Check out this free excerpt of my upcoming sci-fi, space opera novel Hand of the Union.
***
The big singularity cruisers never came down to the surface. They could be as much as 30 kilometers across. The energy required to get them down to a planet’s surface, then back up, was just too great. The science of wormhole drives demanded ships that huge, even if it meant few humans ever saw one up close. Most people only ever beheld the giant open circles as they perched in high orbit, serenely surveying their port of call.
Tia Dynn gazed up at one now. It stung to be looking at someone else’s singularity ship, rather than her own. But that was the purpose of today’s meeting. It wouldn’t help anything to get emotional about it before the negotiations even started.
Trying to calm herself down, she whistled a centuries-old tune from Earth as she waited for the elevator to bring a passenger down from it. Said passenger wasn’t the only cargo that would be coming down from the ship, of course. No one would send an FTL ship just to deliver one person. The cost in exotic matter and antimatter was far too high for that.
Not the only cargo, but definitely the most important.
The elevator was making a single trip for him, and only later would it begin the heavy work of shuttling down the main freight.
“I don’t like the fact that they’re sending a Hand,” said a voice to her left. “They would normally just send an Agent. The Union smells something about this that we don’t.”
“I’m rather excited to meet him,” Tia replied. “Most people go their whole lives and never meet a Hand.”
“Most people aren’t the executive of a planet,” her companion replied.
Tia acknowledged the fact with a half nod and an arched eyebrow. Her companion — a member of Felicitas’s Board of Directors — had the right of it. She needed to keep her mind on the planetary corporation’s financial situation, rather than being starstruck.
A slender woman, she stood with perfect posture and a face composed like artwork. Her blonde hair piled atop her head in an elaborate style almost like a golden crown or headdress. She wore a navy blue business suit in the classical style, with a skirt and blazer. The fashion wags might snark about her conservative clothing choices, but Tia adopted the look deliberately for the usually incompatible properties of being distinctive and inoffensive.
Above her, the elevator cable stretched seemingly into infinity. Scintillating in the morning sun, it looked like a line of diamond heading straight for the singularity cruiser. But it faded into the distance before it reached it. All around her, the fabled emerald green of Felicitas’s equatorial vegetation spread out like an ocean. The warm sun of dawn filled her with energy.
Her companion was older and male, and with a much more cutting-edge sense of style. His suit was black, single-piece, snug and form-fitting, leavened only by a bright red swath of fabric hanging from his neck that took the place of a tie.
“I don’t suppose you’ll come right out and tell me why you invited me, will you?”
Tia flashed the famous smile that looked so good on VR. She turned slightly, the sun glinting off her hair. “Ardo, it’s just the right thing to do. The Union paying us back is the biggest business before the board right now. The opposition deserves to be as fully informed as my own people.”
He harrumphed. “I thought not. Well, once again history gets to see Tia Dynn being fair and aboveboard.”
She rolled her eyes, shook her head, and turned away, going back to her whistling. Ardo, though, wasn’t ready to let it rest yet.
“You’ve made such a show out of your quest for exactly the perfect spouse, the VR is going to go there if you don’t have a better explanation than that. The famously-single corporate executive, turning her courtship into a political triumph by wooing a leader of her opposition on the board.”
“Oh drop it Ardo. I am not making a publicity stunt out of my personal life. I barely even have a personal life.”
This was the price of living with 24/7 VR news coverage and a political system with too much superficiality. Every tiny detail of her life found its way into a stream. Ardo was being a jerk about it though. Usually Tia didn’t mind his sarcasm that much, but he was a bit more bitter than usual today.
And besides, the so-called courtship was too flimsy to make a good PR stunt. One disastrous ex, two one-off dates, and that was that. Hardly the stuff of campaign theater. He was right, though. The media lapped it all up, regardless how fruitless.
A ring of bodyguards and functionaries surrounded them. Some chattered among themselves, some looked up at the singularity ship in orbit, a reminder of what their world had so recently lost. Most — especially the security personnel — looked either at Tia and Director Ardo Khalif or out for possible threats.
Many decades of terraforming gave their world a comfortable, stable climate. The elevator station was, of course, sited in the most comfortable, stable part of it. It nestled in the greenery of the equator, far from the oceans that could have sent severe weather at it. The warm temperatures would have made standing outside in their business attire uncomfortable, except that the climate systems were supplying cool mountain breezes for the day. The western hemisphere’s main range rose in the distance to their west, rocky peaks higher than any on Earth, but far enough away that the elevator faced no serious seismic threat from the fault line the mountains marked.
“What are you going to do if they don’t pay?” her companion now asked.
“They have to. It’s in our contract. The Union always pays legitimate claims, that’s why people join.”
“But they’re sending a Hand instead of an Agent. Maybe they don’t think it’s a legitimate claim.”
“It is a legitimate claim. I don’t know any more about the Gentle Hand than you, but supposedly they can read minds. If so, he’ll know what’s in both of our heads. He’ll know we didn’t fake it. Is it even possible to fake the loss of an entire singularity ship?”
“It’s a big galaxy, and FTL cruisers’ entire reason for being is that they can go anywhere they want within it. When you can go anywhere, it can’t be impossible to hide.”
“Ardo,” the Executive replied, “they need antimatter and exotic matter to move. Those aren’t just lying around. You have to get them from a refinery, and refineries are the Union’s most heavily regulated facilities. That means they can’t keep a pirated singularity ship flying. Sooner or later they’d have to show up on grid. Whoever ‘they’ are in this hypothetical conspiracy of yours. There’s no mystery about this, and no reason for the Union not to pay. It’s the same thing that happened to Primus II and Fealtana. We invested a century’s worth of income into the Blue Nebula, and it was lost in the vagaries of wormhole travel. That’s why people buy insurance. It’s why the Union exists. And if the Gentle Hand is everything people say, then this fellow will know that no one in the planetary government could have stolen it or pirated it, because we didn’t. He will know the truth.”
“All of that makes sense to me. But you can’t deny they’re sending a Hand, not an Agent. Agents are who the Union sends to transact routine business. Hands are who they send to solve the problems that are too big for agents. You’ve never seen a Hand, I’ve never seen a Hand. Most people go their whole life and never meet so much as a single one. The Union isn’t sending him here for nothing.”
Their argument ended when the elevator door opened. Out walked not one but six people. Every last one of them wore the uniform of the Gentle Hand.
For a moment, the two Felicitans simply stared in shock. Six Hands? Had anyone anywhere ever seen six Hands at once? None of the VR dramas about them ever showed six in one place, Tia and the Director traded nervous glances. Finally they bowed before the new arrivals. Tia spoke only after taking a second or two to catch her breath.
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Felicitas.”
***
The uniform of a Hand of the Union drew its fame almost exclusively from VR. Every time a major criminal enterprise fell apart, there was often virtual reality news coverage that featured a member of the Gentle Hand at the center of solving the problem.
Where there was no news, the entertainment industry took over, producing crime dramas and action stories with Gentle Hands as the heroes. But as far as the real world? As far as real humans wearing the uniform? Tia had never seen one before. Nor had Ardo Khalif. Nor had 99% of the population of Human Space.
The uniform jacket stretched from the highest of collars down to mid thigh, a dark tan unrelieved by any change of color. A tightly-fastened seam divided the shirt down the middle. Each one wore a name badge affixed to his or her chest, and a tiny gold pin at the collar: an open hand, upside down, palm out.
Each of the six Hands wore pants of the same color as their tunics. But where smooth, starched plain fabric covered their upper bodies, the trousers billowed out and bulged with a veritable explosion of pockets, loops, and fasteners. They wore rough two-tone boots mostly of black, but accentuated with the same flat dark earth color as the rest of the uniform.
All were excellent examples of physical fitness, as might be expected from officers of the Union’s most prestigious law enforcement arm. All wore the khaki uniform easily and proudly, knowing that the clothing by itself said everything that needed saying about their abilities. Even their facial expressions were the same, for the most part. Smiles, eyes wide and inviting, head angled ever so slightly down as if right on the edge of bowing all the time. They must have practiced it.
Only hair and height set them apart. Two women were among them, one wore her hair long and braided, a deep red Tia admired. A clumsy bun held the other’s brown hair atop her head. Among the men, brown hair predominated, with a leaven of black and gray. The gray haired one, bearded and short, led with barely noticeable gestures and angling of his head. The others looked where he looked, smiled when he smiled, and bowed when he bowed. Somehow Tia thought she recognized him.
But before she could figure out how she could possibly have seen him before, the man next to him pulled her gaze over like a magnet.
He was the youngest — a few years younger than Tia. He was also the tallest, the most attractive, and the only one not wearing the trained, deliberate expression of friendliness and openness. Instead, he gazed at her as if everything around them were a barren wasteland, and she the only flower in it. His eyes met hers, and all at once the cool breeze of the climate systems abandoned her, and Tia felt a bit warmer.
His pitch black hair gave him a countenance of shadows, as if without speaking his face could promise hiding places and secret retreats. His smooth complexion and easy smile reflected his youth. He was probably about two and a half decades old.
Of them all, only he looked anywhere but where the bearded leader looked. Whereas their chief took in the security guards, the surroundings, the elevator itself, and Ardo; the young one never looked anywhere but Tia.
She found herself a little bit shocked by how quickly her thoughts fell down this unproductive path. While she daydreamed about a handsome young hero, the Hands were in the process of returning the Felicitans’ bows in perfect unison.
Their leader, the gray-haired, bearded man, spoke. “My name is Ven Tremmer. And this,” he waved at the younger man, “is Langston Wheeler. We’re from the Union of Human Space. We’re here to serve you.”
Only then did the executive realize who the bearded Hand was. Ven Tremmer was a legend. Of those news VR stories and fictionalized accounts, he was personally the subject of several. Ven Tremmer broke up the only successful exotic matter theft in human history. Ven Tremmer was the most decorated Hand in the Union. Ven Tremmer was supposed to have retired to become a professor for young Hands long ago, an honor richly deserved after the most celebrated career in the organization’s history.
And the Union had called him out of retirement and sent him here? To Felicitas? To a quiet colony world that — until their first FTL ship disappeared — had never made any news? The great paragon with not just one assistant but five more Gentle Hands?
What exactly was going on here?
And yet, even that was not enough. When he named himself, he also named his young companion. Even with glaring evidence that her planet was in crisis, even with a bona fide hero of the Union before her, still her gaze went back to the younger, as ifcaught in a gravity well.
What had Tremmer said his name was again? Wheeler. Langston Wheeler. All the Hands were physically fit, but there was something different about this one. It wasn’t just the way his uniform clung to the powerful muscles of his chest and arms. Well,maybe a little bit.
His probing eyes communicated some sadness in him, but also some kind of fire too deep to make out clearly. His whole bearing exuded a level of confidence she’d never seen. It seemed like Ven was the teacher and Langston the student. Somehow, though, it was Langston Tia thought she’d want by her side in a crisis. Or in a social setting. Or with a fun, lively musician playing dance music. Or, actually, in any situation. She almost let her whistling habit slip out in front of them.
Somehow, she felt more aware of herself physically. Now she regretted her professional instinct to dress conservatively, and wished for something fashionable and eye-catching, like the one-piece suit Ardo had worn.
At last, the obvious question hit her. Was it all in her mind? The mental powers of the Gentle Hand were a thing of legend. Their telepathy was what made them anything more than intensely-trained martial artists. Maybe he simply wanted her to think he was attractive, and so she did?
It was a wasted thought anyway. They were Hands. That meant they had a genetic trait that must be strictly controlled. Young Mr. Langston Wheeler could be as mysterious and intriguing with his face as he liked, but he would never be allowed to consort with anyone other than another Gentle Hand.
Her fellow Felicitan fixed an impatient stare on her, and Tia remembered she was supposed to be introducing the two of them. “My name is Tia Dynn, Executive of Felicitas. With me is Ardo Khalif, a member of our board of directors. It’s an honor to meet you.”
Ven Tremmer’s baritone voice resonated with assurance and confidence. He made no sign at all that he even noticed her long pause when she was fantasizing instead of paying attention. For a moment she could imagine that voice alone being what made him famous. “I don’t think any of us have ever been personally greeted by a planetary Executive before. You do us too much honor.”
He held eye contact with her, and his wrinkles multiplied as a kindly smile bloomed amid his beard. For a moment, she saw her grandfather in front of her.
“Why… why thank you. But surely it’s you who are showing us excessive honor. Never mind Ardo and I, I’m not sure anyone in all of human space has ever seen six members of the Gentle Hand in one place before.”
His warm laugh felt like an invitation to laugh with him, though Tia didn’t quite get what was funny. She smiled, and he cleared up her confusion.
“There are a few people in human space who have seen six Hands at once,” he replied, still laughing with his eyes, if not his mouth. “But none so respectable as you. Or so charming. It’s an honor usually reserved for criminals and terrorists.”
Ardo interrupted with the obvious question: “Then why are we so lucky?”
“Ah. To business then. You are correct, Director Khalif. I am old — I should be too old to be in the field anymore — and easily distracted. Forgive me for the delay. Shall we start the meeting?”
They went inside, where the elevator station’s personnel had prepared their most formal conference room. Tia and Ardo’s brigade of bodyguards and bureaucrats followed. Once inside, even the planetary executive had to catch her breath as she took in the opulent decor. Real wood flown in from Earth lined the walls. Luxurious chairs of the finest synthetics enveloped a long, rectangular table. Like the walls, it was made out of Earth wood, then inlaid with a particular shiny metal found only on Felicitas. Each piece of the conference room was costly beyond measure. It existed to greet off-world visitors, who were usually worth impressing.
Tia and Ardo took seats in the middle of one side of the table, all but necessitating that the six Hands sit across from them. Tia started the conversation, conscious as always of how the words would sound when someone read them later.
“You have our gratitude for coming so quickly. I’m sure you can imagine that the loss of the Blue Nebula is a grievous financial blow to Felicitas. We’re eager to begin the noble task of rising from the setback and overcoming it. The settlement of our claim with the Union will make a real difference to our people.”
All five of the lower-ranked Hands fixed their full attention on her as she spoke, leaning forward. They moved almost as one, giving her the distinct impression that their deliberate expression of attentive and respectful body language was a trained and chosen action. The eldest Hand spoke, as usual. As he did, all the other Hands very delicately shifted their gaze to a point midway between the two of them, to show they were listening to him but still acutely concerned with Tia. All except the youngest, whose eyes hinted at a daydream going on behind them when he forgot to look away from her.
Tia wanted to smile — it had been a long time since she’d had a handsome, attractive man mooning over her — but she finally managed to keep herself to business. She trained her eyes on Tremmer. Try as she might, though, even forcing herself not to look at him, Langston Wheeler’s presence pressed in on her mind as if there were some physical contact. She wondered again if it was just something about being a Hand. They were supposed to read minds, be telekinetic, to know the future… Maybe something about those supposed mental powers caused her to feel this way.
She missed a few of the elder Hand’s words while lost in her musings, but his conclusion grabbed hold of her attention tightly and drew it right back in.
“…until we can be sure whether a financial settlement is the appropriate adjudication of your claim.”
Fortunately, since she had missed the context of those last words, Ardo didn’t wait for her to reply.
“Excuse me? You’re not going to pay? And why not? What have we paid our premiums for all these years?”
“Please bear with us, Director Khalif. Your shareholders have endured a major loss, and you want to be made whole, and to make them whole. That speaks highly of you as a leader. Our job is to determine the facts of the case. We don’t yet know what the situation is, so the Union can’t know what’s the best way to return you to that wholeness you rightly seek. We will honor your policy with us. We need to know what happened so we can make the act of honoring the policy also an act of mutual respect.”
All of Ven Tremmer’s carefully chosen soothing words were wasted on her. Tia felt the blood drain out of her face. If the Union didn’t pay, Felicitas would be ruined— ruined under her stewardship. Half the planetary product had gone into the Blue Nebula for a century — for far more decades than she had been alive. The people of the colony world started work on it almost as soon as the first permanent structure was built on their new home.
Shareholders owned the Blue Nebula instead of investments, instead of savings, and instead of retirement accounts. The income of flying cargo between worlds on a singularity cruiser was supposed to support the entire living population of Felicitas, and those yet to come. If the ship was lost and no compensation was forthcoming, it wouldn’t quite mean starvation. But it would mean centuries of backbreaking labor for every person — every shareholder, she reminded herself with some trepidation — who lived here.
And, most likely, it would mean those shareholders would vote new directors onto the board, and those new directors would install a new Executive. And the textbooks would record Tia Dynn as the most disastrous leader in Felicitan history.On the great moral scale, that couldn’t compare to her people’s financial devastation. But it still scared her.
Now she spoke instead of Ardo. “The Blue Nebula went into a wormhole and never came out. It is lost somewhere in whatever transdimensional reality exists there. That sometimes happens with singularity cruisers. Not often enough to make FTL travel too unsafe, but often enough that people need insurance for the cost. We all know these facts — they’re the whole reason the Union of Human Space exists. If you will not pay when an event occurs for which your organization was founded, then why should anyone pay premiums to you?”
She concluded with words she at once wished she could have back. “If you’re not going to pay our legitimate claim, we will ensure that your other policyholders know that your guarantees are not reliable.”
That would be on VR if anyone here leaked. “Dynn threatens Union” was just too juicy of a headline. She regretted her carefully planned invitation to Ardo. Having the opposition at the meeting once seemed like a great way to share the blame if something went wrong and buttress her own reputation as an even-handed leader. But after she said an idiot thing like that, she no longer really wanted her main political adversary in the room.
Ardo’s head twitched toward her — he recognized the faux pas as quickly as she did — but it was Ven Tremmer, the gray-bearded elder Hand who spoke. All of his colleagues adjusted their gaze for the center of the axis between him and Tia.
“Please, Executive. Please bear with us. Our goal is the same as yours — that shareholders of Felicitas emerge from this situation financially whole and prosperous. We simply need to take some time about doing it. We know your board does its diligence, we know you know the history of the Union. We exist to deliver many forms of security to those worlds that choose to join, not just insurance against loss. Even so, in your diligence you must surely have observed that over the centuries we’ve paid nearly a dozen claims for the loss of FTL cruisers, and never denied one. We are not here to swindle you. We simply want to make sure that the right thing is done. We’ve taken note of a possibility here of which you may not yet be aware—”
Part of Tia’s mind wondered about that last sentence. What possibility weren’t they seeing? But the rest of her had slipped into panic mode about the risk of not being reimbursed for the Blue Nebula. “The only possibility I need to be—”
But even as she spoke, all six Hands leapt up out of their chairs, trading alarmed glances.
“I can’t get a sense of which door—” the younger one, Langston, blurted out. He looked from side to side.
“It’s bigger than that,” one of the female Hands replied. Unlike the junior, she didn’t glance anxiously from side to side, or let her voice rise. She simply spread her feet wider, adopting a ready posture, lifting her hands up to a fighting stance.
As the younger one looked wildly about and the other Hands simply prepared themselves for whatever they sensed, the eldest said to his young pupil, “Protect the Exec—”
And then the world collapsed.
Something like a beam of light sliced through the conference room, bisecting it ceiling to floor. Screams and shrieks of agony rang out at once when it chopped through people as well as surroundings. One half of the room began to pull away from the other, and the ceiling and walls collapsed from the loss of structural integrity. A corner of the wood table fell into Tia’s lap, sliced by the light as it whipped through a second time.
Beside her, Ardo screamed. He’d been caught by the light. Her head glanced toward the noise, then jerked instinctively away when she saw what remained of him. Whatever the line of light was that had destroyed the conference room, it had cut him in half. From his chest up he was still alive to scream, but Tia knew at once that couldn’t last long. She thought she could see the legs of one or two of the Hands in the chaotic pile of construction materials that used to be the other side of the table. They kicked briefly then went still.
Then a chunk of the ceiling fell down on top of the table that was already in her lap, pinning her there. The weight hurt, but compared to what Ardo’s last moments were like she felt ashamed to cry out in pain. She was torn between her revulsion at the gory mess he had become, and her desire to help him. Decency won out and she tried to turn to him, but the chunk of ceiling pinned her. She couldn’t even roll over.
Tia could only reach to the side and take his hand, squeezing it hard as he screamed. She couldn’t do anything about it. He was going to die. But at least she could do better than turning away from him in disgust.
Around her, dust and debris made it impossible to see much more than her immediate area. Where she had been looking at the six Hands, now there was nothing but a wall that used to be the entire elevator station’s floors above her, decorated with some bloodstains.
Then it hit her. The line of light that cut the room in half. Had it been the… could it be…
The space elevator was a marvel of engineering, but in concept very simple. A cable of carbon nanotube microfilament stretched from the planet’s surface up to a counterweight in the highest of orbits, well beyond geosynchronous. Elevator cars ran up and down the microfilament to the docking station where singularity ships and sublight ships docked to send people and cargo down to the planet.
If the cable broke loose…
It would whip wildly around as the orbital counterweight carried it loose from its anchor. In the end, the elevator was little more than a super high tech string with a weight on the end. If the string broke, the broken end would swing back and forth as the counterweight pulled it away. The high tech composite filaments that made up the cable possessed reflective properties. Braided into one unit as they were, they might indeed scintillate like a beam of light.
If the elevator cable actually did break, it could easily cause the kind of destruction she had just witnessed. But that was only the beginning.
If that was indeed what had happened, Felicitas’s ability to receive supplies from the rest of Human Space was gone. Space elevators existed because they were orders of magnitude more energy efficient than rockets. They cut the cost of moving weight up and down from orbit by vast amounts.
If Felicitas lost its space elevator, they’d need rockets to get back up. Ships would be dropping re-entry capsules into the oceans to get things down. It would destroy their economic efficiency. If the elevator had truly just been destroyed, Felicitas had lost its highway to the stars, and would have to rebuild in the most inefficient way possible.
As what remained of Ardo ceased screaming, she realized that the others in the room had already gone silent too. Was she the only survivor?
She tried to plan. Could she save herself? The debris pinning her down was much too heavy to move. Could she cry out for help? Yes, but were there other survivors in the building? Had the microfilament destroyed the entire station? Would anyone hear her plea for help?
“Is anyone there? Hello?” Her shouts, at first, drew no response at all. Perhaps they weren’t audible over the grinding and shifting of cement and metal.
And then the shard of concrete pinning her down began to move.
Slowly it simply lifted off of her, floating into the dust and smoke-filled air above her. In its place, she saw the younger Hand, Langston Wheeler. Coated from head to foot in dust, bleeding from a cut to the left side of his face near his eye, he simply stood there with his eyes closed and a hand held out in front of him, open, palm up, as if pushing something up from underneath.
The concrete must have weighed tons. It had hurt to have all that weight pinning her down, even protected by the table as she had been. However much it weighed, Tia remembered well that she couldn’t even budge it when trapped under it. Now, it floated above her like a particularly sharp-edged cloud.
She had seen it in VR often enough. She had watched such things in fictional streams like “Not So Gentle” and “The Hand And The Fist.” Now, seeing the reality of it hanging in front of her, Tia’s fear of dying alone here vanished at once, replaced with a confidence that everything would be alright.
“Oh thank God,” Tia said, but Wheeler didn’t reply. She was about to say something else to prompt him to speak when she noticed that more debris was floating through the air. Rubble and ruined building material drifted away until a path led from where she lay to the outside of the building.
Even when he’d cleared a way out, he didn’t immediately reach out to her. Instead, he knelt beside Ardo’s remains. He closed the man’s eyes. Under his breath, she barely heard him whisper something.
Then he stood, at last extended his hand to her, and said, “Let’s get you to safety.”
***
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