Technokill

by David Sherman

  "A couple of centuries later, the young United States of America decided it needed to open trade with Japan. To that end, the United States sent a navy flotilla to the remote island nation. The ships were larger and more powerful than anything the Japanese had. And," he smiled and nodded at the men, "the flotilla was accompanied by a company of Marines.

  "Japanese culture was still at a level roughly analogous to the Age of Chivalry where the United States flotilla and Marines were far more powerful than the Europeans had been a couple of centuries earlier—armored knights swinging swords don't fare very well against cannons and minnie balls. Through a combination of cajolery, bribery, and threats, they got Japan to agree to open itself to the outside world and the United States got the desired trade agreements.

  "The Japanese were shaken to their core. But they weren't about to give up on being fighters. They studied Western methods and technologies and duplicated them so that by the beginning of the Twentieth Century, barely half a century after coming out of their equivalent of the Age of Chivalry, they had become a world power. Neither had they forgotten their ambitions of conquest. As the Twentieth Century wore on they took a large part of Siberia, all of Korea, much of China, Indochina, Indonesia, and most of the islands of the central and western Pacific Ocean."

  He stopped talking for a moment, simply paced back and forth, looking at the deck before his feet, thinking. Then he looked up and resumed. "The Twentieth Century was an interesting time. I'm sure you all know what sociopaths and psychopaths are. During the Twentieth Century several nation-states, major and minor, were headed by psychopathic sociopaths. Most notable among these were Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Milosevic. They were responsible for the deaths of eighty to a hundred million people.

  "Japan didn't have a psychopathic sociopath as its head of state. During their conquest of eastern Asia and the Pacific islands they murdered untold millions of people. In one Chinese city alone, they slaughtered upward of three hundred thousand people. It was a hint the rest of the world ignored: that the entire population might consist of psychopathic sociopaths." He shrugged. "Were they? Nobody knows, nobody ever asked the question. All I have is my own suspicions based on their deeds.

  "Anyway, during their time of great conquest, the Japanese made a major mistake. They launched an attack against the United States so they could take the Philippines, and convince the West not to interfere with their ‘Greater Asian Co-prosperity Sphere.’ The attack didn't work. The war that resulted lasted nearly four years and culminated with the first use of nuclear weapons.

  "Shaken to the core again, the Japanese proved their resilience. They rebuilt—with American assistance. Again they set about their campaign of conquest, but they didn't do it by force of arms this time. Instead, they used trade and economic manipulation. In a generation they were second only to the United States in wealth and economic power. That's when things got really tough.

  "The United States and the European nations had, over several centuries of commerce, developed mechanisms for fair trade that benefited all of them." He held up a hand to forestall protests from anyone who had studied history. "I'm not saying their trade was fully equitable. It was relatively fair among themselves, because they had laws that ensured fairness. When they dealt with others, they could be, and often were, quite rapacious.

  "The Japanese felt no such restraint. They were engaged in a war of conquest. One thing to bear in mind here. Among the European and American countries, government and business were separate. Government might regulate business, but it didn't run it. Japan was the opposite.

  "I said earlier that at the time Japan opened to the west, Japanese culture was roughly analogous to Europe's Age of Chivalry. It's a very rough analogy. They had a knightly class, the Samurai, who fought and owned property. But there was a major difference. In Europe, the concept of noblesse oblige had developed, which was codified in the Code of Chivalry. What it meant was that the strong had an obligation to care for and protect the weak. Many of them didn't live up to it, but they did have the concept. Under the Code of Chivalry a knight had loyalty to his lord, his king, his god, his peers. He had obligations not only to all of them, but to those under him as well. Japan had the Code of Bushido. Under the Code of Bushido, a Samurai was required to have loyalty to the Emperor and to his lord. That is also where his obligations lay. Nowhere else. The Japanese were historically a brutal people."

  He aimed an apologetic half shrug at Staff Sergeant Hyakowa. "Anyone weaker than you was to be stepped on. Any Samurai had the right at virtually any time, in any place, for any provocation, to kill a commoner."

  He stopped pacing and looked at the spellbound Marines. "Lance Corporal Claypoole!"

  Claypoole jumped to his feet and looked anxiously at the first sergeant. He hadn't been sleeping or talking, so he wondered why the Top was calling him out.

  "Lance Corporal Claypoole, Brigadier Sturgeon is your lord. What would your reaction be if he told you to go to the barracks, get out your combat knife, and cut your belly open so that you died from the wound?"

  "Top?" The question baffled him.

  Myer shook his head. "You heard me, Marine. What would you do if Brigadier Sturgeon told you to kill yourself?"

  Claypoole blinked a few times, then shook his head and said with some hesitancy, "Top, I think I'd have to say, ‘With all due respect, Sir, go fuck yourself,’ and then take my chances with a court-martial."

  Myer nodded sharply. "Right. That's the reaction I'd expect from any of you. That's the reaction you'd expect from just about anybody who's ever lived. That's not the way it was with the Samurai. A Samurai's loyalty and obligation demanded that if his lord ordered him to go home and murder his wife or his children, he had to do it. More than that, if his lord ordered him to go home and commit suicide, he was bound to do that. And they considered it an honor!

  "The late Twentieth Century Japanese applied a variant of the Code of Bushido to international commerce. They still had the Emperor, and the lords had become high government officials and business leaders. They worked hand in hand.

  "The earlier Japanese saw nothing wrong in lying to anyone to whom they did not owe loyalty. The late Twentieth Century Japanese had no loyalty to anyone else in the world. Time and again they promised that they would obey the basic laws of international commerce, and then they conducted business in violation of most of those laws. Unfortunately, they didn't have the centuries of experience in international commerce the West did. They still believed the only way to prosper was to take over other countries. They became so influential in the economy of other nation-states that when their lack of experience in international commerce finally caught up with them, it caused the collapse of the economies of half of east Asia, and damaged the economies of most of the rest of the world.

  "That's an example of a relatively primitive people causing massive damage when encountering a more advanced culture."

  Top Myer stopped pacing and stood facing the Marines, hands clasped behind his back. "That's why the Confederation has decided to keep the Avionians quarantined. Nobody knows what will happen if we open contact with an alien sentience. The contact could kill them—or it could turn them into the most virulent enemy humanity has ever faced." He shot a warning glare at Schultz, who looked like he was about to say something. Schultz withdrew.

  "I don't think there's room for any questions until you've digested what I said. Platoon sergeants, take your platoons." Top Myer walked down the aisle between the rows of benches and left the compartment.

  In the small wardroom given over to their use during the journey, Captain Conorado and his officers were joined by Captain Natal. Conorado had earlier made arrangements with the captain of the Khe Sanh for audio to be piped from the physical recreation compartment to the Marine officers' wardroom. Company L's leaders were going to eavesdrop on Top Myer's briefing.

  The first thing they heard was his dissertation on the state of development in Renaissance Europe. Ca
ptain Natal listened quizzically, his expression changing from minor confusion to consternation. He had the grace not to say anything to interrupt the Marines who were listening with great interest and occasionally shaking their heads.

  When the briefing ended, Natal looked at Conorado and said, "Can you explain that, Captain?"

  "Yessir, I can," Conorado replied calmly. "The first sergeant wants to tune the men up before an operation, get them focused on the mission so they don't make as many mistakes as they might. He sometimes gives history lessons. His details may be off, and his conclusions occasionally leave something to be desired, but he's often dead on. He wants to save Marines' lives. In this case, he also wants to impress on them the importance of a mission they might not understand." He smiled.

  Natal nodded thoughtfully. He looked around the room at the Marines. "Thirty years ago I was about to enlist in the Marines. But a navy recruiter convinced me that life aboard ship was more desirable than a life spent slogging through alien mud while getting shot at. The first sergeant's briefing has convinced me I made the right decision." He ruefully shook his head. "I don't think I would have advanced farther than lieutenant commander if I had to spend my career matching wits with men like your first sergeant."

  Gunnery Sergeant Bass, the only noncommissioned officer in the room, laughed. "No problem, sir; if you'd joined the Marines, you would have started off as a private and learned to coexist with first sergeants from the ground up."

  Chapter 10

  Jum Bolion hit the landcar's fans hard crossing the ancient lake bed. He wanted to raise the biggest possible dust cloud, before the Cheereek camp came into sight. After three visits planetside, he was learning to spot the guard posts by the presence of tall animals that vaguely resembled extinct, giant, flightless birds from Earth called, he thought, orstriks—something like that anyway. In the local language the animals were called something close to a warbled eek. He shook his head; he had trouble with the local language; it seemed to be mostly vowels with a bunch of slurs and a very few, very hard consonants thrown in seemingly at random. The Cheereek warriors used the eek the way humans used horses, as riding animals. The warriors rode them, that is. Females, young or old, walked. But the warriors rode everyplace they could—he'd seen a warrior step out of his nest, hop on his eek, ride ten meters, then hop off and step into another nest.

  An eek that stood in place instead of running from the landcar had to be domesticated, and that had to mean a Cheereek was hidden very nearby. Up ahead, just off his starboard bow, a lone eek was calmly ignoring the roar and dust cloud of the landcar. On his right side two stood placidly together. Two more stood off to the left and paid the landcar no more attention than the others. That meant at least five guards were nearby—except they were too well hidden for him to spot. The Cheereek were warriors, they liked to fight. Bolion wanted to impress them with the power of the landcar; that would help keep them from attacking him and Herbloc. So he hit the fans hard.

  Spencer Herbloc, in the passenger seat, chuckled and took a nip from his ever-present flask. He knew why Bolion hit the fans. He also knew which guard stations his driver thought he knew about, the three with the eeookks. He himself saw four others, but there was no need to upset the driver by telling him they were surrounded by more potentially hostile aliens than he realized. Herbloc wasn't concerned, however, about the potential hostility. He knew how badly the Cheereek wanted his trade goods. He thought of those fools up there in the space station and snorted.

  A drunkard, was he? Hah! If a taste for the juice was just cause for termination, he knew scores of other scientists who should be sacked. No, it wasn't his drinking that had cost him his position, it was jealousy, pure and simple. He was sure that bitch Hoxey was behind it. She was "studying" the Avionians by vivisecting captives. Sure, she learned things about Avionian neurology and brain-control functions that couldn't be learned by other means, but he was making faster progress in deciphering their language and discovering their responses to various stimuli through limited, carefully controlled contact with select Avionians in their own environment. He conducted standardized psychological tests and applied basic anthropological parameters. So what if almost all direct contact between humans and the indigenes was forbidden? His research was more direct and was proving more immediately fruitful. It was putting Hoxey's "studies" in jeopardy. So they'd conspired to entrap him for stealing the stones. He snorted again. He wasn't the only one who picked up a few of the gems for personal use. Everyone who went planetside did. And everyone who went planetside gave a few stones to the mugwumps who stayed in the station and never ventured to Avionia's surface.

  He gritted his teeth when he remembered how they had threatened him with that semilegendary horror called Darkside. He didn't have hard proof that others were taking stones for themselves—and he had no legally admissible record of the gems he gave the mugwumps—it would have been his word against theirs. If he'd had the proof, he would have threatened to blow the lid off the entire operation. But he didn't have that proof! So when faced with the choice of dismissal for incapacitating alcholism or disappearance onto Darkside, he accepted dismissal and reinitialed that absurd agreement not to divulge anything to anyone. He grinned, recalling that he hadn't had to divulge anything. Someone came to him and hired him to do what someone else had told them he could do. So there he was, dealing with the Cheereek again, getting richer than he would have ever imagined. He took another nip.

  Bolion cast a quick, concerned look at Herbloc. Sometimes the man worried him even more than the Cheereek warriors did. He believed Herbloc was mentally unstable, the kind of man who could do something that would get them all killed.

  The landcar reached the far side of the lake bed, and Bolion brought it up to full power so it seemed to fly up the ancient embankment. They roared into the Cheereek camp, sending females, young ones, and oldsters scattering out of their way. He no longer needed to be told where to go—the high latticework of scrap that looked so flimsy was his destination. When he pulled the landcar up in front of the High Tree, Bolion held the machine on hover for several seconds to raise a huge cloud of dust.

  Herbloc laughed delightedly. "That's the way to impress these birdmen, boy-o! Let them eat more dust than an entire herd of their eeookks can raise." He chortled and looked at the ceiling of the landcar's control cabin as though he could see through it. "We're going to have to wade through a thick layer of dust when we get up there. They'll probably still be choking and coughing when we walk in. " He took another nip and eased back in the seat to wait for the dust to settle.

  "Do you have them?" Graakaak demanded as soon as the ritual challenges and obeisances were completed. A sharp glance stopped the slaves who were bringing out the Clumsy Ones' perch. The humans weren't going to squat comfortably on that visit. After the way they fouled his nest with the dust of their arrival, the only reason he didn't have them held for lengthy, painful death was his overwhelming desire for more of their weapons. Even though their defeat of the Aawk-vermin made the Cheereek far more powerful than they had been, there were still more powerful tribes to conquer, and he didn't yet have sufficient strength. If he killed these two, he was afraid the others would deal with his enemies.

  So, instead of allowing them to rest their thighs on that odd perch they favored, he left the Clumsy Ones standing in their precarious balance and spoke to them in insulting tones.

  "We have fifty rifles and two thousand rounds with us, High Chief," the one called Heerk-kloock replied. Like Graakaak, he spoke in the simple trading language used by the steppe people.

  "Only fifty?" Graakaak stood and held his arms bowed out to the side, his neck stretched threateningly forward. "You promised me a hundred!"

  "We have a hundred, and four thousand shooting-stones, just as promised," Herbloc said, and twisted his soft mouthparts in that obscene manner the Clumsy Ones insisted was an expression of friendship. "We put the rest elsewhere. Once we have what we came for, we will lead yo
u to them."

  Graakaak hissed, and his guards became even more alert than they already were. Several leveled their weapons at the humans.

  "You do not trust me to keep my end of the bargain?" Graakaak's eyes glittered with menace.

  Bolion blanched and swallowed, his fingertips tatting on the holster of his hand-blaster.

  Herbloc didn't seem fazed by Graakaak's overt hostility. "High Chief, a failure to trust is not part of the equation," he said in English. If the trading language could express that concept, he didn't know the words.

  Graakaak hissed threateningly.

  Herbloc leaned forward and splayed his own arms. "I am following the business practices of my people," he said, switching back to the trading language. "We pay half down and half on delivery when we buy something of value."

  Graakaak held his attack posture. "Your mount has a hard shell, hard enough to stop the shooting-stones from our weapons. It is faster than our eeookks. How do I know you will not run and not pay us the other half?"

  Herbloc pulled back from the threat posture. "You will know because I will ride with you on an eeookk."

  Bolion forgot about the guards and gaped at Herbloc. "H-How...?"

  "Don't worry about it, boy-o. I know what I'm doing."

  Graakaak slowly drew back from his threat posture. Yes, if Heerk-kloock rode an eeookk, he could not run from the Cheereek. "Let it be so," he said, and resumed his perch. "You may collect your goods. A slave will show you the way."