The great cat hissed; Captain Taress turned to look at him with puzzlement.
The alien was right. Science was the key, and the Kalixi had nothing better. For the first time, a chill of fear ran along his spine—a chill he very quickly suppressed.
Encrai punched in a new set of orders for his fleet, modifying their battle plan. “You shall pay dearly for the opportunity to learn from the Kalixi,” he muttered grimly. The new orders detailed a massive incursion into the gaps between the alien fleets, breaking their flanks and splintering them in chaos.
Encrai yawned, and stretched. He turned to Chief Assistant Mrech. “Colonel, watch after things, will you?” With a look at the timetable, he turned to the alien. “I’ll be back in about six hours. We’ll watch the battle together.” He smiled. “May the best minds win.”
The burrstinger closed, closed, and—Encrai opened his eyes with a start; his whole body was bent with tension, ready to pounce.
It was wrong—something was wrong in this campaign, but he didn’t know what it was. And his hunches seldom erred.
But until his hunch blossomed into understanding, he could do nothing. And soon it would be irrelevant, anyway. The battle was starting. It was time to go see the show.
Encrai hurtled through the air at terrifying velocity, snagging the edge of his web-cradle with outstretched claws as he passed. Back at his console, he created a new display upon the holoscreen; now the two scenes, one of Titan and the other of his fleet, coalesced. Saturn lay dead center, straddled by two opposing armadas. The humans far outnumbered the Kalixi. They looked quite imposing on the screen, but it was only an illusion. In the first conflict, between a Kalixi Class J fleet and the Martian Second Fleet, twenty-five Kalixi vessels knocked off 180 primate ships before the primates pegged their first Kalixi ship; even after that, the Kalixi lost only three more ships, while the humans lost another forty-six. Armor alloy and fusion missiles just couldn’t contest the clean power of gammaxers and gravshields. For the upcoming battle, the High Command anticipated the destruction of eleven human ships for every Kalixi; considering the weakness Encrai had found in the alien strategy, newer figures suggested a ratio of seventeen to one. And the human’s suicidal tendency made no difference—insanity worked once, but only once.
Then why did Encrai’s intuition disagree?
Encrai turned to the prisoner. “I wish to compliment you on the accuracy of your reporting. The fleets are indeed arriving just as you said they would, in just the disposition you described. Thank you.”
“Yeah.” Shadows hung under the prisoner’s eyes, and stubble darkened his chin. The Kalixi admiral chose not to notice.
Instead he turned back to the holoscreen. It was all so beautiful. Simple and elegant. There was, he told himself, nothing to fear.
Then the outer edge broke away from the battlescreen, forming a set of new displays far removed from the battle. These new sections held no fleets, just scattered ships—but the ships were moving at incredible speeds. The Kalixi advance scouts had just detected them. And though they were far away, they were unquestionably heading for the battle zone, and they were accelerating at the fastest pace that the best of the alien stasis boxes could handle and still keep the occupants alive. Encrai played with the controls, and potentialities expanded from those ships in narrow, senseless patterns.
To get to the battle in time, they’d have to continue to accelerate, and when they arrived they’d be going so fast they’d only be in the battle for a few seconds before they flashed past, hopelessly out of control, to speed beyond the limits of the solar system and die—for the aliens had no interstellar jumpdrive, nothing that could get those ships home again. It was truly suicidal, and in that sense at least it seemed typical of these primates.
“Where did those ships come from?” Encrai asked in tense bewilderment. “Where are they going?”
Somehow, the prisoner’s silence seemed ominous. Encrai turned to the alien, and saw that he was no longer haggard and tired. His eyes were bright with a new emotion—was it pride? Could a primate feel pride? “Tell me, primate Admiral, what are those ships doing out there?”
The man smiled broadly, and Encrai’s gnawing tension leaped in his throat. Instantly he swung over the human, claws extended, ready for the killing stroke. “Tell me,” he spat.
The man leaned back, squirming away from the claws. “Where’d they come from? They came from the far side of the sun, beyond the bounds of the solar system. They’ve been accelerating since we figured out your timetable.” He paused, and Encrai came closer with his claws. “They’re on their way to the battle, obviously. They’re on their way to win.”
“How? They’ll only be in the battle for a few seconds before they leave again, as swiftly as they came. They’ll hardly have time to fire, much less time to aim.”
The prisoner raised an eyebrow. “Well, in one sense you’re even more right than you realize—many won’t get to fire at all. By the time they get to the battle, they’ll be traveling at almost a third of the speed of light. Many of those ships’ll be dead hulls even before they get to the battle.”
Encrai cocked his head, questioning.
“Don’t you see? At one-third the speed of light, every dust particle in the solar system is their enemy—because in their reference frame, those particles are traveling at a third of the speed of light. Those dust particles, then, are slow—but incredibly massive—cosmic rays.”
Encrai’s eyes widened in dawning horror as he leaped to the console. He trembled as he composed the fleet’s evacuation orders.
And as he worked, the prisoner’s words taunted him, telling him what he already knew. “Of course, that works both ways. Those ships, those ships, Admiral, are the biggest damn cosmic rays in the universe right now. They won’t have to aim their missiles—they aren’t even going to try. Their warheads are just hunks of lead, with enough deuterium to vaporize. They’ll explode way in front of your ships, leaving clouds of lead nuclei cosmic rays to blast through your damn gravshields. How long can your gravshields take that, Admiral?”
The evacuation orders sped from the admiral’s console. He finished, looked at an instrument display, and sagged in his cradle in agony. “Too late,” he sobbed in a cracked voice. “I’m too far away. My beam’ll take half an hour to get to Saturn from here. The suiciders will arrive before my message does.”
The man broke into hysterical laughter. “We didn’t have a chance, not a chance in the world. But we tried, goddammit, we had to try, and we won!”
Encrai was too numb to respond. He looked dully at the display, saw a small mystery resolved. “Those gaps between your fleets—they’re for the suiciders, aren’t they?” The gaps into which Encrai had sent so many Kalixi ships.
The human admiral nodded. “They’re really for the research ships, but they’re tunnels for the suiciders as well.”
Burning, paralyzing terror fought with cold, penetrating thought in Encrai’s mind; but he was Kalixi, and thought won over terror. He set his teeth in determination. “That still won’t destroy my fleet, Admiral. You’ll hurt us, terribly, but we’ll win anyway. We’re warriors, Admiral. Even this can’t bring you victory.”
The human admiral shook his head again. “You’ve missed the most important part of the attack. We aren’t counting on a single pass to destroy you—because those ships won’t ever get to pass. Look at the trajectories and the timings on those ships. Go ahead and look, Admiral.”
Encrai turned to the holoscreen. Under his direction, the senseless patterns branched again—then, far faster than anything he’d ever seen before, the branches fell away and a handful of single solid certainties locked into place. The certainties emanated from a single point in the center of the Kalixi formation, radiating out in a cone to the suiciders’ ships. Encrai gasped. “Spiders in web! They’re going to collide with each other!”
The human—what was his name! Thearsporn? Thearsporn nodded again—an awful custom, this nodding was.
“We hope to get ten to fifteen of them to ram together within five nanoseconds of each other. The explosion won’t be as bright as a star, but it’ll be pretty close.”
New waves of shock washed through Encrai’s brain, waning as his mind froze, waxing each time a coherent thought tried to form. “My fleet. The center of my fleet.” He shuddered. “But your own ships! That star will destroy your own ships as well!”
Thearsporn turned sober. “Yes, it will. Only the farthest research vessels will survive.”
Encrai ripped deep tears in his web, unbelieving, incapable of believing. “Why? How?”
The admiral’s voice answered gently. “Let me tell you the story of the Bully and the Crazy Boy.”
Encrai had no answer.
“Once there was a crazy boy who always walked home from school. One day a bully confronted him, and dared the boy to get around him. The boy tried to cajole the bully, but failed. So they fought. And the bully beat the boy unmercifully. But in the course of the fighting the boy got in one good blow, and bloodied the bully’s nose.”
The voice through the translator was soft, soothing; by concentrating on the voice, Encrai could think again.
“The next day, the bully and the crazy boy met and fought again, and the boy was brutally beaten, but again he got in one good blow, kicking the bully in the knee.”
Encrai noticed Thearspom’s face; it became increasingly contorted as he spoke. The words were heated now, and Thearspom’s eyes, which were bright before, now burned.
“And they continued to meet and fight for a week. By then the crazy boy was a bruised mass of ruptured flesh. But despite all the bruises he wasn’t defeated. In fact, he looked up at the bully and pleaded, ‘Please, please don’t make me hurt you again.’ The bully laughed at him, knowing he was a crazy, stupid boy—but he stopped laughing because laughing hurt, because the boy’d split his lip the day before, and the bully put his hand to his lips, and felt the swelling from his eye that still hadn’t subsided, and felt the pain in his knee as he shifted his weight. And the bully looked at the crazy boy with horror, and turned and hurried away.”
Encrai felt bile rise in his throat. Insanity, insanity was what this man was about. Why couldn’t Thearsporn and his kind just accept the idea of slavery, like rational beings, when the alternative was death?
Encrai’s numbness was gone; rational thought replaced the emptiness.
And with new thoughts came a new wave of horror. He formed new orders on his console; orders for his flagship and personal guard.
Captain Taress gasped as he read the orders. “Twenty-five G’s! The compensators won’t be able to handle it all.”
“I know that, Captain,” Encrai growled. “Do it anyway!” Encrai turned back to the human admiral. “Are any of those suicidal ships headed for us?”
Thearsporn shook his head. “Nope, ’fraid not.”
A stench from the Iiesniffer assailed Encrai’s senses; his snarl was cut off as a hammer of acceleration nailed him in his webcradle. The human snapped sideways in his chair, awkwardly positioned to survive such force. “Where are they?” Encrai demanded of his prisoner. “How soon will the suiciders get here?”
Thearsporn twisted into the acceleration, trying to get away from the even more terrible agony assaulting him from the pain transmitters in the chair. “They’re, they’re off to one side, away from the scouts. Coming from an off angle. Should be here any minute.”
Even as Thearsporn spoke, Encrai saw a dozen cosmic rays blossom into existence on his flagship’s own scanners. With a strangled cry, Encrai screamed interception orders for his ships, orders they had only seconds to execute.
But Encrai’s officers were the best in the universe, and they made it. The guardships lurched forward, spraying death even as the guards themselves died. The flagship’s acceleration rotated ninety degrees and doubled. And the dead crews of the suicide ships couldn’t retarget on the dodging flagship.
“We made it,” Encrai muttered, then shouted in joy, “we made it!”
His thoughts turned to the future even as his happiness swept away his horrors. They would have to send another fleet to this system, he realized. His personal career was destroyed, of course, but there was something more important here. These crazy primates had to be subdued.
It would be difficult to convince the High Command to send another fleet now, with the retrenchment wars coming, but Encrai would convince them. And it wouldn’t take much; even a Class H fleet, hardly bigger than the original exploratory group, could beat the remains of the human defenses. Yes, a Class H fleet … and a single Planetburster, just in case the fleet failed to conquer. Yes. Encrai turned cheerfully to his prisoner.
The prisoner was clamping his jaw, swallowing hard. Encrai remembered the psychmed talking about a stimulant in the primate’s teeth.
“What …” Encrai started, then slapped his hand down on the alarm button. The man’s complexion darkened, perspiration erupted from his face, and Encrai could smell the man’s anger as he tore himself from the ill-fitting prison chair in the 5-G gravity.
With a powerful lunge Encrai was upon the beast—for beast Thearsporn was, with the light of insanity in his eyes. Closing swiftly, Encrai delivered a lethal stroke of his claws.
But Thearsporn snapped away, and the lethal stroke merely raked across his side, drawing a swath of skin and blood. Thearsporn extended his fist with impossible strength, and bones snapped in Encrai’s side as he crashed through the air.
Disregarding his pain, Encrai followed as Thearsporn dodged down the corridors. A marine appeared and fired a lasgun through Thearspom’s abdomen, but it didn’t diminish his speed. He disappeared around the comer.
Encrai realized that he was heading for the fusion pool at ship’s center.
The creature was insane, no doubt about it. Worse, he was dying—he was already dead, if he would just realize it; no doubt about it. But he would not realize it, and he would get to the fusion pool; there was no doubt about that either. Encrai wondered briefly how the admiral knew where to go and how to get there.
Not that it mattered. Encrai started to take a deep breath, found it was a terrible mistake. The broken bones in his chest must have punctured a lung. And an artery. Moist warmth collected near his throat. He was dying.
Not that it mattered. In a few moments he would become part of another, even smaller, star. Admiral Thearspom’s star.
Encrai sighed. He felt a certain sense of guilt, failing his people like this, but the guilt seemed remote. Poor, poor Kalixi. He wished he could tell them; he wished he could tell them how much they still had to learn before they could conquer.
But for now the learning was too late; and soon the fury of atoms in bondage conquered all.
It has never really been possible to make wise decisions on the basis of short-term considerations alone, but the kinds of destructive power available to us and our descendants make it even less possible than ever before. Some of the most important and agonizing choices, in fact, may require an extremely long view.
WHEN PETE MAWSER learned about the show, he turned away from the GHQ bulletin board, touched his long chin, and determined to shave, in spite of the fact that the show would be video, and he would see it in his barracks. He had an hour and a half. It felt good to have a purpose again—even the small matter of shaving before eight o’clock. Eight o’clock Tuesday, just the way it used to be. Everyone used to say, Wednesday morning, “How about the way Starr sang The Breeze and I last night?” That was a while ago, before the attack, before all those people were dead, before the country was dead. Starr Anthim—an institution, like Crosby, like Duse, like Jenny Lind, like the Statue of Liberty. (Liberty had been one of the first to get it, her bronze beauty volatilized, radio-activated, and even now being carried about in vagrant winds, spreading over the earth . . . )
Pete Mawser grunted and forced his thoughts away from the drifting, poisonous fragments of a blasted liberty. Hate was first. Hate was ubiq
uitous, like the increasing blue glow in the air at night, like the tension that hung over the base.
Gunfire crackled sporadically far to the right, swept nearer. Pete stepped out to the street and made for a parked truck. There was a WAC sitting on the short running-board.
At the comer a stocky figure backed into the intersection. The man carried a tommy-gun in his arms, and he was swinging it to and fro with the gentle, wavering motion of a weather-vane. He staggered toward them, his gun-muzzle hunting. Someone fired from a building and the man swiveled and blasted wildly at the sound.
“He’s—blind,” said Pete Mawser, and added, “he ought to be,” looking at the tattered face.
A siren keened. An armored jeep slewed into the street. The full-throated roar of a brace of .50-caliber machine-guns put a swift and shocking end to the incident.
“Poor crazy kid,” Pete said softly. “That’s the fourth I’ve seen today.” He looked down at the WAC. She was smiling. “Hey!”
“Hello, Sarge.” She must have identified him before, because now she did not raise her eyes nor her voice. “What happened?”
“You know what happened. Some kid got tired of having nothing to fight and nowhere to run to. What’s the matter with you?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t mean that.” At last she looked up at him. “I mean all of this. I can’t seem to remember.”
“You—well, it’s not easy to forget. We got hit. We got hit everywhere at once. All the big cities are gone. We got it from both sides. We got too much. The air is becoming radioactive. We’ll all—” He checked himself. She didn’t know. She’d forgotten. There was nowhere to escape to, and she’d escaped inside herself, right here. Why tell her about it? Why tell her that everyone was going to die? Why tell her that other, shameful thing: that we hadn’t struck back?
War and Peace Page 35
