by George R. R.
The fleet had reemerged into normal-space two days ago, after eight standard years, subjective, of cryogenic sleep. The flight had lasted some sixteen standard years, by the rest of the galaxy’s clocks, since the best velocity modifier even in hyper allowed a speed of no more than five or six times that of light in normal-space terms. The capital ships and transports were still a week of normal-space travel short of the objective, sliding in out of the endless dark like huge, sleek hasthar, claws and fangs still hidden, though ready. But he’d sent the much lighter scout ships, whose lower tonnages made their normal-space drives more efficient, ahead to take a closer look at their target. Now he found himself wishing he hadn’t.
Stop that, he told himself sternly.Your ignorance wouldn’t have lasted much longer, anyway. And you’d still have to decide what to do. At least this way you have some time to start thinking about it!
His mind started to work again, and he sat back, one six-fingered hand reaching down to groom his tail while he thought.
The problem was that the Hegemony Council’s authorization for this operation was based on the survey team’s report that the objective’s intelligent species had achieved only a Level Six civilization. The other two systems on Thikair’s list were both classified as Level Five civilizations, although one had crept close to the boundary between Level Five and Level Four. It had been hard to get the Council to sign off on those two. Indeed, the need to argue the Shongari’s case so strenuously before the Council was the reason the mission had been delayed long enough to telescope into a three-system operation. But this system’s “colonization” had been authorized almost as an afterthought, the sort of mission any of the Hegemony’s members might have mounted. They’d certainly never agreed to the conquest of a Level Three, far less a Level Two! In fact, anything that had attained Level Two came under protectorate status until it attained Level One and became eligible for Hegemony membership in its own right or (as at least half of them managed) destroyed itself first.
Cowards, Thikair thought resentfully.Dirt-grubbers. Weed-eaters!
The Shongari were the only carnivorous species to have attained hyper-capability. Almost 40 percent of the Hegemony’s other member races were grass-eaters, who regarded the Shongari’s dietary habits as barbarous, revolting, even horrendous. And even most of the Hegemony’s omnivores were...uncomfortable around Thikair’s people.
Their own precious Constitution had forced them to admit the Shongari when the Empire reached the stars, but they’d never been happy about it. In fact, Thikair had read several learned monographs arguing that his people’s existence was simply one of those incredible flukes that (unfortunately, in the obvious opinion of the authors of those monographs) had to happen occasionally. What they ought to have done, if they’d had the common decency to follow the example of other species with similarly violent, psychopathically aggressive dispositions, was blow themselves back into the Stone Age as soon as they discovered atomic fission.
Unhappily for those racist bigots, Thikair’s people hadn’t. Which didn’t prevent the Council from regarding them with scant favor. Or from attempting to deny them their legitimate prerogatives.
It’s not as if we were the only species to seek colonies. There’s the Barthon, and the Kreptu, just for starters. And what about the Liatu? They’re grass-eaters, but they’ve got over fiftycolony systems!
Thikair made himself stop grooming his tail and inhale deeply. Dredging up old resentments wouldn’t solve this problem, and if he was going to be completely fair (which he really didn’t want to be, especially in the Liatu’s case), the fact that they’d been roaming the galaxy for the better part of sixty-two thousand standard years as compared to the Shongari’s nine hundred might help to explain at least some of the imbalance.
Besides, that imbalance is going to change, he reminded himself grimly.
There was a reason the Empire had established no less than eleven colonies even before Thikair had departed, and why the Shongari Council representatives had adamantly defended their right to establish those colonies even under the Hegemony’s ridiculous restrictions.
No one could deny any race the colonization of any planet with no native sapient species. Unfortunately, there weren’t all that many habitable worlds, and they tended to be located bothersomely far apart, even for hyper-capable civilizations. Worse, a depressing number of them already had native sapients living on them. Under the Hegemony Constitution, colonizing those worlds required Council approval, which wasn’t as easy to come by as it would have been in a more reasonable universe.
Thikair was well aware that many of the Hegemony’s other member races believed the Shongari’s “perverted” warlike nature (and even more “perverted” honor codes) explained their readiness to expand through conquest. And, to be honest, they had a point. But the real reason, which was never discussed outside the Empire’s inner councils, was that an existing infrastructure, however crude, made the development of a colony faster and easier. And, even more important, the...acquisition of less advanced but trainable species provided useful increases in the Empire’s labor force. A labor force that—thanks to the Constitution’s namby-pamby emphasis on members’ internal autonomy—could be kept properly in its place on any planet belonging to the Empire.
And a labor force that was building the sinews of war the Empire would require on the day it told the rest of the Hegemony what it could do with all of its demeaning restrictions.
None of which did much about his current problem.
“You say it’s possibly a Level Two,” he said. “Why do you think that?”
“Given all the EM activity and the sophistication of so many of the signals, the locals are obviously at least Level Three, sir.” Ahzmer didn’t seem to be getting any happier, Thikair observed. “In fact, preliminary analysis suggests they’ve already developed fission power—possibly even fusion. But while there are at least some fission power sources on the planet, there seem to be very few of them. In fact, most of their power generation seems to come from burning hydrocarbons! Why would any civilization that was really Level Two do anything that stupid?”
The fleet commander’s ears flattened in a frown. Like the ship commander, he found it difficult to conceive of any species stupid enough to continue consuming irreplaceable resources in hydrocarbon-based power generation if it no longer had to. Ahzmer simply didn’t want to admit it, even to himself, because if this genuinely was a Level Two civilization, it would be forever off-limits for colonization.
“Excuse me, Sir,” Ahzmer said, made bold by his own worries, “but what are we going to do?”
“I can’t answer that question just yet, Ship Commander,” Thikair replied a bit more formally than usual when it was just the two of them. “But I can tell you what we’re not going to do, and that’s let these reports panic us into any sort of premature conclusions or reactions. We’ve spent eight years, subjective, to get here, and three months reviving our personnel from cryo. We’re not going to simply cross this system off our list and move on to the next one until we’ve thoroughly considered what we’ve learned about it and evaluated all of our options. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Good. In the meantime, however, we have to assume we may well be facing surveillance systems considerably in advance of anything we’d anticipated. Under the circumstances, I want the fleet taken to a covert stance. Full-scale emissions control and soft recon mode, Ship Commander.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll pass the order immediately.”
* * * *
II
Master Sergeant Stephen Buchevsky climbed out of the MRAP, stretched, collected his personal weapon, and nodded to the driver.
“Go find yourself some coffee. I don’t really expect this to take very long, but you know how good I am at predicting things like that.”
“Gotcha, Top,” the corporal behind the wheel agreed with a grin. He stepped on the gas and the MRAP (officially the Mine Resistant Ambush P
rotection vehicle) moved away, headed for the mess tent at the far end of the position, while Buchevsky started hiking toward the sandbagged command bunker perched on top of the sharp-edged ridge.
The morning air was thin and cold, but less than two weeks from the end of his current deployment, Buchevsky was used to that. It wasn’t exactly as if it was the first time he’d been here, either. And while many of Bravo Company’s Marines considered it the armpit of the universe, Buchevsky had seen substantially worse during the seventeen years since he’d taken a deceitfully honest-faced recruiter at his word.
“Oh, the places you’ll go—the things you’ll see!” the recruiter in question had told him enthusiastically. And Stephen Buchevsky had indeed been places and seen things since. Along the way, he’d been wounded in action no less than six times, and, at age thirty-five, his marriage had just finished coming rather messily unglued, mostly over the issue of lengthy, repeat deployments. He walked with a slight limp the therapists hadn’t been able to completely eradicate, the ache in his right hand was a faithful predictor of rain or snow, and the scar that curved up his left temple was clearly visible through his buzz-cut hair, especially against his dark skin. But while he sometimes entertained fantasies about looking up the recruiter who’d gotten him to sign on the dotted line, he’d always reupped.
Which probably says something unhealthy about my personality,he reflected as he paused to gaze down at the narrow twisting road far below.
On his first trip to sunny Afghanistan, he’d spent his time at Camp Rhine down near Kandahar. That was when he’d acquired the limp, too. For the next deployment, he’d been located up near Ghanzi, helping to keep an eye on the A01 highway from Kandahar to Kabul. That had been less...interesting than his time in Kandahar Province, although he’d still managed to take a rocket splinter in the ass, which had been good for another gold star on the purple heart ribbon (and unmerciful “humor” from his so-called friends). But then the Poles had taken over in Ghanzi, and so, for his third Afghanistan deployment, he and the rest of First Battalion, Third Marine Regiment, Third Marine Division, had been sent back to Kandahar, where things had been heating up again. They’d stayed there, too...until they’d gotten new orders, at least. The situation in Paktika Province—the one the Poles had turned down in favor of Ghanzi because Paktika was so much more lively—had also worsened, and Buchevsky and Bravo Company had been tasked as backup for the battalion of the Army’s 508th Parachute Infantry in the area while the Army tried to pry loose some of its own people for the job.
Despite all of the emphasis on “jointness,” it hadn’t made for the smoothest relationship imaginable. The fact that everyone recognized it as a stopgap and Bravo as only temporary visitors (they’d been due to deploy back to the States in less than three months when they got the call) didn’t help, either. They’d arrived without the logistic support which would normally have accompanied them, and despite the commonality of so much of their equipment, that had still put an additional strain on the 508th’s supply services. But the Army types had been glad enough to see them and they’d done their best to make the “jarheads” welcome.
The fact that the Vermont-sized province shared six hundred miles of border with Pakistan, coupled with the political changes in Pakistan and an upsurge in opium production under the Taliban’s auspices (odd how the fundamentalists’ one-time bitter opposition to the trade had vanished now that they needed cash to support their operations), had prevented Company B from feeling bored. Infiltration and stepped-up attacks on the still shaky Afghan Army units in the province hadn’t helped, although all things considered, Buchevsky preferred Paktika to his 2004 deployment to Iraq. Or his most recent trip to Kandahar, for that matter.
Now he looked down through the thin mountain air at the twisting trail Second Platoon was here to keep a close eye on. All the fancy recon assets in the world couldn’t provide the kind of constant presence and eyes-on surveillance needed to interdict traffic through a place like this. It was probably easier than the job Buchevsky’s father had faced trying to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail—at least his people could see a lot farther!—but that wasn’t saying very much, all things taken together. And he didn’t recall his dad’s mentioning anything about lunatic martyrs out to blow people up in job lots for the glory of God.
He gave himself a shake. He had a lot on his plate organizing the Company’s rotation home, and he turned back toward the command bunker to inform Gunnery Sergeant Wilson that his platoon’s Army relief would begin arriving within forty-eight hours. It was time to get the turnover organized and Second Platoon back to its FOB to participate in all the endless paperwork and equipment checks involved in any company movement.
Not that Buchevsky expected anyone to complain about this move.
* * * *
III
The gathering in Star of Empires conference room consisted of Thikair’s three squadron commanders, his ground force commander, and Base Commander Shairez. Despite the fact that Shairez was technically junior to Ground Force Commander Thairys, she was the expedition’s senior base commander, and as such, she, too, reported directly to Thikair.
Rumors about the scout ships’ findings had spread, of course. It would have required divine intervention to prevent that! Still, if it turned out there was no landing after all, it would scarcely matter, would it?
“What is your interpretation of the scout ships’ data, Base Commander?” Thikair asked Shairez without bothering to call the meeting formally to order. Most of them seemed surprised by his disregard for protocol, and Shairez didn’t look especially pleased to be the first person called upon. But she could scarcely have been surprised by the question itself; the reason she was the expedition’s senior base commander was her expertise in dealing with other sapient species, after all.
“I’ve considered the data, including that from the stealthed orbital platforms, carefully, Fleet Commander,” she replied. “I’m afraid my analysis confirms Ship Commander Ahzmer’s original fears. I would definitely rate the local civilization at Level Two.”
Unhappy at being called upon or not, she hadn’t flinched, Thikair thought approvingly.
“Expand upon that, please,” he said.
“Yes, sir.” Shairez tapped the virtual clawpad of her personal computer and her eyes unfocused slightly as she gazed at the memos projected directly upon her retinas.
“First, sir, this species has developed nuclear power. Of course, their technology is extremely primitive, and it would appear they’re only beginning to experiment with fusion, but there are significant indications that their general tech level is much more capable than we would ever anticipate out of anyone with such limited nuclear capacity. Apparently, for some reason known only to themselves, these people—I use the term loosely, of course— have chosen to cling to hydrocarbon-fueled power generation well past the point at which they could have replaced it with nuclear generation.”
“That’s absurd!” Squadron Commander Jainfar objected. The crusty old space dog was Thikair’s senior squadron commander and as bluntly uncompromising as one of his dreadnoughts’ main batteries. Now he grimaced as Thikair glanced at him, one ear cocked interrogatively.
“Apologies, Base Commander,” the squadron commander half growled. “I don’t doubt your data. I just find it impossible to believe any species that stupid could figure out how to use fire in the first place!”
“It is unique in our experience, Squadron Commander,” Shairez acknowledged. “And according to the master data banks, it’s also unique in the experience of every other member of the Hegemony. Nonetheless, they do possess virtually all of the other attributes of a Level Two culture.”
She raised one hand, ticking off points on her claws as she continued.
“They have planetwide telecommunications. Although they’ve done little to truly exploit space, they have numerous communications and navigational satellites. Their military aircraft are capable of trans-sonic flight regimes, they make
abundant use of advanced—well, advanced for any pre-Hegemony culture—composites, and we’ve observed experiments with early-generation directed energy weapons, as well. Their technological capabilities are not distributed uniformly about their planet, but they’re spreading rapidly. I would be very surprised—assuming they survive—if they haven’t evolved an effectively unified planetary government within the next two or three generations. Indeed, they might manage it even sooner, if their ridiculous rate of technological advancement is any guide!”
The silence around the conference table was profound. Thikair let it linger for several moments, then leaned back in his chair.
“How would you account for the discrepancy between what we’re now observing and the initial survey report?”
“Sir, I can’t account for it,” she said frankly. “I’ve doublechecked and triplechecked the original report. There’s no question that it was accurate at the time it was made, yet now we find this. Somehow, this species has made the jump from animal transport, wind power, and crude firearms to this level more than three times as rapidly as any other species. And please note that I said ‘any other species.’ The one I had in mind were the Ugartu.”