And now to see things from another point of view...
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Chapter 15.
"Leader, an urgent communication for you."
Dajzail looked up from his meal, seeing Kanjstall the Salutant waiting. "That urgent?"
"It is from Fleet Master Alztanza, Leader."
Home and Hive, that is urgent. With only seven Fleet Masters in the entire One Civilization (that the undercreatures mistakenly called an "empire"), communications from them were rare and always important; and Alztanza himself had been one of Dajzail's friends since they were young. "I will take it now, then."
Kanjstall dipped his respect, came forward, and gave him the message crystal. Without being told, Kanjstall dipped again and left. That is why he is my Salutant. I can rely on him utterly.
Placing the crystal in the reader, he was immediately faced by the Fleet Master.
"Dajzail, the Wise and Compassionate," the Fleet Master began, and Dajzail rippled his manipulators in annoyance. I am not some Hive vaingroom, to be foolishly flattered, especially by a friend. But he reminded himself that the last Leader, Alethkand, had been far less tolerant, and the Fleet Master had learned his communications protocol in those days, well before Dajzail had ascended. Fleet Master Alztanza continued, "the Strong and Just, I greet you. We have vital news for you."
As he listened, Dajzail forgot entirely about his meal, and felt his manipulators and entire body vibrating for an entirely different reason: fierce joy. Once the message was concluded, he spoke. "Kanjstall," he said, the green-light ball of Arena communication instantly appearing, "send a message to the Fleet Master, the complete text to be: Report here at once. Then join me in the conferral chamber with the Master of Forces, Master of Homes, and Master of Trade as swiftly as may be."
Dajzail finished his meal, leaving the bones to be cleaned up later, but he barely noticed the sensation of fullness or savored the taste – a shame, he noted distantly, as Tensari was difficult to come by without inciting difficulty with the undercreatures and should not be treated as mere fuel for a day. But his mind was far too occupied to pay attention to anything else.
The other four Molothos were waiting for him in the conferral chamber as he entered. Kanjstall, small but quick on his claws, dark carapace showing the touch of that green peculiar to those from the original homeworld; Malvchait, Master of Forces, massive, almost completely red with highlights of space-black, a warrior and strategist without equal; Elshuti, Master of Homes, mediant sex currently, a steel gray, hir eye damaged across nearly a quarter of its circle but the rest shining clear and sharp; and Master of Trade Peryntik, fresh from her latest molt, her regenerated forelimb still white-soft.
The four dipped low, their lower carapaces touching the floor; he gestured impatiently with one claw and they rose and locked legs for comfort. "What matter is so urgent, Leader?" asked Malvchait.
"The War of Purity moves forward," Dajzail said simply.
The others froze momentarily, and then a great hungry screech of fierce joy rose from all four. "We have word, then?"
"Fleet Master Alztanza finally broke the mystery, yes. His analysts sifted all of the data gathered from the high colonies, and finally discovered that the Twinscabbard-class vessel Blessing of Fire had failed to report back after more than four full revolutions. This was of course only one of several lost in that general period, but the timing was good; it would have been out more than one and a quarter revolutions and due to turn back, thus well out into the Deeps on exploration. Fortunately, there were records for the gene-codes for the Masters and Salutants on Blessing of Fire, and once Alztanza had received them, he was able to match them with the body the undercreature DuQuesne taunted us with."
"We do not know their home-star's exact location, then?"
Dajzail's laugh rippled around the room, a sound he knew would sound far from pleasant to most undercreatures. "Oh, but we do, Elshuti. We know – to within a very small degree – the time at which the conflict must have taken place. Thus, Alztanza was able to determine, within an equally small margin of error, how far Blessing of Fire could have traveled in that time, and what the general planned heading of Blessing of Fire was.
"This leaves only one candidate star, a green-central single-unit star not drastically different from our own, which fits with the human-undercreatures' known illuminance preferences."
"Are there Forces available on the nearest high colony?" asked Peryntik.
"A Seventh-Force is stationed there."
Malvchait bobbed up than down, obviously pleased. "Three hundred forty-three warships? That should be more than sufficient for this. I will take control personally, if you so order, Leader."
"I do wish you, and Alztanza – since it was his discovery – to direct this operation militarily. I will, myself, take command of the Master warship of the operation. However, I do not agree with your initial assessment."
The leader of the Molothos' military forces scissored his claws in apologetic confusion. "Truly? I know they have gained some warships –"
"I have watched these undercreatures very carefully," Dajzail said, and rapped his own fighting claws hard on the table to reinforce his emphasis. "They are dangerous animals. Fortune has favored them multiple times. The warships they were given are from the Survivor, and he is not one to take lightly. The Arena's announcement showed that two of them managed, in some manner, to defeat the entire complement of Blessing of Fire, perhaps even to destroy the ship itself. That may be – almost certainly was – an event that involved great fortune as well as, or even in place of, great skill, but we cannot know that.
"All we do know is that the human undercreatures have won every single challenge they have faced thus far, defeating the True People, the Blessed to Serve, the Vengeance, and the Warpers of Reality, the Shadeweavers themselves." He vibrated in violent negation. "No, we shall take no chances. Assemble a full Force at Zeshezan-Katrill, Master of Forces, all seven Sevenths. No, two full Forces. At the same time, assemble a complete Fleet for quick deployment to lowspace. We will not permit them the luxury of safety anywhere. We will assault and take their Upper Sphere. We will secure their Sky Gates for our own use. We shall bring an entire Fleet thence."
The others rose higher in anticipation.
"And then we will – regardless of cost or time – send that Fleet through their own Sky Gates, come to their very home system, and crush their worlds, and make these undercreatures either the slaves of the True People... or one final, cautionary tale in the history of those who have insulted us!"
Uh-oh. Wonder if the book will be long enough to get to this confrontation…
Hmm, and if maybe the journey to the deeps might yield something to help.
Oh !!!!!! It does make me wonder about how rare a full force is assembled and how much is a complete fleet?
Full Forces are assembled fairly often, but not for what should be a cakewalk like this. Dajzail’s being, from the point of view of the rest of the Molothos, insanely overcautious here.
A complete FLEET is something entirely else again. There are only seven Fleet Masters in the entire Molothos civilization, which has unknown but immense numbers of Spheres and even more “high colonies” founded on currently-uninhabited Spheres, so you’re talking something like a million ships, maybe more, in a Fleet.
Also, can you go into/out of the arena (Kanzaki-Locke space, IIRC) from just anywhere? Or does it need to be from within a sphere? For some reason I thought it was the latter.
You can only jump between universes through either the Harbor (the internal area of a Sphere) or through a Sky Gate.
Do I remember correctly that a jump at the Harbor is into the home system and an trans-universe jump at a Sky Gate is into the relative vicinity of the home system but still in “lowspace” terms a fair distance away? So a Sky Gate is a viable and scary invasion route but you still have some time to see someone approaching? Is there also a tactical constraint on the rate at which ships can jump, say like only a few per hour?
Correct. You come in a fair fraction of a light-year out from the home system.
There isn’t that much of a limit as to how many go through; I calculated that an entire Fleet of about 5,700,000 ships could Transition to normal space through Earthsphere’s Sky Gates in about 10-15 hours.
Wow. That’s an awful lot of ships. I didn’t realize the volume of the sky gates was that huge.
Maybe when they show up, they’ll want to be friends….?
My own guesses as to the meaning of the positions of the Molothos in this scene –
Leader is self-explanatory.
Salutant – Lieutenant, I think? And/or personal assistant?
A Fleet Master is roughly analogous to a high-ranking admiral/general, rank better described by the fact that there are only seven of them in the Molothos.
The Master of Forces is described as leading the Molothos military, and the Master of Trade must have the most difficult job in the Faction – relating to and even talking with subpeople without killing or even scaring them! Maybe even acting NICE to them on occasion!
The Master of Homes – I’m confused there. Maybe construction and/or colonies? Colonial growth?
Salutant is something like a batman (not like THE Batman), someone’s right hand and assistant for anything.
Fleet Master, yes, Four-Star General, though technically higher given how many levels of ranking they’ll need for the size of their military.
Master of Forces: Secretary of Defense
Master of Homes: Combines some of the functions of Secretary of the Interior, Secretary of Labor, and Housing and Urban Development
Master of Trade is about the same level, Secretary of Commerce and some parts of Labor and the office of Trade Representative.
“a green-central single-unit star” – Awesome. I first thought “green huh? there aren’t any green stars”, then I realized, just awesome.
I’m curious what Tensari is, but on second thought don’t really want to know.
You got that! Cool, I was hoping someone would.
The Tensari are mentioned a couple of times in Spheres, they’re a secondary or tertiary faction named after the species that founded them; the latter is of course what Dajzail is talking about.
I have too many possibilities as to what ‘green’ could mean in this context.
Green could be the type of light it typically gives off, for which green plants are well suited to absorb. Even if an alien biology doesn’t have the same type of photosynthesis in plants, whatever organisms provide the primary sunlight-to-chemical-energy function on a planet would likely be green for a star similar to our sun’s output.
Or it could be a stellar categorization term – we use “Main Sequence” but I could easily see colors being used as a more robust classification by a civilization that has a very casual and personal interaction with multiple star systems.
Something tells me I’m missing something, though. Care to enlighten me as to what “green-central” means here?
Its a spectral reference. The spectrum of our Sun, and stars very like it, peaks in the green area of the spectrum. By implication we now also know that the Molothos’ homeworld orbits what is likely a G-class star as well.
Got it. Green is the peak starlight. So the Molothos world probably looks similar in coloring to ours. The mass of sunlight-to-food organisms on their planet would be green like Earth. (though possibly a different shade)
I enjoy the theorizing of interstellar war, especially as passed through the Arenaverse. Most of the tech that is used in ‘realspace’ wouldn’t function in the Arena. Anything that functions in the Arena would be mostly useless in Realspace. So a Fleet will have some balance of space-capable warships that are essentially ‘wrapped’ for transport to the proper Gate, and the collection of Arena-capable warships doing the transportation and protection on the Arena side.
If you can manage to attack the convoy while still in the Arena, at least you’d only need to deal with the Arena-capable ships and not the Realspace ships too.
As far as defense against a Realspace invasion from Arenaspace, the defenders (assuming vaguely similar technical ability) would have their manufacturing base. Even against a million ships, a constant stream of newly created and crewed ships would eventually win against a non-renewing force. “Eventually” and “non-renewing” being key words.
If the defenders know the exit location of the Gate into realspace, they can defend the area and hopefully blow them up as they emerge. (Steve White’s books being excellent examples of defending and attacking through ‘warp points’ like the Gates would be)
Against a defending force that you know will be a long and protracted fight, the attackers should bring significant resources to create a manufacturing base. Somewhere out in the Oort cloud to gather raw materials, with a supply line through Arenaspace bringing in materials that can’t be gathered away from a planet, though if you could find a really far out planet(oid) you might have enough raw material variety to make a manufacturing base of useful size.
Still, that’s a massive enough undertaking with huge enough risks that it wouldn’t be pursued if any other options were available.
Just doing spaghetti-against-the-wall hypothesizing.
There’d be no necessity for their version of photosynthetic pigments to be like ours; in fact, I’ve always wondered why chlorophyll became dominant since it’s THROWING AWAY the majority of the energy in sunlight by reflecting green. We do have other pigments here on earth that are used for the purpose and some of them are more purple-red.
The exact location where the Sky Gates come through in normal space varies somewhat, as the Gates themselves drift, so it’s not really easy to fortify them even if you know where they are.
Also, you drop into normal space a significant fraction of a light-year out from the primary, so doing things like setting up manufacturing bases and such is going to be pretty much normal, because it’ll be a good chunk of a year at least before you can even engage the enemy.
An invading force has the advantage in concentration, of course; since the defenders don’t know if the invaders will come through one, two, or even all gates at once, they HAVE to set up to repel an invasion from any or all of them, while the invaders could choose to just come through ONE gate and force the defenders to redeploy… and of course maybe they only dropped HALF their force in that area, and drop the other half on the other side of the solar system for the second attack.
A “million” is a vague, rough estimate, and probably drastically low. You talk about manufacturing base, so recognize the Molothos have literally tens of thousands of Spheres and probably about that many top-of-Sphere colonies not associated with their controlled Spheres. They have divided their forces into seven Fleets. How many ships will be in one-seventh of a civilization that size?
As to the color of chlorophyll, it’s trying to absorb the right energy level of photon at the right intensity to be most advantageous to form the chemical bond (glucose) it wants. With the type of glucose most plants need, red and blue are the best wavelength + intensity to have CO2 + H2O react.
Most of the chlorophylls that are different colors are in significantly different situations than the majority of plant life on the surface of the ground. Algae is in water, so the light it receives is significantly filtered, giving lots of color variety. Climates closer to the poles (sunlight hitting at a slant, which means it passes through more air, which means more ‘blue’ is filtered out) have plants that are slightly different colors.
It’s a really fascinating question how much environments would or wouldn’t resemble each other on different planets. For an environment that uses glucose as its base sunlight-to-chemical product, then green-ish would probably be a common color IF the sunlight is similar to our own. Move our planet a couple million miles closer in or out, or have our star be a bit more energetic, and we’ll probably get a shinier, more reflective leaf, or darker, more absorptive leaf, but it would probably still be greenish. Shift the star’s peak output wavelength, though, and the colors of the dominant leaves will shift. (IF glucose is the base, which is a big IF)
I’d love to know more about the Molothos’ society to get a better idea of their military/civilian balance. Psychologically, they could very well be disinclined toward ‘luxury goods’ in which case it is eminently possible that they could have something nutty like 80% of their Gross Product going toward military purposes. Or, they could have relatively sensitive biological constraints, and so they need to devote 80% of GP toward keeping worlds habitable with vast terraforming efforts.
Population Density? If they enjoy being packed together, they could have full planet-wide cities that would drive humans nutty for lack of personal space. Or, maybe they have personal space requirements that make their urban centers more like our suburbs, so they need 10x more space than humans. Maybe they REALLY don’t do well in space. Maybe they are underground-based, and their 3D space tactics suck. Maybe they psychologically are inclined to ‘go for the kill’ and so they easily fall for feints. Defensive/cautious fighters? Methodical. Impulsive.
Lots of variety. Their military can be PLOT-sized and PLOT-abilitied without any worries of breaking believability.
But with even big differences in social distinctions, a 10,000-to-1 size advantage makes the war so one-sided as to be barely worth a footnote, _IF_ they were to focus everything they have on Earth.
Even if their productivity/sphere is 1/10th of human level, and they can only project 1/10th of their military might from those spheres to focus on Earth, they still wind up with a 100-to-1 advantage once they arrive.
Solar system battles would heavily favor the attacker because of the issue of concentration you mentioned. However, humanity could use the Arenaverse to FTL move ships around within the solar system. In this situation, you can have FTL within a system, but not outside a system, so the attacker’s concentration of forces will be somewhat negated.
Of course, being able to focus their entire strength on a single planet is yet another big “IF.” A race as relentlessly aggressive as the Molothos seems to be will have a LOT of fires going on at any given time. Asymmetric warfare could be the name of the game for humanity if it breaks into all-out war.
Feel free to ignore my ramblings. I absolutely LOVE the sorts of puzzles the Arenaverse brings forward, and I ramble on and on and on and….