The Tetra War

by Michael Ryan

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A young purvast may not be interested in war, battles, and glory. But war has much interest in him.

  ~ Professor Clasibe Toreelentz

  The world was unstable and crazy as I was finishing pre-college in the years prior to the twenty-fourth century. The Guritain government was sending starship after starship of purvasts to Earth, increasing the Gurt presence at an ominous rate. A combination of factors drove the mass colonization, but economics, as well as space in temperate climes to build superstructure housing complexes, played the biggest role in the migration.

  Citizenship in the Unified Nations of Guritain became a highly sought after status among both humans on Earth and space-faring immigrants. To be a citizen meant civil rights under Guritain Law, which allowed many privileges denied to noncitizens, whether Earth-born or not. I was a citizen at birth, a luxury provided by virtue of my grandmother, who passed along her rights as a full-blooded Guritain citizen to my mother, who passed them to me.

  Sometime between the ages of sixteen and twenty, a citizen was required to choose a course of advanced study if they desired to attend the university system. The children of the rich and powerful were excluded from this rule, of course.

  The alternatives for those who chose not to continue their education, or for those unable to pass the exams and requirements, were entrepreneurship or military service. The first option carried the risk of starvation, the second the risk of a premature, although perhaps heroic, death. Starting around fourteen, students were provided a teacher-counselor who would tutor, extol, and badger us about our studies and lives until we ultimately made decisions that would propel us along our destined path.

  ~~~

  “Pay attention, students,” Mr. Vegreatile said one morning. Our class of twenty-four was made up of October-born fifteen-year-olds, half of each gender, and all citizens. “In one month’s time, each of you will turn sixteen. The clock will begin. I know at your age, four years seems like a long time. It is, and it isn’t. How many of you think you’ve already decided?”

  About a third of the room hit “affirmative” on their desk screens.

  “Monica,” our mentor said, “please share with us your choice.”

  “I’m going to become a Common English teacher,” she said. “And go back to Purvas.”

  “Back?” he said in mock surprise. “I didn’t know you’d ever been to Purvas. My records indicate that you were born at Tevvany Hospital on October 3, 2284 of the Human Common Era, in the city of Coeur d’Alene, Section 18-C, Gurita. Are my records incorrect?”

  Monica colored and fidgeted in her chair. “Um, no,” she said.

  “Precision in language,” he reminded her.

  “No,” she stated flatly.

  “So you were born on Earth?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ve never been to Purvas?”

  “No.”

  “Then how, may I ask, could you possibly return to a place you’ve never been?”

  She paused for a long moment. “I don’t know,” she finally answered. “I guess I mean back to my roots, where my family came from originally.”

  “I see,” he said. “Very well. And, what, may I inquire, drives your desire to teach Common English?”

  “I believe it’s for everyone’s benefit to speak many languages,” she said proudly. “I speak five, and I’m learning a sixth.”

  “Very well,” our teacher said. “Avery, you didn’t signal anything.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not sure.”

  “And may I inquire as to the direction you’re leaning?”

  “Something that will make me rich,” I joked.

  “I see. And you believe riches will provide you with what benefit?”

  “Everyone knows it’s better to be rich,” I said. A few students laughed, and the majority nodded in agreement.

  “Explain,” he instructed.

  “If you’re rich, you can do whatever you want.”

  “I see.” He thought for a moment. “Could you walk downtown, unguarded and carefree?”

  “Well…no. You’d be robbed and beaten, maybe kidnapped and held for ransom.”

  “But did you not just say that if you were rich, you could, I’m going to quote you verbatim, ‘do whatever you want’?”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “What I meant was that you can live however you want, wherever you want. Of course, if you’re going to go somewhere like downtown, you’d have to do it in a secure transport or have guards, but you could still go there.”

  “So, in your opinion, Mr. Ford, going to eat noodles at a downtown street cart would be the same experience for both a rich man and a poor man?”

  I thought for a minute, not wanting to fall into a logical trap and end up looking foolish or arrogant. “I suppose, Mr. Vegreatile, that the noodles would taste far better to the poor man than to the rich man.”

  “Probably true,” he said. “I would caution you to be careful what you wish for. All pursuits and conditions have their costs.” He paused and regarded the class. “On another topic, some of you will no doubt join the military instead of going to university or trying your luck in the marketplace. Those who are considering it should ask yourselves, what do you make of the widely held perception that soldiers provide the greatest service to a nation? Is that a true statement, or recruiting rhetoric to suck you in?”

  “It’s rhetoric. It isn’t true,” a girl in the front row said.

  “Why?”

  “Because soldiers just kill and destroy things,” she answered. “They don’t create anything.”

  His stare bored into her. “Fighting and killing and destroying things is a description that serves as a non sequitur to this discussion, Miss Anderstone. Can anyone tell me why?”

  “I think I know,” said Ariana, one of my friends.

  “Speak confidently, Ariana,” he said. “Tell us what you believe you understand.”

  “I think…I think that saying a soldier kills and breaks things is like saying a doctor hacks up bodies. Or that builders blow up old skyscrapers. It’s incomplete, and it’s pejorative. A soldier enforces the will of the people.”

  “Very good,” he said, and then followed with a question that got me second-guessing my assumptions. “Does it matter if the will of the people is moral?”

  “How can you ask that question without defining morality, Mr. Vegreatile?” I asked.

  “Very well,” he said with a sigh. “Let’s define morality. You go first, Mr. Ford.”

  I thought for several beats. “I think morality is being moral. I mean, like not murdering and raping people.”

  “Can you define murder, Mr. Ford? Many in history have called warriors murderers.”

  “Murder is the outlawed killing of another person.”

  “Which laws would you be citing here? What if our body politic voted that killing any Tedesconian, regardless of sex, age, or socioeconomic status, was perfectly legal? Would that make it moral?”

  “I guess not.”

  “So your definition fails, Mr. Ford. Anyone else care to take a stab at this?”

  “I think killing anything that’s not trying to kill you first is immoral,” a student offered.

  “Mr. Bown, let’s pursue that line of reasoning. Let’s imagine you could kill a Tedesconian scientist who was working on a new weapon. Let’s further imagine that a time-traveling monk showed up and explained to you that if left to his work, this scientist would develop a weapon that would kill not only all your future grandchildren, but a million Guritains as well. Do you think it would be immoral to kill the scientist?”

  “Yes, because we can’t know the future.”

  “I just told you the future.”

  “But that’s impossible.”

  “For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that time travel has been developed and you are shown the future.”

  “I don’t think it’s right to kill a scientist who’s working peacefully.
And I don’t believe time travel is possible, either.”

  “Perhaps not. Then, let’s say a Tedesconian scientist announces to the world that he’s found a way to kill every Guritain by next week. Our own scientists confirm his formulas and means. You’ve been given the task to kill him before he accomplishes his work. Do you believe it’s now morally acceptable?”

  “I know for sure he’s going to use this weapon?”

  “Let’s say no, you don’t, only that he’s developing the science for its production.”

  “Then I say no, it’s not morally acceptable to kill him.”

  “What if he’s going to push the button, or pull the trigger, or unleash the weapon next Tuesday?”

  “Personally?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. At that point it’s morally acceptable. He’s an existential threat.”

  “Anyone else here take such a strident position?”

  A few students pushed their affirmative buttons, and Mr. Vegreatile looked around the room. “Now let’s take the other extreme. Who here thinks we should end this current war with the Teds by blowing them all up?”

  “If we did that, wouldn’t they retaliate?”

  “Perhaps. Mutually assured destruction has a long precedent in negotiations over weapons of extreme power. But what if you could, right now, Mr. Thorinting, push a button and kill every purvast and human who was living in Tedesconian territories, both here on Earth and on Purvas. Would you do so? What if you knew it would end all war and bring about a thousand years of peace?”

  “Yes, of course. Without hesitation.”

  “Anyone else?” our teacher asked.

  About one out of five of my fellow students hit the affirmative button, and another fifth hit the negative one.

  “So, a little over half of you aren’t sure about the dilemma,” he said. “Why?”

  “I think it’s too complex to decide that quickly,” Ariana said.

  “I agree,” I added. “It’s not something you can just decide in a second.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s too complex, like Ariana said,” I answered.

  “Saying something is too complex, Mr. Ford, is begging the question. Why is it too complex?”

  I shifted in my seat.

  “It’s a question that touches on so many areas of morality, ethics, religion, philosophy…so I can’t answer without really thinking it through. And that takes time.”

  The teacher smiled. “You’ve just found a way to say it’s a complex topic with a lot more words. Well done, Mr. Ford. I think, class, that this question of morality is one I’d like you all to study. I expect a thousand words on the topic by the end of the week. Make an argument for or against using an ultimate weapon to eradicate an enemy. Dismissed.”

  ~~~

  I ended up arguing that the use of such a weapon would be immoral and unethical because to willingly accept the killing of children in a war would axiomatically make one’s own nation so deplorable that it wouldn’t be worth saving. Mr. Vegreatile gave me a passing grade on my rhetoric, but asked me to think long and hard about where I derived my definition of deplorable from, and further, why a surviving species might find an action deplorable if it gave them an evolutionary advantage.

  He reminded me that, mathematically speaking, almost every type of plant and animal on Earth and on Purvas that had ever existed had already gone extinct. We were part of the less than one percent of one percent of living beings that had made it this far in the history of the universe.

  I considered, for a long time, that my answer had been inadequate. Maybe if killing a billion sentient beings today meant that fifty billion would live in peace tomorrow, it would be worth the sacrifice. I promised myself that I’d study the idea more, but then Melony’s family ended our relationship, and I suffered from a great depression.

  When I turned eighteen, I decided to join the armed forces.

  My reasons weren’t fleshed out at the time, but in retrospect, I think service and duty were as good a justification as any.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Do not seek to serve under a foolish officer with great desire for heroism.

  ~ Lieutenant Graalend Folescezt

  All recruits, regardless of desired specialties, entered Substratal Training for a period of one year. The purpose of ST was to acclimate greenies to military life, as well as to provide additional classes and instruction prior to testing for specialized training.

  A commitment in the Guritain Armed Forces was for life; however, the standing policy when I joined was that if you served for twenty years or survived ten drops, you’d have the option to transfer into a reserve unit. Reserve pay at the time I joined wasn’t enough money to live on in a large city, but then, as today, it was adequate for life on a colony planet or in any of the third-world backwaters on Earth or Purvas.

  The army wasn’t for everyone; recruits often washed out or got booted. The percentage that graduated hovered around eighty-five percent, and while you couldn’t simply quit, recruits who wanted out merely had to fail enough tests and Command would see that they got their wish.

  Every trainee took basic military history. We studied commanders, strategies, and battles from the past – both Earth and Purvas histories. Required readings ranged from The Art of War by Sun Tzu, a fifth-century BCE Earth treatise on warfare, to The Sum of Warfare: A General’s Perspective, a thousand-year-old tome by Tedesconian General Hal-Buebja Occazalian the Majestic.

  Electives were chosen based on a trainee’s desired specialty and any weaknesses they felt would hinder them. Medical hopefuls took biology classes. Those wishing to enter the starship fleet as pilots, navigators, or even lowly mechanics and stewards were encouraged to take electives on shift-physics, astro-mathematics, and binary universe theory.

  For some time at the beginning of my training, I considered a medical career. I was fascinated by the prospect and hoped that the human consciousness could someday be transferred from one body to another. The early stages of neural mechanics and brain replication, technology developed long before I was born, were promising; but even now, all these years later, nobody in the field had come up with a way to transfer consciousness from host to host.

  However, I soon realized I wasn’t strong enough academically to pass the required exams, and besides, over the course of the year I’d grown fascinated with the infantry.

  I credit, or blame, my base-course instructor and mentor, a former infantry soldier who’d fought in the Vealental Incidents on Purvas as well as other interesting campaigns, some of which had casualty rates that topped forty percent. He’d been some kind of hero back home, but had migrated to Earth and now claimed he merely wanted to die an old man, quietly and peacefully, in his bed.

  ~~~

  “Can anyone tell me their thoughts on what they believe is the primary responsibility of an infantry soldier?” Master Sergeant Veesteeb asked.

  “To kill the opponent’s infantry,” someone answered.

  “To control the ground,” another said.

  “To follow all orders in a workmanlike manner.”

  “To destroy, plunder, burn, and demoralize the enemy,” said another.

  “I think they’ve got many competing responsibilities that change constantly,” I offered.

  “Mr. Ford, elaborate, please,” our teacher said.

  “The question’s similar to asking what the primary responsibility of a parent is. Is feeding a child the primary thing? If you don’t feed a child, they’ll die; but a child who’s only fed and not properly raised would be worse off than one allowed to starve.”

  “Interesting,” he said. “Class, any thoughts on Mr. Ford’s philosophy?”

  There was a round of arguing about the issue. Some claimed I was intentionally making a simple question unnecessarily complicated, while others believed that the question was a trick one with no correct answer.

  MS Veesteeb rapped his desk with his wooden pointer, and we fell silen
t. “The primary responsibility of an infantry soldier is the mission. Questions?”

  “Yes. What defines the mission? I mean…isn’t the mission to win the war?” someone asked.

  “The stated mission of nations in conflict is to achieve security and peace. Politicians, generals, and even the voting citizens often decide that war is their best option to achieve security and peace. This may seem like a contradiction, or even hypocrisy. It often is, but as an infantry soldier, can anyone explain to me how you’d go about this task of winning a war to achieve security and peace?”

  “You must overwhelm the enemy with superior force,” someone answered.

  “I’m not looking for general observations or clever quotes from a book. Give me something actionable. What is the primary responsibility of an infantry soldier, and why must it be so?”

  “The mission,” I said along with most of the class, parroting the answer he’d just given us.

  “Yes, the mission,” our teacher said. “And what is the mission?”

  “To achieve security and peace,” a woman in the back shouted, unaware of the trap she’d fallen into.

  “No!” Veesteeb shouted. “Security and peace is the stated goal of statesmen. Does anyone in here desire to become a politician?”

  Nobody dared to answer in the affirmative, and the classroom was silent for a moment.

  Veesteeb paced. “As an infantry soldier, you can’t concern yourself with winning a war. You can’t concern yourself with winning battles. These should be of little concern to you, about as important as what you’re going to have for lunch next winter on the second Tuesday of November. Can anyone tell me why?”

  I took a stab at the answer. “I believe it’s because a single soldier can’t bear the responsibility of an entire war, or even a battle.”

  He nodded slowly. “This is true. Can you elaborate?”

  “Well, I think a soldier has to follow sanctioned orders to the best of their ability.”

  “A trite tautology, Mr. Ford. Of course you have to follow sanctioned orders. When do you disobey them?”