Extremis (80 page)

Amunherh’peshef tapped a sharp claw on the table. “Then what do you recommend, Councilor Mretlak?”

“Containment of the human Resistance. And then—strangely—the guarding of it.”

“What? I do not understand.”

“Consider. In containing the Resistance, we neutralize their ability to make a sweeping response to any atrocities by the radicals. In simultaneously guarding the Resistance, we also show our general interest in mediating the harshness of our occupation, and our specific resolve to protect them against
Destoshaz
extremists. If the humans become aware of our struggle to protect them, it might make them more amenable to negotiating with us.”

“Which would furnish me with an opportunity—perhaps—to make successful contact through our lesser translators,” added Ankaht.

The Council was still and then began polling opinions. Narrok, detached, felt the deliberations flow around him and let the various councilors read his thoughts and assessments like a book propped open for their convenience.

Amunherh’peshef stood. “It is decided then. Admiral Narrok will spare no effort to halt the advance of the human fleets. We will attempt to contain—and protect—the human Resistance here on New Ardu. Mretlak, have you been able to determine their location?”

Mretlak sent (assurance). “There seem to be two bases. By tracking their flow of logistical needs, particularly those relating to electronics, my Counter-Insurgency Prime Lentsul has narrowed their location down to two regions 100 kilometers square, each…”

* * *

Lentsul watched the live feed from the Council Chamber and could not repress the thrill he felt when Mretlak credited him with locating the Resistance bases. In actuality, it had been a joint effort, but Mretlak was uncommonly generous to his subordinates.

Arriving at the doorway to the office Lentsul now shared with Mretlak, Lentsul’s assistant Emz’hem send a tendril of
selnarm
at him, inquiring. It was a tender tendril, somewhat desperate and forlorn, darkly fixated on the bittersweet rejection it anticipated from him. Lentsul responded, discomfited by this contact even more than Emz’hem’s customary shadings of unrequited love. “Yes?”

“Good Lentsul, I felt your—pleasure. Has Overseer Mretlak relayed the approximate location of the Resistance bases to the Council?”

“Yes, yes.” Lentsul tried not to be snappish, but it was difficult. The memory of strong, passionate Heshfet was like a constant reproach to the ineffectual passivity of Emz’hem. “Why do you ask?”

“I know it was important to you,” Emz’hem answered simply, “and also that it means that your estimates passed Mretlak’s independent review of the inferential data. Which means they were also confirmed by preliminary orbital reconnaissance.”

Lentsul sent affirmation. “Yes, we’ve finally got the Resistance pinned down. We’ve done good work, you and I. Why do you not cease your labors for this day, Emz’hem? They will always be here when you return in the morning.”

“Thank you, good Lentsul. I will do as you suggest. Perhaps when you are done…you might wish to join me?”

There it was again: that same pathetic longing, bleeding out around and through her
selnarm
like sweat out of distended pores. What was it that she—she, a
Destoshaz
—saw in a small
Ixturshaz
like himself? It made her even more contemptible, somehow—but he resolved to be kind. “Regrettably, I am unable to comply with your request. I must log the recording of the Council session immediately, and so will be working late this evening.” He congratulated himself for being the very epitome of charm in constructing this suave demurral.

“I see,” sent Emz’hem and withdrew, her
selnarm
trailing injury and longing like a wounded animal bleeding during mating season.

Resistance Regional Headquarters, Charybdis Islands, Bellerophon/New Ardu

McGee was sitting on the edge of their bed when Jen returned from dropping Zander off with one of his ‘aunts’ among the former abductees. She started when she saw him. “Well, you’re home early. Our date doesn’t start until—Sandro? What’s wrong?”

McGee had learned a great deal about how to be a better communicator, particularly with his fiancée, but he grimly acknowledged that he had made almost no progress in the fine art of approaching a topic obliquely. “Jen, the amateur astronomers coordinated by Toshi Springer have detected changes in the Arduan satellite grid.”

Jen came to sit on the bed next to him and put her slender hands over the great hairy fists that were knotted in his lap. “What kind of changes?”

“The Arduans have retasked their satellites, changed their orbits. To fixed lookdown positions. Pretty much right overhead here, and at the main base in the Aeolian Lowlands, back on Icarus. We also confirmed reports that the Arduans were poking around our old virtual training facility in Upper Thessalaborea. They’re looking for us, Jen, and from what you’ve told me of them, they’re going to find us—very soon now.”

She nodded somberly. “Yes, once they decide something is important, they’re both clever and relentless. And so now I’m guessing everyone here is pushing for an all-out attack. Again.”

“They’ve got to, Jen. All the rank and file know that the debriefings ended months ago, so there’s no basis for claiming we’re still gathering intelligence. We’ve got all the intel we’re going to get, and the gruntiest grunt of us knows it. And everyone’s been getting cabin fever. You can’t have a Resistance movement that doesn’t resist the enemy.”

Jen looked up at McGee, who suddenly wished that they had gotten married the same day he had proposed. “Sandro, who’s making the attack plan?”

“Cap Peters and Chong, with tactical input from me. They’re going after Melantho, like we discussed. And it’s going to be a bloodbath—on both sides.”

“They’re not going to wait for the Fleet?”

McGee shook his head. “They can’t—not anymore. There’s too much unrest, too much impatience. And now, with the Arduans coming so close in their search for us—”

“But what about hostages? Will the attack at least try to take hostages—or prisoners? If we could just get our hands on Ankaht—”

“Jen, no one really sees any value to that option now. Taking hostages is a delicate operation. It puts a lot of added risk on our side—and for what? You yourself argued that there was no value in taking the Council hostage. Besides, we’ve come to a point in this war where it may simply boil down to kill or be killed. No quarter asked, no quarter given.”

Jen stopped as McGee uttered those concluding words. She stared off intently for a second. Then her eyes turned back toward him; a smile played at the corners of her mouth. “You know,” she said, “I’ve just changed my mind. Maybe taking hostages isn’t such a bad idea after all. Just so long as it’s done correctly.…”

Punt City, New Ardu/Bellerophon

Iakkut stood. “And so we have access to the nuclear warheads?”

“It is so,
Destoshaz’at
.” Former-Councilor Mahes sent his (affirmative, savor, exultation) along with the ancient formula of address reserved for the caste’s high warlord: a position and title that had last been used half a millennium before the Dispersal of Sekamahnt. “We have secured the cooperation of most of the security forces in possession of our bombardment munitions. Most of the others will stand aside. The few that resist will be overwhelmed so quickly, they will not have time to act.”

“And you are confident that you can deliver the two strikes in a convincing sequence?”

“Absolutely,
Destoshaz’at
. The first strike will come from our craft and annihilate the two
griarfeksh
bases—once we have located them. The second strike will appear to be a wave of
griarfeksh
reprisals—by secretly planted nuclear munitions—against all our remaining outreach installations in the major
griarfeksh
cities.”

“It is imperative that no race-loyal Arduan be killed in this second strike:
griarfeksh
and race-traitors only. We will need all our true-hearted brothers and sisters to help us control the planet—and the Fleet—after we strike.”

“
Destoshaz’at
, you need have no fear of killing the race-loyal among the Children of Illudor.
However, arranging the ‘reprisal strike’ here in Melantho itself did present us with some difficulties. We have no way of evacuating all our race-loyal brothers in time.”

“No matter. I presume you have planted smaller warheads here, have you not?”

“Yes. None larger than fifteen kilotons. And all in the south-central area just east of the Heliobarbus District.”

“Why there?”

“It is more than a mile from Salamisene Bay. The initial shock and plasma emissions of the detonations will first have to sweep away the dense urban areas—”

“—and thus will be greatly diminished by the time they reach the Bay’s open waters. And so will not flash across and reach us here in Punt.”

“Not much,
Destoshaz’at
.”

“The plan is well-conceived and sound. I could not hope for more. Our Martyr-Brothers Torhok and Urkhot would be proud. The
griarfeksh
will be incensed against us. Those of our brothers who can still be reclaimed will join us in exterminating them. We will naturally ensure that the
griarfeksh
fleets hear of this. They will feel compelled to attack before they are ready, to save their
zheteksh
littermates—and so our immense defenses will have a singular opportunity to deal them a crippling blow in space, as well.” Iakkut stood. “And now, you must excuse me. I have further business to attend to.”

Selnarms
slid against each other in sly appreciation of the innuendo: they all knew the nature of Iakkut’s next business.

Eager to be the first to open the door, Mahes led the way out.

Waiting just beyond the doorway was a
Destoshaz
female, eyes down in shame, yellow-mud colored in embarrassment and strange excitement.

Mahes went past her, staring. As did all the rest. When they were gone, she entered the room, slide-shuffling toward Iakkut. Coming near him, the tentacles of her left cluster writhed fitfully toward the
Destoshaz’at
, then retracted. She looked up, looked away, her
selnarm
tortured and desperate, striving toward his yet also somewhat repulsed. Timidly, she sent: “Shall we join now?”

“Not yet. You have information for me?”

Iakkut smelled how her mating musk redoubled as he held her off, made her wait upon the resolution of the business that had brought them together in the first place. She had been exactly what he—what the entire
Destoshaz’ai-
as
-sulhaji
movement—had needed: an informer inside the cadres that helped the Council with its deliberations and planning. But that had only been half of what made her ideal. The other half was her low sense of self, her
selnarm
troubled by a constant ache of loss or rejection—Iakkut could not tell which and hardly cared. For a
Destoshaz
, she was contemptibly weak: providing information from arch-traitor Mretlak’s so-called military-intelligence section only made her doubly deserving of scorn. She had gone to work for a traitor and had become, in time, a traitor within his ranks. That she seemed to find titillation in the brusque treatment Iakkut showed her here—and in his mating pod—only served to make her a perfectly disposable and depersonalized object for the movement’s purposes and his own dark passions.

He felt her
selnarm
reach out toward his; he ignored it, and smelled the musk become thicker as a result. “The information?”

“What—what do you wish to know?” Her mating urge had obviously addled her wits. She was intelligent, but in the limited way of persons who are only gifted with manipulating set quantities and bases of knowledge: activities which reward maximum focus and minimal imagination.

“You know the information we need, Emz’hem,” Iakkut said, making her work for his compliance.

“The coordinates for the Resistance bases—that is what you want most, yes?” Emz’hem’s agitated
selnarm
writhed and bulged like an animal straining to get outside its own skin.

“Yes. What do you know?”

“Lentsul does not know the exact positions. But he and Mretlak have narrowed their locations to these two map grids.…”

37

Pendragon in Hell

I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.
—Sherman

TRNS
Li Han
, Allied Fleet, Polo System

Both of the Trevaynes turned out to have been right, each in his or her own way.

Li-Trevayne Magda had correctly foreseen that there would be only a handful of operable SDSs in BR-02. There were a surprising number of incomplete ones, festooned with machinery and showing their titanic ribs. But the robot brains of the SBMHAWKs were sophisticated enough to distinguish those from their real targets, and the torrents of missiles raced off to blanket the operable SDSs with rippling sheets of antimatter flame Or so it was hoped. Erica Krishmahnta’s monitors and supermonitors would only begin to emerge after the missiles—and the AMBAMMs—had prepared the ground for them.

But Ian Trevayne had, it seemed, correctly predicted a redeployment of mobile Baldy units to BR-02, judging from the shocking number of heavy superdreadnoughts lurking at some distance from the warp point, protected by belts of minefields. At least that was how it looked: any RD that stayed in BR-02 long enough to get definitive information never returned. In sum, the SDHs and the mines were a vindication that Trevayne could easily have lived without.

Still, he permitted himself to hope that this would be no worse than a repeat of Polo. The Kasugawa generator would soon follow Krishmahnta’s SMTs through the warp point, and the subsequent waves included what was now the standard mix of assault carriers to deal with the Baldy fighters screaming in from the SDSs.

At least that was what Trevayne told himself as he watched the lead elements of Krishmahnta’s oddly named Task Force Vishnu disappear through the warp point.