by Steve White
“So,” he continued, “the local authorities acted on their own initiative and eliminated the fourth Unity Warp Point just after the news from Zephrain came through it.”
“To foreclose any possibility of an attack through it,” Magda finished for him. “Not unlike your own action in starting to move this fleet back here without waiting for orders. Seems there’s a lot of that going around.”
“There has to be. When government becomes too bloated to reach a decision and act on it, individuals have to take the initiative.” Which, of course, begins the devolution of the government into irrelevance, he didn’t add. But what other choice is there?
“Well,” she said, “at least some of those individuals have come around to your viewpoint about the Unity Warp Points, even if the PSU government is still dithering about destroying the far more dangerous one that leads into the heart of Orion space.”
“I’ve never felt less satisfaction at being vindicated,” he said bleakly. Magda waited for him to say something else, but the silence lingered, and his eyes swung back to the viewport.
“Ian,” Magda said after a while, “I won’t pretend I know to the full what you’re feeling. But I do know—”
“Never mind,” he said rather abruptly. “That was in another country, and besides…” He couldn’t bring himself to complete the quotation from Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta with “…the wench is dead.” He sighed deeply, once, and then stood up. “We have other things to concern us. He turned to his desk computer and brought up a holographic display of the adjacent portions of the warp network. He traced the route from Alpha Centauri through the closed warp point that led to a whole series of five formerly Arachnid systems to Pesthouse and beyond through Home Hive One to Orpheus-1.
“The heavy units here departed two weeks ago to join Cyrus at Orpheus-1, where he intends to fight a decisive battle. With luck, if we depart without any further delay, we may just possibly be able to get there in time to join him. I want the resupplying we’ve been doing here completed in forty-eight standard hours. Anything that hasn’t been done by then simply doesn’t get done.”
“Right. I just hope it’s not too late. I just hope everything isn’t too late.”
Trevayne looked at his wife and second in command sharply. This wasn’t like her. She had held up unwaveringly under the tide of horrific news that had reached them, news of the conflagration that was engulfing the accustomed order of things. But now she continued in the same empty voice. “Ian, is it really all over? Is the universe we’ve always taken for granted coming to an end? How can we stop these Kaituni from continuing this mad, unlimited destruction?”
As he so often did, Trevayne replied with a quote. He looked out the viewport at the binary suns, so reminiscent of Zephrain, and said the words Stonewall Jackson had once said in answer to precisely the same question.
“Kill them. Kill them all.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Alessandro Magee glanced at Mretlak, who was in what seemed to be a meditative slouch, back in the avionics and sensors section that was snugged in behind the bridge of the patrol corvette Viggen. “Anything?” Tank asked the Arduan.
“No selnarm of any kind is active in this system,” came the mellow response from Mretlak’s vocoder.
“Sorry to keep asking you that question.” Magee offered a lopsided grin as a good-will gesture. “It’s just that once we make rendezvous with this fusion bucket we’ve been shadowing, we’ll be a lot more vulnerable.”
“Frankly, I appreciate and encourage your prudence, Captain. I have been on so-called snoop and poop outings with other teams that are nowhere near so careful and it has almost been our undoing. What many human and Orions do not understand is that the likelihood of a chance encounter with a Kaituni ship is much smaller than triggering one of their sleeper sensor buoys or mines. And we would have little warning, in such a circumstance: the device would emit a short selnarm burst to report the contact and then return to silence.”
“Let’s just hope we don’t wake up one of those little sleeping tattle-tales when we dock with this broken-down mining ship.” Harry Li was checking his EVA gear; he’d already field-stripped and checked his weapon. “With their docking guide-laser busted, they’re going to have to talk us in the last few meters. And that means broadcast. And that could mean trouble.”
“I share your sentiment,” answered Mretlak. “So far, we have been relatively lucky, even in light of Captain Wethermere’s decision to restrict our missions to rarely trafficked systems. Frankly, I am glad we are coming to the end of our intelligence gathering operations.”
Harry Li raised an eyebrow, turned to Tank, whisper-muttered, “Why do I get the feeling that Mretlak knows something we don’t?”
Magee emitted a noncommittal grunt, became more focused on checking his own gear.
Harry stared at him, then grumbled. “Okay, it’s only me who’s in the dark about our next step.” He sighed. “Typical. Let’s go board this old rustbucket, then.”
*
Two days later, ’Sandro, Harry, and Mretlak wrappied up the mission debrief and summary intel report for Wethermere, Kiiraathra’ostakjo, Ankaht, and Jennifer. In the ensuing silence, the three recon leaders waited. Probably for queries about the reliability of the mining-ship’s crew as intel sources, conjectured Wethermere, or data inconsistencies.
After a long silence, it was Kiiraathra’ostakjo who shifted in his seat, signaling an imminent statement. Which was merely, “It is difficult to believe that such primitive spacecraft are still operating. Reaction thrusters, even those utilizing inertial fusion, are unthinkably slow.”
“Slow, but oddly well-suited for the current post-invasion conditions here at tne margins of the Khanate’s core, Least Claw,” Mretlak pointed out courteously. “Consider: because fusion thrusters generate actual physical motion, rather than pseudovelocity, the captains of such craft can shut down the drives and continue to coast at speed. This allows them to continue to move even if they encounter an anomalous contact that might be an enemy ship—and to be running completely dark when they do so.”
“Besides,” added Alessandro, “it doesn’t take that long at one gee constant to get pretty much anywhere you might want, or need, to go in a stellar system. Some of the intrastellar transits might seem long by contemporary standards, but that’s because reactionless drives allow us to get almost anywhere we need to go in mere hours. For a fusion bucket like this last one we contacted, they measure their transits in days or weeks.
“And that’s not really a big deal for them. They are prospecting, salvaging, mining, shipping goods from one community to the next: all jobs that take a lot of time, anyway. So adding a few days on for travel is not a huge inconvenience: their existence runs along at a much slower pace, to begin with.”
“And since their fusion thrusters run on hydrogen, not antimatter,” Harry concluded, “they can live off the land pretty easily in any system that has a gas giant. If they’ve only got liquid water on hand, that makes things a little more difficult: access requires entering the gravity well of the source-planet. And harvesting ice has its own issues. But the bottom line is that these ships get the job done and stay well off the radar of any Kaituni who happen to drift through their systems, looking for traffic other than their own.”
Ossian nodded. “Which is why you and the other recon teams have been encountering more and more of these old-tech craft—right down to magnetoplasma-driven robot bulk haulers. Low energy signature and low speed make them harder to find against the routine junk and radiant backgrounds of most planetary systems. And as long as they stay close in among belts, Trojan point rubble clusters, or planets and moons, they are almost sure to see a reactionless ship before it sees them. Our drive signatures stand out like lit flares. By comparison, theirs are guttering candles that can be extinguished with a single puff—well, flick of a switch.”
“It’s just good to know that some people have survived the Kaituni scorch
ed-earth tactics,” Jennifer added glumly. “Which, from what this last crew told you, seems to be pretty much their universal post-conquest pattern.”
Tank nodded sadly. “I’m afraid so, Jen. Over the last eight weeks, it’s been the same story, again and again. Wherever the Kaituni go, they first obliterate any spaceside defenses, then find the key population and production centers in a system and destroy them. We’ve only heard of one or two cases where they’ve used nukes—and we can’t corroborate those stories—but between orbital bombardment, HVMs, and long-range seeker missiles that hit outlying communities in asteroid belts and on moons, they’ve been taking out each system’s infrastructure pretty completely. Energy, food, transport, health services, communication hubs: they’re slamming every system back to a pre-industrial level before they move on.”
“Which is ultimately as destructive as extensive bombing,” asserted Kiiraathra’ostakjo. “This was not an uncommon tactic in the Interregnum Strife that followed the war which crippled our homeworld, Old Valkha. Destroying a system’s civil infrastructure has almost the same effect in terms of generating civilian casualties, with the added benefit that it preoccupies the survivors far more, keeps them too busy to consider mounting a counterattack.” He leaned back, a low growl rumbling at the back of his throat. “The Kaituni have planned well, this time.”
“They have,” Ossian allowed. “But if your assessment is correct, Kiiraathra, then they’ve also created a predictable pattern for us to exploit.”
Mretlak evidently saw what Wethermere was driving at. “Of course. Now that we are done gathering intelligence, we would do best to keep most of our travel constrained to smaller systems, such as ones in which they have shown scant interest.”
“Where are we going?” Jennifer asked.
Ankaht raised tendrils that rippled slowly and—despite their alienness—soothingly. “We shall certainly return to that topic, Jennifer. But first, I want to be sure that I understand the reasoning behind Mretlak’s observation.” She turned toward him. “You are suggesting that we should keep to smaller systems because they are less likely to have devolved into combative chaos. Having a smaller and more dispersed population that has less reliance on ponderous infrastructures, they are less likely to descend into internecine strife in the aftermath of the Kaituni strikes. Also, because what infrastructure they do have is not likely to be heavily centralized, they will have taken less damage from the comparatively modest Kaituni attacks. Their resources and support systems being smaller and more scattered, they have greater self-reliance and redundancy. And because small colonies are more likely to be technological backwaters, they are more likely to still be using the older, pre-reactionless spacecraft—and so, still making interplanetary journeys with greater regularity than modern ships, and yet with less chance of detection.”
“Precisely, Eldest Sleeper,” replied Mretlak with admiration in his tone. “You have seen it with all three eyes.”
Alessandro nodded. “And of course, from a purely military perspective, the Kaituni will continue to be less interested in low population backwaters. At this point, their concern is with forces large enough to upset their overall strategy. Any force that large has to be located on or near a sufficient logistical locus—and smaller systems don’t measure up. So by sticking to the backwaters, we remain under both the Kaituni patrol radar and strategic focus. But now,” he concluded with a change of tone, “back to this matter of ‘our travel.’ I knew this was our last snoop and poop outing, and that means you folks at the top of the command pyramid have got to be close to issuing new marching orders. But for the life of me—and that might be a really accurate expression, in this case—I can’t think of where we’d be going. It doesn’t seem like there’s anyplace useful we can go—not if we mean to go there and survive.”
Ossian glanced at Kiiraathra’ostakjo and Ankaht. The Orion’s answering nod was a fluid, almost languorous motion; the Arduan’s was abrupt, jerky. Wethermere turned back to Tank. “Before laying out our next steps, I’d like one last piece of information about your encounter with the crew of this last ship: the, uh—”
“Lucky Strike, sir.”
“Right. The Lucky Strike. The crew was polyglot?”
“Yes, sir. Humans, Orions, one of the Ophiuchi. About half had been running her for the better part of a decade. The other half were recent additions; refugees with spacer skills, mostly.”
“So you feel you had a wide sampling of different intel sources, in terms of what the crew had heard and seen regarding the war to date?”
“As good a selection as we have encountered thus far, Captain Wethermere,” put in Mretlak with a puzzled tone, “and their regional experiences are such that we were able to establish a high confidence of corroborative accuracy among the key assertions of their reports. But surely you know this.”
Wethermere smiled. “I just want to be one hundred percent sure, because, if the information from the crew of the Lucky Strike is as reliable as it seems, then it is an excellent final confirmation of several crucial data points. Some of which you have already reported to us though other sources and earlier contacts.”
“And which the other recon groups picked up in the course of their operations, as well, I’m guessing,” Harry Li put in.
Mretlak’s tone was measured, suddenly certain. “Which makes it quite clear, now, why we were not allowed to have contact with the other recon groups: so we could not know what anyone else was finding and reporting.”
“That is correct,” Ankaht affirmed calmly. “Amongst most intelligent races with individual psyches, it is unfailingly observed that groups with similar investigatory tasks subconsciously gravitate toward consensus in their findings—if they can share those findings, that is. This process was too crucial for us to allow such behavioral artifacts to skew our data. So we were compelled to structure our recon teams as wholly separate cells.”
Harry nodded. “Makes sense. So: what facts have showed up at the overlap points of the Venn diagram you’ve been building from our reports?”
Ossian leaned forward. “Firstly, it seems that the story of the Zephrain Home Fleet sensitive that somehow escaped the Wasting of Xanadu is not a folktale or wishful thinking: it’s absolutely true. The woman in question is named Hilda Silverman. And she was watching when the Kaituni destroyed the capitol, and then killed both Amunherh’peshef and Miriam Ortega. All Amunsit’s reported assertions were, in fact, also genuine and were recorded. Copies of the recording, as well as transcripts, are being circulated. This means that the selnarm morse code that coordinated the Dispersate attacks, the purging of their own shaxzhu, their uncertainty regarding the disposition and orders of the Bellerophon Arm fleet, their xenocidal intentions, have all been multiply corroborated. We’ve encountered three different copies of the transcript so far, all of which are identical in content but were copied at different times, in different star systems. In short, all the news from Zephrain is genuine and it’s spreading.”
Mretlak had come to a full upright sitting position. “Did you say ‘selnarm morse code’? Do you mean to say that this was how the Kaituni coordinated their actions across dozens of light-years?”
Ankaht’s three eyes closed and opened slowly. “That is indeed what we mean to say.”
“But can we trust this claim? Might this be carefully crafted misinformation? I, for one, have always been reluctant to give credence to the notion that Amunsit allowed a number of surviving shuttles and small traders to simply depart Zephrain through several of its warp points after she was done laying waste to Xanadu. It seems—”
“Mretlak,” Ankaht interrupted gently. “Your reservations were my own. For many weeks. But I can assure you—personally—that this information, and all it implies, is genuine.”
Jennifer was staring at her Arduan friend, wide-eyed. “And does that mean that you—I mean, can you also—?”
Ankaht’s voice was slow and deep as it emerged from the vocoder. “Mastering this sel
narmic morse code is not a simple matter. Not nearly so simple as it is made to sound. However, since we first heard of this claim, I have been—exploring the possibility.” Ankaht seemed to take a moment to ensure that her tone remained level. “Two days ago, I made my first contact with Tefnut ha sheri, on Bellerophon, using this method.” Her head bowed slightly. “It is an embarrassment that I did not conceive of such a method myself.”
The room was still as the gravity of Ankaht’s news sunk in, as well as the vastly changed circumstances and possibilities it portended for their small flotilla, to say nothing of the greater war effort.
“Damn.” Harry Li uttered that word as a long exhale. “Makes you wonder what the hell Amunsit was thinking when she allowed that piece of strategic intelligence out of the bag.”
“We cannot know for sure,” Ankaht answered, “but I strongly suspect she felt quite confident that her exact words were not being recorded. And unless she had known about our presence behind her lines, she might have—quite reasonably—conjectured that little harm could come of such disclosures, even if they somehow spread beyond Zephrain.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Jennifer conceded, “But I agree with Mretlak: I still can’t think why she let anyone out of the system at all. If it’s her sworn intent to exterminate all humans, why leave the system’s warp points unguarded for survivors to bolt through?”
Ankaht settled her tentacles in a manner that, to Wethermere’s eyes, almost looked prim. “I do not think that factor is so mysterious, Jennifer. I suspect that she wanted the survivors to go forth and spread terror.”
“You mean, of what the Kaituni can accomplish, of their power?”
“That too,” Ankaht concurred, “but I am thinking more of their ruthless intent. And the anger it will stimulate. Ian Trevayne and Miriam Ortega were once…involved, as I understand it. Amunsit may well be trying to inflame his passions, to induce him to hasty action. Indeed, the most senior human PSU admiral, Cyrus Waldeck, is a long-standing associate of Ms. Ortega. I do not know if one could label them as friends, but they served common causes for almost a century, and were both very close to Admiral Trevayne—whose voice and influence in the PSU is almost as great as it has been in the Rim.