“Major?” Staff Sergeant Kono stood at the platform edge and looked at her with concern. Trace stood, clipped down her faceplate, and jumped back to the platform.
Lieutenant Zhi cut in. “Major, we’ve got another two chah'nas up here. They want to talk to you, they’re challenging our authority here.”
“Be there in a moment,” said Trace, striding up the platform with Kono and the rest of Command Squad falling in behind and beside. She jogged quickly up the stairs, and found that indeed, another pair of chah'nas much like the first were confronting Lieutenant Zhi, weapons not to hand but looming aggressively. Pushy species, all of them. A little was never enough.
“You are Major Thakur?” one of them demanded as she strode to them.
“I am,” she replied.
“I have a message from our commander,” that one said. “He says that…”
“Shut up,” said Trace. “That mess down there. Did you do that?”
The chah'nas smirked. “Good work with froggies, yes? Fire makes them crackle.”
Trace pulled her pistol, and with rifle and pistol together shot both chah'nas simultaneously. They were dead before they hit the ground. “I changed my mind,” she told her stunned marines. “All chah'nas on Eve will surrender or die. We’ll make the announcement. Let’s go.”
20
Medbay Three was getting a little crazy when Erik visited — in addition to various wounded marines and two kuhsi, there were now two very unwounded marines with rifles guarding five wounded tavalai. A couple of Medbay One’s marines had recovered enough to go back to their quarters, but still the total number of occupied beds increased. Erik wondered how long that would continue.
Corpsmen had already attended to all the tavalai, patching gunshot wounds, performing minor surgeries to reattach tissue and insert micro-bios into the right spots to accelerate healing. Erik passed the two kuhsi, and noted the mother was sitting on her bed unrestrained, the cub on her lap, eating while scanning a slate and warily watching the bay’s new arrivals. Both were looking much healthier — the boy especially. He looked up at Erik with bright, curious eyes as he passed.
Erik headed for the tavalai in the far corner, with the bandaged leg, and white hospital pyjamas that looked faintly ridiculous on that broad, squat, green-brown body. That one was engaged in muttered, distressed conversation with his neighbour, whose arm and side were wrapped. Both looked at him as he approached.
“Are you Chis?” he asked.
“I am.” With a nervous glance at the armed marine nearby. “Why are there soldiers here? We are wounded civilians.”
“It’s been a long time since we’ve had tavalai on the ship,” said Erik. “Please understand. We’ve been at war for a long time.”
“I assure you, none of us were much good at fighting even when fit.” He blinked repeatedly, the double eyelids flickering. Tavalai found human air very thin and very dry. No doubt his eyes were drying uncomfortably. “How goes the fight?”
“Little change from your last report.” Erik could have taken the wall-mounted bench seat, but did not want to sit so close. He sat on the end of the bunk instead, by the tavalai’s big feet. “Twenty-seven unharmed survivors, all under marine protection on Eve. Three more critically hurt, our medical people are working on them now. You’ll get their names as soon as we have them.”
Chis looked at the neighbouring tavalai and spoke a stream of staccato, vibrating sounds. Just like kuhsi-tongues, Togiri sounded much different from tavalai mouths. Chah'nas tongues, oddly, were easiest for humans.
“Phoenix database,” said Erik. “Translator programme, authorisation Lieutenant Commander Erik Debogande. Translate this conversation to Togiri, to all tavalai in this room.”
“Understood.”
“Thank you,” said Chis, cautiously. “You… why did you bring us here? There are medical bays on Eve?”
“We may need to move quickly. Wounded are hard to move, and we can’t dock with Eve with the facility still unsecured. And we cannot spare medical personnel from the ship, they’re needed here.”
“And the twenty-seven on Eve?”
“There is a starship pilot amongst them, and several who could qualify as crew. The running plan is to let them take the abandoned chah'nas vessel. We’ll give you assistance should you need it, then you jump to Kolatin, which is currently unoccupied and entirely tavalai. You tell them what happened.”
“Twenty-seven.” Chis seemed dazed, staring at nothing with those big, bulbous eyes. “There is no hope of more?”
“If there are, they’re hiding and we cannot find them. But so far we’ve counted more than five hundred bodies. You said you numbered five hundred and fifty two. So the odds don’t look good.” He paused. “I’m sorry.”
No marines had been hurt. They’d taken the chah'nas by surprise, and these chah'nas, judging by Trace’s skeptical report, weren’t particularly great warriors. After the first couple of exchanges, most had run, and with marines holding the spine high overhead, any chah'nas in the streets was in grave danger from snipers.
Reports from the captured ship indicated it had mechanical problems — nothing that a rotation of work couldn’t solve, Rooke insisted, but enough to keep it from jumping. The techs over there now said it looked like chah'nas had been working to fix it when Phoenix had arrived. Unable to leave with their comrades, this ship had volunteered to stay, and carry out the dirty work, and sacrifice itself if necessary. When they’d found out the incoming ship was human and not tavalai, they’d probably concluded that sacrifice wouldn’t be necessary. What human warship would possibly stop them from killing tavalai?
“Chis?” The tavalai did not respond, just stared blankly. It was shock, Erik thought. And grief. Erik glanced at the armed marine standing nearby. The marine looked unmoved. They’d had a different war, Erik knew, fighting tavalai face to face. For some spacers at least, it was less personal.
“Um kid? Maybe don’t… um…” It was Private Rolonde, Trace’s marine from Command Squad. Erik looked, and found the little kuhsi boy wandering over, his drinking bottle in hand. He passed Erik, quite fearless, and stopped by the tavalai. And offered his bottle, drinking straw and all. “I’m sorry sir,” said Rolonde, “I’m not sure what that is. Fruit juice, I think.”
Chis looked at the boy curiously. “His name’s Skah,” said Erik. “His mother over there is Tif. They’re a long way from home.”
“Why thank you Skah,” said Chis, and sniffed at the bottle with those big, slitted nostrils. He sipped, uncaring that the straw had been in another species’ mouth. Skah let him have the bottle, and Chis patted him gently on the head with stubby fingers. “Very kind of you. Your mother has taught you good manners.”
Skah walked back to his mother, who sat on her bed and watched. Straight backed with ears pricked and chin up. Pride, Erik thought, as Skah climbed back to the bed beside her. Erik nodded to her, then looked back to Chis, who sipped from the bottle.
“You have all manner of species aboard this vessel,” said Chis. It might have been dry humour. Erik had never talked to a tavalai for long enough before to recognise it. Certainly Chis’s fluency and pronunciation was extraordinary — a linguist, Trace had said. Most tavalai soldiers knew only a few words of English. “I am surprised. I’ve never seen a kuhsi face to face. The galaxy is so large, yet we have somehow managed to carve it into portions, and hold each jealously from each other’s grasp.”
“For how long have you spoken English?” Erik asked.
“Over seventy-three of my standard years… that is… one hundred and sixteen of yours. We live regularly past three hundred of your years, I am one hundred and eighty. Learning English was a late life’s decision for me. I thought perhaps it could be my contribution to ending the war.”
“To know your enemy?”
“Yes.” Chis sipped the juice, appearing to enjoy it. “You humans are the most terrifying development in the Spiral for the past thousand years. Imagine my surpris
e to be rescued by one.”
“Tavalai should know terrifying,” Erik replied. “You armed the krim.”
“Yes,” Chis agreed. “Yes we did. And you destroyed them. One of only two successful genocides in Spiral history. One was carried out by what you call the hacksaws. The other was by you.” Erik glanced again at the armed marine. Private Shaw, it was, from Alpha Third Squad. One of Lieutenant Dale’s, and looking itchy on the trigger to hear that assessment from the species who’d been killing his friends for the past hundred and sixty years.
“Do tavalai today still feel sorry for the krim?” Erik asked.
Chis looked surprised. “Sorry? Of course. We’re at war, Lieutenant Commander. Or we were. So many of us have died. Naturally we’d prefer it was humans dying. You would not have wished the krim on us as well?”
Erik had heard this of the tavalai too. Argumentative. Blunt. Difficult. ‘Even with your gun in his face,’ he recalled the Captain saying once, ‘a tavalai will still complain about your bad breath.’ They had some enormous balls, no one disputed it.
Chis made a gesture. “But this is the war talking. We have all been talking the war for far too long. The truth is that tavalai make bad rulers. Perhaps the chah'nas were right about that. That was the way in the Empire — them ruling, us managing. We are excellent managers, you know.”
“So I hear,” Erik said drily.
“We question, we analyse. We enjoy detail. Chah'nas tired of it. ‘Give it to the tavalai,’ they’d say, it’s in all their old records. ‘Let the tavalai deal with it.’ chah'nas are impatient with tavalai arguments. And tavalai decided, upon disposing of the chah'nas, that we weren’t going to run the Spiral that way. We would not make impulsive decisions. We would not simply crush what got in our way.
“And so we found a species, on the edge of our territory… and that edge was the Spiral’s edge, in those days. No other species between us, and uncharted space.” With a glance at the two kuhsi, watching and listening with the translator set to Garkhan. “A vicious species. A hunter species, evolving into space on the back of a series of genocidal internal wars and arms races. No apparent capacity for compassion. A highly evolved race of killers, on the verge of galactic expansion.
“The chah'nas would have crushed them. Chah'nas have the ability to look a fact in the face. Tavalai do not. We questioned and argued. We supposed that krim too had a right to the galaxy that spawned them, and we should not discriminate. We thought that with the right guidance, we could help them to achieve a better path. A more peaceful path. We did not know of the yet-further system, the star Sol and the planet Earth. We granted krim that as their natural space without knowing about humans, until it was too late. And then our embarrassment was mortifying.”
His bulbous eyes swivelled to Erik’s face, searching. “We are the ‘good’ species, you see. The smart species. The compassionate ones. We could not admit that we’d made such a mistake. We tried to help in the war that followed, tried to make peace, but of course humans did not want peace with krim anymore than one can want peace with a lethal germ. You fought us and the krim, and many of us despaired because in truth, we understood. Yet we could not join you to fight the krim as we should have, because that would mean admitting our mistake, and besides, violent enforcement meant the kind of galaxy the chah'nas had run, and we had sworn never to indulge in again. And so we left, and… well. The krim took our withdrawal for a licence to do anything. And they did the most horrid thing imaginable.
“And now the krim are all dead, and humans have joined forces with those who despise us most of all, these six-limbed monsters of our past whom we’d thought we’d vanquished for good. You are our nemesis, you know. Humans. You are our guilt and our hubris, and we know it every time we look at you, the thought that ‘we made this, we made all of this happen with our failure to lead, we got one species annihilated and nearly the second, who now despise us for our failures and blame us for the death of their homeworld’. There are tavalai legends of great spirits brought to life as vengeance for failings of character. You are that, to us. The great monsters of our dark past, come to punish us for our sins.”
“If you knew it was all a mistake,” Erik said quietly, “why did tavalai not say so? Why not apologise and try to make peace?”
“Because it is easier to get milk from a stone than to get a tavalai to apologise,” Chis said tiredly. He seemed a little light-headed from the drugs, Erik thought. Certainly it loosened his tongue… although he’d heard that many tavalai needed no drugs for that. “Someone says it’s our fault, and someone else says wait, it’s not that simple, and then someone else has another angle entirely… and by the end of the discussion we have a dozen opinions and a dozen new reasons to do nothing. We are stubborn, Lieutenant Commander.” A ripple of the broad lips. “Perhaps you’ve heard that before. Would it have worked? Apologising?”
Erik thought about it. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “The Triumvirate War was about actions not hurt feelings. Tavalai were screwing us bigtime, not allowing us our fair place in the seats of power, and letting your bullyboy friends the sard and kaal shoot us up any time they decided they didn’t like where one of our colonies was placed.”
“That was spiteful,” Chis agreed. “We felt resentment at you, for making us feel so bad about ourselves. It is stupid, I know, but I cannot explain it any other way. And you scared us with your incredible military prowess… truly, it has stunned the galaxy, you do not look like such a martial species yet even your mentors the chah'nas dare not trifle with you. And the chah'nas saved you, and the chah'nas are always our nightmare returning, and we feared you would do to us, in vengeance, what the krim had done to you. It was fear and spite and stupidity.
“But the Triumvirate War was not truly about that. Perhaps it was about that for you. But in the broader scheme of things, the Triumvirate War is simply a plot by the alo and the chah'nas to use humanity’s fighting prowess to restore the Chah'nas Empire and relegate the tavalai to lower-power status. You think the Spiral was bad under the tavalai? Wait a few years. What is coming will be infinitely worse. Most tavalai will tell you some version of what I just have, and how we regret what happened to humanity, and blame ourselves in large part for it. But very few of us will apologise for the Triumvirate War. I don’t. We were right to fight it, and even in defeat, I think it was the right war to lose.”
“Down on Merakis,” said Erik. “There are chah'nas shuttles. Troops left behind when we scared their ships away. They’ve done damage, but Phoenix records of this world are incomplete. I’d like you to tell me what they’ve destroyed.”
Chis closed his eyes. “I don’t think I could bear it,” he said quietly. “Tell me the coordinates.”
“East 110, by North 044.”
The tavalai’s chest rose and fell with a deep, painful sigh. Chis was strong, Erik noted. And he was just a non-combatant civilian, presumably with no or few physical augmentations. It was enough to warrant the posting of armed marines to this medbay, even for these traumatised, wounded souls.
“That is the temple of the tenth caste,” Chis said quietly. In the neighbouring bed, Chis’s tavalai companion began to cry softly as the translator converted those words. “It has stood for nearly fourteen thousand years.”
“I’ve been neglecting my studies on tavalai history,” said Erik. “Remind me.”
“Not just tavalai history,” said Chis. “Chah'nas built the temple. Chah'nas have nine castes. For a long time chah'nas-tavalai relations were poor — both of us suffered under the hacksaws. The AI Age ravaged both peoples, but the chah'nas had the worst of it, because the chah'nas fought back. Tavalai made attempts at fighting, but when they met with disaster, we compromised and found some uses for ourselves, amongst the AI.
“When the AI were finally destroyed by the Parren Alliance, the parren adopted chah'nas as their right-hand assistants, and viewed tavalai as cowards. But when the chah'nas needed help overthrowing the parren, w
ho were far less well-suited to rule than the chah'nas, they turned to us. And we became their managers, during the chah'nas empire, and chah'nas began to accept that we were better at many things than them.
“It is the tragedy of the chah'nas. They are linear thinkers. For all their brutishness, they are fair-minded and always give competitors their due. Tavalai earned their respect in management, and so managers and bureaucrats we became. The chah'nas called us their ‘tenth caste’. They meant it as a compliment. Chah'nas have trouble finding a place for anything outside of their language and social structures, so they carved out a special place for tavalai. They even built the temple, here on Merakis, which they knew we valued, to become a part of the Spiral Progression.”
Erik knew of the Spiral Progression. It was what Merakis was famous for — a succession of temples and monuments, built by each successive ruling race. Together, those monuments told the history of the Spiral, from the Ancients to the Fathers, skipping the hacksaws (who had no interest in monuments) to the parren, then the chah'nas, then the tavalai. And now, perhaps, back to chah'nas again. Was this why Fleet had allowed the chah'nas back first? To erase this mark on Merakis’s surface that offended them, and perhaps to build a new one?
“But the tenth caste became our prison,” Chis continued. “Chah'nas move up and down their castes at will. Tavalai were granted a caste of one, and chah'nas could not move into it, yet tavalai could not move out. We had no say in command, no say in laws, or little. We squabbled over matters of governance, over various small wars and disagreements. Chah'nas called us ‘troublesome’. No doubt they were right.
“All the minor species chafing under the chah'nas came to us to indulge their troubles. And we listened, because tavalai will always listen to anyone with a story to tell, and a trouble to share. There is an old joke the chah'nas used to say; they said that among friends, a trouble shared is a trouble halved… but that among tavalai, a trouble shared is a trouble multiplied, retold, translated into five hundred tongues and turned into opera. Chah'nas found out our plotting with other species and threatened, and relations soured to the point that uprising and war were inevitable. We stabbed them in the back, brought their Empire down, and they’ve never forgiven us. We keep the Temple of the Tenth Caste in pristine condition, as we do all our history, to remind us.” He took a deep breath, and blinked back tears. “And now it is gone.”
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