The Xenocide Mission Read online

  ‘Much better,’ Barabadar agreed.

  ‘But either way would take a prodigious amount of energy, much more than we can easily produce, and as to clues here on this base – no, none at all.’

  ‘All the information we could possibly need must be inside their heads,’ Barabadar mused. She waved the notes. ‘And yet I don’t see anything here which suggests how they Shared.’

  ‘I’ve no idea if they did Share,’ Oomoing said. ‘There’s nothing that even looks like a Sharemass on the bodies that I’ve been able to locate externally.’ No autopsies . . .

  Barabadar went back to the notes and changed the subject. ‘The energy weapons they used against us were formidable,’ she said, ‘and yet our stealth technology still seemed to fool them.’

  ‘They probably use electromagnetic systems, like we do.’

  ‘So they’re not that far ahead of us?’

  ‘Maybe. Or maybe electromagnetic systems will always be the best detection system to use at any level of technology,’ Oomoing said.

  ‘Maybe. When they did hit us, they hit us hard,’ said Barabadar. She flicked further through the notes. ‘Your speculations on their home environment are less helpful.’

  ‘I expect Stormer has told you I’m an evolutionist,’ Oomoing said. Barabadar smiled again, with only a little more humour.

  ‘Yes, he wasn’t impressed. Anything that impugns his battle gods will upset him. I think you’ll find that every time he’s prayed to them, he’s won a battle.’

  ‘Has he ever fought a battle without praying to them?’

  ‘Probably not.’ Oomoing noticed Barabadar carefully withheld her own opinion on the topic, but thought she detected it from the tone. Then the Marshal of Space seemed to reach a decision. ‘Learned Sister, from now on the outlanders themselves are of secondary interest. I want your absolute priority to be to find out how they travel faster than light.’

  ‘I never thought you were that interested in expanding,’ Oomoing commented. The entire direction of Barabadar’s tenure as Marshal of Space had been towards consolidating, making things safe and secure.

  ‘I wasn’t. But it’s just possible these creatures could strike at us. If they do, I want to be able to strike back.’ Barabadar for a moment looked something between tired and disgusted. ‘I’ve done this job for twenty years, Learned Sister, and I’ve been good at it. I’ve safeguarded our interests, which is all someone in my position should be required to do. And suddenly I have a whole new frontier to patrol.’

  ‘And new interests to safeguard,’ Oomoing murmured.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Barabadar, missing Oomoing’s point entirely. Safeguard our interests was a safely neutral phrase which could mean a lot of things. In the case of extraterrestrials, Oomoing suspected it meant neutralizing the threat before it emerged. And that could only mean one thing.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll do your job well,’ Oomoing said.

  ‘I always have,’ Barabadar said sourly. ‘And look where it got me.’

  ‘It’s the scientific find of a lifetime!’ Oomoing said.

  ‘It’s a political nightmare. Only a few people in our government know about this, so far. The question is, do we tell the other governments? Rather, what do we tell the other governments, since our interest in this place has no doubt aroused the curiosity of every mother on Homeworld with a good telescope? Or, do we kill the prisoners, blow up the base and pretend the whole thing never happened? Having, of course, taken as much of their technology as we can understand home with us.’

  ‘That would be insane!’ Oomoing protested.

  ‘For reasons you have no idea about and aren’t going to, it’s an attractive option,’ Barabadar said. Then the Marshal of Space sat casually back on her haunches. ‘So far,’ she said, ‘you’ve made better observations than Stormer ever could, but there’s nothing here any other bright female couldn’t have worked out. You’re better than that. Convince me you really were the right choice for this job.’

  Oomoing paused to collect her thoughts. She had a feeling that Barabadar hadn’t let her Share so that she could be tested more subtly. ‘Ever since I heard of this place, I’ve rehearsed this meeting, Martial Sister,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I’ve longed to greet you with something like, “So, you’re the maniac who ordered an all-out attack on an extraterrestrial base.” ’

  She could see Barabadar was amused. ‘Well, here I am,’ said the Marshal of Space.

  ‘You also,’ Oomoing said, ‘went about it in the most unbelievably unprepared manner. You were woefully ill-equipped. The facilities your people have used to imprison the extraterrestrials are jury-rigged. You brought nothing with you that could have been used to make a more secure holding area. Your main supplies all turned up days later. You couldn’t have planned this whole thing on the understanding that exactly two extraterrestrials would be captured. You weren’t expecting prisoners at all.

  ‘And,’ she added. ‘You did it without any kind of ritual of challenge. Not an honourable act by anyone’s standards.’

  The amusement evaporated and Oomoing knew she had struck home. ‘Then what was I doing?’ Barabadar said coldly.

  This was a leap in the dark for Oomoing, but she only had one hypothesis that made any kind of sense.

  ‘You were—’ she began.

  A call signal interrupted her. Barabadar waved her to silence and took the call. ‘Worthy Son?’ she said.

  Stormer’s features appeared on the display.

  ‘I’m sorry for interrupting, Martial Mother,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d want to know as soon as possible that we’ve discovered another ship.’

  Four feet, Joel thought sourly. What a bloody silly number.

  Of course, this wasn’t an entirely worthy idea, and part of him was grateful that he still had this capacity for rational thought. But honestly, Boon Round could be so . . . so . . .

  So.

  Joel supposed he was glad to see Boon Round rallying. The Rustie was spending less and less time in his hammock, which unfortunately meant more and more time moving around the Commune Place and complaining about . . . well, everything.

  Which was what you’d expect from having two completely different species working side by side, Joel thought privately. You couldn’t really have the Commonwealth without the First Breed, the Roving being their home planet and all that, but he sometimes thought there might be a case for having all the First Breed stay at home and let the humans do the spacefaring. Let both sides play to their strengths.

  Joel passed his time doing exercises and thinking, which were really the only two options open to him and had the advantage that they could be done simultaneously. Escape was the main thing to think about, though exactly how was another matter. He kept hoping the big, friendly alien would return and let him out again. If he could somehow win her trust enough to get near a weapons locker . . . or something . . .

  ‘I wish you’d stop that bouncing to and fro,’ said Boon Round. Joel had devised the exercise of kicking gently off the floor of the Commune Place, doing a somersault in mid-air and landing on the ceiling feet first, to repeat the process indefinitely. ‘It’s deeply distracting.’

  Joel stopped exercizing and sulked in one corner. For the thousandth time he triggered the image on his ident bracelet and gazed into those blue eyes. So freakin’ typical. It had been as if every moment, every experience, every lesson of his life had been in preparation for meeting her. And before he had time to work out if he really was reading the signals correctly, he’d been sent to SkySpy.

  ‘I wish you’d come up with some helpful suggestions,’ he muttered.

  ‘Why bother? These creatures murdered my siblings without pity and they greatly outnumber us. Our only hope is to die with glory, taking as many as we can with us.’

  Boon Round sounded as if he approved of the idea. Perhaps he did. A Rustie in his situation would have nothing left to live for. Joel had a great deal to live
for and he wore the proof around his wrist.

  ‘Fine,’ Joel said. ‘Jump the next one to come through that airlock and die gloriously. Me, I’ll hang around.’

  ‘Humans are meant to provide us with leadership. Why do you not show moral support? The Ones Who Command would have worked out what to do long ago.’

  ‘Oh, drop dead.’

  They both knew the Commonwealth would react as soon as it heard from the survivors onboard Lifeboat B. Neither of them knew how long had passed since their capture but surely it would be soon. A starship would turn up, its translator banks programmed with what SkySpy had gleaned of the XC language, and their captors would be ordered in their own tongue to hand any captives over, or else.

  Whereupon, quite possibly, the XCs would slaughter their captives anyway and then die their own glorious deaths. So, while sitting and waiting was a possibility, escape did seem the preferable option.

  Hence, it was with a sense of detached reality that Joel saw a couple of XCs come in – Boon Round did not jump them as suggested – bearing bundles which they carefully left hanging in mid-air and then backed away from. Those bundles were Joel and Boon Round’s spacesuits.

  ‘Amazing!’ said Oomoing. The cavern was well lit with lights brought in from Barabadar’s ship and the object of interest took up most of the open space. She wasn’t an expert on spacecraft but still there seemed something distinctly extraterrestrial about it, even though it was essentially a long tube, flat at the end that faced space, tapered at the inward end. It exactly matched recordings of the other ship, the one that got away.

  The layout of the place confirmed her hypothesis about artificial gravity – there was quite clearly a platform of some kind running the length of the bay and down either side of the ship, with a safety rail to prevent anyone falling off. A rectangular hole showed dark against the craft’s hull three quarters of the way down, and a small ramp led up to it.

  Barabadar, studying the recordings of the attack, had noted that the asteroid’s defences rose out of the rock from beneath hidden hatches. She had ordered a close survey of the asteroid’s surface to see what else might be concealed there, and the entrance to this cavern had been found. From there, the searchers had located the inner entrance and backtracked through the maze of dark, airless passages to the occupied area of the asteroid. This was one of the unpressurized areas and everyone was suited up.

  ‘It’s the answer to my prayers,’ Barabadar said. ‘Loyal Son?’

  Oomoing recognized Stormer’s battle-fit shape in the armoured figure that approached.

  ‘The area is secure, Martial Mother,’ he said. ‘As far as we can tell there are no outlanders on board.’

  ‘You’ve been on board?’ Oomoing interrupted. She caught his sour glance through his visor.

  ‘There’s an airlock and what looks like a simple control panel on the inner hatch, Learned Mother, but I don’t want to start pressing buttons just yet.’

  Oomoing could see his point. The extraterrestrials had been quite thorough about making sure none of their superior technology fell into Kin hands. The lifeboat was probably rigged to blow if any unauthorized entry was attempted.

  ‘So how did you check for outland-extraterrestrials?’ she asked.

  Stormer glanced at Barabadar, as if for permission, then back at Oomoing. ‘We attached listening devices to the hull and we looked through the windows,’ he said. ‘There are lights on inside. I’d surmise it’s under its own power.’

  ‘And the inner hatch would have shut the moment it detected the pressure drop,’ said Barabadar, ‘so the interior is probably pressurized too.’

  ‘So it will have their optimal environmental conditions.’ Oomoing felt an ever-rising excitement. ‘We could learn a great deal about their world if we could get on board.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Barabadar said. ‘But if our two outlanders can operate it – and two Kin could certainly operate a ship of ours this size – then this could be the best way of returning them to their own people.’

  Stormer and Oomoing both looked at her as if she had just renounced the battle gods. Stormer was probably thinking things it would be lethal to say out loud. Oomoing had no such compunction.

  ‘Return them? You’re . . . returning them?’ she said, delighted.

  Barabadar ignored them both. ‘Third Son,’ she said.

  ‘My Mother?’ said Fleet.

  ‘Go and fetch anything that you know belongs to the two captives and bring it here. Stormer, have the captives and the dead bodies brought to this place at once.’

  She turned away from the question in Oomoing’s eyes.

  Joel looked at the suits, then at the XCs, then back at the suits again. The nearest XC pointed at him, then at the suits, then back the way they had come. The two XCs continued to stand there, waiting.

  Joel kicked over to the human-shaped suit, grabbed it in transit and ended up on the other side of the chamber. Then, though he saw one of the XCs flinch when he did it, he activated the control panel on the left sleeve. The suit ran a quick diagnostic and announced that it was intact, the breathing equipment had the same air reserve as when he was captured, the thruster unit was ready for use . . . in fact, it was fully functional, with one exception. The radio had been disabled, as Joel could see with his own eyes. The unit had been dismantled.

  ‘Wow,’ he said.

  Boon Round glanced in his direction. ‘It’s a trap. They intend to lure us into a sense of false security and gun us down without mercy.’

  Joel felt his exasperation rising. ‘And that’s why they don’t just walk in here with guns at the ready and do it more simply?’

  ‘They’re sadistic animals. They like to play with our minds.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Joel. ‘Hold me steady while I put this on and go out to my death.’

  Boon Round airswam over to him and helped him suit up. As they connected the air hoses to the helmet, the Rustie said, ‘Perhaps I will join you. We can die together.’

  And so the two of them made their way under armed guard through the passages of SkySpy to a makeshift airlock. They passed through into the airless zone.

  ‘Not that I have to explain anything to you, Learned Sister,’ said Barabadar, in response to the question Oomoing had carefully not been asking. Fleet was off fetching the extraterrestrials’ belongings and Oomoing’s camera. ‘But, as you surmise, I didn’t expect to encounter outlanders here. Now, supposing your sons had planted an observation post in another solar system, and the natives there fell on it as we did here, without challenge, and a few of your sons got away to tell you about it. What would you do?’

  Oomoing felt a sudden thrill as battle hormones started to flood into her bloodstream.

  ‘Investigate,’ she said.

  ‘Exactly.’ Barabadar’s eyes still caressed the lifeboat and Oomoing suddenly sensed just how difficult this was for her. She wanted it, so badly. But . . . ‘I’m assuming the survivors have somehow left our solar system – I’ve got remote probes crawling all over Firegod’s orbit and there’s no sign of them. I don’t know how long it would have taken them to get back home, but it seems a reasonable supposition that at some point we’re going to get a visit from a well-armed, technologically superior outlander warship with vengeance on its mind. I would of course welcome a one-to-one battle, but a battle like this would by no means be certain.’

  Marshal of Space Barabadar, thinking of defeat? Oomoing felt strangely disoriented. But, logically speaking, Barabadar was right, and just because she was a military leader didn’t mean she couldn’t use logic.

  ‘Even worse,’ Barabadar said as if reading her mind, ‘we might bring them down upon Homeworld. And so, we’ll remain here. If they come, they come; if we can communicate with them and convince them it was a mistake, then so much the better. If they want to fight then –’ she looked Oomoing in the eye; Oomoing guessed she was still smarting from Oomoing’s entirely accurate evaluation of her unprovoked, unannounced attack – �
�then I’ll challenge them to the Ritual of Contested Land. Either way, we’re going to stay here for the time being. But in the meantime, I hope to avoid even that much chance of a conflict we can’t possibly win by returning their sons to them; the living and the dead.’

  ‘The bodies as well?’ said Oomoing.

  ‘Naturally. They’ll want to consume their dead.’ Barabadar sounded surprised that Oomoing could think otherwise, and Oomoing refrained from pointing out that the customs of the extraterrestrials might be different. Indeed, consuming was part of Sharing and Sharing was an integral part of Kin biology, so why should extraterrestrials have the same features? For that matter, why should they have such a thing as the Rituals of Combat, which had surely arisen to meet the specific circumstances of life on Homeworld? But all that would be more evolutionist claptrap to the Marshal of Space.

  ‘They still might kill us all,’ Oomoing said instead.

  ‘They might try, and if they try, we’ll resist. I’m ordering all my people here to make Sharings to send back to Homeworld by message capsule. I expect you’ll want to do likewise. And here comes Third Son, good. Make what observations you can of this vessel because it will be your last chance.’

  Joel couldn’t believe it. It had occurred to him that now might be a good time to try and make a break for the lifeboat bay, and he was so determined to get as close as they possibly could before making a move that it took a moment to sink in: they were heading there anyway. And then they were in, at the inner end of the rock-hewn chamber, and the smooth matte hull of the lifeboat was stretching away into the distance. A crowd of XCs still stood around.

  Joel groaned and looked wistfully at the lifeboat’s airlock. It was only a matter of yards away, but still somewhere he could never get with all these XCs about. As far as he could tell, the lifeboat was fully charged and untampered with, though an XC was clambering about the hull with what looked like some kind of recording equipment, maybe taking pictures. From the markings on the suit, Joel thought he recognized the large female that had supervised his brief moment of freedom, but he had other things on his mind and he turned his gaze back to the lifeboat. Just a few elementary commands were needed to make it whisk them away from here for ever.