* * *
“Translating,” called out the voice of the helm of HIMS Sir Galahad.
Rear Admiral Mara Montgomery grimaced as the wave of nausea washed over her. Fortunately she was not in the top five percent of negative reactors, so she wasn’t barfing her guts out on the deck. Unfortunately, she was in the next five percent, and felt like vomiting would be a good thing. By the Goddess, why did I choose the Fleet? she thought, knowing the answer. She loved the Fleet, traveling through space, just not the going in and out of hyper part. But that was the price of being a serving officer and force commander.
“Enemy ahead,” called out the ship’s Tactical Officer, relayed a moment later by the Flag Tactical.
“Orders?” asked the Captain, as the other three ships of the squadron translated around Galahad.
Montgomery looked at the tactical plot for a moment, pushing the nausea to the back of her thoughts, her quick mind taking in the situation. There was the enemy supercruiser ahead, the two still operational destroyers dueling it out with her, while the dead hulk of another destroyer floated against the star field. She felt guilt at sending the destroyers in against an enemy like that, knowing that they would take casualties. But the mission came first, and this mission was vital.
“All ships open fire on that enemy in sight,” she called out, then looked over at her Flag Com Officer. “Any word on the other enemy.”
“Dungon reports there was a massive explosion from the asteroid field,” said the officer, her eyes narrowed.
“Any idea what it was?” asked the worried Admiral, hoping with all her heart that it was not the ship they had come to rescue. And if it is, then by the Goddess we will have our revenge on these soulless creatures.
“No, Ma’am,” said the Com Officer. “But her captain thinks it was too large to be made by a breaching destroyer. More like something made by one of these guys.”
Pray the Goddess that it was not the ship the Emperor is on.
The Ca’cadasan ship was making a run for it, a light minute ahead. The squadron started in pursuit, flushing missiles and firing all energy weapons in a dispersal pattern, trying to score hits on the enemy ship despite her evasive maneuvers. The enemy was firing back, scoring a hit here and there that was mostly shrugged off by electromag cold plasma fields. She was also firing missiles, but could not achieve critical mass enough to get through the defensive fire of a quartet of larger ships. A particle beam took off one of the Ca’cadasan ship’s grabbers, then another flared from a laser hit, and suddenly the vessel did not have a chance of getting away from the human vessels.
“Order the destroyers to the asteroid cluster,” said the Admiral to the Com Officer. “They are to search for any human vessels, and fire on anything Caca that they find.”
“Prisoners?” asked the Com Officer after she sent the message.
“If any surrender, but they are to take no chances. Only stripped naked and fully scanned.”
The officer got to work, and moments later the two survivors of the destroyer group were pulling for the asteroids. The battle cruisers continued to pursue the enemy ship, until the call came through.
“Dungon reports they have received a transmission from a human destroyer. The Dot McArthur. The ship reports they destroyed the other enemy supercruiser.” The Com Officer, Commander Lee, stopped talking for a moment, a look of shock on her face that soon metamorphosed into a joyful expression. “They have the Emperor aboard. And he is fine.”
Thank the Goddess, thought the Admiral, blinking back tears. That Captain is about to garner more attention than he ever imagined for this. Probably a Dukedom, and command of a Squadron, and well deserved.
“Dungon reports that McArthur is heavily damaged, but her captain reports he could still make it back to base at Hyper IV. He requests that the Emperor be taken aboard one of the battle cruisers ASAP.”
“Of course he does, Ms. Lee” said the Admiral with a laugh. “And I’m sure you would like to see your cousin onboard a larger ship as well. Captain Stafford. Cease pursuit and put us near to the McArthur, if you please. The rest of the squadron can finish up here.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the Captain with a smile.
Sir Galahad changed her vector and curved toward the asteroids. The rest of the squadron finished up very soon after, and another Ca’cadasan invader of human space died far from its home stars.
* * *
SESTIUS SPACE, MARCH 23RD, 1000.
Jana was surprised at the next meeting with the Great Admiral to find that the planet no longer dominated the portal. She stared at empty space for a moment. No, she reminded herself, looking at the glory of millions of stars through the Galactic Disk, not empty.
“We’re moving,” she said as the Great Admiral walked into the room.
“Yes, slave,” said the big male. “We are moving.”
Then she noticed something else. The male was speaking in his language, and she was hearing and understanding him in that language, without recourse to the translation program in her implant. I’ve learned their language over the interviews, she thought, wondering how she could gain use from that new skill.
“I want to ask you about your military dispositions in this sector,” said the Great Admiral, taking a glass from a slave and falling back into his heavy chair.
“I am just a Chief Petty Officer, my Lord,” said Jana, keeping her eyes to the floor. “I was never apprised of any high strategy.”
“But you still would know something about what was in your sector,” said the Great Admiral. “Through the gossip line of the lower personnel, which we both know is sometimes more accurate than high level communiqués.”
“I am sure that I know nothing of interest to the Admiral.”
The Cacada reached up and touched a claw to the pad on his left lower wrist. Jana braced herself for pain, and was surprised when it didn’t come. No, something was missing. It took her a moment to figure out what it was. The constant hum of low level pleasure that had been her companion for over a week was gone.
What is he trying to accomplish, she thought, looking at the male who was smiling and waiting patiently. The minutes went by with no effect. And then it hit her. Her stomach cramped up as a cold sweat broke out on her brow. Her entire body started quivering. She felt like she was going to throw up.
“Do you know what is happening?” asked the smiling male.
“Withdrawals,” answered Jana through chattering teeth.
“Aye,” said the male. “Withdrawals from the neurotransmitters your body and brain has become accustomed to. Neurotransmitters released by your body while a constant thread of pleasure ran through you, now absent as the stimulation is no longer there.”
The male got up from his seat and walked over to her, looking down from his three meter height onto her quivering form. “It is the same with most species, including my own, though yours is particularly susceptible to it. You have been turned into an addict, addicted to your own neurotransmitters. If left to yourself you will experience the most agonizing misery possible. You will not die, while the whole time wishing that you had.”
Jana wanted to resist the pressure of her body and mind betraying her, but could not. This time, when the male asked her about military dispositions she answered to the best of her ability. And when the hum of pleasure again entered her body she felt the complete and utter shame of herself, and knew the next time it happened she would do the same thing.
* * *
THE DONUT, MARCH 23RD, 1000.
“The new batch of wormholes is going out now, Dr. Yu,” said the shipping manager over the com link.
“Thank you,” said Lucille, putting down her cup of coffee and taking a look at the freighter that was carrying the latest run of miniwormholes, destined to become com links or heat sinks aboard Imperial warships. They had found a more efficient way to make the minis, creating them at microscopic size and then ballooning them with gravitons, a method that was found not to work w
ith the normal wormholes. The minis collapsed when they were pushed beyond the one centimeter range. There might be a way around that, she was told by the physicists and engineers. But what it was they couldn’t say.
The freighter, actually a hyper VII destroyer, was now accelerating away, another destroyer escorting her. The wormholes were considered important enough by the military that they weren’t taking the chance that sabotage or some form of piracy taking them away before they could be deployed. If we could figure out a way to send a wormhole through a wormhole, thought the director of the project, dismissing that idea as soon as it came. The interference of other dimensional spatiality would collapse both holes, with undetermined consequences. It still amazed Lucille that the holes could be transported in hyperspace, crossing dimensions of reality while maintaining their integrity.
They were producing thirty of the miniwormholes a day, and the destroyer was carrying one hundred eighty of the holes in their special carrying containers, each of which held both ends of the hole and the negative matter rings that kept them open, suspended in a magnetic field. One end of each hole would be installed in a ship, the other either in a com link center or a heat sink.
Yu looked at her agenda for this week, noting that passenger and cargo gates were on the schedule for the next six days, while four had been run off the day before. The military had been screaming for a couple of ship gates, but after the last disaster she just didn’t have enough negative matter to build one side of one gate.
Lucille put her face in her hands and forced the tears back. She had forgotten about Dr. Landry, who had been obliterated when the negative matter tank had ruptured and sent tons of the material over him. Not even the smallest particle of the man still existed, and Yu, a practicing Christian, wasn’t sure what the ramifications of that was on the man’s soul. Was the soul even any kind of material? If it was then Landry’s soul was gone as well. And coming as it did after the death of the Emperor, his family, and so many of the Director’s colleagues. It was really too much to take.
The signal at the office door interrupted her thoughts, and she thanked her God for the interruption. “Come in,” she said over the intercom, and the door opened to admit her personal IIA agent, Jimmy Chung. The small Asian man smiled and walked to her desk, and she gestured that he should take a seat.
“What can I do for you today, agent Chung?” she asked, leaning forward on the desk. She found the man attractive, even though he was not really what she would consider her type. He was short for a man, part of his racial heritage, while she was tall for a woman of any ethnic group. But he had a warm smile and intelligent eyes. The smile left his face and she knew that whatever it was, he had come here to discuss business.
“I had a talk with Director Sergiov today,” said Chung, naming the head of the Imperial Intelligence Agency. “The analysts back on Jewel have been looking over the reports, and they seem to feel that we have a saboteur aboard the station.”
Yu nodded her head as he finished. She had wondered the same, but had not wanted to say anything until she had more proof. But the experts had looked at the same information and come to the same conclusion, and being experts they hadn’t been afraid to voice them.
“The final clue came from the negative matter tank,” continued the agent, pulling out a small chip and placing it on the desk. The chip projected a holo above it, which showed the tank as it had been before the rupture. “The agent did a good job of making sure that all of his device was in the ejection zone, so the negative matter would annihilate it without a trace. Unfortunately for him there were a few magnetic eddies from the intact bottle units, and this one small area was shaded by an overlapping field.”
The view changed to a close up of the ruptured tank, looking like something that acid had eaten a hole in. Lucille knew that the wall across from it looked just as bad, though one bizarrely shaped area had less damage that the rest, the result of a human body intervening between the tank flow and the matter of the bulkhead. There was also a small projection of metal that had been joined to the rest of the outer hull of the tank. And on that projection.
“This was part of the casing of whatever had been left on the tank. We found part of a molycirc board and a sliver of matrix battery, class III. Very highly energized, but unstable. We believe this was a device for interrupting a magnetic field.”
“So they cut off the magnetic field underneath the plating, causing a rupture in the magnetic bottle.”
Exactly,” said the agent, nodding. “The one major problem we have is that no one appears on the surveillance memory placing this device. In fact, looking back over all the faults that have occurred, we have not found anyone placing anything suspicious in any of the areas of interest. In fact, a recording of this side of the tank just before the event does not reveal this object, which we know was there. Now look at this.”
The view shifted to the scene that haunted Lucille’s nightmares, of Dr. Bob Landry getting caught in the stream of negative matter and ceasing to exist. The view reversed, then went into slow motion, and it was obvious that the man saw something on the tank and was turning, his mouth open to shout a warning. “The cameras had overrides on them that prevented them from recording that device on the plate. But Dr. Landry saw it, realized what it was, and turned to shout when it did its work.”
“The overrides didn’t work on him,” said Lucille, horrified at what was being revealed. “And we have a saboteur and murderer aboard the station.”
“Sure looks that way,” agreed Chung. “Murder is serious enough, but this sabotage is interfering with the military’s efforts to upgrade their capabilities. So you know what I’m talking about, Doctor?”
“Treason,” answered Yu, a shiver running up her spine. One of the few crimes that still invokes the death penalty. “Do you think this person had anything to do with the assassination of the Emperor?”
“I have no idea,” said the agent, staring at the holo behind Yu that showed the outside of the station. “I wouldn’t think they weren’t connected. They could have been separate cells, one not knowing what the other was doing. Other people are looking into the assassination, and my primary job is to keep you safe. Other operatives will be looking into this one. But we just wanted you to know that we are going to place our own surveillance assets around the station. Something the saboteur shouldn’t be able to mess with.”
“Whatever you think you need to do, Agent Chung.”
“Very well,” said the Agent, getting to his feet. “I have just one more request.”
“And what would that be?” asked Lucille with a wide smile on her face.
“Have dinner with me tonight.”
“I would love to,” said Lucille after just a moment’s thought. “I would love to. Your place or mine?”
Chapter Ten
The Ca’cadasans first started on the road of conquest on their own world, as one society grew to empire, then began the march of assimilation upon their planet. Later, when their urges for new lands forced them into space, they found other races who had not progressed as far, and conquered them as well. The Cacada were like a species of alien conquistadores, looking for the next city of gold, and taking everything in their path. There was only one species that really stood up to the Cacada, about a thousand years into their empire. Though more advanced than the predators, the aliens were heavily outnumbered, and not at all warlike. The Cacada annihilated them completely, and advanced their own technology by a millennia. That was the last difficult conquest for the race, until they ran into the humans, who, though not near as advanced, were at least as warlike. The human race was destroyed, or as much of it as the Cacada could find. The survivors ran, reestablished themselves, and continued to advance, until the Cacada found them again. This time there would be no easy victory for either side.
History of the Ca’cadasan War, Imperial Year 1215.
SPACE BETWEEN MASSADARA AND CONUNDRUM, MARCH 23RD THROUGH 24TH, 1000.
The
asteroid exerted a very small gravitational pull, something the ship could compensate for with minimal effort. The rock was perfect for their needs, containing most of the major metals and minerals, as well as volatiles. Measuring a hundred kilometers on a side, the small planetoid also could provide some cover if something unwanted came along.
“The only thing missing is supermetals,” said the Assistant Engineering Officer, who was acting Engineer of the ship.
“We won’t be getting any more of those,” said Commander Xavier Jackson, resting his elbows on the conference table. “Not short of a supply ship, or a factory complex.”
And there won’t be any of those out here, thought Captain Mei Lei, looking at the holo of the asteroid rotating in the center of the table. Supermetals did not occur in nature. Not even a supernova was capable of producing the metals that existed on an island of stability in the higher numbers of the Periodic Table. Only advanced industrial processes could create them, on minor planets that were converted into massive factory complexes, used until the planet grew too hot, then moved to the next frozen planet or moon. And something so sensitive would only be built around the star of a core or developing system, where it could avail itself of the security of the Fleet. The metals were vital for modern technology, especially the technology of the Fleet.
“So what’s the word on the hyper projectors?” asked Jackson, looking over at the Engineer.
“I believe we can build them back to Hyper IV units,” said the officer, a frown on his face. “Too much of the super platinum was taken out when the units ruptured during the catastrophic translation. I just don’t have enough to do any better. Same with the compensators.”
“What about the missiles?” asked the Captain, looking away from the rock.
“What about them?” asked Lt. Commander Jose Hernandez, a puzzled expression on his face. “We still have fifty-eight functional offensive missiles, and a couple of hundred defensive.”
Exodus: Empires at War: Book 3: The Rising Storm Page 25