The Tuloriad-ARC

by John Ringo

  On the other hand . . . he ducked to avoid a hurled vase. The vase smashed against the bulkhead behind him.

  "I promised to love, honor, and obey!" Sally screamed. "But I didn't promise to forgive the Posleen . . . or to let one of them inside me! Have you any idea how personal that is?" She stopped ranting for just long enough to admit, "Well, I suppose you do. But that's not the point!"

  "Won't you at least meet this renegade God-king?" Dwyer asked. "How do you know you'll hate him unless you at least meet him?"

  "I already hate him and everything in the universe that looks remotely like him," Sally shot back. "I don't even like horses."

  And everyone knows there are at least twelve reasons women prefer horses to men, Dwyer thought. Of course he didn't say that; Sally had run out of knickknacks to throw and the mind shuddered at what she'd demolish next.

  Dwyer sighed. He had one course of action open to him that he was pretty sure would work. But, Lord, it is so going to cost me.

  Sally mouth was opening for another volley of rant when Dwyer said, "Heavy Cruiser One Thirty-nine, also known as Lieutenant, JG, Shlomit bat Bet-Lechem-Plada Kreuzer-Dwyer, USN. Attention."

  That was conditioning so deep in the very material of her hull that Sally couldn't ignore it. Dwyer was her husband. More importantly, since she was a warship, he outranked her. She shut up and snapped to attention.

  Dwyer decided to keep the address more or less human. "Lieutenant Kreuzer-Dwyer, these are your orders: There is a Posleen coming aboard. There may be up to three of them sailing with us, soon. You will be polite to all three. You will cease your unsailorly objections. You will in all particulars show that 'cheerful and willing obedience to orders' to which we all aspire. Is that clear?"

  "Perfectly clear, Captain Dwyer," she answered. "May I be dismissed?"

  Dwyer sighed. "Sally, I . . ."

  "May I be dismissed, sir?"

  "Fine. You're dismissed."

  Sally immediately saluted, with a precision that contained more than a touch of bitter sarcasm, walked to a chest in the quarters, and began to remove all of her clothes from that chest.

  I knew this was going to be painful, Dwyer thought.

  Sally didn't start really weeping until she'd reached the Junior Officer's quarters she'd decided to set up housekeeping in. Once she did, it was an opening of the floodgates; everything pouring out at once.

  I'm not beautiful anymore. And I don't have any control over anything anymore. My own husband is making me do something I think is just disgusting. And he doesn't love me anymore and . . . and . . . and . . .

  She said it aloud, "And I haven't been able to get pregnant yet!"

  Her body fell asleep that way, sobbing into her pillow and feeling lower than the lowest rat in the ship. The AID, of course, and the gestalt that was the USS Salem, stayed awake. They also carefully kept any part of their consciousness away from the Captain's cabin, occupied, now solely, by Dan Dwyer, SJ.

  The bed felt cold and empty and utterly, utterly lonely.

  Before, it never would have bothered me, Dwyer thought. But before, I didn't know what I was missing. And it's not just the sex. It's the closeness, the feeling of being at one with someone. It's . . . different from the feeling of being at one with God at High Mass. But it's the same, too.

  Not that Sally's a goddess . . . even if she looks like she ought to be one or has power to dwarf any goddess of old Greece or Rome. Nor even if she's as petulant as an Athena or a Hera denied Eris' apple. Nor even if I love her as much as I do God . . .

  Dwyer looked at the ceiling of the cabin and said aloud, "Well, it's not like You didn't know that, after all. Or that You didn't plan it that way."

  So little of what we plan ever works out the way we intend, thought Guanamarioch, as the city of Rome, what there was of it, gave way to the sea, far below his helicopter.

  I, for example, never intended that I should become a preacher of a religion alien to my birth. Oh, no, I was going to lead a band of the People on the path of fury, win vast renown, garner much edas, and finally retire as a Rememberer, a teacher of the scrolls, leaving a huge estate to my sons.

  "Still," Guano said aloud, one claw reaching up to caress the crucifix he wore on a gold chain suspended from his neck, "still, Heavenly Father, You will have Your little joke, won't You?"

  Panama City, Panama,

  late in the war

  There was no way Boyd was going to take a chance with the most valuable intelligence asset Panama or Earth had. Guanamarioch was free to roam the city, yes. But he was allowed to roam the city only under tight guard.

  It wasn't that Boyd was afraid the Posleen would run, no. That just wasn't in the Posleen make up. The Waffen SS could have taken lessons from nearly any Posleen on the subject of "Meine Ehre heisst Treue." Rather, the Dictator was afraid that some self-righteous son of a bitch would shoot the God-king, kill the reptilian centauroid goose that laid the golden intelligence eggs.

  But life was hard for Guano. Fishing helped, but then the time would come when he remembered his best friend and fishing partner, Ziramoth, dying to an Indian's arrow somewhere in the unmarked traces of the Darien. After that, fishing would pale for a while.

  Drinking helped. Not that alcohol had the slightest effect on the Posleen. Rather, the impurities of the very worst, most vile and disgusting rot gut had an effect very similar to that of alcohol on humans. Any added formaldehyde was especially good. In the long run, too, those impurities had about as bad an effect on a Posleen body as alcohol, taken in huge quantities, had on a human. The God-king hadn't started puking blood yet, but the morning hangover had become an old friend.

  He'd tried to kill himself, once. Boyd, when dictator, had been unwilling to simply write off chemical warfare. He'd acquired a certain amount from the Russians of sundry nerve agents, as well as a few more esoteric types of shell filling. Once, in a fit of despair, Guano had broken into the stockpile and choked down enough VX to kill a thousand humans. It hadn't worked as intended, though at that dosage it had had an effect. Indeed, the problem with using chemicals on the Posleen, other than incendiaries to burn up oxygen, was that the dosage required to get an effect, basically hallucinations, was in practice uneconomical to deliver.

  Money wasn't a problem. Not only had Boyd freed the God-king from slavery, he made sure the Posleen was paid—and at generous Fleet Strike rates, too—for the intel he provided. And then there were the royalties from ancient Posleen songs that Guano received from the so far largely untouched Republic of Ireland. (For there was something in those songs of premature, glorious and, above all, violent death that touched something in the Hibernian soul.) In all, the God-king was borderline wealthy, enough so that he could arrange for his own deliveries of VX and GB. And did.

  He was also probably the loneliest sentient being on the planet, the most cut off and cast off. And he was miserable.

  In thrall to that loneliness and misery, Guano, drunk as a skunk, staggered along the cobblestoned street. Two of his six guards, three walking on either side, took turns shoving him aright whenever his staggering threatened to topple him over. This was often.

  At least, thought one of the guards, the motherfucker isn't snorting VX. I purely hate it when he starts seeing the sausage machine coming for his schlong.

  The Posleen's erratic wanderings took him and his guards first to the sea, along Avenida de Balboa. From there, Guano occasionally stopping to take a long pull from the two gallon jug he carried, they headed east, toward the ruins of old Panama. There was a large square tower there, looming out of the surrounding blackness. The tower was illuminated by lights focused directly on its four sides.

  Somewhere about fifty miles to the south, the Planetary Defense Base on the Isla del Rey was belting out kinetic energy projectiles at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. As loud as those were, still Guano heard the singing that seemed to come from that illuminated tower. It grew stronger and louder the closer he and his gu
ards approached.

  "And though this world, with devils filled,

  should threaten to undo us,

  We will not fear, for God hath willed

  His truth to triumph through us . . ."

  There was a collective gasp as Guano made his appearance at the entrance to the old cathedral that the tower stood watch over. People backed away. A few of them—armed and uniformed soldiers—reached for weapons.

  "Please," Guano said through his Artificial Sentience. "I mean you no harm . . . but . . . I heard . . . the sing . . . the song and . . ."

  "I will sing for you, Lord," the Artificial Sentience said. "Just mouth something. The Humans say that music soothes the savage beast and these look savage enough."

  The AS said on Guano's behalf, "Fear not, good beings. We are here only to listen and observe, never to harm. We work for you. Please, continue with your ceremony."

  Uncertainly, at first, the massgoers picked up their song again, though not without many a fretful view over a shoulder or many a mother clutching a child to her breast.

  "The Prince of Darkness grim, we tremble not for him;

  His rage we can endure, for lo, his doom is sure,

  One little word shall fell him."

  There were no benches in the cathedral; it was, after all, just a ruin with walls and no roof. Still, the people had left an open way through the middle. Into this Guano stepped, uncertainly, drawn by the song. His guards kept their posts, but didn't have to push him aright again.

  The minister at the head of the congregation watched with trepidation as Guano approached. Still, the alien seemed harmless enough, provided one didn't try to count the teeth, of course. He saw that the creature kept its great, yellow eyes fixed on the image of Christ, locked forever in agony on the cross.

  There, thought Guano. There; that human is me.

  A loud crash announced that the renegade kessentai had lost his grip on his half-empty, two gallon jug of hooch.

  Guanamarioch felt his oddly jointed knees buckle. Slowly, like a great tree in the forbidding jungle, he sank down, eyes all the time fixed on the crucifix. Finally, every misery the being had experienced these last few years caused the Posleen's fierce maw to open up and, head twisting from side to side, to give off a great cris de coeur—AGHGHGHGHGH!—before letting that head sink to the ground.

  Guano, the Posleen God-king, had gotten The Call.

  With a sigh followed by a warm smile, Guano twisted his head to look over to where his cosslain wife fretted over their son, Frederico, her claws scraping at imagined imperfections in the child's still-forming crest.

  It was wrong, inaccurate, anyway, to call her a "she" just as it was inaccurate to refer to Guano as a "he." They both had exactly the same sexual arrangements as did, indeed, all Posleen of whatever caste. If anything, they were all egg-bearing and -laying females. But since the alternative was either "Master" or "God" (and "God," under the circumstances, was right out) and "Slave" or "Servant," "he" and "she" would have to do. For his part, ever since he'd found her on EBay and purchased her from an absolutely bug house nuts lunatic of a kessentai who was breeding Posleen children to sell to human bounty hunters for a share of the take, he'd found that "Querida" or "Dear" worked pretty well as a form of address.

  And if ever a human male had a wife who was less trouble and more help, Guano didn't know of it. And if she couldn't talk, well, that also meant she couldn't nag. And even there, they had their own little language of whistles and grunts and touches. No, it wasn't good for anything too complex but it was perfectly capable of expressing the important thing: "I love you." And if Querida loved Guanamarioch in goodly part because he exuded the pheromones of a kessentai? How many human women selected their mates on similar grounds?

  Chapter Nine

  Sing, O spirits, of the fierce fury and fiery tempest that pursued

  the great ship Arganaza'al

  As speeding, it fled the vengeance of the humans who

  sought the death of it and its crew

  Anno Domini 2010

  Light Cruiser Suharto,

  CruRon Fifty-Seven,

  Third Federation Fleet

  There should have been six light cruisers and a heavy in the squadron. That strength, however, had been allowed to atrophy down to the three light cruisers remaining. As for the rest . . . well, the admiral in charge had expenses. The four missing crews and mothballed ships for which he received funding, and not at mothball rates, without having the distasteful need to pay any of that funding forward, helped cover those expenses. And the Darhel, the fox-faced, treacherous lords of the Galactic Federation, were more than willing to overlook the admiral's cupidity. After all, they owned the admiral as, indeed, they owned the Federation and the Fleet, all except for that portion that had effectively mutinied to relieve the siege of Earth. And the Darhel were working on that little issue.

  With the Posleen menace subdued, it was to the Darhels' interest—their vital interest—that humanity have considerably less power than it might have had. The monkey-boys and -girls were simply too dangerous to allow to be free.

  Still, the war wasn't really entirely over. And there were protocols, standing orders, worst of all a news media that occasionally was less tractable than the Darhel—or people like the admiral—might have wished. Many a sensor had picked up the Posleen ship, coming seemingly from nowhere to blast its way into interstellar space. It wouldn't do to simply let it go.

  Still, the individual crews were in as wretched a shape as the squadron was, indeed as wretched as the entire fleet—except for that portion in mutiny—was fast becoming. One of the ways the admiral commanding maintained control on three quarters pay and bad food (for even the spurious costs of four ships were not quite enough to cover those damnable "expenses") was to allow the crew simply to slack off. He always had the threat of transfer to the still Bristol Fashion, Euro and American commanded ships, should anyone complain.

  The price for that was a sluggish response to the call "battle stations." Many a crewman, and woman, was drunk or, at least, hungover. Still others had to detangle themselves from legs, the detangling made worse by cramped bunks. In all, it was long minutes before even a skeleton staff was assembled on the bridge. At that, since the admiral highly discouraged individual initiative, the ships waited further minutes for the admiral to appear, receive the report, and give the order to pursue.

  At the rear of the bridge an elevator door whooshed open. Short and fat, carrying what one would normally assume to be a ridiculous, under the circumstances, riding crop, Admiral Panggabean waddled onto the bridge, followed by the squadron flagship's captain. The captain—young, female, redheaded and leggy; Irish, in fact, since Ireland, too, had been spared the worst of the Posleen invasion—owed her position to the various positions, some of them quite exotic, she assumed at the Admiral's very frequent behest.

  Panggabean was a man who recognized talent; everyone said so.

  "Why has my recreation been disturbed?" the Admiral asked, his voice a menacing hiss.

  The XO of the ship braced to attention. He'd been first on the bridge and, in fact, since the captain's duties included essentially everything but captaining the ship, was effectively the captain as well.

  "Posleen ship showed up on the screens, Admiral. No warning. It came from the ghost fleet."

  Soberly, a lot more soberly than he actually was, Panggabean nodded, the folds of fat at his neck wriggling as he did. "And you didn't order pursuit immediately?"

  The admiral loathed individual initiative, except when its absence threatened to make him look bad. Worse, they might now miss the bounty available from seizing or destroying an active Posleen ship. That would go a long way towards reducing the ponderous commander's still more ponderous debt.

  The XO got out no more than, "I thought—" before the Admiral's riding crop landed across his face. "Follow them, you fools. Now!"

  Fortunately, in normal space human ships were faster.

&nb
sp; Himmit Ship Surreptitious Stalker

  "Get me the human flotilla," Aelool ordered Argzal.

  "Not in our contract," the Himmit insisted, one head rising slightly from his couch and the eyes fixing on the Indowy. "Not going to happen either. Those humans smell blood and they just might lash out at the first thing available. I don't think they can penetrate my screens but they've gotten a lot more capable about such things, generally, and there's no need to take the chance. Besides, my job is smuggling and scouting, Aelool, not battle. If we're discovered, I face a . . . reduction in rank. Besides, I have to make a delivery."

  "If we don't stop the humans, our mission is a complete loss."

  "No matter," Argzal said. "I've done my part and my people will still be paid."

  "Bah! You people have water for blood."