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I announced myself to Helene and she invited me into her studio. She was working on a voice project for someone else that day; she put it aside and sat with me. “The first question I have to ask, Grace, is how territorial you are about the dog business?”
“If it would get me the people I need to help Earth, I’d sell the dog farm tomorrow. I can make more running cargo around the Empire than I can in the dog business, and be home every night.”
“Well, perhaps you ought to do precisely that. My husband has a pair of older size two capital ships that really aren’t economical any longer. They’ve been sitting in a holding yard for years. You should be able to put Interstitials in, maybe even pay an on-board cargo handler. Agree to rent space in the hold to anyone who wants. Class two capital ships have external racks for nine small cruiser auxiliaries, as well as internal space for smaller craft. Inoperants can make sublight runs within the system on impellers. If you simply hold your fees to something the consortium can pay, that would solve most of the problems.”
“That seems like it might have merit, but the real point is to get strong Guardians who can fight demons. My satellite has found a jopas,two spraxos,and several nephraim, none of which I’m confident of facing alone.”
“Not all operants are Vector pilots, let alone Interstitial pilots.”
“I know, Helene, but how many will be interested in Earth?”
“All you can do is ask.”
True. Without the Empire behind it, this whole thing was purely voluntary. On the other hand, I didn’t have to choose by the method of taking the first eight people – or eighty – who ask. I could explicitly reserve slots for operants willing to fight major demons. Class two capital ships might have been small by the standards of current commerce, but they were over three hundred fifty meters in radius – nearly one hundred million cubic meters of which was cargo capacity. By comparison, the largest cargo ships on Earth are around seven to eight hundred thousand cubic meters. I wasn’t certain every stray dog and cat on Earth would fill a hundred million cubic meters. On the other hand, with an internal system for moving stasis boxes, it would make it easy for dog people to bring back a stasis box at a time, and each participant could have boxes and hold volumes marked for their individual use. “Is anyone likely to volunteer just for a demon hunt?”
“I’d say it’s likely. There’s a lot of bad feeling towards demons over their part in the Interregnum. If I wasn’t raising two small children, I might volunteer myself.”
That was a shock. Helene was the embodiment of a dignified lady artist. Then I remembered Anara telling me how she used to have two other children, and I realized I didn’t know how many other close friends and family she might have lost. Figure every Imperial citizen old enough to have lived through the Interregnum was a good candidate to volunteer, and that included a large proportion of the strongest as well as all of the most experienced Guardians. For the first time, I really understood that learning about history second-hand was a poor substitute for the experience of those who lived through it. “What if I were to simply upload my satellite log?”
“You might have to promote it a bit, and add a location. Perhaps you might have to promise transportation. But the response that would surprise me the least is veterans of the era start recruiting on their own. Everyone lost people they cared about. I was extraordinarily lucky in that I, my husband, and four of my six children survived. By comparison the Baryan lost twenty out of twentytwo adult members and all of their children and spouses, the M’Dorna lost fourteen out of fifteen adults and all their children and spouses, and depending upon your interpretation, ten or eleven of the Great Houses were completely exterminated. The Council actually had a survival rate greater than the Imperial population at large. More than half of all Imperial planets were completely destroyed or sterilized, none kept even half their old population alive. Nobody got through the Interregnum unscathed, and the demons were the enabling factor. Most survivors of the Interregnum don’t think we’ve done anything like even the scales yet. Many will drop anything they can to give them a chance at demons.”
“So a two prong strategy, one to recruit volunteers for an assault, one to recruit fellow dog sellers. What is the advantage of the other dog sellers?”
“One person, isolated as you are on Earth, is a lot easier to kill than an ongoing presence. Even if you’re the only pilot for the consortium, the other members will have someone who checks on them if they don’t return.”
Copyright 2014 Dan Melson. All Rights Reserved.
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