Reaper's Crossroad

by Timothy Ellis

  "I'm not too worried about stuff like that. And yes, you’re probably right. I'm more protective about the ships in Redoubt."

  "Only the crews captured in that system know what they saw there, and they didn’t really see what is actually there. They know you do outrageously big missile platforms, but that’s about it. Each group are still isolated from each other, and have no way of knowing the other groups are there. And I was careful not to let them know of others."

  "Good." I paused, debating if I asked or not. The not lost. "Can I ask you something about your species?"

  "Ask. I will answer if I can."

  "We had tigers on our original homeworld, but they were not much different to Angel, except in size, although not as large as your people are. Cunning rather than intelligent, and never allowed to evolve once humans became the dominant species. How did your people get to be able to stand on your hind legs?"

  He laughed.

  "It's not something which is documented, but the story goes, we were once limited to all fours, but there was this particularly tasty large rodent on our home planet which climbed trees out of our reach. While four legs can climb trees, and some were very good at it, those using their full length managed to get better meals than those not. In some regions, the trees were not that high, and so those able to balance on their hind legs were able to reach the rodents at the top of the trees. Over time, the rear limbs adapted to be able to be used both ways, and we’ve walked upright for all of our recorded history."

  "Are the rodents still around?"

  "Certainly. But not on any of our major worlds. There is a whole industry revolving around their farming, and transportation to where they sell for the highest prices."

  "So would speeding up the process of transporting them be a good thing?"

  "Yes, but also no."

  "Explain."

  I was pretty sure I knew what was coming, but wanted him to say it.

  "Those who enjoy the delicacy would want the price reduced. Those selling it would not give up the high prices it commands. Those who make a living transporting the live rodents, will fight to keep what they have."

  "That’s about what I thought. So offering them a rift network will be received by some, and not by others."

  "Yes."

  "What would happen if we started breeding your rodent, or replaced the rodent with something better, and rifted it in direct to where it was wanted most?"

  "Probably civil war."

  "That bad?"

  "I do not like this look you make."

  "Sorry. But if your people refuse to come to the negotiating table, I might need to cause trouble like this in order to get your society to fragment."

  I think he was shocked.

  "You would stoop so low?"

  "Not by choice. But if your people choose to continue to make war against us, eventually they'll force me to use every weapon I can think of against them. Wars are not always fought by the military. Economic manipulation can be just as devastating if used effectively."

  "We are aware of that, and as far as I can find, such manipulation would be fought as if it was military action."

  "It wouldn’t even need to be economic. We could breed something which would break an economy, and simply herd them through a rift in huge enough numbers to effect the food chain sufficiently to make economics fail."

  "Why do you even consider such things?"

  "I hate bullies. A society based on continual conquest is a threat to everything I want to protect, and is basically bullies writ large. I don’t want to kill if I can help it. But everything I might do has a cost in lives, and so I cast around looking for an answer which results in the least loss of life."

  "Why do you care?"

  "I was born caring. And raised to care."

  "Our people would call that a weakness."

  "Your people haven’t seen what's coming for them yet."

  "True. How do we avoid it?"

  "You tell me. What do I need to know about your people in order to convince them we are not their enemy?"

  "You cannot. My people here and now are too far gone. They consider all beings to be an enemy to be conquered."

  "I still need to convince them. What do they respond positively to?"

  He told me.

  It merely confirmed what I already suspected, and it meant we had to go to Keerah.

  Fifty Five

  Hobbes was glad to go back to Haven by rift.

  We talked until Jane informed me the roo general was on his way to my military tower office, and I escorted him back.

  The general was mainly interested in our roo prisoners, and Vonda had passed him on to me for a decision about if he was able to meet with them or not. According to Jane, they hadn't seen anything much of anything, due to the damage their ship had taken. They knew we had large stations with a lot of missile capacity, and the fleet the general already knew about, so it seemed fine to allow them to meet.

  It didn’t take me long from his comments to realize even the concept of women soldiers was not something they were accustomed to. Or women diplomats, but they had taken my advice and included a female on the Karn team. I laughed at his expression, and welcomed him to the real world. He didn’t take it well, and I could see he didn’t understand why we had equality. I wasn’t going to be the one to explain it to him though. I just warned him females in human societies were just as prevalent as men in high office, both in civilian and military. Better get used to it.

  I rifted us down to the island where his people were, and found Jane had sent down prefab accommodation modules, which while basic, still provided a reasonable place to live. I left him to talk to his people, and wandered over to the nearby cliff.

  This part of the island was rugged coastline, with more islands in the distance. The climate was temperate, even though we were close to the equator. This wasn’t all that good a planet, and I wasn’t at all surprised the Solidarians had moved.

  All the same, the view was breathtaking, and I took the opportunity to enjoy it. Footfalls came up behind me, but I didn’t turn.

  "You trust me too much," said the general.

  "Not really."

  "But I could have pushed you off this cliff, and rid myself of an enemy."

  "You could have. Wouldn’t have changed anything. I’d have either enjoyed the long dive into the water and had a good swim, or stepped through a rift back to my office by half way down."

  I didn't mention I'd have shot straight across it before falling on my face.

  "How could you survive such a high fall?"

  I tapped the side of my nose, and grinned at him.

  "Are your people ready to go home?"

  "More than ready. Is their ship space worthy?"

  "I've no idea. But it was badly damaged by debris, so unless my people repaired it, probably not. I'll ask."

  "When can they go free?"

  "When will you sign a non-aggression pact?"

  "The diplomats are discussing such things now."

  "We'll just have to hope they get the job done."

  "You are not involved in the process?"

  "Hell no. My job is the defense of the realm. Making friends is not in my job description."

  "And yet you make them anyway?"

  "Humans do that. We're a social society. And while protecting the people is my prime concern, I don’t seek war, and I prefer not to kill. I've even stopped carrying a gun."

  "If you will excuse me saying it, you are a very strange admiral."

  "I am a strange admiral. Even by my people's standards. But don’t get me wrong. I will do what needs to be done to protect those who depend on me. And if that means killing, it will happen. I won't like it, but if I'm pushed into it, it will happen. It has happened. I have no doubt it will happen again. I make my peace afterwards, but I do what must be done."

  He nodded, but said nothing more. I turned away from the cliff, opened a rift to my office, and we returned there. He sal
uted me, and left in the company of a female security officer I suspected was actually Jane.

  I pondered what the roos might want most, and pinged David to have a visit to one of our agricultural stations suggested. The roos might be interested in how we grew food in space, and the tech which allowed this might be of interest to a trading partner. Or we might even be able to grow some of the food they needed, and trade the food instead. You never knew what might sway a negotiation. David acknowledged my ping, but didn’t respond to the idea.

  Bob informed me the roo ship had been so badly damaged, he'd scrapped it, after we'd taken everything we could out of it. I pinged Vonda to inform the general.

  I took myself back to my new island, and found my parents rearranging the furniture. My mother in particular seemed to be in 'make a house into a home' mode, and after a quick hug, she went back to bossing around butler droids. Dad shrugged at me, but continued to follow her bossing, err, instructions.

  For now, I had no preferences for where things went, and was quite content to leave my mum in charge of it. My mind was still on what to do with the Keerah.

  The beach was empty out the front, but the lunch table and chairs were still there. I sat, and kept thinking. Angel jumped up on my lap, and I idly stroked her as she curled up and went to sleep. I couldn’t help thinking I was lacking some key information.

  "Jane, can you come join me please?"

  "On my way."

  She turned up a few minutes later, to find me gazing out over the vista in front of me. Silently sitting in the chair next to me, she alternated from looking at the view, and looking at me. Finally, I turned to her.

  "Do we know where the Keerah homeworld is?"

  "Yes. The three species' homeworlds are all on Arthur's navmap. So are a lot of their key planets. We'd need to talk to Arthur though to determine which are important. Are you thinking of going to Keerah?"

  "I don’t think we have a choice. We could muck around with governors at this end of their space, and I gather it would achieve nothing. The only way of getting their attention is to hit the homeworld."

  "It’s a long way away. In fact all three homeworlds are."

  "How far?"

  She threw up a hollo of the galaxy, shown from above. In red, she added lines across the central oval of the core, showing the roughly third each species ruled. Another line of red appeared, showing where we'd come from. Four red dots showed the homeworlds.

  Earth was on the Orion spur of the Sagittarius arm. The spine extended down and up the Orion spur, covering pretty much the whole distance each way.

  "That doesn’t look right," I said to her.

  "What doesn’t?"

  "The spine extending as far as it does. How far is it from one end to the other?"

  "Something of the order of twenty five to thirty thousand light years."

  "That's just wrong."

  "No, it's right. The navmap is deceptive. It orders all the systems in a neat cluster around a line, without showing the true distances involved. The reality is there are clusters of systems, with only a few of them having jump points, and huge distances between each cluster. Where the nav map shows sectors being close together, most of them are actually thousands of light years apart."

  "Seems to make the explanation of how the jump points work wrong."

  "It is, and it isn’t. If you think of each system as a bubble, and the jump points as where the bubbles touch each other, for the most part this is true within sectors, or sub-sectors. Something else is obviously happening to join systems across huge distances though. But I suspect this is something we can't comprehend."

  "Why not?"

  "I think the geometry exists at a higher dimension than we're able to deal with."

  "So how far away is Earth?"

  "From here? About twenty five thousand light years, give or take."

  "And the Keerah homeworld?"

  "Roughly three thousand, as the space crow would fly if it was sober. By jumping? Anyone's guess. Even I’d take a while to do the actual math."

  "We don’t need it. I think. I wish I knew how far I could open a titan sized rift though. However far that is will determine if we can get to Keerah or not, or how many steps we'd need to take to get there."

  "Only one way to find out."

  I nodded, and continued looking at the galaxy. The way Jane had it oriented, the curved line of the Earth spine was at the bottom, midway from the core to the Outer arm. The core itself was a diagonal oval shape in the middle, left side low. The Sagittarius arm joined the core at its top end, on the left side.

  The first red line extended from nearby the join, down the middle of the core oval, to about two thirds the way across. Here it met a wide arrow head line, dividing off the lower end of the core. You could call it a blown out umbrella shape with the handle pointing upward to the right. Where the three lines met was where we were now. So we were not in fact anywhere near the center of the galaxy, being at least fifteen hundred light years away.

  The Keerah owned the section adjoining the Sagittarian arm, the Ralnor had the other side, and the Trixone owned the lower third. It explained why both the Keerah and Ralnor had been attacked by the Darkness, and been forced to form an alliance.

  The Darkness system was presumably somewhere around where the Orion spur left the main arm, and so when the Darkness had gone towards the core, they'd entered it in Keerah space, but pushed almost immediately into Ralnor space as well. It also suggested the coreward end of the arm was largely uninhabited, or had few systems in the spine along it. This didn’t sound right, but I didn't know how far the Darkness had managed to get in the core.

  Which was when I remembered both Karn and Kelewan had been taken by the Darkness, which implied they were closer than the three homeworlds had been. It also made Keerah being the last to fall all the more miraculous, given it was the closest homeworld to the Darkness advance, if you ignored the two magician planets. But then, it could just have been how the maze of jump points aligned, or choices made by the Darkness on which way they went.

  "Do we know where Karn and Kelewan are?"

  Two blue dots appeared, and as I suspected, they were closer to where the arm joined than Keerah was. It also answered my previous question. My mouth dropped open. Jane's eyes went wide as well, as she realized what I had.

  "Hooley dooley," she said.

  "Indeed."

  I'd already opened rifts to systems more than ten thousand light years away.

  Fifty Six

  The beach started to fill up.

  Angel woke with the activity, and shot off to play with Max, Gingernut, and Midnight. Midnight being here was explained by my parent's presence. Gingernut meant Grace was around somewhere, and since the others were here, Jeeves had obviously brought Max. Unless Thirteen had, but as usual, there was no sign of him. I had to wonder if sometimes Max's purring and contented look at times indicated an invisible Thirteen was actually patting him. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know though.

  A cargo droid deposited a cat tree in the middle of the sand, and the four cats immediately shot to the top, and mock fought over who had ownership rights of the top level.

  Some of Arthur's people turned up with my team, and it wasn’t long before the beach began to resemble a nudist colony.

  It wasn’t that I was getting jaded seeing gorgeous women cavorting naked in water, or even that I was now in a monogamous relationship and shouldn’t have been looking, or so I told myself, but I was suddenly uncomfortable sitting there.

  With an abrupt decision, I jumped up, shifted into uniform, and made my way inside, looking for a conference room. I had to ask a butler the way, and found it next to my office, which I also hadn't known about. It was already set up for meetings, so I pinged my upper ranks with an invitation to a meeting to be followed by dinner, with togs optional swimming after.

  Lacey was the last one in, having been out in his Excalibur when my ping arrived. My Dad looked relieved to be called aw
ay from decorating. The rest looked puzzled as to why the sudden summons.

  I outlined my reasoning for going to Keerah. No-one seemed too surprised, and none of them had anything to add, or any argument against.

  I told them who was going, and there were knowing nods, and again no argument against.

  I told them the options.

  The room went very still.

  But again, there was no argument against.

  Finally, I asked them if there was anyone who wouldn't be able to follow my orders, whichever ones I gave.

  No-one moved. No-one raised a hand. No-one said anything.

  "Someone say something!"

  "Your will, Great One," said Jane.

  I face palmed, and the room finally laughed.

  With some time still before dinner, I dismissed them all for a swim if they wanted one, or to just soak up some sun somewhere. They left, but I stayed where I was, having caught Jane's 'stay put' look.

  Arthur wandered in.

  "You wanted to see me?"

  As it happened, I did. But I hadn't asked him. A quick glance at Jane showed me a smug look.

  "I did. We're heading to Keerah shortly. Want to come?"

  Totally caught off guard, he dropped into the nearest seat.

  "No, I think not. Not if what I think you intend to do is what you're going there to do."

  "I'm not sure what we're going to do yet."

  "Maybe so, but going there will trigger something, and it's not going to be good."

  "Probably. Any ideas what they have there?"

  "I've not been there in a long time, so not really. They guard their jump point fanatically, but if I remember right, the rest of the system is fairly clear of military ships. Traders on the other hand, the system will be thick with them. Are you sure you really need to go there?"

  "We could go to the nearest governor, and maybe even convince him it’s a good idea to have peace. Will anyone else listen?"

  He sighed.