CHAPTER FOUR: "Surely that can't be right!"
Zephrain was a distant binary system. The orange K8v secondary component, with its small retinue of what were by courtesy referred to as planets, followed an orbit of over fifty percent eccentricity. Even at periastron, it barely swung within three light-hours of Component A. Currently, it was headed out to the Stygian regions where it spent most of its year and was barely visible from Xanadu, the second of that privileged coterie of inner planets that basked in Zephrain A's warm yellow G5v light. Gazing out the window of his office, Raymond Prescott could almost imagine himself on Old Terra.
Not quite, of course. It was always "not quite." The tree whose branches almost brushed against the window was a featherleaf, product of a well-developed local ecosystem which showed little sign of yielding to Terran imports. And practiced senses told him that the gravity was a shade on the low side-0.93 G, to be exact. Still, Zephrain A II was a singularly hospitable world for the humans who'd dubbed it Xanadu.
It was equally comfortable for Orions-and they had discovered it first. Reactionaries like Zhaarnak's father, and even relatively enlightened old-timers like Kthaara'zarthan, had never recovered from the Khan's precedent-shattering act of ceding the system to the Terran Federation.
The move had made sense, though. Indeed, it had become unavoidable the moment the teeming Bug system was found on the far side of one of Zephrain's four warp points. On the far side of another of those warp points lay Rehfrak, a sector capital of the Orions, with billions of the Khan's subjects, squarely in the path of any Bug counterattack an offensive might provoke. Only the Terran Federation, with its prodigious industrial capacity, could fortify Zephrain so heavily as to make any offensive use of the system thinkable.
A project on that scale had required a workforce of millions, and millions more to service the workforce. They'd come from every corner of the Federation. In the streets of Xanadu's instant prefab "cities" could be seen every variety of human being that Old Terra had spawned, and quite a few it hadn't. That was unusual in today's Federation. The Heart Worlds' once-polyglot populations had long since blended into "planetary ethnicities," while the young Fringe Worlds had been settled by people seeking to preserve various traditional ethnicities from disappearance by giving each its own planet.
Nevertheless, this motley crew had sunk tendrils of root into the soil of Xanadu with surprising rapidity. The population had already outgrown government by a Navy administrator, and a provisional government had been organized under the duly appointed Federal governor preparatory to seeking full Federation membership. Watching the constitutional convention, Prescott had occasionally found himself wondering if someone had formed a club for disbarred lawyers. And yet, oddly enough, some genuine political creativity had come out of it. Architectural creativity, too; looking to the future, they'd approved plans for a stately Government House on a hill above the river-named the Alph, naturally-that Prescott could see in the distance, beyond the spacefield. Of course, actual construction was being deferred until things became a little less unsettled here . . . meaning, no Bugs a single warp transit away.
Which, Prescott reminded himself briskly, is why we're here. He turned away from the window. Zhaarnak was waiting with the patience that was one facet of his seemingly contradictory character.
"Have they arrived yet?" the human asked.
"Yes. In fact, they are waiting in the outer office."
Prescott nodded, sat down at his desk, and touched a button.
"Send Small Claw Uaaria and Captain Chung in."
Uaaria'salath-ahn, Zhaarnak's staff intelligence officer, was the senior of the two spooks. By the generally recognized rank equivalencies, a "small claw of the khan" was somewhere between a captain and a commodore. So she led the way into the room, and Prescott reflected on how unusual it was to see an Orion female wearing the jeweled harness that was their navy's uniform. Not so very long ago, it would have been unheard of, and that, too, was a change which owed more than a little to the Terran example. The patriarchal Khanate had been headed in that direction even before it discovered just how capable human females could be as warriors in the first two interstellar wars. Since then-and especially since ISW 3-the move towards full female integration into the military had gone on with what (for the extremely tradition-bound Orions) was enormous rapidity.
On the other hand, female Orions still had to "prove" their worthiness for their ranks by being even better at the same job than the vast majority of males could have been. In some ways, Uaaria's position was a bit easier than most, for Prescott knew that her father was an old friend and war comrade of Zhaarnak's. He also knew his vilkshatha brother well enough to realize that he retained enough of his race's old sexism to find his intelligence officer extremely pleasant to look upon, although he would no more consider taking liberties with her than he would have considered it with one of his own daughters. But in one respect, at least, Uaaria was a perfect exemplar of what it took for a female to succeed in the Khanate's military: she was very good at her job. In fact, she was very, very good. Despite her youth, Prescott considered her to be one of the half dozen finest intelligence officers, human or Orion, he'd ever met, and he knew Zhaarnak relied upon her analyses implicitly.
As did Prescott himself.
"Sit down," he invited.
"Thank you for seeing us on such short notice Fang Pressssscottt, Small Fang," Uaaria murmured, lowering herself into one of the chairs in front of Prescott's desk as naturally as if she hadn't been raised to sit on piles of floor cushions.
"No problem. When the two of you requested this meeting, we were eager to hear the results of your analysis of what we observed during the offensive."
"Particularly," Zhaarnak added, "your interpretation of the unprecedented confusion that overtook the Bahgs after our first major surface strike on Planet I."
"We still cannot be certain as to the cause," Uaaria replied cautiously. "Our working hypothesis is still the same one Fang Presssssscottt advanced at the time: that all the Bahgs in a given system are in some kind of telepathic rapport, and that destroying that many of them at once had an effect on the rest similar to . . . to . . ."
"To hitting them over the head with a hammer," Chung offered.
"Something of the sort," Uaaria allowed. "But whatever the precise mechanism of the phenomenon, its effects were clearly system-wide."
"A pity they are not universal," Zhaarnak muttered.
"That wouldn't do us much good, considering that the disorientation is only temporary and no one's ever figured out how to coordinate attacks in different systems," Prescott observed. One human head nodded and two sets of Orion ears flicked in agreement. Simultaneity was a meaningless concept in interstellar space. "But even so," the admiral continued, turning back to Uaaria, "this seems to offer an advantage we can exploit when attacking heavily populated Bug systems."
"Indeed, Fang. In order to throw such a system's defenders off balance, the inhabited planets should be bombarded as early and as heavily as possible."
"Hmmm. . . ." Prescott considered that for a moment. The ethical issues such a policy would have raised in a war with any other race never even entered his mind-these were Bugs. But that didn't mean there weren't practical problems.
"An ideal combination of circumstances let us land the punch we did," he mused aloud. "Possibly an unrepeatable combination. Still, it's something to bear in mind. For now, though, please continue with your other conclusions."