The Excalibur Alternative

"Watching Her Majesty... convince you of the error of your ways, Your Majesty," Maynton replied in a tone whose solemnity went poorly with the twinkle in his blue eyes.

"Ouch!" The Emperor winced at some image only he could see, then shook himself and his amusement vanished once more into that same grim intensity.

"Whatever possibilities might or might not have existed, Admiral Mugabi, I chose to pursue a second alternative—the one Matilda christened the `Excalibur Alternative.' Perhaps it was presumptuous of us to see ourselves in just that light, but it seemed to Matilda that, in a sense, we had become Arthur's sword." He met Mugabi's eyes levelly. "It hadn't been our choice, but surely we'd been cast into the depths of the stars as thoroughly as ever Excalibur was cast back to the Lady of the Lake. In our case, those depths were also the furnace in which we were forged, and the anvil upon which we were hammered, not simply a safe hiding place, but like Excalibur, it was our duty to return in our homeland's darkest hour. And so, rightly or wrongly, we gave no thought to the alternative of `peaceful coexistence.' We judged that there was no realistic hope of ever reforming something as huge and as static as the Federation, and that if it could not be reformed, then for the sake not only of our own race but of every `primitive' species the Federation ever had or ever would encounter, it must be destroyed."

"We chose the Excalibur Alternative," the Emperor said, his voice harsh as clanging steel, "and we never looked back from that day."

Silence hovered in the cabin, and Mugabi inhaled deeply as he realized that he'd actually been holding his breath. The sense of presence he'd felt from the Emperor from the begi

Four hundred and fifty-one years. That was how long this man had dedicated himself and all of his people unswervingly to the task of building the weapon—of transforming himself and those he ruled until they became the very Excalibur he'd spoken of—to overthrow the most powerful and arrogant federation in the history of the galaxy. No wonder he radiated that steely aura of raw power and purpose.

"And what, if I may ask, Your Majesty," the Solarian said very quietly after a long, silent moment, "does the `Excalibur Alternative' consist of?"

"It consists of everything we have been able to accomplish in four and a half centuries. Of every warship, every weapon, every strategy and tactic and technological advantage we've been able to put together. We certainly can't guarantee victory, Admiral Mugabi, but we can guarantee, especially if the Solar System joins with us, that the Federation's unwavering belief in its own superiority won't survive what happens.

"In more specific terms, however," the Emperor continued in a more normal tone of voice, sitting back in his chair once again, "we've already placed certain forces in motion, and we intend to activate still more of them in the very near future.

"First, we are prepared to station Evely

Mugabi knew his jaw had dropped, but right that moment he couldn't do anything about it. Sixty of these monster ships? Three times that many battleships? His mind reeled at the inconceivable firepower the Empire's Third Fleet represented, but the Emperor continued calmly.

"At the moment, Third Fleet is the largest and most powerful of our formations, although its margin of superiority over Home Fleet is relatively slight. The problem, of course, is that the Federation already knows where the Solar System is, whereas it doesn't even know where to begin looking for us. That may change, but in the worst possible case, it will take them decades to locate any of our star systems. Which means that we can anticipate that any attacks it launches will be directed here and mandates that this is the point at which we must place our strongest defense. Particularly since the Galactics will soon enough deduce approximately how the Empire must have come into existence. Once they've reached that point, they will also appreciate just how vast their advantage in numbers and star systems must be, and I don't doubt for a moment that their response will be to attempt to utterly destroy any of our star systems they can identify.

"At the same time, our intelligence sources within the Federation indicate that it will take them at least eight years to concentrate a fresh squadron as powerful as Lach'heranu's to attack here. It will take considerably longer than that for them to assemble a force stronger than hers was, and I expect that it's fairly safe to assume that the Federation won't commit to any follow-up attack until it can muster a substantially more powerful force than the one it's already lost.

"While the Council is trying to put that sort of force together, we are prepared to transfer to the Solar System automated shipyards and supporting industrial modules. Initially, those yards and modules would be dedicated to replicating themselves, and we would use the same time to begin the transfer of our general technology base to Earth in order to bring the entire system up to date as quickly as possible. Our current estimate is that the first Solarian-built Sword could be delivered within six and a half years; production of fighters for local defense could begin at least two years before that. Once the first capital ships began emerging from your shipyards here, we estimate that your maximum sustainable rate of construction would be a to

Mugabi could feel the eyes of everyone else in the cabin upon him, but he himself could not look away from the Emperor.

"In the meantime, we intend to make full use of certain other advantages to keep the Federation as thoroughly off-balance as possible for as long as possible. I feel quite confident that what happened to Lach'heranu and the implications of the Empire's existence will come as a tremendous shock to the Council, especially when it realizes that what it actually faces is the very thing it was prepared to commit genocide to avoid. Unfortunately for the Council," the Emperor's thin smile was a cold and frightening thing to see, "that's only the first of many shocks headed in its direction. One that it will find particularly unpalatable is the fact that the Empire has substantially improved upon the performance of the Federation's own phase drive. In fact, our starships are almost eleven times as fast as theirs are."

Mugabi would have felt a fresh spasm of shock at that little tidbit... if he hadn't already been anesthetized by the cumulative impact of all the other shocks these people had administered to his system. There was no way that they were going to really surprise him again, he thought.

He was wrong.

"In addition," the Emperor continued calmly, "we've made a few other improvements. In particular, we've developed what we call the singularity comm."

"Singularity comm?" Mugabi repeated cautiously.

"Yes." The Emperor's eye gleamed with something suspiciously like amusement. "At the moment its maximum range is limited to only sixty-two light-years, but its effective transmission speed is approximately seven hundred times the speed of light."