by Rick Partlow
“You know, you’d think that would make sense, sir, but….”
“Excuse me,” Patel said, pointing off to the west with a stalk of something green and leafy. “Does anyone else hear that?”
I shut up for a second and then it reached me, a distant sound that could have been a cross between the lowing of a herd of cattle and the crowd at a soccer game doing some chant for their team. I followed the sound over to the western edge of the platform, as close to it as I dared get, and looked down.
“What the fuck?” I murmured.
There were thousands of Helta in the clearing below us, standing on the grassy floor, hands raised to the sky, mouths open as they cried out in unison, saying something my translators couldn’t pick out well enough to identify.
“It has started already,” Caan-Fan-To said, tossing the remains of a piece of fruit over the side as if trying to hit the gathered throng.
“What has?” Strawbridge wanted to know. “What’s going on? What is that they’re chanting?”
“Those,” Joon-Pah said, giving his English enunciation a grim undertone that I knew had to be on purpose, “are Elder worshippers. I told you about them.”
“What are they doing here?” Strawbridge asked, staring daggers at Joon-Pah.
“The Deputy Facilitator has brought them here,” Caan-Fan-To answered for him. He made a motion toward his aide. “Go, summon more soldiers, make sure there are enough to secure our route back to the Prime’s Residence.”
The Tertiary gestured acknowledgment and hurried off down the ramp much faster than I ever intended to try, like it was a water-slide at an amusement park. Didn’t these damned koalas understand gravity at all?
“Is the Deputy Facilitator a….” Strawbridge faltered, tripping over the words. “…an Elder worshiper?”
“She is whatever is convenient to the moment,” Caan-Fan-To declared. “She knows those among us who see the Elders as gods will be outraged over Joon-Pah’s visit to your world and she has reached out to them to turn the opinion of the Council against us.”
“Will it work?”
Good question. I was pretty interested in that, myself.
“It may. Let us just say it is good the meeting is this morning and not after her supporters have had more time to stir up unrest.”
“What is that they keep repeating?” Patel asked, head cocked to the side to better hear the chant.
“That is directed at me,” Joon-Pah admitted, “at what I’ve done in contacting you, at even traveling to your solar system. I believe the word in your language is…sacrilege.”
“And suddenly,” I said, tossing half of a carrotlike thing over the side, “I’m not hungry anymore.”
Chapter Twelve
“They can’t come inside and that’s the end of it.”
I glowered at Strawbridge and she glowered right back at me. My stomach was roiling from something I’d eaten, my feet were really damned sore from mile after mile on the damned elevated walkways and I had dried sweat built up at the armpits of my class A jacket. At least I’d worn boots instead of dress shoes, and I’d eschewed the cap. Pops had tried to get me to wear a fucking beret, but I left that sort of pretentious bullshit to the Army.
We’d gone from breakfast to some other holding area, different from the guest house where we’d spent last night but otherwise nearly identical, only closer to the Council meeting place, and stayed there for a couple hours until Vandas-Gol came to retrieve us. And then Strawbridge dropped this shit on me.
“I am in charge of security,” I reminded her. “And I say it’s not safe for you to go into the Council meeting without your security team. What was the point of bringing the Svalinns if you aren’t going to have them in there with you?”
“The armor saved us from being arrested by rogue elements in the Helta government,” she said, “for which I am grateful, even if I may have been a bit upset at the time. But we can’t afford to insult the government of the Alliance we’re trying to join. How do you think the US House of Representatives would react if a foreign representative tried to come onto the floor of the House with an armed infantry squad?”
“It would serve some of the self-important assholes right. But the fact remains, they need us more than we need them. Yeah, we’ll have to face the Tevynians on our own if they don’t let us join, but that’s in months, maybe even years. If they don’t let us help them now, this whole system is going to be in ruins in weeks.”
“And it’s up to me to convince them of just that,” she agreed. “It’s my job to convince them, and I can’t do my job if no one is paying attention to me because they’re staring at the big, scary men in their big, scary suits of armor.”
I sighed. She was making entirely too much sense. I hated when that happened.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you can’t go in wearing that, either,” she said, pointing at my gun belt. “You know how the Helta crew get when they see anyone armed on the Truthseeker, and that’s a military ship.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I ground the words out between clenched teeth, but I knew there was no point in arguing with her about it.
We’d carried out our conversation in private, or as private as it got inside one of the Helta treehouses. There were no separate rooms in them and everything, including bathing, was done communally. But Pops and the rest of the Delta team were gathered in a corner, visors up, shooting the shit. Except for the two they’d left outside guarding the two entrances, but they could get the news from Pops.
“Heads up,” I said and the chatter ended as abruptly as a flipped switch. “You guys are going to have to hole up in here while Deputy Secretary Strawbridge and I go to the Council Chamber.”
“You sure that’s a good idea, sir?” Pops wondered.
“No, I’m not sure at all,” I confessed. “But I am sure that she has the authority to tell us that’s the way it’s going to be.”
“We’ll have our ears on, sir,” he assured me. “If anything goes sideways in there, just call and we’ll rush in, guns blazing.”
“I hope to hell it doesn’t come to that, Pops.” I unfastened the buckle of my web belt and held it out to him. “Can you take care of this for me until after the meeting?”
“You ain’t even taking a pistol, sir?” Ginger asked, his eyes going wide.
I shot him a scornful expression, then pulled the Glock out of the holster and tucked it into the small of my back, pulling my jacket over it.
“You all wait here,” I told them. “I don’t care what fuzz-faced bigwig comes and tells you to go back to the shuttle or to another holding area or what. Unless the order comes from me, you guys are staying here.” I had another thought. “I’m going to check in every hour on the hour. If I miss a check in, you try to contact me. If you can’t, you head for the Council Chamber and radio Julie to take off and meet you there with the shuttle and be prepared for a hot LZ.” I shrugged. “Like I said, I hope it doesn’t come to that, but as the saying goes….”
“Hope in one hand,” Pops finished for me, “and shit in the other, and see which ones fills up first.”
“You got it.”
Strawbridge was waving at me across the room, ready to follow Vandas-Gol out the door. The Tertiary was the very picture of an officious, self-important Beltway staffer transplanted into the body of a prissy-looking, fuzzy-faced Helta and he was beginning to get on the wrong side of my nerves. I tried to remind myself he wasn’t human and I was undoubtedly anthropomorphizing his mannerisms, but then it occurred to me that anthropomorphizing was exactly what the Elders had done to the Helta and I shook the whole line of thought away before I fell into an endless feedback loop.
“The Prime Facilitator and Captain Joon-Pah are already inside the Council Chamber waiting for you,” Vandas-Gol informed us as we emerged into the mid-morning light. “When we enter the chamber, you will stand by Joon-Pah’s side at the center of the floor and you will wait until you are called on to speak.”
He kept
looking back at us as he spoke, as if the catwalk wasn’t just a yard wide and fifty feet off the ground and I had to wonder if any of them ever fell off. Did they consider that like cleaning out the gene pool, if someone was too clumsy to live? I shuddered and kept my eyes on where I was walking. Strawbridge was asking him something about parliamentary procedure but I ignored it and tried to perform a tactical evaluation of the Council Chambers.
The building was two hundred yards across and vaguely dome-shaped, but the sides were flattened into some sort of complex polygon at the base, resting on the largest elevated platform in the largest clearing we’d seen so far. The catwalk around the perimeter was actually wide enough it didn’t give me vertigo, and I imagined that was to accommodate the hundreds of Helta that could fit inside. Something seemed off about it and it took me a couple minutes to figure out what it was.
“They don’t have flags here,” I said to Strawbridge, making sure we were far enough behind Vandas-Gol that he couldn’t overhear us.
She snorted amusement, a sardonic turn to her smile.
“That’s a very humancentric thing to say,” she pointed out, “considering we’re on an alien planet.”
“It’s not just that,” I insisted. “I mean, it’s not just that they don’t have an actual piece of fabric flying from a pole with stripes and eagles and shit. I mean, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of representative art around this place. No paintings, no murals, no mosaics, no statues, not so much as a topiary.”
She frowned, her eyes darting around, like she was determined to prove me wrong.
“Maybe the combination of colors is symbolically significant,” she ventured, but she didn’t seem too convinced.
“If this place was on Earth,” I told her, “people would think it was a warehouse or something. I mean, I guess it didn’t hit me when all I’d seen of the Helta was their warships and a couple of isolated colony worlds, but this is their home.” I shook my head. “They’re close to us psychologically, you know? I mean, a lot closer than they have any right to be. I would have expected some sort of symbolic representation, at least some sort of artwork. Surely, a race as technologically advanced as the Helta must have the cultural complexity for some sort of art, right?”
“That’s a damned good question, Major Clanton,” she admitted. “And one it disturbs me that I didn’t think to ask. I’ll bring it up with Joon-Pah when I get a chance.”
I shut up because we were making the final turn onto the main concourse around the dome and dozens of Helta were waiting outside the entrance to the Council Chambers, watching us. If they’d been humans, I would have expected signs and megaphones, but the Helta were just staring. I remembered Joon-Pah telling me it was considered an insult to stare at someone, a sign of disrespect, so I stared back, imitating a Helta expression I’d seen and baring my teeth until Strawbridge noticed and whacked me on the arm.
Diplomats always wanted to be everybody’s friend. In my experience, some people were never going to like you so you just had to make damn sure they respected you.
I worried there might be some sort of security sensors or metal detectors or something at the doors that might catch my concealed handgun, but we didn’t pass through any obvious detection equipment and no guards stopped us for a search. It made sense, I thought. They used energy weapons almost exclusively and I wasn’t sure how long it had been since they used gunpowder, if they ever had.
The interior of the chamber was just as big as it had looked from the outside, but the layout was far different than I would have expected in a human-designed building. The center of the chamber was a flat circle that reminded me of the octagon at an MMA fight except without the wire mesh fence around it. Though I wouldn’t have minded a fence about now. Instead, the ringside seats for this match were the ubiquitous beanbag chairs and I wondered how common back problems were among the Helta because they sure as hell didn’t believe in chairs.
The auditorium did have stadium style seating, sort of. Rather than having graduated levels like a theater, there was a gradually ascending ramp with clusters of the cushioned seats here and there in places that didn’t seem to make any sense to my human aesthetic. Every seat was taken, though, and there were at least five or six hundred Helta in attendance, though I had no clue which were members of the Council and which were simply spectators. The buzz of their individual conversations sounded very human until I tried to listen closer and couldn’t make out a single word, even with the translator.
Vandas-Gol led us to the middle of the center ring, and I wasn’t sure if I should feel more like the main event on fight night or the star attraction in a circus. At least we weren’t alone. Joon-Pah stood nearby, off at an angle toward the edge of the circle, his back to us. He didn’t turn to acknowledge our presence or come closer in an attempt to talk and I assumed that had something to do with their customs for appearing before the Council. I recognized Caan-Fan-To as well, seated only a few yards in front of Joon-Pah, but I couldn’t have told you if the Deputy Minister was here because the rest of the Helta faces all blended into one for me.
Once Strawbridge and I were in place and Vandas-Gol had retreated, a Helta dressed in a loose, flowing sort of gown entered from the side opposite the side we entered, hands above their head and began making some noise I supposed passed for singing. A ululating warble grating and toneless enough that I might have mistaken for a fire alarm if I hadn’t seen the source with my own eyes. Whatever it was supposed to signify, it shut everyone up immediately. Once they had fallen silent, the Helta in the gown—I couldn’t have told you if it was a male or a female with a gun to my head—ceased the caterwauling and exited the same way they’d come in.
Caan-Fan-To stood, one hand raised to the ceiling like a worshiper in a church service.
“Sacred Council of the Helta People, I bid you pause to consider the questions we have before us today regarding addition of the humans of Earth to our alliance. This day, you will hear arguments in favor of this position by me, the Prime Facilitator, as well as Captain Joon-Pah of the Self-Defense Force, he who has had the most dealings with the humans.”
He made a slashing gesture to his right.
“Taking the arguments in opposition will be Gafto-Lo-Mok, the Deputy Facilitator.” The female stood and mirrored the raised hand, then sat. “I implore you to listen closely, question carefully and choose wisely, as our continued existence as a free people depends on our decision this day. We will begin with the testimony of Captain Joon-Pah, who will explain how and why he came to contact the people of Earth and seek their aid.”
Joon-Pah raised his hand and turned in a small circle, acknowledging the whole audience before he faced the Prime and Deputy Facilitators once again.
“Members of the Council of Facilitators,” he said, “I have served long and proudly as a member of the Alliance Self-Defense Force, doing the best I can to preserve the civilized worlds of the galaxy from the threat of the Tevynians. Ever since we discovered the existence and location of the Source of Life, the planet the humans call Earth, many have had concerns we might interfere with the natural development of the planet, that it would be a disaster akin to our giving our technology to the Tevynians.
“I have had another worry that interrupts my sleep. I have worried what would happen if the Tevynians discovered the Source of Life and tried to take it for their own. They believe all that we have is theirs, and once they knew of their place of origin, once they discovered the humans who are so closely related to them rule this planet, they would surely try to conquer Earth as well. So, I made it my mission to guard the Source of Life against any incursions by the Tevynians. Which was how I happened to be in a position to help when the Tevynians arrived, just as I’d feared.”
I bit back a twisted smile. Old Joon-Pah had learned something hanging out with Earth politicians, like how to lie with a straight face. He hadn’t been trying to protect Earth from the Tevynians, he’d been trying to get our help fighting the Helta an
d the Tevynians had followed his ass straight to Earth. He’d been aligned with a bunch of like-minded Helta and they’d been planning this for years under the noses of their government.
Maybe it should have bothered me more, but I’d grown inured to politicians and generals lying after Venezuela. And seeing as how our mission’s success depended on them accepting his explanation, I was prepared to accept a bit of gilding the lily.
“The Tevynians outnumbered us and would have destroyed the Truthseeker had it not been for the timely aid of the humans who call themselves Americans. They were advanced enough to launch a spacecraft around their moon and were able to rendezvous with us in Lunar orbit. Having never been exposed to our technology, they still intuited ways to use it we never would have considered and with their help, we were able to completely destroy two Tevynian cruisers before they could report back on what they had discovered.
“But it is only a matter of time before they find the system again. We lack the ships and the crews to guard the system forever and we must make sure Earth can protect itself. I had the choice of leaving the Earth to the mercy of our enemies, or trying to help them prepare, and I chose to give them what aid I could. Small things, not our lasers or our drives as we gave to the Tevynians, simply more efficient batteries and power generation, things that would, at least, give them a fair chance. But when we received word that Fairhome was under attack and we had to leave Earth to try to save what we could, the humans volunteered to accompany us, to help us against the Tevynians.”
“Holy shit,” I murmured. Strawbridge shot me a quelling glance and I clamped my jaws shut, but it was damned hard. He was laying it on thick. The truth was in there, somewhere, but you’d need a shovel and a good set of boots to find it.
“The enemy had already occupied Fairhome, and we lacked the firepower to take the world back, but we did manage to keep one of the cruisers at the shipyards from falling into enemy hands, thanks to the brave deeds of this human….” He gestured toward me. “…Andy Clanton, one of the officers in their military, and his brother-in-arms, James Bowie. James Bowie gave his life to protect our people from the Tevynians, and in honor of his sacrifice, I allowed the humans to keep the ship they had saved.”