Prologue

I entered the command post of the medium-size reconnaissance ship, which we had specially upgraded for the deep raid on the enemy’s rear. The ship’s commander, the Chinese man Yoon Gao, was standing in front of the main projection screen, on which the three-dimensional image of the vast autonomous space dock slowly rotated. The dimensions of the construction were extremely impressive. Through the exterior structures, the skeleton of a giant ship was seen. Its easily recognizable hull outlines disclosed the twin of the super-heavy battleship Titan, captured by us in the Barnard’s system.

Yoon Gao examined thoughtfully the photograph delivered by the drone from the orbit of the gas giant in the next quarg star system we’ve visited.

“And this is the ninth such dock,” said the commander of the ship. The medium-size recon ship command didn’t match the Commander rank, he outgrew it, but Yoon Gao heeded my request to participate in the raid.

“Judging by the state of readiness of those battleships we’ve already seen, they were all laid down at about the same time. I don’t know how long it’ll take the quargs to build them up, but I’m afraid in a few months, six months at the most, our Fleet will face a very serious problem, and that’s considering weʼve certainly haven’t seen everything they have.”

“What we’ve found so far is more than enough,” I responded cheerlessly, “I’m not sure that our combined fleet could defeat even these ships in a frontal collision. We have to go back, Yoon, we can’t take any more chances. This information must be delivered to Earth as soon as possible.”

“I’m not sure it’s correct, though maybe you’re right,” the commander of the ship shook his head in doubt, “but the reconnaissance isn’t over yet. The data we have obtained is important, but it is not complete. We’re gonna have to fly back here again, and there might be a few more of those docks, or a few dozen of them. A deeper raid is required, but simultaneously in several directions.”

“We’ve only got one ship like this so far,” I reminded the scout, “May I suggest you lead the next raid, and I have to go to the capital. My duties as the Chairman of the New Equipment and Weapons Commission of the Ministry of Defense have never been taken from me, and in the light of what we saw, I have a lot of new urgent work to do.”

* * *

The opportunity to go to a deep reconnaissance raid behind enemy lines arose due to the fact that my scientific and engineering team finally made it to the Fleet’s ships, specifically the scouts.

Technically, it wasn’t really my group anymore. My new position at the Ministry of Defense was utterly incompatible with the position of the head of the weapons company. We had to do everything we could to find a way out, which, on the one hand, would allow me not to lose control of the new developments, and, on the other hand, would not be questioned by numerous anti-corruption fighters, the number of which has grown enormously after the biggest arms scandal in recent years. A lot of people were looking askance at me anyway, but now they didn’t seem to have a strong case for direct charges.

I’ve arranged with President Tobolsky to nationalize the Lavroff Weapons Company. This has deprived my opponents, who started accusing me of lobbyism immediately after my appointment, of one of their biggest trumps.

The nationalization, however, was carried out in a rather cunning way. The Ministry of Defense bought 100% of the shares of our company from my mother for 1.5 billion rubles, and the LWC was actually worth ten times that price in my humble opinion. Even the wildest reporters in the tabloid press knitted their brows discontentedly to hear the news, for there was not the slightest opportunity to pick on such a deal. Trophy battleship Titan alone was clearly worth at least ten billion, but rather several times more.

But there was a flip side to this deal. First of all, I remained the chairman of the company’s board of directors, not as a private person, but as an official of the Ministry of Defense, second, I retained the right to buy back the shares after the war against quargs for the same 1.5 billion. Of course, I’ve lost all my profits for years to come, ’cause all the dividends now went to the Ministry of Defense, but on the other hand, all the assets of the company, which will inevitably increase in the future, will come to me for free after the war, ’cause it’s not going to be possible to increase the cost of the buyback.

The battleship captured from the quargs, we sold to the Fleet almost immediately after the nationalization deal was completed. As a result, the company has acquired substantial funds for further developments, and we didn’t even have to apply to the Ministry of Defence for funding, although now we had the opportunity as a public company.

As chairman of the board, I insisted on a strategic plan to continue work on ground and space equipment camouflage systems, as well as on improving communication systems. The first result of this activity was the ship in which Yoon Gao and I went on a reconnaissance raid. It had only the hull, engines and, partially, life support systems from a standard medium-size recon ship. All of the vacated sites were taken by our new Electronic Warfare stations and upgraded scanners. As a result, the ship’s crew was reduced to five men, as opposed to the original twelve.

We tested the new recon ship in orbit around Callisto, above the Ministry of Defense range. I naturally knew what to expect, but two my aides, Lieutenant General Lyapin and Vice Admiral Fernandez, who I did not change after General Barrington resigned as head of the Commission, were knocked into a mild state of shock by what they saw.

“Mr Chairman,” the voice of the Vice Admiral was tangibly shaking, “is Jupiter really seen thru it?”

Once the EW equipment was turned on, the ship did have a partial transparency effect in the visible radiation range. Of course, complete invisibility has not been achieved. In fact, even the camouflage fields of my past life did not give the illusion of complete transparency, at least from this distance. Our product was still a long way from the real camouflage field, but the first signs that we were on the right track were clearly there.

“I recommend you pay attention to the multi-band scanner readings, gentlemen,” I took the members of the Commission out of their brooding state.

And they paid attention, indeed…

* * *

My decision, as a Chairman of the New Equipment and Weapons Commission of the Ministry of Defense, to personally lead the combat tests of the novelty displeased the Minister of Defense Fleet Admiral Bronstein, my immediate superior. However, his grumbling at the inappropriateness of such action for a person in such a prominent position in the Ministry, could not outweigh the Supreme Commander’s explicit instructions not to obstruct Captain Lavroff in such endeavours, and I shamelessly took advantage of it.

Yoon finally persuaded me to stay in the quarg space a little longer, and maybe he’ll get a monument for that someday, at least I will certainly support that idea. What we found was not what we went to inspect the other two systems controlled by the quargs for, but this finding would influence the course of the war far more than anything we’ve discovered before.

We also found another dock with a Titan counterpart under construction. Both quargs and humans had a tendency to build shipyards in the orbit of gas giants. Almost free source of unlimited hydrogen, as well as many satellites, often rich in essential ores, made such places attractive for industrial production. In exactly such a place, in the orbit of the fifth planet of Delta Trianguli, we discovered one of the enemy’s military industrial centers: a few dozen different-caliber shipyards and a powerful ship repair complex.

Nothing unusual, we’ve seen it before, but our attention was drawn to a quarg cruiser heading for a planet from somewhere on the edge of the system. We couldn’t make out the details yet, but judging by it’s speed and also by the fact that a number of small escort ships rushed to it just after it got out of hyperspace, the damage to the cruiser was severe.

“Yoon, where did this ship come from?”

“Scanners picked up it’s emergence from a jump beyond the orbit of the eighth planet about three hours ago. Since then, it’s been moving slowly to the repair plant. The damage must have affected the propulsion system, otherwise it’d have gotten there faster.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. Why is there a damaged ship HERE? In fact, have you ever wondered why the quargs would want a ship repair complex so deep behind them? It’s very expensive to drag a broken ship down here.”

“Shall we send the probe?”

“Better two. One to the cruiser, one to the repair complex.”

In six hours, having quietly slipped past the intelligence targets, the probes returned to our ship along a wide arc. We did not risk the use of communications and took the probes aboard. When a computer-processed video stream began to appear on the projection screen, we were shocked for a while to remain silent, and then Yoon Gao said with a changed voice:

“Well, Mr Chairman of the Commission of the Ministry of Defense, now we really have to go home.”

We stood in front of the screen for a long time and looked at the image of the enemy cruiser, which was ulcerated in the bow by a multitude of many, not even breaches, but some uneven cavities and through holes, either melted or or eaten through by a strong acid or something like that. The whole hull around them was covered in a nasty whitish coating. Meanwhile, the strange weapon that corrupted part of the cruiser’s side seemed to continue to operate, albeit in a severely weakened state. The armored alloy turned into some kind of rags that continued to fall off from the damaged areas. The escort ships released many small repair robots which treated affected areas with streams of some powder, that reacted violently with the whitish coating, producing gases rapidly scattering in the vacuum.

“We have to find those who did this, Yoon. The enemies of our enemies may not become our friends, but we have no right not to take that chance.”