John Ringo: Watch on the Rhine

At this point, truth fled for… greener pastures. “We care for our planets,” the Tir lied. “Our projections show that, were humans to be let loose onto the galactic scene, ecological disaster would follow quickly. We cannot allow this. And yet we need your people to defend our civilization. It is a difficult problem.”

“What can I do to help?” Günter asked.

Had the Tir had the slightest clue he was being overheard, no doubt his lies would have been even more carefully couched. So thought Deputy Assistant Clan Coordinator, and Bane Sidhe [11] “Killers of elves.” The Darhel are the elves. operative, Rinteel.

Listening to the conversation between the Tir, Günter, and the others in the Tir’s office, Rinteel’s mind kept revolving around one word. Agendas. The Darhel have one. The humans have another. We have still a third. But ours at least leaves the humans free and frees us. Surely they will be difficult to deal with, so violent, so aggressive, so selfish as they are. And yet, so long as the Posleen exist and are a threat, they will need us… to produce their machines of war, to maintain them. They will dominate us, no doubt. Yet my people can have a future in every way brighter under human dominance than ever we have under the overlordship of the Elves. The humans, at least, have some sense of fairness. The Elves have none.

The conversation in the Tir’s office was very difficult for Rinteel to follow. The office was bug proof, the Indowy knew. He had tried to bug it but, alas, without success. The Darhel’s AID, unlike those given to the humans so lavishly, was untapable, at least by any means available to the Bane Sidhe.

But every gate has its fence, every rat hole its exit. In this case it was simple sound. Coming from the speakers’ voice boxes, the sound vibrated the walls of the Tir’s office. These walls in turn caused the air of the surrounding rooms to move. This air, it its own turn, vibrated other walls. In time — and space — the very exterior of the building moved, oh slightly, slightly.

And nearby, and in direct line of sight, a Bane Sidhe listening post picked up those vibrations. A Bane Sidhe computer, constructed by the Indowy but designed and programmed by Tchpth, the deep-thinking “Crabs,” painfully translated these vibrations into speech. The translation required intimate knowledge of each speaker’s voice. The slightest thing could upset it; a cold, a sore throat. And with new speakers the machine was hopeless until examples of their speech could be obtained.

Thus, while one of the speakers, a new voice, was beyond the computer, the words of the Tir came through clearly.

Listening carefully to the sometimes garbled translation, Rinteel thought, I must speak with the ruler of these people. Alone.

“What is it about this place, these thresh, that puts them so far forward on the Path of Fury?” asked Athenalras of Ro’moloristen.

“That remains unclear, my lord. The records we have gleaned indicate only great, fearsome ability on the path. Well…” The junior hesitated.

“Yes,” demanded Athenalras, crest extending unconsciously.

“Well, my lord… the thresh records indicate great, perhaps unparalleled ability in war… but almost always followed by ultimate defeat.”

“Bah. Great ability. Great defeats. Make up your mind, puppy.”

Carefully keeping his crest in a flaccid and submissive posture, Ro’moloristen hesitated before answering. “My lord… in this case I think the two may just go together. A defeat seems not to stop or deter these gray thresh. They always come back, always , from however stinging a loss, and they are always willing to try again.”

The senior snorted. “Let them come back after they have passed through our digestive systems.”

Karl Prael, a goateed, heavyset man of indeterminate years, closed the massive vault door against the ear-splitting and mind-numbing sounds of a tank factory on a frenzy of production. A country that had turned from producing a few hundred tanks a year to over one thousand per month could no longer worry about the niceties of noise-pollution-control measures. The workers in the plant, the much-expanded plant, put on protective ear muffs and soldiered on.

Outside of the plant, of course — this being Germany, Germany being Green, and many — though not all — of the Green leadership having sold out to the Darhel, there was a continuous noisy protest against the plant, the projects it housed, the war effort, the draft… the name-your-left-leaning cause.

The din inside the vault was little better.

Prael had come to the project team from a cutting-edge software company. His job was fairly easy, or straightforward at least: produce a software and hardware package to control a light-cruiser-sized tank mounting a single heavy-cruiser-sized gun. This he could do; had nearly done, as a matter of fact. But the rest of the team…

“A railgun! A railgun, I say. Nothing else will do. Nothing else will give us the range, the velocity, the rate of fire, the ammunition storage capability, the…”

Ah, Johannes Mueller is heard from again, thought Prael.

“Then give me a railgun,” demanded Henschel, pounding the desk in fury, and not for the first time. “Tell me how to build one. Tell me how to keep it from arcing and burning out. Tell me how to generate the power. And tell me how to do those things now !”

“Bah!” retorted Mueller. “All of those things can be fixed. Half the problem in engineering is merely defining the problem. And you just have.”

“Yes,” agreed Henschel. “but the other half is fixing it and for that there is no time.”

“We do not know there isn’t time,” insisted Mueller.

“And, my friend,” said Henschel, relenting, “we do not know that there is time, either.”

Mueller sighed in reluctant agreement. No, they didn’t know if there was going to be time.

“If you gentlemen are finished shouting at each other?” queried Prael.

Mueller turned his back on Henschel, throwing his hands in the air. “Yes, Karl?”

“I have some news; several pieces actually. The first is this,” and with that Prael began handing around copies of a small, stapled sheaf of paper. “The decision on specs has been made. This is it, and we are going to design it.”

An elderly gentlemen, bearded and face lined and seamed with years spent in the outdoors looked over the sheaf. “They’ve rejected the idea of powering every idler, have they?”

“Yes, Franz, they have. They have also…” and Prael gave a brief and irritated moment’s thought to the thousands of Greens protesting outside the plant, ”… they have also rejected powering the thing with a nuclear reactor.”

“What? That’s preposterous,” interjected Reinhard Schlüssel, the team’s drive train and power plant designer. “We can’t power this thing with anything less than nuclear. That or antimatter.”

“We can, we must, we will,” answered Mueller. “Natural gas. We can do this.”

“I see they have at least accepted the use of MBA” — molybdenum, boron, aluminum — “armor,” observed Stephan Breitenbach from where he sat by a paper-laden desk. That’s something.”

“ Limited MBA, Stephan. The stuff is too expensive and too difficult to manufacture to do more than reinforce the basic metal.”

Breitenbach shrugged off Henschel’s comment. Something was better than nothing. And the weight saved did suggest that natural gas would be an acceptable fuel.