by Steve White
Chapter Eleven
Liberator floated in high Terranova orbit, the picture of lordly serenity—or so it seemed to DiFalco, viewing it from the safe remoteness of Kurganov Station. Any time now . . .
There! A series of flashes awoke against the blackness of space off to one side of the Raehaniv ship, without apparent cause. Squinting, DiFalco thought he could make out a certain wavering of the starlight behind the area where the lights were blossoming, as if something odd were being done to space there—as, indeed, it was.
He became aware of Aelanni stepping up beside him and gazing intently at the viewscreen. "Well," she breathed, "so far so good. Now for Phase Two." Very little of her Raehaniv accent remained.
DiFalco had barely nodded when a different sort of light show erupted off Liberator's other flank. Rippling flame like sheet lightning seemed to corruscate in space, the same distance from the ship's skin as the flashes had been. Then, abruptly, the fun was over.
Aelanni made inquiries of the station's main computer, then seemed to focus on a point in midair as she consulted her neural data display. Then she turned to DiFalco with the smile that still excited him after . . . how long? Nearly seven Earth-years since he had first set eyes on her while picking himself up from a deck equipped with the manmade gravity that had turned out to be only the first of many miracles.
"It's definite," she announced. "The deflectors performed almost up to theoretical predictions, against both railguns and particle accelerators. We can tell father and the others that they haven't been wasting their time after all."
It had started with the mysterious abandoned base that continued to haunt their thoughts from the darkness of the outer system. Varien hadn't been able to get those wide-open hangar spaces out of his mind—how could such a thing ever have been workable? Others had wondered as well, including Terrans who were too new to gravitics to be aware of all the things the Raehaniv knew were impossible. Their speculations had caused Varien to exceed even his usual capacity for condescension . . . and then to think even harder. He had brought the Terrans into contact with Raehaniv specialists, who had begun by ridiculing and ended by refining.
The end result was the series of generators aboard Liberator, which projected (to a very short range) a disc-shaped zone of force that deflected incoming objects with a force proportional to their own kinetic energy. Very fast-moving ones were generally incinerated by the heat of their own shedded energy. Lasers, made up of photons which lacked mass but possessed momentum and energy (the Raehaniv had confirmed the Terrans' current tendency to abandon the notion that they had "relativistic mass" though no "rest mass"; zero times infinity is still zero) were made to red-shift, becoming less destructive.
Varien believed the ancient builders had been able to fine-tune the effect to prevent the passage of air molecules while allowing large solid objects like vehicles and personnel to come and go as long as they did it slowly, and had used this capability to fashion the perfect airlock. This still eluded him—but even the admittedly crude applications that he had achieved held potential for fending off attacks that were only now being appreciated.
"Of course," Aelanni cautioned, "we have to bear in mind that this isn't a realistic test. The technicians aboard Liberator knew exactly when, and from what bearing, those attacks were coming, so they could put out their deflectors in advance."
"Yeah. It would be nice to be able to travel around inside a permanent bubble-shaped deflection field. But the effect doesn't work that way—and even if it did, the generators use too much power to just leave 'em switched on all the time. In actual combat, it'll be a guessing game. Still . . ."
Thoughtfully, they turned away from the screen and walked across the control center to the wide viewport. Kurganov Station had grown from the nucleus of one of Varien's factory ships, and now it sat like a spider at the center of a vast web of construction and refitting work that drifted in silent majesty in low Terranova orbit. The panorama beyond the curving wall of transparent plastic had never lost its power to raise DiFalco's spirits.
It might have seemed incredible that their small band could have wrought so much in so short a time. But Varien had brought with him the capacity to produce all the essentials of Raehaniv industry. Once established, that industry had grown by geometric progression, with machines making machines. Their only real limiting factor had been the shortage of raw materials outside planetary gravity wells, in this system that lacked a resource-laden asteroid belt like Sol's. But Terranova's active geology had left its many mountainous regions rich in accessible heavy elements. Those riches had to be lifted into orbit—but with Raehaniv shuttles whose atmospheric drives manipulated the planet's gravity into a force that pushed them to a significant altitude and speed before their fusion drives had to take over, this became workable.
After a few moments they spontaneously turned and faced each other, losing themselves for the moment in common memories. Soon after landing on Terranova they had been married according to the forms of the austere Raehaniv tradition, to the music of Varien's muttering. And they had shortly settled for all time the question of whether the humanity of Earth and Raehan belonged to the same species. Jason hle'Morna DiFalco (a name to which Varien was still far from reconciled, although he doted on his grandson whenever he thought no one was looking) was now in his fourth Earth year, an age at which he had other things on his mind than the distinction of being the first Terran-Raehaniv child. He had not been the last.
Rememberance caused them to notice, as they usually did not, the changes wrought by the years. DiFalco's hair was as thick as ever, but it was now iron-gray, shading to nearly white at the temples. Terranova's ultraviolet-rich sun had darkened his skin to a mahogany tone that was different from Aelanni's dark reddish copper, and drawn squint-lines at the outer corners of his eyes. Aelanni showed fewer visible signs of ageing—provided from birth with the best that Raehaniv medical science could offer, she had a life expectancy of over a hundred twenty-five Earth years. (Her prospect of lengthy widowhood had been a source of soul-searching for them, and of grumbling for Varien. Both had been overcome, partly by the argument that they couldn't count on living to peaceful old age anyway.)
The moment passed, and Aelanni spoke briskly. "Well, let's return planetside. I want to tell father personally. We can start retrofitting the ships with deflectors, after which . . . . Eric, it may be that we're ready!"
* * *
Their drop shuttle had only just landed when a second one swept in from the south and settled down onto its yielding landing jacks. It was different from theirs, armed and armored, and a squad of heavily-equipped infantry emerged from its wide hatches, just back from the latest of the gruelling exercises laid on by Sergeant Thompson (now Major Thompson, by grace of one of what Difalco continued to insist to everyone—including himself—were temporary field promotions under extraordinary emergency circumstances).
It was clear to everyone that their attempt to liberate Raehan would not necessarily be resolved in the clean, remote abstractness of space war—the only kind of war the Raehaniv had experienced in fighting the Korvaasha. A ground-combat capability would probably be needed. So Thompson had set himself grimly to the task of creating one from his own U. S. Marine detachments, their Russian counterparts, and whatever promising recruits he had been able to harvest from the Raehaniv and the upcoming generation of Terrans. He had welded them all into a single organization and trained them exhaustively. But to arm them with weapons fit to face the Korvaasha he had had to turn to Miralann and his beloved historical databases.
Stepping from their shuttle, DiFalco and Aelanni waved to the Raehaniv linguist, who was watching the return of the assault shuttle from the edge of the landing area. Miralann waved back and approached through a cloud of dust stirred up by the odd things the shuttles' grav repulsors did to molecular motion. He wasn't as plump as he had been—years under Terranova's high gravity had seen to that. Like all the Raehaniv, he had a toughened, pared-dow
n-to-essentials look. But his air of absent-minded geniality remained.
"Hi, Miralann," DiFalco greeted him. "From the smile on your face, I assume all the bugs are out of the infantry equipment."
"Most of them," Miralann allowed. His exhaustive library—portable, given the density at which the Raehaniv could store data—had yielded the specs from which the infantry weaponry of the Fourth Global War had been resurrected. Thompson had been reluctant to give up his tried-and-true M22, with its solidly reassuring old 2030's technology. Then he had seen a demonstration of what the Raehaniv had been using on each other five hundred years before.
"It still amazes me," DiFalco admitted, "that you people had all this stuff that far back."
"Remember," Miralann said, "at the time of the Fourth Global War we were almost as advanced as we are now, with the exception of artificial gravity; technological change was frozen after that."
"If our history is any indication," DiFalco mused, "all those total wars must have been a stimulus to technological advancement, with governments subsidizing R&D."
"Oh, yes. In fact, now that I've had time to study your history in depth, I can see clear parallels with ours." Miralann warmed to his subject as he watched a second assault shuttle approach. "The First Global War was fought on a technological level somewhere between your two World Wars; it was as though World War I had been postponed until around your year 1925. The explosion, when it came, was correspondingly more destructive.
"By the time it was over, the scientific groundwork had been laid for a whole new order of weaponry—including fission and fission-triggered fusion bombs. The Second Global War was rather like the war that was expected to break out in the nineteen fifties between your people and the Russians would have been. We could have destroyed our civilization then, but mutual fear prevented widespread strategic use of nuclear weapons. Still, it was devastating. By the time the Third Global War began, we were at a somewhat more advanced level than that of your 'Operation Desert Storm'—but we were also at the end of an arms race without parallel in your history. Very extensive orbital anti-ballistic-missile defenses were in place, and they probably saved our world. But by the end of the war, clean laser-detonated fusion devices were available, and they were employed tactically under the terms of a strict though unacknowledged code."
Miralann paused to watch the new assault shuttle land. It was a design variant on the first one, and the hatches in its flanks were a different configuration.
"It was a long time before we had recovered sufficiently to fight the Fourth Global War," he resumed. "It started in space, but before it was over a quarter of our planetary population was dead. Hardly surprising; by then we had all the weaponry you've seen—including those." He gestured at the grounded shuttle, from whose open hatches the first of the armored titans had just emerged.
"I remember reading," Miralann went on somberly, "that in the aftershock of World War I your people were haunted by the image of thousands of men advancing across open fields of mud to be mowed down by autoloading machine guns. Since the Fourth Global War, our culture has had a comparable nightmare image: infantry in powered combat armor smashing its way through devastated cityscapes."
DiFalco could believe it. He had checked out in the three-meter exoskeletal suits (if something you had to climb into as opposed to putting it on could be called a "suit") and found that he had an aptitude for their operation. The myoelectric "muscles" reproduced the wearer/operator's movements with a strength far beyond his own, and the armor gave a sense of invulnerability which wasn't entirely illusion as far as infantry weapons were concerned. And as for the integral weaponry, and that which could be carried . . . !
DiFalco saw the twinkle in Aelanni's eye, and spoke wryly. "Yeah, I know: these high jinks aren't my job. Whenever I'm in danger of forgetting that, Thompson just loves to remind me!"
As if to prove the old adage about the consequences of talking of the Devil, one of the powered suits walked over with the gait that seemed so ponderous (though DiFalco had run in one). The viewplate rose with a quiet hum, revealing Thompson's face. He flipped his plasma gun up to a casual salute; his unaided strength couldn't have lifted it from the ground.
"Welcome back, Skipper! Good news from the orbital tests?"
"Yes, you might say that. Why don't you get cleaned up and come on over to the HQ building? I'll tell you all about it, and I want to hear about today's exercises. We may be getting close to the real thing at last."
* * *
"I'm the first to admit it," George Traylor was saying earnestly. "Some of my attempts haven't exactly panned out. But try this!"
They had gotten agriculture started early on Terranova, with the stocks they had previously used for Terraforming research plus those that Varien had brought, resulting in an introduced ecology that was a melange of Earth and Raehan. After it was established, Traylor had been able to resume his hobby with fanatical dedication.
So it was that DiFalco now sat sipping homebrew ale—not the same thing as the beer, and entirely different from the mead, as George insisted at mind-numbing length. The Raehaniv, wine snobs all, had by now achieved something quite drinkable from their world's analogue of grapes. Of course they didn't think it was drinkable, and could explain why with a profusion of oenological arcana that would have reduced the French to a state of cowed submission. But they drank it anyway, and DiFalco wished he could join them instead of fulfilling his social obligations by drinking George's latest effort and not telling him that it tasted like fermented cat piss.
Jeff Levinson—he should only fry in Hell!— approached with a wineglass and a satisfied expression. Traylor screwed up his face. "How can you stand to drink that stuff, Jeff?"
"Well," Levinson drawled complacently, "admittedly it's not kosher. But, then, neither am I." He looked around at the small gathering. Everyone had agreed that a get-together to celebrate the successful testing of the deflector was in order. And as it was a fine early-fall afternoon, with none of the biting cold that winter would soon bring, what better place than here on the hillslope outside the HQ building, overlooking the town of New Phoenix and the mountain range beyond it? Of course, they wouldn't have much time—the afternoon of Terranova's 18.9 hour day never lasted long, and the days were getting shorter. But for now the westering sun warmed them and the view was unbeatable.
Levinson sat down, took a sip, and leaned forward to face DiFalco, eagerness awakening. "Well, what's the word? If, like Varien says, getting deflector generators installed in all our ships should only take four months"—they still thought in the Terran units—"then can we maybe set a date to take Seivra?"
Nearby conversations quieted as people listened for DiFalco's reply.
He sighed, and made no attempt to lower his voice. "I think we'll have to. By then we'll be as ready as we're ever going to be; and while we have no knowledge of what's happening on Raehan, we sure as hell don't want it to go on happening any longer than absolutely necessary. But . . . our basic problem is unchanged. Hopefully the deflectors will help us overcome it."
The sky remained crystal-clear, but it was a though a cloud had passed over the gathering. They all knew what the "basic problem" was—indeed, they were too familiar with it to need holographic star-displays to visualize it.
Two and a half months away by continuous-displacement drive at the best speed most of their ships could make was Seivra, a red dwarf system with no life-bearing planets and only a small Korvaash garrison. Even before the deflector had proved out, they had been confident they could take it, attacking from nowhere near either of the system's two displacement points. But after that . . . ?
One of Seivra's displacement points gave instantaneous access to one of Tareil's. But the first rule of interstellar war was that you didn't even try to attack through a defended displacement point without overwhelming numerical superiority and a willingness to take hideous casualties. They had neither . . . and in the Tareil system the Korvaasha would be the defender
s. Of course, they could proceed directly to Tareil by continuous-displacement drive—a hundred of Earth's light-years from Terranova, nearly as far from Seivra, either way a journey for their fighting ships of over two years plus whatever time at least three enroute refuelings would take.
There seemed only one alternative: smash the Korvaasha at Seivra as quickly as possible and, without even pausing to repair their battle damage, roar across the system to the Tareil displacement point and transit it at once, praying all the while that the Korvaash occupiers of Raehan hadn't had time to prepare a defense. But they all knew how unlikely that was.
It was standard Korvaash procedure to keep at least one small picket ship on station at every displacement point in their empire, for the rapid transmission of urgent messages. One of the little craft would transit to the next system along the displacement chain, immediately broadcast its tidings, and another messenger would depart through another displacement point. The Seivra pickets, seeing the system being overrun by unknown attackers from out of nowhere, would surely depart for Tareil at once with tidings of impending attack.
They had gone over it a thousand times, always coming back to the same dilemma. A moment's silence was all it now took for them to come back around to it once again. Levinson, knowing they had, spoke without preamble.
"Well, we could detail a small detachment of ships to proceed by continuous-displacement drive to the vicinity of the Tareil displacement point and hit the pickets at the same time the rest of us are taking on the main Korvaash base, before they know what's going on . . . ." He trailed to a halt. They had been over this, too. Sasha Golovko spoke the conclusions they had already reached.
"Yes, but can we be sure of getting the picket, or pickets, before one of them can transit? I doubt it. And even if we do sail unmolested out of an undefended displacement point into the Tareil system, we'll have to face a vastly superior Korvaash fleet in open battle there, too deep in Tareil's gravity well to use continuous-displacement drive, and with our reaction mass depleted by the dash across the Seivra system."
