EMPIRE: Conqueror (EMPIRE SERIES Book 6)

by Richard F. Weyand

  “I understand and will comply, Admiral.”

  “Please don’t give my guys any excuses, Admiral. They’re pretty hot over here at the moment, and I would just as soon not kill you all out of spite for something somebody else did. McGee out.”

  On the planet, Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Garvey and his company of DP Marines surrendered to the Sintaran base commander, Admiral Roger Denton. They turned in their weapons, but remained barracked in the same building. Imperial Navy personnel once again took up perimeter and gate security.

  The guards became the prisoners and the prisoners the guards, but all the routines of the base continued as before.

  Similarly, in Morgan and Nordstrom, the DP commanders surrendered their formations to the Sintaran forces without a shot fired.

  Reaction To Balmoral

  They were having breakfast with the kids the next morning. Peters noticed Dunham was distracted, as if he were getting constant updates in VR. When the kids started getting antsy and had clearly eaten their fill, she let them go.

  “Sean. Dee. You are excused from table.”

  The twins got up and raced from the room, eager to be gone before Mommy changed her mind. Peters knew they would be headed down the hall to their rooms, and a day of study and of play.

  “So what’s happened?” Peters asked. “You got an emergency call last night.”

  “Yes. One of the DP formations fired on Imperial Fleet Base Balmoral with a ten megaton warhead. Five to six million dead. More than half were Navy personnel on the base.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “They claimed it was an unauthorized launch. Some hothead or something. Only one ship fired, and the missile was rigged so they couldn’t abort it or retarget it.”

  “So it had to have been a missileer.”

  “Somebody who knew what they were doing. Correct.”

  “What did we do?”

  “We dropped a formation into Balmoral and took out their whole formation.”

  “Another sixty-five million DP casualties?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because of one guy, Bobby?”

  “But it wasn’t just one guy, Amanda. The reason he was in that position was the DP attacked us, for no reason. They occupied our systems, fought with our ships, tried to kill our people. If they hadn’t done any of that, that one guy would be at home somewhere, and not out here, not in Sintaran space, not in a position to kill millions of people. How many more of them are there, in their navy? People who are ready to go off, commit war crimes, whether because of their rhetoric at home or because of the way the war has gone for them so far. How many? I can’t take those kinds of chances.

  “Besides, if you step outside the rules, no matter who, no matter why, no matter how, Sintar will not forgive, will not forget, will not look the other way. We will retaliate, massively. Everybody has to know that, or this gets way out of control very quickly.”

  “OK, Bobby. I see that. What about the other three systems? Is something similar going to happen there?”

  “No. We gave their commanders a simple choice. Surrender or be destroyed. All three surrendered.”

  “Would you have destroyed them, if they hadn’t surrendered?”

  “Of course. What was the rule in that parenting book? Never threaten any punishment unless you are willing to impose it, and quickly, if the threat isn’t sufficient to modify behavior.”

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  “Same thing, Amanda. Everybody has to know, when Sintar says do this or else, a failure to do this results in or else. Period. Never any doubt.”

  “So now what?”

  “So now we have a hundred and ninety five million prisoners of war in orbit we have to feed. Which is quite a trick, because we don’t do space-packed food anymore.”

  “Space-packed food?”

  “Yes. Food that keeps. Food that doesn’t have to be refrigerated. There’s only so much refrigeration aboard a ship. Anything that needs refrigeration is a pain in the butt to deal with on-board ship.”

  “Huh.”

  She got a distant look all of a sudden, and Dunham waited. He had seen that look before. She was on the edge of something. Then she had it.

  “Weightlifter stuff. Hiking stuff. Expedition supplies. Disaster supplies.”

  “What?”

  “You know. Energy bars. Protein bars. Protein shakes. Dried fruit. Meal substitutes. The Empire makes that stuff by the ton, for weightlifters and hikers and such. For expeditions. For rescue and relief for natural disasters. Ship up containers of that stuff. It’ll keep without refrigeration, and it’s very dense in terms of nutrition per cubic foot. I wouldn’t want to live on it forever, but for a few months it’s OK.”

  “Excellent. Thank you, Amanda. Another bunny out of the hat.”

  “Nah. You guys were just stuck on one way of looking at it.”

  The request came down out of Projects, but it had been bounced there directly from the Imperial Navy general staff. Sean Dunworthy, the head of the food logistics department, looked at it again. A continuing requirement to feed one hundred ninety-five million people. In orbit, so it had to be prepped foods. The request said ‘Energy bars, protein bars, protein shakes, dried fruits & nuts, meal substitutes, and other expeditionary, rescue, and relief supplies.’

  Ongoing requirement. Well, how many servings a month was that? Three meals a day times thirty days times two hundred million was eighteen billion servings. Call it twenty billion. Per month. Every month.

  Probably only one outfit could handle that in one chunk. General Outfitters and Supply. He placed a call to their Imperial City offices, and asked for government sales.

  “Tricia Milner, Government Sales.”

  “Good morning, Ms. Milner. This is Sean Dunworthy. I’m the department head of the food logistics department of the Imperial Navy.”

  “Yes, Mr. Dunworthy. What can I do for you?”

  “I have an immediate and ongoing requirement for twenty billion servings of expeditionary or rescue & relief type meals per month.”

  “Twenty million servings? That’s not a problem, Mr. Dunworthy.”

  “No, Ms. Milner. I’m afraid you misheard me. That’s twenty billion servings.”

  “Twenty billion?”

  “Yes, Ms. Milner. Twenty billion. Per month. Every month. Beginning immediately. And I’ll want the option to increase those amounts in future months. It could go as high as a trillion servings a month.”

  “Mr. Dunworthy, we don’t have that kind of capacity. Nobody does.”

  “No, but, taken altogether, the industry does, Ms. Milner. I’m looking for the prime contractor here. How you subcontract it out is up to you.

  “And I have an immediate need for however much of it you can get me in the Denovan, Morgan, and Nordstrom provincial capitals. Yesterday.”

  DP Prime Minister Harold Pinter was meeting with his defense minister, Pavel Isaev, as well as his foreign minister and political strategist, Jules Morel.

  “So what’s happened, Pavel? The sketchy reports I’m hearing are not good.”

  “The truth is actually probably worse, Harold. We made a second attempt at the one supply cache of theirs we found. They have apparently figured out how to launch missiles out of static supply containers.”

  “Launch missiles out of a container just sitting there? How does that work?”

  “They light off the rear missiles in the container and push the whole mess – missiles, packing material, everything – out the front of the container. The packing material catches fire, the missiles in front get pushed out without being lighted off until later, the missiles in the rear cook in their own exhaust. It’s quite a mess. But they can get ninety or ninety-five percent of the missiles out of the containers and successfully launched.”

  “Can we do that, too?”

  “No. For one, we can’t get anything to the front, and our forward forces are shot out on their box launchers. We’ve shot a total of almost a billion
missiles out of the box launchers without taking out a single Sintaran warship. They matched us launch for launch, and all the missiles killed each other. And they have three box launches per platform, so they still have half a billion box-launch missiles aboard, and the ability to reload from their caches.

  “The second reason is worse, somehow. Sintar’s missile containers have doors on both ends. They’re basically standard commercial containers. We opted for greater structural rigidity for our missile containers, which are dedicated-use. So we have a bulkhead on the forward end. There are no doors to open on that end. Not with the containers we have.”

  “All right, so what happened?”

  “The formation that entered their supply depot – Admiral Getty’s formation – was completely destroyed. Without any Sintaran warships in the system. It also means we can’t – literally cannot – take any of their supply caches, even if we knew where they all are.”

  “Because every missile in their supply cache is a potential combatant.”

  “Exactly. And there are millions of them in each cache. If we set foot in any cache system, we’ll just get wiped out by however many missiles they want to launch. We could send all four million warships into a single cache system, and they would be facing something like eight million missiles. We’d lose everybody.”

  “All right. What happened in the provincial capitals? I don’t like what I hear about Balmoral. That’s it, right? Balmoral?”

  “That’s right. The idea was to take four provincial capitals and see whether they had any supplies we could forage. All four surrendered immediately. Not only did they have no supplies, they each had over three million personnel which became prisoners of war, and our responsibility under treaty.”

  “Three million personnel? On the ground?”

  “Yes. Living in huge blocks of barracks. Our local commanders confined them to barracks, and let them continue with their own infrastructure. Food, garbage detail, that sort of thing. But the irony here is staggering. We think we may have figured out why they had so many people on the ground.

  “Their new construction ships accelerate at over six gravities, and can flip ship and reverse direction in a few seconds. And they’re tiny. Half the mass you would expect per ship class even with old designs. A quarter of the mass of ours.

  “Basically, we think they’re unmanned, just like their picket ships. There’s no way a live crew could tolerate those kinds of continuous acceleration and abruptness of maneuver, and their ships have no room for all the cabins and environmental equipment a live crew requires. Instead, their warships are being crewed remotely, from the ground, in their provincial and regional capitals.”

  “So by confining them to barracks, we just told them to keep manning their ships against us. Oh, that’s rich.”

  “It would be funny if it were us doing it to them instead of the other way around. I imagine they had quite a laugh over it.”

  Pinter shook his head and sighed.

  “Okay, so what happened at Balmoral?”

  “One of Admiral Beckert’s battleships, the Essen district, fired four missiles at the planet. It was an unauthorized launch. The captain issued abort orders, and three of the missiles successfully aborted. They tried to re-target the fourth missile – send it into the ocean or something – and it rejected the orders because it had been re-keyed. It detonated over Sintar’s fleet base on Balmoral. Three and a half million people on the base and millions more around the base were killed. Injuries also run into the millions.”

  “How can something like that happen? Don’t we control our own weapons?”

  “Well, yes, the crews do. Under orders. When they don’t follow orders, that’s different. Clearly, whoever modified that one missile, and then fired four missiles, knew what he was doing. It had to be a missileer. We think it was a petty officer named Nathan Holmes. We did some looking into his file, and his brother Brendan was aboard the Berthold, an old-design destroyer on recon duty. The Berthold was actually in the same system as the Essen district when Sintar attacked, exchanged missile salvos with our ships, and destroyed the recon destroyers.”

  “So he effectively saw his brother die, live and in-person, then Essen District went to Balmoral with Admiral Beckert.”

  “Exactly.”

  “All right. Then what happened?”

  “A formation of thirty-two thousand Sintaran warships dropped into Balmoral and wiped out Beckert’s formation with another of those massive box-launcher salvos. Beckert was hurrying to try to get out of the system before Sintar showed up, but apparently they had followed along and were close by.

  “Another three Sintaran formations of the same size then dropped into the other three provincial capitals and demanded the surrender of the other three formations or they would be destroyed the same way. All three complied.”

  “OK. So we have what now? Three formations destroyed, and three formations surrendered, out of two hundred formations?”

  “That’s right. And two hundred fifty thousand recon destroyers were also destroyed. The other one hundred ninety-four formations are shot out with their box launchers, otherwise have mostly full magazines, but are dangerously close to running out of food and reaction mass.”

  “How did it get to this, Pavel?”

  “We thought we would fight a war like every other war of the last several centuries. This Emperor, though, is a military historian. What he did to the Alliance is sort of a variant of something called the Six-Day War of the late twentieth century on Earth. Egypt was going to attack Israel, and built up all its forces on the border, but Israel didn’t wait for a declaration of war and used its air force to destroy the Egyptian air force on the ground. Israel had air superiority throughout the war, which didn’t last a week. This against a much larger opponent.

  “The war he fought with us is more like what Russia did to Germany in the middle of the twentieth century. When Germany attacked Russia, the Russians fell back, destroying or taking with them anything useful. This stretched the German supply lines, which the Russians attacked and disrupted with aircraft. The Russians denied the Germans forage and successfully cut off their supplies, and the German offensive ground to a halt and then collapsed.”

  “Which is what’s happened to us.”

  “Yes. Harold, I’m sorry. We fought the war we thought we had. The Emperor made it the war he wanted to fight.”

  Pinter nodded and turned to his foreign minister.

  “What do we do now, Jules?”

  “We could try to negotiate a peace with the Emperor, Harold. Peace is clearly what he wants.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I think he’s amply demonstrated he could destroy all our two hundred formations and the thirteen billion crew members any time he wants. He hasn’t. I think he hasn’t because he knows that would make peace harder. And now his restraint has cost him five million of his own spacers and civilians.”

  “But that was the act of a single deranged person.”

  “Who was our responsibility. We put him in that position, don’t forget. And now that petty officer has managed to singlehandedly withdraw us from the Treaty of Earth. But the Emperor didn’t destroy the other three formations, which they could have done easily. Instead, he demanded and accepted their surrender. That sounds to me like a man who wants peace.”

  “And what would happen if I negotiated a peace with Sintar?”

  “The opposition would move a no-confidence vote and call for general elections, which you would lose.”

  “And we would likely be out of power for a while.”

  “Yes. Actually, I don’t think the party could win general elections again as long as you were the party leader.”

  “What other choices do I have, Jules?”

  “There is one possibility that’s occurred to me. I’m not sure you’ll like it, though, Harold.”

  “I don’t like anything else, either, Jules, so that doesn’t necessarily disrecommend it.”
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  “All right, then. Let a no-confidence vote go forward. Call a snap election, which you will lose. Let Totten come in as PM and lose the war, then run against him on that basis. ‘We were fighting the war, and they botched it.’ That election you’ll win.”

  “So let them have the hot potato, and let it blow up in their face. Then run against them for losing the war. That’s underhanded.”

  “That’s politics. He wants to be PM so much, let him have it. He’ll be out within a year, and they’ll be discredited for a decade.”

  “Let me think about it.”

  Political Upheaval

  Jeremy Totten, the prime minister of the opposition ‘shadow’ government, was meeting with his ministers. They met not in the Executive Building, which he coveted, but in the opposition leader’s office in the Legislative Building at the other end of the Central Mall.

  “There’s been a shift, Jeremy, but I can’t quite put my finger on it,” said the shadow interior minister, Edmond Descartes. “It’s subtle, but I think the support for the government is crumbling within the majority.”

  “Really,” Totten said to his party’s primary political strategist.

  “Yes. There’s less knee-jerk support, a few more mumbled comments. One majority member even said to me, ‘I suppose you’ll be moving the no-confidence vote now.’”

  “Well, that is interesting. I’m not completely surprised, though. The news about the war – what there is of it – is not encouraging. Boris, what do we know about recent events at the front?”

  “It’s not good,” said Boris Andropov, the shadow defense minister. “I think the government is covering up exactly how bad it is. We know about the loss of military infrastructure here in the DP. That was criminally negligent, not to protect our own planets. But the news reports out of Sintar are even more disturbing. That a Sintaran fleet base was bombed – apparently without authorization – and one of our formations destroyed in retaliation makes one wonder just who is in charge of what’s going on. Not our own commanders, apparently.