The New Space Opera 2 (32 page)

“I see,” said Mace, and turned her attention to the plate Pladdick placed before her.

Shanen did tend to babble, but she wasn't stupid, and very often got things right—but not this time.

 

“A bit of a Lild scout ship,” said Ormod, pointing at the big curved screen before him. Unlike the rest of the ship, the bridge was small-scale: just a few chairs at a horseshoe console, all facing a panoramic curved screen.

With Shanen at my side—she had suggested we come up here and find out what was going on, and I'd agreed because I hadn't seen anything suicidal about her impulse—I gazed at the object displayed on the screen, and all I saw was a simple curved tube of metal trailing various cables and pieces of charred infrastructure from each end.

Lild?
I thought.
What the fuck is a Lild?

“So what's the big interest?” I asked.

Surprisingly, the AI replied first, reciting the first two verses of
“Dulce Et Decorum Est,”
then the Captain continued with, “Like the Prador, they built ships in their own shape. The Prador did this out of pure arrogance, but with the Lild, it was arrogance based on their religion. Did not God model the galaxy on
their
form? We just made copies of that form with CTDs inside and left them to be picked up by the Lild, rescued. It was a dirty trick, but enough to discourage them.”

A CTD being a contra-terrene device capable of destroying anything from a small house to a small world, I surmised that such a ploy would certainly discourage them, whoever “them” might be. Having been built too hurriedly during the Prador war, it must have been faults not ironed out then that sent the
Gnostic
AI off the far side of weird. Still believing that this was something to do with that same war, I assumed that the Lild must have been a Prador weapon of some kind.

“I never realized you were aboard the
Gnostic
during the Prador war,” I said, testing.

Ormod parted his mandibles and grinned, again in that oddly distracted way. “I wasn't.” Then, still looking at some point above and to the right of my head, “Professor.”

I turned to see that Elvira Mace had joined us.

“The data are good,” said Mace. “You may proceed.”

“So you got the location,” said Shanen abruptly.

Still distracted, Ormod said, “You talk about?”

“The Circoven Line war, as you well know.”

Now the Captain actually focused on someone properly, and that focus was rather intense and just a little frightening. After a long, drawn-out pause, he said, quite precisely, “Most line wars are named after the Polity worlds involved, but in this case the rule was changed. Probably that was guilt—it should be.”

Shanen grinned, a little crazily I thought, and replied, “ECS had no remit to protect Circoven. The people wanted nothing to do with the Polity.”

Something went
click
in my mind, and I remembered the words “Circoven” and “choudapt” being used in conjunction. I was about to ask about this, but now the Captain rose out of his seat and drew a hand's length of the Samurai sword he always carried.

“Go away,” he said.

“Why, Captain, are you threatening me?” Shanen asked, laughter in her voice. For me, the suicidal impulse must have been at a low ebb that day, for I caught hold of her arm and dragged her from the bridge. Once out of there, Shannen began to fight me, but the doors slid closed and I heard the locks engaging. After a moment, Shanen seemed to get control of herself.

“Tell me about this Line war,” I said. “Tell us all about it—I think we need to know.”

 

“Do you all know what a Line war is?” Shanen inquired.

All either nodded or said that they did, except Parsival, so Shanen explained for our out-Polity recruit.

“Two hundred years ago, we fought an alien race called the Prador. There's still argument now about how that would have ended had not the old Prador king been usurped by a new leader who no longer wanted to continue fighting. Now that was definitely a full-scale, all-out war and fight for survival. Line wars are those border Polity conflicts in which the extinction of the Polity is unlikely, but which could become something worse, and which require a certain level of resource expenditure. I can't really be any clearer than that without getting into statistics.”

“You sound like a logician,” grumped Pladdick.

Shanen shrugged. “I was one, once. You get to my age, there isn't much you haven't done.”

“So, specifically, the Circoven Line war?” I inquired.

“Mostly these things are started by out-Polity humans and sometimes AIs, but every now and again, something completely new comes on the scene.” She grimaced for a moment. “The Lild starship consisted of a series of concentric toroids five miles across. It arrived outside the Circoven system, Captain Ormod's homeworld, about fifty years ago. It was one of those worlds that went the full GM route, even modifying living organisms, if you see what I mean.” Quite obviously, Parsival didn't, but Shanen continued relentlessly. “Circoven was out-Polity, and despite constant pressure to join, obstinately refused. The Lild starship divided into
six segments. One of them headed for Circoven, where it proceeded to bomb the high-biotech world back into the Stone Age, killing some forty million people, while the others headed into the Polity.”

“How is it you know about this stuff and I don't?” I asked.

Shanen turned to me. “The Polity is a big place, Strager—a lot of stuff like this goes on that most people just don't get to hear about. But what I'm telling you is all available on the nets.”

“That didn't really answer my question,” I insisted.

“No, but I guess I know more about it because I crewed on
Gnostic
's sister ship, the
Gnosis
.” She shrugged, perhaps embarrassed about the name. “I was aboard
Gnosis
when the crew departed
Gnostic
shortly after the Line war I'm talking about, when its AI turned very strange and abruptly decided to go independent. I guess it was that that lured me back to crew here.”

Suicide impulse
, thought I.

At that moment, the ship shuddered in a way I'd never felt before, the table vibrating before us, and we could all hear the distant sounds of things falling, followed by a deep hollow boom.

“
Gnostic
not good,” said Parsival, and whether she was talking about the ship itself or its AI I didn't know.

“Fuck is
that?
” asked Pladdick.

“Structure shift,” said Shanen, and we all gazed at her bewildered.

“I'll get to that later.” Shanen waved a hand airily and continued with her story as if nothing important had happened. “The five segments that headed Polity-ward arrived at a world with a population of four billion, a defensive satellite grid, two ECS dreadnoughts on station, and fifty attack ships. Ignoring every warning that could possibly be given, they proceeded to try dropping asteroids on that world and seemed unable to fathom why none of the rocks were arriving on the surface. Meanwhile, ECS was able to penetrate their com security and discover a great deal about them, and what we found out wasn't good.”

“Well, if they were bombing without provocation, I'd say that was pretty obvious,” said Pladdick.

“Oh, it went further than that,” said Shanen, “much further.”

Just then, we all felt the strange sensation of the
Gnostic
dropping into U-space.

“I guess we're not going to the destination logged,” I said.

“I guess not,” said Shanen, then she told us about the Lild.

As Ormod had stated, they were the beloved of God, the Lild. They
were nautiloids, and one could see how the discovery that the galaxy they lived in was exactly the shape of their own bodies might affect them. Arrogance and fanatical belief had become a racial trait. The galaxy belonged to them, having been fashioned for them by their God, so
everything
belonged to them, and they could do with it what they wanted, and what they
wanted
usually involved subjugation, destruction, and death. Religion, a vicious and hardy meme at best, usually collapsed as civilizations became spacefaring, for most such belief systems, initiated when the world was still flat and thunder was the bellowing of gods, usually could not survive the realities of the universe and the steady abrasion of science. But this thing about their shape matching the shape of the galaxy sustained the Lild's vicious faith. When the Lild warship encountered humankind, the nautiloids realized that here was a race competing for the watery worlds they preferred, and knew that this was a test laid before them by their God. Humans did not seem to understand their position in the galaxy; that they must bow to The Plan. The Chosen, as they called themselves, decided in an instant that this irritation called the human race should be exterminated.

The holy war lasted one solar month, for though one segment of the warship was successful against Circoven, the remainder did not do so well.

The asteroids the five segments dropped were vaporized by energies that the nautiloid theocracy knew nothing of and therefore claimed did not exist. The bombardment continued, sort of. When Polity dreadnoughts like the
Gnostic
moved into position and obliterated two segment ships and numerous smaller vessels, denial of the facts became a little more difficult. The survivors ran, the area of conflict—or, rather, the Polity dreadnought hunting ground—spreading out over many star systems. The five segments and most of the smaller ships were destroyed, but the one at Circoven managed to enter U-space far enough from detection to escape.

“Doubtless,” said Shanen, “after that segment's return to the Lild homeworld, there were some theocratic problems to resolve.”

“You not know?” asked Parsival.

“We not know,” she shot back. “Throughout the surveillance of the Lild here, the location of their homeworld remained undiscovered. You see, they had some form of AI running their ships which, though required for space travel, was never allowed to know anything about where the ships were going or where they came from for longer than it took them to operate the U-space engines. Only the Lild astrogators were allowed to retain that information, and we never got hold of one of them.”

“But Ormod now has the location of the Lild homeworld,” I suggested.

“Yes, it seems that some Lild heretics would steal such information when it was available and keep recordings. It seems that
Gnostic
has found a scout ship that was flown by one of them.”

“And in eight weeks time,” Ormod announced over the intercom, “we'll be arriving right over their homeworld for some payback.”

The
Gnostic
shuddered again, this time so hard that those on the opposite side of the table from me slammed against it, and my chair shot back and went over. When I did finally manage to regain my feet and look around, I swore. The refectory ceiling was now not very far above my head, and one wall had receded nearly three meters and bowed out. And that was only the start.

 

The Lild—whose name was a complex infrasound pulse transmitted through its watery home and therefore unpronounceable in any human tongue, but whom we shall call Brian—had ascended to power in the wake of the recent resurgence and subsequent suppression of the Evolutionary Heresy. He was a member of the High Family: that species of the Lild whose shells most perfectly matched the God-given shape of the galaxy, and who brutally maintained the faith. Floating in his coral palace below the spiral sea—his beautiful twelve-foot-across shell presently being micro-etched with new star systems by a young Low Family Lild with very nervous tentacles and, of course, its own breather system—Brian contemplated the past and what must be done in the future.

The return of the segment of an expeditionary warship with its news that another starfaring race had actually been encountered had come as a great shock to the theocracy. When the bald facts of the warship's defeat were presented, the Evolutionary Heresy inevitably reared its ugly head from the scientific quarter, and civil war ensued. It was a long and ichorous affair, and, after Brian's High Family regained power, many Low Family nautiloids were necessarily staked out over volcanic vents, until all elements amid the Chosen stopped asking questions. Even so, the questions still remained, and now, with the strength of his forces growing, Brian understood that something must be done.

The humans were another test sent directly by God, just like the worms before them, though with the worms, the nature of the test had been blindingly obvious. Brian shuddered and the note of the micro-etcher stuttered.

“I hope you have made no mistake,” Brian intoned.

“No, Your Honor,” the young Lild quavered.

Brian would check later, and if the present star system being etched on his shell was in any way wrong, the youngster would be punished. Nothing too severe; maybe a crushed tentacle or two.

“You may leave me now,” Brian ordered.

The young Lild shot away, slightly ink-incontinent with fear, and disappeared into one of the nearby coral tunnels. Brian then jetted out a slow stream of water to set himself drifting across to a chamber wall that seemed just a chaotic mass of variegated corals inset with flat areas of utter blackness. He reached out a tentacle and interlaced its numerous worm-ish fingers around what, in a human sea, might have been mistaken for a brain coral. Pictures now appeared in the blackness.

Throughout the recent resurgence of the Evolutionary Heresy, most of the expeditionary warships had returned. Many had been destroyed in the subsequent fighting when Low Family EH elements used their God-granted scientific knowledge to take control of ships from the tentacles of their High Family theocrat captains, but that was all finished now, and new ships were in the process of being built. The worms, Brian recollected, had occupied an area of space eight light-years across, including twelve star systems and two worlds habitable by them and therefore habitable by the Lild. The war against them had taken a little while to get going, since this was the first intelligent alien species the Chosen had encountered, but once the horrific nature of these demonic creatures was discovered, the war became jihad and the worms were swiftly exterminated. The humans, almost certainly being a larger test sent by God, must occupy a larger volume of space, and maybe even as many as ten or twenty habitable worlds. This meant that more ships needed to be built and crewed—a task that would take perhaps another twenty years…Brian felt a moment of disquiet.