Ambition (27 page)

“I may have misjudged Yang Wen-li. That he’d employ such blatant propaganda, calling us pawns of the empire—there was no need to show us that degree of contempt.”

The entire group nodded vigorously. Seeing this, Greenhill continued. “We started this ourselves. It was facilitated by Rear Admiral Lynch’s returning from the empire and giving us such a marvelous strategic plan. Marquis von Lohengramm had nothing to do with it. That’s so, isn’t it, Lynch?”

Lynch’s eyes, glazed over with drunkenness, burned red. From the face he made, it looked as though he had been seized by some sort of powerful urge. “I’m honored by your praise, but it wasn’t me who came up with that strategy.”

“What?!” An ominous look of doubt spread obliquely across Admiral Greenhill’s face. After a few seconds’ hesitation, he asked, “Then who? Who came up with such an accomplished plan?”

A considerable moment of silence passed between this question and its response.

“Marquis Reinhard von Lohengramm, imperial marshal of the Galactic Empire.”

“W-what did you say?!”

“Yang Wen-li is right. This coup was the brainchild of the Marquis von Lohengramm, the golden brat himself. He wanted to cause infighting within the alliance while he was settling things with the aristocracy in the empire’s civil war. You’ve all been manipulated.”

“You’re saying you’ve had us dancing in the palm of von Lohengramm’s hand all along?” The voice of the asker was hoarse and cracking.

“That’s right,” Lynch jeered, his voice full of venom. “And you all put on a great performance for us. Idiots like Captain Christian did too, of course, but so did you, Admiral Greenhill.”

Borne aloft on breath that reeked of alcohol, an invisible imp leapt about the room, pricking hearts with his spear as he went. Somebody let out a groan.

“Have a look at this. This is the strategic plan Marquis von Lohengramm gave me.” A small, slim file folder flew from Lynch’s hand and made a dry slap as it landed on the desk. Greenhill snatched it up and flipped through the pages.

“But, Arthur, why did you get on board with von Lohengramm’s schemes? What did he offer you that was so tempting? Did he promise to make you a full admiral in the Imperial Navy?”

“There was that, too …” Lynch’s tone quavered as he spoke; it kept rising and falling abruptly. The man himself made no visible effort to rein it in. “But that’s not all. I’m not gonna name names, but let’s just say I wanted to heap humiliation on certain people who are sure that they’re always in the right and never doubt it. The kind of humiliation that can never be explained away. As for what would become of my career track, or even my life, I just didn’t care anymore.”

Lynch’s red eyes drank in the gleam of all the others’ horrified expressions. “So how about it, Admiral Greenhill? How does it feel to know that this glorious bill of goods called the Military Congress for the Rescue of the Republic was nothing but a tool for an ambitious schemer in the empire?”

His words trailed off, becoming a laugh. That grotesque, arrhythmic laughter ate away like acid at everyone’s spirits. This man, who’d dragged his own name through the mud when he fled El Facil, who’d spent nine years in inexcusable alcoholic dissolution—had he nursed this grudge, with nobody to direct it at, that entire time?

“Mister Chairman! The enemy’s attack has begun,” the comm officer called out in a stiff voice. This thawed the frozen gathering. Greenhill turned around and let out a voice like someone waking from a nightmare.

“Which of the twelve satellites are they attacking?”

The note of perplexity in the response was clear. “… They’re attacking all twelve at once, sir.”

The assembled group all exchanged glances. There was more bewilderment than surprise in their faces. The twelve satellites, moving freely in orbit, had the ability to defend and support one another. For this reason, it made sense to attack multiple satellites simultaneously, though that did run the risk of dissipating force projection. But all twelve at once? That defied all common sense. What was Yang Wen-li thinking?

The screen came on, displaying objects moving on straight paths through space toward the satellites. When the nature of those objects became clear, a buzz spread through the room.

“Ice …”

Admiral Greenhill groaned. They were enormous—huge blocks of ice far larger than any battleship.

Three hundred years ago. The Galactic Empire.

On Altair’s frigid seventh planet, there was a young man, a believer in representative government, who’d been forced into a mining job under conditions equivalent to slavery. His name was Ahle Heinessen.

He longed to escape the planet and build a new state among faraway stars for like-minded believers. The only thing standing in his way was a lack of materials to construct a starship and carry the people there.

One day, Heinessen saw a child playing with a toy ship, carved from ice, that the kid had made. The young man was struck as though with a revelation.

He built a spacecraft from the inexhaustible supply of naturally occurring dry ice on Altair’s seventh planet and then embarked on a long, long voyage extending across fifty years of time and ten thousand light-years of space.

That was the shining legend of Ahle Heinessen, father of the Free Planets Alliance.

“I learned this tactic from the tale of our founding father, Heinessen.” Yang said this not out of pride but as a bit of wry humor.

The plan was as follows:

Srinagar, the Baalat system’s sixth planet, was a frigid world of ice. From its surface, a dozen cylindrical blocks of ice would be carved. Each block would have a volume of one cubic kilometer and a mass of a billion tons.

These carved cylinders of ice would then be transported into zero-gravity space, where the temperature approached 273.15 degrees Celsius—absolute zero.

At this point, the central cores would be bored through by laser, and Bussard ramjet engines would be installed.

These engines would project a gigantic, basket-shaped magnetic field in front of the cylinder to capture ionized, charged interstellar matter. As that matter drew near to the ice cylinder, it would be compressed and heated, and in an extremely short span of time, it would achieve the conditions for nuclear fusion to occur within the engine. When it was ejected from the rear of the cylinder, the exhaust would be at an energy level much greater than when it had entered through the front.

During this time, the uncrewed ice craft would continually, ceaselessly accelerate, and the closer they approached to the speed of light, the more efficiently they would draw in interplanetary matter. In this manner, the ice ships would attain near-luminal velocities.

Now, at this point, let us recall a basic fact of the theory of relativity: as matter approaches the speed of light, its effective mass increases.

For instance, the mass of a ship flying at 99.9 percent of the speed of light increases to approximately 22 times its original mass. At 99.99 percent of light speed, it reaches 70 times its original value, and at 99.999 percent, it becomes 223 times greater.

A one billion–ton chunk of ice, its mass increased by 223 times, achieves a mass of 223 billion tons. What would happen if an ice chunk with the same mass as three million sixty-story buildings combined collided with something at near light speed? The military satellites that comprised Artemis’s Necklace would be pulverized, with nary a fragment remaining.

However, to keep these chunks of ice from colliding with Planet Heinessen proper, their vectors of motion had to be set with extreme care. As all twelve satellites and all twelve ice blocks were uncrewed, though, not a single drop of blood would be shed.

“Any questions?”

Von Schönkopf applauded gently in response.

“You don’t mind us destroying all twelve?” he asked—sardonically suggesting that it might be best to leave a handful for future use.

“I don’t mind a bit. Let’s crush ’em all.” Yang brushed the issue away without hesitation. Artemis’s Necklace, Yang believed, constituted one of the reasons people had fooled themselves into thinking this coup would succeed.

This Necklace symbolized a shameful way of thinking: that Heinessen could survive alone, even if all the other star systems and all the other planets were subjected to enemy control. But if an enemy assault ever got this far, it would mean the alliance was just one step away from total defeat. Best to never let an enemy invasion advance so far—and the first consideration for that ought to be political and diplomatic efforts to avoid war from the outset.

The reliance on military hardware to maintain peace was nothing more than a product of the nightmares of hardened militarists. That kind of thinking was on the level of some solivision action program for small children.
One day, hideous and warlike aliens, without reason or cause, suddenly invaded from the far reaches of the universe, so the peace-loving, justice-loving humans had no choice but to fight back.
And for that purpose, mighty weapons and huge installations were required—so went the argument.

Every time he’d see that swarm of satellites encompassing this beautiful planet, Yang would fall into a foul mood, associating it with a snake constricting around a goddess’s throat.

In short, Yang had disliked the cheap costume jewelry that was Artemis’s Necklace for a long time, and he meant to take this opportunity to smash it to bits, with the added bonus of delivering shock therapy to the cult of hardware. He had thought up a number of ways to render Artemis’s Necklace impotent. But for these reasons, Yang had chosen the most spectacular method of them all.

The plan was set into motion.

The twelve gigantic blocks of ice sped toward the twelve military satellites.

It was a sight that beggared the imagination. As their speed increased, the frozen cylinders gained in mass, becoming ever more powerful weapons. The radar and sensor reconnaissance systems with which the satellites were furnished latched on to the rapidly closing ice blocks. They were neither energy waves nor metallic objects, but rather compounds of hydrogen and oxygen—in and of themselves, harmless. Even so, their mass and speed were regarded as threat factors, and the satellites’ computers took action.

A laser cannon locked its sights on an ice block and shot out a column of superheated energy. A perfectly circular hole three meters in diameter opened in the wall of ice. Not even a high-output laser cannon could pierce all the way through the ice, however. The laser’s characteristically strict unidirectionality impeded the spread of destructive effect, leading, conversely, to negative results. But that wasn’t all: a portion of the ice also vaporized, generating a large quantity of steam, which robbed the laser of heat energy. What’s more, in an absolute-zero vacuum, the steam refroze immediately as soon as it formed, transforming into a cloud of ice crystals that, in accordance with the law of inertia, continued to speed ahead at nigh-luminal velocities. Though missiles were fired and the flashes of their detonations lit up the surface of the icy mass, they, too, had no visible effect, having been shredded by passage through the crystals before striking the central mass.

On the bridge of Yang’s flagship
Hyperion,
the crew voicelessly watched this spectacle, and the communications officer’s head swam with the rapidly changing numbers displayed by the mass reader. The nearer the ice missiles approached the speed of light, the greater their mass swelled.

They collided.

The ice shattered. So did the satellites. Shards of ice danced in the void, reflecting sunlight and planetary light, casting a dazzling brilliance throughout the surrounding space. Each and every ice shard had hundreds of tons of mass. But as they glittered beautifully on the screen, one could believe they were lighter than snowflakes. The broken fragments of satellite were already indistinguishable.

“Annihilated … Artemis’s Necklace … has not a single satellite remaining … It’s been annihilated …”

In a state of distraction, the communications officer kept repeating the word “annihilated.” The members of the Military Congress for the Rescue of the Republic stood stock-still, as though transformed into pillars of salt.

They were starting to believe that word alone would echo in their ears forever when there came another sound—like a heavy object hitting the ground. Greenhill had collapsed into his chair. Amid the concentrated gazes of his comrades, he forced out in a hoarse voice:

“It’s all over. Our military revolution has failed. We’ve lost. Let’s admit it.”

After a few seconds’ interval, a cry of opposition arose. Captain Evens raised his voice and tried to encourage his co-conspirators.

“No, it is not over,” the captain insisted. “We have hostages. All of Heinessen’s one billion citizens are still in our hands.” He slammed his open palm onto the table. “On top of that, we’ve captured the director of Joint Operational Headquarters and the commander in chief of the space armada. Depending on the conditions, there’s a chance we can still negotiate. It’s still too soon to give up.”

“We have to quit. Any resistance beyond this will not only be futile, it will harm the reconciliation process between the government and the citizens. It’s already over. Let’s at least face the closing curtain gracefully.”