Commander

by Richard F. Weyand

  The head of the ‘baby staff’ was Judy Ericson, a woman in her fifties who had four children and five grandchildren herself and was a nurse with emergency-room experience. She had weekdays, and supervised the others, who were all in their thirties.

  The other woman on day shift taught infant sign language. Babies didn’t have spoken language until about two years old, but that was due to the delay in the development of the speech centers of the brain and the mastery of the mouth’s speech capability. Manual dexterity started much earlier, and so babies could learn to sign much earlier than they could talk. It was a lot easier keeping babies happy when they could tell you what they wanted. The twins would start signing at about six months.

  The women who had weekend days and evenings, in addition to being nurses, were lifeguard and infant swimming instructors. Infants could learn to swim early because they floated so high in the water and had instinctive reactions to being in the water. When they started crawling and running, they leaned out and their buoyancy decreased. If they had already learned to swim, they already had the moves and the enjoyment of the water under their belt and could handle it easily. The twins would start swimming lessons immediately.

  Peters and Dunham lay on the big double chaise on the pool deck, watching Sean and Dee getting their first dips in the pool with their swimming instructors. Peters was wearing a bikini and Dunham was wearing his trunks, partly out of deference to the staff and partly because the nursing Peters really needed the support of the bikini top to be comfortable.

  “My God, they float halfway out of the water,” Dunham said.

  “Chubby little things. So tiny. They seem to like it, though.”

  “Well, they’re not that tiny anymore. Nine, ten pounds. I’m more worried they’ll be cold.”

  “That water’s pretty warm, Bobby. We bumped the temperature up to the recommendation of their teachers. It was pretty warm for swimming laps.”

  “Ah.”

  After half an hour in the pool, the two staffers took the babies into the cabana and changed them into dry diapers, then brought them back out to Peters for nursing.

  “At least they’re up to six hours at night now,” Peters said. “I’m finally getting some sleep.”

  “Still only three hours during the day, though.”

  “More like three-and-a-half or four, but they have to be fed separately, at least for now. Hopefully I can get to tandem nursing soon. It just takes so long, one after the other.”

  “At least Sean seems willing to wait until Dee is done,” Bobby said. “You don’t have them both fussing at the same time.”

  “Yeah, he’s definitely on a longer interval than she is. He’s happy to wait, as long as somebody is holding him. If they were identical, they would probably both be on the same schedule.”

  “That would be awful.”

  Bobby was holding Sean, who was napping on his chest as Dee nursed. Once in a while, she would nod off, and Peters would shift her to waken her, and she would nurse some more.

  “No, you don’t, little one. No sleeping on the titty.”

  When Dee was finished, they swapped babies, with Dunham burping Dee. The staffers were taking a break, drinking water on chairs on the pool deck until it was time to take them down for their naps.

  “So with all this going on, I haven’t been paying much attention to the outside world. What’s going on?” Peters asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing,” Dunham said. “Everything is quiet at the moment. No more raiders, but we keep escorting because we know as soon as we stop, they’ll be back. We keep getting occasional complaints from the independent star nations, but they’ve gotten pretty pro forma by now.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t, either.”

  “It’s too quiet.”

  “Exactly.”

  “The calm before the storm?” Peters asked.

  “Perhaps. I think we have time before things really go off the rails. There’ll be an increase in tensions. The independent star nations will unite in some form of alliance. Things like that. I doubt it would just explode out of nowhere.”

  “You’re not relying on that, are you?”

  “No,” Dunham said. “I gave Admiral Leicester a war warning a month or so back.”

  “Good.”

  “I told him I thought it would two to five years, and I still do, but the Navy needs to be ready and able to respond whenever it happens.”

  “Sensible. Did you tell him about Project X?” Peters asked.

  “Yes. We should be getting some test results back soon.”

  “That will be interesting.”

  “Yes.”

  The staffers came up as Sean was finished nursing. Dunham handed off Dee to one staffer, while the other took Sean from Peters to burp him. They headed for the escalator down to the kids’ bedroom.

  “I also told Admiral Leicester that, if war comes to us, we will win it, and, to that end, none of our capabilities would be off the table.”

  “Oh, my.”

  “Losing by holding back is not a game I will play, Amanda. Losing is not an option.”

  The Imperial Navy maintained several deep-space weapons test sites where missiles, point-defense systems, and other potential weapons systems were tested. They also maintained several dozen more locations that were also banned for commercial traffic, to hide the active locations.

  Rather than warheads, missiles were equipped with sensors to detect point-defense laser hits. The point-defense lasers themselves were run at a fraction of one percent of their battlefield output power. The missiles, at the end of their attack run, instead of exploding, veered off for retrieval.

  The Imperial Navy had been doing such testing a long time. Now, instead of using special crews stationed to the test site for a deployment, they used crews from across the Navy who were already piloting the new or converted remotely crewed warships.

  One such testing scenario had just concluded.

  “That was pretty piss-poor shooting, Mr. Kennelly.”

  “No doubt about it, Sir. We have a hell of a time hitting them until they’re right on top of us.”

  “Can you not see them?”

  “That’s the tough part, Sir. We can see them, but when we shoot at them, we miss. They aren’t actually where the sensors report them to be. It’s the darnedest thing. We can’t get their actual locations until they’re almost halfway across the engagement envelope.”

  “All right. We have another run coming up. This time we’re supposed to use the new software load. So let’s get that set up and give them the go-ahead.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Another scenario played out, using real weapons against real ships, across the firing range of the test center.

  “There you go, Mr. Kennelly. Nice shooting.”

  “Thank you, Sir. The new software did it. It took a little longer to resolve trajectories, but it closed on the actual position. On that run we were at about ninety-five percent of our normal engagement range.”

  “So the software makes a big difference.”

  “Yes, Sir. Anybody without similar software on their systems, though, is gonna have a really bad day.”

  “We’ve gotten some results back from the missile testing,” Jared Denny told the team.

  “What’s the bottom line?” Vipin Narang asked.

  “Against Imperial sensor suites, an average reduction in the engagement envelope of a bit over forty-one percent.”

  “We had projected what? Like forty percent,” Liu Jiang said.

  “That’s right.”

  “So we’re right on the projections. Even a little better. And we projected what, against DP systems?” Liu asked.

  “Fifty percent.”

  “OK, so it’s probably even a bit better than that. What about when using the modified software?” Narang asked.

  “Again, on average, ninety-six percent of the engagement
envelope was intact. The initial resolution time was a bit longer.”

  “Well, I would call that success,” Liu said.

  “So does the Navy,” Denny said.

  “Good morning, Admiral Leicester.”

  “Good morning, Your Majesty.”

  “You have test results of the ECM system to report this morning, Admiral Leicester?”

  “Yes, Sire. I have the executive summary here.”

  Leicester pushed Dunham the document in VR, and Dunham scanned through it.

  “This is outstanding, Admiral Leicester.”

  “Yes, Sire. It will be particularly devastating until they figure out what is happening. They will waste point-defense lasers shots on chimera, overheating and taxing their systems. But they can’t afford not to take those shots, because the point-defense lasers in a coordinated defense plan have worse hit rates in the inner half of the engagement envelope than they do in the outer half.”

  “Why would that be, Admiral Leicester? I would think that, as they got closer, they would be easier to hit.”

  “If you’re the target vessel, yes, Sire, that’s true. But in a coordinated defense plan, you might be shooting at a missile targeting another ship. As that missile gets closer, it is moving faster across your field of view.”

  “Ah. I see.”

  Dunham looked down the numbers in the executive summary again.

  “And the new software package defeats the system, Admiral Leicester. Can they come up with a similar defense?”

  “Yes, Sire. A couple of things to note there. First is that, unlike us, they won’t have much of a clue what we’re doing. They’ll have to reverse engineer what we’re doing from their own ships’ sensor recordings. And given the effectiveness of this attack, those will probably be hard to come by. Second, our hardware systems and theirs are different. They can’t simply copy the code and run it on their systems, so stealing the code is unlikely to prove very helpful. Third, because the systems are different, we’re not sure to what extent they could modify their code in the same way.”

  “Well, all of this is tremendous news, Admiral Leicester. I want you to be thinking about the best way to use this new system. I think we can assume that, at some point, our enemy, whoever it is, is going to figure it out and design their own counter to it. We need to make sure we get the most out of it while the surprise lasts.”

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “On to the next matter, Admiral Leicester. How is the new warship construction going?”

  “Very well, Sire. Mr. Dunlop has told the shipbuilders that early deliveries result in contract extensions for additional ships. The shipbuilders have responded by running flat out. They are also exceeding the turnaround on spacedocks compared to what we forecast.”

  “Excellent, Admiral Leicester. Now, with so many ships coming on-line, how are we deploying them to best defend the Empire?”

  “On defense, Sire, the picket ships are tremendous weapons. It’s just a terrific anti-ship system, and they’re cheap to build. The shipbuilders are turning them out like potato chips. This has significantly impacted our deployment plan. Our plan now is to park a few dozen picket ships a light-year or so away from every Imperial planet.”

  “All hundred and fifty-five thousand Imperial planets, Admiral Leicester?”

  “Yes, Sire. If an invading fleet comes into the system, the local picket ships running hyperspace sensor duty whistle for the relief, and those standby picket ships come into the system and swarm the attackers.”

  “Those picket ships need a hypergate for that, Admiral Leicester.”

  “Yes, Sire. About ten percent of Imperial planets have some fleet presence. Those detachments always include a projector ship. For the others, there are these small hypergates. We have a bunch of them, but nowhere near enough. They are not used much in the current strategic structure – it’s more of an emergency type of thing – but it’s a proven design. We’ve asked Mr. Dunlop to buy us enough more of them to put at least one with the standby picket ships in every Imperial system. Finally, there are some small hypergate projectors we can mount on light cruisers. They can’t take the tonnage of a capital ship, but they can handle picket ships, freighters, and light cruisers.”

  “And the defenses for Sintar, Admiral Leicester? I expect trouble to land here if it gets bad. And without the Throne, there is no Empire.”

  “Yes, Sire. We are planning a large standby picket ship force for Sintar.”

  “How large, Admiral Leicester?”

  “We’re still debating that, Sire. At full deployment? Perhaps a million.”

  “That’s a lot of ships, Admiral Leicester.”

  “Yes, Sire. But they are coming out of manufacturing very fast, and as the shipbuilders get more experience with them, the prices are really coming down.”

  “And your plans for offensive deployments, Admiral Leicester?”

  “We anticipate several waves of battle, Sire. For the initial provocations, we will not use the ECM units on the picket ships. For the first large wave of attacks, the initial ones once full-scale war is underway, we will use the picket ships with the ECM. The ECM will thus be new to them when we need it most. That should catch them by surprise.”

  “Excellent, Admiral Leicester. And further operations?”

  “We will bring in our converted ships at that point, Sire. These are the ships that would go to the breakers anyway as we roll out the new-design warships. They are still quite effective missile platforms, however.”

  “And the new-design warships, Admiral Leicester?”

  “We are reserving those for the DP, Sire. They will learn a lot from our conflict with the independents, but that knowledge will prove useless if it comes to hostilities between us and the DP. They will be facing our new construction for the first time.”

  “Excellent, Admiral Leicester. Thank you for indulging my curiosity.”

  “Of course, Sire.”

  Project X Continues

  Jared Denny should have been used to getting messages under an Imperial header by this point, but it shocked him every time. He accepted the VR connection, and found himself in a simulation of what he assumed was the Emperor’s office in the Imperial Palace on Sintar. The Emperor sat behind his desk as before.

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “Be seated, Mr. Denny.”

  “Thank you, Sire.”

  “Mr. Denny, I need, for my own use, a list of all the members of your organization and their shipping addresses. Can you get that for me?”

  “Of course, Sire.”

  “The other thing I would like to do is speak to your group. What is the best time to do that?”

  Denny consulted an office tool he had that coordinated meetings across planets and time zones. Since planets’ days wandered in and out of sync with each other, and he had eighteen people on eighteen different planets, such a tool was a requirement to plan any sort of meeting for the minimum disruption on people’s sleep.

  “Given the planets’ days right now, Sire, four o’clock in the afternoon in Imperial City is the best time.”

  “Very well, Mr. Denny. Could you call your group together for four o’clock this afternoon Imperial City time? I would like to speak to them.”

  “Of course, Sire.”

  “Send me the channel information, Mr. Denny, and I’ll see you then.”

  Denny sent a copy of Sintar Specialty Services’ staff roster, including Robert Stewart and Ilia Sobol, to the Emperor. He then sent out a message to the fifteen other engineers and his two senior advisers. He labeled it ‘Important Meeting’ and ‘Don’t miss it or you’ll be sorry,’ and added ‘Be early.’ He wasn’t sure what the Emperor had in mind, but meeting the Emperor, even as an avatar, was no small thing.

  People began showing up ten minutes early, and everyone was there at least three minutes early, including Stewart and Sobol.

  “Thanks for coming, everybody. We will have a visitor today, and I didn’t want anybody to
miss out.”

  “Who is it?” Narang asked.

  “You’ll see. It’s only fair you be as shocked as I was.”

  At precisely four o’clock, Denny got a warning message of the incoming VR connection. He had just enough time to say, “The Emperor Trajan,” before Emperor Trajan and Empress Amanda appeared in the speaker’s well in front of the group in the small lecture room. Dunham’s avatar was dressed in his business suit, the Sintar Cross on his lapel, while Peters’s avatar was her last public image, from the Imperial wedding, in long white dress and barefoot, the crown jewels across her chest and her hair entwined with multi-colored roses. She stood to the Emperor’s right.

  Everyone shot to their feet.

  “Good afternoon, everyone,” Dunham said. “Thank you for coming. Please be seated.”

  Everyone sat down. Most just gaped at the Emperor and Empress. They had been completely blindsided.

  “I was reviewing the changes we have made in our Imperial Navy. New warship designs that can outmaneuver and out-accelerate anyone else’s ships. Crewless designs, only made possible by the HARPER repair units. Picket ships with attack capability. Electronic countermeasures in our missile salvos, making them much more effective.

  “Then I realized all those changes originated here. With this group. And when we were not quick enough to actually give you the assignment, you realized the need and just went ahead and did it on your own. That is extraordinary.

  “I wondered what sort of thing I could do to say thank you for the work you have done on behalf of the people of Sintar. A cash prize wouldn’t do it. You are all in the process of becoming wealthy off your own efforts. You need nothing given to you.

  “And then Milady Empress suggested the solution. It is not often awarded, and almost never to civilians, but I realized it was just right. It was something only I could give you, but which you had all absolutely earned. The Gratitude of the Throne.”

  At this, an image projected on the classroom display behind Dunham, showing the laurel-wreath pin of the award.