June 3, 3400
Grand Base, Location Unknown
[Writer's note: Credit for this segment goes to Dr. Edward Elmer Smith; my efforts were mostly limited to adapting that luminary's style and characterization to the SDNW4 setting]
At some little distance from the galaxy, yet shackled to it by the flexible yet powerful bonds of gravitation, the small but comfortable planet upon which was Helmuth's base circled about its parent sun. This planet had been chosen with the utmost care, and its location was a secret guarded jealously indeed. Scarcely one in a thousand of Boskone's teeming myriads knew even that such a planet existed; and of the chosen few who had ever been asked to visit it, fewer still by far had been allowed to leave it.
Grand Base covered hundreds of square kilometers. It was equipped with all the arms and armament known to the military genius of the age; and in the exact center of that immense citadel there arose a glittering metallic dome.
The inside surface of that dome was lined with monitors and communicators, hundreds of thousands of them. Kilometers of catwalks clung precariously to the inward-curving wall. Control panels and instrument boards covered the floor in banks and tiers, with only narrow runways between them. And what a personnel! There were Terrans, Chamarrans, Phosako. There were Idurans, N'sss, Tau. There were representatives of scores of other solar systems of the galaxy, both known and unknown to civilization.
But whatever their external form they were all breathers of oxygen and they were all nourished by warm, red blood. Also, they were all alike mentally. Each had won his present high place by trampling down those beneath him and by pulling down those above him in the branch to which he had first belonged of the "pirate" organization. Each was characterized by a total lack of scruple, by a coldly ruthless passion for power and place.
The Centralists and their staunch allies had correctly deduced that they faced opposition on an interstellar scale. They knew that the Zebesians were not an ordinary vest-pocket "pirate outfit" in any ordinary sense of the word, but even their ideas of their enemy's true nature fell far short indeed of the truth. That enemy was a culture great in scope, dispersed across hundreds of light-years in hidden strongholds and enclaves, but one built upon ideals diametrically opposed to those of interstellar civilization at large.
It was a tyranny, an absolute monarchy, a despotism not even remotely approximated by the dictatorships of earlier ages. Even states ordinary men would deem tyrannical, such as Bragule and the Centrality itself, were but faint, childish echoes of its ruthless autocratic structure. It had only one creed – "The end justifies the means." Anything- literally anything at all- that produced the desired result was commendable; to fail was the only crime. The successful named their own rewards, those who failed were disciplined with an impersonal, rigid severity exactly proportional to the magnitude of their failures.
Therefore no weaklings dwelt within that fortress, and of all its cold, hard, ruthless crew far and away the coldest, hardest, and most ruthless was Helmuth, the "speaker for Boskone," who sat at the great desk in the dome's geometrical center. This individual was almost human in form and build, springing as he did from a planet closely approximating Earth in mass, atmosphere, and climate. Indeed, only his general, all-pervasive aura of blueness bore witness to the fact that he was not a native of Earth.
His eyes were blue, his hair was blue, and even his skin was faintly blue beneath its coat of ultra-violet tan. His intensely dynamic personality fairly radiated blueness-not the gentle blue of an Earthly sky, not the sweetly innocuous blue of an Earthly flower, but the keenly merciless blue of a delta-ray, the cold and bitter blue of a Polar iceberg, the unyielding, inflexible blue of quenched and drawn tungsten-chromium steel.
Now a frown sat heavily upon his arrogantly patrician face as his eyes bored into the plate before him, from the base of which were issuing the words being spoken by the assistant pictured in its deep surface.
"...took his squadron, Force J3Z9, to engage an Atlantean military supply convoy on the fringes of Sector H-7. As expected, the Atlantean destroyer
Vanguard was in the area; the squadron leader's intent was to ambush the destroyer, disable her, and capture her for addition to our forces. Unfortunately, the destroyer defeated his forces. Three ships were confirmed destroyed; the others' submesonic transponders vanished shortly thereafter, and they are assumed to have been destroyed, or destroyed themselves to avoid capture, as well..."
"Who assumes so?" demanded Helmuth, coldly. "There is no justification whatever for such an assumption. Go on!"
"...based on that assessment, the threat to our bases in Sector H-6 is deemed minimal."
"Your report is neither complete nor conclusive, and I do not at all approve of your unwarranted guesswork about the beings in command of those ships. From the obvious gaps in your report, I deduce that J3Z9's failure against the Atlanteans was due to the squadron leader's incompetence, and see no reason why his incompetence should not extend to the choice of officers assigned to self-destruct charges. Postulating that his failures were comprehensive, it seems to me that instead of being a certainty that the ships were destroyed, it is highly probable that the Atlanteans captured one or more of our ships, and are examining them even as we speak."
"But how could they have bypassed the salvage-denial circuits?"
"The Atlanteans are not entirely without competent technical specialists; there are beings on my own staff who could do the same, even if your vaunted Q'Blort Raiders cannot. Have all standard precautions of relocation been taken?"
"Yes, sir. All remaining squadrons associated with J3Z9 have relocated to secondary facilities, and the primaries are being dismantled and moved as we speak."
"Very well. Perhaps it is not time to replace the masters of the Q'Blort after all. This is their only warning. Their appointed officer has paid the final price for his weakness, and I do not choose to punish his superiors. But any further incompetence among the forces under their command will reflect on their own ability, as well as that of the failure." No more needed to be said, among those accustomed to the harsh code of Boskone.
"I will inform the admirals."
Helmuth nodded sharply and cut the circuit, then switched to another.
"Helmuth, speaking for Boskone!"
"Sir!" The woman at the other end of the line braced to attention. Helmuth scowled; among his own people, women were barely sentient, little more than dumb animals. But as was not infrequently the case with the ubiquitous aliens hailing from the twin Earths, the woman had proven...
her capability, unnatural as it might seem.
"What have you observed on long range sensors over the past week?"
"Small and medium starship traffic on the fringes of H-12 has increased by nearly ninety percent, mostly military drives. We've also detected numerous small contacts, mostly short-lived: possibly anomalies, but more likely small hyper-capable parasite craft moving slowly and quietly."
"Indeed. Your scanner men have performed well; what you see is the beginning of sweep operations by the Centrality, supported by foreign allies: Prussians, Tianguo, and Umerians."
"Then the small contacts are reconnaissance craft?"
"Indeed. Centrality, possibly Umerian; it matters little. How have you responded?"
"All commands are at hyperwave EMCON level two, and the core formations have been directed to move as slowly as practical with an eye to stealth. Additional submesonic comms would..."
"No such units will be forthcoming, for reasons you well know."
The human dipped her head in a gesture of submissive respect. "I hear, and heed."
"See that you do. How go the new deployments?"
"Pursuant to your orders, expendable formations with a backbone force of core units have been stationed around Zebes, but kept out of contact with Grutardus. They are ready to carry out your designs in the event of a major offensive against the planet."
"Very well. Devote all possible alertness to investigating the enemy's sweep lines, looking for weak points or exploitable patterns. If core units can be employed against the sweep lines at minimal risk, do so. If expendable assets can be so employed, do so as long as a favorable rate of attrition is projected. Our interests are served whether the enemy is driven back
or forced to commit additional forces, so long as loss rates are favorable. I want the quadrant's eye on your command, so far as possible."
The human female nodded, gave Helmuth a thin, cold smile. "We will give them something to see, sir."
"Helmuth, out." He cut the circuit, and returned to his own plans. There was much to do while these operations proceeded.
Corsair-J class ELINT cutter CG-85484 “Heavenly Body”
Probing Edges of Sector H-12
June 4, 3400
Heavenly Body bounced gently as Dwight took her through the shoals. This wasn't a speed run, though; they were trying to stay undetected, and even with the most careful tuning of the hyperfields possible, that meant going slow. The pilot turned his head to his gunner. "So, Chris, you think they're ever going to give you a new assistant?"
The cutter's laser operator shook his head. "Not betting on it. I'll be honest, I don't think we really need one, not unless someone decides to bolt some missiles on."
"Probably explains why you haven't got one. For a while there I was wondering if they'd assign us a Centrality liaison to replace Paul, but guess not."
Mary, the EWO, cut in then. "I wish we could have kept him. Cute little guy."
"You had your chance to kidnap him and keep him as a mascot back in February, it's too late to go fly back and pick him up now."
She sighed. "True."
"Hang on, everyone, we're coming up on our next overwatch point." Dwight gradually braked the cutter to a halt in hyperspace, keeping the boat submerged... but eliminating the inevitable static raised by its passage through the dense, murky ether of the shoals. Mary's sensor picture started to clear."
Jiangqi, the assistant EWO, called out "
Eagle Eye is on the move again; picking up some chatter in the background."
"Let me get a look at that." Mary spun the control wands for her display. "Hmm. Could be transmissions... or it could be local color, though that'd make it the weirdest damn standing wave I've ever seen. No way to be sure; these aren't our shoals."
"You got it?"
"Yeah, but I don't know if it
is anything."
"We'll have to wait for the SIGINT teams to put it all together."
After twenty minutes,
Heavenly Body resumed her flight, keeping up a bounding overwatch pattern with
Eagle Eye. They didn't know the local hyperspace conditions, and the static was being a cast-iron bitch... but if there were any pirate hyperwave stations out there transmitting, sooner or later, the Umerian ELINT sweeps would find them.
It wasn't enough to assemble a fleet and demolish the pirate base on Zebes; if it were that easy the Centralists would have done it themselves. They needed to comb massive, poorly charted volumes of space, for elusive and crafty enemies. There were far more pirates than the locals' recon sweeps had accounted for around Zebes itself, and some of them were not so obliging as to park on a planet so easily located.
The Umerians wouldn't be burning any worlds, not easily at any rate. But given enough time and enough effort, they'd know the home address of every major pirate squadron in the sector. Then it would only be a matter of logistics to bring up the starships and take care of them, one by one.
USS Directrix
On Station near Sector H-12
June 5, 3400
Captain Olbac Bozic had the honor of being the senior Centrality liaison with the Umerian contingent, and had found Rear Admiral Hazarika a most pleasant host, more so than he'd felt any right to expect from a foreigner. Hazarika arrived only a week before the start of operations, and was unfamiliar with the preferred doctrine of the region's major starfleets. Knowing this, she had modestly proposed that her squadron be detailed as an independent reconnaissance formation. Bozic knew that his superiors had been about to ask the same thing; the Umerian admiral's recommendation had saved considerable time.
All in all, he had found the Umerians to be surprisingly like Centralists in a number of ways- their commitment to duty was commendable, and they conducted themselves efficiently rather than wasting time on appearances. On the other hand, they were surprisingly undisciplined by Centralist standards, and higher authority did not leave such a heavy stamp on the junior officers and the crew as he was used to. The Umerians were, off duty at least, a bit chatty, and prone to disregard for rank.
Bozic hoped that the Umerians' efficiency would hold up in adverse circumstances; their indiscipline did not make him confident. But still, they
were good hosts, so he did not voice his concerns. He merely quietly reported them, along with his other observations, to higher command, as did his fellow attaché, Captain Anor. Hopefully the other man saw the same things; it could go ill with both of them if their reports disagreed on key points.
Today, he was discussing operations with Hazarika, who had invited him to a working lunch in her office. The admiral seemed remarkably free with her opinions, and he had learned more than he'd expected without having to pry.
"So, if you don't mind my asking, what do you think of the current scouting plans?"
"I'm happy with our part, but... are you sure you're using your recon Fireballs aggressively enough? They seem like good boats to our people, but you keep them clumped more tightly than we do with the
Corsair-J boats."
"For mutual support, Madam Admiral..."
The dusky-skinned Umerian woman snorted. "How many times do I have to tell you, Olbac, no rank in the mess!" Bozic winced inside, but nodded politely. It was a violation of all common usage in the Centrality, where strict deference to superior officers was drilled into cadets from the moment they entered training- indeed, from the moment of birth, one could argue. But if the Umerians wanted to play casual, he could play along. He nodded again.
"Very well. As I was saying, though, the recon Fireballs are vulnerable units; formations keep them secure."
"You're thinking of them like starships when they're not, is what I think. For starships they're vulnerable, but starships come in smaller numbers. With cutters you have enough units to set up a good bounding overwatch routine. You don't
need to bunch them up that way; the halted cutters just ping if they spot an attacker and the group circles the wagons. You'd be covering a lot more ground if you loosened up your formations, and getting a lot more angles on anything you spotted."
"Perhaps. But still, I think we're making decent progress, ma'am; the first group of subsectors are already examined and we've got a few leads already. And there
are the other allied fleets, once they shake out properly."
"True. It'll be interesting to see how the Tianguo handle things. But I wouldn't expect too much from the Prussians if I were you, I'm afraid."
"Why not? They seem quite committed to this operation; I don't know about you, but I was impressed when I saw how much tonnage they were throwing out here." Too late, he realized that the woman might see that as a slight to her own nation's relatively small commitment; the Umerians' careless speech might be infecting him. But she simply snorted again.
"It's... hard to explain. The Prussians are our neighbors, we know them fairly well. I expect they'll do well enough once we've spotted the bases for them, but I don't trust them in mobile operations over large volumes, or in dispersed actions."
"Why not?"
"Like I said it's hard to explain. They lack... they lack..." she waved her hand in the air. "I'm not sure how to say it. For want of a better term, they lack... balls." She shrugged, looking embarrassed. "That's not quite right, but I'm really not sure there's a word for it. Let me see if I can start from the beginning." She took a deep breath.
"If you've followed the news on Prussian deployment patterns these past few years, you'll notice that they nearly always commit heavy units. It doesn't matter what they're fighting, if it's some fourth-rate place that isn't even dignified by the name "middle of nowhere." They
always send large formations, or they don't send anything at all. There's a reason for that."
"It all started a while back, when they changed the fleet doctrine for light starship units. Before their doctrine was fairly standard: forward deployments in support of capital units, pushing out into enemy space, fight-for-information, all that. Actually pretty good, I'd say; the
Fregattenkapitäns knew their business. But then Fleet Command got it into their heads that the junior officers were needlessly risking His Majesty's investment, and... well. They started changing the doctrine, trying to avoid getting light units sucked into traps or thrown at tough opposition they couldn't handle. Emphasis shifted from aggressive pushes and deep patrols; they started spending a lot more time probing at the enemy's edges and whistling up heavy support from the bigger units, the heavy cruisers and battleships. The frigate skippers weren't supposed to think "Oh, look, a pirate! I'm going to go blow some holes in that pirate to slow him down!" They were supposed to think "Oh, look, a pirate! Better call in a battleship to take care of it!" And half the time, by the time the support shows up, the pirate's gotten away.""
Bozic had to wonder how much of that was accurate, but it was at least amusing, so he kept listening.
"In and of itself, that wouldn't have been a problem... but it encouraged the careful junior officers, the ones who ran home to Mommy when something nasty came their way. Or... OK, that's unfair. But still,
cautious. Emphasis on planning, and on pulling in their horns when the unexpected happened until someone could change the plans. Those junior captains then got promoted into higher slots, until the cautious captains grew up to be cautious admirals. And wrote cautious tactical manuals. So the doctrinal focus got tighter: focus on preplanned operations, on overwhelming concentration of firepower, on careful deployment to make sure that overwhelming firepower would be available when they needed it."
"You ask me,
that's part of why the Prussians go everywhere in big fleets. A small fleet wouldn't know what to do without a core of heavies to fall back on. To make matters worse, their officers don't get a lot of experience with independent command until they reach very high rank: too much time spent tied to the battleships' apron strings, not enough time spend on patrol and committing to action on their own."
"To make matters worse, that planning focus undermines them when they're fighting against an opponent that reacts efficiently. They spend too much time thinking before they act, and they
stop to think instead of doing it on the fly. It stretches out their decision loop and makes them try to mass overwhelming force for every operation... which in turn plays hob with their readiness figures and maintenance cycles because they keep pulling battleships out of the line to put out fires every month or two."
Bozic was skeptical of Hazarika's assessment, or at least inclined to wonder about her objectivity in the matter, but he decided to try and learn more.
"So, do you expect them to perform here?"
"Well. Their methods, the heavy concentration of force and all, work well enough when they're fighting single-planet opponents that can't muster heavy units to meet them with. As long as we can pick out the bases for the Prussians to go beat up on, they should do all right. But they'd be in trouble against a fleet they didn't outnumber or outgun, or against one coordinated and smart enough to get inside their decision loop. Because instead of seeing a problem and reacting to it, their kneejerk response is always "pull back and whistle up a bigger hammer." Even when they're dealing with a walnut they'll go hunting for a sledgehammer, in case the walnut figures out a way to fight back- I mean, did you
see how many ships they threw at Volksland? It's ridiculous."
"But to answer your question, yes I
do expect them to perform here, as long as they're used properly: as a brute squad that charges in and flattens a lightly defended planet with an overwhelming attack. They're quite good at that sort of operation, really. They're just... ponderous. Mechanical. Predictable. Musclebound. You get the idea."
Bozic nodded. This, too, he would report to his superiors. Even if it wasn't true, it was relevant because Hazarika
thought it was true. He would also have to investigate, to see if this contempt was common among the Umerians, or if Hazarika herself were simply biased...
"
- PeZook
