Old Ironsides Read online

  ‘So I was forgotten?’ he suggested.

  ‘Not quite,’ Ceyron insisted. ‘Your remains were kept frozen, and throughout those terrible decades our predecessors ensured that power was available to maintain your stasis. They knew of the importance of your body and knew it was essential to keep trying to find a cure using people still alive and exposed to the freshest variations of the virus. Over time, as the cure was found, so your body became a preserve for the primordial version of the virus and was locked away for safe keeping. As time went on and civilization was rebuilt under the new world order and prosperity returned to our world so your remains became a source of study for later generations.’

  Nathan tried to remain calm. ‘So I was of some use then, at least.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Ceyron admitted, ‘but after a couple of centuries had passed and mankind had ventured further and further into deep space, the discovery of new and novel life forms had resulted in far more advanced medical technologies capable of tackling exotic illnesses and your frozen cadaver was put aside for other uses.’

  ‘Other uses?’ Nathan echoed. ‘Such as?’

  Ceyron appeared to become somewhat embarrassed and glanced briefly at Lieutenant Foxx, who appeared to sigh softly as she looked at Nathan.

  ‘You were put in a museum in New York City,’ she said.

  Nathan felt his face turn red and he shot up out of his chair. ‘A museum?!’

  Ceyron lifted his hands defensively. ‘It was considered unwise at the time to inflict upon you the pain of knowing how much time had passed since you had died,’ he said. ‘We were not sure just how difficult it would be for any one individual to cope with the change in society, for the loss of their loved ones centuries before, and I think that your recent outbursts at the medical center bear out those concerns.’

  ‘They were caused by your actions!’ Nathan snapped. ‘What the hell did you expect? That I’d just rise and shine and run off singing into the sunset?!’

  ‘No,’ Ceyron admitted, ‘but then we knew also that you had the right to life. It was not an easy decision to make – to reanimate you, to preserve your life indefinitely in stasis or to simply allow your remains to thaw and any chance of you living again to slip away.’

  Nathan peered at the people around him. ‘So why did you let me live? Why am I here?’

  ‘Indeed,’ said another man, ‘why did you let him live? Don’t we have enough inhuman species already populating this galaxy? Holosaps, Ayleeans, genetic freaks, half men and half machines and now a walking corpse.’

  Ceyron and Nathan glanced at the man, a stern looking individual with a neatly cropped gray beard and hair, broad shoulders and hard, cold blue eyes that seemed to be made from ice. He wore a military uniform, of that Nathan had no doubt, a series of brightly colored gems embedded in the breast presumably denoting military victories of some kind.

  ‘Admiral Jefferson Marshall,’ Ceyron introduced him. ‘The Admiral knows more than most about mankind’s spacefaring history.’

  Marshall looked down the table at Nathan and appeared to be one of those people who never, ever blinked. As he spoke his gaze remained fixed on Nathan like laser beams, cold and heartless.

  ‘In the centuries after the plague, mankind learned the art of spacefaring and the navies of Earth became the star fleet of CSS,’ he said, his voice gravelly and hard. ‘Within one hundred years of the end of the plagues, colonies of people began leaving earth in search of new homes within the solar system. Within another century they were finding homes in other stellar systems at increasing distances from earth. It is now estimated that when population growth is considered, there may be as many as ten billion human beings living in perhaps four to five hundred separate star systems across the known galaxy.’

  Nathan sat in silence as he digested this new information. It had not crossed his mind that people might already have expanded from the Solar System into the wider galaxy, that they might even be now living on planets that were nothing like the earth.

  ‘You mean that this is a sort of Star Trek world now?’ he asked.

  Ceyron frowned and looked at an older man standing in the corner of the room, and Nathan recognized the holographic form of Doctor Hans Schmidt, his prim voice carrying easily across the hall and reminding Nathan of his old history teacher at school.

  ‘An archaic form of entertainment, Star Trek was a drama show created in the twentieth century whose protagonists lived in the twenty fourth century. It attained a cult following and loosely resembles our fleet of today.’

  Nathan couldn’t help himself. ‘Tell me you’ve got an Enterprise?’

  Marshall appeared to bite his lip and roll his shoulders inward as though forcing himself to humor Nathan.

  ‘CSS Enterprise is one of our battleships currently on station around…’

  ‘Oh my God!’ Nathan clapped his hands in delight. ‘Is Kirk the captain?!’

  ‘The captain of Enterprise is one Alexander Voight, a highly decorated star fleet officer,’ Marshall growled. ‘But our flagship is CSS Titan, captained by myself.’

  Nathan marvelled silently to himself, but then asked: ‘So what does all of this have to do with me?’

  This time, the holographic doctor Schmidt stepped closer, his digitized voice warbling around the hall.

  ‘The colonies of mankind spread out gradually over hundreds of years and quite often they were never heard from again. Space travel, Mister Ironside, is a hazardous endeavour full of dangers that quite literally were unexpected. We still to this day have no idea just how far people might have travelled into the cosmos, nor the wonders or the horrors they might have encountered. Although the technology of today is far more capable than what they set out with, we don’t know what they might have come across and perhaps learned to use for their own ends.’

  Nathan began to see a picture developing.

  ‘Hence your star fleet,’ he guessed, ‘ready to defend the solar system against anybody coming in from elsewhere.’

  ‘Precisely,’ Marshall replied, ‘and it’s just as well that we did, because thirty years ago one of those colonies came back, and it didn’t look anything like the one that had left a century before.’

  ***

  XV

  ‘So what did it look like?’ Nathan asked.

  ‘Inhuman,’ Admiral Marshall uttered in disgust. ‘They call themselves the Aleeyans.’

  ‘Aliens?’ Nathan echoed, somewhat horrified.

  ‘Aleeyans,’ Ceyron corrected him, emphasizing the ee in the name. ‘The captain of the colony ship that first left earth orbit over two hundred fifty years ago was a man named Werner Aleeyan, a man of German descent. He had a crew of four hundred who intended to travel to a newly discovered star system in the constellation of Orion which had been identified as possessing high levels of valuable minerals in accretion disks that were forming around new born star systems. The colony was never heard from again until thirty years ago when the Aleeyans showed up on our doorstep and knocked rather too loudly.’

  Nathan turned to Foxx. ‘An Aleeyan War, you mentioned that.’

  ‘Has been fought ever since,’ Marshall went on for Foxx, ‘fortunately mostly out on the edge of our solar system between the Oort Cloud and Pluto. The Aleeyans never managed to get inside the Solar System, but what they did manage to do was inflict heavy losses on our fleet using a range of exotic weapons that we had little defense against. Although we did win the war and managed to repel the Aleeyans, we also realized that had they possessed more of such weapons they could have decimated us.’ Marshall’s fists clenched on the table before him and his white teeth flared in a grim smile. ‘Fortunately, we had managed to capture a few of their ships during the conflict and reverse-engineered them, re-equipping our own vessels and taking the fight back to the enemy. They were last defeated in a major engagement four years ago, at the Battle of Alpha Centauri. They barely got away with a handful of ships intact, and we haven’t heard from them since.’


  Nathan’s mind filled with images of immense warships slugging it out in deep space, but there was something about the Admiral that he disliked. ‘Back home in time for tea and medals,’ he dismissed Marshall’s oratory. ‘What does it have to do with me?’

  Ceyron leaned on the table, his arms folded as he spoke. ‘They’re back, and this time their tactics are different.’

  ‘In what way?’ Nathan asked.

  ‘That’s classified right now,’ Marshall assured him, perhaps as a message to everybody else in the room as much as to Nathan himself. ‘What I can tell you is that as a race the Aleeyans are no longer what we’d call human and seem intent on fighting for control of the earth. We assume that they’re expanding their territory in all directions and we just happen to be in the line of fire.’

  Nathan frowned. ‘What do you mean no longer human?’

  Marshall did not reply directly, instead gesturing to Doctor Schmidt. The holographic projection appeared to concentrate for a moment and Nathan sat back as another projector shimmered into life from the center of the table and a towering figure loomed before him with frightening effect.

  Nathan leaped out of his chair and backed up, reaching instinctively for a service pistol in a shoulder holster that was no longer on his person.

  ‘Know how you feel,’ Foxx observed as she saw Nathan’s response.

  The holographic projection was eight feet tall and revealed a huge, muscular creature that bore only a superficial resemblance to a human being. A powerful musculature was visible beneath a hard, leathery skin that was mostly dark brown but flecked with patches of lighter color, almost gold. Dressed in metallic armor that covered approximately half of the Aleeyan’s body, the rest was naked but protected by a thin shield that Nathan assumed was rather like the gravity pads used for couches and chairs, invisible but designed to deflect anything that touched it.

  Nathan looked up at the head, a tangled mess of thick black hair surrounding a thick, heavy-boned jaw, hunched shoulders and a fearsome yellow eye. The other eye was covered by a device that seemed to be some kind of laser sight, a thin red beam flickering as it caught on dust motes in the air. The Aleeyan had small, sharp teeth, its lips thin and regressed as though the creature was showing a permanent snarl, and it cradled a large plasma rifle in its grip.

  ‘How the hell did they end up looking like that?’ Nathan asked.

  ‘Genetic variation through manipulation of DNA in response to diverse environments,’ Doctor Schmidt replied, his diaphanous form drifting through the hall as he spoke in his warbling digital voice, as though he were pacing up and down. ‘One of the great breakthroughs of modern genetics was the ability to alter the human genetic code not just in vitro but in living beings. Modern geneticists were able to re-model the human form to better resist novel environments as and when it was required, resulting in some spectacular if unattractive adaptions to planetary conditions different to those on earth.’

  Nathan continued to look at the Aleeyan form before him as Ceyron went on.

  ‘After the plague it became necessary to alter the human genetic code in order to effectively correct the mutations suffered by so many of the population who had contracted the plague but survived,’ he said. ‘Millions had been hideously disfigured, but it was not possible to reach them all and those disfigurements, sadly, turned out to be heritable by later generations.’

  ‘Freaks,’ Marshall snapped, ‘just like I said. There’s no reason for anybody to look as they do any more, and yet they hang on to their gruesome appearance like a talisman. They’re not human.’

  ‘You’re saying that some people didn’t accept your help?’ Nathan asked Ceyron.

  ‘There was a schism,’ Schmidt replied, ‘in the wake of the plague. Those who lived farthest from the cities, who endured the illness for long after the city folk had been cured, felt as though they had been abandoned. They rebelled, as did warlords who saw the return of ordered, law-abiding society and feared they would lose their hold on power. Between them, they created the foundations of the Aleeyan culture.’

  Nathan frowned. ‘And they resisted cures for their disfigurement?’

  ‘They carried the scars of their sickness with pride,’ Ceyron admitted. ‘In the years that followed, as the governments of the world slowly reformed and began to restore law and order to the globe, many black market operators set up shop in order to take advantage of the new genetic options available to those with the wealth to afford them, the technologies that had developed while curing those who did want to remain human and those who wished to be, how can I put it? Enhanced. They claimed it as their right, to enhance themselves as they saw fit rather than accept more routine cures.’

  Admiral Marshall gestured to the Aleeyan hologram.

  ‘Before laws and regulations were in place to prevent it, what was almost an entirely new race had emerged – those who preferred bio-genetic enhancement over evolutionary adaption. You name it they had it in place; prosthetic bionic limbs, optical implants offering infra-red, X-ray and ultra violet vision; electrodes implanted in the brain to enhance thought processes and creativity; skin that was encouraged to form bonds with durable bio-metals like Epithanium, itself a hybrid of human skin and titanium. The results were the birth of the species we see before us now.’

  ‘And these Aleeyans took off at some point afterward under the leadership of this Werner Aleeyan?’ Nathan guessed.

  ‘The CSS outlawed the unregulated use of both genetics and prosthetic enhancements over two centuries ago, effectively driving the use of such technologies underground and creating a war that law enforcement has been fighting ever since. Criminals, of course, have no great desire to obey the law and every reason to want to stay one step ahead of us. There were riots for years in New York City and other capitals all over the world over the proposed de-volution of human enhancements, right up until the development of effective faster-than-light travel in the wake of the invention of the mass drive. The Aleeyans decided to abandon earth altogether rather than allow their improvements, as they called them, to be reverse-engineered.’

  ‘Mass drive?’ Nathen echoed.

  ‘A drive that is designed around our control of the Higgs Boson and its opposite number, the Faubes Boson, also named after its discoverer,’ Doctor Schmidt explained. ‘It’s why we no longer use engines in vehicles as you would be used to seeing. The mass drives allow the manipulation of gravity, mass and energy in various ways to counter the effects of gravity in planetary systems and atmospheres or use it as a source of thrust, depending on the situation. Across deep space, the drives allow the creation of gravitational waves and wells that accelerate spacecraft far beyond the speed of light without the accompanying infinite mass and time dilation problems normally associated with such velocities.’

  Nathan blinked and looked at Foxx.

  ‘They either push or pull stuff real fast, and nothing breaks,’ she said.

  Nathan nodded and looked at Ceyron. ‘So, again, what am I doing here?’

  ‘The Aleeyans were repulsed, as we mentioned, some years ago during a major conflict fought in the outer reaches of our solar system,’ Ceyron explained, ‘but our intelligence sources tell us that they are amassing once more and that this time their tactics are markedly different. We believe that they intend to infect the human race with a fresh virus, something that we have no defense against and that we can presume they have already immunized themselves against. It is almost certainly based upon the virus that almost destroyed us, that which was carried to earth in your lungs.’

  Nathan felt prickly heat irritate the back of his neck.

  ‘So you needed me because of the virus inside me,’ he said finally. ‘You needed samples.’

  Doctor Schmidt replied, his voice touched with regret.

  ‘It’s unjust and unfair, Mister Ironside, but the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. We required your body to extract the virus you carried, and you had to be thawed by myself and my tea
m in order to achieve that, a process which took some years. It was my hope that rather than simply extract the virus from your body and abandon you, we might be able to attempt revival despite the long duration in which you had been in hibernation. We were successful, although I am yet to determine whether such a course of action was of a benefit to you, or to us.’

  Nathan rubbed his temples and sighed. ‘Now what?’

  Ceyron stood and looked down the table at him.

  ‘It was our intention to give you your choice of futures,’ he announced, ‘to ensure that after what you had endured and been required to sacrifice you should be able to live out the rest of your natural life in peace. However, the attack by the drones in Colorado has changed all of that.’

  Nathan looked at Foxx, who spoke to the hall clearly.

  ‘A brief analysis of the drones we captured has confirmed that they were relics from the plague wars but that their programming was recent: they were targeting Mister Ironside directly.’

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff glanced at one another and a soft murmur went up in the room.

  ‘They were designed to kill me?’ Nathan asked. ‘Why? I’m sure I didn’t piss off anyone that badly four hundred years ago that they’d still be after me.’

  ‘The Aleeyans have sympathizers among the population here,’ Ceyron explained, ‘who may have a vested interest in your demise. If they fear, as we suspect, that the primordial and unaltered virus we extracted from your body could be used in any way as a defense against any planned attack by the Aleeyans, then they may have sought to eliminate you as soon as you emerged from bio-stasis.’

  ‘Couldn’t they have simply blasted my capsule into pieces?’ Nathan asked. ‘You said that I was left in a museum for decades?’

  ‘The exhibit was ray shielded in multiple layers,’ Doctor Schmidt explained, ‘but often under observation, so a duplicate was set in its place when we began work to revive you. If our hunch is correct it’s only recently that they may have taken an interest in you, probably because we did and switched your capsule for the decoy. It was one of the more popular exhibits in the history section and viewed by many millions of people over the decades, and the Aleeyan’s allies here on earth may have noticed the deception.’