The Three-Cornered War| Chapter | F | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
The Three-Cornered War
"Colonel Romlar is here for his briefing, sir."
"Good. Send him in." As the Director of Research and Development got to his feet, the door opened and Artus entered. Kusu gestured at a chair.
Artus took it. "So," he said. "Here I am, ready to be informed."
"I don’t know how much you already know."
"Assume zero. You won’t be far off."
"Right. Lotta told me she was in two-way communication with you psychically, while you were still on Maragor, and let you know then about the invasion Armada. How much did she tell you?"
Artus frowned. He’d been in a weird state at the time. Had confused the Armada with a war fleet of twenty millennia earlier, that he’d revisited in nightmares. "I know it exists," he said. "That it left their central system two or three years ago. And that it’s bigger and better equipped than anything we’ll have to meet it with."
Kusu nodded. "We’ve made major progress in matching its equipment, but they’ll arrive with close to twice as many warships of every class. I’ll give you a chart comparing forces; you can familiarize yourself with it after you leave." He got up and walked to his beverage machine. "Joma?" he asked. "Or thocal?"
"Joma."
Kusu drew two cups and set one of them in front of Artus. Sitting down himself, he sipped reflectively and began his lecture. "I suppose you know how we’ve learned what we know."
"From Lotta. And her staff."
"Right. They get it through a covert, long-distance mind meld, the sort of thing she did as your intelligence specialist on Terfreya. Some T’swa have been able to do it for a long time. For generations, some of our Ostrak masters have been able to meld too, but only with people they knew, and mostly face to face. Lotta bridged the gap. She may be as good at it as any T’swi. And she’s testing other Ostrak operators for the potential, and having them trained.
"The tricky part of remote spying is the initial connection. She learned how to find, and meld with, a person she simply knows about. That was the critical step. From them she learns about others with the sort of knowledge she wants to tap, and melds with them. A chain of connections, so to speak. So far as we know, none of the imperials has any notion they’ve been visited. Except maybe their central artificial intelligence; she tried snooping it." He grinned. "It spit her out. That’s how she put it.
"The first person she trained was her own old mentor, Wellem Bosler. Now Wellem does the training for her, at the Lake Loreen Institute. And she runs the shop here—assigns, coordinates, and oversees projects. And generally handles the most important contacts herself, though she’s gradually farming those out too."
He took another swallow of joma. "Interestingly though, some of the most critical information we’ve gotten came through standard intelligence procedures. When the Klestroni occupied Lonyer City, they wanted to learn what they could about the Confederation. And you know what a backwater world Terfreya is. Anyway the Klestroni rounded up a number of people there—bureaucrats, technicians, teachers—and took them out to their flagship. Kept them separate from each other and interrogated them, to learn what they could. They worked on them for all the weeks they were there, then released them on the surface before leaving."
"Just a minute," Romlar said. "I’m not clear on the connection between the Klestroni and the Empire."
"Klestron is simply one planet in the Empire. They’re all sultanates—semiautonomous theocracies. With major overpopulation problems. The Klestroni were looking for a world to colonize and milk. After you guys ran them home, the Empire put together an armada to come back and do the job right."
Kusu paused till he remembered what he’d been saying. "At any rate, the Klestroni returned their prisoners to Terfreya. Their rules of warfare don’t allow holding civilian prisoners after hostilities are broken off. Which was fortunate for us as well as the prisoners, because Lotta had Ostrak operators sent there, who questioned them at length in an Ostrak revery. Debriefed them, so to speak, of the questions the Klestroni had asked. The Klestroni were particularly interested in our fleet, including some kind of protective shield they assumed we had—something that protects ships from warbeams and torpedoes.
"The apparency was, they had shields while we definitely didn’t. So ship armor was one of the first things Lotta snooped. It turned out not to be armor in the usual sense of the word. The imperials call it ‘force shields’ in their language."
Artus interrupted. "She’s learned their language?"
"Not really. She reads flows of mental concepts and images. But to some degree they’re tied up with language, which imprints on her language center as a kind of side effect."
Blessed ’Tunis, Artus thought, I knew she was a genius, but . . . She’d never talked shop with him, and he’d never asked. She dealt with shop ten to sixteen hours a day. And that, it seemed to him, was enough.
"Anyway," Kusu continued, "my group worked on developing shield generators, starting with the information she gave us. But even before we could make them, we knew our older warships couldn’t accommodate them. We knew that well before the Klestroni got back home. So most of our fleet is new.
"The most remarkable thing Lotta did was provide us with technical information on the imperial fleet. She had to fish it from people’s minds while they thought about it or used it. She had to find out who to hang around, psychically that is, and where and when. It’s still beyond me how she managed to do it all, and to integrate what she learned into something that made sense. She had no engineering background at all! Zero! Nothing! Not even drafting. Her patience and persistence astounds me." He fixed Artus with his eyes. "When the history of all this is written, I have no doubt your wife will be ranked among the most remarkable human beings our species ever produced."
Artus stared at him, mind-boggled.
"Our older ships fell into two categories: the frigates and the rest of them. The frigates are inadequate in various respects, but we may find limited roles for them. The rest are being used as training ships. We’re phasing them out as we commission new ships, and cannibalizing them for useful parts."
The two men sipped joma, then Kusu continued. The Imperial Armada, he said, was organized into three war fleets and a huge fleet of transports and supply ships. Each warfleet had its own flagship, each with its own supercomputer. The Confederation had nothing to match those computers, and no prospect at all of building any.
"Our one technical advantage," he said, "is the teleport. The recent ones are far more accurate than the model you had on Terfreya. And apparently the Empire doesn’t know such things are possible. They redeveloped science and technology a few thousand years ago, then at some point lost their science again almost as completely as we lost ours. We’re not sure why; they don’t seem to have had anything like the Sacrament. Anyway they’ve used the same old technology over and over for a long time, without much change. Lotta suspects their supercomputer had something to do with it. It seems to do their technical thinking for them, but apparently doesn’t do basic research.
"At any rate, we can now make teleport jumps to targets in space almost as accurately as to surface targets, even without the gravitational interface effect."
He sensed blankness behind Artus’s eyes. "Don’t worry about how," he said. "We can go into that some other time, if you want. The important thing is, we can do it. What we’re working on now is scale: how to build a functioning gate large enough to transit warships. There are some real problems. We keep hoping we’ll find a way around the topological enigma, too, but so far we haven’t a clue to work on."
Topological enigma? Artus had no idea what Kusu was talking about. Before he could ask, Kusu took a video cube from a drawer and handed it to him.
"I want you to familiarize yourself with this. It’s from talks I’ve given to the War Ministry. It’ll give you the basics of how fleets function in space. We’re not trying to make you an expert in space warfare, but there are things you need to know. Read them today, then sleep on them. We’ll talk again tomorrow."
| Chapter | F | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
