The End of All Things: The Fourth Instalment Read online

  THE END OF ALL THINGS

  The Fourth Instalment

  TO STAND OR FALL

  JOHN SCALZI

  TOR

  Contents

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  About the Author

  By John Scalzi

  Copyright

  To the Committee and attendees of Swancon 40, in Perth, Australia, where this novella—and book—was completed.

  Hey, didn’t I say I would do this?

  PART ONE

  There’s a saying: “May you live in interesting times.”

  To begin, it’s a curse. “Interesting” in this case uniformly means “Oh god, death is raining down upon us and we shall all perish wailing and possibly on fire.” If someone wanted to say something nice to you, they wouldn’t tell you to live in “interesting” times. They would say something like, “I wish you eternal happiness” or “May you have peace” or “Live long and prosper” and so on. They wouldn’t say “Live in interesting times.” If someone is telling you to live in interesting times, they are basically telling you they want you to die horribly, and to suffer terribly before you do.

  Seriously, they are not your friend. This is a tip I am giving you for free.

  Second, the curse is almost always ascribed to the Chinese, which is a flat-out lie. As far as anyone can tell it appeared in English first but was ascribed to the Chinese, probably due to a combination of causal racism and because someone wanted to be a shithole of a human being but didn’t want it to be marked down against them personally. A sort of “Hey, I’m not saying this, those terrible Chinese are saying it, I’m just telling you what they said” maneuver.

  So not only are they not your friend, they may be also a bigot and passive-aggressive.

  That said, the Chinese do have a saying from which it is alleged that the bigoted passive-aggressive curse may have been derived: which, roughly translated, means “It’s better to be a dog in peace, than a man in war.” Which is a maxim which is neither bigoted, nor passive-aggressive, and about which I find a lot to agree with.

  The point is this: My name is Lieutenant Harry Wilson. I’ve been a man in war for a very long time now. I think it would be preferable to be a dog in peace. I’ve been working toward that for a while.

  My problem is, I live in interesting times.

  * * *

  My most recent interesting time began when the Chandler, the ship on which I was stationed, skipped into the Khartoum system and promptly blew up the first two other ships it saw.

  They had it coming. The two ships were attacking the Tubingen, a Colonial Defense Forces ship which had been called into the system to quell a rebellion against the Colonial Union, instigated by Khartoum’s prime minister, who really should have known better. But apparently he didn’t, and in came the Tubingen, which sent a platoon of soldiers to the planet to escort the prime minister off the planet. Which is when these other two ships skipped in and started using the Tubingen for target practice. I imagine they expected that they would be able to finish the job, unmolested. They were not prepared to have the Chandler come at them out of the sun.

  In reality we had done no such thing, of course. We had just skipped into the space above Khartoum slightly closer in toward the planet’s star than those two ships, and the Tubingen, which they were busy attacking. And the fact that we were, from their perspective, hidden in the disk of Khartoum’s star, did not give the Chandler any special advantage. The ships’ systems would have detected us no later. What gave us an advantage was that they were not expecting us at all. When we showed up, they were giving all their attention to destroying the Tubingen, firing missiles at close range to shatter the ship at its weak points, to end the lives of everyone on the ship and throw the entire Colonial Union into disarray.

  But coming out of the sun was a nice poetic touch.

  We had launched our own missiles before our particle beams touched the ships’ missiles, detonating all of them before they could smash into the Tubingen. Our missiles jammed themselves into the hulls of the enemy ships, targeted to disrupt power systems and weapons. We didn’t worry about the crews. We knew there wouldn’t be any, except for a single pilot.

  From our point of view the battle was over before it began. The enemy ships, only lightly armored, went up like fireworks. We hailed the Tubingen by standard coms and by BrainPal networking, to assess the damage.

  It was significant. The ship was a loss; it would barely have time to evacuate its crew before its life-support systems collapsed. We started making room on the Chandler and sent skip drones back to Phoenix Station for rescue ships and crews.

  Reports trickled in from the surface of Khartoum. The platoon from the Tubingen, tasked to bring the planet’s prime minister into custody, had been shot out of the sky from ground-based defenses. The soldiers who had leapt from the shuttle to escape its destruction had been picked off by the same defense.

  Only two soldiers had escaped unharmed, but between them they destroyed the defense installation, staffed with Rraey soldiers aligned with Equilibrium, the group who had wreaked so much havoc on the Colonial Union and the Conclave. They captured two of the Rraey from the ground installation, including the commander. Then they finished their original mission and brought back the prime minister of Khartoum.

  Someone was going to have to interrogate them all.

  For the two Rraey, that someone was me.

  * * *

  I entered the room where the Rraey prisoner of war had been waiting for me. The Rraey had not been shackled but a shock collar had been placed around his neck. Any motion quicker than a very casual and deliberate movement would generate a jolt, and the faster the movement, the more powerful the jolt.

  The Rraey did not move very much.

  He sat in a chair very badly designed for his physiology, but no better chair was to be had. It was positioned at a table. On the opposite side of the table stood another chair. I sat in the chair, reached out, and placed a speaker on the table.

  “Commander Tvann,” I said, and my words were translated by the speaker. “My name is Harry Wilson. I am a lieutenant in the Colonial Defense Forces. I would like to speak to you, if you don’t mind. You may answer in your own language. My BrainPal will translate for me.”

  “You humans,” Tvann said, after a moment. “The way you speak. As if you are asking for permission when you are making demands.”

  “You could choose not to speak to me,” I said.

  Tvann motioned to the collar around his neck. “I do not think that would go very well for me.”

  “A fair point.” I pushed up from the chair and walked over to Tvann, who did not flinch. “If you will permit me, I will remove your collar.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “As a token of good faith,” I said. “And also, so if you choose not to speak to me, you will not have to fear punishment.”

  Tvann craned his neck to allow me access to his collar. I removed it, unlocking it via a command from his BrainPal. I set the collar on the table and then returned to my seat.

  “Now, where were we?” I said. “That’s right. I wanted to speak to you.”

  “Lieutenant…” Tvann trailed off.

  “Wilson.”

  “Thank you. Lieutenant, I— may I be candid with you?”

  “I hope you will.”

  “While I do not wish to suggest I do not appreciate you removing this instrument of torture from my neck, allow me to note that the act is hollow. And not only hollow, it is, in fact, disingenuous.”

  “How so, Commander?”

  Tvann motioned ar
ound him. “You have removed the shock collar. But I am still here, in your ship. I have no doubt that on the other side of this door is another CDF solider, like yourself, with a weapon or another implement of torture. There is no escape for me and no assurance that aside from this immediate moment, I will not be punished or even killed for not speaking with you.”

  I smiled. “You are correct that there is someone on the other side of this door, Commander. It’s not another CDF soldier, however. It’s just my friend Hart Schmidt, who is a diplomat, not a killer or a torturer. He’s on the other side of the door primarily because he’s running a recording device—an unnecessary thing, as I am also recording this conversation with my BrainPal.”

  “You’re not worried about me trying to kill you and escaping,” Tvann said.

  “Not really, no,” I said. “I mean, I am a CDF soldier. You may know from your own experience that we are genetically engineered to be faster and stronger than unmodified humans. With all due respect to your own prowess, Commander, if you attempted to kill me you would be in for a fight.”

  “And if I did kill you?”

  “Well, the door is locked,” I said. “Which kind of puts a damper on your whole escape plan.”

  Tvann did the Rraey equivalent of a laugh. “So you’re not afraid of me.”

  “No,” I said. “But I don’t want you to be afraid of me, either.”

  “I’m not,” Tvann said. “The rest of your species, I am afraid of. And of what might happen to me if I don’t speak to you now.”

  “Commander, allow me to be as candid with you as you have been with me.”

  “All right, Lieutenant.”

  “You are a prisoner of the Colonial Defense Forces. You are, in point of fact, a prisoner of war. You were captured having taken up arms against us. You, either directly or by the orders you gave, killed many of our soldiers. I will not torture you, nor will I kill you, nor will you be tortured or killed while you are on this ship. But you have to know that the rest of your life is going to be spent with us,” I motioned around, “and in a room not much larger than this one.”

  “You are not inspiring me to be forthcoming, Lieutenant.”

  “I can understand that, but I’m not finished,” I said. “As I said, the rest of your life is very likely to be as our prisoner, in a room about this size. But there is another option.”

  “Talk to you.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “Talk to me. Tell me everything you know about Equilibrium and its plans. Tell me how you got ten human colonies to agree to rebel against the Colonial Union. Tell me what the endgame is for your organization. Tell me all of it, start to finish, and leave nothing out.”

  “In return for what?”

  “In return for your freedom.”

  “Oh, Lieutenant,” Tvann said. “You can’t possibly expect me to believe it’s within your power to offer that.”

  “It’s not. As you’ve implicitly noted, I’m just a lieutenant. But this offer doesn’t come from me. It comes from the highest levels of both the Colonial Defense Forces and the Colonial Union’s civilian government. Disclose everything, and when this is all over—whatever this is, whenever it’s over—you’ll be handed over to the Rraey government. What they do to you is another kettle of fish, assuming that they have something to do with Equilibrium at all. That said, if you’re especially forthcoming, we can make an effort to have it seem like we didn’t know what an excellent intelligence asset you were. That we thought you were just some common military commander.”

  “But I am,” Tvann said. “The scope of my orders were limited, and focused on this mission.”

  I nodded. “We were pretty sure you were going to try that,” I said. “And who could blame you? There’s no percentage for you letting on any more than you had to. But we know something you don’t think we know, Commander.”

  “What is that, Lieutenant?”

  “Commander, does this ship seem familiar to you in any way?”

  “No,” Tvann said. “Why should it?”

  “No reason,” I said. “Except for the small detail that you’ve been on it before.”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  “Oh, believe it,” I said, and then looked up toward the ceiling. “Rafe, have you been listening in?”

  “You know I have,” said a new voice, from the speaker. A translation, in a slightly different voice to differentiate it from my translation, followed almost immediately afterward.

  “Okay, good,” I said, and looked back to Tvann. “Commander Tvann, I would like to introduce you to Rafe Daquin, our pilot. Or more accurately, I would like to reintroduce you, as the two of you have met before.”

  “I don’t understand,” Tvann said.

  “You don’t remember me?” Daquin said. “I’m hurt, Commander. Because I remember you very well. I remember you threatening to blow my ship out of the sky. I remember you shooting my captain and first officer. I remember you talking with Secretary Ocampo about the best way to murder my entire crew. Yes, Commander. I have a whole heap of memories with you in them.”

  Tvann said nothing to this.

  “Ah,” I said. “See. Now you’re remembering after all. This is the Chandler, Commander. The ship you took. And the ship you lost. Well, maybe not you specifically, but Equilibrium. We know you were on it. And we know you’re not just some field commander. No, sir. You’re a key member of the Equilibrium military. And your presence on Khartoum, leading the forces that shot our people out of the sky, isn’t just luck of the assignment draw. You’re here for a reason.”

  “How is it that you’re here?” Tvann asked me.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Your ship thwarted the attack on the CDF ship that responded to the Khartoum rebellion,” Tvann said. “How did you know? How did you get here to stop it?”

  “We had inside intelligence.”

  “From whom?”

  “From whom do you think?” I said.

  “I’ll give you a hint,” Daquin said. “It’s the guy I stole from you when I made a break for it.”

  “Secretary Ocampo has been very forthcoming,” I said. “When Khartoum declared its independence, he suggested to us that there was a good chance that there might be a trap laid for any ship that responded. The Chandler happened to be near skip distance—and the Colonial Union didn’t want to inflame things by sending a large contingent of CDF ships—so we got the call.”

  “Thanks for grafting those weapons systems back onto the ship,” Daquin said. “They came in handy.”

  “Secretary Ocampo,” Tvann said. “No doubt forthcoming because you’ve put his brain into an isolation chamber.”

  “You’re not really going to go there, are you?” Daquin said. “Because I have news for you, pal. You don’t have much high ground to stand on with that one.”

  “If you have Ocampo you don’t need me,” Tvann said, to me. “Ocampo has far more operational knowledge than I ever did. He was a primary architect of our plans.”

  “We know,” I said. “We have all his records. The thing is, we also know you know we have all his records. You have to have assumed that once Rafe absconded with the secretary. Which means Equilibrium can’t use them anymore. You have a new game plan, one that’s being carried out on an accelerated schedule. Ocampo can make educated guesses. But we need more than educated guesses at this point.”

  “I’m captured,” Tvann said. “They’ll know to change their plans.”

  “You’re not captured,” I said. “You’re dead. At least that’s what they’ll think. You and every other Rraey, obliterated beyond identification, and before identification. And you died completing your objective of luring the Colonial Union into a trap—and making it look like Khartoum was responsible for the attack. That was a nice touch, by the way.”

  Tvann was silent again.

  “That’s our communication plan—everything that’s coming out of us is pinning it on the Khartoum government. So as far as Equilibrium knows
, it’s still game on for the latest plan. We’d like you to tell us the plan.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  “Then you better get used to walls,” Daquin said.

  “Rafe, why don’t you sign out for a bit,” I said.

  Daquin signed out.

  “You’re not the first Rraey I’ve ever met,” I said, to Tvann, after Daquin had departed.

  “I’m sure you’ve killed many in your time,” Tvann said.

  “That’s not what I meant,” I said. “I mean that I knew another Rraey as a person. A scientist named Cainen Suen Su. He, like you, was captured by us. I was assigned to him.”

  “To guard him?”

  “No, to assist him. We worked on several projects together with him as the lead and me following his direction.”

  “He was a traitor, then.”

  “I don’t know that he would disagree with you,” I said. “He was aware that in helping us, his knowledge could be used against the Rraey. Nevertheless he did help, and in the course of time, he also became a friend. He was one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever met. I was honored to have known him.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He died.”

  “How?”

  “A soldier, who was also his friend, killed him at his request.”

  “Why did he ask to die?”

  “Because he was dying anyway,” I said. “We’d introduced a poison into his blood and the daily antidote he was given was increasingly less effective. He asked his friend to end his suffering.”

  “The suffering you had imposed on him in the first place.”

  “Yes.”

  “Lieutenant, if there is a point to this discussion of yours, I’m afraid it has entirely escaped me.”

  “Cainen was an enemy who became a friend,” I said. “And despite the terrible thing we had done to him—and yes, it was terrible—he still chose to find friendship among us. I’ve never forgotten that.”

  “I do not think we will be friends, I’m afraid.”

  “I’m not asking for that, Commander,” I said. “My point in telling you this is to let you know that, at the very least, I don’t see you merely as an enemy.”