“I’ve got to look into this,” Sandy decided.
“Talk to Penny. Have Mimzy research the West’s intervention in Japan during the last half of the nineteenth century. I’ve been reading up on that.”
“What happened?”
“Japan had locked itself away and refused all but the most minimum of foreign contact. Then the West decided they wanted to sell stuff to the Japanese and they opened the country up to trade and other contact. The Japanese got a good look at what the Western powers were doing to the next country over, China, I think. The Japanese took off to modernize themselves as fast as they could.”
“How’d that work out for them?”
“They ended up with a lopsided economy with the Army driving the entire country. The West had colonized much of the world. Japan not only tried to modernize, but also become a colonial power. Unfortunately for them, they got into the colonial thing as most of world was discovering that it didn’t work all that well, for both the imperialists and the colonials. Japan ended up being the first and only country to get atomics used on them.”
“Ouch,” Sandy said. “What I’m hearing from your cautionary tale is that we need to keep the technological, sociological, and political capabilities close to even.”
“I think so. Still, neither I or anyone else know how to do it. Strange, I had my ship’s computer search the historical archives, and there weren’t a lot of good examples of how you introduce high tech into a lower tech world and didn’t get a mess.”
“So, I foresee another trip to see the cats and a whole lot of bargaining in my future.”
“Yes, ma’am. By the way, while you were gone, we completed another squadron of battlecruisers. They’re sitting at the pier. We can’t find more than a skeleton crew for them.”
“We need cats?”
“We need cats.”
“Okay, you get me that threat assessment and see what you can do about working out a rotation schedule to swap task forces between the forts and here. The crews get to keep their ships, no swapping crews between ships. At least we won’t get into that mess. Me, I’ll look into the cats.”
“Thanks, Admiral. Ain’t it wonderful to be the head high muckety-muck?” Amber said with a dry-humored grin.
“Oh, I thank Kris Longknife every night for going home and leaving this mess in my lap.”
“You think she’s really enjoying her desk job?” Amber asked.
“I had a desk job once,” Sandy said. “I never thanked it properly for driving me to drink.”
On that laugh, they parted ways.
4
It was a good thing that Sandy ate most of her meals in the Victory’s main wardroom. When she left her office after wading through more information that added little, but provided a stronger back up to what she’d already been told, the wardroom in Admiral’s Country was still loaded with boffins carrying forth on their pet part of the issue.
Sandy was halfway through her meal when Jacques and Amanda joined her.
“Any surprises?” Sandy asked as the couple settled down to their meal.
“No, but the xenobiologists are going apeshit over the collection of species samples we recovered from under the pyramid. They want you to send out scouts to see if we can locate some of those worlds. One sample of a species is hardly enough to study. They want a good look at the entire ecology.”
Penny shook her head as she joined them. “They left nothing to study on the planet we assume conquered and occupied them.”
“Yes, but that first planet Kris Longknife discovered? There was still a lot of evidence left behind about the world and its ecologies,” Jacques pointed out.
“That was a fairly recent destruction,” Penny countered. “There won’t be a lot left of the planets that got massacred ten thousand years ago or more.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Sandy said, putting her foot down, even if it was just under the table. “I am not sending out exploration ships. First, I don’t want to lose them. Second, if there are motherships that haven’t gotten the word about us, I don’t want one of them getting brought into this war because they intercepted a strange little vehicle with strange vermin that look too much like the properly enlightened ones. Okay?”
“Oh, we’ve got something to add to your pipe,” Jacques said. “After we captured the alien cruiser, the one we caught before we all headed off to the home world?”
“I remember the ship,” Sandy said.
“We sent off a request to Wardhaven asking for the genetic work-up on the people that Kris first ran into. They were a family or something. They were running a small mining operation.”
“Yes, I asked about that before we left. The word was that they’d been lost.”
“Just about everything from that circumnavigation of the galaxy disappeared down a vanishing hole,” Penny said. “They were none too happy that we’d let the others in the circumnavigation corps know that we could find fuzzy jumps when they couldn’t. Anyway, it was all classified somewhere up there above God almighty.”
“And?” Sandy asked.
“We got them to give us at least the genetic work-ups for them, the couple of raider females we found murdered on the first raped planet, as well as the gene report on the two babies we rescued when we blew up that alien scout in Iteeche space.”
“Where are those kids?” Amanda asked, patting her own stomach. While Sandy was gone, Amber had signed a general permission order for everyone who wanted to have kids. Apparently, many wanted to start a family, Amanda and Jacques included.
“They gave us their genetic picture,” Penny said, dryly, “not their address.”
“What’s interesting about the work-up,” Jacques said, ignoring the side tracks, “is that most of the members of that independent family all had the rebellion markers. The aliens must have more than one way to get their independently-minded types off their base ships.”
“And the others?” Sandy asked.
“Two of the three women who were murdered and their bodies hidden among the slaughtered local bodies also had the rebel makers,” Penny said. “I guess they weren’t as docile as some guys wanted them. The two kids also bore the marks. I wondered how it was that their parents had attempted to escape the general death that the aliens accepted with defeat. I’m sorry we didn’t get to meet them.”
“Me too,” Sandy said.
“Have you met the kids we do have here on Alwa?” Jacques asked.
“No, not yet.”
“Admiral, I really think you’d benefit from spending some time with them. They may not be our enemy, themselves, but they’re the closest we have.”
“How would I arrange some time with them?”
“Cara, Abby’s niece, is working a lot with them. Call Abby for an introduction.”
After a couple of calls, Sandy had an invitation to the children’s school for the next morning. “Please don’t wear your uniform, Admiral,” the young Cara told Sandy. “Some of the alien kids get anxious when they see someone in uniform.”
Sandy wasn’t sure what that meant, but the next day she was in a mufti as she stepped from the longboat to the shuttle landing dock at Haven. A taxi was waiting and quickly drove her to the school. She arrived about ten a.m. local time.
The school didn’t look all that different from the middle school she’d visited when her own offspring was growing up. Built of adobe brick with red clay roof tiles, it fit in nicely with other colonial buildings. Sandy reported to the office where the principal offered her coffee, then took her to a play area in the open space surrounded by classrooms.
Twenty kids in their early teens were getting set up under the care of Abby’s niece, whom Sandy recognized from her file picture. All of them were dressed in the same clothes; khaki shorts and green t-shirts. Whether it was a uniform or just what they wore, Sandy didn’t know. The kids had the lankiness of early teens who were shooting up so fast they could hardly find their feet, much less keep their feet on the ground.
The principal offered Sandy a seat in one corner and handed her a tablet. On that screen, she could monitor all the kids.
The students were about to play one of their favorite games. It was a multi-player game. They were divided up into five groups of four. Two of the groups, Sandy learned from a glance at the information displayed on the tablet for her, were made up of colonial kids. Two other groups were made up of kids that General Montoya had succeeded in sleepy darting before the female alien managed to incite them all to suicide.
Like most people in human space, Sandy was familiar with the grandmotherly woman who spewed invectives and threats at any human who would listen. A lot of battlecruisers were being paid for and built by people who’d made her short acquaintance.
The kids, however, were bright-eyed and eager to play. Spending a morning playing a game was great sport for them.
The last team was a mix. Two of the kids had been brought out from human space when their parents immigrated to teach at Haven University. The other two kids were aliens, members of the hunter-gatherer tribe that had ambushed a Marine patrol protecting a science team. Sandy spotted a scar on the boy’s leg. It was an infected wound that had almost turned lethal which had driven his parents to risk taking on the sky gods in search of a miracle.
Beside him was a slightly younger girl who seemed inseparable from him.
A dive into the student file of the aliens showed that the two tribal kids had the full rebel genetic fingerprint. The eight ship-borne aliens were untouched by any of the markers.
Sandy leaned back to watch and learn.
The kids hurriedly went through the opening moves. Some aspects of the game became clear quickly. The objective was to exploit resources to build and expand your small village. Each child in the teams needed to cooperate with their teammates. One of the colonial kids tried a sleight of hand, committing to a trade, then reneging after he got his half. That didn’t work out for him; the other three ganged up on him the next turn.
The four kids needed to cooperate, although fighting and conquest was an option. However, with only four players in each group, there was no way to settle on a course of action, except unanimously or with a vote of three against one.
The untrustworthy player apparently tried his trick every game. The kids had learned to land on him heavy when he did it the first time. By the third time, he’d fallen into line.
The five teams, however, did allow the overall game to fall into two-on-three if one student could get the other eleven to join in a game of conquest.
Today, one of the colonials, Nancy the Hun, as she was known, tried to turn the game into a war, but the other players would have none of it. Quickly it became clear to Sandy that the kids were out to maximize their growth, while seeing if they could edge out the other teams for the lead.
It was there that the internal dynamics of the four-player teams began to show itself.
The two colonial teams settled for a good strategy that balanced resource exploitation and population growth with care for the land. They might suffer natural disasters or have a good year with abundant crops. They’d roll with the punches, help where they could, but keep working towards the goal they’d set for themselves.
The two teams that had children from the alien ship teams had a problem. They understood the basics of the game; they enjoyed playing it, and did so often. However, they couldn’t seem to agree on an overall strategy. Each year, they would have to make their decisions all over again. Each time, a different kid seemed to get into the driver’s seat and they’d go off where he or she wanted to go.
Sandy noted that her monitor kept track of who was the leader of each group. Leadership was collegial for all the teams, but some of the ship aliens would talk more one time, less another. Depending on who was talking, the team went one way or the other.
The strongest argument among the eight aliens always centered around risk. All of them were very risk averse.
The fifth team was anything but risk averse. The two immigrant kids and the two tribal ones weren’t reckless, but they weren’t averse to a gamble. Most of the time, they won. When they lost, they’d laugh and set about recovering.
Sandy went deep into the teacher’s materials. The mixed team had won ten of the last twenty games. The other ten were split between the two colonial teams, often by little more than a nose.
The ship aliens always came in last, frequently by a lot.
Sandy waved down Cara when she stood back to watch her students play their game. The admiral pointed at the results. “How does the trailing team feel about that?”
“They’re fine with it,” Cara said. “They just love building. When we finish this game, we’ll mix up the teams and I’ll show you something.”
Sandy leaned back, keeping one eye on the kids and the other eye on the readouts, and watched the game develop.
One of the colonial teams was almost wiped out by a volcanic explosion. All four of the other groups accepted refugees, fed them, and allowed them to pass through their lands on their way to an area that had no burning mountains.
One of the ship-borne groups suffered a major flood. They had to retreat into the hills and survive as hunters again before they came back down to the flood plain and rebuilt. This time, they split their population between seven hills with only those that needed the river for fishing or transport.
The mixed group got carried away. They tried to expand their population fast and split out to form their next town. Unfortunately, mother nature didn’t cooperate. They suffered a year of bad crops. Those that stayed behind had food stored in their granaries. The new town had no such reserves. Survivors fled back to the mother town, and there was civil strife and famine.
They recovered in a few years and tried again. This time, crops were abundant.
This was the cycle of the game for two hours.
With lunch only minutes away, the students made their final moves. Cara totaled the score. Again, the hunters and the immigrants came in first by a significant margin. The two colonial teams were neck-and-neck for second place and the ship-borne were well back. While the eight colonials ribbed each other for their mistakes, the eight raider kids showed no reaction to last place but took it all very placidly. They were more verbal about how fun the game had been, not who won or lost.
Sandy found it interesting, yet also disturbing. This was how slaves would react; quiet, servile, well-behaved.
There was a break for lunch which Sandy spent in the teacher’s lounge listening to the usual good-natured pleading of cases for more farm implements, electric cars, and other goods as well as more teaching tools. Sandy listened, but made no commitments. They knew as well as she that defense had a strong demand on them.
After lunch, the game continued. Only this time, Cara divided up the kids differently. The two colonial teams swapped two kids each. It was the other three teams where reorganization got the most interesting.
The mixed team was distributed between the ship-borne aliens. Each of the hunter kids was assigned to one of the other teams. Each of those teams contributed one person to the mixed team, leaving two immigrants with two ship-borne raiders.
The internal dynamics of those three teams was totally different in the afternoon game.
The two hunter kids dominated the ship-borne. They quickly arrived at a strategy and began to implement it within the group. The other three kids became more cheerful and enthusiastic as they went about fulfilling the orders they had been given.
The mixed group, however, was the most verbose. The two immigrant kids drew ideas out from the two quiet aliens. Some of their ideas were quite good and they were the basis for the final strategy. The assessment of Sandy’s tablet was that they were implementing a plan that was the closest to optimum.
Meanwhile, the two other mixed groups ran into a few problems. With three following the leader, the boss didn’t have anyone to question some of their worst ideas which led to a catastrophe or two. They me
t adversity with good humor, but still, you could see that the two hunter kids had a pretty good idea where they’d screwed up and went back to the game with a strong intent to get back in the lead.
Sandy nodded to herself as she watched the game play out in a small space all the strengths and weakness of government by the strong man. When the leaders were right, things went very well, but when the policy was wrong, there was no one there to spot it before it went south, or offer alternatives when it did.
That left Sandy wondering about the command structure she faced among the alien raiders. The Enlightened One called the shots; that was clear. What wasn’t clear was what the internal processes were. Was there a committee of Enlightened Ones that chose how the wolf pack did things or was it a top-down dictatorship? From what Sandy knew from Earth’s history with dictators, they were far more worried about keeping their jobs than the average elected official, usually because losing an election was bad. Being dethroned usually involved losing a head.
The one data point that Sandy had of an Enlightened One’s job performance related to her recent battle. The boss guy had failed to prepare for the attack she launched, and when it hit, he ran like a chicken, screaming for his subordinates to sacrifice themselves to save him.
In the end, one of his subordinates had blown him out of space.
“I wonder how well the aliens with rebel markers play with each other?” she asked herself. Sadly, she had no answer, but she was getting ideas.
Her commlink buzzed.
“Yes,” she answered.
“Admiral, we have a problem,” came in Admiral Kitano’s smooth voice. “A convoy just arrived from human space and it got into a fight. You might want to get up here so we can debrief the convoy commander.”
Sandy stood. The kids ignored her, so intent were they in the final few moves of their game. Cara, however, quickly came to her side.
“I take it that you have to go,” the young woman said.
Kris Longknife's Successor Page 4