EMPIRE: Warlord (EMPIRE SERIES Book 5)

by Richard F. Weyand

  “I am a commoner, Your Highness, oath-sworn to the Throne. The position of Emperor is not hereditary, and bestows no other honor or benefit. My parents are not nobility, nor are my wife and children. When I pass, another commoner will be sworn to the Throne, to do his best for the people of Sintar. The Throne is special. I am not.”

  “I had heard that was the official position, Your Majesty. It is interesting to hear you say it.”

  Dunham merely nodded to her.

  “And the second question, Your Majesty,” Roberts said. “Can Sintar defend us from this approaching force? Will you defend us?”

  “Yes, Captain. Were you to annex to the Empire, the Democracy of Planets will not be permitted to invade Sintaran territory with impunity.”

  “But how can you defend against such a large force, Your Majesty?” Queen Jingda asked.

  “The Imperial Navy has over four hundred thousand ships poised to intercept them, if you decide to proceed with annexation, Your Highness.”

  “Four hundred thousand ships?”

  “Yes, Your Highness. The outcome is not in doubt.”

  “That’s more than Midlothia and Jasmine had between them even before this all started,” Roberts said.

  Roberts looked to Queen Jingda, and she nodded.

  “Very well,” Roberts said. “Your Majesty, Midlothia and Jasmine formally request annexation into the Sintaran Empire.”

  “Granted,” Dunham said.

  They all stood, and Queen Jingda and Roberts shook hands with the Emperor.

  “Sector Governor Jin, Sector Governor Roberts, you must inform the Jasmine and Midlothia navies the Imperial Navy is no longer at war with you, and our incursion into your space is friendly, to defend you against the DP.”

  “We will take care of that, Your Majesty,” Queen Jingda said. “And thank you.”

  Rear Admiral Conroy was surveying the hyperspace map. Jasmine and Midlothia were now tinted green, as was the rest of Sintar. Of the twenty independent star nations, only the Satrapy of Sirdon, the Kingdom of Wingard, and the four republics of Abelard, Bordain, Doria, and Westhaven – all on the farside of Sintar from Earth – still stood as independent. All the rest of the map was tinted the green of the Sintaran Empire or the orange of the Democracy of Planets.

  Sintar now had two hundred and seventy thousand planets, almost double the number when the Emperor Trajan had ascended to the throne, while the Democracy of Planets had but a hundred and fourteen thousand. This was misleading, though. The earlier-settled, more populated planets Earthside from Sintar meant the DP actually had the population advantage, with five hundred and eighty-seven trillion inhabitants, while Sintar had four hundred and eighty-six trillion.

  Astrographically, they were split along a single rough plane, without one side having the advantage of interior lines over the other. The border between the two political behemoths was over ten million square light years.

  The Emperor and Admiral Leicester appeared in the channel.

  “Yes, Admiral Conroy.”

  “Sire, Admiral Leicester. You wanted to be told when we could project their destination.”

  Conroy turned to the map.

  “Magnify forty-three.”

  Garland expanded and moved to occupy the center of the space. The red hypertrace of the DP invasion force crossed the void well outside of Garland, and now had a hook on the end.

  “They’ve made their corner, Sire. It’s Jasmine.”

  Very good, Admiral Conroy. Do you have a course for them?”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  The Emperor looked to Admiral Leicester.

  “Send me their exact course, Admiral Conroy,” Leicester said.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Well done, Admiral Conroy.”

  “Thank you, Sire.”

  Fleet Admiral Espinoza considered the latest communication from Imperial Navy Headquarters Sintar, then called over her chief of staff.

  “Well, Jay, it’s Jasmine,” Espinoza said. “Sintar has annexed Jasmine and Midlothia. The enemy has made his turn around our flank. And their destination from their projected course is Jasmine.”

  “If the Emperor has annexed Jasmine, Ma’am, then he would not permit a DP incursion into Sintaran space.”

  “Yes. I suspect that was a major consideration of Queen Jingda and Captain Roberts, don’t you?”

  “A hundred thousand DP warships? Perhaps, Ma’am. Perhaps,” Kim said with a smile.

  Espinoza chuckled, then turned serious.

  “Looking at their projected course, Spacing Plan J-4 is probably our best response. What do you think, Jay?’

  “Either J-3 or J-4, Ma’am. I think I lean to J-4 myself.”

  “All right. Spacing Plan J-4 in an hour.”

  She looked at the clock.

  “Call it 13:00 hours, fleet time.”

  “Spacing Plan J-4 at thirteen hundred hours. Yes, Ma’am.”

  All across the Sintaran Empire, Imperial Navy crews ran for their bunks and logged into VR as the general quarters alarms sounded.

  All across the Garland Province, along the border with Jasmine and Midlothia, ships brought their fusion bottles up to pressure, preparing to make way.

  Projector ships – both the massive projector ships that spun up the huge hypergates for fleet movements of big warships and the light cruisers with small hypergate projectors that projected the small hypergates for the little picket ships – spaced for the border. Their customers lined up behind them in long strings of warships and picket ships.

  At 13:00 hours fleet time, the projector ships cut their engines and killed their acceleration. The long strings of warships and picket ships began spacing through the hypergates and disappearing into hyperspace.

  By 14:00 hours, four hundred thousand ships of the Imperial Navy – a hundred thousand warships and three hundred thousand picket ships – were en route to defend Jasmine.

  The Battle of Jasmine

  Offensive operations against monarchies were primarily aimed at making the monarch capitulate, that they might be left in place as a puppet government rather than be killed outright. These offensive operations were thus aimed at the capital planets, the home of the monarch and their government. The Democracy of Planets’ plan was structured along this line, with the entire force spacing for the capital planet of Jasmine. Having taken it and forced the capitulation of Queen Jingda, the expectation was they would get further orders to space for Midlothia and force the capitulation of Captain Mark Roberts, who was monarch in all but name.

  DPN Fleet Admiral Daisuke Ito looked into his tactical display. One hundred thousand warships, all in hyperspace, now bound back in from the void toward the Kingdom of Jasmine. He couldn’t see the ships, of course. They were too far apart, against the miasmic void of hyperspace. What he saw in the tactical display was a representation of his ships, calculated from their wakes, which were easy to detect at this distance.

  His ships were all current-generation warships, or, perhaps better, prior-generation warships. He had none of the DP’s new construction ships. Those were being held in reserve for use against Sintar, if it came to that. It didn’t matter. He didn’t need any of the new ships to prevail against Jasmine. His force had almost a two-to-one advantage over their remaining navy of home-built warships, which were not a one-on-one match for the DP ships he had.

  He had warned his fleet to keep their scanning crews active and on alert for the hyperspace portion of their trip. Something had happened to Annalia Fleet Admiral Steiner’s forces while in hyperspace, and, whatever it was, he didn’t intend to repeat it.

  Imperial Navy Fleet Admiral Maria della Espinoza had run her defensive plans for Jasmine and Midlothia through Fleet Admiral Cernik’s tactical group. Between them and her own flag tactical staff, they had hammered out the details. They had included a decision tree that would allow her to make adjustments as the battle wore on.

  Most importantly, they had included hypergate-projector-equipped
light cruisers to accompany the picket ships. They would drop out of hyperspace at the conclusion of each wave of the attack to report in, then use their projectors to go back into hyperspace and tag along behind the incoming fleet.

  Espinoza had to wait until the DP fleet had crossed the border into Sintar’s new Jasmine Sector. There would be no attack on DP ships as long as they remained in empty, unclaimed space.

  Once they crossed the border, though, they were fair game.

  It was another emergency meeting, once again in VR rather than in Pinter’s office. Morel had called the meeting, and he and Pavel Isaev showed up on the VR channel nearly simultaneously.

  “What is it, Jules?”

  “The Kingdom of Jasmine and the Captaincy of Midlothia have requested annexation into Sintar, and the Emperor has granted it. They are now Sintaran territory.”

  “Damn. I didn’t expect that, least of all from Jasmine. The Jin dynasty has been around for five hundred years. What is Queen Jingda thinking?”

  “That they can’t defend against Admiral Ito’s force?” Morel asked.

  “Can they even have seen them yet, Pavel?”

  “Perhaps. Jasmine has always maintained a picket watch on the edge of the void. That’s why Ito’s spacing plan went so far out in the first place, to duck around their scanning. But if they looked in the right place, and scanned carefully enough, he’s raising a pretty big hyperspace wake.”

  “Can we call them back, Pavel?”

  “Not before they get to Jasmine, Harold. Admiral Ito will check in for instructions as soon as he drops out of hyperspace.”

  “We can tell him to say Hi, call it a courtesy visit, and come home, I suppose,” Morel said.

  “If the battle isn’t already under way by then,” Isaev said.

  “In hyperspace?” Pinter asked.

  “Something happened to the Annalia/Berinia/Garland force that attacked Estvia, Harold. We don’t know what, because there were no reports filed. The entire attack force was wiped out.”

  “That was what? Five thousand ships?”

  “Three thousand. But only two hundred and twenty-seven made it to Estvia.”

  “Shit. That’s right. Now I remember. We should have given Ito instructions to drop his force out of hyperspace and get instructions before crossing the border into Jasmine.”

  “Hindsight is twenty-twenty vision, Harold,” Morel said. “We didn’t know it was going to be Sintar’s border when Admiral Ito left.”

  “But that was what, Jules? Three weeks ago? A month? Damn it. This is my screw-up. I should have built in a safety in case the situation changed. I’m just not used to borders changing on such short notice. Especially Jasmine. That’s the last thing I expected.”

  Pinter shook his head.

  “Can we talk to the Emperor, Harold? Defuse all this somehow?”

  “What makes you think his forces aren’t already in hyperspace as well, Jules?”

  “Which means that Admiral Ito–“

  “Is very likely spacing into an ambush, Pavel. My big surprise annexation of Jasmine. Ha! What a disaster. The opposition is going to go nuts.”

  He looked down at the conference table for a long minute, then looked up, looked back and forth between the two of them.

  “So what do you fellows have planned for your retirement?” Pinter asked.

  Fleet Admiral Espinoza staged her picket ship attacks on the incoming DP fleet in four waves, of one hundred thousand, seventy-five thousand, fifty thousand, and twenty-five thousand picket ships per wave. They spaced out from Garland into Jasmine to four separate points along the DP fleet’s projected course, then turned to space toward the enemy. They could see the oncoming ships in their scanners, although the DP fleet could not yet see them.

  The other fifty thousand picket ships Espinoza placed in a last-ditch anti-missile defense around Jasmine itself. Their destination was a close orbit around the planet, where they would be able to intercept any missiles aimed for the planet itself. These picket ships all had missile containers on their backs, and carried a total of four hundred thousand missiles among them.

  Her hundred thousand warships she placed well outside the expected arrival point of the DP fleet. They also mounted missile containers, and would be able to flood the zone with missiles.

  And in all those four hundred thousand Sintaran ships, there was not a single Imperial Navy crewman.

  “Sir, we’re picking up something ahead. It looks like fog.”

  “Fog? In hyperspace?” asked Captain Georgy Sarnoff, Ito’s flag captain aboard the DPS Mandate.

  “That’s what it looks like, Sir. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Go to battle stations. Stand by point-defense. Helm, stand by for evasive maneuvers.”

  The battle-stations alarm sounded, and crewmen rushed to their posts, whether in VR or physically within the battleship.

  Commander Mark Malone, his executive officer, walked up to Sarnoff’s command chair on the VR bridge.

  “Battle stations, Sir?”

  “We’re over the border into Jasmine, Mark. When we’re invading another country and scanning sees something unusual – something they’ve never seen before – I’m going to battle stations. It’s not like we can’t stand down if it’s nothing.”

  “I see, Sir. That’s probably the safe move.”

  They waited tense minutes before scanning piped up again.

  “It’s resolving into point sources now, Sir. Estimate one hundred thousand picket ships incoming.”

  “A hundred thousand?” Sarnoff asked.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Helm, they’re going to try to ram us. Evasive maneuvers. Point-defense free.”

  Sarnoff was physically strapped into his bunk in his cabin, while he mentally occupied his avatar in the VR bridge. While he was jerked back and forth in his bunk by the ship’s wild maneuvers, the bridge only simulated a fraction of the sideloads.

  One hundred thousand Democracy of Planets warships and one hundred thousand Imperial Navy picket ships closed the distance between them and slammed into each other’s formations. The DP warships twisted crazily to avoid their attackers. Limited in their ability to maneuver in hyperspace, picket ships lost tracking of their targets, and switched to other convenient targets, those that dodged into their envelope or others deeper in the DP formation. Point-defense lasers fired constantly, wiping out picket ships by the scores, the hundreds, the thousands. Ships exploded, and then the debris dropped out of hyperspace, leaving absolutely nothing behind.

  It was complete chaos.

  The two formations slammed into and through each other. From one side emerged forty-six thousand surviving DP warships, from the other nineteen thousand surviving Sintaran picket ships. The Sintaran picket ships turned around and set off after the DP warships, held back to the same velocity in hyperspace.

  Running along in front and to the sides of the DP warships were a dozen Sintaran light cruisers. They had reversed course before the formations collided, and observed the battle and its aftermath. They now cut their engines and dropped out of hyperspace. Arriving in normal space, they transmitted their recordings to the Garland Fleet Commander, then pulled their hypergates over themselves and set off to chase the survivors.

  “So it appears Mr. Denny was correct,” Espinoza said.

  “Indeed, Ma’am,” Kim said. “Fifty-four percent kill rate. Something like that. Eighty-one percent loss rate on our own side.”

  “Well, it’s a twenty-seven percent loss rate on our side, and fifty-four percent kills. I mean, that’s the way they attack, right, is to ram the enemy? So you can’t call that a loss. That’s a win.”

  “Yes, Ma’am. I see your point. The new software, though. It’s working splendidly.”

  “I was really worried about it – about how many DP ships would survive to Jasmine – but if we can keep this up, it won’t be an issue.”

  “We’ll see soon, Ma’am.”

  Admi
ral Ito’s flagship, DPS Mandate, was one of the survivors.

  “What’s our status? How many survived?”

  “Making it approximately forty-six thousand, Sir.”

  Ito studied the plot bleakly. Half his force, gone in minutes. But what was he to do?

  He couldn’t give any orders in hyperspace. And even if he could, what would they be? He couldn’t turn around, or he would get attacked again by the group of surviving picket ships chasing him. He couldn’t drop out of hyperspace, or the picket ships chasing him would drop out and hit him in normal space.

  The only option was to carry on. Whatever happened.

  He suspected it wouldn’t be good.

  “Sir, we have another fog ahead.”

  “Battle stations. Stand by point-defense. Helm, stand by for evasive maneuvers,” Captain Sarnoff said.

  Seventy-five thousand Sintaran picket ships slammed into the forty-three thousand DP warships remaining. As before, a chaos of ship explosions, laser point-defense fire, and wildly gyrating warships passed in a wave through the DP formation. DP helmsmen tried to anticipate the picket ships’ attack, but there was no obvious pattern, no repeated strategy. The attack was just as new to them as the last one.

  Nineteen thousand DP warships passed out of the other side of that chaos, while twenty-nine thousand Sintaran picket ships survived to turn around and set off in pursuit.

  The DPS Mandate was not one of the survivors.

  A dozen Sintaran light cruisers dropped out of hyperspace to report, then up-transitioned and set off in pursuit.

  “What were our numbers like this time, Jay?” Espinoza asked.

  “Fifty-six percent kill rate, Ma’am. We lost sixty percent of the picket ships. Twenty-nine percent were lost to point-defense fire, and twenty-four thousand committed successful attacks.”

  “Or, given that there were more attacking ships than targets, some of the DP ships may have been rammed by two picket ships.”