Vengeance Weapon

“Igor Yakovlevich,” Nelson began the conversation as we were seated at the conference table, “the President is very determined. He tasks the army and fleet with preparing a joint strike against the toads’ planets as soon as possible. The quargs’ representatives got excited about the prospect and are ready to send their entire fleet, down to the last ship. The lizards are somewhat more restrained. They have all their occupied planets back, and they have never fought a war on another’s territory. Nevertheless, they, too, are ready to take part. So the decision to invade toads’ space can be considered made. It is only a question of developing a plan of operation and timing. I’m sure you already have some thoughts on that, and we’d like to hear them.”

I was a little puzzled by this start of the conversation. It hasn’t surprised me for a long time that Nelson and Knyazev are willing to listen to my opinions, but still, they were both my supervisors, and, in theory, they should have given me the task first, and then ask my thoughts on the method of accomplishing it. But since this is the case, let’s lay it out…

“We know too little about the enemy’s defense system, Mr Minister,” replied I, picking out my main doubt from the pile of thoughts about the upcoming operation, “Our scouts, even those equipped with imperial camouflage fields, are still unable to gather information on the composition of the cover forces of the toads’ planetary systems. Apparently, their planets and orbital fortresses have scanners that are superior to imperial models.”

“But then why didn’t they use them on their ships?” wondered Knyazev.

“I asked myself the same question," I nodded to the General, “I think this is stationary equipment, too cumbersome to use even on battleships. There is one more point. From the interrogations of the captured toads, we know that there are some weapons on their planets and in the orbital defense system, inherited from their ancestors. All this is so classified that even the commanders of warships can’t properly describe these weapons and their capabilities. Their fleet commander, of course, had this information, but he died in the Delta Trianguli system with his flagship.”

“So we may encounter something very serious when we try to hit the metropolitan toads’ system?” Knyazev rubbed the bridge of his nose with his bent index finger.

“It is difficult to say,” I shrugged my shoulders, “the same prisoners claim that the state of these weapons systems is not well known. In their memory there have been no exercises on their use, which means that it is a perfect pig in a poke. But of course, we must take into account that this pig can be very toothy and clawed. In my opinion, we should not start with hitting the planets, but with reconnaissance-in-force. Since we can’t even send unmanned probes into their systems, we’ll have to go in with a strong squadron, not to take over the planets, but to find out the combat potential of the enemy defenses.

This operation has another purpose. As far as we know, the key toads’ star systems are connected by transport rings, or hyperportals, as they are called in the Empire. We need to find and destroy these devices. Modern toads can’t build them, and if we succeed in destroying the portals, we will deprive the enemy of mobility and gain a decisive advantage in this matter.”

“I see another plus in this version of the plan,” added Knyazev, who clearly liked the suggestion, “that such a strike can be prepared quickly. It would not require a giant fleet. After the defeat in the Delta Trianguli system, the toads are clearly short of ships, which means that they can only counter us with stationary defense systems, as a result, they are unlikely to be able to effectively protect their transport rings, always located far away from the planets.”

Nelson was silent for a while, and then he grinned faintly at the corner of his lips and abruptly changed the subject adopting an official tone.

“Late last night, a conference of the heads and top military leaders of the Allied nations was held via hypercomms. It was about our future plans together, but the operation that ended with the battle in the Delta Trianguli system was also discussed. Your actions, Fleet Admiral, Sir, were highly appreciated by all participants of the meeting. The President of the Earth Federation, the Senior Lizard and the Headman of the Quargs have instructed me to inform you of their joint decision. You have been appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet by the Council of Heads of State. You are tasked with planning and executing a strategic operation to capture enemy star systems and force the adversary to surrender. During the preparation and conduct of the operation, the general staffs of the armed forces and the heads of military-industrial complexes of the allied states are ordered to give you every assistance as a matter of priority. Congratulations, Igor,” Nelson suddenly switched back to his usual tone, lowering his voice slightly, “It really is an honor and a great trust. However, you know it as well as I do.”

* * *

We had a meeting of the Chiefs of Staff and the Allied war industry ministers the very next day. I knew the military-industrial potential of the Federation and the lizards quite well, but the capabilities of the quargs really shocked me. After listening to Head Kosh who led the military-industrial complex of our former enemies, I clearly understood the danger we had got rid of by avoiding further confrontation with the quargs. Now I understood how the quargs managed to rebuild their defeated fleets at such a fast rate. Yes, technologically they lagged behind the Federation in many respects, but they far exceeded us in production and shipbuilding capacity. The amount of extracted and processed resources they produce, our industry could not even dream of. This is what can be achieved when the economy is fully mobilized for military purposes. About this I once told Tobolsky, but at the time the highest officials of the Federation were not too inclined to listen to me. Well, all that power was now ready to work for us, willingly and enthusiastically, and I wasn’t going to pass up opportunities that fell into my hands.

According to my calculations, ten to 15 Black Dragons accompanied by a large unit of «Invisibles» and other drone torpedo carriers would be enough to raid the toads’ systems. At this point we only had two Black Dragons, and they were under repair, but with our newfound capabilities, we could build the right number of ships in a couple of months. Unfortunately, the discontinued supply of components from the Empire reduced the combat characteristics of the new ships somewhat, but just somewhat, because we were already quite capable of producing the protective field generators and plasma weapons ourselves, albeit less advanced than the Imperial ones.

The situation was worse with the camouflage field generators. We managed to get quite a few of these generators from the Empire, enough to equip many dozens of ships, but we also used imperial generators for drone torpedoes, and torpedoes, as you know, are disposable. So now the torpedoes will inevitably have to be equipped with camouflage devices of our own making, which were very inferior to the imperial ones, and that meant their consumption will be much higher than in the last battle. However, I planned to solve this problem by using giant quarg aircraft carriers as torpedo carriers.

The quargs were also to take over 70 percent of the torpedo production. The Federation was left with the sole responsibility of manufacturing electronic warfare systems and warheads with disposable plasma weapons. The lizards supplied the auxiliary engines, and everything else, including the final assembly of the torpedoes, was taken care of by the quargs.

With this approach, we could have provided our entire fleet with torpedoes in the time we had left.

* * *

About a week after the first part of the operation plan was approved, I got a call on my tablet from Lit-ta.

“Good to see you, Admiral,” I smiled at the image of the lizard on the screen.

“Hello, Igor,” Lit-ta was very serious, but that didn’t stop her from addressing me by my name, “you’ve climbed so high now, so I’m tempted to ask if you can give me some of your time.”

That was an astonishing politeness for the lizards, who simply do not accept such curtsies. But knowing this cunning reptile quite well, I guessed that she was just slightly mocking me, not maliciously, but just for fun.

“I always have time for you, Lit-ta, you know that,” I grinned back.

“Who can understand you, people,” the lizard showed me her forked tongue, “sometimes you get so blown away by the career ladder that you become unrecognizable.”

“Isn’t that how it works with the lizards?” I was genuinely interested.

“It happens. It’s true, mostly in males, but it’s a rare phenomenon for them, too. Don’t get worked up, I’m just in a good mood.”

“Yeah, I see it”

“I have something new for you to look at,” Lit-ta nodded her head, “Especially since your woman had a hand in it.”

So that’s where Inga has been for the past week. She was begging Jeff for a business trip to the lizards, but she didn’t tell me much about it. Her acquaintance with Lit-ta seems to have had an unexpected sequel.

“Are you inviting me to visit again?”

“No. You don’t have to use the portal this time. Your Inga told me that you would enjoy flying to Ganymede to visit Colonel General Schiller. For old time’s sake, he agreed to provide Major Lavroff with the Academy’s range and a unit of cadets to test our innovations.”

“Lit-ta, didn’t Inga tell you how the last such event on this range ended?”

“Of course she did, she was a direct participant in those events. We and the humans have a very similar sense of humor, Igor, and your woman has a very talented way of telling army tales. Honestly, I would love to see the place where all this was going on and the General who allowed this whole circus to take place on his training ground.”

“Lit-ta, I owe a lot to this General.”

“I see,” Lit-ta showed me her tongue again.

I last saw the Chief of the Planetary Commando Academy when I was still at the rank of Lieutenant General. In fact, I was very grateful to Inga for the chance to see again this now old officer, who had done so much for me during a very difficult period in the beginning of my military career and the first steps of the Lavroff Weapons Company.

In all the whirlwind of preparation for the raid on the star systems of the toads, I had somehow lost sight of the changes that have occurred around my humble person in connection with my new assignment. And changes, as it turned out, did take place.

Colonel General Schiller, of course, has not forgotten how once Igor Lavroff stood before him for the first time in the company of four other similar candidates and tried to prove to the Head of the Academy that he was worthy of becoming a cadet at the Planetary Commando Academy. But now from the Admiral’s boat, which had landed on the edge of the school’s plaza, emerged not a cadet, but Fleet Admiral Igor Lavroff, Commander-in-Chief of the combined allied forces, accompanied by Admiral Lit-ta, who had led the lizard squadron in the last battle.

And as he was visited by such guests, the Colonel General was not going to miss the opportunity to squeeze the maximum pedagogical benefit out of this visit for the cadets of his Academy, which had long been his life’s work.

The parade of cadets and military equipment, the Academy anthem, the appearance of the color guard… In general, I didn’t remember being greeted like that anywhere else.

But I haven’t forgotten anything, either: my assignment as an instructor when I was a first-year cadet, the provision of the guarantee in court when my fate hung in the balance, the assistance in the development and testing of the first samples of new weapons, I remembered a lot more as I was going to Ganymede.

I remembered, and for the first time exercised the right that President Tobolsky had once granted me by his personal decree. After looking at my reflection in the mirror, I came to the conclusion that the uniform of a commando general suited me better than that of a fleet admiral.

We walked along the frozen line of cadets. I didn’t know what Inga was thinking, and I certainly couldn’t imagine how Lit-ta was looking at this action, but just now I clearly realized that everything I said about being no longer an Imperial general, but a citizen of the Earth Federation was true. I felt like I was back home.

General Schiller marched out to meet me, but I was not going to wait for his report, as a senior in rank and position should. I stood at attention and was the first to salute the Colonel General.

Chapter 2

They fell silently right out of the clear midday sky. There was no howling of engines, no roar of air being torn, and no clouds of plasma around the nose fairings. Only fuzzy blurry points, poorly distinguishable even in the visible spectrum, rapidly increasing in size as they were getting closer. When they were detected by the scanners of the commando company, which held the defense of the conventional fortified area, it was too late – a dense volley of light plasma cannons has already hit the positions of the cadets.

“60 percent of the defensive personnel and equipment have been taken out of action,” unemotionally stated the range computer. The attackers suffered no losses. I couldn’t even name what was falling from above onto the Planetary Commando Academy range, though the word «creatures» flashed in my mind at the first glimpse of the attackers’ battle lines.

Inga wasn’t there; she was commanding the landing party, just like last time, and Lit-ta was just staring impassively at the projection screen, with occasional brief glances in my direction. General Schiller seemed at a loss for words and only gloomily watched the continuing beating of the cadet company. The best company in his Academy, by the way. Two-thirds of his men and robots had already been computed into losses and were frozen motionless in the places where they had met their conventional death or destruction. But the Head of the Academy did not teach his cadets for nothing. The remnants of the company remained combat-ready and now met the attackers with heavy fire, trying to organize a flexible mobile defense of the fortified area.

I wasn’t too interested in the outcome of the battle, especially since, despite the cadets’ stubborn and quite skillful resistance, they didn’t stand a chance. I looked at the attackers with interest. This, it turns out, is what my wife has been so enthusiastic about lately at the lizards’ planet, which Jeff and Professor Stein have also visited several times. For some reason they did not tell me about their venture, though, perhaps they were right, as I was frankly not up to it lately.

I’ve seen a similar equipment before. When we first came into contact with the lizards, it was such «dinosaurs» that met in a deadly battle with quarg combat robots on the planets of Iota Persei, the star system of Lit-ta, then Governor General. But they were not exactly the same. Those biological machines didn’t have the plasma cannons, camouflage field generators, or even the light force shields that were present here. These beasts were as big as our Bisons, but they were not machines by human standards. Their hulls were grown rather than manufactured in factories, but the flexible and malleable living tissue, covered with thick segments of organometallic armor, coexisted in them with the smooth metal of the plasma cannons and with the grids of the force-field emitters. Technogenic elements fused with living tissue to form a single whole, and this symbiosis formed the strange and terrifying creatures now rushing toward the positions of the cadet company. As it turned out, these were only visible combinations of the technologies of two, or rather, even three races, representatives of one of which we had never seen. The interior of the «dinosaurs» concealed even more surprises.

“Why didn’t they burn up in the atmosphere during the landing?” asked the slightly recovered Colonel General, “They entered the atmosphere directly from space, without dropships or any protective gear.”

“Their bodies have a special organ for correction of gravitational attraction,” explained Lit-ta, “Approximately the same are used as engines for drone torpedoes and hybrid Black Dragon-class battleships. Only here they are very small and therefore low-power, otherwise they would take up too much space. So the ‘Theropods’ can’t fly, but they have enough power for controlled landings, as well as for long and high jumps during combat, as you may have already seen.”

“What did you call them? ‘Theropods’?” asked the General.

“Yes. This name was suggested by Major Lavroff. It seems that such predatory dinosaurs once lived on Earth.”

“it is quite suitable," agreed the General, as he continued to watch the gradually waning combat. In fact, only one commanding robot of one of the cadets and a pair of his surviving drones continued to operate. The robots skillfully used the folds of the terrain and the remnants of the defensive fortifications, they constantly changed positions and hit the encroaching ‘Theropods’ with all available weapons. Actually, they should have been clamped and destroyed long ago, but the cadet managed to slip away, he broke wawy himself each time and led his drones out of the shrinking ring of enemies.

“You train great fighters,” I smiled at General Schiller.

“It used to be easier,” the clearly flattered General grumbled back, “but now, after one troublesome cadet came in six years ago, I don’t have time to retrain the men on the new types of combat equipment. I’m not complaining, though, as I don’t get the news of my graduates’ deaths very often anymore.”

“Lit-ta, are these drones or manned machines?” I switched to another topic with a nod to Schiller.

“Neither, ” the lizard replied with a little hesitation, “It’s a pack with a leader.”

I didn’t expect such an answer. “Can you tell me more about that?”

“This is one of our latest developments,” Lit-ta turned to me and the General, “In principle, we have been developing the topic of artificially grown multilayer neural networks for a long time, but the real breakthrough came only recently, after our contact with you. You are also working in this direction, only you don’t grow neural networks, you simulate them with your computers. As it turns out, your theoretical work goes well with our pseudo-living neural clusters. Professor Stein, when we showed him our products, invited his former colleague from the Colonial Tech… However, these details are not so important. The bottom line is that the ‘Theropods’ are indeed unmanned, but they don’t require a constant, sustained communication link like your drones do. Their pseudo-brain consists of a very dense neural network grown by our bioengineers and trained in many thousands of training fights according to techniques compiled by your mathematicians. The result is an artificial brain with the rudiments of imitative intelligence. Of course, it is not a mind, but if you compare it to your animals, approximately it reaches the level of a very intelligent wolf, only obedient and perfectly trained. A wolf, as far as I know, is a pack animal, and any pack needs a leader. In the battle we just witnessed, Major Lavroff acted as the leader.”

“So a pack of ‘Theropods’ is capable of fighting on its own, even in conditions of complete suppression of communication channels?” General Schiller was interested.

“For a while, definitely. Even an individual ‘Theropod’ will continue to follow the last order received, or a predetermined sequence of orders. The set of these orders, of course, is limited, but the list is quite extensive. For example, you and I have seen the pack perform the task of capturing and mopping-up the territory. After receiving the order, the Theropods fought on their own. Major Lavroff did not interfere in the actions of her subordinates.”

“But the latest models of our drones can also continue to perform the received task in the absence of communication," I reminded Lit-ta, “This function is especially developed in boarding robots. How are the ‘Theropods’ better?”

“They’re better because we can produce millions of them a month, Admiral, as long as we have enough plasma cannons and protective and camouflage field generators," Lit-ta replied softly, “But now we have the quargs with their fantastic industrial power, so there won’t be a problem with that, I suppose.”

I nodded silently to Lit-ta and pulled out my communicator.

“Mr. Minister of Defense? Admiral Lavroff speaking. Do you have an opportunity to come to Ganymede? How urgent? Well, I think you should see this. I believe what we want to show you can make a big difference in the coming campaign. General of the Army Knyazev? Undoubtedly! His presence is also highly desirable. Thank you. We’ll be expecting you.”

“Nelson, Knyazev, Lavroff, Kotova, I beg your pardon, Major Lavroff…” General Schiller said thoughtfully, running his hand over the gray hair at the back of his head and taking out his communicator, “it surely reminds me of something… I think I’ll warn the Academy’s supervisor, General of the Army Vasnetsov, and the civilian administration of Ganymede as well, because, you know, anything can happen.”

* * *

General Las once again carefully reread his agent’s report. Dr. Silk’s trail was discovered in the Kappa Giyan star system, recently overrun by the toads but retaken from them during a counterattack, planned by Marshal Klink. The central planets of the system survived two landing parties, first by the toads and then by the Imperial forces, which knocked the «frogs» out of the cities and industrial areas they captured with heavy losses. To say that the infrastructure of the planets has suffered is to oversimplify the facts. Actually, all that was left there was ruins. The detritus of the multi-level cities were to be cleared and rebuilt for many months.

It was there, in the chaos and confusion of the front-line zone, that the elderly volunteer was found, succumbing to the wave of patriotic enthusiasm, caused by the hysteria in the media. He arrived from the central worlds of the Empire to help the authorities of the system to rescue people trapped in ruins and to rebuild destroyed cities and military facilities. It was quite reasonable, by the way, and plausible.

But Dr. Silk did not hold back, he could not keep away unnoticed, engaged in some low-key debris removal, when millions of affected civilians were in urgent need of medical care, and medical personnel and equipment were woefully lacking. The doctor remembered his younger years, when as a field medic he used to pull guys and girls back from the brink of death, those, who had been cut with plasma cutters from the warped armored compartments of the walking tanks after the battle.

The doctor opened himself up. He was still listed as Colweg, a service systems engineer, but the medical knowledge and experience of an unremarkable volunteer suddenly surfaced. He explained that he gained this knowledge while maintaining medical equipment, but it nevertheless drew the attention of the local security officials and, through them, of the General Las’ agent. After that, the issue of identifying the missing doctor was no longer a problem, and now Las knew exactly where to look for Silk, but it looked like the head of the Ministry of Defence security was too late after all.

A general toads’ offensive – a real one, not that invented by Shun’s journalists – struck the Empire’s peripheral systems entirely unexpectedly. The online clamor, extinguished by the assurances of the new acting commander-in-chief, has just subsided. There was even talk of a large-scale counterstrike by Admiral Dier’s staff, which again required a mobilization of all forces and reserves. But the toads were unwilling to play along with these plans. A simultaneous attack on seven star systems shocked the Empire’s fleet and army. Kappa Giyan had not yet been attacked, but Las was well aware that if this continued, its turn would come very soon.

“Major Tealc,” said the General into his communicator, “Get my ship ready for takeoff immediately. We’re going into the front zone, so provide an escort.”

“Three destroyers?” asked the Major.

“No,” Las hesitated for a second, “considering the situation, add an escort cruiser to them.”