War in the Galaxy
A Science Fiction Novel
Read Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, and 24.
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25
Lilia sat through the entire presentation. The speaker - a balding, white-haired man with a prominent chin and a reddening nose - began by giving a brief synopsis of the history of viruses of non-Terran origin in the Milky Way. Lilia knew that baldness had been medically cured centuries ago, making baldness a stylistic choice for men who decided to forego the treatments. She supposed he thought it made him look wiser, although she also knew that there were some women who found baldness attractive, so perhaps that had been the reason the presenter had foregone the treatments.
Lilia didn't know much about old viruses, so she was surprised how interesting she found the talk. Apparently, while the human race had never encountered intelligent life anywhere in the galaxy, they had found viruses and bacteria throughout the Milky Way. Lilia had never thought about this before. It made sense that bacteria would be more common than other lifeforms, and given the animal and plant life human beings had found in the galaxy, it only stood to reason that human beings would have encountered viruses, too. Apparently, the speaker held the minority viewpoint in the scientific community that viruses were not a lifeform, but rather a sort of lifeform-adjacent biological automata. He said that this was an older view. Lilia knew that viruses were typically included with bacteria in the types of microscopic life. But it had been decades since school biology and she couldn’t remember much beyond this.
The speaker said that many of the first viruses humans discovered were benign. But some caused plagues and pandemics. The first - in 2288 - had wiped out three colonies in the Vega system before scientists had developed a vaccine. The worst pandemic had been in 2409, when an outbreak of a strange fever on Yarvin-Desi had spread around the entire galaxy before any drugs had been found to work on it. Nearly a quadrillion people had died. At the time, this had been a tenth of the population of the human race.
These days, the microscopic life in the Milky Way was pretty well documented and understood. In the early centuries of space travel, the new forms of biological life had frustrated scientists’ Terran tools, which meant that infectious diseases had once again become a scourge of human life. Life expectancies had temporarily trended down as infant and maternal mortality had increased. But now, death from a virus was so rare as to make federal news. More people were killed by wild pets each year in the Federation than died of any virus. This was thanks to revolutionary treatments which essentially made human immune systems nearly impossible for any new bacteria or virus or parasite to thwart. As soon as a person came into contact with a new disease, his or her body evolved new defenses to throw it off.
But it was theorized that in other galaxies, there might be new forms of microscopic life – or non-life, as the case might be – that would resemble neither bacteria, nor viruses, nor any known parasite, but would operate in entirely alien fashion. If they existed, these lifeforms had the potential to cause diseases hitherto unknown anywhere in the Milky Way, even ones which might threaten pandemics greater than the one in 2409. After all, the galaxy was more connected these days. Travel had become so quick and painless that anyone could hop across the galaxy in a matter of days or weeks, unwittingly carrying a disease along. And in the centuries since 2409, the human race had lost its collective quarantine reflex. Ships were no longer held in orbit before being allowed to descend and travelers were never tested for anything.
At this point, the speaker backed up and explained that scientists had been surprised to find that so much of the life in the Milky Way exhibited the same basic structures as life on Earth. They had expected that there would be more diversity of form, but so far the life that had been discovered all fell into the same basic kingdoms. One theory held that this wasn't a sign of convergent evolution, but was instead evidence that life in the Milky Way had all originated in the same place. Possibly Earth, since that was where life was the further developed. Spores or seeds had then been spread from star system to star system on interstellar rocks, or possibly even by surviving in the vacuum of space itself. Some viruses and bacteria had been found which did not need a host and could indeed survive in the vacuum of space. So perhaps island-hopping through the formless sea could have spread life originating on Earth to all corners of the galaxy.
If this was true, though, life should be clustered in certain sections of the galaxy more than in others. Broadly speaking, this hadn't been true. At least, scientists hadn't detected much of a discernable pattern in the spread of life throughout the galaxy, other than that all of it was primitive by Earth standards.
But some scientists, including the speaker, believed that other galaxies might contain life which did not operate according to the same principles, because it had emerged separately and had not been seeded by Milky Way lifeforms. And if this was the case, it might include microscopic creatures which could prove dangerous to human beings.
He stopped there for questions. Lilia wanted to ask him what was happening with the research conducted in the Andromeda galaxy, but thought better of it. Before this mission, Lilia hadn’t realized how much of the known universe remained a mystery. After centuries of space travel and millennia of scientific exploration into the nature of matter and life, human beings still had more questions than answers.
Perhaps in another life, she would have gone into scientific research. Perhaps she could have had a normal life, too.
As she was leaving, Lilia found her mind distracted by the idea of viruses in the Andromeda galaxy. She wasn't here for the presentations. She was here to keep an eye on Reni Haffenswen. But there must be a reason Haffenswen had given this conference so much attention. And according to her boss, he wouldn't be the only influencer here. Presumably, they had the usual conspiratorial interest in any gathering which might be construed to have nefarious intent. But perhaps there was something else. Perhaps there was something important in all this business of ancient viruses.
It was as she was floating across the chasm again on one of those moving walkways that Lilia saw Haffenswen. He was sitting in the downstairs cafe, drinking tea or coffee. There was another man talking to Haffenswen with his back turned towards her. She was just far enough away that she could see them without being noticed. She stepped to the rail and looked down.
Like the starship, the building here had precautions against anyone jumping. It would be so easy to step off the walkway, and as Lilia gazed down at Haffenswen, the bare metal rail under her hand felt like flimsy protection against a fall which would break all the bones in her legs, if not kill her. She had to hold continually in her mind the knowledge that it was impossible to fall from here. But the instinct for self-perseveration hadn't evolved at all in the millennia since the first man had stepped out of the jungle, and she found herself flooded with an urge to leap away from the railing. She felt naked and unbalanced.
And as the walkway floated slowly over the cafe, Lilia realized who the man sitting with Haffenswen was. Dr. Sideney. At that moment, while Lilia was gazing down at the two men seated in the cafe, Haffenswen looked up and met her eyes. He grinned and waved. He pointed up. Sideney turned around. Lilia had nowhere to hide. She saw Sideney smile. She stood there like a fool and stared at them until the walkway docked on the far side of the room and they were blocked from view.
26
Gurney had forgotten how many hours had passed since the firefight had begun. It was nighttime now, and he had found Heni. Gurney had been the sole survivor from the bazaar attack, and he'd been redistributed to Heni's unit. Now, they were defending the city center, which was under attack again. Over the course of the fighting, the various attacks and counterattacks, Gurney had lost track of how many times the lines had shifted. It seemed the insurgents were popping up anywhere, constantly putting pressure on new neighborhoods to keep the Merian and Kridalian forces from controlling the city.
The fighting had been intense for some time, and he was surprised the Raathi Front had the strength to put up a sustained assault for so long. As best he could tell, similar fighting was going on around the system. But he had no idea anymore. He wondered whether – if the fighting grew bad enough – the Kridalian and Merian forces might pull out of certain areas and the Navy might irradiate them from the sky. Depended on how bad the fighting was, he supposed. And how many civilian casualties the Kridalians were willing to tolerate.
A number of Kridian men had joined the efforts to purge the Raathi Front from the city. There were a couple local militias already and another one had been formed impromptu by several twentysomethings in the Geor neighborhood. But the city police had discouraged this, because the militiamen wore civilian clothes and might be mistaken for Front members themselves.
What had happened at the bazaar was that Gurney had been preparing himself to be killed, hoping to hold out as long as he could, when a special team from the local police had pulled in on one side in some armored vehicles and begun firing from a set of cannons at the various Front members. Simultaneously, two Kridalian copters had flown over with bay doors open and paratroopers firing down to pin the insurgents. When an opening had appeared, a dozen paratroopers had jumped out, using their jetpacks to slow their descent. Most had landed on the rooftops around Gurney, but three had dropped down into the alley. One of them had told the woman and her daughter that he could take them to safety, and they had held onto his arms as he jetted back up to one of the copters. When they were safely inside, he had dropped back down to join Gurney.
"You hurt?" he had asked.
"Not really."
"Your armor is torn up in the back," the paratrooper had said.
"I know."
"I've got a patch," the paratrooper had told him. And he had, in fact, had an armor patch, a temporary, self-forming plate which wouldn't hold up under a steady barrage, but could deflect a stray dart or shell and keep a suit of armor together until the end of a firefight.
"Don't go taking any grenades to the back," he had said when it was all finished. "You can't use it the way you would your normal plating."
"That's how I got the hole in the first place," Gurney had replied.
All this time, the other two paratroopers had covered for them, firing into the bazaar where various Raathi Front members had disappeared. The Kridalians on the rooftop had done a good job of pinning down any insurgents still out in the open. But most had found cover.
Around that time, a battalion of Merians had arrived, including Heni. Combined the three forces had overwhelmed the remaining Front fighters, and within twenty minutes the bazaar had been cleared. It was later estimated that the Front had lost three dozen fighters. The rest had disappeared into the city.
The copters had spent a few minutes firing down into the street, and then when the Kridalian paratrooper had finished patching up Gurney, they had flown off, presumably to drop the woman and her child in a safe location, and then find other flare-ups of fighting. Gurney wondered whether there were any safe locations left in the city.
Now, he and Heni were holed up under a shot-out window in a building across from city hall. Insurgents had driven several vehicles laden with explosives into the front of city hall, of which there wasn't much left anymore. This had been more of a symbolic attack than anything else, for by that time city hall had been abandoned. For a time, it had been used by the city police as a base. Several local politicians had hidden inside it. But they had been evacuated to the safety of the Kridalian base, or possibly up to orbit. Gurney wondered whether there had been any suicide attacks on the fleets. Probably. But he doubted these had amounted to much. Even a terrorist organization as sophisticated as the Raathi Front can't have had any major infiltration in the Kridalian Navy and he doubted they had much in the way of ships themselves.
He was starting to wonder when they were going to give out. The Front was losing men across the system and even if they had recruited tenfold the number suspected of belonging to their organization, they couldn't mount much of any attack for longer. He knew they were being supported by the Xing Coalition. It was obvious they hadn't coordinated all of these attacks and obtained all of the necessary weapons themselves. But so far, he hadn't seen any Xing soldiers. Perhaps that would be the next shoe to drop – a Coalition fleet and a convoy showing up in-system.
Now there came an order – Gurney had forgotten how many such orders there had been – to move. Apparently, the insurgents were falling back and regrouping. Gurney hadn’t seen anyone leave city hall, but apparently there was a tunnel.
Within a minute, the two of them were out in the street and heading south. Dozens of marines poured out of buildings around them and fell in alongside. A skirmish near the Bextar Capital District had been won and the Front lines were breaking apart.
As they moved, more details came in. The rebels were falling back to a set of warehouses along the Ritany River, where they'd built a stronghold. Early in the day, they had taken over these warehouses and several nearby factories, and through all the fighting they had continued to hold them. These had formed their new base of operations and despite heavy shelling which had leveled three factories to the ground, the Front had continued to occupy the warehouses. They had some sort of protective shield – an unidentified technology – which defeated every effort so far to shell it. There was to be one more ground push, and then if that failed the plan was to try to pull all ground forces back to a safe radius and raze the warehouses from orbit. There was a fear though that if the orbital strike failed to penetrate this new technology – which must have been donated to the Front by the Xing Coalition – it might radiate out into the city. If the ground assault failed, the marines were to sweep through the nearby districts and try to extract all of the civilians they could.
Gurney found himself glad the battle had resolved to a single focus. He was growing tired of this work of constantly pivoting to every new point of flareup as more terrorists popped up behind them somewhere in the city. He idly wondered whether the Coalition had invented some new technology which allowed invisible or instantaneous translation, and which might explain the Front's seeming ability to appear anywhere.
But if the Coalition had developed such a technology, it obeyed no laws of science known to Gurney. And he suspected that if they did have such a technology, the Coalition would already be deploying it for their own forces. He had heart no such reports. Whereas this new shielding technology had been reported in several recent battles in Sol Eri Go and Golaniy. Merian scientists were speculating that it was nothing more than a version of the traditional magnetic shield with the laser interaction solved. It was reportedly weaker than traditional shields, though, and could be defeated by ordinance if it was heavy enough. But anything beyond this was speculation and the mechanism by which it worked remained unidentified.
When the marines approached within a kilometer of the warehouses, the Merian guns fell silent. No longer did the marines trot along in a column. Now they hugged buildings and zigged across any thoroughfares. Their commanders had deployed an interdiction field, ending the ability of either side to deploy drones.
They reached the bombed-out factories. The marines crawled through the wreckage, keeping to cover, waiting for shots to come from the warehouses. Surely, they were being monitored from the windows. Gurney kept his rifle trained on one of the windows of the nearest warehouse, waiting for a face or a flash of movement. As soon as he fired, it would give their position away, but any moment now, an order would be given and they would go.
The shielding around the warehouse was designed to prevent large projectiles and lasers from penetrating it, but small darts from a rifle could slip in and out. In this way, the insurgents inside and the marines outside could fire at one another. When the Merian forces had proceeded to the edge of the bombed-out factory, they crouched in the rubble and awaited further orders.
When the order to charge came, half the men maintained cover while firing into the windows of the warehouse and at the roof, while the other half went over the top of the demolished factory wall and half-ran, half-jumped towards the warehouse.
Unseen machine guns opened up from somewhere in the warehouse and small shells began ripping up the ground in front of Gurney and Heni as they ran. Like the others, they ran in a zig-zag pattern, dodging and jumping and ducking and occasionally diving to the ground. Still, by the time they reached the warehouse, a quarter of their number had been killed.
There was a large bay door on the front side of the warehouse and Heni fired at it with his rifle until it was full of holes. Gurney ran up and kicked it in and then jumped away.
A barrage from several guns firing at once came out of the door, but Gurney and Heni stood to the side against the wall and waited. Their comrades back in the wreckage of the factory began aiming in through the bay door.
Gurney and Heni each tossed a grenade inside. When the echoes died away, Renmin – a dark-skinned Merian from the Lackota System – led three other marines inside. Gurney and Heni were busy running to one corner of the warehouse in case any insurgents tried coming around the side. They heard the chattering of machine guns from inside the warehouse and Gurney wished they had drones.
27
On the way back to her room, Lilia recorded a message to the director. She spoke in code into a device which would encrypt her message, and she sent it to a private hub the Agency maintained for transporting messages. The Merian armed forces and intelligence services had small operations on most planets in the Federation. They collected data, transmissions, and even personal notes. Small messenger ships carried information packets from planet to planet and base to base. This was the most secure means of transmitting messages through the galaxy, because it was physically passed on very fast ships.
But Lilia had spoken into a basic, handheld, encrypted recording-transmitter while walking in an open city, so she knew that there was still a large risk of being overheard. But it was too important for her to reach the director to worry about that. And besides, it looked increasingly like there was a mole or a leaker in their organization.
Somehow, her cover had been blown without any action on her part. She had suspected as soon as Dr. Sideney had come to her door on the starship that her cover had been blown, but now she had confirmation. Haffenswen had known exactly who she was. It was as if he had been expecting her.
Lilia spent the lunch break in her room trying to find anything she could on Reni Haffenswen's known contacts in the Wildprong Province. She had not yet reached out to the local intelligence officers – although by now, because she had sent the transmission, they would be aware of her presence on-planet – because she had been told this was a need-to-know operation and she wasn't sure yet who she could trust. Right now, only the Director would have the ability to open and read her messages, and she wanted it that way.
Strictly speaking, Lilia had full authority to read anyone she trusted into the operation and give them need to know. But the Director had given her this authority because she was unlikely to use it unless she absolutely had to. And she didn’t intend to read anyone in if she could help it.
After the lunch break, there was a convocation. The morning's presentations had been a soft opening, and the afternoon convocation would officially kick off a weekend of meetings and presentations. Lilia went to the convocation to see if she could spot Haffenswen in the crowd.
It was held in another overly grand auditorium. This one held ten thousand people and it was full. The stage amplified the speakers with gigantic holos projected three stories into the air and perfect sound – anywhere in the auditorium, one could hear the person on stage speaking clearly as though standing a foot away. The sound quality was even throughout the auditorium, which sloped down from high bleachers to the stage in the middle, and it was no louder near the stage than it was in the back.
The conference organizers made a few announcements. They welcomed everyone to the conference. Lilia listened with half an ear, scanning the stands for a glimpse of Haffenswen. She was wearing a set of contacts which allowed her to see minute details up to two miles away, so she could see the faces of people all the way on the other side of the auditorium.
Of course, if she could do that, Haffenswen and Sideney could wear similar contacts and see her.
The conference organizers thanked their sponsors. And then one of them announced, "And now, we'd like to give a special welcome to the man who made all of this possible. Without him, none of us would be here. I am speaking of course of our largest sponsor, whom I'm sure all of you know. I'm proud to introduce him this afternoon. Ladies and gentleman, I give you..."
He paused for dramatic effect and a man in a purple tunic and a yellow fedora bounded onto stage from somewhere out of sight. He was grinning. Lilia sighed.
"Mr. Zaphod. The richest man in the galaxy."
Zaphod took a sweeping bow. He doffed his fedora. He winked at the crowd.
"Third-richest," he said. He grinned at the man who had introduced him. "Plutonium futures not doing so hot today."
He waved at the crowd. "Thank you," he said. "Thank you. So glad to be here." There was a roar of applause and cheering.
Lilia rolled her eyes. She half expected him to be singing copies of Douglass Adams novels.
28
There were no lights on the inside of the warehouse, because warehouses had been fully automated since the twenty-first century. But the marines’ night vision kicked in as they went inside, and they could instantly see the blasted shelves and crates around them. Debris from nanochip boards lay strewn across the floor.
They moved from row to row, slowly sweeping the insurgents to the back of the warehouse. Heni lost track of how long they had been fighting. The building was surrounded now, and more marines were pouring inside every minute, amplified by Kridalian security forces.
They had lost nearly a third of their men in the first charge inside, but Heni had managed to stay on his feet. He was pretty sure he had a mild concussion from where a bit of shrapnel had caught him in the head. His helmet had stopped it, but he had ended up on the ground. Gurney was nursing a laser burn on his right arm. The armor on his right shoulder was totally gone and a direct hit on that side would probably kill him.
But the insurgency had broken in that initial charge, as the Raathi Front began to run out of men. The warehouses had been their stronghold to which to return when their forces began to shrink. Now, they were falling back all the way to the rear of this warehouse, where Merian marines were already working on the other side of the wall to blow their way inside. Heni wondered what the point had been. Even with thousands of men fighting for the Front, this battle could only ever have ended one way. The combined Merian and Kridalian military forces outnumbered the Front at least five to one. The Front would only have stood a chance if they’d been facing the city police alone.
But the Front clearly had the fighters to launch a heavier assault if only they’d concentrated them. If there had been uprisings all over the Kridalian Republic, there were enough insurgents to take a city or a moon, or maybe even make a play at one of the smaller planets. From there, it would have been much more difficult for the joint Merian-Kridalian forces to dislodge the Front, especially since they could have taken thousands of civilians hostage.
As it was, the Front hadn’t managed to take many hostages in the city that day. They had tried, but many local citizens had resisted and been killed. They knew their country’s policy towards hostages and knew that fighting back was their best chance at living. Heni suspected that hundreds of civilians had been killed in Jaff alone. Perhaps elsewhere in the system, there had been even more casualties.
Heni assumed this battle had been some of the heaviest fighting. But he had no way of knowing because his helmet no longer had access to any network, and so he didn’t know what was going on anywhere except in this warehouse.
He and Gurney were crouched against a two-story housing for the robotic warehouse managers, mindless automatons which moved inventory without ever becoming conscious or sentient. Someone had deactivated the robots, and they stood in their cages, drooping listlessly, staring out of dead eyes at a floor they could not comprehend.
When the order came to move again, Gurney had to tell Heni, whose helmet was no longer receiving orders. They dashed out from behind the housing and took aim at a walkway above, where Gurney had been informed a contingent of insurgents was holding out. But the information was old, and no such collection of insurgents appeared.
In the depths of a battle such as this, without the benefit of drones or other eyes in the sky, the lines shifted so rapidly that any information which made its way to the officers and then down to the enlisted men inevitably tracked significantly behind events. Gurney swore at the bad intelligence and lowered his rifle.
And just then, a dozen dark-clad men rose up off of the floor at the far end of the factory. Heni had assumed they were dead. He began firing, but darts were already spraying his armor and Gurney’s. They ducked back behind the housing as darts rained against the titanium walls.
“You alright?” he asked Gurney.
“Yeah. Not hit anywhere serious.”
“This is proving to be tougher than I thought.”
“Yeah. Wonder how long it is until dawn.”
“No idea.”
Gurney looked over at him and nodded. The darts had died away.
“Ready?”
“Yeah.”
And they stood up and stepped out into the open again, firing before they had anywhere to aim, resolved this time to charge into the oncoming darts and not to fall back again.