Dirge - Alan Dean Foster [84]
What were they after? What did they want? If total obliteration was not their aim, it suggested they wanted something intact. He couldn’t imagine anything that an invading force could not have acquired simply through threat. The only explanation, he decided, was that the attackers wanted to protect their identity. Based on the collapse of planetary communications and on what he could see from the front of his home, it was a hypothesis that gained credence with every passing moment. He had no doubt that the space-minus communications facility near the shuttleport was one of the first sites to be targeted. Almost certainly the other one at Chagos Downs had suffered a similar fate.
If so, it suggested that the aliens knew what targets to hit first and where to find them. That put the lie to the notion that the attackers were a new, previously unknown and unencountered species. There were always KK-drive ships in orbit around Treetrunk, and they would have noted and communicated the presence of any alien vessels embarked on a survey of strategically important locations. Therefore the attackers must have arrived with a carefully laid-out, premeditated plan of assault based on prior research already in hand.
Even so, the unannounced arrival of one or more large alien craft would have been noted by the government and as a matter of course passed along to the citizenry through the usual media channels. He had seen no such bulletin on the tridee, not the previous night or this morning during breakfast, when everything had been operating fine.
He was missing something, he realized. Something important. Whatever it was, the authorities had missed it as well. Not that there was much they could do to stave off a determined attack by a properly equipped military force. As a new, developing colony Treetrunk had only domestic policing weaponry of its own. Humankind was not at war with any of the known intelligent species. Disagreements that revolved around matters of commerce and settlement were settled by discussion, sometimes loud but never physical. Interstellar war on a large scale was too complex and expensive a proposition to be viable. Even the AAnn realized that and limited their occasional depredations, usually in thranx territory, to isolated, confinable piratical acts. No one thought of assaulting an entire world.
Until now, he told himself grimly.
Having returned to the notably aggressive AAnn, his thoughts once again considered what reason the bipedal reptilians might have for launching so violent an assault on an innocuous colony world. Try as he might, he could not conceive of one. Of course, he was speculating from the standpoint of human motivation. The AAnn might have reasons for attacking Treetrunk that were quite incomprehensible to him or to any other human.
He needed information. In the absence of the usual tridee chutes, he would have to try something else.
Rushing back into the shop, he activated the antique communications console on board the lifeboat. Designed to scan and decipher every possible corner of the spectrum that might contain downloadable information, under his direction it began by checking the bands that carried information from ship to ship and ship to ground. There was plenty of chatter, but it was all in colors and hisses unknown to the unit. It was the attackers, he decided. Talking among themselves. It was maddening to know that he was seeing and hearing the answers to his most pressing questions but could