Звезда Пандоры

“Not at all, my team is simply providing you with theoretical possibilities. A second option is that they know the location of the barrier builders, and have crossed interstellar space to confront them and finally wage the war which the barrier was put up to prevent. A third option is that they built it to reach the Commonwealth. This is the only option which concerns us. We have to emphasize here that we cannot assign a satisfactory motivation to this, but we are hampered by the human perspective. As the Silfen and the High Angel have demonstrated, our logic and behavior patterns are not universal. And the very existence of Hell’s Gateway demonstrates how true that is. Therefore, for the purposes of this meeting, it doesn’t matter why they are coming here, only that they are. Those are the terms on which we must consider their actions. They have now had two opportunities to begin peaceful contact procedures with us, and have chosen not to do so on both occasions. Following this, it is my team’s conclusion then that if the Hell’s Gateway was constructed to allow the Primes access to the Commonwealth it is for hostile purposes. We recommend that if the Primes open a wormhole either close to or within the Commonwealth that the navy responds with maximum force.”

“Won’t that be tantamount to us declaring war on them?” Patricia said. “I’m not sure the executive, or even the Senate, would approve those rules of engagement.”

“To use an old analogy: you are playing croquet while they are kick boxing. If the Primes did succeed in extracting information from Bose and Verbeke, as the evidence we have so far indicates, then they know everything about us. They will know that our attempts to contact them were peaceful. They know how to reciprocate by opening channels of communication to us in a nonhostile, nonthreatening manner. That they have not sought to at least investigate the state of the galaxy around them after a thousand years of isolation is extremely suggestive. In tactical terms, they are maneuvering themselves into a position of considerable advantage.”

“But why come all this way?” Oscar asked. “If all they want is material resources, then there are hundreds of star systems close to their own that they could spread out to and exploit.”

“The number of unknown factors we’re dealing with means we really do have to concentrate on the few facts we have, rather than engage in perpetual speculation,” Dimitri Leopoldovich said somewhat reprovingly. “We still don’t know why the Dyson barriers were put up, nor by whom. We don’t know why one was switched off. Break it down to basics, my friends, all we know is that they’re demonstrably hostile, they have tens of thousands of warships, and they’re building wormholes that can reach us. We have to reset our civilized way of thinking to default mode: shoot them before they shoot us. In this instance, we have no alternative other than to prepare for the worst-case scenario. I’d rather spend a trillion dollars on the navy and live to regret the waste of tax money than not spend it and find out we really needed to. Remember Pearl Harbor.”

Wilson watched with silent enjoyment as Patricia forced herself not to comment on Leopoldovich’s trillion-dollar navy. “I’m not sure the parallel strictly applies,” he said. “But I do understand where you’re coming from.”

“We will have one strategic advantage,” Dimitri Leopoldovich said. His rigid smile of emphasis made him look even more vampirish. “Precisely one. It must be exploited no matter what the cost to ourselves for it will be our only chance of survival. The Primes are at the end of a very long, singular supply line. Without it, there can be no hostilities. That is why my team makes the urgent recommendation that the Prime wormhole is attacked the instant they open it in Commonwealth space. Attacked and destroyed. I cannot emphasize this strategy strongly enough. There will be no rules of engagement once they start coming through. We have studied the records from the Conway; they were sending dozens of ships through Hell’s Gateway every hour, and that was months ago. While here you talk of building one warship every three weeks, and the first one isn’t even finished yet. If we devoted our entire industrial output to shipbuilding, it would take decades to reach the number which the Primes can deploy against us right now.”

“Is that combat scenario possible?” Patricia asked. “Can we fire something back through their wormhole which will destroy the generator mechanism at the other end?”