by Ian Douglas
And then the ground in front of them erupted, a black wall of rising dirt and smoke and flame in a thunderous roar. The shock wave slapped Connor’s legs and torso hard. What the hell?
At first she thought the Grdoch had just fired a new and far more powerful weapon. These mouth-guns of theirs weren’t powerful enough to do that. . . .
Then she saw the Nightshades.
AGG-44 Nightshades—two-seater gravitic gunships—were Marine air- and space-support vehicles. Ugly, bug-like vehicles, they could only manage accelerations of about 12 Gs, but they were superb as low-altitude close-support, bristling with high-energy lasers and sky-to-ground missiles.
There were four of them, shrieking in from the north and whipping through the cloud of smoke and airborne debris they’d just released. They were close enough that Connor could see the USNA Marines legend on the sides, could feel the shudder in the air as the nearest whipped past.
“Ooh-rah!” Weirton yelled, rising to his feet and shaking his spear. “Get ’em, zoomies! Get ’em!”
The four aircraft vanished toward the south, but in moments they’d pulled up short and circled around for another pass. As the smoke from their first attack whisped away on a gentle breeze, Grdoch emerged . . . closer now, but Connor could only see fifteen of them now, and several were badly torn and bleeding.
“Keep firing!” she yelled, and she turned her weapon on the nearest Grdoch, blowing a bloody crater out of its torso and knocking it back a few steps. The others were wavering.
The Nightshades made a second pass, slower, now, and lower, literally skimming in a meter or two above the ground. She heard a high-pitched whine, a kind of buzz, and realized they were using their Gatlings on the aliens, chewing through the Grdoch at twelve depleted-uranium rounds per second.
“Anyone down there hear us?” a man’s voice said, speaking in her head.
“I’ve got you!” Connor replied. “Lieutenant Connor, VFA-96, USNS America.”
“Lieutenant Dillon, USNA Marines. Are those civilian prisoners down there with you?”
“Mixed bag, Dillon,” she replied. “Civilians, and a few off the Intrepid. Where do you want us?”
There was a pause, presumably as Dillon consulted a higher authority. “Actually, right there inside that compound would be good,” he told her. “I’ve told the Regimental CO, and they’ll have Marines here in a few mikes.”
Connor laughed. She laughed hard. It was not, she realized, funny, but the stress of the past hours had taken a toll, and the sheer relief of the rescue had made her giddy.
“We’ll have to track most of them down and get them back here,” she told Dillon. One of the Nightshades was hovering, she saw, looking for all the world like the head and body of a huge, black, squat dragonfly . . . and apparently looking right at her. Impulsively, she waved. In answer, the Nightshade rocked its fuselage port to starboard and back several times, an acknowledging waggle.
“It’s okay if you can’t round all of them up,” Dillon said. “From up here, it looks like the bad guys are on the run.”
“So . . . we won?”
There was a hesitation. “We won,” Dillon said at last. “But it cost us. Dear God, but it cost us.”
Connor felt a chill at the words, and wondered what had happened.
USNA CVS America
40 Eridani A System
1927 hours, TFT
He’d transferred his flag to the Constitution. From the flag bridge of the new carrier, Gray and his command constellation had an unhindered view of surrounding space—of the USNA fleet in orbit, and the blue, white, and orange sweep of the planet turning below. The battle was over, both in orbit and on the ground. Victory . . .
Mostly.
America was surrounded by a cloud of smaller spacecraft—work drones and robots and transporters carrying out inspections and beginning repairs. The goal was to get her spaceworthy enough that she could be piloted back to Earth, and that meant replacing her power tap assembly.
To that end, scouts had identified a small planetoid in the system—there were two major asteroid belts circling 40 Eridani A—and fleet nanengineers were beginning the work of programming seed nano that would be able to disassemble the planetoid and grow a new power tap assembly. The work would take several weeks—much of that time devoted to the testing and balancing. If they couldn’t get everything purring along exactly right, America would have to stay here in Vulcan orbit until a ship-repair nanufactory could be built in this system. And there might be . . . political problems with that.
Though technically still part of the Earth Confederation, the locals had wholeheartedly joined in with the USNA task force. Captain del Castro, commanding the Confederation Vulcan battlegroup, had placed the ten ships of his contingent unreservedly under Gray’s command. His flag, the battlecruiser Estrella de la Plata, was alongside the USNA Maine now, taking off the last of that vessel’s survivors. The Maine was almost certainly beyond repair—her spine severed in three places, her shield cap and all-important gravitic projectors burned away. Out of her crew of two thousand, more than twelve hundred had been killed, including her skipper, Catharine Francesconi. La Plata’s SAR teams were still going through the wreckage compartment by compartment, searching for more survivors. Captain Francesconi, Gray knew now, had almost certainly saved America by interposing her ship between the Grdoch wreck and the star carrier.
As ship’s captain, Catharine’s first responsibility had been to her crew and her ship. As commander of the entire task force, it had been Gray’s job to see the larger picture, to move the different ships like pieces on a chessboard toward the mission objective as a whole, sacrificing some pieces if necessary.
And, damn it, the nature of war made it always necessary.
It would have been one thing had he ordered Captain Francesconi to block the enemy’s beam and save the America. But Catharine Francesconi had made that decision on her own.
Gray wondered if he would have been able to do the same, had the roles been reversed.
What he had done, he was all too aware, was underestimate an alien enemy, and that had very nearly cost him the star carrier America. Not exactly a career-enhancing move, though Gray cared little for the politics of naval careers. He’d told President Koenig, more than once, that he’d not wanted this job, the command of an entire carrier task force. Politics being what they were, he had no doubt whatsoever about the outcome, here. There wouldn’t be official retribution—at least probably there would not be, but he would be transferred to a desk Earth- or Mars-side and never command a task force or a ship again.
So be it. He’d done his best, and the best had not quite been good enough. He’d failed to establish communications with the Grdoch—not that they’d seemed all that willing to talk in the first place. He’d found what was left of the crews of Intrepid and the Tomlinson, one of the other ships of Intrepid’s task force, and that, at least, represented a mission success. Reports from the planet’s surface indicated that there were several hundred of them alive and well down there, under the able protection of Engelmann’s 1/5 Marines. And he’d convinced the locals to switch their allegiance from the Confederation to the USNA, though Gray knew that he’d had less to do with that decision than the Grdoch. All things considered, 40 Eridani had been a success. A victory . . .
But as was always true with military victories, however, the outcome was a mix of success, failure, and terrible loss.
“Everything okay, Admiral?” Constitution’s skipper, Wade Harmon, had just floated up from the command bridge. “Getting settled in okay?”
“Just fine, Captain. Thank you.”
“There . . . ah . . . there’s a lot of scuttlebutt going around the Connie, Admiral. Talk about where the task force is headed next.”
“And what’s the consensus so far?”<
br />
“Earth. There’s a large minority that’s holding out for the ’Doch home planet, though.”
Gray laughed. “Well . . . we’d need to know just where that is. The Grdoch prisoners haven’t been real forthcoming in that regard as yet.”
There were almost eight thousand Grdoch now being held as prisoners of war, some rescued from fighters around Vulcan, most from the bases they’d established on the surface. Without space support, they’d all surrendered quickly enough. The XT people had been questioning some of them with the new language software, but with no success so far. Gray had seen the report. Eighty Grdoch questioned about the location of their home star system, all purportedly eager to please their captors, had given fifty-nine different answers, ranging from a red dwarf ten light years away to an ancient red giant within the galactic core. Those that could be checked out would be, of course, using robotic drones or recon squadrons, but that would take months, and Gray suspected that none of those fifty-nine would prove accurate. Had the Grdoch discovered the location of Sol and Earth, the results could have been cataclysmic, but, fortunately, pinpointing Sol would be a problem for beings looking for it. The fact that Earth was the third planet of a G2 star a bit less than halfway out from the galactic center was useless by itself, given the sheer number of stars and worlds fitting that description, and the system coordinates—and the programs necessary to translate those coordinates into something useful—were closely guarded secrets. The Grdoch would be no less cautious.
Even so, it had been a damned near thing. The Grdoch, evidently, had stumbled across the human colony at 40 Eridani, made contact with the Confederation forces there . . . and then the dumb bastards had brought a Grdoch warship straight to Sol. That ship had been destroyed at Enceladus, thank the gods, but the results could have been disastrous for Humankind had the Grdoch ship managed to escape. The Sh’daar had learned the exact coordinates of Earth decades ago, and two Sh’daar client races—the Turusch and the H’rulka—had brought the war into the Sol System; the Turusch had even been able to slam a high-velocity impactor into Earth herself with devastating results.
What the Grdoch might have done had they found Earth simply didn’t bear thinking about.
Gray hadn’t offered any further information. After a long moment’s silence, Harmon added, “So, we’re headed back home?”
“Eventually, Captain. I want to make very sure that we’ve rounded up all of the Grdoch. I’ve dispatched a squadron to check out B and C.”
“I was wondering about that, sir.”
The two other stars in the system, 40 Eridani B and C, circled each other in an elliptical orbit averaging 35 astronomical units across some 400 AUs out—a distance of 53 light hours. The Grdoch ships had appeared to be trying to head in that direction, and Gray wanted to be damned sure there was nothing else out there . . . like a third Grdoch warship.
He would not underestimate the bastards again.
“I also want to see if we’re going to be able to carry out local repairs on the America, at least enough to let her limp home . . . or if we’re going to need to bring out a mobile nanufactory. Some of the other task force ships are in a bad way too. The Slava got pretty badly shot up. So did the Long Island. The Constitution took a hit too—”
“Nothing that can’t be regrown in pretty short order, Admiral.”
“I’m glad to hear it. But I want to bring the fleet back to full readiness—as full as we can manage out here, anyway. And we need to decide what we’re doing about the prisoners.”
“I heard they’re being kept in their own prison camps. Good solution.”
“For now. I ordered that they be herded into the walled enclosures that have some of their praedams inside.”
Gray made a face as he said it. It left a distinctly unpleasant taste in his mouth. He still remembered the horror of watching the Grdoch swarm a living food animal—a sight nasty enough to make anyone a confirmed vegetarian.
But starving Grdoch prisoners to death would be worse . . . and at least the enormous praedams weren’t sentient, so far as any XT personnel had been able to discover.
The Grdoch, Gray thought, were going to pose Humankind with some absolutely horrific ethical problems in the future. What did you do, how did you respond, when another sentient species—one with which you wanted to form an alliance, a partnership—held values and ideals so markedly different from your own?
Once, centuries before, a vicious, bloody, and long-fought war had divided Humankind between the West and the followers of religious doctrines that were antithetical to what the West thought of as civilized belief in almost every way. Even mainstream and moderate Islam believed with all the fervor of their faith in practices and punishments the West no longer accepted.
Never mind that the West’s sacred scriptures also called for death for homosexuals, for heretics, for witches, for disbelief, as well as promoting the subjugation of women and the use of slaves for pleasure. The difference was that Islam was still a young religion, youngest of the three great monotheistic faiths, and had simply not yet grown up enough to discard such childishness. Where the West preached—for the most part—tolerance, diversity, and inclusiveness, such attitudes could not be part of moderate Islam without seriously undercutting fundamentalist belief, an attack on Allah and on His Messenger.
And the West had come dangerously close, in the name of understanding and inclusiveness, to going under. Only military victory, the controversial White Covenant, and a united Earth Confederation willing to back it up, had given modern Islam the opportunity to grow up.
Had they not, utter destruction would have been the only possible outcome.
Something of the sort, Gray thought, would be necessary in dealing with the Grdoch. Would they be willing to engage in free and open communication, diplomatic recognition, scientific exchanges, even trade, with creatures they thought of as food?
And what was the alternative? Genocide?
Gray fervently hoped he wouldn’t be around to take part in that decision.
“The damned ’Dochs wouldn’t have done as much for us,” Harmon observed.
“Maybe not. But we have to set standards, draw lines, somewhere.”
The trick was knowing where to draw the line, though. Moderate Islam, four centuries ago, would have rejected utterly the idea that their religion was immature, that it was incomplete or barbaric or lacking in any way. They believed what they believed because they were convinced it came straight from God.
And it wasn’t just Islam. The same was true of fundamentalist Christians, of Orthodox Jews . . . of any belief system purportedly handed down by divine fiat. “God said it, that settles it” had been the motto for generation after generation of believers of all of the monotheistic faiths.
The Grdoch, Gray knew, would never accept the idea that their behavior was in any way uncivilized. He didn’t know if they believed in God, but they would argue, rightly, that they’d been made the way they were by the forces of evolution.
And they certainly wouldn’t change what they were—could not change what they were—just because another species found their behavior horrific.
Was it possible that some mutually alien species were so different from one another they could never communicate in any meaningful way?
Was it possible that the same was true for some purely human belief systems?
Or was the only solution something like the White Covenant, backed by military force?
It was not, Gray thought, a happy thought.
Emergency Presidential Command Post
Toronto
United States of North America
2335 hours, EST
“You want to get rid of the White Covenant?” Deb Johnston sounded shocked. “My God, why?”
They lay in bed together, still entangled in each other’s arms.
Koenig had brought her back to the EPCP and, eventually, asked her to spend the night. His security detail knew she was there, of course—how could they not?
But if he’d given them fits over the past six years by insisting on his own way, still, he trusted their discretion. There would be no leaks, not from that quarter.
Still, Gods . . . if his conservative Freedomist support base discovered that he was literally in bed with a Globalist, heaven help them all. . . .
“Well,” he said slowly, “the political reason is that we want to clear the way for an alliance with the Islamists.”
She nodded. “We’ve been pushing for that for years. It’s stupid to have a true global government when a billion people aren’t even allowed to be a part of it.”
“I know.”
“And I know you’re the most apolitical Freedomist I’ve ever met. What’s your real reason?”
“Big government, government that has forgotten that it derives its power from its people, is one of the worst evils Humankind has managed to unleash on itself. Government has no business telling its citizens what to believe . . . or how to exercise their religious expression.”
“But mob rule—that’s what true democracy is, you know—can be as much of a tyranny as any other. That’s why we have a representative democracy. The people, the ordinary citizens, don’t know what’s best for themselves.”
“And a bunch of bureaucrats or elected officials do? Come on! You know, the old United States of America ran afoul of mommy-knows-best government in the twenty-first century, when it flirted with socialism. Universal education . . . run by the government. Universal health care . . . run by the government. Universal food rights . . . run by the government. Universal work rights . . . run by the government. By the middle of the century, the country was on the point of collective suicide. Suicide by taxation. By presidential edict. By legal entanglements. By wholesale corruption.
