Fallen Empire

by D. L. Harrison

  That was for the external fleets. For the ten million I’d outnumber two to one, I could destroy those in just three and a third minutes.

  No, I could do better. If I programmed the ships to only jump if they were fired at, most of the ships wouldn’t have to jump at all. Forty-seven trillion mini-platforms, but they only had a little over four billion energy turrets. Which meant most of them could fire non-stop without jumping at all.

  Which changed things in a major way. It might even work, except if they had orders to run like I expected. I could take out a lot more than I’d originally projected, but they’d still have most of their fleets intact if they ran right away. But if they hesitated a half a minute, it might just work.

  I used my augmented reality interface to split the six fleets into twelve, with long established macros, and they started building. I also tweaked the priorities to missiles.

  “Alright. I expect we’ll do some damage, maybe take out forty thousand per fleet in the worst-case scenario.”

  Assuming they didn’t run before we could even close to energy range.

  Chen asked, “You think they’ll run?”

  “I would, if I couldn’t win. They’d just need to hide in the void between stars until they figure out how to suppress our jump drives. I suspect they are close to that, or they’re at least working on it feverishly. With the upgraded weapons, we’ll so outnumber them in throw weight they’ll just die in the first few seconds.”

  At twelve thousand to one, mini-platforms to ships, they’d just die in milliseconds if our beams were equal to their beam power. With the old beams their more powerful shields just absorb them easily, for a while anyway. Without cutting our power to a fifth with jumps, it’d theoretically go five times faster.

  Natalya said, “You’ll chase of course.”

  I nodded, “If we can. Subspace sensors work out to five light years or so, we only have probes in their occupied systems. We won’t detect the wormhole formation where they come out, if they avoid getting that close to any of their worlds. Forget about finding them in real space, that’ll never happen unless they retreat to another of their words.”

  Chen said, “You still don’t want to do it.”

  I shrugged, “If their fleets escape and manage to hide, then it won’t matter if the expected upgrade comes through, not if I can’t find their ships. Right now, we know where they all are. But, like it or not I’ll go with the majority. I’ve split the fleets, and I’ll attack this time tomorrow. The good news is we’ll at least get twelve million of them without a problem, so they’ll only be running around with thirty million new ships.”

  Cassie patted my leg under the table, and I supposed she was right. I shouldn’t say I told you so, at least, not until it all went wrong for real.

  Natalya said, “That’s right, three of their borders are still guarded by the weaker ships.”

  I nodded, “Those I can just blast apart in second or two. Anything else?”

  Admiral Grady said, “I wonder why they’re looking in our direction, do you think that means the other empires around them are more powerful?”

  I shook my head, “For the Atans we know that’s not true. I suspect it has to do with how big our empire is, I don’t think the other seven surrounding them are nearly as large as we are. They’ll be just short of tripling the size of their empire, and all they have to do is kill the new kid on the block with only two hundred planets and with a population so small they can’t even man all their ships. Our ships.”

  Natalya said, “But the Atans are stronger than us, they’re just vulnerable to our disintegration beam.”

  That was a good point.

  “Well find out, when we can get their data on their surrounding empires. But I stand by what I just said, that’ll only be a part of it, they’re coming for us because of how big we are. Maybe this space was the weakest when they came up with the plan sixty years ago, but we put the Grays to shame, so that’s going to change that differential by a lot.”

  Minato said, “Good point, but I’d prefer proof of that.”

  I nodded, “Me too, that’ll come with time.”

  Or, we’ll all die. One or the other. Life was uncertainty after all. Still, I was somewhat comforted in the knowledge we were about to leap forward in our ship technology, by a rather large stride. Trusting in hope was a bad plan, but we also had no reason to believe those empires would decide to invade either. For some things hope had to be enough, or paranoia would start to drive our ambition instead of empathy tempering it, and that’s when bad shit happened.

  Natalya asked, “Shall we reconvene this time tomorrow?”

  I replied, “I’ll be in the command center during the attack, but I can pipe status displays into here for the rest of you. I’ll also be piping it down to the joint command center on Earth, of course.”

  Chen nodded firmly, and said, “That will do.”

  We meeting broke up after that, and Cassie and I went to meet Diana for lunch.

  When I finished going over what was going on, Diana shook her head.

  She said, “We’ve got the hardware worked out, including the fabrication of the subspace energy beam turrets. The new nanites are stable and far more robust, and we’ll see a raise of eighty percent efficiency across the board. A hundred gravities of acceleration manned, ten times that for platforms and mini-platforms. The beam weapons and shields are almost twice as powerful, which makes them magnitudes stronger and will make us more than a match for the enemy’s ships.

  “It’s the software side that’s slowing us down, we got it all working in lab conditions, but the software will take us at least three more days, if not a week. Not just for the new shield configurations, or the command and control software for the subspace energy beams, but everything else too. We need to rewrite a lot of the control software to allow higher energy transfers, change the drive acceleration limits, and make sure it’s working seamlessly with the inertial dampers, or a crew could wind up pancaked against a hull. There’s a lot of small things like that. I’ll also want to test it exhaustively for a few days once it’s done, to make sure there’s no bugs and its consistent under all conditions.”

  That made sense, in the past all we’d done was add new technologies. This upgrade was different, we were upgrading four of the major current systems, which touched countless minor systems on the nanite level like energy routing, overload warnings, throttling, and safety features. Rushing that kind of thing would be foolish.

  I nodded, and deadpanned, “So, not by tomorrow.”

  She stuck her tongue out.

  I grinned, “Not your fault, I failed to convince them we were close enough that it was the better risk to wait. On the plus side, the plan isn’t awful, it might even work if we catch the Vrok napping.”

  Cassie just looked at me.

  I shrugged, “Yeah, I don’t think it’ll work great, and hope that the enemy will be negligent is a bad plan, but we’ll see. They’re all letting fear drive that decision.”

  Diana shrugged, “On the good side, you can start building all the turrets on each ship, a few thousand for the ship and twelve million for the missiles. By the time the software is done you should have enough, and at that point you’ll just need to build enough of the new nanites, which should take an hour at most, and then upgrade the software.”

  I nodded, “Then lock it down and sell it as an upgrade, and rake in the big bucks.”

  Diana giggled, “Sure.”

  Cassie nodded, “All those mini-platforms they’re building will be nothing but target practice for the Vrock, if they come up with a jump drive suppression device. They won’t hesitate, if only to keep up with you besides.”

  Diana bit her lip and gave me a regretful look.

  “What?”

  She shrugged, “It’s been percolating in the back of my mind since you mentioned it, and I came up with a way this morning, it just popped in my head. It’d be pretty easy to build a suppression device, I’d
just never considered it before. An omni-directional quantum resonance burst would do it. It wouldn’t have to be that strong either, just strong enough to foul a quantum beacon field from forming perfectly. If the resonance doesn’t perfectly match the quantum jump drive’s field around the ship, it won’t work.

  “The pulse wouldn’t go far, but it only needs to go out a light second in every direction for it to foul any jump drive in energy beam range. If they send out several hundred a second our ships wouldn’t be able to jump, fire, jump and fire.”

  I sighed, “But they’d have to build them.”

  She nodded, “But with some tactical placement they just need to make four thousand per fleet, one out of a thousand ships. They’d just need to plug it in a conduit and turn it on, it could be made to act automatically, always on like a ship’s transponder. A light second radius around the ship is a huge area after all, even four thousand would be overkill. Four million ships could get lost inside a space that large, if four thousand ships used overlapping beacons to create a very large field.

  “We also know from the specs that they have fabricator bays on board for replacement parts. A warship that didn’t and wasn’t nanite driven, well that would just be stupid. The only reasonable delay I could think of would be the need for the superconductive alloy. The suppression device would need the same alloy we both use in our quantum communicators, and that we use in the jump drives.”

  I raised an eyebrow, “Why is that reasonable?”

  She said, “Because they only use that alloy in their communicators, so they don’t have it as spare raw material on their ships. They have a communicator on their bridge and a backup in engineering, that’s considered good enough being those locations are in the most protected parts of the ship. That means picking up some of that alloy from a base before they could build the devices. The stuff is also a pain in the ass to make, if you don’t have an energy to matter device, which they don’t. At least, not on their warships. Still, even that only buys a few days after they figure out how to do it.”

  “Well, let’s hope they’re not as brilliant as you, which is a good bet.”

  She blushed, “You’re biased, but thanks for saying it. Although, without fully understanding the drive’s operations, we can hope it will take them longer than a day to get started on it. I had somewhat of an advantage with that additional knowledge.”

  “I think we can guarantee that, none of the ships in their fleets have gotten deliveries lately. They must still be working on it, and in just a week or sooner it’ll be a moot point.”

  She replied, “Three to four days for programing, three days for testing.”

  Six or seven days that could spell success or failure for the human race in space. No pressure though, and who knew, maybe the attack plan would work.

  After lunch, I headed back to the command center and decided the cruise ship design would have to wait. Instead, I assigned targets for all the fleets, and programmed in the attack parameters. Once the building was finished, the fleets would be ready to move.

  Whether I liked it or not.

  Chapter Nineteen

  It was later that same afternoon, and I had everything ready to go. The probes had the locations of the fleet nailed down, so it was easy to use that data to have my fleets come out of wormholes just outside of a light second distance. Release the platforms and one jump forward, and the craziness would begin. I also timed the wormholes so all the battles would start at the same time.

  The part I was worried about most was the few seconds it would take to launch. Quantum jumping to the location after a launch wouldn’t be much better, and even slower in fact. The first few would get there fast if I could use the probe to set up a handful of beacons, but then they’d have to set up beacons for the next fifteen, then the next hundred, next five hundred, and it would escalate until all the ships were there. That’d be much slower than a launch.

  I’d decided not to use the fleet that stood on the border, I’d just split one of the others in two. The one on the border would be seen to act long before it could close the distance if I did use it, so I figured it was better to preserve surprise. Plus, the old fleets weren’t that powerful at all, twenty-four trillion platforms would kill them just as fast as forty-eight would.

  Jessica said, “We’ve identified the two Earth first terrorists that tried to smuggle explosive compounds on the station.”

  “That’s good news?”

  She’d sounded like it wasn’t, which of course meant there was a caveat of some kind, because of course that was good news.

  “Space Force wants us to turn them over to them. They say both of them are on a watchlist, and the scanners at the spaceport should’ve picked up those two inert compounds even before mixed like ours did. So, they’re concerned. Somehow, they got on board the shuttle despite screening, got explosives on board despite scan screening, and they’re concerned by the fact the luggage wasn’t tagged and associated with them like it should’ve been.”

  I sighed, “Sounds like one of those nuts works for the TSA or the commercial shuttle company.”

  Jessica nodded, “That seems likely, as not even incompetence could cover three large mistakes like that. We also have another problem, another passenger from that shuttle is making a huge stink after being held for three hours while we worked out the guilt party. A Kevin Kearns. He’s been complaining to anyone that will listen, and he’s demanding to speak to someone in authority that can make it right. I suppose he’s probably looking to be compensated with free stuff. The news is running the story, and it’s making us look incompetent, when we’re the only ones who did it right in the whole mess.”

  I snorted, “True, he should be mad at security on the ground, or the shuttle company. Go ahead and give those two idiots to America, they’ll need to question them to find the insider on their side. Ask them to send a shuttle.”

  “Kevin?” she asked.

  I quipped, “We could send him too?”

  She snickered.

  Cassie sighed, “I’ll deal with him. I’ll also get Jayna on some counter-spin, we don’t need a black-eye in the press affecting tourism.”

  I grinned, “If you need help hiding the body, just give me a call.”

  Cassie giggled as she walked out the door, and it slid shut behind her.

  The man wasn’t in any true danger of course, but that kind of thing was just annoying. Security delays were just a fact of life and no one’s fault besides the person who caused them. Expecting anything free from the station or the resort he was booked at was ridiculous, and of course the bottom-feeding press just made it all worse.

  There was still a little time in the workday, a little less than an hour, so I brought up the luxury cruise ship design and got back to it.

  I think I lost track of time working on the ship. It was almost done, most of the luxuries would be installed post-build when I spun off the cruise ship. Regardless, it didn’t seem all that long before Jayna and Cassie breezed into the room and there was so much tension I couldn’t fail to notice it. When I glanced at the time almost a half hour had passed.

  “What happened?”

  Did Cassie kill him after all? I smirked.

  Jayna said, “Cassie lost her mind.”

  “Cass?”

  Cassie said, “The man was verbally abusive, screaming threats and F-bombs in the middle of the docking area in front of everyone including the press. His own family looked highly embarrassed.”

  “So, what’d you do, exactly?”

  Jayna said angrily, “She revoked his Visa on the spot, cuffed him and had him escorted to the shuttle, and kicked him off the station.”

  I chuckled.

  Jayna rolled her eyes, “Not funny.”

  Yes, it was, but not wanting to draw my sister’s wrath my face sobered.

  “That sounds reasonable to me,” I said carefully.

  Cassie nodded, “He escalated during my de-escalation efforts. He was an entitled and
spoiled rich jackass. We didn’t owe him a thing, and he wasn’t taking no for an answer, like a five-year-old throwing a tantrum for a cookie.”

  Jayna blew out a breath, “Yes, but an entitled rich jackass who moves in circles with senators and knows the president. The damned press is already saying we suppress free speech and freedom of expression, and the station is run by a tyrant and his sidekick mini-tyrant. He was an ass, and I was tempted to immolate him myself, but that’s not how to handle things and she knows that.”

  “I’d have probably done the same thing.”

  Jayna waved that away, “No doubt, but Cassie should know better.”

  Jessica snickered.

  Cassie shrugged, “We can’t be bullied into giving out free stuff, and I won’t be treated that way. He was using intimidation to make us cave, and the press never would’ve gotten it right anyway. Make a meme with his face on a baby with a rattle, crying, and post it on Facebook. That should take care of it.”

  I started to snigger, but I stopped at Jayna’s glare.

  “So what should Cassie have done, taken the abuse and let the man run out of steam? We allow free speech, but that’s not the same as allowing verbal abuse. Could you imagine what would happen if a foreign tourist started screaming obscenities at the Secretary of State because his flight was delayed a few hours?”

  Jayna sighed, “I get it, I really do, a part of me even enjoyed watching it happen, but it could’ve been handled much better. Now you need to do a press conference for spin control.”

  I glared at Cassie, nothing else my sister said could’ve made me change sides faster.

  Cassie snorted, “It’s not that bad. There’s always a jerk in the crowd, most of our tourists are very happy and leave good reviews. One more insane tirade won’t make that much of a difference.”