Battlestations

by S. M. Stirling

  “So I gather. But I’m not the one to tell it to.”

  “That’s what the hectator said.”

  “And very correctly, too. What would we do with mere hectators running the government?”

  “Why can’t I tell it to you?”

  “Because I’m not supposed to be told anything important.”

  “Who is?”

  “I think you’d better speak with Rahula.”

  Over the next few days Frank learned that the Saurians had many ceremonies of an extremely boring nature and he was supposed to be the centerpiece of all of them. They mainly involved a lot of bowing and posturing, all of it performed with fixed smiles on everyone’s faces. The Saurians were extremely cautious, though perhaps “suspicious” would be a better word. It was obvious that they were not a sophisticated people. They kept sneaking looks at Frank, like they couldn’t quite believe he was there. Their newspapers had front-page stories about him, getting all the details wrong and pointing out in tedious detail how Frank was a sample of man from the future and going into endless specious detail on how the Saurians stacked up against him. All in all, it looked like the Saurians were having a bad case of culture shock.

  From the first minute of his arrival Frank was trying to get the Saurians to discuss the Ichton situation with him. But they didn’t want to talk official business or to get down to anything important. “Look,” they told him, “don’t get us wrong, it’s a very great pleasure to have you here with us. We’re really honored, if you know what we mean, but before we can discuss interstellar matters we need to finish the new interstellar conference hall. Then we’ll have a place worthy of receiving an ambassador like yourself. Believe me, we want to consider your important tidings just as soon as we are set up for it.”

  “Look,” Frank told them, “this matter of the Ichtons, it won’t wait . . . .”

  But they wouldn’t listen. They would just smile and back away from his presence, leaving him finally talking to himself. Othnar Rahula was the only one who would even pretend to listen to him.

  Othnar Rahula was a member of the Saurian aristocracy and was in every way a being to be reckoned with. He was handsome as Saurians go. His ears were always cocked attentively, a sign of good breeding in man and beast alike.

  Rahula was affable but there was a mystery about him. Frank couldn’t figure out what sort of job he held or what his position was in the Saurian scheme of things. He seemed to be important, and other Saurians were in awe of him, but he never seemed to do anything. It was not polite to ask directly, so Frank decided to put some questions to the Saurian servant who brought his dinner.

  “What government post does Rahula hold?” he asked Dramhood, the servant.

  “Government post?” Dramhood was puzzled.

  “All the government officials seem to defer to Rahula’s opinion. Yet he doesn’t seem to have an official function.”

  “I understand what you mean,” Dramhood said. “Rahula has a function, but it’s a natural one, not an official one.”

  “What is it?”

  “Rahula is this year’s official Exemplifier for the Saurian race.”

  Upon further questioning, Frank learned that the Saurians worked on a role-model system. Every year the high priests of the culture, duly elected by newspaper vote, went to an ancient monastery high in the mountains, there to confer and decide who would become this year’s role model for the inhabitants of Luminos. Rahula was that year’s standard-bearer of cultural self-identity, the one the other Saurians wanted to model themselves on.

  This custom, Frank learned, had some interesting consequences. What the role model did was what everyone wanted to do. What he believed quickly became what everyone believed. What he thought was what was on everyone’s mind, and what he considered unimportant hardly counted at all.

  After a week on Luminos, Frank had been unable to get any response to his threats and warnings about the Ichtons. His mention of the spaceship engines he wanted to sell had met with polite disinterest. This led Frank to conjecture that the Saurians had by no means reached their full intellectual potential yet. In fact, as Othnar Rahula remarked one afternoon, sitting in the cabin of Frank’s scoutship, where Frank had asked him for tea, “We’ve just entered into the idea of even having a potential. We’ve just discovered intellect and all of its pleasures. It’s like we’ve just woken up onto the stage of galactic history and here you come telling us we’re in danger.”

  Frank said, “I’m sorry if your intellect is taking a beating by discovering you’re not the only kids on the block.”

  “I understand your metaphor,” Rahula said. “I think it does not apply in our case. Or, perhaps, it does. I don’t know. I just know that it’s pretty shoddy when you come here from a superior civilization and tell us that we are about to be wiped out by a race of large carnivorous insects.”

  “So you were paying attention to what I’ve been talking about all week!” Frank said.

  “Yes, of course. But frankly, Frank, your news is too important to take seriously. Besides, I mean, if it’s so important to do something, why don’t you sentient beings with battle fleets do something about it?”

  “Maybe I haven’t somehow made myself clear,” Frank said. “We, the allied forces, are doing everything about it that we can. The war has been going on for years. Either we destroy the Ichtons or they wipe us out.”

  “Well, it may be as you say,” Rahula said in a tone that left no doubt as to his uncertainties.

  “You simply are not acting in a realistic manner,” Frank said.

  “Is that what you asked me here for?”

  Frank shook his head. “The real reason I’ve invited you to my ship is to try to convince you of the emergency one last time.”

  “It’s easier for us to believe you’re mistaken in your facts about the Ichtons,” Rahula said, “or that you are drunken or drugged or a crazy person. It is very difficult for us to think that our entire race may be going down the tubes in a couple of weeks due to an alien invasion we can’t do anything about. If the Ichtons come, we will bargain with them. We are a clever people. We will come out all right.”

  “Your strategy of bargaining,” Frank said, “is based upon a delusion. I have something to show you.” Frank touched a button on the scoutship’s switchboard. Well-oiled motors sprang into instant hum. Rahula sat up, startled. The great tuft of silky blond hair that depended from a knob in the center of his forehead rustled with the sound almost that of a snake shedding a skin.

  “You have started the ship’s engines!” he said.

  “I’m taking you for a little ride,” Frank told him.

  The spacecraft doors clanged shut. Machinery hummed into life. Red and green lights flashed, then steadied.

  “I don’t want to go for a ride!”

  The generators kicked in, and a low throbbing replaced the sudden, high-pitched whine of servos. Lights flashed on the banks of dials above the instrument panel. There was a soft chittering sound as circuits opened and closed.

  Rahula said, “You must let me out of this ship at once. I have a luncheon appointment in fifteen minutes.”

  “You’re going to see what I want to show you,” Frank said. “Think you can bargain with these guys? I’m going to give you an idea of what it means for a planet to come up against the Ichton horde.”

  “But I really don’t want to see this,” Rabula was saying pettishly as the scoutship moved through Luminos’s upper atmosphere and then into the darkness of space.

  It took Frank only one FTL jump to get to the location he wanted. It was a system of one planet and three moons circling around a red dwarf.

  As they came within visual range, Rahula could see that the place had an oxygen atmosphere and possessed the deep green-blue colors of living matter. But as they came closer though, he saw that most life had almost been expunged from the surface of this place. Sweeping low over the planet, Rahula saw that no birds flew in the sky. They passed over dry ocean
bottoms; the very water had been sucked away and put into tanks for Ichton use in other places. The land had become mainly desert, and there were miles-deep scrapes where the surface had been strip-mined, ruthless machinery tearing apart the fundamental rocks to get at the valuable minerals and rare earths. A vast cloud of smoke lay over the land, hugging the mountain contours in great, greasy coils. Here and there were shallow ponds that had not been entirely sucked up by the Ichton salvaging and reclamation operations. Higher magnification revealed that these ponds were pustulant with noisome lower life-forms.

  They swept over the land at what would have been treetop level, had there been any trees left standing. Beneath them, miles and miles of rocky devastation sped hypnotically past their eyes. And this scene, monotonous and horrifying, repeated itself endlessly as they traversed the planet, until Rahula finally cried, “Enough, Frank, you have made your point. What is this place?”

  “This planet is called Gervaise. It is a sister planet to the Gerson world that received similar treatment at the hands of the Ichtons.”

  Rahula was silent during most of the flight back to Luminos. His soft, shiny brown eyes seemed turned inward. His blink rate was up; he seemed to be thinking very rapidly indeed. When they came down on the landing field at Delphinium, capital city of Luminos, Rahula turned to Frank and said, “How many of those ship’s engines do you have to sell?”

  “Thirty-one,” Frank said.

  “And what do you want for them?”

  Frank took a deep breath. “My partner and I want to get ten fire gems per engine.”

  “So many? But it would take us years to find a quantity like that.”

  “Well, make it five per engine, then. If you all worked together, your people could probably get that together in a matter of weeks.”

  “Perhaps we could,” Rahula said. “But meantime, we can’t kid ourselves any longer, the Ichtons are coming toward us and there’s no time to waste.”

  “Nor any need to waste it. I will let you have the engines now, if you give me your promise to pay the agreed-upon price of five stones per engine.”

  “Yes,” Rahula said, “I agree to that. Now bring us back to Delphinium. I must arrange transport for the engines.”

  “Are you sure you can speak for your people?” Frank asked. “Will they agree with you about the engines?”

  “I believe what I’m doing is correct,” Rahula said. “Therefore the others will also think it correct. They will do what I do. It is our system.”

  Frank had to admit that having all the people believe what you believed was a political advantage few races ever possessed. Overnight, and as though by magic, all of the Saurians were aware of the menace that confronted them from space, and, rather than being blasé and evasive about it as before, were, like Rahula, suddenly and deeply concerned. Within minutes after Frank’s talk with Rahula, through a sort of racial telepathy, which was immediately reinforced by unprecedented coverage in the newspapers and television, the Saurians all knew they were about to be attacked by the Ichtons, a six-limbed insect species of unparalleled ferocity. Everyone also knew and approved of trading fire gems for spaceship engines.

  The Saurians sent several heavy trucks to carry off the thirty-one L5 engine components. The trucks brought them to an industrial complex in a park not far from the capital city. On radio and TV, Frank heard about the organizing of the search for fire gems. Expeditions were quickly organized and sent out to the little-visited regions of the planet near the polar caps, where fire stones had been discovered in the past. Great numbers of Saurians were enlisted into this search, which was supported by all the considerable resources of the planet. Soon the first fire gems began to arrive. Rahula made himself personally responsible for ensuring that Frank got what had been promised him. That meant that all the Saurians considered themselves responsible. It was one of the best-secured debts in the history of loaning.

  For a few days Frank could take some time off from the concerns of war. He visited the best-known wonders of the Saurian world. These included the upside-down waterfall at Forest Closet, the Twisted Volcano at Point Hugo, and the Glass Dance Floor at Angelthighs. These were not the spectacular sights for which some of the worlds in the region were known. But they were very special, and carried a load of sentiment. Frank especially liked Forest Closet with its ranks of whispering willows. It was disagreeable to realize that the Ichtons were about to cancel all possibilities, good or bad.

  It took the Saurians eight days to collect all of the promised fire stones. There were 155 stones in all, and the presence of so much concentrated mood essence in crystalline form was more than a little overwhelming. There was a special ceremony in which Frank accepted the fire stones on behalf of himself and Owen Staging.

  Next day, Rahula took Frank out in one of the surface cars and brought him to the main factory where the engine components were being built into fighter bodies. Frank was a little surprised to find that the Saurians were planning an active defense of their planet. He had somehow assumed that a government group would try to save their own lives, escaping to another world in the ships they could build before the onslaught of the Ichtons. He had seen this happen before. It was typical behavior.

  But not for the Saurians. With rapidity and efficiency, they were putting their planet into the best state of defense possible. Under the goad of this emergency, they produced great quantities of jet fighters and equipped them with improved models of the basic jet fighter engine. These were for defense in the atmosphere. To fight between the worlds they had constructed separate bodies to house the thirty-one spaceship engine components purchased from Frank. Their ship designs had been purchased from reliable off-planet sources. Looking these plans over when he was taken for a tour of the factory, Frank could spot some mistakes. Luckily, they were matters he could correct on the spot.

  A voice tube torpedo arrived for him. Captain Charles Mardake, head of his section, wanted to know when Frank would be back. Frank sent back a reply in which he explained that the situation on Luminos was still fluid, and that although the Saurians were now working actively in their own defense, they still had a ways to go and therefore Frank could still be useful here. The Ichton attack was still not imminent and so he was exercising his discretion and staying on a while longer.

  That morning another message rocket was recovered and brought to Frank in his ship. It was from the office of the Fleet observation corps. They reported that the Ichton fleet had diverted slightly because the big insects had to take care of a larger planet that lay close to their invasion path. It was a planet where high gravity beam installations had been causing problems to some of the outlying Ichton ships. “So the main horde is going to miss you,” the report went on, “and that’s the good news.”

  However, the message went on, the bad news was, some Ichton squadrons were being sent to check the flanks for overlooked worlds that could be usefully stripped. One such squadron was coming directly toward Luminos. It consisted of between five and ten cruisers and would be there in about a month or three weeks. They appeared to be Stone-class cruisers and were judged very dangerous.

  The message was a blow to Frank’s hopes. He had begun to believe that the world of Luminos might be overlooked, but this news dashed that possibility. A group of even five Ichton battle cruisers was potentially as devastating to Luminos as the arrival of the entire battle fleet. The Ichton ships were of a technology far superior to anything the Saurians had been able to put together. Not only that, there was also the matter of battle savvy. The Saurians had never fought a modern space war. Their own wars against each other would have to be considered the equivalent of the bow and arrow struggles of primitives.

  But the Saurians were prepared to fight, and the raw youngsters piloting the thirty-one ships built around Owen’s L5 units had a lot of esprit de corps. They had memorized some of the fighting tactics as taught by the standard training manuals. But they were a long way from being prepared to face up to the reali
ty of a murderous opponent. They needed more training.

  Frank decided abruptly that he would take the situation in hand himself. He announced through Othnar Rahula that starting that very day he was giving classes in spaceship tactics as they pertained to planetary defense. There was no lack of enlistees for his crash course. The Saurians picked up the main concepts with great rapidity. Soon Frank was able to lead the thirty-one new ships in simulated battles in Luminos’s troposphere. By rapid shuffling of personnel, and keeping the ships occupied all of the time, Frank was able to train a good number of Saurians in spaceship tactics. The civilian population, meanwhile, made its own preparations, working day and night to get guns of appropriate mass and shocking power online in an attempt to defend the cities against the onslaught that now might be no more than days away.

  Another voice torpedo arrived. It was a message from the trader Owen Staging. “Frank,” it said, “I don’t know what you’re staying around there for, but please get out. Now! You’ve done all you can. Maybe a lot more than you should have. It’s time you got out of there. Remember, you owe me something, too, like half the stones. That’s a joke. But seriously. C’mon back, partner. We’ve got a great future ahead of us!”

  Frank was resting in his bunk aboard his own spaceship when the trader’s message came. Soon thereafter there was a warning signal from a long-distance satellite warning station: first elements of an Ichton battle group had been detected at the fringe of radar receptivity.

  Frank stood up, and with a heavy heart activated the switches that closed the main airlock. Yes, like it or not, it really was time to get out. He had almost cut it too fine. He’d gone right down to the wire with these Saurians. He would have liked to take station with them and have it out against the Ichtons here and now, but he knew that he couldn’t do that. His loyalty was to the Fleet and it was to the Fleet that he had to return.

  Losing no time getting aloft, Frank directed his ship to an asteroid belt that formed a maze of rocky moonlets in space near Luminos. He knew he should be kicking back up again into FTL drive, but he couldn’t resist waiting long enough to see how his protégés did against the Ichton battle group.