She let go of him and stepped back. They were very different. Steve was tall, muscular and blond, wearing a simple starship tunic that dated all the way back to the early days. She was tall, with long black hair, almond eyes and tinted skin. The older generation commented, sometimes, that Steve had married a woman from the other side of the world. The younger generation didn’t care. Hoshiko and most of her family were boring, to them. They didn’t even change their skin colour to ensure they stayed fashionable, let alone anything else. But then, being a Stuart brought responsibilities. Hoshiko would probably have been disowned if she’d refused to serve at least one term in the military.
“This is a remarkable ship,” Steve said. “And human-built.”
“From scratch,” Hoshiko agreed. “And they’ve held up very well.”
She indicated the hatch. “Would you care to accompany me?”
“It would be my pleasure,” Steve said. “And thank you for not laying on any formal receptions.”
“I’m afraid there will be a formal dinner later,” Hoshiko told him. “My staff wanted a chance to meet you, of course. And I’m sure you wanted to meet them.”
She smiled as she heard her grandfather snort. He’d always dreaded pressing the flesh. And yet, he was easily the most famous person in the entire solar system. His fame reached well beyond Earth and the Solar Union itself, the man who had turned an entire world on its head and given the human race the stars. And brought the hope of freedom to countless billions of aliens. He could do nothing else - he could die tomorrow - and he’d still be remembered as long as the human race endured.
This too is fleeting, Hoshiko reminded herself. Sooner or later, everyone is forgotten.
She felt cold as she led him down the corridor and into her cabin. The Tokomak Empire had endured for thousands of years - the Tokomak themselves had been spacefaring for far longer - and yet their entire existence was a mere eyeblink, on the scale of the entire universe. A million races could rise, flourish and fall in the time it took for the galaxy to complete one grand cycle. There were people who wondered why there weren’t hundreds of ancient races around, each one a million years older than any known race. Some of their speculations were truly disturbing. If there was something out there that ate advanced races ...
Or maybe they just travelled beyond the edge of the galaxy and vanished, Hoshiko thought, dryly. We may never know.
She opened the hatch, motioned for him to take a seat and headed to the drinks cabinet. “Can I get you anything?”
“Anything,” Steve said. “I never had the time to develop expensive tastes.”
Hoshiko smiled as she poured them both a generous glass of Scotch. It was surprisingly good, she’d been told, for Scotch that had never been anywhere near Scotland. The oldsters might place value on alcoholic drinks that had matured for years, but the youngsters thought they were silly. It was simplicity itself to program a food processor to turn out something that was effectively indistinguishable from the original. But then, she supposed rarity alone gave the drink value. There was a certain pleasure to be had in owning something expensive and showing off a little.
“I was hoping the government would send someone out here,” she said, as she passed him a glass. “I wasn’t expecting it to be you.”
Steve laughed. “You couldn’t lie to me when you were a little girl with a bow in her hair,” he said. “What makes you think you can lie to me now?”
“The optimism of youth?” Hoshiko grinned. “What makes you think I’m lying to you?”
“I was a serving officer too,” Steve said. “Back then, we had a real problem with micromanagement. The oafs in the Oval Office thought they could issue orders in real time and get away with it. Which they did. It was us who paid the price. Here ... you’d be foolish to expect the government to either hold your hand or issue orders you could actually follow. By the time you got them ...”
“The situation would have moved on,” Hoshiko finished. It took six months for someone to travel from Earth to Apsidal, let alone N-Gann. It would take a year for her to request orders and receive them. By then, things really would have moved on. “And things are moving already.”
She sat down, resting her drink on her lap. Command was a lonely place. She didn’t have anyone she could confide in, let alone share her doubts and fears. Her subordinates had problems of their own. They didn’t need to know hers. And ... she shook her head. If she confessed her weaknesses, some of her subordinates would start to lose confidence in her and start second-guessing her at the worst possible time. Steve Stuart, the man who had given Earth the stars, was perhaps the only person who understood the weight resting on her shoulders. She could lose the war - and ensure the destruction of the entire human race - in an afternoon.
“We beat them,” she said. She was sure Steve would have read the summary when he passed through Apsidal. She was pretty sure he’d have read the entire report, from the cold-blooded analysis of the engagements to the formal assessments and suggestions for future operations. He’d certainly had more than enough time. “But we haven’t won the war. Not yet.”
She keyed her terminal, projecting a holographic starchart. N-Gann, Apsidal and the stars between them glowed green, although she knew that could change at any moment. The Tokomak hadn’t started raiding her supply lines yet, but it was just a matter of time before that changed. They were probably reading their own history books, assessing how their ancestors had forged the greatest empire the galaxy had ever known. Hoshiko had studied their texts, when she’d been preparing for her first deployment. The alien authors had been long-winded bores - they never used one word when a thousand would do - but they’d generally made good points. Their early campaigns provided insight into how they should run a war against the human race.
“We’re on the edge of the inner worlds now,” she said. A tingle ran down her spine. No invading fleet had so much as dared to slip so close to Tokomak Prime, even though there were still thousands of light years between N-Gann and the enemy homeworld. “But that weakens our ties to Sol even as it brings us into contact with more and more of their mobile units. They’re probably reactivating even more of them as we speak.”
She gritted her teeth. It didn’t seem fair, somehow. On the face of it, the numbers were so badly against the human race that it wasn’t even a contest. The Tokomak could afford to trade a hundred ships for each and every one of hers, including the gunboats, and come out ahead. Their fleets could march towards Earth, blowing hell out of every blocking force they encountered until time eventually ran out. She knew the situation wasn’t that bad - the Tokomak couldn’t even begin to man their entire fleet - but it was pretty damn bad. And she was alone, right on the end of a branch. She had no doubt the enemy was already plotting how best to saw it off behind her.
“We’ve heard reports of mass conscriptions,” she continued. “We know their allies are sending spacers ... some more reluctantly than others. We know time is not on our side. We have the edge now, but that won’t last.”
“We’re in the same position as Imperial Japan,” Steve commented. “We have to win quickly or not at all.”
Hoshiko nodded. She’d studied her ancestors. She still found it hard to believe that they’d risked war when the odds were so badly against them, although - as she’d dug into the geopolitical background, she’d started to realise that they’d faced the choice between fighting now or fighting later, perhaps under far worse conditions. She had no sympathy for Imperial Japan - it had been as fascistic as Nazi Germany - but she understood the problem facing its leaders. And Earth now faced a worse one. The Tokomak would happily spend centuries hunting down every last human, just to make sure the threat was crushed beyond all hope of recovery.
“And that means taking the war into enemy space,” she said, calmly. “And that means we cannot wait for orders from Earth.”
Steve lifted his eyebrows. “Explain?”
Hoshiko met his eyes evenly. She was sure h
e understood - he’d done the same when she really had been a little girl - but she knew he wanted to understand her reasoning. It was quite possible, as she’d been taught in school, for two people to reach the same conclusions from widely different starting points and radically different logic. And besides, Steve hadn’t commanded anything larger than a small squadron. It was odd to realise that, in some ways, she had more experience than her grandfather. The thought gave her an odd sense of reassurance. She really wasn’t a child any longer. She could stand up for herself.
“They’re already working on their defences.” Hoshiko indicated the display, showing worlds and gravity points that were being hastily fortified. “The longer we wait, the longer they’ll have to block our advance and bring more and more ships of their own online. If we don’t move soon, we may have to resign ourselves to eventual defeat. It may take decades for them to crush us, unless we come up with a real silver bullet, but crush us they will. And that will be the end.”
She took a breath. “Is there a silver bullet?”
“Not yet.” Steve didn’t bother to dissemble. “Admirals Webster and White have come up with a number of improvements, some of which have been added to our weapons already, but nothing that really changes the game. They keep promising a war-winner ... unfortunately for them, everyone’s already read Superiority. We do think there are some promising lines of research that will turn the enemy fleet into nothing more than scrap metal, but ...”
He shrugged. Hoshiko understood. “Don’t hold your breath, then.”
“Yes.” Steve nodded. “Right now, we don’t have much hope of really shifting the balance of power through new technology. Give us a century, and ...”
Hoshiko nodded. She’d heard rumours, so highly-classified that even a fleet admiral only heard whispers, of a handful of colony ships being launched into unexplored regions of space well beyond enemy control. A human colony, so far from the Tokomak that they might never stumble across it, would make all kinds of advances as it fortified its position and built a whole new war fleet. She understood the potential of GalTech better than most. Given time, and unrestricted fabricators, a fleet could be built up in short order. And if they lost the war, the colony would - one day - return to the sector and extract revenge. Who knew? Maybe their tech would advance so far it would be a very short war.
Or maybe not, she thought. She hated the enemy, but she had to admit they’d been ingenious. The war had killed off much of the deadwood infesting the enemy high command, giving them a chance to promote younger and more capable commanders in their place. And, perhaps, galvanised their long-moribund research and development programs. Given time, who knew what they’d do. They might advance too, after the war. We certainly showed them that technological advancement was still possible.
“Then we have to take the offensive.” Hoshiko studied the starchart thoughtfully. “Do you see any objections?”
Steve gave her a sharp look. “Are you asking for my support, or for my opposition?”
“Your insight.” Hoshiko wished, just for a moment, that they weren’t related. It would be easier for them to disagree if they weren’t grandfather and grandchild. “And your advice.”
“I would be far happier if we hadn’t drawn their attention when we did,” Steve said. “I always knew it was inevitable, after we started expanding outside our own system, but I’d hoped we’d have a few more decades. Their power was always hard to grasp. At some point, the numbers become just ... statistics.”
He smiled, rather dryly. “But that’s no help, is it?”
“No.” Hoshiko indicated the starchart. “Do you have any objections?”
“I have a lot of objections,” Steve said, bluntly. “I dare say there will be hundreds of critics who will blast you for risking everything on one throw of the dice, if you lose. Such people are like cockroaches. You just can’t squash them. And ... yes, I can see a great many things that could go wrong. You can have those insights and welcome, in the hope that you can minimise the risks as much as possible. But Hoshiko ...”
He took a breath. “None of those objections outweigh the risk of sitting on our bums and doing nothing. You said it yourself. Time is not on our side. We either take the offensive, and force them to react to us, or we concede eventual - certain - defeat. There’s no prospect of being able to force them to stop, unless we really do come up with a silver bullet, and little prospect of blowing up their worlds and calling it a draw. And ... I like to think we’re better than that.”
“Survival comes first,” Hoshiko said. She hated the idea of mass planetary bombardment, but she wouldn’t hesitate to retaliate if the enemy started it. Retaliation - or the credible threat of retaliation - was the only thing that might deter the Tokomak from hitting Earth with antimatter bombs. “If it’s them or us ...”
“Then you have to do whatever you can to ensure it really isn’t them or us,” Steve said. He kept his voice very cold. “Are those the sort of insights you wanted?”
“Yeah.” Hoshiko had to smile. Steve had been a good grandfather, looking after the grandkids without ever really spoiling them. “I trust you’ll be joining the conference?”
“If I must.” Steve looked amused. “But won’t that undermine your authority?”
“I have a bunch of very keen subordinates,” Hoshiko said. “Half of them will take your presence as a sign to start an argument.”
“Which is better than the alternative,” Steve told her. “Believe me, insincere flattery isn’t worth having. Someone has to play devil’s advocate and point out that the emperor has no clothes. Not a safe place to be, not when I was your age, but important.”
He smiled in memory. “Just as long as they remember they’re the ones on the sharp end.”
“Right now, we’re all on the sharp end,” Hoshiko said. She drained her glass and stood. “Coming?”
Chapter Three
Hoshiko forced herself to ignore Steve’s quiet gasp as she led him into the conference chamber. It was striking, particularly to a groundpounder, but he’d been in space for longer than she’d been alive. He should be used to immersive holographic environments by now, even ones that gave the impression they’d walked right through an airlock and into airless space. Her lips quirked at the thought. If they’d somehow jumped into space, they’d be dying by now. Their implants and genetic enhancements had their limits.
Although people have survived long periods of exposure to vacuum with the right equipment, she thought, as she took her place in the centre of the chamber. Some of them weren’t even permanently harmed by the experience.
She pushed the thought aside as she studied the god’s eye view in front of her. The fleet itself, positioned close enough to the gravity point to reinforce the defences without sacrificing the ability to move rapidly to the defence of N-Gann itself; the planet, with its cluster of improvised defences and industrial nodes that had been reconfigured to support her fleet; the hundreds of freighters moving in and out of the system, carrying word of the war and enemy defeats back to their homeworld. She knew some of them might not be friendly - their sensor records would give the enemy insight into her defences - but there was nothing she could do about it. They didn’t have time to search every ship that wanted to visit N-Gann. Some of her officers had suggested closing the system, banning everything that wasn’t human, but she’d overruled them. The Galactic economy was already a mess. They didn’t need more reasons to hate humanity.
“It never fails to awe me,” Steve said, quietly. He was studying the giant ring orbiting N-Gann. “They built on such a scale and then ... they just lost the urge to keep going.”
Hoshiko shrugged. The Tokomak were a planet-bound race. They might have lived and worked in space for longer than humanity had known how to use fire, but they still kept the mindset of their ancestors. They still thought there were limits. Hoshiko and her generation, on the other hand, wouldn’t live on a planet if they were paid. The limits that kept groundpounders ...
grounded simply didn’t exist in space, where there was endless living space, unlimited resources and vast sources of energy. The Solar Union didn’t need planets. It just needed asteroids, technology and a willingness to work. They’d be building rings of their own soon, if they didn’t move straight to Dyson Spheres. She’d seen the plans drawn up by idealists, for the days after the war. A Dyson Sphere would be something new. No one, not even the Tokomak, had tried to enclose an entire sun.
“I guess they never realised the limits had vanished,” she said, quietly. “And there are humans who have the same problem.”
“It’s an old problem.” Steve shot her a sharp look. “Too much conservatism and you end up with stagnation, decline and eventual defeat. Too much progressivism and you end up with chaos, decline and eventual defeat. The trick is to find a way to balance them.”
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