Operation Georgia
Copyright© 2026 by Prince von Vlox
Chapter 4
Families Embassy, City of His Word
“You can’t tell me it’s just good discipline,” Eldest Willa said. “I would expect a lot more feelings from your crews. The Medinans--”
“Truth be known, Ma’am,” Adana said, “there’s a very simple explanation: fatigue. A couple of months ago, it was so bad I seriously thought of putting down on one of the planets we’d blockaded, but the risk was too great.”
“Interaction with the locals?”
Adana shook her head. “Nothing so simple. I have every indication that an Imperial Task Force has been chasing us.” She stared at the wall for a few seconds. “I did send one of my scouts back to check on our mine-laying program. I wanted to make sure they were working as advertised. R&D has produced some good things, but...”
“One of my nieces is in the Navy,” Eldest Willa said. “She’s told me of some of their ideas.”
“They told me that someone is chasing us. Normally, you try to get ahead of the person you’re chasing. That way, you’re set when your target finally shows up. But we didn’t move in a straight line, and--”
“Don’t answer this next question unless you want to, Admiral, but you had to have something that guided your path, not just hunches. What was it?”
“You’re right,” Adana laughed, “I’m not going to say, except that Intelligence and the Commercial Service have spent a lot of time tracking the movement of goods all through this arm of the galaxy. Some people, and Prenger is the first one who comes to mind, would be shocked at how thorough that knowledge is. I will say that a number of the decisions I made were governed by Imperial fuel production.”
“I won’t ask any further. Back to your crews. Do you anticipate any interaction with the people of Medina?”
“I think,” Adana said slowly, “that we should restrict ourselves to official meetings, with enough personal interactions that any suspicions the Medinans might have are alleviated. The cleaning staff are all women. That was a good touch.”
“Between you and me, I suspect half of them are whatever equivalent the Medinans have for a spy agency.”
Adana nodded. “Even better. They’re not going to learn much. All they’ll see are a bunch of young women resting in the sun.”
“What about the technology interchange?”
“There are some difficulties, Ma’am, but on the whole I think it’ll work out. Dumping all of that equipment on the Medinans was probably one of the best things we’ve done. It’s certainly gone over much better than when they get a look at our equipment.” Adana chuckled again. “As I understand it, the most difficult thing has been the initial concepts. We come at things from completely different approaches.”
Medina, Tech Lab #3
Tech Yanili, Humbled-By-His-Light, put her clipboard to one side. “What is that thing?” She was part of a technology exchange program between Medina and the Families, and was having trouble understanding the paths the Families had gone.
Tech/4 Giana Hendricks followed the Medinan woman’s look. “That?” She chuckled slightly. “That is the most cobbled piece of equipment it has ever been my misfortune to use.”
The device in question was a cylinder four meters wide and 12 meters long. There were open apertures at each end. A panel on the upper hemisphere was open, revealing a confusing array of microcircuit boards.
“This is an automated minelayer,” Giana said. “Feed gravel or rock in one end, and it’ll produce mines out the other end. We left 20 in each system we visited.” She patted the unit. “Each of these is capable of producing 10,000 mines before we have to refurbish it.”
Yanili peered in both ends. “How does it work?” She looked up at Giana. “I thought the radiation in your home system was too severe for microcircuits.”
“It is,” Giana said, “but we have places that are protected from the radiation.” She wasn’t going to reveal the existence of systems on the other end of the Weon Wormhole. The far end was light years distant from the Nebula with a background radiation that was less than Earth Normal. Families R&D had assembled it there. Having met the scientist who’d dreamed this up, Giana was still amazed that it worked.
“As for how it works...” Giana shrugged. “This started life as a simple ore converter. We bought some devices from the PSK and put the two together. They told me it uses nanobots, whatever those are.”
“Those are microscopic machines,” Yanili said. She scratched her head. “Mines? Don’t they just sit there? Wouldn’t they just cluster around the unit?”
“The unit gives them a random motion when they come out the far end,” Giana said. “And as for how they work, if you get too close, it sets off a gravity warper, and the mine is pulled close enough to go off. It can be a proximity explosion, which can cause a lot of damage, or a direct hit. The latter will take out most ships.”
Giana grinned. “We put thousands of mines around every planet we visited.”
“And you want to put them around our planets?”
“Not necessarily. That is a decision for someone much higher up than we are.” She led Yanili into the next room. “Now in here we have something we picked up from an Imperial system. As far as we can tell...”
Faegol System, The Colandran Empire
Wing Admiral Dorvan Bradermann studied his Tactical Display and scowled. Faegol-3, Faegol-4, and the two lesser gas giants were surrounded by hundreds of tiny bright lights. Those glittering motes were mines, and they were certain death for the unwary. In the last three months, he’d lost too many ships to those vicious things. One of the first ships destroyed in this system had been his last modern minesweeper.
Governor Spaleen insisted that the Admiral provide him with a landing force to support his rule. The Bitches had taken away the heads of his security forces, then bombed and destroyed the bases Internal Security used. Predictably, Governor Spaleen had then tried and failed to manage the troops himself. The idiots in the ranks had proceeded to run amuck, antagonizing and alienating the entire civilian population. Internal Security troops seemed to have a rare genius for that sort of thing.
He addressed himself to the image in the corner of his screen. “Governor, I sympathize with your position. I earnestly desire to assist you in any way I can. I believe you will agree with me that wasting my ships against those damned mines is utterly useless for both of us. I recommend you wait patiently for the engineers and minesweepers I told you are following behind me. I really cannot spend any more warships attempting to support your troops. If you take my advice and hang a few of those uniformed cretins, you might find yourself talking to the Emperor’s loyal subjects, rather than shooting at them.”
The Governor’s already livid expression darkened to a truly amazing shade of purple. Rather than listen to another pointless tirade, Admiral Bradermann switched to his intership frequency and quietly eavesdropped on the repairs of several of his ships that had survived attacks by the Bitch mines. That was, at least, somewhat less depressing. He wondered how many weeks behind his capital ships the engineers and minesweepers were.
They were clever, so very clever, those Bitches. They didn’t try to take and hold a planet. That would have made life easy. If they had, he would have had time to put together a strong enough fleet, and then he would have come into that system and blasted them apart. No, they were smarter than that. The Bitches simply wrecked the government by removing key commanders of the security and intelligence services. Just a few key men gone, and everything swiftly went to Hell. He had to wonder if there were saboteurs at work. Uprisings followed quickly after the security organizations were decapitated. It couldn’t all be reactions to leaderless troops running amuck.
Of course, the Bitches wrecked the infrastructure in each system, too, and then they sowed mines around the critical locations. Those mines were the devil’s own spawn. Their guidance systems were immune to jamming. They were armored and stealthed until they were almost immune to preemptive attack. With his own eyes, he had seen one of those damned things survive two hits at point-blank range from a heavy cruiser’s fixed-mount energy weapons. The cruiser had not been so fortunate. The mine’s beam had ripped through her lengthwise, breaching virtually every compartment. Only fast thinking by an engineer who immediately ejected both fusion bottles had saved what was left of the crew.
By placing those mines where they did, the Bitches isolated the most important resource of a system: the people. Admiral Bradermann found he could not even receive spare parts launched on remote-controlled vehicles. Those mines cut entire planetary populations off from the Empire as surely as if the industrial base, the people, and their worlds were magically transported to the other side of the galaxy.
When he had arrived at Stadeos, the first system the Bitches had raided, he had brought with him the Navy’s latest minesweepers. After watching them work for a week, he had appealed directly to Sector Command for more. Minesweeping was painstakingly slow and cautious. Even so, casualties among the sweepers had been nearly 20%. That was intolerable and had led him to try other solutions.
He had sent rock storms sweeping through the mines. The mines had ignored the rocks, and the rocks had failed to destroy more than a few mines. His staff had likened that to shooting at bugs with a riot gun, only the odds of hitting a mine were so much less. He had dispatched fighters to hunt down and destroy the mines. That had cost him 15 fighters in three days, which was a stupid waste. He had even bombarded the damned things with his battleships’ main batteries. It’d taken several direct hits per mine, but even their armor couldn’t stand up to it.
Then he had reviewed the costs in fuel and operational readiness, expenditures of spares, repairs, and supply. He had tossed the job back to the engineers and told them to do their best to keep up with him. Months later, he was now at Faegol, 14 systems after Stadeos, and the engineers were a distant, faded memory.
Every system visited by the Bitch raiders would need hundreds of hours of work to clear the mines. His engineers would expend millions of Imperials worth of munitions and energy, and those incredible mines kept coming back. He was certain they multiplied. Perhaps some sneaky Bitch minelayer was dropping new ones into each system.
In the Stadeos System, he had been convinced the mines had been completely cleaned out. He had sent the engineers and the old, slow minesweepers on to the Denetia System. Then, as he had prepared to take his warships to follow them, his crews had found a handful of mines near Stadeos again. The sparkling motes had reappeared on his Tactical Display. Each passing hour, the crew found more.
Four frustrating days later, when his minesweepers and engineers had arrived, hastily recalled from Denetia, there were as many mines orbiting Stadeos as there had been when he had started clearing them weeks earlier. There had been nothing else to do but request more precious minesweepers so he could assign a few the thankless job of keeping each of the most important systems clear. It was a losing proposition. The Empire did not have enough minesweepers to do this for every system. Lesser systems would have to wait until a better solution occurred to somebody. At least the locals would be safe from other raiders. Nobody could safely approach a mined planet, and with the planets isolated, they had no reason to return.
Admiral Bradermann considered the pathetic image of Faegol-3 surrounded by Bitch mines, shook his head, and returned to his plotting center. “Let’s take a look at the holotank,” he told his Chief of Staff. “I want to see if I can guess where that Bitch has gone now. I can hardly do worse on my own than with the help I’ve received from Analysis.”
Cruiser Captain Aritaz nodded. “Have you studied the track she’s left, sir? I was running different logical filters against her target list this morning. It looks pretty grim.” He began punching commands into the holotank. “This is what the Empire looked like before our Bitch showed up.” Bright, white stars appeared in the display, connected to each other with thin white lines. The last were an addition the Admiral had not seen in previous sessions.
“What are those?” He took a guess. “Lines of commerce?”
“Yes, sir. I’ve had to extrapolate those. Our information is from the Imperial Traders Association.” Captain Aritaz grimaced in wry amusement. “It is somewhat incomplete. It seems they do not like to publicize that sort of information for fear that their competitors will discover it and beat them to market with it.”
“How can we protect them if...” Admiral Bradermann subsided, waving his hand. In his opinion, the Imperial Traders Association dictated far too much of the Navy’s deployment strategy. “Never mind. Now, you were saying?”
“About the time of Se ... er, that is, about six months ago, sir.”
“Say it, Captain.” Admiral Bradermann glared, his heavily jowled chin thrust defiantly forward. “Part of how we got into this mess was by not letting ourselves recognize what has happened. Say it. Setosha. Remember what we lost there. Remember who we lost to. Remember that word for the bad taste it leaves in your mouth.”
Bad taste in what way? Captain Aritaz wondered. He knew Admiral Bradermann had been criticized because he wasn’t “firm” enough to satisfy some of his superiors at Fleet Headquarters. His pursuit of enemy raiders might seem too cautious to some. Those critics weren’t out here trying to deal with this mess.
Captain Aritaz took a deep breath. “Aye, aye, sir. About the time of the Battle of Setosha, this particular Bitch showed up at Stadeos. She tore up Jang Nizarran’s six squadrons of cruisers and dumped him near Stadeos Lower with a message for the governor. Jang was lucky. The next three commanders didn’t live through a meeting with our Bitch. In five weeks, she hammered their systems, mined them, and left, just like she did at Stadeos.” In the holotank, four stars changed color from white to dull red as he talked. The white lanes of commerce connecting them with other Imperial systems vanished.
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