Chapter 1
“Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable—the art of the next best.”
― Otto von Bismarck
Location: Gok Station
Standard Date: 03 30 632
Janis Tecumseh leaned forward in the plush chair the vid station installed just for her. “What you really need to do is take Canova,” Janis said. She used her interface to call up a graphic of the jump routes around Parthia and Canova, which went out as a background to their chat.
“But that would be an act of war against the Canova System! And the Cordoba Combine has outlawed intersystem wars.” The reporter, Tokljkap, a neuter male of the Jkap clan, with expressive eyestalks and—to Parthians—a soothing voice, was clearly shocked at the suggestion.
This was an interview on a popular news feed, and Janis was getting paid for it, so she was having a ball. She smiled a toothy smile. “The Canova System committed an act of war against your system when they put that fort in Parthian space. And that was also a violation of Cordoba rules. So you are perfectly within your rights to retaliate and—”
“No! The Cordoba regulations are quite clear. Multisystem polities are against the rules. That, after all, is why the Canova system didn’t take over Parthia.”
“But they were getting ready to replace the council of clans, weren’t they?” That was something Clan Gold learned after they got to Parthia. The Canova government was threatening to replace the council of clans with a human government if Parthia didn’t see reason.
“They wouldn’t have done it,” Tokljkap insisted. “It was just a bargaining ploy.”
“How do you know?”
“We have our sources,” Tokljkap said. “Even before the fort was destroyed, they were trying to get enough of the clans to join them to form a Parthian government to replace the one we have. They were afraid that if they installed a human government over a system of Parthians, then the Cordobas wouldn’t accept it as a separate polity.”
“Well, that’s your answer then. Install a human government over Canova after we kick their butts for you.”
“But how could we trust a human government?” Tokljkap shot back in what it clearly considered to be a barbed question. “Humans are lacking in honor, after all.”
Janis laughed. “Well, you probably wouldn’t want me in charge, I’ll grant you that. But what about Clan Danny Gold? Didn’t they come back twice now? And aren’t they including adopted members from your clans?” Janis wasn’t actually pushing an agenda. She didn’t care that much about Parthian politics as long as she could buy and sell here. She was just arguing for the fun of arguing. “For that matter,” she continued, “there’s the new Starchild Clan with little Jenny in charge of it. She has her own ship too, and it’s a warship, if a small one. I understand that the council of clans is trying to determine whether to acknowledge it as a new clan right now.”
Janis enjoyed the way Tokljkap’s mouth-hand scrunched up at the reminder of that. Tokljkap wasn’t fanatically anti-human, but it was no great fan of the human race—or its obscene system of reproduction. It was a proponent of the “close the jump and throw all the humans out” faction of public opinion.
✽✽✽
Jenny Starchild laughed and clapped her hands as she watched Janis playing with the reporter. She was twelve, almost thirteen, and the captain of her own ship. Healthy and well fed, but still slim, with olive skin and brown eyes, Jenny was still learning her interface, as natural as it was. She was the ship Arachne, and—at the same time—she was not quite a teenager yet. She felt her body and Arachne’s body, all at once and all mixed together. She had more control over her body, both her bodies, than she ever had before, but no one could tell any of that by looking at her.
Now that interface kicked in, providing information and correlating facts without Jenny having to ask. The political situation, the military situation, all brought to mind as Janis spoke on the broadcast.
It was grim.
All the way back to ancient history on Old Earth, if a sniveling little weakling that the Powers-That-Were had been casually knocking about somehow managed to win the first battle in a new conflict, they suddenly took on the status of Might-Be-A-Real-Threat. More often than not, that meant the weakling with delusions of grandeur was going to be hammered flat, maybe even exterminated.
Carthago delenda est. That ancient Roman phrase might soon become Parthia delenda est, translated into the galaxy’s multitude of tongues.
Blowing the fort put the cat amongst the canaries, like Mom used to say, thought Jenny. The council of clans had to approve their actions or reject Danny’s clan after they had accepted it. But everyone was worried—even scared—about what the Jackson-Cordobas were going to do. Also, for the bug on the street, there was considerable confusion about where the Jackson-Cordobas left off and the Cordoba Combine began. Tanya was a big help about that since she was a Cordoba-Davis. She was in a good position to clarify that while the Jackson-Cordobas, like the Cordoba-Davises, were affiliated with the Cordoba Combine, they didn’t set—or always follow—Cordoba policy.
The strange thing was that Jenny, with Arachne tied in to sort out the stuff, was following the whole mess. She understood the big issues involved and was rapidly coming to understand the clan politics that were influencing the decision-making process.
Suddenly, Jenny had an idea. She ran it through Arachne, and realized that it would work. At least, she thought it would work. The Kiik clan was related to the Kiig clan and allied with the faction that was opposed to including yet another human clan in the Parthian council of clans.
It was a reasonable concern. Humans were all breeders. If all those breeders were their own clans, they would rapidly swamp the Parthian clans. But Parthian clans didn’t consist of a single breeder pair, or even a single “queen” and a bunch of drones. The Zheck clan, for instance, had fifteen female breeders and twenty-two male breeders.
There was no particular reason that a human clan had to stay wholly human. In fact, neither of the human clans were wholly human. They both had Parthian workers. But they could have Parthian breeders too.
That was what was brought to mind by the article about the Kiik clan. The Kiik had been hit by the recent upheavals again and again. They were a very old clan and very prestigious, but over the last three years they were forced to sell off over half their workers. The news was in one of the gossip blogs, which reported that the Kiik were looking for an alliance. They were going to sell a breeding pair.
Meanwhile, the acceptance or rejection of the Starchild Clan was turning into a referendum on the fleet’s taking out the fort. It was all very complicated . . . and yet it all fit together. If she could get the Kiik on their side, it would shift maybe fifty votes. And fifty votes would make the difference.
Jenny didn’t call Rosita Stuard or Sara Electrum for advice. She didn’t even ask Tanya Cordoba-Davis, her captain who was on board the Arachne. They were humans and the people that mattered for this were Parthians. Jenny called Kiiggaak, the Parthian trader that Goldgok trained. She also got on the shipnet and got her Parthians into the discussion.
“I don’t know, Breeder Starchild,” Kiiggaak said. It knew the human breeder female only slightly. She was in the outsystem for most of the time it worked for the Gold clan. But it knew Startak moderately well. “The Kiik are much more conservative than my own clan. And besides, your ship isn’t large enough for breeding Parthians.”
Parthians didn’t lay eggs. They deposited tadpoles, small aquatic animals that each lived in their own pool and were fed by workers as they grew. After a few years, they started to grow legs and became amphibious, then a few years later they became wholly land animals, about the time they reached physical maturity. But they needed fairly large pools and you couldn’t put them in the same pool because the brainless little monsters would try to eat each other. They didn’t even start to become civilized until they reached the amphibious stage, and you couldn’t manage the hundreds of them that a breeding pair produced on a spaceship. It wasn’t even easy on a space station. The point was, it all took a lot of room and the Arachne wasn’t even vaguely equipped for housing a breeding pair and its offspring.
“Well, for now, they would stay on Parthia. We’d need to buy some land on Parthia to house that part of the clan, or maybe get some space on Gok Station.” Jenny considered. “Maybe we could build our own station. You know that I—ah, we—own a share of the ore from the mining bots, and our escort fee is going to be a lot more than we expected. So we can buy space. The new breeders would not be overcrowded.”
Kiiggaak dipped its left eyestalk in consideration. It was an affectation that Jenny found amusing, since it was one Kiiggaak picked up from Goldkgok, but she didn’t crack a smile. “I will broach the matter.”
Jenny knew that there was a major difference in status between simply being forced to sell breeders to another clan and contributing breeders to a new clan, one that hadn’t yet been accepted by the council or had only recently been included. The first was a public admission that the clan had fallen on hard times. The second was the duty of an elder clan. Or—the way Jenny thought of it—the second let them be all snooty about it. Jenny figured there was a good chance the Kiik would go for it.
It wasn’t a whole plan, but it might get the Parthians off the pot. Get them to take action against Canova. And they must take Canova if they were going to have any chance of survival at all. It was the doorway to the Parthian System.