Eric looked slightly embarrassed. “A technological revolution, I fear, is not limited to one side. However, these are different in a hundred ways. For one thing, no one was changed into them. They are laboratory created and bred. They save lives. One can make the poor your cannon fodder, as it has always been, or one can artificially raise cannon fodder. An interesting moral choice, is it not?”
He had no answer for that.
“So,” Eric continued, “it becomes a matter of us versus them. When it was decided by the Outworlders that all remaining humans would be converted into their own kind, a few of us rebelled and planned. We stole a ship and got it to Earth. The story is a true adventure in and of itself, but it is not relevant. We got here and, somehow, avoided being shot down, although we were, of course, captured. They were quite surprised to find us as human as they.”
“I’ve heard about Earth up then. I didn’t much like my own time anymore, after what we’d both done to it, but I think I like it better than what I hear of the edge.”
“Indeed, it is miserable. The Outworlders wish conquest, not elimination, so they do not extinguish life as they could easily do with their present command of space. Instead, they sit up there and hurl rocks at us, some hundreds of kilometers in size. The rocks are broken up by Earth defenses, but they still hit in large chunks. They destroy as surely as nuclear bombs destroy, but without the mess. Of course, they are mostly random, but when you get several a day for years, it tends to leave things pretty
ugly.”
“If they’re so inhuman, what do they want with the Earth?”
“Control. So long as Earth exists, it is a potential dagger at their throats, if not now, then in the future. They have plans for the Earth. An adaptive Earth, they call it. A population all changed into monsters, all working for extraterrestrial overlords. An enslaved Earth populated with practical monsters adapted to various needs. The end of humanity, Mr. Moosic. The end. I’m not going to pretend that the Earth I know is a nice place. Wars make nice places ugly. The cost in human suffering is enormous, on a scale that almost makes the annihilation of the human race by nuclear arms seem preferable. Those old warheads still exist, Moosic. Not in the numbers they used to, but they are still there. Earth has suffered too much to surrender to the monsters, to become monsters and make misery permanent.”
“You mean that they’re willing to wipe out humanity if they lose?” He was aghast at the idea. “Commit racial suicide? But is there no hope for a reconciliation?”
“None. But like all things in time, it is a possibility, not a certainty. Earth is losing. It cannot win against the massive power of the Outworlders. It no longer has the power to even move more than a handful of people back into the Safe Zone, let alone the equipment and staff required here to build up this base and increase its power. It’s too late. Either Earth wins by changing the equations so that it does win, or humanity is wiped out. Except for the very elite, of course, who will be able to sneak out the back door to here before it blows. There is no way to bring more. Oh, we’ll bring a huge number of fertilized eggs and try a new race here, but, even then, if a sufficient human presence is truly established for a civilization back here, the Outworlders will be able to know it and come for it.”
Moosic sat down on the cold floor, feeling weak and dizzy, not so much from his health as from what he’d been told. It was always true that there were two sides to every story, and this one was a doozy. If both sides were to be believed, there were no good guys at all in this, only tragedy for all humankind, no matter what the result.
If Benoni could be believed, and his words had the very ring of truth in them, then the fate of human civilization, of all humanity, rested with him. That was something he’d never bargained for, something he was not prepared to accept.
“Why Marx?” he asked the blond man. “Why all this stuff in the first place?”
“Because we have so little to work with. It was a way, a device, to cause the other side to act. A chance, perhaps, to catch them, to trace them back. Bait.”
“I really want no part of this. A pox on both your houses.”
Eric nodded. “I know how you feel. I really do. But understand, you were not originally in the desperation move. All of those antique suits of yours were supposed to be destroyed. The Outworlders were supposed to be the ones tracking our young radicals, not you. But—here you are. The loop was formed around you rather than they, and that puts you center stage. Now you see our moves, and our desperation. Tell me—what reward would you like? You have all of time, you know. Within the minimizing ripple effect, we can make you whatever you want wherever and whenever you want to be.”
But you can’t give me back Dawn and the kids, he thought sourly. Neither side is willing to do that. Aloud he answered, “What I want is not within your power, and the other side denies it to me and holds it over me like a club. I’m going to be frank, Benoni. I don’t give a damn who wins or loses your dirty little war. I grew up under the nuclear threat, so I’m really only surprised to find it took so long. You ask me to make a choice, and I refuse. You have no right to ask it, and I have no right to grant or not grant it. I’ve never seen your Earth, but I think I’d hate it. I’ll grant your Outworlder version, so I’m not too thrilled about them, either. But I’ve never seen or talked to them any more than I have your Earth. I’m being asked to take the facts on faith and to maybe decide the war on that. I can’t and I won’t. Piss on it and bring out your torture. I’d rather just die now and get it over with.”
Eric stood up and walked over in front of him, looking down, a curious expression on his face. “I’m not going to kill you. In fact, out of your own mouth you have guaranteed this. I was going to take you forward to the edge, show you what your loyalty has wrought, but I think not. Your mind-set is not prepared to make the adjustments, to see that an issue of human survival surpasses all else, including the present quality of life, or lack of it.” He turned to the gargoyles. “Feed him and make him comfortable but secure. Keep him in Room 226 until I return.”
Moosic found himself being lifted by powerful arms, and shook them off. He preferred to do this on his own as much as possible, and he followed the hulking creatures up a stairway and into a comfortable, motel-like room. In a few minutes, some food was delivered that appeared mostly synthetic, but it did taste something like the meat and vegetables it was supposed to be. The beer he found surprisingly good, although it had been quite a while since he’d sampled any. Then they cleared away the trays, closed and locked the door, and left him alone.
He felt very tired, almost achingly so, and suspected that the beer or food had been drugged in some manner. Well, let them. They could make him talk under the influence, but he knew full well that if they moved him up to the sergeant’s time, he would once again become the sergeant and once again be awake and alert. Benoni had been very nervous in that time frame, and Moosic suspected that his captor could ill afford another trip there. Yet, with the multi-shifts of the military compound and the patrols all about, they would have to call up humans to shepherd a drugged and wheelchair-bound man, one known to almost all in the area, out to the fossil cliffs. Nothing else they could learn from him mattered.
In fact, nothing really mattered to him anymore. The other side denied him the only people he had ever loved. This side had less to offer. More, they might have to move fast—the Outworlders could easily discover him kidnapped and then cut power to the belt, bringing it back to their base and denying Eric the trace to their new headquarters indefinitely.