Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail

If they’re really homes for Altavar young, why the hell did they tolerate human populations in the millions on them?

Questions with no easy or clear answers like that one disturbed him. For most of his life, the Confederacy had been his spck, and he had believed in it. He, himself, had caught some of the very people down there on those four worlds, sending them to what he believed to be a hellish prison. He still wasn’t very impressed with the Four Lords and their minions or with the systems they had developed; but, he knew, he felt no real difference when looking at the Diamond or at the Confederacy. He felt like a confirmed atheist in the midst of a vast and grandiose cathedral, able to appreciate the skill and art that went into its construction but feeling pretty sure it wasn’t worth the effort.

In many ways he identified almost completely with Marek Kreegan, who must have had similar thoughts upon coming to the Diamond, and, most likely, even before. That priestly role was more than mere disguise, it was a subtle and humorous tweaking of the man’s nose at Man’s odd and distorted attempt at building institutions that served him. How many thousands, or tens of thousands, of years had Mankind been trying to build the right institutions? How many had slaved in faith at that building, and how many, even now, deluded themselves as they always had that, this time, they’d gotten it right?

Once upon a time sixty percent of the people didn’t believe in their system. Only twelve percent thought there might be something better than the system they hated, something worth bothering to fight about. Loss of faith equaled loss of hope, then, in that large a segment of the population, and it didn’t, in historical retrospect, seem out of line. People tended to extremes, and hope was a very mild extreme when faith became impossible, while despair was easy and all the way down the other end of the scale.

He pounded his fist on the console hard enough to hurt his hand. “Tarin Bul” had given in to despair, yet had died with slight hope. Qwin Zhang had risked everything on hope, and won. Park Lacoch had refused to be seduced by a good and happy life when he knew that others he did not even know depended on his actions. Cal Tremon had been used and abused by practically everyone for their own purposes,, yet he had never surrendered.

Pour people, four distinct individuals, who were, in every sense of the word, sides of himself. He hoped, he thought, he had learned something valuable, something the Confederacy had never meant to teach him. Now it was his turn.

The great orb that was Momrath filled the screens early on in the trip, and he watched it grow closer with eerie fascination. Ringed gas giants were always the most beautiful of places, and, in more than once sense, the most forbidding as well. At last two moons of the great planet were large or larger than any of the Diamond worlds, yet he went not to them but to small and frozen Boojum. Well, Momrath had been the one place he hadn’t visited, in a sense, as yet, and it seemed appropriate that it be his world.

He settled back to await the landing, still deep in reflection.

Task Force Delta was composed of four “war stations,” each surrounded and protected by a formidable battle group. Clustered around the barbell-shaped station that was the nerve center and computer control for its awesome firepower were hundreds of “modules,” each complete in and of itself. Most were unmanned; war these days was very much a remote-controlled affair, with battle group leaders merely choosing from a list of tactics, giving their battle group computers the objectives, and letting everything else run itself. Not a single one of the modules was intended for defense; the battle group provided that. Yet among all the clusters, there were weapons that could take out selected cities on remote worlds, could level a mountain range or even disintegrate all carbon-based life forms within a proscribed radius while doing no other damage. Other modules could ignite atmospheres with sufficient combustible gasses in them, while still others could literally split planets in two.

One such station could wipe out an entire solar system, leaving nothing but debris, gasses, and assorted space junk to orbit the sun, or could, in fact, even explode that sun. There were only six such stations in operation throughout the vast Confederacy, and four of them were concentrated here in the task force, the largest ever assembled.

The protective battle group was composed of fifty defensive ships, called cruisers after ancient seagoing vessels none could remember at this stage, built along the same lines as the war stations. But their modules consisted of hundreds of scouts, probes, and fighters, again almost all needing no human hand or brain, capable of taking continuous streams of orders from their base cruisers or, in the event the cruiser was destroyed, from any cruiser or the war station itself. Nothing else was needed; the combined firepower and mobility of a cruiser was equal to an entire planetary attack force, complete with human and robot troops that could land on and occupy a cleared stretch of land and hold it until relieved provided the cruiser’s modules continued their air and space cover. As well, the human marines inside their battle machines could be so effective that a squad might be able to take and destroy a medium-sized city, even if the city were defended with laser weapons, immune to the lethal energy rain their supporting fighters could unleash.

In theory the task force was as close to invulnerable as could be imagined, combined with the punch of an irresistible force. The only trouble was, its powers, weapons, programming, and tactics had never been tested under real battle conditions. For several centuries the Confederacy military had been amost exclusively devoted to policing itself.

A forward cruiser, still more than a light-year off the Diamond, launched four probe modules, one to each of the four Warden worlds. They sped off, skipping in and out of subspacial modes, in a near-random approach to the system, their next direction determined only after they came out for that brief moment and saw where they were. With no humans or other living organisms aboard to worry about, they made the trip in less than an hour.

Stern-faced men and women born and bred to the art of war sat in the center of the battle group, watching the four probes track on a great battle screen showing the entire probable sector of engagement, while subsidiary screens scrolled data slow enough for the human observers to see, although the data was far behind the reality being fed back to the master battle computer.

In precision drill, the four small steely blue-black modules arrived off each of their four target worlds simultaneously and quickly closed on their targets. Their armament consisted entirely of defensive screens and scramblers for potential adversaries; they were the forerunners, the testers of defenses and the data-bearers to the command and control center far off but closing.

“Measuring abnormal large energy flow between the four worlds,” a comtech reported to the battle room. “Our probes also report scanning on an unusual band, origin each of the four targets.”

“Very well,” the admiral responded. “Close to minimum safety zone on each world. All photo recorders on. Commence evasive action on scans.”

As soon as the order was given it was done. The admiral wanted to know how well his hardware could be tracked after it was first discovered.

It could track very well indeed, it seemed, and the odd sensors kept pace effortlessly with the variations in course and speed; even shields and jamming techniques had no effect.

They approached within twelve hundred kilometers of the respective planetary surfaces, not too far above the orbits of the space stations of the Four Lords.

All data ceased on all boards simultaneously. Startled comtechs and observers leaped to then: consoles and ran every kind of data check they could, to no avail. There seemed no question that, on all four worlds simultaneously, something had fired and totally destroyed the probes.

They ran back the last few seconds frame by frame, looking for what happened, but could see nothing and had to call upon the computers for help. Ultimately the computers could simulate what could not be seen. It had been an electrical beam, a jagged pencil line of force looking more like natural lightning than something fired from any kind of known weapon, reaching up and out from an unknown point below the upper atmospheric layers of each world and striking each probe, destroying it instantly. Only a single burst had been used in each case, the burst lasting mere milliseconds yet packing enough punch to destroy the heavily armored probes completely.

Commander, Special Task Force, sighed and shook his head. “Well, we know that we’ll have a fight when we go in,” he said with professional objectivity.

Five seconds after the probes were destroyed, all Confederacy satellites around the Warden Diamond were taken out, leaving only one channel of outside communication unjammed.

He had to admit that while the rock wasn’t much it offered a really fine view. The great multicolored orb of Momrath filled the sky of Boojum, and the small probe boat settled into a cradle dock on the bumpy and drab surface. The setting made it seem as if the moon and ship were about to be swallowed by a sea of yellows, blues, and magentas.