by Ian Douglas
What made the Qesh tick? The question was gnawing at me there on the ward—had been gnawing at the back of my brain since that first battle outside Salvation.
I was beginning to think that I might see a little of the pattern.
Suppose the Qesh saw themselves as superior to other species, superior to humans, in the same way that humans saw themselves compared to dogs—and that, in turn, meant that human worlds and humans themselves belonged to them, that they could do to us what they wanted. From the Qesh perspective, we would have no rights.
Hell . . . the concept of rights is purely human, a holdover from a simpler time when a beneficent deity bestowed unalienable rights upon His creation. Why would a species as alien as the Qesh think in terms of rights?
Especially for the likes of us?
I remembered what one of the human natives, Caleb, had told us. “They told the elders that the Bloodworld was theirs, and that we now belong to the Qesh! Lies of Satan! We belong to God, and none other!”
But I retained in my mind two contradictory images of the Qesh—the Qesh herding helpless human prisoners into line above the nano-D pit, allowing them to be slowly and horribly dissolved, and the Qesh I’d seen inside the city of Salvation—one of them even speaking English. The first were treating human prisoners like animals, worse than animals. The second group had been mingling with humans, talking with the Salvation rulers with the help of an electronic translator, evidently helping the human government put down “banditry.”
In human history, hunters started off as nomadic clans following the herds, but eventually they settled down. And they learned to domesticate livestock.
No, I didn’t think that the Qesh were domesticating humans as food animals. Again, that’s one of the sillier tropes of popular download fiction—that and alien-human hybrid babies. Qesh and humans are just too different biochemically. The fact that they incorporated so much copper in their bone and muscle chemistries certainly meant that their flesh would be highly poisonous to us; I would need to do a full biochemical workup on them to be sure, but the chances were good that humans would be toxic to them as well.
But suppose that the migratory Qesh had simply been looking for a pliable population that could be coerced into subservience?
The Salvationists were convinced that they were living in the mythical Christian hell, serving time for the sins of Humankind. When the Qesh turned up, they proved to be reasonable stand-ins for demons or devils—whatever the ancient Christians thought were supposed to populate such a place.
I remembered those spy-cam views of the interior of Salvation, of Qesh in battle armor patrolling passageways, of humans off to the side, some looking bored, some looking scared. Curious, I sent a search query through my in-head RAM, and brought back a snippet of overheard conversation—one of the Qesh invaders speaking with a human who obviously was some sort of leader in his community.
“It is important”—the artificial voice of the Qesh—“to present the . . . how do you say . . . the people with an object lesson immediately, to prevent similar banditry in future.”
And the human leader replied, “Of course, Lord.”
Perhaps the situation on Bloodworld wasn’t as much about predarion invaders as it was about the human colonists and the struggle for power.
Think about it. Humans had been on Bloodworld for sixty-five years. There might yet be a few geriatrics still alive who’d come to Gliese 581 IV on board the Outward Venture, but the vast majority would be second, third, and even fourth-generation natives of the planet. Conceived, born, and raised on Bloodworld, they would see that hell of storms and tidal waves and volcanic eruptions as home. Dangerous, perhaps, uncomfortable at times, but quite normal.
The first generation had come with the common goal of escaping what they saw as a corrupt world, settling in hell to save humanity—or at least that’s what the rank-and-file colonists had been told, what they believed. They must have believed passionately, because nothing else would explain their willingness to carve out a new life in that almost literal hell. That kind of zeal and dedication, that closely bonding enthusiasm of what amounted to a group mind, would have kept the original colonists going—and perhaps their children as well.
But what about the children’s children? And their children? None of them had ever seen Earth, save for through the records the colony elders had brought with them. Earth and its doomed, sinful billions meant nothing to them. Within four or five decades, the colony must have begun losing its focus, its purpose.
The colony’s leaders might still believe the myth that had landed the group on Bloodworld, but it was also possible that a certain amount of cynicism had begun creeping into their worldview. The original leaders would be dead, probably, given their mistrust of modern medical technology, so the current rulers would be less interested in the colony’s “mission” to save Humankind than they would be in simply maintaining control, in staying in power. In the early stages of the colony’s growth, simply struggling to survive in that environment would have been challenge enough to keep the colony united.
But humans are incredibly adaptable critters. Look at us! Even with paleolithic technology—tools of wood, bone, and stone—we worked our way into Earth’s environmental niches with astonishing adaptability, living, thriving, everywhere, from the edge of the polar icepack to the now-vanished jungles of Amazonia; from the Sahara Desert, before it was turned into a sea, to the Tibetan Plateau; from the Ethiopian Rift Valley to the gaspingly thin air of the Andes—before we had respirocytes.
And once we developed some decent technology, my gods! From sea-floor habitats and ocean-surface megapoli to Geosynch, the Lunar caverns, Ice Station Pluto and the Oort Collectives, we built them all in the blink of an eye. The technology improved a bit more, and suddenly we were spilling out across interstellar space to Chiron, to Valhal, to Morrigen, to Nubes de Cielo, all environments as different from Earth—and each other—as Earth is from Bloodworld.
And back on Earth we were daring to battle the advance of the New Ice Age with microwaves beamed from orbit. Until we discovered the Arean permafrost biota, we’d seriously considered terraforming Mars. Now there are corporations back there planning the transformation of Luna from barren and airless waste to living world.
The Bloodworld’s environment, to the third-generation colonists, would be as much home now as the icepack is to the Inuit, as the Alto Plano is to the Inca, or as the Kalahari is to the !Kung.
People being people, once they became adapted to life on Bloodworld, the colonists must have begun losing some of their tightly focused discipline, their sense of purpose, their willingness to endure hardship or privation for the sake of religious dogma. There would have been dissension, even rebellion. Within a religious context, there would have been new doctrines, new ideas, break-away sects. Heresies.
Acquiescenists and Militants.
As I thought about it, I decided that the colony’s leadership must have seen the arrival of the Qesh as . . . dare I say it, even to myself? Heaven-sent.
Organized religion is always about control—the most serious form of control of all, the control of belief. If the rank-and-file Bloodworlders had been showing dissension—and Matthew and the Militants proved that they were—the Qesh-as-demons would have allowed the colony leaders to blame hardships on them, and to provide tangible proof that the myths that had brought humans to Gliese 581 IV were true.
That seemed a good fit for what we knew so far about the worldview of the Bloodworld humans. What about the Qesh? They would know—or care—little to nothing about human religious beliefs. What was their take on things?
I thought about those huge machines we’d seen digging out the pit beneath Salvation’s walls. They were either some sort of heavy mining equipment using nano-D to eat through rock, or—more likely, given that they’d been devouring basalt, which isn’t exactly hard to come by in the
cosmos—they’d been engaged in terraforming.
No, not terraforming. Qeshiforming, perhaps, since we didn’t know the name of their homeworld.
The Qesh felt they owned Bloodworld and its inhabitants.
Perhaps they’d been looking for a species whose members were willing to allow themselves to be owned.
They might have been doing so by seeing if some were willing to passively stand in front of a pit while nano-D dissolved their legs. Or perhaps that was simply a convenient means of getting rid of troublemakers, of leaving behind a population willing to do what they were told, or of conditioning all of the population to obey without question. Acquiescenists.
It didn’t excuse what the Qesh had been doing to those people by any means, but given their likely Qesh-centric attitude—these creatures belong to us, to do with as we please—it made a horrible kind of sense. Humans are cantankerous, contrary creatures, but history is filled with populations that were conditioned to go along with the crowd, to obey orders, to snap to with a loud “sieg, heil” when called upon to do so. Such populations don’t often last for long, but the Qesh wouldn’t have known that about us. They’d been looking for obedience and, perhaps, a population that they could reshape for their own purposes in the same way that their Qeshifying machines had been reshaping the planet.
Reshaping.
That suggested something else. The Encylcopedia Galactica said that the Qesh came from a world circling a type F1 star. Their eyes, however, suggested adaptation to both a brilliant sun and to near darkness.
I’d been assuming ever since downloading the EG data on the Qesh that their homeworld might be like Bloodworld, tidally locked to its primary—either that, or the Qesh had evolved in caves or underwater, and needed two kinds of eyes to handle two kinds of light conditions. The trouble with that was that a planet close enough to be tidally locked with an F1 star would have surface temperatures of a thousand degrees or more, uninhabitable, at least by humans and by Qesh, who were somewhat similar in their basic environmental needs. I doubted that they’d started out underwater or in caves, either. Their physical anatomy showed no evidence of having been adapted to a marine environment at any time in the past 100 million years or so, and creatures that big would be severely restricted in cave systems.
But what if the Qesh had changed themselves, deliberately adapting their physiology through medical nanotechnics to a variety of environments?
It was possible. They had nanotechnology—likely had had it for a long time. I’d already noted that the break in their otherwise bilateral symmetry—their upper, seventh, arm—looked like it might be the fusion of two limbs into one. Possibly, that had been a deliberate self-modification, but it seemed more likely to be evidence that they’d evolved—not on the world of a relatively short-lived type F sun, but rather on the world of a much older star—type K, or type M, like Bloodstar. A world where a species might evolve across 100 million years rather than the half million or so for Homo sapiens.
A world of a dim, blood-red sun, like Bloodworld, where eyes might be large enough to capture low levels of long-wavelength light. The tiny eyes had been deliberately grown later, when they moved to a planet orbiting an F1 star.
Gods, the Qesh were old.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Qesh-Human conference was being held on board that Jotun-class Qesh warship, a cigar-shaped asteroid 10 kilometers long and perhaps 3 wide at its middle. Going in, I noticed a hell of a chunk taken out of one end of the thing. It looked like one of our ships had caught it with a kinetic impactor powerful enough to give it a serious nudge. Seeing that gave me a serious jolt of pride; the Navy had hit the bastards, and hit them hard.
In the time between my release from Ward E on board the Consolation and my collection by Captain Reichert, the company CO, I was able to download an update on the naval engagement so far—the Second Battle of Bloodstar, as it was now being styled. First Bloodstar, of course, had been the diversionary attack launched by 3rd Fleet so that the recon Marines could get off the planet.
Admiral Talbot’s strategy had taken the human fleet a long way, destroying seven of the enemy’s forty-four ships, and seriously damaging nine more. That was a helluva showing, considering how badly their capital ships out-massed ours. But doing that much damage had cost the human fleet 132 ships and almost forty thousand naval and Marine personnel.
We’d been losing. The Marine division that landed on the surface had fought through and taken both Salvation and Redemption, but in space we were getting our asses kicked.
Once the Seabees and heavy engineer battalions had grown the planetary batteries out of solid bedrock on Bloodworld’s surface, though, the Qesh had pulled back out of the batteries’ range, had disengaged, in fact, and taken up a tight defensive position ten million kilometers out.
The logical countermove by the Qesh would have been to drop a high-kinetic planetary crustbuster on Bloodworld to eliminate the batteries. They still had troops and ships on planet, or they might have wanted to keep the world intact for themselves, but Talbot and his staff were bracing for the worst.
Instead, they’d received a message, in English, asking for the conference.
I wondered about Talbot and the Fleet Command Constellation accepting the invitation to board the monster enemy mothership. Yes, they were permitted to keep their sidearms, but those hardly posed any threat at all against the Jotun. And this would have been an opportunity for the Qesh to decapitate the human fleet’s command structure with one blow.
But the message had certainly sounded like a sincere appeal for negotiations. And possibly Talbot didn’t think we had any choice. We’d lost almost half of our fleet at that point, and no longer had the element of surprise. The engagement had deteriorated, I understood, into a static slugging match, and there was absolutely no way we could match the Qesh giants slug for slug.
Captain Reichert and three members of his staff escorted me to a ship’s boat docked with the Consolation, and the AI took us from Bloodworld orbit out to the Jotun. The Qesh ship had been moved to a position about halfway between their fleet and ours. More evidence, perhaps, that they were trying to be honorable.
“So how’s the leg, Carlyle?” Reichert asked. We were in zero-gravity at the moment, and adrift in the boat’s small cabin. The seats had been reabsorbed into the deck, and one bulkhead had become a viewall, showing the feed from the boat’s forward hull cameras. The Jotun-class vessel filled much of the screen, and was slowly expanding as we approached.
I looked down at the contraption growing from my left hip. They’d fitted me with a temporary prosthetic back on board the Consolation, a robotic leg that would do me until they could grow me a new organic leg from my own stem cells. It looked realistic enough inside the material of my dress uniform, and the neurolinkages grown into my spine while I was sleeping gave me both control and sensations of pressure.
“No problems, sir,” I replied. “These things don’t have much of a learning curve at all.”
Walking in it hadn’t posed a problem, though I felt slow and a bit clumsy. In zero-G, of course, there was no problem at all.
“Well, we’re sorry to have rousted you out of your heal-tube,” Lieutenant Kemmerer said. She was Reichert’s exec, his company second in command, and also worked S-2, Intelligence. “Your doctors wanted to keep you out until they’d attached a new leg, but I’m afraid this wouldn’t wait.”
“They told me . . . the Qesh have asked for me?”
“They have,” Reichert said. “Not by name, but they wanted to speak with “the human warrior who saved the Qesh warrior from the fire.”
“According to our records,” Kemmerer added, “that was you.”
“The one you saved,” Reichert added, “evidently was clan-sibling to Thunder-in-the-Valley, who, we are told, is a high-ranking member of the Qesh warfleet. We’re not sure yet how high, but he . . . or
it . . . damn Qesh pronouns, anyway! Anyway, they’re grateful.”
“It’s just possible, Carlyle,” a senior chief named Alvarez said, “that you’ve managed to stop this war single-handed.”
I honestly didn’t know how to answer that. Forty thousand men and women had still died just in the one battle, which had been fought after I’d saved that alien’s leather-skinned ass on Bloodworld.
But I was saved having to say anything when the cabin speakers announced that we would be under acceleration in sixty seconds, and that we should take our seats. Acceleration couches rose out of the deck, yawning open, and we allowed ourselves to be folded into their embraces. We felt the heavy drag of Gs as the ship’s boat closed. On the viewall, a minute white speck just visible against a wall of dark gray and cratered rock and dust grew slowly larger and brighter, resolving a few moments later into a hangar bay with an entrance easily 100 meters wide. Still slowing, we entered the Qesh asteroid ship. The viewall had to stop down the brightness; this was definitely the harsh, white glare that might be expected on the world of an F1 sun.
We were met by an escort of seven Qesh in ornate honor, and led deeper into the cavernous depths of that ship.
Gravity. Funny, but I didn’t notice at first. The EG says that the Qesh evolved on a world with a surface gravity of roughly two and half times Earth’s.
“Sir,” I said as we walked along inside the circle of Qesh septapods. “I thought the Qesh were from a high-G planet. This feels about right for Earth.”
“It is. Nine point nine meters per second squared.”
“And nothing rotating. It’s not spin gravity.”
“We’ve noticed that.”
I’ll bet they had. We come close to generating antigravity with our trick with quantum-spin flipping, like our stretchers and the quantum flitters, but that needs a surface—road, open ground, or water—to work against. True antigravity—taking gravity and making it do what you want it to do, including running backward—is something quite else. Some physicists will still tell you it’s impossible. Others say there might be a way to do it, but you need to juggle a couple of artificial black holes to twist the fabric of space, and that’s just too cumbersome for daily applications.
