Exodus: Empires at War: Book 11: Day of Infamy (Exodus: Empires at War.) (2 page)

Chapter One

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood
up for something, sometime in your life. Winston Churchill

CAPITULUM, JEWEL:  NOVEMBER 10
^TH
,
1002.  D-52.

Warrant Officer First
Debra Visserman pulled the stick of her F-48 Peregrine and banked through the
high clouds.  She was cruising at eighteen thousand meters over the city, her
airspeed set at Mach two.  She wanted to push it harder.  The sixty ton
aircraft felt like a hobbled stallion to her experienced touch, wanting to
break free and gallop across the sky.  At her present altitude she could push
up to Mach thirty-five, except she would then be breaking a dozen regulations
against such speeds over an occupied area of the planet.  There were also rules
against attaining that kind of speed over any of the wilderness areas of the
world, lest the aircraft frighten the wildlife.  In fact, just about the only
place she could open it up was over the ocean deeps.

She looked down at the
nighttime cityscape below, several hundred thousand square kilometers of the
most occupied land in the Empire, the capital, with over three billion
inhabitants.  Toward the center were the towering megascrapers, many reaching
above five thousand meters in height, interspersed with lower archologies that
still towered over a kilometer into the sky.  Radiating out from the central
region was a lower sprawl of skyscrapers and smaller buildings, set among
neighborhoods of low rise and single family housing.  The huge urban area was
one of the reasons there were so many rules in place restricting her handling
of her hot fighter.  Not only the way in which her hypersonic booms might
disturb the populace, but the threat of an out of control aircraft falling into
the city like a kinetic weapon.

Like I would let that
happen
,
thought the confident young woman, who had placed at the head of her class in
Imperial Army flight school among almost five hundred classmates.  She had
almost five hundred hours in the Peregrine, a thousand overall among all types
of atmospheric craft.  It was like a part of her, and she felt like she was
wearing leg shackles under all the restrictions.

“You are entering a
restricted air zone,” said the craft’s computer voice, what they all called
Bitching
Betty
, a term that had come down from the antiquity of prespace
civilization.  “You are entering a restricted air zone.”

“OK, you bitch,” replied
Debra, making sure that it wasn’t going out over the com.  She banked the
fighter over again, moving out of the airspace of the Constance the Great
spacesport, the largest and busiest landing field in the Empire, before she
started getting complaints from the air-space controllers of the facility. 
There were at least a dozen shuttles always on one or another stages of
approach, and an equal number on their way up to high orbit and beyond.

“This is Alpha Three
Seven,” she said over the com, connecting to her own base, just outside of the city. 
“Permission to ascend to two hundred thousand meters.”

“Permission granted,”
came back the voice almost immediately.

She was not surprised, as
she was out on a training mission, and extra-atmospheric flight was one of the
areas she needed more time on.  The Peregrine, like most advanced atmospheric
fighters, used an array of grabber units for propulsion, and really could
function as a short range spaceship at need.  Flying back into an atmosphere
was a trickier proposition than heading out, and it was a skill that all
atmospheric fighter pilots were expected to master, since they might be
assigned to an assault carrier in the future, flying support and air
superiority missions from orbit.

Visserman set her plane
on its tail and rocketed upwards, rising high above the planet until she was in
low orbit, watching as the partial globe of the star poked over the horizon. 
She checked her tactical display, made sure nothing was in the way, and pushed
the craft up to thirty thousand kilometers an hour, flying out to sea and into
the rising sun for ten minutes, then quickly decelerating back down to four
thousand kilometers an hour and pushing her nose down, heading back for a
reentry.  In about a minute the fighter was biting back into the atmosphere,
and shook with the turbulence of hitting the gas envelope of the planet.

The pilot leveled the
craft off at twenty thousand meters, then banked again and went into a steady
descent until she could see the ocean waves below, then leveled off again,
kicking in the acceleration until she was flying Mach ten only a couple of
hundred meters above the water.  Her computer cautioned her on her speed as she
approached the coast line, and she was down to just below the speed of sound as
she crossed one of the popular city beaches and headed for her base.

The base, Paulus Sevestal
Field, was an operational fighter field tasked with the defense of the city and
this hemisphere of the planet.  Not that there was much need of defense at
this, the veritable center of the Empire.  It was laid out with the protection
of the based aircraft in mind, with covered revetments spaced out around the
runway.  Laser, particle beam and missile emplacements surrounded the field,
there to protect the aircraft and crews from attack.  Or at least to provide
training for the soldiers still learning to master those systems.

“The Colonel would like
to see you, ma’am,” her mechanic told her as soon as she climbed out of the
aircraft.  “At your earliest convenience.”

Crap
, thought the Warrant,
wondering what this might be about.  She couldn’t think of anything good,
unless her transfer to a unit aboard an assault carrier had come through.  With
that thought came a smile, and she hurried across the field to the
administration building.  Capitulum was situated in the tropics, and always
seemed hot to her.  Debra was from Frisco, the city on the peninsula in the
upper temperate zone of this same continent, and was used to cooler temps,
except for the winters that were downright cold.  She had worked up a sweat
through her flight suit by the time she had gotten to the building.

“Reporting as ordered,
sir,” she announced as she stepped into Colonel Gonzalez’ office, rendering a
perfect hand salute.

“Have a seat, Warrant
Visserman,” said the officer, pulling up a flimsy that had been sitting on his
desk.  “Or I should say Chief Warrant Officer Two Visserman.”

“I’m getting a
promotion?”

“Some idiot thought you
deserved one, based on your skill as a pilot.  Lord knows it couldn’t be
because of your decorum and attention to military protocol.”

“Who put me up for
promotion?” asked Visserman, confused.

“I would be that idiot,
Chief,” said the Colonel with a wide smile.  “You’re one of the best natural
pilots I’ve ever seen, and it will be a shame to lose you.”

“I got my reassignment?”
asked Debra in an excited tone.  “Not that you haven’t been a great commander
and all.”

“You’ve gotten a
reassignment to a basic flight school, Chief,” said the Colonel, his smile
turning down to a frown.  “I know it wasn’t what you wanted, but it’s what the
service needs.  We need for your skill to rub off on some new pilots, so that’s
what will happen.”

“Yes, sir,” said
Visserman with a sinking feeling.  She could remember talking with her own
instructors in basic flight school.    All had talked about how a training
assignment was a no way out ticket to the rear.  Most of them had loved the
idea that they could stay at home with families, not putting themselves at
risk.  The really good ones had been disappointed that they had been stuck in
limbo with no way out.  “When do I go?”

“Two months from now,”
said Gonzalez, looking at the flimsy.  “You’ll transfer through wormhole to
Ruby.  You’ll have four days free to do with as you please before you have to
report.”

Visserman felt like the
bottom had fallen out from under her as she left the Colonel’s office. 
Four
days
, she thought, wondering what she would do with them.  She could go
home, only she didn’t feel at home in that place. 
Or I could just stay in
the city and see some of the sights I haven’t had time for.  And drinking with
my mates at night.
  That settled it.  She would stay here and drink with
her buddies, the people she felt closest to.  And let they, who still had a
chance at a slot at the front, to commiserate with her.

*     *     *

Lucille Yu sat at her
desk and looked at the bank of holos that surrounded her, surveying her own
personal empire.  Not really hers, since she owned none of it, not even the
desk she sat at.  But her responsibility.  Not the military part, the millions
of personnel who swarmed the station, both as a duty station and a passage to
elsewhere.  Not the labs and weapons development workshops.  Not the weapons
aboard, those placed on the station for self-defense, as well as the massive
constructs that sent their power across the light years to the battle fleets. 
Nor did she have a stake in the thousands of wormhole passenger gates that were
starting to link the Empire in a way that generations past would never have
imagined.  Or the negative matter and antimatter production that supplemented
the other industrial centers of the Empire.

No, her empire centered
around the production of wormholes, her area of expertise.  Over seventy
percent of the station was dedicated to generating the energy needed to make those
wormholes, using the rotational energy of the black hole it orbited around. 
The twenty-five million kilometer circumference station contained three million
of the enormous generating devices that wove a sheet of electrons around the
black hole and used that rotation as a giant dynamo.  Pentatons of crystal
matrix batteries, the most efficient way to store power outside of antimatter,
were stored here, soaking up energy for each creation event.  This machinery
was the reason the station existed.   It had taken over a hundred years to
build the structure and pack it with that machinery, something the doubters had
said was impossible the entire time it was being built.

And it’s mine to run, as
long as I coax the most wormholes I can out of the thing, and don’t break it in
the process
,
she thought.

One of the holos lit up,
the one showing a camera view from over the top of the black hole.  The
distortion at the center, outlined in a ring of light from the surrounding
stars bent around the event horizon, was the black hole.  The ribbon of the
station, glowing with a multitude of built in illuminators, seemed tiny,
fragile, almost invisible against the backdrop of space.  The ribbon sat a
little under four million kilometers out from the center of the hole.  The
event horizon was about a hundred and eighty kilometers out from the
singularity, and would have been invisible if not for the thick halo of light.

The inner side of the
ribbon lit up with a blue light as the generators started to produce their
electron beams.  At ten points on the ribbon the beams combined to create much
more massive lances of light that shone through space.  Electrons reached down
toward the event horizon at very near light speed, to a point five hundred
thousand kilometers above it where a smaller ring of supermetal alloy orbited
around the mass.  Electron beams linked, then bent as they were spun around in
the enormous electrical dynamo the system created.

For fifteen minutes the
dynamo spun, building up power that was stored in the crystal matrix batteries
until they were packed with energy.  At that point the power was shunted into
massive microwave projectors on the hull of the station that fired off their
energy to the pair of wormhole generators twelve light seconds out.  They pumped
all of the energy in the batteries, followed by a final spike from the
generator.

Lucille looked over at
another holo, this one showing the interior of one of the wormhole generating
satellites.  Within were eight great arms, each holding something invisible in
the magnetic field cups on their ends.  The area around the objects glowed as a
matter stream was fed into them, maintaining the mass that was slowly
evaporating.  Huge superconducting cables wrapped each of the arms, conducting
the fierce heat coming off the objects.  Micro-black holes, each massing
billions of tons, more than the rest of the satellite altogether.

As energy surged through
the chamber the arms moved closer together, electromagnetic fields rivalling
those of a world enfolding each arm, strengthening it.  The cups moved to the
edge of a twenty meter circle, just barely holding the charged black holes against
the gravitational force that wanted to pull them together.  They maintained
that range for a nanosecond, stressing the space between the holes, then pulled
apart, the arms straining at first to move them, the motion speeding up until
they reached a velocity of one meter per second.  The area in between the holes
rippled, then ripped open, the opening of a nascent wormhole forming.

Enormous graviton
projectors took the energy transmitting from the
Donut
and beamed them
as attractor particles, increasing the pull on the wormhole, holding it open as
the micro-black holes moved back into their holding areas.  Magnetic field
generators formed a donut shaped field just outside of the hole, moving it into
the wormhole opening.  The graviton generators powered back, letting the
wormhole start its collapse onto the negative matter now held in the magnetic
field.  Negative matter projected antigravity, and repelled itself, and it now
held the hole open as a small frame of supermetals was moved out to catch the wormhole
and hold the negative matter in another electromagnetic field.  And there they
had it, the opening of a new wormhole, framed and ready to go.