Imperative - eARC

by Steve White

  The Tangri, however, had always tended toward smaller, faster ships, in keeping with their marauding style of warfare and their decentralized political system (by courtesy so called). And now, even that system was shattered. There was no possibility of encountering enemy units that would require a superdevastator to deal with them.

  The symbolism, however, was important…and not just the symbolism of this ship’s name. Li Han represented an earnest of the Terran Republic’s commitment to putting an end to the Tangri Confederation once and for all.

  Of course, Trevayne reflected, all the symbolism in the galaxy couldn’t cancel out the deployability limitations of a superdevastator. Which was why this task force had a Kasugawa generator with it.

  The shuttle nosed through a cavernous opening’s atmosphere screen and settled onto an extensive hangar deck. As the hatch wheezed open and the gangway extended itself, two honor guards came to attention. This was a joint Terran Republic/Rim Federation task force, predominantly the former. A second task force, partly PSU and partly Arduan in composition and under the command of Trevayne’s old colleague Cyrus Waldeck, was operating a few warp transits away. Trevayne was in overall command; Magda commanded this task force. They descended the ramp, went through the ritual of requesting permission from Li Han’s captain to come aboard, then began accepting salutes.

  “Welcome back, Admiral Trevayne, Admiral Li-Trevayne,” Adrian M’Zangwe greeted. He had been chief of staff to her after whom this ship was named, and after her death Trevayne’s flag captain. Now he was a rear admiral, commanding this task force’s Terran Republic component. He had also worn a second hat as acting task force commander in Magda’s absence. “And how is your delightful little daughter?”

  “She’s back home on Novaya Rodina,” said Magda, “where my godparents are doubtless spoiling her to within an inch of her life.” Jason Windrider and Magda Petrovna Windrider, now in their 160s and 140s respectively but still spry, had served with Li Han in the Fringe Revolution and battled Trevayne at Zapata. More irony, thought the latter.

  “How can they help themselves?” A smile split M’Zangwe’s dark face. “If only she could have lived long enough to know…” He shook his head to clear it of painful memories, and spoke briskly. “Allow me to introduce Rear Admiral Rafaela Shang, who during your absence relieved Admiral McFarland as commander of the Rim Federation components.”

  “Ah, yes, Admiral Shang.” Trevayne extended his hand. He was going to miss Alistair McFarland, whom he had known since the Fringe Revolution and whose accent, from the Rim world of Aotearoa, he had always found endearing. But Alistair had been pushing mandatory retirement age (calculated in terms of physiological rather than chronological age these days) even during the Arduan War. As he ran his eyes over Shang’s staffers, he spotted the Intelligence officer. “Andreas! Congratulations on your recent promotion—especially given the number of career changes you’ve gone through.”

  Captain Andreas Hagen beamed. He had been a lieutenant commander, and doing a stint as an instructor at the Rim Federation’s Prescott Academy, when he had been picked for a rather unique assignment: “technical liaison officer” to the freshly resurrected Ian Trevayne, who had had eight decades worth of catching up to do. The relationship had lasted longer than anticipated, for Trevayne had kept Hagen with him through the Arduan war. Afterwards, Hagen had transferred from his original BuShips billet to Intelligence.

  “As senior spook in the task force,” M’Zangwe explained, “Captain Hagen will be presenting part of the briefing we’ve prepared for you.”

  “Excellent. We’re both in need of an update.”

  “Not just on the strategic picture,” Magda added, “but on the situation here in this system.”

  “Yes, Admiral.” Hagen nodded. “And in that connection, we’re going to have a…special guest.”

  *

  The being on the stage of the briefing room didn’t really resemble anything from Old Terra’s zoology or mythology. But humans, at first sight of the configuration of a large, bilaterally symmetrical hexapod which had liberated its front pair of limbs for manipulation in the course of evolving as a tool-user, automatically thought centaur. Actually, the upright torso was even less humanlike than the horizontal barrel was horselike, so the predominant (and totally misleading) impression was equine. Hence the traditional nickname “horse-heads,” even though the face was, if anything, more suggestive of an ape than a horse (until one saw the teeth, at which time any resemblance to either vanished), and the cranium was protected by a bony ridge. That ridge was the only thing exoskeletal about the entire body, which was otherwise covered with short, thick fur in various reddish shades.

  Anyone knowledgeable about extraterrestrial races would simply have identified the “special guest” as a Tangri. But Ian Trevayne had made an in-depth study of the species in the course of this campaign, and he discerned certain subtle indicia—flatter than average snout, duller than average rufosity of fur, and so forth—that spelled Zemlixi, the descendants of the agricultural societies long ago enslaved by the Horde culture he was here to extirpate.

  Tangri history was a freak. In all other known advanced species, civilization had grown out of settled agriculture before beginning the climb of technological advancement. But the Tangri themselves were also freaks of a sort among tool-users, for they had evolved from purely carnivorous predator stock. For them, “agriculture” could only mean raising fodder for meat animals—and the plant life of their homeworld was nutrient-poor. The mobility that their physical form imparted—and the psychology that went with it—lent itself to nomadism. In the end, the nomads had triumphed over the farmers. Industrialization, when it finally occurred, had developed within the context of nomadism’s values, and been employed to serve those values—the values of raid and plunder, now carried out to the stars.

  It was as though Genghis Khan and Timur-i-leng had set the tone for all of subsequent human history. As though their descendants had never been assimilated by the civilized societies they had conquered, but rather had beaten and brutalized those societies down to a level of permanent subservience.

  The Zemlixi were the descendants of those crushed proto-civilized societies that had been snuffed out—enslaved, and periodically thinned like any other herd. Their lot had improved somewhat over the centuries as the dominant Horde culture had required bureaucrats to administer the increasingly complex support structure that enabled it to sustain its depredations through ages of ever-increasing economic and technological complication.

  This particular Zemlixi, Thertarz by name, had until recently been one such bureaucrat. He was now leader of the Hulixon Provisional Government.

  Trevayne listened as Thertarz reviewed, with the aid of translator software, the progress of events in this system. Hulixon had no indigenous inhabitants, only an imported Zemlixi population, which had eliminated one complicating factor. In accordance with what was now established procedure, the Allied fleet had cleared the system of the scattered Tangri spaceborne units, then landed Marines on the planet, distributing weapons to the Zemlixi, who were already in a state of insurrection. It had not been difficult to dispose of the remainders of the Daroga Horde, of whose domain this system had been a part. The problems arose afterwards.

  “Nation-building” had involved enough headaches even for those who had coined the term in the late twentieth century. They had learned to their cost that you couldn’t simply tell a population with no tradition of self-government that it was free and then walk away. It was far worse among the ruins of the Tangri Confederation. The Zemlixi were the deracinated descendants of peoples whose societies had been leveled and blighted even more thoroughly than the Mongols had once devastated the centers of higher Islamic culture. There was no foundation to build on; the building would have to be from the ground up.

  The good news—at least in the short run—was that the Zemlixi were conditioned to obey the instructions of those placed above them. The difficult
y was in finding someone to so place.

  “Thank you, Thertarz,” said Trevayne when the presentation was finished. “We are fortunate that you are here to take the lead among your people.” This was not flattery. Thertarz really was one of their best finds among the liberated Tangri worlds.

  “It is we who are fortunate, Admiral,” came the synthetic voice, as Trevayne automatically edited out the sounds Thertarz was actually making. “What you have given us is beyond even the fulfillment of a dream, because we never dared dream it. For myself personally, I thank you for assigning Captain Gobinda as Resident Advisor.”

  “I’m glad the two of you work together well.” There was a division of labor between the Provisional Government and the Resident Advisor’s military administration, with the latter still in ultimate authority. Gobinda, as Trevayne already knew, was one of those with a knack for being tactful about it.

  Hagen resumed the podium. “And now, Admiral, with your permission I will summarize the strategic situation.” Trevayne nodded, and Hagen activated a display behind him. It was a flat screen, which was all that was needed to display the warp network. At lower center was the Hulixon system, with a green icon reading “TF 4.1,” denoting the first task force of the Allied Fourth Fleet. At upper right, the icon “TF 4.2,” denoting Cyrus Waldeck’s task force, stood in a system with no close warp connections to Hulixon. However, the warp lines from both converged a few transits to the right on a system featuring a red icon.

  “By now,” Hagen began, “with the new intelligence sources that have become available to us, we have been able to confirm our original supposition as to the enemy situation. By the end of the Arduan War, their central fleet—the ‘Confederation Fleet Command’ is our best translation—was effectively broken. With our subsequent general offensive into their space, the individual Hordes were pretty much left to defend their own territories as best they could. In a sense, this wasn’t all good; instead of a single monolithic enemy to strike at, we’re facing decentralized opposition—the ‘Free Raiders’ as they apparently call themselves—waging a kind of guerilla war.”

  “Also,” speculated Magda, “it probably suits them better. To them, large political organizations are unnatural abstractions.”

  “True, Admiral. The primary loyalty of every Tangri of the Horde culture is to his own horde. But we can’t place too much reliance on that. They’re on the run now, and they’re smart enough to put aside their feuds in the face of a common threat to their existence. Also, they have common goals: to get revenge against us, and to punish the Zemlixi who’ve ‘betrayed’ them.”

  Thertarz spoke, and his grimness came through the translator. “You have no conception of the things that would be done to us if they came back.”

  “Actually, I think I do,” said Trevayne, who had seen worlds—human worlds—raided by the Tangri. “And that is not going to be permitted.”

  Hagen pointed to the screen. “As you know, we have been advancing into the domain of the Daroga Horde. Admiral Waldeck is in the territory of the Hurulix. Our advance has been facilitated by the sparse use of mine fields and orbital weapon platforms at the warp points.”

  “The Tangri have never emphasized fixed warp point defenses,” Trevayne nodded. “Not their mind-set. Their contempt for all other races is such that the whole concept of defense against those races seems as far-fetched as the idea of humans defending themselves against cattle. Except,” he added with a cold smile, “cattle have been known to stampede.”

  “Which, of course, brings us to the next stage of our advance,” M’Zangwe observed with a smile.

  “Indeed, Admiral,” said Hagen. He manipulated hand-held controls. A cursor ran along the warp lines from Hulixon to the system with the scarlet icon. A slightly longer series of warp connections led by another route from Cyrus Waldeck’s current position to that same destination. Hagen let the white cursor flash beside the red icon. “Our plan for the two task forces to converge simultaneously at this system, which is believed to be the central stronghold of the Daroga, is going according to schedule—that is, it should culminate a little more than a standard year from now. As soon as we receive confirmation from Admiral Waldeck that he has secured the next system along his line of approach, we will be able to resume our advance.” He moved the cursor to the warp nexus just beyond Hulixon. “This is a starless warp nexus, and our recon drones have established that it has only some hastily deployed minefields. Otherwise, it is held by a mobile force largely dependent on fighters, of which it has a very large number—its largest units are fleet carriers and a limited number of superdreadnoughts.” He touched his control pad again, and an order of battle appeared at the upper left corner of the screen. “And the recon drones’ findings suggest that these are not at the highest level of readiness.”

  “Why would that be?” Magda wondered aloud.

  “The warp point of ingress is one of those which will accommodate no tonnage larger than that of a supermonitor,” Hagen reminded her. “We surmise that the Tangri are waiting for us to dredge it to allow our devastators and superdevastators to pass through—a procedure which they can easily detect, thus giving them advance warning.”

  “Therefore,” Trevayne said decisively, “we will make no attempt to dredge it until after we’ve secured the far side. I want the task force placed in readiness for a warp point assault utilizing nothing larger than supermonitors. I don’t believe we’ll need the DTs and SDTs to deal with what I’m seeing here. And certainly any advantage of having them is outweighed by the element of surprise which we’ll achieve by going in without them. Is everyone clear on this?” A chorus of affirmative noises answered him. “Excellent. Then as soon as we hear from Admiral Waldeck we will resume our…stampede.”

  *

  There was no nearby star to give a sense of location, only the disorientingly infinite void of interstellar space. What distinguished this particular expanse of nothingness was invisible: the two warp points that lay eighteen light-minutes apart, one connecting with the Hulixon system and the other leading further on into the systems held by the Daroga Horde.

  Squadron Leader Huraclycx was fleeing from the former to the latter in his fighter. Soon he would catch up to his carrier, in time to be recovered before the carrier transited the second warp point and made good its escape.

  Huraclycx shifted his body on the framework that made it possible for a Tangri to assume the unnatural position necessary to pilot a fighter. The discomfort was such that most fighter pilots used the drug sacaharrax to mask it with euphoria. Huraclycx didn’t and had only contempt for those who did. The stuff was addictive, and long-term use led to metabolic degeneration and an early death. It was one of the reasons for the mystique of fighter pilots as doomed, slightly mad swashbucklers. Huraclycx disdained that too.

  So he flew on, stoically enduring without chemical buffering the physical discomfort. It wasn’t quite bad enough to make him forget his rage and his hatred.

  It had been anticipated that the human prey animals would use their mysterious technique for tampering with the physics of the warp network, enlarging the capacity of the Hulixon warp point to allow passage of their largest ships, the truly monstrous ones. Instead, they had done the unexpected. (But then their leader—Trevayne by name, as Intelligence had learned—was the master of the unexpected.) Without warning, a blizzard of AMBAMMs—antimine ballistic missiles—had come through the warp point, burning a path through the minefields. Hardly had the glare of antimatter annihilation died down when the first waves of ships had followed the AMBAMMs, led by the supermonitors whose hulls were the largest that could transit the warp point in its natural state—not devastators or superdevastators, but mighty enough.

  The Tangri had not been caught napping. They had been able to launch clouds of fighters. But—and acid rose in Huraclycx’s gut at the thought—for the past generation fighters had lost more and more of their traditional advantage over large ships. It was galling for the Tangri, whos
e individualistic warrior ethos was so suited to fighter combat that they were willing to endure pain or risk dangerous drugs to indulge in it. Partly it was a matter of the narrowing of the margin of superior maneuverability that enabled them to get into the behemoths’ sternward “blind zones” created by their reactionless drives. But there was also the matter of steady improvement in shipboard defensive weaponry. Huraclycx had witnessed this as his squadron was decimated by long-range AFHAWK anti-fighter missiles before they could even close to the short ranges at which they were most effective. Those that did get into knife-range were ripped apart by the electromagnetically propelled flechettes of datalinked point defense systems.