Date Point: 15y4m2w AV
Hierarchy/Cabal Co-Operative, Session 17
++0005++: Do you seriously expect this to work?
++Cynosure++: If you’re asking whether I think the argument will sway the Human leadership, then no. That wasn’t the point. But I do expect it to complicate matters for them.
++0003++: Because they are rule-bound?
++Proximal++: Because Humans are intensely moralistic creatures and, importantly, do not base their moral judgements on rational consideration. Rather, they perform post-hoc rationalization to support their snap decisions.
++Cynosure++: It is a quirk of deathworld evolution. Much of a Human’s decision-making process is unconscious and instant.
++Proximal++: It should be noted this is a thing the Humans themselves have only recently begun to understand.
++0005++: I see. So the objective here is to crumble the foundation of popular support beneath the leadership by inspiring a dissident faction.
++Cynosure++: It is a stalling tactic. By itself it will achieve nothing.
++0003++: And the longer-term goal?
++Cynosure++: That, 0003, is the problem. So far we have depended on sticking to known strategies and have failed to adapt when our intended outcomes do not arise. The objective here is not to harm the Humans, it is to educate ourselves—we must practice agility.
++0008++: We create chaos, and adapt to exploit it.
++Cynosure++: Exactly.
++0005++: But without a plan—
++Cynosure++: Plans got us into this mess. We stuck to them and they failed, and we stuck to them and they failed. Time and again. We became inflexible and thus doomed ourselves to failure.
++Proximal++: “The pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless: if it is formless, then even the deepest spy cannot discern it nor the wise make plans against it.”
++0012++: Successful humans in leadership often do not work towards a goal. They have underlings for that. Instead, the most effective human leaders focus on changing the environment and systems so they benefit the desired end state.
++Proximal++: <Pleased> It is good to see that senior Hierarchy agents studied the enemy’s psychology as well.
++0008++: We are on the defensive and losing ground. The time will come when we must go on the offensive again, and without a clear strategy our counterattack will be unguided and useless. Surely you are not proposing we proceed with no plan at all?
++Cynosure++: I am proposing that we are in no position to make a plan at the moment. We do not know enough about the Humans, and we have nothing to offer them which might tempt them to permit our existence. We must change the system to favor us.
++Proximal++: More importantly, we do not know enough about ourselves or what we are really capable of. We have spent millions of years adhering to an inflexible doctrine and we do not know what we can achieve when we break its confines. That must change.
++0012++: So we experiment. Introduce stimuli and watch the response.
++Cynosure++: <Amused> Poke the hornet’s nest.
++Proximal++: <In-joke> Didn’t that go badly for you last time?
++Cynosure++: To the contrary.
++0003++: Very well. Rather than worry about our long-term strategy, then… let us discuss our next move.
++Cynosure++: …Outstanding.
Date Point: 15y4m2w AV
Highway 12 rest station Westbound-3, Planet Origin, the Corti Directorate
Slomn
Being a yellow-banner meant exclusion from the breeding castes. Insufficient genetic and behavioural compliance. In other words, Slomn was too emotional and she had been unceremoniously kicked out of the gene pool before she was even properly old enough to understand why.
Not that breeding was a pleasure for Corti anyway: They’d stopped doing it the biological way a hundred generations ago as their ever-increasingly large brains made birth at first difficult, then dangerous, then eventually impossible save through surgical intervention. Ultimately, the whole pregnancy business had been done away with entirely, replaced by artificial gestation in womb tanks.
So it wasn’t like Slomn had been looking forward to breeding, but it still seemed unfair somehow to know that an unbroken lineage had broken with her and there was no way in which she was actually responsible. She hadn’t done anything, she’d just been the victim of an unfavorable random combination that permanently affected not only her reproductive status but also her career prospects.
The dizzying, wealthy heights of academia, business or the glittering dream of the Directorate itself were all so far away that they may as well have been the edifices of another species.
She’d built up her banner as well as she could in the circumstances. Years of diligent work in the service sector, ensuring that the endless rivers of logistics traffic flowing along the eastbound carriageways from City 7 to City 8 were properly supplied. Her rest station recharged the drone vehicles and provided basic ablution and nourishment facilities for their operators. She maintained the equipment, ensured that the vending machines were stocked, kept the plumbing watertight and programmed the cleaning drones.
She was proud of her work. By yellow-banner standards, her personal banner was practically dripping with prestige. It was barely as long as her arm, but that was still an incredible accomplishment for one of her Caste.
She wasn’t equipped to handle a human.
She especially wasn’t equipped to handle an angry human female who was leaning against the wall and inhaling eye-stinging smoke from a slim white stick of some kind while muttering viciously in a language Slomn didn’t understand. She didn’t know what it meant that the hand holding that stick was shaking except that after finishing each one the human would glare at it, drop the stub on the ground, grind it under her strange sharp-heeled shoes and then immediately light another with further dark, untranslatable invectives. A cleaning drone warbled mournfully at her as it tried to clear up the ground around her only for the human to kick it again. Gently, so as to shoo it away, but still a kick.
Slomn quietly took out her control tablet and ordered it to go sanitize the toilets instead. She herself was lurking beside the vending machines and watching, fascinated beyond belief. She’d never dreamed of meeting any alien, let alone one of the infamous deathworlders. At least the human’s expression softened slightly whenever she glanced in Slomn’s direction.
The legs, she decided, were the fascinating part. The human’s legs were sheathed in some kind of a sheer skin-tight fabric, beneath which Slomn could plainly see the deceptively delicate curve of a muscle that ran from heel to knee.
That single muscle was almost as thick as Slomn’s waist.
The human finally abandoned her insane relaxation activity, but only because the pack of smoking-sticks was empty. She glanced in Slomn’s direction again and an unreadable variant of a smile flickered onto her face.
“Tuumuj tuuas kif yugatahnee sigah rets, huh?” she asked. Slomn blinked at her and she chuckled. “Thotso.”
She inserted a fingernail into her ear for the fifth or sixth time and extracted a little black bud that she kept in there. She tapped it experimentally, shook it, pressed at something on the side, knocked it against the wall and then put it back in her ear. “Haobao nao? Zitwur kin? …No?” She sighed when Slomn blinked at her again. “…Peess ahkrap.”
Clearly her translator was broken. Slomn had checked but the cheapest translator app she could find for her own personal devices still cost a whole day’s wages, and human languages were an expansion pack. She hated a mystery, but she hated spending money she didn’t have even more. So, she and the human were locked in mutual incomprehension.
Fortunately, some gestures were easy to decipher. The human raised a hand to her mouth and mimed tipping a container full of liquid. Slomn fetched her a jug full of water and continued to watch fascinated as it was drunk. Even the human’s throat was muscular, and it undulated powerfully as she drained the jug—enough water to see Slomn through the whole week!—in a long series of gulps.
The jug was returned with a single terse syllable— “Thanx” —and silence fell again. Slomn decided that was probably for the best on the grounds that she had no idea what kind of conversation she could begin having with this mysterious deathworld visitor who’d come stumbling out of the grasslands hours ago, even if they could communicate.
She’d called the security forces, and been dismissed as a hoax until she aimed a camera at the human, who’d spoken urgently to it for a couple of minutes before Slomn was ordered to keep her visitor comfortable and wait for assistance.
That had been half the afternoon ago. The only change she could detect was that the vehicle convoys weren’t stopping any longer. Presumably some traffic routing system had kicked in to divert them away from her rest station until the deathworlder was gone.
But when and in what form the assistance would arrive hadn’t been divulged. The command was simple: Wait. And Slomn was good at waiting.
But right now, she wished she wasn’t.
Date Point: 15y4m2w AV
Weaver-class dropship, approach sequence, Planet Origin, the Corti Directorate
Skesat
Skesat had never endured a rougher flight in all his life. Either the humans were hopelessly further behind in their development of inertial management technology than he’d thought or, and this was both the worse and more plausible option, they felt that an entry sequence without the occasional thump, jolt and rattle was somehow incomplete.
He couldn’t fault their precision and discipline, though. The report of a missing human appearing at a rest station in the middle of nowhere had finally filtered up high enough to reach somebody with the authority and means to contact the humans, and the polite reply had boiled down to Acknowledged with thanks. Recovery team is en route.
Said team had arrived practically on the message’s heels, and it had fallen to Skesat as a ranking executive officer of the border guard and customs division to liaise with them…And to ride down in the dropship with them, apparently. He was wearing a security harness but next to the sturdy armored gear the humans were layered in he felt entirely unprotected.
They’d insisted. The humans hadn’t protested the presence of a Corti official’s oversight at all, to the contrary they’d demanded it.
For their part, the team of four men now dropping into Origin’s atmosphere around Skesat seemed politely intrigued at the sight of the Corti homeworld and its yellow flora.
“So how many people live on Origin?” the team leader asked. Skesat wasn’t sure if the name he’d given was a pseudonym or not: He’d introduced himself as “Wild” and the literal translation was giving Skesat some pause for thought. The puzzling part was that one of Wilde’s colleagues—Wright—also had a literal translation, but then there were Hobbs and García who didn’t. Or at least, none that was known to the translator. Were they from different subcultures, perhaps?
All four were intense sorts. Quiet, focused and poised, even though they were plainly feeling relaxed and confident.
“Ten billion,” Skesat revealed.
“Really? That’s not many more than Earth…” García commented. He stooped to look out of one of the tiny round windows again.
“The Department of Population Control established ten billion as an optimal per-planet population several centuries ago,” Skesat told him. “Sufficient to drive a booming economy without the burden of interstellar dependency for resource production.”
“The Gaoians had twenty billion,” Wright observed. Skesat simply gave him a blank look.
“The Gaoians are not the Corti,” he said.
“…Right.”
That seemed to end the conversation until they were through the entry sequence and skimming low over the grasslands east of City 7. The planetary security forces had established a safe landing site at the next rest station up from the target, and had provided vehicles as the humans had requested. In deference to the disparity in physical size between species, the vehicles in question were cargo vans.
The Weaver set down on an open vehicle park with characteristic solidity and there was a fierce but short-lived rush of air as its hatch opened and the pressure equalized. The humans all grimaced and Wright touched the side of his head with a pained expression.
“Fuck!”
Wilde performed a strange maneuver where he pinched his nose and appeared to try blowing through it. Whatever this achieved, he shook his head viciously and gave a relieved gasp afterwards. “Fuck me, it’s worse than bloody Peru.”
García yawned expansively then cleared his throat. “Peru?”
“Yeah. La Rinconada. Highest city on Earth. Sixteen thousand feet up.”
“When were you in Peru?”
“Operation Kamber. Disaster relief after the Christmas Eve earthquake.” Wilde rummaged on his belt and produced what looked like swallowable medication, a series of rhomboid blue pills. “Better pop a V, lads.”
Hobbs muttered something that Skesat didn’t catch as they were handed out. “How come we still use this shit?” he asked, more audibly. “Ain’t there anything better?”
García dry-swallowed his pill with a grimace. “Just don’t make it awkward, man.”
“Dude, it’s already fuckin’ awkward.”
“Dare I ask?” Skesat asked as he alighted from his seat.
“Altitude medication,” Wright explained. “For the thin air. It has… other uses. You probably don’t wanna know.”
The ramp finished lowering and the four deathworlders descended it in a few springing steps, like the gravity didn’t touch them at all.
“I shall take you at your word,” Skesat replied, following them. Wilde already had a map out and was studying it.
“Right. Target is fifteen klicks that-a-way,” he said. “Wright, García, you take that van. I’ll ride with Hobbs. Skesat, I take it you’re driving?”
“I’ll program the vehicles,” Skesat confirmed. If he read them correctly then the humans would have preferred manual controls, but they were making do with what had been available in the region on short notice.
He acknowledged his support team with a nod to their drones. The team wasn’t physically on location of course. They were remote pilots, operating their drones from the safety of a distant precinct. In fact there was no good reason to believe any two of them were even in the same building. “This is your backup.”
Wilde eyed the hovering devices uncertainly. “Drones?”
“Why so skeptical?” Skesat asked. “These drones are tireless, more durable than a Corti and equipped with advanced sensors. They’re piloted by a veteran security specialist and equipped for heavy suppression. You will value their presence more than you would the presence of a squad of my kind.”
There was a kind of unspoken conversation among the humans which ended in shrugging and they loaded up without comment. “We’d better get moving,” Wilde said.
Skesat’s authority emptied the road, putting the freight traffic between two major cities completely on hold while their vehicles and the drone escort pulled out onto the highway and opened up to their top speed. He sat in the front, glad to have some physical space between him and the humans, who were periodically making uncomfortable faces and adjusting their clothes.
Fortunately, it wasn’t far and the vans were high-performance models intended for rapid courier work. Skesat was satisfied to note that when they slammed down the off-ramp for the rest station at highway speed, the humans actually looked faintly intimidated. They certainly held on tight, as if they didn’t entirely trust Corti technology to work as well as intended.
It did. Skesat had programmed their arrival down to the second, with the result that both vans simultaneously crunched to a halt on the concrete in front of the rest station only a few precise meters from the target human, who actually flinched backwards.
Wilde and Hobbs were out of the van in a moment, and when they raised their weapons it was like they simply didn’t respect the intervening space between angles. One moment those rifles were pointed loosely at the floor, in the next instant they were level and lethal without apparently having traversed the distance between.
Skesat was still disembarking by the time they had the human woman securely held down with a scanning device pressed to her skull, while the hapless yellow-banner attendant was given a much gentler but still inexorable treatment.
By the time he reached them, the whole station had been secured, searched and declared clean, and Wilde was helping their target to her feet. To his surprise, all five of the humans were breathing heavily despite the limited exertion.
“Urgh… was that really necessary?” the female asked.
Wilde gave her a sympathetic expression. “I’m afraid it was. Sorry about that ma’am.”
“Well.” She clucked as she inspected some damage to the thin, sheer garments on her legs. “You boys know how to make an entrance. Let me guess, Spaceborne Operations?”
“That’s right.”
“I thought you’d be… bigger.”
“You’re thinking of a HEAT team. And trust me, they wouldn’t’ve wanked around with the vans, they’d’ve just landed on you. We’re the gentle option.” Wilde grinned, then raised his hand to his radio. “TOURIST ONE-ONE, HILLFOOT. Target secured, come on in for evac.”
“…Is that it?” Skesat asked. The security drones were milling around uncertainly with nothing to do, and García waved them away.
“That’s it,” he confirmed.
The target dusted her hands off. “…My head’s definitely clean, right?”
“One hundred percent, Miss Park.” Wilde promised her.
“Good…” Park cleared her throat and looked around. “…Good.”
Wilde handed her another of the blue pills. “Here. The air on this planet’s too thin by half.”
“…Viagra?” She held it delicately between thumb and forefinger. “Really?”
Wilde’s reply was lost in the sound of the Weaver coming in overhead, but Park snorted and took her medicine. Skesat made a mental note to research that drug later. Clearly there was some interesting cultural facet that he was missing.
He turned his attention to the station attendant. “You. Name.”
“Slomn, sir.” She was a yellow-banner, hopelessly at the bottom of the pile.
“Did she do anything?” Skesat asked, pointing at the human.
“No sir. She just… inhaled smoke and drank water.”
“Inhaled smoke?”
“Yes. It may have been medicinal or narcotic, I don’t know.” Slomn indicated a patch of gravel by the wall, which was littered with burnt stubs. “Otherwise she did nothing.”
“Nothing at all. You’re certain? No defecation, urination, expectoration, regurgitation or ejaculation?” Skesat asked.
“She used the ablution facilities…” Slomn plucked a tablet from its pouch on her hip and tapped through some management software. “…Twice. Liquid waste only.”
“Sanitize the system with alkaline compounds,” Skesat instructed. “Where does your sewerage go?”
“We have an on-site processor,” Slomn told him, and pointed to it.
Skesat frowned at it. Origin was not going to suffer a Cimbrean-style biosphere contamination on his watch. He called up his contact details and forwarded them to Slomn’s device. “After you’ve sanitized the system, isolate the processor and shut it down. Do not go near it. Biohazard drones will be along shortly to destroy it in a controlled incineration. Those too,” he added, and indicated the burnt stubs. “After that you are relieved from work for two days and are to remain in isolation during that time. In the event that you feel any disease symptoms during your isolation, you will contact this datasphere address and await further instructions. Do you understand?”
“Yes sir!” Slomn said. She was competent, for a yellow-banner.
“…You have done well,” Skesat added. “There will be a bonus. Hazard pay and exceptional circumstances, that sort of thing.”
“Thank you, sir. I— Oh.”
The human woman, Park, had turned away from the Weaver, carrying a portable translator.
“I’m sorry for making your day difficult,” she told Slomn, and extended a hand. Slomn looked to Skesat, who gave a nod of approval, and the station custodian’s hand was smothered in Miss Park’s much larger and stronger one.
“You made it… interesting, ma’am,” Slomn replied. Park laughed, a harsh barking sound that made Slomn flinch.
“I bet I did! Sorry, sorry… I have to go. But thank you for your hospitality.”
“I was only doing my job, ma’am.”
“I know. But I appreciate it anyway.” Park smiled again and turned back to the Weaver.
“…That will be all, Slomn,” Skesat said. The custodian nodded and made herself scarce.
While García, Hobbs and Wright escorted Park up the ramp, Wilde paused at the bottom and turned back to Skesat. “…We appreciate the assist,” he said.
“I hope I will never need to give it again,” Skesat told him. “Director Lesv instructed me to thank you for swiftly resolving this… incident…. but please, the sooner you leave the sooner I can be sure that all biohazards have been properly contained and accounted-for.”
Wilde nodded and retreated up the ramp. “Good luck then.”
The ramp closed behind him. Rather than take off, a few seconds later there was a black shimmer in the air, the thump of air rushing in to fill a vacated volume, and they were gone.
Skesat sniffed and set about the task at hand. Humans were filthy, and he intended to ensure that Origin did not suffer from this breach of quarantine. He touched the communicator behind his small, pointed ear.
“Bring in the drones,” he said. “We have work to do.”
Date Point: 15y4m2w1d AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth
President Arthur Sartori
“…He’s officially out of his mind! He thinks he can wave the Israeli Declaration at us and that we’ll let millions of years of unchecked murder go unpunished?! He’s psychotic!”
Sartori stood up from the Resolute desk and took a good look out the window to give his indignation a chance to subside. The sheer… devilish irreverence of Six’s gambit was getting to him. He didn’t want to call it ‘balls’ or ‘audacity’ because he didn’t want to give the bastard even a shred of respect, and ‘cheek’ didn’t suffice.
Because the worst part was, the genocidal maniac actually had a point. The Israeli Declaration really did apply to all sapients, and that included the Igraens. The bold, incautious phrasing that had made it such a watershed political moment contained its own tripping hazard, and Six had adeptly kicked it right under the Allied nations’ collective feet.
In one move, the Hierarchy had ably demonstrated to humanity that they had both the capacity and the gall to snatch a VIP out from under her security escort’s noses in the heart of Dominion territory. They were still powerful in ways that humanity couldn’t match or meaningfully fight, even if they’d taken a few hits. They could have much more easily abducted Adele Park from her hotel room or whatever temporary residence the Corti had given her… instead they’d stopped time for a whole starship and blinked it two hundred lightyears away just to show they could.
It was just as big a punch in the gut as learning the true scale of the Swarm-of-Swarms had been. It soured the victory on Gao, it reopened the old doubts about whether Earth truly had been sanitized…
And now the big moral rallying cry of the century to date, “Never Again!” had been turned against them. There was nothing, it seemed, that the Hierarchy would not poison if they could. They fought dirty and Sartori was growing sick of it.
He toured the famous office and listened as his advisors spitballed possible replies to the Hierarchy’s challenge. Experimentally, he ran a finger along the top of Rembrandt Peale’s portrait of George Washington and found it clean. He’d brought back the Earthrise photograph first installed by Nixon, kept the Bronco Buster, added a few touches of his own like the Firebird sculpture, a photo of the San Diego skyline and the rich green rug that would probably be remembered as the Sartori Rug.
He let the conversation play out without his input for a little while, but nobody had any great ideas.
“The problem we’re facing,” Margaret White summarized after several minutes of futile conversation, “is that if we disagree with him we effectively have to say that genocide can sometimes be justified.”
“And if we say that then we’re agreeing with the Hierarchy,” Sartori grumbled. “But what can we do? Back down? There’s no reason to believe they won’t wipe us out if we take our foot off the gas.”
The VP, William Hendricks Jr., nodded and made a grim noise of agreement. “And there’s no reason to believe they’ll reform,” he said. “If we flinch, they’ll end us.”
Everybody in the room looked at everybody else in the room while the unspoken thought hung above them all that in a kill-or-be-killed situation, maybe genocide absolutely was justifiable… and that none of them were stupid enough to say it aloud. Even these walls might have ears.
“There’s a precedent,” Sartori said as his tour of the room brought him to a photograph of President Roosevelt. “The Nuremberg Trials. We didn’t wipe out all the Germans, but we did punish the Nazis appropriately.”
“True…” Margaret mused. Whatever she’d been about to conclude was gently and diplomatically interrupted by General Kolbeinn, however.
“And what about the Hunters?” he asked. Everyone gave him their attention and a grim mockery of a smile made his jaw move. “The Israel Declaration applies to them as well,” he pointed out.
“Those things? They’re teeth on legs with no concept of restraint!” Hendricks objected. “They’re animals!”
“Animals don’t send ultimatums,” Kolbeinn replied. “They’re as sapient as we are, Mister Vice President. They’re just… horribly alien.”
Again, the cloud descended over the room. The problem, as Sartori saw it, was that the question was horribly simple: The answer was to wipe them out. It was a winner-takes-all fight to the death with only oblivion waiting for the losers. There was no room for letting parasites like the Hunters share the galaxy with them, and the Hierarchy was arguably worse.
But principles mattered didn’t they? The Igraens didn’t seem to think so. Six’s own manifesto, as recorded by listening in on him in Egypt during Operation EMPTY BELL, from his interrogation logs and from this latest conversation with Adele Park, held that the only thing that mattered was the continuity of the species. Survival über alles, and any other principle was a dangerous distraction.
Cleaving to principles like “Never Again” separated humanity from… that.
But were they so important that Sartori was willing to stake everything on them? Hundreds of millions of his fellow Americans, and billions more in whose lives he had no mandate or right to meddle?
…No. No they weren’t. The conversation had happened, had needed to happen…but the answer remained simple.
“…Our policy remains unchanged,” he said, and returned to the desk. He sat down and tidied a piece of paper aside. “They won’t give an inch, and neither can we. I don’t care if the future remembers us as monsters and questions if we went too far, at least there’ll be a future. We aren’t here to be the moral conscience of America, we’re here to captain it through rough seas. This is just another rock, and I don’t intend to founder on it.”
Kolbeinn nodded with a large dose of satisfaction. Hendricks sniffed, then nodded. Margaret White just folded her hands in her lap and pursed her lips contemplatively. Sartori got the impression that a couple of the others would have preferred to eat their cake and still have it, but the general air in the room was that the President Had Spoken and that was an end to the matter.
“…Next item,” he said. “…What is the next item?”
“The Coltainers, Mister President.”
“Right…”
Date Point: 15y4m2w1d AV
Planet Hell, Hunter Space
Rachel Wheeler
The biggest problem in Ray, Spears’ and Cooks’ plan was that it revolved around finding one of the migrating tribes, herds, families or whatever of alien slaves wandering their shitheap of a prison planet, and then throwing them under the bus.
It wasn’t a popular suggestion.
“But… They’re people!” Holly Chase objected, again.
“We know, Holly,” Ray told her again. “We don’t like it either. But you asked for our plan and there it is. It’s the only one we have that stands a prayer of working.”
“Don’t you have any other plans?”
Ray shrugged. “We’re still here,” she said, meaning that if they had anything else they’d have done it by now. Chase wilted.
“They’re completely regressed anyway. No names, no speech, nothing. They’re just… smart animals at this point,” Cook insisted. Maybe he was just rationalizing—he had more blood on his hands than the rest of them, after all—but it was a rationalization that Ray had internalized long ago.
Conley—their botanist, who’d worked some small miracles over the last few years which included deriving an effective painkiller from a species of local almost-mushroom—shook his head firmly. “It’s murder.”
To Ray’s surprise, Berry spoke up in Cook’s defence. Normally, his nervous stammer kept him almost totally silent at crew meetings. “Pete, f-face reality,” he said in an exhausted tone. “We all know what g…g…” he paused, swore under his breath and attacked the next word like he was jumping in feet-first. “—goes in the Hot.”
Conley gave him an anguished look and folded in on himself. It was a horrible thought that none of them liked to touch, but Berry was right. If buying their survival at the expense of regressed xeno lives was murder, then they were all guilty already. They’d been living that way for far too long.
“So, from the top,” Spears said. “We lure a herd close enough to the canyons that when the Hunters pounce on them, we can sneak up on them, kill them and steal their ship. What we’re short on is detail. How we lure a herd without being seen, how we can be sure the Hunters will hit them, how we sneak up on and kill the Hunters, how we fly a Hunter ship…”
“So we’re just going to abandon Dauntless,” Jamie Choi said. He was—or maybe had been was more accurate—their engineer. Thanks to him, Dauntless still provided them with water for drinking and washing, did their laundry, let them entertain themselves with movies and music. His hard efforts had keep the old girl alive enough to support her crew in their hour of need.
Naturally, the idea of leaving her behind stuck in his craw bad.
“I don’t like it either, but we can be sentimental or we can get outta here,” Ray told him. “We can’t take her with us, we can’t escape in her and if we tried the Hunters would just catch us… and if we’re very very lucky, they’ll kill us before they eat us.”
Jamie nodded dejectedly and stared at a point on the ground between his boots.
“I see a lot of what-ifs in this plan,” Conley spoke up again. “What if dropping that close means they spot Dauntless? What if they fly their ships through control implants in their brains and don’t even have physical controls? What if—”
Spears answered him mid-question. “Then we die,” he said. “That’s the answer to all of the what-ifs. We die. But we’re gonna die here anyway, and the only way we don’t is if we pull this off and escape. So yeah, a lot of what-ifs. But what if we succeed, Pete?”
“We aren’t going off half-cocked on this,” Ray promised. “We want to work out the details as much as we can. We want the best shot at going home, I promise. But the time to try or die came a long time ago, guys—We’re way overdue to finally grow some backbone and try to get outta this hole ourselves.”
Conley pulled a face, but subsided again. Down and despondent though the mood was, it was still the best reaction they’d had to an escape plan yet. Nobody had stormed away to be alone, at least.
Holly cast a tearful look around “…But… Ray, you’re talking about killing people so we get to live…”
“…I know.”
“They’re not—” Cook began.
“They are, Cook,” Spears told him. “Or they could be. Should be. Holly’s right, we shouldn’t forget that…” he gave Holly a small smile that was barely more than a spasm at the corners of his mouth “…but God forgive me I’m willing to do it.”
“Yeah,” Ray agreed. Cook nodded, as did Berry and Choi. A few seconds later, Conley sighed and nodded as well with painful reluctance. Holly looked around at them all, then shut her eyes and nodded.
“…Okay,” she said. “…I’m in.”
“Show of hands,” Ray said. She barely murmured it but they all heard her. One by one, seven hands rose into the air.
For better or for worse, they were doing it.