The Starship Theseus

5. Do we really have to protect the bad guys?

The stimulant dissolved under Nathan’s tongue. He was approaching his limit before his mind would be affected by the carefully balanced drugs in the thin wafer, but he couldn’t sleep now. Not now that he knew . The official and the unofficial version of the Aurealian – Deathsworn conflict that he’d been taught were both fabrications.

The fact that he had spent his life believing lies about the only two non-earth origin sapients known to exist, and the sources of their conflict, filled him with rage. But at the same time, he understood why the deception was necessary. Why the UEOSC lied about what it had been told by the belligerents, and about what it knew from other methods.

This war between aliens was an existential crisis for the UEOSC. Yosca was not a sovereign government. It was an organization dedicated to peace and the preservation of life, but it passed no laws, nor did it enforce them. That was the role of its allied military forces, of which the ESF was just one of many.

That the UEOSC possessed a weapon like the Theseus was pushing the boarders of several interstellar treaties, which Yosca itself had brokered. It’s modular nature was not only a feature of redundancy, it was a method of skirting several key provisions which had been put in place to limit the council’s power by classifying each module as a separate vessel.

Which, to be fair, they technically were.

"How are you feeling?" Katherine asked him, showing actual emotional concern for him for once. It wasn’t that she was typically unfriendly. She was just so professional to the point where she came off as an ice queen most of the time.

"It’s a lot to take in. I get why I wasn’t – why nobody knows the truth."

"Oh, people know. The right people," she answered. "Representatives of all of the UEOSC’s military alliances have been briefed in full."

"Then why the fuck! Why is nobody doing anything about it? It’s easy to just fucking say ‘they’re not Earth origin so our hands are tied,’ but if the people knew half of the shit you just told me there would be violence in the streets. People would be lynching polit--"

"That’s exactly why this knowledge is so tightly controlled, and why nobody is doing anything about it," Katherine answered gently. She reached out to grip his hand in a surprisingly human gesture. She was actually in the room with him this time, she had jumped over to his habitation module to read him in personally. "Try to predict the consequences of what you just said in terms of lives lost. Human lives, Aurealian lives, and Jurassian lives. Then remember the UEOSC’s express purpose for existing."

Nathan suppressed his knee jerk reaction and actually followed the various chains of logic in his head. Despite the fact that his genome was largely unmodified, he was fairly intelligent. The brainjack helped him with numbers when he needed it, but for logic and moral questions, he relied entirely on his upbringing.

"People would lynch their politicians if they refused to act," he said after a moment. "Fuck. Half of the colonies out there are already powder kegs ready to explode as they try to stride the balance between human rights and the rights of other sapients. The protests to get their governments and military forces to help the Aurealians would turn into riots, and people – people of all species – would die in the violence. Fuck, the death toll would be terrible if the more obstinate and oppressive governments dragged their heels."

"That’s part of it," Katherine agreed.

"And almost all of the military forces have signed a non-aggression treaty," Nathan realized. "They’re authorized to deal with piracy and criminal actions only. But the Jurassians aren’t human, according to their laws and customs they’re doing nothing wrong. If one force attacks them, they can approach all of the rest of them and claim that their rights were violated. Fuck, I’ll bet the legal web of treaties is so damned convoluted that it would take decades of legal work to figure out a justification not to defend the Jurassians with all available force, including against the Aurealians."

"That’s another part. Every interstellar treaty would have to be rewritten. The truth is that we’ve already started the process of doing exactly that, but you don’t need the details. Most of the treaties covered a first contact situation, but none of them were prepared for two alien sapients engaged in a war of extinction," Kathy informed him. "A host of aliens hostile to human life? We were prepared for that. Aliens which outclassed us technologically? We’d thought of that too. But this particular situation landed in a legal blind spot. Our best course of option is to invite both belligerents into the UEOSC and mediate a peaceful solution, but the Jurassians won’t agree to a ceasefire, and the Aurealians can’t . The most aide we can legally provide either side is humanitarian efforts, and the protection of significant population centers."

"And Horthus Prime is a significant population center, which means we’re legally required to protect it. Fuck! Do we really have to protect the bad guys?"

"We have to protect Horthus Secondary too," she said sadly. "Although that protection extends only to weapons of mass destruction which will inflict significant casualties to non-combat personnel. We’re not obligated to defend military installations. Hell, the Aurealians can mass drive their cities from orbit provided they give the civilians sufficient time to evacuate and prepare."

"The fucking Horthians are eating people down their, and you’re telling me that we are legally obligated to protect them because they don’t see why such actions are morally reprehensible?" Nathan exploded.

"That is not what I said, Nathan. I said that we cannot let the Aurealian fleet target the Horthian civilian population. That is the limit of our legal obligation. And there are other factors which you have not considered. You still haven’t figured out the Theseus’s true mission. Take a moment to compose yourself and think about what I’ve told you. You’re tired and overwhelmed. Jon told you that this mission is morally just, and I stand by that statement with every fiber of my being. Jon has been waiting for this opportunity for decades. History will either remember us as disavowed criminals, or heroes responsible for bringing the longest and deadliest war known to human history to an end."

"Fuck!" Nathan exclaimed, but he didn’t ask any follow up questions, not yet. Instead he went into the mess, where he poured himself a cup of coffee. The stimulant he’d taken earlier contained some caffeine, but the blend of chemicals meant that there wasn’t very much, and a cup of joe felt like a good idea to calm his mind.

"I’m just a fucking kid," he whispered to himself. "The old man’s talking about changing history, setting precedent that might affect all of humanity and its allies, present and future. And He’s asking a fucking nineteen year old kid who washed out of the ESF because he has a fucking phobia of dying in stasis to help him. Fuck, I just came along to get a ride in a cool fucking spaceship. I am so far out of my depth here that I’ll have to worry about explosive decompression if I even try to swim to the surface."

The coffee helped. It was good coffee. Not grown on earth, but one of the many garden worlds that exported vast amounts of food to other colonies struggling to reach self-sustainability. It was better than the coffee he remembered drinking on earth, before he’d abandoned his childhood home to explore the stars. Was that because the coffee was better? Or maybe his father just didn’t know how to brew a good cup? Or could it just be because he’d applied for emancipation at age fourteen and never looked back – except to send messages to his mother – and his tastes had changed in the last five years.

Thinking of home, thinking of his mother, he wished he could ask her advice. She saw things in terms of her religion, true, but she explored secular morality with even more vigor. Reconciling what she saw as ‘God’s law’ with modern philosophy and morality was a passion of hers that Nathan hadn’t really understood when he was younger. He still didn’t, not really, but that was because he didn’t believe like she did. Few people did outside of the commune that Nathan had been born into, and those like it scattered throughout UEOSC space.

It was one of the reasons he had left. The ESF had been his ticket off of Earth. Then the Theseus had been his ticket into Yosca – dammit. He had been so proud when he had sent that message back to his mother. They may believe very different things, but one of the things they agreed upon was their opinion of the UEOSC and its raison d’etre. The Theseus had left before she’d been able to send a reply, but he knew that she would be proud of him. She had disapproved of his joining the ESF to be a foot soldier, but a diplomat of the UEOSC? He had thought at the time that his role was more of that of a spy than a diplomat, but he had carefully phrased his way around that. She could always tell when he was lying, but she would understand if he had to bend the truth. And besides, weren’t most diplomats just spies that announced their movements?

What would she think of all of this? He could really use her advice right now. He’d even be willing to pray with her just to get her opinion.

Either the coffee or thinking of home, and his mother, worked to clear his head. Refilling his mug, and filling one for his companion, he returned to sit at the small table in the dining area. Reserved for officers, a holoemitter was built into the top of it. After the things he had seen there, Nathan would never be able to eat at that table again. Katherine accepted her mug from him, but sensed that he wasn’t ready to speak again yet and respected his wishes.

"Who built the cloning facilities?" he asked after more than ten minutes of silence. "Cloning doesn’t seem like Jurassian tech. The way they’re using it might be right in line with their worldview, but the tech itself just doesn’t mesh with what we know about their abilities. Their medicine is crap. How can they have advanced cloning facilities and shitty first aid at the same time?"

"We believe that Horthus Prime, and the other worlds we’ve identified with similar facilities, were originally Aurealian worlds," Katherine answered. "It makes sense when you think of them as methods of increasing their population following initial colonization. Aurealians have three sexes, as you know. A female, and two … well, they’re not exactly both males, but they both contribute genetic information to the child that then gestates in the female, who also contributes equal genetic information. That’s fairly normal for the fauna of their worlds as well, although their plant equivalents use a completely different method of sexual reproduction. But for Aurealians, the female is the bottle neck in establishing a self-sustaining population capable of reproducing without the intervention of technology. All of the Aurealians we’ve identified being produced by the facilities are female. All of them."

"Makes sense, yeah. Finish the terraforming, xenoforming, whatever you call it, then clone up a bunch of first generation colonists. Must be nice to be in a bachelor’s paradise like that," Nathan chuckled.

"Actually, we’re fairly certain that the entire process was automated. The cloning facilities generated the first generation of colonists, yes. Then they would be impregnated with preserved genetic information to establish the second generation. These worlds? They’re old. Tens of thousands of years old, and so are the facilities. It’s amazing that they still work. The Theseus only has an expected operational life of two centuries. Yeah, we can push it beyond that, but the Aurora drive, PMT systems, and other vital tech will be outside of their shelf life. Two hundred years is the point where we expect it’ll be safer to dismantle and recycle it and build a new one than to continue to operate it."

"So either the Jurassians are maintaining, or the ancient Aurealians really built their shit to last," Nathan guessed.

"Basically, yeah," she agreed.

They both paused to sip their coffees. They both took it black and unsweetened.

"So, the timeline of the war as we’ve figured it out is as follows: the ancient Aurealians sent out a bunch of automated colony ships, which xenoformed worlds throughout the conflict zone tens of thousands of years ago. They do their thing for a while, but then the Jurassians show up and decide that Aurealians are absolutely delicious. The fact that they’re intelligent – I mean, they BUILT WORLDS by remote control for fucks sake – is irrelevant to their sense of morality. For some reason their technology is almost perfectly on par, but Aurealians suck at thinking like warriors, so their weapons systems lag behind while the rest of their engineering is superior to the Jurassians, putting them more or less in a stalemate. At some point the Jurassians chase the Aurealians off of a bunch of the worlds they’d colonized and, what’s far worse, they figured out how to operate the facilities used to populate the colony in the first place."

"That’s a fairly accurate summary, but it’s missing a few details," Katherine said. "Nathan, the Jurassians didn’t come out of nowhere. We’ve located their home world. That’s exactly why we’re calling them the Jurassians. The scientists studying it say that the flora is extremely reminiscent of that of the Jurassic era on earth. The fauna differs, but there are multiple families of animals which resemble the Jurassians’ basic appearance and physiology. Multi-pigmented semipermeable skin like an amphibian from earth, skeletal structure similar to avians or reptiles, although very few things on their world are capable of flight, and those are insect equivalents. The Jurassians are everywhere, an estimated population of three point six billion, which is pretty impressive considering their dietary restrictions and their technology level."

"The Deathsworn have FTL. Yeah, it’s just skip drives, but if they can figure that out then--"

"Nathan, you don’t understand. The heavy-world Jurassians are late iron age at best. And the eggheads are fairly certain that they could never develop a method of space travel without outside intervention."

Nathan jerked in surprise, almost spilling his coffee. "But they did. They have an entire armada. Maybe they just let their home world return to nature, like we’re doing with Earth."

"Did they? Do they? Are they? Or are they just using the advanced technology of another race which they managed to figure out how to operate? Nathan, Ulessa – That’s the local’s word for their planet, at least in the predominate language – Ulessa is a Super Earth. One point nine times earth gravity. The rockets humans used during the early space exploration might not have even gotten off the ground, let alone achieved escape velocity. We have PMT, so orbit-to-surface is trivial when we already have ships in orbit. But we’re restricted to land drones and ultra-light aerial surveilance drones. We’re pretty certain that air travel will never be a thing on Ulessa unless we introduce it to them ourselves, but so far we’re in observation mode only. The Jurassians on Ulessa, they have no idea about the Deathsworn or the Horthians or any of the atrocities that their cousins are committing throughout the conflict zone. They hide from our aerial drones because they believe it’s unnatural for things not to touch the ground. More than unnatural, it’s a sign of the apocalypse. Their world has multiple impact craters, many of which are geologically recent. They’ve been hit before, and they remember it."

"And we’re certain that isn’t why they lost their tech?" Nathan asked.

"There’s more," Katherine explained. She stared at the dregs of her coffee gone cold, then set the mug aside. Waving her hand, she activated the holoemitter embedded in the table. With a few swipes and motions, she brought up the information she wanted.

"The Jurassians are more or less like us genetically. DNA based, although their genetic alphabet is different. Sexual reproduction with two sexes, two pairs of twenty eight chromosomes. We have hundreds of Deathsworn genetic profiles from the action on the Elizabeth, and it wasn’t hard to gather a comparative number of samples from the Ulessians."

As she spoke, the hologram showed what he vaguely representative of the chromosomes in question, paired up and arranged by size. As her explanation progressed, the representation suddenly cloned itself, with a label on top indicating ‘Ulessian’ and the one beneath indicating ‘Jurassian.’ Nathan had no trouble following along with her, the differences between uplifts and native species were generally explained along the same terms.

"The Jurassians, the spaceborn species, is clearly related to the native Ulessians," she explained. "Yet the eggheads say that while the Ulessians evolved naturally, the Jurassians had the blue areas of genetic information added to their DNA."

About ten percent of the Jurassian DNA lit up in little bands of various thickness.

"At the same time, the Ulessians possess a significant amount of DNA material which the Jurassians lack, indicated in red," she continued.

Almost thirty percent of the Ulessian chromosomes lit up, again in bands of various thickness.

"It’s mostly junk or detrimental DNA that’s missing, but there’s also a number of proteins and enzymes which are replaced by the blue insertions. Except they’re not the same. How’s your biochemistry?"

"I washed out of the Marines, ma’am," he reminded her. "I joined when I was seventeen after three years of cramming to meet the basic education requirements. Before that I was in an anachronistic Christian commune. Some of my friends growing up would curse you out just for trying to explain genetics to me."

"Right. Sorry. Well, excluding the red DNA that’s useless or detrimental, all of the red DNA that was replaced with blue versions serve basically the same function, but with different proteins, or different chirality, or, well, honestly I don’t understand it myself. Not well enough to explain it properly, at least But here’s the thing, Nathan. We’re pretty certain that those changes were made specifically to allow the Jurassians to eat fauna not native to Ulessa. In fact, we’re pretty certain that most of the Jurassian diet would be poisonous to an unmodified Ulessian. Without those modifications, a Jurassian could not eat Aurealian flesh and survive."

Nathan allowed the information to sink into him for a few moments before exhaling a punctuating "Fu-uck. And we don’t think that the Jurassians did it to themselves, do we?"

"We do not," Katherine agreed.

"So what do we think? Because I’m barely keeping up at this point, to be completely honest."

"There are several competing theories," Katherine informed him. "One is that the modifications to the Jurassians were made by the Aurealians. The technology they would need for such a thing is only a step beyond the cloning facilities that we’re attributing to their ancestors. The war and resulting migration of their peoples explains why such technology, and even the knowledge that they possessed it, would be lost."

"So the leading theory, if I’m understanding you right, is that this entire war, which we have estimated to have cost billions, if not trillions, of lives … The Aurealians did it to themselves? Why would they do that? Why would they take an apex preditor, make it able to eat them, and then teach it how to fly their space ships?"

"As I recall, you and Tony are fast friends," Katherine pointed out. "The changes to the Jurassians were changes of metabolism, not intelligence. Tony is a gentle soul, but his increased intellect makes him far more dangerous than any of his man-eater ancestors."

"Man-eater is a no-no word around Tony," Nathan reminded her. "And he wouldn’t speak with you for weeks if you even suggested he was related to one, no matter how distantly."

"Sorry, but I was making a point."

Nathan could only shrug. He knew what she meant, but it was hard for him to imagine Tony as anything other than his friend, a friend she had just insulted. "So, the Jurassians are uplifts gone rogue? That’s what we think?"

"Not exactly." She sighed and scratched her temple, right about where Nathan’s brainjack was, except that Katherine’s brain was all natural. "The Jurassian and Ulessian culture and social structure is very similar. The Ulessian have Unnamed making up the majority of their population, with Named individuals of importance, and when they go to war they swear an oath mostly equivalent to the Deathsworn. Aside from that, Ulessa is actually quite a bit like iron age earth, with tribes, city-states, and nations of various sized, usually led by an individual of prominence such as Horthus. Travel is severely limited, which explains why the Jurassians have a comparatively monolithic structure that stretches entire star systems while Ulessa is divided against itself like … well, like us. Even now, we’re still split into thousands of different camps. The UEOSC focuses on interstellar relations, but if you actually look at it human politics are exponentially more complicated than that even without getting into inter-species relations.

"But aside from those slight differences in social structure, they show no marked differences in intellect. Vast differences in the available technology, but to be honest, we’re not much smarter than cavemen either. We just have better education and access to technology they couldn’t dream of.

"The Aurealians, if it was the Aurealians who modified the Jurassians, did not try to elevate the Ulessians as we tried to elevate our friends and allies from earth. They simply made the Jurassians capable of eating different foods."

"I still don’t understand why the Aurealians would build themselves an apex predator that actually eats them," Nathan protested.

"We don’t think that was their intention. Not for the Jurassians to eat the Aurealians themselves. We think they were trying to make them able to survive on the fauna that the Aurealians brought with them from wherever they came from, and at some point the Jurassians realized that they could eat the Aurealians as well, and that evolved into the situation we face now."

Nathan considered the explanation. "That still doesn’t explain why they would do such a thing. Why not just leave the Ulessians alone?"

"We think this is why," Katherine explained, interacting with the hologram again. The genetic information vanished, and after swiftly shifting through the directory she brought up an image of a planet. Text at the bottom identified it as Ulessa. It looked surprisingly earth like, unlike most potential colony worlds until the late stage of terraforming. With oceans, vast lakes and river systems, and vast swaths of greenery and occasional deserts, it could be mistaken for earth if you didn’t pay attention to the twisting shapes of its continents. The image itself didn’t give a sense of scale, after all.

"Here," she said, pointing towards one of the land masses. The hologram zoomed in on one of the landmasses, but remained in an aerial orbit. It took Nathan a moment to understand what he was looking at.

"A crater? Isn’t that sort of normal for Super Earths? I mean, they have all that gravity -"

"We dated it. It’s about seven or eight hundred years old, which predates the beginning of the Aurealian – Deathsworn war by about a century according to our intel."

"Oh." Nathan took a moment to process the information.

"What would early human settlers have done if we’d found peers out there among the stars? Like us, but different. Intelligent tool users, but technologically primitive. And as soon as we learned that they existed, we realized that they were living on borrowed time, that their Armageddon Clock was ticking down."

"We would have saved them," Nathan said. "Tried, at least. Whatever we could do, whatever it took."

"Exactly."

"That’s … I can’t even process that," Nathan said. "That’s Shakespearean levels of making Greek tragedy even more tragic, there. And the Ulessians survived the impact, which means that the monsters the Aurealians released upon themselves didn’t need saving in the first place."

"Yes."

"Do they know?"

"We haven’t asked. Ulessa isn’t in the charts that we have examined from either Aurealian or Jurassian navigation systems. Whatever the Aurealians tell themselves, however they are coping, it’s not our place. At least that’s the leading thoughts on the matter."

"Fuck," Nathan whispered. He was so far past emotional overload and exhaustion at this point that all he could do was try to understand the information as Katherine shared it with him.

"There’s an alternate theory. One which is both less tragic, and yet more troubling for its larger implications," Kathy said after he had been silent for several moments.

"Is it any better than the Aurealians attempting to save a race of doomed sapients only to get ‘et tu, Brutus’ed for centuries?" he asked

"I’m not certain. The alternate theory is that a third race of xenosapients released the Jurassians upon the Aurealians. Motivation and intentions unknown and unclear."

Once again, Nathan required time to process. He looked at his coffee mug, then got up and began to leave the mess hall.

"I’m going to take a sedative and sleep. If you have any more nukes to drop on me, you can do it when I wake up."

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