The Omarian Gambit: A Pax Aeterna Novel

by Trevor Wyatt

  There are murmurs of agreement from the audience, including me.

  “Good. Now let’s move up the ladder to cultural electives. Those are customs also, but you needn’t conform to them. For example, in the Czech Republic it used to be customary for alcohol to be offered at the start of a business meeting, even if it was eight o’clock in the morning. If you wished to be considered polite, you’d take a sip. It needn’t be more than that. Muslims would offer coffee to signal friendship. And so on.”

  More murmurs of agreement and understanding, much nodding of heads.

  “And at the top of the list are cultural imperatives,” said the professor. “Now, these are customs that you simply must adhere to if you want to be successful and show genuine respect. This becomes slippery. To be successful in a post-first-contact world, you will have to build a relationship with the other side.” He paused. “I see many puzzled looks. As if to say, ‘Well, that’s obvious, Professor Guss.’ It should be, I agree; but it really isn’t. Upon meeting the representative of an alien civilization, you have to understand that you will not be communicating with the civilization—you will be communicating with a person, even if he doesn’t look like any person you ever heard of. And if you don’t build a relationship with him—or her, or it, whatever—you are doomed to fail because at the bottom, communication is between people, not companies or religions. Can anyone tell me why this is?”

  I thought as hard as I ever have in my life, because I was sure I understood his line of reasoning. I raised my hand.

  “Yes, Mr. Montgomery,” he said, nodding at me.

  I took a breath. “You have to build trust,” I said.

  He grinned. “That is exactly right. Trust will make or break a deal. Is there another example of a cultural imperative?”

  A Japanese girl raised her hand. “In my culture,” she said, “you can’t act in such a way as to lose face or to cause someone else to lose face.”

  “Excellent,” the professor said. “There are other examples, of course. In Japan prolonged eye contact is considered offensive.” The Japanese girl nodded. “However,” said Professor Guss, “Arab and Latin American regions strong eye contact is necessary or else you’ll be regarded as evasive and untrustworthy. So you have to have an awareness of the culture with which you are communicating.”

  “But that’s not going to be possible with extraterrestrials,” I said. “We will be in a cultural vacuum.”

  “And that,” said Professor Guss, “is precisely my point. You may well find yourself in a position where you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

  “Well, what do we do then?”

  “You will have to weigh the possibilities as best you can, and take the course that results in the least amount of burning.”

  It was terribly frustrating. Guss’ class, which we cadets had taken almost as a lark, had become the most thought-provoking one of all. Whereas we could study navigational problems all week long and arrive at exact methodologies, we could discuss cultural imperatives for a year and never solve the problem.

  * * *

  What I have to do is to look at the situation from Ghosal’s point of view, much as it pains me to do so. From his viewpoint, we are interlopers, trespassers, no matter how valid our reasons are to ourselves. It could well be that the only proper way, in his view, to approach the problem was to politely ask to investigate the region of space in which The Mariner has vanished. As far as Ghosal is concerned, we have barged in without so much as a by-your-leave.

  The fact that we hadn’t had a clue that Ghosal’s ship was there or that the nebula was considered private property doesn’t matter in the least. Ignorance of the law, as the old saying goes, is no excuse.

  I tap my fingers on my console. I am going to have to do something I don’t want to do. Admiral Flynn isn’t going to like it. My crew isn’t going to like it. Hell, I don’t like it.

  Knowing that I am going to leave myself open to all sorts of criticism from every level of command, I close my eyes. Hellfire, Professor, I think, when you said there would be times when I’d be damned if I did and damned if I didn’t, you didn’t know the half of it.

  I brush off my uniform. A delaying tactic. I don’t want to go back out into the CNC and tell them what I have to tell them.

  I was wrong; there wasn’t a clue to be had in my memory of the professor’s discussion on cultural imperatives. Not as far as problem solving, anyway. The subtext is clear, however: this is a test of me, of Jeryl Montgomery. Jeryl has to do the right thing. Which means he can’t stand up to these Sonali bastards and dare them to shoot his ass off, because they will—along with the collective ass of his crew.

  I’m pretty fucking sure that these blue skinned bastards destroyed The Mariner.

  But the universe doesn’t care. And we can’t get any vengeance now.

  Jeryl Montgomery can risk his crew to stay and bring justice to these people.

  And he—I—dare not risk that.

  And so, with as much dignity and gravitas as I can muster, I reenter the CNC and say, “Mr. Ferriero, lay in a course for home.” There is dead silence as The Seeker’s FTL engines engage, flinging us into interstellar space.

  I am not happy.

  Book II

  Jeryl

  Five years.

  Five years of war.

  Five years of blood.

  Four billion humans dead.

  I haven’t shaved in two days. I used to be clean shaven every day. Part of the Armada regulations.

  But somewhere along the line, I stopped.

  Maybe it was during many of the battles where The Seeker lost power for non-essential things like lights in crew quarters.

  Or when we were sneaking along in radio silence and people were so jumpy that trying to shave would have resulted in a cut neck.

  In fact, the nagging thought in the back of my head returns again.

  If I could go back in time to when we first discovered the ruins of The Mariner…well then I would tell Admiral Flynn nothing. I wouldn’t even mention that damn ship.

  And then I would tell myself to turn the ship around and make the best possible speed back to Edoris station.

  Because it’s not like a lot of things went wrong. It’s like one thing went wrong.

  Me.

  I’m sitting in one of the briefing rooms of Edoris station and I’m surrounded by three other ship captains. There’s a briefing that Admiral Flynn will be doing shortly. It will be going over our part of the Wolf offensive. The Seeker has been tapped for a crucial role.

  No one knows what the Wolf Offensive entails just yet.

  But hopefully, it’s something that’s going to bring this war to a close.

  Endless combat does more than make you stop shaving.

  It makes you start to think during that time. About the most random things in the universe.

  Sometimes I wonder if there’s something I could’ve done to prevent the war. You know that part of you that answers back with answers that you don’t want to hear?

  That’s the part of me which tells me it’s not just something I could’ve done. It’s everything I could’ve done.

  I could’ve turned the ship around.

  I could’ve not brought up the fact that The Mariner was destroyed when I talked to the Sonali.

  I could’ve filed a different report with Armada Command.

  I could’ve spoken up when Armada Command began to question whether it was the Sonali that destroyed The Mariner.

  From the very beginning Armada Command believed that the Sonali were responsible and it colored everything that they did.

  So there was never any diplomatic interchange. There was never any cultural awareness expeditions. Instead, immediately after first contact we were sent away from their territory into a border dispute prompted by what happened to The Mariner.

  The battle cry, “Remember The Mariner” began to resonate throughout the Earth, throughout the Union, even thr
oughout the Outers.

  I’ve seen our worlds bombarded orbitally from above – killing millions on the surface. I’ve seen our retaliatory strikes. It took a while, but eventually our savagery shone through. We glassed Sonali planets – killing their civilians with something near glee.

  We’ve gone mad as a race.

  Losing billions of people will do that to you.

  “What are we doing here, you think?” one of the Captains, a Goncalo Richard asks.

  “I heard we’re going to lead a full-frontal assault during Wolf Offensive,” another captain responds.

  My ears perk up and I lean forward. It’s a rather optimistic tone from someone who’s been in a sector that has seen the heights of the war that no other area of the Terran Union has experienced. There’s been a lot of fighting. Entire worlds have been laid to waste, more than anything that ever happened to Earth. It took almost a year and a half for Armada scientists to catch up with the Sonali in all offensive capabilities. Theoretical concepts went to battle. They were tested with blood. Colony worlds that were around at least one or more generations fell. To the point where Edoris station became the last bulwark for a while to prevent the Sonali from overrunning this sector and starting to threaten the Inner Union worlds.

  By the third year of the war the Union was catching up and the Armada began to become more resourceful. Those theoretical concepts? Began to be deployed in the field. Those same weapons that we looked at and scratched our heads as we puzzled over how they could destroy The Mariner? Standard offensive capabilities on all Armada starships now.

  I realize that I have lost myself once again in thoughts about the war and I shake myself awake.

  But you can’t really fault me for reflecting back on these last five years.

  If there was ever any conflict in the history of humanity that was worse than the Third World war, then this would be it.

  4 billion people…dead.

  It’s almost too large of a number to comprehend. Add the countless Sonali dead and the last five years have been brutal.

  Entire colony worlds that have been around for generations, some with populations that numbered in the hundreds of millions—glassed.

  The Sonali followed our lead in bombarding planets. They didn’t even bother to invade or send any sort of ground forces after a while. They came, they bombarded, they destroyed all life on the surface, and then they retreated.

  But they learned from the best. When we didn’t have the capabilities to engage them in deep space the first years of the war, we struck back in other ways.

  We used pirates to smuggle thermonuclear packages into their worlds.

  We sent suicide runs of ships who took out entire worlds.

  We’ve attacked their star bases, their planets, and their shipping lines.

  But all that wanton destruction aside, for the first two years of the war, it seriously was a losing battle. Edoris Sector saw the worst of it. Colonies fell, and bases were destroyed. Deep space stations that didn’t have any planetary support were extremely vulnerable within the sector and were gone within the first year of the war. It got to the point where the Sonali were attacking Edoris station over several engagements—although nothing like a concentrated attack, thank God.

  I know Admiral Flynn has a whole hell of a lot to deal with. He's seen so many captains reporting to him that are no longer around. He’s probably never going to live down the death of the billions of people whose blood he has on his hands.

  But even with those theoretical weapons we’ve developed, we are at best fighting to a stalemate.

  It used to take several Armada ships to bring down a Sonali. Now, it only takes two armada vessels to be destroyed to bring down one Sonali cruiser.

  Do I sound bitter?

  Well, that’s because I fucking am.

  It’s gotten to the point where failure is not an option. Because if you fail, you die. There’s no other way to put it except this is the defining conflict of our lives.

  That part of your brain that you don’t want giving you ideas and asking you questions? That’s the part that makes me laugh right about now in a morbid sort of way. Because, I’m thinking back to the people who served on The Seeker.

  No man, including me, had ever fought in a war this large and this devastating. But entire classes in the Academy today are graduating having only known war. The Sonali are relentless. They come at you and attack with a ferocity that you would never expect.

  Sadly, it took no time for humanity to match that ferocity.

  The one thing that’s come out of this, I think, that may be some sort of a fucked up silver lining is that the technology advancements that we’ve gotten through the war have really expedited the rebuilding of much of Earth.

  Not that that really matters if the Sonali come into orbit of the Terran home system and begin bombardment of our cities.

  Makes World War III look like a walk in the park.

  I worry about Earth. Every day.

  My crew feels it.

  They all think about their home planets. You can see it in their faces as well. Every time a colony world falls, we get word that a settlement has been attacked; you see it in the faces of everyone. Did they know anyone there? Do they have any family there? Do they have any friends? Could it happen to their home planet?

  It keeps you up at night and doesn’t let you sleep. But sometimes that’s a good thing, because sleeping can turn those thoughts into nightmares.

  Surprisingly the morale has been pretty good within the Armada. Armada Command has seen fit to reorganize along much better lines of command than anything we’ve ever had before. We got a new president of the Union who actually seems to want to prosecute this war and preserve humanity. He campaigned during the second year of the war on a platform that both morbid and made you chuckle--‘Preserve Humanity’.

  Of course, that means more corporate involvement. I wonder what new corporate shingle will be hanging outside the briefing room on the Edoris Station Promenade when I go out.

  Maybe another Trinidec Pleasure Palace?

  Or a billboard from the Astra Corporation?

  Will it even matter if the Sonali come out of nowhere and vaporize this station in a coordinated assault? Before they break through the lines and go destroy humanity?

  Sounds kind of melodramatic doesn’t it?

  Well, that’s what a lot of people are worried about. That these are the last days of the human race.

  This is a pretty fucking valid concern. I think by now I’ve counted at least 100 engagements with the enemy. I’ve seen ships destroyed in front of my eyes. The frigate that had the name The Seeker is gone. We got most of the crew out alive. We’re lucky that we got out alive.

  Will we continue to be lucky much longer?

  Sure, there been technological advancements. We’ve encountered other alien races as we jumpstarted our exploration through the sector. Multiple contact with multiple species as a result of war.

  Thank God we didn’t get into more conflicts with them.

  And perhaps one of the biggest things ever—the Terran Union and the Armada finally looking outward rather than just inward. Of course, we got our backs to the wall. Today, we're fighting for survival. But there is a chance that maybe we get out of this alive and not go extinct as a species. I know that sounds pretty gloomy. But there’s nothing rosy about this war and the devastation it’s caused.

  And that’s when Admiral Flynn walks in. The sliding doors close and he takes the dais.

  “Thank you for being here, gentlemen,” he says as he looks into each of our faces. “We are here today to discuss your role in the Wolf Offensive. A campaign we hope that will turn the tide and end this war.”

  Admiral Flynn continues. “Within several days’ time, a fleet of over 400 starships from the Armada will be amassing at this station. We will be striking at the heart of the Sonali defenses in this sector. You will not be a part of it.”

  My eyes open wide and I
lean forward. If we’re not going to be part of one of the greatest offenses in the history of human warfare, then I want to know what we’re going to be doing.

  I know that Admiral Flynn will tell us in time. I also know that he’s going to keep as much information as he’s not allowed to share it himself. But I know this as well—Admiral Flynn wants this war to be over. He’s right there with me when I think about how it started. Not with the demands back and forth to re-compensate us for the destruction of The Mariner. Not the speeches by the politicians who tried to whip the crowd into a frenzy for war. Not even from the decision within Armada Command to make the first strike. That first strike was not the start of this conflict.

  The first salvo in this conflict, the first conversation about a potential war, all that occurred over one coded slipstream frequency when I reported back on the state of The Mariner debris to Admiral Flynn.

  Earlier, I remember saying there are a lot of things I could’ve done. Well, I bet you that Admiral Flynn thinks that there are a lot of things he could’ve done as well. I think he goes over his actions five years ago with a fine tooth comb.

  A half-dozen of orders just within the few hours of discovering the wreckage would’ve altered today and the state that we’re in.

  I know that he’s thinking none of these would’ve happened if he had given those orders. And not just me. Other people are probably thinking something similar as well.

  It looks like all of us will pay for any mistakes I’ve made. After watching humans die and being forced to kill Sonali I don’t really know if I have the ability to care anymore. It’s like you go numb inside after the first billion deaths, you know?

  It’s like with every death that I see or cause, another part of my soul is on its one-way trip to hell.

  “Your target,” the Admiral continues and I raise my eyes to shake myself awake and pay attention.

  “Is none other than the central planet of all Sonali region,” he finishes.

  Well, this should be interesting.