It was a planet distant from their own and populated with beings different from themselves who had basically made most of the same mistakes that humankind had, and a few more that humanity hadn't even dreamed of.
It didn't take RJ long to learn their language and only a little longer before she was reading over their written texts. The written records had been well maintained and were how the humanoids of this planet had kept and remembered their past so completely.
Just as she had suspected, the Abornie, as they called themselves, had once been a huge and thriving civilization, highly technologically advanced. But as Earth had done, they'd allowed strange religious practices to influence better judgment and logic. They had badly overpopulated their planet, to the point that famine was imminent. They had polluted their world to a truly unbearable, hardly believable level. Farmland and forests had continued to be gobbled up for housing till there was very little room to grow crops, and pollution had dangerously depleted their oxygen supply.
Whereas humans had sought to leave the planet and pushed their research in that direction to cure their overpopulation and pollution problems, the Abornie had turned to genetics. They began by creating highly nutritious plant life that could thrive in poor, almost nonexistent, and often toxically polluted soil. They had turned to the oceans that they had already badly polluted to find the raw materials they needed to continue to build and maintain their cities, vehicles, and in short to keep their way of life going.
Like humans, it had never dawned on them to just simply stop breeding like flies and conserve their resources instead of going full out to deplete one source and then go find another. Taking care of the planet, learning to waste less and recycle more, had never even occurred to them as an option. Humans had trashed Earth out till they were teetering on the edge of extinction; the threat of that and war with the alien menace had helped the Reliance to come to power. The Reliance had cured those problems, but the cost had been the enslavement of the human race, mind, body and soul, and the conquering and plundering of numerous other worlds.
Rather than change their ways, the Abornie, like humans, had just found another way to continue doing just what they always had. They found another resource to exploit.
However, raping the oceans hadn't been as easy as they had expected it to be. Farming and mining the ocean had turned out to be dangerous and less than cost effective. So they again turned to genetic engineering for answers. There had been a large octopus-type creature that dwelt in the planet's oceans. It was slow and not terribly dexterous, but not unintelligent. Geneticists spliced the creature's DNA with that of their own and a half a dozen other creatures and soon had a semi-intelligent underwater work force. They called these creatures Ocupods. The Abornie had created the suits the creatures wore of a strong uncorrodable metal alloy they called Zspun. The creatures were trained to carry out the simple, mostly mindless tasks of digging up ore from the oceans' depths and carrying it in buckets up out of the water. They were trained to bring crustaceans and shrimp from the oceans' depths. The Abornie basically used them as slave labor.
RJ had just finished reading this to Topaz when he exclaimed, "See? The Abornie are the bad guys. I always wondered why in all those horrid movies it was always the slimy ugly guys that got the bad rap. Why couldn't something cute and fluffy be evil? Some of the most beautiful women I have ever known have been the biggest bitches, yourself included. Nothing personal. How come we never saw, say, evil Ewoks? No, it's always the slimy tentacled guy who is evil to his gooey core. Now finally here's the proof, the cute guys are evil. Ha!"
"So I guess you'd like to trade Oxania, the Abornie girl we all know you've been boinking, for a slimy tentacled lover," RJ said with a laugh.
Topaz made a face.
"That's why the slimy, ugly guy is always the bad guy, Topaz," RJ said as she continued to read, being able to talk and read at the same time, which annoyed all hell out of anyone she happened to be talking to. "We can't relate to the Ocupods. We don't understand their needs or their desires, any more than they can understand ours. There is no common ground on which we can stand to try to understand the others' needs, no basis on which to negotiate. Their needs and what makes them happy aren't even close to the same as ours."
RJ read on. The Abornie had used electric impulses to drive their newly created slaves, to train and communicate with them. For a hundred years the creatures had carried out these simple tasks even as the Abornie continued to pollute and overuse their planet. Then something unforeseen had happened. They had detected a huge meteor heading their way. Since they had put no effort or cash into it, there were no spaceships that could do anything more than carry satellites up into orbit around their planet/moon, which they called Frionia.
There was hope that the larger planet they orbited would drag the meteor off its course, but not much. Early calculations put Frionia between the planet Humongous and the meteor when it came into their space. There were a few government installations that had been built for just such a disaster across their world, but they had been constructed to hold only a few thousand of the chosen of their race. The government had avoided panic in the streets and a struggle for room in the bunkers by covering up their findings and leaving the general public uninformed while the "chosen" moved to the safety of the bunkers.
The meteor had broken up in their atmosphere, sending thousands of huge segments of the rock plummeting into the surface of the moon. It was as if the entire surface of Frionia had been sprayed with high impact missiles. The worst damage had been concentrated on one side of the planet, which had been far from a good thing. The planet had tilted on its axis, which had in turn triggered massive tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, continental shifts and earthquakes. The volcanoes had spewed noxious gases and clouds of ash, which mixed with the dust particles caused by the meteor's impact. Any living thing on the surface that hadn't been killed in the initial chaos had died in the years of darkness that followed.
Only those in the few bunkers that had survived intact had lived to propagate.
And the Ocupods. The oceans had been barely damaged in the meteor shower. The subsequent darkness, the drop in ocean temperatures, the continental shifts, earthquakes and volcanoes erupting hadn't affected the Ocupods much. They had been designed to see and work in the ocean's depths, in the darkness, and the cold. Even eruptions and quakes occurred in the ocean with much greater frequency that on the landmasses, so they were able to cope. In the years that followed the destruction wrought by the meteor the Ocupods thrived. And there was something the Abornie scientists hadn't taken into account when they created these underwater slaves; the original animal had a communal intelligence.
The Ocupods started to make their own civilization under the ocean's surface, not that any of the Abornie had actually seen it. After the attacks began, some of the Abornie speculated that without the work that the Abornie kept them busy with, the Ocupods had become motivated to create a culture of their own.
When the dust cleared and sun could actually touch the planet's surface again, the ice finally melted. The genetically engineered plants came out of their deep slumber and once again started growing to cover the surface of the planet. Life on the surface once again became possible, and the remnants of the Abornie people came up out of their bunkers and started to rebuild. They reintroduced to the planet's surface the animals they had kept alive with them underground, and they immediately started to thrive.
The Ocupods somehow detected machinery on the surface, no doubt because the Abornie DNA had given them a heightened sense of touch, and being as big as they were they could feel vibrations, maybe even feel sonic wavelengths. They put on the suits the Abornie had made for them and went to the surface to check it out. They saw the activity, and no doubt having some race memory, or maybe even a language of their own, deduced that the Abornie would once again overpopulate the surface, pollute the ocean the Ocupods lived in, and force them to work.
So they attacked.
And they had continued to attack every time the Abornie tried to use any sort of technology ever since that time. Any machine they came across they tore apart. They had deduced, of course, that as long as there was no such technology, the Abornie couldn't invade their world and enslave them. As long as they could force the Abornie to live a primitive existence they would never be a threat.
"Well?" Topaz asked, seeing the look on her face.
"The Ocupods, as much as it pains me to say it, are only trying to protect themselves from falling under Abornie rule again. They're simpleminded creatures and most probably don't even know why they continue to stop the Abornie every time they start any sort of machine. It's probably become an instinct for them. They detect any sort of high tech activity and they attack out of fear," RJ said thoughtfully.
"So why attack the village?"
"Because our transmitter was in the pack."
"All right, better question," Levits said as he walked into the room. "Why didn't they, and why haven't they attacked the ship? The Abornie have been here for two weeks, and nothing."
RJ looked thoughtful, she shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe they can't figure out what we are, and whether we're an enemy or not. Maybe they're just flat afraid, and maybe they're smarter than we think and they're checking us out even as we speak, preparing to make an attack. Look at it this way; these are most probably not the only Abornie on the planet. No doubt there are pockets of Abornie all across the surface of this rather large moon. The same would be true of the Ocupods. They could all be coming here in the water, forming such a large group that they can't help but win. That's what I'd be doing if I had thousands of followers and a communal intelligence. The chicken shit equipment on this ship doesn't seem to be able to monitor underwater activity, so they could be grouping underwater and we'd have no way of knowing."
"I'll take what's hidden behind door number two, Marty," Topaz said. "I like door number two." He got up and took off for no apparent reason. Levits sat in the chair Topaz had vacated.
"If they don't like technology . . . Well, on this world, on most worlds actually, you don't get much more high-tech than an interstellar space ship," Levits said. "So if I were the slimy, tentacled bastards, I'd want to take this fucker out."
RJ nodded. "But they'd want to make sure that we couldn't retaliate, because they know we can kill them easily. Since they have a communal brain they'd all know exactly what we did and how." She fell silent again, looking thoughtful.
"All right, what are you thinking?"
"I'm wondering if they have missiles."
"Do they have missiles?" RJ asked the leader, Taral, in his own language.
"Yes," he answered.
"Well?" both Topaz and Levits demanded. Neither of them had even come close to mastering the most rudimentary words of the Abornie language. In fact, Topaz had gone so far as to say that when they spoke it sounded like gargling snot to him.
"He said yes," RJ informed them. She started to ask him another question, but Topaz jumped out of his seat and yelled, "Beautiful! Fucking beautiful!"
"Is he going to hurt me?" Taral asked, holding up his hands as if to shield himself from Topaz.
"No, he's just crazy," RJ explained. Then she turned to Topaz and said in the Reliance tongue. "Sit down and shut up, or leave. You aren't helping."
Topaz grumbled something that not even RJ could make out, then flopped back into his chair.
RJ smiled, momentarily amused because the sound Topaz had made sounded a whole lot like gargling snot. She sobered and looked at Taral again. "How big are their missiles?"
"What?" He obviously didn't understand her question.
"How much damage do they do?"
"You saw," he said, and made a loud noise and spread his hands to imitate the blasting apart of an object.
"That's not a missile," RJ said shaking her head. "That was just a plasma cannon." Well, she'd thought she knew their language pretty well until she was trying to explain something they might not even have words for.
"Well?" Topaz and Levits asked again.
"He thinks the plasma cannon is a missile," RJ said.
"Then they don't have missiles," Levits said in a relieved tone.
"No one said that." She flipped on the monitor on the wall and ran her fingers over the keyboard. A picture of a missile appeared, and then it flew through the air and blew up a mock ship. It was a training film. She turned to Taral. "Do they have something like that?"
Taral's eyes were large. "No," he said. "Nothing like that, but with something like that we could kill them."
RJ sighed, relieved but still troubled.
"What?" Levits and Topaz demanded.
"The Ocupods don't have missiles." She was speaking in the Reliance tongue. "This bloodthirsty bastard wants us to get him some missiles to blow them up."
"We don't have any missiles, just some lasers and the plasma cannons on the ship and on the skiff, and probably not nearly enough power to run them for long enough to fight a huge battalion of those horrid metal spider things," Levits said.
"I'm sure we could find the power, and build better weapons, given time. That's hardly the problem." RJ was upset, and she didn't try to hide it.
"What would the real problem be then, RJ? Those really creepy things could be grouping in the thousands to attack us even now. You said so yourself." Levits remained a bit confused by RJ's demeanor.
"Those really creepy things are the only thing that has kept the Abornie from going right back to destroying this planet. In all the books that I've read since I've been here, their books in their words, nowhere did they show any remorse over what they had done to their world. Nowhere did they take responsibility for what the Ocupods have become. It's as if they totally fail to realize that their actions and the actions of their ancestors are directly related to their lot in life today.
"I'm afraid that if we take away their only enemy they will go right back to doing what caused the problems of their world in the first place. It's the first real moral dilemma I've come across in battle since the day I decided I wasn't going to kill unarmed civilians and turned on the Reliance."
"We have to live here, RJ," Levits reminded. "Those things, they don't think or feel the way that we do, you said so yourself." He seemed to be hell-bent on reminding her of everything she'd said as if she had somehow forgotten, which RJ found more than a little annoying. "The Abornie . . . they're like us. They deserve to have something better than a minimal life, living in the jungles like primitives. Being hunted down and killed anytime they try to better their lives. The Ocupods are evil. You only have to look at them to know that." Levits shot Topaz a heated look, no doubt blaming him for RJ's dilemma.
"The Abornie created that evil, maybe they deserve to live under its rule," RJ said.
"I can't even believe you're suggesting that. You, who fought for human freedom. You, who put freedom above all else." Levits stood up and started pacing. "Do I even have to remind you that if we don't find compatible energy of some kind that we have no chance of leaving this planet? And then there's the added problem of finding our own space. The fate of these people—and let's call them people because that's what they are to us—is the same as ours. Whatever happens to them is ultimately going to happen to us. True, the slimy tentacled creeps haven't attacked the ship yet, but eventually you know that they will. Even if they don't, what happens the first time we try to do something on the surface? Go looking for an energy source . . . if we find one, what are they going to do then?"
"If they attack the ship, what are the chances that they'd be able to get in? The solar cells seem to be running at full efficiency here. Our power cells are charged . . . at least enough to run our weapons. If we fired in short, well-targeted bursts we could probably hold back a massive attack," RJ said. "I'm sure our shields would hold."
"I can't believe that there's something to fight and you don't want to fight it!" Levits turned on Topaz and trumpeted accusingly, "This is all your fault, old man, you put this crap into her head."
Topaz laughed. "Oh yes, because of course I've always had such sway with her."
"Why is everyone yelling?" Taral asked, holding his hands over his ears.
"What did he say?" Levits and Topaz asked RJ.
"He said if you spent as much time learning his language as you did bitching at me and each other maybe you wouldn't have to ask so many stupid questions," RJ said with a crooked grin.
"We don't all have genetically superior brains," Levits said hotly.
"Or even sufficient ones," Topaz said, looking at Levits with meaning.
"That's it. I'm kicking your ass, old man," Levits jumped up and punched Topaz, who fell out of his chair and got up swinging. Soon the two men were rolling around on the floor.
"What's wrong?" Taral asked, getting out of his chair and moving away from the fight and towards the door.
"Two men of the same race can't get along, and yet I think I can make some sort of truce between two different species," RJ said in his language as she rose from her chair and physically pulled the two men apart. She held them each at arm's length. "That's enough!" she yelled at them.
They grumbled, but each went back to his chair.
RJ glared at Levits. "This isn't our world, what right do we have to meddle here? Maybe the Abornie deserve the life they have . . ."
"And maybe the work units deserved the life they had under the Reliance. I don't really see what the difference is between this and that," Levits said, wiping some blood from his lip.
"As much as it pains me to say this, he's right, RJ. Like it or not, this is our world now. The Abornie made mistakes, similar to the ones humans made. They created a monster to help them out of a problem, and now the monster controls them. Perhaps we can free the Abornie and keep them from falling into the same traps as their ancestors. We could tell them what they did wrong, how to advance without destroying their planet. Maybe we really can keep history from repeating itself."
"You were the one who kept saying that maybe the Ocupods weren't the bad guys, that maybe these people were, and you were right. Don't you get it? They don't understand that what they did was wrong. They want to return to a time when they overran the planet like rats. When they polluted the water and the air, and abused every other lifeform on this world. They didn't learn from their mistakes, and if we remove the problem their carelessness caused then they'll never learn . . ."
"RJ, these Abornie never lived in that world. They didn't sin against the planet. They didn't create those things in the ocean. They didn't pollute their world. Maybe they have no remorse because they didn't do anything wrong. You want to punish them for mistakes made by people who died hundreds of years ago," Levits said, in an unusually (for him) calm voice. "The only thing that Taral here and the others are guilty of is trying to make a little better life for themselves. Just trying to live. Maybe it didn't start out that way, but those things are now the aggressors, and I think your first instincts were right. They're slimy and icky and they need to be destroyed." He took a breath before continuing. "The Abornie built these genetically engineered freaks to serve them, and now they are causing problems. It's time for them to go."
Topaz leaned forward, buried his face in his hands and mumbled, "And he was doing so well right up till then."
Levits still wasn't aware that he'd said anything wrong. He really thought the old man was just having one of his insane moments till he heard a low, throaty growl emanating from the throat of his beloved. He gave her a curious look and then quickly went over what he had just said. He swallowed hard and must have looked as horrified as he felt, because RJ quit growling, glared at him with eyes that were almost glowing with rage, and then she got up and stomped out of the room. He got up and ran after her.
"Now, RJ . . . you know I didn't mean it that way . . ."
Topaz ran his hands down his face and raised his head to look at the confused native he shared the room with. "You see, the real problem is that no one is ever really happy with things the way they are, so they start trying to make them better." The native said some snot gargling thing, and Topaz continued as if they understood one another. "That's right, Taral, exactly, it's all about wanting what you don't have. Food, shelter, sex, it ought to be enough, but invariably it's not. People start out wanting simple things like better food and better sex, and wind up making multileveled attachment dildos that sing and roll and vibrate, and buildings that touch the clouds, and hand-held hair dryers, because of course your hair will never dry otherwise." Taral said something else. "Call me crazy all you like, but you know it's true. You could get along just fine with these creatures if you would just stop wanting so much. And RJ and the Ocupods wouldn't be here at all if people would have been happy with creatures the way they had evolved, and hadn't decided to play God."
RJ wasn't talking to Levits, as much because she had more important things on her mind as the fact that he could be so clumsily insensitive and she wanted to punish him.
Not that she wasn't enjoying making him feel at least as badly as he'd made her feel. It seemed to bother him no end that she walked out of any room he walked into, and when she told him she didn't want to talk about it she could feel the waves of frustration coming off of him like heat. He kept saying he was sorry, and she would say, "It's all right. Forget about it." But her tone was very dismissive, and his head would all but explode. She'd let him roast in his own juices until she wanted to have sex, and then she'd suddenly forgive him, knowing damn good and well that he'd say something just as insensitive in another day or two.
Human nature, humanoid nature, you couldn't get away from it. Sentient beings did thoughtless things.
"The suits are the problem," RJ said to Poley as she walked away from the viewing port she'd been standing at. "Take away the suits and the Ocupods can't attack the Abornie, or us for that matter. Take away the suit and they become just another genetically engineered freak on this planet, swimming happily in the ocean until the Abornie totally overrun the planet and decide to enslave them again. Vicious cycle."
"Do you think they have the ability to make new suits?" Poley asked.
"I don't know, but I don't see how. To make metal you have to smelt ore and it's damn hard to keep a decent fire going under the water. If they were doing it on the surface surely the ship would have detected the activity. They at least have the technology to repair them though, or after all these hundreds of years they would be dysfunctional. I wish we could have brought one back to the ship."
"That would have been most useful."
"If they aren't capable of making the suits, then how many could they have? No matter how well you maintain something, there are certain things that go wrong that can't be fixed. Over several hundred years how many would have had to be parted out to keep the others going?" RJ turned to look back out the viewport again. Frionia was a beautiful world. Reclaimed by plant life, the air was clean and rich. The planet was covered with crystal clear rivers and streams. "Poley."
"Yes, RJ."
"If we get rid of the Ocupods, or at least stop them from attacking the Abornie, how long before that stream is running in sewage and toxic waste?"
He walked up behind her and looked at the stream in question. "There's no way of knowing, perhaps never."
"What, no long stream of numbers, Tin Pants?"
"Where people are involved you can make no accurate numeric predictions. Perhaps knowing the mistakes of their forefathers they will curb their destructive natures, and . . ."
"You've been talking to Topaz," RJ said with a laugh.
"That doesn't make me wrong," Poley said.
"No it doesn't." RJ turned and kissed his check. "Thanks, Poley."
Poley smiled, pleased with her praise. "Are you really angry with Levits?"
"I'm more angry at what he said than I am at him," RJ explained.
"He doesn't think of you that way. That's why he said it, RJ, because he doesn't think of you as a GSH, just like you don't think of me as a robot."
She had noticed before that it distressed him when any of them fought, but he'd never actually tried to intervene before.
"I love you, Tin Pants." She patted his shoulder and moved around him towards the door. She turned in the door and looked at his back; he was still looking out the window at the jungle. He was a machine, but he was so much more to her. He had been given an artificial intelligence, and he had as far as she was concerned become sentient. But to the Ocupods he'd just be another machine. He was a machine, but he was her brother, and those things would take him completely apart if given half a chance.
Dilemma over.
As she had calculated, the Ocupods appeared one day in full force, but she had prepared carefully for the day and they were as ready as they could be.
In the weeks it had taken the Ocupods to put an army of this size together RJ had worked up a defensive strike plan that would very quickly turn defender into aggressor.
She had armed as many of the Abornie as she could with the Reliance weapons on the ship, then she'd taught them to use the laser sidearms.
With Levits ready at the weapons console and watching the scanners carefully for any activity, RJ, Poley and Topaz had taken teams of the Abornie out onto the surface to make traps and primitive weapons with which to supplement the ship's weapons. The ship's power supply needed to last throughout the duration of the battle, and the only way to make sure of that was to use its weapons as little as possible.
RJ had been sure they were fully prepared for an attack, but now . . . There were just so damn many of them. RJ looked at the scanner as hundreds of spider shaped images started crawling across it. She ran her hands down her face.
"Well?" Levits asked.
"Fire at the ones on the front line when they come into range . . . No, wait." RJ looked thoughtful for a minute and mumbled the word cannon fodder and then started calculating again. She smiled when she was done. "Wait till the ones in the middle come into range."
"RJ . . . By the time that happens the ones in the front will be on top of us."
"No, because we're going to go out to fight them. Don't you see, Levits?" She was excited now. She was going to do battle. She wasn't afraid; this was where everything she was came into play. Only in battle was her full potential ever put to the test. "Cannon fodder. These things have probably employed every viable suit they have. I'm sure they can't make the suits themselves, and they've been parting them out for hundreds of years. Some of those suits, maybe most, are in varying states of decay, and if I'm right the worst of those will be in the front lines. Cannon fodder. The damaged ones will be easier for us to take out. We take out the strong ones in the middle and the back, and maybe we won't run out of power before we run out of big metal spiders."
Levits nodded. "I hope you're right. Be careful!" he yelled at her departing back, though he knew it wasn't very likely. Still, when your girlfriend was a GSH with a legendary talent for battle, you didn't really worry too much about her. Mostly you just felt bad for her opponents.
Unless they were slimy tentacled guys, and then you just didn't care.
The children stayed on board as RJ led every other Abornie on the ship out into the jungle to face their mortal enemy. They were afraid, but they were also fed up. They were tired of losing and tired of running. They had been kept down because they'd had no way to fight their enemy, and now they did. Most of them were excited, ready to have it over. On this day, maybe only on this day, they became one people. All thoughts of self were for a split second put behind them. RJ had been half afraid that when it came down to the wire they'd run into the jungle to hide and leave her and her crew to face the Ocupod army on their own. But today they were fighting for the freedom of their race, for the chance of a better life. They believed they were going to win. They believed their new "friends" were going to lead them to a new age, an age of comfort and security. RJ only hoped they didn't lead them into a time of overpopulation, pollution and constant war.
RJ called her troops to battle stations as the Ocupods fired their first barrage of plasma blasts on the ship. Most of the blasts fell short, and the others bounced off the ship's defense shield. She and Poley ran into the fray as Topaz took his troop to arm the traps that had been mostly designed by him. Of course his first trap didn't have to be armed at all, as became evident when the first row of Ocupods fell into the limb-covered pit.
As RJ had expected, the machines in the front were in the worst shape, so half of the ones that fell in the pit broke—sometimes immediately killing the slimy alien inside. As the other half tried to climb out, the first line of Abornie fired their lasers at the glass domes of their tentacled oppressors, and as they cracked, a second wave of Abornie ran in with wooden clubs and smashed the domes.
With their front line basically destroyed and making an obstacle between the ship and the rest of their troop, the Ocupods slowed, seeming to take a collective minute to think. While they were doing this Topaz unleashed his second trap. He gave the order, and the Abornie cut through the ropes holding back the mountains of logs on both the left and right sides of the Ocupods.
The logs rolled from their devices, bowling an entire row of the Ocupods down and crushing about a third of them. Most of the machines in the front lines were in worse repair than even she had calculated; many were barely operational. The Abornie pressed forward and once again attacked the fallen Ocupods. RJ and Poley ran into the fray, RJ taking the left flank while Poley took the right. They targeted healthy looking machines, ran beneath them and shot out their hydraulic systems. The machines then lurched around hampering the movements of the fully operational units behind them.
All the while RJ could hear and see the ship's laser and plasma cannons picking off the Ocupods on the back line. Beside her one of the creatures stuck a tentacle all the way through the chest of an Abornie. The Ocupod fired at her and she rolled away from the blast and came up underneath him where she then fired on his hydraulic system. As he was lurching around, he hit RJ with the dead Abornie still stuck on his tentacle and sent her flying through the air. She landed on top of another Ocupod and hung on. She targeted the glass dome with her laser until it cracked and then smacked the glass. As the machine started to lurch in the creature's death spasms she jumped from the top of it to the top of another and did the same thing. She continued to do this till none of them were close enough to jump onto, and then she jumped to the ground and continued her assault from below, again targeting the hydraulic systems.
By dusk only a dozen of the creatures were still standing, and they were beating a hasty retreat.
"Levits, hold fire," she ordered and the cannons stopped. "Finish these off," RJ ordered the exhausted Abornie, and pointing at the still lurching Ocupods. "Poley, you with me."
He nodded and ran after her. "RJ . . . why are we chasing them? Why not let Levits finish them off?"
"Because they have a communal intelligence," she answered. "Come on . . . we have to beat them to the water."
"Water . . . RJ, I can't go in the water," Poley reminded.
"You won't have to. We have to stop them getting back in." She increased her speed.
"RJ . . . I can't keep up," Poley said.
"It's all right, Poley you can take the rear."
He wasn't sure he knew what that meant, but his sister was gone, so he just moved towards the ocean as fast as he could and hoped she was telling him the truth about her plan not including him going into the water.
RJ pulled out all the stops. It had been a long time since she'd run as fast or jumped as high as she could. It felt good to be pushing herself to the max. She easily got around the Ocupods without them being the wiser and moved between them and the ocean. When they saw her they turned to retreat into the jungle, but Poley was blocking their way. One of them fired upon her, and she once again ran under them, easily knocking out their hydraulic systems, and Poley did the same. In minutes all twelve units were lurching around on the beach.
"Get back and wait," RJ ordered Poley, and he joined her some fifty feet away from where the Ocupods struggled. Two of them actually managed to get into the water. RJ watched as the domes opened and the Ocupods swam away. She smiled, and waited for the others to lie still on the beach. "You wait here. I'll call if I need you."
Poley nodded.
RJ walked to the beach. One by one she dragged the Ocupods into the water. When the last of them had escaped into the ocean she pulled the machines from the water. Once they were out of the water Poley helped her drag them above the high tide line.
"Why?" Poley asked, as they finished dragging the last one to a safe distance from the water's edge. "I have calculated over and over, and can think of no reason to let those creatures live."
"They have a communal intelligence," RJ explained.
"I fail to see the significance of that."
"By destroying their machines but saving them we showed compassion. That it's not them we hate, but their power over us, i.e. their transport machines. It tells them that we won't come after them in their world. That we are willing to share the planet with them. Them in their place and us in ours.
"But . . . How does that serve our cause?"
RJ laughed and patted his back. "Sometimes it's nice just not to be perceived as an asshole."
"What are you going to do now, RJ?" Poley asked as they walked along the path of destruction the Ocupods had made through the jungle when they had embarked on this, their last campaign.
RJ looked at the damage around them and thought about all the Ocupod debris around the ship. "Well, the first thing we have to do is clean up the mess."
"You know what I mean, RJ," Poley said. "You were built for battle. With nothing to fight, what will you do? I was built to serve Stewart, and after that I was programmed to serve you, and when you were in cryogenic sleep—even though I was still fulfilling my purpose—I felt incomplete. What are you going to do?"
"You found a hobby, perhaps I, too, will find a hobby."
"I don't think you will find one that will allow you to fulfill your full function."