Date Point: 15y6m1w3d AV
Corti medical barge Continuity Correction, Cimbrean System, The Far Reaches
Nofl
Doctor Rachel Wheeler was not, by human standards, in good physical condition. She was malnourished, skinny and dehydrated. Her androgen hormones were significantly elevated leading to the formation of cysts in her reproductive organs. Her body was absolutely flooded in adrenaline and stress hormones, her left knee was showing significant wear, two of her teeth were exhibiting rather advanced cavity formation…
All of that was present in the surgical scan. But the surgical systems aboard the Continuity Correction were designed to perform exceptionally invasive surgical procedures on life forms endlessly more fragile than even the frailest human.
Of course, the surgical lead was getting carried away with power.
“Technically, the humans only wanted us to correct the foreign object in her chest and the associated organ damage,” Nofl pointed out.
“We have license to perform whatever surgery we deem necessary. I deem it necessary to correct the other problems as well. And I remind you, Citizen Nofl, that I hold rank in this situation.”
It was true. The surgical lead was a silver-banner far up the pole from Nofl’s lowly position. It didn’t matter a jot that his theatre used tools and medicines that Nofl had been personally instrumental in developing: he held rank.
Nofl knew a battle he couldn’t win when he saw one. Besides, why fight it? The humans would probably raise some kind of an ethical objection, but ultimately the patient would be returned in better condition than if she’d come through the Array whole and unwounded.
Probably the Humans could make life difficult if they chose to take punitive action, but Nofl had raised his concerns and made his case, and most importantly had recorded himself doing so: his own backside was covered against whatever backlash ensued. On the surgical lead’s head be it.
“Well. I shan’t be a back-seat surgeon,” he promised. “Let me retire to the observation area and I’ll leave you to your work, hmm?”
He got a distracted muttering in reply.
There was no running commentary or conversation involved. The surgeon controlled the whole suite himself, there was no need to coordinate with a second surgeon, an anesthetist, a nurse or whoever. Indeed, the theatre did most of the work—all the surgeon needed to do was direct it.
Step one: the bag containing the patient rose off the table and hung in mid-air, held aloft by forcefields. It was turned off, and fist-sized drones danced around it in the span of a second, removing both the bag and the patient’s clothing in strips. Nofl glanced at the monitors: a few feeble vital signs waved at him for a few seconds before flatlining. The patient was dead.
Step two was a study in choreographed clinical violence, and it began with Doctor Wheeler’s decapitation.
A drone orbited her throat trailing a blade of fractal sharpness, and the head was carted away still wearing an expression of pinched shock and fear that was only just beginning to go slack. It was promptly swept to one side and hooked into a life support system that supplied the brain with an oxygenated blood substitute… as well as a powerful anaesthetic. Nothing good could come of allowing her to regain consciousness at a moment like this. A handful of tiny multi-limbed drones pried open her mouth and crawled inside to perform the dental surgery.
The rest of her body was disassembled with similar casual ease, and spread out into a constellation of glistening parts and limp limbs. Nofl had to admit, the view was fascinating: He’d never seen a human so completely before. It really drove home just how thick and deep all those muscles were: the whole torso seemed to be held together by them, in fact.
Vital signs flared back into life on Nofl’s monitor as the blood substitute did its work. Wheeler was alive again, albeit very firmly unconscious. She had been clinically brain-dead for all of five seconds.
Step three: repairs. The heart was definitely destroyed: in fact it was barely in one piece, being held together by a thin thread of connective tissue. In theory, the same cell-level microsurgical techniques that would reassemble the patient at the end of this procedure could have simply woven that heart back together had the wound been clean, but the fusion claw had burned and seared the cardiac muscle, partly blowing it open when the blood inside had boiled.
Fortunately, they had a replacement cloned from Doctor Wheeler’s own tissue sample. There would be no immune rejection response, no complications—it effectively was the same heart, except new and healthy. The replacement floated into place somewhere amidst the splayed organs, and the drones went to work on attaching it to the circulatory system and delivering the appropriate electrical and chemical stimuli to get it beating.
Meanwhile the knee was stripped down like an onion being peeled, pulled open, washed out, resurfaced and a synthetic synovial membrane was attached and filled with fluid. The ovaries were deconstructed, the cysts drained, closed, and rapid-grown tissue was printed in to fill the voids they left before a hormone regulator in the form of a tiny patch the size of a pinhead was adhered to each one as it was put back together.
As quickly as she’d been pulled apart, the stricken doctor was reassembled. The bloodless edges of her component parts were seamlessly brought back together with micrometer precision where they fused instantly so that there was no indication they had ever been taken apart. Her blood, having been filtered and infused with appropriate nutrients and regenerative medicine, was reintroduced to her circulatory system.
Reattaching the head to the spine and throat produced a delicate and even quite balletic weaving of nerves and muscle fibres. Nofl was duly impressed: the surgeon was extremely skilled.
In all, the procedure took five minutes, and the patient—now definitely alive, with a strong pulse and breathing independently—was settled reverently on a gurney. If Nofl read the prognosis correctly, she would wake in two hours.
He returned to the control room, where the surgeon was sipping a measure of water.
“Was that fun?” Nofl asked. He got a disinterested stare for a second, then the surgeon put his drink back in the recycler.
“It was intriguing,” he admitted. “But flying this whole ship here just for one middle-aged Human woman hardly seems like an efficient use of our resources.”
“Just you wait and see, darling,” Nofl grinned. The surgeon reacted with barely-disguised contempt, and he changed the subject. “I read the automated prognosis. I presume you’re just as confident?”
“Of course. She’ll be somewhat groggy from the anaesthetic when she first wakes, but once it’s worn off she will feel strong and healthy.”
“And you don’t foresee the Humans raising any objections over the, hmm, bonus treatment she received?” Nofl asked. He got a blank look.
“Why would they?”
“…Good.” Nofl decided that the time had come to get himself off the ship. The patient needed her escort back down to Folctha and her waiting friends and employers and family anyway. “Well. I shan’t detain you, I know your time is extremely valuable.”
“Yes.”
And that… ended the conversation as far as Nofl could tell. He decided he didn’t much like the surgeon.
The Byron Group representative, Jenkins, was waiting for him alongside a couple of SOR operators as Nofl exited the theatre complex. He nodded at the gurney where Wheeler was back in stasis for transport back to a human hospital. “She’s okay?”
“Indubitably!” Nofl chirped, feeling much happier now that he had a human to bounce off. “You should have watched, it was fascinating! You people really do have some interesting internal organs.”
Jenkins squirmed a little. “…Thanks, but I’m good.”
Satisfied that his ability to troll was still working just fine, Nofl turned to the two SOR men: JETS operators, Wilde and Hoeff. Hoeff had just confirmed the integrity of the patient’s brain by dropping the stasis field and pressing a scanner to her scalp.
“Well?” Nofl asked him.
“Alive. And green. Looks like your doctor did good.”
“He went above and beyond,” Nofl told him.
“…That so?” Jenkins asked. “How?”
“Nothing sinister,” Nofl assured him. The look he got back told him that Jenkins was far from convinced, or trusting.
“Well… okay. Let’s, uh, get her downstairs, huh?”
The shuttle ride back down to Folctha passed mostly in silence. Wilde and Hoeff talked quietly at one end of the shuttle, Jenkins spent the trip reading something on a tablet, and Nofl was left to swing his legs idly in the oversized chair and contemplate what had just happened.
He doubted that the Humans would fail to notice the extra work done to Wheeler. The question was how they would react. He’d been truthful about none of it being sinister: Doctor Wheeler herself would probably be grateful to be rid of two chronic health conditions that had doubtless plagued her for years, once she got over the shock and awe of somehow still being alive.
But if the Directorate were going to build any kind of a trust-based relationship with the Humans then superior and disrespectful behaviour as exhibited by the surgeon was not going to help. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be a deal-breaker. He really didn’t want to go back to the Directorate and explain that the Humans had withheld payment over a single doctor’s ego.
Or was he worrying needlessly? Would the Humans actually do that?
No. Whether his worries were well-founded or not, they weren’t needless. The future of the Corti species was… not riding on this deal, but certainly would have been badly set back if it fell through.
It occurred to him that Jenkins had spoken to him, and was now trying to get his attention.
“Nofl? Hey!”
“Hmm? Oh, sorry dear. I was distracted.”
“Anything I should worry about?”
Nofl sighed and sat up straighter. Evasiveness or dishonesty at this point would only be harmful.
“I am… worried,” he confessed. “Our surgeon was, ahm… ambitious. Zealous to put everything right with his patient, you might say.”
He watched his insinuation sink in. “Oh…hell,” Jenkins groaned. “So when you said he ‘went above and beyond’ you mean…”
“I mean exactly that. Doctor Wheeler is in perfect health, but the treatment extended…” Nofl cleared his throat delicately, “…beyond the remit of the asked-for surgery. I tried to talk him out of it, but he insisted that no patient would leave his care in anything less than pristine condition.”
“…Y’know, if he were human he’d be gettin’ a malpractice suit right now.”
“Hence my concern.” Nofl scooted forward in his seat. “I think I need to persuade you to overlook this.”
“That ain’t my call,” Jenkins said.
“As I feared.” Nofl sighed and returned to his more relaxed position. “This is an important deal for my people, you know. The dawn of what I hope will be a brighter future. We need goodwill with Humanity, but every time we begin to build some up, some idiot puts their ego ahead of rational necessity, and…”
Jenkins smiled. “Relax, this won’t blow the deal outta the water,” he predicted.
“I hope not.”
“It won’t. Look, worst-case scenario you just hafta buy the information you need.”
“We need more than the information,” Nofl explained. “We need the expertise. We need the goodwill. Access to the raw data alone will get us where we want to go, of course… but ultimately, for obvious reasons, the galactic experts on the Human genome are Humans.”
“Funny how y’all spent years collecting human samples and then… what? Did the data on us just go up in smoke? I was an abductee, I know they took gene samples.”
“Samples are one thing. Sample size is another.”
“As I recall, your ‘sample size’ approached ten thousand.”
“Yes, mostly of defective specimens. Examples like, hmm, Julian Etsicitty and his mates, for instance, were much less common. A handful of paragons is hardly an ideal baseline to properly understand a gene-line. If it were, we would ask for the HEAT’s material and leave it at that.”
Jenkins raised his eyebrows. “Defective, huh?”
“The baseline for human physiology was established more than a thousand years ago. That’s too long under the influence of civilization and its selection pressures to leave alone. Unfortunately, most sanctioned human experimentation ceased hundreds of years ago, prior to your world wars. You were getting too advanced, too able to understand what was happening to you. There’s a reason for the massive uptick in reported cases of alien abduction in the post-war era.”
“Delusional dumbasses jumpin’ on the bandwagon,” Kevin sniffed.
“Yes, but fuelled by genuine cases like yours. And, again, by case studies like Julian. There is something…captivating when you observe someone like him in his element.”
“And us ‘defective’ types?”
“…I’ve offended you.”
“Yes,” he sighed, “but with you I can at least tell it ain’t malicious.”
“Thank you.” Nofl glanced at the stasis pod with Doctor Wheeler in it. “If it counts for anything, I promise you that Corti in general don’t stoop to malice. My people have our flaws—thoughtlessness, arrogance, and a lack of empathy that makes it hard to fathom how our society operates sometimes—but malice isn’t really in our nature.”
There was a bing sound, and a little icon above his seat told Nofl to put his seatbelt back on if he wasn’t already wearing it. Seconds later, the first ghost of turbulence and fire sent a queasy jolt through his stomach as the inertial compensation system fought back against upper-atmosphere turbulence.
“So what was my defect?” Kevin asked.
“I couldn’t possibly say. I have no idea who abducted you or why, and you certainly don’t seem defective to me. Though considering what happened to you, I’d hazard that your abductor was some bottom-feeder who turned to ‘zoology’ in a desperate last-ditch attempt to preserve tenure, rather than a Directorate-approved study.”
“Greeeat. And does Julian know the details of his capture? Do his ladies?”
“I don’t know. I should…probably ensure that they do.” Nofl shrugged. “If nothing else, it would be nice to build a little trust with him especially.”
“Hmm. So you do know.”
“I have recently learned,” Nofl explained. “It’s become quite relevant to my interests. And as an aside, the social consequences of it are fascinating.”
He saw Kevin’s blank look and explained.
“…Events on the galactic stage have caused your species to do something remarkable. Like any successful sophonts, you have mechanisms to sieve the seedcorn from the chaff, as it were. You do this on a number of levels, but the HEAT indirectly did this in an important area: genetics. That has become my interest as of late, dear, and studying them with their permission has been hugely important. But it’s been made much harder by your species’ attitude towards the field.”
“Oh?”
“Very often, superior examples of your kind are embarrassed by their own superiority. It’s puzzling and utterly, wholly alien to a Corti. We simply cannot fathom why.”
“I reckon I can explain that one,” Jenkins said.
“Please, go ahead.”
Jenkins chewed on his thumbnail for a second before speaking. “I used to be a Christian,” he said. “An’ it was a big part of what my congregation was taught that we’re all equal in the eyes of the Lord, don’t judge lest ye be judged, let him who is without sin cast the first stone. Right?”
“Christianity is a closed book to me,” Nofl replied. Kevin nodded, but ploughed forward.
“Okay, well on, like, a secular level, the idea that some folks are just better than others is real unpopular. Not without reason, too: Some really, really shitty things got done to some folks by some other folks over that belief. If this group over here think they’re the Ubermensch and this other group are the untermensch then why the fuck would the self-identified ubers keep the unters around for? Just kill the lot of ‘em to make room for the better class of humanity. Millions of really good folks got straight murdered because of thinking like that.”
“Some specimens are superior, though. And I note that the governments controlling SOR are not marching through the streets or otherwise abusing their advantage.”
“The SOR isn’t that big of an organization, Nofl.”
“Yes, dearie! But my point is that beings like them matter. The SOR is absolutely lousy with high achievers in all dimensions! Goodness, even people only loosely associated with them are exemplars of your kind. But for their circumstances, I imagine Julian, Allison and Xiù would all have found themselves quite comfortable among their ranks.”
“…Eh, I doubt it. Ability ain’t the same thing as personality or desire. None of ‘em are soldiers.”
Nofl acknowledged the point with a serene nod. “Oh, that I wholly understand, dear. But my point stands,” he maintained, “that they are all supremely advantaged beings, filtered and concentrated by a well-designed merit system. I approve! Nor is it the only path available to exploit excellence. Goodness, your culture has several such sorting systems in place!”
“Well…yeah! Ain’t no civilization gonna work if you can’t reward hard work, man.”
“Oh, don’t be obtuse!” Nofl flapped his hand excitedly. “Work only gets you so far. At some point you need to be better and you know it, don’t you dare lie. Many of your academics are every bit the intellectual equals of a prissy silver-banner Corti Dean. I’d wager some of them are better! And yet despite all that, your species seems reluctant to acknowledge the basic truth of it all. Why not take full advantage? You can’t tell me you don’t use what you have to get what you want. Why pretend otherwise? Why would anyone on the SOR? Julian? Presidents? Geniuses?”
“I never said they don’t, but people like that usually don’t flaunt it. Also,” Kevin continued, “you keep coming back to Julian. Why exactly was he abducted?”
“His suitability for the planned experiment and his exceptional genetics. He was blessed with functionally optimal and effectively defect-free versions of many alleles, and with strong hybrid vigor in his ancestry, too. That, along with his physical and mental developmental history, made him as ideal a specimen as could be found. His social background was optimal as well.”
“…Right.” Kevin pressed on with a grumble. “Anyway. That means super-Julian is a perfect example of what I mean, actually. His ancestors suffered hard ‘cuz of those kind of ‘master race’ ideas, right? So then it’s pretty fuckin’ ironic that he’s apparently a Goddamned wunderkind like all those murderin’ racist motherfuckers could never be.”
Kevin was clearly agitated for some unfathomable reason but he abruptly paused, considered something, and changed tack. “Hell, y’know what? I bet that fucks with him, hard. All three of ‘em prob’ly. I assume Allison and Xiù are in the same boat?”
“If you mean by selection criteria, not entirely. All three are genetically quite gifted but his women were destined for very different experiments.”
“…Lovely. And you wonder why they all prefer their own company? Jesus! Why d’you think they’d rather hang out with cavemonkeys instead of on talk shows?”
Nofl considered that idea. “Then I should plan my conversations with them carefully.”
“Yeah. An’… look, maybe some folks just are better than other folks. Not everyone can be a… an Olympic gold medallist or a Nobel physicist. But if one o’ us is better, the best personal quality that person can have is humility. It ain’t all about them, man. It’s about all of us.”
“…Well, you’ve certainly described the phenomenon,” Nofl sighed. “I don’t feel as though you have adequately explained it in such a way as to make the logic clear to me.”
“I dunno, man. I think it’s about teamwork and shit. An’ hell, I’m not even that good of a team player myself. I ain’t no psychologist, you’d probably better talk to one of them.”
“I may do that. But… in any case, about Doctor Wheeler—”
Jenkins shrugged. “It’s done. Wouldn’t undo it even if we could, so… If it were my call, I’d say we’re just happy to get her back to her family alive. For what it’s worth, I’ll do everything I can to see that your doctor’s stupidity don’t derail this whole thing… And hell. We can legitimately claim it was a miscommunication, too.”
“That’s not entirely honest, Mister Jenkins.”
“Honest an’ legitimate ain’t the same thing.”
Nofl conceded that argument with a blink and a tilt of his head, and looked up at the information above his seat again. They were on final approach, apparently.
“True,” he agreed. “And… I would be exceedingly grateful.”
Jenkins nodded, and settled back in his seat for the landing. Nofl glanced at his patient one last time, then relaxed.
If nothing else, he’d saved a life. That was worth cherishing.
Date Point: 15y6m2w AV
USS San Diego, The Ruibal Territories
Ambassador Sir Patrick Knight
“She’s a fine ship.”
San Diego’s captain, Mike Brewer, took the compliment with a smile and a fond look around. Knight hadn’t been false, either: the American cruiser had taken a lot of lessons learned from the V-class destroyers and the two captured Hierarchy ships Myrmidon and Caledonia in her design, and it showed. Nobody could accuse her of being spacious and comfortable, but the interior was just that little bit more efficient, the citadel that little bit more secure, the compartments that little bit more refined in their layout. Subtle differences that only a truly seasoned sailor would notice, perhaps, but present nonetheless.
Good coffee, too.
Still. In comparison to the Rich Plains, San Diego was a pike swimming alongside a whale, and it was telling that the Dominion flotilla had carefully rearranged itself, without being overtly threatening, to keep an eye on the human warship.
Neither Brewer nor Knight were worried: San Diego was built around shield generators, to the point where actual weaponry was almost an afterthought. If she needed to destroy anything she had her wormhole link to the Strategic Deep Space Weapons Reserve at Minot, but the shield generators themselves could wreak terrible havoc if needed. They were powerful enough to physically crush a hostile ship, and could function as a variable-frequency laser in a pinch.
They were certainly powerful enough to keep the ship intact long enough to jump out if the Dominion ships opened fire. Unlikely as that scenario might be, it was a comforting thought.
Right now, however, they were waiting for permission to take a shuttle over and Brewer was getting impatient.
“Are they in the habit of keeping species delegates waiting like this?” he asked.
“Probably just us,” Knight replied. “We have made a point of not taking our place at this council before now…”
“So why now?”
“The Gao specifically requested it. Apparently Daar feels that our absence is doing more harm than good now.”
“And our protest?” Brewer asked. “Ambassador Hussein died in that very chamber…”
“I think we’ve made our displeasure plain enough…” Knight examined the Rich Plains again. “Besides. Our allies requested it.”
There was a call from elsewhere on the bridge. “Sir? Rich Plains extend their welcome and invite the ambassador aboard.”
“About bloody time…” Knight muttered. He was quite sure that keeping him waiting was a studied power-play on the Council’s part. They were in a… tetchy mood after Daar had chewed them out. He finished his coffee and nodded to Brewer. “Captain.”
“Sir.”
He wasn’t alone in his shuttle, which after all needed to carry more than just the ambassador. He had a security detail, an aide, a few advisors…
He shook one particular advisor’s hand with care and no small amount of satisfactory anticipation. The Council were going to have conniptions, and he was looking forward to it.
Champions Genshi and Sheeyo were waiting for him when the shuttle’s ramp came down aboard the council ship. Both had the Gaoian equivalent of his own expression: Mischief was afoot, and they were all relishing it.
“Welcome aboard, Ambassador,” Sheeyo performed a kind of ducking bow before shaking Knight’s hand: Genshi remained straight-backed. Different Clans, different manners.
“Thank you. How are the Council taking my arrival?”
“The usual bluster,” Genshi commented.
Sheeyo was a little more verbose. “They made a lot of impatient noise to the effect that it’s past due for the Human race to take their place at this council, with a few barbs about your ‘unsanctioned claim’ over the planet Cimbrean and the damage you caused to the planet Garden, and goading the Hunters… Nothing of consequence, but you aren’t popular in there, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, that’s alright. Popularity is a cage anyway.”
Genshi bent sideways at the waist to peer into the shuttle. “You accepted Father Regaari’s suggestion over your special advisor, I see.”
“He made a very persuasive argument,” Knight smiled. “And the man himself laughed for quite a long time when I asked him. I think he was rather tickled.”
“This is going to be fun, isn’t it?” Sheeyo predicted.
“Quite. Shall we?”
Knight turned to his security detail, who were looking significantly neater and even more impressive than usual.
“Master Sergeant Firth! You shaved for me!”
“Only the best for you, sir.” The behemoth operator had one of his rare wry grins today. “Though it’s Senior Master Sergeant now. I’ve got shiny new stripes and everythang.”
“Well, I regret having missed your promotion, senior master sergeant. I presume the festivities were memorable?”
“Always, sir.”
Knight chuckled. “What about you, Colour Sergeant?” he asked, addressing the much “smaller” figure of Robert Murray. “You’re looking downright dapper.”
Murray sniffed a quiet laugh. “Aye, I scrub up. Gotty look the part, don’t we?”
“You succeeded admirably. After you, gentlemen.”
They nodde d, and all their jovial anticipation vanished in an instant. The two of them assumed their positions alongside and slightly behind Knight, and from there…
Weighty, robotic, stone-faced precision. Like all the best-drilled ceremony, it managed the trick of conveying genuine menace without so much as a flicker of aggression. They weren’t there to threaten and intimidate. They were there…to show they could, if it was needed.
The perfect click of their heels on the polished stone was almost hypnotic, and it conveyed all the threat they could want in its understated way. Very much a velvet glove, under which the mailed fist was plainly obvious despite their lack of weapons.
Not that either man needed one. They were weapons, and the well-fitted close cut of their uniforms made that plain, even under all the ‘fruit salad’ as the Americans called it. Both wore their impressive service records on their chests, and though much of the details would go well over the head of most of the representatives, the general message would not.
The sudden silence as the trio of humans entered the council chamber spoke volumes.
With their charge safely delivered to his place in the chamber, Murray and Firth did fine statue impressions and became part of the scenery at the edge of the hall, alongside their counterparts from the other Dominion species.
Knight would admit to some small private pleasure as many of the other honor guards subtly gave them room.
His spot on the floor was among a cluster of four at one end of the chamber alongside, in descending order of seniority, the Corti, the Rauwrhyr and the Gao. It was a potent faction: the Corti brought the gravitas of the Dominion’s most advanced and wealthy member, while the Gao and humanity were arguably the two mightiest militaries in the room.
The Rauwrhyr were the interesting ones, really. If the other three species in their little circle could be considered a coalition of the ambitious, then the Rauwrhyr were a little out of place: they’d always, as Knight understood it, been a voice of temperance and caution. And yet, here they were.
Clearly, he’d need to get to know them better when he had the chance.
There was a chime and the chamber went silent to pay attention to the Speaker, a venerable Rrrrtk who looked down his nose at all of the ambassadors before turning his attention specifically to Knight.
“…On behalf of the council, may I say that we are pleased to see you, Ambassador. It’s been too long since the Human species was represented in this chamber.”
Knight nodded, and took that as his cue to step forward a little. He promptly became the focus of a spotlight.
“Indeed,” he said. “Understand that we are here at the behest of our friends and allies. It’s been three years by our calendar, almost to the day, since Ambassador Hussein was murdered here on this very floor, and we have not forgotten.”
“A tragedy,” the speaker declared, and assorted heads and appendages around the chamber performed a variety of bobbing motions in agreement. Knight simply gave the elderly alien a cool stare that was nevertheless far warmer than such a tepid platitude deserved.
“…Do you recall his last words, Mister Speaker?” he inquired.
There was an awkward silence, which he allowed to stretch out to the point of aching discomfort, before grunting and answering his own question. “He asked: ‘what must we do?’ Specifically, he was asking what humanity must do to earn the trust and respect of the Interspecies Dominion. That was an act of abject prostration by a proud and powerful man… And this chamber repaid his humility with murder. If you should now have an answer to that question, I shall not be taking it today: We are no longer interested.”
“Ambassador,” the Domain’s delegate stepped forward. “Your predecessor’s murder was an act of sabotage by agents opposed to the process of galactic peace—this Hierarchy that your government and the Clans of Gao have inescapably uncovered. I’m sure my fellows will join me in deploring what happened to Ambassador Hussein, but surely you cannot blame us for the actions of an infiltrator?”
“Maybe we cannot,” Knight conceded, “but what about the Fall of Gao? Were Hierarchy saboteurs responsible for the way this council stood back and watched? Is their infiltration of this chamber that total?”
He gestured at Sheeyo. “We are here because our friends request it, for their own reasons. Do not mistake our presence for endorsement. Now, I have a few matters of procedure to cover before—yes?”
He aimed a sharp look at the Kwmbwrw delegate, who had stood up and raised a hand, requesting that he give way and take a question or comment.
The Kwmbwrw ambassador was a matriarch, he guessed. Her fur was almost snow white from her face to the tip of her coiled tail, and glowed under the spotlight as she tall stood on her hind legs to speak.
“A passionate argument,” she said. “But your disregard for this council and its rules was made evident long before your predecessor’s tragic assassination. I believe your colony on the planet Cimbrean celebrated the tenth anniversary of its founding last year: A colony that was, may I remind the council, founded without formal declaration or a legal claim.”
Knight gave her his most disinterested blank look. “Ambassador, our position with regards to Cimbrean was made quite clear some time ago and it has not changed: ‘Molon Labe.’ I invite you to research the translation of that yourself,” Knight said wearily. “And if irrelevant jabs like that are to be the calibre of interruption I face, then from now on I will not be giving way.”
What could they do, after all? He was facing down interstellar powers with access to gargantuan resources, but not a one of them could so much as tickle the human race. Better and far more dangerous things had tried. That was a position of the most incredible strength, and there was no point whatsoever in abandoning it, especially not in being polite to politicians who clearly had no interest in being polite to him.
They couldn’t even kick him off the council, given that the Dominion charter stated clearly that sapient life forms were automatically entitled to an irrevocable seat. In theory, even the Hunters had the right to attend.
Of course, in practice the Dominion’s policy with Hunters was, sensibly, to shoot first when possible.
“As I said, I have a few matters of procedure to address,” he continued, “the first and most important of which is the naming of my advisory staff. It’s my understanding that the rules and procedures of this house permit me to name one cross-species advisor?” He looked to the speaker, who gave him a slow gesture of acceptance.
“Go ahead, Ambassador Knight.”
“Thank you.” Knight nodded to Murray and Firth, who turned a smart one-eighty and vanished out of the chamber, the sharp clicking of their boots as they heel-struck in perfect unison ringing off the walls. Their job was to put on a show here, and they were damn good at it: He could tell that the Gaoians were suitably impressed, but not even the other ETs could fail to miss the precision and discipline on show.
That was the point, of course.
Knight watched and appreciated the low conversation among the delegates as he waited. Most of them were on-edge, though the Chehnash Ambassador had watched the two men leave with what looked more like professional interest than bewildered intimidation, and the Corti delegate to his left had an utterly peerless poker face.
A minute later, the sharp heel-strikes were back, and as before the two men stopped ramrod-straight in front of the entrance, turned a smart ninety degrees and stepped aside.
“Ambassadors,” Knight said with no small air of satisfaction, “may I present the special cross-species advisor to the Allied nations of Earth.”
For the first time in more than ten years, Krrkktnkk A’ktnnzzik’tk stepped into the Dominion Security Council chamber.