The Belt Loop (Book Three) - End of an Empire

by Robert B. Jones

  “Fifteen seconds, on my mark,” Mister Heevie said, then, as he watched the numbers crawl across his screen he said, “Mark!” and started counting down to zero. At the five second point he hit a few controls on his console and looked at his admiral.

  When the appointed time came, Heevie was instructed to launch the weapon. The bright plasma hole in the Higgs Field sparkled and opened up like a springtime flower catching the first rays of sunshine. The bright blue plume of the rocket shot through the center of the field opening and it was past and headed for Canno at over 40,000 kilometers per hour and it was almost out of sight when the wound in the Higgs corrected itself. The rocket casing was hardened Malguurian chromium steel coated with ceramic and graphite tiles meant to withstand the rigors of entering the atmosphere of Canno at speed. A mighty meteor of Malguurian manufacturing, destined to trigger when it was 5,000 meters from the surface.

  An antimatter bomb. A planet killer.

  As soon as the weapon was away Regiid turned his attention to the Decimator and the raging battle around it. He had twenty minutes to shake off the pesky human ships and return to the fold and the trip into the history books. He didn’t look back at the blister, the planet, the battles. He knew he had completed his mission; now all he had to do was get home alive.

  PART TWO: Canno Falls

  Chapter 8

  One hour before the Decimator released its bomb against Canno, Captain Van Dryfus plotted his course for Bayliss. He was in the CNS Mississippi River, a Typhoon-class destroyer with over 175,000 flight hours on its clock. The engines had recently been overhauled and the ship was in fairly good condition considering its age. Dryfus went over his checklist with his bridge crew and once the engine room reported its boards all in the green, he commanded the boat into a measured acceleration profile and set his course for Bayliss.

  With unnerving groans and creaks the huge ship lumbered up to speed. The process took over thirty minutes and strained the Mark-I Dyson Drive engine to the maximum. Dryfus checked the positioning of his following boats and once satisfied his flotilla was in proper orientation for the fold, he poured on the coals.

  “Mister Norman, take us to Dyson threshold and make your course zero five five. Your entry angle should be positive six six. Mister Michaels, relay the coordinates to the following ships. Try for a minimum of zero six mikes separation; we don’t know what these old buckets will do in the fold, so there’s no need to bunch them up.”

  His commands were passed down by his XO and acknowledged by his helm and his communications officers.

  The bridge comm stack was open and the ship-to-ship chatter filled the bridge of the Mississippi with technical information from the other ship captains, observations of hull status checks from visual inspections, speed and mass ratios from the towed target ships trailing the main convoy, and general sounding and position reports from the arrayed ships. Movements of this size were common in the old days, when the ships were hardly more than tin cans strapped to a nuclear bomb of an engine with rudimentary jump technology. These first-generation Navy warships were some of the first ones constructed by the yards on Elber Prime’s Nova Haven Navy Base, before the huge erection and repair facilities were built out on Canton, Elber’s satellite. A lot has changed in the intervening years: now all of the Colonial Navy ships were equipped with both Higgs Fields and Mark-IV Dyson Drive engines.

  “Solution to the fold threshold, Captain Dryfus. We’ll be at speed in three mikes,” Lieutenant Commander Norman said.

  “Very well, helm. Steady as she goes. Pass down the entry point to the rear.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Sir, I’ve got an incoming message for you, from a courier boat, the Susquehanna out of Luna-II,” Lieutenant Michaels said.

  What was this? Some kind of last-minute change of plans? Hell, he was at speed and only minutes from folded space. This had better be good, he thought. “On my stack, Mister Michaels.”

  The ship-to-ship radio chatter was supplanted by a thin reedy voice, distorted and warbled by the conflicting doppler effects of the Dyson Drive fields. “Captain Dryfus, Lieutenant Commander Gale here. I will be passing by your port flank in twenty seconds, well out of your wake. I have an urgent message that must get to Bayliss prior to your arrival, sir. I’ll let them know you’re under way, I’m sure they’ll be glad to see you.”

  “Roger, that, Commander Gale, got you on my screen now. Thanks for the heads-up. We’re two mikes from the fold.”

  “Say, we’re cutting this pretty close, sir. My apologies to your bridge. Susquehanna, over and out.”

  “Have a safe trip, Mister Gale. Old Miss, out.”

  A blur zipped past the Mississippi River and Dryfus watched as the small boat made the fold in a splash of light and color.

  “Steady as she goes, Mister Norman.”

  “Helm, aye. Making one four zero klicks per sec. Fold threshold in one minute.”

  “Acknowledged. Give me a count at ten.”

  “Helm, aye.”

  Dryfus hit the stud on his comm stack and announced the upcoming transit to the general population. Entering folded space was pretty routine for his crew and no preparations were necessary. The drive computers handled the cross-over and kept the M/AM engines at full throttle for the duration. Dryfus estimated his travel time today at thirty-four hours and some change. Provided this bag of bolts held together and those coatings didn’t rupture and foul the Higgs. The Higgs Field was essential for two reasons. First, it maintained local gravity for the ship and always oriented the weight effects perpendicular to the direction of travel and oriented “down” toward the bottom of the boat. Secondly, it also served as a deflector shield capable of absorbing heat and energy and distributing those effects throughout its electrical and magnetic surface. Once the Higgs was in place the effects of the tremendous speeds required to pierce folded space had no effect on the fragile human inhabitants of the vessel. The fold was achieved by the Dyson Drive’s tremendous accelerating force bunching up the space in front of the ship like a heavy object pushing a throw rug up against a wall. Once the folds were penetrated at the lowest loops, vast distances could be traversed in less-than-normal relative time.

  In the half-minute leading up to the fold Dryfus wondered what kind of message leaving Canno was so important as to warrant a courier boat heading out at almost causal-uncertainty speeds. The Colonial Navy had learned the hard way about hitting folded space at almost the speed of light; you could end up almost anywhere in the galaxy at any time reference point. In the early days of Dyson Drive testing many ships were lost to the void and never heard from again.

  “We’re in the green on all the boards, sir,” Commander Hue Guardo said. He was Dryfus’s Executive Officer. The green boards signaled the correctness of the drive plots from the mainframe.

  Lieutenant Norman started his countdown at ten seconds. The electrical whine of the Higgs and the Dyson Drive engines permeated the enclosed space of the bridge and just as the vibrations seemed to increase to the point of pain, the ship hit the fold at zero five five degrees with her nose pointed up at six six degrees relative to the plane of the ecliptic.

  The Canno portion of the rebuilt First Fleet was on its way.

  * * *

  The captain’s ready room was spacious compared to what he had been accustomed to on the Corpus Christi. His new digs defied the conventional wisdom of minimalistic ship design; he had an enormous stateroom, a chart room, and this ready room with tables, chairs, holographic wall displays, a mini-bar with its own refrigerator and a built-in coffee maker. The only thing missing was a scantily-clad server with a tray and folded credit notes in her hand. The transition between fast-attack boats and destroyers was like the jump from a skateboard to a full-on racing car. Hell, he thought, if this was the new approach to shipbuilding, what on Elber did he have to look forward to when he made the next transition to a battle cruiser?

  Haad had visited enough Navy ships to get the feel for
what was ahead, when he pinned on his first star, and the thought made him cringe. The chirp from the comm stack by the aft hatch shook him out of his speculation about the opulence of his surroundings.

  “Captain Haad, Holli Leaf here. Do you have time to look at some footage, sir?”

  Holli Leaf? The photographer? Here? He walked to the hatch, hit the stud and invited her in. She moved into the room like a cool breeze on a hot day, her long hair billowing out as she moved, her freshly washed skin pushing a slight freshly-cut-apple fragrance ahead of her. Haad stepped aside and watched her move to one of the reference tables in the center of the room. He purposefully left the hatch open. Was he afraid of being enclosed in this vast arena with this beautiful woman? Did he need security up here?

  “Well, Miss Leaf, this is a pleasant surprise,” Haad said calmly. He crossed the room and stood on the opposite side of the table from her. She flicked him a glance and busied herself with her tablets and playback machines.

  “How about you just call me Holli, sir? After three months on your ship, I think we’re at least on the first-name rung of this ladder.”

  He nodded. Her words hung in the air like the opening notes of a formal symphonic arrangement of classical music, thin string plucks from the first violin. “Okay, Holli it is.”

  “I’ve managed to collect quite a portfolio of you and your ship, captain. One of my motion videographers brought me some footage of your last battle, and I just wanted to get your take on it,” Holli said, her eyes still on the table.

  “Sure, I’ll take a look. You guys have certainly been busy around here. What’s the footage of?”

  She raised her head, shook her hair out of her face and said, “The collision of those enemy ships. Taken at super high-speed. Very dramatic images.”

  Sounds interesting, he thought. As pretty as she was, she could have brought him pictures of his ratings swabbing the deck down in the mess and he would have given her his rapt attention. After all these months this was the first time he had spent any time looking at her work, looking at her up close. She was wearing a flattering rust-colored outfit that he had never seen before. She was usually in coveralls and utility clothes with her hair rolled up in some kind of severe bun. Her worker persona. Now she was wearing her woman costume. He approved.

  “Captain? You with me?”

  “Sorry, I guess my mind wandered off there for a second. Let’s see it, Holli,” he finished, attempting to put a little bit of professionalism into his voice.

  “Well, you’re going to have to come around to this side of the table. I’ve set this stuff up over here. Come on, captain, I won’t bite.”

  He chuckled and moved to her side of the table. His brain was starting to overload. He would have been more comfortable up on the bridge waging war against the Varson Empire than standing next to this gorgeous photographer from BayCom. In battle he knew exactly what to do, what to say, how to command. This close encounter with Holli Leaf was more fearful for him than war.

  She pulled out two chairs and they sat. Her deft fingers moved over the controls of her portable and the footage Gil Palis had taken spooled up. Haad leaned in to get a better look. She scooted her chair closer to him.

  “Pretty amazing stuff, huh? I’ve been doing this since the first Varson War, captain, and I’ve never seen anything like this. This is prize-winning footage, you agree?”

  “Uriel. Call me Uri,” he said, turning his head slightly. “Second rung, Holli.”

  She looked into his eyes and smiled. “Okay, Uri,” she said, reaching for his hand.

  It took them two hours to watch the twenty-minute video. Within days they became lovers.

  * * *

  Yola Teals stepped out onto the hardened patio deck and looked toward the paddock. Something was spooking the horses. The late afternoon had turned cool for midsummer and a freshet of wind stirred the trees and shrubs around the back of the house. She looked skyward and saw a line of heavy clouds working up a thunderstorm in the southwest. All around her the clouds were gathering, lowering, and the thin brush-strokes of virga grayed out the slanting light.

  She rearranged the tables and chairs on the patio, pushing them closer toward the door, getting them under cover away from the approaching squall. Josep should be home within an hour or two and she wanted to have everything ready for their evening meal. Sitting outside in the evening taking a meal in the healthy orange glow of sunset was the way her husband liked to relax after a week away from home. He had been putting in horrendous hours up on Luna-II for the last two months and now, his mission accomplished, he wanted some quality down time.

  Several of her ranch hands ran toward the barn to her left. The sounds of panicked horses filled the air with high pitched equine screams. Yola stopped pushing chairs around and walked to the rear of the patio. Something was wrong.

  She was getting ready to step down into the yard when she first heard it. A low rumble coming from the north. Could something have happened over in Yellin, something at the Navy Base? Was that thunder?

  Suddenly the sky above her exploded in a blinding white light. Before she could lower her head she had already been blinded by the flash. She stumbled down the steps and fell to her knees in the manicured grass. When the concussion wave tore through the horse farm and leveled the buildings, the barns, her house, Yolanda Teals started to scream. Her ruptured eardrums prevented her from hearing the roiling, thunderous aftershock from the explosion. All she could feel was the shaking and vibrating of the earth beneath her body. Seconds later she was vaporized by the intense heat from the bomb and had no sense of her own doom. It was as if all the atoms in her body, and all the particles surrounding her, had been sucked up into an enormous energy vortex whirling overhead, only to be reborn as heat and light energy.

  The air-burst from the Varson weapon ignited a firestorm that incinerated everything within a fifty-kilometer radius of the town of Yellin. Half of the million-and-a-half residents of the colony vanished in a matter of seconds. The Navy Base was flattened to pea-sized rubble in less than a minute. Two incoming shuttles were incinerated in-flight and for all practical purposes they just ceased to exist: two aircraft with crews and eighty passengers, gone in the wink of an eye.

  One of those passengers had been Admiral Josep Teals.

  Chapter 9

  “Come on, you big pussy. This could be our only chance to get the heck out of here for awhile. Most of the other kids have already gone over the wall and, really, no one cares one way or another. Taft is gone and there’s nobody left up here on the second floor.”

  Cory Chase stared at Har and shook his head. “No thanks, I’ve got some studying to do. If you want to go down to Narid and horse around for a few hours, be my guest. I’ll tell them where you went when they come looking for you. I’ll be the last one to see you alive, I guess.”

  “Funny,” Har said.

  “If you get caught, it’ll be even funnier.”

  Har stomped his foot and threw up both hands. “Where’s your sense of adventure, Core? You just hang around the room all day and night when we don’t have classes and you just read your stupid books. You trying to get smart, or something?” Har had called Cory “Core” — short for apple core — almost from the beginning of their first run-in on the floor of the open mess some months ago.

  “Look who’s talking. Seems like I can remember you telling me about all of those books you read while you were on that ship. Maybe I’m just trying to play catch up.”

  “You don’t have enough time in your day to catch up with me. I read for almost three years straight. I know I must have read over a thousand books on my reader and another twenty or so pulpers.”

  Cory shifted his legs off the bunk and stretched his arms. Next he showed Har the back of his throat with a humongous yawn. “Yeah, I’ve heard that before, mister broken record. If you read so much, how come you still want to go traipsing off-base to some dive town? Haven’t you learned anything in all of your reading?”


  “Forget it. Stay here. I’m going. If you change your mind, there’s a hole in the chain link out behind the gymnasium. The walk to Narid only takes an hour or so, and it’s mostly downhill.”

  “See ya,” Cory said. “What’re you going to do down there anyway? It’s just a little town with no redeeming qualities, so my mother told me.”

  Har paced a few steps in front of Cory’s bunk. “I want to see it for myself, Core. Get the lay of the land it’s called. Maybe I’ll go to one of those shows, you know, with all the naked women. I heard some of the guys up on three talking about that.” In his mind he could see the lovely ladies in their gossamer outfits parading their goodies around a bunch of excited sailors in a smoky bar or night club set up to keep the men in fighting condition and remind them why they should come back from war. At least that was the idea he had managed to harvest from his stash of space opera magazines and books.

  “Yeah, right, like they’re gonna let a kid get in to see that stuff,” a dismissive Cory said. “Dream on.”

  “I’ve got my own money. I can bribe my way in.”

  “Boy, you’re just itching for extra details, aren’t you? Just because your best friend Midshipman Taft is gone for the weekend doesn’t mean they’re not gonna send someone around to check on us at lights out. I won’t cover for you, Har. I don’t want to get into trouble myself by covering your worthless ass.”

  Har slumped. Maybe Cory was right. How could he possibly explain his frustrations to him? He had been cooped up on a Navy ship for over three years and now that he had a semblance of freedom staring him in the face, he wanted to get outside, get away from the school for a few hours and just enjoy not feeling like a prisoner. The entertainment attractions on the campus were dull and boring. What else could they do? Go to the theater? Go to the arcade? Go to the gymnasium and see if they could get into a pickup game of basketball? That lineup sounded as exciting as watching Commander Holt dusting his furniture in that office of antiquities he inhabited.