Angels of Eternity
Page 21
The last two raids they’d conducted were quick and effective. Ever since Durga had died, Shakti kept her remaining co-wives close and safe. She’d taken the death of her latest companion hard and spent most of her waking moments going over the charts and data streams to find out where the wasps might make another appearance. The last two raids were very easy. The Widowmaker folded through space to find a small detachment of wasp cruisers in the process of repair and destroyed them all. From now on, Shakti decided there was no reason to do anything else. Every wasp ship destroyed was one less to cause destruction.
But their weapon systems needed overhaul and the nuclear torpedoes were down to three units. It didn’t look good. The war college needed to recall them just to make repairs on the ship. Shakti didn’t think it was possible to operate the corvette with such a small crew for much longer. She had every woman in the command center when the last run happened. It was her sixth sense that allowed them to survive an engagement with a wasp fast attack ship. It came out of the shadow of the moon where they found a brood ship undergoing repairs. She’d powered the laser cannons up just before the wasp attack ship struck. It was her swift thinking that allowed them to hit the attack ship with the lasers when it came into range.
She knew the wasps were capable of learning from their enemy and victims. If this was the case, it meant the ambush was planned. If it was the result of the wasps’ trying to lure the Widowmaker into a trap, it meant the wasps had learned their destination in advance. This could also mean the wasps had some inside knowledge of the imperial court or war college.
If there was someone inside the war college who worked on behalf of the wasps, they could easily be sent into a situation where the wasps would be waiting for them. The last engagement made Shakti feel it might happen again. She couldn’t prove it, but what if one warship vanished on a raid deep into enemy territory? Who could tell whether it was a trap or not? She knew there were couriers at the emperor’s palace that had no love for them. They wouldn’t mind it if the warbrides were all killed in action. Wasn’t she told by the prefect that no one expected them to last very long?
They had done very well and she had every intention to see they would continue to perform phenomenally against the wasps. Shakti felt responsible for the other women on the ship, even though their number shrank to less than half of their original numbers. Let the court think they were just a bunch of cheap whores. They showed them every time they could deliver just as good as any trained centurion in the imperial corps. Perhaps it was time to assess for whom they fought.
Two standard days into the orbit of the latest star where they’d been sent, Shakti decided to call a meeting of all the remaining warbrides. Their numbers were shrunk to the point where they could easily hold a brief meeting in the command center. Shakti waited until all of them were on duty at the same time. She made a final check to ensure there was no hostile activity near their location when they all floated to the center of the common area.
“There’s nothing in this system,” she announced to the other women. “I think the war college has sent us someplace where we won’t be an embarrassment any longer to the imperial forces. I can’t read a lot of the information that comes across the transmissions, but the regular fleet has taken a number of serious beatings out there. They don’t want us to show them up, so we’re being sent to the rear until they can figure out a way to make the imperial fleet look good.”
“Have your tried to contact our royal husband?” Chimata asked her.
“All communications have to go through the war college,” Shakti explained. “The prefect in charge of our program sees everything before it goes to the palace. I doubt anything sent to him would ever reach the bedchamber.”
Bravi, still floating around with little to cover her, managed to pull herself close to the group of women in the command center. “You wouldn’t have called us together if you didn’t have a plan,” she told Shakti. “So let’s hear it.”
“I think we should quit with these hit and run operations and strike at the home planet,” Shakti announced. “We need to find out where the wasps come from and destroy as much of their home world as possible. If their home planet is destroyed or damaged, they’ll be forced to return to save it. With the wasp forces in full retreat, the empire can hunt down and kill them all.”
“That’s bold,” Kamala commented as she held onto a handle, which projected from a control panel. “It means disobeying orders too. What will we tell the war college?”
“We will tell them to inform our imperial husband that his wives have decided to take the battle to the heart of the enemy,” Shakti announced. “They won’t like it, but what are they going to do? We’re out here on our own.”
“It puts us outside the mission objective,” Chimata observed. “You know what they do to deserters on the home worlds, don’t you?”
“We’re not deserting,” Shakti, informed her. “We’re taking this fight to the wasps. Up until now, the wasps have determined where the battle will be fought and the empire responds. If we can locate the wasp home world, we determine who fights and who stays home.”
“I don’t know about this,” Dharma brought up. “We have a full corvette under our control and the war college won’t take too kindly to the news about us going out on our own. We don’t know if the ship has some kind of kill switch built into it just in case the crew decides to revolt. There’ve been rebellions before, but nothing too big in the past hundred years.”
“Kamala,” Shakti said as she turned to the big woman. “Do you have any way of finding out if there is a kill switch built into this ship?”
“I can find out,” she said to her. “It will take time and you can never be one hundred percent sure in these things. If I find one, there will be more. Because there always is. Give me a few days.”
Shakti turned to Dharma, who floated over her and held onto a hand restraint. “I haven’t heard from you.”
“I agree we need to take this to the heart of the wasps,” she agreed. “Our husband is too busy playing with his latest batch of wives to be concerned with the fate of the human race. But don’t do this for the wrong reasons.”
“Explain yourself,” Shakti ordered. Her brown eyes flared and looked right through the small woman.
“Look, we all know how you feel about what happened when we boarded that ship. I was there when Durga went down too. I’ve seen plenty of my co-wives die out here. Too many. There are times when I wonder if it was wise to come out on this crusade. That prison planet wasn’t so bad, no worse than the fat businessmen who used to pay me to sleep with them. I want to make those wasps suffer for what they’ve done too. But don’t make this too personal.”
“I don’t see how I can make it more personal than having my sisters slaughtered before me,” Shakti snapped. “Our mission ends when the wasps can’t make war any longer.”
“You can’t lose control of yourself, boss,” Dharma told her. “You would have killed every wasp on that ship if we’d let you.”
“Is there something wrong with that?”
“Yes there is. Eventually the wasps would have killed you. You rush into a mob like that and they’ll find a way to kill you eventually. The wasps don’t fight very well together, but they seem to be learning. And if you are killed, where does that leave us? We couldn’t make it back to the empire without you. The way you’re talking, we may never make it home.”
Shakti turned and looked away. The last death hit her hard. It had opened up a place inside her she didn’t want to go. Not since the days when she was living on the streets had she felt the urge to kill and injury so many at the same time. She tried to fight the sensation to kill and destroy. It helped her survive in the past and it kept coming back. She needed to hide it, to make the intensity of her feelings sink back inside, but she didn’t believe in using drugs to hide her animosity. Worst of all, she needed to get this meeting wrapped up.
“So is everyone in agreement with me?�
� I need to know you’re all with me when we make the next jump. Because I want the next jump through space to take us right into the lair of the wasps. Who’s with me?”
“I am,” Dharma announced. “We’ve been through it all so far, might as well see it through to the end.”
Shakti waited for the rest of the women to respond. She knew if she were to take the Widowmaker to the home world of the wasps, she would need their support. No way could she command the corvette if any one of her remaining co-wives didn’t support her. And right now, it didn’t seem she had all the support she needed. The others floated around the command chamber in the loose clothes they wore and held onto whatever hand support they could find.
Chimata was about to open her mouth and say something when a screen next to her began to blink. She spun around, punched a few codes into it and her face illuminated as she saw something important.
“Got it!” she announced. “Found the wasp home planet!”
“I didn’t know you were trying to find it,” Shakti responded. She pulled herself down the tree of extensions inside the command center to look at the screen.
“I’ve had a program analyzing the wasp attack patterns and traffic for the past few weeks. Every time I received some new data from the war college, I fed it into it,” she explained. “The program has identified this star system as the probable home system of the wasps.”
“How can you be certain it’s the right one?” Kamala asked her as she pushed her way to the screen. “What kind of probability do you have?”
“It’s decent,” Chimata told her, pushing her hair under the band she used to keep it under control.
“How decent?”
“Ninety-five percent probability. As I said, it’s decent.”
The other women in the command center became quiet. Shakti starred at the screen with the other warbrides and waited until the information sunk into everyone.
“So who wants to go take them out?” she asked.
“I’m in,” Kamala announced.
“Me too,” Chimata pledged as she made a few adjustments on the screen.
“I’ll see it through,” it was Bravi who hadn’t said a word so far.
“You already know I’ll go,” Dharma told her. “This will be one for the history books.”
Two standard days later, they folded space to the system Chimata identified as the home of the wasps, which Bravi dubbed Wasp Prime.
Shakti sent a message that folded itself through space to the war college. She made it as concise and clear as she could; given the lack of time, they had to prepare for the final assault. The message gave the war college the location of Wasp Prime and included the data Chimata had used to locate it. This way they had proof of the warbrides’ reasoning. The second part of the message was to be delivered personally to their Imperial Husband. It stated they no long took orders from him and were in open rebellion. The warbrides listed a series of reasons starting with the lack of interst in their success by the war college and concluding with the need to launch an independent strike against Wasp Prime.
Two days afterwards, the warbrides were strapped into their chairs when Shakti had Chimata begin the procedure for folding space. The Schrodinger generator was powering up as she turned and looked at Kamala’s form secured into her chair. All of them had their suit armor on with the helmets in place. Shakti noticed the personal device Kamala had freshly painted on her helmet and transmitted to her with helmet microphone.
“Did you find any kill switch bombs?” she asked the halberd fighter.
“Two,” she told her. “Right where I expected to find them. I hope those were the only ones. Guess we’ll find out in a few minutes.”
The screen in front of her began to distort as Shakti felt the generator kick in.
“Or less,” Kamala commented.
The corvette made the jump to the inner rim of the wasp solar system. Wasp Prime was one of six planets, which orbited a star close to the size and shape of the one where humanity called home. Shakti waited before she began to unlock her straps on the chair. She let a few more minutes pass, and then decided that if the ship still had another active kill switch inside it; it wouldn’t make much difference. She unlocked her helm and gave the other women permission to removes theirs too.
“We’re fine for now,” she announced. “Dharma, what do we have on the screens?”
“Nothing out here,” she announced. “Plenty of activity around Wasp Prime. They have a lot happening on the moon of the planet. Seems to be a steady stream of ships on their way out of the solar system that use the gravitational pull of their sun as a slingshot to increase their speed. Some nuclear explosions that appear to be used as rocket boosters, but those are far from Wasp Prime. I don’t detect any background information which would indicate they know about us.”
Shakti heard Dharma curse. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Huge fleet of ships being grown in orbit around their moon. Much bigger than the last ones we saw. I can’t even count the number; it has to be in the hundreds.”
“Sizes?”
“All kinds. From corvettes like ours to the big dreadnaughts. They’re planning something huge once those ships have finished their growth.”
Shakti thought for a few minutes. “Chimata, can we fold space to end up right inside the orbit of that planet?”
“Theoretically, we can” Chimata replied. “In theory, you can do anything. I don’t know how practical it would be to do it, however. The precision of the generator is good for about one million miles, give or take. The best we could hope for would to end up a million miles from their planet where…oh I see where you’re headed with this.”
“We can get close enough to drop some nukes in the middle of their ship yards and make a run for it,” Shakti announced. “Take out most of their offensive capacity and buy the empire some time. If you can get us reasonably close, we’ll at least have the chance to release the torpedoes. We’ll have to be ready to do it the moment we end up there, because there will be no hiding once we show up.”
“The Schrodinger generators,” Bravi mentioned. “What about them? Aren’t you worried they might capture the generators and learn how to fold space?”
“They won’t capture those generators,” Shakti announced. “I’ll blow the reactor if they get too close.”
Bravi nodded. For some reason, this wasn’t a reassuring thought.
Their helmets back on and suits strapped into place. Chimata punched in the figures for the final jump to Wasp Prime. This was the decisive moment and all they could do was lock into their chairs. The nukes couldn’t be released during the jump, but Kamala was able to prime them for use. All it would take would be a quick check of coordinates and the torpedoes could be launched. They still had enough to do the job once the Widowmaker folded space to the planetary orbit.
There was a shift in perception once again as the corvette transferred through the space-time continuum. Once the panel in front of her became clear, Shakti could see where they were. Her eyes focused on the images before her and she could see the location of five large wasp ships less than two thousand miles from them.
“Holy Mother!” Kamala was the first to shout. “We’re right in the middle of them!”
Everyone’s exterior display showed the same thing. A solid mass of wasp ships grown in orbit from umbilical cords to the surface of the Wasp Prime moon. And they were right inside the entire cluster. Directly around them floated some kind of wasp construction vehicle, which appeared not to notice their presence. They might be hidden right now, but it was all about to change.
The screens about them illuminated in a series of red and orange lights. There was no reason for Shakti to tell her co-wives what had just happened. The wasps knew they were inside their perimeter. At this very instant, the wasps were doing their best to take out a source of infection. At some level, a wasp supervisor had figured out that the humans were in the shipyards and needed to be contained.
“Where to?” Chimata replied as she looked at the display, which floated in front of her. “We’re in the cooking pot and the only place to go is the flames.”
The orange lights on the screen were slowly turning to red. “Kamala, can you use the nukes without damaging the ship?” Shakti transmitted to the big woman. “Maybe use a nuclear detonation as a decoy.”
“Can’t set them off at this range without destroying the ship,” she said. “We’re in a great spot to use them, check out where we are.”
In the display, which floated in front of Shakti, she could see the wasp fleet, which was still in the growth phase. They were so close to the construction work that the stars were blotted out in front of them. Shakti said a prayer to the Great Mother and made a decision.
“We’ll take the shuttle down to the surface,” she announced. “Send the Widowmaker right into their hive and detonate the nukes. It’s the only thing I can think to do.”
“Shakti,” the voice of Bravi came out of the audio feed. “We’ll never make it down there. The nukes will vaporize the shuttle before it reached Wasp Prime’s atmosphere.” Now all the lights in front of her were red.
“Punch the shuttle with the Schrodinger drive to the edge,” the voice of Dharma came out of the feed they all shared. “Use the power from the nukes to send us as far as we can go. We leave the empire and the wasps. The wasps get a farewell present when the nukes blow and we get freedom.”
In her helmet display, Shakti saw a green, habitual planet displayed on the edge of the known galaxy. It was far from any imperial station. If there were any kind of civilization on this world, it wouldn’t be reached by the wasps or empire for hundreds of years.