The Cockroach Crusade, page 3
“Is that why this Corvou was so impatient? Because it was looking for multiple pieces and couldn’t afford any delays?”
The massive head tilted to one side. “The Corvou queen is very long-lived. She will normally lay eggs for a thousand years or more. The current queen is dying after only a fraction of that time.”
According to Holchuk, Nandrians spoke to one another in riddles as a form of mental exercise. That was apparently what Agnosk was doing now. Unfortunately, after eight sleepless nights, thinking wasn’t exactly Townsend’s strong suit.
The moment stretched out. The big alien was staring expectantly at him. He had to say something. A Hak’kor could not remain silent. In desperation, Drew blurted out the first thing that came into his mind: “And you suspect foul play?” Then he went cold all over.
It couldn’t possibly be the right answer. It was a knee-jerk response by a former field investigator. And yet, to Townsend’s astonished relief, the Nandrian was baring his lower fangs in approval. “You understand,” he said, giving weight to each syllable. “We suspect, but do not know, so cannot act.”
Oka-ay. Drew arranged his features in what he hoped would be interpreted as a sympathetic expression.
The Nandrian tilted his head once more. “The Corvou queen does more than lay eggs. She also produces nechtarah, a substance that gives her offspring long life. The more eggs she lays, the more abundantly her body produces nechtarah. As long as she lives, they all do.”
Now Townsend was beginning to see some logic. “So, each new clutch of eggs adds to the population,” he said, thinking aloud. “But this queen is dying young, meaning that her offspring are still relatively small in numbers.” His voice slowed in wonder as the realization finally sank in. “You’re telling me we might actually have a fighting chance in this war.”
“The queen has stopped laying eggs and will soon be dead. Normally, her attendants have a thousand years to extract and store a reserve of nechtarah. After her death, it sustains the Corvou population for up to fifty standard years while they protect the unhatched eggs and finish their work for inspection by the Mother of All.”
“Normally fifty years,” Drew repeated. “And how many do you figure they have this time, Agnosk ban Sitgaram?”
“I cannot be specific, Hak’kor, but a queen this young is centuries away from producing nechtarah at full capacity. I suspect the hive can last only a handful of years after her death.”
And that explained the urgency of the Corvou’s mission.
“Now that the Corvou have decided they’re all doomed, I imagine a lot of their pieces will remain unfinished,” Drew commented.
“Or will be completed by others as the Corvou all return to their home world to prepare for war. The galactic treaty forbids them to design or build any weapons. They will be starting, as you Humans say, from the first square. As a result, even with the entire population dedicated to the task, it will take the hive at least a standard year to assemble their armada.”
A standard year was forty-eight intervals long. That worked out to a year and a half in Earth time, roughly five hundred and forty days. Drew’s heart dropped. Humanity would need more time than that to ready its defenses against an enemy like the Corvou. And yet… “The Corvou will be living on nechtarah during that year?”
“For nearly all of it, yes.”
If the big nasty could be said to have a silver lining, Townsend decided, this was it. Anything that shortened the hive’s supply of life-giving substance before the fighting began was a break for Daisy Hub.
“Once you have completed ssalssit essendi,” Agnosk continued, “we will be formally allied, and every Nandrian House will stand with your own forces in battle. House Daisy Hub is where war was declared. That place has always been the Corvou’s first target. So, we will engage the swarm here. We will not be able to stop it, but if we can slow its progress long enough, the Corvou will run out of nechtarah and will die off before all of Humanity is annihilated.”
Agnosk was evidently assuming that the swarm would contain all ten million Corvou. Perhaps that was what had happened the last time. However, these cockroaches were intelligent, meaning that they were also capable of modifying their combat strategy to compensate for a shortage of resources. If they believed their entire race was doomed, it wouldn’t matter to them when individual members died. And if the early death of some bought more time for the rest, then… No. It would probably haunt him later, but none of that bore thinking about right now. Townsend gave himself a hard mental shake, then turned his attention to the question that had been gradually rising to the surface of his mind.
“So, you figure they’ll keep attacking us until every one of them is dead. And what happens after that, to the final clutch of eggs on Coravon?”
The Nandrian paused, blinking slowly. “They will hatch, of course. One of them will produce a queen, and the Corvou life cycle will repeat itself. You suspect that we would destroy them, to avenge the loss of Serrussha?”
Just in time, Townsend remembered that the slaughter of noncombatants was considered by the Nandrians to be a criminal act. “If I did, I would hope to be mistaken, Agnosk ban Sitgaram,” he replied stiffly.
The big alien bared his lower fangs. “With respect, Hak’kor, our high speakers teach that every living race is a vital part of the universe. The loss of even one cannot be tolerated, for it throws all the rest out of balance.”
—— «» ——
As he stepped off the tube car onto AdComm, Townsend knew what he had to do. Ignoring the curious eyes trained on his face, he strode directly to Lydia’s station, where the blip representing the Nannssi was slowly sliding toward the edge of her tracking screen.
Meanwhile, Ruby sat staring at the air above her console. “Now we know why the tseritsa is so important to them,” she murmured, so softly that she might have been talking to herself.
“The living staff isn’t just a stick of wood anymore, is it?” said Holchuk, referring to a comment she’d once made in the moments before a Nandrian welcoming ceremony. “Serrussha was a charred ruin when the survivors returned to it,” he went on. “All that was left of their largest city was the sacred tree in the courtyard of one of their worship halls. According to their predominant religion, that tree was the living soul of Serrussha, and simply transplanting it somewhere else wasn’t an option. Instead, each Hak’kor very respectfully took a cutting to symbolize the spiritual connection of the House to the ancestral home world. And ever since then, miracle of miracles, those cuttings have remained alive, behaving as though they were still attached to the original tree.”
Ruby gave him a long look. “But you don’t believe that.”
“I don’t believe in miracles,” he told her. “What I do believe is that there is now a full-grown sacred tree secretly kept inside the worship hall of every House on Nandor. And once we’ve exchanged tseritsao with Trokerk, finalizing our alliance, there will most likely be one planted on Daisy Hub as well.”
“Well, true or not, it’s a very moving story. I get shivery just thinking about it,” said Ruby.
Townsend was experiencing cold shivers as well, but for quite a different reason. The odds would be dauntingly, perhaps overwhelmingly, against Humanity in the coming war. They could be facing ten million Corvou, each with a couple of years to live, or ten thousand with a couple of decades of killing in them. In either case, the enemy would be attacking with weapons of alien design and unknowable power. It was not a pleasant prospect to consider.
Still, for the sake of his crew, there had to be hope. If the Humans aboard the Hub thought for one minute that preparation for this conflict was an exercise in futility, they would be lost before the battle had even begun.
“Cheer up, people,” he told them, pinning on a smile. “However they got that way, the Nandrians are the fiercest warriors in the galaxy, and they’ll be fighting on our side. Even the Corvou should think twice before taking them on. And we’ll have Earth’s Fleet backing us up as well. Slim though it may be, we’ve got a chance, and we’re going to make the most of it. Lydia, I need to make an all-station announcement.”
She toggled a couple of switches, then gave him a thumbs-up signal.
He took a steadying breath, performed a quick mental rehearsal, and said, “Attention, all crew and guests of Daisy Hub. Please stop whatever you’re doing and listen up, because this is important. You’re probably wondering about the ‘code yellow’ earlier today. Because vital information was withheld from Humanity by order of the Galactic Great Council, we’ve had a botched first contact, resulting in a declaration of war by the Corvou. We’re safe for the moment, but as of right now, Daisy Hub is Earth’s first line of defense against an invasion that we know for a fact will be coming in about one standard year’s time.
“There will be a strategy meeting in AdComm in half an hour. All department heads will be expected to attend. Townsend out.”
Handing the mic back to Lydia, he turned to Ruby and added, “Send Soaring Hawk a separate invitation. We’ll need his input. And I’ll want to talk to Karlov right afterward, to see whether the Stragori will come onside. They’re part of the Nandrian alliance, after all.”
“Sure thing, Chief.”
Meanwhile, a calculating expression was playing across Holchuk’s features. “I’ve been turning something over in my mind, boss man,” he said. “This may not be the best time to mention it, but… You once asked me how the Nandrians could possibly benefit from entering into a defensive alliance with a race that’s physically weaker than they are and has inferior weapons technology. I think Agnosk has given you your first clue. The Nandrians obviously don’t need our help in a physical confrontation. However, we may have an advantage over them in other kinds of encounters, especially if a direct attack on our ‘enemies in common’ would violate the Nandrian code of honor.”
Those enemies would have to be unarmed and noncombatant. Waging war without weapons? Townsend could think of only one battlefield that fit that description — a negotiating table. Representatives of Earth’s five political unions were constantly squaring off against one another on matters of trade and security. Tension between Americas and Indo-Asia had reached alarming levels more than once during his lifetime. And the alien equivalent to that would be—
No.
The lump in Drew’s throat was back. He swallowed hard, but it refused to budge. “Holchuk, are you suggesting what I think you are?” Lowering his voice, he continued tightly, “Is that why they’ve been testing our worthiness? To see whether we have the right stuff to help them take down the Galactic Great Council?”
The other man’s face morphed into a wide-eyed portrait of shock. “Why, boss man, that would be treason! How could you even think such a thing of a race so obsessed with ritual and tradition?”
It was easy to do, actually, if Drew had read Agnosk correctly and the Nandrians suspected the Great Council of somehow arranging for the untimely death of the Corvou queen. Right and wrong, honor and dishonor, these the huge warriors understood. And now Townsend understood as well, and the realization was sending a mortal chill right through him.
The big nasty was even bigger and nastier than he had imagined. It involved guile and deception, two things that the Nandrians abhorred, but that they evidently believed were right up Daisy Hub’s alley. In many ways, they were right. But just considering what would be needed to run a con on the Great Council, exposing them as criminals, was making Drew feel light in the head and wobbly in the knees.
Earth’s High Council would never agree to sanction or participate in such a risky venture, no matter how just the cause might be. Neither would the Earth Intelligence Service. It would fall completely to House Daisy Hub, the loyal ally of House Trokerk. That was assuming, of course, that anyone on the Hub survived the coming battle with the Corvou. Apparently, fighting an interstellar war was going to be the simplest item on Townsend’s agenda for at least the next couple of years.
Wonderful. First Olivia, then the Stragori, now the Nandrians. Was anyone he knew not plotting to overthrow a government?
“Drew?” Lydia’s voice snapped him back to the moment. “Karlov is on the comm. He says Odysseus became agitated during your announcement and pushed past him into the corridor, insisting that he needed to go back to alien space. Our Mitradean guest is in a tube car right now, on his way to the landing deck. Do you want me to stall him?”
“No, let him go,” Townsend replied. “I can’t really blame the little fellow, considering what’s coming down the pipe. Once he’s left the system, reopen the channel to Zulu so I can set up a face-to-face with Rodrigues. We need to warn Earth about the declaration of war, and the High Council thinks we’re all troublemakers out here, so no one’s going to put much credence in my report unless he corroborates it. Bottom line is, whether we like it or not, we’re going to be working together with the Rangers on this.”
“Peachy,” she muttered glumly.
He couldn’t have agreed more.
CHAPTER THREE
By now, the senior staff of Daisy Hub knew who they were. No further notification was necessary to summon Holchuk, Jason Smith, Hagman, engineers Gouryas and Singh, and Doctor Ktumba to a strategy meeting in Drew Townsend’s “office” on AdComm. As they stepped off the tube cars, the attendees found chairs waiting for them, arranged in a semi-circle around the station manager’s desk. Townsend stood behind it and watched as they wordlessly took their seats.
Like Holchuk, Ruby and Lydia had already been briefed. They remained at their posts, monitoring the proceedings from the other side of C Deck and prepared to jump in whenever an additional comment or opinion seemed called for. When everyone was present, Drew began, in the most confident voice he could muster:
“All right, people, let’s pool what we know. I’ll tell you everything I can about what’s coming at us. Then I want to hear from you how we can prepare for it. Don’t hold anything back. No matter how impossible an idea may sound to your own ears, there could be someone on the station with the skills and knowledge to make it a reality.”
As heads began turning and bobbing, Townsend felt his own spirits rise. His people were divergent thinkers, and they were very good at what they did. They’d pulled together and figured things out in the past, achieving what for most others would have been wishful thinking. Somehow, they would find a way to do it again. Of course they would. They had to.
“The enemy is insectoid,” he told them. “Captain Rodrigues described it as a giant cockroach. According to the Nandrians, the Corvou do not engage outside their ships, so we don’t have to worry about being boarded. They’ll simply attack in great numbers with powerful weapons and use them to try to blow the station to bits. On the plus side of the ledger, they’re going to have to go through the Rangers and the Nandrians to do it.” This sparked a general murmur of approval. “On the minus side,” he continued, “there’s no guarantee that the Hub will be their first target. Agnosk seemed certain that it would be, because the Corvou have always attacked first at the coordinates where the war was declared. But the Corvou are operating under special circumstances this time, so we have to consider the possibility that they might change their tactics, bypassing us and hitting Earth first.”
“Or they could come through multiple Gates and try to take out both targets at once,” Jason Smith pointed out. “When I was still a Fleet officer, I saw a copy of the Gate map the Great Council had given us. Of the nearly three hundred Gates that open in Earth space, more than thirty lead to star systems outside our boundaries. Fleet Control and Space Installation Security by themselves don’t have the resources to guard every one of them. The Nandrians may be able to, but they probably won’t want to. Spreading yourself thin is never the smartest move in a war.
“As I see it, our problem is this: we’re expecting the main battle to be fought here, but if the Corvou force is large enough, and if the fighting is fierce enough, we’ll have no way of knowing whether they’ve split their offensive until it’s too late to do anything about it.”
“Definitely, that’s a problem,” Townsend agreed. “How do you suggest we counter it?”
Smith paused, visibly considering alternatives. “You said to entertain impossible solutions. Okay. Is there some way we could seal off the Gates we don’t want the Corvou using? Choosing our own battlefield would give us a tactical advantage, while also minimizing the collateral damage.”
“Well?” said Townsend, gazing the question at every face in the room in turn. “Does anyone know whether this is doable?”
“It is!” Lydia’s exultant cry vaulted over his wall of filing cabinets a second before she appeared at the end of it. “I don’t know exactly how, but Captain Takamura does, and O’Malley may as well. Remember the con we ran on Sullivan after the Marco Polo returned from alien space? Rob found all kinds of interesting data on that ship’s logs, and I know that he saved some of it.”
“Then get O’Malley up here,” Drew instructed her. “Let’s find out what he knows.” She gave him the OK signal with thumb and forefinger and disappeared again. “Meanwhile, assuming that we are able to confine the battle to our own coordinates, we’re going to need some damned impressive defenses. Mr. Gouryas, Mr. Singh, what have you got for us?”
The two engineers gestured to each other to begin. A second later, they did it again. Neither one wanted to speak first. This did not bode well.
