To Challenge Heaven, page 7
“But how could they’ve done that?” Battle Squadron Commander Kythar-ur-Laitair demanded—not of Gysharu so much as of the universe at large—and Sensor Commander Yirak sighed.
“As I told you, Battle Squadron Commander, most of what I can tell you is what we can’t tell you. Clearly, that peculiar structure on the noses of their ships serves a function—and an important one, given how much mass and volume they’ve invested in it—but none of our technicians can explain what that function is. Oh, we can tell that it appears to generate a highly localized, very powerful node of gravitational force. Effectively, these creatures can produce an artificial black hole, which is another reason we believe they’re artificially generating shipboard gravity, assuming their process permits them to manipulate it with the necessary fineness of control. But even assuming we understood how that was done, the energy requirements to produce the gravitational node we’ve already observed must be astronomical, which argues that there’s some reason these humans have chosen to pay that price. One of my techs has suggested the possibility that those black holes are at least part of the explanation for the preposterous apparent velocities they must have achieved to reach us so soon after Fleet Commander Thikair attacked their homeworld. He can no more explain how it does whatever it does than any of my other techs, but I’d say he’s almost certainly right that it’s part of the explanation. Yet how it works is utterly beyond us.”
“Then…”
Kythar’s voice trailed off and he looked around the briefing room.
“Then what are we to do?” Hyrshi finished for him, his tone unflinching and yet almost compassionate, and Kythar’s ears flicked in agreement.
“What we are about to do,” the Navy Commander told his officers, his ears as steady as his measured, deliberate voice, “is what we took an oath to do when we entered the Shathyra’s service. We’re about to fight … and even with the orbital bases to back us, I believe most or all of us are about to die. But we are Shongairi. We will die on our feet, with our fangs to our enemies. If Shathyra Haymar decides we must submit to these creatures, then our entire empire will do just that. But before that day comes, the Imperial Shongair Navy will force these ‘humans’ to prove he has no choice.”
IMPERIAL PALACE,
CITY OF SHERIKAATH,
PLANET SHONGARU,
SHONG SYSTEM,
241.5 LY FROM EARTH,
APRIL 20, YEAR 41 TE.
“No wonder these ‘humans’ are so determined to punish us,” Shathyra Haymar said softly.
He sat in his private council chamber once more, with his sire and his four most senior ministers, and his ears hung.
“Your Majesty, I must point out that we have no way to verify the legitimacy of these creatures’ records,” Minister of Colonies Kiramar-ur-Pokal said. “All of this—” he waved a hand at the holo display where the humans’ download had just finished playing “—could be fabricated.”
“It could have been, but it wasn’t,” Minister of War Timal-ir-Nolar said heavily.
“But we can’t be positive of that,” Kiramar argued. “They captured Thikair’s flagship. That means they have all of his computers, and apparently none of them were scrubbed before they were captured. With all of that, it would be cub’s play to generate—to fabricate—every single piece of ‘evidence’ they’ve shown us.”
“But why?” Shathyrakym Yudar asked. Kiramar quirked an ear at the shathyrakym, and Yudar’s ears shrugged back impatiently. “Why bother? The humans aren’t indicting us of anything before the Hegemony’s weed-eaters. They have no need to present ‘evidence’ or to justify their demand that we yield to them. If they’re the stronger and we’re the weaker, then both necessity and honor are clear, are they not? So why spend the time and effort to create this—” it was his turn to jab an angry finger at the holo display “—before they demand that we do?”
“Because they want us to know why they’re demanding it, Sire,” Haymar said quietly, his ears sad. “They aren’t indicting us before the weed-eaters; they’re indicting us before our own gods and honor. Indicting us for Thikair’s violation of every precept of Jukaris.”
“They’re aliens, Your Majesty,” Kiramar said.
“And does dishonor become honor when its victim is ‘only’ an alien?” Haymar’s voice was cold, his ears folded tightly. “I think not. And neither do these humans. Their own spokesman, this Dvorak, proved that when he called Thikair urmakhis. And he was right.”
Kiramar looked away, his own ears half-furled in fearful confusion … and possibly shame. Urmakhis was the worst insult which could be hurled at any Shongair. In modern usage, it was rendered “the dead who breathe.” That was a rather more poetic usage than a literal translation—“shit eater”—of the original, ancient Shongarian, yet the insult was just as profound—and as deadly—as it had ever been.
“They’ve shown us his actions because they clearly intend to hold us responsible for them. They want us to know that. And they prepared their ‘records’ to punish us by making us watch them. By making us see what Thikair did in our name to their homeworld. To their people.”
“Punish us, Your Majesty?” Minister of Industry Yusair-ir-Lokar repeated.
“How can we view that and not be punished?” Haymar demanded. “Females and cubs … How many of them died in their beds in Thikair’s initial bombardment? Died not even knowing he was there? How many of their warriors were denied the honor of challenge? Any chance to fight back? Thikair’s own records make it clear why he did it, but his justifications are beside the point, given the human’s presence in our star system. Worse, the humans are completely correct; his justifications, his excuses, don’t—can’t—excuse his actions. Let’s be clear about that, here in this council chamber. How these creatures could possibly have advanced so far between the Barthoni’s survey visit and Thikair’s arrival is more than any of us can even guess at this point. Perhaps they truly were given technological assistance by one of the weed-eaters, as Base Commander Barak suggested to Thikair, however bizarre the entire notion sounds. But whatever he thought, he ought to have abandoned the mission when he realized how enormously Survey Command had underestimated the level they would have attained by the time he got there.”
He looked around his ministers’ faces.
“But he didn’t do that, did he? I understand his reasoning about how valuable such a race might have been to the Empire, why he continued the operation. But even assuming he was justified in ignoring the fact that the humans had attained a Level Two civilization, to strike as he did, without warning.…”
“Your Majesty, there’s nothing dishonorable in a surprise attack,” Timal said almost compassionately when the Shathyra’s voice trailed into silence.
“There is when you strike without so much as a challenge against an opponent who can’t possibly match your weapons and doesn’t even know you exist,” Haymar said flatly. “And doubly so when your attack kills so many millions of them in their homes, in their beds—in their schools and nurseries, Timal. And what possible ‘honor’ is left when you kill billions of them with K-strike after K-strike?”
“But they should have submitted!” Kiramar protested. “Thikair’s initial strike may have been—very well, Your Majesty, was—excessive. I’ll grant that. But if they’d acknowledged that they were defeated, there would have been no additional K-strikes!”
“In fairness, Kiramar, honor would have demanded that even Shongairi resist so long as they could do so effectively,” Timal replied heavily.
“But the fact that they couldn’t stop the K-strikes proved they couldn’t resist ‘effectively,’” Kiramar argued.
“Their aircraft and armored vehicles were certainly capable of fighting ‘effectively,’” Haymar pointed out grimly, remembering the holo images of what those aircraft and vehicles had accomplished before they—and their crews—died. “And whatever may have been true where kinetic bombardment was concerned, something enabled them to annihilate one ground base after another. Yes, and then to capture every one of Thikair’s orbiting ships! So I don’t think we can argue that Thikair’s atrocities, however ‘effective’ they may have been, proved to the humans that they’d been defeated.” His ears twitched sourly. “The fact that they’re here, in those enormous ships, would seem to suggest they hadn’t been, and if that was true, not even Shongairi could have submitted in honor!”
“There’s too much here that we don’t yet know,” Yudar said after a moment. “Obviously, these humans are very different from any of the weed-eaters, and I suspect they’re very different from us, in many ways, as well. In fact, I think it was significant that their download included Base Commander Shairez’s memo about the difference between human psychology and our own. Obviously, we haven’t had time to study this, and we have no access to her notes and the data on which her conclusions were based, but they clearly wanted us to have that particular memo, and it seems self-evident to me that she was right when she said that by our standards—by the standards even of the weed-eaters—humans are insane. If that’s actually the case, then trying to second-guess their decisions when Thikair attacked their homeworld is pointless. Unless it gives us some insight into what they intend to do to us.”
“I think not ‘insane’ so much as sane in a very different way, Sire,” Haymar said. “But you’re right about the implications. And they, obviously, have had far longer to study our psychology, at least from the literature, than Shairez ever had to study theirs. Which means they’ve come to Shongaru with a definite strategy and a definite plan based on their understanding of how we think. Or, at least, of how they think we think. Of how our honor concepts differ from their own. And that, I hope to Dainthar, may be the one good thing about this entire catastrophe.”
“Why, Your Majesty?” First Minister Urkal asked.
“Because if all they wanted was to repay us in Thikair’s coin, you, and I, and everyone else in this council chamber would have been dead before we ever knew they were here,” Haymar said flatly. “If they could approach Shongaru as closely as they did without ever being detected, then any one of those ships could have destroyed our homeworld.” He looked around the chamber. “Don’t think for a moment that it couldn’t have. So I believe they have, indeed, come to demand our submission, not to destroy us.”
“Your Majesty, you can’t—!” Timal chopped himself off, and Haymar’s ears twitched bitterly.
“No, I can’t,” he acknowledged. “For myself, I would. I would contact this human—this ‘Dvorak’—and submit in an instant, however it tarnished my honor as a Shongair and an individual. But our people couldn’t accept that. And the humans have already demonstrated that they’re better than we in at least one respect.”
“One respect?” Yusair repeated when the Shathyra paused.
“Thikair was right in at least one way,” Haymar said. “If Dvorak had done to Shongairi what Thikair did to the humans in his initial K-strike, we would have yielded. His attack would have been made without honor, just as Thikair’s was, and we would have remembered that, as well, yet there would have been no question in any Shongair’s mind that we’d submitted to the stronger. The humans obviously don’t think that way, but that doesn’t mean they don’t understand us one hell of a lot better than Thikair ever understood them. That much, at least, may not be his fault, although I’m disinclined to give him much credit, considering how thoroughly he managed to self-fertilize everything else that came his way. But what matters to us is that they do know how we think. They know that if they did to us what he did to them, we would yield. We would have no choice if we wanted our people to live. Yet they’ve refused to claim that base, contemptible ‘victory.’ They’ve challenged us openly, demanded our submission in honor, instead. Challenged us with the honor Thikair never showed them. And because they have—and because they aren’t him—I suspect they’ll fight our warriors, not our mothers and our young. They won’t just slaughter our people the way we did theirs. But because they won’t, we have no choice—our warriors have no choice—but to fight and die before we acknowledge their right to rule. And how bitter is it that I have no choice but to ask that of them and be grateful that ‘only’ they have to die?”
PUNS RELENTLESS,
AND
ORBIT ONE,
SHONGARU ORBIT,
SHONG SYSTEM
241.5 LY FROM EARTH,
APRIL 21, YEAR 41 TE.
“All right,” Admiral Josephine Mallard said, brown eyes bleak as she gazed at the visual display’s image of the blue-and-white-swirled globe waiting in space, four light-minutes from her ships, and the last few seconds ticked off the countdown clock. “Let’s do this.”
“Yes, Ma’am!” Captain Lucas Escribano, her chief of staff, nodded sharply and turned to the com display.
He didn’t really need that display. His neural feed could have implanted the imagery directly on his visual cortex. But it turned out that simply acquiring instant mental access to data didn’t satisfy some human requirements. People wanted to use their eyes—not to mention their noses and their ears—and they wanted to actually see one another. It was silly, but it was also true, and he looked at the faces of the sixteen ship commanders on the display.
“Execute,” he said simply.
* * *
AS IT HAPPENED, Josephine Mallard’s information on the state of the Shong System’s defenses was far better than Navy Commander Hyrshi’s information on her own command. She and her staff had started with the data in Târgoviște’s secure memory, which had contained virtually every detail of the Shongair homeworld’s defenses as of Fleet Commander Thikair’s departure. And, since Relentless’s arrival, her recon drones—which were more sensitive, longer ranged, and enormously more difficult to detect than anything the Hegemony had—had probed those defenses bone-marrow deep. She knew exactly what she confronted today.
Which was why she knew that whatever else she might call what was about to happen, it wouldn’t be a “battle.”
* * *
“THE HUMANS ARE advancing, Navy Commander!” Ship Commander Frekhar-zik-Charsu, Hyrshi-ir-Urkah’s chief of staff, announced, and Hyrshi checked the time display.
“At least they’re punctual,” he said grimly. The light-speed sensor’s report was a fourteen-shrekar look into the past at this range. Which meant the humans had waited two days to the tiskar from the moment they’d transmitted their challenge. “Alert all units. Although—” his ears twitched frostily “—I would suspect they’ve already noticed.”
“At once, Navy Commander.”
Frekhar sent out the orders, and Hyrshi sat back in his command chair as the icons of the human ships accelerated towards Orbit One and Shongaru. It was ironic in so many ways, he thought. Ironic that the Shongairi had built this horrific foe for themselves through their arrogance and the stupidity of one fleet commander. And ironic that the enormously powerful fleet they’d built to deter any attack was about to fight the first—and probably the only—battle in the entire history of the Imperial Shongair Navy. All those years worrying about the weed-eaters, planning for the day they awakened to the Shongairi’s plans for empire, and instead they faced this.
The range was fourteen light-shrekari. For a Shongair ship, that meant a three-yirka voyage, with turnover after eighteen myrtarni, and his ears grimaced as he watched the icons gaining speed. For a human ship, he suspected, it would take less time. In fact—
“Sir, their acceleration rate is over a hundred and fifty gravities,” Frekhar said in a carefully controlled tone, as if to confirm Hyrshi’s thoughts, and the Navy Commander’s ear twitched in acknowledgment. That was two and a half times the acceleration a Shongair ship could have sustained.
A tone chimed, and he looked down at a secondary display as Sensor Commander Yirak appeared on it.
“Yes, Yirak?”
“Their compensators are obviously more efficient, Navy Commander, but their normal space drive itself appears to be identical to our own. They can simply sustain a much greater acceleration rate.”
“Well, that’s good news.” Hyrshi tried to sound as if it were going to make any difference. From the set of Yirak’s ears, he wasn’t very convincing.
* * *
MALLARD CLOSED HER eyes, communing with her neural link, as the task force accelerated towards Shongaru. She had to be careful how deeply into that link she dove. There was no real limit to the amount of information a feed could provide, but there most definitely was a limit to how much information a human brain could process. She was an old hand at this by now, though, and she focused on the astrogator’s station to watch her task force accelerate. A Shongair ship would have needed just over six hours to make Shongaru orbit; her ships could have done it in under four. Not that she had any intention of coming that close while any of those Shongair ships were still in existence.
Actually, she didn’t really need to close with them at all. Unlike the Hegemony, the PUN had developed a particle beam that was actually practical for a shipboard weapon system. It was huge—almost two-thirds again the size of a ship-to-ship laser—but it was much more powerful and longer ranged. Part of the cornucopia of the Gannon team’s breakthroughs in the field of gravitational engineering was a particle accelerator which consisted of an intensely focused gravity field that allowed electrons to make as many laps around the track as they wanted before the projector fired.
