1st to Fight (Earth at War) Read online

  “That’s fucking nuts,” I blurted, ignoring what had to be a half a dozen dirty looks aimed my way. “You’re saying these Elders terraformed planets and then took some of the most complex predators on Earth and mutated them into sentience so they could populate the galaxy?”

  “I am saying exactly that, Mr. Clanton,” Joon-Pah agreed. “And had they ended their efforts there, this galaxy would be a far more peaceful place. But in their wisdom….” Again, I wasn’t certain, but I thought I detected a bitterness behind the word. “…they decided to transplant one more species, one which needed no mutation to reach sentience.”

  The image rushed back across the planet to those Stone-Age tribesmen in their huts, making knives from flint.

  “Us,” Michael Olivera said.

  I realized he’d been silent since we’d reached the bridge. He looked like a cow smacked between the eyes with a mallet just before it got its throat slit at the slaughterhouse.

  “Quite.” Joon-Pah, slashed a hand across what had to have been some sort of haptic hologram and the projected image faded back into the Earth-Moon system. “Understand, we knew none of this for tens of thousands of years. The Helta developed our own civilization, our own sciences, and as we did, we discovered the truth about our origins. We knew almost immediately our world had been designed and, for many thousands of years, we worshipped the designers as our creators, what you would call our gods. This gave us a great incentive to perfect space travel, a way to go and meet our gods, to prove our worthiness. And in our haste to meet our creators, we discovered the principles of hyperdimensional physics and developed a method of accessing and traversing another state of reality.”

  “You made a hyperdrive,” I said, grinning broadly. “You actually made a damned hyperdrive.”

  The curves of the Heltan’s mouth seemed naturally to be smiling, but the smile grew broader at my words.

  “That is probably as close as we can come to describing it in terms that aren’t pure math,” Joon-Pah said. “Call it a hyperdrive then. And we discovered our neighbors, the Vironians, the Skrith, the Chamblisi… and,” he finished, his mouth flattening out, “the Tevynians.”

  The image in the central projection changed again. The face was a human male, pale-skinned, with a long, straight nose and ice blue eyes, red-blond hair swept back into something resembling a mane. There was something fierce and feral in those eyes, in the cut of his jaw, and the clothes he wore seemed to be some sort of uniform, though in a colorful, checkered pattern that would have put my grandfather’s worst golf pants to shame.

  “Jesus Christ,” Olivera murmured, and I thought it was a curse until I saw him crossing himself.

  “We were naïve,” Joon-Pah confessed. “We shared freely with our new friends, gave them our technology and asked next to nothing in return. We thought we were emulating our gods. And it seemed, at first, that we’d done the right thing. Genetic testing showed us that all our legends were truth, that all the races of the galaxy shared the same DNA as ours, that all life came from a single source and we were all one family under the skin.

  “Most of our newly-discovered neighbors willingly became our allies and we developed a brisk trade. Except the Tevynians. They behaved in a friendly manner at first, until they were able to get their hands on one of our starships. Then they began to loot and pillage and hijack whatever was within their reach. They were a nuisance at first, an irritant costing us a few ships here, a few lives there…”

  Joon-Pah tossed his head in what I thought was a gesture of negation.

  “We were fools. Had we banded together immediately against them, we might have had the chance to put a stop to their depredations before it was too late, before they were too strong. Now…” The Heltan trailed off.

  “What?” Olivera prompted. I think it was a testament to how stunned Strawbridge was by all this that she wasn’t still trying to play diplomat.

  “They have kidnapped our engineers, seized one of our colony systems where we construct starships, and built themselves a fleet. Their technology lacks the sophistication of ours, but they make up for it with numbers, for they breed like rats, fast enough to overcome their woeful attempts at medical science. And in battle, they show no care for their own lives, throwing themselves into hopeless situations, determined simply to kill more of us than we do of them.”

  “Yeah, that sounds like humans,” Jambo agreed.

  “What they’re doing makes no sense from any rational point of view,” Joon-Pah said, his teeth bared in an expression I took for anger or frustration. “They have the hyperdrive, they have fusion power, or at least they have of it what they can steal from us. They even have our engineers and machinery to build more. With that, they could go anywhere, mine what they need from asteroids and comets, build space stations to house however many people they want. But they don’t think that way. They weren’t a truly technological civilization before we found them and they lack the history to handle this sort of power peacefully.”

  The Heltan’s eyes turned soft and more liquid, if that was possible, and his shoulders sagged.

  “And we lack the history to have any experience at open warfare. Despite their primitive nature, or perhaps because of it, every effort we have made to fight them, either singly or with the rest of the Alliance, has ended in disaster.” Joon-Pah went to one of the couches the crew used for chairs, leaning against the back of it in obvious exhaustion.

  “I must be honest with you and your government. The rest of the Alliance…” He closed his eyes for a moment, as if forcing back pain. “Even many of my own people oppose our coming here. When we discovered the location of Earth a few years ago, found the origins of our own peoples and the Tevynians, there was much sentiment to put this whole system under quarantine forever. But I see no other option. Our backs, as your saying goes, are against a wall.”

  There was an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach. I knew what was coming. I’d read books about what was coming. Hell, I’d written books about what was coming, and it never ended well.

  Joon-Pah fixed his gaze on Strawbridge, raising his right hand with the palm-down in a gesture that probably had some significance in his culture.

  “I am here to offer you, your United States specifically and whatever allies you choose, an exchange. A deal, I think you would call it. We will give you what we have, fusion generators, hyperdrives, all of our technology and the training to build it yourselves, in exchange for your aid in this war.”

  “Holy shit.” Julie breathed the words like a prayer.

  Gatlin had not said a word. I’d glanced over at him a few times, expecting him to say something. He was famous for having an opinion and not being afraid to share it, but he’d kept silent this whole time, his eyes as wide as a child on Christmas morning, drinking everything in. I couldn’t read his thoughts, couldn’t put myself in his head. If I could, I’d have been the billionaire and he’d have been the moderately successful science fiction writer.

  He wanted to say something now, though. I could see the muscles in his jaw working, like he was barely able to keep his mouth shut. I figured he wanted badly to yell at Strawbridge to take the deal, visions of starships and asteroid mining dancing in his head, but he knew pressuring Strawbridge or Olivera would do no good, he’d have to save his pitch for the President.

  “I—I’m afraid I can’t make this decision on my own,” Strawbridge stuttered, her voice raspy, as if her mouth was dry. “I’ll have to consult with the President, and he may require a Congressional authorization…”

  The sound wasn’t quite like anything I’d ever heard in any of the various and sundry countries I’d visited in my misspent youth, but there’s something about an alarm that must be universal. The howling klaxon echoed off the bridge bulkheads and the Heltan crew who had been silent and respectfully still while Joon-Pah spoke to us were suddenly strapping themselves into their seats, grumbling at each other in a language of gutturals and modulated hoots and honks.


  Joon-Pah bared his teeth and lurched to a central acceleration couch, fingers dancing over controls there. The image in the center display zoomed in beyond the moon to a position somewhere past the Lagrangian Points. A rainbow ring, its very existence impossible in the vacuum of space and through it, was a hole into…somewhere else. I blinked and looked again, but there was nothing inside the hole. Not blackness, not an absence of light, just nothing, as if my eyes couldn’t focus on it. Instead, I focused on the spaceship coming through the hole. It was as large as the one we were inside now and of similar design.

  “Tell me you were expecting friends,” I said to Joon-Pah.

  “They followed us,” the bearlike alien said, and his English was good enough to convey the despair. “It’s the Tevynians.” Joon-Pah was trembling, his breath coming heavy and fast. “They’ll kill us all.”

  Chapter Five

  “We need to get back to our ship and get out of here,” Colonel Olivera insisted, sweeping around the compartment until he found the exit, as if he’d lost his bearings in the few minutes we’d been there.

  “They will destroy you the second you’re outside our defense shield,” Joon-Pah snapped. He rounded on one of the stations along the bulkhead and snarled something at the crewmember sitting there. He—or possibly she—waved through a haptic hologram with his hand and the alarm ceased. “Our only hope is to distract them long enough to force them to chase us from this system. And hope we can draw them away from here before they destroy us.”

  “And then what?” Strawbridge asked, her voice a subdued squeak.

  “You brought this thing here,” Olivera yelled, his face flush with rage. “Can’t you fight it?”

  Joon-Pah stared back at him for a moment before he barked an order to one of his crew. The view in the holographic display was moving, moving fast toward the Tevynian ship, and I put out a hand instinctively, trying to brace myself against something. All that was available was the back of Joon-Pah’s chair, but I grabbed it anyway. It didn’t do a damned thing for my inner ear, but it did settle the panic building in my chest just a little.

  “Are we accelerating?” Julie asked, staring at the display.

  “At the equivalent of nearly one hundred gravities,” Joon-Pah replied between orders to the crew in his native language.

  “Why the hell aren’t we being squished into a thin, fine paste against the back wall, then?”

  “They control gravity,” I reminded her.

  My voice was calm and I wondered why. But then I remembered sounding calm when I was giving orders to my platoon during firefights down in Caracas, when streams of lead were raining from the balconies on both sides of the road, when my stomach was turning cartwheels and panic was gnawing its way out of my chest like a living thing.

  “We do have gravity plates,” Joon-Pah said, “but the reason you don’t feel acceleration is because our drives use a method of manipulating spacetime, the equivalent of what you might think of as a boat propeller. The drive field also serves as our defense shield, and it’s also what we use to open the wormhole into hyperspace.”

  His words had a strange emphasis I hadn’t noticed before, as if he were having to hunt for each one, and I figured it was because he was even more scared than I was. He knew what was coming.

  Something flared from the nose of the Tevynian ship, a pale blue streak of lightning that should have been just as impossible to see in space as that damned rainbow ring, and yet there it was. The blue glow enveloped the view in the projection and the deck shuddered beneath us. Patel and Shaddick both shrieked, Patel falling to his knees, palms flat on the ground as if this were an earthquake.

  “What the fuck?” I exploded, anger displacing fear at the wrongness of it. “That was some kind of energy beam! How the hell could I see it with no atmosphere? And why did the damned ship move when it hit us? Was that some kind of gravity weapon?”

  “Is this really important right now?” Olivera snapped. “Don’t we have other things to think about?”

  “The weapon is a particle accelerator,” Joon-Pah answered. “Or rather, an anti-particle accelerator. The glow is Cherenkov radiation, and the ship moved because the energy from the shot caused our drive field to fluctuate, and to shrink. A few more and it will disappear altogether, and we’ll be defenseless.”

  “And don’t you have the same kind of gun?” Olivera asked him, desperation in his voice.

  “We do. And we’re firing….” Joon-Pah made a gesture at one of the crew to his right. “Now.”

  Blue lightning lashed out from somewhere above the camera view and a hemisphere of azure fire enveloped the nose of the monolithic Tevynian vessel for just a moment. There were shouts in the Helta language from the bridge crew, but they stopped after an announcement from the crew who’d fired the weapon, the one I was dubbing the Weapons Officer in my head.

  “Glancing blow,” Joon-Pah told us. “They were ready for the shot. We’re breaking off and trying to lead them out to safe jump distance.”

  “One shot?” Jambo asked, looking from the view on the screen, which was veering away from the Tevynian vessel. “You’re only firing one shot?”

  “You don’t understand. They’ll sail straight into the guns, take any damage in order to kill us…”

  “The fuck?” Jambo looked as if he wanted to slam a fist into the Heltan’s face, and maybe he did. “Do you guys not have any kind of tactics or battle plans or anything?”

  Joon-Pah stared at him blankly, the way those new Japanese robot receptionists at my agent’s office did when I told them dirty jokes.

  “I know the words,” Joon-Pah said, “but we do not have your history of warfare, not in space, not anywhere. What would you have us do?”

  “You got physicists, right?” I asked him. “Drive technicians, people who understand how things work?”

  Joon-Pah made that tossing-head gesture again, then gabbled something at a crewmember to the left. The ship lurched and I had to grab at the back of the chair to keep from pitching over.

  “Goddamnit!” Julie yelled.

  “What do you have in mind, Clanton?” Olivera wanted to know.

  “This is our ship’s hyperdimensional specialist,” Joon-Pah said, gesturing at the…male? Maybe? Whatever, the Helta was a head shorter than me and a bit paunchy. He looked like something I’d won at the state fair for my girlfriend when I was fourteen. “Whatever you intend to do, it had best be quick. That last shot severely attenuated our drive field. One more hit and we’re dead.”

  “What happens if you touch one drive field to another?” I asked, looking at the…engineer? Yeah, I was gonna call him an engineer. “Rammed it straight on?”

  A cross-chatter between the two and neither seemed happy.

  “Head on, it would cause both fields to collapse, violently, and possibly kill us all.” More gabble from the engineer. “If we were able to skim the edge of their field, however, experiments have shown it would send both ships heading away from each other at relativistic speeds, with little damage to either.” He cocked his head toward me. “But what would be the point of that?”

  “Can you hit it with enough accuracy to control which way both ships ricochet?”

  Olivera’s head snapped around, realization in his eyes and a smile spreading across his face.

  “Mr. Clanton,” he said, “that is fucking brilliant.” He jabbed a finger at Joon-Pah. “Have them turn this Goddamned ship around. Now.”

  The Heltan didn’t argue. I didn’t think about it at the time, didn’t consider the implications until much later, but it was obvious to everyone that Joon-Pah didn’t want to be in charge, and Olivera did. Joon-Pah relayed the order to his helm officer and I think had to say it again—the helm officer stared at him for a moment, perhaps wondering if his captain had gone insane. But the ship was turning and, as she did, a slight, distant rumble shook the superstructure.

  “Near miss,” Joon-Pah explained. I don’t know how he had learned English, w
hether by old-fashioned memorization and practice or some high-tech computer reading it into his brain like something from my books, but his command of tone and inflection was getting better just from his short interaction with us, and the clipped tension of the words spoke volumes. “They won’t miss again at this range.”

  “Do you people not have any concept of evasive maneuvering?” Olivera demanded. “You know, moving your ship in irregular, hard-to-predict patterns to make it harder for the bad guys to hit you? Can we not even try that?”

  I’d begun this with sort of a jaded view of the Space Force in general and Olivera in particular, but I have to admit, the man was growing on me.

  “Fuck it, let me do it,” Julie said, tapping the helm officer on the shoulder. “I can’t read these Yogi-bear hieroglyphics you got going on, but I’ve been watching Boo-boo here pilot and it doesn’t look that damned hard.”

  “Julie,” Gatlin said, the word trailing off at the end uncertainly. “Now isn’t the time—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” the pilot sighed. “Here, let me show you.”

  She leaned over the helm officer’s shoulder and ran three fingers through the haptic hologram and I paid attention to the details of it for the first time since we’d been there. There was a small, three-dimensional model of the ship on the helm display, with lines running along each axis. Julie stroked the lines at the port axis with two fingers. The view in the central display changed as the ship rotated to port and Julie barked a laugh, then made an orchestra-conductor motion through the hologram. The image spun like a kaleidoscope and even though we felt none of it, the view was enough to spur a twinge of motion sickness.

  The Tevynian ship fired on us, but the pale blue tendril went wide and we felt not even a shiver. Joon-Pah gestured at the helm officer and the Heltan cut loose his seat restraints and vacated the position. A self-satisfied smirk crossed Julie’s face as she slid into the chair.