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

by Robert B. Jones

  Enough illumination to show the retreating Varson flotilla disappearing into folded space, enough to highlight the destruction of the Madagascar, light enough to bounce off the assembled WIN Fleet, the Colonial Navy battle group, and provide a stellar light show to the colonists on Wilkes, some 62 million kilometers away.

  The Higgs containment had corralled the explosion and except for some buffeting and lateral listing, the nineteen WIN ships all survived. Dent wished he could have thought of something to save the Madagascar from coming apart, but that was not to be. He scanned her debris field and couldn’t detect any signs of life, no lifeboats, no shuttles.

  “North America, this is the Kona Coast. That was some show, Captain Dent. My question for you now is what do we do next. The Varson raiding party has escaped into the fold, destination unknown. You have lost one of your ships. I am planning to go after them. You can follow me if you choose, but this fight is mine,” Uri Haad said.

  After the appropriate delay, another voice replied to his question. “Ahh, admiral, sir, this is Commander Tex Decker. Captain Dent and Admiral Pauls are busy in the navigation shack right now. I was instructed — ordered, if you must know — to request that you hold your position until further notice.”

  Haad looked at his blister. The nineteen WIN ships were breaking formation, heading back to the main Great Black Fleet armada. “Understood, Commander Decker. I will hold for now, and make preparations to sail. I don’t want those murderous bastards to get too far ahead of me. We’ll be approaching uncertainty speeds just to catch them as it is.”

  Haad bristled at being asked to delay his pursuit. This Admiral Pauls was not in charge of prosecuting the Varson War and should just carry on with his dog-and-pony show with the Colonial Navy. They can steam into Wilkes on their own, meet up with the hydrogen barons there, have a cook-out, toss back a few drinks and have a nice day.

  The end of the delay brought a chuckle from the XO of the North America. “That’s why they’re asking you to keep station, sir,” Decker said after his thin laugh, “you don’t have to chase them at all. Once they work out the trajectories and transit times, we can be there waiting for them when they unfold. We have enough ships to provide a show of force no matter which planet they pop out at.”

  “Yes, commander, understood,” Haad replied sheepishly. He’d forgotten about the WIN’s new drive capabilities. Hell, he thought, if they made the trip from Earth to Wilkes in only two weeks, they could surely best the times of the retreating Varson battle group. He had to figure a way to be invited on their mission to the Varson Domain. “Remind the admiral that this is a Colonial Navy fight. Any action in the Varson Domain would necessarily dictate that my ships participate. Is it possible to tow us along with you? Co-join my ships to yours with our Higgs Fields?”

  Admiral Haad waited for a reply. He hadn’t wanted to sound like he was begging, but he secretly hoped the idea he’d just put forth had some merit to it.

  “I will pass your request down to our engineering department. Can’t say I’ve ever had to tow many ships through folded space, admiral, but I know its possible. Send over your mass loadings, sir, let us take a look.”

  “Roger that, North America, ship specs on the way,” Haad said and broke the connection. He instructed Mister Richard to start pulling up his ships’ profiles. This was going to be an interesting morning.

  While he waited for his reply from the WIN flagship, Haad instructed his captains to make ready for a trip into the Varson Empire.

  * * *

  “All you have to do is sign the arrest warrant, sir,” an impassioned Niki Mols said. “All of the evidence points in one direction.”

  Vice Admiral Vincent Paine looked across his desk at his niece. The information she had just shoved at him was impossible to digest, improbable on its face, and utterly too damning to ignore. He reached for the lab report for the third time and scanned its contents. “Did anyone else see this? Besides your staff and the lab technician?”

  “No, sir. I walked it through personally. Only my second, Lieutenant Rand, knows what’s in that report.”

  “And I can depend on you that the chain of custody on this evidence was never broken?”

  “You have my word. I sealed the glass in a plastic bag and tagged it immediately.”

  Paine sat back in his chair and sighed. He’d had his own suspicions, but, now that Mols’s investigation had yielded results to support his own uncertainties, he had no choice but to believe her. Still, he had to make sure this wasn’t just another red herring. “And the surveillance recording?”

  “You saw the date/time stamp. A secret meeting between him and Coni Berger, at the War College, a meeting you were not privy to, a little head-to-head that never showed on either of their appointment logs? It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what they were talking about.”

  “And the money?”

  Mols shifted in her chair, leaned over. “That was the final nail in his coffin, Uncle Vinny. We found it while looking for withdrawals related to Robi Zane. The huge amounts of credit transfers led us to his secret accounts; simple cross-referencing revealed the rest. Berger, Zane, Fraze — huge cash deposits made into their accounts from one source. Corresponding transfers from a numbered account. His numbered account.”

  Paine shuffled the pages on his desk and pulled out a financial report for Admiral Stanley Geoff. The numbers didn’t lie. “Any idea where this money came from? No way he’s got that kind of cash just from his O-9 pay and entitlements.”

  “Inskaap told me about how the Varson spy network disbursed huge credit vouchers to the top operatives in the colonies. It was complicated, most of the funds coming from private concerns, mysterious dummy corporations in the hydrogen business. His thoughts were along the line that if the Varson War could be extended, reanimated in some way, the hydrogen use in the colonies, specifically, increased usage by the Colonial Navy, the profits would escalate to the point of being obscene. You see before you the by-product and derivative of those profits.”

  Admiral Paine pursed his lips and looked away. One of his oldest friends and longest-serving Admiralty allies was on the take from enemies of the human race. And, to make matters even worse, the man he knew as a comrade in arms, a friend, was in reality a fourth-generation Varson doppelganger. Not even the real admiral. He wondered when the switch had taken place. He questioned Mols about it.

  “Your guess is as good as mine. Again, from my talks with Inskaap, sometime in the last year. Maybe Geoff went on leave and was snatched, probably killed, similar to what they tried to do with Captain Yorn. I don’t have a ready answer for that, but, I’m sure if we look at the dates those big accounts were set up for Geoff, and compared it to his leave requests, we would have the basic time frame narrowed down. Inskaap said the Varson warlord had maybe fifty of these highly trained and altered spies prepared for his vengeance campaign.”

  Paine reached for the DNA report again. Varson DNA from a creature masquerading as his friend Stanley Geoff. The Second Fleet of Elber Prime rotten from the top down. Geoff, Berger, Fraze, and Zane. And for what? Money. Greed. Gain without reciprocal industry. He thought the whole affair was pathetic.

  “Give me the arrest warrant, Niki,” he said.

  She stood and slid a single-page document across the desk to her uncle.

  He signed it. After throwing his pen down in disgust, he said, “Make it quick, commander. Should you meet any resistance, kill the bastard.”

  Chapter 45

  It had taken only twenty-two hours for the lash-ups to be completed. The Kona Coast was securely sealed inside the Higgs Field of the massive WIN flagship and Admiral Uri Haad was sitting in a spacious ready room with Admiral Pauls and several staff officers from the bridge of the North America. They were underway, in the fold, headed for the mysterious Varson planet called Rauud Mithie. Estimated transit time: seventy-four hours. A two-week sail for the Colonial Navy reduced to a matter of days. The WIN Fleet had been divide
d into seven battle groups and each had departed the space around Proctor-34 with specific targets on the other end. All of the Varson worlds would be assaulted, residual combatant ships destroyed as encountered, skies cleared prior to the return of the Varson’s Wilkes raiding party. Haad had left Captain Yorn and the rest of his battle group to keep Wilkes safe from further incursions by the Varson, and the Corpus Christi was to serve as the group’s command ship.

  Before departing Wilkes space, Admiral Pauls had summoned one of his courier boats and put it at Haad’s disposal for sending his action reports back to Bayliss. The new drives in the WIN couriers would get the change in sailing orders posted in less than a day, and relay to Admiral Paine the proposed disposition of the Kona Coast. His orders allowed him to make command decisions on-the-fly and he felt it his duty to notify the Admiralty of his decisions.

  After several hours spent exchanging operational and technical information, the group of senior officers in the ready room had settled into a light round of swapping war stories and Haad mostly listened to the glorified adventures described by the sailors from the World Integration Navy.

  “So, when I got to flight school,” an animated Commander Tex Decker said, “I decided to forego my first name. That’s why everybody calls me ‘Tex’ right now. You can imagine my horror when I heard all of those guys yelling, ‘fire at Will, fire at Will’, and I didn’t want anybody to take them literally.”

  Light laughter rippled through the ready room and Haad rubbed the left side of his face. These WIN sailors were just as corny as some of the clowns he had sailed with in the Colonial Navy. Decker was a ruddy-faced Texan from somewhere in what used to be America, and his slow talk and accented drawl seemed to fit right in with his rugged good looks and his muscular frame. Somewhat shorter than the average colonist, the gregarious XO was almost exactly as Haad had pictured him when they shared radio talk prior to the cruise. Captain Dent was a different story.

  The captain of the North America was young and energetic, tall and gangly, and moved like a string puppet. He walked around the ready room with long loping strides and made it a point of checking the comm stack every few minutes. He had told Haad that he was an academy graduate and had a few academic degrees to go along with his Naval credentials. His only combat experience had been gained during skirmishes with brigands and pirates operating between Earth and the Proxima cluster. Dent was clean shaven and wore his dark hair just a tad longer than stubble.

  “How many times are you going to tell that story, Tex?” Dent said in passing. “I’m sure Admiral Haad’s not interested in your cornball exploits. From what I’ve read, the admiral has taken more fire than all of us combined.”

  Haad waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, I don’t mind listening to him, captain. It’s all a part of Navy life. Men sailing off into the unknown, coming back with stories to tell.”

  “So, how is it that these guys wound up with some of your technology, admiral?”

  Haad explained to Captain Dent how the operational and technical details of the Mobile Bay had been compromised at the tail end of the first Varson War. He went on to tell Admiral Pauls how the enemy had managed to marry human technology with Varson crudeness and come up with new weapons and new drive capabilities.

  “Dangerous tools in the hands of a tribal enemy, admiral,” Pauls said, shaking his head.

  Admiral Pauls stood. He was about 180 centimeters tall, going soft around the middle, and was on the north side of sixty. He had the remnants of an expensive-looking cigar wedged into the corner of his mouth and spoke with a raspy bass voice. “Gentlemen, feel free to relax and regale each other into the night. As for me, I have some reports to file. This Great Black Fleet showcase has taken an unexpected detour and I have to cover my ass. I have to prepare a sitrep on the Madagascar and get it on a boat back to Earth soonest.” He approached Haad with an outstretched hand. “Admiral, pleasure meeting you. Extend my greetings to your ship and arrange for her crew to come over and look around the North America if you desire. We’re in a Higgs bubble, so I can send a boat for them.”

  Haad stood and shook. “Thank you, sir. That would be a good break for my crew. I appreciate your offer.”

  The rest of the ready room snapped to attention when Pauls left the room and before long the men and women fell back into friendly talk and outlandish war stories.

  Haad listened intently, but his mind was elsewhere.

  He was thinking about his wife.

  * * *

  “I have no idea how they knew we were going to strike at Wilkes,” Bale Phatie said. He was not used to having his plans questioned, his strategies subjected to scrutiny. Phatie was in the wardroom on the second deck of the Decimator with his shadow Manciir close at hand. Four of his personal guards ringed the room and Admiral Onduure and several of his bridge officers sat around the central table. On the far bulkhead a comm stack was open and all of the imbedded screens were active. Trips through folded space entailed nothing operationally other than system checks, engine efficiency monitoring, and the occasional looks at navigation checkpoints.

  “Maybe the Deliverer was attempting to send us a message, your eminence,” Onduure said. By invoking the name of the Divine One, the One Who Casts No Shadow, he figured he could voice mild dissent and still keep his head.

  “No, admiral. Nothing Divine at all. I have examined the recordings from the Hellfire and the images of those ships are something never before seen. They had Elberese hull numbers, Colonial Navy designs. I know for a fact the Colonial Navy has nothing like those ships in its inventory, and no capacity to amass that many ships on such a short notice. My contact in the Colonial Navy Admiralty assured me that the Second and Third Fleets were pitifully understaffed and their erection facilities were relegated to repair and retrofit assignments.”

  “Can we be sure we destroyed them?” Mister Heevie asked. “It looked like they were trying to contain our weapon when we made the fold, sir.”

  Phatie walked menacingly around the room, each step producing a rattling of his chains. “No, we cannot be absolutely sure. One of their ships blocked some of our fire. I would like to think the weapon was detonated. I would like to think we have nothing else to fear from those new ships.”

  “If I may, sir,” Lieutenant Sheerd said, “based on snatches of conversation I was able to intercept between the new group and the first group of ships we encountered, they were conversing in standard Elberese. My guess is the big armada of ships were from Earth. Their home world. That’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  Phatie stopped to consider Sheerd’s words. “So what if they were from Earth? It makes no difference. We fight them here, we fight them there. Eventually we are going to have to kill them all.”

  The room was silent. Taking on an enemy such as the Colonial Navy was one thing. Getting into a shooting war with an enemy that could cloak their ships, could unfold forty, sixty, maybe a hundred ships at a time? That was an entirely different matter, Admiral Onduure thought. He voiced his concerns out loud. “If Regiid’s device failed to destroy them, sir, what are the chances they will follow us into the Domain? We would be hard pressed to fight off that many ships, ships from an unknown faction, ships technologically superior to anything we’ve seen.”

  “That remark should cost you your head, Onduure,” Bale Phatie said, pointing a long accusatory finger at the admiral. “Our mission is unchanged. Once we get to Rauud Mithie and refuel our ships and upload new planet killers, the campaign against the humans continues. I will return to Canuure in the Decimator and petition the Onduud for additional funds to replenish our stores and manufacture more ships. This fight is to the death, admiral, and you would be wise to remember that.”

  Admiral Onduure stood and pounded his chest. “You have my total faith and commitment, Piru Torgud Phatie. Praise Malguur!”

  Phatie looked at the man with mixed emotions. He could not afford to remove him. He was scraping the bottom of the barrel as it was. With a d
ozen days’ of travel left before they reached Rauud Mithie, he could not maintain control of the situation without a senior officer on the ship. The crew was showing signs of becoming disaffected with the war and he felt the tension among his men. All he had to do was ride out the setback, regroup and rearm, head back into the fray with more ambitious men. New targets. Perhaps a strike against Bayliss or Elber Prime would turn the tide back in his favor.

  Phatie pounded his chest and said a few meaningless things about the Deliverer. Regardless of the outcome of the war, he needed all the help he could get.

  He would even take Divine Intervention if it was offered.

  Chapter 46

  Once the WIN Fleet unfolded around the various Varson worlds, the technology gap became more apparent as the Earth ships made quick work of the Varson ships in orbit around the planets. Each sub-unit of the Great Black Fleet was comprised of fifteen ships, all with the electronically adaptive tiles, with the new high-energy Dyson-IV engines. The Varson ships were not capable of penetrating the Higgs fields with their crude weapons, not even the newer hybrid designs. Once convinced of their inferior position, most ships surrendered and were boarded. The ones that didn’t surrender were blown apart without warning. The battles lasted for two days and finally the WIN Fleet settled in to await the returning Varson flotilla, the ships responsible for the abortive raid on Wilkes.