The trooper’s eyes flicked back and forth between Hal and the stones in Noreen’s ring, oscillating between them. After about three or four repetitions, the trooper decided.
“Come then. I will point my weapon at you as we progress, so my brethren will not shoot you, when they see that you are my prisoner,” stated the trooper.
“That is well… I have messages of great importance for your High-Rak masters.”
* * * *
“Oh, Diet,” sniffled Noreen, as tears welled in her eyes, as they watched the Rak troops leading Hal away. “They’re taking him. They’re taking Hal somewhere.”
“I know, hon,” replied Diet softly as he held her. “It’ll be all right.”
“But what are we going to do?” asked Noreen. “We have to help Hal!”
“We can’t,” responded Diet. “At least not right now. They haven’t killed him and where there’s life, there’s hope. We’ll wait here until after dark, and then make our way back to the hotel.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know right now, babe,” admitted Diet. “We’ll just have to play it by ear.”
* * * *
The Confederate Planet Ginia
June, 3866
After four months of intensive crew training and extensive shakedown operations, all three of the gigantic asteroid-battleships that entered service last January, finally received their Fleet certifications and were ready for deployment. According to Fleet-Admiral Roger Kalis’ standing orders, a full task force from the Confederate 5th Fleet was detached to escort the three monsters to the Kitty Litter system, where they were to rendezvous for deployment with Ben Stillman’s Confederate 2nd Fleet. So in late June, 3866, under the overall squadron command of Rear-Admiral Stacey Irwin, the new CSS Leviathan, CSS Behemoth and CSS Gargantuan asteroid-battleships departed Ginia and lumbered off to war.
* * * *
Chapter-8
If cats looked like frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are.
Style. That's what people remember. -- Terry Pratchett
The Rak Planet Vnayrk
July, 3866
Even N’raal eventually found herself exhausted from the energy expenditure of maintaining such a high level of caustic truculence, so she retreated into caustic silence instead. She found herself wandering listlessly, exploring the compound she found herself abandoned in. Others were respectful and tried, on occasion, to be helpful, only to be met with a silent glare that spoke louder than a shout. Fortunately, she saw little of Drix, who was off somewhere, running his little war, supervising his region, or whatever else it was that occupied his time. For that she was grateful. She’d be seeing all too much of Drix, soon enough. Her time was approaching, however much she might wish it otherwise.
One day while she was wandering through the kitchen area, she found hope… hope in the form of a slim, deadly fang-blade someone had carelessly left lying on a counter. N’raal’s eyes widened when she first spied the blade, and she meandered towards it without altering her pace, hoping to avoid drawing notice to her movements or her intentions. When she reached the counter, she slowly turned and faced away from the blade, searching for anyone who might be watching her. When satisfied she was unobserved, N’raal slowly reached behind her and finding the handle, she reversed the blade to where it lay against the inside of her arm, as she brought her arm down, hiding the fang-blade between her arm and body. With her heart in her throat and her pulse racing, N’raal forced herself to appear calm and she slowly walked out of the kitchen with the blade still hidden against her body.
When she got outside, she slowly drifted towards the edge of the forest. When she was finally concealed from view and hidden amongst the closest layer of trees, N’raal brought the fang-blade up and examined it closely. Long and thin, with a very sharp, pointed blade, N’raal stabbed it into an adjacent tree, to test its strength.
This will do. This will do nicely.
Satisfied, N’raal slipped the fang-blade down into her bodice and proceeded directly towards her room, where she could hide her newly found treasure. For the first time in sub-cycles, N’raal felt the beginnings of a smile coming on.
When that monster tries to stab me with his… thing, he’ll find himself the one being stabbed, instead!
* * * *
“So, she found the fang-blade that you left on the kitchen counter for her?” asked Drix.
“Yes,” said OverMaster Varq. “She thought herself quite clever, the way she palmed the blade and pretended nonchalance, as she wandered out beyond the edge of the forest to examine and test it.”
“She’ll try to kill me with it, when the time comes to conceive the kit,” observed Drix.
“Most assuredly,” replied Varq. “But have no fear. The real fang-blade will have been replaced by the safe alternate, having identical appearance, by that time. I will not fail you in that, my son.”
“You know, Varq,” said an exasperated Drix. “If anyone besides you had told me that it was Dol’s will that I take that she-devil as my mate, to produce a specific kit that he desires conceived, I’d have…”
“I know,” interrupted Varq, with a raised paw. “I know, my son. Dol does indeed work in strange ways sometimes.”
“Well, let’s just pray that it doesn’t get any stranger than this.”
* * * *
The Planet Bavara, Germanic Empire
July, 3866
Like at Minnos, the invading Raknii must have realized they had insufficient reserves to hold Bavara against a concentrated counter-attack, because they voluntarily withdrew from the planet and then left the Bavara system altogether, after two weeks of wanton destruction and indiscriminate killing. This had been a vengeance raid, pure and simple.
Diet and Noreen made it back to the relative safety of the hotel basement, where her family and friends huddled, without further incident after darkness finally fell, on that awful day when Hal had been taken by the aliens. Without power, water or other municipal services, life was difficult during those two weeks, as obtaining adequate supplies of food and water for so many people, while avoiding roving patrols of marauding Rak assault troops, had been a challenge. Noreen considered her new husband a bona-fide hero, as he snuck out into town every night, and brought back many of those precious supplies that had sustained them. Noreen fretted constantly that Diet would be caught or killed all the time he was gone on one of those excursions, but he always returned, just as he’d promised her he would. Fortunately, the aliens seemingly could not tell the purpose of one building from any other, and evidently had no idea what a hotel was, so no Raknaa had actually entered their building during the ordeal.
After the aliens departed, Diet and Noreen contacted the local authorities about Hal’s disappearance, but they were already overwhelmed, their hands full with searching out all of the other missing and dead, so other than accepting their report, the police could offer them no other help at the moment. It took another several days to finally arrange transportation back to the city of Munic, where they hoped the TBG owned spaceliner they’d arrived in had survived.
It hadn’t. Nearly $5 billion worth of burnt out wreckage sat within the collapsed hangar Diet had rented to shelter the spaceplane, while they went sightseeing in Fürt. Unfortunately, Diet hadn’t had the forethought to rent a hangar that would stand up to alien invasion and 3-gigwatt pulse-laser fire.
The entire infrastructure of the planet of Bavara was a complete mess, and Diet was told that would take a minimum of three weeks, with costs ranging from the merely exorbitant, all the way up to totally outrageous, just to get first-space-available commercial coach seats for everyone, when spaceliner service was finally restored. Not being the meek and patient type, Diet left Noreen and her clan cooling their heels momentarily at the badly damaged Munic International Spaceport, and commandeered a ride to city hall, where he contacted the mayor... who then contacted the planetary governor... who in turn, contacted the admiral i
n charge of the now decimated German Imperial Fleet. Who miraculously managed to find a little used, but always thoroughly maintained luxury spaceliner, owned by one of Kaiser Wilhelm’s grand-nephews that curiously had been in storage, inside an underground bunker.
It was truly amazing what a German passport bearing the name and likeness of a member of the German Imperial Royal Family could accomplish, even in the midst of an unmitigated disaster. Eight hours later, a sleek, black spaceliner, bearing the golden crest of the German Imperial Family, landed at Munic International Spaceport, where Diet, Noreen and her entire entourage boarded thankfully and took off for Nork International Spaceport. There they all could finally get a good night’s sleep in a luxury hotel and find readily available commercial flights back to their respective homes... all at Diet’s expense, of course.
Noreen was becoming accustomed to Diet’s seeming to pull miracles out of his backside, and so she just assumed that Diet had somehow contacted the baron, who then authorized their use of that German government-owned spaceliner. Had she not been so damned tired from so many weeks of poor food and little decent sleep, she might have stopped to wonder exactly how Diet managed to contact the baron, all the way from Germany.
The next morning, after tearful hugs and goodbyes with Noreen’s family and friends, Diet and Noreen left them at Nork International Spaceport with 1st-class, commercial flight tickets in hand, and then they climbed aboard another, smaller TBG luxury spaceliner... the kind Diet said he normally traveled on, which took them back to Bostin, on Massa.
* * * *
It wasn’t just German Bavara that the Raknii attacked, in retribution for the seven Rak worlds that Admiral Kalis and the combined allied fleets had taken from them. Almost simultaneous alien raids were also launched against the Alliance, the Russians, the Chinese, the British, the Italians, the Australians, the Japanese, the Brazilians, the Compact and the Children of Allah, with varying degrees of success.
The Raknii attack on Wisco were met and driven off, with extremely heavy losses, by two full task forces under the command of Rear Admiral Jeannine Litzler. The British and the Russians were the only other human powers that managed to fend off the aliens, without suffering significant damage to their planets, but both sustained much heavier losses to their standing fleet assets, than Litzler had at Wisco. The British Fleet lost nearly two-thirds of their defending ships, while the Russians lost fully half of theirs.
All of the others had seen their standing fleet assets destroyed and their planets ravaged, much along the lines of what happened to the Germans at Bavara, and humanity was left asking itself: How could this have happened?
After the initial shock of the Raknii attack on Minnos died down, most of the international community succumbed to a rather lackadaisical attitude towards mankind’s war against alien invaders, as it was assumed it was nicely confined to someone else’s back yard. Most never dreamed that it could happen to them, so there had been little sense of urgency about it, especially after Kalis’ success at Kitty Litter.
But all humankind was awake and thoroughly pissed off now. The Children even declared Jihad.
* * * *
The Alliance Plant Massa, City of Bostin
July, 3866
“Hal?”
Diet! I am so relieved to finally hear from you. I’ve been so worried, ever since I first heard of that Raknii attack on Bavara, where you all were. Are you and Noreen both all right?
“We are. You’re not.”
Am I… dead?
“No, not dead… not that we’re aware of anyway. You were captured by the Raknii.”
How did that happen?
“The Raknaa were shooting indiscriminately at everything that moved. You sacrificed yourself… gave yourself up as a distraction, to give Noreen and me an opportunity to escape, after all three of us were nearly caught by them, the day after the wedding.”
Wedding? Did you and Noreen get married over there?
“Yes, that was the only good thing to come out of that entire Godforsaken trip.”
Congratulations! But back to me…
“The last I saw of you, Noreen and I were hiding behind some trash bins and you grabbed a Raknaa assault trooper and stuck Noreen’s engagement ring into his face and then you started growling at him in the Raknii language.”
Ah, then what happened?
“The Raknaa answered you back and then the conversation went back and forth a couple of times. Then the Raknaa pointed his weapon at you, and led you away.”
Interesting, I daresay that I was improvising.
“We tried to find you after the Rak finally pulled out, but there were so many dead and missing, the police were no help at all.”
Unsurprising. Don’t worry Diet, I strongly suspect that I’m quite all right.
“What makes you say that?”
I probably did exactly what you would have done in that situation… talked my way out of it.
“But there was no sign of you after the Raknii pulled out, two weeks later.”
No, I’d have been quite surprised if there had been.
“So, where do you think you are now?”
Well, if I did what I’d do in that situation, which I very probably did… I’m most likely in the belly of the beast.
Diet was never quiet sure exactly how it was that Hal managed to keep all of his various selves arranged in his mind, but his strange use of personal pronouns was often rather bizarre.
* * * *
Life just felt wrong. Everything had changed… well, not everything... not really. Noreen still loved Diet and they were still together, but losing Hal had torn great gaping holes in their hearts and their lives. We’re still in mourning. There were other differences as well. Diet had already ordered a replacement for her engagement ring that she’d given to Hal, but Noreen couldn’t seem to generate any real sense of excitement or anticipation towards its future arrival. It might look the same, but it wouldn’t actually be the one she’d been married in.
Noreen found herself wishing that she could have given Hal a lot more than merely a ring, that horrible day. She had no idea exactly what she might have done, but her conscience didn’t feel like being logical. It insisted on insisting that she should have been able to do something, anything that might have prevented the loss of Diet’s brother and her new friend. It was totally surreal, how the very best day of her life had been followed, so immediately, by the very worst.
As before, Noreen and Diet were again living aboard a TBG spaceplane at Bostin International Spaceport, but it was the smaller one that had brought them back to Bostin from Nork — a smaller one like Diet said that he normally used, when traveling on the baron’s business. It was sitting in the same gigantic hangar where the big jumbo had parked earlier, but didn’t come near to filling it the way the big one had, and it looked small and lonely inside that cavernous building. This one wasn’t nearly as huge, or as totally over the top. It was still luxurious and had all the amenities, but Diet was right... the smaller one was cozier than that other goliath had been, and if it hadn’t been for the awful events that led up to how they acquired it, she might have preferred it as well.
Even being back at work for BioCom wasn’t particularly satisfying anymore, as it left her tasting ashes in her mouth. She was worried about Diet, and about his frame of mind. He was quieter now… more reserved, sometimes just staring off into space and she often wondered where it was within his mind that he went, during those moments. And a couple of times, just as she was stepping inside after returning from work, she could have sworn she heard Diet talking to himself… out loud.
He’s worried about Hal. Hell, we’re both worried about Hal! Things just wouldn’t… couldn’t be right again, until Hal was restored to them.
* * * *
As at Kitty Litter, construction battalions were hard at work building fighter bases on all six of the sparsely settled Rak worlds the allied combined fleets had recently captured. Two of those syst
ems had been struck by Raknii counter-attacks that coincided with the alien raids that had recently shocked all of humanity, but the fleets that had taken them were still on station, so those attacking aliens were decimated. Even as those defensive bases were still under construction at their latest points of conquest, supply depots were being set up within sterile systems adjacent to their next targets. Due to the vast distances across those extensive life-voids en route to those targets, refueling bases were also being set up along the line, but preparations for humanity’s next major offensive were under way.
* * * *
The Alliance Planet Nork, City of Nork
July, 3866
While thumbing through his files of stored materials that he’d put away for potential storylines when things got slow, Alliance Broadcasting System Senior News Producer Irving Steingold stopped when he discovered a curious note that he’d written to himself some years before… something about the president and top Heptagon brass following the advice of a clairvoyant. Other than the sensationalized stories of the alien attacks throughout the international community, local interest news had been slow lately. They’d been forced to run a lot of the pre-packaged pieces they already had on file, and he was looking for ideas that he could research and put in the can for another rainy day.
Never one to forgo an opportunity to embarrass the Feds or the military establishment whenever possible, Steingold decided to sic his Waston reporters on this one and see what kind of amusing dirt they could dig up on it for him.
* * * *
Chapter-9
Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy. -- François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld
The Rak Planet Vnayrk
August, 3866
The time had finally arrived. The time that Drix had awaited, dreaded, anticipated and feared. N’raal was finally ripe for the taking. It was finally time to consummate their bonding and conceive the next generation of Supreme-Masters of the Raknii Empire. It should have been a glorious and joyous moment for both of them, but instead he was going to war.
Wrath of an Angry God: A Military Space Opera (The Sentience Trilogy Book 3) Page 9
