by Ian Douglas
“Get some probes where we can see in there.”
“I’ve already dispatched battlespace drones, Admiral. We should be getting images in a few minutes.”
“Good.” He thought for a moment. “The spooks were working on the H’rulka language after that last fight back home. They might want in on this.”
“I’ll patch a call through to Commander Morrissey and Dr. Wilkerson, sir.”
“Very well.”
He was glad that Wilkerson had transferred back on board America after his brief deployment on the Kinkaid. The man had an excellent working knowledge of Turusch thought processes—the odd layering of two individuals’ thoughts. He had a gift for being able to drop human bias and opinion from the equation when dealing with the genuinely alien.
“Images coming through from Alchameth now, sir,” a CIC sensor technician reported.
A bulkhead screen lit up, showing the broad curve of the giant’s limb. The city, or whatever it was, still lay in darkness, but the dawn terminator was fast approaching over the horizon a few thousand kilometers ahead. Though dark, the tops of the cloud bands were visible by moonlight—light scattering off of Jasper, especially—and also from the underside of the rings sweeping overhead. The canyon depths between the cloud bands were in deep darkness, though pulses and flickers of silent lightning flared against the night, each flash briefly illuminating the nearest clouds.
And there was the city. . . .
The structure, Koenig thought, might not be a city, as such. That was a distinctly human concept, and the H’rulka did not think like humans. The ranks and clusters of lights, however, gave the impression of a city seen from the air at night. One side, however, was dark, and appeared to have crumpled.
“We’re still not sure exactly what happened,” Sinclair said. “Telemetry from Gray’s fighter was spotty—interference from the planet’s magnetosphere. We’ll know more when we can interrogate his fighter directly. But we think that two or more nuclear explosions—Gray’s Kraits—triggered a runaway fusion reaction in Alchameth’s hydrogen atmosphere. The blast obliterated the H’rulka ship . . . and the shock wave may have damaged the city.”
“It looks like something punched through the platform,” Koenig said. He pointed. “Just there . . . and there. Those look like god-awful holes.”
“Yes, sir. The H’rulka apparently use artificial singularities to extract zero-point energy from the quantum field, just like us. When the containment fields collapsed . . .”
“Right. At least two fair-sized black holes heading for the nearest major gravitational mass . . . in this case, Alchameth.”
“Right. And that gas-bag city happened to be in the way.”
“Admiral?” a familiar voice said, speaking in Koenig’s head. “Wilkerson here. I’m in communication with a H’rulka group-organism that calls itself Abyssal Wind. They claim to speak for the Golden Clouds Gathering. That’s the name of that brightly lit structure adrift in Alchameth’s upper atmosphere.”
“What do they have to say?”
“Admiral, they need our help to evacuate the planet.”
It sounded at first like an offer of surrender. On the other side of the large CIC compartment, dozens of viewscreens were showing a confusion of images coming in from the Marine assault on Arcturus Station. Moments before, the Crocodiles had nudged into the huge, orbiting complex, their docking collars molding themselves into and through the station’s bulkheads, disgorging their combat-armored Marines. There’d been some resistance, but so far it sounded like the Marines were making good progress, and had already reached the compartment where the human prisoners were being kept.
The battlegroup had won, a singular victory in a thirty-seven-year war that had seen precious few victories.
“I don’t think we can look at it as a surrender,” Wilkerson told him. “They’re asking for . . . for cooperation, I think.”
For the past hour, Wilkerson, down in America’s intelligence department, had continued to talk with the surviving H’rulka. A round-trip distance of 3.6 million kilometers meant a time-delay of twelve seconds on all radio traffic, but that was an annoyance at worst. The H’rulka were eager, even frantic, to communicate.
The Gathering had indeed been damaged by the shock wave when Gray’s missiles had triggered a runaway fusion reaction, and things had been made much worse when a pair of rogue black holes had plunged through the city’s main deck. Perhaps a third of the platform had broken away and vanished into the black depths of the abyss below. Power was failing, and the surviving H’rulka feared that the antigravity lift pods that supported the massive construct would die. If that happened, the rest of the platform would fall as well.
At first, Koenig thought that the H’rulka wanted to be rescued, and for the life of him he’d not known how he could pull that off. Individual H’rulka were huge, hot-air balloons each a couple of kilometers across. Koenig’s battlegroup didn’t have any ship with an internal compartment large enough to carry even one of the group-organisms . . . and there were over twenty-five thousand survivors down there. There was no way the Confederation fleet could evacuate the platform.
As the conversation continued, however, it became clear that even if the floating city collapsed, the remaining H’rulka were not in immediate danger. They were floaters, after all, at home in the open atmosphere of gas giants like Alchameth. The Golden Cloud Gathering, Koenig was given to understand, was less city than manufacturing center . . . and apparently it was also the resting place of a small H’rulka starship.
And they wanted to use that ship to send a message home.
“They are the enemy, Admiral,” Captain Buchanan pointed out. “We generally try to block enemy communications, don’t we? At least, that was the fashion in vogue when I went through the Academy.”
“They are distressed civilians,” Koenig replied.
“Actually, Admiral,” Wilkerson’s voice put in, “we may not be able to make that distinction. Human society tends to assign distinct roles to individuals—doctors, politicians, technicians, soldiers. We haven’t found anything yet in the H’rulka social system that represents a professional military. They may be citizen-soldiers.”
“Meaning everyone in society can double as a soldier?” Buchanan asked.
“Something like that. They don’t seem to differentiate. Makes sense, if you think about it. There’s no such thing as an individual H’rulka. They’re colony organisms, with something like a hundred different life forms working together—gas bag, tentacles, brain, digestive system. Everything works together to create the whole.”
“Wouldn’t it be just as likely that they’d think in terms of different parts of the whole, each with its own function?” Koenig asked. “That would lead to class specialization, I’d think, like in a beehive. Workers, drones, soldiers . . .”
“Human thinking, Admiral. Because we’re familiar with beehives and anthills, and we still think in terms of the class and caste structures humans have used throughout history. For the H’rulka, it’s not everyone, it’s everythey. It’s as if humans thought about being a city, instead of being just one person living in a city. Warfare—deploying soldiers—is just one thing a city might do. It also raises food, communicates with other cities . . .”
“I’m not entirely sure I’m following that,” Koenig said. “But if I do understand you, it’s vitally important that we help them.”
“How so?” Buchanan asked.
“What is it that defines humans?” Koenig asked.
Buchanan shrugged. “That’s one of the all-time great imponderables, isn’t it? Communication, building societies, adapting the environment, technology . . .”
“All of which other beings do as well, both sentient and nonsentient. But for the H’rulka, I wonder if their definition of H’rulka-hood isn’t cooperation, working together to sustain life and civilization
in a hostile environment.”
“A distinct probability, Admiral,” Wilkerson said. “You know . . . the H’rulka term for us translates into something like ‘vermin.’ And for them, vermin are insignificantly tiny organisms that attack the whole.”
Buchanan chuckled. “Mean little critters that feed on the body, eh?”
“Something like that. Parasites that interfere with the sound functioning and internal cooperation of the body.”
“Then maybe we can prove to them that we’re not vermin,” Koenig said. “I’ve been running numbers. A Marine carrier can function deep enough in Alchameth’s gravitational field that they could lower tethers to the platform.”
“Anchor it from space, you mean,” Buchanan said. “That could be damned tricky. That platform is moving with the local winds.”
“The carrier’s AI could balance the forces involved easily enough, I think,” Koenig replied. “Damn it, we have to try.”
“How long would we have to hold the thing up?”
“We’re still working on understanding H’rulka concepts of time,” Wilkerson said. “But it may just be a matter of hours . . . no more than a day or so. They need to complete repairs on their ship, which they’ll dispatch to one of their systems, another H’rulka colony. And they’ll either send back rescue ships to pick up the colonists on Alchameth, or they’ll send the ships necessary for building a new platform.”
“Can we allow that?” Buchanan asked. He sounded shocked. “What if they return with reinforcements?”
“By that time, I think,” Koenig said, “we’ll be long gone. And just maybe we’ll have given the H’rulka something to think about.” He hesitated, then nodded. “We’re going to do this.”
From the other end of CIC, a ragged cheer broke out. The Marines had just reported that Arcturus Station was secure.
Chapter Seventeen
1 February 2405
CIC, TC/USNA CVS America
Arcturus System
0745 hours, TFT
Two days later, the Star Carrier America prepared to depart from the Arcturus System.
“Nassau and Vera Cruise both report they have cast off from Gathering, Admiral. The H’rulka platform is stable and holding its own. Our engineers and . . . uh . . . shore parties are on their way out.”
“Very well. Have the carriers return to Jasper orbit as soon as they’ve retrieved their fighters.”
The Marine fighters had been swarming around the two light assault carriers for the entire time, even dipping down into Alchameth’s atmosphere in order to circle Golden Cloud Gathering at visual ranges. The Marines of MSU–17 were not trusting souls, at least not when it came to their assault carriers. The constant fighter patrols had been a guarantee against an ambush or a double-cross.
But there’d been no double-cross. The Vera Cruz and the Nassau had parked themselves in the planet’s atmosphere above the gathering and generated ten-thousand-kilometer Bucky-weave cables, growing them from carbon brought into their machine bays by scavenger shuttles. Drones had carried the ends of the cables down to the platform, where they’d been used to secure the torn and twisted part of the structure.
After that, shuttles had gone down and landed on the platform, disgorging a small army of combat engineers and agrav techs. Dr. Wilkerson and his staff had gone down as well, in order to talk with the H’rulka directly. They’d used an array of spare War Eagle singularity projectors, mounting them on the damaged portion of the platform. With power from a couple of portable generators tuning the grav drives to a low, carefully balanced purr, they’d managed to stabilize the H’rulka platform.
Throughout the operation, Wilkerson had said, the H’rulka came and went, drifting above the platform like huge, errant balloons. It was clear that they didn’t need the platform, not when they could drift above it, or out across the dizzying drop into the cloud-walled abyss below with no concern for having someplace to stand. Manufacturing, however, required solid ground.
“So . . . how did they bootstrap themselves out of their homeworld’s atmosphere in the first place?” Koenig asked Wilkerson. “They would have needed something like this platform to build their first ships . . . and it’s hard to imagine them being able to get the raw materials from a planet’s atmosphere.”
“Right,” Wilkerson said. “They are superb chemists, and apparently they could extract carbon from atmospheric methane, carbon tetrachloride, and the free-floating organic compounds they use for food. But they had no real reason to leave their world at all until somebody called the Starborn showed up.”
“ ‘Starborn.’ Is that the Sh’daar?”
“We don’t know. Not enough to go on yet. If they weren’t the Sh’daar, though, they were another Sh’daar client race. But these Starborn apparently helped them expand their carbon-mining from their atmosphere . . . and apparently they taught them how to build antigravity thrusters. After a while, they were making jaunts out to their homeworld’s moon system to mine heavy metals. You were right, by the way, Admiral.”
“I’m glad to hear it. About what?”
“About cooperation being how these folks define people. The Starborn helped them achieve spaceflight and large-structure fabrication. And now we’ve demonstrated the same willingness to help. Abyssal Wind isn’t sure what to make of that.”
“You told him that there was no need for humans and H’rulka to fight? That this war is something the Sh’daar started?”
“I tried. Some of the concepts are . . . difficult. But they—Abyssal Wind is a they, remember—promised to talk about it with other H’rulka when they get back in touch with them.”
“Good. How long before they launch their ship?”
“I don’t know, Admiral. We’re also having some trouble translating basic concepts of time. But Abyssal Wind seemed confident that they would be able to complete preparations and launch soon.”
Koenig wondered if they should stand by until the H’rulka ship was away. There seemed little point in that, however, unless the CBG planned to stay put until the H’rulka rescue fleet arrived . . . and Koenig was not willing to trust the alien floaters that far, not yet.
Trust had to be earned.
By any set of expectations, the Second Battle of Arcturus had been a spectacular victory for the Confederation. The defending fleet had been destroyed and the survivors scattered, Arcturus Station had been taken back and the human prisoners held there freed. But it was possible that the most important aspect of that victory would turn out to be direct contact with the H’rulka. If the events of the past couple of days led to diplomatic contact with them, so much the better.
So little was known about the Sh’daar, and about the alliance humans referred to carelessly as the “Sh’daar Empire.”
A true galactic empire in the classical sense, with emperor and central ruling world, was ludicrous in Koenig’s opinion. The galaxy was so large, composed of so many suns and worlds and so many unfathomably diverse forms of life and mind. No emperor, no one ruling race could possibly keep track of everything taking place within such a realm. No conquering army could hold billions of worlds in thrall. No imperial decree could have the same meaning for hundreds of millions of different sentient species. Human xenosophontologists couldn’t even yet agree on what the word intelligence meant, much less figure out how to relate to them all.
Whatever form or philosophy of rule the near mythical Sh’daar had imposed on a large portion of the galaxy, it must be fairly loosely structured in order to encompass beings as mutually alien as H’rulka, Turusch, Jivad Rallam, and Agletsch. And that meant that, just possibly, some of those species could be pried away from their alliance.
For his part, Koenig was not completely convinced that there were such beings as Sh’daar. The Turusch and the Agletsch certainly thought there were, but no member of either species had ever admitted to actually seeing one. I
n Koenig’s opinion, it seemed likely that the term “Sh’daar” referred to an idea rather than a physical group of beings. Maybe “Sh’daar” was a word for “union” or “alliance” that had taken on a life of its own uncounted generations ago.
But then again, humans had only just begun venturing out into the interstellar sea. First Contact with the Agletsch had occurred less than a century ago. The Agletsch claimed to have been starfaring for millennia—even they didn’t seem to be sure just how long.
It might be, though, that the America CBG had discovered the first small crack in the monolithic façade of whatever the Sh’daar Empire actually might be.
And now was the time to exploit that.
“Admiral Koenig?” Lieutenant Ramirez said. “The Sleipnir reports she’s ready for boost.”
Koenig nodded. “Very well. Tell her Godspeed.”
On one of the CIC bulkhead display screens, a black, egg-shaped ship turned slowly, orange sun-glint sliding across its curved and mirrored surface. The ships of the CBG carried a number of HAMP–20 Sleipnir-class packets, the only way the fleet would be able to stay in even tenuous contact with Earth. They were piloted by AIs copied from America’s CIC artificial intelligence; they could carry human pilots, of course, but Koenig was concerned about what might happen to them when they reported to Fleet HQ. They couldn’t toss an AI into the brig.
“You’re being paranoid again, dear,” the voice of Karyn Mendelson whispered in his mind. “If they throw anyone in the brig, it will be you.”
“True,” he thought back. “But if they can’t get me for a court-martial, they might take it out on whoever is handy. I’m not going to risk someone else’s career.”
“Admiral Carruthers will cover you.”
“Until he gets fired. Or quits.”
Koenig had examined the distress message from Osiris for long hours. By now, three weeks after the news of the enemy capture of 70 Ophiuchi II reached Sol, the Confederation Senate must be frantic, expecting another enemy attack on Sol at any moment. He’d half expected to find a Sleipnir here at Arcturus waiting for him, with orders for him to return with his fleet immediately to protect Earth. He suspected Admiral Carruthers’ hand in that. Carruthers knew how important Crown Arrow was . . . and he pulled a lot of mass with the Senate and with Regis DuPont. Koenig hadn’t disobeyed orders yet, since he hadn’t yet received orders to return the CBG to Sol.
