“You sing a soothing song, and I appreciate it, Urzueth Ragh, but I will have no lullabies. This was my doing. I was not cautious enough in our deployment. I split the fleet, and allowed us to sink deep into this gravity well, for which we will now pay. The force we have sent to meet the humans labors against Earth’s pull, while the rest of our ships must remain in close orbit, held fast by the planet’s heavy claws. Easy targets, should any of the human craft manage to engage us.”
Darzhee Kut raised an objecting claw. “With respect, Hu’urs Khraam, your deployments were optimal for forcing a swift conclusion to a war of occupation—”
“Perhaps, but those deployments were still wrong. Darzhee Kut, if you should find yourself burdened with the cares of the Wholenest in the years to come, I offer you the counsel of this day: in war, there is no surety. Now, no more on this. What other differences does the human fleet exhibit this time?”
“It is early to tell, but sensors indicate a far higher ratio of drones. Almost five times as many as the humans had at Barnard’s Star.”
“None of these differences sing in harmony with our hopes, Speaker Kut. How do you expect they will attack us?”
Darzhee looked over at Caine, who was pointedly absorbed in the act of tying his left shoe; no help there. “We cannot be certain, Hu’urs Khraam, but we expect that they will salvo missiles at long range, probably several flights of them in close sequence. As we come to shorter range and pass each other, missiles launched then will be less effective, because they will have less time to acquire targets, maneuver, and track. This is when we can expect our greatest advantage.”
“Because of our superior lasers?”
“Yes, Hu’urs Khraam, and particularly because of the X-ray lasers that form the spine of our shift-cruisers. If we elect to spend their drives’ antimatter reserves to fully charge those spinal weapons, they will have a devastating effect upon the human ships, particularly at close range.”
“And we are confident that the humans have no such system?”
Again Darzhee Kut looked at Caine. The human’s right shoelace was now the object of his undivided attention. “Not within their hulls, Hu’urs Khraam. They do not have the engineering acumen necessary to generate and sustain the spectrally-selective energy emissions. However, as we saw at Barnard’s Star, they do have a special form of drone that can briefly mimic our spinal weapons: their single-use X-ray laser missiles.”
“True, but our intelligence tells us that they do not have many of these systems. A handful at most. Five years ago, the human nations signed accords severely restricting the deployment of any weapon system that either uses nuclear charges as warheads, or as power sources, as is the case with their X-ray laser drones.”
“This is indeed what our intelligence told us.”
“You are unconvinced?”
“I am—uncertain, Hu’urs Khraam.”
“Why?”
“Because every time the humans make such accords with each other, they immediately begin violating them in secret.”
“Agreed. But our information on these matters came from their own megacorporations. How could they be wrong? Do not the corporations produce the very drones of which we speak?”
“Hu’urs Khraam, the weapons of which we speak are produced by a special subgroup of megacorporations, called the industrials.”
“I cannot follow the melody you are trying to sing for me.”
“First Delegate, there is antipathy between the industrials and the megacorporations that have allied with us. It is conceivable that our collaborators were mislead, deliberately provided with false information via the industrials’ counterintelligence efforts.”
Hu’urs Khraam bobbed. “Darzhee Kut, you are learning the prime lesson of this day welclass="underline" question everything. But our human sources took great pains to gather accurate data, for if we do not succeed, they will be executed as traitors. This is one set of data that we may trust.”
Or maybe not, Darzhee Kut thought as he bowed a deep acquiescence. We cast eyes back upon our path and realize that, since Barnard’s Star, we thought we were manipulating the humans—but all along, they were manipulating us. They play the linked games of war and deception better than we do. And the reason lies before us. They spend most of their time imagining how we would best fight a war against them, rather than how they would like to resist us. So of course they knew how to show us what we wanted to see, what seemed reasonable outcomes, gave us logical decision paths. All so that we would follow a course of action that they could predict, which would deliver us to this moment and this place where they would spring their carefully laid traps all at once. Darzhee rose up higher, one claw raised to signal that he must share this last point—
But Darzhee Kut felt the pressure of a gentle yet firm claw clamp over his own, kept it from raising. He swiveled to the side, saw Urzueth Ragh, who lowered his eyes and diddled his mandibles. “Let it go, rock-sibling.”
Darzhee Kut considered, looked after Hu’urs Khraam, who was already deep in a teleconference with Tuxae Skhaas, the senior sensor coordinator for the command ship of the orbital flotilla. And with that brief pause, the moment to speak had passed. If Darzhee Kut brought up the issue of CoDevCo’s questionable reporting to the First Delegate once again, it would signal a much more serious, and possibly insolent, questioning of Hu’urs Khraam’s judgment. But, still…
Urzueth Ragh seemed to read his mind. “I know what you mean to do, to say, and I tell you it will be a tune sung to insensate antennae. You are right, of course. How can we be certain of the reliability of the human intelligence? But if we begin to question all our data, we have no basis for action, must lie on our claws, might as well concede. So, either way, we must make our best conjectures and move on. We must act rather than reflect. Alas, it is a hurried process that I like it no better than you. It is not our way.”
“No. It is war.”
Urzueth Ragh bobbed his agreement. “As I said, it is not our way.”
“So what’s it going to be, Skipper?” asked Commander Ruth Altasso. “A stand-up brawl or a drive-by shooting?”
Admiral Ira Silverstein smiled at his XO, found his brain running on two tracks simultaneously: a blessing, or curse, amplified by Talmudic study.
Track one: Commander Ruth Altasso was a fine XO and knew her business well-enough to know that her question was no question at all. All three echelons of the fleet had stopped hab rotation, tucked in their booms, and were maintaining acceleration typical to interplanetary traveclass="underline" they were going in hot. However the battle might unfold against the Arat Kur, it would be sharp, savage, and so fast that even if one wanted to give or call for quarter, there simply wouldn’t be the time. Today, there would be two kinds of combatants: the quick and the dead.
Track two: Ruth was almost a good enough actress to pull off the precombat bravado shtick. Almost, but not quite. She had never been in real combat before. Hell, none of her generation had. It had been almost twenty years since a US vessel had fired a shot in anger, more than thirty since a formal, brief, and almost wholly inconsequent declaration of war in the last of the many desultory posturings known collectively as the Sino-Russian Belt War. The training sims were realistic—nearly made Ira wet his own pants—and no one did a better job than the Commonwealth at creating authentic field training environments. But as any soldier knew, training was no substitute for paying your penny and seeing the elephant that was war, up close and personal. And the few recent veterans who had earned that distinction by both fighting and surviving at Barnard’s Star were now stuck in that system, so there were no “blooded” ratings to sprinkle among the hulls of Admiral Lord Halifax’s fleet. Now arrayed in three tandem echelons, it was, collectively, the hidden weapon that had been slowly forged via the covert sequestration operation code-named Case Leo Gap, but now known simply as RTF 1 or Rescue Task Force One. However, as will happen with acronyms, a rival label had become popular in the multinational armada: “Rag Tag Fleet Number One.”