by Evan Currie
*****
“Hiding in the transport is not what I agreed to,” Kriss growled, eyeing the open door and the humans who stood guard.
“Boss says you stay inside,” one of the Terrans answered without turning, “then you stay inside.”
Two Lucians started to get to their feet at that, but Kriss waved them down despite the rebellious glares they shot him.
“Calm down,” Strickland said, coming up the ramp that opened to the back of the vehicle. “You’re not missing anything. This is strictly intel gathering and just presenting ourselves to the locals. We don’t want to rub their face in the fact that the Alliance is in charge here. They wouldn’t respond well.”
“We will do things your way, Major,” Kriss grumbled, “for now.”
“If there’s any fighting to be done,” Strickland said, “you can be pretty sure it’ll be all hands on deck, but hopefully it won’t come to that just yet.”
“We should be hunting the ptahs down!” a Lucian spat out, his English far from perfect but better than Strickland’s Alliance Standard, despite the random indecipherable curse in the middle of it.
“What do you think we’re doing?” Strickland asked simply. “Unless you’re holding out on us, you don’t know where to find them. Alliance brief on this op is clear: The goal is to suppress local terror operations without turning this into an interstellar incident. This is hunting them down.”
Another started to object, but Kriss shut him down.
“The major is correct,” Kriss said, sounding like the admission actually hurt. “Without active targets, we would only make things worse.”
Strickland nodded. “The colonel was surprised when she learned you were assigned to this op, Sentinel. She told us it didn’t seem like your type of mission. In her estimation, you were more direct action operatives.”
“The colonel, as you say, is correct. This skulking around is not the duty of a Sentinel,” Kriss admitted. “However, others were sent before us and had little success. Casualty rates were high, and so the Alliance Council elected to send us. It was a statement to the public of the Alliance.”
Strickland nodded, understanding. “It’s funny how often the government’s ‘statement to the public’ involves screwing the job up just because they don’t have the patience to do it right.”
“‘They’ who? The government, or the public?” Kriss asked, amused.
“Yes.”
****
“So,” Sorilla asked as she leaned into the bar, “who is this Eri?”
Lira looked her over briefly before shrugging. “Eri controls most of the arable land in the area. You drove past his crops coming here from the landing field. What land he does not control, he mostly provides irrigation for.”
Local land baron, Sorilla thought, filing the name away. “We noticed a lot of good crops coming in, but no grazing land.”
“Grazing?” Lira looked confused.
“Livestock crops?” Sorilla suggested, getting a similarly confused look. “Meat animals.”
“Ah, no, we do not raise them. Land is at a premium here,” Lira said, “or, rather, arable land is. Water is available, of course, but it takes much work to clear a section of land from the toxic trace materials.”
“Like hydrogen-cyanide,” Sorilla said.
“Among some others,” Lira confirmed. “Levels are much higher here than on Earth. The current belief is that this world is younger than Earth, so the levels of such things haven’t been washed down by millions of years of weathering.”
“That fits with our initial scans,” Sorilla said. “We scanned several fresh craters that would indicate some pretty massive orbital bombardment in recent geological history. The system doesn’t seem to be too active, though, or it wasn’t in my brief if it was.”
“We scanned the system in depth before we landed the colony ship,” Lira said. “It was declared as safe as one might reasonably hope, though the night sky is quite active.”
Sorilla nodded in agreement while she was prepping a query file for the people on the SOL, making appropriate noises until she’d pulsed the file out.
“What do you do for meat?” she asked. “I’m assuming that you aren’t vegan. That would be unusual, considering your originating culture.”
“Vegan? As in vegetarian?” Lira asked, amused. “No we are not. We vat-grow meat proteins.”
“Cloned meat, then,” Sorilla said. “Figured it would be something like that. Still quite energy intensive, but I suppose you have solar to spare to supplement chemical growth mediums. Most colonies seem to come to similar solutions. Even Hayden mostly uses flash flesh. Only Earth really still maintains livestock herds.”
Sorilla was only a little surprised, and that only because the colony had left so early in the development of jump drives that most of the colonial technical advancements were years away when they quit the Earth. She had expected them to have tried to maintain herd beasts, as much as part of their culture as anything. They had certainly brought the materials to make the attempt, with tens of thousands of embryos from a wide genetic sampling of everything from cows to pigs and even horses and other useful beasts.
“You’re from Earth,” Lira said suddenly. “Have you eaten…steak?”
Sorilla chuckled. “I have. A lot of people are neo-vegans these days. They refuse to eat actual meat, just flash flesh, but my dad was never one to buy into that particular social convention. I grew up on Texan barbeque just as much as I did on cultured proteins. I’m guessing you mostly eat burgers here though?”
Lira nodded. “I would like to try steak sometime. The books describe it as being very good.”
“It can be,” Sorilla agreed.
Cloned proteins and flash flesh had similar issues when it came to classic foods, primarily texture. It was easy enough to get the taste close, and nutrition was a no-brainer, but texture was a real problem. Muscles had to be worked to get the sorts of fibrous composition to most meats. It could be simulated in a rather rough way, but it took a lot more work and energy to do so, so most flash flesh setups just ground up the protein into burgers.
She hadn’t actually considered that as part of her preparations for this mission, but now that it had been brought up, Sorilla loaded another pulse comm message and sent it off to the SOL, just to see if they had any real steak in inventory. For many cultures, it wouldn’t be more than a moderately interesting delicacy, but she suspected that here it would be worth its weight in gold…back when gold had actually been worth something.
Even if it isn’t, it might be worth it just to have an excuse to raid the admiral’s freezer, she thought, amused by the idea.
Her implants logged a response from the SOL on her previous inquiry, so she loaded it up and read the file while continuing to speak.
She let the conversation meander, occasionally nudging Nicky to offer up his own thoughts, all the while reading the report from the SOL. They’d been analyzing the much more detailed hyperspectral scans from the ship’s scanners, showing that Arkana had relatively low oxygen and ozone in the atmosphere, but with her pointedly directing their focus, they had now begun looking at trace elements as well.
Hydrogen-cyanide was present in high enough quantities to be a serious consideration, making Sorilla wonder just what it was that drove the original crew to choose this world as their stop of choice. She supposed that the discovery of an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere had probably blinded them somewhat to the faults.
They’ve lasted this long and seem to be thriving on the surface, so I guess they acclimated and adapted well enough.
The Alliance files told a bit of a different story, unfortunately. The planet had been hit by three civilization-killer asteroids in the last hundred thousand years, and she didn’t understand how the rock wasn’t a snowball from an effective nuclear winter.
Since the Alliance had claimed the local space, they’d actually prevented another four impacts…not to the same level, of course. They estimated
that over the last century at least twenty decent-sized rocks had made it to the surface, and they couldn’t even estimate how many airbursts there had been.
The irony of this mess is that if the Alliance hadn’t found these people, they’d probably be wiped out by a rock before long.
She kept a smile on her face as the conversation with Lira wrapped up and she said her goodbyes, leaving the rest of her flask with the woman in thanks.
She and Nicky stepped out into the sun, their implants automatically adjusting to maintain their vision as they walked toward the APC.
“So, what did we learn?” she asked the younger man.
“Ma’am?”
“Homework, Nicky,” Sorilla chided him. “What did we learn?”
“Other than to look for poison in the drink we’re offered?” he asked, a hint of a jab in his tone.
Sorilla accepted it with an easy smiled. “Not a bad lesson. We have hyperspectral implants; use them. I wouldn’t have spotted the hydrogen-cyanide spike anyway, though. It’s far below the threshold my scanners were set for.”
Nicky seemed a little disappointed that she hadn’t reacted more, but he shrugged as they walked. “She said they didn’t even have an army base. No professional soldiers?”
“Why would they?” Sorilla agreed. “They’re the only culture on the planet, and they’re not big enough or old enough to have formed any significant schisms. No one to wage war on.”
“Militias, though?” Nicky asked, uncertain.
“Probably, and good ones, I would wager,” Sorilla said. “That’s traditional for them, if I’m not missing my guess.”
“Not a lot of good against a starship in the orbitals.”
“No, but they could make life a living hell down here for the Alliance,” Sorilla said, “assuming the Alliance gives a damn about what goes on down here. I doubt they do.”
“The swastikas behind the bar were creepy,” Nicky said dryly.
Sorilla just nodded, “I know.”
They stopped at the back of the APC and Nicky glanced in to where the Alliance Sentinels were waiting impatiently.
He switched over to a direct comm, cutting out the open air speaker. “So why are they here at all?”
“Governmental inertia,” Sorilla said on the same channel. “The Alliance is expanding, so whether they need this space or planet now is beside the point. They’ll claim it so no one else can.”
“No matter who got here first.”
“Power speaks, always has,” Sorilla said as she climbed into the APC and walked over to where Kriss was sitting, staring pointedly at the Lucian beside him as she continued to speak over the private channel. “Alliance corporations probably want resources in the outer system where it’s cheap to mine them. That was how the Ross got clearance to move into Hayden.”
A silent nod from Kriss was all it took for the Lucian to get up and make room so that Sorilla could drop into the bolstered seat that was really more of a built-in restraint system. She locked the restraints in place before turning her comms again to the open air.
“Locals are definitely planning a resistance,” she said. “Don’t know if they have anything in motion yet, though. The odds of them having the chemical know-how to do what you report is…higher than I would have expected.”
“Yet you do not seem convinced,” Kriss said calmly.
“Too early to be certain,” Sorilla admitted. “but higher than expected doesn’t mean high, it just means that they have come skill in handling chemicals that I wasn’t counting on. How many people have access to Alliance spacecraft?”
“All Alliance citizens, including protectorates, are guaranteed right of free travel,” Kriss said firmly. “Open berths made available for a minimal cost, subsidized by the government. Better quality accommodations are also available, unsubsidized, of course.”
“Of course,” Sorilla said dryly. “Well, that means that we’re going to have no end of suspects to look at.”
“Your opinion of the local resistance, then?”
“They’ll be effective, more inclined to strike-and-fades than chemical or other types of attacks,” Sorilla said. “Don’t mistake that for an unwillingness or inability to use those sorts of strikes. They’ll just prefer to be more direct.”
“Good. They might be fun to spar with in the future,” Kriss chuckled.
“The only question now is whether they’re already active or not,” Sorilla said, sighing, “but I’m leaning toward not.”
“Why?” Kriss demanded sharply.
“Frankly? I’m guessing that they’re still deep in intel gathering, and the local barons are likely still working out how they can profit from your tech base,” Sorilla said. “It’ll take longer for a resistance to form without their say so.”
“Barons?” Strickland asked, leaning over as the APC closed up.
Sorilla nodded. “Probably of the robber type, but I’m just spit-balling there. Land baron by the name of Eri controls pretty much all of the arable land. I’m guessing there’s likely a meat baron of sorts, controlling the cloning vats used to produce meat proteins. Name a resource, there’ll almost certainly be some figure controlling it.”
“Not a terribly libertarian ideal, is it?” Strickland asked, snorting.
“Power vacuums have to be filled, Major. If the government doesn’t do it, individuals will,” Sorilla answered. “That’s always the balancing act: a government strong enough to protect its citizens, but not so tyrannical as to utterly dominate them.”
Kriss laughed. “Has anyone from your worlds ever achieved that?”
Sorilla shook her head. “Not to my knowledge. There is a saying, Earth history…‘a government strong enough to give you everything you need is strong enough to take everything you have’.”
“Wise saying,” Kriss nodded.
“I have a corollary for it,” Sorilla went on. “Any government too weak to take everything you have is too weak to protect anything you love.”
“That sounds like a catch-22, Colonel.”
“History is a catch-22, Major,” Sorilla answered Strickland. “The question isn’t if a government, or system, goes bad on you. It’s when and how. Doesn’t matter what the idea behind the system is, the rot is at the core of the system…”
“The laws?”
“The people,” Sorilla said, dead serious, looking at Kriss. “I don’t know how it is with the Alliance, but humans are corrosive. We’re bred to break any system we live in, to take advantage of any hole we can. We push into the cracks and widen them, until the system crashes down around us…and then we build it all up again and start over.”
“It is a familiar story.” Kriss nodded. “Most technological species seem to do the same.”
“Yeah, I wish I were more surprised,” Sorilla sighed. Abruptly, she banged on the side of the APC, three heavy thumps. “Move out! Take us closer into the main colony site.”
The APC silently whirred off on its electric motors.
*****
Eri Constantine was a man accustomed to the finer things in life.
That was something that had not changed when the Xenos arrived, and he didn’t foresee it changing anytime in the near future.
Things were changing apace, however, that much was certain. The Xenos brought with them new opportunities, and once they’d established meaningful contact, it was clear that they were a reasonable sort. He had wondered where they’d learned English, but with the news from the airfield he’d recently been made aware of…well, that question seemed answered.
I must admit to some curiosity about how Earth has turned out.
He’d never admit it in public, but Eri had always harbored doubts about the official histories. The idea that they were fleeing a doomed planet, sinking in its own filth, was romantic and compelling, but it sounded too much like fiction to him. Of course, that might have been because most local fiction had been informed by those histories, so maybe there was a little bias there.
In any case, it seemed clear that Earth hadn’t quite managed to fry itself in natural disasters or sink into the cesspool of racial mixing…whatever that really meant.
His scouts had already reported back on the progress of the vehicle the Earthers were riding in, and it looked interesting. Clearly not Alliance tech, but clean and advanced, and very impressive from the photos he’d been sent.
They have a shuttle capable of atmospheric escape. He let his finger brush the display with the image of the craft in question.
He’d give a substantial chunk of his wealth for one of those, and to have one so close…and humans who could presumably build, repair, and maintain it as well? It was frustrating in the extreme, because he knew that taking it would be the worst possible course of action. An atmospheric shuttle was worthless without a jump ship to match it to, and the only one the colony had was a rusting hunk of junk that would never fly again.
The Alliance was more than willing to sell tech to him, of course, though he had determined that it was pretty much obsolete crap by their standards. The costs were the problem. Food, mineral wealth, and the like were all of little to no value to the Alliance.
None.
It was beyond his understanding. Nothing in his life had every prepared him for it. The idea of material wealth being all but worthless had been the biggest shock of meeting the Xenos. Even their inhuman appearance hadn’t been remotely so stunning.
He’d lived his entire life in the comfort of being wealthy. His father had left him control over almost all the local productive land, as well as the means of making it productive. What he didn’t personally own, he had control of through one method or another.
The Xenos didn’t care about food, however; they had plenty. Gold? Steel? With access to asteroids, those were about as valuable as dirt, and damn near as common.
Some pharmaceuticals had value, and he’d parlayed those into a few bits of technology here and there. Technology had value as well, but the Alliance was well above anything Arkana had to trade.
Put simply, it was an infuriating situation, but not an impossible one. He’d spent much of the past decade working on ideas and products the Xenos would trade for, competing with his fellow patriarchs to see who could acquire the most useful technologies from the Xenos.