by Adam Vance
That secured the lobby. Beyond the scanport, the door to the guts of the power station was surrounded by red LEDs, indicating lockdown. The scanport screamed as they walked through it, armed to the teeth, and Engineering stuck a blade into its speaker, silencing its protests.
The team split on either side of the door, ready to clear the room when the door opened. The Captain pressed a six number code on the keypad beside it. Nothing.
“They locked out the door.” He activated the mike next to the pad. “Attention inside. This is FJ One. You are under arrest. Lay any weapons down, and come out with your hands up or we will take Extreme Judicial Action.”
There was a crackle on the speaker. Then a familiar voice said, “Hello, Captain.”
“Doctor Caughlin. Let’s end this peacefully, shall we?”
“We control the mine, Captain. We have tanks aimed at the alien city. Try to make your way in here and we’ll blow it to kingdom come.”
This never ceased to amaze him, the use of the word “alien” to describe the natives, when it was humanity that was alien to this place.
“A pouch left for home about one minute after I first saw your tanks, Doctor. Ordering up a transport to take you and your followers to Eden One.”
“And how will you enforce that, Captain, with no mechanicals, and no factory to make them?”
Space travel was expensive. Colossally expensive. The bigger the ship, obviously, the more it cost to build it. And the bigger the ship, the bigger the Flash Drive had to be to propel it. And bigger, for some reason, meant slower movement through flashspace.
Even if Earth had the resources to create them, and it didn’t, giant armies of mechanicals – flying, rolling and walking drones, droids, and missiles – couldn’t be sent across the galaxy on a whim. That was what the JIT-facs and stroidfarm ships were for, to drop onto a big tasty asteroid and manufacture those armies only as needed.
The Doctor went on. “You’re about…” He paused and the Captain heard a young man’s voice mutter. “Even if Central sends you a stroidfarm ship as soon as they have one available, you’re weeks and weeks away from having enough firepower to overwhelm us. So I don’t have anything to lose, do I? Here’s the deal. You give us the mine. Which we already have. We don’t kill the aliens. You withdraw your force from Tiamat, permanently. Try anything smart, and we kill the aliens. A stroidfarm ship comes out of flashspace, we kill the aliens.”
The Captain thought about his next words carefully. “Negotiating with terrorists” had once been a dirty word on Earth. Now, his ability to negotiate with terrorists was a skill to be proud of.
“There are women and children in here, Captain,” the Doctor went on. “So even if you can disable the tanks, I don’t think you want to risk hurting them, do you?”
The Captain looked at Medical, who shook his head – no bodies small enough to be children were on his scans.
“You’ve certainly thought of everything,” the Captain said. Or someone had anyway. Engineering handed him a piece of paper, on which he’d scribbled, “Work the geek.”
The Captain nodded. “I have to hand it to you, this engagement has included the most brilliant hacks I’ve ever seen. You disabled our alert systems, turned cyberaptors against us, and moved your entire electronic infrastructure inside the one building we can’t blow up. Congratulations to the architect.”
“We have thought about this a long time, Captain. Planned it carefully, for a long time.”
That “we” was what he needed. “You have an amazing group of technicians in there. It must have taken quite a lot of them quite a long time to come up with the solutions.”
“There’s no…” the young voice chimed in, the one the Doctor had consulted earlier.
“Yes,” the Doctor said, cutting him off. “We do have quite a group in here.”
That was what the Captain had thought. One single brilliant individual had done all this – one young man who bristled at the idea that he couldn’t have done it alone. One single link in the chain, both the strongest and the weakest.
“Someone like that could rise quite high in the Fallschirmjäger, you know. That level of software expertise? And the military planning capabilities to go with it?”
“I’m the planner here,” the Doctor snapped.
“In fact, I would be able to cite ‘special circumstances’ and pardon that individual for all his crimes, if he were to apprentice himself to our program.”
The sounds of struggle were louder now. “Stop him!” the Doctor shouted and a great deal of crashing was heard.
“Get ready,” the Captain said.
The LEDs around the door went from red to green. As soon as the door flew open, Weapons threw a flash bang grenade inside. The squad’s earpieces noise-cancelled the explosion, and before the stunned colonists could respond, they were inside in room-clearing formation.
“Drop your weapons! Drop your weapons!” Engineering shouted in his deep commanding voice. Warning lights flashed as the smoke set off fire alarms.
Their contacts automatically switched to infrared in the smoke-filled room. Most of the ten people in the room were down, coughing and covering their battered eardrums. One was raising a weapon.
Medical threw a dagger and missed. Engineering threw his dagger as well, burying it in his forehead. The man dropped.
The safety systems sucked the smoke out of the room, revealing the eight remaining hands raised in surrender. Weapons and Comms quickly whipcuffed them.
“Eng?” the Captain asked.
“On it,” he replied, taking over a console. “The tank drivers are saying that if they don’t hear a response from Central, they’re gonna fire on the city.”
“Do what you need to do.”
“Roger that,” he said, sending override signals to the tanks that would turn their weapons systems on each other. Garbled, panicked shouting came out of the console speakers, then silence.
“Threat removed,” Engineering said.
“Okay, genius,” the Captain said, “where you at?”
“Here,” came a scratchy version of the young male voice he’d heard on the comm. “I’m, uh…bleeding.”
“Medical, over here.”
The voice belonged to a young man. A teenager, actually, skinny and pale and astonished at the wound in his side, and the amount of blood he had inside him.
“Knife wound, kid, you’ll be fine. Sorry about my aim.” Medical opened a skinpack and sealed it over the wound. “You’ll need a new kidney, and some blood, and a lot of rest.”
The Captain knelt next to the whiz kid. “What’s your name, son?”
“M…m…Marcus.”
“Okay, Marcus. I meant what I said. Provisional pardon. That means, you go straight upline from your hospital bed to the station, and then to FJ Tech School. But provisional means that if you fuck anything up like you did today, you’re on the next transport to Eden One. Sound good?”
“Sounds…fucking awesome. Sir.”
Comms had wrestled the Doctor to his knees when she cuffed him. His snowy white hair, usually so carefully arranged into sweeping piles and waves like a symphony conductor’s, was disheveled and dirty now.
“This can’t go on,” the Doctor said. “This whole…thing you’re doing. You’re holding us back, all of us, you’re killing the human race,” he spat. “For what? To save a bunch of fucking savages.”
“I believe you and your co-conspirators are the savages today, Doctor. Comms, read him.”
Comms launched into a litany of the crimes committed that day, every one of them a Class 1 Felony, any one of which had the same sentence.
“You are hereby sentenced to transportation to Eden One, for the rest of your natural life.”
Even the Doctor’s proud, angry demeanor flinched at that.
The Captain bent down, close to his face.
“Doctor, let me explain something to you. A terrible mistake was made, that let you slip through the profiling syste
m to this level of authority. It’s people like you who killed Earth. People like you who are the reason we have to leave. Greedy and impatient and cruel and selfish. Who ruthlessly turned every neighbor and potential ally into an enemy. Who destroyed the environment, and the health of every living thing in it, to get another nickel you didn’t need.”
He leaned in closer, his steady, steely blue eyes dominating the Doctor’s, forcing him to blink. “And if you think for one moment that we are going to let you repeat those mistakes on a fresh new world, and ruin our chance at doing it right this time, you are out of your fucking mind.”
The Captain strode out without looking back. “And now, I have go to see the Hierarch and explain to him why he and all his people were nearly killed today by one of ‘my kind.’”
CHAPTER FIVE – THE BEST SEED PREVAILS
The Captain took a fifteen minute nap, which was just enough sleep to keep going. When he woke up, he was out of “combat” mindset, ready to take off his battle cap and put on his diplomatic one.
He changed into his full dress uniform, replete with sharp creases, shining buttons and glittering medals. The High Tiamatans were obsessed with signs of status. The one thing that was the same on his field and dress uniforms was the holographic badge on his shoulder, with the Fallschirmjäger emblem: two shimmering light sabers, one red and one green, crossed in combat.
He took a slider to the Great Gate, and walked into the city of Rumbra from there. Foreign ambassadors arriving to take their place at court would be expected to put on a lavish procession as they entered through this gate, displaying their nation’s wealth and power. Regardless of their splendor, those processions would be critically observed from the city walls by the High Ones, who used them as an occasion for a war of wits over who could best mock their new guests.
The Captain and his team had made a sufficiently magnificent entrance into Rumbra on Day One, the day of first formal contact, three years ago. They’d studied the planet from the orbiting station (and undercover on the ground) for two years before that. That was the usual timeframe for finding a good place to found a colony, identify key members of the local community whom they’d need to win over, and of course how best to make a good first impression. Scarcity had nothing to do with the gilded chariots they’d rode in on, or the mechanical horses that pulled them, built from dug-up plans for rich men’s toys of a century earlier.
It was the common practice to name potential colony worlds after planets from old science fiction novels. It was one of the few “imperialist” tactics of Department 6C. It helped humans think of new worlds as part of their own heritage, instead of as “foreign” lands. This in turn helped 6C to persuade them to take stewardship, rather than control, of a new planet. The locals often didn’t have a name for their whole world, other than the native translation of “the land.” The goal was, over time, to rename the planet once humanity was comfortable enough and integrated enough with the natives to think of the world’s population as “us” rather than “us and them.”
Today, the city streets were quiet. People had taken shelter in their patrons’ walled compounds, as if that could save them from the death-dealing machines that had, just barely, stopped short of the walls.
There was only one man on the street, sitting just inside the gate on a camp chair, reading a book. He jumped up with both a salute and a smile when he saw the Captain.
“Captain Chen, sir. Is everyone okay?”
The Captain returned his salute, then shook his hand. “Lieutenant Orlov. We’re all fine. A little dinged up, is all.” His wounds from the cyberaptor attack were legion, but they’d been sealed with nuskin, and toxin tests had been negative. He was running on pain blockers and a small kick of adrenalert that Sergeant Hewitt had grudgingly allowed him after his nap.
But he was asking no less of himself than he asked of his team. They would be due for a rotation back home soon, for an early Lazarex. And some rest and recreation on Caladan, the only colony that could bill itself as “The Pleasure Planet!”
He was tired, spent after the furious battle. But he had to make this visit to the Hierarch without delay, to explain what happened and what they’d done to punish the wrongdoers.
Lieutenant Orlov was their Civil Affairs man in the capital, but his role so far had been that of observer rather than participant. The status-sensitive citizens had refused to speak to Orlov since his rank was inferior to Captain Chen’s. When FJ One departed the planet for its next assignment, leaving a permanent Civil Affairs presence behind, the lieutenant would be promoted to captain, at least for the duration of his mission, anyway, so that the High Tiamatans would deign to recognize his existence.
High Tiamat was a pre-industrial society, about as developed as ancient Egypt, which it resembled in many ways. The Hierarch was not venerated as a god, but his bloodline claimed descent from gods. It was a peaceful society, as much as any other with plenty of food, little disease, and a social stasis where everybody “knew their place.” Females were equal to males, but slavery was a cultural norm. However, slaves could be Elevated to citizenship, and the local religion made no distinction about who could Ascend after death.
They walked the empty streets towards the palace. Here, as in the colonists’ compound, the colors were bright pastels. The pillars and friezes of the temples and banks were bright to the point of gaudiness, with the myriad clashing colors of the Greek temples of old.
Their entrance was a matter of great ceremony. There was, after all, only one Ambassador From the Stars at the Hierarch’s court. Their approach was seen by pages, who raced back up the palace’s polished stone steps and rolled a green carpet back down.
A squadron of hornsman deployed down the steps on either side of the carpet, furry paws grasping their musical instruments. Their retractable nails slipped in and out of the holes in the horn’s length, varying the notes. The result was a piece considered by the natives to be splendid triumphal music, that happened to be extremely painful to the human ear.
Captain Chen took the steps at the pace of the beat, with Lieutenant Orlov one pace behind him, a measure of his rank relative to the captain, and to his right, that indicated his status as that of one “in favor.”
Inside the Great Hall was the most magnificent indoor fountain that Chen had ever seen. It was three stories high, with all manner of strange marble beasts tangled around two columns, all stretched out in their predatory attack positions, their open mouths spouting water into jade leaves, from which it all trickled down into a ceremonial pool that also served as a drinking fountain of sorts.
The Tiamatans were essentially feline. They had developed opposable thumbs, the secret to the development of a technical civilization, but they still ate and drank by putting their faces into bowls, including the magnificent fountain. Of course, only the most elite Tiamatans were permitted, as a sign of the Hierarch’s favor, to drink from it.
When they reached the throne room, Hierarch Gabari was standing, a gesture of friendship and respect. Captain Chen was relieved to see it – His Most Predatory Majesty had every reason to greet them sitting on his throne, in which case both men would have been wise to throw themselves down on the ground immediately.
“Captain Chen,” the Hierarch said in a slow, imprecise but still impressive feat of Standard. Humans had discovered that their vocal chords were more flexible and capable of mimicry than those of most other intelligent species. This meant that humans had to learn the local language more often than the locals would learn Standard.
The Captain looked the Hierarch in the eyes for a few seconds, then blinked and looked away as if he could care less, thus giving the appropriate amount of deference and submission from an ambassador to a King.
“Your Majesty,” the Captain replied in Tiamatan, a gesture that allowed the Hierarch to return to speaking his native tongue.
The Hierarch extended a paw magnanimously, allowing the two men to sit on the steps below his throne.
“This has been an eventful day. Can you explain to me what happened?”
The tone was cautious, an acknowledgement that the neighbors had more powerful weapons than the locals had known. Gabari was King in this land, but only a fool would lash out at a species capable of the violence he’d seen today.
“A terrible thing, Majesty. A revolt against The Order, which was quickly put down.”
The courtiers in hearing shuddered. “The Order” was everything that made their society work. Everyone in their place, and no changes to that place that weren’t done in the proper fashion. It was possible to move up in status (and down again), sometimes through violence against rivals, but never by violence against The Order.
“The leader and his cohorts will be transported to a penal colony, Majesty.”
“A prison? Why aren’t they dead?”
“We don’t have a death penalty, as such, Majesty. They will be relocated to a planet on which they will face very harsh conditions.”
“Eden One,” the Hierarch said slowly.
“Yes, Majesty.”
“Where wild beasts out of myth will pursue them and eat them, or bite them so they die of slow poison.”
“That’s the place.”
The Hierarch clapped his hands. “Wonderful! May their seed never Ascend.”
“May their seed never Ascend,” everyone in the room assented.
Chen found the local religion fascinating. Perhaps as predators with little use for agriculture until recently in their development, they understood Darwinian concepts better than most.
In their theology, the “struggle for life” didn’t end in death. After death, your soul was a seed, not unlike a spermatozoa, one among countless others who died at the same moment you did. This “between lives” state was a contest, to see who could swim the fastest to get to, and burrow the hardest into, one of the great Eggs.
Like most of the sperm in an ejaculation, not everyone was fast or strong enough to get into an Egg, and their spirit died there on the bridge between worlds. Only the strong survived to Ascend. Tiamatans would even commit ritual suicide if they got the local version of Alzheimer’s disease – it was critical to be in full possession of your faculties when you died, if you were going to have the wits to “make it” through the portal.
