20. Who would have guess that his lessons in Rodentia interpretive dance would come in useful
"Who would have guess that his lessons in Rodentia interpretive dance would come in useful," Simon thought to himself as his options suddenly began opening up. He had not appreciated the discovery that Jon had severely limited his access to ongoing military operations. He could observe and obtain data, but his ability to write or assist directly in real time had been neutered. The Rodentia corps would not be in such dire straights if he had been able to act sooner.
He had finally gotten through by sending a personal message, marked for bereavement counseling. Fortunately, the squad had taken his offer to help seriously, and now he had nearly full access to everything he wanted for the ongoing mission. He immediately began to put his plan into action.
Taking over the facility’s computer networks was child’s play. They were different, slightly, from known operating systems of the Aurealians and the Jurassians both, but no more secure. In fact, they seemed to be designed to give the user as much access as possible with little to know credentials. All he needed to do was design a virtual network hub and connect it with the relay jacks the Rodentia had been placing everywhere, and within moments he had full access. Not control, he had to compete with local terminals. The Jurassians could overwrite his commands locally, and he couldn’t figure out a way to see what they were doing except to pull a status report of each facility and compare it with his last update. The Theseus could handle the process without much trouble, the problem was the facility. Doing so too often would crash their systems.
So he crashed their systems. Repeatedly. On purpose, just as they were fixing things. It was fun. And it didn’t seem like they could figure out what was causing the problem, either, so they couldn’t patch it. If anything, Simon suspected that the system was working as intended.
Chaos reigned.
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Simon knew, objectively, why he had been locked out of the mission. He got itchy fingers when he had a new network to infiltrate, and he was supposed to wait until after the Rodentia corps had exfiltrated before going to work. The sabotage and shutdowns were supposed to happen slowly over time, allowing the humans to maintain plausible deniability.
Those plans should have been thrown out the airlock the moment the first squad found a group of kips, but there had been nobody available to make the call. Rodentia corps leadership was … well, they were rats. Smart rats, good rats, useful rats, brave rats. Excellent maintenance workers, explorers, spies, and sappers. But they weren’t human level intelligent.
They weren’t stupid, by any means. But their memory, advanced reasoning, and decision making skills lagged behind the other uplifts. It was for this reason that the Rodentia corps was routinely provided only with the information that they needed to complete their current objectives. The leadership might have known the overall plan, but the Theseus had been operating under a very important false assumption.
The Theseus’s leadership had assumed that the Cloning facilities would be separate from the ‘farms’ where the kips were raised, not that the Aurealians would be crammed together like … Simon couldn’t think of an appropriate simile. Nobody had put fish in barrels for centuries. Nobody put much of anything in barrels anymore. The entire barrel making industry had fallen apart at some point and nobody had noticed.
So had the fishing industry, although that hadn’t gone out without a whimper. Nowadays, when humans ate fish, or meat, they were in fact eating cloned tissue. It was humane, healthy, good for the environment, and cheaper than actually harvesting a live animal. The difference in taste had been scientifically prove to be psychological in sixty percent of the studies on the topic, although genuine products still sold for a premium where legal and ethically acceptable. In fact, ethics became the key word, especially where cetacean and mollusk uplifts were prevalent. Which was everywhere with oceans, considering their importance in terraforming such world. Which made the ethics of fishing a complex and controversial subject … everywhere.
Not for uplifts, of course. Uplifts had the same food sources as humans available to them, but their rights to gather their natural food sources naturally was considered a basic right to them, provided only that such actions did not harm other sapients. Simon himself had a crate filled with mangoes that he had harvested himself and allowed to come to perfect ripeness before placing them in stasis. While the food dispensers covered his frugivorous diet perfectly - and deliciously, the artifical diet on the Theseus was spectacular – he was saving those for something special.
The distraction was helping. Simon did his best hacking while he wasn’t actually focusing on it. He had successfully shut down all of the cloning machines except for those that had current occupants. The rest were undergoing cascading failures and progressive damage. Embryos were being fried, genetic sequencers contaminated, sensitive probes were crashing and incubators were overheating. Everything was throwing safety errors and all errors were being overridden.
The slow, subtle sabotage that the Rodentia had started was building geometrically. Except for those machines who had occupants too far along for Simon to feel ethically comfortable terminating, most of the facilities had produced their last generation. But they would be worthless once the current batch was finished. It was the same logic as an assembly line; break the start of the process and you break the finished product as well.
But even with the cloning problem solved, there was more to do.
Horthus Prime was a large world. Larger than earth in terms of surface area, both usable and total. The oceans were smaller, and the core less dense, so even with 1.2 times the radii of earth, it had a slightly lower gravity. Jon and the Theseus had been looking for where the Horthians were raising the Aurealian kips until they were old enough to hunt, but Horthus prime was an enormous world. Even with automated orbital surveillance and the numerous stealth drones which were scouring the surface, they had thought that they would have more time to locate the kips in danger and plan a rescue.
That wasn’t happening, and Jon was answering neither Simons nor the Rodentia leadership. And unfortunately, those were the only forces those poor kips could rely on.
He couldn’t help them alone. He needed the rats. He needed the dogs and the humans and Lucy too, but all he had at the moment were the rats. So he did what he had to do. He’d already put his plans to evacuate the kips into motion, now he just had to explain it to the Rodentia corps.
Forcing himself to smile and be in good cheer, he faced the nearest holo-recorder and began to dance.
He was well aware of the absurdity. A space-monkey was dancing for a bunch of space-rats in order to save aliens from another kind of aliens because the humans were too busy to answer a goddammed message. But all he could do about it was dance, and so he danced, and was careful not to let his frustration show.
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It would only confuse the rats.
~~~~~~~~
Yellow was scared, and she was hurt. Her face burned where the other’s claw had scarred her. It hurt worse than anything she had ever experienced in her life, although she was now realizing that she – none of her litter, really – had ever been hurt before. While the Other had been holding her, she had thought that she was going to die, but then the dancers had saved her, and they had killed the Other that was hurting her. Some of them had died to save her, and she did not know what to feel about that. She sat numbly on the floor, listening to the rats sing.
No, it wasn’t the rats singing. It was teacher singing, but her voice was coming from the things that the rats were wearing. She was very confused, but she tried to listen.
"We are members of the star craft Theseus. We are your friends. We came because you are in danger, and we want to make you safe. The others wish to hurt you, to make you afraid, and eventually to kill you. We wish to take you away from the others and bring you to one of the worlds where your people live, where you will be safe.
"The things you see before you are called Rodentia nobilus. They are very clever, and they found you when we did not know where you were. They communicate with each other by dancing the same way you communicate by singing. You should be very grateful to them. But they are not very good fighters. They were going to report your location to those of us who are better equipped to save you, but now that the (untranslatable) know that we know where you are, they will start to hurt you. You must leave. You must follow the Rodentia, they will take you somewhere safe."
The song repeated, over and over again. Some of the other kips began singing along, like it was just another lesson about how hydrogen bonded with carbon and made up the stuff of life. But not Yellow.
At some point, she realized that she was looking at her hands. Her hand was covered in blood. Green, and purple. Her blood, and not her blood. She had been hurt, and the Other had died because he had hurt her.
She was thinking in circles. Perhaps she should change her name to Yellow Circle.
"Are you okay?" Purple Dots asked her.
"Do I look like I’m okay?" she asked. Numbly, with no hostility. She actually wondered the answer.
"I don’t know. I went into the other rooms, some of the Rodentia are going around opening them all up and gathering the other litters. There are so many of us. I never knew how many of us there were. The Other … he hurt some of the Kips much worse than you. They are not breathing or moving any longer, and their litter mates do not know what to do to help them."
"Then he did not hurt me that bad, since I am still breathing and moving," Yellow reasoned. "So I should stop feeling sorry for myself."
"I am sorry. I feel like a fool. I never truly thought the Others were our friends," Purple Dots told her. "I just … you were always so clever, and the others … arguing with you made them listen to me. But I do not know what to think any longer."
"I think that the Others are certainly not our friends," Yellow told her numbly. "And I think that the dancers saved me, the Rodentia saved me. They say they want to bring us somewhere safe, so I will go with them. That is what I think. And I think the others would listen to you if you told them that you agree with me."
"I will tell the others that we agree," Purple Dots told her. "And then I will help the dancers gather as many of the other litters as will go with us, and we will leave this terrible place. I have always wanted to see the outside world."
Yellow had never seen Purple Dots as a rival, despite the way the other kip had always argued with her. She had always been happy with her litter mates. And now, a little bit of happiness burst through the numbness that had lingered after her attack. She became happy that the Other had hurt her. Not because she was happy to have been hurt, but because he had chosen her, and not one of her precious siblings.
Silently, she finally got to her feet. She picked something up, not really certain what it was or did or why the Other had been carrying it, but she took it with her as she left the room where her eyes had been open and she had learned to see the world.
Twice.
~~~~~~~