The General watched an electronic painting shift. The stylized image of a podship faded, giving way to a violent depiction of a supernova.
He’d better listen to me.
Having been trained in war college to think in terms of high-stakes games, General Sajak was considering the potential responses he might receive. If Doge Lorenzo chose to disregard the urgent entreaty, a new and drastic course of action would be undertaken.
* * * * *
As the Zultan Abal Meshdi rode a sedan chair across Alliq Plaza, the center of his fabulous city, he was surprised by the sudden coolness of the weather. In the last half hour the temperature had dropped precipitously. Most unusual for this time of year.
On impulse, he ordered the runners to set his chair down near a fountain, and then disembarked onto the flagstones of the plaza. Gazing up at the darkening sky, he didn’t think he had ever seen clouds quite like those before, with striations of deep purple against gray that were like arteries about to burst open and rain blood on the planet.
* * * * *
The Mutati homeworld was guarded by a fleet of warships that conducted regular patrols over that galactic sector. On a cosmic scale, this did not comprise much area, but it was substantial in planetary terms. The mounting of such a comprehensive guard force required the allocation of a tremendous amount of personnel and hardware.
The patrol ships, while light, fast, and armed with heliomagnetic missiles, were not capable of traveling between star systems. To cross deep space, no practical alternative to podships existed. The distances were too great, making the costs involved with traveling by vacuum rocket or other conventional means prohibitive, because of the incredible fuel requirements that would be involved.
Prohibitive for most galactic races, that is. The Merchant Prince Alliance had more money and other resources than anyone else. It was from this seemingly bottomless treasury that General Mah Sajak drew funds to build the Grand Fleet and send it across light years of distance. It was all done with the permission of the Doge and the Council of Forty.
Sajak and his military brain trust knew about the Mutati patrols, and had taken steps to counteract them. For this assault force, timing was everything. At precisely the right moment, the admiral in charge of the fleet would implement the massive destruction plan. It would be horrible, and beautiful at the same moment.
In his mind’s eye, the General envisioned the assault force waiting under the cover of an asteroid belt. This part of his imagination was fairly accurate, but beyond that the differences were significant.
* * * * *
When the Mutati patrol moved along to the other side of Paradij, the merchant prince warships made their long-anticipated move. Piercing the upper atmosphere of the Mutati homeworld, the Grand Fleet generated swirls of ionized hydrols around it which looked like large gray-and-white storm clouds, concealing the attackers from the inhabitants of the planet below. Even the sophisticated electronics of the Mutatis could not detect them.
Theoretically.
* * * * *
In the sedan chair far below the fleet, a communication transceiver crackled, and the Zultan heard Mutati battle language, chattering frantically. Paradij was under attack! The Humans had generated artificial storm clouds to conceal their forces.
Abal Meshdi stared upward, unmoving, and thought of all the defensive preparations that had been made by the Mutati High Command. They had not known exactly when the attack would occur, but had received a number of clues that it was coming, and—with the approval of the Zultan himself—had made certain clever arrangements.
The Mutati war program, after so many losses to Human forces, was two-pronged. The Zultan’s doomsday weapon was undergoing final testing, and barring any unforeseen problems it would soon be launched against enemy planets, annihilating them to the last one.
He also had a shock in store for anyone daring to attack his worlds, as the commander of the enemy fleet was about to discover.
He smiled nervously, and prayed to God-On-High for the defense of sacred Paradij. He hoped that his people had taken adequate steps, because in war, anything could happen.
High in the atmosphere, the clouds roiled.
When Meshdi was a young emir in training for future responsibilities, his grandfather had said to him, “Preparation is the child of necessity.” At the time, the boy had not understood the significance of the adage, but later it had become abundantly clear to him.
Thousands of years of hatred and armed conflict against Humans had led to this moment, a stepping stone in what he hoped would ultimately be Mutati dominion. Meshdi felt his pulse accelerate. Since the earliest moments of his recollection he had loathed Humans. Under his leadership, no expense had been spared and important programs had been initiated. Galactic espionage, for one.
Mutatis, by virtue of their ability to shapeshift, could work as spies on Human worlds more easily than the enemy could on Mutati planets … provided that Mutatis controlled their strongly allergic reactions in the presence of their arch enemies. Implanted allergy protectors usually worked, but when they failed—as they did occasionally—the consequences could be disastrous. The best solution lay in a small percentage of Mutatis who for unknown reasons did not show any Human aversion—so it was from this group that spies were recruited. There had been a handful of incidents in which even they sometimes developed reactions, but the Zultan played the odds, and thus far his espionage operations had not been compromised.
Humans knew that these enemy incursions were occurring, and had their own safeguards, including regular physical examinations for persons in sensitive positions. Under even a cursory medical examination, a Mutati could be revealed. It just took a needle prick to reveal the color of the blood. But Humans were susceptible to bribes and other deceptions, and Mutati spies continued to ply their artful trade. Secrets were learned, bits and pieces of information that made their way back to Paradij and the Zultan.
In this manner the Mutatis learned—more than a decade ago—that a massive Human fleet was going to be sent against them, but at an unknown time. For years, the Mutatis waited. And waited. They knew … or strongly suspected, based upon their knowledge of conventional cross-space transportation technology … that a Human fleet could not possibly travel as fast as the mysterious podships. The sentient pods had never cooperated with any military venture, and in fact had undermined a number of attempts by various races to exploit them for warlike purposes. As a consequence, the Mutatis knew that Humans would need to transport their fleet on their own, without the assistance of podships.
As the clues arrived via their spy network, the Mutati High Command held emergency meetings. They floated an idea that the Humans might move their military hardware and personnel in disguise, a little at a time, using podships. In this manner, they could set up a staging area closer to the core of the Mutati Kingdom, at a place where they could launch their attack more quickly. In an attempt to discover such a location, the Mutatis sent out continual scouting parties in comprehensive, fanning search patterns.
Nothing surfaced. This suggested the probability that the Humans were sending their force en masse from one of their own military bases, which meant time would be needed to make the journey … perhaps ten to fifteen years. It also suggested the possibility of obsolescence, since the hardware would be old by the time it arrived at its destination. Maybe the enemy was counting on the element of surprise.
At least we’re taking that away from them, the Zultan thought. But will it be enough?
* * * * *
From the bridge of his flagship, Admiral Pan Obidos surveyed the protective cloud layer beneath his fleet of ten mother ships that had traveled across space in a bundle of vacuum rockets and were now spread out in attack formation. Minutes ago, each mother ship had disgorged thousands of small fighter-bombers that looked like silver fish flying in the upper atmosphere.
As he watched, the mother ships fired electronic probes into the artificial clouds every
few seconds like lightning bolts, checking their thickness and integrity as a shield.
Going well so far, the Admiral thought. This renowned “Mutati-Killer,” hero of two big military victories against his arch enemies, stood behind his command chair, with his hands gripping the back. A small man with a jutting jaw, he had a large mole over his left eyebrow.
Moment by moment, inexorably, the masking clouds dropped lower and lower, concealing the advancing fleet like an immense shield.…
In order to make the clouds appear authentic, the attackers had initially generated them over a sparsely populated region of the Mutati homeworld, and had then moved them (as if blown by high atmospheric winds) in the direction the Admiral wanted to go, toward the capital city of Jadeen and the surrounding military installations.
A successful strike would be devastating to the Mutatis, cutting the rotten heart out of their entire kingdom.
Looking around the command bridge at the flagship officers who had endured the perils of this long voyage with him, he felt pride in their loyalty and dedication. None of the officers in the fleet had complained about their hardships, nor had the twenty-four thousand fighters under their command.
Jimu, a black, patched-together robot who was Captain of the sentient machines in the fleet, hurried up to Admiral Obidos, and saluted with a short metal arm. In his mechanical voice, the robot gave a concise report. Then, at a nod from his superior, he hurried off, to tend to his duties.
Despite prohibitions against it, a number of women under the Admiral’s command had conceived and given birth to children in space—twenty-eight in all—and they were subsequently raised in a community facility. The unauthorized pregnancies had irritated Obidos, but such problems had been minor in comparison with other problems faced by the task force.
The huge vessel jostled, and the Admiral held onto side bars.
“Just turbulence,” one of the officers reported.
Five years into the mission, most of the officers and crew came down with a serious space sickness, including Admiral Obidos. More than three hundred died before the fleet medics came up with a treatment, combining marrow and calcium injections.
After so many years of injections, however, there were side effects. Obidos and the other victims no longer had their own bones, as their entire skeletal structures—even the essential marrow—had dissipated and been replaced by artificial substances. The Admiral had been among those who had suffered the most physical pain—but each day he tried not to think about it.
As the assault force dropped lower and lower in the atmosphere, proceeding slowly and methodically behind the cloud cover, the Admiral felt cold, and shivered. Sliding a forefinger across a touch pad at his belt, he activated a warming mechanism. Within seconds, heat coursed through the artificial marrow cores and calcium deposits of his bones.
Nonetheless, he shivered again.
Obidos could not get warm, no matter how high he turned up the mechanism. There was no remedy for cold fear.
* * * * *
High over the Zultan’s head, the storm clouds began to break up, revealing what looked like thousands of silver needles glistening in the sun. Ships … and several much larger vessels behind them.
A merchant prince task force!
Abruptly, the flight pattern changed in the sky, and Abal Meshdi thought he detected disarray. He heard confirmation of this over the nearby communication transceiver, as it crackled in Mutati battle language. “We broke the electronic integrity of their shield, and they are attempting to regroup.”
Over the open line he heard percussive blasts, and saw distant flashes in the atmosphere. The storm cover had been anticipated, based upon intelligence information that the Mutatis had received.
In short order, the attack turned into an epic debacle, as the Mutatis shot down everything in the merchant prince fleet except for the flagship, which they captured along with the officers and crew. They even took the Admiral prisoner, saved from his intended suicide by a fast-acting Mutati medic.
* * * * *
As he prepared to visit the captured officers in their electronic cells, Abal Meshdi wondered why the merchant princes had undertaken such a risky mission. He was about to board a lift platform, on his way to interrogate and torture the military leaders, when an aide rushed up to him, breathing hard and perspiring.
“Sire, their Admiral is dead!” he reported. He went on to explain that Obidos had taken his own life in a second suicide attempt—after obtaining poison in an unknown way.
Moments later, Meshdi burst into the cell and examined the body himself. There was no sign of life. Off to one side, a dented black mechanical man watched.
“He’s the Captain of their machines,” the aide said, pointing. “Calls himself Jimu.”
An idea occurred to the Zultan, and he acted on it without delay. Within hours he sent the robot back to Timian One, carrying holos of the humiliating military defeat and of the Admiral’s body. Jimu traveled by podship.
But that was only for entertainment, to make Abal Meshdi’s prey suffer the most possible agony. Soon he would send them something even bigger, a storm of doomsday weapons.
Demolios.
Chapter Eighteen
There is a beginning point to everything, and an ending point, but it is not always possible to identify either one.
—Noah Watanabe, Reflections on my Life, Guardian Publications
At sunset a brown-and-black catus, one of the thick-furred persinnians that ran wild on the grounds of the Ecological Demonstration Project, stalked a bird. The feline remained low on the dry, yellowing grass, its front paws outstretched, and pulled itself toward a fat pazabird, moving forward only centimeters at a time without making a sound. The white-breasted bird dug around the roots of grass for worms, oblivious to danger.
Thinking he felt movement beneath his feet, Noah got down on all fours and placed an ear to the ground. He heard something, a distant rumbling noise, but could not determine the source. He wondered if it could be a nuisance that had been occurring on Canopa in recent years, groundtruck-sized digging machines that were left behind by mining companies. The “Diggers,” with artificial intelligence and the ability to sustain themselves, had been burrowing deep underground and occasionally surfacing like claymoles, tearing up large chunks of real estate and damaging buildings. So far, Noah had been fortunate, but it was an increasingly widespread problem. The Doge himself had ordered their extermination on a variety of merchant prince planets, which amounted to commando raids against the machines in their burrows—going after them like pests.
The rumbling noise subsided, and he felt nothing in the ground. Looking up, he saw the catus pounce, filling the air with feathers. It was an efficient act of predation, with the kill completed in a matter of seconds. Now the catus played with the dead bird, lying on the ground and batting it around like a kittus with a ball.
With the last rays of sunlight kissing his face, he was reminded of an incident from his childhood. No more than seven years old at the time, he had been out in a forest, walking along a path that led from the village to his home. Upon hearing a repetitive thumping sound, he’d noticed a red-crested woodbird pecking away at a rotten log beside the trail. Instinctively, Noah had not moved and was careful not to make a sound. The bird seemed unaware of his presence, and the curious boy stood silently, watching it extract worms from the holes it was making in the soft wood. Presently the bird flew off, into the high branches of a pine tree. Perching there, it fed worms from its beak to hungry chicks that poked their heads out of a hole in the tree trunk.
Afterward, Noah had gone to the rotten log and pulled some of the wood away, enabling him to see many worms writhing around in their moist habitat, trying to burrow deeper into the log to escape him. He had gathered some of the wriggling creatures, taking them home to put in a jar with air holes in the lid. That afternoon, however, his sister Francella stole the worms and chopped them into pieces, just to watch the little segments
keep moving. When he found out about this, Noah screamed, but it was too late.
The twins’ governess, Ilyana Tinnel, had separated them as they fought. A kindly woman, she showed Noah other worms in the rich soil of her own garden and explained how they enriched the dirt, adding nutrients to it. She told him something that intrigued him, that soil, worms, and birds were all connected and that they worked together, as other life forms did, to enhance the ecology of Canopa. In her world-view, soil was a living organism, part of the vital, breathing planet.
Though his father discounted the concept of complex environmental relationships, it was an astounding revelation to the boy, and proved to be the starting point for his life’s work. In his adulthood he extended his study to a number of planets … and the roles that Humans and other galactic races played on each of them. Noah learned about incredibly long food chains, all the predators and prey, and marvelous plants that sentient creatures could use for medicines, herbs, and food. For each planet, all of the parts fit together like the pieces of a complicated jigsaw puzzle.…
Now the catus, having grown tired of playing with the bird, devoured its prey, bones and all. It was an unpleasant sight for Noah to watch, but entirely necessary in the larger scheme of existence. He would not think of interfering.
His thoughts spun back again, to a time when he began to wonder how life forms survived in hostile environments, such as snow fleas on mountains, lichen on cliff faces, and desert succulents that stored water in their cellular structures. He had also been intrigued by chemical life forms thriving in the deepest ocean trenches where immense pressures would crush other creatures, and by alien races such as Tulyans, that did not need to breathe.
Noah had tried to put things together in new ways. He considered how seeds fell from trees and were carried by winds, so that saplings grew a few meters away, and even farther. It was a continual process of establishing new root systems, growing young plants, and then having seeds carried off again, to someplace new. When he put this information together with what he knew about comets and asteroids—heavenly bodies that carried living seeds around the galaxy in their cellular structures—he found his mind expanding, taking in more and more data. He envisioned fireballs entering atmospheres and spreading seeds … not unlike the seeds transported around a planet by its own winds.
The Timeweb Chronicles: Timeweb Trilogy Omnibus Page 11
