“I think that if the yakuza were asking questions about a particular crewmember we could assume someone’s past was coming back to haunt them. But this sounds like a different sort of issue. I can only think of one thing big enough to get the attention of multiple bosses like this.”
“I suppose you’re right, sir. But should we be talking about this here?”
“Hmm. Alice, do you want to know a dangerous secret? Or would you rather stay away from shady conspiracies, and go enjoy your evening?”
“If I get to choose, sir, then I’m all in,” I said earnestly.
“Kids,” Beatrice sniffed. “Always chasing excitement.”
“Perhaps,” the captain responded. “Please explain your reasoning, Alice.”
Well, that was unexpected. “Um, yes sir. Being ignorant won’t protect me if the whole ship is the target, sir. I need to know what’s going on if I’m going to help keep Naoko and the techs safe.”
“Are you certain that’s what you want, Alice? This is a busy port. You could leave us here, and find yourself a safer berth. With your record and a recommendation I’m sure you could talk your way into an apprenticeship somewhere.”
“No way! I have friends here, sir,” I insisted. “I’m not going to leave them in the lurch. The only way I’m leaving is if you kick me out, sir.”
Beatrice was studying me with an annoying smirk. “Oh, I get it. Pack bond, huh?”
“I think our Alice is a bit more nuanced than that,” the captain replied. “But it seems we can rely on her discretion. Naoko, you’ll want to hear this as well.”
“Me? But, my captain, I might still have latent compulsions we haven’t discovered. What if I turn out to be a spy?”
“That is less of an issue than you might think. Tell me, have either of you heard the story of the Mirai treasure fleet?”
We both shook our heads.
“Well, this will take a bit of explaining, then. The story goes that during the final months of the Kami War the Mirai high command began to realize that they were going to lose. They had the best troops, the best crews and by far the best commanders, but it wasn’t enough. The Dominion expeditionary force had better ships, and the Swarmlords were drowning them in mass-produced robot war machines.”
“Serves them right,” I muttered. “Stupid genocidal maniacs.”
The captain paused, and gave me a disapproving look.
“I know the Mirai have become this generation’s Nazis, Alice, but you would do well to remember that history is written by the victor. War is filled with atrocities, and the more competitive pressure the great powers feel the more savage their behavior. With hundreds of thousands of nations vying for power in the modern era it was inevitable that the laws of war would regress to the mores of the city-state era. By that standard the Kami War was only a little worse than usual.”
“But sir, the Mirai killed twenty billion people at Karwin’s Rift,” I protested.
“The Dominion’s Grand Unification campaign kills that many people every year, Alice,” he pointed out. “The Polytechnic Swarm makes a point of exterminating an enemy every decade or so, and the death toll on those ‘cleansings’ is often a hundred billion or more. If anything, the Mirai were more restrained than their enemies. They only exterminated people who attacked them.”
That was news to me. I guess I couldn’t really trust the history I’d learned on Felicity, but still.
“Then why do they make such a point of teaching little kids how evil the Mirai were, sir?”
He sighed. “Alice, at the start of the Kami War the Mirai were a second-tier power surrounded by richer nations with much larger navies. Yet in a scant twelve years half of the warring powers of the Inner Sphere came together in an alliance against them, while the rest suspended their hostilities and turned their attention to observing the conflict. It took all the ships the Grand Alliance could muster to put down the Mirai, and when the war was won the allies abandoned their usual policies towards conquered colonies. Instead of assimilating them, what did they do to the Mirai?”
“They destroyed every ship and station, and bombarded their home world until the crust melted all the way down to the mantle,” I repeated my history lessons. “There were moons in the system that had so many deeply buried forts it would have been impossible to clear them, so instead they were nudged into collision courses with the system’s inhabited planets. Then the Swarmlords set a battle fleet on permanent watch over the system, to make sure nothing survived.”
He nodded. “You see? People don’t go to such extremes out of moral revulsion, Alice. That was fear. The same fear that leads every major colony to forbid research on class six AIs, and require decades of testing on any enhancement that increases the user’s intelligence.
“The Mirai were turning themselves into something inhuman, Alice. Bit by bit, year after year, they were working their way past the normal limits of the human mind. At the beginning of the war their best scientists were already making impressive breakthroughs, and their younger officers were all military geniuses. I’m sure you’ve heard about how things went from there. For the Alliance the war was a nightmare of impossible superweapons and unstoppable enemies, and by the end the best of the Mirai were as far beyond their enemies as we are a simple bot. The truth is, the great powers of the Inner Sphere united to exterminate the Mirai because if they hadn’t, the Mirai would have conquered the galaxy in a generation.”
Part of me wanted to ask what was so scary about making yourself better. Shouldn’t every mother want her daughters to have all the advantages they could get? Mine certainly had. If it was possible to make people like me shouldn’t everyone be doing it, so we wouldn’t have to worry about some isolated kingdom of crazy people taking over? Whatever abilities those monsters had invented, I was sure I could match them.
Saying that sounded like a really bad idea. So I just nodded. “Yes, sir. I understand.”
“At any rate,” the captain went on. “The story that’s relevant to our situation is that Emperor Kato outfitted a secret expedition to establish a holdout colony in the Outer Sphere. The colony fleet was lavishly equipped, with a modified battleship serving as a colony transport and a squadron of cruisers and escorts accompanying it. To ensure they got their new industry off the ground as quickly as possible, the ship was loaded with millions of tons of rare elements. Radioactives. Rare earths. Platinum group elements. Oh, and two and a half million tons of gold.”
I choked.
“This has all the signs of an urban legend,” Naoko commented. “I assume this treasure ship vanished somehow?”
“Intercepted by the 47th Battle Swarm as they tried to leave Mirai space,” he confirmed. “Thing is, it was a long running battle and half of it happened in the Delta Layer. Most of the Swarmlord forces were wiped out during the engagement, and while they claim to have a confirmed kill on the Emperor’s Hope they lost track of the wreck at some point. There have been several searches since then, but no one has ever found it. So all that gold is still out there somewhere, just waiting for some lucky stiff to stumble on it. It’s a pretty common spacer yarn.”