EMPIRE: Warlord (EMPIRE SERIES Book 5)

by Richard F. Weyand

  “How will the second wave of picket ships get into hyperspace, Admiral Cernik?”

  “We will send along enough converted light cruisers with hypergate projector modules to stream them from the local mustering sites, Sire.”

  “And will you target the freighters as well, Admiral Cernik?”

  “Yes, Sire. Striking at the enemy’s logistics is always worthwhile.”

  “I see, Admiral Cernik. Carry on.”

  “Thank you, Sire. Of course, we will be monitoring the operation in real-time. Once the picket ships have completed their attack, there will either be operational enemy ships remaining, or there won’t be. We plan follow-up operations as necessary, using converted battleships and cruisers.

  “After the attack on their mustering sites has begun, we will attack their space-based military assets in their home systems. Many of these will be through the use of the picket ships as total-fission weapons. The remainder will be attacked by picket ships in the conventional ramming attack mode. We will be attacking only those facilities that are majority military, per Your Majesty’s orders. Target selection is ongoing, but we still have at least two weeks for final target selection per Admiral Conroy.

  “Our forces for these operations are moving into staging positions even now, so we are not waiting for the final target list to get resources forward deployed.”

  “Will the movement of all these forces in hyperspace not be visible to the enemy, Admiral Cernik?”

  “We’ve done some testing on that over the last several years, Sire. A very large group of picket ships spacing individually at wide intervals looks like hyperspace noise. They simply don’t create enough of a wake for sensor systems to resolve. Even more interesting is the noise disguises the motion of larger ships, as long as they are spacing individually, and not as divisions and squadrons.”

  “I hope you are not staging in large mustering areas, repeating the mistake they are making that gives us advantage, Admiral Cernik.”

  “No, Sire. We are staging in groups of a few thousand or so, at over a thousand locations. We get most of the economies of scale, with very little risk to the mission.”

  “Excellent. Thank you, Admiral Cernik. Admiral Leicester.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “Your plans writ large are approved. I leave the details to you and your staff. You all are doing a fine job.”

  “Thank you, Sire.”

  “I ask only that you tell me when Admiral Conroy updates her status, Admiral Leicester.”

  “Of course, Sire.”

  Dunham nodded to Leicester and Cernik, and he, Saaret, and Peters disappeared from the VR channel.

  Dunham and Peters were relaxing on the chaise on the pool deck, watching the kids playing in the pool. Peters had swum her laps, which were much easier now the kids had learned not to try to swim toward Mommy while she was swimming laps. They were riding inflatable dragons and swinging at each other with pool noodles while the staff swim teachers refereed. Happy squeals filled the air.

  “Are you happy with Admiral Leicester’s battle plan?” Peters asked

  “Yes. I think it’s a good implementation of the orders I gave. I won’t second-guess or micro-manage him. The Navy will be much better at carrying out its own plan, which it understands, than any changes I could make anyhow. If I had any changes. It looks pretty good to me.”

  “’No plan survives contact with the enemy.’” Peters quoted.

  “Yes and no. The first attacks on an unsuspecting enemy often go very well, and much according to plan. After that, you’re right. You have to be able to play it by ear. Hopefully, in the long peace, the Navy hasn’t forgotten how to do that.”

  “Well, no one alive now has memories of any of that. It’s been a long time.”

  “Yes,” Dunham said, “but most of the staff officers, and many of the lower ranks, have masters degrees and doctorates in military history, strategy, and tactics. Many of them have written books analyzing the decisions made, both bad and good and why, in the Navy’s history. The institutional memory is there. It’s more an issue of how well those studies transfer to the real world, in real time.”

  “Ah. But you’re happy with the initial plan, at least.”

  “Yes. If we can take out several million warships in the first wave, whittle them down to size, and cripple their logistics chain and command structure with the infrastructure hits, the ultimate outcome becomes inevitable.”

  “Can’t they build more ships, like we’re doing?”

  “No. Their homegrown warships are inferior to Sintar’s or the DP’s. They’ve been buying the superior DP warships for almost four years. Their own shipyards have not turned out a warship since that started. To build ships now, even their own inferior designs, they would basically have to start from scratch, and they just don’t have the time. Meanwhile, we’re continuing to build new-design warships.”

  “Can’t they buy modern warships from the DP?” Peters asked.

  “No. The DP has sold them just about all the current design ships they had. They aren’t going to sell them new-design ships, not with a war on. The DP is going to keep them for itself. And the DP isn’t going to have shipyards start turning out new ships of the current design, either. Unless I miss my guess, those shipyards are turning out new-design ships for the DP navy about as fast as they can.

  “So whatever the Alliance has, they have. They’re not getting any more. And, after our first wave of attacks, they’re going to have a lot less.

  “Or at least that’s the plan.”

  When he came back from leave, Kowalski went into the mess for dinner and noticed the flag of Sintar had been changed to the Imperial Navy battle ensign. The difference was not subtle.

  The flag of Sintar was white, with the golden Throne of Sintar in the center, surrounded by a gold laurel wreath. The Imperial Navy battle ensign was black, with crossed white bars, four black stars in each half-bar. In the center, in a white circle, the golden Throne of Sintar and laurel wreath were as before. Arrayed to either side of the battle ensign on the wall hung the HMS Raptor’s battle honors, Imperial Unit Citations and Imperial Fleet Citations dating back over three hundred years.

  Several guys were standing there just staring at it all.

  “Oh, shit,” Kowalski said.

  Like anyone who had been through basic training in the Imperial Navy, he knew what the Imperial Navy’s battle ensign was. He had never seen the battle ensign flown on a Sintaran ship before, though, had never, in fact, seen it outside of a picture in a book. But he knew what it meant.

  They were spacing to war.

  Across the vast Sintaran Empire, crews shuttered up in their quarters took command of their vessels in VR. Most crews assigned to the offensive operations had four assigned ships, and they rotated among them as they got their ships under way.

  Across the Empire, millions of picket ships and tens of thousands of converted battleships and heavy cruisers headed for the local hypergates, entered them, and disappeared.

  Rear Admiral Dorothy Conroy stood staring into the hyperspace map of all human space. The shower of knitting needles – the short line segments of hyperspace travel of the ships the computer was following with the sensor data from a hundred and fifty thousand planetary pickets within the Empire and thirty thousand clandestine pickets outside it – was different now. The tens of thousands of green and yellow line segments were lost in a sea of red dashes – millions of them – representing atypical ship movements as tagged by the computer.

  A swarm of them, like a cloud of red gnats, was moving out from their forward deployed locations within the Sintaran Empire to get closer to the frontiers. In the Alliance star nations, red dashes were everywhere throughout the volume surrounding the Empire. And, off to the right, in the Democracy of Planets, hundreds of thousands more were swarming toward their border with the Alliance nations.

  Her chief of staff walked up beside her and looked into the display.

/>   “My, God, Ma’am. What is it?”

  “It has begun.”

  The Empire Prepares

  Jared Denny was early to the meeting in the VR conference room. He sat and collected his thoughts while he waited.

  Denny was still Chief Executive Officer of Sintar Specialty Services, the engineering services company he had created when he left university after he received his masters degree in mechanical engineering. He had recruited people to his company, selecting the best, brightest, and most innovative young engineers he could find across the entire Sintaran Empire. Sixteen of them. He had also managed to recruit two of the Empire’s most accomplished engineers, Robert Stewart and Ilia Sobol, as his technical advisers.

  They had hit it big with the design of a new generation of warships for the Imperial Navy. Half of the design royalties were being paid to SSS, the other half going to the shipbuilding companies who had detailed out the designs in a way Denny and his associates could not. They had had additional big wins with the proposal and design of the HARPER systems, remotely piloted bots that could perform shipboard repairs on the new, uncrewed vessels, the proposal and design of the electronic countermeasures system for Imperial Navy missiles and picket ships, and the proposal and implementation of the real-time map of hyperspace traffic throughout all of human-settled space.

  And they had all received the Gratitude of the Throne, personally, from the Emperor and Empress themselves. Denny himself had the personal mail addresses of the Emperor and Empress. He had, in fact, called the Empress personally to propose the hyperspace map project, knowing that ultimate secrecy was the project’s biggest asset.

  All this had resulted in a great deal of income for his company, including the profits from the manufacturing of the HARPER system, which Denny had let out to a contract management firm. The dividends the company was now regularly spinning out had made Denny and his associates and advisers wealthy beyond their dreams. It was particularly satisfying for Denny, who had worked his way up from the streets at the persistent urging of his grandmother.

  Denny was still CEO of SSS, but he had hired a general manager to handle the business aspects of the company, including managing the outside contractor, billing and receivables, and issuing dividends. These activities had grown to take up more and more of his time, and he was now free of them. This meeting was his re-emergence into the design activities that were the core of SSS’s business model.

  The others began appearing in the conference room as the time for the meeting approached. Bob Stewart, Ilia Sobol, Vipin Narang, Liu Jiang, Bertha Townsend, Freja Gunnarsson, Bob Fielding. When all eighteen were present, Denny opened the meeting.

  “All right. Let’s get started. As you know, I’ve hired Sol Guzman as general manager of the company. He has taken all the paperwork and management tasks off my shoulders, which frees me up to be a hundred percent committed to design work again.”

  “Excellent,” Narang said.

  “Yes, I think it’s a good move, and thanks to Ilia for suggesting it and proposing Sol as a candidate.”

  Denny nodded to Sobol, and Sobol nodded back.

  “With that out of the way, I’ve been thinking about the ECM system. I’m hearing rumblings that the war we knew was coming is imminent, that Sintar will be attacked by some combination of other star nations. This is from confidential sources and should not leave this room.”

  Denny swept his gaze from one side of the table to the other, catching people’s eyes, watching them nod.

  “It is likely the ECM system will be used, for the first time. What happens after that?”

  “Our adversaries will be looking for ways around it,” Liu said.

  “Exactly correct, Jane. And so we should be working on what?”

  “Figuring out how they will try to work around it, and figuring out ways to confound their workarounds,” Narang said. “But we are already working on this, Jared.”

  “Yes, we are. But I think we are looking at it wrong. How will they try to do workarounds?”

  “In software,” Townsend said. “They aren’t going to want to pull ships out of an active war to do hardware upgrades. Not significant ones, anyway, which is what it would take. Ships in dock can’t fight.”

  “Exactly,” Denny said. “And we have been doing the same. Working at defeating their possible workarounds in software. For the existing picket ships that makes sense, for the same reason. But if you think about it, it makes no sense for the missile systems or for new-construction picket ships.”

  Liu slammed her hand on the table.

  “No, of course not. The missiles are being expended. We can certainly do software upgrades on missiles in inventory, but we can also do full-up hardware upgrades on missile designs, and let the upgrades work their way out to the field as missiles are used up.”

  “Damn,” Narang said. “I can’t believe we didn’t think of that. We’ve missed you, Jared.”

  “OK, so let’s continue to work on the software upgrades to counter their likely workarounds for the missiles and picket ships in inventory, but let’s also work on a second generation hardware system both for the missiles and for the picket ships yet to be built. This war is unlikely to be over quickly, and we’ll need those new designs before it is.”

  Admiral Maria della Espinoza was meeting with her new chief of staff, Vice Admiral Kim Jae Seong. He was another of the merit promotions that had come along since the Emperor Trajan had ascended the throne, with an excellent reputation and many years with his own flag commands. She had picked him as her chief of staff from among the vice admirals transferring to her command with the large influx of ships that had been coming in steadily over the last six months, and she was pleased with how well they were working together.

  “We’re on schedule in deploying forward to the positions that came in the last orders from Sintar, Ma’am,” Kim said.

  “Excellent. How many total ships under our command now, Jay?”

  “Approximately four hundred and fifty thousand picket ships and forty-eight thousand warships equally distributed among battleships, heavy cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers, Ma’am. Half of the light cruisers are equipped with hypergate projectors as picket ship tenders.”

  “With forty-eight thousand warships, I’m kind of surprised they haven’t sent a fleet admiral out here to run the show,” Espinoza said.

  “I’ve made judicious inquiries, Ma’am. The forward-deployed forces have been consolidated into nine commands. These have all been done under the commander in place. All but two of those are admirals. Headquarters is leaving the commander on the scene in charge in all cases.”

  “Local experience over rank, eh? We’ll see how that works out. And how many total crews do we have for all those ships?”

  “One hundred and fifty thousand, Ma’am,” Kim said.

  “So four ships per crew, more or less.”

  “Yes, Ma’am. Between three and four.”

  “The timing on this is going to be interesting,” Espinoza said. “I don’t think one crew can effectively fight four ships at once, but it looks like we’re being mustered to attack a single location.”

  “There is an interesting proposal out of one of our tactical people, Ma’am. One of Vice Admiral Schansky’s people. Of our four hundred and fifty thousand picket ships, only one hundred and fifty thousand have ECM systems. Those are the new construction. There simply hasn’t been time to upgrade the picket ships that were already built when the ECM system came along.”

  “So three hundred thousand of our picket ships are going to be sitting ducks for the enemy’s re-aimed defensive fire?”

  “Perhaps not, Ma’am,” Kim said. “The ECM systems were developed first as a system to mount on a missile in place of a warhead, to make a hole in the defensive sensor system for a salvo of other missiles to slide through. The proposal is we use the picket ships with ECM systems to make a hole in the defenses for the picket ships without ECM systems.”

  “So
one crew takes four picket ships, the first one having ECM and the other three not, into the battle in a formation of some sort, and let the ECM make a hole for them all?”

  “That’s right, Ma’am. They peel off the non-ECM ships to attack one at a time as they pass targets, then hit their final target with the lead ship. And if it’s one crew, they can coordinate their evasive maneuvers.”

  “I like it,” Espinoza said. “I like it a lot. Now the first fifty thousand ships into the system are supposed to be ECM ships. They stir things up and map the system for the rest. So that leaves us what?”

  “A hundred thousand ECM ships and three hundred thousand non-ECM ships, Ma’am.”

  “And fifty thousand crews on the first wave, with a ship each, and a hundred thousand crews in the second wave, with four ships in formation for each?”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Kim said.

  “All right, Admiral. Get this written up. I’m going to send it to all my reports, as well as to the eight other attack commanders.”

  “Without going through channels, Ma’am?”

  “There isn’t time, Jay. I’ll send an apology to Admiral Leicester and copy that apology to my chain of command. We need to get this idea out there.”

  “All right, Ma’am. We’re on it.”

  Imperial Admiral Leicester met with Fleet Admiral Cernik in VR. It wasn’t strictly necessary to use VR here, but it saved time, and time was likely in short supply.

  “So what do your people think of Admiral Espinoza’s idea, Stepan?”

  “They like it, Sir. As a matter of fact, they like it a lot. It solves our two biggest problems at once – a shortage of crew availability and the vulnerability of the non-ECM picket ships. The only concern they had was whether some settings on the ECM system would be more effective than others in masking the other ships, and they weren’t sure how fast we could come up with an answer for that.”