“You want to bring in the Zoo?”
“Yeah. Don’t forget how much they helped with setting up the annexation of Pannia in the first place. We did the work, but a lot of the ideas came from them. They have some serious outside-the-box types over there.”
“Box? What box? Nobody ever told them there’s a box.”
“I think they’d be disappointed to learn there’s a box. But Consulting’s not just Valery Markov’s new ideas group. There’s the review and proposal groups, too. Once they get done filtering the Zoo’s ideas, we got terrific input. Joe Lin runs a great organization over there. I don’t think we could have handled Pannia without them, and this is a whole ‘nother level of problem.”
“All right, all right. Get them started on it, then, Greg. Because I think this is just the beginning.”
Harold Pinter, prime minister of the Democracy of Planets, looked out his office window down the Central Mall to the Legislative Building and sighed. Another emergency meeting asked for by Jules Morel. Now what? Maybe Sintar finally made its displeasure felt about the nuclear attack on Estvia.
What a bunch of morons. He wouldn’t put such a thing past King James and King Peter, but the Autarch should have known better. And now they were all likely to pay the price for their stupidity.
And the tenser things got, the more chaotic things got, the more the opposition party banged the drum about his government’s ‘feckless’ foreign policy. Things better get to quieting down out there soon, or he would have to move back to the building at the other end of the mall to make way for Jeremy Totten’s government.
Morel and Isaev arrived, and they all took their seats around the small meeting table in Pinter’s office.
“All right, Jules. What’s happened? Did Sintar respond to the Estvia attack?”
“No, not yet. At least not directly. Sintar has annexed Phalia and the Rim.”
“Was it a forceful annexation? I mean, did Sintar just go in there and take over?”
“No, at least that’s not what everybody’s claiming. Queen Anne and King Albert announced it first in separate speeches, then Sintar confirmed it in a press release. They said they asked to be annexed. Apparently Sintar was content to simply let them cease hostilities.”
“Do you believe that, Jules?”
“I don’t know, Harold. Sintar hasn’t done anything else since its initial attacks, first on the Alliance mustering points and then on the capital planets and spacedocks and such.”
“I’m not sure I believe the official story, Jules. Why would Queen Anne and King Albert voluntarily sign up for their subjects to be second-class citizens of Sintar?”
“Well, the official story is they’re not. According to them, Phalians and Rimmers will be equal to any other Sintar citizen.”
“I don’t believe that either.”
Morel shrugged.
Pinter turned to Isaev.
“What about you, Pavel?”
“I have no opinion on what’s going on there, Harold. Not my pidgin. But we could move into Annalia and Berinia to protect them from annexation if you wish.”
“No. No, not yet. I think it’s still the Emperor’s play. After Estvia, it’s his turn, so he has a card to play, and I don’t think this annexation is it. I don’t want DP ships anywhere near those two. Not until the other shoe drops.”
“What do you think it’s going to be, Harold?”
“I don’t know, Pavel. But I don’t want any DP forces getting tangled up in whatever Sintar has planned for Annalia and Berinia. But I do think we’ll know it when we see it.”
Greg Deval was working on the freighter problem. He called Fred Dunlop over in the ship acquisition department to ask his advice.
Otto Stauss was inspecting the books when the phone rang. His profits still weren’t what they should be, what with the war and all making things so uncertain, but he was doing OK.
“Otto Stauss.”
“Good morning, Mr. Stauss. This is Greg Deval in the Imperial annexation department.”
“What can I do for you, Mr. Deval?”
“Well, Mr. Stauss, you may have heard in the news about the annexations of Estvia, Phalia, and the Rim. That’s what our department works on. And one thing we need to do is move a lot of Imperial products and technologies into these new provinces. So we need freighters. Lots of freighters.”
“I have lots of freighters available, Mr. Deval.”
“That’s what I’m told, Mr. Stauss. What I need to know is how many freighters you have available?”
“For sale or lease, Mr. Deval?”
“For lease.
“Taking new freighters and freighters returning from lease, Mr. Deval, all together I have approximately fifty thousand freighters available currently.”
“Fifty thousand?”
“Yes, Mr. Deval.”
“Excellent, Mr. Stauss. We’ll take the lot.”
Operation Hadrian
It was over a week, straight-line course, from the locations of Shvets’s and Espinoza’s main forces to the capitals of Annalia, Berinia, and Garland. But the picket ships they had dispatched didn’t take straight-line courses. They went out of their way to bypass populated planets that may have hyperspace sensors operational. So it was a long and meandering journey through the dark gaps of human space to get to their destinations.
But they eventually did get to their destinations, on Friday, the twelfth day from the Emperor’s deployment order, and two weeks after the attack on Estvia.
In Annalia, the pickets patrolling hyperspace did spot the two Sintaran picket ships, but not until they were within an hour of the system. With no crew or passengers to keep comfortable, the Sintaran picket ships were coming in at only 0.4g, just enough to keep them from dropping out of hyperspace prematurely. Their wakes were tiny in the hyperspace confusion around a major star system with large freighters and passenger liners arriving and departing daily.
Worse, the Annalian pickets were on a heightened readiness status, which meant their reporting cycle had gone from twelve hours to four hours. The would drop out of hyperspace to report anything significant, like fleet movements into Annalian space, but the tiny wakes of the two Sintaran picket ships did not cross their threshold for immediate reporting.
Annalia Fleet Headquarters this Friday afternoon was busy. Nobody was planning any leave this weekend. All Annalia Space Navy warships were in space around the planet, in a layered defense involving over a hundred thousand warships, with the battleships and heavy cruisers mounting box launchers for mass missile attacks.
But it had been two weeks since the attack on Estvia, a bit over a week away in hyperspace, and no attack had come. Pickets on the edge of Annalia space did not detect any large fleet movements from Sintar, in their direction or otherwise.
Would there be no response? No one could believe that, and they continued to analyze the sensor data coming in and refine their plans for the battle they were sure was coming.
Almost five hundred miles away, in the capital city of Delorme, life went on pretty much as usual. The Navy, after all, had always protected the capital, and it would this time as well.
In his palace, the Autarch Gustav Adolph and his ministers and aides had a meeting Friday afternoon to review the status of the defense plans prior to breaking for the weekend. He had stayed in the city, although he did have a shuttle standing by in case of an attack on the planet. They would see any significant Sintaran force almost a day away, so there was plenty of time.
The bureaucrats and administrators of the Autarchy worked away in their offices and cubicles, carrying out the myriad large and small tasks of a government that ruled over eighteen thousand planets and some fifty trillion people. They, too were looking forward to the weekend, just hours away now.
Office workers, store clerks, shopkeepers – all the various members of the private economy – were also at work. Bartenders, too, were at work, serving those whose weekend had started early.
&nbs
p; The millions of school-age children were only an hour away from weekend dismissal, and smart teachers had scheduled less rigid activities for Friday afternoon. Art classes and music classes dominated the agenda. Pre-school children, meanwhile, played in the parks in the crisp, early-autumn air under the watchful eyes of parents, grandparents, and nannies.
And then, in a flash, it was all gone.
When the Sintaran picket ships down-transitioned from hyperspace one hundred miles above the surface of the planet Annalia, the total-fission event generated one hundred fifty megatons of radiation and kinetic energy of the atomic by-products. This energy was projected onto a twenty-mile diameter circle on the planet’s surface. The radiation density approached eighty thousand joules per square centimeter, four hundred times that of a conventional one-hundred-fifty-megaton nuclear explosion at a hundred-mile distance. This was due to all the energy being focused on one four-hundredth of the surface of a sphere around the event.
The result was the complete destruction of everything in the twenty-mile circle. Everything that could burn simply disintegrated. People were vaporized. Buildings imploded and crumbled. Metal melted. The soil itself was blown away, and the rock below it slagged. Water in the river and the lakes was instantly converted to steam. Where there had been a city, there was nothing left. Nothing at all.
Six thousand cubic miles of superheated atmosphere, together with the vaporization of so much on the surface, created a huge over-pressure. Under the radiation pressure of the incoming wave, this over-pressure spread sideways, creating a hypersonic flow of superheated plasma out from the twenty-mile-diameter target circle. It propagated more than ten miles before the vacuum of the rapidly cooling central mass began sucking it back, and tornadic winds rushed back into the center.
When it was over, nothing – no person, no animal, no plant – lived within twenty-five miles of the center of Delorme. No structure stood within fifteen miles.
At the center was a twenty-mile-diameter circle sliced right out of hell, a flat plain of molten rock, glowing with the heat, a steaming river of boiling water flowing through it.
“Sir, there are two large explosions on the planet.”
“What?” Annalia Fleet Admiral Dieter Koester asked.
That wasn’t possible. Nothing had gotten past them.
The scanner technician on his flag staff turned at his console to face Koester.
“Sir, Delorme and Annalia Fleet Headquarters. Well, they’re no longer there, Sir. They’re completely gone.”
Two thousand miles east of the capital, it was a quarter past five in the morning at Berinia Fleet Headquarters. The overnight shift in the operations centers was just about done with their shift, and the day shift would be waking soon and getting ready for the day
In Bering, the capital city of the planet Berinia, in the Kingdom of Berinia, it was a quarter past three in the morning when the Sintaran picket ships arrived. Most everyone was in bed, save those who kept the pulse of a city alive overnight.
By half past the hour, nothing remained of the capital city or the fleet headquarters but smoking slag.
Over dinner on Friday evening, the big news in the Walston house was the GNS Predator was due to arrive in Garland space tonight. Some delay in the mail had brought the letter to them only today. The crew probably wouldn’t get shore leave right away, though.
After dinner, Dick Winger and Francis Schmitt-deVries watched the evening news on video. Without the ability to access VR, Schmitt-deVries felt cut off from whatever was going on in the capital three hundred miles away. Winger, a political junkie, had needed no encouragement to turn on the video receiver and watch with him. Most of the news was doings in the capital city. The only kingdom news was a publicity shot of King James and his senior advisers discussing their responses to the ongoing conflict with Sintar.
The video seemed flat and unengaging to Schmitt-deVries compared to immersive VR, but, hey, you couldn’t have everything. James didn’t know where Schmitt-deVries was – and could not find him if he didn’t turn on his VR interface – and that was just fine with Schmitt-deVries.
They were sitting out on the porch after the news, watching it grow darker, the birds singing good-bye to the day and the insects serenading the coming of night. Suddenly, to their left, to the east, the sky light up as if dawn were approaching. The intermittent clouds in that direction disappeared. The illumination faded over several minutes leaving the eastern quarter of the sky cloud-free, the stars shining.
“Well, that’s interesting,” Schmitt-deVries said.
“What just happened?” Winger asked.
“I think Sintar has finally been heard from. Why don’t you go inside and check the video channels?”
Winger got up and went inside. He came back several minutes later.
“All the video channels are empty. The local repeaters are sending carrier, and we’re picking that up, but there’s nothing there.”
Schmitt-deVries nodded. Winger sat back down next to him.
“You think Sintar struck the capital?” Winger asked.
“Or the fleet headquarters. Or both. We should know in a couple minutes.”
Twenty minutes or so after the glow in the east, there was a hard tremor. Something rattled in the house behind them. It was followed two minutes later by another.
“They hit them both,” Schmitt-deVries said.
“You seem awfully calm about it,” Winger said.
Schmitt-deVries turned to look at him.
“Oh, anything but,” he said.
He turned back to look out over the fields.
“You saw who was at the king’s meeting this afternoon, right?” Schmitt-deVries asked absently.
“Yes. So what?”
“Well, anyone with a stronger claim to the throne than I was apparently in Flower today.”
Schmitt-deVries turned to look at the wide-eyed Winger.
“It seems I’ve just become the king of Garland.”
Winger called a meeting of the adults in the household once the kids were in bed.
“Wait, let me get this straight,” Anita Murphy said. “You’re now the king of Garland?”
“Well, there’s usually a bit of a tussle first, but I have the strongest claim to the throne.”
“A tussle?”
“Yes,” Schmitt-deVries said, “between people with similar claims to the throne. The problem is all the mechanisms for deciding the issue are likely gone.”
“Do we really know anything about what’s happened in Flower?”
“No, other than there were two large nuclear explosions in that direction and the right time delay away.”
“How can we find out?” Murphy asked.
“I could turn on my VR interface and check, but I’m not sure that’s a smart idea.”
“Why not?”
“Because VR interfaces can be back-traced,” Schmitt-deVries said. “And I do have a cousin who may have pretensions to the throne. He is rather more aggressive than James was, and is not James’s intellectual equal. By quite a bit, actually.”
“Cousin?”
“Second cousin, once removed. I am a generation closer to the throne.”
“I see,” Murphy said.
“Not James’s intellectual equal? That’s worrisome,” Winger said.
“Oh, yes,” Schmitt-deVries said. “James banished him from Flower, so he is unlikely to have been, um, eliminated from contention by today’s events.”
“So how do we solve the problem?” Winger asked. “He is likely surrounded by his henchmen, or whatever”
“Yes, but I do have one advantage.”
“What’s that?”
“I have a current code phrase for the Navy, and I don’t think Henry does,” Schmitt-deVries said.
“Code phrase?”
“Yes. There were some emergency preparations in place for the succession. Have been for years. The Navy insisted. Each potential heir was given a code phrase and crypto key.
The phrases are in order of succession. The flag commanders have an encoded file of the phrases. With the key, they can unlock the file. If no one produces a higher-ranking code phrase, they will know I’m the proper heir to the throne. The issue is getting those out of my account and to the Navy before my dear cousin Henry can back-trace my location and respond.”
“Can he, though? Does he even have that capability?” Winger asked.
“I have no way of knowing. It would be the sort of thing he would work at, though.”
“Maybe we can have him back-trace to a different location,” Lester Walston said.
“Then I have to tell the Navy where to respond to, and that creates the problem I might be telling Henry where I am when I tell them where to find me.”
“I have a solution to all that, I think,” Walston said. “You ever flown in a helicopter before?”
Admiral David Fortney looked at the message with puzzlement. The GNS Predator had arrived in Garland space last night only to find the capital and the fleet headquarters had been destroyed by two incredible explosions. The Navy figured it was a Sintar retribution strike for the Estvia attack, but was at a complete loss to figure out how the devices had got past them.
And now this message:
Schmitt-deVries to Fortney: I am the rightful heir. I require one Marine assault division at my location for security immediately. Assign shuttle pilot PO2 Gertrude Winger and CMDR Robert Murphy, aboard HMS Predator, to lead Marines to my location, codename Farmhouse. Establish Combat Air Patrol. Code phrase and decrypt key are “Mary owned a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow.” E795E691D2B72CC9EA154F4A438A957013F7A820
He half-expected this to be some sort of joke. He was not the highest-ranking flag officer in the Garland Space Navy. Nevertheless, he pulled up his flag files in VR, and found the encrypted succession file. He applied the decrypt key, and the file decrypted. A long list of the nobility of the Kingdom of Garland, each with a code phrase. And near the top, there it was:
EMPIRE: Warlord (EMPIRE SERIES Book 5) Page 19