Chapter 41: Signal From a Dead World

  Tamara kept her polite smile fixed as, with every harsh syllable, the German delegate jabbed a bony index finger at her. The Delegate's name was Frau Muller, and the intense lady with iron-grey cropped hair and ruthlessly plucked eyebrows stared at her with the unblinking intensity of a predatory insect.

  “Even effective tactics like the Blitzkrieg and the Kesselschlacht will have effects on the culture of my people. We have for centuries worked to delete the stigma of that era from our cultural identity.”

  The German had begun her rant before even taking a seat, and now Tamara was reaching her limit.

  What was it about “absolute power” that some people didn’t get?

  Did this twit not monitor the feed? The Ares Codex project that inspired this tirade had failed before it could even begin. It had been doomed the moment the ingeniously hidden device had been strapped to that buffoon's wrist. That the whole project had been her idea made it all the worse.

  Her leg began its jiggle under the table.

  All that effort for nothing.

  Frau Muller was standing now, stabbing at her with that arthritic digit and ranting about the dangers of fascism.

  In the face of everything that was happening, it barely registered on Tamara’s radar.

  Tamara’s attention was drawn to the tiny news-feed window her implant had pinned at the corner of her vision.

  The jiggle escalated.

  More riots. They had spread to Japan now—a nation she had recently praised publicly for their strict conformance to UE wartime policy.

  She cycled headlines. The Middle East was on fire. The Philippines had attacked Vietnam for reasons that nobody could ascertain. Australia —No. She didn’t even want to think about Australia. The whole damn continent was in open rebellion aside from Victoria, which was ironic considering that was where he was from.

  Her calendar pinged—a ten-minute timeslot opening as the delegate from Zimbabwe cancelled their 15:30 meeting. A moment later the country declared independence, withdrawing entirely from the UE.

  With practiced motions, she cycled to the medication shortcut in her implant, deploying a minor dose of alprazolam. She pressed hard against the nub of long-healed bone at her wrist, and the pain helped her hold on until the drugs took effect. Then she was back in control. Really, she thought, the drudges should be grateful to have this automated.

  At least North America—the Delegated Domain she had controlled before promotion to Wartime High Marshal—was stable… well, except for Texas, Tennessee, and that one town in Oregon, of course. What a goddamn mess that was.

  She pinged for an update to the list of National Delegates. How many had left? How many independent nations would she have to crush?

  Beneath the table, her leg sped up. The collection of small glass ornaments, arrayed and displayed with care upon the polished wooden surface tinkled as they trembled in time to the movement.

  After a moment, she dialled up the dose just a tiny bit, clicking through the doctor’s warnings without reading them.

  It was fine. They would be dealt with. Earth was strong. Her leadership unquestioned.

  Frau Muller yammered on, but Tamara wasn’t listening.

  The newscast jumped to a vid-feed displaying a stadium in Western Australia. The stands were packed, the grounds flooded with Drudges, Citizens, and even a handful of her Dominion Peers all standing side by side.

  She sent a ping, requesting an update. They still didn’t know how the Drudges were disabling their implants. Unacceptable.

  The scene continued, showing an ancient national flag being hoisted as the UE's golden globe was cut free and set aflame. Even without the sound, Tamara imagined she could hear their defiant roar.

  Disgusting.

  Fucking Australia.

  Fucking Allan and his big fucking mouth.

  It seemed to her like every time the big buffoon had two seconds to himself, he had to open that mouth of his and flap his gums about things that should have remained privy to a select few. Exactly how he suddenly knew all these secrets was still a mystery. She had suspected the youngest Du Bouchard, but they watched her continuously, and a thorough investigation had ruled her out. Her experts now suspected it had something to do with Allan killing Seth Indiana, as rediculous as that sounded.

  The German delegate had gone silent. Her chair scraped in the silence as she took a step back from the desk. Those silly little eyebrows now tilted in concern. Tamara realised that she was scowling, her fingers pressing the nub of bone at her wrist. She wiped the expression from her face. She had cultivated a reputation, and leadership was all about perception.

  It did not do to show emotion in front of these people.

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  “I hear and understand your concerns, Delegate Muller,” said Tamara, her voice composed. She was in control. “But we are at war. Not for land, not for food, and not for ideology. We are at war for our very survival. And for the sake of our survival I have been given the power to use any and all resources at my disposal.” She took a deep breath, trying—and failing—to keep her anger in check. She upped her dose, ignoring the increasingly insistent warnings.

  It didn’t help.

  “And had you been paying attention, you would understand by now that the concerns you have just wasted the last seven minutes, forty-three seconds of my very precious time explaining, are a—Moot. Fucking. Point.” She slapped her hand down on the polished wooden surface of her desk to punctuate each word. Frau Muller stumbled away, knocking her chair over. Tamara levelled a finger of her own. “With the power and processing constraints required to squeeze a goddamn supercomputer inside a watch, the device needed almost a week to fully initialise.” She clenched the finger pointed at Delegate Muller into a fist and shook it. “That buffoon managed to destroy it in less than a day.”

  “Ja, this one is destroyed,” said Delegate Muller, composing herself and stepping forward once again. Her eyes glittered beneath those silly little eyebrows. “What of the next?”

  Frau Muller scoffed. “Halt mich nicht für dumm.”

  Tamara had had enough. She turned slightly, dismissing the Delegate and full-screened her notifications.

  “And what of your Buffoon?” Asked the German delegate, her lips twisted into a nasty little smile. “What are your plans to deal with him?”

  “Any plans I may, or may not have are not your concern.” She sent a ping to the guards outside. “We’re finished here. The next time you schedule time with me, Delegate Muller, kindly ensure you do not waste my time, or else a more appropriate Delegate will be selected.”

  The office doors behind the delegate irised open and two hulking security personnel entered, taking the German lady by the elbow as she sputtered a half-considered retort.

  Tamara checked the time on her implant and found that there was a little over three minutes till her next appointment. A veritable luxury. Her attention was drawn by the flashing notification of priority mail.

  “Is this a joke?” she murmured as she read the title and full-screened the report from the head of her intelligence team.

  Frau Muller was at the doorway, and turned to shout over her shoulder:

  “Ze Germans make no jokes!”

  Tamara barely heard her.

  She sent a ping and pushed back the next meeting.

  Allan’s seditious words could be heard by anybody that live-streamed his WARGAMES! feed. They couldn’t stop that. But somehow his words were reaching further than made any sense. They were being shared—somehow. Saved and re-watched. Along with figuring out how the Drudge implants were being disabled, finding out how had been of the highest priority.

  Now… she had an answer. An impossible, ridiculous answer.

  She sent a coms request, her leg jiggling along as the Globo-Tele-Co jingle played on repeat. Finally, her request connected and a hairy, pale-faced man with dark eyes appeared in her overlays.

  Tamara spoke before he could even make a greeting.

  “You have answers?”

  A heavy pause.

  The wet, burbling sigh of a habitual smoker.

  “Da, Commander,” came the voice of Paval Sidorov, so thick with accent that her implant’s AI automatically subtitled the words for her.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Da. Am sure,” said Paval.

  Tamara waited. She’d worked with Paval over the years. They’d rigged several delegate nomination elections, and even, memorably, collapsed an ill-conceived coup in Mauritius. Better times.

  The wiry Russian spent his words with the frugality of the perpetually poor. Tamara knew she need only give him time. But it hurt her to wait, so she deployed another small dose, ignoring the flashing red warning.

  “We traded reproduction rights for information with a Drudge from Novosibirsk,” Paval began. It sounded as though he was reading dot points, words as emotionless as a computer program. “She sent us a virus. A Trojan, she called it. It allowed for P2P transmission of files, including itself, and gave access to a network folder containing saved footage.” He slipped a cigarette between his lips, lighting it with the flick of an old Zippo lighter, and took in a deep, wet drag. “We traced the data-stream.” The hairy man’s dark eyes glittered under heavy brows, through a veil of curling blue smoke. “It seems that some of the ancient Starlink constellation was not eradicated, and has been reawakened.”

  “Don’t fuck with me, Paval. Mars has been dark for more than a century. I thought they were all dead.”

  “Da. Last communications, 146 years ago.”

  “And you’re trying to tell me what? That after a hundred and fifty years, someone has revived the internet?”

  “Da. Martian Internet.”

  “Martian fucking Internet… You’re sure, Paval? No—don’t answer. You couldn’t make this shit up.”

  Tamara’s mind raced. “So that explains the spread of Allan’s words. What of the implant suppression?”

  “Da. Trojan allows for manual override.”

  “Can we implement an antivirus update to exclude it?”

  “Da. Am working on it.”

  “Good. And Paval?”

  “Da?”

  “Scour the WARGAMES! feed. I need to know if there are any Martians amongst the contestants.”

  She closed out the conversation and sent a high-priority request for a group call. Her leg jiggled at double time as, one by one, portraits rapidly populated upon her overlays.

  Despite her ever-escalating stress level, Tamara hid a smile. One whistle from her and the thirteen most powerful and influential people on the planet had dropped what they were doing to answer her summons.

  She kept them muted, forwarding the report from Paval, and watched as a range of emotions paraded across their faces. Disbelief, shock and in the case of the Indian, fury.

  The conversation that ensued followed predictable lines but nevertheless resulted in an effective management strategy. There was a good reason these thirteen had risen to this position.

  Aaliyah Al-Saud raised a digital hand, and Tamara gave her the floor. Her ageless face and kohl-ringed eyes gave away no emotion as she spoke.

  “I have become a student of history these past weeks. The Arthashastra lays out the principle: ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ Who better to fight against our interstellar enemies than one of their own?”

  There was a pause, and then every portrait lit up. Tamara denied them with a gesture and held Aaliyah’s channel open. Her mind raced, but she couldn’t quite wrap her head around the implications of Aaliyah’s words.

  “One of their own?” asked Tamara, her voice slurring slightly from her escalated alprazolam dosage.

  Aaliyah didn’t respond right away, a slight smile curling her red-stained lips. A pair of emeralds as large as grapes swung from her ears like pendulums as she nodded slightly. She leaned forward until her portrait displayed nothing but her dark-ringed eyes.

  “Where there is power, there is jealousy. Where there is control, there is subversion. It seems the heavens have the vision to see our potential. They bring gifts and promises. Do we wish to hear them?”

  Tamara exhaled slowly, her pulse thundering in her ears. There was a weight to Aaliyah’s words—the intangible weight that fate sometimes carried. What did the Saudi Prima know that she did not?

  Everyone was silent. All staring. Waiting.

  She had to respond.

  But every instinct screamed at her that what was about to happen would affect the fate of her world.

  “I will hear your proposal, Saudi Prima,” said Tamara.

  The words were hardly out of her mouth when a notification pinged.

  Permission Acknowledged.

  A wash of glitching static wiped away her interface.

  New Message Request.

  Unknown Caller.