Exodus: Empires at War: Book 9: Second Front Page 18

Yet another damned meeting, thought Sean, leaning back in his chair. This, of course, was more important than most, though all were important. What was so important about this one was that many of the people in the room were not his to command. They were subjects, true, and they would honor him for his position. But they were leaders in their own right, and people he had to negotiate with to get what he wanted.

  Samantha again sat to his right, and again Jennifer was conspicuous in her absence. Lord T’lisha and Ekaterina Sergiov were here, in their positions as the leaders of the security and intelligence communities. Grand High Admiral McCullom was also there in her capacity as the senior officer of the senior service. As was H’rressitor, the Gryphon Minister of Commerce and Industry. None of the other Ministers of the Cabinet were present. They didn’t have the need to know what was going to be discussed here.

  On the other side of the table sat the people he had come to convince. The most important, and the one who probably needed the least convincing, was the Countess Haruko Kawasaki, his Prime Minister, the noble member of Parliament responsible for coordinating the efforts of the three houses. Sitting beside her sat the only other noble in that group, the Baron Emile von Hausser Schmidt, the Leader of the House of Lords, the senior body of Parliament. His party was the largest seated in the Lords, hence his position. Without his input, nothing would pass the Lords. On other side of the diminutive Countess was Laura Goolsby, a commoner, though wealthier than anyone else in the room other than the Emperor. She was the Speaker of the Commons for the same reason that Hausser Schmidt was the leader of the Lords. Her party held the most seats of the dozen or so major cliques in the body. Her party couldn’t pass a bill on its own, but without it there was little chance of the majority needed to enact a law. On her other side was Mohamed Ishner, the leader of the House of Scholars, though he was more a facilitator than anything else, since the scholars tended to vote their own minds and consciences and not what the herd wanted.

  And unless I can convince them to the point where they can convince their own people, and without the benefit of all of the information we are about to give them here, we’re not going to get a treaty with this new ally, no matter what I want, thought the Emperor.

  “Thank you for coming my Lords, Ladies and Citizens,” he told those gathered. “I am hoping we can work some things out before we are through.”

  “Is what we have heard in our briefs true, your Majesty?” asked Goolsby, her eyes narrowing. “About this other human kingdom, I mean?”

  “Yes, we have found them,” said Sean nodding. “And yes, there are some concerns. But despite those concerns, I don’t see how we can win this war without an alliance with them.”

  “We seem to have been doing pretty well without them up to this point,” said Goolsby. “After all, we did chase the Cacas damned invasion fleet out of the Empire. They’re on the run.”

  McCullom sat there shaking her head, her eyes closed.

  “Well, aren’t they?” asked Goolsby, staring at the Admiral.

  “They are very definitely not on the run, Madame Speaker,” said Sean, shaking his head. “We defeated an augmented conquest fleet, not the Caca battle fleet, which I am sure we will be facing next.”

  “And that is something else my constituents will want to know, your Majesty,” said Goolsby, seeming to let his last sentence go right over her head. “When are you going to strike at their homeworld? When are we going to get some back for what they did to us?”

  Hausser Schmidt stared at the woman like she had lost her mind. Sean felt the same way, but had enough decorum to keep himself from showing it. That’s what we’re here for today, he thought, looking over at McCullum. “You’re up first, Admiral.”

  “Yes, your Majesty,” said the highest ranking human in the Fleet. She closed her eyes for a moment, linking with the local computer, and a holo sprung to life over the table. “As you may know, the Fleet was in the process of an expansion when the Cacas hit. That said, it was a slow expansion, all we could do based on the allocations of Parliament. Normally, what we had would be enough for our needs, but as the Empire was expanding, we could see the need for more assets in the near future.”

  The image of a fifteen million ton battleship appeared on the holo, rotating. “This was the largest standard ship we had up to a couple of years ago, when we started building superbattleships, of which we had a hundred and fifteen. Still, these ships were the backbone of our battle line. At the beginning of the war, we had forty-five hundred of these vessels in front line service. The normal lifespan of a battleship is twenty years. We upgrade as needed. Electronics are easy, just a couple of hundred kilos of nanites and the proper programing and we have state of the art tech packages aboard. Every ten years the ships undergo a six month refit period, which means one fortieth of our ships are not available. After twenty years, we retire a ship to the mothball fleet, our reserves, where they spend another decade. Some of the retired vessels are given to our allies, the Margravi Hegemony and the Klashak Concordiam. We also tend to lose some ships on combat patrols, border clashes, and of course the few that just seem to disappear into nowhere. If we are involved in a major war that number increases. To keep up our fleet strength we need about three hundred new battleship commissionings a year, which also allows us some increase to keep up with the normal expansion of the Empire.”

  The holo switched to a view of a battle cruiser, an eight million ton heavy scout ship. “We had almost sixty-three hundred of these at the start of hostilities. Same lifespan as the battleships. In fact, all of our classes of ships go through the same stages, though the normal operating losses are heavier for lighter ships, since opportunistic enemies or pirates are more willing to take those on.” The holo changed again, showing two ships, the cruiser classes of the Empire. “Ten thousand five hundred heavies and nineteen thousand light cruisers.” The image switched again. “Sixty-four thousand destroyers, seventy eight thousand frigates. And then we have the carriers, a ship class that was not really embraced by many in the Fleet, but still with their own uses. Five hundred and sixty fleet and a thousand light carriers.”

  “An impressive number,” said Hausser Schmidt, nodding. “What is that? About a hundred and eighty-four thousand warships. Plus all the support vessels, assault ships, transports. So well over two hundred thousand vessels?”

  “That seems like an awful lot of ships,” said Goolsby. Ishner just sat there listening, his mouth closed, his eyes darting from holo to the faces of the people in the chamber.

  “And what have been our losses so far, Sondra?” asked Sean, nodding at the Admiral.

  “To date we have suffered over thirty-five percent losses across the board,” said McCullom. “About seventy thousand ships. Our allies have lost a combined five thousand ships. The losses were heavier percentage wise among the capital ships, the very vessels we need to successfully prosecute this war. Right now we’re trying to make up those losses. Which, I believe minister, is your purview.” The Admiral nodded toward H’rressitor.

  “Thank you, Admiral,” said the Minister in heavily accented but understandable Terranglo. “While it is not in my mandate to develop the ships we need, and ordering the necessary classes, it is my task to give the fleet what they need. Unfortunately, they need more than I can give at the moment. We have the slips and docks, and the necessary factories, to build what the fleet ordered plus a ten percent reserve. This was all well and good when we were talking about replacing between five and seven percent of the fleet each year. Now we are faced with replacing that thirty-five percent loss, plus expanding the fleet to an unprecedented degree. We have doubled our shipbuilding capabilities since the beginning of this war, but ships still take time to build. A battleship takes a year, cruisers seven months, even a destroyer five months. And the Fleet is asking, nay demanding, a higher percentage of capital ships, including more superbattleships and the new super heavy battleships. We hope to be able to double our capacity next year, and again the year
after, but to even reach the level of sustainability for projected yearly losses, we’re looking at four to five years. Significant expansion of the fleet, even longer.”

  “And don’t forget, Lords and Ladies, we have another war on the horizon, against the Machines,” said Sean. “I have no way of knowing what we are facing on that front, but I am sure it will take ships and people to fight it. Ships and people we won’t have to fight the Cacas.”

  “A good point, your Majesty,” said the Minister, giving a human head nod that looked strange with his avian head. “And ships are not the only things we need. We need missiles, powered armor, land and air warfare vehicles. And, most of all, supermetals.” The holo switched to a view of a small planet that was almost covered in machinery, the manufacturing plant for supermetals, the substances needed for grabbers and other devices. Most could make out the huge structures of fusion reactors, heat exchangers, particle accelerators, all on a massive scale. “As we expand our fleet and army, we will need to expand our supermetal production to keep pace. Which is yet another sap on our manufacturing ability.”

  “Thank you, Minister,” said the Emperor, linking into the computer himself. “And that brings us to an even greater need. Manpower.” The holo switched to a view of Peal Island, the home of the Fleet Academy on Jewel. Not the only one in the Empire, but the largest and most prestigious. The island was a complex of buildings; classrooms, dorms, gymnasiums, labs, airfields, everything needed to turn civilians into naval officers.

  “It hurt to lose all of those ships,” said Sean, looking down at the desk and feeling his eyes tear up slightly. “It hurts even worse to lose the crew, all of the men of women, humans and others, who died in those battles. We need people to replace those losses, even though those people are not really replaceable. But we need spacers, as well as soldiers and Marines. We are expanding all of our training facilities, and so far have more volunteers that we can handle. Someday we may need conscription, but this is not the day. Those people need leaders, and we are expanding the academies, as well as instituting office training programs in colleges and increasing our number of officer candidate programs. Of course, we are having to rob Peter to pay Paul on this one, as every man or woman we select for officer training is depriving the Fleet and Army of a competent NCO. And as we train up new officers, we will still have a shortage of senior commanders. We will have to promote people before their time, sometimes before they are ready, but we really have no choice. Add to that the problem with getting the training personnel, themselves officers and NCOs, and the services are going to have a severe shortage of leaders.”

  Sean chuckled for a moment. “I was just thinking. If I hadn’t have become Emperor, I might be a ship’s commander by now. And I wasn’t really considered command material when I served.”

  “You seem to have grown into the job, your Majesty,” said Countess Kawasaki.

  “Because I had to,” said Sean. “Just like these men and woman will have to. And that is where we sit at the moment. We have plans to rectify the situation, but it will take time, and we have an enemy who has his own plans. I’ll let Director Sergiov take over this part of the presentation.”

  ‘Thank you, your Majesty,” said the woman, a raven haired beauty despite her years. She stood up, preferring to move while she lectured, closing her eyes for a moment and pulling up a star map of the Milky Way Galaxy. Everyone could recognize the glowing boundaries of their own Empire, and those around them. Goolsby gasped as she recognized the blinking dot that signified Sol, the home star they had left, and the enormous boundaries of the Empire it had been within for the last two thousand years.

  “We really didn’t have a complete appreciation of the strength and resources of our enemy until recently,” she said, stepping to the side of the holo so she could look at the members of Parliament. “We have been working on snippets of intelligence, mostly gathered by the Fleet.” She nodded her head at the CNO. “The Cacas were very good at purging their computer systems, and the ones we captured have not been very forthcoming. We knew the Empire we faced was vast, and that it had been in the conquering business for thousands of years. Now, thanks to a couple of new sources, we have a more complete picture.”

  The holo changed to show the image of a large Ca’cadasan male, one whose very gaze exuded authority. “This is the Great Admiral Miierrowanasa M’tinisasitow, if I’m pronouncing that correctly. He was the supreme leader of the Caca fleet that entered our space and did so much harm to the Empire. Our latest estimates are twenty billion civilian casualties. The son of a bitch is not a bit sorry for what he did. But he had some concerns of his own people, and told some of our intelligence officers’ stories about the rise of their Empire. Of course in his stories they are the good guys, only taking on the burden of ruling the Galaxy for our own good.”

  There were a couple of laughs around the table. Sean laughed with them, though he had already heard the tale. He thought of how many human conquerors through history had said the same thing as they spread death and misery across the Earth.

  “This is our other source, and one which is classified at the highest level of Top Secret.” The image of the big Caca was replaced by one of a much smaller creature, that looked no less dangerous for its smaller size.

  “It looks, like a wolf,” said Goolsby, her eyes wide.

  “An appropriate connection, ma’am,” said Sergiov. “Our code words for this particular specimen is Striped Wolf. She is a Maurid, a species that has been serving the Cacas for over a thousand years as scouts and hunters. As it turns out, they have been unwilling servants, and have wanted a return to freedom from the day they were subjugated. She contacted one of my agents, and has been feeding us information about the Cacas ever since.”

  “And you trust this creature?” asked Ishner, speaking for the first time.

  “So far they have been giving us good information, while returning mostly false to the Cacas.”

  “Mostly false?” asked Ishner.

  “I’m sure the Speaker of the House of Scholars must realize that a double agent plays a dangerous game,” said Sean, holding up a hand to silence Sergiov, who was about to respond. “If these agents only give crap for intelligence, always proven wrong, the Cacas will soon realize that something is very wrong.”

  “A good point, your Majesty,” said Ishner, nodding. “Still, a dangerous one.”

  “And hopefully more dangerous to the Cacas than to us,” said Sergiov after the Emperor nodded her way. “There are risks, but then again, there always are, in intelligence gathering, as in war. But I do believe they are taking an even greater risk in aiding us. They believe we are their best hope of escaping the yoke of their Caca masters.”

  “And are we?” asked the Prime Minister. “It seems to me they might be backing the wrong horse.”

  “Not if it’s the only horse in the race, Haruko,” Sean pointed out. “Continue, Ekaterina.”

  The holo changed again to the map of the Galaxy, zooming in on a large section of both arms. “According to our new friends, the Cacadasan Empire stretches well over twenty-five thousand light years from end to end along the curve of the arms, and fifteen thousand light years in width. This is an area of seven hundred and fifty billion cubic light years. Compare that to the area of our own Empire, which is thirty-two billion cubic light years. That’s over twenty-three times the area of our Empire, and over eight times the total area of all the powers in this sector.

  “Of course, area does not tell the whole tale. So, here are some figures given to us by our friends. They estimate that there are about three trillion Ca’cadasans in their Empire. The good news is that the females, who make up slightly more than half that number, are almost nonsentient. They provide the children of the species, but contribute little else to their military effort. The bad news is that almost every male in their Empire is first and foremost a soldier. The agricultural and manufacturing muscle of their Empire is in their slave holdings, and they need a lot of so
ldiers to hold them down.”

  “How many slaves?” asked Goolsby, who looked like she was going to be ill. Sean couldn’t blame her. The first time he had heard this information he had felt lightheaded, as if he couldn’t believe what they were facing.

  “About fifteen trillion, from among over three hundred species,” said Sergiov. “It seems that those who are under the boot heel of the Empire have seemed to prosper, as far as numbers and the expansion of the species beyond their home world. At the price of their freedom, of course. In the Ca’cadasan Empire only those of Caca blood are truly free, or as free as one can be in a totalitarian system. Any Caca can kill any non-Caca with almost impunity.”

  “And that brings a bit more good news, people,” said Sean. “Slaves are not the most motivated of workers. And the Cacas number not just their laborers among the slave races, but their scientists and engineers as well. One of the many reasons they are so slow to progress in their tech. The other being that they have rarely faced anyone their equal.”

  “But they still outnumber us in ships, yes?” asked the Prime Minister. “They’ve got more of them, and they can build more of them too?”

  “Our friends estimated that they have a half million ships in their fleet, and, of course, most of them are larger classes than our own,” said McCullom, frowning. “So we estimate about a seven to one disparity in tonnage. Probably closer to eight to one. Our friends weren’t really sure about shipbuilding capabilities, but if it’s less than six to one I will be quite surprised.”

  “We are so screwed,” exclaimed von Hausser Schmidt, his eyes widening.

  “And now you see why this information must not become general knowledge,” said Sean, looking the Lord in the eyes. “It would dishearten the public, at a time when we need them to work their hardest, give their best effort, for the common good.”

  “It sure makes me feel like giving up,” said von Hausser Schmidt, shaking his head. “Is there any good news?”