Chapter 8

Ferro paced in front of the huge screen with his stylus in hand. He was in the same hall where he had witnessed the failed vacuum fight but this time the screen showed his first detailed designs of the first craft. The room seemed empty with only twelve or so people in it but Ferro still felt crowded. While a few people sat on stools with computers on their knees taking notes or downloading details from his computer files, the others were pacing with him, asking questions and making points.

Ferro had made a number of presentations during his career, mostly to bored Council members who shook their heads to stay awake. This was the strangest presentation of his life for nothing about it was ordinary. Volentin didn't sit and listen to his lecture as if such a setup was a waste of time. They pointed and asked as they walked up and around the screen. When he spoke they listened attentively but then they paced again as soon as a question not relevant to their own inquiry was posed.

After three hours, most of the reviewers left, promising to send him more questions. Responding to a hand motion to sit, Ferro sat down on the floor in front of Benni and two others.

"You designed this after learning how to fight like us," Benni said, although there was a question behind it.

"When Volentin fights, there is a peculiar intensity behind it, a hyperawareness if you will, but more than that. The body is more attuned to the immediate space, more aggressive but with a Zen-like calm at the same time. Lao Tzu would have understood your family better than any other human."

"Who is this?"

"He is the author of the ancient Chinese text of philosophy, Tao Te Ching," Ferro said. "I'm surprised that you've never heard of him. I think that Family Volentin lives by many of his teachings."

"Philosophy is for another time. Is this the only ship that we need?" Benni asked.

"Excuse me, patriarch," Ferro said. "I asked you before who the enemy is, and you refused to say. I can't answer your question unless I know who we are fighting."

Benni chuckled and nodded his head. "I said that I would answer when the time was right. The Vizz are returning to finish annihilating the human race."

"I thought..." Ferro began and then stopped. "How long do we have?"

"Days, months, maybe even a few years," Benni said. "They didn't exactly tell us why they left or when they would return. We were losing when they left."

"Haven't we produced new weapons since then?" Ferro asked.

"Eh," said Benni dismissively. "I've seen one or two, but nothing that will truly defeat them and nothing that will stop them if they come after us with their ships again. There is a distinct lack of imagination among the outsiders. They borrow and steal from the few remnants of wrecked Vizz craft, but they've only reversed engineered a few items. None of the human scientists or researchers has developed any revolutionary insights. Our task is to jumpstart the revolution."

"The marine corps gave you carte blanche to develop new ships and weapons?" Benni asked.

All three Volentin laughed. "The marine corps negotiated and signed away what they needed to keep us from contaminating their precious troops with our decadent way of life," Benni said. "They negotiated a worse deal than you did."

"Wow, that must really be a stinker of an agreement," Ferro said with calm certainty. Then he realized what that implied about him. "Aw, shit."

All three laughed even louder with Benni slapping his knee with delight. Ferro didn't even try to say another word until the laughter had died down. He hated being the butt of a joke but the Volentin were a straightforward group of people who laughed at the joke, not the man. Ferro could live with the embarrassment.

"We need more ships," Ferro said. "These are combat vehicles and they will have to be transported in an interstellar ship. We should also construct necklaces and angels, and they will need delivery systems, too."

"What are necklaces, and what are angels?" Benni asked.

Ferro dredged up the facts from his university years.

"We can't fight an interstellar battle against the Vizz and win. For reasons that no one can fathom, we lost every ship-to-ship battle. The few 'wins' were Vizz accidents and fatal errors. We must avoid ship-to-ship contact.

"Necklaces encircle and strangle enemy ships far from the mother ship and angels are remote attack vehicles that are preprogrammed to respond to specific stimuli and suicide themselves, destroying the enemy without any intervention from the host."

"The marines have drones," Benni said. "Why are these things superior to drones?"

"Drones require human intervention and the Vizz have plotted out and anticipated an entire universe of human responses. I'm only quoting my professors. The only viable reaction to the Vizz capability is to give them a non-human response. Angels and necklaces are not computer-aided human responses; they are programmed to react in ways that their creators cannot anticipate.

"Volentin exhibits the same unpredictable behavior when they encounter outsiders who know nothing of them."

"Damn," Benni said. "Someone did pay attention in class."

"These sound like fascinating ideas, but from where do the names come?" the older man on the right asked.

"The old earth religions had this belief in these magical creatures that hovered above believers protecting them from harm. They called these beings angels."

"The image is beautiful," the woman on the other side said.

Her voice was familiar to Ferro, but he couldn't place where he had heard it before.

Ferro continued. "The necklace is not so beautiful. Another earth artifact still practiced in the spy thriller movies today is the garrote, a thin wire with handles at either end. The assassin wraps the wire around the victim's neck and pulls until the victim is strangled or the neck is sliced through, depending on the tensile strength of the wire and the intent of the assassin. Since the garrote goes around the neck, it is referred to euphemistically as a necklace."

"We are designing weapons to strangle the Vizz robotically?" the woman asked.

"The idea, which is an old one, is that if conventional weapons such as missiles, lasers, and projectiles fail, stop shooting at the ships. Strangle the enemy ship by leeching onto the skin of the ship and strangling it. A necklace is made up of tens or hundreds of independent components. Any one component is too small to be easily targeted by ship size weapons. Even if some components are destroyed, it doesn't matter. The necklace doesn't have to destroy a ship in order to incapacitate it."