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  He indicated that on the chart – the world the League had thrown everything into defending and continued to defend as a tremendsously fortified world.

  ‘In our eyes,’ Alex said, ‘this was a victory – this was the point at which we said This far and no further, protecting all the worlds behind this border, then and ever since. As for all the worlds beyond – worlds we’d befriended and then abandoned, well, we had to prioritise protecting what we now regarded as our own defended space, right? So they were on their own. And the Marfikians – well, we decided long ago that they are monsters, cyborgs, ruthless predators attacking any world they regard as vulnerable, for no other reason that that they live by the rule that the strong must always dominate the weak. That view, that belief, has underpinned everything about who we are in the League ever since – seeing ourselves always as under threat by this monstrous enemy and standing strong against them, but at the same time it has made us afraid of the alien, stopping exploration pretty much in its tracks for at least five centuries and even now making us very wary about how we approach any potentially inhabited world. So that is, for us, the way we see that history, yes?’

  He cleared the chart back to a basic star chart.

  ‘But there is,’ he said, ‘an alternative view of those events, which starts a lot further back. So let’s go back, here, ten thousand years, and look at the situation as it was then.’

  He began highlighting systems again. ‘Cartasay,’ he said. ‘Alar. The Olaret – seven worlds were theirs, the Olaret Archipelago…’

  He went on adding systems, listing their names. Some of them were familiar. Others were not, their people lost to history, as the Alari had been lost. Nineteen species, altogether, had elected not to produce survival genomes, feeling that too awful a burden to bequeath to their children.

  ‘Pirrell,’ said Alex, tapping that in, ‘and Marek.’

  There were no other worlds identified around Marek. Pirrell was the nearest, but Samart, Prisos and all the other hundred-plus inhabited worlds known to be in the Marfikian Empire were not identified at all.

  ‘And now,’ Alex said, zooming in on Cartasay, ‘I will add sovereignty.’

  He touched the screen and a bubble appeared around the world now known as Chartsey, causing some surprise since it was considerably bigger than the system itself. In fact, it encompassed quite a region, as Alex zoomed in further, revealing that Chartsey’s sovereignty encompassed three other systems including Flancer and Canelon.

  ‘This,’ said Alex, ‘is Cartasay. I know we are accustomed to thinking of ‘a world’ as the physical limits of a solar system, but as Trilopharus said when explaining his own world, a world may mean very different things to different people. All of these systems were part of the Cartash world, the outlying ones just as much a part of their world as outer planets are, with us. This was their space, their home, their sovereign territory. It wasn’t defended because they had no need of that, nothing to defend against, but it was understood that this was their space and nobody would set up colonies here or anything like that. Here, at Alar, you can see, their world-space includes the mineral-rich region we’re now mining at Tolmer’s Drift. And the Olaret Archipelago… they would just call this ‘Olar’, which is what was so confusing for us at the start, thinking that Olar was just one planet, one system. And at Pirrell, it was just one planet – here is their historical sovereignty; you can see how small, its actually smaller than the outskirts of their system. This was, at the time, all that they felt the need to say ‘this is ours – we control this space and who comes into it’. Again, a matter of etiquette, really, no kind of defended border. And you may notice that none of these borders are touching. It doesn’t matter how close they may come, there is always a gap, neutral space. And it doesn’t matter how big they are, either. Whether it’s a tiny sphere like Pirrell or a huge sprawl like the Olaret Archipelago, each people decides for themselves how much space around them they need to control in order to feel comfortable, just as we recognise some individuals amongst us who need more personal space than others. There was never any conflict about it – more than enough space to go round, after all. And the Marek – well, the Marek, with their obsessive need for hygiene, it is not surprising really that they felt the need to control a wide space around them. And this is it. This is the Big Bad. Because this, in fact, was Marek.’

  He touched the screen and the 3D shape he’d shown Mister appeared, growing out from the system of Marfik until it was huge. Two of the vertices of the dodecahedron touched, or nearly touched, at Cherque and Lundane, with a direct line running between them. And that odd cone-shaped indentation fitted neatly around Pirrell, nestling them like a ball in a cone-shaped cup.

  Some of them got it quicker than others. Mister was still sitting there staring at, incomprehending, when others were already swearing, shaking their heads or clapping their hands over their mouths, as quite a few did, in instinctive reaction to horror.

  It was a zone which covered, the zone which was, the Marfikian Empire.

  And if that was the case, if that had been their space all along…

  Was Alex saying, then, that they had a right to it?

  It was intolerable. No League citizen could look at that map, not with any understanding of what it implied, without outrage. It would take blaming the victim to a whole new level… Look, it’s your own fault that your world is under cyborg domination and they destroy cities with millions of casualties if you don’t obey their orders. Really, what can you expect when you moved in on their space?

  No. Unthinkable. The League had massive culture-guilt over the fate of the worlds beyond its borders as it was. They had, after all, been the ones who’d explored out there, made friends, shared tech, founded colonies and had several worlds well on the way to becoming League members, too, including Prisos. And then they, a League ship, had opened up the can of cobras that was Marfik. And when the Marfikians emerged, the League had fled, securing a border they felt they could defend and abandoning every other world outside it. And it was true, too, that if people felt guilty and responsible for what had happened out there, then it was because the League was guilty and responsible for it.

  In that light, therefore, even to hint that the Marfikians had some territorial rights over that region was beyond controversial, beyond offensive.

  Alex was aware that he was the focus of extremely dark and worried looks. They trusted him, so none of them was jumping up and shouting abuse. But there were many people drawing breath, hovering on the cusp of protest.

  ‘I am very sorry,’ Alex said. ‘As I said – high impact. The Big Bad. But there it is. The space they now occupy was, once, historically, Marek. Which does not mean for one moment, before anyone gets any daft ideas, that anyone is saying that gives them the right to dominate the worlds which are in that space now, or that we should just abandon them. Far from it. Absolutely the opposite. It is in acknowledging and understanding the history of what has happened there that we have any chance of finding a solution.’

  Tension released. Alex could see it on their faces, in the breath that they let go, in the way they dropped rigid shoulders and glanced at one another.

  ‘So,’ Alex said, putting the star chart up again, ‘allow me to clarify. This, from all the information we’ve gathered from multiple sources, is what we think happened back at the time of the plague. Marek did not close their border as we would think of that, with defences and patrols. They pulled back to their homeworld and they implemented the same kind of Veil technology as Pirrell, a quarantine barrier which we gather was being distributed to lots of worlds at the time, as part of their efforts to combat the plague. There is a tech principle which I hardly need to explain to anybody here, that the harder you run a system the sooner you will wear it out. This might explain why Pirrell’s Veil is still working but the Marek’s, perhaps on maximum settings, had stopped working before our exploration ships arrived. But here we are, ten thousand years back and from the point
of view of everyone else around, the Marek have done this…’

  He shrank the sovereignty dodecahedron right down till it was only enclosing the system of Marek itself.

  ‘As far as everyone else is concerned,’ Alex said, ‘they’ve abandoned these systems, no longer want them. We believe it’s probable that these systems weren’t actually used by the Marek themselves anyway, but had been terraformed to suit the preference of visitors – like guest rooms, planets within their space where visitors could be comfortable and not be treading dirty feet all over Marek itself. So worlds may have been used to seeing those planets as theirs at least to some degree. Anyway it’s apparent that they believed the Marek had given them up. And since there was at the time a pressing need for terraformed worlds for all kinds of lifeboat colonies, people started using them. We don’t know who went first, but let’s say, the Olaret. So, here are their Nestings - Samart, Prisos…’

  He carried on, dabbing in the worlds the Olaret had colonised and then running through the others, filling up the planets which had been occupied when the League set off exploring there. They’d started a few colonies themselves, too, finding worlds with rich biospheres but no people. Prisos and Arak had fired off several colonies as well, almost as fast as they’d started building ships for themselves.

  ‘So, this is how we see things,’ Alex said. ‘But if you can imagine it for a moment from the Marek perspective… they have gone into quarantine and shut down their comms, but it seems that as far as they’re concerned the wider territory that has always been theirs is still theirs. They expect people to respect that and the last thing they’d imagine would be that other people would dump colonies full of infected people right there, not even on their doorstep, but right inside their home. Remember the Urr? Think about what you said about how you would react if a billion stinky poo-squirting disease ridden Urr arrived and set up home on a planet in your home system. Think about how obsessively hygienic the Marek were even when entertaining people like Trilopharus. And now just try to imagine what humans – plague ridden, hairy, aggressive humans, teeming by the billion and emerging from their worlds on starships… imagine what that looked like to them. To them, we are the Urr and from the Marek point of view we have invaded their home and are spreading disease all over it. I think we would all agree that we ourselves, in that situation, would feel ourselves fully justified in telling people to get...’

  ‘No.’ Mister LIA had held his self-control for as long as he could, but this was beyond bearing. ‘No!’ he was reddening with rage, the fingers of his right hand clenching into a white-knuckled fist as he shifted to the edge of his seat and leaned forward, hectoring the skipper. ‘Don’t you dare!’ he snarled. ‘Don’t you dare call the people of those worlds filthy and disgusting and ask us to see things from the Marfikian point of view! What kind of bloody Fleet officer are you?’ He was on his feet, now and stepping forward, ‘You’re a disgrace to your uniform! A Marfik-lover! No!’ Alex had not even needed to look for Simon, he was ready and right there, moving to put a mediband on the LIA agent’s wrist. ‘Get your hands off me, I’ll…’

  He started to make an unarmed combat move, but Simon was quicker.

  ‘Come on, sunshine,’ he said, marching Mister out of the auditorium with an officer and a couple of crew going after them just in case they might be needed.

  Alex looked resigned. He had tried to warn him. And he’d done what he could to support him, too, including him in things, building trust, steering him towards a friend he might feel able to confide in. But the LIA agent was never going to tolerate being asked to look at anything from the point of view of the evil he feared more than anything in life.

  And it was, after all, a big ask, to expect people in a war which had gone on for centuries to take a mental step back from it and try to see things from the point of view of the enemy. Only using the Urr to consider the issues hypothetically had enabled them to attempt that. That and raising awareness of their own alien-intolerance and seeing how easy it might be, how tempting, to go down a route of biotech enhancement.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Alex said, very aware of the awkward, embarrassed silence, ‘that he was listening.’

  ‘Not taking it in, dear boy,’ Buzz said, with a placid air. ‘Poor lad – when people are overloaded they do tend to grab on to what they think is being said and react emotively rather than listening and processing.’

  He hardly needed to tell Alex that, but then, he wasn’t saying it for Alex’s benefit. He was explaining for the crew, putting the LIA agent’s outburst into context.

  ‘Yes,’ Alex said thoughtfully. ‘Well, it is an overload, of course, even for those of us accustomed to dealing with high impact events and information. And this one…’ he tapped a finger on the chart, ‘is a lulu.’

  People laughed – nervously, not with any burst of humour, but with a further lowering of tension at the skipper’s frank acknowledgement of how difficult this was

  ‘But,’ Alex said, ‘hard as it is, I have to ask you to consider the theory that the Marek regard this territory as theirs, historically. They are wrong, of course. Species can’t just turn up thousands of years later and say those worlds used to be theirs and now they want them back. To us, that’s obvious. But it isn’t to the Marfikians. In their eyes, the space is theirs and they are doing what they have always done – trying to keep it clean and under their control. And the methods they use, of course, are logical, ruthless and terrible. They are monsters. They’ve engineered all the emotions out of themselves and turned themselves into living machines and this is what living machines do when they are faced with a problem. They work out a solution based on logic, pure logic, with no consideration of morality, no guilt, no compassion. The most efficient way they can control all the worlds in that space with a minimum of resources is to destroy a city whenever planets don’t do as they’re told. That is monstrous, utterly monstrous and we have to find a way to stop them. So nothing has changed, there, those worlds still need our help.

  ‘I would,’ Alex said, ‘call it quits there for today and give that time to settle. But you are smart people.’ He was looking around, not just at the auditorium but at the screens showing all the people watching round the ship. And there were one or two already who were looking back at that chart with arrested expressions. Hang on… ‘It will not be long,’ Alex predicted, ‘before you start realising the implications of that chart. So I will call a tea break at this point and I will ask you all to take some time out, have a quiet cuppa or go for a walk around, whatever you need to let things calm down. We’ll reconvene in half an hour.’

  Most of them had worked it out before then and those who hadn’t had had it muttered to them. Hissing, incredulous conversations had been gaining pace all over the ship. A few people had taken themselves off into showers, either to swear or to cry. Most were just looking calm, but grim.

  ‘All right, thank you,’ Alex said, when everyone had resumed their seats and as the buzz around the ship quietened to expectant silence, ‘I am going to talk,’ he said, ‘about something all of us will find painful. So I need to make it absolutely clear, first of all, that I say this with utter respect, honour and gratitude to the people who have lost their lives in combat against the Marfikians. Neither their courage, nor their sacrifice, will be in any way tarnished by anything I have to say.’ He paused for a moment and said, very steadily, ‘We need to talk about the Battle of Cherque.’

  ‘Knew it!’ said a voice, in somewhat inappropriate triumph. There was some nervy laughter, some scolding glares and at least one person who kicked him on the ankle.

  Alex smiled, glad of the little byplay, because he could see that it had been a tension buster, too.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘No need to remind any of you about the Battle of Cherque, of course and any civilians amongst us not familiar with the facts will have to look them up afterwards.’

  He certainly didn’t need to remind them about it. It was the battle as far
as the League was concerned, their most famous historic battle and the one which had in many ways defined them, resonating through the centuries.

  It had been both the worst defeat the Fleet had ever suffered and their most remarkable victory. More than four hundred ships, the biggest fleet the League had ever assembled, representing most of their spaceworthy warships at the time, had headed off to deal with the Marfikians once and for all. Their intention had been to liberate Prisos and to use that as a base of operations to push on and attack Marfik itself.

  They had never got as far as Prisos. Marfikian attack craft had come at them out of nowhere and had kept coming, again and again, strafing past so fast that the Fleet ships could barely get a shot fired, but firing their own missiles with appalling accuracy.

  By the time the surviving CO realised that they were completely outmatched and ordered the fleet to turn back, there were two hundred and forty eight ships left. But the Marfikians had been merciless, harrying them relentlessly. By the time they’d reached Cherque, only a hundred and two ships had remained.