by B. V. Larson
“Right.”
“Then let’s go.”
Myrmidon raised his eyebrows. “Go?”
“To your people. I need to see for myself. That’s what you said.”
“I have an Opter ship hidden among the asteroids. It’s stealthy and sidespace-capable.”
“Will your ship hold two?” Straker asked.
“It will.”
“How long is the trip?”
“At least twelve days each way, and you should plan for a few weeks of observation.”
“So, call it two months minimum.” Straker stood. “Does it matter what I bring along?”
“No. I’ll provide all you need.”
“Then I’ll meet you at the airlock in one hour.”
Chapter 5
Engels, three days later, New Earth
Commodore Carla Engels sat at the head of the Indomitable’s main conference room, surrounded by fellow officers—ship captains, squadron commanders, aides and even admirals of the former Mutuality, now New Earthan Republic, navy.
Yet she felt alone.
Well, except for the aides. Those aides—mostly Ruxins and humans, but also two elephant-trunked Huphlor, a lizard-like Suslon, and even a Thorian wrapped in his rad suit—were present in the flesh. The others were holograms, but the only proof of this was their lack of substance. Their holovid and audio were flawless.
Engels, seeing Indomitable’s inability to reassemble in time and reach the battle at the Murmorsk inner worlds of M-3 and M-4, had decided to keep the battleship separated and ready for transit. When she’d been unable to sway Straker from his insanely hazardous course to visit Opter space in person—when had she ever been able to talk him out of anything?—she ordered Commodore Gray and the fleet back to New Earth, formerly Unison.
Now, Indomitable hung in orbit above the New Earthan capital, the rest of the fleet within easy transmission range. After a quick consultation with retired admiral Benota, Minister of War, she’d ordered this meeting to assemble.
Yes, ordered—never mind that she had no genuine statutory authority to do so. She was just a jumped-up ship captain, and all she really had going for her was her status as the Liberator’s wife, good right hand and space tactician.
But she and Benota had a plan for that… and if Straker didn’t like it, well that was too damned bad. Running off for two or three months meant he didn’t get a say.
Engels rapped a gavel on the table, and the holographic conferencing system transmitted the action flawlessly to every other location in the secure network, where the attendees sat. “I call this council of war to order,” she said as the chatter died. “I yield the floor to Minister Benota.”
“Thank you, Commodore. Our first order of business is settling the chain of command.” The large, florid man, now dressed in a simple civilian suit, glanced at a row of more than thirty admirals and generals, formerly of the Mutuality. They’d had many days to think about their status—bureaucratically frozen by the new Senate’s Reorganization Edicts—and where they would end up in the new regime. If there was resistance, now was when it would manifest.
Benota continued, “Right now, all of you flag officers have your positions, your staffs, your privileges—and your pensions—according to the Edicts. Before I continue, does anyone wish to retire at your current rank and grade? If so, simply indicate that fact and leave this meeting. You’ll be a private citizen within weeks. No? Last chance, ladies and gentlemen.”
Nobody moved.
“All right, let it be on your own heads then.” Benota picked up a hardcopy folder. “I have here the new flag staff table of organization, confirmed by the Senate. All but the following three of you are mandatorily retired at the grade of Flag One, regardless of former rank: Devereux, Kapuchin, Lubang. The rest will be processed out immediately.”
Benota waited for the howls of protest to subside. “You will note in your copy that you may appeal this action through the usual channels. Thank you, and goodbye.” All but the three designated flag officers winked out, disconnected from the hololink.
“Good riddance,” Benota muttered.
“Will they cause trouble?” asked Commodore Gray, sitting to Engels’ right.
“I knew they wouldn’t volunteer to retire, so I gave the Hok in their offices specific instructions to immediately distribute my orders in writing to all the staff. They’ll escort them off the premises and revoke their security clearances and access.” He smiled a wintry smile. “I’d like to see them start trouble.”
“Seems a bit highhanded,” Gray replied.
Benota waved airily. “I am but a humble servant of the duly elected Senate, carrying out their orders. Don’t worry, Commodore—or should I say, Admiral—Gray. It’s all legal.”
Gray lifted a dark eyebrow. “Admiral?”
“Yes, in charge of the new Home Fleet. Does that suit you?”
Gray glanced at Engels, who grinned. “I nominated you. Think you can handle it?”
“I can.”
“Good.”
“But what about you… Commodore?” Gray asked.
Engels turned to Benota. “Yes, Wen, what about me?”
Benota made a production of looking in the folder. “Ah, yes, here it is. Given that you’re the Liberator’s wife, we couldn’t very well—”
“Screw that, Minister,” Engels snapped, playing her part. “I’ve earned my place on my own. My relationship to Derek Straker is a separate issue. What’s the will of the Senate?” She held her breath waiting to see if Benota would follow through on what he agreed—or if the Senate had allowed him to.
“How does Fleet Admiral sound?” Benota said.
Genuinely surprised, she smiled. “What’s that mean?”
“It means you’ll be the senior operational naval officer in the Republic. Top dog in the field.”
“Woof.” Engels’ forced herself not to gape. She’d expected a big promotion, but to be given the whole Fleet… She shook herself and straightened. “Okay, I… I accept. But will the rest of the chain of command?”
“For now, the Hok follow the Senate’s orders through me. We’re at war, under martial law, and I’m the Minister of War.”
Engels’ eyes narrowed in suspicion. Was her promotion some kind of payoff, to get her to go along? “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”
“Latin? ‘Who…’”
“Who watches the watchers,” she said. “What keeps you from being a dictator?”
Benota spread his hands. “The same thing that conquered the Mutuality. You, Indomitable, and the rest of your military forces. Commander Paloco and the Breakers are here in the capital, not to mention your marines and your ships above us. The Hok are compliant to my orders, but there are nowhere near enough of them to actually enforce my will on more than this one planet. The rest of our brave new Republic has to believe itself legitimately governed. I suggest that unless you want to go running from planet to planet with that battleship threatening to bomb everyone back to the Stone Age, you have to trust me to knock the heads and herd the cats while you worry about our next big problem.”
“Which is?”
“The Hundred Worlds. They’re gobbling up our systems as fast as they can while we’re barely able to defend our Committee Worlds—our Central Worlds, I mean—from this new Opter threat. We need to work fast to raise new forces, and plan for a war on two fronts if necessary.” Benota scowled. “Liberation won’t mean much if all Straker did was set us up to be conquered by the Huns and the bugs.”
“The Huns haven’t responded to our overtures for a truce and talks?”
“They’re stalling while they grab more territory—and frankly, our local forces aren’t fighting all that hard. They feel off-balance and defeated by the Liberation anyway. The Huns don’t look so bad.”
Engels scowled and bared her teeth. “I’d have thought they’d be overjoyed to get out from under the Inquisitors and want to defend their newfound freedom.”
�
�The border worlds have been fought over so much, the people are war-weary. With the fear of repression gone, many of them actually want the Huns to come in with their big money and their entertainments—or that’s what they hope. They see the propaganda broadcasts that makes the Hundred Worlds look like a consumerist paradise.” Benota sighed. “That’s always been the Mutuality’s dilemma—patriotism goes only so far in the face of perpetual misery and fear. The citizenry’s spirit has collapsed. I’m afraid our brand-new Republic may collapse with it—especially with the Liberator off on this… reconnaissance mission.”
Engels held back a sharp retort. Benota was right, damn him, on every point.
The only silver lining to this storm cloud was the fact that the new Republic was just so damned big. Even if the Hundred Worlds gobbled up a hundred more, the old Mutuality still had a thousand systems to draw from. She was beginning to see why the war lasted so long.
“We can’t help where Straker chooses to go and for how long, so let’s get past that and do what needs doing,” she said. “Distro the rest of that reorg plan if you please, Minister. We’ll reconvene in an hour to discuss operations.”
“Operations?”
“As you said, we have to fight the Hundred Worlds. With Straker gone, I’m the supreme field commander, and I intend to give the Huns a punch in the nose that will bring them to their senses.”
* * *
“Display Calypso System, and zoom in on C1, the first planet,” Admiral Engels said when the holo-conference resumed.
The table lit up with a detailed depiction of an unusual star system. A curved streamer of dense gas millions of kilometers long reached out from the primary, a small orange sun. At its end it thickened into a ball.
The ball had at its core a supermassive gas giant, which was slowly eating the plasma the star fed it. At some point in the last few million years, the planet had swung close to the star, and its gravity had plucked at its corona like a child unrolling a skein of cotton candy. Soon enough—perhaps within only a few hundred thousand years—the gas-eater would gain enough mass to ignite into a star of its own.
Within the nimbus of swirling gas around the planet hung a gargantuan orbital fuel processing facility, by far the largest ever built—covering a captured asteroid moonlet over one hundred kilometers across.
“Felicity Station,” Engels said. “No other fuel factory is as big or as efficient, because nowhere else do we find this concentration of rich gas just floating in space. Easy access to a variety of hydrogen isotopes and byproducts. It supplies half the Republic military with high-grade fuel and exotic elements—and it refines the thickest known stream of antimatter anywhere. They collect over ten kilograms a year there, one atom at a time.”
Admiral Gray whistled. “That would make one hell of a bomb.”
“That would be wasteful,” said Zaxby, who was running the holo-table. “Antimatter has many useful qualities for research and engineering. Destroying it to obtain an explosion that could just as well be generated by a fusion device would be foolish.”
“Like using diamonds for bullets,” Engels agreed. “The point is, this is a valuable facility, and it’s in the path of the Huns’ advance. They’ve been methodically absorbing systems so far, playing it safe by taking and securing each in turn rather than striking deep into our territory, so I’m confident in the timeline of their arrival, plus or minus a few days.”
Captain Zholin, now assigned as commander of the superdreadnought Stuttgart, spoke up. “So we meet them there and stop their advance—at least along that axis. But I’ve been studying the intelligence reports. There are nineteen separate Hun fleets, each taking a system every few days or weeks. Turning them back at one place won’t solve the problem.”
“I don’t intend to turn them back, Captain Zholin.” Engels smacked her fist into her palm. “I intend to crush them. I haven’t trained for war my whole life just to play interstellar chess with fleets—a game we’re losing.”
Admiral Gray raised her eyebrows. “Now you’re sounding like Straker.”
“I learned from his wins—and his mistakes. This isn’t the Liberation, where we’re trying to incite people to rebellion and get them on our side. This is straight-up war, and we have to press our few advantages.”
“What advantages?”
“Indomitable, for one. Two, our certainty they will strike Felicity Station at Calypso. Three, the time we have to prepare. It’s our home ground, and they’ll be operating at the end of their supply lines.” Engels sighed. “I once thought the Hundred Worlds was always the pious defender and would make peace when the opportunity presented itself, but our new Senate’s sent a dozen official messages to their Parliament and received no response but continued conquest.”
“It’s hard to get people to talk when they think they can win by force,” said Benota.
The Ruxin War Male Dexon stirred his tentacles. “‘War is politics by other means,’ the human Carl von Clausewitz said. He also said the target of our efforts must be the enemy’s will to fight. This is why the Liberation was successful. We broke the Mutuality’s will, even while a thousand worlds remained militarily untouched.”
“That’s right, Commodore Dexon,” Engels replied. “And I intend to conduct some violent ‘politics’ in order to target the Huns’ will to fight. Ladies and gentlemen, please clear the room of all but flag officers.”
Zaxby stood as if to go, but Engels waved him down. “Not you.”
“So I’m a flag officer?”
Engels humphed. “Trinity is unique. Let’s call you a special advisor to the Admiral of the Fleet—if you want the job.”
“We would be honored. Well,” he said hastily, “I’m not, but Marisa is, and Indy seems impressed, though she is young. I, however, have worked with many admirals, and am not easily dazzled by rank and status. I—”
“And to think I was worried your annoying individuality could possibly be drowned in a group-mind,” Engels deadpanned. “Zaxby, run that sim of my plan, would you?”
* * *
When Engels presented her plan, the room fell silent. The senior officers seemed to ponder.
Or maybe, she thought, she’d shocked them.
Their sudden protests confirmed it. Even the usually phlegmatic Benota had opened his mouth, though he’d shut it again with a grimace as others babbled. Engels stood and waved them to silence. “Don’t try to tell me it can’t be done. Tell me the problems, and then tell me how to solve them. Who first?”
That slowed them down. They all looked at each other as if deciding who would be the naysayer. Zaxby’s tentacles seemed to twitch, and then grow still. Engels wondered if that was the other parts of Trinity overriding his natural chattiness. “Zaxby, you have something? Trinity?”
“We have run a detailed analysis of your plan, Admiral Engels, and can present it at this time.”
“You can work with the staff on the details later. For now, what’s the top problem—and its solution?”
“Obviously, ships, especially escorts—destroyers, frigates, and corvettes. The battle with the Opters, though a victory of sorts, was costly. Over one hundred escort ships destroyed and two hundred more damaged. Over nine thousand trained crew killed.”
“But we didn’t lose any capital ships.”
“That is fortunate—but that has only exacerbated the divide between the neglected and overburdened escort classes.” Zaxby turned to Marisa Nolan, who rose from her seat among the now-absent staffers. “Doctor?”
The slender, ethereally pale woman stepped forward. “Morale among our naval escort corps is on the verge of collapse. The Mutuality treated their personnel badly, used them as a dumping ground for problems and assigned them every dirty job, such as military suppression of dissent. Combined with overwork and lack of maintenance, we might as well say that, as a fighting force, they’re now nonexistent. They gave the last full measure against the Opters—yet, there’s no relief in sight.”
“W
e should rotate personnel from the capital ships and the reserves,” said Admiral Gray. “Step up recruitment and training. Raise pay and bonuses.”
“That takes money,” replied Minister Benota drily. “Our new Senate is already agitating for tax relief and elimination of odious regulations, in the name of liberation. It seems the people want the freedom Straker promised—but they don’t want to pay for it.”
“Not my problem,” snapped Engels. “The Senate will have to come up with the money somehow—unless they want the Huns to gobble up everything.”
“It is our problem, Admiral,” Nolan replied. “I’ve been among bureaucrats for over eighty years. Zaxby is almost two hundred, and Indy processes thought faster than either of us. Together, Trinity assesses that our war efforts will soon fail—not from lack of tactical leadership, or even of military strategy, but from economics and governance. That’s always the Hundred Worlds’ advantage. The Republic has inherited a collectivist system that barely functions. We need years, perhaps decades, to reinvent ourselves. Barring that, we need a government that knows how to get the most out of the aging dinosaur of a bureaucracy.”
“Great,” Engels replied. “That’s the problem. What’s the solution?” She looked around. “Anyone?”
Benota cleared his throat and stood. “I hate to say I told you so—but I did. Liberation is all well and good, but right now we need a strong hand to manage the economy until the war is over and we can transition to a less-regulated model.”
“You want to be the economic Czar as well as the Minister of War?”
“Not me, no.”
“Who, then?”
“We already have a Director, though Straker sharply curtailed his powers. I suggest we use him.”