There was a light tap at the door. "Come," she called.
It wasn't, as she'd expected, one of the Academy medical staff. "The nurses at the monitor station are annoyed you haven't gone to sleep yet," Jonny commented as he walked into the room.
She blinked, then snorted. "They brought you all the way from Capitalia to tell me that?"
"Hardly. I was in the neighborhood and thought I'd drop in." Pulling up a chair, he sat down.
Telek nodded. "They did good. You can be damn proud of them."
"I know. Though Justin doesn't think so."
"Well, he's wrong," Telek growled. "If he'd tried to get to Purma's underground stuff, he wouldn't have made it out alive. Period. And if he hadn't made it out, we might have taken Yuri and Marck aboard before we knew how the Qasamans like to stack their deals."
"I understand that. He will too, eventually. I hope." Jonny waved toward her comboard. "The Menssana's report?"
"Uh-huh. You people did pretty well yourselves."
Jonny nodded. "They all look promising," he agreed. "At least two are better even than that."
Telek looked him in the eye. "I want those worlds, Jonny."
He returned the gaze without flinching. "Badly enough to fight a war for?"
"Badly enough to do whatever we have to," she said bluntly.
He sighed. "I'd rather hoped that what happened on Qasama would have blunted your eagerness a bit."
"It's made me aware of what it'll cost. But the option is the loss of the last nineteen thousand people on Caelian."
"Or so goes the argument. They can always move back here, you know."
"But they won't. Anyone who was willing to lose that much face by admitting defeat has already done so. We can't move the rest of them back to civilization-their pride won't take it."
"Whereas your pride won't let you turn tail on the Qasamans?" he countered.
"Pride has nothing to do with it."
"Sure." Reaching into his tunic, Jonny produced a magdisk and handed it to her.
"Well, whatever your motives, as long as you're solidly hell-bent on smashing
Qasama, you might as well know as much about the place as possible."
Telek frowned at the disk. "What's this?"
"The official Baliu'ckha'spmi report on Qasama."
She looked up at him, feeling her mouth fall open. "It's what? Where did you get it?"
"From the Troft ship out there," he replied. "Clearly, any ship sent to back up our mission would have their own world's report aboard for emergency reference.
So I went up this afternoon and got a copy."
"Just like that?"
"More or less. A combination of bluff, bluster, and legal footwork." He smiled faintly. "Plus a healthy new respect for us on their part."
"God knows we earned that much," she said quietly. York and Winward alone had earned them at least that much.... She shook off the sudden resurgence of guilt for her failures on the trip. "So why give it to me?"
"Oh, the whole Council will get copies in the morning," he shrugged. "As I said,
I was in the neighborhood."
"Yeah. Well... thanks."
"No charge." Jonny got to his feet-wincing with the effort, she noticed-and walked to the door. There he paused and looked back at her. "Lizabet... I'm not going to let the Worlds go to war for your new planets," he told her quietly.
"Not after what we've seen of Qasama. A surgical strike against their technological base, perhaps, if feasible; aerial bombings, probably, if it'll actually do any good. But no land war. Not even for Caelian."
She nodded slightly. "I understand. And I'm as willing to look for middle ground as you are."
"Let's hope we can find it. Good night."
He left, and Telek found herself staring at the Troft magdisk in her hand.
Suddenly she was very, very tired....
Ejecting the Menssana's report, she inserted the Trofts' into her comboard, keying to run it through the Academy's central translator. Then, sighing wearily, she splashed more cahve into her mug and began to read.
Chapter 24
The Council meeting was postponed two days, to give the members a chance to read both the Qasama Mission debriefing and the Troft data package Jonny had obtained. But when the debate finally began it was quickly and abundantly clear that the cautious approval that had existed for the original mission had flipped solidly in the opposite direction.
And it wasn't hard to figure out why.
"If the damn planet wasn't a lost human colony no one would be nearly this emotional about the whole thing," Dylan Fairleigh growled afterward as the governors gathered for their own meeting.
"Neither of the Caelian syndics was complaining," Vartanson pointed out quietly.
"We know what the trade-off is here."
"Us or them?" Jonny asked. "Is that it? Come on, now-we don't even know why the
Trofts are so worried about Qasama."
"Don't we?" Roi shot back. "A thriving, highly cooperative, highly paranoid human culture? That's not something to be afraid of?"
"A culture without starflight, without even system space travel?" Hemner quavered.
"We don't know they don't have spaceflight capability," Fairleigh reminded him tartly. His eyes flicked to Jonny. "There's a lot we don't know about their industrial and technological base. That we should have found out."
Jonny bristled; but Telek got her word in first. "If that's a slur on my team in general and Justin Moreau in particular, you're invited to withdraw it," she said coldly.
"I only meant-"
"If you'd like, you can head the next trip to Qasama," she cut him off. "We'll see then how well you do."
Stiggur chose that moment to make his own belated entrance, his presence stifling the budding argument. "Good afternoon; sorry I'm late," he said with an air of harried distraction as he sat down at his place and pushed a pile of magdisks into the center of the table. "Preliminary biological data analysis-just came in. Summary in the front. Take a quick look and we'll discuss it."
It was, as Jonny had expected, an analysis of the Dewdrop and Troft data, concentrating on the mojos. He skimmed the summary and was halfway through a more careful study when Vartanson harrumphed. "Nasty. Reminds me of some of the feathered killing machines we have on Caelian."
"Aside from the weird reproductive setup, I presume," Roi said. "The whole arrangement looks pretty fragile to me. Kill off enough of their embryo-hosts-these whatyoucallem, these tarbines-and you could wipe out the species overnight."
"Most ecosystems look that unstable at first glance," Telek put in dryly. "In practice, you'd find you'd need to kill a hell of a lot of tarbines to make any real dent. I take it, though, that you feel the mojos to be the major threat to any Cobra forces we put down there?"
"No question," Roi said. "Look at the record. No one except Winward suffered any appreciable damage from the Qasamans' guns, and that single case was a surprise attack. But the mojos got him and York and came close with Pyre and Moreau."
"They really are the first line of defense," Fairleigh agreed. "And the Qasamans know it. Hell, they design their cities to keep the things happy."
"Makes sense, of course," Stiggur said with a shrug. "Why risk human deaths in a battle when you've got animals to take the brunt of the attack?"