Damocles Read Free

paranoid, and beset with juvenile fantasies not congruent with the objectives of the administration.” In other words, he’d had to stand before a panel of generals and administrators and tell them that, despite the assertions of his report, he did not in fact believe alien life did exist, nor did he believe these nonexistent aliens would ever make contact with Didet or its inhabitants.
    Loul’s best friend, Hark, had shown his support by exploding with outrage when he’d learned of the inquisition and recanting. Of course, it was easy for Hark to take the high road. He had a cushy job at his mother’s furniture plant overseeing the installation of heavy-duty casters for office chairs. His career path didn’t have a lot of room for improvement, but at least the only people outranking him were his own family. It wasn’t so much a glass ceiling as a blood ceiling, and short of outright embezzlement, he wasn’t in danger of losing his job. Loul wasn’t either. He just had no hopes of ever rising any higher in the ranks than his current midlevel weather-monitoring position.
    Hark had gone so far as to suggest that Loul upload the entire report to the Internet, targeting those fringe groups who believed that alien life could and probably did exist, some even going so far as to claim to have made contact with non-Didet life-forms. After the humiliation at the hands of his superiors, he’d been tempted to. His administrators and the generals above them hadn’t even tried to suppress their contempt at his report, some even laughing right in his face at his recommendations. Word had spread quickly throughout the department that Loul Pell was “one of those people,” those nut jobs who claimed to have implants under their skin, who claimed to have had years taken off their lives, who knew for a fact that aliens had probed their bodies and attempted to mate with them. If that was the grouphe was going to be lumped into, why shouldn’t he share the hard work he’d put into his report?
    Because the administration had seized it. Every word of it. Even though he’d done his research and his calculations and his probability studies on his own computer during his own time, the administration had claimed he’d violated their resources and, as such, his intellectual property was now the property of the Cartar Satellite Telemetry Administration. He’d been chastised for irresponsible use of resources, for attempting to incite public fear, for denigrating the intellectual propriety of his position, and, underneath it all, he could feel the unspoken threat of labeling him a terrorist. They were afraid he would make them all look like fools.
    So now he charted weather patterns and ignored his desk mate and waited for his workday to end so he could head out the social center and meet up with Hark and the gang and pretend to be wizards and star kings and minions of the Shadow as they worked their way through another round of Circle. And when the game hit a lull or they got a little too deep in their hot beers, Loul would let his mind and sometimes his words wander back to the ridiculous theories that had trapped him in this cycle of mediocrity. Because despite his recanting and his humiliations and his flatline pay scale, or maybe because of them, Loul Pell still believed there had to be life beyond the yellow skies of Didet.
MEG
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    Meg ignored the bleating of the alarm firing off again from the engine room. In the six weeks since coming up from deep sleep, it seemed the primary malfunction on the ship was the ship’s alarmsystem. Something was always going wrong, and while there was no such thing as a minor emergency in space this far from any type of help, she wouldn’t have minded a volume control on the announcement level. After all, she had a lot of listening to do.
    She checked again to make sure the door to her cabin was sealed, shutting out as much noise as possible. Of course it was shut. She’d shut it herself. Plus