by Steve White
Knight just stared at the understatement, then nodded slowly. “Considering that the smallest of the three could still reduce every one of our ships to atoms without committing more than a third of her batteries to a single salvo, well, yes, sir. This could be tricky.”
Wethermere shook his head. “I’m not talking about the danger from their guns, Knight: I’m talking about the specific situation. As you point out, we’re in an Arduan hull. Twelve hours ago, that would have been, at most, a curiosity: Arduan ships aren’t seen this far away from Bellerophon very often. But now, this hull is—understandably—suspect. Extremely suspect. Now let’s add this to the equation: we’ll be talking to Orions. They don’t know the Arduans as well as we do, having only had contact—to put it tactfully—with Amunsit and her fanatics. Now, if those three approaching vessels were Rim Federation warships, the cruisers are big enough that one of them might even have an Arduan on board as a selnarm communicator. But not the Orions.”
“And it doesn’t help that no one seems to know we’re running a covert snoop and poop out here,” concluded Knight. “So yes, I suppose you’re going to have to do some pretty fast and friendly talking, Captain Wethermere.”
Somehow, Ossian found the good grace to smile. “Commander, if I didn’t know better, I would say, judging from the tone of your voice, that you are actually enjoying my predicament.”
“No, sir. I’m simply glad it’s you, not me, who has to try to sweet talk a bunch of combat-provoked Orions.”
“Can’t say I blame you—or would feel any different if our roles were reversed.” He shifted the direction of his speech. “Very well, Temret. I need to reach those ships now, using your commo mast. We’re going to need all the clarity and range we can get. Which means we can’t use the hardware here aboard the Wooly Imposter: we’ll degrade the signal too much by trying to send any communications through your hull.”
“Acknowledged and agreed. We are ready to attempt to contact the oncoming ships.”
Wethermere watched the three larger blips creep closer as Temret tried—repeatedly—to raise the ships. The only response was dead air.
“Temret,” he asked,” any acknowledgement at all?”
“No, sir.”
“Have you tried sending a distress signal?”
“As soon as they failed to respond to our second resend.”
Wethermere measured the rate of approach: three minutes until they entered the outer range band of the Orion ships probable largest batteries. Operational security notwithstanding, he had no choice left but to violate his mission’s secrecy protocols. Again. “Temret, I say three times: transmit our secure ops code to them using my full PSU naval prefix.”
“Yes, sir. Transmitting now.”
More seconds ticked by. More of the light-seconds separating Wethermere’s humble detachment from the Orion heavies evaporated. As the other civvie ships in the plot began drifting further away, Engan turned toward the con. “Sirs, even through Fet’merah’s hull, I am detecting power spikes in the Orion ships. Seems like they are powering up their main batteries.”
Well, of course they are. “Temret, any response?”
“Just came through now, sir. They are evidently processing our, and then their, messages through a translation program. But the gist of their communiqué is that they have no record of the code we sent.”
“But they at least recognize the PSU command prefix as authentic and current?”
“Sir, they did not mention that either way. My impression is that they are both extremely suspicious and not well-acquainted with English.”
Which made sense, unfortunately. Orion rear-area units were very likely to have little if any contact with humans, and were very far down their own forces’ intel food chain. Well, there was only one thing left to try. “Temret, patch me into the channel you’re sending on.”
“Yes, sir. You intend to make a personal appeal?”
“No, I doubt that would do any good. If they don’t believe you, there is no reason they’re going to believe me.”
“Then, if I may ask, what are you planning to do?”
Wethermere could not repress a resigned sigh. “I am going to try communicating to them in their own language.” With my fingers crossed.
“You are live on the channel on my mark, Captain. And…mark.”
Wethermere breathed deep, mentally reviewed the relevant grammar, and said in the Tongue of Tongues, “This is Captain Ossian Wethermere, PSU serial number R213740-421, currently in command of covert operations detachment Imminent Vapor, code Capstone Papa Niner. Please confirm and respond.”
The rate of the Orions’ approach decreased slightly. Wethermere waited a few moments, then followed up with, “Please confirm that you have received our transmission.”
After several moments, a flurry of snarls, caterwauls, and purring coughs replied.
Knight glanced at Wethermere. “What did he say?”
“It was ‘she’ and I believe she said that they are relaying my message to the commander of their honor guard. Or maybe that they are awaiting permission to have the honor of being the first to open fire upon us,”
Knight was not amused. “Sir, don’t we have a translation program for Orion on board?”
“Only a very basic one: the capability wasn’t deemed mission critical. And it won’t help us with translating this. This Orion is speaking in a very strange dialect: a lot of colloquial idioms. Our translator would have as much success with it as we would have understanding Chaucer in the original.”
“Understanding who?”
“Never mind, Skipper.”
The channel’s thin thread of static changed slightly. The Orion speaking now did so haltingly. “Acknowledge is given. Making approval is completed.”
Wethermere released his held breath, saw that Knight was doing the same. “We are grateful. Have you located and checked our clearance codes, then?”
“No.”
Wethermere started. “Then why have you accepted our credentials?”
“Reason is given from our Least Fang flotilla lord, Kiiraathra’ostakjo. He says that the Tongue of Tongues can only be so butchered by the human Ossian Wethermere. You are to formate into our space-pride and travel with us through the warping point.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Lieutenant (j.g.) Victor Menocal of the PSU Fortress Command knew he couldn’t hear the inexplicable objects hurtling through the Orphicon system at upwards of two-thirds the speed of light. But he fancied they made a weird, malevolent whistling sound as they flew like demons escaped from Hell and loosed on the universe.
A few minutes earlier, one of them had struck a gas giant in the outer system, and an astronomical research station orbiting that planet had transmitted the image of a vast, spreading, leprous red blotch on its yellow-orange surface. Now Menocal, like everyone else in the control center of Orphicon’s orbital fortress—a small one, for no one had menaced the peaceful Heart Worlds for generations—waited in stunned silence, telling himself over and over again that the world of Orphicon, which their fortress orbited, was a much smaller target.
There was a lull in the reports, and his attention strayed to the viewscreen, and his homeworld of Orphicon below. The terminator was creeping over the Naiad Ocean; it would be early morning on the subtropical coast where the ancestral home of the Sanchez family, his maternal bloodline, crowned the cliffs and looked out over the ocean to the east.
His mind strayed to the story his late grandmother Lydia Sanchez-Menocal had once told him. She, then twelve standard years old, had been standing on that cliff when her mother Irma Sanchez had returned from the Arachnid War, wearing the Wounded Lion of Terra, the highest decoration for valor that the old Terran Federation had been able to bestow on its sons and daughters. He, Victor, had always known their story. Irma had brought the infant Lydia—then Lydia Sergeyevna Borisova—to safety from a world about to be consumed by the seemingly unstoppable Bug hordes, and subsequently adopted
her. They had been reunited on that cliff, and Irma, after trying to explain to her barely comprehending adopted daughter why the years of cataclysmic violence through which she had waded had been necessary, had answered Lydia’s timid question with, “That’s right, Lydochka. The Bugs are never going to come.”
Thank God Lydia didn’t live to see this, thought Menocal. The Bugs may not have come, but it may be that something even worse has.
“Commander!” came the quavering young voice of the comm tech, shattering Menocal’s thoughts. “Urgent, from the astronomical station. They say…they say…”
“Calm down, son,” said Commander Hannity in a steadying voice. “Report.”
The tech gulped, and obeyed. “Sir, they’ve tracked one of the things and…it’s due to impact the planet.”
The silence that fell on the command center was more than the mere absence of sound.
“Any data on it?” Hannity demanded. The Old Man was only in his late thirties, but as he sat in his command chair and stared straight into the viewscreen his face seemed that of an old man indeed. Yet his voice remained under tight control.
“Uh…they say it’s one of the smaller ones, sir—maybe the size of a fist. It’s traveling at about 0.67 cee—”
“So, given that speed, it doesn’t really matter if it isn’t very massive,” said Hannity. He took a deep, unsteady breath. “Time of impact?”
“The time they estimate is…less than a minute from now, sir.”
And there was nothing else to be said. No one even suggested the possibility of targeting such a thing with the fortress’s weapons. Nor was there any point in alerting the planet. Everyone gazed at the serene world in the viewscreen, as though seeking to fill their eyes and memories with it before—
Out of the corner of his eye, Menocal fancied he could glimpse the briefest possible flash—an almost invisibly swift streak of reflected sunlight.
Against the darkness just on the shadowed side of the terminator, a red point of light appeared. In less than a second it turned orange and then yellow and then dazzling white. Then it dimmed and expanded and reddened.
“An ocean impact, and near the equator,” Commander Hannity said tonelessly. “So there will be tsunamis, and hurricanes, and salt rain all over the planet.”
Where the pinpoint of light had first appeared, there was now a spreading blob of bright orange.
“It must have smashed right through the ocean floor—probably halfway to the core at that velocity. And now the magma is welling up,” Hannity continued, speaking to no one in particular. “More heat, more boiling…more salt rains…”
The red flare had now swelled into a monstrous fireball, reaching up to the top of the planet’s atmospheric envelope and flattening out there. Around it, rings of cloud rushed outward, rippling as the shock wave through the ocean water distorted the cloud cover. For a time there was clear air around the fireball. As the leading edge of the tsunami entered the day side at hundreds of miles an hour, that mountainous wall of water could be perceived as a ripple that, as Menocal watched, swept over and far beyond the shore.
Menocal didn’t listen to the reports that began to come in—of coastal areas washed clean of life, of a world shuddering to cataclysmic earthquakes as though in the throes of a planetary ague, and all the rest. He stared fixedly at the ruined coast where the old house was gone, as was so much else.
*
“Do something!” yelped Assemblyman Obasanjo, not for the first time.
He had, of course, no business on the bridge of the luxurious VIP transport that had brought him and a gaggle of staffers to the Christophon system to confer with his allies of the Waldeck family that essentially owned the planet. But then, just after they had departed for the return voyage to Old Terra, had come the word of the inexplicable objects whipping through the system at more than half the velocity of light. And when the chief power broker of the PSU Legislative Assembly had blustered his way onto the bridge, no one had been disposed to say no.
They had just departed from the planet when the unbelievable message had arrived, quavering with the tones of panic, followed by an addendum that one of the larger chunks of matter was headed for Christophon’s sun at almost four-fifths of lightspeed, its several tons of mass enhanced by relativistic effects. Before the implications had even had a chance to sink in, they had witnessed the incredible in the view-aft.
The local sun, about ten light-minutes behind them, glowed in automatically stepped -down intensity so they could look at it. They therefore saw the surface of the photosphere, to one side, seem to acquire a dimple. Then, at appreciably the same moment, the other side of the sun erupted in a shower of flaming matter…and the entire great sphere seemed to waver…and then, almost before the receptors could compensate, it ballooned out in a fireball before whose dimensions imagination reeled. And as that star-hot wave front came closer, the light from it took less and less time to reach them, so they were no longer seeing the events of ten minutes earlier, and to their eyes the fireball seemed to be growing even faster than it was.
“It must have passed straight through the convective and radiative zones, and maybe even the core, and out the other side,” the captain said calmly. “Of course we had no way of knowing what the result of such a thing would be—it’s never happened before.”
“Do something!” Obasanjo’s voice had now risen to a near-scream. “Get us to the warp point and out of this system! Go faster!”
The captain sighed, and didn’t bother trying to explain the reactionless drive to Obasanjo, whose scientific ignorance was profound. “We’re going as fast as we can, Mr. Assemblyman…and this ship isn’t exactly built for speed. That wave-front is moving a lot faster than we are. We won’t be able to reach the warp point before it catches up with us.”
Obasanjo’s mouth hung open. “But…but…we’ll die!”
“Probably. Our only hope is that by then, this…stellar event will have grown so attenuated that the ship will be able to survive it.”
They watched the titanic fireball grow with soul-shaking rapidity. Silhouetted against it was a black circle: the planet of Christophon…
And all at once that circle seemed to catch fire, and fray away around its circumference, as the wave-front reached it. They watched a world die.
“It won’t be completely vaporized,’ said the captain, eerily calm. “The planetary core will survive as a small, dense object orbiting…whatever is left of this sun. We just don’t know what that will be. This is outside the normal course of stellar evolution.”
“But what about us?” Obasanjo’s voice was now a full scream.
The captain turned and looked at him somberly. “This ship is far less massive than that planet, Mr. Assemblyman,” he said, as though that was all the answer required. As, indeed it was.
The entire viewscreen grew sun-colored as the expanding star seemed to fill the universe. Then the receptors went out and the screen went black. It grew very hot…
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“I tell you, Ian, the Tangri have some new leadership!” growled Cyrus Waldeck.
“We know that, Cyrus,” Trevayne assured him. “In fact, we’ve been able to acquire some intelligence information about one of their rising stars.”
Waldeck gave him a sharp look from under his shaggy eyebrows. He was, Trevayne thought, visibly ageing. The face, with its features so typical of his clan of Corporate World magnates—thin-lipped mouth seemingly discordant with the massive jaw and large hooked nose—was beginning to sink in a little, and become a mesh of wrinkles. But then, even for someone who had for all his life had access to the best antigerone treatments money could buy, a century and a half plus was getting along.
Trevayne could never look at that face without recalling the history behind it. Humanity’s interstellar colonization had followed a pattern of three waves, with wars in the “troughs.” First, after the discovery of warp points in 2053, the worlds most accessible via the warp networ
k—the Heart Worlds, as they were known today—had been settled under governmental auspices. Then, in 2206, had come first contact with the Khanate of Orion, and the era of interstellar wars had begun. The next group of colonies, with corporate funding behind them, had occupied “chokepoint” systems astride the warp access to the systems beyond. That had become important after the Third Interstellar War, when the virgin systems—the “Fringe Worlds”—had seen a great surge of colonization by ethnic and cultural groups seeking to preserve their identity from submergence in Earth’s cosmopolitanism. The Corporate Worlds had been in a position to control the flow of goods and even information to and from the burgeoning new colonies…and robber baron capitalism had returned, with the Waldecks of Christophon among its most prominent and successful players. Generations of exploitation had eventuated in the Fringe Revolution and the sundering of the old Terran Federation that Trevayne, in his first body, had fought to save. The younger Cyrus Waldeck had fought beside him, with a fury fueled by class vindictiveness. But he had exhibited a capacity for growth unfortunately rare among his kin, and now he fought for wider loyalties.
His task force and Trevayne’s had converged as planned on the central Daroga system, and fought their way through two of its warp points in the teeth of heavier fixed defenses than the Tangri were wont to emplace, not to mention fanatical resistance by the Daroga Horde’s mobile forces. In the end, though, the system had been secured, and the brutalized remnants of its Zemlixi population liberated.
But then the campaign had slowed down. Probing outward through the system’s other warp points deeper into Tangri space, they had encountered the closest thing to guerilla warfare that was possible in space. Swift carrier forces, very difficult to catch, operating from no fixed bases, skulking among asteroid belts and gas-giant Trojan points, avoiding hopeless toe-to-toe battles but carrying out annoying mosquito-bite raids with swarms of fighters, doing no great damage but generating tension and frustration in the occupiers.
