Empire
by Warringer
Chapter 7
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Hikaru von Bismark, President of the Interstellar Commonwealth, leaned back and closed his eyes for a moment. One again they were in a planning session about what to do now.
The only difference between the ones they had every hour since the transfer, this one was able to draw on actual information about where they were and especially when they were.
As he opened his eyes, he nodded at an aide who placed a tablet with sandwiches and a new can of coffee on the table. He sighed as he reached out for the can to refill his cup, before grabbing a sandwich.
"What did The Brain say," he asked John Patric Ryan junior, who was the current head of the Commonwealth Intelligence Agency, and bit down on the sandwich.
John sighed and took a sip of his coffee and looked down on the stack of papers in front of him.
"The Brain got us any data we needed," he said with a certain amount of pride.
The Brain had been his idea, through the actual design was one of the many TIT designs that were in use anywhere in the Commonwealth.
Essentially it was a vastly powerful quantum computer running a highly chaotic software to bombard any unknown computer or AI system with access codes trying to get entrance by sheer chance. Once The Brain was able to get a hardware access to continued to bombard the computer to force a connection. With the connection The Brain began to search for any command that was possible and filed down the responses of the computer.
Commonly The Brain needed at max two days to force access to any file on any, even completely unknown computer and get its secrets from it.
"And it needed less than three hours," he continued with a chuckle.
Hikaru raised an eyebrow and swallowed his bite.
"So we got all files already?"
John nodded.
"Yes. The Navigational informations are currently at Sandhurst to be translated into a star chart that we can use. We are currently working through our share of the informations."
He sighed.
"But it was Admiral Masaki who got us the main information about the 'when'," he said with a slight frown and looked at the clock standing in a corner." Just four hours ago, the first Death Star destroyed Alderaan and send a certain tremor through the force. But it seems that Dark Knight, her avatars and Setsuna were able to sense the thoughts of the dying people on Alderaan with such a force that even Admiral Masaki was able to sense it through his connection with his ship."
All other people around the table stared at John and Hikaru slowly placed his sandwich on the table and took a long sip of his coffee, closing his eyes to think for a moment.
For all he knew Palpatine could have already ordered the Death Star to investigate the 'tremor in the force' the transit of Eath had most likely caused.
He placed the cup on the table and looked straight at John.
"What about the psychological profile of Palpatine I asked you about. Were the Profilers able to take an educated guess?"
John sighed again and massaged the bridge of his nose.
"It very likely that he will first investigate us, if he sensed the transit, with a scout and than send in a larger force, maybe the Death Star. First he want to have the galaxy cower in fear and show them that its useless to rebel."
There was a short pause.
"He will go for Yavin IV before using the Death Star on any other target."
Hikaru nodded and leaned back again, the sandwich forgotten for the moment. He glanced over to Michael, the slightly twitchy member of The Race who happened to be the technological advisor of the President, a very capable engineer who had gone through the TIT and especially the Dooms Day Squad of insanes.
"Anything about the Empires capabilities on the military sector?"
The raptoid licked his lips for a moment, before looking at Hikaru, his tail twitching slightly.
"We can scratch the 200 Gigatons for once, Sir," he noted with a little satisfaction. Considering that Michael was a Trekker, it was not too surprising. It also caused some of the Star Wars fans among his staff and the Joint Chiefs to groan a little.
"We can rate the turbolasers of the Imperium I class SDs to be the equivalent to our heavy plasma bolters, through we still need to find out what they really are. The DDS thinks that we are looking for some form of coherent particle or coherent plasma weapon.
"Their Ion Cannons are more a form of EM weapon, firing a directed stream of ionized particles that contain a massive charge and knock out any unshielded system. It also has a very bad influence on out type of shielding, worse than any Minbari EM weapon."
This got a few nods from all around.
"Than we have the defensive capabilities. For one the shields. We know that they got particle and ray shielding, two specialized forms of shielding. Because of that specialization, any particle or ray shield generator is about twice as powerful as a pure quantum shielding generator of the same size. But there are the limitations of that system of shielding however that causes the shield to work both ways.
"Armor wise they are better than anything we know from our universe, but less good than the Commonwealth. Considering the weakness of their shields they managed to come up with a very effective armor. The DDS thinks that we are dealing with the equivalent of the Carbonat III armor. The Tyrannic got at least five meters of that armor.
"They are lacking dedicated Point Defense however and use their light anti-capital lasers and turbolasers against fighters.
"Bottomline is that an ISD can take on a Lupo with a fifty-fifty chance of winning and are to be rated as Cruiser."
Hikaru nodded. He knew that a well trained crew in a Cruiser could be worth any Battle Cruiser. And the Empire had thousands of ISDs and the Commonwealth had only about a thousand ships of Cruiser size and above. Everything else was smaller.
"Now we need to deal with the Death Star," he said after sighing again." There is no way of knowing if the Rebel Alliance really manages to destroy it. For all we know it could go horribly wrong."
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"You need HOW many fighters to do WHAT WHERE?"
Admiral Ryan wasn't able to exactly say who had asked that question, but considering the plan, it was very understandable.
"I want half of our fighter, bomber and interceptor squadrons, twice as many Space Jets and assorted small craft, all our carriers, all our AEGIS vessels and all Von Braun's to attack the First Death Star at Yavin IV. And I want them to carry as many Ghostrider Pods as possible."
Repeating her words only caused the remaining Admirals of the Fleet to fall back into the surprised mute shock they had been in earlier.
"The Death Star?" one of the Admirals asked again and Ryan nodded.
Even more than seven decades after the first release of the Star Wars movies, they had retained a good backing of fans and just about everyone on Earth and a good part of the members of the Commonwealth knew what the Death Star was. That the Dooms Days Squad at the TIT still tried to figure out how to get the Deparment of Defense to build one.
Everyone remembered seeing the Death Star one-shoting a planet, something even the Vorlons needed several of their Planet destroyers to do.
Ryan knew that something like the Death Star build with the technology of the Commonwealth would be possible and much more deadly than the one they were about to face. But on the other hand it would waste a massive amount of resources the DoD was not willing to pay. Especially if they could get a large fleet of Warlocks and Victories for the same prize tag and be able to split them up.
The DDS still tried to go the 'forward resupply base' route, but that was futile since the Hiigaras were already deployed in that role.
"Why?"
"The Death Star already destroyed Alderaan, Yavin IV might be the next because of our mere presence and Earth could be the next on the schedule. Besides its an order of the President."
Again the briefing room descended into silence.
"What is the plan?"
Ryan smirked a little.
"Reinforcing the Rebels at Yavin IV and get into the fray when the Death Star arrives. The opening salvos would be the entire load of the Ghostriders and the Von Braun's missiles, aimed at the focusing array of the Superlaser.
"Than the fighters and small craft make sure to bomb the surface installations and get Rouge Squadron the time to drop their load into the ventilation shaft. But maybe we are lucky and get a chain reaction between the Superlaser and the reactor, blowing the whole thing up."
"It has to have shields," Ramsey noted dryly from where he was sitting, not as shocked into silence as the rest of the commanding officers of the Fleet." How about those."
"The spooks of TNI think that Tarkin is not going to activate the shields until the very last moment. That puppy got a shield the strength of a planetary shield."
There were a few nods.
"How about adding the Kushans and Rattlesnakes? They are snipers and should be able to fire from bejond the Death Stars capital engagement range."
"Fallback plan," Ryan noted." They remain here at Earth in case Palpatine is going to send the Death Star our way."
"That would be bad..."
Ryan rolled her eyes.
"Thank you, Admiral Obvious..."
Admiral Andreas Obvious, Commander of the 25th Task Fleet just grinned.
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This had to be one of the strangest missions Lieutenant Commander Marvin Dridan had ever flown.
He breathed in deep and licked his lips as he stared out into the strange nothingness that was Slipstream. Slowly his glance drifted down upon the displays in front of him and checked the informations he got from them.
His breathing and the low rumble of the Slipstream drive were the only things he heard and preferred to hear while he speed through slipstream at more than four million times the speed of light.
The silence and the nothingness outside were great if you wanted to think. In a way it was very much like a Zen meditation.
He closed his eyes for a moment, preparing for the last minute of slipstream before he was about to fall back into normal space, just outside the orbit of a planet called Alderaan. He didn't really know how to take it, but it seemed that Earth had dropped in the Wild Space area of the Mid Rima few thousand lightyears away from Zonama Sekot.
It was a bit ironic that they had fled one galactic war only to drop by in the beginning stages of another galactic war. And now he had been ordered to scout out the Alderaan system, trying to determine if the Death Star was still there and how many time the Pentagon had to call together a large attack force to send towards Javin.
He glanced at the timer. Ten seconds until he left slipstream then it was time to step on it and get as fast as possible, and being the pilot of an SR-171B, he could get very close to light speed.
A red light flashed up and not a moment later the nothingness of slipstream was exchanged with the star scape of the Galaxy Far Far Away. While he pushed the throttle up to the maximum, he glanced out into space, noting that the light of the galaxies core was very good to see from here.
He flipped a switch and the sophisticated sensory equipment of his plane went to work. Not even a moment later he could see a massive metallic object exactly in his course vector and nudged the sidestick to the left for a moment, enough that his Blackbird would pass it in a distance of little more than thousand kilometers and get very good reading of the powerful sensors.
The sensors where so advanced that the people back on Earth could tell any surface structure of the Death Star down to ten meters. But he knew that Professor Habuki and Skunk Works had worked on the design of this plane and its systems, so it was not surprising that the sensors were so powerful.
In front of him he could literally see how the icon representing the Death Star grew on his HUD before he passed it at more than .5c.
Even if they had seen him it was very unlikely that they could do anything against him.
Time for a second pass, he thought and pushed his planet into a curve of several million kilometers diameter and pushed for the Death Star a second time.
As he passed the massive Weapon of Planetary Destruction a second time he chuckled a little as he noted a small object lighting up on his board that speed away from the Station at high speed, through not nearly as fast as his Blackbird.
Grinning he flipped a second switch and targeted the small object that could only be the Millennium Falcon and set of a focused radio message on a Rebel frequency, encoded and encrypted by Kyle Kartan, telling the Rebellion that they would get some help to destroy the Death Star.
He chuckled a little more. It seemed that the Millennium Falcon used to be the fastest ship in the galaxy. Now that title belonged to the SR-171 Blackbird II and the Bahamut class.
Than he nodded to himself and with a few hand movements ordered the navigation system to calculate the course home and angled his Blackbird into the direction indicated and activated his Slipstream system again.
The entire operation had only lasted ten minutes of doing two flybys of the Death Star and taking as many readings a possible, while leaving the Imperials wondering what the hell was going on.