The Course of Empire(10)

"Well, I'd love to meet the Subcommandant." Tracy Guin's round face grinned. "They say he's really young and dashing. And—"



Caitlin blocked out the rest of the chatter and concentrated on eating her meal, trying to control her temper.



Idiots.



Worse than that, really. One of the many negative side effects of the Jao conquest had been a sharp differentiation between human nations, and, within each nation, its various classes. Those nations that had resisted the Jao conquest militarily—the United States being foremost among them, because it had had by far the most powerful military—had been subjected to ferocious direct rule thereafter. Those that had surrendered quickly, like Japan and most of Europe except for England and France, had been allowed far more in the way of local autonomy.



The same, within each nation. Those people who collaborated quickly and readily were granted more privileges. In a war-devastated area like North America, which still hadn't recovered from the destruction of the conquest, that could mean the difference between eating well—and enjoying a higher education—or just barely scraping by.



Miranda and her friends were the inevitable byproducts, some twenty years later—a group of college students who'd been born and raised since the Jao conquest, and had the screwiest ideas about the universe and their true place in it.



She gave Miranda, still prattling cheerfully about the "Jao prince," a sidelong glance. The girl had no idea what a Jao really was. First and foremost, the Jao were conquerors. They used humans, and the resources of Terra, entirely for their own purposes. Whatever Miranda's delusions were, the fact was that the Jao neither required nor wanted anything emotional from humans. Not affection, not friendship—and certainly not a bunch of silly college girls mooning over them!



Fortunately for Miranda, and all the brainless twits like her, the Jao were not interested in the sexual favors of human females. So they were ignored completely, instead of becoming the concubines of their conquerors.



Too bad, really, Caitlin thought savagely. She would have been delighted if someone like Miranda or Tracey could assume her hostage duties even for a few days. She could use a break from the constant surveillance and they needed their eyes opened.



Why they couldn't just travel to the Chicago or New Orleans craters and get educated that way, she didn't know. The thought of all that devastation sobered her every time. The Jao had destroyed Chicago and New Orleans during the conquest without even having the excuse of retaliating against human use of nuclear weapons. Caitlin knew from her father, who'd then been the Vice-President of the United States, that the U.S. government had considered the use of nuclear weapons and finally decided against it.



The Jao invasion had come as a complete surprise to everyone, since Jao technology enabled them to circumvent Terra's electronic early warning systems. They'd struck hardest in North America. Clearly, they'd already been able to determine that continent contained the most powerful human military forces. Their troop landings had taken place in several areas in North America, and rapidly expanded outward from there. By the time the U.S. government could react coherently—which had taken days, since the Jao had used their advanced technology to suppress or at least disrupt human electronic communication—Jao troops were too closely mixed up with human armies and civilian populations for the use of nuclear weapons to be a viable option. Not unless the U.S. government was prepared to kill tens of millions of its own citizens in the process, and radioactively contaminate most of the continent.



They hadn't been. But, in the end—for Chicago and New Orleans, at least—it hadn't mattered. The American armed forces had put up their most ferocious fighting to defend those two cities. After days, even though they were killing ten human soldiers for every one they lost, the Jao casualties had mounted significantly and they hadn't made much headway. So, they lost patience.



Not even that, really. "Patience," like every other human characteristic, was something that could only be fitted onto Jao psychology in a loose way. It might be better to say that the ever-practical Jao simply decided they could afford to lose the resources of those areas in order to end the thing. And, given their technology and control of space, they hadn't had to worry about radioactive contamination. Two chunks of rock taken from the asteroid belt and accelerated to 50,000 miles per hour had done just fine, thank you.



And the fact that, in so doing, they'd butchered millions of people hadn't bothered them in the least. Nor did it still, twenty years later, so far as Caitlin could tell.



She finished her meal, and decided the rest of the tea wasn't worth listening to the imbecilic chatter around her. Caitlin snatched up her knapsack, scraped back the chair, and headed for the door. Booted steps across the tile told her that Banle wasn't far behind. But then, Caitlin thought resignedly as she pushed open the outer doors, she never was.