War in the Galaxy
A Science Fiction Novel
If you haven’t read “Hortus Deorum,” or “System Sanctus,” both of those are in the same universe as this story.
3
Lilia read about it over her morning coffee. A mysterious financier had just incorporated a new media company in the Wildprong Province and hired several infamous holovision commentators and writers known for their antiwar positions. “Antiwar positions” was putting it mildly. One had openly said the Meri Federation deserved to lose. Another had said that the greatest enemy of the Merian people wasn’t the Xing Empire, but the Merian government. Whenever they were criticized for insufficient patriotism, these commentators claimed their free speech was being threatened because of their dissidence. Of course, in the Xing Empire, such freedom didn’t exist, and criticism of the regime would land individuals in jail for decades. But that was just a minor detail.
The chatter was that this financier was working for the Xing government. Nobody had ever heard of her, and her companies appeared to be shells. Her holdings were supposedly quite large, but nothing was certain.
Lilia would be in charge of finding out who this woman really was.
“Agent Trasker,” said a voice at her door.
She turned and stood.
“Director,” she said.
“May I come in? You look in the middle of something,” said the director, who had to duck to get under the doorway.
“Yes, of course. I was just looking over the reports on Dreier Media. Please, have a seat,” said Lilia, indicating the chair she kept in the corner of her office for guests. She reminded herself to stop sitting with her back to the door.
“Glad to hear it,” said the director, taking the chair. “I was just coming down to talk to you about it.”
Director Givens was a handsome man in his early fifties, with dark skin and graying hair. Lilia found him charming, though she would never say as much. For his part, he seemed kind, but never wasted time on personal details, never askied how someone’s day was going. He was friendly, but all business, all the time. Lilia had been intimidated when she first met him, but he smiled enough that she figured he had a good opinion of her. She had risen through the ranks in the last ten years and was frequently given the most difficult assignments, so she felt reasonably comfortable assuming that he was pleased with her performance.
In ’86, she’d brought in Bargamide out of the cold. He hadn’t gone rogue, it turned out, but he’d wanted to quit and his way of doing that was disappearing. Any other agent would have killed him upon finding him, but Lilia talked him into returning and personally oversaw his processing out. She’d kept an eye on him in the subsequent years, to ensure he never made contact with any of their enemies, but he’d lived a quiet, private life. He even married.
That had been her first big assignment. In ’92, she’d uncovered the Grimrald assassination plot and in ’93 she’d caught Agent Yakx selling secrets to the Ixgees. In ’94, she’d investigated the Wilet Scandal, the financial crime of the century, and brought M. Wilet and his brother to trial.
And now she was forty, and still an agent. She’d never sought a management role and when they’d been offered, she had declined. There was no further room for advancement without becoming an administrator, but she’d wanted to remain a field agent – at least while she had a few years of youth left. That was a career dead-end, but the agency let her do it, because she’d earned the right to do it. They paid her a little better than they normally paid agents and gave her the best office – not that she spent much time there – but that was about it.
“Have you gotten a chance to read through the dossier?” asked the director.
“Not entirely,” Lilia replied, looking back at the folder open on her desk. “I’m almost finished.”
“What do you think?”
“If there’s a connection, I’m sure I can know for sure within a week or two.”
“Do you think there is? Do you think the chatter is accurate?”
“I haven’t made up my mind yet,” said Lilia. “It seems very likely, but that could be the way information is presented. I’ll have to talk to our agents in Wildprong Province, especially those assigned to tail Bengate and Holcormb. It’s clear their office has already made up its mind, but I’ll withhold judgement for now.”
Justis Bengate and Josieh Holcormb were two of the influencers hired by Dreier Media. Bengate was a known antiwar activist who had been involved in extremist politics for many years. He changed his positions on any number of issues depending on the day, but his through-line was opposition to the Merian armed forces and a general antipathy for Merian society. Holcormb was new, and had grown popular only in the last few months. He had gone viral on one of the social platforms for criticizing the war in harsh terms and saying that the Xing Empire was a great civilization, more worthy of victory than the decadent Merian Federation, and that the Xing forces would soon likely crush the weak and enervated Merians. Surprisingly, this message drew a very large consistency within the Federation.
“I’ll want to track down these influencers. If there’s a connection, I’ll want to know just how much they know.”
“Have you considered that some of them will know more than others?” asked the director.
“Of course.”
“How are you going to approach them?”
“Undercover, of course,” said Lilia, shifting in her chair. “These chuds would take one look at a badge with the words ‘Merian Federation Intelligence Services’ on it and bolt.”
“Do you think it wise to make contact at all, even undercover?” asked the director.
“I will make that call after observing them from a distance. If there’s a way to find out what we need without that risk, I’ll take it.”
He nodded. “How soon can you leave?” he asked.
She raised an eyebrow.
“This takes priority. Your other cases have just become less urgent.”
“Even the border smuggling…?”
“We know the smugglers are selling weapons to the Xing. I’ll send Brink and Darios down and have them try to make some arrests. I know you’ve been working on fraud in defense contracting, but that will have to wait. There was always bound to be some fraud with any buildup this size. If we wait, more evidence will come to light and it will be easy to get an indictment.”
Lilia took it all in. “I can leave tonight,” she said.
“Good,” said the director. “I’ll arrange a ride to the spaceport.”
He stood up. “Good to talk to you, as always,” he said.
“And you, sir.”
“I’ll rest easier tonight knowing the case is in your hands.”
“Sir, if I may, what makes this so urgent? None of these guys is really having an impact on the war effort. Sure, they have basement-dwelling fans, but what’s the point of sidelining an investigation into contracting fraud – which materially impacts the war effort – in order to go after some holo trolls?”
The director frowned. “I have a hunch,” he said. “I think there’s more going on. If there isn’t, you have my sincere apologies. But I went to grade school with Bengate. He hasn’t changed much – it appears. If there’s any chance for some more serious skullduggery, I’m sure he’ll be involved. He always wanted to be a spy.”
This was the most Lilia had ever heard the director say about his personal life. Until now, she’d never heard him mention school or childhood or a family or even any friends outside of the office.
“Understood, sir,” she replied. “I’ll see what I can find out about him.”
“Thank you,” said the director. Then he turned on his heel and walked out of her office.
4
Lilia stared out the viewscreen as the spaceport faded into the shrinking surface of the planet. She’d spent a lot of time flying out of spaceports in the past decade. She’d spent more time in spaceports than she had at home.
In all that time, she’d never once regretted her career path. She didn’t like to stay put, and she was so busy that it never occurred to her to be lonely. Every so often, like today, she would be seated near a family in the spaceport and she would watch the growing children and she would watch their parents and she would realize that she was about the same age as their mother. Now, she was the odd one out.
On most worlds in the Federation, few people had children before age thirty. With a century left to live and decades of healthy fertility, twentysomethings rarely felt a need to start families. Even well into her thirties, Lilia often felt a stab of surprise when she saw couples her age shepherding small children. They must have started young, she’d thought.
But now, she was no longer twenty-nine, or even thirty-three, and she was the odd one who never paired up. She wasn’t against marriage or children. If anything, she didn’t think about them much.
Lilia had enough self-awareness to realize there was something unnatural about her. Despite its total lack of social or economic utility in a technologically-advanced, galactic civilization, and despite many efforts over the millennia to stamp it out, the nuclear, two-parent family remained the norm for the majority of human beings. There must be something evolutionary driving it, she knew, something which human beings hadn’t managed to out-evolve yet.
Not that she thought humans needed to. Marriage and children seemed perfectly fine for other people. If the family had lasted this long, there must be something going for it, and Lilia saw no reason to do away with it. She’d never felt any great passion either for or against it. For that matter, she rarely felt any great passion about any great political or cultural questions. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d cast a vote, or even if she’d cast one. Perhaps when she’d first become eligible. But for whom would she have voted?
Yes, there must be something unnatural about her. Friends sometimes told her that she was cold, even though she never felt she was being cold. But she liked this – she liked being set apart. Not different – she had no need to be different – set apart. In Lilia’s mind, there was a clear line between herself and everyone else around her. She was the observer. She needed to be a little cold to withhold judgement. That made her good at what she did. She could watch without coming to conclusions. Agents who drew conclusions too quickly didn’t last long at the agency.
Lilia now watched as the planet grew smaller and smaller, shrinking into the darkness of space. Off to starboard, there was a great light from the star of this system. Soon, it would flash out as the ship spun up to hyperspace. For now, she watched as the planet shrunk until it was the size of a moon, and then of a distant star, and then just before it disappeared, it vanished along with the universe around it.
Lilia took advantage of hyperspace to sleep. Some travelers couldn’t sleep in that limbo state between moving and not moving, but she found she could do little else. Like most agents, Lilia rarely slept enough, and she’d learned the hard way to grab whatever sleep she could when the opportunity presented itself.
When she awoke, a note had been slipped under the door of her cabin. Apparently, someone had tried to pay her a visit and, finding her door locked, had left a courtesy note asking her to call. There was a number which would reach one of the other cabins on the spaceliner. She held it in her hand as she considered punching it into the keypad on her wall.
She decided to wait. This was a long transit – almost twenty-four hours in hyperspace. Whoever it was would have a chance to stop by again. Perhaps he or she – no name had been left on the note, and the handwriting was plain and unexpressive – would call the wall-phone.
Lilia had read about the days of landline telephones on Old Earth. Many centuries after landlines had ceased to exist, something like them had been introduced on spaceliners. These phones only called other berths in the ship, but given the size of most spaceliners, this was necessary. It could take a reasonably fit adult an hour or more to walk end to end in the largest spaceliners, even when taking advantage of all the moving walkways and pneumatic tubes. A few shuttle tunnels existed for quicker in-ship travel, but they were often reserved for the handicapped or elderly.
Lilia set the wall-phone to take a message and went off to her private bathroom. The agency could afford to put her in one of the better cabins, where she could have some privacy. She slipped off her clothes and stepped into the shower, turning the water up as hot as she could stand it. She took a long shower, slowly turning the knob to the right every minute or so, so that the water would grow colder and colder. By the end of her shower, it fell so cold it hurt her skin.
She stepped out of the shower and queued the dryer, which blew warm air across her body to skim away the water droplets. It warmed her up and she felt very good, as she always did after a shower.
When she had dressed and made herself a cup of tea, she checked the flight progress. They were twelve hours from the Wildprong Province. Lilia decided to make herself some food and read whatever the ship’s database had about the province.
Her cabin had a small kitchen, but the food it produced was very bad. She ate a small cup of soup, and bit into the bread, only to spit it out in disgust. The tea was fine. It would suffice until they touched down in Wildprong Spaceport.
A provincial part of the Federation, Wildprong Province consisted of a series of systems, mostly undeveloped, which lay in between the industrial hub of Merian territory and the true frontier. Far from the battle lines, one would think people there wouldn’t worry much about the fighting, but surprisingly Wildprong had become a hotbed of antiwar sentiment. Less than one percent of the citizens of the province served in the military in any capacity, but here pacifism was as strong as it was on the academic worlds and in the student centers.
Lilia wondered what drove someone to that position. The Merian Federation asked very little of its citizens. Some days, it asked practically nothing at all. But it did provide defense against the various autocratic regimes of the near-galaxy and it ensured freedom of navigation.
The Merian Navy kept trade routes open and deterred pirates. In the days before the Federation had naval dominance, piracy had grown so troublesome that one out of every two trading vessels hadn’t reached its destination. Passenger voyages had been infrequent and dangerous, and governmental travel always required heavy police presence. Corporations had taken to hiring private security forces, and the Privateer Wars of the late-early spacefaring age had lasted for several decades.
With the consolidation of the Federation, peace had crept across the near-galaxy. When the Federation Navy grew strong enough, it embarked on a decade-long mission to root out the pirates. War had raged across dozens of worlds, but in the end the Merians won. After that, trade which had been stymied for centuries took off, and the economic growth which followed made the Merian Federation the wealthiest place in the galaxy. Merian citizens grew used to private space travel and the average young person had been in hyperspace dozens of times. Merian business grew so used to freedom of navigation that they almost took for granted the naval presence required to maintain it.
But now, war had come back, and now the Merian Federation was asking its citizens to make a sacrifice. As always, it asked some more than others, and when it levied the first draft in Merian history, the Federation angered a great number of citizens.
But still, Lilia did not understand the antiwar sentiment. Everyone knew the Xing Coalition practiced a form of slavery and did not let its citizens make decisions about their occupations or marriages. Indeed, if anything Bengate and Holcormb celebrated that. It made the Coalition strong, whereas the dissolute, disparate Merian Federation would never muster the same solidarity in its people. Lilia read on, trying to find out as much as she could about the Province and its people.
Read Chapters 5 and 6.