Bessany was frowning. “We’ve been incommunicado, with the radios missing, so I don’t know what’s happening with the rest of the colonies, but it seems to me other clans would have used this stuff before now, if they thought it would kill us.”
John rubbed the back of his neck under his parka. “Not necessarily,” he was forced to admit. “Not if they knew it might kill them, too. Damn, what a prickly puzzle.”
Bessany narrowed her eyes. “Chilaili, would a clan ask the Ones Above for guidance before using such a weapon? And would the Ones Above answer them?”
John shot his sister-in-law an intent stare. Unit SPQ/R-561 had picked up a radio transmission just before the release of that neurotoxin, something he hadn’t mentioned to anyone here. Chilaili’s head swung around to peer at her. “A clan’s akule might well seek permission for the viho to use such a deadly weapon, or ask for guidance to avoid destroying the clan when using it. But the Ones Above have not spoken since this war began. The last message our clan received before I left the nest cavern was the command to kill the devils from the stars. The blizzard had already begun by then, and we could not leave.”
Bessany frowned. “This is something I’ve never asked, Chilaili, but how often do the Ones Above speak through the Oracles? And what do they talk about, when they speak?”
John followed her logic instantly. If Chilaili’s creators spoke infrequently, on very general subjects, then the Oracle might well be nothing more than a long-distance communications system similar to SWIFT, capable of reaching across interstellar distances. But if they spoke frequently, on matters of day-to-day import, there had to be a base of operations somewhere in this star system, probably on one of the moons. And the more he thought about that, the less he liked it.
“The Ones Above speak to the akules several times during the wheel of the year,” Chilaili answered readily enough. “They remind us of our duty to them or tell us of new laws we must obey. Sometimes they warn us of impending danger. They have spoken twice to Icewing Clan about great stones which were about to fall from the sky. Each time, the clan sought safety underground, although such a thing has never happened during my life. My father’s grandmother was a child when the last great stone fell. The clan nearly starved that winter. Everyone would have perished had the warning not come in time, allowing the clan to take shelter in the deepest cavern in our territory.”
“A meteorite warning system?” John glanced at Bessany.
“It makes sense,” she shrugged, although there was a hard edge to her voice. “It’s clear they view the Tersae as lab rats. A big meteorite would wreak havoc with a sizeable investment of time, money, and scientific resources. This is the biggest eugenics experiment I’ve ever heard of and it’s obviously been under way for generations.”
“God, yes.” The cold finger that had touched John’s spine repeatedly during the past few minutes left his whole body chilled this time. An experiment lasting multiple generations spoke to a massive, disturbing level of government support. And that scared him. Badly. My God, he wondered, staring at Chilaili, what have we stumbled across here?
“All right,” he muttered, “I’ll grant you the importance of a meteorite warning system to protect their research. But is the surveillance carried out by live technicians? Or an automated computer system?” He frowned. “And if they’re using live technicians, are they still in the system somewhere? Or did they abandon their base quietly and slip away through all the muck out there, when our first military forces arrived? Or have they sent a courier,” he blanched at the sudden thought, “to bring in reinforcements?”
Bessany eyes widened. “You mean we could find ourselves under attack? By an alien war fleet coming in from hyper-light?”
“Yes. We could. I don’t like this, Bessany. I really don’t like this. They’re watching us, Bessany. Whether they’re still in the system or operating automated equipment from a safe interstellar distance, they’re watching us. Gathering data on how we fight, how we react, how we think. And that bothers the hell out of me.”
“What bothers me,” Bessany muttered, “is this hemorrhagic neurotoxin. If Chilaili’s makers didn’t give it to the clans to use against ‘devils from the stars’—” Her eyes suddenly widened. “Oh, my God . . .”
“What?”
“Chilaili,” she whispered, voice shaking, “tell John about the threats your akule used to force Icewing Clan to obey. To attack Seta Point, I mean, and this station, once the weather had cleared.”
Chilaili blinked. “The Ones Above demand total obedience. The akule reminded us of this. I was not the only one arguing against the attack. Many Mothers and Grandmothers want nothing more to do with the Ones Above. They are murdering us slowly, by altering our chicks inside their eggshells. They are making the males more violent, more suicidal. The akule was afraid when the Grandmothers spoke of defying our makers, for his greatest desire is to protect the clan to which his life-mate was born. He gave up his own clan to mate with Zaltana, our last akule. Since her death five winters ago, he has worked ceaselessly to protect . . .”
Chilaili’s voice trailed off, prompting Bessany to ask, “What is it, Chilaili? What’s occurred to you?”
“Only that in twenty seasons together, they produced no chicks. Not one. Is it possible the Ones Above have caused this somehow?”
Bessany sucked down a hissing lungful of air. “God, yes. If they’ve gengineered each clan to be fertile only with members of their own birth clan . . .” She met John’s gaze. “Don’t you see it? The Tersae are in serious genetic trouble. And I mean serious. This war could wipe out the whole species. All it would take would be to drop the gene pool of each clan below the critical recovery threshold. The Tersae’s creators have to know that. Yet they’ve ordered the Tersae to stop at nothing to kill us.”
“My God, Bessany, what kind of monstrous things are we dealing with here?”
“Why do you think I kept sending those urgent messages?” She pressed fingertips to her eyes, rasped out, “I could see some of this even before Chilaili came here to warn me. But this . . . My God, this changes everything, the whole scale of the war, the stakes we’re fighting for, the level of ruthlessness we’re up against.”
John groaned aloud over the disaster of those unforwarded, unread, unholy reports. When he got back to Sector Command, heads were going to roll. He’d see to it they bounced, all the way down those impressive stone steps. “What, exactly, were these threats the akule used?” he asked grimly.
Chilaili, whose puzzled expressions were becoming rapidly more fathomable, said, “The Ones Above long ago warned the clans that disobedience would be severely punished. A clan that defies the will of the Ones Above will be totally destroyed. The only clans which ever dared such disobedience, the ones that used the weapons meant for the star devils against one another, were destroyed. Perhaps by one another, perhaps by the Ones Above, as the akule insists in his teaching parables. I cannot say for sure. But the akule spoke the truth, when he reminded us that the Ones Above will turn their most powerful weapons against us, if we disobey.”
The snow outside had more color than Bessany’s face. Her voice shook. “I’m an idiot, John, not to have seen it sooner. All the clues point to it.”
“Point to what?” he demanded, not quite seeing where she was going with this—although he was quite sure he wasn’t going to like it.
“That neurotoxin wasn’t developed as a weapon against some hypothetical enemy from the stars. If Chilaili’s right, it’s been sitting in the ground for hundreds of years, so it predates any possible human contact with the Tersae’s creators. Not only that, there’s no guarantee that a neurotoxin deadly to one species would even make another species sneeze, so it wouldn’t make sense to create a weapon out of a neurotoxin unless you knew the biochemistry of the target you planned to kill.”
“If it wasn’t developed to kill humanity, then—” His eyes widened as he saw it. “It’s meant to kill the Tersae!” John stared at his sister-in-law. Felt the skin along his back crawl. Eugenics experiments, a doomsday neurotoxin to wipe out the experimental animals . . .
Names from ancient history slipped into his mind, terrifying names like Mengele, Treblinka, Auschwitz. Worse yet, what did the experimenters plan to do with the information they were gathering? A planetwide study in deliberate genetic deformation of an intelligent, self-aware species had all kinds of ugly implications attached to it, very few of them connected to mere scientific curiosity.