The Excalibur Alternative

-XI-

"So," Admiral Mugabi sighed. "It's official."

"Not quite," Admiral Stevenson replied with a tight smile. "What's official is my informing you that the Galactics are finally getting around to issuing their ultimatum. Of course, we're not supposed to know that, because the official note hasn't arrived yet. And the consensus is that even when it does, the exact consequences if it's rejected won't be precisely spelled out in it, anyway."

"Of course they won't," Mugabi snorted. "They're so damned sanctimonious that there's no way they're going to commit themselves in an official communique."

"I wouldn't bet on that," Stevenson said much more somberly. "The one thing we can be fairly certain of is that they didn't have this brainstorm overnight, whatever they may be trying to tell their citizenry. There had to be some pretty drastic horsetrading to get the Kulavo and Daerjek to sign off on their final position. Unless ONI is completely off base, one of the points the hardliners like the Saernai and Josuto will have insisted upon is that the Kulavo, at least, officially endorse their prescription for finally solving their little problem once and for all. After all, the Kulavo have been the `conscience' of the Council for so long that the faction that wants to smash us almost has to have the cover of their public agreement. So I'd guess that the final act in that little Kabuki play will be the presentation of an official note demanding that we hand the ship—and the Romans—over on pain of military action."

"But I'll bet you anything you care to name that they won't mention words like `genocide' in any official note," Mugabi shot back.

"You're probably right about that," Stevenson agreed. "Of course, they won't have to, either. After all, if we're so unreasonable as to provoke them into taking military steps in the first place, any little accidents, like a planet-buster that just happens to go off course, will be on our own primitive heads. They'll have warned us that we could get hurt, so their hands will be clean when the `accident' takes place on schedule. I mean, all they're really demanding is that we hand over to them a ship that's stolen private property and the crew—who are also private property, under the Federation's laws—who stole it and murdered their legal owners in the process. If we're so unreasonable, stupid, and primitive that we're unwilling to hand such bloodthirsty, mutinous criminals over to the appropriate authorities, then certainly no law-abiding government like the Federation could possibly just stand by and see its fundamental legal principles flouted. Obviously they have to take steps, and if those steps just coincidentally end up with a star system full of aborigines getting mashed in the gears, well, maintaining the rule of law sometimes requires unpleasant actions."

"Sure it does," Mugabi growled.

It wasn't the best growl he'd ever produced. In fact, it wasn't even close. The men and women of the Solarian Navy were only too familiar with the subterranean rumble the bearlike admiral normally produced in moments of intense displeasure, but he was too tired to do justice by it this time... and not just physically.

He cocked back the chair behind his desk and let his body sag around his bones for just a moment while he scrubbed his black, broad-cheekboned face. Then he let his hands fall back to the old-fashioned blotter and turned his head to gaze out the armored viewport set into the outer hull of the huge space station.

It was a spectacular view. Under normal circumstances, it exercised a perpetual fascination and spawned an almost childlike sense of delight deep within him. But not even the view could lighten the crushing sense of despair which loomed over him today.

The planet about which the station orbited was a cloud-swirled sapphire, breathtakingly beautiful as it floated against the soot black of space and the pinprick diamonds of the stars. The white disk of its moon was visible around its flank, and the clutter and cluster of hundreds of spacecraft glittered like scattered gems of reflected sunlight as they went about their business. One of the Navy's main construction docks dominated the scene, and Mugabi could just make out the bright, color-coded vacuum suits of the yard workers as they hovered about the mile-long hull of what would have been a new battlecruiser. The ship was perhaps three-quarters completed, with most of the hull plating in place. Probably her powerplant was pressurized and on-line, since he could see that three of her five main drive nacelles had already been closed up. But even under the best of circumstances, she was still at least six months from completion... and even under Mugabi's most optimistic estimate, there was no way she could be finished and worked up for duty before the hammer came down.

He closed his eyes and scrubbed his face again, feeling the responsibility which accompanied his despair and wondering which was truly the greater burden. He'd given the Solarian Navy forty-three years of his life, from the heady days as an ensign, when he'd truly believed that humanity might be able to build a fleet strong enough to protect its world against the Galactics, until today. Along the way, he and the rest of the human race had learned too much about the crushing power of the Federation for him to cling to any false hope that the Navy could successfully defend the Solar System, yet he'd continued to hope—or to tell himself that he did, at any rate—that they could at least put up sufficient fight to convince the self-serving Galactics that humanity's threat was too slight to justify the losses they might take to eliminate it. But all of those false hopes were gone now, exposed for the pipe dreams they had been. The Federation's Council had decided to call the human bluff, and no one knew better than he how threadbare that bluff truly was. Yet even now, even knowing how futile it would be, the high rank and the duties he had spent half his lifetime earning remained. Hopeless though it might be, the responsibility to defend humanity against its foes was still his, and if it would have been so seductively easy to pass that responsibility on to someone else, that was an act of which he was constitutionally incapable. Besides, it wasn't as if it would really have mattered in the end.

"Has the President decided how she'll respond to the Galactics yet?" he asked finally.

"No," Stevenson replied. "Or if she has, she's keeping the final call confidential so far. There hasn't been any official demand for her to respond to yet. In fact, I doubt very much that the Galactics have the least suspicion that we know what they're up to. They're not very good at that part of this," he added with monumental understatement.

"Maybe not, or maybe they just don't care," Mugabi said without opening his eyes.

"I think they really are as incompetent as they seem," his superior said. "They haven't really had to be competent—not when they carry the biggest stick in the known universe. Besides, their fundamental arrogance seems to preclude any possibility of their taking any of us `primitives' seriously enough to worry about how we play the game."

"And even if they did worry about how we play it, they'd only change the rules if it looked like they might lose." Mugabi opened his eyes once more, and glared almost challengingly at the other admiral.

"Now that," Stevenson sighed, "I'm afraid I can't disagree with. Not given how thoroughly they've decided to change their own rules to screw us over."

Mugabi only grunted. There wasn't really anything else to say, although it had taken humanity a while to realize just how completely rigged the game was. It was ironic, really, that all those late twentieth century "saucer nuts" had actually had a point about how closely extraterrestrials had kept Earth under surveillance. One of Mugabi's great-grandfathers had been a special agent of what was then called the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and he'd kept a diary with religious attention to detail. Mugabi had read it when he was in high school, and he'd been particularly struck by its account of the handful of "saucer investigations" his ancestor had been assigned to. Special Agent Winton had done his job conscientiously enough, but in his journal, he'd also always ridiculed the possibility that there was anything to be discovered. After all, why would anyone capable of interstellar flight worry about keeping a planet full of prespace aborigines under surreptitious observation? What could possibly have made the human race so important that a civilization that much more advanced would bother with them in the first place? Or worry about keeping its presence a secret from the aborigines if it did take an interest in them?

Personally, Mugabi thought Great-Grandad Winton's objections had made excellent sense, given what Earth had known about the cosmos at that point in her history. Of course, there had turned out to be entirely too many things Earth hadn't known then, and given what humanity had discovered since, the nuts and paranoics turned out to have had a point all along after all. In fact, the only thing Quentin Mugabi had never been able to figure out was why the Galactics had waited this long to make their minds up about just how to deal with the barbarian menace the human race represented to their comfortable view of how the universe ought to be run.

No, that wasn't really true, he reflected. He doubted that any human would ever truly understand how a so-called "government" could dither, literally, for centuries before reaching the decision every member of it must have known from the beginning was inevitable. The very idea should have been ridiculous, but it happened to be what had actually transpired, and he had to look no further than the Kulavo and Daerjek to find the boots which had jammed up the works. He still couldn't truly wrap his own brain around the mind-set it required, but the actual events were clear enough.

It had taken the humans' intelligence services many years to begin to unravel the complexities of politics in the Federation, and there were still a lot of unanswered questions, some of which were pretty damned big. One thing was obvious, however: the closest human parallel to the Council's internal dynamics would probably have been a meeting of the Italian Mafia, in Moscow, chaired by the Yakuza. It was all about complex and constantly shifting alliances and power blocks, and the fact that a councilor might sit for as long as three or four Terran centuries at a time gave each of them enormous scope for maneuvers and countermaneuvers that left the odd dagger planted in a colleague's back... sometimes literally. No one (including the members of the Council itself, probably, Mugabi thought mordantly) really understood all of the involved and intricate obligations, debts, and unsettled accounts involved in the complicated crafting of deals and positions on policy issues, but no one was foolish enough to pretend that anything besides naked self-interest formed the basis for almost all of those deals in the end.

No one except the Kulavo, that was.

Mugabi knew far too much about the impossible disparity in the balance of power between humanity and the Federation not to be grateful for the traditional Kulavo obstructionism. Anything that held that power in check had to be a good thing from the human race's perspective, but even so, there was something particularly galling to him about admitting that his own race owed at least the last two or three centuries of its existence to an entire species of professional hypocrites.

Galling or not, it was unquestionably fortunate that the Kulavo had been one of the three original founding races of the Federation... and had no intention of allowing anyone ever to forget it. It was probably equally unfortunate, though, that neither of the other two founding species were still around. The current crop of Galactics was more than a little vague about precisely what happened to the two extinct Founders, and whatever had happened to them had taken place so long ago that none of the humans' sources had been able to shed any light upon the question. Mugabi had his own theory about their disappearance, however, and he knew that most of the Office of Naval Intelligence's analysts shared it.

And ONI had managed to amass quite a bit more information about the Galactics and their history than the Council probably realized, the admiral reflected. The Federation had a highly developed sense of paranoia where anyone who might challenge the stability of its beloved status quo was involved, yet there was a curious disconnect between that paranoia and the security measures it produced. No doubt a lot of that was produced by the millennia-long stability which was so precious to the Galactics and which humanity found so incomprehensible. No Terran government could have survived for so long without at least an occasional reexamination and revision of its security arrangements. The dogged inventiveness with which its opponents would have sought out ways around those arrangements would have seen to that! But the Galactics, for all their endless backstabbing and machinations, appeared to have absolutely no equivalent of the human willingness—or ability—to seek advantage by cheerfully manufacturing new approaches to old problems. The races which owned the Federation were all fanatical rules lawyers, but once they'd agreed upon what the rules were (and they had rules which detailed even the proper and acceptable ways to commit treason), they clung to them with death-grip intensity. Their rules did change, of course. Not even the Galactics could maintain something the size of the Federation in an absolute state of true stasis, however much they longed to do so. But the changes were always small, incremental ones... and occurred at such a glacial pace that two or three thousand years might pass between them.

Because of that, human intelligence services had managed to penetrate the Council's security far more completely than the Galactics even began to suspect, despite the enormous difference in the technological capabilities of the two sides. It helped that many of the "protected" races who served the Federation's owners hated their masters so bitterly that they were more than willing to feed the upstart humans information whenever possible. Indeed, the human analysts' greatest handicap had been the sheer mass of data available to them once access was gained. The Federation was a compulsive keeper of records, with a pure and simple delight in bureaucratic excess which no terrestrial government had ever approached. Given the sheer length of its existence, that had produced a store of information which far exceeded the storage capacity of any human archive and made any systematic examination of it a Syssiphean task.

Despite that, humanity had managed to determine a great deal about the Federation and its history. For one thing, it was apparent that the Council's moral posturing stemmed from its original Constitution, which had almost certainly been created by one or both of the two since vanished Founders. Certainly no one in the current crop of "superior species" which ran the Federation would have bothered with any of the moral or ethical nonsense incorporated into that Constitution. It was even possible, although even such an open-minded soul as Mugabi found it difficult to truly believe it, that the original Federation actually had believed it had some sort of moral obligation to look after less advanced races. God knew humanity had come close enough to wiping itself out once weapons of mass destruction became available to it, so perhaps there truly was something to be said for keeping a sort of semi-parental eye on developing races until they got through the danger zone and learned to survive their own technology.

But if that had been the original purpose of the Federation and its Constitution, it was a purpose which had been corrupted into something else long, long ago. Given the degree to which that self-serving something else promoted naked aggression and exploitation, Mugabi rather doubted that the Founders whose purpose had been twisted would have been very happy about it. Which, in turn, suggested at least one very plausible (and grim) explanation for why two of them were no longer around.

At the same time, however, the incredible love of stability which was so much a part of the Federation had preserved at least the form of the original Constitution. If nothing else, it was far too valuable as a pretext and a justification for extending the iron fist of the Council's power over every upstart species which might have threatened its beloved stagnation for the Galactics to do anything else. And the Kulavo, as the only one of the original Founders still in existence, had staked out a claim to the moral high ground in any policy debate almost a thousand centuries before humans had learned to kindle fire.

The xenologists kept warning Mugabi that it was both dangerous and inappropriate to attribute human motivations and viewpoints to nonhuman species, but the admiral had long since decided that he would go right on doing so as long as the practice allowed him to make accurate predictions of those species' actions. So far, the model had worked just fine, as long as he was careful to incorporate a sufficient degree of amorality into his calculations. And in this instance, he found himself wondering which was the more remarkable—the totality with which the Kulavo seemed to have convinced themselves of their own sincerity, or the degree to which their fellow Council members resented and despised their towering hypocrisy.

In either case, he suspected that the Kulavo's moral posturing would be their own eventual downfall, although it would never happen in time to save humanity. In the meantime, however, the Kulavo clung to the highly vocal purity of their motivations and refused to rush to judgment on any issue... unless their own interests were immediately threatened, of course. And since their status as the sole surviving Founder gave their collective ego a towering splendor which not even the other Galactics could match, they had been disdainfully unwilling to concede that something as insignificant as humanity could possibly have been a threat to them.

The data available to the Terran analysts suggested that they'd begun to change their minds as much as two or three centuries ago, but, like any self-respecting Galactic, they had declined to rush to judgment. Besides, they'd staked out their customary moral position, and finding ways to modify that without the loss of face inherent in abandoning their self-proclaimed principles had required the odd hundred years or so.

The Daerjek were another matter entirely. Even for Galactics, the Daerjek were a conservative lot. Indeed, Mugabi often wondered how they had ever managed to accept such a radical concept as the wheel. There was never any true need to ask the Daerjek for their position on any decision which came before the Council, because that position was always the same. Any alteration in any Federation policy was automatic anathema to them, and they were perfectly happy embracing any justification for resisting changes. They saw no particular need to be consistent in their justifications, but as it happened, the Kulavo's insistence on "carefully weighing the moral aspects" of any policy decision made them natural partners in obstruction.

Unfortunately, that obstruction appeared to no longer obtain when it came to the disposition of humanity's fate.

"We could always agree to give the Romans back," he suggested finally, in the tone of a man who found his own suggestion profoundly distasteful. "If that's the pretext they've settled on, we could cut the ground out from under them by conceding." Stevenson cocked an eyebrow at him, and the heavyset admiral shrugged. "I don't like it any more than you do, Alex," he said irritably, "but we're talking about the survival of the human race!"

"The President is well aware of that. In fact, I understand that the Cabinet has already agreed, very quietly, that the ship itself will be surrendered to the Galactics upon demand. But you know as well as I do what will happen to the Romans if the Galactics get their hands on them."

"Of course I do. That's why I don't like my own suggestion very much. But the executions of a few hundred people, all of whom would have been dead two thousand years ago anyway, if the Galactics hadn't interfered with their lives in the first place, have to be considered an acceptable price if that saves the rest of the human race from extinction!"

"I can't argue with that," Stevenson agreed with a sigh, then ran his fingers through his thinning, sandy hair. "And while I didn't sit in on the meetings between the President and her Cabinet or the leaders of the Senate, I feel confident that they were honest enough with one another to face the same conclusion. Hell, for that matter, the Romans themselves recognize the logic!"

He massaged his forehead with both hands for a moment, then gazed out the view port instead of meeting Mugabi's eyes.

"I don't know whether it's gallantry or simply an acceptance of inevitability, but the Romans' leaders have already agreed that they should be surrendered to the Galactics if that will prevent an attack on the Solar System. Their only stipulation—" he pulled his eyes back from the icy beauty of the stars to Mugabi's face "—is that they be permitted to commit suicide before we hand them over."

Mugabi grunted again, this time like someone who'd just taken a fist in the solar plexus, then drew a deep breath.

"That makes me feel like even more of a shit for suggesting it," he said in a voice like crushed gravel, "but it also underscores my point. However much we may all hate it, how can we justify not handing them over?"

"I think the human race has had just about enough of the Galactics," Stevenson said after a few seconds, his tone oblique, and it was Mugabi's turn to raise an interrogative eyebrow. The senior admiral saw it and twitched his shoulders.

"We've known about the Federation for almost a century now, Quentin," he pointed out. "It took us a while to figure out why the Galactics were obstructing our efforts at extra-solar expansion... or even that they were, for that matter. Given the time it takes to move between stars, even under phase drive, it's probably not too surprising that we didn't tumble to it immediately. In fact, I hate to admit it, but we might never have figured it out at all if the bastards hadn't been so arrogant and contemptuous of us that they let their true attitude show.

"You know as well as I do that the public wasn't very happy about that when the word got out," he went on with characteristic understatement. "And public opinion got even less happy when we found out that the Council had decided that—in our special case—our version of the phase drive was too `primitive' and `crude' to justify an immediate invitation to take a seat on the Council. And then we figured out that they'd had us under close observation ever since the mid-nineteenth century, and people got even more unhappy. By now, the man in the street would love nothing better than to put a stick right into the eye of the entire high and mighty Federation."

"I realize that," Mugabi replied. "But are you actually saying that the `man in the street' is so pissed off that he'd prefer to see himself—and his wife and his children—killed rather than give in to the Galactics' demands? Is that what you're trying to tell me?"

"I didn't say that. On the other hand, I don't know if most people really believe just how ruthless the Federation truly is, or the degree to which their technology and resources outstrip anything we could imagine," Stevenson said. "I tend to doubt that even those who recognize the hopelessness of any open resistance intellectually have really grasped it on an emotional basis. You and I," he waved a hand in the air between them, "are a hell of a lot better informed than any civilian, including, I sometimes think, the members of the Senate. But I have to tell you, Quentin, that there've been times when my own emotions have flatly refused to let me really accept that we're looking straight down the barrel of racial extinction. I don't know. Maybe it's just something that we're genetically incapable of accepting. A survival imperative designed to keep us on our feet and trying even when our brains know that there's no point in it. After all, maybe the horse will learn to sing."

Mugabi surprised himself with a harsh bark of laughter in response to the last sentence, and Stevenson flashed him a small smile.

"What I'm trying to say isn't that the electorate wouldn't understand the circumstances forcing the President's hand if she turned the Romans back over to the Galactics. But even if the voters understood, they wouldn't like it, so the President and her supporters would undoubtedly pay a certain political price for it in the next election cycle... assuming that there was a next election cycle.

"At the same time, however, I know the President well enough—and I suspect you do, too, although I realize that you haven't dealt with her directly as much as I have—to feel confident that she'd go right ahead and choose whatever she believed was the right and proper course of action, even if that's complete submission to their ultimatum. Unfortunately, everything ONI has been able to turn up suggests that it won't be possible for her to give them what they want, however hard she tries."

"What?" Mugabi's expression was confused. "I thought you said they were going to demand the return of the ship and its crew, so—"

"That's exactly what I said," Stevenson agreed. "The problem is that, according to our sources, the Council members have decided among themselves, whatever the public record may show, that whatever we agree to give up won't be enough." He sighed when Mugabi stared at him. "Come on, Quentin! You and I are in a far better position than almost anyone else to know what's really going on here. This whole demand is nothing but a cover for what they intend to do all along. If we accede to it in its original form, they'll simply sit back and keep tacking other demands onto it until they find something we physically can't give them. And when we can't, they'll send in their navy."

"I see." Mugabi squeezed the bridge of his nose, and his shoulders sagged. "I hate to say it, Alex," he said after a moment in a voice of inexpressible weariness, "but maybe it's time to pull the flag down. I don't know if I want to survive to see it, but maybe it's time to consider officially applying for protectorate status. At least there'd still be human beings somewhere in the universe, even if they were slaves."

"Do you really believe you're the first person to consider that?" Stevenson asked very quietly, and shook his head. "We'd all prefer to be a Churchill and not a Petain, Quentin. But a head of state has responsibilities. The President swore an oath to defend the Solarian Union against all enemies, foreign or domestic, but when the only alternatives are total surrender or total destruction, her responsibility to preserve the existence of life on this planet has to take precedence over any grand gesture of defiance.

"Except that in this case no surrenders are being accepted."

"They're that determined?" Mugabi's voice was equally quiet, and he winced when Stevenson nodded. "I knew they wanted to smash the threat they think we represent. And I knew they wouldn't turn a hair at wiping us out to do that. But I guess it's part of that emotional inability to accept that there's no alternative to extinction that you're talking about. Somehow a part of me has always believed, even in the middle of the war games that proved we don't stand a chance militarily, that if we just bit the bullet and crawled on our bellies to them, they'd at least let us survive as their slaves."

" 'Fraid not," Stevenson sighed. "Apparently we've scared them even more than we'd realized. I think it's not just us, anymore. I think they're afraid that our example might be contagious. We could be a valuable asset to them, I suppose, but as far as they're concerned, our very existence is an eternal threat to their stability, and they've decided to eliminate it once and for all. Especially since eliminating it will also be a pointed warning to any of the other protected races whose attitudes we may already have contaminated."

"So there's no way out," Mugabi said softly.

"No way at all," Stevenson agreed.

"How long?"

"It's hard to say. Our information arrived with an Ostowii courier."

Stevenson paused, and Mugabi nodded impatiently. The Ostowii were one of the senior slave races of the Federation, often acting as overseers and supervisors for the races who held seats on the Council. But despite the special privileges their position brought them, the Ostowii's hatred for their masters was every bit as deep as any other slave's. They'd become one of humanity's best sources very early on.

"The courier was one of their transgenders, and it wasn't in the military or diplomatic service. It's a merchant factor, and it was simply passing through on its way to another assignment. One of its clan superiors decided that we needed the information and used it to pass the warning to us, but its ship can't be more than a month or two ahead of the official instructions to Lach'heranu. And you and I both know how she'll react to them when she gets them."

Mugabi nodded again, this time grimly. Fleet Commander Lach'heranu was a Saernai, and the Saernai had been pressing for a more... proactive response to the human threat to galactic stability from the very beginning. Her assignment to command the Federation's "observation squadron" in the Solar System had been a bad sign when it was announced. Given what Stevenson had just finished telling him, it looked as if it had been an even worse sign than the admiral had allowed himself to fear.

"So," Stevenson went on levelly, "it looks like we're screwed whatever we do. I don't know whether or not the President will go ahead and offer our formal surrender, but I wouldn't really be very surprised if she doesn't. If there's no point in surrendering, and if the bastards are going to wipe us out—except perhaps for a little breeding stock on some primitive planet somewhere where it can be massaged into proper docility—then we might as well go down swinging."

"I can't say I disagree," Mugabi said. "But I hope she realizes that all we'll be doing is kicking and scratching on the way to the gallows. My people will do everything humanly possible, but I doubt we'll manage to do any more damage than inflicting a few scratches on their paint. Assuming we manage even that much."

"Oh, she understands," Stevenson told him with a sad smile. "But if we're dead anyway, then let's go out on our feet, not our knees. Who knows? We might get lucky and scratch that paint. And even if we don't," he shrugged, "maybe, just maybe, we'll be the example that somewhere, sometime, provides the spark to push some other poor bunch of slaves into standing up on their hind legs and going for the Council's throat."

Alex Stevenson would have lost his bet, Quentin Mugabi thought, although he was far too weary and crushed by despair to feel any satisfaction about it.

The Kulavo clearly had been unwilling to admit, even now, to the practice of real politik on such a ruthless scale, and the diplomatic note from the Federation Council had all the earmarks of a classic ultimatum... except for the absence of any clear specification of the consequences which would attach to its rejection. In fact, there was a distinctly Kulavo-like mealymouthedness to its appeal to the moral rectitude of its authors. There was something greasy-feeling about it, and Mugabi suspected that the only common ground he and Fleet Commander Lach'heranu would ever have was the contempt they both felt for the Councilors who'd drafted it.

Of course, they felt that contempt for rather different reasons.

"... and so, Fleet Commander," President Sarah Dresner said from the huge screen, "I feel certain that we can reach a peaceful resolution of the current unfortunate situation if the Council is made aware of our willingness to consider its views and to accommodate them to the very greatest extent possible."

The screen on SNS Terra's flag deck was normally the main repeater for CIC's battle plot. At the moment, however, it was configured for communication purposes, and for the last seven hours it had borne the split images of Dresner and Lach'heranu so that Mugabi, as the Solarian Navy's senior commander in space, could be kept abreast of the negotiations. Lach'heranu had raised no objection to his inclusion in the communications loop, which Mugabi had privately taken as a very bad sign. Normally, the Saernai were punctilious to a fault, especially when it came to standing upon their dignity where primitives were concerned. The fact that Lach'heranu obviously couldn't have cared less that someone as low ranking as a mere admiral was privy to her diplomatic conversation with a head of state (even a mere human head of state) suggested that she had something else on her mind.

"I am afraid that I cannot share your confidence, Madame President," the Fleet Commander said after a moment. The translating software used by the Galactics produced the piping, uninflected, and vaguely ridiculous sounding voice which it always used for the Saernai. Mugabi was accustomed to the fact that the English speech produced by the translator never matched the movements of the Fleet Commander's speaking mouth, but he usually found the disconnect mildly amusing. Today, there was nothing amusing about the situation at all.

"The attitude of your species has been most regrettable and obstructionist for the last several of your generations," Lach'heranu went on, cocking her foxlike ears while all three of her space-black eyes gazed sternly into her own communicator's visual pickup. She reached up and smoothed her purple, plushy fur, and Mugabi wished for far from the first time that he was capable of reading her species' facial expressions.

"The Federation has attempted ever since its first contact with your species to devise some means by which humans might be harmoniously integrated into the society of civilized races," the Saernai told the President. "In recognition of the responsibility which older and more advanced races owe to barbarous species which have yet to make the transition to true civilization, we have extended every possible consideration to you. Yet despite our efforts, entire generations of your political leaders have steadfastly refused to meet us even half way. While we recognize that it is particularly difficult for such a short-lived race to learn true wisdom, the fact that we have received such responses from so many of your leaders and their successors clearly indicates that your race's intransigent arrogance is an inherent quality and not one out of which it may be educated. As such, I fear that it is no longer possible for us to delude ourselves into believing that true change on the part of the human race is possible."

Mugabi heard a muffled curse from one of his staffers, but he didn't even turn his head to see who it was. It didn't matter, and even if it had, he agreed entirely. There was something especially demeaning about being forced to listen to such rank hypocrisy from a creature whom one knew intended to exterminate the human race wherever the "negotiations" led. He wondered if Lach'heranu was enjoying herself as much as he thought she was. It was hard to know what some of the Galactics found amusing, but from what he'd seen of the Fleet Commander, and of the Saernai in general, she probably thought that watching President Dresner crawl was hilarious.

If the President suspected the same thing, she let no sign of it color either her expression or her voice. She knew she was playing an ultimately losing game whose rules had all been carefully fixed to make it inevitable that she could never win. Yet she couldn't afford to assume that. Or, rather, it was Dresner's final responsibility to make completely certain she had overlooked no possibility, however remote, which might have saved humanity's life.

"By the standards of the Federation, the human race is, indeed, young," she said levelly. "No doubt many of the difficulties which have arisen between the Solarian Union and the Federation truly have stemmed from that disparity in our ages and experiences. In the final analysis, however, we have always recognized both the legitimate prior territorial claims of the Federation and its unquestioned supremacy as the one true interstellar power. Where we have differed with the Federation has been solely over matters which we considered to be internal concerns of our own star system and political union. We have never attempted to dictate to the Federation outside our own boundaries, nor have we ever attempted to encroach upon territory already claimed by the Federation or any of its member races.

"Perhaps our insistence on maintaining our internal independence from the Federation has been wrongheaded. Probably, as the Council's note points out, such a view is typical of youthful and barbaric species. If so, then it may be that the time has come to put it aside with the other toys of childhood. I don't say that it will be easy for us to surrender this particular toy, especially in light of how long we've clung to it. Yet we aren't fools, Fleet Commander, however foolish we may sometimes seem. We are proud of our navy and of the men and women who serve in it, yet our entire fleet is completely outclassed by the single squadron which you command. So however difficult we may find it to put away our toys, we cherish no illusions about the Federation's ability to compel us to do so. And as survival is always preferable to the alternative, I have been empowered by the Senate to immediately appoint a committee of delegates to be transported to the Federation's capital, there to meet with the Council or its representatives and began immediate, binding discussions on precisely how our star system and our race may be most expeditiously and smoothly integrated into the Federation."

Someone—it might have been the same officer who'd cursed—inhaled sharply behind Mugabi, but the admiral's own expression didn't even flicker as he heard his President agree to what amounted to the unconditional surrender of humanity. He'd known it was coming. For that matter, every officer on Terra's flag deck must have known it was. It had to be, given the incredible firepower of the thirty-four Federation superdreadnoughts gathered around Lach'heranu's flagship.

The Saernai gazed at the President's image for several seconds, then reached out and touched a small button on the arm of her command chair.

"The recorders are no longer on-line," she informed Dresner in that artificial, maddeningly toneless voice.

"May I ask why not?" the President inquired very carefully.

"Because there is no point in continuing this farce," Lach'heranu said. "It is not possible for your kind to be integrated into the Federation. The very idea is ridiculous and an insult to every other species already part of the Federation, whether they are full members or protected races. Humans are arrogant, contentious, chaotic, willful, barbaric, ungrateful, and stupid. If your kind were permitted to contaminate the Federation, it would pollute and ultimately destroy the greatest and most stable civilization in the history of the entire galaxy. This cannot and will not be permitted."

"So there was never any real intention on your part of attempting to find a negotiated solution," Sarah Dresner said flatly.

"Of course not," Lach'heranu confirmed. "It was simply essential that we demonstrate the extent of our efforts to find some peaceful resolution to the intolerable threat you pose to true civilization."

"Why?" Dresner asked bluntly.

"Because we are the representatives of truly advanced and civilized races," Lach'heranu said with absolutely no sign of irony. "As such, we owe a debt to posterity to make it plain that we had no possible alternative but to proceed to solve the human problem once and for all."

"You mean," Dresner said harshly, "that you need the proper grist for your propaganda mill when you get ready to lie to your other slaves—and to yourselves—about it."

"That observation is typical of human arrogance," Lach'heranu replied. "Only a human could think that your insignificant little star system could possibly be sufficiently important for civilized races to feel any need to lie to anyone about the reasons for your extermination. It is simply important that our archives contain the proof of the propriety of our actions so that our successors upon the Council may draw the proper conclusions and find the proper precedents should such a situation ever again arise, and we have now recorded sufficient material for that purpose."

"In other words enough for you to edit however you need to in order to manufacture the history to justify your actions!"

"Again, that attitude simply underscores your species' unending ability to believe that you are far more important than you are, and so demonstrates the necessity of exercising appropriate control over the archival material relating to this incident. It would be most unfortunate if some future member of the Council should be exposed to the drivel of human `philosophy' and its pathetic insistence upon `self-determination' and so find itself confused into failing to recognize the inevitability of our policy decision. There is no point, however, in drawing this out any further, nor could any truly advanced being justify extending the negotiation process. As a civilized individual, I feel some mild regret for the circumstances which require me to destroy your race, and I propose to demonstrate as much mercy as the situation permits by acting promptly, rather than drawing out the process. It will be much simpler all around if you will simply order your ships to deactivate their shields."

"I think not." Dresner's voice was chipped ice.

"Surely not even you are stupid enough to believe that resistance will have any impact on the final outcome," Lach'heranu said.

"Probably not," the President of humanity told her species' executioner. "But I hope you'll excuse us for trying."

"I have no interest in excusing you for anything," Lach'heranu's piping voice said tonelessly. "I simply require that you die."

"Battle stations!"

It was undoubtedly the most unnecessary order Quentin Mugabi had ever given. The entire Solarian Navy had been at battle stations for the past ten hours, but alarms whooped throughout his warships and the screen which had carried the images of President Dresner and Fleet Commander Lach'heranu switched instantly to its normal designed function.

Mugabi's eyes clung to the repeater plot as the data codes and sidebars the flagship's Combat Information Center projected onto it flickered and changed. Unlike him, Lach'heranu hadn't even bothered to bring her ships fully to battle stations during the negotiations. There'd been no need—not against such insignificant and contemptible opposition. She had taken the precaution of remaining well outside her own attack range of the Terran fleet, much less outside the range of any weapon Mugabi possessed, but she clearly intended to change that. As he watched, her normal-space drives were coming on-line, offensive and defensive systems awoke, and thirty-five superdreadnoughts of the design ONI had code-named the Ogre class, each an ovoid measuring just over nine miles in its long dimension, began to accelerate towards the three hundred pygmies of the human fleet. Any one of those Ogres, Mugabi knew, possessed more firepower than his entire fleet, and they were escorted by over thirty Stiletto-class cruisers.

Humanity's last battle, he thought grimly, was also going to be one of its shortest.

"Execute Alpha One!"

Acknowledgments came back to him, and he felt an indescribable, bittersweet pride in the men and women under his command as his fleet's formation changed. It flowed into the new alignment crisply, quickly... almost as if the humans crewing its ships didn't know that their resistance was absolutely futile.

It was an unorthodox formation: a column of starships, like a huge yet slender spear shaft, headed by two dozen of Mugabi's heaviest capital ships. Those ships blocked the fire of any of their consorts, which ought to have made it totally unacceptable. But Quentin Mugabi had no illusions about his ability to fight anything which might have been called a "battle," and so he'd chosen a disposition oriented towards achieving only one thing. Any conventional formation would have been automatically doomed to destruction without landing a single hit on the enemy, but this one put the bulk of his units into the protective shadow of the battleships leading his column. None of those battleships would survive more than one or two hits, three at the most, from Galactic weapons, but if the rest of the fleet could close quickly enough while they were absorbing their death blows, one or two of their consorts might actually live to get into range of their own weapons and land at least one solid hit of their own.

It wasn't much, but it was the only thing Mugabi could offer his crews, his home world, and his species, and he tried not to weep for the sacrifical gallantry of his personnel as the Solarian Navy began its death ride.

"Enemy has locked on," Tracking announced, and Mugabi's jaw clenched. "Entering enemy missile range in seven minutes," the Tracking officer continued in the clipped tones of despair held at bay by professionalism. "Entering our own range in sixteen minutes."

Mugabi didn't even look away from the plot. There was no more point in acknowledging the report than there would have been in pretending that his fleet could survive nine minutes of Galactic fire from three dozen Ogres.

He watched the time to engagement readout spin downward on the main plot, and to his own surprise, he realized his muscles were relaxing, not tensing, as the timer whirled towards zero. Perhaps it was relief, a corner of his mind thought almost calmly. Relief that he and all of his crews were about to die and so would not have to witness the destruction of the planet they were sworn to defend.

"Entering enemy missile range in two min—"

Tracking's report chopped off in mid-syllable as the plot changed abruptly.

Mugabi's eyes flared wide as the impossible icons flashed into existence. The Galactics' stealth technology was enormously superior to anything humanity had ever possessed. ONI knew that it was, that the existence of that technology helped to explain how the Federation had been able to smother the Solar System with listening posts and automated spies for at least seventy years before the human race became even peripherally aware of its existence. But Lach'heranu hadn't bothered with stealth. Not against something as primitive and unsophisticated as the scanner systems of the Solarian Navy. There'd been no reason to.

But it had just become evident that someone in the universe had a stealth technology which was superior even to that of the Federation. That was the only possible explanation for how nine unknown warships could possibly have made their way into attack range of Lach'heranu's squadron completely undetected.

And they had been undetected. That was obvious the instant they opened fire, for the Federation's superdreadnoughts were taken totally by surprise. All of their defensive and sensor systems had been directed towards their contemptible human victims, and their point defense fire was late, thin, and ineffectual as the unknowns' first missile broadsides went smashing home.

They were fast, those missiles, Mugabi thought numbly. The Solarian Navy's missiles had a maximum velocity of sixty percent of light-speed, and that was possible only because ONI had managed to steal the design for their drives from the Federation's dead archives. The Galactics' own current design, a mere twelve hundred years old, had a maximum velocity of seventy-five percent of light-speed. But the missiles slamming into the shields of Lach'heranu's superdreadnoughts were moving at over ninety percent of light-speed, and even from here, Mugabi could tell that the incoming birds were equipped with ECM systems at least two or three generations ahead of anything in the Federation's arsenal.

"Who the Hell—?"

Discipline cut off the incredulous exclamation, but Mugabi never even noticed as he watched the bright, terrible suns of antimatter warheads rip and tear at Lach'heranu's shields. The yield figures on those explosions were much higher than they ought to have been—higher than the Galactics' own weapons could have produced—and their victims' shields burned like tinder under their fury. Even if he'd noticed the highly unprofessional outburst, though, he could scarcely have complained about it, since it summed up his own feelings so perfectly. Who the Hell were they? And where the Hell had they come from? And—

"Attention, Admiral Mugabi!"

Mugabi's eyes were already as wide as they could get, but they tried to glaze over as the unknown voice, speaking English with an accent he'd never heard before, sounded in his earbug. The only way it could have gotten there was for the unknowns to have invaded Terra's communications net through at least a dozen levels of encryption and security firewalls that should have held up even a Galactic AI for a minimum of fifteen minutes.

"Break off, Admiral Mugabi!" the unknown voice snapped in his ear. "Leave them to us!"

Even as the voice spoke, another salvo of those terrible missiles crashed into Lach'heranu's ships, and the Solarian Navy watched in disbelief as it saw something no mortal eye had seen in over sixty-two thousand years.

A Federation superdreadnought blew up.

One moment it was there, well over a billion tons of warship, with a crew of over three thousand. The next instant, it was an expanding ball of plasma, and a jubilant bellow of savage satisfaction went up from the officers on Terra's flag deck. Mugabi's voice was a part of that bellow, but then he shook his head like a punch-drunk fighter and wrenched himself back out of the exultation raging about him. His command was only minutes short of the Federation warships' engagement envelope, and if there was one thing in the universe he knew, it was that his ships had no business at all between those warring leviathans.

"All units, execute evasion vector Echo Niner! Execute Echo Niner immediately!" he barked.

Acknowledgments streamed back as maneuvering officers fought free of their own hypnotic fascination with their tactical plots, and Mugabi's fleet broke away from the death ride it had embraced just a handful of minutes before. A part of the admiral's mind monitored the frantic breakaway maneuver, but almost absently, for he was unable to tear his eyes from the plot as the outnumbered attackers ripped into Lach'heranu's fleet like ravening demons.

He had never imagined anything like it. Those weren't warships. They were something else entirely, something that took combat power to a whole new level. As his sensors collected more and more data, his disbelief only grew. There were only nine of the newcomers against thirty-five Ogres, and everyone knew—not just the Federation, but ONI, as well—that the Ogre-class was the most powerful warship that had ever been built. They were invincible. Nothing had ever been able to stand up to one of them.

But the unknowns weren't "standing up" to them; they were tearing them apart.

CIC's estimates scrolled up the side of Mugabi's plot, and all his years of experience in naval service insisted that those estimates had to be wrong. Each of those nine ships was fifty percent larger than an Ogre-class. Fifty percent. And despite that, they were at least twenty-five percent faster and far more maneuverable. More preposterous still, their firepower and energy signatures, now that they had emerged from whatever unreasonably efficient stealth technology had hidden their approach, indicated that they were at least six times as powerful, on a ton-for-ton basis, as anything the Federation had ever built.

It was flatly impossible, but those nine ships had Lach'heranu's entire squadron outnumbered by better than two-to-one.

It was a short, vicious, ugly battle. One which lasted only a very little longer than the one Lach'heranu had planned upon... but had a very different outcome. Even in a straight, standup fight in which both sides had known what was coming, the Federation squadron would have been doomed. Taken by surprise in the deep-space equivalent of a point-blank ambush, Lach'heranu and her ships had no chance at all. Two of the unknown attackers were lightly damaged; none of Lach'heranu's superdreadnoughts survived the engagement. A handful of her cruisers tried to break away and run for it, but three of the unknowns loped off after them, overtaking them with absurd ease, and blew them out of existence long before they could get beyond Sol's phase limit and go to FTL drive. Mugabi had no idea if Lach'heranu or any of her ship commanders had attempted to surrender, but if they had, no one on the other side had been interested in allowing them to.

The Solarian Navy floated in space, stunned spectators to the carnage which dwarfed any battle it had ever imagined, and Mugabi knew that every single crewman aboard every single ship was wondering exactly the same thing.

And then the repeater plot reconfigured itself into a communications screen once more, without any input from any member of Terra's crew, and an alien, saurian face looked out of it.

Mugabi felt his jaw try to drop yet again as he recognized the face, or at least the species to which its owner belonged. So far as he knew, no human had ever managed to communicate with the species the Federation called the Ternaui, but ONI was very familiar with them. Everyone knew that the Ternaui were the most loyal, utterly reliable bodyguards any of the Galactics could hope for. The xenologists' best guess was that the Ternaui were telepaths, and that the Federation had devised a technique which allowed it to "program" them for complete obedience and loyalty. Whether that was true or not, humanity had been given ample proof of the effectiveness of a Ternaui bodyguard, and there was no question that the species was mute.

Which made what happened next as impossible as everything else that had happened in the last half hour.

"Good afternoon, Admiral Mugabi," the Ternaui said. His—or "its," Mugabi supposed, if it happened to be one of the neuters—mouth never moved at all, but its obviously artificial voice was as melodious and expressive as any human voice the admiral had ever heard, and its strangely beautiful silver eyes with their inky-black, vertical pupils seemed to look straight into his own. "We apologize for the abrupt nature of our intervention... and for the fact that it was impossible for us to alert you to our presence earlier. We realize that what has just happened must be extremely confusing, although, we hope, not unwelcome."

For a species which was supposed to be incapable of speech, the Ternaui turned out to have a remarkable gift for understatement, Mugabi thought.

"I speak to you as High Chancellor of the Avalon Empire," the scale-hided alien continued. "And as High Chancellor, I formally invite you to come aboard our flagship in order to meet with the Emperor so that he might explain to you what brings us here today."