Into the Unknowable Ch. 08

The Party Secretary paused. He had been speaking for three hours now, but his trained and practised voice, enhanced by biotechnological implants, could easily continue uninterrupted for many more hours though usually on issues of much less substance.

"I will now ask you not to applaud," said the Party Secretary, which was unusual in itself because the standing ovations that followed a speech from such a senior figure normally lasted about half an hour. "The matters which will now be conveyed to you by the Chief Scientific Officer are of a highly classified nature and must not be disclosed to anyone outside this chamber. Any evidence of this will be treated as a security matter and will result in a thorough investigation."

This usually meant torture and death for a pre-determined percentage of officers. The higher the security rating the higher the corresponding percentage would be set. Nobody, even those on the podium, could be guaranteed to survive such a purge, especially as it was generally rather random in nature.

The address from the Chief Scientific Officer was as poorly eloquent and as politically correct as that given by the Party Secretary, but it did contain dramatically more information however much it was couched in Revolutionary rhetoric.

The Anomaly was not of a nature that could be properly determined. It was clearer what it wasn't, rather than what it was. It wasn't a black hole, a wormhole or composed of baryonic matter. It wasn't solid and it wasn't made from dark energy. It was, however, growing at an alarming rate, as were the number of incidents of apparitions. Whatever it might be, it was a threat to the power and ambitions of the Twenty Fifth Reich.

If it was indeed manufactured by an alien intelligence, from beyond the Solar System, then this was sufficient reason for the highest possible military preparedness. No alien culture was likely to be compatible with the interests of the Reich. It couldn't possibly be ideologically correct as Comrade Schleiermacher's wisdom and philosophy was unlikely to have spread far beyond Saturn. It was unlikely to be ethnically pure, merely by virtue of not having had the blessing of an ancestral history based in North West Europe. It was very likely that such aliens would not even be human, possibly not even biological. Such abominations could not be permitted within the compass of the heliosphere.

On the other hand, there was much that could be learnt from an alien civilisation. Although the Reich's mission was to eliminate any alien presence in the Solar System with the same ruthlessness employed on the Slav, the Arab, the Negro, the Celt and the Turk, it was also to gather as much knowledge of alien technology and biology as was possible. It might even be necessary to pretend to tolerate this alien presence in the unlikely event that it wasn't predisposed towards aggression.

After the Chief Scientific Officer sat down, again with a request that there be no applause, he was followed by an address from General Von Baden. The General was decorated with a huge weight of medals but wore a rather less splendid helmet than the one adorning the Party Secretary. Just as the Party Secretary was well schooled in revolutionary rhetoric and the Chief Scientific Officer in revolutionary science, he was a military man who understood the strategies and tactics of modern warfare. This was despite the fact that the purges hit hardest those who merely by virtue of being on the battlefield had come into contact with the enemy and had therefore been inadvertently exposed to their propaganda.

This was the first time that Paolo got a realistic appraisal of the damage inflicted on the Reich's space fleet by the other two empires' space fleets which were also converging on the same destination. It was rather worse than he'd thought. Only a tenth of the ten thousand space craft launched on this mission at crippling expense had survived. This was much the same for the enemy fleets. However, the destructive firepower in the arsenal of just one of the larger battle cruisers could scorch the surface of an inner planet and make it uninhabitable for many millions of years. The combined armoury of antimatter and nuclear devices, let alone the more exotic biochemical and dark energy weaponry, was enough to destroy a moon or make a serious dent in the atmosphere of an outer planet. This had already happened on Jupiter many centuries before when the Great Red Spot had been transformed into an even greater radioactive storm. The General was confident that should it be necessary to disable an alien force the Ninth Army had the capacity to seriously discourage any alien from venturing any further into the Solar System.

"It is hoped that such expensive weaponry will not be needed," remarked the general. "We would prefer that it were used to eliminate Manchurian and Latin scum. Such a battle would be heroic but not one of you assembled in this room would ever live to celebrate again the glories of the eternal Twenty Fifth Reich, whose future is assured thanks to the wisdom and courage of our magnificent politburo and that of General Secretary Heidegger himself."

The hands of the assembled officers twitched nervously, unsure whether to applaud given the instructions not to do so. Every eye studied the faces on the podium. And then with relief, they could see the Party Secretary put his hands together. With that the whole auditorium erupted into the applause that more naturally followed any praise of the government and its wisdom. This applause lasted a palm-numbing forty-five minutes that occasionally descended in tempo only to be brought to a fresh crescendo by those, generally of lesser rank, who most wanted to affirm the fervour of their loyalty.

And then finally, and at last, Paolo could join his fellow officers as they silently filed out now enthused with renewed revolutionary spirit.

Paolo carried away two messages that he reviewed in his mind. One was the imperative to ensure that neither he nor anyone else should discuss this meeting. He had already survived several purges. He'd even had to spend a terrifying month in a Reich cell that had cost him his fingernails and required emergency surgery on his crippled legs before the Great Purge of 207 P.R. had run its course.

And the other message was the realisation that as a senior scientific officer in Biochemistry he might soon very well be practising his research on very exotic life-forms indeed.