by David Drake
“They say you represent great power,” he said.
“That is true.”
“We have waited a long time to see this power,” said Euben. “We have exterminated two of your colonies, and have not seen it.”
“If this is all of eaber, it isn't very large,” I said. “This planet could hardly hold a hundred thousand.”
“I said we were perimeter. Behind us, thousands of planets. Trillions of eaber. There is nothing like us in the universe.”
“We've heard that before.”
This time he brought up two hands, to begin his twirling. I reacted with a hypnosis block, which shunted off all my natural functions for a micro-second (with the help of the plate I was standing on). The pain was much less. He merely brought me to my knees.
“Ah, you are not totally feeble,” he said. “Still I make you bow to me with the twisting of my bare hands in the air.”
“Yes. But Earthmen do not greet new races with tricks and talk like two small boys bragging about how tough their older brothers are,” I said. “I am not here to brag tough. I am here to observe.”
“If you don't like what you observe?”
“Perhaps we will do something about it. Perhaps not.”
He threw back his head and laughed. “You will die, die, die,” he said. “Watch this.” He nudged the other eaber who stepped forward and brought something out of his robe.
It was a boned, dehydrated human.
The thing—evidently a human survivor of an earlier colony—had the floppy, mindless manner of a puppy dog, mewling and whimpering on its long chain. Euben snapped his fingers. The former human ki-yied and scampered back under its owner's robe.
“Cute,” said Euben. “De-skeletoned Earthmen bring a good price in the pet-shops of eaber, so you are not a total loss in the universe.”
There came a sudden scream and convulsion from the eaber's robe. The eaber jumped back. The tragic, deboned human fell to the floor dead, spending a thin, too-bright red ebb of blood.
“Eh—how did you do that?” asked Euben, stepping back a little.
“I am Transstar,” I said. “Certain things we do not permit with our life-form. I urge you not to continue this practice.”
“So—” said Euben toeing at the dead man. “And he was so cute, too. Ah, well. There are more out there.”
I controlled my voice and did not look down. “Can you establish your need for this planet?” I asked.
“Yes. We are eaber; that is enough anywhere in space.”
I stepped to a wall chart and made a gesture. “This planet also falls along our perimeter. We occupy this space—so. We have well utilized the solar and alpha planet systems, and it is time that we move out once more. This planet is but one of a thousand Earth colonies moving out to new space.”
Euben shook his head. “What a ridiculous civilization! All space in this arc is eaber. We close the door, so—”
He made a fast gesture with his hand that tore inside of me, like a hot knife, scraping the bottom of my lungs. I was pretty much riding on my conditioning now. I was sickened, angry with Euben and his race. But it was slightly different from dealing with an Earth neighbor you dislike. Bravery and caution! Always bravery—and caution.
“So you block us here,” I said “Perhaps we will go elsewhere for a hundred or a thousand years. It's no use to fight over space. There are millions of planets.”
“Do you truly believe so?” smiled Euben. “Naive! The eaber do not like unknown life-forms prowling the universe. We will come to solar and alpha, as you call them, and put you on a chain like that one dead on the floor.”
“We might resist that,” I said.
“How?” said Euben, bringing a black box out from under his robe.
I have had my share of black boxes in my Transstar years. Before it was barely in sight, I had retreated to my all-purpose closet. He laughed, peering at me through the observation window and trying the various rays and whatnot in his weapon. Nothing much happened for a while—heat, radiation, gas, sonic vibrations, the standard stuff. Pretty soon I knew he could take me; but it would take him about three days. Fair enough.
The eaber was tough, but not unbeatable—at least on what he had shown me.
He put away his black box. I stepped through the door. Decontamination worked all right, but the heat-reducer was wheezing like an asthma victim in a grain field.
“So. You are junior good,” said Euben. He turned and left the ship, whistling in a very Earthian way, not bothering to look back.
The other eaber remained. I offered him a cup of tea, which he drank greedily. He had something that looked a little like a serpent's tongue which he ran quickly over the control board panels. He sniff-tasted the instruments, the furnishings, the modest weapons and communications equipment I had. Then he stepped back.
“You will not survive eaber,” he said. He left, not bothering to step over the deboned Earthman.
I picked up the soft, cooling mass and set it on the TV cradle. I didn't call through channels. I slapped the Transstar Central button and let them have a look at the creature on the plate.
Hennessy was on the monitor at Transstar Prime, near Mars. He gasped. “That's not good,” he said. “Just a minute.”
I sank into the chair and made more tea with shaking hands. The screen above me lighted and I was staring at Twelve. Thirteen is as high as you get in Transstar. “You've bought it,” he said. “In your arc you have the only mind-contact with the eaber. Elsewhere they've only made patrol war.”
“Anybody solved them?” I asked.
“Yes and no,” said Twelve Jackson slowly. “They can hit us with a freeze-burn system they've got. Explodes you. We can reach them with most of our conventionals, but they don't die easily. Range and depth of their civilization, unknown.”
I told him about their trillion—according to Euben. Then I asked, “What's my condition?”
Jackson hesitated and I saw his hands twiddle over his buttons. “Condition orange,” he said, taking me off white. Power reached through space. In seventy-five seconds I could feel the sudden, subtle shift in the ship's power fields, as they built up.
“Don't get excited,” he said. “I've got a dozen oranges on the board.”
“What about the colony here?” I asked.
“A colony is a local situation,” said Jackson. “Unfortunately, if we squandered our life-power every time a few colonists died, we'd still be confined to the moon. They colonize of their own free will.”
I touched the dead Earthman.
“Yeah,” he said. “Nobody knew about that. It'll get your planet plenty of free space in the TV casts. We'll get a little blubbering from the League for Space Safety.”
“It makes me want to blubber a little myself,” I said.
Twelve Jackson gave me a long, hard look. “Stay Transstar or get out,” he said.
I gave him the rest of my report-interview on the tape and tried to get some sleep. The eaber came over the colony about midnight and bombed it a little, and I groaned awake.
It must have been a half hour later that I heard a scratching on the ship's window. It was Rackrill, peering in at me.
When I joined him in the soft spring night he was excited.
“I've got something to show your high-falutin boys back at Mars,” he said. “A real something.”
We went in silence to his headquarters through the sweet night grasses of Everready. It was truly a planet of richness and beauty in a natural sense, and I thought again of the contrast of the poisoned boy and the monstrosities of human pets that the eaber had created under this moon, in their eaber cities, on this fine world.
My mood was shattered the instant we stepped into Rackrill's combination mayor's home and administration center. The Colony Correspondent had arrived.
There are simply too many Earth colonies for the space news services to cover them all. So they assign a Colony correspondent to cover the whole arc, and you always find them wh
ere the most trouble is.
This one was a woman. She was of the young, peppy breed of females that start out life as a tomboy and remain in trouble all of their lives because they like to take chances. I was doubly disturbed. First, because it meant that wildly distorted stories would soon be muddying things back in solar and alpha; second, because this cute lady reminded me of my own Alicia, who had been a Transstar agent along with me, back a seeming thousand years ago when I was merely a Four. She had the same snapping black eyes, the same statuesque figure, the same light-humored air.
“Well, so Transstar is really here!” she said. “Hey, Chief, how about a Transstar quote?”
“Young lady, I am not Chief,” I said drily. “My name is Webster, and I hold the Transstar rank of Seven, and you well know that all Transstar quotes must come from Transstar Prime.”
“Those fossilized, dehumanized old men on Mars,” she said. “Never mind. I'll find my own stories.”
“Not here you won't,” said Rackrill, with authority's natural fear of the tapes. “It's past midnight. Go to bed. Tomorrow my tape man will give you a tour.”
She stuck out her tongue. “I've had the tour. They're all alike, full of lies and grease, signifying nothing. Only thing I ever learned on an official tour was how to defend myself against the passes of the tape men.”
But she allowed herself to be pushed out. I guess it was the near-tragic urgency of our manner.
Rackrill led me into an inner room. On the bed rested a woman, but there was a strangeness to her. She was ancient in her skin, yet something about her bones told you she was hardly thirty. Her flesh was blue-splotched, the eyes animal-bright. Rackrill gestured at her; she whimpered and squirmed in her bed.
I laid a hand on his arm. “The eaber can hypnotize and make a hand gesture that tears you apart inside,” I said. “Don't hold up your hands in front of her.”
“We got her story,” said Rackrill, low-voiced. “She's been a prisoner of the eaber for over a year. From Colony Two, I guess. The eaber used her for—breeding.”
He led me to a smaller cot, where a blanket covered a figure. For a fleeting second I didn't want him to pull back the blanket. He pulled it back.
The creature on the bed was dead, shot with a Colony bullet. You could tell that it was a boy about three feet long. There was Earthman in him and eaber. The head and arms were Earthian, the rest eaber. It was shocking to see the hard-muscled, dwarf body under that placid, almost handsome head.
“Barely five months,” whispered the hag on the bed. “Forced insemination. Always the hands twisting—always the pain.”
“A friendly scientific experiment,” said Rackrill. “They want drones for the slag jobs in their cities. Jobs eaber won't do. They've produced a hundred or so of those idiots from captive women colonists. Force-fed and raised—this one is barely five months old, yet look at his size!”
I said nothing, busy with taking my tape, holding on to my objectivity through a force of will and my conditioning.
Rackrill opened the dead mouth. It was an exaggerated eaber tongue, black and reptile shaped. “No speech, therefore no intellect. Nor does it have mind speech like true eaber. It begs for food and does crude tasks to get it. I showed it to the men. One of them shot it. Nobody blamed him. Tomorrow we're going out and take these rats, and rescue those poor women that are still over there. Does your highness condescend to ask for a little Transstar help?”
“Transstar won't like this life-form meddling,” I said. “This is the second time.”
Rackrill slumped into a chair, looking at the woman who whispered some private incantation against the evils she had come to know.
“I've got two thousand colonists, five hundred ships,” he said. “With or without your help, we're going out tomorrow and take them.”
“They've got a few more ships, Rackrill.”
He appeared not to hear. He sat there staring at the woman while I gathered up the eaber drone's body to take back to my ship.
“For God's sake, get Transstar,” he said, as I left, and it was a prayer.
Shortly before noon next day, Rackrill was back at my ship. He pointed to the sky over the colony, where his small fighting ships were rising. “What did your bosses say?” he asked.
“They said,” I replied, “that Transstar has to look after the safety of the whole human race, and cannot match colonists man for man. There are safe places in alpha and solar to live—men are not obligated to seek danger. However, they are disturbed about the drone. I am to give an official protest and warning to Euben the eaber, which I have done.”
“Is that all!”
I closed my eyes. “They also demoted me one rank, from a Seven to a Six, for having left my ship unattended in the middle of last night. During the time we examined the drone, a bumptious Colony correspondent sneaked in to my ship and taped an eaber monstrosity I had on the TV plate. She flung her sensationalism to the planets and nations of alpha and solar. To put it mildly, this has rocked the galaxy, which is fine with our Colony Correspondent. She gets paid according to the number of TV stations that play her tape.”
“The universe should know!” cried Rackrill.
“The universe has always known,” I said. “Every history book tells of worse things in almost every Middlesex village and town. Transstar is not in show business or in policy making. It observes and objectively attends to the broad general welfare of the Earthian universe.”
Rackrill's voice was hoarse. “I have one empty ship,” he said bitterly. “I lack a pilot. Will Transstar at least do me the favor of helping to fill that?”
“It will,” I said, reaching for my combat slacks.
This was a wild, foolish mission, and I knew it. But I wanted to get as close as I could to eaber-land, which I had only observed at a distance. And I wanted to do something about the affronts to my system.
Sometimes it's good to fire a killing ray, even if it doesn't mean much.
We passed over three middle-sized eaber cities, the queerest cities I'd ever seen.
“Practically all landing fields,” said a feminine voice in my ear. I looked to my left. The Colony Correspondent was riding a patrol ship on my right. I thanked her for achieving my embarrassment.
“Oh, that's all right, Doc,” she said. “You're officialdom. Natural enemy. You'll get in your licks.”
“I'd rather take mine in kicks. And I know where I'd like to plant my foot,” I said.
I got a brash laugh. Foolish girl! Women do not have to be aggressive. There's the kind that makes a fetish of rushing in where brave men hesitate. On their maimed and dead persons the news tapes fatten and flourish.
Rackrill's group thought they were fighting the battle of the eon. They were trying to land at the most advanced city, where the captive Earthwomen were thought to be. The action was good. I was gloriously bashed around and managed to shoot down my eaber ship. It wasn't a difficult action for a Transstar-trained man. I was more interested in observing that the eaber had out an equal patrol of five hundred to oppose us. But, with all the noise and banging that a thousand-ship fight makes, I could observe that there were easily ten or fifteen thousand more eaber military ships on the ground we ranged over.
So the cities were not colonies. They were military bases for a large operation.
More interesting than the ships at hand were the extremely large areas being cleared and laid out for additional ship concentrations. I estimated that they could eventually base over a hundred thousand ships.
That would interest Transstar immensely.
Rackrill broke off the action when he had a mere hundred ships left. We limped back to the colony without being able to land in eaber territory. In fact, I doubted if the eaber chiefs regarded this as more than a quiet afternoon's patrol action. With their layout I couldn't blame them.
We almost missed the colony and had to sweep back once more. Yes, there was my Transstar ship, glowing orangely on the ground. But what a changed ground! It wa
s brown and bare, a desert as far as the horizon.
During Rackrill's attack a secret eaber counterattack had swept the colony's transport ships, its buildings, and Rackrill's fifteen hundred colonists into oblivion.
In times of shock men do drastic—or foolish—things. Rackrill's group of survivors began to bring down the cooking equipment and bedding from their ships, preparing a camp for the night on the blighted cemetery of their colony, dazed and tearful.
“Ada, Ada,” Rackrill moaned softly, his thick fingers picking at a gleaming aluminum pot. “Ada gone, Johnny gone—”
I noticed that Martha Stoner, the tape girl, had at last lost some of her high gloss. She stared at the scene, stunned. I could almost calibrate the change in her, from a high-spirited girl to a shocked and understanding woman.
I couldn't hold back comment. “Now you see the frontier,” I said to her. “Now you've got a real tape that all the stations can use.” She shook her head dumbly. “Go home, Rackrill,” I advised the benumbed leader. “Take your men and go home.”
He turned on me with teeth bared and lip trembling. “You—and that Transstar fraud. You let this happen! Tell your piddling button-pushers we will never go home!”
The words rang bravely on the scorched ground, while an eaber patrol, high up, gently wafted over us on an observation mission.
I shook my head. “At least go off in the forest where you have some protection—and some wood for your fires!”
I turned to go. A clod of soil struck my back, then a small stone.
“Go, Transstar filth, go!” They were all picking up the chant now.
“I'll file a tape all right!” cried Martha. “I can still get through to the world. The people will act, even if Transstar won't.”
I didn't want to run.
I swear, this was my worst moment, because I had seen this distress many times. I understood their monumental shock. But if I did not run I could be seriously disabled by their attack. At any moment one might pull a gun. My job was to remain in good health so I could observe.
So I ran toward my ship.
They followed in a ragged company, shouting, cursing, and at last pulling guns. I barely escaped into the orange-hued safety of the Transstar ship before the rays flew. The colonists danced and pranced around the ship, shooting at it and beating on it, like nothing so much as forest natives attacking an interloper. I understood and discreetly closed the portholes.