“Make sure you contact me if you run into any problems out there,” said Sean by way of finishing, then terminated the connection.
The Emperor was satisfied with the progress on all fronts. He could have wished for more progress, so the damned war that was weakening the economy of his empire would fade into history. But it was going damned well. If only this relatively unknown of an Emperor didn't pull too many surprises.
* * *
“We are getting more complaints from the commanders at the front, Supreme Lord,” said Great Admiral Trostara, looking out of a holo bubble.
Mrastaran grunted. Trostara had served him well on the last campaign. He was a solid commander, if uninspiring, and the Emperor needed the male in his current position more for his organizational capabilities than for his strategic acumen. Supreme Admiral Klestaras, the former front commander, and one who had been making very good decisions while trying to hold back the onrushing tide of the enemy, had been promoted to chief of naval operations. Mrastaran had considered leaving the last male in that position, but the outcry against him had been too great. He had been too close to the last Emperor, and had been implicated in his assassination. Mrastaran had refused to punish him, but had thought it better to let him go into honorable retirement.
“They are just going to have to make do,” he said, looking Trostara in the eyes. “We don't have the ships to spare. They are to delay the enemy. Nothing more, nothing less. I don't expect them to pull off great victories.”
Though, if truth be told, he would take whatever victories they could give him, while accepting the extra time they would give him. The only unforgivable sin would be the total loss of a force, allowing the enemy to thrust through the gap. Even that wouldn't result in execution, unlike the policy of the last regime. Mrastaran had decided that commanders would not be executed for making mistakes. That only stifled their initiative, which led to more bad decisions.
“Our ambush forces aren't winning many victories,” said the fleet chief of staff, giving a head motion of dismissal.
That had been one strategy endorsed by the old regime that Mrastaran was determined to continue. Again, they weren't expected to win any great victories, though some minor wins would be welcome. As long as they kept the enemy on their toes, looking over their shoulders and slowing down their progress, they were doing their jobs. He didn't like the fact that so many males were sacrificed in battle they couldn't possibly survive. Unfortunately, more would be asked to sacrifice their lives in the future. Suicide attacks were one way to bleed the enemy, and if done properly they could result in a very favorable exchange rate.
The Emperor had decided that he would have to sacrifice many millions of males to bring the humans to the negotiating table. It was the only hope he had of preserving his species and retaining at least a semblance of their position in the galaxy. They wouldn't be able to keep the slaves under foot. The humans wouldn't stand for that, and Mrastaran thought that was one tradition his own people could do without. If he had to give up his position as Emperor, even go to his death, he was willing, as long as his sons survived.
“Seventh and eighth fleets will be ready for action in twelve days, if all continues as planned,” said the chief of staff.
Mrastaran's ears perked up at those words. Those were the first of his new offensive forces. Both had thousands of battleships, many newly committed to the front from backwaters. They had a traditional proportion of their big cruisers to battleships, two to one. What was different was the proportion of scouts to capital ships. Traditionally it had been four to one, but he was shooting for a nine to one proportion, similar to what the enemy used. The new construction had yet to leave the building slips, and he wouldn't have those in his order of battle for at least another month.
He had two more fleets forming further back, hopefully ready for deployment in a couple of months. The Emperor would have preferred to have them ready sooner, but he recognized that they needed training in the new tactics before they were effective fighting forces. It bothered him that he had to deploy the first two fleets without more shakedown and training time, but he needed something to hit the enemy with, so they were to be committed before they were quite ready.
“And the new stealth ships?”
That was one class that the humans had used to punish them since the beginning of the war. The Ca'cadasans hadn't had the wormholes to spare to pursue that class. Mrastaran thought they needed what they could produce of that class, so he had commissioned ten of the craft, with more to follow if the first batch proved their worth.
“The first one is working up, and will be ready for deployment in eight days. We'll have three more in two weeks.”
Mrastaran gave a head motion of acceptance. The only way they could figure to use those ships was to place them in systems before the enemy got to them. They would wait until the perfect targets presented themselves, then fire. They might only get the one shot off, so they needed to wait, be patient, and make sure they took many times their tonnage into the night before they were blown out of space. Which meant assigning commanders with more than average patience to the ships.
The Emperor looked at the holo map, selecting which systems he wanted to deploy those ships. Far enough back that they had time to pick good hiding places, close enough to the action that they could make hits on the enemy that would make them even more cautious. And in systems that had not already been selected for ambushes by the fast attack craft. They would be wasted in those systems, since a strike by the stealth/attack ships would set off a system wide search that might find the fast attack craft, and visa versa.
“Good job, Great Admiral Trostara. You have met and exceeded my expectations for you. Keep it up.”
“I endeavor to serve, Supreme Lord,” said the other male, rendering the traditional salute.
Mrastaran frowned. He had been trying to curb the subservient behavior of his subordinates toward him, something that made the thoughtful leader uncomfortable. He might as well have told the tide on a planet orbiting a gas giant to hold. There were a lot of entrenched traditions in the Empire that would take time to change. Maybe more time than he had. So he had decided to change the things he could, things that were of immediate benefit to the Empire, and let time take care of the rest.
One problem he hadn't solved was the graviton shield the other side had used against him in Pleisia, a system within the Nation of New Earth. It seemed a war winning weapon, though it had serious limitations. Some of those limitations were assumptions, but if they were able to project that shield in front of any of their forces in any system, he might as well give up now. So he had to assume the limitations were true, and tailor his tactics toward defeating those enemy forces which didn't have it. And hope that they didn't improve it to the point where it became an insurmountable obstacle to Ca'cadasan plans.
Chapter Three
In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason. Ernest Hemingway
MAY 18TH, 1004. THE DONUT.
Dr. Lucille Yu studied the schematics of the great ring that she ran. The Donut was the largest construction in known space, twenty-five million kilometers in circumference, and taking a highly advanced civilization just over a century to construct. Ten percent of the gross domestic product for the century, a billion humans workers, tens of thousands of working spaceships, billions of robots, quadrillions of tons of nanobots. The might of an industrial civilization unleashed. A mass of circuits and high temperature superconductors, it was producing the technology that would win the war the New Terran Empire found itself in.
Only now the marvelous construct was damaged. It had been damaged before, once when the Ca'cadasans had brought some quarkium warheads aboard, smuggling them through the wormhole gate from Elysium. Another time when it had been attacked by the ancient aliens that saw it a risk to the integrity of time itself. Both of those attacks had done superficial if appreciable damage. This last incident had involved the Donut beaming its unimagi
nable power through a group of wormholes, powering the devices that saved a planet from a nova.
Repairs were underway, but it would be some weeks before they were producing more than twenty wormholes a day. A full quarter of the massive generators, each larger than a dozen battleships, had malfunctioned due to overheating during the stations deployment as a power source. They could be repaired, even those over fifty years old. In fact, the older ones would be better, more efficient, after the repairs. All it took was time and the attention of machines under close supervision.
A distant beeping sounded in Lucille's ear, really in the auditory center of her brain. Yu looked at the source in her implant and accepted the call.
“Tell me something good,” she said to her chief engineer, Martin Sheffield.
“Some good, some bad,” replied the man, his image forming in the air to her front, looking directly into her eyes. Yu stared back with her emerald green orbs, brows furrowing.
People who had never before met Lucille were always surprised at how tall she was at one hundred and ninety centimeters, a combination of genetics and having grown to maturity on a light gravity planet. Most expected a small Asian woman, such as Chuntao Chan or Admiral Mei Lei. Lucille's father had been of Chinese descent, though he was really a mix of all the ethnicities of the Empire, much like Sean. Her mother was of Scandinavian extraction, from the planet Norje. Lucille, with her natural blond hair, fair skin and fashion model body, had taken after her mother. The Epicanthic folds of her green eyes were the only outward sign of her Asian heritage.
“We'll have the main superconductor line from sector eleven back in working order by tomorrow morning,” said the engineer, a wide smile on his face.
That was good news. The high temperature superconductors that moved power through the station had taken a beating, fully forty percent of them converting to liquid, then vapor, under the extreme long-term load. The main runs were a kilometer wide, and could conduct electrons with no significant loss for the million plus kilometers of their length, even when they reached thousands of degrees. They had been engineered to handle maximum power for just over a couple of minutes, time enough to charge their connected bank of crystal matrix batteries. At just over three thousand degrees they melted, suddenly, and were no longer functioning superconductors. Soon after they converted to vapor, still held in place by their sheaths, but no longer of any use.
Fortunately, with a few exceptions where the sheaths had ruptures, the material of the superconductors was still in place. But the long fibers were no longer there, and they needed a complete rebuild. Also fortunately, with a bunch of nanites and some extra materials they could be reconstructed in place. That was being done to the eleven superconductor runs that had gone down.
“What's the bad news?”
“I don't think we've put enough wormhole sinks in place,” said the engineer, frowning. “What we have will extend their operating life significantly. But enough? I think not.”
“What's the estimated fail point?”
“Just over eight minutes.”
That would not do at all. Not in the long term. Something needed to be done about the heat buildup, and no amount of passive radiation would protect them. The plan had been to insert enough of the same kind of heat sink used by the stealth/attack ships to draw off the heat. The heat would move through more superconductors, into the wormhole and out the other end into a near zero degree sink. All of the sinks were in use, so more were under construction. Ready in another month, possibly?
“If you want more, we're going to need more wormholes.”
“How many?” asked Yu, a sinking feeling in her chest. The Fleet was already complaining that they weren't getting as many wormholes as they needed. And they weren't the only ones. There were resources and cargo ships that needed to be moved, and more gates were needed for those movements. Even though they had fifty times the wormholes of the enemy, more were always in demand. Absent wormholes translated into lost lives. And everyone wanted to save lives.
“Double the amount, at least. And more of the heat sinks, of course.”
“But we will still be able to function for a much longer time without them, right?”
“I believe so. But based on how long we needed to run everything into the red last time, that may not be enough.”
Yu sat and thought for a moment, looking into the face of an engineer who was impatient to get back to work.
“Go with the original plan. Any improvement is a plus. I'll try to get you some more wormholes.”
And more heat sinks, she thought, inwardly grimacing. That would be a major headache. The heat sinks were as large as the generators, using as many superconductors. They lowered the temperature inside their containment vesicle to just above absolute zero. That vesicle, filled with a superconducting fluid, drank up heat like a dying man in a desert did water. The superconductors continuously moved the heat into thousands of square kilometers of superconducting radiator panels. It was a lot of resources to keep the small stealth/attack craft hidden, and one could handle twenty or more of the stealthy ships. Still, they were expensive, and building more was something that she couldn't just ask in an offhand comment.
Yu had read about the old armies on Earth that needed three people in logistics for every one at the front. They had a similar ratio with tonnage of equipment, even worse if truth be told. They needed four to five tons of equipment in support for every ton in ships, war or support. Even more if the Donut was taken into account, but it was already built, and so consumed very little of those resources. At least it was supposed to be that way.
I guess I'll have to talk to Sean, she thought with another inward grimace.
She had an open line to the Emperor, and could call him whenever she needed something. Protocol was for her to go through the War Procurement Board for her needs, submitting her request and letting them weigh the merits. It was so much easier to just ask the man at the top. At they said, shit rolled downhill. But she was afraid that eventually she would use up all of her capital with the Emperor, and would then have to deal with a resentful group of Bureaucrats who had been passed over time and time again.
Yu pulled up the next project on her slate. Reinforcing the structure of the Donut. She wasn't sure if the project was really necessary. The structure was already over engineered. But Sean had experienced first hand the shaking that had come about when the generators had run too long. And he was not about to let his crown jewel fall apart. So more engineers and workmen were placing two kilometer thick woven strands of monomolecular wire, the strongest structural material known. It was also a strategic material, used in the construction of ships, forts, and industrial facilities, and so always in short supply.
I believed he would listen to reason, thought the director, recalling their conversation.
“We've already just about reached our production limit,” said Sean, shaking his head. “The slips are full, and we're beginning to reach the bottom of the barrel as far as workers are concerned.”
One good thing about the war, had thought Lucille. In peacetime more than half the population of the Empire was unemployed, surviving on the basic living wage, the dole. Most industrial processes were handled by machines, though people were mandated to supervise them by law. And no one sentient could be burdened with more machines than they could closely watch. Production had tripled early in the war, then tripled again, and the numbers of people on the dole had evaporated away. They were making real money, though the government would pay for that decades after the war was over, if ever.
“As far as ships go, we're hitting a wall with personnel to man them. Most citizens do not make good spacers, and most spacers don't make efficient officers or petty officers. We're thinking about making ships with more automation to take the place of people, but the traditionalists are bowing up and demanding fully crewed ships. And, frankly, I agree with them.”
She hadn't been able to argue with that. Plus, she was under orders t
o construct the new supports, so in they went. The station would be stronger, the Emperor happier, so there was no reason to argue.
“Director Yu. We have a situation.”
God, but she hated that term. It never presaged anything good.
* * *
MAY 24TH, 1004. JUST BEHIND THE CENTRAL FRONT.
“Shadow,” yelled Cornelius Walborski in an excited voice, walking quickly toward the seated Maurid leader.
The coal black Maurid was kicked back in a seat made for his kind, his lower feet holding a viewer while his upper worked on sharpening a strange looking blade. Maurids were four limbed creatures who switched from bipedal to quadrupedal as the situation demanded. All of their extremities could be used as hands or feet, or weapons, sporting as they did five centimeter razor claws.
“General Walborski,” said the Maurid by way of greeting, dropping both of the objects he was holding to the carpeted floor and springing to his feet. “So good to see you.”
“Cornelius,” said the human, putting out a hand that was taken in both of the upper hands of the alien. “Unless you want me to address you as His Supreme Doggo.”
A fierce expression crossed the face of the alien. Shadow couldn't keep the facade for long, and burst out in the hissing laugh of his kind.
“And how was your trip out?” asked Shadow, gesturing toward a chair.
“Short and uneventful,” lied Cornelius, remembering the nightmare of gate travel. Of course he had received the conditioning to pass through the wormhole without experiencing the seemingly endless time of passage. At least not consciously. The memories remained, and he could look forward to several nights of nightmares, staring at an endless plain forever.
“As you know, my kind doesn't experience your subjective nightmares,” said Shadow, a smirk on his canine face. “My trips are always pleasant.”
Exodus: Empires at War: Book 17: The Rebirth Page 3
