Primary Targets (Earth at War Book 2) Read online

  “Caan-Fan-To,” Joon-Pah said, his hands coming together in an intricate pattern I hadn’t seen before, “it has been long years since we served together as young recruits in the Self-Defense Force. Though our paths of service diverged, I am gratified yours has taken you to a position where you can best serve the Alliance.”

  “We all serve the Alliance in one way or another, my friend. Did you call simply to alert me that your ship survives and is prepared for duty? Or do you bring news from Fairhome?”

  I wondered if the Helta always talked to each other this stilted and awkwardly or if it was just the way the program was translating it.

  “I bring crucial news, Prime Facilitator, news that will affect the survival of our government and, perhaps, our species. We have made new allies in the struggle against the Tevynians, allies who may yet turn the tide in our favor.”

  “What allies might there be?” the other Helta demanded, the translator adding a tinge of disbelief to his tone. “The rest of the races of the Alliance are no better off than us, and none of them are equipped to manufacture their own ships, and none are as capable as us in battle, though we can’t match the Tevynians.”

  “Prime Facilitator, I—and others like me in our Self-Defense Force—decided that these are desperate times and only desperate measures have a chance at succeeding. We sought aid on Earth.”

  If you can imagine a koala bear that just stuck its finger in an electric light socket while being told that the last eucalyptus tree just burned down, then multiply that by ten, you’d be close to the expression on Caan-Fan-To’s fuzzy face.

  “This is forbidden!” he cried, his voice stricken. “You know this! From ages past, even before we knew of a way to reach the stars, the one rule has always been that the Source of Life was not to be touched!”

  “And will this rule save us from the Tevynians?” Joon-Pah asked him. “Will it save Earth from their depredations when they are done with us? Because they know of its stellar location, even if they do not, yet, understand its significance. We fought them there, in the shadow of the Source of Life, desperate to keep their hands off of its riches. And we only succeeded in destroying their ships because of the humans who came to space to meet us.”

  He nodded to the Communications officer and I could tell from the change in the Prime Facilitator’s expression that the view from the video pickup had broadened to include Delia Strawbridge and myself, the only two humans on the bridge.

  “Greetings, Prime Facilitator,” Delia said. “I am Delia Strawbridge, an appointed representative of the nation called the United States of America on Earth. I bring you the word of our President, the leader of our people, and his desire to become allied with the Helta and the other civilized races in their opposition to the warlike Tevynians.”

  “Joon-Pah,” Caan-Fan-To growled, and the noise came through in the original and the translation almost unaltered. “Have you gone mad? These are….”

  “They are not Tevynians,” Joon-Pah insisted. “The Tevynians were taken from Earth when the humans were much more primitive, as we were, by the Elders, but the Tevynians were not raised to greater wisdom as we were. They remained as primitive as they once were, and they lack the understanding to adjust to the technology we have given them. The humans have made great strides since that time. You must believe me, they are willing to help and they have already done so. We were able to capture a living Tevynian, and he has told us that they are on the march to Helta Prime. Their fleet will arrive in weeks. Perhaps less.”

  “What do you ask of me, Joon-Pah?”

  “We wish to meet with you, Prime Facilitator Caan-Fan-To,” Strawbridge told him. “We seek to convince you of our righteous intent and persuade you and your people that we are different from the Tevynians, despite our appearance.”

  Caan-Fan-To was silent for a long time, and I didn’t know enough about the Helta to know what it meant. Strawbridge said nothing, so I followed her lead.

  “Very well,” Caan-Fan-To said, finally. “I will meet with the humans, but it must be in private, and in secret. No one can know of this from the Council of Facilitators.”

  “That is highly irregular,” Joon-Pah objected, “and expressly forbidden in the Charter.” He seemed shocked the Prime Facilitator would even suggest such a thing, though I wasn’t sure why it was such a big deal. Were politicians actually honest here?

  “Need I remind you,” Caan-Fan-To countered, “of all the laws you have broken simply by contacting these beings, much less bringing them here? We meet in secret or not at all.”

  “It shall be as you say, old friend.”

  “Do not call me that. After this day, I believe our friendship may be at an end.”

  The screen went dark and the communications officer cast Joon-Pah an apologetic look.

  “He has ended the transmission, Captain.”

  “That went well,” I murmured. Strawbridge glared at me and I rolled my eyes in return. What the hell did she want me to say?

  “Do you think he’ll listen to us?” I asked Joon-Pah. “Or will he just have us disappeared?”

  The fur on the back of the Helta’s neck stood up and he seemed to grow taller. I thought, at first, that he was angry, but then I decided he was horrified.

  “Are you suggesting the Prime Facilitator would have you killed and the bodies destroyed?” he asked. “Is this something common to your people?”

  “Not common,” Strawbridge said, jumping in quickly to try to save our reputation, as if Joon-Pah was going to abandon us at the nearest asteroid because he’d suddenly discovered, for the first time, that humans could be violent. “But desperate times not only call for desperate measures, as you said, they also make desperate people. How desperate do you believe your old friend might be?”

  “Hopefully,” Joon-Pah said, “he will be as desperate as I was when I came to your planet. If not, this whole venture may be doomed before it begins.”

  ***

  “I expected it to be more crowded,” Julie said, leaning forward as if she could get a better view out of the cockpit by crowding closer to the canopy.

  It was instinctive for her, I knew, wired into her brain from years of flying a Navy fighter. But this was a shuttle, not an F18, and the view out of the “canopy” was a holographic projection onto a blank section of fuselage, just as heavily armored and shielded as any other part of the ship. Julie had argued for a physical window. I’d been there for some of it, for her thunderous back and forth with Daniel Gatlin, insisting there should be a way to dead-stick a landing if all the power went out. I was neither a pilot nor an aerospace engineer, but I’d seen the wisdom in his position that there was no way to use physical controls to fly something as large, heavy and complicated as a shuttle. If the power went out in an atmosphere, the passenger section of the craft could eject and parachute down, and even that had taken hours and days of contentious debate.

  But she was right, I’d expected the skies over the Helta capital city to be one of the old science fiction paintings from the 50’s brought to life, the ones that showed a city in the far-flung year 2000 with spaceships coming in from orbit and the skies crowded with futuristic-looking aircraft, hovering around insubstantial, wispy, never-never versions of art-deco cityscapes.

  Helta Prime and its eponymous capital city were more reminiscent of a nature park, giant sequoias rising above fern-covered plains, the structures of the city woven around and between, as if the trees were the inhabitants of the world and the Helta were merely tenants begging for space in their nooks and crannies.

  “It’s like Greenpeace colonized a planet,” I agreed, leaning against the gunner’s station, unworried about the control yoke on my side because it was locked quite securely. I twisted around to face Joon-Pah, who was seated in the row behind us along with Delia Strawbridge. “How do you fit your whole population in with so little construction on the actual surface? Do you have like, underground cities or something?”

  “Not if I unders
tand your meaning correctly,” he told me. “That is, large structures such as storehouses, government buildings and the like are concealed beneath a layer of soil so as not to break up the flow of nature, but no, we do not house our populations deep under the ground.” His gaze turned down and his ears sagged with sadness. “Though we have, as of late, began to dig large shelters in case of attack by the Tevynians.” He shook off the moment of melancholy and met my eyes once again. “Having seen your cities, I understand your confusion. The population of Helta Prime has never risen above two billion individuals.”

  I realized my mouth was hanging open and I closed it before something flew in.

  “How the hell do you manage to maintain a technological civilization with so few people?”

  “Automation, and off-world industry. We have strict controls in place for expansion on living worlds, but what makes this possible is the fact that we do not reproduce as rapidly as humans, or Tevynians. And that may be part of our problem—they simply have more numbers to throw at us than we can hope to counter.”

  “What about the other races?” I asked him. “The Vironians, the Skrith and the Chamblisi?”

  “None of them had spacefaring civilizations before they joined the Alliance, but their populations are fairly small as well, at least on a world-per-world basis. The Vironians and the Chamblisi also have natural limits to their reproductive cycles.” I tried to picture the images of them I’d seen in Joon-Pah’s briefing packet and was only able to envision the species they most closely resembled and had likely been engineered from by the Elders: monitor lizards and giant octopi. And yeah, I could see where both of them would have reproductive cycles that limited their population growth. “The Skrith, less so,” he went on, “but the conditions on their homeworld are harsh, and many of their young perish in the rites of adolescence.”

  The Skrith were taller and leaner than the Helta on average, with a canine look that the genetic engineering of the Elders hadn’t quite bred out of them. They were the descendants of some sort of wolf or wild dog, or at least that was what Patel had told me. I tried to imagine what sort of rituals of adulthood wolves might bring with them after an abbreviated, artificial evolution to humanoid form and decided they might be harsh, indeed.

  “It’s no surprise the Alliance isn’t experienced in warfare,” Strawbridge mused. At my curious look, she expounded. “Historically, most wars are caused by population pressure and resource scarcity.”

  “It’s kind of like the Garden of Eden before the serpent came along.”

  “That analogy paints a rather poor picture of us, doesn’t it?” she asked, her tone chiding.

  “The early Iron Age us, anyway.”

  “I’ve got the landing beacon,” Julie announced, her hands caressing the steering yoke fractions of a degree, sending the shuttle into a gentle, descending spiral.

  It was early evening over the southeastern end of Helta Prime’s northernmost continent, and the primary star sank lower with each downward revolution the shuttle took. A few thousand feet up, I finally noticed the flyers. They were bulbous, like the thorax of an insect, but where the wings of a flying bug would be, they had ducted rotors to keep them aloft, buzzing back and forth in gentle arcs between one cluster of elevated treehouses and another. They swarmed those gaps in the forest like clouds of mosquitos, but they seemed to know to steer clear of each other, and of our course.

  The redwood forest grew in natural patterns, but the gaps where the Helta had made their homes seemed conveniently spaced, as if they’d reached an agreement with the trees, and our landing pad was in such a space. It looked as if it had grown into the pattern of the trees, or else been constructed in ancient times and the centuries-old redwoods had grown up around it. It was oval at the front, narrowing at the rear until it formed a curving path into the trees, winding around the structures, hugging their trunks until it disappeared beneath the canopy. That was impressive enough until we got closer and I realized how broad the landing area was and how high we were off the ground.

  “I hope this platform can take the weight,” I said quietly, thinking no one would hear me over the rumble of the jets and the roar of the turbines. Julie must have, though, because she chuckled, not taking her eyes off the instruments.

  “These are the people whose starships we’re riding in, Andy,” she reminded me. “Bit late to be doubting their construction skills.”

  “Fair point.”

  The tops of the giant trees passed by as we dipped below them, trunks ten yards wide encircling us, an ancient trap laid by a patient immortal. And we were down, the landing gear a few yards, retracting into their housings under the weight of the shuttle, then springing up again from the resistance of their hydraulic housings. We were the only ship on the pad, and there were no guards, no soldiers, no diplomats waiting to meet us. No one, in fact, in sight for as far as the surrounding sentinel growths allowed us to see.

  “You said this was a government landing pad, right?” I asked Joon-Pah, unbuckling from my seat. “Where is everyone?”

  “The Prime Facilitator wishes our meeting to be confidential,” he said, staring at the fastenings of his safety restraints, hunting for the quick release. I pulled it for him. “He has, no doubt, sent everyone from here on one pretext or another.”

  “He’s more worried about anyone finding out than he is of us causing problems,” Strawbridge summarized.

  I clambered down the steps into the main passenger compartment and found Pops and the others already up, checking their weapons, waiting for orders.

  “We coming with you, sir?” Pops asked, his visor swiveled upward, face bare to the interior lights of the shuttle.

  I gave Strawbridge a questioning look.

  “It was made clear to me,” she said, holding up her hands palms-out, “that you are in charge of the military aspect of this mission. I would not bring armed troops to this meeting, but that is your call, Major Clanton.”

  And wasn’t that a kick in the head. The first meeting with an alien head of state and I was the one who could fuck things up for our entire species before I even got there.

  No pressure.

  “No, I think you guys should stay here,” I decided. “You too, Colonel Nieves,” I added to Julie, who was waiting at the top of the steps behind us. “If things go to shit, I want you ready to pull our asses out of the fire, but this guy Caan-Fan-To already seems jumpy, and I don’t know if marching a squad of powered armor into the middle of his living room is going to calm him down any. Keep your ears open for my call, though.”

  “A wise decision, Major,” Strawbridge assured me, though I couldn’t tell if it had surprised her. She was too good a diplomat for that.

  I pushed the big, red button set in the hull at the end of the passenger compartment and the belly ramp began descending with the hum of servomotors.

  “Lead on, Joon-Pah,” I invited the Helta.

  We followed him into the gathering darkness and there was nothing ominous at all about the thump of the belly door slamming shut behind us. Honest.

  Chapter Ten

  Caan-Fan-To was bigger in person than he’d seemed on the viewscreen, burly and broad-shouldered and gruff now that he wasn’t acting shocked and scared shitless. In fact, he seemed to have gone the other direction and I wondered if I might wind up having to keep him from beating the crap out of Joon-Pah.

  I didn’t know if the particular treehouse we stepped into was this guy’s personal residence or just some official government apartment, but it was larger than the ones we’d seen on Forestglen and I suppose fancier, although what constituted fancy for a self-conscious bear I couldn’t say for sure. There was more of the beanbag furniture and some sort of curving, sloping, polished wood table running around the perimeter of the large, central chamber like a model racecar track. Fruit rested in depressions carved into the wood, but fruit I couldn’t identify, which wasn’t surprising, considering all the flora and fauna on this world had been transplant
ed over ten thousand years ago and every variety of modern citrus fruit had been cross-bred by humans from one original source, the citron. These weren’t citrons, but they were a hybridization route that humans hadn’t taken.

  I sensed that Caan-Fan-To wasn’t interested in discussing citrus farming when he surged across the room at our entrance and squared off with Joon-Pah, the hair standing up on the back of his neck, vestigial fangs displayed as his lips peeled back. There was one other Heltan in the room, a younger male I took to be the Prime Facilitator’s chief of staff or aide, or whatever they called them here, and he grabbed his superior’s arm before it could swing toward Joon-Pah.

  “Please, sir,” the underling insisted. “You must think of your station.”

  Caan-Fan-To yanked his hand away from the younger male, scowling at him.

  “Vandas-Gol, you are my Tertiary, not my mother.” I didn’t know what Tertiary meant and neither the translator no Joon-Pah offered any sort of explanation. The Heltan turned back to Joon-Pah, shoulders still rising and falling, huffing like an animal working itself up for a charge.

  “Do you know what you’ve done to me, you fool?” He gestured at us as if we were inanimate objects. “Do you know what will happen if anyone finds out about this?”

  “Are we alone here?” Joon-Pah asked him, calmer than I would have expected at the tirade from what was basically his president, or close enough for government work.

  “For the moment,” the reply was fierce and guttural. “But how long do you think I can keep this from the others? Did you think no one would notice the return of your ship? Do you think my rivals in the council will not look into the strange shuttle that has landed at my very door?”

  God, what a wimp. He was the one who’d told us to come meet him, after all.

  “Prime Facilitator,” Strawbridge said, and I didn’t realize for a moment that she was speaking Helta without the aid of her translator. Mine converted her words to English, like watching a badly-dubbed foreign movie. “I am Delia Strawbridge. I spoke to you from the bridge of the Truthseeker.” She motioned toward me. “This is Major Andrew Clanton, a representative of our military. Believe me when I say that we did not come here to bring you trouble but to offer our aid.”