CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX  Aboard RKS Eagle

Lieutenant George Prigot sat there, silent and glad to be forgotten in the hubbub. The command staff and the Intelligence units had been in joint session for endless hours now, and the voices of argument swirled around him.

"We can't make First Contact in the middle of a war!"

"The bloody Guards made First Contact. We'll have to settle for second—and we don't have much choice about making Contact. How can we avoid it?"

"But in the middle of a war? How? Who? How can we get through the Guard ships around Outpost?"

Captain Robinson listened to it all for a while before banging his gavel and attempting to bring the talk back to the point. "Lieutenant Calder, I have seen the results of the attack on Impervious, and I am willing to grant that bioweapons are dangerous. I can't quite credit your claim that these Nihilists could or would wipe out the human race. For starters, how could they get to us? They have no starships, no spacecraft of any kind—

"But they will get them, Captain," Lucy said, with the weary voice of someone who has said the same thing many times before. "By trade or theft or by building their own, sooner or later they will have ships, now that they know such things exist. The Nihilists regard intelligent life as an abomination. Before anyone can ask me why, I'm not quite sure. The Nihilists want to keep growing in power— and they lose lots of friends if they start genocide against their own kind. Mostly, as I understand it, the Nihilists limit themselves to killing Outposters as they enter old age, which doesn't really seem to bother anyone. Again, don't ask me why, I don t know.

"But out of all this come some key points: They can kill us, and kill us by the millions. You have seen the results of weapons that can breed more weapons. They are, I assure you, actively seeking to get ships so they can get to us. That's opinion on my part, but every Outpost Refiner I've talked to agrees with that assumption. And killing us has got to be politically healthier for them than killing other Z'ensam—other Outposters. We are very ugly to the Z'ensam. Worse than ugly—mortifying to look on. The Guards are the only humans any Outposter has met, and they aren't the best ambassadors of good will. A lot of Z'ensam would stand back and let the Nihilists go after us—and if the Nihilists, say, take Capital, wipe out the population there, the weapons and the ships and the technology there would let them take over all of Outpost. And if they got starships, and they came hunting the rest of us—imagine, just for starters, a breed of those worms that was designed to attack a planet."

There was a long silence. Finally one of the New Finnish officers broke it. "Just once, right there at the end, did you mention Capital, the Guardians. They are our reason for being here. Your aliens are all very interesting, but we are here to fight the Guards! You know what those monsters did to my world. Why should we defend them against these Nihilists of yours? Let it happen. We would be well rid of the Guards. Let the Nihilists wipe them out. We of the League can handle the Nihilists afterwards. I would consent to that course of action, but even it would not satisfy me altogether. / say we must ignore these creatures who don't even have spacecraft. We must flatten Capital. We have waited in this dreary barycenter of yours long enough, admiral. Enough of caution. We New Finns, at least, came here to kill Guardians!"

George's blood turned cold. This crazy Finn was talking genocide—and no one was disagreeing! They were concerned with the tactics of battle. No one raised the moral issues against allowing the Nihilists to exterminate the people of his planet. He wished Mac or Joslyn were in on this meeting. They would have spoken up. George knew damn well no one would listen to him on this subject. Anything he could say would only make things worse.

Captain Robinson turned to Admiral Thomas, but the admiral didn't seem to want to say anything. Robinson looked to the Finnish contingent. "Gentlemen, we understand your feelings. But I don't think the situation is simple enough for a simple answer. We are not properly prepared to do it, we do not have the experts in xeno-sociology and so on available, but nonetheless I think we must establish some sort of relations with at least this group of Outposters that Lieutenant Calder traveled with."

The Finns did not reply, but a murmur of agreement came from the rest of the table. "So how do we do it?" Robinson asked.

"Ah, Captain?" A nervous-looking young black woman, an Intelligence lieutenant, spoke up timidly. "We can get a team down there, with a minimum of risk. We just can't get them back—at least not for a while. We have those covert landers."

"Right! I'd clean forgotten about them. Thank you, Lieutenant Krebs."

"Wait a minute," came a voice from the rear. "What's a covert lander—and what was that about not getting back?"

Krebs leaned in toward the center of the table so she could be heard. "The coverts are one-shot landers designed to be transparent to radar and so on. We have a number along so we could drop spies and saboteurs on Capital. Each can carry six and some cargo. You can't get back in one because they don't carry much fuel—and they land a little rough, too. A covert lander could follow that beacon down, we could get some people in there, and they'd have to sit tight until we could get them out. They'd have radios and so on, of course."

"Lovely," said the same voice from the rear.

Pete Gesseti sighed at that news, but such was life. He was along for this trip so the League could have some expendable diplomats on the scene to get negotiations started. The key word was expendable. You didn't send the dean of the diplomatic corps into a war zone. May as well get the volunteering over with. Pete rose. "Ah, Captain Robinson. I really hate to admit this, but it seems to me that I'm the logical one to send on this trip."

Robinson had given up looking to Thomas. The admiral was willing to just sit there and listen. "I'm afraid I had just come to the same conclusion. Talk with me afterwards and well put together a team. Obviously, Lieutenant Calder should be on it, if you feel up to it, lieutenant."

"I've been assuming that I'd go back. You'll need an interpreter, Mr. Gesseti."

/ need a drink, Pete thought, but said nothing.

"Very well. Krebs, you get them organized after we're done here. But now we must move on to your other news about this Guardian officer, Gustav Johnson. Can he be trusted?"

Lucy opened her mouth to speak, shut it again, played with a pencil for a moment. "Johnson is a good and honorable man, but you must understand his viewpoint," she said finally. "He is a citizen of Capital, and his planet is at war with us. He makes a very clear distinction between the planet Capital and the political association called the Guardians. He hinted to me once or twice about an illegal opposition group called Settlers, but I don't know much about them. He doesn't want the League here. I don't think he actually wants the League to win. But he has concluded that those persons in power, the Central Guardians, have gotten Capital into a hopeless situation. Capital will lose. He sees that as inevitable. He wants to make that defeat as painless as possible. He believes that the use of bioweapons can only make the League more eager for revenge.

"I should emphasize that Johns—that Gustav—is in a very delicate situation. I have had no contact with him for months. He may be dead. He may have been drugged and tortured into revealing every plan he and I made. The CIs on Ariadne might be dead by now, or simply transferred to another posting. So the situation cannot be trusted. But, if he lives, Gustav Johnson can be. If we receive any transmissions from Ariadne, you must judge for yourself who is sending them."

"And at this range, we can't possibly be certain that a laser link would be secure," Robinson said thoughtfully. "We can't risk talking back to them. Somehow, this seems like a very new land of war, and a very old kind, both at once.

"Meeting adjourned. We all have a lot to think about."