A Line In The Stars (The Stardock Trilogy Book 3) by Fenian Sean

Author:Fenian, Sean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fenian House Publishing
Published: 2024-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

9. Parliaments and Dreams

Over the passing weeks, the Argus array began to grow, a few hundred drones at a time. As planned, the deployment began with a single plane of ‘eyes’ at 18AU, then built both inward and outward from there. The Sun’s gravity was tiny this far out — the orbital period of an 18AU orbit is 76.4 years — and it took the drones less than a micro-newton of thrust to hold their positions. They could keep that up for literally decades before they would need to be recharged.

On the 8th of June, CG-10 Crazy Horse and CG-11 Khubilai were delivered out of the yards, commissioned and went out on their shakedown cruises. Three more cruisers, hull numbers CG-17 through CG-19, were laid down. They would not be completed until early September — but that would still probably be a month before Elegant Solution.

Meanwhile, the Turks and the Kurds … were still talking. The discussions sometimes became heated, but they were talking. And that counted for a lot.

They weren’t the only ones talking. The very, very quiet, largely unofficial talks between the United States and the Russian Federation had expanded to include France and the UK as well. China was still sitting back, waiting and watching to see what came of it, but had not yet taken the plunge itself and actively joined the negotiations. But very very slowly, in informal sessions without hard commitments, in personal communiques, progress was being made on several fronts.

Not everything was so positive. Since the Khreetan scouting foray, at least three new doomsday cults had sprung up, and at least four separate conspiracy theories involving different governments — plus one that laid the blame to a shadowy international cabal. Some said that President Riken was in league with the aliens. Some said that Alex Holder was. And of course, it went without saying that the Bilderbergers were in full foam-at-the-mouth mode, though it was a little difficult to understand how they expected anyone to believe that an alien race from elsewhere in the galaxy could somehow be part of an international Jewish conspiracy. Perhaps if one were to suppose a really expansive definition of ‘international’…

There wasn’t much that could be done about any of them, of course. Any official attempts to debunk them would only strengthen them, by creating ‘evidence’ that governments were ‘suppressing’ them and thus further heightening their devotees’ sense of paranoia. It was always the problem with cults. Ironically and counter-intuitively, the best thing to do was nothing, because almost anything that could be done simply fed them and made them worse. The only useful option open was to keep a close eye on them, in case they progressed to actually being dangerous. Which was why everyone from GSG9, the FBI, the CIA and the Deuxième Bureau to the FSB and Mossad had their people on the inside of as many of the cults and conspiracies as they could manage. It was hard to say which was the more

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