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Leia woke up alone on the padded bench. Her ear piece asked her if she wanted to hear Radmer's message in his voice or in translation. She listened to each in turn. "You slept through dinner last night. I'm in meetings most of the morning but would like to meet you for lunch. Make yourself at home in my space, or go where you will. Ship-mind will let you back in if you leave and want to return. Thank you for sleeping with me." She could hear the smile in his voice and was happy to know she would have understood it correctly without the translation. This was better than waking up to a note on the pillow.
First things first: she found the facilities, then went to the dining hall for breakfast. Baylen and Ysbo waved to her and she joined them. They were talking about Andal. Ysbo was going down, but Baylen wasn't. Leia had not read anything about Andal, and had no idea what the plan was. Ysbo knew her piece of the plan, but she was she was piloting a transport between the big ship they were currently on, and Upper Andal, the station. Depending on what happened, she might also be piloting the same transport from Upper Andal to the planet itself. Ysbo didn't know what else would be happening, and was largely uninterested. Baylen knew a little more, but it was far form clear what crop failures might have to do with an NGO that rescued people from sounds-like-a-car-crash intelligent-specimens-for-a-zoo collectors. From the discussion with Ysbo and Baylen, Leia realized the ship they were on was a lot larger than she had realized, and for probably the third time reminded herself to ask ship-mind for a graphic of the ship and information about how many people were on it and what they all did, individually and collectively.
Ysbo and Baylen had started before she arrived, and left before she was done. Leia looked around for any other familiar faces, but while everyone she looked at smiled, they were all occupied in other conversations. She set her screen on the table and queried ship-mind, which responded with some numbers that sounded wholly implausible. There were over ten thousand people on this thing? She'd been thinking in terms of a glorified ambulance cum SWAT team with associate support crew, but she'd been thinking more in terms of a C-130, not several aircraft carriers. Where were all these people? The graphic didn't help at all. She expected a long, sleek tube, or a sphere, or a tear drop. She did not expect something that looked like a random arrangement of shipping containers. What made it go? It was impossible to imagine any axis along which propulsive force could be applied.
It wasn't any more unlikely that the Yamoto from Star Blazers.
Leia abandoned her efforts to understand the ship she was on in favor of asking ship-mind about Andal. As one might expect, there was a dossier that everyone involved in the mission on Andal was supposed to start with, and then additional information for various aspects of the mission. She whimpered slightly when she realized the scale of what was available. Surely Radmer had been sarcastic when he suggested she'd somehow become the resident expert in two days. This was an entire planet. Earth was an entire planet. She knew only a tiny amount about her own planet after decades, and she really liked learning. What kind of a dent could you make in a new planet in two days?
Andal had been settled by humans for a little over a hundred years; most of the founding colonists were still alive. At least she didn't have to learn about warring dynasties and multi-generational crusades. If she understood the dossier, and her understanding of Earth was correct (big if; she had no reference texts with her), this planet was larger in size and less dense, resulting in comparable gravitation. The land masses were more evenly distributed on the globe, rather than most of the mass being in one hemisphere. It wobbled less, and its orbit was slightly and stably eccentric. It had no satellites of its own. It was closer to its star, which was smaller and younger. Thus, it had no tides. Its climate, while varying according to distance from the equator, was less subject to seasonal variation. And it was not prone to periodic ice ages. Locations of settlements had been chosen based on access to fresh water and to take advantage of cheap ocean transport. Soils had been developed through a variety of techniques that Leia studiously avoided thinking about by labeling them terraforming. The planet had supported an enormous diversity of large animals. Predictably, that diversity was rapidly dwindling. Measures to preserve that diversity were currently on hold because the aforementioned crop failures were consuming all available resources, as the colonists desperately tried to figure out why crops that had been spectacularly successful for most of a century were suddenly failing to germinate.
And as if that wasn't enough of a problem, there had been three separate epidemic diseases. All were curable, but that took more time and resources diagnosing, treating and pre-empting the further spread. Not through vaccination, Leia noted; they had some nano prophylactic instead. All were known diseases, but no one had been able to figure out how they got to Andal. After the second one, onerous procedures were imposed on everyone and everything arriving at Upper Andal; that had not prevented the third disease.
Somebody, thought Leia, had it in for Andal. Why? That was the subject of one of the secondary dossiers, authored in part by Esifwu. Esifwu explored several possible motives for forcing Andal as a colony to fail. The galaxy had environmental activists, and eco-activists might have targeted Andal because they were a new colony damaging an interesting biosphere. Several groups believed colonization should stop entirely, or be limited to artificial structures. The galaxy also had competing groups, a couple of which had wanted to either participate in colonizing Andal, or control its development entirely. They might sabotage the existing colony in hopes of getting to take over when everyone took their toys and went home. Esifwu's third hypothesis was that some internal group was attempting to destroy the colony, for reasons that would only become clear once a team had gone in and talked to enough people to understand the details of the local politics.
The amount of detail available was stunning. Leia skimmed it, then started looking over some of the dossiers for the various groups going in. There was a team that would be talking to the government. Another team would be assessing the security infrastructure at Upper Andal. Another team would be interviewing media, and anyone else they could find who was well-connected. Another team would be interviewing emergency personnel.
There was absolutely nothing that Leia could possibly bring to this. This plan had been in the works for months now. People who were hundreds of years older than her, with hundreds of years of experience in their specialty had put together these plans. And they were good, detailed plans that set up a wide net with a fine mesh. If anything could be learned at Upper Andal or on the planet itself, this crowd would find it. The plans allowed for local decision making; the people implementing them could improvise based on what they were learning, but still coordinate effectively.
Leia leaned back. Esifwu had written the strategy dossier, the dossier that laid out how they thought about this problem, how they would solve it. No wonder Esifwu hadn't paid much attention to a first-contact situation. Kind of a first-contact; first-contact had been with the car-crash guys, if that counted. Was there an organization chart for this ship? Who was in charge? It took a little while to ask the question, and the answer was, predictably, complex. There was an organization responsible for running the ship itself. There were a variety of organizations of people on the ship, like Marines on a Navy ship. Esifwu's role was not clarified by understanding all this. She lay outside all the charts; she was what she called herself: a generalist. Which made Leia wonder, because usually when someone was wandering around off an org chart, they were either totally irrelevant or the person who was really in charge. Esifwu didn't seem to be irrelevant. There were other people, though, who didn't fit into a reports to/supervises structure, and, unsurprisingly, Radmer was one of them. He was attached to the tech services organization, but like Esifwu, not part of the regular chart. Ysbo and Baylen and some of the other people she had danced with were similarly associated with sub-groups, but not part of a regular chart. She hadn't been dropped into the officers' mess. Maybe she was hanging out with the private sector consultants? It was impossible to tell. Even if the whole thing had been on Earth, she would have been hard pressed to understand this group.
Were there other ships like this one? Did this one have a name? There were no other ships quite like this one, which ship-mind translated for her as Hazard. There was a cheery thought. She would have had a bad feeling about that, except she already did. Have a bad feeling, that is.
And it was at that precise moment that the name Hazard crystallized all her anger and fear and powerlessness, all her worrying attempts to make sense of what had happened to her, all her free-floating paranoia that had snagged on Radmer's question the night before about whether her being grabbed had been random at all. She didn't know if she had been grabbed for a reason, or randomly. She remembered absolutely nothing about it, and her first memory after being grabbed had contained no clues: she was naked, sick and in the dark. But there were a lot of possible reasons why Andal was being hurried along to hell, and no one had mentioned one of them. What was happening at Andal was guaranteed to summon Hazard.
Leia contemplated that particular paranoid brainstorm. What a lovely way to justify her presence, draw a lot of attention on herself when everyone else was very busy with other very important things. Quite the Mary Sue, in fact. How pathetic.
On the other hand, not mentioning it could be really bad. Did ship-mind have an opinion? She asked ship-mind if the possibility had been included in any of the dossiers. Maybe she just hadn't read that one. She got a please wait response. She'd gotten those before when she asked a question that took a while to translate. She had not thought this particular question would be difficult to process, but her sense of that was still shaky. People were starting to filter in for lunch. She hadn't left after breakfast, so she gathered up her breakfast dishes and put them away, and picked up something to drink. Radmer had said he wanted to meet her for lunch. She decided to wait until he got here to get her meal. She looked back at the screen to see if it had changed yet, and it did as she looked at it, but not to anything informative. Instead, she heard in her ear-piece what it said on the screen, "Please stay where you are. Esifwu will meet you in ten minutes." No answer to her question from ship-mind. Radmer had been able to look up at least some of her interactions with ship-mind, as had Esifwu. She'd sort of assumed she didn't have any privacy after the fact. It had not occurred to her someone might be monitoring what she was doing real-time, or that ship-mind might decide to bring something she was doing to, say, Esifwu's attention. She had not thought that the bug-on-a-slide feeling could get much worse. Yet another assumption shot to hell.
Radmer walked in before Esifwu did. He smiled at her, then frowned when he saw the expression on her face. She got up and joined him at the serving panel. She was very surprised when he leaned over, cupped her cheek and kissed her on the mouth. She wasn't too surprised to kiss back. "What is wrong?" he asked.
"You don't know?" she replied.
"No. Should I?"
"I have no idea. I had breakfast with Ysbo and Baylen and they were talking about Andal, so I did what you suggested and spent the morning reading some of the dossiers."
He laughed. "I knew it! What are we doing wrong?"
Leia shook her head and returned to her seat. "How am I supposed to figure that out? Esifwu's strategy file is brilliant. All the other files look terribly competent, to the extent that I can make any sense out of them at all. I don't know anything!"
He laughed again. "What are we doing wrong?"
"It's a trap for Hazard?" Leia mumbled it as a question.
He stopped laughing. "Does Esifwu...?" he started to ask then stopped as he saw her walking towards them. "It looks like she does. You told her? Not so passive after all?"
"No. I didn't tell her. I think ship-mind did. Either that, or she's monitoring me."
Esifwu sat down across from them. "How paranoid are you at home, Leia?"
Leia thought about that. "I'm functional. I worry about a lot of things that most people do not worry about. Most of those things never happen, but they could happen. They're just unlikely. Like, the food could be undercooked and make you sick when it arrives at the wrong temperature, but probably it's just been sitting a few minutes and cooled down. Or, if you press on the brakes on a rainy day, you might hydroplane and crossover into the oncoming cars and die, but probably the brakes will work just fine and you won't hit anyone. That one probably isn't going to translate well. I used to worry a lot when someone was friendly to me that I did not know. I thought they were trying to get me to trust them, so I'd tell them something, and then they'd laugh at me when they told their friends and then everyone would laugh at me. But that did happen several times when I was a child, so it wasn't really paranoid."
Radmer looked thoughtful at that. Leia hoped it was because he was still trying to figure out about the cars, and not because he was feeling sorry for her extremely nerdy childhood. "Would you still eat the food?" he asked.
"Depends. I'd smell it. I'd taste it, and give it a minute or two. Based on that, I'd either eat it or not."
"When you didn't eat the food, how did it turn out?"
"Other than that I was still hungry?" Leia laughed. "A lot of times I never knew. How do you know if you would have gotten sick when you don't eat it? Sometimes I did know, because everyone who did eat it got sick and I didn't." She shrugged. "I'm still alive, so I never crashed and died. I was a conservative driver and saved money on car insurance. That's not going to translate at all."
"Long odds," said the translation from Esifwu. Ship-mind confirmed that it was an easy translation. Leia skimmed some of what ship-mind offered up about games of chance and gambling. She knew they were present in this culture, and pervasive. She wondered if she should have paid more attention to the details. She was on a ship named Hazard. She would definitely pay more attention to the details.
"Don't you have some way to eliminate this idea?" asked Leia.
"No," said Radmer and Esifwu simultaneously. Esifwu continued, "That is why I asked you how paranoid you were at home. No one else thought of this, because people who think the way you do don't have this kind of career. A lot of them never leave their home planet; some don't leave their hometown. The ones who leave home go to work for a very different kind of organization and now that you've pointed out this possibility, we should call them for help."
"We need to allow for the possibility," said Radmer.
"Do you have any idea how many people we'd have to consider?" Esifwu sounded angry, and Leia didn't blame her. That beautiful strategy dossier might be the drunk looking for the lost car keys under the streetlight, knowing full well they were out in the dark.
"Not that many," said Radmer decisively. "This is crazy expensive, to trap us. And while we may be irritating, I don't think we have enemies."
"Well, no," said Esifwu. "If we thought we had enemies, we'd have thought of this possibility. But since we don't think we have enemies, we've got nowhere to start."
"Yes, we do," insisted Radmer. "There are time and other resource constraints. This has been developing for months. There's at least some new technology involved, since no one has been able to figure out why the seed isn't germinating. And there are ships involved, because someone is landing people and gear on Andal without going through Upper Andal."
"We don't know that."
Radmer shrugged. "It's likely."
Esifwu sighed, and turned to Leia. "Feel free to contact me directly with any insight you might have. And if you don't, ship-mind will tell me anyway. I'm not happy about this, but thank you for thinking of it. I think."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. Believe me when I say, this happens to me a lot."
Radmer laughed and nodded.
Esifwu left, never having gotten a meal, much less eating it. Once she was out of the dining hall, Radmer leaned over to Leia and said, "You may not have learned this yet, but we have an entire pantheon of minor deities expressly designed to scare the wits out of children who tell lies. You, my friend, will be visited by all of them."
Leia's jaw dropped and her eyebrows climbed.
"Don't even try that with me, and, I might add, Esifwu knew you were lying, too. Food arriving at the wrong temperature? Remote chance of land transport mishap? No. What was your job?"
"I worked for a government agency. I processed information."
"Non-answer."
"There were, are, laws governing what I can say about my job. I'd be breaking them if I told you what I did in the kind of detail you want."
Radmer looked at her in disbelief. "You've misplaced your home planet, and you're worried about on-planet security regulations?!"
Leia sighed and deflated. "I was paid to be as paranoid as I knew how to be, about what other governments might do to injure my government. The information we processed was often collected secretly and illegally. In general, I worked in the safety of an office well within my country's borders, but sometimes, I traveled to other countries because that was the only way to find out something we needed to find out. Sometimes, I pretended to be someone, or work for some other organization. The idiomatic term is spying. The respectable term is intelligence gathering."
Radmer ate for a while, then pointed a finger at her and said, "NOT random. Just not possible."
Leia shrugged. "I cannot imagine what purpose would be served."
Radmer waved, to indicate he was ending that discussion. "What would you do to decide whether or not to pursue this idea?"
"The this-is-a-trap idea? I'd try to figure out how much damage could be done to Hazard specifically by drawing them out of the ship, onto a station, down onto a planet, down to Andal specifically. It seems like a lot of the people on Hazard will be gone at the same time; how often does that happen?"
Radmer chewed, swallowed, and said, "Never. This is a first."
"That is bad. Then I'd look at this set of circumstances from a couple of perspectives: the people off the ship, and what might be done to them while off the ship, and the ship itself, and what can be done to it with personnel off the ship that would be harder or impossible to do if everyone was on it."
Radmer swallowed again, but did not take another bite. He looked at his food glumly.
"That is worse. Then I'd look at what happens politically to the organization as a whole if it is presented with this situation and is unable to take effective action because of security concerns associated with doing its job. That is, there is a threat, so you don't save Andal: then what? Do you lose funding? Are the bosses fired and replaced with other people? Do people quit calling when they need help and everyone suffers from disasters that you used to be able to mitigate?"
"This was your job?"
"Basically, yeah. Part of the time I worked counter-terrorism, so I was trying to stop people from doing stuff like this to us. Other times, I was supporting covert operations, which, when you take all the shiny patriotic stuff off, was basically us being terrorists. I mean, not really. But." Leia trailed off.
Leia heard Radmer mutter. She knew what he was saying. He was asking Esifwu if she had gotten all that. These people were never going to trust her. They were a bunch of honest, forthright, never-intentionally-hurt-anyone idealists, and she'd just exposed herself as one of the cynical types who thought things like: assassination could save everyone a lot of time and trouble or, let's do unpleasant things to these bystanders to draw out the people we're really looking for. Usually, she had the sense to keep her mouth shut. It would have been so nice to leave her old life behind, and be a nice, normal person for a change. Pity that the being-honest part of that strategy had such an unfortunate side effect.
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Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2012.
Created: July 9, 2012 Updated: July 9, 2012