The Last Governor and the Fourth Ship

By author Codae

Interview (edited) between Remembrancer Dana Brunser of the 68th Expeditionary Fleet and President Ali Rubah of Nurwitri, ex officio de facto Planetary Governor of Wilwatikta. Included in the final courier dispatch from Task Group Wilwatikta.

RUBAH: Lady Ju's arrival was a blessing for us. For all of Wilwatikta's history, we have had one rule: eat wheat bran, or die. There were no substitutes until Lady Ju appeared in our skies.

BRUNSER: So you traditionally subsist entirely on wheat?

RUBAH: No, not at all. These canapés are a good example. They are made from buahmanis and tepungmerah: hearty and tasty, but they will not stave off the Veil.

BRUNSER: What did you say the ingredients were? I did not recognise them.

RUBAH: Neither did Consul Marcato. He called them native plants and said they were unique to Wilwatikta, so he had no translation. Let me explain what they are.

[…]

RUBAH: When one is dying of it, there is not just numbness in the extremities, but also a cloud of confusion over one's own thoughts. That is why we call it the Veil. But as long as you maintain an adequate supply of wheat bran in your diet it is not a problem.

BRUNSER: Or rice.

RUBAH: Yes, yes! That is why it was such a blessing that Lady Ju came! Before her arrival, we humans could only live in the temperate belt where wheat grows. We left the rest of the world to the beast and the orangutan.

BRUNSER: Orangutan?

RUBAH: A myth. Or, I should say, it used to be a myth. Much as we are creatures of the plains, our ancestors thought there must be a race to inhabit the jungle as well. Sometimes when something went wrong in the jungle—a road destroyed, a hunter disappearing without a trace—we blamed the orangutan. Sometimes someone would claim to see the orangutan walking on two legs like a human and unlike any other animal. These stories blinded us to the invasion when it started.

BRUNSER: The folklore was misleading?

RUBAH: The folklore was lies! Before the invasion we had an image in our heads of the orangutan. Shorter than a man, covered in red hair, two long arms. Then when we started seeing huge, black, scaly monsters with three or four arms, we couldn't believe our eyes.

BRUNSER: When you say "we", do you mean that you yourself witnessed the aliens before they emerged from the jungle?

RUBAH: Oh, no, not I. I'm talking about scattered reports by poorly connected foresters which none of us even thought of piecing together until Duksina fell. By then it was too late. If it ever wasn't too late.

[…]

RUBAH: So you can see how isolated Duksina was. Jungle to the north of it, desert to the south of it, barely accessible from the western coast. When Lady Ju came through she made sure they had a vox-caster, at least. We couldn't really call ourselves a planetary government without a line of communication to the southern hemisphere, after all!

All we knew of what was going on over there was what they told us over the vox. One day it went silent, and then two days later one of the usual operators came back on and conspicuously said nothing about the monarchy. We assumed it had been merely a coup d'état, with humans still in charge, just a very secretive group. Our main concern was with the fates of the visitors from the Northern Hemisphere, especially Tri Pedagang.

I'm sorry, I'd thought I had no more tears left in me.

BRUNSER: Were you close?

RUBAH: Very much so, for, oh, about thirty years.

[…]

RUBAH: Rather than immediately run for president of Nurwitri, he took a position with the planetary government that amounted to a worldwide speaking tour. We had come close to war before Lady Ju appeared, and it having been twelve years since she helped us set our federation up he was worried the people would take it for granted.

BRUNSER: Is that why Pedagang was in Duksina when it fell?

RUBAH: Yes.

He had a gift, you know? And I don't mean for oratory, though he was excellent at that. I mean the sort of gift the Jami would have boiled him for, had he lived two-hundred years ago. No matter how you tried to hide your emotions from him, he could tell how you really felt. And when he described the Imperium as a beam of golden light, illuminating in spite of the conflicting concerns of everyone else, that wasn't a metaphor. That's how he really saw it.

BRUNSER: What can you tell me about the Jami?

RUBAH: That was the religion that used to rule us. There's a good story about how its grip over the nations collapsed at the "Omen of the Brilliant Star".

[…]

RUBAH: We knew how swiftly they had conquered Duksina, and we knew about their roads across the tropics. But we still weren't prepared. Two years of preparations, knowing the horrors that were going to break through the jungle, and we could barely slow them down.

BRUNSER: How did you slow them down?

RUBAH: Fortifications, mainly. The same solid walls that can stop our bullets stand up well against their las-beams, and the earthworks that block a man's path usually impede an orangutan's. We've been able to defeat the poor mobs of humans they force into battle when they're inadequately supported, but to actually kill an orangutan—I think we only managed that twice before you landed. Once was when they assaulted the mines at Lembahbara and we collapsed the mountain on them. The other time we blew up a dam somewhere in Purwa and found a couple drowned downstream. Those were useful specimens for finding out how hard it is to break into their flesh even when they're not able to dodge.

So even though we held the Isthmus when you arrived, I don't think we could have kept it. The balance of production was best at the beginning of the war, when all of our nations still stood and they had nothing but what they'd built from scratch in the jungle in the last twelve years. Now we have Nurwitri, and they have the manufactora of the rest of the world.

BRUNSER: Why do you say twelve years with such certainty?

RUBAH: That's when their ship appeared. They hid it behind one of the satellites Lady Ju left us. We didn't realise there was anything unusual until they launched their shuttle up to meet it. That's when we checked the blueprints we had and realised that every photograph we had of the satellite, dating back to just after Lady Ju moved on, showed an extra structure docked to it.

BRUNSER: What have you figured out about the ship?

RUBAH: Very little. Remember that the only human on the planet with experience beyond Wilwatikta was Consul Marcato, and he never made it out of Purwa. All that's clear is that it wasn't big enough to hold all the orangutan we've estimated on the planet.

BRUNSER: Are you suggesting they've been reproducing on Wilwatikta?

RUBAH: Apparently. That's one of the more gruesome rumors.

[…]

RUBAH: There is one more thing I'm worried about.

BRUNSER: What is that?

RUBAH: The orangutan ship departed eight days before you arrived with Commander Dulac on the Vivacity. Now, for all you know that is simply a coincidence, right?

BRUNSER: I do not see how it could have been otherwise.

RUBAH: And Commander Dulac, praise him, contacted the Expeditionary Fleet for reinforcements as soon as he observed our status. How did he do that?

BRUNSER: It was an Astropathic message.

RUBAH: What would he have done without an Astropath?

BRUNSER: He would have had to send the ship herself out. We don't have the manpower to win this war on our one scout ship.

RUBAH: So that might add a few weeks to the turnaround time?

BRUNSER: Not that long, since the fleet was already in this sector.

RUBAH: But if you needed to get to another sector? How much time would there be between your departure and the arrival of an overwhelming battle fleet?