A couple of Marines in shipboard medium armor greeted them with rifle salutes outside, while a Fleet captain saluted. “This way, sir,” said the Captain, turning on his heel and leading them into the station.
The station was huge, and the Admiral was sure he would soon lose his way if left to his own devices. But a quick walk and a lift ride got them to the moderately sized room that was the waypoint. The mirrored surface shimmered ahead of the Admiral as he stepped into the room. He noted that heavy radiation shielding had been placed in direct line of sight of the wormhole, the type used to absorb neutrons from the MAM reactors of a spaceship.
“The Station Commander extends his compliments, sir,” was the last thing the Captain said to him before he stepped in front of the wormhole that Yin had already entered. “We all wish you the best of luck, sir.”
“Thank you, Captain,” said the Admiral, shaking the man’s hand. Yin had gone through with their bags, so the only thing Len had to take through the hole was himself. He looked nervously at the mirrored surface, what he had been told was the future of space travel, and remembered that his friend and Emperor had traversed this same portal, and not returned. Then, without waiting for more fear to paralyze, him he stepped through the hole. His leg and arm went through first, and after that it was more like the wormhole pulled him in with a gentle but irresistible force. Until he was gone from the station.
And then it was if Grand High Admiral Gabriel Lenkowski ceased to exist in the Universe. He was part of the void, nothing and one with everything. After a period that could have been an instant or eternity light again struck his reconstituted eyes, and he staggered into another chamber. Another Captain waited for him here with a salute. It took the Admiral a moment to get his bearings, his mind still disoriented.
“Takes a little getting used to, sir,” said Commander Yin, standing next to the bags she had brought through.
“Welcome aboard the Donut, sir,” said the Captain. “Doctor Yu would like to talk with you about a matter of some importance.”
Len nodded while snapping off a short salute, wondering what could have been going on here that needed his attention. He noted the neutron projector that was set to aim straight into the hole, with several others standing by as backups. He knew the theory behind that. A stream of neutrons entering the wormhole would seal it from the other side, as neutrons were not just radiation, they were also particles of matter, and the hole could not transmit out while something was coming in. Effectively, this hole would no longer be of use to the people who were after him. Only electromagnetic radiation could come through, mass-less photons.
“You should be safe enough here, sir,” said the Captain, noting the Admiral’s gaze toward the neutron beams. “We’re sixty light hours from the capital by com, and there are purposely no receivers in this area to pick up anything they might try to send in.
So we have two and a half days before any signal they sent is received here, by anyone willing to enforce their edicts. Most of the massive station was empty, and it would take centuries to fill up the billions of cubic kilometers that made up its space. Everything of note was within several thousand kilometers of the portal, there being no need to spread out the control rooms, labs and quarters at this time. That would come later, when this became the transportation hub of the Empire. If the Empire survives to see that day.
Doctor Lucille Yu was waiting for them in the outer office of a med lab that was near to the entry point. Len always got a chuckle out of seeing the woman who, except for the epicanthic folds of her eyes, looked nothing like her last name. Yu was tall and blond, with the breasts of a Norse Goddess.
“Good to see you, Admiral,” said Yu, grasping Len’s hand. “Even if the circumstances aren’t the greatest.”
“You have some news for me, Doctor Yu?”
“Actually, some good, and some bad,” said Yu, the smile leaving her face. “We’re ready to put the wormhole gate system into operation in the home system. In fact, gates are on their way to every inhabitable planet in the Supersystem, and will be at their destinations within the next three days. With the exception of the Home System. Those ships are being purposefully delayed until you work out what you’re going to do. As you requested.”
Len let out a huff of air as he thought about that. Those gates would be a great help to the war effort, allowing people to move around the worlds of the eight central star systems orbiting the black hole without an appreciable amount of travel time. But first he needed to figure out what he was going to do. “I guess I could find a place to hide on the station, Doctor Yu, if worse comes to worse. I doubt they could bring enough people aboard to do a thorough job of it.”
“Or, there’s the other alternative,” said Yu, gesturing to a star map that was on a prominent viewer on the wall. The Sectors of the Empire, all twelve of them, were highlighted on the map, and there were lines drawn from the supersystem to all of them. The lines were all dashed, indicating that the wormhole gates were yet to be installed. But the one to Sector Four was solid almost the whole way through. Meaning.
“You have the gateway through to sector four,” said Len, feeling the excitement run through him. Four was where the missing heir was last seen, and where it was most likely he could be found. If the way was open.
“Not quite yet, Admiral,” said the Director of the Donut Project. “I think maybe within the next day or two. But not yet.”
“Still, good enough to get you to that sector, sir,” said Yin, smiling. “You can rally support around you.”
“I’m not trying to start a civil war, Commander,” said the Admiral, grimacing. “But it would be good to have some friends around me.” He turned to the Director. “What was the other news, since I assume this was the good?”
“This was good and bad, Admiral,” said Yu. “As is the next bit of news. We caught the saboteur. Or should I say, we killed him, or it.”
“That is good news,” said Len, thinking about the words she used. “So the sabotage should stop, at least for the near future.”
“We could hope, Admiral,” said a small man who Len recognized as one of the IIA agents assigned to Yu’s security. “Though from what we found, we could have another one with us, and never know.
“You said you tried to capture him, Agent?” asked Len.
“Senior Agent Jimmy Chung,” said the Asian. “Director Sergiov put me in charge of Dr. Yu’s security, and the overall security of the project.”
“You say you did try to capture the saboteur. Why couldn’t you?”
“Because it shrugged off all of our attempts to bring it down with sonics,” said the Naval Captain, Callahan, that Len had assigned to the station. “It was threatening to take out the control panel Dr. Yu needed to access the station grabbers, to keep this whole damned thing from falling into the hole. So I decided it was time to stop it in its tracks. So I did, sir.”
“I think that was a good call, Captain,” said the Admiral. “This project is more important than capturing a live saboteur. But you said it, Dr. Yu. Just what are we dealing with here?”
“Maybe it will all become clearer if you officers take a look at what we found after it was brought down,” said Yu, gesturing toward the door to the lab.
The lab looked like many med labs that Len had seen in his career, better appointed than some, less so than others. Yu introduced everyone to the station surgeon, one of what would eventually be a small army of medical personnel to serve the enormous structure. Dr. Patton led the group to a table that was encompassed in a sterile field that would prevent decay, keeping the body as fresh as the moment it was killed.
Len didn’t know what to expect when the covering was pulled back. A normal looking human female was not it. The woman looked like someone he had seen before, and he looked in shock at Dr. Lucille Yu, the image of the body on the table.
“This is Doctor Lucille Yu,” said Yu, pointing to a screen that showed a picture of the woman on the table while she was in t
he control room. “Obviously it is not my twin, as I have none. And Agent Chung has verified that I am the real me.”
“Doctor Patton,” said Yu, and the small man walked up to the table and pulled more of the covering back. There were the burn marks of lasers on the flesh, and holes that reached into the body cavity, the obvious cause of death.
“I have never seen anything like this,” said the doctor, pulling the covering all the way back and revealing what looked like an incomplete set of genitals in the groin area. A closer look revealed an incomplete set of male genitalia. The doctor grabbed a medical instrument and pulled at the opening of one of the laser shots, revealing something that did not look like human skin or muscle. “This thing is not human, despite all appearances. And when the agents caught up with it the thing was in the process of changing.”
“Changing?” asked Len. “Into what?”
“Into someone else,” said the doctor. “This is a shape shifter. Able to take the shape of another being, imitating it perfectly, at least on the surface. Skin samples even match exactly the DNA structure of Dr. Yu. Beneath the surface is another story.”
“Like something from a damned vid,” said Yin, looking with a horror struck face at the creature.
“Not exactly like a vid,” said the Doctor. “It can’t change instantaneously. In fact, from the amount of restructuring it must do to become another person, I would estimate it takes from one to three days to change into someone else.”
“Still damned useful to penetrate security,” said Agent Chung. “This thing has caused me nightmares since we killed it. No telling who else might be running around this station who isn’t what we think they are.”
“Any way to tell one of these from a real person?” asked Yin, reaching out to touch the creature, then thinking better of it and drawing her hand back.
“Not from any kind of surface scan,” said the Doctor, shaking his head. “And not from a surface sample of tissue. A deeper sample should tell us what they are. And that’s the other thing, Admiral. This species is unknown in our space.”
“Then where does it come from?” asked Len, not able to take his eyes off of the saboteur.
“Best guess would be Elysium,” said the Doctor. “We have some data suggesting a species that matches this one.”
“Son of a bitch,” growled the IIA Agent. “No wonder their intelligence apparatus is so good. With perfect infiltrators like this.”
“I have an even greater concern, Agent Chung,” said the Admiral, looking around at the people in the room. “If they are sabotaging our military resources now, is this a prelude to a war.?”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Looking outward to the blackness of space, sprinkled with the glory of a universe of lights, I saw majesty but no welcome. Below was a welcoming planet. There, contained in the thin, moving, incredibly fragile shell of the biosphere is everything that is dear to you, all the human drama and comedy. That's where life is. That's where all the good stuff is. Loren Acton.
HYPERSPACE NEAR CONUNDRUM, APRIL 15TH, 1000.
“Enemy missiles have passed the enemy VII ships,” called out the Tactical Officer. “Our missiles will strike the enemy ships in twelve minutes.”
“And the enemy missiles will get here when? Twenty minutes?”
“Close enough, my Lord,” said the Tactical Officer. “It’s a formidable strike, but we should be able to handle it with minimal damage.”
“And use up most of our remaining hyper counter missiles,” said the Admiral, giving a head gesture of acknowledgement. “I pray to Gods and the Emperor, their vessel on this plane, that we don’t have to fight another major engagement before getting back to base.”
“I don’t think we will, my Lord,” said the Tactical Officer. “We can destroy this other force and then head back, and nothing the enemy has will be able to catch us.”
“Nothing? What about these hyper VII ships of theirs?”
“We have already determined that they have a limited number of them, my Lord. And this force we have destroyed must be the majority of those vessels in this region. The rest are these hyper VI ships, including all their most formidable capital ships.”
“May you be correct,” said the Admiral. “Begin deceleration to hyper jump speed,” he said to his Helm Officer, looking over at the Com Officer and giving a nod as well. “Our missiles will destroy the few VII ships that remain. And then we will jump into VI and destroy the other enemy force. This will be a black day for the humans.”
* * *
The two waves of missiles, human and Ca’cadasans, approached each other through hyper VII. At ten seconds from closing fifty of the human missiles detonated, flooding the space with plasma and radiation. The plasma soon faded back into normal space, while the low mass radiation continued on for some minutes. A score of enemy missiles detonated within the plasma fields, while forty more had their sensor heads destroyed by radiation.
A second later fifty more human missiles went off, then fifty more, until half the missiles had blown up in space, taking out four hundred and seventy-four of the enemy weapons. Three hundred and twenty-six enemy missiles continued on toward the human VII force, while eighty-one wandered off into space with no lock on any target. Five hundred and twelve human missiles forged on toward the Ca’cadasan force, while the eighty-eight damaged birds became short term wanderers of hyperspace.
* * *
“Signals coming down the line, sir,” said the Flag Com Officer. The officer looked back with a stricken expression on her face. “Admiral Montgomery’s force took a major hit by the enemy. Only five ships survived.”
“Goddammit,” yelled the Admiral, looking at the plot and wishing he could change the laws of physics to get his ships where he wanted them to be, and knowing that wouldn’t happen. He looked over at the Com Officer and let out a breath. “I’ve got to believe that Mara’s ship was one of the survivors, and that the heir is on her ship. Order the fleet to maximum acceleration. All crews to the tanks. As soon as we get within our missile envelope I want all ships to fire their hyper VII missiles. We’re going to try and blow those bastards out of space.”
“Aye, sir,” said the Com Officer, her face still distraught, but her hands working efficiently at her board to send out the signals.
“Should have done this in the first place,” said the Admiral, slamming a fist into an open palm. “Instead, I had to play it cute and try to set a trap.”
“You couldn’t know,” said Commodore Gomez, putting a hand on the Grand Fleet Admiral’s shoulder.
“Remember your history lessons, Commodore,” said the Admiral, turning on her with a scowl on his face. “I played Yamamoto at Midway, splitting everything up in an overly complicated plan. When I should have played Halsey, and just sent everything I had at them. Well, now I’m going for the throat, and let them see what we can do when we’re pissed.’ He walked back to the plot, studying the dispositions before him.
“Is it worth using all of the hyper VII missiles in the sector, Admiral?” said Gomez, holding up her hands when he turned back to her with fire in his eyes. “Just saying, Admiral. Without those missiles we really don’t have a way to strike them while they are in VII. And we don’t know that the heir has survived. The odds are against him still being alive.”
“And I intend to play it like he is, no matter what the odds say,” said the Admiral, pointing a finger at his Intelligence Officer. He lowered his hand and shook his head, turning back to the holo and putting both hands on the railing running around it. “And I think we are seeing the end of hyper VI warships. The future will belong to the VIIs, at first more lightly armed, but later bigger and better. Oh, not right away. We have too many VIs in the pipeline, and it will take time to change the factories over to making new equipment.”
The tanks had finished rising from the floor, and the Admiral trotted over to his cubby and had it remove his armor. It would still be several minutes before they would go into emergency a
cceleration, giving all the crew time to get to their tank stations. The Admiral stepped into his tube, fitted his breathing mask, and made sure his link into the fleet control system was strong. Fluid flowed up around him until he floated in the body temperature mixture, and he looked over to see Gomez floating in her own tank.
A minute later the ship increased its acceleration to thirty gravities over the capacity of the inertial compensators. And around her forged the other four hundred vessels of the strike fleet; battleships, battle cruisers, heavy cruisers and even some lighter vessels. All heading for a launch point where they could take the enemy ships under fire.
* * *
“Missile impact in three minutes,” called out the tactical officer.
The lasers rings of the surviving ships were now cycling through as fast as they could acquire targets. The ships were all oriented with their flanks facing the incoming weapons, allowing all of the laser rings to engage. At the same time the ships were releasing plasma torpedoes from both bow and stern. Unlike the normal torpedoes, these were only about half the mass, and left the tubes at a low speed, hanging in space close to the launching ships, hanging within the hyper fields while the hyper projectors attached to the following capsules of the torpedoes extended the envelop out. The mass of plasma and the capsules used to enclose it in a magnetic field was normally more than the projectors had to handle, grouped as they were three to a hundred and fifty ton missile. They were set to an overload status that would cause failure within ten minutes, which was more than enough time.
The lasers took out over a hundred of the incoming missiles. Decoys spoofed another fifty-six weapons that wandered off track. The limited counter missiles knocked down another thirty-three, leaving one hundred thirty-five headed into the ships. It was mathematically impossible for the lasers to take out more than forty of the remaining missiles, and the fraction of a second of particle beam fire could only take out thirty more. There would be sixty five hits, more than enough to wipe out the five ships that were there targets.
Exodus: Empires at War: Book 3: The Rising Storm Page 62