God's Dogs

Moving first — initiating the attack — will often put you at a disadvantage: You are exposing your strategy and limiting your options.

Robert Greene’s The 33 Strategies of War

The emperor and his advisors were studying a holographic representation of both the Empire and League space. The question before them was what to do next. Both flanks they tested held. In the holo-display, the plane of the galaxy was exaggerated to show space as more two dimensional than it was. Even so, the strategic importance of the two fronts was obvious, regardless of the three dimensional space involved.

League space was a large ovoid, an egg-shaped territory. The Empire was a sphere attached to the middle of League space. The initial strategy was to secure both flanks and sprint to the center of League space where Central was located. It was still a workable strategy, but time was running out.

The League’s manufacturing capabilities were converting to war production. Therefore the emperor’s advisors needed an updated strategy to crack the League open.

“If we abandon our annexation scheme,” the fleet commander, Evan Montgomery, began, “naval doctrine is to attack their strengths, disrupt their logistics, and encircle their political leaders.”

“We’re not strong enough to do that,” John Scanlon pointed out. “We need to defeat them in detail until we outnumber them.”

“A difficult proposition. How do we find smaller groups?”

“That’s the question.”

“Are we agreed on this?” the emperor asked. When no one objected, he went on, “We need to expand our scout forces and upgrade their stealth capabilities.”

Montgomery said, “And couriers as well. We need them for communication. Two in each planetary system we are investigating.”

“Like a relay system,” the emperor said.

The commander nodded. Then he said, “What we need is FTL communication.”

The emperor told him, “We are working on it. I’ll add more resources to that project. In the meantime, which Sector do you want to begin with?”

“I still want to attack their strengths,” Montgomery replied. “If we whittle away at their existing fleets, we eliminate their experienced captains and crews.”

“And our ground forces?”

“Attacking infrastructure.”

Scanlon nodded. “I’ll have our intelligence people find out where the greatest concentration of League warships is located. I suppose they will be around their shipyards, and we know where those are.”

Cedric was happy with this development. He realized he never did like the subversive campaign he originally agreed to. This was better – fight them straight up, man to man.

There were thirteen Sectors in League space, which was an irregular egg-shaped volume of space. It measured some 3,000 light years in diameter and 500 light years top to bottom along the galactic elliptical. The Sectors were arranged more as economic units than by proximity. The boundaries among the Sectors were fluid rather than fixed. Agricultural worlds partnered with technological worlds, for example. And those partnerships were equally fluid.

The League, though, established Sector headquarters in a uniform distribution so as to support the nearby Sectors when necessary.

The Empire of Man was a large bubble off the core-ward side of the League. It was through the loose boundary to the League that the incursions were meant to exploit. The efforts were at opposite ends of the boundary, and both were now blocked; hence, the new strategy. The Empire didn't secure either flank to the degree it would insure the security to march on Central. However, it did have enough security to encroach on League space and weaken the Navy.

To do so, the Empire planners would need to find both a high concentration of League warships and know when those ships would travel in small convoys or task forces. Empire forces had easy access to where they shared borders with the League, at least the interior regions of that border. It was now hoped they could attack the farther reaches of League space heading directly into the heart of the League.

Cedric guessed that the separate incursions would meet closer to the center of League space. Not an optimal location to land ground forces. He decided to let the reconnaissance go forward anyway. Maybe there would be pleasant surprises.

The other hoped for pleasant surprise would be a ship-mounted ansible – the mythical FTL communication system. If they had that, the cumbersome courier system would be obsolete.

They knew the science – quantum entangled pairs of different particles. They lacked the engineering breakthroughs to make it work.

With FTL communication, the strategy of defeating League ships in smaller groups would have a greater chance of success. Cedric sent a note off to his engineering minister urging him to greater efforts.

Robert O’Brian was back at work, but he realized his heart wasn’t in it anymore. He found he chaffed under Minister Andrew Lockhart’s virulent hatred of Penglai. When the call came for an agent to supervise the highly classified FTL communication project, O’Brian volunteered.