“It could be something worse,” Amanda said. “Maybe they aren’t judging the egg but the parents. If you’re a troublemaker, your egg’s bad.”
Kris shivered. “And every mother just accepts that their egg is trash?” Yes, kids were out of the question while she commanded a fleet on the tip of the spear, but she was a woman, and a newly married one at that.
“That’s where things get interesting,” Amanda said. “Tell them, Jacques.”
“No, there are those that grab their egg and flee into the deep woods or jungle.”
“And get eaten,” Kris said.
“Some. Maybe many, but not all. There’s a tribe of hunter-gatherers that are surviving in the deep woods,” Jacques said.
“I thought you said that being thrown out of the community was a death sentence,” Kris said.
“It is, for most, but there are exceptions. And imagine the attitude of Alwans that don’t care for the elders and have managed to stand up to the lions and tigers and bears in the deep woods with just their short bows and spears,” Amanda said.
“They must be good at hiding, and good at fighting when cornered,” Jack said slowly. “Just the folks that make great Marine recruits.”
“We don’t have a lot of nanos for recon dirtside,” Jacques said, “but I’ve got a few following that tribe, or tribes. I’ve also got a theory; honey, should I tell them?”
“Go ahead, love. All they can do is laugh.”
“I don’t think all Alwans have the same brain.”
“I’ve been wondering if all the Alwans were even the same species,” Kris said. “They look so different from equatorial to temperate to polar.”
“Oh, they’re all drawn from the same gene pool,” Jacques said. “Unlike us humans, who almost went extinct twenty-five or thirty thousand years ago, they have a much more diverse genetic pool to draw on. But I’m starting to think that there are parts of their brains that some Alwans don’t use, like many of the elders. Others, like the ones that hang around us and are running free in the forest, do use it.”
“Could the egg selection have something to do with that?” Kris asked.
“It kind of has me wondering. The ostrich types down at the equator don’t have an egg review. They’re a lot more aggressive and more willing to think about the future and accept that there is a past. Not so much with the elders here. What I’d give for brain scans from a couple of hundred subjects! I’ve checked out several volunteers, Alwans working with us, and they all showed the same. The problem is getting an elder.”
“The problem is the elders,” Jack said.
“Am I interrupting anything?” Mr. Benson said from the door.
“No, I think we’ve beaten this live Alwan as much as we can,” Kris said.
Amanda and Jacques nodded.
“You have a problem for me?” the former admiral said.
“Has your mess or restaurateurs bought any fresh fruit or vegetables dirtside?” Kris asked.
“Oh, that problem. Yes, Kiet, the guy running our Thai restaurant, dropped down to the farmers’ market yesterday to see about some fresh chickens, among other things.”
“How’d it go?” Amanda asked.
“He found a truckload of chickens and offered to buy them. Farmer asked him for one personal computer per chicken and wanted at least three of the good ones like Granny Rita got. The rest could be just so-so,” the former officer said.
Jack whistled. “That’s kind of steep.”
“Well, Kiet loves nothing better than haggling, so he counters with two, maybe three for the truckload. The farmer wouldn’t budge past one computer for two chickens. He says he has contracts to fill, and he might be able to swap computers for chickens, but he’s got a lot of contracts. The rest of the market was the same. Everyone owed someone something and needed a whole lot to settle the contract. Kiet came home empty-handed.”
The former admiral paused to study Kris and the tableful of people around her. “I take it that Kiet ran into something more than just a lot of opening bids from hard bargainers.”
“Kiet seems to have run full speed into a famine that’s been going on for near eighty years,” Amanda said.
“And we’ve just dropped twenty thousand hungry and hard-drinking Sailors, Marines, miners, and assembly-line supervisors into a place that not only can’t defend itself but can’t feed its defenders,” Benson concluded.
“You got it in one,” Kris said.
“Logistics, logistics, logistics,” the former admiral was heard to mutter. Then he locked eyes with Kris. “So if Alwa can’t support a defensive fleet, and we’re just supposed to be the first of many, do we pack it all in and go home?”
“Not on my watch, Admiral.”
“No offense intended, Viceroy. I believe in examining all my options, and it helps to get the worst off the table first.”
“No offense taken, Admiral. Now, as you said, logistics had just jumped ahead of a lot of things to take first place in this swamp as the biggest alligator chewing on our rump. We need things, and you’re the magician appointed to make them.”
The former admiral settled into a chair that Nelly made appear at the table.
“We need fishing boats,” Kris started with. “Big, strong ones able to tackle thirty meters of angry muscle and teeth. These leviathans have been keeping both Alwans and colonials off the oceans. They’ve been exploiting the sea’s resources for themselves. I intend to stop that.”
The admiral took that order and frowned at it for nearly a full minute. “You’re talking ancient sailing technology, ma’am, but it just happens to be a hobby of mine. Still, you can’t send men out in less than five-, six-hundred-ton boats if you want to have them come back from fighting something that big.”
“You’re not surprising me,” Kris said. “Nelly, do you have something like what the admiral is talking about in your storage?”
The screen beside them took on a picture of a boat identified as from 1940. “Raven class minesweeper, seventy meters long,” Nelly said. “A smaller one, Admirable class, was less than sixty meters long and a hundred tons lighter.”
“We could put a harpoon on the front deck,” the shipyard boss mused. “Rig it with an explosive tip. By the way, one of the exploration teams finally found an island loaded with guano, the natural source for nitrates used in both fertilizer and explosives. We should be able to start upgrading the weapons and maybe the farms.”
“One shuttle flight at a time?” Amanda said dryly.
“Something tells me you want a five-thousand-ton bulk freighter, too, Princess.”
“We need everything,” Kris said. “We have nothing.”
“I take it that building those planes to move the scientific teams around just got knocked out of high priority?”
“No, Admiral. We’ve got a planet we know way too little about. We need more discoveries like that guano island. If it’s not raining here, where is it raining? Do they have a bumper crop or just flash floods wiping everything out? I need to know.”
“So everything is my number one priority,” Benson said drolly.
“My Marines could take beach guard and shoot those things that steal from the fisherman, Kris, but I don’t know how effective the small round from an M-6 will be.”
“We need elephant rifles,” the former admiral said. “Heavy 12mm stuff to hit something big and let it know it’s been hit.”
“And let’s not forget the hunter-gatherers in the deep forest,” Jacques said. “They are finding some food resources even as they hide. If Jack’s Marines took out the main threat to them, we might find another entire food chain to exploit.”
“Alwa’s never going to be the same,” Penny said sadly.
“If those aliens Her Highness whipped had showed up,” the old Navy officer said, “Alwa not only wouldn’t be the same, it would be very dead. I choose change and a chance to live.”