When she’d asked Hal about the legalities and moralities of manipulating the market in ways unavailable to the general public, Hal had assured her that he was meticulously careful not to break the spirit of securities exchange laws and rules, and that he was very careful in making sure that his shenanigans generally tended to keep the market profitable and stable, and thus more healthy for the average investor.
When Noreen was dressed to the nines in her resplendent new gown, a limousine picked the four of them up and whisked them off into the Berlen night. Diet was dressed as Noreen had never seen him —in full royal regalia... a black tunic edged in gold, starburst medals and iron cross at his throat, with a gold sash running shoulder to hip, a gold stripe running down the side of each pant leg, disappearing into a set of high, black boots having golden spurs. Even their nanny was dressed infinitely better than Noreen had ever seen her. Diet obviously had something very, very special in the offing.
Noreen soon got lost, trying to follow the plethora of turns the limo was taking, and she gave up trying to figure out where they were. Eventually the limo pulled up to what appeared to be another massive, exquisite hotel. Six tuxedo-clad young men greeted them at the door and escorted them to an elevator, where they were met by a different six young men in black tie on the third floor, who escorted them to an absolutely stunning room, the likes of which Noreen had only seen in electronic magazines.
Just as she was gawking at the room itself, Noreen was startled by the loud banging of a staff upon the floor next to her, and an ornately dressed older gentleman bellowing, in English:
“Your Royal Majesties, I am pleased to announce the arrival of Freiherr Dietrich Anton Guderian von und zu Fürt, his wife Freiin Noreen and their newborn son, the Honorable Hans Niklaus Guderian!”
The herald paused a moment before continuing, “Freiherr and Freiin, I am very honored to present to you, His Royal Majesty, Kaiser Wilhelm VII, Emperor of Imperial Germanic Empire and his wife, the Empress Wilhelmina!”
Evidently, Diet’s big surprise was that they were having an intimate family dinner with his great-uncle.
* * * *
The Raknii Imperial Planet of Raku
November, 3868
The remnants of Tzal’s imperial fleet, which had been beaten by the humans at Slithin and then again at Yegraia, arrived back at Raku just after Tzal left for Slithin. Less than two out of every ten ships that the empire had built and equipped with the best new weaponry available had returned, and it didn’t take long for word of the twin disasters that had befallen that proud fleet to leak out. For his part, Drix turned a blind eye to the slowly developing sense of panic, radiating from the fleet into the populace upon their hearing these dark tales. Soon, rumors of these dire events and the grave implications of the ominous silence from Region-6 would spread by word-of-mouth throughout the farthest reached of the empire, as spaceliners took it with them on their rounds like carriers of disease.
They didn’t know it yet, but the cracks in the Raknii people’s long-standing belief in their utter invincibility as predators that first appeared after the Disaster at Golgathal, were about to receive yet another series of even stronger blows. Drix’ unprecedented message to the Raknii people upon his ascendancy to the supreme-mastery, and the wide-spread publishing of his subsequent Book of Revelations, were already causing riots, rebellion and other forms of civil disobedience to break out on dozens of planets all over the empire, as proponents of modern secular philosophy fought back at the new government’s attempt to bring religion and “the old ways” back to prominence within Raknii society.
Their mantra was not Freedom of Religion, but rather Freedom from Religion, as they railed for a binding and permanent separation of temple and state, within the government. The violence and chaos was less in Region-1 and Region-3, as Xior and Glan had always been devout followers of the old ways, so there was less need for changing hearts and minds there. Harf and Olin, however, had their hands full trying to restore order to their newly unruly populace.
The human aliens were currently seeing to things in Region-4, and very probably in Region-6 as well, but no one really knew for sure about that one.
Drix summoned Region-Masters Harf, Glan and Olin to the imperial palace to brief them personally on the extent of the disasters, and to discuss their implications as they debated strategy for curtailing the onrushing human scourge. All had been appropriately horrified by the setbacks and losses sustained by the fleet, but became profoundly alarmed by the ominous silence from Region-6 and what that might portend. Drix held joint and private meetings with all three region-masters, so he could judge both their public and private opinions on these grave matters.
Only with his private meetings with his foster-sire Glan, of Region-3, did he include the High-Human, Hal into their conversations. Varq and Xior monitored all of these discussions invisibly, hidden from the view of all but Drix, by the hypnotic injunctions that caused the diamond sunburst and onyx rank-stones of an OverMaster to create a mysterious “hole” in Raknii memories. Glan was already a devout follower of Dol, and he was fully committed to supporting Drix’ efforts to bend the hearts and minds of the Raknii people into accepting his new Bible, as a new and authoritative guide for their daily lives. Harf and Olin had to be treated a bit more delicately, as their roots in modern secularism were considerably stronger than Glan’s.
Drix deftly followed his intricately crafted script of a series of leading questions (much as he’d used on Tzal), which were specifically designed to guide his listeners towards discovering for themselves the truth and logic behind the points he wished them to comprehend. Drix had always had a natural bent for such tactics, but it wasn’t until his discussions with Hal that he was able to develop it into a true art form. Hal explained it as the Socratic Teaching Technique, first developed by the human philosopher Socrates, some 4,200 standard human years earlier.
Harf was fearful of these unsettling events, of course, but he was too overcome by the changes he witnessed in his daughter N’raal, for them to really sink in. N’raal was not only civil, she was actually pleasant! She was a very good dam to Drix’ heir and she doted submissively on her mate with rarely an unpleasant thing to say. N’raal was truly happy, and Harf marveled at the changes in his formerly petulant daughter. Harf didn’t know what all the answers were to these unstoppable aliens, but he was willing to turn most of those problems over into Drix’ capable paws. Whatever they were, those problems couldn’t possibly be any worse than what Drix had confronted in civilizing Harf’s legendary daughter.
Drix’ questioning led Harf to discovering exactly what Drix wanted him to realize, and Harf came away thinking that most of it had been his idea in the first place. From the way things shook out, Harf believed himself to be a primary leader among the region-masters, in their efforts to formulate a workable strategy for placating their angry god and saving their race from extinction.
Olin, of Region-5, was another matter entirely. From his monitoring of the human ships’ x-wakes, his region was constantly being crisscrossed by their warfleets and transports, ferrying supplies back and forth to their various war efforts in Region-4. His warship masters were wild to attack these interlopers, but Olin had prohibited attacks, as he knew that his old-style warships would be totally ineffective against the fantastic armor of the human’s warships. Olin had been immersed in modern secular philosophy since birth, so arrogant aggression towards any non-Raknii race was ingrained in his very genes. The impotency of his military was not only aggravating him, it was frightening him. Although the aliens had not yet attacked any of his worlds, their very proximity was giving Olin a severe case of indigestion.
During questioning, Olin was forced to admit to himself that their Empire was indeed in a bad way, but he just couldn’t quite bring himself to even consider voluntary submission to aliens as a viable alternative to their current slow march towards the same destination, one world at a time. The potential deaths of billions of
Raknii citizens in stubborn defiance of invaders somehow remained less repugnant to him than living with the shame incurred in saving those lives by submission, without even attempting to fight.
Drix found himself wishing that his friend and old mentor Raan was here, as Raan had already established a semblance of rapport with Olin, in ways that he had not. Perhaps Raan’s influence might have made enough of a difference to nudge Olin into agreement with the policy that Drix needed the unanimous support of all of his region-masters to implement without inciting civil war within the empire. Unfortunately, Raan had neither responded to Drix’ summons, nor did he have any word at all about what was transpiring in Region-6, since all communications from there suddenly ceased, seven sub-cycles ago.
Drix certainly had his suspicions as to what might be happening there. Humans had to be swarming all over Region-6 to have invaded so many worlds in Region-4 recently. Reports of enemy movement from Olin’s forces within Region-5 confirmed that.
Drix also knew of the high probability that humans had some form of undetectable ships which could scout Raknii systems without their knowledge, so if the humans had somehow discovered one or more of Raan’s worlds, he would most certainly lock down all communications with other regions to prevent humans from discovering worlds beyond what was revealed to them by the planted start-charts that had led to their attacks on Blug’s worlds. But Drix never dreamed that Raan had personally bared belly and throat, submitting the 60-plus worlds of Region-6 to the humans. It truly might have been to his advantage, if he had.
* * * *
Chapter-24
The enemy fought with savage fury, and met death with all its horrors, without shrinking or complaining: not one asked to be spared, but fought as long as they could stand or sit. -- Davy Crockett
The Planetoid Discol, City of Waston
December 10th, 3868
After the debacle of the Confederate War of Independence, the United Stellar Alliance desperately needed heroes and the Battle of 2nd Yegraia finally gave them one. Admiral James Timothy Turner led the Alliance 17th Fleet in both battles of Yegraia, and he had won them both. The first one had been a walkover, barely worth mentioning… but the second one however, was epic. Hell in the Rocks, as the Fleet had begun calling it, had been as brilliant as it had also been deadly.
J.T. Turner lost his life and three-quarters of his ships over the course of those horrible three days last July. Thousands of Alliance spacers lost their lives along with him, but Turner had seemed a man possessed... incapable of understanding when he was beaten, and so in the end, he triumphed. He’d had to shepherd every missile, using them miserly against an enemy so vast as to defy description. But the Alliance 17th Fleet killed Raknii warships with almost every missile they fired. As incredible as Turner’s losses had been, he’d bled the cats dry in their fanatical attempts to ferret his fleet out of those rocks.
Indeed, it had appeared that the Raknii commander had been every bit as desperate to finally disprove the Allied Combined Fleet of Humanity’s legend of being unbeatable, as Turner had been to maintain it. Long past the time when any sane commanders would have cut their losses and withdrawn, the two antagonists continued to claw at each other’s throats. Both sides seemed totally oblivious to losses and casualty rates... their attention focused totally on nothing other than killing.
The miracle that was Hell in the Rocks would not have been possible if not for Turner’s brilliant strategy, the technological superiority of his fighters and missiles, and the iron nerve of his crews. The flight paths of the goings and comings of his 690 Raptors and Demons, making their attack runs and then returning for rearmament, eventually pinpointed the general locations of his nine carriers to the cats. Whenever Raknii fighters tried coming into the rocks after them, they were obliterated by an interlinked, overlapping firestorm of computer-coordinated point-defense weaponry — lasers, charged-particle beams and chain-guns, from ingeniously positioned support ships that surrounded humanity’s carriers.
With their tiny and comparatively primitive fighters unable to penetrate the human defenses, the Raknii tried sending in their old-style corvette class warships by the thousands. Turner wisely withheld using his medium-yield anti-ship missiles, utilizing only his point-defense weaponry and his fleet’s 5 and 3.5-gigawatt pulse lasers, which were all amazingly effective against the cats' thin, destroyer-grade armor.
A big part of Turner’s genius was his decision to keep his fleet’s scanners and active ECM gear shut down, so as to not give the cats any emissions to home in on. Instead, he depended upon keying his fire-controls to passively-received reflected laser light illuminating their targets, emitted from a half dozen specially equipped spaceplanes, shining relatively invisible broad-band lasers on the cat ships, while drifting hidden among the millions of small rocks.
His fleet ships were actually grounded on larger asteroids, which hid them from the Raknii’s probing scanners in the back-splatter returned by the asteroids themselves. Without any active emissions coming from Turner’s warships to home in on, the cats were forced to rely on line-of-sight for targeting. Unfortunately for the cats, most of their ships that got close enough to pick out a human ship grounded on an asteroid usually didn’t live long enough to make a report of their sighting.
All the while, Turner’s Raptors and Demons repetitively ran the gauntlet of the Raknii envelopment, attacking and returning to their carriers, flitting among the asteroids and enemy warships like flocks of nimble little sparrows. Unlike Turner’s warships, the human fighters used their scanners and ECM gear prodigiously, giving the cats hundreds of fleeting targets that their weaponry found very difficult to hit. The Alliance fighters made every single missile count, angling for stern shots on the cat’s bigger warships.
Like the Confederates at Slithin, the Alliance fleet carried no anti-fighter missiles aboard, but once it was discovered the cats had fighters of their own, the chain-guns on all their Raptors and Demons were fully stocked, which many of the relatively slow and clumsy Raknii fighters fell victim to, whenever they happened to get in the way.
When the cats realized their old-style warships weren’t getting the job done, they sent in their heavies. Turner maintained his strategy, except that his heavier energy weapons on his battlecruisers, heavy cruisers and light cruisers joined the fray. His fighters didn’t have to go out as far to find targets, after the cats started coming in after them. The cat attacks came in waves, as they couldn’t send in nearly all of their capital ships at the same time, as maneuvering room amongst the densely packed asteroid belt was at a premium and they just got in each other’s way.
This gave the cats the advantage of always having rested crews to funnel into the battle at any given moment, while the human crews were stretched far beyond the point of mere exhaustion and managed to stay awake only by carefully monitored doses of stimulants — awake, but not necessarily alert. By the third day of the battle, more human fighters were lost to collisions with rocks than to enemy fire.
Over three days of intense, continuous combat, fire from the human fleet dwindled, as one-by-one, their ships were spotted and eventually destroyed. As Turner’s fleet slowly eroded away, his surviving crews accepted their fate, and saw themselves adding to the legends of the hopelessly outnumbered heroes defending the Alamo and the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. Heroes possessed with a rare form of combat insanity that sometimes happens occasionally. Heroes in hopeless situations, who didn’t break and didn’t run... who stood and fought to the last man, and died to the last man. Heroes who died, but neither retreated nor surrendered.
After losing over 200 carriers, over 16,000 fighters, over 200 heavy cruisers, 600 cruisers, 200 destroyers and over 2,900 of his old-style warships to the infuriating, frustrating, and horrifyingly effective, unorthodox tactics of these maddening humans, the Raknii commander finally had enough. Just as the Alliance 17th fleet was all but destroyed, the Raknii withdrew, a mere hair’s breadth from their first major victory
of the war.
Turner’s fleet survived, but he, himself, did not. Just an hour before the cats suddenly and inexplicably withdrew, Turner’s flagship, the attack carrier USS Alliance was spotted by a cat heavy cruiser and raked by 11-gigawatt pulse-laser fire. Damage control parties found their fleet commander still strapped into his command chair, on the deck below where the bridge had formerly been located.
Most considered it miraculous that J.T. still lived, if even barely. Everything humanly possible was done to save him, but four days later, Vice Admiral James Timothy Turner breathed his last. Many claimed that, knowing his duty done, he chose to go, but that was merely standard spacer’s scuttlebutt —almost as wild as the few claims that he’d been gathered into the arms of angels and whisked off to his reward in the great beyond.
Now it was finally time to honor the great hero, whose exploits would ensure that his name would abide forever in the annals of military history, alongside the enduring legends of Napoleon and Robert E. Lee. At the behest of President McAllister, no expense was spared and Congressional Medal of Honor-winning Admiral James Timothy Turner was given a send-off for the ages — a presidential-grade funeral, including a slow procession along streets lined by hundreds of thousands of flag waving mourners, from the largest cathedral in Waston to Arlinton National Cemetery by horse-drawn caisson and Alliance-wide holovision coverage. It was amazingly sunny and relatively warm for a December day in Waston, which many thought to be a sure sign that God was smiling down, as his Iron Warrior was being laid to his eternal rest. No reigning monarch ever received a more elaborate funeral.
Wrath of an Angry God: A Military Space Opera (The Sentience Trilogy Book 3) Page 27
