Theogony 3: Terra Stands Alone (7 page)

...and then he was in a bedroom, judging by the snoring, although it was hard to tell in the
dark. “Damn it,” Calvin said as he fell six inches to the floor.

“See?” asked Steropes. “Nothing to it. Unless you were really unlucky,
nothing bad was going to happen.”

There was a grunt close by. The snoring stopped
, and a light turned on. Calvin saw that he was indeed in a bedroom, a very ornate and well-appointed one. “What is the meaning of this?” a voice asked in Chinese. A man sat up in the bed. Calvin recognized him. The man was Jiang Jiabao, the President of the People’s Republic of China.

Seeing Steropes, the man yelled, “You!” in a very loud voice.

Steropes quickly said, “Yes, we would like to talk to you privately.” He held up the briefcase. “I have the pictures for you.”

Someone began beating on the door. “Are you all right, Mr. President?” a voice asked.

The president hopped out of bed and walked quickly to the door. He motioned Calvin and Steropes to move to where they couldn’t be seen, and then he opened the door, just as the armed guard outside was opening it with a key.

“I am fine,” said the president.
“I was just having a bad dream. I will probably watch TV for a little while to relax before going back to sleep. Good night.” He closed the door and locked it. Reaching up, he turned on what looked like a genuine Mrowry Tri-D TV that was mounted on the wall. They may have withdrawn from politics, but their espionage network still seemed to be functioning quite well, Calvin noted. The president turned and motioned for Calvin and Steropes to join him next to it.

“Those are my pictures?” he asked Steropes.

“Yes,” agreed Steropes. “All of them.”

“And what do I have to do this time?” the president asked.

“Wait a minute,” said Calvin. “What is this? Blackmail?”

“Yes,” answered the president, “they have been blackmailing me. You expect me to believe that you weren’t part of it? Wait! I recognize you. You are the American hero that stopped the attack. Of course
! You’re in on it.”

“No, Mr. President, I was completely unaware of
this before now,” replied Calvin. “I was just at a meeting of the Terran government, and we need your nation to join us if we are to have a chance of defending our world. There are aliens coming that will destroy us all. I knew you were deceived into attacking the United States, and that the Psiclopes had something to do with it. I asked Steropes if he might know of a way to get you to join the Terran Federation. He said that he did, and then he beamed us here, but he has yet to tell me why.”

“Arges
was blackmailing him,” said Steropes. He turned to the president. “I never knew what leverage Arges had over you Mr. President, but something he said to me after we were banned from the
Vella Gulf
got me thinking. He said something like, ‘well, I can still make the Chinese dance,’ or something like that, so I knew he had something. It wasn’t hard to figure out what, once I asked the
Vella Gulf’s
AI a couple of questions. Personally, I am sorry he did this to you.” He handed the president the briefcase.

“Don’t you want me to promise to join before you give me this
?” the president asked. “What are you not telling me?”

“I am not hiding anything,” answered Steropes. “I am here to
right a wrong that was done to you. I can’t make what Arges did right, but I can at least remove the hold he had over you.”

“So I am free to choose to join or not, as I
alone decide?” asked the president.

“Yes,” said Steropes, “although I hope you will choose to join. The need is dire. We expect the planet to be overrun
sometime within the next six months.”

“
Then we had better get moving,” said the president, tossing the briefcase onto the bed. “Although we withdrew politically, we have kept tabs on what was going on, and we are aware of the Drakul menace. We knew that you would need us eventually, and have been mining and storing all of the raw materials we could. I knew that one day the need would be terrible enough that you would come to us; I wanted to be prepared for that day.”

“You wouldn’t happen to have any thulium,” Calvin asked, “would you?”

“That is one of the so-called ‘rare Earth elements?” the president asked.

“Yes, it is,” Calvin replied.

“Then we should have at least a ton of it,” the president answered. “We have at least a ton of all of them. There’s just one thing.”

Calvin’s eyes narrowed.
“What’s one more thing?”

“I will give you all of these things,” the president responded, “
and we will join the world government, but I want one thing in return. I know that you are about to leave on a mission. I want my son to be part of it. He has about 2,500 hours of flight time in tactical jets. I think he would make a nice addition to your squadron.”

“Umm, I don’t have any say in that,” Calvin replied. “All of the manning is done by a selection board.”

“You were able to get the government to let Steropes go along with you,” the president said with what could only be called a sly grin. “I think you ought to be able to get Fang in, as well. See what you can do. I would hate for all of the thulium we have stockpiled to go to waste.”

“
Damn it!” Calvin swore as he fell a foot to the floor of the transporter room. “This shit’s no fun. I’d almost
rather
take a shuttle than beam someplace if I’m going to fall every time I transport.”

“Sorry about that,” Steropes replied. “I asked Solomon to aim a foot high. Better you fall a little bit than materialize too l
ow. Until you get surveyed, it was just a good precaution.”

“Wait a minute,” Calvin said, “You told him to aim a foot high? I only fell about six inches when we beamed down. If I’d have materialized a foot lower...”

“It would have been really painful,” answered Steropes. “Good thing you weren’t really unlucky today, isn’t it?”

“Fuck!” swore Calvin. “That’s not funny. You could have killed me!”

“It was very unlikely,” Steropes replied. “Solomon’s beamings are within a foot of ‘on target’ in 99.3% of transits. You were fine. Besides, we needed to do it.”

“We did,” Calvin agreed. “But next time, how about telling me, so that I at least have a say in whether
or not I kill myself?” Calvin asked.

* * * * *

“Hey Skipper,” Calvin said
. “What’s going on? I just heard that we’re not leaving on time.”

“That’s true,” said Captain James Sheppard, the commanding officer of the
Vella Gulf
. Recently promoted to captain, he had also been named the ship’s permanent commanding officer. Sheppard had returned from the last mission as the ship’s acting commanding officer, a position he assumed when all of the officers senior to him left to take command of the newly acquired, larger ships. “We were just starting our final checks when we got word from Fleet Command that we needed to wait for the shuttle that’s coming up. They also said that we would need to take on additional fuel, but neither message said where it was coming from, nor where we were supposed to put it, since our bunkers are already full. I guess we’ll find out when the shuttle gets here.”

“I wasn’t aware there was a shuttle coming,” Calvin replied. As the squadron commander for the ship’
s space fighters and shuttles, normally he was aware of all of the flights into or out of the
Vella Gulf
. He mentally checked the daily flight schedule again. Nope, not there. “The flight isn’t on the flight schedule. When is it due in? Where’s it coming from?”

“I don’t know where it
’s coming from,” Captain Sheppard replied. “I wasn’t told. But it should be here soon.”

“Solomon,” Calvin said, “can you tell me
the point of origin for the shuttle that is coming?”

“My sensors show that it left from the area of Alice Springs, Australia,” replied the AI, “however my records do not show a facility of any kind in that area.”

“Hmmm...,” said Captain Sheppard. “I’ve heard rumors about–”

“The shuttle is here,” advised Solomon, before Captain Sheppard could say anything else. He looked over to see a faraway look in Calvin’s eyes as he communicated with someone via implant.

“The shuttle only had one person on it,” reported Calvin. “The squadron said the lieutenant’s name is Peter Finn. Apparently, he’s some kind of special combat systems engineer that brought something up for us. The lieutenant has asked if the senior officers would meet him in your conference room for some sort of presentation.”

Calvin and Captain Sheppard walked into the conference room to find the lieutenant
already there, which was surprising because he had about four times the distance to travel. As the lieutenant turned around, Calvin could only think of one word. Nerd. He was medium height with dark hair slightly longer than regulations permitted, and he had thick-rimmed glasses that would probably have worked better at birth control than condoms. If he had seen the Sun in the last decade or so, it wasn’t apparent from the pallor of his skin. He also looked like he was about 16 years old, far too young to be in uniform, much less a lieutenant.

Before either could say anything, the lieutenant walked over and stuck out his hand to Calvin
. His walk was weird, Calvin noted, almost like he was dragging his right foot. “Good afternoon, Lieutenant Commander Hobbs,” he said, his speech faster than normal. “It is such a pleasure to meet you. I have read all of your reports. Very exciting. Did you really kill the god Quetzalcoatl with a spear? Of course you did. It was in the report. You have always had access to the best and newest equipment, so it was really surprising that you used a spear to kill him. I wish that I could have been with you when you first met the aliens. It must have been really cool to be the first person to get to use alien technology.”

“
Who’s the new guy?” asked army captain Paul ‘Night’ Train, walking into the room. Night was the XO of the special forces platoon that Calvin commanded, in addition to his job of being the
Gulf’s
squadron commander.

“
I don’t know,” said Calvin. “He hasn’t stopped talking long enough for us to find out anything about him.”

“Oh
! Of course! We need to introduce everyone so that I can get on with my work,” said Lieutenant Finn. “I must confess to being a big fan of yours. I can’t imagine going to all of those places and doing all of those things. Of course, now I guess I will be going to new places and seeing new things, too. I just don’t know about all of those adventures. I’m not sure that my heart will be able to take it. I’m just...”

“
What the hell are you talking about?
” growled Night loudly. He had received a wound to his voice box earlier in his career that made his voice sound gruff at the best of times. When he was annoyed, it only got worse. Like now.

“Oh! I’m doing it again!” Lieutenant Finn said. “I
just get so excited sometimes that I can’t help myself.” He turned to focus on Night. “Oh, my goodness! Lieutenant Paul Train! Now Captain Train! The man they call ‘Night.’ You singlehandedly killed 27 Ssselipsssiss onboard the
Emperor’s Paw
, giving you the all time record for extraterrestrials killed. The way you took down that dino-bear on Keppler-22 was nothing short of amazing, too. I just can’t imagine being in the same room with both of you.”

Night held up a hand. “Do you have a death wish?” he asked.

“No,” said Lieutenant Finn. “Why would you ask that? If anything, it would seem that you are the one that puts yourself into positions from which there is no escape, leading one to infer that—”

Night held up his hand again. “Then. Shut. Up.” Night said slowly. “Or. I. Will. Kill You. Myself.”

The threat worked; the lieutenant stopped talking.

Captain Sheppard used the pause to regain control. “I’m Captain Sheppard,” he said. “What was so important that we needed
to wait for you?”

Lieutenant Finn blinked.
“Didn’t anyone tell you?” he asked.

“No,” Captain Sheppard replied, “Until you got here, we didn’t even know you were coming.”

“Oh! I get it,” he said, looking around furtively. “It’s a military secret, of course. We wouldn’t want the word to get out that we’ve got it, now would we?” He looked around the room as if looking for spies.

“This ship is quite secure,” said Captain Sheppard. “Whatever it is that you’ve brought for us, you can talk about it here.”

“Really?” he asked. “Oh! OK. As promised, I’ve brought your stealth modules.”