A Sword Into Darkness

6: “OF PICTURES, PRAWNS, AND POSSIBILITIES”

December 10, 2039; Calvert’s Gumbo Room; Alexandria, VA

Nestled in the corner of one of Alexandria’s oldest buildings downtown, the quiet little restaurant existed as neutral territory in the battlegrounds of scandal and ideology, enjoying the coverage of an umbrella of discretion and anonymity that few establishments retained for as long. This sort of unspoken agreement of private civility between the press and the upper echelon patrons of the dark, wood-paneled Gumbo Room meant that Calvert’s would never be fabulously successful or famous, but it would allow the little place to become an important footnote in the unwritten history of the nation.

Here, senators could dine with their mistresses in style, without too great a fear of discovery. At this table, the majority and minority leaders could share a drink and a laugh over how divided their public personas had become, while the actual difference between them had never been narrower. At that table, the conservative talk show host, the liberal editor, and their respective publicists and advisors could all gather round heaping piles of steaming blue crab and divide up the political landscape, working out talking points and scathing rebukes of one another, all the time keeping a keen eye toward maximizing their individual market share.

As a direct consequence of Calvert’s unacknowledged place in the political universe, an unofficial non-meeting could be held there which might receive undue attention were the principles to meet in an actual government office. Many a nation-altering deal had been brokered secretly and safely above the Gumbo Room’s varnished tables and embroidered maroon tablecloths. Thus, at the table in the far corner, isolated from the rest even in this sanctuary of isolation, the Assistant National Science Advisor, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and their tardy guest could quietly change the course of the world and the human race.

Lydia Russ smiled softly and contemplated her glass of wine in silence while Carl Sykes, Lieutenant General, USAF (retired) seethed over their guest’s continued absence. He jabbed a toothpick violently into another olive from his small plate, swished it through his untouched martini, and devoured it with a growl and yet another look toward the entrance.

No one was there. Sykes shook his head and snapped his toothpick, tossing it negligently behind him. “Where the hell is he?”

Lydia took a sip of wine. “He’ll be here. Stop worrying.”

“I’m not worrying. I’m pissed. It’s unprofessional and rude to make us wait. You’d think that someone with his ego would jump at the chance to cackle at us.”

Lydia smiled more broadly. “You don’t know Gordon like I do. His ego wouldn’t allow him to be here on time even if he had nothing to crow about, and now that he does, he probably considers making us wait some form of payback. He’ll be here, though. It’s the opportunity he’s been waiting for, after all.”

Sykes grunted and snatched another toothpick from the small open jar among the condiments at the center of the table. He was just about to angrily spear an olive yet again when Gordon Lee’s smug voice behind him caused him to snap the pick instead.

“Imagine my surprise! After being persona non grata in this town for the past 16 years, suddenly, people are accepting my calls. Suddenly, the whispers that I’ve got one foot in the loony bin quiet down a bit. And if that wasn’t nice enough, I suddenly get myself a personal invitation to the Beltway Bandits’ own secret dinner club. Whatever could be the reason for this startling reversal of fortune?”

Sykes looked back and saw Gordon Lee, shedding an expensively tailored tan trench coat and straightening his jacket and tie, a tie, he noted, that was covered in little Flash Gordon-style rocket ships. Sykes shook his head and said, “Maybe Christmas arrived early this year.”

Gordon’s smile became tighter, more vicious. “Somehow I doubt that.” He approached Lydia’s side of the table and bent down to squeeze her hand and gave her a kiss on the cheek. His lips were cold from the chill wind blowing outside, but his eyes were warm with the embers of their past. “Lydia, you are lovelier than ever.”

She canted her head to one side and gave him a saucy grin. “And you are a manipulative, gloating liar, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. How have you been, Gordon?”

“Lonely … and angry, but excited, too. I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff to show you, both of you, stuff that you’ll never believe.”

Sykes smiled. “Something of a habit for you isn’t it, Lee? Showing off things no one in their right mind would ever believe in?”

Lydia held up a hand to forestall the barb Gordon was about to fire back. “We have things to show you as well, Gordon, but first let’s get the important stuff out of the way. Drinks?”

Unobtrusive waiters dressed all in black, with long, dark green aprons appeared. Within a minute, Gordon proceeded to banish the last of his chill with a cut crystal tumbler half filled with straight single-malt highland scotch. Lydia had taken the liberty of ordering for each of them already. Gordon’s tastes were known and she figured the Gumbo Room would be a special treat for him. Sykes was a bureaucratic insider with a lifetime of government service in war, in peace, and in the special infighting peculiar to the Pentagon and the Washington Beltway. Second in command of the nation’s defense or not, all he would care about was getting a free meal.

By the time the servers backed away, they had all had their drinks freshened, and steaming, spicy cups of Cajun gumbo had been placed in front of them. Different from the Creole gumbo Gordon was used to, he used his spoon to break up the ball of white rice in the center of the cup, mixing it with the dark brown soup and the plentiful shrimp, onions, and celery settled below the surface. Savory, piquant heat radiated out from the first spoonful, and Gordon smiled broadly to his hostess and friend, acknowledging her good choice.

Gordon wiped the corner of his mouth with his napkin, and caught their eyes with his own. Sykes stopped endlessly stirring his gumbo and devoured another martini-dipped olive. Lydia wiped her own mouth and looked back at Gordon. The head of Windward Tech and the man she had helped to ostracize years ago grinned tightly. “So, what happened? Why the turnaround?”

She responded by reaching down to her purse and extracting her suite. Lydia laid it on the table between them and extended the screen from the side. Displayed on it was something he’d grown very familiar with over the years: the constellation Pavo. A familiar, chillingly enigmatic blue star shone next to the position of Delta Pavonis. This picture appeared to be recent—the separation between the blue light and the star it came from was the most pronounced he had seen, parallax making the approaching light oscillate wider and wider across its origin.

Gordon looked up at her again. “That’s not really any more compelling than the ones I showed NASA originally. I believe they downgraded it to a ‘stellar fragment’ and me to a nut-job crank.”

She nodded. “True, unfortunately, but how about this.” She tapped the suite and the image changed. Now, instead of all of Pavo, it zeroed in on Delta Pavonis and the blue light. Another tap and just the blue light filled the screen, fuzzy and indistinct. Another tap and the blue light shrank away, the fuzziness sharpened to distinct threads of light and optical glare, but there was something else there as well. It was a broken halo, something reflecting reddish in spots around the star of pale blue.

Gordon leaned in and she tapped the suite again. The picture became artificially sharp, a false color image designed to bring out the details in the captured blobs of light. At the center was a sharp circle of bluish white, the scintillating edge of the alien photon drive. Around it, an equal distance from the center and arranged in a somehow familiar fashion, there were four reverse shadows, the edges of four immense objects surrounding the drive flare, illuminated with a red brilliance and spots of blue bright enough to obscure anything else from view. Gordon’s heart hammered excitedly within his chest. He looked back up to Lydia. “What the hell is it?”

She shook her head. “We don’t know, but it is structure, and it’s definitely not a rogue fragment ejected from a star.”

Gordon grinned. “I’ll tell you what it is. It’s my damned aliens! This is it! Proof, incontrovertible proof that they’re coming here, just like I always said.”

Sykes shook his head. “Hold on, Lee. It’s ‘something’. Whether or not it’s proof of your pet aliens is another matter entirely.”

Gordon shooed his hands at Sykes, dismissing him and focusing on Lydia. “How did you get these shots? What are they from?”

“Optical interferometry. They’re from the Solar System Baseline Array.”

“I tried to get my astronomers tasking on the SSBA since it became operational, but we always got the brush off. They told me it was because the ‘fragment’ was a low order priority, but I always figured it was just another sign of the box I’d been put in.”

Lydia frowned. “You’re closer to right than wrong, but not everyone who believed was isolated like you were. You had more than a few supporters within the community. Eventually it became more suspicious to reject their requests than it was to let them get their pictures. No one in the administration ever imagined it would reveal something like this, though.”

Gordon’s eyes narrowed slightly. “And which side were you on, Lydia? Were you one of the believers or one of the ones blocking them?”

She returned his glare steadily. “The administration is my administration, Gordon, for better or worse, but I also have faith in my friends. I’m the one that authorized the re-tasking of the SSBA. Is that good enough for you?”

He nodded, his expression softening. “I’m sorry. It’s just been a long time out in the cold is all. I’d become of the opinion that I didn’t have any friends left out there anymore.” Gordon shook his head and smiled again. “But what are we doing here? We should be planning our press conference! We have to get the word out as soon and as wide as possible.”

Neither of the others said anything. A hint of a smile touched the corner of Sykes’ mouth. Gordon looked from one to the other and then sat back, dismayed. “You’re still not going public, are you? You have pictures of the damn thing and you’re going to sit on it?”

Lydia’s voice pleaded for his understanding. “We have pictures of something, something that backs up your original assertion, but it’s still not proof. The images we have come from a new satellite constellation that most people don’t understand, and that brings with it some doubt. We only arrive at a final image by mathematically combining the images from space based telescopes positioned in different orbits all around the solar system. For most people, that brings in even more doubt, some degree of un-believability. And to get the final image of the … object, we had to process it even further.”

Sykes cleared his throat, inserting himself in the conversation. “That picture doesn’t really exist, and it won’t exist. It’s a computer-manipulated image from an unproven system that backs up the claim of an industrialist most people regard as nuttier than Howard Hughes in a straightjacket. No one is going to publicly stick their necks out to support you, and they’re certainly not going to give you a budget to assist with your little science fiction crusade.”

“So we work harder to convince them!” Gordon downed a slug of scotch. His expectations had grown so high in moments, and now they had been sent crashing. His nerves were a mess. “We support some pretty screwy shit in this country with no justification whatsoever, and now that we have something real and verifiable to show people, we’re just going to say that it’s too risky? That there’s not enough there to back it up?

“This could be either the best thing to happen to the human race in its whole history, past or future, or it could be the end of our history, the end of everyone, timid politicians and innocent soccer moms alike. Either way, people have to be prepared. By the time we have the type of evidence that will convince the administration to go public, we won’t need it, because everyone will be able to just look up and see the aliens in orbit!”

“Oh, get off your soapbox, Lee. You had the chance to go public years ago as well, right after you got the brush-off from the government, but you didn’t do it. Where were your press conferences then?” Gordon said nothing, so Sykes continued. “No, you didn’t go forward with telling everyone because you knew that the standard for convincing people about aliens is higher than it is for other things. It’s higher than some weird kinematics off a bunch of telescope sightings, and you know that it’s higher than some doctored photo of a bunch of red and blue blobs that look nothing like our concept of a spaceship. You stayed underground and let the evidence exist as some internet rumor because that’s as far as you could go until you had more to show. We’re the same way. We can’t go forward on the basis of this photo.”

Then Lydia smiled. “But maybe we can stop holding you back.”

Gordon looked at them both sharply, but they said nothing. The servers returned with food and fresh drinks, whisking away their half-eaten cups of gumbo and replacing them with steaming, sizzling dinner plates. Sykes was served some sort of squash risotto alongside an immense blackened porterhouse, a dollop of butter melting on top. Both Lydia and Gordon were each served shrimp.

In this case, shrimp was an oxymoron. These were prawns, three grilled, butterflied tails apiece, each one four inches long, spiced with flakes of red pepper and herbs, lying atop a bed of sticky white rice, drizzled and surrounded by a rich crawfish étouffée, and topped off with a sprinkling of lump crab meat. Gordon looked down at it and smiled. He glanced back up at Lydia. “For this, I forgive you of nearly half of the crap you’ve pulled.”

“My, my. That much? And we haven’t even gotten to coffee or the desserts yet. I just might be back in your good graces by the end of the night.”

“Don’t push your luck.” Gordon sliced off a forkful, making sure he got a piece of everything. He tasted it cautiously, but as the myriad spices, sauces, and meats inundated his senses, he began to chew with gusto. No one flavor or spice stood out. It was an exercise in exquisite balance, with the resulting mélange of flavors nothing less than arthropodic bliss.

In so far as it is possible to define a person in simple terms, Gordon Lee was a man of great drive but little philosophy. One of the few beliefs he held, aside from an almost religious devotion to preparing for the Deltans, was that there was a definite moral equivalency to being part carnivore. If an animal had to die for his dinner plate, he felt that it should have an honorable death, and that its passing should result in something greater than just the filling of his belly.

Fast food, for the most part, was simply wrong and the vast majority could be replaced surreptitiously with Vegan fare without anyone noticing a thing except for the drastically improved health of the nation. On the other hand, a really good burger could represent a sublime ascendancy, placing a simple cow in the bovine equivalent of Valhalla. For a bacon cheeseburger, the moral cost was correspondingly higher, the dish then involving the lives of two farm animals, including one that was arguably more intelligent than a dog. For Gordon to feel good about it, it had to be really good bacon and on a really good burger. If one of them failed to measure up, the whole thing was in a moral deficit.

Gordon had had more than one ethical crisis over club sandwiches.

Though crustaceans were pretty far down the sentience/morality ladder, having three different varieties on the same plate was still more than enough to raise the equivalence bar pretty high. That Gordon dug in with relish and without any sort of soul searching or sense of existential guilt was testament to just how good Lydia’s choice had been.

They passed more than a few minutes without saying a thing other than to comment upon the food. Sykes, who did not share any of Gordon’s philosophies toward meat, merely grunted in seeming agreement, cutting off bite after bite of bloody, seared steak. Eventually, Gordon began to emerge from his culinary fugue and looked down at the remains of his dinner with equal parts satisfaction and embarrassment. He permitted himself another bite and then carefully laid down his knife and fork. He enjoyed another bit of scotch and then bid his hosts’ attention with a look from one to the other.

Sykes and Lydia caught his look and paused a moment in their dining as well. Gordon smiled, but there was a hint of menace in it. “So, aside from plying me with good food, how exactly is the administration going to help me? Or was that ‘obstruct me less’?”

Lydia smiled back, but it was somewhat cagey in response to the less than friendly nature of his own expression. She wiped the corners of her mouth with a cloth napkin and then demurred, “Oh, I think we could probably swing a little of both. The thing we can’t give you is overt support. There’s just not enough good evidence to sell the Deltans to the nation … or the world.”

Gordon nodded slightly. “Okay, maybe I’ll grant you that. Now where exactly have you been holding me back?”

“How about everywhere, Lee,” Sykes said around a mouthful of risotto. He took a drink of water and then wiped his mouth as well. “You don’t think all those rumors started on their own, did you? It took a lot of effort to make sure you didn’t get recognized by anyone respectable. If someone with some actual credentials backed you up, it might have forced the administration to support you without some more concrete evidence. Could have been an embarrassment, or worse, an actual waste of money.”

“Gee, I’d hate for an alien invasion to put anyone out of sorts.”

“Don’t get petulant now that we’re playing fair, Gordon.” Lydia leaned forward, seemingly eager, with a hint of the excitement Gordon always remembered her having. “However, you have done some pretty amazing things stuck out on the fringe. Is it true you’ve come up with a new kind of rocket?”

Gordon tried to play it cool, but failed. The menace was gone from his smile now, caught up by her enthusiasm. “It wasn’t me, but yeah. We’ve decoded the Deltan’s method of interstellar travel and we can duplicate it. That’s just the icing on the cake, though. We’ve developed new structural materials, sensors, computer architecture, armor, you name it. The only sticking point I’ve got is in power. I always figured that propulsion would be the long pole in the tent, but reactor design is where we’ve been held up the longest. Due to your little passive aggressive crusade to marginalize me, I’ve been kept from any real research or development in any sort of serviceable fission power plant. Every time I get close to hiring somebody or investing in someone else’s project, somebody official shows up to investigate me. Do you have any idea how many times I’ve been searched by Homeland Security?”

Sykes smiled. “Actually, I know the number exactly, as well as the number of times we’ve hacked your data without a warrant. We’ve only been able to decrypt a few of your intercepted files, but it’s allowed us to keep tabs on you. That’s how we knew about your little photon drive. We weren’t sure if we believed it, though, since we couldn’t decrypt any of the theory or application to confirm it. I thought it might have been something to lead us off on a tangent, some sort of joke you were having on us.”

Gordon arched an eyebrow at Sykes blasé admission of his illegal data mining. “Huh. Well, it’s real, and I found a way around the NRC and all your reactor opposition anyway. It’s the one thing I had to farm out overseas, but I was able to get a little French company to develop an advanced pebble-bed reactor for me. Now if I could just get your timid administration to let me bring the prototype over to the US, perhaps I could get some real integration done.”

Lydia nodded. “In the interests of removing obstacles, I think we can give that one to you. Consider your work with the French outfit officially authorized. You’ll have your reactor as soon as they can ship it.”

Sykes finished off his steak and wiped his mouth, leaving the napkin on the bloody residue covering his plate. “‘Course, that raises the question of why you didn’t just farm out everything overseas. We blocked you everywhere you turned. If you’re open to French nuclear power, why not German armor or Chinese computers? If you did that, you might have an actual spaceship by now.”

“And I also might have given away a capability beyond anything in the whole US arsenal. This tech is designed to fight aliens should that become necessary, but it could just as easily be used against humans, and our fellow man has been a confirmed threat for a lot longer than the Deltans have been doing their thing. The drive alone could be put to pretty devastating use if you pointed it at something other than empty space. Call me a patriot, or call me a provincial nationalist, but I trust my country more than the others, flaws and all, allies of the US or not. Personally I’d rather face the Deltans with a bunch of spit wads than face our potential opposition with this sort of capability.”

The Deputy SECDEF grinned. “Will wonders never cease? There’s something we agree on after all.”

“Don’t take that as blanket approval, Sykes. I’m not a hundred percent on giving this stuff over completely to the US either. We don’t have the best track record as the arbiters of human decency, and hearing you talk about all the times you’ve tried to access my research doesn’t make feel all warm and patriotic inside.”

Sykes had nothing to say to that, either in defense or in confirmation. Lydia frowned and then asked, “We know your goal is to get direct intelligence on the Deltans with a probe mission. If you had everything you needed, how long before you could independently put up a mission?”

“Independently? Never. Windward is stagnant and stockholders are dropping like flies. I’ve sunk every dollar and every bit of attention I could spare into this project, and the company has suffered as a result. Lockheed and Orbital are killing my market share. I may be okay personally, but I’m no longer one of this country’s ten richest industrialists. I’m probably not even in the top 100, and Windward Tech’s stock has fallen over 40 percent. If I don’t get at least a little assistance, my company is either going to fail or I’m going to have to start releasing some of the project’s developments, and that’s risky in its own way.”

Sykes nodded. “No doubt. You might give away intel to other countries, other companies, or even the Deltans, if they’re watching us with any sort of keen eye. You declassify it, you lose control.”

Lydia put a hand over Gordon’s and squeezed. “I’m sorry, Gordon. Again. I know how much building Windward up has meant to you. It’s been your life, and now you’re losing it because we wouldn’t believe in you.”

Gordon favored her with a bittersweet smile. “Honestly, I’ve been so caught up in the project that I let the company slide. It’s not your fault I let it come to this. What you did didn’t help, but I’m the one ultimately responsible.”

“Well, along with removing obstacles, we probably could free up some indirect funding. I mean, we bail out corn and railroads, why not spaceships?”

Gordon smiled softly. “Okay, give me six months and a little quiet funding, and I can give you a probe that will bring back the intel you need to go public with the Deltans. Support me fully, and I can give you a damned warship that’ll give anyone pause, alien or not.”

Sykes grunted. “And here we’d been getting along so well. I’m all for peace through superior firepower, but there’s still a few too many unknowns to go the warship route yet. We haven’t even assessed a threat, and you’re ready to fire the first shot anyway.”

Gordon’s brow sharpened as he looked at the retired Air Force general. “I’m ready to be ready for anything. If the Deltans are benign, no big deal. Whatever we spent on preparations will be eclipsed by everything we gain just by being in their presence. If they’re indifferent to us, we’ve taken at least the first steps at meeting them as equals and forcing them to take notice. And if they’re hostile, if they’re inimical … well we’ll be ready for that too.”

“Ready? As if you could ever be ready for anything as unknowable as a hostile alien force. They’re coming here from twenty light-years away, Lee. They’ve expended massive amounts of energy and resources to fly here physically for whatever reason they have. How could we possibly hope to contend with them as any sort of real adversary?”

“Interesting position for the Deputy SECDEF, don’t you think?”

Sykes’ face darkened. “I’ve fought for this country in and out of war for 36 years. I’ve seen even battles and I’ve seen when one side clearly outclasses the other. I know what to do for each situation, whether it’s on the offensive or defending territory. In this case, it’s ludicrous to believe that we could hope to really contend with the Deltans in any sort of combat sense. What we’ve uncovered from your plans is that you and Kelley are planning an offensive defense-in-depth, hitting them far out, heavy, and often, should it prove necessary. But don’t you see that’s doomed to failure? They’ve already expended more energy than we’ve released as a species throughout all time and shown off more than enough capability to prove that they can destroy us without a second thought. Your tech is impressive, but it’s not alien-overlord impressive.”

“What would you do then, General?”

“I’d face up to our limitations. I’m all for your probe, and I’d even back up a manned mission if you have the tech to make it happen, but as an ambassadorial effort only. Try to reason with them or divert them, and in the meantime work on defenses here at home. Your tech could be used to build some very effective bunkers and fixed emplacements. We don’t know what they want, but it can’t be to simply destroy us. If that was it, they wouldn’t have even bothered to slow down. They could kill the whole damn globe with kinetic energy alone. And they can’t be coming to our system for resources alone. They’ve had to pass by too many closer solar systems and they’ve expended too much energy for this to be about simple materials.”

“I’ve said much the same thing before, and I agree that we should be applying ourselves to expanding our planetary defensive capabilities, but how can you believe it’s better to begin the fight here rather than off the planet, whether we have any reasonable chance or not?”

“I don’t want to begin any fight at all, Lee. Our only option is to try to work out a benign contact, and then prepare for a dug-in defense in case that fails. All an early attack will accomplish is to piss them off, ruining any chance we’d have at a diplomatic solution, and increasing the likelihood that they would just glass the planet when they got here.”

Gordon threw his hands up. “You can’t possibly know that! We have some pretty effective weapons in our arsenal, and that’s before I’ve even turned my project engineers toward upgrading and adapting them. We might be a hell of a lot more capable than you’re making out!”

“That’s wishful thinking on your part. What little you might be able to send against them in the next 15 years or so would just be nuisance making, and a distraction from developing our defenses on the ground. Face it, when you saw their turnaround flare it was already too late.”

His face turning red, Gordon snarled, “I might have been ready to send more if you people had given me the support I asked for when I first came to you!”

Lydia laid a hand on both of their arms, taking over before more than words were exchanged. “This is not the time or the place for this. Let’s just take it as accepted that both of you have … passionate but differing views about the details of our defense. That’s not what this meeting is about, though. This is about finding out what you need for now. We can work out the next step, calmly and sanely, later when we all have more than personal arguments to go off of.”

She waited for them to nod before moving on. “Six months and funding will get us a probe, right?”

Gordon took a slow breath, pointedly looking away from Sykes. “Yes.”

“And I’m assuming one probe won’t satisfy anyone with any experience in space operations, so more funding and a little more time will give us more probes, right?”

“Yes. I can’t give you a better production time until we make up the prototype, but I’m assuming it will be a lot less than six months for each probe.”

“And how long will it take to get data back from those probes?”

A hint of a smile touched the corner of Gordon’s mouth. “Well that depends on a lot of things: how far away the Deltans are, how fast the probe is going, and what sort of flight profile you send it on. Do I send it straight at their ship for a fast flyby, or do I send it in for a meeting situation? And do I maneuver it overtly or covertly?”

“It’s your probe, Gordon. The administration officially has no involvement, so you tell us.”

“Okay. If they continue tracking as they have, the Deltans are now 1.7 light-years away and moving at 20% the speed of light. If we shoot out a probe and accelerate it at one g continuous for a fast flyby, I can have some intel back in about two and a half or three years. That includes the time to travel out there, and then the time for the report to come back here. Now that’s somewhat misleading since that assumes we can maintain that acceleration for that long, or that a probe could even survive approaching 90% the speed of light, and even if it could, you’re going to get some piss-poor photos at those passing speeds due to Doppler shift.

“A better bet would be to arrange some sort of covert meeting situation, where we accelerate off-axis and then reverse our acceleration halfway out, while still keeping our drive corona pointed away from the Deltans. That lets us match speeds and approach them from the side without totally giving away our presence. That’s the same profile a manned mission would take as well.”

“Better plan, Lee,” Sykes grumped. “If there’s only going to be a couple of these probes, we don’t want to waste one of them on a recon that only nets us a blurred picture or two. I’d rather wait than waste a shot.”

Lydia nodded. “How long a wait?”

“That’s a little tougher. I can’t exactly back-of-the-napkin that sort of maneuver, but call it six to eight years to get data back, or maybe a little less.”

Sykes frowned. “It’s the better plan, but that’s still a long time to wait for intel.”

Gordon shrugged and said, “It is what it is. Voyager has been traveling for over 70 years, and it’s only in the Kuiper Belt. We’re talking about something light-years away and getting back information in a matter of a few years. You’re just stuck thinking in terms of a single planet. For these sorts of speeds and distances, under a decade is practically real-time data.”

Servers appeared around them, clearing away plates and dropping off yet another fresh round of drinks, as well as a pot of coffee and three cups, cream, and sugar. Lydia smiled and began pouring coffee for each of them. “So we can help you out with a couple of probes, and then in six to eight years we get to find out if it was money wasted on a comet, or if the whole world is about to change. What do you plan on doing in the interim? Or, rather, what would you like to do with all your secretive government funding while you don’t have to worry about pesky things like justifying its use?”

Gordon grinned. “I’ll be working on the ship, the prototype for, I hope, all those warships that we’re going to build as the last line of defense we have against the Deltans. The probe is just a starting point. An actual ship with people and weapons aboard is hundreds of times more complex, and it’s going to take years just to figure out what the best design is. And then that first ship will be the ship. The prototype is going to be our ambassador to the stars.”

“How poetic.” Sykes drank his coffee black, swallowing the whole cup in a single gulp. “And what sort of things are you looking to develop for this ship still?”

Gordon began counting off on his fingers. “Environmental support, oxygen replenishment, living arrangements, waste management, radiation shielding, sensors, weapons—”

Sykes pounced without leaving his chair. “What sorts of weapons?”

“Well, I’ve already sunk money into electromagnetic guns, launchers, and laser systems. Those are all bearing differing amounts of fruit, but I recognize that those sorts of systems won’t be enough to stop the Deltans alone, should they need stopping. What I really need to work on is missiles, and specifically warheads. Along with freeing me up to work with reactor components, how about releasing me to work on weapons-grade materials?”

Sykes pushed away from the table and gestured for his coat. “Nope. Forget it. You get the authorization to work on nukes when the Deltans prove they’re a threat. Figure out something else, include space for missiles from our existing arsenal, or, better yet, forget the offensive systems and go with an ambassador ship.”

“Our ballistic missiles are developed for hitting stationary land targets, not an enemy warship in space. They’re totally inadequate for this purpose.”

“Then leave them off.”

“What about ensuring peace by preparing for war?”

Sykes coat arrived. He stood and slipped it on. “Did you forget? I don’t think any ship you send out there is going to have a snowball’s chance in hell. If you send an offensive capability out there, at worst you’ll piss them off, ruining any sort of diplomatic defense we might be able to make, and at best you’ll give away what little capability we do have. So no nukes. No plutonium, no lithium deuteride, nobody from Los Alamos, nothing.” He turned to Lydia and gave a short bow. “Thank you for a fine meal and a very weird conversation, Ms. Russ. I hope this all turns out to be this nut’s fantasy, because if it isn’t, we’re screwed. Good night to you both.” Sykes downed his martini and headed for the door. He disappeared into the cold, black night.

“I don’t think we’re going to be friends.” Gordon shook his head and turned to Lydia. “I’m hamstrung if I don’t have the access to build some sort of ship-to-ship nuclear weapons.”

“I’m sorry, dear. We’re just the heralds of a much higher-ranked decision group, and even then only two representatives of a much bigger organization. I’m the science side, he’s the defense and never the twain shall meet. I can make decisions on funding for development, but not for weapons development.”

“Is there anyone I can appeal to? The SECDEF himself?” Gordon looked desperate.

Lydia tried to show as much compassion in response as she could. “Who do you think they’re going to side with? You’ve only freshly shucked the mantle of shame.” She reached out and held both his hands. “Don’t worry about it for now. You’ve got years yet to change their minds. Focus on everything you’ve achieved tonight and forget about the rest, if only for a little while.”

He squeezed her hands and looked back at her, his frustration slowly giving way to gratitude and the pleasant shades of memory. “It is so good to see you again, Lydia. It’s been too long, with too much left unsaid.”

She smiled. “I’ve missed you too, Gordon.”

Gordon arched a brow. “I believe you mentioned something about dessert?”

Her smile took on a decidedly different character and she gestured to the wait staff for the check and their coats. “I just might wind up back in your good graces tonight after all.”