Dirge - Alan Dean Foster [119]
Meyer Levi was a civilian attached to a military expedition. He was an old man who ought to have been reclining in a soft chair in a library, fronted by a tridee screen and surrounded by real books, a hot drink steaming on a nearby table, and a rumpled dog lying at his feet. Instead he found himself inconceivably far from home and anything akin to such imaginary comforts.
Despite the absence on the system’s outer fringes of any armed confrontation, no one believed that the Pitar were simply going to allow the invading humans to put punishing landing parties down on the surface of the Twin Worlds unopposed. The timing and manner of their resistance was yet to be determined. But one by one, the warships of Earth and its colonies had emerged from space-plus into Pitarian space, uncontested and unchallenged. Now fully assembled in normal space, the armada was ready to take the next step of moving toward the system’s sun and positioning itself around the Twin Worlds.
Nor had the Pitar sent ships to attack Earth itself or any of its more lightly defended colonies. There had been no reaction at all from the tall, elegant humanoids. Their representatives on Earth and elsewhere had died fighting, refusing to suffer imprisonment. All remaining Pitar, the entire population, was on their two homeworlds, presumably cognizant of and awaiting the arrival of a vast assemblage of ships crewed by tens of thousands of angry, revenge-minded humans.
What were they overlooking? Levi found himself wondering. Surely the Pitar were going to resist, were not going to commit racial suicide. But that was essentially what their isolated representatives on Earth had done. Did the entire species have a death wish that humankind had been put in the position of inadvertently satisfying?
The armada was in motion, a great swath of ships and science, when the answer came to him. Rushing as fast as his aged legs would carry him, he hurried toward the bridge. In the vastness of the great ship he lost his way several times, despite the instructions available to him in each lift.
When he finally succeeded in finding his way to the central, shielded core of the Wellington, he had to identify himself several times before he could gain access to Fouad. She was seated in the captain’s command chair, in charge of the ship but not the strategy it would execute. That was the province of the group of general officers seated off to one side, facing one another across a wide, oval table from which projected upward a perfect three-dimensional portrait of the Pitarian system. A cloud of glowing pinpoints was moving toward the sun at its center, each pinpoint a ship. Levi was put in mind of midges attacking a dog.
“Hello, Mr. Levi.” Her musician’s hands rested on controls; her trained soprano voice commanded more destructive power than humankind had ignorantly unleashed upon itself since the beginning of its struggling civilization. “Feeling well?”
“Tired,” he told her. “Tired, and worried.”
“We’re all worried,” she replied. Before her hovered a tridimensional image similar to the one being closely scrutinized by the general staff, only somewhat reduced in scale. “Everyone is waiting for something to happen.”
“What will you do if the Pitar do not respond?” Fascinated as always by technology he did not understand, Levi stared at the perfect, hovering representation of the space in which the ship was moving.
“Place ourselves in orbit around the first of the Twin Worlds. Deliver the ultimatum drawn up by the world council.” She shrugged without smiling. “React to their reaction. If they continue to do nothing, the first landing parties will go down. These will be backed by heavy armor and orbital firepower. Once our forces have acquired a beachhead on the surface the choices remaining to the Pitar will be considerably reduced. Basically, they’ll have to decide whether to opt for capitulation or seppuku. After securing the outer of the Twin Worlds, the armada will move on to the second and hopefully repeat the process.”
Levi nodded. “What happens if they