What a strange world this is; all disgusting, wet, oozing greens. The Kessentai almost hoped for an early onslaught of orna’adar. Better that mass slaughter than a prolonged stay on such a putrid ball.
The Kessentai had actually landed with his oolt before being ordered aloft again to lead this abat-hunt. Binastarion had warned him, through his far-speaker, not to be overconfident, that these particular thresh had sharp kreen, indeed.
They would have to be a tough and resourceful species, he thought, to survive and prosper in such a wretched place. Tough and resourceful, but stupid, since nothing here is worth fighting for. Then again, how stupid are we; trying to take it over. Though the thresh don’t know it, we are actually doing them a favor by exterminating them.
With Rapturous Feast XXVII in the lead, the other eighteen landers — each with its escort of tenar — spread out behind forming a deep “V.” This was a simple formation, simple enough that even fairly stupid Kessentai could maintain it.
Straight as an arrow the wedge of Posleen landers flew, hardly noticing — amidst all the other inexplicable horrors of this world — the shimmering, flashing anomaly on the surface of the sea between the attack group and its target.
And then the anomaly grew a head, one of the foul threshkreen sensory clusters, with ugly projections and a streaming yellow thatch. By the time the landers and tenar had slowed and reoriented their weapons arrays onto the head it had risen up until halfway out of the water. A shimmering golden breastplate (not unlike the one reputedly worn by Aldensatar the Magnificent at the siege of Teron during the Knower wars) covered the monster’s torso and its threatening frontal projections.
The creature from the deeps raised its arms heavenward, masses of something like ball lightning lashing between its gripping members. All Posleen weapons thundered and flashed towards the malignant apparition.
With growing dread, the lead Kessentai saw that no harm — absolutely none — was done the beast. But wait… it seemed to be rocking back and forth as if in distress.
“We’ve got it!” exulted the Kessentai.
“No, lord,” corrected the Artificial Sentience. “The monster is laughing at you.”
Rage warred with fear. Laughing at me? We’ll see who laughs last.
The external speakers carried the sound of a thresh voice, but one frightfully, even impossibly, amplified. The beast’s mouth moved as if trying to speak.
“Translate, AS.”
“My lord, the monster has just said, ‘Stay the fuck away from my sister, you son of a bitch!’ ”
“Skipper, these fucking animals are stupid. They’ll shoot at what they can see with their own eyes, nine times out of ten, and ignore the real threat that they can’t see.”
“How does a stupid race build starships, Daisy?” McNair objected.
The avatar answered, “The theory is that they were genetically altered eons ago, that they are born with skills, even as the Indowy are born with certain talents. The difference is that the Indowy must be tutored to bring their talents to fruition, a long period of intense training and education, while the Posleen just know. But coming into the world knowing all they will ever need in the way of skills, they either never see the need to develop intellectually, or are — in most cases — simply incapable of it.
“In any case, trust me, Skipper, they’ll shoot first at my hologram if that seems most threatening.”
Not for the first time, McNair wanted to reach out and touch the shoulder, if nothing else, of this wonderfully smart and brave and beautiful… warship. He knew there was nothing there, however, and so unconsciously stroked the armored bulkhead of the bridge with a palm.
“Do it, Daisy,” he said, “but be careful, my girl.”
The avatar disappeared from the bridge in an instant, while Daisy’s larger form began to grow up and around USS Des Moines. As Daisy predicted, the Posleen seemed to ignore the shimmering fog that engirdled the vessel proper and to concentrate their fire on her appearing torso. Even behind the heavy armor of the bridge McNair felt the shockwaves as kinetic energy projectiles and plasma weapons passed overhead. The ship was on a course of 270 degrees; thus, due south the sea exploded and roiled with the energies impacting it from the fires of nineteen landers and nearly two hundred and fifty tenar.
And then Daisy spoke. The entire ship reverberated with the amplified message, “Stay the fuck away from my sister, you son of a bitch.”
Down in sick bay Father Dwyer muttered to no one in particular, “Tsk, tsk. Such language, young lady. I see a long penance for you. But, as long as you have to do penance anyway, murder the motherfuckers.”
The guns of USS Des Moines, as well as those of Salem, came in two types. For general work there were the three triple turrets. For anti-lander work there were six individual turrets, one fore, one aft, and two each, port and starboard.
Each of the singles mounted an eight-inch semi-automatic gun, lengthier than those in the triple turrets and firing at a considerably higher velocity. These singles used ammunition, self-contained and not entirely interchangeable with the guns of the triples, though they could fire the more standard ammunition of the triple turrets in a pinch. The normal ammunition for the singles, however, was entirely anti-lander oriented, consisting of armor piercing, discarding sabot, depleted uranium. The APDSDU was adequate to penetrate a Posleen C- or B-Dodecahedron at a range of between twelve and twenty miles, depending on obliquity of the hit. It carried no explosive charge, but would do its damage by the physical destruction of what it passed through, by raising the internal temperature of the compartments it punctured, and by burning.
Depleted uranium burned like the devil.
The general purpose guns, those in the triple turrets, boasted neither the range nor the penetration of the single, anti-lander guns. For the most part they fired high capacity high explosive (or HICAP), twelve kiloton neutron shells (which required national command authority to use), improved conventional munitions (which dispensed smaller bomblets after explosively ejecting the base of the shell), and canister.
ICM was useless. McNair knew better than to ask to open up with nukes. HICAP, fired with a time fuse, would have been useful, certainly, but was not ideal for the purpose at hand.
“Canister, Daisy,” McNair ordered.
“I was planning on it, Skipper,” one of the speakers said.
Eyes still filled with dread, the Kessentai’s attention was fully absorbed with the invulnerable apparition before it. Was it a demon from the legendary times of fire? Some special divine protector of this shit-filled world? An elemental being from the creation?
The Kessentai didn’t, couldn’t, know. What it did know was that the monster’s lightning-clad hands pointed at it and poured forth a blinding fire.
Daisy divided up the enemy’s airborne fleet into three and assigned one triple turret to fire — sweeping left to right — at each third of the fleet. Down below the turrets, machinery, fine-tuned by Sinbad and his Indowy, whispered with movement or clanged with metal-to-metal contact as load after load of canister was moved from storage to the ready racks. The previous HICAP rounds, plus their bagged propellant, had long since been struck below where they would be safe from secondary explosion.