Extremis (50 page)

(Dismissal.) “Do not concern yourself there,
Holodah’kri.
Mretlak is but a little fish in all these waves and troughs. Just yesterday he sent another request for a meeting, even though he had ‘nothing momentous’ to report. He is a functionary, over his head, and I do not think the Council will know how to use him—but nor will they make a gift of him to Ankaht. So he is too small a variable for us to include in our calculations.”

“Very well. I had been worried that, with his special access to restricted human materials, he might perhaps be facilitating and accelerating the speed with which Ankaht is able to disseminate a more sympathetic cultural understanding of the
griarfeksh
.”

Torhok offered (disinterest) and replied, “There is no evidence that Mretlak has been any kind of information conduit for Ankaht up to this point. But either way, that situation has slipped too far beyond control for us to worry ourselves over such minutiae. What is more ominous is that Ankaht’s researchers have started going into the human community—with help from the humans she still has. Together, they are getting access to books from public libraries, universities, even schools for the very young.”

Urkhot twitched his major tentacles on both clusters. “Can we not control these sources of…disinformation?”

Torhok grunted and signaled (flat negation, futility, resignation). “Out of the question. There are too many of these book repositories, dispersed all over the planet. And this does not take private collections into account. Amongst these humans, the distribution of key documents, histories, and information is almost as wide and diverse as the population itself.”

Urkhot mused darkly. “So if we cannot stop the speed with which this sewage of lies and disinformation is rising…”

Torhok sent (conviction). “Then we must cut the pipeline that has brought this pollution into our community. It started harmlessly enough—just a trickle around our ankles. But now it is gushing in, up to our necks, and threatens to drown us all. In short, brother
’kri
, I think I must now take a direct hand in stopping it once and for all, and, along with you, sever this polluting pipeline—before any more treasonous poison can come gushing out of it.”

Urkhot was suddenly (troubled). “Senior Admiral. The Death-Vowed were volunteers. True, they had long ago given me their hearts, and so it was easy to get their ears and convince them that their deed would be for the good of our race. But I remained out of the planning. Carefully and completely out of the planning. In contrast, what you are talking about now is, is—”

“Execution.”

“No. It is premeditated murder.”

“Murder is what civilians do,
Holodah’kri
. We are all soldiers fighting a war. And we have an enemy—a traitor—in our midst. When you kill under those circumstances, it is not murder. It is execution.”

Urkhot wrung his clusters together. “What would the Council say if they knew?”

“I do not know. But in the years to come, subsequent Councils will say only one thing.”

“What is that?”

“They will thank us for taking action when others were too timid—for being the saviors of our race.”

“Do you think they’ll say this of us? Really?”

Torhok carefully concealed his contempt for the priest. “Certainly. Particularly of you. Now let me nap.”

16

Presuppositions Perturbed

Injury, violation, exploitation, annihilation, cannot be wrong in themselves, for life essentially presupposes injury, violation, exploitation, and annihilation.
—Nietzsche

Arduan SDH
Shem’pter’ai
, Main Van, Expeditionary Fleet of the
Anaht’doh Kainat
, Treadway System

Narrok flicked a
selnarm
tendril toward his sensor prime as they came within ten light-seconds of the Treadway system’s Desai limit. “Any sign of human craft?”

“None, Admiral Narrok. We have apparently—” And then the prime’s
selnarm
emission became momentarily sublexical: (hold, change, data) he pulsed in a sequence so fast that it was almost one thought.

Three
murn
-colored icons flashed into existence in the holotank at the same instant that the prime identified them. “Three human vessels, sir. All light cruisers. On a high-speed intercept course.”

Narrok paused: that he had not expected. He double-checked the plot: no planets nearby, no emissions that suggested a new human cloaking technology concealing a flotilla. He had had his fighters scour the light-hour of space surrounding the warp point that was his route of withdrawal back into the Mercury system relentlessly. No, there was no chance that this was some kind of ruse, that another human force was nearby. It was just three human cruisers heading directly for his immense fleet at their best speed. They could not reasonably hope to ram his vessels or get close enough to explode a widely destructive warhead akin to that which the humans deployed in their AMBAMMs. Therefore, this suicidal rush by three light ships made no sense.

But Narrok’s course of action—and duty—was unconfused by the perplexing behavior of the human craft. “Targeting solutions?”

“Calculated and locked, sir.”

“Range?”

“Forty-eight light-seconds and closing.”

“SDHs
Memref
,
Tumpep’f
,
Herres
forward to engage. Fleet signal: maintain best uniform speed.”

“Yes, Admi—the humans are reversing course, sir!”

And so they were…in a manner of speaking. The three
murn
icons had come to a complete halt. Then they started moving again, but now they were veering off in three radically different directions, mostly aiming themselves directly up out of the system’s ecliptic plane.

Odd
, thought Narrok. But obeying his general orders and taking advantage of an easy kill had priority over—and compelled him to put aside—the faint curiosity aroused by what the unprecedented human scattering might portend. In the tacplot, this three fastest SDHs were closing on the light cruisers.

“Lock confirmed. Missile launch,” his operations prime signaled.

Somewhere out in space, too far ahead for it to be detected with the unaided eye, the bows of Narrok’s three pursuing SDHs had sent forth a rippling sheet of flame that quickly resolved into a dense spread of missiles. The human ships weaved slowly in the tacplot. Another, more faint
murn
-colored icon appeared briefly, then flickered away: a sensor ghost generated by a human ship’s image-making ECM package. None of the Arduan missiles were distracted from their target icons.

Ten seconds later, those target icons faded, changed to a dark
crivan
color, and were then blanked from the holoplot. “Enemy vessels destroyed,” affirmed Narrok’s tactical prime.

But Narrok kept staring at the plot. The tactical prime’s
selnarm
touched his deferentially. “Admiral, you seem—distracted.”

“I am, Prime. Tell me. What do you think those human ships were trying to do?”

The Prime groomed his
selnarm
and responded carefully. “One cannot always ascribe reason to the actions of
griarfeksh
, Admiral Narrok. For they are not true thinking beings, after all.”

Narrok gave no response. It would take time, even in his own fleet, to wean his crews away from such propaganda. Instead, he poked a lesser tentacle at the glimmering silver-white hoop from which his own fleet had lately emerged. “They were going there, Tactical. To the Mercury warp point. Without question.”

“With respect, sir, they were headed straight toward us.”

“Were they? Look at their course trajectory: straight out of the inner system to the warp point. Not the smallest bit of deviation. We just happened to lie right along that line.”

The tactical prime looked again and, as if throwing off a cloak of orthodoxy, seemed to see the plot anew. “Yes,” he affirmed after a few seconds, “and our sensors clearly detected them before they detected us—which was why they seemed at first to be on an intercept course but then suddenly pulled away, as if they were surprised by our presence.”

“Yes, they pulled sharply away from us—but not
directly
away from us.” Narrok looked at the three vermillion icons of his returning SDHs, watched them reapproach the system’s ecliptic. “The human cruisers could have turned 180 degrees, possibly made us chase them all the way across the system to one of the other warp points. But rather than choose the most promising escape option, they angled up out of the ecliptic.”

The tactical prime (agreed, wondered). “Why would they do such a thing, Admiral?”

Narrok looked back toward the inner system and understood. “Because however much they feared us, they feared something coming from the other direction even more.” He opened his
selnarm
wide. “Operations Prime, the van of the Fleet is to deploy for broad engagement. Assign twenty SDHs—with the latest generation cloaking systems—to follow us at a range of twenty light-seconds as our hidden rearguard. As soon as our lead elements cross the Desai limit, fighter patrols are to launch immediately to establish a hundred light-second picket radius. The van is on us. Helm Prime, take us directly toward the main world—flank speed.”

* * *

Narrok was not sure—or, more accurately, could not believe—what he was witnessing until his advance elements had drawn within thirty light-seconds of Treadway. Two small auxiliaries, modified for maximum speed and carrying cloaking systems, observed what was transpiring in the vicinity of the human world, recorded it, and sent it back to the Fleet as quick, fluttering laser pulses and
selnarm
bursts.

These were instantly decoded and integrated by the powerful computers on board the
Shem’pter’ai
and projected into the bridge’s holoplot. The human world of Treadway—a mottled orb of browns, blues, and occasional green—appeared in the tank, turning slowly. In orbit around it were a large array of indigo-colored icons: ships unknown to the computer, and thus, unknown the Children of Illudor. But there was no mistaking the activity of the ships: they were bombarding several sites on the planet. There was no evidence of active opposition, or even defense.

The tactical prime edged closer, sent, “Are the
griarfeksh
fighting amongst themselves? Even though news of our threatening approach must have reached them, might they still—?”

But the question died before the prime could finish projecting it: a cluster of yellow spheres bloomed on the planet surface.

“Immense explosions, sir,” explained the sensor prime. “I estimate their nominal yields to be—”

And then the yellow globes became black, then yellow again, then black: they pulsed their dire message out to the silent bridge.

“Illudor’s tears,” breathed the tactical prime. “Nuclear detonations.”

“Over twenty megatons each,” confirmed the sensor prime.

The mysterious ships altered their orbit slightly, leisurely—and struck again: a new crop of yellow, then black, spheres sprouted in the center of the planet’s largest land mass.

Narrok swallowed; his throat was so dry he almost gagged. “What have the ships been targeting, Sensor Prime?”

The sensor prime visibly trembled before he sent his response. “No targets of military value that we can detect, Admiral. The impact points are centered on—on population centers.”

Narrok stared, shocked beyond comprehension. “No shipyards or facilities of any kind?”

“No, sir. But we have intercepted this communication from one of the ground sites.”

The sensor prime lifted a slow tentacle toward one of his bridge display screens. After a moment, the static resolved into a disheveled human male, his head’s top-fur in disarray, his face smudged, a blasted room tilted oddly behind him. Smoke hung in the air; fires could be seen through shattered windows. The man was screaming something, and although Narrok was no expert at discriminating among the chaotic array of human facial expressions, this male was clearly desperate, fearful, pleading. Then billows of flame geysered into the room, filling it; scintillant plasma rushed in a moment later, and the flesh of the human’s body seemed to be flashing away from his bones—just as the video feed flared and died.

Narrok discovered that he was rasping his grinders together so hard that it was audible. “Sensor Prime, the ships in orbit—are they
human
ships?”

“Admiral, I cannot tell if— No! Intelligence has just finished correlating the data on their drives. The tuner signatures of the unidentified ships are not consistent with human drives, nor are the shape and bias of the reactionless envelopes they generate.”

“Could they be ships from one of the other human polities—the Republic or the Union?”

“Not if our comparative technical intelligence on their ships is accurate, sir. And these ships’ communication frequencies—both microwave and laser—seem to be modulated in a manner inconsistent with human equipment.”

Narrok looked at the plot again, watched the unidentified ships begin to spawn smaller motes that plunged planetside. Within moments, a patch of smaller, but more numerous yellow-black-yellow blooms erupted on the surface. Narrok narrowed his eyes. “Operations.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Take us in.”

Tangri SD
Styr’car’hsux
, Raiding Fleet of the Dagora Horde, Treadway Orbit

Not even the military technocrats of the Confederation Fleet Command had succeeded in imposing a rationalistic rank structure on the Tangri—not that their hearts had ever really been in the attempt, for they were Tangri themselves. So Atylycx’s title was simply fleet leader. And in theory, he wasn’t even acting for the CFC at all, but for the Dagora Horde, to which he belonged. Not that he felt any particular identification with it, for it was one of the synthetic “New Hordes.” Some of the members—notably Hrufely, the horde’s
anak
, or chieftain—actually took the farce seriously. They were the ones who gave the horde its reputation for stupidity. Atylycx didn’t care about the stereotype; he knew what the real purpose of the deception was.

Now he stood, all four legs squarely planted in front of the viewscreen, and watched the nuclear rash spread across the tortured face of Treadway. He could have gotten a more precise appreciation from a computer simulation. But that would have been no substitute for this deeply satisfying spectacle.