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“So this is the political version
of ‘They started it,’ is it?” Park laughed. “Well, they started it years ago.
All the Diet has managed to accomplish is to allow the Premm to get ready. Half
the ships of the Third and Fourth Fleets are barely able to get back to Felina
for repairs. I hear the Fifth and Sixth are taking refugees to Earth for
resettlement.”

“No, only the Sixth Fleet,”
Relaviss informed him. “I sent the Fifth on to support the First and Second in
their siege of Trohavn, the capital world of the Holy Premm Empire. We’ll need
ships to protect Felina, however.”

“I’ll leave what’s left of the
Third and Fourth here,” Park decided. “Might want to combine the ships into a
new fleet with Admiral Gilatino in command, but that’s your decision.”

“I concur,” Relaviss agreed.
“You’ll want all your Pirate ships with you?”

“We may need them,” Park replied.
“But I’ll leave you
Hawakor
and
Jalapeno
to help defend Felina. “They
were shaken, but are still battle worthy. I think a lot of the damaged ships
can stand in orbit for defensive purposes as well. I don’t know how well
they’ll fight, but from a distance the planet should look unassailable.”

“I hope you’re right,” Relaviss
nodded. “You can leave immediately?”

“We only have half the missiles
we started out with and our racks are nearly empty,” Park replied. “We’ll
refill the launchers and be off within the hour.”

“Do you want me to send a courier
ship to Earth to request reloads for you?” Relaviss offered.

“That’s a good idea,” Park
nodded. “Thanks. Our long range ones seem to be most effective lately and if we
end up in a siege, we’ll likely be there a while.”

“It’s hard to besiege a planet,”
Relaviss agreed, “but I think you have enough ships to accomplish it. I do not
think the Premm will tolerate a siege, however. It is not in their nature to wait
out a situation. Instead the priestly council, or whatever they call it, will
probably declare a holy crusade against the godless devils. You, of course, are
the king of the devils.”

“And there I thought I was such a
nice guy,” Park remarked facetiously. “I still don’t get it, though. Why did
the Premm declare war now?
 
Seems to me
they should have waited until the results of the Dark Ship attacks came in.”

“Two worlds were destroyed,
McArrgh,” Relaviss reminded him, “Millions of people were killed. The Alliance
has not suffered such war losses in millennia. I think they thought they would
shock us into submission. It nearly worked too. There was a strong, albeit
minority, faction in the Diet that was disposed to give the Premm whatever they
wanted.”

“It would be interesting to see
who was in that faction and what their previous relationship to the Premm
Worlds had been,” Park commented. “We know they still had friends in the Diet.”

“None who dare admit that now,”
Relaviss told him.

“Well, I’m sure Lord Rebbert’s
faction will be keeping an eye on them, regardless,” Park responded. “Any word
on how Rebbert is, by the way?”

“He’s on Felina,” Relaviss
replied, and then smirked uncharacteristically, “against doctor’s orders, of
course. He is not here as the official representative from his world, and
cannot be until his doctors approve, but no one doubts that he’s calling the
shots as usual for his side of any argument.”

“That’s Rebbert,” Park laughed.
“I had to work with him while I was in the Diet. If you had recorded all our
conversations I think you would have been hard pressed to figure out whether we
were allies or opponents.”

“Politics!” Relaviss almost spat.
“I’ll leave them to you.”

“Not me!” Park laughed.
 
Cousin had been sleeping in his lap. She woke
up, looked around and went back to sleep. “I got Shanghied.”

Relaviss looked puzzled for a
moment and then laughed. “It took a while to translate that. I’m not sure what
I got was what you meant, but I guess you meant you were pressed into service?”

“That’s it,” Park nodded. “Come
to think about it, I’m amazed the translators came close enough to get it
right.”

“They didn’t,” Relaviss laughed.
“I had to figure it out by context.”

“Do I want to know what came
out?” Park asked.

“Probably not,” Relaviss
chuckled. “Well, I’m keeping you when you need to work on turn-around. There
should be a supply ship docking with you about now. Recycled food and water
will keep you alive, but fresh victuals are always appreciated in space.”

“As they are here, Admiral,” Park
assured him. “Thank you. Holman… uh… McArrgh out.”

“The joys of a double life,”
Marisea laughed from her console.

“My identity as Black Captain
McArrgh is no secret,” Park shook his head wondering how many times he had
repeated that lately. “I just try to use the same name others call me. How soon
until we can leave for Trohavn?”

“Whenever you say,” Marisea told
him. “The supply ship is just casting off now, although they do need to dock
with our other ships. An hour or less, I think.”

“Good enough. We still need to
finish rearming,” Park told her. He got to his feet and put the still-sleeping
Cousin on his seat. “I’m going down to the engineering deck to talk to Ronnie.
Iris are you free to join me?”

“I was meaning to talk to her
about the phasers anyway,” Iris admitted. “The one on our starboard wing is a
little underpowered.”

“Can’t have that,” Park commented
and they left the bridge together.

While Park was concerned about
his under-powered phaser, his first priority involved the Dark Ship alien’s
ultimate weapon; the one that melted a planet. “How can we defend against it?”
he asked Ronnie after he had chased everyone else out of the Engineering
wardroom.

Veronica Sheetz took a deep
breath and then a long sip of coffee before answering, “That depends on how it
is deployed, Park. You remember that everything I said about that weapon is
pure speculation, right?”

“So let’s take it on a speculative
basis,” Park suggested.

“Very well,” Ronnie shrugged.
“Our best case scenario is that whatever the weapon is, one or more Dark Ships
must land on a target planet.”

“That’s a best case?” Park asked.

“Second best, really,” Ronnie
replied. “The best case would be if it turned out such a weapon didn’t exist at
all, but we know that is not true. So the best is that whatever it is requires
them to land on a planet to use it. All we would have to do is keep them from
making a safe landing.

“I doubt that is the case,
however, so the next possibility is that it is some sort of beam or ray weapon
that must be deployed from orbit over a period of time. Again it would be easy
to interrupt the process. Also again, I doubt it. The survivors would have
noticed it and told us.

“So next best and this is pretty
bad by now,” Ronnie went on, “is that their weapon is something they have to
get near the planet but only very briefly. It is something they release and it
makes its own way down to the planet. This is a real possibility, but while
close, I don’t think it is quite right.”

“Why not?” Iris asked.

“Distribution,” Ronnie replied.
“While the previously known volcanic regions blew out first on Zartilenx, there
were new volcanos that developed after the normally active ones started. The
pattern of distribution was fairly even across the tropical and temperate zones
of the planet, with a scattering, also fairly even, in the arctic. To get that
sort of distribution I think whatever was used had to have been applied from at
least two hundred thousand miles. Could have been from further out, but any
closer and the sensor systems on Zartilenx would have noticed something.”

“What if the weapon is very
small?” Iris suggested. “Perhaps microscopic?”

“It could be,” Ronnie admitted,
“although I doubt it is actually microscopic in scale, but any closer in and
the Dark Ships would have been spotted flying in patterns to get that even a
distribution of effect.”

“Even if the weapon is some sort
of energy-based one?” Park asked.

“Oh, it has to be an energy-based
weapon,” Ronnie replied easily. “In fact, all the Dark Ship weapons are
energy-based or have been so far. I suspect this is a similar product of their
technology. In this case they are lending energy to increase the heat of the
planet’s magma, which, in turn, increases volcanic activity. Then energy
doesn’t just come from nowhere, but without knowing more I can’t say how any of
it works.”

“But you think it was deployed
from high orbit?” Park prompted her.

“Or even further away,” Ronnie
told him. “I don’t think it’s a beam weapon, though, at least not from that
distance. The spread of even the most tightly focused laser would still be so
wide that people on the ground would be able to detect it. I really think
something material has to have landed on the surface and in some way releases
energy and channels it into the magma. Anything fired remotely would have been
noticed. And that’s actually hopeful, because if the weapon is something
material it’s possible to block it. Something big we could shoot down.”

“It’s not big,” Park shook his
head. “Can’t be or, like a ship landing, it would have been noticed. It’s
small, or a lot of very small things.”

“I tend to agree,” Ronnie nodded,
“and so I’ve been thinking of ways to block a cloud of small objects. It all
depends on how vulnerable they are. A widely dispersed gravity cannon shot
might do the trick, unless they can take that sort of punishment. Phasers might
also help, but if they are shiny a lot will reflect.”

“Is there a way to reverse a
gravity cannon?” Park asked.

“Why would you want to do that?”
Ronnie asked.

“Seem to me the point might not
be to shoot them but to catch them,” Park replied.

“Maybe,” Ronnie shrugged. “It’s
possible, of course, but I’m not sure how well a ship would hold up under the
stress. All our bracing is designed with it going the other way. Of course the
best way to stop such a weapon to keep them from setting it off in the first
place.”

“The best way,” Park corrected
her, “will be to make sure they never enter Sol System in the first place.”

Tawatir
and the other Earth ships found themselves under attack
within minutes of their arrival in the Trohavn system. “Four missiles fired,”
Iris announced just before the Stasis shielding activated. “Switching to…” The
view on the screens flickered for several subjective seconds amidst the scream
of tearing metal. “…automatic fire,” she concluded even while the view was
changing. “Three Dark Ships,” she went on as the stasis shields powered down
again and the shrieking sound faded, “We got a direct strike on one, the second
is disabled and the third is running toward the inner system. Launching a high
speed dart.”

“What’s the status of our ships?”
Park asked.

“Minor damage only.” Marisea
reported after the reports came in. A moment later, Iris’ parting shot struck
its target and the flash filled two of the screens. “Our fighters are still in
their bays. Telemetry reports no damage.”

“For an ambush, we did pretty
well, then,” Park concluded. “And there’s one Dark Ship partially intact? Can
we take it captive?”

Garro Tinns fed a new course into
the ship’s navigation computer and Trag, turned the ship around, but before he
could apply the thrusters, the damaged Dark Ship began to glow a vivid red. It
seemed to inflate like a balloon until it was a bubble twice its original size.
A few seconds later the bubble popped and the red hot fragments rapidly cooled
off and turned black.

“Still no captives,” Park sighed.
“All right, it couldn’t be helped. Where are the rest of our ships?”

“Searching,” Marisea reported.

“Nothing on my scopes,” Iris
added.

“Park!” Ronnie called up from
Engineering.

“It was an ambush,” Park
explained before she could ask.

“Of course it was an ambush,”
Ronnie replied. “This is the engineering deck, not a cave. We have monitors
that mirror everything you can see up there. What I don’t see are any of the
ships from the Alliance we were supposed to be meeting. In any case, I was
reporting on something I didn’t think you had spotted yet. There’s an unusually
dense asteroid belt about two astronomical units inward from us.”

“Unusually dense is an
understatement,” Iris agreed a moment later.

“I haven’t seen an asteroid or a
debris field that dense outside of a movie,” Park commented. “I’d have thought
it impossible.”

“I thought that at first too,”
Ronnie told him. “Then I spotted the tender asteroids. We see things like that
in ring systems, like Saturn’s, all the time. In this case we have no less than
six pairs of tenders, keeping the smaller piece all tucked up nice and neat.”

“That can’t be natural, can it?”
Iris wondered.

“Very unlikely,” Ronnie laughed.
“Each pair is sixty degrees ahead of the last all along the belt’s orbit It
could happen naturally, but the chances? No, I think someone did this
intentionally; probably to keep the debris out of the normal space lanes.
Anyway, I’m detecting at least two dozen ships, most of them Dark Ships
patrolling the perimeter of that tight belt. If you’re looking for our ships,
my guess is you’ll find them in there.”

“I see the patrolling ships,”
Iris confirmed. “Looks like two Dark Ships for every Premm vessel.”

“How can you tell they’re Premm
from here?” Park asked.

“Their beacons are in our
catalog. The Premm might have changed them, but apparently did not,” Marisea
cut in, “but I think you’ve underestimated their forces. There are a dozen in
formations of six each patrolling both inside and outside the asteroid ring,
and at least three dozen Dark Ships, although they seem to be spread out over
nearly half the orbit of the ring.”