Confederation -- 27

Chapter 27

We prepared to leave Earth space. I was taking my fleet of four ships back to the Sunny planets. We were going to dump yeast on the Pug-bears and see what happened.

It sounded like a plot for a comedy; defeating aliens by hitting them with one of the ingredients for beer. I could already see the bad jokes coming: "Did you hear the one about the Pug-bear who couldn't hold his brew? He lost his mind!"

Ian assured me it would work, and I believed him. As far as I was concerned, anything that would make it easier to rid the Sunny planets of thousands of the ill-intentioned creatures was worth a try.

If we went from Sunny planet to Sunny planet, the voyage would take almost three months just for travel alone. I didn't want to take that long, so we distributed the yeast and tanks to all four of our FTL ships. By now, all of the shuttles were outfitted with spraying apparatus.

I briefly thought about sending one ship to each Sunny planet but discarded that notion. There were still some FTL ships under Pug-bear control, and I didn't feel entirely comfortable that my ships were ready for a potential battle with another ship, even though the Pug-bears hadn't armed any of their spaceships to this point.

The Pugs did have some armed shuttles, but those were used exclusively against planetary populations. The one time they came after our ship, I'd destroyed all of them. Even so, I'd been lucky. We had lost one of our FTL vanes, and only the fact that we were near a Sunny repair facility kept us from being restricted to in-system speeds and unable to return to Earth.

The Pug-bears' empire covered a lot of space, and we'd only begun to interfere with it. They controlled other planets besides those of the Sunnys. However, Frazzle informed me that these planets were generally not heavily populated by Pug-bears. The creatures each seemed to want to dominate a planet of their own.

The only planets in their control that could construct spaceships were those of the Sunnys. None of the other colonies save the planet of the Pugs even maintained their own ship.

The good thing about the Pug-bears was that they tended to stay there once they became established on the ground. Without help from the Pugs and Sunnys, they wouldn't be able to reach space again. I wasn't inclined to leave them alone for the long term, but I thought that exterminating them could wait if they were planet-bound.

If we captured the remaining FTL ships, the Pug-bears would be isolated, and we could safely leave their colonies to either survive on their own or become extinct. They'd never be able to create their own technology and would be biologically doomed by their physical structure to remain planet-bound.

I finally decided that we'd take the entire squadron to the first couple of planets and see how the liberation mission went. That would give me the chance to make sure that each commander was ready. If all went well at these two planets, I would dispatch Holmes along with Rudy, who'd been promoted to his own ship, to handle the next two Sunny Planets. Joe and I would take the final one. It was far enough away from Earth that I thought Rudy and Holmes would be done with their two by the time Joe and I got there, dumped our yeast, and returned. We'd link up at the first Sunny planet and check on the progress of the yeast-dumping plan.

I would then take all of our ships to Earth. Once there, we'd check in with Jake. I wanted to make sure that he was holding his own against the Motherland forces.

When we got back, I had determined to disrupt their control over the territory they claimed. My conversation with the old veteran in West Virginia had convinced me that something had to be done. Too many people were suffering needlessly due to their president's lust for power.

Perhaps they could be the basis of my planned human confederation, Jake's territory, and the North Park territory where Liz and I nominally lived.

If my daydreams began to materialize, humans would quickly begin to spread out over our single solar system and possibly others as well. For that to work smoothly, we'd have to have the various political and ethnic entities on Earth organized and getting along without conflict.

I'd had a chance to go over my ideas with Liz, and she more or less approved. She pointed out that human society, as it had existed before the invasion, was a hodgepodge of over two hundred formal political entities and a bunch of informal ones. Some were based on ethnicity, some on language, and some were conglomerations of various hostile factions forced together by outside influence.

She didn't think that they'd willingly agree to give up their customs and adhere to my proposed schedule of human rights. I was more of the opinion that the promise of the Sunnys' technology would lure them into agreeing to observe some basic amenities. If they didn't abide by these amenities, we would simply isolate them. They could then sink or swim on their own.

We had discussed the human tendency to cling to ethnic groups. In light of the new alien races that we now knew about, being biased against another human simply because they were different in terms of their national origin, religion, skin color, general configuration, or any of a number of equally ludicrous distinctions was the height of idiocy. Perhaps the fear of strangers bred into our genes from millions of years of what is essentially internecine conflict had once had a functional reason for existence. Now, it seemed like a left-over behavior pattern that would cause a fatal lack of cooperation, potentially resulting in the extinction of the human species.

I'd spent some time listing what I thought were necessary human rights. My list was getting very long and cumbersome when Liz took a look at it. Once again, she cut directly to the chase.

"Dec, you can't possibly list every right in every situation. You've got to come to grips with some principle that will cover all situations and then let the individuals involved decide if their rights are being denied. You'll have to set up some kind of universal tribunal that will handle appeals pertaining to rights. This can only work if you have a basic principle to apply," she said patiently.

As a result, I decided that the basic principles of libertarian philosophy were probably a good place to start. I did not want to rehash old ideas in their original form. Libertarianism was associated in many people's minds with the distortions imposed by propaganda for the old status quo. The truth is government, especially unfettered government, will do anything to obtain and hold power. I knew that libertarianism had received enough bad press to seem both trite and naive in the past when it was nothing of the sort.

After a considerable amount of thought during the early part of our voyage, I came up with a long set of ideas that I felt could be reduced to simple principles.

After writing and rewriting them several times, I again discussed my work with Liz. This time she stated that I needed to reduce the ideas to a simple list of principles that everyone could quickly memorize and understand. I agreed, but the task was a daunting one. I made a stab at it but eventually decided to wait, hoping that I'd have a moment of inspiration that would create the desired result.

I had another excuse for my lack of action since we had arrived at our first destination. The first Sunny system was awaiting liberation.