“Crap.”
I initiated evasive maneuvers on that ship, and for just a moment it initiated a twenty-gravity acceleration as it twisted and dove out of the way. Unfortunately, even the least amount of acceleration required to evade the shuttle’s course, was far too strong a gravity field for the cloaking field to completely hide.
Four of the nearest enemy ships opened fire on the space and the entire fleet started to open wormholes at the same time. For that fleet alone I removed the weapons lockout, and space lit up with three billion energy beams. All the ships also worked to suppress the wormholes being opened, but the front six ranks of the enemy ships were out of range, there’d still been five minutes left before the plan.
The next five seconds was an unbelievably violent exchange of energy, and for the last three the enemy had returned fire and our shields started to weaken as well. I wasn’t too worried though, because we had a good two second jump on them, my ships should win.
Six hundred thousand of the enemy ships in the front six ranks disappeared into wormholes, right about the same time the rest of the ships self-destructed. Every missile, every reactor, and every subspace weapon on the enemy’s ships overloaded and exploded, sending powerful waves of energy into my ships. Far more destructive than I’d imagined possible, at such close ranges. Between that, and the fact the enemy had been firing beams at me for three seconds, two million and four hundred thousand of my ship’s exploded spectacularly.
Ironically, it was the six hundred thousand ships that hadn’t yet moved into their formations that had survived, an equal amount to theirs.
The other seven enemy fleets hadn’t acted yet, so I kept on with the plan there. The longer the storm of destruction waited, the surer I could be of getting all their ships.
Cassie said, “At least the others aren’t running, maybe they think we only found one of their fleets by pure random chance.”
I shook my head, “Maybe. Or maybe they are assuming we’re there, and if they open up wormholes that they’ll lose most of those fleets as well. They’re probably busy figuring out how we stopped most of their ships from opening a wormhole, and also working on a strategy to counter what they must expect is there.”
It was almost a full minute later, just three and a half minutes before we’d have been in place, when the enemy’s ships acted. They all fired five percent of their thousand point-defense turrets in a wide area beam that saturated the entire space their fleet was in, and it also revealed my cloaked ships creeping to a stop at point blank range of their ships.
Damn, that was a good counter plan.
I slammed the button to open fire and release offensive operations, even as the rest of their point defense turrets and their larger subspace energy turrets, opened fire on my fleet with the more pinpoint and destructive beams.
My fleets weren’t quite in place yet, but they were closer than they were before, so only the two front lines were far enough away that we couldn’t jam their wormhole creation while we exchanged powerful energies. I’d also started launching mini-platforms.
At five seconds, another one point four million Vrok ships escaped my simple ambush, if could resurrect whoever flew that damned shuttle, I’d strangle them to death. Two million of the enemy ships had escaped in total. That was a hell of a lot of ships, considering how powerful they were, I wasn’t sure if anyone but me was match for them.
As for the rest, they went up in mutual annihilation. Their shields fell about the same time ours did. They were still firing the diffuse energy beams, which countered the nanite advantage, without shields my ships were simply destroyed. But, I’d launched enough platforms that were still at full shields, while theirs had been hanging on by a thread from my main ship fire, and less than a second later their fleets went up as well in mutual annihilation.
In the end, at all seven sites, I had another four hundred thousand ships survive. So, the enemy had two million ships after all was said and done, and I only had a million left. I ordered the survivors to collect the unattached mini-platforms that’d survived, and absorb them into their ships.
Then I waited, and waited some more, then some more.
“Crap, they’re not showing back up. Either they went into the void between galaxies, or they’re going a far way away and are still in wormhole transit.”
Jessica said, “I’ll set the mass detection field to alert us if it picks up something new. If they come out in any of the galaxies, we’ll get them.”
I nodded, and I blew out a breath. Not good. Taking out twenty-two million of their ships was a victory of sorts, but it wasn’t as complete as I’d hoped with two million getting away. Still, there’d be hope for at least a few hours. If they didn’t show up within that time period, they probably wouldn’t show up at all. It would mean they were in the void between galaxies or out of Vrok space and our space altogether. Nothing was far enough away that’d it’d take more than that long to get there.
As for me, I split my remaining ships and started them growing, just to keep the numbers even. I also dispatched two ships to take care of those two hidden bases the Vrok had. That was one less thing to worry about, as the ships jumped directly there and destroyed them in seconds.
I debated going back to bed until seven to get a few more hours of sleep, but I was too worked up to sleep at that point. Food, then work. Maybe in a few hours once I’d figured out where their ships were or not, I’d take a nap. Otherwise I’d just start my normal work.
“Be right back, I’m going to grab some breakfast.”
Their ships weren’t found that day. I did take a nap before lunch, and worked a normal day besides, and their ships weren’t detected at all. Either they were in the large void between galaxies, or they’d left both our empires’ space. The former seemed more likely at that point, but it didn’t matter, either way they had two million ships we couldn’t find.
It seemed likely they would stay that way, until after the enemy’s attempt to destroy us, anyway. If they destroyed my station, they’d come back, if that attack failed, I was sure they’d stay wherever they were and start to rebuild their fleets. As it was, it’d be at least sixty years before they’d come back if that was the case. The concept didn’t make me all that happy, but at least their known worlds were quarantined, and the danger was limited in scope.
Still, with that many ships they could keep building small fleets of exploding cloaked probes, and just continue to try and kill us until it worked. It was… disturbing to imagine needing to be on guard for that long.
We had to find and destroy those ships.
Chapter Sixteen
The next day I was expecting that attack, but so far it hadn’t happened. It was mid-morning, when Diana asked me to come to the labs so she could show me what she was working on. I headed over there with Cassie.
My wife gave us both a smile, “Take a seat, I think you’ll find this interesting.”
We sat, and my wife brought up a large hologram of the test solar system. There were two test ships on the display, they were two A.U. apart, which was sixteen light minutes.
She said, “I think this is going to be a game changer. Well, it won’t help against the Vrok, they already have the same defense I made to defend from this weapon, which will be obvious when I explain it. On the other hand, none of our other potential enemy empire’s do, at this time anyway. Nor the other FTL races in the fifty galaxies.
“A long time ago, when we were still testing the jump drives, I looked at the possibility of extending our weapons range via quantum resonance. Our communicators work, because we’re only passing through a few volts of energy, and our jump drives work because creating a quantum resonance field is low energy as well. But the artificial quantum resonance fields destabilized on me when trying to pass through greater amounts of energy, like our energy, disintegration, and anti-matter beams. So I threw out the idea.
“Melody’s new advances made me consider trying again, not with the old weapons b
ut with a new one that we hadn’t gotten right yet. It took me a while to get it right. Gravity fields do take a lot of energy, but gravity itself is a force and has absolutely no effect at all on an artificially created quantum resonance field.
“Marry that fact to the second generation jump drive concepts, and suddenly all the problems with projecting intense gravity fields far from the ship goes away. Such as those that would be needed for the singularity weapon which I’ve been stuck on because of the danger of creating such a thing so close to the ship.”
She pointed at the screen, “Check this out.”
One of the ships just… disappeared. It happened so fast I didn’t actually see anything happen. No flash of energy, no explosion, just nothing.
“Did it jump?”
She shook her head, and said, “Okay, this is that event in slow motion.”
I watched as the data and the screen, as the shields on the ship were destabilized and torn away, and then watched slowly, just two pico-seconds in real time, as the ship was sucked forward and compacted so small it barely read on the sensors.
By a ship that was sixteen light minutes, away. Holy crap.
“Umm, so singularity weapons are scary.”
She nodded, “All ships should be equipped with a resonance pulse generator. It would mean no jumping to one closer than a thousand miles, but it would shield a ship from this happening to them.”
I frowned, “Wouldn’t it disrupt comms and prevent a ship from jumping.”
She shook her head, “The systems would have to be timed of course, the resonance pulse generator would pause a microsecond before the internal jump field was formed. We’d also have to shield the communications device to prevent the pulses from destabilizing it. Point is, there’s very little chance an enemy with this weapon could successfully time an attack just as we’re jumping.
“Obviously, that defense means this weapon won’t work on the Vrok, so you’ll have to stick to the subspace energy beam weapon for them. Regardless, it’s a second extremely powerful weapon that normal shields won’t protect an enemy from. Unless they were shielded from that weapon and the disintegration beam like the Vrok are, we wouldn’t have any trouble taking them down.
“Still, it may be that this new weapon should inform your choices. The large dreadnought platforms may no longer be necessary at all. You’ll have to figure that out, but the weapon takes a lot of energy to form that singularity, even temporarily. The mini-platforms are too small, they’ll need to be at least ten times bigger.”
I nodded, “I could either keep the dreadnoughts and have one point two million mini-platforms in each one, or just go with the smaller ships independently and forget the dreadnoughts.”
She nodded, “It’s just one more weapon, but you’ll want to make the other four beam weapons still useful if we run into another aggressive invader with protection from our two strongest weapons.”
I said, “Three really, without the subspace shields, the new subspace weapon would rip apart any ship extremely quickly, almost as fast as the disintegration. The scariest part is the range.”
She snorted, “That’s not the limit, there is no limit. You could have a tiny cloaked probe outside an enemy system, feeding our station quantum frequency coordinates, while the station destroys hundreds of ships at a time, from across the universe. Which is why we need to always have those beacons going, because once we use the weapon someone else will eventually figure out how to use it.”
“You’re so sexy when your terrifying.”
Diana smirked, “Behave. It is frightening, I almost didn’t show it to you. But it’s limited, it takes a lot of power. A dreadnought can fire a thousand strong subspace energy beams, any of our beams really, but only about a hundred singularities at a time. So it wouldn’t even be worth using, against an enemy that couldn’t withstand our beam technology and wasn’t a danger in getting through our shields.
“It’d be faster to jump there and take them on normally. This weapon is more for taking out a true threat, at a distance. A backup and last resort weapon, the less we use it the less chance our neighboring empires will see and try to copy it.”
I nodded, “I might as well go with smaller ships, overwhelm with numbers. If a ship ten times the size of a mini-platform can fire one singularity attack, it should be able to do ten beams. It’s also large enough that it could use a wormhole if it had to, instead of a jump drive. Really, the dreadnoughts were obsolete when our daughter created the second generation jump drive, a wormhole drive is no longer needed, so they won’t ever need a carrier.
“I could split up every fleet into five trillion of these eighty-foot-long ships, and it’d have the same throw weight in beam tech and singularity. With no need to launch mini-platforms it’s tactically better as well.”
If I’d learned anything fighting the Vrok, the two to three seconds it takes to eject the mini-platforms is a huge amount of time against an enemy with equal strength. It didn’t so much matter, when I was swatting the Grays or the Stolthrim who couldn’t really hurt me back once I’d had technical superiority.
Cassie nodded, “A larger ship would make more sense if they were manned, but for our forces I’ll agree that would work fine. Point defense wouldn’t suffer either, the small ships could target ten missiles almost as fast as forty-eight trillion platforms could lock on one each.”
“I’ll go design those, and then split our ships. We should get close to five trillion on every border, and half that in the void. Even better, with two point five trillion ships, the Vrok would take five or six seconds to kill each one. They don’t have enough turrets to take out more than four billion or so in the time it would take them to destroy all of theirs. One more advantage to the change.”
It wouldn’t stop me from making colony packages either, I’d just have to join a whole lot more ships than two to do so. It’d be the same amount of mass either way. The colony ship, a hundred of the dreadnoughts for their manned military ships, but maybe a million of the new small ships instead of a thousand more dreadnought platforms. That would also increase coverage in the solar system, as far as scanning went.
Diana smirked, and then teased, “Also easier to dodge an unexpected shuttle with.”
I nodded, “Don’t remind me, I’m still annoyed about that. We really need to find those ships. I’ll also do as you suggest, and only use singularities, subspace energy beams, or disintegration beams if they’re necessary. Even our old energy beams are twice as strong as they used to be, so I don’t think any of the empires around us could stand up to them outside of the Vrok.”
Diana smiled, “If we’re lucky, they went to conquer a smaller and weaker empire to rebuild.”
I frowned, “Why would that be lucky, exactly?”
Diana smirked, “Because if they’re attacking solar systems in a galaxy two empires away in any direction from our seventy-six galaxies to start a building and breeding project, then Darrell’s cloaked network will find them eventually when it’s full built out. If they’re in the void between galaxies, then we’ll never find them.”
Oh, yeah. That would be good, especially if they were stuck in a solar system with no escape. I mentioned my idea for a new colony package. I also suggested we keep the singularity weapons for ourselves, as one more super top-secret technology, on top of my magic and second-generation energy to matter devices.
Cassie said, “That could work, but you could give them both options. Just because you like the smaller ship concept doesn’t mean they will. It does have one distinct disadvantage after all, it can’t take a lot of damage and rebuild itself, it will be easier to completely wipe out.”
I nodded, “True, but it’s still the same amount of mass, each with their own discrete shields, and the destroyed ships can be replaced a lot faster.”
Diana made a shooing motion, “I need to get back to work, go design our new ships.”
I grinned, “Yes, maam.”
I gave her a proper kiss t
o befuddle her before heading back to the command center.
Designing the new ships and software wasn’t all that hard. I’d already done most of the work making the mini-platforms work together while independently targeting ships, and while five trillion eight foot long ships were a whole lot, it was also much less than the forty eight trillion platforms a four million dreadnought fleet had.
Adding the new weapon as a new option was easy as well. The only tricky thing was changing the mini-platform software to support ten different beam arrays at once, other than those two things, the software was pretty much identical.
The only really pain in the butt part was the physical paired quantum connections. The way it was currently set up, my station controlled the dreadnoughts directly, then there was a second jump as the dreadnoughts were quantum paired to the mini-platforms so I could control them through the dreadnought platform.
Of course, the dreadnought was going away, and I didn’t have enough physical pairs with the station once each ship became about one thousand two hundred and fifty of the eighty-foot ships. I had more than one on each ship of course, a lot more than one, but just enough that splitting the ships to double my fleets on occasion wouldn’t impact anything. This was a whole other ball of wax.
So, the first thing I did once the design for the new ship was ready, was have each and every ship build twelve thousand five hundred more quantum pairs. I offloaded one half of each connection into a cube of nanites that I loaded onto a mini-platform for each dreadnought platform.
Those fifty-five million mini-platforms then jumped to my station, which probably caused a stir in the allied fleets in SOL, but screw it. Surprises were good for the soul. I absorbed all those mini-platforms into the station, and had my command systems link in to all those connections.
Intergalactic Union Page 11