Dark Fate, Chapter 275 (Patreon)

Chapter 275 – Intelligence

(Bridge, INS Arihant, 200 km south of Karachi, Pakistan)

Captain Rishu Banahatti was not having a good day. It was never a good day when your country was at war, of course, and those days didn’t get better when your enemy essentially wiped out your air force and navy. As far as he knew, his submarine was the last intact vessel of the Indian Navy.

Despite all that, his day had found a way to get worse. As the captain of a nuclear missile submarine, there was always one set of orders he’d always dreaded receiving. And, just ten minutes ago, he got them. Receiving orders to ready his missiles for launch made this an especially bad day. You could not leash the Rakshasa once it was loosed, after all. Once one side launched, the other would launch, and everything would be over.

“Captain! Incoming message, priority channel!”

“Put it through, Lieutenant.”

The voice, when it played, was not the grim tones of his admiral telling him that cooler heads had prevailed. Instead, it was an almost cheerful man’s voice, with the kind of modified accent that came from translation spells. Possibly Chinese, by the way he spoke.

“Captain Banahatti, I am Commander Zeng Fu of the Ceres Intelligence Service. I’m sure your first question is going to be how I got through to you on this line, but suffice to say that we are very good at what we do, and your government is still running on pre-System assumptions. Now, while your crew gets those missiles of yours ready, I thought we could have a nice little chat about your family, in Surat.”

The bridge went dead silent. Everyone heard the voice. Everyone heard what they said. The fact that they knew his name wasn’t particularly troubling, since every ship had its captain listed. And it was concerning that they tracked down where his family lived, but that was just a matter of searching databases. No, the truly troubling thing was that they’d managed to penetrate the communications system to make the transmission look like an official message from command. Which meant they couldn’t trust any messages.

Banahatti found his voice. “This is most irregular, Colonel Zeng. What is your reason for contacting me in such a manner? Especially given our current mission?”

If his tone upset Zeng at all, it didn’t show in the man’s reply. “Oh, your current mission is precisely the reason for this call. Your leaders are getting a different version of this communication, of course, but we wanted to give you a concrete example of the consequences of one’s actions. I’m sure you know that your wife and two daughters are attending your son’s football match right now, yes? We’ve calculated the blast radius of the retaliatory strikes the Ceres Royal Navy will be launching the moment your missiles fire, and thought you should know that the stands for the field your son is playing at are just inside the radius. Your son will get to see his mother and sisters incinerated while he ‘merely’ gets fatal radiation poisoning.”

“You dare threaten my family!?”

“This is not a threat, Captain. It is informing you of cause and effect, just as then-King Greene informed the Israelis of cause and effect, when he ended the genocide in Gaza by wiping out the Israeli state. The Israelis believed him to be bluffing, thinking that no one would dare do something like that. Tell me, Captain, how did that turn out for them?”

The voice was pleasant throughout everything. That was the worst, most unnerving part of it. The man on the other end of that communication was talking about the wholesale slaughter of millions. More, when you expanded beyond Surat, and into the rest of the country. There were over a billion people living in India. How many would there be left when this was done?

Banahatti forced his voice to remain calm. “And what are you suggesting, then?”

“Simply that, if you give the order to launch those missiles, your family will die. And the same goes for your first officer, Lieutenant Commander Aakash Kumar. His family lives in Patna, yes? In Bihar province? The temple they are currently praying at is inside the blast radius for that city’s strike zone. They’ll die seconds after the missiles launch, if he tries to take command from you.”

Kumar’s eyes went wide. Banahatti did not need to speak to know that the man had been considering relieving him of duty, if he tried to disobey orders. With his own family on the line, however, he was visibly reconsidering those options.

“Of course, I did not call to simply threaten you. As the Emperor says, there is nothing so dangerous as a man with nothing to lose. You have to give people a way out, or they will stubbornly dig in their heels. The way out is simple. You do not launch those missiles, and suddenly there are options for your families. Whether India wins or loses, Ceres will accept refugees. Whether they are fleeing the victors, or are escaping a court-martial. You and your families will have the option to rebuild elsewhere, if you like.

“However, if nuclear weapons start being deployed? Then the options disappear, and your families will be the ones to pay the price. Again, this is not a threat, but a simple explanation of what will be happening. I will also take this point to mention that similar messages are being delivered to the commanders of every nuclear launch-capable submarine, missile platform, and air base in both India and Pakistan. And, if someone launches, then we will provide the name of the one who launched the missile to everyone else in this little network, so that you know who to blame for the deaths of your loved ones. I’m told that the System Shop has curse rituals for sale that allow one to actually torture souls in vengeance for lost loved ones. So, even if you do not care about your family, you should consider that others might ensure that you live long enough to suffer their heartbreak.”

Zeng paused, and then said, “So, Captain, what are you going to do?”

(Command Trailer, Mobile Strike Force Shiva, near Udaipur, India)

“So, Colonel, what are you going to do?”

Colonel Bhima Padhi bit back a curse. It wouldn’t help. It wouldn’t even make him feel better for more than a moment. The fact that this Commander Sofya Karam Iskander from the Ceres Intelligence Service had come on the line, giving information about not just his family, but those of his executive officer and the individual drivers of each of the missile trucks that were set to launch his country’s nuclear weapons at Pakistan. That an intelligence service knew his name was not outside the realm of possibility, but to get such detail on the rest of his command, and broadcasting it openly? That was not normal.

What was worse was that it was done openly, with them somehow getting into not just his command frequency, but also rebroadcasting it to all of Udaipur. He had no doubt that the threat (and, despite what the woman said, it was a clear threat) to destroy cities across India if they launched nuclear weapons was already being relayed to the rest of the population. It was probably going viral already. There would be no hiding it.

Worse, his words were being broadcast, as well, so everyone in the damn city were waiting to hear whether he would back down, or condemn millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, to death. It was very clever of the Ceresans to do it that way. He would either be a coward, or the monster that brought destruction to his people. And the people would know, for certain, what he chose. Which meant he did not really have a choice, not if he still wanted to look himself in the mirror. Which is exactly why whoever was behind this had set things up this way. Clever bastards.

“All vehicles stand down. Shiva’s wrath does not fall today.”

“An excellent choice, Colonel. Oh, and you will be happy to know that, while your family in Indore is safe, people in new Delhi are taking to the streets to protest the government giving the order to use nuclear weapons. So, there is a good chance that you will not need to worry about reprisals.”

As he hung up the radio, Padhi looked to his XO, and asked, “How in the hell did they do all this so quickly?”

(Intelligence Center, CRN Black Tear of Night’s Folly, above New Delhi)

Lieutenant Commander Sofya Karam Iskander whistled softly as she saw the reports coming in. Commanders in the field were rejecting the military command’s orders to launch nuclear weapons. When faced with the concrete knowledge that launching the weapons would result in the deaths of their families, they all chose to save those they could, over following their orders.

The Palestinian woman’s eyes met those of her superior, Commander Zeng Fu, and the other members of the Black Tear’s Intelligence department. Putting together an operation like this should have been the work of months, or part of a war plan that was updated constantly with new conditions as they developed. It shouldn’t have been possible to do something like this.

But one woman made it possible.

Rear Admiral Lilith Moonchild, also the Crown Princess of the Ceresan Empire, did not have command authority over the Home Fleet. Instead, she was the one in charge of intelligence operations for the Ceres Intelligence Service. With her Diviner profession and the Seer title, getting secrets and gaining glimpses of the future were simple. When one added in the abilities of Nyx, the sapient AI who was the embodiment of the massive superdreadnought’s computer processing power? Well, a lot of things that were normally impossible became possible.

Commander bint Karam had to know the truth. She turned to the back of the room, where the Admiral was standing next to a holographic projection of the AI’s avatar. “How did you get all of this together so quickly, Admiral?”

Admiral Moonchild chuckled. “It would be amusing to say that I had a vision, but then you wouldn’t learn anything. The truth is that, as soon as I took up this position following my return from abroad, I set people to finding out the names of the people who had the actual keys to launch nuclear weapons. Not the higher-ups with the authority to make those decisions, but the people with their hands on the keys. The people who could more easily be swayed, if there was a situation where someone was on the brink of starting a nuclear war.”

She motioned to Nyx, who continued. “Having those names in advance made the next step quite easy. Public networks on Earth have security through obscurity, for the most part. Your attempts at encryption are cute. Military systems have better security, of course, but those are still at least a thousand years behind Great Horde standard. Especially since you have not unlocked quantum computing, yet. So, hacking the different networks to obtain the needed information was only complicated by the slowness of the computers involved, and the fact that several of them had ‘low-tech’ security measures which were far more effective. Automatic lockdown for failed security checks is troublesome to deal with, but easily within my capabilities.”

Commander Zeng frowned. “If that is true, what about the systems on Ceres? Are they vulnerable, now that we’re having visitors from the wider galaxy beginning to come through?”

“Not as much. There is still a tech discrepancy, since purchasing tools without the education base to maintain and sustain them is the road to dependence, and Emperor Greene has been justifiably cautious about how much technology he copies from the Great Horde designs aboard this vessel, not wishing to overstep the bounds when the Great Horde eventually comes here.

“That being said, Ceres is running on Galactic-grade encryption, which ensures that local powers will not be able to hack your systems without subverting human elements of the system. According to the Admiralty, the Emperor has plans to phase in more Galactic-level technology as conditions in the Empire improve, to gradually bring the Empire up to the tech level of peer nations, at least. This process is estimated to take twenty years of gradual deployment, starting with the newly built colony on Ganymede, and the terraformed moon of Titan. Because they are starting from nothing, and are not under the same time constraints as the initial development of Ceres itself, updating them to peer-level tech standards is less problematic than the Ceres, or the Earth-bound parts of the Empire.”