Renegade (35 page)

“How many of you?” Trace asked.

“There were five hundred and twenty of us on this facility. All scientists… we were collecting our final data. I… I am Chisdhorahmradaem, I am a linguist with the Narigalda Institute of Historical Studies, I… I was instructed to be here to give humans a tour of the facility.” Those wide-set, amphibious eyes swivelled far forward to focus on her, seeking understanding. The wide mouth trembled. “If… if we are to lose this place, we can at least leave it in good hands and some human scientists I know are very good and respect the old things as we do, but… but instead we get that!” Pointing with stubby fingers, out at chah'nas, at death and slaughter. “Why did you do this to us? Have the Tavalim not suffered enough?”

Trace swallowed hard. “Listen, Chis. I am not here under orders from human command. Understand?” Incomprehension. “We are
UFS Phoenix
, and we are renegade from human command. Do you understand this word? Renegade?”

A fast blink with the inner, translucent eyelids, but not the outer. “I… yes I think so. They chase you?”

“They killed our Captain.” Possibly it was more than she should say, but at this point she didn’t see the value of deception. “I think our Captain saw this coming, he knew that human Fleet would betray you. Who amongst your people is highest ranked? Who can help shed light on this?”

“No no no!” Chis protested. “You will just save the senior people! You have to save all of us! Please, you must!”

“How many are left?” Trace retorted.

The tavalai began to shake. “There must be some,” he said through tears. Humans and tavalai had that in common too. “There must be some left. Please.”

Trace stared at the grief-stricken alien. This was not right. Whatever purpose the chah'nas had here, this was evil, and should by all rights be stopped. But her cause was not the tavalai cause, it was the human cause. The human cause had demanded that she kill many, many tavalai, tavalai much unlike this one in that they were soldiers, but those soldiers would have families just as her soldiers did, and those families no doubt felt grief just as this one did. Did feeling sympathy for a tavalai make her a hypocrite? On so many occasions, she’d
been
the chah'nas, as they were behaving right now. Not massacring civilians, but cutting vast swathes through tavalai soldiery, which had in turn, on occasion, opened tavalai civilians up to direct assault, and the horrors of collateral damage.

“
Major, got a chah'nas out here. Different guy that shot our tavalai.”
It was Corporal Rael, up on the next intersection. “
Posture unthreatening, looks like he wants to talk.”

Trace left quickly, almost relieved to have that excuse. “Guard the tavalai,” she said, and Kono left two behind before coming with her as she strode up the road.

“
Could be an ambush,”
he warned, as much for his people’s benefit as to warn her. “
Stay alert.”

At the intersection, Trace found there was indeed a big chah'nas, covered by Corporal Rael, whose other three marines covered the surrounding roads. Trace took position by a tree and beckoned the chah'nas over. The big four-armed warrior seemed to smirk, and came. He had light battle armour, nothing powered, but decorated with spiral patterns on the shoulders and chest. His rifle was on his back, a big pistol on one thigh, and other weapons in webbing about his person.

Not karko-tan, the elite warrior class. Those were like chah'nas marines — the elite combatants, always in advanced armour. That ship at dock was not a carrier, just a dokik-class cruiser. Chah'nas did not distinguish between spacers and marines like humans did — all their spacers fought too. Trace admired that about them — they specialised less than humans, and always looked to climb the ladder from one role to another. Some of their greatest warriors and captains had begun as cleaners and errand boys.

“
Phoenix
,” it said, in clear English. Trace thought this one might be female… with chah'nas it was rarely obvious. “Why are you here?”

“You seem surprised,” said Trace, looking up at it, shoulder to the tree. The chah'nas seemed pleased to see her cowering in cover while it stood exposed. Trace was unbothered. Soldiers who liked to proudly display their bravery by standing without cover usually ended up proudly dead. Professionals didn’t give a damn how non-professionals felt. “Why? This is a human system by conquest.”

“We have permission to be here.”

“Given by whom?”

The chah'nas’s four eyes narrowed. “You entered the system with a tavalai IFF. Our squadron had no choice given their position but to run or be destroyed. You may have just restarted the war, they think tavalai attacked them in violation of the surrender. Why have you done this reckless thing?”

“Speaking of violating the terms of surrender,” said Trace. “You are killing unarmed tavalai civilians. This is a human system, they are under human protection. You will cease, or you will be destroyed.”

The chah'nas considered her for a moment from that great height. “You are acting without orders,” it concluded. No stupid alien this one, Trace thought. “What have you done?”

“We are
UFS Phoenix
,” said Trace. “You know us. We outnumber you. We outgun you. You will tell us who gave you permission to be here, and what your purpose is.”

“I will not,” said the chah'nas. “You can shoot me if you wish, but I do not believe you will. Humans and chah'nas have won this great victory together. We together conquered this place, and restored it to its rightful ownership after ten thousand years of improper occupation. You will not squander this.”

“Tavalai in this zone are under human protection,” said Trace. “Harm them, and you will die.”

The chah'nas smiled. “Frog lover. The weakness of humans is also known to us.” It waved two hands dismissively — the diagonally opposing hands. Those were linked, in the chah'nas brain, and could not easily operate independently. “Do what you will. I will do what I must.”

The chah'nas swaggered away.

“
Major?”
came Lieutenant Zhi’s voice. “
You’d better come and take a look at this.”

She went with Kono and two others, down a diagonal, past some high, ornate columns of what looked like a public building, then to a new intersection. First Squad were there, guarding the intersection. Trace could not see their faces, combat visors still in place, but something looked wrong. Body posture suggested as much, several leaning on things, or sitting, balanced against their rifle butts.

Lieutenant Zhi came up to her, and Trace looked at him in concern. “
Major.”
His voice in her ear sounded strained. “
Down there. Mass transit system, no trains, guess the tavalai didn’t want to spoil the history of the place.”

“What’s down…”

“
Don’t ask. Just look.”
Her soldiers never spoke to her like that. Not unless something was badly wrong. Trace took a deep breath, and signalled Staff Sergeant Kono.

There was a stairway leading down from the road, into a deep tunnel. Trace activated IR and kept descending in the dark. At platform level, she found two more marines — Khan and Lopez, tacnet identified them. Neither said anything.

Trace walked to the long platforms, where once long, long ago, passengers had awaited trains to take them elsewhere. Probably they’d have used magnetic rails, Trace thought, as that technology seemed a constant on this cylinder. She peered off the platform edge as she went, to see if the tavalai had put any kind of working system here at all to reuse this tunnel for its ancient purpose…

…and saw bodies. A carpet of bodies. Dozens of them, limbs entangled, all charred and blackened. Melted together, like some grotesque artwork of straining hands and twisted legs. An arm raised to protect a face, another covering his comrade as though to shield him from the flames… or had it been ‘her’? Lovers, friends. Civilians.

Trace walked the platform rim, counting until she reached a hundred. The bodies were separated in places, where tavalai had tried to run. She knew why her soldiers, who were toughened by so many bad experiences, reacted so strongly. This was fire, flamethrowers used perhaps to save bullets, perhaps not to fill the historic site with holes. Perhaps to make it personal. Bullets could be fast, but flames without armour were slow agony. And she could see it playing out as she walked the platform, could see where screaming civilians had run and fallen, an isolated, charred corpse here, huddled on the ground as though trying to dig through concrete with bare fingers to safety. Others over there, set aflame while running. A great cluster here, where running, tripping tavalai had fallen atop each other, and been scorched to a single, melted ball of bone and flesh.

“LC,”
she said quietly, aware that
Phoenix
was tapped into her helmet cam. “Are you seeing this?”

“
I’m seeing it,”
came the subdued reply. Behind him, Trace heard someone on the bridge utter an oath. “
Major, we’ve got our first visual scans of the surface. Several of the primary settled sites have been razed. It looks like they were doing the same thing down on Merakis itself.”

“LC?”
It was Kaspowitz’s voice.

“
Go Kaspo.”

“I think they were sent here to tear a hole in the tavalai’s cultural memory. These are scientists and academics, they’ll be some of the tavalai’s best. They were expecting humans, they were going to show us around, beg us to look after it, and collect as much data as they could from the stuff they hadn’t dared to look at before now. These are the people who write the story of tavalai history. And the chah'nas decided to wipe them out.”

“And Fleet High Command decided to let them.”
There was cold fury in Erik’s voice. “
Dear god. Major, make sure this is all recorded. I think there’s a few trillion humans who need to see this.”

Trace reached the platform edge, and jumped down. She lifted her visor, and gasped a lungful of thick, humid air. The smell of charred flesh almost made her gag. But it didn’t seem right to hide from it behind her mask and breather. This was what horror looked and smelled like. The horror that her own commanders had arranged, in concert with the chah'nas. She wondered whose idea it had been originally. Merakis was important to tavalai, so they all arranged to slaughter those tavalai best positioned to perpetuate that importance.

What would such people do next? Decide to do the same to human historians who failed to write of Fleet with the proper reverence? Do the same to Worlders who demanded more power? This was an effort to control ideas. These charred remains had once been the people who arranged the tavalai museums, who displayed the artefacts. Tavalai valued such things more than humans, who had lost so much of their history, and forgotten so much more in their endless march of wars and vengeance.

Trace could not bring herself to believe that it had all been a mistake. Humanity had survived from the edge of extinction, and fought back to the point where the prosperous future of humankind now appeared assured. Tavalai behaviour toward humanity prior to the Triumvirate War had been appalling. These were not one-eyed twists of history, they were objective facts that even some tavalai had admitted — the Captain had shown her those articles, and the Captain was as even-handed and wise a person as she’d ever known.

But the tavalai were not the krim. They were not even their primary allies, the sard or the kaal. For much of the Spiral’s history, the Captain had also assured her, the tavalai had been a force for good. She’d never liked to fight them, had never taken pleasure in her kills, only a grim satisfaction from the job that had to be done. It had been her great hope that now, with the war over, perhaps humans and tavalai could begin a new conversation, free of posturing and defiance. This was certainly not what she’d envisioned. This was evil. And this evil was perpetuated by those to whom she had unconditionally sworn her life.

“
Major?”
Staff Sergeant Kono stood at the platform edge and looked at her with concern. Trace stood, clipped down her faceplate, and jumped back to the platform.

Lieutenant Zhi cut in. “
Major, we’ve got another two chah'nas up here. They want to talk to you, they’re challenging our authority here.
”

“Be there in a moment,” said Trace, striding up the platform with Kono and the rest of Command Squad falling in behind and beside. She jogged quickly up the stairs, and found that indeed, another pair of chah'nas much like the first were confronting Lieutenant Zhi, weapons not to hand but looming aggressively. Pushy species, all of them. A little was never enough.

“You are Major Thakur?” one of them demanded as she strode to them.

“I am,” she replied.

“I have a message from our commander,” that one said. “He says that…”

“Shut up,” said Trace. “That mess down there. Did you do that?”

The chah'nas smirked. “Good work with froggies, yes? Fire makes them crackle.”

Trace pulled her pistol, and with rifle and pistol together shot both chah'nas simultaneously. They were dead before they hit the ground. “I changed my mind,” she told her stunned marines. “All chah'nas on Eve will surrender or die. We’ll make the announcement. Let’s go.”

M
edbay Three was getting
a little crazy when Erik visited — in addition to various wounded marines and two kuhsi, there were now two very unwounded marines with rifles guarding five wounded tavalai. A couple of Medbay One’s marines had recovered enough to go back to their quarters, but still the total number of occupied beds increased. Erik wondered how long that would continue.

Corpsmen had already attended to all the tavalai, patching gunshot wounds, performing minor surgeries to reattach tissue and insert micro-bios into the right spots to accelerate healing. Erik passed the two kuhsi, and noted the mother was sitting on her bed unrestrained, the cub on her lap, eating while scanning a slate and warily watching the bay’s new arrivals. Both were looking much healthier — the boy especially. He looked up at Erik with bright, curious eyes as he passed.

Erik headed for the tavalai in the far corner, with the bandaged leg, and white hospital pyjamas that looked faintly ridiculous on that broad, squat, green-brown body. That one was engaged in muttered, distressed conversation with his neighbour, whose arm and side were wrapped. Both looked at him as he approached.

“Are you Chis?” he asked.

“I am.” With a nervous glance at the armed marine nearby. “Why are there soldiers here? We are wounded civilians.”

“It’s been a long time since we’ve had tavalai on the ship,” said Erik. “Please understand. We’ve been at war for a long time.”

“I assure you, none of us were much good at fighting even when fit.” He blinked repeatedly, the double eyelids flickering. Tavalai found human air very thin and very dry. No doubt his eyes were drying uncomfortably. “How goes the fight?”

“Little change from your last report.” Erik could have taken the wall-mounted bench seat, but did not want to sit so close. He sat on the end of the bunk instead, by the tavalai’s big feet. “Twenty-seven unharmed survivors, all under marine protection on Eve. Three more critically hurt, our medical people are working on them now. You’ll get their names as soon as we have them.”

Chis looked at the neighbouring tavalai and spoke a stream of staccato, vibrating sounds. Just like kuhsi-tongues, Togiri sounded much different from tavalai mouths. Chah'nas tongues, oddly, were easiest for humans.

“Phoenix database,” said Erik. “Translator programme, authorisation Lieutenant Commander Erik Debogande. Translate this conversation to Togiri, to all tavalai in this room.”

“
Understood.
”

“Thank you,” said Chis, cautiously. “You… why did you bring us here? There are medical bays on Eve?”

“We may need to move quickly. Wounded are hard to move, and we can’t dock with Eve with the facility still unsecured. And we cannot spare medical personnel from the ship, they’re needed here.”

“And the twenty-seven on Eve?”

“There is a starship pilot amongst them, and several who could qualify as crew. The running plan is to let them take the abandoned chah'nas vessel. We’ll give you assistance should you need it, then you jump to Kolatin, which is currently unoccupied and entirely tavalai. You tell them what happened.”

“Twenty-seven.” Chis seemed dazed, staring at nothing with those big, bulbous eyes. “There is no hope of more?”

“If there are, they’re hiding and we cannot find them. But so far we’ve counted more than five hundred bodies. You said you numbered five hundred and fifty two. So the odds don’t look good.” He paused. “I’m sorry.”

No marines had been hurt. They’d taken the chah'nas by surprise, and these chah'nas, judging by Trace’s skeptical report, weren’t particularly great warriors. After the first couple of exchanges, most had run, and with marines holding the spine high overhead, any chah'nas in the streets was in grave danger from snipers.

Reports from the captured ship indicated it had mechanical problems — nothing that a rotation of work couldn’t solve, Rooke insisted, but enough to keep it from jumping. The techs over there now said it looked like chah'nas had been working to fix it when
Phoenix
had arrived. Unable to leave with their comrades, this ship had volunteered to stay, and carry out the dirty work, and sacrifice itself if necessary. When they’d found out the incoming ship was human and not tavalai, they’d probably concluded that sacrifice wouldn’t be necessary. What human warship would possibly stop them from killing tavalai?

“Chis?” The tavalai did not respond, just stared blankly. It was shock, Erik thought. And grief. Erik glanced at the armed marine standing nearby. The marine looked unmoved. They’d had a different war, Erik knew, fighting tavalai face to face. For some spacers at least, it was less personal.

“Um kid? Maybe don’t… um…” It was Private Rolonde, Trace’s marine from Command Squad. Erik looked, and found the little kuhsi boy wandering over, his drinking bottle in hand. He passed Erik, quite fearless, and stopped by the tavalai. And offered his bottle, drinking straw and all. “I’m sorry sir,” said Rolonde, “I’m not sure what that is. Fruit juice, I think.”

Chis looked at the boy curiously. “His name’s Skah,” said Erik. “His mother over there is Tif. They’re a long way from home.”

“Why thank you Skah,” said Chis, and sniffed at the bottle with those big, slitted nostrils. He sipped, uncaring that the straw had been in another species’ mouth. Skah let him have the bottle, and Chis patted him gently on the head with stubby fingers. “Very kind of you. Your mother has taught you good manners.”

Skah walked back to his mother, who sat on her bed and watched. Straight backed with ears pricked and chin up. Pride, Erik thought, as Skah climbed back to the bed beside her. Erik nodded to her, then looked back to Chis, who sipped from the bottle.

“You have all manner of species aboard this vessel,” said Chis. It might have been dry humour. Erik had never talked to a tavalai for long enough before to recognise it. Certainly Chis’s fluency and pronunciation was extraordinary — a linguist, Trace had said. Most tavalai soldiers knew only a few words of English. “I am surprised. I’ve never seen a kuhsi face to face. The galaxy is so large, yet we have somehow managed to carve it into portions, and hold each jealously from each other’s grasp.”

“For how long have you spoken English?” Erik asked.

“Over seventy-three of my standard years… that is… one hundred and sixteen of yours. We live regularly past three hundred of your years, I am one hundred and eighty. Learning English was a late life’s decision for me. I thought perhaps it could be my contribution to ending the war.”

“To know your enemy?”

“Yes.” Chis sipped the juice, appearing to enjoy it. “You humans are the most terrifying development in the Spiral for the past thousand years. Imagine my surprise to be rescued by one.”

“Tavalai should know terrifying,” Erik replied. “You armed the krim.”

“Yes,” Chis agreed. “Yes we did. And you destroyed them. One of only two successful genocides in Spiral history. One was carried out by what you call the hacksaws. The other was by you.” Erik glanced again at the armed marine. Private Shaw, it was, from Alpha Third Squad. One of Lieutenant Dale’s, and looking itchy on the trigger to hear that assessment from the species who’d been killing his friends for the past hundred and sixty years.

“Do tavalai today still feel sorry for the krim?” Erik asked.

Chis looked surprised. “Sorry? Of course. We’re at war, Lieutenant Commander. Or we were. So many of us have died. Naturally we’d prefer it was humans dying. You would not have wished the krim on us as well?”

Erik had heard this of the tavalai too. Argumentative. Blunt. Difficult. ‘Even with your gun in his face,’ he recalled the Captain saying once, ‘a tavalai will still complain about your bad breath.’ They had some enormous balls, no one disputed it.

Chis made a gesture. “But this is the war talking. We have all been talking the war for far too long. The truth is that tavalai make bad rulers. Perhaps the chah'nas were right about that. That was the way in the Empire — them ruling, us managing. We are excellent managers, you know.”

“So I hear,” Erik said drily.

“We question, we analyse. We enjoy detail. Chah'nas tired of it. ‘Give it to the tavalai,’ they’d say, it’s in all their old records. ‘Let the tavalai deal with it.’ chah'nas are impatient with tavalai arguments. And tavalai decided, upon disposing of the chah'nas, that we weren’t going to run the Spiral that way. We would not make impulsive decisions. We would not simply crush what got in our way.

“And so we found a species, on the edge of our territory… and that edge was the Spiral’s edge, in those days. No other species between us, and uncharted space.” With a glance at the two kuhsi, watching and listening with the translator set to Garkhan. “A vicious species. A hunter species, evolving into space on the back of a series of genocidal internal wars and arms races. No apparent capacity for compassion. A highly evolved race of killers, on the verge of galactic expansion.

“The chah'nas would have crushed them. Chah'nas have the ability to look a fact in the face. Tavalai do not. We questioned and argued. We supposed that krim too had a right to the galaxy that spawned them, and we should not discriminate. We thought that with the right guidance, we could help them to achieve a better path. A more peaceful path. We did not know of the yet-further system, the star Sol and the planet Earth. We granted krim that as their natural space without knowing about humans, until it was too late. And then our embarrassment was mortifying.”

His bulbous eyes swivelled to Erik’s face, searching. “We are the ‘good’ species, you see. The smart species. The compassionate ones. We could not admit that we’d made such a mistake. We tried to help in the war that followed, tried to make peace, but of course humans did not want peace with krim anymore than one can want peace with a lethal germ. You fought us
and
the krim, and many of us despaired because in truth, we understood. Yet we could not join you to fight the krim as we should have, because that would mean admitting our mistake, and besides, violent enforcement meant the kind of galaxy the chah'nas had run, and we had sworn never to indulge in again. And so we left, and… well. The krim took our withdrawal for a licence to do anything. And they did the most horrid thing imaginable.

“And now the krim are all dead, and humans have joined forces with those who despise us most of all, these six-limbed monsters of our past whom we’d thought we’d vanquished for good. You are our nemesis, you know. Humans. You are our guilt and our hubris, and we know it every time we look at you, the thought that ‘we made this, we made all of this happen with our failure to lead, we got one species annihilated and nearly the second, who now despise us for our failures and blame us for the death of their homeworld’. There are tavalai legends of great spirits brought to life as vengeance for failings of character. You are that, to us. The great monsters of our dark past, come to punish us for our sins.”

“If you knew it was all a mistake,” Erik said quietly, “why did tavalai not say so? Why not apologise and try to make peace?”

“Because it is easier to get milk from a stone than to get a tavalai to apologise,” Chis said tiredly. He seemed a little light-headed from the drugs, Erik thought. Certainly it loosened his tongue… although he’d heard that many tavalai needed no drugs for that. “Someone says it’s our fault, and someone else says wait, it’s not that simple, and then someone else has another angle entirely… and by the end of the discussion we have a dozen opinions and a dozen new reasons to do nothing. We are stubborn, Lieutenant Commander.” A ripple of the broad lips. “Perhaps you’ve heard that before. Would it have worked? Apologising?”

Erik thought about it. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “The Triumvirate War was about actions not hurt feelings. Tavalai were screwing us bigtime, not allowing us our fair place in the seats of power, and letting your bullyboy friends the sard and kaal shoot us up any time they decided they didn’t like where one of our colonies was placed.”

“That was spiteful,” Chis agreed. “We felt resentment at you, for making us feel so bad about ourselves. It is stupid, I know, but I cannot explain it any other way. And you scared us with your incredible military prowess… truly, it has stunned the galaxy, you do not look like such a martial species yet even your mentors the chah'nas dare not trifle with you. And the chah'nas saved you, and the chah'nas are always our nightmare returning, and we feared you would do to us, in vengeance, what the krim had done to you. It was fear and spite and stupidity.

“But the Triumvirate War was not truly about that. Perhaps it was about that for
you.
But in the broader scheme of things, the Triumvirate War is simply a plot by the alo and the chah'nas to use humanity’s fighting prowess to restore the Chah'nas Empire and relegate the tavalai to lower-power status. You think the Spiral was bad under the tavalai? Wait a few years. What is coming will be infinitely worse. Most tavalai will tell you some version of what I just have, and how we regret what happened to humanity, and blame ourselves in large part for it. But very few of us will apologise for the Triumvirate War. I don’t. We were right to fight it, and even in defeat, I think it was the right war to lose.”

“Down on Merakis,” said Erik. “There are chah'nas shuttles. Troops left behind when we scared their ships away. They’ve done damage, but
Phoenix
records of this world are incomplete. I’d like you to tell me what they’ve destroyed.”

Chis closed his eyes. “I don’t think I could bear it,” he said quietly. “Tell me the coordinates.”

“East 110, by North 044.”

The tavalai’s chest rose and fell with a deep, painful sigh. Chis was strong, Erik noted. And he was just a non-combatant civilian, presumably with no or few physical augmentations. It was enough to warrant the posting of armed marines to this medbay, even for these traumatised, wounded souls.