Empire Ascendant: Road To Empire, #2

By Dietmar Arthur Wehr

The ten year old Tau Ceti Empire is at a critical junction. The power vacuum left over from the collapse of the Commonwealth has been filled by five multi-planet star nations, the TCE being one of them. If the other four join forces and attack the TCE, it will be overwhelmed and crushed. But the longer Empress Brandenburg waits, the bigger the difference in military strength becomes. She must make plans soon because the leaders of the other four are already making theirs. This conclusion to the Road To Empire series features political, military and personal intrigues that will keep you guessing to the very end. Who will ultimately stand astride a unified human star empire?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dietmar Arthur Wehr
• Release date: Nov 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9781988998060

Dietmar Arthur Wehr

Dietmar started writing SF novels when he was 58 after a career in corporate financial analysis. He got tired of waiting for David Weber to write another Honor Harrington series book so he decided to write some military SF of his own. He lives near Niagara Falls, Canada. In his spare time, he dabbles in steampunk cosplay, pursues his interests in science, history and free energy. He can be contacted via his website.

Book preview

Glossary of Terms:

AstroComp – Computer programmed to use astrogational data

CO – Commanding Officer

CIC – Combat Information Center

CSF – Corona Space Force

ECM – Electronic Counter-measures

EG-drive – Electro-Gravitic drive

HO – Helm Officer

L-drive – Longitudinal drive

Sub-light zone – Volume of space around a star or planet where space-time continuum is too stressed to allow faster than light travel.

Uber-space – When an L-drive makes a ship go faster than light, the ship is said to be travelling in uber-space.

SDF – System Defense Force

SL – Squadron Leader

TacComp – Computer programmed to use tactical data.

TO – Tactical Officer

XO – Executive Officer

Chapter One

Ten years have passed since the events of Empire Dawn. Empress Brandenburg sighed. The latest model android sex toy that she’d recently acquired seemed to be having difficulty calibrating its thrusting setting to the fine line between too much and not enough. If it wasn’t for the fact that this new model was self-lubricating, she’d switch back to the older model that was in storage somewhere.

Lay on your back, dammit. Once the android had done as instructed, she straddled it, quickly brought herself to a minimally-satisfying climax and climbed off. I won’t need you for the rest of the day.

Was my performance satisfactory, dear lady?

Brandenburg sighed again. Breaking in a new model was such a chore with so many settings to be adjusted. The constant requesting of feedback was a setting that would have to be rolled back a bit, but she didn’t have time now.

You did fine. As she watched the android walk away, she wondered if she should revisit the idea of finding a human sex partner again. Being caressed by an android just wasn’t the same as feeling a human hand touch her face or stroke her body. But human sex partners, of either gender, had personality flaws that could not be programmed away, and given who she was and the power she had, how could she be sure that the caresses and loving words were genuinely felt and not calculated responses to gain her trust and favor? Well, at least she was still biologically young enough to respond to erotic stimulation. Medical advances would keep her that way for maybe another half century, and who knew what the possibilities might be by then.

As she stepped into the shower and enjoyed the gentle spray coming from a hundred different directions, she pondered what possibilities there would be for her during another half century of being Empress. She was quite proud of the progress made by the Tau Ceti Empire over the last ten years. It now included 21 planets, and with the exception of Earth, none had been forced to join through the use of military force. Economic and financial leverage had sufficed for most of them, and the remainder had accepted their new status after a modest show of force. It was amazing what a low orbit by a fleet of warships could accomplish. But, as Grand Admiral Delacor never got tired of pointing out, all the low-hanging fruit had been picked now.

What was left were a few dozen planets that for one reason or another would actually be liabilities if they were incorporated into the Empire, plus four multi-planet political entities that were militarily strong enough to make any attempt at conquest by the Empire a risky venture, especially if they joined forces. That same possibility of military co-operation made them a real threat as well. So far, their different cultures and political structures had made anything more than mutual-defense pacts difficult for them to engineer. But there were enough of those that if the Empire attacked any one of them, it could very quickly be facing all four of them. That was one of the few things that caused her nightmares.

The Empress smiled at the thought that the Grand Admiral did not share those nightmares. She seemed to actually relish the idea of going to war with the rest of humanity in one glorious leap into the abyss of chaos. Her reasoning was logical but simplistic. If the Empire did nothing, the differential between her Navy’s strength and the combined strength of all four polities would only grow bigger over time. The longer the Empire waited, the harder it would get, and Delacor was convinced that sooner or later somebody would pull the trigger and start the war whether by choice or by accident. While the trend lines in military strength did point in that direction, Brandenburg did not believe that to be the whole story. She considered the key to the Empire’s future to be Earth. Her draconian measures to bring down population growth, expand emigration to other Empire planets and address the worst ecological problems had stabilized the situation there. Living standards were no longer falling, and people were no longer starving. That had generated a lot of support, both for her personally and for the Empire. Her long-range plan to sift Earth’s population for anyone of genius level IQ was laying the foundations for a surge in R&D that would hopefully produce a breakthrough technology to offset the gap in warship numbers. And now that the Empire’s tax revenues were starting to increase from internal growth, it could afford to pay more for ships built at her company’s shipyard complex in Wolf 359. She would continue to invest all those profits back into expanding shipyard capacity just as she had done for the last ten and a half years. If the Empire could acquire even better ships in large quantities, then Delacor would have some interesting strategic options. But all that depended on how much time the other political players let her have. Proconsul Antoninan Delisani of the Delisani Empire was not known for being patient. He was known for being ambitious. She remembered that the latest Intel report on the Proconsul was waiting for her in her office. It was a good thing that she had learned how to stay alert and mentally healthy with little more than four hours of sleep a day. Without those extra waking hours, she’d be overwhelmed with reports and meetings. Her shower now done, the Empress called her personal attendant android to assist her, and got dressed.

Delisani Empire Capital (New Danzig):

Delisani looked out the round window of the space station at the newest addition to his fleet. Centurion was the first battleship to be commissioned, and the sight of her massive hull was enough to make his pulse speed up. At just over a million metric tonnes, she was the largest warship built not just by the Delisani Empire but by anyone. Not even the Tau Ceti Empire had a ship this big. The ships Empress Brandenburg called battleships were all in the eight hundred thousand tonne range. That the TCE had five of them was an annoying fact that the Proconsul decided to ignore. Centurion was their first but would not be their last. And now that he had a battleship of his own to show Tanaka and the leaders of the other two star nations, maybe they would be more inclined to consider a military alliance to crush the TCE and divvy its planets up between them. All except Earth of course. No one in their right mind would want to be saddled with that black hole of a planet. Didn’t Empress Brandenburg understand that her empire would be twice, no, three times as financially capable if she cast Earth aside? Apparently, she did not.

He reluctantly turned away and walked over to a large wall display, which was showing a tactical representation of human space that was slowly rotating, giving him a better grasp of the three-dimensional aspects.  Regardless of how many times he looked at this image, he never got tired of it. It was like an interstellar chessboard.  Human exploration had formed a volume of space shaped like a disk due to the fact that local distribution of stars had thinned out at the top and the bottom. The Tau Ceti Empire sat in the center like a cancerous tumor. His own Delisani Empire was larger in volume and the number of colonized planets but was smaller in terms of economic output. The Tanaka Shogunate was about equal in size and economic output to the DE and just happened to sit on exactly the opposite side of the TCE. To the right was the Kingdom of Atlantia. The Proconsul eyed that relatively small cluster of colony planets with hungry eyes. Atlantia included several planets that were rich in both mineral and biological resources. The potential for exploitation was staggering. Their current King apparently understood the importance of those planets because he was building warships as fast as he possibly could. But not big ones, thought Delisani. The King’s military advisors had convinced him that lots of fast but lightly-armored cruisers would prevail over a few, heavily-armored capital ships. Delisani’s own people were of the opinion that a fleet the size of what Atlantia was capable of fielding was not nearly large enough to offset the benefit of ships that had heavy armor and lots of defensive systems. He suspected that the truth was probably somewhere in between, which meant that Atlantia could be conquered but not if he waited too long in attempting it.

On the left was the Republic of Garnett. It had almost as many colonized planets as did the Delisani Empire. Collectively they had roughly the same economic output as Atlantia but without the same potential for development. Their military outlook was strictly defensive. Each colony world had large networks of defensive satellites in orbit. Their Navy was small but, by all reports, highly professional. Conquering Garnett was definitely possible, but Delisani wasn’t sure that it was tactically sound. The problem was that taking it would be a lot easier than holding on to it. His own fleet didn’t have enough ships to garrison every Garnett planet in sufficient strength to deter Tanaka or Brandenburg from making a grab for it. And the Republic’s egalitarian form of government meant it was very unlikely to want to join a military alliance and attack on the TCE.

And then there was the Tau Ceti Empire itself. Its central location was both an advantage and a potential problem. It could literally strike in any direction, and it had two potential targets: Garnett and Atlantia, both of which it was strong enough to conquer right now if it wanted to. As he had done before, Delisani tried putting himself in Empress Brandenburg’s shoes. If he were the head of the TCE, he would address the problem of the central location, which was the risk of being attacked at the same time from opposite directions by the DE and TS. Neutralizing one of them would secure the rear area and allow Grand Admiral Delacor to concentrate on the other. With only the Republic and the Kingdom left, they could then be picked off at his leisure. But while it was easy to contemplate knocking out one of the two adjacent power centers first and then the other later, actually doing that was a far harder task. If the TCE attacked Tanaka, the DE wouldn’t hesitate to take advantage of that by attacking the TCE from the other side, and vice versa. If the TCE’s leader could convince Atlantia and Garnett to keep the DE busy while the TCE took out Tanaka, then that just might work. But what could the head of the Tau Ceti Empire offer them that would entice them to go to war with a more powerful star nation? The only carrot that Delisani could think of was a treaty promising not to incorporate them into the TCE later. Now if he, Delisani, were making that offer, he would eventually break the treaty and attack them too, but if Brandenburg made the offer, she just might be rigid enough to honor it.

So much for looking at the situation from the perspective of the TCE. What he really wanted to be able to do was put himself into Tanaka’s shoes, but the man was the epitome of inscrutability. Delisani had no idea what Tanaka wanted or how he thought. He had already refused Delisan’s offer of mutual military co-operation and wasn’t even prepared to discuss it. His Shogunate was almost as inscrutable as he was. Security was very tight, and getting any useful information out of there was damnably difficult. Delisani had no real idea of how big Tanaka’s Navy was, how good its technology was or the quality of its officer corps. He did know that Tanaka’s Navy had at least one battleship but only because it had come within visual detection range of a Delisani freighter whose captain had been ordered to keep an eye out for such occurrences. With Centurion about to dock with the station, Delisani headed for the docking bay to greet his son, who was Centurion’s Captain. As heir to the Delisani Empire, he was too important to risk in battle, but since there didn’t seem to be a war on the horizon—at least for a while—his father was willing to let him play with a battleship for the time being.

Chapter Two

New Paris star system , Task Force 2.2 flagship Kutsov:

Division Admiral Terranova entered the Flag Bridge and looked around to gauge the general atmosphere. The Battlecruiser Nimitz was now seriously overdue, and everyone knew it. Nimitz had been assigned to patrol Luyten’s Star, the system containing the colony world Dorado. If anything untoward had happened, she would have tried to send back a courier drone, but none had been received. With her patrol time over, the ship should have reported back to the New Paris system and Terranova’s Task Force three days ago. Standard procedure said that he should detach another battlecruiser from TF 2.2 to investigate, but Terranova had a gut feeling that Nimitz was overdue because she had run into something nasty, and anything powerful enough to cripple or destroy one battlecruiser could do the same thing to another. He could detach two battlecruisers, but that would mess up the patrol deployment schedule for other star systems. Taking the Kutsov, his flagship, to Luyten’s Star was technically against his standing orders; however, those very same orders gave him the flexibility to take the Kutsov elsewhere if the situation warranted it. In his mind, the situation did.

Bridge, this is Terranova.

Bridge here. What can we do for you, Admiral? asked Senior Commander Martell.

We’re not waiting any longer for Nimitz. I’m declaring her officially overdue and missing. How soon can Kutsov leave orbit, Commander?

I have some people on the ground, but I can have them back aboard in half an hour. We’ll be able to leave orbit then, sir.

Fine, but I intend to hold you to that half an hour, Commander. Terranova thought he heard Judith sigh, but it could have been his imagination. Leaving orbit a few minutes later would probably not make any difference, but Terranova had learned that officers and crews tended to get sloppy unless they were given demanding deadlines once in a while. He thought he knew what Judith was likely thinking: her crew would all be back aboard in half an hour, give or take a few minutes. Now she had to make sure it was 30 minutes or less, not more.

As it turned out, she made the 30-minute deadline with a few