“That’s because they won’t.” Charles said. “They have five ships. That’s a very finite supply of force. We’ve had three years to stockpile, and our manufacturing capacity is already well established and streamlined. Our available force is, to all intents and purposes, infinite.”
“And yet they were able to take complete command orbit from us.” Knopf said.
“Not without cost.”
“The cost to our opponent is not what we are concerned about.” Kidawa said. “You have shown us these numbers in order to awe us with our military preparedness. Alright. We are sufficiently awed. Now tell us the truth. We lost in space, what is to keep us from losing on the ground.”
They think I’m blustering, Charles realized. They think that this meeting is to cover the embarrassment of a loss in space. They think we’re losing.
Bairn cleared his throat and Charles nodded to him to take the floor while he puzzled out a way to communicate to them the reality of the situation. “If you look at the numbers on your implants, or screen.” Bairn said. “You’ll see our projections for the course of the Kamele incursion. They’re troop numbers are projected to the right side of the screen, while our own are to the left. The same for their manufacturing capacity. We have done the projections for the crash factories, and the numbers can swing in their favor. If they get twelve crash factories operational, with specs in a range similar to the specs for our own crash factories or even slightly higher.”
“Our own projections yielded similar results.” Kidawa said.
Bairn nodded. “There are a lot of unknowns involved in that kind of operation though. For example there’s a good chance their production specs will not match our own. The tactic was also an innovation when we went to war. There is a good chance it won’t occur to them.”
“An innovation we have since exported.” The man that made the comment sat on Charles’ end of the table. One of his own execs, making Charles frown. “The Kamele have been fighting nonstop for three generations.” The man said. “We think our crash factories were clever, to the Kamele it will most likely seem, well, obvious.” Ryker.
Ryker had been one of Jonathan Quinn’s closest allies in the corporate hierarchy before he passed the leadership to his son. Young, at a few years Quinn’s elder, he wore his black hair long and in meetings seemed to think people didn’t want to hear the good news, but needed to hear the bad. He was also the only one of his father’s old execs who had publicly opposed Charles’ accession to his father’s place.
“He’s a good man.” Charles’ father had said when Charles took over the top office. “Always loyal. I don’t understand his distaste for you, and he won’t give me a reasonable justification for his position against you. He seems to think that anybody would be better than you, but I can’t get him to change his mind. Be gentle with him. He’ll come around. He always did for me. It’s his way to be a little harsh, when he thinks it needs to be heard.” It was a sentiment Charles had heard others in his cabinet express, including Bairn. So, much as the exec irked him, the man stayed, a thorn in the side of every meeting of the executive staff. “Besides.” His father had said. “A CEO always needs someone who will tell him the bad news without dipping it in liquor first.”
Another Exec to Charles’ opposite side stirred himself. “The Kamele have not been fighting wars like this.” Dylan Scarn said. “Remember, this is not the Kamele who invested in the Corporation in its infancy three hundred years ago. This is a new breed, upstarts, a revolutionary band that thinks they’ve inherited the empire building powers of their previous hegemony. They won’t know invasion, not the way the old Kamele might have. What they’ll know is guerilla tactics.” Dylan was an exception to the old regime rule that made up Charles’ cabinet staff. One of Charles’ personal innovations, an element inserted into the corporate hierarchy intended to tilt the political maneuvering back in Charles favor even after the aging Bairn retired to the Quinn estate.
Dylan was young yet, but like Bairn, he knew where his loyalties lie, particularly after Charles himself had pulled him from his family’s hovel along the Mighty river when they were little more than boys. Board rooms could become nasty places, one of Charles’ first lessons when he watched his father outmaneuvered on a lease for some automated mineral extractors the Kidawa’s requested and he’d intended to turn down. What it turned into was an argument over sub-dynastic rights, one with all of the sub-dynasties arrayed against his father.Short or resorting to force he didn’t have any choice but capitulation. That had been the old Kidawa Patriarch. Ginny Kidawa’s father. Charles was glad he was more or less out of the picture.
Charles learned his lesson, and while he was being trained to be the company CEO, Dylan was being trained to take over the logistics division of the company. An important role, but most importantly, one that would put him where Dylan could line his political guns up with Charles’ own. Small though they were. What Charles had forgotten was how insular Marain’s high society could be, particularly with an upjump like Dylan Scarn. He could hardly be said to have political power, or friends that could back him up in the boardroom, but he did have his uses and Charles kept him around, hoping to find someone else to take Bairn’s place when the man retired. He would have to come from high society, but loyalties there were such a tricky thing. It was an eventuality Charles dreaded.
“Such guerilla tactics will make them excellent at building underground manufacturing facilities we can do nothing to eradicate.” Ginny Kidawa countered.
“Shut up.” Charles IM’d his exec staff. The whole thing only served to irk him at Ryker’s presence once again. They’d met an hour before the meeting. He’d had plenty of time to bring up his concerns before the dynasty heads were here. “They will have been counting on the lunar factories.” He said. “Even if they weren’t we are prepared for the crash factories. We have cherubs and hordes of hounds ready to assault any incursion on the ground, be it small or large. If their entire carrying capacity was dedicated to crash factories we could drop a hundred cherubs on each lander and still have hundreds left over to deal with their aircraft. We are beyond prepared for this war.” He signalled his implant again and it sent a second document to them. He knew what course he had to steer them now. “The reason we called you here is so that you can be prepared as well.”
“Three hundred years!” Karamaz piped in her reedy voice.
“Three hundred and seventy five.” Larry Knopf grunted.
Ginny Kidawa’s dark brown eyes considered Charles coolly.
At the end of the table Edward Avakoff rocked back in his chair and began to chuckle. “This can’t be serious.”
“Three hundred and seventy five is the long estimate.” Charles said. “The short one is closer to a hundred and fifty.”
“A century and a half of warfare?” Karamaz asked, eyes wide and shocked.
“There have been longer wars.” Avakoff replied.
“It’s outrageous!” She replied, giving him a sharp look.
“Consider where we stand.” Charles said. “The enemy holds space, and we can’t touch him while he’s there.” Mouths opened at that as though to retort but Charles plowed on. “We hold the ground, and we have a sufficient level of force to make it impossible for them to build a foothold on the planet. So long as we hold the ground, they can’t touch us.”
“That’s no guarantee.” A patriarch down the table said. Charles didn’t see who it was.
“We have the resources of a planet behind us,” Charles said. “While they have only what they’ve brought with them. They have space, sure, but we aren’t fighting over space, we’re fighting over a planet.”
“They could just drop rocks on us.” Larry Knopf grumbled.
“And hit what?” Charles asked. “Our cities and factories are shielded. What good would it do to shell the planet?”
“It would disrupt shipping.” Knopf replied.
“Yes. It would disrupt shipping, but would that win them the war
?” Charles passed his gaze over the whole table, preparing to take them to the next point in his prepared speech. “Ladies and gentlemen, what are we fighting for? What is really at stake here? Do you think they’ll point some guns at us and demand controlling share in the corporation the way we did to the Kidawa’s old corp? Do you think they’ll be satisfied with a smaller piece once we’ve turned their armies of automata to slag and just fly home? Make no mistake, the Kamele didn’t cross the stars because they wanted a little more of our wealth. They had an empire that spanned stars, we don’t have anything they didn’t have. There is no guarantee that the fighting will go on for a hundred years. It will last until either we have been destroyed, or their will to fight has been broken.”
“Do we know who they are?” Ginny Kidawa broke in.
Charles shook his head. “A captain in each ship? I’d expect that as a minimum, perhaps a few more. Possibly their families in a support ship.” Transmissions intercepted from the battle seemed to indicate the probability, though much of it was garbled by the battle itself. The strategy would match their own in the evangelists and during the Kidawa incursion. Machines could fight, but always needed at leas a few human commanders to adapt to changes in the course of a war.
“Is there a possibility they might be bought?” She asked.
“It’s a possibility worth exploring. But so far, they haven’t responded to our calls.”
“Where is York?” The Karamaz woman asked shrilly. “Where is the fleet we were promised?”
“The earliest the fleet might have been able to arrive was last week.” Charles said. This was another variable, one with to many moving parts and old political maneuvering on the part of the dynasties. Three people had been sent to the York system after the Kamele ambassador informed them of their intention to send a fleet to enforce their ultimatum, a Kidawa, an Avakoff, and one of Quinn’s siblings, to his Mother’s discontent. The York corporation had been one of the Kidawa financier’s when they arrived in system almost a hundred years ago. Including them as an investment shareholder in Quinn Corporation’s claim over all the Kidawa holdings had been a big part of their consolidation deal with the now sub-dynasty. Any threat to Marain was therefore a threat to the York corporate investment, which gave them incentive to send a ship or two if they had them to spare, but Charles held out little hope for reinforcement from that quarter. When the Kidawa corporation was subsumed, they hadn’t bothered with more than a single reconnaissance ship, more to establish the outcome of the war than to participate in it.
“It won’t be necessary.” Charles said. If they did arrive he didn’t expect them for another year or two anyways. “We have the high ground, so to speak. They might have us blockaded, but this war won’t be won in space. It will be won on the ground. They need the ground to win the ground, and we hold it.”
“What will this do to share growth?” Avakoff asked.The mildness of his voice and the distracted way he twirled his liquor glass did not hide the importance he placed on the question, anymore than the silence of the rest of the dynasty heads hid their interest. Each dynasty lived and died on their shares in the Quinn Corporation wealth. Quinn shares meant access to automated and custom factories, advanced electronics, fine fabric and metal. It was the very real difference between living in a hovel and living in a mansion. A larger share meant greater command over the industry dedicated to dynastic needs and more surplus wealth to invest back into the sections of the corporation that showed promise of returning the investment or sending prospectors into the settlers to search out opportunities for turning corporate goods into pastoral ones. Axes for crop shares, bolts of cloth for barrels of beer or jugs of liquor, a fine knife or household machinery for the rare bit of sought after information. A dent in corporate wealth could mean a family’s inability to maintain luxury or ambition.
“Nothing.” Charles said. “Nothing bad.”
“Anything good?” Avakoff asked.
Charles took a seat and gestured for Bairn to answer the question as he took a sip of liquor. If he wasn’t going to be permitted to finish his point about stakes they might as well get the questions out of the way. Bairn was the CFO, best if he preserved that place in the eyes of the dynasties.
“As you all know, Quinn Corporation was on track to begin its interstellar phase of commerce and industry very soon.” Bairn said, clearing his throat. “There isn’t much demand for the raw materials we have. Plenty of, minerals and metals, and such, but the biology of Marain has several life forms that fit the mold of life forms that have turned into profitable trade deals for corporations in the past, and we have a number of innovations developed specifically for industrial colonization that might prove useful to other start up corporations. These would have been brokered through either the Kamele or the York corporations to the interstellar market yielding returns that would have allowed us eventually to buy out their investments and allow us to begin the long journey to becoming an interstellar power. A few centuries from now we might have been parity to the likes of York and capable of making our own colonial investments.”
“That was until the Kamele decided we weren’t egalitarian enough for them.” Avakoff said.
“Their decision to attack may actually accelerate the process.” Bairn said.
Silence greeted the announcement.
“How?” Knopf asked eventually.
“Well first.” Bairn said. “By declaring war and relinquishing their claim on our colony, they have effectively freed us from any obligation to satisfy their investment in our corporation.”
“So there’s only York left with its hand out to us.” Avakoff said, eyes narrowed.
“And a war” Bairn reminded him. “Which, by wars end, will allow us to perfect and test a whole variety of military technology and models. Since this marks, to my knowledge, the first interstellar conflict since the death of the homeworld, that expertise will most likely be able to demand a very high price on the interstellar market, virtually guaranteeing a very short, if profitable period of brokerage on the part of our last investor. The design for the four evangelists alone will be wanted by every planet with the manufacturing capabilities to produce them, and every planet that can purchase them will also want to purchase the recordings of their performance and possibly the brokerage of an experienced or trained advisor in their use. Those are designs and data only we can provide in terms of real world experience. Us, and the Kamele, who demonstrate a decided disinterest in emprie building.”
“My nephew died on one of those ships.” Karamaz intoned.
“And is currently celebrated as a hero.” Charles snapped. He was growing impatient with her grieving. She’d practically sold the boy to him.She had a right to grieve, but only so far.
“To make a long story short.” Bairn continued with a look to Charles. “The Kamele have given us an opportunity to become the kind of super power they once were, in the same amount of time it would have taken us to pay back their initial investment, had they chosen to let their investment grow instead of presenting their ultimatum prematurely.”
“This war will become our fortune.” Charles added.
“If you win.” Kidawa said.
On the tactical display the last of the survey satellites went dark as the horde of Kamele automata lowered themselves over the planet.
“They really are coming.” Avakoff mused watching the display.
“This war will be our fortune.” Charles said again. It was time to make an end of this. He ordered his implant to send a final document to the dynasty leaders showing the projected growth for the course of and after the war. It showed a gentle downward slope for the duration of the blockade in anticipation of damage to their more vulnerable networks of industries. A hundred years of gentle decline that shouldn’t scare anyone who didn’t already need to be concerned, the Coleburns and their mountain of debt for one, followed by a dramatic spike as they exported the technology. It was all speculation, Charles knew. Propaganda as much as so
lid fact. The numbers were meant to be comforting. It was true, certainly, that there would be demand for wartime experience amongst the other corporations, but there was no way to say how much growth it would inspire. All he needed from it now, was that it inspire loyalty, and perhaps to encourage them to invest in the war as an opportunity to advance their ambitions.
“No one wins if the Kamele win.” Charles said. The fleet of warships on the tactical display were dropping now towards the planet’s atmosphere. “They’re ultimatum makes it clear. All corporate wealth, including dynastic shares, will be syphoned off for the general population. No more corporation, no more industrial shares, no more dynasties. But if we win, then the possibilities for every dynasty that contributes to that victory are limited only by the imagination.” He could see a few eyes glassy as they considered what the numbers on their lenses might mean for their own plans.
The party was over after that. There were other questions and comments. How much of this, and how soon will this, and what if that happened. Hens, Charles reminded himself, clucking to ensure that they were going to be taken care of. As the meeting was winding down and the last dynastic leaders made their goodbyes the tactical display showed the last of the enemy’s automata mopping up the thin line of defenders while a fleet of smaller craft emerged from the main ships.
As the ships descended a swarm of missiles, Cherubs as Falkye had decided to call them, the man did have a flair for the dramatic, streamed upwards out of bunkers to the East of the mighty river, an ambush tactic that appeared on the display like a huge hand composed of solid golden icons stretching its fingers in a punching motion towards the Kamele ships. Swarms of the Kamele craft dove down to meet them in the upper atmosphere. There the neat image of fingers reaching for toy ships dissolved into a tangled snarl of maneuvers too fast for human comprehension.
Space Knights- Last on the Line Page 4
