The Last Stand - Brad Ferguson [50]
“As are we, Captain Picard,” Hek said for them all. “We know why you are here with us, and we should get right to it, don’t you think?”
“Yes, we do,” Picard said firmly. “The leading units of your fleet will be in standard orbit range of Nem Ma’ak Bratuna in less than two days. The Lethanta are sure to panic if large numbers of your spacecraft begin encircling their world, even if not a single shot is fired by your side.”
Hek nodded. “You want to avert a war,” he said. “To tell you the truth, Captain Picard, I don’t see how you can possibly do that. We’ve come a long way and have been through too much.”
“Tell us your side of it,” Picard invited. “We listened very closely to what the Lethanta had to say, Presider Hek. We will listen just as closely here, I assure you.”
The Presider glanced left and right at the national leaders, who nodded. Hek returned his attention to Picard. “Very well, Captain,” he said after a moment. “We’ll trust you on that point. The story of our people has come down to us from generation to generation, parent to child. It is sacred to us, as I think you will come to understand. Grek, will you please begin?”
The leader of the South Nation nodded. “Yes, Presider,” he said. “Captain, we know that long ago we were left to ourselves, and we lived in relative peace. There are legends about wars having been fought among us, but that was very long ago—so long ago, in fact, that there are no adequate records of who fought these wars, or when, or why. We do know that one day, at a time of relative peace, invaders came out of the sky and, soon, they made us slaves. They were the Lethanta, of course.”
“We estimate that this occurred about seven thousand years ago,” Scrodd put in. “We don’t have a date per se for the invasion, but our heredity records are nearly complete despite everything, and they go back much farther than that. Given the number of generations that have passed between then and now, we’re confident of that number.”
“The Lethanta agree with you on that date,” Picard said.
“How nice,” Hek said dryly. “Please continue, Grek.”
“Our people had no idea that there were others in the universe, much less others so nearby,” Grek went on. “If we had been sufficiently technologically advanced, perhaps we would have known that the third planet of our home star was inhabited, but we did not even possess the telescope then.”
“There were always stories about people being abducted and mysterious lights in the sky,” Larkna said. “Who knows if they were true or not? There were also stories about dragons and giants and who-knows-what living in the unexplored areas of our world.”
“Even if the stories were true and they had been believed,” Pwett said, “there would have been nothing we could have done about staving off the invasion of the Lethanta. We were farmers, Captain—farmers and merchants. The Lethanta possessed spaceships and nuclear weapons. We had just invented gunpowder.”
Reckkel picked up the story. “The Lethanta came to our world, slaughtered a sufficient number of us to cow any rebellion in the remainder of the population, and put us to work. We were adaptable, Captain Picard. Within less than a generation, we became an industrial army, mining and manufacturing at the command of the Lethanta. They stripped us of our resources, and they poisoned our world with their manufacturing.”
“This went on for a thousand years,” Hek said. “Thirty generations of my people were slaves, but we never forgot our freedom. There was an underground, always active and very effective in making the cost of our continuing occupation