by Ian Douglas
“Hello, Na Lal,” St. Clair said, politely touching one tentacle. “It’s good to be seen. We need to discuss the treaty some of my compatriots put together. . . .”
“Indeed. Many of us appreciate your offer of assistance, but there may be . . . difficulties of translation that should be addressed.”
“With Gudahk?”
“Among others.”
St. Clair glanced around the room. “Is this supposed to be somewhere on Gudahk’s ship?”
“The vessel’s name translates as something like ‘Wrath of Deity,’” Na Lal said.
“I should explain,” Speaker said, “before Gudahk’s avatar arrives here, that the Tchagar possess . . . call it a species imperative. They will not . . . they can not show weakness to another. Ever. If you challenge this presumption of strength, of authority, you will . . . unsettle them.”
“Sounds like it’s high time someone unsettled them.”
“Commander,” Na Lal said, “a disturbed Tchagar can be extremely dangerous.”
“What are they in your empire?”
“I . . . do not understand,” Speaker said. “‘Empire’?”
“The local polity, the Cooperative. What do you call it? The Xalit Ta. Where do the Tchagar stand within your government?”
“They are members. Important members. Their polity is referred to as the Principle Associative.”
“Are they . . . what? Rulers? Founders? A military caste?”
“The Xalit Ta does not work like that, Lord Commander,” the Kroajid explained. “It is, truly, a cooperative of distinct species working with one another, each contributing in the best way that it can.”
“So some are more cooperative than others.”
“Of course.” The Speaker didn’t seem to be aware of St. Clair’s sarcasm.
St. Clair sighed. He was taking a terrible chance here, he knew. “Tell Gudahk that humans have a species-wide imperative as well. We extend respect to others when others respect us. Kick us . . . and we kick back. Understand?”
The Kroajid’s buzzing speech seemed more agitated, somehow. “I understand the words,” Newton’s voice translated in his head. “I do not grasp your meaning, or your intent.”
Other beings had been arriving moment by moment, appearing in flashes of light from within the crystal archways. A majority were Kroajid, but there were other species as well. A massive, four-legged body taller than a horse stepped into the lit area, a tiny head the size and shape of St. Clair’s outstretched hand weaving back and forth on a snake-slender stalk. Obviously, its brains weren’t in its head, which must be nothing more than a mobile support structure for sense organs. How, he wondered, did it eat? He wasn’t sure that he wanted to know.
Something like a translucent orange-and-purple balloon emerged from an archway, drifting two meters off the floor, with twitching tentacles and less identifiable organs dangling underneath.
There was something shaped like an upside down U three meters high, with a slender foreleg balancing a massive leg-body behind. It was one of the few beings in the room actually wearing clothing, with red-and-violet sheets draped across its arched back, though whether that was purely decoration, an indication of rank, or a concession to modesty, St. Clair couldn’t tell.
And there were several of the ubiquitous Xam, looking more like spindly limbed, big-eyed insects than something that just possibly was descended from humans. St. Clair desperately wanted to talk to one, but attempts by various humans to approach them so far had always ended with the being retreating, as if afraid.
There were others, but St. Clair was beginning to have trouble keeping up with all of the bizarre alien shapes. Back when he’d been preparing to leave Earth for the galactic core about four gigayears before, he’d been studying a list of known alien species across the then-Galaxy, member species of what then had been called the Coadunation, and others. Nothing he’d seen here in this era bore the slightest resemblance to species he’d seen then. Life, apparently, was endlessly creative in the myriad ways it expressed itself.
He wondered: with millions, perhaps billions of mutually living alien worlds in existence, wasn’t it possible for evolution to repeat itself occasionally? Based on what he’d seen so far, if it ever happened, it was incredibly rare. Only the remote resemblance of the Xam to humans was apparent—and that might well turn out to be a family resemblance.
All told, perhaps fifty beings of various descriptions had entered the sunken area that St. Clair now was thinking of as the conference room. Some sat, slouched, or oozed into furniture that morphed to fit their bodies, while others, like the jellyfish, simply floated or stood nearby. He was aware of a low, background cacophony of buzzes—the Kroajid—mingled with chirps, singsong warbles, grunts, clicks, and a host of other, less definable sounds as the dissimilar beings conversed with one another.
“Newton?”
“Yes?”
“How many of these . . . people are here digitally?”
“All of them, Commander,” the AI replied, “including yourself.”
“Sorry. I should be more clear. How many have a physical existence, like me? And how many are digital uploads from the Ki Ring?”
“That,” Newton replied after a moment, “is difficult to assess. Is it important?”
“It occurs to me,” St. Clair said, “that whether or not an individual exists in what we think of as the real world would have a difference in how you looked at . . . everything. How you thought about the cosmos. About other species.”
“We know some of the Kroajid are physical entities . . . though, of course, what you are experiencing now are digital avatars.”
“The Gatekeepers, yes.”
“I will research the question and get back to you.”
“Thank you.”
The answer, St. Clair was convinced, was of vital importance to the survival of the human castaways.
Chapter Seventeen
St. Clair’s speculations were interrupted by another bright flash of light, and the ponderous emergence from one of the archways of a Tchagar, four meters tall and as massive as an extinct terrestrial elephant. Dragging itself along on a tangle of what looked like twisting roots, the entity looked more vegetable than animal. Its main body resembled a misshapen potato that must have massed two tons in a one-G gravity field, while the erect buds, three small ones and one large, central bulb held aloft on fleshy stalks added to the impression of an enormous plant. St. Clair felt an odd tingle spread through his body as it approached. “What the hell?” he thought at Newton.
“Please remain motionless,” Newton warned him. “The sensation you feel is the Tchagar’s electrical field, ey’s primary sense.”
Or, at least, that was how Newton was translating the experience, since St. Clair’s physical body was in his office back on board the Ad Astra, not within a room, physical or virtual, on board the Wrath of Deity. Presumably, the virtual reality within which they could interact was giving the Tchagar the illusion of sensing St. Clair within its electrical field.
“‘Primary sense’?”
“Ey is looking at you closely, and it’s polite if you don’t move for a moment while ey scans you.”
“Lord Commander St. Clair,” the Speaker said formally, “I present you to the Living God Gudahk. I have relayed your message to ey.”
“You may move,” Newton told him.
St. Clair stood, conscious of the prickling across his body as he moved within the being’s projected electromagnetic field. “Living God,” St. Clair said. “It’s good to meet you mind-to-mind.”
“A statement of the obvious,” the being replied. “You are first among your species?”
“I command the colony-ship Tellus Ad Astra,” St. Clair replied. He was not going to go into the details of the humans being exiles from their own time and space or their internal politics.
“Then you will give orders now for your warriors to attack targets of my choosing. I am transmitting the coordinates of t
hese targets to your AI. Your first objective will be the hyperdimensional world-ship now within the Ki system.”
“Excuse me, Living God,” St. Clair said, “but . . . no. I don’t think so.”
The small crowd of alien beings around the table froze, the buzzings and chirps and warbles of conversations suddenly gone silent.
“You have agreed to an instrument of surrender, placing your ships, property, and persons under the direct control of the Principle Associative! You belong to us!”
The electrical tingles grew sharply with that last. “Had you been present physically,” Newton whispered to him, “ey might have electrocuted you. If you intended to get eir attention, you have succeeded.”
“That instrument was signed by people who should have known better,” St. Clair said. “They certainly didn’t see it as a surrender—just as we don’t belong to the Andromedan Dark, we don’t belong to you. We will help the Cooperative . . . but as free beings and on our own terms. We do not belong to anyone!”
The Tchagar squirmed closer, towering over St. Clair. He could feel its electrical field pulsing, possibly with emotion, and interpreted the eyeless inspection as a glare.
“Obviously, ephemeral,” the being told him, “you do not understand your place within this association of worlds and species. But I will enjoy teaching you . . .”
St. Clair lifted his chin, looking up at the towering behemoth. He wasn’t physically afraid; what he was seeing and hearing was all taking place inside his head, within his implanted neural circuitry, and the Tchagar could no more strike or otherwise attack him than ey could smile.
He was mindful, however, that Tchagar’s seven-thousand-kilometer-wide spaceship was hanging in the sky a mere fifteen thousand kilometers ahead of Tellus Ad Astra. If Gudahk wanted to destroy the human vessel, ey almost certainly could without breaking the Tchagar equivalent of a sweat.
He wanted to provoke the being, but not too much. . . .
“I hope you do,” he told Gudahk. “I enjoy learning. But I suggest an exchange between equals would be appropriate here.”
“Data is coming through, Commander,” Newton’s voice told him. “A lot of data, very quickly. I’m shunting it through to Ad Astra’s primary memory.”
Meaning, St. Clair assumed, that the flood would have overwhelmed his own personal RAM.
“That, human, is a taste. Learn of the Living Gods!”
“I’ll go through it later,” St. Clair replied, trying to imply a nonchalant verbal shrug. “I’m sure I’ll find it fascinating. Perhaps for the moment, however, we should focus on just what it is you expect of us. Why should we humans attack these targets? What can we do that you cannot?”
The Tchagar visibly bristled at that—a good trick given that the being did not possess hair or fur. But the satellite buds pulled in on their stalks, almost as though the being was dropping into a defensive posture, and the tangle of tentacles on which it was balanced contracted into a tight ball.
St. Clair found the reaction interesting—and illuminating—on several levels. Outwardly, Gudahk presented as arrogant, powerful, and constantly, aggressively angry, but physically ey seemed to respond to a perceived verbal attack by pulling in on eyself. On a deeper level, St. Clair wondered if he’d just revealed a kind of inferiority complex in the Tchagar, which it sought to mask with bluster.
Might Tchagar aggressiveness be nothing more than a kind of overcompensation for self-perceived weakness? Back on Earth, when he was a kid, St. Clair had known bullies like that. He’d seen the tendency more recently, too, in adults . . . specifically in Günter Adler: lots of bluster, little substance, and a tendency to pick on the little guy.
He didn’t like bullies as a kid, didn’t like Günter Adler when he was in charge of the Council, and he definitely didn’t like Gudahk.
“Mine is an ancient, powerful, and technologically advanced species,” Gudahk said after a moment, as pretentious as ever. “There is nothing we cannot do! And there most certainly is no way in which a primitive species such as yours could do better than we!”
“Well in that case, Living God, we accept.”
Gudahk hesitated, ey’s electrical field throbbing. “What do you accept, human?”
“Let’s see you use your ancient and powerful technology to destroy the Bluestar object. You say there’s nothing you can’t do? That would be a reasonably minor demonstration of your capabilities, wouldn’t you say?”
The silence in the room dragged on for long seconds.
Finally, the Kroajid Speaker buzzed at St. Clair. “You humans were brought to this place because of your combat skill,” Newton’s translation said. “It is up to you to destroy the object.”
“Then we appear to be at an impasse, Speaker. We have engaged the Bluestar several times in the past several days. We have planted AI clones within its computer network. We don’t yet know if that was successfully accomplished, but we’re still waiting on that. But our particular expertise when it comes to warfare is asymmetric warfare. I see no way at the moment of applying those principles here.”
“What . . . principles?” Na Lal asked. “What is . . . asymmetric warfare?”
“It’s a conflict where the two sides are wildly out of balance with one another in regard to strength, in technology or in numbers. One side big and powerful and technologically proficient, the other small, relatively weak, with more primitive weapons. The weaker state must use guerrilla warfare and not try to match the enemy strength-to-strength. Or they use insurrection after they’ve been conquered. We’ve had lots of experience in the past couple of centuries with that sort of thing.”
“I would . . . learn more,” Gudahk said. Ey sounded interest almost in spite of eyself.
“Well . . . you gave me a history of your species. Let me give you this in exchange.”
He’d already set it up with Newton, so that when he thoughtclicked an in-head icon, FM 80–128, a United States joint services military field manual thirty-some years out of date, was transmitted to the aliens. The document’s title was a ponderous one: Navy and Marine Corps Asymmetric Warfare and Guerrilla Operations.
“What is this?” Gudahk asked. The being sounded genuinely puzzled.
“We do not understand,” Speaker added.
“A training manual that shows the ways and means by which a primitive force can successfully challenge a more advanced one. It lays out the principles of warfare as we understand them, and as we would apply them against an enemy more technologically advanced than we.”
The electronic file was actually something of an antique. In the decades following St. Clair’s birth in Dayton, Ohio, in 2110, the so-called Earth Empire was newly born as well, and the United States of America was still struggling to redefine itself. Major wars between nation states were largely a thing of the past, but resistance to the Treaty of Quito and the First Directorate was widespread and determined, and the Directorate Joint Armed Forces had spent the next thirty-some years putting down dozens of bloody rebellions, brushfire wars, and guerrilla insurrections.
One of St. Clair’s fathers, Randall Patterson, had been a staff sergeant in the Marine Corps, back when it had still been the United States Marine Corps. FM 80–128 had been a training download issued to Marines in 2128, the same year Staff Sergeant Patterson had been killed in the savage Battle of Seattle.
Patterson had given his son a copy of the field manual download the day St. Clair had learned he’d been accepted at the Naval Academy. “You just might find you can use this,” Patterson had told him. “I’m not sure this new Navy covers the basics anymore.”
He’d carried the file within his personal RAM ever since.
And now a four-meter-tall being with an uncanny resemblance to an uprooted tulip was mentally paging through it.
“Useless,” Gudahk said at last. “Not applicable to these circumstances at all.”
“I do not see the relevance of these documents,” Speaker said. The Kroajid, St. Clair thought, w
as working to insert itself in the discussion as a kind of peacekeeper. “They describe combat on a planetary surface, not in space. And the weapons shown are primitive.”
“Don’t take it so literally,” St. Clair said. “Use that book to learn the spirit of this kind of warfare . . . the philosophy.”
“What do you mean,” one of the other beings in the lounge said. It was the large, inverted U-shaped creature draped in red-and-purple sheets he’d noticed earlier. St. Clair couldn’t tell how it was communicating . . . or even how it was aware of him, for that matter. “What philosophy is there to warfare?”
“Never attack the enemy where he is strong,” St. Clair replied. “Don’t seek to fight large-scale battles with a stronger enemy—your goal is to wear down the enemy’s political will to fight. Convince your enemy that conquering you will cost him more than he’s willing to spend. . . .”
“These are concepts many of us here have never considered,” the being said. Newton was identifying the being in St. Clair’s mind as a Thole, though he wasn’t sure at the moment whether that was a species name or a personal identifier.
“Spirit and philosophy,” Gudahk said, “are not useful concepts. Ephemeral, we simply require your physical assistance in destroying the Graal Tchotch, what you call the Andromedan Dark.”
“According to the information they’ve just given us,” Newton whispered in St. Clair’s mind, “the Tchagar are a supremely materialistic species. Terms such as ‘spirit’ or ‘philosophy’ appear to be completely alien to them.”
“Maybe they should learn about them some day,” St. Clair said. “Newton?”
“Yes?”
“Are the Tchagar leaders of the Cooperative?”
“As far as I can determine, no. The Principle Associative is simply one among many participating species.”
“He acts like he’s running the whole damned show.”
“Ey is one among many,” Newton said, gently correcting St. Clair’s use of pronouns. “Ey is perhaps a little louder and more forceful than some others.”
