Alien Empire

by Anthony Gillis

  ///

  A light year away, Varen watched the departure through a rift. He received signals from his senior officers.

  “Star Marshal Sir, let’s finish them off!” said Atsra’aak.

  “I do not like the idea of slaughtering them as they are helpless,” said Edad, “But will do as you decide.”

  Varen surveyed the helpless ships.

  “We know they have a lot more transports coming. If we leave them here, sooner or later they may be able to finish their repairs and retrofits, and rejoin the war!” said Atsra’aak.

  “No. Let’s see if they are willing to surrender,” replied Varen.

  He decided to take a chance, he rifted through to maximum sub light communication distance, far outside weapons range, and hailed the fleet using one of the hacked Protectorate channels.

  “Attention warships of the Galactic Protectorate. This is Star Marshal Varen of the League of Free Worlds. I wish to speak with whoever is your current ranking officer.”

  The reply was swift.

  “Star Marshal Varen, this is Fleet Admiral Ghanem, what do you want?”

  “Cease hostilities, and we will escort your personnel to facilities where they may remain safe for the duration of the war.”

  “We will not surrender, Star Marshal. Bring your fleet here, and we will accept YOUR surrender.”

  “I won’t give you another chance, Admiral” said Varen.

  In answer, a Warden Ship fired a missile at him. It would take a long time to arrive, but it made the point. He rifted away. Once back with the fleet, he shrugged grimly, and spoke to his fleet.

  “We have a long day ahead of us.”

  “All units, open rifts.”

  “Select targets.”

  “Zoom in.”

  “Fire.”

  54

  “The Grand Fleet is on its way to the next stop. Let’s hope Skrai’kiik’s transmitters stay hidden,” said Varen through a rift communicator.

  Karden’s mind stuck on the last part what Varen said. It was frightening that so much depended on factors that were both small and out of their control. If those transmitters were found, the Grand Fleet could stop anywhere they chose within striking distance, and they’d never find it, until it found them.

  If they were willing to take risks, as Shirazi had, the Grand Fleet could conceivably come out of their wormholes much deeper into the system, much closer to Ground, than normal Protectorate procedure allowed. They might leave some stragglers, even lose some ships, but with so many to spare, they could come in close enough to ignore efforts to wear them down by rift tactics, blast through Ground’s defenses, and render the planet a dead cinder in space.

  From what he knew of Katiyar thus far, Karden thought the Elder Admiral might just take such risks. For a moment, he felt his age close upon him, and slumped, weary, in his chair. But he had a job to do. The lives of billions on Ground, the fates of hundreds of billions among its allies, and ultimately, of the trillions of the galaxy, depended on the outcome of what happened next.

  He called Neem, and patched in Harker.

  “The Grand Fleet is on its way earlier than they wanted to be. Do you have the production copies ready, and the licensing?”

  “Yep,” said Neem with good cheer, “railguns , particle guns, and cool new really powerful lasers I designed, all with targeting controls like the one you used. Collectively, we’re calling them Rift Guns.”

  “We can get companies on thirty-one worlds going on this within hours of you giving the word,” added Harker.

  “Now that the Elders in that fleet will have no chance to find out what we’re up to, and no time to react, I’m giving the word. Go”

  “On it!” said Neem.

  “I’ll start making calls,” said Harker.

  ///

  What followed was perhaps the strangest military buildup in the history of the galaxy. The Grounders and their allies began feverish construction of orbital weapon satellites. The satellites consisted of nothing more than weapons lined up on long trusses, stabilizers to avoid getting pulled down by gravity, and large supplies of ammunition and power. The weapons were immobile on their trusses, they didn’t need the ability to physically aim, as they did that with their rifts.

  It was all, by the standards of space engineering, very cheap. The League of Free Worlds built them by the thousands, then tens of thousands. Fire control centers went up, intentionally scattered, on every world in the league.

  There was something else they would need.

  ///

  On a warm clear night, Karden was sitting with Tayyis at an outside table at GDC headquarters with some old friends. He looked across at Neem and President Chayar of Bacchara. She’d come on a quasi-official state visit, and had managed to send her entourage away on other business. It was strange to see them together, since it happened so rarely despite the theoretical existence of their relationship.

  To his side was General Abida, his tough scarred face looking softer and happier than he’d seen it in a while. Abida hadn’t seen his old revolutionary comrade-in-arms in over a year.

  Much as they’d avoided it, the conversation finally turned to the war. Abida was troubled. “We’ve been recruiting the best marksmen from the military of each world in the League, but I am not sure we’re getting the best results.”

  “What do you mean?” said Chayar in much-improved Tadine.

  “To be a marksman firing a live weapon takes a certain set of skills, and I think certain personal traits. But, in the tests we have done, we have seen that selecting targets quickly using the interface, in combination with others, while sitting in a chair for long stretches of time is very different from live fire. It is more like computer operation or a game.”

  Neem laughed.

  “That’s because it IS a game, or just like one, but played with real guns and live enemies. I bet if we did some research, we’d find out it takes a lot of the same skills and personality needed to be really good at shooting games on computer.”

  “So how to find such people? Said Abida, who came from a country where such things were rare.

  Even after all the amazing changes in basic assumptions he’d had to make in the past few years, that one struck Karden. His mind processed. Then it hit him.

  “Why go looking? Let them come to us. Perhaps we could announce some kind of contest across the League to qualify as gunners for the Rift Guns? Abida, you are in charge of ground forces, and we’ll be fighting from the ground,” said Karden “So I think that would make you supreme commander of the campaign.”

  Abida smiled a fierce and dangerous smile. “I think this should be organized and fought as a people’s war! The first round of recruiting should be open to anyone who wants a chance, anyone at all, to get a Rift Gun for let us say, ten minutes, and see how they do. If they can handle this task, then we put them on firing duty for an hour, and the ones who prove to be good at it would be invited into some form of final round for training.”

  Neem got the bouncy look he did when he was enthusiastic about something, “So you’re saying we should write up a program to simulate the guns, and get it out there to see how people do?”

  “No, I’m talking about letting people live fire the guns, at real Protectorate targets, and see how they do,” replied Abida.

  He went on, “We can get some people together to figure out what the minimum skill qualifications are in each later round. We only have a few weeks, so we will want to keep it simple. And I think that this will depend less on traditional military ways of doing things than even a normal guerilla war. We can keep the guns manned twenty-four hours a day if we wish, but I do not see that it matters exactly when one person comes or goes.”

  “And,” he concluded, “There may be some very unusual fighters in this battle. We may find that some of those who qualify are older people, adolescents, or those who are physically disabled. It requires only sitting in a chair and being good at the weapon interface!”
>
  Chayar looked horrified. “So you are saying to use real live people, in their starships, as target practice for a test, a game?”

  Karden phrased his answer carefully, “Chayar, we are at war. There are a lot of Protectorate ships still around, ones where we know the location, but haven’t had the time or resources to hit them yet, not under our old assumptions. But we WERE going to hit them, as soon as we could. We were already planning to kill those people. Now, we simply have the means.”

  Abida, by contrast, looked as pleased as Karden had seen him since their days in Bacchara.

  “This is no more than we did as guerilla fighters! Whenever we could, we hit our enemy from safety far away. At the start of the revolution, they had all the power. We could only hid, fire, and hide again. How is this any different? We have our new revolution to liberate not just a country, but a galaxy! Give me the word, and I will start this program!”

  Chayar’s shock at last turned to laughter, “Hesdi Abida, you are still the same clever and ruthless man who helped us defeat Hadeb!”

  “But here,” said Abida, “Our fighters are in no personal danger. Not unless they fail, and then all of us will meet the same fate.”

  “The rest of you have left out two things,” said Neem, “First, we’ll need to put some controls in place to make sure the rifts only go to fire zones we select. We don’t want some kid with an attitude figuring out he can shoot at his neighbor’s house from orbit.”

  “Second,” he continued, “All this equipment will take a lot of maintenance and logistical support. We have some in place already, but we’ll need to staff up fast.”

  Chayar looked at Neem with some surprise and awe, “Why my sweet, you are a boss as well as a scientist!” and she gave him a snuggle.

  Neem blushed.

  Tayyis watched the interaction of the much younger couple. It was cute. She had something very different with Haral, but wonderful in its own way. She took his hand and sat closer. He smiled.

  Karden considered what Neem said. He added, “We have a lot of military personnel with the skills for the space work now, especially after all those operating bases. On the ground, I’ll see who Harker can round up among all his new business contacts around the League.”

  Then he decided to skip more such talk, and basked in the company of dear friends.

  ///

  Across thirty-one worlds, the call went out. Tens of millions gave the new Rift Guns a try. Here and there in the nearer parts of the galaxy, Protectorate ships vanished in hails of railgun and laser fire.

  Out of the tens of millions, two million or so proved to have some real skill. As Abida imagined, they included quite a few people no military recruiting system would have been able to find or mobilize. The top ace on Ground was a sixteen year old boy who had an uncanny knack for moving from kill to kill, hitting targets in exactly their weakest points.

  The second ranked ace on Ground, to Karden’s shock, was his old colleague Professor Snel. The shy mathematician had replaced her simple eyeglasses with advanced Elder sighting goggles from Solidarity, and her intuitive grasp of both computers and spatial relationships had proven… frighteningly effective.

  There were some, the young and bored, the lonely, the skilled but obsessive, who spent eighteen hours a day methodically firing at Elder targets. Other treated it as a pastime, even a sport. Giuseppe McCoy figured out a scoring system.

  Abida travelled constantly, talking to groups of trainees, motivating them. He gave video speeches that made the rounds on the nets. His fierce, yet enthusiastic warlike energy became infectious. His odd army acquired a kind of fighting spirit. He organized them into loose flexible brigades. They developed cheers and battle cries, logos and flags.

  There were competitions and championships, and rumors of betting.

  Abida had method under the freewheeling appearance. He had an organized officer corps of military personnel, and coordinated campaigns through them. The leadership selected and prioritized targets, while the volunteers destroyed them.

  There were strange personalities, like the Tsamier grandmother who adopted full Elder-style military manners and showed up in an elaborate uniform of her own devising. She proved to be one of the top five aces on Unity 23. There was an immensely overweight Daltaran who needed a special chair, and munched constantly as he worked, but who was one of the top three aces on Collective Destiny 2.

  And across the League of Free Worlds, companies under contract kept producing more and more weapons and control stations.

  One day, reviewing reports of it with Karden, Varen looked over and shook his head.

  “I’ve never seen or imagined war fought like this, or by the people who are now doing the fighting.”

  “And” he continued, “Here we are, with a fleet of twelve thousand starships en route in space to its next stopping point, after which they intend to come exterminate us, and half the population of thirty-one worlds are cheerfully following it like a sport.”

  “Thirty-two, now” said Karden, “And is keeping people’s spirits up such a bad thing? Besides, I think it is having quite the opposite effect on the Galactic Protectorate.”

  ///

  And indeed it was.

  The starbases and Sector Squadrons for the growing section of the galaxy within shooting range were gradually decimated, after them followed the transport ships. The carefully controlled, specialized, and balanced interstellar economy began to collapse. Without transports, the Supply worlds ceased to get Elder technology, without supplies, the Production worlds ground to a halt, and without either, the Administrative worlds, largely populated by Elders, scrambled to avoid starvation.

  Bereft of his leadership, Shirazi’s proud fleet at Anish in Sector 101, the last large concentration of Elder forces in that part of the galaxy, gradually melted away as ships were destroyed, dispatched to hiding spaces in deep space, or jumped to Sectors farther from the front.

  There was panic and rioting on Production worlds. Some blamed the League of Free Worlds, while many more blamed the government for what was now, thanks to ongoing viral propaganda, more and more being seen as a war the Galactic Protectorate started.

  And, in the wake of the eliminated Protectorate fleet, came bright new warships and rift-capable cargo ships of the League of Free Worlds. They offered peace and plenty. They offered supplies, now, in return for overthrowing their planet side leaders.

  It was an offer a growing number of worlds were willing to take. Many more were held back only by fear of the Grand Fleet. No one knew where it was, but billions of people knew it would strike somewhere, and when it did, they thought, worlds would die.

  In the rest of the galaxy, the vast areas still outside of League firing range, populations became tense, sullen, but the authorities held things in check. Fleet recruitment began to run into problems. Elders, indoctrinated from infancy toward fatalism and fearlessness, still volunteered in numbers, but all others ceased to. There were rumors of conscription, unheard of in three thousand years. Nonetheless, far from the front, weapons continued to be stockpiled and ships armed. With three quarters of a galaxy to draw on, the Protectorate was mighty still.

  And, above the vast military complexes of Luna, three strange ships arrived by rift, bearing the colors of the Diplomatic Directorate, and carrying Sector Administrator Vazquez.

  ///

  The normal peace of wormhole travel was completely disturbed aboard the Grand Fleet.

  That their prior location had been found meant either the enemy was extremely lucky, or a traitor had been at work. Katiyar thought a traitor far more likely, and one of his last orders before they’d jumped was to search ships from top to bottom looking for signaling equipment, and conduct interrogations.

  Under normal circumstances, in a society pervaded by fear, the fleet, with clear rules and hierarchy, ancient traditions of professional collegiality, and a disproportionate number of Elders, was one of the places it was felt least. But now paranoia reign
ed. Sikrai had his own ship searched thoroughly and ruthlessly – every panel opened, every room searched and every crewman questioned, but could find nothing.

  When they finally arrived at their new waypoint, and communication between ships was reestablished, morale across the fleet was in a poor state. Shortly thereafter, Katiyar was reviewing reports on searches compiled by his Fleet and Squadron Admirals.

  “Admiral Sir,” said a Communications Officer, “Warden Ship Captain Jiang of the Courageous is signaling. She gives oath it is worthy of immediate attention.”

  “Patch her through to me, Communications Officer.”

  “My apologies Admiral Sir,” said Jiang, “During our searches, my engineering staff noticed a strange energy reading, it only flashed once. They narrowed the probable source to a storage chamber carrying ration packs. I thought it best to be thorough, and ordered them to open and search the packs. Admiral Sir, I recommend activating video.”

  Katiyar activated the screen.

  “They found this,” continued Jiang, holding up an opened vitamin cake tin containing what looked very much like some kind of transmitter.

  “Thank you Warden Ship Captain. Well done,” said Katiyar.

  He switched to an all-fleet channel.

  “All ships, all crews. We have identified one probable source of the enemy’s trace on our location. There may be more. Stand by for instructions…”

  55

  At last, the time had arrived. Jat had estimated the longest possible time the Grand Fleet could have been in wormholes since their jump, and this was it. Karden unlocked the transmitter and pushed the button.

  There was a ping. Only one now, but it was enough.

  He read the coordinates and loaded them into his copy of the galactic map. It was another stretch of deep interstellar space, but much closer, and…