Aille stopped beside a massive vehicle topped with a rotating gun turret. "Did they develop all these vehicles for their struggle against the Jao?" he said, raising his voice to carry over the omnipresent screech of power tools.
Nath snorted. "I think you will find these creatures the most quarrelsome beings ever evolved! From their earliest recorded history, they have fought one another as vigorously as they ever resisted us. All of these armored vehicles and mobile assault weapons were in service long before we made landfall on this world."
"Interesting." Aille walked around the large vehicle, noting the thick armor plating, the open hatch above and the bristling array of communications antennae. The metal was cool and grainy beneath his hand. "Perhaps that was why they were so effective in their initial resistance—they had a great deal of practice."
"Perhaps." Nath sounded unconvinced. "It boggles the mind, though, to think of kochan fighting kochan, pitting strength against strength, rather than creating associations and binding assets in a common cause. Think of what they might have accomplished, had they molded themselves into one massive unified power, rather than a squabbling cluster of minor political states. It would have taken us twice as long to conquer them, if we could have done it at all without obliterating life from the planet."
She stepped aside as a pair of human techs wheeled a Jao laser generator on a cart toward a gutted vehicle. "In the long view, our conquest benefits them as well. They might have annihilated themselves altogether before very much longer and the Ekhat would have encountered no resistance at all in this sector. Now, perhaps they will have time to mature as a species and create a new cooperative social order."
Voices rose suddenly above the clamor of metal against metal and the whir of saws. Aille rotated until he located their source, then threaded his way through techs and machinery, finally emerging near the end of the refit bays where a grizzled dark-haired human male was facing off with a larger Jao official.
"You can't just slag these guns!" the human was saying. "In fact, it's stupid to replace them with lasers in the first place!" His face was reddening, a hue which Aille was coming to associate with overstimulation in humans. He cocked his head, trying to read the creature's posture. Was that fear? Anger? Greed?
A handful of humans crowded around, their faces showing a similar response. Two Jao guards pushed them back, then exhorted them in low voices to return to their stations.
"I fought at the battle of Chicago," the man continued in an insistent tone of voice, ignoring the guards. "We took your tanks out right and left. If you Jao hadn't had air supremacy, things would have turned out very different. Don't think they wouldn't."
With the flick of an ear, the Jao official seized the human's shirt and lifted him into the air. "Your only function here is to make yourself useful to the Jao. Either you do the work assigned without further comment or you go to the stockade. We are not interested in preserving inferior human gadgets."
Aille glanced at Nath. The supervisor was obviously striving for indifferent-patience, but he could detect underlying unease, perhaps even anger. She did not seem happy with the official and the way he was conducting himself, he thought.
Aille stepped out of the shadows and the Jao official seemed to see him for the first time. He released the human he was clutching and swatted him away with a cuff to the side of his head.
"They are idiots," he said. "They persist in believing their primitive toys have value. Too bad we cannot shove them forward to face the Ekhat on their own. Then they would have some idea of what was coming and stop prattling about the merits of their technology! If their hardware was so superior, why does Terra belong to the Jao now?"
"Indeed." Aille glanced at the human who'd been arguing. He looked dazed from the cuffing he'd received. It hadn't been a severe blow, but humans were less sturdy than Jao. "Just exactly what is it this one wishes to preserve?"
The Jao glanced at a discarded gun mount and scowled. "One of their primitive kinetic weapons. We will melt it down and make something useful out of it."
"Perhaps he has a point," Aille said. "It is true, after all, that our ground vehicles suffered tremendous casualties during the conquest. Inflicted, as I recall, by these same perhaps-not-so-obsolete kinetic weapons."
"And who are you, to have opinions? I see no command bars on your cheeks!" The Jao official seemed to suffer from a short temper. He braced his shoulders, then gestured at the human he'd cuffed and bellowed at the guards. "Take this human to the stockade! I do not want him on the work floor stirring up the rest of them."