will be offered something wonderful, and you cannot reject it or turn it aside.”
The comm officer gestured, and the comm channel was muted.
Hussein turned on the man, “What are you doing?”
“Sir, we just detected a nuclear blast on the surface, in the ten-megaton range.”
“We aren’t going to let Bitar level a defenseless planet.” Admiral Hussein gestured to unmute the signal. “Admiral Bitar, I am relieving you of your command. I order you to stand down and surrender.”
“I can’t do that.”
He gestured to cut the outbound transmission and whipped around to face Captain Rasheed.“Engage the
“Sir?”
“Now!”
“Yes, sir!”
Klaxons sounded and lights began flashing. Around Bitar’s image, tactical displays began coming up showing the relative positions of the
The tactical holos showed the
Admiral Bitar turned to face Hussein. “You are making a mistake.”
Even though he was no longer transmitting, Hussein answered, “You made the mistake, firing on a planet of the Eridani Caliphate.”
On the tactical screens, the red arcs of missiles began tracing between the fleets.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Gotterdammerung
The past is always waiting.
The urge to destroy is a creative urge.
Bill floated, alone, in his artificial environment, the water inside his pressurized bubble comfortably mimicking the temperature and pressure of the inhabitable layer of ocean back home. The water around him resonated with sonic feedback from the sensors built around the robotic toroid on which his globe rested. The signals were abstract, but the combination of Bill’s training and his complex Paralian brain allowed him to reinterpret the signals as he received them. Human scientists called what he did a high-order visualization.
Bill did not think the term accurate, since his mental image of the data bore little analog to his other senses. It didn’t map to the vibrations he felt, the shapes he could sense through sounding the area before him, the chemicals he tasted in the water he breathed, or the textures of the material he touched. In his mind the data became something like all of those, and none of those. He could sense/feel/taste the cargo bay around him in every frequency his sensors could detect. Even beyond, through the grate, he had a mental model of the stars in the vacuum beyond his small space, the planet growing large in the distance, and of the vessels moving about between here and there.
He idly allowed his attention to follow those ships, the most dynamic element in the slice of the universe he could perceive.
Even though he was disappointed in how the
