Neither threat materialized. Human strategists were perplexed. The xenologists who had studied the Pitar were not.
Levi was one of those who was not. Others like him had been assigned to the armada, one to a ship so that in the event of catastrophe all the members of his group and the valuable knowledge they represented could not be lost in a single blow. If not the fleetest of mind or the most experienced member of the team that had studied the Pitar since first contact, he was acknowledged the senior member of the group. His opinion was solicited and respected. He found himself on the Wellington, seconded to the general staff.
It was subsequent to a meeting where the plan of first attack was being finalized that he found himself, thoroughly preoccupied with the critical matters at hand, strolling aimlessly through the great ship. As big as anything mobile that mankind had yet put in space, the Wellington was an impressive achievement. Four rings of armaments located in evenly spaced weapons blisters girdled the main body of the dreadnought. The KK-drive generating fan that spread out before it and pulled it through space-plus was the size of a small town. Between fan, hydrogen spark plug, and the main body of the ship were five defensive-screen generators. No more powerful or fearsome ship cruised the cosmos. It was a supreme example of contemporary human technology, an other-than-light vessel representing a confluence of all that human civilization had thus far accomplished.
That it was designed expressly to blow things up placed it squarely in the mainstream of human technological achievement.
Meyer Levi was a civilian attached to a military expedition. He was an old man who ought to have been reclining in a soft chair in a library, fronted by a tridee screen and surrounded by real books, a hot drink steaming on a nearby table, and a rumpled dog lying at his feet. Instead he found himself inconceivably far from home and anything akin to such imaginary comforts.
Despite the absence on the system’s outer fringes of any armed confrontation, no one believed that the Pitar were simply going to allow the invading humans to put punishing landing parties down on the surface of the Twin Worlds unopposed. The timing and manner of their resistance was yet to be determined. But one by one, the warships of Earth and its colonies had emerged from space-plus into Pitarian space, uncontested and unchallenged. Now fully assembled in normal space, the armada was ready to take the next step of moving toward the system’s sun and positioning itself around the Twin Worlds.
Nor had the Pitar sent ships to attack Earth itself or any of its more lightly defended colonies. There had been no reaction at all from the tall, elegant humanoids. Their representatives on Earth and elsewhere had died fighting, refusing to suffer imprisonment. All remaining Pitar, the entire population, was on their two homeworlds, presumably cognizant of and awaiting the arrival of a vast assemblage of ships crewed by tens of thousands of angry, revenge-minded humans.
What were they overlooking? Levi found himself wondering. Surely the Pitar were going to resist, were not going to commit racial suicide. But that was essentially what their isolated representatives on Earth had done. Did the entire species have a death wish that humankind had been put in the position of inadvertently satisfying?
The armada was in motion, a great swath of ships and science, when the answer came to him. Rushing as fast as his aged legs would carry him, he hurried toward the bridge. In the vastness of the great ship he lost his way several times, despite the instructions available to him in each lift.
When he finally succeeded in finding his way to the central, shielded core of the Wellington, he had to identify himself several times before he could gain access to Fouad. She was seated in the captain’s command chair, in charge of the ship but not the strategy it would execute. That was the province of the group of general officers seated off to one side, facing one another across a wide, oval table from which projected upward a perfect three-dimensional portrait of the Pitarian system. A cloud of glowing pinpoints was moving toward the sun at its center, each pinpoint a ship. Levi was put in mind of midges attacking a dog.
“Hello, Mr. Levi.” Her musician’s hands rested on controls; her trained soprano voice commanded more destructive power than humankind had ignorantly unleashed upon itself since the beginning of its struggling civilization. “Feeling well?”
“Tired,” he told her. “Tired, and worried.”
“We’re all worried,” she replied. Before her hovered a tridimensional image similar to the one being closely scrutinized by the general staff, only somewhat reduced in scale. “Everyone is waiting for something to happen.”
“What will you do if the Pitar do not respond?” Fascinated as always by technology he did not understand, Levi stared at the perfect, hovering representation of the space in which the ship was moving.
“Place ourselves in orbit around the first of the Twin Worlds. Deliver the ultimatum drawn up by the world council.” She shrugged without smiling. “React to their reaction. If they continue to do nothing, the first landing parties will go down. These will be backed by heavy armor and orbital firepower. Once our forces have acquired a beachhead on the surface the choices remaining to the Pitar will be considerably reduced. Basically, they’ll have to decide whether to opt for capitulation or seppuku. After securing the outer of the Twin Worlds, the armada will move on to the second and hopefully repeat the process.”
Levi nodded. “What happens if they do submit without a fight?”
Fouad looked at him closely. “Is that what you think is going to happen?”
“No, but at this point the possibility cannot be entirely discounted.”
She turned away from him, back to the glowing, in-depth representation. “That’s not my department. I’ll do what the general staff tells me to do. They in turn have their orders from the world council. All I know is that there’s a predetermined sequence of actions whose degree of reaction is calibrated according to how the Pitar respond.” Her jawline firmed. “To one extent or another, they are to be punished for what they did on Treetrunk.”
“You asked me what I thought was going to happen.” Levi watched her expectantly.
The captain’s interest was piqued. “You have an idea?”
“I think so. You know, among the original Twelve Tribes the Levites were the scholars. I do not feel like I belong here, on a warship, preparing to engage in mass destruction.”
“Your unhappiness is noted,” she replied curtly. “Tell me what you think.”
“I’ve studied the Pitar ever since they first arrived on Earth aboard the Chagos.”
“I know that.” Her tone was impatient. “Get to the point, old man. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s an invasion in progress.”
“Sorry. There are a number of ways I could put it scientifically, but I see no need to couch an opinion in complex systematic jargon. Suffice to say that the Pitar are homebodies.”
“They don’t colonize. They told us that from the first.” Fouad tried to divide her attention between the clustered general staff, the view tridee before her and its accompanying heads-up displays, and the lugubrious sage standing next to her seat. “It was one of the reasons their complicity in the massacre was so hard for so many to accept.”
“They’re not just homebodies. They’re fanatical about the Twin Worlds. Except for occasional excursions to places like Earth and Hivehom, and deviate adventures such as Treetrunk, they do not leave their home system. Not only are they not colonizers, they are not big on straightforward exploration. They simply do not like to leave home.”
“Which means what? You do have a point, don’t you?”
“I think so. What I am trying to say is that all the energy, and effort, and advanced technological development we have put into spreading ourselves outward, they have focused inward.”
She frowned and idly adjusted the neural jack above her left ear that allowed her direct communication with the rest of the armada, her own staff, and the Wellington’s intelligence center. “So you’re saying that…?”
A
little anxious himself now, Levi interrupted her in order to state the thought. “Everything we have put into offense, they may have concentrated on defense.”
It was not long thereafter that the Wellington was rocked by explosion and near catastrophe, and the armada found itself fully and desperately engaged.
Extending in their respective orbits outward from Pitar’s star were three worlds of various mien, none suitable for permanent habitation. Then the closely aligned planets numbered four and five, the Twin Worlds of the Pitarian Dominion. Between the fifth planet and the sixth, which happened also to be the first of four gas giants, was not one but two asteroid belts. While one lay in the normal plane of the ecliptic, the second occupied an orbit almost perpendicular to the first. Among this mass of planetary debris were a good many planetoidal objects of considerable size.
Every one of which had been transformed by the Pitar into an armed and shielded attack-and-support station.
In those first lunatic moments frantic commands ricocheted between ships at the speed of light. Humans and their machines slipped instantly into battle mode, each functioning efficiently and effectively. In this it was difficult to say who had the greater advantage. Machines offered speed and reliability, humans the ability to improvise in response to the unexpected. Organic and inorganic had spent several hundred years evolving in tandem to perfect the art of combat.
On the other hand, in spite of the unprecedented ferocity of the human assault and despite all their racial introspection and paranoia, the Pitar did not fold up and slink quietly back to their homeworlds.
Interstellar space is unimaginably vast. Even between planets there is room enough to lose a thousand ships. But the physics that can follow the tracks of tiny comets and minuscule asteroids are also adept at locating the operational drives designed to push vessels through space-plus. And a vessel that is propelled by anything less takes months to journey from one planetary body to another.
So while humans and Pitar swam in inky nothingness, their respective machines utilized far more sensitive instruments than eyes and ears to plot each other’s courses. Every time a ship of the armada attempted to pass within the orbits of the intersecting asteroid belts it found itself confronted by two or more Pitarian warcraft. Each human vessel was parsecs from home while support for the defending ships was, astronomically speaking, an eye blink away.
And the Pitar were capable. Avoiding confrontation wherever possible, they concentrated exclusively on countering any approach to the Twin Worlds. Initially, fear of active counterattack dominated much of the general staff’s strategic thinking. As the days became weeks and the weeks months it became clear that Pitarian tactics included such thrusts only insofar as they related to their defense. No attempt was made, even by a single suicidal ship, to threaten Earth or any of the colony worlds. Everything the Pitar had, every armed vessel they could throw into the conflict, remained close to home. Not one ventured beyond the Pitarian heliosphere.
The attacking humans tried everything. When a deliberate concentration of forces in one place was met by an energetic and equivalent Pitarian response, the battle planners went to the opposite extreme by suggesting an attempted englobement of one of the Twin Worlds. Reacting aggressively and quickly, the Pitar promptly dispersed their forces in precisely the most opportune fashion to counter the widespread assault. Probes of sectors presumed weak were beaten back by Pitarian forces of unexpected strength.
Missiles launched at the fifth world were detected, tracked, intercepted and destroyed. The residents of the Dominion suffered no casualties as a result of the invasion of their system. Requests to parley were met with strident animosity. It became clear that while humans had originally taken an immediate liking to the Pitar, the humanoid aliens felt very differently about their smaller mammalian counterparts. This did not take the form of outright loathing: The Pitar were too courtly for that. It was more on the order of a general contempt for the human species as a whole. The Pitar would not talk, would not discuss any sort of armistice with the lowly humans, until every last ship of the armada had left the sacred system of the Twin Worlds.
It didn’t matter, since they refused to apologize for what they had done on Treetrunk or discuss handing over those responsible. One Pitar spoke for all, and all Pitar spoke for one. Admitting no guilt, they therefore dispersed it among themselves and repeatedly commanded the disgusting, detestable invading beings to depart, as their very presence constituted a corruption in the sight of the hallowed Dominion.
Their attitude helped Levi and his colleagues to unravel the rationale behind many prior enigmas: why no embassy had been allowed to open on either of the Twin Worlds, for example, and why visits to the Dominion had been prohibited. It had nothing to do with racial shyness or reticence. The Pitar were not coy—they were overbearing. Nasty, uncouth humans could not be allowed to defile the purity of the homeworlds.
To what end their plundering force had removed the reproductive organs of thousands of human females from Treetrunk continued to remain a mystery. Here it was left to an admixture of Levi’s people and researching biologists to speculate on possible reasons. Many were put forth, some fantastic, not a few revolting. Among the facts that were assembled in the ongoing attempt to build an explanation was the realization that from the moment the Pitar had been contacted until the day when the armada had emerged from space-plus on the outskirts of the Dominion, no one had ever seen a Pitarian child.
Had some factor still unknown, psychological or biological, caused them to stop reproducing? In carrying out the atrocity on Treetrunk, were they seeking a means for ensuring the continuation of their species? Had that means been found and implemented, and if so, did humankind really want to be informed of the methodology? Many people on Earth and elsewhere had relatives who had perished in the extermination of intelligent life on Argus V. Levi and his colleagues were not so sure that they would be happier or otherwise better off to learn precisely what had happened to some of their deceased relations.
Certainly the Pitar did nothing to enlighten their attackers. Even tentative requests for explanations were dismissed out of hand. They would not talk, coldly refusing all attempts at communication with what they could now openly admit to regarding as an inferior life-form. Levi and the rest of the scientists and researchers who accompanied the armada grew increasingly frustrated. The uniformed masses who crewed the ships labored under no such mental strain. Some of them, too, had lost friends or kin on Treetrunk. Their interests were much more focused: They did not need to understand; all they wanted to do was kill Pitar.
Five months into the attack the ships of the armada and their frustrated personnel began to be rotated. New ships arrived from Earth and the colonies crewed by eager, fresh enlistees. They opposed an enemy whose soldiers faced no long journeys through space-plus, who could find ease and relaxation within a day’s flight of their duty station. In battle they found themselves confronting concentrations of ships that could be quickly and easily repaired and restocked. It was the classic battlefield situation of an overextended attacker trying to break down the defenses of a determined and well-entrenched enemy, translocated to an interstellar environment.
Eight months passed without any change in the line of battle. The Pitar would not permit a single human vessel of any size to cross beyond the orbits of the intersecting asteroid belts. The attacking humans would not give up. Determination and not skill or strategy became the defining factor on both sides.
While ships might stand still, weapons research did not. For every new means of attack the humans refined and threw into combat, the Pitar developed a counter. High-energy beams were met with high-energy deflectors. Subatomic particle guns designed to disrupt communications on board opposing vessels were intercepted and shunted harmlessly into space-plus by low-power versions of deep-space drives. Larger, faster missiles were met with small interceptors that were faster and more agile still. Space was filled with the scattering of shattered matter
from fusion weapons that never reached their intended targets.
Now and then a ship engaged in skirmishing would take a hit, suffering damage or on rare occasions, implosion. At such moments hundreds, even thousands of lives would be snuffed out of existence, vanishing into the icy limbo of the void. Each such loss made the Pitar more intractable and the humans more unforgiving.
Finally admitting after ten months of failed attack that they were unable to break through the defenses of the Dominion, the general staff debated how best to proceed. Breaking off the offensive was unthinkable: Now spread across a number of worlds, humankind would not hear of it. Ending the confrontation would imply that the Pitar had won, that they had consummated their barbarism without suffering any penalty. Such an abomination could not be tolerated.
It was remarked that while no human warship had been able to reach either of the Pitar homeworlds, neither had any of the aliens’ craft been able to travel a sufficiently safe distance from those twin planets to safely engage its full drive and make the jump to space-plus. Trapped in the glare of human vigilance, the Pitar were effectively confined to their homeworlds. Other species, however, were not.
On the face of it, the notion of a blockade in space seemed unworkable. Even the comparatively tiny distances between planets allowed ample room for a ship to enter into or emerge from space-plus. Once back in normal space, however, any and every such vessel was vulnerable.
The word was passed, though not without trepidation. How would neutral intelligences such as the Quillp react to being banned from an entire system with which they had no quarrel? More importantly, how would the combative and powerful AAnn react to a unilateral attempt to restrict their access to a people with whom they enjoyed amicable if not affectionate relations?
Before such a tactic could be tried, it was the turn of the diplomats to go on the offensive. The Quillp were puzzled. But while the ornithorps were expansionists, colonizing empty worlds in the manner of humankind, they were by nature inherently unaggressive. As might have been expected, the Unop-Patha wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the ongoing conflict, preferring to stay as far away from both the arrogant Pitar and the demonstrably demented humans as possible. Several minor species, each confined to a single inhabitable world, were not important enough to enter into the equation.
Dirge Page 27
