“Everything I said was true, Norja. And you know it.”
“The truthfulness of your impassioned speech is irrelevant,” Norja said. “You’ve scared everyone out of their mind.”
“Good,” said Lem. “Maybe they’ll take it up a notch. If we’re complacent, we’re sunk.”
“You say that like we’re plateauing, Lem, when we have seen nothing but steady growth. Our last quarter showed our highest gains yet.”
“That doesn’t matter, Norja. Who cares what our growth is?”
“I’ll pretend the CEO of this company didn’t just say that,” Norja said.
“We’re successful because of demand,” Lem said. “We can make a ham sandwich, call it a gun, and the IF will buy it. Just look at all the trash they’re buying from Gungsu, who also happens to be doing very well, I might add. Gungsu is swimming in cash. But financial success isn’t going to win us this war. We can’t focus solely on the bottom line, Norja.”
“I’m glad to hear you say ‘solely.’ For a moment I thought you had erased its importance completely.”
“We have to remain solvent obviously,” Lem said. “We have to generate a profit. But that is a tertiary concern.”
“And what are our first two concerns?”
“Killing Formics and keeping soldiers alive.”
“Not running Gungsu out of business?” Norja asked.
Lem smiled. “That would be a nice bonus.”
Norja sat back and frowned. “You were a little hard on Serge. The man’s filling in, you know. He’s doing the best he can.”
“Is that compassion I hear in your voice, Norja? That’s one of the signs of the apocalypse. Has the moon turned to blood already? You would think I would have noticed that, us being on the moon and all.”
“Humiliating an executive is bad management, Lem. It doesn’t inspire devotion. It prompts departure.”
Lem sighed and reclined in his chair. “I know.”
“You’re going to have more people bailing on us if you’re not careful. We can’t afford that. The last thing we need is your father sucking away more of our MVPs. If we lose another executive, the press will make a story of it. They’ll call it an exodus, a talent drain, the end of Juke Limited’s heyday. And bad press—if spread around enough—can actually cause the kind of downfall they’re reporting. Stocks sink. Client confidence drops. Corporate partners get gun-shy. All because the media bastards want to run a juicy story. And oh what a story it would be. The plebeians love to see the mighty stumble.”
“I know,” Lem said again.
“You crucified the guy, Lem. You know better than that. He’s poison now. No one is going to want to work with him because they think he’ll taint them. Which is only going to make it harder for him to do his job. He’ll be excluded from meetings, dropped from e-mails, skipped on intel. You just dug his grave.”
“You’re rubbing salt in the wound at this point, Norja.”
“The wounded one is Serge, Lem. This isn’t how companies are run. That management style expired about a hundred years ago. That’s how enemies are made.”
“I’m not normally like this,” Lem said. “I’m normally quite pleasant.”
“Normally,” agreed Norja.
“I’ll need to give Serge a success,” Lem said. “Then praise him profusely in the next meeting to restore him to his previous status.”
“Without appearing weak,” Norja said. “We need a strong CEO. Or at least the perception of one.”
“A cutting insult disguised as good counsel. Glad to see that streak of compassion has passed and you’re back to your old self, Norja.”
Norja Ramdakan shrugged. “My soul is only visible in brief spurts, weak as is it.”
“Showering Serge with praise will come off as a pathetic and obvious apology,” said Lem. “Why don’t you praise him in the next meeting, and then I’ll simply agree with you?”
Ramdakan shook his head. “Oh no, you stepped in your own cow manure. No one can clean your boots but you.”
“That can’t be a real idiom.”
Norja grunted and got to his feet. On Earth, a man of his girth would have struggled to do so. But here beneath the surface of Luna, with a fraction of Earth’s gravity, Ramdakan was up with little effort. “Serge isn’t chaff, Lem. He’s extremely bright. You don’t become the assistant director of operations if you’re not ambitious, intelligent, and willing to abandon every other pursuit in your life. The man puts in eighty hours a week easy. You make him nervous.”
“If my father wouldn’t keep pilfering my executives and engineers, this wouldn’t be a problem.”
“Can you blame your father?” Norja asked. “He’s the Hegemon. He needs the best people he can find, people he can trust. He built this company, so he knows how our people think, how they work with others, how they strategize. He doesn’t have time to try out new blood and see if they can deliver. He needs people to hit the ground running, leading big initiatives competently from day one. If I were in his shoes, I’d steal from us too.”
“You as the Hegemon,” said Lem, smiling. “Now there’s a thought. You would lead us all to a hedonistic ruin.”
Norja smirked. “At least we would all die enjoying ourselves.”
“Just don’t leave, Norja. Whatever my father offers you, I’ll meet it.”
Norja laughed. “There was a time when you wanted to strangle me or use me like a puppet to get back at your father, if I recall. And not in the too distant past.”
Lem shrugged. “You’ve grown on me.”
“Your father can’t hire me. I’ve got too many skeletons in my closet, most of them placed there by him. I’m what you might call a political liability.”
Lem knew that Norja had been with Father from the beginning, back when the company was a single mining ship at the start of the space-mining boom. He also knew that Norja had done a lot of Father’s dirty work over the years. Lem could never get rid of him for that reason alone. The man would be a danger not only to Lem and Father personally, but to the company as well.
They parted, and Lem headed back toward his office, weaving his way through the company’s tunnel system. Factories, processing plants, test facilities, labs. An underground web so complex and far-reaching, that without his wrist pad to guide him, Lem could quickly get lost.
He had known about most of the company’s initiatives before becoming CEO. But there were a few projects and a few tunnels that his father had kept secret even from Lem. Classified military hardware, hush-hush research and development, whole departments of people on the company payroll that Lem hadn’t even known existed.
The discovery wasn’t much of a surprise, though. Lem had always assumed that Father would keep a few projects close to his chest and out of the public eye.
But rather than put Lem’s mind at ease, rather than give him a calm reassurance that he now knew everything the company was engaged in, learning about the secret initiatives had only left Lem with questions. Had Father told him everything? Had he pulled back all the curtains? Or had he only shown Lem just enough to make Lem think he had shown him everything? That seemed more like Father’s style. And if so, it meant that Father had kept a few pet projects for himself and taken them with him to the Hegemony, funding them with the vast resources that were now at his disposal thanks to the Hegemony’s heavy taxation of Earth.
And even if Father hadn’t taken pet projects with him, he was certainly up to something. He had siphoned off some of Lem’s brightest engineers.
What are you working on, Father? What are you building?
Lem had tried answering those questions himself recently, but his searches had proven fruitless. Whatever his father was doing at the Hegemony was deeply shrouded in secrecy.
Which gave him an idea.
He spun on his heels, took a different route, and made his way to Serge’s office. He knocked once and entered before waiting to be invited inside. Serge was standing at his desk, with a dozen windows
of data hovering in front of him.
“Mr. Jukes?”
Lem held up a hand. “I owe you an apology. I was a bit of an ass earlier.”
Serge shook his head. “No, no. All my fault, sir. I shouldn’t have brought such an issue to the executive team. I should have handled it. I assure you it won’t happen again.”
Lem waved the apology aside. “First off, don’t call me ‘sir.’ I’m younger than you. Call me Lem. Second, let’s put the previous meeting behind us and move on. In fact, I want you to do something for me.”
“Okay.”
“Something secret. Only between the two of us.”
“Okay.”
“I want you to find out what my father is doing with all the scientists and engineers he’s hired.”
Serge paused. “You want me to spy on the Hegemon of Earth?”
Lem shook his head. “No, no. I want information, Serge, legally acquired. The Hegemony is taking some of the brightest minds in the world, minds that were previously working for me. That hurts our bottom line. That makes us vulnerable. I want to know why it’s happening. The world has given my father a very long leash, and my father is not one to let an opportunity pass him by. I want to know what he’s doing with that leash.”
“You think his endeavors exceed his authority?” asked Serge.
Lem shook his head again. “No. My father may be secretive, but he’s not stupid. Whatever he’s doing is within the bounds of his authority as Hegemon. He wouldn’t court impeachment, if that’s how the world would deal with him. He values being the supreme ruler too much. But that said, there aren’t many limits to his authority right now. The world’s in a mad scramble to prepare for war. That lengthens my father’s leash considerably. He’s the kind of person who would capitalize on that.”
Serge nodded. “You obviously can’t ask your father directly what he’s doing or you would have done so already. You wouldn’t be coming to me.”
“My father wouldn’t tell me even if I did ask,” Lem said. “He and I don’t always agree. And anyway, whatever he’s doing, he’s keeping it quiet. When I approach him, I want to know the answers. I want to see how he responds.”
“I understand.”
“Good. Norja tells me you’re very capable, and I believe him. That’s why I’m here, asking you to do this instead of anyone else on the executive team. I want to see the greatness Norja clearly sees in you.”
Serge nodded gratefully. “I appreciate the confidence, Lem. I won’t disappoint you.”
Lem tapped a command on his wrist pad, and Serge’s holoscreen chimed with a new message. “That’s the direct access to my wrist pad. Contact me when you have information. Don’t send me anything. We’ll meet in person.”
Serge furrowed his brow. “You think someone might be monitoring our communications?”
Lem smiled. “You don’t know my father.”
He turned and moved for the door.
“Lem?” Serge said.
Lem turned back.
“I agree with you,” Serge said. “For what it’s worth. Everything you said in the meeting. About it being our duty to win the war, about us having that responsibility. I believe that completely. It’s why I stayed with the company instead of joining the IF.”
Lem paused, intrigued. Serge wasn’t feeding him a line; Lem could spot butt-kissing a mile away. This was sincere. “You considered joining the IF?”
“I looked into it,” Serge said. “After the first war, after watching all the footage coming out of China. The bodies in the streets, the burned rice fields. I think everyone considered enlisting. But I was too old, they told me. Plus I probably would’ve failed the physical. I don’t exactly fit the soldier stereotype. The recruiters offered to give me some small administrative duties as a citizen volunteer, but I knew I wouldn’t make much of an impact. My place was here, I realized. This is where I can make a significant difference.”
“You made the right choice, Serge. And the people who did enlist made the right choice for them. I’m glad we have you.”
“Thank you, Lem. I’ll get you that information. I’m curious myself.”
“Legal channels only,” Lem reminded him.
He left Serge’s office feeling somewhat better, but the good mood didn’t last. The more he thought about it, the more unpromising it seemed. Every one of Lem’s inquiries into Father’s Hegemony projects had yielded nothing. Why would Serge, who had fewer contacts and less access to information, have success where Lem had failed?
And yet it didn’t hurt the man to try. Hopefully. Father could be prickly about people nosing in his business.
Lem’s assistants were all waiting for him when he returned to his office with matters they claimed needed his immediate attention. Lem politely told them whatever they had could wait, and he stepped into the holoroom adjacent to his office.
The room was a white, empty, circular space with floors that curved up to meet the walls—like the inside of a giant egg. A light rig loaded with holoprojectors hung from a vaulted ceiling in the center, as if the room were a theater set to stage a minimalist play. Lem removed his shoes at the entrance and moon-hopped across the glass floor to the center of the room where a pair of footprints was painted on the floor. Beneath him, below the glass surface, sat another rig of holoprojectors, all pointing upward.
Lem placed his feet on the footprints and said, “Scout ship. Exterior. Twenty kilometers out.”
A column of blue light appeared in front of him, projected from the floor and ceiling, two meters square. An hourglass materialized in the column, dropping grains of sand as the system acquired the satellite images. A moment later the hourglass winked out, and a holo of the Formic scout ship appeared—a giant, red, teardrop-shaped monstrosity locked in geosynchronous orbit above Earth. The Formic ship had held that position from the moment it first arrived at the start of the first war, with the point of its bulbous shape pointing toward Earth like a spearhead.
Lem still felt a twinge of unease whenever he saw it, as if he were approaching a sleeping monster. The ship was entirely in human hands now—specifically the hands of Juke Limited, who had seized it after the war by right of salvage law.
All alien life on board had died in the final assault. But even so the sight of it always left Lem with a tingling sense of dread. It was a reminder that the enemy was coming—an enemy the human race had no chance of defeating. Sometimes it seemed to Lem that all the efforts of the Hegemon and the IF and the company were nothing but theater, a giant game of pretend: Let’s all put on our smiley faces and act like we can win.
It was laughable. We are fooling ourselves. The Formics brought us to our knees with a single ship last time. Do we honestly think we can take on ten or more at a time?
Three giant rings now encircled the ship at its widest point, each rotating slightly to give the people inside the illusion of gravity. Juke Limited had built the rings to house the company’s research facilities and employees who were painstakingly studying every inch of the ship. Most of the Formic tech on board had been severely damaged when Victor, Mazer, and the MOPs flooded the ship with radiation, killing everything on board. But even the broken equipment had proven to be a treasure trove of information. Nearly every major branch of science had benefitted from the discoveries made there.
Lem zoomed in on the tip of the teardrop, where the shield generators were mounted in a ringed formation. The shield generators were the company’s greatest find on the ship. They hadn’t sustained any damage in the fight, and Lem’s people had successfully reverse-engineered them. That tech alone could keep the company afloat. Every ship being built for the IF was being equipped with Juke proprietary shield generators, which were even stronger and more resilient than the original Formic design.
But the discovery that mattered most was the one that still eluded them. The hull. How do we penetrate the hull?
He wiped a hand through the ship and it disappeared.
“Show me the main
lab.”
The column of blue light expanded, growing outward in the holoroom. The holofield enveloped Lem and continued to spread, stopping when it measured five meters square, with Lem at the center. Shapes composed of light flickered into existence around him. Workstations, computer terminals, various bots and lab equipment. The company had installed a holoprojector setup in the lab very much like the one here at company headquarters, albeit smaller. The holos were pixelated and monochromatic, and the time delay of the transmission made it hard to have a normal conversation. But it was good for Lem to have face time with those who were leading the work and living at the Rings.
Dr. Dublin, the chief engineer on the project, stood alone in the lab, waiting for the scheduled transmission to begin. He had not been Lem’s first choice to lead the team studying the hulmat—short for “hull material,” the impenetrable alien alloy that covered and protected the ship—but Dublin was capable enough. Like everything else in the lab, he appeared as a life-sized construction of light, partially fuzzy because of the transmission degradation that always happened across great distances.
“Morning, Dublin,” Lem said. “What’s the status?”
There was a five-second delay.
Dublin finally heard the question and winced apologetically. “Progress is slow, Lem. We’ve identified more weapons and chemicals that don’t penetrate or damage the hulmat, but that’s the hardly the report you want to hear.” He shrugged. “Nothing we do inflicts the slightest degree of damage. We can’t cut it, burn it, dent it, scratch it. We can’t even chip off a tiny piece of it to put under a microscope. It’s mocking us at this point.”
“The gamma plasma burned through the hull,” said Lem. “That’s how we won the war, by using their own weapon against them. We’ve established that the hull isn’t indestructible.”
Five-second delay.
Dublin nodded. “True. But we don’t understand the gamma plasma, either. We’re not even sure what the substance was exactly. We’ve been calling it gamma plasma only because that’s the name Victor gave it. Those are the closest words in our vocabulary for what it actually represented. But it wasn’t gamma plasma technically. Nor do we know how the plasma was laserized at the nozzles before being fired at a target.”