Let's Not And Say We Did
Fuqu was well within his people’s moral code of the time to kill Hurza right there on the spot. But still, he hesitated. Truth be told, Fuqu wasn’t sure he actually wanted to kill Hurza, just that that behavior had been ingrained into him by generations of stagnant thinking.
On planet Xingfrond, the Faarlecs have been fighting the Torselads for over 100 years. The two countries border one another, and they’ve been engaged in a seemingly never-ending battle to either hold, or, preferably, as far as either side believed, advance their line.
To us in the Galactic Council, given Universal Standards of Classification, the civilization on Xingfrond is considered primitive. As far as they’re concerned – which, by the way, doesn’t have to be the way they need to be concerned, they could be better if they chose to be – they are still in the stage where survival is a fight. Thus, they fight with one another. Mostly because they’ve already won their fight over the land and other animals, getting it and them to produce what they need in order to live comfortably.
It’s likely the civilization on Xingfrond will be considered primitive for another 5 to 9 centuries. They’ll land on the lower end of that scale if people like Fuqu, a Faarlec, successfully and bountifully spreads their genes and memes.
The Xingfrond civilization, even within the classification of primitive, is still relatively early in the game. Forget air travel, it will be at least another two centuries before there is efficient mechanized land travel. The peoples of Faarlec and Torselad have only recently discovered something that resembles gun powder.
The war in which Fuqu and Hurza are spies has been fought with single-shot rifles, crossbows, bows and arrows, swords, catapults, and what not. For you, a reader likely on Earth, imagine 1700s European warfare.
Fuqu, a Faarlec, and Hurza, a Torselad, have remarkably similar duties.
They are tasked with going far ahead of the front lines, by themselves, to see what information they can gather that will assist in battle strategy. They often spend days alone, in the northern woods of Xingfrond, acclimating themselves with the land, looking for any signs of enemy movement, or anything else that will help their side in the war.
Again, they are spies.
One day, each of them roaming the same woods, Fuqu heard a disturbance in the bush. A few silent steps later, he saw Hurza, clearly a Torselad, given his green and brown attire, which clearly distinguished him from Fuqu’s brown and green attire. Fuqu gave it a few seconds, ensuring there were no other Torselads in the area, then, he struck. Noiselessly, he covered the remaining distance and blindsided Hurza with a tackle that sent them both crashing to the forest floor.
Ideally, Fuqu wanted to disarm and immobilize the enemy, and hopefully glean some useful information from him. Killing him – which would have been easy, given Fuqu’s upper hand – would yield nothing useful, other than a dead Torselad, which Fuqu felt was a horrible thought. He hated killing. He’d been forced to do it once, out of self-defense, and the vision of stabbing another Xingfronder to death haunted him daily.
Still on top, Fuqu located and grabbed hold of Hurza’s weapons, and threw them off to the side. Fuqu swung down with a powerful fist to knock Hurza out, but well trained himself, Hurza countered by grabbing hold of Fuqu’s arm and pulling him to the ground.
And onward they wrestled.
Hurza thought he was in a fight to the death. He managed to get a few good blows in, but it was clear Fuqu was better trained. Hurza had the gruesome thought that this may be the day he dies. And he fought like it, too. But it wasn’t close to enough.
Alas, Fuqu had Hurza pinned down then tied up to a tree in less than 5 minutes.
“Just go ahead and kill me,” Hurza said in Torseladian, defeated. “I’m not telling you a thing.”
“I am not going to kill you,” said Fuqu, able to speak Torseladian. “And I’m not going to torture you. I just want to talk.”
Fuqu proceeded to tell Hurza about his life as a Faarlec; with his wife and two kids, both boys, age 3 and 4; with his buddies hanging at the alehouse, lamenting the war; how long he’s been fighting the war; and what not. Fuqu asked Hurza his name, said, “I’m Fuqu, nice to meet you.”
Hurza said, with wonderful comedic timing, “Well it’s not so nice to meet you, fucker.”
Instinctively, Fuqu burst out laughing. His laughter was contagious and Hurza found himself laughing, too.
After their laughter left and they were faced with the current reality, Hurza said, “Alright, hear me out.” He paused, as if to find the right words. “Look. My name is Hurza. Yours is Fuqu. Beyond that, you and me, we’ve got the same life, more or less. We’re supposed to come out here and patrol the land and find enemy combatants so we can go back to camp and let everyone know and then they storm this way or that and next thing you know dozens sometimes hundreds of people are getting killed. On both sides. Let’s just say, theoretically, I tell you everything I know – where our nearest camp is, where we’re going, all that. You go back to your base and let your commanding officer know. He then plans this big attack. Though no doubt, in that attack, people are going to die. On both sides. More of my friends will die, as a result of your friends having better information, thanks to you, but that doesn’t stop your friends from dying, too. At least some of them. And clearly, you don’t want to kill me. Why don’t you just cut me loose, we go our separate ways, and tell our sides something else. That we found nothing.”
“Or,” said Fuqu, loving this refreshing insight from his fellow Xingfronder, “maybe we tell them some intelligence. But intel that leads them away from eachother.” Fuqu really liked where his own mind was going. “Maybe we could each feed them coordinated bad intel that will lead our armies in opposite directions? Who knows, maybe we could even save some lives here. War is fucking stupid, anyways.”
And Fuqu cut Hurza free.