Exodus: Empires at War: Book 11: Day of Infamy (Exodus: Empires at War.)

by Doug Dandridge

  “Wait,” shouted one of the staff who had the look of a doctor. “Who are they? What happened to them?”

  But Angel was already in the air, looking for someone else to help in this smashed city. He turned his audio sensors to maximum, trying to find those who needed his help the most. And thinking. It was time he outgrew this selfish streak of his, and started worrying about his species and his kingdom, and not just his own comfort. He hoped that Ekaterina Sergiov had survived this attack. He was ready to take her whole deal. He knew he was only one man, and there wasn’t a lot one man could do in a war this large. But what he could do he would.

  * * *

  “Releasing holes, now,” said Lucille Yu, manning the station that was linked to that operation in her control center.

  Admiral Mikal Kalashnikov nodded, still not sure about this plan. But they needed to do everything possible to stop the enemy, and he was sure that throwing kitchen sinks wouldn’t do the job. But he still wasn’t sure that black holes would be much better.

  Unfortunately, only two of the wormhole generators had been in the proper orientation to be of use. They were vital assets, but he would sacrifice them all if it would save the station. The generators could be replaced in a year, the station a century.

  Each of the two generators, a matched pair, were accelerating on a vector that approached the enemy fleet at an angle, the best that could be done. The Admiral would have preferred a straight on approach, but the generators had been orbiting the central black hole, and the laws of physics dictated that the angled approach was the only one possible. Each carried eight of the micro-black holes used to rip apart space. Each was a highly charged mass of several billion tons, held in a massive electromagnetic field in a cup of pure supermetal alloy. Each of the holes was radiating at several hundred thousand degrees, the heat absorbed through a superconducting system and offloaded through a wormhole heat sink. That radiation was caused by the mass loss inherent in the nature of small black holes, hundreds of tons a day. It wouldn’t take long for the holes to lose mass in increasing measures as their own bulk shrunk, until they reached a point where they exploded in a furious multi-gigaton blast. Regular feeding of an equal amount of ions to the loss kept them stable. They would only last a couple of months without that feeding, and would self-destruct well before they became wandering hazards to navigation outside the hyper barrier.

  The huge generators came apart as the separation charges blew. Moments later the multiple arms of each generator pod reared back, then moved forward, cutting their electromagnetic fields at the end of the arc and sending sixteen micro-black holes toward the enemy force. Each was moving at slightly above the velocity of their containers at time of launch, about point zero one light. That was as fast as they would ever go, lacking any kind of ability to accelerate on their own. The containers themselves started to decelerate so that they wouldn’t catch and overtake the projectiles they had just released.

  The weapons were on their way. Weapons with no guidance systems, no means to adjust vectors. Unlikely to actually hit a target, but capable of destroying that target if they did. Admiral Kalashnikov watched their track on the plot for a moment, then turned his attention to other matters of the defense. There was nothing more he could do about this attack, which would either accomplish something, or not.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Desperate affairs require desperate measures. Horatio Nelson

  From a distance the slender ribbon around the distortion in space looked fragile. In the cosmic scheme of things it was, but the hundred kilometer wide, fifty kilometer deep construct was probably the toughest object in known space. It needed all of the toughness at the moment as the Ca’cadasans tried to destroy it.

  From the distance all seemed well, the bright pinpoints of nuclear and antimatter blasts looking like briefly lived sparklers in the darkness. Some larger pinpoints showed, the gigaton shipkillers, and the larger terraton quarkium warheads, by themselves not enough to destroy it, but paving the way for something that could.

  Several hundred Caca fighters continued to circle the station, hitting every weapon position they could target, while thousands of space superiority fighters kept up the chase, blasting them out of existence when given the opportunity. Their attacks were also mere pinpricks, but every defensive weapon position they took out was another that couldn’t target the other weapons that were targeting the station.

  Two thousand missiles of the third wave sped toward the station, on their way to weaken it further. Three hundred multi-pentaton blasts erupted in space around them, not well aimed, making up for their poor targeting with the fury of their blasts. Hundreds of missiles were caught up in the blasts, blown away, or thrown off course at the point where there wasn’t enough time to get back on track. Moments later two and a half wings of intertialess fighters appeared from out of nowhere, heading toward the station at point three light, the missiles catching up, heading toward the station at point nine light, a point six c closing speed with the fighters. The fighters had twelve seconds to fire at the missiles as they came in, putting laser and particle beam shots into the weapons. As the missiles passed they had a further nine seconds to fire before they had to raise their negative matter bubbles and boost away on a course that would avoid collision with the station and the black hole. Only a hundred and seventy-three missiles made it past the fighters, including all forty-three of the larger tougher quarkium weapons. Forty-one hit, including twenty-two of the quarkium warheads, the most at this point.

  * * *

  “They hit us hard with that volley, ma’am,” said the Aide, looking down at his seated Admiral.

  “Time for us to leave,” said McCullom, getting up from her seat and looking across the large chamber, where most of her staff had already left their stations. She felt like a shit for abandoning the station, right after abandoning the capital city. But she knew in both cases it was the right decision. They weren’t here to fight for the defense of the station, but to coordinate the fleet across all of the battlespaces that was the war. If the station went they would lose much of their communications capabilities, but there would still be enough, with the offsite wormholes and Klassekian com techs who had been evacuated earlier.

  And from what her staff had told her in their analysis of the enemy attack, something really big was about to hit the station. Probably wormhole through wormhole big, something that would dwarf any of the warheads. We needed to have a contingency plan for something like this, she thought, grabbing her comp pad. Some way to get our most important assets off the station. Unfortunately, almost all of the active wormhole gates were placed in semi-permanent settings. They would take hours to remove from those placings, not to consider the time it would consume to move them to a dock, get them aboard a ship, and away. The only other way she could think of doing it better would compromise security and increase the chances of an accident doing the same thing to the portals.

  “I’m tired of this shit,” exclaimed one of the junior Captains, walking to her front. “We’re acting like a bunch of cowards.”

  She didn’t even know the officer’s name, something she should have chided herself about, especially since he was just below flag rank. But she probably had two hundred captains on her staff, and five or six hundred commanders. They also moved, new ones coming in all the time while others rotated out. Probably wishing for a ship command, where he could stand and fight. But his remark hit home, and Sondra found herself rounding on the officer.

  “When you have a ship command, you can stand and fight all you want, Captain,” she growled at the officer, seeing the panic growing in his eyes. “As long as the situation requires it. Right now, we are in the shit, and chances are we are going to lose this station. Now, if you want to stay and man a battery, you have my permission, Captain. Otherwise, you will get your ass through the portal and we will continue to do the jobs we have been assigned. Understand?”

  Her nose was almost touching that of the other off
icer, who was probably thinking that his career was over. She decided to take a little pity on the man. “I wish there was something I could do here as well. I could stay here and die, which would be the coward’s way out. Or I could leave and continue to do my duty, knowing that we failed to protect our most valuable asset on my watch. Now, if you really wish to stay, I’ll let you. But you can probably accomplish more if you come with us.”

  The young Captain nodded his head, closing his eyes for a moment. She put a hand on his shoulder and motioned him toward the chamber exit. The man walked away quickly, and McCullom motioned for her Aide to go.

  The vibrations from one of the larger hits came through the deck, over three minutes from the time of the explosion. The Aide picked up the secure briefcase and led the way from the room. There was a wormhole portal room only eight hundred meters down the corridor from the war room. Marine guards hustled them past a crowd of people, military and civilian, trying to get off the station. The military were probably all nonessential personnel or those passing through the station at the wrong time. Their implants would alert those checking the evacuation if they were someone in dereliction of duty, so it was doubtful that too many would try.

  “Ma’am,” said the Aide, his eyes unfocused for a moment in the sign of link. “Director Yu wants to speak to you. She says it’s important.”

  McCullom nodded as she accepted the link from the Director, not sure what could be so important at this moment. I need to order her off the station as well, she thought, and all of her staff. They might just be the minds we need to salvage something from this disaster.

  “Dr. Yu. I need for you and your people to evacuate the station in case of the worst.”

  “I think they’re going to trying and pull and wormhole through wormhole event on us, Admiral.”

  “I believe you are correct, Director. Which is why we need to get you off. I think there’s a very good chance we will stop them, but if we don’t, we will need you and your people.”

  “I think I have a way to stop them, Admiral. We ran the simulations and it looks like it would work.”

  “What would work? And why aren’t you talking to the station commander about this plan?”

  “I wasn’t able to get through to him, Admiral,” said the Director in an exasperated tone. “We’re having communication problems. Or he’s got too many other things on his mind. All I know is his com link is no longer accessable by me or my people.””

  Like trying to save the station, thought McCullom of the Admiral being off the com, stopping and stepping out of the way of the others trying to get through the portal. “We’re doing everything we can to stop that damned ship from closing on the station, Director, but war, unlike science, is not an exact art. If we can’t get rid of the screening ships, I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do to stop it, unless you have some kind of superweapon up your sleeve.”

  “We can use another wormhole to suck them up at the moment they are transiting the second hole through their own. I know it’s a long shot, and the simulations said as much, but it might be our only chance.”

  “And how would you suck up a massive explosion through a wormhole?” said McCullom, trying to visualize such a thing and failing. “It’s already in the best vacuum we know of.” The Admiral knew that was not strictly true. There was still matter in that vacuum, in very small quantities, but there. Even in intergalactic space. The best research labs could produce an almost absolutely perfect vacuum, but only in small volumes, and even that kind of a void wouldn’t be enough to suck up such an energy surge.

  “We don’t use a vacuum. We use the hole.”

  “The hole?” McCullom still wasn’t sure what the woman was talking about. She had already mentioned the wormhole.

  “The black hole, Admiral. The damned thing could eat a supernova.”

  “And you think you can channel the energy from the explosion into the black hole? What happens if three wormholes intersect?”

  “I don’t know that, Admiral, but I doubt it would be any larger than one passing through another. Most of the energy comes from the conversion of the matter involved, the ship transiting, or containing the hole being transited by the other. Or it could add up to something a thousand times greater. Not that it would matter if even a wormhole through wormhole explosion occurred next to the Donut.”

  The Admiral thought about that for a moment. The blast of an eight to ten million ton merchant ship converted to energy in the wormhole through wormhole incident would be enough to blast through a significant portion of the ring. All it really had to do was sever it, and the structure would come apart, some of it falling into the black hole, the rest flying out of the system. Some of the wormhole portals might actually survive such an event. But the means of generating more would be gone. It was risking Dr. Yu if she let the woman stay for a chance of saving the station. If they didn’t stop the enemy bomb ship she would die. But it would be worth the risk if it saved the station.

  “Here,” said Yu, and a moment later the data of her plan came across the link in a burst, the salient features already at the front of the Admiral’s mind. The rest would be there to digest when she had the time. But from what she saw, there might be a chance.

  “Try your plan, Dr. Yu. I will forward authorization to the station commander. If it doesn’t work..”

  “Yes?”

  “Try to get yourself through a wormhole and off the station before it’s gone. The Emperor will have my ass if anything happens to you.”

  “I will do my best, Admiral.”

  And we both know that there isn’t a chance in Hell you’ll be able to get off.

  McCullom nodded to her Aide, then headed through the portal, a feeling of relief battling with the guilt of leaving this station to its fate.

  “We’re setting up, Admiral,” said one of the staff officers as she stepped out of the portal, fighting off the disorientation that came with wormhole transit. “We have some links into a wormhole network that don’t go through the Donut, and some Klassekians to take up the slack.”

  “Let’s see what we can do to help coordinate the battle,” she said, heading toward the lift that would take her to this backup war-room. Moments later she walked into the large chamber, her eyes roaming to take in the scene.

  “Let’s get to work, people,” she said to the hundreds still standing around, most in shock from the pair of bombardments and evacuations they had just gone through. “We’ve just been hit hard, now let’s get to work and figure out how to kick some ass in return.”

  * * *

  “We have permission,” said Yu, looking up at Jimmy. “And I wish you would go ahead and get your ass off this thing. There’s no need for you to be here.”

  “You’re here, so here I stay,” said the Head of Station Security. “And besides, this is my duty station until I am relieved.”

  “And if I got word that you were relieved of those duties?”

  “I would still stay here, love.”

  Lucille shook her head, then got to work. There was no more time for banter, now it was time to see if her harebrained scheme could save the station. She searched through the station inventory to make sure they had what they needed, and in a place where it could be employed in time.

  “I need this wormhole taken from its shipping container,” she told her staff over the com link. “One end needs to be mated to a self-expanding gate, then mate it with a boosting pack and put it out on through an outer hatch when you get the order.”

  “And the other side, Director?” asked the spokesman for the staff.

  “Move it to the inner side and get ready to put it out the hatch with a boost pack. And I need this done within twelve minutes.”

  “I’m not sure we can do it in that time frame, ma’am.”

  “No excuses. Just get it done. Move as if your life depends on it, because it does.”

  Lucille severed the connection, then started to run some more simulations, looking at all th
e variables, trying to work the timing through to perfection. It was an impossible task, since those variables kept changing from moment to moment.

  “Can you do it?” asked Jimmy, standing at her shoulder and looking at the graphics of the event she was planning.

  “Oh, I can do it. The question is, will I do it at the right moment?”

  Jimmy went silent with that, something that Lucille was grateful for. She kept playing with the simulation, knowing that she wouldn’t be able to come up with the final solution until the moment arrived. But she couldn’t help herself. She had to do something with the time, and she couldn’t think of anything else to catch her attention. The station floor shook again under her feet, the slight tremor indicating its distance. At that she went ahead and set up a program to do the best it could at the last moment, probably better than she could do, though it wouldn’t have her intuition to guide it.

  “Just let us hang in there,” she whispered in prayer. She wasn’t sure what she was praying to, and really didn’t think there was anything there to listen to her. But it couldn’t hurt.

  * * *

  “Just get the damned thing aboard,” yelled the Commander, pointing to the large missile that sat in the middle of the chamber.

  Some of the ratings had been complaining over what seemed to them to be a crazy idea. He agreed it was crazy, but crazy might be what they needed. Two ratings lifted the heavy sealed box with antigrav grapples, then moved it into the open nose of the missile, where the warhead would normally sit. It joined another ten of the containers already there. There was probably room for two more of the containers. Another missile lay on its side twenty meters away, naval personnel loading it as well.

  This had been an order passed down from on high. No one knew where it had come from, but it had carried the authority of the Station Commander, so it had been implemented with urgency. Every crated wormhole, those which had yet to be shipped from the station, were being put into capital ship missiles, the type that were put in the wormhole acceleration tubes for combat launches. All would be launched as soon as they were loaded, on upward courses away from the battle, at twenty thousand gravities accelerations. Hopefully they would get away moving at such high acceleration and on evasive maneuvers that they would escape, and could be recovered later. That would save a couple of hundred wormholes, which could be recovered later, just in case the station was destroyed.