Empire Ebook Full (19 page)

“Are you blaming me?”

“No, they fired on us. They had it coming. But it was awful to watch. I feel a bit
sick, because they think the Worms did it on their own. We tricked them, and killed
them without suffering a loss.”

Miklos looked surprised. “If we had lost a few ships, I wouldn’t be feeling any better.”

Sandra shook her head. “I don’t know. I suppose you’re right. It’s just not the same,
watching humans die under alien fire. I don’t think we’ve ever caused something like
that to happen before—at least not on purpose.”

“What your conscience is objecting too, I think,” Miklos said, “is the trickery. Warfare
is full of unfair moments. Stand-up fights are rare. Usually, one side or the other
is out-classed or out-maneuvered and butchered.”

“Well, I don’t like it. Not when they’re our people.”

“Agreed,” I said, joining the conversation, “but the question now is what we’re going
to do next. Do we turn back as they asked, or do we press forward and see what’s waiting
for us in the next system? After Alpha Centauri, it’s only one short jump to the Solar
System.”

“I say press onward,” Miklos said. “We can slow down and send a scout through to the
other side, someone to find out what’s going on out there. We don’t want to run into
a massive minefield.”

I nodded thoughtfully. “I have a slightly different strategy,” I said. “We’ll press
ahead at full speed, while asking the Worms what’s on the other side. With luck, we
can talk them into scouting for us. I want to keep moving. We can’t let the Earth
ships limp all the way home. They’ll call up the fleet to form against us.”

Miklos’ eyes grew wide. “Are you talking about going
all
the way? All the way back to Earth?”

I shrugged. “If we don’t run into anything that can stop us, why not?”

We managed to get the Worms to tell us there were no traps ahead, and we assumed that
meant no mines existed. More detailed intel was harder to get out of them. It took
a lot of back-forth communications with the Worms just to get them to understand what
I wanted. At first, they simply reported that there were “a lot” of ships on the other
side.

Worms apparently didn’t deal well with precise numbers. After about seven units of
anything, they moved to a symbol that meant “a lot”. This symbol depicted an egg chamber
dotted with Worm infants. Apparently, this could mean anything from eight up to several
hundred. After that, they had a bigger number concept that meant, roughly, “a
whole
lot”. This symbol was a pictograph of the stars in the sky. Generally, this was thought
to indicate hundreds or thousands of individual objects. The only larger denomination
was an image of an endless beach, representing countless grains of sand. This number
indicated hundreds of thousands, millions, or even an infinity of items.

After we’d sorted this out, we repeatedly received the answer that “a lot” of Earth
forces were in the next system. I found this frustratingly vague. As I didn’t even
know how old the intel was, it was almost useless. All we knew for sure is that there
were more than seven Earth ships in the Alpha Centauri system.

Working with Marvin for another hour or two, I finally got the Worms to agree to scout
the other side of the ring. I was eager for fresh information. They sent through a
startling force of fifty ships. Apparently, they liked to scout in force. The ships
flitted into the ring and vanished. We all watched the screens, waiting for their
return. I think most of my staff was barely breathing.

An hour passed before Sandra declared the Worm scouts dead. “There simply isn’t any
reason for anyone to take so long to scout a neighboring system. All they had to do
was fly in there, take a look around, and fly back out. They weren’t moving very fast.
They could have managed the whole thing in ten minutes. We must assume they have all
been destroyed.”

“You could be right,” Miklos said. “In which case, we should slow down as fast as
possible. We don’t want to make the mistake of barreling into the Alpha Centauri system
after our duped scouts and suffer the same fate they did.”

I glowered, rejecting any suggestion we should retreat, or slow our advance. “The
intel from the Worms is so vague it’s useless. We’ll keep advancing. How long do we
have until we have to start decelerating in order to halt before going through the
ring?”

“We’re just about at the point of no return,” Miklos said. “You must decide now, or
we’ll have to shoot past the ring and reverse course to return to it—either that,
or rush right in without knowing what’s in front of us. There could be mines, sir.
Some kind of defensive system…it would explain the disappearance of the Worm ships.”

“We could fire missiles ahead to annihilate any minefield,” I said, gritting my teeth.
“but if we shoot blindly we might well take out the last surviving Worm ships. I’m
not going to have any blue-on-blue. We’re going to have to decelerate and tiptoe through
the Alpha Centauri ring.”

Everyone looked visibly relieved at my decision. Everyone but me, that was. I didn’t
like slowing down, losing my momentum. In space battles, it was critical to keep moving
forward. I’d won a number of battles that way in the past against superior forces.
I didn’t want to lose the initiative now, but I couldn’t see what else to do. The
enemy was a big question mark and I couldn’t take the risk.

We’d almost reached the ring when a single Worm ship nosed out of it to greet us.
It was moving slowly, almost drifting.

“Let’s make contact with that ship,” I snapped. “Marvin, open a channel and translate,
please.”

“Channel open.”

Worm pictographs began flashing on my screen. I frowned at them uncertainly. I didn’t
know all the Worm symbols, far from it. But these seemed easy to identify. There was
the symbol for “a lot” followed by the symbol for friendship.

“What the hell does that mean? Do they love us a bunch?”

“No sir,” Marvin said. “Worm messages are similar in nature to insect communications.
They relate information that is helpful to the entire nest. For example, a terran
honeybee might use pheromones and bodily movements to indicate there is an excellent
batch of ripe pollen in an indicated direction. Termite and ant colonies, on the other
hand—”

“Cut the crap, Marvin. What are they saying?”

“The message indicates there is a large group of friends nearby. The meaning is always
subject to context and interpretation, of course. In this instance, that message doesn’t
make much sense.”

“Sure it does,” Miklos said. “The implication is clear, Colonel. There is a large
Earth fleet in Alpha Centauri.”

“Then why are they calling them friendly?”

“Maybe they have confused things, calling all Earth ships friendly because we’re from
the same homeworld. Or perhaps Crow’s ships have used diplomatic communications, as
we have, and convinced them they’re friendly.”

No one was happy with these ideas. My staff babbled for a few minutes. Meanwhile,
we were flying closer to the ring every second. It was hard to remain calm while approaching
a dramatic transition point into the unknown. We were flying blind. It made the skin
on my neck tingle with unease.

“Slow down to a crawl,” I ordered. “We’ll poke our noses on the other side and see
what’s going on.”

It took another full hour to reach the ring. Under us, the engines trembled and shuddered,
applying tremendous thrust in order to reduce our speed. To increase efficiency, we
turned our ships around and directed their exhaust ports toward the ring. We decelerated
hard, feeling the G-forces in our bones. A plume of exhaust plasma enshrouded each
of my ships in a glowing fireball.

In the end, we couldn’t get our speed down to zero. We fell through the ring, flying
backwards and thrusting at full power to slow down. I didn’t know what we’d find on
the far side, but I knew that flying into a battle ass-first wasn’t the best way to
do it.

-16-

In the final moments before we hit the ring, I ordered the fleet to come about and
direct their weapons systems forward. Every pilot breathed a sigh of relief.

“Come about and prep everything you have to fire. We’re barely moving, but we don’t
know what we’ll meet up with when we arrive.”

As we took the plunge, gritting our teeth and praying, we felt the tiny familiar transitional
shudder. It was such a small sensation for having traveled a hundred light years.

“Switch all sensors into full-active mode,” I ordered. “We aren’t sneaking in, and
I’m tired of not knowing what’s going on.”

The sensor officer worked his board feverishly. Quite often in space combat, we ran
with our detection equipment in passive mode. The problem with active detection systems
is that they gave the enemy almost as much information about you as you were able
to gather about them. Worse, it gave the enemy that information in approximately half
the time it took for you to gather your tidbits of data. This was due to the vast
distances involved.

The speed of light barely seemed adequate when crossing a star system. A radar blip,
for example, might take several hours to reach across space, find an enemy ship and
return with an echo. Unfortunately, it took the echoing blip just as long to travel
back through space to the ship that had sent the pulse in the first place. In the
meantime, the enemy had recorded the blip, traced it back to its source, and knew
who sent it. At that point they could fire upon the pinging ship and when your radar
bounced back to you, it could come with a nasty surprise in its wake.

Passive sensors such as optical clusters were therefore superior in timing and stealth.
Unfortunately, they didn’t give you as clear a picture. You were less likely to find
things that didn’t want to be noticed, things that suppressed their energy outputs
and ran coldly and quietly in space. Because of this, I ordered the pinging machines
turned on and turned up.

We flew through the ring in a rush. I put my own ship in the lead, as we had plenty
of defensive lasers. If we were charging into mines or missiles, the cruiser with
her numerous small guns could shoot them down before my stubby little gunships plowed
into them.

Everyone tensed up, but there were no klaxons or shocking explosions. So far, so good.

“Incoming data sir, the holotank should update any second now,” Miklos said.

The brainboxes in charge of the display systems chewed on the incoming mountain of
data from the moment we appeared in the tri-star system. At first, it put up a model
of the system from memory as a time-saver, and to provide a point of reference for
hard details it managed to detect. This amounted to the three suns and various known
scraps of debris that floated in predictable orbits around the system. The two central
stars were similar in composition to Sol. The dimmer third star, Proxima Centauri,
was a tiny red dwarf in a far-flung orbit. Taken as a whole, there really wasn’t much
else to see in the Alpha Centauri system.

Today was an exceptional day, however. Contacts began swimming into existence as we
watched with growing alarm. There were three groups of them, three distinct flocks
of objects.

“Are they asteroids?” Sandra asked hopefully.

Miklos shook his head, adjusting the holotank to zoom in on the nearest cluster. “Colonel,
by count and individual size alone, I think the nearest grouping is the Worm fleet.”

I nodded. There wasn’t any argument from the rest of the staff. Even with incomplete
data, it had to be the Worms. They were even swinging around and shuffling formation
as we watched, which was classic Worm behavior.

“Okay, we’ve found the Worm fleet, and the good news is they haven’t been annihilated
as we thought they might be. They seem to be pursuing the smallest group of ships
in the region toward the far ring—the one that leads to the Solar System. I would
guess that smaller group is made up of Imperial Earth ships. Anyone want to argue
that?”

No one did. Sandra was quick to point to the largest mass of ships, however. “What
about these? The Earth ships are running right toward them. They have to be more Earth
ships. Kyle, there are hundreds of them. We don’t stand a chance.”

As we weren’t under immediate threat, I removed my helmet and gauntlet, then gave
my face a good scratching. Sweating in a battlesuit and breathing recycled air for
hours wasn’t glamorous. Around me, others took the moment to do the same. We’d been
tense and ready for battle for a long time now.

“We have fifty ships. The Worms have about a hundred. Combined, if the Earth ships
all turn on us—you’re right. They will outnumber us probably four to one. But let’s
get all the data in before we do anything rash.”

“Rash?” Miklos asked. “Like turn tail and run?”

I gave him a displeased glance.

“Sorry sir,” he said. He quickly went back to his controls and fiddled with the focus,
trying to get details on the third group of ships.

“Let’s hear your analysis, Captain,” I asked him. “What are we missing?”

“Well, first of all, the Imperial ships have tripled in number. Only two cruisers
escaped the Worm ships back in the Helios system. Now, there seems to be six of them.
They must have had four ships on our side of the ring and four ships on the far side.
A garrison force, it would seem. The Worms destroyed two, but now there are a total
of six. Still not enough to defeat the Worms, however.”