A Learning Experience Read online

  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.
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  “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.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Shadow Warrior, Earth Orbit

  Steve had spent days studying how the aliens waged war, only to discover that there were as many ideas on how to fight as there were spacefaring alien races. Only a tenth of known intelligent races, according to the database, had actually developed spacefaring technology on their own – and only a handful had developed FTL before they were discovered by someone else – but there were still quite a few ideas. The only reassuring note was that the Horde didn't seem to be very competent at space combat, no matter how capable they were on the ground. But with two starships – if there were two starships – coming towards Earth, they would definitely have the numbers advantage.

  “Sound red alert,” he said, as he sat down in the chair he’d fabricated to replace the Subhorde Commander’s throne. “All hands to battle stations.”

  Mongo smirked. “How long have you been waiting to say that?”

  Steve glowered at his back, then linked into the interface, accessing the starship’s tactical systems directly. They weren't designed to actually fight the ship, he’d discovered, but they did handle issues that moved too rapidly for organic brains to comprehend. The two contacts were still racing towards the edge of the solar system, the gravity-waves announcing their arrival speeding out ahead of them. It would be nearly an hour, the interface noted, before the enemy starships arrived at Earth.

  He disengaged, then looked over at Charles. “Bring the assault teams onboard and issue weapons,” he ordered. “And then prepare them, as best as possible, to board and storm another alien ship or two.”

  “Understood,” Charles said. He hesitated, then leaned forward. “Are you going to alert the President?”

  Steve hadn't considered it until Charles brought it up. Should he alert the President? But what could the President do? It would take days to bring the American military to full alert – and besides, it wasn't as if it posed any real threat to the Hordesmen. All they’d have to do was stay in orbit and drop rocks on any centres of resistance. After a few hours of constant bombardment, the remainder of the human race would be begging to surrender. No, there was nothing the President could do. But should he be told anyway?

  It would be a gesture of trust, Steve knew; the President had wanted to be kept in the loop. But it would only worry him when there was nothing he could do ... and yet he’d be outraged if he heard, afterwards, that Earth had been in grave danger and he hadn't known a thing about it. No, he probably should be told. And, if Shadow Warrior was lost, he might be able to swear blind that he’d never heard of the ship or its human crew. Maybe the Horde would accept it.

  Steve made a face. “I’ll talk to him,” he said, finally.

  He keyed into the interface, then opened the link to the communicator they’d given the President. The Secret Service, those few in the know about the starship and the new colony, had been frantic with worry, pointing out that there was no way to prevent the President from being kidnapped from under their very noses. But the President had overruled them, showing more balls than Steve had expected from him. Or maybe he was smart enough to understand what had happened to the Taliban and deduce that Steve could easily do the same to him anyway, even if he didn't carry the communicator.

  It was late night in Washington, he realised, a moment too late. But the President was probably used to being woken in the middle of the night. Besides, Steve’s first Drill Instructor had been confident that being woken late at night was good for the recruits character, the bastard.

  “Mr. Stuart,” the President said. “What can I do for you?”

  “There's one, perhaps two, alien starships heading into the system,” Steve said, quickly. “We may just have run out of time.”

  He heard the President gulp. The man had only had ten days to come to terms with the reality of aliens and a group of former US servicemen in control of an alien starship and a growing lunar settlement. He’d been the most powerful man on Earth, but now Earth was merely a drop in the galactic bucket, a tiny and utterly insignificant world protected only by its isolation from any gravity point. And nemesis was fast approaching.

  “You need to call a very quiet alert,” Steve said. He knew it would be useless, but at least it would convince the President he was doing something useful. “And pray for us.”

  “I will,” the President said. “Good luck.”

  “Thank you,” Steve said.

  He broke the connection and returned his attention to the main display, now reformatted for human eyesight. The two contacts were reducing speed, slightly, as they entered the solar system, apparently trying to avoid the outermost planets and their gravity wells. From what Keith Glass and his theorists had deduced, partly from clues in alien fiction, the alien ships actually bent gravity around them and surfed through space at FTL speeds. A sufficiently large gravity well would break up the gravity waves and force them to return to normal space, if indeed they’d left it. Glass’s reports hadn't been too clear on that topic.

  Perhaps we need to hire more theorists, Steve thought, coldly.

  It burned at him that the Hordesmen, despite being primitive barbarians, had access to the technology of his dreams. But they’d bought, begged or stolen it for themselves. No wonder, Steve considered, they were trapped in cultural stasis. The gulf between them and the Galactics – or humanity – was simply too wide to cross easily. They’d have to change their very mindset to start making advances and that would be tricky, if not impossible. In many ways, they were simply too conservative for their own good.

  “They’re not leaving a ship on the edge of the solar system,” Mongo commented. “You’d think they’d consider it a wise precaution.”

  “They don’t think Earth is dangerous,” Kevin countered. “Remember just how casually they moved into the atmosphere and kidnapped us?”

  Steve nodded, bitterly. Every year, thousands of people in the United States went missing, never to be seen again. Some of them had probably just wanted to vanish, others had been murdered and their bodies hidden beyond easy discovery ... and some of them might just have been abducted by aliens. God knew there were plenty of stories about alien abduction in the United States. Could some of them have been taken by other aliens? He hadn't seen anything resembling the tiny grey aliens of X-Files myth in the database, but that didn't mean they didn't exist. There were thousands
of spacefaring aliens in the galaxy.

  “No, they don’t,” he agreed. He leaned forward. “Do we have the decoy ready to go?”

  Kevin smiled. “It's ready,” he said. “And they won’t be expecting it at all.”

  Steve had to smile. As if to make up for being outnumbered, trawling through the files had revealed the security codes the Hordesmen used to assure one another that they were safe and not under enemy control. The latter codes, it seemed, were rarely used, as the Hordesmen preferred death to what they saw as dishonour. But, with some ingenuity, Shadow Warrior ought to be able to convince the newcomers that everything was fine until it was too late.