A Learning Experience

Chapter Fourteen

Shadow Warrior, Earth Orbit

“Welcome to your first dose of guilt,” Mariko teased. “It’s what being human is all about.”

Steve snorted, but he couldn’t escape the image of the girl staring at him. She had haunted his dreams for the past week, ever since he’d laid eyes on her for the first time. It wasn’t romantic, he hastened to tell himself, it was a grim awareness that she was human, that she was real, that she had thoughts and feelings of her own. She wasn’t just a statistic any longer.

He sat up in bed and looked over at his partner. Mariko had spent most of the last few days in Afghanistan, working in the refugee camps. From what she’d said, conditions had been hellish, particularly when some of the villagers who’d fled ahead of the Taliban started to return and assert their authority. Eventually, Steve had provisionally authorised a number of children — and teenage girls — to be moved to a camp and placed in line to go to the moon. It was a drop in the bucket, but his conscience would allow no less. Besides, he knew — all too well — what fate awaited them if they remained in Afghanistan.

“I thought I was human,” he said, bleakly. “I didn’t know I wasn’t.”

Shaking his head, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood, making his way towards the shower. Whatever else could be said about the decor the Subhorde Commander had considered appropriate — the interface said it was alien porn, but it looked like nothing more than splashes of paint — the showers were wonderful. He stepped inside, allowed the warm water to wash the sweat of nightmares away from his skin, then waited for the hot air to dry his body. Outside, Mariko was already pulling herself out of bed.

She looked gorgeous, Steve realised, once again. Part of him wanted her right away, to take her back to bed and prove to both of them that life went on, but he knew there was no time to waste. The meeting was scheduled to take place in thirty minutes. Instead, he walked over to the food processor, picking up pieces of clothing along the way, and ordered them both breakfast. There was a ding from the machine as it produced its latest version of something edible for humankind.

“They won’t starve, down there,” Mariko said. “And they won’t die of thirst either.”

Steve nodded. He’d sent two biomass processors down to the surface, along with a portable water cleanser. It was probably best not to think about where some of the biomass was actually coming from, but the locals wouldn’t starve. So far, they were so grateful to be fed that no one had started to complain about the tasteless food. The cynic in Steve suspected that it wouldn’t be long before that changed.

He passed her one of the plates and tucked into something that looked like scrambled eggs, although the eggs were gray and the bread a faint pinkish colour. It tasted fine, despite its appearance. Kevin and Mongo kept experimenting with the food processors, trying to produce something that both looked and tasted good, but there were just too many variables in a system designed to feed individuals from over a thousand different races, each one with their own requirements. The sections on interstellar diplomacy he’d accessed through the interface had warned of problems in serving dinners when two or more races met to talk. One race’s food might be literally sickening to the other race…

Once they were finished, Steve returned the plates to the processor and walked out of the cabin, heading down towards the conference room. It was astonishing just how much like home the giant starship had become, now they’d cleaned the decks and removed most of the more disturbing alien artworks. The interface seemed to believe that some of them were worth considerable amounts of galactic currency in the right places, but Steve found it hard to believe that it was right. But then, if someone could stick a piece of wood in a glass of urine and claim it was modern art, perhaps the Horde had their own sense of aesthetics. Or, for all he knew, there were races that collected their art.

The conference room was an odd mixture of human and alien technology. Steve had moved the heavy wooden table from the ranch into the compartment, then surrounded it with chairs from the closest office store. One of the alien projectors sat on the table, ready to project images into the air; another was placed near the door, allowing people outside the starship to attend the meeting virtually. The system was so remarkable that it made videoconferencing look like a piece of crap. Kevin hadn’t taken long to point out that it would also add a whole new dimension to pornography.

He sat down at the head of the table and waited, accessing files from the interface to bide the time. Kevin, having the shortest distance to go, arrived within minutes, then sat down at the other end of the table. Charles, who had teleported up from Earth, took a seat next to Steve, while Mongo and Wilhelm sat down at the middle. Steve couldn’t help wondering if they were already picking sides, in anticipation of the moment they developed factions. It hadn’t taken the newborn American Republic long to develop political parties.

Steve shook his head, inwardly. As long as he had influence, he would make damn sure there were no political parties, no one voting the party line against their conscience. Maybe parties had an important role to play, but they eventually became more intent on ensuring their own survival than actually representing their people. And that was the death knell of democracy.

“I call this meeting to order,” he said, cheerfully. “Coffee’s in the processor, smoke them if you have them, etc, etc.”

There was a brief pause as the group found cups of coffee for themselves and Wilhelm lit up a rather large cigar. Steve, who had given up smoking years ago, watched it with some amusement. Now, with alien medical technology, smoking posed no health hazard at all. But it was still banned on the moon, outside the smoking room. The CO of Heinlein Colony wasn’t inclined to take chances with the rapidly expanding base.

“It’s been a week since we intervened in Afghanistan,” Steve said, once they were sitting again. “It’s been ten days since we came to a preliminary agreement with the United States Government. I believe, therefore, that this is a good time to take stock of our position and bring us all up to date. Kevin?”

“I get to go first, do I?” Kevin asked. He smiled, rather dryly, then sobered. “At the moment, both the Afghanistan and Pakistani Taliban are in disarray. Their senior leadership has been effectively wiped out, shattering their command and control structures. In some places, this may allow for local accommodations and even surrender talks, as the Pakistani Taliban absolutely refused to allow any form of compromise between the Coalition and insurgent fighters. We have successfully created a window of opportunity for the local government and the Coalition to re-establish their authority over the nation.

“However, we have not tackled the underlying conditions that brought the Taliban into existence and gave them so many supporters. Corruption in the government has not been brought under control, tribal issues remain untouched and there is still a growing humanitarian crisis in large parts of the country. In the long run, we may see a resurgence of the Taliban insurgency — or something else, something more local.

“A further problem is that we may have accidentally destabilised the Pakistani Government,” he added. “They had ties to the Taliban, despite our protests, fearful of what would happen after the inevitable American withdrawal. Now, several of those agents are dead and the Pakistani Taliban is unravelling. The government may take advantage of the situation to eradicate the last traces of the insurgency or it may become more inclined to host them, as the geopolitical realities have not changed.”

Steve sighed. Like most American officers, he had rapidly grown to distrust and despise the Pakistani Government during his service in Afghanistan. They had played a double game, helping NATO with one hand and protecting the Taliban with the other. Maybe they did have good reasons for acting in such an underhand manner — although it wasn’t something Steve would willingly have tolerated — but they also undermined American trust and support for their government. And there were far too many questions about just how Osama Bin Laden had remained in Pakistan without being discovered. Had he been hidden and protected by Pakistani intelligence?

“We are proceeding to track down Al Qaeda links from Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Middle East,” Kevin concluded. “As Langley warned, AQ has fragmented into several dozen franchises that are both cooperating and conflicting with one another. We can work out ways to identify most of them, but it’s going to be a long hard slog.”

Steve nodded, slowly. “Keep working on it,” he said. “What about the cooperation you’ve received from the government?”

Kevin smiled. “Which one?”

He went on before Steve could say a word. “I’ve got a team of analysts from NSA and Langley assisting with the intake,” he added. “Most of them are doing a wonderful job, although the sheer torrent of information is often overloading our capacity for analysing it, let alone turning it into actionable intelligence. Still, we have some advantages. For one thing, once we tag someone he stays tagged.”

Steve felt a chill running down his spine. Kevin had been right. The sheer potential for abuse was terrifying. As long as they held control, it wouldn’t happen… or would it? Would there come a time when he’d be tempted to use the technology to rid himself of political enemies? He thought of some of the politicians in Washington and gritted his teeth. Would he be able to resist the temptation?

“Good,” he said, finally. “Charles?”

Charles nodded and leaned forward. With Kevin detailed to intelligence, Charles had effectively taken over recruitment.

“Now that we can move more openly, we have around five thousand prospective candidates in mind,” Charles said. “Half of them are military veterans, some crippled, others are various civilians who may be able to assist us. Quite a number are research scientists on the cutting edge of technological development, several are theorists who can be added to Keith’s group. However, the wider we cast our net, the more likely it will be we pick up a spy.”

Steve nodded. The DHS had already put together a profile of the people Steve was recruiting, even if their imagination had failed to deduce the existence of the starship or Steve’s long-term plans. He had already confirmed that they wouldn’t try to recruit serving military personnel, but the government could probably find a likely candidate and try to brief him first. Who knew where that would lead?

“Run them all through the lie detector first,” Kevin said. “So far, no one has been able to fool it. If they turn out to be spies, we can either restrict their movements or tell them we’ll pick them up later.”

“That leads to another problem,” Charles said. “Two, actually; where do we draw the line?”

Steve lifted his eyebrows. “The line?”

“Ninety percent of our recruits, so far, are American,” Charles said. “The remainder are British, Canadian and a handful of others from NATO countries. I’m planning to expand operations in Britain once the British Government is briefed into our existence. But where do we draw the line?”

He leaned forward. “Once we go public, there will be millions of people wanting to immigrate,” he added. “Not all of them will come from the West. Do we refuse to take Muslims? Or Russians? Or Chinese?”

Steve looked down at his hands. America had been built on immigration, he knew, hundreds of thousands of immigrants forced into a melting pot that had produced a semi-united culture. But now immigration was often a threat, to both America and the West, when the immigrants refused to integrate and the government refused to force them to comply. One immigrant was hardly a problem, a whole community — often isolated, not always speaking English — was a major headache. He’d heard too much from the south to take the problem lightly.

“Let me see if this makes sense,” he said. “We take people who are willing to work — no handouts for anyone on the moon — who speak English and are prepared to follow our laws, such as they are.”

“That does require that we codify our laws,” Kevin said. “So far, all we have are a handful of regulations on the moon. We’ll need a constitution, we’ll need a civil code, we’ll need some form of police… hell, we probably need some form of the Pledge of Allegiance.”

“We’ll write one out,” Steve said. “It’s a problem we will have to tackle over the next few months, I suspect.”

He shrugged. “Markus?”

Wilhelm leaned forward. “The US Government has requested ten fusion reactors,” he said, “and as many superconductors as we can produce. So far, we have provided five reactors, three of which have vanished into Area 51. The remaining two have been quietly attached to the national power grid, replacing a number of purely human power plants. I think they’re running experiments with the superconductors right now, concentrating on trying to produce batteries and directed energy weapons. The latter, in particular, will be very useful.

“In the meantime, the Internet Dongles have been a fantastic success and the world is waking up to their potential. Internet geeks all over the United States have been unlocking their functions, including several we didn’t anticipate when we produced them. By now, I imagine that NSA is having kittens. It’s simply not possible to trace the dongles through modern human technology. Several of them have even spread to China, despite — I’m sorry to say — the Chinese government slapping an immediate ban on them. Anyone would think they didn’t want their people to have unlimited and unmonitored access to the internet.”

He smiled. “Suffice it to say that the next few years should be very interesting,” he said. “I suspect that modern file-sharing software is about to be replaced with something else, something far faster. Hollywood and the other producers are going to go ballistic when they realise that someone can download a complete copy of The Avengers II in less than five minutes. In the long term, we may destroy Hollywood completely.”

“What a shame,” Steve said, dryly. He had scant regard for Hollywood. “What about our imports?”

“We’ve been able to expand more,” Wilhelm said. “It turned out that one small company was producing inflatable space stations for NASA. They…”

“Hold on,” Kevin interrupted. “Inflatable space stations?”

“It’s quite a sound piece of technology,” Wilhelm assured him. “As always, the real problem is getting the bubbles up to orbit. We can do that, which will allow us to expand our operations in space and start working towards producing asteroid homesteading kits. Give us five years, sir, and the asteroid belt will be full of tiny settlements.”

“Another good reason for laws,” Charles commented. “How do we tell when someone’s been claim-jumping?”

Wilhelm shrugged. “Other imports are proceeding well,” he said. “Now the government isn’t going to get in our way, I’ve started to order more specialised space equipment as well as vast quantities of supplies we need for the colony. The cost is quite staggering, but we’re raking in money from the dongles.”

Steve smiled. “Keep a sharp eye on it,” he said. “We don’t want to wind up in debt to the government.”

He looked over at Keith Glass. “And our long-term plans?”

“The alien database suggested several ways to terraform Mars,” Glass said, calmly. “I suspect we will need to use the quickest way, which will take just over a hundred years, once we produce the right equipment. However, the database also warned that it would destroy any prior traces of life on Mars… assuming, of course, there ever was any. And it will hardly be unnoticed on Earth when we start slamming ice asteroids into the planet.

“Tech-wise, we’ve made some progress on understanding alien weapons and defensive systems,” he continued. “They do have force shields protecting their starships, but they can be broken down by sufficient energy. Unfortunately, the energy needs to be a ravening needle, not a simple explosion. I suspect that a modern alien starship could simply take a nuclear blast and shrug it off. Right now, we’re preparing plans to convert modern nuclear warheads into bomb-pumped lasers. However, without a large-scale nuclear warhead production program, it might take us years to build up enough weapons to defend the Earth.”

Mongo snorted. “And if they made a fuss over Iraq perhaps having nukes,” he said, “what will they make of us building nukes on the moon?”

Steve shrugged. “Could we purchase warheads from the Russians and adapt them?”

“Perhaps,” Glass said. “However, I don’t know if they could be adapted. Russian tech is… crude, to say the least. We might be better off constructing our own breeder reactors on the moon, at least in the long term.”

“We can work on that,” Steve said. He had never been irrationally terrified of nuclear power — the alien interface spoke of antimatter power plants and even stranger ideas — but he knew enough to treat it with extreme care. “And perhaps recruit some more experts from Earth to assist us.”

“Perhaps,” Glass agreed. “In the meantime…”

He stopped as an alarm rang.

Steve checked the interface, then swore. “We have one contact, perhaps two, coming towards the solar system,” he said. Their time had just run out. “I think we’re about to be put to the test.”