by Jerry
There was a polite titter around the room. “But no one has that right, Gerol,” said Anya, reasonably.
“Not here, no. But what if they do on the Earth ship? What if the crew are trying some kind of social experiment, something based on people telling other people what to do?”
“It wouldn’t work. It’s ridiculous!”
“Well . . . It might work, if there were different ranks of people, with different degrees of authority and obedience was enforced and . . .” Gerol faltered, trying to conceive the inconceivable. “Look,” he went on. “The words Empire, Imperial and Empress. We don’t know them. They’re not in any of our books but Dora says they are probably all from the same root as the word imperious, which we all know. By analogy to other words, she says Empress is a female person’s title or honorific. She says that, grammatically, the Imperial Fleet belongs to or is part of the Empire and that the Empress is either also part of the Empire or is a functionary in the Empire or . . .” He spoke louder to drown out the scoffing noises. “If this sounds insane . . .”
“It’s rubbish! They’d have to be mad to carry on like that.”
“I’m just saying, if this is true, then to be reabsorbed into the Empire may not be something we want. It may be something we should reject.”
The room erupted into angry and exasperated argument. Anya rose and waited patiently for it to subside. Slowly, people noticed her waiting and remembered their manners. When there was silence, she asked, “Why are you telling us all this, Gerol? Do you wish us to do something?”
Gerol sighed and looked down. “I don’t know. I’m just worried, Anya. Why have they come here after so long? Why is their tone so . . . so imperious? What if they are not going to be friendly, Anya?”
Anya looked at him with great sympathy for his distress and smiled. “Well, they’re here now. Why don’t we go and talk to them and clear it all up?”
* * *
With the five landers at his disposal, Colonel McGregor had sufficient men and materiel to capture or destroy a small city. Which is exactly what he might be asked to do. With the fighters in the air also under his command, he was confident he could handle anything the colonists could throw at him. Nevertheless, his deployment to secure the landing site was a textbook manoeuvre. This was an alien world, his intel was minimal and he did not want to jeopardize the mission by being sloppy.
His troops moved out, cleared the area and erected a boundary fence—a series of poles between which ionising lasers carried a heavy electric charge. It took little more than a bit of pushing and shouting and the whole action was complete. The colonists, who had seemed to think they were at some sort of party, reacted with shock and horror at the soldiers’ rough handling of them but they backed off and no one tried anything funny and that’s all that mattered.
“All right,” he told a lieutenant at his side. “Give Captain Cheng’s party the green light to leave.”
He watched the monitor as Cheng’s armoured car with six marines on foot in full battle armor moved slowly forward. Another armoured vehicle, a missile launcher and twenty-four more marines fell in behind. Above them, five fighters hovered, one high to give long-range sensor cover.
“Get me Major Young on the Resolution,” he growled and, within seconds, Young was facing him from a display. “Young, are those drones in place?”
“Yes sir. We’ve had full geographic dispersal since you set down sir. At your command we can nuke any spot on the planet—or all of it at once, sir.”
“Nice work, Young. Stand by.”
He watched Cheng’s column moving slowly towards the city. A gaggle of colonists were trailing behind them as though it were a carnival parade.
* * *
“Look! Ahead!”
The small group of councillors spotted the approaching Earth people as they crested a rise. They had seen the slowly approaching formation of aircraft some time ago but had been unable to fathom its meaning. Now they could see that it was maintaining its position directly above this column of vehicles and strangely-dressed people.
Something about the rigid order of the Earth contingent made them nervous and they slowed and stopped.
“What does it mean that they are so neatly arranged, do you think?” asked one.
“Perhaps it is an aesthetic effect they seek, like some kind of dance,” suggested another.
“It is disturbing, is it not? Almost threatening in its implication of mechanical purpose.”
“We must congratulate them when we meet,” said one, uncertainly. “They must have practiced long hours to achieve such precision. Why, every person is walking in step with every other!”
Malc placed himself squarely in the road and waved his arms, indicating them to stop. The lead car drew right up to him and came to a halt. The two armored vehicles swivelled their weapons towards the waiting councillors, and the marchers, looking more like machines than men in their body armor, dispersed quickly to stand rigidly around the lead car. There was a short delay before a door opened and a scowling man stepped out of the vehicle. A taller, more relaxed man followed him, and two of the marchers flanked them.
Malc was so astonished by all this that, whatever he had been going to say had gone completely out of his mind. Seeing his difficulty, Anya stepped forward.
“Welcome to Beasphor, Earth people. I am Anya and this is Malc. The others . . . Well, I’m sure they’ll introduce themselves in due course. I must say we’re very excited about all this.”
* * *
Cheng looked sideways at Lee, noting the suppressed amusement in the man’s face. “I am Captain Robert Cheng of the . . .”
“Oh so you’re Cheng!” Malc burst out. “What was all that stuff about superiors? Young Gerol’s been bending our ears about that all afternoon.”
“Malc, please!” said Anya. “Where are your manners? Captain Robert Cheng was speaking. Please let him finish.”
Cheng regarded the Beasphoran woman coldly. Was that sarcasm? Or was she suggesting she had the authority to decide when he spoke and when he may be interrupted?
“Who is in charge here?” he snapped. The Beasphorans looked at each other in confusion. Cheng’s temper finally broke. “I said, who is in charge here?” He took a step towards Anya. “You, madam. Do you have authority here?”
“I . . . I really don’t know . . .” she stammered, quite alarmed by this sudden aggression.
Gerol stepped forward to face Cheng. There was a rattling of armor from the marines as they trained their weapons on him. “No one is ‘in charge’ as you put it. We are members of the City Council—well, most of us anyway. We were elected to serve the people of this city. We don’t tell people what to do though. If you’re looking for someone who tells us all what to do, you won’t find anyone. There isn’t anyone.”
“Interesting,” said Lee.
Cheng glowered at the group of puzzled, anxious colonists. “Bring this one, this one and this one,” he said pointing at Malc, Anya and Gerol. Then he spun on his heels and went back to the armored car. Behind him, invisible beams stabbed out and the three councillors fell unconscious. Marines stepped forward to push back the others while the three limp bodies were picked up by servo-assisted muscles and carried back to the vehicles. Once they were aboard, the convoy turned and began its slow progress back to the landing site.
The other councillors watched in stunned horror as their colleagues were carried off. Then they surged after the Earth people running alongside and shouting for them to stop and to let their prisoners go. Hundreds of other people had watched the kidnapping and now they too joined in the haranguing of the column. Then someone in the crowd had an idea. Shouting for others to help, he ran ahead of the column and sat down in the road. Seeing him, a great cry went up. This was a good idea. This would stop the Earth vehicles. Within seconds, scores of people had followed his example and the road was filled with silent, angry people, sitting so as to block it completely.
Cheng watched the roa
d ahead fill with people. His staff quickly updated him on the threat status. No weapons. No signs of military activity anywhere. “Well, Lee? What do you recommend?”
“Crowd control was never my forte. Just drive around the idiots.”
“What the hell do they think they’re doing?”
Lee shrugged and kept silent.
“Sergeant!”
“Yes, captain!”
“Clear the road. Use extreme force. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Captain.”
Six of the marines marched forward and levelled their weapons at the seated Beasphorans. Suddenly the front rows of people erupted into flame and flying body parts. The marines advanced up the road and with every step more people were blasted into ruin. Soon they were marching forward through the burning, bloody wreckage that was once a crowd of people and the rest of the convoy started up and followed them. Cheng thought he saw more people run in from the crowd to sit on the road ahead but in the smoke and confusion, he could not be sure.
* * *
All through the night, people gathered at the scene of the slaughter. Ambulances carried away the living. The dead, what could be found of them, were collected by relatives and friends. The news services came but all broadcasts were being jammed by the Earth people. A slow ripple of shock spread across the city and people came in their thousands to join the mourners. A huge crowd of silent, angry Beasphorans gathered in Hundred Acre Field to sit and stare at the monsters from space.
On the fringes of the great gathering, people talked, trying to understand what had happened.
“Someone must have said something that upset them,” one suggested.
“But what would they have said?”
“Something that angered them. A mistake, maybe.”
“But my friend Jorge, whose brother was there, said they didn’t say anything offensive. There wasn’t even an argument.”
“What if they said something that violated some strange taboo these Earth people have? Something we couldn’t possibly know about?”
“Yes but”—and it always came back to this—“what could ever be said that would justify what they did?”
The sun rose on a crowd swollen by thousands more. Volunteers threaded through the mourners, bringing food and drinks for those that wanted them. A few banners had also appeared saying “Go Back to Earth” and “Leave Us Alone.”
In the dawn, the marines on guard looked grimly out at the solid mass of faces staring in at them. If these men felt any unease, it did not show in their expressions. They were good soldiers. So they kept their weapons ready and kept their eyes open and checked and rechecked the status of the electric fence.
At the very centre of the gathering, in the command ship, Captain Cheng brooded over his cold coffee and considered his next move. The mission was going badly and he could not understand why. He had led five other reabsorption missions and each one had gone like clockwork. He made contact with the leaders, he explained the power of the Empire and the weakness of the colonists, and then they started bargaining. Once, on someone else’s mission, the colonists had put up a fight but the negotiators had simply found a faction hungry for power and backed them. The fight turned into a civil war and the Empire had control in a week. After that, it was just a matter of agreeing to the amount of yttrium to be mined and how the Empire would like it delivered.
Yet this was different. This had the makings of a monumental cock-up. So Cheng’s mood was dark when Lee walked into his room without knocking. He glared at the secret police officer and thought what he might do to him if he had but a little more influence at Court. “Well?” he growled.
Lee said, “It has been a long night,” and helped himself to a coffee from the machine on the table. Cheng said nothing but watched as Lee slumped into a chair and ran a hand across his eyes.
Lee spoke again from the depths of his weariness. “The old one died under interrogation. The other two are all right. They’ll live anyway.”
“So? Who do I need to talk to?”
Lee shook his head, his eyes closed. “There isn’t anybody.”
“There has to be somebody. What about this Council of theirs? Who runs it?”
“Nobody. It’s a kind of anarchy, or . . . or something.”
“What about a national government? A planetary government? There has to be something?”
“There isn’t! The councils are elected to help coordinate a region—usually just a city—if they need anything wider than that, they just get together and talk it over on an ad hoc basis. There is no military, not even any police. No one’s in charge, no one gives any orders, no one has any power.”
Cheng’s voice was heavy with disbelief. “Crap!” he said.
Lee lifted his eyes from the table and looked straight into the captain’s. “Do you think they would lie to me, Cheng?” he asked in a soft voice.
Cheng knew they would not. Not for long, anyway. “So what about the 150,000 people sitting out there watching us? Who organised that? Who’s feeding them? Who’s minding the children? They’ve got teams of workers putting up toilet facilities for God’s sake! That kind of thing doesn’t just happen!”
“If the crowds are bothering you, just take off and bomb them from orbit.”
“That’s not the point!”
Lee slammed his hand on the table. “I know what the fucking point is, Cheng. The point is that it won’t be as easy to get the Empress her damned yttrium as you’d hoped.” He glowered at Cheng, eyes burning. “Well, tough! I’ve told you all there is to know. Now it’s your problem.” He shoved back his chair and stomped out of the room.
Cheng sat perfectly still for a while, controlling his breathing, calming himself. He believed Lee. Why should the man lie? But it still made no sense. There had to be something they were missing.
* * *
Lee woke up some hours later to the sound of commotion in the corridors. “. . . stupid bastard’s out there throwing . . .” he heard someone say as they ran past his room.
“Come on ladies, the colonel’s waiting!” a marine sergeant bellowed.
Lee made his way to the command center and scanned the displays. The duty officer scrambled to attention but Lee waved him away distractedly. There on the external visual display was what he was looking for. “Put that on the speakers,” he snapped and suddenly the room was filled with shouting and scuffling.
Outside, Colonel McGregor was bellowing at the colonists and several marines had formed ranks behind him, with more arriving as they watched. The colonel had his weapon out and was holding it to a seated man’s head. “Kiss them!” he shouted at the man. “You saw what I did to your friend. Now kiss my boots!” Lee scanned the scene quickly and saw a nearby group of colonists tending what might have been an injured or dead comrade. Colonel McGregor’s current victim stared silently ahead of him, his face a mask of stubborn fury. The people around him were not so silent and Lee could hear shouts of “Go home, you animal!” and “Leave us in peace! Why are you hurting us?”
Looking up, McGregor fired at one of the shouting people, wounding her badly. A roar of anger went up from the crowd. He put his weapon against his victim’s head again and shouted something that was lost in the commotion. Then he blasted the man’s head off. In a blind rage, he grabbed at another man nearby and began shouting at him too. The colonel had clearly lost his self-control but that did not interest Lee. Instead, he focused on the colonists, watching their faces and their actions as the colonel rampaged among them.
* * *
“Perhaps you would explain it for me, Gerol,” Lee asked, some minutes later in the peaceful quiet of the interrogation room.
Gerol, tired and drawn, was using most of his concentration just to sit upright. “Explain what?” he asked from a dry throat.
“Why no one will do what the colonel wants, even when he threatens their lives.”
Gerol was confused. “I’m sure people would help him if he just asked.”
“No, no, no. He doesn’t want help. He just wants them to do something, some little thing, to show submission.”
Gerol’s head swam. He felt weak and dizzy still from the drugs and the beatings. None of these questions made sense. “Why would the colonel do that? Is he mentally ill?”
Lee smiled. “Never mind the colonel. Just tell me why no one will do what he tells them to do.”
Gerol shook his head. “Why should they? I don’t understand!”
Lee was patient. “They should do what he says because they know he will kill them if they don’t.”
Gerol was almost weeping with the effort of talking to this madman. “Surely you can see it would be stupid to obey someone like that! If people were to let themselves be bullied by people making threats, then we would soon all be slaves and life would become a nightmare of fear and violence.”
And suddenly it was all clear to Gerol. The key to understanding the Earth people was his. He looked up into the eyes of his torturer and was filled with awe and pity and revulsion.
Lee too, understood it all now, although he could barely believe it.
* * *
Outside, the colonel threw down another body and looked around. Behind him a broad swathe of corpses lay bleeding and smouldering. He was panting and hoarse and tears streamed down his face. The crowd was still passively watching him except where the injured were being tended. Many people still shouted at him. Many, like him, were weeping. His marines, realizing there was no threat, had relaxed and were watching him with impassive faces. One of them had turned away and stood with his head down and his eyes closed.
“What is the matter with you people?” McGregor croaked, his voice almost gone. “Will you sit there and let me kill you all?” In a surge of fury he snapped up his weapon but he found he couldn’t fire it again. He looked down the sights at the pale, frightened, unflinching faces that looked back at him and he knew he could not kill them anymore. Perhaps he could never kill them again. Slowly, he lowered the weapon and let it fall from his fingers. He looked again at the dead and injured all around. Then he walked back to the ship without a backward glance. The sergeant stepped over to where the colonel’s weapon lay and picked it up. Then he and his men also went back to the ship.