Back in the field house, Ted waited until the last of his officers’ backs had gone out the door, then whirled, meaning to punch Eddie Lucas right in the face. Meaning to really hang one on him and beat him bloody for springing this ambush, this bushwhack on him and the men with no warning.
But when he turned, Eddie wasn’t there. He was on the other side of the room because Eddie, though not a fighter, was not an idiot. He knew a dangerous, cornered animal when he saw one.
“Over here, Commander,” he said.
“You knew?”
“Of course I knew. I told you: You’re not the only one with friends at the company.”
“You knew about this when we walked in here.” Ted moved toward Eddie, hands hanging loose at his sides.
Eddie started circling away, backing off at equal speed, moving around the outside edge of the tent until he came to the door. “I found out this morning.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“I told you I had a surprise.”
“That’s not funny.”
Eddie favored Ted with one of his blinding smiles. He said, “Ta-da,” then slipped out the door and into the sun.
Ted stood alone in the middle of the room, surrounded by chairs, humming equipment, and Jimmy McCudden, who sat at his post with his eyes closed, his head down, and his hands folded over the back of his neck. Last man standing, but once again Ted Prinzi had a feeling that he’d lost a fight without really understanding how.
NATIVE RIGHTS INTERSYSTEM, more commonly called just NRI or Natives R Us, was a political association, foreign aid organization, and lobbying group dedicated to the protection and preservation of indigenous cultures and native peoples the galaxy over. It said so right on the covers of all their brochures.
NRI had a snappy logo that looked nice on posters. It translated well to television and the Net. They had a very slick and practiced public relations department that made commercials and organized rallies and crafted public service announcements full of pathos and inspiring music. Their proficiency at fund-raising was almost unparalleled, gathering their treasure ten dollars at a time from softhearted university students and grade-schoolers and a million at a go from corporations aching for a whiff of social activism on their prospectus. The group also had a certain air of fanatical missionary zeal, which was attractive to those who really felt the need to care deeply about something but had neither the motivation to actually do anything nor the desire to examine their convictions too closely. NRI was full-service. Opinions, heroes, villains, smart catchphrases, and T-shirts were provided to the faithful, all in gross amounts.
As a political action group, NRI lobbied, lied, and campaigned for the interests of all the fine, indigenous populations who occupied all those planets that the evil human race wanted to exploit. They labored mightily to keep away the strip miners, the real estate speculators, carpetbaggers, and squatters, the adventure capitalists and the developers, the smugglers, thieves, and snake-oil salesmen. With the outward appearance of unimpeachable virtue, they struggled to keep both the legitimate military and not-so-legitimate mercenary companies out of all the endless squabbles going on in every miserable backwater of the galaxy. It was their deeply and passionately held belief that every culture and nascent civilization should be granted the opportunity to grow and develop freely, without meddling humans constantly trying to trade them Zippo lighters and whiskey for whole continents or getting them hooked on Coca-Cola, cheeseburgers, and color TV before they’d even discovered, say, the wheel. This, too, was in their brochures—though worded somewhat more eloquently.
And in his bed, in his tent, on an airfield very far from home, Carter knew that, under other circumstances, NRI would’ve been heroes. Champions for the downtrodden, voices for the voiceless—this would have all been a good and decent thing for them to do had the local galactic neighborhood been densely packed with planets and short on life. But the fact of the matter was, the opposite was true. Because while yes, the galaxy was fairly fucking teeming with planets, nearly every goddamn one of them capable of supporting life, did.
A century ago, when mankind first began exploring the stupid galaxy in earnest, this was taken to be a good thing. Such bounty! Such wild diversity and wondrous multiplicity of nature in all her guises! Life, it seemed, was tenacious and far more varied than anyone had ever guessed—capable of flourishing in the strangest places and under the most extreme conditions. For a while, everyone thought it cute how critters of all description thrived in lava chutes, beneath nitrogen permafrost, under waxy oceans made of liquid hydrocarbons, and in atmospheres made up entirely of sulfur and noble gasses. Cities were found beneath roofed seas where giant walrus monsters cavorted in blood-warm seas with salinity so high the things could almost walk on the water. Humanoid paleolinds on the icy second planet of 18 Scorpii got their own dedicated broadcast channel with high-def cameras recording every step, grunt, and shit they took. The planets surrounding Alpha Lyrae were the focus of much scientific inquiry because they contained no life at all, only its ruins.