Theirs Not to Reason Why 5: Damnation, page 14
“Yeah, right,” he dismissed. Turning his attention to the data flowing across the transparent screen, he narrowed his eyes. “Wait . . . this is . . .” Brows pinching together, he frowned at the screen and tapped down through the summary page. “This is insane! You’re asking us to fire on our own people?”
“Technically, I’ll be having the military fire on infected ships, though merchant reserve vessels will be drafted into those forces where necessary. This is not an option, Director Gomez,” Ia repeated. “This is what will happen, and this is what your department will do to ensure it does not spread to the rest of sentientkind.”
“This is not how you fight a plague!” he countered sharply, glaring at her through the text on his screen. “If you’re such a precise and powerful, all-seeing precognitive, where is the information on how to counter this plague? Where are the details on its genome, its molecular structure, how it replicates, and how it infects its hosts? For that matter, what kind of plague can infect every single life-form out there, even the Chinsoiy? Is it mutagenic? Retroviral? What?”
This was the start of the fog. Ia shook her head. “There is no cure, other than to kill it in a fire hotter and longer than that required for a cremation.”
“No,” Gomez denied, shaking his head in turn. “I don’t accept that. Every disease has a survival rate. Every disease has a cure.” His finger thumped into his desk in emphasis.
“Oh, there is a survival rate,” Ia told him candidly. “But it’s a rate of less than one in one billion, and of those who can survive it, they already have serious health problems of their own. Even accounting for the fact that the remaining population would consist of only a few hundred people per race . . . if they were to have normal, healthy children, which rebuilding their species would require,” she reminded him, her words grim, “those normal children would still die.”
“Then we’ll just have to prevent it from spreading in the first place,” the Terran Director asserted. “Who is Patient Zero, and where are they, or where will they be? If you can see everything, like all the rumors flying out of V’Dan space claim you can, then you can see that, and that is what I demand to know. Let’s stop it right here, right now, and have done with the whole thing.”
Ia stared at him. Religious zealotry, she could understand. She had faced it back home on Sanctuary, after all, a level of fanaticism she still had to face when she went home for the last time before losing her homeworld behind enemy lines. Karl Marx once decried that religion was the opiate of the masses. That it was a drug that dulled their wits and their minds, removing their ability to think rationally. But medical zealotry . . . ?
“Tell me where and when this plague will start, and we will stop it at Patient Zero,” Alvin Gomez repeated, thumping his desktop once again with a finger.
How do I get it through his head how wrong he is? He’s one of those men who believes only in what he himself believes. What he himself . . . She could see it, a glimmer of a path through the fog, one which led out of the mist and into the future where she needed this moment to go. Rising from her seat, Ia stepped around the end of the bulky furniture separating them. One hand came down on the edge of his desk, the other lifted up near her shoulder. He stared up at her warily. At least I have some of his attention. Unfortunately, I need to seize all of it.
“Director Gomez, the entire Salik race is Patient Zero. They have to die. As. A. Species.” She moved her free hand to within centimeters of his face. “Because if they do not die within the next year, this is what will happen, and keep happening, for the next three hundred years.”
Closing the distance between them, she pressed her fingertips to his brow, touching him with skin and gifts even as he tried to lean back out of range. She didn’t submerge herself very deeply, but she did give him a thorough soaking.
A few years back, she had taken her 1st Platoon leader, Lieutenant Oslo Rico, into the timeplains in search of the location for the manufactories for the anti-psi machine the Salik had created. During that temporal walk, the two of them had been forced to witness a living K’Katta being torn apart and eaten one piece at a time. That was what the Salik loved to do, after all: eat sentient beings while they were still alive and aware enough to scream in pain.
Ia did not show him that exact memory. Instead, she submerged the Terran Director into the last few life-stream moments of a fellow Terran being slowly eaten alive under similar circumstances.
He didn’t scream. Gomez tried to, but the only sounds that emerged were hissing breaths from his terror-locked throat. Ia pulled him out after only a few seconds at most of objective, real-world time. Subjectively, though, he had suffered for at least a full minute or more.
Breathing hard, the middle-aged Terran stared at her in horror. “You . . . You . . .”
“Not convinced yet? Do I need to remind you that we have already suffered two hundred years of this?” She plunged him back in again ruthlessly, into the body and mind of a Tlassian of the worker caste. Again, he suffered a subjective minute or so of torment before she pulled him out. It wasn’t quite as intense since some of the alien nerve sensations didn’t quite translate into Terran physiology—Humans did not have tails, for one—but it was still painful. “. . . Didn’t like that, did you? No? Of course not.
“No one sane would enjoy such suffering. But we have suffered it, Director Gomez. We have suffered two hundred years of that for a plague, Director Gomez,” she emphasized. “Two hundred years of this as a covert, hidden cancer on the body of the Alliance.”
Again she pressed her fingers to his skin and made him suffer. A V’Dan this time, alien in that the language being thought by the victim was different, but the pain being suffered, oh, the pain translated completely. Eloquently. Brutally. She held him under for an extra half second/half minute in the waters of his fellow Human’s agony, then pulled him out again.
Panting, he stared at her, brown eyes wide and wild. “. . . Will you stop doing that?” he finally demanded, clutching at the armrests of his chair. He flinched back when she extended her hand a second time. “Don’t do that! Don’t touch me!”
Ia lowered her hand to her hip, the other one still braced on his desk. “That, Director, was two hundred years of covert lunch. If we do not stop the Salik completely in the next year, then it will be three hundred years of that being inflicted upon everyone in what will be left of the Alliance, and it will be inflicted openly. Entire colonies will fall. Millions and billions will be enslaved, chained, and devoured. That is what the Salik have all been promised by their leaders. That even the lowliest-ranked among them will finally get to savor the sweet, bleeding screams of sentient meat.
“You need to pull your head out of your asteroid and look at the real plague trying to kill off the Alliance worlds.” Straightening, she dropped her arms at her sides and waited for him to think his way out of the fog of secondhand pain and terror she had inflicted. “We are not going to stop the release of this plague on the Salik, but we will contain it so that it only kills them. That part is your job.”
“Stopping diseases is my job,” Gomez growled, rising from his chair with a glare. “Not genocide.”
Ia matched him stare for hard stare. “The Salik population currently stands at just over fifty-three billion. If they stay alive, they will slaughter one hundred fifty trillion sentients. You tell me which set of deaths needs to be prevented.”
He opened his mouth to argue.
“Which plague will you prevent, Director? The one that claims fifty-three billion lives in a matter of weeks, or the one that tortures and devours one hundred and fifty trillion sentient, living, thinking beings over three hundred screaming, bleeding, bred-to-be-eaten years?” She did not blink, did not relent. “Is that what you want? Do you want to aid the Salik in their efforts? Because that is what it is coming down to.”
“It . . . You . . . !” Raking his hands over his short-cropped hair, he finally railed at her, “It isn’t about the math! You can’t just randomly decree that X number of lives is more valuable than X other number! It’s not just about the math.”
Relaxing her hard stare, Ia shook her head slowly. “No, meioa. It’s not just about the math. It’s about quality of life, and mercy. By permitting them to die by the plague, I will be giving them mild fevers, chills, some pins-and-needles sensations . . . then numbness . . . paralysis . . . and a peaceful, quiet death. It will be far more merciful a death than their victims have ever felt. It will be far more merciful an ending than the Salik deserve. But I will give it to them . . . and I will deny that death to the rest of the Alliance as a whole.
“But I will not tell you or anyone else what that plague is, where it is, or when it will start . . . because the Salik will turn it against us once they realize what is going wrong. We will need every single second of silence on the subject of Patient Zero we can wrench from this situation before they realize what will be happening to them, to make sure that they don’t successfully turn that plague on us.”
“The easiest way to do that is to stop the plague from spreading at all!” Gomez countered.
Mouth tight, Ia reached up and poked him in the forehead. Plunged him face-first into the life-stream of a man being eaten alive by the officers of a Salik warship just thirty light-years away, right at that very moment. She pulled her finger away, and he gasped for air, then scowled at her, smacking her hand away. “Don’t do that!”
Ia pressed the point, literally. A plunge into the timestreams, and a release. “Three.” She did it again, following him as he tried to step back. “Hundred.” He tried to retreat, only to fetch up against the back wall of his office. “Years.”
“Stop it!” he ordered.
She didn’t relent, just tipped her head in acknowledgment of the irony. “Funny, but that’s exactly what their victims keep crying.”
He tried to protest one more time. This time, she clamped her whole hand over his face and ruthlessly hauled him upstream, plunging him into the body of a V’Dan from the First Salik War. She did so at a point just a day or so before the end of the man’s life, and just deep enough that he could feel what that other Human had felt, though not deep enough to give it any temporal context.
It wasn’t a pleasant experience, even though it was very, very mild compared to the other torture. Both she and Gomez felt how numb his borrowed limbs were, how the abdomen tingled with pinpricks, and his thoughts . . . those poor thoughts were sluggish. It was all the man could do to finish dictating a final message for his loved ones . . . and hoping that the plague would die in the intervening years of cold, dark space.
They hadn’t found that ship. Ia held her fellow Human in that life as the thoughts slowed, as the heartbeat weakened . . . she brought him out before their host could actually die, but only long enough to whisper in Gomez’s ear, “The suffering induced by the plague—what you felt just now—is a mercy killing, compared to this.”
She plunged him into a V’Dan being carved up slice by slice, with the woman’s wounds cauterized by a Salik officer who wanted his prey to last . . . and plunged Gomez into the Salik’s mind, so that he experienced the cold, brutal amusement firsthand, the excitement and pleasure of torturing a V’Dan over and over and over.
Bringing both of them out, she pulled her fingers away from his face. He staggered and sagged back against the wall, then doubled over and retched. Nose wrinkling against the smell, Ia backed up physically, but did not back down verbally. “What you don’t understand is that I believe the Salik should have a right to live. I would like them to live. But in order to do that, they must get along with all the other races. Just as the Humans and the K’Katta and the Tlassians, and all the rest have chosen to do.
“Unfortunately, Director, the Salik cannot change. They are biologically incapable of changing their mind-set. They are sadistic as a species. Cooperation with another race is a hunting strategy, nothing more—cooperating with each other is a hunting strategy. They do it to lure their prey into a more favorable position for eventual attack. I learned long ago a very ugly and painful truth: if the rest of the Alliance is to live, the Salik must die.” She turned to pace around the desk to the other side, facing him from a couple meters away. “We—the Alliance—do not have the resources to spare to wipe them out man-to-man. We will barely have enough as it is to contain this plague, if you do your job.
“And your job, Director Gomez, is to save the lives that you can. Alliance lives. The Salik are not a part of the Alliance, and they never have been. And before you protest that we are killing them, I will tell you this. They created that very same plague!” she asserted, jabbing her finger off to the side. “By the sheerest chance, it was not released two hundred years ago. By luck and the wits of the V’Dan, who found and destroyed the research base that created it, they lost every last note on how to replicate it in the two centuries since, or we would all be long dead and gone, our worlds barren and lifeless of anything with a brainstem or greater.
“But while the Alliance barely escaped annihilation as a whole two centuries ago, it is a slagging shakk-load of trouble that is finally going to descend on us all in this era . . . and I find it poetic justice that they should be slain by something they themselves created. It is poetic that, in their greed for the taste of sentient flesh, they will devour and spread this plague among themselves, creating their own genocide.
“Your job is containment, Director. Nothing more, nothing less. You will not send out biohazard teams to try to ‘study’ the plague, you will not take samples, and you will not permit advisors or observers to approach, for that would be a death sentence for them. You will do nothing but burn whatever has been contaminated. The only ‘cure’ is frying anything touched by that plague for twenty minutes Terran Standard at one thousand degrees Celsius or hotter.”
Gomez blinked at her words.
“You will not even be able to touch an infected atmosphere with the skin of a spaceship, for fear of dragging it to another world,” she added bluntly. “Atmospheric reentry does not last long enough to destroy this plague, nor does it actually burn the hull, thanks to the hot-shockwave effect. Neither will the coldest depths of space destroy it. Rather the opposite; the coldest depths of space has preserved this plague, allowing it to lie dormant in the cold vacuum of space for two centuries. It was designed to be a weapon, one which I am turning back on its creators as the fastest means we have of stopping them before hundreds of billions of innocent sentients are slaughtered one sadistic bite at a time. That is more important to stop, and the only way to stop it is to stop the Salik race permanently.
“Incarceration with the Blockade did not work. You cannot isolate this patient, because the Salik will only escape to slaughter again and again. For the good of the rest of the known galaxy’s body, this limb must be amputated to keep it from destroying all the rest of the otherwise healthy flesh. You, meioa, are trying to argue that a lethal, gangrenous cancer is more important to keep alive than all the normal, healthy cells that can still be saved if we act now with an amputation. This is that amputation. Stop trying to save the cancer, and start trying to save the rest of the patient.”
He stared at her, visibly shocked and bewildered by her claims. Now she had him, with a clear path straight toward where the future needed to go at this stage. She didn’t like playing the bad guy in this moment, forcing him into temporal rapport . . . but it wasn’t the first time she had acted against her normal inclinations, and there were yet more points ahead where she would have to do worse. Such as the reason why she was here in the first place. Ia tipped her head in slight, ironic acknowledgment.
“As I said, Director, you and I are going to have to redefine ‘Quarantine Extreme’ today.” She gestured politely toward his empty chair, glad that her ploys had worked. “Please, retake your seat and let us make plans to ensure that the cancer of the Salik nation and the malignant dangers of their plague are properly eradicated from our patient, being the Alliance as a whole, and the rest of our galaxy as well.”
“But, I . . .” he tried protesting one last time.
“If you do not comply, Director, I will have you removed from office on grounds of Fatality Thirty-Five, Sabotage, and Fatality Two, Grand High Treason . . . because I will hold you personally responsible for this.”
One last time, she dragged him into the life-waters of someone being eaten alive by their enemy. Without touching him. Stone-faced, sick inside that she had to do this, Ia held him there until she knew he would comply, then flung him back into his body. She settled back in her seat and crossed her legs, hands clasped in her lap as if she had all the time in the world. Gomez stared at her, wide-eyed and wary.
“That can keep happening to the whole Alliance for the next three hundred years, Director. Or we can end it within one year. Do forgive me for having the compassion to prefer the latter. Now, let’s get to work.”
JANUARY 23, 2499 T.S.
SIC TRANSIT
Christine Benjamin studied her white-haired commanding officer. The pressure of that long, thoughtful look was almost an energy of its own, though it had no flavor. Drawing in a deep breath, Ia let it out and slouched down in the thick-cushioned easy chair bolted to one corner of the chaplain’s counseling office. This was the one place where the eyes of the crew weren’t upon her yet wasn’t a place where she had to be alone.
Conversely—vexingly—she almost wished she were alone.
“Going to finish your caf’?” Bennie asked, picking up her own mug for a sip.
“No.”
The older woman swallowed. “Got something on your mind?”
