The stronger enemy Fleet Resolution Field would surround the Human Field; the Duglaari generators would press irresistibly inward, the Human Fleet would be crushed and compacted until ships collided, until there was nothing left but a huge, tightly compacted mass of mangled metal—and dead men.
In the beginning of The War, three hundred years ago, such battles to the death had occurred, with horrid regularity. It had cost many ships and men to learn the lesson: if you can’t win, retreat. Get out with as many ships as you can. Heroics only meant that the imbalance in men and material between Human and Duglaari would grow that much worse.
Eighty percent would be the point of no return.
“Switch to GN-7.”
At least the number of patterns was virtually inexhaustible….
But two more lights went amber. Then blue.
“Switch to GN-50.”
Damnit, the Duglaari computer was learning to crack the patterns faster. Maybe, in some weird Duglaari mathematical system, the Human patterns fell into some master pattern of their own. Maybe that was one of the reasons that the Doogs were better….
No! No! Not better. Maybe more advanced, maybe a bigger, older civilization, but not better….
Another light went amber.
“By all the cowards of Sol!” Palmer swore. “Switch to GN-13.”
Almost immediately, the amber light went blue. The Duglaari computer had adjusted again, and this time almost as fast as the pattern had been changed! It’s hopeless…. Palmer thought bitterly.
“Switch to GN-69,” he muttered into the command circuit.
“Commander Palmer! Commander Palmer!” It was the voice of Twordlarkin, the chief computation officer. Palmer had a pretty good idea of what was coming….
“Commander, the latest extrapolation is eighty-three percent chance of Duglaari victory. My official recommendation at this time is immediate retreat. We can expect the beginning of an engulfing action shortly, otherwise, and we will be unable to succesfully resist it.”
Palmer swore, taking care to switch Twordlarkin out of the circuit first, though. Official recommendation! An “Official Recommendation” from a chief computation officer was a command in everything but name, even to a fleet commander. The Navy runs the ships, so the saying went, but the computers run the War. Only one thing could save a fleet commander who ignored a computation “recommendation” from a court-martial—victory.
Fat chance of that. The hell of it was that Twordlarkin was right. Sylvanna was lost. Still, a combat officer should at least have the right to order his own retreat.
Palmer reactivated the computation circuit. “Very well,” he grunted. “Recommendation acknowledged and approved.” He switched over to the command circuit. The standard retreat tactic should work this time, he thought, since at least we’re not caught between the Doogs and Sylvanna….
“Fleet Commander to all ships. On my mark, reverse Resolution Field Generators one hundred eighty degrees. Five…four…three…two…one…mark!“
Suddenly, every remaining Human ship reversed its generator. Instantly, the Human Fleet Resolution Field was reversed, and the disc formation of Human ships shot outward at tremendous speed. For now, instead of opposing the outward thrust of the Duglaari Fleet Resolution Field, the Human Fleet was suddenly riding it, adding its power to the power of its own Field. As a result, the outward acceleration was twice that that either of the fleets could manage by itself.
For a few brief moments, the Human Fleet continued to open up the gap between itself and the startled Duglaari. Then the Doog commander reacted, reversing his Fleet’s Resolution Field, so that the Human ships were no longer riding it. Impelled now by the greater power of its larger Fleet Field, the Duglaari Fleet was beginning to close the gap. It would be a race to the outskirts of the Sylvanna System, a race for life.
Palmer glanced hurriedly at the Master Battle Grid, then switched on the Computation circuit. Computation had some really vital uses, after all.
“Do we have a big enough jump, Twordlarkin?” he said. “Will we be able to beat them to the orbit of Sylvanna VIII?”
There was a long, tense minute of silence as Twordlarkin put the problem, involving distance, initial acceleration, relative speeds and closing speed to the Command Computer.
“Affive,” Twordlarkin finally said. “They cannot catch up to us before we cross the orbit of Sylvanna VIII.”
Palmer heaved a deep sigh of relief. The battle was over now. The Duglaari Fleet would not be able to catch up until the Human Fleet had crossed the orbit of Sylvanna VIII, the outermost planet, and once the Human Fleet left the Sylvanna system, it would be able to translate safely into Stasis-Space.
Stasis-Space was not the mythical “hyperspace” of the ancients. It was not an abnormal condition of space at all; it was a bubble of time. Within the bubble, time was many, many times faster than outside, while spacial properties, aside from some weird optical effects, remained essentially normal. A ship in Stasis-Space did not exceed the local speed of light, but, in relation to normal time, time in the bubble was contracted, so that the bubble itself disappeared from the normal timestream, and reappeared light years away, in a matter of hours, by “normal” reckoning. An inverted Stasis Field was erected within the outer Stasis-Field of each ship, so that the crewmen lived within the normal timestream and did not age abnormally.
Since ships in Stasis-Space carried their own timestream with them, they could not even be located by other ships.
The Human Fleet, what was left of it, would get safely back to the great base in the Olympia system….
Palmer checked his Damage Control Board. Thirty-two of the original sixty lights were still green. Thirty-two ships had gotten away safely….
“How many Doogs destroyed?” he asked Computation glumly.
“Eighteen,” was the answer.
Twenty-eight Human ships traded for eighteen Duglaari.
Twenty-eight ships, and the system of Sylvanna.
Somewhere out there, safe in their bubble of time, were the Duglaari troopships. Now the Duglaari could safely bring them into the Sylvanna system….
Palmer tried not to think of what would happen in the Sylvanna system now. There were fifteen million Humans in the Sylvanna system…. They were as good as dead.
No, he thought bitterly, not as good. Not nearly as good….
Not nearly…. He remembered Brycion, the planet where he had been born, the planet where he had spent the first five years of his life, the planet where his parents had died, and he saw, through the eyes of his childhood, what was about to happen to Sylvanna.
There were fifteen million people in the Sylvanna system and perhaps enough ships for a hundred thousand of them to flee before the Doog troopships arrived. That was the mathematics of chaos and riot and terror.
He dimly remembered what had happened when t That wags had driven the defending human fleet from the system of Brycion. There had been close to a hundred million humans in the Brycion system and ships enough for a hundred thousand to escape. A thousand mad, terrified people fighting for each berth, with only hours to go before the Doogs arrived.
Palmer’s memories of that time were confused and fragmentary, but mortally vivid. He remembered a human sea flowing out over a deepspace field, toppling ships with the sheer weight of stampeding humanity, he remembered fires, and shooting and senseless, futile fighting in the streets.
He remembered his father and his mother, fighting their way, block by block, to the deepspace field. He remembered being herded aboard a ship with what seemed to him at the time a million children.
But most of all, he remembered the last he ever saw of his parents, a glimpse out the viewport just before the ship lifted off for Olympia and relative safety….
A maddened, seemingly endless mob was roaring across the open concrete towards the ships. A thin circle of men and women, mostly parents of the children the ships were to carry to safety stood between the mob and the ship
s, buying with their lives the time needed for the ships to lift off.
He saw his father, and his mother too, firing coldly into the terror-maddened mob, and the leading wave of the endless human sea about to engulf them in its deadly embrace….
Then, mercifully, the ship had lifted off, and Palmer never knew for sure whether his parents had been torn to pieces by the mob, or whether they had survived to face the Dpog occupation.
Ever since he had been old enough to understand, Palmer had hoped that his parents had died then and there, torn to pieces by men turned into animals. Horrible as such a death was, the people who died before the Doogs landed were always the lucky ones….
Palmer tried to turn his thoughts away from Brycion and the past. Now there was Sylvanna, and the present….
Soon the Doogs would bring in the troopships and occupy the three inhabited planets of the Sylvanna system. There would be no great conflagration, no mass slaughter, no bloody extermination of human beings. That would be a waste of time and energy and material, and the Doogs were too efficient to waste effort on a pogrom.
The humans would simply be herded into small, crowded reservations, and the Sylvanna system would be repopulated by Duglaari.
The humans within the reservations would be left strictly alone, to fend for themselves—minus medicine, food, clothing, machinery, even water.
The Duglaari would simply keep them penned up like wild animals until they finally killed themselves off fighting for what little food and water there might be in the reservation areas.
The Duglaari were not needlessly cruel.
But they were not needlessly merciful, either.
Chapter II
TO THE people of the Human Confederation, the solar systern of Oiympia was almost a capital, and to Jay Palmer, it was almost a home. By some by-now-untraceable quirk of history, Oiympia had received the lion’s share of wave after wave of refugees. Since most of these refugees were children, the government of Olympia had become a kind of massive foster-parent, and since the chief business of the human race was the war for survival against the Duglaari, all these war-waifs were, with their own enthusiastic approval, pointed towards military careers throughout their rattier abbreviated childhoods.
From this position as the number one supplier of officers and non-coms to the human fleets, Olympia had naturally evolved into a garrison system. There were three inhabited planets in the Olympia system: Olympia II, a small Mars-sized world with a medium-thin atmosphere, was a huge drydock and armory world; Olympia IV was a tiny, frigid, airless rock, but as such it was an excellent location for the cryogenic computers that formed the Chief Computation Center of the Confederation.
And Olympia III, a temperate, Earth-type planet, had become the nerve-center of the Confederation, the headquarters of the closest thing that there was to a united human government—the Combined Human Military Command.
Jay Palmer had grown up in this garrison system and spent what leaves he had in the Official Liberty Cities of Olympia III, and as unlovely as it was, Olympia was home.
Palmer had left the battered remnants of his fleet in the drydocks of Olympia II, and had caught the first shuttle for Olympia III. As he stepped through the airlock of the shuttle and onto the debarkatoin ramp, the warm, fragrant air of Olympia III reminded him that it had been a long time since he had had a leave, or even a moment to wish for one. There were pleasures to be had in the Official Liberty Cities, the usual soldier’s pleasures and quite suddenly Palmer felt the weary, stale aftermath of battle wash over him, the slackness that comes after a long period of high tension, and he knew (hat what he needed most now was a short period of unwinding, a real bender, and then a long, long sleep.
But that would have to wait. This shuttleport was not in one of the Liberty Cities. It was directly outside Pentagon City, the Headquarters of the Combined Human Command, and the first order of business was not liberty, but a painful debriefing session with High Marshal Kurowski himself.
As Palmer stepped down the ramp and onto the concrete apron of the shuttleport, the solid, geometric massiveness of Pentagon City loomed above him, almost stupifying him, though he knew the place about as intimately as anyone could.
The shuttleport was right outside one of the entrances to the city, and from the field, the seemingly endless wall, stretching vertically for five hundred feet and horizontally past the horizon in both directions made Palmer feel like a microbe on a slide, looking up into a strange world whose scale was beyond his comprehension.
There was nothing else like Pentagon City anywhere else in the Human Confederation or in the Duglaari Empire. Or, as far as anyone knew, in Fortress Sol itself.
Pentagon City was the largest single building in the known Galaxy.
It was built in the shape of a pentagon, for some mystical reason lost in the mists of antiquity, ten miles on a side, five hundred feet tall. The walls were a hundred feet thick, im-pervium-reinforced concrete, and there were no windows. The whole building was air conditioned and artificially lit. It even kept its own time. Nothing short of a direct hit with a fusion bomb could touch it, and there were subterranean redoubts beneath it that could survive even that.
Palmer walked slowly across the field towards the nearby entrance to the city, his gaze fixed upwards at the endless expanse of smooth, featureless wall. It always seemed to him that Pentagon City had come in his mind, and in the mind of many others, to symbolize the Confederation itself, in the way that the Pyramids had symbolized the forgotten civilization of the Nile back on mysterious Earth.
Although no one he knew considered Pentagon City anything but ugly, everyone had a weird kind of affection for it. It was a kind of beloved monstrosity, a monument to the present instead of the past. It was the Confederation’s monument to itself, the most massive and total shrine to the military mind that had ever been built.
It almost made Palmer feel that any race which could produce such a building-city should surely be able to defeat the Duglaari Empire. Almost….
Palmer presented his credentials to a guard at the entrance, and after an inspection that was little more than a formality, he was admitted to the outermost ring of the City. Although it was called Pentagon City, and although upwards of fifty thousand men actually lived within its walls, it was not set up like a City at all. It was simply a gigantic office building. It had fifty above-surface levels, twenty subsurface levels, and a hundred concentric rings of corridors on each level.
Palmer was now in the outermost ring of the ground floor level, Level One. The walls of the corridor were studded with doors to offices, as far as the eye could see, and further. The corridor itself was as wide as a small street, and to complete the city-effect, the center of the corridor was filled with scores of men zipping by on tiny one-man scooters. More scooters were parked against the walls.
It would have been totally absurd to expect anyone to be able to find his way anywhere in the vast maze that was Pentagon City by himself. Not only was the scale of the building too great, no one could possibly remember where more than a few dozen of the thousands of rooms and offices were.
Therefore, the corridors were supplied with nearly a hundred thousand tiny one-man scooters, all circuited in to one master computer located deep within the subterranean bowels of Pentagon City.
Palmer threaded his way to one of the unoccupied scooters, sat down, snapped on the safety belt, and punched 220;L-50, R-1, 1001” on the row of buttons mounted on a pedestal on the front of the scooter, where the manual steering controls would normally be. “L-50” meant level fifty, the top floor; “R-1” was ring one, the innermost of the hundred rings; “1001” was the office number of High Marshal Kurowski. Had Palmer been headed for an office whose coordinates he did not happen to know, he would’ve looked them up in the directory chained to the seat of each scooter.
Palmer pushed the power bar forward. The scooter shot along the corridor for about half a mile, till it came to one of the radial passageways that led
from the perimeter of Pentagon City to the center.
It turned into the radial passageway and accelerated. Palmer watched the signs at the turnoffs flash by: Ring hundred…ring ninety…fifty…thirty…twenty…ten…five….
At ring one, the scooter turned off, and boarded a small elevator, which automatically shot upward, controlled by the same master computer as the scooters. Level ten…twenty…forty….
At the fiftieth level, the elevator came to a halt, and the scooter took over again, finally depositing Palmer neatly outside room 1001.
The lettering on the door said simply: “Coordinating Commander-in-Chief.” Kurowski’s name was absent for reasons of economy—Supreme Commanders came and went with such dreadful rapidity that there was no point in wasting the paint.
Palmer announced himself to the grid on the door, and a moment later, the door opened, indicating that Commander Palmer was to come in.
Kurowski was seated behind a frighteningly uncluttered and huge duroplast desk. At his right elbow was an intercom; at his left, a box of cigars.
The entire rear wall of the office was a huge political map of the known Galaxy. The Duglaari suns were four hundred and twenty malignant red dots arranged in crescent formation between the Human Confederation and the center of the Galaxy. The Human Confederation suns, two hundred twenty of them—no, thought Palmer, now two hundred nineteen—were an elipse of gold dots partially embraced by the horns of the red crescent.
At the far end of the elipse, out towards the rim, was a great glowing green sphere that dominated the entire map. That rich green color could mean only one thing to a human being, no matter what planet he had been born on—the mysterious, sealed-off ancestral home of the human race, Fortress Sol.
The Solarians Page 2