“I was sitting down with Bhattacharyya this morning. He’s had a better look at what’s in that database and here’s just some of the major strategic implications of this data. First, the Krag ship used its computer to read encrypted signals, so we’ve got all of their military encrypt keys, until they decide to change them, which may be up to one of their years, which is 377 of our days. We’ll be able to read every transmission we intercept immediately, rather than after days or weeks in decrypt. That’s going to make a huge operational difference right there. Second, there’s a huge database of technical specifications: ships, weapons, area sensors, communications equipment, computers, the whole lot. With those specs, we’ll be able to find, hundreds, maybe even thousands, of exploitable weaknesses in those systems. We’ll know how to confuse the computers, jam the comms, deflect the weapons, blind the sensors, defeat the ships, the whole nine yards. Who knows, we might be able to find holes in their sensor net that will let one ship or maybe even a task force walk right through without being detected.”
“That would certainly be useful.”
“That’s just the beginning. When we had relations with them, the Krag were very cagy about some things. We never learned the exact location of their home world, their economic centers, the layout of their Hegemony. All that stuff’s in there. So, if we can penetrate their defenses and get into their space, now we know where to go, where the assets are, what to attack that will hurt them the most. Add to that, we now know the location of their comm relays, fuel production facilities, logistics nodes, convoy routes, the makeup and location of their theater and strategic reserve forces, and a thousand other details that tell us where and how to hit them. And, my friend, the icing on the cake is that there is no way in hell the Krag know we have it. So, when we start putting this information to use, they will be completely surprised.” He paused to marvel at what it all meant. “That’s just scratching the surface. There’s information in that box and implications of that information that we can’t even guess at yet. It changes everything.”
“Will it win the war for us?” Bram was starting to catch on.
“Likely not. Not by itself. But I’m confident that, well used, and absent some kind of major battle defeat that destroys one of our two task forces in operations against the Krag—the one under Middleton or the one under Hornmeyer—it will keep us from losing it. At least for the next year or so. Long enough for us to accumulate more allies or to come up with something else that will give us some kind of resource or manpower or technological advantage.”
“So, you say that we now know the location of their home world.”
“Yes, I’m afraid so.”
“Why ‘afraid,’ my friend? Why wouldn’t possession of that information be unambiguously good news, Max?”
“Because it’s a lot further away than we thought. You know, when we encountered them in 2183, it wasn’t by finding a planet that they occupied. Instead, one of our long range exploratory ships ran into one of their long range survey ships taking readings on the same pulsar. When we traded information, both sides disclosed a fair amount of information about their home worlds but we both studiously did not disclose their location. They found out the location of Earth from some of our trading partners easily enough. We’ve never done a very good job of keeping it concealed. They have.
“When the war broke out, we just assumed that their core worlds were about the same distance from the FEBA as ours. Turns out, there are more than 2500 light years back from the initial front, and that front has moved about a thousand light years closer to our Core Worlds since then. So, there’s no question for the foreseeable future of any offensive that would knock them out of the war by putting their heartland directly at risk. Even if we turn the tide and start taking great chunks of their space, we’d be years away from being able to force a surrender, much less attain what I suspect our overall war aims are.”
“And what might those be? I don’t think I’ve ever heard them discussed, outside of “ultimate victory,” “utter defeat of the enemy,” and other, similar verbal formulations full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
“That’s because I don’t think a lot of thought has been given to them. For so long, our only reasonable objective has been to stave off defeat until we can muster whatever it takes to turn the tide and push the Krag back. How far we would push them and under what circumstances we would stop pushing them in order to make peace have been categorized as bridges to be crossed when we get to them. But, we don’t have much of a choice as to our war aims, don’t you think?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Well, the Krag have said that they have a religious obligation to destroy us down to the last child, to eradicate us from the galaxy forever. So long as they believe they have a duty to wipe out our race, we would have to be crazy to do anything short of obliterating their military, destroying their colonies, vaporizing every space vehicle they have and the means to produce them, and parking a constellation of battle stations in orbit around their home world, armed to the teeth, with instructions to blow to flaming atoms anything that gets more than a hundred kills or so above the surface. And, that’s the minimum. A good case can be made for bombing their home world back to the stone age or even rendering the planet uninhabitable.”
“You mean genocide? Total genocide of the entire Krag race?”
“When and if we get to that point, it’s going to have to be on the table. After all, that’s their objective in this war, isn’t it? I mean, if all we do is inflict a few major military defeats on them, maybe destroy two or three battle groups, and they sue for an armistice or a peace treaty, how can we reasonably give it to them? What assurance do we have that they won’t just use the time to rebuild and rearm and come at us again and again and again until they finally catch us when we are weak and vulnerable and they get the upper hand and wipe us out?
“We’re dealing with our survival as a species. We can’t afford to take any chances. If we could make a peace treaty with them and believe that they aren’t going to come at our throats at the first chance, that would be one thing, but given that their stated aim to kill every human being in the galaxy and then to sterilize the Earth and every Earth-settled world so that no trace of our genome remains, I can’t see how we can tell ourselves that we have done our duty to protect generations of human beings to come if we leave them with any kind of space capability at all. And, I would not be surprised if we wind up having to wipe them out altogether.”
“That is almost too monstrous to contemplate. The complete elimination of another sentient species from the universe. Has it ever been done?”
“The short answer is, yes, we’re pretty sure that it has, and right here in the Orion-Cygnus Arm, too. But, you know that our knowledge of the galaxy is very, very incomplete, even in terms of astrocartography, much less the histories of the sentient races. We hardly know anything of what took place before we came onto the galactic stage. Other races are very close-mouthed, not just about their own history, but the history of other races, too. Of course, they particularly don’t trust us with that kind of information because we have a way of taking information and using it in unexpected ways—like the way we took the jump drive technology we got from the Ning-Braha and made the intuitive leap to metaspacial radio, something that no one else in this part of the galaxy had, except for the Vaaach. Speaking of the Vaaach, we’ve gotten some sketchy information from the Tri-Nin, who have been engaging in interstellar travel since about the time Columbus sailed for the New World, on this subject. According to them, there used to be a race called the Bhandka-Hamp-Her that they say that the Vaaach wiped out.”
“The Vaaach wiped out an entire race? When did this happen?”
“Sometime around the time of the American Revolution—late 18th Century. Interesting story, though, what little we know of it. The Tri-Nin are saying very little and the Vaaach are saying less, but from what we’ve heard, they had it coming.”
“By wiping out hundreds, maybe thousands, of other races.”
The doctor took several breaths before he could speak again. “Hundreds? Thousands?”
“That’s right. Haven’t you ever wondered why every race in this part of the Orion-Cygnus Arm of our galaxy is at about the same technological level, with the exception of the Sarthan and the Vaaach, who aren’t from around here but come from the Sagittarius Arm.”
“Actually, I have wondered about it and thought it a peculiar coincidence.”
“Well, my friend, it’s no coincidence. Not even close. The tall trees in the forest are all the same height because all the taller ones got cut down. This race, let’s call them the Bhandka for short, had got their society just the way they wanted it—no wars, no strife, no upheaval--and wanted to preserve it. Exactly as it was. I mean exactly—no cultural change, no technical innovation, nothing. So, they made cultural stability their overriding social priority. As you can imagine, you can’t have that kind of cultural stability when you are in contact with alien races. If you have friendly contact with them, they introduce new ideas, art, music, fashion, literature, products, and who knows what else. If you aren’t friendly with them, you have to keep your technology up to par and your military forces to match theirs or one day they might decide to enslave or kill you. And, even if you win the war, we all know wars bring cultural upheaval. There never would have been a Russian Revolution without World War I, an American Civil Rights Movement without World War II, a Revolt of the Estates without the Lamoni Conflict. Or, if those things happened, they would have happened years later and probably more gradually.
“So, our friends decided perfect stability required perfect isolation which, in turn, required that they be alone in this part of the galaxy. That’s just what they achieved. They periodically surveyed all the habitable worlds for about five thousand light years in every direction and, whenever they would find an industrial civilization on one, they would simply wipe it out, usually by smacking the planet with a big rock or two from its own asteroid belt, rendering just about every large animal on the planet as well as a lot of the rest of its life, extinct. A lot like what happened to the dinosaurs on Earth. The only local race they spared were the Tri-Nin and only because they’ve got all those advanced non-violent defensive technologies that render them impervious to attack. That hive mind thing that all their females have with each other let them progress a lot further from one survey to the next than the Bhandka figured they could—so by the time they checked back, the Tri-Nin were too advanced for them to wipe out.
“Their civilization endured without meaningful change or advancement for a hundred million years, maybe even longer. Could be billions of years. They even used genetic engineering to keep themselves from evolving further. Who knows how many civilizations they wiped out? For all we know, it might be thousands, even tens of thousands. It’s impossible to get your brain around. Anyway, when the Vaaach arrived in the vicinity and figured out what happened, they went practically insane with rage, swept the Bhandka fleet out of their way like a formation of paper airplanes, and threw the largest forty-five or fifty asteroids from the Bhandka system at their planet, giving them more than a taste of their own medicine. Their planet looks like an overgrown version of the Earth’s moon now. Supposedly it doesn’t even have an atmosphere any more. And the Bhandka, destroyers of more cultures than we will encounter if we explore the galaxy for a thousand years, are gone forever. May they roast slowly in hell.
“On the other hand, the Bhandka did us a favor. Until about the year 1780, every industrial civilization that arose in this part of the galaxy was destroyed, which is why there are so many races now stepping out into interstellar space at roughly the same technological level—these are the races that were on the verge of industrialization when the Vaaach took down the Bhandka. There isn’t anyone who was more than fifty to a hundred years ahead of us technologically when the Bhandka were sent into oblivion.”
“So, then, the Bhandka are the explanation for the Fermi Paradox,” the doctor said.
“The Fermi Paradox?”
“Yes. It’s named after Enrico Fermi, the famous physicist who helped build the first fission reactor, the first fission weapon, and many other seminal contributions to physics that are far beyond my limited understanding of the field. It is said that after discussing alien visitation during a walk with a few colleagues he sat down to lunch with them and suddenly asked, “where are they?’ One of the other diners responded, ‘Who, Doctor Fermi? Where are who?’ He replied, ‘the extraterrestrials. Where are they? They should be here by now.’ He then proceeded to do some calculations showing that given the age of the galaxy and the number of stars in it, the Earth should have been visited many times over. And, as I understand the time line of such things, it was a good point.”
“You bet it was a good point,” said Max. “The thin disk of the galaxy, the part where the core and the spiral arms are, is something like eight billion years old. The Earth’s age is four point two billion, and has evolved intelligent life that is now exploring the stars. Assuming that the evolution of intelligent life and the period for that life to develop interstellar travel is roughly the same from race to race, that leaves nearly four billion years for some star faring race to do what the Western Europeans did on Earth, spread their culture and technology throughout this part of the galaxy, if not the whole thing. So, Fermi was right in wondering where they were, because by all rights they should have come. There should have been some highly advanced race that had come to Earth and brought us primitives under its sway or at least had its version of anthropologists in pith helmets and khakis studying us.”
The doctor was nodding his understanding. “But, the Bhandka never let that happen—they created a five thousand light year wide ‘nature preserve’ where we and the Tri-Nin and the Pfelung and the rest could develop without interference and then, when we were about to reach the point where we were to be destroyed, the destroyers were themselves wiped out. Well, that explains another thing, too.”
“What’s that.”
“The Vaaach. Most of the time they are the embodiment of the superior attitude that comes from being truly superior, as well as showing their instinctive territoriality derived from their heritage as predators, and their highly developed ethical sensibilities; but, sometimes, you get a whiff of paternal concern. I think it’s because they know they saved our culture from extinction. Every time we impress them or show some promise, they look at us and think ‘but for us, these people would be gone.’ They are a very emotional race you know. That is likely why they bind themselves so strictly to act by their rules and code of Honor, because without them they would be killing each other right and left.”
“Interesting theory. I’d never thought of it that way, but it makes sense. Bram, sometimes, I wish we could sit down and talk, really talk to the Vaaach. Leave all of this ‘puny pink monkey” and “Warrior of Honor” crap in the hall and just carry on a conversation like sentient beings. Man, oh, man, the things we could learn from them.”
“Indeed. As extensive as their explorations have been, they must have made contact with hundreds of other races. The genetic and biological information they have collected over the course of their travels would be enough to revolutionize our understanding of Exobiology, Comparative Anatomy, Comparative Biochemistry, the similarities and differences between the evolutionary paths taken on different worlds . . . .” He hastened to add, “And, I’m sure that there would be a few interesting things to learn in other fields as well. Perhaps even a little physics or maybe a smattering of engineering, if you place value on such things.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
***
“And what in the name of bleeding Piccadilly Circus is this? Is this your doing, Wang?” Chief Engineer Brown was pointing to a small label, printed on the fire-proof laminated polymer used on the ship for
printing labels, affixed to the outside of the number two auxiliary cooling pump for the main fusion reactor’s primary graviton generator. The unit had been running rough when it got its weekly test run, so it had been torn down, all of the rotary components rebalanced, lubricated, adjusted, and reassembled—a difficult and tedious five hour task. Apparently, upon completion, the three men who had done the work had attached a label to the outside of the unit. It was on the same pattern as the one designed by Cho the day before, this time showing that the excellence of the unit was certified by Pennoyer, Neff, and Gunderson.
“No, sir, not me” responded Ordinary Spacer 3rd Class James Edwin Smith, known as “Wang” because he came from Wang IV and was one of three “James Smiths” on board, not to mention being one of two “James Edwin Smiths.” “Never saw it before, sir. Well, that’s not exactly true, sir. I’ve never seen that one before, sir, but I’ve seen several like it. Actually, sir, not several, sir, the more I think about it, sir, I think it’s more like dozens. Sir.” Wang was not accustomed to being questioned directly by so lofty a personage as a full blown Lieutenant, not to mention the ship’s Exalted and Revered Chief Engineer. As a result, his “sir” reflex was running at Flank speed. Notwithstanding his nervousness, Wang—although not having much in the way of leadership ability—was very bright and had a truly excellent memory. “Sir, now that I think about it more precisely, I believe I have seen twenty-eight of them, sir. They started showing up last night, sir.”
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