Imperative - eARC

by Steve White

  Zum’ref half-raised an arm to signal the guards to put an end to this annoying griarfeksh. But then he paused. Mere death—even the death of the zhetteksh, who had no reincarnation to look forward to, only eternal nothingness—was too good for Monetti. Instead, he should not be permitted to die before realizing the fate that lay in store for his people. Anyway, he had a few minutes.

  So he leaned forward and continued to speak in the same mild tones. “Actually, it wasn’t a mistake. This represents the final attainment of our objective. Everything we’ve done has been intended to lure the PSU into sending its heaviest concentration of devastators and superdevastators—the more of them the better—against us, in just such circumstances as these.” Monetti’s open-mouthed look of incomprehension was deeply satisfying. So Zum’ref leaned further forward. “You are to be honored beyond your bestial imaginings, for I am going to take the trouble to explain it to you before you die, so that you may understand the full weight of doom that is descending upon your race this day.

  “In the course of our long journey through normal space, we sought deeper understanding of the quantum physics behind our photon drive. Our delvings led us into the realms of quantum entanglement—and to the realization that it was possible to build a weapon that would hyperaccelerate a particle stream to suprarelativistic energy states.

  “As even you humans have been aware for centuries, quantum mechanics is founded on the postulate that, under certain circumstances, particles can ‘teleport’ from one side of a barrier to another.”

  “Yes,” Monetti said, nodding slowly, as though his incomprehension was beginning to give way to a dawning suspicion. “In Heisenbergian terms, every particle in the universe has a greater-than-zero-percent chance of being anywhere, at any time. We’ve long since recognized that this must be the basis of selnarm—it’s the only way to explain the instantaneous transmission of thought over vast distances.”

  “Then you understand that, without violating the lightspeed barrier, it is possible to cause certain particles to exchange one volume of space for another without traversing the intervening distance, much faster than light could travel between the two points—effectively instantaneously, in fact.

  “We have exploited this phenomenon of ‘focused quantum entanglement’ to build a weapon that can cause a hyperenergized matter stream of subparticles such as mesons and neutrinos to experience this ‘particle teleportation’ effect. The matter stream then reenters normal space in a targeted volume. Perhaps your limited understanding is incapable of imagining the effect on any object occupying the volume where the particles reemerge and multiple bits of matter are forced to do the impossible and occupy the same volume. The result is one hundred percent matter-to-energy conversion. As catastrophic as an antimatter warhead…except that it occurs inside the target.”

  “But,” said Monetti in a tone of grasping-at-straws desperation, “how could such a thing be targeted?”

  “The targeting is a function of the level of excess energy in the particles and the biasing of the field when they ‘jump’ out of normal space. These provide the range and bearing respectively. However, your instinct is correct: the weapon is only effective against targets that are big and relatively slow and unmaneuverable. In fact…” Zum’ref paused, savoring the effect he knew his next words were going to have. “In fact, the weapon is only practical against devastators and superdevastators.”

  Now, as horrified realization fully dawned, Monetti’s face wore the expression of a man who knew he, and all his world, were in a nightmare from which there would be no awakening.

  “Now you understand, don’t you?” Zum’ref asked rhetorically. “You understand why our entire strategy has been aimed not at avoiding head-on combat with your monster ships, but at luring the greatest possible number of them to us. And it has succeeded. They have come to us like bilbuxhati to the slaughter.

  “Our scientists call this new weapon the ‘relativistic acceleration weapon.’ But our common term for it is ‘the Hand of God.’” The term, of course, would translate literally as “the Tentacle-Member of Illudor,” but Zum’ref wanted it to have the maximum impact on this cowering griarfeksh. “And it is about to strike a blow that will shatter your fleets and open the way to the final purging of your repulsive species, and all the other species of zhetteksh with the effrontery to pretend to intelligence.”

  Monetti seemed to have withdrawn into a place where his new knowledge could not pursue him.

  “Destoshaz’at, it is almost time,” said Inzep’fel diffidently.

  (Pleasurable anticipation.) “Yes, so it is. Take him away and kill him.” Zum’ref turned and walked back to the display screen. The icons of the oncoming, unsuspecting enemy were inching closer to a certain glowing line, marking the range of the new weapon, slightly greater than that of their gee-beams.

  It belatedly occurred to Zum’ref that he hadn’t made full use of his opportunity. He could have also told Monetti that there was another secret he was about to reveal to the humans, here in this system—and he wasn’t sure which of the two would horrify them more. But that would have to wait a little longer.

  A burst of reports came in. The enemy had launched barrages of long-range heavy bombardment missiles from the massed batteries of their devastators and superdevastators, before coming into gee-beam range. His fleet would have to endure that for a short time. They were also deploying their fighter screen, expecting to have to counter swarms of selnarm-controlled suicide fighters. But that, of course, would come later…

  Time seemed to crawl as the extended-range engagement raged, with point defense batteries battling the missile-storm. But then, finally, the enemy icons were almost touching the line.

  (Respect behind which quivered eagerness.) “We await your command, “Destoshaz’at,” said the Intendant.

  Zum’ref’s large central eye, the one that always revealed emotion in his species, gleamed as the line was crossed.

  “Let the Hand of God strike,” he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  There was no warning. None at all.

  Cyrus Waldeck was on his flag bridge watching the satisfyingly destructive effect of his battleline’s torrential missile bombardment on the Kaituni fleet and the relatively ineffectual response to it. Waldeck was still wondering why no army-ant-like swarm of selnarm-controlled fighters was sweeping toward him (as it had toward Yoshi Watanabe’s fleet at Zephrain) when the first superdevastator vanished in a boiling cloud of superheated gas that consumed the ship so quickly that its hull did not have enough time fly apart into chunks of wreckage.

  As stunned as everyone else on the flag bridge, Waldeck’s immediate reaction was, It must have been an accident. But then another superdevastator exploded, and then another.

  “Aline,” Waldeck shouted at his Intelligence officer, a long lifetime of military formality forgotten in the throes of nightmare, “what is it? What’s happening?”

  Aline Chuan turned a paper-white face to him. “I…I don’t know, Admiral. There’s no indication that anything was targeting any of those ships. They just…blew up. From the inside.”

  And so the great ships’ almost impenetrable energy shields had been irrelevant, Waldeck realized. There was only one thing to do.

  “I want maximum velocity!” he commanded his chief of staff. “Whatever in God’s name this is, their ships—probably their monitors—are somehow putting it out. We’ve got to get in close and smash them before they can wipe us out. Get us into gee-beam range! And keep putting out the maximum possible volume of missile fire while you’re doing it, targeting the monitors.” Then, recalling the intelligence analysis of the data from Zephrain, he added an afterthought. “But don’t emphasize the ones with the energy signatures of the heavy assault monitors. Those are designed for warp point assaults, for taking the lead and early casualties. They won’t be the ones we’re after.”

  The order was passed, and, with the fleet flagship PSUNS Ivan Antonov in the le
ad, the battleline formation surged forward—less raggedly than might have been expected, considering the state of shock that gripped most of its personnel. But Waldeck’s orders proved impossible to carry out, for as they strained to get to closer range they simply advanced deeper into the range of the relativistic acceleration weapon—or the RAW as it was soon to become known. Withdrawal out of that range was the only thing that might have saved some of them…but Waldeck could not know that.

  Concentration of defense-saturating missile fire on the Kaituni monitors destroyed some of them, but could not alter the outcome. The battleline became defined by a luminous cloud of expanding gas molecules and particulate matter, like a planetary nebula through which shone the stroboscopic glare of exploding superships, like rapid-fire novas.

  Cyrus Waldeck’s heart was already dead within him when a hyperenergized stream of particles emerged into normal space deep in Antonov’s bowels, whose outraged matter instantly converted itself into ravening energy in protest.

  *

  At first, Zum’ref could only stand in a state of exaltation, watching the holocaust unfold. And the involuntary selnarmic emanation of that (EXALTATION!) bathed everyone else on the command center balcony like the warmth of a nearby sun.

  What did the scientists truly know? Their knowledge was shallow and superficial. They knew only the material outer surface of the truth—the quantum physics that was merely a way of putting that truth into terms comprehensible to lesser minds. He, Zum’ref, had glimpsed the truth in its entirety: what was happening was the will of Illudor made manifest, intervening directly in the material universe to cleanse it of the non-Arduan life forms infesting it. It was the Hand of God indeed!

  But, he reminded himself, Illudor helps those who help themselves. And I have been chosen to be his instrument. So he forced his mind back to practicalities.

  Only monitors could (just barely) carry the massive RAW generators. He had, as a matter of prudence, not emplaced those generators on the new heavy assault monitors, whose heavy armor and shields would have given them the maximum protection but whose intended use—leading warp point assaults—did not tend to increase their life expectancy. Instead, he had distributed them among the other monitor classes, using ubiquity as a form of camouflage. To be sure, it had been necessary to modify the RAW-equipped monitors. They had had to give up most of their conventional offensive armament, while at the same time receiving enhanced energy shields and point defense to increase their survivability. These peculiarities, in addition to the engine output spike that marked the power surge whenever the RAW was used, might make those ships identifiable. But the human admiral—who had correctly deduced that whatever it was that was so inexplicably destroying his superships must somehow emanate from the Kaituni monitors, and had accordingly targeted them—had no leisure to analyze his sensor readings and search for such patterns. He had also been correct in his apparent assumption that the assault monitors—specialized warp point assault ships, according to his best information—were unlikely to be the ones he sought. So he had had no way of knowing which monitors were wielding the new and utterly deadly weapon. Nevertheless, the smashing long-range missile salvos that datalinked superdevastators could administer had gotten a few of RAW-equipped ships. But only a few. And in his desperation to get within gee-beam range of his tormentors, that human admiral had merely rushed headlong into the mouth of Illudor’s furnace.

  But Zum’ref wanted no more losses among the RAW-carrying monitors—there would be other devastators and superdevastators to deal with in later battles. And there was no point in risking them. Even the enemy supermonitors weren’t massive enough or clumsy enough to allow good targeting solutions for them. So…

  “Pull all RAW-bearing monitors back,” he commanded. “All other elements will proceed with phase two of our plan—the extermination of the remainder of this gutted fleet. Our fighters will concentrate on their supermonitors, which are the only ships they have left that outclass everything of ours. Otherwise, our heavy superdreadnoughts can deal with most of their surviving ships, aided by superior numbers of our lighter hulls.”

  His subordinates hastened to execute his orders.

  *

  Most of Second Fleet’s highest officers had been flying their lights aboard devastators and superdevastators, and had died with them. But not all. The vice admirals and rear admirals in command of carrier task groups and the lighter supporting task groups built around battlecruisers survived. And Chandra Konievitsky, whose task force was made up of the latter, abruptly found herself the senior living officer, and in command of a fleet for which escape had now become the best-case scenario.

  “Get the fringe of supermonitors back,” she ordered in a hoarse voice. “They’ll be the next-priority targets for…whatever this is, after the devastators and superdevastators are gone.”

  She could hardly credit that she was saying the last seven words—they had a weird ring of unreality in her ears. All she could do was try to minimize the disaster. And she found herself on the horns of a dilemma. She must try and preserve the supermonitors, the largest ships Second Fleet had left. But they were also the slowest, and would delay the fleet as it retreated to the Orpheus-1 warp point. But of course, came the ghastly thought, if the Kaituni destroy them the same way they’ve destroyed the devastator classes, that will eliminate the problem, won’t it? She thrust the notion from her mind with revulsion and turned to the nightmarish job of trying to impose smooth tactical coordination on a fleet whose command structure had been more than decimated, whose lines of communication were tattered, and whose collective state of mind was like a choppy sea of uncomprehending horror over which rose whitecaps of sheer panic.

  But this was, after all, a professional fleet. Gradually, she and her staff managed to bring order out of chaos, and well-drilled tactical doctrine for a fighting retreat reasserted itself in the face of the Kaituni onslaught: a tidal wave of heavy superdreadnoughts and lesser ships plus a limited number of monitors, spewing uncountable missiles and preceded by selnarm-directed fighters in their thousands. (Though not, Konievitsky noted, the fighter “triads” that Intelligence reports from Orion space had described. Perhaps the Dispersates making up this fleet didn’t have them. Or perhaps the Kaituni didn’t consider them necessary for dealing with a fleet that had just had its heart torn out.)

  But as patterns began to emerge, Konievitsky’s sweating Intelligence staff discerned two of them quite clearly. In the first place, certain Kaituni monitors were holding back and not engaging in combat. And secondly, none of her supermonitors were simply exploding in that ghastly, inexplicable way. Instead, they were at the center of swarms of fighters like angry bees.

  Konievitsky didn’t even try to discern any connection between the two. In fact, she barely noticed the first one. She was struggling to cope with the role of fleet command, into which she had been unceremoniously thrust at least two levels below preparation for it. And she therefore fixated on the one datum that seemed very clear in the midst of this maelstrom of space-wracking violence: lesser ships than devastators were not turning into miniature novae for no intelligible reason. So, evidently, the Kaituni couldn’t do it. She didn’t try to understand it. She merely reacted to it.

  “Order our fighter screen to concentrate on protecting the supermonitors,” she commanded.

  Through the disaster-wracked comm channels of Second Fleet, the order was somehow passed, and the fighter screen reconfigured itself in accordance with the new priorities. Those fighters were hugely outnumbered, but by an even huger margin they were individually superior to their adversaries. This was partly because some of them—not nearly as many as Konievitsky would have liked—were piloted by Ophiuchi, whose evolutionary ancestors had traded the ability to fly for intelligence but without giving up millions of years of intuitive sense for relative motion in three dimensions. And partly because even selnarmic control could not totally equal the highly motivated instantaneity achievable by a pilot r
ight there in the cockpit. But mostly because of the rapid-fire energy torpedo that had been miniaturized into a viable fighter weapon system. Second Fleet’s fighters corkscrewed through the dense swarms of their adversaries, cutting swathes through them. Meanwhile, the supermonitors they protected used their heavier, ship-to-ship energy torpedoes— more effective than standard missiles at the medium ranges to which the Kaituni van was now closing—to lay down a withering defensive fire that would continue as long as their powerplants kept functioning.

  But the thousands of kamikaze fighters—unhindered even by the natural last-few-seconds’ hesitation that must have often gripped the pilots whose suicidal attacks centuries earlier over Old Terra’s Pacific Ocean had fixed the label in both memory and lexicon—were too numerous to be insulated against. Konievitsky watched her losses mount as she continued her fighting retreat—always one of the most difficult tactical problems in space warfare, for it could not be a simple headlong flight, lest the pursuing enemy find too easy a path into the sternward “blind zones” created by all reactionless drives. But, she reflected, maybe just such a flight was the only way to save her remaining supermonitors.

  “New orders,” she told her chief of staff. “All supermonitors are to disengage and get back to the Orpheus-1 warp point. The remainder of the fleet will continue to withdraw in accordance with standard tactical protocols.”

  The chief of staff stared at her. “But Admiral,” he began, but she cut him off with an impatient gesture.

  “Yes, I know: we’ll lose their firepower. But we’ve got to get them out of this system. And, as they’re our slowest remaining ships, they’ll slow us less this way. The rest of us can continue to fight a delaying action, while working our way back to the warp point a little faster than we could with them in the formation.” She managed to smile inwardly, for the word formation scarcely described her exercise in desperate improvisation.

  The order was transmitted, the supermonitors lumbered away, and the battle—now waged by monitor-sized and smaller ships alone—snarled its way across the system of Home Hive Two A.