Free Scarcity (Special Forces: FJ One Book 1) by Adam Vance

junk’ from around Earth’s orbit.”
    The smile, or as much of one as that little mouth could manage, turned up its corners some more.
    “You see, as we said, we are here to help.”
     

CHAPTER TEN – I WANT TO BELIEVE
     
    Social’s bandwidth had to be throttled – the overwhelming response to what was being tagged as “Salvation” was crashing servers worldwide. “Saved” was the biggest tag in the cloud, and pictures were being posted and shared and reshared: The blackened wasteland around Centralia, smoldering but visible for the first time in decades. The great “pillar” of trash rising out of the Pacific, being sucked into the maw of an alien ship, like something out of a biblical epic as directed by Cecil B. DeMille.
    The aliens’ self-declared status as “Visitors” was being eagerly embraced. Not everyone was raving with joy, of course. Social being what it was, there were comments about the Visitors’ long flowing robes (“maybe they’re hiding six dicks or something,” one wisecracker suggested). Aficionados of old TV science fiction reminded those who would listen about the scaly reptiles beneath the human masks in “V,” who were also called “visitors.”
    The Captain and HM walked the halls of the Palace, idly discussing inoffensive things.
    “The closest parallel I can think of is V-E Day in Britain during World War II,” HM said. “That sense that all the struggle, the suffering, was finally over. I say in Britain, because its people had to deal with more deprivation than the Americans.”
    “Yes, but ‘Austerity Britain’ was a state that went on for years after the victory. Whereas we’re seeing immediate improvements in our quality of life.”
    “Definitely.”
    They entered the secure room and sealed themselves in. HM opened the drinks cabinet. “This calls for the very good stuff. I’ve been saving this for a long time.” She held up the bottle of Macallan to show him.
    He knew his boss well after all these years. She held his gaze firmly, and batted out a message in Morse code with a few short and long blinks of her eyes: Windtalk.
    He took the bottle from her hand. “Very nice. What a gorgeous crystal bottle. It looks rare. How’d you get hold of it?”
    With his free hand, he signaled back in their private cipher, his fingers twitching rhythmically. Assuming we’re being overheard?
    “After Collapse, there was a bottle in one of the Latifundia in China. For a billionaire, $628,000 for a bottle of alcohol he would never drink was a mere trifle.”
    Always assume the worst. They’ll break the code eventually but it’ll buy us time. Their cipher was complicated, based on the “unbreakable” Navajo language used as code in World War II, with another layer of code over that. Living to a ripe old age gave one plenty of time to devise difficult puzzles.
    “Well, I look forward to enjoying what he didn’t. Thank you,” he said, taking the glass.
    The whole thing smells, the Captain signaled. Little Green Men. Signs and Miracles.
    “Cheers.”
    You can’t fault people, HM replied. It’s as if everyone won the lottery. Earth is saved, or that’s what it feels like. No more struggle, no more austerity, no more hardship on new worlds.
    “Man, that is fantastic. Not $600,000 worth, but still.”
    I’ve been on a lot of worlds, ma’am. I’ve been in the business of first contact for almost seventy years. And this is not how Contact goes. Greeks bearing gifts and all. They dropped that hint, that they ‘learned of how you have advanced,’ that implies they’ve been here before. Which ties up the whole LGM thing with a bow. But if they’d been visiting us all this time, we would have run into them somewhere by now, or at least a trace of them.
    “I rarely abuse my power, Captain, but when I saw that bottle on the appropriations registry, I’m afraid I pulled some strings to get it. Of course, post-Collapse, the whiskey is less valuable now than the bottle.