The attack came without warning, in the middle of a Senate session, three unmarked warships dropping out of the Fold and driving straight for the capital with every gun lit. It was over in under half an hour (Earth's orbital defenses handled it with almost contemptuous efficiency, three burning wrecks scattered across low orbit before the shelters beneath the Senate building had even finished filling), and Commander Zhang walked the corridor back toward the council chamber already certain of one thing: an attack that expensive, that suicidal, and that tactically pointless had not been fought for the reason everyone in that chamber was about to assume.
The shelters themselves were larger than anyone expected who'd never had cause to use them, carved decades ago into bedrock nobody had touched since the last Akkadian war and kept, ever since, in a state of embarrassed, half-funded readiness: emergency lighting a shade too yellow, ration stores rotated on a schedule nobody actually trusted, the whole place smelling faintly of the sealant used to keep it airtight. Most of the senators filing back up into daylight afterward had never set foot down there before today, and it showed on their faces: the particular offense of powerful people reminded, all at once, that the ground under their own capital had teeth.
"What I want to know," Senator Voss of North America said, before Zhang had even finished his report, straightening his jacket as if the last hour hadn't happened to it, "is who these aliens are and why they thought they could strike at the heart of the United Nations of Earth without consequence."
"I can't give you that yet, Senator."
"Why not? You have wreckage. You have bodies. Surely something in all of that tells us who to hold accountable."
"Earth has been attacked," Speaker Liu Ye put in, as if the fact required repeating for it to properly land. "We require answers, and a response equal to the insult."
"More than that," Voss added, his glare daring Liu Ye to interrupt him twice in one afternoon, the old rivalry over the mining rights at Luminos plainly still simmering somewhere under the outrage, "we require assurance that Star Fleet has the resources to prevent this from happening a second time. I'd remind the chamber that resources have a way of finding themselves reallocated toward whichever region shows the most initiative in a crisis."
"This is hardly the moment for regional posturing, Senator," Liu Ye said.
"I agree completely," Voss said, in a tone that made plain he intended to keep posturing regardless.
Zhang let the two of them trade outrage back and forth across the chamber floor for the better part of an hour, nodding at the correct intervals, giving away nothing of what he actually thought, which was this: no one attacks the capital of a Federation power for no strategic gain unless the loss they're willing to absorb is worth more to them than the objective everyone assumes they were chasing. Three warships and every crew aboard them, thrown away to punch a hole in Earth's orbital shield for half an hour. Either whoever ordered this had badly misjudged the defenses, or they had wanted exactly this: every eye in the Senate turned inward, toward the smoking wreckage overhead, and away from whatever else was happening at that same moment somewhere the Senate wasn't looking.
He didn't yet know that a refugee convoy limping toward the safety of Avaros's neutral shipping lanes had gone dark within the same hour, every vessel in it reduced to debris by an attacker no scanner picked up until it was already too late to matter. He wouldn't know it for another day. But the shape of the question stuck with him regardless (not who. Why. And why now), the same instinct, though he'd never have credited it to the alien he hadn't yet properly met, that had put a hydraulic-leg weak point in front of Taisen's blade before either of them had time to think their way there consciously.
Eleven light-years from the Senate chamber where Zhang stood making soothing noises at men who would never know how close they'd come to being right for the wrong reasons, four unarmed transports carrying some six hundred displaced Quinians and Avari toward the one neutral harbour left willing to take them in dropped out of the Fold on schedule, exactly where their flight plan said they would, and found nothing waiting for them at all: no welcome beacon, no customs skiff, nothing but empty space and Avaros's cold blue crescent hanging distant and unconcerned on their forward scopes.
The convoy's lead pilot, a Quinian grandmother named Yeshi who had made this run eleven times without incident and had stopped, somewhere around the fourth crossing, being frightened of it, noted the silence on the beacon frequency, filed a routine flag with her own logs, and never got the chance to file a second one. Whatever found them afterward left no wreckage large enough for anyone to later determine how it had done what it did, only debris, and a stretch of vacuum that stayed, for a long while, unnaturally quiet even by the standards of a region already used to silence. No distress call reached anyone. No warning reached Avaros, or Earth, or the Hermes burning on a plateau on Boettia a system away. The only record that it had happened at all would surface, eventually, as a line item in a shipping ledger nobody in power had any pressing reason to read carefully.
"Sir," his aide said, finding him at last back in his own office, the lights of the capital's skyline glowing steady and undisturbed through the tall windows behind him. "We located him. The alien. He's in a cantina at the edge of the underworld."
"Good," Zhang said. "Send Colonel Lyn to extend the invitation. And arrange payment (three million credits, clean, no trace) to a man named Jorun Na'ak, currently attached to the same party. He did us a service getting that crew off Boettia alive. I intend to be the kind of patron who remembers a debt, even one I never signed for personally."