Waterside was one of the oldest residential districts in Prescott, sprawling along the Alph estuary downriver from Government House and ending at a seawall overlooking the harbor. In fact, it dated back to the city's early days as a city, as distinguished from a military installation's residential annex. Typically early colonial, the houses made extensive use of native materials and nestled among old native trees. Less typically, they embodied a distinctive local style which architecture critics of an antiquarian bent called "Neo-Tudor" although no one else on Xanadu understood the reference.
Miriam Ortega remembered Waterside from the time of the Fringe Revolution. She had been living in a small rented house that, like its neighbors, had settled into a kind of shabby/picturesque upper-middle-class ambience. There, she had received word of her father's death in the First Battle of Zephrain. And there, a short time later, the already almost legendary Admiral Trevayne had rung her doorbell—a courtesy call which had developed into something very unexpected. . . .
She thrust away the thought and concentrated on the view through her ground car's window. Subsequently, the district had been rediscovered and the old houses restored and extended. But, pricey though Waterside had become, Ian Trevayne could have afforded something far more pretentious—a suite in the high-technology wonderlands of the sky-spearing towers, or a large and equally cutting-edge estate out in the hinterlands. But when a riverfront house not far from the seawall had gone on the market, he had told his agent to buy the place.
Parking the ground car, Miriam passed through the gate in the low stone wall that enclosed the small front garden and rang for admittance. The door swung open as the security system recognized her as one with automatic access. She stepped into a dim hallway, beyond which sliding glass doors opened onto a terrace overlooking the estuary. It was a warm early summer afternoon, and the doors were open. Miriam stepped through onto the terrace, which commanded a superb view. To the right, beyond the headland, the ocean stretched to the horizon. To the left, upriver, the towers of central Prescott could be glimpsed in the hazy distance. Directly across the estuary, at the water's edge, homes not unlike this one peered out from foliage in which Terran oak and hickory mingled with native featherleaf.
And, silhouetted against the riverscape, a tall young-seeming man stood at the balustrade, hands clasped behind his back, staring fixedly out across the water.
"Hello, Ian," Miriam said quietly.
He turned, startled. "Oh, uh, Miriam," he stammered.
"The robot let me in," she offered by way of explanation.
"Naturally." He nodded.
Silence stretched.
"Nice place you've got here," she said, making conversation. "I still remember this area. Do you think my old house is still standing?"
"Yes, it is," Trevayne said . . . and immediately realized just how promptly he'd said it. "Uh, that is, I just happened to pass it on one of my walks around the area. Of course, it's been renovated quite a bit since we . . ."
"Yes, of course."
Again, silence closed over them.
It was the first time they had confronted each other without any third parties present to cushion the awkwardness. She thought she understood that awkwardness better than he did—or, at least, she ought to with the advantage of age.
No pair of old lovers in human history had ever faced a situation remotely like theirs. Trevayne's memories of that love were fresh—only a few months old. Those memories included a Miriam Ortega in her thirties, almost fifteen years his junior. But he had awakened to find her in antigerone-mitigated old age, their love overlaid in her memory by eight unshared decades of recollections and experiences of which he had no part, including . . .
"How are your sons?" he asked, to fill the silence. "And their families?"
"Oh, they're well enough. Aaron has accepted a professorship on Aotearoa now, which is where his daughter and her husband are. I keep telling him I hope his grandchildren don't pick up the accent they have there!"
"The one you always say—or always used to say—reminded you of mine," he said accusingly.
She looked blank for a perceptible and hurtful moment before recalling the old mock bone of contention, then laughed. "Ramon is still here on Xanadu—a senior partner in his law firm. He has three children, and I've almost lost count of how many grandchildren!"
"Yes," Trevayne said softly. He reflected on her sons—both far older now in duration-of-consciousness terms than he was—and her grandchildren, whose bodies were physiologically older than his. He also reflected on their father. Who would ever have dreamed it? Miriam and . . .
"Joaquin Sandoval." Realizing he had murmured the name of the young fighter jock who had been his operations officer out loud, he hastily added, "I was sorry to hear about his death."
Miriam nodded. "Even after he made captain, and even with the prosthetic leg he had after Zapata, he could never resist taking crazy risks. But I knew that, or should have known it, when I . . . when we . . ." Her voice trailed off. But her eyes continued to meet Trevayne's, level and unapologetic.
"Of course," said Trevayne, nodding. The two words covered a great many things.
After a moment, Miriam spoke with an attempt at briskness. "Ian, the governor-general asked me to come and see you. Have you heard the news?"
"Oh, yes." All at once, the melancholy she had interrupted was back. "I was just now thinking about Sean."
"His loss was a terrible blow to us all. I know how you must feel."
"I'm not sure you do." The words might have been brusque, but his voice was not. He was talking as much to himself as to her. "To you he lived a long, full life, even as such things are measured nowadays. As you're mourning him, you can remind yourself of eight decades that, for me, simply didn't happen. As far as my consciousness is concerned, he was cut off in his prime." As our love was cut off in its prime, he didn't add.
Looking in her eyes, he knew he hadn't had to add it.
"Ian . . ." she tried to begin.
"I know," he said, nodding slowly.
And there was nothing more to be said. Standing only a few feet apart, they gazed at each other across a chasm unique in human experience. When she spoke again, it was as if that cryptic exchange had never taken place.
"It's not just the loss of Sean, Ian. It's . . . well, the government is still in shock over what's happened. The sheer size of these ships is terrifying."
"That's not what the government ought to find terrifying. This is the first time in history that the human race has encountered hostile aliens who came to us through normal space. Are you aware of what a shock it was when closed warp points first came to light?"
"Well, yes," she said, puzzled at the seeming irrelevancy. "It was centuries ago, and I've never been a history buff like you, but I do know it came as a surprise that here were warp points which, for whatever reason—and as far as I know it's still not fully understood—simply couldn't be detected until somebody actually came through them."
"Precisely. Before that, the universe of interstellar travel had seemed an orderly and relatively safe one. You simply went through one warp point and emerged into a new system, which you then surveyed for other warp points. And so on. But then it turned out that nasty surprises could appear out of nowhere. That was bad enough, even though closed warp points proved to be relatively rare. But now . . ." Trevayne swept his arm around in a gesture that encompassed the cloud-fleeced blue firmament above. "Now the entire sky has, in effect, become one vast closed warp point! If these aliens crossed normal space to Bellerophon, they can cross it to anywhere, given enough time."
"But Ian, surely no civilization limited to a single system could launch more than one expedition like this! My god, those ships—!"
"That may be true. But have you considered that this may not be an 'expedition' in the usual sense of the word? Maybe it's an . . . exodus."
Miriam Ortega stared at the youth's body that contained the man who had, long ago, won her love. And she began to remember why.
Trevayne turned away and leaned on the balustrade, staring out at things far beyond the river. "Slower-than-light interstellar ships—'generation ships' was the term—were common in both fiction and scientific speculation before the discovery of warp points. But there were always problems with the concept—ethical ones, to begin with. Presumably the initial crew would be volunteers; but what about their children, and all the unborn generations? By what right could they be consigned to such an unnatural existence without their consent? And then there was the impossible political economics of the thing. What society would be willing to make such a staggering investment in a project which couldn't possibly show any return within the lifetimes of the taxpayers' many-times-great grandchildren, if ever?" He turned around to face her, and his eyes were somber beyond their apparent years. "No. Such a thing could only be justified by the direst necessity: species survival itself."
"So you think they're running from something," Miriam breathed. "But what? An invasion?" A chill went through her at the thought of an enemy able to send the race that could build those incredible ships fleeing for its life.
"I hardly think so. That wouldn't have allowed them time to prepare a fleet like this."
"That's a relief. But in that case . . . what?"
"Haven't the foggiest. A nearby supernova ought to do it."
"Whose light wouldn't necessarily have reached us yet." She nodded, recalling the paradoxes of the warp network.
"Precisely. But the point is that they might well have launched more than one survival fleet. In fact, I should think they would have. There's an old saying about not putting all one's eggs in one basket."
Miriam took a deep breath. "This is certainly food for thought. You may well be right. If this really is a species with its back to the wall, it may account for something that's been worrying the government almost as much as the size of those ships: the apparent disregard of these beings for their own lives. In fact, that's caused something close to panic."
"I can well imagine. In my time, seemingly suicidal tactics meant one thing to most people: the Arachnids. And I doubt if that's changed much now. The Bug War was an experience burned permanently into the human psyche." Trevayne shook his head. "But I can't believe that the galaxy could hold more than one race like that at a time. And there's more behind that feeling than just an instinctive recoiling from horror. The scientific consensus holds that a technologically advanced hive consciousness was a freak of chance."
"I hope this is one of the times the scientific consensus is right." A shudder ran through Miriam. She reached inside her briefcase and withdrew a sheaf of hard copy. "This is an intelligence analysis of their tactics. There was the usual bureaucratic horseshit about 'security,' but getting around it was no trouble after I reminded the governor-general that it was you we were talking about!" Her nasty grin faded quickly. "It also includes our total losses. It's been withheld from the media. For once, I agree."
Trevayne skipped ahead to that part. He immediately wished he hadn't. He was afraid he was going to be sick.
"It gets worse," said Miriam grimly. She took out her personal pocket computer and set it on the balustrade. It was one of the late models that would accept verbal commands. She spoke a few words and a holographic display screen came to life in midair. It showed a warp-line chart of the usual sort, which bore absolutely no relation to the actual three-dimensional locations of the stars in the real space. It looked more like a very old-fashioned circuit diagram. Trevayne examined it. It showed the Bellerophon Arm.
"As you know," Miriam began, "I'm the most unmilitary person you'd ever hope to meet—"
"Yes, I remember," smiled Trevayne, who had always found her candid avowals of ignorance refreshing, even while recalling Shakespeare's "the lady doth protest too much, methinks."
"—but even I can see the strategic implications of what has happened. By taking the Bellerophon System, they've cut off the entire Arm—like chopping a tree at the base. Furthermore, Bellerophon is—or was—the only major Fleet Base in the Arm. The naval people tell me that we have no great strength in the rest of the Arm—"
"No need for it," Trevayne interjected.
"—so the local systems can't hope to resist these beings when they figure out about warp points and start working their way up the warp chain."
"Which they will," Trevayne stated unequivocally. "I gather they've observed warp transits. And anyone capable of normal-space interstellar flight can surely work out the implications. Our own ancestors weren't even close to such a technological level back in the twenty-first century when the Hermes blundered through Sol's one warp point on its way from Europa Station to Neptune." He shook his head slowly, contemplating the sheer improbability of the accident that had made humanity a player on the interstellar stage.
After a few moments, Miriam broke the silence. "Ian, as I told you, the governor-general asked me to come. He probably thought I should be the one to talk to you because of . . . well, you know . . ."
"Yes, you did mention that." Trevayne rescued her with a getting-down-to-business tone. "And I've just been indulging in speculation—'farting at the wrong end,' as Sean always said. I do appreciate being given access to this information you've brought. But I'm not clear on why I'm being given access to it. Or on what it is the governor-general wants of me."
"No, you wouldn't know, would you? You've been so busy familiarizing yourself with the present-day world and keeping up with the big news stories that you haven't had a chance to get out and . . . Well, Ian, the fact of the matter is that the people of the Rim Federation have been looking for something—or someone—to turn to in this crisis. And they're starting to look at you."
At first he simply stared at her, stunned beyond the possibility of a response.
"There is, I think, almost a mythic quality to what they're feeling," she continued. "Something deep in the human psyche: the hero who will return when his people need him. Like King Arthur, or Holger the Dane." She smiled at Trevayne's evident surprise. "Yeah, I've actually read up on those Old Terran legends, to help me understand the way public opinion has started to fixate on you. Only, unlike those guys, you really have returned! The people see the founding father of the Rim Federation walking among them again."
"But I never wanted for there to be a 'Rim Federation!' All I was trying to do was hold the Rim for the legitimate Terran Federation government."
"That's been lost sight of for a long time. But yes, I suppose there is a certain irony in the way the people of the Rim look on you now."
" 'A certain irony'? It's absurd—as absurd as that bloody statue you let them put up. 'Founding father' indeed! You're the Rim Federation's founding mother."
"I'm too modest for false modesty." She grinned. "But the times require a warrior hero. Like it or not, you're it. People have even been comparing you to Howard Anderson."
"What? But . . . but . . .!" Trevayne was inarticulate in the face of what was, to him, a form of blasphemy. Howard Anderson, the legend who had led the young Terran Federation's navy through the fires of the first two interstellar wars, then guided the Federation through the third as its president, and later . . .
"Well," said Miriam with her old mischievousness, "you are chronologically almost as old as Anderson was when he came out of retirement for the Theban War. And you're the most senior officer in the Rim Federation Navy."
Trevayne brought himself under control and took a deep breath. "Miriam, on the large assumption that this isn't an overelaborate joke, let me try to enumerate the objections. First of all, I'm not even on the active list."
"That's easily remedied."
"All right. That just leads to the second problem. My 'seniority' has been accumulated while doing nothing but getting well and truly freezer-burned! Bloody hell, Sean Remko had an active career twice as long as my entire conscious life span! So has Cyrus Waldeck. There must be other officers with almost as much experience as that. How do you suppose they'd feel about having some relic out of an historical novel placed over them? And you can be sure my current apparent age wouldn't help a bit!"
"I can see how some people might feel resentment," Miriam admitted.
"Then consider this: they'd be right to feel it. I'm still hopelessly out of date on modern technology. All the mythic resonance in the galaxy isn't going to matter to them. What they're going to be asking is whether I know what I'm doing well enough to keep them alive. No, if I went back on the active list now, I wouldn't be anything except . . ." Trevayne's face went blank with sudden realization—and instantly hardened into a glare. "I wouldn't be anything except what the governor-general and the prime minister and their advisors want me to be: a kind of mascot, to be trotted out on demand to hearten the troops!"
"Oh, Ian, I really don't think that's fair . . ." Miriam's voice trailed off miserably, and her eyes slid away from his coldly angry ones. Normally, she had a working politician's ability to deny anything with a straight face. But not to this man. Nor did it help that she had tried to warn the fatheads in the cabinet that they'd forgotten whom they were dealing with . . . and then, momentarily and inexcusably, forgotten it herself.
"Ask yourself this, Ian," she started over, all useless denials tacitly shelved. "If there's any contribution you can make to the defense of the Rim, even as a living symbol, do you have the right to withhold it? You may not have foreseen the Rim Federation, and you probably wouldn't have approved of it if you had foreseen it. But it exists now. And it's the same Rim you fought to defend. And now it's in peril again."
"Miriam, I've come to accept the existence of the Rim Federation. And yes, I'm willing to do my duty. But my duty is not to serve as a talking head to rally public support for the government. If I resume active duty, it will not be as a public relations ploy. It will have to be genuine or not at all. And . . . I'm not ready for that yet. I need more time to bring myself up to speed. Bloody hell, I've practically had to go back to the Academy!"
"I understand that, Ian. How about this: I'll ask the Admiralty to assign a special liaison officer to you—someone who's a technical expert but also a good communicator. We'll turn it into a crash course. And you alone will be the judge of when you're ready. Fair enough?"
"Fair enough." He nodded.
"Good. I'll take that word back to the governor-general." She gathered up her things and started to leave, then paused. "Only, don't make it too long. The Admiralty is starting to plan a counteroffensive already, and we want you to be ready by the time the fleet is."
"That latter could take a while, from what I've been reading," Trevayne remarked dubiously.
"Yes. That's why we've been screaming for help from the Pan-Sentient Union—through its Terran Federation component of course. In fact . . ." Miriam looked thoughtful. "I'd have to consult the astronomers. But considering what you were saying earlier about other 'survival fleets,' it's possible the Terran Republic could become involved." Her trademark grin flashed as she observed his expression. "If they do, you could end up renewing acquaintances with another old friend, if that's the word: First Space Lord Li Han!"
The supermonitor slid through space, the light of a nearby sun glinting off its flanks and bringing out the intricate complexity that contrasted with its more-than-mountainous mass.
Trevayne, however, could discern telltale patterns in that complexity, and he recognized this as a specialized missile ship, configured to hurl the heaviest possible salvos of heavy bombardment missiles, hopefully consuming any possible enemy in a holocaust of antimatter annihilation long before he could close to energy-weapon range.
I bloody well ought to recognize it, he reflected. He himself, after fighting his way through the Fringe Revolution to Zephrain, had ordered the first SMTs put into production and supervised the development of the HBM to arm them. So he gazed with a kind of paternal pride on the awesome killing machine, the backbone of the Rim Federation Navy's battle line, as it made its stately way through space.
Of course, the columns of multicolored words and numbers that hung in space off to the side somewhat spoiled the effect. . . .
So did the familiar voice of his liaison officer. "They considered naming it the Trevayne class. But they decided that only dead people can have ship classes named after them."
"Good of them not to insist that I meet the qualifications," said Trevayne dryly. He focused his mind and thought a command. The illimitable space through which the supermonitor had moved—and in which he himself had seemed to float like a disembodied god—vanished, leaving the bare walls of the training room.
Trevayne could have turned off the hologram manually. But he needed to practice with the direct neural interfacing that had merely been a theoretical possibility in his earlier life, as it had been for four centuries before his birth. Even now, it was still new technology. And only a small fraction of 1 percent of the human race (and even fewer Orions) possessed the talent for true mind-link, making computers extensions of themselves even though those computers were as far from genuine sentience as they had been eighty years before. Trevayne had been secretly relieved to hear that last part. And he was not among the tiny talented minority. But he could, with the mental discipline that had always been part of his makeup, give simple commands.
The liaison officer gave a nod of approval. Lieutenant Commander Andreas Hagen was normally attached to the Rim Federation Navy's Bureau of Ships, but had recently been seconded from BuShips to the faculty at Prescott Academy, the Rim's naval academy. There, he had come to the attention of Genji Yoshinaka, who had mentioned his name to Miriam Ortega. Thus it was that he'd been seconded again, and his initial reaction had been ambivalent: awe at the thought of the living legend he was being asked to nursemaid, tempered by the patronizing attitude inherent in the nursemaid relationship. The fact that the living legend looked like one of his students at the Academy only added to his confusion.
But by now his feelings had settled into a kind of equilibrium: solid respect, untroubled by any mythic residues but occasionally jolted out of complacency by surprise at how readily a figure out of history books caught on to things.
He gave another nod. "You've mastered the concentration techniques remarkably well."
Trevayne waved the praise aside. The technology was something he could cope with but which didn't really engage his interest. To his way of thinking, it was a matter for specialists. He needed to know the capabilities of the system, but not the details of how it worked—details which Hagen would be only too appallingly willing to impart, given an opening. So he changed the subject.
"I've gathered that these predominantly missile-armed ships make up two-thirds of the Rim's inventory of supermonitors."
"Yes," Hagen affirmed, dispensing with the formality of "Sir" as Trevayne had asked him to. "The other third are almost equally specialized beam-weapon ships, intended to deal with anything that gets through the long-range missile envelope. But the main reliance is on HBMs. I've always told my students that the doctrine goes back to you."
"And now it's being put to the test," said Trevayne, not altogether comfortable with the responsibility. "But I've also gathered that other navies have other design philosophies for their supermonitors."
"Oh, yes. The Terran Republic favors generalist designs with mixed armament, able to engage at any range. The Pan-Sentient Union uses what they call the 'carrier/main combatant' concept: something like the Republic's, but sacrificing most of the HBM armament in order to pack in as many fighters as possible, for long-range strikes. This, despite the inherent design inefficiencies involved in incorporating fighter launchers into a ship that isn't a purpose-built carrier."
"That's the Orion influence in the PSU," Trevayne chuckled. "They've loved the fighter since the moment it appeared, because it lets them get out and risk their pelts in individual combat as the code of theernowlus tells them it befits a warrior to do. A Tabby who's a cog in a large organization with millions of tons of capital ship wrapped around it doesn't feel like a warrior at all."
"I'm sure there's an element of that behind it. But there's also a rational argument: it enables them to deploy so many fighters that they may be able to mount an effective attack against a modern first-rank fleet. That's also the reason for the disappearance of the lighter carriers that existed in your day." (Hagen had learned that this turn of phrase didn't give offense.) "The largest fighter strike you can send out is none too big."
"You know, for me that's been one of the most difficult concepts to adjust to: the decline of the fighter as a deep-space weapon. It's had quite a long run since the Rigelians introduced it."
"Almost three hundred years." Hagen nodded. "But several factors have caught up with it. One is improved screen technology. You remember, of course, the original designs introduced by the Terran Republic."
"Vividly," said Trevayne with a wince. The new energy screens, which automatically reset when they overloaded, instead of simply collapsing in a heap of fused circuits like the older "shields," had been one of the unpleasant surprises Li Han had sprung on him at the Battle of Zapata, mere minutes before the great discontinuity in his life. "And now I understand their generators have been miniaturized by a factor of two."
"Right. But even more importantly, they'll now stop energy emissions in all wavelengths, including x-ray. So ships are a lot more resistant to most fighter weapon packages than they used to be. At the same time, shipboard defensive weaponry has improved. Modern point defense installations can engage up to six fighters at a time, thanks to computer advances. And anti-fighter missiles are effective a much longer ranges—especially the capital AFHAWK mated with strategic bombardment missiles. They can engage fighters at a range of up to thirty light-seconds! And any fighters that get through all this face a storm of powered flechettes—some of them from the new space superiority fighters."
"Ah, yes. That. Another development from a reb— from a Terran Republic innovation." Trevayne looked thoughtful. "Naturally, the mere existence of the space superiority fighter requires that anti-shipping fighter strikes have their own space superiority fighters as an escort. And those take up launcher capacity. So, aside from its inherent ability to destroy strikefighters, the space superiority fighter has degraded the strikefighter's effectiveness simple by reducing the number of them any given carrier may operate." Trevayne paused, and gazed into Hagen's openmouthed countenance. "Am I not correct?" he inquired mildly.
"Uh . . . yes, Sir," Hagen managed. It was a point he had been about to make, in carefully elementary terms. "And finally, there's the proven impossibility of scaling phased gravitic propulsion down to fighter size—which means that in deep space the fighter has lost its speed advantage."
"Ah, yes: the Desai Drive." Trevayne still had difficulty imagining a velocity half that of light, achieved instantaneously in the usual manner of reactionless drives. The mention of his old subordinate's invention reminded Trevayne that he had sent her a greeting via the courier drones that plied the warp lines through the Terran Republic between the Rim Federation and the Pan-Sentient Union.
"The drive has its drawbacks," Hagen cautioned. "It's not at all maneuverable, and due to gravitational harmonics it won't function at all within a massive body's 'Desai Limit'—roughly two light-minutes from a typical habitable planet, and twenty light-minutes from the kind of stars such planets orbit. So fighters still have a role in planetary defense. And they have some new capabilities for playing that role—notably the FIDATS system." (Hagen stopped himself short of reeling off the full "Fighter Information, Data, and Tactical System." Trevayne would already know what the acronym stood for.) "It permits larger command nets, so larger squadrons are practical."
"Yes," Trevayne mused. "A great deal has changed. But not everything. Ship-to-ship armament is fundamentally as I remember it. The missiles are essentially unchanged."
"The warheads they carry have undergone some development in response to improved ECM and point defense," Hagen argued. "The idea has been to enable them to inflict damage from a greater distance. The laser torpedo for instance—it only has to get within hetlaser range of the target. And the very old shaped-charge concept has been revived in the form of a mag bottle that channels blast effects into a stream of highly radioactive plasma."
"Yes, yes . . . but the missiles that carry them are essentially unchanged. The same is true of the traditional shipboard energy weapons. They have a higher output-to-mass ratio, due to the general advances in energy storage, but that's a difference of degree rather than kind. The same can be said of the variations on the primary beam that have come in since the new screens reduced the laser's effectiveness." Trevayne smiled wryly. "Of course, there's this new 'energy torpedo,' but I'm not sure whether to think of it as a beam weapon or a nonmaterial missile."
"There's also something else." Hagen hesitated, then seemed to reach a decision. "It's still under development, and highly classified, but I've been told that you have an unlimited clearance and an across-the-board need to know. It's a spinoff from the Desai Drive that turns the drive itself into a weapon whose power is directly proportional to the drive's power. It involves a kind of unidirectional twisting of space. Theoretical ranges go up to twenty-five light-seconds. Like all beam weapons, the damage it inflicts drops off with range. But if there's any truth to the figures in the classified message traffic—to which I'll see that you have access—a capital ship with one of these things will be really scary, especially at the shorter ranges."
"I definitely want to see those data." Trevayne took on his thoughtful look again. "This can only further accentuate the trend toward larger ships, and away from fighters—which, as you've pointed out, can't mount the Desai Drive." Once again, he was reminded of Sonja Desai. And it occurred to him that he hadn't gotten a reply from her, although there had been time. He wondered why.