Region-1 suffered least, or most, depending on your point of view. Only about one-fourth of the 212 worlds of Region-1 suffered a secular modernist rebellion. Drix had no patience, nor showed any mercy to secularism within the Imperial Region. If secularists wanted to hold on to their savage natures that badly, so be it. Savagery would be the inheritance of their convictions and the parting gift of a supreme-master they rejected. Imperial assault troops were combat-dropped onto the rebel worlds to restore order, and anywhere resistance was experienced, new imperial heavy cruisers bombarded it into quick submission with 11-gigawatt plasma bolts falling from the sky. Within a mere three sub-cycles, rebellion within Region-1 was all but obliterated, along with a few dozen million Raknii citizens. Drix literally put the Fear of Dol into the Raknii populace the hard way.
* * * *
The Alliance Planet Minnos
April, 3869
After dispatching Admiral Thorn on her mission of ferrying Region-Master Raan around Region-6, to accept the formal submission and surrender of those 63 planets individually, Fleet Admiral Roger Kalis took the GulfMaster II executive spaceliner, that Thorn had brought forward to Troxia for him, back to Kitty Litter to drop off Planet-Master Mraz and Vice Admiral Bonhoeffer. From there, Kalis traveled back to Minnos, in order to update Bozo on the latest learned at Troxia, and to submit a few inquiries of his own to his sentient, computerized friend.
Kalis found himself wishing that there was a sentient Bozo on Kitty Litter, as having such a resource that far forward would be invaluable. But then if he had it, he’d also want one at Klista and Slithin as well. The length of his supply lines was getting incredibly long and logistics was becoming a nightmare. The Sextus 1st Fleet, the Confederate 2nd and 4th Fleets and the Alliance 3rd, 8th and 11th Fleets were all still out there on the end of that tenuously long supply line. Fueling stations set up all along the long supply route also had to be constantly resupplied, and crews rotated as well.
Recently, Bozo had given him an entirely new set of problems, along with all new star-charts he’d reconstructed out of a multitude of Raknii ships wrecked at Minnos. Bozo’s new charts delineated most of the 63 planets, reported by Region-Master Raan, as part of Region-6 — an area which showed up as a large life-void area on the star-charts captured on one of the Raknii planets taken earlier, which had been used for targeting the allies attacks on Slithin, Vlisnal, Klognin, Blenthna, Yegraia and Umviil… all reportedly part of the Raknii Region-4. Bozo’s new charts proved that the charts they had used for targeting those attacks had been doctored and deliberately planted for his troops to find… a deliberate attempt to mislead his fleets away from the Raknii worlds of Region-6 and towards Region-4, for whatever political reasons the Raknii might have had for doing so.
The problem Kalis faced now was that Bozo’s new charts also showed over 70 inhabited Raknii planets within what he’d thought was as a second large life-void, designated on Bozo’s new chart as Raknii Region-5. Kalis’ long supply line to his fleets in Region-4 ran right through the center of all these Raknii worlds in Region-5.
All this time, our fleets and transports have traveled safely through the heart of two Raknii regions without being attacked.Why? How much longer can I trust my delicate, undefended supply lines to Raknii hesitancy to attack them?
Just as Kalis was debating this question, a message arrived from Stillman at Slithin, informing Kalis that a Region-Master Tzal had arrived at Slithin with orders from Supreme-Master Drix to surrender all 83 worlds of Region-4 to Stillman… just as Raan had surrendered all of the worlds of Region-6 to him. This changed everything. A peaceful surrender of Region-4 meant he no longer had to maintain all of those combat fleets out there, while his supply lines hung out in the wind.
Kalis took advantage of having Bozo close at hand to help him draft and issue orders to all of his fleets (except for Stillman’s in Region-4), to pull back and attack designated targets along his supply lines within Raknii Region-5. Kalis also issued orders recalling the Confederate 1st Fleet under Admiral Gregory Schettano from Ginia, where he’d sent them for R&R while giving those weary ships a yard period at Norf Fleet Shipyard. He also sent an outline of his surrender agreements with Raan off to Stillman, to act as a guide for his surrender demands with Region-Master Tzal.
All-in-all, Kalis now felt much better about the overall progress of the war, but in the midst of all this activity, he completely forgot about the interrogatory forwarded to him from Admiral Melendez in Waston, about the identity of that mysterious “High-Human,” advising Supreme-Master Drix at the imperial capital on their home world of Raku… which also was clearly delineated on Bozo’s new star-charts.
* * * *
May-July, 3869
Word and videos of the horror that transpired in Region-1 was distributed and the harsh lessons were not lost on the secularists within the other regions. Wherever imperial troops dropped, the secularists went underground and order was quickly restored. Many continued to starve, as the collapsed systems that drove civilization couldn’t be restored quickly, but they were being restored… if only slowly. The secularists began to seriously reconsider their position, as they now questioned their ability to overthrow their mad supreme-master.
Drix was obviously a true alpha who didn’t hesitate to gut the losers of dominance combat — those who had dared to challenge his authority, as a dire warning to others thinking to attempt similar foolishness. Wise others took those hard lessons to heart and submitted to the will of Dol, or at least to the will of his terribly fearsome servant, without further challenge. Unwise and foolish others took those hard lessons to their graves.
News of the horrific crackdown on dissidents in Region-1 made its way to every corner of the Empire. The average Raknii citizen was aghast that outright rebellion against the supreme-master had actually occurred. Never had such a thing happened since the Dolrak had first introduced the hypnotics that had tamed the savage nature of the Rak males, providing a means by which dominance was established, without the need for individual dominance combat. It was the Dol-sent miracle that allowed their culture to cooperate and reach for the stars. Most understood instinctively that Supreme-Master Drix could not allow such heresy to flourish, as it threatened the stability of the empire, striking directly at the underpinnings of their entire civilization.
Few were really surprised at the crackdown, just at the swiftness and shocking severity of it. Strange rumors were beginning to circulate that on planets already surrendered to the humans, the humans appeared considerably more merciful than their own supreme-master, when it came to dealing with enemies. It presented the Raknii with a confusing parallax-view of their new supreme-master. A supreme-master who surprisingly ordered planets invaded by humans to submit without resistance and who touted a new and peaceful way of life for the Raknii people, as taught in his Book of Revelations. That this strange Prophet of Peace could personally order this kind of horrific brutality inflicted upon his own people was perplexing. He presented a great paradox… a stark contrast in harshness and gentleness never seen before.
A new message from the supreme-master was disseminated, wherein he explained that Dol was wroth with the stubborn secular modernists, and had decreed it better that those whose passions drove them into open rebellion against Dol’s established order be sacrificed, rather than allow the innocent and temperate among them to also suffer their god’s wrath against insurrection. In it, Drix emphasized the dual nature of their god… loving and gentle towards his children, yet fearsome and merciless towards his enemies — enemies who would willfully lead his children astray, onto paths of perdition.
Flexibility or rigidity, happiness or vexation, obedience or defiance, prosperity or desolation, creation or destruction, war or peace, life or death — Dol held both extremes in his mighty hands and asked his children their preference. The choice was totally theirs, Drix declared and he pleaded that they choose wisely and quickly, for Dol’s implacable aliens… created specificall
y to be their teachers, were coming and would remove all choice, if they delayed too long.
Drix then stunned his people by openly proclaiming that Dol himself had sided with the aliens and fought against the Raknii fleet, at Slithin and Yegraia, deep within the Raknii Empire, helping those aliens to destroy a hundred times their own numbers, against the very best the Raknii military could oppose them with. He then stunned them again when he informed them the humans were even now bringing all of Region-6 and Region-4 under submission, and that he had no means of preventing it.
Drix warned that these were sure signs that Dol would indeed deliver the entire Raknii race into the hands of those unfaltering ultimate predators, just as the prophecy foretold — aliens who would impose submission and discipline upon them with irresistible force, if they could not resign themselves to voluntarily obeying the precepts of their god and rediscover their proper role within his creation.
Planet-Masters in both Regions 4 and 6 were, therefore, thoroughly primed to submit immediately to Thorn and Stillman, wherever Raan and Tzal took them.
* * * *
CSS Ghost, en route to the Raku System
July, 3869
“I’m still not sure that I understand exactly how you intend to contact your doppelganger after we go into orbit around Raku,” said Noreen.
It has to do with the mechanism I devised for uploading and downloading of data when we update each other, Noreen. I take it from your work at BioCom that you’re familiar with electroencephalography, which is the recording of electrical activity along the scalp?
“To some degree, but why don’t you refresh my memory and put it into context for me?”
The human brain is essentially an electro-chemical system consisting of billions of neurons, which are electrically charged, or “polarized” by membrane transport proteins that produce an electrical pressure, or voltage, if you will… that causes movement of electrical ions across their membranes. Neurons are constantly exchanging ions with the extracellular milieu, or the chemical environment just outside the cells, primarily to either maintain resting potential or to propagate action potentials.
“That’s getting a little thick, for a non-engineer, Hal,” said Diet.
Sorry… suffice it to say that ions of like charge repel each other, and when many ions are pushed out of many neurons at the same time, they push against their neighbors, who then push against their neighbors, and so on, forming an electromagnetic wave.
“Okay, I’m with you on that… I think,” said Noreen.
This process is known as volume conduction. When the electromagnetic wave created by the movement of ions between neurons reaches the electrodes on the scalp, they can push or pull electrons within the metal of those electrodes attached to the scalp, imparting a voltage onto those electrodes. Since that metal conducts the movement of electrons easily, the difference in voltage potential between any two electrodes can be measured by a voltmeter. The recording of these voltages over time is what gives us an EEG readout.
“Okay, so an EEG measures voltage fluctuations resulting from ionic current flows within the neurons of the brain, correct?” asked Noreen.
Correct. The electrical voltage potentials generated by individual neurons are far too weak to normally be picked up by an EEG, so the activity recorded always reflects the summation of the synchronous activity of thousands or millions of neurons that have similar spatial orientation. If the cells do not have similar spatial orientation, their ions do not line up and create waves that can be detected. Pyramidal neurons of the cortex are thought to produce the greatest EEG signal, because they are generally well aligned and fire together. Because the strength of electromagnetic fields fall off with the square of distance, activity from deeper portions of the brain is more difficult to detect than currents near the skull.
“So how does this relate to your doppelganger? He’s not wearing a neural network of electrodes,” asked Diet.
He is, they’re just not visible. My mobile self has thousands of tiny electrodes implanted into his skull that connect through micro-wiring to a tiny high-speed data port hidden within his hair, just above and behind his left ear. Normally we just connect a standard high-speed data transfer cable to any computer hardware of sufficient power that I have access to, and we can swap data.
“If deeper brain functions cannot be detected by cranial electrodes, how is it that you can achieve two-way communications to a level necessary to exchange information with his brain from the outside?” asked Noreen.
The cloned brain was initially grown around an intelligent neurofeedback system of my own design, built by a TBG company named NeuroDynamics on Bama. This neurofeedback system incorporates a 3-axis, 1024-bit accelerometer to compensate for variations in angles caused by head movement and position. This intelligent neurofeedback system also includes micro-wiring connecting to a few thousand microelectrodes embedded deep within the brain itself, which allow access to the deeper regions not generally accessible to cranially mounted EEG nets.
“What mechanism are you using to prevent the clone’s immune system from attacking the neurofeedback system as a foreign invader?” asked Diet.
The cloned brain was literally grown around the intelligent neurofeedback system, which existed first. It acted as a framework during the growth process, much as a vine attaches itself to an adjacent fence as it grows. As the alloys used in the neurofeedback system are all hypoallergenic, the cloned cells came to recognize it as “normal” for it to be there, as the brain grew.
NeuroDynamics was highly excited by the design as a potential new product line to market to companies like BioCom, as it would allow their customers to greatly enhance the capabilities of their current bio-computer lines, so NeuroDynamics has agreed to pay royalties directly into Diet’s personal accounts to help offset the costs of my taking over Ghost.
“Okay, I see how your updating system might work, but I still don’t see how you’ll be able to contact your mobile self from orbit,” said Diet.
I envisioned a time where it might be necessary to contact my mobile-self, when a physical cable connection wasn’t feasible. The neural net itself is designed to double as an antenna for receiving a specially encoded microwave signal on a specific frequency, which I can surreptitiously embed into any commercially available common carrier signal, or broadcast via broad-beam microwave.
“So he’ll be able to receive a transmission from you?” asked Noreen.
Correct. Although my mobile self lacks the capabilities for wireless radiation that would be required for him to answer back, he should be able to hear me, just fine. I figured that simplex communication was better than none at all.
* * * *
Chapter-27
If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it. — Albert Einstein
The Raknii Imperial Planet of Raku
Raknii Imperial Palace
August, 3869
Xior had taken to spending a lot of time with Hal, as he puttered around in the sophisticated chemical laboratory that Drix had installed in the palace, as a convenient place for the alien to work on perfecting a “chemical cocktail,” as he put it, that would hopefully keep Xior’s cancer in remission and eventually eradicate it from his body. Xior didn’t understand exactly how it was that an alien could be so knowledgeable about Raknii physiology, but Hal assured him that most carbon-based life shared a majority of genetic similarities, and that he’d run enough tests to ascertain the major genetic differences between Raknii and human toxicology and DNA structure, so that he was confident that he could produce medicines that wouldn’t poison his patient. Xior already had plenty of evidence of Hal’s competence, as he was alive and feeling better that he had in cycles — much better than being dead, which was what he would have been without Hal’s efforts.
Human pharmacology was far in advance of the relatively primitive Raknii efforts along those lines and Hal had explained that Xior was suffering from cancer… a generic t
erm for a malignant neoplasm — a broad group of various diseases all involving unregulated cell growth, where cells divide and grow uncontrollably, forming malignant tumors that metastasize, invading other parts of the body. Hal told Xior that he suffered specifically from colon cancer, which he was attempting to control through the use of an angiogenesis inhibitor… a monoclonal antibody that shuts down the process whereby tumors grow new blood vessels that help them receive the nutrients they need to survive.
“An angiogenesis inhibitor stops the action of a substance released by tumors called vascular endothelial growth factor, which binds to certain cells to stimulate new blood vessel formation,” Hal told him. “Impeding the blood supply that tumors need to survive tends to slow their growth, and can potentially add cycles to your life.”
Hal told him that he was also using a dihydrofolate reductase inhibitor, which generally inhibits the synthesis of DNA, RNA, thymidylates, and certain proteins.
“Dihydrofolate reductase is an enzyme that participates in tetrahydrofolate synthesis,” Hal explained. “It catalyses the conversion of dihydrofolate to the active tetrahydrofolate, which acts specifically during DNA and RNA synthesis. Thus it is cytotoxic during the S-phase of the cell cycle and therefore has a greater toxic effect on rapidly dividing cells, such as malignant and myeloid cells and gastrointestinal and oral mucosas, which replicate their DNA more frequently, and thus inhibits the growth and proliferation of these kinds of cells. Facing a scarcity of dihydrofolate reductase, rapidly dividing cancer cells die, via thymineless death.”
Wrath of an Angry God: A Military Space Opera Page 31