“Morality comes first,” he shivered, for no one had told him about the climate and he was wearing just his usual bathrobe outfit.
“I tried talking to him, but he would not listen,” an even more familiar voice said, and Angelina emerged from behind him.
“Darling!” I called out and we had a quick embrace then drew away as Jay Hovah’s voice came between us.
“It is my understanding that your mission here is to convince these people to use psychcontrol techniques on the aliens so we can win the war. These techniques are immoral and will not be used.”
“Who is this who comes here?” Hanasu asked in his coldest voice.
“His name is Jay,” I said. “In charge of our Morality Corps. He makes sure that we don’t do things that violate our own moral codes.”
Hanasu looked him up and down like some specimen of vermin, then turned away and forced me. “I have seen him,” he said. “You may now take him away. Have your ships land so the operation against the aliens can begin.”
“I don’t think you heard me,” Jay Hovah said through chattering teeth. “This operation is forbidden. It is immoral.”
Hanasu turned slowly to face him and impaled him with an arctic stare. “You do not talk to me of immorality. I am a Leader in Moral Philosophy and I interpret the Law. What we did to the aliens to start this war was a mistake. We will now utilize the same techniques to stop it.”
“No! Two wrongs do not make a right. It is forbidden.”
“You cannot stop us, for you have no authority here. You can only order us killed to stop us. If we are not killed we will do what must be done as ordered by our own moral code.”
“You will be stopped…”
“Only by death. If you cannot order us killed remove yourself and your interference.” Hanasu turned his back and walked away. Jay moved his jaw a few times, but had trouble talking. He was also turning blue. I waved two of the schoolboys over.
“Here, lads. Help this poor old man back into his ship so he can warm up and consider the old philosophical problem of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object.”
Jay tried to protest, but they gave him a firm clutch and frog-marched him back aboard.
“What happens now?” Angelina asked.
“The Kekkonshiki are unleashed and go out and try to win the war. There is no way that the Morality Corps can find justification for killing them in order to stop them from saving us. I think that will be a little too much hair-splitting even for Jay and Incuba. He can maybe order us not to give aid to the Kekkonshiki, but will probably have a hard time justifying even that.”
“I’m sure that you are right. Then what is next?”
“Next? Why, saving the galaxy, of course. Again.”
“That’s my ever-modest husband,” she said, but tempered her admonitory words by kissing me soundly.
Twenty-Two
“That really looks impressive, don’t you think?” I asked.
“I think it looks disgusting,” Angelina said, wrinkling her nose. “Not only that, they stink.”
“An improvement over the first model. Remember, where we are going anything bad must be good.”
In a way Angelina was right. It did look disgusting. Which was good, very good. We stood at the front of the main cabin of the spaceliner we had commandeered for this job. Before us stretched row after row of heavy chairs, almost five hundred in all. And in each chair there crouched, or flopped, or oozed, a singularly repulsive alien. Something to gladden the eyestalks of the enemy I was sure, for all of these had been patterned after my first alien disguise. More of the same race, the Geshtunken. What would not have gladdened the multiple hearts and plasma pumps of the enemy, if they had known, was the fact that each of these aliens held a solemn-faced Kekkonshiki. While built into each thrashing tail was a high powered synaptic generator. Our crusade for peace had begun.
Not that organizing it had been easy. The Morality Corps was still resolutely set against our brain-twisting the enemy. But their authority worked through planetary governments and the heads of staff. For once I blessed the complex tangle of bureaucratic tanglement. While orders were issued and routed a few of us in the Special Corps launched a rush program to circumvent the orders before we received them. Key technicians were whisked away and their destination lost in the files. A protesting Prof Coypu was ripped from his midnight bed and found himself in deep space before he had put his socks on. A certain highly automated manufacturing planet had been co-opted by our agents and the Kekkonshiki volunteers were spacelifted there. While the alien disguises were being fabricated, Hanasu headed the programming team of psychcontrol technicians. We had barely succeeded in time, finally blasting off short hours ahead of the battleship that Morality Corps had dispatched to stop us. In the end this aided instead of hurting since we zipped up to the alien fleet with the battleship belting along after us. A few barrages from the spacewhales had it turning tail.
“We’re within communication distance now,” I announced. “Are you ready for your work, Kekkonshiki volunteers?”
“We are ready,” came the loud but unemotional response.
“Good luck, then. On suits, my crew.”
I climbed into my alien outfit and Angelina got into hers. James was in one robot disguise, Bolivar in the other. They waved, then clanged the tops shut. I zipped my neck and turned on the communicator.
“My darling Sleepery Jeem returned from the grave!” a repulsive thing with claws and tentacles rattled and gurgled at me from the screen.
“I do not know you, ugly sir,” I simpered. “But you must have made the acquaintance of my twin. I am her sister, Sleepery Bolivar.” I actuated the trigger that released a large and oily tear that trickled down my lengthened eyelashes and splashed to the deck. “Back on Geshtunken we heard of her noble death. We have come for vengeance!”
“Welcome, welcome,” the thing gurgled and writhed. “I am Sess-Pula, the new commander of all the forces. Join me at once and we will have great stinking banquet!”
I did as ordered, joining our ships and rolling to his rotten welcome with Angelina at my side. I had to sidestep neatly to avoid Sess’s wet embrace and he squashed to the deck instead.
“Meet Ann-Geel, my chief of staff. These little robots bring gifts of food and drink which we will now consume.”
The party rolled into high gear at once, and more and more of the ship’s officers came to join us until I wondered who was flying the thing. Probably no one. “How goes the war?” I asked.
“Terrible!” Sess moaned, draining a flagon of something green and bubbly. “Oh, we have the alien crunchies on the run all right, but they won’t stop and fight. Morale runs low since all of our soldiers are fed up with war and want only to return to the sticky embraces of their loved things. But the war must go on. I think.”
“Help is on the way,” I cried, slapping him on the back, then wiping off my hand on the rug. “My ship is filled with bloodthirsty volunteers all lusting for war and victory and vengeance. In addition to being great fighters and having good senses of smell, my troops are great navigators and fire control officers, watchkeeping officers and cooks.”
“By Slime-Gog we can use them!” Sess gurgled aloud. “Do you have many troops with you?”
“Well,” I said coyly. “We might just have enough to spare one for each of your battleships, and each battleship can lead a fleet, and if the officers of the fleet want advice or morale boosting they are welcome to talk to my people who work night and day and are sexy to boot.”
“We are saved!” he screamed.
Or lost, I thought to myself, smiling toothily at the disgusting revelry on all sides. I wondered how long it would take for my brainscrambling saboteurs to get the job done.
Not long, not long at all. Since the aliens had had to be convinced to go to war in the first place, were fed up in the second place, they were ripe for subversion in the third place. The rot spread and it was only a few days later that Ses
s-Pula slithered up to me in the navigation room where I was making sure, by rotten navigation, that we didn’t catch up with the fleeing human fleet. He looked gloomily at the screen with a halfdozen blood-shot eyestalks.
“Not sleeping too well lately?” I asked, flicking one of his rudy orbs with a claw. He sucked it back in unhappily.
“You can say that again, bold Woleevar. It is all too depressing, the fleet seems to be getting away, back in my home hive last year’s crop of virgins will be approaching estrous. I keep asking myself what I am doing here.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I don’t know. My hearts has gone out of this war.”
“Funny. I was thinking the same thing last night. Have you noticed that the aliens really aren’t too crunchy? They have damp eyes and nasty-looking wet red things in their mouths.”
“You’re right!” he slobbered. “I never thought of that before. What can we possibly do?”
“Well…” I said, and for all apparent purposes that was that. Ten hours later, after a lot of radioing back and forth among the ships, the mightiest fighting armada the galaxy had ever seen was cutting a great arc in space. Turning, reversing, going back to the creepy places from whence they had come.
In the drunken party that evening that celebrated the victorious end of the war—they had rationalized it that way with some help—I and Angelina clutched claws and looked around at the disgusting sights on all sides.
“They are really sort of sweet when you get used to them,” she said.
“I wouldn’t go quite as far as to say that. But they are rather harmless once they abandon all the war plans.”
“Rich, too,” the James robot said, pouring something nasty into my glass.
“We have been doing a little investigating,” Bolivar said, rolling up on the other side. “In their various operations they have captured ships and planets and satellites. They emptied all the bank vaults since they knew that we valued their contents, though they didn’t know why. They do not have money as we have it.”
“I know,” I said. “They have the Eckh Unit, which is best left undescribed.”
“Right, Dad,” James said. “So when they raided all the treasuries they sent the stuff here to the command battleship, hoping something would figure out what to do with it. What they did do with it was to store it all in one of the holds.”
“Let me guess,” Angelina said. “The hold is now empty?”
“You’re always right, Mom. And the transport ship is sort of full.”
“We’ll have to return the loot to the sources from whence it came,” I said, and was pleased at the two shocked robotic looks and one alien stare of despair.
“Jim…!” Angelina gasped.
“Do not worry. I have all my senses. I mean we’ll have to return the alien loot that we found…”
“…but we didn’t recover very much.” She finished the sentence for me.
Something heavy, greenish-brown, tentacled and clawed, quashed down noisily next to me.
“To victory!” Sess-Pula shouted. “We must drink to victory! Silence, everyone, silence, while the pulchritudinous Sleepery proposes a toast.”
“I shall!” I shouted, jumping to my feet. Aware of the sudden silence and the fact that every eyepad, eyestalk, optic tentacle, not to mention six human eyeballs, was fixed upon me.
“A toast,” I called out, raising my glass on high so enthusiastically that some of the drink slopped out and burned a hole in the carpet.
“A toast to all the creatures that live in our universe, large and small, solid and sloppy. May peace and love be their lot forever more. Here’s to life, liberty—and the opposite sex!”
And thus we rushed down the light years toward a far, far better future.
I hope.
FB2 document info
Document ID: 126575
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 2005-10-08
Created using: Adobe Acrobat paper capture, ExportXML.dot, FB Tools software
Document authors :
Dark Moon
About
This file was generated by Lord KiRon's FB2EPUB converter version 1.1.5.0.
(This book might contain copyrighted material, author of the converter bears no responsibility for it's usage)
Этот файл создан при помощи конвертера FB2EPUB версии 1.1.5.0 написанного Lord KiRon.
(Эта книга может содержать материал который защищен авторским правом, автор конвертера не несет ответственности за его использование)
http://www.fb2epub.net
https://code.google.com/p/fb2epub/
The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You ssr-4 Page 17