It was impossible to believe that the donations funded the dispatch of only one aid ship every ten years.
They already knew that the ship arrived, unloaded, and left without delay, because none of the crew would stay a moment longer than necessary on that planetary pesthole. The cargo was transferred to Imperial Representative Teltrenn’s estate, a large, parklike tract of land surrounding a palace and barracks whose perimeter was guarded by a heavily armed, elite force. The reason given for the military presence among the unarmed colonists, who were required to supply them with food and low-ranking support personnel, was that they were there to guard against a possible offworld invasion. At intervals of a few months, there seemed to be no great urgency about the process, Teltrenn traveled to distant parts of the colony world to distribute the new medication, information on its administration, and news of the continuing research being done on Imperial Etla.
It would have been faster and more efficient to supply the colonist medics with the new material and instructions simultaneously, but Teltrenn insisted on bringing it to them in person so that he could pass on the personal sympathy as well as the good wishes of their emperor.
This lack of urgency aroused the suspicions of Conway and the other Corps medics, who analyzed the various plague vectors going back over several decades. They found that many of the earlier diseases were disappearing, probably because the sufferers and their families were developing a natural resistance to them. But invariably a new disease appeared to replace the old, usually one involving visually horrifying skin eruptions, multiple limb deformities, or uncontrollable palsies that were, against all the laws of medical probability, rarely fatal.
All of the evidence pointed to the incredible and horrifying conclusion that the much loved and respected Imperial Representative Teltrenn was deliberately and systematically spreading diseases, not trying to cure them, and that the reason was financial.
CHAPTER 21
Even the pennies donated by a poor but sympathetic population in response to a local disaster appeal could amount to a significant total, and the Etlans were a generous and caring people who were constantly being reminded of the dreadful plight of their brothers on Etla the Sick. Those continuing contributions from the population of fifty inhabited worlds were vast beyond belief, and with a single relief ship being dispatched every decade, it was obvious that only a tiny fraction of the total donations was going to the people for whom it was intended. Instead it was being treated as a covert form of taxation and diverted into the imperial treasury for the benefit of the emperor and the proliferating families and personal armies of his hereditary representatives.
This was not a situation that the Federation could tolerate, and when direct questions regarding the misappropriation of the funds were asked, on Etla the Sick and on Imperial Etla, Teltrenn and his emperor panicked. Missiles with chemical warheads-plainly they wanted to avoid the destruction of their spaceports by using nuclear devices-were directed at the Monitor vessels, which deployed their meteorite shields and escaped.
The medic who had been visiting Imperial Etla was never heard from again.
On the Plague Planet there was enough advance warning from the ship on Imperial Etla for the Monitor Corps personnel to be withdrawn safely before Lonvellin, who insisted that it was safe inside its ship’s screens, died in a nuclear fireball.
The emperor could not allow the truth of what he was doing to be known by the imperial citizens, so he blamed the Federation for what had happened on Etla the Sick, accusing it of the crimes he himself had been committing for over a century. He said that while the Monitor Corps personnel they had seen resembled human beings like themselves, he had discovered from one of them that the majority of their Galactic Federation was composed of visually horrifying, depraved, and sadistic monsters rendered even more terrible because of their high intelligence. For the first time in its long history the very existence of the Etlan Empire was being threatened from space, and their only defense was an all-out offensive war. The imperial propagandists and the xenophobia instilled into them from earliest childhood did the rest, and a vast, crusading war fleet was assembled.
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