by John Scalzi
Harvey smiled. "I love you too, Lieutenant." He nodded to Seaborg. "Now," he said. They dropped.
The tree whipped up; Sagan adjusted and fought against the acceleration to keep her position. When the tree reached the apex of its swing Sagan kicked off, adding her own force to the force of the tree launch. Sagan arced impossibly high, it seemed to her, easily clearing the guns, which tracked her but could not fire. The guns followed her until she was beyond the perimeter and rapidly arcing toward the meadow beyond. She had time to think, This is going to hurt before she balled up and plowed into the ground. Her unitard stiffened, absorbing some of the impact, but Sagan felt at least one rib crack from the hit. The stiffened unitard caused her to roll farther than she would have otherwise. She eventually came to a stop and, lying in the tall grass, tried to remember how to breathe. It took a few more minutes than she expected.
In the distance, Sagan heard Harvey and Seaborg calling for her. She also heard a low drone from the other direction, growing higher in pitch the longer she listened. Still lying in the tall grass, she shifted her position and tried to see over it.
A pair of Obin were coming, riding a small armed craft. They were coming right toward her.
"The first thing you have to understand is that the Colonial Union is evil," Boutin said to Jared.
Jared's headache had returned with a vengeance, and he longed to see Zoe again. "I don't see it," he said.
"Well, why would you," Boutin said. "You're a couple years old at most. And all your life has been made up of doing what someone else has told you to do. You've hardly made choices of your own, now, have you."
"I've had this lecture already," Jared said, recalling Cainen.
"From someone in Special Forces?" Boutin asked, genuinely surprised.
"From a Rraey prisoner," Jared said. "Named Cainen. Says he met you once."
Boutin furrowed his brow. "The name isn't familiar," he said. "But then I've met quite a few Rraey and Eneshans recently. They all tend to blur. But it makes sense a Rraey would tell you this. They find the whole Special Forces setup morally appalling."
"Yes, I know," Jared said. "He told me I was a slave."
"You are a slave!" Boutin said, excitedly. "Or an indentured servant, at the very least, bound to a term of service over which you have no control. Yes, they make you feel good about it by suggesting you were born specially to save humanity, and by chaining you to your platoon mates through integration. But when it comes right down to it, those are just ways they use to control you. You're a year old, maybe two. What do you know about the universe anyway? You know what they've told you—that it's a hostile place and that we are always under attack. But what would you say if I told you that everything the Colonial Union told you was wrong?"
"It's not wrong," Jared said. "It is hostile. I've seen enough combat to know that."
"But all you've seen is combat," Boutin said. "You've never been out where you weren't killing whatever the Colonial Union tells you to. And it's certainly true that the universe is hostile to the Colonial Union. And the reason for that is, the Colonial Union is hostile to the universe. In all the time humanity has been out in the universe we've never not been at war with nearly every other species we've come across. There are a few here or there the Colonial Union deems useful as allies or trade partners but so few as to have their numbers be insignificant. We know of six hundred and three intelligent species inside the Colonial Union's Skip horizon, Dirac. Do you know how many the CU classifies as a threat, meaning the CDF is able to preemptively attack at will? Five hundred and seventy-seven. When you're actively hostile toward ninety-six percent of all the intelligent races you know about, that's not just stupid. It's racial suicide."
"Other species are at war with each other," Jared said. "It's not just the Colonial Union that goes to war."
"Yes," Boutin said. "Every species has other species it competes with and goes to war against. But other species don't try to fight every other species they come across. The Rraey and the Enesha were longtime enemies before we allied them, and who knows, maybe they will be again. But neither of those species classifies all the other races as a permanent threat. Nobody does that but the Colonial Union. Have you heard of the Conclave, Dirac?"
"No," Jared said.
"The Conclave is a great meeting between hundreds of species in this part of the galaxy," Boutin said. "It convened more than twenty years ago to try to create a workable framework of government for the entire region. It would help stop the fighting for real estate by apportioning new colonies in a systematic way, rather than having every species run for the prize and try to beat off whoever tries to take it away. It would enforce the system with a multispecies military command that would attack anyone who tried to take a colony by force. Not every species has signed on to the Conclave, but only two species have refused even to send representatives. One is the Consu, because why would they. The other is the Colonial Union."
"You expect me to take your word for that," Jared said.
"I don't expect anything from you," Boutin said. "You don't know about it. The rank-and-file CDF doesn't know about it. The colonials certainly don't know about it. The Colonial Union has all the spaceships, Skip drones and communication satellites. It handles all the trade and what little diplomacy we engage in on its space stations. The Colonial Union is the bottleneck through which all information flows, and it decides what the colonies learn and what they don't. And not just the colonies, it's Earth too. Hell, Earth is the worst."
"Why?" Jared asked.
"Because it's been kept socially retarded for two hundred years," Boutin said. "The Colonial Union farms people there, Dirac. Uses the rich countries there for its military. Uses the poor countries for its colonial seed stock. And it likes the arrangement so much that the Colonial Union actively suppresses the natural evolution of society there. They don't want it to change. That would mess up their production of soldiers and colonists. So they sealed Earth off from the rest of humanity to keep the people there from knowing just how perfectly they're being held in stasis. Manufactured a disease—they called it the Crimp—and told the people on Earth it was an alien infection. Used it as an excuse to quarantine the planet. They let it flare up every generation or two just to maintain the pretense."
"I've met people from Earth," Jared said, thinking of Lieutenant Cloud. "They're not stupid. They would know if they were being held back."
"Oh, the Colonial Union will allow an innovation or two every couple of years to make them think they're still on a growth curve, but it's never anything useful," Boutin said. "A new computer here. A music player there. An organ transplant technique. They're allowed the occasional land war to keep things interesting. Meanwhile, they have all the same social and political structures they had two hundred years earlier, and they think it's because they've reached a point of genuine stability. And they still die of old age at seventy-five! It's ridiculous. The Colonial Union has managed Earth so well it doesn't even know it's being managed. It's in the dark. All the colonies are in the dark. Nobody knows anything."
"Except you," Jared said.
"I was building the soldiers, Dirac," Boutin said. "They had to let me know what was going on. I had top-secret clearance right until the moment I shot that clone of mine. That's why I know the Conclave is out there. And that's why I know if the Colonial Union isn't killed, humanity's going to get wiped out."
"We seem to have held our own up to this point," Jared said.
"That's because the Colonial Union takes advantage of chaos," Boutin said. "When the Conclave ratifies its agreement—and it will in the next year or two—the Colonial Union won't be able to found colonies anymore. The Conclave's military force will kick them off any planet they try to take. They won't be able to take over anyone's colonies, either. We'll be bottled up, and when another race decides to take one of our worlds, who will stop them? The Conclave won't protect races that won't participate. Slowly but surely we'll be whittled back to one
world again. If we're left with that."
"Unless we have a war," Jared said, not hiding his skepticism.
"That's right," Boutin said. "The problem isn't humanity. It's the Colonial Union. Get rid of the Colonial Union, replace it with a government that actually helps its people instead of farming them and keeping them ignorant for its own purposes, and join with the Conclave to get a reasonable share of new colonial worlds."
"With you in charge, I presume," Jared said.
"Until we get things organized, yes," Boutin said.
"Minus the worlds that the Rraey and the Enesha, your allies in this adventure, take for their own," Jared said.
"The Rraey and the Enesha weren't going to fight for free," Boutin said.
"And the Obin taking Earth," Jared said.
"That's for me," Boutin said. "Personal request."
"Must be nice," Jared said.
"You continue to underestimate how badly the Obin want consciousness," Boutin said.
"I liked this better when I thought you were just trying to get revenge for Zoe," Jared said.
Boutin reared back, as if he'd been slapped. Then he leaned in close. "You know what the thought of losing Zoe did to me," Boutin hissed. "You know it. But let me tell you something that you don't seem to know. After we took back Coral from the Rraey, the CDF Military Intelligence office predicted the Rraey would make a counterattack and listed the five most likely targets. Omagh and and Covell Station were right at the top of that list. And you know what the CDF did about it?"
"No," Jared said.
"Not a goddamn thing," Boutin spat the words. "And the reason for that was that the CDF was spread thin in the aftermath of Coral, and some general decided what he really wanted to do was try to grab a colony world from the Robu. In other words, it was more important to go after some new real estate than to defend what we already had. They knew the attack was coming, and they did nothing. And until the Obin contacted me, all I knew was that the reason my daughter died was because the Colonial Union didn't do what it's supposed to do: keep safe the lives of those in its protection. To keep safe my daughter. Trust me, Dirac. This has everything to do with Zoe."
"And what if your war doesn't go the way you want it to?" Jared asked, softly. "The Obin are still going to want their consciousness, and they'll have nothing to give you."
Boutin smiled. "You're alluding to the fact that we've actually lost the Rraey and the Eneshans as allies," he said. Jared tried to hide his surprise and failed. "Yes, of course we know about that. And I have to admit it worried me for a while. But now we have something that I think puts us back on track and will allow the Obin to take on the Colonial Union by itself."
"I don't imagine you'll tell me what that is," Jared said.
"I'll be happy to tell you," Boutin said. "It's you."
Sagan scrabbled on the ground, looking for something to fight with. Her fingers wrapped around something that seemed solid, and she pulled at it. She came up with a clod of dirt.
Aw, fuck it, she thought, and then sprang up and flung it at the hovercraft as it went past. The clod connected with the head of the second Obin, sitting behind the first. It tilted in surprise and fell off its saddle seat, tumbling to the ground.
Sagan bolted from her place in the grass and was on the Obin in an instant. The dazed creature tried to raise its weapon at Sagan; she stepped to the side, yanked it out of its hand, and clubbed the Obin with it. The Obin screeched and stayed down.
In the distance the hovercraft was wheeling around and looking to make a run at Sagan. Sagan examined the weapon in her hand, trying to see if she could make sense of the thing before the hovercraft came back her way, and decided not to bother. She grabbed the Obin, punched it in the neck to keep it subdued, and searched it for an edged weapon. She found something like a combat knife hanging from its waist. Its shape and and balance was all wrong for a human hand but there was nothing she could do about that now.
The hovercraft had now turned around completely and was bearing down on Sagan. She could see the barrel of its gun spinning up to fire. Sagan reached down, and with the knife still in hand grabbed the fallen Obin and with a grunt heaved it into the path of the hovercraft and its gun. The Obin danced as the flechettes sliced into it. Sagan, covered by the dancing Obin, stepped to the side but as close as she dared to the craft and swung the knife as the Obin flashed by. She felt a shocking wrenching of her arm and was spun hard into the ground as the knife connected with the Obin's body. She stayed down, dazed and in pain, for several minutes.
When she finally got up she saw the hovercraft idling a hundred meters away. The Obin was still sitting on it, its dangling head held on to the neck by a flap of skin. Sagan pushed the Obin off the hovercraft and stripped it of its weapons and supplies. She then wiped the Obin's blood off the hovercraft as best she could and took a few minutes to learn how the machine worked. Then she turned the thing around and flew it toward the fence. The hovercraft crested the guns easily; Sagan set it down out of their range, in front of Harvey and Seaborg.
"You look terrible," Harvey said.
"I feel terrible," Sagan said. "Now, would you like a ride out of here, or would you like to make some more small talk?"
"That depends," Harvey said. "Where are we going?"
"We had a mission," Sagan said. "I think we should finish it."
"Sure," Harvey said. "The three of us with no weapons, taking on at least several dozen Obin soldiers and attacking a science station."
Sagan hauled up the Obin weapon and handed it to Harvey. "Now you have a weapon," she said. "All you have to do is learn to use it."
"Swell," Harvey said, taking the weapon.
"How long do you think until the Obin realize one of their hovercraft is missing?" asked Seaborg.
"No time at all," Sagan said. "Come on. It's time to get moving."
"Looks like your recording is done," Boutin said to Jared, and turned to his desk display. Jared knew it before Boutin said it because the vise-like pinching had stopped mere instants ago. "What do you mean that I'm the thing to get you back on track against the Colonial Union?" Jared said. "I'm not going to help you."
"Why not?" Boutin said. "You're not interested in saving the human race from a slow asphyxiation?"
"Let's just say your presentation does not leave me entirely convinced," Jared said.
Boutin shrugged. "So it goes," he said. "Naturally, you being me, or some facsimile thereof, I would have hoped you'd come around to my way of thinking. But in the end, no matter how many of my memories or personal tics you may have, you're still someone else, aren't you? Or are for now, anyway."
"What does that mean?" Jared said.
"I'll get to that," Boutin said. "But let me tell you a story first. It will make some things clear. Many years ago, the Obin and a race called the Ala got into a go-around over some real estate. On the surface, the Ala and the Obin were well-matched militarily, but the Alaite army consisted of clones. This meant they were all susceptible to the same genetic weapon, a virus the Obin designed that would lie dormant for a while—long enough to be transmitted— and then dissolve the flesh of whatever poor Ala it was living in. The Alaite army was wiped out, and then so were the Ala."
"That's a lovely story," Jared said.
"Just wait, because it gets better," Boutin said. "Not too long ago, I thought about doing the same sort of thing to the Colonial Defense Forces. But doing that is more complicated than it sounds. For one thing, Colonial Defense Forces military bodies are almost entirely immune from disease—the SmartBlood simply won't tolerate pathogens. And of course neither the CDF or Special Forces bodies are actually cloned bodies, so even if we could infect them, they wouldn't all react in the same way. But then I realized there was one thing in each CDF body that was exactly the same. Something I knew my way around intimately."
"The BrainPal," Jared said.
"The BrainPal," Boutin said. "And for it, I could create a time-release virus of its own�
�one that would embed itself in the Brain-Pal, replicate every time one CDF member communicated with another, but would stay dormant until a date and time of my choosing. Then it would cause every body system regulated by the BrainPal to go haywire. Everyone with a BrainPal instantly dead, and all the human worlds open for conquest. Quick, easy, painless.
"But there was a problem. I had no way to get the virus in. My back door was for diagnostics only. I could read out and shut down certain systems, but it wasn't designed to upload code. In order to upload the code I would need someone to accept it for me and act as a carrier. So the Obin went looking for volunteers."
"The Special Forces ships," Jared said.
"We figured the Special Forces would be more vulnerable to their BrainPals locking up. All of you have never been without it, whereas regular CDF would still be able to function. And it turned out to be correct. You eventually recover, but the initial shock gave us lots of time to work with. We brought them here and tried to convince them to be carriers. First we asked, and then we insisted. Not one cracked. That's discipline."
"Where are they now?" Jared asked.
"They're dead," Boutin said. "The way the Obin insist is pretty forceful. I should amend that, though. Some of them survived and I've been using them for consciousness studies. They're alive, as much as brains in a jar can be."
Jared felt sick. "Fuck you, Boutin," he said.
"They should have volunteered," Boutin said.
"I'm glad they disappointed you," Jared said. "I'll be doing the same."
"I don't think so," Boutin said. "What makes you different, Dirac, is that none of them had my brain and my consciousness already in their heads. And you do."
"Even with both, I'm not you," Jared said. "You said it yourself."
"I said you're someone else for now," Boutin said. "I don't suppose you know what would happen to you if I transferred the consciousness that's in here"—Boutin tapped his temple—"and put it in your head, do you?"
Jared remembered his conversation with Cainen and Harry Wilson, when they suggested overlaying the recorded Boutin consciousness upon his own, and felt himself go cold. "It'll wipe out the consciousness that's already there."
