The President had wanted him to write a speech that he would use to address the nation as the sun set and darkness fell over the land. Toby had almost handed the task over to one of the official speechwriters in Washington; only the high security classification on the material had ensured that he kept it to himself. He felt beaten, almost defeated. Whatever else happened, the aliens would almost certainly get what they wanted. All of Earth’s major powers would join their global government, disband most of their military forces and destroy their nuclear stockpiles. It sounded like a dream. Toby knew that it could become a nightmare.
He would have shaken his head, if he hadn’t been so tired. General Thomas had been right; the government was walking down an unconstitutional path, seduced by the promise of alien technology and threatened by the prospect of losing their political careers. The protesters thronging through Washington and every other state capital were a reminder that careers would be made or broken on this issue, an issue that affected everyone in the entire world. Toby had watched in numb disbelief how abortion and gay marriage had been moved from minor issues to political millstones, dragging political careers below the waterline and effortlessly drowning them before the politician ever had a chance to run for national office. And they’d been minor matters. Membership — or not — in the Galactic Federation affected everyone on Earth.
Slowly, he pulled himself to his feet. He’d acquired a taste for strong coffee from his father, one of the few things he’d kept since he’d left the farm. The coffeemaker had been one of his few expenditures since he’d moved to Washington, but it had been worth the price to have a cup of strong coffee available upon demand. He poured himself a cup, added a splash of milk and a spoonful of sugar, and then drank it in one gulp. It was hot enough to scald the back of his throat, which was how he liked it. The shock of hot caffeine brought him back to his senses.
Every week, a team of counter-intelligence experts from the Secret Service gave his apartment a careful check for bugs. Toby suspected that they would have missed the alien bugs; hell, he had no way to know if they hadn’t tagged him again, or if Gillen and her team would ever develop a small bug-sweeper that could be used to find and remove alien bugs without a full search procedure. Sitting down in front of his desk, Toby pulled out a sheet of paper and started to write a letter to his father. It was a risk, but it was impossible to do it mentally; he’d discovered that while he was a child. His father had been obsessed with codes and he’d taught all of his children how to create and decode basic ciphers. Oddly, the memory gave him a pang of homesickness. It would be wonderful to be a child again.
Every code could be broken, given enough time and computing power. Toby was counting on the aliens only paying attention to internet and cell phone traffic. They would find it much harder to keep track of messages hand-carried from place to place. The mundane cipher he’d used to encode his message was based around a book he and the Colonel both had on their bookshelves. With some effort, the message shouldn’t arouse suspicion in alien minds, although a human might wonder if someone was trying to hide something. He wrote the message out in clear, wrote it again in code, and then fed the original message through the shredder. Anyone who worked in politics knew better than to keep embarrassing documents around when they could be shredded. Who knew what could prove embarrassing or career-destroying in the future.
Picking up his coat, Toby headed downstairs, nodded to the security guard on duty in the lobby and walked out onto the streets. He could hear the sound of chanting in the distance and knew it to be protesters, demanding immediate compliance with the terms of the Galactic Federation. How could they be such fools? But then, they knew nothing about the alien bugs, or any of the other signs that the aliens weren’t being entirely straight with the human race. And the aliens had given them the most significant thing of all. They’d given them hope.
There were any number of bars and restaurants around Official Washington. Many of them served young lobbyists, reporters and others who existed on the outskirts of politics, rather than serving within the White House or Congress. Toby walked into one that served a number of lobbyists who were currently pressing for immediate acceptance of the Galactic Federation’s terms and ordered a whiskey and soda. His father’s friend was seated at a single table, all on his own. Officially, he represented a small company in Virginia that was hoping to get a piece of the vast funds everyone assumed would be doled out by Congress once the human race was enrolled in the Federation. It helped that he had a legitimate reason to be in Washington. And if he’d been marked by the aliens…
Toby cursed the uncertainty under his breath as he sat down. His father’s friend looked up, one cigarette drooping mournfully from the corner of his mouth. Toby said nothing; he merely unfurled the newspaper he was carrying and made a show of reading it. The paper was talking about the wonders of Federation membership. It was all they talked about these days. He finished his drink and put the newspaper on the table.
“Hey,” his father’s friend said. “Can I have the paper?”
“Knock yourself out,” Toby said.
He passed the paper — and the note concealed in its folds — to his father’s friend and left the table. Behind him, the man put the paper in his bag and headed off in the opposite direction. Toby silently prayed that the aliens weren’t following him closely. Given enough computing power, they could probably track everyone in Washington, or even the country. The ultimate national security state, all the more dangerous for being far less intrusive than anything the Soviet Union or the Nazis had devised. They wouldn’t even know that they were under observation until it was far too late.
And that could be the most devastating thing of all.
“Joe Buckley,” Matt Robertson said.
Jayne looked up, rubbing her tired eyes. They’d spent the last two days trying to track down the sources of funding for the protest movements that were mobilising hundreds of thousands of young Americans, but most of the money seemed to disappear in an official haze. Follow The Money was standard advice for journalists, yet the money trail seemed to have completely disappeared. It didn’t help that the protesters had opened up a hundred different ways for their supporters to donate money electronically, ensuring that they no longer needed to rely on supporters who wanted to remain unseen.
“Who?” She asked. “I’ve never heard of him.”
Robertson leered at her, cheerfully. He was a computer nerd who might not have been cut out for the life of a blogger, but he was quite capable of supporting other bloggers. It helped that he had no visible link to the BAN. Rumour had it that he’d hacked a number of government databases and that the FBI was after his head, preferably not attached to his body. When not working on the computer, he was devouring junk food and watching pornographic material on his television. Jayne was privately surprised that he wasn’t too fat to walk. Some people, she thought, remembering all the exercise she had to take, had all the luck.
“Joe Buckley,” Robertson said. “Famed for writing the Grand Fleet Saga, from Baen Books. Former US Navy crewman; former Navy brat… New York Times bestselling author… and former alien sceptic.”