EMPIRE: Warlord (EMPIRE SERIES Book 5)

by Richard F. Weyand

  “Turn complete, Sir.”

  “Release missiles,” Volkov said.

  Gunderson hit the control to open the doors of the missile containers his four ships carried on their backs. The missile loads slid out the back of the containers, and the compression of the shipping separators shoved them apart. They drifted along at Raptor’s velocity at the time they were released, even as Raptor continued to decelerate relative to the planet.

  “Missiles released,” Gunderson reported to the bridge.

  “Engaging all missile drives,” Gunderson said to his crew as he pushed the control. “Report link to your birds.”

  Each of the other five missileers reported active control links.

  “Active control links on all missiles,” Gunderson reported to the bridge.

  “Sir, we have missile separation. Scanning makes it, uh, two plus million missiles incoming. Arrival time forty minutes.”

  “From the picket ships?” Dern asked.

  “Yes, Sir. Each picket ship launched eight missiles. Now making it two-point-four million incoming. Status change. The picket ships have reversed course. They’re decelerating at ten gravities. They’re going to outrun our missiles, Sir.”

  “Orders to all commands. Retarget our missiles to the incoming missiles. Send it.”

  “Transmitting, Sir.”

  “They’re targeting our birds, Senior Chief.”

  “I see it,” Gunderson said. “Engage ECM.”

  “Engaging ECM.”

  The Alliance missiles lost lock on their targets, then, as they got closer to their targets, they reacquired lock on whatever was nearest. There were a lot of incoming missiles, so it wasn’t hard for most of them to reacquire lock, but some of them locked on to the same targets. When the two walls of missiles reached each other, all the Alliance missiles and two hundred thirty thousand of the Sintaran missiles went missing in a cascade of nuclear explosions. The other two million, one hundred and seventy thousand Sintaran missiles bored on.

  The Alliance got four missile launches off before the Sintaran missiles closed the gap. A total of about a million of the Sintaran missiles were destroyed. That left one million four hundred thousand missiles entering the Alliance point-defense envelope.

  Taking his lead from the other Alliance commanders, Lofgren had reprogrammed his point-defense lasers to ignore targets in the outer point-defense perimeter and focus on the inner point-defense perimeter. Their performance exceeded the prior performance of the systems against the Sintaran ECM, and a total of thirty percent of the incoming missiles were destroyed.

  Then the remaining million or so missiles were in among the Alliance formations.

  Destruction rolled across the Alliance formations, from the outer orbits of the rocky planet that was the mustering point to the inner orbits. A ring of nuclear fire encircled the planet as missiles found targets and detonated. Other missiles, finding their target destroyed, sought lock on other intact targets. With almost three missiles per target, most were disappointed and ended up blowing up the bigger chunks of debris.

  The ring of fire contracted through the Alliance formations over the course of several minutes. When it was done, there was nothing left but a ring of debris around the planet.

  Looking into the tactical display, even Admiral Espinoza was stunned. She finally broke the silence on the flag bridge.

  “Well, that was decisive.”

  Espinoza turned to her head of scanning.

  “Do we detect any intact plasma bottles?”

  “No, Ma’am. Nothing. There are tens of thousands of cargo shuttles intact, but that’s about it.”

  “They weren’t targets. The missiles ignored them,” Kim said.

  “Understood. Well, let’s call the cruisers up and head out. Nice work, everybody.”

  Wingard

  PO/2 Gertrude Winger was only in the middle of the shift that had started with her dodging debris from the first Sintaran picket ship attack on the Alliance battleships. Now she saw over two million Sintaran missiles incoming on the Alliance formations, and she made a quick decision.

  “Larry, jettison the containers.”

  “What?” asked PO/3 Larry Stonecipher, Winger’s loadmaster.

  “Jettison the containers. We’re getting the hell out of here.”

  “Oh. OK.”

  The shuttle shuddered when the containers unlatched.

  “We’re free.”

  Winger dialed up the engines, and, unencumbered with cargo, the over-powered shuttle’s velocity shot up with four g’s of acceleration.

  “Oof,” Stonecipher grunted.

  Winger didn’t answer. She was busy steering through all the ships and shuttles of a fleet in port, aiming for the closest clear space she could find. It took her fifteen minutes to make her way out of the fleet formations and get north of their equatorial orbit. Once there, she cut the engines and spun the ship around.

  She and Stonecipher watched agape as the wave of destruction washed over the Alliance formations. When it was all over, there was not a word between them for several minutes as they continued to watch the debris of the Alliance’s Wingard invasion fleet orbit the planet, an asteroid belt of steel and plastic and flesh.

  Stonecipher finally broke the silence.

  “Now what do we do?”

  Winger turned to him with tears running down her face.

  “What?”

  “Now what do we do? We have no way home.”

  “Oh.”

  Her thoughts were slow and disconnected, but she finally got her brain working.

  “I guess we wait for someone to come and pick us up. In the meantime, we’d better check the emergency stores and see what we have.”

  Summary

  Across all nine Alliance mustering points, the story of the second-wave attack was the same. Total annihilation of the Alliance forces, and no losses of any Imperial Navy ships or crew.

  In the overall operation, the Imperial Navy lost three hundred and twenty-five thousand picket ships. No Imperial Navy officers or crew were lost.

  The Alliance lost a total of three million one hundred and fifty thousand warships, three hundred and fifty thousand freighters, and over five billion officers and crew.

  Terre Autre Grand Admiral Jacque LeClerc did not get his briefing the next morning. There was no one to report, about a fleet that no longer existed.

  He was the only surviving Alliance commander.

  Second-Wave Aftermath

  Dunham and Peters dropped out of VR into their normal seats in their private living room in the Imperial Apartment, he on the sofa where he could look out the glass wall over the balcony and down the Palace Mall, she on one of the large club chairs facing him.

  “That was brutal,” Peters said.

  “It was surprisingly successful.”

  “Why surprisingly?”

  “Things seldom go so according to plan,” Dunham said. “Especially war. Anything, really, but especially war.”

  “And the Alliance is no longer a threat.”

  “Not quite. They still have three hundred fifty thousand modern warships, as many hulls as us, more or less, and the attitude that it’s OK to wage an aggressive war against Sintar. I can’t leave it there. It will just come up again, and we might not be so lucky or so well-prepared next time. Consider what happens if they find their own Jared Denny, for instance.”

  “Oh, now there’s a scary thought,” Peter said.

  “Exactly. So I have to put an end to this, now, while I can. I have to ensure the Alliance poses no further threat to Sintar.”

  “And so the third-wave attacks go forward.”

  “Yes. Absolutely.”

  “OK. I can see that. And then what?”

  “It’s their move.”

  Dunham got a distracted look on his face for a moment.

  “Excuse me, Amanda. I’ll be right back.”

  Dunham was off in VR for several minutes, then was mentally back in the liv
ing room.

  “A quick after-action report. They also wanted my authority to proceed with the third-wave attacks. And I reminded them of rescue parole.”

  “Rescue parole?” Peters asked.

  “Yes. We’re letting the Alliance navies into the mustering points under white flag to rescue any of their people who survived.”

  “Did any survive?”

  “Oh, yes. Tens of thousands of cargo shuttle pilots and crew, for instance. They weren’t targeted by the missiles, and most of them apparently survived.”

  “Amazing.”

  “So we are going to tell the Alliance it’s safe to go in there and do rescue ops. We won’t attack their ships in those systems under white flag.”

  Queen Anne was meeting once more with her defense cabinet. It was not yet noon.

  “I knew I’d see you later today. What’s happened?”

  The three looked back and forth among themselves, then Dunning spoke up.

  “Sintar has attacked all nine Alliance mustering points with very large forces and destroyed all the Alliance ships in all nine systems, Your Majesty.”

  That was hard to hear. She had expected it, but it was still hard.

  “What sort of forces did they use, Mr. Dunning?”

  Dunning looked to Admiral Keller, and Keller answered.

  “They used a total of three-point-six million picket ships spread across all nine mustering points, Your Majesty.”

  “All picket ships, Admiral?”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  “And what were their losses, Admiral?”

  “We don’t believe they lost any ships, Ma’am.”

  Queen Anne raised an eyebrow and Keller went on.

  “They used a hitherto undisclosed capability, Ma’am. Their picket ships are capable of firing eight ship-to-ship missiles. Each. Simultaneously.”

  “Eight missiles? Per picket ship?”

  “Yes, Ma’am. We believe it is a one-shot deal. They can’t do it multiple times. But each of the picket ships in the attack launched eight missiles, and then the ships fled back out of range. They expended over twenty million missiles in the attacks, Ma’am.”

  “Which completely overwhelmed our defenses.”

  “Well, yes, Ma’am. We’ve never seen anything like that missile barrage. No defenses were designed to counter that.”

  “And so all three-million-plus Alliance warships deployed for the invasion have been destroyed, and the Emperor has not yet brought forward his proper navy, nor exposed any of his new construction. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” Dunning answered.

  “I might suggest to you gentlemen that it is time to try to think of a way out of this war other than fighting our way through it.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” Mallory said.

  “There is one other thing, Your Majesty,” Dunning said.

  Queen Anne turned back to him and nodded.

  “I have received a communication from Sintar, Ma’am, addressed to the chair of the Alliance War Council. It informs me there are tens or hundreds of thousands of Alliance people who survived the attack. Mostly shuttle crews. They were considered noncombatants. It offers that we can go into the nine mustering points and effect rescue operations to recover our surviving personnel without being attacked or molested in any way. The interesting thing, Ma’am, is it’s signed by the Emperor himself.”

  “Well, then, get your people under way, Admiral. We don’t know how much life support or stores those people have.”

  “But can we trust him, Ma’am?”

  “The Emperor? To keep his word? Yes, absolutely.”

  “But, Ma’am, these attacks–“

  “The Emperor promised me that if we went to war with Sintar, we would regret it. These attacks didn’t break a promise, Admiral. They kept one. Now go rescue our people.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  “We have orders coming in, Sir.”

  Captain Jonas Whitney waited for the orders to come up on his screen, then called his exec, Commander Robert Murphy, over to his command chair.

  “Rob, our orders say a state of war now exists between the ‘Alliance’ – which is everybody except Sintar, the DP, and Estvia – and the Sintaran Empire.”

  “Wow.”

  “They go on to say that Admiral Fortney’s squadron is being directed to space at our best speed to an uninhabited system in Wingard and effect rescue operations under white flag. We will have passenger ships coming along behind. It notes that we are on our parole from Sintar to carry out these operations and not to interfere with or confront Sintaran vessels. What do these orders tell you?”

  “Somebody went out and caused a lot of trouble and got their asses shot off.”

  “That’s the way I read it, too. In any case, we are going to be leaving almost immediately. What is our stores situation?”

  “We’re good on everything, Sir. Two months of reaction mass and stores aboard.”

  “All right. Good. Make preparations to get us under way.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “And make sure to set our transponder to broadcast our white flag.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Gertrude Winger and Larry Stonecipher were in touch by radio with other cargo shuttle crews similarly marooned. The shuttles had no QE radios, so they couldn’t call for help, but they could at least talk to each other.

  One of them had a good idea. What would rescue ships require once they got there, if they were going to remain in-system long enough to rescue everybody? Stores and reaction mass. And what did they have lots and lots of floating around in the debris field? Intact containers of stores and reaction mass, from when the freighters broke up. They also had the cargo shuttles to go and lasso those loose containers and build a payload.

  Besides, it gave them something to do other than to worry that, with all the carnage, they had simply been forgotten in an uninhabited and uninhabitable system.

  In the Democracy of Planets, Prime Minister Harold Pinter was meeting with his foreign minister, Jules Morel, and his Defense minister, Pavel Isaev.

  “All right. What’s happened?” Pinter asked.

  “The Alliance was mustering its fleets to attack Sintar, and somehow Sintar figured out where they were,” Morel said. “Sintar attacked and destroyed the Alliance attack fleets.”

  “Destroyed them all?”

  “Yes, Sir. Every single ship. Over three million of them. Most of the DP-built ships they bought from us, in fact. They’ve very nearly returned the region to the status quo ante.”

  “My God. How did Sintar know where they were?”

  “That’s a matter of some speculation, Harold,” Isaev said. “The secret was pretty closely held. Only the host countries knew which planet was the mustering point for each location. I’m not sure anyone actually knew more than one, much less all nine.”

  “Then how?”

  “Well, it’s sort of fantastical, but the remaining option is that Sintar has some improved way of scanning hyperspace. They saw where all the ships were going, and that’s where they attacked.”

  “Is that even possible?”

  “Well, it must be,” Isaev said. “They did it. We don’t know how to do it, but our technical people are looking at it.”

  “How many ships did Sintar lose, Pavel?”

  “They lost over three hundred thousand picket ships in a reconnaissance in force to find out where in the systems the Alliance ships were mustering. Their main attacks came a couple hours later. We don’t think they lost any ships in their main attacks.”

  “They didn’t lose any ships in the main attacks?” Pinter asked.

  “No. It was a standoff missile battle, and they simply overwhelmed the Alliance. They fired over two million missiles in a single salvo in each of the nine mustering locations.”

  “Two million missiles in one salvo?”

  “Yes,” Isaev said. “That’s what the recordings show. More like two-point-four milli
on, actually.”

  “So what did we learn about their new construction?”

  “Nothing. Their main attack was all picket ships. Across all nine locations, they deployed three and a half million of them.”

  “They launched missiles from picket ships? Do they have impellers?” Pinter asked.

  “No. It’s more like an old-style box launcher. They run up to speed, drop a bunch of missiles, then flip around and go back. They ignite the missiles from there. Crude, but in such overwhelming numbers it was very effective.”

  “I’ll say. Three million ships. It took us five years to sell and transfer them all. Even now, it would be something like two years’ production. And they destroyed them all in– What?”

  “About three hours,” Isaev said.

  “In three hours. Can you imagine?”

  Pinter shook his head.

  “I didn’t even know there had been a declaration of war,” he said.

  “There wasn’t one. From either side,” Morel said.

  “Sintar saw them mustering forces, and preemptively attacked?”

  “Yes. They weren’t going to just sit there and wait for the Alliance to attack them. Not when they apparently saw them mustering.”

  “I can’t say as I blame them. So where does all this leave us, Jules?” Pinter asked.

  “Hard to say, Harold. War normally continues until both sides want it to stop or one side totally surrenders. I can’t see Sintar wanting it to stop at this point. The Alliance has been returned to their position of five years or so ago – actually worse, with all the staff losses – but Sintar has all the advantages of its buildup and technology improvements. I can’t see Sintar stopping here. The Alliance could arise as a threat again, and they’ve already demonstrated they have no problem with waging a war of aggression against Sintar if they think they can pull it off.”

  “So if the Alliance surrenders, where does that leave us?” Pinter asked.

  “As the only other political entity in human space. And the smaller one at that.”