Chapter 1 - Contact

Contact is made by an exo-colony

L4 Dust Cloud

Forged in the fires of creation, the great iron rock, inert flotsam in the endless emptiness of space, but for a time a great ship, floated serenely in orbit, rendered lifeless by the nuclear fires of man.  Where structures had once gripped its surface, now only seared and radioactive ruins remained.

Once described as humanity's last hope for the future, human conflict had changed its purpose from life carrier to life taker.  Hyper velocity missiles had blazed from its axial mass driver, killing billions.  Now the ship stood as cold as the chill of space, as were the fusion reactors that drove it, the living spaces within it, and the cold sleep capsules humans needed to cross the vastness of interstellar space.

In the last days of the Long War, enemy warheads had blasted its craggy surface, their white hot nuclear pulses ripping grout gouts of liquid metal from its flanks, bringing death to the men within, turning the ship into a war grave.

Since those last days of war, it had hung silent, hidden, awaiting once again the touch of man.  For over thirty years, the only thing its dying sensors had noticed was the restless movement of L4's dust cloud.  Relentlessly moving, the dust particles had generated countless contact alarms, but there was no one aboard to listen.

One day men would return.  The question would be for what purpose?  Would it be to revive the ship as a weapon of war, or to restore it to its original purpose, a great space seed destined to convey humanity to the stars?

 

Angel Station

On the 14^th of April 2327 exo-system contact occurred.  Unlike contacts depicted by the movies, no silvery disc pirouetted over the Potomac, to land on President’s Park and disgorge a large silvery robot named Gort, nor did Martians land on Horsell Common and invade London with tripod machines armed with heat rays.  Instead, like a faint cry in a hurricane's howl, the radio transmission was barely detectable.  The considerable degradation the transmission had suffered over its multi-decade journey required all the resolution power of the Angel Station's Giant Ear for it to be heard at all.  For the Angels' station mainframe, it was just another short burst of noise in a roaring sea of interstellar static. 

What separated the transmission from the rest of the radio static was that it was in a old digital code originally broadcast at 2.4Ghz although what was received was a 1.2Ghz sub-harmonic.   Even so, it took the mainframe nearly a day to work through the petabytes of data collected over the previous day to confirm the signal was a signal and not the cosmic gibberish it normally received, and determine that it came, not from Earth, or any of the lunar towns, or the asteroid mining colonies, the Mars station, or a ship travelling through the source coordinates, or any other possible extraneous source, but from HR4523A, a G-type yellow-orange star in the constellation of Centaurus, and had been in transit for just over thirty years.

When the mainframe displayed the most interesting interstellar signals, the Angel operator raised his eyebrows, and then marked the signal as one requiring further processing.  Several hours later, the signal had been cleaned up enough to convert to an audio format, and he played it back.

Listening to the transmission on his headphones, the operator's only response was 'Wow,' before he down loaded the signal to his datapad and propelled himself down the weightless corridor which separated the observation deck from the living quarters to find his supervisor.

The operator then selected the room’s loud speakers as the datapad’s playback option and played back the transmission.  On it a woman’s voice screamed in strangely accented English, ‘Mayday, mayday, mayday.  Oh please help us.  Please help us.’  Then she shrieked in terror, the sound of a shot, and following that a sort of crashing sound that sounded like the microphone being thrown to the floor and stamped on. 

The message ended,  and his supervisor also said 'Wow,' a lot too before they both returned to the observation deck, and packaged the cleaned up signal for (in Top Priority encrypted) transmission to Earthgov’s Space Exploration and Development Administration (ESED) headquarters in Luxembourg (Director-General eyes only)

Shunfeng District - Beijing Crater Zone

 

 

It was late morning in the Shunfeng shanty town.  The town, for want of a better word to describe it was a vast huddle of crudely constructed shacks amid a sea of dust in the summer and mud in the winter, surrounded by hundreds of hectares of broken ruins, on what had once been a golf course.  Now it was a shallow slope three kilometres north of the lip of the Beijing Crater.

The people there did their best to eke out a living growing rice and vegetables on the Crater’s volcanic ash rich slopes, and irrigating the plots from the Crater’s lake.  For those prepared to take more risks with their lives, there was the task of picking through the ruins surrounding them, and exploring the tunnels which ran around and through the carcass of sub-Beijing on all sides of the Crater.  There were things of value to be found, even after a generation or so of scavenging.  Below ground, people would risk their lives penetrating the collapsed and collapsing tunnels of what had once been the largest sub-city in the world.  Occasionally they came back with riches, but mostly with scrap they could sell to the weekly scrap metal and flea market.  Traders would come up the broken highway from the coastal cities and trade for whatever was found.  The work was highly dangerous, as occasionally scavengers didn’t come back at all, and another family would be bereft of a person whose grave lay somewhere beneath their feet.

Alongside one of the small shanties, doing her best to avoid the humidity and the heat, sat ten year old Zhao Jin, waiting for her father to return from his morning scavenging expedition.  Like most of the other children in the town, Jin’s clothes were mostly clean, but ragged, and her feet were bare, calloused from walking every day without shoes.  She played a simple peasant’s work song on her konghou harp.  Every now and then, passersby down the rubbish strewn streets between the lines of shacks would stop and listen to her melodies.  The konghou was a cheap one made from timber recovered from the Crater, with strings her father Zhao Wu had somehow found in the ruins of the old sub-city.  Wu had bought it for her, as her way out of the shanty town to a better life along the coast.  Their poverty meant an advantageous marriage was not possible, and Wu had no intention of letting her marry any of the men in the Crater Zone.  Of course, marriage was some years away, and Wu aimed somewhat higher for his daughter than to become a beast of burden for a low born scoundrel, as he was wont to call his neighbours.

Wu encouraged her to practice every day, and Jin did so, when she was labouring in a nearby dairy farm, or tending the family vegetable plot, or attending the shanty town school,.  But hunger made their future desperate and uncertain.  A drought had brought famine to what had been the heartland of the Eastern Federation.  The Crater lake level had dropped, and had grown polluted by heavy metal leaching from the ruins deeper in the Crater.  The water was no longer safe for irrigation, or the cows, and had never been safe to drink.  The work on dairy farm, which was an odd description for a business which involved herding five stunted cows from one patch of grass to another around the edges of the shanty, and milking them each morning, had ended.  The farmer had taken his cows further north, where he hoped to find better forage for his animals.  Working with the animals had benefitted Jin.  Access to a daily supply of fresh milk for five years had meant that she had grown a lot taller than girls of her age, and was even taller than her father.  Her teeth were a beautiful white colour, and she often drew praise from her neighbours.  Her father had grown concerned as she developed into a beautiful girl.  There were rumours that slavers were stealing young women from the countryside and selling them in the cities.  He wanted her to avoid such a fate, and was anxious to get her away to somewhere safer than Shunfeng.

The shanty town school provided basic tuition to the town’s children for a couple of hours each afternoon, just enough to benefit them when they left looking for work in the reconstructed towns along the coast.  Jin’s teacher had told her of wht had happened to make things like they were today.  Once, where the shanty town stood, there had been the largest megalopolis on Earth, before the Federation’s enemies had brought utter ruination upon them, sprawled across and below the countryside.  It had been the capital of a mighty empire.  But for centuries, what had been once the Empire of China, and then for a while the People’s Republic of China, had gnawed at its own resource entrails, gradually turning its landscape into a despoiled and polluted wasteland.  In its hunger for new resources, it and its Eastern Federation allies had gathered their might, and waged a war lasting nearly a century on the Western Coalition states.  Initially, the Eastern Federation had waxed mightily, surging across the lands of its enemies, devouring but ever hungry for more.  Its strength brought slow defeat to the Western Coalition, until, on the very day that the Federation’s victory appeared assured, death had struck from the skies in the form of missiles accelerated to near light speed by a gigantic spacecraft lying hidden beyond the orbit of the Moon

The entire megalopolis that merged Beijing and the cities along the East China Sea coast had been transformed in an instant from a heavily populated ferro-concrete fortress and city into an apocalyptic wasteland.  The  sky had gone from dusty yellow to one filled with gigantic red and black mushroom clouds.  Then a firestorm had burned from horizon to horizon, leaving the great city a ruined charnel house full of the dead and dying.

 Three billion people living in the megalopolis died that day, as the earth itself heaved when the projectiles smashed through the Earth’s outer crust, and short lived volcanoes erupted fiery lava.  After the conflagration all that remained were mountains of charred rubble.  The impact shockwaves collapsed every structure for hundreds of kilometres and toppled cliffs and forests.  The Yangtze River once again rolled from the mountains to the seas unimpeded, as one of the projectiles annihilated the Three Gorges Dam, the resulting muddy torrent swept away everything in its path, further adding to the celestial death and destruction wrought upon the hub of the Eastern Federation.

That was over thirty years ago, and a life of sorts had returned to what had been the cradle of eastern civilisation.  Now, as sun rose high in the sky, the shanty people took up their midday protest against the local government.  Each person who could stand went outside, and bang metal on metal.  The aim was to apply pressure to the local government to better the lot of the people, and provide the long promised but never delivered civic improvements.

The noon clarion drowned out Jin’s practice.  She turned to preparing the midday meal.  Her father would return from the crater, and expect to see food ready.  For over thirty years, people had been picking at the crater, looking for things to sell at the markets.

Then she heard the screaming and yelling.  She went onto the street.  In the distance, in flatter land down the slope, people were milling around an open space in the middle of the town.  Some were fighting red uniformed Shunfeng Government thugs.  Ever increasingly, they were entering the town.  Sometimes it was to extort money from the shanty dwellers.  Other times it was to drag away screaming men and women who were judged enemies of the state.  Occasionally it was to force people to move away.  The midday protests were gaining attention in the international media, and even in the depths of the shanty town, news filtered through.  The local government disliked criticism, and its first response was to silence it.

Then she smelt the strong smell of wood smoke filled with the acrid odour of burning plastic.  A fire had erupted near the disturbance.  As she watched, the flames and smoke spread as the wind drove the flames deeper into the shanties, and the wind was driving it towards Jin.  The screaming and yelling grew louder, and over the next few minutes, a stream of blackened, smoke stained, and frightened people started walking and running pastherm, some carrying their portable possessions, but most with no more than the shirts on their backs.  In the middle distance, she could see clubs rising and falling as a pitched battle broke out between the hired thugs and the shanty dwellers.

Then the wind changed, driving the fire away from Jin, back towards the town centre.  As she stood there, transfixed by the pillars of fire and smoke, her father Wu returned.  Covered in grey dust, and bearing the scrapes and bruises the scavengers working the old city ruins suffered from, he clutched a very dirty sack with something heavy in it.

‘Get off the street,’ he yelled over the mayhem in the distance.  Jin rushed inside the shack, hotly followed by her father.

‘Stay inside,’ Zhao Wu said, as his worried daughter peeked past him at the smoke and flames in the near distance.  Soon mobs of armed men could descend on their street, as they had in the past.  Then Jin and Wu had fled into the hills, and returned to rebuild the shack from the inexhaustible supply of rubble and rubbish left behind around the Crater.  The way Wu was throwing their few possessions into another sack suggested that this was what he intended to do again.

Keeping an anxious eye on the fire, now flaring in the distance as the winded shifted erratically, comforted Jin, while packing their few belongings.

‘Why are we going father,’ Jin asked?

‘Because it is no longer safe here.  I found something today which means a better life for us on the coast.’  With that, he opened the dirty sack, revealing shiny gold and sparkling gems that reflected and enhanced the light shining red light in a cascade breaking through the gaps around the shack’s door.

‘With this girl, you can study music, and I can set up a small business.  But hurry, there were others in the shaft when we found the jewellery store.  I have no doubt that they will talk about what they found.  We must leave now.’

With that, they did so.  They had little, and so had little to leave behind.  Only a few utensils and a cooking pot filled the sacks, as they joined the throngs leaving the town, away from the fires.  The Shufeng Government thugs, whose job was to make them go, let them leave.  A long walk across the devastated countryside was ahead of them, but their wills were strong, and they would make it to where they needed to go.

Oxford, England

 

As funeral’s go, it was timeless.  The sky was deep late afternoon grey, with more than a promise of rain, the stoic mourners wore dark colours, the service had a procession of people speaking in front of the congregation, extolling the virtues of the departed, and at the graveside the funeral rites performed had not changed for centuries. 

For the young woman weeping  by the grave as her father’s coffin was lowered out of sight, it was unique, as anyone who has experienced the death of a parent can attest.  Her beloved father was gone, and her life, and all those others who were close to him had changed forever.

Dr Leah Clark was a tall attractive blonde woman in her early thirties, dressed in black blouse, skirt, and coat, with a jarring purple fashion stripe rippling through her hair.  She threw a handful of earth down on the coffin, and then a posy of lilies picked from her father’s garden.  Some of the other mourners three in earth or flowers, such as a medium height black man standing next to her, he too tossed in handful of earth picked up from the pile next to the grave..

‘Leah,’ he added a north-eastern North American accent  ‘I just want to say how sorry I am about your father.  I wish I had known him better.’

‘Thanks, Alec’ she replied in a saddened, clipped English accent.  ‘I am sure he would have liked to know you better too.’

‘I’m sorry, but I can’t stay for the wake,’ he added.  ‘I have to get to the airport,’ he replied in a flat tone.

‘You could take a later flight,’ she replied.  ‘What’s so urgent that you have to get back tonight.’

‘The Argus Six budget proposal.  Winkel wants it ready for the next ESED Board meeting.’

‘But the next round of proposals aren’t due for months,’ she remonstrated.

‘Apparently there is some money left over in the current budget he wants to put into Argus Six.  I think he wants to avoid under spending for this financial year.’

‘You’d better go then,’ she sighed indifferently.  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow at the office.’

With that she turned on her heel, and followed the other mourners to the cars.

ESED Headquarters

The following morning local time, at ESED Headquarters, on the top floor of a heavy concrete building at the edge of the fortified Earthgov Precinct in the Luxembourg city centre, the decrypted intercept arrived in the virtual desktop of ESED Director-General Doctor Erwin Winkel; a short man, with thinning ashen hair, artificially tanned skin, and piercing blue eyes. There it joined all the other urgent items demanding his attention in his virtual in-tray.  Before he got to looking at that, he did the first thing he did after making coffee with his office coffee machine, and that was review the newsvid feed on his desk’s personal data station. 

The latest big item of news were the ongoing rumblings of discontent among the East Asian states over the allocation of reconstruction funding.  That included a riot in a shanty town next to what used to be Beijing, which showed graphic and bloody violence between the rioters and the local police.  He sighed.  Even thirty odd years after the end of the Long War, massive reconstruction was still required across what used to be the Eastern Federation. 

The damage inflicted on Eastern Asia at the end of the war had been apocalyptic, and much still needed to be done.  Earthgov was theoretically representative of all the peoples of Earth and the off-planet colonies, but reconstruction of the areas which had been part of the former Western Alliance had always been given just that much greater priority.  The Eastern Senators were threatening a walkout from the Senate over the issue.  In response, the Earthgov President was struggling to bring pressure on the Easterners through the non-aligned states in Africa and the Pacific, but was noticeably failing to do so.  Like a lot of other people, Winkel thought the crisis looked serious this time.  There were already massive protests in the partly reconstructed East Asian cities, and there was a lot of bitter anger at Earthgov’s policies, particularly since western aligned senators were a majority in the Earthgov Senate.  There was already loose talk of secession, something the President was doing her best to down play.

Winkel had served as ESED's head for the past five years, having been promoted from ESED's deep space exploration division.  During the last decade of the Long War he had been responsible for planning strikes, using weapons of mass destruction, against Eastern Federation assets, and had been the key player in the Anubis project which had ultimately ended the Long War.

After the war, in an effort to atone for his personal responsibility in the monstrous deeds performed to end the war, he had joined the newly formed ESED and over the following three decades had risen in the ranks until he now occupied the top job. 

During that time, ESED had been responsible for enormous projects such as the Giant Ear, the development of permanently manned asteroid mining operations, the rebuilding and expansion of the lunar colonies, the reestablishment of the Martian terraforming programme, and the greatest achievement of them all, the construction and installation of Earth’s second space elevator.

All of those achievements paled before the portent of the message when he found it in his virtual in-tray.  For several long minutes he sat motionless as the voice in the message rolled over him as he played it over and over again.  Then he summoned one of ESED’s senior analysts.

A few minutes later, Dr Leah Clark, walked in.  Unlike funereal garb of the previous day’s, now she wore her typical dark green blouse and slacks combination.  She was ushered into his office, and he asked her to sit.

‘Leah, I’m sorry I missed Fred’s funeral.  I wanted to go, but I just couldn’t get away.  Did you get my card?’

‘Yes Sir, and the ESED wreath was very nice as well.’

‘Leah, something has come up that I want you to look at,’ he said.  Then, without additional explanation, he transferred the message to the datapad she wore on her left wrist.  She read the signal details, and then listened entranced to the audio replay.  Then she almost slid off her chair when the enormity of what it was overcame her.

‘My God,’ she said.  ‘What does it mean?’

‘I don’t know.  We may never have an answer,’ he replied.  But it is a call for help,’ Winkel replied with a brittle and clipped voice, ‘I think this is going to change a lot of things.’

‘That depends on whether ESED does something about it, Sir,’ she replied earnestly.

‘Tell me Leah,’ he responded in a less brittle voice, ‘if you were sitting in my chair, what would you do about it.’

‘Find out what the message meant,’ she replied smartly.

‘And how would you do that, hold a multi-decade conversation?’

‘Have we replied to this yet,’ she asked?

‘Not yet, it’s only just arrived.  But it is impolite to answer a question with a question.  What would you like to find out what it meant.’

‘Go there and ask myself.’

‘A worthy notion, but an extravagant one.  The Earth colonies, and I speculate here that there are others out there who have not yet phoned home, were established by asteroid ships we sent out two centuries ago.  Our ability to span space has not noticeably improved since then.   Sending another expedition would require decades to build such a ship, and decades to get it there.’

‘What about the Anubis,’ she replied archly, as if revealing a knowledge she had held secret?

‘Destroyed at the end of the war, as you well know.  I know you have read the Long War histories.  Its destruction enabled the armistice talks, and then the Earthgov Treaty.  Why do you ask about something that no longer exists?’

‘As you well know, Sir, the Anubis is sitting in the dust cloud at L4, and it is pretty much intact.’

‘Leah how is it that you claim to have information that would be well above you clearance level, should it be true, which it isn’t, of course,’ he said with a nervous twinkle in his eye?  He forced a note of levity into his tone.

‘My father told me,’ she replied promptly.

‘Fred was indiscreet indeed if he imparted such classified information to one such as yourself,’ Winkel replied in a somewhat serious tone, ‘assuming that that information was correct, of course.’

‘Cut the crap, Doc,’ she replied.  He laughed cheerfully in reply.

‘Okay, my young blood, you know the big secret, even though you shouldn’t.  The question therefore is whether we connect our response to this message with the existence of the Anubis.  You seem to already made that connection.  Assuming the ESED Management Board agrees with your assessment, what should ESED do next?’

‘Refit the ship, and send it to investigate.’

‘Rarely has the expenditure of so much treasure and effort been foretold with so few words.’  He paused for a moment, while her face fell somewhat at the potential of disappointment, while he looked at the message again.

‘However, I agree with you,’ he added.  Her face brightened considerably in response.  ‘ESED needs another big project, as does Earthgov.  I will discuss your suggestion with the Board this afternoon as a non-agenda item.  If it agrees, I will raise it with the President when I give her the monthly briefing tomorrow.  In the meantime, I will raise your data access clearance from Confidential to Top Secret.  I want you to do a preliminary report on the status of the Anubis that I can provide to the President tomorrow.  You’ll need this,’  as he punched in a password and a file reference into his datapad, and then transferred it to her datapad.  ‘That will allow you into my personal files.  There you will find a data store marked Egyptian Gods.  In that is all the data I have been able to scrape up on the Anubis since the end of the war.  There should be more, but the Easterners hit our Top Security data storage facility right at the end, and we lost most of the Western Coalition’s records.’

‘Okay, I will put together what I can.  Do you want me to try and predict costs.’

‘Do what you can.  But, instead of the bottom line you should focus on the benefits of the project as a unifying mission, on par with the Apollo Programme’s impact on the USA in the 1960’s.  That approach worked for NASA back then, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t work now.  That is far more likely to get her attention.  We could even sell it as a rescue mission.’

‘I’ll see what I can do.  Should I call in the some of the communication specialists to craft the message.’

‘Good God no.  I want to give the President an honest appreciation.  If I hand over a carefully crafted report which hits all the right notes she will smell a rat.  No, your sort of verve for this kind of mission is what she wants to hear.  In fact, if I know the lady, it will be what she thinks a lot of people want to hear.’

That afternoon, in ESED’s appallingly modern board room with its long metallic finish table, and faux jungle scene displayed on the Tri-D wall panels, the ESED Management Board had worked its way through a long agenda, when, in the General Business section, which generally preceded the much needed drinks and nibbles which ended such sessions, Winkel dropped the bomb.

‘Ladies and Gentlemen, before we conclude today’s meeting, I have some extraordinary news I want to share with you.’ 

The tired and rather jaded board members looked back at him, and some of the more attentive retrieved the meeting’s agenda on their datapads, and checked it for extraordinary news.  It wasn’t listed, and looked at him quizzically.

Then he told them what had arrived, and played back the message.  The effect was electric, as they all sat back, took the news in, collectively inhaled, and then started asking questions.  Winkel put up with the blizzard of sound for a moment, and then silenced them by raising his hand.  Then he outlined Clark’s basic plan.  Again they fell back in their chairs, and again followed that by demanding answers to a lot of rather more difficult questions.  Three hours later, the drinks and nibbles long forgotten, the meeting finally concluded, and Winkel had the genesis of a viable programme set out on the room’s vidscreen, which he transferred to his datapad, and copied to Clark.

One of the key questions was who or what would lead the programme.  Winkel had made it clear throughout the meeting that it had to be all inclusive.  If ESED tried to run such a programme by itself, it would lack the collective political clout needed to make the necessary headway.  Earthgov Defence Force was the other logical partner for the programme, and the Board reluctantly agreed for Winkel to raise it with the Defence Force Supreme Commander prior to his meeting with the President on the morrow.

Earthgov Defence Force Headquarters

The following morning, Winkel was ushered into the ornately decorated office of Field Marshal Heinrich Kessler, Supreme Commander of Earthgov's Defence Force.  A tall, fit and vital man with greying hair, with a slight stoop and an old shrapnel wound scar crossing over his right eye and cheek, he dressed in his dress uniform of dark blue, with five gold stars decorating his epaulettes and collar.  He greeted Winkel as an old friend, which he was.  They had worked together, off and on, since the last years of the Long War, and both had achieved the peak of their chosen professions.

After the usual pleasantries, Winkel made his pitch.  Kessler was at first staggered by the arrival of the message from Centaurus, and then bowled over by the enormity of the plan Winkel laid out.

‘If we lose the threat of the Anubis, the Easterners could try seceding from Earthgov,’ he said.

‘The Anubis is hardly much of threat at the moment,’ Winkel sneered.  ‘It would take months to get it operational again.  Actually trying to do so would undoubtedly start a new war.  This way we avoid that, and create a new status quo, one that I believe everyone would be happier with.  In any case, I doubt that this much appetite for a new war, on either side.  There is too much to lose for everyone.’

Kessler changed tack, and said, ‘You do realise that this project would require an enormous increase in funding for Earthgov.  If we try to do it within the existing budget, deep cuts will be required elsewhere.  The Defence Force budget is the obvious place to make the cuts.  To ensure future stability, the Defence Force needs to maintain its strength.’

‘I am well aware of that Heinrich.  I want to pitch this programme as something similar to the Apollo Programme of the 20^th century.  That enjoyed the full support of the US and its allies, and was supported by raising taxes.  The Anubis Programme will be much larger, requiring the full support of the whole world, and the funding by doing the same, or some other way.  Most importantly, I think it is a project that the President will take on, and willingly lead.’

Kessler appeared to soften his position somewhat, and he replied, ‘Then Erwin, we will need to at least change the ship’s name, otherwise the Easterners will never support it.’

‘I know.  We’ll think of something that is more acceptable.’

‘You can’t use the name Enterprise,’ Kessler said forcefully.  Winkel just laughed at Kessler’s sudden friviolity..

‘Of course not, although a lot of people will suggest it.  But we need something else before we worry about such trivialities.  We need a programme leader with the right level of skills and experience, with broad appeal, who everyone can accept, including the Easterners.  Someone who won’t be dazzled by the appointment, and someone with a great deal of common sense who can get things done.  I don’t believe that I have anyone like that in ESED, but I thought you would be able to find someone in Defence Force who meets those criteria.’

‘I’ll take it up with the Defence Chiefs.  Of course, there will be many officers who would vie for the role, but it would be better if we selected the right man, and just ordered him to take the job.’

‘I see the military mind has not changed any since I left.  You might wish to give the candidate more of a choice.  What I have in mind will in all likelihood be a one-way mission.  He and his crew are most unlikely to see Earth again.’

‘Why’s that, Erwin,’ Kessler asked?

‘Because there are other potential colony sites in that quadrant I want checked out.  Another six asteroid ships were sent there, and it makes sense to include them in the mission parameters.  But adding them significantly lengthens the mission, from decades to centuries in Earth time.  Short of going with them, we will probably not live long enough to find out even how the first colony encountered fared all those years ago.’

Kessler visibly shuddered at the thought, not something a seasoned commander would normally do, ever.  Winkel was comforted by the sight.  It meant that his old friend had not lost the humanity that had kept them friends for so long.

‘Your meeting with the President.  Do you want me there as well?’

‘Thank you, Heinrich, but no.  I will mention that I have sounded you out, and that you are supportive of the mission goals.’

The shook hands, and Winkel returned to his office to review Clark’s preliminary report, and prepare himself for his meeting with Earthgov’s President.

Earthgov Presidential Palace

After lunch, where he carefully avoided the temptation of fortifying himself, he made his way to the President’s office in a more attractive building in the Precinct.  Inspired by the now lost Élysée Palace in Paris, albeit with less ostentatious decoration, and a heavier ferro-concrete fallout shelter feel to it, the building was located at the centre of the Precinct, and was surrounded by a four story high featureless concrete wall, with guard towers just inside the wall every fifty metres or so. 

At the front lobby, Winkel’s internal identity chip was scanned by Earthgov Security, and he was passed through.  Several layers of security later, he was admitted into the President’s Office, where he had to wait for a further half an hour while her prior meeting ran long.  This was normal, and Winkel spent the time running his pitch over and over in his mind.  From the lobby he could see into the Palace Gardens, currently done in the pseudo- Capability Brown style of sweeping artificial landscape, although the size of the gardens did not suit the style well.  An artificial brook ran through the garden, ending in a large pool which dominated the view.  Colourful waterfowl occupied the little island in the centre.  They were the only creatures in the whole palace who didn’t need a permit and a really good reason to be there.

Looking at Clark’s report on his datapad again, he made a few amendments, and then it was time to see the President.

The President’s aide showed him in, and he found President Sizani Kazulu working behind her desk. Upon sighting him though, she rose and walked across the room to greet him.  A tall elegant woman, she carried herself with the considerable grace of her people.  She was dressed in the richly decorated clothes East Africa was famous for.  She was on the down slope of her first term in office, with Presidential, and Senate elections due in just over a year.  At the last election she had been the non-aligned nations candidate, and had been successful in garnering a bare majority of the popular vote among Western and Eastern voters; mainly because they were not going to support the other side’s respective candidate.  However, her popularity with the Earthgov electorate had been slumping with the current crisis, which was why Winkel judged her more likely to be receptive to his proposal.

‘Doctor Winkel, it is a great pleasure to meet you again,’ said in her soft East African accent.

‘Madam President, the pleasure is mine.’

With that they sat down at the office’s nest of couches set aside for the purpose of less formal meetings, and Winkel got down to the briefing.  These monthly meetings occurred to update the President on ESED activities.  As a result, Winkel hurried through what he was originally planning to report, and quickly got to the main point of why he was there.  President Kazulu may have wondered at the brevity of this report, but the absence of questions suggested that this brevity was not unwelcome.  To Winkel’s alarm, she seemed to appreciate it.  Now he worried that his previous briefings had been a little too fulsome.

‘Madam President, I want to bring to your attention extraordinary news.  Two days ago, the Giant Ear picked up an human transmission from what we believe is a colony in the HR4523A system in the constellation of Centaurus.  It was sent about thirty years ago.  We believe that this means that humans have established a colony there, and...’.  Kazulu shushed him before he could continue.  Her aide stopped taking notes on her datapad’s Tri-D keyboard, and also sat back, eyes suddenly widened in surprise.

Even as the President dragged in a deep breath, Winkel could imagine the metaphorical levers and gears moving in her brain as she determined how best to utilise this news to her best political advantage.

‘’That is indeed incredible news, Dr Winkel,’ Kazulu breathed out.  ‘We must respond, and soon.  We must reach out to our brothers and sisters among the stars.’

‘There’s more, Madam President,’ he added.  He played the transmission, and the President and her aide both frowned at the fear and violence explicit in the message.

‘What can we do, Doctor, to answer this cry for help,’ Kazulu asked?

‘I have something in mind which would do that, Madam President,’ Winkel replied.  ‘But it will require a considerable investment on the part of Earthgov, indeed, everyone on the planet will need to contribute in some way or another.’

‘And what is that, Doctor,’ Kazulu demanded, her accent harshening a she realised a major commitment was being asked for?

‘Send a ship to Centaurus, and to the other colony sites in the quadrant, and determine their fates.’

‘But that would take many years, Doctor. I would be long out office by the time such a task could be achieved,’ she added with a level of ingenuousness that clearly demonstrated how much the news had caught her off guard.

‘We could have a mission in a position to leave in a year, Madam President,’ Winkel replied in a supportive and generous tone.

‘And how would that be possible, Doctor,’ she asked, with an edge to her voice which indicated she knew exactly what his reply would be?

‘As you know, Madam President, the asteroid ship Anubis is currently hidden in the L4 cloud.  She requires an extensive refit, but could be ready to leave the solar system in about a year.  I recommend that we positively explore this option.’

‘Are there any other options, Doctor,’ Kazulu asked.

‘Of course, Madam President.  We can do nothing, or send a message requesting further information, but be prepared to wait sixty years for a reply, or we can build a new ship.  Short of an astonishing breakthrough in space propulsion we still will need an asteroid ship to make the journey.  We can have a new one ready in fifteen to twenty-five years, and arriving in the Centaurus system thirty five to forty years after that.’

‘Such a long wait is unacceptable to me, and I believe, the people of Earth,’ Kazulu replied.  ‘They will want to know the fate of the people that went to the stars so long ago, and the truth behind the message.  How soon can you develop a mission profile based around the Anubis.  In the meantime, I must consult with the Cabinet as to whether Earthgov and its members want to commit the considerable resources that such a mission will require.  I presume you have prepared some preliminary estimates for me.’

‘Of course, Madam President,’ Winkel smoothly replied.  He tapped his personal datapad, and transferred Clark’s report to Kazulu’s personal data station on her desk.  The President made a point of not wearing a personal datapad as it clashed with the traditional fashions she normally wore.

‘The report gives some preliminary numbers only.  They are high, I’m afraid, but we hope to refine them once we have inspected the Anubis, and determined what needs to be done to get it into a ready condition.’

‘I understand, Doctor.  The Cabinet is meeting in three days.  I will introduce your report as a non-agenda item, and test the water for their interest in announcing that we have received a cry for help from an Earth colony, and the existence of the Anubis at the same time for those members not already aware of its existence.  I for one would be pleased to get rid of that damned thing.  The Easterners have been after me since I took office to disarm or destroy it.  The Western states demand the opposite, and the Defence Force has counselled me to do nothing as well.  They don’t want to lose their edge in a future war.  Neither I or any of my predecessors have wanted to be put in a position to use it.  This offers myself and future Earthgov leaders a way out.  A strong and good way out.’

‘I agree, Madam President.  I believe that this project will do more to unite the people of Earth than anything else we have tried in centuries.’

Winkel left the meeting with happy feelings about the future.  It wasn’t wrong to stimulate self-interest among the politicians to get things he wanted done.  It was an ancient trick used by advisors since the dawn of time.  The problem was that the politicians were usually wise to it, but Kazulu was not well positioned to look this particular gift horse too closely in the mouth.

The next question was the programme leader.  For that he had to rely on Kessler and his subordinates.  They would find someone who would be just what he wanted.  Winkel was also wise to the machinations of officials.  The ability to maintain control in a fluid environment was their first and often their only aim.  Kessler would make every effort to keep the programme under some sort of military control.  Which was fine, because if things went wrong, Defence Force would carry the blame.  The ball was in Kessler’s court.

Earthgov Defence Force Headquarters

The following day, Kessler called an unscheduled meeting of his senior advisers.  Admission to the conference room was for the dozen or so four star commanders active in the Defence Force.  Some worked in Luxembourg, while the remainder teleconferenced in from commands around the world.  He also took the precaution of putting out a rumour it was budget bid related.  This quelled the opportunity for some of the more bizarre possible rumours, although he noticed some of the less able officers surreptiously updating their resumes.

The resident generals trooped in, dismissing their aides at the door to the conference room, while the others made their presence felt through Tri-D representations bulging from the wall display units.  All of them wore their normal dark blue day uniforms., with their stars of office decorating their epaulettes and collars.  Earthgov’s Defence Force did have full dress uniforms for formal events, but this wasn’t one of them.

‘Gentlemen, and Lady,’ Kessler said as he acknowledged the sole woman to rise to such an exalted rank in Earthgov’s Defence Force since its establishment.  The Defence Force had been much criticised for this apparent glass ceiling, with occasional protests from women’s groups at Defence Force public events.  The Defence Force’s defence was that the Defence Force was evenly gender balanced in all positions of two stars and below.  However, female officers at that rank or approaching it tended to be poached by private sector companies before they were elevated to three stars and above.  Now they were Chief Executives or Board Members of some of the most powerful mega-corporations instead.  In practice, Kessler was somewhat more concerned that there wasn’t quite as much comparable private sector demand for the very senior male officers.  He wasn’t quite sure what to make of that.

It didn’t take him long to brief his subordinates.  On the whole they took the news from Centaurus well.  Some of them appeared to think the passionate cry for help was also a call to arms, and appeared to relish the opportunity of commanding troops in a real war.  Oddly enough, the ones who thought so had come into the Defence Force after the end of the Long War, and hadn’t seen much or indeed any real action.  The actual veterans of the war were rather more reticent on the topic.  A few raised the issue of not having the Anubis available if a future world war was threatened or broke out, but Kessler shut that complaint down.  The fact that it had taken over three decades to even begin to repair the damage done to the planet by the Anubis the last time it was used was a pretty good argument to avoid having it around in the future.  As Kessler privately ruminated, leaving such weapons lying around tended to give people ideas.  The fact that he already commanded enough firepower to utterly annihilate humanity, and render the entire planet a sterile rock, didn’t seem to impress them.  They still wanted the really big weapon, just in case.

It was when Kessler got to the point of explaining the need for Defence Force involvement, specifically leading the project, that the debate got more heated.  Everyone of them made it subtlety clear, and sometimes rather less so, that he or she was the man for the job.  In the case of the only four star woman, Kessler had never been sure of her actual gender.  It was generally accepted she was probably a woman.  It was, of course, illegal for him to ask, as Earthgov’s human rights laws mandated a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy for all employers when it came to gender identity matters.

Kessler then mentioned the projected mission duration, and the onrushing enthusiasm died away as the people in the room realised just what they would be signing up for.  The discussion got more sensible after that, and they quickly set out a short list of criteria for the person they would be recommending to the President as the person with the right stuff for the job.

The commander they wanted needed to have the requisite space operations command experience, be technically competent, be very good at getting on with people, be able to get the impossible done, and be acceptable to all the political blocs within Earthgov.  He asked each of the generals for recommendations.  The meeting ended, with Kessler reminding them that the matter was confidential, and to use the budget bid cover story when asked by their subordinates.

The following day, a dozen responses lay on his desk.  The same name featured on nine of them.  Kessler knew the man, but took the opportunity to review his personnel file, and give it a much more careful read.  Then he got on his quadplex and started making inquiries with the man’s former commanders to get the low down on what he was like.  The responses were uniformly positive.

A few hours later, he made his decision, and prepared a formal communication to the President’s Office with the recommendation for the commander of the mission to the stars.  All that remained was to cut the relevant order, and have the officer returned to Earth from his current duty station.

Earthgov Presidential Palace

Two days later, the Earthgov Cabinet met.  President Kazulu was in fine form, driving the agenda items through as quickly as possible.  There was no real difficulty in this process.  One of the advantages of being a politician was that all the decisions were generally sign posted by the officials writing their papers.  While the politicians set policy, or at least thought they did, it was the officials who really set the direction of their decision-making, although there was the occasional politician who broke away from the herd, and made things difficult for a while.  Regular elections and term limits generally got rid of them eventually, while the career officials saw governments in and saw governments out.

‘That concludes our agenda business,’ she remarked.  ‘There was incipient movement for the fresh coffee, tea, and snacks recently delivered for the morning refreshments.

‘Before we finish, there is a non-agenda item we need to discuss.’  The anticipatory movements ceased, and the Cabinet’s attention was dragged back to the President.

Then she told them of the message from Centaurus.  Despite the worldliness of the men and women around the table, each appeared shocked and appalled by the message played back to them. 

Then Kazulu interrupted their responses by saying, ‘I want Earth to respond to this cry for help, and in doing so, reach out to our brothers and sisters in the stars.  I want to send a new mission, a manned ship which will convey our greetings, our support, and our willingness to reconnect with the human inhabited planets out there.’

In the hubbub which followed, she set out her plan to refurbish the Anubis, and send it in a year.

The faces around the table generally fell into three expressions.  There were those who didn’t know that the Anubis had survived the war, and had been available to use all that time.  Then there were those who did know and were bowled over by the news.  Then there was the third group wore a more sour expression, as they realised that they had to give up their ace in the hole and also sell a very expensive plan to the voters.  Because of the overlap between these three reactions, people’s expressions were shifting between a wide range of emotions.

‘Madam President,’ Kirsten Bouvier, the senator elected from the 7^th French Republic, stated cautiously,  ‘The news you bring is incredible, but there will be questions raised about the sense of sending our guarantee of future peace on a jaunt to the stars.  The Anubis has been the means of ensuring that war was impossible for over thirty years.  Why should we give it up now.’

‘Are you suggesting that we need that mass murder engine hanging over our heads to blackmail us into supporting the peace,’ snapped Zhang Zhou, the senator from the Republic of New China.  ‘What of the mutually beneficial progress made since the end of the war.  We have no interest in future conflict.  But now we wonder at the sincerity of what was once the Western Coalition.’

‘Senators,’ called out Kazulu, trying to nip the hostility between the Western and Eastern camps in the bud, ‘if you please.  This project is aimed at unifying the peoples of Earth behind a collective goal.  It is our intention that all the benefits of this programme will be evenly spread among all the nations.  I see this programme as the first of many, as we search for, and reconnect with our brothers and sisters beyond the stars.  For the greater good of all humanity, we must stand united, not apart.  This is our opportunity to do something together, for the benefit of all.  I commend all of you to take that message back to your constituents.’

After that burst of oratory, the meeting calmed down, and the senators started seeing some of the potential benefits that such a programme might have in individual electorates.  Pork barrel politics was never far from the surface of their political personas, and something which enabled them to satisfy domestic demands for more Earthgov spending in their economies was never unwelcome, particularly if it helped redress the economic balance between the Western and the Eastern aligned states.  They even agreed to not leak the news until the President announced it herself.  She had darkly hinted that leaks would be investigated and punished in a anti-pork barrel way, and they took the hint.

Kazulu left the meeting with a feeling that her plan to unify the Cabinet behind her vision was going to be supported. 

The Easterners were going to be very supportive, mainly because it removed the Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, and also promised significant spending to aid the recovery of the Easterner economies.  The Westerners were going to object but there were other ways of changing the minds of national leaders, and that was through the force of public opinion, which Kazulu had every intention of whipping up in support of the mission.  The non-aligned states would fall into line because they could see the economic and technology transfer benefits of such an international programme.  Moreover, none of the national states would so foolish as to stay out of what promised to be the most popular move made by Earthgov since its inception.

Now that her political future looking a little brighter, President Kazulu’s hopes renewed for the first time in months.  All she and her supporters needed to do was stay the course, and shore up support for her and her project as and when it was required.

She called in her communication advisers, and started the next step in exploiting her administration’s grand new vision.  Much work was required before the programme could go public.