Scarcity (Special Forces: FJ One Book 1) Read online

  Ragged cheers ensued from some, but there was another element here – radical Hasteners, from the sound of it.

  “Let us on! The ship has to go today, doesn’t it? Let us go instead, we’re ready!”

  “Yes, let the ship go! My eggs are on there! I want my children born on Alderaan!”

  The Hastener faction started moving in on the squad.

  “Draw stunners,” the Captain said loudly, unholstering his non-lethal weapon.

  “You can’t stop progress!” the leader shouted. He was young and wild-looking, his shorn skull and tight clothes marking him as one of the far-right fringe. “Fuck the rich. We’re going on that ship tod…”

  He jerked convulsively as a Tasercup latched onto his chest.

  “Back up! Everyone back up! That’s an order!” The stiff breeze from the suction units was pulling at the waving signs now, and people in the crowd were staggering into each other.

  “There’s only five of them! We can take ‘em!” another Hastener shouted.

  “We will shoot to kill if you don’t stop where you are,” the Captain said in his loudest, coldest voice.

  “Better to die here and now than to wait for the black lung to get us!” the new ringleader said. But he had stopped advancing, and was looking up at the sky.

  A shadow fell over the scene, which the Captain assumed was the first rain cloud, ready to dampen some spirits. But then a gasp came from the crowd, and then a scream.

  “Look!” someone shouted unnecessarily. Because now everyone was looking up.

  It wasn’t a cloud. It wasn’t natural, its arc smooth and perfect, a long oval slipping into place over the city.

  Captain Chen was glad he’d started making plans for the arrival of the aliens. Because whoever they were, they were already here.

  CHAPTER NINE – JUNGIAN ARCHETYPES

  The visitors hadn’t wasted any time. A second ship had appeared over Berlin, and minutes later, they sent an audio message delivered directly to the earcomms of the Earth Union’s Prime Minister, as well as HM and the Union Parliament delegates.

  The voice was female, warm and soothing, something you’d hear at an airport to remind you to walk to the right and respect the loading zone.

  “Peaceful greetings from your friendly visitors. We are neighbors, who also call the Orion Arm of the Milky Way our home. In your tongue, our name is ‘The Bringers of Justice.’ We encountered your probe craft, and learned of how you have advanced among the community of civilizations.

  “As you were alerted to our presence, we felt it only right to contact you immediately to ease any potential fears. Upon discovering your planet’s dire need of assistance, we took the liberty of entering your space to render aid. We look forward to meeting you as soon as possible, to ease what is no doubt a great anxiety among your people about what their future now holds.”

  HM packeted it to the Captain in Xichang, who relayed it to his team. As they shuttled back to Berlin at breakneck speed, they discussed it over the secure, wired, pod-to-pod systems. “Smooth,” Comms said. “Polished.”

  “Everything explained, too,” Engineering added. “Tidied up the loss of the probes, the blips on our radar, and their justification for hauling ass to get here.”

  “Basic commando principles,” Weapons added. “Shock, surprise, speed, and violence of action are your assets.”

  “There’s no violence yet,” Medical said.

  “Exactly,” Weapons agreed. “If you’ve got the first three, you don’t need much of the fourth. And parking two gigantic motherships over the planet, that got here from deep space in less time than it takes us to get to a near colony… Well, the threat of violence is there, isn’t it. If they’ve got the power to do that, they can kick our asses.”

  The Captain felt a surge of pride. None of his people were freaking out, none of them had wobbled in the face of…well, the biggest thing to happen to humanity ever. Even more than the discovery of other habitable worlds within our reach, this was…

  HM beeped in his earcomm. “Your presence is requested at this event, Captain. By our visitors.”

  “Copy that. En route.” He flipped to the local channel. “They asked for me by name. For a bunch of folks who’ve known about our existence for a week, they’ve done a lot of homework already.”

  “I don’t believe it,” HM said.

  “This is like…a movie,” the Captain replied.

  “Yes. That’s the point, isn’t it. They’ve certainly done a lot of research on us in a short amount of time.”

  “Including Jungian archetypes, it seems.”

  Two ships had appeared in Earth’s skies, like giant blimps. One hovered over the world capital of Berlin, and the other over Xichang. It had been important to them, obviously, to stop the liftoff. The Captain and HM had racked their brains over that decision, trying to come up with a positive reason why an alien race would impede a colony ship from reaching its destination.

  And now, out of the belly of the blimp over Berlin came a disc. As it descended, they could see the clear dome on top of it. Landing gear telescoped out of the disc.

  Neither of them said the two words out loud. The rest of the world said it for them on Social.

  It made sense, if this was deliberate. For them to present themselves to a new culture in a familiar, non-threatening form. To land in what was, as everyone knew, a flying saucer.

  The flying saucer extruded a ramp, and the door opened. The whole world was watching. Who, what, was here among us? Did they look like us? Were they giant insects? Robots? The Captain thought about Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End,” in which the aliens hid themselves for fifty years, until religion had become a thing of the past, before emerging from their ship, big and red with horns and tails. He was all ready for Michael Rennie and Gort to walk out in their shiny silver suits, if it came to that.

  Three of them emerged, and the world gasped. It was all true, then, all the sightings, all the legends, all the rumors. Little green men.

  They were dead ringers for the aliens in “Close Encounters,” with their bald blue-green humanoid heads, their Keane Eyes and tentative smiles. They wore flowing robes like Roman senators, and their motions were elegant, as they glided towards the waiting delegation.

  Each of them had a little blue disc at the base of the throat. Their necks looked far too slim to hold such big heads, the Captain thought.

  The leader was the tallest, and it stepped forward and inclined its head, and its throat disk flashed.

  The voice was that of a human male. “We are sorry for the abrupt nature of our arrival, but all our readings of your biosphere indicated that there was no time to lose. I am Vai Kotta, leader of this delegation from my people, the Rhalbazani.”

  The Prime Minister of the New Union, Magnus Abboud, stepped forward and nearly tripped on himself as he reached for the alien’s hand. The PM wasn’t the worst representative of humanity, but he was a politician, and his hand-shaking instinct was unquenchable even in this most awe-inspiring of moments.

  The Captain was watching the three aliens closely. In each of them, there was just a flutter of the eyelids, a…revulsion? Body language was body language, the Captain had learned, and these bodies had stiffened for a moment before regaining their equilibrium.

  Vai Kotta’s smile hadn’t left his face, but he demurred. “We are sorry, but it is not our custom to touch. No offense is implied.”

  “Of course,” the PM said, nearly groveling. “My sincerest apologies.”

  Alerts began ringing in the Captain’s earcomm. “That megablimp over Xichang just darted east,” Comms said in his ear. “It’s over the Pacific Ocean now. And there are saucers coming out of it, splitting up and….”

  His comms went silent as Vai Kotta raised a hand, perhaps stilling them himself. “That would be your warning systems, but there is no need for alarm. We are taking action to assist you. The thing you call the Great Pacific Trash Patch is being funneled into one of o
ur craft. The coal fire that has been burning on the American East Coast is being extinguished by another craft. The fallout from the Hanbit nuclear disaster is being contained and cleaned up. And of course we’re cleaning up the ‘space junk’ from around Earth’s orbit.”

  The smile, or as much of one as that little mouth could manage, turned up its corners some more.

  “You see, as we said, we are here to help.”

  CHAPTER TEN – I WANT TO BELIEVE

  Social’s bandwidth had to be throttled – the overwhelming response to what was being tagged as “Salvation” was crashing servers worldwide. “Saved” was the biggest tag in the cloud, and pictures were being posted and shared and reshared: The blackened wasteland around Centralia, smoldering but visible for the first time in decades. The great “pillar” of trash rising out of the Pacific, being sucked into the maw of an alien ship, like something out of a biblical epic as directed by Cecil B. DeMille.

  The aliens’ self-declared status as “Visitors” was being eagerly embraced. Not everyone was raving with joy, of course. Social being what it was, there were comments about the Visitors’ long flowing robes (“maybe they’re hiding six dicks or something,” one wisecracker suggested). Aficionados of old TV science fiction reminded those who would listen about the scaly reptiles beneath the human masks in “V,” who were also called “visitors.”

  The Captain and HM walked the halls of the Palace, idly discussing inoffensive things.

  “The closest parallel I can think of is V-E Day in Britain during World War II,” HM said. “That sense that all the struggle, the suffering, was finally over. I say in Britain, because its people had to deal with more deprivation than the Americans.”

  “Yes, but ‘Austerity Britain’ was a state that went on for years after the victory. Whereas we’re seeing immediate improvements in our quality of life.”

  “Definitely.”

  They entered the secure room and sealed themselves in. HM opened the drinks cabinet. “This calls for the very good stuff. I’ve been saving this for a long time.” She held up the bottle of Macallan to show him.

  He knew his boss well after all these years. She held his gaze firmly, and batted out a message in Morse code with a few short and long blinks of her eyes: Windtalk.

  He took the bottle from her hand. “Very nice. What a gorgeous crystal bottle. It looks rare. How’d you get hold of it?”

  With his free hand, he signaled back in their private cipher, his fingers twitching rhythmically. Assuming we’re being overheard?

  “After Collapse, there was a bottle in one of the Latifundia in China. For a billionaire, $628,000 for a bottle of alcohol he would never drink was a mere trifle.”

  Always assume the worst. They’ll break the code eventually but it’ll buy us time. Their cipher was complicated, based on the “unbreakable” Navajo language used as code in World War II, with another layer of code over that. Living to a ripe old age gave one plenty of time to devise difficult puzzles.

  “Well, I look forward to enjoying what he didn’t. Thank you,” he said, taking the glass.

  The whole thing smells, the Captain signaled. Little Green Men. Signs and Miracles.

  “Cheers.”

  You can’t fault people, HM replied. It’s as if everyone won the lottery. Earth is saved, or that’s what it feels like. No more struggle, no more austerity, no more hardship on new worlds.

  “Man, that is fantastic. Not $600,000 worth, but still.”

  I’ve been on a lot of worlds, ma’am. I’ve been in the business of first contact for almost seventy years. And this is not how Contact goes. Greeks bearing gifts and all. They dropped that hint, that they ‘learned of how you have advanced,’ that implies they’ve been here before. Which ties up the whole LGM thing with a bow. But if they’d been visiting us all this time, we would have run into them somewhere by now, or at least a trace of them.

  “I rarely abuse my power, Captain, but when I saw that bottle on the appropriations registry, I’m afraid I pulled some strings to get it. Of course, post-Collapse, the whiskey is less valuable now than the bottle. Which, mind you, I will certainly make sure goes into the arkship resource pile. When it’s empty.”

  The whole flying saucer thing is clearly deliberate. Wherever they go, I bet they present as what’s least shocking to the native population. Remember the Aztecs? Cortez was thought to be the “white skinned god from the east.” A happy accident for him, but it does make a great strategy.

  “Well, it’s truly fantastic stuff.”

  The Jungian Archetype, you mean. Something to soothe the subconscious. Well, it’s working.

  “Do you know the story behind this bottle? It’s really quite fascinating. This is the ‘Constantine’ decanter. There were only four of them made. It took 17 craftsmen over 50 hours to complete the job. They destroyed forty decanters for imperfections before they were happy with the final product.”

  People are tired, Dieter. They’re tired of struggling, knowing that for most of them, life will never get better. They’re tired of starting over on new worlds and having to behave when they get there. Maybe we made a mistake, encouraging a completely secular culture. Maybe there is a “god gene,” and people will always look for a god or a savior, and our Visitors can just…step into the vacuum.

  The Captain nodded. “Amazing. It never ceases to astonish me, you know? Reading about those times. People back then were still appalled by stories of Roman orgies, and yet they didn’t bat an eyelash when they heard about a man who spent nearly a million bucks on a bottle of booze.”

  I have to admit. “I Want to Believe.” It would be so nice to stop fighting… So let me play angel’s advocate – what if they’re The Culture, from the old Iain M. Banks books? The post scarcity civilization, peaceful, rational, who’ve really come just to uplift us?

  “Their definition of what was ‘normal’ in that department just kept expanding, it had to, to accommodate the ever-more-unreal reality of it all. That a man could spend so much wealth on a single object. That a whole school of philosophy existed to justify his decision.”

  Then they surely won’t mind if we make provisions for the opposite case. Speaking of philosophy, I want to know theirs, if they have any religion. Let’s see if we can’t get our guest to discuss it.

  “Well, they paid the price after Collapse. That’s how bad it had to get, for all the world’s Ents to finally rise up and take down their Sarumans.”

  That would be revealing, wouldn’t it. I’m assuming you’re thinking about the Campbell quote?

  She nodded. They were both intimate with Joseph Campbell’s work, and after so many years of working together, he could read her intent from inference. In “The Power of Myth,” he noted that some cultures had mythologies of war and some had mythologies of peace.

  But those whose mythologies were peaceful “have not been the people generally who have survived in what Darwin termed the universal struggle for existence. Rather…it has been the nations, tribes and peoples bred to mythologies of war that have survived to communicate their life-supporting mythic lore to their descendants.”

  HM waved her free hand, dismissing the foolishness of people in the past who should have known better. “On the bright side, at least our Visitors found us after we’d come to our senses, and not before. I wonder if they’d have been so helpful to a world run by Sarumans.”

  Also, I need you to take the pulse of popular opinion here in Berlin. Do a walkabout, see what people are thinking. We know the mob mentality from Social, but I want you to use the personal touch. See what people say when the world isn’t watching.

  “If the world was still run by Sarumans, there wouldn’t be much of a world left, would there?”

  Will do. I could use a good cup of ersatzkaffee.

  “No. And no reason to visit, other than to collect some of leftover humans as zoological samples, I suppose.”

  That’s a contradiction in terms. But if people are welcoming our new
visitors with wide open arms, we need to make some plans, you and I.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN – DOWN WITH THE NANNY STATE

  The Captain put on civilian clothes for the first time in a long time. It was strange, looking in the mirror and just seeing “Dieter Chen, citizen.” He’d had to ask his team what to wear that wouldn’t make him look too rich or too poor.

  “Kind of ironic,” Hewitt said, shaking his head at the pile of clothes that Chen had left behind on Earth. “You’ve ‘gone native’ so many times that you’ve got no idea how to live at home anymore.”

  “FJ One is my home,” he replied automatically.

  He laughed. “Right. Okay, good thing we’re the same size then. And a good thing that I’m still a bit of a clotheshorse.”

  He’d outfitted the Captain in a pair of polycot khakis, a dark blue polo shirt, and a pair of white Adidas. “You’ll look like a businessman who’s uncomfortable in comfortable clothes. Someone who doesn’t know how to wear anything but a suit, which is close enough to your situation.”

  Mr. Chen took a side exit from HM’s apartment building across from Museum Island. The building had once modestly housed one of the last leaders of Germany, who’d given up the stately home that came with the job to remain here in her comfortable home instead. HM had taken the apartment herself, as much for the symbolism as anything else.

  Now he was just another Berliner on a stroll on a balmy summer evening. Unter den Linden was a piece of the old world that could let you believe, for a little while, that nothing had changed. Thousands of linden trees had once lined this old world boulevard, and even now, there were still hundreds, an island of greenery in a drought stricken city.

  Year after year, Berliners voted to sacrifice a part of their water allotment to keep the trees alive. For centuries they’d thrived, until Adolf Hitler had uprooted all the trees and replaced them with Nazi flags. But the city’s attachment to them was so strong that even he had caved in the face of massive outrage and had to replant the trees. If Hitler couldn’t kill the trees, Berlin had decided, then even the end of the world didn’t stand a chance against them.