Imperative - eARC

by Steve White

  “It’s impossible to say exactly, Admiral, as out information is somewhat out of date, despite the best efforts of the recon probes we’ve been sending along the warp lines. But I can tell you they’re advancing slowly.”

  “Yes,” said Tirnyareeo, russet pelt bristling. “I am certain the defenders of Telmasa and Kilean have taken a heavy toll of the chofaki!”

  “No doubt, Least Fang; from all indications the local forces have been maintaining a determined delaying action. However,” Chuan continued carefully, “the principal reason for their slow progress has been congestion due to their sheer number of ships. Since only one can safely transit a warp point at once, it is taking them a lot of time to…” She let the depressing thought trail off.

  Waldeck wasn’t nearly the history buff that, say, Ian Trevayne was. But from somewhere he recalled that in World War II, when Marshal Zhukov had closed in on Berlin, his greatest problem had been “artillery traffic jam”: he’d had so many guns that there hadn’t been room to emplace them all within range of the Nazi capital. This, he reflected bleakly, was evidently another such military embarrass de richesses.

  He shook loose from the thought and rapped on the table’s edge for attention. “All right, everyone. We all know why the PSU’s fleets haven’t been able to get in motion and concentrate. They’ve been maneuvering for a third of a year to try and counter scattered incursions, in the midst of all the chaos that followed the Deluge.” Like everyone else, he used the now-universal term for the waves of kinetic strikes that had wreaked such unthinkable devastation. “After all, with so many systems—and their courier services—totally disrupted…”

  “Yes, Ahhdmiraaaal Waaldehkh,” said Tirnyareeo. “We all know this. And we all know how futile and possibly counterproductive movement without a definite objective can be. Nevertheless, I must tell you…” He paused, then spoke on as though with an effort. “I am forced to admit that patience has never been among the more conspicuous virtues of my race. There are those among the Zheeerlikou’valkhannaieee who will mutter that the human members of the Union are less than prompt in responding to incursions which have fallen, and continue to fall, most heavily on our worlds.” He quickly raised a hand, palm outward and with claws retracted. “Be assured, Cyrrhusss, I would never suspect you of dilatoriness, and neither would anyone who knows how much you have to avenge. I only tell you how some members of my race will feel.”

  “I understand, Tirnyareeo, and I appreciate your words,” said Waldeck. “And I’m gratified that you understand the difficulties that have faced us in the absence of a clear appreciation of what the primary threat is.” His voice hardened, and his gray eyes narrowed into slits of resolve. “But now there’ll be no more random motion—no more chasing our tails. Now we do know where that threat is, and what its target is.” He gestured at the screen. “And this time we’re finally in a position to respond, because we’ve got the single biggest fleet of the PSU right here! I therefore intend to take the following actions.

  “First, I’m going to advance our main body to Orpheus-2, as I expect to meet them either there or Home Hive Two or both, depending on how rapid their progress is.

  “Second, I’ll dispatch couriers to the patrols in the nearby systems—which are mostly lifeless former Bug systems, anyway—ordering them forward to join us in Orpheus-2. Speaking of reinforcements, we will of course request them from the bases at Alpha Centauri via selnarmic relay.

  “Third, once we’re in Orpheus-2, I’m going to send an advance force further along the warp chain to harass and delay the hostiles as much as possible, for I’d prefer to meet them with our main force in Home Hive Two.

  “Fourth, I intend to move as many orbital forts as I have time to, given their slowness, into the systems in warp proximity to what I anticipate will be the main battlefield—that is, into Home Hive One, Orpheus-1 and Orpheus-2.” Seeing a few puzzled expressions, he explained. “This is to contain any possible hostile breakthroughs from the decisive battles I expect to fight. However,” he added with a tight smile, “I don’t really expect any such breakthroughs.” He swung on Chuan with an abruptness that made her jump. “Am I correct in supposing that these ships are their usual parasite warships?”

  “Yes, Admiral, that appears to be the case—for the most part. They have a certain number of vessels of monitor size, some of them apparently for specialized purposes in connection with warp-point assaults—an innovation since the last war. But as a general rule we’re looking at ships of heavy superdreadnought size or less.”

  “Just so.” All at once, that which Waldeck had been holding sternly in check ever since he had learned the fate of his homeworld came boiling to the surface, and he no longer tried to contain it. His face took on the choleric red that was a family characteristic, and his voice rose steadily. “At Zephrain, Admiral Watanabe had only a very few devastators and even fewer superdevastators. We have the bulk of the PSU’s entire inventory of those ship classes here. If Alpha Centauri responds as I anticipate, we should have two thirds of that inventory in time for the decisive battle. I don’t give a good God damn how many monitor-sized or smaller ships they’ve got. Our devastators and superdevastators, with their heavy gee-beam armament, will eat them!”

  Heads nodded around the table. The gravitic disruptor, or “gee-beam,” developed during the last war, inflicted damage in direct proportion to the mounting vessel’s engine power. This, plus the massive projector it required, made it unsuitable for lighter ships classes. But it was one of the things—besides their sustained-barrage-capable batteries of launchers for heavy bombardment missiles and SBMHAWKS—that made devastators and superdevastators so, well, devastating.

  “But Admiral,” said Konievitsky hesitantly, “at Zephrain, even Admiral Watanabe’s heaviest ships seem to have had their defenses overloaded by enormous numbers of fighters, employed without regard for losses.”

  “I’m not overly worried about getting swarmed with kamikaze fighters, Chandra. To repeat, Yoshi Watanabe had only a very limited number of devastators and superdevastators. The volume of defensive fire our big ships are going to be able to put out is something else again. And I believe we have enough carriers to provide adequate fighter cover—some of which,” he added, inclining his head to Vice Admiral Sheeraiee, commanding TF 2.11, “are crewed by our Ophiuchi allies.” He didn’t need to add that the avian-descended Ophiuchi were the best fighter pilots in the known galaxy. “Furthermore, many of our heavy fighters have been retrofitted with rapid-firing energy torpedo systems. Unfortunately, that program hasn’t been as far advanced in the PSU as it has in the Rim Federation. But it’s enough to restore some of the old punch to our squadrons.”

  This time the nods were more emphatic. The energy torpedo—a plasma weapon fired as a ballistic projectile at near-light speeds that gave it hit probabilities close to that of a beam but out to standard-missile ranges—had been greatly refined since the last war and was now the primary armament of all ships smaller than devastators. Most recently, further refinement had produced a smaller variant that was practical as an integral fighter weapon. It had given the fighter, once believed to be on the way to obsolescence since the Desai Drive for ships had robbed them of so many of their old advantages, a new lease on life.

  “But remember, the main thing to keep in mind is this,” Waldeck concluded, “In a stand-up fight, any ship of theirs that comes within range of our battle line is dead. The Kaituni don’t know what they’re up against, but they’re going to find out.”

  He saw he had them, for the faces around the table lit up with an animation whose absence lately had worried him. The oppressive sense of doom that had held them for four months had almost caused them to lose sight of the fact that they possessed by far the mightiest warships ever built—the ultimate killing machines ever conceived by any of their races. And here at Pesthouse they possessed an unprecedented concentration of those ships, with all their unimaginable firepower.

  “Yes!” excl
aimed Tirnyareeo, speaking for them all. “And may our claws strike deep!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  It was a cool, blustery winter day in the Riverside district of Prescott City. (The Xandies still called it that, not simply “Prescott” as they would later shorten it.) He walked slowly toward the seawall, along the street between the small but character-rich old houses shaded by native trees. He came to the address he had dreaded, opened a gate in a low stone wall, and proceeded reluctantly to the front door. It swung open to reveal the woman who had opened it—an obscenely butchered woman who nonetheless moved in a ghastly undead fashion even as blood flowed from her.

  Her mouth opened slightly to form the well-remembered smile…and blood spurted from it.

  There was blood everywhere…

  Ian Trevayne awoke, shivering and drenched with sweat. He reached across the bed, then belatedly remembered that Magda was still aboard her own flagship. He arose unsteadily, fumbled for his robe, and stumbled through the door into the main sitting room of his quarters, still in the darkness of night-watch but bathed in the illumination that flooded in through the wide viewport. He collapsed into a recliner and stared out at the Alpha Centauri system where he had only just arrived.

  By the time the allied governments of the PSU and the Terran Republic had finally shaken loose from the state of shock that had held them paralyzed after the incomprehensible series of catastrophes that had overtaken them, no one had been in any mood to quibble about the fact that Trevayne had, on his own initiative, sent Cyrus Waldeck and his task force to Pesthouse to organize the PSU’s strategic reserve there. In fact they had been inclined, in a way almost unprecedented in the annals of governments, to commend him for doing the sensible thing.

  They had also belatedly ordered him home from Tangri space with his large fleets, to the defense of the home worlds. (The recall of the legions, he had thought, summoning up a parallel from British history as naturally as he breathed in and out.) Under the circumstances, he had seen no constructive purpose to be served by pointing out to anyone that at the time he’d received that order he had already been under way toward that destination for a month.

  He had known that order would be coming, so the main thing holding him back had been the moral dilemma he had put himself in by his promise to protect the liberated zemlixis against a vengeful comeback by the Hordes. But he had left a substantial task group built around carriers and their escorting battlecruisers to deal with any incursions through the troublesome closed warp point in the system that had previously been the central stronghold of the Daroga Horde, reasoning that his limited number of devastators and superdevastators were what would be called for in combatting that which was ravening through the home systems. He had also deployed dense minefields and medium-weight battleline units around all the known hostile-interface warp points. Then, reasonably confident that he had honored his commitment to those who had trusted him, he had ordered the massive core of his fleet to commence the voyage home, confident that he would encounter the expected order somewhere along the way—and that no one would begrudge his jumping of the gun. Rather the opposite, in fact.

  The route, though long, hadn’t been as circuitous as it had once been, thanks to some newly created warp links. Thus it was that he was now here in the great warp nexus of Alpha Centauri, one transit away from the “dead end” system of Sol. It was this system’s seven warp points that had enabled humanity to explode outward in many directions in the first great colonizing surge of the late twenty-first century. Because of its unique strategic position, it was very strongly defended. But two standard weeks before Trevayne’s arrival, the heavy elements of that defense force had departed in response to Cyrus Waldeck’s summons. Trevayne had learned of the reason for that summons: the immense Kaituni armada advancing from Alowan toward Orpheus-1, where Cyrus would need every available ship to meet them.

  But then, on the heels of that, had come other news.

  TRNS Li Han and the rest of the fleet were in orbit around the center of mass of the double planet system of Nova Terra and Eden, at an orbital radius that rendered visible both of the twin life-bearing water planets which would have made this system a pearl beyond price even if it hadn’t been a warp hub. The Sol-like light of their primary, Alpha Centauri A, was reflected off their oceans as they revolved around each other in stately sixty-one-hour epicycles. At this point in its eccentric eighty-year orbit, the smaller companion star Alpha Centauri B was approaching periastron, already closer than Uranus is to Sol, an orange-tinted mini-sun or superstar that was visible in the skies of the twin planets even by day.

  All in all, quite a spectacle. But Trevayne stared at it without seeing it.

  He was seeing another, not too dissimilar binary star system—the one called Zephrain. And remembering it as it had been nearly a century ago.

  When the vicissitudes of the Fringe Revolution had stranded him and his battlegroup in the isolated Zephrain system, fresh from learning of the death of his wife and daughter at the hands of the rebels, he had placed himself under the command of Admiral Sergei Ortega, the local commander—who had been killed when the rebels had attacked, leaving Trevayne to batter them back…and, in the process, kill his own son, who had joined the rebellion. Afterwards, with a dead void where his soul should have been, he had landed on Xanadu, Zephrain A’s colony planet, to give pro forma condolences to Sergei’s daughter.

  Who had given him back his soul.

  Miriam Ortega, in her thirties, had been no conventional beauty. But hers had been the kind to which conventional canons of beauty were irrelevant—an intensely alive, vividly expressive face. And then he had seen her smile…and had shortly begun to smile again himself.

  More importantly, her dynamism had been at least the equal of his. Together they had formed the Rim provisional government. And they had been lovers as well as partners.

  Because of her, he had ceased to think of Zephrain merely as an abstraction to be held for the legitimate Terran Federation government, along with the Rim systems beyond it. He had come to love Xanadu and its melting-pot people—“Xandies,” they’d called themselves—almost as much as she did.

  And then, as he’d attempted to fight his way back to the Federation, had come his near-death in the hell known as the Battle of Zapata, followed—immediately, as far as his consciousness had been concerned—by his strange resurrection inside a youthful copy of his own body. And there to greet him had been a hundred-and-sixteen-year-old woman—seemingly in her late sixties by grace of antigerone treatments—with a face that, however wrinkled, was still unmistakable in its high-cheeked curve-nosed uniqueness, with its extraordinarily expressive smile.…

  It hadn’t been an easy adjustment—her a mother by another man, and a multiple grandmother, and he holding more than five decades of memories within a new twenty-year-old body. But he had adjusted, and settled into an autumnal affection that had never died—for her, and also for Xanadu and its people—even after he had married Magda and moved to the Terran Republic. It was an imperishable part of his life. Or it had seemed imperishable…

  He closed his eyes, shutting out the binary stars that were so like Zephrain, and tried to summon up the memory at the heart of the nightmare from which he had awakened: the first time he had met Miriam. He recalled the street, the raw salt wind off the Alph estuary beyond the seawall, the gate in the wall, the door…

  But he dared not let his mind venture any further. The nightmare had overwhelmed and superseded the real memories. He squeezed his eyes even more tightly shut, and a strong shudder ran through him.

  He felt a slim hand on his shoulder. Magda had entered unheard. Under that firm but gentle pressure, his shuddering subsided.

  “I just came aboard,” she said after a moment. “I…heard the news.”

  She knew about him and Miriam Ortega, of course. He had told her long ago, and jealousy or resentment would have been preposterous after so much time and under the present circumstance
s. Now she stood above him in silence, until she finally sensed that he needed for her to say something besides condolences.

  “Ironic, isn’t it? We were only able to get the news from Zephrain—which the Kaituni obviously only let out as a ploy to sow panic and despair—because of the fourth Unity Warp Point, which was off the beaten path in Orion space and connected to a warp linkage with the Heart Worlds. At least there, the selnarmic courier system is still in partial operation.”

  Trevayne opened his eyes, looked up at her as she stood in the light of Alpha Centauri A, and placed a hand over hers. He managed a very small smile. “Yes. The irony lies in your use of the past tense for the fourth Unity Warp Point. It rather takes one back to that cocktail party in Rome, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, and your little conversation with Assemblyman Obasanjo.” They had learned some time ago that Obasanjo had been in the Christophon system when an unusually large relativistic object had punched through its sun, and Trevayne hadn’t pretended he regarded it as too great a loss. He had his faults, but hypocrisy wasn’t one of them.

  “And my other conversation, with Dr. Kasugawa,” he said. “The PSU government has evidently now had the same conversation with him, since they built a deconstructing counter-generator.”

  “But, of course, continued to drag their heels about using it,” she reminded him.

  “Or even issuing clear protocols for its use,” he nodded grimly, reflecting on the cumbersome—if not self-paralyzed—nature of the PSU government. Above a certain size, government inevitably became smothered in its own fat. Today’s technology, up to and including the selnarmic relay, had expanded the envelope of that size limit far beyond that of history’s Egyptian, Chinese and Byzantine empires, but hadn’t and couldn’t eliminate it. The limit was always there, and always would be.