EMPIRE: Conqueror (EMPIRE SERIES Book 6)

by Richard F. Weyand

  Miriam Towne picked up on the tone in Jones’s voice and was suddenly filled with dread.

  “What news, dear?”

  “Sintar attacked the space station. They say everyone is dead.”

  “Jimmy,” Towne whispered.

  “I don’t believe it. I would know. I should feel it. Shouldn’t I? Jimmy can’t be dead. Oh, Jimmy!”

  “Wait, dear. Wait until we hear more. We can’t be sure. Not yet.”

  Meanwhile, Towne was seriously trying not to be dead. He switched from channel to channel, broadcasting the same cryptic message, then listening for a reply.

  “This is James Towne, survivor of the Lorne space station attack. Marooned. Require pickup. Over.”

  One channel at a time. Wait several seconds, switch to the next channel, try again. The loader radio had to be able to talk to ship’s crews, so it had every channel, and enough battery to last a double-shift, so he might be able to raise somebody. Might.

  And then an answer came.

  “Freight shuttle 72-115 to James Towne. Do you read me, Towne.”

  “Yes, I read you, shuttle 115.”

  “What’s your status, Towne?”

  “I’m in a freight loader. I got thrown free from the station. I have air, and radio. That’s about it. Can you pick me up?”

  “Maybe. If we can find you. But we don’t have an airlock. There’s no way to get you aboard.”

  That’s right. The shuttles used the airlocks on the station. Damn.

  Wait a minute.

  “Towne to shuttle 115. You got an empty container? With my grapples, I can pull myself inside.”

  “We don’t have an empty now, we were on our way to the station loaded when it came apart right in front of us. We’ve been ducking nukes since. But we can dump one.”

  “All right. Great.”

  “Now how do we find you?”

  “I got thrown forward and out-orbit from the station. Looks right now like I’m ten miles east of the station and maybe five miles higher.”

  “All right. We’ll head out there and see if we can find you. We have to make our way around all this crap.”

  “Let me know when you think you’re close. I have big work lights on the loader I can turn on so you can see me.”

  “You got it, Towne. Shuttle 115 out.”

  When the bus pulled up at the bus stop in downtown Pine Hollow, Jeannie Jones was about ready to vibrate out of her skin. Then the doors opened and Jimmy Towne got off the bus. She hit him so hard she almost knocked him over, and he was instantly plastered all over with incredibly happy fiancée.

  “Oh, Jimmy. You’re alive. I love you, I love you, I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Jeannie.”

  Towne made his way over to his mother, even with Jeannie hanging on him, and hugged her with his other arm.

  “Oh, Jimmy. We’re all so happy you survived. I think you may be the only survivor, from what they’re saying.”

  “I got lucky, Ma. I got real lucky.”

  “No more space, Jimmy. That was too close.”

  “I won’t argue with you, Jeannie. I’m done with that stuff.”

  He sighed.

  “I can still buy you the pretty house, Jeannie, but I’m afraid I don’t have enough for the store.”

  “That’s not how you do it, Jimmy Towne. You buy the store. We can always buy a pretty house later.”

  “But where will we live?”

  “In the back of the store. We’re a team, Jimmy. Don’t forget that. We can work the store together. We’ll live in the back of the store, and that’ll be fine. A house can wait. You put your money into the store, Jimmy, because the store makes you money. That’s how you do it.”

  Miriam Towne had had her concerns about the relationship between the two young people. Always cracking jokes, seeming less than serious about life, and about each other, than they should be. Those concerns dissipated now. The girl had a head on her shoulders after all, and she was terribly in love with her Jimmy. That’s all they really needed to be successful, in life and with each other.

  Slowly, inexorably, over days and then weeks, Operation Cupboard swept across the Democracy of Planets, and into Annalia, Berinia, and Terre Autre once the DP invasion fleet had passed. In its wake it left no orbital military facilities behind. With Operation Cupboard, the Sintaran Empire had robbed the Democracy of Planets of the ability to service, maintain, or even restock its six and a half million warships, except through the limited commercial services available..

  And it had put a halt to new DP warship construction and destroyed half a million ships under construction.

  Operation Roaches

  The Democracy of Planets’ response to the long, slow wave of Operation Cupboard rolling over the DP was two-fold. First, it reinforced its military presence in systems with large military orbital infrastructure by consolidating units from systems with less. This did no good whatsoever, as massive swarm attacks by the Sintaran picket ships overcame them. The DP forces did their best, and destroyed thousands of picket ships, but the Empire had picket ships to throw away, and they overwhelmed the defenders by sheer numbers.

  The second response was to evacuate all the supplies they could from systems not yet hit by Operation Cupboard and move them forward to the front for resupply of their invasion force.

  The problem with that plan was there was a steady stream of data coming out of Admiral Conroy’s Project Far Sight, and there were millions of Imperial Navy picket ships swarming around in the Democracy of Planets with impunity.

  The destruction of those re-supply convoys was the goal of Operation Roaches.

  “What have we got coming through our grid box, Marty? Anything?” Rear Admiral Darren McDwight asked his chief of staff.

  “Looks like we have one, Sir,” Captain Martin Duchesne said. “Scanning makes it two dozen freighters with four heavy cruisers for escort.”

  “Pretty light pickings. Well, let’s not let them past us. Work up the program and get our assets on the way.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  There was now a more advanced user interface for dispatching picket ships to attack in hyperspace. The target was specified, and its likely course transferred from the incoming data. The number of picket ships were selected, and the number of light-cruiser observers. Then one simply pushed the Attack button and off they went. The computer calculated all the courses, downloaded them to the picket ships selected, and issued the order.

  It was push-button destruction, and it was all done by remote control. McDwight and Duchesne were actually on Imperial Fleet Base Madrid, in the Catalonia Sector, safe in their beds.

  Rear Admiral Noah Chandler had been very nervous while spacing into and through the wave front of destruction the Imperial Navy called Operation Cupboard. He knew Sintaran picket ships were targeting military orbital infrastructure, but he didn’t know whether they would target him as he passed through their midst.

  Chandler breathed a sigh of relief as they passed into what looked like a dead zone on his tactical map of the Democracy of Planets. All the military spaceports and spacedock facilities he could use in need should show up on that map as a green dot. Instead, all there was in each location in front of him was a red dot, indicating a facility that was no longer there, that had been destroyed. He had passed through the boundary, but now all there was in this half of the DP was those red dots. None of the green dots like those still present in the volume of space behind him. Nothing but red dots. Everywhere.

  Chandler shook his head. Somebody had screwed up by the numbers. How had they misread Sintar’s capabilities and preparedness so badly? Of course, in a democracy, a war vote is going to be a public process, so Sintar knew it was coming, but so had the DP.

  Then a nasty thought occurred to him. What if they had known, or guessed, at Sintar’s capabilities, but felt politically they had no choice. Rather than educate the public about the realities, they had gone ahead with the war the public wanted,
because it was politically required to stay in power.

  He was rolling that morbid thought around in his mind when the attack came in.

  Admiral Chandler’s cruisers were all new-design ships, with four forward-shooting and two rear-shooting missile impellers arranged in a hexagon around the ship’s central axis. All his warships went to rapid-fire on their forward impellers, shooting a total of four missiles from each tube during the action. The missiles seemed to move forward from his cruisers in slow-motion, because even at their ten-gravities acceleration, the nature of hyperspace made them not much faster than his heavy cruisers accelerating at one gravity.

  It took a long time for the missiles to reach the picket ships. They weren’t very far out in front of Chandler’s forces when the multiple waves of missiles began exploding among the Sintaran picket ships. Of the two hundred picket ships in the attack, sixty-one were destroyed by the sixty-four missiles.

  Of the hundred and thirty-nine picket ships remaining, over half were destroyed by the coordinated point-defense fire of the DP ships with their much higher complement of point-defense lasers in the new designs. Only sixty-two picket ships remained to attack the cruiser division and the two-dozen freighters. Some of them managed to strike the same ship multiple times before its engines blew up and the debris dropped out of hyperspace.

  A total of twenty-nine of the original two hundred picket ships made it past the DP formation. They turned in hyperspace and returned to their station.

  The four light cruisers that had accompanied the picket ships dropped out of hyperspace and sent their battle recordings to the local commanders as well as to Sintar.

  Chandler’s force had done really well, destroying over two-thirds of the Sintaran picket ships before they could make their attacks. It hadn’t saved their lives, or Chandler’s life, or the freighters, but it was a loss rate Sintar could not afford to sustain against larger forces.

  Admiral Leicester called a meeting to discuss the recordings coming back from Operation Roaches. He brought Admiral Stepan Cernik, the head of the Imperial Navy’s tactical department, with him. Attending were the Emperor, the Empress, and Co-Consul Saaret.

  After Cernik presented the DP’s new capability of launching missiles in hyperspace, and the results of several encounters, Admiral Leicester took the floor.

  “It’s still more than worthwhile to deprive their forward fleets of the supplies on those freighters, Sire, but this has bad implications for loss rates in Operation Flying Duck. If we attack DP formations in hyperspace, our loss ratios are going to be so high it will reduce our ability to carry out other operations against them.”

  “How are they firing missiles in hyperspace, Admiral Leicester?” Dunham asked. “I had the impression that was impossible.”

  “They’re igniting the missile’s drive while it’s still in the impeller, Sire. There is never a time when the missile’s acceleration isn’t above 0.4 g.”

  “I see, Admiral Leicester.”

  “Doesn’t that damage their impeller tubes, Admiral?” Saaret asked.

  “We think it does, Mr. Saaret. That’s why we’ve never operated our own tubes that way. The wear and tear on their tubes is incredible, but it’s getting them results.”

  “I’m not sure what we do about that, Admiral Leicester. We probably have to rethink Operation Flying Duck.”

  Peters looked back and forth between Saaret, Dunham, and Leicester.

  “Wait a minute. Doesn’t this give us an advantage?”

  “How so, Milady?” Dunham asked.

  “So we attack them in hyperspace, right? And they shoot off a whole bunch of missiles, tearing up their missile tubes, right? Why wouldn’t we want them to do that, Your Majesty?”

  “And lose all those picket ships, Milady?”

  “No, Sire. Have the picket ships cut their drives just before the first missiles reach them, and they drop out of hyperspace. Clean miss. Do it again and again. By the time they get to normal space, the DP ships will have shot their tubes all to hell. Their magazines may even be empty. And if they don’t shoot the missiles, the picket ships press on and wipe them out. They’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.”

  Everybody was stunned to silence. They all looked at each other. Cernik was the first to recover.

  “And they can’t refill their magazines, because we’ve cut off their supplies. That is an excellent tactic, Milady.”

  “Modify Operation Flying Duck, Admiral Cernik,” Leicester said. “Each attack should have enough picket ships in it to get them to fire lots of missiles, but not enough to prevail. Then use more attacks, so we can tease them into firing those missiles more times.”

  “Yes, Sir. That seems the best approach. We’ll need Mr. Denny to make some modifications to the software, but I’m sure we can get that done.”

  Leicester nodded, then turned to Peters.

  “Thank you, Milady Empress. That was a truly splendid suggestion.”

  Jared Denny took the meeting request from Admiral Leicester and found himself once again in the small meeting room with Leicester and Admiral Cernik.

  “Admiral Leicester. Admiral Cernik. What can I do for you, Sir?”

  “Go ahead, Stepan.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Cernik described to Denny the DP’s use of missiles in hyperspace and the effect it had on loss numbers.

  “The benefit to us, Mr. Denny, is that lighting off their missiles’ drives in the impeller is really going to trash their impeller tubes, while also draining their magazines. So we want to encourage them to do it as much as possible, but without losing picket ships. So we need an option in the user interface for the attacks that will allow us to specify that if the enemy force fires missiles, the picket ships are to cut their drives and drop out of hyperspace at the last minute, before even proximity detonations of the missile warheads can harm them.”

  “I understand, Admiral Cernik. Timeframe?”

  “This is a sooner-is-better scenario, Mr. Denny,” Leicester said.

  “No field testing, Admiral Leicester? Simulation testing only?”

  Leicester took a deep breath, let it out slowly.

  “I think we have to field test it in combat, Mr. Denny. If we have to, we can back up to the previous version. We won’t be any worse off than we are now.”

  “I understand, Admiral. We’ll do our best.”

  “Oh, and here are the combat recordings for you, Mr. Denny.”

  Cernik handed over a slip of paper in the simulation. He was actually pushing a database pointer to Denny’s account.

  “Thank you, Admiral Cernik.”

  Denny turned to Leicester and nodded.

  “Admiral Leicester.”

  And with that he disappeared from the channel.

  “Jay, did you see the latest package from tactical?” Fleet Admiral Espinoza asked her chief of staff.

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Admiral Kim Jae Seong said. “Firing missiles in hyperspace? That’s very worrying.”

  “Yeah, but I like the response. That’s gotta be tough on their tubes, so make them do it a lot. Somebody over there was thinking.”

  “It’s a new software package again, too, Ma’am.”

  “Yes, and they warn this one has not been field-tested. So we may have to revert versions. But I’m aching to give it a try.”

  “It will be interesting, Ma’am”

  “Let’s get that new software package downloaded to the picket ships and update the attack selection user interface. Make sure we keep the old versions around, though, in case we need to revert.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  The interdiction of DP’s freight traffic spread to any freighter traffic, anywhere in DP space, not just those heading for the front. The dwindling number of Sintaran picket ships on Operation Roaches was bolstered by the picket ships remaining from the completion of Operation Cupboard. Together they put a stop to all freighter traffic anywhere by the simple expedient of destroying any that ventured
into hyperspace. As the number of no-shows at their destinations increased, shipping companies were increasingly loathe to space anything at all until the hostilities were over.

  Interstellar commerce in the DP slowed to a trickle, finally ceasing altogether.

  Operation Houdini

  Two weeks after the Democracy of Planets invasion force left its debark points, the two hundred invading fleets had crossed Annalia, Berinia, and Terre Autre and reached the first inhabited systems in the Sintaran Empire.

  Twenty-thousand-ship formations down-transitioned into two hundred different systems, at battle stations and ready to fight.

  “What’s our status, Brian?” Fleet Admiral Conrad Benton asked his chief of staff.

  “Getting reports now, Sir,” Admiral Brian Grant said. “We should have an update in a few minutes.”

  The minutes passed. His flagship, the DPN Parliament, stood down from battle stations. What the hell?

  “Sir, there are no combatants in the Andorra system.”

  “What do you mean, no combatants?”

  “There are no Imperial Navy warships in the system, Sir. No Imperial Navy military facilities, either.”

  “There’s no orbital infrastructure in the system?”

  “There is, Sir. A space station, a hypergate, the usual for a lesser system. But they’re all squawking commercial IDs. There’s no space-based military facilities here.”

  That didn’t seem right. That certainly wasn’t the way it was in the Democracy of Planets.

  “Are we sure about that, Brian? Did we check them against the register?”

  The DP Navy had compiled a list of commercial facilities from information collected from their commercial freighters doing business in the Sintaran Empire over the years, and had a complete list of commercial facilities for every system.

  “Yes, Sir. They’re all in the register. Every space-based facility here has been a commercial facility for years.”