Commander

by Richard F. Weyand

  Stepping It Up

  Dunham, Peters, Saaret, and his wife Suzanne were sitting around the table with their coffee after their Sunday brunch together in the dining room of the Saarets’ apartment on the top floor of the Imperial Palace. Suzanne enforced a strict rule against discussing business during meals, but she had relented about business discussions over coffee afterwards.

  Here on the top floor of the palace, which contained only the apartments of the Emperor and the Co-Consul, also at Suzanne’s suggestion, everyone was on a first-name basis, escaping during their off hours the rigid formalism of the Emperor’s office floor four floors below.

  “So, Geoffrey, what do you think of Sector Governor Walthers’ message from King Michael of Estvia?”

  “I’m not sure what to think, Bobby. Estvia has not exactly been friends with Sintar.”

  “How much of that is our fault, I wonder. Howard Walthers indicated our bureaucracy was continuously tweaking Estvia – in King Michael’s opinion at least – in order to keep low-level hostilities active. Their weapons-manufacturer patrons wanted the increased business such hostilities provided, and paid handsome bribes for maintaining them.”

  “Given how many border fracases we were involved in when you took the Throne, Bobby, I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find out we were the instigators. Defense and Foreign Affairs were the two areas I had perhaps the least visibility into as Chairman of the Council.”

  “I thought he was less than mannerly when you met with him the last time, Bobby,” Peters said. “Downright rude, even.”

  “No doubt about that. But Walthers also indicated King Michael expressed his regrets to Walthers for his behavior at that meeting and would convey his apologies to me in person.”

  “That is unusual between heads of state, I think,” Saaret said. “More likely that it is all taken care of by underlings, and then everybody later pretends it didn’t happen.”

  “Real men don’t have a problem apologizing,” Suzanne said. “When they are wrong, at least. Even when they aren’t, for that matter.”

  She patted Saaret’s hand on the table.

  “It does tend to smooth over difficulties,” Saaret said carefully.

  Suzanne mock-scowled, and Dunham and Peters laughed.

  “What I don’t really know yet is why he wants the meeting,” Dunham said.

  “He didn’t say anything about the topic?” Saaret asked.

  “No. Just that it involved a developing security situation that affected Sintar.”

  Peters had one of the flashes of insight for which she had become famous.

  “Somebody’s trying to stir up trouble,” she said suddenly.

  “Why do you say that, Amanda?” Saaret asked.

  “Ask yourself. If you were trying to start trouble for Sintar, and you wanted to recruit star nations for your little project, where would you start?”

  “With Estvia,” Dunham said.

  Saaret nodded.

  “And King Michael decided he didn’t want to play along,” Saaret said.

  “Apparently not,” Peters said.

  “But who’s trying to cause trouble?” Dunham asked. “We aren’t really having problems with anyone right now.”

  All the reading Amanda did, all the little scraps of information that flowed through her news stream, clicked together.

  “It’s the Democracy of Planets,” she said.

  Saaret looked surprised. Dunham considered.

  “We’re not really having any problem with them right now, Amanda. That would be surprising to me,” Dunham said.

  Amanda was already sorting her data stream, and two items she had seen popped up.

  “I have two sort of unrelated news items. One is that the DP has signed a contract to provide Annalia with warships.”

  “Annalia is a DP client-state. That’s not unusual,” Saaret said.

  “Not export units. Front-line DP warships. Retiring ones, but front-line units nonetheless.”

  “OK, that’s unusual,” Saaret said. “The DP never sells front-line units. To anybody. They scrap them.”

  “Annalia is between Pannia Sector and the DP,” Dunham said. “I don’t like to see them beefing up their navy.”

  “As I say, that’s one item,” Peters said. “The other item only takes on significance in the context of the rest. The DP has started negotiating free trade agreements with star nations farside from us.”

  “Farside?” Saaret asked. “On the other side of us from the DP?”

  “Yes,” Peters said.

  “OK, now that’s weird. The DP doesn’t do a lot of trade out there. Some, sure, but not a lot. What’s the benefit to them of free-trade agreements when there’s so little trade involved?”

  “Exactly,” Peters said. “It struck me as strange, but it didn’t correlate with anything when I saw it. Now it does, though.”

  “I’m lost,” Dunham said. “Why would it make a difference?”

  “Free trade makes for closer relations,” Peter said. “If the DP is courting star nations on the other side of us, they stand to surround the Empire with their friends.”

  “Now I get it. But surely there are other reasons as well.”

  “Could be,” Peters said. “Could be. But I don’t like the look of these things taken together. What if the DP decides to start selling front-line warships to some of those nations as well?”

  “OK, that would be bad,” Dunham said.

  “Well, I guess we won’t know for sure until you meet with King Michael,” Saaret said. “I assume you are going to meet with him, Bobby?”

  “Sure. Why not? More information never hurts.”

  Saaret nodded.

  “On to another topic, then,” Saaret said. “What did you think of the drone battleship testing?”

  “Disappointing, to say the least,” Dunham said. “I guess I didn’t realize our warships were so fragile.”

  “I don’t think it’s that so much as they are complex,” Saaret said. “You can have a very high mean time between failures for each module or system, but when you assemble several thousand of them into a warship, it means something is always breaking.”

  “Yes, I see that,” Dunham said. “And most of those are something the crew takes care of. Hopefully this HARPER idea will give some of that ability back to the crew.”

  “It should,” Peters said. “I’ve been looking into it. The whole idea was actually from a supplier, the design house that won the high-level ship designs. That ‘cupcake with a pencil in it’ design, as it’s been called. Jared Denny has assembled a crew of very bright people around him, including a pair of famous senior engineers. All the engineering types know about these guys. That Denny was able to recruit them as advisers is really impressive.”

  “The idea came from them?” Saaret asked. “So they saw the need on their own?”

  “Yes,” Peters said. “They asked the ship acquisition department to put them in touch with a bunch of senior enlisted types, so they could figure out what the system had to be capable of.”

  “That was smart,” Dunham said. “What do they need from us? Is there anything we can do to move things along?”

  “Why not let them a cost-plus, no-bid contract to mount a prototype system on those six converted battleships, and try the same trip again?” Peters asked. “See what happens.”

  “That sounds smart to me, Bobby,” Saaret said. “Then they’ll have the funds to push this thing along.”

  “Me, too,” Dunham said. “Let’s let Projects know, Geoffrey. And make sure there’s enough money involved to do it right. We have millions of ships that will need this. Whatever it costs to outfit six ships for a good prototype test is worth it.”

  “OK, enough business,” Suzanne said. “I swear, you guys never relax.”

  “What do you mean, Suzanne?” Dunham asked. “We are relaxing.”

  Suzanne just rolled her eyes at the Emperor.

  When Jared Denny checked his mail, he found
a communication from the Imperial ship acquisition department. The subject was ‘Award of Contract.’ That was odd. Perhaps it was just a delayed official communication of their win of the design contest for the high-level warship designs.

  When he opened it, however, it was anything but. It was an open-ended, cost-plus, no-bid contract to outfit twelve converted battleships with installations of a prototype HARPER system. The ‘not to exceed’ amount was in the stratosphere.

  He called an immediate meeting, and sent out a request for Bob Stewart and Ilia Sobol to attend if they could make it.

  “All right, so here’s what we have,” Denny said. “We just got an open-ended contract on a no-bid basis to outfit twelve crewless converted battleships with a prototype HARPER system for testing. It’s cost-plus, and the ‘not to exceed’ amount is breathtaking. I don’t even know where this came from.”

  “I might be able to shed some light on that last,” Bob Stewart said. “I received permission to fill you in on a little consulting project I worked on the last couple weeks.

  “The Imperial Navy sent six converted battleships out on a three-hop, three-hundred-sixty light-year test run. Three ships emerging from this short cruise were still combat capable. Two ships suffered module failures of the exact sort we have considered a basic function of the HARPER system. The other ship never emerged from hyperspace on its last leg.

  “That last ship hasn’t shown up yet, but we suspect it will drop out of hyperspace when it runs out of reaction mass somewhere in Carolina Sector. It will still have power, just not reaction mass, so it will get in touch then and tell us where it is so we can go out and fetch it and see what went wrong.

  “I was asked to look at the navigation system and try to figure out how it could have not dropped out of hyperspace. There are two redundant systems that calculate the proper time to drop out of hyperspace, but there is one system that compares the two and approves the decision. Clearly, that is the likely failure point.”

  “They ran the output of two redundant systems through a common failure point?” Denny asked.

  “Oh, yes. Happens all the time. Network engineers put in redundant communications cables and then the installers run them through the same conduit, or there is a redundant hydraulic system and the hydraulic lines get run in parallel right next to each other. Very common. I was looking for it, actually.

  “So that failure, too, is likely a simple module replacement. I mean, they have to fix the setup so the ship does drop out of hyperspace before the HARPER system could be used, but that is easy to fix now that we know – or think we know – where the problem is.

  “In any case, that is the event driving the sudden urgency to get the HARPER system deployed, at least as a prototype to see if we can have a combat-capable squadron at the end of what should be pretty routine maneuvers.”

  “OK, well, that makes sense, I guess,” Denny said. “Any ideas how we should proceed on this, Bob? Or you, Ilia?”

  “I would think you would want to overdo it,” Sobol said. “As an example, if you think a dozen Harper units would be the optimum contingent for a battleship, mount two dozen for the prototype testing. We will then find out how many are actually required, based on what gets used. If you go too low, however, you will learn it is not enough, but not know how many it should have been.”

  “I see,” Denny said. “If some don’t get used, they don’t get used.”

  “Exactly,” Sobol said.

  “Just using those numbers, that would be a hundred and forty-four HARPER units of multiple types. I will take us forever.”

  “Oh, no. You use a prototyping shop. You don’t actually build them all. You send them the plans, pictures, samples, whatever, and they ramp up and build them.”

  “That’s pretty expensive,” Denny said.

  “You said the ‘do not exceed’ number was breathtaking, right?” Stewart asked. “The Navy’s in a hurry, and they made the money available. The only failure mode now is not getting it done quickly.”

  “All right, I get it. OK. Thanks, Bob, Ilia. I think we have it from here.”

  Sobol and Stewart dropped out of the VR meeting, and Denny opened the floor to the rest of the group.

  “So what do we do first?”

  “Specify the charging racks and get them done first, so the spacedocks can mount them on the ships,” Bertha Townsend said. “That will be a pacing item.”

  “True enough,” Denny said. “What else?”

  “I should probably start on a training video for the crew members, so they see how to work these things,” Freja Gunnarsson said.

  “That’s another good one,” Denny said. “I didn’t even think of that one.”

  “I will look into what prototyping shops are available for a rush, big-ticket project like this,” Vipin Narang said.

  “I’ll see what Bob Fielding has for prints on those brackets he’s been making,” Liu Jiang said. “And I guess I ought to look into some quantity pricing on those subassemblies we’ve been buying as one-offs.”

  “OK, everybody have assignments?” Denny asked. “As you come up with ideas, message them around. Oh, and don’t forget to track your time. We’re on the meter now.”

  The sixth battleship, HMS Peregrine, did show up eventually. It dropped out of hyperspace in Admiral Shvetz’s command area and was picked up by a tug and dragged to spacedock on Draco. As Bob Stewart had anticipated, the hyperspace navigation comparator unit had failed. It was a simple module replacement. The ship’s reaction mass tanks were refilled and the ship’s crew ran it back to Osaka without incident.

  By the time it got back, power lines for charging HARPER system units were being run on the squadron’s ships.

  “There’s only one thing I don’t get,” Senior Chief Harmon Cooper said.

  “What’s that, Coop?” Senior Chief Daniel Yates asked.

  “So the yard crews go aboard that goofy remote-control battleship from Honshu Sector, right?”

  “Yeah?”

  “And they run diagnostics on the navigation system, and it’s got a bad comparator, right?”

  “Yeah?”

  “So how does some guy a thousand light-years away figure out the failure before the fuckin’ ship even drops outta hyperspace? That’s the part I don’t get, Danny.”

  “Coop. It was Robert Stewart.”

  “Not that Robert Stewart?”

  Cooper jerked a thumb over his shoulder in his office on Imperial Fleet Base Draco, to where several books by Robert Stewart were on his quick-access shelf, including the classic ‘Fault and Failure Analysis in Complex Military Systems.’

  “One and the same.”

  “OK, well that makes sense. Fuck. Robert Fucking Stewart. Imagine that.”

  A More Cordial Meeting

  King Michael VI was waiting in the featureless VR meeting room when Dunham logged into the simulation. Both wore simple business suits. King Michael stood alongside a pair of club chairs waiting for the Emperor, who was a couple of minutes early.

  “Good morning, Your Majesty,” King Michael said, walking forward to shake the Emperor’s hand.

  “Good morning, Your Highness.”

  Estvia and Sintar being several hours out of sync at the moment, it was afternoon in Sintar, but the etiquette was the etiquette, and King Michael, having asked for the meeting, was the host.

  “Please, Your Majesty, have a seat.”

  They both sat and Dunham waited.

  “Your Majesty, I want to convey my apologies for my behavior at our last meeting. As I’m sure you are aware, it was a strategy, one that would have worked with the Sintaran Council members I had met, such as Lord Pomeroy.”

  “Apology accepted, Your Highness. For what it’s worth, I agree it would have goaded our self-important, erstwhile Councilor for Defense into doing something rash or stupid. Or perhaps both.”

  “In any case, my strategy didn’t work. I misread you, Your Majesty. I will not do so again.”

&nb
sp; “Let’s move forward, Your Highness. You asked for this meeting.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty. Very gracious. The reason I requested this meeting is I had a very interesting meeting with the ambassador to Estvia from the Democracy of Planets.”

  Dunham, of course, was expecting this. Peters had scored again.

  “Indeed, Your Highness.”

  “Yes. He had come to share with me the DP’s concerns that Sintar was apparently becoming expansionist and would pose a security concern to Estvia.”

  Dunham snorted.

  “Not likely.”

  “Agreed, Your Majesty. In making his argument, the DP ambassador pointed out your hiatus in building warships, your over-production of long-haul freighters, and your annexation of Pannia as evidence of your intent.”

  “The annexation of Pannia was at King Howard’s request, Your Highness.”

  “As Sector Governor Walthers assured me in our meeting, Your Majesty. I don’t know how much of a student of sector history you are, but Pannia’s House of Walthers and Estvia’s House of Roberts have been friends since the Fifty Years War that resulted in the devastation from which the Kingdom of Sintar assembled the Sintaran Empire.”

  “I majored in military and political history, Your Highness, and have become more well-read in the field since.”

  “Ah. Excellent.”

  “So how does, in the DP ambassador’s formulation, ceasing the construction of warships and instead building long-haul freighters signal a growing expansionism, Your Highness?”

  “Sintar is obviously, in his view, planning to expand its commercial contacts and influence with other star nations through the use of these long-haul freighters, with a political consolidation of its resulting sphere of influence to follow.”

  “That’s a tortured logic at best, Your Highness.”

  “Oh, I agree, Your Majesty. The larger point, though, is the DP is out among the independent star nations working up hostility to Sintar. There are many ways this could end badly. And if it comes to armed conflict, I would not have Estvia be on the losing side.”