Author´s Note:
-This story changes the Babylon 5 time line since 2233, just after the Dilgar War. I will only keep Sinclair going into the past with a human Space Station (Not necessarily Babylon 4) and becoming Valen. Everything else will most probably change.
-I recommend reading The Dilgar War by Lord of Misrule. Not only it's a masterpiece, but I´ll base my story on many of the events that took place on that fanfict. You won´t need to read it thou to understand mine.
-The prologue and the first two chapters are going to be a 'little' dense in technical and background information. If it was my own story I could add that information as the story grows, but please understand that as I'm making a new Babylon 5 time line, many things including technology are going to change and I don't want people saying, "Hey this technology was like this not like that", so I'll be giving the whys and hows in the prologue and first few chapters.
-In some parts of the prologue I'll be using numbers (21347) in the dialogue because writing them (twenty one thousand three hundred and forty seven) will make those parts unbearable.
-Hope you like it.
Prologue
Earth – Earth Alliance
Secondary Global Orbital Defence Command & Control Center
2233, Eight months after the fall of Omelos
The main screen was showing an inbound jump vortex near the L4 Earth-Moon Lagrange point. Five ships emerged from it in an inverted "V" standard pentacan formation.
"Sir, long range sensors are detecting five ships. Optical arrays are vectoring in." said a sensor officer, while a secondary screen was showing an optical fix on 5 dots. Immediately the screen zoom to the dots, showing clearly the configuration of the vessels. "Sir, confirmed one Dilgar cruiser with two destroyers and two frigates as escort."
"Recon party," said General Alexei Denisov. "We knew they were coming people, so stay sharp."
A few hours back, heavy jamming of hyperspace probes, confirmed the presence of a significant force on approach to the Sol system. A few minutes earlier the loss of contact with several of the probes confirm that whomever was coming was already near the outer beacons. Now with a Dilgar recon pentacan in system, there were no doubts as to the offending force.
A few minutes later, hundreds of jump points illuminated the main screen and from each poured a Dilgar pentacan. "Sir reading nearly three thousand vessels bearing 117 mark 024 range seventy three thousand kilometers."
"Redeploy the fleet, position them near the satellites facing the enemy's fleet to provide interceptor fire and keep the Sagittarius well behind that screen. Order GODS behind those bearing 027 through 207 mark 294 through 114 on the opposite side of the planet to ripple fire all missiles."
The main screen showed 437 Global Orbital Defence Satellites or "GODS", some of them pretty old, distributed around Earth on a spherical configuration. All those satellites that were positioned behind the coordinates specified by the General, that were in opposite side of the planet in relation to the engaging fleet, started firing their missiles and in less than a minute more than 4000 thousand were on its way. Redeploying and behind the satellites was less than a Fleet strong of EA vessels. 12 Hyperions backed by 128 Artemis, 119 Oracles, 73 Sagittarius and 18 Avengers.
"Sir enemy ships are deploying fighters and are vectoring for the missiles,"
"Nothing we can do, they´ll buy us time to redeploy the fleet."
"Sir, I´m sorry to interrupt, but the President´s aide is on the line," said a communications officer
"Patch it through to my headset."
"Yes, Sir."
"Denisov here, ..., Yes no problem when? …, OK, Tell the President I´ll be there in 5 hours, …, Thanks Rosy, bye."
The General turned to see the Colonel in charge of the installation and said, "Cancel the drill. A need to go to Geneva. Please transfer all simulation results from the last 2 months to the EIA report." The Colonel nodded and he turn to the Lieutenant in charge of communications and added. "Have my shuttle ready for immediate departure, and tell them to prepare a flight plan to Geneva."
"Yes, Sir."
The simulation was cancelled and the screens returned to normal, but this time showing a heavily fortified defence grid.
Geneva – Earth
EA Presidential Office
5 hours later
President Dieter Hauser was reading a summary of known civilizations ordered by economic power, attached as annex of a Forward looking report on the future military spending requirements delivered by the EIA (Earth Intelligence Agency), just to get his bearings before the meeting with the EIA Director, The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of State. The annexed summary read:
...
Centauri Republic
Population: 42.21 billion
Worlds: 59
Economy: 2,688 TC
Defence spending: 4.7 percent (126.33 TC)
...
Earth Alliance
Population: 23.17 billion
Worlds: 38
Economy: 926.85 TC
Defence spending: 4 percent pre war, 12.3 percent current (readjusting to pre war levels)
...
Yolu Theocracy (League of Non-Aligned Worlds - LONAW)
Population: 6.8 billion
Worlds: 4
Economy: 357 TC
Defence spending: 6.2 percent (22.13 TC)
...
Narn Regime
Population: 7.9 billion
Worlds: 17
Economy: 185.65 TC
Defence spending: 29 percent (53.84 TC)
...
Brakiri Syndicracy (LONAW)
Population: 5.6 billion
Worlds: 5
Economy: 173.6 TC
Defence spending: 3.5 percent (6.08 TC)
...
Ventuki Conglomerate (LONAW)
Population: 3.6 billion
Worlds: 4
Economy: 117 TC
Defence spending: 5.4 percent (6.32 TC)
...
Markab Confederacy (LONAW)
Population: 4.3 billion
Worlds: 3
Economy: 77.4 TC
Defence spending: 4.8 percent (3.72 TC)
...
Drazi Freehold (LONAW)
Population: 6.9 billion
Worlds: 12
Economy: 72.45 TC
Defence spending: 17 percent (12.32 TC)
…
His intercom beeped and he activated the communications device and said, "Yes Rosy, what is it?"
"Sir, they have arrived. Shall I send them in?"
"Yes Rosy, please." said President Hauser cutting off his intercom and continued reading the summary.
...
Hyach Gerontocracy (LONAW)
Population: 1.3 billion
Worlds: 4
Economy: 56.55 TC
Defence spending: 5 percent (2.83 TC)
...
Abbai Matriarchy (LONAW)
Population: 4.2 billion
Worlds: 4
Economy: 52.5 TC
Defence spending: 6 percent (3.15 TC)
...
Cascor Commonwealth (LONAW)
Population: 3.6 billion
Worlds: 3
Economy: 39.6 TC
Defence spending: 4 percent (1.59 TC)
...
pak`ma`ra individualism (LONAW)
Population: 2.9 billion
Worlds: 1
Economy: 24.65 TC
Defence spending: 3.1 percent (764 GC)
...
Ipsha Baronies (LONAW)
Population: 900 million
Worlds: 3
Economy: 13.95 TC
Defence spending: 4.2 percent (586 GC)
...
Balosians (LONAW)
Population: 1.3 billion
Worlds: 1
Economy: 5.85 TC
Defence spending: 2 percent (117 GC)
...
Llort Mi-Ma-Ti (LONAW)
Population: 530 million
Worlds: 2
Economy: 2.91 TC
Defence spending: 2.1 percent (61 GC)
...
Androma Republic (LONAW)
Population: 210 million
Worlds: 2
Economy: 1.15 TC
Defence spending: 3 percent (34.5 GC)
...
Descari Committees (LONAW)
Population: 79 million
Worlds: 2
Economy: 435 GC
Defence spending: 3.5 percent (18 GC)
...
Gaim Intelligence (LONAW)
Population: 130 billion (estimated)
Worlds: 1
Economy: n/a
Defence spending: n/a
…
The President was unable to continue reading the summary, because at that moment his aide open the door and three men entered the room.
"Welcome Gentlemen, please sit down," said the President pointing to a set of sofas, "Did you have a nice trip Alexei?"
"As good as can be expected." answered the general
"I´m sorry to interrupt your simulations and bring you here in such short notice, but the senate is convening ahead of schedule next week to discuss defence spending and this is our chance to keep a strong and healthy Earth Alliance.
"Don´t worry Dieter, we were just making extra simulations to confirm our findings."
"Great then, so? What do we have?"
Two months after the War, President Hauser commissioned the men in front of him to prepare a forward looking analysis that had the intention of determining the weaknesses and strengths of all governments involved in the war. It had to take into account their governments, fleets, defence spending, strategies, technologies, etc. and come with a solutions to help the Earth Alliance avoid falling into the same mistakes or better said avoid being wiped out as a civilization. Those solutions had to be reasonable in order for the senate to approve the spending. And now, after nearly six months of analysis they were gather again to share the results.
"Well to make it simple, we were victorious because we were very far away from the Dilgar to begin with and we also had sufficient time to build up our forces. 87 percent of our simulations ended in defeat, if Earth would have been Alaca or Balos and the remaining 13 percent ended in a stalemate in the time allotted for the simulation and they were not looking good, the last 13 percent had more than 90 percent of the fleet in Earth orbit to repel the initial assault. Not a healthy outcome." answered General Denisov
"Considering it was done by a civilization with an economy slightly bigger than the Markab and just to get things into perspective that's nearly ten times smaller than the Earth Alliance, it was a remarkable achievement and something that limits our options when dealing with bigger powers." added Karl Durban the EIA Director. "At least if they show the same strategic and tactical level as the Dilgar had."
"And how was that possible?" asked the President
"They had nearly a 40 percent military expenditure and 10 years of secret military build up. Don't get me wrong Mr. President. If we had done the same as the Dilgar and then you add conquered League industrial output, we would at this moment be closing our jump points far beyond Centauri space." answered Karl, " The problem is that if the Centauri decides to do the same, there be no one to stop them, not even if we find out about it and have a reasonable amount of time to prepare."
"So, you are saying that we could as well cross our arms and wait for the Centauri to knock us out?" asked the president with an inclined head and his eyebrows raised
"Nothing like that Mr. President. I was just pointing out the fact that if we would have been engaged by a power stronger than what the Dilgar were, but with the same level of military spending and the same secret military build up, like the Centauri or the Narns and even some League members and, and I emphasize the and, we had the same level of military spending we had before the war. We would have had our asses handed over in a silver platter." answered Karl in a very clear voice.
"OK then, so what are you proposing in your report, I was barely able to scratch the summary." said the president looking at the datapad in his hands.
"As you already know the report was produced in close cooperation with the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of State. You´ll find every analysis, simulations, field reports and all required annexes from which we reached the conclusion perfectly explain in the report." said Karl
"I know I will. Lets keep this simple and to the point. I trust that the recommendations you are bringing have been thoroughly studied." said Dieter
Karl gather his thoughts and started, "Everything in this report," said Karl putting a hand on top of his datapad´s screen and taking a deep breath, "requires a defence spending of 9 percent."
"9 percent!" said the president with a shocked face and then turned to look at the Secretary of State, "Harry, what is the senate stand on defence spending?"
"They are pushing to return to the pre war 4 percent, but if we play it right, I thinks they´ll go for it. There are many industrial and economic incentives to the plan, so I think it´s a strong one." said Harry Brogan, the Secretary of State.
"It is still more than double. I really think you are pushing too much with this." said the president with a concerned face and then turned to see Karl Durban, "OK Karl let´s see what you got."
"The report is divided into six areas of work." He linked his datapad with the other ones so that they were all able to see what he was doing with his, "They are the following, with the required percentage in defence spending." and the datapad displayed:
1.- Global Orbital Defence (1 percent)
2.- Fighter and Military Garrison (1 percent)
3.- Fleet (2 percent)
4.- Mothball Fleet (2 percent)
5.- Planetary Exploration and Colonization (1 percent)
6.- Motherships (2 percent)
"Number one, two and three, are strictly military in nature and represent the four percent the senate in seeking. Number four is in support of the fleet but will invest heavily in infrastructure and that will help our overall economy. Number five and six are for civilization expansion but that will strength our overall fleet strength and our industrial and population redundancy. Let me explain each one."
"The Global Orbital Defence network is required as a fixed method of denying our enemies access to local space. Specifically space close to our population centers. The defences at the Abbai and Hyach homeworlds and to a lesser extend that of the Brakiri clearly demonstrated this. To give an example, 1 percent of our actual economy will give a annual budget of 9.26 Tera Credits for our Global Orbital Defence. Considering that Earth alone represents nearly 90 percent of our economy. The Defence grid on Earth will have 8.33 Tera credits per year."
"Now, with the actual cost of a GOD satellite at 12 Giga credits which includes production, a one hundred year maintenance budget and a research and development percentage, we could field nearly 700 per year. In one hundred years, when we will need to start replacing the first ones, we will have a defence grid on Earth with nearly 70,000 satellites. That's a 50 percent bigger defence grid than that deployed by the Abbai, the current strongest defence grid in existence."
"And do we need such a strong defence grid?" asked the President
"Well, my example was for Earth, which is currently the most heavily populated planet in the known galaxy and the single largest planetary economy. If we were to compare it to the Abbai, we are only investing one fifth of what they are using. Our colonies will still have one percent of their economic output devoted for their defence grid, but our biggest colony will not have 70,000 GOD satellites. It may be able to deploy at the most 1,300 of them after one hundred years of construction."
"OK, I get it, and I don´t think it will be too hard to sell." The president continued reading his pad and added. "I think the information in the report is more than enough to do it. Please continue Karl."
"Of course. The second point, the one the report shows as Fighter and Military Garrison, will require a heavy change in philosophy. All major powers maintain a heavy deterrence in ground forces, but the Dilgar showed that they were useless to orbital bombardment. Also the Dilgar showed us that on those occasions that they were prevented from gaining space superiority. The ground forces were useless again as they never entered combat. Only when we struck back that the ground forces became useful. Now, as we don´t have the intention of going into a conquering war, the point of keeping such a big ground force is pointless."
"We want to considerably reduce the number of ground units. Using Earth as an example again, we have the intention of reducing the actual 21,000,000 troops to a little more than 4,000,000. Now, we all know that we have try to keep one soldier for every one thousand people on the planet, and while we currently have a very strong military presence it has always been inferior than those deployed by other races. Specially the Narn and the Drazi which keep that relation to less than a hundred to one. In simple terms, they have ten times the ground forces per population than we do. Decreasing our ground forces even further may not be seen as a wise move unless we make each and every single troop, more lethal than one hundred of those fielded by other major powers."
"Uh huh, and how do you plan on making our troops that powerful?"
"Easy, we don´t allow enemy troops to land on our planets by engaging them in space before they land. How?, well, let me give you an example again using Earth. Using 1 percent of our economy and 90 percent belonging to Earth, we have 8.33 Tera credits available per year. If we create a unit that has four people, each a hybrid pilot-engineer-gropo and assigned this four guys to an endo-exo atmospheric fighter with an estimated life of 50 years. The cost of constructing the fighter and operating the unit is estimated at 400 Mega credits per fifty years. That will allow us to produce nearly 21,000 fighters per year and a total fighter garrison on Earth after fifty years, of approximately 1,040,000 fighters and by having four people assigned to each fighter, gives us a total of more than 4,000,000 pilot-engineer-gropos."
"How will this work? Well we definitely can´t operate that many fighters with one percent of our economy. So the intention is having the fighters in storage and train the crew in simulators. They won´t be aces, but will allow our planets to field a huge space capable force. Even if the fighters are not armed with nukes, they will still yield a combined fire power greater than what the combined Dilgar fleets had."
"So you are telling me, that you will train each recruit to operate a fighter, to maintain it and to fight in the ground if necessary? So why do you need four?" asked the President
General Denisov answered, "Its simple. While the fighters will be in storage, we need to keep each unit combat ready. That means having them twenty four seven, all year round. That's why we need four people per fighter. We will be keeping some of those units fully operational and on patrol duty. We believe we could have at least twenty thousand fighters either on patrol or ready to launch in thirty minutes and in case of an emergency, we could have the remaining fighters ready within a day."
"The budget for each unit includes, salaries, fuel and ammunition stocks, simulators, four hours of real flying training per year, one per recruit, which I know its not enough, but we´ll compensate it with one hour per day on simulators, and the production of the fighter itself." finished the General.
"I know it does give us an awesome amount of fire power with little investment, but I don´t know if the Senate will like us to produce thousands of fighters per year just to get them into a warehouse." said the President
This time it was Harry who answered, "I´ll have to disagree. From a military point of view, we will actually have a far smaller force in operation, even though our active reserves will be far far bigger. But on an economic point of view, we´ll have factories producing and enormous amount of fighters, which translate into a lot of permanent jobs, which will be seen with good eyes to the majority of the Senators."
"The problem we have for the moment and that will delay the implementation of this strategy, is our lack of an exo-endo atmospheric fighter. As you know the Nova class starfury is not atmosphere capable and making the modification to allow it to reach orbit and return will take at least a year. The intention is to designing an air breathing engine pod, that will be mounted just behind the cockpit, with two small air intakes on its side. This will give the Nova in combination with its plasma engines, sufficient power to reach orbit, but will not make it an atmosphere capable fighter." added the Alexei
"Once we have this running, we´ll have a very big fighter force to call upon in times of crisis, not to mention that we'll have a very strong fighter production capability. One single year of production will churn out more fighters than we lost in the entire Dilgar war." Said Karl
"OK, Gentlemen. I trust your judgement. Please lets continue." said President Hauser.
Karl straighten up and said, "I´ll like to explain point three and four together. Fleet and Mothball Fleet. We are assigning 4 percent in total for both of them. Now. The 4 percent gives us approximately 37 Tera credits to work with and to compare apples to apples, let's say we have that money and invest it in the traditional way, and to make matters simpler let's say we only invest in Nova Dreadnoughts, which have a unit cost of 96 Giga credits."
" Uh huh."
"A Nova dreadnought costs nearly 2 percent per year of its production to operate. So, in 50 years we would double the price of the ship. An in its expected life time of one hundred years, it will triple. So for every unit, we need to consider two thirds of our budget for operational costs. If we take one third of 37 Tera credits and divide that by the cost of the ship. We'll be able to produce a total of 128 Nova class dreadnoughts per year. For a total fleet after one hundred years of production of 12,800 vessels. A very powerful fleet, but no ships in reserve and a production capability of 128 vessels per year."
"Uh huh."
"That's the traditional way. Now, What we are proposing is using half our budget in the traditional way, which will give us 6,400 vessels after one hundred years of production. No reserves and a 64 vessel production capability. We then use the other half exclusively for producing ships. That will give us 192 ships per year and 19,200 vessels in reserve after one hundred years. Summing all up. We'll have a fleet at the end of one hundred years of production of 6,400 vessels deployed and operational. 19,200 vessels in reserve and 256 ships in production. While this will give us half the operational fleet of the traditional method. It will also give us twice the number of total ships available and twice the production capacity." finished Karl
"It also gives us a much younger fleet. With 256 vessels produced each year. It will only take us 25 years to reach 6,400 vessels of the operational fleet. So ships will start entering mothballs reserve after just 25 years of operation, with the same age for our oldest vessel." added the General.
"There is also one more thing that the Dilgar war brought to bear. The time required to ramp up production. We engaged the Dilgar two years after the start of the war, and we took that time to build ships on our idle shipyards, and investing in new ones. We came close to investing twenty five percent of our economy, but it took nearly three years to have our production facilities ready to mass produce ships and weapons. If we had been facing the Dilgar from the star of the war. We would have had our reserves consume by attrition, before our economy could have made a difference." said Karl
"That's why, we propose to start investing the Fleet's budget, to construct ships for operational use, but we intent to use the Mothball Fleet's budget to invest first in shipyards that are able to handle twenty five percent of our budget and place them in mothballs. We then take that budget to construct ships." added Karl
"OK, I didn't get that. What do you mean by shipyards that can handle twenty five percent of our economy." said the President
"Its simple. If we were to engage in a total war again. Maybe even in one that is bigger than what we faced with the Dilgar. We are going to be able to invest maybe thirty percent of our economy, without wreaking havoc to it. Now, as I already explained, we just can't go and say 'Hey here, I have more money, give me more ships'. We need to develop the infrastructure in order to build them. Our proposed budget contemplates three percent for ship building. One percent from the Fleet budget and two percent from the Mothball Fleet budget. If we also take aside Global Orbital Defence and Fighter and Military Garrison budgets. We may have up to twenty five percent of our economy ready to help us in a war, but with no industry to channel those resources, there is little it will do to help us. That's why we propose to use the Mothball Fleet budget to first build a reserve ship building production capacity that could handle those excess resources." answered Karl
"But that will also cost a fortune to maintained and I don't see anything in this report that contemplates that."
"No, Because we intend to use the same shipyards. In times of peace, every shipyard will be building vessels at a much slower pace, a little more than ten percent of capacity, than what we´ll be able to do in times of war." answered the General
"That will reduce the efficiency of the shipyards and drive up the cost of ships produced during peace time." said the President
"Yes and No. If you take into account the cost of the shipyard and divide it into the number of ships it produces, then yes. But then you could say the same for the ships produce by the Mothball fleet budget. They will only operate for twenty five years instead of one hundred before being sent to the reserves. But the point is that this whole research was done for the survival of humanity in future wars. We'll be investing on things that will guarantee that, but that will not necessarily be efficient unless a war breaks out. At that moment every credit expended to build our defences and industrial muscle will be felt by anyone who wishes to face us. Now returning to the shipyard. It will definitely be more expensive to build, but if we take that as an investment for our future, then the cost of producing ships in them during peace time will be the same in raw materials and man hours." said the General
"Don't get me wrong. I understand your point. But wouldn't this be seen as an aggressive posture from the Earth Alliance?"
"Not necessarily. The defence grid and fighter and military garrison are defensive in nature. While the fleet and mothball fleet's four percent budget is well within the range being invested by other empires and far below that being invested by the Narn's twenty nine percent and the Drazi's seventeen." Answered Harry.
"OK. Who's making the presentation to the Senate?"
"I am, but I'll be showing a lot of comparative simulations to gain their backup" said Karl
"I wish you luck. You are going to need it."
"Thanks for the vote of confidence Dieter."
The president smiled and continued, "OK. Let's continue."
Karl took a look to his pad before continuing, "OK. Planetary Exploration and Colonization. We are adding this point to the Earth Alliance's defensive requirements because of our precarious population and industrial distribution. Our name says it all. We are called the Earth Alliance not the Human Alliance or the Terran Alliance or the Interstellar Alliance or the Whatever Alliance. And even thou we have a healthy number of colonies. We still have ninety percent of our population on Earth. That's nearly 21 billion in one planet against 2.3 billion in thirty seven. We lose Earth and the rest of our colonies are not better than a low level LONAW member"
"We have been unable to find suitable planets for colonization. Only Orion VII and to a lesser extent Proxima III are close in quality to Earth. Some of the other colonies have a breathable atmosphere, but the majority are planets with similar gravity to Earth, but with domed cities."
"We want to use our ships in peacetime to do just that. Find new planets suitable for colonization and send ships to build infrastructure and move colonists. As you know our Fleets are composed of Novas, Hyperions, Avengers, Oracles, Sagittarius, Artemis, Olympuses and Tethys. We have ships for every type of operation required but almost no multi purpose ones, except the Hyperions, which are not suitable for the task at hand."
"We need a jump capable ship, that is able to carry the necessary equipment to build the infrastructure required by the colonist being moved, and at the same time to be able to cover all military requirements in time of war. We have one vessel that can cover all requirements in times of war and that is the Hyperion, but it doesn't come close to what we need in peace time. We are proposing to redesign the Nova dreadnought, and make it a multi purpose vessel."
"Military speaking, the Nova only requires a redesigned defence grid in order to allow it to operate without escorts, and a better fuel capacity to extend its range. For peace time duty, the Nova already has the ability to carry a full division of troops and its heavy equipment, which is more than enough space for colonization infrastructure and transport requirements."
"This will make the navy a peacetime Juggernaut. It will reduce our overhead burden of keeping so many designs in operation. It will allow us to concentrate research and development efforts into a single unit type, instead of half a dozen, It will allow us to field a little more than the six thousand four hundred vessels for the operational fleet. We could have a fleet rounding nearly nine thousand ships."
"So the intention is to use the budget, to increase the number of vessels in operation, and use them for two purposes. One to find new systems suitable for colonization or resource gathering and Two, to move colonists to those planets that are already suitable. We intend to use our ships to build the infrastructure required by the new colonists, making it an attractive proposition for people to move away from Earth, because we really need to balance the distribution of population and economy into other planets, to be less dependant on Earth."
"OK, I don't see any inconveniences with this one. What about Motherships?" asked the President
"We have a way, through our Fleet and reserves, to keep any future enemies outside of Earth Alliance space. We should have a sufficiently strong force to even gain space superiority on enemy space, but we have to look into all possibilities, and one of them is that our Fleets could be defeated. If that happens we should have a sufficiently strong planetary defence grid and fighter garrison to make any attack on our colonies prohibitively expensive, forcing a superior enemy into a stalemate. But we must also consider the possibility that we may face an enemy far stronger than our fleets and planetary defences can handle, even an enemy with the intention of completely wiping us out. That's were our Mothership budget comes up." said Karl
"If we have a completely self sufficient mobile space habitat or Mothership, orbiting any planet in our space, and we were to be attacked by an overwhelming force. The Mothership will simple escape through hyperspace and settle itself in another planet for resource gathering, even an uncharted one. This enemy could wipe out our fix planetary populations, but our civilization will continue its existence in highly industrialized Motherships with sufficient population to viably settle ourselves in another area of the galaxy and start again."
"Our Orion class space stations are not mobile. If we make the station self-sufficient it will have sufficient space for only eight thousand people. To make a mothership viable, we are looking for starters into populations that run above a quarter million to a million. A mobile self sufficient space station of that size will have at least one hundred times the mass of a Nova class Dreadnought. And our budget will allow us to construct maybe three units per year at the most."
"But, apart of making our civilization more survivable. Having Motherships will allow us to use every single planet for resource gathering. If we had the resources and the population we could have billions of them deployed in the billions of planets not suitable of colonization, making our expansion completely independent of habitable planets."
Karl placed his data pad in the table and said, "That concludes the presentation. What do you think Dieter?"
The President kept looking at his pad and smiled. "Well, your presentation sucked, but I think the proposal is good." and they all started laughing. "We'll have to present this to the senate before next week's meeting and hope they see it our way. If Harry is right and they want to reduce the budget to the precarious pre war level, you'll have a tough fight ahead of you. I suggest playing this to their likings. Don't force the military matter too much as they already consider us invincible. Try to focus more on the economic rain fall of this investments. I thinks they'll consider it a better proposal if you do that."
"Don't worry Dieter. It won't suck like this presentation. We have prepared a very thorough one. It includes a visual presentation of the simulations, including military and economic ones. I believe they'll like it. I just hope they like it as I do."
"I hope that too. Well gentleman that'll be all."
Geneva – Earth
EA Presidential Office
One week later …
"Congratulations people. You made it. You have secured our place in the Galaxy." The president then turned to see Karl and added, "Karl, that was quite a presentation you pulled out of your sleeve. Really commendable."
"Thanks Dieter. I would have liked that they had agreed to the whole budget, but I think we can manage the changes."
The Senate agreed to the entire proposal but with some conditions and changes. The Fighter and Military garrison budget would be given a go once they have developed a fighter capable of both endo and exo atmospheric flight, even if it's an upgrade. The use of the mothball fleet budget to first create a shipbuilding capability to handle a war level military expenditure was not authorized, but instead relegated to be added to the future Motherships capabilities. New ship building budget that included one percent from fleet and two percent from mothball fleet will be given the go ahead once the Nova class had been upgraded to a multi purpose vessel.
"Yes," said Harry "But at least we have the nine percent secured. The percentage not being assigned yet, will be use for rebuilding the League and will not be compromised for other essential projects. We are not going to have to fight for them later."
"And that is what we fought for." added Denisov
"There were several other concerns you had about the Dilgar war, that could affect us in the future Karl. What were them?"
"Our main concern was to secure this budget, to guarantee our defence in any future war. But there are several subjects that could become an issue in the future and should be addressed. You know the reports on this new race. The Drahk. They were very efficient at infiltrating the Dilgar Leadership and are believed to be primarily responsible for many of the atrocities committed by them. The problem is that we know nothing of them, only that they are advanced, because of the technologies we know they provided to the Dilgar. Including the spectre's cloak, armor, computers, weapons, most notably those crust busting missiles, among other things. There are many races," he paused and added "or things out there that we don't know. And if we are susceptible for infiltration, we can be destroyed from within."
"It's a risk we have to take Karl."
"Not necessarily."
"What do you mean?"
"We need two things. One, a way of detecting infiltrators and Two, if we can't detect them then make the system immune to infiltration to the best of our abilities."
"What do you propose."
"You will laugh for what I have to say, But I'll say it any way. We need to disband the Psicorps and integrate their intelligence assets into the EIA."
All started laughing but Karl. "You of everybody, is asking to have Psicorps melded to the EIA. You hate them Karl."
"I don't hate them. I just don't trust them."
"So why do you want them with you."
"Every year, more and more people are gaining psychic abilities. We have such a great mistrust in them that we hunt them down and place them in the Psicorps. But the reality is that our race is evolving. If part of our growth is developing psychic powers, then we must learn to live with it. We should start to integrate them into our society. Allow them to decide what to do for themselves. If they want to be Marines, Fleet officers, or just sit around in their houses to drink beer. They should have the choice. Otherwise, it will tear apart our society in the future. We'll have so many groups struggling for power just to have the means to defend their positions, that it will be very easy for someone to influence or infiltrate another group, just with the promise of a better future."
"So you want all Psicorp's agents in the EIA"
"Hell no! They'll need to apply for what they want. Those that select the EIA we'll be screened as everyone else. We need to stop this internal power struggle with different organization but with the same objectives. I strongly believe that well train psychic agents will be an excellent asset for the EIA, and the same applies for all government organizations."
"OK, and how do you intend to make the system immune to infiltration."
"Well. If we understand that no system can be thoroughly protected from outside influence. We can avoid the arrogance of many of our government officials, that think that they are all powerful, and stablish a set of security algorithms to avoid double agendas or agents."
"Also. We need to change our form of government. We need to get out of this boom-bust cycles that comes with every change in presidency. We need to create a type of government that is not linked to a party. We need a government linked to sectors in our society. We select, I don't know, ten of the best candidate for every sector, the best not the most popular, for Defence, Health, Transportation, Intelligence, Tourism, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, and they make decisions as a hole body. If you have for example ten sectors and ten councillors per sector, you will have a one hundred strong ruling council."
"I don't think that'll be possible Karl, and I'm not saying that because I'm the President and I don't want to lose power. After what we went through with the Dilgar, I'll give it back without giving it a second thought. But the infrastructure all ready in place does not come cheap, and I don't think anybody will be voting positively on that change."
"I wasn't suggesting making the change from one day to the other, nor was I seeking the replacement of our infrastructure. We have many colonies. We can test this on a local government in a new colony. We can even test it in our Motherships once we have them. After that, if every thing goes well we can slowly implement it to the entire Alliance. Every planet will have his own independent government for local administration purposes. They'll even handle Local Orbital Defence and Fighter and Military garrison budgets, but we create another government for all the planets, which could handle fleet, mothball fleet, exploration and colonization and Mothership construction budgets."
"So you are seeking to change us from a representative democratic republic, into a meritocratic federation?"
"Yes, We already are a Federation on Earth, but we don't give the same status to our colonies."
"I see your point Karl, and I like the idea of a Federation. It will eliminate the head ache from all the colonies with separatist movements. Now how do you intend to select our leaders for their merits. How will you quantify their Merits?"
"With tests. Very thorough tests, and proven experience in the sector."
They continued talking about how they were going to implement the authorized budget and how to start testing Karl's ideas for the internal protection of the Earth Alliance.