The Right of the Line Read online

  They were infected, Stephen thought. He shivered, inwardly. The virus has reached Earth.

  “Our preliminary examinations of the dead bodies revealed the presence of the virus,” Middlebrow said, echoing Stephen’s thoughts. “Right now, we are attempting to trace them back to their point of infection and ...”

  “This isn’t good enough,” the Home Secretary snapped. “I thought we had defences in place to stop this ... this kind of infection!”

  “We took all rational precautions,” Middlebrow said. “However, sir, the plain truth is that there are simply too many ways to smuggle something down to Earth that bypass most of our security checks. We have tightened things up as much as possible, but gaps remain. We may discover, for example, that a lone starship crewman was infected and ... induced ... to carry the virus through security. We’ll have to backtrack the infected to figure it out.”

  “Fucking careless,” the Home Secretary growled. “Prime Minister, I insist on an official inquiry ...”

  “After we have handled the current crisis, we will have time to reassess our safety precautions,” the Prime Minister said. “Chief Constable, what are the odds of tracking down any surviving infected?”

  Middlebrow winced. “Poor,” he said. “We believed our testing regime was sufficient, but clearly we were wrong. The combination of blood tests and biological warfare sniffers needs to be reassessed. If they pass through a checkpoint, we’ll catch them; if they don’t ... they may be able to hide out for quite some time. There are large swathes of the country with very limited security.”

  “So they could be ... breeding ... somewhere in Wales or Scotland or wherever,” the Home Secretary said. “Is there no way we can find them?”

  “We have deployed an extensive array of sensors,” Middlebrow said. “And we have ordered civilians to return home and stay there. Anyone still moving at the end of the cut-off period will draw attention. The police force will investigate any signs of trouble.”

  “But we can’t keep people inside forever,” the Foreign Secretary said quietly. “They’ll start to starve.”

  “And the economy will tumble,” the Prime Minister added. “We can’t keep the country in a state of emergency indefinitely.”

  “This is going to be worse than the Troubles,” the Home Secretary predicted. “Anyone could be an enemy.”

  Stephen nodded in agreement. Anyone could be infected. Anyone ... or anything. The police checkpoints were looking for humans, not dogs or cats or even mice. The xenospecialists had warned that the virus might be able to infect dogs and cats, although they had suggested that the animals couldn’t host enough of the virus to make it a viable threat. Stephen hoped that was true, but it struck him as a classic example of wishful thinking. The virus could hardly be blind to the prospect of using smaller animals to spread itself. The only upside, as far as anyone could tell, was that insects couldn’t become hosts. That would have made the virus unstoppable.

  “And where did they get the weapons?” The Home Secretary glared around the room. “And the bombs?”

  “Our preliminary assessment suggests that some of the weapons were legal, their owners presumably infected and turned against us.” There was a hint of irritation in Middlebrow’s voice. “And the bombs were all jury-rigged devices, the explosives put together from freely-available compounds. I have no doubt we’ll eventually discover that shopkeepers and suppliers were infected and, again, forced to work against us.”

  “And the virus can turn our people against us so easily?” The Home Secretary sounded sceptical. “There’s no way to resist?”

  The Prime Minister glanced at the First Space Lord, who nodded. “There is considerable evidence, Home Secretary, that the virus is capable of both accessing and using the memories of its host. The host, to all intents and purposes, no longer exists. They are not held at gunpoint, they are not reconditioned ... they are no longer who or what they were. They do not choose to betray us. They are not us any longer.”

  “Crap,” the Home Secretary said. “There’s nothing we can do about it?”

  “We have taken precautions to prevent infection,” the First Space Lord said, quietly. “But once the virus gets firmly established ...”

  It becomes impossible to stop, Stephen thought. He knew how infiltrations worked. The virus, he suspected, understood it intimately. Infiltrations and infections followed the same basic idea. The first thing an infection did was weaken the host’s ability to fight, either by attacking the immune system or trying to gain control of the security services. If we don’t know that something is wrong, how can we stop it?

  “They’re not good enough,” the Home Secretary growled.

  “There is little else we can do,” the Chief Constable said. “We can expand the blood testing program - we have no choice, now we know the virus is loose on Earth. We can limit public transport in hopes of slowing any major outbreak ...”

  And that won’t be easy, Stephen thought. We shouldn’t be thinking of this as a viral outbreak. We should be treating this as a biological attack. The virus is far more intelligent than we realised.

  He shivered. The Age of Unrest had seen a handful of biological attacks, all carried out by terrorists who had very little to lose. They’d taken advantage of advances in genetic bioengineering technology to attack their enemies ... thankfully, the science hadn’t been advanced enough for the engineered viruses to spread before they were detected and countered. A little more good luck for the attackers - and bad luck for the entire human race - and the entire planet might have been turned into a graveyard. And now ... the virus was intelligent, combining a deep understanding of its own nature with a complete disregard for the lives of its hosts. It was easy to imagine it evading checkpoints and spreading itself over the entire planet.

  “I’m sure the police have the matter well in hand,” the Secretary of Defence said. “The question now is why ... why now? Why launch the attacks now?”

  “The attacks started shortly after the Battle of Falkirk,” the First Space Lord said. “That cannot be a coincidence.”

  “And that means they have access to the flicker network,” the Home Secretary said. “Or even the media.”

  And if the media is infected, Stephen mused, could we tell the difference?

  “We told the media not to report on the battle,” the Prime Minister said.

  “But rumours would have spread anyway,” the Home Secretary countered. “And ...”

  He took a breath. “How do we know that we were told the truth?”

  The Prime Minister frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “The virus can pose as a host, right?” The Home Secretary looked from face to face. “It wears a host’s face, speaks with a host’s voice ... there’s no way to tell if someone has been infected without a blood test. Prime Minister ... how do we know that the entire MNF hasn’t been infected?”

  “The MNF understood the dangers,” the First Space Lord said, quietly. “The virus did attempt to board a handful of ships, but ... none of them were infected. Their crews took prompt action to remove the boarding parties before it was too late.”

  “And if they failed?”

  “There were contingency plans,” the First Space Lord said. “It would be difficult to subvert them.”

  “For someone from the outside, yes.” The Home Secretary didn’t sound convinced. “But what about someone on the inside? A single corrupt clerk in an office can do more damage - and hide it - than an entire team of burglars!”

  “They would have to get inside first,” the First Space Lord reminded him. “And, like I said, the MNF understood the dangers. They took precautions.”

  Stephen kept his face impassive. It was true that Admiral Weisskopf would have taken precautions, but it was also true that there was no way to know if the precautions had been completely successful. The Home Secretary was right, damn him. Sneaking onto a planet was far easier than boarding a starship - and Admiral Weisskopf had ordered regu
lar blood tests - but there was no way to be entirely certain. They lived in an era when almost anything could be faked. There were talking heads on the nightly news that were almost certainly nothing more than computer-generated composites. Why couldn’t the virus have taken control of the flicker network and sent them misleading reports?

  They managed to take control of Dezhnev and send her against us, he thought. Why couldn't they do the same with an American battleship or two?

  He shook his head. Dezhnev and her crew hadn’t known the dangers. They’d thought they were facing a conventional opponent ... his lips twitched in grim amusement. The crew might not have realised they were facing an opponent at all. They’d had strict orders not to do anything that might be construed as hostile, anything that might spark off a third interstellar war with a mysterious alien race ... they had very clear orders not to open fire unless there was a clear and present danger. It would be easy for the virus to take control of Dezhnev before the crew realised it was under attack. Stephen could imagine a dozen ways to do it.

  It may not matter, he reminded himself. The virus punched us right out of Falkirk. And now, it’s on Earth.

  Stephen allowed none of his feelings to show as he surveyed the room. The First Space Lord looked calm and composed - he understood the realities of the situation - but the politicians seemed badly worried. They looked as if they were on the verge of panic. Stephen knew how hard it would be for the virus to work its way into the very heart of government or take control of the orbital defence systems, but the politicians didn’t. They feared the worst. And they were all old enough to remember the Bombardment.

  The Prime Minister’s voice echoed in the silence. “There is no way we can talk to the virus,” he said. “We have no choice but to press on.”

  “There has to be some way to make ourselves understood,” the Foreign Secretary objected.

  “The virus doesn’t seem to think like us,” the First Space Lord said. “And even if it did ... why should it talk to us? It doesn’t want to come to terms, it doesn’t want surrender ... it doesn’t even want submission. We are locked in a war for survival, a war that has just come home. If we lose, we lose everything.”

  And that’s the nub, Stephen thought. There had been no prospect of complete extermination during the First and Second World Wars. Humanity as a whole would not be wiped out by the conflict. But any war with an alien power put the survival of humanity itself at risk. The Tadpoles had killed millions of people during the Bombardment. God alone knew how many people would have died if they’d won the war. The virus won’t just defeat us, if it wins the war. It will destroy us.

  “So we keep fighting,” the Prime Minister said. “And we tighten our precautions, once again.”

  “And then the virus will get around them, once again,” the Home Secretary said. “Whatever we do, it will find a way to circumvent. We need to find a way to take the war into enemy space and finish it.”

  “The virus is a unique threat,” the First Space Lord said. “And one that requires us to work closely with other nations to defeat. But it is not all-powerful. It has its limits. It can be beaten. We have not lost this war.”

  No, Stephen thought. He remembered the fleet of warships gathering in Alien-One. But it may be too powerful for us to handle.

  “We lost a battle,” the Prime Minister agreed. “But we have not lost the war.”

  “And our allies are coming,” the Foreign Secretary said. “We are not alone.”

  “No,” the Prime Minister said. “And that makes all the difference.”

  Chapter Two

  “I trust you found the meeting to be interesting,” the First Space Lord said. “It should have been an educational experience.”

  Stephen took a moment to organise his thoughts. The First Space Lord had caught his attention as soon as the COBRA meeting had come to an end, summoning him to the Admiralty once the roads were clear. Stephen had known better than to argue, even when his brother had demanded his attention. There was little to be gained by picking a fight with his uniformed superior. Besides, he could catch up with his brother later. The latest update from the BBC had made it clear that all non-essential flights to orbit had been suspended as long as the state of emergency remained in effect.

  “It was ... interesting,” he said, finally. “I ... permission to speak freely?”

  “Granted,” the First Space Lord said.

  “I thought the politicians had to have military experience,” Stephen said. “Or at least some kind of experience.”

  “The Secretary of Defence does have to have military experience,” the First Space Lord said, calmly. “Everyone else ... they don’t have to have any relevant experience in the field to serve as a cabinet minister. They have staff to handle the practical details.”

  He looked as if he wanted to say something more, but stopped himself. Stephen understood, more than he cared to admit. The cabinet ministers were selected for political reasons, not because they were the best candidates for the job. They didn’t always know how their departments worked, let alone what the people who were nominally under their command actually did. They tended to get blindsided by procedures and polices laid down by their predecessors they didn’t realise hadn’t been changed simply because there’d been a change in government. It wasn’t easy for them to change anything, particularly when the civil service was opposed to change. The governing system made sure of it.

  “They understand that the war needs to be fought,” the First Space Lord said, briskly. “Right now, Captain, that is all that matters.”

  “Yes, sir,” Stephen said.

  “And the situation has become dire,” the First Space Lord added. He pointed to a seat. “We have to decide how to proceed.”

  He took his seat behind the desk and keyed a switch. A holographic star chart appeared above his desk, the handful of alien-occupied systems glowing red against the green and blue of humanity’s stars. Stephen felt his heart sink as he realised just how deeply the virus had sliced into the human sphere. Twelve colony worlds now lay within its grasp, just waiting to be infected. The colonists knew what to expect, but ... Stephen doubted they could save themselves. Only a handful had any real defences, none of which were capable of standing off a major fleet. Their only hope was the virus deciding not to mop up the colonies while Earth and the major worlds were still untouched.

  And it doesn’t have to detach entire battle squadrons to bring most of those worlds to heel, Stephen thought. A lone destroyer would be more than sufficient to smash the defences and infect the population.

  “We were able to re-establish contact with the MNF when it withdrew to UAS-4823,” the First Space Lord said. “The virus was apparently able to take out the flicker station in Honshu, breaking our lines of communication. Admiral Weisskopf - or the person we think is Admiral Weisskopf - has sent a full report.”

  His lips twisted. Stephen understood. The odds of the virus being able to capture USS Texas and her crew intact were very low - it was far more likely that the ship would be destroyed in combat - but there was no way to be sure. The Home Secretary had had a point, when he’d raised concerns about just who was on the far end of the line. Maybe the man was being paranoid or ... maybe he was right to be concerned. If the virus had managed to infect Admiral Weisskopf ... Stephen shuddered. It didn’t bear thinking about.

  “We lost a third of the MNF outright,” the First Space Lord said. “Another third is heavily damaged. Admiral Weisskopf made it clear that a number of ships were under tow. The remainder are low on ammunition. They will not be able to make a stand if the virus gives chase.”

  “And it probably absorbed navigational data from Dezhnev and her crew,” Stephen said. “It won’t have to waste time surveying the tramlines to pick out the route to Earth.”

  “Probably,” the First Space Lord said. “We would certainly have drawn navigational data from a captured ship, if we had that level of access.”

  We wouldn’t
have risked sending her into battle, Stephen thought. A captured starship - a captured alien starship - was a prize beyond price. The Royal Navy was prepared to pay millions in prize money to the crew who brought home an intact alien ship, knowing that the value of the intelligence bonanza would be in the billions. It would take years, perhaps, to finish stripping the hull of valuable information. Why did the virus risk us recapturing or destroying Dezhnev?

  He shook his head, dismissively. It wouldn’t have taken long for the captured ship’s datanodes to be downloaded into an alien datacore, not if the virus had access to the ship’s command codes. There was no reason to assume the virus hadn’t copied everything from Dezhnev before using her as a modified Trojan Horse. Anything else ... he cursed the security nightmare under his breath. Anything else was just whistling in the dark. The virus owned and operated starships, for God’s sake! It might be alien, but it couldn’t be that alien.