to you by your immediate superior. Now you may be excused, Rear Admiral.”
When the door closed behind Lavroff, the President turned his eyes towards the Minister of Defense.
“And what do you think of all this, Mr Bronstein?”
“I’m very afraid he’s right, Ivan Sergeyevich. He’s a cheeky green upstart, but I kind of like him. I’ve never been like this myself, although, frankly, I sometimes wanted to.”
“Stop messing me around, Mr Minister. Do you realize that if he’s right, we need to urgently redirect almost half the military-industrial complex to produce the «Invisibles», pursuite planes, drone torpedoes and these segments of the transport rings not yet even tested.”
“I’ve already told Lavroff that I consider this a pure venture. But I find it hard to object when he pushes in my face the results of his previous, no less adventurous actions. And he’s right about that, surprisingly. But all of his previous operations were incomparable in scale with what he wants to do now. Even if they had ended in total failure, there would have been no catastrophe, and now… If he’s wrong or something goes wrong, we’ll have instead of a balanced fleet a strange assemblage of ships with a clear shortage of heavy streamers and an abundance of highly specialized ships, that not all commanders are able to use normally in combat. And the transport rings? We haven’t yet seen any prototypes, except for the small ring that Lavroff used to launch a tiny steel cylinder from the Barnard’s Star system. It’s not serious, Mr President. We cannot base our defence policy solely on this preliminary result. The stakes are too high.”
“In this war the stakes were always high,” replied Tobolsky, rubbing his chin with his palm, “You’re wrong, by the way, that Lavroff’s failure wouldn’t have been a disaster for us. I was shown the other day a curious report on a retrospective analysis that a group of members of my renewed security team did. There’s a lot of detail in the report about mathematical modeling, so I didn’t read it completely, but Ignat gave me a brief version with the conclusions… I think it would be good for you to see them, too.”
The Minister of Defense opened the file he received, and for a while he carefully read the text on the tablet screen, after which he looked at the President, and Tobolsky saw a mixture of surprise and confusion in his eyes.
“I think I understand now, Mr President, why you didn’t really punish Lavroff for his arbitrary actions. Eight months ago… So, according to this report, we’ve been alive for eight months because of his adventures?”
“Well, I wouldn’t make it that simple. He couldn’t have done it alone, but we couldn’t have done it without him. I didn’t believe it at first either, but the results in the report were double-checked several times by different analysts. It all fits.”
“So you’ve made up your mind, Mr President?”
“Do we have a choice?”
“Do you have such faith in Lavroff and his prognoses?”
“I do or I don’t believe it, what difference does it make? I see the results, I know that this man in the Battle of Groombridge saved the lives of three hundred million Federation citizens, myself included, and he developed the idea of the whole operation and personally participated in it. Now Lavroff has come to us to save hundreds of millions, maybe billions. He’s already proven he has every chance to do it. Are you, Mr Minister, ready to tell him «no»?”
Kappa Ceti was the seventh quarg system in which Yoon Gao’s ship arrived, on the basis of information obtained from captive quargs who managed to get rid of the block. Rear Admiral Lavroff had given the scouts two tasks. First, they should have gotten information about what the quargs were preparing for, and what they were so careful to hide in the central regions of their star systems. The second part of the task was directly related to captured men and lizards. During interrogations, some quargs had nothing to say about where they were held, other quargs pointed to three widely dispersed stars, which may have detention centres on the planets. Two of these scouts have already visited, but they haven’t found anything useful. There were only small orbital plants, and there were no terraformed planets.
Kappa Ceti was different from anything Yoon Gao’s men had seen before. The yellow dwarf, very similar to the Sun, glowed just a little fainter than its earthly counterpart. A pair of gas giants, heavily overflowing with the industrial infrastructure of the quargs, immediately suggested that the enemy was operating here on a large scale.
The new unmanned reconnaissance probes, equipped with lizard engines and the best EW systems from engineer Jeff, spread across different vectors, scanning the situation in the system. Six hours later, they came back.
“The same shit,” swore Mbia, looking at another shipyard with an almost complete aircraft carrier on a projection screen, “They’ve almost stopped building their giant battleships, but they’ve done at least two dozen of these troughs, because we probably haven’t seen everything.”
“Note, André, the ship is ready,” commented Yoon Gao on the scout’s observation, “I wouldn’t be surprised if it leaves the dock today or tomorrow. Look, they’re loading pursuit planes into it… stop! They’re not pursuit planes, Lieutenant Colonel. It’s something bigger, but not torpedo bombers.”
Yoon Gao enlarged the image and finally recognized the outlines of the ships that were slowly loaded into the belly of the enemy aircraft carrier. They were ships, not pursuit planes.
“I remember them. These are probe carriers for anti-torpedo networks, part of a system for protecting heavy ships from torpedo attacks. They’re being loaded into an aircraft carrier, so the quargs are not going to use them for defense. Our «Invisibles» will get a nasty surprise, André.”
“Yoon, notice where this dock is,” thoughtfully said Mbia, “It’s not near the gas giant, as is usually the case with us and the quargs. They dragged it to the third planet, a central part of the system. Apparently, they didn’t want us to see it. It was the same in other places, and we were all wondering why they were building aircraft carriers in such a secret. Yeah, well, these ships are a lot bigger than we’ve been used to, but an aircraft carrier is not a battleship, the size of the aircraft carrier doesn’t really matter. Looks like it wasn’t about the size, it was about the stuffing.”
“Well, they’re building battleships, too, but the quargs are intentionally placing the shipyards with battleships on the outskirts of star systems. This is all very bad. I wish we could have built a chain of hyper-beacons, as we did last time, they would have known about this threat on Earth by now. We have to get back quickly.”
“We’re not done here yet, Yoon,” Mbia has shaken his head, “The second part of the task has not yet been accomplished. Let’s see what the other probes have brought.”
Kappa Ceti’s first planet was of no value to the scouts. A stone ball, like Mercury, spinned at a short distance from the star, turning towards it with one side, on which the eternal fire day reigned. The quargs did not even try to go there, limiting themselves to sluggish activities on the night side of the planet, where they apparently found something useful for themselves, but not enough to be overzealous.
The probe then skirted the star and reached the second stone ball circling the local yellow dwarf at a much slower pace, and it was much more interesting for the quargs, and therefore for Mbia with Yoon Gao. There was no artificial sun in the orbit of the planet. Apparently, Kappa Ceti’s natural radiation was enough to create acceptable conditions on the surface. However, the quargs have obviously worked on the atmosphere of this planet, because normally such small planets do not have such a representative air coat. The probe’s
