Chapter 32
..[ MATIVO ]..
“All of them?”
“Yes. After they got to within five kilometers of the cities they were landing in,” Chantel said.
“Jamming. Just like in Mbelisaf,” I said as I laid my hands on the conference table. “Only this time, we are dealing with a near superior civilization.”
“To the Mbelisaf or us?” Ganesh asked, he was the Chief Engineering Officer.
“Us.” In reality, I didn’t think that they were. Far from it even, but I knew they had the capability to hurt us. Very badly.
“You can’t be serious. They might have ships capable of faster-than-light speeds, but that’s just barely,” the Chief Financial officer, Savage said, facing around the table and then pointed at the images displayed on the conference room Display. “Look at the state the planet is at, they don’t have the resources to be much more than that.”
“Where we travelling at our maximum speed when we approached the planet?” I asked him. We had been meeting inferior civilizations for too long they had forgotten just how dangerous it is to underestimate your foe.
“It is possible they can move faster than they were travelling,” Mũsango said.
“And that would mean we cannot underestimate their weapons’ capabilities either,” Xhalo added.
“How do we proceed?” I asked as I stared at the Display. All ten teams had been captured. I hadn’t been there to even see it happen. I had assumed that things would go smoothly and went to take a nap when the talks had begun. I got a rude awakening with the news that all teams had been led into houses and no security left on the shuttles. Totally against protocol.
“Can’t they get out on their own?” Savage asked. “They are combat certified.”
“And so are the natives. They are not going up against stone wielding natives here, but people with fighting capabilities comparable to ours,” Xhola told her. He was losing his patient too. For a security chief, our situation was one of the top situations he didn’t want to be in.
“We should call the shuttles in,” Savage said.
“I don’t think they will be needed,” I told him.
“You just said they might be as powerful as we are. We need all the firepower we have!”
“Not necessarily,” Strom said. “We didn’t meet or find any signs of their presence out there on our way here. And from what we have seen of their ships, it is very possible they broke the light-barrier before we did. But they stagnated somehow.”
“The only thing we don’t know for certain is their weapon capabilities. We figure that out and we can come up with a clear plan of action.”
“We could draw one of their ships into battle,” Ganesh offered.
“And risk our crewmates?” Xhalo asked. “No. We land. If things go wrong, the Swift is fast enough to get out before it can be hit.”
“Talk first, then land,” Angeles offered. “Give them a chance to realize the err of their ways. We can get out of this without bloodshed.”
“I highly doubt it, but I’m okay with the talk then land idea.”
After a round of consents, Kalũki asked, “Who lands? Who remains on the ship?”
…
Of course I was on the landing party. And I brought Mondhe with me. The ships left to keep watch on us didn’t have the authority for a negotiation. When the message from back on the planet came asking for us to wait while they send up someone who could, I told them we couldn’t wait and ordered the ten shuttles to go for land.
We had taken the Class Four shuttles, and each were going for the landing sites of the previous shuttles. They had instructions to remain inside until otherwise told. They were waiting for one of three orders: retreat, devastate or disembark. We all hoped for disembark. But prepared for retreat. My shuttle went for where the lead ship had landed.
On landing, only Mondhe and I disembarked. The shuttle doors were locked up as we moved around thirty meters towards the hangar, and waited. The hangar doors were open and I could see hundreds of natives with their weapons pointed at us.
“How long are they going to make us wait?” Mondhe asked after we had been standing there for more than ten minutes.
“As long as it takes,” I told her. “Be ready for anything.”
A few minutes later, six figures approached. Sadly, the leader we had seen before wasn’t one of them. Beggars can’t be choosers. We would meet him soon enough anyway. But first, we had to get through the riffraff.
After a whole minute of no talking, I decided to break the ice.
“You already know why we are here. So, what is your response?”
One of them said something while pointing at the shuttle. “Others come out,” the translator-device said.
I gave it a few seconds before answering, “No.”
“We have many. And hostage.” The translator-device spoke for him. He wasn’t that tall, maybe a centimeter on me, but he was thinner than I was. I could bet he wasn’t any more than fifty kilograms. He looked as emaciated as that time I had TB.
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“You attack us; we will assume they are already dead. And then, nothing will stop us from levelling this whole place to the ground.”
Some of natives were already throwing glazes back at the hangar, with their hands getting closer to their weapons. I could literally feel Mondhe priming herself for a fight. The hairs on my left hand, where she was, were standing on end. And by the looks she got from the six natives, they felt it too. They should really keep those hands away from their weapons.
“Either you return the ones you took,” I paused for effect. With how much tension there was, it proved to be too much. “Or you all die.”
I don’t know what happened first, him touching his weapon or Mondhe slicing his throat open. By the end, he was left choking on his own blood with his comrades paralyzed, in fear I hoped. He brought his hands to his throat, trying to stem the flow of blood. But it was too late. She had done too much damage to his neck.
“You move, you die. As you have seen, she can kill faster than you can blink. How many times can you blink between drawing your weapon and firing? That’s the least number of people she can kill before any of you manage a shot.”
I was completely bluffing but they didn’t need to know that. I could clearly see that she was out of energy. Try as she might, she wouldn’t be able to do that again. At least she didn’t collapse outright. And she was definitely keeping the exhaustion in check. That one Month had borne fruit; not as much as I would have wanted, but it was something. I think she would hang me if I suggested another Month of no nanobots. She had literally gone through nanobot withdrawal. It had been an ugly Week.
After he was done writhing, I turned to the five remaining natives. “Shall we go meet your leader?” I asked in a light tone, with a smile plastered on my face.
They looked at each other before blankly staring at us. Huh, is it possible they didn’t have any hierarchy below him? I looked past them to the hangar. The ones there were still pointing their weapons at us. Either they weren’t aware of what had just happened or they were very cautious. Either way, it was working great for us.
I knew the translator-device had translated my question. Didn’t they understand? I choose a direct approach.
“Take us to your leader.”
And that got them moving.
“Slower,” I called to slow them from their near run retreat to the hangar. It was also to allow Mondhe to recover somewhat.
Inside, we were met by another native wearing the same clothing as the one Mondhe had just killed. Rank? They spoke with one of our escorts before they turned to us.
“I take you.”
From the voice and their general body appearance, it was safe to assume that they were female. But I asked anyway. “Are you female?”
“Yes.” The translator-device said. Her voice though had gained an edge to it. Maybe it was offensive to ask, or she thought it should have been obvious.
We were led to a side-door that opened into a well-used hallway. They had tried to keep it nice but it was clear that its hey-Days were gone. After a few turns, we got into an elevator that took us to the top floor of the building. She kept four other natives with her all the way. The elevator opened to a well-maintained decent looking hallway. I started getting the feeling we were in a gang building and not a governmental one. Was it possible there were no governments on the planet?
She led us to the end of the hallway, the door there opening as she approached. Inside, the room had a reception hall feel to it. On the opposite wall from the door, there was a desk but no one was sitting there as we filled the room. The wall behind the desk had a wall length window that had translucent curtains lightly moving with the breeze through the openings. There were brown-colored sofas on the wall to the right of the door. And others to the left of the door. On the left side of the room, a door led to an adjacent room where I assumed the leader to be.
Our new guide disappeared into that adjacent room, leaving us with the four escorts on the reception room.
“Doesn’t he already know we are here?” Mondhe voiced my question as she took a seat next to me on the sofa. The escorts remained standing. If he wasn’t, then he was doing a very bad job of running his gang.
“It’s all for show.”
“What for? He should be groveling already.”
“Unless he still has a trick or two up his sleeves,” I told her.
But she turned to me with a skeptical look, “You don’t believe that.”
“You never know.”
I turned to one of the magazines on the low table and tried to read it but it was all in their native language. So I did what normal people did, I watched the pictures. But they didn’t give me enough time to do more than peruse a few pages.
“Come,” her translator-device said while she kept the door open.
We went in, our escorts keeping with us. The room was the same size as the reception room. The door opened to the middle of the room, facing directly at the huge desk where the leader sat. Behind him was a small bookcase filled with books. In front of the desks, there were two chairs facing each other and sofas on the wall opposite the desk. It still had the same window design as the reception room with the addition of four plants distributed along its length.
He pointed us to the seats as our escorts closed the door behind us and took their positions beside it. Our guide stood to the side of the leader while I took the right seat, leaving the left for Mondhe. But she didn’t take it, standing a few steps behind me with the window behind her and everyone else in the room within her sight.
“Bande,” he said. Then added, “My name.”
He must have been learning English while he made us wait. At least the introductions.
“Say something wrong?” the translator-device asked for him.
After a minute of silence, he said, “Right, hostages.”
A small quirk of my mouth was the only sign I gave him that he had hit the mark. I was no diplomat, and I wasn’t going to pretend to be one. What I was, was a ruthless overlord and that was what he was getting. If it led to battle, meh, I was already on the planet. They were doomed. They just didn’t know it yet.
Okay, maybe my crewmates wouldn’t be okay with that. But seriously, they knew that about me. Otherwise, they didn’t know me at all.
“Your leader has proved a very dangerous hostage to keep. I’m not even sure we are not the hostages,” he said through the translator-device. And I gave credit for the effort he had made. His attempts at trying to understand our language made him capable of using the translator-device for much more legible sentences. Also, I needed that technology. I had to have it. It was way better than what I had been using.
But the talking was taking too much time. I looked at our guide and apologized with my eyes. She gave me a bewildered look before turning to her boss. I adjusted my right hand on the table to face her, and released.
I breathed a sigh of relief as she hit the bookcase behind with such force I thought I heard the room shake a little. It could have gone either way. I was still working on minimal hand movements to get the intents directed. The guards meant to move but a hiss from Mondhe stayed them. Bande had stood up from his seat so abruptly it was thrown to the wall too. He stared at his underling, then me and uttered, “Helbos.”
That, I clearly heard. It was hard not to, when it was spoken in such fear. I could see him shaking a little, his lower lip trembling. He gave me a full body appraisal before asking, “Are you Helbos?”
I looked at the translator and then back at him. Apparently, that word couldn’t be translated.
“I don’t know what that means, but the answer is no.”
“What are you?” he asked. Just how many phrases had he crammed in the time it took us to get here. I kept that thought to myself though.
“Mũsumbĩ.” Technically, I was a human. But if we were going to rule, then Ũsumbĩ needed to be the thing they heard first. Then human second. We should have been doing that from the moment we made first contact. We had adjusted to that way of introduction in our current expedition. “You release the hostages. Then we talk.”
I gave a pointed look to the groaning guide. She was only managing to get up from the heap of books she had created.