The Starship Theseus

2. We don't start fights. We end them.

"What is it doing?" Horthus demanded, glaring at the vast hologram tank of his tactical room. Twenty minutes previous, it had been focused on the entire star system as he prepared for the arrival of a swarm of hostile spacecraft, but now it was focused entirely on Horthus-Prime, and the object which had appeared in orbit around it in defiance of all known laws of physics.

The arrival of the Aurealians in overwhelming numbers was one thing. He could deal with that. The Aurealians were weak and predictable, and though they may destroy all of the system’s defenses through sheer numbers, they would never take either of the inhabitable planets before reinforcements arrived.

Horthus had already been calmly planning ambushes and traps to make the Aurealians pay for every light second in blood and scrap metal when the human ship arrived. Horthus would never admit it, but his tail had almost fallen off when the sensors detected the fabric of space-time bending in a way that could only be the unique faster than light engine of the humans.

"Nothing so far, highness," a Nameless sensor tech answered. It was a male that Horthus recognized and knew to be competent. But not competent enough to earn him a Name. "It’s in realspace, as the humans say, but it’s just sitting in orbit around Horthus-prime."

Horthus grunted in acknowledgment, regretting for the thousandth time renaming the star and all of the significant planets after himself. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but he had been young and foolish when he’d issued that particular edict. He half wished that one of his rivals would challenge it, simply so that he’d be able to figure out which Horthus was being discussed in any given conversation.

"Are they in range of any of our defenses?" he asked after a moment.

"They’re outside the effective range of our planet based direct energy weapons," another Nameless, a female who was new to her post but seemed capable to Horthus’s experienced eye, answered. "They’re in range of two surface to orbit – highness, orbital platform six has just launched a missile battery against the humans."

"What fool authorized that?" Horthus bellowed. Plans for dealing with human visits to the Horthus system – he really should rename it but he couldn’t think of a way of doing so without losing face – had been in place for decades. In none of those plans were local commanders allowed to initiate hostilities against any human vessel or suspected human vessels.

"Draft a decree. I shall strip that fool of his name, and the names of his parents and children."

"That may not be necessary, highness," a third nameless spoke. Horthus did not know this one, he had simply appeared when the planning for the Aurealian invasion had begun and Horthus had not bothered to ask why. "Orbital platform six is venting atmosphere at a rapid rate. In ten minutes, everyone on board not in a vacuum suit will be breathing vacuum unless they can get to a shuttle or escape pod."

Horthus struggled to maintain his composure.

"We don’t start fights, we end them ."

The creed of the humans and their strange allies. It was a promise, and a threat, and the reason why you never, ever shot first at a human ship. Not if you valued your own.

Horthus felt no fear. He suspected he was incapable of fear. Fear was a thing for prey and the weak, and he was neither of those things. He DID feel anger and frustration, but he knew that if he expressed anything other than calm stoicism in the face of the human presence, the Nameless would squawk their lies as they always did and Horthus’s Named competition would use the rumors to their advantage somehow. He was not particularly worried about that – he had more loyal Named vassals than disloyal or questionable – but it was easier to solve a problem before the problem existed.

"How many shuttles and pods does the emplacement have?" Horthus asked calmly.

"One shuttle, two pods," came the answer. "Just enough for the eight Named aboard."

Horthus grinned. He knew that humans grinned too, sometimes even for the same reason. But where a human smile showed general pleasure, Horthus’s grin was the pleasure of a predator catching the scent of prey on the wind.

"How many nameless are aboard the station?" he asked calmly.

The answer was minutes in coming. Nameless came and went where they were told and did as they were told. The population of Nameless at any military instillation could vary widely, even from one day to the next.

"Sixty-three nameless," A voice Horthus vaguely recognized as being unimportant answered. He grinned wider, showing off his sharp, predatory teeth.

"Prepare to broadcast a decree." Placing his sceptor before him, resting the butt on the ground but careful to ensure that in no way could it be said he was resting on it, he waited for his holographic twin to appear before him. When it did, he shifted his posture slightly – he had been sagging more recently and it took conscious effort to correct it sometimes – he gestured for the recording to begin.

"I, Horthus, Supreme of the Horthus system, Horthus-prime, and all space within the orbit of the third ice-giant of the Horthus system, issue the following decree. Several moments ago, orbital platform six around Horthus-prime launched an unauthorized attack against a known human vessel. The humans retaliated as they always do, damaging an orbital platform vital to the defense of the jewel planet of the Horthus system. This attack on the humans was unauthorized and counter to established protocols for dealing with human visitations, and the human response is within their established rules of conduct regarding the defense of their vessels. They are, in fact, authorized by their various governments to destroy the platform entirely, yet they have thus far shown restraint.

"I, Horthus, issue the following decree. All Named aboard orbital platform six are stripped of their name. If the damage to the platform is repaired before the Aurealians arrive, their names shall be restored. Any who attempt to flee the damaged platform will have their names stripped from not only themselves, but for their families going in six generation backwards and forwards. I am Horthus, and this is my decree."

The recording ended just as the muscles in his back began to pinch, and he signaled to a Nameless female that his body required attention. She went to fetch a bottle of pain relief oil as he shed his robe and reviewed the playback of his decree.

"Send it," he said after the first playback. "Broadcast it to the humans too, I want them to see it."

With a gesture – one hand still on his back to massage the aching muscle – he zoomed into the damaged vessel. He was greatly amused when the escape pod, which had already launched, was shot down by the platform. Fratricide, most likely. And a good chance that the occupants of the pod had demanded it.

Death before dishonor. The credo that even the nameless Deathsworn abide by.

"What are the humans doing now?" Horthus demanded. "Have they responded to the missiles?"

"The human ship is breaking apart," One of the Nameless who had spoken before answered. The holotank shifted perspective to show the invading ship separating into numerous pieces.

"One of the missiles actually hit them?" Horthus asked, unable to mask his surprise. All previous attempts to attack the humans had been met with evasion or frustration as they disarmed or disregarded lethal weaponry.

"No, highness. It appears to be separating into modules. There is no atmosphere leakage, and each piece appears to have its own ion thrusters. The process began the moment it emerged from its transit. One of the modules is launching flack that has already destroyed eight – no, that was all of them. All of the missiles targetting the humans have been destroyed."

‘Of course they have,’ Horthus thought. This is why he hated humans. They were always ten steps ahead, and they danced around all attempts to catch up to them with malevolent laughter.

"Zoom in on the individual modules," he suggested. "Identify weapons and counter measures. Also identify gravity fields, living spaces, energy sources, and especially any magnetic bottles. Humans never go anywhere without a kiloton of antimatter and I want to know where it is until it’s five light years away from my planet."

"Shall I establish contact to the human vessels?" another Nameless asked.

Horthus considered. It was a valid question; should he? The edict didn’t count, not really. He was simply disavowing the foolish actions taken by those idiots on the orbital emplacement to prevent escalation. Or, at least, Horthus believed that would be the human interpretation of his actions. In his eyes, he was simply punishing fools for being fools. He had not contacted the human leader, the ‘captain’ of the ‘ship’ to demand the reason for their visit. Should he? By the humans own rules, they could only respond to violence initiated against them. Could he just … ignore them?

It galled him to admit it, but avoiding a conflict with the humans might be the best solution he could hope for. They were invaders, unwelcome and unasked for, yes. Unfortunately, fighting a human was like fighting your own shadow, except the shadow was faster, stronger, and had sharper claws.

"Have you fools figured out how the humans destroyed my space station yet?" Horthus demanded.

"Somehow they overrode the safety measures on the toilets, causing them to vent atmosphere directly into space," came the answer.

"The toilets?" Horthus was unable to mask his anger, so he didn’t even try. "The humans destroyed one of the key defensive structures of the entire star system defending the most valuable planet for six light years by breaking its TOILETS ?!"

All of the nameless cringed submissively. They were keenly aware that he could dismember them with his bare claws, and there was nothing they could do to stop him. But that would be unseemly, and would cost him a capable Nameless.

"Is the station salvageable?" he asked. "We’ll need it to deal with the Aurealians, once I convince the humans to leave."

"Eleven Nameless managed to don vacuum suits in time and are working to correct the problem," came the answer. "The humans somehow infected the station with a talking … metal wire thing. And something called Are Gee Windows. The metal wire keeps offering solutions that make the problem worse, and the ‘windows’ keeps crashing and needs to reboot every five minutes. If we can fix the computer problem, it should just be a matter of replacing the lost atmosphere."

"Inform the Nameless that if they manage to salvage the station, they and their immediate kin will be given Names," Horthus declared. He really did need that station operational, and passing out names to the Nameless was such a little thing. By most standards, every Nameless in the room deserved a Name five times over, but holding it back was such keen motivation that he would withhold it from them until their funeral feast. But if passing out names got him that platform back, it was currency well spent. "How long before the station runs out of atmosphere?"

"It’s tanks are already dry. The surviving crew not in vacuum suits are crowding in chambers cut off from the air recyclers. Most will be dead in a few hours. The nameless in suits have maybe a day."

Horthus grunted in acknowledgment. "Begin plans to retake, repair, and repopulate the station. Assume no survivors, and that the malicious human computer programs will remain in place. Repair teams will power down the station completely, replace the memory cores, and reprogram whatever they need to reprogram so that this doesn’t happen again. And they will do it before the Aurealians arrive!"

"Yes, Highness," the room answered. The nameless began furiously interacting with their holographic inputs.

Horthus took control of his own holo-display, zooming in on the modular human vessel as it continued to separate. He understood, now, what it was doing. It was yet another method of defense. Even if one of the modules was destroyed, the others would be far enough from the blast radius to be unaffected. Brilliant. Impractical for anyone but a human, but brilliant.

Not for the first time, he envied the humans. Their FTL tech was simply miraculous. As he understood it, even their ‘skip drives’ were more efficient than the drives in the Deathsworn ships and faster than the ones the Aurealians use. It wasn’t that the humans couldn’t travel the stars using understandable technology, they simply chose to use something that was so far outside of Horthus’s understanding that it might as well be magic.

The human’s statement that they’d stopped using the skip drive because they were ‘slow and inefficient’ was hard for Horthus to swallow. To the humans, the fastest ships in the deathsworn fleet, which were measured at 45C operating at peak efficiency were ‘inefficient.’ The fastest Aurealian transport, estimated at 60C, were ‘slow.’

Meanwhile, human ships simply jumped from point A to point B instantly, even if the points were light years apart. Oh, there were limitations of course. ‘Line of sight,’ as the humans call it, but that’s hardly a problem in the emptiness of space. Singularities and supermassive stars can throw off the accuracy of the guidance system with their gravity well, or so the humans claimed. But otherwise? Simply magic.

Horthus hated humans.

He particularly hated that they were unwilling to share their secrets with him, or the Deathsworn fleet. The fact that the embargo applied equally to the Aurealians was not satisfactory, in his opinion. Unfortunately, it was apparently human policy to destroy the Aurora Drive by flooding it with antimatter rather than allowing it to fall into the hands of ‘belligerents.’ Even IF Horthus knew which module contained the drive, and even IF he sent a boarding party and they were not destroyed by the humans wickedly effective anti-boarding measures, his only reward would be wiping out the life of a large portion of his planet as the radiation from the resulting explosion wreaked havoc.

Sure, it might be a bluff, but Horthus had never known a human to bluff.

Horthus hated humans.

If Horthus had access to the sort of technology they used so casually, he would rule the galaxy. Forget the Horthus system, it would be the Horthus spiral! He would completely subjugate the Aurealians and any other lesser race his Nameless and Named subjects found.

Except, perhaps, the humans.

Horthus sighed. He hated humans.

Perhaps most galling of all, according to them, he hadn’t even met their military yet. Every human he’d met had insisted that they were something else. Merchants, explorer, cartographer, diplomat. Never soldier. And yet those explorers and diplomats had stomped all over any attempt to stop them and then, instead of delivering the coup de grace as was proper, had stopped and asked with concern "Are you okay? Sorry about that, but you didn’t give me much choice. You shouldn’t be attacking strangers, you know?"

Humans were an enigma.

Horthus hated enigmas.

And now an enigma inside an enigma inside an enigma had appeared in orbit around the crown jewel of his legacy just as it came under threat of his species’ arch enemy. Were they here to help the Aurealians? Why would they do that, they’d shown no interest in the conflict before. They had, in fact, taken deliberate steps to distance themselves from it.

Perhaps they were simply here to exploit the conflict for profit? That was a human thing to do, wasn’t it? Or was there some other motivation that was uniquely human that he had not considered yet?

Horthus sighed.

"Ignore the humans unless they cross firing paths of our emplacements. If they do, issue a demand for them to move. Position local orbital emplacements to intercept them if they show hostility, but do not initiate. We have wasted enough time on them. Show me the latest projections of the Aurealian force."

The human mind was an enigma to Horthus, and its intentions were clouded and obscure. All he could do was wait until they made their intentions known, and hope that none of his subordinates made the situation worse by shooting at them again.

Because the humans had a saying of which he was quite aware.

"We don’t start fights. We end them."

‎