To challenge heaven, p.3
To Challenge Heaven, page 3
Carefully arranged bulkhead and freestanding displays gave instant access to the status of every unit of the Shongair Expeditionary Force and a combination conference table and command desk was placed to allow someone seated at it to see almost any critical display instantly.
No, Buchevsky realized. It wasn’t placed to let someone see almost any critical display; it was placed to let someone see every critical display. What he’d thought at first were less efficiently placed primary displays were actually secondaries or backups, judging from the information duplicated upon them.
“This way,” Wilson said, leading the way towards the conference table as the people seated around it rose and braced to attention.
“Sit back down,” the general commanded with a rather casually waved acknowledging salute. The same wave continued to indicate the empty chairs at the table. “Pick a seat,” he told the visitors.
Vlad and Buchevsky settled into two of the indicated chairs, and Buchevsky looked around the table thoughtfully. There were a lot of men and women with the single starbursts or gold planets the Planetary Union had adopted for its colonels and brigadiers. There were several with the single golden planet of a major, as well, and even a couple with the three white moons of a captain, but he was pretty sure he’d never encountered such a concentration of senior field grade—and flag—officers in his career as a breather.
“We’ve got a shit ton of people to introduce you guys to,” Wilson said, dropping into his own chair, followed a moment later by Brigadier Fitzgerald. “That can wait until we’ve been able to give you a better idea of what we’re thinking here, though. For now, let me just introduce Colonel Mihail and Colonel Boucher.” A wave of his hand indicated a tallish, fair-haired woman and the shorter, darker man with a pencil-thin mustache sitting beside her. “Jenny’s my S2, and Christian’s my S3.”
Buchevsky nodded. That meant Colonel Mihail was Wilson’s intelligence officer while Colonel Boucher was his operations officer.
“I figure the place to start is with a general background brief on the Expeditionary Force and the basic thinking behind what we’re calling Operation Riposte,” Wilson continued. “Actually, that’s what Dave christened it; here in Marine Country we think of it as ‘Operation Payback’s a Bitch.’ I gotta admit Dave’s name is shorter, but I think ours has more pizzaz.” He smiled again, thinly. “Admiral Mallard and her people will give you a clearer idea on the Navy’s side of the shop when you sit down with them, so we don’t have to go into any excruciating details there, but we will have to at least touch on some of her stuff if we want to fit all the bits and pieces together in a way that makes sense.”
“That seems eminently reasonable,” Vlad said. He shook his head. “From what I have so far seen, alone, it appears that the Planetary Union has been very busy building things since we left.”
“One way to put it,” Wilson acknowledged. “Of course, as usual, the damned Squids get all the big-ticket items. Still, I guess I have to admit we heroic Space Marines get our own share of shiny toys. I think you’ll like them when we get around to walking you through them, Stephen. But for now—”
He tipped his hand in Mihail’s direction, and the colonel cleared her throat.
“Prince Vlad, First Sergeant Buchevsky.” She nodded to them across the table. “First, since I rather doubt the Boss got around to it—” she smiled at Wilson “—please allow me to formally welcome you aboard the Emil. Technically she belongs to the Navy, but we’re rather proud of her, ourselves. She’s named for one of Colonel Sanders’s company commanders who died at the Harirud. In fact, both of her sisters are, as well. We thought it was appropriate.”
Given what Lieutenant Colonel Alister Sanders and the men and women of his brigade had done to Brigade Commander Harshair at the Harirud River in Afghanistan, Buchevsky had to agree with that one.
“All right,” Mihail continued, and the conference table’s smart screen surface came alive with the Expeditionary Force’s table of organization. She hadn’t touched any controls, and Buchevsky’s eyes narrowed at his first demonstration—or the first one he’d recognized, at any rate—of the direct neural interface Earth had developed since his own departure.
“As you can see the ‘Transport Element’ is listed way down here at almost the bottom of the chart, just ahead of the ‘Fleet Train’ supply echelon,” she said as one of the headings blinked. “But despite our humble place in the pecking order, all the rest of them are really here to support our mission. Not—” she smiled almost impishly at the single Navy officer seated at the table “—that the Space Squids want to admit that. But that’s okay. We all know the truth, so we can be big-minded about these things.”
Laughter rumbled around the compartment. Even the single Naval officer present—a curly-haired, green-eyed commander with severely elegant features and a name tape that read “DENVERS, M.”—joined it.
“I don’t think you want to put it quite that way to the Old Lady,” she said with a grin. “I’d pay good money to see it, though!”
“Jenny wouldn’t even flinch,” Wilson told her. “She’s a Space Marine, and we’re totally fearless. Says so right in the recruiting brochure!”
“I don’t think you want to talk to me about recruiting brochures—or recruiters—and their veracity, ‘Uncle Rob,’” Buchevsky said dryly.
“Cheez! Does that still rankle?” Wilson shook his head, his expression doleful. “I even told you I had a quota to make!”
More laughter rumbled, but then Wilson nodded to Mihail, and she cleared her throat.
“Up here at the top,” she said as another heading flashed, “we have BatRon 11: Relentless, Neobosit, Implacável, and Ameíliktos. They’re all Relentless-class superdreadnoughts: twenty-four-point-eight kilometers length of hull, four-point-three-two kilometers maximum beam.”
An exterior view of Relentless appeared on the tabletop, and the more Buchevsky studied it, the less like a Hegemony design it looked. The huge, bulbous “nose” of the Gannon Drive ought to have been the most obvious difference, and he supposed it was. But what actually struck him most strongly was the absence of the outer shell of Târgoviște’s war hull.
Unlike the Hegemony, the Planetary Union Navy no longer required spin sections to produce a gravity humans found comfortable, and its designers had done away with the angular, geodesic baskets of the war hulls the Hegemony wrapped around the central, rotating cores of its warships. All of the fixed weapon mounts, drive nodes, and access points which had been mounted in their individually armored pods on the war hull, like encrusting barnacles, had disappeared along with it. Instead, Relentless’s flanks were smooth, dimpled with the rows of heavily armored hatches behind which her weapons crouched. And there were a lot of those weapons. Despite her relatively slimmer profile, the human ship’s mammoth dimensions gave her almost fifty times Târgoviște’s internal volume. And while the Gannon Drive was enormous as a single system, it took up barely a third of the volume Târgoviște’s far more numerous phase-drive nodes required. Not only that, its “energy siphon” effect—which Buchevsky still hadn’t wrapped his mind fully around—cut the load on Relentless’s internal fusion plants by over seventy percent. Since humans had also reduced the mass and volume of her reactors by better than thirty percent by reducing the multiply redundant layers of failsafes Hegemony technology incorporated, her actual onboard power plants massed barely twenty percent of what a Hegemony-designed ship her size would have required.
Assuming, of course, that the Hegemony could have built a starship her size and gotten her into phase space in the first place.
Which it couldn’t have.
But all of that volume had to be used on something, which was why Relentless all by herself, could have polished off the entire Shongair Navy in an afternoon. Hell, she could have done it before lunch!
“In addition to the superdreadnoughts,” Mihail continued, illuminating another heading, “we have Cruiser Squadron Nine: eight Sword-class heavy cruisers—” which, despite their designation as mere cruisers, were a kilometer longer than Târgoviște, with almost twenty percent more volume than the Shongair dreadnought, Buchevsky noted “—to screen for the big boys and spread our coverage envelope. And to increase our platform numbers for purely psychological reasons, to be honest.”
“Psychological?” Buchevsky asked.
“We’ll get to that in a few minutes,” Wilson said. “When we get to the ops plan. For now, let Jenny finish building out our force for you.”
Buchevsky nodded, and Mihail turned to the final item on her list.
“And here we have the Fleet Train,” she said, “although that’s actually a bit of a misnomer. They aren’t really here to support the Expeditionary Force or the Task Force themselves so much as they are to support our greater mission. Assuming things go according to plan—” she rapped her knuckles on the tabletop’s surround, which, Buchevsky realized, was made of actual wood, not a synthetic “—the Transport Element and the Task Force’s units should be pretty much completely self-contained. But because certain general officers—” she very carefully didn’t glance at Lieutenant General Wilson “—believe in a belt-and-suspenders approach, we also have Armory and Waffenkammer, which are basically really big-assed freighters loaded with ammo and general stores.” Her expression sobered. “They’re roughly the same size as Relentless or the Emil, but their complements are a lot smaller—less than a hundred people each—and their total engineering and environmental requirements use up less than fifteen percent of their volume. That leaves an awesome amount of cargo space, and the two of them carry enough material to meet our projected needs for a minimum of three years of sustained combat. We have no intention of being caught short like Fleet Commander Thikair did when he came calling. But we’ve also brought along Forge, Zhùzào Chǎng, Jujo, and Gießerei. They’re all Foundry-class industrial ships, each with about forty times the combined capability of the two industrial platforms Thikair had. They have more capacity, even on a mass-for-mass comparison, their robotic and cybernetic support is a lot more efficient than anything the Hegemony has, and Director Bai can have all four of them up and running within four months.”
She paused, and Vlad shook his head.
“I am … impressed,” he said. “Indeed, I grow more impressed with each revelation of your capabilities.”
“That’s basically the idea,” Wilson replied. “Not so much to impress you as to impress the hell out of the Puppies, though. Which brings us to the next stage of our little presentation. Unfortunately, you’ll have to put up with a Frenchman for this next bit. Christian?”
Colonel Boucher rolled martyred eyes.
“On fait du mieux qu’on peut entouré de barbares,” he observed with a deep sigh and a perfectly executed, ineffably Gallic shrug. “Although, I must confess, the task of elevating the cultural level of certain unnamed superior officers does rather remind one of an ancient Grecian gentleman named Sisyphus.”
“We don’t even need penicillin to cure that anymore,” Wilson informed him. “So go ahead. We’re all prepared to put up with you.”
Boucher smiled, but then he turned his attention to Vlad and his expression sobered.
“Operation Riposte had its origins in Ambassador Dvorak’s research into the Hegemony’s history, and in his observations and experience in the Sarth System, Your Highness. Before we get into its underlying reasoning, however, a bit of context-setting history might be in order.
“After you left Governor Howell in possession of the captured Shongair industrial platforms in the Sol System, he parlayed that into the creation of the Continental Union, with Canada, Brazil, and the United States as its original members, and the Governor as its first president. His obvious eventual goal was the creation of the current Planetary Union, but achieving that was the classic example of even the longest journey beginning with a single step. It was not until almost twelve years after your departure that the Planetary Union’s Constitution was formally ratified, and even at that time, not all of Earth’s nations had joined. A few were more … recalcitrant than most,” he glanced at Wilson, who grimaced in memory, “but ultimately all of Earth’s countries, including the successor states of some former nations, such as the People’s Republic of China and Italy, petitioned for membership and ratified the Constitution.
“President Howell was, not surprisingly, elected as the Planetary Union’s first president by an enormous majority. Given the life spans now available to us, the drafters of that Constitution recognized the absolute necessity of building in term limitations. The last thing anyone wanted—especially President Howell—was a ‘President for Life’ whose tenure lasted three or four hundred years! Because of that, the Constitution provides for a twelve-year term of office, and a president may serve two successive terms. He—or she—may also stand for reelection for additional terms after two terms out of office, however, and there is no limit on the total number of times one may serve, so long as they are served in no more than two successive terms. President Howell was reelected to a second term approximately eight years before our departure. I would suspect that he has since been succeeded by Jolasun Olatunji, who has served as his vice president and is almost as popular as President Howell, himself.
“During his first term, President Howell initiated what’s become known as the Howell Doctrine. In essence, it’s the exact opposite of the Hegemony’s traditional foreign policy. It calls for the creation of an alliance of star systems and species designed to defy the Hegemony’s supremacy, and rather than stultify technology in the name of stability, it aims to stimulate research and development as a way to provide the Terran Alliance with the physical means to resist something as enormous and powerful as the Hegemony.” His mouth tightened just a bit. “Despite the size and firepower of ships like Relentless, the sheer disparity between the Alliance and the Hegemony in manpower and resources remains staggering. Literally astronomical, in this case. Which is why we’re here and why Operation Riposte was first conceived.”
He paused, looking back and forth between Vlad and Buchevsky, and there was no humor in his brown eyes. He let the silence linger for a breath or two, then shrugged once more.
“As President Howell’s Secretary of State, for both the Continental and Planetary Unions, Ambassador Dvorak played a leading role in formulating the Howell Doctrine, and he left the Secretary’s office to lead the first diplomatic mission to another star system: Sarth.”
“Where,” Wilson interjected, “he damn near got his ass killed.” He grimaced, his eyes dark. “It was sheer luck he didn’t. And, much as I may rag on him, it’s a damn good thing he made it.”
“I believe most of us would agree with that.” Boucher nodded soberly. “And in more ways than one. The Ambassador’s study of the Hegemony’s history had already started him … rethinking his initial view of the Shongairi. His experiences on Sarth, and particularly with the then–Qwernian Empire, solidified his thoughts, and upon his return to Earth, President Howell authorized Operation Riposte. Convincing the President and Congress to endorse it was … less than easy, but he succeeded in the end. And had President Howell not already been into his second term as Planetary Union President, I strongly suspect that he would have led this expedition. As it was, it was imperative that we depart the Sol System in time to overtake Târgoviște.”
“Damn good thing, too!” Wilson snorted. “Dave would’ve let Howell have Shong, but much as I love my brother-in-law, that man can hold a grudge forever! He would’ve been like a bear with a sore tooth for decades. Hard enough living with him when he’s feeling cheerful!”
Vlad smiled, but Buchevsky laughed out loud.
“I don’t know the Ambassador as well as General Wilson does,” Boucher said in a judicious tone, “yet I’m forced to concur in that estimate. On the other hand, at the time of our departure, missions were being planned to several additional star systems, as well, including the Tairyon System.”
“Tairyon?” Vlad repeated, forehead furrowed in thought, and Wilson grunted.
“One of the systems the Hegemony handed over to the Liatu about nine hundred years ago,” he said.
“Ah.” Vlad nodded. “I knew I recalled the name. The Liatu deployed a bioweapon in Tairyon, did they not?”
“One way to put it. Like you say, the Hegemony cheerfully signed the system over to the bastards. But when they arrived, they discovered a little problem. The Tairyonians were only a Level Six civilization, about equivalent to Earth around 1000 BC, when they were cleared for conquest, but they’d moved almost to Level Five by the time the first colony ships got there. That was still slow as hell, by our standards, but it was a scary rate of progress by Hegemony standards and suggested that they might become … rambunctious. Especially since they were omnivores with a strong carnivorous streak. The Liatu could hardly be expected to put up with something like that!”
The disgust in Wilson’s voice was profound.
“Of course, the Froggies—no disrespect, Christian,” he continued, flashing Boucher a fleeting grin, “are respectable, morally upright herbivores, not like us aggressive, morally repugnant omnivores. And they’re certainly not carnivores, like the Shongairi! It would never occur to them to genocide an entire species just because it was inconveniently in possession of real estate they wanted. So instead of killing them all, the Liatu whipped up a little genetic cocktail, instead. There are still plenty of Tairyonians, according to the Hegemony’s files. Not as many as there might’ve been, with advanced technology, of course, but probably—oh, as many as four whole million of them, spread across the entire planet. That’s what happens when you reduce a species which has discovered agriculture and city building to an intelligence level somewhere between a Labrador retriever and a four-year-old and then just ignore the hell out of them while they die back to a level their ‘technology’ can support. The Froggies—” Wilson’s term for the amphibian Liatu was unflattering but quite apt, given their body form, Vlad thought; it was definitely not one of approval, however “—call ’em guharnaks, now. Means ‘nuisance animals,’ and much as it pisses me off to admit it, from their perspective, it’s an apt label, cause there’s jack shit the Tairyonians can do about the bastards. They’re still social animals, and they even still use fire and flint-tipped spears. That’s about it. And that’s not worth squat against air cars and autocannon.”
