Off Armageddon Reef (3 page)

“Do you think we gave them enough of a shock that they may start actively innovating, Sir?” Thiessen asked after a moment. Pei looked at him and raised one eyebrow, and the chief of staff shrugged with a crooked smile. “I'd like to think we at least made the bastards sweat, Sir!”

“Oh, I think you can safely assume we did that,” Pei replied with a humorless smile of his own. “As to whether or not it will change them, I really don't know. The xenologists' best guess is that it won't. They've got a system and culture which have worked for them for at least eight or nine thousand years. We may have been a bigger bump in the road than they're accustomed to, but the formula worked in our case, too, in the end. They'll probably be a little nervous for a century or three, if only because they'll wonder if we got another colony away somewhere without their noticing, but then they'll settle back down.”

“Until the next poor dumb suckers come stumbling into them,” Thiessen said bitterly.

“Until then,” Pei agreed quietly, and turned back to the display.

Eight or nine thousand years
, he thought.
That's the xenologists' best guess, but I'll bet it's actually been longer than that. God, I wonder how long ago the first
Gbaba
discovered fire!

It was a question he'd pondered more than once over the four decades it had taken the Gbaba Empire to destroy the human race, for two things the Gbaba definitely were not were innovative or flexible.

At first, the Gbaba had clearly underestimated the challenge mankind posed. Their first few fleets had only outnumbered their intended victims three- or four-to-one, and it had become quickly and painfully obvious that they couldn't match humanity's tactical flexibility. The first genocidal attack had punched inward past Crestwell to take out three of the Federation's fourteen major extra-Solar star systems, with one hundred percent civilian casualties. But then the Federation Navy had rallied and stopped them cold. The fleet had even counterattacked, and captured no less than six Gbaba star systems.

Which was when the
full
Gbaba fleet mobilized.

Commander Pei Kau-zhi had been a fire control officer aboard one of the Federation's ships-of-the-line in the Starfall System when the real Gbaba Navy appeared. He could still remember the displays, see the endless waves of scarlet icons, each representing a Gbaba capital ship, as they materialized out of hyper like curses. It had been like driving a ground car into crimson snowflakes, except that no snow had ever sent such an ice-cold shudder through the marrow of his bones.

He still didn't know how Admiral Thomas had gotten any of her fleet out. Most of Thomas' ships had died with her, covering the flight of a handful of survivors whose duty had been not to stand and share her death, but to live with the dreadful news. To flee frantically homeward, arriving on the very wings of the storm to warn mankind Apocalypse was coming.

Not that humanity had been taken totally unawares.

The severity of the opening Gbaba attack, even if it had been thrown back, had been a brutal wakeup call. Every Federation world had begun arming and fortifying when the first evidence of the Gbaba's existence had appeared, ten years before Crestwell.
After
Crestwell, those preparations had been pressed at a frenetic pace, and a star system made an awesome fortress. The surviving fleet elements had fallen back on the fixed defenses, standing and fighting to the death in defense of humanity's worlds, and they'd made the Gbaba pay a hideous price in dead and broken starships.

But the Gbaba had chosen to pay it. Not even the xenologists had been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation for why the Gbaba flatly refused to even consider negotiations. They—or their translating computers, at any rate—obviously comprehended Standard English, since they'd clearly used captured data and documents, and the handful of broken, scarred human prisoners who'd been recovered from them had been “interrogated” with a casual, dispassionate brutality that was horrifying. So humanity had known communication with them was at least possible, yet they'd never responded to a single official communication attempt, except to press their attacks harder.

Personally, Pei wondered if they were actually still capable of a reasoned response at all. Some of the ships the Federation had captured or knocked out and been able to examine had been ancient almost beyond belief. At least one, according to the scientists who'd analyzed it, had been built at least two millennia before its capture, yet there was no indication of any significant technological advance between the time of its construction and its final battle. Ships which, as Alban had suggested, were brand-new construction had mounted identical weapons, computers, hyper drives, and sensor suites.

That suggested a degree of cultural stagnation which even Pei's ancestral China, at its most conservative rejection of the outside world, had never approached. One which made even ancient Egypt seem like a hotbed of innovation. It was impossible for Pei to conceive of any sentient beings who could go that long without any major advances. So perhaps the Gbaba no longer
were
sentient in the human sense of the term. Perhaps everything—all of this—was simply the result of a set of cultural imperatives so deeply ingrained they'd become literally instinctual.

None of which had saved the human race from destruction.

It had taken time, of course. The Gbaba had been forced to reduce humanity's redoubts one by one, in massive sieges which had taken literally years to conclude. The Federation Navy had been rebuilt behind the protection of the system fortifications, manned by new officers and ratings—many of whom, like Nimue Alban, had never known a life in which humanity's back was not against the wall. That navy had struck back in desperate sallies and sorties which had cost the Gbaba dearly, but the final outcome had been inevitable.

The Federation Assembly had tried sending out colony fleets, seeking to build hidden refuges where some remnants of humanity might ride out the tempest. But however inflexible or unimaginative the Gbaba might be, they'd obviously encountered that particular trick before, for they'd englobed each of the Federation's remaining star systems with scout ships. Escorting Navy task forces might attain a crushing local superiority, fight a way through the scouts and the thinner shell of capital ships backing them up, but the scouts always seemed able to maintain contact, or regain it quickly, and every effort to run the blockade had been hunted down.

One colony fleet
had
slipped through the scouts…but only to transmit a last, despairing hypercom message less than ten years later. It might have eluded the immediate shell of scout ships, but others had been sent out after it. It must have taken literally thousands of them to scour all of the possible destinations that colony fleet might have chosen, but eventually one of them had stumbled across it, and the killer fleets had followed. The colony administrator's best guess was that the colony's own emissions had led the Gbaba to them, despite all of the colonists' efforts to limit those emissions.

Pei suspected that long-dead administrator had been right. That, at any rate, was an underlying assumption of Operation Ark's planners.

“At least we managed to push their damned scout ship far enough back to give Breakaway a fighting chance of working,” Thiessen observed.

Pei nodded. The comment came under the heading of “blindingly obvious,” but he wasn't about to fault anyone for that at a moment like this.

Besides, Joe probably meant it as a compliment
, he thought with something very like a mental chuckle. After all, Breakaway had been Pei's personal brainchild, the sleight-of-hand intended to convince the Gbaba they'd successfully tracked down and totally destroyed mankind's last desperate colonization attempt. That was why the forty-six dreadnoughts and carriers which had accompanied the rest of his task force in stealth had not fired a missile or launched a fighter during the fight to break through the shell of capital ships covering the Gbaba scout globe around the Sol System.

It had been a stiff engagement, although its outcome had never been in doubt. But by hiding under stealth, aided by the background emissions of heavy weapons fire and the dueling electronic warfare systems of the opposing forces, they had hopefully remained undetected and unsuspected by the Gbaba.

The sacrifice of two full destroyer squadrons who'd dropped behind to pick off the only scout ships close enough to actually hold the escaping colony fleet on sensors had allowed Pei to break free and run, and deep inside, he'd hoped they'd manage to stay away from the Gbaba scouts. That despite all odds,
all
of his fleet might yet survive. But whatever he'd hoped, he'd never really expected it, and that was why those ships had
stayed
in stealth until this moment.

When the Gbaba navy arrived—and it would; for all of their age, Gbaba ships were still faster than human vessels—it would find exactly the same number of ships its scouts had reported fleeing Sol. Exactly the same number of ships its scouts had reported when they finally made contact with the fugitives once again.

And when every one of those ships was destroyed, when every one of the humans crewing them had been killed, the Gbaba would assume they'd destroyed
all
of those fugitives.

But they'll be wrong
, Pei Kau-zhi told himself softly, coldly.
And one of these days, despite everything people like Langhorne and Bédard can do to stop it, we'll be back. And
then,
you bastards, you'll—

“Admiral,” Nimue Alban said quietly, “long-range sensors have picked up incoming hostiles.”

He turned and looked at her, and she met his eyes levelly.

“We have two positive contacts, Sir,” she told him. “CIC makes the first one approximately one thousand point sources. The second one is larger.”

“Well,” he observed almost whimsically. “At least they cared enough to send the very best, didn't they?”

He looked at Thiessen.

“Send the Fleet to Action Stations, if you please,” he said. “Launch fighters and began prepositioning missiles for launch.”

SEPTEMBER 7, 2499
LAKE PEI ENCLAVE,
CONTINENT OF HAVEN,
SAFEHOLD

“Grandfather! Grandfather, come quickly! It's an angel!”

Timothy Harrison looked up as his great-grandson thundered unceremoniously through the open door of his town hall office. The boy's behavior was atrocious, of course, but it was never easy to be angry with Matthew, and no one Timothy knew could
stay
angry with him. Which meant, boys being boys, that young Matthew routinely got away with things which ought to have earned a beating, at the very least.

In this case, however, he might be excused for his excitement, Timothy supposed. Not that he was prepared to admit it.

“Matthew Paul Harrison,” he said sternly, “this is my
office
, not the shower house down at the baseball field! At least a modicum of proper behavior is expected out of anyone here—even, or
especially
, out of a young hooligan like you!”

“I'm sorry,” the boy replied, hanging his head. But he simultaneously peeped up through his eyelashes, and the dimples of the devastating smile which was going to get him into all sorts of trouble in another few years danced at the corners of his mouth.

“Well,” Timothy harumpfed, “I suppose we can let it go without harping upon it…
this
time.”

He had the satisfaction of noting what was probably a genuine quiver of trepidation at the qualifier, but then he leaned back in his chair.

“Now, what's this you were saying about an angel?”

“The signal light,” Matthew said eagerly, eyes lighting with bright excitement as he recalled his original reason for intruding upon his grandfather. “The signal light just began shining! Father Michael said I should run and tell you about it immediately. There's an
angel
coming, Grandfather!”

“And what color was the signal light?” Timothy asked. His voice was so completely calm that, without his realizing it, it raised him tremendously in his great-grandson's already high esteem.

“Yellow,” Matthew replied, and Timothy nodded. One of the lesser angels, then. He felt a quick little stab of regret, for which he scolded himself instantly. It might be more exciting to hope to entertain a visit from one of the Archangels themselves, but mortal men did well not to place commands upon God, even indirectly.

Besides, even a “lesser” angel will be more than enough excitement for
you,
old man!
he told himself scoldingly.

“Well,” he said, nodding to his great-grandson, “if an angel's coming to Lakeview, then we must make our preparations to receive him. Go down to the docks, Matthew. Find Jason, and tell him to raise the signal for all the fishing boats to return to harbor. As soon as you've done that, go home and tell your mother and grandmother. I'm sure Father Michael will be ringing the bell shortly, but you might as well go ahead and warn them.”

“Yes, Grandfather!” Matthew nodded eagerly, then turned and sped back the way he'd come. Timothy watched him go, smiling for a moment, then squared his shoulders and walked out of his office.

Most of the town hall staff had paused in whatever they were doing. They were looking in his direction, and he smiled again, whimsically.

“I see you all heard Matthew's announcement,” he said dryly. “That being the case, I see no need to expand upon it further at this time. Finish whatever you were doing, file your work, and then hurry home to prepare yourselves.”

People nodded. Here and there, chairs scraped across the plank floor as clerks who'd already anticipated his instructions hurried to tuck files into the appropriate cabinets. Others bent over their desks, quill pens flying as they worked towards a reasonable stopping point. Timothy watched them for a few seconds, then continued out the town hall's front door.