And there it was, the request they had been expecting until now. The mission to Madalin had shown the Com to be impotent against alien invaders who claimed to have subjugated an entire galaxy.
Maps distributed with the briefing materials before the meeting showed that action had to be taken immediately. The Com comprised about two-thirds of one arm of the Milky Way. Assuming the Dreel came from Andromeda, as some of the captives had boasted, they had reached the Corn’s arm near its outer tip and were proceeding inward. It was most likely that the first civilization the Dreel had encountered was the human one—so the Dreel campaign had just begun. Still, they had absorbed at least one human world and had commanding positions on several more; they had had ample time to plant agents unobserved on almost all the worlds.
Now the Dreel, would accelerate their operations because within a year mass innoculation would have denied these human, then Rhone bodies—in geographical order. The Dreel would need those bodies; otherwise their expansion would be limited by their host’s gestation periods and by the time it would take for each new host to grow enough to be useful. From the Dreel point of view, most tragic of all would be loss of the knowledge they would have gained by subjugating established civilizations.
“Our military analysis is based on several assumptions,” Varga told the Council. “First, the Dreel are technologically in advance of us, at least in the ways that would count in a conflict. Second, they are at least as smart as we are. Given the fact that the opportunity for a high-profit takeover is diminishing— and given that they now know that we are aware of them—we assume they will launch an all-out attack on worlds within striking distance of their main fleet. That they haven’t done so yet indicates that though they are technologically superior, they are still numerically very much inferior to us. We caught them before they were ready; before their key agents were in place and set up to be fully effective; on all our worlds before they had secured enough resources to supply the fleets needed to beat us; before they had taken enough of our population to man those ships. We must hit them. Now. We must go after them with everything at our command. Now. We urge that you vote to open the weapons locker; that a general military and scientific mobilization be ordered throughout the Com; that we hit them first at Madalin, destroying the entire planet to draw their fleet into action before it is ready. I call for accelerated debate on this matter—and an immediate vote.”
The presentation was over. It was time for the most momentous decision by any of the races since they had sequestered the weapons. The debate wore on long after the sun set. Late in the night, they voted. Each Councillor had a specific key to the impregnible machinery that guarded the weapons locker; 1081 delegates would have to use their keys to enable the military experts to use the weapons. Weapons activation had been attempted before, but never successfully. Centuries earlier, the sponge syndicate had tried for a majority by drug blackmail. Had they succeeded, they would have been the absolute commanders of the then all-human Com; the attempt failed narrowly when the syndicate chief mysteriously disappeared—atomized, it was believed, by the Com Police.
This time, after the delicate point about the composition of the military staff was resolved by placing in overall command a Tarak—a capable general of a minority race—they voted, by almost three to one, to go ahead.
Immediately, the keys were activated. The proper signal was received by the great computers who guarded the machines. The highly trained staff was already in place.
And throughout the human and nonhuman worlds of the Com the word spread faster than could have been thought possible—the news that struck fear into every individual who heard it:
The weapons locker is open.
In the Madalin System
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 formidible 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 Corn’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.”
Dreel Central, about Five Thousand Light-years from the Com
the recorder’s tiny ship docked easily. the mother ship was an entire world, more than ten thousand kilometers in diameter, but it was a world inside-out. It took the Recorder almost four hours by shuttle from the surface spaceport where he had landed to reach the chambers of the Set.
The chambers themselves were modest, for the Dreel were an austere people with little use for art or creature comforts. It came from inhabiting another’s body—the Dreel, safe and secure inside a body, cared little for it beyond that it be in excellent health and remain undamaged.
Thus the seat of Dreel power was a chamber no more than thirty meters square, furnished only with hard plastic benches and enclosed only by undecorated steel bulkheads. The Recorder, expected nothing else; he sat on one of the benches and waited patiently, if a little nervously. All Dreel shared a desire for long life, and Dreel leaderhip had more than once been known to kill the bearer of unhappy tidings.
Still, The Recorder’s concern was strictly for its own self; that the Dreel were here, that the great mother ship had brought them across the intergalactic void over an impossibly long time, was reassuring. That the Dreel might lose never crossed The Recorder’s mind.
“Recorder, give your report.” The voice echoed from the walls. Its suddenness startled him, but he recovered quickly. They already knew what he had to say—this was, as his title implied, strictly for the record, and in case questions were necessary.
“Subjects have an effective defensive force not realized in the early scouting reports,” he told the Set. “Their weapons, while slow, are of an extremely high order and in many ways inconsistent with their past history. Obviously, the relatively static culture that we found was atypical of the races involved. Such weapons as these, and the highly unorthodox methodology employed—much of which had obvious nonmilitary applications not reflected in their technological level are quite obviously a product of a savage evolution. Although apparently at Level One evolution—peaceful, highly developed, relatively static, as we have found elsewhere—they are not so. We depended too much on past models. These are at least Level Three cultures—barbarians, if you will, wild animals—with a convincing veneer of Level One.”
“Such a finding is inconsistent,” the Set objected. “A Level Three culture would continually war, continually fight among itself. We are faced with an affront to the laws of nature if your information is correct—a pack of ferocious annuals who have reached a working compromise. We could accept that of one race perhaps, but there are fourteen totally different types of life-form. It is against the laws of historical evolution. Such a civilization as is represented by this ‘Com’ should be at the highest level, beyond wars or threats of wars; it should be as it observably is, in social stasis, at precisely the level where the only possible advancement is Dreel assumption of control.”
“Nevertheless,” The Recorder responded, “they have a stasis reality and yet did not destroy the weapons of their barbarian past—and, most incredibly, did not lose the knowledge or will to use them. This is a fact. More, it applies to all of them. Therefore the different races are cooperating with each other against us.”
The Set remained silent for a moment. The Recorder waited, still patient, knowing that within the heart of the massive mother ship the Set—countless Dreel without body—were interacting, searching for answers, devising plans. It was a giant live, organic computer with billions of years of wisdom and experience accounted for among its myriad components.
One of the things the Dreel had learned in all those years was pragmatism; it was the last refuge of the puzzled, and it worked.
“Much work will be done to explain this anomaly,” the Set announced at last. “It is possible that laws of historical evolution do not apply universally as they did to our birth-galaxy. Therefore, faced with a civilization technologically capable of detecting us, further passive infiltration is hereby ended. If it is a Level Three we are dealing with, then we must counter it as we would a Level Three culture anywhere, no matter its outward appearance.”
“That is a dangerous road,” The Recorder pointed out. “Although slower than we, they successfully destroyed twelve of our ships on the Madalin attack to no losses on their side. Our fleet numbers under forty thousand ships, our factory-ship capacity is limited, and we do not control sufficient worlds to use their own facilities.”
The Set was actually shocked. “To suggest that the Dreel might lose to such evolutionary inferiors! . . .”
The Recorder became alarmed. “No, no! I mean nothing of the sort! Only that the most submissive pet might still bite, kick, or otherwise injure the master.”
“We are aware of that,” the Set replied coldly. “Know that superior numbers are not always the answer. They are on the defensive, not we. They must meet our threat. The twelve ships lost were lost because they had to face a preset gauntlet. The situation will be reversed. Be at ease, report to Medical. Go.”
Even as The Recorder left, the Set was ordering that, while undergoing medical check, additional Dreel be added to his system to counterbalance the obvious alienation The Recorder had suffered while in the Com. The historical anomaly had obviously unhinged him. Recombination was needed. Never before had the Dreel faced this sort of society; never before had it been at such a disadvantage. The victory here would be all the greater for the difficulty the Com presented. A herd might trample a warder, but never the race of warders. Now was the time for the Dreel to show its true superiority, which was power.