Judge by Karen Traviss Page A

satisfying grumpiness, no longer needing to give a hand-job to political egos to get what he wanted. Zammett was familiar territory. Only the faces changed.
    â€œWe’d like to understand the wess’har—the Eqbas—better, Mr. Michallat, and you’re about the only neutral person I can reach who knows them well.”
    There’s Shan, and Ade, and the Royal Marines. But maybe you don’t know where they are now, and you’re trawling.
    â€œI suppose I do,” said Eddie. The five-second delay on the relay was a blessing sometimes, a little shakedown time. “What do you want to know that I didn’t cover in nearly six hundred hours of features and doccos over the last twenty-seven years? I wouldn’t have thought there was anything left not to know about. Even their sex lives and recipes.”
    Zammett had an extraordinary ability to sit completely still while waiting to speak. He was bred for live video. “We got off to a bad start with them, alas. They violated our Antarctic airspace, one of our air force observers got too close, and there were shots fired. The pilot ejected safely, though. We could still talk calmly with them at the moment.”
    Eddie shrugged. “If the Eqbas had opened fire, the pilot wouldn’t have been able to bang out, except as vapor. If he saw a big flash, that’s part of their mechanism for fending off collisions.”
    There was a longer silence than Eddie expected. “Unfortunately, one of our warships launched a missile.”
    â€œWell, is your office still in one piece? That means they weren’t too upset, because I’ve seen them wipe out a whole city for that. And they don’t have a concept of airspace and national boundaries.”
    â€œThe missile certainly seemed to make no impression on their ship…”
    â€œMr. Zammett, have you actually seen any of my programs? The civil war on Umeh?”
    â€œNot all of them.”
    â€œWell, get your secretary to dig up the BBChan archives and just watch the lot. That’ll tell you all you need to know about their military capacity. Capacity, as in you don’t stand a chance . They were spacefaring when we were living in caves. You know what they say—resistance is futile. Clichés are clichés for a good reason.”
    â€œIt’s hard,” said Zammett, “to know that, and yet still be unwilling to be downsized like Umeh was without at least putting up a fight.”
    He’d absorbed that much, then. So what was he after? There was information, and there was special pleading. He didn’t need military intelligence. The words hundreds of thousands of years ahead of us should have told him everything.
    â€œWhat do you want from me?” Eddie decided to play for time. “My wife isn’t keen on me getting involved with Earth matters these days, so I’d have to square it with her, but just tell me straight what you want.”
    â€œJust advice from time to time on who we should be talking to. Cultural advice. That kind of thing.”
    Right. If he’d seen the programs, then he would have known that he could just ask a wess’har anything at all and get a completely open answer. They didn’t need diplomacy and good contacts.
    â€œOkay,” said Eddie, seizing a bargaining chip for the future. “For whatever good it’ll do.”
    â€œYou’re a European citizen, Mr. Michallat. I don’t think you want to see the English regions destroyed, however welcome the wess’har have made you.”
    Zammett was right, but the Eqbas would do whatever made sense environmentally, and singing “Jerusalem” to them wouldn’t bring a tear to their eye and make them spare England. It wasn’t even a green and pleasant land any longer. It was a cluster of storm-whipped islands, and far smaller than they’d been when he left Earth. “Anything else?”
    â€œLong shot,