Out of the Dark: Chapter Two

    The attention signal whistled on Fleet Commander Thikair’s communicator. He would remember later how prosaic and . . . normal it had sounded, but at that moment, as he looked up from yet another ream of deadly dull paperwork, when he still didn’t know, he felt an undeniable sense of relief for the distraction. Then he pressed the acceptance key, and that sense of relief vanished when he recognized his flagship commander’s face . . . and worried expression.

    “What is it, Ahzmer?” he asked, wasting no time on formal greetings.

    “Sir, we’ve just received a preliminary report from the scout ships. And according to the message, they’ve made a rather… disturbing discovery,” Ship Commander Ahzmer replied.

    “Yes?” Thikair’s ears cocked inquisitively as Ahzmer paused.

    “Sir, they’re picking up some fairly sophisticated transmissions.”

    “Transmissions?” For a moment or two, it didn’t really register. But then Thikair’s eyes narrowed and his pelt bristled. “How sophisticated?” he demanded much more sharply.

    “Very, I’m afraid, Sir,” Ahzmer said unhappily. “We’re picking up digital and analog with some impressive bandwidth. It’s at least Level Three activity, Sir. Possibly even” — Ahzmer’s ears flattened — “Level Two.”

    Thikair’s ears went even flatter than the ship commander’s, and he felt the tips of his canines creeping into sight. He shouldn’t have let his expression give so much away, but he and Ahzmer had known one another for decades, and it was obvious the other’s thoughts had already paralleled his own.

    The fleet’s main body had reemerged into normal-space barely four day-twelfths 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 two standard months of normal-space travel short of the objective, sliding in out of the endless dark like huge, sleek hasthar, claws and fangs still hidden, while the medical staffs began the time-consuming task of reviving the thousands of ground personnel who would soon be needed. But the much lighter scout ships’ lower tonnages made their drives more efficient in both n-space and h-space, and he’d sent them 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 began 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 –”humans,” they called themselves — 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 Shongairi’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 a Level Six culture was primitive enough for its “colonization” to be authorized almost as an afterthought, the sort of mission any of the Hegemony’s members might have mounted. And in this particular case, authorization had been even prompter than usual. Indeed, Thikair knew some of the Council’s omnivores — even some of its herbivores — had actually given their approval where KU-197-20 was concerned with hidden satisfaction. The visual and audio recordings the original survey team had brought back had horrified the vast majority of the Hegemony’s member species. Even after making all due allowance for the humans’ primitivism, most of the Hegemony had been none too secretly revolted by the bloodthirstiness those recordings had demonstrated.

    Thikair’s species wasn’t revolted, which was one of the reasons those hypocrites on the Council had taken such ill- concealed satisfaction in turning KU-197-20 over to the Shongairi. Despite that, they’d never agreed to the conquest of a Level Three civilization, far less a Level Two! In fact, anything which had attained Level Two automatically came under protectorate status until it attained Level One and became eligible for Hegemony membership in its own right or (as a significant percentage of them managed) destroyed itself first.

    Cowards, Thikair thought resentfully. Dirt-grubbers. Weed-eaters!

    The epithets his species routinely applied to the Hegemony’s herbivorous member races carried bottomless contempt, which was fair enough, since that emotion was fully reciprocated. The Shongairi were the only carnivorous species to have attained hyper-capability. Indeed, before them, the prevailing theory among the various Hegemony members’ xenoanthropologists had been that no carnivorous species ever would attain it, given their natural propensity for violence. Over forty percent of the Hegemony’s other member races were herbivores, who regarded the Shongairi’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 Shongairi when the Empire reached the stars, but the Shongairi were still the Hegemony’s newest members, and the other species had never been happy about their presence among them. In fact, Thikair had read several learned monographs arguing that pre-Shongairi xenoanthropological theory had been correct; carnivores were too innately self-destructive to develop advanced civilizations. His people’s existence (whether they could truly be called “civilized” or not) was simply the exception which proved the rule — 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 Shentai and the Kreptu, just for starters. And what about the Liatu? They’re herbivores, but they’ve got over fifty colony systems!

    Thikair made himself stop grooming his tail and inhaled deeply. Dredging up old resentments wouldn’t solve this problem, and if he were going to be completely fair (which he didn’t really want to be, especially in the Liatu’s case), the fact that some of those other races had been roaming the galaxy for the better part of seventy-four thousand standard years as compared to the Shongairi’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’s fleet had departed on its current mission, and why the Shongairi’s 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, but most species — the Barthoni came to mind — had deep-seated cultural prejudices against colonizing any world which was already inhabited. Unfortunately, there weren’t all that many habitable worlds, and they tended to be located bother somely 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 species believed the Shongairi’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, because no Shongair ever born could resist the seduction of the hunt. 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 importantly, the . . . acquisition of less advanced but trainable species provided useful increases in the Empire’s labor force. A labor force which — 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 which 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.

    That was one reason the Shongairi had been so secretly delighted when the more pacific members of the Council had decided that anyone as bloodthirsty as “humans” deserved whatever happened to them. In fact, Thikair was of the same opinion as the Emperor’s senior ministers — the majority of the Council members who’d approved KU- 197- 20’s colonization had seen it as an opportunity to neutralize the humans before they could become a second Shongairi. Better, in their opinion, to have only a single expansionist, bloodthirsty, hyper-aggressive species to deal with. Besides, a lot of them had probably salved their consciences with the reflection that conquest by the Shongairi would at least shortcut the humans’ almost inevitable self-destruction once they got around to acquiring nuclear capability. Looked at from that perspective, it was actually their moral responsibility to see to it that KU-197-20’s unnaturally twisted development was aborted by an outside force while it was still primitive.

    And if it happened that, in the process of being conquered, the humans should most unfortunately be rendered extinct, well, it wouldn’t be the Hegemony’s fault, now would it? No, it would be the fault of those vile, wicked, insanely combative Shongairi, that’s whose fault it would be! And however regrettable such an outcome might be, at least the civilized races would be spared yet another batch of bloodthirsty deviants.

    But the Shongairi saw humans in rather a different light. The majority of their client races (it would never have done to call them “slaves,” of course) were as thoroughly useless in a military sense as the Hegemony’s more developed herbivores. Most of them weren’t exactly over-blessed with intelligence, either. They could be taught relatively simple tasks, but only three of them could be trained, at least without significant surgical intervention, using the neural educator technology the Hegemony took for granted. And none of them had any of the hunter’s aggressiveness, the drive — the fire — that fueled Shongair civilization. Workers and drones, yes, but never soldiers. Never warriors. It simply wasn’t in them.

    But the humans, now . . . They might have some potential. It was obvious from the survey team’s records that they were hopelessly primitive, and from their abysmal tactics in the single battle the survey team had observed, they were just as hopelessly inept. Still, they were the first species to come the Shongairi’s way who might possibly — with serious long-term training — make useful slave-soldiers. According to the survey team’s admittedly no more than superficial physiological data, it might even be possible to teach them using neural educators without surgically inserted receptors. While they would never be the equal of the Shongairi as warriors even if that were true, they’d at least make useful cannon fodder. And who knew? A few generations down the road, with the right training and pruning and a suitable breeding program, they really might at least approach Shongair levels of utility.

    The Emperor had made the importance of exploring KU-197-20’s utility in that respect clear before Thikair’s expedition departed. And the fact that the weed-eaters and their only slightly less contemptible omnivore fellows had so cavalierly handed the planet over to the Empire only made the possibility that it would prove useful that much more delicious.

    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 should 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. That didn’t mean such a species couldn’t exist, however. Alien races could do incredibly stupid things — one had only to look at the pathetic excuses for civilizations some of the weed- eaters had erected to realize that was true! Ahzmer simply didn’t want to admit it was possible in this case, 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 reactions. Survey’s always off a little when it estimates a primitive species’ probable tech level; the sheer time lag makes that inevitable, I suppose. I admit, I’ve never heard of them being remotely as far off as the scouts’ reports seem to be suggesting in this case, but let’s not jump to any conclusions until we’ve had time to thoroughly evaluate the situation. We’ve spent eight years, subjective, just getting here, and Medical is already half a month into reviving Ground Commander Thairys’ 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.”