“What do you intend to do?”
“We will have a gathering of my people. All will come to this place.”
“And then you will launch all of your ships on an attack on the station?”
“No, Xavier Jackson. We will send one ship. We do not have the energy reserves to bring a fleet into battle. We will pool our resources so that our most capable vessel will be able to fight at full efficiency.”
“Perhaps you could approach us in peace, and ask for the power of the station to recharge your energy cells,” suggested Jackson. Klorasof had told him once about how they had used their black hole station to power the baby universes they used for energy, and how they could no longer charge them without that station.
“You would have made a good diplomat, Xavier Jackson,” said the Ancient. “And that is why you will be going with us. So that you may talk your people into evacuating the station before we destroy it. And then you can go home.”
“Home?”
“Of course. We are not a cruel people. And once your people know that we are still here, there will be no need to continue your captivity.”
Except you will send me back to my people after you have taken away our means of winning a war we must win, thought Jackson, keeping his face expressionless. He continued to look at the alien, who had all of its eyes focused on him, waiting. Unless I find a way to stop you.
* * *
“Admiral McCullom,” said the Com Officer, looking up from his station. “We have a transit request from both Elysium and the Crakista.”
“What are they asking to do?” asked Sondra, sitting up from the position she had been in on her chair, near to falling asleep from the exhaustion.
“They are requesting transit to the black hole system.”
“I think they’re a little late to help out there,” there McCullom with a scowl. “Maybe if they had come back a couple of days ago.”
The Com Officer started talking into his system, his voice too subdued for the Grand High Admiral to follow.
“They’re both requesting further transit authority to the front,” said the excited
Com Officer.
“How many of them?” said McCullom, coming to her feet and running to the officer’s station.
“It sounds like all of them. Their entire fleets.”
“Damn. Send them all the permission they need. Then get through to every gate along their path. I want all other traffic stopped when they’re ready to transit.” McCullom could feel the smile stretching her face. They’ll probably still want something in return. But if they’re coming into the battle, I don’t care what they ask for.
“And get me the Emperor on the com.”
* * *
“Are you sure, Sondra?” asked the Emperor, glancing back at the plot that showed how the battle was going. They were winning every fight, except the one they were yet to be involved in. The largest enemy force was still on the way to New Moscow, not more than a day away. And he didn’t have enough there to stop them. And if they had a wormhole aboard? Then their fleet would grow in the system while they challenged him to come and get them.
“They’re pumping ships through the gates as fast as we can take them, your Majesty. One very fifteen seconds. We’re routing them toward the front in the most efficient way possible. I have a good portion of my staff planning their transits, and they are accepting our directions.”
Sean looked back at the plot, at the one system that was vital to his plans out here, and the one that was in the most danger. And he knew where those ships needed to be.
* * *
The High Admiral cursed under his breath as he watched the impossible fighters appear once again on the plot. If only we had some of the new detection devices aboard, he thought. Unfortunately, they were still a new development, and they were not an easy install. It took a complete refit of the sensor system to work properly at any range. And since this had been for all intents and purposes a suicide mission, it had been decided that it was not worthwhile to put these ships through that refit.
Not my decision, thought the High Admiral as a couple of the fighters flew close to his ship, hitting it with lasers. The lasers on a fifteen hundred ton fighter could not do much to a twenty-five million ton warship. He doubted they were even piercing the armor. They were no more than a nuisance, but they were keeping his crews on alert, since he couldn’t afford to take a chance that the next attack would have missiles aboard.
They were now fifteen hours from the station, over three light hours distant and moving at their maximum safe velocity of point nine five light. That put them sixty-one light hours from the hyper I barrier, a little over sixty-one and a fifth standard hours. In ship’s time that would come to eighteen hours. That was if they wanted to cruise through the barrier point at their maximum speed. Instead, they would start decelerating at three light hours from the barrier, reaching it at point three light, their maximum translation speed. And adding another eight standard hours onto their travel time.
More impossible fighters left their warp and moved into the attack. Again they caused no harm, but the close in weapons and laser batteries took out three of the twenty-one craft before they could jump back into the warp.
How many are they going to sacrifice? thought the High Admiral. The humans were showing insane courage. Their fleet was still on his tail, and as he watched they launched another spread of missiles at his force. It would take over thirty hours for the missiles to close to attack range, and they would be closing at a mere point zero two light. This would put them in laser engagement range for thirty-three minutes, and they would be easy targets while crossing that light minute.
“How does it look ahead?” he asked his Tactical Officer, looking at the plot. This system was like no other he had ever been in. Most systems extended from two to four light hours from the primary before navigable hyperspace was reached. Sixty-four light hours. And nothing in it but the primary, except for the objects built by intelligent beings.
And all of those objects are still behind us, he thought as he growled deep in his throat.
“We are picking up nothing ahead of us, my Lord,” replied the Tactical Officer. “But, this system is different. I can’t make sense of some of our readings.”
The High Admiral gave a head motion of acceptance. Their graviton readings were, strange. The huge point source, infinite mass in infinitesimal space, spinning, was sending out graviton pulses that masked other sources. Things that were close, other ships, missiles, were still detectable. Objects at distances over four light hours were problematic.
“The enemy ships will be less than a light hour behind by the time we reach the barrier,” said the Navigation Officer.
Which meant they might be able to get some missiles into his force at a dangerous closing speed. But then he would be through the barrier, and they would still have to decelerate. Or they could choose to start to decelerate so they could jump after his ships as soon as they reached the barrier. In which case they would never get a good shot in normal space. Either way, the advantage was his.
“What is the nearest system to us on the heading we will be on when we leave this desolation?”
“One of the systems orbiting this black hole, my Lord,” replied the officer, looking at a holo hanging over his board. “Umber. A K class star twenty-three light hours beyond the barrier. Three inhabited planets.”
“And there is sure to be a system fleet there, my Lord,” said the Tactical Officer. “They will not let us near any of the inhabited planets.”
“Then we will smash whatever infrastructure we might find in the outer system, then head on to another target,” said the High Admiral. And with luck we will be able to do that to several systems before they bring us to battle.
* * *
“We are on an intercept course, your Grace,” said the Navigator, looking back at the Admiral. “Coasting along. As long as they don’t change course, we will intercept in twelve hours stand
ard time.”
Mei Lei nodded, wiping her hair before climbing back into her shipboard skinsuit. Her ships had all boosted for the required time with the crews in the tanks, allowing the vessels to accelerate at an additional thirty gravities. They were now up to a velocity of point nine light, and were on a course that would bring them across the path of the enemy just ahead, able to put missiles down their throat.
And now, if only we had more missiles, thought the Scout Force Commander. That was their one lack. They were going in for a refit back at Central Docks when the attack came, and most of their missiles had been offloaded, with the others to follow the next day. And they had only been able to load a few more on the vessels before they went through the gate to here. Her flagship only had thirty-three aboard. Her whole force less than five hundred. They had full proton packs, and of course the lasers were always at full power as long as the ships had reactors. But nothing had the impact on space combat that missiles did, and without wormholes aboard, what they had was all they would ever have for this fight.
“Let system command know our position,” the Admiral told her Klassekian Com Tech, who could instantaneously transmit the information to one of her birth siblings. That sibling was not in this system, but was stationed in another system on the frontier, the area from which the scout force had been dispatched. From there the transmission would go through a wormhole to the Donut, and to the system command. A round trip of thousands of light years, all in a moment.
“Message from command,” said the Com Tech. “They have another surprise waiting for the enemy. They’re hoping that it will help us.”
And I wonder what that is, thought the Admiral.
Chapter Twenty-four
A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week. George S. Patton
“Jumping, now,” called out the Helmsman of the flagship.
Sean braced himself for the nausea of the translation from hyper to normal space. He had always been an easy translator, but he was tired, mentally and physically. And that made the normal stress of translation even more difficult.
He took one last glance at the plot that showed an enemy force heading toward them in normal space at point five light. The Cacas were retreating from one of his groups, not yet down to translation speed. And his force was going to jump right into the middle of them before they could get away.
They know we’re coming, he thought with a grin. And a fat lot of good that will do them.
The translation nausea hit, thankfully brief, and suddenly the massive ship was shaking from missile launches and particle beam shots. Augustine, an ironic name now the Emperor thought on it, was now equipped with four wormholes. They had offloaded the others onto ships that had come through wormhole gates and didn’t have their own. Two were presently configured as missile launchers that were spitting out thirty weapons each in thirty second streams, all travelling at point nine five light. The other two were attached to particle beam accelerators in place back at the Donut, each capable of sending a hundred kilograms per second of protons or antiprotons at just under one hundredth thousandth of light speed. They were the most devastating beam weapons in known space, and at the moment they were ripping holes in the hulls of two Caca superbattleships. Four of her sisters were with her, firing the same kind of weapons.
The Cacas fired back, their beam weapons doing little against the thick armor of the super heavy battleships. There were some holes blasted through into the outer layers of the ships, while most of the enemy missiles were blown out of space. A few hit, releasing a gigaton of explosive power, but adding little in the way of kinetic energy. That was still enough to cause significant damage to even a ship of Augustine’s mass and armor, while it shattered destroyers and light cruisers, and sent heavy cruisers into out of control spins. Augustine shook from a pair of hits spaced three seconds apart, and damage klaxons sounded throughout the vessel.
He knew his wife and his counselors would continue to give him hell for leading from the front. And he knew he needed to be on the sharp edge of the battle, with the teeth of his fleet, rending and tearing at his enemy. It fed the rage within him, while relieving the stress of this war and the way it was damaging his people and his Empire.
For this battle the wormhole weapons had been mounted on tracks just under the armor, accessing through a series of portals running from bow to stern. They didn’t really need much within the ship, since the actual weapons were thousands of light years distant. They moved along their tracks to bring the most enemy ships under fire, stopping at each portal to release some seconds of particle beam, or a stream of missiles, before taking a few seconds to speed to the next portal, where they repeated the process. If the Donut had been lost this strategy would not have been possible, at least for the beam weapons.
The fleets engaged in passing, a total of a little under two minutes. As they separated the missiles continued to fly, though those from the Cacas were now trying to accelerate to overcome the velocity of their launching ships, while the human vessels without wormholes put out missiles that were catching up to the enemy at point five light, not the best closing speed, but still dangerous.
Augustine had taken damage, not crippling, but enough to leave a thousand of her crew dead. Duke Mormont, one of her sisters, had gone up in a flare of plasma as thirteen warheads struck and her antimatter stores breached. Two destroyers that had guarded her too closely went up with her. One other ship would be spending time in a shipyard before she was combat ready.
Seventy-three enemy superbattleships had been destroyed, hit by high velocity missiles or punctured by particle beams that breached their engineering spaces. Forty-six of their large cruisers and over a hundred of their scouts had joined them in death. A mere forty-one ships in total had made it away, and Sean’s forces would be after them. The five Augustine class ships had torn the guts out of a strong enemy force. And that force had been the last reserve the enemy had in this part of the battle.
“Order our own reserves into battle,” ordered the Emperor. He had to hope that would be enough to break the enemy. At the moment he had no more ships to throw into the fray, at least here. And still no way to reinforce New Moscow with any of his ships, not anything that would get there in time. Only his allies could save that system, if they were able.
* * *
D-5
“We’re at the barrier, Ma’am,” said the Chief of Staff.
“Order all ships to jump,” she said in a hushed voice. She had led a fleet of over eighty thousand ships into this system. She was retreating with less than twenty thousand. Much less.
I should have been more cautious, she thought. The President warned me, and I thought I was listening. But dammit, I wasn’t.
The battle had started off so well. They had the enemy ships where they wanted them, coming out to meet the Klavarta force being led by the Imperial commander, the Gryphon Admiral Mashara Ignoa. Her force had come in on another vector into the system. Of course the enemy had been able to detect her before she jumped into normal space, but they were already engaged and unable to do anything to stop her. Her force moved into the system, brushing aside the few pickets before her, launching a swarm of missiles at the backside of the enemy force. It looked like it was going to be a slaughter, until the rest of the enemy ships came out of hiding and launched in mass at her force.
And we hadn’t a clue they were here. Our scouts had no indication that they had so many ships, and no sign of those ships entering the system. Wormholes had said the Imperial Admiral, just before his ship had gone up in a ball of plasma, taking one of her own portals with it. The twelve ships that still had wormholes had given good account of themselves, spitting out stream after stream of high relativistic weapons. But her main force was short on missiles, a problem the enemy didn’t seem to have.
The ships jumped, and she felt the slight nausea her kind experienced during the transition. The last thing she had seen had been the mass of
enemy ships heading for the barrier, on her tail. The other force, less than two thousand ships, had left the system an hour before, another large enemy fleet coming after them.
Once we’re in hyper, we’ll have no trouble outrunning them, she thought, looking at the plot, trying to see something that might give her idea of how to turn this around, and failing. Unless they have something else hidden from us out there in deep space. She thought about that again. She might not be able to outrun all of their ships. As long as they could stay within sensor range, they could follow. And she would lose more ships.
She couldn’t even talk with command at this point. The human battlecruiser that had been her liaison had also been lost, and with it her instantaneous com. There were still some ships with either the wormholes or the quantum entangled aliens aboard, but none within hyperspace com reach of her vessel. She might send some code through grav pulse to a ship that could transmit to base, but she couldn’t have the conversation that she wanted. In another way, it was good that she couldn’t have that conversation, since most of what she had to say were apologies for the ships and crews she had lost.
“What course, Ma’am? Back to forward base.”
“Hells no,” growled the Admiral. “We would just be leading their fleet back to another target they could destroy.”
She pulled up the holo plot of this bordering section of the Nation, looking for a destination that she could use to her advantage. Nothing jumped out at her, nothing that solved all of her problems. She could resort to the age old Klavarta tactic of run and scatter. That was sure to get some of her ships away from the pursuit. And what if the enemy didn’t break up their forces to chase her ships? They could forge into the Nation to hit targets of opportunity, while her force was too scattered to do anything about it.
Exodus: Empires at War: Book 11: Day of Infamy (Exodus: Empires at War.) Page 31