Caines mutiny, p.78
Caine's Mutiny, page 78
part #4 of Caine Riordan Series
“And so this ‘proves’ Ktoran involvement?”
“No, not on its own. But it is interesting how certain members of House Perekmeres were familiar with the Turkh’saar system, how they knew ahead of time that almost eight hundred Terran abductees had been planted there sometime in the last century or so. Which begs the question: who planted them there to begin with? And how were they familiar enough with the system and the planet to do so? Which leads us back to the identity of those who placed the wreck of the Katek Hud on Turkh’saar, which, by process of induction, is no longer so mysterious. Because whoever put her there obviously passed on knowledge of the system—and her presence—to those who later planted the Lost Soldiers nearby.
“That was a mistake, of course: too many clues in so small a plot of ground. But the placement of the wreck: that was extremely clever, and subtle. BD+56 2966 was obviously the first system the Hkh’Rkh would explore when they achieved sublight interstellar travel. Not surprisingly, they noticed the ‘crash site’ and immediately found and developed the shift-drive technology. And so they were ready to play an indispensable role in the invasion of Earth: an invasion that the Arat Kur could not hope to have carried off alone, given their distaste for above-ground activities in general and combat in particular.”
Shethkador was not smiling, but did not appear rattled. “An interesting set of hypotheses, Commodore—but hypotheses, just the same. In your legal parlance, they are supported by circumstantial evidence alone.”
“Well, I suppose that’s true—presuming we don’t find some Arat Kur and Hkh’Rkh to corroborate our suspicions.”
Shethkador sat a little more erect.
“You have excellent intelligence sources inside our fleet, so you no doubt know I was conferring with highly placed Arat Kur yesterday. And you no doubt know that if First Voice is discovered alive, and is apprised of your deeds, he will be likely to share what few know: that both his government and the Arat Kur Wholenest were coordinating with the Ktoran Sphere years in advance of the invasion.”
“The last is pure conjecture, Commodore.”
“No, I merely lack evidence. That’s not quite the same thing. But thank you for indirectly confirming what the Arat Kur and Hkh’Rkh leadership has, or will, tell us about your prewar involvement with them.
“Frankly, I suspect that the Patrijuridicate will not want First Voice to be found. During my time with him, I found him a balanced leader and not entirely comfortable with the role in which he had been cast: the face most associated with the invasion of Earth. Yaargraukh has long been convinced that he may have been talked into cooperation with you by the more hard-line Old Families, who publicly claimed that the war was the outcome of Convocation. That lie will unravel as soon as they have access to the data on the wreckage near Turkh’saar: the average Hkh’Rkh can reconstruct an obvious timeline as well as anyone else.
“Yaargraukh also suspects First Voice would have been willing to call off the assault if the outcome of Convocation had been better. Which makes it interesting to wonder if he was among those who were purposely misled. Perhaps only the Arat Kur and the Ktor conspired to orchestrate a bad outcome and so, ensure the progression to war.”
Shethkador shrugged. “Your prewar accusations are without conclusive, objective evidence. So a senior Arat Kur or First Voice of the Hkh’Rkh decide to accuse Ktor of collusion: what of it? Do you suppose that only Ktor’s leaders lie? Your own recent history is filled with evidence to the contrary.
“And as far as the more recent violations are concerned, I reiterate that they are not the doing of the Ktoran Sphere, but of a group of traitors whom we spared because we believed they were redeemable. A bitter error, on our part.”
Downing perched his chin upon his palm. “I must confess that I admire the unmitigated gall it takes to try to float such a fatuous collection of denials regarding Ktor’s involvement. If you would have us believe that you are truly innocent of a misdeed, such as the attempt to wipe us out with the Doomsday Rock forty years ago, then you need to start by explaining why you didn’t come clean on it in the first place, the moment we were introduced at Convocation.
“But I suppose that would be rather difficult, since then we might press you to explain why you were on Earth itself during the prior century, in violation of the Accords. And why you have since been advising other races in their campaigns to attack a homeworld, the most serious of all possible violations? Because if we start down that path, then we will demand to know the source, the origins, of those transgressions within the Ktoran Sphere. In each case, someone gave orders, those orders were obeyed, and consequences followed. So tell us: who gave the order that you, personally, should go to Earth in disguise? Who gave the orders to infiltrate our corporations? Who gave the order that your entire race should conceal its true speciate identity, thereby violating the Accords in the very act of applying to them for admission?”
Shethkador shrugged. “You do not understand the impossibility of what you ask, because you do not know how political decisions are taken in the Sphere.”
“No, but I understand this: without accounting for the historic violations to which you admit, you have no reason to expect that we will take your word that the Ktoran Sphere was uninvolved in the ones perpetrated most recently. From our standpoint, only now—when you have nothing to gain by keeping the earlier violations secret and denying their very existence—do you admit that there are, in fact, flaws in your organization, that you don’t have complete control over all your personnel.” Downing shrugged. “Perhaps those admissions might have mattered before. They are pointless, now. They simply underscore how utterly opportunistic you are: if you believe you can get away with something, you elect to keep it secret, or to blame someone or something else, for as long as you can.”
Shethkador leaned forward. “You call my admission pointless, but in so saying, you acknowledge that they are admissions. You thus concede the real possibility that we, the Ktoran Sphere, had no direct hand in the events that took place surrounding the seizure of the Arbitrage and all that followed therefrom.”
“It’s possible, but no longer important.”
“It is urgently important, and I will illustrate why.” The Ktor sat straighter. “If some group of your people were to go rogue, should we hold Terra accountable for their infractions?”
“Yes, you should, particularly if it takes us almost forty years to admit our people made a mess of things, having known about it all along. And since you were one of the powers watching our system at the time this House Perekmeres pushed the Doomsday Rock at us, you can hardly claim you didn’t know.”
Sukhinin sliced the air with his heavy hand. “Enough, Richard. We know he and his breed are guilty, and he has made it clear that they will not admit it. This is now a matter for the Custodians, to whom we have provided the evidence of our accusations.” He looked at Shethkador as if he was a hatrack. “It was you who asked for this meeting. What do you want?”
Shethkador shrugged. “I want to prevent our people from going to war.”
And it sounded like he meant it.
Chapter Sixty-Nine
PLANET TWO (“HOMENEST”), SIGMA DRACONIS
“We have never wanted to fight you,” Shethkador continued. Which sounded somewhat less true.
Sukhinin seemed less willing to pursue the nuances in Shethkador’s responses. He scoffed. “Yes, you wanted to rule us without fighting. It is as you pointed out just after we discovered that you were human—more or less. You would have been quite pleased if Hitler had won World War II. That would have made your job easier for you.” Sukhinin, whose family was said to have suffered horribly in his nation’s Great Patriotic War against the Nazis, wore a smile that was more reminiscent of bared teeth.
Shethkador’s reply was almost casual. “Of course we would have preferred that outcome. You would have been preacculturated to our ways.”
Downing raised an eyebrow. “So Adolf Hitler is your idea of an ubermensch?”
“Hitler? A superior being? Fate, no. Do not mistake our approval of the ethos of a regime for admiration of its leader. Hitler was a weak, superstitious amateur whose profound insecurities and absolute inability to perceive himself accurately ultimately caused the downfall of his project.”
“How so?”
“Is it not obvious? Firstly, he surrounded himself with those like himself; fanatics who were also cranks, individuals whose personal derangements or need for rationalizing their own inferiority led them to a psychopathic projection of their own failings onto others. The true object of their exterminations was what they most feared and loathed in themselves; weakness, insufficiency, flaccidity, cowardice. They could not admit this, of course, so they protected the roots of their self-hatred by ensuring that these traits were not the overt criteria upon which their social extirpations were based. Rather, they demonized specific groups and then attributed these traits to them, thereby amplifying the political appeal of their movement by invoking traditional prejudices and stereotypes through suitably crafted propaganda.”
Riordan folded his arms. “Actually, their methods sound almost as devious and well-rationalized as your own.”
Shethkador waved a hand at Caine’s comment as if it were a pesky insect. “A jibe that reveals how little you understand. Ktor breeds strength and power through pitiless self-knowledge: that is the natural purpose of any healthy organism. Hitler and his cabal subsumed their personal psychoses of self-loathing and need for rebirth by projecting all that destructive energy outward, so it could never rebound upon them. The immense social and physical monuments they then built to discharge their own psychoses demonstrates how just profound their weakness was.”
Downing nodded. “Indulge me; cite one such moment of weakness.”
“The Wansee Conference. The so-called Final Solution and the deathcamps.”
“But wouldn’t that be the ultimate expression and assertion of one’s mastery over others?”
Shethkador seemed to flinch backward. “Ultimate? Perhaps—but so grotesque and wasteful that the desire to construct it can only be interpreted as a crippling weakness in any leader who would embark upon such a project.
“Consider: how many did Hitler kill? Six million? What if he had simply held his genocidal bigotry in check, had sought suitable recruits from among that immense throng? Even if only ten percent were emotionally, psychologically, culturally, and physically fit for service in his armies, that would have furnished him with slightly over six hundred thousand additional troops. Then consider all the security forces required to maintain and operate the machinery of genocide: the guards, the train security, the detachments tasked with rounding up those to be detained, the intelligence assets dedicated to investigating who did and did not belong in the camps. It was an immense undertaking. Let us be conservative, though, and assume that it was achieved with no more than sixty thousand personnel. So, all together, Hitler wasted the manpower of forty-four divisions of fifteen thousand men in his insane scheme. Then add in the cost of constructing the camps and shuttling detainees to and fro, often at the expense of adequate logistical support for his army. In short, Hitler’s maniacal focus to destroy select subcultures on the Eurasian landmass may very well have cost him the war, and ultimately, his life. Had these persons been carriers of a literal plague, then maybe such actions would have been valid. But the priority he gave the Final Solution was out of all proportion to his strategic objectives. Hitler had a war to win but, in fact, his psychoses ensured his own defeat.”
“If you mean to teach us that insanity is a weakness,” Sukhinin smirked, “then here is a lesson for you: good instructors do not teach the obvious.”
“They also do not labor to teach the ungifted, but I shall make an exception for you, given the importance of this discussion. So I will provide an example in which the weakness is not so much a byproduct of psychoses. To wit: consider Hitler’s idiotic impatience to achieve his objectives. Consider his bloodless European acquisitions throughout the 1930s and the profound appeasementist attitudes in England, France, and Russia as the swastika came to fly over Vienna, then Prague, then Copenhagen, then parts of the Ruhr and the Saar. What if he had done what any sane individual would have done: pause and consolidate?
“It would have been easy to do: the other powers were still exhausted from World War One, did not wish to mobilize. And these early acquisitions were an immense adornment to the growing Nazi industrial complex. Given a five-year program of war preparations, during which he could have utterly obliterated any resistance in these territories, their addition and integration could have made Hitler all but unstoppable.
“But he was not the master of himself, of his drives. His vision of, and personal need for, self-assuring success overwhelmed strategic prudence. It is a similar species of ego—his ardent desire to be seen as a great war leader—that led him to consistently contradict and countermand the advice and plans of his own supremely capable general staff. And had he won, who was then to stop him from selectively demobilizing his armies and ensuring that the members of the groups he wished to exterminate never returned home, but were led to remote places where they could be disposed of? Who would have remained to contest his forces when they came for the families, back in their homelands?”
Sukhinin sneered. “And who would want to hear you talk so much, about a topic that has nothing to do with preventing war between us?”
“But that is where you are mistaken, Consul Sukhinin,” Shethkador objected. “It has everything to do with preventing war. It is important—imperative—that you understand us. Note I do not say it is urgent that you like, or even accept, us—but that you understand us.”
Riordan stared at him. “You mean, understand you to the extent you deem it safe and useful.”
“Of course I meant that. It would be absurd to propose that we are potential friends, or even disinterested states. But for you to make prudent decisions dealing with the Ktoran Sphere, you must understand that our power structures do not work the same way yours do. We are not founded on nations, but Houses, and while our self-interest is united and absolute, our political will is concentrated in far fewer hands that are resolved to act with vigor and dispatch. We are not the Nazis: we are not a monolith, nor are we subject to the whims of leaders like Hitler, whose actions are just as often motivated by suppressed insecurities and phobias as they are by prudent statecraft.”
Downing rubbed an index finger under his lower lip. “And how do you propose this should guide our interactions with you—to prevent war, as you said?”
Tlerek nodded. “Actually, we require only one thing: that you do not reveal the existence of the Aborig—the Terrans you have labeled the Lost Soldiers.”
Downing blinked. “And what would you suggest we do with them?”
“Whatever is necessary. I suspect you will wish to maroon them somewhere, possibly return them all to cryogenic suspension. Such a solution reveals the weakness of your system: your delusions of sympathy, of justice, of ethics, are ultimately just fetishes you worship in the hope that you shall be the beneficiaries of similar treatment. It is a ritual of self-reassurance, no different than those practiced by Hitler, except that his were global in expression and, according to your value structures, more egoistic and barbaric.”
Downing’s reply was slow, which often meant he was struggling to control his reaction. “I see. And you would not maroon the Lost Soldiers?”
“Of course not. They, and the other personnel who encountered them personally, should be eliminated. That is the only way to be sure that a secret shall be kept: that there is no one left to keep it.”
“Virodok!” exclaimed Sukhinin, who sounded short of breath. “Do you monsters hold nothing dear beyond yourselves?”
“No, we do not, and that is the source of our power: to reject the delusion that any human, anywhere, at any time, actually does anything or feels anything that they believe is not, at some level, in their own interest.”
Riordan nodded. “Okay. So let’s presume that we refuse to put the Lost Soldiers into cold sleep or on a module headed into the sun. What do you fear as a result?”
“It is not a fear, but a certainty, of what shall occur next. Your people will hear their story, the narrative of their rescue, and come to understand that it was the Ktor who put the Lost Soldiers on Turkh’saar. They will thus learn that we have been on Earth at various times in the past one hundred and fifty years. Immediately, our hand will be seen behind every war, every disaster, every misery your race has ever inflicted upon itself. In the wake of the recent invasion, your terrified populace wants a common enemy to hate, so they are singularly primed to declare us the source of all of Earth’s woes.”
Sukhinin’s lips pulled back in a snarling smile. “So far, I am enjoying this picture you are painting.”
“That is because you are foolish, Consul Sukhinin. Within mere hours, after your governments have been flooded with inquiries about our interference, the rumors about the ruins you found on Delta Pavonis Three will suddenly arise again, but as much more than scientific curiosities. They will become mute answers to the questions of your people. The Ktor can walk among you because we are you, because you and we were both in the stars long ago, servitors to the more advanced races that came before us.
“I must believe you see what follows, just as every domino flawlessly foretells the fall of the one after it. This revelation will spawn all manner of outcry among your unruly population—itself a classic illustration of the inadvisability of conferring political power upon lesser beings. That shall bring immense pressure to bear upon every level of government. There will be demands that you disclose information that you do not even possess, and your best attempts at transparency will be disbelieved. There will be increased suspicion among your population, a veritable witch hunt of ‘Ktor sightings’ that will fuel both fear and viciousness. It shall particularly impact your commercial entities, even those we did not suborn, resulting in significant physical damage and fiscal disruption. And since the government of Indonesia joined the megacorporations in inviting the Arat Kur and Hkh’Rkh to land as guests, a new purge will sweep Jakarta, and Indonesians in other countries will be in daily fear for their lives.
