“Her full report has been downloaded to your flagship’s computer,” Andrew told him. “But Captain Tanaka’s ship came under fire on entering Sol from a Kanzi warship.”
The black flickers on the Fleet Lord’s skin grew more intense.
“I will review Captain Tanaka’s report, but I presume you were also present,” he said. “Summarize for me.”
“A Kanzi attack cruiser was making a stealthy approach to the Sol system when Captain Tanaka spotted them. They translated in and attempted to ambush Hunter’s Horn upon arrival in the system.
“Duchess Bond ordered Tornado to intervene and the Kanzi vessel was destroyed, with no damage to Captain Tanaka’s ship and, of course, no opportunity to pass on their scouting data.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Tan!Shallegh replied. The alien was still studying Andrew, and the Terran Captain couldn’t help but wonder what the A!Tol saw. “It could be worse, but this is not good news.”
“Captain Tanaka felt you needed to know as quickly as possible. We agreed, hence my presence.”
“The Duchy of Terra’s willingness to cooperate is appreciated,” the Fleet Lord said, the translator softening his voice in recognition of emotion Andrew couldn’t read. “We will of course compensate the Duchy both for your time and fuel and for the munitions used in Tornado’s rescue of Hunter’s Horn.
“Even without reviewing the report, I suspect that Captain Tanaka would have been in serious trouble without your intervention.”
“Thank you, Fleet Lord.”
“Inform Duchess Bond that the Navy remains aware of the threat to Sol and is both monitoring the situation and taking several of the steps Captain Tanaka would have discussed with her.”
“Is that why part of your fleet is moving?”
A flash of red—hopefully not anger!—flickered across the alien’s skin.
“Indeed, Captain Lougheed,” the Fleet Lord told him. “Rest assured, the Imperium remains responsible for the Duchy of Terra’s ultimate security. We have not forgotten that duty and we will not fail in that charge.”
#
Chapter 25
While negotiations continued with several of Hong Kong’s premier landlords around acquiring a building for the Duchy’s government, Annette continued to monopolize the Lucky Dragon Hotel.
She’d seen what they were paying for the privilege. Even if Zhao hadn’t been one of the main shareholders, no one involved in the chain was complaining.
Taking over an entire hotel, however, gave Annette a lot of space to put up guests, so it wasn’t entirely a surprise when a four-year-old’s shriek of “Auntie Annette!” tore through the lobby, shortly followed by a tiny blonde missile.
The pair of Ducal Guardsmen trailing her even here knew better than to get in the way, and Annette scooped up Morgan Casimir carefully as the little girl reached her.
“Good to see you, kid,” she told the child. “Where’s your father?”
“Still outside,” Morgan said cheerfully. “He’s sooo slow. Thinks you don’t love him anymore.”
“Morgan!” a scandalized voice said as a very British-looking middle-aged woman in a prim black dress hurried through the hotel doors, one of Casimir’s private security men trailing in her wake.
“I’m sorry, Your Grace,” she said crisply. “I wasn’t expecting her to take off like that! Morgan, you need to show the Duchess some respect.”
“Miss, I’ve changed her diapers; I think it’s okay,” Annette told the nanny. She didn’t recognize the woman—she wasn’t the pretty young woman they’d pulled out of the Weber Network’s cells.
“Still, there are proprieties to observe. I am Miss Lovecraft, her new nanny. Come here, Morgan.”
Morgan clung even more tightly to Annette, who suspected that the girl was going to have another new nanny in very short order.
“Her Grace has seen far worse from Morgan, my dear Amanda,” Elon Casimir told the woman as he stepped through the door behind the nanny, trailed by another pair of private security and a pair of men awkwardly dressed in suits the way only engineers could be.
Casimir himself, despite being an engineer by inclination and trade, wore his perfectly tailored gray suit like he’d been born in it. Annette took a private moment to enjoy the sight, then suppressed any further reaction as she gently lowered Morgan to the ground.
“Where’s Anna?” she asked Casimir, watching the little girl grudgingly allow herself to be corralled by Lovecraft.
“She was hired to be the caretaker of a multibillionaire’s child,” he said quietly, “not watch men and women be killed in front of her. She resigned once the immediate crisis was over—and I don’t begrudge her for a second.
“Anna did far more than she was hired or paid for. I owe her more than money, more than any contract can oblige me. She somehow brought my daughter through that disaster with her heart and soul intact.” He smiled. “She got a very generous severance package and instructions to call me if she ever needed anything.”
“Anderson has a lot to answer for,” Annette agreed quietly. “We’re trying to find him, but he’s crawled into a hole and pulled it shut behind him.”
“He’ll come out, Annette,” Casimir warned her. “And your people will need to be ready.”
“They will be,” she promised. “Will Nilsson be joining us?”
“His plane was delayed by weather; he should be about twenty minutes behind me,” Casimir replied. “We’ll be ready to present to your Council on time, Your Grace. I promise.
“And if we’re not?” He shrugged. “I am many things, my dear Duchess, but I will never be a waste of your time.”
#
By now, the conference room was starting to fit Annette’s Council like a well-worn piece of clothing. All of her Councilors had preferred seats, and their preferred drinks were waiting for them as they took them, the hotel staff having picked up on everyone’s tastes by now.
Annette sipped on her own black coffee as Casimir and Nilsson linked a portable computer into the hologram display, the two engineers with them taking up silent flanking positions as the executives completed their prep.
“All right,” Casimir said as the hologram flickered to life with an image of one of the A!Tol destroyers the Militia had received.
“Everyone here knows who I am,” he said without a hint of arrogance, “and who Tomlin here is. These two gentlemen are Kyle Hammond and Dilip Narang. They are our top starship engineers and the poor bastards who’ve spent the last three weeks locked in a room with me, working through what we’re now calling the Sword and Buckler defensive systems.
“You’re all familiar, I hope, with the A!Tol City-class destroyer,” Casimir continued, gesturing at the hologram hovering in the middle of the room. “Three hundred meters long, one hundred and twenty wide, elegance, speed, and danger personified in steel and fusion power plants.”
The ship had a bullet-shaped central core from which a number of nacelles and other surfaces extended, a design that in many ways made the ship resemble its A!Tol designers.
“It’s also very clearly a ship designed with its shield as its primary defense,” he noted. “A lot of surface area, intended to radiate heat and mount weapon systems, irrelevant to your defense when you have a spherical shield against any attack.
“After some careful analysis of the specifications and dimensions, we believe we can produce compressed-matter plating to armor the Cities,” he concluded. “That alone will dramatically increase their survivability, but Duchess Bond charged us to create a more active defense for the Duchy’s ships.”
The destroyer shrank to one end of the table and a new object appeared, an oddly shaped drone with four “petals” around a central core. Annette recognized the deadly rainshower defender drone the Laians had installed on Tornado for her.
“We were given one of Tornado’s missile defense drones to study,” Casimir told them. “After a surface analysis, we realized there was no point in dismantling it. The
rainshower defender’s plasma-weapon technology is so far beyond even A!Tol plasma weaponry that we don’t even begin to have the tools to duplicate it.
“The concept, however, we could work with.”
The rainshower defender shrank off to join the destroyer, replaced by a much less decorative design, resembling nothing so much as a flying saucer from an old SF movie.
“Ladies, gentlemen, this is the Buckler defense drone,” Nova Industries’ restored CEO told them quietly. “The latest generation in A!Tol hyper-dense power storage married to a rapid-cycle laser system the Indiri developed as a mining tool, and a shuttle-sized interface drive.”
Annette studied the simple-looking drone carefully.
“Capabilities?” she asked.
“A lot of its systems are based on the versions the Imperium uses for assault shuttles,” Casimir replied. “Sensors can track missiles at about one million kilometers; longer-range engagement will require the mothership to feed them telemetry. The laser can damage a missile up to about two million kilometers, but the true effective range is only about two light-seconds.
“The Buckler carries six lasers, each cycling once every two point five seconds. It has a two-hour operating life before needing to be recalled and recharged. Without sacrificing any material armament, we believe we can mount six of these on a City-class hull for ready deployment. More could be stored inside the ship, as they will likely suffer a high degree of attrition.”
“Impressive,” Villeneuve said. “How do they stack up to the rainshower defenders?”
Casimir gestured to Narang, who stepped forward to answer the question.
“We ran live tests with the prototypes and the rainshower drone we were given,” he said slowly. “The rainshower drones are…flashy. They’re overpowered for their designed purpose. The Buckler drone doesn’t have the same offensive uses that a rainshower defender can provide but is approximately ninety-six percent as effective as a defensive platform.”
Annette managed not to whistle. The rainshower platforms were an extremely advanced piece of technology—like Casimir had said, even the A!Tol couldn’t duplicate them. The Imperial Navy had most of Tornado’s spare drones, in fact.
“You said this was part of a system?” she asked.
“The Buckler is a complete system on its own,” Casimir replied, “but only the first layer of the defensive suite we have designed.”
The destroyer expanded back into the middle of the screen, now with six Buckler drones floating around it, one at each cardinal point.
“As I said, we will also be mounting compressed-matter armor on the destroyers.” A faint green coating covered the ship. “This will increase the mass of the ship by approximately one hundred thousand tons, requiring a refit of the power and engine systems to maintain her speed.
“Those refits will be based on the, ah, black database we were provided,” Casimir warned. “We can refrain from them if needed, but we would lose point oh seven cee from the destroyer’s top speed.”
The interior sections of the ship where the engines and power plants were located now glowed blue inside the green armor layered onto the hull.
“We can’t afford that,” Annette told him. “Having a well-defended ship is useless if she can be outrun. We’ll take the risk, Elon. I’ll bear the consequences if we get in trouble for our stolen tech.”
“Good,” he said with a swift grin. “Because without those power upgrades, I’d be concerned about the ship’s ability to support the Sword system.”
Twelve places around the destroyer’s hull acquired dark green splotches, domed turrets mounted on top of the compressed-matter armor.
“The Sword missile defense system calls for the addition of anti-missile laser turrets to the ship,” he explained. “On a destroyer, we would be building twelve turrets, each with roughly the same capabilities as a Buckler drone but with the mothership’s power supply and sensors behind it.
“Combining the Sword and Buckler systems, I would expect to see between a seventy- and ninety-percent kill rate on missiles rated up to point eight cee,” he concluded. “That would decrease as the number of incoming missiles increased, but combined with the compressed-matter armor, the refitted City-class destroyer should be between six and eight times as survivable as the unretrofitted ship.”
The room was silent as Annette’s Council studied the design. After a moment, she heard Zhao sigh quietly, her unofficial Treasurer realizing there was no way they couldn’t justify paying whatever Casimir wanted for the refit.
“What’s the timeline?” she finally asked.
“That depends on priorities,” Casimir admitted, glancing at Nilsson. “We had instructions to prepare a yard capable of refitting an Imperial super-battleship. If we focus our yard construction efforts on that, we are limited to the four yards on BugWorks.”
“That remains the best plan,” Annette told him. They’d need those refit yards shortly.
“Then we can either do eight ships at a time, which will take two months per refit cycle, or concentrate our resources and have four ships in a month.”
She glanced at Villeneuve.
“Admiral? Your call.”
“We might have crews for four ships in a month, but without more training platforms, we’d struggle to have crews for eight in two,” he admitted. “I’ll admit I’d also prefer to have more platforms as soon as possible, both for training purposes and also to feel more comfortable in Sol’s security.”
“Four at a time, then,” Annette concluded. “Any concerns, Elon? Tomlin?”
“None,” Casimir said instantly.
“Does anyone else have questions for the Nova Industries team while we have them?” she asked.
She was unsurprised when almost her entire Council leaned forward, each with their own points to raise. She hadn’t picked her Council, after all, for being passive people.
#
Somehow, despite neither of them having said anything, Annette wasn’t surprised when the knock on her office door two hours after the meeting turned out to be Elon Casimir. Not least because her security would let only a very short list of people get to that door to knock without checking with her.
“Your security is tight” was the first thing Casimir said as he stepped through the door. “I’m guessing most people miss the microcameras and the ranged DNA scanner?”
Annette blinked in surprise.
“I didn’t know there was a ranged DNA scanner,” she pointed out.
“It’s Imperial tech,” Casimir explained. “I’ve been looking through the database we were given. They’re three, four hundred years ahead of us technologically. That impacts more than just starships and power plants.”
“Thank God for the Uplift program, or we’d be screwed trying to compete economically,” Annette admitted. “I have plans, but if they weren’t intentionally giving us a leg up…”
“We’d be utterly doomed,” the man said, taking a seat without asking. “I’m guessing your plans have something to do with why my company is building a refit yard sized for ships we don’t have and don’t expect to be able to build for ten years at least?”
“Only the Council is cleared for that,” she told him. “For now, I’d suggest being content with the vast quantity of Imperial marks Nova is getting for the job.”
Casimir sighed.
“You know, the first thing Tomlin asked after we finished our presentation was why Lebrand was on the Council and I wasn’t,” he pointed out. “There aren’t many companies bigger than Nova, and almost all of them are linked to somebody on your Council.”
“You’re not exactly unlinked to Villeneuve,” Annette pointed out, feeling more than slightly guilty.
“Villeneuve isn’t a shareholder,” Casimir pointed out. “I’m not complaining, Annette. I can understand if our…personal history is a problem.”
“The damn problem, Elon, is that I needed you to talk to me the day I landed,” she told him quietly. “They dr
opped me back in at the deep end, without any kind of support locally, and the one man who could have stood at my right hand and helped me start sorting this mess out was pretending he was dead.
“So, my Council was picked assuming you were dead. I’m not kicking anyone off it, so I need to decide if you add something that I don’t already have. Miyamoto and Lebrand are both engineers and corporate executives, after all.”
“Miyamoto’s people build great cars, solid ocean ships, and brilliant planes,” Casimir said calmly. “Lebrand’s have their fingers in sixty percent of the food sold on store shelves and half the household appliances on the planet.
“Neither of them or their companies has put anything in space more complicated than a communications satellite,” he concluded. “You need Nova Industries, Annette. Your ‘plan,’ unless I’m missing something, is to turn us into the premier supplier of defensive technology to the Imperial Navy, probably segueing into shipbuilding inside a decade or two.”
Annette paused carefully, studying the younger man sitting across her desk.
“Zhao is the only person on this planet I’ve even mentioned that to,” she said quietly. “Villeneuve is the only person I would have thought had enough information to guess.”
“I have almost as much data as Jean, and much as the man has had your back, I know you better than he does,” Casimir replied. “Compressed-matter armor. The Sword and Buckler systems. Those are the key to creating a unique product that can propel the Duchy’s economy forward inside an Imperium where we have no choice but to play tech catch-up.
“So, you need Nova Industries involved, which means you need Nova at the damn table,” he finished. “Annette, if you don’t want me there, fine. But Nova has to be there. Let Nilsson speak for us, but someone has to.”
He thought she didn’t want him on her Council. Morgan’s comment from earlier popped back into Annette’s head, and she suddenly smiled, studying Elon’s body language with a care she hadn’t applied for years.
Duchess of Terra (Duchy of Terra Book 2) Page 17