Hunted, page 21
As for the actual content of the conversation—like which high admiral said what to whom during a recent summit on some race called the Peacocks—I sleepily let it pass by till Prope asked me, “So what did your father think of it all?”
I jerked awake. Felt myself blushing. Prope knew who I was; and as I glanced around the table, Harque smirking, Festina looking grim, Kaisho hidden behind her hair but tilting her head to one side as if she was eager to hear my answer—I realized they all knew. Since I’d come aboard, they must have had time to look over my navy records.
Dumb me: I should have expected they’d check. Smart people learn who they’re dealing with. I just wished…I don’t know. I wished I could have stayed Edward York instead of becoming Alexander York’s son. Especially with the way Festina felt about High Council admirals.
“Um,” I said. “Um. My father has never told me what he thinks about anything. Except maybe when he was talking to somebody else and didn’t notice I was in the room. I haven’t heard a word from him in the past twenty years; and even back then, he sent letters to my sister, not me. After Sam died…” I stopped, remembering Sam wasn’t dead. “My father and I aren’t close,” I mumbled, hoping folks would leave it at that.
Prope didn’t. “Frankly, I’m astounded,” she said, “that you and your dad are…estranged.” She gave me a sympathetic smile. Prope’s kind of sympathy anyway. “You look so much like him, you know. A chip off the old block. Only better—more handsome.”
She laughed lightly. I tried to laugh too, but didn’t do such a great job; no matter how stupid you are, you get good at spotting when someone is flirting with you. If you don’t flirt back, you’re being rude, or a prig. Except that I never think fast enough to toss off sexy banter, especially when I don’t feel sexy. (If you really want to snare me into bed, convince me you’re lonely, not coy.)
So for a second, I just sat there with no idea what to say. I didn’t want to talk about my father, and I definitely didn’t want to talk about being handsome. Then I found myself replying, “Sorry, Captain, but the real chip off the old block was my twin sister Samantha. Another case of ‘my father’s looks only better’—stupendously better, almost as beautiful as the lovely ladies here at this table—but Sam inherited Dad’s personality too. His force of will. Which I’m afraid led her to a bad end.”
“You have our sympathies, Your Majesty,” Kaisho whispered. She stressed Your Majesty just a bit, not sarcastically but pointedly. As if she knew she was talking to more than boring old Edward York, Explorer Second Class.
Yes. I’d been possessed again—a backseat passenger watching someone or something else take the wheel. Almost as beautiful as the lovely ladies here at this table…I’d never say something like that. I wondered why Festina didn’t demand, “What’s wrong with you?” Even if we’d only known each other a single day, she should have noticed the difference. But she just said, Tell us about your sister, Edward. What really happened to the mission on Troyen?”
“The thing controlling me was only too happy to give its version of those long-ago days…a version filled with jokes and sly asides, many of them directed toward Prope. “Oh Captain, you should have seen…” “If only I could have shown you…” “Perhaps someday we can walk through the…” Nudging her on the good parts, making Troyen’s descent into war sound like a series of silly missteps and goofed-up blunders rather than a desperate fight to avoid a fight.
As the spirit possessing me made Prope’s eyes gleam, smirking over tales of disintegration, I thought about what really happened. The truth.
What really happened were the wrong ideas at the wrong time. I guess that’s an old, old story in human history, and it’s just as common in other parts of the galaxy.
Mandasars were genetically programmed for monarchy…anyone could see that. But not everyone could accept it. Least of all some of the races who started visiting once Troyen joined the League of Peoples.
You know what I’m talking about—you’ve probably watched The Evolution Hour at least once, where that purple Cashling with the high-pitched voice yells at everybody how Totally Selfish Anarchy™ is the only way for any race to advance up the ladder of sentience. Then there are those “free sensuous VR experiences” that really just send you to a Unity Arcana Dance, and the “traveling art shows” that the Myriapods think will inspire you to reject the decadent Culture of Entertainment they say has poisoned human civilization. A lot of aliens are fanatically determined to make humans see the error of our ways.
But humans have always had it easy compared to the Mandasars. We never pissed off the Fasskisters.
The same way Mandasars specialized in medical stuff, the Fasskisters specialized in robotics. You wouldn’t think there’d be much overlap between the two fields, but there is. Fasskister robots have a lot of biological components, because there are fancy things you can do with organic chemistry that are real hard to match with electronics. The other place medicine meets cybernetics is the whole area of nanotech: doctors really love teeny microscopic robots that can get inside a person’s body, snip away at tumors, scrape guck out of arteries, that kind of thing.
So Troyen always had tons of trade with the Fasskisters—selling sophisticated new tissues for use in robots, and buying smart little nanites for doctorish tricks. Both Mandasars and Fasskisters should have been happy with the booming business…except for one tiny problem: Fasskisters can’t stand royalty. It drives them positively manic.
A long time ago the Fasskisters had royals of their own, a whole separate caste like Mandasar queens; and overall these rulers were pretty decent types, competent, generous, not too tyrannical. In fact, that was the problem. One day, someone from the League of Peoples showed up and declared that the royals were sentient, but the commoners weren’t. Next thing you know, most of the noble caste left the home planet for upscale homes in the stars. The normal folks who were stuck behind got so mad they killed the nobles who stayed and swore they’d never tolerate monarchy again. Even after the commoners got civilized enough to be accepted into the League (a thousand years later), the Fasskisters were still totally rabid on the subject of crowns and thrones and palaces.
Samantha said it was a big psychological thing: the Fasskisters still had this bred-in drive to be ruled by royals, but they felt all betrayed and abandoned by their leaders, so they overcompensated with aggressive antimonarchical something or other. Like humans who don’t have a mother, and feel this big hole in their lives, even if they have kindly nannies and all the toys in the world.
So no matter how much the Fasskisters depended on Troyen for trade, they just couldn’t stomach the idea of queens. In fact, they took every possible chance to rabble-rouse, preaching how a democratically elected parliament—or a republic or an oligarchy or technocracy or even a random selection of two hundred people from the Unshummin census database—could run the planet better than High Queen Verity and the three lower queens.
This stirred up trouble…not a lot at first, because Mandasars pretty well ignored what the Fasskisters said, but as time went on, the Fasskisters learned how to play on the natural discontents of the people. Whenever anything went wrong for the Mandasars—a deal falling through, a tissue graft that didn’t hold, natural disasters, or even just at the end of a long slogging workday—you might find a Fasskister there, whispering how the queen was to blame.
Naturally, it made the queens furious. Several times they expelled the worst of the troublemakers, but that was bad for business. Not only did it sour trade with the Fasskisters, but it upset other races too: Troyen wasn’t “alien-friendly.” So mostly the queens had to let it go—grumble to themselves as they kept their claws tight shut and their stingers tucked away.
But they still hated it. In the end, they approached a third party to see if anyone could get the Fasskisters to back off.
Enter a small diplomatic mission, headed by Samantha York of the Outward Fleet.
First day on the job: an official reception in the Great Hall of Verity’s palace in Unshummin city. It was a huge space, three stories high with mezzanine galleries, and long enough to hold an Olympic javelin throw…but no artificial lights at all. Instead, the place was filled with Weeshi, a bioengineered insect that was like a firefly with no flicker. Little glass dishes of sugar water were hung overhead to feed the Weeshi, so light tended to concentrate around the dishes; but there were still plenty of Weeshi just flitting about on their own—like tiny roving stars glittering in every direction.
In honor of us navy folks, the room was swathed in a turquoisy blue that Verity had designated the caste color of Homo sapiens. (Mandasars felt sincere pity that humans didn’t have a set color scheme—we were all different skin tones, not to mention shades of eyes and hair—so Verity insisted on giving us official title to that turquoisy blue. That way, we wouldn’t feel all bashful and inadequate among people who had a real caste color.)
I didn’t look so bad in turquoisy blue. Sam, of course, looked fabulous…especially since she was wearing the color in a slinky evening gown with one skintight sleeve and the other arm bare. Sam had our outfits made before we left New Earth; and I can’t tell you how snippish other diplomats got, that no one else was told about dressing in that color. They were all stuck with a bunch of ugly shapeless jumpsuits made by Mandasar tailors. (The tailors knew that Homo sapiens had two arms, two legs, and a head, but that was pretty much the limit of their familiarity with the human form.)
Since it was our first official function, my sister kept me close to make sure I didn’t get into trouble; but I couldn’t really tell what she thought I might do. Go dance in the fountains that were spritzing up turquoisy blue water? Munch on the turquoisy blue floral arrangements? Climb the turquoisy blue draperies that had been hung on the walls and the ceiling and the stair-ramps, so that the whole place looked like a sea grotto lined with velveteen?
No—I knew how to behave in public. It was the Fasskisters who needed a lesson in manners…because they came dressed as hive-queens.
You may have noticed I haven’t described what a Fasskister looks like. There’s a reason for that: even today, I’ve never seen one in the flesh. Whenever they go out among other species—and maybe even on their homeworld, for all I know—they always ride inside custom-made robots. Really. When they visit New Earth, they show up in android thingies, pretty humanish-looking except they have big chests the size of beer barrels. Those chests are basically cockpits; the Fasskister sits inside and drives the machine, making the legs walk and the arms move and the mouth chatter away on the bad points of royalty. You never see the Fasskister itself, just its robot housing.
Of course, lots of folks speculate on what Fasskisters look like. The species has to be pretty small to fit inside those chests…the size of an otter or a big barn cat. Most diplomats on our mission believed Fasskisters were nothing but great big brains: the rest of their bodies withered up shortly after birth, and their robot shells provided everything necessary to keep the brains alive. Samantha thought this theory was too tame—that the old brain-in-a-box cliché was melodramatic hooey, and the truth was probably a lot stranger and more interesting—but neither she nor anyone else could say for certain.
One thing everybody knew was that Fasskisters could change robot bodies whenever they wanted; and on that first night of our mission to Troyen, all the Fasskisters came in identical mock-ups of a Mandasar queen—-each full-size and sulphur yellow, with four working claws, bright green venom sacs, and a brain hump even bigger than Verity’s.
As if that weren’t bad enough, they all came reeking of royal pheromone…which none of us humans could smell, but which practically paralyzed every Mandasar but the high queen.
Royal pheromone is a special scent queens can produce at will. One whiff is enough to reduce other Mandasars to trembling wrecks—barely able to think straight, and pathetically eager to do whatever the queen tells them. Like an obedience drug you inhale. It takes a heck of a lot of self-control for any Mandasar to resist it, and most don’t even try. After all, why would you disobey your rightful ruler?
Verity hardly ever used the pheromone herself; she thought it was beneath her dignity, doping her subjects into submission. Almost no one in the palace had ever smelled the stuff before, till the Fasskisters doused themselves like it was cheap perfume. Heaven knows how the Fasskisters reproduced the pheromone—maybe a secret team of nanites hung around Verity till she produced some, after which the nanites carried a sample home for analysis. However they did it, the Fasskisters had obviously worked out the formula to perfection…because every last warrior, worker, and gentle dropped belly down and groveled as the Fasskisters pranced into the hall.
Every voice fell quiet. No sound but the babble of fountains and the slow thud of feet as the Fasskisters came forward. The six of them stepped over each prostrate body in their way, walking up to the silver dais that Verity used as a throne. I had no experience reading Mandasar facial expressions back then, but any fool could see the queen was almost homicidally furious. Any second, I could imagine her saying, To hell with sentience and the League of Peoples, these Fasskister fucks are going down.
That’s when Samantha stepped forward, straight in front of the Fasskisters, between them and the throne. I stayed right at Sam’s side, determined to protect my sister for the full second and a half it would take the queen to kill me. The two of us stood bang in the middle, with six elephant-sized robots to our right, and a seething Verity, just as big and up on a meter-high dais, to our left. I felt small and surrounded, outnumbered and overshadowed…so it was a darned good thing I had absolute confidence Sam would fix everything with a few clever words.
“My job,” she said, “is to get people to talk. When people aren’t ready to talk…” She turned toward the Fasskisters. “When they just want to piss everybody off and deliberately cause scenes…” Sam reached into her handbag. “Then you need a way to catch their attention.”
She pulled out a small globe of glass crystal. Every eye in the room followed her hand as she passed the globe to me. Under her breath, she murmured, “Break it.”
For a second I hesitated—I hated all the fuss whenever I broke something—but Sam was smarter than me and must know what she was doing. With a sudden clap of my hands, I smashed the globe between my palms.
Glass tinkled down to the floor. Little drops of my blood fell too, though my palms were callused enough from martial arts that I didn’t get cut too badly. What I felt more clearly than the shards of glass digging into my skin was a kind of fuzziness in the air between my fingers: nano.
I lifted my arms and spread them wide, feeling blood trickle down my wrists; but I could imagine the teeny nano-bots fanning out, zipping toward the Fasskisters who loomed above us.
The closest Fasskister must have known enough to worry about what the crystal held—Fasskisters of all people know about nanotech weapons—so the big queen robot tried to take a step back. The body moved, but the legs stayed where they were, quietly separating themselves from the main shell. With a muffled thud, the robot’s body clumped onto the turquoisy blue carpet. The legs stayed standing a heartbeat longer, then toppled sideways away from the body, like tent poles flopping down from a collapsed tent.
Some of the other Fasskisters tried to get away; the rest stayed rooted to the spot, maybe thinking they’d be all right if they didn’t move. But it didn’t matter. Within ten seconds, the legs fell off every queen robot there, leaving the big yellow machines (and their drivers) stuck high and dry in the middle of the hall.
Verity’s antennas and whiskers slowly relaxed from anger into a very satisfied smile. The other Mandasars, noses still full of royal pheromone, stayed quivering on the floor till she said to them, “Laugh.”
The room erupted into sound—kind of like human snickering, not loud but intense, with much waving of antennas and clacking of claws. A bunch of warriors dragged the broken robots out of the palace and took them to Diplomats Row, where the legless queens were left on the curb outside the Fasskister embassy. Meanwhile, Verity showered praises on Sam and me, declaring us Beloved Companions of the Throne.
Our first night in the Great Hall might have won Verity’s friendship, but it sure didn’t soothe the bad feelings between Troyen and the Fasskisters. Things got worse…especially because Fasskisters began to use their royal pheromone all around the planet. In a business meeting with Mandasar manufacturers, they might let a bit of the pheromone loose “just to aid in negotiating a fair deal.” There were also rumors of pheromone bombs being triggered in taverns or schoolrooms, and someone telling the gas-shocked Mandasars to rebel against the queen.
I don’t know if such things really happened; but rumors started circulating, and next thing you knew, Fasskister warehouses were getting burned by Mandasar vigilantes. The Fasskisters reacted by protecting their properties with really nasty security stuff, not quite lethal but pretty darned near—poisons that could cause permanent nerve damage, booby traps designed to cripple, flash bombs so bright they blinded every Mandasar within range, including innocent bystanders.
As time went on, Sam negotiated agreements to ease the tensions, but nothing ever stuck. Troublemakers were jailed or kicked off planet; then more troublemakers took their place.
Of course, kicking rabble-rouser Fasskisters off Troyen caused problems of its own. A lot of times, when the Fasskisters had a chance to cool off and think, they’d begin to doubt whether their behavior had been 100 percent sentient. Pretty soon, the banished Fasskisters turned pure terrified how they’d acted “without due concern for sentient life,” and they moaned they’d surely be killed by the League if they left the Troyen system. Our navy ended up paying the Fasskisters to build themselves an orbital habitat close to Troyen’s sun—part of some settlement Sam brokered, as the Technocracy tried to keep both Troyen and the Fasskisters happy.
