The Great Destroyer (30 page)

Weak, the voice of man falls upon my ears
, the Enshath thought as she listened to the speech. 

She sat on a cushion and sipped from her cool cup of the
shanarah
fruit juice, a delicacy from the home planet that had only recently been made available once again by the farms on Madagascar.  After so long, she had only faint memories of her father, the previous Enshath, but she distinctly remembered his fondness for the juice.

That thought triggered the same crushing pressure, the same fear. 
Singular is the responsibility for the Ushah.  I bear it alone.

She could not speak to her subjects as equals, not even her closest advisors.  In the deepest recesses of her mind, she knew that she had hoped the First Representative of humanity would be someone who understood the burden of leading an entire species.  But, no, Redfeather was
another
simpering fool, obsessed with sentimental, airy notions that had been given names as if they were beloved offspring. 
Equity.  Inclusiveness.

The Ushah had gone through such a period, to be sure.  The Enshaths had guided their people through those times with a minimum of waste.

The caste of the Enshath was every bit as genetically distinct as those of engineers, warriors, and technicians.  Enshath were bred and trained for two specific traits: calculation and perceptiveness. 

To hone perceptiveness, her father had instructed her in countless hours of training to discern, among other things, when a subject was lying, when they loved her earnestly, when they faked adoration, and when they didn’t know the answer to a question.  “Without effort, the facts tumble from the subject, even when he wills it not,” she remembered her father telling her over and over.

Calculation was less a skill and more a way of life.  Absolutely no emotion was to intrude on making the best decision for the Ushah as a whole.  No taboos, shibboleths, customs, or preferences were permitted to overcome
the calculation
.  Costs and benefits to the Ushah were all that mattered.  Everything else was rhetorical ornamentation.

“Redfeather offers nothing but ornamentation,” she said aloud, completing a thought in her mind and caring not at all that her advisors did not know her full thoughts.  They rarely did, being of castes without the breadth of the Enshath’s intellect.

“This is so, leader,” her military advisor said.  “We continue to build heavy weapons for our ground forces so that they can defeat the Great Destroyer.  Our capability to use precision asteroid strikes is now proven.  We have yet to find
any
meaningful weapon the Terran Alliance can wield against us.  With a continent of resources, it is only a matter of time before our numbers are sufficient to subdue any human force.”

Which would be entirely unnecessary, the Enshath knew.  In a few years, she would offer to make the Terran Alliance a formal protectorate of the Ushah, and Redfeather would doubtlessly accept.  At that point, the Ushah would be truly safe at last, with no threats on the horizon and a perfectly habitable world—one that would be a few degrees more comfortable after this temporary cold period.

But that was several steps ahead of where they were now.  “The Great Destroyer escaped,” the Enshath said, a statement rather than a question. 

“Yes, leader,” a technician said.  “Our observation platform on the
Narazh
detected them running from our colony an hour before impact.  We believe that if they ran at their top speed, they would have been far enough away as to survive the impact.  We lost track of them in the jungle, and do not know where they are at present.”

A stab of fear hit the Enshath, but she suppressed it.  Calculation was needed, not fear.  It had been calculation that led her to confide the secret of the Great Destroyer to First Representative Redfeather, though it was certainly not a secret to her own people.  True, the Ushah soldiery had not fared well against the Great Destroyer, but her engineers were clever, and they would now be fighting on their undisputed homeland.

The Great Destroyer thought it knew war, but those robots would learn what the unitary will of the Ushah was capable of, the might of Calculation.

“I wonder,” she said, “what First Representative Redfeather can tell us about the Great Destroyer.  I’m sure if we allow some small amount of trade, maybe send an ambassador to the Terran Alliance, we can extract much in concession.”

Yes, it would be simple,
she thought.  Understanding the Great Destroyer would be the first step in eradicating it, the first step toward a perpetual peace.

She closed her eyes for a moment and remembered the warmth of the home world.  Death was coming for her after thousands of years.  At that moment, she vowed that she would be the one to eliminate the Great Destroyer, that her successor could lead the Ushah to a warm future. 

But before the eternal warmth enveloped her, she would remain cold.  She would bring war to the Great Destroyer.

The End.

Dedicated to Jamie, the love of my life.