Carnage Aer-ki Jyr (pdf ebook reader .TXT) 📖

time ago, but had kicked the habit when he chewed a little too deeply once and they started to bleed. The Archon raised his hand to his mouth and rubbed his teeth on his index finger, not biting but filing one down a bit, with the sensation kicking in some old memories he’d thought were long gone.

“I went too deep out of a need to help others,” he said some minutes later as they both stood and watched the boat traffic pass underneath them. “Because I thought helping save as many lives as possible was the top priority. My logic says it still is, but my instincts say no.”

“That I can help you with. Would you murder an individual if that death would save 10 million?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s wrong.”

“Then your top priority is not to save the most lives. If it was, you would have gone darkside a long time ago in order to achieve that mission. All invariably do, for saving the most lives requires making sacrifices. It requires betrayal, for you must trade some for others.”

“But you don’t own them, which means they’re not yours to trade.”

“If saving lives was the top priority, it wouldn’t matter. Only what you had the power to do or not do.”

“Are you familiar with a vaccine?” Paul asked as an old memory resurfaced.

“No. What is it?”

“Something Earth used to use before Star Force. They would deliberately infect you with a virus, theoretically in a weakened state, so your body would fight it and win and create antibodies to make you immune to the virus later.”

“But there is no such thing as immunity to an errant virus unless the transmission method is blocked.”

“Yeah, but they didn’t know that back then. Or at least they didn’t tell us that. I learned later, through Star Force records, that the vaccines were maiming and killing a lot of people, but the governments covered it up and protected the vaccine makers because they felt the benefit to the populace outweighed the losses. They were willing to betray a few thousand to save a few million…or potentially save.”

“Did Star Force stop them?”

“Eventually. But I remember them saying on the news…back when it was more propaganda than actual facts…that the highest priority was in saving lives, and that no cost was too great to do so. I guess I had somehow taken the same notion with a caveat. Saving the most lives while maintaining your honor. And it’s dishonorable to kill a few to save millions…especially when those millions aren’t actually saved. But even if they were, and it was guaranteed they’d live forever, it still wouldn’t be right.”

“So the top priority is not to save lives, it’s to do the right thing?” Cal-com asked. “Didn’t Earth’s Klingons have a few words on that subject?”

“Death before dishonor, which they often noted when faced with a situation that seemed to force them to do something cowardly or die with the words ‘today is a good day to die.’”

“They turned the logic trap around on those attempting to leverage them into doing bad things for the sake of saving lives?”

“The Klingons didn’t actually exist. You know that, right?”

“I do, but the way you have spoken of them before they seemed important enough to have been real.”

“They weren’t big on saving lives. More about saving face. But they didn’t back down from a hard fight. They preferred it to stagnation….or actually they just preferred it period.”

“And you admire that?”

“When you grow up amongst a culture of weaklings, liars, and manipulators, sometimes it’s refreshing just to be able to punch a person in the face as a way of saying ‘hi’ rather than it being a crime. Things were really messed up back then, and I didn’t even realize most of it at the time.”

“You’ve never spoken of that before.”

“Problems solved and gone,” Paul said with a shrug. “Davis showed us a worthy path when he created Star Force. I guess I still owe him for that, though I’d forgotten. I’ve forgotten a lot, it seems.”

“If you lose your way, it is wise to backtrack until you find your proper path again, then follow it where it leads.”

“Is that why you brought me here? Because this planet is in bad shape.”

“We’re warriors. We go where the need is, and there is need here. We don’t think well when problems are theoretical. We need to feel them out.”

“There’s nothing here that can’t be solved with some annexation.”

“So why don’t you?”

“Good question. Now that I’m here I’m wondering why we haven’t myself, though I know the logistical reasons.”

“And that is why we must go to where the orbital bombardment will hit rather than relying on scouting reports.”

“We don’t need to bombard them to take over, you know?”

“Same principle. You just found better ways of doing it.”

“But if we annex this place, and the problems are solved, we will lose our purpose…or that’s how it felt before. Now I’m not so sure.”

“It’s because you’re here rather than onboard your ship imagining it. Imagination is limited to what you know. Exploration has no such limitations.”

“Then let’s keep exploring, if you’ll be my eyes so I don’t trip over anything. These robes are horrible for situational awareness.”

“But good for concealment. No one has noticed you are Human. And they don’t even know what a Voku is.”

“Let’s keep it that way. Lead on, my friend…”

3

October 18, 154929

Bo’vu’ma’shu System (Hadarak territory)

8th planet

A brilliant topaz beam shot down from the sky, momentarily blinding Esna-58321JOR-18 as her helmet faceplate switched to an alternate view that showed silhouettes of the enemy minions in the valley below for a split second before switching back to normal when the beam was gone.

It landed farther up the valley,