To Challenge Heaven, page 29
Sherak stiffened internally at the alien’s obvious lack of surprise. Assuming that it truly was unsurprised, she reminded herself. She still couldn’t read its expressions or body language, and it could have instructed its translating software to inject whatever emotions it chose into the Liatu words it produced.
“That’s precisely what I’ve done,” she told it, ignoring the contemptuous tone of its last sentence.
“I’m not surprised. It’s what the Shongairi planned when we proved a bit too difficult to conquer. We didn’t much care for it. In fact, we take the entire notion of things like bioweapons and genetic bombs pretty personally, I’m afraid, First Minister. So if you chose to deploy any such weapon against the Tairyonians, it would be a very bad decision on your part.”
“Why?” Sherak spat back. “What do I have to lose? What have you creatures left me to lose? So now it’s your turn to choose how all of this works out. Either you withdraw from the inner system and allow me to send a message to Erquoid and inform the Hegemony Council of events here, then wait to hear back from it … or else I deploy the weapon.”
“Really?”
“Try landing a shuttle on this planet and find out,” Sherak said flatly.
“If you were to successfully do anything of the sort,” Howell said levelly, “I would totally destroy every orbital habitat in the star system. And then I’d carry out a systematic kinetic bombardment of your planetary population enclaves.”
“Oh, would you?” Sherak sneered pure orange contempt at him. “Are you really stupid enough to expect me to believe you’d commit an atrocity like that over less than two million primitive creatures barely smart enough to bury their own feces when you know how the Hegemony would inevitably respond in the fullness of time?! Do you truly think I’m that gullible and stupid?”
“Actually, I realized long ago that you’re far stupider than I initially thought was physically possible,” Howell told her. “In fact, given your ongoing delusion that there’s some reason I or any other human should give a single solitary damn about the Hegemony’s ‘inevitable responses’ to whatever happens here, I expect any one of the Tairyonians you despise is smarter than you are. But you—and when I say ‘you,’ I mean you, as an individual, specifically—would be very ill-advised to even attempt to carry out your threat.”
“And why would that be?” Sherak demanded contemptuously.
“Because if you don’t order your subordinates to destroy your bioweapon, without harming a single Tairyonian, within the next five Earth minutes—ah, that would be one of your siltahls, First Minister—you’ll die and I’ll continue this discussion with Second Minister Hyrak, who I suspect will prove more reasonable after your death. And if she doesn’t, there’s always Third Minister Lyralk. Or Fourth Minister Gortuni. Eventually, I’m sure someone—even a Liatu—will see reason.”
“I’m in a concealed location, and—”
“You’re in a command bunker seven hundred and fifty meters—four of your siljeshes—under the Palace of Government,” Howell interrupted.
Sherak’s mouth hung open for a moment. Then she shook off her surprise at the fresh, casually displayed evidence that the human knew far too much about her planet.
“Yes, I am,” she said. “And that means I’m directly under the largest city on this planet. You expect me to believe that you’d murder three and a half million Liatus just to kill me? What happens to your high and mighty ‘moral’ objection to our treatment of the nuisance animals if you do that?”
“To be honest, there’s a part of me that could live with killing job lots of Liatus just fine,” the human replied coldly. “But I don’t like that part very much. It reminds me too much of you, First Minister. Fortunately, the problem doesn’t arise. I can kill you at any moment I choose without harming a single additional Liatu. I suppose I shouldn’t say this, but the fact is that I would truly appreciate the opportunity to demonstrate that. And I will, if you don’t immediately give the order to destroy your bioweapon.”
“Oh, you will?” Sherak sneered. “Then you’d better do it now, because if you haven’t started leaving planetary orbit in the same siltahl you just gave me, I’ll deploy the weapon. So if you genuinely think you can kill me to stop that, go right ahead and try!”
“Have it your own way,” another human voice said, and First Minister Sherak, Second Hatched of Her Brood, Daughter of Ursahl, of the Line of Sercom, lurched up from her chair in shock.
That voice hadn’t come over the com. It had come from inside the bunker, from directly behind her, and she started to twist around towards it, eyes widening in shock.
She was still rising from her chair when a five-fingered hand—a human hand, its fingertips armed with curved, razor-sharp claws at least a sorljesh long—reached around her and ripped out her throat.
Adjunct Yursak lunged to his own feet, staring in disbelieving horror at the human who’d somehow infiltrated the command bunker without setting off a single alarm and then materialized out of thin air, like the demon in some Kreptu fairy tale, to murder the First Minister before his eyes.
“I think you’d better get Second Minister Hyrak on the com, Adjunct,” Pieter Ushakov said across Sherak’s still-quivering body.
He flicked her blood from his hand as the talons that had shredded her throat retracted into his fingers, and his blue eyes were frozen ice.
“I’m pretty sure she’ll want to talk to Ambassador Howell.”
PUNS INEXORABLE,
TAIRYON SYSTEM,
419.9 LY FROM EARTH,
JANUARY 2, 43 TE.
“So the situation dirtside is definitely under control, Mister President,” Lieutenant General Palazzola said, winding up his report. “I don’t say any of the Froggies are happy about it, because they aren’t.” He shrugged. “On the other hand, there’s not a lot they can do about it.”
“Aleandro’s right about that, Mister President,” Admiral Swenson put in. “And between my boarding parties and Rog’s technical people, we have control of their complete orbital infrastructure, as well.”
“That’s your assessment, too, Rog?” Judson Howell looked across the briefing room table at Director of Industrial Operations Roger MacQuarie.
He and MacQuarie had been friends since college. More to the point, for the purposes of this conversation, MacQuarie was the man he’d put in charge of creating the mammoth industrial capacity humanity had built around the starting kernel of the platforms they’d captured from Fleet Commander Thikair.
And he was also the man who’d accompanied the Tairyon Mission for the express purpose of converting the Liatu industrial infrastructure to the service of the Terran Alliance.
“Yes,” he said now, and shrugged. “We’re still sorting through some of the lower-level command interfaces, but we have complete control of the upper-tier nodes. It’s going to be a couple of more weeks—our weeks, not Liatu weeks—before my people are comfortable enough to start rooting out all of the Hegemony’s damned software redundancies and introducing something like real efficiency to them, but that’s all pretty much routine at this point. It’s not like we haven’t done it before, after all! And the platforms we brought with us are already deploying. Give me a few months, and we’ll have pretty much tripled the system’s current capacity.”
“Good.” Howell smiled nastily. “And you’ll have such a good purpose to put it all to!”
An unpleasant chuckle ran around the compartment, and Howell smiled more broadly.
He supposed it was unfortunate that Second Minister Hyrak had proved no more reasonable than her old—and recently deceased—friend Sherak when Adjunct Yursak patched Pieter through to her in the backup command bunker.
It had proved unfortunate for Hyrak, at any rate.
For obvious reasons, no Liatu had even suspected the capabilities the “vampires” provided to Howell. They’d never suspected that someone like Pieter didn’t need a shuttle to reach their planet’s surface, or that his cloud of nanobots could flow invisibly through any command bunker hatch that was left conveniently open for him. If Hyrak had been even a tiny bit more naturally reflective than Sherak, though, it might at least have occurred to her that if the humans could infiltrate one command bunker undetected, there was no reason they couldn’t have infiltrated two of them.
Unhappily for her, it hadn’t. She’d not only rejected Pieter’s com message, she’d actually begun issuing the order to deploy the bioweapon.
Until Jasmine Sherman materialized out of the thin air of her bunker and presented the same argument against her decision that Pieter had already presented to Sherak.
After which Third Minister Lyralk had been only too eager to order the weapon’s destruction and surrender the system.
That had been just under a week ago, and the stunned, shellshocked Liatu were still just beginning to adjust to the tectonic changes sweeping through “their” star system.
Sherak’s and Hyrak’s actions—and fates—suggested to Howell that even after meeting Sherak, his estimate of Liatu arrogance and hubris had remained too low. He’d come to the conclusion since that it would be almost impossible to overestimate those qualities, and it was obvious the Liatu had no intention of abiding by the terms of their surrender unless a boot was kept firmly planted on the backs of their nonexistent necks.
Aleandro Palazzola’s three Space Marine divisions, backed by Francisca Swenson’s warships, were a very substantial boot, however.
The Tairyon Mission’s preliminary planning had always presumed that something very much like the “Battle of Tairys”—although, actually, the “Massacre of Tairys” would be a better name for it—was probably inevitable. And it had also called for Tairyon to be massively fortified against any potential Hegemony counterattack afterward, especially if any Liatu starships had managed to escape with word of what had happened here. None of them had, however, which meant MacQuarie’s construction crews would have decades—probably at least a couple of centuries, minimum—to work on those fortifications. Given what human-designed weapons platforms and starships were already capable of, that promised a rude reception should the aforesaid potential counterattack ever materialize.
Of course, quite a bit of that industrial capacity would be doing other things for the next few years, he thought with profound satisfaction.
The Liatus here in Tairyon were only beginning to come to grips with the ways in which their lives were about to change, and he expected them to be very, very unhappy when they realized he’d meant what he’d told Sherak about the Terran Alliance’s determination to return Tairys to its proper owners.
His medical teams were already spreading out across the planet, dusting the nomadic Tairyonian bands with the nanotech they’d brought with them from Earth, and early indications were that it might prove even more effective than they’d hoped. The damage to the Tairyonians’ cognitive functions was actually the result of the subtle rearrangement of no more than two or three protein analogues on their chromosomes. Repairing that damage for future generations of Tairyonians was straightforward—indeed, child’s play for modern medical capabilities. Repairing it in current generations had been more problematic, but even the present generation’s fully mature adults seemed to be responding well. It would probably be a while before they were prepared for the concept of peaceful interaction with any non-Tairyonian, and the human medical teams were being very, very cautious about attempting to initiate contact, but it was obvious that would be happening even sooner than the original mission planners had dared to hope.
And in the meantime, other humans would be making room for them. Not the way the Liatu had “culled” their own ancestors, although he suspected that relatively few of the Liatus currently living on Tairys would see the Terran Alliance’s policy in a favorable light. And in some ways, he couldn’t really blame them for that, since every single one of them would be moving to an orbital habitat over the next five local years.
That was almost eleven Earth years, and he really would have preferred to push the transition even faster, get it done and out of the way while the Liatu were still in their present state of shock, unlikely to muster anything but passive resistance. That was as quickly as even Galactic-level technology could produce the habitats that would be required, however. Particularly since he had no intention of simply packing them into their new homes like sardines. He had no objection to—in fact, he firmly supported—the notion of providing them with the orbital equivalent of luxury condominiums, and he’d stressed to MacQuarie’s engineers that the Liatu habitats had to be amply provided with the aquatic elements their species craved. But they would be moved off the world their ancestors had stolen from its original, brutalized inhabitants.
Humanity had a sufficiently dismal record for its own dealings with indigenous peoples over the centuries. Yet that record paled to insignificance beside the sort of policies Galactics like the Liatu habitually deployed against any species—like the Tairyonians—who got in their way. The Planetary Union was determined to learn from its own ancestors’ mistakes and misdeeds and equally determined to hold the Hegemony accountable for its even more egregious crimes.
Howell suspected that General Palazzola’s Space Marines might find themselves confronting more than merely passive opposition before the great Liatu migration was complete. In many ways, he actually sympathized. Much as he might despise the Liatus’ policy toward the Tairyonians—or “inferior species” in general—and despite the contempt he still felt for Sherak and her minions, he did understand that Tairys was the only world its Liatu inhabitants had ever known. That he was evicting them from their own homeworld. And if, at some time in the future, the restored Tairyonians were prepared to allow any Liatu to return to the planetary surface, he would applaud their decision. But it must be their decision, and he would not put their ability to reclaim their own world at risk by leaving hundreds of millions of Liatus on it while they did it.
It’s an imperfect solution, he thought now. But we live in an imperfect universe, and we aren’t the ones who screwed this part of it up.
“All right,” he said out loud. “I think the situation is under control here, and since it is, it’s time I headed home to report in.” He shook his head. “I’ve got a pretty fair idea that some of your former fellows are going to be moderately appalled by how we handled this, Arthur!”
“Oh, I think you can take that for granted.” Arthur McCabe rolled his eyes. “Dad and I argued enough over what he thought we’d be doing once we got here. I guarantee you that he’s going to do his best to raise merry hell over what’s actually happened. After all, we’ve clearly just poisoned the well where the possibility of amicable relations with the Liatu are concerned.”
“Amicable relations?” Admiral Swenson repeated quizzically, and McCabe snorted.
“Dad is genuinely doing his best to be ‘realistic’ and ‘pragmatic,’ Admiral. And I have to say that before Sarth—and before Ambassador Dvorak and Alex got hold of me—I was very much where he is now. For that matter, I wish he was right. The thought of—what was it Sherak called us? One ‘miserable little species’?—challenging the entire rest of the galaxy should be more than enough to make anyone with a working brain nervous as hell. But I’m afraid this is one of those situations where practical experience makes it impossible for me to pretend we could avoid that even if we wanted to.” He looked at Howell. “Ambassador Dvorak’s right, Mister President. And so are you. If I’d still doubted that for a second, what we’ve seen out of the Liatu here in Tairyon would have cured me.” He shook his head, his expression grim. “The mere fact that we’re what and who we are means conflict with the Hegemony is inevitable. Inescapable. They can’t let us loose to destabilize their neatly organized arrangements, threaten their technological ‘stability.’ Trying to avoid that conflict could only put us in an even weaker position to survive it when it comes.”
“I know.” Howell nodded. “At the same time, I’m trying—we all need to try—to avoid taking that so much for granted that we get even more bloody-minded and confrontational than we absolutely have to. That’s what quite a few people back home are going to wonder about where our policy—my policy, really—here in Tairyon is concerned. Which is why I need to get home and start explaining and, if necessary, justifying it.
“Fernando,” he looked at Ambassador Garçāo, who was about to become Governor Garçāo, “are you ready to take over?”
“I think yes,” Garçāo replied with a shrug. “I know the Liatu will get … more restive as their military defeat recedes into memory, but I think Arthur, Kacey, and I can handle it, with Aleandro and Francisca’s able assistance.”
He smiled at Kacey Zukowski. The former Planetary Union Secretary of War would be remaining behind as Garçāo’s military advisor. Her husband, Donald, would remain with her, as what would amount to Garçāo’s Attorney General. Or his interface into the system’s existing Liatu legal structure, anyway.
Howell smiled at Kacey, as well. He knew how competent she was, and he’d be leaving Swenson’s entire fleet, minus the transport Isaac O’Reilly, as the nucleus of the Tairyon System Defense Force. It would be Kacey’s task to integrate the new fortifications and heavily automated warships MacQuarie would be building into something sufficient to break the teeth of any Hegemony effort to reclaim the system. He was confident that any routine Hegemony visit to Tairyon would be drawn into the spider’s web the Terran Alliance intended to build out here, but eventually, someone was going to wonder why no one had heard anything from Tairyon in the last couple of centuries. By the time they got around to sending someone to make inquiries, the Alliance would have turned the star system into a fortress fit to sneer at Galactic armadas.
