“We probably won’t have total casualty figures for days,” said the young woman. “But the preliminary count is above two hundred million in Capitulum alone. Other cities hit include Frisco, New Paris, Rio and New Shanghai, with the death toll in the tens of millions. Earth Town, also filled with vacationers there for the long weekend, was hit with a half dozen kinetic weapons, and over three hundred thousand people were killed, including many children.”
Jennifer stared at the holo in shock, tears rolling down her cheeks. With eleven point one billion citizens, Jewel was a crowded world, one that was a desirable destination for people from all over the Empire. As such, only a limited number of reproduction licenses were issued in any year, only enough to keep up with the limited losses from death and emigration. And in a population whose members lived to over two hundred years, in many cases three hundred, there were only about forty million babies born in a given year. They were scarce among the population, though an amusement park like Earth Town was sure to have as many as half its attendees be children. Parents brought them to see the reproductions of old Earth, the Eifel Tower, cathedrals, a section of the Great Wall. And many of those three hundred thousand people killed would be children.
Jennifer looked down at Glenn, lying in her lap, the bottle she was holding in his mouth as he happily sucked away. So innocent, with no knowledge of what had happened this day. Do you miss your twin? she thought, looking into his blue eyes. Or is it someone you will never remember, only to know him from pictures and vids we show you when you are older.
The view from the newscast swept across the city, where rescue crews were digging through the rubble, trying to recover survivors and those who could be resurrected before it was too late. They would try their best, and in many cases that wouldn’t be enough.
“Do you really want to continue watching this, your Majesty?” asked her Chief of Detail.
Jennifer looked up with angry eyes at the Secret Service Agent. You lost my son, she thought, holding back her rage. Your one job was to protect the heirs, and you failed. She shook her head, closing her eyes, then opened them to look back at the holocast. She knew the agents had done their best to get her and her sons out of the target that the city had become. If not for them, she and the precious life she held in her lap would also have been killed. She looked back up at the Agent.
“I am the Empress, and these are my people. I need to see what happened to us.”
The Agent nodded, his face one of stone. Jennifer turned back to look at the holocast as she took the bottle from Glenn and pulled the baby to her shoulder, patting him on the back in the age old method of burping a baby. The holo was now showing an aerial view of the city, sweeping outward from the bay, the irregular shape of the metropolis nestled up against the mountains to the West, the hills and forests to the north. Three hundred and seventy-five thousand square kilometers of city, the largest in the history of humankind.
The cast then went on to show the Imperial Zoological Gardens. Here the tragedy was as great, as the large gardens, almost three thousand square kilometers, had also been packed. Several large warheads, or kinetics, had struck close to the gardens, and a multitude of people and animal exhibits had been destroyed. Many more of the exhibits had been freed, and some were dangerous in the extreme. Crews were working to round them up, to stun them and bring them back into captivity. Some would have to be put down, and that again was a tragedy.
It would take years to repair the city, decades to replace all of the animals and the botanical exhibits in those gardens. More reproductive licenses would be issued, more people would immigrate, and eventually there would be nothing to show that anything had ever happened here. Except in the memories of the people who would miss the loved ones they would never see again.
This news of course was going out over wormhole to all of the other systems hooked into the wormhole com net. All of the other core worlds, major industrial developing worlds, any with large Fleet installations. Other developing worlds and the larger frontier worlds would get the news through the hyper link net, which could take as long as a couple of days to appear on their planetary news casts. And still others would not get the news until a ship called on their system, meaning from a week to a month. But all would eventually get the news about what the Cacas had done to the heart of the Empire.
And we’re lucky the Donut survived, thought the Empress. Otherwise we might not have an intact wormhole net.
“Son of a bitch,” growled the Chief of Detail as the scene switched on the holocast, this time showing a man in battle armor pulling debris away from a rubble pile, then lifting some injured people from the destruction. “I’m sorry, your Majesty. It’s just that…”
“What?”
“That’s the armor worn by the man who tried to kill you and the Emperor.”
Jennifer took a closer look at the man on the holo, reversing the picture and running it again when it switched. “It is him. What the hell is he doing?”
“It looks like he is rescuing people, your Majesty.”
“Why would that monster do something like that?” asked Jennifer, shifting Glenn back into her lap and placing the nipple of the bottle into his mouth. She knew the staff around her here in the bunker wanted the professional nurses to take care of the now heir. But she didn’t want to let the baby out of her sight. Not the only one she had left.
“Maybe he isn’t quite the monster we feared,” said the Agent. “After all, he could have killed you and the Emperor. And he didn’t.”
“But he was still a killer.”
“Yes, he was,” agreed the Agent. “But he…”
The holo changed, showing the image of a young woman in a Fleet uniform. “Your Majesty. The Emperor is on the com. He wishes to talk to you.”
The face of the man she loved, the father of her children, the ruler of human space, appeared on the holo as the newscast faded away. She wanted to yell at him, to call him names, to throw questions in his face. Why weren’t you’re here, protecting your family? She stopped herself, reading his face, seeing the stress and strain written there. Sean was a young man, not even forty, with at least two hundred natural years ahead of him. Yet he looked like a man of a hundred and fifty, reaching the lower boundary of middle age.
And his eyes? They had the hundred-yard stare that she had seen in too many combat veterans. An endless stare that seemed to look at all the terror of the war he was fighting, and, seeing no escape, turned inward. And sorrow. A deep, abiding sorrow. She knew it was tearing him apart. So many of his subjects. His heir.
“I was hoping you would call,” she said, trying to keep the accusation out of her voice, and failing.
“I am so sorry,” he said, looking down and breaking eye contact. “I wish I could have been there for you. For Augustine and Glenn. If there had been any way, I would have been there.”
Jennifer was silent, not knowing what to say to this man. She understood the physics that had kept him away. He had been aboard a warship, traveling at high relativistic speed for the last four days. It was impossible to transit a wormhole at that velocity. The gates could absorb some momentum change, but velocity differences above point ten light were too much to handle. The ship, a super heavy battleship of the latest design, was needed in battle, so it could not slow down. But you didn’t have to go. You could have stayed here. You could have watched the battle from here, instead of haring off to the far side of the Empire.
“Augustine is dead,” was all she could say. And you should have been here. Immediately the thought struck her. To do what? To repel the Caca attack by Imperial decree? They might have ridden together in the same car, but the Secret Service would have insisted that one of the children ride in a separate car. Would Augustine still have died? Would theirs have been the target car instead. The philosophers continued to hash out the vagaries of changing the time line. One person in a different place could change much, maybe everything. Sean being in the capital wouldn’t have changed
the Caca attack, but what he did change might have killed them.
“I’m so sorry,” he said again. “If there was anything I could do to change it, I would.”
She nodded. They would have much to talk about when he returned. She decided it was time to change the subject, before their talk hurt both of them too much. “How goes the battle?”
“We’re at the point of decision,” he said, looking up, some of the life, the fierceness she had known in the past relighting his eyes. “This ship and its task group will be going back into battle, soon. And then we will know.”
“And the Donut? I understand we have won that fight.”
“We won, but the battle is not over. It will not be over until those Caca ships have all been destroyed.” He spat out the last words, and his eyes narrowed. Now his mood had changed. She had never seen him so angry. This was the man the Empire needed at this moment, not the one crushed by grief. And she would let the Empire have him.
“This is your heir now,” she said, holding up Glenn. “This is who you fight for. Leave him a strong Empire, and crush his enemies.”
Sean nodded, then the holo went dead. A moment later the newscast came back on, but Jennifer was no longer interested in what it had to say.
“I will go to bed now,” she told her Chief of Detail, who looked like he could use some sleep himself. “Please have a nurse put Glenn to bed.”
She was sure dreams would come reliving this day. That part she dreaded, but at least she would not have to think about them during her sleep, only react.
Chapter Twenty-three
A sincere diplomat is like dry water or wooden iron. Joseph Stalin
D-2
“This is the moment,” said Thomas Sparkmen, the man Kenji Guatarrez knew as the Interrogator.
“Are you sure?” asked Achieng Okoye, the woman the scientist thought of as the Disapprover. They were all following the newscast that was reporting the death of Prince Augustine Ogden Lee Romanov, the heir to the Empire. “What do you think, Nick?”
Nick Stumpfield, the leader of the group, stared at the cast for a moment longer. “We need to look at the incident ourselves, to see if the Prince survived the crash.” He gestured to the one tech in the room, who worked the holographic gear. A moment later the view changed to a shot of the Empress’ aircar convoy as it fled the city.
“How are you getting this vid?” asked Guatarrez, leaning forward in his seat. He was still the unwilling guest of this organization, which was more powerful than he had at first thought, but he was a comfortable prisoner. Especially since he had proven his theory of dimensional time travel to them.
“We have our sources,” said Nick with a smile.
Guatarrez nodded. He had seen that these people could get pretty much whatever they needed. He wasn’t sure who Nick Stumpfield was, but he had heard some of the lower ranking people in the organization call him lord. Nick hadn’t liked that, and had been quick to let them know not to use that title in public.
The vid showed the aircars starting to juke and dodge, then one of them was hit by the angry red of a particle beam, slicing into the power plant of the car with a splash of alloy. The car immediately lost power and fell from the sky trailing smoke.
“Was that it?” asked Okoye, pointing to the vid.
“I think not,” said Sparkmen. “That was one of the perimeter cars.”
The view switched to another of the cars, this one near the center. Again, a bright beam came down, missing. The second beam didn’t miss, and the back of the car exploded outward, then it started to fall. Fifty meters into the fall it exploded, and several objects were ejected from the ball of fire.”
“Zoom in on that one and slow the vid,” ordered Stumpfield.
The Tech did as he was told, and the view zoomed in as it slowed to a crawl, centering on a globe that was falling toward the ground. The outside of the globe had some scorch marks on it, but the damage appeared superficial. The globe continued to fall, taking a minute to drop a hundred meters in the view, then slowing to a near stop.
“That’s an escape pod,” said Okoye. “And from the size, it was made for a child.”
“And it fell under power, and pretty much intact,” said Sparkmen.
“Which is still no guarantee that it contained the Prince,” said Okoye. “Or that he made it out alive.”
“It would be smart money to bet on both,” said Stumpfield. “After all, the reports of what they found do not seem to make sense. Anything that took a hit that could totally destroy the body of the passenger would not look like that falling from the aircar. It would have a damned big hole in it.”
“Haven’t the authorities seen this vid?” asked Guatarrez. “Wouldn’t they know the Prince was still intact, and that what they found didn’t make sense?”
“They never saw this,” said Stumpfield, looking over a replay of the vid. “Our operative that got it out made sure there were no copies left behind.”
The leader looked up and over at Guatarrez. “So, can you get a wormhole to that time? First I would like to see the Prince alive before we send people back.”
“If we start right now, we can probably get one to that point in time in a week our time.”
“And I don’t think we can get the transfer ship insystem in that time, Nick,” said Sparkmen, who seemed to be in charge of those assets. “This system will be on lockdown, and we will have to tread softly.”
Nick looked off for a moment, then nodded. Even though the dimensional transfer craft was very small and very stealthy, it would not do to have it picked up on sensors and intercepted. There would be all kinds of questions this organization wouldn’t want to answer. “We will wait a week, so let’s say two weeks. But go ahead and send the signal to the operations team. Let’s get the asset started on its trip.”
So, in two weeks they will be able to see if the Prince is on that escape pod. And then?
“I hate using so many wormholes for this one project,” said Sparkmen. “We could only get our hands on so many, and I doubt we will be able to get more in the future.”
“We can retask the one we send back for a look,” said Guatarrez, wondering a moment later why he did. After all, he still wasn’t sure what the ultimate plan of these people was, and if he approved of that plan. But first and foremost he was a scientist, and curiosity ruled him. He desperately wanted to see if his theories would test true.
“What do you mean?” asked Stumpfield, staring straight into the scientist’s eyes.
“After viewing the Prince, we can put the carrying vehicle back into the backwards dimension, then allow it to go back again, to the time before the time we viewed the heir in.”
“And the time frame?”
“We get it back out to the point in space where it can jump back into the backwards dimension, then bring it back in while it advances forward again. Say, a month, while we advance another three weeks. So when we go back to retrieve the Prince, it is five weeks from now.”
“That sounds good,” said Stumpfield with a smile. “Good time frame as well. I really don’t want to approach their Majesties for another three months anyway. Let them deal with their loss, build their anger, and then we offer them the hope that their son and heir is still alive.”
“Won’t he then be the younger of the two brothers, by over five weeks?” asked Okoye, a confused expression on her face.
“He is still the first born,” said Stumpfield with a smile. “I don’t think anything is said about biological age in the laws of succession.”
* * *
“We have been picking up additional ripples in the time stream, Commander,” said the alien who slid soundless across the floor. “Small at the moment, only involving a single life, maybe a few more. But we are afraid the ripples will grow from this point.”
Xavier Jackson stared at the Ancient, one of the few remaining of the race that used to rule this region of space. He had been their guest for several years now, since they had
rescued him from the deep space he had found himself drifting in after a catastrophic translation from hyper. It had looked hopeless. There was no way he could have been found by his own people, but the aliens had much better tech than his people. He had been hearing the refrain for over a year now, that his Empire was a threat to the time stream with their use of wormholes.
“The enemy is also using wormholes,” said Jackson, looking into one of the multiple eyes of the Ancient. “You’ve told me so yourself.”
“That is also the fault of your species,” accused the Ancient. Its expression was impossible to read, since it didn’t possess what Jackson would consider a face. The motion of its six tentacles were the way in which it expressed its emotions, and Jackson had learned how to read those. The creature was agitated, nervous, angry.
“Blaming all the ills of the Universe on us,” said Jackson with a smile. “I didn’t think we were so powerful.”
“Once you built that wormhole generating station, you assumed that power. Only you don’t have the wisdom to handle it.”
“Like your people?” asked Jackson, taking a seat and reaching for a drink decanter. “Didn’t you tell me about your own experiments, and how they resulted in so much death and destruction.”
The alien stared at him for a moment, and Jackson wondered if maybe he had said too much. The Ancients were not a cruel people. In fact, they were quite the opposite. But he had seldom seen one so agitated.
“Maybe no species has that wisdom,” said Klorasof, turning away in a circle on his locomotion cilia. It sat there for a moment as Jackson poured himself a drink, then spun back around in a motion that almost blurred his form. “That is why we must stop species from playing with the time line. And I know what you will say. The use of wormholes does not have to lead to playing with the time line. But that is what seems to happen, over and over again. If you continue to press your enemies, they too will be tempted to mess with time. And so it must stop, now.”
Exodus: Empires at War: Book 11: Day of Infamy (Exodus: Empires at War.) Page 30