The Ruins of Anthalas (The Ember War Saga Book 2) Page 5

  “Looks like it’s time you ate. I’ve got the finest chicken cordon bleu hockey pucks the ship’s food processors can manage.” Hale poked the edge of a carton against Valdar’s chest. Steam rose around the edges and Valdar’s stomach growled.

  He took a carton and let Hale in.

  “Wow, sir, is this battle damage?” Hale said as he looked around the room for a clean place to sit.

  “I have the time to get this ship ready for battle or I can square away my laundry.” Valdar ran an arm along the edge of his bed and swept clothes and blankets to the floor. He sat at his desk and popped open the carton. The breaded lump of chicken with rubbery-looking rice and vegetables smelled better than they looked.

  “You look like hell, Uncle Isaac,” Hale said.

  Valdar spooned a mouthful of rice into his mouth and choked it down.

  “I’ve had my ship in dry dock since they were built on Titan station, repaired battle damage to twelve decks and replaced almost two thirds of my crew thanks to casualties and the brass shuffling every last crew in the fleet. I’ve got new alien tech in my engine room and an alien on my bridge crew as an ‘advisor.’ So what if I don’t shave twice a day?” Valdar poked at the chicken with a plastic knife and shoved the whole tray toward the garbage can at the side of his desk.

  Hale snapped a hand out and stopped the carton before it could go over the edge.

  “Eat. You don’t have to like it. Remember when my mom would try to make apple pie? You asked for seconds every time and I know how awful that tasted.”

  Valdar grunted. “I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.” He choked down a lump of chicken and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

  “I heard you went to your parent’s house in Maricopa,” Valdar said. “You and your brother.”

  “We did. Got in just before the demolition crews did.” Hale rubbed the back of his knuckles against the class ring attached to his dog tags. He and Jared had taken two artifacts from the rotting house where their parents died during the invasion: the class ring and a pair of brass spurs, mementos of their grandfather who’d served in the military at the turn of the twenty-first century.

  “At least you had that,” Valdar said between bites. “Xaros wiped the entire eastern seaboard clean. All I’ve got ….” He tilted his head to the shrine against the wall.

  “Who’re you talking to?” Hale asked. “Chaplain Krohe? Another ship captain?”

  Valdar shook his head. “No time.”

  “You need someone, Uncle Isaac. You keep holding all this in and it’ll eat you alive,” Hale said.

  Valdar crossed his arms over his chest and lowered his head.

  “I never called them,” Valdar said. “I was going to. Soon as I got on board I’d open a channel, tell them I’d be back when they found another captain for this ship. That was the deal I made with Garret. Get the ship to Saturn then I’d be back in no time.” He sniffed and wiped a sleeve across an eye. “Haiden, he understood. Said he wanted a rock from the rings. David, he wouldn’t speak to me. Didn’t say goodbye at the space port. I didn’t hold it against him, I’ve been in and out of their lives since they were born. I was supposed to stay dirt side for a couple years straight, be there to get them both through high school and see them off to college.

  “Garret put the ship on commo blackout before I could call them. Then the Chinese attacked and this ship and the rest of the fleet …. They must have thought I didn’t care enough to call them.”

  “I saw you with your boys when we were growing up,” Hale said. “They knew you loved them. I don’t know if Haiden ever told you, but he used to bug my father to tell the story how you rescued him and my mother from Okinawa, got them out before the Chinese overran the island. Haiden said he was always happy when you were deployed because you were out there saving people. You were his hero.”

  “And in the end I couldn’t save any of them,” Valdar said.

  “We didn’t have a chance or a choice. The Breitenfeld needs you now, Uncle Isaac. It needs you healthy, focused. You can at least finish your dinner every once in a while.”

  “Ugh,” Valdar said, poking through the carton. “If this ship had chefs I’d fire them.”

  “Someone opened a Thai place in Phoenix. We’ll go when we get back, deal?”

  “Deal. Now let me get back to a mountain of paperwork the bureau of personnel insists must be completed before I take this ship to the far ends of the galaxy.” He picked up a data slate and pressed his thumb against the screen to sign a document.

  “I may or may not have your orderlies on payroll to know how much food you throw away. Don’t make me come back here,” Hale said.

  “Shoo, kid, you bother me.” Valdar waved Hale toward the hatch with a flick of his wrist.

  Hale gave a cursory salute and let himself out.

  He turned down a passageway and found Commander Ericsson, the ship’s second in command, and Lieutenant Commander Utrecht, the gunnery officer, waiting for him.

  “Well?” Ericsson asked.

  “He’s eating, at least,” Hale said.

  “He going to make it through this mission?” asked Utrecht, a square-jawed man with a salt-and-pepper buzz cut over his head.

  “Captain Isaac Valdar is one of the best officers in the fleet. He’ll knuckle down once we’re underway … sir,” Hale said to Utrecht.

  “I know you two are close, but if he snaps, we have to do what’s best for the ship and the mission,” Utrecht said.

  “Planning mutiny already?” Hale asked.

  “It’s not mutiny when it’s a mental health issue,” Utrecht shot back.

  “Lieutenant Hale,” Ericsson said. “I was on the bridge with Valdar at the Crucible. He’s got my respect and my trust, but he’s had a rough time. We may need you again if he starts to waiver.”

  “No problem, ma’am. Call if you need me.” Hale glared at Utrecht and left.

  CHAPTER 4

  The control room on the Crucible wasn’t designed for human beings. There were no chairs for workstations set at almost shoulder level for the average person. The basalt-like material rising from the floor glistened with golden motes of light, and the effect couldn’t be traced to any power source or explained by engineers and physicists that had visited and examined the station.

  Touch screens, holo projectors and raised platforms—all aftermarket modifications installed after the last human fleet seized the Crucible in battle over the dwarf planet Ceres—made the control room useable. Fleet command had tried to use the Crucible as a base of operations while Titan station was under construction, but sailors and Marines on the alien station reported strange noises and odd flashes of light and claimed the station would rearrange itself without warning or explanation.

  The resident master of the Crucible blamed the alien design, at odds with what the human mind could process. Admiral Garret removed his crew as soon as he could, and no one had clamored to return to the station once they’d left.

  From its home in a plinth centered in the control room, the silver needle of light calling itself Marc Ibarra rose into the air. A doorway at the top of a set of too steep stairs didn’t open so much as it peeled aside. Three people came down the steps: Admiral Garret; Theo Lawrence, the nominal head of what remained of the Ibarra Corporation; and a woman, gray hair loose against her shoulders. Tatiana Caruthers earned an invitation to this meeting by dint of being the elected mayor of Phoenix. Together, they were the three most powerful people on Earth.

  “Garret, Lawrence and Ms. Caruthers, how nice to see you all here for the launch,” Ibarra said. A thin sliver of light floated from the plinth and morphed into the shape of Marc Ibarra, younger-looking than when he’d imprinted his mind and memories into the probe on the eve of the Xaros invasion.

  “Cut the crap, Ibarra,” Garret said. “We could have watched the jump just fine from Titan station without having to wander around this godforsaken haunted house. What do you want from us?”

  “So, no te
a?” Ibarra asked. He called up a hologram of the Crucible and the approaching Breitenfeld with a thought.

  “Mr. Ibarra, we agreed to meet here on council business,” Lawrence said. “I take it that’s why you summoned us.”

  “Yes, our little council: me, the admiral, the industrialist and the manager.” Ibarra directed the last word at Caruthers. “We’re a sitcom at the end of the world.”

  “Ibarra,” Garret grumbled.

  “Fine!” Ibarra waved a hand in the air. “Fine, no theatrics, no pleasantries. Just business, business, business with you all. I should know better. I hired each one of you.”

  “You aren’t the Marc Ibarra we knew,” Caruthers said. “You’re some kind of program. Something alien.”

  Ibarra tapped at the side of his holographic head. “Everything Ibarra ever was, ever thought, is in here. Call me a ghost if you like. Calling me a program makes me feel like a virtual assistant on your Ubis. Can your VA open wormholes to different stars? No? Didn’t think so.”

  Ibarra called up holo screens around the room, each showing population projections, fleet construction schedules, food yield rates from the automated farms around Phoenix. He raised his arms like a circus barker and the holo of the Crucible morphed into a star field.

  “May I present to you … our situation? A little over 450,000 human beings remain on and around the planet Earth. We’ll chop that number down by 12,000 once the Breitenfeld leaves us, hopefully to return soon. The nearest Xaros presence is at Barnard’s star, six light-years away. With the time it takes a light-speed message to reach the star and the recorded Xaros speed between solar systems, we expect the next invasion force to reach us in exactly fourteen years and twenty-seven days.”

  “I already have enough reasons to drink, Ibarra. What’s your point?” Garret said.

  The star field changed to show a Xaros drone with a graph next to it, one with a line growing higher exponentially.

  “If the Xaros follow the model, and they always do, they will arrive with a force of one hundred million drones. Not as many as they showed up with originally, but more than enough to overmatch our remaining fleet.” A bar graph showing the current number of capital ships and a projected number of hulls in service by the Xaros arrival popped up on the holo.

  “If,” Ibarra said, “if we do nothing else but focus all our efforts on building defenses and the fleet until the moment the Xaros return, we have a 0.002 chance of survival.”

  “Why don’t we use a skip drive again?” Caruthers asked. “Let them come, find nothing and think we ran off into the void.”

  “They may be drones, but they aren’t stupid,” Ibarra said. “They’re wise to that trick now. Don’t think we can fool them twice. A simple tachyon pulse through the system would disrupt the field and dump anything out of stasis. Besides, we’re plum out of quadrium for the skip drives, and for the Q-shells.”

  “If the Breitenfeld succeeds, won’t we be able to make all the Q-shells we need from Omnium?” Lawrence asked.

  “That’s the plan,” Ibarra said. “Our chance of survival rises to just over a whole percent if we have Q-shells.”

  “Then why are we risking the ship and her crew for something so negligible?” Garret asked with a sigh.

  “What if our fleet had …,” the bar graphs on the fleet projection rose dramatically, “this many ships?”

  “Impossible,” Caruthers said. “There are only so many people left on Earth. Even if every child alive today was put into the fleet, we can’t crew a fleet that large. It takes forty weeks to gestate a baby, Mr. Ibarra. Any child born today wouldn’t be old enough to be of any use as a sailor by the time the Xaros arrive. The only way to control that many ships is with automation and computer assistance. The Xaros would hack it in an instant.”

  “Correct!” Ibarra said. “Ms. Doom and Gloom gets the prize. Now, what if I told you there was a way to crew a fleet, and have pilots for wings of fighters, and find men and women for divisions of Marines and battalions of armor by the time the Xaros arrive?”

  “I’d say you’ve been inside that needle for too long,” Garret said.

  “Different discussion. No, let me show you a little something.” Ibarra clapped his holographic hands together, but there was no sound. He tried again, and his hands passed through each other. “There goes my dramatic moment.”

  He switched to a singsong voice. “Oh, Mr. Thorsson?”

  The holo projection switched to show a tall, Nordic man with blond hair and a full beard. Behind him were rows and rows of cylindrical tanks.

  “Sir,” Thorsson said. He tilted his head to the side to look around Ibarra and he glanced over his shoulder at the tanks behind him. Thorsson adjusted the camera to remove the tanks from view.

  “Don’t be shy, Thorsson,” Ibarra said. “It’s time everyone knew about our little experiment.” Ibarra turned his attention back to his guests. “Mr. Thorsson is aboard the Lehi, one of my fleet’s science vessels. But before I bury the lede ….”

  Ibarra raised a hand to the air, and one of the displays floating over a workstation flipped to show a dark-skinned man in a naval uniform talking to a group of sailors standing in a scrub desert.

  “This is Commander Clive Randall. He’s heading up the effort to salvage what remains of the Midway that crashed just south of Phoenix. He’s an expert mechanical engineer with several doctorates’ worth of knowledge and decades of relevant experience in his head.”

  “I know him,” Garret said. “I’m the one that gave him that mission.”

  “But you didn’t know him before my fleet sidestepped the Xaros invasion, and that’s because Commander Clive Randall was born one month ago.” Ibarra’s fingers wiggled in the air and a picture of Randall floating in a liquid-filled tank took the place of the video. Randall, wearing silvery undergarments, had hoses over his nose and mouth. Wires and tubes ran into a cap covering his skull.

  “A clone?” Caruthers asked, her face pale. “God damn you, Ibarra, that’s been forbidden for decades.”

  “Clones? No, don’t be so small-minded,” Ibarra said. “Clones aren’t our answer. They’d be a disaster, what with DNA degradation over time, and just imagine the inbreeding disaster we’d have after a third generation of everyone having babies with their genetic brother or sister. Besides, if I grew a clone this quickly, it would be nothing but a flailing toddler once I decanted it.

  “No, boys and girls, Randall is something different from a clone. He’s the combination of good old-fashioned sperm and ovum collected over decades by the healthcare arm of my corporation. All stored aboard the Lehi and combined in artificial wombs to make a baby just as legitimate and unique as the old-fashioned method.”

  Caruthers backed into a workstation, her lip trembling.

  “Ibarra,” Garret said, “if that … thing is really a month old, how can it know so much? When I talked to him, he remembered going to college, raising the wreck of the Reagan off the California coast.”

  “An excellent observation. Tell me, admiral, how much data does your brain hold at this point in your life? If I could watch every second of life that you remember, how long would it take?” Ibarra smiled and jiggled his eyebrows.

  “I’m not a neuroscientist,” Garret said.

  “A little over two petabytes, that’s how much data you’ve got in your gray matter. Taking in the vagaries of head trauma and substance abuse, we could cull a movie from your memories that would last about nineteen years. Fascinating how three pounds of brains can hold so much. But this is the twenty-first century. I can store all that data on a chip the size of a fingernail. And I did!”

  Screens across the control room popped to life, first-person camera footage of class rooms, military training, waiting in line at the DMV and more and more facets of life, both the fantastic and mundane, appeared around the room.

  “As soon as the smart phone became popular, recording every aspect of a person’s life became easy. It became even easier when almos
t everyone in the Western world had one of my Ubis in their pocket. Hundreds of millions of people gave me almost their entire life story—not with their knowledge or consent, but that hardly matters now. I used that data to create virtual lives inside quantum computers. I can procedurally generate a person’s entire life, all their memories and skills I need them to have, and upload it to a natural body flash grown in a tube. Not one identical by genome or memory to another.

  “In six months I can have an entirely new crew for the Midway, all with the necessary and unique training for every sailor in their heads. They’ll all remember growing up in the Atlantic Union and their lives before the Xaros invasion, and they’ll remember fighting to take back the Earth.” Ibarra tried to snap his fingers, uselessly.

  “Ibarra, you can’t play God like this,” Caruthers said. “These aren’t real people. We can’t just let them … mingle with us.”

  “Someone has to play God, my dear,” Ibarra said. “I set humanity down a very narrow path to survival the night I met this probe in the desert. All we have left are the embers of what we once were. This is how we rekindle the fire. This is how we beat the Xaros when they return. A fleet to match their swarm full of men and women no less human than you are.”

  “They don’t have souls,” Caruthers said. “They’re procedurally generated abominations. If we let these things loose, there won’t be any true humans left within a few generations.”

  “Why don’t we leave the theistic discussions to the clergy, yeah?” Ibarra said to her.

  Lawrence cleared his throat. “Morality and ethics aside, how are we supposed to incorporate these kinds of numbers? There are only so many humans left, and we don’t all know each other. If we reshuffle the personnel on ships and in departments, we could infiltrate a couple of these procedurally generated people—”

  “They’re not people!” Caruthers shouted.

  “Shut up, Tatiana,” Lawrence snapped at her. “To get the force numbers you want, people will notice.”

  “For once in my life, I’ll advocate complete honesty. Tell everyone what’s happened. If I did my job right, no one will know if they’re an actual survivor from Earth or grown in a vat,” Ibarra said.