Catherine Kimbridge Chronicles 2: Redemption (14 page)

"That order was given the moment I set foot on the
Yorktown
. You'll also find you have already been assigned his 'lieutenant' survivor benefits. If I recall you have a niece named Claire that Matty was fond of. She wants to go into robotics at Carnegie Mellon University if I remember correctly. Perhaps you could setup a scholarship in his name for her?"

Lieutenant Andrews beamed. "Yes, Ma'am! The Matthews Memorial Fund. He would love that, and so would I."

Cat smiled and patted the young Lieutenant's arm as she left. 

The next few hours went by in a flash for Captain Mike Jeffries.
After only a few minutes of walking he began to see something in the distance. Its size must be truly massive as he had since then been walking for hours. The height of the section he was rapidly approaching was easily double the height of a human skyscraper. There appeared to be the remnants of a glass dome covering portions of the structure. 

The wind continued to pick up at an alarming rate.
At some point he realized the wind direction and pressure was working against him and that he was not going to be able to make it back to the escape pod. His only choice was going to be proceeding on towards the wreckage of the massive floating city, with the hope that he could find shelter and perhaps a working power source for his encounter suit. With any luck he could ride out the storm and still have enough water and air to make it back to the pod to his food supply.

As he approached the city wreckage he began to wonder if he would find a way in.
The crash had created numerous breaches in the hull but most seemed to be too high to reach. He checked his power reserves. He had a little over three hours left. Once his power failed he would be at the mercy of the stronger gravity. In addition, his air purification system would shut down and his backup chemical CO
2
scrubbers would only last him an hour or so.

He kept his suit on full power while walking
but every time he stopped to rest he scaled back the gravity shielding to preserve as much energy as possible.

After an additional
forty-five minutes of exploration around the edge of the structure he encountered a fissure in the bedrock. It was sizable, and presented him with a choice: continue around the structure and look for an opening or explore the fissure in the hopes he could locate a rent below that would allow him access. Ultimately he decided to 'take the low road,' if only for a change of pace and to get out of the ever increasing wind. It turned out to be a fortuitous decision.

About twenty feet into the fissure he located exactly what he had been looking for.
It appeared to be an oblong window frame in which the glass-like material had shattered. He kicked at the window with his foot. Nothing happened. He decided this was likely to be his best entry point so he dialed up the power to his suit's servos and kicked again. The glass gave ever so slightly. He was killing his power reserves but he continued to kick. After four attempts the window gave in and with a massive popping sound the glass shattered and imploded. It was then that Mike realized that this section of the structure had managed to maintain air pressure.

This had several immediate implications...
some good and some bad. If some of the structures still maintained air pressure then there might be pockets of breathable air. Unfortunately it might also mean he had just killed some survivors if they were depending on the air in this pocket. Enough people had already died. He would proceed with added caution from this point forward.

***

The hive super-mind tweaked entry vectors for a couple hundred exotic matter solar miners. Most responded to the course corrections. However, a handful of the pilots had either succumbed to the radiation or advanced age and were not responding. No matter. Projections showed this group would at last provide enough of the material needed for the hyperfold star drives to bring the first one hundred iron-nickel asteroid weapons online. The super-mind decided this would be sufficient for the first part of its plan.

When it had broken into the
GCP Yorktown's
computer the super-mind had secured the jump coordinates of each of the GCP member
s
’ star systems. After reviewing the relative merits of each potential target the initial targeting decision was confirmed. Sol would serve as the testbed for its eradication project.

Each of the kinetic weapons would be jumped to a point within the Kepler
-47 star system, where the gravity well of the primary could accelerate the asteroids towards the star, adding a tremendous amount of kinetic energy in the process. Just prior to entering the sun's corona the asteroids would be jumped into the Sol system on an intercept course for Earth. The jump point would be just inside Earth's lunar orbit so there would be no time to respond to or flee the onslaught. 

***

Cat swung her racket with just enough force to cause the 'adaptive impact' Spalding to graze the forward wall of the court. This forced her opponent, Admiral Bud Faragon, to rush forward and scramble to reach for his next shot. Cat's Heshe enhanced reflexes made the match unfair in the extreme but it was a part of the Admiral's character to cherish an impossible challenge. The racquetball they were using was based on a new design that actively and intelligently changed its response characteristics based on the person hitting it.

This had become popular
, as the various races within the GCP had vastly different physical characteristics and yet they enjoyed playing sports together. The adaptive nature of these new creations by the
Spalding
Company allowed the physical differences between the various races to be minimized. It also allowed the Admiral to have a modicum of a chance against his opponent. In truth, if Cat had not deliberately downgraded her response times by a full 60 percent even this small chance would have not existed.

It had been four weeks since the events at Kepler-47. There had been an extensive after-action review in which an attempt was made to codify the lessons learned from the encounter. A new set of rules were in place for entering a star system for the first time.

Ships would remain cloaked until it was determined that the system was either unpopulated or a decision was made to make first contact. No longer would alien artifacts be brought onboard a ship until an assessment could be made of said artifacts potential threat to the ship. Finally, computer security would be mediated by a Heshe encryption layer that hopefully would prevent a repeat of the breach that occurred within the
Yorktown's
computer core.

Quite a bit of effort had been put into attempting to determine what impact the knowledge stolen by the Kepler Buggers, or
KayBees as they were now generally called, was going to have on both the KayBees and their interactions with other races. Unfortunately, the result of that analysis was not promising.

One
bright spot was Rasta-Tckne
r’
s decision to stay with the crew of the
Yorktown
. It seemed he had little to look forward to in his home system. Until the super-mind released control of his people there was really very little to go home to.

The
KayBee situation presented the GCP with a number of seminal questions. Was it the GCP's responsibility to attempt to undo the damage done to a people by the Uruk?  Was the threat posed by the unrestricted and unauthorized theft of dangerous technology worth pursuing? Was there a need, as Rasta-Tckner was urging, to actively seek the disruption of the hive collective super-mind?

"So..." Admiral Faragon gasped as he threw himself into a wall in a vain attempt to reach a ball that Cat had imbued with an excessive amount of backspin. "Are you ready to concede yet?"       

"If you are referring to the game I would gladly grant you a reprieve from further embarrassment.  If you are referring to my disagreement with Admiral McMullen, I'm afraid I will have to pass. While its true honest people can disagree and still be honest, I'm afraid this is one time when he and I will have to agree to disagree. When we were given access to the Heshe technology I believe it was in part because of our capacity for compassion and to see the universe as a bigger stage than just the role humanity plays in its little corner."

"I'm inclined to agree with you
, but for a decision of this magnitude I'm afraid we need substantial buy-in."

Cat grabbed a towel as the officers headed for the showers. "That may be
Sir, but I worry about what the KayBee's are doing with the information they got from us. WhimPy-23 has recorded sixteen hyperjump trails. We may very well find ourselves with the decision made for us."

Cat's words turned out to be prophetic
, as no sooner were they out of her mouth then the battle klaxons began to blare.

Cat immediately toggled her internal
comm. "Cal, report!"

"
Precise data is not available but roughly ninety-five massive objects just tried to jump into near Earth space. Hyperfield inhibitors prevented the jumps which were redirected 1000 AU into deep space.
" 

Admiral Faragon interrupted with an order of his own
. "Cal, priority one override. Open a fleet-wide ship-to-ship channel."

"
Channel open.
"

"Attention all stations. At 1423 local time an incursion force of unknown intent attempted to penetrate Earth space. All planetary defense systems in all GCP member worlds are to go to high defensive posture. We will advise when you can stand down from this alert status. Admiral Faragon out."

Cat signaled her first officer on the bridge. "Ken, I assume you have been monitoring?"

"Aye
, Commodore."

"Ken
, I want you to cloak us and jump to a position that gives us a good view of those ships that tried to pay us a visit. I want to know who was trying to pay us the visit and what their intent was. Also, open a channel to WhimPy-23. I want to know if he noticed any activity in the KayBee system."

"Will do
, although I think we can guess what the intent was," Ken said.

"Given they sent pretty near
one hundred ships I guess we can rule out an invitation to tea," Cat agreed. "Still we should learn what we can: is this someone we know, or is this someone new?"

"Actually
," Admiral Faragon interjected, "Based on the hyperfold activity that WhimPy-23 has actively documented, we have every reason to believe these ships are from the Kepler-47 system. A large share of the asteroids that they have been mining for the last month have suddenly disappeared."

Cat turned to face the
Admiral. "Sir, given the likelihood that this was intended to be an attack and given that we know the KayBees have access to a large portion of our cartographical database, I think we can assume all GCP worlds are in potential danger."

"I agree
," the Admiral said while toweling sweat from the racquetball match off his face. "That is why I ordered the elevated defense posture."

"Sir
, my concern is not so much for the member GCP worlds as it is for the Ashkelons. They are not part of the GCP, but their home world was in our database. We should at least warn them."

***

WhimPy-23 adjusted a static electric charge in the upper thermosphere of a select area of Kepler-47b. The charge caused minute pieces of dust to coalesce and fall deeper within the gravity well of the planet. This action had several immediate effects.

First it reduced the amount of particulates in the upper atmosphere that could contribute to greenhouse heating.
Second it caused a downward draft current that effectively denied a potential storm the opportunity to become tightly organized. The effect was small, but WhimPy-23 had been applying meteorological tweaks to the Kepler-47b system for the better part of thirty days. It would take years of accumulating these changes for there to be a permanent correction to the turbulence in 47b but WhimPy was patient. 

The tweaks
, while minor and seemingly random, where anything but. What the WhimPy failed to detect was the interest his activities were generating within the hive super-mind. The vastness of the collective hive intellect was perhaps one of the few natural rivals for the WhimPy's Heshe engineered intellect.

A portion of the super-mind noted the changes taking place on the
host world. It had been understandably concerned when its own analysis determined the meteorological changes on the planet had doomed the two remaining nest moons. It was a lower priority problem, however, that could and would be addressed once the more immediate threat of alien coexistence was dealt with.

When sudden, seemingly random events
, started to occur which favorably mitigated some of the more deleterious effects of the atmospheric turbulence on the host world, the super-mind took note. As these events began to accumulate, the likelihood of them being truly random began to approach zero. The logical conclusion was that some force, for whatever reason, was attempting to re-engineer the host world. This was unacceptable.

The super-mind began to operate on a series of assumptions. First, the changes it was observing were deliberate. Second, they were linked somehow with the recent incursion into
its space by this group called the Galactic Coalition of Planets. Third, the GCP must be employing some type of stealth technology.       

The super-mind began to track the changes and performed a statistical analysis whose sole purpose was to establish the likely point of origin for this unseen perpetrator. Once it established a probable point of origin, the super-mind put into motion a plan it had devised when the alien's super-platform had been in orbit around the
host world.