Shadow of Freedom Read online

  “No, I haven’t,” he said. “Yet.”

  “Then we all have something to be grateful for,” Prime Minister Alquezar observed. Alquezar, by far the tallest person seated at the table, turned to Admiral Augustus Khumalo. “And while Henri’s doing his best to leave Bordelon’s neck un-wrung, I believe you had something you and Admiral Gold Peak wanted to bring up, Admiral?”

  “And which you would prefer to discuss rather than Minister Krietzmann’s relationship with Admiral Bordelon, Mr. Prime Minister?” Khumalo responded innocently.

  Khumalo was a full head shorter than Alquezar, but the planet of San Miguel’s gravity was only .84 g. For all his height, Alquezar looked almost frail beside the considerably more massive Khumalo.

  “Admiral, I’d rather discuss almost anything rather than Henri’s ‘relationship’ with Bordelon!” the prime minister said emphatically, and Krietzmann grinned. Then Alquezar’s expression sobered. “And all humor aside, the truth is that at the moment the disposition of our naval forces is more important than just about anything else we could be discussing.”

  Khumalo nodded, then glanced at Michelle before he turned back to the other people at the conference table.

  “Since Admiral Gold Peak is the commander of our mobile forces, I’ll let her address the specifics of your question, Mr. Prime Minister. Before she does, though, I’d just like to emphasize that she and I have discussed the situation exhaustively, both between ourselves and with our squadron commanders, and with Minister Krietzmann and the members of his staff, as well. I don’t think anyone’s genuinely satisfied with the deployment stance we’ve come up with, but under the circumstances, I believe it’s the best available to us.”

  He looked around the attentive faces, then back at Michelle.

  “Milady?”

  “Thank you, Sir,” Michelle replied with rather more formality than had become the norm between her and the man who commanded Talbott Station. Then it was her turn to look around the table, making eye contact with the men and women responsible for the Quadrant’s governance.

  “Essentially,” she began, “our problem is that while Admiral Khumalo and I believe we’ve decisively demonstrated our combat superiority, we simply don’t have enough hyper-capable units to cover the entire Quadrant. I doubt anyone back at Admiralty House is any happier about that than we are, although I’ll grant our unhappiness has a little more immediacy than theirs does. Unfortunately, I don’t see any way the deployment priorities are going to change anytime soon. Given the combination of what’s happened to the home system, the fact that we have no reason to believe at this time that the Sollies have an additional force anywhere near the size of Crandall’s in our own vicinity, and the activation of Case Lacoön, there simply aren’t any more ships for the Admiralty to send our way.

  “So we have to make do with what we have, and while neither Admiral Khumalo nor I like that situation, it’s one Queen’s officers have had to deal with more often than we’d like to remember.

  “After careful consideration, we’ve concluded that the best use of our current forces will be to cover each system of the Quadrant with four or five LAC squadrons for local defense, backed up by a couple of dispatch boats. The LACs should be more than adequate to deal with any ‘pirate’ stupid enough to come this way, and given what we’ve seen of SLN technology, they also ought to be able to deal with any Solly raiding force that doesn’t include a core of capital ships. Given Crandall’s losses, it’s unlikely there are enough Solarian capital ships anywhere near the Quadrant to provide that kind of force. Obviously, that’s subject to change—possibly without much warning—but even in a worst-case scenario, the local-defense LACs should be able to at least delay and harass any attackers while one of the dispatch boats goes for help.

  “I realize there’s been some thought of splitting up our own capital ships in order to give our star systems greater protection.”

  She carefully didn’t look in the direction of the two men sitting on either side of Samiha Lababibi. Antonio Clark, from the Mainwaring System, was the Quadrant’s Minister of Industry, while Clint Westman, a Montanan cousin of the famous (or infamous) Stephen Westman, headed the Ministry of the Interior. On the face of it, they should have been almost as unlikely allies of an oligarch like Lababibi as Krietzmann once had been, but the nature of their responsibilities gave them a certain commonality of viewpoint. Inevitably, all three were worried—deeply—about what would happen if the Quadrant’s star systems were hit by anything like the Yawata Strike. Westman and Clark, especially, had argued in favor of dispersing Tenth Fleet to give every star system at least some protection. After all, they’d pointed out, the decisive superiority of the Manticoran Navy had been conclusively demonstrated, so the traditional risks of defeat in detail for dispersed units must be less applicable than usual.

  Lababibi had found herself in the same camp, although she’d been a rather less fervent spokeswoman for their position.

  “There are several reasons we’re not proposing to do that,” Michelle continued. “The two most important ones, though, are that dispersing our capital ships wouldn’t provide any appreciable increase in system security against the sort of attack which hit the home system, but it would disperse the powerful, concentrated striking forces it’s vital to maintain to respond to any fresh Solarian activity in our area.

  “At the moment, the Admiralty and ONI are still working on how the Yawata Strike was launched. From the information available so far, Admiral Hemphill is more convinced than ever the attack relied on a new, previously unknown drive technology. In effect, we believe the attackers were ‘invisible’ to our normal tracking systems. So far, at least, no one’s been able to suggest how whatever drive they used might work or how we might go about figuring out how to detect it in the future. In the meantime, however, analysis also suggests the attackers were probably operating in relatively small forces, relying on their cloak of invisibility rather than raw combat power. I realize that may sound absurd, given the damage inflicted, but I assure you that if a single podnought—or even a couple of Nike-class battlecruisers—had been able to get into range of the inner system totally undetected, that would have been ample to have inflicted all of that damage.

  “My point is that the problem in Manticore wasn’t lack of combat power or lack of defenses; it was the inability to see the enemy coming. Scattering wallers around the Quadrant’s star systems isn’t going to appreciably increase our ability to detect these people. We can deploy enough remote sensor platforms—in fact, we’re already in the process of deploying them—to give each of our systems more detection capability than an entire squadron of SDs could provide. The LACs will give us large numbers of manned combat platforms to chase down and prosecute possible contacts; the dispatch boats will be available to send for help in the case of an attack in strength; and we’ll be deploying enough missile pods in planetary orbit to provide the long-range missile firepower of at least a pair of SD(P)s in each system. We won’t have the sort of sustained firepower superdreadnoughts could provide, or the area missile defense they could offer, but we’ll have enough to deal with anything short of a Solly battle squadron, assuming we see it coming.”

  She paused, and this time she did look across the table at Lababibi, Clark, and Westman.

  “I believe those deployments will give us at least as much defensive depth as splitting up my wallers could accomplish. In addition, however, it will permit Admiral Khumalo and me to concentrate my hyper-capable units into two striking forces, each with a powerful LAC element of its own. One will be deployed to Tillerman; the other will be based on Montana.

  “Obviously, the Tillerman force will be closest to Monica and Meyers, which would normally be the most probable threat axis where any fresh Solarian adventures were concerned. Frankly, though, at the moment I’m not really very concerned about something coming at us out of the Madras Sector, given the fact that we just polished off seventy-plus superdreadnoughts that were s
tationed in that sector. It seems unlikely they have still more capital ships tucked away out here, even with Mesa and Manpower pulling every string they can reach.

  “If the Sollies do decide they have anything else to spare and send it our way, it’s more likely to come in direct from the Core. That’s why I’m planning on basing the second force at Montana to cover the Quadrant’s flank, and the Lynx Terminus picket force will be available to cover any threat that might come in past Asgerd. There are some arguments in favor of staying right here in Spindle instead of moving to Montana, given Spindle’s more central location within the Quadrant, but so far Admiral Khumalo and I don’t find them persuasive. To be honest, our objective is to get sufficient combat power—enough combat density—deployed across a broad front to permit me to respond quickly to dispatches from the star systems behind me while simultaneously positioning me to operate offensively into Solly and Mesan space, if that should become desirable.”

  She saw one or two sets of eyes flicker at the reference to Mesa. Not everyone in the Quadrant endorsed her own suspicions of Mesa and Manpower, Incorporated. It wasn’t that anyone questioned Manpower’s involvement in what had happened at Monica and New Tuscany. Nor did anyone in the Quadrant doubt Mesa’s and Manpower’s implacable (and thoroughly reciprocated) hostility towards the Star Empire. More than one of the people sitting around that table, though, remained of the opinion that Frontier Security (and possibly other interests within the League) had been using Manpower as a catspaw. Certainly that made more sense, in their view, than the possibility that a single outlaw transstellar corporation was using the entire Solarian League as a catspaw!

  Most of the others were prepared to grant at least the possibility that Michelle and Khumalo and their staffs might be correct—that Manpower or the Mesa System might indeed have been the prime mover. Might even have provided the “invisible” starships which had carried out the Yawata Strike. Michelle doubted any of them found the notion any less bizarre than she did, but they were at least open to it. And if she was reading the ONI appreciations from home accurately, opinion within the Admiralty and the Grantville Government was hardening in the same direction. There was, however, a vast gap between “prepared to grant the possibility” and “willing to bet the farm on it,” and she decided—again—not to go into all the details of the logic behind her proposed deployments.

  She’d considered mentioning that she intended to base herself on Montana, closest to Mesa and what she believed was clearly the greater threat, while assigning the Tillerman force to Vice Admiral Theodore Bennington, who’d become her senior battle squadron commander upon his arrival from the home system. Under the circumstances, though, it would undoubtedly be wiser to let that particular sleeping dog lie. She didn’t expect Alquezar or Krietzmann to object, anyway, and they were the Talbott decision-makers who really mattered where fleet movements were concerned.

  “In addition to the deployment plan Admiral Gold Peak and I are proposing,” Khumalo said after a moment, “there are certain other measures we’d like to set in motion. Three of them are especially important.

  “First, as Prime Minister Alquezar, Minister Lababibi, Minister Krietzmann, Minister Clark, and I have already discussed, we need to complete our survey of the Quadrant’s industrial capabilities as quickly as possible. I suspect our local resources may be able to contribute more materially to our defense here than some people might think. Nobody’s going to be building any superdreadnoughts anytime soon, but several of our systems—Rembrandt, San Miguel, and Spindle itself come to mind—have sufficient local industry to provide significant support for both our local defense and striking forces. Obviously, we’ll be making technical advisors from Admiral Gold Peak’s repair and depot ships available wherever possible.

  “Secondly, and possibly even more importantly, Admiral Gold Peak has proposed we begin a vigorous program to expedite the raising and training of naval personnel right here in the Quadrant. The Navy’s taken substantial losses in both the Battle of Manticore and the Yawata Strike, and unless I’m sadly mistaken, the emphasis in the home system and Trevor’s Star—where the bulk of our more…technologically sophisticated population is concentrated—is going to be on reconstituting our skilled labor force as rapidly as possible. I believe that, especially if we make use of the LAC simulators already available to us and request additional simulators from the home system, we’ll be able to produce and train a significant number of naval personnel. To be painfully blunt—and I hope no one will take offense—providing personnel with the education level we would expect from the home system or Trevor’s Star is going to be beyond our capabilities here for some time to come. Within the next several T-years, the effort being invested in improving the Quadrant’s educational systems is going to correct that problem. For the immediately foreseeable future, however, it’s going to remain with us. That means the personnel we’ll be able to train won’t be as fully trained as we might hope—won’t have as deep a skill set, let’s say—but they’ll still provide a very useful expansion of our manpower, and the technical aspects of their education can be continued aboard ship.

  “The third initiative we’d like to consider very seriously is for us to use the Quadrant Guard as the basis for an expansion of planetary combat troops. Manticore has never had a powerful ground combat component and, frankly, a lot of what we did have has become committed to Silesia. Not because there’s a lot of armed resistance going on, but because we had to pretty much disband a sizable percentage of the existing Silesian forces when we started weeding out entrenched cronyism and military corruption. With them gone, we had no choice but to provide peacekeeping and law enforcement personnel—and cadre to train and supervise locally raised police forces—out of our none-to-large Marine and Army strength. That situation seems to be well in hand, but it’s still going to tie up those Marines and Army personnel for many months to come.

  “That diversion to Silesia is also the reason we’ve seen virtually no Army personnel transferred to the Quadrant. Well, that and the fact that the Quadrant isn’t Silesia and—with the exception of Nordbrandt and a couple of other lunatics—we haven’t faced anywhere near the same need for additional peacekeeping and law enforcement personnel as Silesia, particularly with the Guard in the course of formation. In addition, as we all know, our new-build construction is very short on organic Marine detachments, and Tenth Fleet’s entire attached Marine strength amounts to little more than a pair of brigades. That’s a lot of firepower, given their equipment and training, but it’s a very limited total number of men and women. If the situation with the League turns as ugly as we think it may—if we find ourselves forced to carry out offensive operations against the League, for example—that shortage in troop strength is likely to come home to roost with a vengeance.

  “Because of those considerations, we believe it would be a good idea to use the Guard as a platform to begin raising, training, and equipping at least several divisions of infantry and atmospheric combat support units right here in the Quadrant. We can teach the technical skills an effective ground force would require much more rapidly than we can train personnel in the sorts of shipboard skills the Navy will need. In addition, our existing infrastructure can produce planetary combat equipment as good as or better than anything we’re likely to face out here in the Verge…and probably get it into the troops’ hands in adequate quantities by the time we can get the necessary recruiting and training programs into place. Frankly, it may turn out that the provision of the ground forces we’re almost certain to require may be the most effective immediate contribution to the Star Empire’s overall defense that the Quadrant can provide. And, finally, while the skills we’ll have to teach our planetary combat forces aren’t the same ones the Navy requires, they’ll still represent a powerful step upward for a lot of our member star systems here in the Quadrant—one which is going to carry over to their peacetime economies once the shooting ends.

  “In addition to the actual increase
in manpower and eventual overall education and training levels, however, the sort of programs we’re proposing should also contribute to the Quadrant’s sense of solidarity and unity and that, after all, is one reason for the Guard’s existence in the first place. We all know this is still a new political unit. We’re all still…settling down with one another, and the threat of outside attack is generating a lot of fully justified anxiety and uncertainty. We believe—I believe—that directly involving as many as possible of our citizens in their own self-defense will be the best antidote for that anxiety. We’re not proposing this as any sort of placebo. If it succeeds as well as we believe it can, it will contribute materially to our ability to defend the Quadrant and probably to the overall defensive strength of the Star Empire outside the Quadrant. For that matter, I personally would strongly oppose any dispersal of effort that wouldn’t contribute to that ability and combat strength. I’m simply pointing out that it could contribute in more ways than one.”

  There was silence for several seconds, then Prime Minister Alquezar looked at Baroness Medusa.

  “I’m inclined to endorse Admiral Khumalo’s and Admiral Gold Peak’s proposals, Madame Governor. I know Henri’s already had considerable input into them, and while I’d like the opportunity to read over the details for myself, I have the greatest respect for both Admiral Khumalo’s and Admiral Gold Peak’s judgment. With your concurrence, I’d like to suggest we authorize them to begin organizing to deploy Admiral Gold Peak’s units as they’ve proposed and that you and I review those details with an eye towards giving them a firm approval—and requesting the Quadrant Parliament’s approval for the necessary funding, of course—within the next two days.”

  “That seems perfectly reasonable to me, Mr. Prime Minister,” Medusa agreed. “And that ought to give everyone else involved”—she allowed her own gaze to slew sideways to Lababibi, Clark, and Westman for a moment—“enough time to review them and put forward any suggestions they might care to make, as well.”