Dirge

by Alan Dean Foster

  Following the designs and delimitations of Couvinpasdar’s research group, a single stingship was fabricated. Out at the testing station beyond a moon of Hivehom’s largest gas giant, it was activated. It did not succumb to the peculiar distortions of space-plus, nor did it tear itself to pieces and kill its two pilots. Others were built, the inaugural design tightened and refined in the process.

  The first symbiotically cached concussive armed missile was built. True to the predictions of Couvinpasdar and his associates, when its absurdly tiny drive system was sent into deliberate overload, the shell promptly threw itself at a drone target vessel programmed to avoid and escape. The drone did not. When their drive fields intersected, both ship and shell vanished in an entirely satisfactory and supernally bright dissolution of energy-encumbered particles. It was a very gratifying demonstration.

  Couvinpasdar and his colleagues accepted the honors and commendations bestowed upon them by both thranx and human authorities with quiet grace—and in traditional thranx fashion, promptly returned to their work. Though they had earned and were entitled to a rest, they replied with an old thranx metaphor to the effect that “no burrow was ever finished.”

  Eight years after humankind had taken pleasure in its first contact with the imposing Pitar and three years following the destruction of the colony of Treetrunk, the commingled human-thranx armada once more threw its combined strength against the defenses surrounding the Twin Worlds of the Pitarian Dominion. But this time the probe by hundreds of capital warships was augmented by a prodigious swarm of tiny stingships each armed with a single self-propelled SCCAM shell.

  Caught in the annihilation sphere of hundreds of explosive devices, or swept by devastating beams of coherent energy, dozens of stingships and their pilots evanesced out of existence, many before they even had a chance to launch their weapons. Dozens more accomplished their runs and were destroyed before they could escape.

  But Pitarian warships found themselves riven and ruptured from the aftereffects of their own overloaded drives, while others switched off their fields and screens only to be annihilated by precision-targeted thermonuclear devices. On the opposite side of the sun from the Twin Worlds, the hitherto impenetrable defensive sphere protecting the Dominion began to implode under the unexpected new kind of assault. In the end it collapsed like a balloon. Once a single hole had been punctured in the curvature, the rest of the orb simply caved in.

  MacCunn was not there to exhort his troops. The field marshal had died six months before, a victim of his failed digestive system, when the outcome of the conflict was as much in doubt as it had been when the first assault had been launched against the Twin Worlds. His friend and colleague Admiral Hyargas Yirghiz was present at the final Pitarian collapse, however. Standing before the main battle tridee on the bridge of the damaged but still very battle-worthy Tamerlane, he watched in silent satisfaction as the surviving stingships returned to their mothercraft and the main body of the armada advanced to within orbital bombardment range of both worlds.

  After three years of struggle there was no wish among the attackers to annihilate the population. Different degrees of punishment to be applied as circumstances dictated had been worked out by the world council of humankind and the Grand Council of the thranx. All depended on how the Pitar reacted to their defeat.

  They reacted as if they had not been defeated. From the surfaces of both planets, ground-based missiles fired from hardened launchers streaked upward toward the assembled invaders. A few did damage, but most were easily knocked down or brushed aside. One by one, their flight paths were tracked, traced, and the launching facilities destroyed. Small red flowers erupted on the surface of both the Twin Worlds, blossoms of nuclear death.

  And still the Pitar fought on.

  It was finally deemed necessary to land troops, an eventuality the senior officers had hoped to avoid. Unrelenting Pitarian hostility left them with no choice. The thranx participated in this exercise only as observers. Their alliance with humankind did not extend to providing support for ground action. Thranx enough had died crewing ships of the armada, as well as aboard the tiny, seemingly insignificant but ultimately lethal stingships that had at last altered the course of battle.

  To dispassionate observers the concluding consequences were inconceivable. The Pitar would not surrender. Every community was armed. Those who capitulated did so only as a convenience of deception, turning on and slaughtering their captors the instant the humans’ guard was down. Even Pitarian progeny knew how to pick up and fire a small weapon or rush a pod of human soldiers with explosives strapped to their bodies.

  Scientists wished to preserve at least a remnant of Pitarian civilization in hopes of being able to study and perhaps understand their rabid xenophobia. It proved impossible. Whenever cornered and weaponless, the Pitar always managed to find a way to kill themselves, if not their enemies. Remembering the atrocity of Treetrunk, individual human soldiers were not inclined to go out of their way to ensure the survival of any Pitar.

  Still, through the use of stun guns, soporific gas, and other nonlethal weapons, a small number were captured alive. They refused to be studied. Noncooperative and virulent to the last, they turned on their captors when possible, committed suicide when they could not, or retreated into a kind of voluntary madness until their minds and bodies finally expired of natural causes.

  In the end, three habitable but unpopulated worlds remained as a consequence of the conflict—one human, two Pitarian. They are not often visited.

  The research teams that followed the departure of the armada gleaned what clues they could from the ruins of Pitarian civilization. What they found was not so much that the Pitar had been incontrovertible xenophobes as they had been irredeemable narcissists. Unable to countenance the ongoing existence of any intelligent life-form but their own, they had deliberately set out to steal as much knowledge as they could from humankind before turning on Earth and its colonies. Hivehom and the thranx would have been next, or possibly the inoffensive and blandly expansionist Quillp. But the Pitar had a problem.

  Every other sentient species was capable of outbreeding them. Unlike humans or thranx, Pitarian females ovulated only once a year. It helped to explain why no children were present on any of the ships that visited Earth or its colony worlds, why none participated in any of the infrequent cultural exchange programs. The occasional Pitarian progeny was precious.

  The stolen reproductive organs of the several thousand human females on Treetrunk who had been surgically eviscerated were found—floating in carefully maintained tank batteries, rank upon rank of disembodied uteruses, ovaries, and fallopian tubes. The eggs of human females were removed, their DNA modified; they were then inseminated with Pitarian sperm and were replaced—returned to their natural cavities to follow the “normal” progression of plenteous human pregnancy. Once sufficiently matured, each embryo was then removed and implanted in a suitable Pitarian female for the sole purpose of giving birth.

  Surrogate mothership of Pitarian offspring by living human females, even if it had been proposed to and accepted by qualified women, was a thought no Pitar could countenance. So they attempted to thieve the organs and eggs they needed in hopes of enlarging the population of the Twin Worlds to the point where they could successfully challenge the more prolific species that infested an otherwise unpolluted galaxy. The complete destruction of Treetrunk had been carried out to mask their real intentions.

  How awful for a noble Pitar to have to live in a cosmos swarming with lesser humans and thranx, Quillp and AAnn, Unop-Patha and other debased species. But having confined themselves to their two perfect worlds, they could not begin to cleanse their portion of the galaxy until they had significantly increased their numerical strength. It was decided that a naïve, biologically similar humankind would unknowingly provide the means. And might have, had not a single sullen and solitary human succeeded in escaping the holocaust with proof of what had taken place.

  The armada
was disbanded, its constituent vessels returning to Earth or to their respective colony worlds. The vast majority of surviving stingships were decommissioned—but not all. Mindful of the expanding empire of the AAnn, who had watched the conflict with the Pitar with pitiless, impenitent interest, an active fleet and its buttressing reserve was maintained. The thranx returned to their own interests.

  Following an initial outpouring of human gratitude for the insectoids’ assistance in defeating the Pitar, there came a gradual return to normalcy, to the business of living lives and devoting time to more insular concerns. Colonies continued to expand, and potential colonies continued to develop. Worlds such as Wolophon III and Amropolus that technically fell within the human sphere of exploration but were too redolent of greenhouse effect for human comfort were conceded to the busy thranx, while humankind’s chitinous friends willingly turned over to the more cold-tolerant bipeds information on planets they found too frigid to conveniently accommodate their kind. Given an extensive technological effort, each species could colonize the other’s preferred worlds, of course, but the mutual trade-off in climatological comfort zones made infinitely more sense. Interstellar distances being what they were, there was no real perception of one species intruding on the space of another.

  The AAnn watched these developments unhappily. Unable to challenge the maturing human-thranx axis directly, they pondered less confrontational means of impeding the resolution of a deeper, stronger alliance. There were many ways of doing this, at which the insidiously artful AAnn were masters. Their advantage lay in the fact that a great many humans and thranx remained ultimately suspicious of one another, and of any expansion of intimate contact.

  With a little luck, and much shrewd manipulation of opportune circumstances, sagacious AAnn nobles and their skillful xenologists felt it might even be possible to bring both transient allies into open conflict with one another.

  The AAnn set to work.

  By Alan Dean Foster

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group:

  THE BLACK HOLE

  CACHALOT

  DARK STAR

  THE METROGNOME AND OTHER STORIES

  MIDWORLD

  NOR CRYSTAL TEARS

  SENTENCED TO PRISM

  SPLINTER OF THE MIND’S EYE

  STAR TREK® LOGS ONE–TEN

  VOYAGE TO THE CITY OF THE DEAD

  …WHO NEEDS ENEMIES?

  WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE…

  MAD AMOS

  THE HOWLING STONES

  PARALLELITIES

  IMPOSSIBLE PLACES

  DROWNING WORLD

  THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK

  LOST AND FOUND

  The Icerigger Trilogy:

  ICERIGGER

  MISSION TO MOULOKIN

  THE DELUGE DRIVERS

  The Adventures of Flinx of the Commonwealth:

  FOR LOVE OF MOTHER-NOT

  THE TAR-AIYM KRANG

  ORPHAN STAR

  THE END OF THE MATTER

  BLOODHYPE

  FLINX IN FLUX

  MID-FLINX

  REUNION

  FLINX’S FOLLY

  SLIDING SCALES

  The Damned:

  BOOK ONE: A CALL TO ARMS

  BOOK TWO: THE FALSE MIRROR

  BOOK THREE: THE SPOILS OF WAR

  The Founding of the Commonwealth:

  PHYLOGENESIS

  DIRGE

  DIUTURNITY’S DAWN

  Praise for Alan Dean Foster’s Founding of the Commonwealth

  PHYLOGENESIS

  Book One

  “Foster does a fine job with his misfit heroes and even with his minor characters (such as the reptilian Aann). He shows his usual mastery of narrative pacing and slips in a great deal of wry wit. The novel will be a treat for those who have followed Foster’s tales of the Humanx Commonwealth.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  DIRGE

  Book Two

  “Foster’s mining of the human-Thranx affinity continues to yield compelling stories.”

  —Booklist

  “Fast-paced action and likable human and alien protagonists.”

  —Library Journal

  This book contains an excerpt from Reunion by Alan Dean Foster, published by Del Rey® Books.

  Copyright © 2001 by Thranx, Inc.

  A Del Rey® Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 2000 by Thranx, Inc.

  Excerpt from Reunion by Alan Dean Foster copyright © 2001 by Thranx, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  www.delreybooks.com

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001116592

  eISBN: 978-0-345-49426-9

  v3.0