Forging Alliances Snippet 4

 Sitrep:

So, Rea sent me back the manuscript. I now need to put the edits in and final pieces and then shoot it off to Goodlifeguide for final formatting.

 

In other news I've been having fun with the AI. I've animated a few of the covers. Some are wildly cool! I'll be posting them eventually.

 

Anyway, on to the snippet!

 

Chapter 4

Antigua

 

Admiral Irons was concerned over the way things were going. They were not anywhere near where he wanted to be. He’d expected to possibly go up against some remnant of the Xenos at some point, just not so soon, nor so close to Rho sector.

Were they going to be able to fight them and win? That alone worried him. The alliance between the Xenos and the Necrons … that was terrifying in its own way. It meant the Xenos were not going to respond as they had before. The psychological modeling and tactics that had been engineered during the Xeno war were now invalid. How do they fight that combined threat?

He frowned as he tried to game out the problem. Nothing really came to him. They needed more information.

<<(O)>>

Commander Protector noted his principle’s concern, fear, and frustration. He also understood the underlying causes for them and in many ways agreed with the admiral’s emotional state.

He sent a request to Captain Fletcher to see if the ONI AI had anything new of value to help distract the admiral. The AI responded with a negative after a few moments.

Pity, the AI thought.

<<(O)>>

Vice Admiral Horatio Logan looked over the production priorities one more time. Ever since he’d taken command of BuShips, he’d had to contend with a lot of politics, both internal and external, while also trying to deal with anticipating the future needs of the fleet.

Politics were the bane of his existence it seemed. At lease he didn’t have as many problems to contend with as Sprite did. They saw both internal politics in the navy and external politics with Congress, but Sprite was being picked on because she was a handpicked replacement and nepotism was whispered about her and others constantly. Some of those who kept the whisper campaign up did so to undermine her credibility. A lot of the attacks came from Bek.

If it bothered the AI, she didn’t show it as a mortal would. She just kept plugging away at her job. Apparently, she was another person who pushed that the best way to show off a critic was to do the job right so they had little to complain about and therefore looked like an idiot.

He shook his head and focused on his own problem children. They were legion it seemed.

Internally he had to find a balance between the gun club, the carrier club, and the cruiser patrons. It was sometimes a royal pain in the posterior.

There was a fourth group too of course—the folks like him who were into infrastructure. They included the orbital fortress people for some reason, as well as the recon people over at ONI.

How they’d been saddled with the spooks was anyone’s guess. He shook his head in disgust.

“Penny for your thoughts?” Lieutenant Beau, his AI, asked.

“Just trying to do the usual. Find balance where there seemingly isn’t any.” In front of him was a request form from a shipyard lobby to build additional ships in Bek.

“You mean find a way to make everyone happy?” she asked.

He snorted harshly. “I’m not that deluded,” he scolded. “No matter how much you give them they’ll always want more.”

“True.”

He sat back and rocked slightly in his chair for a moment as he gathered his thoughts. “I think the biggest problem is that we don’t know what we are up against.”

“I thought we did? Xenos? Necrons?”

“Yes, but what does that combine into? How far along are they? What sort of navy do they have? Force mix?”

“Xenos were nanite based. They grew their ships from cruiser grade to major capital ships.”

“Exactly. How long have they been at it? Are they focused on a balanced fleet or something else? Where do the Necrons play into this?”

“Ah. That is a big unknown. I’ve seen the debate in some of the forums.”

“Exactly.” Horatio scratched at his scalp. He had very thin fuzz on top. After a moment, he dropped his hand. “We need more intelligence.”

“Agreed. That is Admiral Subert’s shop. Until we get it, we have to go with our best guess.”

“Yeah, I know. I just hate being wrong.”

“Then don’t be. Focus on balance as you said, infrastructure so we can pivot and build rapidly when we need to and all of that as far away from the front lines as possible.”

Horatio nodded slowly. She was right.

“Of course we can let specialists do their thing. But I think we need to consider that we can’t produce large capital ships in quantity anymore.”

He blinked and then his brows knit in inquiry.

“The gate?” she asked helpfully.

Slowly he nodded. Again, she had a telling point. Nothing larger than a monitor could get through the gate. They were also ponderously slow in hyperspace. There was therefore no point pushing for anything larger than a super dreadnought or fleet carrier.

He began to nod to himself slowly. He was starting to agree with the admiral’s decision on the fleet mix. Vice Admiral Georgi Pashenkov had also emphasized fleet mixes that could easily transit the gate as fast reaction forces. There was no point building titan ships that were slow and couldn’t get to where they were needed in a timely manner.

“Okay, so, compromise with the gun club, no big battle wagons thank you. But we will build smaller ones up to super dreadnought class. I don’t think we need anything smaller than a cruiser.”

“At the moment, we need more light cruisers for scouting duties,” Beau warned.

Horatio nodded. She was right; there was a pressing need to find the other hyper bridge connections. “See if Ops can kick a few tin cans to do light scouting duty in behind the scenes locations. That might free up a few.”

“Patrols too?”

“Exactly. Some of the larger tin cans should have the legs.”

“Agreed. Should we convert the tin can production lines to cruisers?”

He frowned. “My knee jerk reaction is yes …,” he said slowly and thoughtfully. “But …?”

“But?”

“I don’t think it is the right reaction,” he said thoughtfully as he rubbed his chin. “We built Meridians on some destroyer size production lines.”

The Meridian class prowler was the largest prowler to date with the longest legs. It had been designed to be able to make the jump between sectors and to live off the land as it scouted in enemy territory for extended periods of time. It had an antimatter reactor as well as a fusion reactor.

“They are a bit big for them now. ONI actually had us stop production on the Meridian class in favor of the newest line,” Beau warned.

Horatio nodded thoughtfully. The new Poltergeist II class of prowlers were smaller than the Meridian but had better stealth, speed, and energy abilities. They had been ordered to go to Sigma and Tau and therefore no longer needed to sail between the sectors, burning time in transit. They also had stasis pods to supplement the crew for long voyages.

Horatio rested his elbows on his desk as he leaned forward. His fingers knitted together in front of him.

“Okay, memo to Phil, we need to know if we should produce more of that class if he has the budget, or fall back on the Meridian since they’ll need to get to Upsilon and Omicron eventually … or should we kick the two designs to R&D and see if they can come up with a hybrid?”

“Good points. If ONI lost the Bus and Ops lost the light cruiser division scouting Omicron, what did the enemy learn? How should we adapt to that breach?”

Horatio blinked and then sighed. “You would bring that up,” he growled as he rubbed his brows.

“Where were you thinking about producing them?” Beau asked as she tried to keep him on task.

“Hmm? Oh, we need to produce them in secure lines obviously. We built them all here …”

“Correct,” she prompted. “You are considering converting a destroyer line in Pi and Tau? Or combining all of the destroyer lines in each yard to one prowler line?”

“One line for each at the moment, the rest can stay idle. If I remember, the damn Nova Bombs were big mothers. So, we need to start planning on producing those, plus the carrier craft needed to deploy them,” he growled.

“Now that’s a lovely thought,” Beau murmured as she took additional notes. “I bet the spirits will just love that.”

<<(O)>>