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CHAPTER ONE

All conversation on TRNS Zeven Provinciën’s flag bridge ceased when the Marine sentry rapped out “Attention on deck!” and a tall man in fleet admiral’s uniform entered.

That uniform was not the standard space-service gray coverall that could serve as a spacesuit liner. For this occasion, Ian Trevayne wore the deep-blue and white and gold service dress of the Terran Republic Navy. To most people in most times and places, there would have seemed something strangely incongruous about his apparent age—early thirties at most, appropriate perhaps for a lieutenant commander—and the rank insignia of a broad gold stripe and four narrow ones on his sleeves. Not to these people, though, and not to anyone in what was currently left of human space, for his unique story was too well known.

In part, it was that story, with its mythic resonances that seemed to create a palpable aura around him, that caused the flag bridge to hold an even more profound hush than his exalted rank could account for. But only in part. These days, in his presence, people tended to take refuge in silence, not knowing how to behave around a man who had suffered such a loss as he sustained at Bug 17, two systems behind them.

As he approached the chair that was sacred to him, he spared a glance at the outside viewscreen. At a distance of almost fifteen light-minutes, the primary sun of Harnah was a faint orange-tinted gleam, for it was only a K-type main sequence star. As such, it was not a naked-eye object from the Solar system, although no one but astronomers gave a damn about how many light-years from Man’s birthworld it lay in normal space. The distance that mattered was measured in warp transits—three of them, a distance that had become terrifyingly short.

Four light-minutes from the primary, and quite invisible from here, was a planet that had once been Earthlike. In fact, it still held some hardy and by now wildly mutated forms of plant life. But it had been a world of the misnamed Arachnids—the “Bugs” to all who had ever encountered them—and as such had been blasted clean of that universally loathed and dreaded form of life in the Bug War of the 2360s, a little less than two centuries ago by the standard dating of Old Terra. It was the same treatment that had been meted out to every Bug planet, and when it was over everyone had truly believed that Creation had been cleansed of the Arachnid abomination, an insensate hive consciousness that existed only to expand and consume like some obscene melanoma eating at the body of galactic life. Trevayne’s mind shied away from the memory of that belief, now so cruelly disproven.

Trevayne stood beside the chair but did not sit down. He turned to a ruddy-faced man with the massive build imparted by many generations lived in low temperatures and high gravity. “Is all in readiness, Captain?”

“Aye, Admiral,” rumbled Flag Captain Janos Thorfinnssen in a voice which held only a trace of the dialect of his native Beaufort. “All elements of Combined Fleet are linked into the hookup, and all personnel are standing by.”

“Very well.” Trevayne turned to his operations officer, currently doubling as acting chief of staff in the absence of Captain Elaine De Mornay, who was two warp transits away in the Alpha Centauri system supervising the mustering and refitting of the Heart Worlds’ reserve fleets in this hour of ultimate need. Ever the traditionalist, he gave the immemorial naval courtesy promotion. “Captain Singhal, let’s proceed.”

Captain Gordon Singhal stepped in front of the comm screen and activated it. “Attention. Grand Admiral Trevayne wishes to address all personnel.” He stepped aside, and Trevayne took his place.

The screen was split three ways, showing the faces of the admirals commanding Combined Fleet’s three national components: Rafaela Shang for the Rim Federation, Mario Leong for the Pan-Sentient Union, and Adrian M’Zangwe for the Terran Republic. But, Trevayne knew, thousands and thousands of beings, human and otherwise, could see him and would be hearing his voice (not all at the same time, as the transmission flashed across a wide swath of the Harnah system at the velocity of light), with sophisticated translation software for the Orions and Ophiuchi.

In his resonant deep baritone, and in a Standard English which held the still-prestigious accent of Old Terra’s Britain, he began without preamble, for none was needed.

“Even after all that has occurred, many of us still cannot comprehend what has happened to the world we knew and believed to be immutable. Despite this, you have all behaved magnificently in a long and grueling campaign. Keeping up morale despite being continuously forced to retreat is one of the hardest things warriors can ever be called upon to do.” Which, Trevayne reflected, was why he had decided it was high time to give this little talk. “You have not wavered or failed. You have done your duty. But you may find it hard to fully understand what that duty means anymore, in a time when so many unthinkable things have happened and continue to happen, and so many assumptions have been shattered. Confusion and bewilderment are understandable.

“Therefore I wish to review the events that have brought us to this pass. I will be telling you things you already know, but which you may not have fully assimilated.

“Our world first began to change in 2524 when the Arduans arrived in the Bellerophon system, having crossed normal space in immense generation ships—the first known interstellar voyagers ever to do so—to escape a nearby supernova that threatened to make their planet uninhabitable. Even greater shocks were in store: their seeming lack of regard for their own individual lives, and the apparent impossibility of communicating with them. To us, these suggested one horrifying thing: a hive mentality like the Bugs. We didn’t know then that the former arose from their absolute belief in reincarnation, and that the latter was due to the fact that they communicated using their empathic selnarm sense—and that our lack of that sense caused them to regard us as not fully sentient.

“It took a war to get both sides past their misconceptions. But now the Arduans we fought are our friends.” Trevayne’s face and voice grew stern. “Despite everything that has happened, we must remember that. The Arduans as a race are not our enemies. Our Arduan allies of the First Dispersate are marked for genocide just as surely as we are.

“For, as we subsequently learned, the vast exodus we had encountered was only the first of many. On their doomed home planet, the Arduans had continued to send forth one diaspora after another in an effort to save their entire race so that there would be sufficient new births for everyone to be reborn.” Not for the first time, Trevayne wondered glumly if humans could have done as well under the circumstances. “But the Arduans of those later diasporas regressed and devolved in some manner foreign to us, and the Destoshaz warrior subspecies had become dominant, and taken to calling themselves ‘Kaituni’ rather than Arduans. Convinced that the first diaspora had turned traitor, and aided by information from those of their number who had already established themselves in the Zarzuela system, they prepared a war of extermination. In the course of their long slower-than-light voyage they developed new technologies and broke up their generation ships into kinetic projectiles.”

Trevayne grew even more somber. “We all remember what ensued. Without warning, swarms of relativistic rocks swept through many systems of the pan-Sentient Union, devastating planets and in some cases disrupting suns. The Khanate of Orion bore more than its share of the brunt, and all humans of all our star nations appreciate and admire the fortitude with which this calamity has been borne.” Trevayne wanted to especially emphasize that point for the benefit of his Orion personnel, for he knew the destruction of the artificial “Unity” warp point, which he had ordered in an effort to contain the damage had occasioned certain amount of ill-feeling, as though the humans were casting the Khanate adrift.

“But even worse was to come,” Trevayne continued inexorably. “As the Kaituni war fleet began to advance along the warp lines, we were confident that their much lighter ships, however numerous, would be meat for our devastators and superdevastators—the ships that had won the war against the first Arduan Dispersate. Too late, we learned that those titanic ships were precisely the ones that cannot live inside the range of the Kaituni’s newly developed relativistic acceleration weapon, or RAW, employing focused quantum entanglement to teleport particles to within the volume occupied by a sufficiently massive target. Thus it was that Admiral Waldeck’s fleet was gutted in Home Hive Two. And it was in that same system that we received an even greater shock, when a nightmare from which we believed we had awakened reappeared.”

Trevayne didn’t need to say what that nightmare was, and he saw no purpose to be served by doing so. No one in Combined Fleet had ever quite recovered from the moment when ships of the supposedly extinct Bugs had come boiling through a concealed closed warp point from a hidden Hive system where the Kaituni, presumably through some application of their selnarm faculty, had somehow made contact with them.

“Since then,” he resumed, “the Kaituni have hovered behind the Bugs, ‘herding’ them along as they have forced us back from system after system, allowing them to take losses that would be appalling to any other species. And the closer to Sol they have forced us, the less we have been able to risk taking a stand. For far too long, the most we have been able to do is inflict the maximum possible losses on them while maintaining a fleet in being . . .”

For an instant, Trevayne’s voice faltered. No one on the flag bridge breathed—nor, in all likelihood, did anyone in Combined Fleet. By now everyone knew what Trevayne had sacrificed on the altar of a “fleet in being” in the Bug 17 system. For it had been there, two warp transits back along their dismal line of retreat, that his wife, Admiral Li-Trevayne Magda, had staged what could only be called a mutiny, leading a covering force to shield the fleet’s withdrawal because it had been the only way to prevent Trevayne from doing it himself. And when a fresh Bug horde had appeared from an unsuspected direction, she had been cut off and was now presumed dead . . . by everyone but her husband.

Everyone knew all of this. But no one understood the full depths of Trevayne’s torment, for people tended to forget about Han Trevayne, now six years old. Slightly more than a year earlier, he and Magda had sent their daughter to stay with Magda’s godparents on Novaya Rodina, their adopted home, while they themselves had departed on an expedition against the Tangri corsairs. But then they had been caught up in the unimaginable catastrophe that had engulfed the known galaxy and had never seen Han since. Trevayne had had to content himself with very rare interactive messages to her, and the knowledge that Novaya Rodina was unharmed. And now he could look forward to the prospect of explaining to the little girl what had happened to her mother.

The pause was only momentary. When Trevayne spoke next, his compelling voice slowly and steadily built up from the somber depths it had been plumbing. “So now we are here in Harnah, only two warp transits from Alpha Centauri. Our long fighting retreat is coming to an end, because it must. The time is approaching when we must stand and fight, for we will have no choice. Alpha Centauri is not expendable. It is the gateway to all the Heart Worlds . . . and to Sol, and Old Terra.”

He paused again, to let that sink in. To all humans, wherever born and of whatever political allegiance, there was something unutterably sacred about humanity’s birthworld. And only once, in the Bug War, had it been this threatened.

“Even now,” Trevayne went on, “all the available reserve forces in the Heart Worlds are converging on Alpha Centauri. We will continue to delay the enemy, here and in Bug 15, to give them as much time as possible. ” His voice dropped an octave. “In these decommissioned ships, with their proud histories, it is as though we are summoning up ghosts. And I know, better than most, how what may seem to be dead can sometimes arise in times of great need.”

The silence took on a new depth, for all knew to what he referred. In 2443 he himself, the hero of the loyalist side of the Fringe Revolution, had been almost physically destroyed in the Revolution’s climactic battle at the age of forty-nine. For eight decades he had lain in a cryogenic stasis from which he could not be awakened without killing him. Finally, a means had been found to transfer his brain into a youthful full-body but anencephalic clone of himself—and, in a way that had tapped into very deep wellsprings of myth, his reawakening had occurred just before the first Arduan Dispersate had arrived and the dogs of war had been let slip again.

“But it is not enough that we summon up decommissioned ships.” Trevayne’s voice became a clang. “We must summon up from deep within ourselves all that we are. But that is not enough. We must summon up all that we ever have been. But that is not enough. We must summon up all we have ever thought we were. But that is not enough. We must summon up all we have ever thought we ought to be, or that we might become.

“In this apocalyptic hour, nothing less will serve. And I know nothing less will be forthcoming from each of you.” A final pause. “That is all.”

In the midst of a profound silence, Trevayne turned to the flag captain. “Janos, I want you to have your communications officer prepare a new courier drone for Elaine De Mornay. I have new instructions regarding the work on the reserve units—and, in particular, on the deployment of the orbital fortresses.”

“At once, Admiral.”

“In addition,” Trevayne continued, as much to himself as to Thorfinnssen, “I want an update from her on how the work is progressing. Yes, I know she’s doing her best.” He really did. De Mornay was that rarity, a warrior of fiery—sometimes even rash—instincts who was also an organizer par excellence. “But I need for her to expedite the refitting of those bloody old hulks! I expect a strong Bug probe into this system at any time. Quite simply, I need to know how much longer Combined Fleet needs to draw out its fighting retreat.”

“Yes, Admiral. I’ll—”

At that moment, readouts above the sensor station began to flash, and other lights awoke at the communications center. Singhal, alarmed, turned and demanded a report. Trevayne had a pretty good idea of what it all portended before the acting chief of staff returned to his side.

“Admiral, there is a sudden irruption of sensor drones through the Bug 16 warp point.”

Bug 16, thought Trevayne, where humanity’s old demon crouched, with its new demon following behind. “Captain, sound general quarters immediately. Gordon, put all elements of Combined Fleet on full alert immediately. We all know what is coming behind those drones, don’t we?”

SBMKAWK missiles at first, capable of warp transit and prepared to launch gouts of anti-mine munitions to clear the way. Next, the inexorably advancing phalanxes of Bug warships that would come through in multiple warp transits, stolidly indifferent to the losses occasioned when two of them materialized in the same volume of space.

“And Janos,” Trevayne added, “please expedite that courier drone. I believe the clock has started ticking again here in Harnah.”


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