Operation Medusa (Castle Federation Book 6) Read online

  “We owe Kennedy,” Kyle admitted. “Rothenberg would have stood and fought—would have been right to stand and fight—but he would have lost. And we didn’t need to lose another nine starships.”

  He rose, his implant linking into the screen over the window and darkening it to display the data he was asking for.

  The man the media called the Stellar Fox had spent six months stuck in this office, handed an impossible mission: find a way to win the war against the Terran Commonwealth.

  The display overlaid over the view of New Cardiff told the dark truth behind that. On one side, the holographic presentation of ships and starfighters lost by the Alliance. On the other, the estimated losses for the Commonwealth.

  Six months.

  In six months, the Alliance had lost twenty-six capital ships. Each of those ships represented between five and ten thousand lives, five percent of a star system’s GDP, and four years of construction time. Combined, those losses brought the Alliance’s total ship strength down to barely two hundred and fifty starships.

  Including today’s losses, the Commonwealth had spent thirty-three capital ships to inflict those losses. Roughly a fifth of the strength assigned to Marshal Walkingstick, leaving the Terran commander with an estimated one hundred and twenty capital ships.

  Except that the Terran Commonwealth was building twenty-four capital ships a year and the Alliance produced ten. At that, the Alliance was at a full war footing, pressing every sinew of its member systems’ industry to produce starships and starfighters.

  The Commonwealth…wasn’t. The Terrans were fighting a two-front war and dealing with half a dozen minor revolts or resistance movements and winning—on what was still basically a peacetime production schedule.

  For whatever reason, they’d focused their efforts over the last year on the Stellar League, the third party the Alliance had dragged into war with the Commonwealth, but they could change that on a dime. If half of the fleet deployed against the League was redeployed against the Alliance, it was over.

  “What do we do, sir?” Sterling asked. He was looking at the display and had to be running through the same analysis Kyle was. Gods knew they’d gone over it in private and in meetings and conferences enough.

  “In four hours, I walk into a conference with the political and military leaders of the Alliance and tell them we can’t win this war the way we’ve been fighting it.” Kyle smiled sadly at the city behind the disheartening display.

  “And then I tell them all of the horrifying ways we might be able to win anyway.”

  KYLE AND STERLING stepped into the auditorium being prepared for the presentation, the Federation Marines standing guard checking their implant IDs without even needing to break their step.

  The auditorium space was buried seventy-six stories underground. To even reach this floor, the two Federation officers had passed through fourteen different layers of security—and yet if their implant IDs hadn’t been cleared for this room, the power-armored Marines would have detained them immediately.

  The room wasn’t large enough to hold every member of the meeting, but holoprojectors covered every available surface. Once active, the room would artificially expand to hold the dozens of senior flag officers and heads of state that Kyle was going to be presenting to.

  It was large enough to hold all forty-odd members of the Joint Strategic Options Command, a collection of the most off-the-wall tacticians, mavericks, and generally effective pains in the ass that the Alliance had to its name: commanded by Kyle himself.

  Those officers weren’t going to be saying much today, but they’d drafted the four options that Kyle had to present.

  Two non-JSOC officers were also waiting in the room, and Kyle saluted crisply as he realized he was the last to arrive of the three flag officers who would be physically present.

  “Are you ready?” Admiral Mohammed Kane, chief of personnel for the Castle Federation Space Navy, asked him. Kane was a tall man, skin pale from years of indoor and spaceborne work assembling the edifice of living bodies that kept the Federation in the war, clad in a black Navy uniform and matching turban.

  “What’s to be ready for?” Kyle asked with a bright grin. “All I have to do is convince the leaders of over a dozen star nations and their top flag officers that my own brand of calculated hyperaggression is the only way we’re going to win this war.

  “It’ll be easy!”

  The third flag officer chuckled and shook her graying head repressively at him. Fleet Admiral Meredith Blake was the Federation’s Chief of Naval Operations and the head of the Alliance Joint Chiefs. No single person was more responsible for the prosecution of the war against the Terran Commonwealth than she, and it had aged her decades in years.

  “You, Admiral Roberts, can fool your minions,” she told him. “You can fool your fellows. You can even, Stars hoping, fool the Senate and our allies. But you have never fooled me.”

  Kyle inclined his head in acknowledgement of her point.

  “None of our options are good,” he admitted. “But if Walkingstick has taken Midori, he’s already begun his next offensive. We don’t know where he’ll strike next, but he’s already demonstrated that this time, he’s prepared to go head on at our largest concentrations.

  “We need to get ahead of the curve, make the Commonwealth dance to our tune, or it’s all over, bar the dying.”

  Blake nodded her agreement.

  “I think I liked it better when he was being cheerful,” Kane told the CNO. “Are we sure we can sell the Senate on any of this?”

  Even if Kyle sold the rest of the Alliance on his plans, the thirteen-person executive of the Castle Federation would decide if the Federation Navy was involved in carrying them out—and without the CFSN, none of the possible operations would work.

  “We’ve run the numbers,” Kyle told the two flag officers, pitching his voice so none of the surrounding junior officers could hear him. “Eighteen more months. Plus or minus six.”

  The head of the Joint Department of Personnel winced.

  “How do you manage to be cheerful?” he asked.

  “Practice,” Kyle told him, the bright grin returning to his face as he controlled his fear. “Lots and lots of practice.”

  He checked the time in his implant.

  “We’re on.”

  4

  Castle System

  22:00 August 1, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  New Cardiff

  AS THE PROJECTORS came online and the virtual conference room expanded around Kyle, he buried the last of anything resembling stage fright as he mentally cataloged his audience. Every major leader and their top flag officers were there, linked in by the near-instantaneous connections of the q-com networks.

  His own implants interfaced with the system, the virtual conference as much in his head as it was in the holograms around him, highlighting individuals he looked at and making sure he knew who they were. A faux pas today could cause all kinds of trouble.

  “Closest” to him were the thirteen men and women of the Castle Federation Senate, a co-equal executive that controlled the seventeen star systems of his own home nation. Central in their ranks was the mask-like face of Senator Joseph Randall, the Senator for Castle and unchallenged first among equals of the Senate.

  He was also a man who had repeatedly tried to have Kyle killed and, relatedly, whose son remained in a Federation penitentiary for treason.

  Next was the pale and dark-haired Imperator of the Coraline Imperium, John von Coral. Still looking surprisingly young for his authority, von Coral was the unquestioned ruler of the Imperium and single-handedly directed the might of the Alliance’s second-most powerful nation. In many ways, von Coral was the man Kyle needed to convince the most. Fortunately, they’d met, and he trusted the younger man’s judgment.

  Sky Marshal Octavian von Stenger sat carefully next to his Imperator, the bald leader of the Imperium’s military looking like he’d swallowed a raw lemon. Like the re
st of the Alliance Chiefs of Staff, he’d been briefed on what JSOC was here to present—and like JSOC themselves, he didn’t like it.

  The list of names of import went on and on. Queen Victoria II of the Star Kingdom of Phoenix and her Prime Minister. Hanne Kovachev, the pudgy transhuman Chairman of the Renaissance Trade Factor Board. Two dozen heads of smaller, single-system governments.

  The Alliance of Free Stars was made up of sixty-five star systems collected into thirty-two nations. With the fall of Midori, six of those nations and seven of those star systems were now occupied by the Terran Commonwealth.

  Every unoccupied nation was represented here. Their leaders gathered to hear what Rear Admiral Kyle Roberts’s research group had pulled together. As he’d told Kane, however, he’d put a lot of practice into not merely projecting a bright cheer in any circumstances but in actually being cheerful in the face of almost any challenge.

  “Ladies, gentlemen, officers and representatives,” Admiral Blake greeted the gathering crowd. “My systems show that we have everyone present that was invited…except the President of Midori.”

  There was a rumble of concern.

  “Thatcher was successfully evacuated aboard Midori’s Hope and is in transit with the rest of Task Force to join Seventh Fleet,” Blake continued. “While we could probably loop him in, he is understandably exhausted. We’ll provide him and his government-in-exile a recording of Admiral Roberts’s presentation later, but he will not be joining us tonight.”

  The rumble died down, but Kyle knew the undercurrent remained. A year earlier, a series of offensives had reclaimed all of the captured systems and enabled follow-through operations that had struck into Commonwealth space.

  Now, over the last six months, seven systems had been lost. Different systems from before. The Alliance’s morale was wavering, and everyone in this room was expecting JSOC to provide a miracle.

  “You have all been briefed on the mandate of the Joint Strategic Options Command,” the Admiral noted. “We have provided them with complete access to all of our intelligence across the board—I think Admiral Roberts knows more of what’s going on right now than I do!—and their task was to find a way to win this war.

  “To present their conclusions, I yield the floor to Rear Admiral Kyle Roberts—the Stellar Fox.”

  Kyle smiled and bowed his head to his boss. He might have grown used to the nickname, but that didn’t mean he liked it.

  “Officers, representatives,” he greeted them as he stepped into the center of the auditorium. “We all know who the others are, so I think I will get directly to the point.”

  A thought through his implant triggered a simplified version of the chart in his office, showing losses across the last six months.

  “Let me begin with what has to be said, what we must all understand for this presentation to be relevant, and what I know everyone in this room suspects even if few of us have dared to say it out loud:

  “The Alliance is losing this war.”

  KYLE WAITED out the mix of angry, surprised and disappointed responses, judging the hubbub carefully before raising his hands and cutting everyone off.

  “Everyone in this meeting has been fully briefed on our situation,” he reminded them. “We started this war with two hundred and ninety active-duty ships and eighty ships in reserves.

  “We have barely two hundred and fifty ships left—and over two years, we’ve commissioned sixteen new warships. Over one hundred and thirty starships have been lost in action. Twenty thousand starfighters. Eighty-seven manned defensive platforms.”

  He let the numbers sink in.

  “Putting aside the Kematian Massacre, we have lost over two hundred thousand spacers and soldiers in the space of two years.”

  He hated the fact that that number was the least important. The Federation alone had over forty billion citizens. Even with barely eight percent of the population qualifying to be starship crew and less than one percent qualifying for starfighter service, the Alliance could replace its personnel losses easily.

  What they could not do was magically increase the production of the massive exotic-matter coils required for Alcubierre-Stetson FTL drives.

  “We are accelerating our construction dramatically,” he noted. Ten ships this year. Fifteen next year. He knew the numbers by heart now.

  “We have reached the point where we are crippling our production of civilian shipping to provide A-S for warships. Part of JSOC’s job was to run the economic numbers, so we did.”

  Another mental command opened a map of Alliance space, with a number of bright green markers.

  “Each of these markers is an exotic-matter production facility of sufficient scale to produce A-S coils,” he said quietly. “In the entire Alliance, there are only thirty-four such facilities. Each is capable of growing four starship-grade exotic matter coils a year.”

  Enough for one civilian ship or two-thirds of a warship’s needs.

  “We will have no new facilities of this scale for at least three years,” Kyle warned them all. “That means that even if we completely shut down civilian starship construction, we cannot build more than twenty-two ships a year.”

  “The Commonwealth has taken their own losses,” Senator Randall objected. “Worse losses!”

  “Yes,” Kyle agreed with the Senator, despite the fact that the audience wasn’t supposed to be heckling him yet.

  “The Commonwealth initially equipped Marshal Walkingstick with a fleet of one hundred and ten capital ships, plus fifteen Q-ships. To all intents and purposes, that fleet has been destroyed.

  “He has been reinforced continuously throughout this war, leaving him with a current estimated strength of approximately one hundred and twenty warships. He has lost roughly equal numbers of ships to the Alliance, representing basically one hundred percent losses from his original fleet.

  “Prior to the beginning of the war with the Stellar League, he was slated to be reinforced with a single lump of an additional one hundred and twenty warships, concentrating thirty percent of the Commonwealth’s fleet into his Rimward Marches command and allowing him to simply…run right over us.”

  Almost a year later, Kyle still had twinges of guilt over dragging the League into the war. The Commonwealth’s determination to reunify humanity had meant war between them and the League was inevitable, but the false flag operation that had triggered it still sat poorly with him.

  “Instead, the Commonwealth now finds itself in a two-front war. Their own internal politics mean a minimum of fifty percent of their fleet is locked down in either defensive or suppressive formations inside their own borders.

  “That leaves them with a mere three hundred starships for deployable strength, and an annual production of twenty-four starships.”

  Kyle grimaced.

  “That, to be clear, is still a functionally peacetime production schedule,” he reminded his audience. “An equivalent effort to our current projects would double that. An all-out war industry in the Commonwealth could easily produce sixty starships a year.

  “A starship is a three-year project, so it would take them time to ramp up to that…time the existing six hundred warships of the Terran Commonwealth Navy would easily buy them if they were truly threatened.”

  He shook his head.

  “You all know this,” he reminded them again. “We have whispered it in back hallways and thought it in the quiet of our minds, but we must confront the reality:

  “So far, we have a fought a conventional war against the Commonwealth and held our own, but we cannot win a conventional war.”

  With a wave of his hand, he disappeared the displays and faced his audience.

  “Confront that,” he told them. “Accept that. We at JSOC had to do that months ago. You asked us to do the impossible: find a way to win this war.”

  “You just said we couldn’t!” someone objected. Kyle could have learned who, but he didn’t need to.

  He smiled toothily.

  “
I said we cannot win a conventional war,” he echoed. “But that, officers and representatives, is why you gave me all of your worst mavericks and most unconventional tacticians. It was JSOC’s job to find a way to end the war.

  “After six months, we have four options. Which one the Alliance will act on is a political decision…but I warn you now: we must act.”

  He waited for the audience to quiet. There were a lot of important people in the room, but it didn’t take as long as he’d feared. They were all aware just how many other important people’s time they were wasting.

  “I’d ask that you refrain from questions or comments until I have listed all four possible options,” Kyle told them. “All of them will be controversial, and this is not a decision I would expect to make in a few minutes, or even a few hours.”

  He paused, giving them a moment to raise any preliminary questions, and then squared his shoulders and faced the cameras and his audience as steadily as he could.

  “The first option is the one we all hate,” he told them. “While we are reasonably certain that we cannot win the war, we remain in a position to inflict massive damage and casualties on the Commonwealth, not to mention the costs to ourselves to continue prosecuting the war.

  “We represent the third-largest grouping of human worlds in existence—and the largest is at war with the second-largest as well!

  “If we request a cease-fire to negotiate the terms of our absorption into the Commonwealth, it will be granted,” he said softly. “Peaceful annexation would inevitably include the transfer of our ships, potentially with crews intact, to the Commonwealth.

  “If we surrender,” he used the word with careful intent, “we doom the Stellar League as well. The Unificationists in the Commonwealth claim that the course of history is inevitable, that all of mankind will be unified.

  “If we join the Commonwealth, that becomes inarguable. The League would go from outnumbered two to one to three to one, and that war would be over within months. Combined, the new Commonwealth birthed from our concession would represent sixty-two percent of human-occupied space and seventy-six percent of known human populations.”