“Maybe not as many as you would fear, Lucille,” said Jimmy, shrugging his shoulders while glancing sideways into her face. He turned his face forward, a grimace on his lips. “Large areas are gone, and most of the regions around them are filled with rubble. Probably three quarters of those seriously injured or mortally wounded will not be reached in time.”
“That’s, awful.”
“It is. It’s relatively the same for battle between warships. Except that the hits we took would have obliterated any warship.”
Lucille thought about that as she walked. The Donut was not a warship, though she was afraid after this attack it would more resemble a battle station or orbital fort. The only thing that had saved it had been the enormous size of the beast.
“I think you should get some sleep after we get some food in you,” said Jimmy as they entered the cafeteria. It was empty of people, even the attendants had either evacuated the station or gone to other duties during the attack.
“I don’t have time for sleep,” said Lucille, walking up to the vending dispenser that served snacks around the clock. “I have to plan. We need to get this station up and running as fast as possible. That’s the only way we’re going to beat those bastards.”
“Can we beat them?” asked Jimmy, grabbing a sandwich from a dispenser, then ordering a coffee from another. “I mean, now that they also have wormholes?”
“If you went up against an enemy with one weapon, and you had a hundred armed men, would you give that foe a chance?”
“Not one in hell,” agreed Jimmy, a slight smile playing on his face. “I see your point. Except they have more than one weapon, even if they will never be able to match us in wormholes.”
They sat at one of the empty tables and started attacking their sandwiches. Lucille felt ravenous, her lack of food over the last day now making itself felt. She thought about what Jimmy had said. The Cacas did outnumber them in ships, in bodies. That was a troubling thought. And then she remembered that they still had this station, which could still manufacture wormholes at a prodigious rate. One she doubted the Cacas would be able to match well into the future. She looked over at Jimmy, who had already finished his sandwich and was looking at the vending area for something else.
“We have the one weapon they can’t match, Jimmy,” said Lucille as she gestured to the vending area, as if giving him permission to get more food.
“And what is that?” said the Agent as he got up from the table and headed over to the dispenser.
“Our brains. Those damned bastards have been in the conquest business for thousands of years, and we have almost caught up with them in technology. Actually passed them in quite a few areas. And we will continue to pass them, leaving them behind, until their numbers and ships mean nothing.”
* * *
The High Admiral looked at the plot that showed the disposition of the forces in the system. The huge station, the most important object in view, was in the center of the plot. There were still some of the tiny icons of Ca’cadasan fighters and attack ships circling the station. They had no more missiles, no more proton packs for their particle beams. All they had left were lasers, and those were mere pinpricks on the station. Most did not even have the time to attack, busy as they were trying to avoid thirty times their number in enemy craft.
He still had seven superbattleships, enough for another strike on something. They could kill a planet, take out a strong enemy force. But all of their power would just sting that station, and there was an enemy fleet on the way, one that would arrive at the object well before they could kill their momentum and return.
We should have brought more, he thought. But the Admiralty and the scientists had thought that one of the wormhole bombs would be enough to destroy the station. And then the humans would have to spend a hundred years to build another. But the humans had come up with something, like they always seemed to, and the plan had not worked. The sad part for the Empire was that they had not brought enough for a plan B. And they were paying for it.
Now all we can do is run from this system and try to hit something else of value, he thought, hoping that they could avoid the impossible fighters of the enemy and whatever the new hell weapons they had wielded were. They had known from the beginning that they would not be returning home, but it had been thought that they would already be dead. Now the future, short as it would probably be, was an unknown.
* * *
“We’re ready to raise the inertial bubble at your command, sir,” said the Pilot, looking back at his Wing Commander.
Captain Chavez nodded, looking at the plot that showed the enemy ships pulling away from the station at point four eight light and piling on the acceleration. They had been boosting for four hours now, and had reached well over a light hour distance.
“I still think we should go back to the carrier and load up on missiles, sir,” said his acting second in command, Lt. Commander Wilma Streeter.
Streeter had actually been the senior squadron commander in another wing. That wing had sustained over seventy percent casualties, while his own had lost over half their own strength, including their own senior squadron leader. Now he had a small wing of seventy-nine ships, none carrying missiles, proton stores exhausted. All they had were the lasers that were always the last resort in combat.
“I want us letting those bastards know they are not welcome here,” said Chavez, shaking his head. “And I want them heading where we want them to go.”
The Klassekian Com Tech had brought word that a scout group was boosting at maximum acceleration to a point six light hours in from the hyper I barrier. They would get there four hours before the enemy, then lie in wait with everything powered down. The enemy, of course, would have been decelerating at that point so they could be down to point three light by the time they hit the barrier, so they could do an immediate jump. His force was the only one capable of catching up to the enemy from behind at the moment.
The Lt. Commander nodded her head in acknowledgement, though the lack of expression on her face showed how she felt about the order. With missiles they could actually kill some of the Caca ships, if not all of them. With lasers, they could at most harass them, while the enemy ships could still blow them out of space when they were out of the bubble.
“I have calculated our course, sir,” said the junior officer who was his Navigator. He fed the numbers, course, acceleration, deceleration and time, to the Pilot of the fighter and to the Com Tech, who made sure all the information got out to the other ships. The calculations called for them to jump in one point three minutes, and that information went out as well.
“Preparing to raise bubble, sir,” called out the Pilot five seconds before the timer ticked down. As it hit zero every ship in the force released the negative matter from their tanks. The negative matter was pulled into the bubble that gave the drive its name, cutting the ships off from the normal universe. The craft were already moving at point six light, which would be the maximum velocity they could be at when they finally came out of that bubble. The inertialess drive was a wonderful invention, but like all such discoveries it had serious limitations. One of those limitations, the rebound effect of inertia coming back as they left the drive, was the basis of the new weapons they had used against the Cacas this day. The weapons that had been as inaccurate as feared.
“Starting boost,” called out the Pilot as the grabber units started pulling the fighter forward at one hundred and ninety-six kilometers per second per second, the equivalent of twenty thousand gravities of acceleration. The first wonder of the drive was that they felt none of those gravities, which would normally have been well above the capability of a fighter’s compensators to handle.
In fifteen minutes they achieved the second miracle of the drive, passing the speed of light. Twenty-five minutes after that they reached their maximum cruising speed of twice the speed of light and were catching up with the enemy force. They were only in cruise for a short period before they started their deceleration, timing it
so they would come out in front of the enemy ships at the proper time to allow them to attack. And so it would go over the next four or five days, unless they had no more craft left to attack.
* * *
“We will have the station back up and running by tomorrow, your Majesty,” said the blond haired woman on the holo.
“That fast, Director?” asked Sean, not sure if he could believe it.
“It’s true we took a lot of damage,” she said, her face falling. “And lost a lot of people. But the station came through better than I had feared. We only lost one of the six support cables in one small area, we still have ninety percent of our grabbers and an even higher percentage of our electromagnetic generators and crystal matrix batteries. Of course we’re now missing the micro-black holes that ran one of our production stations. It will take a couple of weeks to create the sixteen replacements we need. And I would like to build another backup set just in case.”
“We’ll see what we can do,” said Sean. “So we will not be producing as many as we were?”
“We should be able to hold up our end, your Majesty. We’ve always been running with one extra production facility, so we could perform maintenance on one while running the other four. For now, we will just have to run the eight satellites continuously in four production sets until we can get the fifth set up and running.”
“I think our priority now is to repair the damage to the station, and at the same time fortify the defenses of the structure. The next enemy fleet that closes with that monster will regret coming within range of its weapons.” Which doesn’t mean they won’t try, or that they won’t succeed, he thought.
“I understand, your Majesty,” said the Director, nodding. “I think we can handle the strain of continued production. At least I hope we can.”
“We need those wormholes, Director. Research and development has big plans for them.” And that’s all I can say about that, he thought. He trusted Lucille Yu as much as anyone in his Empire. But need to know had been formulated for a very good reason. What one didn’t know, they couldn’t let slip.
“Your Majesty,” came a call over the com. “You need to see this.”
“I have to go, Director. We’ll talk when I get back to the Capital.”
“Let me say how very sorry I am about your son, your Majesty,” said Yu just before the holo died.
Sean found himself staring at the empty air where the holo had just held the image of the Director. He had been busy the last day, too many things going on, and the thought of his heir being dead had been pushed to the back of his mind. Yu had brought it forward with her condolences. He knew she hadn’t meant to hurt him, that she had only wanted to express her deepest sympathies, something that obviously hadn’t come easy for her.
My poor darling Jennifer, he thought, closing his eyes. She was alone with her grief. Oh, she had people around her, people who cared for her. But that wasn’t the same as having her husband and her dead baby’s father with her.
“Your Majesty?”
“Show me.” Sean opened his eyes to see a scene from the multi-system battle that had been raging for the last two days. The Caca were still pushing hard, and taking heavy losses, as were his forces. He wasn’t sure who would break first. If the Cacas did he would have a respite, time to get his forces back together and prepare for the next wave, while getting his new plans in motion. If his forces broke the Cacas would again take the Kingdom of New Moscow. And it was still looking like that system would not be able to hold up to the attack of a large force of Cacas heading their way. And if they had a wormhole, they would have a base from which to continue their offensive into the Empire, reinforcing at will from the heart of their Empire.
The ship he was looking at was a Caca superbattleship. Only this one had laser rings instead of the domes they normally carried. That in itself was bad news, since the domes, while giving good all-around firepower, also limited their capacity to put laser fire on a single target. That had been an advantage to the Empire. The Cacas had learned, and now were imitating. The ship was still losing the fight, taking a pounding from the human ships around it. One ring exploded as it absorbed a blast of protons from a particle beam, while lasers boiled away hull alloy. There was a flash on the hull, too large to be a beam weapon. It could only have come from a missile. While the blast was still expanding the effect became manifest as the ship’s hull bulged outward, then ruptured. In an instant the ship was gone in a flash, replaced by plasma speeding out from the source of the explosion.
“I could wish we had taken that ship,” said Sean, thinking of the other secrets the vessel might have held. They had captured ships the last time the Cacas had been in the Empire, but it was obvious that they had made changes. It would be helpful to know what those changes were.
“We can order our captains to try and make a capture,” came the voice of Admiral Lenkowski over the com. Len was leading a third of the fleet in this battle, holding an entire flank and fighting to hold onto a half dozen systems.
“Try to make a capture, if possible,” ordered Sean. “I would really like to get a look at what’s hidden in those ships. But not at a risk to the crews or ships.”
This was the second surprise of the day. The first had been even more disturbing. One mass attack by inertialess fighters had met with disaster as the enemy had somehow placed fire on their exit point from their warp bubbles. A third of the attack force, the equivalent of an entire wing, had gone up in a wave of fire. The remainder had suffered further casualties, no surprise there. There was always a risk in any action where small fragile craft mixed it up with massive warships. The disturbing part had been that the enemy had seemed to know when and where the fighters would emerge.
We’ll have some new surprises for them in the near future as well, he thought. The inertialess drive was really a variation on the Alcubierre warp drive, something that had eluded mankind in the early days of interstellar travel, and then forgotten as subspace was discovered and exploited. Then the entire concept had faded into oblivion as humanity had used the much more efficient method of hyper-dimensional travel. Now possibly its time had come again, if not for interstellar travel, then for moving quickly in battle. There were still some obstacles to conquer, but the research and development people were saying they would have it in the coming year. Right now that sounded like music to the Emperor.
But if they can track them, somehow, we might have more problems than we can handle, and one of our most potent weapons might not be as effective as hoped.
“Anything else?”
“We also have this view of an enemy ship, your Majesty, taken from a distance,” said the Chief Analyst over the com.
This view was at an angle, looking from forty-five degrees above. There was some blurring from the distance and the velocity that the ship was moving at. This ship also had laser rings, and it had somewhat different lines than the standard Caca superbattleship.
“What are we looking at?” asked Sean, not sure what they were seeing.
“Here is the plot,” said the Chief Analyst.
The plot showed the enemy ship as an icon, moving forward at point three light. Suddenly another icon appeared, moving at point six light and accelerating ahead at eight thousand gravities. A couple of seconds later another appeared, then another, two seconds apart, until there were seventy on the plot, all accelerating ahead.
“Wormhole launches?” asked Sean.
“We believe so, your Majesty. Unfortunately for them they haven’t perfected the system. The missiles came out much further apart than our wormhole launchers would have sent them, and at a much lower velocity. We believe that they are launching them from free space and accelerating them up to the gate over a light hour’s distance. We doubt they have launching facilities such as ours, and are trying to make do with what they can cobble together.”
“And they made a major mistake, didn’t they?”
“Yes, your Majesty. They could have snuck them up on us if
they had just let them coast toward us. Instead, they weren’t satisfied with their velocity, and had to push them up to an attack speed. We actually caught on to them after their first launch. That attracted our attention, and we looked in on their second launch.”
So now they have wormhole capable launches as well. Not as good as ours, and certainly not as many. But still troubling.
“Do you want us to capture that ship, your Majesty?” asked Admiral Lenkowski.
“I want it destroyed,” said the Emperor. “They can’t have too many wormhole equipped ships. They’re still force multipliers, no matter how primitive they are compared to ours, and I want them off the field of battle.”
“We’ve thought of something else, your Majesty. Even our most pessimistic estimates give them the ability to make at most a couple of wormholes a week, compared to thirty a day for our production facility. They had four of them tasked with the attack on Jewel and the Donut. They couldn’t have more than a dozen of them tasked for this entire battle.”
“And they would have been better served to have kept their wormhole equipped ships hidden,” said Sean with a tight smile. “That’s the only way they can keep communications open between their forces.”
“Now that we know what to look for, we’ll take out their command and control vessels,” said Len.
And teach them another lesson, thought the Emperor.
“We have another force appearing outside of the New Kiev system,” said another of the Analysts. “Coming in from antispinward. It looks like we’re not going to be able to hold there, your Majesty.”
Sean looked over at the large scale tactical plot that showed the entire battlefield. New Kiev had once been a prosperous system, with a population of over two billion. The Cacas had taken care of that population. Every man, woman and child had been killed, either in the military action of the invasion, or from the ravenous hunger of the huge carnivores, to which most other intelligent species were a food source. The system was of no importance any more, except as a battleground, since most space faring races still preferred to fight in normal space, where the danger of a catastrophic translation was non-existent.
Exodus: Empires at War: Book 11: Day of Infamy (Exodus: Empires at War.) Page 28