Thunder & Lightning

by Christopher Nuttall

  He turned on the shower and leaned closer to her. It was odd, but the thought of being so close to a naked man had long since ceased to trouble her; it was amazing what someone could get used to if they had no choice in the matter. Reynolds had glanced at her from time to time, making her a little uncomfortable – she had had the impression, from Oolane, that the Oghaldzon males or females wouldn’t be… violated if someone touched them on their genitals without permission – but he hadn’t tried to force himself on her or even push her into making closer contact. They had, technically, slept together, but they had never been intimate.

  “Samra, we need to find something we can do,” he breathed in her ear, very quietly. She hoped that the noise of the shower, the water streaming down at a rate of knots and being sucked out again at the bottom of the shower, would cover their words; they had had some problems learning to use the shower in the first few days. The Oghaldzon liked to be as clean as humanity, but they didn’t seem to mind water drifting around in their spacecraft as if it owned the place; Samra would have preferred not to be damp all the time. “Can’t you think of anything?”

  She leaned closer to his ear, feeling the muscles of his body under her hands. “I don’t see that there’s anything we can do,” she said. It came out huskier than she had intended; his proximity was causing her body to feel sensations she had ruthlessly suppressed for years. “Do you have any way of getting out of this room?”

  Reynolds nodded once.

  “And then what?” she said. It was becoming harder to think as she breathed in his scent. “What do we do then?”

  “I don’t know,” Reynolds admitted. She heard the fatalism in his voice and winced; it reminded her too much of some of the voices recorded years ago, just before the Wrecker War had intensified with the destruction of New York. The young men, some of them not more than boys, had recorded chilling messages, messages that were an affront to Allah Himself, and then gone out and blown themselves up. The unlucky ones had taken others, innocent lives, with them. “We could find something vital and destroy it?”

  Samra pulled him closer, desperately, no longer sure of her own feelings, of her own motives. “There’s nothing on this ship that could destroy the entire fleet,” she said. She was fairly certain that the Oghaldzon possessed no antimatter or anything comparable; nearly a hundred and fifty years since antimatter had been first studied by humanity, the human race had come no closer to producing more than minute amounts of it. The Oghaldzon had shown no signs of having cracked the puzzle either. “We’d be throwing away our lives for nothing.”

  Reynolds looked at her, right down her body; she didn’t pull away, or flinch. “I just feel useless,” he admitted. “We’re just marking time while the big decisions are made elsewhere…”

  Samra pulled him to her completely and kissed him. He kissed her back, hard, his body tensing with sudden desire, and then his hands were leaving trails of fire and light across her breasts and reaching further down towards her thighs, and then stroking her right in the middle of her secret place. Her sudden rush of pure arousal surprised her; she found herself rolling over and falling back towards the sleeping mat as she felt his hardness pressing between her legs, and then slowly entering into her…

  For the first time in her life, she gave herself to a man.

  She never regretted it.

  * * *

  “The vast majority of human couples have formed semi-permanent relationships,” Yehaka-Researcher-Earth said, as the images played in front of the three Researchers and the War Commander. Dataka-War Commander-Fleet studied the writhing human bodies with dispassionate interest; the very concept of giving pleasure to a mate was something almost alien to the Oghaldzon. A handful of perverts gained pleasure from playing with their sexual organs, but most Oghaldzon merely found such touching painful, although not uncomfortable in the sense that a young human would have found it. “It suggests an endless search for stability, even to the point of… sexual relationships; this can be used to form the future of Human-Oghaldzon relations.”

  “A useful thought, but one that remains long-term,” Dataka said. He was as confident of eventual victory – or at least the stalemate of leaving much of the human race trapped on Earth – but the humans had proven to be grimly capable opponents. He dreaded to think what might have happened if the fleet had been delayed a further ten Grand Cycles; the humans might have destroyed them all before they arrived in Earth orbit. As it was, it had been a close-run thing. “In the short-term, what information have you managed to gather relating to the asteroid… civilisation?”

  “It is a civilisation,” Takalak-Researcher-Seeker said. “The numbers of humans on the asteroids seem way too small to maintain a civilisation, but every human source has agreed that the… Rockrats” – he stumbled over the slang term – “are a civilisation in their own right. The history of human expansion into space shows that those who were born in space formed attachments, including sexual ones” – he nodded at the images playing in front of them, ignored by the Oghaldzon – “with other space-born humans, forming groups that owed no loyalty to the central powers. We might term it as something like an idea-group splitting off from the main memeplexe, something that would be dangerous for us, particularly with such small groups. The human larger memeplexes, however, do not seem to like the idea of tolerating smaller groups within the main memeplexe.”

  Dataka clicked once in understanding. The main Oghaldzon memeplexe was adaptable enough to accept a certain amount of inner debate, even to the point of smaller, autonomous groups forming and reaching the point where they almost presented a secondary nexus of authority, even though they were only subgroups of the main memeplexe. The humans didn’t seem to tolerate the founding of such interest- and idea-based groups; the history of the human settlement of their moon consisted of such groups arising and being squashed by the main power. The Oghaldzon would have accepted the formation of the subgroups; no Oghaldzon memeplexe could have handled the affairs of the subgroup from such a distance. The humans…

  He shook his head. “Are we to expect further attacks from the Belt?”

  “It is possible,” Takalak said. “The surviving ship that attacked us and destroyed a mothership fled towards the Belt. The Rockrats are surprisingly individualistic, even for humans; they may intend to avenge the losses they must have suffered, economically, when we blockaded Earth. Or maybe they just don’t like us.”

  “There is another explanation,” Oolane suggested, somewhat hesitantly. “The ship that launched the attack – the surviving ship, I should say – might not have intended to make contact with the main Belt civilisation, such as it is, at all. Not all of the human race would have planned to kill thousands of innocent civilians; they may not have known what they were aiming at, or perhaps they were heading towards a different base in the Belt. They may have a supply depot in the belt without any contact at all with these Rockrats.”

  “We could not take that for granted,” Takalak snapped. “The humans who attacked us certainly made us look like incompetents to the humans who are trying to decide which side they should be on. There is also a great deal of industry in the Belt… doing what? If I know humans at all, they are building up their forces, either to face us or to ensure that we cannot interfere with their operations.”

  “One would expect that some of them, at least, would be willing to come to terms with us,” Yehaka said. Her crest fluttered through the air as she spoke, performing its function. “We are controlling their access to sources of supplies from Earth and have a need for metals and some of their other resources to set up our own industries in position near Earth. We could discuss a deal with them…”

  “We have attempted to make deals with the Rockrats and the other humans out in the outer solar system,” Dataka reminded her. “The dominant human memeplexe in the belt has apparently refused to talk to us, although a handful of stations belonging to various human… business interests… have signalled that they might
be willing to open discussions with us, provided that we helped them to regain contact with their bases on Earth or the moon.”

  “They are not taking us seriously,” Takalak snapped. He lifted his arms in a complex dance; frustration, mixed with a dispassion that surprised Dataka. He had started to fear that Takalak was taking his work too seriously and becoming like a human. “They would only be impressed by power… and we have displayed far too little of it. We have to convince them that we are not to be trifled with.”

  Oolane seemed to rear back slightly, rocking on her hindleg. “How do you intend to convince them that we are not to be trifled with?”

  “We establish a presence out there,” Takalak said. “We have warships that are no longer needed in Earth orbit, now we have deployed additional orbital weapons platforms and sensor units to identify and destroy even the merest suspect item floating around in orbit. We send a force into the heart of the Rockrat civilisation and emplace a garrison out there, if necessary using a demonstration of our power to destroy them to convince them that submission is their alternative to death.”

  Dataka kept his tone neutral, but his clicking sonar indicated his doubt. “Our threat would be partly a bluff,” he said. “Destroying every possible asteroid that could shelter a kernel of humans would take thousands of Grand Cycles. They might just flee from us and head into the outer system.”

  “Where they would be much less of a problem,” Takalak pointed out. “If we can convince them to work for us, well and good. If not, I would be much happier if we knew just what they were doing out there, perhaps even placing restrictions on what they can do out there. For all we know, they’re building warships.”

  “It is my place to be the voice of caution,” Dataka said. His position as War Commander meant that he could not stake everything on a gamble. “We would be leaving the motherships exposed if we sent the warships out to the Belt. We could not commit everything to the thrust.” He considered. There were a handful of ships that could be spared, rather than sending the entire fleet. “Twenty of the smaller ships and one of the carriers would be the most we could send…”

  Takalak reared forwards. “War Commander,” he said, addressing Dataka by his title for the first time in Cycles, “we know that there can be no human warships out there in great enough numbers to break the blockade on Earth. If they existed, they would have been deployed against us by now, perhaps even crushing us. They have kept a handful of warships in orbit around Mars and Venus; even if they somehow managed to combine those fleets, they could not break through the defences alone…”

  “This is not a debate,” Dataka said, firmly. The Oghaldzon who had served in the military had the right, and indeed the duty, to question his decisions; Takalak, who was a researcher, had no such right. That had to be earned; the Oghaldzon would not place someone who was completely ignorant of how the military worked in command of the military. Human sources suggested that that was exactly what the humans did, although Dataka suspected that that was a human joke; no race could survive for long with such a command arrangement. “We will commit a force capable of carrying out the mission, or breaking contact and withdrawing if the humans prove to be more capable of resistance than we anticipate.”

  He considered the matter for a long moment. “I believe that I will offer command to Makra-Commander-Righteous Rage,” he said, remembering a young officer who had acquitted himself well during the conflict with the Welcome Fleet and then the engagements over Earth itself. "Do you have any objections?”

  “An excellent choice,” Takalak said, choosing to ignore the dry tone in Dataka’s voice. He could have protested before the Fleet Council, but that would have merely made him look stupid, even though the Council would have understood. “I believe that he will ensure that the Rockrats will be brought to heel.”

  Chapter Forty-Eight: The Battle of Freeport One, Take One

  Near Freeport One, Asteroid Belt

  Space was cold and silent.

  It was a cliché, and an overused one, that in space no one could hear a scream. The Rockrats knew the truth of that on a level that no other human group, with the possible exception of those who had colonised the Moon and the other bodies in the solar system, could understand. And yet, in its own way, it wasn’t entirely accurate; with the right equipment, space became very noisy indeed.

  The USS Lead Pipe floated, only a few tens of thousands of kilometres from Freeport One, its passive sensors listening carefully to the sound of space. Seventeen other ships of the same design – the most advanced space warships humanity had ever produced – held position near it, in a formation that would have brought tears to the eyes of a drill instructor. The Rockrats didn’t care about formations that served no purpose other than to look perfect; to them, appearance was nothing compared to substance.

  Jake Ellsworth, breveted as an American Commodore, sat in his acceleration couch and watched as the alien ships drew closer. Freeport One had had a week to get used to the concept of twenty alien ships bearing down on them; a large percentage of the population had been evacuated to other asteroids, clearing the decks for the coming battle. It had been an interesting development; Rockrats had worked together to support each other and even idle mouths, the latter of whom were rarely supported beyond the production of cheap algae-grown food. It worried Kyle Short, who had privately confided to Ellsworth that the Rockrats Association would probably end up as a real government, with all the trappings that that implied. Ellsworth didn’t think that it would be that bad, but change was afoot in the Belt. Who knew where it would end?

  He shook his head and turned back to the display. The alien ships – the Oghaldzon, he reminded himself; the Belt had devoured all of the information forwarded to them from Earth – were currently invisible, but the display projected their most likely course and speed. They hadn’t triggered their fusion drives since boosting out of Earth orbit and setting course for Freeport One, moving fast enough to escape the influence of various celestial bodies; logically, they had to be somewhere within the sphere displayed by the display. They would probably have altered course slightly, very slightly, using reaction gas drives, but they couldn’t have altered course that much without forcing themselves to undertake additional manoeuvres that would eat up their Helium-3… assuming that they used Helium-3. The Oghaldzon had no supply depots in the Belt; if they got really unlucky they would run out of fuel at the wrong time and fly helplessly right out of the solar system.

  “They’re going to have to bring their drives up at some point,” Cindy muttered, from the tactical console. “If they don’t start braking now, they’re going to have to spend days decelerating just to get into engagement range of Freeport One, let alone the defence fleet.”

  Ellsworth scowled. The ships the Rockrats had themselves adapted for space warfare – and which had proven almost useless in that role – had been deployed near Freeport One, both to slow the enemy ships down a little and to confuse them. Ellsworth had wanted to keep every ship he had hidden in the vastness of space, but Cindy had dryly pointed out that if the aliens saw no resistance at all, they would become suspicious. The tone of their messages had suggested that they expected trouble; no Rockrat would agree to stationing a garrison on Freeport One, at least not without having the metaphorical shit kicked out of him first.

  It almost made him want to bring up his own active sensors. A Rockrat knew that normally he or she could take a radar ping off a target if they needed to, whatever happened; a precise reading was almost a fixed requirement for any kind of space endeavour. He didn’t dare trigger the Lead Pipe’s own sensors; it would have revealed their presence to the aliens, who would then have the chance to bring him to battle and destroy him on their own terms. They’d drilled enough in the simulations to know what would happen if the enemy saw them too soon.

  He cursed their ill luck under his breath. There had been no time to summon more help from Area 51… even, part of his mind whispered, if the Americans had been wil
ling to send that help. Space was incomparably vast; there was no way in which help could arrive in time without revealing Area 51 and its location to the aliens, who would then have every incentive to mount a full-fledged attack into the Belt. He was more than a little surprised that they’d sent only a handful of ships, but he had to grudgingly admit that the two sides would be evenly matched.

  The human race, now, knew a great deal about the Oghaldzon starships. Half of them were massive motherships containing, between them, around two billion Oghaldzon. The other half of the force was composed of large warships; some of those had already broken up into smaller warships while others had remained intact and dangerous. Still others had launched the landing craft into Earth’s atmosphere. He could see the logic in their designs; the large carriers could transport the smaller warships into battle without having to put the Oghaldzon through the human experience of sharing a cramped sweaty spacecraft with nine other humans, close enough to feel homicidal urges very easily. Cindy had told him that the USSF had considered such designs, although the only people whom those designs could have been realistically used against were the Rockrats. A carrier would have provided the support that the smaller warships, like the Lead Pipe, would have lacked.

  And the Oghaldzon, in their turn, knew a great deal about human technology. It made him wonder; how much did they know or guess about the Lead Pipe and her sisters? Did they know about the missiles, the guns, or the armour that should provide additional protection against Oghaldzon laser fire? Did they know about the weaknesses of the design, about how a single hit in the wrong place would kill the ship, or did they merely intend to smoother the ships in nuclear fire? A single nuke would ruin any spacecraft’s day. Had they recovered any designs from the ruins of Washington?