stupid. I know how this world works. You don’t. I know trade and customs law. You don’t. I know what’s necessary to get you freed. You don’t. So you can make demands until you’re purple in the face, but you will never see anyone above me until I say so. And right now I don’t say so. As far as I’m concerned, you have two options: You can submit to my questions and possibly let me help you. Or you can sit in your room until your grace period expires and the judge plops you on a shuttle back to wherever it was you came from. Your choice. When I come back tomorrow, you can give me your answer.”
She got up. And without waiting for him to respond, she was out the door and gone.
Great, thought Victor. It’s not enough that I have a nobody. She has to be a snooty nobody. He sighed. He wasn’t helping the situation. And now another precious day was wasted.
He was waiting for her the following day in the same room.
“I obviously can’t go above you without going through you,” said Victor. “So let’s do this your way. And let me preface this by saying, everything I am about to tell you can be proven. I have evidence. It’s all on my data cube, which the staff locked away with all my other belongings when I got here. Should you want more evidence, I can tell you exactly where to look to verify its veracity for yourself. Fair enough?”
“Works for me,” said Imala.
“You’ve heard about the interference in space scrambling all transmissions?”
“Every day on the news.”
“Well, I know what’s causing that interference. And if you can get my data cube, I’ll show you.”
She was gone for ten minutes. When she returned she had a clear bag with all of Victor’s personal items. He took out the data cube, placed it on the table, and turned it on, creating a holospace in the air above it.
“The interference is being caused by a near-lightspeed alien starship on a direct course to Earth.”
“An alien ship?”
“That’s right.”
“Coming to Earth?”
“That’s what I said.”
“I see.”
“I know that sounds insane to you. I know you think I’m insane. But my family put me on a quickship from the Kuiper Belt. Eight billion klicks from here. I was on that ship for nearly eight months. There was a very good chance that I wouldn’t make it to Luna alive. And if you know anything about free-miner families, you know we simply don’t do that. We protect our own. Family first. And if you don’t know anything about free miners, then why do you have this job?”
“I didn’t say you were insane.”
“You didn’t have to. It was written all over your face. And frankly I can’t afford that. I need you to have an open mind and look at this evidence without having dismissed it beforehand. I don’t care what you think of me. I only care that the information I have gets to everyone on Luna and Earth. That won’t happen if we do this with you trying to disprove it.”
“I told you I would listen, Victor.”
“Listening isn’t enough. You need to have an open mind. If you play bureaucrat and worry about how this will affect your standing with that new boss of yours, you’ll only find excuses to bury it.”
“Remember, I’m not stupid,” said Imala. “I will keep an open mind. You’re simply going to have to trust me.”
He didn’t want to trust her. He wanted to trust the person five or six steps up the org chart, but what choice did he have.
He showed her everything: the charts, the trajectory, wreckage from the Italians, video of him and Father and Toron attacking the pod, the hormigas fiercely fighting back, Toron’s death, interviews with the surviving Italians recounting the pod attacking their ships. There was even footage of Victor modifying the quickship and launching it toward Luna. It took nearly two hours to go over it all, and Imala sat in silence the whole time. When Victor finished, Imala remained quiet for a few moments.
“Play back the part where we see the aliens,” she said.
Victor found the spot and played it.
“Stop right there,” said Imala.
Victor freeze-framed on the hormiga’s face.
Imala stared at it for a full two minutes. Finally she looked at Victor. “Is this a hoax?”
“Yes, it’s big elaborate hoax, Imala. I went out and invented a near-lightspeed ship just so I could prank you.”
“I’m asking, Victor, because it looks completely real to me. Not just the alien, but everything. All the data. The math. The sky scans. It looks authentic, and I believe it.”
“You do?”
“Completely. But if this is a hoax then you need to tell me now because I am prepared to help you as much as I can. And if I help you, and this turns out not to be real, I will lose my job, and you and I will go to prison for a very long time.”
“It’s real. If you can get access to a scope powerful enough to see out to that far, you can see it for yourself.”
She shook her head. “That will take too long. The only scopes that powerful on Luna belong to Ukko Jukes. And believe me, he won’t help us.”
“So you’ll take this to your boss?”
“Of course I’ll take it to my boss. I have to. That’s my job. But not the original data cube. I want that to stay with you. I’ll take a copy. Today. Right after I leave here. But that can’t be all we do, Victor. I’m not putting the fate of the world into the hands of a few bureaucrats in Lunar Customs. I don’t know those people, and even if I did I wouldn’t trust them with something like this. Sad recent experiences have taught me never to trust the people above me. So we’ll follow the proper channels, yes. We’ll start the ball rolling that way. But we also do our own thing. We get the word out our way. Now. Immediately.”
“How? We go to the press?”
“No. Not fast enough. The world isn’t watching the Lunar news. I mean right now, Victor. We upload this video of the alien onto the nets. Right now. We get people all over the world watching this video within the hour.”
“How do we do that?”
She took her holopad from her pouch, set it on the table, and copied the video from Victor’s data cube to her own holospace. Using her stylus, she selected a section of video featuring the alien attacking Victor and his Father and Toron on the pod and set it aside. Then she selected other bits of video to follow. The interior of the Formic pod. The wreckage of the Italian ships. Select, frightening accounts from the Italian survivors. She then created several frames with additional information, including coordinates, trajectory, and other data from Edimar. When she finished, she played it back. It was just over five minutes long.
“We can’t make it too long,” she said. “Or people won’t watch it.”
“It’s good,” said Victor. “It’s just the right length.”
She was moving her stylus in the holospace, bringing up several different windows. “There are about twenty major sites we can upload this to. They all get a lot of traffic. Other sites will see it and pick it up. It’ll go viral.”
“How quickly?”
“No telling. My guess is very fast. Once it gets momentum, it will explode. You want to tell the whole world aliens are coming? Here’s your chance.” She handed him the stylus. The windows in the holospace were all selected. Twenty vid sites on the nets. A large green button in the center of the holo was marked “send.” All he had to do was touch it.
He thought of Father and Mother and Concepcion and Mono and everyone back on El Cavador praying for him to reach this moment. This is what he had come for and nearly died for. This is what Toron had died for. He thought of Janda. He thought of her hand atop his, holding the stylus, too. He thought of the twelve billion people on Earth who were in for the wake-up call of their lives.
“This better work,” said Victor. Then he reached out and pushed the button.
