Chapter 29

..[ JACY ]..

Jacy was surprised by how serious Mativo was been with the whole learning English first. He had postponed the meeting twice when the delegates failed to pass the English test. Twice. Sylvia and her fellow diplomats had argued with him for hours, more like talked at him, but he still refused to budge. He was hell bent on holding the meeting in English.

When the delegates had failed the first test, Mativo had asked why they hadn’t become competent in the allocated time. Their answer was a pray for time. Mativo had looked at them for a whole minute before declaring that unless they could fully communicate properly in English, there would be no meeting. They had already been able to hold a conversation albeit barely. But they had angered him somehow, and by the look in his eyes, she knew he would not budge. While the others tried to convince him otherwise, she didn’t bother. The meeting would be held when Mativo considered them ready for it.

And everyone wanted it to happen soonest possible. If the meeting went favorably for all parties, Mativo would lighten the yoke they had put on the natives. And they knew that. While Sylvia and her group became incensed by the second cancellation, the natives accepted the announcement with a resigned acceptance. They had already known they wouldn’t pass.

So they took it like the champs they thought themselves to be and worked harder on it. She still heard a few complains during that period, but it wasn’t anything that could be considered worrying. Three Weeks later and they had become proficient enough for Mativo. The meeting was set back on track and they all attended. That was where they were; her, Mativo and Sylvia together with a few other high ranking Officers and security. In a meeting with three representatives from each of the three continents.

That brought the number of seated persons on the table to twelve, with others spread across the room. High officers who weren’t high enough to be on the table had occupied several seats on the accompanying seating area to watch the meeting happen. They wouldn’t be allowed to participate though.

There were also news personnel across the seating area, both from the natives and the Swift. But none of them were streaming directly to their news channels. That had been forbidden. They were to merely act as recorders of the events that transpired. Records were necessary for events such as the one they were holding.

They were in a parliament like room with the square table at the center of it. It was surrounded by raised platforms with seats for spectators to observe the proceedings from. Mativo had been indifferent to the attendance of the observers that Sylvia had proposed. The entry to the room was located at the highest platform level. The room was housed in a single room building and had a set of security forces from the Swift guarding it. With shuttles on close by. It was essentially the safest place to be on the planet, though Jacy doubted the natives considered it as such. Maybe they thought it the most dangerous place to be. It was all perceptual after all.

The building itself was located on the central continent, at exactly zero degrees latitude and longitude. They had been lucky. The place was less than five kilometers from the ocean. It could have landed in the middle of the ocean. Mativo had said that they would have just gone with one-eighty degrees longitude. And if that failed, rewritten the whole coordinate system of the planet until it met their needs. Like how they had had to construct the building that housed the meeting in less than a Month.

There had been a small city on the spot, a coastal one. But it had not had the kind of building Mativo had wanted. So they had built it from scratch. It wasn’t meant to be a permanent thing or anything like that, but it would serve the purpose. Plus, none of the natives could claim it as theirs. That had been an unintentional win for them.

Sylvia started the meeting with introductions, “I hope you had a good Day. As many of you already know, my name is Sylvia Kadzo Sotiris. The Chief Diplomacy Officer of the Swift. And for the sake of records, all personnel will be introduced with their credentials. I’ll begin with us and move clockwise. Everyone okay with that?”

When no one seemed to object, she began.

“Mativo, Commander of the Swift and representative of the Mũtindas. The ruling family of The Empire.” Mativo wasn’t exactly a representative per se but for the meeting he had to be. It also added weight to his presence and Jacy saw it register on most of the attendees. He only gave a barely there nod; he couldn’t exactly be bowing to them.

“Jacy, Chief Exploratory Commander.” She raised her left hand, setting a precedent all the other delegates followed. Sylvia proved to have done her homework as she went through all the others on the table, without needing help with anything.

There were the northerners; Mao, Gario and Mamuo. The centralists; Tekib, Rirchich and Ronkit. And the southerners; Nanli, Kanfe and Sinpa.

“We are here to talk about your joining of The Empire.”

After saying that, Sylvia stayed quiet. And the whole room did too. It took a while for them to realize that it was their turn to say something about that. And the first to speak was Mao.

“We don’t want to be part of this empire you speak of.” Her voice was a hoarse growl. Maybe she was still mad.

She was a white hair, light skinned northerner. When they had first met, Jacy had thought her a soldier and not a president of one the nations in Uul, the northern continent. She had put up a fight, being the last fighter to surrender. Jacy sometimes thought she had been wishing for death then. But the others had already surrendered, it would have been pointless.

“We are already here,” Jacy said to her. “I’m sure we can find a way to work together.”

Yap. She was still mad. Her glare said it all. If she had some of the alterations Jacy had, she might have proved quite the opponent. Sadly, she didn’t. And if she kept up that mentality, it might be a whole decade before she ever got access to the technology. It would be such a loss.

“What are we here to talk about if it has already been decided that we are joining this empire?” Her voice got even hoarser. If it went further than that, she might torture her vocal cords.

“In what capacity you will be joining The Empire. We are not oppressors. If you have conditions to express, we will listen to them,” Sylvia said. She was nearly lying while still speaking the truth. What play these diplomats employed.

As Sylvia continued to placate the table, Jacy noticed one of the southerners squirming in her seat. What had she been introduced as? Kanfe? Right. She was a princess of a kingdom Jacy had forgotten the name of. Maybe Kanfe was the name of the kingdom. The princess was young; in human age she would be in her late teens or early twenties. She had heard the Talingi aged the same as humans. But their medical technology was a few Years behind, they could be slightly longer lived.

Following the quick glazes she threw their way, she nearly laughed. Mativo was already zoned out. It had been minutes since the meeting began. It wasn’t obvious though, unless one knew him like she did. He was staring dead ahead with an unblinking focused gaze. Which the princess happened to be in the way of. She had been on the receiving end of such a gaze on more than occasion. With his slightly upturned eyes, it gave him the look of a predator. The kind that has a grumbling belly, though Sylvia had once commented it wasn’t that different from his other predatory look. She decided to give the white haired girl, woman?, a break.

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“Pay attention. This is important.”

“What?” Mativo asked as he turned to her.

Jacy noticed the relief the princess wore on her face. When she smiled at her, the princess quickly schooled her features. Of course, she is still a diplomat. She should have thanked me at least. Mativo could stay like that for hours, blinking once every ten minutes or so. Unprepared, it could make one anxious.

“I’m aware of what is happening. Anything I can say will only derail Sylvia.”

“Not everything,” Jacy told him as she got back to paying more attention to the meeting itself.

They had already gotten past the whole joining The Empire issues. Not amicably judging by the grumpy looks they all had. But they had had those in the beginning of the meeting, so she decided nothing had changed much.

“That would be too long. We need our nuclear stations back sooner,” Sinpa said as some of his black hair bristled.

“The nuclear stations will be operational again in a Year after you join The Empire. That isn’t that long,” Sylvia told him.

“Easy for you say,” Gario added, turning his black head from Sylvia. “You will have all the power you need. Our citizens rely on the power they get from those stations. They provide eighty percent of all the power we use. You want us to go back to relying on coal and gas?”

“One Year seems reasonable to us,” Tekib, the brown-haired centralist male said.

Jacy had noticed that most browns and greys were located on the central continent with the blacks and whites mostly found in the northern and southern continents. The northern continent was further skewed towards blacks while the southern towards the whites. Tekib and Ronkit were both brown-haired while Rirchich was grey-haired. All the northern representatives were black-haired, while the southern delegate had the white princess and Nanli, the other female was grey-haired.

“Your opinion on this matter is unwarranted,” Mao said to Tekib. Her statement was harsh, but her voice wasn’t. “There are no nuclear stations on Atik.”

“That’s because we get all our power from renewable sources,” Rirchich said.

“You cannot compare our power needs to those of yours,” the princess said. She had already recovered from her earlier ordeal.

“We could easily satisfy our needs with renewable sources if they ever got to your levels,” Tekib threw at her. He seemed to not like her at all. Maybe he had issues with monarchies, or her kingdom might have been the one directly controlling his nation.

“We don’t have large swatches of inarable land to dedicate to renewable energy generation,” she wasn’t backing down. “There are no areas with enough wind speeds for it to be economical for us. And the amount of sunlight we receive cannot even compare to the amount received at the equatorial region. I have a lot of reasons to give you if you need more. We didn’t go with nuclear because we didn’t care.”

“This argument will get us nowhere,” Jacy said, stopping her from going on with her lecture. She had seemed ready to continue. “We really don’t care that much about how you get your power. Plus, they have pretty good nuclear waste disposal protocols.”

She told the last part to the Atik delegates. She knew they knew it too. But saying it out load made the argument lose some of its heat. Though, only the southerners did, the northerners left a lot to be desired.

“The whole reason for this is to make sure no nuclear weapons are being created,” Sylvia added.

“Can’t you do that while the stations are still running?” the princess asked. “You were going to keep an eye on them even if they stayed shutdown.”

“Not as closely as when they are online.”

“When online, a more intimate presence would have been required,” Jacy said when she noticed the princess was still rearing for another argument. “We wanted to avoid such a scenario.”

“I think I’d prefer that over my subjects not having access to enough power,” she said as she looked at her fellow delegates and those from the Uul. They all seemed to agree. Even Mao, but she might have murmured something to herself.

“Are you saying you wouldn’t mind us overseeing your running of the planet?” Mativo asked. It was the first time he was addressing the table ever since the meeting began.

“Overseeing the running of the planet?” Mao was back to being mad. And she wasn’t the only one. Most of the delegates had been surprised by that statement. “We only agreed to your presence in the nuclear stations, nowhere else.”

“We will be everywhere, remember? It’s not like once you join The Empire we will just pick up our things and leave.”

He was going to ruin everything. Jacy could already see Sylvia rubbing the bridge of her nose in resignation of where all these would lead to. She knew that Sylvia would have preferred a more nuanced approach, but Mativo was not one for beating around the bush.

“We just managed to get ourselves out of one overseer, we are not going to get under another,” Ronkit said.

“Actually, you didn’t. We got you out,” Mativo told him.

“They were nearly out of our lands when you intervened,” he exclaimed.

“They were getting ready to use their nuclear weapons on you,” Mativo turned to the rest of the delegates, “and each other. We stopped that from happening. It would be wise not fool yourselves otherwise.”

“I cannot believe this, just when we thought we had finally achieved freedom. It gets snatched from us,” Rirchich said in a dejected tone.

“Don’t say that,” Sylvia said as she tried to uplift their mood. And calm the more angry looking ones. “You lives will be better under The Empire.”

“Don’t give them false hope. Their behavior will determine how they get treated under The Empire,” Jacy reminded her. Sylvia sometimes tended to forget that they were less of the good guys and more of the bad guys.

And to prove that point, she said, “Yeah, but it wouldn’t hurt to be nice to them. Nothing has been decided yet.”

But Mativo was having none of that, “Nice?” he asked as he turned a disbelieving look at her. And back to the table as a whole.

“I’m trying to take over. Being nice isn’t really a priority right now. If I go around trying to be nice and patient to every planet, civilization and sentient being we come across; it will take me eternity to accomplish my goals. I don’t want to wait that long.

“I need to finish up with the Milk Way. There is a whole universe out there. Trillions of galaxies to explore. This one planet? It’s nothing. I could crash it all to rubble and move on to the next one.”

He had lost himself a little there. Jacy knew Mativo needed the people, for it is they that gave him the wealth he used to explore the universe. But Sylvia must have hit a sore spot. Normally, he wouldn’t react that. And Jacy choked it up to a past that neither of them seemed willing to want to talk about. And in typical Mativo behavior, he calmed down as if he hadn’t threatened to reduce a whole planet to rubble. She didn’t think he could do that. Yet.

Looking around the table she realized that the other delegates were cautiously looking at Mativo. Whatever they were thinking, she was sure it wouldn’t be nice. Mao was the first recover, and her question surprised Jacy,

“How far are you going to go? In the universe,” she added just for clarity’s sake.

“Everywhere. To see everything,” Mativo answered her.

“You cannot be serious. That is impossible,” the princess said.

“That is for you to say. And for me to prove you wrong.”

Jacy was surprised that none of them were talking about the whole reducing a planet to rubble thing. If it were her, that would have been the first thing she asked. It was the most immediate threat to them.

“I’ve heard that you create hybrids with all the species that join The Empire. Are you going to do that with us too?” Nanli asked.

She was the first to actually use the title The Empire. Jacy assumed she had learnt the difference. And she also proved Jacy’s earlier assessment how the natives were ignoring the whole threat to their planet. She went to ask how Nanli had learnt about the hybridization, but Mativo’s answer stopped her.

“Yes,” he said. Nothing else. He at least could have tried to use more diplomatic words.

“What he means is that reproducing together is the fastest way to create cordial relations between us,” Sylvia said.

“But do the kids from this reproduction get a say in the matter?” Tekib asked.

“Does any kid ever get a say in whether they want to be conceived or not?” Sylvia asked in return.

“Let me ask you something. Are you a parent?” Jacy asked him. He looked old enough to be. She also knew he was.

“What?” he asked in confusion.

“Do you have kids of your own?” she clarified.

“Yeess…” he began strongly before the reality of where she was headed with the questions registered.

“Did you ask for their opinion before you decided to have them?” she asked him anyway.

“It is not the same,” he said in defense.

“Why?”

He stammered for a while, not really saying anything in particular, before Gario came to his rescue. “It’s not natural.”

“And who are you to decide what is natural and what isn’t?” Mativo asked him with clear malice in his eyes. It was one of the few things he liked arguing about. But Gario and the rest of the table denied him that pleasure by not pushing the discussion farther. They learn fast, Jacy thought, there is hope for them yet.

The meeting dragged on for hours. In a way, Mativo’s interjection had helped focus them. The Talingi were no longer as antagonistic toward The Empire as they had been since the meeting began. There was a sense of resignation that had settled over the table. Maybe even the whole room. They talked about many things, but the most all the table had been engaged was when the matter of trade and access to other space resources had been brought up for discussion. After all, the whole point for the war had been resources to begin with. That and territory.