Although awareness of the weapons locker was almost universal—it was a nightmare employed to scare both children and adults—few knew what the phrase really meant. The majority of people seemed to think of it as some sort of giant safe that held all the terror weapons their superiors thought too monstrous to employ.
Actually, the weapons locker was a very small computer-run world that had been created long ago, programmed with the most formidable defenses known to that time, then towed to a spot by totally computerized ships and maneuvered to its final hiding place by a master computer that immediately erased all memory of the action. No one knew the whereabouts of the weapons locker, nor had anyone for more than a thousand years. All anybody knew was that it was one of the uncounted trillions of pieces of space junk somewhere in the Com "neighborhood."
However, the Com could communicate with it—i.e., was able to receive a signal the directionality of which was so scrambled that not even the most evil of computer geniuses had been able to trace it.
Now that the proper signal had been sent, the weapons-locker computer did the only thing it was designed to do: It broadcast a complex set of instructions that was relayed by countless millions of communications computers.
The terror weapons were not packed away; they weren't even obsolescent, since as new devices were developed they were routinely programmed to obey only activating signals from the weapons locker.
Now those who manned the fearsome weapons and who had trained on them using computer simulations could use the real things. Deployment and actual commitment were completely computer controlled, of course, but people, human and nonhuman, decided if they were to be deployed, and where, and when.
The fleet that closed in on Madalin was unlike any fleet ever before seen inside the Com or, perhaps, anywhere else. The ships were huge, the ships were tiny; all bore little relationship to the standard naval vessels everyone knew. Security on the weapons had been absolute; the crews who rode and directed them lived apart in their own communities, and when they left the service all knowledge of the weapons was erased from their minds.
The nerve center of Task Force One was a relatively small object, a sphere with long, thin spikes protruding from its surface. Its battle computers would decide how best to employ the fleet. Yet it, too, was merely a convenience; aboard each of the other craft was a computer and a backup crew able to generate the proper instructions.
Madalin was on the screens and Task Force One was already implementing the proper attack when the Dreel moved. Sensors inside the spiked sphere detected ships approaching at velocities far greater than any manageable by the Com technology. It was obvious why the first force had failed. Their weapons computers had been geared to defense against attack by vessels of Com capability, but the enemy had been upon them before they could bring up the proper defenses.
The weapons-locker control was under no such handicaps; it had been created to face the impossible and counter it, if indeed it could be countered. Signals flashed in nanoseconds, screens went up, ships went into defensive postures, catching the Dreel by surprise. Their information could not know what lay inside the weapons locker, since even the Com was not sure.
There were only twenty Dreel ships—a squadron, basically. The task force had been expecting more, and they moved to defend, being too slow to go after the foe.
The spiked sphere served a double purpose in such a situation. It had been designed to look and be deployed as if it were a command and nerve center. It would draw any attacker logical enough to make the most basic assumptions in military terms. The Dreel ships, moving at almost five times the best Com velocity, homed the command sphere just as it was hoped they would.
Computers on the defensive perimeter ships tracked the Dreel's twenty tiny needles and made way for them. The intent should have been obvious, but the Dreel were overconfident even though facing an alien military machine they had never tested. They did not determine the reasoning behind the formation. Rather, they approached the command sphere directly—and in so doing they ran a gauntlet.
Distances were huge and deployment perfect; all twenty ships cleared the outer perimeter before the trap was sprung. Defensive screens appeared all over, and small marblelike ships opened up on the attacking fleet. The Dreel's tremendous speed suddenly became their weak point. They were going far too fast to take much evasive action or undergo rapid course changes; the marble ships were so small that special equipment had to be invented to detect them. They were all automated, and none moved now. They just fired, fired all along the gauntlet, letting the Dreel ships run right into their energy beams.
Twelve of the Dreel ships took direct hits; the other eight somehow managed to alter course slightly and slide around the beams, but even so they weren't able to bring their own weapons into play. They were away and off the screens before any of the military computers could change aim.
At the speeds involved, defenses had to be totally automated and controlled by self-aware computers able to handle the reaction times involved. The initial attack had been detected, countered, and was over before the task force crews even had time to see on their screens that they'd almost had it.
The Dreel had been burned and burned badly. They would pause a bit before attacking again, particularly since only the eight ships remained. Surely, their own computers, alien and probably faster than the Com's, were analyzing what had gone wrong, seeing how they had been fooled, and devising counterattacks. But ships turn in a finite amount of space, and you don't brake easily at Dreel speeds.
The actual destruct signal had to be operator-given on the Com task force; it was given with little hesitation. The officers had all seen the film of the only post-Dreel contact with Madalin. Such a pretty world, really, in the screens, all blue and white, glistening in the reflected light of a yellow star less than one hundred and fifty million kilometers away. A frontier world, but there had been over a million human beings on that world, a million souls lost to the Dreel.
Small triangular-shaped ships deployed around the planet, each one in line of sight of the other. No one except the computers controlling the action really knew what was involved here. All the observers knew, however, that these were planet destroyers.
Position correct, charging correct, all ready—then a single flash, so quick it was hardly seen on the visual screens of the hundreds of watchers in the ships.
In the blink of an eye, that pretty blue and white world had turned a fiery orange, then faded to a dull yellow. Lifeless, barren, no seas, no air, no trace or sign that, but moments before, this had been a world of life and beauty. The atmosphere of the planet, and the top ten kilometers or so of crust, had simply ceased to exist.
The Task Force Commander, a huge Rhone who was the personification of the classical Greek centaur, remained grim-faced as the cheer went up from the technicians on the command bridge. He allowed them their moment of triumph—after all, some had trained for years for missions like this, but had never actually been able to use the equipment before—then reached over and switched on the intercom to all stations and ships.
"Well done. However, let us not forget that we have not won this skirmish. That wasn't an enemy planet down there—it was one of ours. Those were our people, that was our world. We can ill afford many victories like this one, for each one means we lose a little more of ourselves." He paused. All was suddenly very quiet in the command center. "Break off and return to station. This was the opening counterattack, but we have not yet engaged the main force. Welcome to the war, citizens."