Empery

EMPERY

Book 3 of the Trigon Disunity

Michael P. Kube-McDowell

“It is war that makes the chief, the king, and the state.”

—Will Durant

Two light-hours from Ba’ar Tell,
Rampart
drifted silently in its asteroidal orbit, primed for a fight. Its sensors were alive, its weapons battle-ready. The prime watch, the best of what was already an elite crew, held down all eight stations on the bridge.

With an electronic chime as herald, a section of the heads-up display on the bubble of Denn Lieter’s battle couch reformed. Lieter studied the new data for a moment, then frowned.

“Why are we getting estimated flight tracks on the targets all of a sudden? Aren’t the pickets still on them?” Lieter asked quietly. His throat mike picked up the inquiry and relayed it to the other stations.

The answer came from the comtech. “The outer picket in that zone just went silent, sir. Defense Command on Ba’ar Tell is reporting it presumed destroyed. Inner pickets are still too far away for good data.”

“If they’re going to change course, this would be the time,” a calm feminine voice said in Lieter’s ear. That was Mills, the battle strategist, on her private captain’s line.

“We’ll stay put,” Lieter said, with more certainty than he felt. “All stations, call down.”

“Navcom ready.”

“Weapons ready.”

“Communications ready.”

“Strategy and Analysis ready…”

Lieter only half listened to the ritual litany of the call-down check. Moving slowly so as not to trigger the acceleration sensors in the head harness, Lieter twisted sideways in the close confines of his battle couch and looked through the bubble toward the rear of the bridge. As expected, he saw a tall, rangy man in a tan Command uniform standing on the observer’s dais.

Before the visitor could make eye contact with him, Lieter turned back to his console. As captain of the
Rampart
, ordinarily Lieter would have been the highest-ranking officer on board. But such was the import of the moment that the observer both outranked Lieter and unsettled him. Harmack Wells, the new Director of USS-Defense, had that kind of effect on people.

Lieter had no doubt that
Rampart
’s machine component was up to the task ahead, but its human component was still unproven. This was the supreme test. Though it was the sole reason they had been built, no Defender had ever been asked to fend off a Mizari attack on one of the Unified Worlds. It was the real possibility of failure that left Lieter’s shirt glued to his back with cold sweat, and which made it impossible to forget Wells’s watching eyes.

“Interior pickets have reconfirmed the tracks on targets Alpha and Beta,” the comtech announced. “DefCom projects a planetary attack vector for both inbounds, confidence-90.
Rampart
authorized for full-force intercept.”

Lieter took a deep breath and held it a long moment. “Acknowledged, Rampart authorized for FFI,” he said. He tapped a glowing square on a touchboard with his forefinger, and the upper left quadrant of his display changed to a strategy map.“Mills?”

“Yes, Captain. Recommending standard two-target attack.”

“Concur. Weapons, begin mode 21 attack immediately.”

Within seconds the staccato bark of the fifty-barreled rail-gun filled the ship: ten barrels per salvo, one hundred rounds per second, sixty thousand rounds per minute. Even through the insulating cocoon of his battle couch, Lieter could hear the insistent, incessant drumming.

Lieter had to imagine the rest: the furious activity of the injectors, reloading each barrel twice a second; the cylindrical pellets hurtling down their electromagnetic channels; the muzzle deflectors tweaking each projectile toward its place in the dispersal pattern. A mode 21 attack meant the pattern Defender crews called the death halo: a five-kilometre-wide cone of high-velocity shrapnel from which no ship larger than a sprint could hope to escape by luck alone.

Devastating as the death halo could be, it was far from infallible. Given enough warning, the intruder could evade it or even turn tail and outrun it. But first, the Mizari had to detect it—not an easy task, since each element of the halo was less than three centimetres in cross section. To all but the very best optical or radar sensors, the halo would be invisible until it was too late.

“We have a telecam view of Beta from Picket 1-7,” the comtech advised Lieter.

A finger on a touchboard brought the picture up on Lieter’s display. The Mizari intruder was a nearly spherical black-hulled object twice
Rampart
’s longest dimension in diameter. No obvious ordnance blisters marred its smoothly curved surface. There was no hint of the savage power that had long ago devastated Earth and earned the Mizari their better known name: the Sterilizers.

But we remember
, Lieter thought.
We remember
.

Twenty minutes later the railgun closed the last gap in the death halo and fell silent.
Rampart
coasted on, waiting. The trade-off was distance for energy—the closer the Defender was to its targets, the more watts per square metre the lances would be able to deliver. Unless the Mizari forced Lieter’s hand,
Rampart
would wait until the death halo struck the first blow.

“Vector change, Beta,” the gravigator announced, his voice betraying a touch of alarm.

“Mills—has he made the halo?” asked Lieter.

“I don’t think so, sir. Alpha is still on a collision vector. More likely a change from convoy spacing to attack spacing. Recommend we move with Beta.”

“No. At this range we’ll just be giving ourselves away. Lances, track Beta.” Lieter glanced again at the strategy map and the intercept counter. Less than eight minutes remained before the Mizari and the halo would meet. Lieter’s back muscles and sphincter were knotted with tension. “Navcom, prepare to take us toward Beta the moment Alpha hits the halo. We’ll make her cross the tee on us—”

“Vector change on Alpha,” the gravigator fairly shouted.“They’ve seen it. Running to the near perimeter—”

“Lances, fire,” Lieter said reflexively, the observer behind him forgotten. “Navcom, forty percent forward, Railgun, mode 15. Fire on the run. Mills—is Alpha going to clear the halo?”

As he spoke, the six computer-targeted lances fired. Except as tracks on the strategy map, the stabbing bursts of energy from the lances were invisible. But the picket’s telecams showed the result. Great rents opened along the curve of the black sphere as whole sections of the hull boiled away. The first Mizari intruder died quickly and quietly, transformed into a skeleton enveloped in a spreading cloud of molecular metal that had once comprised its integument and sinew.

“Alpha will not clear the halo,” Mills said. “They know it, too—they’re starting to use some sort of DE weapon to clear a path through.”

Lieter’s response was terse. “Lances, target Alpha at the projected point of exit. The moment they come through the halo, burn them.”

“No need,” Mills said. “They’re at a bad angle, for the pattern. They’re not going to make it.”

Even as she spoke, the tracks of the Mizari vessel and the halo intersected. Though the pellets were mere inert mass, the combined velocities of target and missile more than made up for any lack of explosives. A bright flower blossomed on the black face of the intruder, then a second and third. Tiny bits of matter flew in every direction. Then an explosion inside the intruder briefly lit the jagged entry holes, giving it the eerie aspect of a candlelit jack-o’-lantern.

A long moment passed, and then a tight cluster of pellets—five or more, Lieter thought, though it happened too quickly to be certain—stitched a line across what remained of the hull, cracking it open like an egg and spilling its contents into cold space. Almost at once the Alpha marker on Lieter’s strategy map changed from red to green to signify it had been neutralized.

“Break, break,” Lieter said. “All stations, stand down from battle mode. Navcom, let’s go have a look at what we did.”

There was a burst of happy, self-congratulatory chatter that moved from the comlines to the air as the bubbles of the bridge couches began to retract as one.

“Let’s keep the celebration under wraps,” Lieter rebuked sharply, looking for Wells as the couch’s hold-downs released him. The Director was still standing where Lieter had last seen him, his gaze locked on the blank main display used other than during combat.

Clambering out of the couch, Lieter faced Wells and saluted. “FFI exercise completed, sir. I only wish those had been Mizari ships instead of drone mock-ups.”

For several seconds Wells did not react, continuing to stare straight ahead as though he hadn’t heard. Then he straightened and nodded in Lieter’s direction.

“Be careful what you wish for, Captain. Open warfare with the Mizari is not something to be rushed into.”

“I only meant—”

“At least you’re not as reckless with your command as you are with your words,” Wells continued. “After you’ve processed the data from the conflict recorders, we’ll review the results in detail here. Pending that, please extend my appreciation to everyone involved for their efforts.”

“Yes, Director,” Lieter said, and saluted again as Wells flickered and vanished. Sensing someone at his elbow, Lieter turned to see Mills waiting for him. “Good work.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said, fluffing her hair where the head restraints had matted it. “Only, do you have any idea why they were so easy on us? They didn’t throw us a single curve. We didn’t even come under fire.”

“If we had a need to know, they’d tell us,” Lieter said, looking back to where the image of Wells had been. “But you can be sure they have their reasons.”

Shaking his head and frowning, Harmack Wells stepped out of Telepresence Chamber 041. As he started down the corridor toward his office his adjutant, Teo Farlad, fell in beside him.

“A good exercise,” Farlad said. “The crew performed well—”

“Means nothing,” Wells said gruffly.

“It means the Defenders can do their job as advertised—”

“I needed a compelling demonstration for the Committee. I got two big dumb targets that couldn’t take a punch, much less throw one.”

Farlad’s face betrayed his puzzlement. “We gave the drones every reasonable capacity. Their battle computers weren’t constrained—they just didn’t make the halo and
Rampart
until it was too late.”

“Is assuming the Mizari DE weapons couldn’t break through the halo a reasonable assumption? Is assuming their ships were that vulnerable to our lances reasonable? The Chancellor isn’t stupid. She knows when she’s being flimflammed.”

“But, sir—we don’t know what their weapons and defenses are capable of. There’s no way to simulate—”

“For sixty million Coullars I expected more than target practice.”

“There’ll be more rehearsals, with other variables—”

“Hopefully some will resemble the real world. In the meantime we’ll have to figure out how to sell that fantasy to the Committee.” They were approaching the central hub of the USS-Central station, a nine-story open atrium filled with light and greenery.

“I do have some good news for you,” Farlad said, eager to repair the damage. “It’s why I met you—I was coming to tell you.”

“So stop puffing yourself up and tell me,” Wells said, squinting across the hub at a group of people walking toward the entrance to the Resource wing.

“I’ve come up with another Thackery document—”

“Hardly earthshaking news.”

“This one is something special—something he wrote
after
he left the Service—”

“Put it in my private file and I’ll have a look at it,” Wells said, signaling for silence and stopping. “Isn’t that Comité Sujata?”

Farlad peered in the direction Wells pointed and fixed on a tall, long-limbed woman wearing a half blouse and hip wrap in the Maranit style. “Yes, sir. With Whitehall of the Arcturus research colony and his facilitator.”

“I thought you were going to get back to me with some useful information on her.”

“Her bio is as complete as I can make it—”

“I still need to know how she’s likely to vote on Triad.”

“She’s gone with the majority on the monthly Defense appropriations.”

“Not good enough. We haven’t brought any new defense initiatives before the Committee in the six months she’s been sitting on it. It doesn’t require any special commitment to confirm the status quo.”

“I gave her the Triad briefing material the second week she was here. But she’s put off talking with me about it a half dozen times. Maybe if you approached her directly—”

Wells’s answering tone was that of a man nearing the limits of his patience. “I don’t expect her to be a factor. I just don’t want any surprises. We go to the Committee Thursday. Have something for me by then.”

Farlad swallowed hard. “Yes, sir.”

“And come by my office as soon as Lieter relays the combat data. We’ll take up the Ba’ar Tell matter then,” he said, and walked away toward the Defense wing. Wearing an exasperated expression, Farlad watched him go, then started across the atrium in pursuit of Sujata.

The body language of the two combatants could not have been more different. Richard Whitehall, a bullnecked colony manager whose appearance was at odds with his prim antiquarian name, had taken over a chair in the Resource Director’s office with the restless authority of a bear staking claim to his den. In the chair facing him, Janell Sujata sat lightly, legs crossed discreetly, hands fingertip-to-fingertip in her lap, a model of quiet self-assurance.

“I’m sorry,” Sujata was saying. “That’s simply the way things are.”

“
Terira pa niti, par es
,” Whitehall said gruffly, locking his arms over his chest.

“The truth is, I would like very much to help you,” Sujata continued in an even tone which implied she had not understood the Shinn curse, though she had. “But your problem isn’t with Resource, it’s with Defense. Every cargo packet in the octant is tied up with the buildup of Boötes Center and the Sentinel Support Node. There won’t be any ships free to increase the frequency of the Arcturus packet runs until Defense releases them back to Transport.”

Standing while the others sat, the short, round-bodied facilitator interposed himself physically as well as diplomatically between the Comité and the Arcturus manager. “Mr. Whitehall noted that there was excess capacity in the Lupus Octant, and wondered if it wouldn’t be possible to transfer one or more ships—”