by Richard Fox
“I’ve reviewed that math,” Stacey said, her mouth dry as fear crept up her chest. “The chances are miniscule when used in conjunction with a Crucible, even an unfinished one like that near Earth. We’re more likely to encounter a naturally forming rift as a matter of quantum flux—and we’d have to wait several times the known age of the universe for that to happen—than if ships come through the Crucible. Your concerns are unfounded.”
Wexil swept his hand across his chest and a dark filter passed over the vast majority of Alliance space. Only six inhabited star systems were unaffected, all centered on Earth.
“These are the only star systems that can reach Earth without risking a rupture,” Wexil said. “While the individual risk is low with each jump, sending hundreds of ships to Earth’s defense creates an ever-growing probability of disaster. Once the Crucible is complete and we fully understand its capabilities, it should allow risk-free access to the entire Alliance, but until that day…”
Wexil looked at her and sneered. “Perhaps an analogy you might understand, Ambassador Ibarra. One of your ground cars on a highway in a major city has little risk of an accident. Put many more cars on that highway and there will be an accident most every day. And it takes only one such accident to destroy everything.”
“Then only those fleets within range can assist,” Stacey snapped, unable to come up with a valid argument against the logic Wexil presented. She turned her attention back to the assembly. “Is this Alliance going to let the Toth seize the Crucible? Do you think they will use it to defeat the Xaros or raid your worlds?”
A pod carrying a young man who looked barely older than sixteen floated level with Stacey and Wexil.
“Ambassador Shinx of the Gan,” the Qa’Resh intoned.
“The Gan home world lies near Toth space,” the boy said without fanfare. Not every Alliance species cared for the pleasantries of politics. “Hours before my scheduled return to Bastion, a small Toth ship arrived at the edge of my system and self-destructed once it delivered this message.”
A Toth elite in an ornate tank appeared in the holo field above Stacey’s head. A disembodied nervous system floated in pale pink liquid as strands of tiny bubbles shimmied through the liquid.
“Worlds of the Alliance,” the words came out mechanical, translated by a machine without inflection or emotion, “I am Chairman Ranik of the Tellani Corporation. We desire the meat species on planet Earth. We will have them. The system remains yours. Their meat will satisfy us. Interfere and we will find sustenance from the rest of you.” The message repeated twice before the hologram blinked away.
Wexil’s pod rose above Stacey. “The gift we gave the humans to repopulate is fortuitous. The Toth will have a nigh-unlimited food source, and another threat to our Alliance will be neutralized.”
“You would feed us to the Toth as a matter of convenience?” Stacey jabbed her control station and brought her pod level with Wexil. Were it not that Bastion kept all the ambassadors separated by force fields, she would have launched herself into the Vishrakath’s pod and strangled him.
Wexil looked at Stacey with indifference, then turned his chin up.
“The human request has been decided,” he said. “I motion to move on to further business until an alternate course of action is proposed.”
Stacey screamed, but her words remained trapped in her pod as votes tallied in the air.
CHAPTER 6
As Hale swiped pages aside in a thick binder, he glanced up from his assigned reading to scan around the Breitenfeld’s library. Bookshelves bolted against the deck with bars across the shelves stretched from floor to ceiling around the metal table where he sat.
The need for physical books was almost an anachronism in the modern age, when every scanned piece of human learning was available to anyone with a li-fi connection to the Internet, but with the rampant use of malware and electronic warfare from Chinese and other nations—and now the Xaros—the Atlantic Union military took no chances, refusing to rely on databases that could provide a digital attack vector.
“Are you skimming again?” a woman’s voice came from deep within the stacks.
“No.” Hale flipped the pages back. “I still don’t understand why you want me to read about what I experienced with the Toth.”
“Because,” Lowenn said, stepping around the corner of a stack, holding a pile of binders against her stomach, “several scholars on Bastion added notes to your account. Don’t think you’re the first one to ever deal with them.” With her loose hair and thick-rimmed glasses, Lowenn looked every inch a librarian.
“This is pointless,” Hale said as Lowenn dropped the binders on the table. “We know what the Toth want: the proccies. Done. Let me get back to my Marines.”
“No, Ken, it’s not enough to know what they want. You need to understand why they want it,” Lowenn said. She pulled out a chair and sat across from him. “I admit that alien psychology and sociology are a new field of study for me, but the answers are there.”
“The Toth elites, the ones in the tanks, they need to…consume nervous energy to stay alive,” Hale said.
“It’s more than just food for them,” she said. “Whoever designed their tanks hacked into the pleasure centers of the Toth’s brains. Every time an elite feeds, it gets high. The greater the neural energy, the bigger the high.”
“That’s why they targeted the Karigole. They were long-lived…better eating,” Hale said. “I tried to ask Steuben about this, but he gets all kinds of pissed off when anyone mentions the Toth. Can’t say I blame him.”
“He promised to rip my face off if I asked him about the Toth a second time,” Lowenn said.
“Me too. Those exact words,” Hale said with a nod.
“The Toth elites,” Lowenn said, picking through the stack of folders, “can get by with eating the warriors and the menials we’ve encountered, but their addiction to newer, more varied sources of neural energy doesn’t have any known treatment. The Alliance sent a probe to the Toth home world centuries ago and found them on the verge of extinction because the elites were going through the rest of the population faster than they could breed.”
She teased out a thin folder and opened it. “Here we are. Progress reports from the probe showing how it found a way to clone the Toth and caused a population explosion.” She slid the folder to Hale, showing an exponential growth chart with smaller dark bars that levelled off with time.
“The darker bars…that’s how many elites there are?” Hale asked.
“See, I knew you weren’t that dense,” Lowenn said with a smile. “Seems the Toth got their act together and limited how many elites their society would have, but those that were in the tanks weren’t satisfied with eating just their own kind.”
“How could the Alliance go along with this? The Toth are cannibals. Those ambassadors on Bastion wanted…this?”
“Don’t judge another species by our standards. Moral relativism fails whenever we apply it to something with a completely different biology and history. As for Bastion, it seems that the Toth were incorporated into the Alliance before there was such a thing as Bastion.”
“I don’t follow,” Hale said.
“The records I received are incomplete, but there are several references to someplace called Communion. It disappears from the official narrative right around the same time the Toth betrayed the Karigole,” Lowenn said. “Then Bastion enters the scene.”
“Right, another intergalactic mystery for another time. I still don’t know why I’m learning any of this,” Hale said.
“Because, Ken, you’ve…you’ve never dealt with an addict before, have you?”
“I had an aunt. She overdosed on heroin before I was born. Other than that, no.”
“Addicts, you can’t reason with them,” Lowenn said. “They are trapped by whatever their brain is screaming at them to get. Booze, gambling, opiates, whatever. The procedural technology that Ibarra’s using, apparently it can produce a fully grown hum
an with a lifetime of memories in less than two weeks. If the Toth get ahold of this, they’ll have a virtually unlimited, variable fix to their addiction.”
“The difference between living off nutrient paste or eating real food,” Hale said. The last month the Breitenfeld spent waiting for its jump engines to recharge after the retreat from Takeni was spent on emergency rations—nothing but combat paste to eat and water to drink. He and his Marines were used to austere living, but the navy had a reputation for fine dining. The Breitenfeld’s sailors had complained about the eating situation loudly, constantly, and with enough colorful metaphors to make even the saltiest old chief blush.
“Now do you get it?” Lowenn asked. “Now do you understand why the Toth are here? This isn’t some sort of trade delegation.”
“The weapons on their battle cruisers told me as much,” Hale said.
“OK, let’s talk about Toth corporate structure.”
Hale groaned and opened another binder.
****
Lieutenant Durand snapped the tip of a pointer stick against an exploded wire diagram of an Eagle fighter. A ready room full of pilots watched their commander as she moved the tip from place to place on the diagram.
“The new vectored engines have a twelve percent increase in thrust-to-mass ratio. Combine this with the upgrades to the maneuver thrusters and our new birds can outrun, and out dance, what we’re used to.” Durand waggled the pointer stick in the air. “The new specs are loaded into the simulators, so I want everyone to log no less than nine hours per day. If you’re scoring less than ninety percent on the graded runs, I’m upping your time to twelve hours.”
Pilots shifted in their seats, but none dared voice a complaint.
“Your first dogfight with the Toth, if it comes to that, is not the time or place to realize your Eagle flies like a bronco with a poker up its ass,” Durand said.
“Why don’t we just use Dotok fighters? They’re superior to your Eagles even with the upgrades,” someone said from the front row. He was taller than most in the room, with thick strands of hair bound into a ponytail. He wore the same flight suit as the rest of the squadron, but his sallow gray skin and blunted beak marked him as an alien Dotok.
“Thank you, Lothar,” Durand said, calling the Dotok by his call sign. “Remember what we said about waiting to speak until called on?”
“You didn’t answer the question,” said a second Dotok, almost a carbon copy of Lothar but a good foot shorter.
“Same point, Manfred, wait until you’re called on,” Durand said to the second Dotok.
“You didn’t even let us bring our own fighters from the Canticle of Reason,” Lothar said. “Now my brother and I have to fly your human ships that handle like rickety kites.”
Durand breathed through clenched teeth. It had been Captain Valdar’s idea to incorporate Dotok pilots into her squadron while the Breitenfeld and the Canticle of Reason sat in space in orbit around a brown dwarf, waiting months for the jump drive engines to recharge. Her squadron had lost too many pilots, and the Dotok had too many pilots for their few remaining fighters.
Durand had had a few cultural misunderstandings while in the Atlantic Union fleet. Her French heritage hadn’t always meshed perfectly with the mores of other member nations. Dealing with the Dotok brothers had found the limits of her patience on more than one occasion.
“Because—as I’ve told you many times—Squadron Leader Bar’en needs every Dotok fighter plane for his unit, and the chance of fratricide is greatly reduced if we’re all in the same type of fighter,” Durand said.
Manfred’s and Lothar’s heads jiggled slightly, a Dotok gesture for annoyance.
“In other news,” Durand said, “the hot water heater for the showers are still down.” Groans came from the pilots. “Except for the stalls on deck twelve, and I have one hot shower chit. Whoever scores the highest number of kills on today’s sims gets it. Get to your holo pods and show me who wants it the most.”
****
Durand pulled a tray from a slot in the mess hall dispenser and looked around for her pilots. A table full of black jumpsuits stood out from the mass of sailors clad in deep blue and Marines in green camo.
Her pilots had kept a seat open for her in the middle of the table. The men, women and the Dotok brothers barely acknowledged her with more than a nod as she joined them; all were focused on eating.
“It’s real,” Mei “Glue” Ma said as she slurped down a noodle from a steaming bowl of reddish-brown soup and shoveled more into her mouth with chopsticks. “It has to be real,” she said with her mouth full.
“Still reconstructed, soy-fortified with vitamins and minerals,” said a pilot named Landas as he bit into a bacon cheeseburger and closed his eyes. “But at least it’s not nutrient paste.”
Durand slid a plastic lid off her plate and smelled wine and spices of beef bourguignon. She dabbed the tip of her spoon into the sauce and tasted it.
“It isn’t chalky, for once,” she said. The first bite tasted like something she could have ordered at a restaurant in Brettone.
“I think they upgraded the dispensers,” said Choi “Filly” Ma.
“Who needs better Eagles when we can have chow like this?” Landas asked. “I’ll fight harder just to come back to this goodness.”
The crack of a shell cut across the table. Manfred, sitting shoulder to shoulder with Lothar, crunched down with his thick beak, shattering whatever was in his mouth. Two bowls sat before the Dotok brothers, one containing a pile of dark-skinned nuts, the other full of pulverized shells. Manfred leaned over the bowl of broken shells and spat out fragments with a quick shake of his head.
The human pilots stopped eating, their eyes on the Dotok.
“Manfred…” Durand said.
Lothar popped a nut into his mouth and broke the shell with a loud snap.
“Lothar!” Durand snapped.
“What?” Manfred asked. “Isn’t cracking how you compliment the chef? These are the best kushny nuts I’ve had in years.”
“The chef is a 3-D printer, not a person, and it doesn’t need your compliments,” Durand said.
Lothar’s jaw clamped down, with much less noise.
“Thank you,” Durand said.
“Durand called Gall,” Manfred said, “what are…‘proccies’?”
Durand suddenly lost her appetite.
“Yeah,” Landas said, “we’ve been meaning to ask you about that.” Other pilots nodded.
Durand sighed and unscrewed the cap on a small bottle of alcohol-free red wine. “What have you all heard?”
“While we were gone,” Filly’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, “Ibarra came up with some way to make…people—with memories and everything, but none of them know what they are, and there’s no way to tell them apart from the rest of us.”
“First off,” Durand looked each of the pilots in the eye, “none of you are proccies.”
“Told you we had nothing to worry about,” Manfred said to Lothar.
“Captain Valdar knows about it, and there’s been some issues on Earth because of this,” Durand said.
“I heard the Toth are here because of them,” Glue said.
“We’ll know exactly what the Toth want when we get to Europa,” Durand said. Pilots shifted in their seats and looked over their shoulders at the sailors and Marines around them. The aviation wing on the Breitenfeld had always been insular, a step apart from the rest of the ship. She could sense where this conversation was heading.
Better strangle this monster in its crib, she thought.
“But let me tell you all something.” Durand pointed at Glue. “She tried to shoot me down when she was flying for the Chinese.” Glue shrugged her shoulders as her two cousins looked away from Durand in embarrassment. Durand pointed fingers at the Dotok brothers. “You two were sent to goad me into alcoholism.”
“Bar’en said we were supposed to teach you hairless apes how to fly,” Lothar said.
/> Durand’s hand squeezed into a fist.
“Despite all of this, I am still honored to have you all on my wing,” Durand said, “and I will shed my last drop of blood for each and every one of you.” Durand looked to each side of the table, letting all the pilots know they were included in her pronouncement. “I wouldn’t care if any of you were proccies, so long as you could do your damn jobs and fly like aces.”
Durand took a plastic chip from her pocket and slid it toward Manfred.
“Manfred earned our one and only hot shower for the week with six kills in the sims,” Durand said. She hoped the misdirection would end the proccie discussion. Captain Valdar had told her and the other section chiefs more, but she was ordered to keep that knowledge confidential.
Manfred pocketed the chip with a shrug.
“But, Durand called Gall, you said each time we fragged you in the sims was worth two kills,” Manfred said. “Shouldn’t my score be ten?”
“Shut up and eat your nuts, Manfred.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
CHAPTER 7
Jupiter loomed through the windows of the Breitenfeld’s bridge. Valdar, strapped into his command chair at the center of the bridge, watched as the gas giant grew larger as the ship came out of its acceleration.
“Alcubierre drive powered down,” said Ensign Geller, the ship’s navigator. “Switching to thrusters in thirty seconds.”
“Gunnery,” Valdar said, pointing to Lieutenant Commander Utrecht seated to his right, “we have visual on the Toth ship?”
“Aye-aye, Captain. One cruiser analog in orbit around Europa,” Utrecht said. “Nothing else on the scope or from the spotters.”
“Comms, send an IR pulse to Titan Station. Tell them we’ve arrived without incident and will begin negotiations directly,” Valdar said.
The Breitenfeld rumbled as the thruster banks came to life. Void ships always felt more alive to Valdar when they ran under their own propulsion. His ship felt like a hunting dog pulling against her leash, eager for the chance to do what instinct and design demanded.