by David Weber
"'Nickety'?" he asked blankly.
"Sorry. It means, um, exactly correct. I'll have to be careful about my idioms." She smiled disarmingly. "I couldn't resist twisting you with that 'Take me to your leader' larkey, though. Some of the tainment dramas from your period are manic."
He felt suspicion sagging into acceptance. She was speaking English, all right, but the more she said, the more he realized that it wasn't quite his English. And as she relaxed, the differences became more pronounced. He was astonished to realize he actually believed her . . . sort of.
"All right," he said. "But why are you here? What the hell is going on? Those were nukes you were throwing around up there, honey!"
"Yes," she said softly, her face suddenly serious once more. "Yes, they were." Her fingers pleated the edge of her sheet unhappily. "You see, Ster Aston, I'm not here for pleasure. I came—" she drew a deep breath and met his eyes again "—to prevent the destruction of the human race . . . and I'm afraid I haven't quite done that yet."
Aston leaned back and closed his eyes, counting slowly to fifty behind his lowered lids. It was all preposterous of course, he thought almost distantly, and yet . . . and yet. . . .
His mind went back to that night of terrible explosions, and he felt his doubt crumble. Not his confusion—that became worse, if anything—but the memory of those searing flashes and their thunder could not be rejected. Yet it was another memory which suggested just how desperate she was to accomplish whatever task had brought her here. He'd rerun his mental records of that fight again and again, and one point had become glaringly clear; she'd been terribly outnumbered, but she'd been the attacker. And, he reminded himself, she'd gotten all but one of her enemies.
His face showed no sign of his thoughts, but he felt a surge of admiration for the naked youngster sitting on his bunk. He was no pilot, but he'd seen a great deal of combat in his time. He had a very clear notion of what it took to face that sort of odds—and of the skill needed to achieve what she had. He wasn't so foolish as to think courage and skill guaranteed honesty, but he felt oddly certain she wasn't lying to him.
He sighed and opened his eyes slowly, standing without a word, and rummaged in a locker for a black, silk-screened tee-shirt decorated with a dramatic head-on view of an old US Air Force A-10 attack plane. He tossed it to her, and she tugged it over her head. It covered her like a tent, he thought as he wiggled past her in the narrow confines of the cabin.
Amanda chose that specific moment to surprise him with an unexpected motion, and he lost his balance. He leaned away from the bunk, falling towards the table to avoid landing on his guest, but a hand flashed out, moving faster than any hand he'd ever seen. He was more than a foot taller than she, but she pulled him back up one-handed . . . and with very little apparent effort.
Aston stood very still, then continued to the stove and put his battered old coffee pot on to heat. He turned a chair around and straddled it, leaning his chest against its back and reaching for his pipe.
"Pretty well-muscled, aren't you?" he said, watching her run curious fingers over the raised, slightly pebbled texture of the shirt's silk-screening. She seemed fascinated by it.
"What?" She looked up with a furrowed brow, then smiled. "Oh. I suppose I am, but I came by it naturally, Ster Aston. I told you I'm from Midgard." He raised his eyebrows, and she explained. "Our gravity runs about twenty percent higher."
"I see." He filled his pipe slowly, then found his butane lighter and took his time lighting the tobacco. She wrinkled her nose at the smell of his smoke, but she seemed more curious about it than irritated by it.
"Okay," he said finally. "Tell me about this war."
"I'll try, but it's a long story."
"That's all right." He grinned around his pipe and reached for a cup and the coffee pot. "We've got plenty of time, I'm afraid. We're over a week out of Portsmouth, and your nukes fried my radio, or I'd've had proper medical people out here to take you off my hands long ago."
"I see," she said, watching him pour and licking her lips. "Excuse me, but is that Terran coffee?"
"It sure isn't Martian," he said dryly.
"Sorry. It's just that back home Terran coffee's as rare as . . . a hen's tooth?" she finished on a questioning note and raised an eyebrow.
"Scarce as hen's teeth," he corrected, and she nodded, filing it away. He had the very strong impression she wouldn't need the same correction twice. "Want some?"
"I'd kill for it," she admitted with a sigh.
"Well, drink up," he invited, pouring another cup and handing it over. She took it eagerly, and he watched curiously as she sipped delicately. Her conscious eating manners were far different from her unconscious ones, and she was savoring it as if it were a rare treat.
She looked back up and saw his eyes.
"Sorry," she said. "For some reason, coffee doesn't grow well off Terra. The fide thing's expensive."
"Not anymore," he said with a smile, enjoying her enjoyment. "But you were about to tell me—?"
"So I was," she agreed. She took another sip, then leaned back against the bulkhead, looking even more absurdly young in his over-sized tee-shirt. But he wasn't tempted to smile again, for there was a grimness in her eyes and a tightness to her lips.
"If this is 2007," she began, "then in about eighty years, the human race is going to meet the Shirmaksu. When we do, it will be the beginning of a war which will last for the next four hundred years."
"Four hundred years?" he asked softly.
"At least," she said grimly. "You see, the Kangas—that's what we call Shirmaksu—aren't very nice. They introduced themselves by trying to exterminate us."
Her level voice sent a chill down his spine.
"But why?" he asked.
"Because they're Kangas," she said simply. "The way they think, only one sentient race has any right to exist: theirs. It took us quite a while to believe that, I understand." She shrugged. "By the time I was born, we'd had lots of practice."
"But there had to be a reason," he protested.
"Oh, lots of them," she agreed, "and we weren't the first species they tried to cide. So far, we've identified twenty-seven sentient or presentient species they've wiped. Mankind would've been twenty-eight." She shrugged again. "Of course, a lot of what we 'know' is guesswork and deduction, but what it comes down to is that the Kangas had an unhappy racial childhood." She flashed a tight, humorless smile.
"As nearly as we can piece it, there were two intelligent species on their home world, and they hated each other. We don't know why, but, then, enough human groups have hated each other for reasons no one else ever understood. At any rate, they probably started trying to wipe each other while they were still living in caves; by the time they got to pikes and muskets, the Kangas were the only thinking species left on the planet."
She sighed.
"I like to think humanity would've wanted to get the killing out of its system by then, but not the Kangas. They're a strange bunch. They're xenophobic, paranoid, and so cautious they're cowardly, by human standards, but if logic says to take a chance, they will. They'll cover their asses every way they can, but they'll do it. They're big on logic.
"Unfortunately, they've got their own weird streak of mysticism, too. We're pretty hazy on how it works—they haven't exactly talked it over with us, and they arranged things so there aren't any other species around, so we've never been able to study comparative alien psychology—but they put together a 'religion' that makes the most intolerant human fanatic look ecumenical.
"The way they see it, God created one race in His image: theirs. The devil, on the other hand, assumes an endless series of different shapes and forms, and he's constantly trying to destroy God. Which makes the entire universe one huge battleground and means anybody who doesn't look like a Kanga is automatically on the devil's side. And so, of course, the only logical thing to do is to exterminate them."
Her words were almost light, but her tone was not.
"Anyway, their policy was set long before they ran into us. They tend to think in biological terms—not too surprising, I guess, given their history—and they're very good bio-engineers. They're less bright about other things, but their standard procedure whenever they encountered another intelligent species or anything that might turn into one was to grab a few specimens for research, then crank a bio weapon to wipe out only that species and dust its planet. It worked quite well until they ran into us."
Aston noticed her cup was empty and refilled it. She smiled briefly and sipped, then continued.
"By that time, they'd turned their entire civilization into a killing machine. They weren't just wiping anyone they happened to run into, they were out looking for other intelligences to cide. They were even sending out survey ships expressly to find new targets—which is what happened to us.
"One of their scouts got close enough to Sol to pick up some radio transmissions, and that scared hell out of them, because they'd never encountered another race more advanced than the early steam age, and their 'priesthood' had more or less decided that was a divine dispensation. When their scout commander realized he'd found a bunch of devils more advanced than any of the others they'd met, he abandoned the rest of his mission and headed straight home at max.
"When he got there, the Kangas decided they had to forget their usual strategy. They hadn't come up with an FTL com system, though they had FTL travel—of a sort—but the best speed they could manage was about five times light-speed, and the closest system with a heavy Kanga population was over a hundred light-years away. Not only that, but their scout's crew was so scared by what they were picking up—remember, by their standards they'd just found a whole race of horribly powerful demons—that they never came closer to Sol than twenty light-years, so what they were seeing was already twenty years old. It took the scout almost twenty-five years to get home with the news, and it would take them another thirty-plus years to send out their sampling ships just to collect specimens, much less take them home, produce a bug for us, and send it back out. Even if they modified their strategy by sending an entire research ship to develop the bug on-site, we'd have had almost eighty years to develop between the time those signals originated and the time they could get back to Solarian space again.
"They were scared, but they were still logical. Rather than risk warning us with a sampling mission or by hanging around in orbit with a research vessel, they decided to forget nice, neat biological solutions this once and rely on brute force. It would only take them another ten years or so to muster a fleet of warships, and taking the time to make sure they were loaded for draken seemed logical to them.
"But—" she grinned, a sudden, tigerish expression that struck him with a chill "—they made a mistake. They polated our rate of progress based on their own, and humans are much better gadgeteers than they are. Not only that, we've always been a bloodthirsty bunch. They'd fought their last real war with pikes and black powder, and they didn't have the least idea how military competition pressurizes R&D.
"By the time they got back to Sol, there were colonies on Luna and Mars and large-scale mining operations in the asteroids. Political relations were still pretty shaky, too, and all the promises not to militarize space had collapsed once there was a thriving presence in space to protect—or prey upon. Nobody had a real 'space navy,' but there were quite a few armed ships. Most of the colonies had some sort of rudimentary defensive systems, and Terra had some pretty advanced orbital defenses. Most of them were aimed at planetary threats, but the existence of armed spacecraft meant they'd been designed to shoot the other way, too."
She sipped more coffee, and he remembered what she'd said about being a 'histortech.' He could believe it; she had the air of someone expounding on a special interest area.
"They had FTL, but they were still using reaction drives. Basically, they used what you'd call the Bussard ram principle to accelerate in normal-space before they translated." She paused at his puzzled expression, then shrugged. "I can explain that later—right now, just remember that they managed interstellar travel by first accelerating and then ducking into another dimension where the velocity attained in this one is effectively accelerated to a multiple of light-speed, then dropping back into normal-space and decelerating. That's one reason the trip would take them so long; they needed to accelerate in normal-space before they could kick in their FTL systems. Okay?"
"If you say so," he said dubiously.
"We manage things a lot better now," she assured him, "but all this was four or five hundred years ago, remember." She paused again, a brief stab of pain and loss showing in her eyes. "Anyway," she said softly, "four hundred years from when I got into this mess.
"At any rate, they put together a fleet and sent it off. Of course, a fleet of Bussard rams produces a hell of a lot of light when it decelerates, and they had to start decelerating well short of Sol. Terran astronomers spotted them while they were still over a year out and realized someone was coming—a lot of someones, in fact. We're a pretty nasty and suspicious lot ourselves, and it was possible our visitors weren't friendly, so prudence suggested sending somebody out to see.
"But if they were friendly, none of the Terran blocs wanted their rivals getting in first and making some kind of private deal with them. There was a lot of time pressure, but they got themselves organized in a hurry and sent out an 'international' welcoming party made up of ships from all the major power blocs." She flashed that tigerish grin again. It really made her look much less like a teenager, he thought uneasily.
"The Kangas freaked. There they were, ready to smash a bunch of people they expected to find fooling around with atmospheric aircraft, and instead they were being intercepted by ships using a nuclear-powered torch drive! It never occurred to them that we might even consider the possibility of peaceful contact—their minds don't work that way. They were still six months out when our ships came into weapon range and they opened fire.
"They wiped us, of course, but we hadn't sent totally unarmed ships, and we got a couple of them, as well. That really upset them, because they were still decelerating, which committed them to entering our system—either that, or they had to duck back into alpha-space, bypass us, stop, get back up to speed on a home-bound vector, and come back in another seventy or eighty years. And who knew what we'd be capable of by then?
"So they decided to carry out their original plan, and it was our side's turn to freak. I've never seen a Bussard ship myself. They've been obsolete for centuries now, but they were big bastards, and they had a lot of them. Terra assumed the worst, and it's amazing how friendly enemies can get in those stances. By the time the Kangas were down to maneuvering speed and passing Neptune, the major power blocs had decided to bury their differences.
"The Kanga force was two or three times as strong as they'd expected to need—I said they were logical—but their estimate had been too low. Their ships were big, but their mass-to-drive ratio was poor, and the sides were a lot more even than they'd planned or we thought. They never did get any planet-busters into range of Terra, but they wiped every human in the asteroid belt and did the same for Mars. We lost every regular warship and most of the merchant conversions we had, but only a few of their light attack craft got close enough to hit Terra, and they didn't have anything much bigger than a couple of megatons."
Aston felt his remaining fringe of hair trying to stand on end at how casually she used the term "megatons."
"We stopped them, but they killed four and a half billion people, most of them civilians. Of course, from the Kanga viewpoint, there's no such thing as 'civilians' or 'noncombatants,' but we were pretty ired."
Her words were light again, but her eyes were not.
"We learned a lot from the Kangas' wreckage. Not as much as we would have liked, but more than they probably expected we could. Unfortunately, the Kangas are logical, and they'd left one ship out where we couldn't get at it. As soon as it saw how things were going, it headed home at max.
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"The result back home when it got there was pandemonium—and it must have been even worse because they didn't have any samples of our technology. But they did have a head start, and they'd been working hard at R&D ever since they sent their first fleet out, just in case. They knew none of their FTL transports had been captured intact, so they figured we hadn't gotten any samples of their multi-dee—that's what makes FTL travel possible—but they were only half right. Their long-range missiles used a cruder form of the same principle, and we did get our hands on a couple of them.
"Anyway, they went to crash building rates to put together another fleet, and they had eighteen major planetary populations and an undamaged deep-space industrial capacity. They were scared, but they got over their panic when they started puting the odds. Besides, God was on their side.
"Meanwhile, we were doing the same thing. It was obvious we couldn't go after them—we didn't even know where they were—but it was equally obvious that power projection over interstellar distances was a difficult proposition. We didn't have to be able to match them one-for-one or even one-for-ten to defend ourselves.
"To make a long story short, we were ready when they came back. In fact, our weapons were actually more advanced than theirs—not by much, but by a little—and we blew hell out of them. We even got a few prisoners, though Kangas don't last long in finement. They can't handle being captured by 'devils'; it does something to them, and they just stop living.
"But we got a little nav data—enough to realize some of what we were up against. We couldn't quite grasp that any sort of negotiations would be impossible, but we knew it was going to be tough. The one good point was that we seemed to be better scientists—which we are, up to a point. They hadn't realized how well we do in physics and the inorganic sciences; we didn't realize how well they do in the bio sciences.
"By the time we'd wiped their second attack force, we had better n-space drives and more efficient multi-dees than they did, and we sent out a task force of our own. It surprised the nearest Kanga outpost and captured the planet, but at that point technology allowed combat only in normal-space at sublight speeds, and they got away with a few prisoners of their own. We'd only been in possession for about twenty years when they came back with the first of their bio weapons."