Tyrant

by Richard F. Weyand

  “His Majesty’s Navy is thus manpower-intensive. In fact, the limiting factor in our ability to project power is the ability to crew warships. The Empire’s manufacturing base can build us as many ships as we want. Crewing them is another matter.

  “There is an idea for reducing this personnel gap that has been banged around from time to time. It has never gotten any traction because fleet admirals have opposed it. Some people consider the number of people under their command as the ultimate quality factor, as opposed to, say, the ability to project power or to defeat an enemy in a straight-up battle.

  “The idea in a nutshell is to radically rethink ship design and operation. Consider the battleship.”

  Kuznetsov changed the display to a comparison between two ships.

  “By making a single change, we can reduce the mass of a battleship by more than half, increase its maximum acceleration by a factor of three, and do so without sacrificing magazine space, guns, or striking power.

  “That single change is to not crew the vessel at all. The ship’s bridge and most of its other console locations are controlled in VR now. There is no reason personnel staffing those consoles in VR need to be on board the ship. In fact, there are very good reasons not to have them on board ship. The ship can be used in dangerous and unexpected ways without putting the crew at risk.

  “Once the crew is removed, look at what else goes with them. All of the bunk and cabin spaces, the mess halls and recreational spaces. Generally speaking, the entire pressurized volume of the ship. With them also goes all the air regeneration facilities. The food stores. Potable water stores. All the other myriad stores and personnel required to keep the crew fit and healthy.

  “What one is left with is the essence. The guns and magazines, the engines and fuel storage. The operation of the ship is entirely in VR, over QE radio.”

  “Robot ships, Admiral Kuznetsov?”

  “No, Sire. That has been tried before, and it worked out badly. Remotely crewed ships is the better term. Humans still call all the shots, but why put the crew out there in harm’s way if you don’t have to?”

  “Where is the ship’s crew, then, Admiral Kuznetsov?”

  “Anywhere they want to be, Sire. But not in the actual battle zone. Not in harm’s way. That’s a key tactical consideration. If a battle with an enemy fleet may involve large losses, it may currently be necessary to retreat from the encounter even if you would likely win it. The loss of so much training and experience may make the encounter a logistical loss even if it were militarily desirable. If no crew is at risk, however, one can pursue that battle, engage that enemy, and come at them again tomorrow with new ships and the same experienced crews.”

  “Relying on the manufacturing capacity of the Empire to make up the ship losses, Admiral Kuznetsov?”

  “Yes, Sire. And the portions of the ship that are dedicated to crew safety and life support are both the most expensive and the most time-consuming to manufacture. A remotely crewed ship is less than half the tonnage, but it is well under a quarter of the expense, and they can be mass-produced instead of being fitted out essentially by hand.”

  “Can the VR controls be hacked or jammed, Admiral Kuznetsov?”

  “No, Sire. QE radios are immune to hacking and jamming. It’s inherent in the physics. A VR network riding on a QE radio network can be hacked, but only by someone who has legitimate access to the QE radio network already. It’s not hackable from outside.”

  “I see. And if a ship is hit by enemy fire or breaks down, Admiral Kuznetsov? There will be no one aboard to repair it.”

  “Correct, Sire. Then the decision is to abandon it or take it in tow for repair. This is actually the same decision for most ship repairs, but now it becomes an economic decision only, without being colored by the need to rescue the crew.”

  “And what is the result on the offensive firepower of the Navy, Admiral Kuznetsov?”

  “There are several considerations there, Sire. First, remotely crewed ships are not restrained in their accelerations by the need to keep a human crew comfortable or functional. Together with the reduced tonnage of the vessels, ship maneuverability and acceleration are trebled.

  “Second, because of their increased maneuverability, their smaller cross-section, and their greater durability, such ships should be much harder to knock out in a battle. Both harder to hit, and with reduced probability of a hit taking the platform out of the battle.

  “Third, the staffing requirements for an existing Imperial Fleet are reduced by a factor of almost ten, from almost four million spacers down to just over four hundred thousand.

  “Fourth, we can invert that last calculation, Sire. With the crew complements we have now, we can field almost ten times the firepower with existing Navy personnel.”

  “That is the key point, I think, Admiral Leicester.”

  “Yes, Sire. I agree.”

  “And the reluctance to pursue this idea previously, Admiral Leicester?”

  “I think it was primarily a ‘that’s not the way we’ve always done things’ issue, Sire, combined with the ship manufacturers’ desire to have ships be more expensive and more handcrafted. These mass-produced remotely crewed ships would be much cheaper on a per-ship basis.”

  “But the firepower we could field, Admiral Leicester. The mind boggles.”

  “I guess the open question is, How much firepower do we want, Sire?”

  “I want it to be more than we need, Admiral Leicester. The downside risk of too much is dwarfed by the downside risk of too little.”

  “Agreed, Sire.”

  “Is that it, then, Admiral Kuznetsov?”

  “Yes, Sire. We need the go ahead to build prototypes, exercise them, and refine the designs.”

  “One final question, Admiral Kuznetsov. Let’s say we field this navy. What do we do with our current ships? Scrap them?”

  “We are looking at retrofitting the remote control capability onto existing ships, Sire. We have existing gun platforms. With a little tweaking, we can use them as well.”

  “Without crews.”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “And this is your recommendation, Admiral Leicester?”

  “To proceed with prototyping and testing, and to suspend new ship acquisition for the time being while we work through this recommendation? Yes, Sire.”

  “Very well, Admiral Leicester. You may proceed.”

  “Thank you, Sire.”

  Preparations

  Stenis Dernier looked about in the VR. He floated in the middle of a void criss-crossed in three-dimensions by colored lines. Thousands of them. A cat’s cradle of infinite proportion. He stood on no floor, was enclosed in no room.

  For most people, VR was a replacement for regular reality. They stood on an apparent surface, in a room filled with ordinary objects, whether it be a conference room or a lecture hall or their parents’ living room. They also used the VR as a replacement for a physical display, reading or viewing items on a virtual screen in front of them.

  Dernier had long left such mundanities behind. He used the VR in all those same ways, of course, but he also used it for completely abstract displays. His brain had long ago made the several billion extra connections required to be able to see the entire sphere around him at once, and he could float in the middle of such an abstract display and perceive it all without turning his virtual head to look above or below or behind himself.

  There were others who could do the same thing, of course. People who had spent a lot of time in VR, had actively worked at viewing abstract presentations. What a very few additional people, like Dernier, could also do is perceive more than one set of colors. The network operations groups of the Sintaran Imperial government sought them out.

  How did two spectra work? How did you explain color to a blind man? An object that was bright, but different than the bright object next to it. One was red and one was blue. Now consider a red object that was different than the red object next to it. One was red+red, the
other was red+blue. If computers could handle one spectrum, they could handle two. And people like Stenis Dernier could see – in VR – in both spectra at the same time.

  The display he floated in was the quantum entanglement radio network of the Sintaran Empire. Almost half a million connections, each represented by a single line in the VR. On one spectrum, the colors represented the type of connection. The green were the hierarchical connections, from Sintar to the sector capitals, from the sector capitals to the provincial capitals, from the provincial capitals to the individual planets of His Majesty’s Empire. The blue lines were the redundancies that connected planets within the local hierarchy. The red lines were further redundancies that connected across the hierarchy, such as those between provincial capitals in different sectors.

  On the other spectrum was their status. Green for normal operation, yellow, orange and red for varying degrees of traffic density above normal, and black, which nonetheless stood out against the miasmic grey non-color of the void, for lines that were down or disabled.

  Before him was the Catalonia Sector, with Catalonia front and center. Five thousand Imperial planets, over thirteen thousand QE radio links. Five of them came into Catalonia from this side – green from Sintar and blue from other sector capitals. Fifty went out the other side, all green, from Catalonia to its provincial capitals.

  Dernier reached out and pinched the connection into Catalonia from Sintar. He watched the traffic re-route through the other sector capitals to reach Catalonia around the break. One at a time, he pinched those off, and watched traffic re-route again, over the red links from planets within the Catalonia Sector to planets in neighboring sectors.

  All well and good. That was the way it was supposed to work. So his simulation of the real network responded properly.

  Now he set about figuring out how to make it not work.

  Pavel Sokolov was in a similar display, but this one was of the VR network, and was even more complicated. The VR rode on top of the QE radio links Dernier was working on, but the connections were less structured. You also had the VR nodes and connections on the planet to worry about.

  Sokolov had two problems to think through. One was how to disable whatever the Catalonia Sector governor tried to do in terms of hijacking the feed of the coronation. The other was how to turn off the VR on each planet. If the QE network between planets was shut down, that wouldn’t affect VR on a given planet. The primary nodes there were Imperial network equipment. All the private VR equipment on the planet connected into those Imperial primary nodes.

  The issue was how to shut those down in such a way he didn’t smash the structure permanently. That structure had been grown and optimized organically and heuristically over time by some of the most sophisticated computer software ever written. If he smashed the structure, it would have to rebuild itself, and he wasn’t even sure it could do that under a full load. The existing structure had grown up when the VR was less universal and less ubiquitous, and it had adapted as the loads had increased. But if he just smashed it, there were no guarantees it could heal and optimize itself when it was turned back on with the current loads, and he didn’t trust a simulation to tell him if it could.

  What if he advertised a non-existent adjacency right here, on this supernode, and then threw the data away? He reached out in the simulation and inserted the change, then turned it on.

  Holy cow. Well, that didn’t work. It started sucking data from three sectors, all going down the memory hole, like a big vortex sucking in everything.

  Hmm. Let’s be more subtle. What if we advertised adjacency just on this link, and not the whole node? He reset the simulation and tried again.

  OK, well that’s better. Can I replicate that over several hundred of these nodes?

  He worked on refining a solution.

  Sayuri Mori was also working in a simulation of the VR network. She was working on the feed-substitution counter-hack. She had already found a dozen different ways the Catalonia Sector governor could hack the feed of the coronation, and now she was working on counter-hacks for all of them.

  Some of her counter-hacks would counter more than one of the possible hacks, and make them impossible. She still had one stubborn hack, though, and she hadn’t yet found a counter for it.

  Mori opened a feed from Sintar like the one that would be used for the coronation. Straightforward, it was a broadcast feed that propagated to every node in the whole system, on a priority channel. She had already countered all the direct hacks that broke the feed where it entered the Catalonia Sector and inserted a replacement feed on the channel.

  The one she was having trouble with was the distributed hack. The false feed was transmitted on a separate channel to multiple nodes, such as the provincial capitals, and the substitution was made in multiple places simultaneously. The counter-hack would also have to be distributed, but the response would need to be automated.

  Mori began to work on a simultaneous second feed for the coronation, on a private channel, and a bot she could distribute to the nodes that would continuously compare the two feeds and reinstate the correct feed whenever there was a disparity.

  As she worked on it, she realized if she could pull this off, it would be a counter-hack to all the feed-substitution hacks. The silver bullet of counter-hacks.

  “With only a month to go, we’ve been working on the coronation, Sire. There will need to be some changes, and we think we have a handle on them.”

  “What do you propose, Mr. Perrin?”

  “First, Sire, there will only be one person carrying the Imperial jewels up to the dais. This is because, while the crown works for male or female wearers, the plastron necklace is inappropriate for a male ruler. So there will be only one person, who will be carrying the crown.”

  “Who are the candidates for that role, Mr. Perrin?”

  “It is traditionally a female role, Sire, and I don’t suggest we change that. For your sister’s coronation, it was Ms. Dunham and Ms. Pullman, the two women closest to Her Majesty. Going by the same criteria, I would suggest Ms. Peters for the role.”

  “Truly, Mr. Perrin?”

  “Yes, Sire. She is your closest female acquaintance. It also has the advantage that, if there were an Imperial wedding to Ms. Peters in the future, she would already be known to the public.”

  “And if not, Mr. Perrin?”

  “Then no harm done, Sire. It would be the identical situation as if we used some other female acquaintance now.”

  “I see. I will consider it, Mr. Perrin.”

  “Thank you, Sire. For the Imperial cape, it should be two officers in the Imperial Guard who are close to you from your time in the Guard.”

  “I’ll consider who those might be, Mr. Perrin. There is a wealth of choices there.”

  “Yes, Sire. Then we have the problem of what to do about the role the Imperial Council traditionally played. I don’t recommend we skip that portion. People are used to seeing it, and the result would be a ceremony too short to satisfy people’s expectations.”

  “What do you suggest, Mr. Perrin?”

  “I would suggest Mr. Saaret play the same role as he did with the Council, Sire, except this time as co-consul. For the others, I thought we might take the forty most senior department heads. We can have them wear ceremonial robes, to mimic precedent, and have them come up individually and swear their obedience, as representatives for the rest.”

  “I like it, Mr. Perrin. I think that is an excellent solution.”

  “Thank you, Sire.”

  “Very well, proceed on that basis, Mr. Perrin. I will let you know my decisions on the other roles.”

  “Very good, Sire.”

  Dunham and Peters were up on the pool deck after dinner. They had been together five weeks by this point. Dinner this evening had been tapas, with albondigas con caldo de pollo, patatas con aioli, jamón serrano, pincho de pollo, gambas a la plancha, and datiles con tocino, with profiteroles con helado for dessert.

  [
spicy meatballs in chicken broth, potatoes with garlic, Serrano ham with cheese and tomato on toast, chicken skewers, grilled shrimp, and dates wrapped with bacon, with ice-cream-filled pastries for dessert – RFW]

  The Guardsmen had been left at the cupola, and Peters swam laps in the nude, which had become her habit, while Dunham lounged on the deck chair and watched. He was similarly undressed, it having also become his habit on the pool deck.

  Peters walked up to him, wringing out her hair.

  “Why do you never swim, Bobby?”

  “We never had any deep water around when I was growing up, and there was no money in the town for something fancy like a pool, so I didn’t develop a taste for it. I get my exercise, though. In the gym.”

  “That makes sense, I guess.”

  She climbed onto the double lounger with him.

  “Brrr. Hold me. I’m cold.”

  Dunham put his arm around her and she snuggled up tight to him.

  “Perrin was in today discussing arrangements for the coronation.”

  “Oh, I’m so looking forward to it. It’s always so ceremonial and impressive.”

  “Right now he’s trying to fill out the slots in the ceremony.”

  “What are they going to do for the Council? I remember them going up the stairs and kneeling, then swearing obedience.”

  “Right. Well, he thought to have Saaret lead them as before, as co-consul this time, and use the forty most-senior department heads.”

  “That makes sense. They can be stand-ins for everybody else.”

  “Exactly. And there will be two of my fellow senior officers in the Guard to bring out the cape.”

  “What’s left, then? The jewels and the crown, right?”

  “Well, not the jewels. I don’t think they’d look that good on me.”

  Peters giggled.

  “Oh, I don’t know. They’d look pretty good on you right now. I’m just not sure where I’d hang them.”

  “Very funny. No, we’ll just stick with the crown, thanks.”