THE PROWLERS RACED INTO THE SKY with a grim-faced Aeryn Sun leading them. It had taken a few heated exchanges to sell the pilots on their situation – along with the new and rather stark realities of their predicaments. With colonels and marines and MP's surrounding them and grounding and imprisonment facing them some had acquiesced, while most had stood their ground, Aeryn's hard-to-deny logic as encouragement.
"Switch comms to Ej'a 21," Aeryn told her 'recruits' as they punched through the upper atmosphere, "and turn on a heading of Velka 129." The Prowler's tracking array was sweeping ahead.
"Officer Sun," a pilot said, Aeryn recognizing the voice of the rather young one who had been the first to step forward, Rehja Valis, her name was, "when you mentioned contamination down there…"
"…I meant what I said." Aeryn finished. "It's a moot point now. You can all work past it or spend rather miserable short lives down there. I didn't lie, Earth has its amenities. They also need us more than we need them."
"We?" One of the male pilots, a Droka Vajs, a veteran and once a member of the Tegron Regiment, Getheme Company, a rival of Pleisar.
"We. I'm still a Sebacean."
"And still the Striker, don't forget it." Valis again. Aeryn shook her head. That was one of a few informal titles she'd gathered over the cycles. Whatever else she might have been, she was still the finest Prowler pilot of her generation and that yet had weight, despite the ancient slander against her.
"The deserter, you mean." There was no heat behind that label.
"I didn't desert." Aeryn corrected him. "I didn't have a choice. I was labeled IC on no evidence and forced out."
"By Crais," Valis supplied, "if Officer Sun is a deserter, he's a damn traitor and that makes every command he ever gave suspect."
"That's one way of looking at it, I suppose," Vajs conceded. Pilots were nothing if not flexible. He wasn't some indoctrinated ground-slogger. Pilots were elites. That was a simple fact. "At least humans look Sebacean. If you squint real hard, that can make up for a bit."
"It'll have to," Lukasi Halkus, a veteran of the Genki Regiment broke in, "as we have no more damn choices."
"You always have choices," Aeryn told him, "if you're smart."
"Work for the humans?" Halkus seemed to find the idea dubious.
"Would you rather be back under Scorpius?"
"Frell no!"
"Well, then, you have choices." Aeryn pulled her Prowler up short and called them to a halt. They were firmly in orbit. "One of them is to listen to me. I want you to forget what I said down there."
"Come again?" Halkus asked.
Aeryn had stood in the hanger with a dozen Prowler pilots and their heavily-guarded Prowlers and felt things shifting inside her, pieces of her she thought immoveable fallen and smashed and pieces she sworn to herself never to contemplate shining before her eyes like freedom itself. She'd told them what the government had wanted them to hear, what John had wanted them to hear. Now she told them what she wanted them to hear.
"Most humans are harmless," she began, trying to pitch it to their mindsets, "but the governments here are like governments everywhere. If you're smart, you'll appoint leaders or pick one you can trust from any survivors and insist that as many as possible be gathered in one place and isolated – for your own good, of course. You are aliens, after all. Most will likely agree. That will dull some of the contamination concerns, at least initially."
"They'll try and exploit us, naturally." Vajs presented that as a simple truth.
"Naturally. Many Peacekeepers will disappear. Frankly, Humans can be more ruthless than any Peacekeeper can imagine. They have more religions and more political systems on one planet than in the entire Influence."
"Makes ya wonder how they get anything done." Halkus.
"They don't." Aeryn corrected him, listening carefully to any reply. "That's their problem. They need help."
"Why they'll need us." Valis offered. Good girl, Aeryn thought. One of you is a thinker.
"Well, there's a thing." Vajs seemed thoughtful.
"We're stuck," Halkus said, "few choices but not without options."
"Precisely. You're all about to advance this planet several hundred cycles almost overnight. That's no small thing. We were called Peacekeepers for a reason and if any planet needed us, it's this one."
There was silence from the others as they seemed to be thinking it over. Valis eventually spoke up.
"This mission we're on?"
"Never mind it," Aeryn told her, punching in the coordinates for Australia's Woomera Prohibited Area and the clandestine base there, "go here and ask for asylum. Then demand that the rest be sent there as well. There's plenty of room." She thought a moment, then added, "it's hot, but not too hot. It will go a long way to calming the humans. Think of it as a new mission, one for yourselves."
"Suffer now for greater rewards later, eh?" Halkus asked with a heavily skeptical tone.
"I know how it sounds. It's that or their governments will bury you all so deep in their bureaucracy you'll never get out. You can trust Crichton and a few others, Director Akanke for one. You'll have to trust someone and they're good places to start."
"How do we know this isn't a trick?" Vajs demanded.
"Do it or don't," Aeryn reposted, "I don't really care." She turned her Prowler on a different heading and abruptly boosted out of orbit. "Merely offering you alternatives."
"Where are you going?" Valis asked her.
"Somewhere else," was all Aeryn said.