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The Three-Cornered War

Copyright © 1998
ISBN: 0671-57783-2
Publication January 1999
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by John Dalmas

0671-57783-2.jpg (11125 bytes)Foreword

Twenty-one thousand years before this story, eight large shiploads of refugees fled a vast war of destruction, an Armageddon in a distant part of the spiral arm.

They were wise enough to realize that being human, they carried with them the seeds of future discords and war. And in an effort to avoid those wars becoming megawars, they developed The Sacrament. This was a powerful system of pain-drug-hypnosis conditioning for all the refugees, and for all their descendants forever. It was designed to prevent scientific curiosity and investigation. They also stripped their ships’ computers of scientific and technological information that might lead to development of megawar weaponry.

For several years the refugees traveled in hyperspace, emerging from time to time to explore some promising planetary system for a habitable world. Eventually they settled on one they named Iryala.

Over the following millennia, the Iryalans colonized other planets in their sector of the arm, always taking with them the Sacrament and its technicians. Their worlds and progeny remained under the dominion of Iryala, which retained to itself the exclusive manufacture of spacecraft, space drives, and space weaponry.

Despite new worlds, new conditions, new colonies, the Sacrament resulted in a technologically and mentally stagnant culture which increasingly stressed the concept of Standardness. And a shallow view of both past and future, without a great deal more curiosity about history than about the principles of how the universe works.

Each confederated world had its own ingrown interests and focuses, and they were too farflung to be closely ruled. What held them together was the Sacrament, and their dependence on Iryala for technology. Many of the colony worlds never achieved a central planetary authority, but developed autonomous states separated by rivalries and grudges.

The Confederation of Human Worlds, in its various historical formats, had never experienced space warfare. In fact, with one exception, all its wars had been surface wars between states that shared a common world. And in the more distant past, revolts against Iryalan authority.

It hadn’t even made a show of force in space for over seven hundred years. Its naval equipment was of inherited designs, modified long millennia earlier to serve police functions rather than fight wars.

During the exodus, long forgotten now, two large groups of refugees had been purged for refusing the Sacrament. They’d been put down on two planets so difficult, survival seemed questionable and civilization impossible. As the Confederation expanded, those two forgotten worlds had been rediscovered. For a long time their primitive peoples were treated as anomalies, and not quite human. One of those planets was Tyss, also known as "Oven." Tyss was so poor that for millennia its only export was superb mercenary regiments, hired by states on worlds without a central planetary government, to help fight their many small wars.

The T’swa—the people of Tyss—had evolved a culture that eventually caught the interest of a small group of Iryalan aristocrats. Now the T’swa had a new export: ideas. And those aristocrats formed the opening wedge in the stagnated culture of the Sacrament. The Confederation began a planned and gradual change, heretical and covert.

Meanwhile the ancient Home Sector had been terribly ravaged by the interstellar war the refugees had fled. Some planets had been literally destroyed, physically disrupted. Others were rendered uninhabitable for most lifeforms. On still others, the environment was sufficiently degraded that the demoralized humans who survived the war did not survive its aftermath.

Only three worlds retained human populations, and technology had died on them all. Eventually one of them, Varatos, reevolved science, redeveloped space flight, and discovered and subjugated the other two. On eight others, the ecology had adjusted sufficiently to be habitable again, and the Vartosi colonized them. The result was an interstellar imperium calling itself the Karghanik Empire.

Exploration had found no further habitable planets in their sector. Their religion accounted for this peculiarity as the will of God—the same God they believed forbade birth control.

Eventually, the worlds of the Empire grew seriously overpopulated. Finally one of its planets, Klestron, sent an expedition years beyond known space. There it encountered and skirmished with the alien Garthids. Later the expedition discovered and took possession of a very minor "trade world" on the periphery of the Confederation. Within months, however, they were driven from it.

But the expedition had broken the ignorance of both human sectors by whetting the appetite of the Empire, while pressing the Confederation to accelerate change.

And disturbing Garthid isolation.

 

Prologue

More than two hundred parsecs from Iryala, two figures stood on a high balcony of the Garthid imperial palace. Over the previous eighteen millennia, it had been built, damaged by internecine wars, rebuilt and expanded. All without basic change. It was far more than the imperial residence. It housed and officed the central executive function overseeing a loose khanate of fifty-three inhabited worlds. There was no compelling need for its centralization on a single site. Garthid electronics and cybernetics were highly advanced. But the palace suited the Garthid psyche.

The seven-sided wall enclosing it was more than six miles around, and tall beyond need, yet the structures it enclosed rose high above it, an intricately interconnecting complex of buildings, courtyards, jumbled roofs and high-vaulting towers, often irregularly stacked. There were arching walkways, some open, some enclosed. Turrets, landing platforms for floaters and shuttles, and innumerable and often unlikely balconies, large and small, partly in lieu of adequate windows. The architecture was more intricate and extreme than any Gothic cathedral, and far less orderly. Yet somehow stark, brooding, powerful. Nowhere was there a glint of silver, gleamstone, gilt, or even copper. The structures were black—hardsteel and poured blackstone—nonreflective as a military gunbarrel. The tall narrow windows were deep-set, of dark-tinted glass.

It was considered the most beautiful architecture in the Garthid Khanate.

The country surrounding it was a broad, tree-spotted grassland, broken by swales, shrubby knolls, and forested flood plains. Tradition called it the home of the species—a sort of racial shrine. Its local climate and ecology were as little changed over the millennia as Garthid science could keep them. The Garthids, even those whose families had dwelt for millennia on other worlds, felt a powerful, a compelling attachment to it. Garthid racial memory insisted that the species had evolved on that plain, lived and scavenged there. There or in a region and climate much like it. A savage Eden where predators large and predators fleet had struck down or pulled down hoofed prey. Often to be harassed and driven from their kill by robber scavengers, among which the foremost were the pack-roving protogarthids, and later the early Garthids themselves, tough, aggressive, relentless. Intelligent.

Now, after some two million years, the species looked not so different from its ancestors. Their crania were notably larger, their heavy fighting teeth a little smaller, their scaly skin less tough. But except for their crania, they were remarkably like their forebears—obligatory carnivores with powerful jaws and teeth. Their frames were still powerful, though their muscles seldom so sinewy and tough.

Two figures stood by the railing. The giant was the Surrogate of God, the smaller his chief counselor. The Surrogate was of the guardian gender, of course, seven feet tall and 440 pounds. His pantaloons were a sort of exaggerated plus fours, as wide as a Varangian’s, their vividly colorful pattern at odds with the black motif of the city’s architecture. His only other garb was a sort of vest, resembling a kabe-shima, its enormous padded shoulders ending in upcurved black horns. His counselor, a foot and a half shorter and only 40 percent of the Surrogate’s mass, wore nothing below his plain blue-green vest. He was of the healer gender, and had risen through the bureaucracy.

The evening was a pleasant 125 degrees Fahrenheit. Their balcony, a thousand feet above the pavement, overlooked the traditional landscape, its genetically restored herds of prey vaguely visible in the dusk. To the west, a molten smear showed where the sun had set. To the east, stars already gleamed. It was on these the two Garthids gazed.

"The aliens may not have arrived with bad intentions," the Surrogate said. "But suppose for a moment they did."

His counselor answered diffidently. "It is possible of course, Your Potency. But the reports suggest they arrived innocently, lashed out in fear, then fled. I doubt we shall see them again."

The Surrogate’s parietal hood flared slightly, its fringe of vestigial "horns" rigid. "There are passing encounters," he said. "Mere armed incidents. But there are also wars. The difference is vast. We must be prepared, which includes being informed."

The chief counselor recalled a proverb: He who snoops the canebrake may rouse the dragon. But he’d said enough.

The Surrogate continued: "We must develop a sentry system which can monitor a zone at least a parsec across. No such thing has ever been attempted, but I am assured it is technically and economically possible. I may also decide to scout the intruder’s extrapolated course, and perhaps discover its system of origin or destination. Our success in that depends on their having followed a constant course over a very long distance. And we will begin preparation for possible hostilities. To start with, this will consist of preparing an infrastructure for a full war effort, in case one is needed. Meanwhile the expansion of existing forces can be moderate."

The two old friends continued to gaze starward. Finally the chief counselor spoke again: "We have not fought another species than ourselves since we destroyed the Chil-ness-pakth, in the time of the Ninth Khroknash, more than eighteen thousand years ago."

The Surrogate nodded. "In the pride of our youth. But perhaps it is time."

"I will pray on it."

The Surrogate grunted. "I have prayed. And it seems to me God had a hand in this. The probability that an intruder would emerge twice within reaction range of a patrol ship is extremely small." Laying a hand on the counselor’s shoulder, he added: "We shall see. If God wills peace, we shall have peace. I do not intend to force war on anyone needlessly."


Copyright © 1998 by John Dalmas
Chapter F 1 2 3 4 5

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