EMPIRE: Warlord (EMPIRE SERIES Book 5)

by Richard F. Weyand

  “What’s going on, Pavel?” Prime Minister Harold Pinter asked.

  “Sintar is annexing Garland, Harold. The Imperial Navy is flooding into the kingdom.”

  “Guns blazing?”

  “No, it’s apparently a friendly annexation.”

  “All right, Pavel. Move the Navy into Annalia and Berinia. Jules, tell them we’re coming. Make it sound like it’s their idea.”

  “I’ll tell them Sintar is invading Garland, and we’re just coming to protect them from the Empire.”

  “There you go. Sounds good. Hell, they may even believe it. All right, Pavel. Thanks for the heads up. Now I have to go brief Totten and his bunch of morons.”

  “You do?” Morel asked.

  “For a fleet movement this size into a foreign country? Yes, I need to brief the opposition leader and the shadow cabinet. Who knows, it may even get them off my back about doing something.”

  “I wouldn’t bet money on that, Harold.”

  “Yeah, I know. But I can say I tried.”

  DPN Fleet Admiral Vasily Federenko stood on his flag bridge and stared into the tactical display. It was actually showing his deployments in twenty systems along the border between Annalia and Berinia and the Democracy of Planets. His ships were all topped up with stores and getting into formations for the hyperspace trip into Annalia and Berinia.

  Half a million ships under his command. He shook his head. Such fleet sizes were unthinkable back in the day, but such was the world they lived in now.

  Annalia was fifty thousand planets, the largest of all the independent star nations, and Berinia another seven thousand. He had barely enough ships to put eight ships into each system. That’s not how he was deploying, though. The more populous systems, the commercial and political centers, those were the systems where he would deploy. And using VR, he would command them all as one force from his flagship, DPS Electorate.

  Rear Admiral Dorothy Conroy stood staring into her display, but hers was a real-time map of hyperspace activity across all human space.

  I see you, she thought.

  Imperial Admiral Howard Leicester and the Emperor Trajan appeared in the VR in answer to her alarm message. Conroy saluted them both.

  “Yes, Admiral? What are you seeing?”

  “Two things, Your Majesty, Admiral.”

  She turned to the map.

  “Magnify seventeen.”

  The Garland Sector, now tinted green like the rest of the Empire, moved to the center of the map and filled the space before them.

  “Here we see Fleet Admiral Espinoza’s forces deploying into the Garland Sector.”

  Traces on the map ran from the former boundaries of Sintar well into the new Garland Sector. Some of them were marked as having arrived at their destinations already.

  “It looks like Admiral Espinoza is ahead of schedule, Admiral Conroy,” Dunham said.

  “Yes, Sire. She has expedited her movements. But this is why I sent you the alarm message.”

  Conroy turned to the map.

  “Magnify thirty-two.”

  Garland Sector diminished and moved back to its proper place, then the map shifted again and Annalia and Berinia swelled up to occupy the center of the space. Huge red hyperspace traces from perhaps twenty points in the Democracy of Planets were beginning their extension toward Annalia and Berinia. So far they were yet to cross the border.

  “So the DP is moving into Annalia and Berinia. What is the size of the force, Admiral?” Dunham asked.

  Conroy talked to the map.

  “Ship summary, highlighted vessels.”

  A table appeared in the map calling out ship types and numbers.

  “Half a million ships. That’s quite a commitment, Admiral Leicester.”

  “Yes, Sire. And right on our doorstep. Should we respond in any way?”

  “I don’t think so. Not yet. Let’s see where they’re headed. Admiral Conroy, I realize this is early information. When you can project destinations, I would be interested in an update.”

  “Yes, Sire. Of course.”

  “Thank you, Admiral.”

  Dunham and Leicester dropped from the channel.

  Salvage And Memorial

  Otto Stauss and his son Dieter were in the senior partner’s office, in the headquarters of Stauss Interstellar Freight Services in the city of Heidelburg on Hesse, the capital planet of the Baden Sector.

  “OK, so we have all this money coming in now from the freighter leasing. That contract with the Imperial annexation department was a huge boon. But it doesn’t pay to have money sitting around. Money that isn’t working is useless. Wallpaper.”

  “I have a thought about that,” Dieter said. “I’ve been looking into doing some salvage operations.”

  “Salvage? There’s no money in salvage.”

  “There may be this time. Think about it. You know the big battles with the Alliance nations, the ones where the Emperor caught them napping at their mustering points?”

  “Yeah,” the senior Stauss said. “It’s never come out how he did that, by the way.”

  “No, but I have some guesses.”

  “I do, too, but a client’s secrets can never pass our lips.”

  “Of course,” Dieter said. “But there were how many ships at a mustering location?”

  “Three hundred fifty thousand is what came out from some of the Alliance nations.”

  “Right. And the average tonnage of a warship is, what? Thirty thousand tons?”

  “Something like that,” Otto said. “Lightweight stuff, at least compared to a loaded freighter.”

  “Right. Three hundred fifty thousand warships, thirty thousand tons average, that’s ten billion tons of refined metals, per location. And it’s all in just two locations. The operations numbers work great on something like that. But here’s the kicker. With the annexation of Annalia and the Rim, two of those mustering sites are now in Sintaran territory.”

  “By God, you’re right. I just kept thinking of those as being in Alliance space, but those two aren’t anymore, are they?”

  Otto Stauss turned the idea over and over in his head. The operations numbers would work on something like that. You could just put big metal grinding machines in the system, and let tugs feed them continuously. The grindings go in containers, the containers go on a freighter, and you ship out with a couple thousand containers of refined-metal chips. You do it again and again and again, effectively forever. If you got the right grinder machine, you could separate the ferrous from the non-ferrous with a magnetic field, and the value of both went up.

  Erp. Wait a minute.

  “There’s one hitch I can see, Dieter. What about all the human remains? You’re talking about five hundred million bodies. Per location.”

  “The volume of cremated human remains is about an eighth of a cubic foot. If we recovered all half a billion Alliance spacers, that’s sixty two million cubic feet or so. A container is eleven and a half thousand cubic feet, so figure fifty-five hundred containers or so of ashes.”

  “So you wouldn’t identify each and every body?”

  “No,” Dieter said. “I was thinking of building a memorial, a nice one, and attaching it to the fifty-five hundred containers and leaving it there.”

  “Like a mass grave on the battlefield, eh? Could work. What about the energy cost of the cremation?”

  “It would add about five percent to the energy cost of the operation. Not nothing, but it doesn’t begin to touch those operations numbers.”

  “All right. Good job, Dieter. Can you write all this up as a salvage license application?”

  “Sure. I’m pretty far along with that already. I just wanted to run it past you first.”

  It was barely a month after the annexation of Phalia and the Rim when a salvage application came in for the Alliance mustering points that were now in Sintaran territory.

  It would be a massive operation. As many as a hundred grinder-separator-compactor machines at each site, grindin
g up the wreckage and packaging it for shipment. Residential space stations for the workers – huge rotating wheels to produce simulated gravity. Thousands of personnel and cargo shuttles. Even so, it would go on for years. Decades.

  Norm Lazenby, the department head for commercial space operations, looked through the application with curiosity. One of his subordinate groups had bounced it to him just because of the sheer size of it. There was also a cryptic note attached by the group leader – ‘human remains?’

  Oh, that could be a sticking point. Those were all Alliance spacers, mostly Phalians and Rimmers. This would not be a good time to enflame people against Sintar, open it up to charges of profiteering on the tragedy of the Alliance’s losses.

  He flipped through, looking for some reference to the issue. Ah. There it was under ‘Other Issues To Be Addressed.’ He read the plans for mass cremation of the bodies, and the storage of the ashes in a memorial. He followed the link to ‘see attached’ and there was an artist’s rendering of a potential design for a memorial. There was a notation: ‘Or other design as requested or submitted by the Emperor or the Sector Governor.’

  Not bad. They had addressed the issue pretty sensitively, all in all. Cremation and burial in space, with a monument. Even so, there was no way he was going to sign off on this. He bounced it up to Oversight and asked for advice on the matter.

  Oversight looked at the application and they also thought it looked okay, but they weren’t prepared to sign off on it either. The human remains issue with a newly annexed sector and all the consolidation issues that went with it made them bounce it to the Consul’s office for approval.

  Where it crossed the desk of Amanda Peters.

  After Sunday brunch with the Saarets, over coffee, Peters brought it up.

  “So Otto Stauss is at it again, apparently,” Peters said.

  “Now what?” Saaret asked.

  “Wait a second,” Suzanne said. “Who is Otto Stauss?”

  Dunham, Peters, and Saaret looked back and forth at each other, then Dunham waved a hand to Peters.

  “Otto Stauss is the owner of a commercial shipping line. When we suspended buying warships, he surmised we were making new designs, and, when the new designs were completed, we would be building a whole new Navy. This in turn led him to believe all the shipyards would be busy building warships. In the meantime, the price of commercial freighters plummeted because of the oversupply of shipyards when warship purchases were suspended.”

  “OK, so he figured all that out in advance. So what?”

  “So he applied for a huge loan from Imperial Bank and purchased all the new commercial freighters he could at depressed prices.”

  “The bank gave him the loan?” Suzanne asked.

  “Yes. The Imperial Bank’s approval process actually came all the way up to Bobby, and he signed off on it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Otto Stauss knows how to make money, and how to structure a deal. He kept our shipyards alive during the warship hiatus,” Dunham said.

  “Ah.”

  “So then, when we needed to buy thirty thousand freighters for a project, ship acquisition bought them from Otto Stauss,” Peters said.

  “At inflated prices, of course,” Suzanne said, with sarcasm.

  “Well, at current market prices, with a quantity discount. And again, when the annexation department needed lots and lots of freighters to transport nanites and comm nodes and such to the annexed sectors, they leased fifty thousand of them from Otto Stauss.”

  “Because he was the only one who had them available. I see,” Suzanne said.

  “At least in such quantities, yes. But he has a new idea. Metal salvage operations on the Alliance mustering points in Phalia and the Rim.”

  Saaret’s eyebrows went up, but Dunham’s drew down.

  “That’s a very sensitive subject,” Dunham said. “Those amount to floating graveyards. The last resting place of the heroic fallen.”

  “His salvage application addresses that. He proposes cremating all the bodies they find, putting all the ashes in several thousand containers, and then latching all the containers together to form the pedestal of a heroic statue as a monument to the dead. It’s actually quite attractive, as heroic statues go.”

  “Hmm. That could actually work,” Dunham said.

  “An honorable burial in space, rather than just let the mangled bodies float around in the debris field? I would think so,” Saaret said.

  “Forward me the application, Amanda, and I’ll take a look at it,” Dunham said. “I will probably want to talk about it with Sector Governors Bowdoin and Rottenburg before I make any decision.”

  Phalia Sector Governor Anne Bowdoin and the Rim Sector Governor Albert Rottenburg met with the Emperor in a VR simulation of his office.

  The two had been working on a way to divide their former kingdoms into perhaps eight sectors for easier administration within the Empire’s existing structure. The break from that meeting was welcome, but they were also curious about what the Emperor might want. There were no meetings on the schedule.

  The Emperor was seated behind his desk.

  “Be seated.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “Sector Governor Bowdoin. Sector Governor Rottenburg. An interesting proposal has come to me from a Sintaran businessman with whom the Empire has done business in the past. He proposes to salvage the refined metals from the Alliance mustering points in Phalia and the Rim, while providing proper burial in space for the bodies in the debris field. Their ashes would be interred in containers that would be lashed together to form the pedestal of an heroic statue.”

  Dunham waved a hand, and on his desk, to one side, a two-foot-tall scale representation of the proposed monument appeared.

  “From the size of those containers, Sire, that statue looks to be about three hundred feet tall.”

  “Yes, Sector Governor Bowdoin. That is my understanding as well. Large, but not even as large as a battleship, after all.”

  “And how many containers is that, Sire? It looks to be four or five thousand.”

  “Yes, Sector Governor Rottenburg. Approximately thirty-three by thirty-three, by five in the long direction. That is the estimate for the number of containers required.”

  “It looks nice to me. I’ve been wondering what to do, but we have so much going on, all our resources are dedicated right now. My only concern is that due respect be shown the dead. That they aren’t just debris to get out of the way.”

  “The is my own concern as well, Sector Governor Bowdoin. I intend to speak to the vendor directly.”

  Bowdoin looked at Rottenburg, and he nodded. She turned back to Dunham.

  “We approve, Sire. It will be nice to see our dead properly treated, and to be able to assure the families they were.”

  Otto Stauss was used to meeting with important, wealthy, and powerful people. None of them, however, was within orders of magnitude of being as important, as wealthy, or as powerful as the Emperor. It was with more than a little trepidation, then, he accepted the meeting request and found himself in a small meeting room in VR. The Emperor already sat at the meeting table.

  “Be seated, Mr. Stauss.”

  “Thank you, Your Majesty.”

  “Mr. Stauss, I have your application for performing salvage operations and burial duties in the Alliance mustering points in the Phalia Sector and the Rim Sector. I will tell you I am inclined to sign off on this application, as I did on your loan application a number of years ago.”

  “Then it was you who signed off on the loan application, Sire?”

  “Yes, of course. But you already knew that, Mr. Stauss.”

  “I wasn’t absolutely sure, Sire.”

  “As then, I once again find myself in a situation in which your plans to make money will assist me in carrying out plans of my own. No doubt you construct these deals in this manner on purpose, probably by instinct as much as anything.

  “In this case, though, th
ere is a potential we work at cross-purposes, and I want to avoid that.

  “You clearly see this as primarily a salvage operation that will make you a great deal of money – which I don’t object to – but which requires a burial operation to be morally acceptable. I see this as primarily a burial operation that will see the courageous fallen honorably interred, but which requires a salvage operation to be financially possible.

  “The issue is Phalia and the Rim are now Sintaran territory, Mr. Stauss. Those spacers are now – posthumously perhaps, but nevertheless – Sintaran spacers. Their parents, spouses, and children are now Sintaran citizens. They stood for their country and gave the last measure of their devotion to its defense, whether their orders were wise or not. They must be given proper burial and military honors.

  “So I want to meet you halfway, Mr. Stauss. You elevate the importance of the burial operation – make sure it is properly done, properly funded, even at some cost to those large profits – and I will elevate the importance of your salvage operation by giving you the exclusive salvage license to those locations.”

  Stauss’s head spun. An exclusive salvage license to those massive debris fields would be ridiculously lucrative. He could finance a huge operation, because he would never face competition for the site. He could do it right, whatever the set-up cost, because investors could be confident it would eventually pay off. It made his salvage operation a no-lose proposition.

  With that kind of profit stream, the burial operation could be performed with whatever level of sensitivity and care the Emperor could possible want. As long as Stauss knew what it was, of course.

  Stauss looked into the Emperor’s extraordinary white-blue eyes. He saw the humor there as the Emperor watched him come to grips with his offer.

  “That is an exceedingly generous offer, Sire. My only concern is that I have complete information on what would constitute proper and honorable treatment of the bodies. I would hate to fall short of Your Majesty’s requirements through ignorance of military tradition or observance. Therefore I would request the Empire cooperate with me in designing the burial operation, perhaps even provide access to chaplains or other personnel required to do it properly. At my expense, of course.”