Extremis (69 page)

“First of all, it is clear that we have profoundly outraged the Baldies and must consider the possibility of further counterattacks by them. Since they have evidently become our implacable enemies, should we consider the possibility of making a similar offer of alliance to the humans?”

Scyryx spoke up diffidently. “First of all, Dominant One, I am by no means certain they would accept it, given their past experience with us. The stupidity of human politicians is not infinite, appearances to the contrary. Second, even if they did accept it, the result would be disadvantageous to us no matter who won in the end. If the Baldies win, the disadvantage would be obvious: we’ll find ourselves on the losing side. If the humans win…well, they’ll reoccupy their colony worlds, and what they find there will reveal that we attacked the Bellerophon Arm while the Baldy incursion enabled us to do so without their knowledge. They might well…ah, resent this. It will also reveal that we engaged in nuclear attacks on planetside human population centers. My studies lead me to believe that the humans have strangely strong feelings on that subject.”

“Well, then, what alternative do you offer?”

“Simply this, Dominant One: we do the obvious and drive the Baldies out of Tisiphone and Treadway. And then we complete the extermination of the human populations that we have encountered in the Bellerophon Arm.”

“Complete extermination was never part of my orders, Dominant One!” protested Atylycx.

“Of course not,” said Scyryx with renewed contempt. “It wasn’t cost-effective. Slaves, and even meat animals, are worth more than irradiated corpses. But thanks to your incompetence, it has now become unavoidable. After we’ve killed all of the offended populations,
then
we can make the humans the offer of alliance. And whether they accept or not, we can blame the Baldies for the attacks, and there will be no one alive to contradict us.”

Ultraz considered it. From his studies of the humans, he recalled an uncharacteristically sensible proverb:
Dead men tell no tales.

“Very well. We will proceed along these lines.” He swung his gaze to rest on Atylycx, who had blood connections with Hrufely,
anak
of the Dagora Horde. So having Atylycx’s throat ripped out, however deeply satisfying, would have been more political trouble than it was worth. “You will be permitted to keep your command, Fleet Leader, and you will be reinforced with all the CFC units that can possibly be spared from elsewhere. Also, the individual Hordes will be persuaded to contribute. Your part of our new strategy should be within the scope of your talents: drive out the Baldies and exterminate all life on the human planets you previously attacked. Only afterward will we make our approach to the humans, and that will be done at higher levels, so this time you will have no opportunity to mishandle it. This is your final chance. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, Dominant One!” said Atylycx, frantically exposing his throat in the submission gesture.

Touchstone, Provisional Capital, Treadway

“So, you really are Admiral Trevayne.” Commander Stanley Fraser, RFN (ret.) shook his silver-white head slowly, then continued in the distinctive twang of the Rim world of Aotearoa, where he had been born well over a century before. “We heard about you, of course, even out here in Treadway. But it seemed unbelievable.”

“Especially to you, I imagine,” Trevayne speculated with a grin. He liked this tough old bird who had become a leader of the human survivors here.

Fraser nodded and chuckled. “Yes. I was an enlisted spacer back during the Fringe Rebellion—I served under you at Second Zephrain, and in Operation Reunion. I was a youngster then, and you were in your fifties. Afterward I stayed in the Rim Federation Navy and moved here after retirement.”

Trevayne nodded. Fraser had the look of someone who had started on anagathics relatively late in life. He probably didn’t have too many years left. But his mind was still sharp.

“And now,” Fraser concluded, “I’m an old sod, and you…” He gestured at the man in his physiological twenties who sat across the table where they had been sipping Scotch from the latter’s private stock, and gave his head another shake, as though contemplating the inscrutable workings of destiny.

This town currently served as the provisional capital of Treadway, most of whose larger population centers were radioactive pits. It was in the tropics and therefore spared the worst of the prevailing nuclear-winter effects. So today was mild enough for them to sit on the verandah of the large building that was the administrative center. Treyayne gazed out over the valley, which must have been lovely once but was now clogged with refugee camps. At least those camps now had everything they needed in terms of supplies and medical assistance. As he watched, yet another shuttle from his orbiting fleet settled down to join those already parked on the outskirts of the town.

With their advance toward Bellerophon stymied until the new Kasugawa generators were available, he and Li Magda had led major elements of the fleet back to Mercury, and onward to the liberation of the human populations in the Arm beyond it. Thus it was that they had entered Treadway…and made a discovery with which they were still trying to come to terms.

He turned his attention back to Fraser. “I’m still having trouble crediting what everyone here has told me.”

Fraser shrugged, eyes averted.
“The Tangri landed and…did what the Tangri generally do. Then they took off and began nuking the cities from orbit. Not that there was really anything you’d call a city here. No, they just did it for the sake of doing it.” He trailed to a halt and took a pull on his Scotch.

“But then the bombardment stopped,” Trevayne prompted gently. “And after that…?”

“We had no idea what was going on in space, of course. People tried to tell themselves that the Rim Navy had arrived and driven the Tangri off. But then when the shuttles started landing and they obviously weren’t ours, people thought the Tangri were back. But I knew it wasn’t them, even if my ship recognition is a few decades out of date. Then
they
emerged, and we…well, we were too despairing even to panic. But then…”

“Yes, this is the part I find hard to believe.”

“It’s true, though. As you know, they can’t communicate with us, so it all had to be just a matter of gestures and actions. But…they left food and medical supplies. Then they went elsewhere and did the same thing.” Fraser gave Trevayne a look that was almost beseeching. “Admiral, after all we’ve heard about the Baldies…I just don’t understand.”

“I don’t, either,” Trevayne admitted. “But I
do
understand what the Tangri did—what they’ve always done. And this is the last time they’re going to do it. Ever.”

Fraser stared at him. “That’s a mighty big oath, Admiral.”

Trevayne smiled thinly. “I have a mighty big fleet, Mr. Fraser.”

27

Seeming Otherwise

But I do beguile the thing I am by seeming otherwise.
—Shakespeare

Novaya Petersburg, Novaya Rodina

It hadn’t been all that long since Magda Petrovna Windrider, in her capacity as a director of Seinfeld Starship of Novaya Rodina, had been aboard the test station orbiting the planet. The installation was, of course, physically unchanged. And people were scurrying about in their usual numbers, performing their usual duties. But something was different.

Her husband put his finger on it. “They’re numb,” said Senator Jason Windrider.

“How could they not be?” she muttered. Since the news had arrived from Charlotte in the Bellerophon Arm, a wavefront of shock had spread outward to the uttermost limits of the Terran Republic, leaving in its wake a region of dull hurt where everyone awoke every morning to the knowledge that Li Han was gone.

That Ian Trevayne now commanded the predominantly TRN fleet Li Han had led only added to the stunned sense of unreality. “And yet,” her husband persisted, “there’s more to it than that. It’s more than mere grief. It’s also more than a lust for vengeance. It’s a calm, grim determination to see this thing through—”

“—as Li Han would have wanted it,” she said, finishing his sentence for him in the way of old married couples.

They continued on to the familiar conference room, into which they were passed with only the most perfunctory security. A man and a woman rose. The woman they knew, but not well; the man not at all save by reputation. Sonja Desai stepped forward, armored in stiffness, clearly dreading having to do that which she did least well.

Magda tried to ease it for her. “Hello, Sonja. It’s been a while.”

“Yes, it has.” Desai swallowed hard. “Magda, I…I’m so sorry. I know how far back your friendship with Li Han went, and how special your relationship with her was. After all, being the godmother of her daughter—”

“Thank you, Sonja,” Magda said quickly, sparing her the need to go any further.

Desai’s eyes dropped, and she mumbled something inaudible that might have been “Thank you.” Then
she turned briskly to her male companion. “I’d like to introduce Dr. Isadore Kasugawa.”

“Senator…Admiral,” the elderly seeming man murmured.

“Just Magda, please. I’ve lost track of how many decades I’ve been retired. And let me say what an honor it is to meet you, Doctor.”

“The same goes for me, only more so,” declared Jason, extending his hand. “I’m merely a senator—not a genius.”

“That’s one way to put it,” said Magda with a twinkle.

Sonja Desai, reverting to type, plowed straight into the business at hand. “As I mentioned when you asked for this meeting, Dr. Kasugawa and I have been turning our attention to ways of speeding up construction of new generators—especially the improved ones which will be necessary when your superdevastators become operational. I assume you’ve already had the opportunity to review the summary we sent.”

“Yes,” nodded Magda. “You’re quite right about the need to dredge warp lines to accommodate the SDTs. But in the meantime, Admiral Trevayne’s fleet is going to have to fight its way through a certain number of warp points that can’t accommodate the SDTs—or, for that matter, DTs—until after the way has been cleared for the Kasugawa generators to transit. Isn’t this so?”

“It is,” Desai acknowledged glumly. “It’s the basic tactical problem we’ve been up against from the first. Ian—I mean, Admiral Trevayne—would call it a catch-22.”

“Well,” said Magda, “we think we may have found a way around that.”

She could tell that she had their undivided attention.

“We’ve naturally been concentrating on series production of the new SDTs,” she continued. “But ever since it became apparent that the smaller warp-point assaults are going to become a lot tougher, we’ve assigned additional priority to the construction of the supermonitors which can transit them prior to dredging. But the real problem is getting the Kasugawa generators through those warp points. So I sat down with our chief designers,
who’ve determined that, by ripping out practically everything else, we can cram a Kasugawa generator into one of those same hulls. The crew could be extremely small, and the ship would be equipped with specially designed escape pods for them. They would simply
take the ship through the warp point, then abandon ship when it’s time for the generator to activate.”

“In the middle of a warp-point battle?” Sonja Desai breathed.

“The crew would, of course, be volunteers?” Kasugawa tentatively asked.

“Of course,” said Jason. “But I don’t think we’ll have much trouble finding volunteers from the Terran Republic Navy.” He glanced at the black mourning banners draping the peripheries of the briefing room. “Not now.”

28

Stubborn Things

Facts are stubborn things.
—Smollett

Punt City, New Ardu/Bellerophon

Ankaht sent a
selnarm
command to her lexigraphic vocoder:
turn page
. Expecting yet another sheet filled with an unbroken phalanx of human characters, she was stunned when the dense, even turgid, prose of the book—
The Cosmology of Ethics
, written in 2346 AD by the Martian hermitess Farzaneh Adenauer—suddenly relented: in its place was a single iconic image. It was the interpenetrated black-and-white-waves disk known as the
taiji
symbol—the hallmark of the Terran philosophy/faith known as Taoism.

Ankaht leaned back and felt the thread of Adenauer’s argument dissipate, felt the looming omnipresence of the symbol—and its import—grow and fill her mind. The basic notion behind it was not an isolated feature of just one strain of human thought; it was arguably one of the species’ most central and universal concepts, albeit represented in different ways in different cultures. Health, understanding, reality itself: all a product of contending forces that were also utterly interdependent and, ultimately, engendered by their seeming opposite. And returning to Adenauer’s prose, Ankaht discovered the pearl of insight she had begun to despair of finding in this book: “In societies and nations, as in individual organisms, the lesson resident in the
taiji
holds constant: to be
in extremis
is to veer further away from balance; to veer further away from balance is to place oneself
in extremis
.”

In extremis
. Like an ominous antithesis of the
taiji
symbol, this phrase had also leapt out at her again and again from human documents on philosophy, on law, on war. For individuals, to be
in extremis
was the harbinger of disaster; for societies, it was the herald of the Four Horsemen. And the cautionary tales of both history and fables were always the same: when situations got too desperate—or beliefs or behaviors became too extreme—tragedy followed, just as the ear-splitting thunder of annihilation followed a warning flash of lightning.

In contrast, while the humans’ exhaustive analyses of every war and crisis rightly examined the historical particulars that gave each one its shape, they too often became seduced and blinded by those same particulars. In so doing, the otherwise learned experts and academics too often lost sight of the core truth that was the common seed of all the dire events they examined: when humans find themselves
in extremis
, they rarely extricate themselves via peaceful, productive, or prosocial means. The urgency and immediacy of any crisis—having been allowed to develop unchecked—left little time to choose among, let alone consider, alternatives when at last the claws of mortal peril came close.