GENERAL JUNICHIRO KURCHATOV, HUMAN COORDINATOR: Let’s hope que no llegue to that. No, en honor a la memoria of the fallen of both our razas at the Second Battle of Canaan… But quite right, no estamos as worried sobre what your people may do pero sobre how these rebellious colonizers might reaccionar. Probablemente porque we are confidentes that you will transmitir nuestras más sincere apologies a your people—and that they’ll be un poco más rationales than we humans tend to be en such cases… y will accept them.
GARDF-MHALY: It is sad for un líder to place más trust in the equanimity of sus rivales than in that of the members de su propia race.
WILLIAM HURTADO: Probablemente it’s sad, pero it’s también very realístico. Besides, nosotros no somos rivales. Not ahora, anyway… Pero I insist in any case that Doctor Sangan should be given as little información as possible. Él es just un civilian. And the truth is, you’ve already told him demasiado.
At this point, realizing that the tense atmosphere could precipitate a genuine confrontation, the Juhungan observer-host speaks up, even though he isn’t a Coordinator and is theoretically outranked by everyone else in the room.
Let’s call him Mkron-Rve. Human and Cetian lips and throats would be completely incapable of pronouncing his actual name, of course.
Mkron-Rve activates the symbiotic translator-telepath that he wears attached to two of the spines on his uniform. The small organism, which looks somewhat like a quadruped parrot with feather-like antennae, instantly puts his thought-ideas into words.
In proper Spanglish, he basically says that neither the human race nor the Cetians will last much longer unless they both take extreme measures and, most importantly, move quickly. But they are rather foolishly letting their arguments get in the way of that goal.
Then Mkron-Rve adds, speaking of course through the translator-symbiote, that the Olduvailan humans illegally occupying Cetian territory are also civilians, and in any case, everyone present here must not forget that they are on board a combat vessel put at their disposal by the Most Correct Hegemony of Juhung in a manifest sign of goodwill, as representatives of two companion races of the Galactic Community, in order that they may resolve their problems with no further violence—something that the highest governing body of the right honorable hydrogen-breathing race would never have done without first completing an exhaustive study of the most obscure details of the situation.
Juhung, according to some experts, means “la people que use all las words correctamente.”
Emphasis on all…
JHUN-LIKHA: Mkron-Rve habla wisely. Él deserves to be made un Coordinator. No tenemos tiempo for debating detalles or assigning blame; debemos forget nuestras diferencias and undertake un joint rescue. As for data leaks… bear en mente que Doctor Sangan might have refused to take on el caso si two of his former employees were not envueltas. That was algo we could not risk. On my planet nosotros decimos, “Discover dónde están el honor y también duty y the people will follow.”
JUNICHIRO KURCHATOV: Well, on Earth nosotros decimos, “Discover dónde están los profits y people will come corriendo.” Given the laketons, yo creo que this Sangan should have rushed aquí on the double even if su peor enemigo were involved. He’s been trying to get cerca to them por años. I’ve been following su carrera for a long tiempo; él tiene the skills, for sure, pero he wasn’t un especially brilliant estudiante at Anima Mundi, did you know?
MHALY: You have been keeping un ojo en him for so long, General? I think that data point alone suffices para mostrar how special él es. My milk cousin An-Mhaly once harbored, and probablemente still harbors, strong feelings por this Sangan. Therefore I thought him deserving de la verdad. He is a good person. For a human and an hombre, that is.
HURTADO: Okay, maybe we’re judging al hombre too harshly. For a Cetian to fall in love con él, he must not be your run-of-the-mill personaje. Nosotros don’t have a whole lot of otras opciones, either. Let’s let him try the rescue—so long as he signs the most ironclad, restrictive secret confidentiality agreement que nuestros abogados can produce before he lands on Brobdingnag.
LIKHA: As you quiera. Yo insisto that having him work without knowing todos los detalles is más dangerous, not safer. And we truly tenemos few alternativas.
KURCHATOV: So it’s agreed. Tres a uno. For the record, yo estoy en contra, pero… majority rules. Send him in.
And this is where I walk in.
Alone, of course, because when it comes to confidentiality you’re better off not counting on Narbuk. Oh, he’ll keep a lid on it, alright, but he’ll bang that lid like a kettledrum. The Laggoru’s brain is an echo chamber: He’s genetically incapable of keeping things to himself. The second you tell the reptilian a secret, it ceases to be a secret.
So, ignoring his protests, I’ve sent him on to Abyssalia, non-stop. And on his own. Let him figure things out for himself without hiding in my shadow for once. Maybe he can resolve the problem of the grendels spawning out of season without having to get close to them, maybe not. In either case, he’s such a virtuoso at making up excuses, he might be able to convince the anxious ecologists that I’m late getting to them because I’ve run into unavoidable obstacles.
I’m also a bit confused, I won’t deny it. Because the ultrarapid shuttlecraft that Gardf-Mhaly hired for me hasn’t exactly brought me to Brobdingnag…
But rather to something orbiting it. My first impression was that it looked like the enormous excrement of some unknown space organism—not a pleasant thought at all, just a few hours after the tsunami business on Nerea, which gave me enough scatology lessons to last three lifetimes. But when I entered the object, I could see it was a non-human space vehicle.
Indescribable from the outside, it didn’t look Cetian or Laggoru from the inside, either.
What, then? Amphorian? Parimazo? Kerkant?
Or maybe… Juhungan?
What would the hydrogen breathers be doing in the middle of this spat between two oxygen-breathing species? Why so much fuss about rescuing a couple of my old assistants?
To cap it all off, as soon as I walked in I recognized Kurchatov.
Of course, that’s not the name that first came to mind.
Because, as it turns out, this hardass big shot used to be a bit of a slacker when he studied two years of veterinarian biology with me at Anna Mundi…
Back then he was a party animal, famous for getting soused every night. Our friendly nickname for him was Juni Tacho.
Obviously, this was before three generations of scientists in his family finally accepted the fact that he was only interested in colonial insects because his real calling was in the military—something they had obstinately refused to consider possible before then.
Pity about the kid. He was pretty obsessed with soldier ants, militaristic beetles, and the like, but he could have made a good veterinarian biologist. We missed him a lot in our “oceanography studies” over the next few semesters. I was the only one who could out-drink him, and not by many teaspoons…
And now here he is, a full-blown general with so much gold braid on his shoulders it’s a wonder he can hold them up. I hope, for his subordinates’ sake, he doesn’t still drink C2H5OH compounds as enthusiastically as he did when he was a student…