Extremis-ARC, page 26
Eager, in this case, to run back to Torhok with a report on her training. It was quite clear that Torhok had begun soliciting reports. Nothing obvious, she was sure. Just the faintest intimations that he had a passing interest in the doings of his fellow Councilors. And so, when she practiced her maatkahshak publicly, they spied on her.
Just as she had intended. Firstly, knowing that she was training regularly and ambitiously might give Torhok—or anyone else—some additional pause before challenging her. But it would also lead them to assess her favorite moves, her skills, her weaknesses: having seen her practice, they might believe they knew how she would fight. And she wanted—needed—them to believe just that.
What they did not know was that part of her training involved not merely maatkahshak—training in the particular schools of different maatkah styles—but regular immersions into deep, almost trancelike states of shaxzhutok—the reclamation and reliving of past lives. While all Arduans had some measure of this skill, it was strongest in the shaxzhu—those who, like her, practiced it as their primary contribution to the community. In recent generations, this skill had become particularly weak among the Destoshaz. It was murmured that even Senior Admiral Torhok himself had no memories of past wars or commands held.
But whatever Torhok’s deficit in past-life experience might be, he had vast reserves of power and skill that he had acquired in the maatkah ring during the course of this life. He—and many of his devotees—were known to be formidable opponents, and Ankaht did not delude herself in assessing her unaugmented chance of defeating the great majority of them: her odds were, at best, unpromising.
But she had something they did not—past lives—and she planned on using those experiences and skills as well. But today, as she tried to settle into recalling a particularly early life—one in which she had been a warrior in a Pre-Enlightenment island city-state—Ankaht found herself repeatedly distracted by a curiosity that had been provoked by discovering Jennifer’s rudimentary selnarm, and the following discussion of her being a possible reversion. Ankaht had begun to wonder: How did Arduans exist in the Pre-Enlightenment “warring states” period? If selnarm has always been so uniform, how is it that we Arduans did not have better understandings of each other, that our early progenitors were almost as warlike and contentious as the humans are now? How were we not more aware of each others’ true needs, feelings? The only logical conclusion is that, at one time, we were once more akin to the humans: that there was a period in our prehistory when there were great differences of selnarmic skill and awareness not only between different groups, but within the same group. Nothing else would explain the lack of unity and fellow-feeling that must have caused the frequent and wanton violence of those days.
Ankaht pushed with her arms, away from the floor, and rocked back to her knees. She had not often invoked her lives from the early Pre-Enlightenment: they were unpleasant, perplexing, savage. But now she had too many reasons to go back even before the Pre-Enlightenment, to explore past lives—particularly of her earliest Destoshaz existences—in order to better understand the humans, as well as to prepare for her own defense. And there was little rationalization for not doing so: it only required a small increase in effort and time to sample from her many lives, which were strung like dim pearls along the timeline of Arduan social evolution. From a short glimpse into each, she could build a mosaic that might show the larger patterns of how her race had changed not merely in the millennia immediately prior to the Dispersal of Sekamahnt, but in the Star Wandering generations since.
And so she exhaled, inhaled, exhaled more deeply, curled forward—
—and was flitting through the past, picking up pieces of a life here, an existence there, all the while building a picture of a time that few of the Children of Illudor had investigated since boarding their generation ships.
She found that the Pre-Enlightenment was a riot of diversity, with each small island its own state and culture, and the larger islands gerrymandered into even more, and smaller, polities. The innumerable castes and class stratifications had accreted into a ponderous labyrinth of contending etiquettes, prerogatives, and priorities.
The beginning of Arduan social freedom—which, due to the communalizing tendencies of mature selnarm linkages—intruded slowly, rising along with an increased need for the society to perform a greater diversity of tasks. As this Enlightenment edged slowly into existence, it was also comparatively bloodless. Widespread depersonalization was simply not possible when selnarms fused to create a truly harmonious narmata that linked every rank and caste of society.
New relationships were the lifeblood of the flowering of the new era. Just as Ardu was circumnavigated, charted, and new trade routes sprang up, the rules governing interpersonal association—across class, caste, rank, and clan—became more easily navigated, more relaxed. The polarizing wars between colonizing empires that shaped the course of human history for almost four centuries were not possible on Ardu because of the empathies that flowed naturally, unstoppably, along the links of selnarm. Consequently, Earth’s religious wars were also unknown. Rather, as cultures contacted and blended into each other, the Face of Illudor was deemed accessible to all of them, but each one was thought to possess a unique perspective upon a particular feature of that godhead, thereby making an indispensable contribution to the complete picture.
It was toward the end of this period that the numbers of Destoshaz began to drop. Warfare was a rare, and highly specialized, undertaking. Most Destoshaz were consequently diverted into emergency and rescue services.
At the same time, the shaxzhu became both more important and more numerous. Their numbers had always been attributed to the direct influence of Illudor, since a powerful ability for shaxzhutok could not be learned, nor bred for: its appearance had always been both rare and arbitrary. However, the Enlightenment’s increased social complexity and emphasis upon communication and education put a premium on the shaxzhu, who quickly became the dominant intelligentsia of modern Ardu. The increase in their numbers was deemed the hand of Illudor at work, providing for the new needs of his Children.
Then came the discovery of Sekamahnt’s instability. Nations had folded together into vast, monomaniacal instruments of racial survival. There was a sharp increase in centralization and autocracy as Ardu strove to launch as many waves of the Children into space prior to the calamity that was sure to befall it. This, in turn, led to greater militancy, authoritarianism, dogmatism; the principles of toleration, consensus, and the old philosophical whispers of what the ’kri called assed’ai withered. Nuance was as absent as the realization that such absolutism was, in fact, a recidivistic devolution, a return to social primitivisms abandoned millennia earlier—back when Arduans had much more in common with humans. Indeed, many of the developmental parallels were striking—
Ankaht stopped in mid-thought with a self-rebuke: there were obvious limits to how far she could presume similarities between the evolution of two such disparate species. For instance, human histories depicted a crisis of faith arising along with technology. The Children of Illudor had demonstrated a completely opposite reaction: as technology grew, Arduan cultural uniformity—vested in their selnarm and concomitant narmata—also grew, further enabled by machinery that shrank distance between peoples and places. They had no crisis of faith; rather, they had an increased surety of it. So it seemed that the parallels between Arduans and other intelligences could not be reliably projected.
Unless, Ankaht heard her inner voice whispering, unless, of course, the human crisis of faith was not really linked to technology per se. Perhaps that kind of crisis is occasioned by the emergence of any paradigm that problematizes a culture’s early beliefs in the theological wholism of its universe. For my people, technology did not present us with such a challenge: we were still linked by our selnarm and felt the will of Illudor and the permanence of our souls in shaxzhutok. No, for us, the challenge to our belief in an orderly universe occurred when we first contacted the humans. Because if the humans are truly sentient and yet also lack selnarm, rebirth, and knowledge of Illudor, then our cosmology is finally being confronted with a paradigmatic challenge that it cannot answer.
Suddenly frightened by where her thoughts were leading, Ankaht leaned forward until her short forehead rested against the maatkah mats and thought: Illudor’s love, where shall this all end?
12
A Mixture of Madness
There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.
—Aristotle
Arduan SDH Shem’pter’ai, Expeditionary Fleet of the Anaht’doh Kainat, Ajax System
Narrok closed his eyes. But he could still see what the holoplot and the viewscreens had shown him when his flagship, the Shem’pter’ai, had emerged from the warp point just ten minutes ago. He saw it as clearly as if all three of his eyes were still staring at it.
The plot was choked with the ochre-colored icons of his dead ships. Here and there, the sigil denoting a vanquished human hull broke the harrowing monotony of the otherwise uniform mass of devastation. The devastation of his fleet. Again. When the day had begun, he’d hoped it would end differently—
*
Having gone over the order of the coming battle with his entire staff, Narrok had narrowed his selnarm link to share the final strategic assessment and intelligence exclusively with Sarhan and Fleet Second Esh’hid. “This time we know who our adversary is: a human female named Krishmahnta. She is not a legendary leader among the ranks of the human admirals, merely the most senior among those who have been cut off from their main bases when we arrived at Bellerophon. However, for a middle-ranked admiral whose name does not figure prominently in the humans’ pre-war dispatches, she has acquitted herself quite well. Questions?”
There were none. So Narrok gave the order to commence the preparatory operations: clearing the human minefields with Urret-fah’ah minesweepers. But it seemed less effective, this time: evidently, the humans had not had enough mines to thickly seed the area immediately surrounding the warp point. Or so Narrok’s staff insisted.
Narrok was not convinced, and did not race through with the van of his fleet. Instead, he stuck to the attack plan—and thus allowed the humans to, predictably, decimate wave after alternating wave of recon drones, ever followed by SBMHAWKs. Happily, the latter systems did find and savage several large targets—or so it seemed. Certainly, there were more dead human hulls being detected by each successive wave of RDs.
Consequently, when Narrok felt a strident excitement and urgency underlying Esh’hid’s next selnarm send, he knew what she was going to request before she pulsed it across the light-seconds to him: immediate attack. Narrok resisted, but chose not to expressly prohibit, that initiative.
Esh’hid, evidently sensing the significance of her admiral’s indefinite response, pressed further. “Admiral, this could be the opportunity we have been waiting for—an opportunity to push through a warp point before the humans are fully prepared for us.”
“Yes, but it could also be a trap.”
“My instincts tell me it is not, Admiral.”
Narrok elected not to point out that he had more years and experience with which to refine his instincts. Instead, he eventually consented to Fleet Second Esh’hid’s almost piteous pleadings to be given the signal honor of leading an unplanned fast attack against the apparently incomplete human defenses in the Ajax system. With little delay, Esh’hid transferred to the bridge of the largest SDH of the advance assault group and promptly led them through the warp point into Ajax.
Where, drones reported, they were promptly and handily destroyed. The apparent human losses to the SBMHAWKs had been a canny deception: the victims were large, empty bulk-freighters, stripped of everything but their outdated drives and a few electronic suites—just enough to fool the SBMHAWKs into believing them to be valid targets. The RDs had been unable to distinguish the decoys from genuine capital ships: doing so would have required a much closer scanning pass—and the RDs had been unable to get close enough to retrieve that level of detail and still survive to report. Indeed, the few RDs that had returned from each wave spent less than ten seconds on the Ajax side of the warp point.
Esh’hid and her attack force also discovered that a second tier of mines was waiting for them, farther back than the first, and that a surprising number of forts were waiting on the far side of those minefields.
All of which meant that Esh’hid and her advance assault group materialized in the center of a veritable cauldron of lethal human fire. Missile salvos and force beams turned that volume of space into a scintillant collage of overlapping explosions and savagely disruptive energies.
Not that she lived to report it. Narrok and Sarhan got the battle reports from the only two zhed’bidr—terminal drones—that survived to limp back through the warp point, seared and semifunctional. And Narrok could not help reflecting that this tragedy did have an upside: he was now freed from Esh’hid’s ever-prying eyes, although he had—earnestly, at the last—hoped to convince her to reconsider her impulse to lead an attack that ultimately consumed her and two dozen of the last original-construction SDs like zifrik pupae caught in a flame.
So Narrok simply resumed the original attack plan, knowing as he unfolded it that the costs and outcomes were almost as predetermined as the life and death of a star: there might be momentary variations, but the general course of events was unalterable.
With the humans well back from the warp point, Narrok knew that entering the system was not his major problem. Rather, survival of his units, once there, would be a thorny challenge: the forts were predominantly missile-armed, and the data from the terminal drones indicated that they had hammered out densities of heavy ballistic missiles at Esh’hid’s SDHs that neither she nor he could hope to match or deflect. So the first hulls Narrok sent through would have to survive the relentless bombardment long enough to not only close on the forts but to cut through the minefields shielding them.
Unfortunately, once away from the warp point, the Urret-fah’ah mine-clearers were not only useless, they were too dangerous to employ safely. Their efficacy against the minefields proximal to the warp points was a function of their speed of action: using protoselnarmic dead-man switches that were enabled by purpose-bred Hre’selna biots, each Urret-fah’ah did not have to wait for the post-transit electronic disruption to subside. The unicellular Hre’selna biots reoriented almost immediately, and, detecting that they were no longer in range of the selnarmic links of their controllers (who remained safely on the other side of the warp point) they collapsed, enabling a piezoelectric actuator to launch the minesweeper’s missiles almost immediately upon completing transit. But the purpose-built Urret-fah’ah minesweeper had modest engines, few defenses, primitive sensors, and no shields or ECM. In short, when crossing open space, it was little more than a thin-skinned chain-bomb, ready to vaporize any ships that were so unfortunate as to be within two light-seconds of it with it when it was destroyed by enemy fire.
So the approach to, and path through, the second belt of minefields would have to be blazed by fighters and SDHs. And once again, Narrok had reason to curse Torhok’s strategic myopia. Narrok had wanted smaller and more diverse hulls laid down for just this contingency: he needed purpose-built minesweepers and small, fast escorts that could draw some of the murderous fire off the fragile fighters and the SDHs—which were too precious to spend forging an approach through multiply overlapping fields of fire. But no, Torhok and his logisticians had insisted that initiating the design and construction of new ship types would only be an effort-diluting distraction. So the Arduan naval inventory remained limited to SDSs, SDHs, fighters, shuttles, multipurpose tender/transports, and a few of the Urret-fah’ah minesweepers. That, Narrok was told, would have to do.
His SDHs went in by the dozens, trying to survive long enough to launch their fighters. And every time one of the heavy superdreadnoughts lasted that long, the fighters were almost immediately consumed by the overlapping white-star eruptions of a constantly churning blast furnace of human antimatter warheads.
But eventually, as Narrok had known it would, the sheer weight of his numbers began to prevail. Presently, messenger drones from Narrok’s breaching force carried the story and the pictures of what was clearly a change in the tide of the battle: not all of his hulls were vaporized instantly, and they lasted long enough to divert fire from the next rank of incoming SDHs. The fighters started surviving, closing on the minefields, and clearing them—a tactic that was very nearly indistinguishable from suicide. In time, the human fire fell off—simply because their tenders could not resupply the forts’ missile tubes fast enough to maintain their initial salvo volume.
Only then did Admiral Krishmahnta’s fleet show up—fully repaired and in superb readiness. Every human hull that had survived the battles at Raiden and Beaumont now confronted Narrok’s commanders again, but the humans were evidently better armed and better supplied than before. Their firepower, both missile and beam, changed the balance of the battle back against the Arduans, and, for a few moments, there was even some question as to whether or not the Children of Illudor would keep their tenuous toehold in the Ajax system.…
Narrok held his next stroke until the reports were unequivocal—that the human fleet had genuinely committed itself—for that was the moment he had been waiting for. He ordered one last torrent of SBMHAWKs to go streaming through the warp point. They inflicted no damage upon the human ships or forts, but both had to devote the majority of their firepower and attention to counteract that new threat. And hard on the heels of the SBMHAWKs came almost half of the Arduan fleet, led by Second Admiral Sarhan himself.
Over a dozen SDHs were lost, simply to the misfortunes of simultaneous transit, the immense hulls rematerializing in overlapping volumes of space, obliterating each other with blinding glares that made antimatter missiles look like firecrackers by comparison. But most of the dozens that survived quickly swept out of the cauldron, their data nets multiply integrated and cross-patched against any possibility of failure, their defensive batteries cloaking them in an almost unbroken sphere of counterfire. Inside that brief, turtlelike shell of protective energies, Admiral Sarhan pressed through the partial gaps the fighters had cut in the second minefield and closed to effective range with the forts.
