Chapter Twenty-Four
Dathi!
Kathy felt herself recoil at the mere mention of the name. Dathi! The second alien race humanity had met and the first external enemy. The alien race that had introduced itself to the human race by trying to exterminate it. The implacable and unreasonable foe that had destroyed planets and habitats alike, ruthlessly unconcerned about casualties or even practicalities. The very picture of the hopelessly alien force, beyond all communication… and reason. The Dathi, humanity’s greatest enemy and humanity’s greatest victory, wiped out over a thousand years ago.
Or so everyone had thought.
She heard herself stammering even as she spoke. “They were destroyed,” she protested, numbly. She had braced herself for terrifying revelations involving rape, or child abuse, or something else that might have fitted the case, not this. No one could have even conceived of such a thing. “They’re all dead.”
“By now, I’m sure that they are,” Cordova said. He sounded oddly amused, and yet relieved, by her response. “They’ll have sent out someone with Admiral Percival’s level of intelligence and willingness to contemplate genocide. The world will have been scorched and then bombarded with asteroids and then declared off-limits, just to hide what happened there. They needn’t have bothered. Hardly anyone would have gone there in any case.”
Kathy stared at him. It all made a terrifying kind of sense. The Dathi were the nightmares that lurked in humanity’s past, the very backbone of the Empire’s campaign of fear against other alien races… and their sole claim to power. The histories she’d learned from her father and others from the Thousand Families, as opposed to the cut and dried histories spoon-fed to the commoners, showed that the Dathi had been the catalyst behind the Empire. The Federation and the Outsiders, united against the greater threat, had merged to become the Empire… and the Thousand Families, the massive corporations that had pushed humanity into space, had taken the helm. The Dathi were, quite literally, the Empire’s reason for being…
And one of their own had tried to spare Dathi lives.
The very concept shocked her, even though cold logic told her that Cordova had been right. A pastoral world, without any technology capable of reaching space, could be no threat to the Empire. Even if they had had spaceflight, they wouldn’t have had the sheer power required to shake the Empire, although Colin had proven that they wouldn’t have needed that much power… or perhaps they would. Colin had had popular appeal, speaking to those who had been pushed aside and trodden on by the Empire and the Dathi wouldn’t have had that. They were, very much, an equal-opportunity threat.
She’d prided herself on being capable of thinking even in a crisis and forced herself to think, coldly and logically. Tiberius had been right. The more she thought about it, the more she realised that he had been absolutely correct. If the news about Cordova and the Dathi got out into the Empire, the Provisional Government would be badly shaken. If there was one thing that united the human race, it was suspicion of aliens, even harmless creatures like the Rock-Monsters. They wouldn’t accept Cordova if they knew that he had spared a planet of Dathi, regardless of any abstract morality; they’d been brought up to believe that the Dathi were monsters and a permanent threat to humanity. She’d known, a day ago, that the threat had been largely manufactured by the Thousand Families — after all, the Dathi were dead, so they couldn’t complain — but now, now the threat might have been real after all. The Dathi could have a far more advanced world somewhere out past the Rim.
But it was a sword that cut both ways. There was no escaping the fact that Jason Cordova was actually Jason Cicero. Even if the precise Family remained a mystery, everyone knew that he had once been one of the Thousand Families. If the Empire learned that someone from the Families had spared Dathi lives, the Thousand Families would be badly shaken as well, even though they had been weakened by the rebellion. They might even lose what little grounds they had left to rule. The balance between the remainder of the Family-owned businesses and their workers wasn’t a stable one… and this could push it over the edge. The entire Empire might come apart at the seams.
Cordova stood up and started to pace, talking all the while. Kathy listened with half an ear, trying to decide what to do. Tiberius had used it mercilessly, knowing that it would always remain a loaded gun pointed at whoever ruled the Empire… which probably meant that he intended to dispose of Cordova once he had outlived his usefulness. There were other reasons as well, she decided; only a fool would take someone who had survived and prospered along the Rim for granted. Cordova might decide to take him down, just to prevent the secret from getting out, for she was morbidly certain that it wasn’t something known to the vast majority of the Cicero Clan. The more people who knew something, she knew, the harder it was to keep it a secret. Tiberius wouldn’t have shared it with just anyone, not unless he decided to use it.
“He could be bluffing, I suppose,” she said, unwillingly. She had enough experience of Family-level politics to feel certain that she was missing something. Tiberius’s blackmail information would do massive damage to his Clan if he wasn’t careful — talk about shooting himself in the foot, she thought wryly — and his enemies would certainly jump on him. Perhaps the entire Clan was rotten, they would say; if Roosevelt could go under, why not Cicero?
“He’s not bluffing,” Cordova said. Kathy silently cursed herself. She had forgotten, in her burst of oddly maternal feeling, that Cordova had a first-class brain. “I believe that if he told everyone, the remainder of the Thousand Families couldn’t jump on him without tipping off a general collapse. The Provisional Government might be different, but how could they hold Tiberius responsible for something I did?”
Kathy nodded slowly. “And they couldn’t charge you with genocide,” she added, thoughtfully. “You didn’t commit genocide.”
“They’re going to have to charge me with dereliction of duty, at the very least,” Cordova said. His voice weakened again. “Every Imperial Navy officer, at the Academy, is taught about the Dathi War and how close the human race came to being exterminated, leaving only a handful of humans fleeing the Federation in old ships. I believe that that was one of the reasons why the Macore Colony Fleet fled so far from Earth. They cannot afford to let me have a clear escape from the past, not with the entire Empire at stake.”
Kathy winced. He was right. If the news leaked out, the public outcry would become unmanageable. They already had enough problems with Admiral Wilhelm and the other warlords out along the Rim. If the news leaked out — and became exaggerated, as such rumours and stories often were — the Provisional Government would find itself under siege. The human race had become used to keeping aliens down, just so that they could have someone to look down upon to distract them from the miseries of their daily lives, and the very thought of a Dathi-lover in the heart of the Provisional Government would shock them. Colin could get away with a great deal, she knew, but she doubted he could get away with keeping Cordova in his government.
And his position would be very weak. He’d commanded the Volunteer Fleet and was respected along the Rim, but that would vanish in an instant when they learned he’d spared Dathi, not the reputed human colony world. The Rim’s inhabitants would become his most determined enemies, hunting the Random Numbers from asteroid to asteroid, until he was finally brought to battle. Every man’s hand would be turned against him. It dawned on her that the wisest thing to do would be to abandon him, now, but somehow she couldn’t do that. In a universe she’d grown to loathe a long time before she’d been sent out to the Rim, he was one of the few truly decent men and women she’d met. She hadn’t allowed herself to admit that she loved him, but she cared about him and she would not let him go.