The Complete Legacy Trilogy: Star Corps, Battlespace, Star Marines. Ian Douglas
stained by what might have been a distant cloud of smoke, the doorway into the Chamber of the Eye, looking out across the city of New Sumer. Several sharp sounds emanating from the screen—the hiss and snap of high-powered lasers, the shrill whine of power packs—filled the air. Movement, a tumble of half-glimpsed shapes, blocked out the sliver of sky momentarily. Someone screamed.
Several moments passed, punctuated by more sounds, like the cold scrabblings of claws on stone, the clink of metal, a low-voiced grunt. For just a moment another face filled the wallscreen, flat and emotionless, a reptilian face dominated by enormous, oddly shaped eyes of metallic gold, horizontally slashed by elongated pupils. The skin was green and faintly scaled, the skull elongated and topped by a low, bony crest, the mouth a black-rimmed slash. Nictitating membranes flickered over those hypnotic eyes once … twice … and then the apparition vanished.
The wallscreen flickered, then winked out. General Haslett, Army Chief of Staff for the UFR Central Military Command, stared into the dark emptiness for a moment, shocked and afraid. My God, he thought. What are we sending our people out there to face?
General Dahlstrom, the National Security Council’s senior briefing officer, stood as the lights came up.
“Madam President,” she said, “Gentlemen, ladies, that was the last transmission monitored by our ICLI station on Mars. Since about ten hundred hours our time yesterday there has been no further transmission from the Llalande system—only the usual open-channel carrier wave. We still have a visual of the Chamber of the Eye, but there’s been no activity that we can make out.”
“Then the rebels haven’t destroyed the Builder FTL unit,” President Katharine LaSalle mused aloud. “That’s one good break for us, at least.”
Dahlstrom nodded. “Yes, Madam President. However, our xenosoc analysts believe that it would be extremely unlikely for them to damage the unit in any case. The Eye is as sacred to Geremelet’s faction as it is to the High Emperor.”
“Right,” Admiral Knudson, the head of the Joint Chiefs, said. He was a brusque, hard-bitten man with long service in the Naval Space Forces. “Part of their campaign, remember, was to liberate the Eye from the evil offworlders.”
“Just what the hell happened out there, anyway?” the President demanded.
“The situation is … complicated, ma’am,” Samantha Van Horne, Director of Central Intelligence, said. She gestured at the empty wallscreen. “It’s hard enough to get good intel on human opponents, let alone aliens. In this case, we have only the tiniest glimmer of how the Ahannu think and, in particular, what they think of us.”
“They can’t still be thinking of us as escaped slaves,” General Karl Voekel, the Aerospace Force representative of the Joint Chiefs, said. He gave David Billingsworth, the SecState, a hard look. “The State Department has been working on that issue for the past five years!”
“This is hardly the time for recriminations,” Billingsworth said. He looked across at Warren Boland, the Secretary of Science. “Besides, we worked with what DepSci gave us.”
Boland shrugged. “As Samantha said, it’s tough reading nonhumans or guessing how they’ll react to anything we do.”
“Every report coming through my data feed indicated that relations with the God-Emperor and his court were good and getting better,” Billingsworth said.
“Its court,” Dahlstrom reminded him. “The Ahannu have no sex.”
“It must make their Saturday nights damned boring,” Haslett observed dryly. “No wonder they’re so riled up. In any case, this—this Destiny Faction, as they call themselves, appeared to be a minor nuisance, nothing more.”
Voekel chuckled. “Jesus, General, a minor nuisance? It’s a damned civil war, and it’s been brewing for years! How did we miss it coming?”
“It’s not exactly a civil conflict,” Van Horne said. “The Ahannu God-Emperor seems to be waiting to see whether it should openly support Geremelet’s horde. It hasn’t come out with a public disavowal, at any rate.”
“So is the Destiny group working for the Emperor?” the President asked. “Or against it?”
Billingsworth shook his head. “We just don’t know, ma’am.”
“Our best reports suggest that the Destiny Faction is independent of the Ahannu government,” Van Horne added, “but that the imperial court is tolerating it and possibly even helping it along privately.” She shrugged. “Maybe the God-Emperor is just letting Geremelet do what the Emperor itself can’t do.”
“Playing both ends against the middle,” Haslett said. “With us as the middle.”
“Something like that,” Billingsworth said. “Now that the Legation compound has been overrun, we have to assume that the God-Emperor will bring Geremelet into the government formally and probably adopt Geremelet’s foreign policy as well.”
“Do we know what that will be?” President LaSalle asked.
“No, ma’am, but we can take a guess. Geremelet’s faction came to power on the platform that humans were renegade slaves … uh, what was the word?”
“‘Sag-ura,’” Van Horne told him. “It means, roughly, ‘foreign slaves.’”
“Right. They don’t have the technology to strike at Earth, of course, but that’s probably just rhetoric. What they do want is us off of Ishtar, permanently.”
“Ishtar for Ishtarans,” Knudson said with a sneer. “Is that it?”
“Basically, Admiral, yes. They feel they were shamed as a people by appearing inferior to us technologically. Remember, they still think of us as their property, slaves or pets that they domesticated thousands of years ago. If we’re not around to remind them, they can feel better about themselves.”
“So what’s the solution, then?” the President wanted to know.
“Let ’em have their damned planet,” Voekel said. “God knows we don’t need trade with the Annies. The xeno people can study ’em from orbit.”
“Not if they have the technology to shoot a starship out of the sky,” Dahlstrom pointed out.
Voekel shrugged. “They’ve had five years to study these critters. That ought to be enough.”
“Five years,” Boland pointed out, “isn’t enough time to even begin mapping out the problem. This is a whole world, a whole culture, a history, a language, a people unlike anything we’ve ever known—”
“The fact is,” Voekel said, “we don’t need these Annie jokers nearly as much as they need us. And starships are damn expensive. I just think we ought to take a real careful look at what we have invested here, before sending any more of our assets out there to Llalande.”
“Are you saying we should call off Operation Spirit of Humankind?” Haslett asked. He pursed his lips, a sardonic acknowledgment of the pretentiousness of the cumbersome title. “At this late date?”
“What’s late?” Voekel asked. “The ships haven’t launched yet. The relief force hasn’t even been assembled. We could call the whole thing off this afternoon. Damn it, I say we should call it off. The cost—the risk—it’s just not worth it.”
“Which means we write off our people on Ishtar,” Admiral Knudson said. “Unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable!”
“Karl may be right,” Thomas Wright, the Secretary of Human Affairs, said. “The cost of each interstellar expedition is … quite literally astronomical.” He chuckled at his own wit. “Attempting to enforce our political will on aliens is lunacy at best. DepHA regrets the loss of life, of course, but I remind you that we advised against the original involvement at Llalande when contact was first established ten years ago. The Ahannu are primitives and no longer understand those fragments