“Any larger vessels on the scan?”
“No, ma’am,” said the officer, looking at his board. “All weapons are manned, such as we are able.”
“Make sure our close in defenses and lasers have as many people as we can spare,” ordered the Admiral, looking at the tactical plot and making her decisions. “I don’t think there is going to be any need for our main missile batteries in this engagement.”
The Admiral looked over at the Com Tech, a Klassekian, who was on duty at the communications station. “Send out a signal to the rest of the task group. All ships are to follow my lead.” She looked over at the Assistant Tac Officer. “Send all data we have on the unknowns to the other ships. And coordinate some kind of firing response on all the unknowns and anything they launch.”
“Grabbers are online, ma’am,” said the Chief who was manning the helm station. “Orders?”
“Until we have a destination, I want us moving in the best evasive pattern you can generate. Understood?”
A destroyer, thankfully not from her group, ate a missile at that point, its icon blinking for a moment, then disappearing from the plot.
“All ships, execute firing plan, now,” she ordered, leaning back in her seat and trying to think of anything else she could do at this time, and coming up with a blank.
* * *
Fool’s Bane launched within seconds of her sister ship. The fighters she carried didn’t even try to hide like those launched from the Laughing Troll. They had a long way to go, and a short time to get there, and accelerated at their maximum rate as soon as they left the wormhole. They also launched at the largest target any of them had ever seen, something they really couldn’t miss. The problem was getting the warheads to the target through all of the defenses, which was one reason this attack was over twenty times larger than the one hitting the capital.
We should have known they wouldn’t let us close to that thing without a challenge. The mission had been planned with that challenge in mind, though it had been hoped that they might get in closer. As soon as the challenge had come, Fool’s Bane had sent the signal initiating H-hour, and their sister had also launched her attack.
Fool’s Bane had expanded her own wormhole past the hull of the ship, in a frame a kilometer on a side. Instead of releasing entire groups of fifty-six craft, the gate pumped out four group wings of two hundred and twenty-four fighters and attack ships. They didn’t gain any momentum from this end of the hole, only carrying through what they had brought in. The same phenomenon that made it dangerous to transit from fast moving platforms that were beyond the limited means of the wormhole to absorb inertia. The freighter was pushing point one three light, and the fighters were coming out with enough velocity to keep from falling back into the moving hole.
It took a little over sixteen minutes to release the first attack wave toward the Donut, almost fourteen thousand fighters and over eight thousand ship attack craft, twenty-two thousand craft, heading out of the wormhole at over point one five light. As soon as all of the ship attack craft were in space and closing up into one mass formation, they released half of their long range assets, sixteen thousand missiles accelerating at eight thousand gravities.
When that wave was done the freighter pivoted in space and launched the first of the wings toward the rings of gates. Each group was almost forty-four hundred craft, each targeted on one ring. These moved out of the gate at point one five light, ignoring the momentum of the freighter moving in the other direction. There was no expectation that they would fight their way through the defenses to take out the entire ring, but any gate they could destroy would help the overall strategic situation for the Ca’cadasan Empire.
As soon as that first gate ring attack wave was released the freighter pivoted once more, releasing another twenty-two thousand attack platforms toward the Donut. In all it would launch over a hundred thousand attack ships and fighters at the huge station, and twenty-two thousand toward the ring forts. Even those numbers weren’t enough to win a sustained battle, but they didn’t need to. They needed to strike, to put as many powerful weapons into targets as possible. Enough weapons in the right place and the Ca’cadasan Empire would win a battle and a war.
* * *
“Talk to me, Admiral,” said Lucille Yu into the com over the sounding klaxons.
“We have an incoming attack wave of fighter class craft heading at us,” said Admiral Mikal Kalashnikov, looking out of the holo. “Five thousand so far, with more appearing on the plot every ten seconds.”
“Where the hell are they coming from?” asked Yu, a shiver of fear running up her spine. She had thought that something was going to happen, but this was the last thing she had in mind.
“We were tracking this tramp freighter on approach to the station at one light hour distance. We contacted them by grav pulse and demanded identification. When they couldn’t give us a satisfactory response my duty officer vectored a destroyer toward their location. Moments later they started launching.”
“Can you stop them?” asked Lucille, the only thing she really wanted to know.
“We should be able to,” said the Admiral, doubt on his face. “It’s a suicide mission. It has to be. Bu then again, they can’t expect to launch an attack this deep into this gravity well and get out. Which means they will be harder to stop.”
Lucille pulled up the tactical plot on the wall of her office, watching as more icons appeared by the freighter, and icons started to appear from the Donut and the forts that guarded her. She didn’t see what a freighter full of fighters was going to be able to do against all the firepower the Empire had in the system. She watched as the counter got up to ten thousand fighters, wondering if a freighter could really carry that many. She quickly looked up some information on the database, checking at the carrying capacity of a ten million ton fleet carrier, a larger ship than the freighter. She cursed under her breath as she saw that the largest of the carriers could carry a little more than two hundred fighters, and that by cramming more into the hangars than they were built for. And almost fifty times that number had already come through.
Could they have wormholes? she thought in alarm. That had been the greatest fear that she and her production teams had had since news came that the Cacas had captured scientists from New Moscow. The creation of wormholes wasn’t a great secret among the humans people. It just required industrial resources and a great power source. The Donut was their power source, which enabled them to make up to thirty wormholes a day. But it had taken them over a century to construct the huge station, and there were other industrial concerns that required tremendous power generating facilities. Such as supermetal manufacturing planets.
“Admiral,” said Lucille, linking back into the com with the Station Commander. “I think you’re going to need to target that freighter as soon as possible.”
“What’s your thinking, Director?” asked Kalashnikov.
“I think they have a wormhole on that freighter. And as long as it’s active, they can keep pumping their resources out into the system.”
* * *
Jennifer was enjoying the unit of Highlanders that was marching in front of the reviewing stand, high stepping it as they raised their rifles in salute, the bagpipers and drum major leading the way. Suddenly sirens sounded over the city, drowning out the pipes and all the other music sources along the parade route.
“What’s going on?” asked the Empress of her Chief of Detail, looking down at her twins, who were still both asleep, though anything but peaceful. Both infants were jerking in their carriers, their eyes moving back and forth rapidly under the lids They were both having dreams, from their expressions more like nightmares.
“We’re getting a report that the Central Docks are under attack,” said the Chief of Detail, a shocked expression on his face.
“From who?”
“We don’t know yet, but they have launched on our ships.” The Secret Service Agent looked out with unfocused eyes for a moment, obvi
ously in link. “We need to get you and the heirs to safety.”
“Are they coming here?”
As soon as the words left her mouth both children opened their eyes, not in the normal manner of infants having difficulty coming into the world of the awake, but from tightly closed to as wide open as they could get in an instant. Both babies were soon screaming at the top of their lungs, their fear filled eyes moving back and forth, then locking upwards into the sky.
Did they have a prophetic dream? thought the Empress, staring down at her children. She had studied the history of the phenomenon, and it had never before been seen in children this young. Then again, how would anyone know if they had or not. Obviously, whatever they had dreamed was scaring the hell out of both Augustine and Glen, and there was an attack going on in the system. It seemed like too great a coincidence.
“We need to get you out of here, your Majesty,” said the Chief of the Detail, nodding to the nurses. The two women came forward, holding attachments that they put on the carriers. As soon as they were in place they closed up and sealed them in armored containers. Inside they released light sedatives that calmed the children and put them back into a deep sleep.
“Get into your armor, your Majesty,” said the Chief of the Detail as an unmanned suit walked forward, then opened up for her.
“What about the rest of these people?” asked Jennifer, gesturing at the city.
“They’ll be opening the shelters,” said the Chief of Detail, motioning her along after the armor closed up around her. The nurses followed, herding the two floating armored carriers along with them. “Now, we need to get you to the shelter under the palace.”
“No,” said Jennifer, stopping for a moment and shaking her head. “I won’t have my children closed up underground in a target area while an unknown enemy drops kinetics on us.” She stood for a moment thinking. “Get us out to the Imperial Compound.”
“OK,” said the Chief of Detail, moving his charges along until they got down to the landing pad and into the vehicles. Again, Augustine went into one of the cars, while his Mother and twin brother went into another.
“I want to see Glen,” said Jennifer as the aircar left the ground.
“Not until we get you both to safety,” ordered the head agent, holding up a hand to stop the nurse from doing anything.
“The baby will be fine, ma’am,.” said the Nurse, smiling at Jennifer. “The armored compartment will see to all of his needs, and keep him calm and sedated. If he does need anything the monitors watching him will let us know.”
He needs his mother, thought Jennifer, looking away and out through the side window of the car as the city dropped below. So far everything still looked peaceful, with the exception of numerous aircars heading up and out at maximum velocity, and the packed squares and streets starting to empty as citizens headed into buildings or ran for transportation hubs that would take them to their homes.
“We have enemy craft heading for Jewel,” stated the aircar pilot over the intercom. “Fighters are scrambling, and we are receiving instructions to follow a course back to the palace.”
“Not the palace,” said Jennifer, sure that going back there would be a mistake. It was, after all, a major target, noticeable from space. It was a well defended target, but those defenses were intended to take on maybe a squadron of insurgents, not a major attack. “Tell them we are going to the Imperial Retreat.” The image of the Retreat was on her mind, over eight hundred kilometers to the northwest of the city in the Rainbow Mountains, overlooking one of the large tributaries of the mighty Capitulum river that flowed through the capital.
“Get on the com and tell central command that we are heading out of the city on a northwestern course,” said the Chief of Detail over the com.
“What if they ask for our destination?” asked the Pilot.
“Need to know. Tell them only our general heading, and that this is the Empress’ business.”
Jennifer looked nervously through the camera function of her suit’s HUD, panning the view upward, to where bright pinpoints were appearing in the daytime sky. Jewel was locked into a mutual orbit with New Terra, and this hemisphere was always pointed toward the center of gravity where sat the Central Docks.
I wish Sean were here, was her next thought, revised even as it passed through her mind. In a way she was glad he wasn’t here, because if this thing went completely south, at least he was out of danger.
* * *
“What the hell is going on?” asked Tomas Gijardo as the emergency broadcast came breaking through the privacy block of his implant.
He looked down into the eyes of his lover as she came out of the ecstasy of love making, her own orbs with a confused expression in them. “What?” Margo asked in an out of breath voice.
“This is an emergency broadcast,” came the voice over the link, at the same time as it came vocally over the apartment entertainment system. “All citizens are ordered to take shelter in the nearest available facility. Repeat, all citizens are ordered to take shelter. This is a life or death situation, and for your own safety you are ordered to the shelters.”
Tomas tried to tap into the planet wide database system, something that every citizen was supposed to be able to access at any time, and ran into a blank wall. The only thing coming over was the same maddening warning, overriding everything else.
“What’s going on?” asked Margo again, pulling the sheets around her as she sat up in bed, her eyes following her naked lover as he walked quickly to the large window overlooking the city.
“I don’t know, but it can’t be good,” he answered as he looked out from the window of his eight hundred and sixty-third level apartment, over twenty-five hundred meters above the street. The view of the city was spectacular from this vantage, though it was too high to make out any details of the streets. There did seem to be an inordinate number of aircars hitting the sky, with more joining them every moment.
Won’t do any good to try to get an aircar, thought the businessman, who didn’t have one of his own, and doubted there would be any for hire by the time he had gotten dressed and down to the garage level or up to the rooftop landing pad.
“Get dressed,” he told Margo, pulling his own clothes off the chair where he had flung them and pulling everything on as fast as possible.
“Where are we going?”
“The closest shelter,” he replied, sealing up his shoes, then pulling on a shirt. He tried linking into the net again, this time with some success, as the list of shelters came up, along with the numbers of people who had already taken cover in each one. The numbers changed as he looked, and it appeared that the closest shelter was not going to be available by the time they got there.
The shelter system had been in place for centuries, expanded through the years by the rightfully paranoid human government. The two hundred and seventy thousand linear kilometers of transport tunnels were part of the system, used for overflow after the deeper, more secure refuges were filled. The heart of the system were the eighteen thousand deep shelters, made up of the central capsules of battleships manufactured by the same companies that build them for Fleet use. Each capsule was four hundred meters long by the same in width, with a height of two hundred and forty meters, giving each capsule an area of over thirty million cubic meters. Each had its own water supply and food synthesizer, with power reserves that would last for several years, and, most importantly of all, the excavating equipment to dig a way back to the surface if needed. Each shelter could hold a hundred thousand people, since they were devoid of most of the machinery that was installed on the central capsule of a warship. That gave the entire system a capacity of one point eight billion people. Impressive, but the population of the city was over three billion, which left a lot of people out in the secondary and not nearly as well protected overflow.
Each central capsule had a skin of ten meters of carbon fiber impregnated alloy armor, and was buried a kilometer or more beneath the ground. Each was shiel
ded by a number of lower tech inertial compensators that would protect those within from concussion. They would handle a surface blast of over a hundred megatons. Unfortunately, the same could not be said of major kinetic strikes. One that hit directly over a shelter would still blast through all of the covering earth and plasticrete, through the armor, and into the heart of the capsule, killing everyone within.
“Here,” said Tomas, throwing a small pistol to the woman before he pulled a larger version and slid it into his belt.
“Why do we need these?” asked Margo, looking at the small protector in her hand. Capitulum was a weapons restrictive city, like most on core worlds. The Protector was one of the weapons allowed, a moderate velocity magrail carrying twenty rounds maximum in the sealed magazine. When fired it would transmit a location signal to the nearest law enforcement agency. It was a perfect weapon for self-defense in an area where the greatest threat would be petty criminals. And not so great a weapon for committing crimes.
“We’re under attack, sweetheart,” answered Tomas, throwing her the jacket she had worn this day, then picking up his own.
“From who?”
“We’re at war, honey. Guess?”
“The Cacas? So what in the hell are these pistols going to do for us?”
“This is life or death, Margo. And we may have to defend ourselves against our competition in trying to survive. Now let’s get the hell out of this death trap while we can.”
* * *
“Alert,” yelled the speakers on the base. “All pilots to your craft. This is no drill.”
Chief Warrant Officer Debra Visserman looked up from the game she was playing, her implant kicking her out of the virtual reality world she had been inhabiting for the last twenty minutes. She was just about to attack the dragon with the sword of power that was throbbing in her hands.
[What’s the situation?] she sent over her implant.
Exodus: Empires at War: Book 11: Day of Infamy (Exodus: Empires at War.) Page 13