The End of All Things: The Third Instalment Read online

  THE END OF ALL THINGS

  The Third Instalment

  CAN LONG ENDURE

  JOHN SCALZI

  TOR

  Contents

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Part Five

  About the Author

  By John Scalzi

  Copyright

  To the production staff of Tor Books and at all my other publishers.

  Thank you for making me look good.

  PART ONE

  It was Tuesday, and we had to murder a revolution.

  “It is Tuesday, yeah?” Terrell Lambert asked. There were four of us in the squad for this mission, and we waited, slowly circling, in a shuttle twenty-five klicks above the planet surface.

  In one way, it was a reasonable question. Days fade into each other in the Colonial Defense Forces, especially when you’re traveling from one mission to the next. One day is very much like another on a starship, there are no real “days off.” Tracking days might make sense if you were waiting for your term of service to end, but recently we’d been made aware that our terms of service were likely to be extended indefinitely. This is what happens when your sole source of soldiers has been taken from you and you have no way to get any more anytime soon.

  That being the case, tracking specific days didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Was it Tuesday? It might be. Did it matter that it was Tuesday? Not as much as it might otherwise.

  In another way it was a ridiculous question because every CDF soldier has a computer called a BrainPal in their head. The BrainPal is a marvelous piece of equipment which can tell you instantly what day it is, what time it is, what the ambient temperature around is, and every single mission spec—along with, really, anything else you might want or need, information-wise.

  Lambert knew exactly what day it was, or could know. He wasn’t asking as a point of information. He was making an existentialist point about the nature of a life in the Colonial Defense Forces. It’s worth saying that it’s doubtful that Lambert was specifically intending to bring attention to the existential nature of his question. That didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

  Also, he asked because he was bored, waiting for our mission to begin. Boredom also happened a lot in the Colonial Defense Forces.

  “Yeah, it’s Tuesday,” Sau Salcido replied. “Ask me how I know.”

  “Because of your BrainPal?” Ilse Powell asked.

  “No. Because yesterday was Pizza Day in the Tubingen mess. Pizza Day is always Monday. Therefore: It’s Tuesday.”

  “That messes me up,” Lambert said.

  “That it’s Tuesday?” Salcido asked.

  “No, that Monday is Pizza Day. Back on Earth I was a custodian at an elementary school. Pizza Day was always on Friday. The teachers used it to keep the kids in line. ‘Behave yourself or you don’t get pizza on Friday.’ Having Monday be Pizza Day subverts the natural order of things.”

  “You know what’s worse than that,” Powell said. “That Tubingen’s mess serves tacos on Wednesday.”

  “When it should be on Tuesday,” Salcido said.

  “Right, ‘Taco Tuesday.’ It’s right there.”

  “Well, only in English,” Salcido pointed out. “If you speak Spanish, for example, it’s ‘martes de tacos,’ which isn’t alliterative at all. I think it’s ‘martes de tacos.’ I could be messing up the translation.”

  “You could just check with your BrainPal,” Lambert said.

  “And you could have checked with your BrainPal about what day it is, so what’s your point.”

  “At the school we always had tacos on Thursday,” Lambert said, changing the subject.

  “Why would you do that?” Powell asked.

  “Why wouldn’t you? It’s still a day that starts with a ‘t’.”

  “In English,” Salcido interjected.

  “In English,” Lambert continued. “It’s still alliterative.”

  “Technically it’s alliterative,” Powell said. “Functionally a ‘th’ sound and a hard ‘t’ aren’t alliterative at all.”

  “Sure they are.”

  “‘Thhhhhhhh,’” Powell hissed. “It’s nothing like ‘t’.”

  “You’re reaching,” Lambert said.

  “Help me out here,” Powell said, to Salcido.

  “She’s got a point,” Salcido said, to Lambert.

  “‘Taco Thursday’ still makes more sense than ‘Pizza Monday,’” Lambert said.

  “Only in English,” Salcido said. “In Spanish it’s lunes. So ‘lunes de pizza.’ Which kind of makes sense.”

  “That doesn’t make sense at all,” Lambert said. “Not even a little bit.”

  “Sure it does,” Salcido said. “There’s that old song. ‘When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore.’ ‘Lunes’ comes from ‘luna,’ which is moon. So there you go.”

  “I have never once heard of this song,” Powell said. “You just made it up. This is a thing you just made up to win an argument.”

  “Agreed,” Lambert said.

  “I did not.”

  “It’s complete bullshit.”

  “No.”

  “Vote,” Lambert said. His hand went up. So did Powell’s. “The motion passes. It’s bullshit.”

  “I said it was an old song,” Salcido protested.

  “Lieutenant,” Lambert said, “you’ve never heard of this pizza moon song, have you?”

  “I am not being drawn into your stupid argument,” I said. “Or more accurately, another of your stupid arguments.”

  “The lieutenant has never heard of your pizza moon song either,” Lambert said to Salcido. “And she was a musician. She would know.”

  “There are a lot of different types of musicians,” Salcido said, only a little defensively.

  A notification pinged in my view. “They’re done talking,” I said, to my squad. “We’re on. Forty-five seconds. Suit up.” I grabbed my gear, which in this case included a nanobot pack, a drone, and my Empee rifle.

  “When we get back to the Tubingen I’m going to find that song,” Salcido said, grabbing his own gear. “I’m going to find it and I’m going to make all of you listen to it. You’ll see. You’ll all see.”

  “Masks,” I said. I signaled my combat unitard to create a mask, covering my face. It crept up my head, obscuring my view until my BrainPal offered up a visual feed.

  “What’s for lunch today?” Lambert asked, through his BrainPal, because his mouth was now snugly covered, like everyone else’s.

  “Hamburgers,” Salcido said. “Because it’s Tuesday.”

  The shuttle door opened, exposing us to the frigid temperatures of the upper atmosphere of Franklin.

  “Out you go,” I said to the three. They jumped out of the shuttle without further prompting. I counted off thirty and then jumped out of the shuttle myself.

  Franklin was close to the size and mass of the Earth, basically perfect for human life, and was one of the first few planets colonized, back in the early days of the Colonial Union. It was densely populated, with citizens whose ancestry ranged from first-wave North American colonists to recent refugees from the Indonesian civil war, most of them on the large, thin continent of Pennsylvania, which dominated the northern hemisphere. There were a number of provinces and sub-provinces, but New Philadelphia, the city above which I now found myself, was the home of the planet’s global government.

  The global government which was, in a matter of minutes, about to vote on a bill to declare independence from the Colonial Union.

  My BrainPal alerted me to the location of the other three members
of my squad, some thousands of meters below me. They had a different mission objective than I did, although we were all headed for the same place: the global capitol building, affectionately (or perhaps not so affectionately) called “the glass slipper.” It was named so because the architect gave it a swooping, rising profile that vaguely resembled a shoe—very vaguely in my opinion—and because the building was clad in a transparent, glass-like material, designed, or so the architect said, to be a metaphor for the transparency of the Franklin government itself.

  The primary entrance to the Franklin capitol was a large, open arch that led into a rotunda, from which, if you looked up, you could see the shoes of the global representatives, because on the highest level of the “slipper” was the legislative chamber, which boasted a lovely, sloping roof and a transparent floor which looked down into the rotunda. It was my understanding that it wasn’t until the construction that someone pointed out that the transparent floor meant visitors could look up and see the underwear (or not) of the legislators wearing open leg coverings like skirts and kilts, at which point piezoelectric opaquing elements were added to the floor at considerable additional expense. Someone also neglected to consider the fact that a large room whose walls were entirely composed of transparent elements might turn into something of a greenhouse during warmer months, leading to several early heat prostration events before the air-conditioning to the legislative chamber was improved.

  Another thing no one had considered: that placing one’s global legislative chamber at the very top of a transparent building might make it uniquely vulnerable to attack from above. But then, with the exception of a single incursion by the Conclave right after the Colonial Union’s attack on their fleet at Roanoke, Franklin, as one of the core planets of the Colonial Union, hadn’t been meaningfully attacked by an alien species in decades. And by the Colonial Union itself, never. Why would it have been? It was a constituent part of the Colonial Union.

  Until, possibly, today.

  “We’re down,” Powell said to me. That meant that the three of them had landed and were heading toward the capitol rotunda, bristling with weapons and general menace. The idea was for them to draw the capitol security force—such as it was—to them, and to cause a lockdown of the legislative chamber, sealing all 751 representatives inside the room.

  Which was where I was going.

  I signaled to the Tubingen, the CDF ship on which I was stationed, that I was ready to begin. The Tubingen was currently floating directly above New Philadelphia. Normally Franklin’s planetary sensors would have spotted the Tubingen after it had skipped in literally (and dangerously) close to the planet’s upper atmosphere. The problem was that the planet’s sensor apparatus—from its satellites to its ground stations—were designed, installed, and still largely operated by, the Colonial Union. If the Colonial Union doesn’t want a ship to be seen, it won’t be. Someone would have to be looking directly for it to see it. And why would they be looking directly for it if the sensors didn’t say it was there?

  The Tubingen acknowledged my hail and reported that it would begin in ten seconds, and that I should keep clear the beam. I agreed with this and acknowledged the warning. The capitol building was directly below me now. My BrainPal lit up a column that represented the incoming beam. If I were to wander into the path of the beam I might be uncomfortable just long enough for my brain to register the pain before I was turned into a floating pile of carbon dust. That was not on my schedule for the day. I kept myself well clear of its path.

  A few seconds later my BrainPal visualized the high-energy beam, pulsing on and off faster than my eye could register, vaporizing a three-meter hole in the roof of the legislative chamber one micrometer at a time. The goal was to create the hole without shattering the roof or vaporizing the legislators directly below the beam. At this juncture of the mission we didn’t want anyone dead.

  Path cleared, I thought. Time to make an impression.

  “Here we go,” I said out loud, found the hole, and dove for it. I waited for the last few seconds to deploy my nanobots into a parachute form, braking with an abruptness that would have killed an unmodified human body. Fortunately, I don’t have an unmodified human body.

  As it was, I dropped through the hole with enough velocity to make an impression, and to make my combat unitard stiffen to protect me from the impact.

  There was a thump, and a mess, and a general cry of confusion as I seemingly appeared from nowhere. I raised myself up from impact position, looked at the elderly gentleman stunned to see me, and smiled. I had landed on the speaker’s podium, directly behind his desk, exactly where I had planned to. It’s nice when a bit of political theater such as the one I was about to attempt starts out so well.

  “Speaker Haryanto,” I said, to the startled man. “A genuine pleasure to meet you. Excuse me for just one second.” I reached behind me, took the drone off of my back, and activated it via my BrainPal. It whirred to life and rose directly above my head. While it was doing so, I looked down through the floor—the speaker was wearing pants and had opted to keep his podium transparent, though tinted—and saw Powell, Lambert, and Salcido, weapons up, drones deployed, cautiously being encroached on by capitol security. They weren’t in any particular danger, or at least any that they couldn’t handle.

  That done, I unstrapped my Empee, placed it on the speaker’s desk, and invited myself to the microphone, into which Speaker Haryanto had been intoning mere seconds earlier. I had my BrainPal pop up the notes I made earlier, because I knew I would have to give a speech.

  “Speaker Haryanto, representatives of the Franklin global government, and all the citizens of Franklin who are watching this singular legislative event, at home or wherever you may be, greetings,” I began. “I am Lieutenant Heather Lee of the Colonial Defense Forces. I do apologize for my abrupt and unscheduled entrance to your session today, but time was of the essence. I bring you a message from the Colonial Union.

  “The Colonial Union knows that today—in fact, right now—this chamber has begun a vote to declare independence from the Colonial Union. We also know that this vote is hotly contested, and is likely to be very close. This is for good reason, as your independence would leave you vulnerable to the predations of any number of alien species who are even now watching, as we are, the result of your vote.

  “Through standard channels the Colonial Union has made the government of Franklin aware that we are opposed to this vote. We feel it is dangerous not only to the people and government of Franklin, but also to the Colonial Union at large. We also maintain that such a vote is illegal and that Franklin may not, through legal means, separate itself from the Colonial Union. These points have proved to be unpersuasive to many of you, hence this vote that Speaker Haryanto was about to commence.

  “You may believe that I have come here to stop this vote on behalf of the Colonial Union. I have not. The representatives of Franklin, or at least the minority required to bring this vote to the floor, have asked for this vote. The Colonial Union will allow it to proceed. What I am here to do is make you aware of the consequences of this action.”

  I paused for effect, just long enough to make them wonder about the consequences, and then began again. “During the lead up to this historic vote, some of you in this chamber—in a manner you believe fitting, given that the name of this colony is taken from the United States of America revolutionary figure Benjamin Franklin—have quoted the United States’ Declaration of Independence, and specifically how you, like those revolutionaries who signed that document, would pledge your lives, your fortunes, and your sacred honors to your own independence.

  “Very well.”

  I pointed to the drone hovering above my head. “As I have been speaking to you, this drone has identified and targeted every representative in this room, and has fed the information to a Colonial Union ship, which by now has trained high-energy particle weapons on each of you. As the Colonial Union has already declared that this vote is illegal, if and w
hen you vote for independence, you will be offering up an act of treason to the Colonial Union. In doing so, you will lose your sacred honor.

  “As you will be committing treason, the Colonial Union will freeze all your financial accounts, to restrict your ability, or the ability of others, to commit further treason with them. So you will lose your fortunes. And once you vote, confirming your treason, you will be summarily sentenced to death by the Colonial Union, with the sentence to be carried out immediately; as I said you are already tracked and targeted. So you will lose your life.

  “Now, then,” I said, turning back to Speaker Haryanto. “You may proceed with your vote.”

  “After you have threatened all of us with death?” Haryanto said, incredulously.

  “Yes,” I said. “Or more precisely, after the Colonial Union agreed with the principles you have already set out—that this action was worth your life, fortune, and honor. What you may not have expected is that it would cost all these things as quickly as it will. But these are not the days of the American Revolution, and the Colonial Union is not the British Empire, an ocean and several months away. We are here now. It’s time to find out who among you is willing to make the sacrifice for independence that you have declared you will make. Time to find out who means what they say, and who was simply posturing because you thought your posturing was consequence free—or at least, consequence free for you.”

  “But you won’t give us our independence even if we vote for it!” someone yelled from the floor.

  “Is this a surprise to you?” I asked. “Did you not think there would be a struggle to follow? Did you not believe the words you said? Or did you believe the repercussions of your actions would be shouldered by others—by the citizens who will be pressed into service to defend the so-called independence you wish to give them? The fellow citizens of Franklin who will die by the millions as other species claim this planet for their own when the Colonial Union is not here to defend it? Where did you think you would be when that happened? Why did you think you would not be asked to answer for your vote?