“The Governor is going to speak,” Kital told Jean moments before the news feeds he was watching lit up with the same announcement. A few seconds later, the cameras cut to the many-tentacled alien, standing behind a podium with no labels or symbols.
Medit! was larger than many A!Tol Jean had met, though most of Earth didn’t have the experience to judge. When he’d met her, her skin had been a neutral gray through their entire conversation, but that self-control had apparently fled her tonight. While her tentacles remained neutral gray, the bullet shape of her torso glittered in orange, purple, and black.
It wasn’t a pleasant set of colors to human eyes, and he doubted the emotions it represented were any better.
“People of Terra,” she began, her words being replaced by the translator box she wore on her chest. “Today, we have seen a grievous assault on A!Tol personnel across your planet and the destruction of several facilities meant to bring your medicine and industry closer to Imperial standards.
“I must note that in many cases, warnings were delivered to the targets sufficiently in advance to prevent massive collateral damage. Many people are alive who would not be if these attackers had not taken these steps.
“We are uncertain of the total death toll. More information will be provided to the local media as we learn it.
“Given the scale of these attacks, I must assure you that all of our resources will be dedicated to bringing the perpetrators to justice,” Medit! told the cameras. “We will find the guilty and punish them. We can do no less. We will do no more.
“The innocent have nothing to fear. The guilty should start watching the shadows.”
The video feed cut off, Jean’s news feed disintegrating into rapidly assembling articles and live analyst feeds.
“You may want to close that and look out the window,” Kital told him. “I know you fought them, but I don’t think you’ve seen one of our battleships up close.”
The news media remained surprisingly open and free under Earth’s new management, and had happily informed everyone that two A!Tol battleships remained in orbit. It appeared that the Governor had retreated aboard one at the beginning of the attacks, and that was where Jean and McQueen were being taken.
He heard McQueen inhale sharply next to him. Her father had served on Earth’s first battleship, but that would have been smaller than an A!Tol cruiser, let alone this leviathan of the stars. The ship was two kilometers long, a multi-megaton monster with an odd organic feel to it. In many ways, it almost resembled an A!Tol, with a central hull and a number of nacelles reaching forward with her energy weapons.
It was painted bright white, glittering in the Sun as the shuttle whipped around it at a mind-boggling speed now they were clear of atmosphere.
“Shield of Innocents,” Kital said quietly. “She is an older ship, but her crew will die before she leaves this system to the Kanzi. Someday, you may give us credit for that, Admiral Villeneuve.”
#
Jean and McQueen were hustled off the shuttle by their escorts, the power-armored soldiers all unhelmeted now. Without the helmets, the distinctions between the various bipeds became a lot clearer. Height was one divider, but the category of “bipedal soldier” that made up a surprisingly large chunk of the alien ground troops on Earth appeared to include everything from aliens with three eyes, no visible ears, and skin that looked like soft metal, to squat creatures with red fur and wide, toad-like faces.
The rest of the company were saurian centaurs like Kital, all members of the same species with different colors and complexions of scales.
The escort dissipated quickly as they moved into the ship, most of the troops heading in different directions while Kital and a single other saurian trooper led the two humans deeper into the ship.
The interior of the vessel was much smoother than an equivalent UESF ship would have been. Jean’s practiced eye easily picked out where access panels had been tucked away in the smooth lines, but the calm white walls and concealed panels were a far cry from the plain steel and open hatches of Earth’s crude ships.
Shield of Innocents’ shuttle bay was a busy swarm of small spacecraft arriving and leaving, many of the arrivals disgorging injured human civilians into the hands, tentacles, claws, and other manipulators of the waiting medical teams.
“Each of the battleships can handle three thousand wounded,” Jean’s escort told them quietly. “The cruisers another three thousand between them. The less critically injured will probably get shifted to planetside facilities relatively quickly, but since the worst cases will need to be treated up here, we’re planning to bring all of the wounded up for triage.”
The Governor may have given the Resistance credit for trying to minimize collateral damage, but that likely meant there were only thousands of injured instead of thousands of dead. The Imperial troops and government appeared to be pulling out all of the stops in disaster relief in response.
Jean sighed as they left the shuttle bay, shaking his head. Every target he’d seen made sense, and this was exactly the kind of operation the Resistance had been created for, but instead of making the A!Tol look bad, they appeared to have handed them the propaganda coup of the century.
The worst part was that he wasn’t even entirely sure the A!Tol were helping people for any kind of ulterior motive. They really did seem to be just…trying to help.
“The Governor is waiting,” Kital told him, bringing them to a door even Jean had almost missed. “Should your companion wait with me?”
“No,” Jean said shortly. “The Governor needs to see Miss McQueen’s data. I’m just the door opener.”
With a firm nod to the panicked-looking young woman he’d dragged this far, Jean Villeneuve stepped through the door into the office of the A!Tol Governor of Earth.
#
The office didn’t look like a permanent fixture for Medit!. There were no decorations. A utilitarian desk and couch had been added for the Governor to work from, and someone had recently provided two human chairs for her guests. A massive screen was set up next to the desk and couch, and the Governor was scrolling through dozens of images at a time, a haptic field over the screen responding to commands from her fluttering manipulator tentacles.
“Ah, Admiral Villeneuve,” she greeted him. “And Miss Amy McQueen.”
“Not an Admiral anymore,” Jean reminded the Governor. “Not an officer of any kind.”
“We could fix that,” Medit! pointed out. “My staff could have an appropriate uniform and insignia done up by the end of the day. Lesser Fleet Lord would be a small demotion for you, equivalent to your Vice Admiral, I think, but give some time for retraining and we could have you in command of your own cruiser squadron inside a Terran year.”
He shook his head.
“No offense, Governor, but I have no intention of serving the people who conquered my world,” he said dryly. “I have to decline your generous offer.”
Her skin was still torn up in colors of orange, purple, and black—but streaks of blue and red appeared as she offered and he responded. Jean wondered if the Imperial databases that had been made publically available on Earth included a translation guide for their conquerors’ skin tones. He would have looked it up if he hadn’t expected to remain retired.
“Shame,” she told him.
“Every time I talk to one of you tentacled bouffon, I feel like I’m being tested,” Jean pointed out grumpily. “I’m just here to deliver Miss McQueen—something is going on on Earth that either says you’re lying to us or you have a problem.”
Medit!’s skin flashed bright orange before quickly returning to its mottled tones.
“The Imperium does not, as a rule, lie,” she said, her translator picking up a level of flatness that Jean suspected was not due to a software failure.
“We are testing you, Jean Villeneuve,” she continued after a long moment of silence. “In time, we may even tell you why. What did Miss McQueen find that was so important?”
A
t least they weren’t going to lie to him, he guessed. He gestured the young woman forward.
“Tell her what you told me,” he instructed.
Haltingly, McQueen started. Medit! waited calmly for her to finish, and the young lawyer rapidly regained her confidence, likely mentally classifying the Governor in the same category as a human judge.
When she finished the recitation she’d given Jean, the A!Tol gestured with a manipulator tentacle.
“May I see this data?”
McQueen glanced at Jean, who still had the original chip she’d given him, then produced another copy of the chip from her suit jacket. Smart girl.
Medit! took the chip and dropped it onto a small plate next to the big screen that Jean had completely missed. The plate lit up in colors beneath the chip, flickering for a couple of moments. The datachip was designed to be accessed by slotting it into a reader, but it appeared that the A!Tol tech it was sitting on could read it regardless as a directory appeared on the big screen.
All of the labels were in English, but the Governor flipped an icon from the screen onto the directory and everything changed over into a completely different iconography and language—the computer was translating the Terran files, file structure and even language in real time.
Jean was impressed. The top-line computer hardware Nova Industries had acquired for the XC units like Tornado probably had the processing power to do that, but nobody on Earth had written software capable of that. And this was just a secondary demand on the battleship’s computers.
As video streams and text started to flash onto the screen, it rapidly began collating past what Jean could follow. He suspected there had to some kind of AI routine that was organizing the data in a manner Medit! was used to working with, but it was still impressive how quickly the A!Tol cut through all of the data, her skin shifting to darker and darker orange as she worked.
“Miss McQueen,” the Governor said, the translator applying an impressive amount of graveness to her voice. “May I keep this chip?”
“I have copies,” McQueen said calmly.
“I would hope so,” Medit! agreed, a momentary flash of blue cutting through her current burnt umber tone. “This should not be happening,” she noted. “We do not engage in kidnapping or murders. It undermines the entire uplift effort.”
Uplift. Jean didn’t think the translator had chosen that word at random. Uplift was…very different than conquest, if they meant it they way he suspected they did. Of course, what the colonizer thought was ‘uplifting’ could be very different than what the colonized would think.
Medit! stepped away from the haptic interface, her black eyes turning back to the two humans.
“You were correct to bring this to me, Jean Villeneuve,” she told him. “This is a greater threat to the integration of Earth than the Weber Network attacks.”
Jean tried not to wince at her revelation that she knew about the Weber Protocols. He probably failed. That was unexpected—all of the records he’d been aware of were destroyed.
“How?” he asked, not bothering to pretend he didn’t know what she meant.
“There is always a Resistance,” Medit! told him. “We have swum these currents before; we know their rocks and reefs. All sapients are different, and yet so often very similar. We know how to handle armed rebellion.
“But this represents corruption within our own ranks,” she admitted. “These people could only have been kidnapped by the officers and soldiers of our invasion force. Sadly, they have almost certainly been removed from Earth and funneled into the supply chain already.”
“The supply chain?” McQueen demanded. “What has happened to my brother? My husband?!”
“Kanzi slavers operate in our space despite our best efforts,” Medit! said quietly. “They believe that other bipeds were put in this universe to serve them, and would likely happily purchase your people as ‘exotics’.
“I cannot guarantee that we will find your family,” the Governor told McQueen. “I will swear to you, upon the honor of my Empress, that we will find those who stole them. We will move the stars and seas to try to find your family and the other victims.
“We swore protection for Terra when we came here,” Medit! reminded them. “If that oath has been forsworn by our own soldiers, I will hunt them. I will break them. If any power in this universe can return your family to you, we will.
“And if we cannot, I swear to you we will avenge them.”
Chapter 40
Four weeks was a long time to sit still, even on a station with as many and varied entertainments as Tortuga. Those entertainments seemed to be keeping Annette’s crew busy, though her own complete lack of funds had dramatically limited her own ability to enjoy herself.
Despite all of the work, Tornado’s crew compartments had been shifted around in one single piece, and her artificial gravity was efficient enough that there hadn’t even been a spilled drink during the process. Annette had remained aboard through almost the entire work, quietly watching video feeds from her office.
Part of her felt guilty. Every day she spent sitting in dry dock, doing nothing, was a day Earth remained under the heel of an alien overlord. Every day she was here was a day she was asking her crew to spend away from their families and their homes for no certain goal.
But they needed the upgrades, and every day they were away from Earth at all was the same. In quiet moments like this, as she sat alone in her office, it was easy to admit that she didn’t have a plan. Not one she believed in.
The only plan she had was to steal technology and plans for technology from the A!Tol and funnel it back to Earth, where hopefully the Weber Network could do something with it. She didn’t have schematics for the Laian tech, so that didn’t work, but Tornado’s upgrades would finally put her in the same weight class as the A!Tol Navy.
Capturing military logistics vessels and civilian ships wouldn’t get her what she needed. She could buy some of the schematics here on Tortuga, but anything she bought would be inferior to the aliens’ top-line military gear—even more so once the Network managed to somehow assemble a hidden yard to build anything and finished building ships in secret.
Plus, the more she learned of the Kanzi—and of Tortuga itself, for that matter!—the more she realized driving the A!Tol out would only be the beginning. If they drove the Imperium out, the Kanzi would try and move in. If the Kanzi didn’t…the pirates and raiders who operated through Tortuga would be perfectly willing to raid a weak independent world for slaves and resources.
Even if she somehow managed to free Earth, they wouldn’t magically be stronger than they had been before. And freeing Earth wouldn’t be without a cost. Whatever fleet they built would take losses, have damaged ships.
She could free her world from one conqueror only to make them vulnerable to another.
A pile of money so large she could barely comprehend it had allowed her to upgrade her ship to be able to take on any A!Tol ship in her own weight range and win, but she only had one ship. The Imperium and their enemies had hundreds.
The screen in front of her showed Crew workers and drones closing up the gaps around the last of Tornado’s new proton beams. They were slightly ahead of schedule and would finish everything up in the next day or so.
But Captain Annette Bond had to admit, to herself if no one else, that she wasn’t quite sure what to do once her ship was ready for war again.
#
Annette’s brainstorming session, an attempt to find a solution to her problems that had once again devolved into brooding, was interrupted by a chime on her communicator.
“Captain, this is Chan,” her communication officer told her brightly. The woman had been far more cheerful since she and the chief engineer had settled into a quietly solid relationship. Annette, with her lack of available options, was quietly envious of the two women’s obvious luck and contentment.
And surprised, since she doubted they would even have looked at each other without being st
randed light-years and light-years from Sol.
“What is it, Yahui?” she asked.
“We have a caller for you,” Chan reported. “Video link, from the Captain of the new ship that just arrived last night: an Indiri named Karaz Forel.”
Annette sat up straighter. That was the man the first yardmaster she’d spoken to had said could get her recent A!Tol military schematics—those and exotic slaves, which weren’t much use to her.
“What was his ship?” she asked. “I didn’t pay that much attention, to be honest.”
“I’ll forward you Rolfson’s assessment,” Chan promised. “She’s a heavy, though: even bigger than Tornado and a nasty pile of scrap.”
“I’ll take a look,” Annette said. “You may as well put Captain Forel through. Visual to the wallscreen in my office, please.”
She’d been using the screen as a pseudo-window, looking through the video feeds at the work being done on her ship. Now she quickly made sure her uniform and braided blond hair were straight, and faced the screen as it flickered and then formed into the image of the first Indiri she’d ever taken a solid look at.
The translators the humans used had originally been built for Indiri, and so her eyes were drawn first to Karaz Forel’s ears. They looked surprisingly humanlike, despite having black skin and emerging from a broad, wide-mouthed face covered in slickly moist short red fur.
Despite the fur, the Indiri reminded her of nothing so much as a frog. Big bulging eyes protruded from the wide triangular head, and a long tongue flickered around the alien’s disturbingly open, dark-interiored, mouth.
“Captain Karaz Forel,” she greeted him. By now she had a lot of practice at not letting her initial reaction to strange aliens show. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
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