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

by Doug Dandridge

  And if they transit the other ship through at one hundred thousand kilometers, the blast will still be developing by the time they reach that distance. In fact, it will still be building as they actually hit the ring. Which will give Yu about a second to make the catch. And hopefully they will be on a predictable course at that time.

  “Okay. Get this data to Dr. Yu. I think she might be able to make use of it in her own calculations.”

  The station shook again from multiple hits. Kalashnikov pulled up the schematic of the station to see where the hits were clustered, then breathed a sigh of relief. All the hits had been along a section taken up entirely by the huge electromagnetic generators that made up the power feed of the wormhole generating system. Each unit was more massive than a battleship, and there were three million of them across the station. Some of the hits had taken out a generator each, striking directly on the top of one of the units. Others had taken out two, three, even four in one case. They could handle the loss of fewer than two score generators, and the hits hadn’t been on an inhabited portion of the station. Most likely no one had died in that volley, and that was what mattered to the Admiral.

  * * *

  “Thank you, Commodore,” Lucille told the Chief of Staff, trying to smile and failing. “We’ll definitely be able to use this.”

  The holo blanked, leaving her alone with her thoughts once again. She ran another simulation, then pulled up a holo of the man in charge of getting the wormhole terminuses out of the station.

  “How are we coming on those portals?”

  “We’re about to launch the outward hole,” came back the voice of the man in charge of that operation. The holo dilated to show the small ship hangar where the operation was taking place. The hundred meter wide hatch was open, the streaks of star trails, caused by the rapid rotation of the station, the only thing in view. The gate was sitting up under the power of its grabber units in the center of that view, the mirrored surface reflecting the rear of the hangar. Several space suited figures stood to the side, giving scale to the gate, which had to be twenty meters in diameter. The frame itself added another ten meters to a side, and large grabber units projected from the rear. Unseen on the holo, but known to the Director, similar grabber units were also set on the front, giving the frame the potential for a huge amount of acceleration. That would give off quite a graviton signature. Hopefully, given all of the other signatures in space at this time, as well as the enormous background radiation of the black hole, it would go unnoticed. And the frame was made of sensor absorbing materials, while the wormhole itself would be completely invisible to any kind of scan.

  As she watched the gate rushed out of the hangar. It would accelerate like a missile out of the station, killing the angle vector of rotation while boosting toward the enemy. With a thought she switched the com to the other end of the operation, where a much smaller frame sat in a smaller hangar. Ships didn’t normally leave the station from the inner aspect, only small repair vessels, mainly remotely controlled robotic craft. Here the only view through the twenty meter wide hatch was a distortion, ringed by a bright circular band. The mind numbing image of the central black hole, something that no rational mind could really understand, despite the way their technology used it.

  The space was suddenly lit by a bright flash that went on and on.

  “Why the hell is the energy generating system on,” shouted Lucille. The station used the rotational energy of the black hole, and the charged plasma field around it, as a dynamo. The only reason they would need the system functioning at this time would be to generate wormholes. The entire defensive system of the station couldn’t eat the energy of the crystal matrix batteries in a week. And the flare of trillions of tons of electrons, a web the wormhole they were launching would have to transit, could play hell with the survival of the gate.

  “We’re turning the system off now.” It took some seconds for the electron storm to die down, even after the power feed was cut off to the millions of units. Yu fumed as she waited for the storm to subside. Even second wasted was one they couldn’t afford. And this part of the operation was the one that required the most delicacy, the most finesse, as it was maneuvered close to the black hole, time to be sucked in below the event horizon at the same moment the other end of the passage was encountering the enemy bomb ship. To soon, and the wormhole could collapse before it had grabbed ahold of the freighter. Too late, and there might not be enough suction to pull in the explosion. If the ship exploded too close to the station, and the connection had not been made, it wouldn’t matter that a narrow swath of it flew into the outer end of the wormhole.

  “Launching wormhole gate, now,” came the voice of the supervisor of that part of the operation. The gate lifted on its grabbers and sped out of the hangar. It would accelerate until it reached the calculated transit speed, then decelerate until it was hanging above the black hole at the limit of the ability of the frame and grabber units to hold station without collapsing.

  “We have control,” said another voice, the Fleet pilot who would guide the gate to its final destination. Lucille almost wished one of her own people could guide the portal, but she had to admit that none of them had the skill that the best Fleet pilot still on the station had. Though she had to wonder why the pilot, a full Captain, was still aboard the station when so many others were in space battling the enemy.

  I hope he’s good enough, she thought, following both gates on a pair of holo plots hanging in the air before her. Whatever the case, it was out of her hands.

  * * *

  “What in all the Hells is that?” blurted out the High Admiral as the bluish halo erupted on both sides of the ribbon ahead. “Some new weapon?”

  “It seems to be some kind of electrical discharge, my Lord,” said the Sensor Officer. “None of it directed at us. One of the theories of using a rotating black hole as an energy source is to use it as an electric dynamo.”

  “And you think that is what they are doing here? And it’s no threat to us?”

  “It could be a real threat, my Lord, if not direct. That is a lot of energy. Only an order of magnitude below what an average sized star puts out in the same time period. If they’re using it to power a weapon, it could be a fearsome device.”

  And nothing we can do about it now, thought the High Admiral. They were now within less than two light minutes of the station, still decelerating, and would be within that prime engagement range for more than four minutes. A laser with that much power would vaporize one of his ships in an instant.

  “What do you want us to do, my Lord?” asked the Tactical Officer.

  “There is nothing we can do,” said the High Admiral, feeling a chill sweat running down his back. Strange, he thought. Even though I know I am soon to die, within the next couple of minutes, possibly in several days, I still don’t like the idea. Ca’cadasan males were supposed to be fearless, but the Admiral had found that they feared well enough. No intelligent creature sought its own death in normal times, and most not even in the worst of circumstances. And the thought of being vaporized before his death had the meaning that a successful strike would bring was terrifying. “We move ahead with the attack.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid. Benjamin Franklin

  Sean sat back in his seat, staring at the plot, while the ship shook slightly from the launch of missiles. The battle was going on around him, but that wasn’t what caught his attention. While this fight, a small part of the much larger battle going on across a score of systems, was important, it paled in significance to the one going on in home space. And that battle was about to reach its climax.

  Thank god the missile launchers are still working, thought the Monarch. The thousand kilometer long missile tube accelerators and their wormhole gates were in orbit around the central black hole, far enough away from the Donut that even a wormhole bomb wouldn’t destroy them. There were hundreds of the arrays, each carryi
ng from two to four of the launch tubes. They were a thousand kilometers long, true, but less than a couple of hundred meters in width, long, thin needles in space. Just small sensor returns among thousands of large objects in orbit around the black hole. Not something to garner the attention of the Cacas at the moment, while they had a larger target in view. But if any survived the strike, they might go hunting for other targets. Or they might break away and head out of the system, intent on still other targets.

  The ship vibrated again, this the signature resonance of the particle beam cannons fed from the Donut itself. There were hundreds of those as well feeding the Fleet. Kilometers wide, each larger than the warship they fed, they accelerated protons or antiprotons up to one hundredth thousandth below light speed, making them the most devastating beam weapons of this war. And if the station was destroyed, they lost all of those particle beam accelerators as well. Not as great a loss as the missile tubes would be, but still not something to look forward to in the middle of a major engagement.

  “The Caca force is breaking off the action,” stated the Emperor’s Chief of Staff. The woman smiled. “Right into the teeth of the force they don’t know is there.”

  We hope, thought the Emperor. If the Cacas ran into the ambush unaware, this part of the battle would be over, with losses to the enemy force more than double that of his own. They needed to win this battle decisively, a victory that would buy them time before the next wave, instead of locking them into what could become a hopeless battle of attrition.

  He turned his attention back to the unexpected battle, the main fight that might seal the fate of the Empire. The enemy was now little more than two minutes from contact. The station was firing every weapon that would bear, but only a third of the weapons were still intact. The remaining Caca fighters were still taking them out here and there, and what was left was not enough to stop the force of warships surrounding the bomb ship.

  We should have thought if this. We should have emplaced heavier batteries on the structure, more forts in orbit. A couple of squadrons of battleships. But we thought they couldn’t strike us in this manner. Only through infiltration, and we have that covered. But divisions of Marines and soldiers on the station don’t do us much good against an attack from space.

  He stared at the timer, counting down to the moment of decision. Two holos stood open in the air, one showing a plot of the action, the other a live view of the station. The first indication he would have of disaster was if those two holos disappeared. And then the reports would come in, and he would know that the battle against the Cacas had just gotten harder by an order of magnitude.

  * * *

  Here it comes, thought Lucille as the enemy ships came into final approach. She fed the last calculations into the system, shunting them to the two pilots controlling the wormhole gates. The Director wished she could be controlling both of them, and she hated to be so out of control. But she was not an expert pilot or ship handler, and the best people for the job were on it, or at least she hoped.

  The wormholes were not in the perfect positions, but were close enough to work. The outer gate started expanding while the bomb ship was still thirty-one seconds away from the station, twenty-nine from the wormhole. The ship was traveling at point two light, on a trajectory to meet the portal at a distance of one hundred and twenty thousand kilometers. If the bomb went off at that distance, it would still cause damage to the station, mostly due to the shotgun effect. But it wasn’t the optimal distance. The cover superbattleships were already beginning to diverge from their covering duties, starting to pile on the acceleration as they pulled away and started to change their vectors.

  It took two seconds for the gate to go from five hundred meters in diameter to over a kilometer, centered right along the path of the freighter. There was a danger if the ship moved through the gate before it moved its own triggering ship through its portal. It would be the same wormhole through wormhole event, and there was no telling if the wormhole destabilization would occur too soon to actually absorb any of the explosion. But the explosion would be far enough away from the station that it probably wouldn’t destroy it, so that intercept was thought best.

  Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on the point of view, the wormhole equipped ship on the other end of the Caca wormhole chose that time to transit. It was a miscalculation, and one that served the humans well. The force a million one gigaton warheads went off as the wormholes contacted, coverting both ships into fast moving particles, the definition of pure energy. They blasted out in a globe from the center of the blast, those at the front going slightly faster, the trailing particles a little slower. They blasted apart the gate frame holding the wormhole open, starting its collapse. But not soon enough to keep a good portion of the blast from entering the hole.

  At the other end the pilot dropped the portal he was controlling through the event horizon of the black hole, causing the gravitational force at that point to manifest at the other end of the tunnel. It pulled over half the blast into the wormhole, to disappear below the event horizon, forever harmless. An instant later the wormhole winked out of existence.

  The remaining blast came in on a fan, striking the edges of the circle that it cast on the station. A dozen Ca’cadasan warships, those on the fringes, disappeared in the blast, converted to plasma, then blowing out in their own ball of antimatter breaching plasma fire. A trio of ships that had already passed the human gate were sent into tumbling paths that took them into the station. All exploded in spectacular blasts that took out hundreds of cubic kilometers of the station each. Two blasted all the way through, and one took out a single main support cable.

  The rest of the warships survived, something for which they had the human wormhole to thank, though they were sure not to think so. They were still changing vectors, trying to get away, when some of the blast caught them. Two more went into tumbles that took them into the station, both pushing through at angles that penetrated several kilometers before they flew back out into space. Both were now on trajectories that would take them close to the black hole, and neither had their propulsion systems online. Not that it would have done much good with the approaches they were on.

  One ship fell directly into the black hole, coming apart from the tidal forces well before it entered the event horizon as a collection ripped apart fragments. The other ship was somewhat more fortunate, if it could be called fortune. It went into a close orbit around the hole that spiraled inward, giving the crew time to recognize their deaths before they came. Tidal forces took all of them before the hole ripped apart the vessel, sucking them beyond the knowledge of intelligent beings.

  Seven ships made it past, all piling on the acceleration, over five hundred gravities, trying to get away. Lucille breathed a sigh of relief as she watched them go on the tactical plot. Relief turned to sorrow as she pulled up the casualty figures on the station. Many of the strikes had occurred on inhabited sections, and though many had been evacuated from the station, many more were still aboard.

  “Get me the station commander,” she said into the com, then waited for the connection.

  “The station command center is offline,” came back a voice over the circuit. “Switching you to axillary control.”

  “Commodore Menendez speaking.”

  “This is Director Yu. I would like to speak with the Station Commander.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” replied the Commodore. “The station command center was destroyed in the attack. I’m afraid the Admiral didn’t make it.”

  “And you’re in charge, Commodore?”

  “For now, ma’am. Until we can get a more senior officer back aboard.”

  Lucille blinked back her tears. She had not been particularly close to this Admiral, but he had been the face of the military aboard the station. A representative of all who had died in this attack. The station had survived, and it would be repaired, but the lives lost could never be replaced.

  “Have we driven them off?” she finall
y asked after collecting her thoughts.

  “We think so, ma’am. They are still accelerating away, so it looks like we have. We’ll know if they don’t change vectors within the next hour.”

  Lucille nodded, then exited the com with a thought.

  “You need to eat something, my dear,” said Jimmy, turning a worried glance her way. “You’re shaking. I think you need a good shot of blood sugar.”

  Lucille noticed that she was feeling really weak, and she couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten. She didn’t feel like eating, not after what she had been through. But she needed to be at her best, especially with the work she had ahead of her this very day.

  Yu followed her Security Chief out of the control room. The halls outside were almost empty. This area of the station had not been hit, fortunately, since most of the strikes had wreaked havoc on the areas that had been struck. In some of those regions it had been a total loss in people and machinery.

  The pair moved out of the way of a group of military techs moving cryo containers through the hall, the two meter long by half a meter wide containers floating through the air on their antigrav repellers. The techs were moving quickly, and as they passed down hall more came pushing additional units out of a hatch that led to one of the gate rooms. They were also in a hurry. If they could get to those who died without too much damage to their brains in time, they could recover them. If not, then those people would be lost forever.

  “We didn’t see this coming,” said Jimmy, nodding at the score of soldiers moving almost the same number of cryo units. “We didn’t have enough of those units aboard. I doubt anyone thought we would need that many.”

  “And how many people will meet a permanent end because we didn’t think of that?”