Antares Victory E-Book

Michael McCollum

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

After a century of warfare, humanity finally discovered the Achilles heel of the Ryall, their xenophobic reptilian foe. Spica – Alpha Virginis – is the key star system in enemy space. It is the hub through which all Ryall starships must pass, and if Alta and their allies can just capture and hold it, they will strangle the Ryall war machine and end its threat to humankind forever. It all seemed so simple in the computer simulations: Advance by stealth, attack without warning, strike swiftly with overwhelming power. Unfortunately, the logistics prove to be the easy part. With the key to victory in hand, Richard and Bethany Drake must temper the volatile role of human nature if they are to bring down the alien foe…

Leseprobe

ANTARES VICTORY

Copyright © 2002, 2019 by Michael McCollum

All rights reserved.

Published as an eBook in 2019 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

ISBN 978-1-625674-33-3

Cover design by John Fisk

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Foldspace Chart

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

About the Author

Also by Michael McCollum

Chapter 1

Admiral (First Rank) Richard Arthur Drake lay strapped in his acceleration couch aboard the orbit-to-orbit shuttle and gazed at the glowing apparition that covered half the ebon sky before him. Here in the Napier system, the Antares Nebula was a hundred times larger than it was in the night skies of home.

The nebula was a lustrous ball of gas and dust as beautiful as it was deadly. Its intricate network of swirls was a gossamer spider web suspended inside the shell of a shimmering cosmic egg. Save for its seemingly solid central core, the nebula’s delicate filaments were nearly transparent until they approached its outer shell, where they again took on the hue of a fluorescent glow tube. The apparition was a reminder of the enormous cruel joke that God… or Mother Nature, or Saint Murphy, or someone… had played on Drake, his wife, humanity, and yes, even the Ryall.

Six years earlier, Antares had been the brightest star decorating the night sky of Drake’s home planet, Alta. The baleful red spot had dominated the winter firmament ever since colonists first set foot on the blue-white world that was in many ways a virtual twin to Mother Earth. For four hundred and thirty winters, Antares had been the real-life version of the red stars with which Altan children decorated their fala bushes at Christmastime, an ochre beacon hovering low over the Colgate Mountain Range each evening after sunset. Then, at 17:30 hours on the night of Aquarius 16, 2637, the ruby star had undergone a breathtaking transformation. In a matter of minutes, the dying ember blossomed Phoenix-like to become the brightest star in the galaxy.

To those who observed the newborn electric spark high above the city of Homeport, there was no mystery as to what had happened. The cause of the transformation was obvious.

Antares had been well into its dotage long before human beings discovered star travel. For thousands of years, the red supergiant star had profligately consumed hydrogen, heedless of the day when that fuel must inevitably run out. That day came in 2512 (standard calendar). With nothing left to burn, the fusion reaction that had long powered Antares’ inner engine flickered, and died. With no internally generated heat to oppose the pull of gravity, the core of the red giant collapsed. Gigatons of star stuff gave up its energy of position as it slid down the gravity well, causing the surrounding temperature to jump more than a billion degrees in an instant. The release of so much energy in so short a time triggered new fusion, which generated yet more energy. The runaway reaction could not be contained.

Antares exploded into the largest supernova ever observed by human beings.

The universe is a very large place, especially when measured in terms of the veritable crawl that is light speed. The distance between Antares and Alta was such that it took the nova wave front 125 years to cross the gulf of space between them. When the first photons from the explosion finally reached the colony world, they burst forth in a phenomenon that quickly became known as Antares dawn light. However, as impressive as the giant star’s funeral pyre was during those first few weeks, in one important respect, its appearance had been anticlimactic.

Scientists have long known that the cataclysmic flash that marks a supernova is merely a minor side effect of what is really taking place. In addition to outshining all other stars in the galaxy, a supernova produces a titanic storm of particles across the subatomic spectrum. While these and many other effects are of interest only to astronomers, Antares’ death had carried with it one consequence that affected the lives of everyone on Alta. In addition to vaporizing everything around it – including the hapless ships and crews then in transit across the Antares system – the supernova disrupted star travel throughout the region, cutting Alta off from the rest of human space.

The invisible pathways between the stars are the result of long lines of folded space that emanate from the gigantic black hole that inhabits the central core of the Milky Way Galaxy – and indeed, all spiral galaxies. These “foldlines” weave intricate webs of folded space as they sweep outward along the spiral arms, intersecting some stars while bypassing others. Where a foldline intersects a star, it is often focused by the star’s gravity well to produce a “weak spot” in the vacuum of space. Such weak spots are called “foldpoints,” and within their planet-sized volumes, it is possible to produce a hole in space-time. A ship that positions itself within a foldpoint and then generates a precisely formed energy field will effectively drop out of the universe and be flung instantly along the foldline to the next weak point, where it returns to normal space without having traversed the intervening distance.

For half a thousand years, humanity’s ships had used foldlines to circumvent Einstein’s universal speed limit. Foldlines were the superhighways to the stars. Five percent of all star systems possess foldpoints; and in those systems, there are often two, three, or even four of them. Antares, in the days before its fiery death, had been the champion foldpoint producer in human space. It possessed six of the gateways, making it the major interstellar transportation hub in the sector that bore its name.

Valeria, Alta’s star, possessed but a single foldpoint, a deficiency that made the Val System an interstellar cul-de-sac. Of necessity, all traffic to and from Valeria passed through the Napier System, from which Alta was first colonized. That, at least, had been the situation before the Antares Supernova. The titanic explosion had disrupted the foldline running through the Val system, causing Alta’s single foldpoint to vanish without a trace.

The loss of its sole gateway to the stars had plunged the Altan colony into a century of isolation. Nor had the Altan scientists any expectation that the sudden blossoming of the supernova in their sky twelve decades later would change the situation. In this, they proved less than prescient.

For when Valeria finally pricked the surface of the supernova’s expanding bubble of radiation, the geometry of foldspace underwent a dramatic transformation. Having passed beyond the Val system, the supernova shockwave no longer intersected the foldline running between the two stars, allowing Alta’s foldpoint to form once again high above the system’s yellow dwarf primary.

The fact that Valeria was once more connected to the rest of human space might have gone unnoticed for several years had it not been for an anomalous event a few weeks after Antares flashed violet-white in Alta’s sky. While studying the newly revealed supernova, an orbiting telescope picked up a mysterious ship materializing in the vicinity of the system’s long-lost foldpoint. As astronomers watched openmouthed with amazement, the unidentified ship turned toward deep space and began thrusting as though the legions of hell were chasing it.

Drake had been a captain in the Altan Space Navy at the time. He had commanded ASNS Discovery, one of the three old interstellar cruisers that were stranded in the system when Antares exploded. Shortly after the appearance of the mysterious ship, the Admiralty ordered Drake to intercept the interloper at maximum boost.

The chase was a difficult one conducted at high gravs the entire way. When they finally overhauled the intruder, they found a ghost ship. TSNS Conqueror, one of the terrestrial space navy’s mightiest dreadnoughts, proved to be nothing more than an animated hulk manned by a dead crew, with no indication of what or who had killed them.

The discovery left the Altan government with a problem. On the one hand, the arrival of Conqueror announced that the way to the stars was once again open. On the other, its condition was mute testimony to dangerous circumstances somewhere beyond their local sky. If Conqueror could have destroyed the whole of the Altan Space Navy with little or no effort, yet had itself been battered to scrap metal by some unknown enemy, what of those who had destroyed it? Were they Alta’s friends or were they its foes?

Having asked the question, the government decided to send Richard Drake to find the answer…

“Task Force coming into view, Admiral,” the pilot of the shuttle said from beside Drake.

Drake shook off the reverie into which he had fallen. It was a nasty habit of his whenever he contemplated the Antares Nebula, brought on undoubtedly by the fact that his own life had been inextricably linked to the nebula ever since it blazed bright in Alta’s night sky.

Alta was far away at the moment, as was his pregnant wife. He missed Bethany already, not that he’d had more than a few months to be with her these past three years. Building the largest invasion fleet in the history of interstellar war had monopolized his attention, giving him the opportunity for only a few brief visits home, and one glorious vacation that had lasted an entire week. Still, Bethany had usually been within comm range, and the two of them had spent many enjoyable hours talking face to face via comm screen into the wee hours. Now more than a hundred light years of vacuum separated them, a distance that could only grow as humankind launched its maximum effort to defeat an implacable alien foe.

* * *

Drake pulled himself aboard the Terrestrial Blastship Victory. In the suiting cubicle just inside the main ship lock, he found a Marine honor guard and a young man in the uniform of a commander in the Royal Sandarian Navy. Victory was in microgravity to ease the arrival of landing craft from the other ships in the fleet. The Marines stood rigidly at attention with their boots locked into the floor grid to keep them from floating away. The commander floated free, steadying himself with a guideline.

Drake paused just inside the inner airlock door as martial music emanated from the ship’s bulkhead-mounted speakers. It was some tune that he had heard on Earth, but one that he could not name. The unfamiliar musical style indicated that the march must have been written after Alta was cut off from human space.

When the music ended, the saluting Marines all snapped their right hands down in unison. Drake pulled himself toward the officer, whom he recognized.

“Admiral Drake, it’s good to see you,” Philip Walkirk exclaimed, extending his right hand while keeping hold of the guideline with his left.

“Your Highness, good to see you again,” Drake replied as he grasped Walkirk’s hand. “I see you have come up in the world. I remember when you were a lowly ensign.”

Walkirk smiled. “It could be that I have connections at court.”

That, Drake knew, was an understatement. Four years earlier, Philip had been assigned aboard Discovery as an exchange officer. Drake had objected to the assignment when he first heard about it, not that he had anything personal against the young officer. The problem was that Philip was not just any member of the Sandarian Navy. His father was John-Philip Walkirk VI, hereditary king and ruler of Sandar, and Philip would one day follow him on the throne. The thought that the heir-apparent might be injured, or even killed, while serving aboard an Altan cruiser had been enough to give Drake insomnia.

Walkirk had served well while aboard Discovery, and had even led the Marine boarding party that captured the Ryall freighter Space Swimmer in what proved to be a pivotal action for the human war effort. He had accompanied Discovery to Earth, where events had unfolded that led inevitably to this gathering of the fleet.

Philip, he noted, had filled out in the last few years. He still had the jet-black hair, intense eyes, and the prominent nose that marked the Walkirk clan. His shoulders were broader than they had been and his voice lacked the youthful tremor that sometimes crept in when he was excited. His eyes had gained a few wrinkles at their corners, as well; but then, whose had not?

Drake was significantly grayer than he had been when the two of them first met and he had to work harder than ever at keeping his paunch under control. His green eyes tended to squint more, the result of countless hours spent in front of a computer screen working out the myriad details required for the impending invasion of Ryall space. He had not been alone in that task. Thousands of specialists across human space had worked out the plan on which they were about to bet the human race. Drake had a proprietary interest. The whole thing had originally been his idea.

At 41, he was getting to be an “old man” for a spacer, and the fact that he had been forced to leave his expectant wife a mere month before the birth of their first son had done nothing to improve his mood.

“How many are onboard?”

“Everyone, Admiral. You are the last to arrive. I am here to guide you to the briefing.”

“Then guide away.”

The young prince reversed his position and pulled himself along the guideline toward the hatch leading out of the hangar bay. Drake followed him. Soon the two of them were gliding through the corridors and passageways of the big terrestrial blastship. Unlike Drake’s original command, which was a ring and cylinder design, Victory was an oversize cylinder, the better to utilize interior volume while retaining the ability to spin the ship for artificial gravity. It was an outrigger design, with many of its weapons and instruments in twin pods held stationary while the central body rotated, not unlike Drake’s new flagship, Conqueror II. As he trailed Philip through endless corridors and passageways, he wondered how the prince could have memorized the route in the short time he had been onboard.

Around them, serious-faced men and women moved with hurried purpose. If they recognized the insignia on the two colonial officers’ shoulders, they made no sign. Besides, spacers maneuvering in micro gravity had need of both hands for locomotion and none left over for saluting.

After it seemed they had traversed the entire length of the big ship, Philip guided him to a large compartment in which three hundred naval officers were crammed into every available cubic meter, placing a heavy strain on the blastship’s environmental system. These were the captains and executive officers of the ships that had gathered in the Napier system in preparation for entering the Antares nebula. They did not, however, represent the whole of the invasion fleet, or even a majority of it. Task Force Spica would consist of eight major components, of which only two were represented aboard Victory. The fleets that made up the rest of the invasion force were assembling in half a dozen star systems across human space. They would rendezvous with the Altan and Sandarian fleets, and the sizeable Terrestrial Space Navy contingent that had been assigned to augment them, once all were inside the nebula.

Most of those present had strapped themselves into seats bolted to the curved deck, while several clumps of officers floated free to consult with one another. As Drake entered, acceleration alarms began to hoot and a disembodied voice announced the imminent return of spin gravity. Drake quickly used the “overhead” handholds to move to his position at the table that had been set up at the front of the compartment.

There he joined Grand Admiral Georges Terence Belton, who was already strapped into his seat. The admiral was reviewing his notes. At Drake’s approach, he looked up and nodded gravely.

“Welcome, Drake. How was the trip from Alta?”

“Hurried, sir. I wish the lizards had given us another month to prepare.”

“Hell, why not ask for another year?”

“No sense tempting the fates, sir. A month would have been sufficient.”

Belton rubbed his chin, and then nodded. “You might be right. I know I would have been more prepared for this coming fight. Still, while we are wishing, we might want to ask for another hundred orbital fortresses.”

“Just get us the ones we already have in time to do some good, sir.”

G.T. Belton was in overall command of the Spica Operation, and Drake’s boss, even though he would not be going within a hundred light years of the fleet’s objective. Belton had done a brilliant job in bringing a billion disparate elements together to mount the invasion. However, like General Groves of the fabled Manhattan Project, Belton’s skills were that of an organizer more than a warrior. Now that the time had come to put his planning into practice, he would continue in overall command – as much as a sop to the politicians of Earth as for military necessity – but a younger, more vigorous commander would take over direct operational responsibility for the invasion.

After a lengthy debate in which several of the better-known candidates had counterbalanced one another out of the job, a little-known colonial officer had been chosen for operational command of humanity's invasion fleet. That officer was Richard Drake, of the Altan Space Navy.

“Ready to give the lizards a swift kick in the tail?” Belton asked as he buckled in.

“Yes, sir,” Drake replied. “And thank you for the trust you have shown in supporting me for this command.”

“You may want to hold your appreciations until you have a few engagements under your belt. Being at the sharp end of the spear can be a thankless job, especially when you have to deal with REMFs.”

“REMFs, sir?”

“Old terrestrial navy expression, Drake. Its roots are obscene. It refers to the assholes back at base who won’t give the man in combat what he needs unless he asks in triplicate. You can rest assured, by the way, that so long as I am on the job, there will be a minimum of that sort of bullshit.”

“I know that, sir. I also know how many senior officers were passed over for this assignment, and how much your opinion counted in the decision.”

Belton lowered his voice until only Drake could hear him against the background noise. “Then you also know, Admiral, that there will be a thousand pairs of eyes watching your every move, waiting for you to screw up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you interested to know what tilted the decision in your favor?”

“If you would care to tell me, sir.”

“Because this invasion was your doing, Drake. You Altans arrived on Earth with a map of enemy foldspace, something no one else had managed to obtain in more than a century of war. Yet, even though you presented us with the key to victory on a silver platter, not one of us saw the implications until you forced us to see them. That shows an independence of thought that will be sorely needed in the coming campaign.”

Belton spoke standard with an odd, but understandable, accent. He was a native of the legendary city of Rome, a fabled place that Altan children studied in school, but one that no Altan (to Drake’s knowledge) had ever seen with his own eyes. Their first brief visit to Earth had been too hectic to visit the Eternal City, and his two trips since were consumed with planning for the invasion.

“I still appreciate the chance you are giving me, Admiral. I won’t let you down.”

“Appreciation noted,” Belton said gruffly before raising his voice to his normal subdued bellow. It was a voice that projected an image at odds with Belton’s short stature and thinning hair. “Now then, Admiral Drake, are you ready to get on with the war?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let us give the engineers five minutes to put some spin on this old bucket and then we start the briefing. I will keep my remarks short to give you more time for your spiel.”

“That will be fine, sir.”

While Drake led the bulk of humanity’s offensive fleet into the heart of enemy space, Grand Admiral Belton would establish the bases and infrastructure needed to keep the fleet supplied. As Bethany, Drake’s historian wife, had remarked when he told her of his appointment to operational command, Belton was to be General George C. Marshall to Drake’s George Patton. Richard knew who General Patton had been, of course. One of the ships in the fleet was named Patton.

He had never heard of George C. Marshall.

* * *

“Officers of the Allied Forces of Humanity, welcome!” Admiral Belton roared when a few tenths-gee returned to the ship. As he spoke, the terrestrial admiral let his gaze sweep over his audience. His listeners wore the black-and-silver uniforms of the terrestrial navy, the ornate black-and-green of the Sandarians, the subdued, slightly quaint uniforms worn by the Altans, and a dozen more.

“You have all been briefed extensively as to your jobs during the coming mission, so I won’t bore you by being repetitive. Rather, Admiral Drake and I have invited you here today because this will be our last chance to gather in person. We will not likely find ourselves within a few million kilometers of one another again any time soon. Indeed, even if things go as well as we have planned them, many of us will not be returning to human space for several years… and let us be honest, some of us will not be coming back at all. That is the way of war, a necessity we warriors accept as the price of service to our race.

“Events will move very quickly once we enter the nebula and there will be little time for consultation. Therefore, it is important that every fleet and subfleet commander, every ship captain, every first officer, every ordinary spacer, understand our grand strategy. So, let me give it to you without the usual diplomatic niceties.

“We will attack without warning, we will strike hard and swiftly, we will close with our enemy at every opportunity, we will pummel them without pause and respite. If we are audacious, we will have the advantage of surprise. Indeed, we must have it, for without surprise, we will lose the coming campaign. You have all seen the roster of ships taking part in this operation and must know what it has cost us to assemble this many combat units so far from home. If we lose, the human race will be on the defensive for years to come while our worlds rebuild what we will have lost.

“The stakes are high, ladies and gentleman, but the prize is worth it. After too many decades of fighting holding actions, we are striking into the very heart of our enemies’ domain. There we will be outnumbered and outgunned. We can give no quarter in the coming action, nor can we seek any. Our foes are xenophobes who oppose the very idea that we exist. They cannot help it. The impulse is baked into their very genes. For that reason, we cannot give them a break. If this is to be a war of extinction, it is our job to see that the other side does most of the dying.

“As we go into danger, I would leave you with the following thought: We are not deploying this fleet merely to gain a narrow tactical edge. We do not seek a long-term strategic advantage. This time our goal is nothing less than total victory.”

The admiral paused a few seconds to give his words time to sink in. He was gratified that he detected no false bravura or mindless smiles at the prospect of going into harm’s way. The mood of the gathered officers seemed one of grim determination. He approved of their attitude. The coming days and weeks would be grim indeed, and they would require all the determination the human race could muster. He finished his scan of the audience with a nod toward Drake.

“I will now turn this briefing over to the man whose wild idea this operation originally was. Since no good deed ever goes unpunished, he will be in operational command of those of you who will engage in the initial assault.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Admiral Richard Drake, of the Altan Space Navy.”

* * *

Drake climbed to his feet in the careful way people do in minimal gravity. Springing up too quickly would merely have caused him to bounce a couple of meters into the air, possibly to hit his head on the maze of bare piping that cluttered the overhead, most certainly to look foolish until he floated back down again. When he had achieved an erect posture, he moved carefully to the podium, not so much walking as gliding his feet like an ice skater across the deck plates.

He took a few moments to arrange his material and to check the order of his presentation, already loaded into Victory’s main computer. Then he looked up at the expectant crowd, took a deep breath, and launched into the plan that he and a few thousand others had spent the last three years perfecting.

“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Task Force Spica. As you are well aware, the Antares Supernova of 2512 really messed up this section of space.”

As Drake spoke, the holocube flashed to show the exploding star in its depths. Around it, etched dimly in glowing red paths that were not quite straight, were the foldlines of the Antares Foldspace Cluster. “When Antares blew, it changed the focus of foldlines all over the cluster and caused a new foldpoint to appear here in the Napier system. That foldpoint led directly into the heart of the Ryall Hegemony.

“You’ve all read books or seen holo-epics of that first encounter with the Ryall. You know how the Ryall fleet came boiling through the foldpoint to rain nuclear fire down on New Providence without provocation, even as its population was evacuating to escape the supernova’s radiation. That was how we humans first learned of the Ryall, and of their xenophobia.

“It has been more than a century since that first clash, and for all of that time, humanity has been on the defensive. Even though we seem well matched in terms of technology and weaponry, we have been steadily losing this war for twelve decades now. Four years ago, we discovered the reason why.”

Drake pressed a control on the podium and a diagram appeared. On it, the dimly glowing paths from Antares emanated like the strands of a spider web. One of these strands terminated in the Napier system, where the war had begun. Another pathway originated inside the Antares Nebula and arched across the screen to terminate in a star with the odd name of Eulysta.

It had been in the Eulysta system that Drake and the Altan-Sandarian military expedition had discovered the Ryall mining colony on Corlis, an otherwise uninhabited planet. It was there they had captured Space Swimmer with its astrogation computer intact. This, in turn, had given humankind its first good look at the geometry of Ryall space. Beyond Eulysta lay Carratyl, home system to one of the Ryall agricultural worlds. Beyond Carratyl lay Spica, the heart of the Ryall Hegemony.

“This is why the Ryall have been able to outfight us for a century. Spica is larger than Antares and possesses eight foldpoints. Just as Antares was a major hub for our commerce before it exploded, Spica is a major hub for Ryall interstellar commerce. In fact, it is their only such hub.

“Human space is strung out along the spiral arm of the galaxy, but Ryall space is a compact ball of stars, all of which are tied directly or indirectly to the central nexus at Spica. What this means is that no Ryall world is more than three foldspace jumps from Spica, which is a considerable improvement over the eight, ten, or even twelve jumps between the most widely separated human stars. Because of this arrangement, the Ryall enjoy interior lines of communication and can better utilize their navy. With fewer jumps between stars, they can always respond to our attacks more quickly than we can respond to theirs.

“If Spica is their strength, it is also their Achilles’ heel. The ease with which they move goods from star to star has caused their economy to become differentiated. The worlds of the Ryall Hegemony tend to specialize. Some build weapons and ships, others build computers, still others grow the majority of their food. This arrangement makes considerable sense in a foldspace cluster where the stars are only a few jumps apart. However, it also makes them dependent on their interstellar commerce. Where our shipping largely consists of luxury goods and machinery intended to make our colonies self-sufficient, theirs carries everyday necessities. Their worlds have become so specialized that the Ryall must trade to live.

“That, then, is where we are going to hit them. So long as the Ryall control Spica, they can coordinate their attacks better than we can defend against them. Our defenses are too spread out, our reaction times too sluggish. They, on the other hand, can bring their whole fleet to bear on a single objective in a matter of weeks.

“If, however, we blockade Spica, we will have gotten an iron wrecking bar into the gears of their well-oiled machine. With our ships in control of their primary transit system, it will be they who are hamstrung for a change. Denying them transit of Spica will break the hegemony into foldspace strings of just two or three stars each. They will not be able to communicate with one another, except by going the long way around the few series of foldspace transitions that bypass Spica.

“Instead of the well-coordinated, massive assaults they have launched in the past, isolated systems will be forced to launch uncoordinated attacks through foldpoints where we will be waiting to slaughter them as soon as they materialize. For once, we will have the interior lines of communication and the luxury of nearby support. Instead of facing the whole, massive Ryall fleet at once, we will defeat each uncoordinated attack in detail.”

Drake let his gaze scan the surrounding faces.

“Make no mistake, ladies and gentlemen. It is going to be a long war. Yet, if we can hold on long enough, the Ryall economy will collapse from the disruptions caused by our blockade. It will be our job to hold on until that happens.”

Chapter 2

Varlan of the Scented Waters lay amid the unfamiliar green of alien plants, breathed the strange, but not unpleasant odor of them, and let a sun that was not her own warm her gray-green flanks and tail. She was physically comfortable, having pulled her six short legs up close to her body and stretched her long neck out across the green carpet of tiny plants that so reminded her of the visoleth fields of home. For some reason, her captors favored keeping the small plants chopped off to a uniform height. The machine that did the chopping was quietly at work in a distant section of the large green field and would not enter the section around Varlan until its sensors detected her departure.

Her physical comfort on this warm, sun-drenched day was in sharp contrast to her psychic turmoil. She lay amid the greenery with nictating membranes covering her eyes, and her long, mobile ears erect, as she considered the strange turn her life had taken since her capture by the two-legged-monsters.

She had been perfectly happy with her life as manager of the Corlis Raw Materials Extraction Facility, where she had spent her waking periods in comfortable routine worrying about production goals, personnel health, and equipment maintenance schedules. Her year had been governed not by Corlis’s seasons — since the planet rode upright in its orbit, and thus lacked such — but by the semi-annual visits of the ore freighters that transported refined metals back to the home stars.

Her comfortable routine had been shattered one day when Space Swimmer, the ore carrier then in orbit about Corlis, reported the sudden appearance of strange ships in the interstellar gateway from the Evil Star. The development had been as frightening as it was unexpected. Her species’ natural philosophers knew that the second gateway in the Eulysta system led into the heart of a supernova remnant. In fact, had it led anywhere useful, Corlis would have been colonized long since, rather than being the home of a single outlying mineral extraction facility.

She realized immediately that if the enemies of her species had developed ships capable of safely penetrating the Evil Star’s maelstrom of high-energy particles, whipping magnetic fields, and searing radiations, then Those Who Rule must learn of it immediately. She dispatched Space Swimmer toward the normal interstellar gate to spread the alarm and then turned her attention to transforming the tunnels of her facility into a defensive fortress.

As he fled toward the gateway and the safety of home space, Ossfil, Space Swimmer’s commander, beamed the data captured by his ship’s sensors back to Varlan on Corlis. Two alien ships quickly multiplied to more than a dozen. Almost as quickly as Space Swimmer spotted their arrival in the Eulysta system, the monsters detected the fleeing ore carrier and dispatched high-acceleration craft to intercept it.

The rest of the alien fleet left the alternate gateway and began boosting for Corlis. Having done all she could to warn Those Who Rule, Varlan settled down to making the coming assault on her facility as expensive as possible.

Her defensive preparations were completed about the time the swift ships of the enemy overtook Space Swimmer. Three mornings after the ore carrier’s capture, armored bipeds attacked her facility. The fight had been sharp and quick, and the enemy everywhere victorious. Not even the defensive redoubt she established in Tunnel 3 held for very long. In the end, she and her surviving workers found themselves prisoners of an alien enemy.

Imprisonment was not as she had expected. The monsters treated her and her workers well. There was no torture or vivisections, nor were they deprived of food or a comfortable environment. However, the psychic strain of captivity had been great, especially after she learned the Monsters had captured Space Swimmer’s astrogation computer. The race had long guarded the secret of their interstellar portals like a mother hovering over a clutch of eggs. To lose such a database intact was a disaster beyond description.

It had only been much later that she learned just how great a disaster it was.

“Varlan, there you are!” the familiar voice called. She lifted her head and turned her supple neck until her snout pointed directly back along the line in which her tail was pointed. There she saw Bethany, once of the Lindquists, now of the Drakes, approaching across the green carpet.

Bethany was one of the most confusing aspects of Varlan’s captivity. She was a two-legged-monster, true; yet, she considered herself Varlan’s friend. More surprisingly, despite her built-in horror at the thought of a universe inhabited by two races of intelligent beings, Varlan could not help feeling kindly toward Bethany. Not only did she find companionship with the two-legged female, she actually felt concern over Bethany’s wellbeing, especially now.

All of the two-legged monsters seemed odd to Varlan’s eyes, as though part of them was missing. However, she could see intellectually that the seemingly unstable bipedal form had its own functional elegance. When she had first met Bethany, the human had possessed a sleek form suitable for slicing through water. Even the various swells and curves that Varlan had learned were associated with Bethany’s gender had a certain alien gracefulness to them. No longer.

Over the past two cycles, the abdomen of Varlan’s companion-enemy-friend had become grossly distended and her sense of balance, always precarious in Varlan’s eyes, had become even less reliable than usual. Her walk, which had once been flowing as she teetered from one of the long stilts she used for legs to the other, was now uncertain and hesitant. Her new walk showed a distinct unease, so much so that the monsters even had a word for it, a word that Varlan had only recently learned. Bethany no longer walked, she waddled.

“Hello, Bethany of the Drakes. I thought it a day to sun myself,” Varlan called when Bethany had ‘waddled’ to where she lay. “I hope you did not become concerned about my absence.”

“No, of course, not,” Bethany said as she towered over Varlan’s supine form. She looked uncomfortable, but her current physical condition did not allow her to sink to the carpet to rest. Had she done so, she probably could not have gotten up again.

“Are you uncomfortable?” Varlan asked.

“No more so than any other pregnant woman,” Bethany replied with a laugh, “which is to say ‘yes.’”

“It seems to me that laying eggs is more efficient,” Varlan answered seriously. That, at least, was the way her species reproduced.

“You won’t get any argument from me. I am afraid that I will have to interrupt your leisure, however. We have a delegation of xenologists from Earth who would like to meet you. I’m afraid there was some sort of mix-up with the schedule. They are here now.”

Varlan did not groan. That was not the way her kind expressed exasperation. Instead, her ears went momentarily flat against her elliptical skull and her snout pitched perceptibly down, both gestures that Bethany had long since learned to read.

“I know. I would rather not go through another round of inane questions either. Just remember, that which cannot be cured…”

“… must be endured,” Varlan finished the surprisingly Ryall-like thought. She hoisted herself to her feet and stretched her tail out to its full length. “Let us go meet the gentle scientists from Earth.”

* * *

“Oh my, when is it due?” the white-haired woman who was the sole inhabitant of the conference room asked as they entered. In addition to a long table with the chairs all on one side, the room contained a raised dais on which a carpet of Altan river rushes had been spread for Varlan’s use.

“Sometime between ‘any moment now’ to ‘three weeks from yesterday.’”

“I certainly hope we can complete our business before the ambulance hauls you away. Boy or girl?”

“A little boy. He has his father’s hair and my eyes and will be quite a little hellion if the geneticists have any clue as to what they are talking about.”

“I had a little boy a long time ago,” the woman said, her voice catching a bit. “You will have your hands full for a few years.”

“How old is your son now?” Bethany asked.

“He would have been 43 this month had he lived. He was killed at the Battle of Archernar.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“No need to be. It has been more than a decade since his ship took a Ryall torpedo, and I am far from the only mother who has lost a son in this war. By the way, I am Doctor Olivia Southington, Department of Xenology, University of Buenos Aires.”

Bethany took her extended hand. “I’m Bethany Drake, and this is Varlan of the Scented Waters.”

“Yes. Varlan is the first Ryall I have seen close up — alive. We have had a few corpses to study, of course. Oh, pardon me. That comment must have seemed incredibly callous.”

Varlan, who had been studying the interchange between the monster females… the human women, she automatically corrected herself… turned a curious eye toward this latest in a long line of interrogators.

“I do not understand, Doctor Southington,” she said in nearly flawless standard, save for the slight hiss her vocal apparatus gave to the sibilants.

“I forgot that I was in the presence of one of your race, Varlan. It is impolite of me to speak so callously of your dead.”

“My race does not put the same emphasis on the dead as does yours, Doctor,” Varlan replied. “We are more interested in the living and especially the hatchlings.”

“Yes, I have read that. In fact, that is one of the reasons I have come all this way. I would like to understand more about your species’ beliefs and customs, especially from the viewpoint of a member of your managerial caste.”

“I will, of course, place myself at your service,” the Ryall responded smoothly. Since her capture, she had learned to imitate human verbal customs, even if she did not always understand them.

“Don’t monopolize the poor beastie, Olivia,” a male voice said from behind them. Varlan turned to look. A small, dark-haired man had entered the room, followed by a younger female — probably an administrative assistant, to judge from her manner as she followed the newcomer into the room.

“Bethany Drake. Varlan of the Scented Waters. May I introduce Jorge Santiago, my colleague, and Señorita Consuela Aragon, our assistant?”

“Santiago. Señorita Aragon,” Bethany replied as she presented her hand first to the man, who kissed it, and then to the young woman, who shook it in the usual manner.

“Señor Santiago, Señorita Aragon,” Varlan parroted.

Santiago put his hands on his hips and stared frankly. “My, you are a polite one. How long since you were captured?”

“Four of your years.”

“How do you like it here?”

“How would you like to be held captive by your species’ enemies?” Varlan responded smoothly.

“What…?” Santiago sputtered, then laughed. “Why, I don’t suppose I would like it at all.”

“Then we agree.”

“Excuse me,” Bethany said, “but what is it we can do for you Señor Santiago, Dr. Southington?”

“We have come to interrogate your prisoner.”

“Guest,” Bethany warned sharply.

“Fine, guest. We understand you have gotten farther with Varlan than any of the professional interrogators have gotten with the warrior caste prisoners that they hold.”

“It depends on what you mean by ‘farther.’ Frankly, Varlan and I come closer to understanding one another than most people thought was possible for intelligent beings of divergent species. Isn’t that right, Varlan?”

“Yes, Bethany. We have an understanding that even I would not have thought possible before meeting you.” Sensing Bethany’s irritation with the brusque Santiago, Varlan intentionally did not say ‘before I was captured.’

“That is excellent,” Olivia Southington replied, also sensing the tension and stepping deftly in to dissipate it. “Jorge and I have made it a point to study Ryall myths as a way to better understand them. I am afraid that we have gotten as far as we can from merely reviewing interrogation reports. We need to talk to someone who is intimately familiar with those myths, someone who actually believes them and knows their cultural context. And since so many ships were coming this way to support the invasion, well we thought we would drop by to see Varlan in the flesh.”

“We will, of course, do everything we can to help you. Is there any myth in particular that you would like to explore?”

“One in particular. We would like to understand better about the Swift Eaters.”

* * *

One hundred and fifty light-years from Alta, at a point where the Evil Star was a glowing gas cloud in the sky, another Ryall was frustrated. Periskay, of the Clan of the Distant Mountains in the Mist, was no captive, except of his assigned duty. An ex-student of Dolki, the master engineer-philosopher of the Ryall race, Periskay had been assigned to investigate the destruction of the mineral extraction facility on Corlis. What at first seemed a massive industrial accident was beginning to take on all of the mystical properties of the species’ legends from the dim days before written history. Even with the facility wiped from the face of Corlis by a racing wall of water, there should have been clues to the cause of the disaster. Yet, Periskay was faced with a dearth of useable information.

The mystery began in an ordinary enough fashion. Those whose job it was to keep starships on schedule reported that an ore carrier named Space Swimmer was overdue. Since Eulysta was a cul-de-sac system, the only place where a ship could put in was at the agricultural world that orbited Carratyl.

A ship sent to search for Space Swimmer had not found it in the Carratyl system, and had proceeded to Eulysta to see if it was still in orbit about Corlis. There they had found the mineral extraction facility in ruins, its workforce missing, and no sign of the ore carrier.

While terrible, the destruction of industrial facilities was not unknown in the history of The Race. Therefore, to learn the cause, Those Who Rule had dispatched an expedition to Corlis. Periskay, although still young and relatively new to his profession, was assigned to lead the inquiry.

The expedition had been ready to depart Darthan when word came that a team of natural philosophers would accompany them. These thinkers were not interested in the destruction of a far-off industrial facility. They were going to Eulysta to send a small experimental ship into the heart of the supernova remnant.

Being of a more practical mind than the philosophers, Periskay could not see what purpose their expedition served. However, the Collection of Thinkers was providing half the fuel his ship would be using during the voyage, giving him an incentive to aid the philosophers in their study.

When he arrived at Corlis, Periskay offloaded the philosophers in orbit and landed his ship near the destroyed mineral extraction facility. He and his workers began probing the destruction, looking for some evidence of the cause.

Despite their extensive excavation efforts, they found no bodies. Presumably, the manager of the facility, one Varlan, and all of her workers had perished in the flood. Yet, if this were so, where were their corpses? When the upstream dam broke, the duty crew must have been working in the tunnels. If so, they should still be there, yet Periskay’s workers found none of them.

Pondering the problem, he wondered if the missing workers were associated with the missing ore carrier. Perhaps it had rescued the survivors of the disaster and then been lost en route back to the home stars.

While Periskay pondered his problem, the philosophers studying the Evil Star finished their preliminaries and plunged through the stargate into its heart. Periskay received their message announcing their departure, and did not think of them again until he realized that they, like the ore carrier, were overdue.

Chapter 3

The viewscreen aboard the Altan Space Navy Blastship Conqueror II was ablaze with ghostly fire. The fire was produced when energetic particles slammed into the ship’s anti-radiation shielding. The anti-rad shield absorbed both charged particle and high-energy electromagnetic radiation – rays ranging from X- to gamma – as they streamed in lethal doses away from the madly spinning neutron star at the center of the nebula. Once absorbed, the energy was reradiated in the visible spectrum in scintillating sheets of multi-chromatic luminescence. Within the high-energy environment of the Antares Nebula, the human fleet glowed like a string of tiny iridescent soap bubbles adrift in a hellish sea.

It had been a tension-filled week since Conqueror II and her consorts had entered the maelstrom. One instant they had hovered amid the blackness of space with the yellow-white globe of Napier far below them. The next, they were deep in the electric glow of the nebula’s gas and dust, with the tiny dynamo of the Antares neutron star a distant eye-searing speck. In the telescopes, the tiny star was wracked by a violent explosion every minute or so. White-hot plasma arced into the sky, only to be wrenched back to the glowing surface before the geysers of fire had a chance to properly form, pulled down by the star’s rapidly rotating magnetic field.

The Antares/Napier foldpoint lay near its pre-nova position high above the neutron star. Their destination was the Antares/Eulysta foldpoint, only 200 million kilometers distant. In any normal system, they would have accelerated into a flat, hyperbolic orbit and made straight for it. Unfortunately, nothing was that simple in the hell of radiations that made up the interior of the nebula. With the neutron star pumping out multi-gigawatts of power each second, it was dangerous to approach to within even 700 million kilometers. Despite the fact that it was invisible, every ship’s astrogator was wary of the imaginary curved surface that marked the outer boundary of the “death zone,” the volume surrounding the neutron star within which their anti-radiation shielding would be of as little protection as a layer of tissue paper.

So Conqueror and the rest of the first wave performed a maneuver that was, in effect, a giant skidding turn around the nebula’s periphery as they approached their jump-off point. Even so, they were lucky. The fleets coming through the Antares/Goddard foldpoint would have to circle nearly halfway around the star to reach the back door into Ryall space.

That the maneuver was necessary to stay alive did nothing to calm Richard’s nerves. Drake was new to fleet command and as Admiral Belton had intimated, he was not sure that he liked it. Conqueror II was the invasion fleet’s flagship. Like every flagship since the Greeks beat the Persians at Salamis, she housed two separate command entities. A senior grade captain named Pelham Carter commanded Conqueror II. He and Drake had served together twice previously – once aboard Discovery, where Carter had been Drake’s second officer, and before that, in the Destroyer Parthenon, where both of them had been junior officers together.

It was Carter’s job to fly and fight the big blastship, leaving strategy to the admiral and his staff. To help him keep watch over the invasion as a whole, Drake commanded nearly a hundred officers and ratings. These manned the Fleet Operations Center and fed the admiral the information he needed to see the overall shape of the battle. The FOC (spacers learned not to snicker at the acronym twice) might as easily have been aboard any of the invasion fleet’s blastships; and, in fact, could be transferred in the event of an emergency. As far as Drake was concerned, Conqueror was just one more glowing icon on his situation display, to be ordered where it would do the most good in battle.

The problem with being an admiral, he had discovered, was that his subordinates were entirely too efficient. They did their jobs without direction and left very little for him to decide. He knew that would change come first contact with the Ryall, but for now, he was at loose ends. After 160 hours inside the maelstrom, he was ready to climb the bulkheads. Since that would have been unseemly for an admiral, he compromised by sitting in his acceleration chair and pretending to look bored.

“Anything yet, Mr. Carey?” he asked the communicator seated at the console to his right. One of the perquisites of command was an armor-glass aerie high above the Fleet Operations Center, a private perch from which he could command in quiet solitude. Drake shuddered at the thought, preferring the bustling main deck of the fleet center, surrounded by his staff. The battle console he occupied was normally his chief-of-staff’s station, but Commander Parkinson was currently assigned to the mid-watch, giving his admiral the welcome opportunity to get down amid the action.

“No, sir. No contact with Guard Force Antares. The range is still a little long for our lasers to penetrate this soup. They are no doubt tracking us with their specialized detectors and will contact us as soon as they can.”

“Very well,” Drake replied. He wanted to say more, but refrained lest he betray his impatience. Instead, he let his eyes scan the FOC. The change in just eight weeks was striking. When they left Altan orbit, fully one-quarter of the consoles had been inoperative, many with wire bundles hanging out of maintenance panels, and others with nothing on their screens but multicolored static. The premature departure had meant a lot of work while underway, but they had finally gotten the big cylinder with its oversize outrigger pods ready for combat

Conqueror II and her brood, the century-old battle cruisers Discovery,Dagger, and Dreadnought, along with the dozens of newer ships that had come out of the orbital shipyards over the past three years, had departed Alta immediately following the report that the Ryall had penetrated the nebula.

Nor were they alone.

All over human space, the warning message that the Ryall were in the nebula had caused more than a thousand ships to hurriedly load personnel, ammunition, and consumables before shaping hyperbolic orbits for the nearest foldpoint. Blastships, cruisers, destroyers, frigates, speeders, high acceleration scouts, and dozens of more specialized craft streamed toward the systems around Antares. Ships from Sol and worlds on the eastern edge of human space gathered in the Goddard System, while the colony worlds of Alta and Sandar sent their fleets via Napier and New Providence. Other fleets rendezvoused in the Grundlestar, Faraway, Klamath and Braxton systems. Each would enter the nebula via one of the pre-nova foldpoints, all of which still existed inside the plasma maelstrom. There they would rendezvous at Antares’ seventh foldpoint, the new one that led into Ryall space through the back door.

Nor had the fleets of warships been alone. Accompanying the combatants were their supporting auxiliaries: tankers, freighters, repair craft, and lighters. Had anyone been able to track the movement of so many ships, they would have discovered that the Antares nebula was fast becoming the center of human naval power. Eight different task forces would take part in the invasion.

Nor were they the last vessels that would pass through the nebula en route to Spica.

Following the warships and their supply train were the largest mobile weapons ever constructed by men. In systems all over human space, heavy orbital fortresses abandoned their guard stations and began to follow their more maneuverable brethren. It would take months for the ponderous fortresses to reach Spica, but when they did, the balance of power within the Ryall Hegemony would shift in the direction of humanity. That, at least, was the plan. Reality might conspire to present humankind with an altogether different plan, of course, but that was the nature of war.

“Message coming through now, Admiral,” Spacer-First Carey reported. “It’s a data transmission, no voice. ‘From: Captain Virgil Tennyson, Commander, Guard Force Antares. To: Admiral Richard Drake, Commander, Task Force Spica. Message Begins: Welcome to Hell, Admiral. Good to see you brought so many friends. Message Ends. Tennyson.’”

“Send this, Mr. Carey. ‘Glad to be in Hell with you, Commander. You haven’t, by any chance, seen a foldpoint around here?’”

* * *

“Good to speak face-to-face, Admiral,” Captain Tennyson said from the depths of one of Drake’s command screens two hours later. The picture was speckled with multicolored interference, and the sound had a tendency to fade out every few seconds, but the words carried with them an undertone of relief. The Terrestrial Space Navy commander was a young man of approximately 30 standard years. Only his eyes were old, a common malady among those who had seen too much of war.

“And you, Captain. What’s the lizard situation?”

“Quiet, sir. Nothing has appeared in the foldpoint since we dispatched our intruder to the nether reaches. We think it may have been a research ship.”

“Why do you think that?”

“It was small and unarmed, sir. We don’t think they saw us, or our torpedo, before we dispatched them.”

“Any idea of the Ryall presence on the other side of the foldpoint?”

“None, sir. We assumed they were observing the other side, either waiting for their missing ship to reappear, or else trying to determine what went wrong. If we had sent a scout through, I’m afraid we would have been spotted and lost the element of surprise.”

“Glad you have a head on your shoulders, Captain.”

On their first visit to the nebula, they had blundered into Eulysta while searching for an alternate route to human space. To keep their presence secret, they had first captured, and then destroyed, the mining facility on Corlis.

What preyed on Drake’s mind was the possibility that they had missed something. One of the mine’s workers could have gotten away. Their cleanup campaign might have missed a human boot print or a ration wrapper. All it would take was the discovery of one artifact of identifiably human origin on Corlis and the Ryall high command would fill the Eulysta System with warships. Even now, the Eulysta/Antares foldpoint could be the center of a fleet of blastships, each with weapons focused, ready to vaporize the first human ship to materialize within the interstellar portal.

If that were the case, the “surprise” they were counting on would be on them.

As Admiral Belton had remarked during one of their planning sessions, Task Force Spica’s mission was an interstellar version of the ancient Triple Crown of horse racing. Eulysta was the first prize. Capturing it would not guarantee the success of the invasion, but failing to do so would doom their plans. True, Eulysta had strategic value in its own right. Possession of the system and its two foldpoints would push the Ryall back one more system from human space. It would also wreak havoc with the Ryall war effort for however long it took to fortify Carratyl, the next system in from Eulysta.

However, the capture of a single outlying star system would be a poor consolation prize if that were all they accomplished.

“Have your sensors detected any of our follow-on forces, Tennyson?”

“Yes, sir. In addition to your own group, sensors are tracking three-oh-seven other vessels within the nebula. Most are on the long orbit from the opposite side foldpoints, with more appearing every day. By the time you take control of Eulysta, we should have quite a traffic jam hereabouts.”

“Glad to hear it. I am sure we will need the company about then. Astrogator, what is our ETA?”

The latter comment was addressed to Lieutenant Olivia Parker, at the navplot station slaved to the ship’s official navplot on the bridge. Women aboard warships were an oddity in the Altan Space Navy, although becoming less so with each new graduating class from the space training academies. Like the rest of humanity’s worlds, the war with the Ryall had forced Alta to commit its full resources to the battle, despite the colony world’s long tradition against sending women into danger. Mostly, Drake thought that was a good thing, although he had a ways to go before he became as blasé as the terrestrial navy concerning women in battle.

“The fleet will cross the foldpoint boundary in 47 minutes, sir.”

“Very well. We will establish Zero Hour for 13:00. Tennyson, pass the word. We go in…” Drake glanced at the chronometer display in the lower right corner of his screen, “… 218 minutes from now.”