War Against the White Knights (10 page)

“No,
when
we win. I know we will…” He took a sharp intake of breath. “Springer foresaw it. When we win, will you be ready to bring our child into the universe?”

“No.”

Arun’s heart solidified and then shattered. Everything after this point had depended on her saying yes. What the hell just happened?

Xin’s face softened at the sight of his pain. “Don’t despair so quickly, Arun. Since the dawn of time, I don’t think a single prospective parent has truly been ready. Frakk it! Let’s do it, Arun. When we’ve won, we will quicken this little bump into a new life. Into a little girl.”

Arun picked up Xin and swung her around, laughing like a lunatic until they lifted off the floor and bounced off the bulkhead. She had never told him the gender until now.

“Heaven help our child with parents like us,” he said with a grin.

“Heaven help her with a father like you,” countered Xin playfully. “I’m the only one who remembered we’re on a spaceship with nominal acceleration.”

They kissed. Arun wanted more, much more, but that would have to wait until after the planning conference. He settled for tracing a line with his fingertips along her eyebrows, across her cheek, and down to the nape of her neck. As he looked into her beautiful face he wondered idly what would happen to the embryos Pedro had stored long ago. They were his children too. His and Xin… and Tremayne’s.

“Please don’t force me to be the sensible one,” said Xin.

Arun took a deep breath. “Okay. Colonel Lee, we have to go.”

“Yes, we do.”

They set off for the planning room, walking hand-in-hand.

——

The ‘A’ Fleet commanders in
Vengeance of Saesh’s
planning room contemplated the holo-display, but if any there had hoped the display would yield fresh answers, they could only be disappointed.

The vassal races that comprised the Human Legion had always been denied detailed information on the target system, the holo-display reporting only what they could tell through long-range astronomical instruments. The fleet’s astrogation systems didn’t even have an English-language name for the system, something Indiya had rectified. She named the system Olympus-Ultra and the four planets after Earth rivers. It was on the third planet, an inner gas giant called Euphrates, where the White Knight Emperor claimed his species had evolved. Or, rather, on its huge moon, which Indiya had named Athena.

Somewhere on Athena was the Imperial capital where the Emperor waited helplessly inside the shielded citadel. Capture the Emperor, control the empire.

“It is all very well contemplating the target system,” said Graz, the Tallerman commander, pulling her cupola-like head defensively into her rocky body. “But we have no intelligence on what awaits us there. The risk of an attack is huge.”

“The risk of not attacking is greater still,” said Admiral Kreippil. “Does your courage falter, Lieutenant-General?”

For a moment, Arun thought the Tallerman would use her slab-like fists to strike the Littorane, but she must have thought better of it. “A Tallerman without courage is an oxymoron, Admiral. To suggest otherwise indicates only ignorance. The quality my race lacks is blind optimism.”

The big Littorane went very still.

“General Graz makes a fair statement,” said Aureanus, the representative of the Gliesans, a race of hollow-boned gliders from the low-gee world of Gliese-Pavonis. “We cannot know what awaits us because our reserves are overstretched as it is defending Legion territories. The larger our alliance of planets grows the more points of vulnerability we offer to attackers. And they
are
attacking. Khallini has suffered three major attacks in fifteen years. Next time may be the last one for us. We will not get another chance at to take Olympus-Ultra, and it looks unlikely that our enemies will grant us the luxury of waiting for reinforcements.”

“I disagree,” said Graz. “We could still retreat, consolidate on a bastion of strong worlds, wait and expand when we are stronger.” The Tallerman’s attitude didn’t surprise Arun in the slightest. Stoic defense and fortitude against the years-long winters of their natural habitat on Tallerman-4 was more than cultural: it was their key evolutionary strategy.

“I agree,” said Aureanus. “Both strategies carry risk. We cannot quantify that risk without more intelligence.”

“The only way to acquire intelligence is to send a reconnaissance party to Olympus-Ultra,” said Pedro, who attended senior commander conferences now that several colonies of his people had allied with the Legion. “From our position in the Klin-Tula system, ‘A’ Fleet’s fastest scouts are still thirteen years away from Olympus-Ultra. Not only will a scouting mission cause an unacceptable delay, but our reconnaissance will be spotted and our intention broadcast to the enemy. Let us not waste our time speculating on the makeup of the enemy besiegers. The defensive shield around the Imperial citadel on Athena has so far resisted the constant enemy attempts to cut through. I do not understand the nature of this shield, but whatever makes it resistant to harm also means it is impervious to all forms of sensors or communication other than the instantaneous comm links through entangled chbits, meaning the Emperor cannot see out of his shield any more than we can see in. Outside the shield may wait the largest warfleet the galaxy has ever seen, or it may be that the Emperor is bottled up by a single robot programmed to probe the shield to encourage him to keep it switched on. The true picture is unknowable.”

“Well spoken, my friends,” said Kreippil, blinking furiously at Graz, the Littorane equivalent of a filthy stare. But we do have a critical piece of intelligence about the situation in Olympus-Ultra. Whatever we face, our side in this holy war will be backed by the gods. The signs and portents are there for all but the blindest to see. Has the Legion not overcome every challenge we have yet faced?”

“I hardly think–” began Graz.

“Your very presence before me is evidence that I speak the truth,” Kreippil insisted. “If any but the Legion had attempted to evict the New Empire from your world, even your famously hardy people would be nothing but radioactive dust. The Legion under the leadership of General McEwan and Admiral Indiya continues to outthink the enemy…”

The Littorane admiral turned to Arun and nodded.

This was Arun’s moment to make the rousing speech, to explain the long-laid plan so secret that he hadn’t even mentioned it to the Emperor. But his words wouldn’t come out.

He felt a slap of irritation as Indiya’s freakish mind-talk connected with his brain.
Don’t hesitate Arun, this is your cue. Speak now, like we agreed.

Instead of speaking to the assembly of commanders, Arun’s mind turned inward. A diagram took shape in Arun’s head, as if a miniaturized tactical planning team were painting their suggestions onto the inside of his skull. Whatever the Jotuns had put in his head when he was a kid was working wonders at winning the war, but he worried that it was starting to take him over. Often he would wake from troubled sleep with a revised plan of campaign ready-formulated in his head, as if planted there by some outside agency. When he worked his ideas through the AIs in the planning room, he would invariably recognize the three-dimensional war maps they generated, because he had already dreamed those same maps.

Sometimes, as now, the maps and battle plans that pushed into his mind were more abstract. He was seeing a tactical plan with the Human Legion as a central body preparing to make a frontal assault on the forces besieging the Emperor. But on the metaphorical left flank, instead of their advance being anchored by strong defenses, the Legion was threatened by security lapses. Whether through spies or surveillance devices that remained undetectable to the best Legion brains, the enemy was anticipating Legion plans far too often. Even supply convoys in deep space were being intercepted, something no one could explain.

Arun, this is your chance
, Indiya urged, but he couldn’t free his mind from this stupid diagram, which lurked in his skull like an ambush predator, daring him to speak before leaping at him with its poisonous doubts.

And those misgivings extended beyond the obvious security lapses. In this abstract tactical plan, the Night Hummers were heavily involved in providing advice and guidance to many of his commanders in the field. This overt participation was atypical of the Hummers and he didn’t fully understand what his subconscious was trying to tell him, but he knew there was meaning here somewhere. Experience had proven such insights to be trustworthy, which was more than he could say about the Hummers.

Nor were the Hummers his only concern; there was also Del-Marie Sandure, the man who would once have been here at the planning conference as a matter of course: Arun’s mouthpiece, tying the alliance together into a single purpose. But Del had been on that Amilxi ship. The simplest explanation was that Arun had seen a clone or an identical twin, but he couldn’t risk accepting that – it was too convenient, too desirable – but he wasn’t ready to accept the implication of more exotic explanations either. Winning this war was difficult enough without having to contemplate the laws of nature being broken in some new and unlooked for fashion. What if that version of Del he’d seen on the
Bonaventure
had come from the future? He’d confided these suspicions only to Indiya, who had worried him even more with her insistence that if time travel were practical, then FTL travel would be too. Each was the flip-side of the other.

No one could defend against a hostile warfleet equipped with FTL drives. No wonder his battleplanner mind was trying to warn him that his flanks and rear were not secure.

Arun!
Indiya warned.
Oh, I see. Your mind is locking again. Here, let me help.

Arun was paralyzed. It wasn’t fear or uncertainty, and he was used to making difficult strategic decisions; the battleplanner AI imprinted in his mind was glitching again. He had the sense of brass gears that should turn smoothly now locked and smoking.

Indiya worked her freakish mind-magic: oiling, loosening, freeing, replacing choking fumes with sweet-scented lubricants… all in the confines of his mind. This was the reason that he and Indiya were both based on
Vengeance of Saesh
over the protests of all the other senior commanders that co-locating the two leaders was too risky. To function properly, Arun needed her.

Arun stuttered but still couldn’t speak.

Elsewhere in our little human empire the enemy’s forces are rolling us back
, Indiya said in his mind.
The supply routes to our fleet will be cut. We won’t get another chance at this. We attack or we run. Your choice. Make it!

“The security lapses,” Arun gasped. “I have an update.” The other commanders looked at him with interest, but not the horror or concern that he feared. The incident in his head had only lasted a moment in the real world, the briefest of hesitations on his part.

“Some of the resupply convoys that never made it to the front line were not ambushed, they were diverted while in transit.”

Everyone stared at Arun.

“On my orders.”

The reactions of the various commanders would give a xenobiologist enough material to work on for a lifetime. Graz drew her head in until only her eye turrets were showing. Aureanus flicked his wing cases, as if about to leap into the air to escape this shock, while Commander Stonegaze gave a bass Jotun growl.

“Piece by piece over many years we have assembled a huge warfleet in secret and hidden it in deep space. Diverted ships, troops, and materiel are led via staging posts to this ‘Z’ Fleet. Other than a few FTL communicators, the fleet operates under a strict comms blackout. Commanders, ‘Z’ Fleet is already in transit to Olympus-Ultra. If we set off now, ‘A’ Fleet will arrive there simultaneously, catching our opponents in a pincer movement.”

Arun hesitated just long enough to get a boost of encouragement from a glance at Xin. She looked as if she believed in him.

“The best of us are in that hidden fleet. The White Knights despised us. We were all of us the unwanted, the untouchable lowest of the low. We of Earth were so reviled that our name came to be a symbol of the outcast. Whatever our biology we are all here the
humans
of this empire.”

Arun hesitated. Del did this so much better because he spoke of a truth deeper than simple facts. The facts were that the Human Legion was an alliance of more than simply the downtrodden. It included races such as the Littoranes and Jotuns, races held in high regard by the White Knights, as much as any client race could be. But that was the point: they were still
clients
, subservient to a master race, and that was the bond that united all the Legion. That was the bond Arun relied on now as he pressed on.

“To be Human was once a badge of shame, but our enemies miscalculated. Thrown together at the bottom of the barrel, we found each other and discovered strength in our diversity. Littoranes are skilled shipbuilders filled with religious fervor and a deep understanding of nature. Nimble Gliesans are natural pilots for our X-Boats. Our doughty Tallermans offer strength, resilience and patience – qualities evolved to enable them to endure their homeworld’s long winters. The secret people of Khallini are the greatest cyber warriors, as the Jotuns are Master tacticians in the physical plane. To be human is to be strong – strong enough to win our freedom. The word ‘human’ has grown from being a term of contempt to become a rallying cry for the dispossessed, inspiring terror in the hearts of those who oppose us.”

Lieutenant-General Graz rubbed the rocky plates of her hide together, making a deep grinding rumble that indicated the Tallerman’s irritation. “Your talk of humans as a rallying cry is all very well, General McEwan, but I notice you make no specific mention of the humans of Earth. What is your role? There are nine Legion commanders in this conference and three are descendants of
Homo sapiens
. Is this a sign that if we defeat the White Knights, you humans will set yourselves up as new tyrants?”

“We of Earth are the glue that binds the alliance together,” Arun replied.