“So what’s the solution, then?” the President wanted to know.
“Let ’em have their damned planet,” Voekel said. “God knows we don’t need trade with the Annies. The xeno people can study ’em from orbit.”
“Not if they have the technology to shoot a starship out of the sky,” Dahlstrom pointed out.
Voekel shrugged. “They’ve had five years to study these critters. That ought to be enough.”
“Five years,” Boland pointed out, “isn’t enough time to even begin mapping out the problem. This is a whole world, a whole culture, a history, a language, a people unlike anything we’ve ever known—”
“The fact is,” Voekel said, “we don’t need these Annie jokers nearly as much as they need us. And starships are damn expensive. I just think we ought to take a real careful look at what we have invested here, before sending any more of our assets out there to Llalande.”
“Are you saying we should call off Operation Spirit of Humankind?” Haslett asked. He pursed his lips, a sardonic acknowledgment of the pretentiousness of the cumbersome title. “At this late date?”
“What’s late?” Voekel asked. “The ships haven’t launched yet. The relief force hasn’t even been assembled. We could call the whole thing off this afternoon. Damn it, I say we should call it off. The cost—the risk—it’s just not worth it.”
“Which means we write off our people on Ishtar,” Admiral Knudson said. “Unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable!”
“Karl may be right,” Thomas Wright, the Secretary of Human Affairs, said. “The cost of each interstellar expedition is…quite literally astronomical.” He chuckled at his own wit. “Attempting to enforce our political will on aliens is lunacy at best. DepHA regrets the loss of life, of course, but I remind you that we advised against the original involvement at Llalande when contact was first established ten years ago. The Ahannu are primitives and no longer understand those fragments of advanced technology they still possess. It’s not as though they can teach us anything, right?” He made an unpleasant face. “As for the xenohistorical crap, that’s been out of control since First Contact and the Genesis Awareness. I don’t think anyone really understands the Frogs or what they supposedly did on Earth thousands of years ago. I don’t think we need to. It’s all moot.”
“We’d damned well better understand them, Mr. Wright,” Van Horne said, her voice sharp, “if we’re going to understand the psychoreligious mania that’s infected the American population over the past few decades.”
That, Haslett thought, was certainly true. The knowledge that aliens, the ancestors of the Ahannu, had colonized Earth over ten thousand years earlier, enslaving the human inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent, had struck humankind’s collective awareness like a thunderbolt. The idea that those aliens had actually tinkered with the human genome, somehow been responsible for what humans were like today…that bit of information had utterly and forever transformed the way man would look at himself.
“Just the American population?” Billingsworth asked with a wry grin. “Whether people think they’re gods, devils, or alien slave raiders, the whole damned world has gone nuts over the Ahannu, one way or another.”
“Be that as it may,” Voekel said, “certain inescapable facts remain. We cannot support a major military operation at interstellar distances against the determined resistance of an entire planetary population. Further, there is no compelling reason to do so. The loss of our people already in the Llalande system is regrettable, certainly, but we must recognize and accept that even if some have survived the debacle at Ishtar, ten years is a long time. There will be no survivors by the time the Derna and her support group arrives in the Llalande system.”
“Madam President,” Admiral Knudson said, turning to face the woman at the head of the table. “The voters will never forgive a…a betrayal of this magnitude! We must at least attempt to relieve the Llalande mission. Anything less would be criminal!”
“Sending more people after them to die would be stupid,” Voekel said. “If military history teaches us anything it’s that we should know when to cut our losses and get out.”
“There’s more to it than that,” the President said. “There are…certain political considerations that must be taken into account.”
“Aren’t there always?” Billingsworth asked with a wry twist to his mouth.