The Radiant Seas

by Catherine Asaro

  Someone muttered, “You try putting two billion people in one place without producing children.”

  At almost the same moment, Stone said, “Can you get them out?”

  Tahota shook her head. “We asked ESComm to let us evacuate the children. They refused. They’ve blasted every one of our decoy attempts,”

  “Send ships out in inversion,” Brant Tapperhaven said. “ESComm can’t extract every single one of them.”

  “They’ve been doing a damn good job of it,” Tahota told him. “They’ve got telops on those ships. A lot of them.”

  Someone swore. Someone else said, “How long have they been assembling the sphere?”

  “It’s 2.3 hours now,” Tahota said. “We estimate they will be ready to collapse it onto Onyx in another 2.8 hours.”

  Operations spoke. “Even with telops, they can’t collapse a sphere five light-years across with complete accuracy. They have to invert, get their fleet through two and a half light-years to Onyx, and re-form. The fleet will spread in both space and time.”

  An officer on Tahota’s staff spoke. “Whether or not they can maintain enough cohesion to keep us trapped depends on how much they know about our peripheral defenses.” He paused. “Althor Valdoria was the primary officer involved in setting up those defenses.”

  Silence greeted his statement.

  Finally Brant Tapperhaven said, “Commander Valdoria’s mind is protected. ESComm won’t have found him an easy source.”

  Soz knew her brother’s strength. If anyone could resist interrogation, it was Althor. But two years of it? Even the strongest human alive, with the best biomech defenses in existence, couldn’t hold out.

  She spoke quietly, hating what she had to say, hating what it implied about her brother’s last two years. “We have to assume the security of the Onyx periphery has been compromised.”

  Although Tahota nodded, Soz recognized her strain and saw it reflected in faces all around the table. Her brother was well regarded by all branches of ISC. No one wanted to think of how he had spent the last two years.

  A naval captain spoke. “This sphere they’re assembling is a show. It’s meant to demoralize.”

  “It’s working,” someone muttered.

  General Majda spoke. “If we don’t divert the Radiance Fleet to Onyx, we lose the Third Lock. ESComm already has a potential Key. And they’re trying to use telops now. Give them the Lock and they will build a web. Better we give up the invasion of Glory than risk losing everything.”

  Dayamar Stone leaned forward. “Take that conservative approach, General, and we lose our chance to break Eube. ESComm has its critical nodes dispersed in the Platinum Sector around Glory. If they’ve pulled this many ships off their defenses, we’ve an even better chance of getting the Radiance Fleet in there. They don’t even know we’re coming. We’ll never get this chance again.”

  “Onyx Platform is our most critical node,” Communications said. “Losing it will cripple ISC.”

  “If we break ESComm,” Judiciary added, “we can repatriate any prisoners they take at Onyx.”

  “There may be no prisoners to repatriate,” Tahota said.

  Admiral Casestar spoke. “Have they contacted you with conditions of surrender?”

  Tahota nodded. “They want the Lock, the space habitats, myself, my top officers, and all the ships at Onyx.”

  Someone swore, someone else said, “That’s an outrage,” and Stone said, “Starjack, you can’t surrender. You know what they’ll do to you.”

  “If we divert the Radiance Fleet to Onyx,” Tapperhaven said, “we save the Lock and lose Althor Valdoria. ESComm then has a Key and no Lock. If we go in to Glory, we have a chance to save Valdoria, but we lose the Lock.”

  “We can blow up the Lock,” Tahota said.

  “We don’t have the tech to rebuild it,” Logistics said.

  “Lose the Lock and we lose the Triad,” Operations said.

  “We have two more Locks,” Tapperhaven said. “Even with only one, the Triad could exist.”

  “Exist how?” Majda demanded. “Hanging by their fingernails?”

  Soz spoke, and the room became silent. “Don’t blow up the Lock unless you have no other choice.” She regarded Tahota. “We can survive with two Locks, but it would be difficult. If ESComm has no Key, then destroying the Lock to keep it out of their hands becomes less imperative. If the only choice is to give ESComm both Lock and Key, then blow it up.”

  Tahota nodded. “Understood.”

  “What we need,” Operations said, “is an alternate strategy.”

  “Split the Radiance Fleet,” Plans said.

  “No!” Stone boomed. “Split it and we lose everything.”

  “You don’t know that for certain,” Majda said. “It offers a chance to salvage both operations.”

  Tahota spoke. “We’ve run extrapolations. Unless you send most of the fleet to Onyx, it won’t be enough.”

  A man spoke out of the air, a voice with a fey quality. “We’re also running extrapolations. With so many ESComm ships pulled off Platinum Sector, we predict a probability of success for the Radiance Fleet of 63 to 81 percent if it remains at full strength. But even small reductions in the size make those numbers plummet. Cut the fleet in half and both the Onyx and the Glory efforts have a less than 5 percent chance of success.”

  “Who the hell is that?” someone said.

  Taquinil? Soz thought. Identify yourself.

  “I’m Taquinil Selei,” he said. “Assembly Key Selei and I are working on the calculations.”

  “If the Pharaoh and Lord Taquinil are correct,” Stone said, “then splitting the fleet gives us a lose-lose situation.”

  Security turned to Tahota. “What do the surrender terms specify for Onyx personnel?”

  Her voice hardened. “They would be ‘appropriated’ by ESComm and ‘assigned work contracts.’”

  Dayamar Stone scowled. “Sold into slavery, in other words.”

  “That’s the least of it,” Tahota said. “Only ‘units’ considered ‘suitable for salvage’ would be retained.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Majda asked.

  Intelligence spoke. “ESComm will execute most of the Onyx personnel. They take slaves only from certain categories, people who are easy to control, have high Kyle ratings, are worth interrogating, or are sexually desirable. What they don’t want is a big influx of ISC personnel into their slave pool.”

  “We’re talking a massacre here,” Communications said.

  Tahota leaned forward. “There is no way in any ten hells of the Vanished Seas that I would turn my people over to that fate. We’ve kept communications on this wide open on the Onyx intranet. It’s unanimous from every sector. No surrender.”

  “Far better to do as much damage as you can,” Operations said. “The Traders have concentrated a huge portion of their resources into this effort. You could cripple ESComm.”

  “If we turn our attacks into suicide runs,” Tahota said, “we can maybe take out three ESComm vessels for every ISC ship destroyed. That’s almost a million. Half their force.”

  Soz didn’t want her forces turning themselves into a fleet of suicide pilots. “There has to be another way.”

  “Divert the Radiance Fleet to Onyx,” Majda said.

  “Then we win the battle and lose the war,” Tapperhaven said. “We won’t have this chance at Glory again. Damn it, this is our chance to end the war.”

  “At what cost?” Life demanded. “Two billion people? Will you sacrifice them to torture and death? Because believe me, that’s what will happen. When have Hightons honored the Rules of War? I sat in the negotiations for the Halstaad Accord. I’ve seen how the Highton mind works. They don’t consider us human, and the Allieds can rot in hell if they refuse to see that. Have you read The Ascendance of Eube? It’s all the more horrifying because it’s so brutally effective. Let ESComm have Onyx and we will never see any of those people again, the Halstaad Code be damned.”
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br />   Majda hit the table with her fist. “Then divert Radiance.”

  “Do it,” Tapperhaven boomed, “and you condemn us to a war that will kill far more than two billion!”

  An almost inaudible chime came from the palmtop Soz held. She opened her hand to see Barcala Tikal’s face on the screen in her palm. Three words scrolled below it: Code One conference?

  Soz understood. He offered advice. No orders this time. The dance of power played between the Assembly and Ruby Dynasty had almost no rules; where the authority of one left off and the other began remained a constant source of conflict. But in this the boundaries were clear. Code One. Invasion. In such a situation, military decisions belonged to the Imperator, the commander in charge of all the ISC forces. The Assembly couldn’t tie her hands.

  Nor could she give the decision to anyone else.

  She responded via one of her spinal nodes, which uploaded the message to a secured picoweb in the walls of the Strategy Room, using IR. The picoweb sent it to the section of the wall closest to Tikal and signaled his palmtop, which then downloaded it. They used the picoweb rather than transmitting across the room because the signals were harder to intercept this way.

  What do you think? she asked, via her computer.

  Divert to Onyx, he answered.

  And Glory?

  Fight that battle another day.

  This may be our only chance.

  After a pause, he wrote: I know.

  They watched each other while their advisers argued. Then Tikal added, I don’t envy you this decision.

  * * *

  Soz sat alone in the dark. All around her, in bays, halls, and chambers, on deck after deck after deck, the crew of the battle cruiser Roca’s Pride carried out their duties. She had never left the ship; during the entire conference, she had been sitting in this chair by the console table.

  Now she sat alone in the dark.

  You have to choose, Dehya had said. Soz remembered well the answer she had given her aunt. War is always a matter of choices. So facile. So smooth. So stupid. She hadn’t had a clue what Dehya meant.

  Two billion people.

  Onyx or Glory.

  Lose two billion and end the war; rescue two billion and lose how many more over the centuries? Lose the Lock and rescue the Key; lose the Key and rescue the Lock. Break Glory and lose Onyx; rescue Onyx and spare Glory.

  And it was worse than any of them knew. ESComm didn’t have one Key, it had two. Rescuing Althor wasn’t enough; they had to get Jaibriol out as well.

  In 1.8 hours ESComm would converge on Onyx. If she intended to divert the Radiance Fleet, they had to start recoordination as soon as possible.

  A chime sounded in the dark. She touched the common the arm of her chair. “Skolia here.”

  “Imperator Skolia, this is Admiral Barzun on the bridge. We have a transmission from Admiral Casestar on the Orbiter.”

  “Can you handle it?”

  “He’s relaying you a Prime transmission from Earth.”

  Soz tensed. What could have provoked a call on her hot line to the Allied president? “Put it on.”

  “For security, we’re routing the signal through the Orbiter, using a scramble code,” Burzan said. “It will cause a delay of three seconds. President Cohen is almost certain to realize you aren’t on the Orbiter.”

  “I understand.”

  On the table in front of her, a screen rose. As she brought up the lights, the screen cleared to show a handsome man with curly hair graying at the temples. Although Soz didn’t know Cohen as well as the previous Allied president, she had always found him straightforward and likable.

  After three seconds he said, “My greetings, Imperator Skolia.”

  “My greetings, Mr. President.”

  Another pause. Then he said, “We seem to have a problem with the link. We’re getting a three-second delay here.”

  “We’re aware of the problem,” Soz said.

  This time his delay was longer than three seconds. When it became clear no more information was forthcoming, he said, “Your father wishes to speak with you.”

  Her father? What was going on? “Very well. Put him on.”

  Cohen moved out of view and Eldrinson appeared, “Sauscony.”

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  He didn’t waste words. “The Triad link is dissolving.”

  Soz stared at the screen. Five words. That was it. Five words. With them, he had just described an interstellar crisis of a scope so large it had no precedent. For an instant her mind hung in a limbo where those five words had no meaning.

  Then reality crashed in. “No,” she said. No.

  “I’ve no doubt of it,” he said.

  Soz absorbed the implications. If the Triad link dissolved, psiberspace would implode. The web would collapse. No communications. No way to assemble the Radiance Fleet. No way to keep sane the crews on 750 thousand ships in Klein space.

  “How do you know it’s dissolving?” she asked.

  “I feel it,” Eldrinson said. “I see it. Like a ghost web.”

  “Dehya,” Soz said.

  He nodded. “You and she are too alike. The link can’t support both your minds. She’s been holding it together somehow, but something has to give.”

  “How long do we have?”

  “A day? Probably less.” Frustration showed on his face. “The overlap doesn’t affect me. If I could link to a Lock, I could hold the Triad together, at least long enough to arrange a solution.”

  “No!” Soz leaned forward. “Stay on Earth.” Losing the web would shatter Skolia, but webs could be remade. If they lost their Keys, they lost the web for good. And she lost her father.

  After three seconds, he said, “Very well.” That he gave no argument, despite the danger, told Soz he understood the import of that three-second delay even if he didn’t know the cause.

  “Is there anything you can do from Earth?” she asked. “Even just a few more hours could make a difference.”

  “I will try,” he said.

  “Can you put Harry Cohen on again?”

  “Here he is.” Eldrinson moved aside and Cohen reappeared.

  “Mr. President,” Soz said. “I need to invoke the full protection clauses in the Iceland Treaty. I’m asking for Allied forces to defend Lyshriol. Most of my family live in the Dalvador region of the North continent, except for my brother Denric, who is on the planet Sandstorm. You’ll need to pull out Denric and get him to Lyshriol. My father can give you details.”

  Cohen nodded. “We’ll protect your family, Imperator Skolia.”

  “Can you put my father back on?”

  “Here he is.”

  When Eldrinson reappeared, Soz said, “I have a question for you. It may seem odd, but the answer is important.”

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  She spoke carefully. “When Eldrin was sixteen years old, he rode into battle with you for the first time. The army was gone for two months. Do you remember?”

  “Yes. Your brother showed great courage.”

  “When he left, all he took was a sword.”

  “That’s right.”

  “We had laser carbines and EM pulse rifles. He didn’t even consider them.”

  “It was a matter of honor for him. He felt that to use such weapons against men armed with swords was wrong.”

  “He killed three men,” Soz said. “In two months.”

  In a quiet voice her father said, “He had to fight one with his bare hands. I also saw him refuse to kill when he didn’t have to.” He paused. “Your brother may have had trouble in his youth, adjusting to life on the Orbiter. But he has always been a man of honor.”

  Soz nodded. It was true of all her brothers. “Two years later, when Althor was sixteen, he rode into battle with you.”

  This time the pause was far longer than three seconds. Then he said, “Yes.”

  “With a laser carbine.”

  “Yes.”

  Softly Sauscony said, �
�He stood on a hill above the Plains of Tyroll and slaughtered 316 men in five minutes.”

  His voice came from light-years away. “And ended a war that might otherwise have dragged on for decades, killing many more.”

  “Which way do you think was right?”

  He had a look she recognized, one she had seen before, the day they held the funeral services for her brother Kelric. The look of a father who knew the anguish of outliving his children.

  “I can’t answer that,” he said. “All I know is this: Eldrin and Althor each made the best decision they could.”

  “What would you have done?”

  “I don’t know.” Pain touched his voice. “I can’t begin to know what you are facing right now, Soshoni. All I can say is that I have always, no matter what our differences, had confidence in your judgment and sense of honor.”

  She swallowed. “And if there is no way of honor?”

  “You make the best decision you know how.”

  Softly she said, “Gods’ blessing to you, Hoshpa.”

  His voice caught. “And to you.”

  “Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye, Daughter.”

  Then they broke the link.

  She had run out of time. Whatever she decided, they had to move now, before the web failed.

  “Charon, attend,” she said. “Set up a dedicated link to Admiral Tahota at Onyx Platform. Security codes in 3-11-S.”

  “Codes verified,” the computer said. “Link established.”

  The screen on the table in front of her rippled, and then Soz was facing Tahota. The admiral was seated at a console, the blur of holos visible behind her. With her six-foot-six frame and strong features, she looked like the reincarnation of a Ruby warrior queen from five thousand years in Raylicon’s past.

  “Imperator Skolia,” she said.

  Soz felt as if she were in a suddenly muffled room. Her words came out in quiet, still tones. “I’m sorry, Starjack.”

  It was a moment before the admiral answered. Then she said, “I understand.” She took a breath. “I will keep you posted as the situation evolves.”

  “That may not be possible,” Soz said. “We’re losing the web. It shouldn’t affect you within the Onyx complex, given the proximity of your habitats, but we won’t be able to communicate across interstellar distance.”