The End of All Things: The First Instalment (11 page)

“Of course,” he said, and then his face got a look. I thought it resembled what the face of someone who felt guilty about something, but didn’t actually want to be troubled by doing anything to deal with that guilt, might look like.

I waited and eventually I think Ocampo’s vestigial sense of moral obligation kicked in.

“Look, Daquin, I know I’ve put you in a bad spot,” he said. “I know they’ve promised to return your body to you, and I know they will. They’ve done this before. But between now and then, if there’s something I can do for you, well…” He trailed off here, letting me imply that he’d be willing to do something for me, without actually saying it, which I think he thought would give him an out.

This guy was a treasure, this Assistant Secretary of State Tyson Ocampo.

Thank you, sir,
I thought
. I can’t think of anything I need from you right now.
On the monitor, I could see Ocampo visibly relax; I had just let him off the hook. Which gave me the space to say what I really wanted to.
But there is one thing you can do for me in the future
.

“Name it,” Ocampo said.

Someday soon they will give me a mission. My first real mission, not the simulated ones they’ve been having me running. It would mean a lot to me if, on that day, you and Vera Briggs came to see me off.

“You mean, there on the
Chandler
.”

Yes, sir. I realize that to some extent, in my condition
—and that was an intentional knife thrust to the guilt centers of Ocampo’s brain, right there—
it wouldn’t matter whether you said good-bye inside of the
Chandler
or outside of it. But it would mean a lot to me. You and Ms. Briggs are the only people I know now. I’d like someone to see me off. Just a couple of minutes here before I go. If you would
.

Ocampo thought about it for a minute, which was either him figuring out the logistics or trying to see if he could get out of it. “All right,” he then said. “We’ll do it.”

You promise?
I asked. Because this was the guy who just trailed off on “If there’s something I could do for you.”

“I promise,” Ocampo said, and I believed him.

Thank you, Secretary Ocampo,
I said.
You’re a good man
.

Ocampo either smiled or winced at that.

Either way, then he waved and cut the signal.

* * *

Things I learned from Ocampo’s PDA:

One, there was no doubt Ocampo had known he was going away. He stocked himself quite a library of entertainments—several thousand videos ranging from classic movies from Earth to the latest serials from Phoenix, an equal number of books and musical tracks, and a fair sampling of video games, although these were mostly a decade or more old; I guess when you’re running the universe, you don’t have time to keep up with everything.

Oh, and
mountains
of porn.

Look, no judgment. Like I said, it’s clear he knew he was going to be away for a long time, and probably without significant human companionship. I’m not going to say I wouldn’t do the same thing in his shoes. I’m just saying there was more of it than any other sort of entertainment.

And yes, I looked at some. I may be a brain in a box, but that saying that the biggest sex organ is the mind? In my case, both literally and figuratively true.

Also I was curious to see if lack of gonads meant lack of response.

The answer: definitely not. Which was more of a relief than you might think.

Anyway, I might have just gone on about porn too long.

The point was: Ocampo planned for the long term.

Also in the PDA: a truly impressive amount of confidential information from the Colonial Union.

To begin, all the information I think there might have been on the Colonial Union’s military capabilities—not just the general Colonial Defense Forces but also its Special Forces and its capabilities. Information on ships, their capabilities, and their state of readiness.

Information about the manpower of the Colonial Defense Forces, its fatality rate over the years, and information about how the lack of relationship with Earth was having an impact on CDF readiness—after all, if you can’t get new soldiers, every soldier you lose becomes one less soldier you can muster.

Detailed files on the civilian arm of the Colonial Union government with particular emphasis on the Department of State, which made sense considering who Ocampo was, but every aspect of the CU bureaucracy was gone over in what looked like exhausting detail (I did a lot of skimming).

Information on the Colonial Union merchant fleet—the thousands of trade and cargo ships that crossed between the planets—including which ones were purpose-built and which ones were repurposed from CDF ships, and their most recent trade routes.

Briefs on the current relationship between the Colonial Union and every known non-human intelligent species, as well as the Conclave as a political entity, and the Earth.

Briefs on every single Colonial Union planet, population, defensive capabilities, and a list of targets that would offer maximum damage, either to population, to infrastructure, or to industrial capacity.

Blueprints and assessments of Phoenix Station, the seat of the Colonial Union government and humanity’s single largest spaceport.

In other words: just about every single bit of information you would want to have in order to plan an attack on the Colonial Union and make it stick. Or at least what
I
thought you would need. I’m not an expert. But that’s what it looked like to me.

Now, not all this information was classified. Some of this information you could get just from looking at an encyclopedia or public records. Ocampo or anyone else using this information wasn’t exactly going to have the ability to just access a local data network. Ocampo brought with him everything he’d need—or thought he’d need.

But then there was the rest of it.

The
new
information.

The data Ocampo was given since he got here—
here,
incidentally, being a military base hollowed out of an asteroid, made and run by the Rraey until some recent tangles with the Colonial Union and some others made them scale way, way back—and information he’d created since he’d been here.

With this group.

With the Equilibrium.

Which is what they were calling themselves, anyway.

I thought it was a stupid name. But they weren’t giving me a vote. And if they did I would probably name it “The League of Assholes,” so I don’t think they would mind not having my input.

This new information included audio and video recordings of meetings and the automatic transcriptions of the same. Those were useful because they tagged who was saying what. This was useful because some of the people in the meetings were from species I’d never encountered before—a fact that was not especially impressive since most of my travel was within the Colonial Union, but still something to deal with.

Most of the transcriptions were of meetings about unexciting things—discussions about the maintenance of the base, for one, which apparently had a mold problem that was aggravating the respiratory systems of several of the species there, to which I thought, well,
Good
.

But then I found some interesting transcripts after all.

For example: one recorded only a couple of weeks into our stay at the base, which started off with Ku Tlea Dho, a Rraey diplomat, catching Ocampo not paying attention.

“You seem distracted, Secretary Ocampo,” Dho said. The video had him down the arc of the table that dominated a tiny meeting room, which had a dozen people in it, most from different races.

“I’m still getting my bearings on the station, Ambassador Dho,” Ocampo said.

“You will be here for a while, Secretary,” Dho said. “You will have time.”

Ocampo smiled here. “Hopefully not too much more time.”

“How do you mean?” asked Ake Bae. He was an Eyr. The Eyr were members of the Conclave, or so I learned when I checked the files Ocampo brought with him. Increasingly unhappily members of the Conclave.

“The time has come to discuss the endgame,” Ocampo said, to the room. “
Our
endgame.”

“Has it.”

“It’s why I am here, Ake Bae,” Ocampo said.

“Indeed,” said Ake Bae. “Are you sure, Secretary Ocampo, that you’re not confusing your own endgame with
our
endgame? I understand that you are now in exile from the Colonial Union for the duration of the campaign at the very least. That does not imply that Equilibrium must now change its schedule to accommodate your personal needs or inclinations.”

Ocampo smiled again, but not exactly a nice smile. “I understand the concern,” he said, looking around the room. “I know very well that many of you have the opinion that humans, individually and as a species, have an outsized opinion of our importance to events, both in general and here with our particular activity. I’m also aware that many of you are of the opinion that I’ve always been a pain in the ass.”

There were noises in the room that I assumed equated to laughter.

“Let me remind you, however, that the roots of this rebellion of ours come from when we, the Colonial Union, struck out against the Conclave at Roanoke,” Ocampo continued. He looked around the room at the assembled species. “How many of your governments watched the Conclave form, and felt helpless to do anything about it?” He looked at Ake Bae. “How many of your governments joined the Conclave rather than fight it? The Colonial Union—humanity—were the only ones to bloody the Conclave. The only ones to show they
could
be bloodied. The only ones to show that General Gau’s experiment with hegemony could be toppled.”

“You seem to be discounting the attempted coup of Gau after Roanoke,” Ake Bae said.

“A coup given impetus by the Colonial Union’s attack on the Conclave fleet,” Ocampo countered. “My point, Ake Bae, is that we are here today because of what humans have done. If we have a high opinion of our importance to this cause of ours, it’s because we’ve earned it. It’s not merely ego.”

“There’s irony in praising the Colonial Union’s actions against the Conclave when it’s that very action that convinced us all that it must be destroyed along with the Conclave,” said Utur Nove. Nove was from Elpri. I had no idea until that moment that a planet named Elpri even existed.

“We all agree that the return to an equilibrium of power is best for all of our species,” Ocampo said. “Thus the very name of our organization. The Conclave represents the primary threat to that equilibrium. We agree about that. We also agree that the Colonial Union grew too powerful in opposition to the Conclave. But don’t confuse the Colonial Union with humanity.”

He nodded to Paola Gaddis, who was the other human I’d seen, the one who supervised the installation of the weapons systems. She nodded back at him.

“My colleague here represents the interests of several governments of Earth,” Ocampo said. “She will be happy to tell you all the ways those governments are not even remotely concerned about the Colonial Union’s interests. In the end, the Colonial Union is not humanity. It is merely a government. When the Colonial Union falls, and it will, then the Earth might finally take up the mantle of leading the former worlds of the CU. Or those worlds might form other unions.
Humanity
will survive. Humanity will continue as part of the new equilibrium.”

“Humanity, perhaps,” Ake Bae said. “But I was speaking of
you
in particular, Secretary Ocampo. You and your own endgame, which is different from that of the Equilibrium.”

Ocampo smiled again, picked up his PDA from the table. The video feed got momentarily wavy, trying to stabilize the image while being lifted. “You know what this is, Ake Bae.”

“It’s a personal data assistant, I believe,” Ake Bae said.

“It is,” Ocampo said. “And it contains nearly all of the last decade of data from the Colonial Union State Department and the Colonial Defense Forces. Nearly every confidential file or report on the CU’s doings and conflicts. Everything they don’t want known, or would want swept under the carpet. Every double-cross of an ally, completed or intended. Every military action on one of its own worlds. Every assassination. Every ‘disappearance.’ All of it true. All of it verifiable. All of it hugely damaging to the Colonial Union.”

“The data you promised us to help us plan our strategy for our next phase,” Ake Bae said.

“No,” Ocampo said. “Not the next phase. The
last
phase.” He shook the PDA for emphasis, and the video got woozy again. “Understand that every piece of data from the Colonial Union is accurate and verifiable. It all happened. And so it will serve as cover for what I will
add
to it.”

“What will you add?” asked Dho.

“All of
our
operations,” Ocampo said. “Every ship we’ve commandeered, human and Conclave. Every agitation we’ve spearheaded on Colonial Union and Conclave worlds. Every attack, up to and including the destruction of Earth Station. All of it altered, to make it look as if it happened under the aegis of the Colonial Union and the Colonial Defense forces. All verified by both my security hash and the security hash of my former boss, the current secretary of state.”

“And how did you get that?” asked Paola Gaddis.

“The weakest part of any security and verification scheme is the people who use it,” Ocampo said.

Right then I nearly paused the video to savor the rich irony of that statement, all things considered.

“And the fact they trust the people they’ve known for years as friends and allies,” Ocampo continued, oblivious to my scorn. “Secretary Galeano is no pushover but she has a soft spot for loyalty. I earned her trust long ago. I’ve never done anything that would cause her to doubt it.”

“Except this,” Gaddis pointed to the PDA. “And everything else you’ve done for Equilibrium.”

“I’m not going to suggest Galeano will ever forgive me,” Ocampo said. “She won’t. I like to think that in time she’ll recognize the necessity.”