by John Scalzi
::And what should I do if he turns?:: Sagan asked. ::If he becomes a traitor?::
::Then you kill him, of course,:: Szilard said. ::Don't hesitate about it. But you be sure, Lieutenant. Now you know that I can get inside your head, so I trust you'll refrain from blowing his head off just because you're feeling twitchy.::
::Yes, General,:: Sagan said.
::Good,:: Szilard said. "Where is Dirac now?::
::He's with the platoon, getting ready, down there in the bay. I gave him our orders on the way up,:: Sagan said.
::Why don't you check in on him?:: Szilard asked.
::With the upgrade?:: Sagan asked.
::Yes,:: Szilard said. "Learn to use it before your mission. You're not going to have time to fiddle with it later.::
Sagan accessed her new utility, found Dirac, and listened in.
::This is nuts,:: Jared thought to himself.
::You got that right,:: Steven Seaborg said. He'd joined 2nd Platoon while Jared had been away.
::Did I say that out loud?:: Jared said.
::No, I read minds, you jerk,:: Seaborg said, and sent a ping of amusement Jared's way. Whatever issues Jared and Seaborg had had disappeared after the death of Sarah Pauling; Seaborg's jealousy of Jared, or whatever it was, was outweighed by their mutual feeling of the loss of Sarah. Jared would hesitate to call him a friend, but the bond they had was more amicable than not, now reinforced by their additional bond of integration.
Jared glanced around the bay, at the two dozen Skip Drive sleds in it—the total fleet of Skip Drive sleds that had been produced to that point. He looked over at Seaborg, who was climbing into one to check it out.
::So this is what we're going to use to attack an entire planet,:: Seaborg said. ::A couple dozen Special Forces soldiers, each in their own space-traveling gerbil cage.::
::You've seen a gerbil cage?:: Jared asked.
::Of course not,:: Seaborg said. :.I've never even seen a gerbil. But I've seen pictures, and that's what this looks like to me. What sort of idiot would ride in one of these things.::
::I've ridden in one,:: Jared said.
::That answers that,:: Seaborg said. ::And what was it like?::
::I felt exposed,:: Jared said.
::Wonderful,:: Seaborg said, and rolled his eyes.
Jared knew how he felt, but he also saw the logic behind the assault. Nearly all space-faring creatures used ships to get from one point to another in real space; planetary detection and defense grids, by necessity, had the resolution power to detect the large objects that ships tended to be. The Obin defense grid around Arist was no different. A Special Forces ship would be spotted and attacked in an instant; a tiny, wire-frame object barely larger than a man would not.
Special Forces knew this because it had already sent the sleds on six different occasions, sneaking through the defense grid to spy on the communications coming off the moon. It was on the last of these missions that they heard Charles Boutin on a communication beam, broadcasting in the open, sending a voice note toward Obinur asking about the arrival time of a supply ship. The Special Forces soldier who had caught the signal chased it down to its source, a small science outpost on the shore of one of Arist's many large islands. He'd waited to hear a second transmission from Boutin to confirm his location before he returned.
Upon hearing this fact, Jared had accessed the recorded file to hear the voice of the man he was supposed to have been. He'd heard Boutin's voice before, on voice recordings that Wilson and Cainen had played for him; the voice on those recordings was the same as the one on this one. Older, creakier and more stressed, but there was no mistaking the timbre or cadence. Jared was aware just how much Boutin's sounded like his own, which was to be expected and also more than a little disconcerting.
I've got a strange life, Jared thought, and then glanced up to make sure the thought hadn't leaked. Seaborg was still examining the sled and gave no indication of having heard him.
Jared walked through the collection of sleds toward another object in the room, a spherical object slightly larger than the sleds itself. It was a piece of interesting Special Forces skullduggery called a "capture pod," used when Special Forces had something or someone they wanted to evacuate but couldn't evacuate themselves. Inside the sphere was a hollow designed to hold a single member of most midsized intelligent species; Special Forces soldiers shoved them in, sealed the pod, and then backed off as the pod's lifters blasted the pod toward the sky. Inside the pod a strong antigravity field kicked in when the lifters did, otherwise the occupant would be flattened. The pod would then be retrieved by a Special Forces ship located overhead.
The capture pod was for Boutin. The plan was simple: Attack the science station where they had located Boutin, and disable its communications. Grab Boutin and stuff him into the capture pod, which would head out to Skip Drive distance—the Kite would pop in just long enough to grab the pod and then get out before the Obin could give chase. After Boutin's capture, the science station would be destroyed with an old favorite: a meteor just large enough to wipe the station off the planet, which would hit just far enough away from the station that no one would get suspicious. In this case it would be a hit in the ocean several miles off the coast, so the science station would be obliterated in the ensuing tsunami. The Special Forces had been working with falling rocks for decades; they knew how to make it look like an accident. If everything went to plan, the Obin wouldn't even know they had been attacked.
To Jared's eye, there were two major flaws in the plan, both interrelated. The first was that the Skip Drive sleds could not land; they wouldn't survive contact with Arist's atmosphere, and even if they did, they wouldn't be steerable once they were in it. The members of 2nd Platoon on the mission would pop out into real space on the edge of Arist's atmosphere and then perform a near-space skydive down to the surface. Members of 2nd Platoon had done it before— Sagan had done it at the Battle of Coral and was none the worse for wear—but it struck Jared as asking for trouble.
The method of their arrival created the second major flaw in the plan: There was no simple way to extract the 2nd Platoon after the mission was completed. Once Boutin was captured, the 2nd's orders were ominous: Get as far away from the science station as possible, so as not to die in the scheduled tsunami (the mission plan had thoughtfully provided a map to a nearby high point that they figured should—should—stay dry during the deluge), and then hike into the uninhabited interior of the island to hide out for several days until Special Forces could send a clutch of capture pods to retrieve them. It would take more than one round of capture pod retrievals to evacuate all twenty-four members of the 2nd that would be on the mission, and Sagan had already informed Jared that he and she would be the last people off the planet.
Jared frowned at the memory of Sagan's pronouncement. Sagan had never been a big fan of his, he knew, and he knew that was because she was aware from the start that he'd been bred out of a traitor. She'd known more about him than he had. Her farewell when he was transferred to Mattson seemed sincere enough, but since he'd seen her at the cemetery, and been returned to her command, she'd seemed genuinely angry with him, as if he actually was Boutin. On one level Jared could sympathize—after all, as Cainen noted, he was more like Boutin now than he was like his older self—but on a more immediate level Jared resented being treated like the enemy. Jared wondered darkly if the reason Sagan was having him stay behind with her was so she could take care of him without anyone knowing.
Then he shook the idea out of his head. Sagan was capable of killing him, he was sure. But she wouldn't unless he gave her a reason. Best not to give her o reason, Jared thought.
Anyway, it wasn't Sagan he was worried about, it was Boutin himself. The mission anticipated some resistance from the small Obin military presence at the science station, but none from the scientists or from Boutin. This struck Jared as wrong. Jared had Boutin's anger in his head and knew the intelligence of the man, even if the details of all his
work remained unclear to him. Jared doubted Boutin would go without a fight. This didn't mean Boutin would take up arms—he emphatically wasn't a warrior— but Boutin's weapon was his brain. It was Boutin's brain formulating a way to betray the Colonial Union that had put them all in this position to begin with. It was a bad assumption that they would simply be able to snatch and stuff Boutin. He almost certainly had a surprise in store.
What that surprise would be, however, eluded Jared.
::You hungry?:: Seaborg asked Jared. ::Because thinking about how insane a mission is going to be always makes me want to eat.::
Jared grinned. ::You must be hungry a lot.::
::One of the benefits of being Special Forces,:: Seaborg said. "That and skipping the awkward teenage years.::
::Studying up on teenagers?:: Jared asked.
::Sure,:: Seaborg said. "Because if I'm lucky I'll get to be one one day.::
::You just said we get to skip the awkward teenage years,:: Jared said.
::Well, when I get there they won't be awkward,:: Seaborg said. "Now come on. It's lasagna tonight.::
They went to get something to eat.
Sagan opened her eyes.
::How did it go?:: asked Szilard, who had been watching her as she listened in to Jared.
::Dirac's worried that we're underestimating Boutin,:: Sagan said. ::That he's planned for being attacked in some way we've missed.::
::Good,:: Szilard said. ::Because I feel the same way. That's why I want Dirac on the mission.::
Arist, green and cloudy, filled Jared's vision, surprising him with its immensity. Popping into existence at the bare edge of a planet's atmosphere with nothing but a carbon fiber cage around you was profoundly disturbing; Jared felt like he was going to fall. Which was of course exactly what he was doing.
Enough of this, he thought, and began disconnecting himself from his sled. Planetward, Jared located the five other members of his squad, all of whom translated before him: Sagan, Seaborg, Daniel Harvey, Anita Manley and Vernon Wigner. He also spotted the capture pod, and breathed a sigh of relief. The capture pod's mass was just short of the five-ton mark; there was a small but real concern it would be too massive to use the mini-Skip Drive. All of Jared's squad had pulled themselves from their sleds and were free-floating, slowly drifting from the spidery vehicles that had brought them this far.
The six of them were the forward force; their job was to guide down the capture pod and secure a landing area for the remaining members of 2nd Platoon, who would be following quickly behind. The island Boutin was on was carpeted with a thick tropical forest, which made any landing difficult; Sagan had chosen a small meadowed area about fifteen klicks from the science station to land at.
::Keep dispersed,:: Sagan said to her squad. "We'll regroup when we get through the worst of the atmosphere. Radio silence until you hear from me.::
Jared maneuvered himself to look at Arist and drank it in until his BrainPal, sensing the first tenuous effects of the atmosphere, wrapped him in a protective sphere of nanobots that flowed from a pack on his back and secured him in the middle, to keep him from making contact with the sphere and crisping himself where they intersected. The inside of the sphere let in no light; Jared was suspended in a small, dark private universe.
Left to his own thoughts, Jared returned to the Obin, the implacable and fascinating race whose company Boutin kept. The Colonial Union's records of the Obin went all the way back to the beginning of the Union, when a discussion over who owned a planet the human settlers had named Casablanca ended with the settlers removed with horrifying efficiency, and the Colonial Forces charged with taking back the planet likewise utterly routed. The Obin wouldn't surrender and would not take prisoners. Once they decided they wanted something they kept coming at it until they had it.
Get in their way enough and they would decide it was in their interest to remove you permanently. The Ala, who had fashioned the diamond dome of the general's mess at Phoenix, were not the first race the Obin had methodically wiped out, nor the last.
The one saving grace about the Obin was that they were not particularly acquisitive as starfaring races went. The Colonial Union would start ten colonies in the time it took the Obin to start one, and while the Obin were not shy about taking a planet held by another race when it suited them, it didn't suit them all that often. Omagh had been the first planet since Casablanca that the Obin had taken from humans, and even then it appeared that it was more of a case of opportunism (taking it from the Rraey, who presumably had fought to get it from the humans) than genuine expansion. The Obin reluctance to unnecessarily expand the race's holdings was one of the primary reasons the CDF suspected someone else had initiated the attack. If, as was suspected, it had been the Rraey who attacked Omagh and then managed to keep it, the Colonial Union would almost certainly have retaliated and attempted to take back the colony. The Rraey knew when to quit.
The other interesting thing about the Obin—which made their putative alliance with the Rraey and the Enesha so puzzling to Jared—was that in general, unless you were in their way or trying to get into their face, the Obin were utterly uninterested in other intelligent races. They kept no embassies nor had official communication with other races; as far as the Colonial Union was aware never once did the Obin ever formally declare war or sign a treaty with any other race. If you were at war with the Obin, you knew it because they were shooting at you. If you weren't at war with them, they had no communication with you at all. The Obin were not xenophobes; that would imply they hated other races. They simply didn't care about them. That the Obin, of all races, would align with not one but two other races was extraordinary; that they would align against the Colonial Union was ominous.
Underneath all of the data about Obin's relations—or lack thereof—with other intelligent races was a rumor about the race that the CDF did not give much credence to, but noted due to its widespread belief among other races: The Obin did not evolve intelligence but were given it by another race. The CDF discounted the rumor because the idea that any of the fiercely competitive races in this part of the galaxy would take the time to uplift some rock-banging underachievers was unlikely to the point of ridiculousness. The CDF knew of races who had exterminated the near-intelligent creatures they had discovered on the real estate they wanted, on the grounds that it was never too early to eliminate a competitor. It had known of none that did the opposite.
If the rumor were true, it would rather strongly imply that the intelligent designers of the Obin were the Consu, the only species in the local neighborhood with the high-end technological means to attempt a species-wide uplift, and also the philosophical motive, given that the Consu's racial mission was to bring all other intelligent species in the area into a state of perfection (i.e., like the Consu). The problem with that theory was that the Consu's method of bringing other races closer to Consu-like perfection usually involved forcing some poor hapless race to fight them, or pitting one lesser race against another, as the Consu did when they matched humans against the Rraey for the Battle of Coral. Even the species most likely to have created another intelligent species was more likely to destroy one instead, directly or indirectly, the race a victim of not meeting the Consu's high and inscrutable standards.
The Consu's high and inscrutable standards were the primary argument against the Consu creating the Obin, because the Obin, unique among all intelligent races, had almost no culture to speak of. What few xenographical studies of the Obin had been done by humans or other races discovered that aside from a spare and utilitarian language, and a facility for practical technology, the Obin produced nothing of creative note: No significant art across any of their perceivable senses, no literature, no religion or philosophy that xenographers could recognize as such. The Obin barely even had politics, which was unheard of. The Obin society was so bereft of culture that one researcher contributing to the CDF file on the Obin suggested quite seriously that it was an open question whether Obin performed casual
conversation—or indeed were even capable of it. Jared was no expert on the Consu, but it seemed unlikely to him that a people so concerned with the ineffable and eschatological would create a people incapable of concerning themselves with either. If the Obin were what happened with intelligent design, it was an affirming argument for the value of evolution.
The sphere of nanobots surrounding Jared flung away and behind. He blinked furiously in the light until his eyes adjusted, and then sensed around for his squad. Tightbeams found him and highlighted the others, their bodies almost invisible thanks to their input-sensitive unitards; even the capture pod was camoed. Jared floated toward the capture pod to check its status but was warned away from it by Sagan, who checked it herself. Jared and the rest of the squad grouped closer together but not so close they would get in each other's way when they deployed their chutes.
The squad deployed chutes at the lowest possible height; even camouflaged, parachutes could be seen by an eye that knew what to look for. The capture pod's parachute was immense and designed to support dramatic air-braking; it made impressive snapping sounds as the nanobot-created canopy formed, filled with air and then violently tore apart, only to form again a second later. Finally the capture pod slowed enough that its parachute held.
Jared turned to the science station, several klicks to the south, and upped the magnification on his cowl to see if there was any movement at the science station that would suggest they had been seen. He saw nothing and had his observation confirmed by Wigner and Harvey. Moments later they were all on the ground, grunting as they moved the capture pod past the edge of the meadow and into the woods, and then moving quickly to augment its camouflage with foliage.
