The Phoenix War

by Richard L. Sanders

  “Because if he does, then the Enclave will give the weapons to the Rotham. And they will be unstoppable,” said Calvin.

  Hopefully not unstoppable, thought Summers. The roughly one-hundred worlds of the Empire orbited over fifty stars, and, by all counts, there were only fifteen isotome weapons still in existence. So mathematically they couldn’t be used to wipe-out humanity. But, for all intents and purposes, the slaughter would be so extreme that Summers felt no need to correct Calvin on this point. They both agreed that the weapons had to be found and destroyed, and failure was not even a remotely considerable option.

  “What about the prisoners, what have you done with them?” asked Calvin.

  “They’re in the brig. Mister Pellew and I are satisfied that we’ve gotten all of the useful information out of them that we can.”

  Calvin nodded. For a moment he looked like he was going to demand to interview them himself. But he didn’t. Instead he asked, “what are your plans for them now?”

  “I don’t have any,” said Summers. “They are of no use to me but I also don’t think it would be just to… dispose of them in the manner Pellew suggests. They are entitled to some sort of due process of law, no matter how backwards and broken our government seems to currently be. And I’m not about to let them go. I certainly don’t trust them running free.”

  “Yes, you can’t let them go free,” said Calvin. “And I don’t think you should dispose of them.” He looked uncomfortable at the very thought. Summers was glad that Calvin didn’t share Pellew’s ruthless lack of empathy. That was one thing that made Calvin different from Raidan, one reason why she could trust him a far cry better than she could trust her former CO.

  “What do you think I should do with them?” asked Summers.

  “I say we hand them over to the queen. She can have them questioned and see to it they get some degree of just treatment. We transfer them to the officials on Aleator and I’ll personally see to it that they are sent to the queen’s fleet.”

  Summers knew that the word officials was a stretch for describing the ruling party of Aleator, which was apparently a gangster family. She also knew that Calvin had chosen that word precisely for her benefit, to ease her discomfort with the whole idea. And indeed she was uncomfortable with the notion, but she was even less comfortable keeping the prisoners on the ship. And she reminded herself that Calvin was in command here, so she was right to defer to his judgment regarding the matter.

  “Very well,” agreed Summers. “I put them in your hands.”

  “Yes, I think that’s best. Now I have other things to take care of but, before I go, I just want to say…” he looked at her, momentarily struggling to make the words come out. “You’re doing a good job, Summers. Really you are. Keep up the good work.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

  He nodded. “Good luck.” Then he turned and left. Clearly focused on whatever else he needed to do to prepare for his new mission.

  “Good luck to you too, Calvin,” whispered Summers after the door had closed. “Stay safe out there.”

  Chapter 16

  Alex had bided his time in silence. Ever since he’d dealt with the loose end, and arranged for Patrick O’Connor’s unfortunate demise due to an apparent carbon monoxide leak, Alex had lain low. And made extra certain that no unnecessary attention had been drawn to himself. Like he’d hoped, Patrick’s death had been ruled an accident, the result of a systems failure, and since that time the humans had seemed almost to forget about him. Their precious little stealth ship raced across the galaxy, always trying to be somewhere else, hunting after those isotome weapons, while the commanding officer had gone away to play politics at the human capital.

  Alex had enjoyed Calvin’s absence. The female human who’d replaced Calvin as commander seemed not to know what to do with Alex, and so she’d left him alone, to do as he liked, provided he remained out of sight and away from the ship’s critical systems. That suited him just fine. He had no desire to interfere with the Nighthawk’s effort, indeed he wished these humans the very best with their mission. So long as they kept their word and followed-through with their plan to destroy the isotome weapons. Getting rid of such a threat would make the galaxy much safer. And, even though he felt a bit naïve because of it, Alex believed them. That destroying the weapons was their true intention. Doing so would help prevent a costly, bloody war between the humans and the Rotham, and would be a blow against the vile Rahajiim that had infiltrated the Senate and seemed to be poisoning the Republic a little more each day.

  We should leave the humans and the Polarians alone. Mind our own affairs, he thought. We do not intervene. They do not intervene. That is the natural order. When the natural order is broken, when we defy it, then people die. Rotham die. Humans die. And Polarians die. By the millions. Perhaps even the billions. The survivors are thrown into grief and poverty and must live in the ashes of the broken worlds that never should have suffered. It sets society backwards and serves no purpose except to enrich a few at the dear price of the many, and the whole. It had always been the mission of the Advent to safeguard the Republic, and the best way to do that, Alex had always believed, was to set aside the spilt blood of the past century and focus on building the future. If you want to fight a war with humanity, let it be through superior enterprise of science and social development, through explosively expansive industry; let us harvest the galaxy’s endless treasures and sweetest fruits and outgrow and out-build our rival species.

  Alex had always been a non-interventionist. And, not so long ago, it had been true—he was sure—that most of the Rotham government had belonged to the non-interventionists. To this day, Alex persisted in his belief that most of the Rotham people themselves were non-interventionists at heart. They didn’t want war and imperialist conquest. They didn’t hunger for victories on the battlefield, like the savage Polarians, or thirst endlessly for additional power, like the humans. The Rotham merely wished to be left alone!

  True, at various times in their history, a minority of hawkish Rotham had led and tricked the others into engaging in war with the other major species, but for the most part those were the exceptions and not the rule. Alex had to believe that. Just as he had to believe right now, as the human Empire seemed to fracture more by the day in a downward spiral of political and social chaos, that his beloved Rotham people weren’t prepping their fleets, eagerly smelling the death in the air.

  If we attack, it promises to be much worse than even the violence of the Great War, he thought. And if the isotome weapons are used, it will spark a war steeped so heavily in terror and desperation that its inevitable end will be the cessation of all human or Rotham life. And who knows what role the Polarians will play in all of this. Perhaps they’ll be the last sapient, space-travelling beings left standing over the dust and ashes of pointless slaughter and extinction, and what a sad future that would be for advanced life. If the fittest that had survived was also the least intelligent and most superstitious.

  The thoughts of slaughter and extinction on that scale reminded him of an artifact of Polarian culture. The deeply religious, disturbingly mysterious, blue-skinned, violence-thirsty, warrior aliens had a prophecy called The Final War. It was thousands of years old, and had been told and retold by the various mystics and clerics in the evolving Polarian religion since long before any of them had ever met or heard of the humans or the Rotham. But it more-or-less promised the Polarians that they would one-day inhabit the Realm of the Gods, the very heavens above, and that they were destined to plunder the stars themselves. That there were beasts living there, and that the Polarians would subjugate and destroy them, in one final, glorious war, and then rule the heavens, which was their birthright to inherit—promised to them by the gods.

  The Polarians no longer believed in gods. That belief had faded away many years ago and the gods had been replaced by the Essences. Whatever those were. But somehow the prophecy of The Final War had survived, and it remained a tender Polaria
n belief that they’d been foreordained, called even, to inhabit and plunder the stars, and slay and subjugate the ‘beasts’ that dwelled there.

  When the prophecy had first been told—no doubt originating in some distant bronze-age—it had been harmless enough, Alex supposed. But now that the Polarians had mastered space-travel and developed weapons able to wage interstellar war, and had met other advanced life-forms, it was an extremely dangerous belief. There were Polarian children, billions of them, who were being brought up, even now, to believe that the ‘beasts of the stars’ who must be subjugated, tamed, and otherwise destroyed, were the humans and the Rotham. And, the way things seemed to be going, with political turmoil in the Empire and the cunning Rahajiim now manipulating the Rotham Senate, the stage was getting eerily set for just such a Final War. And if there was one thing Alex hated more than superstitious prophecy, it was self-fulfilling prophecy. Which made it all the more imperative that the isotome weapons were entirely purged from existence and the Rahajiim menace once and for all contained.

  Ancient artifacts found throughout the galaxy, some dating back millions of years, gave support to the idea that most intelligent species tended to be their own worst enemies. It seemed that, once a species had become sufficiently advanced to send and receive radio waves, thereby allowing them to potentially communicate with other civilizations, it was only a short matter of time before that species also developed the means to wipe itself out through weapons of mass destruction, careless depletion of resources, abuse of habitat, and so on. These civilizations would rise and fall, marshaling an understanding of the sciences for meager hundreds or thousands of years—hardly enough to register even a blip on the great galactic timeline, more like flashes in the pan. And thus, it was widely believed that nearly all of the advanced life that had ever evolved in the galaxy had risen and collapsed without ever knowing conclusively that other intelligent life existed elsewhere.

  Alex had often wondered if his people, the Rotham, along with the Polarians and the humans, were the great exception to this general principle. Or if they were as doomed as the countless others who’d gone on before, and their doom was merely playing out more slowly. A delayed reaction.

  The Rotham, and indeed even the humans, seemed to have definitively left behind most of their primitive, dangerous superstitions. Both had been intensely religious in developmental stages but, as their cultures had matured, both had cast aside their irrational fears and curious needs for certainty in favor of scientific methodology. They seemed to have accepted the necessary link between natural cause and natural effect that governed the natural universe, and the principle that nothing existed beyond the natural universe. That there was no supernatural. Nor a subnatural. Only a natural. But, for whatever reason, the Polarians had developed differently. They persisted in their ritualistic, mystical, delusionary ways. And if the Polarians, whose evolutionary history was storied with ferocious predators, dragged the rest of the galaxy into some final, ultimate conflict, because they did not understand how very tenuous and fragile a species’ grasp on life was, it seemed entirely too possible to Alex that imminent extinction was in the cards for all three major species.

  I consider myself lucky, at the very least, he thought, to have been able to witness even the tiniest glimpse of it. By all measures of probability, I should never have been. And yet, here I am. Such thinking helped soothe his nerves when he allowed his thoughts to run headlong into the sheer inevitability and futility of his existence, and that of his species.

  He knew that, in the end, the ultimate destiny of the universe was for it to expand so widely and distantly that no life could exist anywhere. It would be too cold. And then every sweat-drenched effort, every triumph of art, every advancement of culture, every invention of industry, every stroke of genius, every honeyed achievement, every bitter conquest and desperate struggle, indeed everything that ever had been and ever was would be rendered completely, entirely, and absolutely pointless. And it would make no difference whatsoever that anyone, or anything, had ever existed.

  Perhaps that is why the Polarians cling to their primitive beliefs and rituals…

  Still, despite what comforts religion and tradition offered, Alex wanted nothing to do with them. He would take the truth, however bitter-tasting, however beautifully tragic, any day over the pleasant numbness of a comforting but entirely empty lie. To do otherwise would be irrational, it would mean voluntarily choosing delusion over reality. And, though Alex was no philosopher, he could imagine no logical rationale to persuade him that delusion carried any significant value.

  The sound of the door’s chime interrupted his thoughts. He immediately spun the chair away from the computer terminal, where he’d been reading the latest news releases and network speculation regarding the political crisis captivating the Empire, and stared at the door.

  Someone is calling on me? He thought, wondering whether this was desirable or not. Recently he’d enjoyed feeling invisible, having slipped below the humans’ radar of attention and suspicious, being left alone with his private thoughts. But he was also becoming tired of feeling cooped-up and helpless. Though they’d treated him kindly, and even given him his own quarters, the humans thought of him as their prisoner, Alex knew. And, for all intents and purposes, he was. At least for now…

  He waited, choosing to do nothing. Wanting to see how the humans would react if he didn’t answer the door. He was feeling more curious than cautious, but he was also aware that some of the humans were very uncomfortable with having a Rotham on the ship, and this might be a ruse by some of them to lure him from the safety of his quarters and exact some sort of misinformed and misdirected human justice upon him.

  The chime range again. Alex head toward the door to check the peephole camera.

  The chime rang a third time. To his surprise, it was none other than the increasingly infamous Calvin Cross. The politically disgraced, ex-Executor of the Empire who, before all the political theatrics, had been the commanding officer of the Nighthawk. And had been the one to order Alex’s release from the holding cell on the Rahajiim ship and, in so doing, had technically saved his life. Not that it meant Alex owed him anything.

  Strange and stranger, thought Alex, wondering what the human intelligence commander wanted with him now. And why he was back. But before he could open the door, the door opened on its own. No doubt reacting to a command override.

  “Not wanting any visitors?” asked Calvin as he looked down at Alex. Like most Rotham, Alex was shorter than the average human and it helped nothing that Calvin was taller than average for his species, giving him an advantage of several inches over Alex. Not that it mattered, the Rotham had gotten where they were through superior cunning. IQ trumped size any day. If it didn’t, the vast leviathan-whales of Alpha Sirius Three would be the uncontested champions of the galaxy, a mature adult could grow a thousand meters long and still only just managed to outthink a walnut.

  “I don’t mind visitors,” said Alex, “though I don’t seek them out.” He waved for Calvin to enter. The human did, allowing the door to close behind him.

  Alex was intensely curious what brought Calvin to him, but he also knew the human would reveal that on his own, without any need for prying, and Alex thought it best not to show too much interest. Hiding his thoughts and feelings around the humans, as much as possible, had served him well so far. “I see that you’ve returned from the Imperial capital,” said Alex. “Pity that didn’t work out for you quite as you’d hoped.”

  Calvin nodded. “Yeah I am sorry about that. But that’s not why I’m here.”

  Alex gave Calvin a look as if to say, by all means please enlighten me. But he pursed his lips and said nothing. Allowing the human to take the conversational lead. It’s better for him to show me his cards without me showing which of them I’m interested in, thought Alex.

  “I’ll get right to the point,” said Calvin. “With civil war about to erupt in the Empire, and the Republic laying claim to Renora
, an Imperial planet, we can’t just wait around. We have to act.”

  “We?” asked Alex curiously. As he spoke, he took a seat and looked up at Calvin comfortably, almost smugly. “Human politics and human civil war sound like an Imperial problem to me, as a citizen of the Rotham Republic, why should I get involved?”

  “An Imperial civil war would affect the entire galaxy and you know it,” said Calvin, looking momentarily frustrated.

  Of course, this assertion was true, Alex was perfectly aware of the spillover effects intra-human conflict would have, and indeed was already having, but he wanted to hear it from Calvin’s mouth. Anything he could safely do to test the human helped Alex to understand him better. And during his stay on the Nighthawk, he felt he’d gotten to know the young human rather well. Even when Calvin hadn’t been there.

  “If the Empire splits into factions and begins to disintegrate, there will be nothing to stop Rotham military ambition,” continued Calvin. “You and I both know there is pressure in the Rotham Senate for the Republic to annex several Imperial worlds in The Corridor. Hell, the Rotham government has already publicly recognized their claim on Renora, like I said. They make no secret about it.”