Nemesis by Alex Lamb Page A

both changed since they first flew together during the war, but Will always felt that Ira had managed the last thirty years better than him. Sure, Will hadn’t aged a day and had beaten everything from cancer to chemical attacks, but Ira had found ways to be happy. When his role in history forced him into politics, Ira adapted. Now, instead of managing a ship, he managed a civilisation – or at least that part of it which pertained to interplanetary security. Ira hadn’t balked when IPSO’s Social Engineering Division insisted on increasing his height, or straightening his nose, or electing him Fleet Admiral six times in a row. Will wasn’t sure how he’d stuck with it. When Will asked, the only answer Ira ever gave was: If I don’t do it, it’ll be some other poor shmuck whose decisions I like less.
    They’d let him keep his trademark bald head, at least – for brand-persistence reasons, apparently.
    ‘The room is secure,’ said Ira. ‘We can talk.’
    Will had already checked for himself. He habitually managed his own security and had never been happy handing off control to the Fleet, not even with a friend like Ira in charge.
    ‘I have a question,’ said Will. ‘Am I still ambassador to aliens?’
    That title hadn’t meant anything useful for twenty years, just hung around his neck like an albatross – a convenient label for his enemies to mock him with.
    Ira nodded. ‘Of course. And handling this is definitely your job. With the scale of threat this event implies, we need the big guns out there, and that means you and the Ariel Two . But realistically speaking, we both know this isn’t likely to be an extraterrestrial problem.’
    After humanity’s interaction with the preeminent Transcended race, a flurry of research had been conducted regarding the probabilities of various kinds of contact scenarios. Hugo Bessler-Vartian, the irascible physicist who’d accompanied them on that fateful mission which led to first contact, had taken the fortune he made from his work on Fecund technologies and poured it into research on aliens. Specifically, on what he perceived as the alien threat to humanity.
    The conclusions had been stark: the probability of encountering a species as old and powerful as the Transcended far outweighed that of finding one of a similar age to humankind. The apparent rarity of intelligent species in the universe made sure of that. With so few civilisations to be discovered, the likelihood of finding one the same age as your own was almost zero. Consequently, the probability of finding aliens who would attack the human race in any recognisable way was also vanishingly small. Humanity was far more likely to be wiped out as a pest before they’d even noticed.
    ‘You think it was some kind of power grab by a sect, then,’ said Will, ‘dressed up to look weird.’
    Ira glanced at him sidelong. ‘Don’t you?’
    ‘Sure – it’s the logical conclusion,’ Will admitted. ‘But why bother?’ Part of him wanted the attack to be exactly what it appeared to be simply because it would give him something practical to do. ‘Think of the expense,’ he said. ‘The drones, the radiation blast, the modified engines. Not to mention hiding all the construction beforehand. It’d cost billions to pull off. And for what?’
    ‘That’s what we’d like to know,’ said Ira. ‘Since that message showed up ten minutes ago, our research cluster has been hard at work trying to find out.’
    He waved a hand at the nearest wall, which screened-on to display a freeze-frame of the terrified youth from the video the Reynard had intercepted.
    ‘We just received this,’ said Ira. ‘We don’t know who he is yet, but that jacket he’s wearing is a giveaway. Our SAPs traced the buttons on his lapel – those insignia belong to the Knights of Kolob, which is the underground Truist Revival branch of the Smithite sect, a group known to have invested heavily in Flag-Dropping.’
    These days, every sect on