Lost in thought, he almost didn’t notice that Grand Admiral Michael was talking again. “I must get back to organizing our forces. The other thing thou must know is that even though thy plan is the best we have, I believe that its chances for success are minimal. If thou art not back in two weeks, we will do what we have to. We will bring all of our fleet through the stargate with the intention of destroying all of the Drakuls that we can. We will fight until our fleet is no more. We will fight and die, but we will do our best to defeat the Drakuls. I wish ye Godspeed and good luck in thy quest.” With that, he got up and walked out. With heavy hearts, the Terrans realized that the meeting was at an end.
Shuttle Back to the Vella Gulf, HD 10180, February 7, 2021
“I’m just happy that we don’t have to worry about committing genocide on the Drakuls,” said Captain Sheppard to the rest of the group returning to the Vella Gulf. “We certainly weren’t authorized to do that by the Terran government; in fact, our mandate was just the opposite. We were supposed to find new allies, not utterly destroy a race, no matter how much they may need killing. I don’t want that on my conscience.”
Most of the officers and enlisted present nodded their heads. “That isn’t actually the case, sir,” said Lieutenant Finn quietly. “The part about committing genocide, I mean. We actually do have the capability to destroy their planets.”
Captain Sheppard’s head snapped around to look at the lieutenant. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“I mean that there is a weapon in the replicator’s database that is translated as the Doomsday Device,” said Lieutenant Finn.
“You mean to tell me that we have been flying around on a ship that has the capability to destroy planets?” asked Captain Sheppard.
“Oh!...umm...no, not really,” said Lieutenant Finn evasively, looking at the deck of the shuttle. “It wasn’t in the Gulf’s database. It was in the Terra’s...”
“He is correct,” said Lieutenant Rrower. “That weapon wouldn’t have existed in a cruiser’s database, even a Mrowry cruiser’s. An Eldive vessel like the Vella Gulf would never have had it at all. The weapon was outlawed a long time ago, and it is a closely held secret that its pattern still exists in our replicator databases. Even then, the pattern can only be found in the replicators onboard battleships or dreadnoughts. These ships would normally have an admiral onboard to exercise the type of authority needed to employ the weapon. You would also need the emperor to authorize the use of the bomb, because only he knows the code necessary to unlock the blueprint. As a military member of the royal family, I am aware of the bomb’s presence in the databases of some of our ships, but I do not have the code to unlock it.”
“Obviously,” Lieutenant Rrower continued after a pause, “we never thought about that when we handed over the Terra to you or we would have removed it. That type of weapon doesn’t belong in the hands of such a young race.” He turned to Lieutenant Finn. “How did you know about it?” he asked. “That file was encrypted. Even the name would have been encrypted.”
“Oh!...umm...yes, it was,” replied Lieutenant Finn in a small voice, still looking at the shuttle’s deck.
“So, you broke one of our highest military grade codes?” asked Lieutenant Rrower.
“Well, yeah, sort of,” said Lieutenant Finn. “When I first saw the encrypted file, I thought it would be fun to try to decrypt the name of the blueprint. I didn’t know what the file was, or I wouldn’t have touched it. I was much happier not knowing that a weapon of this type existed.”
“Well, regardless, that file’s on the Terra, so we don’t have to worry about it,” said Captain Sheppard.
“Umm...well...not exactly,” said Lieutenant Finn.
Captain Sheppard looked angry. “And why is that?” he asked.
“Well...umm...I sort of brought a copy of the database along with me, in case we needed to use any of the things in it,” he said, looking miserable. “The Mrowry database had a lot of cool things that neither the Vella Gulf nor the Ssselipsssiss replicator had. I thought we might need them. I never thought we’d need Armageddon.”
“I really wish you hadn’t said that,” said Lieutenant Rrower. “Even admitting to its existence is a death penalty offense on my planet. It would be best if everyone that just heard that forgot they did. That way, no one will be forced to kill you.”
“Got it,” said Captain Sheppard. “No one heard what Lieutenant Finn said. That’s an order.”
Everyone nodded their heads. They all understood the gravity of the situation.
Lieutenant Rrower tilted his head, looking at Captain Sheppard. “Now that you know it exists, what do you intend to do?”
“I don’t know,” replied Captain Sheppard. “I intend to do my absolute best not to ever use such a weapon; however, I guess we’ll just have to burn that bridge when we come to it.”
* * * * *
Chapter Fifteen
President’s Conference Room, Terran Government Headquarters, Lake Pedam, Nigeria, February 8, 2021
“Attention on deck!” the aide called. Over two thousand people stood and snapped to attention as one. All conversation immediately died.
“Everyone please be seated,” ordered Admiral James Wright, the head of Terran Fleet Command, as he walked into the room. He had been given permission to use the president’s conference room for the afternoon, and he didn’t want to waste a single moment. They had too much to do. The room was full, with the most junior officers, enlisted and civilians either standing in the back or sitting in the aisles. The fire marshal would have had a fit at how badly the room was overloaded if he had seen it. Admiral Wright didn’t give a shit.
He surveyed the room as he walked to his seat. He saw the groups from the Terra, the Pacific and the Septar at the other end of the conference table, along with a contingent from Alice Springs. The Atlantic was conspicuous in its absence, but there was no time to dwell on its loss. On the left side of the table sat his senior staff officers and the head of Replicator Command; all of the senior extraterrestrials sat on the right. Senior officers from all of the Terran states filled the auditorium, as well as a few Mrowry and Domans. The Mrowry and kuji sat together in a section that had chairs modified for their tails. Although most of the former Terran nations had converted to the standard Terran Fleet uniforms, some of the poorer nations still wore their legacy uniforms, making the auditorium look untidy to his military eye. He put that thought aside, too, as he sat down and nodded to his intelligence officer, Vice Admiral Sir James Lockery. “Why don’t you give everyone a quick recap so that we all have the same baseline?”
Lockery nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said. He could have gone to the podium, but everyone in the room had implants and could hear him as well as if he were sitting next to them. The admiral had said not to waste a minute, and he wasn’t going to. “As everyone is aware, we have lost the Ross 154 system and the TSS Atlantic. Although we were forced to withdraw, we destroyed several of the Drakuls’ ships and gave them something to think about. The Drakuls know that when they come through the stargate into the Solar System, we will fight them with everything we have. I expect that seeing the Terra gave them pause, which is why they didn’t immediately follow us back here. Until now, they thought the largest ship we had was a cruiser; the battleship had to be a nasty surprise.” An evil grin crossed his face, but it fled rapidly as he made his next point. “The problem is, of course, that no matter how well Captain Griffin and the Terra performed against the Drakul battlecruisers and battleships, they can’t go up against a Drakul dreadnought in a toe-to-toe fight. The fact is, we don’t have anything that can.”
“We have run a number of scenarios with the Terra’s AI, and one thing is clear: if we don’t come up with a new plan, we will be unable to stop the Drakuls when they assault this system. Unless we can come up with a way to stop their dreadnoughts, we’re going to lose. The purpose of this meeting is to figure out a way to do that.”
There were a number of murmu
rs that could be heard throughout the room. The member of the Terran Fleet that had been in the Battle of Ross 154 sounded uniformly negative in their comments. They had seen the dreadnought shrug off damage that would have destroyed several battleships and keep on coming. Worse, the Terran Fleet Command didn’t have battleships; they had one battleship, which was still being repaired from its last fight. It wouldn’t last long against the dreadnought without a tremendous amount of support.
The kuji princess raised her hand and was recognized. “Has the Terran government begun looking at evacuating the system and bringing the government to Domus?”
Admiral Wright’s eyes narrowed. He did not want this meeting to go down the rabbit hole of despair. “Yes, Your Highness,” he said, “there are other groups that are looking at both of those alternatives.” He stood up, and his steel gray eyes swept the conference room. “I want to make it clear to every military person in this auditorium that I will not entertain that sort of defeatist attitude. President Nehru has decided that she will stay in the system, along with the billions of Terrans we cannot evacuate. We have to hold the stargate to protect our president and all of the civilians that can’t be evacuated, including most of our own families. We have to hold the stargate. We will hold the stargate. From now on, everyone in this room needs to be focused on that.” His eyes swept the audience again, avoiding any contact with the kuji princess. “Are there any questions about that?”
As expected, there were no questions. He sat back down. “Admiral Becker, the floor is yours.”
“Thank you, sir,” replied Admiral Becker, who stood and crossed to the podium. A German, he believed in doing things the correct way. Officers did not sit when leading meetings as important as this.
“As Admiral Lockery noted, the purpose of this meeting is to come up with a line of defense to stop their dreadnought-class and larger ships. Anything that we develop to stop a super dreadnought will function even more admirably against any of the smaller classes. I know that many of you have come up with ideas for how we can do that. We will get to all of them, and then we will work through as many spur-of-the-moment ideas as we have time for. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have an idea that you think will work, now is the time to voice it. We have a lot of work to do, so let’s try to keep the discussion as focused as possible.” He glanced down the table to the senior officer from Alice Springs. He hated to advertise that group’s existence to the Mrowry, but it was unavoidable. “For those of you that are unaware of Department X, we created a special unit; its mission is to exploit all of the alien technology that we acquire. They will make the first presentation. Captain Sarkozy?”
The captain from Alice Springs stood up. Like many of his group, he was pasty white in complexion, despite working in the middle of a desert. They didn’t get out much. “We have been through as much of the new replicator database as we could, and we have several ideas that we think will make a difference.” He glanced at his notes. “The first is that we need to stop building major combatants and focus on building additional fighter craft. We have found some plans that will carry more missiles than our current fighters, making them far more effective.”
“It won’t work,” said a voice from up the table.
“I’m sorry?” asked Captain Sarkozy, blinking his eyes. “Did someone say something?”
“I did,” announced Andrew Brown, the civilian that ran Replicator Command, the unit that operated all of the replicators in the Solar System. “I said that it wouldn’t work.”
“It will work,” said Sarkozy, annoyed that a lesser intellect would challenge his plan. “For the same amount of mass, you can make 56 fighters instead of one battlecruiser. Those 56 fighters have a combined launch capability of 280 missiles, which is sure to breach the dreadnought’s defenses, especially if its shields are already down as a result of our minefield. For the price of two battlecruisers, we can make over 100 fighters that will fire over 550 missiles. We have calculated that a strike of this size will result in the mission kill of a dreadnought. If we have 150 fighters, we can achieve the mission kill of a super dreadnought.” He smiled, sure that he had made his points plain enough that everyone should understand. Even civilians.
“And I still say that it won’t work,” repeated Brown. Seeing that Sarkozy was about to argue the point, Brown waved for silence. “I’m not debating your arithmetic or saying that many fighters shooting that many missiles won’t kill a dreadnought or super dreadnought. I’m not a military expert. It probably would. What I am saying is that your plan won’t work because we can’t make that many fighters. There are two problems. First, every single advanced spaceship we make needs 100 pounds of protactinium for its fire control system, regardless of whether that ship is a fighter or a battleship. I think we currently have just over 200 pounds, total, so you’re not going to get your 150 fighters. Give me a year to replicate the things we need to go to the asteroids and mine it there, or wherever it is that it exists in abundance, and I can do it, but right now or in the next six months? Forget it.”
“The second problem is that all of the advanced fighters use a number of the rare Earth elements in their structural framing. As I’m sure you know, if you don’t put those elements into the replicator, you don’t get them back out again. When the replicator gets to an element it doesn’t have, the replicator just stops and waits for you to add it. If we don’t have the element, the whole production line just stops. Earlier this year, we didn’t have enough protactinium to finish the battlecruiser we were working on, and the replicator was jammed up for nine days. Nine days! We didn’t make anything for nine days while we waited for the protactinium. I don’t want to start building fighters and find out that we don’t have enough yttrium or dysprosium or whatever type of unobtainium it is, and jam up the replicators again. We don’t have time!”
Brown turned to meet Admiral Wright’s eyes. “We looked at this option ourselves. There are smaller fighters in the database that are even a better investment in the number of missiles they can carry per ton of mass expended to build them. Unfortunately all of them need various types of rare Earth elements, plus that damned protactinium. It can’t be done. Not at this time. Our best bet is to continue to make more box launchers and missiles. The launchers aren’t particularly economical, but they work, and we can build lots of missiles. But more fighters to carry them? It. Can’t. Be. Done.”
Captain Sarkozy sat down heavily. All three of their ‘great ideas’ had involved a variety of mini-spaceships shooting lots of missiles. The greatest minds in the Terran Fleet had failed utterly because they had neglected to look at their supply chain while thinking their big thoughts.
Captain Griffin raised her hand and was acknowledged. “What about modifying the fire control system? Can you either re-wire it with something other than protactinium or swap out the computer system with another one?”
“I wish,” said Andrew Brown, shaking his head. “All of the advanced systems use that element, and they don’t work right without it. Not having that element upsets the timing of the targeting information processing somehow, and the missiles launch without getting the entire targeting download they need.”
“He is right,” agreed the Mrowry officer sitting at the table. Originally a weapons officer on the Emperor’s Paw, he had more hands-on knowledge of the advanced missile systems than all of the Terrans put together. “That element is plentiful on one of our home planet’s moons, and is used in many of our systems. The fire control system won’t work without it.”
“What about putting some of our current fire control systems onto the space fighters, then?” asked Captain Griffin.
“We looked at that, too,” replied Brown, “but there is an interface problem between the ship’s computers and our legacy fire control systems, and there are still difficulties in getting enough of the rare Earth elements to build them. We’re working to adapt them, but so far, no luck. We can pass our lessons learned to Captain Sarkozy’s unit; maybe they can f
igure it out.”
“All right,” said Admiral Becker, seeing that the Department X ideas were dead ends, “we’ll move on to the next option. I understand the Terra’s crew has an idea they’d like to discuss?”
The afternoon wore into evening with no solution in sight. The only option that they had discussed that had any chance of working was the solution proposed by the commanding officer of the Terra, but that solution was almost too horrible to contemplate.
Admiral Wright realized that the conference had exhausted all of the ideas that had shown promise, as well as a large number of suggestions that were fanciful or farcical, and they were no closer to a solution. All of them either relied on something they didn’t have or, on closer inspection, just wouldn’t work. He knew they needed to take a longer break than the two 10-minute breaks they had already taken, but they were almost out of time, and his mind kept coming back to the first idea. They needed ships that would mount terrestrial fire control systems which would integrate with their computers.
He realized that there was a question that no one had asked. He raised his hand, interrupting a laser officer from the Septar who was proposing building a massive number of mirrors to create a giant solar-powered laser. The idea sounded like something out of a science fiction book. Admiral Becker gave the floor to his boss.
“We missed something,” Admiral Wright noted. “No one ever asked whether our terrestrial computers and fire control systems can talk to the advanced missiles. Does anyone know if they can?”
“Yes, they can,” replied Captain Sarkozy. “We looked at arming our air-breathing fighters with advanced missiles for the last-ditch defense of Earth. There were some coding changes involved, but one of our smart guys figured out how to make it work.”
“What about space fighter engines?” asked Admiral Wright. “How are we set for making them?”
Theogony 3: Terra Stands Alone Page 14