Theirs Not to Reason Why 5: Damnation (13 page)

The fifteen debaters had a leader, a Dlmvlan male wrapped in an antigravity harness. He shouted in a voice amplified by their commsystems and gestured at the screens showing not his scaled face and faceted eyes, but the smooth, color-flushed skin and huge, black, mouse-like eyes of a Gatsugi. Words in Terranglo, the trade tongue of the Alliance, echoed in the wake of his own, coming from the green not-haired Gatsugi speaking fervently in the recording. Dlmvlan script marched along the edges of the screen, providing translations for those in the hall who did not speak the interstellar trade tongue.

“. . . I transmit in the light, and I am
not/not/not
afraid! The hunters
will
be hunted. Stand on the branches by your choice/will/right. Climb for the strength to survive this war. Fight for your sentient brothers, and they
will
fight for you—when the easy prey has been shaken loose, their ceaseless/wasteful hunger will send them into the trees for those who think they are safe! Strike now! Strike/Strike/Strike
now
, and cut out the tendons of their ambitions. Shove
them
into the Room for the Dead, before they can shove
you
in and shut/lock/seal the door!”

The Bright Speaker flinched and ducked as something smacked into the plexi wall of the broadcasting booth surrounding her. The sounds of fighting didn’t get through, but the sight of it was there at the edge of the screen. For a moment, while the white-robed, four-armed alien ducked out of the way, that fighting could be seen. Some of the bodies involved were the ceristeel-armored forms of Humans, soldiers in Ia’s own Company from over a year before, with a few hastily armored Gatsugi security guards from the colony’s governance hall and broadcast center. Some of those figures were Salik, with their armored tentacle arms either firing their own bulky weapons or curling and lashing to strike at the Alliance members in their way.

The Dlmvlan crowded into the chamber went into an uproar, flailing their own limbs and pounding scaled body parts on railings and bowl-seat rims. The floating leader gestured, freezing the image in place while he roared and buzzed in the local tongue—then slashed his arm out, silencing half the noise. A fling of his other arm silenced the rest. The image on the screen moved again. Straightening from her crouch with a brownish gray tinge of grim determination to her skin tone, the Gatsugi continued to speak.

“Here I stand, surrounded by foes, but
defended
by friends. Gatsugi and alien. Why? Why would these Terrans come to our aid, when they themselves are hunted hard? They have a quote from a Bright Speaker of their own. It has changed words and changed hands many/many/many times, for it transcends mere words, and mere hands, and mere
species
.”

The text on the screen could barely keep up; half a dozen of the ones displaying either the Dlmvlan debater or the Gatsugi Bright Speaker switched to massive views of native transcripts. On those screens that still showed the Gatsugi, her four arms flicked upward in the sign language of her kind, adding emphasis and meaning to her carefully, poetically chosen, fervently spoken words. Pinkish text added itself in smaller lettering to the golden cream on the text-only screens, translating that as well for the Dlmvlan watchers.

“I say it now in my own words, sign it with my own hands! They came for the Solaricans, but I was not a Solarican, and I stayed high above as they perished. They came for the V’Dan, but I was no V’Dan, and did not look nor move. They came for the K’Kattan, but my limbs were less, and I did not raise my spine . . . and the K’Katta, too, died. But I know in my soul that they are coming for me. When will I fight for myself, and how can I fight for myself, if I will not also fight for the rest?

“
I
am not afraid.
I
am not at rest. No ruler, no leader, no
Nestor
can tell me what
I
know is right, and
I will fight
. I am a Bright Speaker because I speak the truth! I speak it until the universe itself listens. I send/send/send in the hyper. I send/send/send in the light. I demand an answer/response from you!
Will you fight?
”
Fists thrust together, one set over her head and one set under, knuckle-equivalents touching in braced arcs of strength, the Gatsugi stared through the cameras at her unseen viewers.

Her posture was a very
Dlmvlan
gesture, not a Gatsugi one, for the masses around them rose up, their own arms arched over their iridescent-eyed heads, fists pressed hard together. They roared as they did so, an abrupt, polysyllabic shout that echoed around the chamber in the silence that followed. A silence Ia had known would happen, and had planned for over a year ago, for her own words fell into the vast, spherical chamber, echoing from the past.

“Make no mistake,”
the Ia of the past warned the assembled aliens. A flatpic of her white-haired face, surrounded by what looked like profile information in Dlmvlan text, appeared on several of the screens as her broadcasted self continued.
“They will come for you, too. My Prophetic Stamp on that.”

The Queen High Nestor, seated on the highest spire, rose and growled something, towering over the assemblage with a stance that conveyed her authority even to the two Humans in their midst. Her anger and displeasure could be seen in the way she hissed and buzzed her words, in the slashing of her claw-hands, in the way she pointed at the floating debaters. The other queens arrayed on the spiked tiers below her hissed and clacked their armor-plated arms against the railings of their bowl chairs . . . provoking a loudly growled wave of counter-response from the assembly.

Not just a growl. Within moments, the crowd was in motion. Brown bodies
moved
, climbing over each other in some cases, all of them heading for those gold-polished balconies. Or rather, they headed for the harnesses that would turn them into floating debaters rather than seated spectators. At her side, Helstead whistled softly through their headset link, warily backing up toward the balcony’s edge as it was the only place left for them to go.

“. . . V’Dayamn, sir,”
she muttered.
“
Something
stirred up their nests.”
She turned her head inside the tough plexi bubble of her pressure-suit’s helm and frowned softly.
“I remember your saying that the Bright Speaker’s speech would cause an uproar in the Dlmvlan Empire. That they’d do the right thing at the right point in time. But political fights are rarely resolved so quickly. I
trust
this isn’t going to end up with us squished—and that it isn’t going to take much longer. My tanks are showing just a little over an hour of oxygen left.”

“This won’t take long. They’re demanding to join the Alliance in our war against the Salik, in the face of strong Queen Nestor opposition,”
Ia murmured back, her eyes on the bodies that were headed their way. Catching Helstead by the elbow, she moved her fellow Human farther in the direction Helstead had instinctively tried to retreat. Some of the Dlmvla around them hissed in surprise at the two Humans when Ia pressed them to one side, against the angry spectators, but it was necessary.

The local gravity was a mere 0.93Gs, and both women were used to roughly twice that, even in their silvery p-suits with extra-large oxygen tanks strapped to their backs. Still, the pair staggered as they were knocked to either side by the much larger bodies of four of the now-harnessed locals leaping off the railing—and then were pressed up against the railing edge by those in the crowd who hadn’t been able to get their hands on any more suits.

“Ugh! Dammit . . .”
Helstead grunted. She was a heavyworlder by birth, and thus naturally short; that meant the Dlmvla couldn’t help but half knock her over when they bumped into her in their rush to the railing. Thankfully, the barrier was too tall for either woman to be knocked off, but the aliens . . . the natives, rather, did press close. Elbowing two of them in the thigh-equivalents, Helstead got them to back off.
“Enough! Okay, sir, I give up. If these meioas are so fired up that they’re going against their own leadership in order to join the war, then what are
we
doing here?”

A twist of humor tickled up through Ia’s normally sober thoughts. She knew Delia Helstead’s background. Knew the other woman had grown up in a farming community before making her escape to the Terran Space Force to get herself off the mud-soaked heavyworld of Eiaven. With that twist of amusement coloring her voice, she held out her case.

“Here, Helstead. Hold my datachips, and watch this.”

Behind the clear curve of plexi sheltering her lungs from the methane-filled local air, Helstead’s jaw dropped. Not just because rural humor had not really changed much from colony to colony in hundreds of years but because her sober, somber Commanding Officer was grinning. Teeth bared in something which the aliens around them would interpret as a grimace but which was pure humor, Ia pushed back telekinetically at a Dlmvla that was crowding too close, heaved herself up onto the broad ledge of the railing, dropped her smile, and grabbed control of the conference. Or rather, the screens.

The dozens of monitors floating through the now-body-crowded air flared with blinding flashes of white.

Instinctively, all the Dlmvla swayed back from the oversized panels, both those on the balconies and those floating in antigravity harnesses. Equally surprised, the Nestor Queens hesitated, then a few of them rose to speak. There were more than enough of the former to quadruple the number of the latter, enough to override anything the Queens decreed—as was the legal right of their populace—but Ia didn’t give either side the chance.

She flared the screens again with another jolt of electrokinesis, then covered half of them with her flatpic and profile . . . and the other pic with a real-time image of herself, clad in her pressure-suit. Inside the bubble of her helm, her distinctive white hair and amber-hued eyes stared at the aliens floating and standing and seated in the debate hall. Her voice, hard and stentorian, rang out across the room via the commsystem; the translation slashed in huge Dlmvlan lettering around that view of her p-suit-encased face.

“. . . I
forbid
you joining the Alliance in this war!”

The uproar that followed her words was so loud, it caused a brief feedback squeal between her p-suit commsystem and her headset. Unlike Helstead, she didn’t bother to slap her hands over her suit’s pickups, located just above each collarbone. The suit and the headset argued electronically for a few moments, first cutting the noise levels too low, then wobbling them up too high again for a few tries, before finally stabilizing the noise at a moderate dull roar.

Ignoring the tumult, she kept her eyes on the lower spire-thrones of the twenty Nestor Queens, and the Queen High Nestor at the top in particular. She didn’t flinch as several of the enraged, floating debaters headed her way, either. No one was going to hurt her, and no one would eject her. They’d do the alien equivalent of yelling at her for a bit, but otherwise she would be fine.

The largest of the leaders, the Queen High Nestor, rose to her full height and let loose a screech somewhere between a wild roar and a buzzing keen. Banging her forelimbs together, she set a syncopated rhythm, which was quickly picked up by the other queens. With all twenty-one clacking their arm-plates together in front of their comm pickups, the sound cut through the growling and the buzzing and the yelling. Those swaying toward Ia backed off, turning to face their leaders.

Ia knew only a fraction of what the Dlmvla were saying, and that only from skimming the timeplains. She just watched and waited while the High Nestor rattled off a rapid-fire speech. The alien leader then sat down, just in time to brace her bulk against the pivoting of the entire central spire. It twisted to the left while the assembled audience muttered to themselves, waiting impatiently.

The torquing of the spires brought a new clutch of Queen Nestors to face Ia, one of whom stood and lifted her upper limbs over her head, clacking them together in the same rhythm as before. The syncopated beat ceased after silence had fallen, and her voice, thin and reedy but echoing with the might of the speakers around the chamber, addressed the intruders in heavily accented Terranglo.

“We demant you identity! We demant reason you say ‘no’ at our sovereign azzemblee!”

Ia relaxed some of her mental grasp on the transparent floating screens, allowing the Dlmvlan translators to hastily, if belatedly, transcribe text of what she had said in their native tongue. Giving them the time to work, Ia stepped forward, onto nothing but air and the ability of her mind to affect the world via the manipulation of energy.

All debaters had to be aloft when they made their demands, though usually it was done while actually flying, through antigravity harnesses, not through telekinesis. There was a chilling reason behind it, for any debater who wished to have their words heard had to prove they were willing to die for whatever they believed. Each Nestor Queen controlled two kill switches for the debating harnesses . . . so for a vote to pass from the people trying to overturn the will of their queens, it had to surpass the ability of the Queens—or the colonial High Nestors, who had one switch apiece in the smaller assemblies—to literally kill its most loyal supporters.

She did not have a thruster harness, and could not have worn the Dlmvlan equivalent anyway, not when her body was one-third at most the size of a native. But she did have her telekinetic abilities, and walked out onto a solid line of methane-filled air. Two hovercameras, not too different from the Terran kind, swerved up to focus on her silver-suited figure. Ia let a few more of the screens slip free of her mental grip, giving their operators a chance to project her face directly rather than electrokinetically.

“I am Ia, Prophet of a Thousand Years, and the fully appointed General of the Alliance Armies of the Terrans, V’Dan, K’Katta, Tlassians, Solaricans, Chinsoiy,
and
the Feyori. My reason is your safety. My demand is your salvation.” She spoke slowly, clearly, giving the translators time to post her words onto those screens. Reaching out with her mind, she touched each of the harnesses on the debaters floating around her. “Allow me to clarify my command: I
forbid
the Dlmvla nation to join the rest of the Alliance in open warfare against the Salik incursion. If you do, they will react with too much strength at the wrong point in time, and we will, one and all, to our deaths
fall
.”