Auer was nodding.
“And despite Mr. Pinter’s failures in this regard, and the situation in which it has left us, you consider this new war strategy to be possible even at this late date, Mr. Prime Minister?”
“I do, Mr. Auer. I believe we can and will push through such a framing of the problem to success, though I cannot share details with you on these matters.”
“Of course, Mr. Prime Minister. Of course. These are all matters of state, and I am an ordinary private citizen, after all. I do appreciate you sharing with me your thoughts on this matter.”
“No problem at all, Mr. Auer.”
“I am sure I have taken up enough of your valuable time, Mr. Prime Minister, and I thank you again for meeting with me.”
Both men stood and shook hands. Then Auer nodded to Totten and cut the channel.
They were laying on the double chaise watching the children play in the pool. Saturday lunch had been comfort food for Dunham, a rabbit stew with dumplings he had shown the kitchen how to make years before. It reminded him of home, and of simpler times, times of moral and ethical clarity.
“You have a decision to make,” Peters said.
“Yes. I have some time yet.”
“Not too long, though. Once those forces leave their mustering points and transition into hyperspace, there’s no way to recall them.”
“Yes, I know. Two weeks, Admiral Conroy says.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
“No. Not at the moment, anyway. I am looking forward to tomorrow morning’s discussion, though. I’m hoping things will be clearer after that.”
“Ah.”
Peters cuddled into him, listening to the squeals of their children as they frolicked in the pool. The support she gave him was her physical presence, and she left him to his thoughts.
After Sunday brunch, the meal completed and the staff and Guardsmen dismissed, Dunham, Peters, and the Saarets sat out on the balcony of the dining room looking out over Imperial Park, the towers of Imperial City beyond. Facing them, in the middle of Palace Mall, the cast-in-color statue of the Empress Ilithyia II, Dunham’s sister, faced them benignly, the book of the Law in her left hand, the sword in her right held down and to the side.
“All right, you three. The floor’s open,” Suzanne said.
“Thank you, dear,” Saaret said.
He turned to Dunham.
“Have you made a decision yet, Bobby?”
“No, Geoffrey. I don’t really like any of my choices.”
Saaret nodded.
“The hardest decisions always float to the top. Easy decisions get made lower in the organization.”
Suzanne looked back and forth between them.
“Why don’t you explain the choices to me, Bobby? Talk it out. Maybe that will give it some clarity.”
“All right,” Dunham said. “We know the new government of the Democracy of Planets is going to act on their bellicose election rhetoric. They are gathering a million ships of their navy – ships which were not involved in the invasion – to attack Sintar. Not the Empire. The planet Sintar.
“My options are actually two separate decisions. First, I can attack their navy at its mustering points. We know where they are, and we have sufficient forces on the way.”
“Sufficient forces?” Suzanne asked.
“Three million ships.”
“Who’s keeping an eye on the existing DP forces we’ve been feeding, Bobby?”
“The other three million ships. We basically cut all our thirty-two-thousand-ship formations in half, with sixteen thousand staying on each of the hundred and ninety-seven remaining DP forces, and sixteen thousand spacing for the DP’s mustering points.”
“And that’s enough?” Suzanne asked.
“In both cases. Yes.”
“OK, Bobby. Sorry. Go on.”
“So I can attack them in their mustering points, or confront them and maybe get them to surrender, or I can allow them to space for Sintar and pick them off along the way.”
“Is there a risk to Sintar if you let them space for Sintar and pick them off along the way.”
“Yes. The problem is they only need one ten-megaton missile to get through. Or one total-fission device. We have to stop them one hundred percent.”
Suzanne looked out at Imperial City and tried to imagine the effects of a ten-megaton warhead detonating a mile above Palace Mall. She shuddered and turned back to Dunham.
“The other problem is, once they’re in hyperspace, I have to kill them all. We can’t contact them to demand their surrender.”
“How many crewmen are in that fleet, Bobby?”
“Over three billion.”
“Oh, my. And your other decision?” Suzanne asked.
“Whether to destroy Olympia or not.”
“You mean Demos? The city is Demos, the planet is Olympia, right?”
“You’re correct, but Operation Hammer Blow would destroy the entire planet. It would kill everyone, and make the planet uninhabitable.”
“It’s not enough to destroy just the city, Bobby?”
“No, Suzanne. The DPN fleet headquarters is also there, and there are agencies and infrastructure all over the planet. The big politicos are also all over the planet. When they aren’t in power, they sit on their huge estates waiting for the next election.”
“How many people live on Olympia?” Suzanne asked.
“Three billion.”
“That many politicians and bureaucrats?”
“There’s also their spouses, their children, the cooks and maids and gardeners and limo drivers, the secretaries and bartenders and waiters. All the support personnel for the opulent lifestyle of the government types.”
“All of whom are innocent.”
“Yes, as are their naval personnel, as are all the people on Sintar, as are the five million who died on Balmoral. Innocence all around. Only the decision-makers have blood on their hands. But it doesn’t seem, whichever party is in power, their belligerence against Sintar will cease unless I kill or render harmless their entire navy. They just aren’t taking No for an answer.”
“That’s their corporate patrons, Bobby,” Saaret said. “The politicians are being puppet-mastered from behind the scenes.”
“I know, Geoffrey. The whole structure is cynical beyond belief. If I take out the core, maybe I can save more people in the long run.”
He looked down the Palace Mall, to the statue of his sister, now bathed in the light of the mid-day sun off the reflectors mounted on the outside walls of the Throne Room.
She looked alive, and her words to Josip Bronsky, the contract murderer of Vash Medved, came to mind. He had seen the recording of Bronsky’s interrogation, and, as her statue came alive in the sunlight on Palace Mall, he could hear her words once again in his head.
“Are you under the illusion that I’m one of the good guys? That you can trifle with me, because I’m naive? I assure you, I am neither. I am the Empress of Sintar. I am pledged to protect my subjects in this, my Empire. There are no rules, no morals, no code of honor to which I adhere other than that one overriding purpose. You sat down by mistake at a very high stakes table, and you’re playing out of your league.”
Dunham then recalled his father’s words about his response to the rape and beating of the elder Dunham’s cousin Martha when they were both teenagers.
“Sometimes a man‘s just gotta do what needs doin’. I couldn’t undo what those bastards did, but I could make damned sure they didn’t do it to anybody else.”
And with that, Dunham knew what he had to do.
That afternoon, Dunham requested a meeting with Admiral Leicester at his convenience. Leicester showed up in VR channel 22, the simulation of Dunham’s office, five minutes later.
“Be seated, Admiral Leicester.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt your weekend, Admiral, but I wanted you to have the most warning I can give you.”
“I appreciate that, Sire.”
There was a single document on Dunham’s desk. He signed it, and slid it across to Leicester. At least, that’s how the simulation showed the digital crypto-signature and file transfer that actually occurred.
Leicester picked up the document and read it. It authorized the “destruction of the planet Olympia, killing everyone on the planet and rendering the planet uninhabitable for at least a hundred years.” It left the means and timing open to the Imperial Navy.
“Operation Hammer Blow, Sire?”
“Yes, at your discretion as to timing. I would think the best time might be a day or two before we confront the DP navy in their mustering points and demand their surrender.”
“Yes, Sire.”
“I am done putting the people of Sintar at risk, waiting for these people to see reason. That is clearly not going to happen.”
“I understand, Sire.”
“When you have decided the timing, Admiral, advise me of your schedule.”
“Of course, Sire.”
That evening, with the kids off reading in their rooms, Dunham and Peters sat in their favorite positions in the private living room of the Imperial Apartment, he on one end of the sofa, she curled up in the club chair opposite him.
“I gave Admiral Leicester his orders this afternoon,” Dunham said.
“Olympia, then surrender demand?”
“Yes. You think that’s the right decision, Amanda?”
“I think it’s your decision, Bobby. Do I disagree with it? No. I had hoped the new government would come in, see the situation, and take a different path. But they didn’t. Their choice, their consequences.”
Dunham nodded.
“Yeah. I feel pretty good about it. I’ll ultimately save about sixteen billion people in their navy if they surrender without a fight. The politicians and all their dependents and hangers-on? They caused all this in the first place, all the way back, including the Alliance War.
“You’d think they’d have taken a hint somewhere along the way. But it was always somebody else doing the dying.
“Not this time.”
Olympia
Rear Admiral Dorothy Conroy watched the hyperspace tracks snaking across the hyperspace map. The million DP warships defending the capital planet of Olympia had mostly reached the system and dropped out of hyperspace. Some twenty percent of them were still on the way.
The million DP warships gathering in the twelve mustering points were also mostly in position, with perhaps ten percent of them still in hyperspace on their way to those destinations.
And the three million Sintaran warships on the way to those twelve mustering points also appeared on her map, because she was able to scan them from behind. Their hyperspace wakes were being disguised from the DP mustering points by three million Sintaran picket ships forming a wall of hyperspace noise in front of each of the twelve quarter-million-warship formations. They were about two days’ travel from the DP mustering points.
She sent a message to Admiral Leicester.
Orders went out from the Imperial Navy Fleet Headquarters on Sintar to the twelve projector ships that had been lying doggo for two years ten light-years distant from Olympia. Together with their escorts of five thousand picket ships and a hundred of the old-design light cruisers as picket ship tenders, they started toward Olympia.
The light cruisers were in the lead. They projected their hyperspace gates, and fifty picket ships transitioned into hyperspace through each one. Then the cruisers drew their hypergates over themselves and disappeared.
The big projector ships were heavily loaded, and labored to get up to 0.4 gravities acceleration, then projected their hypergates and drew them over themselves and disappeared as well. Each of the projector ships carried nine containers totaling thirty thousand tons of depleted uranium.
Harold Pinter wasn’t sure what Jeremy Totten intended to do with regard to the war with Sintar, but he suspected it would be something, like Totten himself, monumentally stupid. In preparation for that, he had announced a month’s vacation on leaving the prime ministership. He had retired for the month to his seaside estate, over a thousand miles from the capital. On the top of a hundred-foot bluff, the expansive low-rise house looked out over the Aegean Ocean.
He sat out on the stone terrace between the house and the bluff with a drink and a cigar and relaxed. All the issues he had wrestled with the last thirteen years, and especially the last six years, were now someone else’s worry.
Whatever Totten did, and whatever retribution Sintar exacted, he would be safe here.
“Sir, I’m picking up some hyperspace fog approaching.”
“From which direction?”
“There doesn’t seem to be a direction, Sir. It’s all around us, and closing in on the planet.”
“Scramble ready squadrons. Prepare for attack.”
“Yes, Sir.”
All across the hundreds of thousands of DPN warships in Olympia space, crews ran to battle stations. Warships turned out-system and accelerated out to meet the enemy.
As they approached the planet Olympia, the light-cruiser picket-ship tenders turned aside and started to go around the planet. They dropped out of hyperspace well outside the safe limit. Not so for the sixty thousand picket ships and the twelve hypergate projector ships following in their wake.
At one hundred miles from the planet’s surface, the picket ships down-transitioned and disintegrated.
The sixty thousand picket ships targeted Demos, the DPN fleet headquarters, and every major population center on the planet. Nearly simultaneously, sixty thousand one-hundred-and-fifty-megaton cones of energy hit the land surface of the planet with an energy density of eighty thousand joules per square centimeter, vaporizing twenty-mile-diameter circles on the planet and turning them into the vestibules of hell.
On the average, they were only forty-five miles apart, over the whole surface of the planet. Many of the blast zones overlapped each other. Blast waves and suction flows ripped and tore at everything on the surface of the planet. Sometimes they combined into tornadic winds filled with radioactive debris that scoured the land as the giant mushroom clouds lifted overhead.
The twelve big projector ships came in next. Seven were aimed at geologic hotspots under the surface. These came in at a sixty-degree angle and down-transitioned a hundred miles above the surface. With thirty thousand tons of depleted uranium aboard each projector ship, the energy bursts were six thousand times bigger than the picket ship explosions.
Nine hundred gigatons of energy were directed into the narrow cone of each projector ship’s down-transition. Energy density on the surface approached half a billion joules per square centimeter. Each cone of energy gouged a huge gash in the surface of the planet, shoving aside and piling up the thin crust over the hotspot, exposing and superheating the magma chamber beneath.
The seven resulting supervolcano eruptions ejected a total of four thousand cubic miles of radioactive ash into the stratosphere in huge gas explosions, together with massive pyroclastic flows and ejected magma.
The five remaining projector ships were aimed at the most tectonically unstable areas of the planet. Their locations, descent angles, and compass orientations were designed to precipitate earthquakes, by pushing or torquing tectonic plates. Jammed lateral faults, their pressure relieved somewhat, slid along each other. Some subduction faults got shoved hard enough to pop, while others got pulled apart for a moment and then popped when they sprang back.
These multiple massive earthquakes relieved or increased pressures on other faults, which then went off on their own. An earthquake storm swept around the planet.
Harold Pinter was sitting in his living room when the first shock hit. He staggered to the sliding doors out onto the terrace as shock after shock rattled the house. Looking around on the terrace, he could see no fewer than five mushroom clouds rising into the sky, the closest maybe thirty miles away.
He turned to run back into t
he house when the ground beneath him abruptly rose ten feet, then dropped nearly sixty feet as the off-shore subduction fault let go. The house staggered on its foundations, and the eastern wing of the house collapsed. That was the end of the house with the garage and the small personal shuttle that was his only transportation from this remote location.
Pinter staggered to his feet and looked out to sea. He knew what came next, and there was no escaping it from where he was. Not without the shuttle. He had time to reflect on just how badly he had misjudged the retribution of the Emperor of Sintar. He should have left the planet entirely.
Pinter saw the hundred-foot tsunami coming in, looking like a ripple in the water as the water pulled back from the shoreline. Then the tsunami mounted the continental shelf two miles offshore and rose to its full height as it hit shallower water.
The hundred-foot surge of water overwhelmed the reduced height of the bluff, and Harold Pinter, his house, and all his earthly concerns disappeared beneath the flow of water.
“Sir! The planet. Olympia. It’s exploding.”
“What?”
Fleet Admiral Joseph Armbruster switched his tactical display, on which he had been targeting twelve hundred Sintaran light cruisers that had just down-transitioned, to the view of the planet. Tens of thousands of large nuclear explosions blanketed the entire land mass of the planet just on the side he could see. Half a dozen horrific explosions followed, with four of those becoming huge volcanic eruptions, ejecting massive amounts of ash and debris well into the stratosphere.
He slumped back in his command chair and watched the devastation play out on the planet. He hadn’t believed they could attack the planet from within hyperspace, but clearly they had. He had no idea how he would have defended against that in any case.
It was a moot point now. It was all gone. Demos, the DPN’s fleet headquarters, all his superiors, his wife, his brother and his wife, his house. Everything. All gone.
“Sir, what do we do now? Sir? Sir?”
EMPIRE: Conqueror (EMPIRE SERIES Book 6) Page 16
