“That should be plenty of time, Jeremy.”
Fleet Admiral Svenson appeared in the VR simulation of a small meeting room. Only Fleet Admiral Cernik was present.
“Hi, Ivar. Thanks for coming.”
Svenson took a seat at the table.
“No problem, Stepan. What’s up?”
“Admiral Leicester is worried about a major attack on Sintar by this new government of the DP. They were very bellicose in the run-up to the elections, and, if they carry that forward into policy, we could have problems.”
“Two-thirds of their fleet is stuck on flypaper, though. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes. It’s the other two million ships we’re worried about. Our success rates against them in hyperspace aren’t as good as they might be. Fighting a large enough force, we might run out of picket ships trying to take them out.”
“So where do I fit in, Stepan?”
“You did those experiments on box launchers. We’re wondering if we can box-launch missiles from picket ships in hyperspace.”
“I’ll have to experiment a bit. I was box-launching from static containers in normal space. When you try to launch all the missiles in the box simultaneously, the second-row missiles are maybe fifty-fifty. Sometimes they blow up.”
“Well, we can’t have any period where they aren’t accelerating in hyperspace or they just drop out. And six missiles is better than none.”
“All right, Stepan. I understand. Let me try some things out and see what I can learn.”
“Thanks, Ivar.”
A Fateful Decision
They were meeting in the prime minister’s office. Now, though, that meant Jeremy Totten’s office.
“All right, Boris. Did you find out what’s really going on?”
“Yes, I did, Jeremy, and it’s worse than we thought.”
“How can it be worse? We knew it was bad.”
“Bad is one thing. This is something worse. Much worse.”
“OK, give us the briefing, and let’s see what we can come up with.”
Andropov took a few seconds to organize his thoughts, then launched into what he had learned in the past week.
“First, let’s talk about our offensive into Sintar. The short story is there is no offensive. Not anymore. Our ships are out of reaction mass, out of food, and low on missiles. We have what remains of four million ships and thirteen billion spacers sitting in Sintar with no offensive capability whatsoever.”
“What remains?”
“Yes. We lost ninety five thousand ships destroyed and sixty thousand surrendered in wildly lopsided battles. Whenever we’ve actually conducted operations against them, they’ve seemed able to destroy our forces with virtual impunity. Other than blowing up lots of their missiles, of course.”
“Why are battles coming out so lopsided?”
“Their ships are smaller than ours. They are faster, more maneuverable, and they have deeper box-launch capability. They also have at least half again as many ships in-theater.
“Further, their main combatants are all unmanned and remotely crewed, not just their picket ships. If we were to blow up any of their ships – which hasn’t happened in any numbers – they would just replace them out of their huge manufacturing base. But they won’t lose any spacers, so they have no manpower shortage and won’t have no matter how long the war goes on.”
“You said our ships are out of reaction mass and food. Are they just sitting there and starving, Boris?” asked Edmond Descartes, the interior minister.
“No. They’re being resupplied by Sintar.”
“Our ships are being resupplied by Sintar?”
“Yes. Sintar has ten thousand freighters delivering food and reaction mass on a biweekly basis, so our ships can maintain gravity and our spacers don’t starve. Our forces are completely dependent on Sintar for survival at the moment.”
“What about here in the DP?” Totten asked.
“Our support infrastructure is simply gone. We knew there had been a lot of damage, but it’s worse than that. We have no orbital military infrastructure left at all. Anywhere. We have just over two million remaining warships in the DP, some of them of the older designs, but we have very reduced means to service them. We are keeping them supplied currently using commercial platforms, but their capacity is limited.”
“Could we mount a major offensive with those forces, Boris?” Totten asked
“Perhaps. It would take a major effort to supply all the ships, and you would have to gather them up in multiple places and then restock them before they left. We might be able to do it, but not with all the ships.”
“How many?”
“We can perhaps swing a million ships for something like that.”
“Out of two million?” Totten asked.
“Well, we don’t want to uncover Olympia, and some of the ships are way the hell over on the other side of the DP. It would be difficult to pull them together in any reasonable time, and they would need multiple restocking stops to make the trip.”
“All right. I see that. And we definitely don’t want to uncover Olympia.”
“What are you thinking, Jeremy?” Descartes asked.
“The Emperor is what holds the Empire together, Edmond. Him and his minions. If you want to attack the Sintaran Empire, you have to attack the Emperor. Pinter was playing for small potatoes.”
“He stays in Imperial City, Jeremy. You going to bomb the city?”
“Sure, why not. That asshole Pinter already managed to pull us out from under the protections of the Treaty of Earth. So we need no longer consider ourselves bound by it.”
“And Olympia? We’re a target, too, in that formulation.”
“We definitely don’t want to uncover Olympia. We can also pull those farther-flung formations together here. They won’t be in the offensive, but we can pull them here. We have large commercial facilities around Olympia, and those should be able to maintain the defensive fleet here.”
“I see.”
“It’s our one opportunity to win, gentlemen. It’s clear to me Pinter set it up so we would lose his war and take the hit for it with the public. So let’s not play his game. Let’s win the damn war, and then we get the credit instead of the blame.”
“All right. That makes sense,” Descartes said.
“Boris, pull the plans together. We send a million ships to Sintar and bomb Imperial City. Kill the Emperor. The rest of our ships we gather up around Olympia to keep them from doing the same thing to us.”
“All right, Jeremy. We’ll put a plan together. In the meantime, we can start gathering our forces, both here and forward.”
“See to it, Boris. Give me a good plan. We can still win this. The Emperor is the key.”
Jared Denny opened the VR channel from the mail message. He appeared in a VR simulation of a small conference room. Admirals Cernik and Svenson were already there.
“Admiral Cernik, Admiral Svenson. It’s good to see you again. How may I be of service?”
“Mr. Denny,” Cernik said, “we expect one last-gasp offensive out of the Democracy of Planets under their new government. Basically, they ran on a war platform, and we think they’re going to act on it. Probably an attack on Sintar. On Imperial City itself. Much of the defense against this attack will be in hyperspace, while the attack is in transit. We want to upgrade our capabilities for fighting in hyperspace by being able to use box launchers from picket ships.”
“I understand, Admiral Cernik.”
“I’ve been doing some testing, Mr. Denny,” Svenson said. “One method for box-launching in hyperspace would be to ignite all the missiles at once. This cooks the rear missiles pretty badly and most of them are dead. Another method would be to ignite the front missiles first. This is actually marginally worse. The best scenario is to light the rear missiles first, have them push everything out of the box launcher, and then ignite the first-out missiles before they fall to one side of the rear missile shoving them from behind. In
that way, the exhaust of the front missile has somewhere to go other than just baking the rear missile. The best interval for that is about 1.4 seconds.”
“I understand, Admiral.”
“Mr. Denny,” Cernik said. “What we need from you is options in the software for box-launching missiles in hyperspace, given that sequence. You know, if in hyperspace, this is the launch sequence, as opposed to the launch sequence in normal space. Can you do that?”
“Of course, Admiral. Timeframe?”
“We haven’t seen them gathering forces yet, Mr. Denny, but, as always, sooner is better.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Oh, and Mr. Denny?”
“Yes, Admiral Svenson?”
“Don’t forget. A hyperspace launch comes out of the container’s front door, not the back door. Don’t forget to change that.”
“Of course, Sir.”
Cernik gave Svenson a quizzical look.
“Hey, it’s the easy stuff that gets overlooked, Stepan.”
Denny smiled.
“We’ll make sure, Sir. Admiral Cernik. Admiral Svenson.”
Denny nodded to each in turn and disappeared from the channel.
Rear Admiral Dorothy Conroy stared into the hyperspace map. She had the Democracy of Planets front and center in the display. There were hyperspace tracks emanating from thousands of DP planets. There didn’t seem to be any order or common purpose to them, but they all started within a day of each other.
“Group tracks by apparent destination, five degree tolerance, highlight in colors.”
Still awfully chaotic.
“Group tracks by apparent destination, ten degree tolerance, highlight in colors.”
There it was. The pattern she was looking for.
“Project destinations by color.”
That was interesting. What was it about that pattern?
“Use the average inbound vector into each destination to project a single outbound vector. Project destination.”
Conroy nodded as she looked at the projection. She checked the time in Imperial City on Sintar, and then sent the alarm message. The Emperor and Admiral Leicester appeared in the hyperspace display room within seconds of each other.
“Admiral Conroy,” Dunham said.
“Yes, Sire, Admiral. I’m sorry to interrupt your evening, but I thought you ought to see this.”
Conroy gestured to the hyperspace map.
“For the last day to two days, we have seen DP warships spacing in squadrons. It was chaotic at first, but a pattern has now emerged. You can see that all the DP warships on the far side of the DP are converging on one location. That location is Olympia, the capital planet. Those tracks are all shown in blue.
“The warships on this side of the DP are all converging on one of twelve systems. They are also color-coded by group. Those twelve systems are all forward. I believe they were selected to minimize the total trip time to their ultimate destination. You can see the projection of the average inbound vector as an outbound vector.
“Those projections converge on Sintar.”
“How many ships are we talking about, Admiral?” Leicester asked.
“On the far side of the DP, about a million ships.”
“Converging on Olympia?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“And on the near side, Admiral?”
“Also about a million ships, Sir.”
“Converging on Sintar?”
“Eventually, yes, Sir.”
“Thank you, Admiral Conroy. This is most helpful,” Dunham said.
“Yes, Sire. Thank you, Sire.”
Dunham and Leicester dropped from the channel.
Admiral Maria della Espinoza considered the tactical plot her picket ships in the DP kept updating.
“I wonder where all these guys are going all of a sudden,” she said to her chief of staff.
“I’m not sure, Ma’am. There sure are a lot of them who decided to just up and space somewhere else, aren’t there?” Admiral Kim asked.
“And we just received new orders from Imperial Navy Headquarters Sintar.”
“Do they want us to attack these formations, Ma’am?”
“Sort of yes, sort of no, Jay. They want us to harass them into firing missiles from their impellers in hyperspace, and then head back to locations along these routes, stopping to reload box launchers on the way.”
“Ma’am, those routes all lead to Sintar.”
“Yes. It looks like the new government of the DP is going to try to roll the dice one last time.”
“That’s not going to work out real well for them, Ma’am.”
“I’m not so sure, Jay. Remember Estvia and Balmoral. It only takes one ten-megaton warhead getting through to ruin your whole day. Any bets their missiles will have final targeting loaded before launch?”
“No wager there, Ma’am. But we’re not to attack these forces?”
“Not yet. We have a new software package coming.”
“What’s Mr. Denny cooking up for us this time, Ma’am?”
“Picket ships box-launching in hyperspace.”
“That will be a serious game-changer, Ma’am. Each picket ship can out-shoot two of their warships.”
“In the first salvo, yes. So that’s why they don’t want us spending picket ships on ramming attacks. They want to make sure one salvo is enough.”
“All right, everybody. Listen up,” Senior Chief Petty Officer Robert ‘Fitz’ Fitzhugh said to the assembled chiefs and senior chiefs in the HMS Raptor’s Goat Locker, in their deployment building on Imperial Fleet Base Osaka. “We got a serious issue goin’ on here. The DP is gonna try one more time. They got a million ships headin’ for Sintar. The planet. Looks like they wanna take out the Emperor.”
There was some serious grumbling and cursing about that.
“Yeah. So here’s the plan. We’re gonna harass ‘em, charge at ‘em and make ‘em burn out their tubes, then drop outta hyperspace once they’ve shot at us a bunch o’ times. Then we go get loaded up, and we station ourselves along their path to the capital.
“But here’s the really good part. Guns, you’re gonna love this shit. What we’re loadin’ up with is missiles. We got new software comin’. Shootin’ off box launchers from picket ships. In hyperspace. Whaddya think o’ that shit?”
Senior Chief Petty Officer Nathan ‘Guns’ Gunderson erupted and started swearing, while those around him laughed.
“Dammit, Fitz. You just made me shoot coffee out my nose. Box launchers in hyperspace? You’re not foolin’ your old pal, are ya?”
“Nope. The inside skinny is Admiral Svenson worked it out, and the same guys who gave us box launchers in normal space are doin’ the software.”
“Oh, that is so sweet. We got ‘em outgunned two-to-one.”
“On the first salvo, yeah.”
“Then we just hit ‘em with another wave, Fitz. We got lots o’ picket ships. And then their tubes start burnin’ out. That’s when the fun really starts.”
Another Fateful Decision
Jeremy Totten had never actually met Gunther Auer. While Auer had been a large donor to Totten’s party in the recently concluded elections, he had also been, over time, a large donor to Harold Pinter’s party. The wealthy CEO of The Auer Group didn’t actually pick which party would win any given election, but he could make it either much harder or much easier to win.
Wealthy in Auer’s case didn’t quite capture the reality. The Auer Group owned hundreds of companies, many of them large interstellars, and had large interests in thousands more. These involvements made Gunther Auer the wealthiest man in the Democracy of Planets and, by extension, in human space.
“It’s good to finally meet you, Mr. Auer,” Totten said.
“And you, Mr. Prime Minister. Thank you so much for meeting with me.”
Auer waved to a pair of comfortable club chairs in the VR simulation, and they both sat. Auer waited until Totten had seated himself before sitting.
&
nbsp; “Thank you for your support during the recent elections,” Totten said.
Auer waved it away with a hand.
“A change was needed. The war with Sintar especially, I think, was poorly handled.”
“Agreed, Mr. Auer. The war was poorly handled, mostly because, I think, it was improperly framed.”
“I am interested in hearing your analysis of that issue, if you could share it with me, Mr. Prime Minister.”
“Assuming our conversation is confidential, Mr. Auer–”
“But of course, Mr. Prime Minister. It would do neither of us any good even for the existence of this conversation to become well known.”
“Indeed, Mr. Auer.”
Totten took a moment to compose his thoughts.
“Consider what is it, really, that makes the Empire and the Democracy of Planets different. For the average person in the street, not much. For the spacer in the navy, either theirs or ours, not much. Even for precinct and district governors, I suspect it is not much.
“No, what makes the two so very different is the decision-making at the top. The Democracy of Planets is run by consensus among politicians and prominent business people as to what is the best course, the best way forward. The Empire, by contrast, is run by one man who makes those decisions.
“This situation should make the Democracy of Planets stronger and more robust than the Empire, other things being equal. We have broad consensus on our direction among the very brightest and most informed and most involved of our citizens, whereas the Empire’s direction is determined by one man, who lives as a virtual hermit in a palace surrounded by minions and flunkies.
“And yet Mr. Pinter’s war strategy managed to negate those advantages by ignoring the central weakness of the Empire, its Achilles heel.
“To wage war against the Empire, Mr. Auer, is to wage war against the Emperor. That is what Mr. Pinter’s government failed to do, and what this government shall not fail to do.”
EMPIRE: Conqueror (EMPIRE SERIES Book 6) Page 15