Dirge - Alan Dean Foster [133]
It was not to be.
Watching the constantly shifting readout within the flagship’s main battle tridee, the lowliest ensign saw what was happening at the same time as general officers like Yirghiz and MacCunn. At first no one could believe it. The ship’s battle instrumentation, which automatically compensated for far punier human senses, was quickly checked for error. Nothing was malfunctioning, and subsidiary instruments confirmed the accuracy of all primary modalities.
Pinpoints of light were rising from the vicinity of both the Twin Worlds. Ascending and racing outward along the appropriate vectors to support existing Pitarian defenders. They were prodigal in number, not staggeringly so but still disappointingly abundant. The Pitar had been holding a substantial number of perfectly good ships in reserve, not employing them even for routine patrol or to help rotate ships and crews. Designed to furnish an entirely unsuspected line of defense for the Twin Worlds, their masters were now forced to use them in order to counter the unexpectedly augmented human attack.
MacCunn, for one, did not have to wait for the official report from remote sensors. The moving pinpoints were difficult to count, but he could estimate.
The offensive was called off before any ships could engage. There was no point in risking personnel and material to fight to yet another draw. The efficacy of Pitarian ships, weapons, and tactics had already been amply demonstrated. No one wished to risk thousands of lives to secure a reiteration of what was already well known.
No one died in the aborted sortie, but the sense of disappointment that spread throughout the armada was crushing. Expecting a decisive battle, the ships had instead withdrawn without either side having loosed a single missile or fired so much as a ranging shot. The thranx had broken the status quo, and the Pitar had promptly reestablished it. The thranx commander, a di-eint himself, was apologetic. They would try harder next time. But no more thranx vessels could be expected to participate than those that had already arrived. The rest of the thranx fleet was obliged to remain on home station to defend their respective worlds.
The government of Earth and its colonies tried to minimize the aftermath. No ships had been lost in the most recent engagement, and not a single soldier had died. Furthermore, the clandestine strength of the Pitar had been exposed. They had been forced to reveal the extent of their reserves. As a military argument it was a good one, but it carried little weight with the discontented people of Earth and associated worlds.
Besides, what proof was there that the Pitar were not concealing still additional martial capacity? That the next assault, however greatly enhanced, would not be met by a similar counteraction? What if the Pitar had yet to divulge their full strength? These were questions a cautious military could not answer. The reaction on Earth and elsewhere, once more led by the xenophobes, was not salutary.
To break the deadlock around the Twin Worlds of the Pitarian Dominion a radical improvement in weaponry or change in tactics was obviously required. But what?
The one development no one expected was that both would occur simultaneously and as a consequence of the same research, or that it would be the thranx who first hit upon the singular idea.
In addition to the cultural and diplomatic exchanges that had permeated relations between human and thranx since the time of first contact, there was a quiet but continuous exchange of scientific information. Discovering that the human interstellar KK-drive was more efficient than their own, the thranx promptly adopted and incorporated into their own vessels specific aspects of its design. Human engineers and researchers also benefited from the results of