Dirge - Alan Dean Foster [122]
Had some factor still unknown, psychological or biological, caused them to stop reproducing? In carrying out the atrocity on Treetrunk, were they seeking a means for ensuring the continuation of their species? Had that means been found and implemented, and if so, did humankind really want to be informed of the methodology? Many people on Earth and elsewhere had relatives who had perished in the extermination of intelligent life on Argus V. Levi and his colleagues were not so sure that they would be happier or otherwise better off to learn precisely what had happened to some of their deceased relations.
Certainly the Pitar did nothing to enlighten their attackers. Even tentative requests for explanations were dismissed out of hand. They would not talk, coldly refusing all attempts at communication with what they could now openly admit to regarding as an inferior life-form. Levi and the rest of the scientists and researchers who accompanied the armada grew increasingly frustrated. The uniformed masses who crewed the ships labored under no such mental strain. Some of them, too, had lost friends or kin on Treetrunk. Their interests were much more focused: They did not need to understand; all they wanted to do was kill Pitar.
Five months into the attack the ships of the armada and their frustrated personnel began to be rotated. New ships arrived from Earth and the colonies crewed by eager, fresh enlistees. They opposed an enemy whose soldiers faced no long journeys through space-plus, who could find ease and relaxation within a day’s flight of their duty station. In battle they found themselves confronting concentrations of ships that could be quickly and easily repaired and restocked. It was the classic battlefield situation of an overextended attacker trying to break down the defenses of a determined and well-entrenched enemy, translocated to an interstellar environment.
Eight months passed without any change in the line of battle. The Pitar would not permit a single human vessel of any size to cross beyond the orbits of the intersecting asteroid belts. The attacking humans would not give up. Determination and not skill or strategy became the defining factor on both sides.
While ships might stand still, weapons research did not. For every new means of attack the humans refined and threw into combat, the Pitar developed a counter. High-energy beams were met with high-energy deflectors. Subatomic particle guns designed to disrupt communications on board opposing vessels were intercepted and shunted harmlessly into space-plus by low-power versions of deep-space drives. Larger, faster missiles were met with small interceptors that were faster and more agile still. Space was filled with the scattering of shattered matter from fusion weapons that never reached their intended targets.
Now and then a ship engaged in skirmishing would take a hit, suffering damage or on rare occasions, implosion. At such moments hundreds, even thousands of lives would be snuffed out of existence, vanishing into the icy limbo of the void. Each such loss made the Pitar more intractable and the humans more unforgiving.
Finally admitting after ten months of failed attack that they were unable to break through the defenses of the Dominion, the general staff debated how best to proceed. Breaking off the offensive was unthinkable: Now spread across a number of worlds, humankind would not hear of it. Ending the confrontation would imply that the Pitar had won, that they had consummated their barbarism without suffering any penalty. Such an abomination could not be tolerated.
It was remarked that while no human warship had been able to reach either of the Pitar homeworlds, neither had any of the aliens’ craft been able to travel a sufficiently safe distance from those twin planets to safely engage its full drive