The Unscheduled Mission Read Online Free PDF

rebel planets before. There are one or two every millennium; we learned about them in school. Until now, I thought it was always for the best. Now, I’m not so certain.
    “Park,” Dannet continued earnestly. “You need to stall for time. Find an excuse to break off these talks.”
    “Break them off?” Park asked. “We just finally got them started and Jance is the one who walked out today.”
    “It was just a ploy,” Dannet told him. “He won’t give up that easily.”
    “Hmm, possibly,” Park nodded, “but aren’t you the one who assured me that with the surrender of the moon base, we had already established our rights to the Moon and beyond?”
    “I did,” Dannet admitted, “and it was true, but I forgot about people like Jance. Silly of me, I know. I grew up with politics all around me. You would think I’d be a little less naïve about them. The Moon and this system is yours by conquest, but it’s Jance’s job to get you to give it back.”
    “Then he can’t be very good at it,” Iris laughed.
    “What makes you say that?” Dannet asked. “I’ll admit he made a mistake this morning walking in and trying to pretend the Covenant was intact, but that was just the way he chose to start. I imagine after that, almost anything else will seem reasonable.”
    “I’m, not sure you’re right about that,” Park told him. “He obviously still believes we’re just some adventurers from another world, pretending to have come from the past. And, really, why should he believe us? Your people don’t have stasis technology and when you get right down to it two hundred and fifty million years is a ridiculous amount of time. I doubt our own scientists believed our stasis equipment would last that long. A century, maybe two, was all we were expecting. Certainly no more than a millennium. I doubt I’d believe it in his case. I’m not sure why you do.”
    “I’ve seen your base,” Dannet replied. “It’s like nothing anywhere else in the galaxy. You’re right, two hundred fifty million is a ridiculous number. It’s long enough for countless civilizations to rise and fall. And that’s my point. Your Van Winkle base is so different it can’t possibly be a hoax.”
    “We could have just found it,” Park pointed out. “then adapted it to our needs.”
    “And built all those ancient artifacts?” Dannet asked. “Your power generators alone are incomprehensible to me, the style of furniture, your forms of entertainment all beyond foreign to me. It’s too much to believe it’s a fake and without your basic claim of stasis, it would all fall apart. Those ancient devices would have crumbled long ago. Am I wrong?”
    “You’re using logic,” Park accused. “I doubt Jance is.”
    “Don’t count on it,” Dannet laughed. “His job isn’t to make a treaty with you, it’s to impose one on the Mer. Like you said, he doesn’t believe your story. I just met with his deputy who tried to get me to open my eyes about you. Well, she did, but not the way she intended.”
    “We can’t just break off these talks after coming all this way,” Park insisted. “It would be as phony as Jance’s little tantrum this morning.”
    “No, you need to wait for the right time,” Dannet admitted. “Don’t let Jance talk you into anything.”
    “It might be better if we draft our own treaty and shove it at Jance,” Iris considered.
    “You can do that, but it will take time,” Dannet told her.
    “And we should hold that in reserve,” Park decided. “Well, this is not my decision to make. I’ll go talk to Arn and Terius and see how they feel about it.”

Five
     
     
    As Park had expected, neither Arn nor Terius were disposed toward breaking off the talks regardless of how arrogant Harat Jance was. Dannet’s predictions that Jance would try to sound reasonable failed to materialize on schedule and rather than attempting to guide them all toward a hasty agreement, Jance seemed more disposed toward delay