STAR TREK: The Lost Era - 2298 - The Sundered

by Michael A. Martin

  “They’re heading straight for their side of the Rift,” Dayan reported, her voice quavering slightly. She, too, must have apprehended what they were about to face. “I’m picking up intense subspace interference from all three vessels. They must have either jammed our other telly-eye probes, or else they’ve destroyed them outright.”

  “Do we fight them?” Baruclan wanted to know. Faraerth noted the dread in the helmrunner’s youthful eyes, a visual complement to the apprehension he could hear barely restrained behind Dayan’s voice.

  The drech’tor chose to overlook his crew’s all-too-evident fear. It seemed perfectly rational, considering the nature of the monsters that now stalked them. Faraerth had never seen a Devil up close, but the few who’d survived such encounters had described them as crystalline killing machines, about as receptive to reason as the dead, dry stones of Oghen’s airless moons.

  “Alert status,” Faraerth said, working hard to suffuse his voice with confidence. He hoped his crew would respond to it, draw strength and resolve from it. “Hard about, maximum Efti’el. Summon reinforcements from the fleet. The Hegemony will learn what we’ve discovered today about Milky-way and Aerth, but I don’t want it broadcast over the [294] subspace bands.” There was nothing to be gained by allowing an implacable enemy to learn that a Neyel crew had apparently found a means of reaching Aerth.

  No one on the command deck wasted any time carrying out Faraerth’s orders. They all held fast to chairs or consoles, using feet, tails, or hands, as the velocity compensators labored to adjust to the ship’s rapid change in course and speed.

  The Rift had just set a pack of Devils hard on Slicer’s heels.

  And now they stand between us and Far Aerth, the drech’tor thought, his righteous anger swiftly growing as hot as the densely packed suns of M’jallan’s Core.

  Chapter 26

  2295. Auld Greg Aerth Calendar, the Neyel Coreworld of Oghen

  The past oghencycle had been a most troubling one for Faraerth. His body had been rent asunder permanently; his right arm had stubbornly refused to grow back, despite repeated regeneration therapies. And ever since the day a Devil monofilament blade had maimed him and a Devil energy-net had crushed Slicer—killing most of Faraerth’s crew—the Neyel Hegemony itself had suffered injuries on a scale not seen since antiquity, when the Tuskers had beheaded the First Drech’tor and made martyrs of so many others.

  The first Devils to emerge from the Riftmouth into Hegemony Space had done so in a single battered ship. A handful of others soon followed. Within the span of one scant oghencycle, the Devils began arriving in steadily escalating numbers. Dozens. Hundreds. The Hegemony Fleet’s drech’tors now likened them to clouds of Oghen cropshearers, the dread insects that had descended upon the Cultivations during the worst of the Coreworld’s early famine years.

  The fleet joined the battle immediately, for Neyel spacers were nothing if not ready and willing to defend their territory. Despite the suddenness and ferocity of the Devil [296] assault, the ships and weaponry of both races quickly reached a rough parity. These days, neither side seemed able to maintain an advantage over the other for very long.

  But during recent days, Faraerth had watched with his own eyes as the balance of power slowly tipped against the Neyel. Even now, the Devils continued to come across the Rift in ever-increasing numbers, apparently as determined as ever to kill as wantonly as the Tuskers of old had done, despite their apparent lack of language, culture, or any other observable evidence of sentience.

  Save, Faraerth often thought, despite the horrors the Devils had visited upon him and his shipmates, their ships and weaponry. These, of course, the Alien Contact experts had always dismissed as the handiworks of other races, taken by the shrewd machinations of a ruthless, cunning, yet subsapient and instinct-driven species.

  Faraerth wasn’t so sure how to evaluate the enemy’s sentience, nor if such questions truly mattered when the Devils were inflicting so much damage upon the Hegemony—and while such a hellish adversary stood between the Neyel people and the Riftmouth that could enable them to regain Auld Aerth.

  And another problem had recently assumed an urgency far greater than the recovery of Aerth: Lately the now-all-but-invisible Riftmouth, the source of the increasingly perilous alien infestation, had begun drifting ever further downsystem from the outer comet cloud, falling inexorably—and at an apparently accelerating rate—toward the warm climes wherein orbited Oghen, the Coreworld to which all other Neyel Hegemony planets paid tribute in troops, raw materials, and finished goods.

  Oghen, a planet nearly as revered among Neyelkind as was Far Aerth itself, might soon be utterly helpless before the Devil onslaught. Gran Drech’tor Zafir had to redouble the fleet’s efforts [297] not only to repulse the expanding Devil incursion, but also to seek to end it at its source.

  And that was why, Faraerth supposed, he now found himself standing under the semicylindrical vault of the Great Hall of Oghen, in the august presence of the Gran Drech’tor Herself, along with some of her most senior visors. That she had called upon Faraerth’s expertise in spite of his shamefully permanent injuries—and despite his having committed the even more outrageous offense of surviving the destruction of Slicer—spoke volumes to him about the fear and desperation that now reigned at Gran Drech’tor Zafir’s court.

  Why she believes I can do anything to stem the Devil tide is Vangar’s own mystery, Faraerth thought, glancing down at his mangled stump of an arm. It was a brutal, unhealed scar that often served as a useful call to humility. Such a talisman might serve some of Zafir’s other visors even better than it serves me.

  Faraerth looked up across the cavernous hall, a space whose polished nickel-iron surfaces brought to mind the hallowed nullgrav Core Spaces of the Vangar Innerworld, the original Great Rock which even now stared down from Oghen’s cloud-scudded sky like some beneficent deity, from the place where Drech’tor Wafiyy had parked it nearly a century earlier. His eyes lighting upon the broad, gleaming dais, Faraerth saw Gran Drech’tor Zafir, flanked by her guards. The guards were hard-pressed to keep up with her pacing, and to avoid being struck by the heavy club end of her anxiously switching tail.

  Standing on either side of the wide, oblong table that lay between Faraerth and the Gran Drech’tor were Jerdahn, an expert in the Soft Sciences renowned across the Hegemony, and Loford, an equally well regarded, top-echelon military and technical visor whose hard-line views toward the Devils were celebrated across the Hegemony, thanks to her voluminous monographs and commentaries on the subject.

  Splayed across the table, and the principal object of [298] attention for the monarch and her visors, was a Devil. Or rather, the charred, cracked-open husk of one, the lifeless residuum of both battlefield and pathology lab.

  “Behold the foe, Gran Drech’tor,” intoned Visor Loford. She gestured toward the alien corpse with both hands and the distal end of her tail. “See that which stands between us and the Ur-world which is the birthright of all Neyelkind.”

  Zafir complied, her thick-lidded black eyes unfathomable. “This creature seems to be a thing of stone or crystal,” she said at length, eyeing the neatly cleaved planes and angles of the dead creature’s open thoracic cavity, the blocky heaviness of its rigid, semitranslucent internal organs. “It hardly seems real.”

  “It is unlike any exobiota we have ever encountered before. Yet it lived, right up until it fell in battle,” Visor Jerdahn said. Faraerth suppressed a smile at the academic’s froshclass lecture-chamber tone, no doubt an unconscious mannerism. Loford scowled noticeably, but the Gran Drech’tor seemed too absorbed by the dead creature that lay before her to pay any heed to the byplay.

  “Even the Tuskers of antiquity bore at least some resemblance to us,” Jerdahn continued, apparently not realizing that Loford had been about to speak. “Even they were constructed of nucleic acids and proteins. The Devils, by contrast, are crystalline mineral constructs, evidently the product of one of the harshest, hottest, highe
st-pressure environments imaginable. Even a species as adversity-hardened as we Neyel could not survive long unprotected under the atmospheric conditions that prevail within their war vessels. It may take us many oghencycles merely to begin fathoming their biotic processes.”

  “Such is the unknowable face of the Devils,” Loford said. “Mindless beasts who would extinguish our way of life as though they were bred merely for that sole purpose. As they have already amply demonstrated, their continuation necessarily means the end of our race.”

  “Assuming, of course, that we continue to fail to [299] communicate with them,” said Jerdahn. Though Faraerth often harbored such thoughts privately, he was surprised to hear the academic give them voice in this chamber. Given the imperative for war that now suffused even the intelligentsia of the Hegemony, such a comment was tantamount to treason.

  But Zafir seemed to take the scholar’s remark in stride, her slate-gray countenance showing a thoughtful aspect. The war must truly be going badly for us, Faraerth thought, if she is actually considering an attempt to parley. Faraerth knew well that most, if not all, Hegemony citizens found the notion utterly unthinkable. Fighting for survival was too ingrained a Neyel characteristic to be headed off by even the wisest of leaders, or by the direst of consequences.

  “We are better off devoting our resources toward studying and countering the instinct-ruled tactics and strategies of the Devils,” Loford countered, a muscular sneer contorting her otherwise rigid face. “Only by pursuing such a course can we succeed in wiping out this scourge before it annihilates us instead.”

  Faraerth still said nothing, silently noting the irony of Loford’s tuskish words. He knew that she had never taken up arms in the service of the Hegemony, nor braved the madness-inducing regions that bordered Riftspace, nor faced down the Devils’ lethal energy webs as he had. The stump of his arm throbbed and a phantom itch crept across a nonexistent elbow as he considered these things. What does she know of war? he thought.

  Jerdahn approached the table. With a theatrical flourish, he raised the Devil’s severed head, reminding Faraerth of a scene from one of the ancient stage plays that had survived the exodus from Auld Aerth. A Devil of infinite jest, the maimed spacer thought wryly.

  “We may be better able to anticipate and counter our attackers’ moves,” Jerdahn said, “if we first understand the contents of this.”

  [300] Loford snorted, her eyelids shuttering down to hostile slits, her gaze like a pair of particle cannons. “We understand that quite well enough, I think. The Devils exist only to kill us, and that is the only thing approximating thought in their hard, subsentient brains. They lack the wit even for intelligible language, and thus aren’t fit even to be slaves, much less free sentients. There can be no coexistence with them.”

  Faraerth found himself growing irritated at this irrelevant line of reasoning. Intelligent or not, the Devils endangered the very existence of the Hegemony.

  “They have sufficient wit to pilot starships, and to unleash terrible energies upon us,” he said, no longer able to hold his tongue. “Their brainpower suffices to do things such as this.” Using his one good arm and his scarred but unbowed tail, Faraerth pointed to the battle-ravaged stump on his right side.

  Faraerth’s outburst apparently brought Loford up short. She sputtered, obviously nonplussed that Faraerth, being a longtime member of the military—and one who had fought the Devils at close quarters—had not reflexively agreed with her.

  “Hear, hear,” Jerdahn said, his eyes alight.

  Gran Drech’tor Zafir raised a hand for silence, and the conversation ceased. Faraerth worried for a moment that he may have fatally overreached himself, then decided he’d been on borrowed time ever since the glowing Devil webs had torn Slicer to pieces.

  If the monarch was surprised by Faraerth’s comments, she revealed no sign of it. “I summoned you here, Drech’tor Faraerth, because you have looked into the enemy’s eyes and lived to tell of it,” she said.

  Faraerth bowed respectfully. I survived in disgrace, you mean, he thought, feeling a bloom of shame spreading slowly across the tough skin of his face. Had I returned alive from an engagement with a lesser foe, your underlings surely would have executed me immediately on charges of cowardice.

  Then his embarrassment subsided as he reached the [301] sobering realization that the whole world was changing all around him. One way or another, for good or for ill, the Devils were forcing Neyel society to adapt itself to the vicissitudes of the current moment. The Gran Drech’tor needs me alive more than she needs to hew to tired traditions, and she knows it.

  The thought prompted him to wonder if the danger posed by the Devils might not be even more dire than he knew.

  Uncomfortably aware that everyone’s eyes were upon him, Faraerth gathered his thoughts and spoke. “I fear that discounting the wiles of the Devils is to minimize the damage they can do us, Gran Drech’tor. How can creatures lacking minds as we understand them so thoroughly destroy a vessel as mighty as Slicer?”

  “Solar flares are destructive as well,” said Loford. “But I do not conclude from this that the stars have the intellectual wherewithal to draw clever plans against us. Such dangers can be outrun, and thus survived, as your presence in this chamber today so graphically demonstrates.”

  Faraerth grit his teeth, nettled. Loford had as much as accused him of cowardice. His left hand twitched, moving slightly toward his sidearm until he stopped it with a supreme act of will. He hoped no one noticed.

  Ignoring Loford, Faraerth continued speaking directly to the monarch, who seemed anxious to hear what he had to say. “It is true enough that the Devils failed to kill me, Gran Drech’tor. But not because they are stupid, pliant beasts like the grazers who held sway on this world before Drech’tor Wafiyy claimed it.”

  Gran Drech’tor Zafir’s eyes twinkled. “Then it must have been your own personal bravery in combat that secured your life.”

  Faraerth wondered briefly if she, too, was trying to shame him, then decided that it didn’t really matter; his fate would [302] be in her hands in any event. Shaking his head, he said, “No, Gran Drech’tor. I survived only because my crew was prepared to fight to the last man to defend their ship and their drech’tor. They did this because they are Neyel.”

  Zafir smiled approvingly.

  “So despite your belief in the entirely undemonstrated intelligence of these unlettered Devils,” Loford said, “you don’t seem to consider it particularly relevant to the fate of Slicer.”

  Faraerth paused for a thoughtful moment, then said, “When the Devils attacked Slicer, we had time only to protect ourselves and wage war as best we could, taking care not to underestimate the adversary. Neither I nor my crew had time to debate philosophy.” He wanted to tell Loford that he’d had time in abundance to consider such things during his oghencycle-long convalescence afterward. But he decided it would be a pointless exercise.

  Loford turned toward the monarch, bowing deeply before addressing her. “Gran Drech’tor, as you have already seen, the massed forces of the Neyel Hegemony stand ready to bear any burden to destroy this enemy. Whether or not we agree on their lack of sentience, they will not cease their attacks and incursions until they overrun Oghen and seize Holy Vangar itself—unless we carry the war directly to the Devils now, and end forever their ability to make war. And the surest way to do that is to destroy them utterly, like the infestation they are.”

  Zafir stood in silence, considering Loford’s words for nearly a full mennet before she resumed her pacing. To Faraerth’s eye, she did not appear entirely sanguine about exterminating another race, even one as alien and implacably hostile as the Devils.

  The monarch halted and addressed Jerdahn. “Is your institute still attempting to communicate with the Devils, Visor?”

  The scholar looked embarrassed. Coughing nervously, he said, “Yes, we are, Gran Drech’tor.”

  “And has any progress been made lately?”

  [303] “
The newest studies remain inconclusive,” Jerdahn admitted. “We have never been able to develop reliable exotranslation algorithms suitable to even begin the task. And we’re not even sure what sounds the Devils use to communicate. It’s even possible that they employ some speech modality other than audible sound.”

  “Ridiculous,” said Loford, sniffing. “They’re clearly beasts operating on instinct, creatures who have come to possess high technology through some opportunistic happenstance.”

  “We invented neither the Efti’el drive nor the antigravity devices which make the Neyel Hegemony possible,” Jerdahn pointed out, his tone eminently reasonable. “What is our acquisition of such things if not opportunistic?”

  Gran Drech’tor Zafir held her hand up again, forcing Loford to fume in silence. Faraerth could only wonder how the military visor might have refuted the academic’s excellent point. Might we not at times seem like Devils to some of the subject races?

  Then the monarch lifted her eyes and stared off into the distance for a seeming eternity before shattering the quiet that had descended over the vast chamber.

  “I have come to a decision. Regardless of the right or wrong of it, total war is now upon us. Whether or not the enemy reasons as we do, the Devils have left but one course of action open to us.”

  Turning her back on Jerdahn, she faced Loford and Faraerth, her obsidian eyes sad, her back bowed by an unimaginable burden of responsibility. “Assemble the entire War Council. Our race cannot survive and prosper while theirs does. They cannot be dissuaded from attacking, so they must die. All of them.”

  Loford looked triumphant. Jerdahn seemed to deflate, as if suddenly realizing that he had just wagered his career and lost. Perhaps he had.

  Faraerth bowed before the Gran Drech’tor, then began [304] slowly moving toward the chamber’s exit to do as he’d been bid. Loford walked beside him, but would not meet his eyes. He wanted to ask her if she was pleased to have finally gotten her wish, but decided against it.