Conflict!

by Dale Moorhouse

  This was met with a sad smile from the Weasel who was now the acting president of the Confederation Council. She said, “I would know more of you who can be so ruthless with your enemies and yet can show such compassion, even to those who unwittingly aided them through inaction.”

  I nodded my head and replied, “In the great reckoning of all acts, there will be very few of us found not having committed wrongs, especially me.”

  The executions began almost immediately and were quick. Each Squid had a small explosive charge fixed to the transparent dome of its suit, and as it was cast into space, the small supply of atmosphere was torn from the side of its suit. When all had been launched, there was a small flash from each dome as the charge detonated and shattered it. The small amount of atmosphere remaining in the suit worked to propel the Squids free where each could be seen as they froze and shattered as they bumped into each other.

  Mother of Glory fired her engines for a short burn that moved her away from the scene of execution and our shuttle chased after her and docked a few centas later. When I got back aboard, the Elders were waiting for me. They bowed slightly and moved away with Elders One and Three pausing for a moment giving me signals of condolence. When they had left Ginger and Elaine came up to me, each grabbed a hand.

  “Let us get you back to headquarters where you can shuck your armour. Then we are going to Jacky and Ishmael’s to meet Tuxedo. This is not a time for you to be alone,” I heard Ginger say. When I looked at Elaine, she nodded and said, “What she said.” Serena, who had accompanied me on the shuttle, said privately, “Come on, Dad. You will feel better being with those who love you, and you know it.”

  I replied, “Yes, you are right, daughter.”

  She chuckled.

  I decided to take downtime the next cycle and Elaine, and I, accompanied by Tuxedo, Ginger and our escorts, went forward on the spine to an area where Elaine and I had never been. Out in the first section of Mother of Glory is a unique park next to some fields on an agricultural deck. What makes this park unique is it is the largest and has mostly Terran trees, shrubs and flowers that have been sent to us or brought aboard by immigrants who wanted to bring something special with them.

  When we got there, I was astounded to see what amounted to a forest growing on a deck that two-hundred metres above it to what I thought was a black painted deck above until I saw Mother of Vengeance pass over us on her way back to her normal station ten degrees behind us. There were lights periodically on the ground, but none above and Tuxedo explained, “This part of the ship is on a cycle that mimics a day on Terra. This is the night portion of the cycle, and if we sit very quietly, we will see some of the animals that have been transported here.

  Tuxedo spread a large blanket on the ground. We sat or reclined on it, and after a few centas, we could hear stirrings in the trees and shadows fly overhead. One let out a hoot as it passed over then suddenly dived to the ground catching a mouse or other small rodent in its talons. I could hear it squeaking as the owl flew to a nearby tree. In the darkness, I could hear some low chirping and realized the owl had nestlings and was hunting to feed them.

  As I was taking all this in Tux touched my shoulder and silently pointed to the meadow, and when I followed his finger, a small doe came out of the forest and began grazing. That sight, more than any other, reminded me of what I was fighting for and what I didn’t want to see destroyed. The simple but elegant dance of nature was unveiled before my eyes. I felt more alive and connected to my spirit and those around me than I had since I came aboard.

  When the doe wandered back into the forest, I heard Tuxedo say, “I found this place a while back and was asked not to mention it or bring you here until you were losing your way. Johnny told me you would need to regain your grounding at some point, and he spent considerable time and effort, putting this little bit of paradise together for you. I’ve been coming here off and on for over a hundred cycles now. I like it most at night because it forces me to use all of my senses to appreciate the beauty and peace of this place.

  “On many occasions, I’ve come here to watch the cats play amongst the trees. They are very careful not to hunt or disturb the wildlife here. Many come to look at it and doze where there is nothing to disturb them and little that can harm them. They usually don’t come at night when the owls are hunting, and when they do, they come in groups and watch over each other.”

  We stayed for a couple of decas and napped and watched and napped some more, and I finally felt like my spirit was recharging. I knew I would be coming back here many times, and I also knew I would be searching for a place like it. I could call my own when the war was over, assuming I survived. I also knew I was going to have a long talk with Elaine about our future and hoped she would agree it was what she wanted as well.

  It was almost time for our evening meal, so we started back and finally ended up at Benji’s Place for dinner. Benji was behind the bar tonight and had our drinks on the table before we even got to our booth. He went back to the bar and when his relief man came in returned with a beaker of ale and joined us for a few centas. After another ale, we decided to order and commed the barman with our order and had a pleasant meal.

  34

  PIOTR BAER COMMED EARLY THE next morning to let me know he was making progress interrogating the strange alien found with the Squids. He really had nothing to add to what we had gotten from the Squids, and he seemed relieved, almost grateful when he heard the Squids he and his friends had been with had been executed.

  After another cycle of showing the creature various items and demonstrating movements and actions, Piotr was able to compile a dictionary of a few hundred words and began ferreting information out of him. After a full cycle of questioning and testing the answers, he came to the conclusion the creature was a clone of a few the Squids had found on a small planet in a system they had passed through many thousands of kilocycles before. The Squids took several thousand of them aboard placing a few hundred in stasis before eating the rest. Periodically the Squids would revive a few, clone them and then place them back in stasis. The Squids would take a few with them when they went on missions and consume them one at a time, feeding the survivors scraps from their mates until it was time to consume them too. My esteem for the Squids dropped considerably.

  When I played Piotr’s record of his talks with the Droumb, as the alien named his species, to Livid and his associates he admitted his kind ate flesh from creatures they brought with them and cloned. But he told me, “These are creatures from the oceans of my home planet that are not sentient and are the equivalent of fish on Terra.”

  Blue Point and Long Arm confirmed Livid’s declaration with Blue Point adding, “There are a great many things we have done in the name of survival but nothing as despicable as consuming the flesh of thinking or reasoning creatures even when we were at our hungriest. These other Squids, the rebels, are deranged and no longer considered part of our species. I suspect that our past Confederation president and its associates may have suffered from the same mental malady as the rebels. If we had its remains, we might be able to confirm that, but it is too late for that now.”

  I thanked Piotr for his diligence and success in learning to communicate with the Droumb, and he smiled and said, “I am happy I was able to help. When we next go into battle, I would ask that you search some of the surviving Plague ships for more of these poor creatures. From what I’ve been able to glean from this one, they are highly social and don’t do well for long in isolation. Unfortunately, this Droumb will most likely die of starvation in the next few cycles. They don’t voluntarily eat their own. He told me he would rather starve to death now that he is free of the Squids and their mental conditioning that forced him to eat his kind.”

  “Perhaps Livid can help out with that,” I replied, “maybe what ever Livid eats will work for the Droumb as well. I’ll ask.”

  After Piotr left, I went down to the isolation cells and asked him how often they ate and what kinds of fo
od and drink they preferred. He told me and said, “If you place him in one of these cells, the food replicator should be able to create something he can consume that will sustain him. If I can speak with him, perhaps I can persuade him that I’m not like the rebels, and then I could teach him to use the replicator so he can feed himself.”

  “It is worth a try,” I said. I commed Piotr and relayed the conversation to him, and he replied, “It might work. I can come back and enter his cell then work with him to find foods he can eat. Will Livid give me the codes to use on the replicator?”

  “Oh, I think it will. Come on back to the brig and let’s give it a try.”

  A half deca later the Droumb was eating and drinking like it was his last meal. He had a taste for a particular type of fish-like creature from Livid’s home-world and liked water infused with a small amount of methane. He also loved kerosene, but it made him drunk and gave him a hangover. His minders would make sure to limit his consumption of it—his vomit was horrible smelling, and the smell stuck to everything in the cell.

  Planning for the strike on swarm three continued for another cycle. We began harassing attacks against the swarm while we assembled the armada we would be sending against them.

  Pilots who had been stood down to recover from wounds or mental exhaustion were slowly being rotated back into squadrons and flights along with new and untested pilots, including my friend, Pete Sandusky. Pete was presently in Sol Rosenblum's command and was demonstrating his abilities on virtually every training mission. Sol planned to promote him after he had a couple of sorties under his belt and to that end took him along on Tiger when Missy went on a raid with a hundred other carriers. Missy had taken over Tiger when Ginger had been bumped up to senior commander and took Thermopylae as her flag ship.

  ◆◆◆

  Ginger

  I led the strike from Thermopylae with a small task force called TF-50 in a raid that taught us two things, more of the rebel Squids had been revived and were actively directing the swarm defence, and either the Squid collaborators had been able to give the swarm more info about FTL than we thought or the rebel Squids had been closer to developing their own flavour of FTL than the friendly Squids had been when our Terran and Mmrrreeowwn scientists started working with them.

  The raid lasted two cycles. While reasonably successful, success came at a price. The Plague managed to hold their own through the first cycle, and neither side had lost many ships. The next, cycle the aggressiveness of the Plague ramped up. Several harvesters made suicide runs against my carriers managing to find and ram them as they had dropped in close to the swarm to launch their bombers and Swift Fangs. We quickly countered that by keeping the carriers back and having the bombers and Fangs short-jump in which required more fuel but protected the carriers, so the bombers had a place to come home to. We were down to seventy-three carriers when we finally stopped taking losses of the big ships.

  I had no idea that our AI Swift Fangs could feel such loyalty towards our task force until they went after one of the trios with a vengeance, coordinating their attacks with our AI fighters who flew interference and generally kept the defending harvesters busy. One of the Swift Fangs was able to short-jump into the relatively empty space between the three globe ships and launched four Cracker-3s against them before a lucky shot from one of the harvesters girdled to a globe ship cut it in two. The AI touched off its remaining Cracker-3s.

  The four missiles it launched managed to penetrate the gig hatch at the “front” of a couple of the globe ships and MIRV warheads deployed. Two ticks later both globe ships disappeared in a massive explosion that took the third member of the trio and many of the harvesters in the immediate area with them. The swarm was so disorganized for a few ticks our AI ships were able to use the same tactics successfully against two more trios before the swarm developed countermeasures that included the forting up tactic we had seen before.

  I ordered my forces to fall back, the bombers to rearm while the second wave took their place and the AI Swift Fangs with their fighter escorts continued to harass the Swarm occasionally picking off a harvester or two with each feint and strike. While the swarm was being kept busy, I lined up my armoured freighters for a drop-in visit to the remaining trios. We had used the tactic successfully before, and my pilots were game to try it again, especially since they would have an AI fighter escort to help divert the swarm’s attention.

  The attack was going well. The freighter pilots had jettisoned the covers to their pods holding the Cracker-3s, so all they had to worry about was firing the missiles and getting out of the area as soon as they were dry. The first ten ship string of freighters completed their runs and moved back to the fleet train to retrieve their pod doors when two things occurred. The target trio exploded, which had been our goal and a second trio developed a reddish haze around it and disappeared. Not an explosive disappearance but a slow fade into nothing sort of disappearance that made me thankful I was recording the raid.

  A second trio started to do the same fade, but something must have gone wrong because it reappeared only a few hundred kilometres from where we were staging the second string of armoured freighters for another attack. Several of the freighter pilots were quicker than their buddies and launched their missiles. There was no way the trio could get away from thousands of Cracker-3s that didn’t even have time to go FTL before they struck the three globe ships. When the explosions died down, we could see that area of space again. The three moon-sized ships were just floating glowing debris.

  The swarm was down to one trio, and I wasn’t about to stop now, so I ordered the rest of the armoured freighters that still had missiles to make their run against it. It tried to jump to FTL, but only one of the ships was able to do the full fade before our Crackers-3s finished the other two. The surviving missiles, joined by the ones launched earlier, proceeded to wreak havoc on the harvesters left behind by the escaping globe ships and our Swift Fangs and fighters killed off the rest in short order.

  It took the fleet train support ships two more cycles to clean up the area, converting the debris to reaction mass and loading it in the empty missile bins of our freighters while our SAR Elsies recovered life support pods from our bombers and the few crewed Swift Fangs we had in the battle. Many of the AI fighter brain pods were also recovered, most survived and could be placed in other ships if that was their choice.

  All too soon, it was time to go back to Terra and explain to Jase why the battle wasn’t over. As long as there were trios capable of FTL in our part of space, the struggle against the Plague would never be over.

  When I got back to Terra, I docked with Mother of Glory and, carrying my AAR and log copies went to the Intelligence Directorate and gave Silent a copy of each before heading down the continuous lift to Jase’s office. I had already sent a short message to let him know what had happened, so he wasn’t entirely blind-sided by my report. I started to apologize for my failure to stop the four globe ships that had escaped, but he held up a hand and motioned me to take a seat.

  “Don’t ever apologize to me for doing your duty. No matter how good you are, there are always going to be battles that don’t go all your way. You didn’t fail, we always knew it was a possibility that the Plague would tumble to our secret. I’m amazed it took as long as it did, to be honest.

  “Now hand me your report and logs and get out of here. I think you have a mate and cub who are waiting for you. Let me look at these and get Silent’s analysis and meet to review it when he is done. Until then, just enjoy some downtime. You and those under you have done far better than I ever expected. Dismissed.”

  I did as Jase ordered. I found my mate and told him what had happened, he just held me while I unloaded. When I was done, he asked, “Is there anything you did or didn’t do that led to the ships getting away? Did you know they had developed FTL? I think if you honestly and objectively answer those two questions, you will find the answers are no and no.

  “Now, I just checked to see what
cycle the Terran nature preserve is in and it is night time for another couple of decas. I think we should get cook to put a picnic together for five and go get the three musketeers and take them to see the preserve, make a sort of family and friends event out of it. I doubt the youngsters would object, especially not the two Terrans who may enjoy a small view of their former home.”

  When we got to the creche, my cub and the kids were waiting for us. Tuxedo had commed them and explained what was happening, and they were thrilled to go. All any of them could talk about on the way was the possibility of seeing the deer we told them about.

  We had our picnic with just the light from a few small candles and then lay back to see what wildlife showed itself. The owl made an appearance and just before the artificial dawn the doe we had seen before showed herself, and she was accompanied by two small spotted fawns. The youngsters were absolutely speechless and didn’t make a sound while the mother with her young approached us and sniffed us. While the other two watched Roni slowly extended her hand and one of the fawns tried to suckle her fingers much to her delight. When she started giggling the mother deer led her babies away, and I felt a happiness settle over me that I hadn’t felt in ages. This is a magical place, and I would be coming here often.

  When we got back to the creche, we were near Benji’s Place so we asked the girls if they would like to stop in with us and have dinner before returning to the creche. They were excited at the prospect of doing something adult, so we went in. After sampling several different dishes and having the time of their lives, we took them back to the creche but not before Benji stopped to chat with us for a moment and had one of the staff bring bowls of ice cream to the youngsters and us. It was chocolate with some kind of nuts in it and was absolutely delicious.

  Two cycles Jase commed asking me to meet him in the conference room across from his office. When I got there, I found he had assembled all of the senior commanders of the fleet as well as Elders Three and Four. He had the Confederation Council on the big screen, and as soon as I was seated, he began to address the assembled group.