Fast food, for the most part, was simply wrong and the vast majority could be replaced surreptitiously with Vegan fare without anyone noticing a thing except for the drastically improved health of the nation. On the other hand, a really good burger could represent a sublime ascendancy, placing a simple cow in the bovine equivalent of Valhalla. For a bacon cheeseburger, the moral cost was correspondingly higher, the dish then involving the lives of two farm animals, including one that was arguably more intelligent than a dog. For Gordon to feel good about it, it had to be really good bacon and on a really good burger. If one of them failed to measure up, the whole thing was in a moral deficit.
Gordon had had more than one ethical crisis over club sandwiches.
Though crustaceans were pretty far down the sentience/morality ladder, having three different varieties on the same plate was still more than enough to raise the equivalence bar pretty high. That Gordon dug in with relish and without any sort of soul searching or sense of existential guilt was testament to just how good Lydia’s choice had been.
They passed more than a few minutes without saying a thing other than to comment upon the food. Sykes, who did not share any of Gordon’s philosophies toward meat, merely grunted in seeming agreement, cutting off bite after bite of bloody, seared steak. Eventually, Gordon began to emerge from his culinary fugue and looked down at the remains of his dinner with equal parts satisfaction and embarrassment. He permitted himself another bite and then carefully laid down his knife and fork. He enjoyed another bit of scotch and then bid his hosts’ attention with a look from one to the other.
Sykes and Lydia caught his look and paused a moment in their dining as well. Gordon smiled, but there was a hint of menace in it. “So, aside from plying me with good food, how exactly is the administration going to help me? Or was that ‘obstruct me less’?”
Lydia smiled back, but it was somewhat cagey in response to the less than friendly nature of his own expression. She wiped the corners of her mouth with a cloth napkin and then demurred, “Oh, I think we could probably swing a little of both. The thing we can’t give you is overt support. There’s just not enough good evidence to sell the Deltans to the nation … or the world.”
Gordon nodded slightly. “Okay, maybe I’ll grant you that. Now where exactly have you been holding me back?”
“How about everywhere, Lee,” Sykes said around a mouthful of risotto. He took a drink of water and then wiped his mouth as well. “You don’t think all those rumors started on their own, did you? It took a lot of effort to make sure you didn’t get recognized by anyone respectable. If someone with some actual credentials backed you up, it might have forced the administration to support you without some more concrete evidence. Could have been an embarrassment, or worse, an actual waste of money.”
“Gee, I’d hate for an alien invasion to put anyone out of sorts.”
“Don’t get petulant now that we’re playing fair, Gordon.” Lydia leaned forward, seemingly eager, with a hint of the excitement Gordon always remembered her having. “However, you have done some pretty amazing things stuck out on the fringe. Is it true you’ve come up with a new kind of rocket?”
Gordon tried to play it cool, but failed. The menace was gone from his smile now, caught up by her enthusiasm. “It wasn’t me, but yeah. We’ve decoded the Deltan’s method of interstellar travel and we can duplicate it. That’s just the icing on the cake, though. We’ve developed new structural materials, sensors, computer architecture, armor, you name it. The only sticking point I’ve got is in power. I always figured that propulsion would be the long pole in the tent, but reactor design is where we’ve been held up the longest. Due to your little passive aggressive crusade to marginalize me, I’ve been kept from any real research or development in any sort of serviceable fission power plant. Every time I get close to hiring somebody or investing in someone else’s project, somebody official shows up to investigate me. Do you have any idea how many times I’ve been searched by Homeland Security?”
Sykes smiled. “Actually, I know the number exactly, as well as the number of times we’ve hacked your data without a warrant. We’ve only been able to decrypt a few of your intercepted files, but it’s allowed us to keep tabs on you. That’s how we knew about your little photon drive. We weren’t sure if we believed it, though, since we couldn’t decrypt any of the theory or application to confirm it. I thought it might have been something to lead us off on a tangent, some sort of joke you were having on us.”
Gordon arched an eyebrow at Sykes blasé admission of his illegal data mining. “Huh. Well, it’s real, and I found a way around the NRC and all your reactor opposition anyway. It’s the one thing I had to farm out overseas, but I was able to get a little French company to develop an advanced pebble-bed reactor for me. Now if I could just get your timid administration to let me bring the prototype over to the US, perhaps I could get some real integration done.”
Lydia nodded. “In the interests of removing obstacles, I think we can give that one to you. Consider your work with the French outfit officially authorized. You’ll have your reactor as soon as they can ship it.”
Sykes finished off his steak and wiped his mouth, leaving the napkin on the bloody residue covering his plate. “‘Course, that raises the question of why you didn’t just farm out everything overseas. We blocked you everywhere you turned. If you’re open to French nuclear power, why not German armor or Chinese computers? If you did that, you might have an actual spaceship by now.”
“And I also might have given away a capability beyond anything in the whole US arsenal. This tech is designed to fight aliens should that become necessary, but it could just as easily be used against humans, and our fellow man has been a confirmed threat for a lot longer than the Deltans have been doing their thing. The drive alone could be put to pretty devastating use if you pointed it at something other than empty space. Call me a patriot, or call me a provincial nationalist, but I trust my country more than the others, flaws and all, allies of the US or not. Personally I’d rather face the Deltans with a bunch of spit wads than face our potential opposition with this sort of capability.”
The Deputy SECDEF grinned. “Will wonders never cease? There’s something we agree on after all.”
“Don’t take that as blanket approval, Sykes. I’m not a hundred percent on giving this stuff over completely to the US either. We don’t have the best track record as the arbiters of human decency, and hearing you talk about all the times you’ve tried to access my research doesn’t make feel all warm and patriotic inside.”
Sykes had nothing to say to that, either in defense or in confirmation. Lydia frowned and then asked, “We know your goal is to get direct intelligence on the Deltans with a probe mission. If you had everything you needed, how long before you could independently put up a mission?”
“Independently? Never. Windward is stagnant and stockholders are dropping like flies. I’ve sunk every dollar and every bit of attention I could spare into this project, and the company has suffered as a result. Lockheed and Orbital are killing my market share. I may be okay personally, but I’m no longer one of this country’s ten richest industrialists. I’m probably not even in the top 100, and Windward Tech’s stock has fallen over 40 percent. If I don’t get at least a little assistance, my company is either going to fail or I’m going to have to start releasing some of the project’s developments, and that’s risky in its own way.”