"Battle Plan"
2nd Shendredie, 5 (2182)
Naomi Of Unity
Qutrok sits down beside me. "I've decided to abolish Rejoin MSI."
"Oh?"
"But I do have a condition."
"What it is it?"
"Naomi, you are Human and Xenayan. You are a warrior, a soldier, a predator. My people are none of those things. If I am to tell my people that we are going to war, to fire and death, I have to tell them exactly what is the plan. And why you believe it will work."
"You know my past."
"You were a prostitute."
"Yes. And it hurts. I have been treated like a toilet by thousands of Minamar, Qutrok. Thousands. Thousands who treated me like... Like..." Breathe. Control. Focus. Breathe. "They used me in two brothels. One was among the high leaders and dignitaries, the other on the docks of a shipyard. And while they were abusing my body, my mind was extracting all sorts of information from them as they let their guard down. Some true, some lies. Confirmed by memorising the MSI ship captain's guidance manual."
"I need to know how you got that manual."
"The ship captain of our slave ship was in dire straits fiscally, verging on bankruptcy if the slave ship venture failed. He was very stressed. And when a woman offered him comfort, relief, care, interest, and sexual pleasures, he couldn't help himself. And over time, I got him to tell me, and show me, things he was not supposed to reveal."
"And then killed him."
I hesitate a little. "While in a moment of intimacy, yes."
"You cold-hearted tlazsdaka."
His voice is shocked. I tap my synthesiser. "That last word didn't translate." Hmm. "On second thought, maybe I'm better off not knowing."
He cocked his head. "How did he die, exactly?"
I hesitate again. After all, Qutrok is a man... "Where do you think a prostitute strikes when she wants to kill a man?"
Qutrok looks at me, his feathers ruffling. "Forget I asked."
"Done. The point is, I know exactly how they will fight us. They will not drop soldiers down onto our world - they will send a Flagship and bombard us from orbit."
"So how can we fight back? I need the details, otherwise my people will not go along with it. They aren't impressed by oratory, we've been deceived by oratory before."
"There's numerous flaws in MSI's methodologies that enable a first-strike attack composed of missiles with highly trained infiltrators on board instead of warheads to successfully board capture the Flagship."
"You want to turn a space battle we can't win, into a ground battle we can win?"
"Precisely."
"How?"
"Do you know why I have vetoed every proposal to use the recovered shuttles from the ship?"
Qutrok thinks it through. "You're proposing to use them to lift men and materiel into space."
"Men and manufacturing capacity, not men and materiel. But essentially yes."
"But you had to wait until we would all go along with it."
"Yes. The shuttles are single stage to orbit capable; nothing else we have is. Building the infrastructure to make our own rockets is something we are only working on so far. We use the shuttles to send people, mining and manufacturing equipment up to our world's asteroidal ring, then build the missiles there."
"That sounds workable. How do you know it will succeed?"
"Imagine that this big fruit is our planet, these nuts are the various orbiting rocks around our world, and this fork is the enemy flagship. That they will send a Flagship is the key. In a ship to ship combat military role, they are immense artillery and hangar craft platforms. They are not intended to engage themselves, but to fight at extremely long range by strikecraft, with the guns blasting anything that gets too close. Corvettes and Destroyers are used to screen for missiles. However, that is only a secondary purpose of a MSI Flagship. Militarily, the main purpose is to intimidate pre-FTLs into surrender, and obliterate them from orbit if not. Now, bombarding through atmosphere isn't easy; energy weapons get diffracted while kinetics are slowed by friction and burn up. Which means the Flagship comes close. Like, clearly distinguishable from the planet below close."
Qutrok watches me move the fork inside the ring of nuts. "And too close to avoid missiles that are launched from asteroids in a ring."
"And it is also trivially easy to hide laser point defence weapons inside asteroids; generate the laser in the asteroids core while streaming the beam using mirrors out to turrets on the surface."
"Which means we can defeat the Flagship and the strikecraft."
"We're looking to capture it, not destroy it don't forget. We need it. I'm envisioning a three race attack strategy in boarding. Xenayan, Lokra-Kitan and Humans. I and Buri will lead the first wave, composed of Xenayans. Our job is to breach and sweep. We will fight our way to gravity control, and take it offline. Our Lokra-Kitan friends have extremely good spatial sense, and they can fly as well in zero gravity as they can in normal planetary gravities, while the Minamar will be floundering trying to figure out how to move; MSI doesn't train for zero gravity operations. Humans will follow and start taking over the ship's systems from Minamar control."
"Are you absolutely sure that boarding will work? Surely they will have soldiers aboard."
"Keep in mind that MSI are corporate slicks. They aren't soldiers. It costs them money and resources to train soldiers and have them on board ships. Ships which generally fight at extremely far distances; fighting can take place as far out as light-minutes away for launching strikecraft, while ship weapons fire at light-seconds away."
"How far is a light-second?"
I do the maths quickly. "Roughly 25 times the diameter of our world."
Qutrok's eyes go wide. "Very far."
"Yes. So out in the wider galaxy, there's almost never a case to have boarding trained soldiers. Never close enough to deploy them."
"But our circumstances just happen to line up."
"Exactly. Plus, being a Flagship, it will not have an experienced starship captain in command."
"Why not?"
"MSI shareholders like to have the prestige of leading Flagship missions. In their experience, colonies like ours break down badly - it's why they mix us up with other races, to try and make us factionalise and turn on each other. The shareholders bid for the prestige and reputation enhancement of being seen to deliver aid to former rebels who have decided to abandon rebellion and accept the mercy of MSI."
"They want the propaganda. The scheming little rats. Which indirectly answers why they won't send warships first I suppose."
"Yes, and why they will wait several years, maybe decades, before coming; they were once a media conglomerate, a very long time ago, and they still always keep an eye on public perception. But also, there's no need to send warships."
"The chances of a pre-FTL race managing to beat a Flagship are that remote. How would a non-unified, pre-spaceflight civilisation beat them?"
"Theoretically, you could use artillery, but sufficiently high velocity artillery would generally be gun-rocket hybrids to be sufficiently weaponiseable. The point I'm making is that they're arrogant and decadent. They won't see us as a threat. We will face someone who has likely never been in combat before, who's entire military knowledge is speed-reading the handbook, not realising he's facing someone who already memorised it."
"I do have one last question. What happens if they decide to go straight to planetary bombardment with the fleet?"
"Well, in the best case, we would capture ships by the same method as they too come close in to bombard us; in some ways, it would be easier. Flagships do have dedicated guards on board, but warships don't. Once we are on board, they will face the prospect of their formations falling into disarray, and because they are running by the book, and the book has no plan for what to do if your ships get boarded as it isn't a scenario that takes place, we can still defend ourselves. In the worst case of them sweeping away our weapons platforms with overwhelming force, we will lose."
"What can we do to prevent the latter?"
"The more weapons platforms we have in orbit, the better our chances. Our technology won't be as good, so we need huge numbers to win an attrition based slugging it out battle."
"Ok, let's say we win. We capture the flagship, fix the holes we drill to get in or fix the airlocks or however we punch through the hull. How can we stop MSI turning up in full force?"
"We have to keep changing the paradigm. Keep them off balance."
"How?"
"An individual rebellion that chooses to defend a single location, is easily crushed. The key advantage of a rebellion is that you can be mobile, and force your enemy to defend everywhere. We can no longer do that."
"Which is very bad for us."
"Yes. But what if they aren't facing one rebellion?"
Suddenly it clicks for him. "The soldiers you've been training. They aren't to defend our world at all, are they?"
She smiled. "Imagine the beautiful chaos a thousand people, trained to do anything I can do, would unleash."
Qutrok looks at me as he thinks it over. "You are completely mad. And the worst part is, you make sense."
"Qutrok, your issue is you have a prey mindset. You're thinking 'Oh no, I'm stuck in a room with MSI.' Me however, I'm not."
"You are thinking 'Oh yes, they are stuck in a room with me.'"
I smile, and hold his wing. "I refuse to be prey."
Qutrok trembles. "What... what kind of... demon are you?"
"I'm not a demon. Just a good woman, who has to do a lot of bad things."
