Star Song and Other Stories

by Timothy Zahn

  "Travis?" the captain murmured.

  I nodded reluctantly. "He's right, sir. If he actually saw the ship, it couldn't have been anyone else."

  "But it doesn't make any sense," Kittredge put in. "Why would any Drymnu ship attack a human outpost?"

  It was a damn good question. All the aliens we'd ever run into out here were hive races, and hive races didn't make war. Period. They weren't constitutionally oriented that way, for starters; aggression in hivies nearly always focused on studying and understanding the universe, and as far as I knew the Drymnu were no exception. It was why hivies nearly always discovered the Burke stardrive and made it into space, while fragmented races like humanity nearly always blew themselves to bits before they could do likewise.

  "I don't know why," Halveston sighed. "I don't have any idea. But whatever the reason, he sure as hell did it on purpose. He came in real close, discussing refueling possibilities, and when he was too close for us to have any chance at all, he just opened up and bombed the hell out of the base."

  The speech took too much out of him. His eyes rolled up, and he seemed to go a

  little more limp beneath his safety webbing. I looked up, caught the captain's eye.

  "We'd better get out of here," I said in a low voice. "It looks like he's long gone, but I don't think we want to be here if he comes back."

  "And we need to report this right away, too," Kittredge added.

  "No!"

  I would've jumped if there'd been any gravity to do it with. "Take it easy, colonel," the captain soothed him. "There's no one else alive down there—trust us, we made a complete infrared grid search while you were being brought up.

  We've got to warn the Services—"

  "No," Halveston repeated, much weaker this time. "You've got to go after him.

  Now, before he gets too far away."

  "But we don't even know what direction he's gone in," Kittredge told him.

  "My pack... has the records of our... three nav satellites." Clearly, Halveston was fading fast. "He didn't think... take them out. Got the... para-Cerenkov rainbow... when he left."

  And with the rainbow recorded from three directions we did indeed have the direction the ship had taken—at least until he came out of hyperspace and changed vectors. But it would normally be several days at the least before he did that. "All the more reason for us to go sound the alarm," I told Halveston.

  "No time," Halveston gasped. "He'll get away, regroup with other Drymnu ships...

  never identify him then. And the whole mind will know... how easily he got us."

  And suddenly, for a handful of seconds, the pain cleared almost entirely from his face and a spark of life flared in his eyes. "Captain Garrett... as a command-rank officer of the Combined Services... I hereby commandeer the Volga... and order you to give chase... to the Drymnu ship... that destroyed Messenia. And to destroy it. Carry out your... orders... captain." And as his eyes again rolled up, the warbling of the life-failure alert broke into our stunned silence. Automatically, we floated back to give the med people room to work. We were still there, still silent, when the doc finally shut off the med sensors and covered Halveston's face. "Well?" the captain asked, glaring at the intercom and then at Kittredge and me in turn. "Now what do we do?"

  The intercom rasped as First Officer Wong, who had replaced Kittredge on the bridge, cleared his throat delicately. "I presume there's no way to expunge that... suggestion... from the log?"

  "That your idea or one of Waskin's?" the captain snorted. Perhaps he was remembering it was Waskin's fault we were here in the first place. "Of course there's no way. And it wasn't a suggestion, it was an order—a legal one, our resident military expert tells me." He turned his glare full force onto me.

  I refused to shrivel. He'd asked me a question, and it wasn't my fault if he hadn't liked the answer.

  "But this is crazy," Wong persisted. "We're a freighter, for God's sake. How in hell did he expect us to take on a warship with eighteen thousand Drymnu aboard?"

  "It wasn't a warship," I put in. "Couldn't have been. The Drymnu don't have any warships."

  "You could have fooled me," Kittredge growled. "I hope you're not suggesting he just happened to have a cargo of full-spectrum bombs aboard and somehow lost his grip on them."

  "I said he didn't have any warships," I shot back. "I didn't say the attack wasn't deliberate."

  "The difference escapes me—"

  "Let's keep the discussion civil, shall we?" the captain interrupted. "I think it's a given that we're all on edge here. All right, Travis, you want to offer an explanation as to why a race ostensibly as peaceful as the Drymnu would launch an unprovoked attack on a human installation?"

  "I don't know why he did it," I told him. "But keep in mind that the Drymnu isn't really 'peaceful'—I wouldn't call him that, anyway. He isn't warlike, but he's competitive enough, to the point of having deliberately wiped out at least one class of predators on his home world. All the hivies are that way. It's just that in space there's so much room and territory that there's no reason for one of them to fight any of the others."

  "But we're different?" the captain asked.

  I spread out my hands. "We're a fragmented race, which means we're warlike, and we've gotten into space, which means we're flagrant violations of accepted hivey theory. Maybe the Drymnu has decided that the combination makes us too dangerous to exist and is beginning a campaign to wipe us out."

  "Starting with Messenia?" Wong interjected from the bridge. "Why? To show that his war machine can blow up a couple hundred Services men, developers, and scientists? Big deal."

  "Maybe it wasn't the entire Drymnu mind behind it," I pointed out. "Each ship is essentially autonomous until it gets within thirty thousand klicks or so of another Drymnu ship or planet."

  "Could this one part of the mind have gone insane?" Kittredge suggested hesitantly. "Become homicidal, somehow?"

  "God, what a thought," Wong muttered. "A raving maniac with eighteen thousand bodies running around the galaxy in his own starship."

  I shrugged. "I don't know if it's possible or not. It's probably more likely that Messenia was an experiment on his part."

  "A what?" Kittredge growled.

  "An experiment. To see if we could handle a sneak attack, with Messenia chosen because it was small and out of the way. You know—club a sleeping tiger or two first to get the technique down before you tackle one that's awake."

  Wong and Kittredge started to speak at once; the captain cut them off with a wave of his hand. "Enough, everyone. As I see it, we have three possibilities here: that the entire Drymnu mind has declared war on humanity; that this one ship-sized segment of the Drymnu mind has declared war on humanity; or that some portion of the Drymnu mind is playing war with humanity to see how we react.

  Does that about cover it, Travis?"

  My mouth felt dry. There was a glint I didn't at all care for in the captain's eyes. "Well... I can't see any other alternatives at the moment, no."

  He nodded, the glint brighter than ever. "Thank you. Any of the rest of you?

  No?

  Then it seems to me that we've got no choice—ethically as well as legally.

  Halveston said it himself: if that ship gets back to one of the Drymnu worlds and reports how easy it was to club this sleeping tiger to death, we may very well find ourselves embroiled in an all-out war. Wong, pull the raider's direction from those tapes and get us in pursuit."

  There was a moment of stunned silence. None of the others, I gathered, had noticed that glint. "Captain—" Wong began, and then hesitated.

  Kittredge showed less restraint. "Captain," she said, "the last time I checked, the Volga was not a warship. Doesn't it strike you as just the slightest bit dangerous for us to take on that ship? Our chief duty at this point is to report the attack."

  "And if Messenia was merely a single thrust of a more comprehensive and synchronized attack?" the captain said quietly. "What then?"

 
She opened her mouth, closed it again. "Then there may not be any human bases left anywhere near here to report to," she said at last, very softly. "Oh, God."

  The captain nodded and started unstrapping himself from his chair. "Bear in mind, too, that even if we're able to guess where he'll come out of hyperspace, we'll have a minimum of several days to prepare for the encounter. Travis, as the nearest thing to a military expert we've got, you're in charge of getting us ready for combat."

  I swallowed. "Yes, sir."

  The wrong place, the wrong time. Twenty minutes later we were in hyperspace, in hot pursuit of the Drymnu ship, and I was in my cabin, wondering just what in hell I was going to do.

  A Drymnu hive ship. Eighteen thousand—call them individuals, bodies, whatever—there were still eighteen thousand of them, each part of a common mind.

  The concept was bad enough; the immediate military consequences were even worse.

  No problems with command or garbled orders. Instant communication between laser operators and those at the scanners. Possibly no need for scanners at all at close range—observers watching from opposite ends of the ship would give the mind a binocular vision that would both make scanners unnecessary and, incidentally, render useless many of the Services' ECM jammers. The ship itself would be a hundred times larger than the Volga, with almost certainly the extra structural strength a craft that big would have to have. More antimeteor lasers.

  More speed.

  In other words, warship or not, if we went head-to-head against the Drymnu, we were going to get our tubes peeled.

  What in the hell were we going to do?

  The smartest decision would be to quit right now, try to talk the captain out of it, and if that didn't work, simply to refuse to obey his order. Mutiny. The memory of the Burma incident made me wince. But this wasn't the Services, and it was nothing like the same situation. Mutiny. In this case, it was far and away the best chance of getting all of us out of this alive. And that, it seemed to me, was where my loyalty ought to lie. I respected the captain a great deal, but he had no idea what he was getting all of us into. These people weren't trained—weren't volunteers for dangerous duty like Services people were—and sending the Volga out to be point man in this war was mass suicide. Maybe Captain Garrett felt legally bound to carry out Colonel Halveston's dying order, but I didn't feel myself nearly so tied.

  In fact, it occurred to me that by refusing the captain's orders, I might actually be doing him a favor. Halveston's order had been directed at him; but if he was prevented from carrying it out, he would be off the legal hook. Any official wrath would then turn onto me, of course, but I was prepared to accept that. Unlike Captain Garrett, I was used to having my career dumped out with the sawdust. Surely enough of the others would back me in this, especially once I explained how it would be for the captain's good, and we could just head to the nearest Services base...

  Assuming there were still Services bases to head for. Assuming the Messenia attack had been a one-shot deal. Assuming the Drymnu had not, in fact, launched an all-out war.

  And if those assumptions were wrong, running from the Drymnu now wouldn't gain us anything but a little time. Maybe not even that.

  Which was where the crux of my dilemma lay. Saving the Volga now for worse treatment later on wouldn't be doing anyone a favor. I was chasing the logic around the track for the fifth time when my door buzzed.

  "Come in," I called, the words releasing the lock.

  I'd expected it to be the captain. It was, instead, Kittredge. "Busy?" she asked, stepping inside with the peculiar gait that rotational pseudogravity always gives people in ships the Volga's size.

  A younger man might have expected it to be a social call. I knew Kittredge better than that. "Not really," I said as the door slid closed behind her.

  "Just plotting out the victory parade route for after we've whipped the Drymnu's sauce. Why?"

  The attempt at humor didn't even register on her face. "Travis, we've got some serious trouble here."

  "I've noticed. What do you suggest we do about it?"

  "Call the whole thing off," she growled. "We can't take on any Drymnu hive ship—it's completely out of the question."

  If it had been Wong who'd tossed my own ideas back at me like this, we would have been off to lay out our ultimatum before the captain in thirty seconds.

  But Kittredge was so intense and by-the-book... Perversely, my brain shifted into devil's advocate mode. "You're suggesting Captain Garrett disobey a duly given and recorded order?"

  She snorted. "No one in the Services would even think of holding us to that.

  What, they'd rather we go in and get blown up for nothing than come back with valuable information?"

  Maybe it was a remnant of my Services pride come back to haunt me, or maybe it was just Kittredge and the fact that I was the one in charge of planning this operation. Whatever it was, something like a psychic burr began to work its way under a corner of my mind. "You assume the outcome would be a forgone conclusion."

  "You bet I do—and don't give me that look. You were a minor petty officer aboard a third-rate starship. I hardly expect they overloaded you with battle tactics, especially against an enemy we weren't ever supposed to have to fight."

  The burr dug itself in a little deeper. "You might be surprised," I told her stiffly. "The Burma's engineering section was designed to operate independently in case of massive destruction to the rest of the ship. We were taught quite a

  lot about warfare."

  "Against hivies?" she asked pointedly.

  "Not exactly, no," I admitted. "But just because the hivies weren't supposed to be warlike doesn't mean no one ever considered what it might mean to fight one of them. I remember one lecture in particular that listed three exploitable weaknesses a hive ship would have against a human ship in battle."

  "Oh? I don't suppose you remember what they were?"

  I felt my face getting hotter. "You mean is the old man losing his memory at wholesale rates?"

  "Well?" she replied coolly. "Are you?"

  "I wouldn't bet on it if I were you," I snapped. "You'll see what shape my memory and mind are in when I give the captain my preliminary plan in a couple of days." "Uh-huh." A faint look of scorn twitched at her lip. "I'm sure it'll be Crecy all over again. You'll forgive me if I still try and talk the captain out of it."

  "That's up to you," I said as she turned around and walked, stiff-backed, to the door. It opened for her, and she left.

  With an odd feeling in my stomach, I realized that I had just set a pleasant little bonfire in the center of my line of retreat. If I didn't come up with a

  workable battle plan now, I would humiliate myself in front of Kittredge—and probably everyone else aboard ship, too. In my mind's eye I could see Kittredge's I-knew-you-couldn't-do-it contempt, the captain's maddeningly understanding look, Waskin's outright amusement...

  Alone in my cabin, the images still made me cringe. More undeserved shame...

  and for once, I suddenly decided I would rather die than go through all of that again. I would draw up a battle plan—and it was going to be the best damned plan Waskin or Kittredge had ever seen.

  I would start with a concerted effort to dredge up those three vaguely remembered hivey weaknesses from their dusty hiding places in my memory. And maybe with a trip through the ship's references to find out just what the hell this Crecy was that Kittredge had referred to. We started making preparations immediately, of course. Unfortunately, there weren't a lot of preparations that could be made.

  The Volga, as was pointed out to me with monotonous regularity, was not a warship. We had no shielding beyond the standard solar radiation and micrometeor stuff, our sole weapon was a pair of laser cannons designed to blow away more dangerous meteors—those up to a whopping half-meter across—and our drive and mechanical structure had never been designed for anything even resembling a tight maneuver. We were a waddling, quacking duck that could be blown into mesons ha
lf a second after the Drymnu decided we were dangerous to it.

  The trick, therefore, was going to be to make the Volga seem as harmless as possible... and then to figure out how we could stop being harmless when we wanted to. That much was basic military strategy, the stuff I'd learned my second week in basic. Fortunately, there was one very trivial way to accomplish that.

  Unfortunately, it was the only way I could think of to accomplish it. Across the room, the door slid open and Waskin walked in, a wary expression on his face. "I hope like hell, sir," he said, "that this isn't what I think it is."

  "It is," I nodded, keying the door closed. "I'm tapping you for part of my assault team."

  "Oh, sh—" He swallowed the rest of the expletive with an effort. "Sir, I'd like to respectfully withdraw, on grounds—"

  "Stuff it, Waskin," I told him shortly. "We haven't got time for it. How much has the ship's grapevine given you about what I've got planned?"

  "Enough. You're having a meteor laser taken out and installed aboard one of the landing boats. If you ask me, your David/Goliath complex is getting a little out of hand."

  I ignored the sarcasm. Everyone else, even Kittredge, had started treating me with new respect, but it had been too much to hope for that Waskin would join that particular club. "I take it you don't think it would be a good idea to send a boat out after the Drymnu ship. Why not?"

  He looked hard at me, decided it was a serious question. "Because he'll blow us apart before we get anywhere near our own firing range, that's why. Or have I missed something?"

  "You've missed two things. First of all, remember that this isn't a warship we're going up against. The Drymnu isn't likely to have fine-aim lasers or high-maneuverable missiles aboard."

  "Why not?"

  "Why should he?"

  "Because he knows we'll eventually be sending warships and fighter carriers after him."

  "Ah." I held up a finger. "Warships, yes. But not necessarily carriers."

  Waskin frowned. "You mean he might not know we've got them?"

  I shook my head. "I'm guessing that the concept of fighters won't even occur to him."