by Kali Altsoba
[Editor’s note: The Board wishes to reassure readers that the chance of war in Orion is regarded by all experts at its disposal as close to zero. The Peace of Orion is nearly 300 years old. While reform of naval design is underway, new ship types and weapons are untested in war. In the objective view of experts consulted by the Board, the new weapons are, like war itself, a relic of our past folly, as morally and culturally vestigial as an appendix. We reside inside the Second Satya Yuga. We shall never again chance losing a future Mozart or a Wang, an as yet unknown youth of eternal talent embedded in the millions who would fall in a future war.]
[Editor’s note: The Board is reviewing this article in its entirely, and the employment status of the author. Pending conclusion of our inquiry, this entry will be removed from the data base and will not appear in future searches. After you leave this page you may not return and it will no longer be available. We look forward to revising this entry for you in the next edition.]
Krakoya
Battleships and heavy cruisers lock-and-load missile tubes. Guided shells are rammed into plasma cannon breaches in massive, multi-barrel turrets. AI-scouts are locked into their forward steam catapults, their stealth-detectors ready. Light cruisers take up defensive positions around the battleships and heavy cruisers. Destroyers and frigates surround the light cruisers. Ice-ships and hospital ships cower under the bellies of the battleships, like killer-whale calves inside the safety of the pod. DRA ammo and heavy equipment transports and a hundred slave ships and shtrafniki prison ships trail in a discrete group, at a distance of 5,000 klics. DRN captains don’t care about any of the auxiliaries. They’ve been ordered to maintain a textbook combat-fleet formation by their admiral, and bulk cargo, ice-ships, slavers and shtrafniki haulers don’t fit in.
Inside huge drop-ship transports, DRA assault infantry are herded down loading chutes into rows of drop-ships and landing-craft. In all-brown combat suits, they look like Dauran beef cattle mooing to the abattoir. Lock Doors are sealed behind them and ships’ rigging is secured. The krasnos strap in just as the red lights go off. They’ll sit in silence, doing the vapors in pitch dark once the fleets make bohr. More swarms of destroyers and frigates circle the troopships and assault transports. From far-off scuttles and on tens of thousands of vidscreens, they appear as furious wasps protecting hives suspended in air from the highest branches. Then it comes, the order to the invasion fleets angrily buzzing at their jump-zones arrives from Nalchik at exactly the same time: ‘Za Jahandar!’ Five great fleets of the Dauran Revolutionary Navy leap into war.
Creaking, outdated, yet immensely powerful fleets. Operation Bloodhound is underway, the planned crushing of the last tan, eastern Krevan worlds and the first blue, Calmari systems jutting toward Dauran space. The blue star-field is called ‘The Balcony.’ Jahandar despises it.
The grand plan is the pinnacle of General Mikva Royko’s military career. Despite being DRA, Jahandar has given him supreme command over his huge fleets of warships and massive surface attack forces. Bloodhound is bohrs-distant from Royko’s command experience, which maxed out at ‘bandit suppression campaigns’ on smoldering outskirts of the Dauran Commons. Yet he has no doubt in Jahandar or himself. This is his great moment, the supernova of his life.
Royko is as immensely confident in “My Grand Design,” as he terms and announces it to everyone, as he is immense. He says it over and over, every chance he can, wallowing in porcine self-admiration. He only regrets that he can attend and oversee just one of his first five invasions. He chose Krakoya, so at the moment he’s standing on the Combat Bridge of the old battleship DRN Leonine, flagship of this and four more invasion fleets by virtue of his august presence.
He says it again, out loud this time to the Bridge crew. I know, I know, but it’s actually what Dauran naval tradition and battle ceremony demands of a commander-in-chief: “I, Mikva Royko of Britomartis, am in charge of the armies of Jahandar the Dread, glorious and eternal, Possessor of All the Worlds! He endorses My Grand Design and chooses me to command.”
Admiral Fedor Aleksandr isn’t impressed. ‘The gods first made idiots to practice creation now they make generals to practice idiocy: they give us this rotund fool as commander of all.’
A wiser head than the corpulent general’s would know that drafting operations plans for a warlord as ignorant of the ways of real battle as desiccated Jahandar is a task pregnant with peril. That making total war for a despotic eminence as mercurial and changeful as the great Tyrant of Astrana risks cruel death for his general at any number of points of future failure. Yet Royko is more wicked than he is wise, more greasily ambitious for his vanity than attentive to his hazard.
Where his ‘Grand Design’ lacks subtlety or invention he substitutes sheer brutality of execution. Despite unbridled pride of authorship and boastful promises of success he made to Jahandar, the architecture of his opening attack is but a blunt assault on five unwary systems all at once. A back-alley gang mugging of a kind familiar to the stooped old man Soso has become.
Royko lifts up his cold numerical superiority as a cudgel to smash Jahandar’s enemies, crudely deploys mere mass to bludgeon and batter. Like most of the Tyrant’s generals, his tactics are shaped and made by the size-over-quality tradition of Dauran arms. He’ll batter where a finer military mind would try finesse, smash when another might thrust or parry. His attack plan is a bastinado of overwhelming force, a beat down with weight of firepower, a crude clobbering to death with a mass of tens of millions of dispensable ‘krasno’ conscripts. He’ll attack head-on without maneuvering, bombard with no discrimination, assault regardless of casualties. It’s the perfect attack plan to please a Boss whose response to all opposition is to attack it with an axe.
Emerging simultaneously from their bohr-jumps, five Dauran assault fleets penetrate the eastern Krevan and Calmari systems. They quickly switch to Type-2 thrusters to traverse at best speed to the inner systems. DRN ships have no Type-3 fusion drives because Jahandar and dead emperors before him so isolated Daura from external contact that the great fusion miniaturization revolution never reached that vast region of Orion. Daura has been falling behind in basic tek for nearly 300 years, withdrawn into its crusty and ancient shell like a Galapagos tortoise convinced that’s all it need do. Just outwait and outlive the dangerous hustle of life lived faster all around.
Arrival is synchronized across fleets, timed to final-burn points that vary slightly with distance to the target from the outer LPs. Once all five fleets are at designated assault points they move in unison toward lush worlds circling lazily inside the warm, habitable zones of their stars.
“All attacks must be simultaneous,” Royko ordered. It doesn’t really make any tactical difference, not across five different star systems, but he deems symmetry of timing to be a key part of his Grand Design. That’s what makes it grand. It’s one more proof that Mikva Royko, Chief of the Great General Staff of All Dauran Revolutionary Forces, doesn’t know war at all.
For the moment, that doesn’t matter. There’s no one left to stop him inside The Balcony. Krevans and Calmari have both stripped these systems of ships and troops needed for the fight against Pyotr. All Orion will reel back as borders dissolve and a hundred worlds are deeded and divided by a sinister pact between the Autocrat and the Tyrant. Kempeitai and Shishi will drop from the skies, to spread terror like oil slicks over whole worlds. An entirely new war is starting, to dwarf the Krevan War. They’ll call it the Fourth Orion War.
***
Admiral Fedor Aleksandr has brought his fleet undetected to Krakoya, first system across the border with the United Planets of Krevo. He slipped into L2 perfect gravity-balance behind the outermost planet, a deep blue, gas giant. All his career he longed for this unholy, anointed hour. He smells of success and unquestioning confidence, of fresh naval starch and old family connections, of Party contacts and career ruthlessness. Also, and this would bother him to know, right now he smells just a little like pearl onions. He left them
untouched on a luncheon plate, but is unaware that one fell into his jacket pocket when his personal server stumbled with his tray.
Where the huge Dauran fleets suddenly appear thousands of private vessels of all types scatter and jump, hiding behind a planetary mass or a moon or in an asteroid belt if they must, rushing to make a direct, emergency, hot-bohr escape if they can. They’re the last of the Little Ships. The “tadpole fleet,” some call it. Ad hoc, anarchic, and remarkably heroic. Some are just arriving, others were getting ready to leave places like Krakoya forever. Now all scatter, fast.
Some of the Little Ships are crammed with civis making the very last Exodus run, filled with ‘Ones’ or ‘Twos,’ as locals call themselves, if they’re from Krakoya I or Krakoya II. They never like the obvious and not very funny jokes even other Krevans inevitably make about how they’re very lucky there’s no Krakoya III. That’s because ‘Threes’ is already taken, by folk of the “Iron Kingdoms,” another small Neutral now under threat from all sides in Central Orion.
Several hundred empty civilian craft are only just-arrived from Harsa, making a return run for the last passengers they can grab from two very old elevators. At Krakoya I and for those nearing the outer LP just as the DRN jumped in, even ships already loaded can’t get to a usable LP in time. They’re going to have to scatter, to spread out, to run and hide anywhere they can in the system. Maybe behind one of eleven small moons of the Twin’s nearest planetary neighbor, a close-in orbiting, orange gas giant hanging in the dim red light of Krakoya’s very ordinary star. They’ll just have to hide and wait for some unforeseeable chance to hot-bohr away, if and when the Daurans leave one of the LPs unguarded. Given the swarms of frigates and destroyers on all the Little Ship scanners and vidscreens, that seems a faint-chance-to-none.
Aleksandr cares even less about the Little Ships than for the DRA’s cargo haulers, which he relegated to the rear of his formation. “Let the flitting midges go. They’re of no consequence. We’re moving in-system.” He watches them dart and dash away from his armada, and smirks.
Captains of Little Ships trapped in the outer system won’t believe their luck, which they haven’t yet realized. They hide and watch the mighty fleet pass-by, not one frigate or destroyer trying to hunt them down. In 30 minutes they’ll see the way open to the outer LP, and wonder what the trap is. Phantoms? Mines? The bravest among them will finally bite her lip and push three mini-fusion engines hard, then glide into a hot-bohr run. When she winks out, when Alice vanishes down the only rabbit hole there is, all the other frightened rabbits will spur fusion-drives to chase after her. Hundreds of white, cottony tails flash into the bohr. Then they’re gone.
Royko also doesn’t care about the shitty Little Ships. He stands alongside Aleksandr on the Combat Bridge of DRN Leonine, to watch his coming mastery and triumph on the ground. Aleksandr wrinkles his nose in silent disgust. ‘God’s the man smells!’
Röhm Krump is here, too, silent and looming. He’ll descend planetside with his Shishi night dogs after the battles are all over and won. He’s thinking about it now. Klack klack!
All three men have killed for Jahandar before. Aleksandr from orbit, so that his naval whites were never soiled or stained. Royko on the ground, pushing krasnos into rebel cities and crowds, stepping over their bleeding handiwork. Krump always close and personal, until his hands and face were red with splatter that he licked at with a mantis tongue and mandible lips.
Aleksandr isn’t worried about frantic, lased-warnings emanating from the fleeing midges, the helter-skelter civilian ships. He knows that before he came around the curve of the gas giant images of his war fleet arriving at the bohr-zone were headed to the inner-system planets at the speed of light, via relay stations necklacing the cold blue planet. Knows they’ll reach Krakoya I in 72 minutes and Krakoya II in 17 more after that, since its one-third through its farside journey around the system star. It’s more important that just four KRN frigates are detected in-system.
‘If there’s no more resistance in other systems than here, this will be a short war. Exactly what that lucky pig Royko promised and Jahandar demands.’ He turns with deliberation to his First Officer and gives the command: “The fleet is deployed in battle order. Move inward.”
Leonine is the largest battleship in the Dauran Revolutionary Navy. Old and obsolete, it was commissioned in the last years of a defunct Empire over nine decades ago. All capital ships in the DRN are that vintage or older. Jahandar paid no attention to the navy during his long rule, leaving ships and crews to slow rot in obsolescent bases, neglecting waiting hulls and unfinished warships in spaceyards closed and shuttered by his always inward-looking Revolution.
Until three years ago when Jahandar ordered a crash program of keel-laying to rebuild the navy in secret on a massive scale. He did it in isolated compartments, world-by-world, so that the DRN High Command had no idea it was happening. He revealed the build-up to his top admirals only last year, summoning the naval chiefs to his ‘Study’ in the Caesarium Selo to see part of the great starmap, showing them locations of their shiny new flotillas and fleets. He was very proud.
No one protested that he lacked skill or knowledge to oversee naval upgrades, or that all the new ships were based on designs at least a century old, dating to before the Grim Revolution. He simply took old blueprints and production plans from corroded Empire files, and ordered work begun. Inside the first year 4,000 new hulls were laid down, all types. That’s how logjams break in the otherwise lethargic Dauran Commons, with a single word from the terrible Tyrant and a swoosh of Shishi capes and implied threats about what will happen to any manager who fails to hit his production target. At least Jahandar included some new naval tek he stole from the Imperium and smuggled back to Nalchik, with the bribed-aid of two captains of the Green Ships.
The biggest warships, the new battleships and heavy cruisers, are still a year or more from completion. They are outside Aleksandr’s grasp. No bright battleships or gleaming fast cruisers grace his creaky war fleet as it descends on the Krakoyan worlds. Just reconstructed old battlewagons and cruisers a century old, and out-of-date even then. Still, he’s confident it will suffice. ‘I have excess firepower to anything the Krevans can face me with.’ He’s nearly right.
By any standard, his fleet is impressive. Although no new capital ships are here, many shiny escorts buzz around Leonine. Hate rides down to the Twins on four older battleships and 10 older cruisers, eight old and six new light cruisers, and 40 brand new destroyers in a wedge screen, within a larger swarm of over 100 escort ships in all. Royko’s troops are huddled in the interior of the invasion formation, locked down in new and modern assault-ships and specialized landing craft whose tek was stolen from the Kaigun, then built under supervision of kidnapped shipwrights. Most of the master-builders are Grünen, but a few are Calmari or from the Neutrals, lifted from border worlds by special forces raiders riding in very old DRN phantoms.
Seventy-two minutes after Aleksandr arrives at the leeside bohr-zone great clarions on Krakoya I blare across every city, over the global memex and on system milnebs. A mystery war fleet has appeared behind the gas giant in the outermost LP! An immense threat has appeared as from nowhere, and now it’s barreling with white plasma plumes around the blue giant, turning to head down to the inner planets. The enlarging image terrifies.
Krakoya II circles its parent sun on a closer orbit than Krakoya I, and is a hotter world. What matters today is that it’s presently on the stellar far side. There, too, alarums will ring out once the first visuals arrive from a necklace of laser-relay stations parked in orbit around the gas giant. In peacetime they announce comings and goings of commercial and science ships from the farside bohr, relayed to inner stations parked all around the parent star.
Now, in the flush of war, there’s a further 17 minute light-speed delay before images of the unidentified fleet brings the same panic and intense fear to the world of Twos that all Ones already know. Everyone holds their breath, wait
ing for the image to clarify.
“Is the Imperium here?”
“Is it the godsdamn Kaigun at last?”
“How did they get here so soon?”
“Could it be the NCU, come to remake the ‘Auld Alliance?”
No need to read frantic warnings from hundreds of ships long-gone from the outer LP, which lased urgent messages to the homeworlds about who has really come. For the strange fleet passed by a relay as it emerged from planetary penumbra into unobstructed star light. Everyone exhales as they see the DRN crest emblazoned on the hull of Leonine, flagship of a death armada.
They know that a terrible war fleet is breaking over the horizon of their system. Invaders not from Pyotr’s brutal Imperium but from the still more mysterious, unknown Hermit Empire. An invasion fleet carrying descendants of an ancient civilization of dead emperors, ruled by the fearsome children’s nightmare the Daurans call “The Jahandar.” All through the ongoing Grün invasion, no one on any Krevan world ever considered or tried to flee into Dauran space. They went the long way round to sanctuary. Daura is unknown. Daura is inviolable. Daura is Death.
“Jahandar’s ships, here in Krakoya?”
