Of course, the hundred warships accompanying the Voice would probably be a fair bit more impressive.
He expected that the Caliphate’s politicians were right, and they would have a victory without firing a shot. All the admiral would require of the colony would be a formal treaty of alliance, no large matter for a planet so far removed from the rest of human space.
Just enough to keep the Caliphate’s rivals at bay.
The admiral steepled his fingers as he waited for the klaxons to announce their last tach-jump. He wondered idly if any of the command staff at attention in front of and below the command dais were as happy as he about the prospect of a largely peaceful mission. The admiral was a veteran of conflicts on Rubai and Waldgrave, and he was not a timid commander, but the Prophet’s Voice was a brand new flagship. Many of its hallways still smelled faintly of new paint.
Not only a new ship, but a new ship design. The Caliphate had spent an unprecedented amount of time and treasure in the creation of the Ibrahim-class of carriers, each with its own fleet of warships, fifty tach-capable vessels and another fifty short-range fighters, all attached to the great ship like parasitic young.
In addition, the Ibrahim-class of carrier had the largest and most sophisticated tach-drive in existence. Until the Caliphate’s engineers built the antimatter-fueled monstrosities filling the guts of these new carriers, the limits of existing tach-drives peaked out at twenty light-years and 256c—and that only effectively reachable by ships a third of the Voice’s mass, without the attached warships.
The Voice’s tach-drives showed a fourfold increase in speed, mass, and distance. It could clear eighty light-years in a jump that took only slightly over twenty-eight days standard. Even if the drives sucked the energy equivalent of a small sun, it placed every world in human space in tactical reach of the Caliphate. Including the far-flung colonies seventy light-years past Helminth.
The potential of the new warships was limitless.
However, the admiral was very much aware that the potential was untested. It was distressing how quickly the Voice and her sisters were promoted from an abbreviated shake-down into active duty. When the orders came for this mission nearly six months ago, the Voice was still being constructed. It had been barely three weeks since the last of the construction crew had left the ship.
The admiral was keenly aware of the rush to space-worthiness. They had not even been able to test the power-hungry tach-drives at their full capacity.
Not until this moment.
The Voice was the last of the four to dive out toward the worlds clustered around Xi Virginis. Their target was a small world eight light-years away from that star, and right at the theoretical outer limit of the Voice’s massive drives from their current position.
The crew functioned admirably under the gaze of so many command officers. He was proud of having his people perform so well after the bare-bones training they were forced through to fully man the Voice in such a short time frame. Checklists were completed, final broadcasts made through the ship, the last engineering details were triple-checked and the navigation team ran the final models on the massive computer cores that pondered the longest tach-jump in human history.
The complicated electronic ballet concluded with a chorus of “Ready” cascading across the bridge, starting at navigation, through communications, environmental and weapon systems, and finally ending with Captain Gamal Rasheed, the commander of the Voice and therefore the highest ranking member of the battle group under Admiral Hussein. The captain turned to him and said, “All stations report we are prepared to jump.”
The admiral nodded. “Give the order, Captain.”
“Engage the tach-drive.”
Date: 2526.5.10 (Standard) Earth-Sol
Sydney was probably about as far as one could get from Rome and still remain on the same planet—not only geographically, but in spirit. Where the Vatican, and most of Europe, seemed to embody the roots of mankind, its ties to Earth, the Australian city seemed the reverse, aggressively tying itself to the star-flung traces of humanity. It still wore its history as the capital of the old Confederacy.
Once the nominal seat of the last attempt at a universal human government, and more than 250 years old, the Confederacy Tower stabbed a kilometer-long finger into the Australian sky. It dominated this city the way it had once dominated all of known space.
To Cardinal Anderson, the building seemed to reach beyond the bounds of Earth, a modern Tower of Babel that was still, in a sense, caught in a slow motion collapse that began 175 years ago. The power still held by the building was represented by the extensive diplomatic compounds that clustered near it. The embassy and consulates here had remained in continual operation even through the collapse of the old Confederacy. No place else would anyone find representatives from more human colonized planets. Across all of human space, there were probably only a dozen planets that didn’t have a diplomat here. And that was including the cluster of colonies around the star Xi Virginis.
Cardinal Anderson stood on a balcony of one of those diplomatic compounds. The Vatican had had a token embassy here from the days of the Confederacy; it was a small structure on the fringes of the diplomatic hive surrounding the spire reflecting its unique status. Even before man had left the bounds of Earth, the Vatican had the strange distinction of having all the functions of a state without most of the secular trappings of that authority. It had been near a millennium since the Bishop of Rome had commanded a nonspiritual army.
However, in some ways, the Church was more powerful now than it had been then. He certainly doubted a request from any other entity would have sufficed to gather together the people meeting here tonight.
He stood and watched as the sun set behind the massive spire, backlighting it so that its silhouette parted the sky as if the clouds were a pair of theater curtains just beginning to open, revealing something dark behind them.
“Your Grace?” came a voice transmitted into the office behind him.
“Yes?” he responded without turning around.
“Mr. Xaing from the Indi Protectorate has just arrived.”
“Thank you. Let the representatives know I’m on my way down.”
He turned away from the shadowed spire caught between a sense of satisfaction at bringing this meeting to fruition and a sense of foreboding over what he had to impart.
Twelve people waited for him downstairs. He had called on representatives not just from the large states of the Indi Protectorate, the Centauri Alliance, and the Sirius Economic Community, but he also invited diplomats from the Union of Independent Worlds, and had even appealed to the nonhumans of the Fifteen Worlds.
When he walked into the conference room in the basement of the Vatican consulate, he faced representatives from every transplanetary government outside of the Caliphate itself. As he walked up to the head of the table, a holo of the Caliphate’s newest Ibrahim-class carrier was projected above the long axis of the table. It was sobering to think this ship was as massive as the Confederacy spire itself.
“Thank you all for coming. I know the logistics of this meeting were complex, but the willingness of your governments to meet here should illustrate the gravity of this situation.”
A dozen pairs of eyes focused on him with emotions that ranged from support from the Vatican’s nominal allies, Centauri and Sirius, to enigmatic disinterest coming from the inhuman eyes belonging to the canid from the Fifteen Worlds, to outright hostility coming from the camp of Indi and the Independent Worlds.