The Excalibur Alternative

"Sure it does," Mugabi growled.

It wasn't the best growl he'd ever produced. In fact, it wasn't even close. The men and women of the Solarian Navy were only too familiar with the subterranean rumble the bearlike admiral normally produced in moments of intense displeasure, but he was too tired to do justice by it this time... and not just physically.

He cocked back the chair behind his desk and let his body sag around his bones for just a moment while he scrubbed his black, broad-cheekboned face. Then he let his hands fall back to the old-fashioned blotter and turned his head to gaze out the armored viewport set into the outer hull of the huge space station.

It was a spectacular view. Under normal circumstances, it exercised a perpetual fascination and spawned an almost childlike sense of delight deep within him. But not even the view could lighten the crushing sense of despair which loomed over him today.

The planet about which the station orbited was a cloud-swirled sapphire, breathtakingly beautiful as it floated against the soot black of space and the pinprick diamonds of the stars. The white disk of its moon was visible around its flank, and the clutter and cluster of hundreds of spacecraft glittered like scattered gems of reflected sunlight as they went about their business. One of the Navy's main construction docks dominated the scene, and Mugabi could just make out the bright, color-coded vacuum suits of the yard workers as they hovered about the mile-long hull of what would have been a new battlecruiser. The ship was perhaps three-quarters completed, with most of the hull plating in place. Probably her powerplant was pressurized and on-line, since he could see that three of her five main drive nacelles had already been closed up. But even under the best of circumstances, she was still at least six months from completion... and even under Mugabi's most optimistic estimate, there was no way she could be finished and worked up for duty before the hammer came down.

He closed his eyes and scrubbed his face again, feeling the responsibility which accompanied his despair and wondering which was truly the greater burden. He'd given the Solarian Navy forty-three years of his life, from the heady days as an ensign, when he'd truly believed that humanity might be able to build a fleet strong enough to protect its world against the Galactics, until today. Along the way, he and the rest of the human race had learned too much about the crushing power of the Federation for him to cling to any false hope that the Navy could successfully defend the Solar System, yet he'd continued to hope—or to tell himself that he did, at any rate—that they could at least put up sufficient fight to convince the self-serving Galactics that humanity's threat was too slight to justify the losses they might take to eliminate it. But all of those false hopes were gone now, exposed for the pipe dreams they had been. The Federation's Council had decided to call the human bluff, and no one knew better than he how threadbare that bluff truly was. Yet even now, even knowing how futile it would be, the high rank and the duties he had spent half his lifetime earning remained. Hopeless though it might be, the responsibility to defend humanity against its foes was still his, and if it would have been so seductively easy to pass that responsibility on to someone else, that was an act of which he was constitutionally incapable. Besides, it wasn't as if it would really have mattered in the end.

"Has the President decided how she'll respond to the Galactics yet?" he asked finally.

"No," Stevenson replied. "Or if she has, she's keeping the final call confidential so far. There hasn't been any official demand for her to respond to yet. In fact, I doubt very much that the Galactics have the least suspicion that we know what they're up to. They're not very good at that part of this," he added with monumental understatement.

"Maybe not, or maybe they just don't care," Mugabi said without opening his eyes.

"I think they really are as incompetent as they seem," his superior said. "They haven't really had to be competent—not when they carry the biggest stick in the known universe. Besides, their fundamental arrogance seems to preclude any possibility of their taking any of us `primitives' seriously enough to worry about how we play the game."

"And even if they did worry about how we play it, they'd only change the rules if it looked like they might lose." Mugabi opened his eyes once more, and glared almost challengingly at the other admiral.

"Now that," Stevenson sighed, "I'm afraid I can't disagree with. Not given how thoroughly they've decided to change their own rules to screw us over."

Mugabi only grunted. There wasn't really anything else to say, although it had taken humanity a while to realize just how completely rigged the game was. It was ironic, really, that all those late twentieth century "saucer nuts" had actually had a point about how closely extraterrestrials had kept Earth under surveillance. One of Mugabi's great-grandfathers had been a special agent of what was then called the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and he'd kept a diary with religious attention to detail. Mugabi had read it when he was in high school, and he'd been particularly struck by its account of the handful of "saucer investigations" his ancestor had been assigned to. Special Agent Winton had done his job conscientiously enough, but in his journal, he'd also always ridiculed the possibility that there was anything to be discovered. After all, why would anyone capable of interstellar flight worry about keeping a planet full of prespace aborigines under surreptitious observation? What could possibly have made the human race so important that a civilization that much more advanced would bother with them in the first place? Or worry about keeping its presence a secret from the aborigines if it did take an interest in them?

Personally, Mugabi thought Great-Grandad Winton's objections had made excellent sense, given what Earth had known about the cosmos at that point in her history. Of course, there had turned out to be entirely too many things Earth hadn't known then, and given what humanity had discovered since, the nuts and paranoics turned out to have had a point all along after all. In fact, the only thing Quentin Mugabi had never been able to figure out was why the Galactics had waited this long to make their minds up about just how to deal with the barbarian menace the human race represented to their comfortable view of how the universe ought to be run.

No, that wasn't really true, he reflected. He doubted that any human would ever truly understand how a so-called "government" could dither, literally, for centuries before reaching the decision every member of it must have known from the begi

It had taken the humans' intelligence services many years to begin to unravel the complexities of politics in the Federation, and there were still a lot of unanswered questions, some of which were pretty damned big. One thing was obvious, however: the closest human parallel to the Council's internal dynamics would probably have been a meeting of the Italian Mafia, in Moscow, chaired by the Yakuza. It was all about complex and constantly shifting alliances and power blocks, and the fact that a councilor might sit for as long as three or four Terran centuries at a time gave each of them enormous scope for maneuvers and countermaneuvers that left the odd dagger planted in a colleague's back... sometimes literally. No one (including the members of the Council itself, probably, Mugabi thought mordantly) really understood all of the involved and intricate obligations, debts, and unsettled accounts involved in the complicated crafting of deals and positions on policy issues, but no one was foolish enough to pretend that anything besides naked self-interest formed the basis for almost all of those deals in the end.