Dirge

by Foster, Alan Dean;

  "They don't colonize. They told us that from the first." Fouad tried to divide her attention between the clustered general staff, the view tridee before her and its accompanying heads-up displays, and the lugubrious sage standing next to her seat. "It was one of the reasons their complicity in the massacre was so hard for so many to accept."

  "They're not just homebodies. They're fanatical about the Twin Worlds. Except for occasional excursions to places like Earth and Hivehom, and deviate adventures such as Tree-trunk, they do not leave their home system. Not only are they not colonizers, they are not big on straightforward exploration. They simply do not like to leave home."

  "Which means what? You do have a point, don't you?"

  "I think so. What I am trying to say is that all the energy, and effort, and advanced technological development we have put into spreading ourselves outward, they have focused inward."

  She frowned and idly adjusted the neural jack above her left ear that allowed her direct communication with the rest of the armada, her own staff, and the Wellington's intelligence center. "So you're saying that...?"

  A little anxious himself now, Levi interrupted her in order to state the thought. "Everything we have put into offense, they may have concentrated on defense."

  It was not long thereafter that the Wellington was rocked by explosion and near catastrophe, and the armada found itself fully and desperately engaged.

  Extending in their respective orbits outward from Pitar's star were three worlds of various mien, none suitable for permanent habitation. Then the closely aligned planets numbered four and five, the Twin Worlds of the Pitarian Dominion. Between the fifth planet and the sixth, which happened also to be the first of four gas giants, was not one but two asteroid belts. While one lay in the normal plane of the ecliptic, the second occupied an orbit almost perpendicular to the first. Among this mass of planetary debris were a good many planetoidal objects of considerable size.

  Every one of which had been transformed by the Pitar into an armed and shielded attack-and-support station.

  In those first lunatic moments frantic commands ricocheted between ships at the speed of light. Humans and their machines slipped instantly into battle mode, each functioning efficiently and effectively. In this it was difficult to say who had the greater advantage. Machines offered speed and reliability, humans the ability to improvise in response to the unexpected. Organic and inorganic had spent several hundred years evolving in tandem to perfect the art of combat.

  On the other hand, in spite of the unprecedented ferocity of the human assault and despite all their racial introspection and paranoia, the Pitar did not fold up and slink quietly back to their homeworlds.

  Interstellar space is unimaginably vast. Even between planets there is room enough to lose a thousand ships. But the physics that can follow the tracks of tiny comets and minuscule asteroids are also adept at locating the operational drives designed to push vessels through space-plus. And a vessel that is propelled by anything less takes months to journey from one planetary body to another.

  So while humans and Pitar swam in inky nothingness, their respective machines utilized far more sensitive instruments than eyes and ears to plot each other's courses. Every time a ship of the armada attempted to pass within the orbits of the intersecting asteroid belts it found itself confronted by two or more Pitarian warcraft. Each human vessel was parsecs from -home while support for the defending ships was, astronomically speaking, an eye blink away.

  And the Pitar were capable. Avoiding confrontation wherever possible, they concentrated exclusively on countering any approach to the Twin Worlds. Initially, fear of active counterattack dominated much of the general staff's strategic thinking. As the days became weeks and the weeks months it became clear that Pitarian tactics included such thrusts only insofar as they related to their defense. No attempt was made, even by a single suicidal ship, to threaten Earth or any of the colony worlds. Everything the Pitar had, every armed vessel they could throw into the conflict, remained close to home. Not one ventured beyond the Pitarian heliosphere.

  The attacking humans tried everything. When a deliberate concentration of forces in one place was met by an energetic and equivalent Pitarian response, the battle planners went to the opposite extreme by suggesting an attempted englobement of one of the Twin Worlds. Reacting aggressively and quickly, the Pitar promptly dispersed their forces in precisely the most opportune fashion to counter the widespread assault. Probes of sectors presumed weak were beaten back by Pitarian forces of unexpected strength.

  Missiles launched at the fifth world were detected, tracked, intercepted and destroyed. The residents of the Dominion suffered no casualties as a result of the invasion of their system. Requests to parley were met with strident animosity. It became clear that while humans had originally taken an immediate liking to the Pitar, the humanoid aliens felt very differently about their smaller mammalian counterparts. This did not take the form of outright loathing: The Pitar were too courtly for that. It was more on the order of a general contempt for the human species as a whole. The Pitar would not talk, would not discuss any sort of armistice with the lowly humans, until every last ship of the armada had left the sacred system of the Twin Worlds.

  It didn't matter, since they refused to apologize for what they had done on Treetrunk or discuss handing over those responsible. One Pitar spoke for all, and all Pitar spoke for one. Admitting no guilt, they therefore dispersed it among themselves and repeatedly commanded the disgusting, detestable invading beings to depart, as their very presence constituted a corruption in the sight of the hallowed Dominion.

  Their attitude helped Levi and his colleagues to unravel the rationale behind many prior enigmas: why no embassy had been allowed to open on either of the Twin Worlds, for example, and why visits to the Dominion had been prohibited. It had nothing to do with racial shyness or reticence. The Pitar were not coy - they were overbearing. Nasty, uncouth humans could not be allowed to defile the purity of the homeworlds.

  To what end their plundering force had removed the reproductive organs of thousands of human females from Tree-trunk continued to remain a mystery. Here it was left to an admixture of Levi's people and researching biologists to speculate on possible reasons. Many were put forth, some fantastic, not a few revolting. Among the facts that were assembled in the ongoing attempt to build an explanation was the realization that from the moment the Pitar had been contacted until the day when the armada had emerged from space-plus on the outskirts of the Dominion, no one had ever seen a Pitarian child.

  Had some factor still unknown, psychological or biological, caused them to stop reproducing? In carrying out the atrocity on Treetrunk, were they seeking a means for ensuring the continuation of their species? Had that means been found and implemented, and if so, did humankind really want to be informed of the methodology? Many people on Earth and elsewhere had relatives who had perished in the extermination of intelligent life on Argus V. Levi and his colleagues were not so sure that they would be happier or otherwise better off to learn precisely what had happened to some of their deceased relations.

  Certainly the Pitar did nothing to enlighten their attackers. Even tentative requests for explanations were dismissed out of hand. They would not talk, coldly refusing all attempts at communication with what they could now openly admit to regarding as an inferior life-form. Levi and the rest of the scientists and researchers who accompanied the armada grew increasingly frustrated. The uniformed masses who crewed the ships labored under no such mental strain. Some of them, too, had lost friends or kin on Treetrunk. Their interests were much more focused: They did not need to understand; all they wanted to do was kill Pitar.

  Five months into the attack the ships of the armada and their frustrated personnel began to be rotated. New ships arrived from Earth and the colonies crewed by eager, fresh enlistees.

  They opposed an enemy whose soldiers faced no long journeys through space-plus, who could find ease and relaxation w
ithin a day's flight of their duty station. In battle they found themselves confronting concentrations of ships that could be quickly and easily repaired and restocked. It was the classic battlefield situation of an overextended attacker trying to break down the defenses of a determined and well-entrenched enemy, translocated to an interstellar environment.

  Eight months passed without any change in the line of battle. The Pitar would not permit a single human vessel of any size to cross beyond the orbits of the intersecting asteroid belts. The attacking humans would not give up. Determination and not skill or strategy became the defining factor on both sides.

  While ships might stand still, weapons research did not. For every new means of attack the humans refined and threw into combat, the Pitar developed a counter. High-energy beams were met with high-energy deflectors. Subatomic particle guns designed to disrupt communications on board opposing vessels were intercepted and shunted harmlessly into space-plus by low-power versions of deep-space drives. Larger, faster missiles were met with small interceptors that were faster and more agile still. Space was filled with the scattering of shattered matter from fusion weapons that never reached their intended targets.

  Now and then a ship engaged in skirmishing would take a hit, suffering damage or on rare occasions, implosion. At such moments hundreds, even thousands of lives would be snuffed out of existence, vanishing into the icy limbo of the void. Each such loss made the Pitar more intractable and the humans more unforgiving.

  Finally admitting after ten months of failed attack that they were unable to break through the defenses of the Dominion, the general staff debated how best to proceed. Breaking off the offensive was unthinkable: Now spread across a number of worlds, humankind would not hear of it. Ending the confrontation would imply that the Pitar had won, that they had consummated their barbarism without suffering any penalty. Such an abomination could not be tolerated.

  It was remarked that while no human warship had been able to reach either of the Pitar homeworlds, neither had any of the aliens' craft been able to travel a sufficiently safe distance from those twin planets to safely engage its full drive and make the jump to space-plus. Trapped in the glare of human vigilance, the Pitar were effectively confined to their homeworlds. Other species, however, were not.

  On the face of it, the notion of a blockade in space seemed unworkable. Even the comparatively tiny distances between planets allowed ample room for a ship to enter into or emerge from space-plus. Once back in normal space, however, any and every such vessel was vulnerable.

  The word was passed, though not without trepidation. How would neutral intelligences such as the Quillp react to being banned from an entire system with which they had no quarrel? More importantly, how would the combative and powerful AAnn react to a unilateral attempt to restrict their access to a people with whom they enjoyed amicable if not affectionate relations?

  Before such a tactic could be tried, it was the turn of the diplomats to go on the offensive. The Quillp were puzzled. But while the ornithorps were expansionists, colonizing empty worlds in the manner of humankind, they were by nature inherently unaggressive. As might have been expected, the Unop-Patha wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the ongoing conflict, preferring to stay as far away from both the arrogant Pitar and the demonstrably demented humans as possible. Several minor species, each confined to a single inhabitable world, were not important enough to enter into the equation.

  Among known intelligences with enough strength to affect the balance, that left the AAnn and the thranx. The insectoids were not only amenable to the pronouncement, but had from the start been quietly supportive of the human attack on the Dominion.

  The AAnn were more difficult to factor. Following intense lobbying by human diplomats, they agreed not to send any of their vessels into the Pitarian system until the military impasse there had been resolved in favor of one side or the other. Their understanding was marked by repeated thranx warnings to the effect that if the Pitar should succeed in seriously degrading humankind's military capability, it would not be past the AAnn to take advantage of the situation. In such an event, probing AAnn attacks on one or more human colonies could reasonably be anticipated.

  The world council and the general staff separately advised the distressed thranx that even in the event of an unanticipated catastrophic human defeat in battle, sufficient forces had been held in reserve to ensure the safety of Earth and every one of its colonies. The thranx accepted this reassurance with a certain aplomb, but remained privately watchful and troubled. It was wonderful to observe the passionate confidence displayed by the humans, but confidence had never been of much use against the AAnn.

  With every species that could possibly be impacted having been contacted and dealt with, the general staff formally announced the imposition of the blockade. Safe and assured on their twin homeworlds, the Pitar were neither impressed nor intimidated. Tens of thousands of individuals on hundreds of ships actively supported by the populations of multiple worlds maintained and strengthened the stalemate.

  It was not a static standoff. From time to time specially designated components of the blockading human fleet would attempt to penetrate the seemingly immutable Pitarian defenses. Each time, utilizing newly conceived tactics and weaponry, their crews would set off full of faith and in high spirits. Each time they would return, thwarted and dispirited. And there were those terrible times when some did not return at all.

  Wars of attrition are not always won by the besiegers, no matter how resourceful and resolved. Having nowhere to go, no hidden retreat, no refuge held in reserve, the Pitar fought with incredible tenacity and determination. Though their ships would hurl themselves entire, crew and all, into an enemy attacking pattern in order to disrupt it and preserve possession of a seemingly minor, insignificant asteroid, they would not commit a single vessel to an attack. Their philosophy of war was wholly defensive, to protect the twin homeworlds at all cost but not to otherwise directly challenge an invader.

  The members of the armada's commanding general staff were rotated along with enlisted personnel and low-ranking civilian affiliates, but they were united in their frustration. As one admiral put it, the blockade was war conducted entirely under cover of night, where night covered nothing. There could be no surprise attacks launched on an alerted, technologically sophisticated species. Instrumentation that never slept saw to that. Mind could only do so much before it was necessary for machine to take over. For a soldier it was hard to sustain the energy and alertness demanded of a fight with an enemy one could not see. Even the enemy's worlds were no more than another bright couple of points of light in the galactic sky.

  Yet no one thought of giving up. Treetrunk could not be forgotten. Even so, despite the comparative recentness of the outrage, it was already starting to fade a little in the minds of a small but growing segment of the population. The media strove to maintain interest, but a blockade is not like a series of dramatic encounters in space. The battle for control of stasis did not play as well on the evening tridee as an invasion.

  Something had to be done. Something had to happen to change the unacceptable status quo, and both military and civilian strategists realized that in that regard sooner would be better than later. By now more than a year had passed since the Wellington and the rest of the armada had entered the system of the Pitarian Dominion to the cheers and vengeful shouts of the majority of humankind. Almost that much time had passed since there had been any perceptible change in that status. In the interim, the cheers had given way to grudging acceptance of the blockade, and the vengeful shouts to orchestrated growl-ings of support. The military was aware of the threat of germinating discontent, but there was nothing more they could do than what they were already doing.

  Others, however, had different ideas.

  Chapter 19

  Why should we help them any more than we already have? Why should the hives, cruk!ck, get involved?"

  "Yes," another member of the circle agreed. "Th
ere is no compelling reason for putting thranx lives at risk." Leaning back, the speaker raised all four hands in order to gesture simultaneously. "These humans do not even like us!"

  "I can just see," still a third sarcastically declared, "these humans risking their own lives to aid us if the situation were reversed. Put them in a tunnel with only us facing danger, and they will turn and run the other way."

  When the dissenters had had their say, the Tri-Eint Debreljinav activated the pickup before her and was respectfully conceded queen's dominance. Since the advent of hormonal extracts that had enabled any thranx female to lay fertile eggs, the lineage of hereditary queendom had vanished from thranx civilization. Subsequent to the enforced abdication of procreative royalty, many heraldic vestiges of those primitive times had assumed highly formalized places in thranx culture. One such was the rotating speaking position of queen's dominance.

  No member of the Grand Council was more respected than Debreljinav. Not many were older; few were as perceptive. Chosen leader of both the hive Jin and the clan Av, she had advanced to the exalted position of eint at an unusually early age, retaining the post while acquiring honor and prestige over the years. Now she could rise no higher, being one of those the great mass hive of thranx had chosen to govern not only Hivehom but the colony worlds as well.

  "It is clear what benefits accrue to us if we remain neutral, like the Quillp. But what might we lose by doing so, and what more might we gain by becoming actively involved?"

  An eint seated among the opposition responded without hesitation. "We lose nothing because we have nothing to gain." Sympathetic stridulation by those of like mind momentarily filled the room with the din of a hundred improperly tuned violas.

  "Nothing?" a supporter of intervention argued. "We have cordial relations with the humans. Aiding them in their war would, if not make formal allies of them, leave them in our debt. When the next serious confrontation with the AAnn arises - and make no mistake, it will arise - we will be able to call upon these tumultuous mammals for assistance. Just the ability to do that will give even the most belligerent among the emperor's court pause."