’Neath Quicksilver’s Moon by Jaye Michael
Chapter Eighteen ― Traitor’s Moon

¿Hasta cuándo, oh simples, amarán la simpleza, Y los burladores se deleitarán en hacer burla, Y los necios aborrecerán el conocimiento?

— Proverbios 1:22

How long, O simpletons, will you love being simple-minded, and you tricksters delight in trickery, and you fools hate the truth?

— Proverbs 1:22

The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we must contend.

 — Marcus Tullius Cicero (attributed)
Loosely based upon the Second Oration against Cataline

“Gentlemen, we have a situation, and I’d like to solicit your input.” Group Captain Cyril Farquhar stood in the crowded Wardroom with his senior officers, seven in all. “Firstly, our ansible terminal has been turned off by Command, so we can neither verify nor ask for confirmation of what I’m about to show you. In fact, it’s only because of my own paranoia that I can show this at all. Wing Commander Smythe, could you play the recording?”

Smythe stood. “Sir! By way of explanation, gentlemen, Group Captain Farquhar asked me to retrieve this data cube from the ansible console, and I found it necessary to disassemble the device to do so, because it had been disabled by an interior circuit I didn’t know existed which caused the transmission and reception circuits to fuse. The recording speaks for itself. According to Group Captain Farquhar, the speaker identified himself as Air Marshal Vidkun Quisling, in command of 1 Group Air Combat. I have no reason to doubt the Group Captain’s statement.” He pressed a control and the image of the Air Marshal appeared on the Wardroom threedee console and spoke, starting in mid-sentence.

“ … Quicksilver colonists have revolted, and at last report had slaughtered those few armed forces stationed there and threatened to cut off further transfers of needed agricultural products and murder the commander of the civil forces, as well as remaining members of the government, unless we meet their outrageous demands. I hereby order you to proceed immediately to Quicksilver, destroy their stronghold in the central portion of the main town, and dispatch a contingent of Marines to capture, hold, and defend the planetary spaceport under martial law.”

“But, Sir!” the Group Captain’s voice said.

“This is a matter of world importance, Group Captain, and vital to the survival of Earth itself. Are you refusing a direct order?”

“No, Sir!”

“Then carry out your mission, Group Captain! You are to make no further contact with Command until that mission is accomplished, lest your ansible transmissions be intercepted and the mission be compromised.”

“Yes, Sir!”

The screen went blank and there was a low buzz of conversation in the Wardroom ….

 … which Farquhar cut short as he took over. “I’m sure that many of you have noticed what I did; ordinarily, we would have been contacted by someone lower in the chain of command, and the mere fact that an Air Marshal subverted that chain is suspicious, which is why I recorded what I did. What the recording doesn’t show, however, and the supposed Air Marshal didn’t know, was that I had just a few moments before this exchange been in contact with the ansible whose parameters are registered as belonging to the Quicksilver Base Commander, and had a fairly lengthy conversation with her immediately before talking to the supposed Air Marshal. She gave no hint of knowing anything about this so-called ‘revolution,’ and in fact discussed mundane details of daily life on Quicksilver in a manner which leads me to believe that the situation as described by the man dressed in an Air Marshal’s uniform did not, and does not, exist. For all I know, that man could have rented that uniform at a costume shop.”

There was another buzz of words between the officers and then Flight Lieutenant Henley said, “Sir! Isn’t it customary to transmit a written copy of any orders, Sir?”

Farquhar smiled, but not pleasantly. “Yes, it is, Flight Lieutenant Henley. I didn’t mention it because I didn’t want to appear as if I were leading anyone’s thoughts too strongly in any particular direction. It is ‘customary,’ and is indeed ordinarily a legal requirement under the Uniform Code of Military Justice in operations involving the use of deadly force, and a separate document detailing the exact rules of engagement for this particular action. Instead, all these details are left to my own imagination. The Air Force runs on paperwork, and I can’t requisition a replacement teacup for the Wardroom without submitting forms in quadruplicate, much less order a military assault on largely unarmed civilians, so it might appear as if the ‘Air Marshal’ was either unaware of proper military protocol or wanted to give himself ‘plausible deniability’ in case of any later enquiry, either one of which will put our collective asses in a sling.” He scowled.

Henley, obviously a brave lad, said, “But if I understand the situation, Sir, without properly signed and transmitted orders we’d be guilty of a war crime if we actually carried through an assault on a civilian population.”

Farquhar shook his head in sad disagreement. “Yes, and no, I’m afraid, and in fact we’re potentially damned if we either comply with the order or refuse it. The Air Marshal — if that’s what he is — could claim that the exigencies of the tactical situation required him to cease communication immediately, and that there was no time to prepare a written order, in which case we’re presumptively guilty of disobeying the lawful order of a superior officer if we disobey, unless we can prove otherwise, but the burden of demonstrating this would be ours. On the other hand, if we act as if the order were ‘legitimate’ and comply with it, he might might easily disavow giving any such order, in which case we might possibly be found guilty of war crimes as you describe, except that he doesn’t know about our recording — but we have also to assume that he might suspect that a recording might exist, in which case the recording could simply be made to vanish.”

“How so, Sir?”

“Right now, we’re mid-deployment. At the end of our mission — whatever it is — we’ll be expected to climb back into our coldsleep capsules like good little boys and go beddie-bye while our superiors — possibly the putative Air Marshal — take over the task of driving the airship around. Wouldn’t it be terrible if our airship ‘accidentally’ dived into a star?”

“Sir!” Henley looked a little green.

“Military discipline relies on explicit relationships of trust and authority between the ranks, and you see what happens, gentlemen, when trust breaks down. That’s what I meant when I said that our asses are in a sling. At some level, gentlemen, I believe we’ve been betrayed, and I don’t know whether this is a military conspiracy or a civilian one, but cold-blooded murder is contemplated upon a civilian population, so I have no reason to believe that the planners of this charade would hesitate to encompass our own destruction. Whoever did this has the capability of accessing our military ansible unit — the parameters of which are rarely shared outside the services — and possessed sufficient knowledge that they were able to manipulate a separate ansible airship control interface in such a way as to wake me.” Then, he furrowed in brow for a moment before holding up his hand to quell the comments already rising as an undertone.

“Oh, and I just thought, looking again at the recording, but there’s a further incongruity as well. I was told by this fellow to make no further contact until the mission is completed, but since the ansible itself has been disabled through physical damage, there’s no way to get in touch with anyone, much less report on the success or failure of the mission, This lends further credence to my tentative theory, that no one cares what happens after our attack on the colony, but that the man who issued those orders doesn’t want me to ask any one for clarification or written authorization.”

Henley asked, “Could this access to the command and control pathways have been done through simple ‘hacking’?”

Farquhar answered, “Theoretically, yes; practically, no. Ansibles work through exploitation of subtle quantum effects usually described as ‘spooky action at a distance.’ To put it simply, particles small enough to be affected by quantum effects can be manipulated in such a manner as to affect particles to which they’ve been intimately associated. Every particle in the Universe was once — at the moment of the ‘Big Bang’ of creation — associated with every other. The discovery of the ‘Ansible Effect’ meant that — provided we knew enough about a given set of particles, we could manipulate them in such wise as to cause other particles, anywhere in the Universe, to be instantaneously affected. There’s still a huge debate going on about whether this means that we’re intimately connected to the entire Universe or simply that everything is rigidly predestined, and that what we think of as ‘free will’ is mere hallucination.” Looking around the Wardroom, he saw quite a few uncomprehending stares.

“No matter,” he said. “I don’t really understand how it works either, but the ‘parameters’ we input into the devices essentially establish a quantum ‘connection’ between one device and another. The chances of discovering these parameters through chance are extremely small — although experiments using the combined processing power of many large scientific supercomputers operating in parallel have actually managed to accomplish it in several experiments — so we treat ansible communications as if they might be eavesdropped upon, even though it seems unlikely that anyone will actually accomplish this. We don’t know everything, though, and some clever child now growing up on Earth might eventually discover a method of discovering ansible ‘parameters’ so quickly as to be a trivial task, like scanning through radio frequencies looking for a signal, but with our present knowledge — as of approximately fifty years ago at least — it couldn’t be done easily, and the chances of doing it twice, with both the airship communications ansible and the airship control ansible, seem vanishingly small.”

“So what do we do, Sir?” It was Wing Leader Norman Bateson who spoke, but his uncertainty spoke for all of them.

“Gentlemen, what we’re talking about is potentially mutiny, and it doesn’t much matter whether the mutiny is on one side of the cusp of this thing or another. I can’t lawfully order you to mutiny against Earth Command, nor can I order you to comply with the orders I’ve just shown you, because I have serious doubts about their legitimacy, and yes, Henley, an unprovoked and murderous attack upon an innocent civilian population would be a war crime, if there were no clear indications of armed hostility, and if the so-called Air Marshal refuses to admit to giving that order, which I firmly believe to be his intention.” He paused for a moment, but no one seemed inclined to raise a question.

He continued, “I further believe that this entire situation has been designed to make us the ‘fall guys’ for someone with a political agenda. Our status as the dupes in this little plot carries with it considerable risk, I think, since we ourselves must be prevented from divulging any details of the plot, whether we carry out these ‘war crimes’ or not, since it seems clear to me that some criminal enterprise was planned, and our testimony might ensure the downfall of an unknown number of very powerful people whether or not we are manipulated into criminal activity of our own or not. As the old saying has it, ‘Dead men tell no tales.’ so to prevent the people behind these planned murders from being found out, it will be necessary to murder us all, and we ourselves are being used as dupes to taint the name and reputation of the Air Force itself in such wise that people will avoid using our names for their children for a hundred years or more, just as people still don’t name their baby boys ‘Benedict Arnold’ or ‘Guy Fawkes’.”

“There was a collective gasp, or groan, or whatever sound it was that each individual in the room was moved to utter. It was one thing to be threatened with death — that was a known hazard of a military career — but to be threatened with dishonor and disgrace, even by proxy, was especially daunting.

The Group Captain went on, grim-faced. “The military protocols for this sort of situation are quite clear, going all the way back to the ancient ‘Pirates’ of the Caribbean sea on the eastern edge of Central America. If we decide here to put this question to the enlisted ranks, our little band of brothers will be a democracy, with any delegation of authority or command subject to a secret ballot in which all of us have an equal voice. For the purposes of this meeting, and any further decisions along this line of action, I’m no longer your commander, but an ordinary airman trying desperately to save his own life, and those of his brothers-in-arms.” Group Captain Farquhar sat down at the Wardroom table for the first time.

They took the lander down to the spaceport, just Farquhar and Smythe, with sidearms holstered. They strolled up the road to where the administrative offices were located and went inside. There was no one at the reception desk so they walked a short way down the most inviting hall and found a door with a plastic placard affixed to it: Barbara Big Horse — Base Commander.

Farquhar knocked.

A woman’s voice inside called out, “It’s not locked, just come on in.”

They entered, Farquhar first, and stood side by side before her desk. “Captain Big Horse,” Farquhar said.

“Group Captain! You should have called ahead, and would have met you at the ’port.”

“Well, we experienced a few difficulties on our way here,” Farquhar said. “Perhaps this will explain.” He handed her the data cube.

She looked at it, slightly puzzled, and inserted it into a small threedee viewer on her desk. After watching it through, she blinked, than said, “I understand your problem. Of course, I surrender my forces completely, assuming your authority is lawful, but I wonder if you might be willing to have me transmit this vid through my own chain of command for clarification.” She started calling on her own ansible terminal, but said offhand, “If you wouldn’t mind, I think I have a neurolizer in that cabinet over there, so you can take possession of all the ‘arms’ I have right now. We did have more, but I worried about children getting hurt.” her face darkened into a scowl. “So we destroyed them all.”

Relief flooded through him, and he said, “That won’t be necessary. I was hoping you might do something like that, actually. We were getting along so well before, and I’d hate to blow anyone I like to smithereens. We were thinking of just refusing, but considered that might have serious consequences, until one of the enlisted men came up with the notion of invading, per orders, and asking permission to blow up the base with no loss of life, thus fulfilling the strict scope of our command without actually doing anything. He’s quite a creative fellow at skipping work as well, but I’m rather inclined to like him just now.”

“He does sound like a likeable sort of man, but hang on a sec …” The threedee showed a handsome Hispanic looking older man. He was smiling. “Senator Ortíz! It’s good to see you, but we have a little problem here, would you mind watching this feed?” She manipulated a control on her device and the ‘Air Marshal’ recording streamed in a little inset at the bottom of her screen.

The Senator’s jaw was set and he was glowering at no one in particular after he saw what had happened. “Thank you, Barbara, for bringing this to my attention.” Then he turned slightly to encompass the two of them. “And you are, Sirs?”

Farquhar introduced them both.

“Very good, Group Captain Farquhar and Wing Commander Smythe. If you’ll wait for just a few moments, I’ll have properly signed and countersigned documents in your hands countermanding these so-called orders very shortly.”

“Sir?” Farquhar spoke up. “I’m also worried about my officers and crew, Sir. Those responsible for this destroyed my ansible terminal through remote means, and I fear they may be plotting to murder any potential witnesses against them through harming the airship.”

“Then there’s no time to lose.” He turned to Barbara. “Barbara, could you scare up an ansible technician and get him up to his airship at once? Group Captain, we can cut any possible remote access to the airship control ansible in a very few minutes, which should restore full control of your airship to you, as well as provide new ansible terminals for any necessary communications. Barbara, please have him take a couple of spare terminals with him, and scramble the parameters so that no one will know how to find them without being told.”

“Done,” she said, and keyed in a code on her communicator. “Mike, could you get over to the spaceport double quick? Bring your ansible toolkit and a couple of scrambled spares. There’ll be a lander there and an Air Force officer either waiting for you or arriving soon.”

Than she turned to Smythe and said, “Could you hop down to the space port? Mike Robbins will be there very soon, since he lives and works just across the way. You can describe your problems and I guarantee that he’ll be able to fix them. I’ll be here with your Group Captain, so he can ensure that I don’t blow up anything.”

His face colored slightly, and he said, “I’m sorry, Ma’am, but we were in a pickle.”

“I’m sure you were, but you’ll all be fine now. If you’d like, please assure your pilot that he can land if you’d like. We’re fully-equipped for heavy freighters, so we should be able to handle a little packet boat with no problem, and that way you could be sure that the men aboard will all be safe and they could walk around a bit and breathe fresh air for a change.” She grinned and added, “The ‘rebels’ are fully pacified by now, I think.”

He glanced over at Farquhar, who nodded. “Thank you, Ma’am!” he said and hurried out the door.

“Now, Group Captain, if you’ll excuse me, I have to use the ladies room, and you have my parole.”

“Of course, Ma’am. I don’t mean to cause any difficulties.”

“Think nothing of it. Oh! and while you’re waiting,” “ she pointed at her terminal. “This blue button here in the lower left corner,” she showed him which one of the small row of color-coded controls she meant, just happens to select a direct connection to your sister, in case you didn’t have enough time with her before.” She walked toward the door. “I’m an extra for most of the Quicksilver series off and on, in my spare time, so she won’t be surprised to receive a call from my terminal, I can’t say the same about seeing you again. She talks about you often, you know, but like you had thought she’d never see you again.” She smiled and waved as she blithely walked through her office door.

He walked over to her desk and sat down, studying the blue button for a long moment before he pressed it. The screen flashed, and then a woman’s face appeared, and she said, “Hi, Barb … ” before she looked at him in confusion and her brows furrowed slightly, trying to puzzle out who he was. She was getting on towards middle age now, but she looked … happy, and she was beautiful. He smiled and said, “Hi, Judi. Long time, no see.”

She looked at him with puzzled attention, then knowledge swept through her and she screamed, “Cy!? Oh my God. Cy! You’re here! Wait right there! I’ll be there in five minutes!” Her face scrunched up and she started crying, “Oh, Cy, you gave us all our lives, and now you’re here. You’re right here. Hang on for just a few minutes more.” And she closed the connection.

He was nonplussed for a moment, and then realized that the Judi he’d known as a child would never have talked on a vidscreen if there was any chance of meeting in person, and Barbara had said — he thought he remembered her saying that — that she lived in town, so she must be nearby. He walked to a window that looked out on the fields behind the building, and they looked lush and green in the fading sunlight of a yellow sun. It must be late afternoon, a strange, but oddly familiar sight. Before they’d left Earth orbit, they’d spent the best part of a year training for the space environment, so it had been a long time since he’d seen a sun though an atmosphere, a long time since he been somewhere you could just walk outside without a pressure suit. High in the sky, he could see the faint outline of a quarter moon, and it looked a lot larger than the Moon he remembered from Earth. They must have tides here like nobody’s business. Then he remembered reading that there were two moons, so the tidal patterns must be very complex.

Just then, he heard the door open behind him. Thinking that it must be Barbara, back from her errand, he wanted to ask where Judi would be coming from, so he could go to meet her on the way. He turned and said, “Barbara …”

 … But it was Judi, and she had three children beside her, a girl, perhaps fourteen or so, and two strapping young men, who both looked to be in their late teens, just a little younger than when he’d first enlisted. He felt a little pang then, because they reminded him of all he’d given up, a family of his own, a home even, when he’d chosen the Air Force Academy as a way out for all of them, his brother and Judi, his Mom and Dad. ‘While I’ve been frozen, drifting in space and time, my younger sister has gone far beyond me,’ he thought, ‘and is a woman now, while in some ways I’m still a boy; no wife, no children, no home more substantial than a tin can, lost among the stars.’ He felt suddenly bereft, because he had nothing, was nothing, except whatever his sister had built upon the ruins of his life, and the one thing he could be proud of was that his body had been placed between her life and the creeping desolation that was the dying Earth, and that his love for her was untarnished.

She smiled at him, and he felt as if his heart would shatter, torn in half by mingled pride and jealousy. She spoke, “Cy!” and rushed to embrace him, weeping now, “It’s so good to see you.”

“Judi, you’re all grown up now, so big, bigger than life, bigger than I am now.” He had to bend down, but he buried his face in her shoulder as salt tears burned all his sins away.

“Jack, so good of you to come!” World Senator Ortíz was in a very good mood.

Jack wondered why, because his moods rarely corresponded completely to the context of a current situation. It seemed sometimes as if he were living on two planes of existence, the ordinary world that most people saw around them, and a secret world outside the world that only he could see. “Nice to see you, Senator. You called?”

“I did, Jack. I have a job you might be interested in, since it involves Quicksilver and Barbara Big Horse specifically.”

“How so?” Jack was cautiously optimistic. Ortíz might, after all, be using this to eke the last bit of drama out of his ‘scoutship,’

He took a folder from his desk and handed it over. “Take a look at this,” he said.

Jack opened the file. It contained a few lowrez mugshots of some sort of military officer in a fancy uniform, a data cube, and an extensive investigation file. He looked up in puzzlement. “And I’m interested in this guy why, exactly?”

“Because this gentleman, who purports to be an Air Force officer, ordered an unprovoked attack on the Quicksilver spaceport and the administrative center where your Barbara Big Horse has her office.”

Jack’s jaw clenched and his face hardened into controlled fury. “Is he?” he bit the words as he spoke, since no throat was available.

“I have no idea. No one who looks like this is a member of any military service, but the man had some sort of access to confidential military information, because he — or those he worked for — was able to wake the officers and crew of an Air Force spaceship on picket duty using secret military access parameters, and later destroy their ansible terminal using a method that even the ship’s maintenance officer was unaware existed.”

“So he could either be a stooge or a VR construct used as a mask for an actual officer.”

“I’m inclined toward the latter hypothesis, Jack, because it’s more difficult — as I understand it — to pretend a familiarity with military customs and jargon than one might imagine. Captain Churco has talked with the officer who received these orders, and he remembered no specific false note in the impersonation — if that’s what it was — other than the fact that the man’s supposed rank, that of Air Marshal, the equivalent of an Army General, was overkill for the actions being ordered. The holos you see, and the vid feed, were supplied by the officer and available because he’d ‘smelled a rat’ early on and started recording the exchange.”

“And the ‘rat’ he smelled was?”

“The uniform was what they call ‘Mess Uniform.’ which is only worn for formal occasions, so it implies that one wouldn’t want to shoot the breeze with friendly chitchat, thereby incurring the wrath of someone with important ‘places to be,’ and so might intimidate anyone with any insecurities. Group Captain Farquhar seems made of sterner stuff — Jorge says that you’d like him — and immediately realized that it also implies that some flunky wandered into the formal occasion and demanded that a general officer come outside and perform the military equivalent of washing up the silverware before going back inside and proposing a toast to the King.”

“I like him already, Senator, because he evidently stood squarely in the way of villainy most foul which concerns me personally.”

The Senator nodded approvingly. “Exactly so, although I’m given to understand that he had a few anxious moments puzzling out how to do it without sabotaging his career.”

“What authority of law will I have?”

“Because the planned action would have been overt treason under Earth law, and any steps taken in furtherance of the plot, including planning, conspiracy, coöperation, or failure to report same treasonous per se, I’ve taken the liberty of bringing you off the inactive list with the title of Plenipotentiary Investigator for the World Senate, with an impressive warrant card and badge which will be the envy of all your former fellows on the Force. In this position, you are not only authorized to ‘look at a king’ — if we had any worth looking at — but spit in his eye. Try not to kill anyone, but only because the paperwork involved can be tedious and time-consuming. Other than that, you have both the high justice and the low as far as I’m concerned.”

“Sounds good enough, since I’m feeling slightly murderous. I can call on resources as needed?”

“There’s a charging account in the file. I doubt that you’ll overdraw it.”

Jack smiled unpleasantly. “That will be just fine. I already have a few ideas. This data cube is an exact duplicate of the cube on Quicksilver?”

“That it is. Have fun,” he said brusquely and turned immediately to some other task on his desk …

 … and Jack felt adequately dismissed.

Copyright © 1993, 2010, 2011 by Jeffrey M. Mahr

All rights reserved.

DEDICATION:

To my loving wife, Betty. She completes me.

Copyright © 2011 Levanah