The warrior’s eyes brightened. She pointed upward as Eustus had. “Reza?” she asked hopefully.
Eustus nodded. “Yes. He’s on Earth, though, not here, not on the ships up there.” He pointed at the girl again. “That’s not Reza.” He took a guess. “That’s Shera-Khan.”
The warrior nodded, as if copying his gesture. He did not know that she had learned it many years before from a very young human boy. “Shera-Khan,” she repeated. “Reza. E’la tanocht im.” She gestured at her loins, and then at Eustus’s, and then at the girl. “Esah-Zhurah. Reza. Shera-khan.”
Eustus sat back, feeling like someone had slammed him over the head with a club. “She’s his daughter,” he said numbly. “Esah-Zhurah is her mother and Reza is her father. And Esah-Zhurah almost killed him. Jesus.” He looked at the girl, shaking his head in sad wonder. “And he never even knew about her, did he?” On impulse, he reached out and pulled up one of the girl’s eyelids again. There had been something strange about the iris, and now, taking a closer look in the dim light, he saw what it was: the child’s eyes were green like Reza’s, and the pupils were round, totally unlike the cat’s eyes of the Kreelans. The “normal” Kreelans, that is. He had not noticed it before, mostly because he had not expected to find anything like that. But now…
“Listen,” he said, wishing that she could understand what he was saying, “I can get you to Reza, and to some doctors who might be able to help Shera-Khan, but we’ve got to hurry. We’ve got to get to the surface and the ship that’s waiting there – I hope – before it leaves.” He gestured at the three of them, then upward. “Reza,” he said again, pointing up.
He did not need a translator this time. The warrior understood perfectly. With infinite care, she gathered the child in her arms and stood waiting while Eustus staggered to his feet.
“This is really going to suck,” he said, mimicking one of his older – and deceased – brothers as he tried his best to follow the warrior down the tunnel. He stumbled after the first few steps. His vision was turning gray as his leg beat at him with lancing pain. He only made half a dozen steps more before he collapsed, exhausted and bleeding.
He could only watch as she returned for him, and he felt himself plucked from the floor as if he were a mere paperweight before she draped him over her shoulder. The floor began to pass by in a blur with the woman’s powerful strides, and her rhythm felt to him like waves rolling on the ocean. Eustus closed his eyes.
Darkness.
Forty-One
Vice Admiral Yolanda Laskowski sat back in her padded armchair, infinitely pleased with herself. It had taken her three times longer than she had originally estimated, but she had found a solution.
No, she corrected herself. She had found the solution. Working alone with the battle computer that was her only true friend, the only one she had ever felt she could really trust, she had finally found an answer to Evgeni Zhukovski’s “hypothetical” scenario (which she knew quite well was more than hypothetical). The projected outcome, while not exactly a landslide in humanity’s favor, nonetheless predicted victory. She had found a way, in theory – and with the help of some very special weapons – that a human fleet might be able to win.
While she had been forced to use a number of unverifiable assumptions in the decision matrix that the computer used to generate the result probabilities, she felt her assumptions were close enough to fit the available data. The Kreelans were in headlong retreat, and were ripe for a full, devastating pursuit.
She stood up and took her place behind the podium at the front of the briefing room.
“First,” she began in her briefing to L’Houillier and the senior members of the General Staff, “this scenario is only valid as long as the Kreelan forces do not demonstrate their historical fighting potential. If at any point in the first phase of the operation they regain their will to fight, for lack of a better description, our odds drop to near zero.” Heads nodded around the table. No one needed the battle computers to tell them that.
“Second, we must have complete surprise. Even in their present state, their fleet potentially could mass enough firepower to beat back the most determined attack we make. Just in measure of known numbers – and the STARNET figures are almost certainly conservative by a factor of at least fifty percent – the engagement will leave us outnumbered by one point seven to one. Only strategic and tactical surprise can balance out that inequality.
“Third, our commitment has to be total. I input every armed ship either currently afloat or ready to put out of drydock into the attack, giving us a total of two-thousand, eight-hundred, and forty-seven vessels. That includes Navy combat vessels and every armed coast guard and auxiliary ship with hyperlight drive that could be assembled in a forty-eight hour period, using midnight Zulu time tomorrow as H-hour.”
She called up the holo image of space that extended from the human-explored Inner Arm sector, inward toward the galactic core. “This,” she pointed to a red spheroid that appeared among the star clusters like a malignant tumor in a mass of neurons, “is the zone where the Kreelan fleet is gathering, which the scenario assumes to be the approximate location of their homeworld. As you can see, it has diminished somewhat in size since it was first identified, but we still do not know the precise location of their massing point.” She paused, looking at L’Houillier, then Zhukovski. “That is the last, and most crucial, assumption I have had to make: that somehow we will discover that information before our fleet sails.”
“I accept your assumptions, admiral,” L’Houillier told her, but he was looking at Zhukovski. “As for the last one, we will see what can be done.”
The Russian admiral said nothing, but stared impassively at the red corpuscle in the holo display as if he had not heard his superior.
“Please go on,” L’Houillier said quietly.
“Sir,” Laskowski said, nodding. Their exchange had not gone unnoticed. Zhukovski, her chief rival, was coming under some kind of pressure. Good. “The operation itself is fairly straightforward, with two simultaneous attacks, one in support of the other. The objective of the first attack is to engage and tie down the Kreelan fleet. It is not to destroy the enemy in a decisive manner, but to prevent it from engaging the ships taking part in the second attack. The objective of that effort will be the physical destruction of the Kreelan homeworld or worlds.”
Faces among the staff suddenly became deadly serious. “Planet-busting,” as it was often called, had always been more of a theoretical issue than a practical one. For one thing, humans had never encountered a Kreelan world. For another, many believed that it could not be done without involving a tremendous number of ships in an extended bombardment.
“A task force of seven ships,” Laskowski went on, “will approach the Kreelan system from a different vector than the main body. They will be armed with kryolon and thermium torpedoes.”
Laskowski felt an electric thrill run through her body at the mention of the device and the effect it had – stunned silence – on her audience. The kryolon torpedo was nearly a legend, a weapon that had been theoretically perfected years before, but that had never actually been used in anger. It was a star killer that caused a star to go nova, obliterating any orbiting planets. Their existence never confirmed to the populace or the military at large, the few weapons that had actually been constructed had remained in carefully protected secret bunkers on faraway asteroids, a suitable target for them never having been identified.