proper hunting permits,” quipped Eugene. Felix looked a trifle confused. “Never mind, please go on.”
“Right. You know how the buoy’s insanely inefficient radio transmitter has been bugging the crap out of me?”
“Yes.”
“And how none of us could figure out how the mystery ship had known where to look for the Magellan, since the crew was blocking the buoy’s radio broadcast?”
“Again, yes.”
“Well, I think I’ve figured out the answer to both.” Felix took a breath. “It isn’t a radio transmitter. At least that’s not what it’s supposed to be.”
“You may have lost me. We know it’s emitting a radio signal,” said Eugene.
“Yes, but that’s not its purpose, like an old-fashioned incandescent light bulb wasn’t supposed to be a heater.”
Someone flipped a switch in Eugene’s brain. “So you’re saying the radio waves are a by-product, like electrical resistance through a wire causing heat.”
“Exactly. It’s wasted energy. For months, I couldn’t figure out why the transmitter was sucking down so much energy for so little signal strength. Even worse, I couldn’t find where the majority of the energy was going. There wasn’t nearly enough waste heat or radiation to account for it all. It has to be going somewhere we can’t see.”
“All right. That gives us a place to start. But that’s only one mystery,” said Eugene.
“I was coming to the second. Since we can assume the majority of the signal is going out somewhere else, we can also assume that jamming the radio spectrum isn’t doing squat to stop the actual signal. That’s why the Magellan’s mystery guest knew where to find her.”
“Oh, wonderful,” said Eugene. “So our people are dragging around a giant torch attracting every moth in range. Ridgeway won’t be happy about that.”
“No, sir. But now that I know I’m not looking at the universe’s dumbest radio tower, I think we have a good chance of figuring out what it’s actually doing. And if my guess is right, whatever signal it’s pumping out is superluminal.”
“Like our QER?” asked Jeffery.
“I don’t think so. There’s no reason a quantum entanglement process should produce any radio waves, even as a by-product. I think whatever it is still takes time to travel, just faster than light can.”
“But that’s supposed to be impossible,” said Eugene.
“Sort of. There are a couple of possible ways around light speed beyond just entanglement. Besides, if the main signal had propagated out from the buoy at light speed, then the ship that came to keep tabs on Magellan would have been really close by to get there as quickly as it did.”
Eugene let his mind backtrack through the time line of events. Even if the mystery ship had been able to travel at just a fraction below light speed, the time between the emergency message being broadcast and the ship being detected by the Magellan was less than two weeks, meaning it had to have been less than a light-week away when it first heard the signal. There was nothing of interest in that area of space for many light-months. It did stretch credibility to think it was sitting there waiting for someone to stumble upon that one buoy.
“Make it your team’s top priority. Lives could depend on it,” Eugene said.
Felix nodded enthusiastically. Even as he said it, Eugene knew the instruction was unnecessary. Felix may have been quiet and shy, but he was a pit bull when it came to mysteries. He was going to sink his teeth into this new problem and thrash it around until it stopped moving.
“Moving on. Jeffery?”
“Yes, Professor. I just heard from the linguists, they’ve cracked the messages,” Jeffery said breathlessly.
Now that was interesting.
“That’s wonderful. What does the first one say?”
“Well, there’s some debate if the different languages represent different social entities like countries, or if they’re from six distinct species,” said Jeffery.
“Well, we may not be able to answer that conclusively until we find someone to ask, I’d wager. But what does the first signal say?”
“Really the turning point came a month ago when Magellan’s crew found the readout in the buoy that displayed the signals in written form,” Jeffery said.
“Yes, I figured. What does it say?”
“Well, the second signal was a request for maintenance like we figured.”
Eugene folded his hands in his lap and squared his eyes at his assistant. “Jeffery, do I need to waterboard the translation of the first signal out of you?”
Jeffery’s shoulders sagged. “You’re not going to like it.”
“I assure you, I like not knowing even less.”
“All right. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Jeffery called up something on his tablet and handed it to Eugene. The screen displayed a memo from the head linguist of the group, marked Signal 1 Translation. It read:
HUMAN WILDLIFE PRESERVE. KEEP OUT.
Eugene blinked. He read it again. It said the same thing. He tried a third time. The memo remained stubbornly resilient to change. After taking a few moments to order his thoughts, he was able to articulate again. “Are they sure about this?”
“There is some disagreement about the exact phrasing. Words don’t always line up precisely from one language to another, much less between seven of them, but they’re greater than 95 percent confident in the overall meaning.”
“Well, then,” said Eugene. “That’s going to ruffle some feathers.”
The next morning, it became apparent “That’s going to ruffle some feathers” would turn out to be one of history’s epic understatements, rivaled only by an unsuspecting Pompeii merchant who rose on a sunny day in 79 CE and greeted his neighbor with, “Looks like it’s going to be a hot one.”
The immediate effect among the circle of politicians aware of the ARTists program was disbelief and indignation. One of them spent the entire morning violently remodeling his office with the help of a putter and a fifth of tequila. None of this should have been surprising. There was only so much abuse the human ego can take. Learning that there were as many as six intelligent alien species sharing the galactic neighborhood with humanity would be enough to shift anyone’s sense of importance. Learning that said species were fencing off humans like elephants? That was another matter entirely.
For Eugene and his merry band of misfits, however, the news was positive. Their budget absolutely exploded, as their superiors were suddenly interested in wringing every bit of technology out of the buoy in as little time as possible. Allison Ridgeway and her A-squad were about to thaw out on the other end of the QER to start their next shift, and the various research groups were running smoothly.
One development Eugene and his senior team members weren’t thrilled about was the military’s growing influence through AESA defense collaboration. Not that it was a surprise. The only real surprise was that it had taken this long.
Invariably, the first question asked about a new technology is, “Can this make killing less of a hassle?” The second being, “Can I have sex with it?” As a rule, someone always says, “Yes.” When man first harnessed flame, it was immediately used to start grass fires to drive game. It took time before he realized he could also use fire to harden clay bricks. GPS was created to advance the art of accurately blowing up undesirable foreigners with high explosives. Making navigation safer for air travel, commuting easier for motorists, or helping find people lost at sea were afterthoughts.
This question was on Eugene’s mind when, early in the afternoon, he received a summons to report to the American/European Union building for a Q&A session with members of parliament. Eugene had attended such meetings before. They traditionally ended with the politicians believing they had all the answers, and the experts questioning why they’d bothered to come.
He brought up Harris’s link on his tablet and hit Connect. “Thomas?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Grab your dress uniform, lad. We have to impress some important people tonight.”
* * *
Later, in Eugene’s Jaguar, Harris struggled with his uniform’s white belt.
“That looks a little snug,” Eugene said.
“It shrank. Must have gotten wet.”
“Uh-huh. I’m sure it doesn’t have anything to do with you spending the last year working with sedentary academics.” Eugene could have sworn he saw a bit of blush forming on Harris’s dark cheeks.
“Why don’t you ask Felix to partner up on a workout routine? It would do you some good, and it could really help his confidence.”
“You think so?”
“Hard as it may be to believe, many years ago I was a scrawny, socially awkward youth myself. It’s not an easy mind-set to break free of.”
“Well, at least you seem to be cured of the former,” Harris prodded from behind a toothy grin.
“Ouch. The wound is deep,” replied Eugene with good humor.
“Can I ask you something, sir?”
“I believe you just did, but you can ask me something else as well.”
“Why me?” Harris seemed confused, but not pleading.
“Why you, for what?”
“This meeting. What questions can I answer that Felix or Jeffery can’t? They’re much more qualified to discuss the details of what we do than I am.”
“Simple,” Eugene replied. “Felix, Jeffery, and I are peas in a pod. We’re all civilians, academic elitists, the nerds. But you, Thomas, you’re the atheist in the pews. Your military background gives you a perspective different from the rest of us. Different, and possibly more valuable to them.”
“More valuable than the scientists doing the actual work?”
“You forget who we’re talking to. These are career politicians. Ignoring or denying the work of experts is a prerequisite for the job.” Eugene’s voice had more than a pinch of lemon zest. “No, they already have a course charted; we’re presenting ourselves so they can cherry-pick our replies to validate the decisions they’ve already made.”
“So why go at all?”
“Because they hold the PIN on our accounts.”
“You’re afraid the military is going to take over the program,” said Harris flatly. If he was offended, he didn’t let it show.
“Not explicitly, no. The AESA has never in two hundred years handed over all control of a project to the armed forces, and to my infinite surprise, the age-old treaty banning weapons in space is as strong as ever. But that was put in place to prevent us from destroying ourselves. Now that there are threats from beyond, I don’t know if it can continue.”
“A challenger appears,” said Harris.
“Indeed. I fully expect we’ll be seeing more uniforms around the office, more ‘consultants’ and ‘advisors’ offering their two cents in ways that will be difficult to refuse.”
Harris digested this for a few moments as the lights of the downtown grew below them. “What do you want me to say to them, Professor?”
Eugene realized Harris had cemented his competing loyalties with the question. “I want you to speak your mind, Thomas. You have a good one. You don’t give yourself enough credit. Just because you’re not as schooled as the rest of us doesn’t mean you’re deficient in the noggin. When you start second-guessing your instincts and try to game what other people want you to say is when you’ll dig yourself a hole.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Don’t thank me just yet. I’m the one leading you into the lion’s den. At the lion’s invitation, I might add.”
Within the hour, they sat in a lavishly appointed parlor surrounded by rich wooden panels and straight-backed chairs with ornately carved armrests. Tiny, irregular tool marks witnessed to their handcrafted origins. They were sinfully cozy. Chair makers had life figured out; there’s hard work to do before you can sit comfortably.
Harris fidgeted in his chair, going over the creases in his uniform like a cadet awaiting inspection from a particularly demonic drill sergeant. Eugene sympathized, but after years of politics at various levels, he was no longer entranced by the wielders of power. The uncomfortable truth was the personal qualities that made someone most likely to be elected had little to do with competence or integrity.
Several members of the American/European Union Parliament filtering into the parlor were case studies in that very phenomenon. Eugene knew many of them personally. They were MAEPs from districts with large AESA research or industrial footprints like Florida, Hesse, Germany, and Paraí, Brazil. They were insiders, already aware of the ARTist program. There were also a few outsiders, presumably being briefed on the program for the first time. Eugene recognized a couple of the others. One in particular strengthened his suspicions about the meeting.
His name was Gladstone Rockwell, although the political press had dubbed him “Gladhand” on account of his unrivaled ability to grab government appropriations for his home district. You could smell the oak and bacon grease from three meters away.
On paper, Rockwell represented the Chicago-Milwaukee metro area. This was a polite fiction. Everyone knew his real constituency was Lockheed-Boeing-Raytheon, which had an unassailable position as the largest defense contractor on the planet. They provided arms to everyone from Warsaw to Walmart.
Space represented the final frontier to many, but none so much as the defense industry. With very few exceptions, space had remained free of weapons since the earliest days of space flight. The Outer Space Treaty, properly known as the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (toner wasn’t as expensive back then), had only officially banned the placement of nuclear weapons in space or the construction of military bases off world. For a number of reasons, a gentlemen’s agreement between nations had expanded the narrow wording of the treaty to include all kinds of offensive weaponry.
However, where there were fences, quarreling neighbors were never far behind. The discovery of mankind’s fence had the potential to trigger an arms race not seen since the fission-stoked days of Cold War paranoia. For Lockheed-Boeing-Raytheon, that meant defense contracts worth untold trillions, which was why the presence of MAEP Rockwell this early in the process made Eugene so uncomfortable.
“Isn’t that right, Professor Graham?” said a familiar, charismatic voice.
“Hmm?” Eugene looked up. “Sorry, I was trapped in a thought. What was that you said?”
“I was saying your team’s research was bearing fruit.” The voice belonged to MAEP Danielle Fenton. Officially, she was the chairwoman of the Advisory Board for Civilian Development of Space (ABCDS). Unofficially, she was the head of their secret circle, and reported directly to the AEU president. Mrs. Fenton also happened to be the former student who’d roped Eugene into his position as AESA’s administrator. That had been one election and two last names ago for her.
“Indeed,” began Eugene. “Our boys and girls have managed to translate many of the messages we’ve found, and the first product of our reverse-engineering efforts is about to begin testing.”
“Gosh, that’s really exciting,” said Gladstone Rockwell. “I’ve only just started reading your reports today, but it sounds like you’re sitting on a gold mine of technology. I was really excited to read about your man Fletcher’s work on faster-than-light propulsion.”
An alarm went off in Eugene’s head. Felix’s suspicions about the buoy’s FTL communication had only been put in this morning’s report. Either Rockwell was an impossibly fast reader, or he had been briefed on the project earlier than Eugene had supposed.
“I’m afraid you may be getting ahead of yourself, Mr. Rockwell, is it?”
“Please, my friends call me Gladstone.”
Eugene managed not to say, And what about people who don’t trust you farther than they can piss Jell-O?
Instead, Eugene continued, “Well, Gladstone, Mr. Fletcher is working on the very early stages of a hypothesis. He believes that the buoy has an FTL communications system. Not propulsion, just signals. The buoy itself seems to only have a low-powered antigravity drive, not nearly as powerful as the gravity drive aboard the Magellan, for example.”
Rockwell pursed his lips. “Well, why spend time on that? Our QERs work instantly and can’t be intercepted. Surely that’s a better system.”
“In some ways, yes. But you must remember QERs only work in pairs, and their bandwidth is abysmal. FTL coms could drastically speed up broadband signals in system. But for now, it’s only a guess. Felix—I mean, Mr. Fletcher—has only just started work on his hypothesis.”
“I see.” This obviously wasn’t what Rockwell had hoped to hear. “So there’s no application for propulsion, then?”
“It does not appear so, no.”
“So it will still take decades to get ships out there and confront these aliens.”
“Confront them?” said Eugene. “That’s a loaded choice of words.”
“What would you suggest? As I understand it, we’ve just discovered that we’re being caged like zoo animals,” Rockwell said.
“I would hardly call a network of buoys a cage. It is probably just a way for them to mark off territory set aside for us.”
“Oh, well, that’s mighty thoughtful of them to decide what our territory is going to be,” Rockwell said sarcastically.
“The border is thirty light-years away. If it’s a sphere, you’re talking about a volume of over 110,000 cubic light-years. It might take us millennia to fully develop all the systems within that space,” Eugene said earnestly. “It’s not as though we’re about to run out of room.”
“Well, that’s a very calm, reasonable position, I’m sure. One could almost call it dispassionate.” Rockwell let the words fall in such a way that the contempt could be clearly seen swimming just below the surface. “What say you, Sergeant Harris? Surely a military man must bristle at someone else building fences for you.”
Harris’s head came up quickly. He looked surprised, but then his eyes looked past the opinionated parliamentarian and settled onto something apparent only to him. He spoke.
“When I was a boy, my family lived on the outskirts of Philadelphia in the sprawl, next to an old Japanese couple. They made good neighbors. The women shared recipes, and my father and the old man would sit on his front porch and argue about the Eagles and the Phillies over shots of sake and a bag of pretzels.
“Then one Saturday morning, we woke to the sound of a hammer banging. When my father went outside to see what the ruckus was about, our neighbor was erecting a white wooden fence. My father was confused. He interrogated us kids to see if we had done anything to upset the neighbors. We hadn’t because we liked them. They always gave us lemonade in the summer. Then my father felt insulted and angry. He stopped talking to the old man. A few months later, the old man fell ill and died.
“After the funeral, my mother went to comfort his widow. She asked my mother why my father had become distant a few months before. She told her it was because of the fence. My father was offended that her husband didn’t try to talk about whatever the problem was first. The old woman began to cry. She said, ‘He built the fence to keep the raccoons out of my garden.’”
“And the moral of the story, Sergeant Harris?” asked the gentle voice of Mrs. Fenton.
“My father never thought to ask why the old man built it. He just assumed it was meant as an insult,” Harris said. “The moral is we don’t even know why these aliens built this buoy network. Maybe we should ask them. Look, I’m not immune to getting angry or even cracking some skulls when necessary, but first let’s make sure we’re getting angry at the right people for the right reasons.”
Rockwell shifted uncomfortably in his seat, but remained silent.
“Sage advice,” said Fenton. “But the president believes that, at a minimum, we need to … introduce ourselves to our neighbors.”
“That should be simple enough,” Eugene added. “Magellan is still close to the border and has more than enough endurance to make a deeper push. Order her to come about and start looking for the mystery ship again.”
“While that’s true, the president feels the Magellan and her crew aren’t ideal for the task.”
“Aren’t ideal?” Eugene sat forward in his chair. “Their performance has been exemplary! Ridgeway and her people have been indispensable to our research efforts.”
“It wasn’t meant as a slight, Professor,” Fenton responded in her gentle tone. “We’re all grateful for the work of Magellan’s crew. However, the president feels that we should ‘put our best foot forward,’ and the Magellan is over half a century old.
“What the president proposes is a crash program to design a purpose-built starship with cutting-edge technology that we’ve gleaned from the buoy. Once that’s completed, we’ll launch a dedicated mission with a crew trained to communicate with the aliens in their own languages. They will be prepared for the delicate negotiations likely to come on the heels of first contact.”
“And who would comprise this crew?” asked Eugene.
“No decisions have been made, but a preliminary list is being drawn up. If you have any suggestions, I’d be happy to add them for consideration.”
“I don’t like it, Danielle,” said Eugene.
“Don’t you mean Mrs. Chairwoman?” injected Rockwell.
“Why, Gladstone, I didn’t peg you for someone preoccupied with formalities,” Eugene said sharply. “But in this case, no, I meant Danielle. When you’ve known someone since her first summer out of high school, a bit of familiarity comes as a perk.”
“All right, boys, zip your trousers up. We’re all on the same side here,” said Fenton. “What specifically don’t you like, Professor?”
Eugene turned back to his former student. “Even if our estimates for the new gravity projectors are accurate and we launched tomorrow, it would still take almost fifty-five years to get a ship to where the Magellan is right now. It just seems to me that a handful of new gizmos and slightly more specialized personnel aren’t good enough reasons to put this off for decades.”
“I expressed the same concern to the president, but the interim will give us the time we need to master their languages, iron out any bugs in the new tech, and formulate an extraterrestrial policy that everyone can live with.” She leaned back in her chair and laced her fingers. “And with over three dozen government bodies representing almost two hundred countries and colonies, that last one is going to be no small accomplishment.”
Eugene deflated a bit and decided to concede the round. “I see your point.”
“You always did, eventually,” Fenton said nostalgically. She glanced around the room and took note of the awkward looks on the faces of some of the other MAEPs. “I think we’re all on the same page now, so let’s dig into the details.”
Three tedious, trying hours later, the meeting wound down as everyone filtered out. Eugene held out his hand for Harris to help him up.
“Thank you, Thomas. The hips have seen a lot of abuse over the years.”
“I’m sure Mrs. Graham would be scandalized to learn that,” said Danielle.
“Not one straight man in the whole organization,” lamented Eugene. “Danielle, a moment?”
“Always for you, Professor.”
Eugene nodded appreciation. He spared a moment to take in her countenance. She’d aged well. No, aged was the wrong word. Danielle had matured. She wore her slightly graying hair and barely noticeable wrinkles like copper wears its green patina.
As a student, Danielle had fierce confidence in her work and arguments, but lacked it in herself. In a way, her young self strongly reminded Eugene of Felix. But that was obviously in the past. She had grown into a strong woman whose presence commanded authority effortlessly. Eugene realized with a trace of recrimination that Danielle was probably several years older than his own wife. Then he remembered the previous evening’s festivities and stopped feeling bad about it.
Eugene waited until only he, Harris, and Danielle remained.
“All right, Professor. What is it?”
“I’m waiting for the other tasteful size-eight pump to drop.”
“Size seven, actually, and I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“Come now, Danielle. Anything we build now will be just as antiquated when it gets out there as Magellan is today. So pull the other one. It has bells on.”
Fenton sighed in resignation.
“What did he really say?” asked Eugene, with his arms crossed.
“Well, it started with a lot of ‘Who do they think they are?’ and ‘They messed with the wrong planet,’ but the finale came with ‘Nobody makes a monkey out of this president.’”
“He wants to build a warship, doesn’t he? That’s why Mr. Rockwell was here tonight.”
“I wouldn’t call it a warship, precisely. Armed courier would be more appropriate.”
“You have doublespeak down to a fine art,” Eugene said.
“Well, I did have an excellent teacher.”
“Don’t give me that. I taught you to identify euphemism and equivocation so that you weren’t duped by them, not so you could use them as tools to obfuscate the truth yourself. I find myself sympathizing with Dr. Frankenstein.”
“When in Rome, Professor,” Fenton said patiently. “This is kind of inside baseball, but I’ve already succeeded in … taming the president’s response and in keeping your team operating independently, I might add.”
“What does that mean?”
“His first impulse was to turn the whole operation over to the Department of Defense.”
Eugene’s face went red, and he threw up his hands. “That’s exactly the sort of thing I’d expect from that genetic throwback. He’s a nearsighted reactionary.”
“Can you really blame him?” Fenton asked. “You’ve studied the history of politics and civilization your entire career. Tell me, how does the indigenous population generally fare when a technologically superior race shows up?”
Eugene opened his mouth in preparation, but no firm rebuttal materialized.
“Exactly. I’d bet that was the first thought to go through your head last year,” Fenton said.
He was embarrassed to recall she was right.
She continued, “Look, tensions were high enough when we discovered the buoy in the first place, not to mention the mystery ship, but that ‘wildlife preserve’ business yesterday was the proverbial last straw. Everyone in the cabinet is united in the opinion that we need some teeth to bare in case first contact goes sour. They believe we need to present some deterrent.
“I’ve managed to convince the president, as well as most of the other advisors, that our first outreach should be a blend of diplomacy and a show of strength. And I’ll tell you something—even that concession was like pushing a cart with square wheels up a mountain.”
Eugene crossed his arms and sighed. “So that’s the deal, huh? Take it or leave it?”
“I’m not satisfied either, Professor, but passions have a way of cooling over time, so I think we’ll see a greater swing toward calm as everyone gets used to the idea. Besides, I don’t know what you’re so worried about. It’s not like we’re even going to be around when it finally happens.”
“Thanks for reminding me.”
“Well, I could be,” added Harris.
“You’re more right than you know,” Fenton said.
“Okay, that sounded ominous,” said Harris.
“That depends on one’s aspirations, I think,” she dodged.
“Don’t leave him dangling, Danielle. If you weren’t going to tell him whatever it is, then you shouldn’t have dropped hints,” said Eugene.
She paused to consider the situation. “All right. A crew for the new vessel is being considered even now. Although the crew will be civilian on paper, its members will be drawn from existing military ranks, including a marine detachment focused on boarding/counter-boarding operations. At this point, you are favored to lead the marine detachment.”
“I’m sorry?” Harris said, genuinely shocked.
“Why does that surprise you?” asked Fenton.
“Because I’m not remotely qualified,” Harris responded quickly. “I don’t have any experience with first-contact situations.”
“Oh, well, then, that is a problem. Can you suggest anyone who does have the relevant experience?”
Harris started to run through names, but stopped when he realized the causational impossibility of finding someone experienced with something that hadn’t happened yet.
“Um, well, no. I guess not.”
“Precisely,” said Fenton. “What you do have is plenty of security experience and an intimate familiarity with the whole ARTists program. You’re a ground-floor member, after all.”
“Basement,” Eugene joked.
“The point is no one else in the corps has your firsthand knowledge of the program or relationships with the people in it. So that makes you the most qualified candidate for the job, despite your junior rank.”
“That’s a real problem, though,” said Harris, struggling for ground. “I can hardly command a ship’s company of marines as a sergeant.”
“No. However, the military does offer Officer Candidate School.”
“That’s a three-year process.”
“I think you’ll find we can speed that up a bit, given the circumstances.”
Harris decided to let go of the emergency brake and just let the wheels of fate spin freely. Despite all the turmoil, he was beginning to think that Jeffery’s carelessness a year ago had been the biggest favor anyone had ever done for him.
“Splendid. We’re in agreement, then,” Fenton said. “Well, if there’s nothing else, I would really like to see my bed once this week.”
“Seconded,” Eugene said. “But there will be more to discuss another time, Mrs. Fenton.”
“It appears time is the one thing we have in abundance, Professor. Please give my regards to your wife.” Danielle Fenton picked up her tablet, nodded to Harris, and departed.
In the Jaguar a few minutes later, Eugene patted Harris on the forearm. “You held up admirably in there. Tell me, Thomas, how much truth was there in the answer you gave Rockwell about your father and elderly neighbor?”
“Are you kidding? We didn’t even have a yard growing up. We lived in apartments right up until I enlisted.”
“So you made the story up out of whole cloth, on the spot?”
“Yup. Anybody who wanted a fence would have had to put it up in the hallway.”
Eugene smiled broadly and silently congratulated himself again for his uncanny ability to spot raw talent in unlikely places.
“Well played, my lad. You may just live through this, after all.”
“Are you really that eager to get rid of me?” Harris asked quietly.
“What? No, you’ve been excellent, Tom. Why would you think that?”
“Because you didn’t speak out about my reassignment. You made it sound like a done deal.”
Eugene sighed heavily and clamped a free hand on the younger, larger man’s shoulder as the streetlights passed below them. “I’d love to keep you here, Tom, I really would. And I know this will take you away from Jeffery.”
Harris opened his mouth to object, but Eugene cut him off.
“Oh, don’t insult me, Thomas. I’ve seen you two sneaking around like kids trying to find the Christmas presents for a year now. I was young and horny once, too, you know. I remember the signs. But if it’s a choice between keeping you here and having some other testosterone-poisoned leatherneck leading the marine detachment on that ship…” Eugene shook his head. “No, that doesn’t bear thinking about. It would be selfish of me. You’re among the best of us, Thomas. I want you representing us out there if the shooting starts. Only you.”