“That, however, is all the province of the Emperor and his admirals now.
“What we are left to consider, then, you and I, is what comes after. After Sintar defeats the Democracy of Planets, with the Empire the one major political entity still standing, with the Imperial Navy unchallenged in power and reach, with our enemies shattered and broken before us.
“What do we do then?
“Do we annex the pieces of the Democracy of Planets? We could. But do not forget their people have been falsely told for years Sintar is the bad guy, the bad actor on the interstellar stage, an empire of oppressed peasants under an all-powerful tyrant. How would we win them over and unite with them in common cause?
“For that matter, how do we avoid the one-government problem? If Sintar rules all humanity, then, when Sintar turns tyrannical, to where could one flee? From what point could one oppose it? For while we have had several good rulers in a row, and two outstanding ones most recently, regression to the mean, if nothing else, tells us that situation will not always apply. What then?
“Finally, all endeavors ultimately stumble. All empires fall. Must the Sintaran Empire eventually collapse into centuries of civil war and barbarism?
“These are the questions I give to you, my friends. They are not simple questions, and they have no easy answers. But the lives and well-being of a quadrillion human beings and their descendants, stretching into the unknowable future, depend on your success.”
Peters spread her arms at her sides, bowed her head to them, and disappeared from the channel.
The denizens of the Zoo sat silent, spellbound and shocked, for several seconds, until a whispered curse from the back of the room broke the silence.
“Holy shit.”
The new ideas group had been the brainchild of Deanna Dunham Garrity, when the Empress Ilithyia I asked her to apply her ‘fresh eyes and youthful idealism’ to the ways the government worked. Garrity’s first idea was a whole group of people with ‘fresh eyes and youthful idealism’ to work government problems and come up with new ideas.
By this time, with the Emperor Trajan on the throne nearly eight years, the new ideas group had been in operation for twenty-two years. It’s original members were in their late forties and early fifties. Most had moved on to become mid-level administrators and department heads in the Imperial government, or worked in Projects, Oversight, Investigations, Troubleshooting, or Budgets. Some, though, remained, both those with an active inner child and those who wore their child on the outside ‘where it belonged.’
Even the old-timers couldn’t remember a time when the new ideas group had faced a bigger problem, or when working there had been more exciting. Over five hundred people tore into ‘Milady Empress’s Question,’ researching mankind’s history of war and peace, freedom and tyranny, progress and stagnation.
War, tyranny, and stagnation were easy, it turned out, while peace, freedom, and progress were more difficult.
Especially all three together.
A New Strategy
Pavel Isaev, the DP defense minister, had called this VR meeting with DP Prime Minister Harold Pinter.
“I’ve read the latest reports, Pavel,” Pinter said. “Please tell me you have some new strategy to turn this around.”
“Actually, we do, Harold. One of the analysts noted our freighters running light weren’t being molested, but no matter what we did with convoys, they were being harassed if not outright destroyed. We think there’s a lower mass boundary below which their new scanning cannot see. That’s always been true of hyperspace scanning, but I guess whatever it is they’re doing to see farther doesn’t help them in terms of seeing lighter craft. So we’re moving our old-design destroyers up to the front. We think we might be able to sneak them through their scanning.”
“What good does that do, Pavel? They’re not going to be able to take on the Imperial Navy. They’re even lighter than the new-design destroyers.”
No, Harold, but that’s not the point. The two things we haven’t been able to do is find the Imperial Navy or find their supply caches. We know their navy is out there. They harass us if we detach forces. And we know they have to have put all the supplies they pulled out somewhere. They clearly have access to them for refueling and rearming.
“What we’re hoping is, if we can sneak the really light old-design destroyers in, and have them spread out and do our scanning for us, we can see them – their forces, and maybe where they go to and from when restocking. If we can do that, maybe we can take some of their supply caches, which simultaneously gives them to us and deprives the enemy of them. And maybe once we know where they are, we can confront their forces in some real stand-up battles.”
“And this is ongoing? You have this under way?”
“Yes. We actually started the destroyers to the front a week or two back. They should be getting there soon, and then we’ll see what we see. We have a quarter million of them still, maybe a bit more. We’re hoping to get a real good view of what’s going on.”
“All right, Pavel. Keep me informed.”
The DP destroyers were spread across a huge area as they moved forward into Sintaran space. They maintained only 0.4g acceleration to minimize their hyperspace wakes. They spaced through and past the DP front lines. As they did, they steered well around known populated planets and the hyperspace-scanning picket ships the Imperial Navy maintained there.
All the way, they scanned the hyperspace around them, looking for the massive wakes of Imperial Navy formations on the move.
“Sir, we’re picking up a hyperspace wake at twenty-five mark fifteen, moving across our bows. Looks from the size of the formation and the mass readings like five thousand heavy cruisers or equivalent.”
“You sure it’s not one of ours?” asked DPN Lieutenant Commander Will Spencer, captain of the destroyer DPN Rodney.
“Yes, Sir. Given the bigger new-design ships and the greater numbers, our formations are about ten times the mass I’m seeing.”
“All right. Good. Can we see where he’s going? And can you track back his course?”
“I’m working on his vector now, Sir.”
A tense half-hour went by.
“Sir, I have that vector. It looks like he’s moving to a patrol position. There’s nothing dead ahead along that vector. Tracking it back, though, it comes from this red dwarf here.”
Scanning marked a system on his tactical display.
“That’s not an inhabited system.”
“No, Captain.”
“All right. Let’s bring us around. Real easy. Try not to kick up a big signature. We want to head to the nearest DP fleet position.”
“Yes, Sir, plotting a course now. Looks like three days spacing at this acceleration.”
“Maintain 0.4 gravities.”
Rear Admiral Dorothy Conroy was waiting in the hyperspace map room when the Emperor and Admiral Leicester joined her on restricted VR channel R-1327.
“Yes, Admiral. Something unexpected?”
“Yes, Sire. We’re picking up small, single DP ships doing reconnaissance.”
She turned to the map.
“Enlarge one-thirty-seven.”
A volume of space in front of the DP front lines, in Estvia, swelled up and took the center of the map before them. One small hyperspace track glowed in that volume.
“As you know, all our planetary pickets have been replaced with unmanned picket ships. The unmanned ship is the equivalent of a manned picket ship in silent running. As a matter of fact, without environmental systems, the unmanned picket ship is even quieter, mechanically, than a manned ship in silent running. This gives us much better range and resolution than ordinary pickets.
“What we are occasionally seeing is lone ships like this. Now this is a destroyer, and it looks like an old-design DP ship. It’s not a multiple-impeller ship. The mass is too low.”
“Are they detaching these from their main forces, Admiral?”
“I don’t think so, Sire.
It looks like these were brought up from their rear areas. We don’t see any reduction in mass readings on their main forces, which we believe are all more massive multiple-impeller ships.”
“They’re looking for our main forces,” Leicester said.
“And our supply caches as well, Sir. They have to know we have them, to support our operations without making ports of call. And they have to be starting to sweat their supply situation now.”
“Any idea how many of them there are, Admiral?” Dunham asked.
“Not really, Sire, although I suspect it’s similar to cockroaches. Even though you only see one or two, you actually have an infestation. They are making a concerted effort to stay out of the scanning reach of our planetary pickets, and are accelerating at only 0.4 gravities, trying to minimize their wake. If it weren’t for the unmanned picket ships, we wouldn’t have seen them at all. As it is, we’re seeing quite a few, in widely spread locations.”
She turned to the hyperspace map.
“Enlarge twenty-five. Show highlight seventeen.”
The map segment in the center moved back until the broad arc of the invasion path was shown. In front of it, dozens of short hyperspace tracks near inhabited planets jumped out in yellow highlight.
“All we’re seeing are short portions of their tracks past our inhabited planets, as you can see.”
“Very good, Admiral.”
Dunham turned to Leicester.
“It’s only a matter of time before they trip over one of our main forces, or see some group entering or exiting a cache location, Admiral Leicester. We should consider response alternatives in both cases.”
“Agreed, Sire. I’ll advise Admiral Cernik.”
The Emperor and Leicester dropped from the channel.
Fleet Admiral Ivar Svenson’s broken body lay in life-support flotation bed at the Imperial Navy Medical Research Center on Sintar. He had been there twelve years, since his flagship had blown up around him, the victim of a mechanical failure of the type that had been far too common in His Majesty’s Navy before the naval acquisition program had been reformed. After the Emperor had cleaned out the corrupt bureaucrats that had let their contractor patrons get away with cutting corners on critical systems, such accidents had grown far more infrequent.
One of barely three dozen survivors of the explosion, he – or what was left of him – had been dragged out of the charred remnants of his flag bridge. He had been kept on total life-support ever since.
One good thing about his situation was that doctors were very much aware of their patient’s desire to be kept alive by extreme measures, as well as what his day-to-day needs were. That was because he could join them in a conference room in VR and talk to them about it, even though the shattered hulk of his physical body was incapable of speech or response.
The irony of it was that Svenson’s primary role in the Imperial Navy was as a strategist and tactician. He only took an occasional turn at flag command to keep his hand in, as most of his time was spent in the Imperial Navy’s tactical department. It was during one of those turns at command his ship had blown up. He had remained in the tactical department since. In point of fact, were it not for his injuries, he would have been the head of the tactical department, rather than Stepan Cernik. Despite that, there was no enmity between the two long-time friends. Cernik was the administrator and decision maker, while Svenson was the brains behind the tactical department’s recommendations.
The medical team and around-the-clock care required to keep Ivar Svenson alive cost the Imperial Navy tens of millions of credits per year. That was considered a bargain by both Cernik and Leicester.
Fleet Admiral Ivar Svenson set the book down on the side table of the overstuffed reading chair in his mountain-lodge home. With nothing else to spend his salary on, Svenson had hired some of the best VR programmers in the Empire to build his home channel – the house, the grounds, the view, the weather. It was all as realistic as the technology could make it.
Svenson checked the time. Five minutes to go until this morning’s tactical department meeting. He touched up his dress-uniform avatar – adding a loose curl of hair there, a slight wrinkle in his uniform jacket there – and then switched avatars and channels.
Fleet Admiral Stepan Cernik was already waiting in the VR conference room when Svenson checked into the channel.
“Good morning, Stepan.”
“Good morning, Ivar. How are you this morning?”
“Good. And you?”
“Good.”
Svenson sat down at the conference table. The other senior tactical types showed up and took their seats, and Cernik got the meeting under way.
“I assume you’ve all seen the report out of Admiral Conroy’s office. The question is, Is there anything we need to change with our current arrangements with regard to the supplies caches?”
“I wouldn’t think so,” Svenson said. “This is exactly the sort of scenario we considered when we set them up. It will be interesting to see how it works the first time someone trips it, and we might want to change it once we have more information, but this sounds a lot like our planning scenario.”
“I agree with Ivar, Stepan. I think we’re good,” Admiral Lance Richardson said.
Cernik scanned up and down the table, but there were all nods, with no contrary voices.
“All right. So if someone sets one off, we’ll review the outcome then. On to the next question. Should we respond somehow to all these destroyers swanning around in our space? Go after them or some such?”
“I’ve been giving these some thought, Stepan, and I have a few ideas for us to discuss,” Svenson said.
“Sir, the DPN Rodney has down-transitioned into the system. We’re getting a report now.”
DPN Admiral Stanislaus Kordecki waited to hear what the report was. He knew about the destroyers reconnoitering out in front of the DP’s surge into Sintar, but didn’t expect to hear from one unless it found something interesting.
“Sir, the Rodney reports they saw an Imperial Navy formation leaving a red dwarf system. No habitable planets. They suspect it is a supply cache location. Coordinates on your display.”
Kordecki looked into his tactical display. A hundred and fifty light-years or so from his position. Maybe three days spacing or so. Well, they definitely should go check it out. If it was a supply cache, that would certainly be useful, even if it were for reaction mass alone. They had cut their continuous acceleration down to .25g while they were waiting in this system, to conserve reaction mass.
“Send the report on to Admiral Benton. Let’s see what he wants us to do.”
“Yes, Sir. Transmitting to Fleet.”
“What do you think, Sir?” Admiral Brian Grant asked.
“Oh, it’s probably a supply cache. Whether we can make use of it or not is another matter,” Fleet Admiral Conrad Benton told his chief of staff.
“Really, Sir? I mean, I understand we can’t use their missiles, but what about reaction mass? That’s all standard connections, isn’t it?”
“Yes, and what do you think the likelihood is it isn’t booby-trapped? It certainly would be if it were my supply cache.”
“So we’re not going to check it out, Sir?”
“No, we’re going to check it out. We just need to be careful.”
Benton thought about it.
“Get me a connection to Admiral Kordecki.”
“Hello, Sir. How are you?” Admiral Kordecki asked.
“Good, Stash, good. Hey, we need to check out this potential supply cache, but you’ve got to be careful. There’s no way I would have a supply depot somewhere without it being booby trapped or guarded somehow. You know, you get in there and then a hundred thousand Imperial Navy battleships drop in after you or some damn thing.”
“I understand, Sir. I wasn’t planning on just dropping in there blind. We’ll reconnoiter it first.”
“Yes, but then watch for the booby trap. It could look completely innocuous and
then blow up in your face.”
“Understood, Sir.”
“OK, Stash. Good luck.”
Kordecki cut the connection and turned to his chief of staff.
“All right, Norm. Let’s get us underway. Make our down-transition maybe a light-year away, and we’ll send a few cruisers in for a look-see. And don’t go straight there. Let’s aim at something else in that general direction, and then veer off at the last minute.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“So that’s what we’re looking for, Mr. Denny,” Admiral Cernik said. “Do you think you can come up with something like that?”
In the VR simulation of a small conference room with Admirals Cernik and Svenson, Denny looked over Svenson’s plan again. He hadn’t met Svenson before.
“I think so, Admiral Cernik. It means the picket ships will be operating for long periods without radio contact, and also they will be somewhat self-dispatching. Multiple course changes, that sort of thing. That’s new. There’s a couple of other issues we probably need to address as well. When they find a destroyer, how many of the picket ships go after it? How does each ship know whether it should, or not? Do we want to readjust the grid when one or more ships drop out? How do we do that? It has to be something adaptive, because they can’t coordinate and we can’t give the instructions. And they can’t drop out of hyperspace to get any instructions, because they’re going to be spread out all over, without a projector ship nearby. If they drop out for instructions, they can’t get back.”
Svenson nodded.
“Right on all counts, Mr. Denny,” Svenson said. “And we also need an absolute time limit, when they head for rendezvous points. No ghost ships going on forever.”
“Well, the limits on reaction mass will guarantee that, Admiral Svenson. Even with a reserve tank.”
Denny looked over the plan again.
EMPIRE: Conqueror (EMPIRE SERIES Book 6) Page 7
