Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 281: Interlude Habicht

“So, Isaac’s now called ‘the Sage’, right? I was thinking we need epithets as well.”

“How about you go by ‘Duck’, Amy? After all, that, that tends to be everyone’s first reaction when you show up on the battlefield. Or maybe ‘Duckie’?”

While Arthur was being a bit hyperbolic here, he did have a point. While Amy was a master of artillery and would never hit an ally, it hardly felt like she had things under control to the guy on the ground when the place one had been less than a second prior had been obliterated.

The jokes continued until all the members were there.

It was a good thing that the members of the Round Table both felt comfortable making jokes and were capable of packing in those jokes once they were no longer appropriate.

“So, space,” Jason stated blandly, “What are we doing about it?”

“The Ankou Aspects are no longer optional, if it at all fits your build, you’re taking it,” Isaac stated, “I think I’m meeting all of you during the next month? Handoff should be easy.”

“Thanks,” Arthur said.

“I have a meeting about potentially setting up defenses against potential space-based enemies in an hour,” Habicht informed the group, “I’m for it, obviously. The reasons are that we can’t control summoning out there nearly as well as we can planetside and in case someone decides to start chucking rocks, it would be for the best to have defenses in place. Do you have other arguments for the blockheads?”

“How about aliens?” Isaac suggested.

“I’ll need to prove that,” Habicht dryly pointed out, “Conspiracy theories are going to get me nowhere.”

“Ask them what language the [System] was originally written in,” Isaac suggested, “There are a lot of linguistic quirks that appear not just when you switch the display language, but persist in all languages spoken today. Might be an alien language.

“There are also people who unlocked [Heir-Classes] with no historical or mythological base we know about, with names that don’t linguistically match any known languages today.

“We also don’t have any reason to expect we are alone in the universe.”

“Do you believe in aliens?” Jason asked.

“Yeah, I …” Isaac trailed off, likely having realized that the topic hadn’t been talked about since before Jason, Fenrir and Dr. Han had joined the [Round Table] the same time Habicht did. It just wasn’t something that came up often.

“Oh, by the way, we might have trouble with little green men a few centuries down the line,” had been a throwaway conversation years ago, soon forgotten with all the other trouble they’d been having.

“When the first Event happened, I swore at the sky, and Loki appeared in front of me,” Isaac began to explain, “He might be a troll, but he doesn’t lie, I’m pretty sure that’s because seeing people try to outsmart his limitations is funny to him. And he was very specific about how he might have been the being from the myths, but not our god. So what if he was talking about other species, somewhere out in the universe?”

“Or he could have been referring to the fact that he’s a Norse god, not a German one,” Dr. Han threw in, “Everything we know about that … being is that it likes to mess with people. I wouldn’t rely on anything it said even if it really didn’t lie.”

Jason was … less delicate in his response, “Please tell me this is the part where you tell me you’ve written up a whole plan for dealing with an alien invasion and you just forgot to make sure we knew where to find it?”

For the first time in a long while, Habicht got to see Isaac look abashed.

“It’s one page, and basically ready ‘try the diplomatic route, if that doesn’t work, punch them in whatever their crotch-equivalent is’,” Isaac explained.

“Inter-species nut-punching,” Jason murmured, “Kinky.”

Amy, who’d been sitting next to him, hung her head and sighed theatrically.

“We’ve got plenty of time before anything like that becomes necessary,” Elena pointed out, “Thanks to Isaac, we have the broad timeline without his intervention up to 2034, and there were no alien invasions then. The paradigm might have shifted down here, but that shouldn’t affect outer space too much, so we can plan for potential aliens when the planet is no longer in danger of imploding.”

“The Events are a [System]-wide change, so if our hypothetical aliens have access to it as well, things could change,” Isaac pointed out.

Elena shrugged, “We do need to keep it in mind.”

“Honestly, it doesn’t matter any more now than it did five years ago,” Habicht interrupted, “We can hypothesize ourselves all the way to the insane asylum, but we have a set of real, present problems we need to deal with. Let’s table the ET discussion and focus on the problems in the here and now.

“So, we know that aliens are an argument for proper orbital defenses. Anything else …”

***

As strange as it might have been to deal with the Round Table and its general levity for a career government employee, it was infinitely more enjoyable than Habicht’s day job.

“Director Habicht, you’ve proposed that not only do we champion the creation of an orbital defense network with NATO, but if necessary, Germany foots the bill?”

Not to mention, he had a shiny new job, with a shiny new office, and a complete lack of fieldwork.

Being put in charge of the entirety of the Bundesargentur für das Übernatürliche after the previous director had been promoted to Minister of Defense was an honor, a way for him to do a whole lot of good, and a pain in the ass.

At least it hadn’t locked him into a logistics [Class]. He’d gained his fifth Evolution after a series of “training exercises” with both Professor Bailey’s team and the Hunter’s Guild, becoming the [Commander of the Paranormal Front]. It had [Skills] for direct action, spells, several boosting abilities, knowledge-granting, etc., but overall, it was great at fighting anything that shifted the overall paradigm in a supernatural way. Outside context problems, or rather, things that would have been outside context problems six years ago.

It granted enough personal capabilities to satisfy his inner commando, but was nonetheless extremely useful for his current position.

“I’m proposing we do something about a problem, within the bounds of what politics allow,” Habicht pointed out, “So, how to phrase it, who do we bring the request to, and how long will we have to wait for something to be done about it?”

As he said this, he threw a dark look at Lauterbach, the previous holder of his position and current Minister of Defense for the Federal Republic of Germany.

“That’s going to be expensive, which one of you is going to give up a part of your budget? Can’t we stick to monitoring and dealing with issues by sending people up there?”

“How many people are able to fight in space without fragile life-support devices?” General Horn asked. He was Habicht’s military equivalent, in charge of military adaptation to the [System].

“Germany is lucky that we have some S-Rankers who’ll look at a problem, ask how they can deal with it without stepping on any toes, and then fix it, all without the need for begging or bribes.” He continued, “But shouldn’t rely on them, that’s just polite. Not to mention that they could just stop helping if we treat them like it’s their job to clean up our messes. I wouldn’t even blame them.”

“Also, we’ve got more issues than just space summoning,” Habicht threw in, “Have any of you considered how we’re going to deal with space-based threats of a more sapient nature?”

“Humans … or Aliens?” Horn asked, bemused, “I’ve been bugging the bosses about some basic precautions for years, they’re not going to go for that.”

“Both,” Habicht said, “We know that space-based summoning is a problem, it won’t be long until there’ll be enough ships out there that we can no longer identify which ships are supposed to have guns at a glance, and we don’t know if we’re alone in the universe.”

“For argument’s sake, if there are aliens out there, why haven’t we heard about them?” Horn asked.

“Space is big, and takes forever to traverse. We’ve advanced more in the past three years than we have in the fifty years before that,” Habicht pointed out, “Portals even allow us to move faster than light, so we know there are ways around that limitation.”

“The current portal range record is two-point-seven-three light seconds and that experiment blew the array apart during shutdown,” Horn replied.

“And that is several orders of magnitude greater than the first portal use, and that progress took only a few years,” Habicht rebuffed.

He and Horn had a good thing going ever since they’d gotten on one level … sort of. Military and civilian power structures didn’t line up perfectly.

“Yes, you’re both on the same page about this,” Lauterbach sighed, “But I’m not the only one that needs to sign off on this. Do you have any actual arguments about aliens existing?”

Habicht tossed a folder onto the table.

“What you have there are the latest findings of bleeding-edge biological research into alternative bases for life. As I understand it, this details the fundamentals of silicate-based life, lifeforms using an entirely different set of amino acids, as well as an alternative metabolism utilizing fluorine in place of oxygen to generate energy, the potential utilization of sugars other than the ones used by practically all Earth-based life, and more besides.”

Everyone stared at the file as though he’d just tossed a venomous snake on the table. He took mercy on them, though.

“The relevant section is just the last ten pages,” he explained, “It points out how many nearby planets might not only contain human-like life forms, but also ones based on alternative chemical compositions, then proceeds to extrapolate how the long it will likely take for a human-like civilization to reach us here, and vice versa.”

“That sounds like a lot of hypotheticals,” Lauterbach commented.

“Lab-grown life forms exist for each of those alternative metabolisms and base building blocks. And need I point out that in the past, predictions where post-[System] technology will go have been scarily accurate? I’ve talked to Professor Bailey and Dr. Thoma. If we need either of them as expert witnesses or anything else, they’ll be there. And there’s ten times more data they can give us if we ask for it.”

Habicht trusted both of the scientists with his life, and right now, he’d discovered one more reason why that was such a good thing. Unlike his various peers and superiors, he didn’t have to go over it with a fine-toothed comb.

“So you already talked this over with them … before you ever brought this up with me?” Lauterbach asked, “Why?”

“Because we both know how these things always go,” Habicht commented dryly, “The obvious, necessary, thing isn’t being done for some reason or other, and we either spend a year locked up in committees, or we figure out a deal.”

“So you figured out a deal before anyone could ever even bring up the idea of a meeting,” Lauterbach sighed, “How sure are you that he’ll follow through.”

Horn snorted at that, “We’ve both met the man, you should know how he is. If it’s necessary, getting it done is more important than money, power, or recognition.”

“Like I said, Isaac Thoma won’t be a roadblock here, he’ll be the biggest asset we could possibly have. It’s everyone else we have to worry about. So, we need a way to make sure that any defenses can’t be turned on the planet, and weapons that will have an actual effect on the kinds of opponents they’ll be up against. Remember, one of the US’ newest warships would have needed almost seventeen hours of constant bombardment to take out a stationary target. That kind of time won’t work in a combat scenario,” Habicht added.

“And once we have a plan, we need a cost-effective plan to implement it.”

Somehow, the two hours that followed were more productive than the last ten meetings combined. But even that didn’t guarantee they’d get anywhere with all the people that needed to be convinced.

Still, he was confident, and on the off chance that things wouldn’t work out there, the situation would still resolve itself. Somehow, magically, without anything he should know about happening, it would resolve itself.

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