by Ramy Vance
“Like a nursery full of infant aliens?”
Jaeger said nothing.
“You don’t really think the K’tax were able to evacuate that entire base in five minutes, do you?” Virgil asked. “The ones who got out before you blew it up were the ones who were strong, and fast, and able to take care of themselves. Do you think the nursery you just happened to stumble across was the only one on that entire asteroid?”
“That is an entirely different topic, Virgil,” Jaeger whispered. She released her cooling cinnamon roll and let it drift through the space. She wasn’t hungry anymore.
“You slaughtered K’tax infants,” Virgil said. “You used their blood to keep writing your story. Why are these human embryos any different? Because they look like you?”
They were murdering the Locauri. Jaeger wanted to say it, but that would be conceding that Virgil had a point worth arguing. She couldn’t let herself fall into a defensive position.
Even an argument gets framed like a battle, she thought bitterly. She saw no way to escape it.
“My point,” she said tensely, moving her bishop, “is that we should strive to change the rules of the game. Just because death is sometimes necessary doesn’t mean we have to embrace it. We should be looking for ways to escape this pattern.”
“Re-writing the very rules of history,” Seeker observed, swiftly capturing Jaeger’s bishop. “That’s…ambitious.”
“Delusional,” Virgil said again.
“I appreciate your input here, Virgil, but please butt out,” she snapped. “I asked you to do a job earlier. Get to it.”
“I’m capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time, Captain.”
Across the glowing chessboard, Seeker’s heavy brow jumped.
“Virgil,” she said slowly. “I gave you an order. Mind your own business.”
“I exist at the mercy and whim of a conflicted and capricious human,” Virgil answered. “The shifting and unreliable nature of her ethical code is very much my business.”
Jaeger stared at the darkened AI interface screen mounted to the wall as if expecting she could read Virgil’s expression on the glass. Then she reached over and activated the AI privacy protocol, forcibly booting the AI’s active presence out of the No-A lounge. Virgil said nothing more.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“We find your DISregard for our WISHes AStonishing.”
Same song, Jaeger thought, staring around the vast chamber of the Overseer’s skeletal forest. Different verse.
The summons to an emergency council meeting had come only twenty minutes into Jaeger’s sleep phase, after the memorial party. She half-suspected the aliens did it on purpose, to keep her sloppy with fatigue.
A single figure moved among the motionless Overseers. The translator bands wrapped around the prosecutor’s waving antennae glowed as he spoke in his echoing, mechanical voice. “CONsidering that you come to us from a POSition of need. You were WARNed not to ACTivate more than TWENTy of your crew.”
Oh, no big deal, Jaeger thought bitterly. I’ll just round up six of the spares and send them off to die, too. Double-tap to the head, no problem. Deal?
She cleared her throat, and remembering Toner’s last advice before they parted ways at the entrance to the chamber, lifted her voice from her diaphragm. “It was necessary,” she called. “To protect the rescued Locauri. If the K’tax had overrun our ship, they would have been slaughtered or dragged away as food. Would that have been a preferable outcome?”
“None of your crew would have NEEDed to die had you GIVEn us the INTelligence as we REquested,” the prosecutor replied. “That would have been the PREFerable outcome.”
This was why Jaeger had asked Toner to sit quietly in this meeting. She could only imagine the string of creative curses the man would cobble together. What Toner lacked in diplomatic skills, he made up for in stage presence. She practically begged him with every bribe she could come up with. It didn’t take much. Toner must have sensed how his mouth could undo what she was trying to accomplish.
There was a soft rustle of sound as the Overseers discussed amongst themselves. Another nearby Overseer moved, separating itself from the motionless assembly.
“Bad faith,” Kwin scolded, his antennae waving in the prosecutor’s direction. “We are not to DIScourage BRAVEry. ESpecially not acts of BRAVery COMmitted on our BEhalf. If CAPtain JAEger had not ACTed SWIFTly, the K’tax would have KILLed more of our COUsins.”
“HAPpenstance,” the prosecutor scoffed, pacing a circle around Jaeger. His long, sharp legs pierced the squishy floor with every step. “She did not know what she would find in the K’tax STRONGhold.”
Kwin did not trouble himself with so much motion and only folded his forelegs across his torso in a contemplative posture. “NEVERtheless,” he insisted. “She has REScued the COUsins and DRIVen K’tax from this SYStem. She is OWEd more than we have OFFered.”
“K’tax will REturn,” the Prosecutor hummed.
Jaeger clasped her hands together behind her back and straightened. “You sound almost happy about it.”
The prosecutor rounded on her, his long, stiff body moving alarmingly fast as he brought his face within a dozen centimeters of hers. She stared into the glossy, multifaceted eyes and saw her face reflected at her.
The prosecutor clicked his mandibles slowly.
Is that supposed to intimidate me? Jaeger had to bite her tongue to keep herself from pulling a Toner. Buddy, I swept the corpses of bigger bugs with bigger mandibles out of my ship this morning.
“K’tax will REturn. Do you DEny it?” The prosecutor asked.
Jaeger gave this question the weight it deserved before nodding her head. “Inhabitable planets are rare. If K’tax needs prey species like the Locauri to hatch and feed their young, they will likely be back.”
“And now BETter PREpared for BATtle,” the prosecutor hummed, satisfied. “They will not be so EASily DEfeated next time.”
“They weren’t so easily defeated this time,” Jaeger growled. It wasn’t good projection, but she didn’t care if the masses heard her. She was talking to this jerkwad. “No. I don’t even mean that my people bled and died to do it. I mean that you couldn’t find them. I did that for you.”
The prosecutor froze.
“This is true,” Kwin reasoned. “K’tax will be PREpared, but ALso, we now UNderstand how they hide Among the ASteroids. Thanks to the CAPtain, they will find it HARDer to hide from us in the FUture.”
Jaeger gave Kwin a small, appreciative nod. The blue-streaked alien returned it in kind.
“We will not be fair-weather friends,” Jaeger added, lifting her voice again to fill the chamber. “Make allies of us, and we will hold fast in good times and in bad. This gesture is not meant to be a single act of trade. It is the prelude to what can be a long and prosperous relationship. Allow my people to settle and build lives on Locaur, and we will help protect the planet from further K’tax raids.”
Another rustling murmur passed through the crowd.
“We have ALready AGreed to ALLow you to SETTle,” came a cautious voice from the crowd. It was the vaguely feminine voice from the first meeting. “CONditionally.”
“That is true,” Jaeger admitted. “With all due respect, your conditions were not reasonable. I cannot build a settlement with only twenty settlers. I certainly cannot help protect your cousins with so few.”
The rustled conversation lasted much longer, this time. In the distance, Jaeger thought she saw the massive Overseer figure move, shifting its weight with the ponderous speed of a glacier.
“You would do this?” The feminine voice asked. Jaeger still hadn’t been able to figure out which of the hundreds of motionless Overseer figures was speaking. “You would take REsponsibility for PROtecting the COUsins?”
Jaeger’s heart fluttered. It was the first time she had felt her heartbeat at all since yesterday’s epinephrine rush had burned her from the inside out.
“We are willing
to assist,” she agreed, breathless with hope. She saw a future of mutual cooperation between humans and Locauri unfolding before her, and it was perfect. “We are willing to work. Let me have the settlers I need, and yes, we will build a defense force to protect Locaur.”
“Three HUNdred,” the feminine voice said.
Jaeger’s hopes dropped like an egg onto cement. “Three hundred?”
“We do not EXpect you to build your DEfensive force in a SINgle GENeration. You may build it over DEcades, BEgining with three HUNdred SETTlers. No more. We have DEtermined that this will PROvide you with a deep Enough GEnetic pool to build a SUStainable POPulation.”
They had determined it, had they?
They’ve planned all this out, Jaeger realized. They came into this meeting already knowing what they would allow. They let the prosecutor do his little song and dance to appease the radicals on the council.
“You are still asking me to destroy hundreds of thousands of lives,” she said softly. “With more, I can defend the—”
“WE Will Aid in BATtle and—”
“I cannot kill my kind like this…”
“SIMple eggs,” the feminine voice said, not ungently. “We must OFTen cull EXcess eggs to ALLow the ones that REmain AMple REsources to thrive.”
Jaeger imagined the emotional process of selective abortion was a bit simpler when you had insect-like physiology and probably laid hundreds of eggs at a time.
“CAPtain? Is our ANAlysis COrrect? Will three HUNdred SETtlers PROvide APPropriate GENetic DIVersity?”
“Yes,” Jaeger whispered. “It will.” She had no more arguments to make, no threads to pull that would mean anything to these creatures, whose ideas of genocide and murder were so fundamentally different from her own. If three hundred could save the species, then to them, it didn’t matter if a thousand times more than that were destroyed in the process.
And Jaeger herself could compile no better an argument, at that moment, other than it feels wrong.
“Then it is SETtled.”
Like fuck it is, she thought.
Jaeger lifted her hand. “More,” she said hoarsely. When a few of the Overseers, and the Prosecutor, turned to stare at her, she forced herself to continue. “Three hundred more than what we have already. Three hundred blank slates.”
Fight me, she thought, eyes watering. Fight me on this. I dare you. Out of four hundred thousand, I will save three hundred more.
The silence that stretched through the vast chamber echoed, and echoed, and echoed.
Then, in the far distance, the unfathomably massive figure bent one limb.
“Very well,” the feminine voice said. “You may hatch three HUNdred ADDitional eggs. Not a SINGle egg more. No more tricks or EXceptions, CAPtain. We will not TOLerate any FURther MISunderstandings on the ISSue. Do we have ACCord?”
Jaeger swallowed a lump in her throat and forced herself to nod. “To be clear. I will hatch three hundred eggs and no more. That is what I agree to.”
“YEs.”
She would not let it be said that now, at the ratification of what might be the most important interstellar treaty in history, that Captain Sarah Jaeger wept or begged. She held her head high.
Besides, these aliens were obviously not familiar with loopholes.
“We have an accord.” She smiled.
Although Jaeger suspected the Overseers, Locauri, and K’tax all shared a common arthropod ancestor, the architectural style of the Overseers and K’tax could not be more different. When the Overseers had summoned her, they had commanded her to bring the rescued Locauri along. If not for their sake, she might have told the Overseers that they could damn well wait until she’d gotten a good night’s sleep.
The Overseer council chamber had been the single largest pressurized room Jaeger had ever seen in a spaceship—until, walking beside Kwin, she stepped out of another entrance. Then she realized that it was little more than the modest entryway to something exponentially larger.
She gasped.
The Overseers had taken an entire slice of old-growth forest and built a spaceship around it. Monolithic tree trunks, each of them sporting a dozen boughs as thick as an entire oak tree, marched off into the distance. Dimly lit holes and cubbies hollowed out of the trunks turned each tree into a column of pale yellow eyes. Carefully trained tree limbs created a network of platforms and ridiculously narrow bridges linking every tree to every other.
Mist obscured both the ground and the ceiling from view. In the distance, the slow, slender figures of massive stick insects crept along the trunks.
Moving with dizzying speed, Kwin scuttled across one of the bridges suspended over a vast expanse of nothing. He reached a platform of floating branches and turned, waving for her to follow.
She had to trust that her invisible bubble of human-compatible atmosphere would continue following her like a loyal dog. The bridges had no rails. Jaeger had to force herself not to look down as she followed Kwin to a nearby tree, through one of the skinny, glowing doorways, and into a chamber carved from the trunk.
Jaeger knew a medical bay when she saw one. Pods filled with a clear jelly that reminded Jaeger of the activation tank fluid lined it. Most of them contained Locauri bodies. At the far end of the chamber, two Overseers huddled over one of the pods, working large syringes and bright tweezers with the help of some kind of surgical droid. As Jaeger watched, one of the medics pulled a pulsing white egg cluster out of the Locauri’s cracked abdomen. When it moved aside to discard the eggs into an empty pod, Jaeger saw the familiar pattern of the Locauri’s olive-brown shell.
“Is Art going to be all right?” she asked fearfully.
One of the Overseers clicked, and Kwin translated for her. “Yes. It WIll take some TIme to REgrow the lost limbs, but they will all REcover. Thanks to you.”
Toner sat on the floor nearby, leaning against the wall. At the sound of conversation, his eyes fluttered open. “I asked if we could keep a couple of the K’tax eggs. I don’t think they took the request seriously.”
“Why would we want their eggs?” Jaeger stared at him.
He shrugged. “Caviar? Anyway, how’d it go?”
Jaeger gave him a wishy-washy hand-tilting gesture.
The surgical droid at the far end of the room moved suddenly, crawling toward them on long, delicate legs like a house centipede. A pattern of light rippled across its metal skin. “It is good to see you again, Captain Jaeger,” it chattered. “I’ve done some thinking since our last meeting. Upon analysis, I believe I have developed a clear understanding of why your AI program has found my intrusions offensive. I would like to offer it a gift of peace if you would be so kind as to pass it along.”
Jaeger stared at the quivering, waist-high centipede. Toner caught her eye and mouthed “AI.”
“You were a flying sphere the last time I saw you,” she said dumbly.
“Oh yes. I have many fully realized physical avatars. I can upload and download my consciousness into many different bio-synthetic constructions. My sphere form is best for quick travel and maneuverability. What you see here is my medical assistance form, complete with an array of tools built into my legs to assist in surgery. I have been busy examining the rescued cousins and—”
Kwin cut the chattering centipede off with a wave of his antennae. “The CAPtain is TIREd.”
“Of course,” the AI surgeon bot chattered. “I forget the limits of purely biological flesh. Forgive me.”
“No trouble,” Jaeger murmured.
A compartment opened in the surgeon bot’s underbelly and a small silver sphere, about the size of a ping-pong ball, rolled out. It floated in the air in front of Jaeger’s face.
“It’s a…mini-me?” Toner asked. “Or, uh, I mean a mini-you?”
“It is a compression program,” the centipede chirruped. “It is the same one I use to compress myself into my various droid avatars. Your AI can use it to load itself into one of your repair droids or perhaps a shuttle. Your ship
may even have the capacity to fabricate new droid designs better suited to your AI’s needs. It may appreciate a new way to experience life outside of its primary housing. Please, give it my regards. I am very sorry for the distress I have caused it.”
Jaeger and Toner exchanged glances, and Jaeger could tell they were both thinking the same thing. Virgil would have a conniption if they dared suggest it lower itself to slumming around in a repair droid.
Still, Jaeger took the sphere politely. “I will pass this along with your regards,” she allowed.
“Thank you very much, Captain. Do you have a few more minutes to chat? I’ve been going over some of the data I incidentally uploaded from your ship’s databases, and I have many, many questions.
“For example, why is it necessary to beat the sugar into the butter when making cookies, not the other way around? Also, what is butter? I understand the sucrose structure of a sugar molecule, such things are fairly common where we find carbon-based life, but I’m at a loss …”
Chapter Twenty-Four
As the stark decorating choices of his prison cell would attest, Seeker was not a man pursuant of the finer things in life.
Still, he figured his role in the battle had earned him a round in Percival LeBlanc’s long-unused sonic jacuzzi. Besides, he hadn’t fired a pea-shooter with the minigun’s kick in years—if ever. His hips and thighs were a patchwork of yellowing bruises, and somehow all the chin-ups in the world hadn’t prepared his arms for the ache.
Jacuzzi was a bit of a misnomer. The contraption was more akin to a sauna, a generously sized closet filled with shower head spigots and amplifiers that generated ultrasonic vibrations that made Seeker’s skin tingle—and not at all unpleasantly.
He was sinking onto the bench when the nearest speaker activated with a blurt.
Seeker’s eyes fluttered open. A holographic chessboard floated in the air in front of him, staticky and jumping in the cloud of vibrating water droplets. As Seeker stared, one of the white knights made a risky opening gambit across the board.
