by Steve White
He departed, and Aelador led the humans to the antechamber that gave access to the scanner system's power leads and connections with the actual hardware on the station's outer skin. As the tide of molten pain ebbed from his nervous system, he wondered what the scanner readings portended. Uftscha had been right: there was no reasonable possibility other than a malfunction. But Aelador knew these systems, and he could imagine no malfunction that could have produced these particular readings.
He was thinking about it as they removed the detachable panels along the base of the chamber's walls and gazed down into the system's glowing guts.
* * *
Aleksander Nevsky disengaged its continuous-displacement drive and resumed the intrinsic vector it had possessed back in the outer system of Terranova. (Strictly speaking, it had never lost it, but this was a minor problem of interstellar navigation.) Golovko noted with satisfaction that the Korvaash picket lay almost dead ahead, so only minor course corrections would be needed.
He spoke an order, the attitude jets performed their aligning function, and the fusion drive roared to life. After the few seconds it took lightspeed phenomena to cross the distance that still separated the two vessels, the picket's reaction appeared on Nevsky's sensors.
"Yes," Golovko muttered to his executive officer, "they picked us up as as soon as the burn commenced. And they're following their standard procedures as Varien described them." He indicated the readouts that told of the picket's broad-band shout of warning to all Korvaash units in the system, and of its simultaneous powering-up as it prepared for the emergency acceleration that would take it through the nearby displacement point to the star that lay on the far side of Seivra (in terms of the displacement connections) from Tareil.
But Golovko knew it would never make that transit, to alert the remainder of Korvaash space. They hadn't been able to drop out of continuous-displacement drive right on top of the picket, of course—Varien had explained that displacement points always occurred inside a star's mass limit. But they were never very far inside it, and Nevsky was already coming into range, approaching on a heading less than twenty degrees from the displacement point. The picket (already burning its fusion drive, by dint of who knew what frantic efforts) was heading almost directly into its doom.
He spoke another order, and a salvo of four missiles leaped forth. The picket exerted its limited defensive capabilities, and point-defense lasers actually stopped one of the missiles while ECM caused a second to detonate too soon. The other two sped home, and the picket died in glare whose magnified image left spots in Golovko's eyes.
The Russian settled back in his acceleration couch and released a long-held breath before ordering the ship turned around to commence the retrofiring that would bring him into position to cover the displacement point in case any chance Korvaash traffic should pass through. It had gone so smoothly as to almost worry him. But, then, the operation had been meticulously planned so as to assure that he would succeed . . . and that Levinson would not.
Similar thoughts were going through Levinson's mind at substantially the same instant, as he watched the Korvaash picket that was Teddy R.'s ostensible target accelerate toward the Tareil displacement point.
He had disengaged his continuous-displacement drive sooner than necessary, outside Seivra's mass limit, and approached from almost dead astern of the picket. Now he ordered two missiles launched—no need to be too wasteful of expensive munitions, as long as realism wasn't compromised.
The missiles did their robotic best, but a stern chase is a long chase. The picket reached the displacement point and seemed to flicker out of existence. The missiles swept on through the volume of space where their target was no longer located, and receeded swiftly into the void.
"And so much for that," Teddy R.'s executive officer muttered. "Now the goddamned Russkies will be insufferable! We could have gotten that bastard if we'd intended to!"
"But we didn't, XO," Levinson reminded her. "Just remember that. Our job was to let him get away to Tareil while seeming to try our damnedest to stop him. And as far as I'm concerned, we succeeded in that. I don't care how stolid the Korvaasha are supposed to be; you can't tell me that wasn't one badly scared crew!
"And now," he continued, "let's take up station at that displacement point. Cheer up—if they send anything back through to take another look at what's going on here in Seivra, you can blast it to your heart's content! Otherwise, we wait."
He couldn't let the XO or anyone else know how hard that waiting would be for him, while DiFalco and the rest proceeded into a battle that was not a charade.
* * *
The two Korvaasha frigates that Uftscha had dispatched outward from the station had approached at a relative velocity that had allowed for nothing but an exchange of fire en passant that could have but one conclusion. Andy J. had rung with cheers as they had hit one of the bogies dead-on with the spinal-mounted particle accelerator, only to grow silent as a Korvaash missile had gotten through and inflicted more damage on Ronnie R. than DiFalco allowed himself to think about. But the storm of missiles from the Terran cruisers had saturated the Korvaash defenses, and they had flashed on past a thinning cloud of debris.
Now they had turned end-for-end and commenced retrofire, braking themselves with blinding violet-white plasma jets into an orbit that would intersect that of the station. (Ronnie R. was able to keep up, to DiFalco's relief.) The fusion drives themselves were formidable if clumsy weapons of destruction, but DiFalco didn't intend to turn them on the station. Nor would he use missiles. He wanted to leave as much of that station in existence as possible, to glean as much as they could of the intelligence information that was the rarest and most precious commodity in interstellar, interspecies war.
Of course, that meant they just had to take it on the way in . . . .
DiFalco, like everyone else, was confined to his acceleration couch, even though the deceleration could not be felt—the G forces they were pulling were such that a momentary failure of the compensating artificial gravity fields could have been catastrophic for anyone caught standing around. So he couldn't even pace as the first of the Korvaash missiles began to arrive.
* * *
Aelador and the other humans knew nothing of the signals that had arrived from the frigates and—shortly thereafter, travelling at lightspeed from the outer system—from the pickets. All they knew was that something had unleashed pandemonium among the Korvaasha, and that Uftscha made an announcement whose disjointedness not even the voder/translator could entirely smooth over, ordering the new grav scanners to be reactivated.
But Aelador could draw inferences, and as they worked frantically under the eyes of unwontedly nervous-seeming Korvaash guards to reconnect all the circuitry they had disconnected in their search for a malfunction that evidently didn't exist after all, a suspicion grew in him. When they were finished, and the rumble of missile launches began to vibrate through the station, the suspicion became certainty.
Seivra was under attack. Someone had, impossibly, gotten into the system by some means unconnected with either of the displacement points. He couldn't imagine how, and he couldn't conceive of who the intruders might be. But he knew one thing, and as he was hauled up through the hatches by the other humans he was sure they all knew it, even though they didn't dare talk among themselves. Someone was attacking the Korvaasha. Someone was hurting the Korvaasha!
The astonishing thought immobilized him for an instant at the edge of the hatch, and one of the low-ranking Korvaash guards rounded on him. "Move, inferior being! We must close up the hatch!" Without waiting for a response, he jabbed Aelador with his implanted neurolash.
Aelador gasped as the jag of unendurable pain shot through his nervous system and fell forward into the arms of one of the other humans—it was Turiel—and suddenly something seemed to lift from him, leaving nothing except the certain knowledge of what he must do, a certitude marred only by what he knew would happen to Turiel and the others after he did it
. Their eyes met and Turiel nodded his head very slightly. All the understanding and forgiveness that the universe could hold flowed between them, wordlessly.
Aelador stood up on the lip of the hatch—the guards were too startled to react—and met the eyes of the other humans for an instant, with an odd little smile. Then, slowly, he toppled over backwards and fell toward the glowing mass of wiring below.
With a crackling roar and a blinding, spark-showering flash, he vanished, and the chamber filled with the stench of burned meat. And electrical systems began to die.
* * *
"Colonel!" Farrell sounded puzzled. "Something's happened to the incoming missiles. There are just as many of them, but it's as if their fire control has suddenly become a lot less effective."
DiFalco could see it himself from the readouts. Their point-defense lasers no longer had precisely coordinated time-on-target salvos to deal with, just straggling individual missiles they could easily handle.
"Yes," he said slowly. "They must have had some kind of major systems failure on that station—a big short-out or something. God knows why; we're not even hitting them yet." He turned his attention to other matters. "Guess we'll never know."
* * *
Retrofiring steadily, the cruisers matched orbits with the station. The three remaining Korvaash frigates, after the tactical datanet they had shared with the station had become useless, had been sent outward on an intercept course which had ended in their deaths in a storm of fusion warheads.
And now the Terrans drew close enough to the station for energy weapons to come into play. First lasers—they were the longest-ranged, but their effectiveness was downgraded by ablative and reflective armor materials, as well as by various countermeasures. Then, as the range closed still further, the plasma guns opened up, bringing deuterium bullets to near-fusion heat with enfilading lasers and electromagnetically expelling the resulting bolts of plasma. The plasma's unavoidable dissipation limited the weapon to short ranges—but within those ranges it was devastating. And, DiFalco thought, it produced a properly-cinematic blinding flash, unlike the laser beams which were invisible in vacuum and only faintly visible in the clouds of vaporizing ablative armor that they themselves created.
The station, of course, had similar weapons—relatively inefficient, clumsily massive as was typical of Korvaash engineering, but a lot of them and a hellacious powerplant for them to draw on. And the Korvaasha were veterans in their use.
But the deflector operators, overseeing computers with reaction times no human could match, artfully interposed their nonmaterial shields between the ships and the stabbing energy swords while the cruisers' weapons ripped and tore at every area of the station's surface where a weapon revealed itself by firing.
After a time, DiFalco was satisfied that the enemy's volume of fire had dropped to the level deemed acceptable for the next phase of the attack. He contacted Major Thompson on the assault carrier Guadalcanal and spoke a brief order. Then he watched as the assault shuttles dropped away from Guadalcanal and her two sisters. (No, damn it; Sevastapol was, he supposed, a brother. Why couldn't the Russians ever get it through their thick heads that ships were female?) Under covering fire from the cruisers, the stubby little craft accelerated toward the station, then began burning their forward-facing retrorockets to reduce their velocity and allow ramming without self-immolation.
DiFalco couldn't imagine what that impact was going to be like for Thompson and his men. It would, he imagined, be a foretaste of hell. And he could only watch and wait.
* * *
With a grinding, screaming roar of tearing metal, the specially reinforced snub nose of the still-retrofiring assault shuttle penetrated the outer skin of the station. The small craft's rudimentary artificial gravity could not begin to cope; Thompson and his men were thrown about in the webbing which, with their powered combat armor's shock absorbers, would hopefully limit their injuries to bruises.
The shuttle, like a slow-motion bullet, ground its way as far into the station as it was going. Thompson slapped the switch that disengaged the webbing, and the shuttle's blunt clamshell nose opened to reveal a vista of wreckage.
"Alright people, move it or lose it!" The armor suits were sealed against vacuum lest the Korvaasha, deciding they had nothing to lose, played cute tricks like letting the air out of the station. But the helmet communicators carried Thompson's voice to the entire squad as he leaped out into the ruined, dimly-lit passageway. Scanning for hostiles and finding none, he consulted the heads-up display that seemed to float a couple of inches from his left eye. Yeah . . . according to what Varien's people knew of the layout of this kind of installation, the command center should be that way.
"To the right," he called out. "Follow me." He had just turned into the branching passageway when an electronic scream awoke in his ear to inform him that a laser target designator had touched his armor. His reflexes were very nearly as instantaneous as the sensing system; he twisted aside just as a burst of hypervelocity, hyperdense slugs crashed into the bulkhead. Only one connected, and it caromed off his armor. Swinging in the direction of the hostile fire, he brought his plasma gun up into the socket that allowed it to tap into the armor's own powerpack. By the time he had completed the movement, he was facing his first Korvaasha. Without pausing to let weirdness register, he blasted the alien into flaming, nondescript ruin.
His squad, most of them armed with heavy-duty mass-driver weapons not unlike the one the Korvaasha had tried to use on him (although a human needed a strength-enhancing powered exoskeleton to carry one) came around the corner and proceeded to mow down the Korvaasha that had followed the first one out of the twisted ruins. The remains, he noted with relief, were more flesh than machinery. These were ordinary security guards. They weren't the fully-cyborgian warrior elite he had studied—those might well give even power-armored troops trouble.
Plenty of time for that later.
Motioning to the squad to follow him, he proceeded along the passageway.
* * *
The second wave had arrived, and the scientific and intelligence specialists were combing over what was left of the station. It was, on the whole, a disappointment. In particular, Kuropatkin and Tartakova would have liked prisoners to interrogate. But there were only corpses . . . not all of them Korvaash.
DiFalco stood with Varien in the chamber near the scanner controls, gazing at the abattoir that Thompson's men had found. Not even the butchery that had occured here could conceal the species of the victims.
I will not be sick, DiFalco commanded himself. He looked at Varien, who had been sick at his first sight of this room. But now he was gazing at the remains of his fellow Raehaniv with an expression neither of nausea nor of shock but rather of infinite sadness.
The old man finally turned to him and spoke with a strange gentleness. "Your weapons didn't do this, you know. They were obviously slaughtered by the Korvaasha—slaughtered with a ferocity I cannot understand. But you didn't kill them."
"No," the American said harshly. "But we both know that we are going to have to kill humans—probably a lot of them—when we reach Raehan. Unless the Korvaasha magically go away in a puff of smoke, there's no way we're going to be able to avoid it." His eyes met the Raehaniv's, and there was almost a challenge in them. Varien looked away.
"I know," he finally said, almost inaudibly. "I suppose I've known it all along. I've simply avoided thinking about it. Like all Raehaniv, I've found that easy to do where the realities of war are concerned—it's all seemed so abstract, so . . . historical." He straightened, and his voice firmed. "No more. Do what you have to do at Raehan, Colonel. You cannot let yourself be deterred by blood, any more than any other surgeon."
They departed, leaving the room to the dead.
Chapter Thirteen
"Quiet, everyone! Order!" Arduin's bellow finally silenced them. He ran a threatening look around the table, then spoke in a normal tone of voice. "We may be pirates by Korvaash definition, but
that's no excuse for behaving like pirates. Now, Daeliuv, please continue."
The intelligence chief gave a professorial harrumph, and his eyes focused on his neural display. "To repeat," he began frostily, "our routine monitoring of the Seivra displacement point detected realtime gravitational emanations that indicated the arrival of what appeared to be a Korvaash picket ship, or other vessel of comparable mass and power. Afterwards we, like everyone else in the system with the proper receiver, picked up a signal which, while naturally in Korvaash code, gave every indication of being a system-wide emergency alert.
"The result," he continued in the same pedantic tones, "was dramatic. Korvaash operations against us here in the asteroids have come to a standstill—they have assumed a defensive posture as their mobile forces have departed for the Seivra displacement point. Likewise, their combatant ships at Raehan itself have been dispatched to the same destination. To it . . . but not through it. We have detected no departures for Seivra. Courier vessels have, however, transitted this system's other displacement points.
"Information from our sources on Raehan is, of course, still too sparse to allow meaningful evaluation . . . ."
"Come on, Daeliuv," Yarvann broke in, risking Arduin's wrath. "You must have some feedback from your dirtside sources by now! Give us your first-sense impression."
Daeliuv's voice dropped a few more degrees in temperature. "Subject to later verification," he said heavily, "the early indications we have received suggest that the Korvaasha on Raehan are in an uproar, as if they are responding to some emergency. Security has been tightened still further, and the Implementers"—a kind of subliminal growl ran around the table—"are behaving with a nervous bluster that suggests that they are feeling pressure from above.
"Any conclusions must, at this time, be tentative . . . ."
" 'Tentative' nothing!" Yarvann swung around to face the head of the table, eyes glowing with a fire that had not been seen among the Raehaniv for a long, long time. "Arduin, there's only one possibility, only one thing that could account for all this. Somebody, from somewhere, has taken Seivra! And," he continued, grinning savagely, "whoever that is has got the Korvaasha here in the Tareil system by whatever they use for balls!" He spoke a command that awakened a holo display above the center of the table. "The only displacement chain that connects this system with the Korvaash empire runs through Seivra! Of course, those departing couriers have warned the Korvaasha in the other chains that converge here at Tareil—but those are just light forces, mopping up our research stations and such. The Korvaasha in this system are on their own, cut off from their own higher echelons!"