Dirge - Alan Dean Foster [138]
And still the Pitar fought on.
It was finally deemed necessary to land troops, an eventuality the senior officers had hoped to avoid. Unrelenting Pitarian hostility left them with no choice. The thranx participated in this exercise only as observers. Their alliance with humankind did not extend to providing support for ground action. Thranx enough had died crewing ships of the armada, as well as aboard the tiny, seemingly insignificant but ultimately lethal stingships that had at last altered the course of battle.
To dispassionate observers the concluding consequences were inconceivable. The Pitar would not surrender. Every community was armed. Those who capitulated did so only as a convenience of deception, turning on and slaughtering their captors the instant the humans’ guard was down. Even Pitarian progeny knew how to pick up and fire a small weapon or rush a pod of human soldiers with explosives strapped to their bodies.
Scientists wished to preserve at least a remnant of Pitarian civilization in hopes of being able to study and perhaps understand their rabid xenophobia. It proved impossible. Whenever cornered and weaponless, the Pitar always managed to find a way to kill themselves, if not their enemies. Remembering the atrocity of Treetrunk, individual human soldiers were not inclined to go out of their way to ensure the survival of any Pitar.
Still, through the use of stun guns, soporific gas, and other nonlethal weapons, a small number were captured alive. They refused to be studied. Noncooperative and virulent to the last, they turned on their captors when possible, committed suicide when they could not, or retreated into a kind of voluntary madness until their minds and bodies finally expired of natural causes.
In the end, three habitable but unpopulated worlds remained as a consequence of the conflict—one human, two Pitarian. They are not often visited.
The research teams that followed the departure of the armada gleaned what clues they could from the ruins of Pitarian civilization. What they found was not so much that the Pitar had been incontrovertible xenophobes as they had been irredeemable narcissists. Unable to countenance the ongoing existence of any intelligent life-form but their own, they had deliberately set out to steal as much knowledge as they could from humankind before turning on Earth and its colonies. Hivehom and the thranx would have been next, or possibly the inoffensive and blandly expansionist Quillp. But the Pitar had a problem.
Every other sentient species was capable of outbreeding them. Unlike humans or thranx, Pitarian females ovulated only once a year. It helped to explain why no children were present on any of the ships that visited Earth or its colony worlds, why none participated in any of the infrequent cultural exchange programs. The occasional Pitarian progeny was precious.
The stolen reproductive organs of the several thousand human females on Treetrunk who had been surgically eviscerated were found—floating in carefully maintained tank batteries, rank upon rank of disembodied uteruses, ovaries, and fallopian tubes. The eggs of human females were removed, their DNA modified; they were then inseminated with Pitarian sperm and were replaced—returned to their natural cavities to follow the “normal” progression of plenteous human pregnancy. Once sufficiently matured, each embryo was then removed and implanted in a suitable Pitarian female for the sole purpose of giving birth.
Surrogate mothership of Pitarian offspring by living human females, even if it had been proposed to and accepted by qualified women, was a thought no Pitar could countenance. So they attempted to thieve the organs and eggs they needed