But then there was the last one! He was an Elder, a very young one in upper class clothes, looking attentive and bright. He could only be an intern, someone on the executive track, the one her lack of connections, lack of being an Elder, or some combination thereof, had prevented her from joining. It also meant he’d be able to pull some strings, if she could pull his.
She put on her most humble posture, and went straight to him. He turned her way, with the smooth grace of the Elders.
“Good morning, I am Administrator Apprentice Strasbourg. How can I help you on the path of service?” he said pleasantly, with the full official greeting no veteran LS worker would have used.
“Good morning Administrator Sir, thank you! I would like to help with the war effort.”
Strasbourg looked at her benignly.
“I would be honored to help you do that. You know, for my part, I’m in training for the Logistical Support Subdirectorate, and this seemed a good place to learn something while directly contributing to our wartime productivity.”
This would be far easier than haggling with some bored, jaded LS staffer.
“Administrator Sir… I, well, this may sound silly, but I’ve always loved vitamin cakes, the ones like our marines and crew eat on the Warden Ships.”
And here she pulled out one of the real cakes for effect.
“Administrator Sir, I’ve heard there were temporary centers going up to help fill ration packs, and… well, the thought of our brave young men and women, off to war, enjoying vitamin cakes packed by me… it warms my heart.”
The young Elder’s face flushed slightly, and his reserve cracked just a bit. A hint of an emotional smile crossed his face.
“It so happens they’ve just put up a center in a warehouse not six blocks from here, across the street from a public shelter, if you need it. Don’t worry about queue position on your request list, I’ll make sure you get assigned to the center. Return to the front desk, and it will all be in order in a few minutes.”
“Thank you, thank you so much Administrator Sir” she said as she left, bowing lower than she had to the security policeman.
Shortly afterward, she was on her way to her new job with a recommendation in hand.
///
At the packing center, swarms of low-level temporary workers, like herself, stood in lines along moving belts containing initially empty ration packs. Other belts conveyed supplies to the packing workers. It was shockingly primitive, but then it had been hastily thrown up in what rumors said was a dire emergency.
The workers were a mix of mostly Ara’kaa and Tsamier, with a smattering of others from among the common advanced races. They wanted to chat with her until they found out she’d specially requested and gotten a place here. Some decided she was a plant from who knew what bosses, others that she was an oddball. Either way, they left her mostly alone, which was what she wanted and needed.
Supervisors and tan-uniformed civilian guards patrolled around from time to time. An Elder senior manager sat at a desk at one end, working on a mobile computer.
She set to work packing vitamin cake tins in the packs. During her first break, she pulled one out of her pack, along with a light snack. She hoped no one noticed that at the end of break, the cake tin did not go back in her pack, but just under the top of a stack she had ready for packing.
A little while later, some security police came in. They gathered the center guards and started up and down the aisles. A police captain at the end of the building was making many apologetic gestures as he spoke with the Elder manager.
Skrai’kiik’s blood felt like it was freezing inside her.
“Bag check!” barked a center guard.
Then they started opening worker’s bags and looking at personal effects, one by one. They got to her. She handed them her battered old bag. Inside were the phone, a few personal effects, and the vitamin cake tins that meant her mission and her life.
“This broken?” said one of the guards.
“Yes Guard Sir, I’m hoping to earn the money to get it repaired and reactivated.”
A security policeman, a burly leathery-skinned Shulgar, was eyeing the vitamin cakes in the stacks, then those he’d found in her bag. She masked her panic.
“Are these stolen?” he said, staring her down as if to make her nerves fail. It was working.
“No Protector Sir… mine. As… you can see… different series. Mine are last year’s…”
“Very good!” he snapped, and moved on, the center guards in tow.
She felt as if she wanted to faint with relief, but she didn’t. She had a job to do, though not the one anyone here suspected.
During her midday break, she carefully staged another transmitter tin, packed it half an hour later, and then did the same with the last one on her afternoon break. With luck, at least one of the packs would go onboard the transport she knew would be arriving in three days. It was quite possible they all would, but three were a safer bet than one. The same, really was the story for the time she had. They hadn’t known how long it would take, but the timing of the transport set three days as the upper limit. Now it turned out she’d only needed one.
Skrai’kiik swallowed her fear, and worked through her next two days as if they were something ordinary. They gave her a charity cloak at the shelter, which helped with the cold. At the end of her third shift, she reported to the Labor Subdirectorate office to check out. It wouldn’t do to disappear on them and try to leave town while still on active work duty. Not with those checkpoints around.
She was glad the young Elder was not there. He’d meant well, and she didn’t want to face him. She signed out with an utterly disinterested LS clerk, and headed out of town. Thankfully, her false travel permit had been set for 30 standard days, the longest one could be valid without special permission.
As she approached the checkpoint, she felt an icy fear that the same security policeman would be on duty. While not necessarily out of line, it was unusual for someone who’d had a job to be leaving so soon. Police looking routinely at ID might not care enough to ask questions, but someone who remembered her probably would.
He wasn’t there.
The police at the checkpoint glanced at her ID and waived her through. Once past the bridge and out of sight, she took a detour, and then spent a miserable few hours hiding in the shrubs. At last, a subtle motion in the air told her the shuttle was back. The hatch opened and she bolted inside. There were Viris, and Tayyis! She hugged them both, squeezing hard like a grounder or perhaps a very small Rhurrg, and collapsed in her chair, nerves spent, as the shuttle took off and rifted safely home.
50
In low orbit above Solidarity 17, a fleet was gathering. More than a thousand Liberty class starships and a hundred of the new Freedom class fast cargo ships sat closely parked in space. They were preparing for the eventual hoped-for assault on the Elder Grand Fleet.
Six more Liberty class ships, in standard Solidarity naval markings, rifted in close to the fleet.
In the brief moments they had, few observers in the fleet or on the ground noticed that the six ships had the names and call signs of Enyarial’s squadron lost at Anish. Then they fired nuclear missiles, and rifted out. A maelstrom of concussive explosions, heat, and thermonuclear radiation swept away six hundred ships in the blink of an eye.
The six Liberty ships reappeared far out in the solar system. They sent one short message, and then rifted away entirely. The message was in a clear Elder voice:
“To the people of Solidarity 17, this is Fleet Admiral Shirazi. You have twenty-four standard hours to return to the cause of enlightenment. You may announce your intention of doing so by rifting all surviving warships to the Anish system, powering down all systems but life support, and jettisoning your nuclear and conventional missiles.”
“Once you do so, we will retrieve your surrendered crews. Provided you initiate no further hostilities, they will be returned to you, and we will discuss your reintegration into t
he Galactic Protectorate. Should you fail to do so, we will consider you to be hostile, and act will accordingly.”
As Shirazi rifted home, he wondered how well his gambit would work. He’d just caught the enemy with the kind of devastating surprise they’d had at Malachite, but unlike them, he had only six ships to work with, and no way to replace them.
///
Scarcely hours after sending Skrai’kiik on her lonely and dangerous mission, Karden received the terrible news. First, a new spy satellite had arrived at Anish, and reported that some of Enyarial’s ships had survived after all, but were in enemy possession. Shortly thereafter, three of them, re-done in unfamiliar markings, had rifted away. Then, no more than a few minutes later, had come the news of a devastating attack by another six of the captured ships on Solidarity 17.
Admiral Shirazi had now beaten them three times, and according to the spy satellite, he was drawing more Warden Ships in from sectors farther from the front. But more frightening by far were the implications of Shirazi’s latest victory.
The Elders had rift ships! Six captured rift starships to fight with, and three that must be on their way to some far corner of the galaxy – probably Earth – for study and duplication.
Karden faced some very unpleasant choices.
They could send the fleet to attack Shirazi in his now very well-prepared position, taking who knew what losses, at the very time when they’d need everything they had for the planned assault on the Grand Fleet. Or they could send the better part of the fleet to safety at hidden operating bases, while trusting in Starfighters and whatever else they could scrape together to defend their home worlds.
Either way, it would be a while before they knew if they had the location of the Elder Grand Fleet.
The transport they’d decided was probably headed there would, if it was loaded as heavily as possible, be leaving in about six days. It would then be some weeks by wormhole, probably at least one but not more than three, till it reached the fleet.
They were going send their first activation code to the transmitters after thirty days, and hoped it was long enough. Even Jat wasn’t eager to use their precious transmitters to find out what would happen if a rift was opened in a wormhole.
Finally, regardless of what choice they made about Shirazi, there were three captured ships to try to catch, travelling somewhere as fast as they could go, by rift.
///
News that the Elders had captured rift ships was quick to spread. With it spread worry. Within hours, Selnin Rorder was on worldwide broadcast, calling for the resignation of Haral Karden and his chief commanders.
There was panic on some of the rebel Production worlds, who’d seen the amazing grounder rift technology as the one thing that made the revolution possibly winnable. If the Elders negated that advantage, all the advantages of their own would be certain to win out.
Karden called an emergency meeting of his commanders. They had to act quickly.
Hraragurr was furious “We don’t know when or if we’ll find the Grand Fleet! I say let’s go smash Shirazi NOW, before he pulls off another raid like that!”
“We’re not going to try a frontal assault now of all times,” said Karden, “And, I would note, the real danger to us at Anish is not the Elder fleet itself, but Shirazi.”
Varen paused, thinking, and then said, “He’s only got six ships, and if we can lure him into a trap, he won’t have any way to rebuild.”
“Then we’ve got to find a way to make him do so,” said Karden, “In the meantime, we’re going to have to start keeping our ships either groundside, where it will be too risky for him to rift, or at operating bases in interstellar space. We’re going to have to keep Starfighters scrambled and on alert in orbit, in case Shirazi decides he wants to start hitting civilian targets.”
“Director Sir, How do you propose keeping them manned and supplied at the operating bases? They, or whatever we send to supply them, will still be vulnerable while leaving the surface and getting into orbit to rift,” said Avtil, who still sometimes used Elder-style formality when talking to Karden.
Karden thought about that. Neem and Jat had shown rifts could be done on the planet’s surface. It had just taken their containment rings, the rift portals they were now using on a daily basis to get from planet to planet. Why couldn’t a rift portal take them to an operating base instead?
“Unless we don’t need to get into orbit to rift,” he said.
“GRRRRR!” laughed Hraragurr, “Watch out, Karden’s got a new idea coming!”
“Even with rift portals,” Karden continued, “I suspect that a rift big enough, on a planet’s surface, to send an entire Liberty ship through is going to either be impossible to keep stable, or will be so expensive in terms of power that Harker and K’tk go into a full-scale rebellion of their own.”
“But,” he went on, “why couldn’t we send components, supplies, weaponry, and crews through?”
“And assemble them in deep space?” considered Varen.
“Exactly so.”
“We would need to build more substantial operating bases, with living quarters, and rift smaller portal rings through for use on the other side,” said Avtil.
“I’ll call Neem, and see if he’ll take the design job,” said Karden.
///
Orbiting Ground were a hundred first generation Neem-Jat rift satellites. In the scramble to pull resources from orbit to deep space operating bases, they’d been a low priority. A rift appeared in space, not far away. A Liberty class ship came through and launched a nuclear missile into their midst, then quickly rifted away. The blast annihilated the unmanned satellites. Starfighters in the area kept their distance, and then patrolled looking for signs of further attack. Liberty ships appeared behind six of them, blasted them apart with railgun shots, and disappeared again.
Shirazi and his ships then rifted a few hundred kilometers away and repeated the process with another group of fighters. They continued for the next hour, shooting down more than a hundred Starfighters, until finally the defending craft, on orders from headquarters, began flying in large staggered formations to cover each other.
But by then, the attackers were gone.
Moments later, but light years away, word had not yet reached military commanders on Unity 23. They had Starfighters on normal patrol. Liberty class ships appeared in the sky behind six of them at a time, shot them down, and then moved on. In minutes, they cleared a large region of orbital and suborbital space of defenders.
It was a region that happened to be over the largest military starport on Unity 23. On the ground were hundreds of Starfighters and thirty temporarily grounded Liberty ships. Shirazi rifted his squadron as close to the planet as they dared, and then swooped low at hypersonic speeds, strafing with railguns, gatling rockets, and powerful conventional missiles as crews on the ground scrambled.
Then, just as suddenly, he ascended back into orbit, and in the absolute first moment stable rifts could be generated, disappeared. Two thousand kilometers further out, comfortably in space where rifts could be done far more cheaply and reliably, Shirazi and his squadron rifted home. Behind them, on Unity 23, they’d left five hundred destroyed Starfighters and thirty smoldering wrecks where starships had once been.
Back on board the Command Starbase at Anish, Shirazi reviewed a message that had come in while he was conducting his raids. It was from the communication office of the Galactic Central Presidium itself. The first portion confirmed his brevet promotion to Fleet Admiral, per the recommendation of Supreme Fleet Admiral Katiyar. The second was very different, and disturbing.
It was an order to support Katiyar in conducting Level Three Retrogression on the planet Ground.
Shirazi was not a supporter of Retrogression as policy. He saw it as a vindictive waste of lives and resources. There were good reasons why Level Three hadn’t been enacted on any world in four hundred years. However as a military officer, it was his duty to obey the orders of the Galactic P
residium, and there they were.
There was one more problem, however.
In the ongoing intelligence war between the Protectorate and the Grounders, or rather now their League of Free Worlds, it was possible at any particular point in time that his communications had been compromised. Though encrypted and coded, the enemy had some frighteningly clever system hackers on their side, and it was quite possible this message had been intercepted.
Katiyar himself must have gotten the same orders, but probably in person back on Earth. Unlike the Presidium, he’d been maintaining the strictest secrecy. In fact, though he must be on his way, Shirazi had no idea where he was at present. That meant Katiyar was planning something massive, and decisive.
Shirazi hoped wherever Katiyar was, he would strike soon, because an order for Level Three Retrogression, if it became known to the general population, would do a great deal to make the Grounders and their cause look more sympathetic. It would make the Protectorate look murderous. It could spread unhappiness and dissent. It could plant the seeds of new rebellions.
51
With the vulnerabilities exposed by Shirazi’s raids. Karden had thought it advisable to follow the long-awaited plan of scattering his key advisors to hidden locations, and communicate by rift. The irony of hiding in bunkers on their own planets while planning an interstellar war was not lost on him.
“It is getting difficult to operate effectively,” said Avtil, “the rift portal system is working, we’re getting ships built and deployed in deep space, but it is much, much slower and more expensive than being able to build on the surface and launch directly into space.”
“Shirazi is showing us how unprepared we allowed ourselves to become,” added Varen, “We got overconfident of the advantage we had with rift technology.”
Harker joined in, “Kids, our dandy new interstellar shipping is at a standstill! Cargo ships are hiding out like Howling Desert Leapers for fear of getting hit while they’re in orbit!”
Alien Empire Page 34
