The proposal had been sent directly to the Imperium Embassy in New Washington – which was still standing, although its personnel no longer had diplomatic immunity – via Quantum Entanglement telegrams. The peace offer – the surrender, not to mince words – was mere hours old. Every available Cabinet member had been rousted out of bed and brought to the Oval Office.
Tyson looked at the gathered notables: State, War, Commerce, Homeland Security and Treasury were all in attendance, in addition to National Security Advisor Geoffrey Chapelle and Sec-Navy. There were ruffled feathers and bleary eyes all around, understandable since the meeting had started at 3:50 am. The mood was brightening, though. The gift horse needed to undergo a thorough dental check-up, of course.
President Albert P. Hewer had lost fifteen pounds since the war started, and his white hair had grown sparse and patchy, making him look like some character actor playing the role of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. The war had been hard on him, but he was still full of piss and vinegar, especially now that things were looking up for a change.
“It all sounds great,” POTUS said. “All we have to do in return is put down Kerensky and his pirates, which we were planning to do all along. And promise not to exterminate the Imperium Thoughts?”
“In terms of capabilities, Mr. President, the balance of power has shifted dramatically in our favor,” Sec-War Salvador said. “The Imperium, by its own admission, has lost the bulk of its navy. If anything, they have understated their losses. They can’t stop Kerensky’s renegades. They probably can’t stop Third Fleet, either. Their navy is a shambles, and even after making peace with us, they are going to have their hands full holding off their neighbors. They are done, sir. Maybe we should demand better terms.”
“Temporarily,” NSA Chapelle pointed out. “We must keep in mind that even after the loss of several systems, the Imperium still controls hundreds of star provinces. We cannot realistically exterminate the entire polity, even assuming that is a desirable goal in the first place.”
“Which means they can try to wipe us out again in fifty or a hundred years,” Tyson said. “They had no problems with exterminating us.”
“We are supposed to be better than them,” Sec-State replied.
“We are better than them. Killing in self-defense is not the same as murder. The difference should be obvious to anybody other than a moral imbecile.” Tyson forced himself not to grin when he saw the look on Goftalu’s face. “In any case, you have to be alive to have morals.”
Sec-State shut up, which was a relief. Tyson was having trouble seeing a future for humanity that didn’t include genocide on an impossible scale. Having to deal with empty platitudes on top of that didn’t help. Becoming blood-drenched barbarians had only slightly more appeal than oblivion. But if those were the only choices, he knew which one he’d pick.
“Kerensky presents a greater threat than any Starfarer alliance,” Chapelle said, shifting subjects before things could get heated. “Colonel Zhang’s reports have been very clear on that matter. Further research of the Kraxan records we discovered in Redoubt System has confirmed her warnings. Null-Space Sophonts could render FTL travel impossible, or so risky it will no longer be viable, which amounts to the same thing. The chances that the Elder Races will intervene before that happens are very high, and they are not likely to intervene in our favor.”
Nice to know that the Space Gods could care less if we get exterminated, but will curb-stomp us if we become too dangerous for their tastes.
Tyson dismissed the irrelevant thought as quickly as it popped up. You played the hand you were dealt. Complaining about the unfairness of it all was best left to teenagers, activists, and other lower life-forms. He watched the rest of the debate in silence. Nobody else used the ‘we’re better than that’ line, for which he was grateful. What was left were practicalities: how much more could the US extract from the Gimps, for example. He could read the room well enough, and knew they were going to go along with the proposal. Al was already in; he was merely letting everyone vent for a bit so they could feel as important as they thought they were.
“Accepting the Imperium’s proposal frees Third Fleet to put an end to the Kerensky’s rampage. There is more at stake than our survival,” Chapelle concluded.
“Agreed,” Hewer said. “We are going to take the deal, pending a few details. The Gal-Imps will be too weak to try to come after us for decades. That will have to be enough. By the time they are ready for Round Two, we will be too strong for them. Time works for us.”
Just as he suspected, they were going for it. Tyson didn’t like the deal. Letting the enemy live meant they could keep trying to exterminate humanity. The US had to win every time; the aliens only had to win once to accomplish their goal. On the other hand, the NSA had a point. There was a whole other dimension to this conflict, and if that wasn’t solved quickly, the US was screwed anyway.
After the current mess was over, humans would have to remain the meanest motherfuckers of the valley for the foreseeable future. Which meant the US would continue to be a heavily militarized society. Tyson hadn’t liked what America was on its way to becoming before aliens bombed it into near-oblivion, but he didn’t love the new version, either. Sometimes there were no good solutions.
“Of course,” POTUS went on. “All of this is contingent on stopping Kerensky’s mutineers. If we don’t, the Black Ships will most likely depopulate Primus. No telling what happens after that, but we have it on good authority it won’t be anything we’ll like.”
Best of luck, Navy and gyrenes, Tyson wished silently on the men and women fighting and dying hundreds of parsecs away. Sending others off to do or die hadn’t gotten easier with practice.
Fifteen
Imperial Star Province Ugo, 169 AFC
“The Governor’s Office is transmitting our new orders, ma’am.”
Having the enemies who’d been trying to sink her ship pass on a message from the Department of the Navy was highly unusual, to say the least. That was the only way they could get them in real time, though. QE-telegram devices couldn’t be mounted on starships. The only alternative to having the Gal-Imps pass on the message was to wait for a courier ship to reach her, which would take a minimum of three weeks. They didn’t have that much time to spare.
The message would be a code phrase, using words from a code book buried deep inside Sondra’s skull and accessible only to her. No security system was perfect, of course, and there was always a chance that all of this was some sort of ruse. On the other hand, she’d come dangerously close to losing the war at Ugo. The ceasefire had worked in her favor, so the Gimps were probably being honest.
The code arrived a moment later. Unlike your typical quantum-entangled telegram, this one had been spelled out in full: ARTICHOKE-RELENTLESS-CORNUCOPIA-GARCIA.
Her code book deciphered it instantly. Cooperate with local forces. Proceed with primary mission. That meant going after Kerensky, with the Imperium’s help.
“Very well,” she said. “We will conduct repairs, with the assistance of the locals; their facilities will be a huge help.” Seemed only fair, for the Gal-Imps to pay to fix the damage they’d inflicted on her ships. “We are to proceed to Primus System as soon as we can. We have three days to get ready. Any vessel that can’t be made fit for duty by then will be left behind.”
Nobody sounded happy at hearing the news. Neither was Sondra. She couldn’t trust someone who mere hours before had been doing their best to eradicate her entire species, not to mention kill her right there and then. Hard not to take such things personally. But she had her orders. And her personal miracle squadron was insistent that Kerensky was the greater threat. Zhang and her coven of warp wizards had proved their worth more times than she could count. Sondra had learned to trust them.
Third Fleet would sail off to do battle with the Black Ships.
* * *
“Shuttles are coming in.”
Fromm watched the descending transports with mixed fe
elings. Relief and shame, mostly. His company had been on the edge of defeat, along with thousands of other Marines. Being rescued by the unexpected cessation of hostilities was better than the alternative, but it didn’t change the fact that they’d been staring at disaster.
They were writing the book on large-scale warp drops on a planetary surface, and finding out the hard way what worked and what didn’t. Entire sections would need to be rewritten after this operation. His company had been running critically low in ammo when the cease fire orders came in. An enemy counterattack would have wiped it out. His people had fought as well as anybody could have expected, but even Marines can’t make bricks without straw. Losing one of their supply trucks during the drop hadn’t helped, of course.
Losing one of his platoon commanders hadn’t helped, either. Twelve men MIW, another eight KIA. Charlie had been decimated. All because some remfies had miscalculated how long the Marines would need to fight before additional support reached them. And to make matters worse, the carnage had turned out to be unnecessary. If the attack had been delayed by a whole eight hours, the Gimps would have surrendered without firing a shot.
Whining is for losers, he told himself. Shit happens.
Time to get back to work. The Gimps had been cooperative, if not friendly, despite having suffered a hundred times as many casualties as the Marines. Most them had been inflicted from orbit or the air, but the Marines had contributed their share. For all that, the Obans had returned wounded and captured personnel, which was more than he would have expected from most aliens. They had also provided additional transport to help bring all the heavy equipment back to the waiting American ships. Fromm’s company was heading up in US shuttles, but Imperium ships would bring up most of its vehicles. Coordinating the effort had taken some work, but it was getting done. His people would be back on the Mattis in under two hours.
Just a few hours, and we wouldn’t have set foot on this planet at all. And Lieutenant Berry would still be alive.
He shook his head. Raging over the waste of war was pointless. Especially since there would be plenty more to come.
* * *
“Glad I’m never setting foot on that dirtball again,” Grampa said.
Russell nodded tiredly. That hadn’t been fun. Gonzo had gotten laser-tagged and was making the trip back in a medical pod. Only his improved armor had kept the little guy alive; his force field had failed at the worst possible time. About half of the guys in Third Platoon had gotten hurt. Russell had a nice set of second-degree burns from a plasma explosion. Worst part was, that had been friendly fire, from a Marine mortar bomb that went off right on top of his fighting hole. Sergeant Fuller had called for a strike right on top of their positions when about a hundred tangos had come pouring out of the last bunker they’d busted. The Eets had gotten the worst of it, but danger close sucked for everyone involved.
“If the War Eagles hadn’t been around, we wouldn’t be getting off this rock alive,” Grampa said, which was nothing but the truth.
“Must be nice, doing ghosting runs and shooting the shit out of the ETs without getting shot back.”
“Funny thing. Back in the day, ‘ghosting’ meant you stopped texting someone,” the old guy said.
“I thought back then you old fuckers wrote letters on paper,” Russel said. Since Gonzo wasn’t around, the duty to make fun of the newbie fell to him.
“Nah, we had most of what’s around now. No imps, but everything else: email, video calls, even some VR just before the aliens bombed us to hell. Kinda surprised there haven’t been more advances along those lines. I guess after you make it to full VR, there is nowhere else to go.”
“There’s the stuff fighters got,” Russell said. He’d been getting an up-close look at what warp witches could do. Deborah had come ‘visit’ a handful of times since Kezz System, whenever their schedules had them sharing some down time. They’d been memorable, every one of them. Not better than the real thing, but probably just as good. Made standard VR look like absolute shit by comparison, and people got addicted to VR, so much so that there were legal cutoffs to how much time you could spend hooked up.
“Faster-than-light telepathy,” Grampa mused. “Just what we need. Spam getting beamed right into our brains.”
You don’t know the half of it, Russell thought, but kept it to himself. He’d had plenty of experience in all that witchy stuff. There would be all kinds of angles to play once the new tech made it to the civvies. Maybe something to think of. New tech would make some people rich, and fuck others over. A smart guy could figure out ways to be among the first group.
“Won’t have to worry about that for a while, though,” he said. “Gotta make it past the next fight, at least.”
Grampa chuckled for a second, then got serious. “We’re going up against humans.”
“Deserters, you mean. Fuck ‘em”
Russell wasn’t a flag-waver, but he’d learned about being loyal to your own back in the Zoo, where your life depended on it. You didn’t betray your gang. Shooting the renegades wouldn’t bother him any.
“You don’t know how bad it gets, when you’re shooting your own,” Grampa said. “Even if they are traitors. I’ve been there.”
“They’re gonna try to kill us. That makes them the worst rat bastards in the universe.”
Primus System, Galactic Imperium, 169 AFC
“That’s a pretty fleet they’ve got. Be a shame if something happened to it,” Lisbeth said, running a visual feed from the Laramie’s sensors focused on the so-called Galactic Guard.
Those ships, all dreadnought-sized or bigger, were the crème de la crème of the aliens’ Navy. They looked pretty tough, she had to admit. Even a squadron of War Eagles would need a couple of passes before splashing one of them. And of course, talking about doing so would be very undiplomatic, since those massive behemoths would be fighting alongside Third Fleet when Kerensky’s renegades showed up.
She’d feel better about the reinforcements if she hadn’t read the reports about the Battle of Vahan. Almost half of the Galactic Guard had sailed there to destroy the Black Ships, and those proud warships had lasted about five minutes before being wiped out. The details were sketchy: all they had to go on were QE-telegram messages from Vahan’s ground facilities, which kept sending out status reports until suddenly falling silent, at around T+2 hours. That was how long it took. A scout ship’s long-range scans had found drifting hulks in space, and a mostly lifeless planet below them. That disaster had been bad enough to make the Imperium overthrow the Princeps who’d gotten it into the war. The coup had turned the Gimps into allies of sorts. Pretty weird, considering they had started the war, but sadly enough it wasn’t even in the top ten weirdest things about this conflict.
The best estimate from the intelligence weenies was that the renegades would arrive in fifteen to twenty days. In between training every warp-rated bubblehead they could in anti-Warpling combat, her squadron had been tasked with thinking of ways to keep NSSs from simply wiping out the minds of anybody they could reach.
Fortunately, one of her spiritual buddies had the answers she needed.
“We were not helpless food-creatures, foolish human,” Vlad the Impaler was trying to be helpful, but the former Marauder of Kraxan couldn’t help dropping off an insult or two along the way. His method of training people in mental combat would put a Marine drill instructor to shame. And now he seemed to think Lisbeth’s questions were the kind of thing a five-year old would know.
“One of the first things we discovered was a method to keep the Starless Ones from invading our minds,” Vlad went on. “How do you think we enticed those entities to make Pacts with our kind? One does not buy what one can simply take by force. Everyone knows that.”
“That’s wonderful. All I need now is some details on what you used, and how we can jury-rig our technology to replicate it.”
She wasn’t very hopeful. Even if the Marauders had come up with an answer, their technology had been ce
nturies ahead of current Starfarer state-of-the-art. The chances the alien ghost could think of something that could be easily reverse-engineered and, more importantly, implemented in the available time were next to nothing.
At least, that was what she thought before Vlad told her.
“That’s it?”
“Why do you think all ships have force fields, human?” Vlad said. “Or that warp generators aren’t allowed to go off if a ships’ shields fall beyond a minimum threshold? Did you think that was to prevent foreign object damage? There is no risk of that while on the Starless Path. No, even ordinary force fields confer a modicum of protection from the Starless Ones. Not enough by themselves, but if they are properly attuned, they should hold them at bay even if they enter this side of the Divide.”
The details were lacking, of course. Vlad was a warrior, not a techie, and was even more ignorant of how things worked than even the dimmest human spacer or grunt. She’d put Lieutenant Miranda to work. The annoying officer had an uncanny way to make things happen. As she drafted a memo for all concerned parties, she turned to her other alien taking up space in her brain.
“How come you didn’t know that?”
Pathfinders didn’t shrug – their shoulders weren’t built that way – but Atu somehow managed. By the time I was born, shield technology had been abandoned for millennia. Looking back, however, I realize now that one of the reasons it was set aside was its interference with true methods of communication.”
“T-waves, in other words. Force fields can interfere with tachyon comms.”
“Yes, although the term ‘tachyon’ as you understand it is woefully inaccurate to describe the medium in question. Then again, most Starfarers also misunderstand what light and gravity are. It is when they finally discover their true nature that they can progress to the next level of development.”
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