The Ajax Incursion

by Marc DeSantis

  He was so close! Supreme command of the reconquest operation was a sign of the Admiralty’s confidence in him. That the Admiralty had allowed him to hoist his flag aboard one of the mighty, and mightily precious, battleships, was yet another indication that they saw further room for his advancement. Then he would be one of them. He would sit at the same oaken table at DN headquarters, and watch as the icons depicting ships and fleets danced above it, obedient to his orders. From there, he might even win the coveted position of Lord Admiral, the most prestigious rank in the Domain’s military, and sit at the right hand of the emperor himself at council.

  It was all within his grasp. So there had been no need for him to stick his neck out and sack Heddrik, he who had been nothing more than a jumped-up corvette commander promoted far beyond his native ability. He had only been good for getting his ships vaporized. Most of the men serving aboard the small ships he had led to their dooms would have been the dregs of the naval service, peasant sons with minimal education. Had they shown any aptitude for space war, they would surely have been posted aboard one of the better ships, such as Cawnpore. The ships they instead served on were cheap as dust and easily replaced, as were they themselves. He regretted only the loss of their displacement drives and fusion reactors, which were increasingly hard to come by with the empire’s recession in recent decades.

  Oh, how callous that would sound to the bleeding hearts of the Republic of Halifax Navy! They who were so professedly squeamish about casualties! Had any of their statesmen possessed half the spine of a Domain emperor, they would have rolled over the Great Sphere a century or more ago. Instead they preferred that the Republic remain an unhelpful ‘balancer’ in interstellar affairs.

  Halifax’s sins were many, but two in particular stood out. First, the Republic refused to lead. There were many systems in need of a firm hand. These would benefit from being incorporated into an expanding polity. Ajax, for example, would bring protection to weaker nations that suffered from attacks by pirates and local warlords. The Domain in return would receive tribute in the form of taxes, natural resources, and foodstuffs. It would be a win-win relationship for all involved. But Halifax refused to do this. The Halies were unwilling to throw their weight around, and chaos reigned among the stars.

  The second sin was related to the first. It refused to allow anyone else to lead. Her politicians - Ronner recoiled inwardly in disgust at the thought of them - were always proclaiming loudly that they were acting only in the best interest of the peoples of the Great Sphere when they moved to check the ambitions of another state that was seeking to expand and bring some order to the systems of Sphere.

  Order, yes, that was it. Was there anything that Man craved more than order? Order meant peace. Order meant security. An individual might yelp loudly about freedom, and carp even more loudly about an infringement of his rights - Ronner didn’t believe this nonsense about personal rights or human rights or whatever the Halifaxians prattled on and on about - but when the sun went down, that man wanted to know that the boogeyman wasn’t out there, going to get him. That meant government, a strong government, that had to exist to ensure order, peace, and security. A man would give up his freedom to be safe from danger and want. The Halifaxians could declare otherwise as much as they wished. They had enough to eat. Let hunger shake the bellies of their citizens just a little bit, and then they would see just so dedicated they really were to democracy, elections, and free speech.

  Free speech. That last was probably the most dangerous, half-baked idea ever to have been vomited out by some puny, pointy-headed intellectual who had never had to worry about where his next meal was coming from. Could any of the Halies show him how free speech demonstrably made things better for society writ large? No, of course not. It was simply one of those things that one had to accept without question, or else you were labeled an idiot, or worse. Free speech was akin to giving everyone a flamethrower in a dried-out forest. Eventually, someone would blast infernium, start a fire, and the whole place would go up in flames. Free speech got in the way of the establishment of order, and that made for bad policy.

  Democracy was another terrible idea. Allowing the people to have a say in how they were governed sounded fine - in theory. In practice, it was a disaster. Had the Halies ever actually encountered the ordinary people to whom the reins of their government were to be entrusted? Didn’t they realize just how ordinary they were? Could they be that naive to think that factory workers and farmhands were qualified to elect their political leaders?

  Ronner shook his head. They couldn’t be! The Republic’s democracy had to be a high-level charade of some sort. True decision-making had to be in the hands of a select few. How else to explain Halifax’s centuries of success?

  Then Ronner remembered how many times the almost-completely victorious RHN had been yanked back, before it could deliver the killing blow to an opponent. Most recently, this had happened at the Battle of Thecla, when the Eighth Warfleet had been poised to crush the Armada of Tartarus fleet in the Memnon system. A craven hunger for peace, the insatiable need to make the people happy, however, had caused the RHN to withhold its deathblow. This had to have been due to entirely political considerations. That meant democracy. That meant civilian interference. Ronner cringed. Civilians! Unworthy folk.

  Before that, that same desire to restore peace, the insensible refusal to demand that the people make tough sacrifices for the greater good, had caused Halifax to hold back just when it was on the brink of crushing the Domain years ago. Ajax had survived, badly wounded, chastised, but fundamentally still in one piece, and itching for revenge. That was a vengeance Ronner would, one day, obtain for his emperor.

  Halifax’s unwillingness to lead and its concomitant unwillingness to let some other state do so ensured that the Great Sphere remained a balkanized arena of unending conflict. War was natural, so Ronner could not complain about that per se. Instead, he saw that the wars of the Sphere never resolved anything. They erupted and then were squelched without any true changes being made to the balance of power. The region remained a patchwork quilt of feuding nations, each jealous of its neighbors. There could be no accumulation of a preponderance of power with the Republic always acting to check the legitimate ambitions of her peers. So unification could never be achieved in the Sphere. Ever.

  That meant that no great power, no true great power, that is, could ever emerge with all of the resources and manpower of the Sphere at its command. Without that, any state there could only hope to be a local power, and nothing more. There could be no dream, no matter how far-fetched and far-off, of rebuilding a human empire on a galactic scale. No Fifth Empire. Not at all.

  Ronner harrumphed in irritation. There was one man, if he could call him that, who had the vision, and the guts, to challenge the decadent Republic. Unfortunately, that man was King Evander of Tartarus, and he was vile. The Sphinx was morally suspect, irredeemably corrupt, and could not be allowed to stitch together the star systems of the Sphere.

  Ronner shuddered at the thought of a Sphere following the diktat of the Sphinx. Who knew what a man like that might do? He did not believe for a moment that his stories of impossibly long life with aliens were true. The mere assertion, out loud, for all to hear, by Evander himself, was a sign of his inner wretchedness. No, the admiral swore silently, the flag of Tartarus would never fly over any of the core worlds of the Domain. Not ever. He would gladly launch the nuclear strikes that would make such planets uninhabitable for millennia to keep them out of the Sphinx’s hands.

  Ronner breathed deeply, allowing his heart rate to fall. Just thinking about the king of Tartarus raised his blood pressure to unacceptable heights. His doctors had told him to watch that. He promised to try, but it was hard to keep oneself calm in a war zone, he explained with some exasperation.

  Where was he? Sins. Yes. The sins of Halifax. Too hypocritically noble to allow anyone else to bind the states of the Sphere into a coherent whole. They claimed it was a dedication to fr
eedom and self-determination, but it was only a recipe for weakness. Ronner sighed. He knew what was out there. Out there beyond the gulf that lay between the Sphere and the rest of the galaxy.

  The cluster he called home was but a small part of a much larger whole that had once been ruled by a single emperor. The days of galactic empires were over, some asserted, but they were ignorant fools. They only said that because they lacked vision, lacked imagination, to see that what had once been could be again.

  Had not the Second Empire, according to legend of course, sprung from a single world? So too the Third Empire had its origins in a single system. The Fourth Empire likewise had gotten its start in a similarly small union of planets. Why could not Ajax be an imperial kernel too? The Domain had begun as a feudal planet, with a king, now emperor, ruling a band of rowdy nobles. Each lord owed fealty to him, and had a remit to conquer in his name. Wealth and worlds brought under imperial jurisdiction were shared between them and the Crown. It worked. Nobles had an incentive to expand the empire, since they got to keep so much of what they captured. Thereby, Ajax had grown large, and had only recently seen its forward march falter as larger powers intervened to stymie it.

  Damn Halifax! Damn the Monarchonate! Ronner glanced at the holo that floated above his command chair. The missiles were still on an intercept course with the RHN destroyer. The vessel interested him, as it conformed to the profile of a Sapphire-class destroyer, a venerable Halifaxian design, but not completely. The Cawnpore’s shipbrain highlighted several notable differences that the ship’s sensors had noted as they had scanned the smaller vessel.

  This intrigued the admiral, who had come up initially in the ranks as a technical intelligence specialist with a focus on RHN warships. It was an ingrained habit of his to assess each and every battlecraft that came within his purview, looking for strengths and weaknesses, with an eye toward avoiding or negating the former and exploiting the latter. He tapped a finger in the air, summoning a description of the weapons loadout that his flagship’s scanners had found.

  What stood out most clearly was the ship’s relatively light armament. Where a Sapphire would have six twin turrets, this one had only four. If the scanners were feeding him accurate information, the gauss cannons embedded within each were smaller than usual too. The missile complement, going by the numbers of launch silos that studded the hull, were also fewer than what would be expected on a Sapphire.

  So the ship, which otherwise conformed closely to the standard Sapphire pattern, was more weakly armed than the old RHN workhorse. This was the first that he had seen of such a ship. Disdaining to ever speak directly to a mere shipbrain, he directed a search, with a flick of his fingers via the holographic interface he summoned before him, through the Cawnpore’s database for other DN encounters with a ship of this type. No results.

  Ronner snapped his fingers, ordering a search again. Still no results. Satisfied that the Cawnpore’s up-to-date database had no record of such an encounter, he sat back in his chair as the missiles continued their chase. What did it say about the enemy, rich, powerful Halifax, that they were producing such underarmed hulls? Could this mean that the strain of war had finally forced on them the same restrictions that had held back everyone else in the Sphere for so long? Had they finally been beset by the need to economize?

  He chuckled. So maybe, just maybe, the princes of the RHN understood now what it was like to go into space with something less than a gold-plated, best-of-its-kind, state-of-the-art ride. Once he had dispatched the destroyer, he would send a report back to Ajax detailing the probable slippage of Halifaxian finances. The RHN, against all expectations, was sending second-rate vessels to war.

  Served them right! Returning to his earlier train of thought, Ronner remembered that it was all of a piece. Halifax had sinned by standing in the way of progress. Ajax wanted to lead and the Republic had said no. It was now reaping what it had sown with its arrogance. By making itself the arbiter of right and wrong in the Sphere, it had squelched earlier attempts at unification. It was now locked in a war with an opponent, the Sphinx, who had developed a power base that was too big to knock out in a short war. If Halifax had only allied with Ajax, or simply stood aside, Tartarus would have been crushed before it could develop into the serious problem that it was today. Ajax was weak, weaker than it had been in generations, but it had avoided becoming entangled in a debilitating war with another great power. The emperor and his admirals and generals had learned the lesson of prior wars, especially in the wake of the Eleven Minutes Battle. Ajax could not go it alone against either Halifax or Tartarus. Not while they were strong. Instead, it would have to bide its time, and bite off small pieces, one at a time, and rebuild the empire that it had lost.

  The empire that it had lost. Ronner heaved another sigh, this one sorrowful. He had helped conquer much of that empire as a young officer. It had been a glorious, optimistic time. There was little that was beyond reach in those heady days of expansion.

  Then those days had come to an end. The Domain Navy had been whipped so badly that many feared that the imperial government might be toppled in a coup. Everything looked bleak.

  Then the crisis of confidence passed. The protesters were shot. Malcontents inside the Navy and Army were hanged. Law and order was restored.

  The effects of the setback still lingered, nonetheless. Talk of mounting an expedition across the Gulf ceased. It would be decades before something so bold could be contemplated again.

  The Gulf. It wasn’t the Gulf itself that mattered. It was what was on the other side of it. The rest of the galaxy, that was what lay on its far side. One day, one year, one decade, no matter how long it took, the Domain Navy would sail over the void to the Milky War proper, and there establish a permanent presence. It would be Ajax’s beachhead.

  A handful of cross-Gulf expeditions had been sent out over the past fifty years, and each time, the surviving ships had come back with much the same tale. The galaxy on the farther shore was a lawless, even wild, place, full of systems littered with single-planet warlords and pirate consortia. None could stand up against a determined offensive launched by even one of the middling powers of the Sphere. All it would take would be a large, well-supplied expeditionary fleet commanded by a suitably ruthless admiral and a territory as big as the Sphere itself might be won in a generation.

  There were sure to be costs involved. Deaths in the hundreds of millions, perhaps even in the billions. Those were of no consequence though. They were barbarians, living in primitive squalor on technologically backward worlds. They were in need of organization. Ajax, with its unique civilizing mission, was the power that could do that most effectively. With the resources that could be garnered from these conquered worlds, the Domain could then expand even more forcefully across the Milky Way. The nucleus of a Fifth Empire could be created in around a half-century, imperial planners predicted.

  Problematically, the shortest transit over the Gulf lay between Halifax and the wider galaxy. The Republic stood in the way of the smooth unfolding of this imperial vision, incapable of bringing it about itself and refusing to let others make the attempt. So the Republic would have to be crushed to make way for the creation of a galactic empire.

  That was easier said than done. Halifax was still several times bigger and stronger than Ajax, and it would be a long while before it could be brought to its knees. Imperial strategists were of the opinion that she would decline in about a century’s time. Democracies were notoriously unstable, and were liable to suffer from internal divisions as competing groups squabbled over the direction of the state. Squabbling led to outright civil strife, and this brought about a fragmentation of political power and a blunting of purpose. It was well-known that ‘the people’ that the Halifaxians so often claimed to be beholden to had no true idea of what should be done. Common folk were driven largely by emotion and fear. They also tended to make terrible decisions when any such matter was left to them.

  There was an ancient tale, supp
osedly dating to the dawntime of Old Earth, in which the commanders of a victorious fleet were executed for failing to retrieve corpses floating in the water after battle. These men were tried and found guilty by a vengeful parliament upset that the bodies of their relatives had not been collected. The commanders’ roles in securing the victory were utterly forgotten.

  This story lacked much detail; the name of the winning navy as well as the place of the engagement were both unknown, but it rang true, and was accepted as such by the scholars of the naval academy at Skagerrak, where it was taught as a cautionary tale warning of the dangers of democracy.

  The quest to rebuild a galaxy-scale empire was no mere vanity project for the glorification of the emperor. Ronner knew what things prowled in the spaces between the stars. All senior commanders of the Domain did. The Sphinx believed that he could keep the knowledge from leaking out, but it had, nonetheless. People talked. There were dragons lurking in the darkness of the greater galaxy. Dragons that had to be stopped. Dragons that had to be slain if humanity were to be preserved.

  He wondered if the Halifaxians knew the truth. Perhaps they did, but it was most likely that they dismissed much of it as lurid tales carried Sphereward by half-crazed sailors who had spent too many years in the black chill of the void. Did they understand that enemies of humankind were gathering, and with every passing year advancing closer to the frontiers of the old empires? Were they ready to act against them before it was too late? The old adage said: ‘Let sleeping dragons lie.’ Yet Ronner knew that was a foolish idea. A sleeping dragon ought to be killed immediately. The dragons at large in the far recesses of the galaxy were assuredly not asleep, but were on the move.