![]() ![]() ![]() By placing groups of dozens to a few hundred of these in places, they can create a faster-than-light communication system where messages are routed among the elders. It is possible to divide this organ in two, so that the elder can manifest in either of 2 places. The Zhirrzh have a special organ (the fsss) that is extracted at death, and from which the animus of the departed Zhirrzh (the "elder") is able to manifest and communicate with the living. ![]() (Lord Stewart Cavanagh, Commander Cavanagh's father, is an ex-parliamentarian - "Parlimin" - with military contacts he uses to organize the rescue force.) Not until the blue light abruptly flared around him.Ĭommander Cavanagh is kept prisoner until late in the novel when a privately-organized search-and-rescue party finds and recovers him. Now if he could just make it outside the cone of whatever focused sensor beams the aliens were using.Ĭoncentrating on the first ship, he never even saw the second ship's approach. Silencing his beacon is enough to keep Commander Cavanagh from being destroyed but not enough to hide him from them, and he is captured and taken aboard a Zhirrzh ship. They perceived the human attempts to communicate (by radio broadcast) as an attack, and the continued radio transmissions from the beacons on the escape pods were the reason for destroying them. We later learn that, from the Zhirrzh point of view, radio broadcasts are called "elder death weapons" and it was the elders on the first ships who called for the attack on the human ships. A minute later, every wire and circuit line to it cut and the blade of his multitool jabbed into its internal power backup, it had finally been silenced. But foolproof didn't necessarily mean sabotage proof. The emergency beacon was a deliberately simple gadget, as unbreakable and foolproof as anything in the Peacekeepers' inventory. And suddenly it was blindingly obvious how they were doing that. The aliens out there weren't just blasting every chunk of rubble in sight they were specifically and deliberately hunting down the pods. He was clawing the equipment access panel open almost before the thought had completely formed in his mind. The pod was little more than a minuscule cone with a power supply, a dioxide/oxygen converter, a backup oxygen tank, an emergency radio beacon, a short-range comm laser, two weeks' worth of rations, a waste-reclaimant system. To destroy them like this was to turn a military victory into a cold-blooded slaughter.Īnd there was nothing that he could do about it except sit here and watch it happen. The pods were no threat to the aliens-they weren't armed, armored, or even equipped with drives. Systematically and painstakingly destroying the survivors of the battle. The aliens were firing on the honeycomb pods. The first book, Conqueror's Pride has a battle as you describe, where after defeating the human ships, the Zhirrzh begin systematically eliminating the escape pods.Ĭommander Pheylan Cavanagh of the Kinshasa realizes, as he watches the Zhirrzh systematically fry the escape pods, that they are probably using the rescue beacons to target them, and destroys his to stop it transmitting.Īnd with a jolt of horror Pheylan understood. This is the Conqueror's Saga by Timothy Zahn. The structures hold the respected elders of the alien race, who are susceptible to electromagnetic emissions, and the original attack was the result of a misunderstanding and response to the humans welcome messages. ![]() The human soldiers also report seeing alien ghosts amongst these buildings. The human forces have taken refuge in amongst some buildings or structures which contain shelves of small sticks of meat or flesh, and it is assumed that this is a burial place. The second stream in this book is from ground forces holed up on an alien planet, surrounded by alien forces. He is kept in captivity for the remainder of the book, where we get an insight into the alien race. A few survivors escape in individual survival pods, which the alien fleet starts to destroy - one of the survivors realises the aliens are using the pods emergency beacons to track the pods, so he disables his pods beacon and is instead taken aboard the alien ship as a prisoner. This story starts off with an alien fleet attacking a human spacecraft or fleet - the alien fleet overwhelms their human counterparts, and destroy all the ships. ![]()
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