“Coming through,” Aguilera’s voice half-whispered in the ear phones. “Taking shape now. God, that’s a big mother.”
Kralik could see it now—a faint, still vague outline against the flaring turbulence, visible mainly because it was made of straight lines and nothing else in the sun was. A moment later, he spotted two other outlines taking shape, then another, then two more, then two more again. Then . . .
Nothing. Eight ships, in all, which was what the Jao had guessed would be the most likely size of the Ekhat invasion fleet.
The first of the Ekhat ships was now a solid image in the screen, no longer fuzzy.
“Big mother,” indeed. There was no way to gauge size through direct visual examination, since the sun provided nothing in the way of recognizable scaling objects. The swirling granular cells that filled most of the screen could have been mere meters across, for all Kralik could tell, instead of the hundreds of miles they actually were. But the computer provided a scale for him, and . . .
Big mother. At its greatest lateral dimension—call it “wingspan” except the term was silly applied to such a weird-looking contraption—the Ekhat ship was almost three miles across. Granted, most of the ship was empty space contained within the spidery latticework of the peculiarly shaped craft. But even the central pyramid where the Ekhat were located was half a mile wide. The submarine swooping toward it was like a minnow attacking a whale.
Kralik shook his head, dispelling the image forcefully. It wasn’t that bad. Say, a catfish attacking a shark. Except this catfish had very sharp teeth, and this shark had very thin skin.
He didn’t find the new image all that comforting. Fortunately, his gunner was a man with either less of an imagination or just more in the way of sheer grit.
“We’ll chew ’em right up, General. You watch.”
Kralik was a little amused at the man’s tone of voice. Awkward, it was, as you’d expect from an enlisted man suddenly finding himself with a lieutenant general as his tank commander. On one level, of course, there was something absurd about Kralik’s insistence upon personally fighting from one of the improvised turrets. But . . .
Why not?
If they didn’t succeed in destroying the Ekhat here—most of their ships, at least—everything else became a moot point. Kralik had decided that his willingness to personally fight in the engagement, in the most dangerous position, would have a good effect upon morale.
Which, it had. Civilian morale, to his surprise, perhaps even more than military. For the first time since the conquest, the human race had living heroes again. And not just human ones. Kralik had watched the relayed images of the rallies and demonstrations himself, and quickly understood what Aille had not. With few exceptions, and those only among diehard members of the Resistance, the human race had taken Aille krinnu ava Pluthrak for their own with all the fervor that Scot highlanders had once embraced Bonnie Prince Charlie.
In the turret, he grimaced, remembering the battle of Culloden and the harrowing of the glens thereafter. That was perhaps not the most auspicious analogy he could have come up with.
The enthusiasm for all things Pluthrak extended to the members of Aille’s personal service, human even more than Jao. Ben Stockwell was a canny politician, and he’d seen to it that all the stops were pulled out in the propaganda being broadcast throughout the human communication network. That official network was still very extensive, even twenty years after the conquest. The Jao on Terra had always been too few to simply suppress human activities and institutions. Much like the English in Africa and India, they’d had to use those existing institutions as the instruments of their imperial control.
Now, the institutions were slipping the leash, although Stockwell was being careful to maintain the formalities of Jao rule. Given Aille’s immense personal popularity with humans, that had been easy enough. Even the pirate TV and radio stations that seemed to be springing up all over like mushrooms—on the internet, like wildly infectious bacteria—spoke at least respectfully of Pluthrak.
It was dangerous to do otherwise, in fact, and not because of the Jao. The Resistance in Texas had discovered that, after they began their uprising in Dallas-Fort Worth. Before General Abbott and his troops had even entered the metropolitan area, a full scale civil war was raging. Most of the inhabitants of Dallas-Fort Worth were hostile to the Resistance, because of its past behavior in the area, and given Aille as a rallying point around which to organize, they’d quickly taken up arms against them. “Arms,” in fact, not just as a literary expression. The ever-practical Jao had never bothered with the hopeless task of trying to disarm the human population of its hand weapons.