by Wil McCarthy
“Sorry,” Ranes told her, ducking his head. “Had to visit the stroom, you know?” He turned toward Colonel Jhee and nodded. “Colonel. Nice to see you again.”
The colonel favored Ranes with a typically disapproving look. “Lieutenant.”
A short, beige-skinned man, the colonel had been born and raised in Burma, one of Earth's southeast Asian republikai. That was, she felt sure, the reason for his being so... whatever he was. Marshe had heard things about that part of the planet.
“You must be Corporal Jonson,” Jhee said, extending a hand out toward the new Drone. Jonson looked at the hand for a moment, as if it were a control he'd never learned to use, then reached out uncertainly and shook it.
“Nice to meet you, sir.” He said.
“Yes,” the colonel agreed, withdrawing his hand. He turned to Marshe. “It seems your hexagon is now complete, Captain. I expect—”
Marshe straightened. “Colonel, please. A hexagon is a geometrical figure, not a family group. We are a Six. Aggressor Six. How many times do I have to tell you that?”
“Talbott,” the colonel warned, “This is my project, and insubordination is punishable by death. I expect—”
“It's my project!” She snapped, suddenly furious at this small, self-important man. “You've fought me every step of the way. You want a tactical think-tank? Fine. I'm working on it. You want a band of toadying ass-lickers? Too bad. It was my proposal that got you your stupid funding in the first place.”
The colonel stood very still. “Captain Talbott. I warn you that your current behavior is not acceptable. Nor, I think, typical of you. Perhaps the Broca device is interfering with your judgment?”
Marshe bit back another tart reply, paused, and snorted softly. “I'm quibbling over words,” she agreed, running a hand across her brow. “I'm sorry. But Colonel, we're not a hexagon. That kind of imprecision is exactly what we need to avoid. If we're going to get a handle on how the Waisters think, it's important that we not project our own prejudices onto them. I mean, they have four different sexes. If we just decided to refer to the Queens and Dogs as 'females', and the Drones and Workers as 'males', we'd be missing something very important.”
Colonel Jhee frowned. “Hmm. Your point is taken. However, your means of expression is not acceptable. I will ignore it this time, but consider yourself warned.”
Warned. What exactly did that mean, Marshe wondered. Would she be court-martialed the next time she raised her voice?
“Now,” the colonel went on, “Since your six is now complete, I expect you to begin performing your designated function. Anticipate the Waister tactics in the siege of Lalande. I want a full report by oh-nine-hundred tomorrow.”
“You're joking,” Marshe said after a moment's thought.
“No.”
“Colonel, we're still setting up, here. We're not prepared-”
“The Waisters are in Lalande system right now, Captain.” Jhee said, his voice cool. “They won't wait until you feel prepared. Do you know Glacia, the third moon of Tempestus? Its surface is mostly ice. Last night the Waisters liquefied it to a depth of a hundred meters, and let it refreeze. Seven million people are presumed dead.”
Marshe looked away.
“If you'll excuse me...” The colonel half-whispered. The door swished open, hesitated, swished shut again.
The room was silent for several seconds.
“What's wrong?” Asked Shenna, in her lilting dog-voder voice. She left Sipho Yeng's side and trotted over to Marshe. “What's wrong? What's wrong? Be happy.” She gave her tail a tentative wag.
“Oh, Shenna,” Marshe said, reaching down to scratch the top of the dog's head. “It's nothing you can help me with. I haven't been happy in years.”
~~~
“...the gravity wave spectrometers indicate the mass of the vehicle doesn't change as it accelerates,” Sipho Yeng was saying. He'd been talking for nearly an hour, now, and Marshe was having a hard time keeping up.
“Meaning what?” Asked Josev Ranes. He sounded lost, too, which relieved Marshe; as a Navy man, a navigator, Josev knew more about relativity than she ever would. If he didn't understand, then Sipho Yeng was in fact doing a poor job of explaining himself.
The astronomer looked surprised, and a little confused. “Well... it means that they're able to trade rest mass for relativistic mass on a one-for-one basis. And with their braking system, they're somehow able to convert the relativistic mass back into rest mass.”
“In Standard, please, Sipho,” Marshe said. Finally.
Yeng squirmed uncomfortably in his chair. “I really don't know that I can explain it more simply than this. They're, well, cheating, okay? Their drive motors produce a beam of coherent gamma rays by converting matter directly into energy. That's their exhaust. The old Colonial starships used matter-antimatter annihilation to achieve the same effect, though at much lower efficiency. A Compton lens was used to shield the forward portions of the ship, with the net effect that the gamma rays, which were not coherent, radiated in all directions except directly forward. This produced a differential which propelled the ship in a forward direction.”
Ranes was shaking his head. “The Waisters have the noodles to build a gamma ray laser, then. Right? That's all you're saying.”
“No,” Yeng replied with even greater irritation. “Listen carefully. They're converting matter into kinetic energy, using gamma rays as a mediator. Then, when they want to stop, they convert the kinetic energy back into matter. They're not obeying energy conservation laws; the gamma rays are free.”
“Oh!” Ranes said. He paused. “You're saying they'll never run out of fuel?”
“Well, not not in the time scale we're worried about. On the captured scoutship we found three tanks of liquid gallium which we believe to be the mass reservoirs for the propulsion system. They were about 90 percent full, which may indicate some gradual loss in the process.”
Marshe held up a hand. “Okay Sipho, thank you very much. I think that's all we need to hear about that. If you remember, my other question was about communications?”
The astronomer nodded sharply. “Ah. Yeah. The fact of FTL communication between the Waister ships is well documented, but unfortunately, it is not well understood. The ansible effect, with which I trust you're all familiar, works only between sites which are fixed in terms of short-term motion, and very widely spaced. Several light years, at least. And, of course, it requires that an ansible be placed more or less directly between the two communication sites.
“Somehow, the Waisters are able to send instantaneous signals from ship to ship while moving relativistically. According to our understanding of relativity, this should make it possible for them to transmit messages backward in time, though in fact we have no evidence that they are doing this.”
“Hold it,” Ranes protested. “You said they came from Alnilam, right?”
“Ah, no. I said Alnilam was the closest star they could have come from unless they made a very dramatic course change before the dispersal maneuver.”
Ken Jonson, Marshe's new Drone, raised a hand uncertainly. He looked quite lost. “Um... Sipho, that's the third time you've mentioned this dispersal maneuver. I don't know what that is.”
“Oh.” The astronomer scratched his chin for several seconds, as though he were resetting brain controls. “Astronomers at Sirius observed a radiant phenomenon in the waist of Orion approximately fifteen months before the arrival of the scout group. Astronomers at Wolf 359 observed the same phenomenon about six years later, and were attacked by a second scout group twenty three months after that. This is all reconstructed, of course; the fact that Sirius didn't have an ansible complicates matters.”
Complicates matters? Marshe snorted. The Colonial period had ended suddenly, its economic collapse leaving the Sirius ansible half-constructed. If someone in the past four centuries had thought to finish the job, the rest of the humanity would have had an extra six years' warning that the Waisters were coming. As
it was, Wolf 359 was completely unprepared for their attack. The inhabitants of Sol and the other colonies watched in horror as, over a period of five months, the Wolf system was scoured clean of human life.
Marshe remembered when she'd first heard the news. She'd been on her way out to meet some friends, her brain buzzing with the excitement of being twenty-six years old, unemployed, and in love. Her father had called just as she was leaving, and had explained, in his brutally direct way, that a mysterious, alien force was attacking the Wolf colony. Marshe had gone out anyway, the news not really hitting deep until she'd arrived at the club, to find it nearly deserted. She'd called her fiancé then, gone to his apart, spent the evening consoling him and being consoled. Next morning, they'd marched together to the UAS offices and enlisted. Three weeks after that, their orders came through, separating them forever, and Marshe's own, personal loss had brought forth the tears that all humanity's suffering could not summon.
She remembered, also, the time two years later, when the radio transmissions from Sirius had arrived like the punchline of a very, very bad joke. Jubilation, at first, the discovery of alien intelligence. The first cries of outrage had followed quickly, and then there had been terror, and finally, in the end, silence.
“At any rate,” Yeng went on, oblivious to the horror of what he'd just said, “By correlating the times and exact positions of these two observations we've been able to determine the point in space at which the phenomenon occurred, which turns out to be twenty light years out on a straight line between Sol and Alnilam. The current theory is that the Waister ships had been traveling as a single convoy until this time, at which point they dispersed, forming two scout groups and two armadas. The scout group which we destroyed last month, and the armada which is currently en route to Sol, are thought to be the same ones that attacked Sirius ten years ago. Lalande's scout group and armada are thought to be the ones that attacked Wolf 359.”
“Hey!” Snapped Josev. “I was trying to make a point. Let's say the Waisters came from Alnilam, okay? That's twelve hundred light years away. Our first radio signals didn't reach them until, like, about two hundred years ago.”
“Yes,” Yeng agreed, raising an eyebrow.
“They only travel at point-nine-cee, right? There you go! They had to have sent a message backward in time. No other way they could get here so quick.”
“Ah, yes,” Yeng said. “That's certainly one theory. However, it's more likely that human activity here in Sol system produced an FTL signal of some sort, perhaps in the early space age, which alerted the Waisters to our presence. Alternatively, they may possess the equivalent of a Faster-Than-Light telescope. If they really could send messages backward in time, then they could have warned themselves, for example, about the destruction of the scout group, and then taken steps to prevent it from happening.”
“Maybe they have,” Josev suggested. “Maybe the timeline we're on is about to be erased.”
Yeng smiled thinly. “Perhaps. But I think we'd do better to assume otherwise, and continue to fight the war. Ah?”
“Okay,” Josev said. “That's true. But maybe it's like the ansible effect. Maybe they can only send backwards-time messages over very large distances, so in this case it wouldn't work.”
Marshe raised her hand again. She'd been swinging her head from Sipho to Josev and back again, like a spectator at a tennis match, and she was getting tired of it. “I think you're reaching,” she told Josev. “You're stubborn, you like to argue. That's good sometimes, but don't let it slow us down, okay? Those aren't bad ideas, we shouldn't rule them out, but let's concentrate for now on the likelier alternatives.”
“I'm hungry,” Shenna complained.
“We'll eat later, Shenna,” Marshe said, a little too harshly. “We've very busy right now.”
“Not busy,” said Shenna. “Sitting. Sitting is not busy.”
Yeng put a hand on Shenna's head. “Hush, little one. We're talking, and that's very important.”
Marshe nodded gratefully. Let the Workers handle the Dog. That was proper. And speaking of Workers... “Roland, you've been even quieter than usual. I presume you have something useful to contribute?”
Roland Hanlin looked up, as if surprised at the sound of his own name. Looking at her for a moment, he shrugged. His gaze returned to the holie screens.
“I'm talking to you, Worker Two. You're Ordnance. Why don't you tell us what weapons the Waisters used against Glacia?”
Hanlin looked at her again. “You saw it as well as I,” he said, with his thick Cerean accent. The words seemed to be forced out of him, like coughs. “They turned their tails to the moon and slagged it with their drive motors.”
“Did they?” Marshe asked. “I didn't see that. How powerful are those beams?”
“They push a starship at ninety gee's, don't they? Two, three hundred terawatts I'd say. Hundred thousand times more than our largest gunboat laser.”
“That must be a standard tactic,” Josev Ranes cut in. “On the scouting raids they fly in backwards, with the drive motors on. Anything in their path gets pretty well vaporized. That's what happened to Nysa. We flew by it on the Century City about five weeks ago, so I got a real good look. Most of the asteroid was just sheared away. There's just this little nubby bit left, and one end of it's all shiny and smooth, like a mirror.
“It's a good defense against natural obstacles, but of course when we attacked we threw the sand across their path, not directly into it. Splat! No time to get out of the way.”
“Okay,” Marshe said. “Thank you Roland. Thank you Josev. What does this mean to us? We're the Waisters, we have this weapon. It doesn't always work, and we know that now. So what do we do? Anybody.”
“Doesn't matter in this case,” said Josev. “We're not moving fast enough for it to be a problem. Same thing is true when we get to Sol. The armadas come in slow, keeping inside the ecliptic plane. We just fan out and march through the system, like we did at Wolf and Sirius.”
“Okay,” Marshe said, picking up the tempo. “That's what I want to hear. What else do we do? Do we spit sand again? No, we can't, can we. We're not moving fast enough for that to be destructive.”
Josev swept a finger across the room. “Nyiiiiiik! We use our disintegration beams.”
Marshe nodded to Roland. “Worker Two?”
“Limited range,” Roland said, after a reluctant pause. “We need to close wi' the targets one at a time.”
“Hmm. And there are a lot of targets. How much range do we have with the drive motors? How quickly can we reorient them?”
“Careful,” said Sipho Yeng. “The higher we turn up the gamma rays, the faster we accelerate away from our target. At non-propulsive intensities, the beams wouldn't be destructive past a few light-seconds.”
“Okay,” Marshe said. “We do need to be close, then. It sounds to me like we really just sweep through the system, end to end, picking targets as we go.”
“That meshes with the Waister strategies at Wolf and Sirius,” Josev agreed. “We get plenty of time to gloat over each little victory.”
Through the corner of her eye, Marshe saw Ken Jonson wince at that remark.
“Did you have something to say, Drone Two?” She asked, turning to face the young man who sat beside her.
Jonson seemed to wither beneath her gaze, bowing his head, hunching his shoulders, drawing his feet up under the chair. His eyes glazed over, a bit, as if looking at something far away. Marshe wondered, with a kind of sick fascination, what it was he was seeing.
“Kenneth?” She prompted gently.
“Ma'am,” he said, with visible effort. “That's not right, what Josev just said. They don't gloat. They don't... they're not angry at us.”
“And what makes you say that?”
Jonson looked up, then looked down again when he saw that all eyes were on him. “You're from Earth, right?” He said. “You've seen wild animals. You can't read their thoughts, but you can always see what they're feeling
from their body language. Fear, anger, curiosity... Even animals that are very different from us. Even sea slugs.”
Marshe placed a hand on Jonson's shoulder, and was surprised to find him physically trembling. What the hell had they done to this man? “Go on,” she said.
“The Drones were the aggressive ones, of course, but they were very, uh, calm about it. Sort of resigned, actually. The others, were more...” His voice trailed away, and moments later a series of gasps took its place.
Marshe rose from her chair, noting that Sipho and Josev were doing likewise. But the young corporal waved her away, waved the whole of reality away. “I'm sorry,” he whispered. She saw tears dripping from his tightly closed eyes. “I really can't do this. I really can't.”
She felt sympathy rising through her like a flood. This man was in torment, how could she be doing this to him? But sympathy was worse than useless here, she knew. Sympathy was a drain on valuable resources. An unpleasant fact, certainly, but Marshe Talbott knew her job.
“CORPORAL!” She bellowed. The fingers which rested on Jonson's shoulder curled themselves into claws, digging into the flesh, dragging him back where he belonged.
A jolt ran through the man's body, almost as if he'd been hit with a defibrillator. His eyes snapped open, looked wildly at her. “WHAT!” He cried, jerking himself away. “What! What do you want me to do?”
She fed him an icy glare. “I don't want to see that again, do you understand me? When I ask you a question, I expect you to answer it. If you fade out on me, I'll just slap your face and ask you again.”
Jonson leaned even farther away from her, and brushed at the tears on his cheeks as though they burned.
“Go easy,” said Josev Ranes.
“Shut up, Lieutenant,” she told him without looking. Then, to Jonson: “Are you listening to me?”
The corporal nodded several times in quick succession. “Yeah,” he said. He was still rubbing his eyes.
“Go take a shower. Be back here in ten minutes.”
“Yeah,” he said again. After a few moments, he staggered up out of his chair and started moving toward his quarters.