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CIC's estimates scrolled up the side of Mugabi's plot, and all his years of experience in naval service insisted that those estimates had to be wrong. Each of those nine ships was fifty percent larger than an Ogre-class. Fifty percent. And despite that, they were at least twenty-five percent faster and far more maneuverable. More preposterous still, their firepower and energy signatures, now that they had emerged from whatever unreasonably efficient stealth technology had hidden their approach, indicated that they were at least six times as powerful, on a ton-for-ton basis, as anything the Federation had ever built.
It was flatly impossible, but those nine ships had Lach'heranu's entire squadron outnumbered by better than two-to-one.
It was a short, vicious, ugly battle. One which lasted only a very little longer than the one Lach'heranu had pla
The Solarian Navy floated in space, stu
And then the repeater plot reconfigured itself into a communications screen once more, without any input from any member of Terra's crew, and an alien, saurian face looked out of it.
Mugabi felt his jaw try to drop yet again as he recognized the face, or at least the species to which its owner belonged. So far as he knew, no human had ever managed to communicate with the species the Federation called the Ternaui, but ONI was very familiar with them. Everyone knew that the Ternaui were the most loyal, utterly reliable bodyguards any of the Galactics could hope for. The xenologists' best guess was that the Ternaui were telepaths, and that the Federation had devised a technique which allowed it to "program" them for complete obedience and loyalty. Whether that was true or not, humanity had been given ample proof of the effectiveness of a Ternaui bodyguard, and there was no question that the species was mute.
Which made what happened next as impossible as everything else that had happened in the last half hour.
"Good afternoon, Admiral Mugabi," the Ternaui said. His—or "its," Mugabi supposed, if it happened to be one of the neuters—mouth never moved at all, but its obviously artificial voice was as melodious and expressive as any human voice the admiral had ever heard, and its strangely beautiful silver eyes with their inky-black, vertical pupils seemed to look straight into his own. "We apologize for the abrupt nature of our intervention... and for the fact that it was impossible for us to alert you to our presence earlier. We realize that what has just happened must be extremely confusing, although, we hope, not unwelcome."
For a species which was supposed to be incapable of speech, the Ternaui turned out to have a remarkable gift for understatement, Mugabi thought.
"I speak to you as High Chancellor of the Avalon Empire," the scale-hided alien continued. "And as High Chancellor, I formally invite you to come aboard our flagship in order to meet with the Emperor so that he might explain to you what brings us here today."
-XII-
Quentin Mugabi had never imagined such a warship. Unlike the flattened ovoid shape of the Federation's Ogres, this vessel was an almost perfect sphere, fourteen miles in diameter, more like a moon than anything Mugabi would have called a ship. As his cutter approached it, he'd watched domes, engine pods, and weapons housings swell across its surface, but the sheer size of the ship had prevented his emotions from truly recognizing and accepting their mountain-range height and ruggedness. It was only now, as the cutter passed along the flank of a drive housing larger than a Solarian Navy heavy cruiser at a range of barely a quarter-mile, that the true enormity of the ship came home to him.
Yet the size of the vessel was the least of the impossibilities his battered brain found itself compelled to deal with. He was honest enough with himself to admit that he was still in a state of semi-shock from the incredible violence and speed with which Lach'heranu's entire squadron had been destroyed. Not to mention his sheer astonishment that any of the ships under his command were still alive! No doubt that had a great deal to do with his sense that the entire universe was just slightly out of focus. But the appearance of a Ternaui as the spokesman for this "Avalon Empire," was just as stu
So how had the most utterly reliable race of bodyguards in Galactic history wound up somehow managing to build what had to be an astonishingly powerful empire, judging by the size and power of its warships, without the Federation ever suspecting a thing? The fact that the Galactics hadn't had a clue as to that empire's existence was abundantly clear to him. If a primitive bunch like the human race had provoked such a... definitive response, then surely something like this "Avalon Empire" would have had the Council in a state of outright panic if the Federation had even dreamed that it existed, and the attack on Lach'heranu would never have come as such a complete and total surprise to her.
That was the most burning question, he reflected, although he had a few thousand others to go with it. For one, why should the Ternaui call themselves the "Avalon Empire"? For another, why should they be willing to risk revealing their existence, which they had obviously taken great and successful pains to keep the secret from the Federation, to come to the aid of the human race?
And why in Hell, he thought, with a sort of detached calm that resulted from far too many shocks in far too short a time, as his cutter approached the huge ship's main boat bay and he finally saw the name etched across the hull in letters two hundred feet tall, should a bunch of aliens name their flagship "Excalibur"?
The cutter drifted through the boat bay hatch into the gleaming, brilliantly illuminated cavern of the bay's interior and settled towards the designated landing circle. There were no docking tubes or umbilicals, only a beacon and a visual target for the cutter's pilot.
There was also no boat bay hatch, despite the fact that this bay, unlike that of his own flagship, was obviously pressurized, Mugabi noted enviously. The human race had made enormous technological strides over the past century, partly out of its own resources and partly by adapting any fragment of Galactic technology it could steal. In fact, as Mugabi was well aware, that very inventiveness was one of the things the Galactics had found most frightening about humanity. Yet rapid as their advances had been, humans had started so far behind the technology the Federation took for granted that the gulf between them had seemed completely insurmountable. One galling example of that gulf had been the ease with which the Federation generated force fields at the drop of a hat. The Solarian Navy had developed some ability to generate them—their warships' shields were based on the same technology, after all—but the energy and mass requirements of any force field generator human technology was yet capable of building prohibited human naval architects from using them for anything less vital than shields. Certainly no human engineer was yet capable of building the selectively permeable sort of force fields which obviously held in this boat bay's atmosphere!