Power Read online

Praise for Ralph Ewig’s Eleuthera

  “Eleuthera is a novel of ideas ... you won't regret buying a ticket.”

  - Matt Bille, “The First Space Race”

  “Eleuthera is science fiction loaded with cool, believable, futuristic concepts ... highly recommended!”

  - Brad Blake, “Blue Third”

  “An exciting adventure with a flawed hero who is so very human … I couldn't put it down!”

  - Erin Lale, Editor of “Time Yarns”

  “Eleuthera is a great read; nicely done!”

  - Eric Bobinsky, “Terasphere”

  POWER

  by Ralph Ewig

  Printing History:

  1st Edition (ebook), May 2013

  Copyright 2013 by Ralph Ewig

  One Hand Publishing

  https://www.onehandpublishing.com/

  ISBN: 978-0-9832821-8-1

  OHP Ref No: 01-3-01-052013

  POWER

  Denek bellowed out a hearty laugh at his friend’s suggestion.

  “What? You don’t see it?” Crim replied, feigning indignation.

  “That’ll be the day, Imperator Crim Aculeo Dorsuo. You’re loosing it man.”

  “You know I have the skills, and the scars to prove it. It’s about time for a promotion if you ask me.”

  Denek had no argument with that part of his friend’s statement. He owed his life to Crim’s skills a dozen times over. That wasn’t the point though.

  “The point is, nobody is asking you. We both know what kind of people get promoted. You don’t fit the profile.”

  “Hey, I can ‘yessir’ my commander and intimidate my underlings with the best of them if I have to.”

  “No you can’t,” Denek replied dryly, “and you don’t want to either. I’ve seen what authority does to people.”

  “The more power you wield, the faster you expend your energy,” Crim agreed, “whether you’re a person, a society, or even a species.”

  Denek couldn’t help but grin at that statement; even though he’d likely spent more time with Crim than any other person alive, he still never stopped surprising him. “And you definitely think too much to be promoted,” he said with dark humor.

  “I will take that as the compliment that you intended it to be,” Crim grinned at him, while continuing to slaughter the partially charred slab of protein on his plate.

  “You look like you’re actually enjoying that synthmeat …,” Denek looked at his own half-finished meal with significantly less enthusiasm.

  “Hey, it’s charbroiled! Anything charbroiled is good, no matter if it had parents or came from a soy vat. It may not be as tasty as the real thing, but being on a hab’ rather than solid ground has other advantages.” He lifted his gaze to emphasize the spectacular view out the panoramic windows. The concave surface of the orbital colony was veined with glittering waterways, arching gracefully away in the distance as the toroidal shape curved in on itself. Beyond its central hub the deep black of space contrasted with luminescent gas streams, shifting through the full range of the electromagnetic spectrum as their hyper-accelerated particles streamed into the gravitational singularity at the heart of this system.

  “Hm, can’t argue with …” Crim’s voice trailed off as a quickly growing iridescent glow in his peripheral vision caught his attention. Denek’s battle trained reflexes immediately shifted into alertness, his sense of time slowing. Reality held its breath as his perception expanded, sounds pinging of his ears like lidar, his pupils dilating, tracking Crim’s gaze; and then the universe caught up with him snapping into focus with the inescapable realization of immediate and life threatening danger.

  “Everybody DOWN!” Denek roared across the crowded eatery, in the same instant overturning the table and grabbing Crim at his overalls to pull him behind the makeshift cover.

  A fraction of a second later, the panoramic window was shattered by the incoming shockwave, unleashing a storm of razor shards into the densely occupied room. With the deadly hail came a thunderous sounds, moments later joined by screams of pain and fear, and the all too familiar smell of human blood spattered over the once sparkling ground, now treacherous with fallen debris, spilled liquids, and discarded meals. It was over in an instant, but the resulting scene would leave lasting memories requiring much more time to forget.

  The room was in chaos, people scrambling to the exits if still able to do so, clutching their injuries, while others rushed to help those struck down, or simply stared in shock. Emergency systems kicked in, bright lights illuminating the ghastly scene, fire suppressant systems hissing inert gases at exposed flames, alarms blaring to life.

  Crim uncurled his bulk from behind the cover of the table, its once polished stone surface now dull with scratches and spattered with debris. “Call it in!” he yelled at Denek, barely able to hear his own voice over the effect of the explosion on his ears, then scrambled to aid the injured.

  Denek pulled his comm – ignoring the trickle of warm blood down his forearm where he had failed to hide behind the protection of the stone faced table. “Trooper Denek Lucis, I’m off duty but just witnessed a Glower attack. Locate my signal and send support immediately; approximately eighty injured, several deaths. Percussive injury and lacerations from debris. We need help here!” He dropped the comm, leaving it active for localization, and rushed to join his friend.

  An hour later, they both sat wearily outside the torn building, Denek’s arm covered in a fresh layer of syn-skin.

  “I hate Glowers,” he growled. “Only a damned traitor to his own species with a radiation baked brain could commit acts this cowardly.”

  “Or a person with nothing left to protect,” Crim responded weariness in his voice. Denek sharply turned his head to stare at his friend.

  “Don’t misunderstand, this is wrong,” he quickly said sensing Denek’s rage still boiling underneath the calm exterior. “I’m just trying to understand what drives a person to do this. Somehow it’s not as bad, if at least it has some meaning.”

  “Don’t tell me you buy the Glowers’ independence bullcrap?”

  “No, not really.”

  Denek watched in silence as Crim absentmindedly drew a pattern into the dust covered street next to him.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “Hm?” Crim lifted his head, looking at his own handiwork as if he just now realized what he had been writing. “It’s an old character for ‘person’ in one of the classic languages. A line leaning on another. We all depend on somebody,” he explained. “Glower’s just traded one dependence for another. They’ve turned to the Novacula for the power afforded by their tech. For that they’ve given up their humanity.”

  Denek watched as the last of the victims were loaded onto a transport. The response team’s triage had focused on the injured first, prioritizing those who could still be saved. All help had been too late for the bodies now leaving the scene, covered with sterile sheeting. His throat constricted as he realized the shape under the last of the stretchers was that of a young child.

  “You can certainly say that again,” he replied.

  ***

  EXECUTIVE COUNSEL

  MEETING TRANSCRIPT

  Y/2206 D/203 23:44.01 UTC

  “It's not economically feasible.”

  “I thought we reduced harvester production cost last quarter?”

  “Even so, targeting is still an issue. The Mark IV has excellent yield, but it still barely breaks even unless we can increase the density of assets in the targeting area.”

  “Hasn’t marketing been working this issue?”

  “Essentially, we're dealing with a nomadic society. The structure is only loosely connected and there are very few vectors which show promise for large scale mobilization. They don't seem to share any common m
otivators, with the notable exception of some historical origin mythology regarding a minor moon in their central territory.”

  “Then we should leverage that! Can we project a long-range incursion?”

  “Not feasible, the destination is too far within the core of Novacula space, and sentiment projections indicate a severe backlash if we're seen as the aggressor. In addition, we have no definite location, only circumstantial references in cultural data.”

  “What if the incursion was to happen prior to general awareness of the Novacula - we have the means to temporally displace assets, do we not?”

  “Not at this scale. Displacing a micro-drone is one thing, displacing armaments effective against a hardened target is something else entirely. Again, it’s not economically feasible; the energy cost involved in displacing something as massive as a task force far outweighs the projected yield, even if it were to result in downstream target densities orders of magnitude higher than what we have now.”

  “Sometimes, it doesn't matter what resources you can deploy against a given target; what matters is what the target thinks you can deploy.”

  “I don't follow?”

  “Then let me spell it out for you: we displace a minimal contingent, equipped with state of the art weaponry. We target the origin point, the protection of which is the only common motivator we have been able to identify. The target is forced to confront a threat of overwhelming technological superiority, way ahead of their current development, resulting in a unification of their otherwise fractured nature which propagates forward, ultimately yielding higher target density in the present time-line. Problem solved.”

  “How small a contingent? The strategy seems workable, but the energy cost of temporal displacement is still significant.”

  “Two operators would be sufficient - a single tactical unit, and we can make the displacement reversible, recovering a significant portion as the operators are returned to the present time frame.”

  “What if they don’t make it?”

  “As long as the objects remain loosely cohesive, it’s inconsequential whether the operators survive. We just need the raw material to retrace the energy potential.”

  “Let's be clear about what we're discussing here - you want to send two troopers with cutting edge weaponry back in time and attack the origin world of the Novacula, in the hope that forcing them to confront a technologically superior enemy will result in a cultural change, causing them to attack us en-masse in the present timeline, so we can use our weapons of mass destruction with greater efficiency? That's insane!”

  “It's economics. Right now the numbers just don't add up - harvesters are the only means of effectively ending this conflict while capturing the resources which drove us into this market in the first place. However, they are too expensive to mass produce and wasted on groups consisting of no more than a couple hundred individuals.”

  “There's no telling what the results of this will be - altering the timeline is notoriously unpredictable. Especially when sentient decision making is a dominant factor; and we understand them a lot less than ourselves.”

  “We can run extensive projections. If the results show two-sigma favorable outcomes we proceed.”

  “By what measure?”

  “The only one that matters - human survival. As a bonus, the market is projected to grow due to the increased per capita demand. There will be casualties of course, but power consumption will go up significantly both during the remainder of the conflict and in the following rebuilding efforts. It's a win-win for us, and we’re doing humanity a favor.”

  “We’ll have to engage outside resources to obtain a sufficiently accurate location fix.”

  “Feinblatt? That man is problematic.”

  “He’s the foremost expert on Novacula cultural artifacts, and the only person with non-pathological memory of the sample incursion into their central space.

  “I’m not sure I’d refer to that man as non-pathological …”

  “We have significant collateral to leverage against our non-disclosure agreement; the situation can be managed.”

  “Understood; proceed.”

  ***

  “Anybody?” Professor Feinblatt swept his piercing gaze across the faces surrounding him. They were assembled casually in the informal room, a broad mix of ethnic heritages so typical for frontier worlds. As usually, they were reluctant to respond to his simplistic question, suspecting a trap based on their past experiences in his lectures – and rightly so.

  “You,” Feinblatt pointed at one of them at random; he never bothered with memorizing their names.

  “The ability to coerce others to do what you want?” the student offered cautiously.

  “Wrong!” Feinblatt snapped at him. “Relevant, but derivative.”

  “You,” he pointed at his next victim.

  “The definition of power?” the young woman replied, restating the question to stall for time, while trying to discern an answer that might get her out from under Feinblatt’s intense searchlight focus unscathed. “The means to force the outcome of a given situation in your favor?” she eventually replied.

  “Wrong!” Feinblatt snapped again, his brisk demeanor as intimidating as ever. “I asked you for the source of power, not its effects.” He picked his next victim, swiveling on his heels with more agility than the wiry old frame of his body suggested, “You.”

  “Um … creative intelligence …?” the student offered, trying to think outside the areas already attempted by his unlucky predecessors.

  “Nonsense,” Feinblatt flung at him. “Haven’t any of you been paying attention?” He glared around the room, searching their unsure faces for challengers, but none were forthcoming. With a sigh, his boney hand whipped up signing a quick gesture to the room’s information system. The ambient lighting dimmed slightly, while in the room’s center a heat-like shimmer hinted at an initializing holographic projection.

  With the binary suddenness of its digital origin, the towering bulk of a space trooper in full battle gear sprang into being, causing the already tense students to draw back with startled motions. The figure’s hematite like surface reflections gave it a sinister glow, menace evaporating of its intimating armor plated form like an aura of evil. The image moved as the helmeted visor slowly swept across an unseen horizon, surveying the surroundings for some distant enemy target.

  “The source of all power,” Feinblatt’s voice came from his wiry silhouette in the darkened room, “is the threat of violence.”

  The students shuffled around for a moment, but with the answer stated in front of them to examine, they quickly recovered their youthful self-assuredness.

  “I’d challenge that assertion,” a well-dressed young man spoke out. “What about social influence? Manipulation? People don’t go around keeping each other at gun point all day, but clearly there are situations where one has power over the other. In a corporate hierarchy for example.”

  “Wrong!” Feinblatt snapped mercilessly. “A manager has authority, because the subordinate wants to remain employed. If the subordinate refuses to follow directions, he is dismissed. If he refuses to leave, security forces can be called upon. Authority has no influence without the threat of violence to enforce it. ”

  “That’s crazy!” another student complained. “What about the scientific definition of power – it has nothing to do with violence.”

  “Power equals energy expended per unit time. Energy is equivalent to work done on the system. Work is force applied through a distance. Q. E. D.” Feinblatt shot back without hesitation. “Why do you obey laws? Social customs?” Feinblatt challenged them. “Because it’s the right thing to do? Or because of the threat of physical enforcement if you don’t? By tomorrow I want everyone to prepare an argument for or against the stated hypothesis, with at least five examples of historical scenarios to support your case. Go.”

  He dismissed the class with typical abruptness, while again miming a control gesture; the troop
er vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, and the lights restored to standard illumination.

  Feinblatt watched them file out of the room, some dragging their lanky frames as if physically burdened by the weight of this new assignment, furrowed brows indicative of their thought processes trying to bound the scope of the work added to their to-do lists.

  “Professor?” a crisply dressed middle aged woman approached him. She must have entered the room while it was darkened, to have escaped his attention earlier on. His facial expression immediately changed to one of distaste.

  “That’s Doctor Feinblatt to you ‘suit’. There’s nothing I can teach you,” he spat as he pinned her with his pale gray stare.

  “We would like to engage your services as a consultant on a high priority project,” she continued calmly. She had been briefed on what to expect.

  “And I would like for you to go away. But then you can’t always get what you want,” he replied with bitterness in his voice.

  “Apparently,” she answered with a professional smile that came nowhere near her eyes. “Shall we go then?”

  ***

  “You’re not serious?” Crim stated in disbelief, pushing against Denek’s massive frame to get a look at the display himself.

  “Serious as radiation poisoning,” Denek replied. “See for yourself.”

  “Advanced Programs division?! You just know they’re going to turn us into guinea pigs for whatever new psych weapon they’re cooking up next.”

  “Or ask us to field test new armaments which might take out the operator just as likely as the intended target,” Denek added with his rumbling voice.

  “Dorsuo, Lucis – let’s go!” an officious young aide, who looked like a twig next to the two troopers, called out to them, pointing down the corridor towards the AP sector.

  “Well, could be interesting …,” Crim said cheerfully and started walking, with Denek behind him like a slow rolling storm cloud.

  “You’re shipping out in thirty,” the young man briefed them as they walked.