The Changeling Game, Chapter 72

72.
The Planet-Killer’s Hit List

“We understand that you have a report for us, Audrey.”

She nodded, studying the faces—the few she could see—on the screen. General Toal, Todd, and Dennis were visible; most of the other participants had their faces hidden and their names reduced to first letters. Apparently, she wasn’t cleared to know who they were. Most of the others couldn’t see her face, either, though.

She also, apparently, wasn’t cleared to know how they’d stolen Quintessa’s proprietary tech for making instantaneous calls across the light years… but she had her suspicions about that. She’d already been warned not to ask.

“I’ve identified the pattern in almost all of the planetary destruction cases on record,” she told them. “And, based on that pattern, we can predict which planets are next, for roughly the next fourteen years.”

“When will Helion Prime fall?” Toal asked before she could continue.

“Sometime in October 2521, so probably less than eleven Standard months from now.” Merry Christmas, she didn’t add, although she was tempted. That was four days away and it felt like it was going to be her worst since the one on Helion Prime itself. “In between now and then, around May, we should expect to see the Aquilan system fall. I’m guessing the Quintessa people didn’t talk about it in their call because it’s not a shipping or travel hub. It’s almost as much of a backwater as the planet I’m on.”

“Audrey,” Michael murmured behind her.

She made herself let it go. For now. She was going to try to plead her case to General Toal again at the end of the call.

“What is the driver behind the pattern?” one of the concealed speakers asked, their voice digitally altered.

Yeah, let’s just cut to the chase, why don’t we? “Level Five Incidents.”

“Officially, such incidents don’t exist. How have you managed to track them?”

Because I have nothing else to do with my time… “I started with a database of all incidents in which a Star Jumper was reported damaged or destroyed. I then excluded any case where the Jumper was later put back into service. That doesn’t happen with real Level Fives. Next, I excluded cases where any of the passengers and crew survived and their whereabouts could be traced and confirmed. Real Level Fives have no known survivors. Something inevitably ‘happens’ to everybody who was on board.”

With one exception, that she couldn’t help feeling a little proud of. Officially, all of them were dead, too.

“What did this give you?”

“A list of forty-seven incidents in which a Star Jumper was irreparably damaged, or was destroyed, or vanished in transit,” she told them, “from the three earliest missing ships, the Isli, the Nick Fury, and the Tenth Crusade, to the ‘implosions’ of the Scarlet Matador and the Lucy Ricardo in May of 2517. I built a timeline of the incidents, along with their locations where known. Next, I built a database of what the Federacy calls ‘Black Planet Incidents.’ Every time a colony planet failed, for any reason, and the planet was declared uninhabitable in the aftermath. Narrowing those down took longer.”

“But you did narrow them down,” General Toal prompted.

“Yeah. Thirty-two cases, one of which is still questionable. And thirteen future targets, based on the pattern that emerged. The first attack occurred in the Ilanga system, one hundred thirty years ago. Fifty million settlers vanished in under a week. The Ibhubesi, one of the early colony ships in the second generation of Star Jumpers, experienced a catastrophic failure when it arrived in 2144. It disintegrated during its descent through Ilanga Prime’s atmosphere. I know that doesn’t necessarily sound like a Level Five Incident, but it’s all about what might exist on the other side of the threshold it was straddling. If, for example, the atmosphere of the other ’verse’s Ilanga Prime was highly corrosive, that would explain the recordings we have of its destruction.”

“So the fourth hypothetical Level Five Incident, which took place 376 years ago, led to an attack 246 years later?”

“Yeah.” Audrey activated her chart on the main screen so that all of the viewers could see it. “In each case that followed since then, the attacks on colony worlds that reduced them to ‘black planets,’ or ‘black rocks,’ have happened in order, corresponding to probable Level Five Incidents that occurred in-system. The only exception is the attack on Furya twenty-nine years ago. I can’t find a corresponding Level Five Incident.”

“Why are you including it in your timeline, then? If it isn’t part of the attack pattern—”

“It is,” Michael said from behind her. “I was there. It’s absolutely part of the attack pattern.”

Audrey switched the main screen over to a collage of video images, many of them similar to the one that she and Michael had watched a little over two months earlier. “This is surviving footage of the attacks from a dozen of the identified worlds. The top right footage comes from Furya.”

“Furya is also the only world in the pattern that hasn’t been reduced to ‘black rock’ status, and is still marginally habitable, even recovering,” one of the hidden speakers commented. “It’s a break in the pattern, yes, in more ways than one. Perhaps there’s a different kind of incident that triggered its inclusion, and somewhat different treatment.”

“The exception that proves the rule, maybe?” another hidden speaker suggested.

“Could be,” General Toal agreed. “As for the rest of the pattern… the data is quite telling. And the attacks, as our intel previously indicated, have been slowly accelerating. There was a decade between the attack on the Ilanga system and the next, on the Sorj system, then nine years until the attack on the Tjindu system. Six Indigenous Australian populations were rendered ‘extinct’ by that probable genocide. The quiet period between attacks has been steadily shrinking, and now the timeline is indicating the likelihood of three strikes in slightly over a year.”

“And yet you predict that the remaining eleven attacks, after the Aquilan and Helion systems, will take place over a thirteen-year period,” another hidden speaker noted. “Why?”

“The Coalsack nebula, the Aquilan system, and the Helion system are near neighbors,” Audrey explained. “They used to share a trade route, but it was discontinued after three Star Jumpers experienced Level Five Incidents along it within a year of each other. One ‘died’ in the Coalsack nebula. It ruptured shortly after transitioning back into U1 within the nebula itself. Officially, it was holed by a massive asteroid, but there wasn’t one recorded as passing through that space in U1 itself, and some of the other surviving readings from the ship are really weird. The next seemed fine when it docked at the space station above Aquila Prime, but all of the cargo and passengers that got shuttled down to the surface burned up during entry. The shuttles carrying them were unharmed, aside from fire damage on their insides.”

Tomlin, she suspected, had been thinking of that very incident when he had ordered the Scarlet Matador to bypass Tangiers Station B and land on the planet’s surface instead.

“And the incident in the Helion system?”

“You know how an unidentified group of terrorists supposedly blew up the Mary Prince during its entry above New Mecca, sixty years ago?”

“Bloody hell,” one of Toal’s unseen colleagues muttered.

“A week after that explosion,” Audrey added, “the Quintessa Corporation announced four new routes to replace the route that the ships in those three Incidents had all used. I know, there’s a lot of supposition and inference getting drawn into all of this, but all of you know just how spotty and heavily redacted the records we’re working with are.”

“So you believe that the shorter timing of the next attacks is due to the close proximity of the three systems, and that we should expect intervals of roughly a year after that,” Toal prompted.

“Yeah. And there are possibilities of unforeseen pauses.” She highlighted five different spots on the chart. “I don’t have any guess why, but there are five times in the last hundred-twenty years when the attack pattern got pushed back by a few years each time. Maybe we’ll get lucky and there’ll be another pause soon, but I wouldn’t count on it.”

“So you are predicting the fall of the Aquilan, Helion, Melpomene, Tulsa, Trafalgar, Clovis, Oahu, Maneki Neko, Catalan, Cascadian, Dubai, Nineveh, and Tangiers systems over the next fourteen years?” another unseen participant asked.

“If the current patterns hold, yeah.”

“That’s a lot to accept,” yet another participant said.

“Even if you don’t want to believe Audrey’s analysis,” Michael said from behind her, “which I think is solid, you only have to look at the intel coming from our spies in the Quintessa Corporation. The Corporation is predicting the same thing and has already begun moving its assets off the worlds in question. A week ago, the resupply route to Furya got shifted back to Tangiers Prime, and two other minor routes that relied on a stop in the Helion system got moved away a month ago. They can’t shut down the major routes yet without revealing more than they seem to want to, but there are six new test routes in the Sirius Shipping dockets that bypass the Helion and Melpomene systems. Oslo Shipping has eight upcoming test routes, one of which also bypasses the Tulsa system. And no new ships are under construction in any of those systems’ shipyards. Their schedules have shifted over to repairs only.”

As he spoke, Audrey called up the data he was referring to on the main screen.

“Rats deserting a sinking ship,” one of the unseen participants muttered. “They won’t even try to warn the populations?”

“If Level Five Incidents are, indeed, the trigger for these attacks,” General Toal observed, “a warning would require them to admit that those Incidents are real and that the Corporation bears culpability for them and their consequences. How long they have known the connection between the two is uncertain, but even if the Coalsack planets were the first they were sure of, they have demonstrated a willingness to let millions die rather than admit their involvement.”

“So what do we do? Is there a warning we can get out to these worlds? Without exposing ourselves?”

That, Audrey reflected, was the crux of the matter. Although technically almost everyone on the call was a Federacy officer or asset of some kind, they were all involved in subverting Federacy policy. That policy included at least one form of government-sanctioned slavery and a whole lot of subservience to a corporation that held a monopoly over Faster-Than-Light travel, as well as some other forms of human rights and alien rights abuses. She and Todd were far from the first espers that General Toal had hidden away from the Federacy, she’d learned. If his actions were ever uncovered, he would probably be executed for treason. And most of them, if caught, would meet fates worse than death.

Which made it nearly impossible for them to openly blow the whistle on the abuses they uncovered.

“We’ve learned some things about the armada behind the attacks, in the last few years,” General Toal said. “Including its name. Necromongers.”

“‘Death-Dealers?’” One person snorted. “How imaginative.”

“Oh… fuck.” Audrey muttered before she could stop herself.

“What is it, Audrey?” General Toal asked.

“I… I don’t know for sure, but…”

“Go on.”

“The Moribund. What he said to me. ‘Death to the things that killed us. Death to the makers of the cages. Death to the ’verse that trapped us. A trillion deaths for every one you took from us. We come. We come to take it all back. All the worlds your filth has stolen from us will burn.’”

“‘Moribund’ means ‘Deathbound,’” the person who had snorted added. “Who is this ‘Moribund?’”

“Not human,” General Toal told the group. “But that may explain the rumors that these ‘Necromongers’ are ‘part human and part something else.’ And it would explain several other puzzles we have been working on… when was the last time you spoke to him, Audrey?”

“Not in years. After New Casablanca, he hasn’t tried to communicate with me.”

“Did he ever say anything else that might be connected to the attacks on these systems?”

She thought for a moment. “Something about not needing outside help to rise… ‘we will break the ’verse itself.’ The last time I heard him say anything, he wasn’t even talking to me directly, but I think he was talking about me. He said, ‘let it tear down all of the cages and break the darkness, and we will agree it is not filth,’ and then he said, ‘you know what will appease us. In due time, we will make it happen.’ He says ‘we’ but I don’t think he has any allies among the other Apeiros themselves. Maybe he means this armada?”

“Audrey is the child who is in communication with the alien species?” One of the others asked.

Fucking hell. Seventeen and still “the child…”

“Yes,” Toal replied. “The ‘Moribund’ seems to be set apart from the rest of the species we call the ‘Apeiros.’ He evidently has his own agenda, one they neither agree with nor approve of, but are unable to prevent. If there is a connection between him and the Necromongers, they will not stop attacking worlds once they have wiped out all the systems where Level Five Incidents occurred. Those attacks might potentially be practice runs for all-out genocide.”

The meeting continued for a while, as others on the call discussed potential strategies for leaking information about the “Necromongers” into public awareness, particularly on the Aquilan and Helion systems, and what might be done to bolster planetary defenses on target worlds without signaling just how much they knew to those Federacy agents influenced or controlled by the Quintessa Corporation. Audrey listened quietly, not really able to come up with suggestions of her own about any of that. Her whole focus, for the last two months—aside from keeping up in school and dealing with the fallout from the college acceptance letters she had begun receiving—had been assembling the timelines and connections between Level Five Incidents and Black Planet Incidents. Thinking about what to do next about these “Necromongers” was something she could barely fathom. The scale of it all was overwhelming.

If there’s ever a Level Five Incident in this system, she thought with a shudder, I’m gonna spend every waking second convincing Mom and Alvin to take Elodie and go anywhere else…

Or, she reflected, she could shift them to Elsewhere, to play pioneers in its redwood forest—

That was an idea she needed to discuss with General Toal. A possible escape portal already existed on Tangiers Prime, and now on Deckard’s World. Could similar ones be created on all of the other target worlds?

The meeting was concluding. As everyone said their goodbyes, she asked General Toal if she could speak to him privately for a few minutes. Once everyone else was gone, she took a deep breath.

“I know what you’re going to ask, Audrey, and I’m sorry. The answer is still ‘no.’”

“But—”

“I am aware of the value of the full scholarship and mentorship offer of the caliber you received. It can be postponed for up to two years to accommodate interplanetary travel issues, and I am happy to help you make the arrangements to do so. But you may not return to Tangiers Prime and begin attending Khair Eddine until you are biologically eighteen years old. That’s still almost a full Standard year away. You will have to spend a minimum of five months in cryo to travel to Tangiers Prime, which I will only permit once you are eighteen. You need to plan accordingly.”

“But… what do I do in the meantime?”

“We can keep you busy, I’m sure.”

It was a struggle not to burst into tears. Busy wasn’t the problem.

“That’s not going to help her, Sir,” Michael said. “She needs more social contact with peers. And she especially needs a peer group that isn’t constantly prying into her past.”

She felt his hand on her shoulder and leaned back, resting the back of her head against his chest. In the last two months, it had grown easier and easier to think of Michael as a kind of father figure, although her crush on him still periodically reared up. Her way of dealing with that—finding someone who reminded her of one of her other crushes and having a fling with him—had only worsened her disconnect from the rest of Eisenhower High’s Class of ’21. While most of them accepted that she had been a virgin at the time of the “Junior Prom Incident,” her flings in the aftermath had, in their minds, moved her firmly into “slut” territory. They seemed particularly vindictive about it because none of their own number had gotten a taste, and especially judgmental about it because almost none of the guys who had were what they considered “white.”

Stuck on a fucking racist, sexist planet…

Graduation was less than two months away, and a relief, but the question of what she was going to do afterward was getting messier and messier.

Eight of the ten schools she had applied to had accepted her. Five were disallowed completely thanks to her own research; General Toal had vetoed going to any schools that were on the Necromongers’ “hit list,” except the Tangiers System itself. He would have vetoed that system as well if it wouldn’t have led to her all-out mutiny. But he wouldn’t allow her to start traveling to either Khair Eddine or New Casablanca University until after December 4, 2521. That meant that enrollment in the Class of ’25 was impossible. Enrollment in the Class of ’26 might be feasible, but figuring out what to do in the meantime, to keep from getting crushed by her growing isolation…

“I do have a suggestion about that,” Michael said after a moment, when neither she nor General Toal spoke. “I want to relocate the safe house to Wyndham Landing at the end of the southern hemisphere summer.”

“Huh?” Audrey glanced up at him in confusion. On the screen, General Toal looked baffled as well.

“Deckard Tech is on a quarterly arrangement rather than a semesterly one. They’ve accepted Audrey and have offered her a full scholarship, too. She can attend there until she’s able to transfer to Khair Eddine. The spring quarter up north starts in May, the summer quarter in August, and the autumn quarter in November. Then, instead of starting the winter quarter in February, she can board a Star Jumper going to Tangiers Prime and get there between five and ten months later, with a full academic year of credits under her belt to help catch up with the year she missed.” Michael outlined it the way he might have outlined a military campaign. She wondered if that was how he thought of it.

As she’d slowly gotten to know him better, she’d realized that he didn’t have much of a civilian mindset to draw on. And, of course, that the reason she couldn’t read him was that he was an esper, like her, with the tightest mental shield she’d ever encountered.

He had been twelve years old, he’d told her, when Furya burned, and his parents bundled him and his little sister onto an escape ship. He’d been fourteen, a year of cryo and two years of foster homes later, when the Federacy had begun to figure out that Furyan refugees were paranormal goldmines and he’d taken his sister with him to hide in the woods of Catalonia Prime. He’d been sixteen when General Toal—then a Colonel—had found them and helped them escape offworld. Of the ensuing twenty-four years, he’d spent roughly a third of the time in cryo, traveling from world to world, training to be the best soldier he could become, and helping Toal locate and hide other refugees from Furya and, in the last few years, fathom and manage the “Quintessa Problem.” His focus on his mission was needle-sharp and there was room for little else in his life.

And yet he understood that she needed more than that… and was starting to starve.

Then again, given that she seemed to be at the dead-center of his current mission, it made sense that he would understand her better than she could understand herself. And that, where she had become stuck and thwarted, he would have found a path through.

“This could work,” General Toal said. “As it happens, one of the Undine class ships is scheduled to depart Plymouth Station A in mid-February 2522. I had already investigated that angle. That would get her to her destination in time for all of the customary orientation activities scheduled for the start of the next school year on Tangiers Prime… and she can visit with the Meziane family while she waits for the dorms to open, since her mentorship offer is from Dr. Meziane. Who, by the way, absolutely cannot know who you really are until you arrive there, Audrey. We will come up with a plausible reason for the delay. Is that acceptable, child?”

“I… yeah, I think that could work.” She understood what Michael’s real goal with it was: to get her connected to a group of students her own age, ones who hopefully hadn’t heard wild rumors about her and wouldn’t try to delve into her past… to give her access to the companionship she craved and was currently deprived of. “General Toal? One more thing?”

“Yes, Audrey?”

“What if there’s another way to evacuate some of these worlds? What if we could find another ’verse we have access to, like Elsewhere, to pull people into if an attack is inevitable?”

“It’s a possibility,” he said after a long, thoughtful moment. “You are currently the only human being we know of who has access to more than two other universes…”

With his permission, after all, she’d “infected” Todd, Dennis, and Michael with Threshold Syndrome, giving them access to Elsewhere and Wonderland, but those were the only ones of her ’verses she could pull someone into without killing them. The Apeiros had promptly congratulated her on producing a “new brood,” but had said they were unable to speak with them directly, even though all three men were espers. Dennis had apparently been amused when she’d campaigned to get him admitted to the safe house’s “inner circle,” given that he and Michael had been its two human managers—in charge of everything AIs were legally prohibited to control—the whole time, and it was Michael who had green-lit Todd’s rescue. She’d only been cleared to find that out after the fall of the Coalsack planets.

“…and there’s no way to get you, or any of the ones with access to ‘Elsewhere’ or ‘Wonderland,’ onsite in the Aquilan system in time,” Toal continued, “even assuming one of those ’verses is habitable there. Dennis and Todd have, unfortunately, already confirmed that neither ‘Elsewhere’ nor ‘Wonderland’ are habitable on Helion Prime, and the time it would take to get you here, to see if any of your other universes would be viable, would cut things far too close. It is a possibility to explore for the future, though.”

He’d already thought of it. She’d wasted her time, and his, bringing it up.

“It is a good idea, Audrey,” he told her, his voice gentling, “and one we will continue to pursue.”

Michael drove her home not long after. Spring was fully upon Settlement Point, and she could hear the distant rumbles of a thunderstorm. The air was warm, soft, and carried the scents of blossoms and rain. Life was burgeoning all around… and yet the cold, terrible touch of that call had left a sense that, just beneath the surface, something eldritch and implacable waited to devour it all. Even the twinkling Christmas lights on every house couldn’t drive that feeling back.

Her mother, definitely not eldritch, was waiting for her when she walked through the door. “So, did you talk to your handlers about college?”

Of course that was what was on her mind.

She’d spent the last two weeks, since the acceptance letters began arriving, trying to talk Audrey into turning down all of the offworld offers and going somewhere local, with increasing desperation, even though she knew that none of the truly local schools had the programs her daughter wanted. She’d even tried to sweeten the pot by saying that she could probably get Audrey a “legacy” scholarship to her own alma mater, where she could study law.

Audrey did not want to be a lawyer.

“Yeah, they’re going to be making arrangements to transfer the safe house to Wyndham Landing, so I can attend Deckard Tech,” she said, wondering how upset her mother was going to get about that. It was the only school she’d applied to that wasn’t offworld, but it was still a hemisphere away.

“Really?” her mother asked. “That’s wonderful!”

Now Audrey was confused.

“Alvin? Audrey’s going to Deckard Tech! Now tell her your news!”

Alvin, carrying Elodie, entered the room smiling. “It’s brand-new news, too, and we were waiting to hear what your plans were before we made a decision about it. I’ve been offered the position of District Attorney. In Wyndham Landing. I’ll start in June if I take it.”

“Take it!” her mother said, laughing. “It’s perfect timing. Elodie won’t miss any school. She’ll start Kindergarten a few months after the move! And we can stay close to you.”

Audrey felt completely off-kilter. The one thing she’d been dreading about the new arrangement, the separation she’d thought was inevitable no matter where she went, had just fallen away. At least, for another year, she would have her family and her little sister close…

Her comm chimed. She glanced down at the screen.

It wasn’t easy, but we’ll always have your back.
Merry Christmas, Kid.
M,M,F,E,C&S

They hadn’t given a thing away. She loved her handlers.

For one brief moment, at least, Audrey’s frustration and dread of the future fell away.