“Khm… well, yes. You really are the responsible person now, so if anything… Come on, Igor, you know me. After Barnard-3, I could bring you a couple of aircraft carriers. But you should talk to Knyazev yourself,” – Nelson smiled cunningly, “If I just start talking about his transports, he’ll slit my throat at once, and as for you, maybe he’ll listen to you first…”
Chapter 2
“Mr Lavroff, what you’re asking is beyond your authority,” informed me gloomily the Minister of Military Production, “Why on earth would I shift the ship repair schedule to reequip your transports? I have the Fleet order approved by the Minister of Defense, and I will be held accountable for failure to meet the deadline.”
Zwerev pronounced all these correct phrases looking me in the eye, but I did not see the answer „no” in his gaze. Something kept the Minister from just telling me to fuck off. Well, I’ll try to find the right words.
“Mr Minister,” I began carefully, “You heard me speaking at the command meeting. If I may ask your opinion, do you also consider me an empty fantasizer?”
Zwerev took his eyes off for a second, but quickly restored the calmness of his face.
“I really thought so,” the Minister confirmed, “until yesterday.”
“So, what changed?”
“I visited the new shipyard where the captured battleship Titan is being repaired.”
“And what made you change your mind?”
“This ship… We won’t be able to build something like this in the next few years. I’m not even sure we’re gonna be able to convert Titan, so that it could be controlled by a human crew. How could you handle it, Mr Lavroff? And you did it in combat, neutralizing the enemy’s resistance, and then you destroyed several enemy battleships. How?”
“The same way, Mr Zwerev, as I’m going to destroy enemy ships under construction: with the help of the latest developments of the Lavroff Weapons Company, now renamed the FAWC, the Federal Advanced Weapons Corporation. But at that time I was able to do myself everything I needed, and now I need your help. Our company has no shipbuilding facilities and all public and private shipyards are full of Fleet orders, and they won’t take my order for any money.”
“Are you so sure you can do what you’re saying? Destroy ten docks behind enemy lines in quarg-occupied systems loaded with their ships?”
“But once I was there and I could come back…”
“Military transport is not a medium-size recon ship, Mr Lavroff. You can’t camouflage it that easily.”
“We’ll get through it. Review the information on Luyten-5 and Barnard-3, which also seemed hopeless. And also try to imagine for a second ten Titan-class battleships coming out of the hyper inside Neptune’s orbit…”
“That’s what I was thinking yesterday, looking at your trophy. That’s why I’m still talking to you, Mr Lavroff, although I should have denied your request outright and write a memo to your immediate superior. And I know about your fights for Luyten and Barnard, as well as about Kapteyn and Gliese, in fact, I was curious about your biography after the meeting at the Ministry of Defence.”
“Will you give me the shipyard, Mr Minister?” I asked a direct question, knowing that all arguments had already been exhausted.
“Yes, I will. But I have a condition.”
“What is it?”
“You will personally lead the attack on the docks of the enemy. Otherwise, I do not believe in success.”
“Where should I take the ships, Mr Minister?”
Jeff and Stein didn’t make it in two weeks, but I didn’t blame them, although I showed how unhappy I was that they didn’t meet the deadline. I myself have been working on perfecting the structure of the medium-size transport, making infinite modifications in order to convert the troop transport into a kind of aircraft carrier. It took up most of my time, including part of my time at the Academy and my time at the Ministry of Defense. They also needed to be provided by EW stations and powerful computers that could make the stations work in coordination. To do that, I had to take two engineers from Jeff, which also affected his schedule. However, three weeks later, a prototype drone torpedo stood in front of me in the hangar of the aircraft carrier Wellington near the command pursuit plane, designed to control ten such items.
With the permission of the ship’s commander, Captain Clark, I’ve invited representatives of the Russian Weapons Concern and Global Weapon Industries right here, on board the aircraft carrier to be present at the internal tests of the new equipment. The chief engineer and commercial director arrived from RWC, and GWI sent Enrique Cruz whom I knew from the last negotiations, and their chief Fleet technician.
“Mr Lavroff,” told me Cruz after mutual gretings, “The management of our company highly appreciates your invitation and hopes for mutual understanding in the future. I would also like to add that I am very sorry for our conflict and hope that it is now a thing of the past.”
“I don’t know about you, Mr Cruz, but I’m not in the mood for internal conflict right now. I know your company as a powerful enterprise of the military-industrial complex with experience in large-scale production of many types of weapons. That’s what I need you for. If you don’t let me down, I’m willing to put all the past controversy behind me.”
“GWI will do its best to do so, you can rest assured, Mr Chairman of the Commission of the Ministry of Defense,” Cruz told me with a solemn official voice.
“That’s great. Well, gentlemen,” told I the invited persons, “What you’re about to see is a demonstration of our new torpedo, which is fundamentally different from what our fleet is equipped with. At the moment we have only one torpedo, but I’m sure you have the imagination to imagine that there could be dozens, and in order for that to become a reality, I brought you here. Come to the ship’s command post, gentlemen, Captain Clark has graciously allowed us to observe the tests from there.”
We chose as our target the shipyard where the badly damaged battleship New York was being repaired. We have, of course, informed the Dock management and the Metropolitan Fleet Patrol Force in advance that a training attack was planned on the facility under their supervision, and now corvette commanders and shipyard anti-aircraft operators, who have long been bored with no real business, enthusiastically probed space with scanners, waiting for a hypothetical adversary to appear.
We did not yet have a carrier for the command plane and torpedo, so we asked Captain Clark to make the aircraft carrier accelerate in the direction of the shipyard, release our experimental products and change course, gradually slowing down.
Our supposed adversary tracked the aircraft carrier’s maneuver. Of course they’d notice a carcass like Wellington, but as I hoped, the start of our machines went unnoticed. By the terms of the test, the shipyard’s defenders should not have paid attention to the aircraft carrier, since it played a purely auxiliary role, and they didn’t.
And that was where it got interesting. The command pursuit plane, controlled by one of the pilots, who had already had experience with this machine, has carefully diverted its course to the enemy’s unexpected attack vector. The torpedo he controlled was moving just behind the command plane, like a dog on a leash, carefully repeating his maneuvers. The distance to the autonomous space dock was still quite large, and our machines began a cautious acceleration to reach the target at maximum speed. Shipyard scanners and patrol ships still didn’t notice the danger, and the command plane pilot saw the ships, which were larger and more detectable, quite clearly, he was maneuvering, trying to get his machines to the target as far away from them as possible.
10,000 kilometers from the dock, the pursuit plane made a circumspect maneuver, set a course that diverged from its target, and the torpedo turned off the engine and went to the target by inertia, using EW systems to conceal itself from detection.
Now