A Terran in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire
19 T.S. Years Ago
United Space Forces Headquarters
After the war ended, Alan Chandrasekhar began engaging in a practice that would prove to be very helpful: ferociously reading intelligence reports that covered events that he wasn't present at, but closely impacted him nonetheless. While he was still living off Chinese lunch specials that supplied multiple meals with each cheap order, at U.S.F. Headquarters on Old Earth, the pieces were coming together that would change his life forever.
Meeting at the Admiralty were the U.S.F. Naval Minister, six top fleet admirals, and the secretary general of the Terran Parliament, the supranational legislature for the four great Terran nations. Also present were representatives from the four great Terran guilds. These men and women—mostly men, to be truthful—were among the most powerful Terrans in the universe, entrusted with a nearly unimaginable amount of power and influence, alongside practically unlimited resources. Some had been present at the Oracion Peace Conference. The notable exception were the 'pirate kings' like the infamous Lord Hazanko. Though the pirate leaders were not necessarily snubbed, they were not present at this Space Forces war summit, for obvious reasons. To this day, Alan couldn't say if that decision had crippled the war effort from the start.
Among the invited, their conversation, according to the records, went as follows:
"We're all in agreement that a settlement with the Ctarl-Ctarl would be most desirable?" asked the Secretary General.
"Of course," the Naval Minister agreed. "And we're not ruling that out as a possibility. But the situation demands we be prudent."
There was uniform agreement from the representatives, even if they didn't actually feel that way. It was important to present a united front to the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire. There some meaningless platitudes and small-talk, before they confronted their military situation.
The Naval Minister did most of the talking. "As you know, the Ctarl-Ctarl order of battle is organized differently than ours—the task force remains their preferred military unit, with very specific assignments and fairly limited autonomy. The Ctarl-Ctarl are particularly fond their pursuit lines—heavy emphasis on destroyers, heavy frigates and fast cruisers—which account for as much as 70% of the ships in their task forces."
"Accounting for their current naval rebuilding campaign from the last war, how many of these task forces do the Ctarl-Ctarl possess?" Alan didn't know who asked this, as the records were partially censored when he found them.
"Our intelligence suggests just over three hundred operational task forces," a fleet admiral explained.
"Three hundred? How accurate is our intelligence?"
"We have no reason to doubt it."
"Likewise, the Ctarl-Ctarl have at least seven major fleets, alongside their reserve fleets. They're comparable to our expeditionary fleets, though smaller."
The representative of the Pyotr Empire asked the next question. "Assuming we're at war in a month, with our own rebuilding campaign, where do we stand?"
"The United Space Forces includes nine expeditionary fleets, three reserve fleets, and the unified corporate fleet. If combined with our task forces that accounts for at least 90% of our current operational forces."
"How many task forces do we have?"
"Forty-two."
This conference, still kept secret from the public, basically set up the course of the whole war. The Ctarl-Ctarl Imperial Navy outnumbered all the Terran navies, combined, at almost 3-to-1. If you optimistically factored out the portions of those navies used for local policing and anti-piracy, it was still 2-to-1 in their favor. The Terrans had twice as many carriers and supercarriers, which were organized both defensively and offensively (by contrast, Ctarl-Ctarl carriers where organized defensively). The Ctarl-Ctarl had almost seven times as many cruisers and twice as many 'big-gun' destroyers, versus interdiction and anti-fighter destroyers. Since the Ctarl-Ctarl hardly utilized fighters and were conservative with their bombers, this meant they had twice as many destroyers in effect.
On paper, it looked like a disaster waiting to happen. If this intelligence had been available ten years earlier, Alan probably wouldn't have even have fought in his first war in the first place, he imagined. And yet, there was another Ctarl-Ctarl War. Maybe the philosophers were correct, in that any war was a losing scenario.
Then again, none of that meant anything to Alan, at least not at first. He was too busy being miserable, underemployed (or unemployed), reflecting on all the mistakes he'd made in the course of his life that brought him this point. It was all terribly self-absorbed, but that could be said, cruelly, about a lot of depression people felt, especially middle-class depression.
Of course, Alan wasn't the only one in despair, and it was a little selfish to think so. He was the middle child of his family, with an elder brother and a younger sister—Armaan and Indira. He did not speak to either of them regularly, and hadn't since he enter the Tenpa Naval Academy as a teenager—they just had drifted apart. He hadn't spoken to either in ten years when he heard from Indira, a few weeks after the Oracion Peace Conference blew up, figuratively.
It was bad news. Indira had her first child with her husband, a wealthy yet cheerful Tenpa businessman, a year earlier. Somehow, against all odds, Indira had caught pertussis—whooping cough—and given it to her baby. The disease almost claimed the infant, and left the couple a nervous wreck. Her husband's family was dispersed across Terran space, even more than hers, and only a few could come to assist. The Chandrasekhar Family congregated around her, trying to fix her frayed nerves, and Alan wasn't an exception.
So, Alan visited the family he wasn't really comfortable with. At least the spotlight wasn't on him and his apparent failures. There wasn't really much to do besides think, and Alan did a lot of that, sitting in his brother-in-law's holiday home on Bentengaun, a rich vacation world in the heart of the empire. When his parents could finally be convinced to go out and enjoy themselves, they had Alan watch his nephew, since he actually had somewhat recent experience with babies.
He would stare at his nephew, the small, round baby who mostly slept and smelled, like any baby. Any Terran baby, anyway—one thing he knew, and the Space Forces knew, were that despite the very close genetic similarities between Terrans and Ctarl-Ctarl, their newborns were very different. Even among the other intelligent species in the galaxy, Terran babies were, for a lack of a better word, notoriously useless, perhaps almost as useless as Corbanite newborns. They could barely function, had no motor skills, and it took time for them to stand upright, much less learn to walk.
Inevitably, he compared them to Ctarl-Ctarl, whom he'd already studied, and as he would soon find out, would study a great deal more. Ctarl-Ctarl babies were exceptionally different than Terran babies, considering they grew up into similar-looking beings. For starters, within days of birth, Ctarl-Ctarl could almost fully stand upright. Their heads were smaller—though adults had heads proportional with their bodies, Ctarl-Ctarl babies had somewhat smaller heads, hardly surprising given that Ctarl-Ctarl women could give birth to three or more of them at a time regularly. Their heads grew very quickly, quickly making them 'proportional' in the Terran opinion. They probably could have walked within a few weeks if it wasn't for the fact that Ctarl-Ctarl babies didn't open their eyes until about two weeks after their birth, after which their vision was still rather poor. That was a weakness they had compared to Terran newborns, who could actually see. They made up for, he heard, by having exceptional hearing that gave them good spatial awareness for newborns.
Another difference was disease: Ctarl-Ctarl children had fantastically strong immune systems, perhaps even more so than adults. Alan was no biologist and was only basically aware of the details, but Ctarl-Ctarl "cubs" or "kittens" as they were called enjoyed multiple layers of protection called "active immunity", inherited from both parents, which was supplemented by antibodies carried over breastfeeding. Ctarl-Ctarl did not nurse as long as Terrans did, so that advantage was lost quickly, but they remained largely immune to many diseases that bothered Ctarl-Ctarl adults. In the U.S.S.A., there was a powerful pharmaceutical corporation, PARA•SOL, who was negotiating for the rights to reproduce Ctarl-Ctarl infant antibodies in a form that could assist Terrans. Those negotiations broke down when the war began a few months later.
While thinking of this, he thought of something: though they lived shorter lives than Terrans, the Ctarl-Ctarl probably owed their massive empire not just to historical circumstance, as Terrans did, but to their biology, and not just because they could turn into vicious animals or deflect bullets. Ctarl-Ctarl women gave birth to large "litters", and quite easily, who could soon take care of themselves. They matured into puberty slightly faster, and then the process repeated itself again. He'd never heard of a Ctarl-Ctarl woman dying in childbirth, not in this millennium. It was no wonder why the Ctarl-Ctarl had a single empire that might be more populous than all of Terran space combined, despite their long history of horrifically bloody wars and internal genocide. On the other hand, the current rates of population growth in the empire were actually fairly unimpressive, especially when compared to the past. If there was a population advantage, it wouldn't be there for long. The answer to that was clearer: only a fraction of Ctarl-Ctarl, it seemed, had children. Imperial military personnel rarely had children until they received a permanent posting on a major world, unlike Alan, who had his first child between periods of leave from his command, like practically every other family man he knew. A good number of Ctarl-Ctarl probably died in military service before they could have children. And for the entire population, Ctarl-Ctarl needed a sort of hybrid marriage-childbirth license issued by the Imperial Ministry of the Interior before they could have children. It wasn't as though the government would abduct a child born out of license, but apparently, they wouldn't have free access to many of the empire's rather numerous social services. A draconian, but effective, method of population control. Terrans had nothing of the sort; if anything, food, clean water, and wealth were the primary constraints on childrearing, and they didn't work that often.
When his nephew was no longer at risk, his thoughts drifted to the coming storm. He spent much of his day listening to the newsfeed over audio or video, in his brother-in-law's mountain estate. Predictably enough, in the decade that followed the Oracion Peace Conference, pundits, ideologues, lobbyists, would-be generalissimos and king-makers of every kind claimed it was so obvious that Terrankind would be at war with the Ctarl-Ctarl again. In truth, as far as Alan remembered, it wasn't that obvious. That, and it was also a surprise how the war ended.
The Oracion Peace Conference was supposed to deliver the goods, to "make the galaxy safe for democracy," as people were fond of saying. To an audience who wasn't aware, Alan made a point of noting that "democracy" really just referred to the Terran consensus of legitimate sovereignty of the constitutional monarchies and republics that made of the great empires, the rights of the capitalist status quo that defined the Terran economy, and the desire to renounce war as an instrument of policy. In a sense, it was far removed from the 20th century origins of the saying on Terra, during the First World War. On the other hand, "making the world safe for democracy" on old Earth hadn't really safeguarded democracy for China, Vietnam, or many African states either.
People, particularly the diplomats, seemed hopeful. In the Presidential Palace on Oracion, an unparalleled outburst of optimism was held up through parades, demonstrations and rallies right up until the government announced the talks had fallen through. He didn't know how the Ctarl-Ctarl were taking it—the rather belligerent attitude their envoys had throughout the conference was suddenly replaced by uncharacteristic silence that lasted right up until they screamed their way out. That should have been a warning sign.
It was a frosty but pleasant July day, and the mountain home was picturesquely covered in snow. Alan was doing what he usually did, sending out copies of his unimpressive resume, doing anything to keep his mind of his unemployment, being unsuccessful in that regard, when a call came for him.
"Song Residence, who may I ask is calling?" he asked, holding a pot of steamed vegetables. Since he'd returned from assignment and fallen into his melancholy he'd found himself eating less and less as a habit. He'd actually lost about three kilograms without trying, though a lot of that was probably lost muscle mass as well. "This is he."
The call was from the military liaison's office in Bentengaun's capital. The office connected him to Counter Admiral Rufus Monzo, whom Alan barely remembered from the shakeup that happened in the navy at Heifong years ago: around Alan got the secret assignment in the Empire, Monzo became commander of the squadron that included the Nova-3. Someone, maybe Duuz, had brought Alan to his attention, and with Monzo becoming a task force commander out of Heifong, on what would soon be a flashpoint on the border, he had come calling personally.
Alan wanted to refuse. Specifically, he wanted to tell Monzo to repeatedly kiss the widest part of his skinny posterior. But what choice did he have? He was depressed, losing weight, and spending time with a family he really wasn't getting any closer to liking.
He assured him good terms: a full reinstatement of his commission, the rest of the back pay owed to him, commendations for part of his assignment (the portion he hadn't screwed up), even a pathway for promotion. Alan tried to downplay his acceptance as much as possible and left Bentengaun the next day. His family was rather surprised, to put it mildly.
He went to Heifong—not the naval port but the capital city—where Monzo greeted him personally, a sign of respect, as did his subordinate, Commander Perez. Alan quickly learned that Perez was the woman who replaced him a whole seven years earlier when he was given a command at Heifong V—her rank was that of a Captain, 2nd Rank, one above him, but being from the U.S.S.A., she called herself Commander, and him Lieutenant Commander. It was one of those little things that made naval life needlessly complicated.
Alan made a point of still sounding a little like a jerk. For the first time in more than a year, he put on his uniform, got a good military haircut which was immediately hidden under his blue uniform cap, and rode with Monzo to his headquarters planetside. He was being taken to meet the brass, and was warned to watch his behavior.
"I read what you've been through, Chandrasekhar, but be careful about what you say."
"Counter Admiral, I have no problem giving my life to the Space Forces. But if you think I'm going to debase myself any further, let me tell you in advance—I will get out of this car now and crawl into a hole so dark the entire Ninth Expeditionary Fleet couldn't find me. And then all of you can fight this war on your own, sir."
After that, the admiral relented, and he was given a small amount of freedom to say what he felt after that.
In the scheme of things, even his deep-seated resentment—resentment that would take perhaps ten years to really subside, when the universe had changed so thoroughly that the particular circumstances that had hurt him were far removed even according to himself—didn't matter, and it was selfish to think so. The war came soon and everyone, Alan, Monzo, Perez, Gregory, and the Admiralty and Secretary General, turned out to be more wrong then right.