by John F. Carr
These were the people who were bringing six hundred years of interstellar civilization crashing about his ears; who were breeding themselves for war, fine-tuning their genes to create a race of human warrior ants. The race which had sterilized a dozen worlds in half as many years.
Somehow, Diettinger’s obvious humanity and apparent decency made it all worse than it already was.
“I expected…something different. What do you want?” he asked, his voice dead.
“I had you brought here not as a prisoner of war, but for a parley. My marines are taking the Canada as a prize ship, but you have my word that after this meeting is concluded, you will be released for retrieval by another ship of your task force. Captain Adderly, I am here at Tanith on a simple raid, not for this world’s conquest.”
‘You must think I’m an idiot,” Adderly said. “Tanith’s Alderson Point routes are old news. Her tramlines reach into Secessionist as well as Loyalist space. Tanith’s system has a mucking great gas giant for cheap refueling. All of which makes the whole system extremely attractive.”
Diettinger nodded. “Obviously. But there are many other ways into the Empire, and securing Tanith is the last one I would choose. It must be obvious, however, that more than a single battlecruiser would be assigned to the task. In any case, that is not my decision.”
Diettinger leaned forward, watching him for a moment. “And, if I thought you were an idiot, Captain Adderly, you would not be here now.”
He doesn’t blink, Adderly thought, although he knew it had to be his imagination. Suddenly it hit him: this was the first time in his life he had ever been confronted by someone with a discernible force of will. Charismatic bastard, I’ll give him that.
“I have a proposition for you that can save a great many lives, both Sauron and Imperial,” Diettinger said.
I would have said, “both Sauron and human,” Adderly realized. He smiled a tired smile.
“This should be good. Let’s hear it.”
“I want the exact location of the borloi awaiting shipment by your convoy. I have Pathfinders looking for it now; I believe you call them ‘death’s heads.’ They are supporting marines who are securing the spaceport for shuttles to ship it to the Fomoria. While this situation persists, both your forces and the citizens of Tanith will be subjected to heavy loss of life.”
“Borloi—” Adderly said, almost sagging in the chair with relief, but caught himself.
They’re here after the borloi? Why? Suddenly he remembered what Diettinger had said about Tanith. “There are many ways into the Empire.” Had the Sauron commander meant routes, or tactics? Were the Saurons going to try to destabilize the Empire by flooding it with borloi? It didn’t make sense, Imperial officials would clamp down hard on anything that threatened the war effort, and personal vices like drug abuse received the simplest solution—summary execution of buyer and seller alike.
Adderly wracked his brain, trying to think of any military applications of borloi. None came to mind: the Saurons did nothing without a reason, and what they did do was almost always militarily related. They were no slouches in the chemical warfare department, either. Still, if the borloi was their target that meant they didn’t know the real reason why the Imperial convoy was on its way.
Adderly waited a long time before answering. “All right,” he said finally, defeated. “Give me something to write with.”
Diettinger smiled. “I have an excellent memory. You may simply tell me the location.”
Adderly shook his head. “What good would it do? How old are your maps of Tanith? Sure, the borloi is at the spaceport, but where? There are lots of storage chambers, most unmarked, and many of them underground. The Commandant knows how addictive borloi is and keeps it in a special facility—safe from spacers and dock hands.”
Diettinger considered a moment, then handed him a writing stylus of some heavy Sauron alloy. “Very well. Please don’t embarrass me by trying to kill yourself with this, or yourself by trying to harm me. I promise you that neither your speed nor your hand-to-hand combat skills are a match for mine or those of my Soldiers.”
Adderly grunted and began to draw. Rectangles, circles, landmarks, roadways, all neatly labeled, all fiction. He was flirting with treason to buy time for the convoy, so he was determined to be convincing.
He had almost finished when he noticed Diettinger had turned to the viewport, looking out at the wreckage of the Königsberg. Something twisted in Adderly’s chest as he watched Diettinger smugly reviewing his conquest of Adderly’s detachment.
Another one for your record, eh? It was hopeless, anyway; he had never entertained the notion that the Sauron’s promise to release him had been sincere. He added a few more notes to the fraudulent map while he waited for Diettinger to turn around again. The Sauron’s reflexes might be superhuman, but he couldn’t react to what he didn’t see coming, and they had to be as vulnerable as humans somewhere. He only hoped the pen was heavy enough.
Adderly made shaking motions with the pen. “I thought these things were supposed to work in low gravity.”
“I’ll get you another.” Diettinger began to turn to his desk, and Adderly extended the motion into an overhanded throw.
The pen was a centimeter away when Diettinger saw it—and caught it, Adderly realized with a shock. But it was too late. The makeshift dart had penetrated the Sauron’s left eye.
Diettinger’s head snapped back and cracked against the viewport. Instantly, Adderly felt a hand close about his throat and lift him off the floor. The guard held him up and began shaking him like a rat.
“No!” Diettinger ordered. He pulled the pen out, and was holding a hand to his ruined eye. The other guard was speaking rapidly into an intercom device, probably summoning medics to treat Diettinger and remove what would be left of Adderly after the guards got through with him.
“Congratulations,” Adderly thought he heard Diettinger say, unsure of anything, as his vision darkened. His windpipe felt as if it had been crushed, and he began coughing. The guard hadn’t killed him, as he’d expected, nor put him down, either. At least he’d let up on the terrible pressure that had been cutting off his airflow.
At a signal from Diettinger, the guard drove Adderly to his knees against the deck. He watched as the Sauron commander’s blood fell slowly to the floor, then stopped. He looked up; Diettinger’s face was centimeters away, the ruined eye dark with clotted blood—no longer bleeding.
Fast healing, Adderly thought, groaning inwardly. They would be…
“I do not understand you, Captain. I ordered you here because you conducted yourself like a soldier, and I wanted to offer you something I thought you valued—the chance to save lives.”
The guard was still holding Adderly down, still crushing his throat. He could breathe, but only a little. He felt faint and far away. He cursed through clenched teeth, “As if you bastards ever cared about that!”
Diettinger remained impassive. “In point of fact, Captain Adderly, I do. Although we do not view death the way you do; I am human, after all.”
“You’re a goddamn traitor, then—” The grip tightened. Adderly desperately wanted to lose consciousness, having no desire to see the fate to which the Saurons would subject him to after this assault on their commander—but his brain refused to shut down.
Diettinger rose. “I serve a Race fighting for its independence from a regime that does not understand our motives and cannot possibly understand our goals. That makes me a patriot, Captain Adderly. You serve that regime, enforcing its will on hundreds of planets, regardless of whether they want you there or not. What does that make you?”
Adderly glared at the Sauron commander. “Patriot? Freedom fighter, maybe? Like hell; you think you’re the first ones to trot out that old saw? You started your ‘war of independence’ by an unprovoked attack on St. Ekaterina! A billion people dead, Diettinger. How do you justify that? Go ahead, give it a shot!”
Diettinger appeared honestly puzzled. “We don
’t ‘justify’ our actions, Captain Adderly, any more than you might explain your motivations to the family cat. Sauron is the cradle of the ultimate expression of the human race; and that is a far greater responsibility than suffering public censure over the removal of a threat like St. Ekaterina, or an inconvenience such as her mongrelized population of convicts, thieves and other non-productives.”
“Inconvenience…!” For the first time since being captured, Adderly was truly afraid. Not for his life, or any of his crew that might also have been captured. Not for the convoy, or even the Empire. He was suddenly very afraid for all mankind.
The Saurons were destroying the very underpinnings of the Empire, and they were losing the war. What would they do to humanity if they won?
“I will assume this map to be useless, of course,” Diettinger said, “We will carry out the battle, and many will die on both sides. A waste, since the population of Tanith is regarded as genetically promising. But do understand, Captain, it is immaterial to me whether the Tanith casualties are one or one hundred million. I will have the borloi; you have my word on it. The outcome is decided. I merely wished to give you the opportunity to decide the means.”
He gestured to the guards, who pulled Adderly to his feet. “See that his spacesuit is intact. Provide him with a rescue beacon and put him out of the airlock.”
Adderly was stunned. “What?”
The Sauron looked back at him with his remaining eye. “I have given my word to you on two counts today, Captain Adderly. I want you to see that I am reliable on the one, so that you will not make another mistake by doubting the other.”
One of the Chinthes picked him up a few hours later.
Chapter Five
I
Diettinger was back on the bridge, the left side of his face hidden in bandages.
How could I have been so stupid? he asked himself. Haven’t I seen the evidence of their hatred for us a thousand times? Didn’t I see it again, today, when they were willing to risk conflagration aboard their own ship just to finish off Saurons they thought were already trapped and probably dead?
Diettinger found the idea of such irrational hatred difficult to credit, and impossible to justify. Saurons were trained from birth to accept the nature of the human species as being emotional, rational, predatory, dominant. To these and the dozens of other adjectives summing up the Sauron version of the human condition, the race that called themselves “The Soldiers” had added a final qualifying virtue: efficient. The level of passion which human norms applied to their activities in general and their relations with Saurons in particular was, Diettinger felt, conspicuous in its lack of appreciation for that virtue.
There was something about them that made personal dealings difficult, diplomacy impractical and surrender, for either side, impossible.
Diettinger found it all…what? Wasteful, he realized, although the confusion and distaste he felt was not so easily summarized as that.
And yet, the degree of the human norms’ hatred for Saurons was no more than the Saurons’ degree of contempt for them. Probably less, he decided.
Some Sauron commanders in the Secession War regarded the conflict as one of extermination. Diettinger was not one of these, but gingerly probing the wounded side of his face, he wondered if they might be right. It might be impossible to deal with human norms as fellow rational beings.
His depth perception was gone, of course. Adderly’s throw had been very strong, and Diettinger’s optic nerve had been ruined. Damned nuisance. It would require at least a week in regeneration therapy, but there was nothing else for it; he couldn’t very well wear an eye patch like some ancient pirate captain.
Fomoria was in high orbit off Tanith again, now accompanied by the Canada as a prize ship. Tanith spaceport’s Langston Field was on, and—with an atmosphere and plenty of ground water to dissipate energy into—it could hold off a dozen Imperial battlecruisers indefinitely.
Laser communications antennae, lofted by Quilland’s units, pierced the Field in a dozen places to establish contact with the Sauron warship. Fighting for the spaceport was reported heavy, but indecisive. Despite the numerical superiority of the Imperials, the large numbers of Cyborgs augmenting the already potent Sauron force prevented them from mounting any assault that would not require leveling the spaceport, and this the Imperial forces were understandably reluctant to do.
“Cyborg Köln. Status on the objective?”
“Material located and secured, First Rank.”
Splendid! An eye lost for nothing. Diettinger sighed. Ah, well. Live and learn…
“Deathmaster Quilland. Enemy anti-aerospace strength?”
“Marginal, First Rank. The Imperials have been arriving piecemeal, disorganized. We assume this is a result of poor surface transportation network and low airlift capability, compounded by inclement weather.”
Diettinger looked again at the solid mass of orange clouds over the surface of Tanith. “It all looks inclement from here, Deathmaster.”
Quilland chuckled, a rare moment of humor, which meant events planetside were going very well, indeed. “Affirm. Weather data being transmitted now, First Rank. Shuttles should have no difficulty.”
“Spaceport status?”
“Currently eliminating pockets of Imperials still within the spaceport perimeter. The spaceport’s Langston Field generator has been captured intact.”
“Very good. Be advised that INSS Canada has been taken as a war prize; her shuttles will also be engaged in the off-shipment of materials. Expect first wave—”
“Emergency break in,” Communications cut through.
Diettinger changed orders in mid-breath; no human norm mind or tongue could have switched tracks so quickly, or completely.
“Speak.”
“Survey Rank Morgan, Vessel First Rank. Large force of Imperials observed to be emerging from Jump at three second intervals. Squadrons engaging during Jump Lag.”
Standard Imperial convoy Jump procedure, Diettinger recalled. No nuclear precedents; why should there be? They think they’re coming into a friendly system.
“Force mix?”
“From this distance, full-spectrum sensors indicate enemy battle group…first wave, all capital ships, four battleships, one carrier, six heavy cruisers…”
The answer surprised him. This was no ordinary convoy; this was an Imperial Battle Fleet. Diettinger whirled on Second Rank. “Lay in a course for the system asteroid belt at seven-Gs acceleration. Transmit data for same to autopilot on Canada.
“Quilland. Enemy fleet arriving in system, standby for composition. Deploy for siege. Under no circumstances are you to lower the spaceport’s Field.”
While Quilland set Diettinger’s orders in motion, First Rank returned to Fighter Rank Severin. “Enemy fleet status”
“Capital ships’ Fields have gone up.” An automatic and expected result of a ship being attacked while her crew was still in Jump Lag. “Enemy ships still emerging, First Rank…ten light cruisers…twenty destroyers…six troop transports…”
Six troop transports? His force on Tanith could not hold out for long against that level of reinforcement; without Fomoria’s aerospace support they would inevitably be overwhelmed. Unless…
“Fighter Rank, break off attack on the capital ships and engage transports. Override the targeting sensors on half of the mines and guide them to the transports.”
“Affirm.”
There was nothing to do but wait, now. In minutes, the human norms aboard the first wave would be recovering sufficiently to evade the mines and launch their own fighters. Severin’s voice came back a moment later.
“All enemy Fields up, First Rank. First wave maneuvering into fleet ops formation. Second wave beginning to maneuver. Enemy fighters emerging from carrier.”
“Mines?”
“Closing on all ships. Capitals taking hits…transports evading, First Rank.”
Evading? Then it hit him, of course they were evading. They bore no ca
rgo to reduce their maneuverability. They were not coming for the Borloi; the drug’s effect on human norms was so potent that there was more here than they could use in centuries. The real cargo of value on Tanith was the two divisions of trained fighting men, desperately needed by the Imperials, perhaps to fight the Saurons, perhaps to hold their crumbling Empire together as world after world used the war to declare their own independence.
“Fighter Rank Severin, break off and rendezvous at asteroid belt sector five. Do not attempt to engage.”
Diettinger made contact with Quilland once more and apprised him of the situation. “We will make a supply pass to your forces before removing to the asteroid belt. Until our own reinforcements arrive, mount only harassment attacks. You may expect greater effort on the part of the Imperials to seize the spaceport. Whatever happens, the borloi must be retained.”
“Understood.” Quilland answered.
Diettinger broke the connection.
He turned to Second Rank, who was watching him with an utterly indefinable look.
Well, Diettinger thought, at least now my request for reinforcements can’t be called misuse of resources. That ought to make her happy.
The Imperial Eleventh Fleet was less than an hour behind as Fomoria finished her supply drop at Tanith and prepared for the seven-G dash to the safety of the asteroids.
“Status of Tanith patrol ships?” Diettinger asked.
“One Chinthe shadowing us, First Rank. Strela and second destroyer rendezvousing with Imperial Fleet.
“And the Königsberg?”
“Still drifting at .001 gravity, no emissions. Effectively dead in space, First Rank.”
Diettinger nodded. “Good. Make for the belt; fire on the Chinthe until she’s vapor, or driven off.”
II
For two days, the Imperials hunted the Fomoria and her prize ship, the captured Canada; the deadly game frustrated each time by the asteroid belt. On Tanith, the Sauron troops and their Cyborg support held off the Imperial ground forces with almost insulting ease. The Tanith troops were far from inept. It was simply that there were so many Cyborgs. Imperial ground forces usually encountered the Super Soldiers as special forces units, or ad hoc groups integrated with Sauron allies for support duty, or with regular Sauron Soldiers for a breakthrough, and regular Soldiers were hard enough to contain.