The Phoenix War (32 page)

Rez’nac gave Calvin the Polarian salute. “It
would be my great honor to serve you.”

“I’m happy to hear that,” said Calvin. “Now
go and get your things ready, we’re meeting at the main hatch at
oh-six-hundred.”

Rez’nac bowed his head and departed. For some
reason Summers expected Calvin to go with him, but instead he
remained. To Summers’ greater surprise, Calvin’s lingering presence
made her happy. More than she would’ve liked to admit, especially
to herself.

“Was there something else, Lieutenant?” she
asked, keeping her tone all-business; she didn’t want to sound too
pleased that he was still there. Considering he was still that same
insolent boy that’d defied her advice countless times before, and
seemed not to understand the value of discipline and protocol.

“Just one more thing,” said Calvin. “I want a
quick update on your mission.
Not
a whole report, just the
basics. I know you’re hunting after the isotome weapons, and that
means interdicting some Zander person, but I haven’t yet been told
why you’re going after him in particular.”

“We’re almost completely sure that he has the
isotome weapons,” said Summers. “At least until we relieve him of
them.”

“Yes, you told me that much before. But you
didn’t mention why you think he has the weapons, instead of someone
else.”

“It’s all in this report that you claim not
to want or need,” she said, a little irritated. “But the short
version is this, all of the jump signature of ships known and
suspected to be involved with the isotome weapons coalesced at the
Kynar Asteroid Belt. We went and searched the belt. There we found
a small ship in hiding. We captured it and took two prisoners. We
interrogated those prisoners separately and their stories agreed
that they were waiting to deliver a message to the Enclave on
behalf of someone named Zander. And that Zander is going to
transfer the isotome weapons to the Enclave. We have some details
of his ship and where he makes port. We’ve put the word out and now
we’re desperately hoping to catch some sign of him and intercept
him before he can deliver the weapons to the Enclave.”

“Because if he does, then the Enclave will
give the weapons to the Rotham. And they will be unstoppable,” said
Calvin.

Hopefully not unstoppable
, thought
Summers. The roughly one-hundred worlds of the Empire orbited over
fifty stars, and, by all counts, there were only fifteen isotome
weapons still in existence. So mathematically they couldn’t be used
to wipe-out humanity. But, for all intents and purposes, the
slaughter would be so extreme that Summers felt no need to correct
Calvin on this point. They both agreed that the weapons had to be
found and destroyed, and failure was not even a remotely
considerable option.

“What about the prisoners, what have you done
with them?” asked Calvin.

“They’re in the brig. Mister Pellew and I are
satisfied that we’ve gotten all of the useful information out of
them that we can.”

Calvin nodded. For a moment he looked like he
was going to demand to interview them himself. But he didn’t.
Instead he asked, “what are your plans for them now?”

“I don’t have any,” said Summers. “They are
of no use to me but I also don’t think it would be just to…
dispose
of them in the manner Pellew suggests. They are
entitled to some sort of due process of law, no matter how
backwards and broken our government seems to currently be. And I’m
not about to let them go. I certainly don’t trust them running
free.”

“Yes, you can’t let them go free,” said
Calvin. “And I don’t think you should
dispose
of them.” He
looked uncomfortable at the very thought. Summers was glad that
Calvin didn’t share Pellew’s ruthless lack of empathy. That was one
thing that made Calvin different from Raidan, one reason why she
could trust him a far cry better than she could trust her former
CO.

“What do you think I should do with them?”
asked Summers.

“I say we hand them over to the queen. She
can have them questioned and see to it they get some degree of just
treatment. We transfer them to the officials on Aleator and I’ll
personally see to it that they are sent to the queen’s fleet.”

Summers knew that the word
officials
was a stretch for describing the ruling party of Aleator, which was
apparently a gangster family. She also knew that Calvin had chosen
that word precisely for her benefit, to ease her discomfort with
the whole idea. And indeed she was uncomfortable with the notion,
but she was even less comfortable keeping the prisoners on the
ship. And she reminded herself that Calvin was in command here, so
she was right to defer to his judgment regarding the matter.

“Very well,” agreed Summers. “I put them in
your hands.”

“Yes, I think that’s best. Now I have other
things to take care of but, before I go, I just want to say…” he
looked at her, momentarily struggling to make the words come out.
“You’re doing a good job, Summers. Really you are. Keep up the good
work.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant.”

He nodded. “Good luck.” Then he turned and
left. Clearly focused on whatever else he needed to do to prepare
for his new mission.

“Good luck to you too, Calvin,” whispered
Summers after the door had closed. “Stay safe out there.”

Alex had bided his time in silence. Ever
since he’d dealt with the loose end, and arranged for Patrick
O’Connor’s unfortunate demise due to an apparent carbon monoxide
leak, Alex had lain low. And made extra certain that no unnecessary
attention had been drawn to himself. Like he’d hoped, Patrick’s
death had been ruled an accident, the result of a systems failure,
and since that time the humans had seemed almost to forget about
him. Their precious little stealth ship raced across the galaxy,
always trying to be somewhere else, hunting after those isotome
weapons, while the commanding officer had gone away to play
politics at the human capital.

Alex had enjoyed Calvin’s absence. The female
human who’d replaced Calvin as commander seemed not to know what to
do with Alex, and so she’d left him alone, to do as he liked,
provided he remained out of sight and away from the ship’s critical
systems. That suited him just fine. He had no desire to interfere
with the Nighthawk’s effort, indeed he wished these humans the very
best with their mission. So long as they kept their word and
followed-through with their plan to destroy the isotome weapons.
Getting rid of such a threat would make the galaxy much safer. And,
even though he felt a bit naïve because of it, Alex believed them.
That destroying the weapons was their true intention. Doing so
would help prevent a costly, bloody war between the humans and the
Rotham, and would be a blow against the vile Rahajiim that had
infiltrated the Senate and seemed to be poisoning the Republic a
little more each day.

We should leave the humans and the
Polarians alone. Mind our own affairs
, he thought.
We do not
intervene. They do not intervene. That is the natural order. When
the natural order is broken, when we defy it, then people die.
Rotham die. Humans die. And Polarians die. By the millions. Perhaps
even the billions. The survivors are thrown into grief and poverty
and must live in the ashes of the broken worlds that never should
have suffered
.
It sets society backwards and serves no
purpose except to enrich a few at the dear price of the many, and
the whole
. It had always been the mission of the Advent to
safeguard the Republic, and the best way to do that, Alex had
always believed, was to set aside the spilt blood of the past
century and focus on building the future.
If you want to fight a
war with humanity, let it be through superior enterprise of science
and social development, through explosively expansive industry; let
us harvest the galaxy’s endless treasures and sweetest fruits and
outgrow and out-build our rival species.

Alex had always been a non-interventionist.
And, not so long ago, it had been true—he was sure—that most of the
Rotham government had belonged to the non-interventionists. To this
day, Alex persisted in his belief that most of the Rotham people
themselves were non-interventionists at heart. They didn’t want war
and imperialist conquest. They didn’t hunger for victories on the
battlefield, like the savage Polarians, or thirst endlessly for
additional power, like the humans. The Rotham merely wished to be
left alone!

True, at various times in their history, a
minority of hawkish Rotham had led and tricked the others into
engaging in war with the other major species, but for the most part
those were the exceptions and not the rule. Alex had to believe
that. Just as he had to believe right now, as the human Empire
seemed to fracture more by the day in a downward spiral of
political and social chaos, that his beloved Rotham people weren’t
prepping their fleets, eagerly smelling the death in the air.

If we attack, it promises to be much worse
than even the violence of the Great War
, he thought. And if the
isotome weapons are used, it will spark a war steeped so heavily in
terror and desperation that its inevitable end will be the
cessation of all human or Rotham life. And who knows what role the
Polarians will play in all of this. Perhaps they’ll be the last
sapient, space-travelling beings left standing over the dust and
ashes of pointless slaughter and extinction, and what a sad future
that would be for advanced life. If the fittest that had survived
was also the least intelligent and most superstitious.

The thoughts of slaughter and extinction on
that scale reminded him of an artifact of Polarian culture. The
deeply religious, disturbingly mysterious, blue-skinned,
violence-thirsty, warrior aliens had a prophecy called
The Final
War
. It was thousands of years old, and had been told and
retold by the various mystics and clerics in the evolving Polarian
religion since long before any of them had ever met or heard of the
humans or the Rotham. But it more-or-less promised the Polarians
that they would one-day inhabit the Realm of the Gods, the very
heavens above, and that they were destined to plunder the stars
themselves. That there were beasts living there, and that the
Polarians would subjugate and destroy them, in one final, glorious
war, and then rule the heavens, which was their birthright to
inherit—promised to them by the gods.

The Polarians no longer believed in gods.
That belief had faded away many years ago and the gods had been
replaced by the Essences.
Whatever those were
. But somehow
the prophecy of The Final War had survived, and it remained a
tender Polarian belief that they’d been foreordained,
called
even, to inhabit and plunder the stars, and slay and subjugate the
‘beasts’ that dwelled there.

When the prophecy had first been told—no
doubt originating in some distant bronze-age—it had been harmless
enough, Alex supposed. But now that the Polarians had mastered
space-travel and developed weapons able to wage interstellar war,
and had met other advanced life-forms, it was an extremely
dangerous belief. There were Polarian children, billions of them,
who were being brought up, even now, to believe that the ‘beasts of
the stars’ who must be subjugated, tamed, and otherwise destroyed,
were the humans and the Rotham. And, the way things seemed to be
going, with political turmoil in the Empire and the cunning
Rahajiim now manipulating the Rotham Senate, the stage was getting
eerily set for just such a Final War. And if there was one thing
Alex hated more than superstitious prophecy, it was self-fulfilling
prophecy. Which made it all the more imperative that the isotome
weapons were entirely purged from existence and the Rahajiim menace
once and for all contained.

Ancient artifacts found throughout the
galaxy, some dating back millions of years, gave support to the
idea that most intelligent species tended to be their own worst
enemies. It seemed that, once a species had become sufficiently
advanced to send and receive radio waves, thereby allowing them to
potentially communicate with other civilizations, it was only a
short matter of time before that species also developed the means
to wipe itself out through weapons of mass destruction, careless
depletion of resources, abuse of habitat, and so on. These
civilizations would rise and fall, marshaling an understanding of
the sciences for meager hundreds or thousands of years—hardly
enough to register even a blip on the great galactic timeline, more
like flashes in the pan. And thus, it was widely believed that
nearly all of the advanced life that had ever evolved in the galaxy
had risen and collapsed without ever knowing conclusively that
other intelligent life existed elsewhere.

Alex had often wondered if his people, the
Rotham, along with the Polarians and the humans, were the great
exception to this general principle. Or if they were as doomed as
the countless others who’d gone on before, and their doom was
merely playing out more slowly. A delayed reaction.

The Rotham, and indeed even the humans,
seemed to have definitively left behind most of their primitive,
dangerous superstitions. Both had been intensely religious in
developmental stages but, as their cultures had matured, both had
cast aside their irrational fears and curious needs for certainty
in favor of scientific methodology. They seemed to have accepted
the necessary link between natural cause and natural effect that
governed the natural universe, and the principle that nothing
existed beyond the natural universe. That there was no
supernatural. Nor a subnatural. Only a natural. But, for whatever
reason, the Polarians had developed differently. They persisted in
their ritualistic, mystical, delusionary ways. And if the
Polarians, whose evolutionary history was storied with ferocious
predators, dragged the rest of the galaxy into some final, ultimate
conflict, because they did not understand how very tenuous and
fragile a species’ grasp on life was, it seemed entirely too
possible to Alex that imminent extinction was in the cards for all
three major species.