By Force of Arms

by William C. Dietz

  The rain seemed to part like a curtain. The troopers were huge. They gathered around. One grabbed the officer from behind. Another punched him in the stomach. The blows came hard and fast. North felt himself fold.

  If there were negative things about Hudathan culture, such as their tendency toward genocide, there were some positive characteristics as well. One was a distaste for the trappings of power that so many humans lusted after. It could be seen in Doma-Sa’s matter-of-fact no-nonsense manner, in the plain rather utilitarian shelter erected for Ifana-Ka’s benefit, and the way that he waved them over. Much to Chien-Chu’s surprise, there had been no attempt to disarm Kagan or neutralize the Trooper II’s weaponry. A sign of respect? A sign of contempt? There was no sure way to know.

  The exoskeleton and the Trooper II were big ... but so was the tent. They whirred, whined, and crunched their way across the rain-soaked gravel. The fact that the shelter had no floor other than what the planet saw fit to provide was consistent with the lack of pomp. Ifana-Ka spoke Hudathan, but Chien-Chu’s onboard computer took care of the translation.

  “Welcome. Please excuse me if I don’t get up. A Ramanthian war drone shot me more than fifty years ago. The butchers wanted to take the leg off but I wouldn’t let them. Now I’m too old for regeneration therapy, too set in my ways for a bionic replacement, and too mean to die. Isn’t that right, War Commander Doma-Sa?”

  “I don’t know about the first two,” the Hudathan replied, “but there’s no doubt about the third.”

  Chien-Chu took note of the military title and assumed the grunting noise equated to laughter. “So,” Ifana-Ka asked, “who are you? And what do you want?”

  The question was addressed to Admiral Kagan, since he was the only being who looked even slightly human. Doma-Sa, who was smooth by Hudathan standards, entered the gap. “Grand Marshall Ifana-Ka, this is Admiral Kagan. He commands the Confederate forces in our sector.”

  The contempt on Ifana-Ka’s face was clear for even a human to see . . . and Doma-Sa hurried to forestall whatever gaffe was in the making. “And this,” the Hudathan said, gesturing toward the hulking T-2, “is none other than Sergi Chien-Chu, past President of the Confederacy, reserve admiral, Governor of Earth, and special envoy to the Hudathan people.”

  Chien-Chu essayed a bow. “I apologize for my appearance. The body I normally wear was less than suitable for a visit to your planet.”

  Ifana-Ka pushed himself up out of his chair and staggered forward. Norba-Ba rushed to support him. “Chien-Chu? The same miserable piece of excrement who fought Poseen-Ka off the planet Algeron?”

  Chien-Chu tried to swallow but didn’t have anything left to do it with. “Yes, I’m afraid so.”

  “It’s an honor to meet you,” Ifana-Ka said. “I served under the bastard, and he was tough. Very tough. So they sent a soldier to make their case? Smart, damned smart. Maybe there’s hope for humans after all.”

  Disappointed by the warmth of Chien-Chu’s reception, and disgusted by the politician’s conciliatory tone, Kagan stood a little straighter. Others could bend ... he would refuse.

  Chien-Chu experienced a profound sense of relief, and was about to offer some sort of reply, when a disturbance was heard. All five of them turned toward the source of the noise. Captain North was a mess. His hair was matted from the rain, blood smeared his face, and his uniform was covered with mud. He had lost consciousness at some point during the beating and come to on a stretcher. That’s when he rolled off, dodged a slow moving trooper, and ran toward the tent. Maybe there would be someone in authority ... someone who could ...

  A sentry yelled. North dashed for the tent, and waited for the inevitable bullet. It didn’t come. Not with two members of the Triad just beyond. He burst through the entryway and looked left and right. “My name is North! Captain North. Who’s in charge here? I want a word with them.”

  That’s when the legionnaire saw Kagan, their eyes locked, and hatred jumped the gap. “Butcher!”

  “Mutineer!”

  Kagan went for his sidearm just as a 250-pound Hudathan sentry flew through the entrance and hit North from the side. The two of them skidded across the gravel.

  Undeterred, the naval officer raised his weapon, and was about to fire, when an ominous whine was heard. Chien-Chu looked through the sighting grid and knew the .50 caliber machine gun was ready to fire. “Hold it right there, Admiral ... this man has something to say. I’d like to hear what it is.”

  Slowly, reluctantly, Kagan allowed the pistol to fall.

  Ifana-Ka was amused. “I thank the Giver that humans spend most of their time at each other’s throats. Guard, help that officer up, and report for punishment. Twenty lashes should put you right. If the human were an assassin, I’d be dead by now.”

  The sentry, who showed no reaction whatsoever, came to attention, did a smart about-face, and marched into the rain.

  North, who had the wind knocked out of him, spoke in short painful gasps. He described the battle, the attempt to escape, and what Kagan had done. The legionnaire had no hope of mercy from the admiral, assumed the cyborg was some sort of escort, and addressed himself to Ifana-Ka. “So, that’s it, sir. My people are ready to fight. Your forces will win, I know that, but we will kill a lot of them. And for what? Nothing will be gained.”

  Ifana-Ka looked at Chien-Chu. “He is yours—do with him what you will.”

  Kagan heard a roar in his head, felt heat suffuse his body, and understood his duty. Here was an opportunity to not only stop Chien-Chu but put the mutineer down. He would shoot the Hudathans, North, and himself in that order. The cyborg would survive—there was no way to prevent that—but not for long. Ifana-Ka’s troopers would see to that. He raised the slug thrower, turned toward Ifana-Ka, and felt the exoskeleton stagger as .50 caliber slugs tore his body apart. The vehicle shuddered, toppled to one side, and crashed into the ground.

  Guards stormed into the tent, and Doma-Sa barked an order. Slowly, reluctantly, the troopers lowered their weapons. The soldier-diplomat turned toward Chien-Chu. A wisp of smoke drifted away from the arm-mounted machine gun. “You see my friend? We aren’t as different as you thought.”

  The cyborg, who found the thought depressing, was forced to agree.

  The ensuing negotiations lasted for six local days. Long, seemingly endless affairs punctuated by hail, sun, rain, wind, snow, and combinations Chien-Chu had never experienced before.

  North, along with his sort-of mutineers, were evacuated to await court-martial. Chien-Chu, relying on his on-again off-again status as an admiral gave his word that they would be treated fairly. That was relatively easy. The mutual defense pact cum treaty was a good deal more difficult.

  First came the question of who could and should conduct the negotiations. Chien-Chu made it clear that while he could help draft a proposal, the senate would have to review it, and the President would need to approve it.

  Due to the fact that the third member of the Triad had been killed during an inter-clan feud and that a replacement had yet to successfully assert himself, Ifana-Ka and Doma-Sa would speak for the Hudathan race.

  They opened the negotiations by demanding full unqualified freedom for their people. Understandable—but completely out of the question.

  Literally dozens of models were discussed and eventually discarded. Chien-Chu discovered that the Hudathans were dogged negotiators ... never giving ground till the battle had been fully fought and lost.

  Still, when the process was over, the final draft was very close to what Chien-Chu had proposed to begin with. It was bound to be, given that his race held most of the cards, and any degree of freedom would be an improvement over what the Hudathans had prior to signing.

  The key to the agreement’s appeal, if there was any, would be in the treaty’s clarity and simplicity. The essence of the document was that the Hudathans would resume their status as a sovereign state, would be entitled to a representative in the senate, would be free to engage in nonmilitary commer
ce with other members of the Confederacy, would pay their fair share of taxes, and, with one significant exception, would be subject to the mutual defense pact. The qualifier, the all important restriction, stated that the Hudathans would not be allowed to build, maintain, or operate a space-going navy.

  The responsibility for transporting Hudathan troops to and from their home planet or colonies, should they be permitted to retain some of the worlds previously under their control, would fall to other space-faring races such as the humans and Ramanthians. Because without a navy, and the independence that went with it, there would be very little chance that the Hudathans would try their hands at conquest.

  This was a bitter pill to swallow, one that not only hurt the Hudathan’s pride, and made them dependent on other races. Something their inborn sense of survival argued against.

  But facts were facts, and Doma-Sa, who had spent a great deal of time observing the senate, knew that this was the best deal he and his people were likely to get for the next hundred years or so, and it certainly beat the alternative, sitting on Hudatha until their own combative culture turned inward and destroyed them, or the planet was torn apart. Besides, even the most superficial study of human history revealed what extremely short memories they had, a fact that augured well for the future.

  And so it was that an agreement was reached, that Chien-Chu and Doma-Sa returned to space, and that Admiral Dero Delany Kagan II remained behind.

  The marker, which stood alone on the rocky, often windswept plain, was cut from hull metal, and bore the best inscription that Chien-Chu could come up with. A poet named Carl Sandberg provided the words:

  Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo,

  Shovel them under and let me work—

  I am the grass; I cover all.

  6

  Power never takes a back step-only in the face of more power.

  Malcom X

  Malcom X Speaks

  Standard year 1965

  Somewhere beyond the Rim, the Confederacy of Sentient Beings

  Far out in space, beyond the largely imaginary border that the Confederacy referred to as the Rim, the very fabric of space and time was momentarily altered. Hundreds of ships appeared, glittered like minnows, and swam through the surrounding darkness.

  The Hoon’s scout ships detected the other fleet the moment it dropped hyper, issued an electronic challenge, and were answered in kind. Recognition codes were received, analyzed, and validated. Signals were sent, courses were altered, formations were merged, and for the first time in more than two hundred years the fleet was whole.

  Whole, but divided, since the original Hoon, which had divided itself into two identical halves in order to cover more space and increase the odds of finding the Thraki, had yet to reintegrate itself. A process of high-speed bilateral updating, which if successful, would result in an artificial intelligence that incorporated all the knowledge and experience each entity had gained during the years of separation. A substantial gain that could lead to a high chance of success.

  However, the same minds that had granted the computer the capacity to split itself in two had enacted certain safeguards as well. One such safeguard included a complicated matrix of truth tables intended to ensure that neither of the two halves had been corrupted during their years apart.

  Neither entity felt any qualms regarding the test, not at first anyway, viewing the process as entirely natural.

  Hoon number one, defined as the receiving intelligence, sampled the inflow at intervals frequent enough to ensure that its counterpart had been operating within the specified parameters.

  Everything was fine at first. The incoming data was not only acceptable, but judging from equally spaced nibbles, made an excellent meal. It seemed that Hoon number two had journeyed far, fed off many civilizations, but failed to turn up anything more than some Thraki splinter groups. But it was then, while number two reported on one such encounter, that number one spotted the potential problem.

  Careful to conceal its activities, lest the other AI realize that an investigation was under way, number one diverted part of the data feed to a parallel processor where it could be dissected without interrupting the main flow.

  The essence of the discrepancy had to do with the outcome of that particular contact report. Having located a breakaway colony, Hoon number two had allowed itself to be drawn into a two-way conversation, and even worse, had been convinced to spare that particular group. Something that should have been impossible.

  Worried lest it be contaminated by some sort of virus—Hoon number one ran an in-depth review of the facts: Having identified a Thraki debris trail consisting of a wrecked ship, a hastily mined asteroid, and a spent fuel core, his opposite number had given chase. So far so good.

  Fleet number two followed the soft bodies, discovered that approximately three hundred Thraki had established themselves on a class two planet, and prepared to destroy them. That’s when a command override was received. Somehow, someway, one or more of the Thraki had come up with a way to spoof the Hoon.

  It appeared that a very sophisticated virus had been planted in the Thraki wreck, a scout had been infected with the corrupted programming as it ingested the ship’s AI, and passed the disease along to its superior as part of an intelligence report. Not only that, but whoever built the virus was so clever that they had imbued it with the means to fool Hoon number two’s virus hunters, and take up residence in the AI’s central processor.

  Once in place, the false input took on the appearance of original programming, programming that confirmed the existence of a special breed of Thraki, a group that could and should be allowed to live. An assertion that Hoon number one knew to be false.

  That being the case, the AI routed the data to a sacrificial memory module, ran a high priority scrub on its primary, secondary, and tertiary backup banks, and did the only thing that it could: lay plans to murder its twin.

  The cabin was dark, intentionally dark, in keeping with the way Jepp felt. Empty ration boxes littered the normally spotless floor, clothes lay heaped where they’d been thrown, and the would-be messiah lay huddled beneath a none too clean blanket.

  The ex-prospector had been in a foul mood for weeks now, ever since the visit to Fortuna, and the manner in which God’s message had been ignored.

  Yes, the sentients who lived there were the dregs of the Confederacy and committed to their evil ways. Still, he had assumed one or two of them would respond and form the core of what would eventually be a galaxy-spanning religion.

  But he’d been wrong, very wrong, and was depressed as a result. Nothing, not even Sam’s most entertaining antics had been sufficient to rouse the human from his emotional stupor.

  In the meantime, the fleet continued to travel through space, the Sheen continued to hunt Thraki, and his followers continued to attend the daily prayer meetings. Humans, bored by the repetitive nature of the gatherings might have stayed away, but not the machines, who listened to Alpha’s rantings with limitless patience, and always came back for more.

  In fact, had Jepp been in a better mood, he might have taken heart from the fact that more than two thousand machines routinely attended services held in the vast nano-draped launch bay where hundreds of vessels sat, waiting for their next assignment.

  It was at the conclusion of one such session, as the congregation walked, rolled, and crawled to their various tasks, that a pair of recycling droids, the closest thing the Hoon had to police, took Alpha into custody.

  The robot complained, but his various utterances and transmissions were to no avail. The recycling machines were not only larger than it was, but stronger and equipped with the ability to override the acolyte’s motor functions.

  That being the case, Alpha could do little more than pepper some of his escorts with some of Jepp’s favorite admonitions while they conveyed him through the main lock and into a labyrinth of passageways. “ ‘He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword.’ ‘As you sow so shall you
r reap.’ ‘What goes around comes around,’ ” and half a dozen more.

  But the recycling droids remained unmoved and continued to chivvy their charge through the brightly lit passageways. It took less than ten minutes to reach the cabin Jepp had assigned to himself.

  Then, with the signal lack of courtesy typical of mechanical devices everywhere, the robots pushed their way in. The human took exception. “Alpha? Is that you? I don’t want to be disturbed. Please go away.”

  In spite of the fact that the answer came via Alpha’s speech synthesizer, it sounded entirely different. It was harder, stronger, and much more insistent. “The ship belongs to me. I will do as I please. I am the Hoon.”

  Jepp felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. The Hoon! Coming to him! Nothing of that sort had ever happened before. What did it mean? He swung his feet off the bunk and placed them on the hard cold deck. “Yes, of course. I apologize. Please excuse the mess.”

  The Hoon processed the message, concluded that an answer would constitute a waste of time, and moved to the matter at hand: While its counterpart, Hoon number two, possessed all the same defenses that it had, the other entity shared the same vulnerabilities as well. That’s where the soft body came in. The trick was to use the biological without allowing the human to know it had been used. It might balk otherwise, or even worse, obtain more data than it was entitled to have. “There is a task that you will perform.”

  Jepp noted the apparent lack of courtesy but knew there was no reason for an alien artifact to observe social niceties appropriate to human culture. Besides, the Hoon saw everything that existed within the structure of the fleet as falling within its domain, and the human was forced to agree. If the AI wanted him to do something, Jepp could either comply or face the not too pleasant consequences. He cleared his throat. “Yes, well, if I can help ...”