The Excalibur Alternative

by David Weber

  "And the people who raise that child are that child's parents," the Emperor agreed softly, then chuckled and glanced over his shoulder at the portrait of his Empress. "Matilda certainly made that plain enough to me at the time!" he added wryly.

  "And speaking from personal experience," Captain Stanhope put in, "Ternaui make excellent parents." She smiled warmly at the High Chancellor, and Mugabi had the sudden sense of a matching smile from the immobile, saurian features of the Chancellor.

  "Thank you, daughter," the Ternaui said after a moment. "Still, we must admit that raising human young is an... interesting experience. And one, we suspect, which has corrupted us rather more than our queens would ever have anticipated."

  "Life is sufficient to do that on its own without blaming it on the children, old friend!" the Emperor laughed. "Not that raising them isn't an `interesting experience' for anyone... whatever their own species might be."

  Mugabi managed to hide his surprise, but it wasn't easy. He had to keep reminding himself that these people had absolutely nothing in common with the Federation. Still, the Galactics were the only "advanced" civilization with which the Solarian branch of the human race had ever had any experience, and the very notion of cross-species adoption was anathema to the Federation. In fact, it was expressly forbidden by law, and the admiral wondered how much that might have had to do with the ease with which the Empire had embraced the practice.

  "At any rate," the Emperor went on after a moment, turning his attention fully back to Mugabi, "we did succeed, and we have maintained the bonds of family. In fact, I believe that we've retained our focus on the centrality of family to a much greater extent than your own branch of the family has, Admiral. Of course, we began from a far more homogenous template, and we've managed to preserve much of that homogeneity. No doubt the fact that we're still a hierarchical—some might say feudal—society and that Mother Church remains so central to virtually all of our institutions has a great deal to do with that, but I suspect that the outside threat of the Federation is another factor. Unlike your own ancestors on Earth, we knew from the beginning that the Federation existed and that eventually it must almost certainly come to open conflict between it and us. That gave us a sense of purpose and a focus, not to mention a powerful source of fear, which helped force us to maintain a sense of unity which was bound up inextricably with our concept of who and what we were. Your own branch of humanity has only really become aware of the Federation in the last hundred or hundred and fifty years, so in a very real sense, you've had much longer to develop a broad menu of different family structures and lifestyles which were never really an option for us."

  "Perhaps we have," Mugabi replied. "On the other hand, from what you've already told me it's evident that the Solarian branch of the `family' is actually a fairly small minority of the total human race."

  "I suppose it is," the Emperor conceded. "And I suppose that there will be some inevitable pressure on Earth-born humans to conform to the practices of the Empire. I assure you, however, that the Empire has no intention of forcing anyone to embrace our own laws or our own form of government. If we did that, Matilda would kick my imperial arse up between my imperial ears when I got back to Camelot! Besides, there would be no real practical difference between us and the Federation if we acted in such an arrogant manner, now would there?"

  "I suppose not," Mugabi agreed. "Although I imagine that the fact that the Empire doesn't have any interest in exterminating us might be considered at least a small difference, if someone wanted to get picky about it."

  "Oh, perhaps a small one." The Emperor chuckled. He and Mugabi grinned at each other, but then the admiral glanced at his watch and shook his head again.

  "I'm certain that it will take years for us to even begin to really catch up with all of the details of what you and your people have accomplished, Your Majesty. I personally look forward to the time when I can properly appreciate the challenges which you must have faced and the ways in which you overcame them. But as you know, President Dresner, Admiral Stevenson, and the President's Cabinet are en route to Excalibur. According to the schedule they transmitted to me, they should be arriving within the next half-hour, and I have no doubt that they'll expect me to have at least the bare bones of a military briefing for them."

  "Of course," the Emperor said. "Forgive me. I'm afraid that having a fresh ear to put up with my recollections of the `good old days' has gone to my head. God knows that this ungrateful younger lot—" he waved at Maynton and the other officers "—aren't slow about letting me know how boring they find it when I reminisce!"

  "Not boring, Grandfather," Princess Evelynn disagreed demurely. "Merely... well polished."

  A general rumble of laughter rolled around the compartment, led by the Emperor, but then he turned his gaze back to Mugabi.

  "Very well, Admiral, let's look at those bare bones of yours."

  The Emperor leaned back in his chair, and despite his amusement of only moments before, his expression was serious, almost grim.

  "It may well be, Admiral, that future generations of historians will look back upon my reign as a total disaster, a case of missed opportunities leading to utter ruin that a wiser man might have avoided entirely." Mugabi opened his mouth quickly, but the Emperor's raised hand cut him off before he could voice his protest.

  "No, hear me out, Admiral. I don't say that I would agree with that verdict; I only say that some people may judge it so, because there were two possible alternatives open to me, and I never even considered pursuing one of them."

  "Two alternatives?" Mugabi furrowed his brow.

  "Two," the Emperor repeated firmly. "One possibility would have been to develop our own phase drive, build our military and technological bases up to a level which would give someone as cautious and basically cowardly as the Federation pause, and then demand a seat of our own on the Council."

  Mugabi stared incredulously at him, and the Emperor chuckled.

  "I realize that, particularly from the perspective of the Solar System's experience with the Galactics, the notion that they might have admitted any human representative to their precious Council must seem ridiculous. But what we can never know, Admiral, is whether or not what appears to be so obvious with the benefit of hindsight would have seemed quite so obvious if we'd pursued a different alternative at an earlier time. It's possible, however remote the probability, that if we'd contacted the Federation on our own terms as soon as we'd thoroughly developed New Lancaster, they might have reacted differently. After all, at that point they hadn't yet placed the Solar System under tight surveillance, which probably indicates that they hadn't yet recognized the threat which humanity's basic nature presents to their precious stability."

  "With all due respect, Your Majesty, I can't see that happy state of affairs lasting very long once they'd gotten to know you. Leaving aside their reaction to the Romans and their `stolen ship'—which certainly suggests how they would have responded once they discovered the foundation of your own beginning technological base—your Empire, from the very beginning, was busy creating exactly the sort of bad example they were afraid that we would present to their subject races."

  "I believe you're correct," the Emperor said quietly, "yet there are times when I lie awake at night wondering what would have happened if I hadn't automatically assumed that hostility between us and the Federation was inevitable. What if I'd pursued the alternative of seeking peaceful coexistence and working to reform the Federation from within once we were seated upon the Council?"

  "I don't lie awake at night wondering about that," Archbishop Timothy said tartly, "because I bloody well know—pardon my language—what would have happened. We'd all have been dead three hundred and fifty years ago!"

  "My analysis of humans' ability to endlessly reinvent and reinterpret their own history suggests that you are undoubtedly correct that some scholar with more credentials than brainpower will eventually suggest precisely what you have just described, Your Majesty," t
he voice of Merlin put in. "All that that demonstrates, however, is that individuals who are not responsible for making crucial decisions are the ones who feel the greatest freedom when it comes to second-guessing those who did have to decide."

  "Be careful, my friends!" the Emperor said with a wry grin. "Arguing an emperor out of feeling a healthy sense of self-doubt is an excellent way to encourage him to believe in his own infallibility, and then where will you all be?"

  "Watching Her Majesty... convince you of the error of your ways, Your Majesty," Maynton replied in a tone whose solemnity went poorly with the twinkle in his blue eyes.

  "Ouch!" The Emperor winced at some image only he could see, then shook himself and his amusement vanished once more into that same grim intensity.

  "Whatever possibilities might or might not have existed, Admiral Mugabi, I chose to pursue a second alternative—the one Matilda christened the `Excalibur Alternative.' Perhaps it was presumptuous of us to see ourselves in just that light, but it seemed to Matilda that, in a sense, we had become Arthur's sword." He met Mugabi's eyes levelly. "It hadn't been our choice, but surely we'd been cast into the depths of the stars as thoroughly as ever Excalibur was cast back to the Lady of the Lake. In our case, those depths were also the furnace in which we were forged, and the anvil upon which we were hammered, not simply a safe hiding place, but like Excalibur, it was our duty to return in our homeland's darkest hour. And so, rightly or wrongly, we gave no thought to the alternative of `peaceful coexistence.' We judged that there was no realistic hope of ever reforming something as huge and as static as the Federation, and that if it could not be reformed, then for the sake not only of our own race but of every `primitive' species the Federation ever had or ever would encounter, it must be destroyed."

  "We chose the Excalibur Alternative," the Emperor said, his voice harsh as clanging steel, "and we never looked back from that day."

  Silence hovered in the cabin, and Mugabi inhaled deeply as he realized that he'd actually been holding his breath. The sense of presence he'd felt from the Emperor from the beginning was stronger than ever, and despite the youthfulness of his appearance he sat in his chair like some ancient granite boulder, unbroken and unbreakable.

  Four hundred and fifty-one years. That was how long this man had dedicated himself and all of his people unswervingly to the task of building the weapon—of transforming himself and those he ruled until they became the very Excalibur he'd spoken of—to overthrow the most powerful and arrogant federation in the history of the galaxy. No wonder he radiated that steely aura of raw power and purpose.

  "And what, if I may ask, Your Majesty," the Solarian said very quietly after a long, silent moment, "does the `Excalibur Alternative' consist of?"

  "It consists of everything we have been able to accomplish in four and a half centuries. Of every warship, every weapon, every strategy and tactic and technological advantage we've been able to put together. We certainly can't guarantee victory, Admiral Mugabi, but we can guarantee, especially if the Solar System joins with us, that the Federation's unwavering belief in its own superiority won't survive what happens.

  "In more specific terms, however," the Emperor continued in a more normal tone of voice, sitting back in his chair once again, "we've already placed certain forces in motion, and we intend to activate still more of them in the very near future.

  "First, we are prepared to station Evelynn's Third Fleet here in the Solar System indefinitely. As currently constituted, Third Fleet's battleline consists of sixty Sword-class dreadnoughts like Excalibur and two hundred Pendragon-class battleships, each of them about two-thirds the size and power of a Sword. They're screened by three hundred and forty Gawain-class battlecruisers and supported by one hundred Nimue-class carriers, each of which carries a thousand phase-capable fighters with an individual combat power roughly equivalent to a Federation Harpy-class destroyer."

  Mugabi knew his jaw had dropped, but right that moment he couldn't do anything about it. Sixty of these monster ships? Three times that many battleships? His mind reeled at the inconceivable firepower the Empire's Third Fleet represented, but the Emperor continued calmly.

  "At the moment, Third Fleet is the largest and most powerful of our formations, although its margin of superiority over Home Fleet is relatively slight. The problem, of course, is that the Federation already knows where the Solar System is, whereas it doesn't even know where to begin looking for us. That may change, but in the worst possible case, it will take them decades to locate any of our star systems. Which means that we can anticipate that any attacks it launches will be directed here and mandates that this is the point at which we must place our strongest defense. Particularly since the Galactics will soon enough deduce approximately how the Empire must have come into existence. Once they've reached that point, they will also appreciate just how vast their advantage in numbers and star systems must be, and I don't doubt for a moment that their response will be to attempt to utterly destroy any of our star systems they can identify.

  "At the same time, our intelligence sources within the Federation indicate that it will take them at least eight years to concentrate a fresh squadron as powerful as Lach'heranu's to attack here. It will take considerably longer than that for them to assemble a force stronger than hers was, and I expect that it's fairly safe to assume that the Federation won't commit to any follow-up attack until it can muster a substantially more powerful force than the one it's already lost.

  "While the Council is trying to put that sort of force together, we are prepared to transfer to the Solar System automated shipyards and supporting industrial modules. Initially, those yards and modules would be dedicated to replicating themselves, and we would use the same time to begin the transfer of our general technology base to Earth in order to bring the entire system up to date as quickly as possible. Our current estimate is that the first Solarian-built Sword could be delivered within six and a half years; production of fighters for local defense could begin at least two years before that. Once the first capital ships began emerging from your shipyards here, we estimate that your maximum sustainable rate of construction would be a tonnage approximately equal to seventeen Sword-class dreadnoughts per month."

  Mugabi could feel the eyes of everyone else in the cabin upon him, but he himself could not look away from the Emperor.

  "In the meantime, we intend to make full use of certain other advantages to keep the Federation as thoroughly off-balance as possible for as long as possible. I feel quite confident that what happened to Lach'heranu and the implications of the Empire's existence will come as a tremendous shock to the Council, especially when it realizes that what it actually faces is the very thing it was prepared to commit genocide to avoid. Unfortunately for the Council," the Emperor's thin smile was a cold and frightening thing to see, "that's only the first of many shocks headed in its direction. One that it will find particularly unpalatable is the fact that the Empire has substantially improved upon the performance of the Federation's own phase drive. In fact, our starships are almost eleven times as fast as theirs are."

  Mugabi would have felt a fresh spasm of shock at that little tidbit... if he hadn't already been anesthetized by the cumulative impact of all the other shocks these people had administered to his system. There was no way that they were going to really surprise him again, he thought.

  He was wrong.

  "In addition," the Emperor continued calmly, "we've made a few other improvements. In particular, we've developed what we call the singularity comm."

  "Singularity comm?" Mugabi repeated cautiously.

  "Yes." The Emperor's eye gleamed with something suspiciously like amusement. "At the moment its maximum range is limited to only sixty-two light-years, but its effective transmission speed is approximately seven hundred times the speed of light."

  "Faster than light?!" Mugabi jerked upright in his chair so quickly that even it couldn't keep up. "You've got an FTL communications capability?!"

  "O
f course," the Emperor said mildly, and this time there was no question about his broad grin. "Doesn't everyone?"

  "My God," Mugabi murmured while his mind raced over the incredible strategic advantages inherent in what he'd just heard. The superior speed of the Empire's warships would have been a huge boon by itself, but coupled with the ability of a high command to deploy and redeploy them using the sort of communications the Emperor had just described, that speed became truly priceless.

  "And finally," the Emperor continued after giving him a few moments to digest the strategic implications, "the Federation's `civilized' races are about to discover that they have all manner of problems closer to home."

  "Closer to home?" Mugabi cocked his head, half afraid of what he was going to hear next.

  "Much closer," the Emperor said with an evil chuckle. "To be completely honest with you, Admiral, if Lach'heranu hadn't moved to attack Earth, you still wouldn't know that we existed. Our military potential is still climbing relative to that of the Federation. In fact, the curve of increase is still accelerating. Unfortunately, our potential still remains enormously short of the full power the Federation could concentrate against us if left to its own devices. Because of that, we would actually have preferred to wait another fifty to seventy-five years to contact you, but the Council's decision brought our preparations to a head sooner than we might have liked.

  "Nonetheless, our projections of the Federation's probable actions had always suggested to us that we would find ourselves in precisely this position, and because of that we've taken certain additional precautions. One, although neither you nor the Federation were aware of it, was to maintain a powerful fleet presence within one month's transit time from Earth for the past sixty years, ready to intervene if Lach'heranu's orders had been issued sooner. Another, however, was to make very cautious contact with certain of the `protected' races. In fact, we've spent the past century or so creating resistance cells on scores of `protected' planets scattered throughout the Federation. It was a particularly risky strategy in many respects, especially given that the Federation would have assumed that Earth was behind it if any of their security forces had realized what was happening. That could very well have ended up accelerating their decision to move against you, but we felt that it was a risk we had to run.