Commander

by Richard F. Weyand

  “But picket ships have a limited range for detecting hyperspace wakes from fleet movements. And it occurred to me, what if we forward-deployed picket ships? Put them way out, outside of Sintar, in open space, or in some other nation’s space, and monitored fleet movements not just in and close to Sintar, but much farther away. Maybe throughout human space.”

  “You would still need a hypergate,” Sobol said.

  “And refueling. Reaction mass, anyway,” Stewart said.

  “Sure. So what would be the minimum complement? You need a freighter for refueling of reaction mass. And you need a projector ship. Or maybe a freighter with a projector. Isn’t that a modular unit? Isn’t there a projector made that mounts on a light cruiser or freighter, assuming it’s large enough to have the power reserve?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Stewart said.

  “And refilling picket ships with reaction mass is not required very often, but when it is, is that handled automatically?”

  “Yes. There’s no guy out there in a space suit with a hose or something, if that’s what you mean. It’s robotic.”

  “All right. So say we put a bunch of units out there. A freighter with a projector, a couple of picket ships, out in the middle of nowhere. Picket ships – our current ones, anyway – don’t make much of a hyperspace wake. If we pick the right spots, they’ll be out of range of detection of planetary pickets. But the range on fleet movements is pretty long. We could collect data from all over space. Send that all back to one big database, and–“

  “And you could map all fleet traffic anywhere in space,” Sobol said. “It’s brilliant.”

  “We actually have everything we need right now, I think,” Stewart said. “There are plenty of big modern freighters around. The hyperspace projector module for freighters is a limited-capacity unit, but we’re talking just picket ships here, plus the freighter itself, of course, when it heads back for refilling. The only thing we don’t have is the central computing software to collect all the data and map all fleet movements in space.”

  “Leave that part to me,” Denny said.

  Denny didn’t know where to go with this one. He didn’t feel good taking this one to Fred Dunlop. It wasn’t properly a ship acquisition question. And, if it were to be implemented, it would have to be held very closely. The more he thought about it, the more he circled in on one solution. He called up the mail address, stared at it in his VR for a long time, and then screwed up his courage and put through the meeting request.

  He was waiting in the simulated meeting room when the Empress Consort Amanda appeared in the chair opposite him.

  “Yes, Mr. Denny. How may I help you?”

  “That is an incredibly good idea,” Dunham said to Peters that evening as they sat at the picnic table in the Emperor’s private gardens, watching the fire dance in the fire pit. The twins were down for their first sleep of the night.

  “I thought so, too. Mr. Denny had checked it with his advisers, Mr. Sobol and Mr. Stewart, but he didn’t say anything to anyone else because he thought it should best be kept very secret.”

  “Oh, I agree. If anyone else knew we had the capability, they would change their fleet movements, stop spacing in squadrons and such, and disappear among the commercial traffic. If they don’t know we have it, though, we can keep track of what’s going on.”

  “So he had a couple of questions. One was, where do we get all the big, modern freighters that would be able to meet the power requirements?”

  Dunham chuckled.

  “Oh, I think Mr. Stauss likely has several thousand, or tens of thousands, still lying around.”

  “Buy them at the current going rate?” Peters asked.

  “Well, with some volume pricing, I suppose, but sure. He’s the one who took the chance after all.”

  “Put the remote-piloting apparatus on them that we’re using in converting warships?”

  “Of course.”

  “Another question he had is the hypergate projectors. Can we get enough of them made fast enough to make a difference?”

  “Did you look into that one?” Dunham asked.

  “Yes. Not a problem. The manufacture of the hypergate projectors is completely automated, and we’re already buying them for mounting on light cruisers so they can transit picket ships.”

  “OK, so that one is just increase the order size and pay the schedule premium to get them faster.”

  “Correct. His other question was if we wanted him to work on the software to collect and coordinate all the data, and, if so, who would be the right contact in the Imperial Navy.”

  “He wants a sensor analysis wizard to teach him all the tricks.”

  “Yes, basically,” Peters said.

  “I have just the person.”

  The response to Denny’s call to the Empress came from another direction altogether.

  “Denny here.”

  “Hello, Mr. Denny. My name is Captain Dorothy Conroy. I understand you have a little project for us to work on.”

  Project Far Sight

  Captain Dorothy Conroy had spoken to the Emperor once before, after her sensor analysis in Pannia had detected both the feint by Celestia and the incipient attack by Berinia. He had contacted her that first time directly, to commend her for that work, to announce her promotion to captain, and to give her both the Distinguished Service ribbon and the laurel wreath of the Gratitude of the Throne.

  So she had seen the Imperial header on a meeting request before, but she wasn’t expecting it any more than she had been the first time.

  When she took the meeting with the Emperor, seated behind his desk in the VR simulation of his office in the Imperial Palace on Sintar, all he did was ask her if she had a competent second in her current department. When she said she did, he told her he had a special project for her, detached her from her current duty, and told her to contact a Mr. Jared Denny at such-and-such a mail address.

  No briefing, no information, no command structure.

  It didn’t look any more promising when she contacted Denny. They had their first meeting in a featureless meeting room simulation in VR. He was very young, perhaps thirty, though he looked younger. He was a civilian, with all that implied. Even his avatar was casual, a mismatched sport coat thrown on over an engineer’s daily work uniform of casual pants and shirt, a hand run through his medium-length hair.

  And then she saw it. On the lapel of his sport coat. The laurel wreath of the Gratitude of the Throne. When she had received the award, she had done some research on it, and she knew just how rare they were. There was unlikely to be another person on his planet, or even in his province, who wore it, and it was fifty-fifty there was even another in his sector.

  This could work out after all.

  Good morning, Captain Conroy. Thank you for meeting with me,” Denny said as they shook hands. “Please, have a seat.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Denny.”

  “How much were you told about what we’re going to work on?”

  “Nothing at all. The Emperor contacted me directly and told me to report to you and assist on whatever you’re working on.”

  “And your specialty, Captain?”

  “Hyperspace sensor analysis.”

  “Excellent. All right, Captain, this is it in a nutshell. We are going to build a real-time hyperspace map of all military traffic in human space.”

  “That’s a tall order, Mr. Denny. And tremendously useful if it can be done. The mind boggles.”

  “Indeed. And as far as I know, there are six people who know anything about it. Me, my two senior advisers, the Empress, the Emperor, and you. That’s it.”

  “How did the Emperor and the Empress learn about it?”

  Denny shrugged.

  “I called the Empress directly. I didn’t want to run it through channels. I thought it should probably be held closer than that.”

  Conroy nodded. Such a capability would be huge, and even more powerful if no one else knew they had it. Not unti
l it was too late anyway. And that Denny both could and would contact the Empress directly indicated he was well regarded in the Imperial Palace. That sort of respect, under this Emperor, had to be earned.

  “Well, I’m all ears, Mr. Denny. Just how do you propose to do that?”

  Denny explained to her the basic outlines of his scheme. Conroy was stunned. Deploying how many sensor platforms? In other star nations’ territory? Their claimed volumes, anyway. Most of space was unpatrolled. It was just too vast. The tiny islands of humanity scattered across the incredible volume of even this small fraction of the galaxy were patrolled in their near neighborhoods, but that left more than ninety-nine percent of human space empty and unpatrolled.

  “So I think the first question we need to answer is how many platforms do we need to deploy to cover all of human space well enough to see at least squadron movements, no matter where they occur,” Denny concluded.

  “That’s the first question?”

  “Yes. There is a lead time in obtaining the freighters, and the hypergate projectors. We can work out the details once we tell the Emperor, in round numbers, how many observation positions we need. We need to do that first.”

  Conroy just gaped at him. The breathtaking speed with which this project might move shocked her.

  “War is coming, Captain. The Emperor knows it. He doesn’t want it, but he will have every advantage he can get going into it. If we tell them, today, how many ships we need, I would expect those ships to be purchased within the week. We should start deploying platforms within the month.”

  Conroy shook herself out of her amazement.

  “Very well, Mr. Denny. The numbers are large, though. Given a volume of perhaps a hundred billion cubic light-years, and a detection radius for squadron sized movements of perhaps a hundred light-years, that comes to... twenty-five thousand platforms? Something like that. But we can’t do twenty-five thousand platforms, can we?”

  “Why not?” Denny asked. “To have a real-time plot of every warship squadron in human space? Sounds pretty cheap to me. We should probably plan on thirty thousand to be sure. Maintenance and all. So thirty thousand freighters, and probably ninety thousand picket ships. I’ll let His Majesty know.”

  Denny got an absent look on his face for a moment, then returned his attention to Conroy.

  “All right, that takes the pressure off for the moment. Now, I believe there is a three-dimensional map of human space maintained by the Imperial Navy from navigational data, is that correct?”

  “Wait a second. Did you just send that estimate to the Emperor?”

  “Yes. Of course. We need to get those freighters, fit them with VR controls, and mount hypergate projectors on them.”

  “But what if it comes out to be twenty thousand?”

  “Then we’ll have extra.”

  “Or forty thousand?”

  “Then we’ll buy more.”

  “Mr. Denny–“

  She shook her head once again at his ruthless dispatch.

  “I don’t know about you, Captain, but I love living in the Sintaran Empire. Being subject to another government is not high on my list of priorities.”

  Conroy began to understand how and why Mr. Denny had earned the Gratitude of the Throne once already. There had been a number of roll-outs in the Imperial Navy over the past three or four years that had happened with breakneck speed. Crewless ships. New warship designs. The HARPER units. Virtually invulnerable picket ships with offensive capability. She wondered just how many of them had come through Jared Denny. Perhaps all of them. At the rate he moved, he had had the time.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Denny. So what was your question again?”

  “The three-dimensional map of human space.”

  “Ah, yes. The Imperial Navy maintains such a map from navigational data. It’s what we use now to display hyperspace sensor readings in our area of operations. We zoom in on whatever portion of it we need to view.”

  “So the interface into that map for hyperspace sensor data is already in place?”

  “Yes, of course. I’m not sure how much data we can feed into the map given the current implementation. We run it on shipboard computers. We may need to get much bigger computational resources to handle the data. And of course we need to feed all the data from every picket ship, everywhere, into that map, continuously.”

  Denny made a note in his VR.

  “All right, Captain. I’ll take care of that. Now we need to talk about the tricks of the trade.”

  The message Dunham got was short:

  Denny to Dunham: Estimate 30,000 sites. One freighter and three picket ships each.

  Dunham sent it on to Peters, in the Co-Consul’s office.

  Fred Dunlop looked at the latest request out of Projects. Project Far Sight. Never heard of it. What did they want? Thirty thousand freighters? Of course, with a Navy as large as the Imperial Navy, that wasn’t a particularly large number, but it also wasn’t a two-year contract. It read “For IMMEDIATE purchase and modification per the following,” and listed the addition of VR remote controls and hypergate projector modules as well as a full-up reaction mass refueling rig.

  He looked at the sign-offs. There was just one, from the Co-Consul’s office. ‘A. Peters.’ That got his attention. If the Empress wanted thirty thousand freighters right away, he would get her thirty thousand freighters right away.

  He searched the ships-available listing, and unbelievably found a single supplier that had thirty thousand freighters available for purchase immediately. Stauss Freighter Leasing, on Hesse, in Baden Sector.

  Even better, the freighters themselves were scattered across a hundred different systems, all of which had major shipyards for doing the modifications, and all the freighters were new.

  Otto Stauss was a bit worried. He had been leasing out freighters – tens of thousands of them – since the shortage caused by the upsurge in naval ship building he had forecast. It was clear now the move would pay off handsomely in the medium term. It was the short term he was worried about.

  His loan contract with the Imperial Bank had delayed the initial payment two years. He had made that payment, and barely made the second, but he was coming up on his third annual loan payment to the Imperial Bank. The way things were going, he wouldn’t make it this time. The slower growth of international shipping due to the commerce raider scare had meant a slower lease-out than he had anticipated.

  “Mr. Stauss, a Mr. Dunlop is on the phone for you.”

  “Stauss here.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Stauss. Fred Dunlop here. I am the department head for the ship acquisition department of the Imperial Navy.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Dunlop. What can I do for you?”

  “Mr. Stauss, I need to buy freighters. The big international ones. And I need a lot of them.”

  “Freighters I have, Mr. Dunlop. Buy rather than lease?”

  “Yes, Mr. Stauss. Some of them may get, er, broken.”

  “How many did you have in mind?”

  “Thirty thousand, for immediate delivery.”

  Stauss’s heart skipped a beat. That kind of money would pay several years of interest payments. He kept his voice level as he replied.

  “Mr. Dunlop, I actually have sufficient inventory to fill that order. I doubt anyone else does.”

  “I understand, Mr. Stauss. Now, the Navy is going to want quantity pricing, you understand.”

  “Absolutely, Mr. Dunlop. That won’t be a problem at all. I believe you have a generally accepted formula for that, applied against the current market price of single units. Would that be acceptable?”

  It was Dunlop’s turn to breathe a sigh of relief. The standard discount would be perfect. Given that Stauss was the only one who could meet the order – and with identical new ships of the proper size, no less – he had been worried about price gouging. Piecing out the contract would be a major pain.

  “Perfectly acceptable, Mr. Stauss.”

  “Very good, Mr. Du
nlop. Let me add my banker to this conversation, and we can hammer out the details.”

  “What the hell we doin’ with these?” asked Paul Heller, the yard chief of the General Space and Specialties Corporation spacedock facility on Helsinki, the capital planet of the Helsinki Sector. “These ain’t even warships.”

  “Easy one. Fill it up full of reaction mass tanks, add a refueling rig, a HARPERs box, and a spares box, and give it a hypergate projector. Oh, and VR remote controls,” said Walter Swanson, the chief engineer at the Helsinki facility.

  “Well, that ain’t gonna take long. How many we got to do?”

  “Looks like...“ Swanson dragged it out as he checked his sheet, “five hundred.”

  “Across all twelve docks?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Figure one a shift.... Call it a couple weeks.”

  “Good enough.”

  “Oh, that’s assuming the reaction mass tanks aren’t put on in spacedock. They can do that direct from shuttles.”

  “Understood. That’s what I was thinking.”

  “OK. Just makin’ sure we’re on the same page. Yeah. Two weeks. No problem.”

  When the freighters were deployed, they and their picket ships moved out of the normal shipping lanes well inside the Sintaran Empire. In hyperspace, they threaded the gaps between the hyperspace detection spheres of populated planets, working their way through the gaps and empty volumes of space to their patrol positions.

  When they got there, they dropped out of hyperspace. The picket ships topped off reaction mass from the huge freighter’s eighteen hundred containers. The freighter then projected its hypergate, and the first picket ship took up its patrol.

  When that first picket ship dropped out of hyperspace eight hours later, it reported its scans back to Sintar as the freighter projected its hypergate again, and the second picket ship began its patrol.