Christopher Nuttall: The Trojan Horse

“True,” Toby agreed. The radio telescopes kept swearing that there was no sign of any alien civilisation near Earth, but Toby had no faith in that conclusion. He wouldn’t feel at ease until humanity had scouted the nearby stars and confirmed that they were barren. Who knew? Perhaps they would find races out there that were friendlier than the Snakes.

He glanced at his watch. “The ceremony is in thirty minutes,” he said. Outside, on the White House lawn, they’d raised a single slab of alien hull metal. Using lasers, they’d burned into it the name of every resistance fighter who’d been killed in the war. There would be many names missed, Toby knew, even in America. Far too many people had simply vanished without a trace. “You said it was urgent?”

“I did,” Jason agreed. “The scientists at Nevada have made something of a breakthrough. You’ll remember how the Snakes got here in the first place? The Pacifists screwed up the control routines for the wormhole, under the impression that it would destroy the entire fleet?”

“I remember,” Toby said. “Why…?”

“The scientists started crunching numbers,” Jason sad. “The Snakes invented the generator, only to discover that it took a vast amount of power to make it function. Their starships have to store power for weeks before they can jump to another star system. It limits their tactical capabilities against other space-faring races…”

“But not races still trapped on their own planets,” Toby said, impatiently.

“The wormhole they formed by accident was a great deal more powerful than their average wormhole,” Jason said. “The scientists believe that the wormhole was actually drawing power from the fabric of space itself, once the energy patterns had been shaped into a wormhole. Looking at the equations, the wormhole actually became continuous; they could have gone far further than they ever dreamed of going, without needing the vast power reserves they had to build up for their interstellar hops.”

He leaned forward. “The possibility is there in the maths,” he said. “We could build a wormhole generator that could put anything they ever built in the shade.”

“We could get to them,” Toby said. The prospect was dazzling. “And they’d never see us coming.”

“A few decades of work and we would be ready,” Jason said. “And if they never develop it for themselves…”

Toby smiled. “Let me have the full report as soon as possible,” he said. “I’ll review it after the ceremony.”

Alone again, he gazed down at the President’s desk. His father would have been shocked to see Toby running the country, but then… they’d made up since the aliens had arrived. It was something to be thankful for, now that the war was over. And his father wouldn’t have wanted to grow old and die in bed.

Shaking his head, he stood up and left the Oval Office. There would be enough time tomorrow to consider what Jason had told him, and the implications for humanity’s new space program. A substantial proportion of the government’s remaining funds were already being spent on space; it would just have to be increased, along with what private funding could be diverted by offering companies tax breaks to invest in space. And then… he smiled and nodded as Gillian met him, wearing a black dress. Tomorrow, they would have time to think about the future.

Now, it was time to bid farewell to the dead.