The Long Mars

Joshua looked surprised.

‘That’s life in the military, Mr Valienté.’

‘Call me Joshua.’

‘Thank you. But you two are both in the clear. I took some advice on that, my XO did some legal research, and I logged his recommendations and my interpretation. You’re simply advisers. Including you, Mac.’

Mac shrugged. ‘I’m probably going to quit the service anyhow after this.’

‘Sure you are. And you, Joshua – thank you for coming in. I appreciate you putting yourself through this; you didn’t have to. By the way, I didn’t know you’d met Snowy.’

‘He saved my life once. Or at least spared it. I guess that counts as the basis of a friendship.’ Joshua gri

She glanced at Mac, who was paying no attention. Maggie concluded Joshua knew nothing of the role Mac had played in the subsequent calamity to befall the beagles. ‘You said it, Joshua.’

‘Look, Captain, I don’t fully understand why you chose me for this – what do we call it, a hearing?’

‘You could call it that,’ Mac growled. ‘A group of people are on trial for their lives. Or a whole new species faces extermination. Depending on how you look at it.’

‘So why me?’

Maggie thought back over what Shi-mi had advised her, what she knew of this man Valienté. ‘Because you too have been an outsider, back in the early days of stepping. You were different. You know how that feels. And because, despite all that, you have proved yourself to be a decent human being, with sound instincts. Your public record shows it. Also, records from Pearl show that you befriended one of these Next.’ She glanced at her own notes. ‘Paul Spencer Wagoner? So you’re in a position to understand the issues.’

‘I’m not sure I feel like any kind of human being, sitting here in judgement like this.’

Mac gri

Maggie said, ‘The decision will be mine, not yours, Mac. The responsibility is all mine.’

Joshua nodded, though still clearly unhappy. ‘I didn’t do any research. I wouldn’t know where to start, what to look up.’

‘That’s fine,’ Maggie said. ‘Go with your heart. Well. Here we are. I have no fixed agenda in mind, no format, no time limit. Mac, you want to go first?’

‘Sure.’ Mac glanced at his tablet one last time, then spread his hands on the table. ‘To begin with, let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. We’d be taking a Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapon – more powerful than the one that took out Madison, by the way, Joshua, and I know you saw the consequences of that – and setting said nuke off, without warning, in the middle of this township. Of course it has to be without warning if we’re to catch ’em all. I might note there will be the usual knock-on collateral consequences. Last weather forecast I saw for the region from the ship’s meteorologists said the fallout plume would head south-east of here. Other communities will be harmed – many of them having had nothing to do with this business of the Next, as far as we know. That’s the nature of the operation. But Happy Landings itself would be obliterated, along with every living creature in the area aside from the cockroaches – human, Next, troll, whatever.’

Maggie nodded. ‘The military objective is to eliminate what’s considered to be the source of this new phenomenon, the Next.’

‘Correct,’ Mac said. ‘So now we agree what the cost of fulfilling that objective will be, let me give you the single most compelling reason why we should do this now. Because we can.

‘We may not get another chance like this. We suspect there are other Next centres and we’re busy tracking them down, but we’re pretty confident from the genetics that this place has been the primary source so far. This surely won’t kill all the Next, but it will be a massive blow, and would give us time to hunt down and eliminate the rest at our leisure. But if we hesitate—’ He studied Maggie. ‘Right now they’re super-smart, but they’re numerically few, and weak, physically, economically. They don’t have any super-weapons or whatnot – in that regard they are no stronger than we are, for now. But that may not last.

‘I’ve seen the linguistics results, the cognitive tests. Our laughable attempts to measure the IQs of these creatures. They are smarter than us. Qualitatively. As we are smarter than the chimps. Just as a chimp can’t imagine the nature of the airplane flying over his tree top, or even less the global technological civilization of which it’s a part, so we won’t be able to understand, even imagine what the Next will do, say, or produce. Any more than a Neanderthal could have imagined that nuclear weapon down on the ground there in Happy Landings. We should strike now while we still can – while they can’t stop us.’

Maggie said, ‘I can imagine that kind of line being rehearsed in the war rooms. We should rise up and hit them the way the Native Americans should have hammered the Conquistadors when they got off their sailing ships.’

Mac smiled grimly. ‘Or, a better analogy in this particular case, those Neanderthals I mentioned should have picked up their big ugly clubs and smashed in the flat faces of the first Homo sapiens who came wandering into Europe.’

Joshua said, ‘Am I allowed to speak here?’

‘Whenever you like,’ Maggie said. ‘No rules.’

‘In both those cases you referred to, that kind of resistance would only have bought time against the invaders. More Europeans would have followed Columbus and Cortés and Pizarro.’

‘True,’ Mac said. ‘But we can use that time. We ain’t superhuman geniuses like these Next, but we ain’t patsies either. We’re not as weak as the Indians, or the Neanderthals. And we outnumber them hugely. With more time we can organize, keep hunting, run them down. Their DNA is distinctive, remember; you can’t hide that. And there are billions of us, only a handful of them.’ He looked uncomfortable. ‘Also many of them were chipped, in detention in Hawaii. That would help.’

Maggie said, ‘But, Mac, you’re arguing for murder. Cold-blooded, calculated murder. Can you justify that?’

To his credit, Mac kept up his momentum. ‘Maggie – it’s not murder. Not if you buy the argument that this is a separate species, that these Next aren’t human at all. It may be cruel if I shoot down a horse, but it isn’t murder, because the horse isn’t a member of my species. All our laws and customs reinforce that view. Throughout history – hell, throughout prehistory probably – we have put human interests before the interests of the animal. We killed the leopard that chased us across the African sava

‘The Next are in a different category from viruses,’ Joshua said sharply. ‘And we don’t always eliminate, just because we can. We protected the trolls.’ He glanced at Maggie. ‘You were involved in that campaign, Captain. Hell, the example of you bringing trolls into your crew—’

Mac shook his head. ‘The trolls are protected as if they are human, in US law anyhow. They aren’t regarded as fully human, or even equivalent to human. Anyhow the practicalities are different. A troll has never been proved to harm a human save by accident, or under provocation of some kind. It’s always been a human’s fault. The trolls pose no threat. The Next, so it’s feared, may one day pose not just a threat to individual humans, but an existential threat, a threat to us all, just as Cutler says. They may drive us to extinction altogether.’

Joshua said, ‘That’s an extreme position. Even if they were hostile to us, why should it go so far?’

‘Fair question,’ Mac said. ‘But the genetic, linguistic, cognitive evidence all points to one thing – that this is indeed a different species, emerging in the midst of our worlds. And because of that there’s going to be conflict between us – that’s inevitable. A conflict that must, must, end in the elimination of one side or the other. And I’ll tell you why.