Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (85 page)

‘So – let’s move on to consider R,’ she said, drawing his attention back to the formula which she’d adjusted, ‘Revulsion.
Vital
, in understanding the imperatives which I believe control what the Marfikians are doing. So, let’s explore that with a further hypothetical.’ She opened up another screen. ‘Allow me to introduce the Urr.’

Alex looked at the bio-profile. It described a species – vaguely humanoid but with frog-like legs and a brutish, simian face. It was covered all over with crusty, warty skin oozing with a tacky mucus. There were orifices on its upper chest, like anal sphincters where a human had breasts. It wasn’t just a picture, either, but a detailed profile including a DNA analysis and biohazard evaluation.

‘The Urr,’ Shion said, drawing his attention to the long list of toxins and pathogens identified in the species, ‘are a walking biohazard. The mucus they produce dries and flakes off constantly, both in airborne particles and actual flakes which fall off around them…’ she touched a control and the Urr began to scratch itself vigorously with one foot, sending a spray of flakes around it like super-sized dandruff. ‘The mucus is toxic,’ Shion said. ‘Just a few grammes of it, breathed in, or exposure to it via the skin, will cause burning pain, nausea, muscle spasms, liver and kidney failure, fatal within minutes unless you get rapid and intensive medical assistance. They exhale carbon monoxide loaded with pathogens. And they frequently do this…’ another touch to a control, and the sphincters on the chest contracted with a sneeze-like sound, firing out two puffs of vapour. ‘Flatus,’ Shion said. ‘Methane, loaded with disease-carrying high velocity particles of excrement.’

‘Not people you’d want to be stuck in a lift with,’ Alex observed, and gave her a patient look. ‘If this is meant to be how the Marfikians see us, I get it.’

‘No, I don’t think you do,’ Shion said. ‘It
is
a model for how the Marfikians see you, of course, but work with me here, okay? Try to imagine they’re
real -
the Exploration Corps is out beyond Quarus right now, and who knows what worlds or even multi-system civilisations they may find out there. Or, as in this case, what species there may be out there already exploring on their own account, and about to find
you
.

‘So, you’re on Therik - put yourself there, okay? The Fourth’s on base leave, and one day, right out of the blue, an alien ship appears. They cruise straight into the system past every defence and land their ship – their ships can go direct to ground – right in the middle of Capital Square. Hatches pop open with gusts of toxins and pathogens, and out come the Urr. They’re not wearing spacesuits, or any kind of protection, there’s twenty of them walk-hopping about, trying to find someone who’ll stop running away screaming and respond to their ‘We come in peace.’ You are ops-comm, Alex. What do you do?’

‘Rapid containment, of course, full biohazard response.’ Alex replied. ‘Get them back on their ship and off the planet.’

‘But they won’t
go
. The Urr have no philosophy of territorial rights, the whole concept of owning a planet is incomprehensible to them. As far as they’re concerned they have as much right there as you do and you
don’t
have the right to tell them what to do. They’re not armed, they’re not attacking, they’re explorers, not warriors, they’re just visiting, just curious, spreading out from the ship, starting to go into buildings, now. Your call.’

‘You know how that would have to go,’ Alex said. ‘Establish a containment zone, evacuate around it, contract the zone and control… peacefully, if they’ll comply with being put into quarantine, but using whatever means necessary to protect our world.’

‘All right – you stun them, take them prisoner, haul the ship off the planet with tugs and slap down quarantine. Then you do your best to explain to them that their very presence is lethal to your people, people have already died from exposure to their various toxins, there’s global panic, you just
can’t
have them walking around. You ask them to remove to an X-base, with the facilities to meet with them safely. But they refuse. They do not see an issue. If your people are vulnerable then it is your people who should wear the protection, not them. Anyway, they say, they have every intention of going anywhere they want, on Therik or any other world they discover. Any number of them may turn up, any time, land anywhere they like. As you’re talking to them you find that they excrete wherever they happen to be…’ another touch to a control and the Urr on the screen crouched into a bobbing motion, spurting streams of thin green and brown diarrhoea from its chest orifices. ‘The liquid component of which is sulphuric acid. They’re particularly keen to see tourist attractions, beauty spots, leisure parks.’ She was watching him closely, ‘Did I mention that they eat their dead?’

She grinned, then, as she saw the reaction she’d been pushing for, in the involuntary heave of his stomach.

‘
Now
you’re getting it.’ She said, satisfied. ‘Gut-wrenching, visceral revulsion. So, what do you do now? Head out with a fleet to blast their planet to cinders?’

‘No, of course not!’ Alex said, with a reproving look. ‘Obviously the necessity
is
to protect our worlds, and yes, I
do
see the analogy with the Marfikians’ fear of our plague-ridden contamination. But you have to handle things with a proportional response.’

‘Ah, the magic words,’ Shion said, and smiled. ‘Proportional response, all about control, yes? Zone-based; establishing control zones with a measured, appropriate response. You would draw the line, there, at your borders, warning the Urr that bringing their ships across that line would be regarded as a hostile incursion. A ship crossing that line would get your outer-zone ‘escort and warn’, mid-zone warning shots and attempts to board and seize, and if they continued into the exclusion zone presenting an imminent threat to an inhabited world, shoot to kill. Yes?’

Alex nodded. ‘That’s our established policy,’ he confirmed.

‘And if the Urr ship is carrying two thousand of them? Twenty thousand?’

‘Irrelevant,’ Alex said, with a curt note.

‘And if you’re told they’ve brought the kids along? Hundreds of little Urr, squirting poo everywhere in their excitement at going to a theme park.’

Alex’s expression closed down.

‘Irrelevant,’ he repeated, tersely. ‘We could not allow them to land. If all other efforts have failed, we would have to shoot them down.’

‘All right,’ Shion said. ‘And that, you see, I believe, is exactly what the Marfikians are doing, proportional response against a species so loathsome and horrific that they have an overwhelming imperative to protect themselves from you.’

‘Proportional response?’ Alex said, with a level gaze and a glacial edge. ‘Invading other worlds, slaughtering billions?’

‘Proportional response?’ she returned, and indicated the Urr. ‘Blowing unarmed ships full of tourists and kids out of the sky?’

‘That’s
different
, they…’ Alex started, then broke off as he saw her quizzical look. He took a few seconds, then, overcoming his instinctive defensiveness on this issue and trying to consider it objectively. ‘All right, point taken. There’s a fundamental ‘We will do whatever we have to do to protect our world’, however terrible those decisions might have to be. But I can’t accept, can’t even
begin
to accept, that what the Marfikians have done is any
kind
of acceptable proportional response.’

‘All right,’ Shion conceded, ‘Let’s go back to the hypothetical, here – you’re coping with the Urr, you’ve got your defences in place, you’ve had to destroy some of their ships but you feel that you’ve got things in hand. Then you discover that while you weren’t looking they have established a colony within League borders – I mean,
ages
before, they’ve already been there a couple of centuries before you find out about it. They’ve built infrastructure, industry, and they breed like maggots, too, so there are more than a billion of them; it is
way
too late to consider any option of evicting them. If the world they’ve settled is some slimeworld way out on the edge of your space it is quite probable that you’d just shift your border back and defend it, yes?’

‘Yes, very probably,’ Alex agreed.

‘But what if,’ Shion suggested, ‘the system they have settled was right in amongst the central worlds? It
could
be, you know.’ She was responding, there, to the flicker of incredulity she’d seen on his face. ‘
Here
, say.’ She zoomed in and found a system which was, indeed, well within the heartland of the League. It was rated D-7, a slimeworld which was not even used as a stopover by freighters, since it was too far off shipping routes to make that convenient. ‘One of the Arcadias,’ Shion pointed out, and flicked up a screen with key-point information just in case Alex needed reminding what that meant.

He glanced over it, though nodding understanding anyway. The Arcadian movement was history from about seven hundred years back – a major effort over a couple of decades to develop a number of D-7 worlds for future human occupation. The idea had been to develop them with large-scale drops of terraforming seeds, scattered from orbit. The intention had been to return after a hundred years to see how things were progressing. By then, though, people had lost interest. The colonising drive was dropping off anyway, and it had become apparent that even if such worlds
were
terraformed sufficiently to be suitable for human occupation, there would not be any great demand for them. Government funding had been pulled, and the only legacy of the Arcadia movement was the member-funded Terraforming Society which paid spacers to drop seeds on slimeworlds they were visiting anyway.

‘Nobody has been here for centuries,’ Shion pointed out. ‘It is entirely possible that another species could have been exploring your space, either missing or avoiding contact with your ships and inhabited worlds, and settled themselves there. So, okay, there are the Urr, right there in the heart of the League, what
are
you going to do?’

‘Contain them, obviously,’ Alex drew a bubble around the indicated world, and a thin shaft rising directly upward from it, the shortest distance from there to the nearest League border. ‘Something like that. You’d have to allow them the ability to maintain contact with their homeworld, I think, but you’d be looking at maintaining a tight quarantine zone around them. And yes, I do see the analogy.
If
you accept the premise that the Marfikians consider these worlds to be theirs, and to have been occupied without their permission – which is a
huge
if, I should tell you, and not something many people would even let you finish saying, let alone be prepared to consider – but
if
you accept that premise, hypothetically, I understand that what you’re saying is that you believe the Marfikians to be policing a quarantine zone.’

‘Yes, exactly that,’ Shion affirmed. ‘And I would ask you to consider that if they truly were the ruthless killer-robots your people see them as, they would have
cleansed
that zone, huh? With no more compunction than you people have in calling in pest controllers to tackle a rat problem. But they
didn’t
do that. They re-established their borders, driving out the pests from the League who were blitzing all over the place spreading their filth and diseases, and then they set about policing the colonies which had sprung up in their space. Try to see that from their point of view – to them, it isn’t an invasion, it’s a
reclaiming
, sending ships to a system to tell the people there that they will be tolerated so long as they behave themselves. Worlds which agree to that, fine, they’re left alone. Worlds which kick off causing problems, they get slapped down. And just as you, your people, are prepared to do whatever it takes to protect your worlds, the Marfikians will do whatever it takes to keep control. I doubt they grieve or have any guilt about it, from what I know I do believe they’ve engineered messy, uncomfortable emotions out of their genome, but I do also believe that they have retained
principles
, an intellectual ethic. What they do, of course, of
course
, is terrible, horrific, and I am not in any way attempting to excuse the atrocities they have committed. But I do think that it is important to understand
why
they feel they have the right to control this space and everything in it, and how powerful that revulsion-driven imperative
is
.

‘Go back to this…’ she indicated the hypothetical Urr settlement in the middle of the League. ‘Suppose you went there, and found that for reasons incomprehensible to you the Urr had banded into different groups, withholding resources from one another. Suppose you could see that one such group was starving – I mean, actually starving to death, children dying in the streets, while another group nearby was hogging food and even throwing it away. I can see you – I mean you, personally,’ she gave him a little grin with that, ‘giving it to them
very
straight…’ she imitated Alex’s coldest, most intimidating look, the one the media called his psychotic stare, and snapped in a fair mimicry of his voice, ‘You, send them the food! No argument! Just
do
it!’

‘Well, yes, you’ve got me there,’ Alex admitted, though shifting uncomfortably, uneasy even at the faintest possibility that there might be any similarity between him and the Marfikians. ‘But you’re not telling me that you believe the Marfikians are acting out of humanitarian motives, are you?’

‘Humanitarian as in concerned, sympathetic, caring, no.’ Shion said. ‘But in terms of moral obligation to ensure that basic needs are provided for on worlds within their space, yes, I do think that is why they allow ship building and direct resources to worlds which need them. And maybe Prisos gets to build the ships because Prisos is the world that needs the stuff – dunno, just guessing there, but it does seem to me that they are organising essential supplies for the benefit of the occupied worlds, not for themselves.