Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

I sat watching vid records. I was a silent witness at funeral services, at beach parties, at celebrations of various kinds, at their courting procedures. I watched them work, watched them play on the beach, watched them prepare food.

I took a look at troops in combat, though there wasn’t much of that in the archive, probably because getting the footage entailed a degree of risk. It was also the case that troops seldom fought other troops. And for the same reason. The various Nok militaries preferred knocking over villages to taking on armed opponents. It was a style of war-making that appeared to be a recent development.

I watched from a lander as dirigibles dropped their bombs. There weren’t many pictures of the effect of the weapons, which was to say nobody had been on the ground getting shots of Noks with missing limbs, or with massive burns. Mostly, it was strictly a light show. You drifted above the attack site, seeing the flashes, hearing the distant rumble moments later. And it all seemed very precise. And even, in its own strange way, beautiful.

“Paul’s right,” Cathie told me. “We can’t get involved in all that. I don’t think it’s a problem if you just step in and stop one of them from getting killed. Just, if it happens, don’t put it in the report. Better yet, don’t even mention it.” She looked puzzled. “Why would a military force raid a wedding party?”

“They don’t operate the way we do.”

“Explain.” At that point, Cathie had been there only a few weeks.

We were sitting in the common room. There were maybe half a dozen others present, arguing about the evolution of Nok’s four major religious systems. We were off to one side, drinking coffee. “They don’t think in terms of strategy and tactics. They go after the easy targets instead. Places where they can kill a maximum number of victims with minimum risk. The idea is presumably that after a while the other side gets discouraged and gives up. Except that it never happens.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t know. Maybe because attacks like the one on the wedding party get everybody angry and they just fight harder. You get lots of flag-waving, patriotism, falling in behind the head guy.

“The balance of power shifts constantly. Seventeen nations are caught up in the current war. But it’s hard to sort out the sides. There seems to be more than two. It changes. Somebody goes down, and they rearrange the allies to make sure nobody gets too strong. It’s right out of George Orwell.”

“It’s crazy,” she said.

“I know. It’s the political system. The leaders aren’t responsive to the wedding parties. They’re all dictators, and I doubt they care much about anything other than staying in power. And the killing just goes on and on.”

She looked unhappy. Worried. “So what are you going to do?”

Ordinarily, having a woman like Cathie Ardahl so close would have completely absorbed me. But not that night. “I don’t know,” I said. “We’re not going to look very good in the history books. Standing by and watching all this happen.”

I couldn’t be sure but I caught a glimpse of something in her eyes. Respect, maybe. Admiration. Whatever it was, she was taking me seriously. “Art,” she said, “you’re not the first here to go through this. You have to divorce yourself from it. Think of the Noks as a species to be studied.”

“I know.”

“Nothing more than that.”

I wondered whether things would change if the people who made and enforced the policy had an opportunity to get a good look at the carnage. Paul and Cathie and the others, sitting in landers or in the VR chamber, saw only the light shows. And the statistics. Estimates of how many killed in a given attack. How many total casualties. They didn’t experience any of it. I couldn’t be sure, of course, but I suspected my colleagues made it a point to avoid areas where there might be incursions. Or raids. God knew, it was the way I felt. Who needs all that unpleasantness? I’d thought the little coastal village with its bright lights and its upcoming wedding would be safe enough.

I didn’t like the idea that eventually there’d be a change in policy, that we’d adopt a more humane attitude, and everybody would wonder how people like me could have just sat and let it all happen.

I didn’t know it then, but I learned later that, over the years, various directors had suggested intervention. But the requests had always come back with the same reply. The Academy would look into it. For the moment, the Protocol would be respected. And it went on being respected. Nothing ever changed.

“How would you suggest we intervene?” Paul’s voice. I hadn’t seen him come in. “Do you think they’d listen to us if we told them to stop?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “We’ve never tried. How do we know what might happen?”

When I was alone, I brought up the operational instructions for the 44 lander, the one we used. I looked up its range, read about its gravity index, saw what I had to do to disable the AI. And I studied the instructions for emergency situations. How to pilot the craft, how to land, how to manage its mass, how to turn left and right, how to descend, how to operate the lightbender.

In the morning I hijacked a lander.

It wasn’t hard. I just got some sandwiches and soup out of the kitchen, checked out a laser and a tensor, and told the ship’s AI I needed a lander. It apparently had never occurred to McCarver that anyone would disregard specific instructions, so he hadn’t bothered to lock me out of the flight lists.

The result was that within an hour of grabbing the extra food, I was on my way groundside.

“ Where are we going, Dr. Kaminsky? ” asked George.

Nok’s class-G sun floated just above the rim of the planet, painting the clouds gold. Below us, an ocean extended to the horizon. “Night side,” I said. “Engage lightbender.”

“ Engaged. Anywhere in particular? ”

“No. Just get me someplace where it’s dark.”

Nok had anywhere from four to nine continents, depending on how you choose to define the term. Seven of the nine were caught up in the war. The conflict itself was so confusing that it appeared allies in one place were fighting each other elsewhere. Armies seemed to be on unopposed rampages across the globe.

The wedding party had taken place on an island a few kilometers offshore one of the smaller land masses. It was in the southern temperate region. I told George to pass over it. There was smoke still in the air. The harbor in which the three ships had waited sparkled in a rising sun. Broad beaches swept away on both sides.

Nok was a beautiful world, as all living worlds are.

We continued west, outrunning the sun, and soon we were soaring through starlit clouds. I began to see lights. Scattered across the land masses.

Some were constant and, if I was willing to give sway to my imagination, seemed arranged in patterns. Others, usually in more remote locations, flickered and burned.

“ Fires, ” said George.

The dictators held each other’s populations hostage. It was almost a kind of sport. You kill some of mine, I’ll take out some of yours. Everybody goes home happy.

On a dark peninsula, we found an inferno. An entire city, and surrounding woodland, were ablaze. “ This area has undergone a dry spell, ” said George. “ It wouldn’t have taken much to start this. ”

Ahead and below, moving away from the conflagration, lights bobbed among the clouds.

“ Aircraft. ” George put an image on screen. Big, lumbering dirigibles. The Noks had no heavier-than-air vehicles, hence nothing in the way of a fighter. They didn’t have much ground artillery, either. The Noks preferred offensive weapons; they didn’t play much defense. This made places like South Titusville an attractive target for bombers, as opposed to national capitals, or fleets of warships.