The Far Stars War

by David Drake

  Several minutes later, as he eased up into the air, he saw the old D’Tarth standing there gazing up after him, the big age-whitened muzzle still wearing no expression he could read.

  Hatred? Lei thought. Who could blame them, after we treat them this way?

  But the thought smelled of treason. LeI put it uncomfortably aside, and turned his attention to the flight.

  The. coordinates were indeed a good distance away:

  LeI considered himself lucky that he hadn’t tried to take public transport. At least four hundred klicks he had to travel, not mentioning the detours to avoid various D’Tarth air traffic control facilities; it was surprising how much air traffic there was, considering how few real cities there were. Tiny ports were scattered all over the place, and little craft came and went everywhere, stopping as frequently as the trams of old.

  But LeI’s flight took him away from the small ports at last, out over the country. For a while it looked the way Luyken had out in its countryside, little fields parceled apart by hedgerows: a long, lovely patchwork of greens and golds and the occasional pewter shine of water, with high golden-tinged clouds piled up in a turquoise sky, and the high horizon leaning against that sky with the dim jagged outline of far away. Then the fields gave out and the country became sparser, dryer: pale golden grasslands, overlying gently rolling hills. Her country house? LeI wondered. Or is she staying on a hunting preserve? For the D’Tarth made a point of staying in touch with their roots as solitary-hunting carnivores, even though their food usually came from distribution facilities instead of heing caught bloodily on the veldt.

  But finally he found the coordinates, and there was no country house there, no game preserve-nothing but a little dirt road leading to an ordinary-looking complex of buildings, of the bubblelike architecture favored by the D’Tarth. Several of the bubbles were clustered together around a central pool, which looked from the air as if it wanted cleaning: it seemed murky.

  Lei circled once, found nothing that looked like a landing pad per se, and finally settled for putting the hopper down nearby, in a patch of long dry grass. He cracked the canopy and climbed out to stand and look around him in mild bemusement. What’s lrrhun doing out here in the middle of nowhere? But it was a nice nowhere, he had to admit: a clean wind blowing cool, rustling softly to itself in the grass: wide views, peace. You could get to like a place like this. . . .

  LeI walked over to the buildings, and found that he had to walk right around before finding a door. Odd. But the door was open, and dilated for him: and inside, she was waiting.

  She was not a whisker different from when he had seen her last. Irrhun was tall even for a D’Tarth when she stood up, and strikingly marked—the particular pattern of the striping of her red-gold coat, she had told him once, meant that she was descended from one of the old D’Tarthi king-houses. Had a council of world government not long since supplanted the kingly house in her little part of the world, she would have been counted a princess of the blood, one whose fur it was death to ruffle. Time had ruffled that fur a bit, during her service with the forces; there were cut places and burn marks on her hide here and there, where the fur had refused to grow back, even with regeneration technology what it was. The warm green eyes were the same too, and the way she grinned at him. The gesture was not one that belonged to her people: she had learned it from the humans she served with, and made “smiles” at them when the situation was appropriate—though sometimes those smiles curdled the blood of those not prepared for them.

  “Hlel,” she said: the old dear mispronunciation. He went to her and hugged her, because he knew she wouldn’t mind: and she hugged back—the D’Tarthi did have that gesture—and kept her claws in.

  Then he let go of her, and said, “Irrhun, you weren’t at the port—was there a problem?” .’

  “No problem, Hlel,” she said. “Just work.” Her tone was cheerful enough. “Come and we’ll go where we can talk.”

  She led him from the large bare circular anteroom where they had met into the next bubble over. It was a garden bubble, from the looks of it, with tall green and blue plants towering up against the clear roof, and spicysweet smells in the air. LeI looked around and said, “The government has you running a nursery?”

  She looked at him oddly for a moment, then said, “Not quite. I’m head of a research program.”

  “Into what?”

  She made another human-style smile for him. “Alien relations,” she said. “I’ll show you shortly . . . Tell me, Hlel, how have you been?”

  “Not too many complaints.” He shook his head. “It’s just that . . . there seem to be a lot fewer people to complain to than there used to be.”

  She twitched her tail in a gesture of agreement. “The War has taken its toll,” she said. “Of all of us … Did you reach agreement with the people you came to see this morning?”

  “Agreement,” he said, and frowned a little. “A little too much of that.”

  She glanced at him in amusement. “What were you expecting?” she said softly, as they passed out of the greenhouse bubble into another one, this one blocked off into office space, with screens and consoles, and perhaps ten D’Tarth working here and there. “You have us rather outgunned, Hlel.”

  “Oh, come on, Irrhun. We would never—”

  “—do what you did to Arkheit, and Downlow? Indeed I hope not.” But her eyes looked unconvinced, and Lel felt a little shudder run down his back. It was always the eyes, with a D’Tarth; their eyes would tell you what was going on, if anything could.

  “Seriously, Irrhun.” He reached down to touch her back as she loped along beside him, so that she stopped and looked up at him. “We’ve fought together. Nothing would make me—”

  “Nothing?” It was soft enough to be a purr. “Not even Mac’s direct order? Suppose he told you to glaze our world over: would you do it?”

  LeI frowned. “He’d never do such a thing—you’re our allies. And even if he did—there would have to be a reason—”

  She would not look away from his eyes, and it suddenly occurred to LeI that she was reading him more accurately, perhaps, than he had ever managed to read her. The old fear raised its head. Aliens, you can’t trust them—

  “Irrhun,” he said finally, “if that order ever was given, I would pray I wasn’t the one who had to implement it.”

  “And if you were?” Her voice was casual. Her eyes were not.

  He looked back at her, suddenly finding that he was sweating. “I would have to think about it,” he said finally, very softly, as if he were afraid someone might hear.

  Her tail swung from side to side in slow agreement, or approval. “Yes,” she said. “That’s what I thought you’d say. Come on, Hlel. I have something I want you to see,”

  They crossed out of the office bubble. Lel was aware of movement at his back, then realized it was every D’Tarth in the office, suddenly released from stillness, all of them having been perfectly motionless for the little while he was having that exchange with Irrhun.

  What is going on here—?

  The next bubble had an airlock to it. Irrhun palmed it open, waved LeI through, then let the door shut before palming the next one.

  They walked through the doorway. LeI looked around him and saw what appeared to be row after row of plastine tanks; over at one side of the bubble was a shut-in office space. The other side of the bubble gave onto the pool he had seen from outside. There was some sort of channel cut in from that pool, along the ground outside, and through the wall of the bubble, to a pool inside this room.

  “My research facility,” Irrhun said, and made another human smile at him.

  They walked among the tanks, and LeI glanced down into one of them. There was nothing much to be seen: the water was murky. A little aquatic greenery poked up out of it, or waved gently under the surface.

  “It was an odd job at first,�
�� Irrhun said. “They wouldn’t tell me what it was. You know how the military can be? Governments are worse. They simply insisted that I was the best-qualified returning officer for this job.” She laughed after the manner of her people, a soft chuff! in the throat. LeI looked down into another tank as they passed it.

  “I can’t tell what it is either,” LeI said. “Looks like you’re raising fish here.”

  “The whole matter came as something of a surprise to our government,” Irrhun said as they strolled. Her tail was twitching gently. “There was just suddenly a visitor to our system one day: a little ship that didn’t have any of the usual ID, nothing but shields of an unusual type. We didn’t even know it had come into the system until it had already crashed, not too far from here.”

  “Another alien species?” Lel said, more interested than surprised.

  “It was surprisingly advanced in design over anything we had seen before,” Irrhun said, as they walked past another rank of tanks, larger ones. “But there was nothing in it but tanks like these. Many of them were ruptured. Most were intact, though, with the instructions.”

  LeI looked in the next tank they passed. The water in this one was clearer, except for something down in the bottom of it, a grimy-looking, jellylike mass. “We set up a facility as much like we found in the ship as we could,” Irrhun said, peering into that tank as well, “and waited to see what happened.”

  They walked on. “So what happened?” he said. “Are you getting results?”

  “I would say so,” Irrhun said. She paused by a third row of tanks, looked in. LeI looked over her shoulder.

  In the end of the tank were tiny tentacled shapes, not more than an inch long, many less than the size of his thumbnail. They wriggled and jetted gently about in the water, having barely enough color to make them visible in it. They swam in threes.

  They were baby Gerin

  LeI stopped stock still, and stared.

  “Our people are terrible in war,” he heard Irrhun’s voice saying. “Isn’t that so? We were one of your best allies because of that. Solitary hunters the One made us, and so we remained. There were no fighter pilots like us, and even you humans had to admit it sometimes. But there’s another side to that haunch, Hlel. Hunters we are, but we are also fosterers. We care for our young like no one else—”

  “Your young!” he whispered.

  “We also,” Irrhun said, “adopt.”

  There was a long silence.

  “You’re trying to tell me,” LeI said, “that the Gerin sent some of their eggs here—”

  “All of their eggs,” Irrhun said. “Their last chance. Hlel, do you know how long it’s been since a Gerin actually reproduced in the sea? Their technology allowed them to switch over to creche-based reproduction long ago. So many more of their children survived that way. Where are their creches now, Hlel? Your people bombed Gerin Prime until barely anything that generated energy stood: the creches and their fail-safe power stations were the first to go. Billions died in the war and the fall of the planet. Of the few million still living, how many of those are going to manage to rear children, if there are any left at all? How many are even going to find a way to spawn?”

  Lei’s eyes were narrowing. “Seems better that way,” he said, “considering what they did to our children when they had the chance.”

  Irrhun sat down opposite him, looking at him cool-eyed for the moment. “You’re the victors,” she said. “No question of that, on Gerin Prime or anywhere else. You have won your war. You’ve been making it plain enough to your allies, as well. No harm in that, I suppose. But you have no right to destroy an entire species.”

  “When it does what they did—” He stared down into the tank with loathing, as the little almost-transparent shapes jostled and glided and bumped into each other.

  “No right,” Irrhun said. “This ship came to us with a message begging us to take care of their children, who now had no parents. What would you have us do?”

  LeI drew his sidearm.

  Irrhun got up and rose up on her haunches, and stood in front of him, her eyes glittering. Did D’Tarth cry? Lel found himself wondering: rather absurdly—it would be wiser to ask whether he thought he could do anything about this place, when a creature with three-inch canines and inch-long talons was reared up in front of him like black-and-gold death.

  “Hlel,” she said. “Listen to me. Put aside your shock for the moment. I brought you here willingly because I knew you would come looking for me, and might otherwise discover the truth on your own. I wanted to be truthful with you from the start, and have a chance to talk to you, my old friend. We desperately need an advocate with the League.”

  LeI began to laugh at the absolute madness of it. “An advocate?”

  “Listen to me! Our government put me here because I had more experience with aliens than almost anyone else. Meaning you humans,” she added softly. “And because they knew I knew you, and they knew you were coming here. We need someone to help us save these children’s lives. If you hadn’t found out, sooner or later someone else would have. And at any rate, soon they’ll be too large to conceal any more . . . nor should they be concealed. They deserve the right to be free, to grow up under sky, in clear water, to learn to be other than their parents were—”

  “They deserve nothing,” LeI said, “except maybe to be dead. Didn’t the children on Luyken, and half a hundred other worlds, deserve to live and grow up, instead of being bombed out of existence, or—” He was in such shock that his mind was refusing to catalog the atrocities for the moment. “They need to be dead,” he said.

  Her green eyes held his. “The killing must stop somewhere,” she said. “If you do not stop it now, all your people, it will hang around your necks for all the rest of your lives, and make them something that should never have been lived.”

  “If these, these things grow up,” LeI shouted, gesturing with the gun at one of the tanks, “they’ll do exactly what their parents did. And why shouldn’t they? They’ll grow up in freedom, right?—that’s what you want for them?—and in freedom they’ll find out what we did to their parents. Wouldn’t you be angry? They’ll find a way to come at the humans again—revenge was always their style. It’s a species trait. And then we’ll have to kill them all over again—but more of our people will die in the process.” He flicked the safety off the sidearm, activated it, listened to the soft, building hum. “Better to get it over with now.”

  Something weighing about thirty pounds hit his hand and sent the gun spinning. Lel cried out and clutched the hand, not sure it wasn’t broken. Irrhun settled back to her haunches and folded her paws neatly again. “Hlel,” she said, gentle-voiced, “remember the Rift battle? You owe me a life. And again, at the Red Giant? If not for my flying, and my squad’s, you would be among those people who are missing, and to whom nothing matters anymore. Not all the Gerin you kill will bring your dead back: not all the humans they killed would have brought back their dead, whom they loved as you loved yours. I fought the war, yes: they were a danger, and that danger is over now. These six million eggs and embryos are no danger to anyone or anything except your own fears. I ask you, by the life you owe me, twice over, maybe three times if we count that last fighter that almost took your cruiser out: help me save them, Hlel. Do this for my people, if nothing else. The One requires it of us. If we turned away the helpless, we would not be D’Tarth any more. And nothing is worse than that: not even death.”

  He stood there, wringing the hurt hand, looking into those green eyes.

  Ghosts whispered to him. Bantry Bay, they said. Crimea. Luyken.

  “They are no more a warrior race than humans are,” Irrhun said, reaching one pad of one paw down into the water. A largish baby Gerin, perhaps three inches long” slipped up to the paw and butted the pad of it gently, stroking it with its tentacles. “It’s early for the programming to begin, but we do know that t
he ‘threesome’ paradigm is easily broken; we’ll teach them to be social solitaries, like us. We know that best. They’ll learn the truth—and learn to deal with it, as we have.” She raised ironic eyes to him. “After all, we have been your good allies and staunch friends—and still have acquiesced to such treatment as you, in all your superior force, have seen fit to mete out to us. All for the sake of peace, of course.” She made a human smile at him, but there was more than the usual face-wrinkling about it.

  He shook his head. “I couldn’t understand why you didn’t fight it harder—”

  She blinked at him, a deceptively lazy look. “We’re solitary hunters, as I said. We don’t care much about the internal politics of running a pack. We’ll buy our peace, if we have to, and go about our business.” And she glanced down at the tank. “Life . . .”

  Death, the ghosts whispered.

  But here was Irrhun, always his friend, always truthful, who had indeed saved his life—more than just three times, too. “You think they can be trained to be ... useful?”

  She looked at him sharply. “Are you useful? Do you prefer other sentient beings to think of you that way? They’ll be alive. If they’re lucky, they’ll find purpose. If they’re luckier still, they’ll find joy. More than that, none of us can say.”

  The ghosts were whispering loud. LeI shook his head, then very gingerly reached down into the tank, slipped one finger into the water.

  One of the baby Gerin slipped up to it, hesitated, touched it with gently probing tentacles, then slowly wrapped them around his finger and squeezed: just a little squeeze.

  His newborn cousin Marl’s little fist had felt the same way.

  On Luyken...said the ghosts.

  “What do you need from me?” he said finally. Irrhun’s eyes held his, then glanced away. “Find a way to tell them what we’re doing,” she said, “a way that won’t endanger your own status . . . but will also let us keep doing it. Find some way to make the League of Man understand that these babies are no threat to them. This is our best chance for peace with this species: to bring up its children as our own, and tell them the truth, and then perhaps let them go home, someday, to tell the truth to those living there. . . . “