Only Hope Remained: Prologue

[Lorpius Prime]

EFSS Gaia, New Atlantis orbit, 2206 AD.

Fleet Admiral Timothy von Habsburg was a dictator; he had no illusions about that. He did like to think that he was a good man, and a just ruler who led his people well. But Timothy tried hard to avoid lying to himself; and that meant, whatever good qualities he possessed personally and however benevolent his use of power was, he still had to admit that he had no popular mandate whatsoever for the use of that power. I am a tyrant, he thought. In the best possible sense of the word, but still a tyrant.

It was especially important to remind himself of this fact when he was signing arrest warrants, political proscriptions, or even—in this case—execution orders. However right he may be, and however necessary his actions, his leadership was no more legitimate than that of the people he had to suppress—perhaps even less so. It was essential for Timothy not to become comfortable with his power, not to enjoy his job, not to forget why he was doing it.

Earth Fleet was at war. Humanity was at war. They had been at war for nearly one hundred years. The scale of the emergency had not diminished with time, and extraordinary measures were still justified, still necessary. Timothy pressed his thumb against the computer screen to confirm his signature, then set the computer on his desk with a sigh.

It was getting harder. Very few people were left who had been on Earth, fewer still who actually remembered their time there. Timothy himself was the first Fleet Admiral who had been born off-world. Unlike so many of his peers on New Atlantis and the other Fleet worlds, however, Timothy still believed in the cause.

He had better information than most, of course. Most humans had been living comfortably behind the Line all their lives. The fear and devastation of war had never touched them as it had their ancestors who fled in the exodus. They saw little reason to suffer the political and economic restrictions laid down by the Fleet in order to fight a far-away war that did not affect them.

Timothy knew better, knew that the Line was worse than useless. The Fleet's warships were no better than the Bats or Charterlings had had 100 years ago, and their fleets had been rolled back right along with Humanity during the exodus. The improvements which the Bats had made since were hardly worth the effort of reprogramming their shipyards. In the end, the enemy was not kept at bay by the Line. The Line simply marked the point where their expansion had halted.

Hardly anyone—at least, hardly anyone on the Fleet worlds—understood that, however. And the Fleet itself was reluctant to really hammer the point home for fear of inciting a panic. Timothy wasn't sure that was the best policy, fear could be an excellent motivator after all. But he wasn't about to overrule all his subordinates to make such a dramatic policy change. Things weren't that bad. Yet.

Timothy put his hands behind his neck and leaned back in his chair as far as it would go. He had just ordered a man—Sekar Walters—shot for organizing a protest calling for an end to the war taxes and martial law. The protest had turned violent when MPs attempted to disperse it, and Walters had been arrested. He might have gotten off with just a lengthy prison sentence, but investigators had discovered some disturbing evidence in his apartment that indicated Walters had bigger plans than simple demonstrations. The Fleet could deal—grudgingly—with protestors, but it was not prepared to tolerate insurrectionaries.

But men like Walters were only part of the problem. It was the fanatics on New Mecca who were truly sapping the Fleet of its strength. Timothy was loathe to admit it, but these days Earth Fleet stuck to the Line mostly out of tradition and because it was the most convenient excuse for his less-scrupulous peers to continue to keep their positions of authority. The Mujahideen, however, were truly dedicated, not to the Line but to Liberation, to taking back the homeworld. The Fleet was too rational, too conservative, to even contemplate the sort of aggressive strategy which was the heart of the Mujahideen philosophy. The Fleet couldn't worry about revenge and restoration when it was still trying to preserve what was left of Humanity.

Timothy still thought the Fleet's defensive stance was the best military option available, but he was one of the few left who did. Now, most people who wanted to fight signed up with the Mujahideen, and became part of the faithful themselves, or joined the cadres of infidel volunteers, New Mecca took them all. It was all well and good for the Mujahideen's navy, but it left the Fleet to fill its ranks with the leftovers: the lazy, unimaginative, and corrupt. And if it weren't enough that Timothy had to contend with an unmotivated and cynical staff, he had to do his job over the mounting objections of a population which increasingly opposed the Line and the Fleet altogether. The Mujahideen had no such troubles, their own citizens were raised from birth to believe in their cause, to love a planet they'd never seen and hate an enemy they'd never met. At least, they hadn't.

The courier had arrived from New Mecca yesterday. Despite the tensions, Timothy and the rest of the High Command kept in fairly close contact with the Gazwaht. After all, they were fellow Humans. But there were other reasons to keep up contacts, as well. Most of the Jihad's warships were built at the New Atlantis shipyards, New Mecca just didn't have the industrial capacity on the same scale as the Fleet's primary colony. In return, the Fleet could often rely on the Mujahideen to gather information or undertake certain sensitive operations which might be politically impossible for Earth Fleet itself. The Line's unity was even more fragile than the Fleet's, and Timothy just couldn't afford to piss off the Bats or Kyhyex and break their alliance completely. The Gazwaht, however, had no such obligations. And it seemed to have paid off for them.

Timothy stood up from his chair and walked around it to face the exterior window of his office. It was actually a holographic monitor, but one detailed enough that the eyes couldn't tell the difference. The only alteration Timothy had made to the display program was to highlight a single star, normally obscured by a bright supergiant from this angle. Timothy looked at it for several minutes.

If the Gazwaht's message was to be believed; that star, far beyond the boundaries of the Line, was now the site of the first battle fought by Humanity against their impossible enemy in half a century.

And the Humans were winning.

[Lorpius Prime]

EFSS Gaia, New Atlantis orbit, 2206 AD.

There was only one alien on the Gaia. Officially, none were allowed on board at all, and the one exception was kept as low-profile as possible by the Fleet. The rule was in place strictly for morale purposes. As a security measure, it was laughable. If the Bats ever cared, they could scan the station's internal structure to within a few microns of accuracy from several light-hours away. Or, more probably, they could have just downloaded the design from New Atlantis' shipyards. After seven decades, Earth Fleet still hadn't cracked the factory software well enough to locate any backdoors the original owners might have included.

But by keeping Gaia off-limit to aliens, Earth Fleet was sending a message. The message was for its partners in the Line, but mostly to its own people: we can survive on our own. It was a ridiculous notion, of course; the Human race would be extinct if it wasn't for the charity of aliens. But such slogans had been important when Humanity's survivors were still struggling to recover from the catastrophe of being ejected from their own homeworld. And the idea remained important today when the children and grandchildren of those survivors had very little motivation to continue their ancestors' struggle. Or at any rate, a little pride in their species didn't hurt.

Still, since the no-aliens rule was propaganda rather than pragmatism, Earth Fleet didn't worry too much about minor violations. Fleet Admiral Timothy von Habsburg had therefore felt no guilt about granting his predecessor's request to allow the Gaia's sole non-human permanent to remain aboard the station after Timothy took over command of Earth Fleet.

He rapped his knuckles against the double-wide plastic doors of the alien's apartment. Timothy rocked back and forth on his heels slightly and took a deep breath. The apartment was in a little-used storage section of the space station—no one would really be bothered by a slightly smaller supply of spare chair legs and kitchen stoves. The remote location also meant the gravity could be safely reduced in this section for the occupant's benefit. On his way down here, Timothy had had to resist the urge to do somersaults through the air like a child during his first low-gravity excursion.

"Come in," a young woman's voice squeaked through the doors. Timothy planted his feet and pushed through the one on the right.

The lighting inside the apartment was much dimmer—and redder—than the station's sterile white standard. Timothy paused inside the door for a moment, but the lighting adjusted before his eyes could. It was still not quite as bright as the hall, but sufficient for Timothy to see comfortably.

Timothy was always slightly unnerved by the emptiness of this place. The apartment was essentially one large box, with a smaller box adjoined to one end—a bathroom connected to the station's plumbing. Of course, this was how most of the apartments on Gaia were designed—though few were quite so large. But the other apartments had furniture and knick-knacks and decorations to break up the space, this one did not. On one end of the main room were a single fake-wooden table and a single chair. The other end had a food processor and a computer terminal set into the wall. There was a fifteen-meter stretch of space between the two walls, and nothing to fill them except a single large and lumpy object covered by a sheet of rough blue cloth.

The cloth fluttered and the thing under it rotated to point end-on towards Timothy.

"Hello, Admiral," said the Charterling Sage, still sounding like twenty-year-old woman.

Before the exodus, the Charterlings had been a galactic superpower. Their Starfleet had fought regular battles with the Bats—and won most of them. Back then even the Kyhyex thought twice before screwing with the Charterlings. Supposedly, the Charterlings were the only reason the Kyhyex had ever bothered to build a navy in the first place.

This was all second-hand information to Timothy. Humanity's own pre-exodus records on galactic history were horrendously sketchy, and anyway came from a badly-skewed perspective. The only reason he believed any of it was that even the Bats swore it was all true.

Today, Earth Fleet had more warships than the Charterlings. The exodus had been even worse for them than it had been for the Humans. Every single one of the thousands of star systems in the Charterlings' empire was now behind the Line. One of Timothy's history instructors at the Earth Fleet academy had said that, after their homeworld fell, the Charterlings "just went nuts". Their entire society had collapsed; their Starfleet splintered and was destroyed as its remaining units mounted suicidal attacks against the invaders. Humanity had also lost its homeworld; but Humanity had survived, the Charterlings had not. So far as Earth Fleet could tell, the Charterlings had stopped reproducing altogether, their species was dying.

In the wake of their empire's destruction, a few Charterlings had fled and settled on the worlds of their former enemies among the Line races. Even if they had wanted to, they were too scattered and weak to carve out any new territory of their own as the Humans had done. But the Line races had tolerated these Charterling refugees because some of them had proved to be quite useful to the Line. Apparently, the Charterlings had had quite a few secrets. There were certain facts about them that not even the Bats had suspected until those refugees began to talk about themselves.

Most astonishing had been the revelation that the Charterlings were, apparently, immortal. The Sage which lived aboard the Gaia claimed to be more than ten thousand years old. More than half of his life had been lived before the invention of FTL Warp; he remembered the entire Interstellar War between the Bats and Charterlings, from its start to its terrifying, chaotic end.

"Afternoon," Timothy said, and bowed slightly to the alien. The Sage was only a foot or two taller than him, where most Charterlings stood around three to four meters in height. Charterlings were a bipedal species, but the Sage had long ago developed a severe hunch, and now walked using his hands for support in addition to his legs.

"Would you care to sit?" the Sage asked, he raised one hand from beneath his robes to gesture at the table to his right. Timothy had never seen him except under the dark coverings. They were not a uniform he had worn on the Charterling homeworld as Timothy had originally suspected, however. The last Fleet Admiral had thought he was just embarrassed by the fact that he no longer looked like other Charterlings and preferred to hide his appearance.

"Thank you," Timothy said, "but I'm all right for now."

The robes shifted again as the Sage nodded. He asked, "What can I do for you, Admiral?"

Like all Charterlings with whom Humanity had ever had contact, the Sage spoke with the voice of the 21st century Earth woman who had recorded the language program they originally used to learn English. The more practiced ones, like the Sage, had figured out vocal inflections to make their speech sound genuinely Human. But it was nevertheless disturbing to hear a moderately attractive woman's voice coming from a creature that looked like a giant bug. Timothy found it even less comfortable listening than the annoyingly monotone, machine-synthesized voice the Kyhyex used.

He suppressed his feelings, however. "I received a message from the Gazwaht earlier," he told the Sage.

The Charterling was still. He had adapted a few common Human gestures into his conversation, but body language was not really a part of his species' nature. "I conjecture that they have tested the new devices they have been attempting to build?"

"Yeah," Timothy folded his arms and looked up at the ceiling, "apparently they work."

"This does not surprise you," the Sage said, and there was a hint of criticism in his voice. "Your scientists told you it was a sound theory. So did the Bats. But neither of you were willing to support the New Meccans because the Kyhyex did not agree."

"And because they hijacked a Kyhyex transport to get the tech they wanted!" Timothy sounded exasperated. "If the Kyhyex ever find out what actually happened…"

"So you are attempting to determine how you should reveal this to your allies?"

"No," Timothy shook his head. "The test they ran… well, it was the real thing. They've invaded the Solar system."

The Sage was silent for a while. Eventually, he said, "The devices work very well, then."

"Apparently."

Another long pause, then, "Have you told the Tharn scholars?"

"No, wouldn't be much point to that if they don't have any useful information."

The Sage bobbed his head in another nod. "Have you ever been to the Kyhyex homeworld?"

Timothy blinked; this was an odd twist in the conversation. "I know about it," he said, "haven't actually been there. No Human has."

The Kyhyex "homeworld" wasn't actually a world at all. It was some sort of engineered megastructure, like the stargates which tied together the Kyhyex's core systems, but even more impressive. A concave disc twenty thousand kilometers in diameter and ten kilometers thick, it massed as much as some small stars and housed God-only-knew how many Kyhyex on its surface. That was what the Bats said, anyway. But Timothy had no reason to doubt their description, and the Kyhyex themselves certainly weren't the sort to spin propaganda.

"We always thought it must have been built by someone else. We certainly never observed anything that suggested the Kyhyex were capable of constructing such a wonder, even their stargates are flimsy devices by comparison," his head moved slightly beneath his robes. "Perhaps it was the Tharn. If the New Meccans have stolen technology that was itself stolen from the Tharn, perhaps that is why it is so powerful."

"No way. Have you ever looked at any of the machines the Tharn brought with them? Not even the Bats can make heads or tails of that stuff. The Kyhyex built the stargates on their own, and the Gazwaht just figured out how to use that technology against the ghost ships. Anyway, that's not my problem."

"Then what is?" The Sage sounded a little annoyed, and he shifted around some more.

"The Gazwaht wants our help. They say they've got a way to find the enemy ships and defeat them, but they haven't got enough ships of their own. They've formally requested that Earth Fleet send reinforcements to Sol."

Timothy's voice broke just a little as he said it, and he had to spend a moment concentrating on fighting back his emotions. It truly was incredible, the idea that they could be so close to reclaiming Earth.

The Charterling Sage waited long enough for Timothy to compose himself again, and then a little longer. "And you're going to do it," he said, finally.

"The Admiral Lee's battle group would triple the number of ships they have—which the Gazwaht say is even more important than the firepower increase that represents."

"Why are you telling me this?"

Timothy blinked again, and he had to spend a minute thinking about his answer. "To seek your counsel, I suppose. Admiral Weiss valued your wisdom, and I tend to agree with him. It's hard to get really unbiased advice from this position, and being an alien gives you a unique perspective, not to mention your experience. And I consider you a friend, so I value your opinion."

"But you have already made your decision," the Sage said.

"No," Timothy said, more than a little defensively, although he didn't want to admit it.

"Then do not send your reinforcements. Let the New Meccans stand alone."

"But—" Timothy started to protest, then checked himself as realized he was falling into the Sage's trap. Then he decided he didn't care. "We could liberate Earth!" he continued. "This is exactly the opportunity we have been waiting for for so many years."

"Assume you are successful. These new devices work as well as the New Meccans claim. You free your home system. Then what?"

Then what? Timothy tilted his head. He was the supreme commander of Earth Fleet. Earth was in enemy hands, liberating it was his supreme objective.

"We defend it," he said matter-of-factly. "We share the new weapons with the rest of the Line to help win the war—"

"You think this new technology will win the war?"

"The Gazwaht said—"

The Sage's voice rose in a perfect imitation of anger. "You are Fleet Admiral Timothy von Habsburg, the chief military officer of your entire species! Your plan to win a century-old war rests on the power of a single new device?"

Timothy pursed his lips. "Our problem has always been that we couldn't see them. If we've gotten around that, then we can fight them."

The Sage took a few steps towards Timothy, which were all the steps it took for the Charterling to cross the entire room. Timothy found himself looking almost straight up into the great shadow which concealed the alien's head, as if he were looking into the hood of a highly stylized ancient monk.

"Remember what started this war, Admiral, and do not make the same error." The voice would have made the criticism sound absurd if Timothy were not standing so close to the Sage. The alien's looming bulk was more than impressive enough to make up for its voice. "After so many years will your species still mistake foolhardiness for courage?"

Timothy took a step back and opened his mouth to make an ill-considered retort, but the Sage didn't even allow him that.

"Neither you nor I can even conceive of the power our enemy can wield. They have been waging war against reality itself for ten million years, and you think that in a hundred you have discovered the secret to defeating them? Arrogance! We are nothing to them! A century ago you asked them a difficult question, and their response was to snuff out all the life from a tenth of the galaxy. What will they do when you seize back your home planet from them?"

The Sage moved his head very slowly from side to side, and Timothy followed the shadow with his eyes. "You will not defeat them this way. I do not believe it is even possible to consider victory against such an enemy. You will have to smash every planet and blacken every star in all the galaxy and beyond before they are beaten. And then what will you have won?"