by Steve White
“I prefer not to assume any lack of insight on the part of this particular enemy.” (Decisiveness.) “No. The main body of the fleet will change course, leaving only a holding force here. If the enemy yields to the temptation to remain here and overwhelm that force, well and good. But I believe he will follow us…which is even better.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Ian Trevayne muttered a distracted “As you were” as he entered Zeven Provinciën’s flag bridge, blinking his interrupted cat nap out of his eyes. Elaine De Mornay and Andreas Hagen nonetheless stood up straight over the system plot of the tactical display they had been studying intently.
“All right,” said Trevayne without preamble. “What’s this about the Kaituni breaking off the engagement?”
“Well, Admiral, they have indeed discontinued their attacks and opened up some space between their fleet and ours. But since then, something else has happened.” He indicated the display, and the swarm of scarlet “hostile” icons. The swarm had subdivided into two unequal parts. And the greater of the two was veering off at an angle of about forty-five degrees.
“They appear,” De Mornay continued, “to be leaving a relatively small holding force here and departing with the bulk of their fleet.”
“And,” Hagen put in, anticipating Trevayne’s question, “we have no indication of why.”
“Go to system-scale display,” Trevayne ordered. “And project the courses of all major formations.”
Hagen obeyed, and the white icon of Home Hive Two A shone in the center of the holo tank. Combined Fleet and its enemies currently lay at a bearing of a trifle more than ten o’clock from that star, a little over twelve light-minutes from the Oprheus-1 warp point—a course which a string-light marked, running almost straight “up.” But another string-light, forty-five degrees from the first one, showed the projected route of the Kaituni main body, heading…nowhere.
Trevayne glared, narrow-eyed, at the expanse of nothingness into which the Kaituni were so inexplicably headed. The second and fourth planets of Home Hive Two A were further in a clockwise direction around the star, at their present orbital positions…and at any rate, there was nothing on any of those charnel house worlds that could interest the Kaituni. The same went for Home Hive Two B and its retinue of equally dead planets, two hundred and fifty light-minutes away and in an altogether different direction. No matter how far the Kaituni’s present course was extrapolated, it intersected with absolutely nothing.
Nothing that we know about, Trevayne mentally qualified.
Were they seeking to rendezvous with an undetected Kaituni force which had entered Home Hive Two earlier and was now lurking in the depths of interplanetary space? No. Waldeck had scouted this system for any such threats, and Cyrus was—or had been—nothing if not thorough.
He sought desperately for meaning, for facts. But there was only one fact he knew for certain—and that fact was surely irrelevant, for it rose from between the dusty pages of history books.
He rejected the thought, irritated with himself. There was no connection with his present problem. There must be no connection. How could there be?
No. There could be only one answer.
He became aware that De Mornay was practically fidgeting with eagerness to speak. “Yes, Elaine?”
“Admiral, for some unfathomable reason of their own, the Kaituni have divided their forces. This presents us with an opportunity to defeat them in detail. We can overwhelm this rearguard they’ve left almost in contact with us. Let’s concentrate on that, and not follow their main body off on some wild-goose chase into the middle of nowhere!”
“There’s only one problem with your reasoning, Elaine,” said Trevayne. “The Kaituni are, by our standards, stark raving mad—but they are not stupid, as we have learned to our cost over the past several months. There is only one rational basis for what they are doing: they must know of a previously undiscovered closed warp point in this system.”
That silenced De Mornay. Closed warp points—undetectable until somebody came through them from the other side—were a phenomenon heartily detested by the theorists, who had never succeeded in accounting for their existence, and also by naval officers, for whom they were an ever-present source of nasty surprises from outside the known warp network. When the first Arduan Dispersate had appeared out of normal space—an unprecedented occurrence—in 2524, someone had glumly observed that the entire sky had suddenly become one vast closed warp point. But now the Kaituni had committed themselves to warpline warfare, and there could be but one strategic reason for what they were doing at present.
“Sir, are you suggesting…another Kaituni armada, from an unsuspected direction?” breathed Hagen.
“We don’t know. In fact…” Trevayne paused, with a brief, self-deprecating smile. “There’s only one thing that we do know. It occurred to me a few moments ago, God knows why. Silly of me. But I couldn’t help remembering…we’re in what used to be Arachnid space.”
For a long, silent moment, the air was full of ghosts.
Two centuries before, humanity and its allies had fought the most devastating war in history, and the one with the simplest objective: sheer survival. There could be no peace, no compromise, no reasoning with the Bugs, for every attempt to communicate with their eerily silent hive intelligence had failed. They had been an enemy like no other: an insensate, all-consuming essence of nightmare dredged up from the deepest recesses of childhood terrors, for they had been not merely genocidal but anthropophagous, literally eating entire sentient populations in the path of their seemingly unstoppable advance, and even breeding sentient livestock—meat animals that knew.
With their backs to the wall of extinction, humans and others had fought the Bugs to a standstill in a series of campaigns almost inconceivable in their scale and intensity, and, in the end, wiped the universe clean of them. But the sheer flesh-crawling horror and loathing they had aroused was seared into the human soul forever.
De Mornay laughed nervously, breaking the spell, and the ghosts vanished.
“Well, sir, fortunately that was a long time ago!”
“Quite,” said Trevayne briskly—a little more briskly than was necessary, some might have thought. “At the present time, I am firmly convinced that the main Kaituni body is going where it’s going for a reason—to exploit something we can’t see, and a closed warp point seems the only possibility that makes sense.”
Hagen looked thoughtful. “Also, sir, I recall some of the reports of the investigation Captain Wethermere and Councilor Ankhat had been conducting into Amunsit’s machinations. As I recall, they turned up leads that kept pointing back to this region of space.”
“So they have. There may or may not be a connection. But whatever it is the Kaituni are up to, we must attempt to disrupt it. I want to interdict that main body if at all possible. As of now, that is Combined Fleet’s first priority.”
“Yes, sir,” De Mornay and Hagen answered in unison.
“And…Elaine, have comm raise Admiral Li-Trevayne. I want to consult with her.” Specifically, Trevayne didn’t add, I need someone I can talk to about this vague, intuitive feeling that won’t go away, however little sense it seems to make.
*
As the fleets proceeded along the new course, exchanging fire intermittently, it became increasingly clear to Trevayne that even if he was right about a closed warp point he wasn’t going to be able to seize it and defend it against entry. The main Kaituni van was too big to be brushed aside. Furthermore, the smaller Kaituni delaying force did just that: it delayed him, even though it was gradually worn down in the running battles. If he paused to wipe it out, as De Mornay had originally wanted to do—and still at least half wanted to do, he suspected—he would be delayed even more. He would just have to observe whatever move the Kaituni van made, whenever it made it, and react as seemed indicated.
They had reached a point eleven light-minutes from Home Hive II A, on a bearing of twelve o’clock, and an incre
asingly tense Trevayne was sharing his anxieties with Magda. He sat on Zeven Provinciën’s flag bridge and gazed at a flatscreen image of her, looking into eyes that reminded him of Han’s, although whenever that thought occurred to him he had to sternly remind himself that according to his most current information Novaya Rodina was untouched.
“You realize, Ian,” she was saying, “that you’re still gambling. You don’t know what it is you’re trying to prevent.”
“I know,” he replied glumly. “I just wish I had more to go on than the nagging intuition that I can’t quite put my finger on. At any rate, whatever it is, we’re just going to have to try to work ourselves into the best position to—”
“Admiral!” rapped Hagen in a brittle voice. He had been living over his readouts of sensor data, and was under instructions to interrupt Trevayne at any time. “What appears to be a small task group—squadron, rather—of cruiser-sized ships is separating off from their van. The rest of the van is changing course—swerving away.”
“Tactical,” snapped Trevayne, turning toward the holo plot and knowing Magda was doing the same aboard her flagship. Yes, he could see the tiny cluster of even tinier icons speeding ahead of the main Kaituni force, which seemed to be…well, he couldn’t avoid the impression that they were getting out of the way of something. Whatever it was, the delaying force was still doggedly interposing itself to prevent him from doing anything about it.
But all speculation, fled his mind as he watched the cruiser-icons begin to vanish.
“They’re making warp transit,” Hagen reported unnecessarily.
“Well, Ian, you were right about an undiscovered—at least by us—closed warp point,” came Magda’s voice from the communicator.
“And now we know where it is,” De Mornay added.
“But how the bloody hell did they know where it is?” Trevayne demanded. “Since we didn’t know about it, Amunsit couldn’t have passed it on to the coming Dispersates along with all the other navigational data about our warp networks. And why have they sent this tiny detachment of ships into it?”
No one had an answer. For a space that seemed longer than two minutes but wasn’t, they all studied the tactical plot as though trying to extract revelation from it by sheer concentration.
Then the icons began to reappear, emerging from the warp point…but only half as many as had gone in.
“What the devil—?” Trevayne began.
But then the display suddenly grew brighter as ship-icons began to appear at the warp point—large ships, and appearing in multiple simultaneous transits that seemed to transcend even the usual Kaituni indifference to death. As Trevayne watched, two ships materialized in the same volume and vanished in a space-wracking explosion. But this in no wise caused the new arrivals to grow more cautious; they continued to pour into Home Hive Two system in the same reckless way.
Trevayne forced calm on himself. “Well, at least we’re not caught in an awkward position between the force we’ve been engaging and this new Kaituni fleet. Captain De Mornay, I want Combined Fleet realigned to—”
“Admiral,” said Hagen in a voice whose very expressionlessness demanded Trevayne’s attention, “those aren’t Kaituni.”
“What are they?” Trevayne turned on the Intelligence officer.
“We’re beginning to get a lot of detailed sensor readings on these new ships—and they don’t match any of the Kaituni classes.”
Trevayne had stopped listening. The nagging, tickling intuitive feeling he hadn’t been able to dismiss from his mind had suddenly crystalized like a recovered glimpse of a dream…and he wanted to reject it, hurl it back into oblivion with revulsion. But he couldn’t allow himself to do so.
“Andreas,” he cut in, “I want you to run comparisons with everything in the ship’s database—including all the historical data.”
“The historical data, Admiral?”
“You heard me. Everything.”
It took Hagen only a moment to set up the problem, and even less time for the computer, acting at the speed of molecular circuitry, to run the immense quantity of data through the mill. But afterwards, Hagen said nothing at first.
“Well, Andreas,” said Trevayne quietly, not wanting to hear what he was now certain he was going to hear.
Hagen turned haunted eyes to him. “Admiral…the only matches in the database date back to the Fourth Interstellar War. They’re…they’re Arachnid ship types, Admiral.”
And now Trevayne knew what the dreamlike intuitive feeling had been trying to tell him about an undiscovered closed warp point in Bug space. And he knew the barriers his mind had set up against that feeling, preventing him from grasping it.
“But the Bugs don’t exist anymore!” he heard De Mornay exclaim.
“It appears they do, Captain,” Trevayne said heavily. “And that the Kaituni have made contact with them. And that they are loose in the galaxy again.”
An almost palpable wave-front of shock spread around him, as his listeners found themselves face to face with their culture’s ultimate primal terror, only to find that it was real.
Trevayne could feel the paralysis gripping the flag bridge, freezing it into horrified immobility like an ice sculpture which a single word might send shivering into a cloud of panic.
He saw De Mornay start to open her mouth…
“Captain De Mornay!” His voice cracked like a bullwhip of command. “Combined Fleet will disengage and shape a course for the Orpheus-1 warp point. Fortunately, the Kaituni fleet has put itself in a position from which it will not be able to realign itself promptly, and the…new arrivals will take time to complete their warp transit.” He moderated his tone a trifle. “We will have time later to assimilate this new turn of events and try and account for it. But for now, our duty and only priority must be to get back to Pesthouse without delay. In the meantime, while we’re en route, send courier drones ahead of us through the warp point with this…new intelligence. Are my orders clear, Captain?”
De Mornay gulped, took a deep breath, and allowed her tradition to settle over her like a cloak. “Perfectly, Admiral.” And she began to give commands, giving people something to think about other than the nightmare which had just emerged into the waking world.
*
It was, Zum’ref thought, a matter of no real importance that the griarfeksh admiral (who, over the course of this campaign, he had almost—not quite, of course—ceased to think of as griarfeksh) hadn’t placed himself in a position to be trapped here in Home Hive Two. It merely postponed the moment when he would be trapped.
So he turned his attention to more immediate matters, and addressed his Intendant. “Be sure no obstacle—even a perceived one—is placed in the path of these bilbuxhati.” He mentally chided himself for his use of the term—a herd-animal of lost Ardu—for these creatures. The use of that term had become widespread among the Destoshaz because it seemed natural to think they were releasing a herd of mindless, maddened bilbuxhati before them, to trample their enemies. But it wasn’t really accurate. Not at all. One had to somehow imagine ravenously carnivorous bilbuxhati. “Remember, the plan is to let them take the casualties for us as they pursue their gluttonous way along the warp chains.”
(Distaste.) “In some ways, Destoshaz-at, they are even more repulsive than the humans and other species of griarfeksh. It is as though…well, their means of hive communication is almost like a dirty joke on us. And on Illudor.”
(Indulgence.) “I know what you mean, Inzrep’fel. But they have their uses.”
*
So at last the System Which Must Be Concealed had been escaped. And now the path to the worlds of the Old Enemies was open.
Of course, the New Enemies—the Hive-Killers—must be dealt with as well. And then there were these still newer enemies—distinct from the Hive and therefore, by definition, enemies—to factor into the equation. And, in all the time of isolation in the System Which Must Be Concealed, there had been opportunity to study the technologies
of the Hive-Killers. Perhaps even more important, it had been possible to evaluate the survival strategies of the now-dead original Hives. Those had been found wanting. A gradual conquer-and-feed approach had given the Hive-Killers too much time to adapt and innovate—an ability which had been their one great, ultimately decisive advantage. It had been a mistake which would not be repeated.
And because the original Hives’ failings and weaknesses had been so fundamental, study of those failings and weaknesses had led into heretofore neglected realms of the biological sciences. Which, in turn, had opened up whole new possibilities for the waging of war, more subtle and insidious than the old brute-force approach. Possibilities which could—and would, when the situation warranted—be turned against the Newest Enemies.
For the moment, however, these Newest Enemies had their uses.
*
Trevayne had worried that Combined Fleet would be slowed by his supermonitors. But the Kaituni fleet made no move to pursue, and he had been correct about the time it would take the Bug armada to complete its warp transit; Combined Fleet would make it to the Orpheus-1 warp point ahead of them.
In a way, he would have preferred further fighting. As it was, they all had time to brood, to contemplate the abyss which had opened up under their feet, and into which all the comfortable assumptions of their society had fallen, vanishing into the darkness of hopelessness.
He was conferring with Magda when Hagen approached. “Admiral, a report from the recon drones covering the Bug 06 warp point.”
“Yes?” As a routine precaution, Trevayne had scattered the drones widely throughout the Home Hive Two A system to provide him with wide-ranging “eyes,” with emphasis on the region where the Kaituni had originally emerged, now over thirty light-minutes astern. He was grimly sure he knew what Hagen was about to say.
“While we’ve been…occupied, new Kaituni ships have been entering this system. Our information on their numbers is, of course, out of date because of the communications delay, but—”
