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"Faster than light?!" Mugabi jerked upright in his chair so quickly that even it couldn't keep up. "You've got an FTL communications capability?!"
"Of course," the Emperor said mildly, and this time there was no question about his broad grin. "Doesn't everyone?"
"My God," Mugabi murmured while his mind raced over the incredible strategic advantages inherent in what he'd just heard. The superior speed of the Empire's warships would have been a huge boon by itself, but coupled with the ability of a high command to deploy and redeploy them using the sort of communications the Emperor had just described, that speed became truly priceless.
"And finally," the Emperor continued after giving him a few moments to digest the strategic implications, "the Federation's `civilized' races are about to discover that they have all ma
"Closer to home?" Mugabi cocked his head, half afraid of what he was going to hear next.
"Much closer," the Emperor said with an evil chuckle. "To be completely honest with you, Admiral, if Lach'heranu hadn't moved to attack Earth, you still wouldn't know that we existed. Our military potential is still climbing relative to that of the Federation. In fact, the curve of increase is still accelerating. Unfortunately, our potential still remains enormously short of the full power the Federation could concentrate against us if left to its own devices. Because of that, we would actually have preferred to wait another fifty to seventy-five years to contact you, but the Council's decision brought our preparations to a head sooner than we might have liked.
"Nonetheless, our projections of the Federation's probable actions had always suggested to us that we would find ourselves in precisely this position, and because of that we've taken certain additional precautions. One, although neither you nor the Federation were aware of it, was to maintain a powerful fleet presence within one month's transit time from Earth for the past sixty years, ready to intervene if Lach'heranu's orders had been issued sooner. Another, however, was to make very cautious contact with certain of the `protected' races. In fact, we've spent the past century or so creating resistance cells on scores of `protected' planets scattered throughout the Federation. It was a particularly risky strategy in many respects, especially given that the Federation would have assumed that Earth was behind it if any of their security forces had realized what was happening. That could very well have ended up accelerating their decision to move against you, but we felt that it was a risk we had to run.
"Actually, what we would most have preferred would have been to be able to set up such cells on Earth herself, but that simply wasn't practical. Our stealth systems are much better than anything the Federation has, and in this instance, at least, we could have inserted our own people as agents, since they would have blended neatly into the background. Unfortunately, the Federation has had Earth and the Solar System so heavily seeded with listening devices—and at least some human turncoats as informers—for so long that we dared not make contact. For us to have played any significant role in helping you to prepare against a Federation attack, we would have been forced to communicate directly with your government, or at least your military, and those are the areas of your society which the Federation has taken the greatest pains to spy upon. Had they suspected our existence for a moment, they would have reached their decision to destroy you much more quickly—probably before we were in a position to stop them.
"But at the same time that they were concentrating on you, it never seems to have occurred to them to worry about anyone else. As your own intelligence services have discovered, their security arrangements on the `protected' worlds leave a great deal to be desired. What you haven't known, because we were at considerable pains to be sure that you wouldn't, is that one reason so many of the `protected races' have been so ready to share information with you is that they were already in contact with us. We had to be very cautious about the information we used that conduit to pass on to you, but it's been extremely useful to us upon occasion. And even though we dared not communicate with you lest their listening devices pick up on it, we were able to use our own technology to tap their communication links and to set up listening posts of our own here in the Solar System. That's how we knew who to communicate with and how to reach you aboard your flagship when Lach'heranu began her attack.
"Perhaps even more importantly, though, we're now in the process of begi
"Nonetheless, we project that at least three hundred subject worlds will revolt, with at least some degree of success against the Federation. We've chosen our targets as carefully as possible, with an eye towards crippling major industrial hubs and depriving the Galactics of naval bases wherever possible. Coupled with a series of preemptive strikes that Admiral Maynton's fleets are prepared to execute, we estimate that we can cripple or outright destroy almost half of the Galactics' total war-fighting ability before their slower communications can even pass the word of what happened here."
"My God," Mugabi whispered again. He stared at the Emperor for several endless seconds, then drew a deep breath. "I can't—" He paused again, then shook his head. "This morning I knew that the entire human race was about to be destroyed," he said softly. "Now this." He shook his head yet again.
"Don't mistake us, Admiral," the Emperor said very seriously. "Even if our plans work perfectly, even if we manage to destroy more than half of their war-fighting ability and to distract them with rebellions on scores of their planets, their total military potential will remain vastly higher than our own. Once they realize they're under attack and fully gear up for wartime production, they should be able to replace all of their lost building capacity within no more than thirty or forty years, although the rebellions in their rear areas may slow them down a bit more than that. By the time they can repair the damage, however, we should have your own system fully industrialized, and we intend to offer the same terms of alliance to every star system in which a `protected' race manages to win its freedom, so our own production capacity should also be climbing rapidly. We believe the odds will move steadily in our favor, assuming we can survive their initial counterattacks, but there are no guarantees. At absolute best, I believe we have perhaps a sixty percent chance of ultimate victory, and even if we win in the end, our casualties will be very, very high. And none of that even considers our moral responsibility for the deaths of all the beings our underground network will bring into open rebellion against their masters. We aren't offering you a promise of salvation—only its possibility."
"Which is infinitely more than we had this morning," Mugabi replied. "Your Majesty, the Galactics passed a death sentence on us long before your fleet ever opened fire this afternoon. Every single day of additional life Earth enjoys will result solely from the fact that you attacked a Federation naval squadron to save us. To use a cliche, fighting the Federation, whatever the odds, is the only game in town, and at least you people seem to have spent an awful long time buying us the best odds we can get."