Chapter 2: Damage Control

Ambassador Jon Wintersmith sipped coffee as he watched his holo-monitor. Scenes from the Z’uush civil war were playing on just about every Federation news channel. Blown apart troop transports, shredded habitation pods, crashed landing craft, and of course, pixelated dead Federation peacekeepers had been playing damn near 24 hours a day for the past few days.

He smiled. It was the standard Federation clusterfuck. Now the Z’uush government forces screwing the pooch he could understand, but the Federation should have learned by now. He turned to an uncensored Federation government feed to watch actual combat footage and nodded approvingly. The Z’uush were pretty damn good shots. He had no idea who supplied them, but they had clearly bought the good stuff. They were using front-line hardware, especially those armor-piercing rounds. Those had to be late generation stuff, at least mark twelves from the looks of the carnage.

The feed suddenly shifted to a static-filled picture of a mushroom cloud rising in the distance. Jon’s smile faded. Who the fuck sold them nukes? One political incident coming right up. He pulled out an edible from the desk drawer and consumed it, savoring every morsel. Grandma made the best brownies. Another mushroom cloud popped up, then another. Fuck. He picked up the analog telephone on his desk and called his secretary.

“Good morning, sir. Have you been watching the feeds?” His Kalesh secretary lisped with undisguised amusement.

“Yes, I have. Get me in touch with Terran intelligence.”

“I’ve already started the process.” Jon smiled again. Good ol’ Toby. Annoyingly efficient as always. A few minutes later, his phone rang.

“Hey Jon, This is Helen.”

“Helen, hi. The Z’uush just used nukes. Is there something you need to tell me?”

“They didn’t get them from us if that is what you are asking.”

“Any ideas?”

“Nothing confirmed. We do know that Sheila Donovan was recently seen in the company of an unknown Z’uush, though,” Helen replied.

Jon groaned.

“Can we just arrest her already?”

“For what, having lunch? We don’t have shit on her.”

“We never have shit on her. You guys are intelligence, right? Can’t you just… make the problem go away?”

“Since the shooting stopped, we are avoiding ‘extralegal’ solutions, especially after that fiasco on Io. The best I can do is list her as ‘wanted for questioning concerning matters of Republic security category 1’, but she has had that dubious honor for awhile.”

“Ambassador, Councilor K-shal-ta is here wishing to speak to you urgently,” Toby said over the intercom.

“I bet he does. Helen, I gotta do damage control over here.” Helen cut off the communication.

“Toby, let the honorable Councilor in and make some kreen tea.”

“Will do, boss. The honorable Councilor prefers peshka. I’ll brew that instead.”

“I DO NOT DESIRE REFRESHMENT! I REQUIRE ANSWERS!” K-shal-ta screamed loudly as he stormed in, his crests fully engorged and pulsing. Jon rose and bowed politely.

“Councilor, to what do I owe the honor of your presence?” Jon said with amused courtesy. The sight of an enraged Pol-ka is something that always tickled him. Pissing them off was sort of a hobby of his. The edible was starting to kick in, and he had to keep himself from giggling.

“YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHY I AM HERE!”

“Calm down, councilor. Anger does not facilitate constructive communication.” Jon laughed. K-shal-ta used that exact same line on him once, and he loved rubbing his face in it every single time he could. K-shal-ta became silent, shaking with rage. “Let’s try using our grown-up inside voices. Now let’s try this again. To what do I owe the honor of your presence?”

“As… you… are… no doubt already aware… Terran combat arms... and fusion explosives... have been used by Z’uush... insurgents in their... illegal insurrection.”

“Yeah, the Z’uush dragoons and your peacekeepers are getting their asses handed to them by some miners. I’ve been watching the feeds. They are pretty good.”

“YOU ADMIRE THEM!?!”

“Now, now… inside voices, please.” Jon giggled despite his best efforts. A muppet with inflatable peckers popping out of his head was just too much. “To answer the question that is odds are the reason for gracing me with your most august personage is no. No, we did not supply the rebels, and no, we do not know who did. The next answer is yes. Yes, we are looking for them, and yes, we are taking this seriously.”

Jon gave K-shal-ta a pleasant, lightly stoned smile. This was a fantastic batch of brownies. He made a mental note to call grandma.

K-shal-ta quivered with rage. He hated Terrans with a burning passion. Every time he saw one, he immediately remembered slithering over the dead and clawing his way past the living as he surged towards an escape pod in a blind panic with Terran marines right behind him calmly slaughtering their way through the station. That was horrible, but what truly tightly bound hatred to his heart was the short message burned into the hull of his pod as he made good his escape.

“Your life has been spared by the Terran Republic.”

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He blinked hard, trying to swallow the hate and rage and remain professional. The war was over, and he had to try to move on, but each and every time he saw a Terran, it all came back, and Jon was perhaps the worst. Most species chose their most polite, most diplomatic, most deferential individuals to be ambassadors to the Federation but the Terrans… They sent Jon.

To use a human term, Jon was an asshole.

K-shal-ta, in his studies of the human’s language, had always struggled with human idioms, slang, and obscenity but the word “asshole” he understood. Jon was an asshole. He wasn’t posted as ambassador in order to encourage peace and mutual understanding but more as an enduring “Go and fuck yourself.” directed to the Federation. “Go and fuck yourself.” was a phrase K-shal-ta was also familiar with. It was used by Jon quite often.

What he hated most about Jon were the medals. He wore all of his decorations denoting his experience and prowess in battle on his diplomatic uniform. K-shal-ta had informed himself regarding the meaning concerning each and every one and the bloody swath across the galaxy they represented. The one that was the absolute worst was the stylized silver human skull and crossed femurs on a notched black obsidian background. It was the mark given to a marine raider, with each notch representing ten kills. He had seen them before killing their way across his homeworld in their expressionless powered exoskeletons.

Jon had a lot of notches.

K-shal-ta checked the brain wave scanner he had implanted in one of his manipulators. As usual, the brain waves from Jon were utterly unusable. He did not know whether it was some primitive technology or archaic martial discipline, but Jon could change the baseline of his mental state seemingly at will. He could somehow make everything seem funny to himself regardless of the gravity of the situation. All he could detect was mild euphoria and hilarity.

“Do you honestly expect the Federation to believe that you do not know the origin of those fusion bombs?” Jon looked over at K-shal-ta and laughed.

“Do you have any idea how many nukes we produced?”

“No! How many?”

“It wasn’t a rhetorical question. We have absolutely no idea how many we made. We were cranking those babies out as fast as we could, and we made them by the millions.”

Jon looked at a data screen.

“From what we can gather, the ones the Z’uush freedom fighters are using are between a type five to a type eight," he continued, "Those were belt-fed into mass accelerators and sprayed by the dozen. You remember, right? You are from where? Zaran-7, isn’t it?...”

Jon smiled, revealing his wide fang-laden mouth.

K-shal-ta lunged forward with a primal hiss, pincers splayed, as he nearly leaped over Jon’s desk.

Jon rose from his desk, still wearing that toothy grin.

“Why councilor, you surprise me. Where is that stately decorum for which the Federation is known? You are acting almost Terran, not that I object, of course,” he snickered.

Green phlegm started bubbling from K-shal-ta’s primary mouth, dripping onto Jon’s desk. K-shal-ta, shuddering with rage, drew himself up to his full height and, without bothering to wipe the rage phlegm from his face, said.

“The Federation is disinclined to believe that the distribution of fusion weaponry to those acting against the Federation is accidental and is in fact deliberate. We view this as an act of war.”

“Ok. Sounds good to me.” Jon said with a giggle.

K-shal-ta blinked in shock.

“Do you not realize the gravity of my statement?”

“Sure do.” Jon picked up his toppled cup, went to the coffee maker, and poured another drink. “Let me explain something to you.”

He took a long slow sip.

“A lot of Terrans think that the war ended way too soon, including myself. A lot of us think that we should have kept going, myself included. A lot of us, including myself, view sneak attacks, especially when we were already weakened due to a conflict with the Collective, to be a dick move and would love, truly and deeply love, watching the entire Federation burn, so forgive me if I don’t throw myself down in front of you begging for the almighty Federation to spare us lowly backward primitive humans.”

Jon advanced towards a bubbling and spluttering K-shal-ta.

“If you want to declare war, go right ahead. I’m begging you to do it,” He continued his advance backing K-shal-ta into a corner. “So the way I see it, you have two choices. You can declare war over some surplus from a war that you started coming back to bite you in the ass, or you can take your bullshit threats and fuck off.”

K-shal-ta hissed and spat a huge wad of rage phlegm at Jon, splattering his uniform, shoved him out of the way, and stormed off.

“Are you certain you don’t want to stay for tea?” Jon called after him with a giggle.

An enraged scream echoed down the hall. Jon grinned, took off his now slimy jacket, and flopped into his chair.

“Diplomacy is hard,” he said with a smile as he reached for another edible.

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