by Bob Mauldin
Two Mambas sat in the parking lot beside the three Terran Alliance “automobiles,” lending a lethal air to the otherwise peaceful scene they inhabited. Off to one side, on an expanse of grass that had been used as a picnic area, sat the personnel shuttle sent to Earth from Orion Base. The sight reminded Lucy that she’d be returning to Earth in the not-to-distant future. One of the people sent out on the Galileo was her replacement.
Dozens of volunteers from the recently commissioned Niven moved crates from one place to another, kept track of Alliance message traffic on communications equipment that had been classified as secret as the weapons technology, and in general, began to make the building feel lived in.
Technicians were in the process of setting up the defense grid when Lucy walked into the basement room that had been co-opted as the main computer room on her first inspection tour of the premises since personnel had begun to arrive.
The Niven’s chief engineer looked up at her entrance. “Glad you stopped in, ma’am. It’ll save me a trip to report,” he said. “Six more hours, maybe eight, and we’ll have the equipment installed. Then we can bring down the power core and energize this beast.”
Lucy nodded her approval. “Thanks, Chief. I appreciate your team’s efforts. How are you going to get the core down here?”
“In pieces,” he said with a grin. “First will be the core itself. Its force fields have been reconfigured to minimum tolerances and will fit in the freight elevator. The other equipment can come down in bits and be assembled as we go. Once the core is actually in place,” he said, pointing at a bare space in one corner of the room, “it won’t take us more than four or five hours to have the grid up and functional.”
The core would provide all the power the embassy would need for the next several years and was just as secret as the comm units. If it weren’t for the fact that the defense grids wouldn’t work without the immense power output of the core, it wouldn’t have been necessary to bring it along. One function of the computer would be to monitor the force fields holding the monopoles in place and adjust them automatically.
FUGUE
Another endless time passed and she neither knew nor cared how long that time was while she struggled to fill the Emptiness that had arrived when she re-integrated Loss into her being. She reached out to the other things that floated within her perception but beyond her grasp, fearful of what they might bring her, yet more afraid of feeling so Empty.
Fear of the Emptiness within her turned into Hatred, and she began to plot ways to trick the things into coming into her reach. She would look where they weren’t as she strode through the void and then make a darting leap in the direction of the things. More often than not, they eluded her grasp, but occasionally she was able to lay hands one and draw it in to make it a part of her.
Time after time these things, these feelings, these emotions, brought with them a degree of pain—not pain in the physical sense, for she had no physical body, she felt, but pain in the mental sense. Pain that took a brain and ripped it apart cell by cell, synapse by synapse, reveling in the discomfort It produced in Its victim.
Gradually, after several eternities, her efforts began to pay off. Now it wasn’t just a sense of self. It was more than just, “I am.” Faces appeared in the formlessness of her world, faces to which she could put names. Names that brought comfort. One such face was “dad.” Another was “mom.”
With these faces came the first kernel of what was becoming a growing sense of self. A sense of... identity.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Marcad Korvil, supreme ruler of the Korvil Hegemony, strode around the circumference of his family’s Pit of Justice, stopping at each of the fancifully carved pillars to offer his respects to the ancestor within. Beyond mere structural support, each pillar was a tomb holding the stripped and cleaned bones of an honored ancestor. Inset into the upper reaches of each pillar was the skull of the resident ancestor, some so old that they’d begun to decay in the hot, humid atmosphere of the cavern that surrounded the Pit. Recent technological advances had allowed the skulls to be treated for the prevention of any further deterioration.
He stopped before the tomb of the father of his father’s father, The Korvil, as he had come to be known, and studied again the life and accomplishments of the occupant. This one had risen to racial primacy through trial by combat, thereby giving the family name to the whole race, as well as the planet.
This communion with his ancestors was supposed to help him achieve, if not wisdom, at least balance. A full cycle had gone by since Marcad had given in to the urge to spare the life of Pankatt Korchon, his liegeman—twice the time he’d expected to wait before hearing back.
Deceit, even treachery, he expected. After all, had they not been racial attributes of the Korvil since time immemorial? But so was obedience to one’s Lord. It had been so since the earliest Memories. Cooperation had been a necessity on the young, volcanic world of Korvilene, called something else all those thousands of cycles before. Loners died out, while cooperative groups just hung on at first and finally grew to planetary dominance, with power residing in the smartest, strongest, or luckiest.
Power changed hands most often in the early days through trial by combat. Lately, it had tended to lie in family lines. Marcad’s great-great-grandfather had stepped back into the race, so to speak, when, dissatisfied with his lot, he challenged his Lord to a trial by combat. Winning that combat led to Marcad’s dilemma now. Each Korvil since The Korvil had pushed the race into the expansion that kept them bumping into the krath-Shiravi at every turn. Needing the space and being able to use the same worlds produced one of the sparks that kept the fires burning between the two races. Another spark was the drive to dominate that had not yet had time to mellow in the young Korvil race.
A large part of the inability of the Shiravi to interact peacefully with the Korvil was the problem with actually hearing Korvil words. In main part, it could be said that the concept of the Korvil as a race, the Korvil as an individual, and the Korvil as a ruler sounded the same to Shiravan ears, and this problem lent itself to all other aspects of the Korvil language as well.
The Korvil culture was at a more basic stage of its evolution and hadn’t developed the “shades of grey” that the more advanced Shiravan culture had, so the concept of “me/mine” ran head on into “let’s talk about it,” with the result that the more restrained Shiravans had been caught off guard and had stayed there for almost three hundred cycles.
Fearing a power shift based on knowledge of the “human” captives, Marcad sent scout ships out to the farthest reaches of his empire to demand whatever information Korchon might have wrung out of the Humanz. Another half-cycle went by before the ships returned to report the news of Korchon’s demise, along with his entire Sept, as well as the loss of the Humanz, bringing on the barely controllable urge to smash the perpetrators of such a heinous act.
So it was that Marcad had wound up in the depths of his palace, communing with the dead instead of marching out to exterminate the krath-Shiravi. For it was surely they who had done this to his subjects, his ships, his Honor. With the return of the fleet to Korvilene, he had in his hands indisputable and disturbing proof of the power of the krath-Shiravi.
The fact that the original sin—the massacre of the first Shiravan ship to land on his world and theft of their ship—rested on Korvil shoulders was lost on Marcad. They had occurred long before The Korvil had won the right to rule in personal combat lifetimes before. And had he known, it would have made no difference, for to the Korvil, all things belonged to the Korvil.
The major problem Marcad faced was not whether to attack but when. Since the inception of the Korvil space program, most manufacturing had been at the freighter and cruiser level. A few mid-sized vessels had been constructed, but not enough to even begin to think about attacking the fixed defenses the krath-Shiravi had around their major population centers. And it took an entire hunter pack to take out one of
their mid-sized defense crafts. That was why, even though able to take more damage than a Shiravan craft, there was some attrition in the Korvil fleet. It was for this reason that most of the Korvil objectives centered around lone ships traveling known lanes or new colonies on the outskirts of Shiravan space that hadn’t had time to build their defenses.
Another problem was deciding how to respond and with what degree of aggression. Some response must be immediate, of course, to keep the enemy from gaining any more of an advantage than they already had.
The normal state of affairs for a Korvil, when attacked, was to fight to the death. That seemed to be the case in this instance, anyway. Conversations with Darmag, the Korvilene War Minister, had accounted for all of Pankatt Korchon’s ships, grounded and in space at the time of the attack. It appeared that only two of his ships had been crewed, and it was surmised that the attack had taken place on Korchon’s return to Kravarine after his interview with Marcad. The wreckage indicated that, while the krath-Shiravi had had superior numbers and possibly the advantage of surprise, the two active ships had each managed to attain Honor by taking their attackers with them. The laxity of having no ships on patrol could almost be forgiven since the krath-Shiravi had never mounted a more than ineffectual defense, much less an effective attack of their own. Most losses taken by the Korvil had been attributed to luck as much by the Shiravi as the Korvil.
The Korvil had operated with numerous smaller ships in hunter packs and minimal support as Tradition and Honor dictated for so long that it was almost impossible to conceive of a different way of fighting. But a different way would have to be devised to teach the krath-Shiravi that they could not attack the Korvil with impunity.
In order to combat larger vessels with heavier weapons and a significantly increased aggressiveness, new ships were going to have to be designed and built. Nothing would please Marcad more than to rid the universe of the species that had visited this ignominy upon his people, his Honor. But even a cornered krath was a danger to unprepared hunters. And for this hunt, much preparation needed to be made in advance.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The days that followed sel Garian’s revelations had left Rentec frustrated to the point of exasperation. His inability to talk to anyone about the meeting, along with the daily notices from various ministries concerning what his particular ministry was supposed to do, had drained him, not to mention Ramannie’s endless questioning.
Telling Ramannie that the information was classified only served to infuriate her since she was running into the same lack of information in Minister Foran’s office. What little he was able to tell her had already been public knowledge even before Rentec had visited her apartment the next day.
“I want to know what went on behind those closed doors!” she exclaimed. “If it’s causing you this much discomfort, you should share it. ‘Two to bear a burden halves the work,’ you know.”
“Don’t mouth platitudes at me today,” he demanded. “I don’t want to be on the receiving end of one of sel Garian’s purges. When the time is right, all will be revealed. Until then, isn’t it enough that we are at war with the Korvil?”
The war footing the matriarch had embarked all of Shiravi on impacted the life of Rentec do’ Verlas in four distinct ways. The first was that his relationship with Ramannie had cooled noticeably since the secrecy order. The second was that his ministry was catapulted into the forefront of the activities to prepare for a war no one had expected to be declared for many years to come. The third was related to the first. His visit to the do’ Verlas estates had been postponed. And the fourth lay in wait, marking time until it could manifest itself properly. Not only was the war taking up his time, but with Ramannie on the outs with him, it was not a propitious moment to have his mother engage in a matrimonial reading for the two of them. Emotion was so much a part of the reading that any discord was able to throw off the results.
Following sel Garian’s announcements, Rentec had become uncomfortably aware that ministers who hadn’t given him more than a polite nod in the past were now trying to curry his favor. The experience was unnerving, to say the least, for the most junior Shiravan minister. Sitting in Minister Foran’s office, he said as much over a glass of that worthy’s more esoteric vintage.
“I have people from every ministry but yours, Intelligence and Military pounding on my doors day and night, Minister!”
“Of course, you do! You are now one of the most preeminent persons on the planet after the matriarch and sel Garian. You are the one with the information about which ships are where, what they’re carrying, how they’re armed, who crews them, and how they’re trained,” the older minister said, ticking off points on his fingers. “Colonization is at a standstill, so I have no reason to search you out. Military and Defense have their own ships and agendas, and they’re tied to Intelligence by cords too strong to break. I’ve often thought that it would be simpler to have them under one central command structure, but too many ministers would balk at having that much power in one person’s hands. Also, several would lose their jobs entirely and actually have to find work or return to the family compound. This would be a good time to initiate a new attempt at doing so, though. It would speed up reaction times to any attacks.”
Rentec spent his days in a seemingly perpetual fog while barely managing to accomplish the nearly endless tasks appointed to his office. Disruptions, one after another, cropped up often enough to make him wary of walking into his office each morning. The sound of his comm unit caused him to sweat each time heard it in the middle of the night, and he began to noticeably lose weight in just the first week after sel Garian’s bombshell.
Halfway through the third week of the Korvil War, a harried Rentec arrived at his offices to find workmen scurrying around, moving things without apparent rhyme or reason. “What’s going on here and who authorized this?” he asked furiously, grabbing the arm of a passing worker.
Immediately, a burly man who was directing the operation interposed himself between the two. “Minister do’ Verlas, I’m Building Superintendent Darvel,” he said soothingly. “My staff and I are only following the orders handed down to us last week.” The subtle emphasis on the last two words were not lost on Rentec. “Surely you were informed of the move?”
Rentec took the paper offered to him by Darvel and scanned it quickly. Halfway through the work order, he stopped. “This must be a mistake! My ministry doesn’t need the space indicated here. And on the top floor! What is being done with Minister Foran’s staff?”
“Minister,” the man said quietly, “I realize that you may not have had time to read all of your correspondence, but it may simplify things if you look at the signature at the bottom of the order.”
Rentec’s eyes widened in shock at the name scrawled across the bottom of the page. In the distinctive blue ink used only by the matriarch’s staff was the phrase, “For the Matriarch, sel Garian.”
Befuddled by lack of rest and one too many surprises, Rentec allowed the work order to be gently pulled from his numb fingers. His eyes strayed to a workman carrying a box labeled with writing of his own. He followed the man to the back of the floor and into a freight elevator that he half remembered led to Mondel Foran’s Ministry of Colonization. Standing in an uncomfortable silence, he felt the floor press against his feet as the elevator moved upward, and he swayed in compensation. When the door opened, it was onto a scene he could not have imagined. The room, once sparsely furnished with a half dozen desks, one of which had been Ramannie’s, was now crowded almost to overflowing with desks, computers, filing cabinets, and people.
He stepped hesitantly out of the freight elevator into semi-organized madness. The workman he’d ridden up with carried the box into the room, and Rentec slowly moved in the same general direction. Not one face was familiar to him as he desperately searched for someone he recognized. His staff had consisted of a private secretary, four general secretaries, and a pair of runners. Here were no
less than thirty persons, all moving about as if each errand was of the utmost importance. Deducting the obvious workers who were just moving things from one place to another still left him with over twenty to contend with.
His eyes finally stopped on a young woman who appeared to be giving instructions to anyone who came within range. At the same time, she spied him, finished giving instructions to the woman before her, and headed his way. “Minister! I was expecting you to use the public transport or your private lift! Please! Follow me. I’ll show you to your office.” The poise with which she carried herself made him wonder why someone as competent as she appeared to be was directing the reassignment of a junior minister like himself.
The woman led him through a maze of desks to an aisle that led down the center of the room, which led to an office he’d visited many times before. The differences this time were stunning. He entered, expecting to find his friend and mentor, Mondel Foran, sitting at his desk as usual, perhaps reading the latest directive from Polity Headquarters. Instead, he found that all of his possessions used to personalize his own office were now placed tastefully around the room.
“I hope you approve of what I’ve done with your furnishings, sir,” the woman said deferentially.
“Everything seems to be quite... all right...” Rentec turned from his inspection of the room and stared at the woman standing quietly just inside the door. “I am at a total loss here. And you seem to have me at a disadvantage, ther’a?” he asked, using the formal designation for a woman of unknown status.
“Maratai kep Parrasine, Minister. At your service.”
Rentec fell into his chair in shock. The kep Parrasine clan was among the oldest and most revered clans on Shiravi. It was Kerel kep Parrasine who’d postulated theories that led to the construction of artificial monopoles. Later, it was his grandson, Mordas kep Parrasine, who’d constructed the first converters that allowed the power from matter/antimatter to be channeled into power generators that could accelerate a vessel into what scientists called “second-space.” This had led to the colonization of a large portion of nearby space until running into the Korvil Empire some two hundred and fifty years ago, known then as the Tarkah Empire for reasons still not known to the Shiravi. A kep Parrasine stood beside Manura sel Garian at Harusel and had an entire sector of space named after him, and another was second only to sel Garian on the matriarch’s staff.
