by Andrew Beery
“I’m sure they are feeling foolish right about now. I used your Mark Six’s crowd control loudspeaker to send an ultra-high frequency audio signal at the building they targeted. My suit sent a matched signal that was designed to interact with your broadcast in such a way that it appeared that there were armed forces holding out on that building. In point of fact, they were really hearing a time and frequency shifted recording of their own movements.”
“Nice,” Private Stone said.
“We’re about four blocks from our ob…,” Cat had been about to say objective but before she could - every alarm in her suit went off at once. This was accompanied by sensor feeds showing a truly impressive number of inbound mortar rounds.
Pushing her Heshe reflexes to their limits she raced in the general direction of the Private. She’d made it about a third of the way when the first of the rounds hit her.
Chapter Sixteen - Burnout...
"Run!" Cat yelled at Private Stone.
The young soldier, who had come down off the roof remained frozen in place. His armor showed signs of heavy abuse but she doubted a malfunction was the source of the sudden freeze-up. That would be the massive line of enemy track vehicles moving in their direction that suddenly appeared on their suit scanners. Admiral Cat Kimbridge kicked his shin. The metallic exoskeleton of his battle suit shuddered with the force of the blow. A normal human would not have had the strength to budge the high-tech battle armor but she was far from a normal human by any measure. It was enough to get his attention.
"Run?... Yes, ma’am... Good idea, ma’am"
The sound of gun fire was deafening. The smoke and fire made visibility difficult. In the background Cat could hear the sound of Syndicate heavy armor moving in their general direction.
"If we can make it to that ridge, I can call in an air strike. How much juice do you have left in your suit?" she yelled over the deafening noise of the battle.
The soldier paused as he checked the combat computer built into his Mark Six battle suit. The last several minutes had taken their toll. His suit had been hit several times by flying shrapnel which would have killed him instantly had he not been wearing the suit. Unfortunately its energy reserves were growing critically low.
"I'm down to about twenty percent on my mains plus two percent on my backups." Private Stone paused for a moment as he double checked a readout. "My AI is showing only thirty-eight percent combat effectiveness due to damage. If I let the repair systems have the power to fix things up I'll drain both my reserves and be dead in the water."
Cat nodded her silver-clad head. Her last meal had been over a day ago. In short, her own energy reserves were critically low as well.
She looked around. The buildings in this part of the Modos capital city of Harromog were thoroughly trashed. Days of mortar fire had pretty much destroyed everything in sight. Each side had taken and lost the city several times in the last weeks. The spaceport where her shuttle had crashed three days ago was now just so much rubble. She could see dust clouds nearing her position as the Syndicate armored lines advanced one last time. Most of the in-theater GCP forces had been neutralized. They were quickly running out of options.
Her ultra-sensitive hearing detected the rising pitch of another incoming mortar round as it whistled through the air. The shell would land a few feet away but before it could impact with the ground, Cat's Heshe enhanced reflexes reacted. She threw her body over the young marine, tackling him in the process. The force of the explosion sent shrapnel flying in every direction. Several pieces struck her armor. The active shielding in her armor warped local physics and reversed the momentum of the objects hitting her. They bounced off her like balls bouncing off a wall. The cost was a few thousand calories. She was seriously hungry.
Cat contacted her embedded AI. "Cal, do a sensor sweep. Give me enemy movement and let me know if there is a functioning power source nearby."
"Enemy movement detected. I estimate your position will be overrun in three point four minutes. A significant power source has also been detected. It is currently outputting thirty-six thousand kilowatts."
"Perfect... that's exactly what we need. Where is it?"
"Approximately two hundred meters directly below you."
“Private… Do you still have that bunker-buster handy?”
***
Commodore Jason Ruck inched forward in his seat on the bridge of WhimPy-101. Unlike the time when he was on the bridge of the Mador, his role here was purely that of observer and advisor. The Mador and the Yorktownwere on the other side of the sun—still in orbit around Naanac. They were part of an elaborate ruse. Field emitters on the skin of each ship had been reprogrammed to create the illusion of the massive Heshe weapons platform. Meanwhile, WhimPy-101 had jumped directly in front of the MS Retribution. The plan was to deal with the threat the Retribution represented quickly and then jump back to the picketing position above the planet before the Syndicate forces knew they were gone. Unfortunately, no plan ever survived contact with the enemy.
WhimPy-101 emerged from the Hyperfold intent on quickly subduing the enemy vessel but quite to his surprise the enemy vessel was already firing on them as they folded back into local space-time.
The WhimPy’s shields took the brunt of the assault but they were drained by a full sixteen percent. In his rather extensive life time, the Heshe weapons platform had never seen an attack this energetic. A vessel would need the entire radiant output of a small sun in order to equal what had just been fired against the shields. Immediately, 101 started rotating his defenses and began to fire a collimated anti-proton beam at the attacking ship. The beam in question should have decimated the other ship’s defenses and vaporized it in an instant. Normally the WhimPy would not have contemplated using force of this magnitude but a suspicion first voiced by Admiral Kimbridge was looking more and more likely. There was a third player in this conflict and this player was in all likelihood the most powerful of the three. WhimPy-101 activated a special circuit that had been installed a millennia ago in the hopes it might never be used. It was a distress beacon… one that could only be heard by the Heshe.
The anti-proton beam the WhimPy fired struck the other ship. Amazingly, the beam was simply absorbed by the other ship’s shields. Sensors on the WhimPy platform detected no significant change in its shield emitter output. In essence the other ship shrugged off the attack without even noticing.
The Retribution fired on the WhimPy platform again. This time it used a hyperfield conduit as an envelope to deliver an antimatter warhead. The WhimPy’s shields resisted the onslaught for the better part of twelve milliseconds before the tiniest of fluctuations occurred. It was this fluctuation that the Retribution’s AI was watching for. Once it occurred, an antimatter payload was materialized a kilometer deep within the Heshe platform. The explosion blew a full third of the platform away.
“Holy Mother of God… what was that!” Jason yelled, as picked himself up from across the room where he had been thrown.
“That…,” the WhimPy platform answered, with a tangible sense of awe in its voice,“should not have been possible.”
“Possible or not, it happened,” Jason yelled.“Our priorities have just shifted,” he said, resolutely.“This is a game changer. The GCP needs to know what we are facing!”
The massive AI deployed emergency countermeasures in the form of additional shield nodes, active obfuscation signal decoys, and continuous-fire kinetic, energy, and antiproton beams. The combined output severely taxed the WhimPy platform’s reserves, but it bought him the precious seconds he needed to run a comprehensive situation analysis. The results were not good.
Another hyperfield conduit began to test the WhimPy’s shields. 101 made a decision. He deliberately perturbed his shields ever so slightly. As predicted, the Retributionattempted to jump another antimatter bomb deep inside the WhimPy’s ablative shielding. One picosecond before the weapon materialized, the WhimPy translocated to a point one kilometer deep within the su
n’s corona. The backwash through the hyperfield conduit was effectively hidden by the antimatter explosion. With any luck, the Retribution would assume the WhimPy platform had been destroyed.
***
Cat bent a steel girder out of the way. Private Stone’s bunker-buster had opened a hole in the street that reached down thirty-plus meters. The placement of the charge had been critical to its effectiveness. Cat had used ground-penetrating radar to position it above a series of subterranean tunnels. The resulting hole that the shaped charge created was deep, but it was still a long way from the power source they had detected. That said, it was enough to get them into some type of underground ventilation system. Hopefully, the conduits would get them to where they needed to go.
“More importantly,” Cat thought, “it gets us out of the immediate field of fire”’
Because of Cat’s greater strength and smaller size, she led the way. As she crawled through the often constricted space, she used her quickly dwindling power reserves to expand the opening for the larger Private in his Mark Six combat suit that was following behind her.
“Watch the end of that pipe,” Cat called, over her shoulder.“It will do a number on your rucksack if it gets caught.”
“Got it, ma’am. I’m showing us a little over a hundred meters from that power source.”
“What’s your status?” Cat asked as she eased a collapsed girder out of their way.
“Not good, admiral. My mains are about gone, and my reserves are just under two percent. I seem to have a short that my suit’s AI can’t isolate. It’s draining my systems even faster than normal. Another ten or fifteen minutes and I may have to abandon the suit.”
Cat thought for a second before answering. If Private Stone abandoned his armor, he would be without weapons and defense. Even strapped in an immobile suit, he would be safer than walking unprotected in this environment.
“Let me know when you get down to half a percent. At that point we’ll deactivate your Stark and I’ll take your exhausted spare power pack with me. Hopefully I’ll be able to find the power source; top off your spare and get it back to you before our friends up there get too curious about the hole we made in the street above us.”
The journey as a team lasted only another few minutes. As the private had indicated, the short in his suit was draining his power pack at an alarming rate. The irony was that if his power pack been fully charged it would have been able to power the maintenance systems that could have repaired the short.
Cat left the private near a small utility cabinet about sixty meters from their target. Unfortunately, the going was getting progressively tougher. Many of the ventilation conduits had collapsed due to the heavy bombardment and the resulting collapse of buildings in the city above.
Cat’s own energy reserves were critically low. She allowed her protective metallic skin to slough off. It simply required energy she no longer had to spare.
“Cal,” Cat signaled her AI.“How much progress have we made parsing through the Syndicate data net? Do we have a map of the surrounding area yet?"
“Affirmative, Admiral. I can provide a complete map of Harromog including infrastructure. In addition I can now provide you with the exact location of the systems you will need to access in order to disable the planetary sterilization system.”
“Wonderful,” Cat said, as a detailed map of her immediate surroundings superimposed itself on her vision. A few meters ahead there was a common wall between the corridor Cat was in and the one that led to the emergency backup generator that supplied the Headquarters computer complex.
Cat touched the section of wall in question. A small stream of construction nanites flowed from her fingertips. They immediately began to attack the seams that held the aluminum wall panel in place. With very little effort she was able to force the weakened panel out of place. Behind it was another panel that belonged to the adjacent corridor. Again a small number of construction nanites flowed forth from her fingertips. In a moment she eased the second panel out of the way and stepped through the newly created opening.
She quickly consulted her internal map. She was surprised to see she was actually closer to the administrative terminal where she needed to enter the stand-down code than she was to the power source. She checked her power reserves and decided to address the stand-down issue first. The terminal room was just down the hall and around a bend.
“Anthony… you still on comm?”
“Affirmative, Admiral.”
“I’m going to take a little detour. The terminal room we were looking for seems to be right down the hall. I’m going to send the ‘stand-down’ code before I make my way to the generator. I should only be a few minutes longer than anticipated.”
“I’ll continue to guard our rear, Admiral. Please be careful, ma’am. I can’t imagine the first sergeant taking kindly to me losing a flag officer on my first deployment.”
“I understand your concern, Private. I’ll be careful.”
The corridor was lit with subdued emergency lighting. The walls were the same stone gray that seemed to be a favorite of the Modos. Cat made her way forward carefully. She was uneasy but if pressed she couldn’t say why. Her entire sensor array was on active scan. There were stray readings that seemed to materialize and then disappear. None appeared long enough for a definitive reading. It could be stray radio frequency noise or it could be something more. She just couldn’t tell.
The door to the room she needed to enter was sealed. A keypad and biometric scanner were inset just to the right of the door. They appeared to be powered down. A quick scan confirmed that the power feeds to the circuits in the scanner and keypad were dead. They were low power systems, so Cat decided to try feeding current directly into the system from her ever dwindling reserves.
The panel lit up. Professor Debbu had known about the security measures, but had not known the appropriate pass code, nor would the codes have helped without the correct biometric signature. Cat’s nanites probed the system looking for the correct pathways. In a few seconds they had found them and the door swished open.
“Abbra Ka-Dabra,” Cat said, as she walked into the room. It was filled with computer consoles designed to monitor a large number of locations simultaneously. The displays completely occupied two of the four walls. Many, but not all of the displays were dead. Those that were still receiving feeds told a horrific story of carnage and suffering. Naanac’s bid for freedom had come at an immense cost.
Cat pulled the memory stick from a hidden front pouch. She was eager to eliminate this final threat to the Naanac people. Perhaps that was why she failed to notice a second set of nanites floating silently into the room. They were cloaked, so it was unlikely they would have been detected by anything less than a deliberate effort to locate them. As it was, they headed for a secondary panel behind Cat. There was the briefest of EMF pulses as the panel came alive. Although the equipment into which the cloaked nanites flowed appeared to be of Modos origin, it was in fact a sophisticated piece of Uruk technology.
The memory stick felt cold in Cat’s hand. Later, she would remember being curious why that was. It would be one of the last things she would remember for a very long time. She reached forward to plug the small device into its receptacle. Before her hand finished moving, the room was filled with an electro-magnetic pulse powerful enough to register on the surface-facing sensors of the starships in orbit above the planet. The officers manning those sensors had no idea what had caused the pulse, nor the result in the subterranean room where Cat now stood completely immobile.
A magnetic flux density on the order of 1023 Amp Meters flowed through Cat. Every nanite system in her body was immediately overloaded and wiped out. The only exception was a small, heavily shielded reserve buried deep within her now useless Heshe encounter unit. As the nanites died, they inadvertently sent a powerful electrical shock through Cat’s cerebral cortex. Completely discombobulated, the woman who had been Cat Kimbridge now stood in a room filled with unfamiliar
equipment. She was dazed, confused, and had no idea who she was. A useless memory stick fell from numb fingers and hit the ground with a hollow clatter.
Chapter Seventeen– Victory Denied...
"Run!" Snatch Bait yelled. The situation was rapidly turning into a disaster of unprecedented proportions. The battle had begun along the lines they had anticipated. The Galactic Coalition forces advanced toward a seemingly inferior Syndicate fleet. A great deal of time and effort had gone into collecting and moving cloaked GCP probes from the current battlefield to a supposed staging ground some forty light years distant. The bulk of the GCP fleet was supposed to follow these probes in the mistaken belief that they were still attached to Syndicate ships. They were not. The very same Syndicate ships were still in-system around a star the GCP called Sol. They had powered down and were running as silent as they could in the hopes of luring the GCP forces into attacking the small number of still active decoy ships.
The GCP armada was orders of magnitude larger than intelligence reports had indicated. Even when his cloaked ships fully engaged in the battle they were grossly outnumbered. Even worse, reports coming in from the other task forces that were attacking the other GCP member worlds, were that the same situation was occurring in those systems.
For every ship the Syndicate fleet destroyed it seemed like two more were detected by the fleet’s sensors. While it was true that the GCP forces were not scoring many hits, those weapons that were getting through were having a devastating effect. Already a third of his battle group was reporting minimal to severe damage… and still there seemed no end of new ships from the GCP joining the battle.
The bridge of the MS Typhoon shook as another kinetic round from a GCP rail gun impacted with her hull. Alarms sounded as the ship began venting atmosphere yet again. It was the third time that particular alarm had sounded. The damage-control team was being run ragged.