Prologue
“You made it,” General Robin Petrovna Sams exclaimed, as a scruffy human male in a worn brown shipsuit staggered in to the derelict conference room. Colonel Inigo Ayala clasped hands with the redhaired human woman whose comfortable, plump figure and heart-shaped face were so at odds with the devious brain inside. She was the titular head of the Insurgency, and hoped one day to sit at in the President’s chair at the Senate Council of the newly reformed Thousand Worlds Confederation—reformed by her forces, of course. In the meantime, they were a rebellion on a budget. The very space station in which they were meeting was nearly derelict. The Insurgency liked to say they captured it, but the fact was the Confederation had all but abandoned it during a fight with the nascent rebel forces.
“Missed a Con patrol by a scoche,” Ayala said, flopping into a chair. The hydraulics had long ago gone flat, and the servos shrieked under his weight. His ivory skin, pleated from long years of staring at stars from behind inadequately shielded viewports, was paler than usual. “They’re getting too close. We’re going to have to abandon K-17 sector for a while.”
“They’re reading your power signatures,” Itterim Van Yarrow grumbled. No ally to humankind could look less like it. Itter’s homeworld had produced as many billions of intelligent, upright bipedal beings as Terra, who would have (and had) taken one look at the Itterim and thought, “praying mantis.” Ayala snorted at him.
“Well, what do you expect? All we’ve got is crap ships, everybody’s leftovers, anything we can capture or steal or adapt. Every time a closet rebel industrialist who claims he hates the Confederation promises us funding, they always find an excuse not to pay off. We might as well hover off the bows of Con dreadnoughts and throw stones.”
Van Yarrow curled his green foreclaw and shook it. “By my exo, we will, if we must. The Confederation treats us like hive insects, all to be treated like one type of being. It is unnatural. How all our species and cultures have survived so long under its yoke I do not know.”
“Never mind,” Sams said. “We still have Benarli.”
“Three rotten little planets circling three minor stars barely adequate for maintaining viable systems,” Ayala said scornfully. “Look at us! We just don’t have the headcount or the weaponry to attack. We need more soldiers, more ships, more money!”
Sams shrugged. “I’ve got everyone I can spare on procurement, Ayala.”
Vareda Borenik growled. The old woman turned her one good eye towards him; the cloned replacement for her left had yet to grow to viable size yet and was still behind the sewn-closed lid. “The traders are getting smart. If they’re carrying a valuable load they travel with military transports. The little ones are hard to catch.”
“The little ones often have the really worthwhile cargoes, like power supplies and nanocomputers! If we had better intelligence we could intercept those.”
The itterim clicked his mandibles. “That is what I have come to tell the general,” he said. “My spies have sent me the flight paths of five transports carrying goods that we will want.” He pushed an infopad toward Sams and aimed a claw at the fourth entry. “This one is four thousand units of Tachytalk generators.”
Sams nodded. Tachytalk was a brand name for a communications system that relied upon tachyons, particles that could not travel slower than light, to enable almost real-time information exchange within a few light years, and significantly cut down transfer time of more distant communiqués.
“That would go a long way in helping to coordinate our efforts. Go get them.”
“As good as done, general,” Van Yarrow clicked, crossing his paws to show how pleased he was with himself.
Sams pushed away from the table and half-floated toward the starchart that glowed softly on the only illuminated screen wall in the chamber. “The Benarli cluster will be ours soon. The populations of two of the remaining inhabited planets have submitted to our occupying forces. It will become an ideal base for us. No one in the Confederation will notice that they’ve stopped transmitting: their communications were intermittent anyhow because of all the black holes surrounding the stars. The fact that they are small and unimportant helps us to make the rest of the Confederation forget them.”
Her captains nodded. Travel through Benarli space was tricky; craft traveling by means of interstellar strings avoided routing through the area. One missed calculation, and a ship could be sucked into eternity. The only reason the Benarlis had been interesting in the past was because such old systems were a ponderance of heavy minerals not as plentiful in younger stars. Over the thousands of years humanity and others had plied the spaceways, the easy sources in the cluster had been whittled down, and more (sources) had opened up in other, safer parts of the galaxy. Benarli was like a ghost town, ideal for a gang that didn’t want to attract notice.
“We still aren’t addressing the problem,” Ayala argued. “I need more trained pilots and better fighter ships. We have lots of volunteers. They’re all newbies. I have plenty of cannon fodder, but no one I can really trust.”
Borenik smiled, her sagging eye making the expression sinister. “I think I can fix the problem. If we had ships that could fight for us, then we wouldn’t need to put more people at risk.”
Ayala waved the suggestion away. “Fantasy. All the efforts to create AIs that are capable of sophisticated strategy without being plugged into the opposing system have had too many flaws.”
“Ah,” the old woman said. “What if I knew where a superprocessor was being developed that had the capacity not only to counter multiple-front input and deduce the strategy behind it, but read a situation and come up with its own ahead of time?
“Now, I agree with the human,” Van Yarrow chittered. “That’s such a fantasy.”
“But it’s not. In fact, one of the greatest inventors in the galaxy is working on the problem.”
“Who? Who’s got the funding for that kind of R&D?” Ayala demanded.
Borenik leaned back in her chair and took a plastic sheet out of an upper pocket. “My intelligence sources inform me that he is almost finished. And when I tell you where he is you’re going to kick yourself in the behind for not figuring it out for yourself.”
“Where?” Sams asked greedily.
Borenik threw a brochure on the table. The plastic sheet immediately began to emit flickering lights that coalesced into happy costumed figures of humans, animals, cuddly monsters and animated inanimate objects smiling and dancing together.
“Oh, happy happy happy. All of us are happy. Come with us and sing a happy tune! Happy happy happy, all the world is happy. Dance with us and you’ll be happy soon!”
“You’re joking,” Sams said.
“No,” Borenik smirked. “And if you hurry, you can get in before any of the other bidders.”
Ayala grinned fiercely at his fellow officers. “It’s decided, then. We’re going to Wingle World.”
***