* * *
Birnbaum looked up and saw Michael Washington looking down at him.
“How did you get in here?” Birnbaum asked, after he had taken a couple of minutes to remember who he was (Albert Birnbaum), where he was (Washington Sacred Heart Catholic Hospital), what time it was (2:47 a.m.) and why he was there (he’d been shot).
Washington pointed with a gloved hand to the badge on his chest, and Birnbaum realized Washington was in a police uniform. “That’s not real,” Birnbaum protested.
“Actually it is,” Washington said. “I usually work plain clothes, but this was useful for the moment.”
“I thought you were some sort of facilitator,” Birnbaum said. “You have clients.”
“I am and I do,” Washington said. “Some cops tend bar on the side. This is what I do.”
“You’re joking,” Birnbaum said.
“That’s entirely possible,” Washington said.
“Why are you here now?” Birnbaum asked.
“Because we have unfinished business,” Washington said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Birnbaum said. “You asked me to pimp a pro–Colonial Union story. I did that.”
“And you did a fine job with it,” Washington said. “Although at the end things were beginning to flag. You had fewer people at your rally than you had anticipated.”
“We had a hundred thousand,” Birnbaum said, weakly.
“No,” Washington said. “But I appreciate you making the effort there.”
Birnbaum’s mind began to wander, but he focused on Washington again. “So what unfinished business do we have?” he asked.
“You dying,” Washington said. “You were supposed to have been assassinated at the rally, but our marksman didn’t make the shot. He blamed it on a gust of wind between him and the target. So it fell to me.”
Birnbaum was confused. “Why do you want me dead? I did what you asked.”
“And again, you did a fine job,” Washington said. “But now the discussion needs to be brought to another level. Making you a martyr to the cause will do that. Nothing like a public assassination to embed the topic into the national consciousness.”
“I don’t understand,” Birnbaum said, increasingly confused.
“I know,” Washington said. “But you never understood, Mr. Birnbaum. You didn’t want to understand all that much, I think. You never even really cared who I worked for. All you were interested in was what I was dangling in front of you. You never took your eyes off that.”
“Who do you work for?” Birnbaum croaked.
“I work for the Colonial Union, of course,” Washington said. “They needed some way to change the conversation. Or, alternately, I work for Russians and the Brazilians, who are upset that the United States is taking the lead in the international discussions about the Colonial Union and wanted to disrupt its momentum. No, I work for the political party not in the White House, who was looking to change the election calculus. Actually, all of those were lies: I work for a cabal who wants to form a world government.”
Birnbaum bulged his eyes at him, disbelieving.
“The time to have demanded an answer was before you took the job, Mr. Birnbaum,” Washington said. “Now you’ll never know.” He held up a syringe. “You woke up because I injected you with this. It’s shutting down your nervous system as we speak. It’s intentionally obvious. We want it to be clear you were assassinated. There are enough clues planted in various places for a merry chase. You’ll be even more famous now. And with that fame will come influence. Not that you will be able to use it, of course. But others will, and that will be enough. Fame, power and an audience, Mr. Birnbaum. It’s what you were promised. It’s what you were given.”
Birnbaum said nothing to this; he’d died midmonologue. Washington smiled, planted the syringe in Birnbaum’s bed and walked out of the room.
* * *
“They have the assassin on video,” Jason from Canoga Park said, to Louisa Smart, who had taken over the show, temporarily, for the memorial broadcast. “They have him on video injecting him and talking to him before he died. That was when it happened. When he revealed the plot of the world government.”
“We can’t know that,” Smart said, and for the millionth time wondered how Birnbaum managed to talk to his listeners without wanting to crawl down the stream to strangle them. “The video is low resolution and has no audio. We’ll never know what they had to say to each other.”
“What else could it be?” Jason said. “Who else could have managed it?”
“It’s a compelling point, Jason,” Smart said, preparing to switch over to the next caller and whatever their cockamamie theory would be.
“I’m going to miss Al,” Jason said, before she could unplug him. “He called himself the Voice in the Wilderness. But if he was, we were all in the wilderness with him. Who will be that voice now? Who will call to us? And what will they say?”
Smart had no good answer to that. She just went to the next caller instead.
EPISODE FIVE
Tales from the Clarke
“So, Captain Coloma,” Department of State Deputy Undersecretary Jamie Maciejewski said. “It’s not every starship captain who intentionally maneuvers her ship into the path of a speeding missile.”
Captain Sophia Coloma set her jaw and tried very hard not to crack her own molars while doing so. There were a number of ways she expected this final inquiry into her actions in the Danavar system to go. This being the opening statement was not one of them.
In Coloma’s head a full list of responses, most not in the least appropriate for the furtherance of her career, scrolled past. After several seconds, she found one she could use. “You have my full report on the matter, sir,” she said.
“Yes, of course,” Maciejewski said, and then indicated with a hand State Department Fleet Commander Lance Brode and CDF liaison Elizabeth Egan, who with Maciejewski constituted the final inquiry panel. “We have your full report. We also have the reports of your XO, Commander Balla, of Ambassador Abumwe, and of Harry Wilson, the Colonial Defense Forces adjunct on the Clarke at the time of the incident.”
“We also have the report of Shipmaster Gollock,” Brode said. “Outlining the damage the Clarke took from the missile. I’ll have you know she was quite impressed with you. She tells me that the fact that you managed to get the Clarke back to Phoenix Station at all is a minor miracle; by all rights the ship should have cracked in half from material stresses during the ship’s acceleration to skip distance.”
“She also says that the damage to the Clarke is extensive enough that repairs will take longer to make than it would take for us to just build an entire new Robertson-class diplomatic ship,” Maciejewski said. “It would possibly be more expensive to boot.”
“And then there is the matter of the lives you put at risk,” Egan said. “The lives of your crew. The lives of the diplomatic mission to the Utche. More than three hundred people, all told.”
“I minimized the risk as much as possible,” Coloma said. In the roughly thirty seconds I had to make a plan, she thought but did not say.
“Yes,” Egan said. “I read your report. And there were no deaths from your actions. There were, however, casualties, several serious and life-threatening.”
What do you want from me? Coloma felt like barking at the inquiry panel. The Clarke wasn’t supposed to have been in the Danavar system to begin with; the diplomatic team on it was chosen at the last minute to replace a diplomatic mission to the Utche that had gone missing and was presumed dead. When the Clarke arrived they discovered traps had been set for the Utche, using stolen Colonial Union missiles that would make it look as if the humans had attacked their alien counterparts. Harry Wilson—Coloma had to keep in check some choice opinions just thinking the name—took out all but one of the missiles by using the Clarke’s shuttle as a decoy, destroying the shuttle and nearly killing himself in the process. Then the Utche arrived and Coloma had no
choice other than to draw the final missile to the Clarke, rather than have it home in on the Utche ship, strike it and start a war the Colonial Union couldn’t afford at the moment.
What do you want from me? Coloma asked again in her mind. She wouldn’t ask the question; she couldn’t afford to give the inquiry panel that sort of opening. She had no doubt they would tell her, and that it would be something other than what she had done.
So instead she said, “Yes, there were casualties.”
“They might have been avoided,” Egan said.
“Yes,” Coloma said. “I could have avoided them entirely by allowing the missile—a Colonial Union Melierax Series Seven—to hit the Utche ship, which would have been unprepared and unready for the attack. That strike would have likely crippled the ship, if it did not destroy it outright, and would have caused substantial casualties, including potentially scores of deaths. That seemed the less advisable course of action.”
“No one disputes your actions spared the Utche ship considerable damage, and the Colonial Union an uncomfortable diplomatic incident,” Maciejewski said.
“But there still is the matter of the ship,” Brode said.
“I’m well aware of the matter of the Clarke,” Coloma said. “It’s my ship.”
“Not anymore,” Brode said.
“Pardon?” Coloma said. She dug her fingernails into her palms to keep herself from leaping across the room to grab Brode by the collar.
“You’ve been relieved of your command of the Clarke,” Brode said. “The determination has been made to scrap the ship. Command has been transferred to the port crew that will disassemble it. This is all standard practice for scrapped ships, Captain. It’s not a reflection on your service.”
“Yes, sir,” Coloma said, and doubted that. “What is my next command? And what is the disposition of my staff and crew?”
“In part, that’s what this inquiry is about, Captain Coloma,” Egan said, and glanced over at Brode, coolly. “It’s regrettable that you had to learn about the disposition of your ship in this way, in this forum. But now that you do know, you should know what we’re going to decide is not what we think about what you did, but where we think you should go next. Do you understand the difference here?”
“With apologies, ma’am, I’m not entirely sure I do,” Coloma said. Her entire body was coated in a cold sweat that accompanied the realization that she was now a captain without a ship, which meant in a very real sense she was no longer a captain at all. Her body wanted to shiver, to shake off the clamminess she felt. She didn’t dare.
“Then understand that the best thing you can do now is to help us understand your thinking at every step in your actions,” Egan said. “We have your report. We know what you did. We want a better idea of the why.”
“You know the why,” Coloma said before she could stop, and almost immediately regretted it. “I did it to stop a war.”
“We all agree you stopped a war,” Maciejewski said. “We have to decide whether how you did it justifies giving you another command.”
“I understand,” Coloma said. She would not admit any defeat into her voice.
“Very good,” Maciejewski said. “Then let’s begin at the decision to let the missile hit your ship. Let’s take it second by second, shall we.”
* * *
The Clarke, like other large ships, did not dock with Phoenix Station directly. It was positioned a small distance away, in the section of station devoted to repair. Coloma stood at the edge of the repair transport bay, watching crews load into the work shuttles that would take them to the Clarke, to strip the ship of anything and everything valuable or salvageable before cutting down the hull itself into manageable plates to be recycled into something else entirely—another ship, structural elements for a space station, weapons or perhaps foil to wrap leftovers in. Coloma smiled wryly at the idea of a leftover bit of steak being wrapped in the skin of the Clarke, and then she stopped smiling.
She had to admit that in the last couple of weeks she’d gotten very good at making herself depressed.
In her peripheral vision, Coloma saw someone walking up to her. She knew without turning that it was Neva Balla, her executive officer. Balla had a hitch in her gait, an artifact, so Balla claimed, of an equestrian injury in her youth. The practical result of it was that there was no doubt of her identity when she came up on you. Balla could be wearing a bag on her head and Coloma would know it was her.
“Having one last look at the Clarke?” Balla asked Coloma as she walked up.
“No,” Coloma said; Balla looked at her quizzically. “She’s no longer the Clarke. When they decommissioned her, they took her name. Now she’s just CUDS-RC-1181. For whatever time it takes to render her down to parts, anyway.”
“What happens to the name?” Balla asked.
“They put it back into the rotation,” Coloma said. “Some other ship will have it eventually. That is, if they don’t decide to retire it for being too ignominious.”
Balla nodded, but then motioned to the ship. “Clarke or not, she was still your ship.”
“Yes,” Coloma said. “Yes, she was.”
The two stood there silently for a moment, watching the shuttles angle toward what used to be their ship.
“So what did you find out?” Coloma asked Balla after a moment.
“We’re still on hold,” Balla said. “All of us. You, me, the senior staff of the Clarke. Some of the crew have been reassigned to fill holes in other ship rosters, but almost no officers and none of those above the rank of lieutenant junior grade.”
Coloma nodded. The reassignment of her crew would normally come through her, but technically speaking they were no longer her crew and she no longer their captain. Balla had friends in the Department of State’s higher reaches, or more accurately, she had friends who were assistants and aides to the department’s higher reaches. It worked out the same, informationwise. “Do we have any idea why no one important’s been reassigned?”
“They’re still doing their investigation of the Danavar incident,” Balla said.
“Yes, but in our crew that only involves you and me and Marcos Basquez,” Coloma said, naming the Clarke’s chief engineer. “And Marcos isn’t being investigated like the two of us are.”
“It’s still easier to have us around,” Balla said. “But there’s another wrinkle to it as well.”
“What’s that?” Coloma asked.
“The Clarke’s diplomatic team hasn’t been formally reassigned, either,” Balla said. “Some of them have been added on to existing missions or negotiations in a temporary capacity, but none of them has been made permanent.”
“Who did you hear this from?” Coloma asked.
“Hart Schmidt,” Balla said. “He and Ambassador Abumwe were attached to the Bula negotiations last week.”
Coloma winced at this. The Bula negotiations had gone poorly, in part because the Colonial Defense Forces had established a clandestine base on an underdeveloped Bula colony world and had gotten caught red-handed trying to evacuate it; that was the rumor, in any event. Abumwe and Schmidt having anything to do with that would not look good for them.
“So we’re all in limbo,” Coloma said.
“It looks like,” Balla said. “At least you’re not being singled out, ma’am.”
Coloma laughed at this. “Not singled out, but being punished, that’s for sure.”
“I don’t know why we would be punished,” Balla said. “We were dropped into a diplomatic process at the last minute, discovered a trap, and kept the trap from snapping shut. All without a single death. And the negotiations with the Utche were successfully completed on top of that. They give people medals for less.”
Coloma motioned to what used to be the Clarke. “Maybe they were just very attached to the ship.”
Balla smiled. “It seems unlikely,” she said.
“Why not?” Coloma said. “I was.”
“You did the right thing, Captain,” Balla sai
d, becoming serious. “I said so to the investigators. So did Ambassador Abumwe and Lieutenant Wilson. If they don’t see that, to hell with them.”
“Thank you, Neva,” Coloma said. “It’s good of you to say that. Remember it when they assign us to a tow barge.”
“There are worse assignments,” Balla said.
Coloma was about to respond when her PDA pinged. She swiped to her message queue and read the mail there. Then she shut down the screen, put the PDA away and returned her gaze to what used to be the Clarke.
Balla watched her captain for a moment. “You’re killing me over here,” she finally said.
“Remember when you said that there are worse assignments than a tow barge?” Coloma said, to her XO.
“Considering it’s the second to last thing I said, yes,” Balla said. “Why?”
“Because we may have just gotten one of those assignments,” Coloma said.
* * *
“The ship was the Porchester,” Colonel Abel Rigney said. “At least for its first thirty years of service, when it was a Hampshire-class corvette in the CDF. Then it was transferred to the Department of State and renamed the Ballantine, after an old secretary of the department. That was another twenty years of service as a courier and supply ship. It was decommissioned last year.”
Coloma stood on the bridge with Rigney and Balla and looked over the quiet banks of monitors. The atmosphere on the ship was thin and cold, befitting a ship that no longer had a crew or a purpose. “Any immediate reason for the decommissioning?” she asked.
“Other than age? No,” Rigney said. “She ran fine. Runs fine, as you’ll discover when you put her through her paces. She’s just old. There are a lot of klicks on this ship, and eventually being on her began to look like a hardship assignment.”
“Hmmm,” Coloma said.
“But it’s all a matter of perspective, isn’t it,” Rigney said, quickly, moving past the implied but unintentional insult he’d just offered Coloma. “If you’re new to space travel, and don’t have your own fleet of ships, then what you and I see as old and past its prime will look shiny and new. The folks from Earth who we are proposing to sell this ship to are going to look at this baby as their first step into the wider universe. It’s right about their speed.”