2-76: Long Distance Delegation
"What do you mean they don't have any openings in the orbital positioning?" Lehrai said, staring at navigation and the helm.
Helm was looking a little tense. She had her hands on the controls. It wasn’t the same as before. This was a ship with different shifts so it’s not like it was the same people in the CIC every time something interesting happened like on shows.
One of the controls was a good old-fashioned flight yoke, and the other one was the throttle with a bunch of buttons on it. That was another thing that was a little different about a modern star cruiser than the kind of thing you typically saw in ancient science fiction.
Michael and Denise Okuda might’ve created a shorthand for futuristic-looking stuff that rang down through the ages, and they were rightly lauded for all the work they'd done over those long years. But at the same time, the ability to control a starship in three dimensions was better translated to a good old-fashioned control stick and throttle with a bunch of buttons on it rather than a touch screen. hich always made it look more like an old-fashioned fighter craft than something you might see on a carrier or on the bridge of the many USS Enterprises that used those touch screens to handle their flight controls.
"I'm sorry," Comms said, another new face since Arhur was busy with the newly created science team, looking over at Lehrai and seeming genuinely apologetic. "They seem to be stonewalling us."
Lehrai stared at the holodisplay in the middle of the CIC. Her teeth were grinding together so loud I could hear them even at this distance. I walked over and put a hand on her shoulder, which had her jumping as she turned to look at me.
"You don't need to get so worked up over all this," I said.
"Like the hells below, I don't," she said, turning to look at a display of the fourth planet in the Alartha system like it was one of the hells below she was talking about.
I thought it was fascinating that the livisk had a concept of an underworld the same as what we had back on human worlds. Not that I'd really gotten into much of their mythology. I had enough on my plate as it was dealing with the consequences of a monarch who was causing all this trouble.
"Seriously," I said, giving her shoulder a squeeze. "It's going to be okay. We can expect they're going to try and stonewall us."
"So what are you suggesting we do?" she asked, turning to look at me.
Varis stepped forward. She looked at the holodisplay, and then she turned to take in everybody in the CIC. She took a deep breath, and she let it out.
"Should we just open fire until they let us do what we want?" Lehrai asked.
"No," Varis said before I could get in between that particularly bad idea and anybody who might be feeling trigger-happy enough to shoot some of the battle group's weapons.
I turned to look at Varis. She hit me with a faint smile. Confidence came through the battle link. The kind of confidence that said she could handle this, and she’d appreciate it if I let her handle it.
So I merely nodded to her and retreated to the simulation for a moment.
"Do you have any idea what they're trying to do here?" I asked Arvie.
"I would imagine they aren't happy about us coming to the fourth world under the guise of trying to have a little bit of R&R, and so they are doing their best to try and stop us from achieving the goal by holding us up with bureaucratic bullshit as much as possible."
"They're trying to hold us up with bureaucratic bullshit," Varis said, and I blinked as she echoed exactly what Arvie had just said. "Damn."
There were times when I got so caught up in everything that was going on here that I had to remind myself she was wily enough and crafty enough that she'd been able to rise to prominence in one of the major houses in the Livisk Ascendancy.
Information on her family was scarce, but I got the impression she hadn't been the default person to take control of House t’Thal, and there’d been a little bit of maneuvering on her part before she took the big seat.
I'd never gotten into it too much. I figured that was a family history I didn't need to get into. Especially not when there was already so much other bullshit I needed to worry about.
"They're trying to hold us up with bureaucracy, but we have more time to wait than they do,” Varis said.
"But the empress is out there," Lehrai said, turning to look at Varis. "The two of you might act all casual about that sort of thing, but I'm not happy about the idea of maybe having an Imperial battle fleet drop on us in the middle of unfamiliar and mildly unfriendly territory."
"That is a possibility, yes," Varis said.
There was some tension on the CIC when she said that. I'm sure nobody else enjoyed the idea of being reminded that the Imperials could come at any moment and cause some serious trouble for us.
"William, you have an incoming communication from Senior Media Management Specialist Rachel Keen."
I turned to look at Arvie in the simulation, and I grinned.
"Well, how about that? Go ahead and put her through in the simulation. I don't want to bother Varis with this right now."
"What we need to do in this situation is try and figure out a way to beat them at their own game," Varis said. "There’s got to be some sort of rule or loophole we can use. Arvie, we have backups of all of House t’Thal’s legal agreements here, right?"
“We do," Arvie said.
"Very good," Varis said. "Let's go ahead and start looking for something we can use to take all this bureaucratic red tape and throw it in their face."
"Of course, General," Arvie said.
Meanwhile, I turned my attention to Rachel, who popped up on a screen in the simulation. I figured Varis had everything well in hand. She was doing everything I would’ve done. If somebody was using a tactic against you, then the best thing to do was to try and turn that tactic around on them. It showed that you weren't to be trifled with, and it would show that we were more than a one-trick pony solving all our problems at gun point with our battle group.
For all that using that one trick of blasting our way through things had been working out pretty well for us so far.
Rachel appeared on the screen. She looked a little harried. There were dark bags under her eyes, even darker than the rest of her, but she also had a thin smile on her face.
"Rachel," I said, nodding to her. "How are things going back on Livisqa?"
She took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. "Do you want me to sugarcoat bullshit for you, or do you want me to just tell you how everything is?"
"You know I love to take my bullshit straight with no chaser."
"I know you do," she said. "But I also imagine you have your hands full out there wherever you are."
"At least we can tunnel directly through fold space and have instant communications. Better than the two weeks it took us to get all the way out here."
"And what's been going on out there since you arrived in the Alartha system?" Rachel asked.
"Would you believe we made contact with that alien species that’s been fighting the livisk all the way out here?"
"You did?”
"You don't sound very surprised," I said, disappointed she wasn't taking the bait and showing what I thought was the appropriate level of surprise for that sort of bomb dropped right in the middle of our conversation.
"Come on, Bill," she said, that thin but tired smile still there. "You're the kind of guy that stuff happens for. Of course you're going to run into those aliens out there. If I had to guess, I'd be willing to bet you're already best friends with them and pulling them into an alliance you're going to use to try and conquer the empress."
"Nothing like that. Yet," I said, adding the "yet" more as an afterthought, but that had her chuckling nevertheless.
"Okay, Bill," she said. "I'll take a nibble at the bait you're dangling in front of me, even though I don't really have time to take a whole bite."
"Would you believe it's a race of sapient cat-like creatures who’ve modeled their society on Star Trek because they picked up old broadcasts due to gravity lensing."
"Bullshit," she said.
"Yeah. Arvie is already putting together a few different papers he says are going to be accepted at major research institutions on both sides of the Terran-Livisk border, and then he's going to use the publication of those papers to throw it in the face of a bunch of people on the galactic net who are still saying that kind of thing is improbable."
"Because it is improbable," Rachel said. "Do you have any idea how fucking ridiculous that sounds? A bunch of sapient house cats pulling a Galaxy Quest?”
I shrugged. "Maybe it sounds ridiculous, but we're in an infinite universe."
"But it's a finite galaxy."
"It's still a very big galaxy, Rachel."
"Not that big," she said.
"Anyway," I said, figuring it was time to move on. The situation with the Kith’var was what it was, and we had more important things to chat about. "Do you have something for me? I'm assuming you're not calling me because everything is going well."
"Actually, everything is going decently well," she said with a sigh. "We are having to run the big shields around House t’Thal’s territory in Imperial Seat."
"Oh yeah?” I asked.
"I'm surprised you haven't gotten a report from any of the military types."
I turned to look at Varis in the real world. She was looking down at a data slate and moving through a bunch of text while Lehrai stood beside her doing the same thing. Meanwhile, there was a data display in the holoblock that was going through a bunch of text at the kind of pace that only Brent Spiner would be able to read back in the day. Presumably that meant Arvie was doing his thing as well.
"Did you know about this, Arvie?" I asked, turning to him in the simulation.
"I was aware, yes," he said.
"Why weren't we informed?"
"It started shortly after we dropped out of fold space and didn't seem like it was the sort of thing that was worth bothering you with, considering everything else that was going on," Arvie said. "I had every intention of making you aware of it as soon as we stopped confronting potentially life-threatening situations here. Which hasn’t happened yet. Besides, it seemed like a distraction since everything is well in hand with the shard we left behind on Imperial Seat and the people working in the tower to keep everything secure. Plus it's not like there's anything you can do from a distance."
"Yeah, okay," I said, rubbing at the bridge of my nose. I wanted to be annoyed that they weren't keeping me in the know, but at the end of the day, I was but one man. It's not like I could take care of everything in the galaxy all at once. At a certain point, I had to trust the people I'd put in charge of handling that kind of stuff and know they’d do everything to the best of their ability.
Even if it felt wrong to not be on top of everything that was happening back in Imperial Seat.
"So is that why you called?" I asked. "You wanted to make an end run around the Combat Intelligence to tell me the empress is dropping bombs on you?”
"No, that's not why I called,” Rachel said. "I wanted to give you an update on the broadcasts we've started to send out through the Ascendancy."
I thought about some of the screens I'd seen in the various rec rooms in ships we'd been traveling on as we made our way all the way out here to the boonies. Which probably looked like running away to the empress, but that was exactly what I was hoping it would look like to her worship.
I glanced over to Varis and Lehrai again, but they were still deep in conversation, occasionally looking up to Arvie and making a notation on their slates.
"Okay, fine," I said. "I guess I have time. This is important. So what's been going on with our fledgling news network? How's the Livisk Ascendancy reacting to a little bit of information warfare?"