by M. D. Cooper
“Yes, that is the case,” Sera replied. “Over the last century, their military growth has outpaced our ability to seed agents. We have, at best, seventy percent coverage. I have reported on this gap frequently—as did my predecessor.”
The thought of Justin gave her a pang of remorse, but Sera pushed away guilt at the punishment meted out on Justin to protect Andrea—and to secure her a place near her father’s center of power.
“No recriminations,” the president said. “For now, we must focus on the issue at hand. However, if it turns out that all the Hegemony ships in Ascella have no Hand agents on them, that is very telling information in and of itself.”
“It means someone has a mole,” Admiral Kieran said with a pointed look at Sera.
“Of course we have moles,” Sera replied. “You have moles, I have moles—even the president’s office has a mole. Given how many we have even here on Airtha, do you really think that we can control every one of the tens of thousands of agents and assets in the Inner Stars?”
“Again,” the president raised his voice. “Let’s focus on what we can learn from this. How is it that we did not know of a fleet movement of this size? What’s more, how did none of the Hegemony’s neighbors see it? Again, not to spur recriminations, I want ideas. If you move this many warships, people will notice. People will get nervous.”
“It’s hard to tell what nervous even looks like right now in the Inner Stars,” Sera replied. “Ever since the Intrepid blasted its way out of Bollam’s World, every system has been building up, worried their enemies will get their hands on the Intrepid’s tech and use it against them.”
“Pico research is happening all over,” one of the president’s advisors added.
Sera nodded. “No one has met with success yet—that we know of. However, a few research facilities have self-destructed from containment issues. So far, no one has reported any grey-goo incidents.”
“Just what we need,” Admiral Dredge sighed. “The Intrepid will have offset any usefulness if their presence spurs a picophage that ravages the Inner Stars.”
“We’ve stopped them before,” Admiral Kieran replied.
“We’ve stopped nanophages,” Dredge scowled. “We don’t even know how to stop a picophage.”
“I have an update,” Sera said, glad to get the conversation back to Ascella. “We have not been able to identify any of the Hegemony ships in Ascella.”
“Meaning?” her father asked.
“That these are net-new ships. Ones we had no knowledge of,” Sera replied. “Apparently, there are levels of secrecy in the Hegemony of Worlds that we have not yet infiltrated.”
“The Guard has to be involved,” Admiral Jurden shook his head. “They could have sent supplies into secret bases through jump-space. My analysis shows that the eighteen years since Bollam’s World would have been ample time to build a fleet like this with Guard support.”
Sera nodded. Jurden’s assessment made sense. It meant that the Guard had fully revealed itself to the Hegemony—which was more likely than the Hegemony building this fleet on their own. The Orion Guard had long striven to break the Transcend’s hold on the AST. They must have placed someone close to President Uriel to put a plot like this in motion.
She had to consider that any intel from the Hegemony of Worlds could be compromised—fed to her agents by a government that knew they were there. It was unlikely that the Hegemony had ferreted out all her agents, but that made things worse. It was impossible to tell what information she could trust.
She passed that thought back to her teams in the CIC while the Admiralty discussed options regarding the fleet in Ascella.
“Look,” Kieran said, raising his voice over the others. “If they are Orion backed, then we are no longer a rumor. There is nothing to be gained by hiding the existence of the watchpoint. I argue that we engage them fully—or we destroy the system.”
“Both of those are rather final options,” Admiral Dredge replied. “We cannot contain a fleet that large. Even if we won—and I fear we may not—some of their ships would escape. Even if not, they would get messages out. Blowing the star would not just confirm to the AST that we’re out here, but all of the Inner Stars would know.”
“The time of our secrecy is coming to an end, anyway,” Adrienne said. “We all know this to be true. The arrival of the Intrepid from the fifth millennia has set this in motion. The Orion Guard will not sit still, but they cannot defeat us on their own, or they would have tried long ago. Only with the aid of the major players within the Inner Stars can they do so. Every path out of Ascella leads to Total War.”
Adrienne’s words silenced the room. Everyone knew that the ultimate confrontation with the Guard was coming, but none had expected it to be on their doorstep so soon.
“Then we must destroy the stars and the system with it,” Admiral Jurden said. “We cannot risk any of our technology falling into their hands, it’s the only edge we hold over Orion at present.”
Around each star, in every system containing a watchpoint, orbited a black hole. Usually hidden within a small planet, most of the black holes had a mass close to that of Earth’s moon—depending on the mass of their target star. These black holes, at only a millimeter or so in diameter, were held dormant with the energy they released shielded from prying eyes.
Should a watchpoint fall, the black hole would be fired into the star, tipping the delicate balance between the pressures of fusion and the mass of the star bearing down on the reactions within its core. The black hole would devour the dense matter in the star’s core, and within a matter of hours, the star would collapse under its own weight before exploding in a nova.
“I have another option,” Sera spoke up, raising her mental voice across the virtual space.
Her father held up his hand and the room quieted.
“What is it, Sera?” he asked.
“I don’t like it, and I’m not sure I should even raise it, but my AI assures me it will work. We use the antimatter from our ship’s AP drives and create antimatter warheads. We send them through the gates and wipe out the AST fleet before they even know what has hit them,” she said softly.
“Antimatter weapons are not in our arsenal for a reason,” Admiral Kieran said. “Every civilized system has outlawed them. Once we start down that road, there is no going back.”
“And the road of stellar destruction?” Admiral Jurden asked. “That has always seemed much worse to me.”
“We don’t have the equipment to manufacture enough warheads fast enough,” Admiral Dredge said. “As much as I would like to win this without shedding a drop of Transcend blood, or cutting and running—I don’t see how it can be done.”
“It’s possible,” Sera replied. “I’m putting the device specs on the net. We can retrofit our RMs to carry the warheads through the jump-gates right into the AST fleet. They won’t know what hit them.”
Her father caught her eye in the virtual space and a frown crossed his usually implacable features.
Sera was surprised by his harsh tone.
?> Helen asked.
Sera was worried, she had never known Helen to be this upset, this…frantic.
Sera pulled herself from her private chat to rejoin the conversation. Many members of the admiralty were in favor of the move. It seemed that many had long been proponents of using antimatter weapons against the Orion Guard.
“I like it,” Admiral Dredge was arguing. “It’s conventional, so it doesn’t signal that there is an advanced force laying in wait. The RMs can look like they’ve been pre-seeded. We can run the operation from our base on the fifth planet around the second star. The enemy is still a light day away. They’ll be dead before they ever see our operation. Maybe it will make the AST think twice about allying with Orion.”
The debate for and against raged for several more minutes, but the side arguing for using antimatter weapons was winning. Their logic was simple. It was a zero-loss scenario that allowed for a careful dismantling and destruction of the watchpoint without blowing the stars.
“Do it,” her father said after a minute. “Send the order. I want them to prep enough missiles to kill those Hegemony ships two times over. This operation is zeta-level clearance. No one ever knows we did this.”
The room fell silent, and then the admirals, one-by-one, affirmed the order and left the conference. President Tomlinson cast Sera an unreadable look before leaving the virtual space with his aids. Adrienne followed a moment later, leaving Sera alone.
Sera said softly.
ORDERS
STELLAR DATE: 10.22.8945 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Watchpoint Command
REGION: Ascella System, Galactic North of the Corona Australis star forming region
“This has to be a mistake,” Greer muttered as he read the order.
“What is it?” Tsaroff asked, and Greer passed the pertinent part of the communication to him via the Link.
Greer waited while Tsaroff read the orders, and the technical documents which accompanied them.
“What?” Tsaroff whispered. “Antimatter. They want us to use antimatter?”
Greer nodded slowly. “It satisfies the desire to only use conventional weapons in an engagement like this—though I don’t know that it’s any better.”
“I’ll put it in motion,” Tsaroff replied, and Greer waved him away.
He looked out over the assembled AST fleet as it moved into the Ascella system. Those men, women, and AI, every last one of them, would die, never knowing what hit them.
The watchpoint would still need to be evacuated, but they would have time to do it carefully and deliberately. No lives under his command would be lost. All-in-all it was a good outcome, just not one he would have ever suggested.
OBSERVATION
STELLAR DATE: 10.23.8945 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: OGS Britannica
REGION: Near the Ascella System, Galactic North of the Corona Australis star forming region
Kent was glad for the distraction. The 192nd battalion had been sitting idle on the Britannica for over two months while the ship carefully eased into a viewing location just beyond Ascella’s heliopause.
When he had received the promotion to lieutenant colonel and received command of his own battalion, he had expected to see action against the ever-building forces of the separatists—forces everyone now knew were backed by the Transcend. However, that had not proved to be the case.
Instead, the battalion was transferred to Admiral Fenton’s direct command, and two weeks later they were aboard the Britannica, passing through a jump gate to a destination deep within the Inner Stars.
It had been the longest jump Kent had ever been on, lasting almost three hours. Still, it was nothing compared to the years it would have taken to arrive at their destination using dark layer FTL.
Once he realized the importance of the events which were about to unfold, he understood why they wanted the best on the Britannica. The President of the Hegemony of Worlds was onboard, along with General Garza, a well-respected member of the Guard’s upper echelon.
No one knew exactly what Garza did, but whatever it was, it was important. Admiral Fenton treated him with more deference than he did the Inner Stars president.
The fact that the president was a clone, not the real leader of the Hegemony may have had something to do with it. From what Kent understood, when the clone returned to Earth, its memories would be merged with the real president’s and she would have access to all the experiences of the clone.
It wasn’t Guard technology; the Orion Freedom Alliance had outlawed the sort of cognitive manipulation it took to do such things. Kent knew why—he had read about stories of what happened when neural pathways were forced to operate in patterns they did not naturally evolve into.
Given that the clone’s brain was a copy of the president’s—though Kent would bet that certain key memories had been removed—it should merge back with few issues. Still, Kent shuddered at the thought of what it must be like to have another mind invade your own.
The president-clone claimed that the AST had perfected the process and the risk was infinitesimal. She apparently had multiple backups and would revert to one of them if anything went amiss.
Cloned backups were one area that the Transcend and Guard were in perfect harmony. They had both witnessed every civilization which allowed the liberal use of neural cloning disintegrate within decades. There was something about the fear of death that kept humanity on its toes. Without it, things fell apart fast.
The Hegemony president’s presence onboard had sparked a lot of talk about cloning and its merits. Kent learned that the Guard had experimented with cloned soldiers at one point in its earlier years. The problem was that the soldiers knew they were clones, and while some treated their lives as precious and behaved like their sources, most quickly became suicidal.
Kent imagined that knowing you were nothing but fodder for orbital bombardments would have that effect on a person.
One of his captains told him about an experiment by an Inner Stars federation, where the military had used some mental shenanigans to convince all the clones that they were, in fact, not clones and when they saw the same model as themselves, they saw someone different.
The idea broke down because the clones eventually figured it out, and rebelled. The descendants of those clones now controlled that region of space.
Even when clone soldiers performed well enough to use, the brass treated them differently and spent their lives too freely, and ultimately less effectively.
And so, real soldiers were still what took the field. Time and time again, it had been proven that even AI couldn’t beat the instinctual, split-second decision making abilities that humans had been honing over millions of years.
Kent reached down and scratched at his regrown right leg, which still had a phantom itch that he couldn’t shake. Of course, the human soldiers that took the field these days were far more powerful than any vanilla human from long ago.
His mind flashed to that brazen dash he had made toward those mechs back on Trisal. Real humans had that one key ingredient
that neither clones nor AI exhibited: courage.
The lift stopped at the bridge level, and the doors slid open, ending his reverie and introspection.
Ahead of him, past several rows of lower ratings at consoles, stood President Uriel, alongside Admiral Fenton and General Garza. Also present were two of Uriel’s aides, and Admiral Jerra, one of the AST’s top military commanders.
The president’s clone never failed to look the part of her real self. Her mode of dress would have been considered foppery by his friends and family back on Herschel, but Kent had to admit that, even though he tended to find men more attractive, she was quite desirable.
Her hair was swept up with strings of glowing blue pearls strung throughout, and her dress was complementary emerald hue, which shimmered with an iridescent glow. A belt, which appeared to be made of solid diamond with no visible clasp, drew her in her waist. Her shoes also appeared to be made of diamond, and cast rainbows of light around her feet.
The shoes and belt should have been terribly restrictive and uncomfortable, but the president moved in them with ease. Kent cycled his vision through several bands, all of which confirmed that the woman’s accessories were indeed made of dense carbon, yet he could see them flex and move.
It was rare to see someone from the Inner Stars exhibiting a level of technology that was beyond the OFA’s, and to do so casually with fashion on a daily basis was even less common. In many respects, it was as though the Hegemony of Worlds never fell with the rest of humanity. He could see why General Greer was going to such measures to court them.
The idea of a third major power in the Orion Arm, one with the moral lassitude of the Terrans, gave him no small amount of concern. If the Hegemony of Worlds were to gain advanced technology such as jump gates, they would quickly take control of the Inner Stars and pose a major threat.
He hoped Admiral Fenton and General Garza knew what they were doing.