The End of All Things (38 page)

“I’m glad you trust me, Lieutenant.”

“I trust that you have nothing left to lose, Secretary.”

“That’s not quite the same thing, is it.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not. Sorry about that.”

Ocampo smiled again, and ran a toe into the sand of the beach. This simulation was about as perfect as I could make it, and from a programming point of view was in fact a bit of a marvel. The simulation was only detailed to the degree of Ocampo’s attention. Any part of the beach he wasn’t looking at was a low-resolution map. Any part of the sand that wasn’t directly under his toes was an undifferentiated texture mat. The beach existed as a bubble of perception around a man who himself existed as a brain in a jar.

“Did you make this beach for me?” Ocampo said. “As a reward?”

“It’s not a reward,” I said. “I just thought you might like it.”

“I do.”

“And I confess I didn’t make it for you,” I said. “Rafe Daquin had a birthday recently. I modeled it for him.”

“You still haven’t given him a body?” Ocampo asked.

“His new body is ready,” I said. “And he can move into it any time he likes. Right now, he’s decided to stay with the
Chandler
and pilot it from the inside. He’s really very good at it now. He’s done some amazing things.”

“I wonder how he would feel if he knew you’d given a gift you made for him to the man who caused his brain to be taken out of his body in the first place.”

“Actually he was the one who suggested I do it. He told me to tell you he remembers how lonely it was, and is, to be a brain in a jar. He hoped this might give you some peace.”

“That was very kind of him.”

“It was,” I agreed. I conveniently left out the part where Daquin told me that if I wanted I could program in a great white shark that tore Ocampo’s simulated body to pieces. It would not be convenient to the current situation. Rafe might have forgiven, in his fashion, but he had not forgotten.

“Lieutenant,” Ocampo said. “As much as I appreciate a trip to the beach, I’m not under the impression that you’re here because you and I are friends.”

“I need a little more information from you, Secretary. About Equilibrium.”

“Of course.”

“Will you give it?”

Ocampo didn’t answer this. Instead he stepped forward onto the beach, into the water that rushed up to surround his feet and make them sink just a little into the sand. Despite myself I smiled at this; it really was a good simulation that I had thrown together.

“I’ve been thinking about why it was I became part of Equilibrium,” Ocampo said. He looked back at me as he said this and grinned. “Don’t worry, Lieutenant, I’m not going to try to make this a monologue of disillusioned nobility that you will have to politely nod through. At this point I can admit that much of the reason I did was ambition and megalomania. That is what it is. But there was another part of it, too. The belief that the Colonial Union, however it had gotten that way, was antithetical to the survival of our species. That every other species we know had come to associate humanity with duplicity, savagery, ambitious cunning, and danger. That this is all that we would ever be to them.”

“To be fair, none of the rest of them are exactly angels,” I said.

“True enough,” Ocampo said. “Although the response to that is how much of that is them dealing with us. The Conclave brought together four hundred species of spacefaring beings into a single government. We can barely get any to tolerate us. It does suggest the problem is not them, but us, the Colonial Union.”

I opened my mouth to respond; Ocampo held up a hand. “It’s not the right time to debate this, I know. My point is this, Lieutenant. For whatever reasons, I aligned myself with Equilibrium; independent of that, the problem of the Colonial Union remains. It’s toxic to itself. It’s toxic to humanity. And it’s toxic to our survival in this universe. I’m going to help you if I can, Wilson. At this point there is no reason not to. But you have to understand that unless something happens to the Colonial Union—something big, something substantive—then all we’re doing here is kicking the can just a little further down the road. The problem will still exist. The longer we wait the worse it gets. And it’s already almost as bad as it can get.”

“I understand,” I said.

“All right. Then ask your question.”

“After Daquin attacked Equilibrium headquarters the organization pulled out from there.”

“Yes. The location was no longer secure, obviously.”

“We need to know where its new headquarters is.”

“I don’t know,” Ocampo said. “And if I did know definitively, they wouldn’t use it, because they would have assumed that you would have extracted the location from me.”

“Then I would like a guess, please.”

“Equilibrium is a relatively small organization but the emphasis here is ‘relatively.’ It can operate from a single base but that base has to be relatively large and also recently abandoned, so that its systems can be brought back up to operational capacity quickly. It needs to be in a planetary system that’s either friendly to the Equilibrium cause, or recently abandoned, or not heavily monitored outside of core worlds.”

“That should cut down on the number of available military bases,” I said. “At least that’s something.”

“You’re limiting yourself,” Ocampo said.

“How?”

“You’re thinking like a soldier, and not an opportunistic scavenger, which is what Equilibrium is. Or still is, for the moment.”

“So not just military bases,” I said. “Any sort of base with the requisite infrastructure.”

“Yes.”

“And not just of species obviously aligned with Equilibrium.”

“Right. They would know you’d already be looking at those. They’d want something that’s in the Colonial Union’s blind spot.”

I considered this for a minute.

And then I had a really truly stupendously far-fetched idea.

My computer simulation must have accurately replicated my eureka moment, because Ocampo smiled at me. “I think someone may have thought of something.”

“I need to go,” I said, to Ocampo. “Secretary, you need to excuse me.”

“Of course,” he said. “Not that I could make you stay, mind you.”

“I can leave this simulation running,” I said.

“Thank you,” he said. “I would like that. They won’t keep it running for more than a couple of minutes after you leave. But I will enjoy it until then.”

“I could ask them to let it run longer.”

“You can ask,” Ocampo said. “It won’t make a difference.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and despite everything Ocampo had done, I was.

Ocampo shrugged. “This is how it is,” he said. “And I can’t say that for all I’ve done I don’t deserve it. Still, let me put a thought in your head, Lieutenant. If that idea in your head pans out, and all your plans for it succeed, then ask a thing for me.”

“What is it?” I asked. I was concerned he would ask for a new body, which I knew the Colonial Union would never ever give him.

He anticipated that thought. “I’m not going to ask you to ask them for a new body. They won’t do that. Institutional forgiveness never goes that far. But I have a place, on Phoenix. Had it, anyway. A small summer cabin up in the mountains, by a small lake. It’s on a hundred acres of forest and meadow. I bought it ten years ago with the idea that it would be a place for me to think and write. I never did, because who ever does? Eventually I thought about it as a foolish investment. I thought about selling it but I never did. I guess I lived in hope I’d eventually make use of it. And now I never will. I won’t ever see that cabin again. Really see it.”

He looked back out, away from the beach, into an Indian Ocean that didn’t exist.

“If it all works out, Lieutenant, and you get what you want out of this whole adventure, then use your influence to get me that cabin, here, in simulation. I know that I’ll never be out in the real world. But if the simulation is good enough, maybe I can live with that. And these days I have nothing to do now but think. Finally, I would use the cabin for what I bought it for. A version of it, anyway. Say you’ll do that for me, Lieutenant Wilson. I would appreciate it more than you can possibly know.”

*   *   *

“Sedna,” I said.

Colonel Rigney, who was in the small conference room with Egan, Abumwe, and Hart Schmidt, frowned at me. “You’re trying to get me to use my BrainPal to look something up,” he said.

“Sedna is a dwarf planet in Earth’s system,” I said. “More accurately, it’s a dwarf planet just outside of Earth’s system, at the inner edge of its Oort cloud. It’s about three times further out from the sun than Neptune.”

“All right,” Rigney said. “What about it?”

“Ocampo said he didn’t know where Equilibrium’s new base was, but that they would likely take a base, military or otherwise, that was recently abandoned. And also one that we wouldn’t think to look for. One that’s in our blind spot.”

I used my BrainPal to turn on the wall monitor in the conference room. The image of a small reddish planet popped up. “Sedna,” I repeated. “It had one of the Colonial Union’s oldest maintained science bases. We used it for deep field astronomy and for planetary science; Sedna’s in a good place to observe Earth’s entire system and the orbital dynamics therein.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” Egan said.

“The last couple of decades it’s been largely dormant,” I said. “It’s had a basically caretaker staff of three or four scientists on a month-on, month-off basis, mostly to monitor some very long-term observations undertaken there, and to run the maintenance robots.” I popped up a map of the base on the monitor. “But the relevant thing here is that during its heyday, over a century ago, the base was far more active. At its peak of activity there were more than a thousand people there.”

“How do you know about it?” Hart Schmidt asked me.

“Well, and I’m not proud of this, back in the day I worked in the CDF’s research and development arm, and there was a staff member I thought was a real asshole,” I said. “I had him transferred there.”

“Nice,” Rigney said.

“He wasn’t the only asshole in that scenario, I realize that now,” I allowed.

Egan pointed to the base map. “We don’t have a caretaker staff there anymore?”

“No,” I said. “After Earth broke off formal ties with the Colonial Union in the wake of the Perry incident”—and here I allowed myself a small smile at the idea of my old friend precipitating the greatest political crisis the Colonial Union ever had—“we abandoned the base. Partly for political reasons, since we didn’t want the Earth to feel like we were lurking on their frontier. Partly because of economics.”

“So, a large, recently abandoned base, dead square in our blind spot,” Rigney said.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s not the only large, recently abandoned base that the Colonial Union or the CDF has, or that’s out there generally. I’ll create a list of sites we should survey. But if I were going to lay my money down on a site, it would be this one. We should check that out right away. Discreetly, obviously.”

“Well, are you busy?”

“Yes, he is,” Abumwe said. “I have another immediate task for him. I need him on Earth, right away.”

Rigney turned to Abumwe. “And you were going to tell us about this when, exactly?”

“I just told you,” Abumwe said. “Prior to this I have been babysitting nine representatives, getting them to agree to our terms.”

“How is that going?” Egan asked.

“As well as can be expected. The representative from Huckleberry is complaining, but the representative from Huckleberry is a complainer. The others see the opportunity here and are working on him. We’ll have an agreement on time.”

“Good.”

“And you will need agreement on your end, Colonel.”

Egan and Rigney looked at each other. “It’s in process,” Egan said.

“That doesn’t sound as optimistic as I would like.”

“It will get done. Right now the question is how messy it will have to be.”

“I’d still like to talk about Lieutenant Wilson going to Earth,” Rigney said. “We can’t send a ship there. Not now.”

“I have a solution to that,” I said. “Well, sort of.”

“Sort of,” Rigney said.

“It involves a bit of technology that we sort of abandoned a few years ago.”

“Abandoned why?”

“When we used it there was a slight tendency to … explode.”

“Explode?” Hart said.

“Well, ‘explode’ maybe isn’t the most accurate term. What
actually
happens is much more interesting.”

*   *   *

As I floated over the surface of the planet Earth, a thought came to me:
One day I’d like to visit this planet without having to toss myself down its atmosphere
.

The small wire-frame sled I was currently sitting in was the size of a small buggy and entirely open to space; only my combat suit and a small supply of oxygen kept the vacuum of space from eating me whole. Behind me in the buggy was an experimental skip drive, one designed to take advantage of the relative flatness of space at the Lagrange points of two massive objects, say, a star and its planet, or a planet and its moon. The good news is that the theory behind this new type of skip drive checked out, which meant that, if this new drive was reliable, it could revolutionize how space travel happened.

The bad news was that despite our best efforts, it was only 98 percent reliable for masses under five tons, and the failure rate went up in chartable curve from there. For a ship the size of a standard Colonial frigate, the success rate dropped to a very unsettling seven percent. When the drive failed, the ship exploded. And when I say “exploded” I mean “interacted catastrophically with the topography of space/time in ways we’re not entirely able to explain,” but “explode” gets the gist of it, particularly with regard to what would happen to a human caught in it.

We could never fix it, and the Colonial Union and the Colonial Defense Forces had a strange aversion to having their ships potentially explode ninety-three times out of a hundred. Eventually the research was abandoned.

But there were still the small, very light vehicles we created with the prototype engines attached to them, currently stored in a warehouse module of Phoenix Station. They would be the perfect way for me to get to Earth both in a hurry—because I would only have to travel as far as the nearest Lagrange point—and undetected, because the sled was very small and could skip very close to the atmosphere of the planet. It was, in short, perfect for the mission.