by Steve White
Chapter Fourteen
It had been longer than she wished to remember since she had seen a sun of that particular shade of deep gold, and now Aelanni gazed at the distant gleam of Tareil through a blurring mist. For a moment, she could only turn away from everyone else in Liberator's control room and swallow hard. Then, in command of herself, she swung around and managed to face Yakov Rosen with a smile.
"Do you suppose," the middle-aged (on their standards) Terran asked rhetorically, "that we'll ever be able to scientifically pinpoint the moment at which a star one is approaching ceases to be a star and becomes a sun?" He spoke in English. He liked to practice his already-fluent Raehaniv with her, but to do so at this moment would have been somehow wrong—almost patronizing. He had had more than five months (minus his turns in cryogenic hibernation) to sharpen his sense of what was fitting in dealing with the Raehaniv.
Aelanni's glance showed her gratitude to the Terran. (But he wasn't simply a Terran, she reminded herself; none of them were. He also thought of himself as a Russian and, in other contexts, as a Jew. It was so confusing!) Before their departure from Terranova, it had been decided that one Terran should accompany Aelanni's fleet; when she made contact with the Raehaniv resistance in the Tareil system, such an emissary would carry more impact than any amount of holographic imagery. Rosen, a noncombatant with a good working knowledge of Raehaniv, had been the logical choice. And so he had shared the strain of their voyage, the longest by far ever attempted under continuous-displacement drive and the first ever undertaken with powerplants overhauled in accordance with Varien's new theory.
It had, all in all, gone better than they had had any right to expect. Only one ship's drive had failed, and they had stopped to take its personnel aboard the others. This had not caused serious overcrowding—but then had come their midway refueling stop, and the accident that had damaged Vindicator beyond their ability to make repairs in that desolate system. That was when things had become seriously uncomfortable, and Rosen had shared the discomfort uncomplainingly for the remainder of the voyage that was now coming to an end only a little behind schedule.
"No," she answered him gravely. "The concepts of 'sun' and 'star' are too subjective. But everyone knows when the moment has arrived—especially for one's native sun." Her eyes wandered again to that golden flame. Then she shook herself and turned to the holo display, currently set for large-scale representation. Tareil appeared as a dot in its own deep-gold color, and the orbits of the inner planets were traced out in ellipses of light (a trick which never ceased to fascinate Rosen), with a kind of necklace-like effect for the asteroid belt. Off to one side was the purple circle that denoted the Seivra displacement point. From far above the plane of the ecliptic the white arrowhead marking their own position moved inward at the impossible rate of their pseudo-velocity.
The tricky part of their manuevering was already over. While still too far from Tareil for any kind of detection, they had burned their fusion drives while jumping in and out of reality, building up the 'real' vector they would need when they reached Tareil's mass limit and disengaged their continuous-displacement drives. This was perfectly possible, but created navigational problems beyond the capacity of organic minds, reducing them to little more than an audience for a computer-choreographed performance. But now the fusion drives were cold, and the mass limit was approaching.
A digital countdown seemed to hover in midair just in front of Aelanni's eyes, invisible to anyone else. "Naeriy," she said to her flag captain (a Terran concept which, like so many in the military sphere, had proven to hold the practiality so often embedded in tradition), "on my command, cut the continuous-displacement drive and implement the prearranged emission-control guidelines."
"Aye aye," Naeriy acknowledged in English. Her voice, and profile, held a fierceness that Aelanni noted, not for the first time. Naeriy's persistent belief that she was under a cloud was irrational, of course; the Korvaash discovery of the Lirauva Chain had not been in any way her fault, and she had acted properly in all respects. But the role of bearer of ill tidings was not a congenial one for the young Raehaniv, whom DiFalco had long ago diagnosed as a classic "hot dog." Irrational or not, Naeriy's need to erase a nonexistent stain was like an elemental force that Aelanni had learned to direct. And, like every other destructive agent at her command, she would have need of it shortly.
She turned to Rosen. "Yakov, you realize that when we disengage the continuous-displacement drive we will be irrevocably committed to battle?"
"Our plan isn't entirely unfamiliar to me," he replied drily.
Aelanni made the vague wiping gesture with which the Raehaniv indicated a desire to correct a misunderstanding. "Of course not. But you are, after all, a civilian . . . ."
"So is everybody here." Rosen grinned. "That's one reason I was so willing to come along: no professional military people! There are, however"—he glanced at Naeriy, then gazed up into Aelanni's eyes for a long moment—"warriors. You Raehaniv have changed since I've known you. You'll go on changing. Even if we win, your people will never be the same again. We may defeat the Korvaasha, but we can't defeat time. The old days you've told me so much about are gone forever, Aelanni." He grimaced with the wry self-mockery she had come to know. "Remind me never to try to give the troops a rousing speech before battle!"
Aelanni's tension broke in a laugh that caused heads to turn. "I will, Yakov, I will. You just don't have it in you!"
Then she sobered. "But you're right. The most we can hope for is to win back Raehan's freedom. We can't win back the way it was. The Korvaasha have irrevocably destroyed that. Eric likes to say 'There ain't no justice.' He's right; there isn't. In a very real sense, aggressors can't be defeated, because the harm they do is irreparable. The very act of doing what is necessary to stop them changes their victims' world forever." Her eyes took on a look that caused his to drop. "What about it, Yakov? What does your religion, that you've tried to explain to me, have to say about this imbalance? Why does your God allow evil to do undying hurt without even having to be victorious?"
Rosen tried to meet her eyes again and could not. "I do not know. No one can answer that question."
Aelanni took a deep breath and let it out. "Well," she finally said, "we may not be able to undo the damage the Korvaasha have done . . . but we can damned well do our best to prevent them from doing any more!"
Rosen could not respond. The seconds slid by in silence as Aelanni watched the countdown. Just before they entered Tareil's mass limit, it reached zero and the woman of dark-red flame spoke in a voice like a clarion. "Execute!"
Abruptly, Tareil stopped growing in the screens, just as the marker of their fleet stopped dead in the holo tank. But of course it hadn't really stopped—after a moment, its crawling motion became visible. For they had merely ceased to outpace light, proceeding onward in free fall along the vector that they had established outside the borderlands of Tareil and kept while under the strange not-velocity of continuous-displacement travel.
All right, Rosen thought, unconsciously gazing slightly upward. We're obeying Your laws again. Happy?
Power stepped down to life-support requirements, effectively indetectible, they fell along a hyperbola that would bring them to the region where tactical analysis—and their hopes—told them the Korvaash fleet should be crouching, ready to pounce at the Seivra displacement point.
* * *
There was really no need for DiFalco to be in Andy J.'s control room just now, and he knew that Farrell and the others would be inexpressibly relieved to have him out of their hair. But the control room had one advantage over his cabin, now that it was equipped with artificial gravity: it was—almost—big enough for satisfactory pacing.
For a time, the tension had let up fractionally as their worst nightmare had begun to recede. They had all known, too well, that they could not possibly stop a determined counterattack in force from Tareil. But weeks had passed and no Korvaash warships had emerged from the displacement
point, and their minds had downgraded the threat from unbearable suspense to mere background worry. DiFalco still wondered why the Korvaasha had missed their chance.
Their other waking-nightmare had been that a Korvaash convoy or reinforcing battlefleet would come blundering through the other displacement point from the Korvaash-held systems beyond that had, as yet, no way of knowing what had happened at Seivra. But none had—only one nondescript courier that they had blasted out of existence. Eventually, of course, that courier would be missed. But not yet.
So they had repaired their battle damage and taken up their planned position . . . and begun sweating again, for they had entered into the time-frame within which they could realistically hope for word from Aelanni. An open-ended time frame, of course; no one could know what delays she might have encountered on her long, risk-fraught voyage to Tareil. They could only settle grimly into a state of readiness that was exhausting over the long haul but which they would maintain until the word to move arrived—or until the Korvaasha finally got over whatever it was that was keeping them sitting passively in Tareil.
Gazing at viewscreens, DiFalco could see the other cruisers that lay off Andy J.'s flanks. And he could almost hear the thrumming of overstretched nerves from across space, for they had entered into the real nightmare: the protracted time-scale of helpless anticipation.
A rustling sound of movement behind him brought his head snapping around. It was Varien.
"Goddamn it, don't ever sneak into the control room!" He was instantly sorry, but a shift to mere grumbling was the closest he would let himself come to an apology. "You shouldn't even be in the control room at all, you know. Hell, you shouldn't even be aboard this ship! When we go through that displacement point blind, with God knows what waiting on the other side . . ."
"We've been over this before, Colonel," Varien said mildly.
"Yeah, but I still don't understand why you insist on going in with the first wave. When we attacked Seivra you were willing to follow along in a transport and wait until we'd secured the system."
"The situation is quite different now, as you must realize. When we transit this displacement point, we will be . . . 'going for broke'? Yes, that's it. This will be our first, last, and only opportunity to liberate Raehan, and if we fail there will be no point to my further survival, Colonel. To use another of your idioms, I have nothing to lose. And I have no desire to sit in this system waiting for word of the outcome at Tareil. Patience is not my strong point; I have been told that by so many people that I must reluctantly admit it is probably true."
DiFalco was silent. He had thought he knew the full spectrum of Varien's moods, but he had never seen this fatalism. And yet the old Raehaniv was right. This one was for all the marbles.
"You could wait with the transports, you know. The whole point to stationing them in the outermost outskirts of this system was to enable the noncombatants to get away to Terranova on continuous-displacement drive if we blow it. The settlement there could use you."
Varien smiled. "I know you mean well, Colonel. But over these last years the freeing of Raehan has become the only meaning my life has, other than my son and daughter—and they, too, are on the other side of this displacement point. You see," he continued, as if carefully explaining something that must be made clear, "I can no more not be on the first ship through than you could . . . Eric."
For a long moment there was no sound but the low hums and beeps of the control room, and no motion in the two shadowed faces that regarded each other in the dim light. When DiFalco broke the silence, his voice was very matter-of-fact. "When we start to accelerate, I want you in an acceleration couch, and I want you to stay there. I still don't trust this artificial gravity of yours . . . ."
* * *
Aelanni did trust artificial gravity, which to her was old technology, and she stood with arms folded in Liberator's control room, gazing unblinkingly at the Korvaash warships in the screen.
Huge, as if designed in proportion to the creatures that built and crewed them. Ungainly seeming, although like all Raehaniv she knew too well their basic functionality. Crudely ugly, with none of the aesthetic flourishes that Raehaniv engineers had always found a way to work into spacecraft designs. And numerous—appallingly numerous. Scores of them, arranged in the precise alignments of what was clearly a standard formation.
Rosen, too, could not take his eyes from the screen, for on it he saw the nightmare that had haunted his world for generations: technology as Leviathan, soulless and hideous and deadly to all that was human. How pathetically mild our imaginings turn out to have been, he thought, and wondered what nightmares from Raehan's Global Wars the sight awoke in Aelanni.
She gave no sign, but continued to stare fixedly at the magnified images in a silence that Naeriy finally broke. "We have now entered our extreme missile range," the flag captain said quietly. "Shall I . . . ?"
"No." Aelanni spoke the flat monosyllable without moving her eyes a micron from the screen. "Is there anything to indicate that we have been detected?"
"There is not," Naeriy replied emphatically. There was no reason why there should have been. As soon as they had detected the Korvaash fleet they had made the course correction—minor, as it had turned out—needed to assure that their hyperbolic orbit would bring them sweeping past that fleet's sterns. The short burn, far out in the darkness of the outer system and far above the ecliptic, had elicited no response, and they had continued to coast in silence toward a consummation of thunder.
Time ticked by and Rosen began to fidget. "Aelanni . . ."
She waved him peremptorily to silence. "I want to get closer. The shorter the range at which we launch, the less time their countermeasures will have to respond."
Rosen composed himself to wait.
Chagluk gazed critically at the sensor readouts and recalled his earlier pride that a mere courier ship like the one he commanded should have received the new, upgraded instrumentation. Now he wasn't so sure. The sensor suite had been endless trouble, and he suspected subtle sabotage by the humans who had labored on the refitting. But now they seemed to be on the way to getting the bugs out, and he felt sure that by the time they rendezvoused with the still-distant battlefleet all would be in order.
"Do another grav scan of the battlefleet," he ordered the engineer (no separate sensor billet on a craft this size), "and compare the readings with the known masses of the ships."
"Acknowledged," Gozthag replied, then stiffened with annoyance. "The directional controls are still off. I must search for the correct region . . . ." Suddenly, he stiffened again, in a very different way. "What . . . ? Look—approaching the battlefleet at interplanetary velocities . . ."
Chuglak looked over Gozthag's head at the readouts. His paralysis lasted only an instant, and while Gozthag was still blithering he roared at the communications officer.
Rosen could keep quiet no longer. "Aelanni, you must give the order! We're close enough! They're bound to detect us any time."
"But they haven't yet," Aelanni replied calmly, without taking her eyes from the magnified images in the screen. "I want to close the range a little more."
Rosen started to open his mouth, then clamped it shut. He didn't trust his voice to keep steady, any more steady then his hands. He clenched his fists, despising himself for his jitters, and looked again at the range readout. Then, irrationally but irresistably, he darted a glance out the wide-sweeping armorplast viewport.
Good God! Does the crazy woman mean to get within visual range?! Rosen wondered wildly if, in spite of everything, maybe the Raehaniv weren't really human after all. But then he swept his eyes over Naeriy and the others in the control room. They all looked as nervous as he felt.
Grashkul, Effectuator of Expansion, surveyed the expanse of the flagship's commamnd center with satisfaction. He had only recently arrived to take personal command of the system battlefleet, although he had departed from Raehan as soon as possible after taking over from the late Kulnakh.
The thought of the former Effectuator of Expansion soured his mood. Kulnakh had been right, of course. They should have launched probing attacks through the displacement point to gauge the strength of the opposition in Seivra. And if that opposition had proved to be no stronger than he thought it was (having exhaustively studied the picket's report, including the imagery of the oddly old-fashioned-looking ship that had attacked it) then they should have gone through in full force, accepting whatever losses it took to recapture Seivra. Yes, Kulnakh had been right . . . but Grashkul wasn't about to say so aloud.
At least the unknown inferior beings had displayed equal caution, allowing time for the entire battlefleet to be concentrated here. Brobdingnagian battleships like this one, armed primarily with long-range missiles, made up the rear echelons, behind the somewhat smaller, faster battlecruisers with their batteries of energy weapons, including plasma artillery powered by fusion plants of the scale on which the Korvaasha built ships. Nothing could come through from Seivra and live—of that he was certain.
A harsh series of sounds suddenly awoke at the communications console. After a moment, the operator turned and spoke across the command center in the far-reaching low frequencies of Korvaash speech.
"Effectuator, I have received a somewhat incoherent message from the commander of a courier vessel enroute from Raehan. He urgently advises us to scan a certain region of space which I have taken the liberty of downloading to the sensor controls. Of course," he continued, doing a rapid calculation, "the message was sent over twenty rizhula ago."
Grashkul understood. Neutrino-pulse communication over a sufficiently long range ouside a gravity well could effectively exceed lightspeed—the carrier beam itself did not, of course, for neutrinos were not really massless as had once been thought; but the information-carrying pulses could be propagated along it faster, as much as five times as fast in fact. But it took real distance to take full advantage of the effect. So this courier commander's alert held a slight time lag.
