War Against the White Knights (23 page)

“The Hardit will say anything to divide us,” said Indiya. “Remember her aim in all of this is to make us weak. And we know who’s been behind us all along. The Human Legion, the Civil War, my purple hair and your eyes of the same color, Admiral, the same shade in the eyes of those people in the images too.”

“Night Hummers,” said Xin.

Her words were spoken with exaggerated calmness, but Indiya saw Xin’s fists bunch until her knuckles turned white.

Finfth wrapped his arms around Indiya and rested his palms over the back of her hands, ensuring full skin contact to allow maximum bandwidth for communication between the nano-constructs built into each of their augmented bodies. She trusted Finfth completely, but it still took a strong effort of will to allow herself to relax in his embrace. She eased against him as her chief staff officer, Arbentyne-Daex, wrapped the two augments in the sleeping pouch and secured its outer edge to the overhead in Indiya’s quarters.

It was an unusual way to conduct a command conference, but Indiya was not the same as Arun, and she was in charge for now. This conference was to be virtual, the senior officers at their posts on their ships, connected to the secure data network via AI assistants. Indiya and Finfth didn’t need artificial assistants, they could build their own.

She smiled at Daex to let the Kurlei know she was mentally calm as her flag staff officer secured herself nearby in a similar, though smaller, zero-g sleeping pouch.

Indiya immediately smiled at her foolishness. Arbentyne-Daex was present because the Kurlei’s natural empathy allowed her to monitor Indiya’s state of mind, and from that the quality of her decision making. You never needed to smile at a Kurlei for them to know whether you were calm.

Finfth was here to fulfil the same function, although he had other reasons to contribute as one of the most talented human engineers. She was glad of his physical presence now, the loose embrace of his arms, like a brother’s.

She sighed and thought again of Arun in his recovery pod. For a reason she couldn’t pin down, ever since he’d been injured she had been reminded of that briefest of moments when they first met, and the two of them had danced around each other as possible lovers. The memory of the young Arun’s tender caresses upon her skin was stored in full fidelity, and now released by Finfth’s fraternal touch.

To see a fellow human being was rare these days, she thought sourly, let alone to touch one. She was more used to the company of the amphibious Littoranes, with their four stubby limbs and long tails.
Am I deliberately cutting myself off from human contact?

“No,” chorused Finfth and Daex.

Indiya’s mouth made an ‘o’ of shock at this invasion of her private thoughts. Then she laughed – that was precisely what she had ordered them to do.

“You have subsumed yourself into your role,” said Daex. “That is not the same thing. Humans are no longer – forgive me, the human language here is treacherous… We who are not children of Earth look up to you, Admiral, and note the company you keep. We see that the Human Legion fights for the freedom of all the under-trodden peoples of the empire, whatever their homeworld. We are all human.”

Pride swelled Indiya’s heart. It was a truly strange thing. The word ‘human’ was simple enough to be portable across many languages and the vocal organs of many species. As a result, ‘human’ had long ago become a loan word used across countless star systems to mean the lowest dregs of society, despised and dispossessed, just one step away from vermin. The Human Legion had taken that symbol of wretchedness, and transformed it into a word of power. Alien soldiers reporting to alien officers had fought and died in this war of liberation, proudly shouting the word ‘human’ as they advanced into battle. Arun speculated that the Hummers had seeded the spread of the word, but whatever the source of its spread, Indiya was proud of the way it bound them together.

“Your CSO is partially correct when she notes the importance of not being seen to favor the children of Earth,” said Finfth. “But for my part, I miss my sister. I rarely see you.”

She rubbed her shoulders against his back, indulging in the warmth of Finfth’s sentiment. They weren’t siblings, of course, but of the group of augments created on the
Beowulf
, Loobie and Fant were dead, Furn imprisoned on Khallini-4, and Tizer had been left behind on Tranquility, his status and that of the Sleeping Legion unknown.

Would she see Tizer again? Perhaps she should encourage the Reserve Captain to assist in the creation of a new generation of augments?

Indiya realized with a start that she had never considered such things because she never thought of her future. The drive to establish an autonomous zone for all humans had consumed her life to such an extent she could not see beyond that goal. Perhaps after they captured Athena, surely the war would be over, their freedoms won, and she could re-establish contact with the concept of a personal future? Of being Indiya, the purple-haired woman, not Admiral Indiya, the Navy commander.

She imagined her mother rolling her eyes.
About time you thought of yourself for a change, my girl. Ever since that Marine caught your eye… Arun McEwan has much to answer for.

But Momma’s shade was wrong. This was entirely the wrong time to think about the future. The lives of countless billions depended on winning this next battle.

And, without Arun, the responsibility for doing so was a crushing weight on her shoulders.

“Help me,” she ordered Arbentyne-Daex.

Indiya closed her eyes and allowed the warmth of the Kurlei’s empathy to embrace her mind. Indiya and Finfth could both give her hormonal commands of mellowness, and there were many drugs designed to eliminate worries and concentrate minds. Indiya’s mind, was not strictly human, and the choices she was about to make were vital. She could not afford for her judgement to be clouded by chemicals. Only the Kurlei would do.

Unlike the Hummers, Daex’s mental touch was so gentle it almost tickled. The Kurlei nudged her commander gently away from distracting thoughts and drew Indiya’s mind close around the problem at hand.

The whole process took about a minute. A last, distracting thought flickered before her –
why don’t I use Daex like this more often?
But then, that too disappeared and Indiya was ready.

She opened the data feeds to the senior officers and specialists on ships throughout the Legion fleets, and began.

“I am initiating the invasion decision-making session. Let me first make clear the rules for your involvement. I need hardly state that we all have deep misgivings about an attack on Athena in the current circumstances. Your collective role is to challenge what I suggest and to propose alternate courses of action. I shall say now that I am inclined to proceed with the invasion, and that means we must assume my assessment of all arguments for and against is already distorted by cognitive bias – I will give greater weight to arguments that support my preferred option. You are to combat that bias. However, make no mistake, I am not General McEwan and this is not the kind of collective decision making the general prefers. You are not here to argue your case – that time has already passed. You are here to help me make the right decision, but that decision is entirely mine to take alone. First, Major Uhll, give us your best assessment on whether we will be successful in turning off the barrier protecting Athena.”

The Tallerman engineer drew his head in defensively, but then told the assembly of senior officers precisely what he thought without sugaring the pill. Bringing the Tallermans into the Legion alliance had added a backbone to decision making that Indiya couldn’t now imagine being without. The hardy Tallermans had such a fatalistic view of life, having evolved in such a grindingly difficult environment, that they seemed unaffected by the cognitive biases that concerned most other races in the Legion. It made them good commanders, and was why Indiya had placed Major Uhll in charge of the team that would turn off the barrier. Finfth, who was on the same team as a special adviser, said that the Tallerman inspired confidence through his scratch team of engineers and xeno-biologists.

Uhll reported that the Hummer story was plausible. The energy generated in a large gas giant such as Euphrates was certainly enough to power a massive-scale operation such as the barrier. How the power was harnessed, and how the barrier operated around Athena was beyond his team, but they had seen changes in the orbits and geological activity in all of the other moons orbiting Euphrates. That was consistent with the idea that Euphrates was being tapped for power on a scale beyond anything he’d ever heard of.

The one element of information his team had extracted from the debriefing of the Hummer team was that the code they had inserted into the barrier controller, carried in their own bodies, had not been written by Hummers. The controller was a modified Hummer, but was still only a living tool. The engineers who had written the code – who had designed and built the barrier – they were the White Knights themselves.

As for whether the Legion now had the ability to switch the Athena barrier on and off at will, Uhll would only be drawn to say that the second Hummer team recovered from Euphrates had reported that their mission was a success.

“Can we switch off the barrier or not? I must press you for a recommendation, Major,” Indiya insisted. “That is an order.”

“Very well then, Admiral. The main variable here is political, not technological. My answer is dependent on your assessment of whether you trust the Hummers more than you distrust them. If, on balance, you think the Hummers we inserted into Euphrates were sincere in their reports, then I say that, on balance, I think we can switch off the barrier. If you think the Hummers are acting out an elaborate charade to deceive us, then I do not think we can switch off the barrier.”

Indiya could sense Kreippil’s anger at Uhll’s roundabout answer, but the Tallerman was right that everything hinged on whether the Legion could trust the Hummers.

Del-Marie and Lieutenant-General Aelingir, the Jotun commander of Army Group Armored Fist, tried to act out various positions of loyalty and treachery that the Hummers might be taking. Was there really a rival Hummer faction behind the Hardits, and if so what was their goal? Who had supplied the codes to the Hardit Hummers in the first place? Del-Marie and Aelingir did their best to enact credible answers, but the Hummers were so different from every other race there, that trying to think from their point of view was of limited use. The Khallenes and Trogs had the most unusual evolutionary path of all the races to contribute to the meeting, but that was no help in understanding the Hummers. The mudsuckers were almost as strange, but they were strange in a different way. And despite Faraday cages, jamming systems, and both Finfth and Arbentyne-Daex present to prevent or detect Hummer eavesdropping, Indiya had to acknowledge when pressed by Xin that the aliens could be listening in or even directing the decision making.

The exercise in trying to second-guess the Hummers produced no new insights, and so Indiya moved to wargaming the possibility of there being a Hardit warfleet waiting for the Legion to be engaged against Athena’s defenses. ‘Z’ Fleet’s commander, a Friokeban named Admiral Jiann-Hax-Jiann had been tasked with doing her best to fortify the Legion Navy against an attack from a Hardit fleet that could not be detected. The result was a grid of detector lattices that worked on the principle of firing tagged projectiles from one edge of the lattice to the other. If the projectile didn’t arrive at the far side, then there must be something blocking its trajectory, even if other sensors insisted there was nothing there. The basic principle had been tried and tested on a much smaller scale, such as protecting the entrance channels to wet navy bases, but space was vast in comparison – even the small region in the vicinity of Athena – and there were broad gaps between the lattices that meant ‘Z’ Fleet had to make do with mining the area as heavily as possible.

All in all, the Legion’s position was far from impregnable, and relied on the assumption that the Hardits would have to switch off their stealth capability before fighting – which they had done up till now. None of this was certain, but Indiya was satisfied that the Legion was in a stronger position to fend off the Hardits than they had been when Tawfiq had appeared out of nowhere – and chosen not to attack the Legion. It would have to suffice.

Finally, Admiral Kreippil argued the case for withdrawing from the Olympus-Ultra system altogether.

“Each of the Legion fleets should regroup on our main supply bases: Khallini, Shepherd-Nurture, and Tallerman. By the time we return in force – and it will take us decades to get back – we may need to retake those systems, but once we have all three, we can launch a series of flyweight counter offensives to steal the initiative from our enemies while we rebuild our strength. The Hardits are the biggest unknown. We may need to seek new allies and then return to Tranquility. The risk of this approach stems from what happens while we are in transit.”

Indiya sucked in a breath. Kreippil had spelled out the big worry of interstellar war. The average journey time between star systems was sixteen years. Even a victorious fleet could arrive at their next stop to find that the war was over and they were on the losing side.

Kreippil continued. “If we took the Imperial citadel and had the Emperor of the White Knights within our power, the galaxy would know within the day. We would be immeasurably stronger. On the other hand, if we withdrew, the galaxy would soon know of that too, and with such a reverse, our position would be correspondingly weaker, even more so than we now find ourselves. As soon as we left this system and reached cruising speed, I expect the Old Empire would turn on us and we would find ourselves in a war on four fronts.

“And the Amilxi?” asked Xin. “How do they fit into your thoughts, Admiral Indiya?”

Xin’s interruption sounded laden with meaning to Indiya’s ears.

“It was,” said Finfth in Indiya’s mind. “Xin is emotionally hurt and seeks to wound you too. I don’t know why she would… oh, the
Bonaventure
… the images your spybots captured… I apologize Indiya, but your thoughts are uppermost in your mind.”