The Course of Empire by Eric Flint

  Caitlin pressed a hand to her head, abandoning any pretense at calm-acceptance. Her cheeks had gone fiery red and the breath rasped in her throat. "It's so hot! I think I'm going to pass out."

  Kralik took her good arm. "Why don't you go back into the ship?"

  "No!" Aille's voice was much louder than Tully had ever heard it, even in battle. "She must stay. We must all stay. To do anything else would be exceedingly dangerous."

  Tully glanced over his shoulder. Whatever stance the Subcommandant was executing, it sure as hell wasn't Caitlin's calm-acceptance. Probably something more like about-to-shit-a-brick, he told himself.

  The Ekhat began speaking, both of them at once. The sounds were similar but not identical, as though the creatures were singing an atonal song with separate melody lines and verses. If he had thought the grinding metal noise bad, this was even worse. The cacophonous sound of the clicking and warbling voices felt as if they were being carved into his writhing brain. He had to restrain himself from clasping his hands over his ears.

  "We notice you," a mechanical voice said from behind him in Jao, "infesting this framepoint."

  Tully realized that Aille held a compact device against his chest, probably a mechanical translator.

  "We occupy the third planet, not the framepoint," Aille answered, also in his own language, "but the Interdict has never concerned itself with planets. Do you intend to permeate this system?"

  The device screeched out a thunderous translation. Caitlin bit her lip and shuddered.

  "This infested coldness!" The closest Ekhat wheeled away as the mechanical translator repeated its words. It resembled a tall, elongated spider on those thin, segmented legs, now striding in a intricate pattern around its fellow. "Unspokenness! Unsaiding!"

  It was oddly compelling, Tully thought. Each movement was precise and controlled, yet utterly spontaneous, as though its kind were somehow born dancing. The Jao with their formalized stances looked positively wooden in comparison. But Tully now realized that they'd acquired their obsession with postures from their one-time masters.

  The bizarre light show was getting to him, more and more. He concentrated on calm-assurance, the back leg straight, weight distributed just so, fingers curved.

  The two Ekhat prowled closer, their legs twitching. Their hides looked soft and pale, the unwholesome color of whey. They spoke again in that odd dual mode that was not unison. A second later the translator bleated, "Interstitial brilliance surfacing."

  "What?" Tully leaned forward, straining to make some sense out of its words, but Yaut jerked him back into place by the shoulder.

  The foremost Ekhat stopped, its body pulsating in time with the lights. "Complete Harmony condition of contemplating."

  Aille's ears swiveled. "We have not detected any sign of the Complete Harmony in this solar region."

  Tully looked at Kralik. "Is that another faction of Ekhat?" he asked in a low voice.

  "A competing faction." Kralik shook his head. "There's at least four, if I understood the records correctly."

  "Tonal motif unmodulated for this key," the other Ekhat said. The throb of an organ badly out of tune underlay its voice, before the translator rendered the words into Jao. "Improvisation recommended."

  "Jao motif?" Aille said.

  "Full dynamics approach this red place," the first Ekhat said. "New notes in a condition of blue. Unharvesting. Heeding take."

  "You spoke of the Complete Harmony," Aille said, returning to one of the few bits of sense Tully had been able to make out. "Is it their motif?"

  "True Harmony unharvesting," the Ekhat said, turning its head so that the circle of immense eyes glowered down at the small group on the ramp. "Complete Harmony unharvesting. Condition of unharvesting all."

  Tully watched the two creatures grow ever more agitated, circling one another as though they were binary suns caught in the wells of one another's gravity. "What does 'unharvesting' mean?"

  "I am familiar with the term 'harvest,' " Aille said. His eyes flickered. "It refers to sweeping through a solar system and selecting those species that can make themselves of use. The Interdict, who find all lower lifeforms repulsive, do not harvest at all. Neither does the Melody. But both the Complete Harmony and True Harmony carry out such operations from time to time, depending upon their mood."

  "Then 'unharvesting' indicates the opposite?" Caitlin said. "They're not coming?"

  "Far more likely, it means we can expect what some call a 'weeding,' " Aille said. "Extermination of all life in this system."

  "It sounds like they're trying to warn you, then," Caitlin said. "If the Complete Harmony is coming, maybe the Interdict wishes to become our ally."

  Aille turned the translator off. "The term 'ally' is meaningless, applied to them. Interdict does not concern itself with the fate of lower lifeforms, any more than a human on your world would take an interest in the affairs of carrion flies. All Ekhat are xenophobic, but the Interdict is perhaps more so than any other faction. Their horror of interstellar travel is linked by some scholars to the fact that it exposes Ekhat to pollution by lower species. That they lower themselves to intervene here means only that they are using us in some way to thwart another faction."

  The taller of the two Ekhat fingered the moss on its head with what seemed a nervous motion and Aille switched the translator back on. "Chord completion!" the creature cried and turned toward its partner. "Condition of minimizing!"

  "Watch," Aille said grimly. "What comes next is one of the few common elements in all Interdict parleys."

  The two Ekhat orbited one another in increasingly tighter circles. Their arms were extended as though they would embrace in another second, their movements becoming less graceful, more stilted. Tully suddenly became even more apprehensive. Humans did not belong here, he told himself. In fact, nothing sane belonged here.

  Abruptly, the taller alien leaped upon the other and tore one of its legs off. Thick white fluid spurted as the injured Ekhat threw back its head and screamed, a terrifying, shrill cry that vibrated into Tully's marrow. Then it tackled the first, crashing with it onto the floor, where the two fought like a pair of tyrannosaurs out of Earth's past, rending gobbets of flesh and casting them aside, bellowing in pain and rage.

  Caitlin backed against Kralik and closed her eyes, but Aille and Yaut only watched, their postures identical. "You knew!" Tully said. "You knew this would happen!"

  "This is inevitable," Yaut said stolidly. "Members of the Interdict faction consider themselves irreversibly tainted by any contact with lower lifeforms. After communicating with us, they would never be allowed to rejoin their own kind and taint them as well. This is a form of sterilization."

  "It's horrible!" Caitlin said. Her face was flushed with the terrible heat, but beneath it, she was as pale as a new moon.

  "They are Ekhat," Aille said. "It is their way."

  "Then let's leave," Caitlin said. "They aren't going to tell us anything more and I can't bear just standing here while they tear each other to bits."

  "It is required that we watch," Yaut said.

  The fraghta's gaze was level, his arms positioned carefully. Tully knew he had seen that stance before. Resignation, he wondered, or perhaps aversion?

  "It has been well documented that attempting to leave before the matter is concluded," Aille added, "will trigger them to suspend their attack on one another and effect our deaths first."

  The carnage slowed as the two aliens weakened, but still they fought on in a pool of viscous white fluid, seemingly determined to rend each other limb from limb.

  "How—" Caitlin gave a muffled sob, then tried again. "How could they have enslaved the Jao, if they can't stand even to talk to you?"

  "The Complete Harmony advanced the Jao to the point of usefulness, not the Interdict," Aille said.

  The taller of the two Ekhat crashed to the bloodied deck like a felled sequoia and lay twitching, the white of its eyes slowly discoloring to yellow. The other, staggering on only
three legs now, continued to disembowel its companion until its strength failed. It then collapsed onto the corpse, where it tore weakly at its own flesh before finally subsiding into unconsciousness or death.

  The light flashes had slowed. Aille's whiskers shifted and he looked around. "We can leave. Indeed, we must."

  Kralik, his arm around Caitlin's shoulders, strode back up the small ship's ramp.

  Tully hurried to keep up with them. "I never really believed in the existence of the Ekhat," he said in a low voice as they stepped through the missing hatch. "I thought it was all just Jao propaganda."

  Caitlin turned reddened eyes to him. "The Jao almost never lie. Whether that's a cultural trait or something biologically hard-wired in their brains, I couldn't tell you, but they don't. They can and do exaggerate readily—sometimes even wildly—or refrain from mentioning, but they rarely invent from whole cloth. They're just not easily imaginative, the way we are. That's why they find our fascination with novels and movies so peculiar—even distasteful. To them, fiction is a form of lying." She raked perspiration-soaked hair out of her face and shuddered. "They definitely weren't exaggerating about this."

  Aille and Yaut climbed in behind them.

  "How are we going to leave?" Kralik said. "They've damaged the ship. We don't have a hatch left."

  "I can generate a field to reinforce the inner hatch," Aille said. "It will draw our power down very low, but it will probably hold until we reach Terra."

  Caitlin hugged her broken arm across her chest. "Do you have spacesuits, in case it doesn't?"

  "We have suits for Jao, none for humans," Yaut said. "This vessel was never intended to transport your species."

  So the three of them, Caitlin, Kralik, and himself, might not make it back. Angrily, Tully dropped into one of the seats. Just because the Ekhat were too damned impatient to wait until they'd opened the fricking door.

  Insanity was one thing, but that plain pissed him off!

  * * *

  After Aille piloted the small ship safely away from the Ekhat vessel, Caitlin found a flavored drink in the ship's stores and offered it around, one-handed. Aille and Yaut waved the carafe away, preferring to analyze recordings of what had just transpired. She could tell by their twitchiness that what they really wanted was a good long swim. Banle had often displayed a similar mussed discontent during long formal occasions and always made her way to the nearest pool afterward.

  Humans, though, liked to have something to do with their hands, when they were under stress, so she wasn't surprised when Kralik and Tully drained their cups and asked for more.

  Caitlin served them, then retreated to her own seat, her head reeling, suddenly cold with an intensity that indicated shock. That terrible ship with its deranged crew—she could still taste the miasma that passed for their atmosphere, feel that excruciating racket jangling through her bones. Jao had been warning humanity about the Ekhat for over twenty years, but no one had ever really believed them. And, unfortunately, with their lack of imagination and creative expression, they had never been able to fully communicate the depth of the Ekhat's strangeness.

  She herself had only thought she understood how alien another species could be before today. Compared to the Ekhat, the Jao were almost human and their rule positively benevolent. The universe was clearly a much more dangerous place than humans had ever credited. She had to get back and warn her father.

  " 'Unharvesting.' " Kralik looked up from the work station where he was searching the ship's archives. His face was as grimy as hers surely must be, his jinau uniform stained with dark circles of sweat. "So far I can't find any references, but I don't like the sound of it."

  "It may not mean an attack," Caitlin said, glad to have something to focus on. Her broken arm throbbed and she needed a bath herself. The Ekhat ship had been sweltering and her clammy shirt clung to her body. Her hair would probably carry that stink for days. "The Subcommandant wasn't sure. It could mean something so totally off the wall, we'll never be able to make any sense of it."

  Tully had wedged himself in the back of the cabin, as far from the two Jao as he could get, and had the look of a caged animal. His eyes kept returning to the missing hatch. The forcefield Aille had rigged glimmered green and was all that stood between them and naked vacuum. Some of the brighter stars were visible beyond. "All they had to do was wait five more seconds," he muttered, "and we would have opened the fricking door!"

  "Get over it." Kralik punched up another file. "They're aliens. Really aliens. They not only don't understand doors or humans—or Jao, for that matter—they don't want to." He hesitated, then scrolled down through the data on the display. "Okay, here it is. I found a reference to 'unharvesting.' "

  Yaut crossed the cabin, ears lowered, and bent over Kralik. His whiskers stiffened. "Yes, it is as we thought. Unharvesting indicates extermination. The Complete Harmony must be planning to come through this system and sterilize it." He straightened, the line of his shoulders indicating worried-contemplation. "The Subcommandant has already communicated that probability to the Governor."

  "Then they'll be ready," Caitlin said. "We'll be able to defend ourselves."

  "Harvesting is a ground operation," Yaut said, "which we could defend against using the troops and materiel currently stationed on Terra. Unharvesting, or 'weeding' as it is sometimes known, is an assault on a planetary scale. The Complete Harmony will attack by discharging plasma in Terra's atmosphere. Under those circumstances, tanks, artillery, and foot soldiers will be useless."

  "Then we'll have to stop them out here," Kralik said, "as soon as they emerge from the framepoint. We can't let them get close enough to Earth to attack."

  Caitlin tried to think. "But Earth has very little in the way of a space fleet, just a few old shuttles, and I've been under the impression that most of the Jao ships from the initial conquest have been assigned elsewhere."

  "They have," Aille said, "and long since." His ears were canted very low. "The Ekhat press on many other fronts."

  She read cautious-indecision in his posture. Not at all reassuring.

  "What about the submarines being refitted at Pascagoula?" Tully said from the far wall.

  "Didn't you see the size of that Ekhat ship?" Kralik said. "They would be too little, too late. The Jao need to bring back their heavy hitters."

  "We have no available ships large enough to be effective in that sort of warfare," Aille said. "The vessels the Complete Harmony will bring will be as large as the one you just saw. Possibly larger."

  And that one had been huge, Caitlin thought.

  "Earth still has missiles," Tully said. "I think. Unless you Jao destroyed them all."

  "They won't be any use." Kralik shook his head grimly. "I understand now why the Jao have never spent any time developing missile weapons. You saw when that ship came through the framepoint. They wrap burning solar plasma around their hulls! Anything you shoot at them will be like tossing a match at the sun. A missile would be vaporized before it got anywhere near the actual hull. And what's the point of setting off a thermonuclear device in what's already a thermonuclear holocaust? As far as I can tell, you'd just be adding more energy to the plasma ball and making it worse."

  "Lasers are equally ineffective," Aille said. "In the Jao experience, there is only one effective tactic against Ekhat ships using solar plasma weaponry. It is necessary to wait until the plasma ball has been discharged, when the ship will be vulnerable to lasers."

  "But what will happen to Earth if they release that much plasma in our atmosphere?" Caitlin asked.

  "Temperatures in the exposed areas will rise rapidly," Yaut said. "Combustible materials such as vegetal matter and building materials will burn. And there will be a rolling blast wave similar to that produced by some of your most powerful weapons."

  "You mean a hydrogen bomb?" Kralik stood and put an arm around Caitlin, who realized she was trembling. "This will be as destructive as a thermonuclear blast?"

  "Similar, though
not the same," Aille said. "In some ways, worse. The amount of energy contained in one of those plasma balls greatly exceeds that of any nuclear weapon. At least, any that either Jao or humans have ever built. However, it is almost pure energy, with little of the contaminating radiation typically produced by nuclear weapons. Many of your species would survive the initial attack, therefore, especially if they have taken shelter below ground. Ultimately, though, if the Complete Harmony makes enough runs through the system, all of your kind would perish. So would all other forms of life on Terra. Enough of those fireballs will strip the atmosphere from a planet."

  "How many would die—the first time?" Caitlin heard herself ask, though she could have sworn she was too dazed to talk.

  "Perhaps a twentieth or even a tenth of your population, if the Ekhat fleet is as large as usual." Yaut said. "Even a single plasma fireball in the atmosphere can wreak havoc across much of a continent. It is difficult to predict. There are many variables and every world is different."

  Caitlin's mind tried to wrap itself around the figures. A twentieth—at best. Dear God, that'd be something like three hundred million people. More fatalities in a few hours than all the wars in history put together, including the Jao conquest.

  Her palms were sweating. "And you've seen this before? It isn't just conjecture on your part?"

  "It is unfortunately quite common," Yaut said. "The Ekhat criterion for 'usefulness' eludes us, so we cannot accurately predict where such 'weeding' will take place."

  And Oppuk had known this would come, she thought. He's had years to arm Earth against just this possibility and hasn't done so, because he's been mired in his self-absorbed anger. Deep down, he's probably been hoping for this all along.

  "We have to do something," Kralik said. "We can't just sit on our hands and wait for them to annihilate us!"

  "What can be done, will," Aille said. "I have relayed what little we learned and Governor Oppuk is forming a strategy now. We will join him at the palace."