Koban 6: Conflict and Empire (14 page)

He scratched idly at his chin, looking at a list of Ragnar ships destroyed or significantly damaged here at Meglor, and the list of those still functional, or nearly so, provided by Grudfad.

“I am certain we will recover some Stranglers here, which the Thandol gave to us anyway, and we might find more elsewhere in the Empire, possibly in the other two sectors. We can negotiate with the Finth and Thack Delos to borrow them. Popular uprisings have been reduced under this Emperor, because he has not increased taxes recently. With a war starting, that is definitely going to change, but we can try to obtain underused Stranglers before that happens. We can probably obtain eighty of those. The Thandol certainly will not try to use them themselves, deep in atmosphere on their secretly planned orbital attack, because they will not have our Ravagers there to defend them. Another flaw in their plans, because they refused to include us.

“We will have a foothold on that world, if not its outright surrender, before the Thandol are even ready to move. We need over five hundred large support ships, to carry food supplies, parts, and spare power packs for our ground forces, and I can commandeer about two hundred fifty of our own commercial ships, which can carry part of what we will not have room to carry on our Spears. I’ll commandeer another two hundred fifty ships from subservient species in our security sector, and pay for them by reducing our share of the taxes we normally collect from them.”

“What will you eventually tell the High Command, Sire? I am sure you will not wait until they are ready to attack.”

“No. But before I tell them what we did, we will locate a web of other Federation planets that trade with our target world. The Thandol can hit and punish one of those worlds just as easily, and we can get the credit for finding them.”

“Sire, do you anticipate an effective ground resistance on this world? There was not on the colonies we and the Thandol have hit.”

“No. We will have around three thousand six hundred ships in this invasion fleet. We will strike fast and hard, so the humans won’t know what hit them.”

****

“I need to strike while the iron’s hot, my man.” Chief Haveram observed. “Howard, this mining deal can’t wait for Pittsburg II to ship the equipment to Tanner’s world, where I can buy it outside of the limits of the PU embargo. We have to start building our new ships as quickly as possible, to prepare for what we know the Empire can throw at us.”

“I can’t see how you sitting in jail, waiting for an unfavorable PU court hearing will speed that along.” Colonel Howard Caldwell was close to the end of his term of duty on Poldark, because General Nabarone would be returning. Howard intended to retire from the PU army and partner up with Haveram, in his growing interstellar shipping business.

One of Nabarone’s armies had just finished mopping up the last of the Krall on K1, now again being called Greater West Africa. “Mopping up” was the euphemistic phrase the PU army used in press releases, to describe the extermination of every warrior found on K1, down to the adolescents, cubs, and unhatched eggs. There was never an offer by the Krall to surrender, and it was unlikely that troops that suffered or witnessed horrific Krall atrocities on Poldark would have considered accepting their surrender if they had tried. They made certain never to offer the possibility, to keep the idea out of the warrior’s minds. A smaller second army had also cleared the Krall from Bollovstic's Republican Independency, in a solar system near Poldark.

Caldwell promised to help when the shit hit Haveram’s fan. “Chief, I’ll try to post your bail, and aid your escape off whatever planet has your ass locked up. But they’ll certainly have seized the Falcon, or whatever the Hell you’ve decided to call it on some phony registration while in port there. You’ll lose that slow-poke relic you love so much.”

“Well, I can’t take one of our captured clanships to a Hub world. Everyone knows only Kobani fly those. I’ll pretend to be a mercenary opportunist, intending to mine the exposed planetary core wreckage of that exploded gas giant in the Meadow system. I bribed a person in ship registry here on Poldark to list my ship, called The Bird of the Republic, as being owned by a former miner from Bollovstic. It’s a sympathetic cover.”

Rumor had it that Bollovstic would eventually have a name change too, whenever some rich Hub world became interested in it for its rich agricultural value. It wouldn’t keep its old Rim world colony name, because so few of the original colonists had escaped alive, and almost none of them wanted to return and start again with nothing. The Hub world banks that had supported and financed the initial colony landings, from before the Gene War, had been based on the prosperous Hub world of Meadow. The total destruction of that planet and wrecking of its solar system by the Krall had left nobody to repay the loans to, and no colonists to tax for the payments anyway. The irony was that most of the few hundred thousand survivors from the Krall invasion of Bollovstic had fled to that patron world, which had offered them shelter. Many of the original victims of the Krall invasion of Bollovstic became double victims when they died on Meadow.

“So, you want to claim to be from Bollovstic, and also a survivor of the Meadow destruction, in order to buy mining equipment to make a profit out of core fragments drifting in the Meadow system? Kind of cynical, to play on sympathies like that, don’t you think?”

“If that was what I was going to do, it would be. But I’m actually trying to avoid gaining that sort of future sympathy, after Koban and Haven have been destroyed by the Empire. Without Koban and Haven, the Federation will fall, and then so will Human Space.”

“Don’t preach to
me
, pal. I know why you’re doing it and I agree. However, it’s possible somebody you’re dealing with on Pittsburg II will have a scintilla of integrity, and report you to the authorities for your exploitation of the Meadow disaster.”

“Howard, who the hell do you think I’m dealing with there? The Charitable Ladies of the Society for Refugees? I have contacts with people who deal under the table even when they have reputable customers, and if they’re working with a reputed smuggler like me, they charge extra, and will go out and steal what their customer wants. On the surface, I’m operating as a reputable customer that has an unfortunate prohibition against buying equipment for sale on the open market, and for which there are only legitimate uses.

“I didn’t ask the providers for stolen goods, and I’m offering a fat
finder’s fee
if they don’t dig too deep into my cover. Something I know they don’t give a rat’s ass about anyway. That cover will shield the paperwork from scrutiny by people with casual awareness of the sale, and of the off world shipment of perfectly legal machinery. It even shows that the shipments go to Tanner’s world, out on the Rim, where the embargo can’t be enforced.”

“It’ll take you months to make enough round trips to transport all that mining equipment to Koban in the Falcon, which has about one third the capacity of a far faster clanship.”

“Ye of little faith. I can’t believe I thought you’d make a smart enough partner to keep up with me.” He shook his head in mock dismay.

“Why would I take the Falcon all the way to Koban? Besides, I told my contacts that I was really going to mine at Meadow, which is much closer than Koban to Pittsburg II, or even to Tanner’s world, where I’m pretending it will go. The Rim world is a just cover name to protect them, not me, so they can say they didn’t know I was also deceiving them. You’re too gullible, and blinded by that shiny streak of honesty.” He winked as his friend’s face turned red.

Caldwell laughed. “It’s a reflection of my having to manage Poldark’s evolution back to civil rule from martial law. Like when the Khartoum kidnappings happened, I’m also part of law enforcement here. With shady friends like you, I’m sure I’ll acquire the appropriate degree of skullduggery in no time. Although, a round trip to Meadow from Pitt 2 only takes a week in the Falcon, and you are supposedly flying to Tanner’s. You’d be returning too often for reloading if you use the same spaceport. Let me test my skullduggery instincts. You’ll have Kobani ships with suppressed gamma rays waiting somewhere near Pitt 2, and transfer the equipment to them. Then come back for more, using a different spaceport each time.”

“There ya go, Howard. I have a more corrosive effect on honest people than I thought.”

“Thanks, I think. When are you leaving for Pitt 2?”

“As soon as I hear from Cal Branson, who’s headed to Tanner’s world to pick up supplies going to Zanzibar. He’ll tell me if he was able to set up the cover story that our equipment was sent there from Pittsburg II, if there should be inquiries later. The PU knows some supplies from Human Space are going to Federation colonies, routed through Rim worlds, and they can’t stop that from happening. They won’t be able to trace our equipment after it leaves Pitt 2 beyond Tanner’s world. If they’re told it arrived, and was sold and shipped to the Federation, that ends the trail for the PU embargo enforcers, who can’t force a Rim government to show them the bill of sales.

“The PU might try to stop future sales of similar equipment to Tanner’s world from Hub worlds,” the Chief acknowledged, “but we’ll just shift our pretend deliveries to another Rim world. I’m only protecting my contacts on Pitt 2 with that story, so they don’t get burned and refuse to deal with me in the future.”

Caldwell remembered something he’d heard about Tanner’s world and shipping. “By the way, we won’t keep the speed advantage in our transport business for long. PU shipyards have started turning out new merchant ships with T-cubed Jump drives. They saw how our ships have dominated long distance shipping between Rim worlds, and that we’re working our way into New Colony markets, who want a share of that faster shipping. When diplomatic relations are finally opened between us, they know we’d enter Hub markets and take a share of that business too.

“I learned one of the new merchant ships is operating out of Tanner’s world. Earth put pressure on the New Mombasa colonists on Zanzibar, through family and friends left behind, to maintain their ties to Earth, and therefore to the PU. As a gesture of goodwill, the Mombasa colonists chartered the Streaker, a new Earth registered freighter with T-cubed drives, to bring in supplies and more colonists, but only from Tanner’s world. President MacDougal said the Federation has a policy of open ports of entry, and welcomes shipping from Human Space to help us expand faster. Now we have some competition.”

Haveram shrugged. “It was bound to happen. At least the Federation, with about five thousand T-cubed ships, all of them well suited for cargo, will outnumber a new PU merchant fleet for a decade or more. We need to establish our markets and contracts while we have the edge.”

Caldwell thought of another problem. “Ours are also warships, so we can’t devote many of them to commercial enterprise in the midst of a new war. Although, I’ll bet the Prada and Torki can out produce even the large PU shipyards. Especially if we activate some of the abandoned yards on the former Krall clan production worlds.”

Haveram agreed. “If the new mining equipment can produce enough raw materials for them. Koban’s metal rich system provides plenty of raw materials on moons and asteroids.

“I just hope we can add to our new fleet without having to salvage many of the functional clanships for material, as the Prada suggested we do. We need the extra warships that can double as cargo carriers. The most severely damaged Krall ships, and the thousands of large wreckage fragments orbiting K1 were collected and towed to Koban. The Prada fed the scrap into their forges to get the metal alloys for the first generation hulls of our new ships. Salvaging older but still operational T-cube warships might speed that up, but it wouldn’t expand our fighting capability. I’m afraid we’re going to need more ships than we can build, if the Empire starts to press us aggressively.

“Maggi says the Hothor estimate the Thandol have twenty-five thousand warships of all classes, spread across their three security sectors, in addition to what their security forces possess. For an Empire that hasn’t been in a serious war for over a thousand years, that’s a lot of capability. The bulk of those ships are Thandol built and operated, which I suspect is to give them total domination over their combined puppet security forces, which have far smaller fleets. The Hothor mostly see Ragnar warships in their sector, but assuming the Finth and Thack Delos are kept at a similar strength, they each have roughly two thousand to twenty-five hundred warships, designed by their own species. They often borrow Thandol built ships, converted for their use as they did at Zanzibar 2. I hope we don’t find out too soon if the Hothor numbers are accurate.”

****

Cal Branson’s first Comtap link from Tanner’s world wasn’t to Haveram. It was an urgent conference call to Mirikami and President MacDougal.

“Cal, its night time on Haven, but midday for me on Koban. Stewart…, excuse me, President MacDougal, is getting out of bed. He’ll be on in a moment.”

“Sorry, Tet. This seemed vital, and I think we’ll need to warn the Planetary Union. I’ve invited the President of Tanner’s world to meet with me in two hours, and it’s the middle of the night for him as well.”

“Whoa. You were serious about this being urgent. Hold on, I have the link open with Stewart, but he apparently put it in privacy mode. I think he hit the bathroom first. He’s always been a stickler for propriety. Even if we can’t see him, he knows where he is and feels awkward talking.”