Viveros glanced over to me, and then back to Bender. "You think what we're doing is simple?"
"No, no." Bender smiled and held up a hand placatingly. "I said simple relative to diplomacy. If I give you a gun and tell you to take a hill from its inhabitants, the situation is relatively simple. But if I tell you to go to the inhabitants and negotiate a settlement that allows you to acquire that hill, there's a lot going on—what do you do with the current inhabitants, how are they compensated, what rights do they continue to have regarding the hill, and so on."
"Assuming the hill people don't just shoot you as you drop by, diplomatic pouch in hand," I said.
Bender smiled at me and pointed vigorously. "See, that's exactly it. We assume that our opposite numbers have the same warlike perspective as we do. But what if—what if—the door was opened to diplomacy, even just a crack? Would not any intelligent, sentient species choose to walk through that door? Let's take, for example, the Whaid people. We're about to war on them, aren't we?"
Indeed we were. The Whaidians and humans had been circling each other for more than a decade, fighting over the Earnhardt system, which featured three planets habitable to both our people. Systems with multiple inhabitable planets were fairly rare. The Whaidians were tenacious but also relatively weak; their network of planets was small and most of their industry was still concentrated on their home world. Since the Whaid would not take the hint and stay out of the Earnhardt system, the plan was to skip to Whaid space, smash their spaceport and major industrial zones, and set their expansionary capabilities back a couple of decades or so. The 233rd would be part of the task force that was set to land in their capital city and tear the place up a bit; we were to avoid killing civilians when we could, but otherwise knock a few holes in their parliament houses and religious gathering centers and so on. There was no industrial advantage to doing this, but it sends the message that we can mess with them anytime, just because we feel like it. It shakes them up.
"What about them?" Viveros asked.
"Well, I've done a little research into these people," Bender said. "They've got a remarkable culture, you know. Their highest art form is a form of mass chant that's like a Gregorian round—they'll get an entire city full of Whaidians and start chanting. It's said you can hear the chant for dozens of klicks, and the chants can go on for hours."
"So?"
"So, this is a culture we should be celebrating and exploring, not bottling up on its planet simply because they're in our way. Have the Colonials even attempted to reach a peace with these people? I see no record of an attempt. I think we should make an attempt. Maybe an attempt could be made by us."
Viveros snorted. "Negotiating a treaty is a little beyond our orders, Bender."
"In my first term as senator, I went to Northern Ireland as part of a trade junket and ended up extracting a peace treaty from the Catholics and the Protestants. I didn't have the authority to make an agreement, and it caused a huge controversy back in the States. But when an opportunity for peace arises, we must take it," Bender said.
"I remember that," I said. "That was right before the bloodiest marching season in two centuries. Not a very successful peace agreement."
"That wasn't the fault of the agreement," Bender said, somewhat defensively. "Some drugged-out Catholic kid threw a grenade into an Orangemen's march, and it was all over after that."
"Damn real live people, getting in the way of your peaceful ideals," I said.
"Look, I already said diplomacy wasn't easy," Bender said. "But I think that ultimately we have more to gain by trying to work with these people than we have by trying to wipe them out. It's an option that should at least be on the table."
"Thanks for the seminar, Bender," Viveros said. "Now if you'll yield the floor, I have two points to make here. The first is that until you fight, what you know or what you think you know out here means shit to me and to everyone else. This isn't Northern Ireland, it's not Washington, DC, and it's not planet Earth. When you joined up, you joined up as a soldier, and you better remember that. Second, no matter what you think, Private, your responsibility right now isn't to the universe or to humanity at large—it's to me, your squadmates, your platoon and to the CDF. When you're given an order, you'll follow it. If you go beyond the scope of your orders, you're going to have to answer to me. Do you get me?"
Bender regarded Viveros somewhat coolly. "Much evil has been done under the guise of 'just following orders,'" he said. "I hope we never have to find ourselves using the same excuse."
Viveros narrowed her eyes. "I'm done eating," she said, and got up, taking her tray with her.
Bender arched his eyebrows as she left. "I didn't mean to offend her," he said to me.
I regarded Bender carefully. "Do you recognize the name 'Viveros' at all, Bender?" I asked.
He frowned a bit. "It's not familiar," he said.
"Think way back," I said. "We would have been about five or six or so."
A light went on in his head. "There was a Peruvian president named Viveros. He was assassinated, I think."
"Pedro Viveros, that's right," I said. "And not just him—his wife, his brother, his brother's wife and most of their families were murdered in the military coup. Only one of Pedro's daughters survived. Her nanny stuffed her down a laundry chute while the soldiers went through the presidential palace, looking for family members. The nanny was raped before they slit her throat, incidentally."
Bender turned a greenish shade of gray. "She can't be the daughter," he said.
"She is," I said. "And you know what, when the coup was put down and the soldiers who killed her family were put on trial, their excuse was that they were just following orders. So regardless of whether your point there was well made or not, you made it to just about the last person in the universe to whom you ought to lecture on the banality of evil. She knows all about it. It slaughtered her family while she lay in a basement laundry cart, bleeding and trying not to cry."
"God, I'm sorry, of course," Bender said. "I wouldn't have said anything. But I didn't know."
"Of course you didn't, Bender," I said. "And that was Viveros' point. Out here, you don't know. You don't know anything."
"Listen up," Viveros said on the way down to the surface. "Our job is strictly to smash and dash. We're landing near the center of their government operations—blast buildings and structures but avoid shooting live targets unless CDF soldiers are targeted first. We've already kicked these people in the balls, now we're just pissing on them while they're down. Be fast, do damage and get back. Are we clear?"
The operation had been a cakewalk up to that point; the Whaidians had been utterly unprepared for the sudden and instantaneous arrival of two dozen CDF battleships in their home space. The CDF had opened up a diversionary offensive in the Earnhardt system several days before to lure Whaidian ships there to support the battle, so there was almost nobody to defend the home fort, and those that were, were blasted out of the sky in short, surprised order.
Our destroyers also made quick work of the Whaidians' major spaceport, shattering the kilometers-long structure at critical junctures, which allowed the port's own centripetal forces to tear it apart (no need to waste more ammo than necessary). No skip pods were detected as launched to alert Whaidian forces in the Earnhardt system to our attack, so they wouldn't know they were duped until it was too late. If any of the Whaidian forces survived the battle there, they would return home to find nowhere to dock or repair. Our forces would be long gone when they arrived.