A Question of Faith: A Castle Federation Novella

by Glynn Stewart

  “Senator Pan, Senator Christensen, Senator Falk,” he continued. “I’ll admit, I’m only used to meeting Senators one at a time. What’s going on?”

  “You’re familiar with the Boudicca System,” Senator Falk said immediately. The dark-haired woman was the current Senator for Castle itself, the first-among-equals of the Federation’s executive branch.

  “A long-standing trade partner of ours,” Darius replied instantly. “Current trade volume around two trillion annually, twenty-five light-years from Castle and sixteen from Aballava.”

  “And, like most of our trade partners, operating under a promise of protection from the Federation in the face of major threats,” Falk completed. “They have activated that part of their trade agreement with us.”

  “And the Counter-Clockward Fleet is the closest major military formation, of course,” Darius agreed. “Have they briefed us on what kind of threat they’re facing? I’d prefer to deploy the correct level of force.”

  “It’s not clear,” Carson cut in. “The only solid data we have is that someone ambushed and destroyed Defiant while she was patrolling the outer system. She was an older vessel but still an A-S battleship.”

  “So, they’re running panicked,” Darius said crisply, considering the situation. “Are we showing the flag or seriously attempting to handle the problem?”

  Falk closed her eyes for several long seconds, then focused her gaze on him. Everyone else on the call waited to let her field that question.

  “I appreciate your frankness, Admiral,” she finally said. “And to be equally frank, were the situation different, I would leave the force levels entirely to you and Admiral Carson.”

  That didn’t sound like someone who was going to let him decide his own force levels. Darius leaned back in his chair and studied the images of the people around him. Those images looked present, but they weren’t even projected holograms. For a call at this level of security when he was away from his secured base, the entire meeting was inside his head.

  They were seeing him behind Michaud’s desk, the visuals pulled from the battleship’s computers. Given that everyone else was in their usual secured facilities, they probably had a hologram of him.

  “What is the situation, then, Senator Falk?” he asked.

  She gestured to Pan. The pale Senator for Aballava smiled thinly.

  “The most important part is that Boudicca has a similar agreement with the Coraline Imperium,” Pan told him. “Intelligence has confirmed they’ve sent the same request to the Imperium.”

  “Which is risky as hell, since we think that the Imperium is the most likely culprit,” Carson cut in. “Boudicca is being used as bait. Von Santiago wants to lure a portion of your fleet out and ambush it.”

  “Potentially,” Pan said coldly.

  Darius got the unspoken message there. Fleet Admiral Carson was, once again, going off on a tangent civilian intelligence didn’t support. Quite probably, even JD-Int didn’t agree.

  Of course, everyone tolerated Carson’s flights because he was right at least as often as he was wrong.

  “Von Santiago has a larger fleet than I do,” Darius pointed out. “Head-on, I think the Counter-Clockward Fleet is a match for hers, but these kinds of games are dangerous.”

  “Regardless of how much the Imperium is involved in these attacks, we have every reason to believe that von Santiago will sortie to Boudicca with a significant portion of her fleet,” Pan said. “Imperial policy would be to overawe the locals with force—but the Coraline Imperium is far from immune to opportunism.”

  And a battleship fleet in orbit of a planet without battleships of its own just screamed opportunity to Darius.

  “If we send nothing, the Imperium will likely deal with Boudicca’s problem…and then annex the system,” Pan concluded. “They’ll have invited the viper to their own home. To counter that, we need to show the flag in force. In enough force, Admiral, to make certain that von Santiago does not act against our friends in Boudicca.”

  “That will take my entire fleet,” Darius told them. “Von Santiago is doing the same calculation. She probably doesn’t think we’ll take the system by force if she lets us, but I don’t see any scenario where she won’t send at least six battleships.”

  “Agreed,” Falk told him. “And those are your orders, Admiral Moonblood. You are to take the entire Counter-Clockward Fleet to the Boudicca System. You are to intimidate Admiral von Santiago into refraining from any extreme actions, and you are to find and deal with whoever is threatening the system—be they Imperial or otherwise.”

  “And if they’re Commonwealth?” Darius asked softly. “If it’s not the Imperium, there aren’t many others likely to challenge us here.”

  There wasn’t anyone. There were only a handful of single- or multisystem powers in the region who’d even dream of it—the Renaissance Trade Factor and the Star Kingdom of Phoenix came to mind—but they were closer to allies than enemies.

  It was just the Imperium…and the nine-hundred-pound gorilla looking for its next banana.

  Falk sighed loudly.

  “There are no grounds to believe the Terran Commonwealth is poking at a minor system on the edge of nowhere with enough force to kill a battleship,” the Senator pointed out. “Let’s not jump at ghosts, people.”

  She was clearly including Darius’s fear of Terran involvement in with Carson’s certainty of Coraline involvement.

  “Given the age and maintenance status intelligence tells me that Defiant suffered from, it is entirely possible that she suffered a catastrophic failure,” Falk continued. “Our worst-case scenario is local pirates with a flotilla of sublight gunships or maybe an old battlewagon.

  “But the Boudicca System is a point of tension and contest between us and the Imperium. Coraline will act, which means we must act. Sending your entire fleet appears the best way to protect our ally and avoid a potential war.”

  She shook her head.

  “Do you think you can manage to get us through this mess without a war, Admiral?”

  Darius smile grimly.

  “Senator Falk, so far as I am concerned, avoiding a war is my job,” he pointed out. “The decision to start a war generally rests with you and the Senate, not Admirals.

  “What are my rules of engagement if I find the ‘pirates’ and they are agents of a hostile power?”

  “Our promise to Boudicca is that we would protect them,” Falk told him. “You will do so. I would prefer not to end up in a war with anyone over that star system, Admiral, but the Castle Federation does not break its promises.

  “Am I clear?”

  Darius inhaled and nodded.

  A blank check, then. Because that was always a good sign.

  4

  Sixteen light years was eight days’ flight at the maximum acceleration Darius’s Alcubierre-Stetson drive battleships could manage. If someone had destroyed the Boudicca System’s only major warship, there was a significant chance the system would already be screwed by the time he arrived.

  The only good sign was that Darius was certain von Santiago was still in her anchorage in the Beschel System. That put her just over twenty-two light-years from their likely shared destination, which bought him a bit over a day of leeway.

  That wasn’t enough in his mind, and he walked back into the dining room with a plan already taking shape in his mind. Barre, Michaud and Adema had clearly been waiting for him to finish his call, the three of them sitting in silence around the room as he returned.

  “We’re deploying,” he said flatly. “Captain Michaud, congratulations; Vagabond is now my flagship. I need the flag deck online ASAP.

  “Barre, I need my staff and my travel gear aboard Vagabond as soon as you can arrange it,” he continued, turning his attention to his operations officer. “Once you have the wheels turning on that, I need every Captain in a virtual conference in one hour.

  “If there’s anything stopping them from warping space immediately, they need to br
ing it to that meeting,” Darius concluded. “I’ll brief everyone in that meeting, but assume that we need to be underway in three hours or less.”

  Barre turned to Adema instantly.

  “Commander Adema, can I borrow an office?” she asked. “I imagine the flag deck offices aren’t fully on—”

  “We shipped out directly from our testing,” Michaud cut the Senior Fleet Commander off. “The systems were suspended, but I just issued the activation commands. Everything should still be in place and ready for you and the Admiral’s people to set up without preparation.”

  Adema was silent for a thoughtful moment, probably reviewing Michaud’s messages and his own files on the flag deck.

  “It might have been egotistical,” the XO admitted, “but we kept the furniture and everything in place. Vagabond is, after all, the most advanced warship in the Counter-Clockward Fleet. We hoped to be made your flagship, though admittedly I expected less urgent timing.”

  “Well done,” Darius told them. “In that case, I’ll pull directions to the Admiral’s office from the ship’s network. Captain Michaud—you just arrived. I know you’re going to have supplies you need restocked before we move. Have a list for Barre by that meeting.

  “Any questions, people?”

  Everyone in the room was already multitasking with neural-implant coms while they listened to him.

  “Then let’s get moving. I’ll brief you in an hour.”

  Darius spent most of the hour assembling a briefing packet that was fired into everyone’s neural implants the moment the meeting began. It took a few seconds for the fleshy part of his subordinates’ minds to pick up and process the new “memories,” but it was still faster than spending thirty minutes explaining it all.

  “Questions?” he asked as the virtual images of his Captains refocused on him. Even Michaud was on her bridge. The conference table he sat at the head of was entirely fictional, with most of the Captains who appeared to be sitting at it actually on their bridges.

  “What’s our expected threat level?” Captain Dusko Jamison, commanding officer of Croatia asked. “We’re deploying the entire fleet?”

  “Our worst-case scenario at the moment is that this is a Coraline ambush, the opening move of the war we’ve been building towards for the last twenty years,” Darius replied. “In that case, we can assume a threat specifically calibrated to wiping us out. That’s von Santiago’s fleet plus a couple of extra battleships.

  “I’m expecting von Santiago with six to eight battleships,” he continued. “My worst case is ten.”

  His true worst case wasn’t something he could share with his subordinates. The Admiral had to watch the sprawling and expanding imperium based on humanity’s homeworld and regard them as a threat. His subordinates needed to focus on more immediate threats.

  “Someone jumped and destroyed an A-S battleship without leaving enough behind for long-distance scans to resolve her attacker,” Darius pointed out. “That means modern stealth and ECM.”

  “They’ve got to know what happened, at least,” Michaud argued.

  “Everything we’ve got from Boudicca is in the packet I sent you all,” he said. “Their best guess is that between one and three vessels of indeterminate size and energy signature ambushed Defiant at close range and engaged her with heavy mass-driver fire. Nothing unusual, not even antimatter warheads.”

  Just cee-fractional slugs with impact energy measured in the dozens to hundreds of megatons.

  “Even the energy signatures of the impact should give us more than that,” Barre said. “I’m looking at the data and it’s frustratingly limited. Shouldn’t they have live q-com data?”

  “Boudicca doesn’t have their own q-com switchboard,” Darius reminded them. “They purchased entangled blocks from us and from Coraline, but they don’t trust either of us enough to run military telemetry through our hardware, whatever promises we’ve made.”

  Quantum entanglement was inherently a two-point communication system. That meant that, for example, Vagabond carried several hundred thousand entangled particles whose other half lived on a station in Castle orbit.

  Any change to the particles on Vagabond was reflected at the switchboard station. There, routing codes would tell the system control who to send the data to and would then relay the change to the particles entangled with the intended recipient. The largest delay was the fiberoptic cabling in the switchboard station, providing an instantaneous communication link across any distance people could transport the particle blocks over.

  But the people in control of the switchboard station could access your data. They weren’t supposed to—the Federation switchboards weren’t allowed to access civilian coms without a warrant—but they could. And very few nations provided legal protection to foreign powers renting their communications equipment.

  “So, because Boudicca doesn’t trust us, they don’t have the data that could actually let us help them,” Barre concluded aloud. “Messy. Do we have a plan, sir?”

  Darius smiled thinly. His operations officer was calling out the obvious problems and softballing him the questions he needed to answer for everyone. They were a well-oiled machine at this point, and he was going to miss her when the promotion he’d already recommended went through.

  Rumor said there were some very odd things going on in JD-Tech’s weapons R&D programs. If he had his way, Captain Barre was going to be at the heart of an entirely new generation of warfare—but that was the future.

  “Our mission is threefold,” he told them all. “First, we are showing the flag in serious force. We are going to reassure Boudicca and our other trade-partner protectorates that we mean our damn promises. We will protect them in the face of external threats and will do so without annexing them as unwilling true protectorates.”

  The Federation already had three of those: a daughter colony, a religious colony with minimal spaceborne industrialization, and a star system that was one wrong word from another civil war. All three would hopefully eventually become full members.

  But hopefully and eventually were risky words.

  “Secondly, we show the Coraline Imperium the same thing,” he continued. “Whether this is an Imperial ploy or not, von Santiago will be present with a major fleet. We’ll discourage her from opportunism and remind the Imperium that we both agreed to protect systems like Boudicca.

  “It’s our one common ground with the Imperator, people. We want to use it to avoid a war if we can,” he told them.

  “Of course, our official mission doesn’t include either of those priorities,” he told them, his thin smile not even twitching. “Officially, we are being deployed to secure the sovereignty and security of a trusted friend and trade partner against a clear and present threat.

  “That is the third part of our mission but, sadly, in many ways the least important.” Darius shook his head. “Our most likely scenario is either local sublight warships or a rogue battleship.”

  There weren’t supposed to be any of the latter, and pirates with A-S ships were a recurring nightmare for any government. An Alcubierre-Stetson warp drive required multiple Class One Mass Manipulators, boson-manipulating systems capable of creating black holes from nothing and preventing those black holes from eating the solar system around them.

  A Class One Mass Manipulator required years to grow its exotic-matter coils. They were probably the single most expensive technology known to humanity—and an A-S drive required a minimum of four of them. The drive was forty percent of the price tag of a warship and almost ninety percent of the price tag of a civilian freighter.

  Most star systems that couldn’t build Class Ones couldn’t afford to buy someone else’s. The corporations that fielded A-S freighters were immense entities, but even they would blink at the price tag of a private warship.

  “Wouldn’t the locals know if their battleship had been jumped by local ships?” Jamison asked.

  “I would assume so, but they don’t have enough data,” Darius poin
ted out. “Boudicca has asteroid belts and clusters that are relatively easy to hide in with a bit of work, and our hostiles have already demonstrated modern image-baffling systems.

  “Boudicca doesn’t have those systems, so I’m still leaning towards a third-party actor,” he concluded. “That might be Coraline. It might be someone else—though I couldn’t see, for example, the Trade Factor trying to pull a stunt like this. It could well be the ‘mighty Black Syndicate!’”

  That got a chuckle from his officers. The “Black Syndicate” was often the opposing force in their training simulations, an entirely fictitious crime syndicate with the resources to deploy battleship squadrons against the Federation.

  They couldn’t run all of their simulations with the Coraline Imperium as the enemy, after all, and Darius felt like the only person who regarded the Commonwealth as a threat most days.

  “It doesn’t matter who they are,” he concluded. “Our orders are clear: we will secure the Boudicca System against any and all threats.”

  There was a long pause, then Jamison coughed delicately.

  “To be clear, sir, that includes the potential of starting a war with the Coraline Imperium,” he pointed out.

  “It does,” Darius agreed crisply. “And that is explicitly covered under my orders.”

  From the expressions on his Captains’ faces, everyone else registered the problem with being handed a blank check.

  5

  “You have no idea how glad we are to hear that you are coming, Fleet Admiral,” the woman on the other end of the link told Darius. The data flowing along with her visual told him that she was Princess Admiral Alexa Burgundy, the heir apparent to the Boudicca System and one of their seniormost military officers.

  She was at least fifty. There was just a point, somewhere around a hundred, where everybody started looking like children.