Chapter 3

Lieutenant Colonel André Mbia and his men never returned to the 105th Infantry Division. He now served in my department, and he was in charge of testing all ground combat equipment related to reconnaissance. Captain Yoon Gao met a similar fate, but he was responsible for space intelligence. Now both scouts were standing next to me at the command post of cruiser Moscow, trying to see something on a tactical projection.

Our scanners were silent, although I thought they should have spotted a reconnaissance ship on an oncoming course a few minutes ago. But nothing happened at all. Only a few minutes later, the space control operator gave a report of a faint signal slightly distinguishable against the background of natural noise. We only confidently spotted the reconnaissance ship when it was so close to us that it seemed to be observable to the unaided eye, and cruiser Moscow was equipped with the best scanners of the latest improved series, but still they were serial samples. And on the reconnaissance ship, Jeff and his crew worked individually, tailoring the EW complexes to the kind of precision no serial product could ever dream of.

“Take the command of the ship, Captain,” I told Yoon Gao, “You’re the first one to have the honor to be the commander of a hybrid reconnaissance ship with a mixed crew. Now, Officers, Sirs, I’ll introduce you to the crew.”

“This is my ship?” The Chinese, usually calm, looked shocked. He stood silently in front of the projection screen for a long time, looking from different angles at the ship, which was developed jointly by Jeff’s engineers and Lit-ta’s lizards. This small ship had some of the familiar outlines of a medium recon ship, but if the fore part differed slightly from the standard pattern, the changes were increasing closer to the stern. Smooth matte armor sheets made by people have merged into a single whole with bumpy shell plates. Almost all of the ship’s stern, except for the marching engine made by humans, was raised by reptiles, it irritated the eye of a fleet officer, accustomed to smooth surfaces, with its bumps and irregularities characteristic of the lizard ships.

“Rrrearrr Admirrral, Sssirrr,” I heard a voice behind me and turned to the lizard who entered the command post, “Thisss isss Engineerrr Dirr-go, rrreporting forrr prrresentation to the ship’sss commanderrr.”

I stood just a little bit away, I looked at Yoon Gao, and I could hardly stop laughing. I’ve already seen the Chinese like this, it was the first time we met before the raid on the asteroid in Gliese 338 system.

* * *

Marshal listened to Bronstein’s report without interrupting or asking questions, read my report silently and said quietly:

“Rear Admiral, you’ve gone too far this time. Your military successes have made your head spin, and you’ve lost your perspective. I understand that your service to the Federation gives you the moral authority to behave a little more freely than your rank and position allow, but there are limits to everything. By your actions, you have destroyed the work of a team of specialists from another ministry and have messed up our diplomats’ plans. Not only have you displayed our diplomatic service to the Allies in a very unflattering light, you have shown them that there is no unity and order in our system of power. By doing so, you have damaged the reputation of the Federation at the most critical moment of its first official contact with the new race. Are you aware of the consequences of your actions?”

“I’m aware that all this looks very bad, Mr President. I stand ready to apologize in person to every member of the diplomatic service whose work I have disrupted, and I will do so, no doubt, but in the circumstances I saw no other solution then, and I do not see any solution now. We don’t have time, not at all. I’ve already told the Minister,” I nodded towards Bronstein, “and I’m ready to tell you again. I have a strong feeling that we are already late with the steps I outlined in my report, and if I decided to wait until the diplomatic office’s plans were realized, we would be late forever.”

“I’ve heard it before,” said Tobolsky with a vague mirthless grin, “That time with the quarg shipyards, you were in a hurry, too, Rear Admiral, but then you weren’t listened to… By the way, did you recover your own 1.5 billion rubles spent on manufacturing drone torpedoes?”

“Somehow, I hadn’t time for that, and my mom and I have more than enough royalties to live on…”

“Mr Minister, please follow up on this matter,” Tobolsky told Bronstein, and then turned his eyes on me, “Seven and a half trillion rubles and 30 per cent of the Federation’s shipbuilding capacity. Do you know what you’re asking for, Rear Admiral? The amount you gave me last time you tested your transport ring was three times smaller.”

“But the scale of the project is different now, Mr President. Circumstances have changed, a terrible threat looms over us, and at the same time a rare opportunity has emerged that must not be missed.”

“Well, I understood about the chance in your report, but the threat… Like last time, it’s not very specific.”

“Last time? Groombridge 1618 is now in the hands of the quargs. How can I be more specific, Mr. President?”

“Do you think that if you were right then, it should automatically mean that now any sensation you have will be a sufficient reason to reconfigure the entire Federation’s defense policy, Rear Admiral?” Bronstein entered into the conversation.

“I gave my opinion in my report, Mr Minister. It doesn’t matter what I think about my premonitions. My department will do deep reconnaissance of the central areas of the quarg star systems, but it will take time, and we don’t have it. It’s up to you, gentlemen, whether we wait and do nothing or take preventive steps.”

“Rear Admiral Lavroff,” the President turned to me, “I point out once again that your actions are unacceptable. I expect you to settle the issue with the diplomats and I am confident that you will not allow such incidents in the future, otherwise I will have to draw the appropriate organizational conclusions. Your report will be decided shortly and communicated to you by your immediate superior. Now you may be excused, Rear Admiral.”

* * *

When the door closed behind Lavroff, the President turned his eyes towards the Minister of Defense.

“And what do you think of all this, Mr Bronstein?”

“I’m very afraid he’s right, Ivan Sergeyevich. He’s a cheeky green upstart, but I kind of like him. I’ve never been like this myself, although, frankly, I sometimes wanted to.”

“Stop messing me around, Mr Minister. Do you realize that if he’s right, we need to urgently redirect almost half the military-industrial complex to produce the «Invisibles», pursuite planes, drone torpedoes and these segments of the transport rings not yet even tested.”

“I’ve already told Lavroff that I consider this a pure venture. But I find it hard to object when he pushes in my face the results of his previous, no less adventurous actions. And he’s right about that, surprisingly. But all of his previous operations were incomparable in scale with what he wants to do now. Even if they had ended in total failure, there would have been no catastrophe, and now… If he’s wrong or something goes wrong, we’ll have instead of a balanced fleet a strange assemblage of ships with a clear shortage of heavy streamers and an abundance of highly specialized ships, that not all commanders are able to use normally in combat. And the transport rings? We haven’t yet seen any prototypes, except for the small ring that Lavroff used to launch a tiny steel cylinder from the Barnard’s Star system. It’s not serious, Mr President. We cannot base our defence policy solely on this preliminary result. The stakes are too high.”

“In this war the stakes were always high,” replied Tobolsky, rubbing his chin with his palm, “You’re wrong, by the way, that Lavroff’s failure wouldn’t have been a disaster for us. I was shown the other day a curious report on a retrospective analysis that a group of members of my renewed security team did. There’s a lot of detail in the report about mathematical modeling, so I didn’t read it completely, but Ignat gave me a brief version with the conclusions… I think it would be good for you to see them, too.”

The Minister of Defense opened the file he received, and for a while he carefully read the text on the tablet screen, after which he looked at the President, and Tobolsky saw a mixture of surprise and confusion in his eyes.

“I think I understand now, Mr President, why you didn’t really punish Lavroff for his arbitrary actions. Eight months ago… So, according to this report, we’ve been alive for eight months because of his adventures?”

“Well, I wouldn’t make it that simple. He couldn’t have done it alone, but we couldn’t have done it without him. I didn’t believe it at first either, but the results in the report were double-checked several times by different analysts. It all fits.”

“So you’ve made up your mind, Mr President?”

“Do we have a choice?”

“Do you have such faith in Lavroff and his prognoses?”

“I do or I don’t believe it, what difference does it make? I see the results, I know that this man in the Battle of Groombridge saved the lives of three hundred million Federation citizens, myself included, and he developed the idea of the whole operation and personally participated in it. Now Lavroff has come to us to save hundreds of millions, maybe billions. He’s already proven he has every chance to do it. Are you, Mr Minister, ready to tell him «no»?”

* * *

Kappa Ceti was the seventh quarg system in which Yoon Gao’s ship arrived, on the basis of information obtained from captive quargs who managed to get rid of the block. Rear Admiral Lavroff had given the scouts two tasks. First, they should have gotten information about what the quargs were preparing for, and what they were so careful to hide in the central regions of their star systems. The second part of the task was directly related to captured men and lizards. During interrogations, some quargs had nothing to say about where they were held, other quargs pointed to three widely dispersed stars, which may have detention centres on the planets. Two of these scouts have already visited, but they haven’t found anything useful. There were only small orbital plants, and there were no terraformed planets.

Kappa Ceti was different from anything Yoon Gao’s men had seen before. The yellow dwarf, very similar to the Sun, glowed just a little fainter than its earthly counterpart. A pair of gas giants, heavily overflowing with the industrial infrastructure of the quargs, immediately suggested that the enemy was operating here on a large scale.

The new unmanned reconnaissance probes, equipped with lizard engines and the best EW systems from engineer Jeff, spread across different vectors, scanning the situation in the system. Six hours later, they came back.

“The same shit,” swore Mbia, looking at another shipyard with an almost complete aircraft carrier on a projection screen, “They’ve almost stopped building their giant battleships, but they’ve done at least two dozen of these troughs, because we probably haven’t seen everything.”

“Note, André, the ship is ready,” commented Yoon Gao on the scout’s observation, “I wouldn’t be surprised if it leaves the dock today or tomorrow. Look, they’re loading pursuit planes into it… stop! They’re not pursuit planes, Lieutenant Colonel. It’s something bigger, but not torpedo bombers.”

Yoon Gao enlarged the image and finally recognized the outlines of the ships that were slowly loaded into the belly of the enemy aircraft carrier. They were ships, not pursuit planes.

“I remember them. These are probe carriers for anti-torpedo networks, part of a system for protecting heavy ships from torpedo attacks. They’re being loaded into an aircraft carrier, so the quargs are not going to use them for defense. Our «Invisibles» will get a nasty surprise, André.”

“Yoon, notice where this dock is,” thoughtfully said Mbia, “It’s not near the gas giant, as is usually the case with us and the quargs. They dragged it to the third planet, a central part of the system. Apparently, they didn’t want us to see it. It was the same in other places, and we were all wondering why they were building aircraft carriers in such a secret. Yeah, well, these ships are a lot bigger than we’ve been used to, but an aircraft carrier is not a battleship, the size of the aircraft carrier doesn’t really matter. Looks like it wasn’t about the size, it was about the stuffing.”

“Well, they’re building battleships, too, but the quargs are intentionally placing the shipyards with battleships on the outskirts of star systems. This is all very bad. I wish we could have built a chain of hyper-beacons, as we did last time, they would have known about this threat on Earth by now. We have to get back quickly.”

“We’re not done here yet, Yoon,” Mbia has shaken his head, “The second part of the task has not yet been accomplished. Let’s see what the other probes have brought.”

Kappa Ceti’s first planet was of no value to the scouts. A stone ball, like Mercury, spinned at a short distance from the star, turning towards it with one side, on which the eternal fire day reigned. The quargs did not even try to go there, limiting themselves to sluggish activities on the night side of the planet, where they apparently found something useful for themselves, but not enough to be overzealous.

The probe then skirted the star and reached the second stone ball circling the local yellow dwarf at a much slower pace, and it was much more interesting for the quargs, and therefore for Mbia with Yoon Gao. There was no artificial sun in the orbit of the planet. Apparently, Kappa Ceti’s natural radiation was enough to create acceptable conditions on the surface. However, the quargs have obviously worked on the atmosphere of this planet, because normally such small planets do not have such a representative air coat. The probe’s scanners confirmed this suspicion by reporting signs of a gravitational correction on the planet. The abundant cloudiness of the world made it impossible to get a visual image from the surface, but the probe’s equipment, using different scanning ranges, clearly indicated that there was a fairly well-developed infrastructure at the planet. Only the word «developed» was not very suitable here, rather it was underdeveloped. First of all, this was due to the low concentration of energy there. Modern cities consume lots of energy that is used to ensure the comfort of their inhabitants. This energy is generated somewhere, transmitted to consumers, and partially dissipated in the form of thermal radiation during utilization. No matter how much energy efficiency increases, no matter how the transmission lines are isolated, good scanners will immediately determine whether they are facing a modern mega-city, a pre-space era city, or a medieval settlement. However, here we were faced with something completely incomprehensible. There were signs of modern technology, but it was kind of fragmented and lost in the mass of something that seemed to be very much outdated and clearly insufficient to sustain normal life in such large settlements.

The probe’s flight program was not directed to climb into the atmosphere and descend below the cloud layer, nor was it designed to fulfill such tasks. Mbia again scrutinized the scanner readings and turned to the ship’s commander.