by Steve White
Amunsit’s response was slow, as if she were savoring every word of it. “Targeting our arrivals and bombardments optimally was the simple part of the task, since all our ships had been sent forth into the same thirty-light-year footprint of space, as seen from Ardu. This meant that changing destinations was not so arduous, given that we had as much as eight years at 0.5 cee to effect it. That gave every Dispersate a four-light-year radius of potential destination change within the footprint. Given that we had Dispersates Three to Sixteen at our disposal, we were able to assign a sufficient force to almost every target in the region of space toward which we were headed.”
Amunherh’peshef’s vocoder voice was small, stunned. “You have—fourteen Dispersates arriving near here?”
“Near each other in real space does not equate to near each other on the trail of warp points. Since there is no strong relationship between warp-point links and the physical proximity of the two stars so linked, this provided us with the opportunity to deliver strategic, system-killing strikes throughout the polities that the humans call the PSU and the Rim Federation. And since my agents—and your defectors—were able to build an encyclopedic data base of industrial centers, transit hubs, fleet stations, refitting depots, and a host of other strategic targets, we were able to both cut the pathways whereby your fleets might reinforce each other, as well as inflict maximum destabilizing damage. By the time your military units and key planets have recovered, the outcome of this war will be a foregone conclusion.
“It was that same collection of data which allowed us to expand both our competencies in science—notably, genetics and advanced computers—and reform our fleets so as to be truly wartime tools of destruction. As you have experienced, we are no longer shackled to a few classes of warship, supported by vehicles and systems designed largely for explorers and planetary pioneers. Our equipment is now proper for warriors, arriving to conquer, not settle like so many neutered bilbuxhati. And, again unlike the First Dispersate and even my own when it arrived, the later Dispersates have spent the last five years doing nothing but training in the personal operation and tactical doctrine of using this vastly expanded armory of weapons. Which includes some with which you are not yet acquainted, and one which you taught us how to make and to use: a warp point generator.”
Miriam hoped she had been able to keep the brief flash of panic from registering on her face. Perhaps she had; perhaps Amunsit was too poorly versed in reading the facial nuances of humans.
Or perhaps she was simply too absorbed in her own preening: she had turned toward Amunherh’peshef once again. “Where is your sensitive, traitor? I would—study—such a human.”
“I do not have a sensitive assigned to me,” the Senior Consul replied truthfully.
“The sensitives were all assigned to the fleet,” Miriam half-lied. “So you’ll have to consult your own genocidal captains as to where you might find their remains—if any are left.” She suppressed, but did not eliminate, the fury from her tone of voice.
Amunsit stared at her. “You speak boldly for a zhettek, aged creature. It is the one puzzlement I have not resolved in my contemplation of your species. Logically, having no hope of incarnation, you should be more eager than we are to retain your life, but—at moments such as this—you seem willing to risk it for no gain. I do not understand this.”
“There’s a lot about us you don’t understand,” Miriam said through half-clenched teeth. “As you’ll learn soon enough.”
“A threat. How quaint and pointless.” Amunsit’s vocoder voice was more bored than dismissive. Then she turned back to Amunherh’peshef and, in one smooth motion, raised her right tentacle cluster. The wrist-surrounding machine pistol she had ready in it stuttered briefly. Amunherh’peshef staggered backward, the slugs evidently exploding within him. He fell to the marble floor, and a dark maroon pool of blood spread out to cover the spattering that had been left by the impacts, as if guiltily trying to paint over its own mess.
Amunsit turned back to Miriam, paused, and then approached her. With the Kaitun showing no signs of stopping even as she drew within five feet, Miriam backed up before the alien’s casual but implacable advance. Hating her age, her powerlessness, she felt her buttocks push up against the wall behind her.
Amunsit stopped, less than half a meter in front of Miriam. In a tone as calm as she might have used to ask a mess-mate to pass the soup, the Kaituni admiral said, “I shall ask one more time: where are the sensitives? You would not have sent all of them to the fleet; you knew we were coming. You would have retained some, in the event that the battle for this system did not go as you hoped.”
“Oh, we retained one,” Miriam admitted, being sure to allow the conviction of that truth surge in her voice for the sake of the vocoder. “But when we heard you were coming, where do you think we sent her?” Miriam turned and pointed a blue-veined finger out the ruined window behind her—straight at the seared expanse of rubble where the capitol complex had once been.
Amunsit stared at the distant patch of blasted ground, then at Miriam. Perhaps it was the tones of conviction relayed by the vocoder, or perhaps it was the almost inevitable logic of the human’s explanation that induced Amunsit to glance away. But Miriam was fairly sure that her lie had succeeded, and that Hildy was now—and only now—truly safe. But to be sure, it was best to change the conversation, to redirect this monomaniacal ravager in Arduan form. “You look like an Arduan,” Miriam muttered, “but you certainly don’t act like one. What the hell happened to you—to your people?”
It was the ego-hooking lure that Miriam had hoped it would be: Amunsit turned, stared again, but even a human could see that the look in her eyes was different. The burning topic of the moment had changed. Questions that might inadvertently point to Hildy’s continued existence were now far out of Amunsit’s mind.
“You are right, human: we are different. And what happened to us was a deliverance from our own laxity, our own decline. We are the Kaituni, and had it not been for the practical and disciplined society which evolved on Ardu as its day of destruction approached, we would have succumbed to the same seductions with which you misled and corrupted the First Dispersate. But I do not blame you zhetteksh. All organisms fight to survive, and will do so using whatever means are at their disposal. No, it was the moral decay and insipid, heretical optimism of the shaxzhu that nearly undid us.
“We took the measures necessary to ensure our survival and that of Illudor. For if you know even the most simple realities of our relationship with the One God of All, you know that just as we depend upon him for unity and life, so he depends upon us to be the agency whereby His Will is expressed in the physical universe. Without us as his faithful children, Illudor would be silent. So our duty is not just to ourselves, but to our god: we are indissoluble, linked, different parts of the same continuum of existence. And our current Destoshaz’at, he named Zum’ref, understood the quest that Torhok’s reports necessitated we undertake, that redefined us, made us something more than mere ‘Arduans’—for why should we keep a name from a dead world any more than we should be subject to its equally dead histories through the shaxzhu? Rather, Torhok’s messages revealed to us that our new identity had to be, as Zum’ref proclaimed, the Kaituni: those sworn to the Quest. Just as the circumstances of our planet’s demise had compelled us to flee into space, so the circumstances of our journey’s end called us to battle, and revealed that resurgence of the Destoshaz caste was a sign from Illudor himself that our survival—and his—depended upon our readiness to win a great war against a massive tide of zhetteksh foes.” Her machine pistol rose to point at Miriam. “Which is to say, against you.”
“I am not your enemy. None of us are.”
“You are right—at least insofar as even the most ferocious predators are not truly enemies. They are dangerous forces which must be destroyed so that thinking creatures—the Kaituni—may safely survive, and in so doing, carry on the presence and will of Illudor in the physical world.�
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Miriam smiled. “You almost sound as though you believe that. But I have seen your type before, Amunsit: you exist in every species I know. You have draped yourself in pious words to validate the ravenous personal ambition that is your true motivation.”
Amunsit started back, then seemed to pause. When her voice came from the vocoder, it was amused, and possibly pleased. “I see why the First Dispersate was so easily fooled by your species. Some of you have remarkable insight, for zhetteksh. But no matter: I am not here to debate, but to gather information. You will tell me where the Bellerophon fleet is, its strength, and its current orders.”
“Actually, I would if I could,” Miriam lied. “But you may notice that I am not a military officer. I am not even a legislator, who might ostensibly hear such things. I am a Liaison to the Consulate of a people—not even a member-state—located within our borders. I had no access to military information. None of any significance.” Miriam congratulated herself on that final qualification: lies were often detected because they tended to be absolute statements, simple contradictions of a fact. In contrast, reality was shot through with shades of gray and qualifying statements. Such as she had ended with.
Amunsit stared at her. Miriam watched as the Kaituni admiral holstered her machine-pistol and her vocoder announced, through a sigh. “That is logical. I believe you.”
Miriam nodded—and in that moment, felt her chest split open, cold rushing into the interior of her body. She looked down in time to see Amunsit’s cluster rip free of her lower left chest, hooked claws carrying two ribs out of her sliced and bleeding torso.
As Miriam Ortega fell, Amunsit’s other cluster came up from the holster and swept across the aging woman’s neck. Miriam saw her own blood fly up at the periphery of suddenly narrowing vision, had the vague sense she was falling, hit the wall, rolled off, saw Amunsit towering over her, gore dripping from both claws.
As Miriam’s vision began narrowing down from a tunnel to a pinprick, she heard Amunsit’s vocoder-voice casually say to her entourage, “We are done here. Commence the bombardment. Leave nothing standing. Or alive.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The type B blue giant star known as Pesthouse had no planets, of course. Such a massive protostar, condensing from the interstellar medium, developed a gravitational field so powerful that it sucked all the available matter into itself without allowing any secondary condensation processes to occur around it.
But, Cyrus Waldeck thought, it might as well have a planetary system, given the sheer tonnage that now orbited it.
He stood gazing out the wide viewport of his quarters in the massive space station that was only one element of the immense base that PSU maintained here against the possibility—now so abundantly realized—of trouble from the Arduans of Zarzuela, as well as the never-openly-discussed possibility of a change of heart among the friendly Arduans of the Bellerophon Arm. Of necessity, the base orbited at a great distance from that raging blue-hot inferno beside which the smaller main-sequence suns that warmed habitable planets were like tallow candles. Further out, in fact, than the system’s three warp points, whose distances from that hellish primary ranged from nineteen to twenty-eight light-minutes. Few could transit those warp points without an uneasy awareness they were skirting the edges of that monster star’s radius of total destruction.
Out here, however, that star was reduced by distance to little more than a point-source of bluish light. But that light was eye-wateringly intense—in fact, the total luminosity was more than equal to that of Sol as viewed from Earth—and it was reflected off the flanks of the secondary weapon platforms, space docks, manufacturing and repair facilities, and other orbital constructs that made up the base. Further away, it also revealed superdevastators whose size made them seem deceptively close.
Not even all the unimaginable horror that had filled every incoming report for the past four months could keep Waldeck from feeling grim satisfaction at the sight of those magnificent, invincible ships.
The communicator on the desk behind him beeped for attention. “Speak!” he rapped.
“They’re ready now, Admiral,” said the voice of his orderly.
“Very good.” Waldeck turned and walked to the adjoining flag briefing room. The task force commanders of Second Fleet rose to their feet as he entered. There were more of them than might have been expected, for “Second Fleet” hardly described the concentration of naval power that had managed to assemble here. Several were Orions, and Waldeck hoped the pills he took against his unfortunate allergy to their fur would be no more ineffective than usual.
“As you were,” Waldeck rumbled, and they all sat down around the long conference table. A bulkhead overlooking them consisted mainly of a large flat viewscreen. A two-dimensional display was all that was needed to represent the warp network, which somewhat resembled a circuit diagram from the early days of electronics. At the time this station had been constructed, that had been all that was needed.
And it’s still all that’s needed, Waldeck told himself savagely. These later Dispersates may be coming at us out of three-dimensional space, but they can’t do us any harm until they light somewhere among our systems. And then they have to advance along the warp lines like anyone else. Which they foresaw, which is why they used up all their generation ships, turning them into rubble for use as projectiles. His mind flinched away from that thought, as it always did, and as always he clamped the lid of almost a century and a half of habitual self-discipline on it. “I’m going to begin by asking Captain Chuan to give us an updated recapitulation of the strategic picture,” he began, referring to his staff Intelligence officer.
“Yes, sir.” Aline Chuan stood up and activated the screen. The relevant portions of the warp network appeared, seemingly diseased with irruptions of red. A cursor flickered over one of those leprous intruders. “We know about the fall of Zephrain, of course—”
“Of course,” Waldeck echoed. His memory leaped the span of almost a century to the days of the Fringe Revolution. He had been there when Ian Trevayne had held Zephrain and the Rim systems beyond for the Terran Federation from which they had been sundered save a tenuous clandestine warp linkage through the officially neutral Khanate of Orion. Miriam Ortega had been Trevayne’s partner…and lover. The last part had been the worst-kept secret in the Zephrain system. Waldeck wondered how generally known it was now. And he tried to imagine how the news of Zephrain’s fall was going to affect Trevayne.
“—and so we know that the Bellerophon Arm is now sealed off—which is clearly the invaders’ intention, as they seem to be fortifying the Zephrain system. We know this because of the abundance of selnarmic courier drones in the Arm, coupled with the link that Admirals Trevayne and Li Han created between the Terran Republic and the Borden system during the late war.”
“Understood,” Waldeck nodded. The link to Borden had been the first use of the Kasugawa warp point generator, and it had been instrumental in bringing the war with the first Arduan Dispersate to an end. And now it provided a very long communications route all the way back to Sol. “But however we got the news, it’s bad. We have no realistic expectation of linking up anytime soon with forces from the Bellerophon Arm, which as we all know has become an industrial powerhouse since the last war.” He looked around the table, meeting each pair of eyes, human or otherwise, in turn. “And that is especially bad news in light of a report which has now reached us, and which I would like Captain Chuan to summarize.”
“Yes, sir. The information came to us fairly promptly, as it went through Orion space and reached Sol within a week, via selnarmic courier and Unity Point Five.” Chuan drew a deep breath and moved the cursor. “A new hostile fleet has occupied the Alowan system.”
All of the faces registered shock, followed by muttered exchanges. But Least Fang of the Khan Tirnyareeo’zhelak, commanding TF 2.5, was silent and immobile, save that his whiskers quivered with the effort he was exerting not to emit a howl. Waldeck understood.
Alowan was the primary sun of the populous Orion world Pairsag. Or at least formerly populous, Waldeck mentally amended.
“Fleeing survivors were able to provide a surprising amount of information, from which the Intelligence analysts on Terra were able to draw certain inferences,” Chuan continued, speaking above the low hubbub, armored in expressionless formality. “For one thing, this is an armada of immense—indeed, unprecedented—size. From the survivors’ impression of its numbers, coupled with our knowledge of how many parasite ships a given diaspora is likely to carry, the analysts calculate that this force represents the combined resources of no less than seven Dispersates.”
The shock in the room was now complete, and a dead silence fell. Tirnyareeo broke it.
“Do we have any knowledge of what these chofaki have subsequently done?” he demanded. “Have they entered the Sak system?” He pointed a clawed finger at the screen, indicating the system at the other end of one of Alowan’s warp connections—an uninhabited system, but one possessing three other warp points, all leading into the Orion heartlands.
“No, Least Fang. They advanced through Alowan’s other warp point, into the Telmasa system, which as you know is lifeless, and continued up the warp chain.” Chuan moved the cursor along the warplines indicated, and Tirnyareeo stiffened anew when it touched the system just beyond Telmasa: Kilean, with two Orion-inhabited planets. The cursor proceeded through the icons of system after system until it reached Home Hive Two.
Vice Admiral Chandra Konievitsky, commanding TF 2.7, leaned forward and studied the screen intently. “It’s pretty obvious where they’re headed.”
“Yes,” Waldeck nodded. “Orpheus-2, just two transits beyond Home Hive Two. It’s the choke point they’ve got to secure in order to get to the warp chain linking Sol to Zephrain. Which just proves what we already knew: they’ve picked their targets very well, using intelligence information that is very good indeed. These incoming diasporas know infinitely more about us than we do about them.” Thanks to the Arduans in Zarzuela, he didn’t need to add. He turned back to Chuan. “How far along this warp chain have they gotten?”
