To Challenge Heaven, page 4
“I see.” Vlad leaned back, gazing at the stony faces of the “breathers” around the table. “And I understand your anger over what was done. But forgive me for pointing out that if the Tairyonians’ … mental capacity and numbers have been so reduced, they would not seem promising material for President Howell’s Alliance. And there is the minor matter that the Liatu are currently in possession of the system. I suspect that both they and the rest of the Hegemony would not look favorably upon any attempt to dispossess them of it.”
“Agreed.” Wilson nodded. “But as far as your first point is concerned, their capacity doesn’t have to stay reduced. The details of the Liatu genetic bomb weren’t in the records, but there was more than enough for our medical people to reconstruct what they must’ve done. And come up with a way to undo it that we’re at least ninety percent confident will work.”
“Ah!” Vlad repeated in a very different tone, and Wilson nodded again.
“This is exactly what the Terran Alliance is supposed to be about preventing … or fixing,” he said. “We’ve got a moral responsibility to undo the genetic damage if we can, but to be brutally honest, rescuing the Tairyonians and repairing what was done to them—and documenting what was done to them by the ‘noble’ Liatu herbivores—should give us a pretty hefty bargaining chip when we come calling on any other species at risk from the Hegemony.”
“And if I recall correctly, Tairyon is over four hundred light-years—and what? Sixty-five years’ travel time?—from the Liatu homeworld,” Vlad said.
“More like four hundred fifty light-years and seventy-five years’ flight time for a Hegemony phase-drive. Of course, it’s a bit closer than that to Earth—only about four hundred and twenty. Even running the current Gannon Drive at max instead of easing off a bit, like we did on the trip out, that’s a seventeen-and-a-half-year trip. On the other hand, Gannon and his people were still tinkering with it when we left, and their projections said they were getting really close to the next plateau. God only knows what they’ll have by the time we get home! But the distances involved mean it’ll take at least seventy-five years for anybody in the Hegemony to realize the monkey boys and girls are rooting around in the Liatu’s back pasture. And that’s assuming somebody heads home to tell them about it the minute we get there. So, absolute worst-case, the Tairyonians get a hundred and fifty years—call it six generations, with neural education and modern medicine to reduce infant mortality—to recover from what the bastards did to them and get up to speed on our tech before anybody gets back to them from Liatu.”
“I see.”
“And, assuming things are proceeding according to plan back home, President Howell is now Ambassador Howell and heading the expedition currently en route to Tairyon,” Wilson said. “He’s got a few bones of his own to pick with people who think bioweapons are a good idea.”
“Yes,” Vlad murmured. “I imagine that is precisely how he would see it.”
“Damn straight,” Wilson said. Then waved an open hand at Boucher. “In the meantime, though, I think we should probably let Christian get back to Operation Riposte.”
“Indeed.” Vlad faced the Frenchman squarely. “So I presume that the underlying logic of ‘Operation Riposte’ depends upon the ‘submission’ mechanism of the Shongairi?”
“It does.” Boucher nodded. “In fact, it depends upon a much deeper appreciation for Shongair psychology than we possessed at the time of your departure. I believe Ambassador Dvorak’s already mentioned the Shongair honor code—Jukaris—to you?”
Vlad nodded, and Boucher shrugged again.
“Jukaris can be thought of much like the Japanese code of Bushido, but ‘Bushido’ is in many ways what might be called an umbrella for a host of variations on a central theme that one might call chivalry. It has evolved as Japanese culture evolved and changed over the centuries, and it is essentially … philosophical in nature. It’s a code of conduct for the individual, and there have been many what one might call ‘schools’ of Bushido. And as many philosophies, especially military philosophies, over the course of human history, Bushido has sometimes been perverted, as when it was twisted into what amounted to a national suicide pact in the course of the Second World War.
“Jukaris goes even deeper in Shongair history and society than Bushido in the Japanese experience. It evolved out of the nature of the primordial Shongair pack’s psychology, and there are far fewer ‘variations on the theme’ in Jukaris than in Bushido. What variations exist are minor and consist of what might be called differing interpretations of the ‘fine print’ by individual pack groups. The central core of Jukaris, and its governing tenets, are accepted by the entire Shongair species. Even the variations between pack groups have been adjudicated, with legal precedents to determine which pack group governs in a given situation for literally centuries. Galactic centuries, not our own.”
“Indeed?” Vlad tipped back slightly in his chair. “And how does this code of honor speak to our present situation?”
“Essentially,” Boucher said, “Jukaris codifies the pack’s challenge and submission mechanism. None of the xenopsychologists are prepared to offer a definitive opinion, even now, on how much of Shongair psychology is ‘hardwired’ and how much of it is a purely social construct, but given Jukaris’ longevity and persistence, I, for one, incline toward the ‘hardwired’ thesis. This is a truly ancient part of Shongair culture—its recorded form literally dates back as far as the Shongair Bronze Age, as if the Code of Hammurabi had survived into our own time. And whichever came first, the chicken or the egg, Jukaris is very much central to Shongair thinking. It lays down the moral and philosophical justifications for both the beta’s right to challenge the alpha and for the beta’s responsibility to submit once the alpha’s dominance has been proved.”
“Actually,” Vlad said, his eyes intent, “one might argue that Hammurabi’s laws contributed significantly to the underlying DNA of even modern Western legal thought.”
“A valid point, Your Highness.” Boucher nodded. “But after four thousand years, that Babylonian DNA has become far more attenuated than in the case of the Shongairi’s Jukaris. Unlike Hammurabi’s laws, Jukaris is a living, dynamic philosophical code which is directly incorporated into their current legal jurisprudence, not simply social practice. For example, it’s expanded to provide for and govern non-combat challenge modes. A Shongair bureaucrat may ‘challenge’ a superior for promotion into that superior’s position under Jukaris, not on the basis of physical combat but on the basis of demonstrated levels of performance. And, arguably, Thikair violated Jukaris in his operations against Earth. That’s a significant point of which the Shongair Empire cannot be aware, since none of Thikair’s ships survived to report back to it.”
“And does ‘Jukaris’ enshrine some reason the Shongair should have extended their honor concepts to an alien species it intended to enslave?” Vlad asked skeptically.
“That, unfortunately, is an interesting and as yet undetermined point,” Wilson said with a grimace. “It’s what the Expeditionary Force is here to find out, really. But it seems pretty clear that whether or not Thikair ever believed the provisions of Jukaris applied to alien species, its concepts and the entire challenge-submission mechanism it rests on were fundamental to his strategy and choice of tactics.”
“In what way?”
“Thikair’s own memos and an analysis of his actions make it clear that the massive strike on Earth’s pre-invasion military forces wasn’t prompted solely by his recognition of how powerful they were,” Boucher replied. “While it’s true that the Shongair psychology and honor code enshrine the principle of submission to a proven superior—and regard refusal to submit as a highly dishonorable act—the internal mechanisms are rather more complex than we’d believed. There’s no dishonor, in Shongair eyes, to being bested, to acknowledging that one is the beta to another’s alpha. But there is dishonor—and quite a lot of it—in not first striving to one’s utmost to avoid being bested. That is, it is the honor responsibility of the beta to force the alpha to demonstrate his superiority before acknowledging defeat.
“Thikair anticipated that, had he not struck our pre-invasion militaries such a devastating blow, we would have fought back—hard—to the best of our capability, as his concept of honor would have required. From the pragmatic viewpoint of securing control of the planet, that would have made his task far more difficult, and that was probably the main driver of his strategy. But, in addition, just as the beta is honor bound to resist to the utmost of his ability, the alpha is honor bound to demonstrate his superiority by besting the beta as rapidly as possible, and he confidently expected the total destruction of our organized military forces—and the decapitation of our civilian governments—would demonstrate that to us.”
“Well, that didn’t work out for him real well,” Buchevsky observed.
“No.” Boucher nodded in agreement with the observation. “But remember that by his lights, he had proved, in the most decisive imaginable fashion, that the Shongairi were the alphas in the equation. However he’d chosen to do it, he’d accomplished that part of the process and proved, both to his own satisfaction and—he believed—to our own, that no effective resistance was possible. And to be totally honest, he would have been ultimately correct in that, had not you, Prince Vlad, and the other ‘vampires’ been able to intervene. There’s a great deal of material buried in the archives to suggest his methodology would have been considered less than honorable against another Shongair, which may indicate that Jukaris doesn’t apply to an alien species. But as a countervailing point, his own memos and the minutes of his staff meetings make it clear that in his thinking, he and the Shongair Empire would have been obligated to respect our role as betas and treat us as honorably submitted subjects of the Emperor if we had submitted after his initial ‘demonstration strike.’ That suggests that Jukaris would have applied to us, at least in his eyes and in his initial planning. It’s unlikely that we would have possessed all of the rights of the Shongairi, but the Empire would have been prohibited by its own honor codes and legal framework from contemplating anything remotely like what the Liatu did to the Tairyonians.
“And to the point of how the Empire might have regarded Thikair’s actions, another reason Ambassador Dvorak has become convinced the imperial government would never have authorized Thikair’s bioweapon is the Shongairi’s profound respect for their habitat. They evolved out of hunters, not farmers. When they developed ‘agriculture,’ it was only so that they might better breed and produce their domesticated meat animals. And, like all apex hunters, in their pre-technic existence, they were dependent upon the habitat that produced the herbivores upon which they preyed. Preserving that habitat—avoiding its destruction or pollution and culling the herd to prevent it from destroying it through overgrazing—is imprinted upon the Shongairi at an almost genetic level. One reason they were so shocked by our widespread use of fossil fuels and other non-nuclear means of power generation was because of their negative impact upon our environment. Indeed, I think it’s probable that Thikair’s best chance to convince his Emperor to accept his actions—at least after the fact—was that our use of fossil fuels demonstrated that we constituted the equivalent of deer or elk overgrazing our range, and if so, our … poor stewardship of our world might very well—indeed, probably—have weighed in the balance against us.”
“But the point here,” Wilson said, pulling Vlad’s and Buchevsky’s attention back to him, “is that the Shongairi do have this alpha-beta submission mechanism, and that so nearly as we can tell from the records, Jukaris and its workings run deeper and are even more decisive than the social tradition that turned the Qwernians into Dvorakians. If we can convince them to submit, we may well bring them to genuinely embrace the concept of the Alliance, and that would add all the star systems they’ve already colonized or conquered to the mix, as well.”
“And how does ‘Operation Riposte’ propose we accomplish that?” Vlad’s tone was torn between skepticism and something very like disappointment, and Wilson gave him a shark-like smile.
“I have five entire Space Marine brigades up here,” he said. “Numerically that’s a good bit less than the strength Thikair had along. In terms of combat power?” He snorted. “Trust me—there’s no comparison!
“Now, when we turn up and demand their surrender, their Navy’s almost certain to fight. There’s that business about ‘striving to the utmost,’ after all. It’s possible that after the dreadnoughts and their orbital defenses get smashed, they’ll recognize our superiority and surrender. From our analysis, we don’t think that’s likely. We think we’ll have to go down and demonstrate our superiority on the ground, as well, unless we want to do a Thikair and just blast hell out of them with kinetic strikes. Our current plans call for us to avoid mega casualties to the best of our ability, though, and the xenologists think that once the Shongairi figure out we were ‘going easy on them,’ doing our damnedest to avoid mass slaughter and ecological mayhem while we proved hell out of our alpha status, it will only deepen their recognition and acceptance of honorable defeat. But no matter how hard we try, it’s going to be ugly. Frankly, I’d love to convince them to roll over with a few demonstration strikes. Maybe, I dunno, write our names on their moon, like Chairface.”
Buchevsky surprised himself with a bark of laughter at the mention of one of a much younger Stephen Buchevsky’s favorite animated villains, and Wilson grinned at him. But then the grin faded, and he shook his head.
“I’d like that, honestly. Truth in advertising, I’m like you guys; I want some of our own back—a lot of our own back, really—for what happened to us. But like Dave says, no one in this star system had anything to do with Thikair’s decision to kill us all. For that matter, it’s been eighty years since Thikair set out. Hell, the Emperor who sent him may be dead by now, even with antigerone. But everything we’ve seen indicates that they’ll fight, and they’ll fight hard, before they surrender. So whether or not I want to kill job lots of Shongairi, I’m pretty sure we’ll get a hell of a lot of payback for what happened to Earth, anyway.”
PUNS RELENTLESS,
SHONG SYSTEM,
241.5 LY FROM EARTH,
APRIL 9, YEAR 41 TE.
“That smells delicious.”
Stephen Buchevsky sounded a bit wistful, and Alexander Jackson smiled sympathetically as the two of them crossed the living room of the Dvoraks’ comfortable shipboard suite with Thornak BryMerThor.
The Sarthians, he’d discovered, were more than “just” bodyguards. Specifically, despite Merahl’s superior military rank, Captain Brykira was the neutro “anchor” of the BryMerThor triad. And the fact that ou (Buchevsky was still getting used to the Sarthian neutro pronouns) also just happened to be Herdsman Belsorak, which translated into English roughly as Earl Bright Shield, meant both Merahl and Thornak bore the title of Herdsman Consort Belsorak, since Sarthian patents of nobility passed through the neutro parent, in addition to their military ranks. Perhaps even more to the point, Brykira also just happened to be the grandchild of Yairka CharYairSha nar Dvorak, Flock Lord Consort Thairlahn, Dave Dvorak’s (and Abu Bakr’s) Dvorakian chancellor on Sarth. Aristocratic connections didn’t get much higher than that, and Buchevsky had already recognized that the triad were Dvorak’s Sarthian “sounding board” as well as his bodyguards.
The sherhynas clearly took their protective responsibilities seriously, however, and one of them stood post outside the Dvoraks’ quarters whenever one or more of the Dvoraks in question were home. Tonight, Merahl had that duty, but Sarthian custom required that at least one bodyguard have the indoor “close cover” watch on social occasions, as well. And Bektor nar Dvorak, Sharon’s personal sherhyna, looked up from his post by the open door through which various delectable aromas wafted.
It was probably fortunate that Qwernian—Dvorakan—custom required only a single sherhyna for a clan ruler consort. Buchevsky didn’t like to think about how Sharon would have reacted to being trailed around by three of them. For that matter, it was probably fortunate that all four of them had become members of the Dvorak clan in more ways than one.
Stephen Buchevsky knew exactly how the Dvorak “extended family” tended to envelop anyone who crossed its path, and it was obvious that had happened to the Sarthians. Which let everyone pretend Thornak and Bektor had just dropped by for dinner rather than admit they were there as the Dvoraks’ mandated bodyguards.
And that enveloping process also explained the Sarthians’ tartan kilts. The kilt itself was normal Sarthian attire; the tartan was that of Clan Gunn, the clan to which the Irish Clan Wilson was sept. What Buchevsky hadn’t figured out yet was whether the idea had been Sharon’s or Dvorak’s, but he had discovered that the Sarthians took it very, very seriously.
“I like a lot of Dave’s cooking,” Jackson continued now, sniffing appreciatively, “but I really do think I like his spaghetti sauce best of all. Of course, I can’t appreciate the aroma the way you guys can.” He shook his head. “Until Pieter and Dan started working with the medics, I don’t think any of us could imagine what it must be like to control your senses the way you ‘vampires’ can. And even with direct neural links and built-in sensory boosters incorporated into the wetware, I don’t think we can match that even now. We can come a lot closer, mind you, but General Torino can still pull stuff out of his sense of smell and hearing in ways no ‘breather’ I know can.”
