EMPIRE: Warlord (EMPIRE SERIES Book 5)

by Richard F. Weyand

  “And sector defenses, Admiral Leicester?”

  “As planned, Sire, we are moving our forces out of systems that have no other space-based military assets, and either sending them to the frontier with the DP or using them to significantly augment the defenses on the sector and provincial capitals where the Navy maintains fleet bases.”

  Dunham nodded and checked his notes on another channel in the lower half of his vision.

  “Do we have our initial attack plans in place, Admiral Leicester?”

  “Yes, Sire. The full set of options you and Admiral Cernik discussed two months ago have been planned out, reduced to sealed, encrypted orders, and transmitted to fleet commanders.”

  “What does it take to implement any of those attacks, Admiral Leicester?”

  “Just your order, Sire.”

  “So you think we’re ready, Admiral Leicester?”

  “Yes, Sire. We’re as ready as we’re ever going to be. It’s up to them, whether they want peace or war.”

  Disturbing Conclusions

  Rear Admiral Dorothy Conroy ran through the calculations again. She zoomed up the hyperspace traces and inspected them carefully. Then she contacted Jared Denny.

  “Yes, Admiral Conroy. What can I do for you?”

  “I wonder if you could drop in here and take a look at something with me, Mr. Denny.”

  The face image went away and Denny appeared in the hyperspace map room as he changed to the restricted VR channel.

  “Yes, Admiral?”

  “Look at this, Mr. Denny. What do you make of it?”

  Conroy highlighted a hyperspace trace. Denny touched it for a readout, and looked at the mass reading.

  “Looks like a battleship squadron, Admiral.”

  “That’s what we initially thought, too. But it spaced pretty close to one of our observation posts. They didn’t see us, but we saw them.”

  She turned to the map.

  “Enlarge ninety-five.”

  A portion of the trace swelled up in the display until it resolved into separate traces, one for each ship. Not the eight ships of a squadron, though, but the four ships of a division.

  “Whoa!” Denny said. “Is that for real?”

  He touched one of the ship traces, and it came up with a mass reading. A very high mass reading.

  “It’s real, all right. This must be some of their new construction.”

  “What can we infer about their new construction from that mass reading, Mr. Denny?”

  “Let me work on this a bit, Admiral. We have some really good design data from all the things we were doing when we designed our new construction. You know, mass required for life support, crew quarters, and mess per crewman, mass of impeller per unit, mass of point-defense laser per unit, all that sort of thing. I’ll get some things back to you. Give me a couple of hours.”

  “Very good. Thank you, Mr. Denny.”

  Rear Admiral Dorothy Conroy received a message back from Jared Denny, and read it carefully. She checked the time in Imperial City, then sent an alarm message to Admiral Leicester and the Emperor.

  Within minutes, they both showed up in restricted VR channel R-1327, the location of the hyperspace map.

  “Yes, Admiral Conroy,” Dunham said.

  Conroy saluted.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt your evening, Sire,” she said, “but I think you should see this. We’ve been watching Democracy of Planets fleet movements, of course. They’ve been moving a lot of things around as they reposition behind their deployment into Annalia and Berinia. In all this movement, we think we’ve identified some of their new construction.”

  Conroy turned to the map.

  “Enlarge ninety-five.”

  A portion of the map deep within the Democracy of Planets grew and took up the center of the display.

  “The system was calling this a squadron of battleships until it spaced past one of our observation posts. Not close enough to see us, but close enough for us to resolve the individual wakes.”

  “That’s only four wakes, Admiral.”

  “Yes, Sire, it is. But look at the mass readings. It has the mass of a squadron of current-technology DP battleships, like those we faced in the Sintar-Alliance War. It has the wake of a squadron of current-technology DP battleships. But when it got close enough, it resolved as a division of ships, not a squadron. Each has approximately twice the mass of a previous generation DP battleship.”

  “Are you sure of this, Admiral?” Leicester asked.

  “I asked Mr. Denny to stop by and check it all with me and my staff, Sir. We’re sure.”

  “So their new construction is twice as big, and is being deployed in divisions.”

  “Yes, Sire. Which leads to some inferences.”

  “Yes, of course. They wouldn’t want to give up the firepower of a squadron, in terms of missiles in a broadside.”

  “Which means they likely have mounted multiple impellers on a single ship, Sire. Exactly.”

  “Two, do you think, Admiral? Or more?”

  “Mr. Denny looked at the mass readings and did some quick ship design analysis. Mass required to house how many spacers, how many spacers required to service and maintain the guns along with the rest of the ship. He set it up as multiple simultaneous equations, and solved it for the number of guns. He’s tentatively calling it five to eight impellers on a battleship.”

  “Five to eight impellers?” Leicester asked. “It’s surprising they don’t space them in pairs.”

  “Mr. Denny did caution they might not all point forward, Admiral Leicester.”

  “Of course,” Dunham said. “Some pointing aft could be a surprise. They could shoot at you while they were retreating.”

  “One other thing Mr. Denny asked me to point out to you, Sire. A ship with five to eight impellers, and the mass readings we are seeing, is going to be even slower on the helm than their current technology ships. He expects the DP to have compensated with more point-defense lasers.”

  “OK, I can see that,” Dunham said.

  “That’s one of the reasons for the uncertainty in the number of impellers, Sire. It depends on how much they’ve increased the point-defense, along with the magazine space they’ve included with those multiple impellers.”

  Dunham nodded. He looked back into the hyperspace map, at the four tiny traces recorded there as they passed the Sintaran observation post hidden in DP space.

  “All that from those four little traces,” he said.

  “Sire, I have to caution you. We may not be right. As we get further down the inference tree, the odds of us having mis-stepped somehow, misread the evidence, increases. But that’s our best guess right now.”

  “Understood, Admiral. But I would prefer your and Mr. Denny’s best guess to most people’s solid certainty, and it does give us some things to think about. We at least won’t be surprised by any of those things if your guesses turn out to be correct. Well done.”

  “Thank you, Sire.”

  “And let us know if you catch them again. It would be interesting to know if they’ve done the same thing in their other ship classes.”

  “Of course, Sire.”

  “I think we should give a name to these, Admiral Conroy,” Leicester said. “How about super-battleships? If you see similar mass differences in other classes, we can add the super to them as well.”

  “That sounds good, Sir.”

  Dunham was staring into the map, and Leicester heard him mumble something.

  “I’m sorry, Sire. What was that?”

  “Oh, just thinking out loud, Admiral Leicester. What I said was, ‘Yamato and Musashi.’”

  Leicester looked at him for a moment, then his eyes widened and he nodded.

  “The latter half of the Great War of the twentieth century, wasn’t it, Sire?”

  “Yes, Admiral Leicester. The Japanese navy deployed ever larger and more heavily armed and armored battleships, hoping for the decisive stand-off battle that never came. Their bi
ggest battleships, Yamato and Musashi, were sunk by carrier-based airplane attacks. The technology of warfare had changed, and their encysted general staff missed it.

  “That was actually an echo of an earlier, similar mistake by Spain in the sixteenth century. The light, fast English ships made mincemeat of the heavy, slow galleons of Spain.

  “I think the Democracy of Planets has just made the same mistake. These bigger and heavier ships will just be bigger and more expensive targets, with larger crews. It should make any war against the DP easier, not harder.”

  Dunham had been staring absently into the map. Now he turned to face Leicester.

  “As long as we avoid the decisive stand-off battle they want, as the United States did in the Great War and Sir Francis Drake did with the Spanish Armada.”

  “Point well taken, Sire.”

  Dunham turned to Conroy.

  “Well done, Admiral. Keep us advised of any new developments,” Dunham said.

  “Yes, Sire.”

  He nodded to her, and he and Leicester disappeared from the channel.

  Their next meeting was, once again, in Pinter’s office.

  “You’ve been checking your sources, Jules? What can you tell me?” Pinter asked.

  “It’s not good, Harold,” Morel said. “The opposition is going to move a war vote.”

  “Oh, wonderful.”

  “Oh, it gets better. They’re tying it to the no-confidence vote. If they vote for war, they immediately move to a no-confidence vote on the current government, on the theory the current government cannot successfully prosecute a war they don’t believe in.”

  “What do you suggest, Jules?”

  “If you want to lead the parade, Harold, you have to get out in front of it.”

  “So you think I should put my backing behind the war vote?”

  “Yes, because if you do, their argument for the no-confidence vote falls apart. In fact, it turns against them. ‘You don’t want to change the government on the very verge of war.’ That sort of thing.”

  Pinter just shook his head. After a moment, he turned to Isaev.

  “What about you, Pavel. Can we win a war against Sintar?”

  “I’m not sure, Harold.”

  “That’s not what you said last week.”

  “I know. After our last meeting, I asked some serious questions of the chiefs of staff. I was getting what sounded to me too much like pat answers. So I kept pushing for data, for the justifications behind the assumptions. A lot of people in the defense department had a very bad week. And at the end of all that, I just don’t know.”

  “What are the issues?” Pinter asked.

  “Almost too many to count. First, we have no experience with our new construction in combat. Will it prove out as they hoped? Don’t know. One thing I worry about there is the new warships were designed by committees, with everybody getting their pet theory in there. The ones who prevailed are, by definition, the ones with the most power, which are, by definition, the most senior. Does that make them wonderfully capable combat warships? I’m not so sure.

  “The second issue is the mirror image of the first. We have no idea what Sintar’s new construction is like, or how it will prove out in combat. One troubling point there is the Emperor executed his entire senior bureaucracy immediately upon taking office. That took care of all the hidebound, design-by-committee types. Further, by all accounts, the Emperor had tremendous influence over their design choices, and he is a young man, with combat experience. Does that make his deigns wonderfully capable combat warships? How would anyone know?

  “The one part of their new construction we have seen is these damned picket ships. They’re not much bigger or more massive than a highway truck. They make them by the millions, and they have no crews aboard, so they can afford to throw them away by the tens of thousands. And they’re damned hard to destroy. Watching those recordings of their attack on Admiral Ito’s fleet was terrifying.

  “The other thing we don’t know is how many ships of this new design Sintar has. The estimates vary widely, because we don’t even know what the ships look like. If they are building ships at their normal pace, well, that’s one thing. We probably have something like parity with them there. But if they are managing to build them faster, given their shipyard capacity, the estimates go way up.

  “So, after a week of digging, I know less than I knew before. Or thought I knew anyway.”

  Isaev shrugged.

  “I’m sorry, Harold, but I honestly can’t do better than to say, at this point, I just don’t know.”

  “That’s troubling,” Pinter said. “And it’s headed in the wrong direction.”

  Pinter turned to Morel.

  “What say you to that, Jules?”

  “In some sense, it doesn’t matter, Harold. The Democracy of Planets is going to declare and wage war on Sintar, whether we like it or not. The only choice we have at this point is whether we’re the ones leading the DP or not when it happens. Because it is going to happen. It’s what the people want.”

  “And our illustrious benefactors?”

  “Most of them think war will be good for business. I don’t think they have any concern whatsoever we won’t win. Losing just isn’t part of their world view.”

  Pinter sat, his chin on his folded hands, and stared at the coffee table in the middle of the sitting area of his office.

  “Maybe we can bloody their nose a bit, and then negotiate a peace treaty or a ceasefire,” Morel said.

  Pinter didn’t move, but raised an eyebrow in Morel’s direction.

  “Really?” Pinter asked. “All indications are this Emperor does not consider war a hobby. If we go to war with Sintar, it’s going to be the end of one of us.”

  Pinter continued to stare at the table, running his diminishing options over and over in his mind. Finally he stirred.

  “Very well. The government will support the war vote in Parliament.”

  “And then what do we do, Harold?”

  “Win the war, Pavel,” Pinter said.

  He shrugged.

  “If we can.”

  Please review this book on Amazon.