Waking Gods (Themis Files #2)(30)

—No! I couldn’t have! You can’t wait. You can’t worry about other people’s feelings. You can’t com … compromise, hope for the best. Or people die.

—You seem agitated all of a sudden.

—Have you ever seen a village being raided?

—I have not.

—Me neither. Bu … but my father told me. I was still in Sarajevo when the siege began. The whole country went c … crazy. Everybody fought everybody. The Serbs fought the Croats. Everyone f … fought the Muslims. Villages were being raided all the time. Then one day, they came into our village.

—Who did? Serbs?

—It doesn’t matter. Bosniaks and Croats killed plenty of people too, but yes, they were VRS. Do you know how many men it takes to terrorize a town of ten thousand people?

—Fewer than one would think.

—You can probably do it with fifty men. There were a lot more that day. Two hundred VRS soldiers raided my town while I was away. We had all heard of the atrocities. People knew what the VRS did. The villagers weren’t defenseless. They had weapons, p … plenty of them. People could have fought back. Ten thousand against two hundred. They would have been overwhelmed in minutes. But they didn’t. The town leaders called for everyone to remain calm, stay in their home. Don’t p … provoke them! Don’t make things worse! They thought offering no resistance would make things easier.

—Did it?

—Maybe it did. They only killed twenty-seven people that day.

Two hundred men … Fffewer than that, because a dozen of them were taking turns raping my … raping my sister to death. They made my parents watch, then they killed my mother, let my father live … because he was a Serb. They raped and killed a whole lot of people that day. There couldn’t have been more than a hundred men left on the street, in the whole town. No one did anything. No one tried. Everyone just … hoped for the best. My father killed himself a week later.

That’s what happens if you don’t do what needs to be done. Vincent and Kara were in their midtwenties. That meant they could be eff … efficient for another t … twenty years at best. They could have died. They could have got … gotten sick. I thought there was a good chance their children could operate the robot, but it would take years to find out …

—You do realize there are … other ways for people to have children? Did you ever wonder why I would encourage two people in a military unit to pursue a relationship?

—I don’t think that’s why you did it. I think you liked them. Maybe you thought it would make them work better together.

—If I have, in any way, willingly or not, led you to believe I was remotely interested in your opinion of me, it was my mistake. It will not happen again.

—It doesn’t matter why you did it. I was also hoping their children, in the tr … traditional sense, could pilot the robot. It would be the best-case scenario. Make a dozen babies, each of them could operate either station. But their ch … children would only have half of each parent’s ge … genes, maybe not the good half. It might not work. I couldn’t wait and see. I had to try cloning them too. I had to see if I could splice animal genes into theirs so their legs could bend the right way.

—You are mad.

—Am I? What would you have done if they had children? Cut open one of their kids and remove all of his leg bones so his knees would bend backwards? Now that would be cruel. I don’t think they would have volunteered for that. You just didn’t think … think this through. At least my plan didn’t involve mmm … mutilating anyone.

—Were you successful?

—Of course not! You drove me out of my lab before I could even begin. The aliens came sooner than I had hoped, but surely you can see now that I was right?

—Three minutes ago, I told you that I would take great pleasure in seeing you tried for your crimes. To most, that would suggest that … No, I do not think that you were right.

—Imagine that the aliens had come a f … few years later, and that Kara had been injured. How many more people would have died in London? Would they have st … stopped after London? If I had offered you a new pilot to replace her, would you have said no?

—I can imagine a world in which you saved us all and became a hero. In that world, I would ask for your forgiveness and solemnly watch as the president pins a medal to your chest. Fortunately for me, I do not live in that world. Based on my experience, your sentence will probably also be based on facts and not on what could have been.

—I don’t think so.

—You do not think it will be based on facts?

—I don’t think there’ll be a trial.

—Surprising as it may seem, most governments will not summarily execute people if there is no reason to forgo a trial. They view such things as … unbecoming.

—I don’t think you’ll t … turn me over to the Americans, not before you get me a f … full pardon.

—Are we still in living in this make-believe world of yours?

—You don’t seem to like hypotheticals, so let’s see how far your con … conviction goes in real life. I didn’t have time to clone anyone at the lab. I barely had time to grab a few specimens before the Marines st … stormed in. I had a fake passport the Russians had given me, but you can’t … you can’t t … travel with biological samples without anyone’s asking questions. So I stopped by a fertility clinic before I left the island and arranged for them to use the … specimens I gave them. There were four eggs. Three didn’t take. One did.