OBT Forum

Chapter One

“More wine, Sir?” the steward asked as he lifted the empty plate from the spotless white linen which covered the table.

“No more for me, Jean-Paul,” the officer answered as he leaned back in his chair.  Lifting his glass, he swirled the amber liquid within twice, and then stopped as the third person in the spacious and elegantly accoutered compartment frowned at him.  “And for you, my dear?”

“After seeing you abuse your own glass, Jason?  I shudder to think of what my father and brother would say, seeing you mistreat the fruit of the grape in such a cavalier fashion,” the elegantly coifed lady replied from the far end, with a theatrical shudder of her shoulders, one covered with fine white silk, the other bare.

“My Lady, you and your illustrious family were raised in an environment that demanded an appreciation of the subtleties embedded within each flavor and taste of the wine.  I, on the other hand, am but a humble officer in his Imperial Majesty’s naval service.  The best that I can tell the quality of a wine is by how quickly it can get one drunk.”

“You are an actual barbarian, Admiral Chandler.  But I shall endeavor to forgive you for your faults, my husband,” she said with a smile.

“And for that my dear Julia, I am most profoundly grateful.”  Jason turned back to his chief steward.  “I do believe that we have finished for the evening, Jean-Paul.  We will ring if we need anything else.”

The steward bowed first to the Admiral, and then to the admiral’s lady, and withdrew with the empty plates from Jason’s private dining room.

Julia raised one eyebrow.  “Rather presumptuous of you; what if I wanted something rich and delightful for dessert?”

Jason stood and walked around the table to where Julia sat, and knelt beside her.  “I believe that something can be arranged to your satisfaction, my love.”  And then he kissed her.

*****************************************************

Later, as the two lay in his large bed in his equally large and magnificent sleeping cabin, Julia began to giggle.

He bent his head and kissed her again on her forehead.  “Was it something I said, or perhaps did, that has you so amused, love?”

Curling her body tight against his chest and belly, she brought his hand to her mouth and kissed it.  “No, Jase.  I was just wondering, how many Very Important People have shared this bed with you?”

“Well, most of those types are distressingly male, my dear Julia.  And none of them, regardless of their exalted Imperial ranks, are you.”

He lay there holding her and drew in a deep breath.  “You know, if your father had not pulled strings it would have been four months before we could have shared a bed again; if my duties in Cyralis allowed me the chance to go planet-side, that is.”

“I do not use my connections often, Jase, but for this, yes, I had Father arrange it.”

“Hail Caesar,” he whispered into her brown hair, as she began to giggle again, and then lightly hit Jason’s bare chest.

“It is not my fault that I am his only daughter, Jason Chandler.  At least he did not have you arrested as a traitor when we told him we were getting married.”

“There is that.”

For several minutes neither said a word in the darkened room.

“Father actually likes you, you know.  I was surprised by that.”

“Your father is the Emperor, Julia.  And I serve him in all things, save where you are concerned.”

She sighed and rested her head on Jason’s chest, her long chestnut hair covering him like a silken blanket.  “And that is why he likes you, Jase.  For the longest time, he was so afraid that my only suitors would be those who wanted me simply because I was his daughter; who would not actually care for me, but instead use me for their own political gain.  When I told him you had proposed, he was afraid of me getting hurt, or used.  But once he actually met you, he gave me his blessings.”

“Funny; he told me that I would be crucified, hung, and drawn and quartered if I ever did anything to cause you any harm.”

She sniffed.  “Of course, I am Caesar’s sole daughter, after all.  I get only the best of everything.”

“In that case, my love,” he said as he began to nibble on her earlobe, “I shall just have to prove that I am indeed the best you will . . . “

A sudden loud buzz interrupted Jason in mid-sentence, in mid-nibble.  He sat up and leaned over his wife to hit the receive button on the intercom.

“Report.”

“Admiral, we have intercepted an emergency transmission from the destroyer Seydlitz in the Tammoran system,” Captain Nathan Serrano, his chief of staff, replied.  “She reports having discovered a Confederation base in that system; however the defenses are too heavy for her to penetrate without assistance.  Sir, the message is addressed to Sector HQ, but they won’t receive the transmission for another fourteen hours.  Transit time from Jouett to Tammoran is over a week, if they even have heavy forces available in-system to send.”

“Distance to Tammoran, Captain?”

“Seventeen point three eight light-years; if you decide to respond to their request, it will take forty-four minutes to change vector aligning the Task Group for trans-light insertion, with a flight time of seven hours and fifty-four minutes.  We can shave two hours and thirty-eight minutes from our ETA if we leave the 501st to proceed independently to Cyralis.”

Jason frowned as he considered the idea, and then shook his head.  “No.  I know the transports will slow us down, but I do not want to leave them unprotected; this is a front-line sector, after all.  Regardless of the fact that I am his son-in-law, Caesar Nicolas would have my hide if an entire Shock Legion was jumped by raiders when I went gallivanting about with their assigned escorts.”

Nathan Serrano said nothing, but Jason could see in his mind’s eye the corner of his mouth twitching.  Nathan was not the only officer aboard the Imperial Star Ship Reprisal that found the Admiral transporting his wife as essential diplomatic personnel amusing.

“I will be on the Flag Bridge in twenty minutes, Nathan.  Assemble the staff, and ask Captain Danislov to attend; by screen will be fine if he has gone off duty.  And contact General Tuturola; he may appreciate the time to prepare in the event we need his troops.  In the meantime, issue orders for the entire Task Group to alter course for trans-light insertion, destination Tammoran.”

“Aye, aye, Sir,” the chief of staff said and then the intercom died.

Julia was already sitting up and pulling on a robe as she turned on the lights in the sleeping cabin.

“You do not have to get up, love.”

“I would not be able to sleep, Jase,” she said, giving him a beaming smile.  “Besides, how often do I get you see in action?  Other than in that,” she giggled, pointing to the bed.

*****************************************************

“Admiral on the deck!” sang out one of the two armed petty officers flanking the hatchway as the two of them entered the Flag Bridge, trailed by four of the Praetorians assigned to Julia by her father.  Caesar Nicolas had insisted that it was routine security, but all of the involved parties knew the real reason:  many in the Empire of Humanity continued to discriminate against women involved in politics, business, or the military.  Anything but being a living, breathing incubator for future generations, actually.  It was a legacy of humanities first encounter with an alien race.  We won that one, Jason thought, though it took us forty years and over five billion lives to do so.  The victory had turned even more pyrrhic afterwards; in a final spasm of fury at their loss, the Ordan-Kraal had managed to dust Old Earth and her five extra-solar colonies with a biological agent.  That agent had rendered sterile over ninety percent of all living women and girls.  What was worse, it altered the DNA of the survivors, making it far more difficult for the few fertile women left to conceive.  Needless to say, the human race had not appreciated the parting gift and seven years later no Ordan-Kraal remained alive anywhere in the known universe.  And it had not taken any fancy biological tinkering; no, old fashioned nuclear bombardment worked just as well, at least in making an entire race of beings extinct.

That had been four hundred years ago, at the dawn of the 22nd Century.  Mankind, with an emphasis on man, had not handled the situation well.  Women, fertile women, at any rate, became a commodity too precious to risk, and within a generation the need to shelter females from danger had resulted in them losing nearly all of their rights, becoming little more than property.  Until the DNA virus had been finally eradicated ninety-seven years ago, women had lacked citizenship, could not own property, could not vote; they could not serve except by bearing the next generation of humanity.  Thanks to the vaccine, though, more and more women were regaining their full fertility.  Since wide-spread introduction of the vaccine began, the population of the Empire had nearly tripled, and with the vast increase in numbers of men and women both, the Caesars had slowly, ever so slowly, begun to restore women’s rights.  It was only in the past decade they had at last regained the right to serve in the military or the government and to earn their citizenship, and with it the legal right to vote.

Many men, even with the human population growing with leaps and bounds, still refused to treat women as equals, however.  It had become ingrained in the social customs of humanity, this branch, at least, and some elements of society had responded badly.  Rape, a crime once considered so heinous it warranted the death penalty, was rapidly on the rise.  Many officials in the government turned a blind eye to harassment, to persecution, even to vile criminal acts.  The entire social compact of the Empire was changing, and some people hated that change with a mortal vengeance, refusing to accept it.  At least, they refused until someone forced them to do so.  And in Julia’s case, it would be the Praetorians her father had assigned to her that would do that forcing.  Even the most misogynist of men would behave themselves when those killers fixed their glare upon them.

Jason shook his head, as he waved for the staff to resume their duty stations, even as they were all rising to their feet at the petty officer’s booming announcement.  “As you were,” he snapped, and then lowered his voice to a whisper as leaned over towards the young spacer.  “There is really no need for that every single time I step foot on this deck, O’Reilly.”

The man blushed and mumbled, “Aye, aye, Sir.” 

Jason smiled wryly, and patted the man on the upper arm as he stepped past him into the compartment.  “Just don’t let it happen again.”

Scores of high-resolution screens lined the walls of the Flag Bridge, each sub-divided into dozens of individual readouts showing everything from the fuel status of each of his ships to images of the surrounding space, while spaced around the rim of the chamber were dozens of work stations, each manned with either an officer or staff NCO hand-picked for the job of keeping Jason informed with the minutiae involved in the command of an Imperial Battle Squadron.

In the very center of the compartment, a massive holo-tank projected a slowly rotating image of the Cavanaugh system with a tiny blinking dot representing the fourteen vessels under his command looking lonely and lost in its vast reaches.  Cavanaugh, with its red dwarf primary, was a desolate and isolated portion of the Empire of Humanity.  There were no permanent settlements; just a handful of automated mining stations among the rings of debris that served the slowly dying cinder instead of proper planets.  Above the red dwarf in the holo-projection, a second projection replaced the mostly empty space of stellar north with an expanded view of his Task Group; the ten warships of his own 342nd Battle Squadron and the four assault transports assigned to ferry the 501st.   Of course, even in the expanded view, each ship was only an icon, but he could read the icons easily enough after many long years of practice.

The secondary projection centered on four battleships, Leviathan and Vanguard of the old Dreadnought class alongside Reprisal and Renown, two modern Resolution class ships.  Reprisal and her sister Renown were, at 2 kilometers in diameter, among the largest mobile structures ever conceived of and built by Mankind.  Leviathan and Vanguard were just slightly smaller at 1.9 klicks across, but were every bit as deadly, even if they had been in service for nigh upon two centuries.  Together with the even smaller and older Warrior class ships that had first seen combat during the Ordan-Kraal Wars, the battlewagons gave physical representation to the will of Caesar, serving as his voice and his fist here in the outer provinces of the Empire.  The battle-line had been forged during the Ordan-Kraal Wars when a victorious humanity found that none of their existing ships could survive against the planetary defenses of their foe’s core worlds.  Hastily built and placed into service, the Warrior’s had smashed their way through a hail of tungsten penetrators, beams of coherent light, plasma bolts, and fusion warheads to break the defense shields and shatter the homeworlds of the Crabs into silent and lifeless wastelands filled with radiation and ash.  The Dreadnoughts and Resolutions carried on that tradition established above a burning Ordan, giving pause to all the enemies of mankind about what their own fate might one day entail.

Icons representing Centurion and Lancer, each a Gladiator class Cruiser, blinked in the tank as well; one ranging ahead of the four heavy ships, the second trailing behind the vulnerable transports.  Faster and more maneuverable than his battle-line, the cruisers provided the crucial inner perimeter of his escorts.  At just under 1.4 kilometers in diameter, the cruisers were far less massive and far more vulnerable than his battleships, with a much lighter battery of weapons to boot.  Despite that weakness against true capital ships, they could overpower any lesser vessel in existence, and their secondary and point-defense batteries were just as intense as the battle-wagons own.  Plus, with their lighter and thinner layers of armor, less intensive shields, and smaller caliber main guns, the sensor arrays of the cruisers were capable of better resolution and greater range than that of capital ships.

All in all, the cruisers gave Jason his eyes and ears, in a fleeter-footed and more agile package.  The Fleet had begun life as a cruiser navy, with the thousand-meter diameter Boxer class that fought the Ordan-Kraal to a standstill.  Even today, cruisers (and cruiser squadrons) outnumbered the battle-line by a factor of four, and the Gladiators were simple the last in a long line of tried and tested cruisers.  Many in the Fleet and the Senate wanted to replace the battle-line with the smaller, less capable, but also far less expensive ships.  They argued that while the Gladiators were individually less powerful, the Fleet could afford to build more of them; allowing the Empire to provide a more complete defensive coverage of the systems that they claimed.  And, after all they reasoned, most situations did not require the firepower of four ships of the line to resolve.  Luckily, Jason thought, Caesar did not agree.  Nor, in fact, did Jason himself.  Not while the Empire and the Confederation were at war, or while predatory races like the Rilthani or the Jokar stood poised upon the borders.  Cruisers were excellent ships as escorts, or for long duty missions that required one to cruise through real-space on patrol.  Enough of them could even pack enough of a punch to hurt battleships, in theory anyway.  But they were simply too fragile to stand in battle against enemy capital warships, or fixed planetary defenses, for that matter, even the late-generation Gladiators.

Four Alexander class destroyers rounded out the 342nd; Belisarius, Napoleon, Scipio Africanus, and Wallenstein.  The workhorses of the Fleet, the Alexanders were also the smallest warships in his squadron at just 800 meters.  Unlike the massive cruisers and battlewagons, the destroyers mounted none of the medium or heavy class plasma cannons that those ships used as their main weapons.  Instead, the tin-cans made do with an array of light plasma guns (the same weapons in fact used as secondaries aboard the heavier ships) supplemented by an extensive network of point-defense.  Combined with their relatively weak armor protection and shielding, this should have meant that few would have any use for such fragile vessels.  Those few would be wrong, however, for what the destroyers lacked in firepower and durability, they more than made up for in speed and sensor reach.  The Greyhounds of the Fleet, as they were often referred to in Imperial service, were nimble and agile ships, with the largest maneuver sphere of any warship in service and they were the only warships in the Imperial Fleet capable of operating in an atmosphere or setting down on the surface of a world.  And the destroyers held a trump card as well in their massive banks of torpedo launchers.  While not as accurate as plasma cannons and far more vulnerable to point-defense, the sheer number of torpedoes unleashed in a salvo ensured that some of the gravity fused hydrogen weapons would penetrate the targets defenses.

However, in order to ensure a torpedo pattern would saturate a target, the weapons needed to be launched from an almost suicidal range, deep within the engagement envelope of any significant warship.  Launching from farther out gave enemy point-defense more time to track the warheads and would spread the salvo; resulting in few, if any, hits.  When used properly, though, by an aggressive skipper at close range, a salvo of torps could gut even the heaviest of ships, but it was a trump card that could only be played once, twice at the most.  For the great weakness of a torpedo battery was the sheer size of the damn things.  Each of torpedoes was as large as a pre-spaceflight ICBM, leaving little if any space for reloading equipment and magazines, especially on a ship as cramped for internal volume as a destroyer.  They were, on the other hand, remarkable low in mass for their size, and required virtually no power consumption, unlike high-intensity plasma cannons.

All in all, torps had proven themselves as viable and valuable weapons for Imperial destroyers.  No reloads were carried aboard; giving the Alexanders just one big salvo or two smaller ones with the system; but if the torps managed to hit it almost guaranteed a dead ship.  Some powers, including the Confederation, had a different design philosophy; those navies included one or two reloads per launch tube at the expense of guns, point-defense, shields, armor, or parasite vessels.  Some of their cruisers even replaced their medium weight plasma cannons with torpedo batteries that contained reloads for four, five, or even six salvoes per tube.  Rumors about a Confederation battleship class featuring a heavy torpedo battery with over a dozen reloads combined with the armor and guns of an Imperial cruiser had been rampant for years, but never confirmed.  Imperial doctrine, on the other hand, saw that practice as far too restrictive on the remainder of the ships armament.  Such cruisers were, in the opinion of most Imperial naval officers, little more than outsized destroyers; lacking the guns, armor, and shields for most of the cruiser roles.  They did make impressive bombardment platforms, however; at least until their magazines ran dry.

Cape Town, Moscow, Perth, and Sofia, the Dresden class assault transports, were troop carriers.  At 900-meters in diameter, they were among the largest ships capable of entering atmosphere and making planet-fall, but they lacked any credible offensive weaponry.  The sole armament of the transports consisted of a light array of point-defense guns, with even weaker armor and shielding than the Alexanders.  But the job of these ships was not to engage enemy vessels in fierce fire-fights; no it was to land a full-strength Shock Legion in the face of enemy fire.  Each of the Dresdens could lift a full combat brigade of the legion, plus a portion of the service and support brigade:  over ten thousand troopers and almost eighteen hundred combat and support vehicles along with nearly a million cubic meters of cargo, supplies, munitions, and fuel.

Designed from the core out as dedicated assault ships, the Dresdens also carried nano-forges aboard that could construct any component or weapon, provided the forges were supplied with the correct raw elements in the proper proportions.  A Legion supported by four Dresden class ships could remain in combat indefinitely, as long as the ships had power and supplies for the forges, that is.  These particular assault ships were carrying the 501st Shock Legion, Caesar’s Black Panzers.  Bound for Cyralis to serve on the front, the 501st was a heavy formation, with tanks, artillery, and battle-armored infantry, along with their entire support and service brigade.  An elite unit normally deployed on Terra, General Miles Tuturola had personally requested the assignment from his Imperial Majesty.  After all, the boys were getting rusty, he had bluntly told Caesar, over the objections of other, higher-ranking, officers.  Caesar had been amused, however, and had released the Black Panzers with orders to hone their edge.  I really pity the people of Cyralis if peace has been declared by the time they arrive, Jason thought.

Jason finished considering all this as he took his seat at the head of the conference table to one side of the holo-tank.  “Captain Serrano, what is our current status?”

“Admiral, we will complete our course change in thirteen minutes.  Following that it will require another six to accelerate to the proper velocity for trans-light entry.  All ships have reported in at Condition Two, and General Tuturola has alerted the 501st for possible ground assault.”

“Commander Hedges?” he turned to his astrogator.  “Is there anything of special interest about Tammoran?”

The tall, sandy-haired officer pursed his lips before answering.  “Yes, sir, Tammoran was included in our nav briefs.  The single star is approaching the end of its life span.  Right now, it is in full-blown Red Giant stage.  Only the outermost planets remain intact, though debris fields range throughout the system.  Radiation output is high, but our armor and shields should counteract virtually all of the detrimental effects.  I feel, however, Admiral, that I must advise not entering the Tammoran system.”

Jason leaned forward, placing his elbows on the table.  “Why is that, Henry?”

“Sir, there is a red flag on the system in the nav data banks from the last research team to visit the system.  That star is going to explode any time now and we won’t have much of a warning if it does.”

“A supernova?” asked Captain Aleksey Danislov from one of the video screens to the side.  The commanding officer of the Reprisal, Danislov was Jason’s Flag Captain, his senior ship commander.

“No sir; the star is not quite massive enough for that.  However, it will go nova and if it does than no amount of armor or shielding will prevent total destruction of our ships.”

Another officer, Commander Leslie Drake, the flag communications officer, spoke up.  “How much warning will we have if it decides to blow?”

“None, if it has already popped before we arrive.  If it hasn’t, then we should have forty or so minutes from the first tachyon flash to the arrival of the leading edge of the expansion shell.  Given where Seydlitz says the Confed base is, it will take us thirty-three minutes to accelerate to minimum safe velocities for trans-light insertion from orbit, Sir.  That is not a lot of spare time.”

Jason frowned as he sat back and ran through the options.  He shook his head, “Not a lot, no, but it is enough of a margin of error.  Miles,” he continued as he turned to speak to the image of General Tuturola on one of the wall-mounted view screens, “I doubt we are going to want to unload your troops, but keep them updated just in case.  Gentlemen, there is an enemy base in our territory.  If we knew that star was going today or tomorrow, then I would say to hell with it, and let them burn.  But we do not know.  It could be next year; it could be a decade.  And it is our job to travel in harm’s way.”

“Nathan,” he continued, “We know Seydlitz is in system, so have astrogation plot our T-space exit half a light-year outside Tammoran’s Oort cloud.  We will contact her via phase-com when we reenter real-space and find out the status of the star.  If it hasn’t exploded by the time we arrive at that point, then we will jump into the system itself; that should give us only fifteen-or-so minutes of uncertainty.  Understood?”

“Aye, aye, Sir.”

“Then the word is given, gentlemen.  Next stop Tammoran; assume your stations for trans-light insertion,” he finished as he stood.  For a moment he stood there, looking down on his wife; her face pale, drawn and ashen as she realized for the first time, perhaps truly and deeply understood for the first time, just what dangers her husband’s chosen life might bring.  And then he made himself turn away and continue with his duties.

*****************************************************

Forty light minutes from the Red Giant at the heart of the Tammoran system, a small rocky orb silently orbited the sullen swollen star as it had for the past six billion years.  Half the size of Mercury, the ball of rock (planet was far too grandiose a term for such a worthless piece of cosmic debris) featured no significant mineral deposits; it had no atmosphere; nothing really to attract the attention of anyone.  Until the destroyer Seydlitz had stumbled across the hidden base the Confederation had constructed on its surface, that is.  ISS Seydlitz orbited the rock at a distance of five hundred thousand kilometers, far outside of weapons range from the surface.  From that safe distance she kept watch on the base below, keeping the Confeds pinned up until the Fleet arrived to deal with the problem.

Commander Gaius Scott sat in his command chair upon the bridge of his destroyer as he waited for the arrival of Task Group Chandler.  The Grierson Phased Tachyon Pulse Communications Array (Phase-Com, for short) transmission had surprised him when he received it almost eight hours ago.  With the distance between Tammoran and the Sector Headquarters on Jouett, he had not been expecting any help for the next week, possibly even two, given how stretched Imperial forces were out here on the Rim.  He had certainly not expected his transmission to reach a battle squadron in transit at a real-space way point.  If those ships had been under trans-light drive, his message would have missed them completely, for no one traveling faster than light speed could communicate with, or even detect, anyone or anything in real-space.

The Patrick-Sogabe-Kaplov (PSK) drive had given Man the stars.  Commercial vessels and transports without heavy radiation shielding could only manage to attain a velocity of 2.2 light-years per hour; military vessels with their better shielding (and some very few, very expensive civilian ships) could travel at velocities of up to 3.3 ly/hr.  But if the miracle of the trans-light drive had opened the galaxy to exploration and colonization, it had also been subject to a number of limitations.

First among them, was the fact that there seemed to be a lower limit on how small the PSK drives could be built, limiting their use to ships with enough volume to cram them in.  That lower limit had been reached on vessels slightly less than half the size of his own Seydlitz, an Alexander class destroyer.  Second, the drive consumed more and more power as the ship increased in mass, which, given the current state of power production, produced a very real and very hard limit on the upper size of the ship possible.  The law of diminishing returns had proven that past a certain point, somewhere around 2.2 kilometers in theory, a larger vessel would be weaker than a smaller one, in terms of absolute armor and shield protection, firepower, and sub-light speed.  The third limitation was in the nature of the drive itself.  In order for the PSK drive to function at all, the ship mounting it had to attain a real-space velocity of no less than 42.075 kilometers per second on a direct vector to its destination.  Once insertion speed was reached, the PSK Drive translated the ship and crew into what the Fleet termed t-space (or transit space).  How it managed to do so had driven more than one physicist insane.  Regardless, no matter how the thing worked, it worked, and to a Fleet officer that was all that mattered.  But the PSK Drive had one minor flaw associated with it.  For some reason known only to geniuses and God, it would overload if engaged for longer than 20 hours, 34 minutes, and 48 seconds.

An overloaded PSK Drive expelled the ship back into real-space and sent a surge through the drive controls and power runs, burning out both systems simultaneously and subsequently requiring thousands of man-hours of painstaking work to repair; if a ship even carried enough spares, that is.  It could even overload if consecutive uses of the drive exceeded the governing limit.  But, for every three seconds spent in real-space, the drive seemed to recover two seconds that it could then spend in t-space.  No one, not even the physicists, knew why, but it imposed a very real barrier on the use of the drive system.  Imperial ships were hard-wired to prevent a single transit of more than 12 hours; though, of course every chief engineer knew how to disconnect the safeties.  Standard Imperial policy was that for every second spent in transit, a ship had to spend at least two in real-space.  It was a policy with which Commander Scott thoroughly agreed, even if it meant that he had to spend a full day cooling his heels in the deep black between transits.  After all, there was no auto-club out here in the back of beyond to rescue ships and crews that had abused their drives to the point of failure.

It was because of that minor flaw that the Task Group Chandler had been coasting along in real-space in the Cavanaugh system instead of racing faster than light to their original destination of Cyralis.

“Sir, we are picking up the fringes of a t-space emergence wave,” Ensign Rebecca Hastings called out from Tracking, interrupting his reverie.  Scott looked down at the small repeater monitor mounted on the arm of his chair, and saw the wave gaining strength by the second.

“Thank you, Becky.  Ian,” he said as he turned to face his executive officer, “send the ship to Action Stations.  It should be Admiral Chandler, but let’s take no chances.”

“Aye, aye, Sir,” Ian Sinclair replied.  Turning back to his own console, he lifted a hand-held phone and pressed a button.  The lights on the bridge shifted from normal to red battle lighting, and three whoops of a siren sounded throughout the ship.  “All hands, this is the XO.  Action Stations, Action Stations.  Set Condition One throughout the ship, this is not a drill.  I repeat, this is not a drill.”

“Talk to me Becky,” Commander Scott said to the young woman as the crew of his destroyer rushed to man their stations.

“Sir, the numbers are building nicely, we should see t-space emergence in five, four, three, two, one; we have real-space emergence, sir.  Range 3.2 million kilometers, multiple emission sources.”

Commander Scott could feel a drop of sweat trickling down his neck.  If this wasn’t the Admiral, then he would have only a few choices available.  Unfortunately, given the number of ship icons on the display, those choices mostly boiled down to running for his life.  It should be the Imperial Task Group; after all only seventeen minutes had passed since he confirmed the star was still a star, and not an expanding cloud of gas and debris.  But stranger things had been known to happen, and there was a Confederate base on the surface below.  “Orin, send the challenge.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” his comm officer said.  “Unknown vessels, this is His Imperial Majesty’s Starship Seydlitz, you have entered a restricted area.  Identify yourselves immediately.  I repeat, unknown vessels, this is the His Imperial Majesty’s Starship Seydlitz, you have entered a restricted area.  Identify yourselves immediately.”

For several moments, Scott and the crewmen on his bridge waited in silence.  Then from the speakers came a voice.  “Seydlitz, this is the His Imperial Majesty’s Starship Reprisal.  I do believe that we are expected.”

“Query their transponders and confirm the ID, Becky.”

The young officer concentrated on her board and then visibly relaxed.  “Transponder ID confirmed, sir.  Those are Imperial ships, and ISS Reprisal is the one transmitting.”

Scott let out the breath he had not quite realized he was holding.  “Put me on, please, Orin.”

“Hot mike, sir.”

“Reprisal, this is Seydlitz.  Welcome to Tammoran, Admiral Chandler.”

“Roger that, Seydlitz.  We are initiating deceleration for a zero-zero intercept with you in thirty-six minutes from . . . mark.  Admiral Chandler requests that you transmit all pertinent sensor data on the enemy installation and then wishes to speak with you at your convenience, Commander Scott.”

“Acknowledged, Reprisal.  Is there any further traffic this station?”

“Affirmative, Seydlitz.  From the 342nd in general and Reprisal specifically, we extend a hearty well done to the commander and crew of ISS Seydlitz.  Reprisal out.”

“Seydlitz out,” Scott said as he swallowed the sudden lump in his throat.  “Orin, get with CIC and transmit the data-package for Admiral Chandler.  Ian, stand the ship down to Condition Two, and pass along that last transmission from Reprisal to the crew.”

“Aye, aye, Sir,” the XO said.

Chapter Two

Just another day in the Corps, thought Corporal Frasier Blenheim as he made one final sweep of the deserted Confed base.  Ahead of him roamed Private Charles N’Buta, a Marine so new he still squeaked.  Not that Charlie was a bad kid, Frasier mused, but he was just so damn eager.  Still, he supposed he had been much the same when he first enlisted ten long years back.  But ten years had proven more than enough of this shit for him.  Twenty-three days and a wake-up were all that remained until he returned to civilian life.  But he would not be a mere civie; he would return an Imperial Citizen with full voting privileges.  That, plus the land-grant he had earned in twenty-seven separate engagements, and the separation bonus Caesar awarded for honorable completion of a term of service would prove enough to set him up in comfort for the rest of his life.  At least he hoped that it would.

With the booming population, land-grants awarded on even the outer worlds were becoming worth real money.  Frasier smiled as he remembered the shark from the realty office before they departed on this assignment.  The man had offered to buy his land-grant; sight unseen, no less, for a quarter of a million talents.  But he would wait, for some land-grants were worth far more than that.  As a decorated veteran of ten years, he might well be awarded several thousand hectares of prime land, albeit most likely on a remote world.  But his separation bonus and pension would let him live, even if he did not sell a single square meter.  Of course, it depended on the climate of the grant, for Frasier detested the cold.  If it were some snow-covered forest of pine, or an alpine valley besides a lake, or even just a high-latitude spread on grassy plains, then the property would be up for sale to the first interested party.  On the other hand, if his grant included a nice sandy beach on a warm tropical sea, that would be a whole new ball game.

Hell, he might have enough to buy a wife, even.  That sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen anymore, but who really enforced the new rules in the outer worlds?  Some poor dumb plebian struggling to make ends meet would have too many daughters and not enough sons; and the opportunity to marry into the family of a Citizen?  Some of these outer worlds were pretty liberal in their marriage laws; he might even be able to find a pair of twins for sell.  Red-headed twins, tall and curvy, that was a sure ticket to happiness.  A third pair of hands on a new homestead would not hurt either.  But it was getting harder and harder to find women who would be content to stay home and obey their husbands and masters.  Too much was changing, he thought as he shook his head.

“Corp, I’ve got something hinky up here,” Charlie called out from ahead, breaking Frasier out of his reverie.

Frasier sighed as he shook his head.  This whole place had been swept twice and this was the final sweep before bugging out to the shuttles for the taxi-ride back aboard ship.  What wonderful new prosaic discovery had his rookie made now?  “What have you got, Charlie?”

The Marine turned to face him, and Frasier could just see the kid trying to shrug his shoulders inside the armor.  The armor, of course, did not shrug.  Twenty-three days, he thought, just another twenty-three days.  “Corp, this section of the wall, well, my scanners show nothing.”

“Private, nothing is not what we are looking for.  Any signs of life?”

“No, but . . .”

“Any power emissions?”

“No, Corp, but . . .”

“So your instrumentation is showing nothing unusual at all, right kid?”

“Corp, my system is working fine; I can see you all lit up like a tree at Christmas time.  But when I scan this section of the wall, I got nothing.”

Frasier slowly counted to ten.  “And?”

“Well, I could detect the rock behind the wall in the previous section, Corp.  But here, I got NOTHING,” the newly minted recruit said in a tone of voice that was utterly perplexed.

Frasier frowned and dialed in his own sensor array, focusing on the wall the private pointed his armored gauntlet at.  The scanners detected the wall just fine:  standard ferro-crete building material, power lines, air lines, water lines, and air ducts.  But behind the corridor wall itself, it was as though nothing at all existed.  Just exactly like his rookie fresh from boot had said.  And he had been so concentrated on his future instead of his job that he had completely missed it.  At least he had not been the first to miss, since the two previous sweeps had not noted it on the log, but that was cold consolation.  Frasier considered, for just a moment, not reporting it, but then he sighed and activated the phase-com.

“Central, Patrol Twelve.  Private N’Buta has located what may, I say again, may be a scan-shielded compartment not on the compound schematics.  Level three, section 27.  Shall I ring the bell or wait for reinforcements?”

“Patrol Twelve, Yarrow here.  Third platoon and HQ are now en route to your location.  Hold fast until we arrive.”

“Aye, aye, Sir; Patrol Twelve awaiting your arrival.  Twelve Out.”

As the circuit clicked off, Frasier closed his eyes; I will never live this down in the NCO club, he thought.  “Good eyes, Charlie; you done good kid, you done good.”

*****************************************************

Saul examined the sensor data on the section of the corridor wall himself when he and his command team arrived two minutes later at the head of the thirty-six battle-armored troopers of Third platoon.  Sure enough, the space behind the wall was non-existent.  Either the laws of the universe had suddenly changed, or someone had not fine-tuned their scan shielding to match the mineral composition of the mountain surrounding this facility.

“Gunny, find out who swept this corridor earlier and remind me to rip a few strips right off of their fat lazy rumps.  Corporal Blenheim, good job.”

“Sir, it was Private N’Buta who detected the anomaly, Sir.  I missed it on my scan, Sir.”

“Short-time or not, Corporal, you are still a Marine.  I will not have you written up and flogged for slackness, this time, but it best not ever happen again.  Private N’Buta, excellent job, son,” Saul said as he clapped the Marine on the shoulder.

“Thank you, Sir.  Sir, I would not have even known what to look for if the Corp; Corporal Blenheim, that is; had not drilled me on search protocol on the voyage out, Sir.”

Saul’s lips twitched inside his helmet.  This kid is going to make a fine Marine, he thought.  “Is that so, Private?  Well then, Corporal Blenheim, thank you for doing your job, some of the time at least.  Gunny, why don’t we stand back and let Parsons here play Ali Baba?”

Frasier grabbed Charlie’s arm and yanked the armor-clad trooper to one side, pressing him flat against the wall as the company HQ team moved back down the corridor.  The four squads of Third also pressed as close to the wall as they could, leaving just Lance Corporal Parsons to affix the demolitions.  After placing the final segment of the breaching charge in place, the Marine yelled “Fire in the Hole!” and bolted down the corridor.  Five seconds later, the charges blew, smoke and debris filling the corridor as the lights flickered on and off.  Frasier’s sensors saw the breach, wide enough and tall enough for two suits abreast, and then it saw the hidden corridor beyond.

Two of the Marines from Third rushed into the passage way, then another two, and two more.  The fourth pair had just cleared the breach when the Imperial sensors of every trooper present suddenly detected Confederation battle armor rapidly moving ahead of them.

*****************************************************

Jason splashed the cold water on his face from the sink in his personal lavatory just outside the Flag Bridge.  Ten minutes until the Marines finish the sweep, another thirty to recover the troops below, and then we can leave this dying system, he thought as he looked at himself in the mirror.  Not a bad haul; two prize ships with full loads of cargo, plus some thirty-two hundred prisoners.  The Sector Governor should be rather pleased with us.  He wiped the drops and wetness from his face, and then checked his uniform again.  Presentable, good.  Turning around, he opened the hatch and reentered the Flag Bridge.

“Nathan, get the staff to work on a least-time course for trans-light insertion, destination Cyralis.  Marius,” he asked his tactical officer, “what is the latest ETA from Centurion Yarrow?”

“Another six minutes should do it, Sir.  I will contact . . .”

“Admiral Chandler?  Captain Danislov is asking to speak with you immediately, sir,” Commander Drake called out from his comm station.

Jason moved over to his command station and sat, putting his wireless headset on and making certain it was properly in place.  He then snapped a switch on the arm of his chair, bringing to life a small screen beside his right knee bearing the image of Captain Danislov on Reprisal’s command deck.

“What is it, Aleksey?”

“Sir, our Marines have located a scan-shielded compartment on the base below; one not present on any surrendered schematics.  They are preparing . . . “

A sudden yell from behind Danislov caused him to stop and turn away.  For several seconds, Jason could hear nothing, and then Danislov was back, his face grim and somber.

“Sir, Centurion Yarrow reports contact with Confederation battle-armored infantry, number indeterminate.  He is under fire and is engaging the enemy.  Also, a Kitredge class armed escort has just launched from a hidden hanger bay on the planetary surface.  They are attempting to use the planet to shield themselves from our guns and are not responding to hails.”

“Vector the CAP to intercept and engage the Kitredge, Nathan.  Aleksey, advance the battle-line by division on separate orbits until we have a clear field of fire on the enemy vessel.  All ships are to engage with secondaries only, and aim for the main thruster plates.  Nathan, make certain the fighters have those orders as well.  Marius, order Marine reaction teams to the surface to support Yarrow; remaining Marines prepare to board and take that vessel once it is disabled.  And someone contact the Master-at-Arms and have him escort the Confed commander to my bridge; I have a few questions for him.”

“Aye, aye, Sir,” a chorus of voices replied.

*****************************************************

“Black Sheep, Black Sheep, this is Ramrod.  Come to heading 251 mark 119 and go weapons hot.  Target is Kitredge class armed escort designated Bandit One.  Intercept soonest.  Command requests you target main thrusters only, repeat main thrusters only.  Over.”

Lieutenant Commander William Wallace, known by the call-sign Highlander among his flight crews, spotted the flashing red strobe of the enemy vessel in his heads-up display.  “Roger, Ramrod, moving to engage, Highlander out.  Black Sheep, you heard the man, throttle up and follow me in, attack pattern Delta-Four.”  Several clicks on the transmission channel confirmed that his squadron mates had heard the order and he banked his Havoc strike bomber onto the new heading and pressed his throttles to the stops.  The quad gravity thrusters that took up forty-eight percent of his strike bombers mass responded instantly, hurling him forward at 15-g’s of acceleration.  Even with the inertial limiters functioning correctly, Will still sank back into his acceleration couch as his body temporarily doubled in mass.  Behind him, the fifteen other Havocs of the Black Sheep squadron completed their own turns and accelerated in his wake.  The squadron spread out into four four-ship flights, each in their own diamond configuration, precisely arranged in formation.

“Rambler, spin up the missiles and targeting systems.  Petey, we are going toe-to-toe with a warship,” albeit a small one, he thought, “I want you jamming their tracking the whole way in, comprende?”

“Roger, Highlander,” Lieutenant Morris ‘Rambler’ Simpson replied from the cockpit behind him.  The radar intercept officer maintained the missiles carried by the Havoc and also kept a watchful eye on the tracking systems.  While Will flew the craft, Morris Simpson was his eyes and ears.  A moment later, and a new bank of lights came to life on his console as Ensign Pavel ‘Petey’ Petrovich brought the Havocs powerful electronic warfare gear on-line.  “Roger, Highlander,” the EW officer chimed in, from his cramped, isolated compartment below and behind the two other crewmen, deep in the bowels of the sharply swept delta-wing craft.

Will settled the strike bomber down on its new course, and then reached down and flipped two manual switches on his control panel.  The first armed the eight mass driver cannons mounted in the leading edge of his wings.  Basically out-sized Reaper pulse cannons, the Mark VII mass-drivers fired 2cm projectiles instead of the 7mm rounds the Marines and Army used.  Almost useless beyond knife-fighting range, the Mark VIIs were standard on nearly every Imperial fighter or bomber in service for two reasons.  First of all, while they might well be out-dated technology, they were capable of extremely high rates of fire.  Together, all eight guns could fire almost five thousand rounds per second.  And while they were short-ranged, they gave pilots a substantial ability to strafe enemy ships or ground targets, or to defend against other fighter craft.  The second reason was their sheer hitting power.  Each of the 2cm tungsten slugs were accelerated to incredible velocities and the sheer kinetic energy when they impacted a target could crack open armor as though it were nothing more than a ripe watermelon.

The second switch powered up the four 5cm plasma guns mounted in the nose.  Far lighter than any plasma guns mounted by warships, indeed among the very lightest ever constructed, they could reach farther and hit harder than the Mark VIIs.  A direct hit from all four of the plasma guns could tear the wing from almost any fighter in service, or gut a tank.  They could even crater capital armor, and would certainly play, well, havoc, against any surface fixtures, such as radar and communications arrays, secondary turrets, and the like.  The only reason that the Mark IX plasma guns had not completely replaced the Mark VII mass drivers in service was their rather low rate of fire.  Each gun could fire only one round every two seconds.  The four mounted in the nose of his Havoc would alternate fire every half-second, ensuring a continuous stream of plasma bolts towards his target.  But still, for a craft designed to engage at the velocities the Havocs could attain, a half-second delay between shots could mean a miss.

On his heads-up display, Will could see the ten missiles carried in their bays beneath the wings and fuselage of his lithe little craft come to life.  Four were the massive Vanquisher anti-ship missiles, each with a range of 50,000 kilometers.  Designed to penetrate capital ship point-defense and shielding, the Vanquishers included a 20 kiloton gravity-triggered fusion warhead.  Pure stand-off weapons, they were, rather unfortunately, easily identified by tracking systems and targeted by hostile point-defense guns.  One missile alone, or even two or three, would not penetrate the defenses of any warship, even one as light as an Escort.  But the odds of probability almost assured that sixty-four such missiles launched simultaneously by the sixteen Black Sheep Havocs would result in two, three, or maybe even four of the missiles slipping through the point-defense fire, penetrating the shields, and striking home.

The other six missiles were Scorpion anti-fighter missiles, designed for anti-fighter and anti-shuttle work.  Their shorter-range (20,000 kilometers) and far lighter warheads (2,000 kilograms of conventional high explosives) meant that they could inflict little damage to capital ships.  But against fighters, the Scorpions shone.  Able to generate a higher thrust than any fighter in existence, they were very hard to spoof, and almost impossible to engage with point defense, a feature most fighters lacked anyway.  In a pinch, they could be used against ground targets or capital ships, but their lack of shield penetration aids and the low power of their warhead meant that few would hit, and of those that did only light damage would result.

Unfortunately for the Black Sheep, the instruction to target the enemy vessel’s main thrusters, in an attempt to disable the Escort, meant that they could not use their Vanquishers against the target.  The big missiles were not accurate enough to ensure hits only on the engineering section of the ship.  No, for this strike, the Black Sheep would have to do this the old fashioned way, with guns and precise missile strikes from the Scorpions.  If they got lucky, if they survived, maybe one or two of Will’s fighters would disable the drive.

“Black Sheep,” Will sang out as the range rapidly fell, “deploy decoys . . . NOW.”

The squadron leader felt his Havoc buck slightly as Morris ejected the two decoys from their internal bays in the rear of the strike bomber.  Thirty-two new icons suddenly appeared on his HUD as their drives came on-line and the decoys began to sing their electronic songs.  Each of big drones mimicked the signature of a Havoc, complete with all of the latest EW tricks built into his vessel.  Tied directly into his bomber’s main computer, the decoys would match his thrust and vector exactly, multiplying the targets the enemy ship had to deal with by a factor of three.  Will smiled as he imagined the consternation in the hostile ships CIC; the decoys were new equipment just added to the Havocs in their latest upgrade.

Will began to weave his fighter as he crossed into the 40,000 kilometer range of the main guns of the 400-meter diameter Kitredge.  To port and starboard, the decoys matched his velocity and vector changes precisely.  Designed as dual-purpose weapons, the rapid-fire 10cm plasma guns began to spit bolts of plasma at the strike squadron.  As each bolt reached its maximum range, the magnetic containment field failed, and explosions erupted around the fighters are they bored in towards the target.  The lighter 5cm point-defense guns were tracking the fighters as well, but they would not be able to fire until the range closed to 20,000 kilometers, and the quad-mounted 3cm mass drivers would not add their fury to the barrage until the range closed to under ten.  The Imperial bombers, on the other hand, could not open fire with their plasma guns until they reached 10,000 kilometers; or the mass drivers until a mere thousand kilometers.

“Steady, boys, steady; stay loose, if they can’t track you they can’t hit you,” Will chanted into his mike.  Unless you are just unlucky enough to fly right into the path of a bolt, he thought.

“Highlander, we are locked on main thrusters,” Morris said, as Will’s display changed, carating the grav-thrust plates on the stern of the enemy ship.  The squadron commander acknowledged his RIO with two clicks on the internal comm transmitter, even as he opened the squadron tactical frequency and began to broadcast.  “Ripple-fire all Scorpions at the thrusters only, Black Sheep, say again, thrusters only.  We will follow the birds in and finish the job with plasma and tungsten, people.”

More plasma bolts streaked past the armored canopy of his fighter as the range steadily fell.  Visible to the naked eye, the bolts glowed with their white-hot heat as they streaked by at half of light speed.  Keeping one eye on the range indicator on his HUD, Will jerked the craft through the sky with random vector and speed changes, as did the other pilots arrayed around him.  As he closed to just over 21,000 kilometers, a shrill warbling sounded in his helmet.  “Tone, I’ve got tone; Scorpions are locked on the target,” Morris called out from the rear-seat.

Will’s HUD lit green with the information that his entire squadron was now locked.  As the fighters cross the range threshold, he cried, “FIRE!” and triggered the birds.  Beneath his Havoc six weapon bays opened, and one by one, the Scorpions lit off their drives and accelerated towards the Kitredge at 50-g’s.  The point-defense guns of the enemy vessel also opened fire as the strike bombers entered their range, but then immediately shifted to the incoming missiles.  They must have a green crew over there, Will thought.  Scorpions possessed such a high thrust that it was nearly impossible to shoot them down, even with a warships point-defense.  Almost in response to his thought, the rapid-fire guns switched their fire back to his fighters, and two of them, along with a dozen decoys, exploded under direct hits.

Ninety-six Scorpions were launched at the target; none were killed by point-defense fire.  Then they hit the shields.  Modern shields could be penetrated by enough firepower, but light warheads such as those hitting the Confederation ship now were almost always unable to burst through.  Eighty-nine of the missiles flared and died on the shields, but their sacrifice buckled the defenses and seven broke past.  Four impacted on the upper starboard thruster plate, while three hit the lower, and the enemy vessel heaved as fourteen metric tons of explosive detonated, each detonation sending a self-forging penetrator deep into the hull.  Against a warship heavier than an Escort, that would not have even dented the armored skin, but Escorts were too light-weight to carry much armor, and the little they did carry was not enough to stop the fifteen thousand degree stream of molten and gaseous metal as it burned its way into the ship.

At least one of the missiles hit something important, and a massive plume of air erupted in a fireball out of the hull, scattering debris and bodies as the ship bled air, heat, and life into the void.  The two starboard engines died, and the target sharply veered towards the Black Sheep.

“Thrusters only, Black Sheep, thrusters only.  One pass, then clear the area for the big boys,” Ramrod sent over the squadron tactical net.  On his display, Will could see Reprisal and Renown clear the horizon of the planet, almost in range of their secondary battery of 12cm plasma guns.

As his targeting reticule turned green, Will pulled the trigger on his stick.  Bolts of incandescent plasma streaked away from his fighter, each shot hammering him back into his seat with the force of the recoil.  Still accelerating, it took him only forty-three seconds to pass over the stern of the enemy ship.  In that time, he fired eighty-seven plasma bolts into the vessel, as did each of the other pilots of his squadron.  The light bolts splattered against the shields, but collectively they delivered far too much energy for the already battered barrier to hold together.  Twenty-three from him, three hundred and seventeen in all, slammed into the bare, broken hull of the Kitredge, directly over where the missiles had torn a gap in the armor.

Even light plasma bolts packed tremendous energy into their magnetic containment fields.  The explosions literally ate their way through the ruined starboard thrusters, into the port mains and out the hull opposite.  The escort shuddered as its sub-light drives cut out and her fusion power plants went into emergency shutdown.  Lights on the outer hull flickered and died, and her guns went silent as she began to drift helplessly without power.  The hail of fire from the mass drivers shredded what was left of her stern quadrant as the squadron screamed past.

Will let out his breath, and checked his displays.  Twelve of his squadron-mates were still with him, but seven were flashing yellow-orange in his display; damaged by near-by plasma detonations, they needed to return to base to repair, refuel, and rearm.  Transponders from two of his destroyed strike bombers were flashing on the display, both crews had managed to eject; the third Havoc had not been quite so lucky.

“Ramrod, this is Highlander.  Bandit One drifting without drives or power.  Black Sheep is Winchester, RTB to Reprisal.  Three birds down, seven damaged; have emergency crews and medical personnel on stand-by.  Request immediately launch of Search and Rescue.”

“Highlander, Ramrod.  Copy your traffic to Reprisal.  SAR are launching now.  Command says well done, Black Sheep, come on home.  Ramrod out.”

*****************************************************

A sleet of tungsten filled the corridor as the six Imperial Marines that had managed to get inside exchanged fire with their Confederation counterparts.  Well-trained, mostly veterans of other deadly skirmishes, five of the Marines found shelter behind the structural supports.  The sixth, a new recruit fresh from basic training died as he stood his ground in the center of the corridor, firing at the Confeds.  Caught in the holocaust with nowhere to go, the two Marines in the breach also fell, their armor shattered in dozens of spots by the Confed pulse cannons.  A pair of Confed troopers also went down, one to the essentially random fire from the five veterans; the other to the steady aimed fire of the recruit a heartbeat before his own death.

Both the Confeds and the Imperials were now each sheltering behind solid cover, extending their arms out just far enough to send a hail of slugs towards the others.  Saul could see it on his helmet display, clear enough.  Stalemate, he thought to himself.  I can break through this holding group, but who knows how many more of them there are out there.  But doing so, he thought, would eat his men like paper thrown into a furnace.  He sucked on his lower lip; well, Marine, it is time to improvise, adapt, and overcome.  Never mind that it breaks a dozen close-quarters regulations and utterly throws away the Book.  His lip twitched, not that the idiots who wrote the Book had ever been in the midst of a real fire-fight.

“Third Platoon, prepare to rush and clear the corridor,” he called out over the suits phase-comm array, “but wait for the big boom!  FIRE IN THE HOLE!” he yelled as he leapt towards the breach.  Charlie looked up, twisting his body away from the wall as the Centurion flew past him, and then he slammed down hard on the floor as Frasier shoved him down and covered him with his own body.  Third Platoon (and Saul’s headquarters team) quite sensibly hunkered down; waiting for whatever crazy stunt their commander was attempting to unfold.

Saul threw his weight on his right hip, and bent his knee.  Slamming his knee into the floor, the heavy suit shattered tile and left a short trench behind, but the act also brought him to a complete halt directly facing the breach.  As he skidded across, with slugs of tungsten whizzing past his head, but mostly above him (even veteran troopers had a tendency to shoot high, after all), he pulled down the Thunderbolt launcher with his right hand.  Even before the click of the launcher told him the weapon was locked and armed, he was squeezing the firing trigger.  As the Thunderbolt snapped into place, the solid-fuel motor ignited and streaked forward down the corridor, the flames and fumes striking the walls behind Saul and splashing away to both sides.

All of the troopers in the shielded corridor in front of Saul, Imperial and Confederation alike, cried “OH SHIT” at the same time, and immediately dropped to the floor.

Saul was already ahead of them, and as the missile reached the ‘T’ junction at the corridors end, he was face first on the ground, armored arms and hands covering his head.  The 110 kilogram primary warhead detonated upon striking the far wall.  Designed to gut armored vehicles, the main charge formed into a stream of plasma that ate through fifteen meters of reinforced ferro-crete and solid granite.  The secondary effect of the Thunderbolt occurred a fraction of a second after the main charge detonated.  Around the outer hull of the missile casing, just behind the primary, four more charges were positioned.  Each of these four contained just 12 kilos of high explosives, but all of them were covered in pre-fragmented tungsten and ceramic plates; ten overlapping plates almost eight centimeters thick and nearly a full meter in length.  The four secondary detonations showered the corridor with lethal fragments, razor sharp and with just enough kinetic energy to stand a chance at penetrating full-up battle armor.

The shock-wave from the concussion of the detonation threw everyone to the ground as it reverberated from the walls, floor, and ceiling.  Dust and shattered tiles rained down on all of the troopers, even those on Saul’s side of the breach, and the remainder of the concealing wall shattered, peppering the Centurion with chunks of debris.  As the blast rolled past him, pressing him down to the ground, Saul pushed himself up and charged into the corridor, firing short controlled bursts from his Reaper into the helpless Confederation troopers, stunned by the concussion and wounded by the shrapnel.

“On your feet, Marines, GET ON YOUR FEET!  FORWARD!” he yelled as he sprinted towards the far junction.  Third Platoon poured into the breach behind him as Frasier pulled Charlie up from the floor.

“Corp, did he just do what I think he did?”

Frasier Blenheim cycled his pulse cannon to clear any debris from the barrels and shoved the private forward towards the breach in the wall.  “Private, if it is stupid and it works, then it ain’t stupid.  Now follow that maniac, Marine.”

*****************************************************

“Reprisal, Ramrod.  Assault team is docking with Bandit One now.”

Leslie Drake turned around to face Jason.  “Sir, the boarding team is ready to proceed, and we have confirmation that the Marines from Leviathan are down and en route to reinforce Centurion Yarrow.  Vanguards troopers will ground in two minutes.”

“Thank you, Leslie,” Jason said as he peered at the holographic display.  Currently, it showed a schematic of the base, along with icons representing each of the forty-six Imperial Marines in the field of view.  Each suit of battle armor was equipped with an inertial mapper, and those devices reached out with the suits sensor arrays, transmitting back data on what they discovered.  The mapper consolidated that data into a real-time three-dimensional map, and the phase-com system uploaded it to the flagship, through the breach in the scan- and comm-resistant walls.

Three of his Marines were dead, according to the display; another four were severely wounded.  But, their armor also reported that drugs had been administered and the troopers stabilized.  They could wait for the navy corpsmen accompanying the reinforcements.  Saul had slowed his pace, letting the grunts take point as they sealed off side corridors with conventional demolition charges and moved towards the large open area the sensors had detected.  Scores of red icons showed on the display in that chamber, each icon representing electronic emissions from a suit of armor; Confederation armor.

“I always knew he was a madman, Admiral,” Nathan said, “but this takes the cake.  What was he thinking, firing a Thunderbolt inside an enclosed space?”

“I imagine that he wanted to save the lives of the Marines that would have died to take the corridor in a more conventional way, Nathan.  And it worked, remember?  If it is stupid and it works . . .”

“. . . then it ain’t stupid,” his chief of staff finished.  “Got it, boss.  What are you thinking, sir?”

Jason leaned on the edge of the holo-tank and bit his lip in thought.  Then he highlighted a section of the compound below.

“This chamber here, where the Confeds are holed up in; how much rock would you say is overhead?”

Nathan read the data from one of the console screens nearby, and compared it to the scans taken of the area by the battleships own sensor arrays.  “Six hundred and, call it twenty meters.”

Jason nodded.  “That looks about right.  Reckon they laid on any heavy armor in that scan-shielded section?”

“No sir, that would go against their doctrine; besides it really, really hard to shield that much HCA against ship-based systems.”

The Admiral nodded again, and turned to look at his communication officer.  “Commander Drake, ask Centurion Yarrow to set up a blocking and containment point at the next junction.  He is to halt the advance,” as the Commander bent to pass along the order, Jason turned back to Nathan.  “Captain Serrano, ask Captain Danislov if the main battery would like to show these people why a false flag of surrender is generally considered to be a bad idea.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” the junior officer replied with a grin.

*****************************************************

The rear quadrant of the Kitredge was twisted, shattered metal, with clusters of flotsam and debris drifting all about.  The pair of Intruders ignored the single boat bay of the hostile armed escort, and instead clamped themselves to the outer hull of the forward section.  A sixteen-man section of marine combat engineers swarmed out from the port-side hatch and immediately began erecting a three layer pressure curtain around the shuttle’s hatch.  Sealed to the side of the derelict vessel, the pressure curtains would prevent the explosive decompression of the ships interior when the boarding party cut their way inside.  Working as a team, the engineers rigged the curtain in less than two minutes.  The engineering Gunnery Sergeant and two of his demo experts floated across to the hull and began setting out a pattern of breaching charges.  Behind them, another six Marines fixed heavy plates of HCA armor plating atop the demolitions, bonding each plate to the ship’s hull with a molecular adhesive.  It took another two minutes to finish setting the charges, and then the Gunny yelled, “Fire in the hole!”

The engineers swarmed back aboard the shuttle, and the marines in the open bay hunkered down facing away from the ship.  Two dozen explosions erupted beneath the armor plates cemented to the enemy vessel.  Prevented from expanding towards the shuttle by the HCA plates, the fury of the explosions turned inwards, ripping through the outer hull of the vessel, and shattering it into small chunks of debris.  The debris began to enter the ship, but the air pressure of the ships interior quickly reversed changed its course and peppered the interior of the shuttle, and the marines taking cover there.  But the Marines were ready for that, and the second set of armored hatches on the opposite side of the Intruders was already open.  The debris flew through the shuttle, past the hunkered down Marines and out into deep space.  As the gale of air escaping from within the Kitredge roared past, the hatches slowly closed, sealing the breach tight.

The commander of the boarding team, Centurion Danny Tibbs, stood and began barking orders, “Commence boarding operations.  First Platoon secure CIC, Second and HQ the main bridge; Third the ordnance magazines, Fourth remains in reserve.  Go.”

One hundred and fifty-two Imperial Marines, a full-strength Line Century, all clad in battle armor, stormed aboard the drifting vessel.  The sixteen combat engineers, attached from the battalion HQ still aboard Reprisal, remained behind, patching the holes in the pressure curtain the breaching charges had created and providing security for the pair of shuttles.  On the other side of the Kitredge, the second Intruder unloaded yet another century of Marines.

The Confederation naval personnel were not idiots.  Outfitted with lightly armored pressure suits designed for working in vacuum, not combat and armed merely with sidearms, or perhaps even sub-machineguns if they were lucky, the Confed spacers knew they had neither the firepower nor the defenses to hold off the marine assault.  Perhaps if the Kitredge had been a larger ship it might have been different, but she was an armed escort, and armed escorts did not carry a Marine complement.  In less than seventeen minutes, the ship was taken, with but two exchanges of violence.

In the forward dorsal magazines serving the point-defense 5cm plasma guns, a squad of Marines from Third Platoon arrived in the nick of time to kill the Confed officer attempting to detonate the plasma munitions and scuttle the ship.  Not wanting to set off the ordnance himself, the squad leader turned off his contra-gravity generator and bull-rushed the Confed.  Five hundred kilos of battle armor, containing another hundred or so kilos of Marine, slammed into the desperate man at almost thirty-five kilometers per hour, and then proceeded to crash into the bulkhead beyond.  The Marine suffered a concussion from the force of the impact; the remains of the Confederation officer had to be peeled from the bulkheads of the magazine afterwards.

On the main bridge, a woman wearing rank tabs of a Confederation Commodore opened fire on Danny and his troopers with a pistol as they entered.  She might as well have been shooting spitballs, as the rounds bounced off the armored plates and ricocheted across the bridge.  Screaming at the top of her lungs, “No, you can’t; you can’t; NOT YOU; YOU CAN’T!” over and over and over again, she emptied her magazine, causing no casualties among the Imperial forces, but four among her own crew.

Danny Tibbs shook his head and walked across the deck as she reloaded, and reached out and grabbed her forearms, and then twisted his armored gauntlets.  With a sickening crack, all four of the bones in her forearms snapped, and the women went limp from the sudden pain and shock.  “Sorry about that ma’am, but the Admiral wants answers.  And that means you get to survive until interrogation.  Anyone else want to play?” he asked as he looked around the bridge.

Dozens of ratings and several officers quickly shook their heads in an empathic no.  And Danny grinned.  “Top, inform the Flag we have taken the ship and require transport for prisoners.”

“Aye, aye, Sir,” replied First Sergeant Harper.

Chapter Three

Jason grabbed the phone from the wall-mounted speaker and barked into it, “This is the Admiral.  Get me Captain Serrano.  Now.”

As he waited for Nathan to pick up, he watched Inquisitor Kim unhook Colonel Warren and inject him with a cocktail of pain-killers and sedatives.  Kim’s assistants unstrapped the enemy officer and placed him carefully on a gurney and wheeled him out of the interrogation room, leaving Kim and Jason alone.

Kim shook his head.  “He actually believes that it could work, as much as he may not wish to, Admiral.  He is well and truly frightened by the prospect that Palik’s theory is indeed correct.”

“So am I, Inquisitor, so am I,” Jason answered.

 â€œFlag Bridge, Captain Serrano,” spoke a voice from the phone.

“Nathan, how long will it take to complete recovery of all troops and prisoners from the planet?”

“Forty minutes, Admiral.”

“Order them to expedite and lay in a course plot on least time to t-space from orbit for all ships.  If we begin departure now, can the shuttles catch us?”

“Not at best speed, Sir.  We would have to hold acceleration down to 2-g’s until they catch us and we recover them.  Then we could take the formation to up to max.”

“How much time would that save?”

“One moment, Sir, we are running those numbers.  Breaking orbit right now at 2-g’s, and then increasing to 6-g’s after shuttle recovery saves eleven minutes on our time to t-space velocity.”

“Do it.  And tell the Marines dirtside to get their asses back aboard ASAP, because we are not waiting around.”

Jason racked the phone and turned back to the intelligence officer.  “As soon as she is able, Kim, grill Palik.  In the meantime you . . .”

“In the meantime, I should begin with the research scientists,” Kim finished for Jason.  “Admiral, I do not tell you how to run your ships; please show me the same courtesy, after all, we are both professionals at what we do.”

“Inform me immediately if you uncover any information, Inquisitor, I will be on the Flag Bridge.”

*****************************************************

“Shag your asses, Marines!” Saul bellowed in the main hanger bay of the facility, directed at the last members of his century to come tearing up to the shuttle ramp.  Four Intruders crouched in the pressurized bay; thrusters already spun up and ready to go once the last of the Marines were loaded.  “Go, go, GO, GO!”

Gunnery Sergeant Jean Valjean counted each Marine as he passed by, the computer in his armor keeping an independent count.  As the last trooper streaked up the ramp, he compared totals:  145 to 145.  The dead and wounded had already been loaded, and the prisoners; well screw the prisoners if they had missed a few.  “That’s all of them, Centurion,” he snapped as he headed up the ramp.

Saul turned and followed him as the navy crew chief began retracting the ramp and closing the hatch.  “Make a hole, Marines!” he snarled as he headed for the cockpit at the forward end of the shuttle.  Armor clad Marines squeezed back against each other as they cleared a path for the Centurion to the cockpit hatch.  Reaching it, he stuck his head in.  “We’re loaded, Warrant, lift us off now.”

“No can do, Centurion, we have to let the bay depressurize . . . “

“To hell with that, Warrant; the Admiral said ASAP.  Wilkins!” he boomed into his helmet microphone.

“Sir,” the heavy weapons specialist answered.

“Are you riding in Dorsal 1?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Blow that miserable hanger door out of our way, Marine!”

“Aye, aye, Sir!”

The flight officer, and the co-pilot, and the flight engineer turned to look at Saul with widening eyes.  “You can’t just . . .,” the pilot began to say.

The whine of the rotating turret interrupted him, and then the quad plasma guns fired in sequence.  The explosion ripped apart the doors, and a hurricane force gale of air erupted into the vacuum   The shuttle rocked violently on its landing legs and a hideous screech echoed throughout the interior as it was dragged twenty meters across the hanger floor, the pads on the bottom of the legs ripping furrows in the ferro-crete surface.

“Consider us depressurized for flight, Warrant.  Now lift this puppy off.”

Perhaps it was coincidence, but Saul’s right arm SMG was pointing in the general direction of the command pilot as he said this.  The crew of the assault shuttle quietly turned back to their stations, and the shuttle lifted up and roared out past the shattered doors, the other three following in their wake.

As the shuttles lifted for orbit, Saul watched as the flight engineers console depicted the steadily increasing range from the Confederation facility.  As the last shuttle passed the five kilometer mark, Saul yelled, “FIRE IN THE HOLE!” and transmitted the detonation command to the dozen demolition charges his Marines had rigged.

Twelve 100-kiloton detonations devoured the base behind them, but the shuttles were too far down-range to suffer more than a minor scorching of their paint.  “Bet the Admiral forget we laid the charges, gentlemen, but hey; waste not, want not, I always say.”   

*****************************************************

“Nuclear detonations!  Multiple detonations on the planetary surface!” sang out Marius Valentine from the Flag tactical plot.

Jason smiled crookedly as the remainder of his staff began trying to determine who was shooting at whom.  “Centurion Yarrow strikes again,” he said.

Nathan Serrano nodded, “The demo charges?”

“I forgot to tell him not to bother.  Oh well, I always did enjoy fireworks.  Use this as an unscheduled drill for the tactical team, Nathan; I will deal with Saul when he gets back on board.”

“Aye, aye, Sir.”

“Sir,” said Commander Hedges from astrogation.

“What is it, Henry,” Jason asked, his stomach suddenly knotting.

“We have just received a massive tachyon flash from the Red Giant.  It has begun to collapse, Sir.”

“Time to insertion?” Jason snapped.

“Twenty-three minutes at current vector and thrust; that includes the increase to flank after recovering the shuttles.”

“How long do we have before the shock-wave arrives?”

“Thirty-nine minutes, Admiral.  It would seem we began departure in the nick of time.”

God, let her be wrong, Jason thought to himself.  Let her be wrong.  “Nathan, sound General Quarters across the squadron, and put me on the speaker; all-hands, all-ships.”

“You’re hot, Admiral,” Nathan said after adjusting a few controls.

Picking up the phone, Jason closed his eyes.  “This is Admiral Chandler.  We are preparing for t-space insertion on a course to Cyralis.  Unfortunately, the Red Giant has also picked this moment to erupt.  We will enter t-space well before the shock wave can reach us, and our shielding and armor can handle any increased radiation output before it arrives.  Unfortunately, recent studies by the Confederation personnel at the base on Tammoran VII indicate that this event may have some effect on ships in t-space near Tammoran.  I cannot tell you what those effects might be.  I will only ask that you trust your officers and carry out their commands.  To the officers of the Fleet and the Legion, remain calm and do your jobs.  This is Confederation research after all; it may well prove to be nothing.  However, I want all ships to stand by at action stations with damage control teams ready.  Soldiers and sailors of the Empire!  Hail Caesar!”

“Hail Caesar!” rang out in answer from the men of the Flag Deck as Jason racked the phone.

Jason turned back to Nathan, whose face had gone pale.  “Effects, Admiral?  Just what can affect us in t-space?”

“Just pray the mad Confed woman is exactly that, Nathan.  Pray.”

*****************************************************

The jump clock in CIC slowly counted down the minutes and seconds as Reprisal and her brood raced for the magic velocity to enter t-space.  Jason leaned on the edge of the holo-tank and watched the digital countdown flicker from one number to the next.  Time itself seemed to stand still.  Minutes were hours, and seconds were minutes, and beads of sweat began to pop out onto his forehead.

He stood straight, and adjusted his uniform jacket as he wiped his brow.  His staff, the hand-picked staff he had personally chosen for this assignment, were doing their job and doing it well.  No panicked voices sounded out from their stations, each of his men and women were performing their duties like the professionals they were.  He looked back up at the clock:  2 minutes to go.

The armored hatch to the Flag Bridge opened, letting his wife and her entourage into the cavernous space, and he watched her cross the deck towards him.  The admiral swallowed a sudden lump in his throat as he did.  God in heaven, if anything went wrong, she would die here with him, or be stranded centuries in the past; all because of his selfish needs and desire to have her with him.

The Praetorians stopped well short, and her ladies-in-waiting stood back, but she walked up next to him, looking up with nervous eyes.  Ignoring the need for protocol, he placed one arm around her, and pulled her tight against his chest, and she laid her head on his breast.

Time now raced, and only seconds were left until the Fleet engaged its PSK drives.  Jason closed his eyes, and he held Julia tight against him.

*****************************************************

Seventeen ships, fifteen Imperial warships and two Confederate auxiliaries, disappeared from our universe as the drives engaged.  Flung into a different dimension of space-time, they hurtled faster-than-light away from Tammoran.  Yet it was not enough of a head-start.  For the Confederation Commodore had been right about the effects of the nova and a shock-wave expanding throughout T-space as well as normal space hit the ships almost immediately.

*****************************************************

Reprisal rocked hard to one side, with the lights flickering on and off.  Alarms began to sound, and red emergency lights began to shine.  Jason barely kept his footing as he held his wife tight against him, even as the ship lurched yet again, and then a massive bang caused the vessel to jump, and both of them fell hard unto the deck.

“FTL off-line!” his flag engineer cried out from his station, amid dozens of other emergency reports.  “We have emergence in normal space!”

Jason rose to a kneeling crouch, and touched Julia’s cheek.  “You all right, love?”

She nodded her head, but her eyes were full of fear.  Despite that fear, she forced herself to smile at her husband and replied with a steady voice.  “Never been better, Jase.  Best you see to your ships, Admiral.”

“Hail Caesar,” he whispered, causing her to giggle and hit him on the arm.  But then he stood, helping her up to her feet as well, and turned to face the central tank once more.  “Status report!”

“FTL is off-line, Admiral,” Nathan said from his console as he listened to the reports streaming into his ear-bug.  “Comm reports all ships of the squadron and attached auxiliaries are in normal space, sporadic damage reports throughout.  Mostly minor damage, but we are still waiting on reports from Engineering.  Weapons are good with minor shock damage, shields are on-line and engaged, and life support is at 100%.  No hull breaches reported on any vessel.”

Jason nodded.  “Get me the engineering reports ASAP on the status of the drive, Nathan.  Confirm with all vessels their status and instruct them to stand by for further orders.  Navigation,” he said, stepping over towards Commander Hedges, “where are we?”

The flag astrogator stared as his board display in disbelief, his jaw dropped and his eyes wide.  He did not answer.

“Henry,” Jason continued softly and gently.  “Henry.”

Finally, the astrogator turned to look at the Admiral and he shook his head, gathering his senses back together.  “My apologies, Sir.”

“Where are we, Henry?”

“According to this, Sir, we are in Tammoran; exactly where we entered t-space, on the same vector and same velocity.  But these reading can’t be right.  There are no signs of the nova, none.”

“I see,” he said, woodenly.  “Thank you, Henry.”

He hung his head, and then he lifted it again, his face fixed and stony with determination.  No, I will not let myself be driven down by an event beyond my control, whether this be our time or the past or the future or whatever.  I will not be defeated by a quirk of fate, nor let myself or my people be destroyed in the process, he thought.  He nodded to himself, and marched across the bridge to Nathan.

The chief of staff looked up at his approach.  “Admiral, Engineering reports the PSK Drives can be restored to full function but it will take at least an hour to conduct repairs.  Apparently, there was a massive surge through the system that shut down the entire unit; all ships are reporting the same.  All other systems are operational, with only minor damage.”

“Excellent, Captain Serrano; get me a channel, all-hands, all-ships, if you would, please.”

Nathan nodded, and keyed in a few commands on the console, and then handed Jason a phone.

“All personnel, this is the Admiral,” Jason began as he looked at the men and women, his men and women, his wife as well, on the Flag Bridge turning to look at him and listen to his words.  “We have suffered an event unlike any other in the history of our race.  We have been thrown out of t-space due to the gravitic interference of a star going nova; an event that has never been considered as a possibility, save by one lone researcher in the Confederation.  She believed that such an event would form a bridge through time itself into our past.  I do not know if that is what has happened, but we will find out, and we will find this out together.”

“As of this moment, we are in space-normal conditions in the Tammoran System.  As you are aware, when we entered t-space, that star was in the process of dying in a nova.  Now, it is not.  I do not know when we are, but we still are.  All of us are here now, whenever now is.  We will discover exactly how far back we have gone, and when we do, when I do, you will be told.  Until then, you are Imperial officers and spacers and marines of the Fleet; you are tankers and troopers and warrants of the Legion; you are the Empire.  We will overcome, as Mankind has always overcome.  Carry out your orders, and remain ready for action.  Chandler out.”

As he disconnected from the live broadcast, he could see the shocked expressions on the faces of his crew, his friends, his wife.  “Nathan,” he whispered.

“Yes, Admiral?” his chief of staff, his friend, replied.

“As soon as all ships report PSK Drives have been restored, set course for Earth at our best speed.  We are going home.”

Throngs of people crowded against the barriers erected by the NYPD around the United Nations building.  Some were protestors holding signs and posters and banners that showed their disagreement with allowing these alien beings (they only said they were human, after all) to set foot on Earth.  A few of the more clueless protestors held signs that argued against taxes, abortions, and the War in Iraq.  Many more of the crowd was members of the world-wide press; their cameras, both still and video, recording the event for all posterity.  But the majority of the teeming masses were simply New Yorkers who wanted to see with their own eyes the events of today.

Within the barriers, police outfitted in riot gear, police of all stripes and denominations, NYPD, Port Authority, Transit Authority, New York State Troopers, and federal agents of a dozen different agencies, stood by, their plexiglas shields and black batons ready to respond if the crowd suddenly surged forward.  Intermixed with the men and women of law enforcement were Army troopers in their desert camo, incongruous as that was in the streets of the Big Apple.  Regulars and reservists alike, the soldiers were clumped together in small units around the perimeter prepared to back up the police if they needed the assistance.  On the rooftops of nearby buildings, sniper teams tracked the crowd and watched the windows of high-rise skyscrapers, while Coast Guard cutters and Harbor Patrol boats cruised slowly by off-shore.

Only the sky above was free of congestion, a no-fly zone having been ordered by the FAA hours beforehand.  Not even press choppers were allowed into the designated zone, but those vultures hovered and buzzed just outside of the perimeter.

One of the many, many people in the crowd spotted the descending ship first, and he raised his arm to point at the heavens.  One by one, the citizens of America’s largest city turned their gaze skyward.  A mass of metal silently descended with no roar of engines, no noxious exhaust, no contrails through the clouds high above.  Smaller than the vessels that had delivered Fox Century earlier, the Hermes class shuttle quickly closed the distance, descending to less than a hundred feet and approaching from the water’s edge towards the hastily marked landing grid in the center of the Plaza.

Stationed around the grid, deep within the perimeter of New York’s finest, were the armored vehicles and men of Fox Century.  Eight Gephardt main battle tanks, eight slightly smaller and less intimidating, slightly less intimidating, Corey armored personnel carriers, and two Devon armored command carriers, along with the seventy-two battle-armored infantry troopers.  The Imperial forces kept their eyes, and their sensors, on the crowd and the surrounding buildings; and unlike the NYPD, FBI, ATF, and other various acronymed agencies, these faceless goliaths carried nothing quite so innocent as a rubber baton.  Their assorted weaponry looked quite lethal, and while they did not point the guns directly at the crowd, neither were they aimed very far distant.

The Hermes silently drifted over the plaza and deployed its thick, heavy landing struts, and then set down softly onto the ground.  As the contra-gravity generators aboard the shuttle spun down, the broad feet at the base of each of the six landing struts slowly sank into the concrete and asphalt, compressing and compacting the ground beneath the almost inconceivable weight of ship; sinking about three feet deep, on average.

In the rear half of the ship, two hatches swung open, and a pair of ramps extended and lowered themselves to meet the ground below.  From each hatch, a line of armor-clad men exited, marching slowly in what appeared to be a ceremonial cadence.  Unlike the troopers of Fox Century, these warriors were not clad in gray-and-black urban camo; instead the Praetorians wore suits of glistening crimson and gold, along with sweeping cloaks of crimson silk clasped to their armor with golden chains.  The Praetorian’s armor lacked the Reaper pulse cannon and Thunderbolt missile launchers, giving each of the suits a leaner, sleeker appearance than those of the Legion; for those who doubted the Praetorian’s ability to return fire, a polished rifle, complete with bayonet and carried at port arms, quickly erased any such fears.  Additional weapon muzzles protruded from both forearms as well, giving an added air of menace and restrained lethality to Caesar’s guardians.

The two lines split apart, becoming four, and lined up flanking the main hatch of the Hermes, as yet still sealed.  Eight troopers stood in each line, and a silent command brought them to a halt, their rifles snapping vertical.  The remaining four Praetorians halted at the end of the lines of armored men, near to the entrance of the United Nations.  These four turned in place, one-by-one, and stood facing the shuttle.  The two outermost lines of troopers moved their right foot back and spun in place, now facing away, outwards, towards the crowd.

And for several moments, there was no movement, no noise, just silent anticipation.  With a hiss, the main hatch of the Hermes opened, and a third ramp descended to the ground between the two inner lines of guards.

A man, a human being, dressed not in armor, but in an ornate uniform of white, trimmed with crimson and gilded with braids of golden thread, emerged from the hatch.  His boots were white, as were his belt and gloves, and the leather holster upon that belt carrying a heavy pistol was also of white leather.  Opposite the sidearm, he wore a long curved sword, the hilt wrapped in cords of golden silk and crowned with a basket weave of golden metal; the scabbard of polished ivory.  His face stern, the man slowly looked over the waiting crowd, and then he nodded his head, as if in approval.  Turning back to the hatch, he removed the peaked cap gilded with braid and knelt, bowing his head low.  Following his lead, the two innermost ranks of Praetorians likewise knelt, one pair after the next, tilting their rifles slightly forward as they sank to one knee.  When the final pair had knelt, the four who waited at the entrance also dropped down, bowing low to the empty hatch.  And all through this, the outermost lines of Praetorians did not kneel, but instead watched closely the surrounding crowd, their rifles at the ready.

New York City, the United States of America, the whole wide world held its collective breath.

From the shadows of the hatch there now stepped forth a woman, far younger than many would have imagined an Empress to be.  She was dressed in a gown of gleaming and pristine white that billowed from her ankles to where it looped about her neck, the folds both obscuring and enhancing her slight bust.  About the waist, a belt of golden links closely hugged her slender hips.  Her right shoulder and arm was bare, the alabaster skin but a few shades darker than the gown itself, the left was covered in a voluminous sleeve that flowed down the arm to be secured to her hand with golden rings upon her first and last fingers and her palm.  Her chestnut hair was worn long, intricately woven into braids studded with faceted stones of blue, green, and gold; and upon her brow she wore a laurel wreath fashioned of fine gold and gleaming malachite.  Her bare right arm featured a wide bracer of silver and turquoise tight against the bicep, and her feet were clad in sandals of white leather straps.

She cast her gaze, her green-eyed gaze, across the still and silent crowd.  And then she smiled.  She smiled and she stepped forward and she waved one long and slender hand towards them.  That simple gesture caused the crowd to roar with delight.  She smiled again, and she blushed, and she held her hand down to the man kneeling before her.  He took her hand, his wife’s hand, in his own and rose, tucking that hand into the crook of his arm.  She smiled again, and kissed her Admiral upon his cheek, and the noise from the crowd trebled in volume.  Still smiling, the Empress of Humanity, the Caesar Julia and her Consort descended the ramp, walked down the line of Praetorians and entered the Headquarters of the United Nations of Earth.

*****************************************************

“NO!  We will not be refused access while the United States makes secret deals with these, these . . . people.  Accepting their invitation is unacceptable!” the Ambassador of Russia to the United Nations bellowed towards the Imperial delegation.

“Nor will the People’s Republic take kindly to the West gaining this knowledge while our population of more than one billion, one-sixth of the entire world, if I may remind our visitors, is denied their rightful due,” the Foreign Minister of mainland China added.

Across the table, squabbling broke out as more than two dozen ambassadors, Ministers of State, and heads of government, depending on who could actually get to New York in time, began arguing and shouting with each other.  Thankfully, the delegates from less developed nations had been excluded from the meeting, although none had left willingly.  The semi-insane dictator of Libya had been so incensed at being shut out that he was ranting in the well of the Assembly, and done so for nearly three hours straight.

Jason frowned at the chaos before him as he sat beside his wife and Empress.  They are like children fighting over a new toy, he thought.  He turned his head and glanced at the eight Praetorians standing behind Her Imperial Majesty, each of them still wearing full ceremonial armor.  And then he looked at his wife again.

She wasn’t happy.  The screaming, the yelling, the thinly veiled insulting remarks towards the Imperials, the threats, the proffered bribes; all of this had taken their toll on her, and Jason, in the four and a half hours they had sat in this room.  She shook her head, and then met his gaze with her sad eyes, squeezing his hand under the table.  Jason squeezed back, and cocked one eyebrow as if in question.  She hesitated, and then nodded her head in resignation.  The Admiral smiled and lifted Julia’s hand to his lips, kissing it lightly in the center of the palm, and then he stood.

Only a handful of delegates stopped their bickering as they noticed him rising, but the overall noise level was unabated.  The Warlord of the Empire of Humanity made a simple chopping motion with one hand, and upon that signal, one of the Praetorians raised his right arm towards the ceiling.

The thunder of the sub-machine roared inside the conference room, bringing the bitter so-called debate to a sudden and fearful halt as overhead tiles shattered, crashing down on the table in a cloud of white dust.  In the ringing silence that followed that short burst of fire, Jason heard a scuffling at the door, and then a crash.  One of the UN security guards had learned just how much Praetorian armor magnified the strength of the wearer, he thought to himself, his mouth twisting into a crooked smile.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began calmly as the Praetorian behind him lowered his arm once more and resumed his post.  “You seem to be laboring under a misconception.  Yes, we are refugees.  Yes, we are seeking to make our home here on Earth.  We do not, however, require either your permission, or your assistance, to do so.  If we chose to simply land and claim an area for our own, you could not stop us.”

Jason waited as the blunt statement soaked into the assorted heads of state and representatives before him.  And he smiled again.

“Luckily for you, Caesar Julia does not wish to institute a whole-sale; what is that phrase that seems so popular in this era, oh, yes; a whole-sale regime change.  We are willing to work with you, but we will do so on our terms.  We are not, after all, an old bone to fought over by a pack of mangy mongrels.  We are willing to share certain portions of our technology with you, as a gesture of our good-will.  As Her Imperial Majesty has already stated, several times this session, I may add, we will provide medications for the treatment and eradication of cancer, AIDs, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and many, many others.  We will show you how to manufacture these items yourself.  We will provide you, all of you, with certain civilian technologies that will let you clean your world’s water and air, and provide such abundant energy that there will be little excuse for keeping your peoples impoverished and existing hand-to-mouth.”

“However, we are not going to hand you complete copies of our data cores, nor will we provide any of you with military technologies.  Furthermore, we will not, either as individuals or as a group, swear allegiance to anyone at this table, or to any political institution on this planet.  We are already oath-sworn, ladies and gentlemen, to the Empress of Humanity.  For the moment, because the Empress so wills it, we will not force anyone on this world to join the Empire; neither will we allow anyone to dictate to us with whom we may ally ourselves.”

“Admittedly, there are just one hundred and thirty thousand of us and six billion of you; and we still have you outgunned and outmatched if it comes down to that; which, of course, I hope it does not,” Jason continued with a broad smile.  “Not for your sakes, but rather that it would cause Her Imperial Majesty great heartache to have to issue such an order.  Understand this, all of you; the Ordan-Kraal are coming, and they are coming soon.  If you let us, we will lead your defense against them, and given enough time and cooperation, we can build enough ships and outfit enough Legions to take the fight to them, stopping their slaughter before it ever begins.  History records that when they came, in my past, in your future, more than five billion of you died.  Your children will die.  Your grand-children will die.  Entire cultures will perish forever.  All struck down by the bombs and the viruses and the claws of the damned Crabs.  Humanity itself will become an endangered species.”

Jason paused and leaned forward on the conference table, forcing his glare on each of the dignitaries sitting there.  He finally, finally, had their full attention.  “If you cooperate with us on building defenses and training troops, we may avoid that.  We may be able to prevent the deaths of five billion human beings.  If not, well, we will do our best, but we will concentrate on defending those individual nation-states that have asked for our aid and cooperated with us.  Everyone else will have to stand on their own.  When the Ordan-Kraal arrive, ladies and gentlemen, if you are not one of those powers allied to us, you will wish with all of your heart and soul that today you had made a different choice.  If you survive, that is; the dead have so few regrets.”

“What do you propose then, Admiral Chandler?” asked the British Prime Minister as he brushed the white ash-like debris from his suit coat.

“I propose nothing, Mister Prime Minister.  The Caesar Julia suggests this:  we will purchase Vancouver Island and the surrounding territory from the Canadian government and set up our own enclave as a free and independent government, fully sovereign in our own right.  If Canada does not want to part with a portion of its territory, then Chile and Argentina might agree on signing over Tierra del Fuego.  Maybe it will be the Falkland Islands, or half of New Zealand, or any of a dozen locations around the world that we can build a home.”

The Chinese representative shook his head.  “That is out of the question.  We will not allow you to establish your own government; that much is unacceptable to the People’s Republic of China.”

“What makes you think you have a choice in the matter, Minister?” Jason bluntly responded.  “Deal with us or not, but do not presume to lecture either myself or my Empress in this matter.  Some leader, some government, somewhere on this planet will cut a deal with us, and we will form our enclave.  And you must remember, ladies and gentlemen, alliances are two-way streets; we are not bound to ally ourselves with anyone just because they ask; they need to show their willingness to cooperate and to follow Imperial law.  You don’t want to join the Empire?  Fine.  Leave us alone and I promise you, on Her Imperial Majesty’s behalf, we will leave you alone.  Unless you provoke us, in which case pray to whatever gods you hold dear that you suffer a death from natural causes before we respond.”

Each of the delegates bristled at the threat, but then President Gavin leaned forward.  “And how do you propose paying Canada or Argentina or Chile or the United Kingdom or New Zealand for the land?  I don’t think that your ships are filled with vaults full of hard currency, are they Admiral?”

Jason smiled, but it was a cold, cold smile.  “Actually, Mister President, we have something far better than vaults filled with chests of gems and precious metals from some mint somewhere.  We have the complete history of mankind, including that of the next five hundred years, and we are quite literate.  Our arrival might change many things in those records, but somehow I do not believe geological discoveries will alter their location because we altered the time-line.  Mister Prime Minister,” he said, directly addressing the Canadian at the table.  “How would your country like a stake in the greatest gold strike in history?  One that, historically, proved itself far, far larger than the Yukon and South Africa strikes combined.  Would that be worth a few thousand square kilometers of land?”

****************************************************

“Easy, Janos, easy,” Gaius Scott whispered, “too much thrust and you will tear the tractors right out of the hull.”

“Aye, aye, sir.  Coming to 2% percent on the mains now,” the sweating helmsman said as he concentrated on his controls.  Ian Sinclair looked up from his own bank of controls and nodded at Scott.  “Looking good, Skipper.  As long as we take it slow and steady, we should be golden,” the exec said with a wide grin, a grin that Scott returned as he chuckled.

ISS Seydlitz was operating in tandem with ISS Wallenstein, their tractors locked onto the immense asteroid between them.  Designated SGK-01/997C, the misshapen rock measured some eight kilometers in length and almost fourteen kilometers across at its widest, tallest point.  Normally this would be a job for dedicated Fleet tugs, but since the Imperials no longer had any tugs, the two destroyers were manhandling the rock from the Belt all the way into a stable Earth-moon orbit.  SGK-01/997C was just another lifeless rock floating in the Belt between Mars and Jupiter, albeit a big one.  But, two hundred years from now, in that otherwhen that had been, a survey team had struck it big on the asteroid.  Renamed Motherlode, the asteroid was found to contain incredible amounts of gold, silver, tungsten, platinum, iridium, and other rare and valuable minerals and metals.

But that was in a future that would never happen.  The records clearly showed which precise rock Motherlode was, however, so Admiral and Warlord Chandler had sent Scott out here with Seydlitz to fetch it home.  The problem was that Motherlode was so massive that it would take weeks to shepherd it safely into the orbit that had been chosen.  Like all Imperial Fleet ships, Seydlitz mounted two heavy-duty tractors that allowed her to rescue damaged vessels in combat and drag them out of the line of fire.  But Motherlode was far, far past their rated capabilities.  Too much acceleration and the tractors would rip themselves right out of the hull.  It was a delicate balancing act that allowed for no second chances.

“Just how much gold does Motherlode truly contain, Captain Scott?” asked his guest, a mining engineer of the Canadian government sent along to stake out his government’s share of the claim.

“I looked that up in our data-banks just this morning, Sir.  Annually, the mineral extraction company managed to recover on average over thirty-five hundred metric tons of gold from that rock, sir, along with sixty-three hundred of silver, ninety-four hundred of tungsten, nineteen hundred of platinum, and well over four million metric tons of iron.  Even managed to get just a hair more than four hundred tons of iridium, which is a damn sight rarer than any of the others.  It was fifty-eight years before it finally played out, and the Imperial government of the time got pretty close to half the total revenue stream generated.  One of the surveyors that discovered it went on to buy three whole planets with his share.  The old fool set them up as resort worlds and four years later ending up drowning in a hot-tub he was sharing with half of the Moscow Ballet’s touring company.  What a way to check out.  As far as the Empire was concerned, that one rock damn near managed to pay for a hundred ships of the line, plus escorts and parasites, before it was all said and done.”

The geologist blinked with disbelief as he turned his gaze back on the asteroid, and Sinclair moved over by Scott.  Leaning down, he whispered something in the captain’s ear, and Scott grinned.

“Mister Holbrook,” the youthful ship commander said, “if you will turn your attention to the center screen on that console, please.”

The mining expert turned to the screen, which projected a live image from the surface of Motherlode.  A small team of vacuum suited crewmen from Seydlitz, and one in a bulky, white, ex-NASA spacesuit, hurriedly emblazoned with the Maple Leaf on the right arm, were pictured in the center, clustered around two metal poles embedded in the surface of the asteroid.  As Holbrook watched, the white-suited astronaut attached the Canadian flag to the first pole, and then one of the Scott’s men placed the Imperial standard on the second.  Both men withdrew several paces, and saluted the two flags.

“Congratulations, Mister Holbrook.  It appears that Canada has just become the second wealthiest nation on Earth.  I just hope that the gold doesn’t have the aroma of maple syrup.”

*****************************************************

“If I had known how much of this bureaucrat manure Father had to deal with, and that you expect me to deal with, Jase, I swear I would have never agreed to this.”

“Love, this is not even one-hundredth of one percent of what your illustrious father dealt with on a daily basis.  Just wait until we get a proper Imperial Senate seated once again; then you will really experience what a headache the job is.  And it was for that,” he said with a beaming smile, “as much as having no desire to usurp the Imperial laurels that I refused the job in the first place.  Hail Caesar.”

His wife’s answer came in the form of a plush sofa cushion smashing into his face at a remarkably high rate of speed.

“Feel better, love?”

“No . . . yes . . . hell, I don’t know,” she answered sourly.  “There is this whole matter of the population down there to deal with.  Three-quarters of a million residents on Vancouver Island?  My God, Jase; that is twenty times what I expected.”

The admiral, warlord, and prince-consort shrugged his shoulders.  “The whole bloody planet is seriously overpopulated by our standards, Julia.  The last census put our Earth’s total population at 1.2 billion, and the older Senators were grumbling about us taxing the environment and natural resources.  There are more than six billion people on this planet right now.  That is almost seven percent the total population of the entire Empire in our time.”

“It is just something we have to deal with, along with setting up the fuel processing facility on the moon, organizing the first colonial expedition to Alpha Cent, boot-strapping this chaotic hot-bed of insurgency to produce enough of our technology to defend against the Ordan-Kraal and any other predatory race, while keeping the most sensitive aspects of our weapons tech out of the feverish little hands of dozens of petty dictators and would-be Napoleons, and convincing the nearly two hundred individual governing bodies and who-the-hell knows how many political factions it is in their best interests to unite; and just as a side-note reform the Senate and reestablish civilian control over the Imperial Fleet and Legion.”

“And I suppose you have more items for the week after next as well?” the Empress of Humanity asked acidly as she frowned at her husband.  And then she began to giggle; the giggles rapidly descending to full-blown guffaws of laughter.  Jason stood from his chair and moved across his cabin to sit down beside his wife, and he took her in his arms to hold her tightly against him.  The laughter turned to sobs and tears, as Julia buried her head in his chest, and he slowly stroked her back and her hair and made a soft, gentle hushing sound.

“I don’t know if I can do this, Jase,” she whispered.  “Why did this happen?”

“That, love, I don’t know.  God moves in mysterious ways, it is said.  But I do know one thing:  you can do this.  And you will be no mere figurehead, Julia.  You learned from Caesar Nicolas and your brothers more about practical politics than you think, and you are a scion of the House of O’Conner, the last O’Conner of the Imperial line in the now in which we live.”

“You really think so?” she asked, looking up at him with tears still trickling down her cheeks.

He smiled, and used one thumb to brush a tear aside, and then gently caressed her check.  “I know that the woman I married and that I love can.  Are you still her?”

The young woman nodded her head, and Jason lowered his head and softly kissed her lips.

*****************************************************

“If this twenty-something bimbo is their leader, then we have learned one thing about these so-called Imperials; her husband, Admiral, Warlord, and Prince-Consort Chandler, must be the real power and authority.  Did you see that gown she wore in New York to address the UN?  Shameful, shameful, shameful,” Karen Hall droned on to her guests.  “I’ve seen street walkers wearing more venue appropriate clothing than that.”

“Karen, all of you so-called liberal feminists are just pissed off that this young woman, this lady, happens to be more attractive than all the rest of you combined.  Can you drop this cat-fight you want to provoke?” replied Professor Emmett Leshy, head of the political science department of New York University.

“This is no cat-fight, Professor, and it has nothing to do with her beauty,” Hall replied hotly.  “This is about morals and respectability.  You could see her breasts underneath that gown; she wasn’t wearing anything beneath it, for sure.  That sort of thing might go over in Hollywood or some mid-east harem, but if she wants to be taken seriously as an actual leader, she needs to quit dressing like some Britney Spears floozy wannabe.  And shame, shame, shame on that middle-aged man for marrying such a young woman.  Tsk, tsk, tsk,” she added shaking her head.  “I’ll bet deep down inside he likes little girls, you folks at home know what I mean.”

She turned back to face the cameras.  “And for another view point of this issue and all of the others arising from the arrival of our Imperial visitors, we will bring in our next guest.  In a CNN exclusive, this show has managed to arrange for Captain Nathan Serrano, the chief of staff for the afore-mentioned power behind the throne, the probable perv, Admiral and Prince-Consort Chandler.  Captain Serrano, welcome to New York.”

Nathan walked out onto the stage, his face flushed and tight, his hands balled into tightly clenched fists at his side.  Ignoring the chair, he crossed the stage until he stood directly in front of Karen Hall.  “Captain Serrano, if you will take . . .”

The sharp crack of his open hand striking her cheek echoed across the studio and over the live CNN feed to millions of homes across the globe.  The anchor woman looked up in shock as he swung another blow, this one back-handed, and toppled her from her chair onto the carpeted studio floor.

“How dare you, you miserable jealous hag, speak of her Imperial Majesty in that manner?  In my presence, no less,” Nathan snarled, breathing heavily through his nose as he ignored the cameras, the shocked guests, and the CNN studio crew alike.

Several staffers came running onto the stage, one of them wiping the blood of Hall’s split lip from her face.  She sputtered, and tried to stand, but fell, and then, helped by two of her aides, managed to get her feet underneath her.

“SECURITY!” she shrieked, as the cameras continued to roll.  “I want this man arrested!”

Nathan’s mouth turned up in crooked grin.  “You call those spineless thugs security?  My own detail is real security, Miss Hall.  This interview is over,” he said as he turned away and began to walk off-stage.

“I’ll sue you,” the anchor screamed at his back.  “I’ll sue you and your Empress-whore alike.”

Nathan stopped and shook his head.  And then he turned back to face Hall again.  “Are you really that much of an idiot?  You must have a death wish, Miss Hall.  But, as Father always said, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”  And then he moved back towards her, his fist balled and his arm cocked back.

The staffers took one look at the furious officer and lifted Hall aloft and rushed her from the stage, away from the man about to beat her (and maybe them) into a senseless pulp.

The Imperial officer stopped and unclenched his fist, and released his breath.  And then her turned to face the cameras, still carrying the images and sounds live across the world.  “Remember this, people of Earth.  We don’t play by your rules.  To all of the commentators and journalists out there, consider this your first and last warning before you insult Caesar Julia again in a public forum.  Miss Hall is still alive since you have yet to receive a lesson in courtesy.  Next time, neither I, nor any other Imperial, will be so lenient.”

The cameras still rolling, Captain Serrano nodded politely to Professor Leshy, walked off of the set, and exited stage left.

Chapter Five

“Ridiculous, Mister President!” exclaimed the Speaker of the House from his seat across the table.  “This is nothing less than the surrender of our sovereignty to a gang of high-tech barbarians!  You are not seriously considering this proposal, are you?”

“Jake, we have to take a hard look at what they are offering, and then determine what points we will, and will not, contest,” Michael answered calmly, even as the remainder of the congressional delegation finished reading their copy of the succinct report Tom had prepared on his instructions.

Senator Morand, the majority leader of the Republican party in the Senate, was also shaking his head.  “Somehow, I am reminded of the fact that we bought Manhattan Island from the Native Americans for forty dollars worth of glass beads.  This deal has that specific odor to it.”

The President nodded as he leaned back in his chair, one arm propped up on its elbow.  “The batteries and power plants are something we need, and this offer of help in Afghanistan and Pakistan needs to be carefully considered as well.  Things are not going so well over there, at the moment.”

“No, Mister President, they are not,” wheezed one of his former rivals for the presidency.  Senator Kessler smoothed out the top sheet of the report, and then he continued.  “And while I agree that their offer of help is quite generous, this provision about any current governing body on this planet, or part thereof, which asks to be incorporated into the Empire of Humanity and whose request is accepted, as an integral part of the Empire, ladies and gentlemen,” he said as he shook his head, “this could balkanize our nation.”

Jake Takai snorted.  “It is the red states that are liable to go, Senator, being gun-nuts and right-wingers and half-savage themselves.  Good riddance to them,” and their counter-productive elected representatives standing in the way of real progress, he thought.

“Do you think this will stop at Alabama and Arkansas and Alaska, Mister Speaker?” the old man sharply replied.  “What happens to this country when they agree to put a new factory in Ohio, if Ohio asks to join up?  Or if California jumps ship when the Imperials agree to absorb their debt?  The entire country is one nation, whether you like it or not, and this provision is the single most dangerous idea I have ever seen.”

“I agree, John,” the President said, “and so does Tom.  We cannot sign any treaty with them that includes that provision, but to tell the truth I am a little more than concerned about this part covering diplomatic immunity, and that they want us to look the other way in their handling of the Afghan problem.  Are we sure that we really want to deal with these people?”

“It’s like making a deal with the devil, Mister President,” Amanda Vance, Vice-President of the United States, said from her end of the table.  “What they are offering could launch us into a period of prosperity unparalleled in our history, but there are loopholes and catches, and God help us if we fail to parse their words exactly.  We need to establish a working group—Justice, State, Defense, Commerce, Treasury, Homeland Security, NSA, and CIA—and determine exactly what we can accept and what we cannot.  I’d be happy to head that up for you, Mister President.”

And the bickering began as seven Democrats, four Republicans, and five Independents began to argue over who would chair the committee and present its recommendations to the President.  Michael shook his head and loosened his tie; time to roll up the sleeves and go to work, he thought.

*****************************************************

Across the globe, other meetings by governments—democratic, autocratic, and theocratic alike—took place in similar, if less familiar, rooms.  Leaders of nations throughout the world argued over the points of what would become known in the days ahead as ‘The Proposal’.

*****************************************************

“Corp, why did they pick us for this detail?” Charlie asked as the ramp of the Intruder slowly lowered itself towards the ground.

Frasier Blenheim, Corporal in Her Imperial Majesty’s Marine Corps, sighed inside his armor.  It wasn’t fair, he thought.  He had been short-time; and suddenly this load of crap?  Discharges were delayed for the immediate future, he had been told; but at least Centurion Yarrow had not taken away his fire-team, even if that did mean he still got to ride herd on the kid.

“Well, last time Her Imperial Majesty had me over for tea and crumpets Charlie, I remember her telling me just that . . . NO, WAIT!  She’s never had me, and I’ve never had tea and crumpets.”

The two other members of his team chuckled, and Frasier could just picture the kid blushing again inside his armor.  “Seriously, Private, it doesn’t matter why they picked us; we are Marines and we have a job to do.  Focus on that and leave the worrying to people who actually get paid for that.”

“Corp,” one of others chimed in, “does that mean I can submit a payroll voucher for time spent worrying?”

“You go right ahead and do that Johansson,” Frasier replied.  “I’ll make sure it gets to Centurion Yarrow first thing tomorrow, and then maybe I can get a real Marine as a replacement while you are in the body shop.”

More chuckles erupted across the squad tactical net as the ramp made contact with the ground below and locked into place.

“Heads up, Marines!” Frasier called out.  “Fire Team Bravo, disembark and form up on the ready line.”

The four Marines, and the other one hundred and forty-eight troopers of Centurion Yarrow’s Delta Century, moved quickly down the ramp and into formation beneath the outstretched wing of the shuttle in the middle of United States Army base in the heart of the Mojave Desert.

Camp Irwin was the home of the US National Training Center, the primary base where the Regular Army honed their war-fighting skills against the men (and now women) of the Opposition Force, OpFor for short.  It seemed that someone on high wanted to impress to the Americans (and through them, their NATO allies) just how effective Imperial equipment was.  So Delta got tagged to come down and play soldier against the entire Brigade sized OpFor. 

A mere 152 officers, NCOs, and men arrayed against more than two thousand; Imperial Marine battle-armor against local IFVs, Main Battle Tanks, and artillery.

But before the games could begin, Delta had to demonstrate how deadly their weapons were, so that the referees could assign a damage value to them in the base computer network.  When the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had proposed the wargame, Warlord Chandler knew what he was really after; real-world tactical information on their systems.  But Jason just smiled and agreed; after all, there was little enough that the locals could do to replicate the systems in question.  And he knew exactly the unit to send to Death Valley.

So, now, as payment for the repeated sins of their Centurion, Delta was once again at the sharp end of the stick while the other jarheads aboard Reprisal were lounging in their bunks or watching Confed porn.  Life sucks, thought Frasier sourly.

*****************************************************

“I was rather impressed with your equipment, General Tuturola,” Brigadier General Kelly Tantaros said as the two stood in the center of the dimly lit Operations Center of the NTC.  Dozens of wall-mounted screens surrounded them, showing icons representing units (both US Army and IMC) as well as terrain, weather, and much, much more.  Specialists manned consoles, monitoring the equipment that would measure the engagement when it began.

“Not my equipment, General Tantaros,” replied.  “I’m a tanker by trade, not some jar-head gun-bunny.”

“But you use basically the same gear, right?”

“To some degree, yes, that is true.  The standard Marine infantry battle armor is basically the same as that of my own infantry troops.  But those troopers are light infantry, Gen . . . oh, hell.  What do say I call you Kelly and you call me Miles?”

“Begging the General’s pardon,” the American replied with a wide grin, “but my understanding of Imperial ranks is that yours is superior to my own.  It just wouldn’t be proper for me to call you anything but ‘General’ or ‘Sir’.  Now, I have no problem with you calling me by my first name, and really couldn’t complain to anyone if you did.”

Miles Tuturola frowned as he pulled a small metal case from his jacket pocket and tapped it into his palm twice.  “Bullshit.  That pale blue ribbon with the stars means you rate a salute from any man, any service, regardless of rank.  Oh, yes,” he continued as he nodded his head at Kelly’s surprised expression, “we remember what that little patch of cloth and metal means.  Hell, we consider the Imperial Medal of Honor its direct spiritual descendent.  So call me Miles.”

The Imperial General opened the case, and extracted a single brown cigarette from within.  He put the case back inside his jacket, and placed the stick in his mouth, the end automatically igniting as he sucked in first air and then smoke.

“This is a no-smoking area, Miles,” Kelly said with a chuckle.

“The smoke is bad for the equipment?”

“No, sir.  The Federal government of the United States of America has decreed no smoking in any building owned by the aforementioned government.  Including this one.”

“You are joking.”

“No, sir.”

Miles shook his head, and took another drag.  “Good thing I outrank you and those MPs outside.  Want one?” he asked, reaching for his jacket again.  A grinning Kelly shook his head. 

“Next thing you’ll tell me is they don’t allow liquor on ships,” he said, and stopped suddenly at Kelly’s expression.  “On second thought, don’t tell me.  Back to the point, Fleet Marine Force expects to be involved primarily in close-quarters combat, boarding actions and the like.  And that is the majority of the Corps; century and cohort sized unit, company and battalion in your term, intended for shipboard security and short, sharp actions in confined spaces.  Oh, the Corps has several large formations much like my Legion built to go in and take a landing zone as well, but even a Marine Assault Legion is primarily comprised of light infantry.”

“But the Fleet Marines, they operate with very little dedicated support, engineers, armor, artillery, and logistics, other than what their ship can provide.  Because of that, they expect to have to carry everything they need on their backs.  My boys are heavy infantry, with their own integral armored carriers.  The vehicles carry the heavy weapons and supplies that the Marines have to haul around, and they can also recharge spent grav-fusion fuel cells from their onboard reactors.  Our suits have about half the endurance without dedicated logistical support, but because of that we can, and do, pack on even more armor and ammunition than the Marines.”

“Your infantry are more heavily armored than those Marines?” the American asked with a shocked expression.  “How much more?”

“About a quarter again as much, give or take a few percentage points.  The Legion suits are tougher than those of the Marines, and we carry roughly half again as much ammunition, plus a few of our own tricks and trade secrets.  The down-side is that we are not quite as nimble as unburdened Marine suits, but the difference is not too bad, especially considering we can take, and lay down, heavier fire.”

Kelly frowned as he considered what the Imperial had said.  Tests here at the NTC had confirmed that the suits of battle armor worn by the Marines were nearly invulnerable to small arms fire, only a .50 caliber armor-piercing machine-gun round had a chance to penetrate the chest, back, or head.  If the suits used by the Legions were even tougher . . .

He shook his head.  “I think tonight’s exercise is going to be interesting,” he finished quietly, not wanting to consider what lay at the end of that stream of thought.

“Interesting?  I think you could say that,” Miles answered with a wide smile.  “The Centurion commanding those Marines out there in the desert; well, let’s just say he is about as unconventional as they come.  Interesting?  Lord yes.”

*****************************************************

“Corp, are we going to use all this stuff?”

“What?  You mean you actually believe that Centurion Yarrow cleaned out ships stores just so you could lug an extra two hundred kilos on your back half-way across this desert and spend an extra fourteen hours cleaning it before you turned it back in to the armory?” Frasier sarcastically replied.

“Yes,” chimed in Johansson and Belk, the fourth member of his team.

“Stow it, you two apes, and keep your eyes peeled for the locals.  Look, Charlie, we are going up against one of best trained units on this dirt-ball and they got tanks.  They might be shitty tanks, but they are real honest-to-God tanks.  About a hundred of those damned ground-crawlers.  How many Thunderbolts do we have assigned to our unit?”

“One hundred and fifty-two, Corporal; one per man.”

“Correct.  Now, they also got around two hundred of their tracked infantry carriers, plus some fifty-odd helicopters.  How many is that in total?”

“About three fifty, Corp.”

“Once again, you are right.  Belk, give the kid a cigar!”

The Marine grunted in reply as he scanned the desert terrain they were racing across.

“Now, do you think we can take out that many armored vehicles with one hundred and fifty-two Thunderbolts, Charlie?”

“No, Corporal,” the rookie whispered over the comm.

“Good, we might make you into a Marine yet, kid.  Yes, this gear is heavy.  Yes, it is draining your power reserves hauling it.  But it just might make the difference between winning and losing.  I’ve lost a time or two before, Charlie, but I’ve never acquired the taste for it.  Have you?”

“NO, CORPORAL!”

“Uh-rah, Marine.  And if I’m not mistaken, right over there is the hilltop Gunny Valjean told us to set up the observation post on.”

Fifty meters ahead of the rest of the fire-team, Johansson suddenly raised his right fist, and came to a halt, crouching down low in the dark night.  Behind him, the three other Marines stopped as well, their weapons spread to cover all approaches around them.

“Talk to me, Johansson,” Frasier whispered, even as beads of sweat slowly rolled down his neck.

“Seems like we are not the only ones who thought this bit of terrain was pretty good, Corp; I’ve got movement on the hill.  Infantry and vehicles, and they are digging in deep.”

“Delta Two-Six, Two-Bravo Six.  Hill 403 occupied by enemy forces.”  Frasier did a thermal sweep with his sensors, and his suit display indicated between forty and sixty shifting man-sized signatures, and more than dozen vehicle sized ones.  “Estimate one company, infantry and vehicles, type unknown.  Over.”

“Delta Two-Bravo, Two-Six.  Copy your last.  Delta Two diverting to 404.  Dig in and keep eyes on hostiles.  Over.”

“Digging in and keeping watch, Two-Six.  Two-Bravo out.”

Frasier looked at the menacing, low-slung vehicles on the hill two kilometers away and swore.  “All right, you heard the LT, let’s get cracking; sun is up in four, and I don’t think it would be healthy for any of us if they spot us then.”

Each suit of Marine armor featured a small plate magnetically locked against one thigh.  Frasier reached down, and activated the unit.  It released from the armor and locked onto his left hand, transforming it into a miniature makeshift spade.  Slowly sinking down to the ground, and laying flat against it, he began to move earth, forming a shallow firing pit with a low berm of raised soil between him and the enemy.  The others did the same, moving slowly and cautiously, so as not to be spotted.

When it was deep enough, the Corporal rolled into the depression in the desert floor and returned the shovel head to his leg.  Opening yet another compartment, he extracted and then unfolded a square of camouflage netting some four meters across, and using the half-dozen composite telescoping spikes that came with it, suspended the thin material above and around him.  Taking the free end of a cable attached to the netting, he plugged it into a port on his armor, activating the reactive camo.  His suit computer thought for a micro-second as it compared stored patterns with the terrain though which Bravo Team had traveled, and then it picked one.  Within a minute, the netting had shifted color, blending into the desert sand and rocks and brush around him.  To his sides, and behind him, the edges of the netting lowered itself to the ground and micro-gravity generators locked them in place, leaving only the ground in front of him open.  The computer send a second command and the supple material stiffened, appearing to anyone outside as nothing more than irregular boulder protruding from the sandy desert floor.

Frasier raised his right arm, and extended it, and with it, the Reaper pulse cannon, over the lip of the small berm; the muzzle and rotating barrels free of all obstruction.  Switching his sensors to the gun camera located in the center of the Reapers five-barrels, he scanned the hilltop once more.  Satisfied that his field of fire was clear, he sent one more command to the netting, and the forward opening drew itself closed.  His sensors could still see out in every direction, but (hopefully) no one could see in.

He took a sip of water from the nipple inside of his helmet, and looked at the status of his team on his secondary monitor.  Each of whom had finished erecting their own hide.  Now, if they didn’t spot us getting into position, maybe we are home free, he thought.  Maybe.

“Belk, Johansson.  Get some shuteye, two hours.  Charlie, I’ve got the hill; you stay put and use your sensors, PASSIVE MODE ONLY, to watch for anyone else.  If you see so much as two rats that decide to get freaky I want to know if he satisfied her.  Got it?”

Three voices quietly whispered in reply.  “Aye-aye, Corp.”

*****************************************************

An explosion of white smoke, streaked with bits of soil and rock erupted six meters away from Saul Yarrow as he dove for the cover of a boulder.  Cursing, he waited for his armor to shut down, but the computer ruled he had managed to avoid most of the shrapnel, suffering only than minor damage.

“Gunny, I do believe these boys have a hard-on for us,” he spoke over the company tactical net.

“They are a mite aggressive, Sir.”

“Options?”

“Their infantry is inconsequential, even with those light-weight anti-tank missiles.  Our suits are too fast and mobile; any hit is pure luck if we keep moving.  It’s this damnable artillery that’s murdering us, Sir.”

“Agreed,” Saul said sourly as he scanned the HUD showing his company status.  Twenty men down, but the remainder was moving from position to position, ripping into the Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles charging at them upslope.  Still more of the desert camouflaged armored vehicles sat hull-down behind a distant ridge, giving covering fire to the charge.

Damn, he thought to himself.  I warned the boys not to get overconfident, and what do I do?  Get stuck in good; too deep to extract and not close enough for them to suffer friendly fire.  All right, you screwed up, Saul, but it’s time to change the game plan.

“PARSONS!” he bellowed.

“Sir!” answered the marine from forty meters away, his Reaper spitting fire into the side of a Bradley.  As the MILES gear aboard the vehicle registered the hits, the NTC mainframe ordered it to shut down and the smoke generator began to pour thick, oily, black plumes into the air.

“You still got the package?”

“Yes, sir,” the Marine replied.

“All Delta units, lay down covering fire and then hunker down.  Evac ten seconds after computer simulated detonation.  Parsons, you know what to do.”

“Aye, aye, Sir.”

More than one hundred Imperial marines rose up and poured pulse cannon rounds and grenades into the oncoming wave of American tanks and infantry carriers.  A dozen Thunderbolt missiles were triggered, the training warheads screaming down-range towards the heavy tanks of their foes.  The Imperials moved as they fired, even as more simulated artillery rounds impact across the ridge, causing five more suits to shift in Saul’s HUD to ‘destroyed’.  Dozens of vehicles began to spew smoke, red flashing lights indicating they had been killed in the barrage, even as their compatriots on overwatch renewed their fire.

“Choppers!” screamed out one voice over the tac-net.  Overhead, Saul saw the Apaches swarm in, salvoing pods of rockets, 30mm cannon, and Hellfire missiles into the melee, and more of his Marines went off-line.

But the Imperial Centurion ignored the attack helicopters as he watched one individual suit of Marine armor as it dodged across the kilometer wide valley, evading the enemy fire as it began to zoom up the opposite slope.  “Come on, Parsons,” he whispered.  “Go, go, go.”

The Marine reached the summit, and a hail-storm of light weapons fire splattered against his armor.

“DELTA!  Cover now, now, NOW!” Saul yelled as he ceased firing and dropped to the ground, followed by all of the Marines except Lance Corporal Olin Parsons.  Caught in the cross-fire of a full battalion of the OpFor, Parsons armor jerked as its computer simulated the damage it was taking, but the Marine had prepared for that.  The bomb was set to detonate when his onboard systems finally failed.

Chapter Six

“I’m a fisherman, ma’am,” the old man said as he took the microphone.  He looked nervous as he stood amongst the thousand-strong crowd in the cramped secondary school auditorium, questioning the Empress of Humanity.  “I’ve lived here on the Island my entire life; my family lives here; my home is here.  What is going to happen to me and to mine?”

The crowd applauded the question as the fisherman sat back down, and Julia beamed a smile towards them.

“You, and everyone else currently living on Vancouver Island, will have a choice to make.  If you want to stay, you may do so; provided that you swear allegiance to the Empire of Humanity as one of my subjects.  Our laws are not so very different from your own, and our Grand Charter accords all subjects with rights that no one, not even Caesar, can lightly discard.  I would like for you, for all of you, to stay, but we will force no one to take an oath to which they object.”

“If you choose to leave, the Empire will pay you full market value, in gold, for your home and your land, as well as provide you with a compensatory package to help you in your move off the Island.”

Another man stood, his face pinched and tight.  “Market value?  Have you paid no attention to the financial meltdown?”

“Market value,” replied Julia calmly, “as of seven years ago today.  I will not take advantage of you, nor will I allow you to be cheated of your possessions.”

The crowd began to murmur and whisper as those present conversed with their neighbors, friends, and families.  After several long minutes, a third man stood.

“Your Majesty,” he began, “you said we would become subjects if we stayed.  Can you explain that to us?”

“Certainly, Sir.  The Empire has three categories for people living within its jurisdiction:  residents, subjects, and citizens.  Residents are those who have not sworn fealty and allegiance to the Empire, and through it to Caesar.  This stratum of society features the fewest rights and liberties, but they pay only a sales tax on goods purchased.  Residents may not benefit financially from any Imperial program, and they are not allowed to own or possess weapons or purchase land, though they may rent property.  Typically, residents are visitors from another political body, although there have been many humans who refuse to swear oath.”

“They are however, assured of certain rights, including the freedom to peacefully assemble, to protest; the right of free speech and the guarantee of freedom of worship; the right to privacy both against governmental entities and private individuals.”  She paused, and smiled again at the crowd.  “Privacy; that is a major concern on this world, in this time, is it not?  We take our laws seriously, and we enforce them unflinchingly.  No one, not even Caesar, may intrude upon the private affairs of anyone, citizen, subject, or resident, that has not been formally accused of a crime.  We are forbidden by law from looking at your computer files, your work records, your medical records, unless you are accused.  And so are private individuals, as I have said.  These private investigators and paparazzi your world seems to have spawned in such great numbers?  They will be without a job in Imperial territories.  And our courts tend to impose prohibitedly large fines against anyone outside our territory that intrudes upon the privacy of our people; if our armed forces do not send them quite a different message first, that is.”

“But back to the subject of subjects,” she said as a twitter of laughter burst through the hall.  “Subjects may own land and weapons, but they do not have the right to vote in Imperial elections.  That right is reserved for citizens only.  Subjects can vote on purely local matters of the region in which they live.  Subjects pay five percent of their gross annual income in taxes, plus the sales tax on goods purchased, while citizens pay ten percent.  Both subjects and citizens receive free health care, provided for by the Imperial government, residents do not.  All Imperial subjects and citizens are afforded access to primary and secondary education for their children with the funds dedicated by the Imperial government.  The actual schools and curriculum are managed by local jurisdictions which answer directly to the parents of the children attending.”

“How do you become an Imperial citizen,” a woman called out from the audience.

“Excellent question, madame,” Caesar said as she nodded solemnly.  “Citizens are those who devoted their lives to the Imperial cause, defending our subjects and residents with their own life if need be.  Law enforcement, fire-fighters, soldiers and sailors of our armed forces; all of these are paths to earning the rights of a citizen of the Empire, as are doctors and nurses, paramedics, and many other methods of public service.  Before we grant the franchise to anyone, we expect him or her to prove they are willing to put their own lives on the line for others.  Citizens pay higher taxes, but they are the only members of Imperial society that may vote or hold office above purely local jurisdictions.  Also, only citizens may become educators in our schools.”

A woman stood, her face white from shock.  “Teachers have to serve as myrmidons before they can teach?” she exclaimed.  “That is ridiculous!”

“You are a teacher, I take it?” asked Julia, her smile vanishing.  “I have seen your so-called educational system; it is nothing less than criminal.  It is more indoctrination than education, and it is you and those like you that have created it.  The purpose of school is not to teach children what to think, but to teach them how to think; how to reason and to apply logic; how to ask questions and find answers for themselves.  You idiots teach by rote and discourage free-thinking, and then you are surprised when so many fail?  The freedom to make a decision for yourself is, in the end, madame, the only real freedom anyone has.  And it is a freedom that you have been destroying for the past century.”

From the front of the auditorium, sudden noise erupted as a group of protestors, carrying hand-painted banners stormed inside.  “ALIENS GO HOME!” they shrieked.  “NO NUKES!  NO NUKES!  NO NUKES!” they chanted.

Julia shook her head in disgust as the dirty and unkempt mob swept forward towards the stage; towards her Praetorians waiting patiently.  A three meter wide space had been cleared around the stage, with the assembled crowd kept back behind a simple rope barrier one would expect to see in a theater.  The protestors ignored that rope and crossed over towards the stage.

The first one across, a shaggy-head man with a long beard, was met by an advancing Praetorian in full battle armor.  His eyes bulged outwards as the Empress’s guard slammed the butt of his polished rifle deep into the man’s stomach, doubling him over before he collapsed to the ground.  A woman was backhanded by another guard; the SNAP of her jaw breaking echoing across the town-hall meeting.  Dozens, scores of protestors crossed the barrier, but each one was beaten bloodily to the ground; seven would die before the day was over.

And then the surviving protestors stopped short of the rope, their survival instincts warring with their outrage.

“I do believe that my guards asked nicely at the beginning to please not cross that line.  If you want to stay and participate you may; but I warn you now, I will tolerate no outbursts or demonstrations in here,” Julia sweetly said to the crowd with a cold smile.  “You can take that behavior outside, or you can go to the morgue, your choice.”

*****************************************************

“Shall we wait for the Empress?” Michael asked Jason from across the conference table in the Cabinet room of the White House.  Beside the President sat Vice-President Vance, and then to either side the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader.  Lesser representatives of the government filled out the dozen or seats on his side.

Facing them sat Jason and Nathan, along with his legal affairs officer, Lt. Commander Webster Lewis, the remainder of the chairs forlorn and empty.

“No, Mister President, Her Imperial Majesty has another engagement at this moment,” Jason replied.

“Another engagement?” the Speaker asked, his high squeaking voice sounding to Jason’s ear as something akin to the scrapping of fingernails on a chalkboard.  “This is a meeting with the President of the United States; she couldn’t be bothered to attend?”

“Mister Speaker,” the Consort of Caesar answered, “she is speaking with the people of Vancouver Island about how we are going to handle the transition.  Some of those men, women, and children will become our people; that fact alone makes them far, far more important to her, and to me, than any bloviating assembly of politicians.”  He turned his gaze back towards the President.  “Regardless, Sir, I am here on my wife’s behalf.  You called this meeting, so the floor is yours.”

“Admiral Chandler, we,” and Michael gestured around the room, “have considered carefully the specifics we discussed at our last meeting.  There are a . . .”

“Your pardon, Mister President,” Jason interrupted.  “But I do not need the entire history of your reasons for calling this meeting.  What is your decision?”

“All right, Mister Chandler, you want it blunt, you will so have it.  We will not surrender our sovereignty to you or to anyone else.  While I will pardon Captain Serrano for the incident in New York, only accredited diplomatic personnel will receive immunity from prosecution.  We agree, in principle, to your proposal to intervene in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but there are numerous concerns.  Specifically, we will require that you not use any of your tactical nuclear devices.  We will not . . . what are you doing?” Michael blurted as Jason and his two officers stood and began to walk out of the room.

Jason turned back towards the table and placed both hands on the oak surface, glaring across the polished top at the world’s most powerful man.  “I told you then, Mister President, take the terms or leave it.  You have chosen the latter, apparently, as have Russia and China.  So be it.  Fight your own war, then.  Just stay the hell out of our way while we fight ours.”

He stood straight and turned to leave once again, as the table began to erupt in bursts of outraged shock.

“Admiral!  Surely we can discuss this issue; there must be some room for compromise,” Michael spat out.

Jason stopped just before he arrived at the door, and gave Web a wink, and then he slowly turned around, a scowl on his face.  “Don’t screw with me, Mister President.  If you want us to solve your problem, do not, for one damned instant, believe that you can dictate to me and my troopers how we solve it.  Ninety days and the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan will be over and done, and you will be the President of the United States that brings the boys home.  But don’t you, a man who has never worn the uniform and shed blood or shared mud, ever presume to tell me how to fight that war, Sir.”

The President nodded slowly.  “If we can talk about the rest . . . ?”

“Captain Serrano,” Jason said to his Chief of Staff, “inform Reprisal we may run a little late.”

*****************************************************

Six hours later, as the Hermes class shuttle accelerated out of the atmosphere and into orbit, Nathan shook his head.  “I didn’t believe they would give away so much, Sir.”

“Never forget the allure of an individual’s quest for power, Nathan.  Even their President suffers from it, wanting to go down in history as a great man.  History has yet to be written, but they are not concerned with the future; they all want to seen today as great.  It gets in the way, that ambition, and prevents them from taking decisive action that would make them great.  They are all condemned to mediocrity because they do not dare take a risk.”

“Still, we got most of what you and the Empress demanded, Sir; everything, in fact, but the blanket immunity and the recognition of individual portions of terrestrial powers joining the Empire.”

Jason chuckled.  “They were never going to give us that, Nathan.  But they wanted the rest of the carrot pretty damn badly.  By including those ‘demands’, I could compromise by giving them up, not that we ever really wanted them in the first place.  But, in return, I held on to what we really, really needed.  And we got it.”

“Yes, Sir.  You did, Sir,” replied his Chief of Staff.

“Signal General Tuturola, Nathan; the word is go.”

“Aye, aye, Sir.”

*****************************************************

The village was quiet.  Hours before, the sun had set over the mountains to the west that marked the border with Afghanistan, and in the dry chilly night air even the dogs were silent.  Gusting winds blew down from the peaks above, swirling dust across streets that had never been paved, not even with cobblestones.  A few men, their head scarves covering their mouths and noses against the dust, walked the streets, AKs in their hands.  They did not fear the Americans, except for their unmanned drones that dealt death from out of nowhere, but the Pakistani civil war had brought chaos and turmoil everywhere.  Even here, in this valley, seventy miles north-west of the great city of Peshawar, where the Taliban all but ruled, there was a chance of a raid by the corrupt government in Islamabad.  It would not succeed, of course, Allah himself would insure that.  But why take chances?

In this quiet village, high on the shoulder of the great peaks of rock raised by Allah himself, they watched the approaching slopes with even greater vigilance than usual.  For tonight was a great celebration.  They had the honor of sheltering the two men who had done more in one short morning to harm the vile Americans than any other.  Two great leaders of the movement, come here to discuss operations for the future with young leaders of both the Taliban and Al Qaeda.  The sentry moved slowly down one street, watching and listening; but he never saw the hands that grabbed him from behind, nor the blade that pierced deep into his kidney, the pain keeping him from crying out as his life faded into blackness.

*****************************************************

“By next year, my friends, we will have available weapons such you have only dreamed of in the past,” the old white-haired man said to those men seated around him.  “Omar has assured me that the Faithful working for this treacherous government will deliver the material we need to utterly destroy the Great Satan.  With his cities ablaze and poisoned, he will have no choice but to abandon the House of Peace.  And then we shall put our own House in order, eliminating those who would be puppets to the West and their false gods.”

The young men nodded their agreement, several softly uttering prayers to Allah, even as they stroked their rifles that even here, in the company of holy men, they never laid aside.

“When Dar-es-Salaam is set to right, our Jihad will once again raise swords in the House of War.  The infidels will learn to fear God; they will serve him or they will perish.  There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet.”

The door and both windows to the house exploded inward, even as several of the armed men jerked, their chests erupting in a splatter of gore.  Horrific figures, demons of Shaitan, entered the house that sheltered the two leaders of the muhajaden.  Their metal skin was blacker than the deepest night, seeming to absorb the light around it; each stood taller than the Great Leader, three times as broad at the shoulders, and from their forearms fire spat into their midst.

In seconds, the Imperial SpecOps squad had eliminated all of the armed men and taken the two wanted criminals into custody.

*****************************************************

“My god,” the CNN correspondent aboard ISS Reprisal whispered as he realized just who the old man sitting on the floor of the cell was.

“Not exactly,” the frowning Legion officer to his right said.  “Her Majesty thought that you would like the exclusive on this; of course if not, I can go back to the press pool we have aboard . . .” his voice trailed off suggestively.

“NO!” the reporter snapped, as he turned to face his camera-man.  “Get that damn thing rolling!”

*****************************************************

Michaels’s jaw dropped as his recognized the captive man on the television screen that Tom had just turned on after rushing into the Oval Office.

“This is Robert Jordan, reporting live from the brig aboard the Imperial battleship ISS Reprisal, in geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles above the Canary Islands.  Just moments ago, I was brought here to witness and report on the capture of terrorist mastermind Osama bin-Ladin by special operations forces attached to the 501st Shock Legion.”

“Earlier this evening, a small team of soldiers from the 501st infiltrated the mountainous border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan.  They have captured alive both bin-Ladin and Mullah Omar, the head of the former Taliban regime of Afghanistan.  The Imperials have asked CNN to broadcast this event live, and it appears that they are ready.”

On the screen, the camera showed bin-Ladin, still wearing the same dirty, dusty robes that featured in so many of his video tapes, but his hands were bound behind him, and he was seated on a metal stool in an empty cell.  The cell door opened, and an Imperial officer entered the cell, along with a member of the Saudi royal family.  The Saudi nodded his head quickly, confirming that it was indeed bin-Ladin sitting before him, and the emissary spat on the floor of the cell before he left.  Then the Imperial Legion officer spoke.

“Osama bin-Ladin, I am Major Jamil al-Saud, of Her Imperial Majesty’s 501st Shock Legion.  More so, I am a chaplain to the Imperial Legions, a mullah of the Faithful.  You have been brought to judgment before a duly constituted tribunal of officers of the Empire of Humanity for your actions in contributing to the murder of thousands.  Do you wish to pray with me before I inform you of their decision?”

“Heretical dog!” the old man spat.  “You are a traitor before Allah, the Prophet, and your people!”

“No, old man; no traitor am I, but a loyal son of Islam; the true Islam; the religion that you and the other sons of Shaitan pervert by slaughtering innocent men, women, and children.  Does not the Book tell us that we are all children of God; Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike?  Does not He, though his prophet Muhammad, teach that all men have worth, regardless of their faith or lack thereof?”

The fanatic spat on the uniform al-Saud wore, and the Imperial officer solemnly nodded, ignoring the sputum slowly rolling down the front of his jacket.

“Very well, then.  Osama bin-Ladin, you have been found guilty of the crimes of which you have been accused.  Your own words confess to the world your guilty actions; your inability to repent and seek forgiveness shows that you lack the very mercy that the Lovingkind, the Triumphant, would have you accept.”

“Guilty?  I am guilty of nothing in eyes of Allah!  The laws of the infidel and the heretic will never bind my hands from accomplishing the will of God, the Great Jihad.  And what is to come now, heretic?  Will I be kept as a trophy in your prisons as a sign of your false mercy?  Will I be chained like an animal in a circus for you parade the Faithful past in your attempts to destroy Islam?”

“We are not the Americans, old man.  Nor are we Europeans, or Arabs, or any other people of this world.  We are Imperial Terrans; and for your crimes there cannot be justice.  Too much blood has been spilled by your hands and upon your order for any punishment to be enough.  You will not be confined; you will not be given a public forum to speak your hateful words.  The sentence upon you, Osama bin-Ladin is death.  May Allah grant unto your soul the mercy you failed to show others in life, though you deserve it not.”

“I die a martyr to the Faith!” the prisoner exclaimed.

“No,” the mullah replied as he drew his sidearm.  “You will simply die old man.”

And then Jamil al-Saud raised the pistol and fired one shot into bin-Ladin’s forehead, broadcast live across the world by CNN.

*****************************************************

Perth led the way as the four assault transports descended into the atmosphere.  Alerted beforehand, radars from almost every nation on Earth, and not a few telescopes, tracked them as their hulls glowed white-hot during reentry.  The mammoth 900-meter diameter ships plunged deep into the atmosphere, creating immense pressure waves from the heat and speed of their passage.

Slowly, the fireballs in the sky dissipated, and the hulls began to cool as they crossed over the Black Sea heading south-east towards the Afghan-Pakistan border.  They streaked across the sky above Iran, but though some members of the Revolutionary Guards wanted to fire missiles, cooler heads (and a dozen newly headless generals) prevailed in the end and war between the Islamic Republic and the Empire was narrowly avoided.  Entering Afghani airspace, massive hanger doors on the sides of the ships cracked open, and hundreds, thousands, of light vehicles were ejected while still six kilometers above the ground.  Light, that is, in relative comparison to the ships themselves.

The first wave consisted of Calderons, recon tanks little larger than the US Abrams in scale.  More than two hundred emerged from the cavernous holds and launch bays of the transports, fanning out to form a perimeter around the descending Legion.  As the ships screamed onwards, descending towards the surface far below, still more waves belched forth.  Tanks and armored personnel carriers, command carriers and mobile howitzers, electronic signal warfare vehicles and combat engineering vehicles; all these and more, numbering greater than two thousand, formed up into their cohorts and the perimeter of vehicles swelled outwards again.

Far overhead, the serried ranks of Banshee interceptors, Skyhawk strike fighters, and Havoc strike bombers of the Fleet rolled to point nose down towards the blue-white marbled globe of Earth and dove deep into the atmosphere.  Within minutes, the fighters and bombers had swooped down to assume top-cover over the vulnerable transport ships, their onboard sensors and targeting arrays searching for the slightest sign of any resistance.

Still the quartet continued to fall, surrounded by their brood of parasites.  Thrusters flared on the great ships, and they began to slow as they descended past three thousand meters.  The assembled cohorts sped off in all directions of the compass, diving towards the ground and disgorging ten thousand battle-armored infantry; each cohort spreading out to establish and man a section of the twenty-kilometer diameter perimeter of the landing zone in the center of the Khyber Pass.

The four mighty vessels slowed still more, until they crawled across the sky, their bulk casting artificial eclipses on the homes and fields and rocky crags below.  When they reached five kilometers from the center of the landing zone, a hatch on the upper hemisphere of each transport snapped open, and a single heavy missile emerged amid a column of smoke and flame.  The size of many ICBMs currently in service on Earth, the four missiles shot up towards the heavens, and then they arched back towards the ground, gaining more velocity and kinetic energy with each passing second.  The ground shook as the quartet of missiles slammed into the soil and rock, penetrating deep below the surface before the gravity fusion warheads detonated in union.  Rock melted as four new suns ignited just below the surface of the planet, and debris flew up and away to rain down for kilometers in all directions.  Even before the clouds of vaporized earth and stone had fully formed, four more missiles flashed away from the transports, plunging deep into the craters the first penetrators had left behind.  These missiles carried not fusion warheads, not chemical explosives, nor were they kinetic penetrators; no, these missiles carried a generator that created a spherical shield quite similar to those that cloaked the ships of the Fleet.  But this generator would only last for a fraction of a second before its circuits collapsed, burned out and useless.  In that time, however, the expanding shield would consume the loose debris and shattered rock, vaporizing it and forming the crater into a perfectly symmetrical hemispherical landing pit, its surface glazed and smooth; a pit that exactly matched the dimensions of the lower quadrants of Perth and her sisters.

The four assault ships slowed their advance until they hovered directly above the field-expedient landing pits, and then lowered themselves on contra-gravity drives into the depths.  Hundreds of ports on the ventral surfaces of the transports opened and a cloud of liquid nitrogen sprayed out in a fine mist, cooling and hardening the rock into a stable solid platform.  As the nozzles closed and the mist dissipated, the transports gently settled into place, their hulls in contact with the fused surface of the pit.

From the dark maws of the hangers, the last of the Legions combat vehicles slowly emerged.  Three times the size of the largest vehicles ejected earlier, massing more than seven hundred tons (more than some naval destroyers of the First World War), the two hundred and twelve Howes of the Legion were the heavy shock elements; the mailed fist that shattered enemy formations and sparred with hostile spacecraft in low orbit.  These mighty behemoths could not fly as high or as fast as the other vehicles of the Legion, but against them only another heavy tank—an Imperial heavy tank—could hope to survive.  One by one, they glided down the ramps, their shields flaring as the energy field made contact with the ramp and the ground, and their turrets rotated to scan the horizon; searching for targets to kill.

Six kilometers away from the now-grounded ships, General Miles Tuturola trotted down the ramp of his Devon command vehicle, joining his staff where they were setting up the Legions temporary command post.  Close behind him, an aide followed, holding Miles helmet.  The general placed clenched armored fist on his armored hips, and took in a deep breath of the air around him.

“Smell that, boys?” he asked theatrically.  “This whole damned country just shat itself; I love my job.”

The 501st Shock Legion—Caesar’s Black Panzers—had arrived in-country.

*****************************************************

The full-bird colonel was shaking his head in disgust and private disquiet as he heard a voice call out his name from down the hall.

“Colonel Nash, may I introduce to you Inquisitor Kim?” Captain Paul Stanley of the Imperial Legions asked.

Nash stopped and looked up at the two, well, aliens was too harsh a word, time-travelers.  Stanley he knew, if not well, from their meetings over the past twenty-four hours, but Kim . . . the small, slim, immaculately uniformed Asian he had never before met.  Then the title Stanley used hit him.

“Inquisitor?” he blurted.

Stanley smiled and nodded his head.  “Yes, Sir.  Inquisitor Kim represents Imperial Intelligence and is currently on loan from the Fleet.  His equivalent rank, in both my service and your own would be the same as yours, Sir.”

“You must the torturer in chief that we have been waiting on then,” Nash stated bluntly.

“My methods bear little resemble to the monks of the historical Inquisition, Colonel,” Kim replied in return.  “And they are certainly far more effective in their results.”

“Colonel,” Stanley interrupted, “Inquisitor Kim is a senior member of Intel.  He gained his posting through sheer ability, and he is far more skilled at extracting information than the specialists assigned to the 501st.  That is merely one of the reasons why the Admiral asked him to supervise the interrogations.”

“What can you find out that we couldn’t?” Nash was unable to stop himself from asking the question, the rancor at being replaced as the CO of the captured Afghans still gnawing at him.

“Quite a lot, actually, if I had the time to do the job correctly,” Kim politely answered with a slight bow.  “Alas, Colonel Nash, time is very much a finite resource.  I will presume that you and your people have done an adequate job at extracting information, and quite frankly it is highly unlikely that anyone here knows much of great import in any case.  I will, for today, at least, be asking just one question of each detainee.”

“And what might that question be?” Nash asked, his curiosity outweighing his indignation.

“Quite a simple one, I assure you.  Have you used a weapon, with the intent to kill or wound or intimidate, against either a member of the Coalition or any unarmed civilian?”

Nash barked out a burst of laughter.  “Sure, they will just up and tell you the answer to that one.”

Kim shrugged.  “They will answer while connected to one of our truth-detectors; the machine will tell me if they are lying or speaking truthfully.”

“Without a base-line?”

“Such as your polygraph requires?” Kim responded, shaking his head.  “No, that technology is quite antiquated and unreliable as well.  And one can be trained to defeat any polygraph your civilizations have so far produced.  Our machine works on a different principle, measuring the pattern of synaptic activity within the brain.  Truth produces one result, a lie something quite different.  And there is no method to trick the machine.  None.”

“And if the detainee refuses to answer the question?”

“For our purposes today, Colonel, no answer is as good as a confession.  If I had a fully-trained support staff and a dozen other Inquisitors, perhaps I could spend four-to-five hours using machine- and chemical-interrogation tactics to discomfort and disorient them enough to answer.  That, however, is for another day, and for prisoners with more valuable information.”

“You are talking about torture!”

“Am I?  Colonel Nash, the men I interrogate will receive no permanent injury due to my procedures; directly, at least.  But the information I can obtain will save lives.  The point is, however, quite moot, because I said before, time does not allow for a full interrogation.  Now, if you will please excuse me, I have two hundred and seventy-three people to ask a question of.”

*****************************************************

Seventeen hours later, the open-air compound yard surrounded by razor-wire was filled with detainees.  A door to one of the concrete blockhouses, separated from the prisoners by yet another wire fence opened, and Inquisitor Kim stepped out onto a small wooden platform, accompanied by Colonel Nash and Captain Stanley.  A second door opened off to one side, and eight battle-armor clad Imperial soldiers filed into the yard with the detainees.

Kim tapped the microphone, and when he was sure it was working, he began.  “Good afternoon again, gentlemen; I would like the following prisoners to report to Staff Sergeant Hall,” one of the soldiers raised an armored-clad arm, “when I call out your name.”

He recited twenty-two names, and each of the white-garbed prisoners came forward, shuffling their shackle-clad feet and looking as nervous as lambs going to slaughter.

“You gentlemen told me the truth when you denied having ever used a weapon.  With the apologies of Her Imperial Majesty for your confinement, gentlemen, you are free to go.  Caesar Julia has instructed me, with her own voice, no less, to give each of you compensation for your time here, and to extend to you an offer.  If you wish to remain here in your country, with your families, that is of course your right.  But if instead, you, and your family, wish to swear allegiance and fealty to Her Imperial Majesty, then we will accept you as subjects of the Empire.  Be warned gentlemen, such oaths are not given lightly, and if you lie to me, then, well, let us say that bad things will happen.”

“You will be given clothing, money, and a good meal before you leave; further, if any of you have any medical needs, my staff will see to your care.  Think hard about our offer, gentlemen, and make the right decision for you, for your wives, and for your children.”

Kim nodded, and Sergeant Hall waved the twenty-two forward through the door.

When the last of the twenty-two had left the compound yard and the door closed once more, Kim turned back to face the crowd and shook his head sadly.  “As for the rest of you, well, all but two of you lied to me.  Gentlemen, I do not care for being lied to; it presumes that you believe me incompetent at my job, which I assure you I am not.  Khalid Adjani and Pashmir Khan, the two of you told me the truth about killing Coalition troops and or unarmed civilians.  Thank you for having the honor to admit what you have done, for being men enough to take responsibility for your own actions.  I regret to tell you, however, that your punishment will be the same as those who lied to me.  Staff Sergeant Hall, you may now execute your orders.”

“Sir!” the trooper replied with a salute, and then all eight members of the squad brought up their Reapers and opened fire on the crowded yard as Colonel Nash, United States Army watched, his eyes wide with horror, the atrocity happening directly before him.

*****************************************************

“The instructions from your government are quite simple, General Keller,” Miles snapped at the Frenchman commanding the NATO contingent.  “Return to your base camps immediately while my Legion neutralizes the insurgency.  Can you not follow your orders, sir?”

“Oui, mon General, I understand my orders perfectly well.  But I will not stand by while you use these hell-rounds of yours upon the people of Afghanistan.  Such a thing is not needed.”

“I beg to differ, General,” Miles said as he lit another cigarette and took a long puff, which in turn caused Jacques Heller to frown again.  Bloody health-Nazis, Miles thought to himself.

“Point the first:  those are Taliban holed up in that old mountain fort and the NATO forces you command have failed repeatedly to remove them.”

“Point the second:  all sixty-three of those people in that fort are heavily armed, so any idea that innocent Afghanis are there is bullshit; that flag ain’t gonna fly, not today.”

“Point the third:  as much as I detest Centurion Yarrow, he is quite right that sometimes you just gotta send a message.  And that message today, General Heller, is if you shoot at my boys, then you are going to get slapped down pretty damned hard.”

The Frenchman waved his hand in dismissal.  “Using this weapon is not necessary; your infantry can clear that redoubt in fifteen minutes.”

“Of course they can,” Miles snorted.  “You think that is a concern of mine?  Please, General, worry about anything else; my boys could take that place in five minutes flat.  But for right now, I need to put the fear of God-almighty and my Legion in everyone watching, insurgent and civilian alike.”

A kilometer away from the mobile command center, one of the mobile howitzers attached to the 501st fired; the boom of the shot echoing across the valley floor as a dull POMPH from this distance.  The French general’s shoulders sagged and he shook his head.

“This is not what warfare should be, mon General,” he said sadly, “where is the honor in this?”

“War is not about honor, General Keller,” Miles quietly replied as an immense fireball erupted against the flank of a distant mountain, the mushroom cloud rising high into the sky above, “nor about fair-play.  It is about kicking the other side so hard he cries uncle and hoping you survive in the process.  It is about keeping as many of your own alive for as long as you can, and killing as many of your foes as possible in the meantime.  War is Hell, Jacques; it has never been anything but.  If you plan to wage it, however, then you best damn well be prepared to do whatever it takes to win it.  Otherwise, why the hell even bother?”

“Of all the bone-headed, dumb-ass things that you could have done, Centurion, you just had to go balls to the walls flank speed ahead and hand my wife this load of crap!” Jason snarled as the LAPD officer in riot gear let him into the isolation cell where they had moved Saul.

The grizzled Marine veteran snapped to attention as his Admiral entered the room.  “SIR!” he snapped as he locked his eyes on the cell wall.

“Sir, what?” Jason spat curtly.  “Is that supposed to be sir, I’m sorry I screwed up and handed you a major diplomatic incident?  Or is it sir, I’m sorry I’ve put your ass in a sling because I didn’t think about what I was doing ahead of time?  Which is it, Centurion?”

“Sir,” Saul answered crisply, “that would be both, sir.  And sir, I’m sorry I didn’t get the chance to finish that pack of filthy damned rapist bastards off before I got pulled off of them, SIR.”

Jason stepped directly in front of Saul Yarrow and glared directly into his eyes.  “That was not your job, Centurion; not today it sure as hell wasn’t.  Christ almighty, Saul, I’d expect this out of your fire-eaters and heart-breakers, but you I thought would show a bit more common sense.”

The Admiral shook his head, and then forced himself to relax.  “What happened today, Saul?  Just give me the straight story and don’t worry about making any excuses.”

“Sir.  I witnessed a crime on the boardwalk; a mugger shoving down an old lady and stealing her purse.  I stopped it, sir, but I got a little carried away and the asshole died.  Apparently, they frown upon citizens stopping crime in these here parts, sir, because next thing I know the local cops are putting steel bracelets on me and hauling my ass off to jail.”

“Then they put me in a great big cage with a bunch of other criminals; real dirt-bag scum criminals, sir, the kind that brag about raping women.  I didn’t start that one, but I finished it, or would have if they hadn’t come in to break it up.  After that they put me here in a cell by myself, sir, and then you came in.”

“Seven dead, Centurion, and another four in surgery at the hospital that may not make it out alive; with five more that you somehow failed to cripple or maim,” Jason interrupted.  “Sounds like you didn’t leave them much to clean up afterwards.”

“No sir.”

“Well, the shit has royally hit the fan, Saul.  These locals want your balls in a vise; and there is no way in hell their President is going to order you released, not after they have seen how we are dealing with their problem in South-West Asia.  My problem is this:  we promised these sons-of-bitches that we would follow their laws in their territory.  Luckily, this state doesn’t allow its civilian government to execute prisoners . . .”

“What?” blurted the Marine.  “Have all of their governing officials just lost their ever-loving minds, Sir?”

“Maybe, Saul, maybe.  But count your lucky stars you are not going to be standing trial facing capital charges.  We will get you the best legal representation available, don’t worry about that.  And if things go belly-up in the trial, I won’t leave you to rot in one of their prisons; damn the consequences.  My boys will not be sharing a cell with people who find rape and child molestation humorous.  Until then, however, you need to stay frosty, Marine; you understand me?”

“Sir, yes, Sir!”

“Good.  We are going to push them hard to try this fast; I want you back in charge of Delta ASAP, Saul, but it will take some time.  Apparently, their legal system is as screwed up as everything else they are doing; seems like normally this might take two years before it came down to a trial.  I’ll move heaven and earth to see that it doesn’t, but you have to stay out of any more trouble; and for god’s sake Saul, whatever you do, don’t kill any of the prison guards!”

“Sir, no, Sir!  The very thought had never even crossed my mind, Sir.”

“Right; I know you Centurion,” Jason said with a slight smile on his face.  “And Saul?”

“Sir?”

“Try not to kill any more of their prisoners until we get this cleared up, ok?”

“I’ll try my best, Sir.”

*****************************************************

“OK, people, quiet down,” Robert Schaeffer said as he walked out onto an auditorium stage.  “Find a seat and shut your traps if you want to find out exactly why we are assembled here today.”

Slowly, the crowd of nearly one thousand engineers, scientists, administrators, mission specialists, and astronauts finished milling around and the auditorium quieted.  The lights over the audience dimmed, allowing all those gathered to view the stage and the NASA logos on the wall behind clearly.

“All right then, most of you, probably all of you, have heard this before, but let’s keep it traditional:  welcome to Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.  Mission control.  Kennedy may be the launch point, but Houston has been, and always will be, where we plan, execute, and direct our manned and unmanned exploration programs.  To anyone here from the Cape, sorry about you being second-best, but hey, at least you are better than Vandenberg.”

A mixed set of sounds came from the audience; some people clapping and whistling and laughing, the minority booing and making cat-calls.

Schaeffer smiled at the men and women he knew well.  As Director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration it was his job to know them and to lead them.  The past few years had sorely tried his, and his people’s, nerves, what with the administration canceling both the return to the Moon and the projected Mars mission, as well as the entire Constellation program to replace the shuttle fleet.  Money had been siphoned away from NASA, and with the mandatory retirement of the shuttle fleet a few years back, the very future of manned missions was suddenly in doubt.  NASA had lost many of its best and brightest as hope slowly faded away; they left their government jobs, with paychecks restricted by law to less than that of a congressman, for more lucrative private sector employment.  Still, the ones who remained were the ones that still dreamed, who wanted to follow in the footsteps of Glenn and Armstrong and Lovell.  They were the best America had to offer, even in a time of tight budgets, and collectively were the most brilliant collection of men and women on the face of the planet.

“I’m not going to bore you with a long introduction,” Schaeffer began, but had to stop as a standing ovation interrupted him.  Waving them back down into their seats, he shook his head and started over.  “The recent arrival of our guests has really upset the apple cart.  Not only are they far more advanced, with hundreds of years of knowledge that we have only just begun to plumb, they have a functional faster-than-light means of travel and working single-stage-to-orbit lift vehicles.”

The crowd went utterly quiet.  Most had thought that this was what the conference would be about, but they had not known for certain.  It was uncommon for NASA to summon the cream of the crop for a conference with no published topic, but it had happened before.  Only rarely in the past had the attendees been ordered to leave all lap-top computers, digital recorders, cameras, cell phones, and blackberries outside, but even that had occurred.  But to have both, at the same time, and for armed NASA security to be present at all doors?  That was highly unusual.  But when they had walked through the doors and saw the EM scramblers mounted on the walls and ceiling of the auditorium, they knew they were in for something very secretive and very, very special.  The electro-magnetic scramblers prevented anyone outside from using listening devices to record or transmit the session, and the devices would erase any magnetic or digital tape that passed through their field.  This particular auditorium was of the cold-war era, and it showed in the construction.  There were no windows for laser whisker microphones to hear the conversations through, only four-foot thick concrete walls.

Their curiosity was raised, so the normally boisterous crowd simply waited for the Director to continue.

“First of all neither the Administration nor the White House has approved of this meeting, and especially not of the topic.  I will take full and complete responsibility if they find out.  We all know they want to kill manned flight; replace it with probes and sensor packages to make it safer and cheaper.  But we are not going to go to the stars without taking risks, even with the help of our long-lost cousins from the future.”

Schaeffer turned to the wing and nodded, and then an Imperial navy officer stepped out onto the stage and took the Director’s place at the microphone.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen.  My name is Dan Moore, and I hold the rank of commander in Her Imperial Majesty’s naval service.  I am an engineer, and am currently assigned to the flag staff of Commodore Liu Teng-Hui, commanding officer of Cruiser Division 342.  Today, I want to share with you some of our, the Empire of Humanity’s, plans for the continued exploration and colonization of space.”

From somewhere in the crowd, a voice floated out on the ether.  “A damned grease-monkey; we came here to listen to a wrench-puller?”

More voices, some agreeing and some disagreeing began to fill the air.  Schaeffer walked back over to the microphone.  “Stow that shit, people.  For the record, Doctor Moore holds three Ph.D.’s; in physics, astrophysics, and computer science.  He attended and graduated from M.I.T., yes, it still exists in their time, and it is still one of the best schools around, and then volunteered for service in the Imperial Fleet to earn his citizenship.  Add to that the fact that he knows how to build the engine for a SSTO, and I think it will be worth your while to listen to what he has to say.  Doctor Moore?”

“Thank you, Director.  I understand your skepticism, really I do.  What you have to understand is that I, and the majority of the Fleet, both enlisted and officer alike, are in awe of what you have done over the past forty years.  My god,” he said, shaking his head and grabbing the sides of the lectern, “from this room, from this Space Center, you people put Armstrong and Young on the Moon.  You began all of this.  And you have our deepest thanks for your sacrifices and your struggles.  Her Imperial Majesty instructed me to come here, and to offer you all a place in what we will be doing.  We would be honored to serve alongside you heroes.”

The room was quiet once again, as the Commander’s quiet and sincere words touched the heart of everyone present.  Thinking of themselves as heroes was viewed as anachronistic and old fashioned; certainly the current President and his cabinet did not think of them in that way.  Sometimes it seemed he thought of them only as a budgetary obstacle, in fact.

“Three months from now, the destroyers Napoleon and Scipio Africanus will escort the auxiliary merchantman Preston Little from Earth orbit to Luna orbit.  Little will be carrying supplies and equipment to construct the first permanent lunar settlement.  This site, which will become Heinlein Base, will be primarily a fuel processing station, extracting lithium hydride from the lunar crust for use by the Fleet.  However, it will also serve as a scientific research facility and an astronomical observatory.  Plus, there are a few other strategic minerals nearby the area where we plan to build that will be eventually mined.  Heinlein will also serve as the gateway to Clarke City, which we expect will attract men, women, and children caught by the lure of space.  This twin city complex will become Man’s first extra-planetary refugee.”

“The problem is,” the navy officer continued, “we lack one critical resource, numbers.  Numbers of people.  Trained and skilled and motivated people who want to press outwards and onwards.  We intend to ask for volunteers from every nation on this planet; but those volunteers will need to have skills and training and the sheer guts to carve out a settlement in a hostile setting.  As we expand our construction to Clarke City, we want to bring families to the Moon, allowing the miners and researchers and hundreds of other required professions to be near their loved ones.”

“Both Heinlein, and eventually Clarke City, will be equipped with our contra-gravity generators, which means that the installations will feature the same gravity as Earth itself, so there will be no need to worry about the health risks of prolonged exposure to a low-gravity environment, and our anti-radiation shielding is a lot better than what you have right now, so that concern can also be set aside.”

“Heinlein will also serve as the primary planetary defense facility for Earth.  There are races out there that mean the people of Earth harm, ladies and gentlemen.  Even if you object philosophically to weapons in space, I can assure you that those races will not applaud your decisions to make war no more; they will devour you and your children.  The defense facilities will remain under the control of the Imperial Fleet and will be manned and commanded by our personnel, to include men and women from this time who volunteer for service.  When completed, Heinlein will have more firepower at its disposal than Admiral Chandlers entire Battle Squadron, enough to smash into kindling any Ordan-Kraal culling fleet that ventures too close to the Moon and Earth.”

“Once we have the beginnings of Heinlein up and running, we will begin construction on a pair of stations, one in Earth orbit and one in Lunar orbit; those stations will be named Mercury and Apollo to honor your own exploration programs.  Eventually, we plan to add two more stations, Gemini and Capricorn, in Earth orbit to complete the orbital infrastructure.  These stations will serve as transit points as well as orbital factories and shipyards.”

“Within five years, Admiral Chandler, myself, and, most important of all, Her Imperial Majesty, hope that we can launch the first extra-solar colonization mission, using Little and Lindsey Santiago, our other merchant auxiliary, to transport colonists to the Alpha Centauri system.  There is a habitable world there, ladies and gentlemen, untouched by any sentient hands.  It has oxygen, it has chlorophyll, it has both plant and animal life that we can digest.  Within a decade, we want to transplant a million humans to New Earth, and start colonies at Tau Ceti, Epsilon Eridani, and a score of other pristine and virgin worlds waiting for us.”

“Within twenty years, we hope to have colonies on Mars and Titan as well, and we intend to construct a massive ship-yard orbiting Titan.  The moons of Saturn and the asteroids of the Belt will provide us, as they did in our past, your future, with incredible quantities of material to build the Fleet that will defend our race, our home, and our people.”

“That is what we hope and dream of accomplishing; God willing and the Ordan-Kraal don’t come early.  But we can’t do it without you.  And that is why I am here to today; to ask the heroes of my childhood to help us save all of Humanity from the threat that wants nothing less than our enslavement or extinction.”

Commander Moore released the podium and stepped back and to the side as Director Schaeffer walked forward again.  The silence was overwhelming; a single dropped pin would have deafening.

“Now you know what this conference is about,” Schaeffer said with a sad voice.  “My contacts within the White House tell me that the President will not be diverting any funds to this effort; he hopes to force the Imperials to foot the bill and join later on the cheap.  But we didn’t sign up to sit on the sidelines, people.  We didn’t join NASA to let someone else, even heroes from our future, boldly go where no one has gone before and make history.  We didn’t study and work and dream to see other brave men and women do the job we have trained to do.”

“Caesar Julia has spoken privately with me, and has offered full Imperial citizenship to any member of NASA that wishes to ask for it, along with a place in their program described today.  I am submitting my resignation to the President a week from Friday afternoon in order to accept her offer.  I want you to think about this; think about this hard.  Go back to your departments and divisions, and let your people know as well.  We have to keep this quiet, however.  Regardless of what the President agreed to, do you really think he is going to let this entire agency leave en masse if he knows about it ahead of time?”

“Talk to your families, and make the choice for yourself.  If you decide to accept the offer, there will be Imperial shuttles at Kennedy, Johnson, and Vandenberg on Friday of next week to take you to Vancouver.  Have no doubt about this, people; if we do this, there are some that will call us traitors to the United States of America.  I can live with that to accomplish what these people are offering.  As for you, the choice is yours.”

The lights in the auditorium came up as Schaeffer stepped back from the microphone.  And then, from the crowd, one astronaut stood and began to clap, the sound echoing across the chamber.  And then a second, and a third, and it became a wave ripping through the crowd until every one of the thousand was on their feet and the sound was thunderous.

NASA had made its decision.

*****************************************************

“Their general is here to see you, Your Excellency,” Abdullah Ghadrin’s major-domo said to the newly reelected President of Afghanistan.  The President sat back in his seat as he savored the title once again.  Let the West say his election, his reelection, was corrupt; it was no matter.  They needed him to retain the little stability they had in his country.  And so what if his extended family had become Ministers of state and judges and chiefs of police?  The best government was kept in the family, was it not?

“Yes, Jamil, show him in please and offer him some chilled pomegranate juice.”

“General Tuturola, mister President,” the man announced a moment later as he held the door open for the Imperial.  The Westerner was short and stocky, Ghadrin saw, and accompanied by another of the Imperials, though this one was darker skinned, with a thick neatly trimmed black beard.  That one could have passed for any one of the president’s tribal leaders, if he had a bit more dirt and grime scattered on his uniform.  Both of the men wore field camo, and each carried a sidearm; holstered in the presence of the President of Afghanistan, of course.

“Ah, thank you for coming, General Tuturola,” Ghadrin said with a beaming smile after both of his guests turned down the offer of the juice, or even of water.  “Your troops are making excellent progress against the rebels, and I have wanted to speak with you in private.”

“Well, go on, Mister President,” the general said amicably.  “Major Khan is a member of my staff at the moment, and since he grew up in the Kabul of our time has been an invaluable source on the region.”

“Quite an asset then, General,” the Afghani leader said, and then paused as he carefully decided on his next words.  “There are some in the tribes who lack a certain amount of respect for our central government, General.  Now that your Legion has dealt with the warlords who sided with Mullah Omar and the remnants of the Taliban have fled into Pakistan, we must set our house in order to assure that chaos does not return.”

“You got that right, Mister President,” the General replied with a smile of his own, “which is why you will announce within the next twenty-four hours that you are voluntarily stepping down as President and going into foreign exile.  So that your countries wounds can heal without a leader present whom many regard as illegitimate.”

Ghadrin blinked once, then twice, and he emitted a short bark of laughter.  “I had not known for you to have such a lively sense of humor, General,” he said, but his eyes were not laughing; his skin had turned a pale white, and his hands were shaking slightly.

“I have a very good sense of humor, Mister President, don’t I Amir?”

“As the General says,” his aide replied.

“Only, I’m not joking today, Mister Ghadrin,” the General finished as he lit one of his cigarettes and inhaled deeply, releasing the smoke through his nose.

“Why?” Ghadrin wailed.

“You stole the election, which means that at heart you have become nothing more a fraud, sir.  Maybe others in this time play the game that way, but we don’t.  I’m sure you were fairly honest and wanted the best for your country when you began this, but when you just asked me to break the heads and hearts of people politically opposed to you, rather than people who are actually pointing guns at you, that only confirmed the Empress’s decision for me.  No, Mister Ghadrin, you gotta to go.”

“And if I decide not to?” the seething almost-former President managed to utter past clenched jaws.

“In that case, I will bury you myself.  The choice is between going into exile and spending the rest of your natural life in luxury, Mister Ghadrin, or being carried out of this palace in a body bag.  I’ll let you make your own decision.”

“And who replaces me?  That flea-bitten son of a whore I ran against . . .”

“No.  Right now, Mister Ghadrin, there is no one in this country, from this time, either I or the Empress will trust with putting the Afghani people first.”

“From this time,” Ghadrin whispered.  And then he grew red in the face, and stood to shout, “You intend to install one of your own as President?”

“Sit down, Mister Ghadrin,” Miles said in a forceful voice, dangerous and flat.  Even as angered as he was, Ghadrin still retained enough sense to follow that instruction.

“There will not be a President.  Quite frankly, your people are not ready for democracy; not without corruption and whole-sale incompetence.  You are still a tribal people, not a united society by any stretch of the imagination.  Major Khan is a direct descendent of Amanullah Khan, the last legitimate King of Afghanistan.  You, having discovered that he is in fact the last son of Shah Amanullah, will announce tomorrow along with your chief rivals for the presidency that you are all going into exile, renouncing all claims of future power among the tribes of Afghanistan in favor of crowning Amir Khan as King, as Shah, in Kabul.”

“His ascension to that ancestral throne will calm the Pashtun tribesman; his being an Imperial and our even-handed treatment of men and women in the north will restore relations with the Teljik and Uzbek tribesmen that the Taliban will not be returning as well.  The rest will learn to accept your new King, and so will Pakistan.”

“What of the mullahs,” Ghadrin asked sourly.

“What of them?” replied Miles.

“They remember Amanullah Khan; they deposed him for lightening the restrictions of shariah law, for letting women decide whether or not to wear the veil, to learn to read and write, for taking away their role in the courts.  They will oppose your man.”

Major, soon-to-be King, Amir Khan smiled at the former in all but name President.  “Let them try, Abdullah.  Let the bastards try.”

****************************************************

“What have they done now?” asked the President as Tom entered the Oval Office, his face pinched and narrow.

“They just restored the Kingdom of Afghanistan; Ghadrin and those who opposed him in the campaign are all going into exile, supposedly voluntarily,” his Chief of Staff answered bluntly.

Michael’s jaw dropped and his eyes grew wide.  “They overthrew the government?”

Tom nodded.  “Turns out one of their people is direct descendant of one of the Afghan Kings deposed back in the ‘20s, they just finished crowning him a few minutes ago.”

The President opened a small drawer on his desk, and took out a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches along with an ashtray.  Striking a match, he lit one of the smokes and took a deep inhalation, holding it for several seconds before releasing the cloud of smoke into the air.

“Did they give a reason?”

“Speaking to Her Majesty’s spokesman, he said that the Ghadrin government recognized their legitimacy was in question, and after having, serendipitously, discovered that one Major Amir Khan was in fact the great-great-great-great-great-and-so-on grandson of Amanullah Khan, he and all of his opponents in the recent race decided that the people of Afghanistan needed to be united behind a monarch that none could accuse of corruption.  On the bright side, the new King, although his official title is Shah, declared that he would retain the national assembly, but he would not tolerate any corruption among the delegates, or his police, or his army.  He pledged to serve the people of Afghanistan, regardless of tribe, and offered amnesty to any member of the Taliban or any member of the various militias run by local Warlords who are willing to lay down arms and swear allegiance to the throne.  Then he said that anyone continuing to bear arms against his government would be staked out in the desert for the women to mutilate.”

Michael’s eyes goggled, but Tom shook his head.  “It sounds more poetic in Pashtun, Mister President.  It is a traditional form of punishment that most Afghanis take to mean any type of death sentence.  I’m not at all certain he actually meant it.”

“After these past few weeks, Tom, I won’t bet the farm on it,” the President replied coldly as he rapidly finished with the cigarette and crushed out the lit coal.

“Will the Afghans accept this; I mean the Imperials putting one of their own on the throne?”

Tom shrugged.  “Amir Khan was born and raised in the Kabul of their time, he is an Afghan.  He knows the people, the culture, their society, their history, and shares their religion.  The question is, Mister President, will the Afghans see him as an outsider or as a knight in shining armor come to rescue them from their nightmare?”

Michael nodded.  “And the down-side?”

“Other than they just installed one of their own as a head-of-state and deposed the standing government?  Other than they have given up on democracy and returned to a monarchy?” the advisor shrugged.  “Your guess is as good as mine, sir.  The left will scream bloody murder, if they haven’t already screamed themselves hoarse, that is, and if Shah Amir pledges his fealty to Her Imperial Majesty, bringing Afghanistan into the Empire of Humanity as a province, it will cause a lot of tension in the region.  Especially with China and Iran.”

The Chinese were already upset with the Empress over the casual use of nukes in Afghanistan, as were the majority of countries across the globe, Michael thought.  That, and the way which they dealt with the terrorists they captured, or got from us, had threatened to split America’s own government apart.  The left had gone completely nuts, calling for the renouncement of all points of agreement for the multiple human rights violations, while the more moderate center had condemned it but espoused the don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater philosophy.  The right-wing (of course) had thrown celebrations over how, in their words, the Imps were kicking ass and taking names.  Iran, well, he wanted Iran to be nervous, it could be a lever to use against their pursuit of nuclear weapons.  Although having a neighbor who had them, and had used them, no less, might well have the opposite effect.

China, on the other hand, could be a major problem.  China had been thoroughly rebuffed by Her Majesty and her husband after they had insisted on being given access to the Imperial military technology.  And when China’s leadership had coldly lectured the Empress that a third of the world’s population looked to China for leadership, she had smiled and replied that can change in a heart-beat.  Whether or not she meant to imply that her ships could bombard mainland China back to the Stone Age from orbit, the government in Beijing choose to interpret it that way.

And when the Empress had visited Taipei last week, the People’s Republic went ballistic.  She emerged from her meetings with the Taiwanese Prime Minister with signed contracts for those fusion plants, along with a basing agreement, and Taiwan had forged a defensive treaty with her as well.  Any attack on the island or people of the Republic of China would be considered an attack on the Empire, she oh-so-sweetly had announced on live TV from the Prime Minister’s front lawn in Taipei.

To call the Chinese government miffed would be like saying the Pacific Ocean was just a little bit bigger than your average back-yard puddle.

The phone on his desk buzzed, stirring the President out of his momentary reverie.  He hit the speaker button.  “Yes, Margaret?”

“Mister President, the Attorney General is here, and she says it is urgent.”

Michael and Tom exchanged a worried look, and then he answered, “Send her in, Margaret.”

The curved door set into the wall of the Oval opened and Leslie Baker, Attorney General of the United States stepped into the President’s office.

“Afternoon, Leslie,” Michael said as he stood, extending his hand to the woman.  “What brings you to this part of town today?”

“Mister President, we have a situation with NASA that requires your immediate attention.”

*****************************************************

The Empress groaned with pleasure as she lay back on the couch, her eyes closed.  “That’s the spot,” she whispered to Jason as he massaged her bare feet.  “Right—ooph—there; press just a little harder.”

She sighed, as the day’s tension began to ebb away.  A flash of lightning from the storm clouds still far out over the Pacific lit the room around them for a moment; already, the breakers below the house overlooking the ocean were white-capped and rough.  Soon enough, the storm would be here.  She sighed again, and then sat up, tucking her feet beneath her legs.

“Jase,” she whispered, as he bent over to kiss her, “we need to talk first.”

The Admiral, her Admiral, smiled.  “After all that work, I get nothing?”

“Spoilsport!  You are supposed to like doing that for me!” she laughed.

“What’s on your mind, love?”

Her smile faded.  “We can’t do this; there aren’t enough of us, Jas.”

“Of course we can; we show them how the Empire works, better than any government they have; we help them out, and they will eventually join us.”

“Eventually, they will join us.  But will it be before the Ordan-Kraal come?  We don’t know when they will expand in this direction; we know when they did in our time, but everything is changed now.  What if they detected our time-jump?  What if they come looking for us now?”

“Then we fight.  The 342nd can handle their initial expedition alone; and the effects of that battle might force everyone to unite behind us to resist the main force when they arrive later.”

“It isn’t enough, Jase,” the young woman said.  “I know you, and your men, want to keep as much tech as possible out of these people’s hands.  That’s why we are setting things up here so that Vancouver, and Heinlein, when that gets up and running, will produce our weapons.  But there is only so much room here, and there is so much to do.”

“What do you want?” her husband asked, the warmth in his voice fading away.

“We can’t have a, oh, call it a bunker mentality, love.  These people are smart, they are industrious; it’s just their governments that are utterly unworkable.  Give it to them, Jason; give them the entire data-base, all of our technology, except for the weapons tech.  They will set up the means to produce what we need, and who knows, some young genius out there might come up with something we haven’t thought of.”

“You are serious about this?”

“Dead serious, Jase.  There are too few of us to hoard this information.  But there are six billion of them, and their own interests will drive them to produce what they can themselves; for them and for us.  You can keep the weapons tech, and we can produce it here and on the Moon, but if we get them to do the rest, that means we can concentrate on preparing for the confrontation.  We aren’t businessmen and women, Jason, we aren’t magnates of industry; I’m just Caesar’s daughter with a degree in political science, and you, and your people, are soldiers and sailors.  We have to bring everyone on this planet to the table, or we risk losing everything, husband.”

“You are not Caesar’s daughter, Julia, you are Caesar,” the man she loved said softly.  “I swore an oath to obey you, and I will hold to that oath.”

“Even if you don’t agree with me?” she asked sadly.

“Even if I don’t agree with you, love,” he replied gently.  “It would help us boot-strap them to modern times a bit faster,” he mused.

“And it would let you get your engineers back to the Fleet, instead of running around trying to explain how to construct this or that widget,” she said with a little smile.

“How many of the NASA people do you think we will wind up getting?”

“Half,” she answered, after considering the question.  “At least half, and about the same again from the ESA, the Russians, and the Japanese.”

“That will help ease some of the pressure on my people.  Are you certain you want to do this?  With all of these new men and women . . .”

“They don’t know how to build and run production factories anymore than you or I do, Jase.  We have to incorporate a lot more people, or we will come up short when the balloon goes up.”

“All right, then we do it your way.  When do you want to make the announcement?”

“Tomorrow, if we can.  If you can have copies of the data-base ready by then,” she paused as she chewed on her lower lip.  “This is really the first command decision I’ve had to make, Jase; I mean where you and I don’t agree.”

“Yes.  But you, not I or anyone else, are Caesar.  You are.  I will support you, now in private and later in public, and so will my officers.  So will the men.”

“Have I told you today how much I love you?” she whispered as she fell into his arms, tears trickling down from her cheeks.

“After that foot massage, I would hope you still love me,” he answered with a chuckle, as the Empress joined in.

Against the angled windows set in the wall, the first heavy drops of the rain began to splatter.  The storm had arrived.