For a parren new to his or her phase, the experience must have been something like that, only multiplied a thousand times. Each house had ideological denominations with their own leaders and ‘in crowd’ thinkers and personalities, and then the martial and pseudo-martial institutions that Fortitude parren belonged to even when they were not active military. Just as human UF marines dictated that every marine must be a rifleman no matter what his actual job, all Fortitude parren learned martial skills to some extent. House Fortitude history was littered with proud examples of Fortitude civilians who had found themselves under attack, dropped their civvie professions to take up any weapon at hand and fight to the death against formidable odds. Other institutions emphasised labour; construction and engineering workers tended to be overwhelmingly Fortitude, and space facilities in particular were half-Fortitude as a rule of thumb, with obvious strategic advantages for the house.
Against the far wall, Gesul’s leading entourage stepped onto an elevator platform wide enough to carry entire shuttles up to the next level. The other parts of the entourage formed up with typical parren precision, Lisbeth watching Orun on her left for the proper indicators, stepping past Gesul’s position to take her spot at the side of the platform. Liala and her two armed escorts clattered past in some mockery of parren decorum… like battle tanks invited to participate in a ballet. With weapons, each AI weighed comfortably ten times the average parren.
“There are a lot of cameras,” Liala informed her. “The feed is controlled, someone is editing the visuals, they are going out live and watched by everyone on this planet.” Naraya was the capital world of all House Fortitude, and this, Shonedene, was the ruling complex of House Fortitude, their equivalent of what the Kunadeen on Prakasis was to House Harmony. On this world there were somewhere in the vicinity of five billion parren. Beyond that, Lisbeth did not doubt there would be hundreds of billions of parren who would see this vision eventually.
“Just keep watch for anything suspicious,” Hiro told her. He was in Timoshene’s group, clad in black and passing for a parren, though that would not likely fool the most observant Fortitude agents.
“This is another of those vague English terminologies,” Liala remarked. “Suspicion may be taken as a sustained state of watchfulness, which appears to be the permanent state of successful individuals in all circumstances.”
“Don’t be such a cliche,” Hiro told her.
Lisbeth repressed a smile, and the great platform shuddered, then began a smooth, gentle climb up the wall. As it did, Lisbeth saw briefly out the entrance beyond their landing shuttle on the pads, where this ridge of mountain fell into a long valley flanked by steep, rocky cliffs. She saw only a few tall buildings before the elevator rose too far, and the hangar ceiling filled her view.
The next floor was hangar-like, but clearly parren by design, with enormous windows lined with crossbeam supports overlooking the valley below. Across the floor, more immaculately ranked parren, these with the greater ceremonial garb and headdresses of senior ranks, standing perfectly to attention. Drums rolled and thundered as they would in a cosetine play — House Fortitude’s favourite style — and Gesul began his walk forward. Lisbeth waited, then stepped when the others stepped, now conscious that she was on the right flank close to many rows of ceremonial weapons.
Against those windows, upon a small pedestal, a single parren sat crosslegged in the breastplate and armguards of a conadra warrior, one of Fortitude’s most noble orders. His chin was upon one clenched fist, the symbolic posture of all Fortitude’s house leaders, denoting a thousand things that parren learned from childhood in lessons, plays and histories. A great, gold staff strapped diagonally to his back, and the pedestal, Lisbeth saw in a clearer view past the heads of Gesul’s first rank, was actually a solid iron anvil, used since older times for the beating of swords hot from the furnace. This was Sordashan himself, the ruler of House Fortitude, the supreme commander of all parren peoples. Displaying for all to see the many millennia of symbolism and power that the great winds of the flux had now accrued to him, and all of the Fortitude phase.
Gesul walked until ten metres from the pedestal, where the drums stopped. He halted, then went down on one knee, and bent to place both hands on the ground before him. Lisbeth copied, as the entire House Harmony leadership prostrated itself before the parren king. Humans might have seen such a thing as a concession of relative weakness. Lisbeth knew that for parren it meant nothing more than a concession to the great powers that worked through the parren people at this stage of their cycle. The flux placed Sordashan and Fortitude in power over all. But what the great flux had granted, the great flux could take away.
What followed was as scripted and rehearsed as any play. Senior officials in great headcrests conveyed symbols of respect from Gesul and his seniors to Sordashan, who considered them dutifully in turn, chin not lifted from his clenched fist. Great announcements were made, cries that echoed from the high ceiling, and were sometimes echoed by chants, othertimes fading to ghostly silence. In meetings between parren of this rank, spontaneity was not an option. Too much hung upon individual words and symbols for anyone to dare risk a misinterpreted move. The real talks would come later, in private, where no one else could hear.
Allowed to kneel upright on her one knee with the rest, Lisbeth considered the vast view beyond the windows. The sun on this world was a large K-class, its light faintly orange even at midday. It gave the low white mist above the valley’s cliffs a surreal glow, like the glow of a coloured paper lantern, turning all the light misting rain to orange swirls. Amidst the glow, Lisbeth now saw various hovering vehicles, some near, some further up the valley. Military vehicles, or that midway mix between personal security and state military that parren never seemed to make much distinction between. Guarding against someone down in the valley firing a missile, no doubt. There was a big, old city down there, though she could not see it on this angle, below the rim of the windows. But she could see the famous waterfall, a single white plume falling down the far cliff, whipping veils of spray across the city below. Surely it was always raining in the city, when the waterfall was gushing from the white sky.
Sordashan was staring now over Lisbeth’s head… no, at what was directly behind her. Liala and company; three great drysine war machines. Weapons pointed in his general direction by virtue of always pointing toward whatever a drone was facing. At times like this, Lisbeth thought that even a parren as steeped in ceremony as Sordashan must be reconsidering the wisdom of allowing such heavily armed creatures into his presence.
“Does his stare indicate displeasure, do you think?” Liala asked.
Lisbeth thought Liala would do better to ask one of the parren… but parren, she’d discovered, did not like to be bothered while in ceremony.
“I think his stare indicates that he’s the only parren in the room with complete freedom of action,” Lisbeth replied. “And he wants us to know it.”
“Interesting,” said Liala. She often took the tone of someone with a thousand questions, who only refrained from asking because her brain worked infinitely faster than the passage of verbal exchanges, and because she doubted the answers would be as concise as the possibilities inside her head. “What would be my reception among human leaders, do you think?”
“That depends on how much they needed you,” said Lisbeth. “If humanity was threatened, and they needed you desperately, I think they could be quite polite and gracious.”
“And were that external threat removed?” Liala queried.
“I’m sure they’d have you destroyed on sight.” Lying to Liala was not only useless, but potentially dangerous. However inexperienced, there couldn’t have been many minds in the galaxy less likely to fall for it.
“Yes,” Liala agreed. “Perhaps Styx was correct, and this is the best place for drysines to be seeking alliance.”
“Keep your options open, kid,” Hiro interjected, listening in.
“Always,” Liala agreed.
16
“In honour of Lieutenant Shilu,” said Romki, “I propose that this should be called Operation ‘Silent Thunder’.” Some smothered laughs and rolled eyes in Phoenix’s operations room. Wei Shilu, linguist and lawyer that he was, found military code names and attempts at grandiosity to be endlessly preposterous. ‘Silent Thunder’ was obviously another of his parodies that during the war had only remained parodies until Fleet HQ had issued something worse. Better yet, ‘Silent Thunder’ was what Fleet crews called a certain type of flatulence.
There were more people gathered in the operations room than Erik would have thought wise, but given the shared nature of this operation with Makimakala, he didn’t see much choice. Pram and Djojana Naki and three more senior tavalai officers. For Phoenix, that left space for Erik, Draper, Trace, Kaspowitz and Geish, plus Romki to give the presentation. It was far from ideal, as Romki was a civilian more interested in culture and society than military affairs. Of Phoenix’s two specified intelligence officers, Hiro had remained behind on Defiance with Lisbeth, and Jokono was a policeman even less qualified to give broad-scale military analysis than Romki.
It made Erik feel the loss of Suli Shahaim more keenly than ever — she’d been their most knowledgeable on ships and force structures, and had functioned as Phoenix’s unofficial intelligence officer for more than a decade. Makimakala had numerous very informed officers on Spiral affairs and old AI history, but aside from this one contact with the corbi delegation in Croma’Dokran space, they knew as little as Phoenix did, and less still about the reeh. Which left Romki as the best qualified to pick up all the bits and pieces he’d been gathering, and stitch them into some kind of formal presentation.
“The scale of what’s going on in reeh space is even more depressing than I’d thought possible,” Romki said heavily, activating the holographics within the circle of seats. It glowed with a mass of star systems, stretching away from croma space. “The croma and their corbi guests disagree on many things, but they’re very much in agreement about the reeh. Reeh barely talk at all, so we can discover very little about them by monitoring communications channels or by spying on their society. In xeno-psychological terms I think they would be classified as ‘avoid at all costs’. They’re a bit strange in that all the most nasty organic species in the Spiral have been hive-minded, while the reeh seem to be far more sophisticated and varied. They don’t appear to be any more collectively-minded than humans or tavalai — which is to say that they see themselves as a distinct civilisation as we do, but they haven’t done away with individuality entirely. It’s just that while humans and tavalai are capable of compassion and affection as individuals, reeh seemed programmed to permanent hostility.”
He touched an icon in the air before him, and the charts behind him changed to a three-dimensional display of something humanoid and alien. It was not pleasant to look at, limbs spindly at the wrists but thick through the muscle, a lean, almost reptilian face with grinning, exposed teeth.
“Now you’ll have to take this image with a pinch of salt,” said the professor, adjusting his glasses. “Reeh don’t only mutate the genomes of those species they conquer, they mutate their own, which makes it hard to pin down precisely what they are as a species, or what they look like. There are many different forms, I understand that some have mated themselves to bio-mechanical add-ons, weapons and the like… all quite unpleasant, and describing, perhaps, a certain dark psychology.”
“Sounds familiar,” Geish murmured. A few of the tavalai rumbled in agreement. Alo, Geish meant. Many tavalai had long regarded alo as the true enemy, the puppet masters behind humanity’s aggressive expansion.
“Well in truth, we’ve never observed the alo being cruel,” said Romki. “We know that they’re unsociable, don’t like outsiders, and feel quite superior to everyone else. But we’ve never observed actual cruelty because despite humanity’s ties, no human has spent any considerable time in their presence.”
“Tavalai have observed cruelty,” Pram rumbled. “Alo have taken tavalai prisoners. None returned.”
Erik had heard those rumours too, but tavalai were not in the habit of sharing intel with humans on anything. Romki glanced at him, as though prepared to continue that line of enquiry. Erik gestured for him to continue with the briefing instead.
“Yes, well,” said Romki, adjusting his glasses once more. “All of reeh civilisation appears to be built around genetic manipulation. It’s their primary technology, and it seems both indigenous and ingenious. If the croma and corbi tales about what reeh have done to the occupied peoples in their space… well, the scale of the tragedy is beyond comprehension. Krim were unrelentingly hostile, but for all their formidable nature they were limited enough that a species they’d nearly exterminated managed to come back and wipe them out. Sard haven’t managed to get themselves wiped out yet, they seem a little wiser than the krim in that they choose their allies better and don’t overstep what their allies will tolerate like the krim did… but if they lost those allies, they’d get wiped out just the same, they’re not so formidable on their own, their economic and technological base would not stand a full scale war against humanity.
“It’s been a fact of the galaxy that has comforted many prominent scholars I could name… including some I’ve had heated disagreements with… that the most aggressive species tend to get themselves wiped out. Even the chah’nas, though nothing like as bad as sard or krim, have notably more instinct for self-preservation, and are thus capable of caution and even respect for non-chah’nas. But in the reeh it seems we have the ultimate nightmare of xeno-sociologists everywhere — a species that is intelligent, individualistic, opportunistic, creative and all those other qualities that we’ve usually associated with ‘good’ species… except that this one is almost entirely homicidal, and perhaps even genocidal, depending on whether one might choose to characterise what the reeh are doing to the corbi and others as ‘genocide’.”
“If they’re that dangerous,” said Kaspowitz, “why do the croma still survive? I mean, no insult intended to them, they seem impressive. But what you’re describing with the reeh is a dynamic civilisation, one that changes and adapts. Croma are strong, but they’re not that. Adaptive civilisations tend to win… but the croma are still fighting.”
“Quite so,” said Romki, in that manner he took when he might have liked to quibble, but realised he wasn’t in a university here and that it would serve no purpose. “The only saving grace with a species quite so nasty appears to be that no one else likes them either. They control a truly vast region, and even the croma aren’t aware just how vast because they’ve never been able to establish firm communication with the other civilisations that surround them. But the croma are quite sure that the reeh are surrounded, and that most of those civilisations appear to be as stubborn about it as the croma are. Which makes obvious sense when you think about it, because reeh expansion only stops when it hits something hard, like the croma. The croma think reeh borders have been relatively static for a while, as opposed to various periods across the millennia when they’ve been expanding rapidly.”
“Have the croma made serious attempts to establish cooperation with those neighbouring species?” asked Captain Pram.
“One of those things the croma simply don’t discuss, it seems,” Romki said regretfully. “Perhaps the reeh’s other enemies are no better than the reeh themselves, one can never tell. But the reports I’ve been cross-checking with Phoenix bridge crew indicate croma awareness of large battles taking place elsewhere on the reeh perimeter. Reeh ship-movements and industrial composition suggests a civilisation constantly at war, and since they don’t appear to fight amongst themselves, it must be directed outward. Croma scholars have estimated the industrial warfighting capability of the reeh, and it’s quite frightening. If they aimed it all this way, the croma would be finished, and humans and tavalai would be next. But for the reeh to put all forces on this perimeter, and leave their other perimeters undef
ended, would be suicide for them.”
“Be nice if all the reeh’s enemies could coordinate one big offensive against them,” Geish suggested.
“You’re describing a conflict that would kill countless billions on all sides,” Romki said coolly. “There would be nothing ‘nice’ about it, I assure you.” He looked at Erik. “Captain, I could keep going if you wish, but I believe this covers the preliminary introductions required, and the military analysis should be left to officers.”
“Yes, thank you Stan.” He glanced at Pram, wondering if the tavalai would like to take over.
Pram gestured for Erik to stand. “We are guests on this human vessel,” he said. “The floor is yours.”
Erik stood, thinking of their time on Do’Ran, and of a little lost group of people who lived in isolated luxury, dangling like a fish hook in case some passing fish might take an interest and come to help save their people. Given the state of the Spiral at present, he didn’t hold much hope. Perhaps in a thousand years the descendants of that group would be the only corbi left in all the galaxy.
“Our corbi friends told us a lot about the corbi resistance,” Erik told the group. “The corbi homeworld is Rando. They had a small number of other systems at the time the reeh reached them — at the time they were fighting alongside the croma, perhaps a thousand years ago. But the croma retreated past them to the present position of the wall, and left the corbi isolated. The croma still don’t like to talk about it, they like to give the impression that their wall has always been permanent. In reality, all things shift and move over time, and the Croma Wall is no different.
Croma Venture: (The Spiral Wars Book Five) Page 30