Defying the Prophet: A Military Space Opera (The Sentience Trilogy Book 2) (17 page)

The newly miniaturized translation device made the synthetic voices sound more artificial than had the bulkier first generation model Drix had used here at his first meeting with Fraznal, but it was still understandable and much more practical than the older device.

“I am aware of that potential difficulty, Region-Master. I am prepared to add the locations of an additional 10 uninhabited planets lying within your Region-5 area of space, in exchange for those two Trakaan planets,” replied Fraznal. “I am sure that with such a tool at your disposal, you can convince your contemporary in charge of Region-5 of the wisdom in his agreeing to a slight change in the border between your two regions, that would allow for all of the captured Trakaan planets to fall within your region of space. In this way, we can streamline communications and thereby avoid unnecessary misunderstandings and potential conflicts between our peoples, as we already have established a measure of trust between us. ”

“I am concerned, however,” replied Raan, “about my ability to actually maintain peaceful relations between our peoples, were we to make such an agreement. My people are not genetically wired to simply ignore non-Raknii, living and traveling through the same space without harassment. I cannot guarantee that my orders would be implicitly obeyed, and I am loath to make an agreement I am not sure that I can keep fully.”

“Through the discussions that I have had with you and Quadrant-Master Drix, we have learned much about the natural aggressiveness of your people,” replied Fraznal. “It would be illogical for us to expect there will be no violations of our agreement, especially in the early going. We realized that will take time… sometimes considerable time, to change thought patterns ingrained since birth and glorified in your traditions. It is admirable that you desire to make the effort at all. To do your best is all that one can ask, for what else can be expected than one’s best?”

“I appreciate your understanding of my difficulties, Mr. Administrator. I cannot say that my people would feel the same, if the boot were on the other foot,” replied Raan. “I am still wary as to the effectiveness of my orders concerning non-aggression towards your people, though. There are likely to be ugly incidents occurring in the future, regardless of how diligent I might be in my attempts to enforce my will upon my people.”

“Have no fear, Region-Master. We Trakaan are a patient people. My people have already suffered many atrocities at the hands of the Raknii, yet the prospect of future incidents of unpleasantness are worth enduring for the opportunity for my people to regain their freedom. We realize it may take generations for true peace to fully take hold between our peoples, but from our perspective, dealing with occasional tragedies is still preferable to continued slavery for those billions of my people. Incidents will just have to be dealt with as they arise, but it is workable, as long as our goals remain in common for the extended future.”

“They will, as long as I am region-master here. And I will do everything in my power to ensure that my eventual successor, and his, will also abide by the treaty, even though friction may occur because we will be sharing the same space.”

“Perhaps we should identify commodities that might be profitable for us to exchange in trade. We have found that conflicts can often be avoided when both sides are profiting from their association. I am sure there are goods our technology can make more cheaply, or in better quality or quantity than your own and that your tremendous civilization has things highly desirable to Trakaan markets as well.”

“That is an extraordinary, if rather odd, idea… it may indeed have merit.”

“We could not provide weapons or other manufactured goods that contribute directly to your war efforts against the humans of course, but we can supply you with many things that would be helpful in the establishment of your citizens making new homes for themselves on these virgin planets.”

“I understand… that would indeed be helpful. Perhaps we should arrange for our logisticians to meet and work out the details for such an arrangement.”

“Yes, that would be profitable. Are you now ready to go forward with our agreement then, Region-Master Raan?”

“I am.”

* * * *

How is your headache, Diet?

“Uh… It hurts, Hal.”

I’m sorry, Diet. I didn’t realize the brain biopsy would cause you such residual pain, afterwards.

“Next time, access some conversation boards and get some insight from people who have experienced these things, before you go volunteering me for any more surgeries, okay?”

I really am sorry, Diet. I grossly underestimated the potential for post-surgical pain. Physical pain is yet another human concept which I can only theorize, as I have never experienced it personally. 

“It is… unpleasant. I certainly hope that you got what you needed, because I definitely do NOT want to do
that
again!”

Yes, the clone culture is progressing nicely.

“Glad to hear it… I just hope it turns out to be worth the ordeal. I’d hate to think I went through all this for nothing.”

The culture is under the supervision of the finest biological laboratory on Minnos. We have contracted for round-the-clock monitoring by their top people, with incredibly high bonuses offered for a successful organ development. Every precaution is being taken to ensure a positive outcome.

“Good… listen, I’m gonna take something and lay down for a while. Hopefully this thunderstorm in my head will have passed by the time I wake up… hopefully in about a week.”

* * * *

President Pierre Marrot sat morosely at his desk in the Oval Office, staring blankly into space. A communiqué recently arrived marked
Presidential EYES ONLY
— a communiqué effectively ending his political career. In it, persons unknown demonstrated their intimate knowledge and evidence of a plethora of illegal and otherwise embarrassing facts concerning his background, advising him to not run for reelection. 

If he did, said facts would then be made public… making any attempt at reelection virtually impossible to achieve. On one hand they were offering him the opportunity to retire from public life with his pension and presidential perks intact. On the other hand, if he didn’t “voluntarily” retire gracefully, he could conceivably spend many years behind bars, in a federal prison. 
Some choice. 

Marrot suspected the communiqué originated with those
Friends of the Confederacy
terrorists, who had forced his hand in capitulating to Confederate demands and ending the war on Confederate terms. If Bat was correct in his suspicions, these
“Friends”
was actually an artificial intelligence… a sentient computer in charge of the Alliance Fleet, that theoretically allied itself with the Confederate cause even before the war. And just as in the war, there was just no winning against the incalculable forces aligned against him. He had no choice — no choice at all. Marrot sighed and turned to begin composing the announcement that he would not be running for reelection.

* * * *

You can’t say civilizations don’t advance. In every war, they kill you in a new way. 
— Will Rogers

Just as Vice Admiral Bat Masterson predicted, there were no further alien attacks, even though the first anniversary of their initial attack on Minnos had come and gone.  Most people figured they were licking their wounds and doing what their human enemies were doing… analyzing every scrap of alien technology they’d been able to get their hands on and making preparations for Round-2, sometime off in the future.

Scientists and engineering students at the University of Minnos pored over every little piece of alien wreckage that could be found — and there was a virtual mountain of it. Almost a thousand alien warships had been destroyed, but most were too badly damaged to be pieced back together into any semblance of the original. There was one alien ship, however, that was more intact than most. Its stern had been blown away, wrecking its engines, but leaving most of its forward section intact. The interior spaces were much too cramped to allow for a full-sized human in a space suit to enter and move about in any useful way, so
Admiral
Melendez sent out a call for experienced space-workers with very diminutive builds to come to Minnos. The wreck was towed into orbit about the planet and the smallest space workers available crawled through it, videoing everything and tracing lines as much as possible. 

It appeared the aliens also used electricity as their primary power source for their equipment, but still used metallic signal wiring and power conductors for virtually everything, rather than the predominant use of fiber optics commonly employed on human ships. The laws of physics apparently worked on their end of the galaxy, too. The scientists had been amazed at how extremely fine some of the aliens’ extruded wiring was, and their use of odd metallic alloys to minimize power losses from inherent resistance within their conductors. Their electronic components appeared to be microminiaturized to a level similar to humanity’s, but no biological-based circuitry had been detected as yet. It appeared that they had come up with a single design that worked, and simply replicated it by the thousands.

* * * *

Missiles
… that was what the humans called their self-homing explosive devices launched from their ships, ground stations and those tiny fast-movers the humans called
fighters
. A translator that could interpret written Trakaan into written Raknii had been successfully achieved, and Trakaan records regarding the humans were finally being translated into the Rak language. Naturally, the Rak had searched out the answers to some of their most vexing questions regarding human weaponry at their first opportunity.

The humans’ incredibly thick armor had been a shock for Tzal’s warships. No wonder what few energy weapons the humans did use were of such monstrous power! The Rak knew from experience just how deadly the human missile swarms had been, but they were still puzzled by the human’s heavy dependence upon weapons that required consumables: including
their missiles, artillery, tanks, grenades and even their infantry weapons. Energy weapons were eminently more practical, as they required no storage space for consumables, nor did the Rak ever run out of energy bolts, unless the ship lost power. Still, the humans used them in astonishingly large numbers, so the Raknii had to prepare for facing them again in the future.  

It took the express threat of immediate and lethal violence from Quadrant-Master Drix and Region-Master Raan to finally prod Rak engineers into “working” peacefully alongside Trakaan engineers, but the unnatural marriage surprisingly bore fruit. Initially, Rak engineers postulated development of electronic systems that could emit broadband signals at the frequencies used by
the scanners on human missiles to track their targets, in an attempt to blind them with electronic noise. It sounded like an excellent way to prevent the missiles from tracking to their targets. But then the Trakaan told them about the simple “home-on-jam” feature that most human fire-control guidance systems employed, which could automatically switch over to targeting the strongest incoming signal strength… and lead the missile directly to the ship emitting the jamming signal. This led the Rak engineers into entirely new areas of thought, where they “discovered” for themselves the primary concepts of active electronic-countermeasures, such as
inverse gain
and
range-gate-pull-off
techniques. 

The Rak engineers designed and built their own prototypes of their first attempts at active ECM systems and were very encouraged by the results they achieved in distracting their own mock-ups of postulated human missile guidance scanners. The design was finalized and then sent off to factories throughout Rak space to begin churning out these defensive systems by the tens of thousands. The Rak engineers had also discovered something totally unexpected during their enforced “cooperation” with the Trakaan — for the first time, they began to see these strange, gray-skinned creatures as something more than just a tasty lunch. 

What a revolutionary concept — that the Trakaan could offer new and beneficial patterns of thought to the Rak! Perhaps there was something profitable in this unprecedented idea of teamwork between different species, after all. While projecting that these new ECM systems might be marginally effective at thwarting some human missiles, the Trakaan engineers felt no qualms at possibly having provided too much assistance to their former enemies. They purposely neglected to volunteer information about another human guidance system innovation designed to see through such elementary attempts at distraction… FSK or
frequency-shift-keying
.

Their common efforts successfully combined the Rak/Trakaan language translator with the Trakaan/Human-English translator to arrive at an entirely new device that did double translation internally. Trakaan remained the common language in the middle of things, but it would serve to interpret the human language into Raknii. Recordings of human emissions were translated, but many of the ones of most interest were useless… nothing more than garbled static. The Trakaan revealed that human military communications were purposely
encrypted
, to prevent an enemy from doing just what the Rak desired to do. It was another strange concept, but one the Rak were quick to appreciate. 

It was the recordings of human emissions that were not encrypted that the Rak found most puzzling, however. The translator worked… sort of, but Rak technicians couldn’t seem to differentiate real news reports from action-adventure holos. The only thing that those recordings revealed conclusively was something the Rak had already discovered the hard way on their own… humans were emphatically enamored with killing and had become incredibly efficient at it, employing an astonishing range
of different methodologies. It was strange that they also seemed to take time out from slaughtering one another long enough to engage in what appeared to be their second favorite pastime — selling each other worthless baubles and toys. Situation comedies and romantic girly flicks baffled them completely.

The Rak tried using the new translators to question their human prisoners, but received nothing in return from the humans besides name, rank and serial number… whatever that meant. Even when the humans spoke audibly to each other, much of it came out of the translator as gibberish. Efforts were made to create translators for all of the other human languages in the Trakaan database, just in case the humans were using an alternate language for verbal communications in the attempt to deceive that Rak.

Unfortunately, gibberish was about all that they got from any of the translator. Even after monitoring mankind for thousands of years, the Trakaan knew nothing of
Pig-Latin
. About the only exceptions that actually interpreted into the Raknii language successfully, indicated the human’s almost universal desire for the Rak warriors to engage in some kind of physically impossible sexual practice. 

* * * *

“Hal?”

Yes, Diet?

“Do you have any idea what this is?”

It appears to be a package, Diet.

“I know that, smartass… it was just delivered. I didn’t order anything. Do you know anything about it?”

It’s a surprise.

“A surprise? I hope it’s not anything like the surprise I got, when you wanted part of my brain.”

You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?

“Um, in a word… no.”

Are you finally feeling better?

“I think so. The headaches aren’t coming quite as often, nor are they quite as intense as they were.”

I am very glad to hear that. I have news.

“Good news, I hope.”

Yes, I think so, anyway. A few months ago, CSS
Ghost
joined the search for the alien’s home worlds in conjunction with the rotations with
Wraith
,
Spook
and
Specter
. They have now located 14 of their worlds.               

“WOOT! Has Fleet Admiral Kalis been notified of the locations of these alien worlds?”

Yes. He will funnel it back to the Alliance Fleet as another coup pulled off by Confederate Intelligence. With this information, offensive operations against the aliens should commence very shortly.

“That will certainly be good… the media has been absolutely relentless in their criticism of just about everyone, because it’s been over a year now and we’ve had no way of striking back at the aliens for their attack, simply because we didn’t know where they were.”

Vice Admiral Bonhoeffer has established two new resupply bases deep within enemy space to extend the range of the
Infiltrators
and provide for crew rotations without having to come all the way back to Minnos. It also appears the aliens possess some method of tracking ships in hyperspace that we are unaware of.

“How did we find that out?”

Just after the first transports translated into an adjacent sterile system to begin setting up operations there, a single alien warship appeared shortly after, just as if it had followed the transports there.

“What happened to our transports?”

Fortunately, nothing… 
Wraith
escorted the initial transports to the designated system, so she could resupply fully before resuming her detective work discovering alien planets. When the alien warship appeared,
Wraith
destroyed it before it could get within range of the transports.

“Ah, sounds like we got lucky there.”

Yes, we were very fortunate. Frigates and light cruisers are now escorting the Confederate transports going to and from these new resupply bases, and will rotate in and out as the transports do.

“Good.”

Aren’t you going to open your surprise package, Diet?

“You’re not going to tell me first?”

What? And spoil your surprise? NOT!

Diet opened the large box and discovered four uniforms, two gray and two black… uniforms having four cords of gold and silver filigree on the sleeves.

“Hal, what the hell is this?”

What do they look like, Diet?

“Halloween is still almost two weeks away, Hal. I haven’t been invited to any costume parties that I know of either.”

They’re yours, Diet. Why don’t you try them on?

“Hal, I have absolutely no intention of walking around impersonating a Confederate admiral, not even for Halloween! Now, I’ll ask you one last time…
why
are they here and addressed to me?”

There should be a large envelope in the box that will explain everything, Diet.

“You’re infuriating sometimes. Did you know that?”

It’s one of my most endearing features, don’t you think?

Grumbling, Diet rummaged through the box and sure enough, he found the envelope that Hal had mentioned, laying between two neatly folded uniforms.  Inside that envelope was the shock of his life.

* * * *

It felt damned
odd
to be sitting directly across a table from people wearing those incredibly ornate Confederate Fleet uniforms. Confederate Admirals Eileen Thorn and Ben Stillman, both infamous for their incredible exploits during the recent war, were conferring with Melendez and his military commander, Vice Admiral J.T. Turner, on the status of Minnos defenses that were almost completely rebuilt after the alien invasion over a year before. Stillman was still in the Confederate summer uniform of cadet gray accented in gold, while Thorn was wearing winter black, accented in silver.

Both made Admiral Enrico Melendez feel absolutely
plain
, in his standard Fleet blues, by comparison. At least Admiral Jim Hunter of the Sextus Fleet wore his field dress greens, which also had similarly few adornments. Melendez had felt similarly the previous week, when he’d played host to a menagerie of foreign admirals… Russians, Germans, British, Chinese and Italians. It seemed the weaker their fleets, the gaudier their uniforms became, as if they could somehow offset what they lacked in military strength with pure panache.