James Gardner: Hunted

"Well," Festina said, looking at the purple twilight rather than me, "if you’re all right here, I should head back to Jacaranda. The Celestian authorities are supposedly fixing the recruiter problem even as we speak, but someone has to keep an eye on them."

"Shouldn’t I help you?" I asked.

"Nah," she told me, "watchdogging planetary governments is my job. You just look after your own people."

She’d said the same things up in the ship — couldn’t stay long, work to do, no need for me to help. Yet she’d still come to see me safely down on Celestia.

Maybe she just didn’t want to say good-bye with Prope watching. Festina longed to nail the captain with a few good punches for marooning us on Troyen; but since Prope had been following my orders, decking her wouldn’t be fair. Instead, Festina gave Prope the cold shoulder and spent all her time with me. That probably hurt Prope way more than a simple whack in the jaw — the captain was always staring at us venomously, as if it pierced her to the heart that I’d chosen Festina over her.

Prope obviously believed Festina and I were up to something steamy. But we weren’t: we just talked. About the responsibilities of power, and the ways of power, and the limitations of power. A crash course in galactic politics, and a whole lot of reminders not to see people as children who needed Daddy’s help.

I think hive-queens have a gene that makes them go all condescending about their subjects. Now I had that gene too… but Festina did her best to help me get over it. Never once did we talk of judo mats. Never once, in all our trip back from Troyen, did we touch each other.

I’d been afraid my pheromones would start acting up and make her go all crazy against her will.

I don’t know what Festina was afraid of.

"Okay," she murmured in the Celestian twilight. "Time to go." She stepped toward me, and just for a moment, she looked straight up into my eyes. Then she rose on tiptoe and kissed me on the cheek.

I couldn’t help remembering that woman back on Willow, the one pretending to be Lieutenant Admiral Ramos. It made me kind of wistful that the real Festina wasn’t the one who kissed me on the lips.

But that was just me, being stupid.

I’ve seen too many science fiction universes where humans are important.

If life is common in our universe, a lot of alien species must be way ahead of human technology. After all, plenty of star systems are billions of years older than ours; if planets in those systems had evolution working on a similar time-scale to Earth, they could have produced intelligent species whose technology is a billion years better than ours.

That’s one heck of a headstart.

So I imagined a universe in which humans are hopelessly outclassed by thousands of alien species, some of whom had FTL travel back when our ancestors were hamster-like things trying not to get stepped on by dinosaurs. However, I didn’t want humans in my stories to be downtrodden slaves of bug-eyed monsters with superior technology; it seemed more likely that highly advanced aliens just wouldn’t care about humans. They definitely wouldn’t want to govern us — we humans don’t want to govern earthworms, do we?

Therefore, all my books have started with the League of Peoples: an alliance of super-powerful aliens who are happy to let us humans (and other such primitive species) do whatever we like… provided we don’t cause trouble. Specifically, the League doesn’t want homicidal creatures leaving their home star systems and traveling elsewhere — that’s like letting a disease spread. If you do have murder in mind and you try interstellar travel, the League infallibly executes you the second you "cross the line" from one star system to the next.

This ever-present threat has influenced much of the action in my first three novels, but oddly enough, the League never directly killed anyone in those books. That all changes in the fourth book, Hunted. The League executes almost everybody on a navy starship, and the single human survivor has to find out why.