Trial by Fire - eARC (87 page)

Sukhinin started, then nodded. “Of course. This
zjulik
gave them a false confirmation code when he ‘attempted to contact’ them.”

Shethkador stared out at the stars, at Homenest. “I suppose there is little reason to refuse you this accommodation.”

Caine smiled. “And every reason to comply, if you want us to keep your speciate identity a secret.”

Shethkador looked away. “Keeping our identity is of no consequence to us.”

“Lie. If it wasn’t important, you wouldn’t cooperate in
any
way.”

“You are quite wrong. We stand to lose nothing by having others know our identity.”

“Nice bluff—but I was born on the planet that invented poker. You want that secret kept because what the Arat Kur claim is true: humans
are
the killer species they fear, the ones in their legends. But it was you—the Ktor—who were still traveling between the stars, who were slaughtering other races before we were even wondering about how to build pyramids. And if the Arat Kur were to learn that, I wonder how they might start rethinking their positive opinion of you, and their negative opinion of us.”

Shethkador turned and smiled—and Caine noticed that there were flecks of blood or red mixed into his eyes’ light amber irises. “You have admirable skills, Mr. Riordan, but remember to be measured in your requests. It is useful, but not essential, that our speciate identity remains undisclosed. If you make the price of your silence too high, you will receive no concessions at all.”

Caine smiled back, wanting to squeeze the trigger. “So it was you—the Ktor—who almost obliterated Homenest.”

“It would seem that way.”

“And the locals on DeePeeThree? Them too?”

Shethkador’s smile broadened. He shrugged. “Who can say?”

Caine pursued. “Don’t be coy. There are no other alternatives.”

“No? There’s always the possibility of yet another group of humans. If two, why not three? Or five?”

Caine shook his head. “Because if you believed that, you wouldn’t suggest it. You give away no useful information. You’d only bring up the possibility of other human enclaves if you thought it would sow uncertainty and confusion into our planning.”

Shethkador smiled back. “Impressive. One point for you.”

“More than one.”

Shethkador’s eyebrows elevated slightly. “Oh? How so?”

“By just now admitting that there are only
two
groups of humanity, you’ve told me something else. That you have fairly intact records of the actual history of our species, of how it was that we were in the stars twenty millennia ago, who brought us there, and what we were doing, and why. Otherwise you wouldn’t be so sure that there
weren’t
other groups.”

Shethkador’s eyebrows lowered. “And therefore, you have deduced a third and final piece of information.”

Caine studied Shethkador’s utterly expressionless features and then nodded. “That you’re not going to share the smallest bit of that history with us.”

Shethkador smiled again. “Such a clever low-breed. It would be interesting to examine your DNA.”

Caine tried to suppress—but couldn’t—the shudder that rippled from the center of his spine out in all directions.

Visser had stepped forward and aggressively planted herself in front of Shethkador. “You will do more than contact the Arat Kur homeworld; you will agree to cease and desist from any interference in our affairs. Which is to say, you will now observe the Accords to which you have pledged yourself.”

Shethkador looked down at her; his smile became a mirthless laugh. “As if any of the races do observe the Accords—with the possible exception of the rather inane Slaasriithi. Although I suspect that even they may bend the rules from time to time. Perhaps by providing a few key pieces of data on other races?” His smile broadened; his eyes narrowed into hers.

Christ. He knows that the Slaasriithi passed us intelligence on the location of the Arat Kur homeworld.

Visser blinked. “I would not know anything about that.”

“Of course not.” He nodded, smiled wider still, looked away. “At any rate, I will make no agreement which limits Ktoran freedom of action. And I think you must ask yourself if exposing our identity is truly in your best interests. Have you considered the cost to yourselves? You may see yourselves as different from us, but your history—your very recent history—argues differently.” Seeing Visser’s lowering brow, he shrugged and provided examples. “The active and then passive extermination of the indigenous peoples of three continents; your biosphere held hostage to absolute thermonuclear destruction as a pawn in the game of empires; the death camps of countless regimes while you were in the first flower of your glorious atomic and information ages; and, less than a century ago, your benign toleration of what you called the ‘megadeath.’ What horror have you not perpetrated against yourselves in the recent past? By extension, what horror will you not perpetrate against others, particularly other species whose ways, appearances, biologies are so different and daunting to such rude minds and sensibilities as yours? Will revealing our speciate identity make heroes of you, or to borrow your metaphor, will revealing us tar you with the same brush?”

Shethkador seemed ready to yawn, but continued. “Besides, if you elect to tell other races that we are, in fact, human, we will deny it. And unless you make me a testamentary zoo-specimen—which would bring about a war you could not win—you will have no evidence to support your claim.

“But this is all moot. Your genes are ours, and so are your deeds. You cling to the differences in our behaviors. But other species will not note these distinctions. They will be subtleties that your exosapient allies will silently brush aside in view of the greater truth. That the most bloody deeds of your recent past resonate with our own. In short, they will see that—first, last, and foremost—you are us.”

Caine shook his head. “They will also see that the Dornaani allowed events to unfold this way so that we would be the ones to spare, even save, another race—and so redeem ourselves. And eventually, when the inevitable day of revelation comes—when all masks are dropped or stripped away—we humans of Earth will be remembered and seen for what we can be at our best, not at our worst.”

Shethkador waved a hand at Caine’s retort. “Oh, that may occur too, I imagine. But do not forget that the Dornaani also used you in the prosecution of this war because they understand us as a species. Human social evolution is unique in that our race has achieved the maximum, even optimum, balance of violent aggression and social cohesion. Again, consider your recent past. What other race could teeter so long, and yet not topple over, the brink of nuclear self-extermination? And all in the name of ideals, which were simply the facades behind which you hid your national prejudices, racial fears, and innate savagery. They are the blinds behind which you hid your appetite for the horrors you had made and amidst which you lived. Who else could have been shrewd enough, versatile enough, resilient enough—and brutal enough—to stalemate us in this war? It is not chance that you were the ones to foil our plans. You have a saying that eludes me now, about how you extinguish wild-fires, that you…er—”

“Fight fire with fire.” Caine finished for him, his stomach growing smaller, harder.

“Just so. You were the Dornaani application of that principle: using humans to fight humans.”

It could not be mere chance that Alnduul had invoked this same axiom—that of fighting fire with fire—back at Convocation and again less than half an hour ago. He had foreseen this coming from Shethkador, had subtly primed Caine for the revelations of this moment.
Suggesting that full control, and full understanding, of this war and our place within it has never been wholly ours, not even when we thought we were taking the initiative.

Perhaps Shethkador had seen some trace of surprise or discomfiture in Caine’s face: his voice was suddenly less histrionically jocular and detached, almost became earnest. “Accept what the Dornaani have accepted about us. We, as a species, are not instruments of enduring peace. We are engines of perpetual war. And together, we would be unstoppable.”

“And apart?”

The Ktor smiled. “You have an expression: ‘war to the knife.’ Only one of us may prevail.” Shethkador stared straight at Caine for a long moment, then around at the rest of the group’s glittering, somber eyes, and finally—with a smile and a shrug—looked out toward the stars.

Caine nodded to himself.
And so that is our future: the fire that fights fire. And that fight will become Earth’s redemptive trial by fire. The struggle that will simultaneously expiate humanity’s past deeds and prove our future promise.

That macroscopic glimpse of humanity’s futurescape goaded Caine to reexamine and reconceive the “serendipitous” events that had helped humanity prevail in the war. Had the first, fortuitous meeting between himself and Darzhee Kut truly been a matter of chance? Had the Hkh’Rkh disdain and, ultimately, disregard for the Arat Kur been hormone-enhanced? Had similar hormonal tinkering amplified the humanophobia of the leading Arat Kur castes into a fatally dismissive blind-spot? Were any of these occurrences
truly
serendipitous—or merely instances of Dornaani manipulation?

Caine pulled pack from the steep slope unveiled by that thought.
If you start thinking that way, soon you’ll see Dornaani covert control in every event, every random factor of human existence. But how do I—how does anyone—distinguish between the two? How do we go about sorting out the actual Dornaani intents and intrusions from the noise, the illimitable static, of routine human affairs? I guess Downing’s IRIS is still going to have plenty of work to do.

Sukhinin—during the two silent seconds that had compassed Caine’s thoughts—approached Tlerek Shethkador. He drew himself up straight, shoulders back, head high. “We would die before allying with you.”

The Ktor smiled, did not look away from the stars. “Your words may well be prophetic, Consul Sukhinin.”

Caine adjusted his grip on the handgun. “So tell me. If we’re so promising as allies, then why not try to recruit us from the start, openly, instead of trying to blast us back into the bronze age with an asteroid?”

That brought Shethkador’s head around. “Because we did not approve of the outcome of the events of the Twentieth Century. Two prominent forms of autocracy were routed. The impotent rot of pluralism and equality had almost completely perverted the natural order, of survival of the fittest. You were intent on protecting and preserving the weak, both nations and individuals, all in some fawning worship of these inane concepts you’ve derived from your laughable mystery cults.”

“What ‘inane concepts’ are you referring to?”

“Empathy. Justice. Compassion. Each one is a means of decaying the essential truth of strength and power.”

“So, was Nietzsche one of you?”

“No, but we hoped his wisdom would become predominant. Alas, it did not. Not in the last century, nor this one. So, seeing how quickly you were moving toward the stars, we deemed that you would be an impediment, rather than an adornment, to our plans.”

“So you decided to kill ninety-five percent of our population.”

“Our estimates were only eighty percent. But no matter. The cattle had grown soft and the herd needed culling. You would have recovered in two or three centuries. We made sure that the asteroid we directed toward Home was large enough to significantly damage but not destroy you. The resulting waves and geological perturbations would have wiped out the epicenter of the linked viruses you called ‘humanism’ and ‘paidiea.’”

Darzhee Kut’s claws clacked. “Paideia?”

“The virtue of civic duty and sacrifice, usually associated with Pericles’ funeral oration in the Peloponnesian War.” Caine looked at Sukhinin. “Pretty much spoken in the shadow of the Parthenon.”

Sukhinin nodded. “
Da
, and it was why Nolan chose that location for the meeting. To remind us all how much of that work is still left undone.”

Caine nodded. “And in order to do that work, we have to be in the Accord. And if the Accord is to endure, the price we have to pay right now is silence. We let the charade continue. We act as though the Ktor are not human.”

“So we lie?”

“No, Vassily. We follow the implied spirit of the Accord. It is not our business to reveal information about any race other than our own. But it’s also the smartest thing we can do, in this instance.”

The door opened. Hwang and a dozen security personnel entered, Bannor Rulaine at their head. “Is this the—gentleman—we are to escort to special quarters?”

Caine nodded. “That’s him. And good riddance.”

“A strange farewell,” observed Shethkador. He smiled as the two shortest commandoes—Miles O’Garran and Peter Wu—pulled a restraint jumper up around his ankles. “This would be a better parting platitude: ‘until we meet again.’”

“I hope not.”

“I predict otherwise.” With the Ktor’s arms wrapped tight against his body, the security detachment frog-walked him out of the room. Caine did not lower his sidearm until the door had closed behind the detail.

Even Alnduul seemed to relax slightly, then turned to the humans in the room. “There is one more item of importance. The final name by which the Accord is to address your polity. World Confederation was only a tentative term, was it not?”

Visser nodded. “That is correct, Alnduul. Since we were summoned to the Convocation, though, there has been much talk of settling upon a more species-specific, a more inclusive, term: Human Confederation.”

Alnduul’s lids nictated slowly. “I would suggest you consider a different term.”

Sukhinin stared at the Dornaani. “Now you will tell us what to call ourselves?”

“I merely offer a prudent suggestion. Consider, you are planning to call yourself the Human Confederation. Yet, what is the Ktor, but another human?”

Sukhinin shrugged. “So perhaps we are simply more precise. ‘The Earth Confederation,’ maybe?”

Caine thought. “What about the Terran Confederation?”