Dark Matter (Star Carrier, Book 5) (23 page)

Given that humans had such a poor record in that regard just with various species on Earth, from ritualized cannibalism to the wholesale slaughter of the now-extinct cetaceans, intelligence might not provide that much of a disincentive for the Grdoch.

“With this in mind,” Armitage continued, “your operational orders have been changed.”

Here it comes
, Gray thought.

“Your primary directive, investigating the disappearance of the
Intrepid,
remains as before. The emphasis of your mission now, however, will be a show of force designed to establish peaceful relations with the local Vulcan government. To that end, you will not employ a preliminary bombardment. In particular, you will avoid using relativistic bombardment. There is the possibility that USNA prisoners of war are on Vulcan . . . and, quite apart from that, it would be good to work out a separate peace with the local government
without
destroying the planet.

“As for the Grdoch, you are to use your own discretion there. If you can use the language software we got at Enceladus to make friends, well and good . . . but I must emphasize one thing:
Don’t trust them!
Our XT people at Crisium report that the Grdoch seem to use the truth only as a tool to get what they want. It’s possible that they don’t even understand the concept of binding agreements.

“At the same time, the USNA Senate has decided that we’re stretched too thin to involve ourselves in another war. You can protect yourselves if you’re fired upon . . . but don’t go looking for trouble.

“I’m sorry this has to be so vague, Sandy. Discretionary orders are a bitch. But I know we can count on you to do what’s best out there.”

Just fucking wonderful.
Gray thought about his crews . . . and the problems of making friends with the bloody-minded Grdoch.
They’re going to just
love
this
. . . .

Holding Area

Himmel-Paradisio

Neubavaria

Vulcan, 40 Eridani A II

1725 hours local time/0943 hours, TFT

The governor, together with most of his people, had long since given up all hope.

Immanuel Vicente Delgado had been the governor of Vulcan for four years, now. With a world population of some 87 million, Vulcan wasn’t exactly a bustling planetary megalopolis. With the colony all but independent from Earth, the post of
governor
was more ceremonial than anything else.

Vulcan’s government alternated between Spanish and German governors, each serving five years, and he
was
the constitutionally elected representative of his world. It might be a ceremonial post, but someone had to speak for the population. It was a matter of sovereign propriety . . . and of dignity.
Human
dignity.

Los demonios
didn’t care about constitutions or elected government or propriety, and they certainly didn’t care about human dignity.

What they cared about was feeding time.

The monsters were entering the enclosure now. Delgado couldn’t see them—the gate was a hundred meters from where he was sitting within the 200-hectare pen, but he could hear the shrieks and screams, could see the tide of naked people spilling across the uneven ground.

The Grdoch, it turned out, preferred to
hunt
their food.

“Not again!” a woman seated next to him said. “How long has this been going on?”

“I’m not sure,” Delgado told her. “A couple of weeks or so . . .”

Maria Fuentes was a relative newcomer to the camp. She’d been first officer of the USNA star carrier
Intrepid
, captured when her ship was badly damaged in the skirmish in-system, perhaps two weeks ago. She’d been rescued by Confederation SAR vehicles and held as a POW in Himmel-Paradisio . . . but when the Grdoch had shown their true colors and occupied the capital—the monsters were supposed to be
allies
, damn it!—she’d been held at their ground base, and only brought here with the other
Intrepid
survivors a couple of days ago. Now, the
Inrepid
crew were prisoners of war, along with almost a thousand civilians from the twin cities of Himmel and Paradisio.

“Heaven” in German . . . “Paradise” in Spanish. But in the past week the place had become hell incarnate.

The fleeing mob parted, scattering across the fenced-in compound, and Delgado could see
los demonios
. . . a dozen bloated, saggy, scarlet things covered with those obscenely questing trunks or snouts with their tooth-lined sucking mouths, sprouting the three clawed and splay-footed legs moving those rubbery bulks along with surprising speed. Fuentes drew back, shaking, and Delgado felt a sick wrenching in his gut. One of the Grdoch, less than ten meters away, now, reached out with one clawed foot and dragged down a fleeing, screaming woman. Delgado desperately wanted to help, but the deepest horror was in his complete helplessness.
There was nothing he could do
.

Pinning the struggling woman down, the monster rolled on top of her, completely covering her except for her thrashing legs and one wildly waving arm. At least . . . at
least
her heart-rending shrieks as she was devoured alive were muffled by the monster’s flabby bulk.

When the Grdoch lifted itself from her mangled corpse, what was left was bloody scraps, severed limbs, a shockingly faceless head, and a torn and broken torso hideously slashed and eviscerated.

“Ay, Dios y Santa Maria!”
Fuentes said, a strangled whimper.

Delgado grappled with a bizarre, horrid thought—that Fuentes shouldn’t be invoking religion . . . but recognized that his overstressed mind was groping for something else,
anything
else, to avoid thinking about what he was seeing. The White Covenant was meaningless here. Faced with such horror, such helplessness, people were going to invoke their gods no matter what the impropriety, no matter what the law might have to say about it.

Sated, the monster rolled off the woman’s body and began its slow and obscene roll back toward the compound gate. Other Grdoch were rising from their victims as well. One small band of men and women off to the right had tried attacking one as it fed horribly, with predictable results. The Grdoch were far stronger than humans, their outer integument as tough as rubbery plastic. With no weapons but sticks, stones, and bare hands, there was no way even a dozen people could harm one of the beasts. The monster completed its meal, casually swiped at its attackers with one foot, leaving two of them writhing in the dirt as it rolled off with its fellows.

The horror was over for the moment . . . but Delgado knew the nightmare would continue. Small bands of Grdoch entered the compound to feed every few hours. The citizens penned here had been stripped before being locked up here, presumably for the gastronomic convenience of their keepers. Other humans—under the watchful gaze of heavily armed Grdoch—brought food in for the inmates each day . . . some dried, nanoprocessed emergency rations and—mostly—bloody chunks of raw meat.

It was best not to think too hard about where that meat might have come from, from what kind of animal. . . .

In any case, Delgado and other civic leaders in the group had taken on the responsibility for seeing to it that the meager rations were fairly distributed. Water was hauled in by the tankerfull and emptied into a long, muddy ditch near the gate; the Grdoch evidently intended to keep their food animals alive for as long as possible, though the
comfort
of their herds, obviously, was not one of their priorities. People slept on the bare ground, huddled together for mutual warmth.

As for waste disposal . . . well, Delgado and the other community leaders had designated the southwestern corner of the pen as the sewage pit. It was the best they could manage, and even with the rule, some of the inmates refused to follow this most basic of sanitation regulations. That’s where they took the sad remains of the Grdochs’ meals after feeding time as well. There was no room, no tools, no
will
for proper burials.

Delgado feared that what little camp discipline there was would break down completely before very long. The people were utterly broken, utterly without hope. Attempts to fight back, like the one he’d just witnessed, were driven by desperation, or, just possibly, by a suicidal urge to end the horror and the uncertainty of who would be hunted down next.

“They’ll be . . . they’ll be sending . . . a fleet . . .” Fuentes said with some difficulty. She was sobbing as she spoke. He’d seen several of her shipmates devoured over the last week, had even been in a gang that had tried to fight back. That had been when one of the monsters had taken Michael Glover,
Intrepid
’s captain. A brave, brave effort, but completely futile.

“I’m not so sure, Commander,” Delgado replied. “The ships we had here left with a Grdoch ship last week. Our naval people thought the demons were the best of friends.”

“I mean
my
people,” Fuentes told him. “The USNA. They’ll know
Intrepid
is overdue. They might even get the message drone we launched. They’ll send a stronger fleet. . . .”

“Assuming, Delgado replied slowly, “that the Grdoch haven’t just attacked the Sol System as well. They could be there by now. That might have been what they wanted all along, you know—to learn the location of our homeworld.” He shuddered, and almost added,
A well-stocked larder.
He stopped himself. Fuentes couldn’t stand much more stress, he thought, and his attempt at black humor might well have backfired. The woman was clinging to the ragged edge of sanity as it was.

“I still can’t fathom how they . . . how they think of us as just
food
,” Fuentes said, shaking her head as if in denial of what she knew to be true. The sobs had ended, and she appeared—again—to be grappling with the larger problems of who and what the aliens were, and how they might be stopped. “They
know
we’re intelligent, that we’re a space-faring civilization. You said they were talking with the commanders of your naval squadron.”

Delgado nodded. “When they first arrived in-system, they attacked us, the planet, did terrible damage to several cities. We thought they were a Sh’daar client race and tried to tell them that we wanted peace with the collective. We had no planetary defenses, and only a few ships in the Vulcan Legion to protect the system . . . from you.”

She nodded, and Delgado thought about how strange it was talking with her like this . . . a USNA naval officer, the
enemy
. The arrival of the
truly
alien made any and all human political differences completely insignificant. For the two of them, naked, emotionally broken, sprawled in the dirt as they helplessly awaited the next Grdoch feeding onslaught . . . mere politics meant nothing, less than nothing.

He reached out and touched her shoulder. She covered his hand with hers.

“The aliens,” he said, continuing the story, “brushed the Legion aside. They landed and established a base on Las Pampas. That’s the other continent, the smaller one. They massacred—I’m not sure—several million colonists there, maybe. Most of the populations of Nova Argentina and Buena del Mar. A fleet arrived from Earth under the command of Commodore Becker, on the
Emden
. What was left of the Legion joined with them, and they launched an attack on the aliens . . . a fairly successful one. At least the alien fleet was pushed back from the planet, isolating their base, and Commodore Becker opened a planetary bombardment of Nova Argentina. It was at this time that I was able to send several reports to the
Emden
, and they, in turn, dispatched it back to Earth on board a message drone.”

“But . . . you were able to communicate eventually?”

Delgado nodded. “During the bombardment, the aliens on the planet stopped firing back, and transmitted a broadband image: a 1024 by 1024 binary matrix that plotted out a symbol.”

“What symbol?”

“This.” Delgado reached down and drew it in the dirt: a narrow, vertical ellipse framed inside a circle. It looked something like a sketch of a cat’s eye.

“What does it mean?”

“We didn’t know at first, but we took it as an indication that at least the demons wanted to communicate. The linguists on board the
Emden
thought it might be their symbol for themselves—a kind of flag. Later, they concluded it meant ‘we surrender,’ or possibly, ‘we want to talk.’ ”

“It would be hard learning a completely alien language from the start, with no knowledge at all of their culture . . . no knowledge even as to whether they used a spoken language.”

“Exactly. Fortunately, Commodore Becker had a team of Agletsch on board the
Emden
.”

Fuentes looked surprised. “You have the Agletsch working with you as well?”

“Naturally. Don’t be foolish. They came first to the Confederation, remember, before your people tried to break away. They are completely apolitical. I know a few continue to work with you, but there is a sizeable enclave of them in Geneva, and some serve on board our ships as linguists and contact specialists.”

“Of course.” She looked chastened. Delgado thought that the woman was naïve, but put that down to her youth. As a full commander in her navy, she would have to be in her mid-thirties, at least, but she looked younger than that. Cosmetic anagathics, perhaps.

Or possibly it was the stress of the situation that had her not thinking clearly. Well, he could scarcely blame her.

“In any case,” Delgado continued, “the Agletsch are experts at establishing communications with unknown xenosophonts. With their help, Becker was able to open communications with them, and the fighting stopped at once. We thought . . . we thought maybe there’d been a terrible mistake, that they’d not realized we were intelligent until after Becker spoke to them. Or, possibly, they were at war with the Sh’daar, since our Agletsch insisted that they were not part of the Galactic Collective.” He gave a despondent shrug. “All I can imagine is that they decided to
pretend
to have misunderstood, in hopes of learning the location of our homeworld. Becker departed the system to return to Earth, and one of the three Grdoch warships departed with him. The Grdoch remaining in the Vulcan system attacked again, less than nine hours after our fleet dropped into metaspace.”