I stood ramrod stiff, and I gave him a precise salute.
Venturi studied me, and I couldn’t tell what went on in his tiger brain.
The first self-inflicted crisis of the mission had passed. I doubted it would be long until we faced the next.
-16-
The Lokhar shuttles hauled every Earth trooper into Indomitable. I spent the next several hours making sure my people found their berths, had their symbiotic suits and weapons.
The tumen colonels had small staffs. I had a tiny one. We were doing this mean and lean. My eyes hurt after reading so many manifests and I wondered if I’d been better off as a Jelk trooper.
Freedom always took more work. Being a slave was easy, like a child. Let someone else do the thinking. I’d had enough of that in prison. Even so, I was tired, and I wouldn’t be letting my eyes shut for quite some time still.
The Lokhars had sophisticated gravity-plates, better than what I’d seen on the battlejumper. I remember feeling a slight bump. I swayed, and grabbed hold of a rail.
I had been marching down a corridor with my security zagun, N7 and Doctor Sant. The two tiger watchdogs had stayed with Venturi.
Sant and I hadn’t said anything about the last incident. It made me wonder if the Lokhars used bugs and hidden video cameras. I made myself a mental note to have that checked out later.
I grabbed the bar as the jolt made the security troopers sway just like me.
“Is there trouble with the ship?” I asked Sant.
“In what manner?” he asked.
“Didn’t you just feel that?”
“Yes, of course I did. Lokhars have keen sensibilities.”
“I’m sure that’s true. What was that then? What caused us to sway?”
“We’re accelerating,” Sant said. “I believe…at three or four gravities.”
“You’re kidding.”
Doctor Sant jerked at his uniform as if straightening it, which I’d come to learn was a sign that a Lokhar figured I’d insulted him. They were as touchy about their honor as Medieval Samurais.
What now? Then I understand what I’d done. “Doctor Sant, sometimes a humans says, ‘You’re kidding,’ as a way of speech. It does not mean to imply the other is joking or being frivolous.”
“Yes, yes, I know that, of course. I have been studying you for over three weeks now. I am the ship’s xeno-psychologist.”
I stared at him, and it clicked. “You know, Doctor Sant, I’m going to have to insist that every listening device and camera be removed from human…living quarters.”
“But that’s preposterous!” he cried.
“That you have them trained on us, or that you’re unwilling to have them removed?”
He stood there frozen, and finally whispered, “How did you know? I cannot understand your insights, what I’ve come to believe are your intuitive leaps of thought, Commander Creed. You are an enigma to us, and that is making certain important people…”
“Nervous?” I asked.
He straightened his uniform. “I will see what I can do…concerning your request,” he said.
“Thank you, Doctor Sant. Having you as the liaison officer has made things much easier for us than it otherwise would have been. I’ve learned to trust you and your insights.”
“I don’t see why you’re saying—”
I held up my hand so he quit talking. Then I gave him a salute, one less precise than I’d given Venturi. But I believed it would help Sant in whatever internal debate he’d have to go through with the watching Lokhars. Clearly, he spoke for their benefit, and now so did I.
A glimmer of understanding sparkled in the doctor’s eyes. His manner lightened. He gave me a similar salute, no doubt as a sign of respect. Then he took his leave with loping Lokhar strides. He seemed like the most athletic NBA stars, the natural athletes. The tigers weren’t the most cunning aliens. The Jelk easily outdid them in that regard, but they did have size, strength and agility. Against an average human, I’d bet on the Lokhar. Against us modified and trained troopers…
I yawned, and I debated getting another stim from Jen. I shook my head. She was setting up an infirmary. It might have been a useless gesture, given we were headed to the last battle. But I wanted to do everything I could to make the troopers believe this was a two-way mission. A soldier who believes he can survive will take greater precautions during combat to insure that happens. Japanese banzai charges in WWII proved the idea. Suicidal soldiers become too reckless with their lives. I’m sure a suicidal soldier figured: Since I’m going to die away, why not do it with abandon?
Courage was critical to good soldiering, but so was survival. I believed George S. Patton’s saying. “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”
The infirmary should have shown our boys that I believed what I said. I did believe it, at least until I went to the Lokhar strategy session.
That was wild, and it went bad in a way I would have never foreseen. If I hadn’t gone to it, though—I don’t like to think about that, either. Was it fate I happened to be there or just dumb luck?
What happened?
Supreme Lord Admiral Venturi belonged to Orange Tamika. The Emperor had bumped him in rank, and Venturi ran the three-dreadnought flotilla. Politics back home must have shifted, though. The Emperor must have had second thoughts, and he used the fastest Lokhar ship in the fleet to tell everyone his new decision.
***
Before I relate the strange strategy session, I should let you know something about the dreadnought as a class of hyperspace vessel. I saw it later, but this seems like a good point to describe it.
Hyperspace, as I would discover, had many weird properties. I suppose that made sense given its aspect. Consider a universe, a space-time continuum, as a balloon. It could be a water-filled balloon, one crammed with helium or one that a kid just blew up with his mouth. Actually, that’s a good way to think about it. Each universe had its own properties, its own realities: water, helium or mixed lung air. A fish couldn’t swim in helium, just as a human couldn’t exist in some of the theoretically different universes.
Suppose now that all those balloons were stacked or dumped into an auditorium. The balloons would lay against each other in a mass, piled one on top of another. The small areas between the balloons would be like hyperspace. It was non-space-time continuum, outside universes. Hence, it was different.
What kind of engine and equipment would it take to leave a universe, travel through hyperspace and enter another space-time continuum?
I’m not a scientist or much of a mathematician. Ella and N7 tried to explain the precise concepts to me more than once. Mostly, I blanked out those times with glazed-over eyes. Yet I suspect that the majority of you are how I used to be in grade school. If the math teacher explained a problem to me in her adult jargon, I got confused. If another kid explained it to me plainly, a light bulb went on in my head.
The balloon analogy falls apart here, because we couldn’t jut tap out of a universe anywhere. There were weak spots in a space-time continuum, and we needed the right equipment to tell us where reality was frail. That meant we had to travel to a soft spot to enter hyperspace there. Then we had to travel through non-reality to reach the portal planet.
Are you with me so far? Good.
The energy needed to bust out of our space-time continuum was vast. From a human perspective, the engine doing the breakout proved to be colossal.
That meant the dreadnought had outrageous size. In the middle of the ship, with the volume of a small lake, was a globular area holding an artificial black hole in its exact center.
I know what you’re thinking, because I thought it as soon as I learned about it. The Forerunner artifact, the torus object, had a black hole in its donut center.
The point is obvious. Black holes helped one escape a universe. Now I’m not saying Indomitable had a black hole in the middle of the ship. It had an art
ificial black hole. Both N7 and Ella assured me that made a huge difference.
Whatever, huh? When they talked like that, it made me want to pull him or her behind a gym and beat the crap out of them. Not that I’d ever done that before as a kid, mind you. I’m just saying.
Around the artificial black hole, around the lake-sized liquid volume, were billions of tons of special engines, computers and equipment. That gave the dreadnought its size. No one entering or leaving Indomitable ever went into that inner sanctum part of the ship. Sealed in there was a special class of Lokhars, a concentrated order half adept and half scientist. I’d been told they read ancient writ, chanted prayers and used semi-divine instrumentation and machines to take us out of our reality and into hyperspace.
What struck me was the size of everything more than the technology. It reminded me of old footage of the Apollo space missions. I’m sure you’ve seen all those Houston geeks in their white shirts and narrow ties, with their 60s buzzcuts and black-rimmed glasses. In the background would be the computers, banks and banks of them with less computing power than any laptop a kid would have used at school before the tigers dropped nukes on us.
The Lokhars were like the 60s Americans with computers able to get a man on the Moon. It struck me there should have been miniaturized versions of the hyperspace-ripping equipment. Instead, we had first generation stuff that could get the job done, but man oh man, it was honking bigger than what future Lokhars would use—if we could get to the Forerunner artifact and stop the Kargs from killing the future.
***
I lay down on my cot and shut my eyes. It took time for several of my back muscles to stop twitching. Finally, I fell asleep, getting a solid six hours. Before Sant returned to us, N7 woke me.
I sat up, groggy. You’d think with such a monstrous vessel that everyone would have plenty of room. No. I felt like a Japanese apartment dweller living in a coffin. There was a cot, a stand with my Bowie knife and an old .44 Magnum on it and a stool. Diana had given me the nickel-plated pistol as a gift, complete with a holster. How she’d learned I’d used one in Afghanistan, I didn’t know. I’d been wearing the gun on the ship as a reminder I fought for those back home.
Anyway, N7 sat erect on the stool. If he leaned back, he’d be touching the hatch. If he leaned forward, he’d been hovering over me in my cot. My room was like a coffin.
I wiped accumulated gunk out of my eyes and groaned. My head hurt, making me wonder if I was coming down with a cold.
“Admiral Venturi has summoned you to a strategy session,” N7 informed me.
“When?”
“It begins in an hour. If you leave now, you’ll get there with ten minutes to spare.”
“Sheesh. You’d think they would have a faster way to move around their own starship.”
“I suggest you shower and eat immediately. You’re running out of time.”
“Yeah,” I said, sliding down to the end of the cot.
N7 stood, the hatch opened and he stepped into the corridor. An officer walked past, glanced into the room and hurriedly turned away. We were learning to live together in these cramped quarters and give each other privacy by not noticing things.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“To summon Ella,” he said.
“To do what?”
“To join you,” N7 said.
“I’m taking you to the strategy session.”
“I do not suggest that, Commander.”
This was interesting. “Does it bother you when the Lokhars call you a machine?”
“Do not be absurd,” N7 said. “I am too logical to let bigoted comments affect my equilibrium.”
“Then why don’t you want to come? Aren’t you curious what they’re going to say?”
“I am curious, yes. But you have…hmm…ruffled them enough for now. I am also to inform you that Lokhar technicians have arrived and have begun removing spy equipment from our living quarters.”
“So Sant succeeded,” I said. “Good for him.” I frowned thoughtfully at N7. “It seems to me they’re doing what we want. Let’s keep pushing so they continue to do so.”
“There is a time to push and a time to relent. I suggest that now would be a good opportunity to show the admiral that you are able to cooperate as well as you are able to push.”
N7 had a point. “I wonder why they don’t like androids.”
“Agreed,” N7 said. “It is an interesting question.”
“You don’t have any ideas?”
“I suspect it has a philosophical reason.”
“Which for the Lokhars means a religious reason,” I said.
“I believe that is what I just said.”
I ran my fingers through my hair. I must have been more tired earlier than I realized for me to feel this groggy.
“Time is running short, Commander. You should have already showered.”
“Okay,” I said. “Grab Ella. Tell her she’s coming with me to the session. And alert my security team.”
“I suggest you leave them behind today,” N7 said.
“Nope. The zagun stays with me all the time. I don’t have a great big ship and ten million tigers to call on. I don’t have an empire. I have our small army. One thing I’m going to do is be strong at the point of contact as much as it’s in my power to do so.” I yanked on a pair of pants and began buckling on my knife and gun.
“By continuing to bring your zagun everywhere,” N7 said, “you antagonize the Lokhars.”
“I think that’s what I just said.”
N7 surprised me, and he let the corners of his lips upturn in the slightest smile.
“Let’s hurry,” I said. “Go get Ella.”
N7 left, the hatch shut and I stretched good and hard before getting started. A strategy session; I wondered what that would be like.
-17-
In a way, this reminded me of the Starkien strategy session aboard their ship when I’d been a Jelk trooper. I don’t mean the Lokhars sat on the floor or hooted like baboons. They were more formal and dignified than that.
We sat at a great rectangular structure. Each commander faced inward, surrounded on three sides by table, with staff standing behind him or her. I had Ella, and realized too late that I should have brought more people. It would have made me look more important. My security zagun was outside with the admiral’s guards, but it was too late to grab one or two of them to stand behind me.
While the Lokhars didn’t strike me as bureaucrats, they definitely had certain bureaucratic mentalities. The bigger the entourage one had, the more important he was. It went ditto for the more nifty uniform, medals, etc. I had compensated on the spot as Venturi’s guards scanned my nickel-plated magnum. No lasers or needlers were allowed within the main chamber. The gun looked impressive, so I told them it was part of my uniform, an ancient Earth sidearm of harmless design. Lokhars didn’t use gunpowder weapons and their scanners proved it wasn’t electric in any way. The guards still balked, so I’d said, “It’s like a medal of honor. I received it for courage in the line of duty.” That they had understood, finally letting me pass with it.
Each dreadnought admiral sat at the gigantic table. There were also ten Lokhar marshals, one for each million legionaries. Fighter-wing generals sat at the table, the captains of suicidal attack-craft and the chief officer of the Lokhar teleportation missiles. Finally, a number of the oldest-looking tigers I’d seen so far, wearing shimmering orange robes with acolytes behind them, sat with us. They were holy adepts, akin to Catholic bishops, but in the Lokhar religious hierarchy.
I sat down at the end, directly across a great breadth of burnished metal from Supreme Lord Admiral Venturi. I might have pointed out that as the Lokhars’ only ally, I should be sitting beside the prince. But I let this one pass. He had one end of the table. I had the other. Who was to say which person sat at the head of the table?
I cracked my knuckles and gained a few sour looks from the nearest legion marshals. I found it interes
ting the infantry soldiers sat down here at the low end. As far as I saw it, we were the key to everything. The flyboys and priests saw things differently. I guess such thinking held true for both human and tiger versions. Maybe we footsloggers had more in common than we realized.
The door opened and the senior guard announced Doctor Sant. He hurried to me.
“I’m to help liaison with you, Commander,” Sant said quietly. “Does that meet with your approval?”
“Certainly,” I said. “Thanks for coming.” I lowered my voice. “And thanks for talking to whoever was in charge of spying on us.”
He nodded curtly, and I wondered if he wore a bug. I didn’t ask, and the meeting started soon thereafter.
The oldest tiger of all rose, with his robes shimmering. He gripped a metallic sphere in his trembling paws. The thing had the size of a bowling ball. Lifting his face toward the ceiling, the old Lokhar began to chant in what Sant informed me later was the speech of the First Ones. It sounded alien, and it made my spine tingle. He went on a long time, and finally, the globe in his hands began to pulse with an eerie light.
Tigers gasped. Many made holy signs. A few even cried out in what sounded like anguish.
The ancient one became more animated, speaking louder than ever. He raised the object in his paws and released it. The thing hovered in place.
At that, Lokhars began to roar and cry out. Some slumped forward, crashing their torsos onto the table, as if all their strength had left them. Many closed their eyes.
The radiance in the floating sphere reminded me too much of the Forerunner artifact in the Altair system. I didn’t like it, and I expected to hear heavenly singing at any moment.
Instead, Ella bent near and whispered, “Interesting, is it not? I suspect that is a piece of Forerunner technology.”
I half turned, staring at her in amazement.
Extinction Wars: 02 - Planet Strike Page 18
