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XI : GUESSES

Xonmik nodded, smiling quietly to himself. "The Ra'che'e'terrchangjon sees reason."

"Pardon, sir?" His executive officer looked up from trying to rub a scratch off his blue keratin carapace.

"Nothing… nothing at all. How are the resource extraction procedures coming along?"

"On schedule, sir." The first officer fiddled with his console, projecting several new displays onto the master screens. "As you can see," he explained, pointing to the graphs and charts, "we’ve restocked all the foodstuffs we need for extended operation. Machined parts have been recovered to mission-ready status via cannibalizing our destroyed vessels, and raw resources for our fabricators are only slightly subnominal. This is an agricultural zone lacking in processed elements, so it is taking some time for our nanosmelters to process the ore we’re picking up."

Xonmik folded his front arms and scratched the back of his neck with the claws of his lifting arm. "And the caches?"

"We’re working on that, sir. As you said, first priority is to refresh our own stores to maximum. We do have several flash-frozen food stores hidden amongst pockets of carbonaceous rocks in the asteroid fields; this should keep them relatively safe. I suppose that is also why you ordered that we extract minerals from the planet instead of the mineral-rich asteroid fields."

"Exactly. Those fields will give us a place to hide anything we cache."

"What if the Zoners attempt to refill their own stores here when we’re forced to leave? They’ll hit the asteroid belts and simply absorb our caches."

"I doubt that; they don’t want to take the image of pillagers. If they do, they’ll take the closest fields at hand; that is why we’re scattering our little nest-eggs."

The executive officer nods. "I understand, sir." Blinking twice, he looks up at his captain, finding Xonmik looking back down at him with a bemused look. "Sir?"

"You’re learning." Xonmik chuckles, an odd choking sound from his reptilian frame. "Good. Always learn things the easy way if you can;" he holds up his right hand, brandishing his missing right index finger. The knuckle that it would normally extend from is a twisted, calcified lump that obviously healed naturally and without much if any medical help. "Learning things the hard way tends to be extremely painful. What they teach you in the egg leads to this"-he taps the bony lump-"what you learn here keeps you whole."

"Do we have any idea on threat distribution, Val?" Fleet Admiral Nibnumber was not a happy fellow right now, leaning on one elbow at his command console while looking irritably at Captain Kordont. Val simply shrugs, his jewel-like eyes glowing yellow from his jet-black angular face. "We’re still getting data from the Hiss, but the most reliable of it seems to be on the other side of the bloody wedge. On our side, the Thaurians are next to useless-"

"Don’t remind me about them."

"-and the Hiss doesn’t have the presence we need. Working on our own long-range scans on jump-sigs, we know we’re outnumbered at least three to one in the local area, and the number goes to five to one if you want to factor in that their fleet seems to be quite a bit heavier on average than ours."

"That’s just wonderfully outstanding. They have the numerical and strength advantage… but not enough to kick us out of a defensive posture. We can’t destroy them in detail because we need the bulk of the task force here to protect our foothold and the moment we jump in on their sig they’ll start flipping around their forces to keep us guessing. If we simply stand back here, they’ll raid us until we eventually lose our effectiveness. If we get out, then they’ll have established a foothold and boom, we have a second front to deal with. The Navy isn’t going to pull resources from the Sh’kai Corridor because that’s our blitzkrieg wall; and it isn’t going to put any Zone defenses unless we really get into deep couscous. Anyone have any comments?" Nibnumber leans back, folding his hands behind his head.

"Well, sir, normally such a disappointing assessment would be considered bad for morale," Ka-Ri mutters, "but," his voice becomes almost chipper, "I know you’ve got some way out of it."

"Oh, really?" Nibnumber smirks. "I didn’t think Kzroth were known for their high psionic potential. So, my orange swami, how do you know that I have a plan?"

"You must or else you would’ve kept your thoughts to yourself."

Nibnumber nods with a tiny chuckle. "Well, you’ve got me figured out-what can I say?" He shrugs. "Now can you guess what my plan is?"

Ka-Ri holds his chin. "Thinking of the options you presented, I’d stand back and fight defensively… but initiative is only maintained on the offense. So I assume we are taking a sword-and-shield strategy where we hold the system and yet strike out at the same time."

Nibnumber nods. "Good, you paid attention in strategic warfare class. Now, what is the most efficient way for us to strike?"

"We must take advantage of our enemies weaknesses while exploiting our strengths."

"And those would be? Both categories."

"Reaver equipment is less efficient and requires large groups for success. Their crews coordinate better, but their tactics and strategy are inferior."

"And they are inferior because?"

"Initiative is not a virtue in the RBC military."

"And it is not a virtue because?"

"Authority to act is completely pyramidal, focused on fleet or regional commanders."

"Exactly. And because of that pyramidal structure, and the Reaver tendency to put their best personnel on the same ship…"

"You’re planning on finding the admiral in charge of the invasion and eliminating him."

"He’s on one of three superbattleships. Any time we see a super-BB sig, we send in a hunter-killer squadron to tear it apart. Cut off the head, and the limbs will flail. Ares will take along some heavy cruisers and fire support frigates and start distributing the hurt."

"The only downside to that, sir," Ka-Ri muses, "is that it removes forces from our defenses, decreasing the window where we will be whittled down to the point we can no longer effectively resist."

"It’s a race against time, Ka-Ri, no denying that." Nibnumber frowns as his jaw tightens. "But I’ll be damned if we don’t take some real action. FleetCom, assemble an H-K squadron for me. Helm, be ready to coordinate jump at any given instant. We don’t want to give the Reavers time to scratch their non-extant nuts between the time they jump in and we pounce on them, much less time to coordinate a defense."

"There, you’re patched in."

I stared at the screen. It had a single line of text, glowing orange over the black background. It accompanied the soft voice in my mind.

I rubbed the stickypad contact placed over the ThinkUnit implant in the back of my neck. ThinkUnits then, like now, were almost universal in the Zone. The ability to directly interface with the brain and permanently write data to it is a staggering advantage over traditional education, and, so far, I don’t think any of those dystopian prophecies about hard-wired brain propaganda have come true. Still, this was the first time I had used it to jack into a system. Hell, I’d never known that it could be used to jack into a system, but that was just naïveté on my part-how else were you supposed to program it but by wireless or induction connection? And if you’ve got a connection with enough bandwidth, you can jack.

Still, my confusion at the new sensation of thinking aloud to something… no, someone else caused me to be less than creative in my response, which typed itself out on the screen.

Pelok, looking over my shoulder reading the conversation, laughed. I almost leapt out of my seat. "Good, good," he smiled, "you’re getting the hang of it, ma’am. Would you like me to introduce you to The Second Sight or would you like to continue chatting with ‘Bane?"

"I… uh… duh…" Think about it--two different conversations simultaneously, one in your head, the other not. That’s why they log them on the screen, so if an operator gets distracted he can scroll up and get back in touch with the ship.