Chapter 3: Discovery

“Are we really going to drop this, General?” he asked.

This time, they actually were sitting in the bar downtown. General Talerk was still wearing her uniform, but she had unbuttoned it and was clearly not in the mood to enforce military hierarchies at the moment—the tall glass of dark beer on the table in front of her proved as much. Still, he thought, she was his superior and should be addressed as such, despite being a Jerrassian.

The woman sighed. “Of course we are.”

She took a moment to gaze around the busy room before continuing. “I’m not saying I like it, but an order is an order. She’s a Special Agent. Her word is law.”

“I know. But a hundred thousand souls, and the entire Sunguard is just going to sweep it under the rug like that? People are already asking questions. Ordinary people, I mean. The press. This could turn into a storm.”

She shrugged. “We’ll say it was a natural disaster. A sudden volcanic eruption, perhaps, one that covered the entire place in a lava field. I don’t know. Something that’ll justify us not going back there again.”

“But that’s not what happened, General.”

“Who knows? Maybe it was.”

“She knows.”

“She’s a Special Agent,” General Talerk repeated. She clearly felt she didn’t have to say more on the matter. She probably didn’t.

“I don’t trust her,” he said, frustration giving his voice the faintest hint of treason.

The general leaned forward, her muscular arms crossed over her chest. “But I do.”

Before he could say anything, she volunteered an explanation.

“You know my world has seen its share of trouble, right?” she asked. It was a rhetorical question, of course. She was from Jerr, after all.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she continued. “I fully support the Solar Council’s evacuation policy. It was a democratic decision, and as a Sunguard officer I’m sworn to uphold the law, even if that same law says that as a Jerrassian I can’t vote until after Nova Solaris.

“Now, the Liberation Front obviously doesn’t agree with that, and having a different opinion is their right, for sure. We’re a democracy, after all. But using violence against the Federation? That’s not acceptable.”

Colonel Reynolds nodded. He assumed it was a sensitive subject for her and didn’t quite know how to respond. Best to say as little as possible, he thought, and let her do the talking.

“And so the Sunguard has had to enforce the law there,” she continued, seemingly of the same mind. “Of course, you know that. But there have been occasions, I feel, when our police actions have been perhaps a bit too heavy-handed. People have died. People who were not with the JLF.”

Obviously, he knew of the Fotar-mer Incident. Everyone did. But what to him was a dry story from a history book about something that had happened on an alien world generations ago must, to her, still be an open wound.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said carefully. “Did you lose someone? I mean, did your ancestors?”

“No,” she replied, nodding. “No, nothing like that.”

She laughed a little. It was a nervous chuckle that he didn’t quite know how to respond to.

“You really don’t know how to talk to me about this, do you, Kelile? I’m not made of glass. I’m a Sunguard officer, same as you.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He really couldn’t bring himself to call her Mar.

“Don’t take this as criticism, but historically, the Sunguard hasn’t always acted as friends to the Jerrassian people,” she explained.

“I… see your point,” he said, hoping he did.

“But the Special Agents always have. They’ve always been on our side. Ask any Jerrassian who’s not with the Front. They might spit on the wolf-and-the-sun, but they’ll never say a bad word about the Special Agents.”

“And why is that, ma’am?”

She paused, seemingly to let her point sink in. This was important to her.

“Because they don’t see us as aliens. To them, we’re just humans who happen to look a bit different and who were born under a different sun—and they don’t care about those differences. They only see what unites us. When they look at me, they don’t see the fur or the paws. They just see a citizen of the Terran Federation.”

Well, how did you respond to that? Colonel Reynolds certainly didn’t consider himself a Terran supremacist. He had no trouble working with a Jerrassian superior. He wasn’t a racist… right?

Then again, if he were perfectly honest with himself, he had to admit he had never seen the Sonmai or the Telamur as equals to the four founding races. They were nothing like the Jerrassians or the Etarians, just to name a few examples, and they shouldn’t be given the same rights. It was simply the natural order of things that Terrans—or Jerrassians, for that matter—were in charge. Perhaps, he thought, he wasn’t quite as pure of spirit as he liked to believe. Still, those opinions were what made him who he was, and he wasn’t going to apologize for them. He certainly wasn’t the only one in the Sunguard to feel that way about the aliens.

He bit his lower lip.

“If,” he said, very carefully, “if I were to keep looking into this matter, would you turn me in, General?”

Her big brown eyes locked onto his. She snorted, and the sound made her black nose wobble a little.

“Exactly how would you be going about doing that, Kelile?”

He shrugged. “I’d rather not say. Not until I know where you stand. Unless you order me to, of course. General.”

She smiled. It was a weak smile, but it was enough. “No, of course not. Just don’t get me into trouble. Just don’t get yourself into trouble.”

“I won’t, ma’am.”

Chances were, he would.

* * *

Trouble came, as trouble usually did, when he wasn’t looking for it.

It had been three weeks since the incident. Three weeks during which he had spent every waking hour when he wasn’t on duty contemplating his treasonous mission.

At first, there had been a public uproar, of course. You didn’t lose an entire Terran colony without the Terran people noticing. But the public protests and demands for action had been less intense than he had anticipated. There were, of course, a handful of loud voices among those who had lost friends or relatives at Eta Boötis, but he had truly expected the general public to remain interested in the matter far longer than they actually did. In hindsight, he should have known better.

This was the last generation that would ever see the sun rise over the snow-covered peak of Olympus Mons. The children of today could swim in the warm swells of Niobe Planitia, but their children would never see Solaris sink below the endless horizon, where the sea met the sky.

Most of the people around him would still be alive to witness the end of the world. Their last memories of the solar system would be of Luna melting into a formless blob of magma as Nova Solaris, with the finality only physics could guarantee, incinerated the racial home of man.

In the light of the dying sun, the loss of a small colony on a remote world at the far edge of the Terran Federation was quickly forgotten by most.

But not by Sunguard Colonel Kelile Reynolds.

Unable to let go, he spent his days absentmindedly performing his duties as a communications officer at Sunguard Headquarters to the best of his abilities, while focusing most of his energy on his secret off-duty investigation.

And so, when the crucial piece of evidence he was missing came during active-duty hours, in the form of a tedious and highly uninteresting official call from the customs officer at the Sunguard Forward Logistics Operations Base at Beta Comae Berenices, rather than during the course of his clandestine after-hours investigation, he almost missed it entirely.

“September 20, 14:06 UTC, Registration Number ABR-47201. Private contractor. Destination, 61 Ursae Majoris. Nothing suspicious.

“September 20, 14:08 UTC, Registration Number CC-902. Bergman Lines Personnel Transport, carrying 248 Kotomar refugees evicted from their colony at HR 5553. One suspect on the no-fly list taken into custody.”

The list, and the droning voice of the customs officer, went on and on for what seemed like an eternity.

“September 20, 14:39 UTC, Registration Number SG-89034/C. Sunguard scout ship, coming in from Eta Boötis.

“September 20, 14:43 UTC, Registration Number LAI-33. Private yacht. Port of origin, 61 Ursae Majoris. Nothing suspicious. Nice ship, though.”

Too late, Colonel Reynolds realized he had missed the details of what the man on the other end of space had said. Never mind, he thought. This would all be entered as part of the official Sunguard record. He could always look up the information later.

For a moment, he considered setting his official duties aside to study the record as soon as the call from Beta Comae Berenices was over, but he quickly dismissed the thought. Whatever he might feel about the Special Agent and the cover-up she had instigated, he was still a professional officer. He still had a job to do first.

But later that night, when he went off duty, he didn’t go home to his small apartment near the end of Christensen Avenue as he usually did. Instead, he stayed behind, careful not to draw too much attention to himself as he retrieved the information he needed from the digital depths of the Sunguard computers.

Not that his secrecy really mattered, of course. His very act of reading the records would be logged, and if anyone were to audit the access log, they would see exactly what he had done. He could only hope no one would bother to do so—at least not until he had time to conclude his investigation.

In the end, it all turned out to be for nothing.

Oh, he did find the relevant customs records, of course. Anything else would have been inconceivable. They were all there, just as the official at the logistics base had said—the private yacht, the evicted refugees, the private contractor, and a host of other ships he cared nothing about.

But of the scout ship that had arrived from Eta Boötis three weeks after Special Agent Ellie McBrian had declared the system off-limits to the Sunguard, there was no trace to be found.

Well, Colonel Reynolds thought, the lack of evidence was, in a sense, evidence itself. Someone had clearly tampered with the customs documentation, and if he could just find out who had done it, he would have a thread to begin pulling on. He smiled to himself. The irony was delicious indeed. The access log he had initially feared might become his own doom would, in the end, turn out to be the very tool he could use to unravel the entire conspiracy.

Two minutes later, his smile had turned into a frown.

No one had changed the documentation. No one had written to it after it was originally created. The digital certificate matched exactly what the customs officer had provided, proving the record Colonel Reynolds had pulled from the memory banks of the Sunguard computers was identical to what had originally been stored there. It had not been altered. Not by the customs officer. Not by Special Agent McBrian. Not by anyone.

Except he had been on the original call himself and had heard it with his own ears, and it most definitely didn’t match what his eyes were now reading. The black text on his screen seemed to glare at him in defiance of reality. This was simply not possible.

Someone out there appeared to have both the will and the technical competence to re-sign official Sunguard documentation, making the tampered version look as if it were original. Doing so wasn’t just illegal, it was technically impossible. The certificates were too complex, the encryption too strong, for anyone—human or biot—to forge. That was, after all, the whole point of them. The root certificate was securely held by the system itself, by the intelligent computer responsible for the archive, guaranteeing the cryptographic chain of trust was kept entirely within the system and could never be tampered with.

And yet, someone had done exactly that. Someone—or something.

Author's Note

The story you're reading is one of many set in the Lords of the Stars universe I've been creating over the past 30 years, where familiar characters and places reappear, and new favorites await discovery. Check out my profile to explore more stories from this universe.

While Guardian of the Wolf is entirely standalone and can be read without any prior knowledge, I think you’ll particularly enjoy Soldiers of Heart and Steel and Choices of Steel, both which are prequels to this story, as well as Conscience of Steel and From My Point of View, which are sequels.

Visit the official Lords of the Stars blog for more information about this hard sci-fi universe: https://lordsofthestars.wordpress.com

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