Fear the Future (The Fear Saga Book 3) (48 page)

Interval L: Callback

No one on the Council had really expected an exoneration from the difficult topic they had stumbled into, but were one to come, they definitely had not expected it from Princess Lamati. But the princess’s expression spoke not of forgiveness, not of a hangman’s reprieve, but of a tightening of the noose, and Quavoce cringed inside as she explained her idea. “There is a clause in the Colonization Treaty that can be applied here, should we all think it appropriate.”

They waited, and she smiled. It was not a pretty smile, and Quavoce was reminded of why he had never succumbed to her proposals in the softer moments, when she could be so enticing. For this person here, this was the real Princess Lamati, this woman now saying, “The treaty allows, once battle is entered, for the appropriation of military assets should any contingent no longer be able to control its own forces.”

They all stared at her. She shrugged. “Well, we are faced with a tough choice, a harsh reality. If we are to balance the thrust to mass ratio, we must, unfortunately, cut a portion of the transports lose, 12.37% of them, by my PM’s calculations. Given that, I propose a way to recover a large portion of that shortfall with minimal effect on the contingents gathered here, a step that is fully legal under the Colonization Treaty.”

He saw the next part coming now, like an approaching crash, slow-motion, inevitable, as she went on. “I can prove it is legal, what I propose, simply by saying it here, in the presence of all the Council members capable of attending, and under the Arbite’s ever-watchful eye. Given that battle has now officially been joined, and that now the Yallans find themselves incapable of managing their own forces effectively, the treaty states that we are within our rights to appropriate the remaining Yallan military units. It also states that any contingent’s damaged transports may be cut free if it is deemed that they are impeding the overall success of the mission.”

There. She had said it. She waited. It had been a gamble, but her legal AIs had been very clear. The treaty allowed it. They all waited for a moment for a reaction from the Arbite, a lightning bolt from their self-imposed omniscient being.

It did not come, and as they sat there even Quavoce knew that he would have trouble standing against a resolution whose alternative would, no doubt, include sacrifices on the part of his own fleet to make up for the shortfall.

There was a moment’s impromptu silence for what they all, in their hearts, knew would be an inevitability in the face of the Yallan’s absence, but one among them, Shtat, was silent for another reason. Why had he not been told about this by his advisors? Why had he not been warned by Marta and the others? He had assumed, at the outset, that they had not seen whatever the Lamat, Kyryl, Eltoloman, and Mantilatchi had.

But now, given the note from them that he now reread, that seemed unlikely. “… in the event of a proposed fleet reduction by force, we propose that you support that.”

Had they known about this? What else did they know? What else were they keeping from him? But as the meeting continued to unfold, the rest of the meeting’s little surprises would leave his advisors as blindsided as anyone else.

Across the space, Quavoce allowed his disappointment to show. Not in the other members of the Council, but in himself. So, this was it then, thought Quavoce, this was the beginning of the infighting. He had known it would come. It had been as inevitable as the wind, but he had another little factoid to share as well. Another ditty to add to the list of ramifications that would be tied to this unholy day.

After his state’s AMs and war committee had completed their analysis with their usual efficiency, the following discussion had not gone the route of the amputation of the rest of the helpless Yallan contingent’s colony ships. If it had he would have tried to stop it. Sar had not been so circumspect.

Now, the Mantilatchi PM had begun feeding this new option into its models, grinding them through algorithmic cogs to press out the future of this new course.

After it was done, it told Quavoce what he needed to know, and he spoke up.

“It is a … creative solution, Princess. No doubt about that. One that, I fear, will prove all too compelling. But I am afraid that even that, alone, will not be enough to balance the shortfall,” he said.

He was struggling to hold eye contact with his fellow Council members, but this next thought he had to share, this next idea. For this specked more of what he had come for, of military strategy, of the stroke and counter-stroke that he loved so dearly.

“Even with the Yallan contingent … repurposed, we would need a supplementary strategy to allow the bulk of the fleet to stop at Earth. And, as we analyze our new situation, it also seems that such an alternative plan might be prudent given our new understanding of our enemy’s true military capabilities.”

All were listening intently as he said now, the fire returning to his eyes, “For as we look to equalize our fleet’s braking capacity, we could also let a portion of our fighting fleet go, maybe even a large part of it, removing its main thruster to retain for our own deceleration. Then we could drop those craft at our target.”

“Without their main engines they would fly right past,” said Shtat.

“Yes,” said Sar, her eyes alight with appreciation for the plan’s brilliance. She was staring at Quavoce with an affection that made him, and To-Henton, uncomfortable, as she went on, “but they would get there in half the time, drastically reducing the human’s remaining preparation time. They could eradicate the human’s defenses as they pass by and then we could come in and take control, as originally planned.”

“Indeed, Princess,” said Quavoce, meeting her eyes. He could not criticize her ability to get to the crux of a situation. And nor could he really fault her for her idea to sacrifice the Yallans, as he then said, “I wish I could say that this idea negates the need to eliminate the Yallan transports, but, actually, that significantly increases the number of attack craft we could send. Given our situation, I am sad to say, I fear we will have to do both, or face cuts across the board.”

He looked around once more. War was not supposed to be clean. Choices must be made, lives would be forfeit. If his own state had been the one weakened by the attack, he would have fully expected the others to seek to feast on his carcass, and he was sure the Yallans’ fangs would have been just as bloody as the rest of them if that had been the case.

These were not his friends, these were his temporary allies, at best, the enemies of his nation’s enemies. He settled his conscience by telling himself that his plan, his contribution, would allow them to properly thank the humans for their gift. Yes, thought Quavoce with a militant indignation, they would answer the missile-mine strike with a horde of weaponized Skalms, flown with vengeance, and arriving at Earth a full year before the humans expected them.

Interval M: A Painful Divorce

By design, the orders came without warning and without discussion. They surged out from the Arbite itself, flowing through the fleet with irresistible edict and went into immediate effect, setting the plan in motion before anyone had time to question them.

With the Arbite’s stamp of approval, the legitimacy of the action could not be questioned. The Yallan AMs were the first to feel it. Suddenly they were full of the sting of countermanded authority being ripped away from them as overriding parameters baked into their design were called to task by the one entity empowered to activate them.

With the Yallan PM damaged in the assault, the Arbite was able to start pulling its military AMs from it while the remnants of the Yallan leadership started shouting in protest. But the calls flooding in from the directors of Third Yalla, Wholly Owned Subsidiary of the Yallan Corporation, were routed straight to the Arbite’s equivalent of voice mail and it moved forward regardless, their vote having already been muted by overriding Council rule.

Now the new order started to show its first physical effects. The squadron of Skalms along the Yallan part of the fleet’s vanguard started to waken to something other than their role in the Armada’s diminished deceleration. It started as a faint warble, a clearing of throats as they were imbued with pilot minds, minds receiving very specific orders.

Once ready, the squadron began moving in concert. They had targets now, real targets, but even though those targets were behind them they did not turn upon them directly. Instead they disconnected their own interlocking arms and began wafting outward, ferrying out to the border of the Armada’s great discus. From there they used their now untethered power to slow themselves more vehemently than the great fleet and began to push themselves backward relative to it.

All this time, their engines remained pointing forward, into the void, tweaking only in minuscule vibrato tremors as they played with the balance of power to shift themselves relative to the fleet’s mass. Now, as they fell back, they began to move inward, along the borders of the Yallan contingent.

Their engines, still firing hard, were soon turned into hot scalpels falling across the nanotube spars that intersected the various ships of the flotilla, and slowly the Yallan sector was cut free.

The flow of dispute from the Yallan command grew in volume as the next step became apparent. They had been moving in subspace for the two days since the attack. Their engines still had bite here, but only a fraction of the power they wielded in the real universe. It was enough to give them a momentum gain in the usually kinetically balanced gravitational slingshot of stellar translation, but they would soon have to shift back into reality if they were going to give their cosmic brakes the grip they needed to bring them to a halt at their destination.

First though, as the vitriol and protest from the Yallans grew to a desperate crescendo, they would cut this gangrenous limb from their body.

Inside the Yallan sector, the last of the Yallans’ newly repossessed fleet craft were busily deserting their former masters, either moving outward across the still smoldering canyon that was now opening up between it and the rest of the fleet, or moving inward to one of the Yallans’ fifteen massive carrier craft, still firing into the blackness with their own mammoth stellar thrusters, the true horsepower of the deceleration.

But it was the huge subspace actuators inside those carrier craft that made them truly exceptional. It was those immense actuators that were generating the interlocking translation bubble around the Armada, along with the others dotted throughout it. As the last of the repair bots and tug ships moved inward to bond with the hulls of the heavily armored carrier craft, the order went out.

The carefully hewn, beautifully synchronized chord that was the overlaid subspace spheres being generated around the Armada changed in tone now. It did not change gradually, one moment it was one note, the next the harmony was entirely and spectacularly different, as the carrier ships in and around the doomed Yallan sector morphed it instantly into a new format.

The change was most drastic for the carrier ships in the heart of the Yallan sector, where they drew their enveloping shields suddenly inward, snapping them from vast, encompassing umbrellas, to tight shielding orbs, surrounding only their own hulls and the small cloud of sheltering fleet craft they had each just gained.

The effect was instantaneous. One moment the Yallan sector was there, the next it was not, leaving only fourteen of their fifteen carrier craft in the yawning gap left in the Armada, like smoothed bare islands left in the center of a gorge after a flash flood has scrubbed the countryside clean.

In truth, though, the Yallan sector’s colony ships had not disappeared; they had reappeared, in a flash, dropped back into reality like a screaming infant born into a harsh, unwelcoming world. The Yallan high commanders, what was left of them after several key members had been drafted into fleet service along with their military units, tried to analyze their new paradigm, looking for any sign of hope after this horrific betrayal by their own brethren.

But as they looked to their shockingly diminished force, they were surprised to see a good-sized contingent of Skalms had also joined them, along with one of their precious carrier craft. Their Prime Mind, injured and weakened, tried to reach out to the units, but they were not responding. Were they damaged, perhaps, thought the chairman of Third Yalla, still barely healthy herself but fighting through her injuries to address this cataclysmic shift in her fortunes. Was that why she had been left these few craft in the darkness, these limited life rafts for her scuttled ship?

“Yallan carrier ship, please give us your status,” said the chairman, speaking through the system and instructing the PM to broadcast by any means still available to it. “Yallan carrier, Skalm units, please respond. This is the chairman of Third Yalla, Council member for the Yallan Corporation asking, no,
ordering
you to respond immediately.”

She waited, then tried again, but to no avail. Hopes that these craft might be damaged remnants of their own fleet, and so might be friendly, were starting to fade as the units now began to move with purpose. While the carrier kept to a safe distance from the slowly rotating raft of colony ships, the Skalms started to move into position, interlocking with the slice of life that had been cut out of the Armada and bringing its lazy rotation to a halt.

They still refused to answer calls though, calls from a Yallan leader desperately trying to remain optimistic. Their silence was ominous as they positioned the block of ships and settled them. Then there was a moment of silence, a moment where all the survivors aboard the colony ships held their breath and waited, hoping against hope that there might be some reprieve from this terrible fate they had suddenly been assigned.

But their only answer would prove just as confusing as the lack of communication from the mysterious fleet outside their walls sprang to life once more, giving the colony ships one more seemingly fractional nudge before separating again and returning to the carrier ship waiting to one side.

Concern and fear driving her to hysteria, the Yallan chairman was now screaming. “What are you doing, you bastards? What are you doing to us?” The message went out through every radio, subspace, and laser-beamed comms the PM had managed to string together in the last few fraught minutes. “Where are you going? What more do you want from us, you goddamned fucking sons of bitch motherfu …”

And with that, the carrier ship, without comment or valediction, spread its subspace wings and sucked itself and its complement of Skalms back into the beyond, leaving the Yallan leader to curse into the blackness while her PM quietly calculated the terrible final purpose the Skalms had just consigned them to.