“No way, no way, no way,” Ford objected, as Absen knew he would. “We just get a war-winning advantage and she wants to hand it over to them for free? I knew she was a traitor.”
“Not for free,” Vango Markis said. “To buy an alliance that we need. Do you know how fast they can increase their raw military capacity with those living ships?”
“Yeah, I do, flyboy. That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”
Vango surged to his feet, his South African accent coming out strongly in his anger. “I know you’re afraid. That’s why you hide under five hundred meters of armor while real men go fight your battles for you.”
Captain Absen slammed his hand on the table. “Stand down, you two, unless you both want to be cleaning the heads for the next month. Quan,” he said, looking at his chief engineer, “what do you think about buying them off this way?”
Quan Ekara shrugged, a precise, rehearsed motion. “It’s not going to affect me one way or the other. You have to decide how much it levels the playing field. I mean, what can a stardrive-equipped Meme ship do? How ugly can it be?”
“Not as bad as all that,” Ellis Nightingale rumbled, his arms crossed over his massive chest. “Without direct-fire weapons, or antimatter Exploders, it’s far less effective than Conquest.”
Commander Scoggins said, “Less effective in a standup fight with us, but it still hands them a big strategic boost. With a stardrive, we can no longer see them approaching Earth system and counter them. That’s huge.”
“And they can use it as a suicide weapon,” Ford chimed in. “They can do what they did to Earth, but worse – put a Destroyer on autopilot and stardrive it into an inhabited planet. That’s unstoppable.”
Nightingale and Absen exchanged glances, their shared secret now hinted at by Ford’s passing deduction. “He’s right,” the weapons engineer said when Absen gave him the nod. “They could easily come up with something just like our SLAM.”
“Slam? What’s a slam?” Ford asked.
“Stardrive Lightspeed Attack Missile. Something the boss has me working on,” Nightingale replied when Absen gave him the nod. “Make the smallest lightspeed drive we can, fit it in a big, special missile, and we have an undetectable bullet that will vaporize the first thing it hits.”
“My God,” Ford gasped. “I could bombard Earth’s moon from Jupiter! That’s a war-winner!”
“Yes, but which war?” COB Timmons murmured at Absen’s elbow.
“That’s right,” Absen said, “it’s a war-winner, and I intend to win a war with it. But Ford and Scoggins have a point. If we give the Meme stardrive tech, there’s no way to limit them to using it the way we’d like them to. Our advantage will narrow.”
“Sir?” Conquest spoke through her Michelle android avatar. “If we can truly ally with the Meme, it won’t matter. I mean, no one is concerned that Desolator, or the Ryss, or the Sekoi for that matter have the tech.”
“Because they are allied with us against the Empire,” Scoggins said. “And they all got screwed by the Meme, so they have a common grudge.”
Rick Johnstone ran his fingers through his hair, rolling his eyes. “You know, it’s pretty pathetic if that’s the only thing holding us together – a shared hatred. Me, I got friends among the Ryss and the Sekoi both. That’s why I trust them. That’s why they trust us. That and mutual self-interest.”
“That’s a weak reason,” Bull ben Tauros growled, glancing at Trissk and Bannum sitting silently near the back, representatives of their peoples at this human-heavy conference. “I’ve fought against and alongside Ryss and Sekoi. They’re both admirable, honorable races. We have a lot in common. We live on planets, form societies, raise families, create art, value freedom...but I don’t see the Meme in any of that. They’re as alien as you can get.”
“No,” Leslie Denham said from her seat, hands tucked into her yellow-gold sleeves. “Not as alien as the Scourge. However bad the Meme are, the Scourge is a thousand times worse.”
“Yeah, yeah, so you say,” Bull retorted. “Better the devil we know.”
“Yes, that’s just the point!” Leslie snapped. “I –”
Absen held up a hand, and the Blend subsided immediately. The captain knew that his staff already distrusted Leslie, and her arguing in favor of an alliance with the Meme would make acceptance less likely, not more. And he had become convinced over the last several days that humanity really had no choice. Like the Allies who needed the might of Stalin’s Soviet Union during World War Two, humanity, in its current weakened state, must have the Meme on its side, no matter what humans thought of their morality.
Survival demanded it.
Now the only trick was to get his people to want that alliance too.
Sure, Absen could just order it, and they would follow instructions. But the farther away from his EarthFleet professionals those orders proceeded, the less enthusiastically people would comply. He might even find himself policing dissenters, especially among the Skulls, the most fanatically anti-Meme faction of the resistance movement. Hell, he could hardly blame them, but...
“Yes, Bull,” Absen finally said, dropping his hand. “Better the devil we know, to help us against these new demons that are ten times worse.”
Absen let the discussion rage until he believed they had a rough consensus. Acceptance might be reluctant, but everyone there at least was on board. Once they took the next step, though, there would be no going back.