Exodus: Empires at War: Book 11: Day of Infamy (Exodus: Empires at War.) (28 page)

“They’re continuing in on
a maximum decel profile, sir,” said the Chief of Staff, stopping at Admiral
Mikal Kalashnikov’s station.

“That doesn’t make a lot
of sense,” said the Admiral as he studied the simulation data of the only known
wormhole bomb explosion, the one set off by the Empire among the Caca ships
around New Earth.  That ship had come through an almost stationary wormhole. 
The ship itself had only been moving at a couple of kilometers per second. 
And
they are bringing in a ship carrying a wormhole moving at a significant
fraction of light.  If they set the bomb off more than a light second from the
station, the effect will be negligible.  If they wait too long, the ship hits
the station, possibly breaches, and destroys the wormhole it’s carrying.  Or it
misses the station and goes in too close to the black hole, most of its blast
absorbed.  Maybe even into the black hole.
  Of course, no matter the range
of the blast, the momentum of the ship would carry some of the force into the
station, the shotgun effect.  But there would be spread, and it wouldn’t take
much to render the blast incapable of severing the ring.  Not that it would do
the poor spacers and civilians under that blast any good, but the supports
would survive, even the secondaries.

“They’re trying to give
themselves a margin of error,” the Admiral told his Chief of Staff.  “What will
be their estimated velocity as they enter the hundred thousand kilometer
range?”

“About point two light,”
said the Chief of Staff.  “Meaning they will hit the station in about one point
six six seconds from the time they reach that distance.  But they will need to
detonate within twenty thousand kilometers to insure the breach of ring
integrity.”

And if they transit the
other ship through at one hundred thousand kilometers, the blast will still be
developing by the time they reach that distance.  In fact, it will still be
building as they actually hit the ring.  Which will give Yu about a second to
make the catch.  And hopefully they will be on a predictable course at that
time.

“Okay.  Get this data to
Dr. Yu.  I think she might be able to make use of it in her own calculations.”

The station shook again
from multiple hits.   Kalashnikov pulled up the schematic of the station to see
where the hits were clustered, then breathed a sigh of relief.  All the hits
had been along a section taken up entirely by the huge electromagnetic
generators that made up the power feed of the wormhole generating system.  Each
unit was more massive than a battleship, and there were three million of them
across the station.  Some of the hits had taken out a generator each, striking
directly on the top of one of the units.  Others had taken out two, three, even
four in one case.  They could handle the loss of fewer than two score
generators, and the hits hadn’t been on an inhabited portion of the station.  Most
likely no one had died in that volley, and that was what mattered to the
Admiral.

*     *     *

“Thank you, Commodore,”
Lucille told the Chief of Staff, trying to smile and failing.  “We’ll
definitely be able to use this.”

The holo blanked, leaving
her alone with her thoughts once again.  She ran another simulation, then
pulled up a holo of the man in charge of getting the wormhole terminuses out of
the station.

“How are we coming on
those portals?”

“We’re about to launch
the outward hole,” came back the voice of the man in charge of that operation. 
The holo dilated to show the small ship hangar where the operation was taking
place.  The hundred meter wide hatch was open, the streaks of star trails,
caused by the rapid rotation of the station, the only thing in view.  The gate
was sitting up under the power of its grabber units in the center of that view,
the mirrored surface reflecting the rear of the hangar.  Several space suited
figures stood to the side, giving scale to the gate, which had to be twenty
meters in diameter.   The frame itself added another ten meters to a side, and
large grabber units projected from the rear.  Unseen on the holo, but known to
the Director, similar grabber units were also set on the front, giving the
frame the potential for a huge amount of acceleration.  That would give off
quite a graviton signature.  Hopefully, given all of the other signatures in
space at this time, as well as the enormous background radiation of the black
hole, it would go unnoticed.  And the frame was made of sensor absorbing
materials, while the wormhole itself would be completely invisible to any kind
of scan.

As she watched the gate
rushed out of the hangar.  It would accelerate like a missile out of the
station, killing the angle vector of rotation while boosting toward the enemy. 
With a thought she switched the com to the other end of the operation, where a
much smaller frame sat in a smaller hangar.  Ships didn’t normally leave the
station from the inner aspect, only small repair vessels, mainly remotely
controlled robotic craft.  Here the only view through the twenty meter wide
hatch was a distortion, ringed by a bright circular band.  The mind numbing
image of the central black hole, something that no rational mind could really
understand, despite the way their technology used it.

The space was suddenly
lit by a bright flash that went on and on.

“Why the hell is the
energy generating system on,” shouted Lucille.  The station used the rotational
energy of the black hole, and the charged plasma field around it, as a dynamo. 
The only reason they would need the system functioning at this time would be to
generate wormholes.  The entire defensive system of the station couldn’t eat
the energy of the crystal matrix batteries in a week.  And the flare of
trillions of tons of electrons, a web the wormhole they were launching would
have to transit, could play hell with the survival of the gate.

“We’re turning the system
off now.”  It took some seconds for the electron storm to die down, even after
the power feed was cut off to the millions of units.  Yu fumed as she waited
for the storm to subside.  Even second wasted was one they couldn’t afford. 
And this part of the operation was the one that required the most delicacy, the
most finesse, as it was maneuvered close to the black hole, time to be sucked
in below the event horizon at the same moment the other end of the passage was
encountering the enemy bomb ship.  To soon, and the wormhole could collapse
before it had grabbed ahold of the freighter.  Too late, and there might not be
enough suction to pull in the explosion.  If the ship exploded too close to the
station, and the connection had not been made, it wouldn’t matter that a narrow
swath of it flew into the outer end of the wormhole.

“Launching wormhole gate,
now,” came the voice of the supervisor of that part of the operation.  The gate
lifted on its grabbers and sped out of the hangar.  It would accelerate until
it reached the calculated transit speed, then decelerate until it was hanging
above the black hole at the limit of the ability of the frame and grabber units
to hold station without collapsing.

“We have control,” said
another voice, the Fleet pilot who would guide the gate to its final
destination.  Lucille almost wished one of her own people could guide the
portal, but she had to admit that none of them had the skill that the best
Fleet pilot still on the station had.  Though she had to wonder why the pilot,
a full Captain, was still aboard the station when so many others were in space
battling the enemy.

I hope he’s good enough
, she thought, following
both gates on a pair of holo plots hanging in the air before her.  Whatever the
case, it was out of her hands.

*     *     *

“What in all the Hells is
that?” blurted out the High Admiral as the bluish halo erupted on both sides of
the ribbon ahead.  “Some new weapon?”

“It seems to be some kind
of electrical discharge, my Lord,” said the Sensor Officer.  “None of it
directed at us.  One of the theories of using a rotating black hole as an
energy source is to use it as an electric dynamo.”

“And you think that is
what they are doing here?  And it’s no threat to us?”

“It could be a real
threat, my Lord, if not direct.  That is a lot of energy.  Only an order of
magnitude below what an average sized star puts out in the same time period. 
If they’re using it to power a weapon, it could be a fearsome device.”

And nothing we can do
about it now
,
thought the High Admiral.  They were now within less than two light minutes of
the station, still decelerating, and would be within that prime engagement
range for more than four minutes.  A laser with that much power would vaporize
one of his ships in an instant.

“What do you want us to
do, my Lord?” asked the Tactical Officer.

“There is nothing we can
do,” said the High Admiral, feeling a chill sweat running down his back. 
Strange
,
he thought. 
Even though I know I am soon to die, within the next couple of
minutes, possibly in several days, I still don’t like the idea.
  Ca’cadasan
males were supposed to be fearless, but the Admiral had found that they feared
well enough.  No intelligent creature sought its own death in normal times, and
most not even in the worst of circumstances.  And the thought of being
vaporized before his death had the meaning that a successful strike would bring
was terrifying.  “We move ahead with the attack.”

Chapter Twenty-One

We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard
to remain stupid. Benjamin Franklin

Sean sat back in his
seat, staring at the plot, while the ship shook slightly from the launch of
missiles.  The battle was going on around him, but that wasn’t what caught his
attention.  While this fight, a small part of the much larger battle going on
across a score of systems, was important, it paled in significance to the one
going on in home space.  And that battle was about to reach its climax.

Thank god the missile
launchers are still working
, thought the Monarch.  The thousand kilometer long missile
tube accelerators and their wormhole gates were in orbit around the central
black hole, far enough away from the
Donut
that even a wormhole bomb
wouldn’t destroy them.  There were hundreds of the arrays, each carrying from
two to four of the launch tubes.  They were a thousand kilometers long, true,
but less than a couple of hundred meters in width, long, thin needles in
space.  Just small sensor returns among thousands of large objects in orbit
around the black hole.  Not something to garner the attention of the Cacas at
the moment, while they had a larger target in view.  But if any survived the
strike, they might go hunting for other targets.  Or they might break away and
head out of the system, intent on still other targets.

The ship vibrated again,
this the signature resonance of the particle beam cannons fed from the
Donut
itself.  There were hundreds of those as well feeding the Fleet.  Kilometers
wide, each larger than the warship they fed, they accelerated protons or
antiprotons up to one hundredth thousandth below light speed, making them the
most devastating beam weapons of this war.  And if the station was destroyed,
they lost all of those particle beam accelerators as well.  Not as great a loss
as the missile tubes would be, but still not something to look forward to in
the middle of a major engagement.

“The Caca force is
breaking off the action,” stated the Emperor’s Chief of Staff.  The woman
smiled.  “Right into the teeth of the force they don’t know is there.”

We hope
, thought the Emperor. 
If the Cacas ran into the ambush unaware, this part of the battle would be
over, with losses to the enemy force more than double that of his own.  They
needed to win this battle decisively, a victory that would buy them time before
the next wave, instead of locking them into what could become a hopeless battle
of attrition.

He turned his attention
back to the unexpected battle, the main fight that might seal the fate of the
Empire.  The enemy was now little more than two minutes from contact.  The
station was firing every weapon that would bear, but only a third of the
weapons were still intact.  The remaining Caca fighters were still taking them
out here and there, and what was left was not enough to stop the force of
warships surrounding the bomb ship.

We should have thought if
this.  We should have emplaced heavier batteries on the structure, more forts
in orbit.  A couple of squadrons of battleships.  But we thought they couldn’t
strike us in this manner.  Only through infiltration, and we have that
covered.  But divisions of Marines and soldiers on the station don’t do us much
good against an attack from space.

He stared at the timer,
counting down to the moment of decision.  Two holos stood open in the air, one
showing a plot of the action, the other a live view of the station.  The first
indication he would have of disaster was if those two holos disappeared.  And
then the reports would come in, and he would know that the battle against the
Cacas had just gotten harder by an order of magnitude.

*     *     *

Here it comes
, thought Lucille as the
enemy ships came into final approach.  She fed the last calculations into the
system, shunting them to the two pilots controlling the wormhole gates.  The
Director wished she could be controlling both of them, and she hated to be so
out of control.  But she was not an expert pilot or ship handler, and the best
people for the job were on it, or at least she hoped.

The wormholes were not in
the perfect positions, but were close enough to work.  The outer gate started
expanding while the bomb ship was still thirty-one seconds away from the
station, twenty-nine from the wormhole.  The ship was traveling at point two
light, on a trajectory to meet the portal at a distance of one hundred and
twenty thousand kilometers.  If the bomb went off at that distance, it would
still cause damage to the station, mostly due to the shotgun effect.  But it
wasn’t the optimal distance.  The cover superbattleships were already beginning
to diverge from their covering duties, starting to pile on the acceleration as
they pulled away and started to change their vectors.

It took two seconds for
the gate to go from five hundred meters in diameter to over a kilometer,
centered right along the path of the freighter.  There was a danger if the ship
moved through the gate before it moved its own triggering ship through its
portal.  It would be the same wormhole through wormhole event, and there was no
telling if the wormhole destabilization would occur too soon to actually absorb
any of the explosion.  But the explosion would be far enough away from the
station that it probably wouldn’t destroy it, so that intercept was thought
best.

Unfortunately, or
fortunately, depending on the point of view, the wormhole equipped ship on the
other end of the Caca wormhole chose that time to transit.  It was a
miscalculation, and one that served the humans well.  The force a million one
gigaton warheads went off as the wormholes contacted, coverting both ships into
fast moving particles, the definition of pure energy.  They blasted out in a
globe from the center of the blast, those at the front going slightly faster,
the trailing particles a little slower.  They blasted apart the gate frame
holding the wormhole open, starting its collapse.  But not soon enough to keep
a good portion of the blast from entering the hole.

At the other end the
pilot dropped the portal he was controlling through the event horizon of the
black hole, causing the gravitational force at that point to manifest at the
other end of the tunnel.  It pulled over half the blast into the wormhole, to
disappear below the event horizon, forever harmless.  An instant later the
wormhole winked out of existence.

The remaining blast came
in on a fan, striking the edges of the circle that it cast on the station.  A
dozen Ca’cadasan warships, those on the fringes, disappeared in the blast,
converted to plasma, then blowing out in their own ball of antimatter breaching
plasma fire.  A trio of ships that had already passed the human gate were sent
into tumbling paths that took them into the station.  All exploded in
spectacular blasts that took out hundreds of cubic kilometers of the station
each.  Two blasted all the way through, and one took out a single main support
cable.

The rest of the warships
survived, something for which they had the human wormhole to thank, though they
were sure not to think so.  They were still changing vectors, trying to get
away, when some of the blast caught them.  Two more went into tumbles that took
them into the station, both pushing through at angles that penetrated several
kilometers before they flew back out into space.  Both were now on trajectories
that would take them close to the black hole, and neither had their propulsion
systems online.  Not that it would have done much good with the approaches they
were on.

One ship fell directly
into the black hole, coming apart from the tidal forces well before it entered
the event horizon as a collection ripped apart fragments.  The other ship was
somewhat more fortunate, if it could be called fortune.  It went into a close
orbit around the hole that spiraled inward, giving the crew time to recognize
their deaths before they came.  Tidal forces took all of them before the hole
ripped apart the vessel, sucking them beyond the knowledge of intelligent beings.

Seven ships made it past,
all piling on the acceleration, over five hundred gravities, trying to get
away.  Lucille breathed a sigh of relief as she watched them go on the tactical
plot.  Relief turned to sorrow as she pulled up the casualty figures on the
station.  Many of the strikes had occurred on inhabited sections, and though
many had been evacuated from the station, many more were still aboard.

“Get me the station
commander,” she said into the com, then waited for the connection.

“The station command
center is offline,” came back a voice over the circuit.  “Switching you to
axillary control.”

“Commodore Menendez
speaking.”

“This is Director Yu.  I
would like to speak with the Station Commander.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,”
replied the Commodore.  “The station command center was destroyed in the
attack.  I’m afraid the Admiral didn’t make it.”

“And you’re in charge,
Commodore?”

“For now, ma’am.  Until
we can get a more senior officer back aboard.”

Lucille blinked back her
tears.  She had not been particularly close to this Admiral, but he had been
the face of the military aboard the station.  A representative of all who had
died in this attack.  The station had survived, and it would be repaired, but
the lives lost could never be replaced.

“Have we driven them
off?” she finally asked after collecting her thoughts.

“We think so, ma’am. 
They are still accelerating away, so it looks like we have.  We’ll know if they
don’t change vectors within the next hour.”

Lucille nodded, then
exited the com with a thought.

“You need to eat
something, my dear,” said Jimmy, turning a worried glance her way.  “You’re
shaking.  I think you need a good shot of blood sugar.”

Lucille noticed that she
was feeling really weak, and she couldn’t remember the last time she had
eaten.  She didn’t feel like eating, not after what she had been through.  But
she needed to be at her best, especially with the work she had ahead of her
this very day.

Yu followed her Security
Chief out of the control room.  The halls outside were almost empty.  This area
of the station had not been hit, fortunately, since most of the strikes had
wreaked havoc on the areas that had been struck.  In some of those regions it
had been a total loss in people and machinery.

The pair moved out of the
way of a group of military techs moving cryo containers through the hall, the
two meter long by half a meter wide containers floating through the air on
their antigrav repellers.  The techs were moving quickly, and as they passed
down hall more came pushing additional units out of a hatch that led to one of
the gate rooms.  They were also in a hurry.  If they could get to those who
died without too much damage to their brains in time, they could recover them. 
If not, then those people would be lost forever.

“We didn’t see this
coming,” said Jimmy, nodding at the score of soldiers moving almost the same
number of cryo units.  “We didn’t have enough of those units aboard.  I doubt
anyone thought we would need that many.”

“And how many people will
meet a permanent end because we didn’t think of that?”

“Maybe not as many as you
would fear, Lucille,” said Jimmy, shrugging his shoulders while glancing
sideways into her face.  He turned his face forward, a grimace on his lips. 
“Large areas are gone, and most of the regions around them are filled with
rubble.  Probably three quarters of those seriously injured or mortally wounded
will not be reached in time.”

“That’s, awful.”

“It is.  It’s relatively
the same for battle between warships.  Except that the hits we took would have
obliterated any warship.”

Lucille thought about
that as she walked.  The
Donut
was not a warship, though she was afraid
after this attack it would more resemble a battle station or orbital fort.  The
only thing that had saved it had been the enormous size of the beast.

“I think you should get
some sleep after we get some food in you,” said Jimmy as they entered the
cafeteria.  It was empty of people, even the attendants had either evacuated
the station or gone to other duties during the attack.

“I don’t have time for
sleep,” said Lucille, walking up to the vending dispenser that served snacks
around the clock.  “I have to plan.  We need to get this station up and running
as fast as possible.  That’s the only way we’re going to beat those bastards.”

“Can we beat them?” asked
Jimmy, grabbing a sandwich from a dispenser, then ordering a coffee from
another.  “I mean, now that they also have wormholes?”

“If you went up against
an enemy with one weapon, and you had a hundred armed men, would you give that
foe a chance?”

“Not one in hell,” agreed
Jimmy, a slight smile playing on his face.  “I see your point.  Except they
have more than one weapon, even if they will never be able to match us in
wormholes.”

They sat at one of the
empty tables and started attacking their sandwiches.  Lucille felt ravenous,
her lack of food over the last day now making itself felt.  She thought about
what Jimmy had said.  The Cacas did outnumber them in ships, in bodies.  That
was a troubling thought.  And then she remembered that they still had this
station, which could still manufacture wormholes at a prodigious rate.  One she
doubted the Cacas would be able to match well into the future.  She looked over
at Jimmy, who had already finished his sandwich and was looking at the vending
area for something else.