“And I’ve been accessing some of the files,” Monica said. “I was right, one of those planets was inhabited by a sentient species. They were at an early industrial age.” She datavised the lounge’s processor. An AV lens on the ceiling came alive, projecting a laser-like cone of light down into the compartment. A series of two dimensional pictures materialized at the base, just above the decking. Aerial reconnaissance shots of grey, dirty towns, their brick and stone buildings sprawled across a landscape of blue-green vegetation. They all had rows of factories clustering around the outskirts, tall drab chimneys squirting thick smoke into the azure sky. Small vehicles moved along narrow stone roads, puffing out exhaust fumes. Cultivation was extensive, with human-style checkerboard squares of fields cutting into forests and lapping against the steeper hills.
Tyrathca spaceplanes started to feature in the pictures, landing in the fields and meadows outside towns. Crowds of the four-armed bipeds Monica had found in the archive display cube were shown running from armed soldier-caste Tyrathca. Close-ups of the quirky alien buildings with their arched roofs. They didn’t have windows in the outer walls, instead a funnel-like light well delivered illumination to the interior. The architectural arrangement was obvious: many of them had been struck by Tyrathca missiles, exposing the burnt-out structure.
At some time, what passed as the xenocs’ army had rallied. Crude artillery pulled by lumbering eight-legged horse-analogue beasts had been deployed against the spaceplanes. Masers reduced them to smouldering ruin.
“Jesus,” Joshua muttered when the file had finished. “A genuine invasion by bug-eyed space aliens. The whole thing looked like snatches from a low budget adaptation of The War of the Worlds .”
“I’m afraid it was inevitable,” Parker said in regretful tones. “I’m beginning to learn the hard way just how rigidly individual species stick to their own philosophies and laws, and how different that philosophy can be to ours.”
“They committed genocide,” Monica said, glaring at the old project director. “If there’s any of those xenocs left alive, they’ve probably been enslaved. And you’re calling it a philosophy? For fuck’s sake!”
“We regard genocide as one of the worse crimes a person or government can commit,” Parker said. “The massive extermination not only of life, but an entire way of living. Such an act repels us, and rightly so, because that’s the way we are. We have emotion and empathy, some would say they govern us. I remind you the Tyrathca do not have these traits. The nearest they come to emotion is the protectiveness they extend to their children and their clan. If you put a breeder caste into a human war crimes court to answer for this atrocity it would never be able to understand what it was doing there. They cannot be judged by our laws, because our laws are the embodiment of our civilization. We cannot condemn the Tyrathca, however much we despise what they do. Human rights are precisely that: human.”
“They took over an entire planet, and you don’t think they’ve done anything wrong?”
“Of course they have done wrong. By our standards. And by our standards, so have the Kiint in continually refusing to give us the solution to possession which we know they have. What are you proposing, that we file charges against Jobis as well?”
“I’m not talking about filing charges, I’m talking about the whole Tyrathca situation. We have to reconsider our mission in view of what we’ve uncovered.”
“What do you mean, reconsider?” Joshua asked. “The original circumstances haven’t changed, and our goal certainly hasn’t. Okay, the Tyrathca committed a terrible crime thousands of years ago. We personally, these two ships, can’t do anything about that. But we do know to treat them more cautiously than before. When we get back, the Confederation Assembly can work out what to do about the genocide.”
“If they’re allowed to take that initiative,” Monica said quietly. “I admit I’m angry about the genocide. But I’m more worried about the present day implications.”
“How can that affect us?” Alkad asked. “And I speak of someone with direct experience of a genocide. What we’ve seen is awful, yes. But it was a long time ago, and a long way off.”
“It affects us,” Monica said, “Because it shows us the Tyrathca in their true light. Consider, we’ve now established that there were a thousand arkships.”
“One thousand two hundred and eight,” Renato said. “I rechecked the flightpath files.”
“Great, even worse,” Monica said. “Even assuming each of them was less successful than Tanjuntic-RI, say they only founded a couple of colonies apiece, that gives them a population at least two to three times greater than the Confederation.”
“Spread over a huge volume of space,” Kempster said. “And not a cohesive political entity like our civilization.”
“Only because there’s been no need for them to achieve unity,” Monica said. “So far. Look, I’m in intelligence; Samuel and I both spend our time assessing potential risk, it’s what we’re trained for. We catch problems in their embryonic stage. And that’s the situation we have here. We’ve discovered a massive threat to the Confederation, in my opinion at least as dangerous as possession.”
“Physically dangerous,” Samuel interjected. He smiled for the interruption. “I do concur with Monica that the Tyrathca present us with an unexpected problem.”
“Crap,” Joshua said. “Look at what we did to them back at Hesperi-LN. You and the serjeants defeated an entire regiment of the soldier caste. And Lady Mac flew circles round their ships. Confederation technology means we outclass them by an order of magnitude.”
“Not quite, Joshua,” Ashly said. The pilot was still gazing at the last picture projected by the AV lens, an apprehensive expression on his face. “What Monica is saying is that we’ve stirred up the proverbial hornets’ nest. The potential of the Tyrathca threat is a serious one. If all those thousands of colony worlds joined together, sheer numbers would present us with a huge problem. And they do have Confederation technology, we sold them enough weapons in the past. They could retro-engineer combat wasps if they had to.”
“You saw how they used them against Lady Mac ,” Joshua said. “The Tyrathca can’t handle space warfare, they don’t have the right kind of neural wiring for that kind of activity.”
“They could learn. Trial and error would improve them. Granted they’ll probably never be as good as us. But that’s where their superior numbers come in, and it works against us. In the very long haul they could wear us down.”
“Why should they?” Liol asked. He spread his arms wide in appeal. “I mean, Christ, you’re sitting here talking like we’re at war with them. Sure they’re narked we jumped into their system and raised a little hell. But this flight is totally deniable, right? Nobody’s going to admit to sending us. You don’t commit your entire race to a conflict that will kill billions because we beat up a chunk of wreckage they’d already abandoned.”
“We tend to overlook what they are so that we can maintain our preferred policy of diplomatic tolerance,” Samuel said. “We like to see them as slightly simple, and stubborn; the ultimate big lummox. A species we can feel superior to, without them ever being aware of our complacent condescension. While in fact, they are a species so aggressive and territorial that they have evolved a soldier caste. Evolved one. We can barely comprehend the drive behind such a phenomena. Such a thing requires tens of millennia to achieve. Throughout all that time on their homeworld the social climate maintained the pressures necessitating such a development. Their history is a solid monoculture of conflict.”
“I still don’t see how that makes them a danger,” Liol persisted. “If anything it works in our favour. We provided the Hesperi-LN Tyrathca with the ZTT drive over two hundred years ago. And what do they do with it? Do they rush off to contact their long-lost relatives on the first five colony worlds? Bollocks. They’ve founded more colony worlds for themselves, so their immediate relatives could benefit. They didn’t want to share that little technological gem with anybody else.”
“You’re right,” the Edenist said. “Providing you add one qualifier: to date. As Monica said, we are dealing with the concept of potential here. In one respect, the Tyrathca are like us; an external threat will unite them. The arkships themselves are proof of that.”
“We’re not a threat to them!” Liol was almost shouting.
“We haven’t been until now,” Monica said. “Until now they didn’t know we could become elemental. They were so disturbed by the prospect of human possessed they immediately opted for isolation. We have become a danger. Possessed humans have attacked Tyrathca settlements. Our already superior military strength has been multiplied by an unknown amount. Remember they do not see humanity divided between possessed and non-possessed. We are one species, that has suddenly and dramatically changed for the worse.” She pointed to the projection. “And now we’ve seen what happens to xenoc species which come into dispute with the Tyrathca.”
Liol lapsed back into silence. Scowling, worried now rather than angered by losing the argument.
“All right,” Joshua said. “There’s a potential for conflict between the Tyrathca and the Confederation, assuming we survive possession intact. It still doesn’t affect our mission.”
“The Confederation should be warned of this development,” Monica said. “We have learned more about Tyrathcan nature than anyone has before. And with their isolation policy, nobody else is likely to find out. That knowledge is now of considerable strategic importance.”
“You’re not seriously suggesting we turn back already?” Joshua asked.
“I have to concur with Monica, that’s now a factor we should consider,” Samuel said.
“No no,” Joshua said. “You’re blowing this out of all proportion. Look, we’re forty-two light-years from Yaroslav, which is the nearest Confederation star system. Lady Mac would have to expend a lot of delta-V to match velocities. We’d take over a day to get there, and the same to get back here. And right now, time is the biggest critical factor we have. Who knows what the possessed are cooking up behind us? They might even have taken over the Yaroslav system.”
“Not the Edenist habitats,” Monica said. “Voidhawks could distribute our warning.”
“The Oenone would only need a day to get to Yaroslav and back,” Ruben said. “That’s not so much of a delay.” He gave Syrinx an encouraging smile.
She didn’t return it. “I really don’t want us to separate at this point,” she said. “Besides, we haven’t even established how the search for the Sleeping God is progressing. I think we should at least hear the status review from Parker’s team before we go making that kind of decision.”
“Agreed,” Joshua said quickly. Monica glanced at Samuel, then shrugged. “Okay.”
Parker leaned forward, permitting himself a small smile. “At least I have one piece of good news for us: we have confirmed the Sleeping God does exist. There’s a reference in one of the Tyrathca files.”
There were smiles all round the lounge. Ashly clapped his hands together, and let out an exhilarated: “Yes!” He and Liol grinned broadly at each other.
“The file didn’t tell us what the bloody thing was,” Kempster said gruffly. “Just what it did. And that’s really weird.”
“Assuming it’s true,” Renato said.
“Don’t be such a depressive, my boy. We’ve already been through that aspect. The Tyrathca don’t invent stories, they can’t.”
“So what can it do?” Joshua asked.
“From what we can determine, it transported one of their arkships a hundred and fifty light-years. Instantaneously.”
“It’s a stardrive?” Joshua asked in disappointment.
“I don’t think so. Oski, would you put this in perspective for us, please.”
“Certainly.” She datavised the processor block on her table, clearing the final picture of the Tyrathca invasion from the AV projection. “This is a simulation of Tanjuntic-RI’s flightpath from Mastrit-PJ to Hesperi-LN, based on what we’ve discovered in the files from the arkship.” The AV lens projected a complex starchart centred on the colourful smear of the Orion nebula. A red star on the opposite side of the nebula from the Confederation was surrounded by a swarm of informational icons. “Mastrit-PJ is now either a red giant or supergiant, and it has to be quite close to the far side of the nebula, which is why we’ve never seen it before. Now, the Tanjuntic-RI flew right round the nebula. We don’t know which way round; the Tyrathca have never revealed the location of their other colonies to us, and we didn’t extract enough information from their terminals to determine them. However, we know for certain that it stopped eleven times en route, eventually finishing up at Hesperi-LN. Five of those stops were to found colonies; the others were in star systems without a biocompatible planet, so they just refuelled and repaired Tanjuntic-RI, and carried on.” A thin blue line extended out from Mastrit-PJ, linking eleven stars in a rough curve going around on the galactic South side the luminescent nebula. “This course is important, because it actually cut the arkship off from direct line of sight to Mastrit-PJ. Their communication laser simply wasn’t powerful enough to penetrate the dust and gas that makes up the nebula. So after the fourth star they visited, all messages to and from Mastrit-PJ had to be relayed through the colonies. Which is also why the latter communiqué files were stored in the Planetary Habitation terminal.”