- 105 -
WarAvocat was reluctant to give the order. It meant he would surrender his role as force commander.
The worst was past, though. The methane breathers had their backs against the wall. Now it was a matter of wearing them down.
VII Gemina was no longer combat effective. After three years even the Deified were tired.
It was time to go home.
He gave the order.
Starbase had changed. Construction channels were storms of sound and fire. A millennium’s hoard of materials had been consumed. A few more years and the fleet would begin to feel the drain.
He tried catching up on what had happened inside Canon space. Incursions and provocations everywhere, answered ruthlessly as diminished forces tried to hold the Rims.
Canon would double in volume before the plague of violence ran its course.
The fleet had to be expanded. It was able to cope now only by employing its nameless reserves and because Starbase Dengaida could provide some repairs and replacement secondaries.
Starbase agreed. Expansion was necessary. Canon had grown but the fleet had not.
Starbase proposed expansion to one hundred units and construction of five more Starbases. Twelve Guardships to be assigned each Starbase with twenty-eight palatine units at Starbase Tulsa able to reinforce in any direction.
Starbase had other suggestions. Enrollment of five million new volunteers. Continuous recruiting afterward. Renovation of Canon’s administration. The enfranchisement of nonhumans, who made up the majority of the population in Canon space. And a long list more.
WarAvocat wondered if Kez Maefele had found some way to tamper with the system.
But Starbase had been ruminating upon Canon’s next two thousand years for some time.
WarAvocat was intrigued by one report originating outside usual sources. Its having reached Starbase at all was enough to make one consider reevaluating the certainty that there was no Divine Providence.
It came out of House Tregesser, unloved by Canon officialdom. As witness the wilderness of coda, addenda, and subscripts the report had accumulated, meant to vilify House Tregesser, whose main crime was that it refused to be gobbled by the bureaucratic machine.
House Tregesser claimed to be the object of an Outsider effort to take advantage of its maverick status. The House had defended itself and had captured several Outsider humans.
They had no idea of their origin. Their memory was one memory. Their history was one history. Alliance in worship of the Destroyer. They had been prowling the Web, with the methane breathers, committing holy atrocities, for ages. Their allies had no idea whence they sprang either.
The Godspeakers were so called because they could summon the Presence to grisly rites carried out by their human cohorts. They could communicate over any distance through the medium of the Web.
Though the Godspeakers set down colonies wherever they found suitable worlds, they were not empire builders. Nor were they true proselytizers. Those sprang from their human companions.
WarAvocat paced, bewildered. His experience with superstition was limited to an uncertain belief in Tawn, VII Gemina’s tutelary. He was repelled and revolted by those creatures. He felt no impulse toward mercy.
He was tired and slow. Maybe he was too old. He considered potential successors. None could cope any better.
“Access, the Deified Aleas Notable, if she’s willing.” They had become friends during their year as Dictats. He had not stood for reelection. She had been reelected the twice she had stood.
“Hanaver? Are you brooding again?”
“Me?”
“You.”
He asked if she had reviewed the data just received.
“I have now.”
Disconcerting. “And the commentaries filed in response?”
“Ah. I see what you mean. This struggle will have no end short of extermination of the methane breathers and their creed. It’s the most evil thing we’ve ever encountered.”
“Have you reviewed Starbase’s recommendations?”
“No subject has ever exercised the Deified as much. But I doubt any have reviewed the Outsider info—and I suspect its implications are the predicates upon which Starbase’s recommendations are based. You wanted me to see that? I’ve passed it on.”
“I want an opinion. Should I retire?”
The face on the screen went vacant. Then, “You want a vote of confidence? You got it. Nine to one against your retirement.”
“My confidence doesn’t need buoying. I’m burned out, Aleas.”
“And thinking about the artifact still?”
He had told her. “Yes. Damn it. I’m lonely.”
“Gemina has her specs. We could run a copy.”
“Politically unacceptable.”
“We’ll think of something.”
“I’m sorry for disturbing you.”
“Hanaver Strate! You… Forget it. I have things to do.”
WarAvocat grunted. If he got to work, he would not have these lapses. He would not have the time.
He put the Tregesser report aside, reviewed what other Guardships had learned about the enemy empire. The information would not take shape as a whole. Maybe if he went to Hall of the Stars....
Something had begun to nag. Something to do with star charts. Spots of blue.
“Access, Gemina. I need the visual data gathered by the soldiers who stormed the orbital fortress used to neutralize Objective Thirty-Eight.” He had reviewed the material once and found it uninteresting. “Specifically, what was taped at the fortress’s heart.”
One company had gone all the way. The heart had proved to be a hollow sphere containing several thousand points of blue light. Twenty-some methane breathers had lain heaped in bowls on the surface of that hollow.
Could those blue points be some kind of chart?
He ordered them examined on that assumption. Gemina justified everything into the human sensory range, presented it three-dimensionally. “It is a chart, then?”
affirmative.
“Of what?”
insufficient data.
“Find correspondences with our own charts.”
Blink-blink-blink, a wave of about eighty flashes, systems suspected to be occupied by methane breathers. there are no representations for systems neutralized. A lot of blinks, systems inhabited by subject species.
“What’s our viewpoint? Show me the Rim.”
A red gauze curtain sliced off part of the egg. Blue points floated on the Canon side. “Damn. Match those with known systems. Then eliminate everything associated with a known system.”
As blue sparks vanished, he noted the presence of a brown sparkle similar to those representing subject systems not associated with blue sparks. “Knock out the brown spots not associated with a known system.”
All those went. Several hundred blue sparks remained. He toyed with them, concluded they represented methane breathers on the Web.
They could track one another on the Web!
action incumbent?
“Advise Starbase. Suggest directives to all systems noted our side of the Rim. Also suggest penetration of additional orbital fortresses to obtain longer tape exposures.”
He sat down, leaned back, closed his eyes, pleased with himself.
“That quick interplay of analysis and intuition is why the Deified won’t accept your retirement.”
“Aleas?”
“In the flesh.”
He opened his eyes. “What the hell?”
“I had myself reanimated. Gemina approved. That’s some response, Hanaver. When I was this age, I was considered reasonably attractive. By the standards of the time.”
“Or any other.” This was an act of friendship that prostrated him. And one he did not know how to accept.
“It’ll take me a while to learn how to handle a body again. I’d forgotten so much. Especially how limited you are.”
“Aleas...”
“Never mind, Hanaver. I know you better than you think. It’s worth a try.”