Ure Infectus (Imperium Cicernus Book 4) (22 page)

The instant the
Alexander Hamilton
entered the
perimeter of his narrow firing
arc,
Hadden diverted
all power from the primary and secondary grids to Rail Gun Number Three and
fired his improvised mass driver. In a matter of seconds he sent eight thousand
kilograms of iron pellets slamming into the unaware battleship in rapid
succession, with enough force to shatter its shields and literally sheer the
vessel in two—which it did. The two halves spiraled briefly out of control and
then exploded in a flash of blue-white light—before Rail Gun Three went dead,
several of its coils having fused due to overload from the sustained energy
output.

But RG3’s loss was of little consequence since Hadden knew
the attacking fleet would log the weapon’s location and firing arc so it could
not be used against them again. And while he had five more rail guns in his
arsenal, the odds of even one more of them coming into play were incredibly
remote—he had been lucky to get that particular shot in when he had, especially
against such a high-value target.

He restored the primary and secondary grids to their full
power and unleashed another volley of long-range fire at the approaching
fleet’s optimal target—this time, a destroyer named the
Monitor
. He
opened fire with six of his ground batteries, and the
Monitor
was destroyed in a flash of nuclear fire—but five of
Hadden’s six batteries were destroyed before he could redirect them toward new
targets.

The battle continued for several minutes as, one by one,
Hadden’s surface-based artillery was snuffed out by the approaching fleet. The
Stephen
Hawking
became separated from its formation after suffering major drive
failure due to a focused barrage of a nearby squadron. Not long after it had
been separated from its allied ships, the Virgin Fleet snuffed the
Hawking
out of existence with a torrent of well-coordinated fire, just as the
Max
Born
likewise succumbed to a direct hit on its power plant from the Battlecruiser
C.C. Pinckney
’s long guns.

“I would be remiss if I did not order you all to abandon the
station,” Hadden said, his voice piped through the base’s intercom system. “You
have fought bravely, but there is no need for all of us to die here.”

Admiral Berggren stood up from his post at the bank
coordinating the free assets of H.E. One and looked Hadden sternly in the eye,
“Permission to speak freely, Director?”

“Of course, Admiral,” Hadden replied through the intercom.

Berggren grabbed a nearby microphone and, after piping into
the same intercom system, said, “I’ll be fucked bloody if I turn my back on the
only fight I’ve ever been in that actually meant anything—I’m taking as many of
those bastards with me as I can!”

There was a resounding chorus of cheers which quickly became
‘fucked bloody’ repeated over and over. Though Hadden disapproved of his senior
Commander’s chosen liberty of speech, he could not help but feel a rare moment
of connection with the people who had remained with him at H.E. One.

“Very well,” Hadden acquiesced as he unleashed another,
less-coordinated, volley of fire from his shorter-ranged plasma cannons. He had
reconfigured them to provide for maximum range while sacrificing a significant
portion of firepower, but he knew that if he did not at least try to bring them
into the fight the Virgin fleet would simply pulverize anything which even
remotely appeared man-made on the moon’s surface.

He was pleasantly surprised when the volley struck a
corvette which had apparently believed itself outside of the range of such
weaponry. Before the enemy vessel could recover, the
Albert Einstein
poured everything its plants could generate into the vessel and destroyed the
Virgin corvette’s drive systems. The enemy corvette went into a bow-over-stern
tumble which saw a spray of shrapnel fly off the ruined vessel’s aft section
before it exploded. A roughly spherical shower of debris expanded from the
point of its death, until that cloud was no longer recognizable as once
belonging to a ship.

Not long after that corvette had been destroyed, however,
the
Albert Einstein
and
Isaac Newton
each came under more fire
than they could absorb. Within seconds of each other, the mightiest of the
vessels which had fought in H.E. One’s defense were destroyed. And in that
moment, the mood in the Command Center turned from one of barely-controlled
savagery to one of tacit resignation that their turn had come and gone. They
all knew that it would only be a matter of time now that their most powerful
mobile assets had been destroyed.

Nearly all of his plasma cannons were destroyed just a few
seconds later, and Hadden knew that the bulk of whatever damage they had hoped
to cause had already been done. He continued to fire whatever batteries he was
able until he quite literally was defenseless. Admiral Berggren’s efforts with
the embedded plasma cannons, while initially effective, had become markedly
less so when the remaining vessels maneuvered to follow the same basic paths as
those vessels which had been struck had followed.

Naturally, Admiral Berggren had anticipated this and had
therefore been circumspect in which weapons he had fired and in what sequence
they had been activated, but his adversaries were just as capable as he was. It
was only half an hour before the moon had been functionally surrounded, and the
fleet began scouring its surface with deliberate, patient strikes which destroyed
what remained of Hadden’s defense grid in a methodical ‘scraping’ of the moon’s
surface.

Hadden remained alert throughout, however, and even managed
to land a few crippling blows with well-hidden batteries during the VSF’s
scouring of the moon-base’s surface, but no more of the enemy vessels were
destroyed by his efforts.

“Admiral Berggren,” Hadden called out when the last of his
weaponry had gone offline, “
give
me the count, if you
please.”

“Yes, Director,” Berggren replied curtly, clearly fighting to
keep his voice steady. Hadden saw that the man’s eyes were filled with tears as
the weight of reality came crashing down on him. The recently-retired Rear
Admiral—who had served with distinction and honor for thirty six years in the
Virgin System Defense Force before retiring in protest of recent political
shifts—called up the tally on his own monitor and mirrored it on each screen in
H.E. One’s labyrinthian compound. “Last count,” the Admiral said, his voice
threaded with unyielding resolve once again, “thirty six enemy warships entered
H.E. One’s zone of control; of those thirty six, only fourteen remain.”

The pride in his voice was something Hadden actually
shared—and apparently the rest of the Command Center’s personnel did as well,
as they erupted into a chorus of ‘fucked bloody’ for several minutes as the
tally cycled across their view screens.

“Well done, Admiral,” Hadden congratulated over the
intercom, “indeed, well done to you all. We have done something remarkable this
day and we must now ensure that our defiance cannot be ignored by those who
would cover up this atrocity. I take great pride in standing…or, rather,
sitting,” he corrected sheepishly, having been caught up in the moment, “with
you here today.”

Another chorus of mixed cheers and laughter went up, and
this time Admiral Berggren joined them as little more than a common soldier. If
Stephen R. Hadden had been physically able to do so, he would have done
likewise but using his speakers to usurp the natural mood seemed disrespectful.
He would not take this moment away from them.

And so it was with more than a sliver of regret that he set
the massive power generators buried deep within the moon-base’s rocky interior
to an irreversible overload cycle while simultaneously accessing the highest-security
protocols in the base’s computer. Those protocols would set the station’s
entire store of delicately-contained antimatter—which, since Hadden Enterprises
was the most powerful corporation in the Sector, was more than any other
location this side of the now-collapsed wormhole could boast to possess—free to
annihilate with the nearby matter in a carefully-calculated chain reaction that
would leave Hadden’s mark on the Virgin System and, he hoped, the entire
Sector.

The truth, of which Hadden had been convinced for over a
century, was that President Han-Ramil Blanco and those who had gone before him
were nothing but a puppet. Whether he was aware of that fact was irrelevant,
because Hadden had already taken aim at the real architect, or architects, guiding
the Chimera Sector’s fate. While
Blanco’s blatant assault on the rights and privileges afforded the citizens of
the Virgin System had succeeded in destroying Hadden Enterprise’s base of
power, Direction Stephen Hadden knew that, as with any competitive game of
chess, difficult sacrifices needed to be made.

Blanco, the short-sighted fool that he was, believe he had
pinned Hadden’s most crucial piece and was about to destroy his organization
root and branch. But Stephen R. Hadden had known this day would come for a
hundred years…and he knew that the only piece in the game which truly mattered
would remain in play long after the Director of Hadden Enterprises was gone.

Just as the cheers and boisterous mood in the Command Center
reached its crescendo, Hadden flipped the proverbial switch and said,
“Check…your move.”

Several hours passed as Masozi and Jericho hurtled toward
Chambliss, and the tactical feed of the tiny pod kept track of the events at
H.E. One throughout the epic battle which unfolded between the moon base and
the VSDF fleet. As she watched the battle rage, and counted twenty distinct
flares which could have only been created by the destruction of warships,
Masozi felt her spine stiffen.

She had distanced herself from her family precisely because
she had feared to someday be associated with an event like the one she was
watching, and now that she was viewing a tragedy of this kind up close—and from
a vantage point she had never thought possible—Masozi felt something change
deep within her.

Just when it seemed that H.E. One would surrender, the
inexplicable occurred and Masozi shrieked in horror as the entire station was
enveloped in a flash of orange and white light, which quickly saw the rocky
moon’s body fly apart in a shower of molten rock.

The explosion seemed almost sluggish from their vantage
point, but Masozi knew that any explosion capable of destroying a body the size
of that moon would have been powerful beyond her limited ability to comprehend.
The blast wave of molten moon fragments was completely asymmetrical and, as she
looked at it with tear-brimmed eyes, actually looked like a giant weapon’s
discharge—a weapon aimed directly at the beautiful, iconic rings of Chambliss.

As she watched the aftermath, the tactical display went
dead. The screen through which she and Jericho had watched the battle unfold
had simply been relaying information from H.E. One’s own systems, most of which
no longer existed as anything but a rapidly expanding cloud of their
constituent atoms.

Then she saw the nearby section of Chambliss’ rings interact
with the wave of molten debris, which caused a chain reaction among the icy
particles that made up the massive, beautiful rings. It was not a huge change,
but even with her naked eye she could see the effect the explosion had caused
as it began to clear out a roughly ovular region of the ring’s surface.

“They can’t sweep that under the rug,” Jericho said quietly,
and she looked over to see his fists clenched tightly at his sides before he
deliberately reached up and returned the screen to a view of the approaching
gas giant.

For the first time since Masozi had met Jericho she
emotionally connected with him in that moment, and they shared the rest of
their journey toward the gas giant’s atmospheric envelope in relative silence.

Masozi awoke with a start as the image of H.E. One’s
destruction interrupted her surprisingly tranquil dreams, and she looked over
to see that Jericho was cycling through the various data feeds the tiny pod’s
systems provided.

“I’m no good with this crap,” he grumbled as he cycled
through a seemingly endless chain of menus in apparent futility. Masozi was
then vaguely aware of the sensation of gravity pulling her forward against the
restraints in her harness. It was barely enough to notice, but it was there.

“I’ll do it,” she said after rubbing her eyes and rolling
her shoulders, which was as much stretching as was possible in the cramped
compartment. Jericho gestured in disgust toward the screen and Masozi began to
flip through the various data feeds. “What were you looking for?”

“The external thermometer,” he replied irritably, and as
Masozi flipped through the menus she came across a feed which showed that the
egg-shaped craft had entered the outer region of Chambliss’ atmosphere.
“Everybody at H.E. One was trained to operate the standard escape pods and this
thing’s been fitted with the same interface, but…”

“You’re no good with ‘this crap’,” Masozi concluded after
fighting down her rising nerves.

Jericho nodded, “Exactly.”

“Well,” she said as she flipped through the menus before
finding the proper subset of commands, “I think it’s….here”

The thermal gauge expanded to fill nearly a third of the
screen, and it was represented by a vertical bar which was still very near the
bottom. The color of the legend beside the bar indicated that once the external
temperature exceeded what looked to be the 80% mark, the craft would have gone
beyond its operating thresholds and permanent damage would occur.

Thankfully, the bar was barely at five percent…but even as
she watched, it ticked up to six. Then it passed seven percent, and more
quickly even than the previous increases it shot almost completely past eight
and went to nine.

“That doesn’t look good,” she said warily.

“No…it doesn’t,” Jericho agreed as the craft wobbled slightly
and the sensation of falling forward against the restraints intensified enough
that Masozi realized they were engaged in an atmospheric braking sequence of
some kind.

Sure enough, she cycled through the craft’s menus until
coming to the vessel’s relative velocity indicator which had already been set
against Chambliss’ own speed and vector through the system. The number was
slowly, but steadily, decreasing from a mind-blowing four thousand five hundred
meters per second.

“I’m not sure that was a good idea,” Jericho said evenly,
and Masozi was forced to concur as she struggled to grasp their current
velocity—which would have allowed her to orbit Virgin at its equator in less
than two and a half hours! She reached up to deactivate the velocity indicator
but Jericho gently grabbed her wrist and shook his head, “But there’s no going
back now.”

Nodding her agreement, she settled back into her form-fitted
seat and only then did she realize that it
had
been form-fitted
perfectly to her body’s dimensions. She looked over at Jericho’s seat and found
the same to be true for him.

“Hadden knew Blanco’s fleet was coming before he let on,”
Jericho explained. “That physical you were so fond of probably let his people
put the finishing touches on this thing’s launch profile—as well as our
clothing,” he added with a pointed look at her bodyglove.

She nodded slowly as she realized that the bodyglove was
almost certainly a highly-advanced flight suit of some kind. It hugged her
soft, fleshy parts in a flattering manner precisely because it was preventing
excessive blood pooling in those areas, and she shook her head in a mixture of
wonderment and irritation.

“Don’t be upset,” Jericho said in a conciliatory tone, “you
only get one chance at a first time—don’t begrudge the circumstances which
bring it to pass.”

The gee forces continued to grow until the craft wobbled
again, and Masozi looked down to see their craft’s external temperature had
reached twenty three percent, and their deceleration was still sluggishly
decreasing their speed as it ticked just below forty four hundred meters per
second.

The craft began to wobble with alarming consistency, and
before Masozi could ask what was happening the entire vehicle spun violently a
hundred and eighty degrees and continued to wobble side to side for several
seconds before its movements calmed and eventually abated. When they did so,
the deceleration forces were sucking Masozi and Jericho deeper into their seats
than against the restraints which kept them securely in place.

“Now the real fun begins,” Jericho said grimly, and Masozi
felt the urge to grab a hold of something but resisted as she clenched her
fingers into tight fists while
the gee
forces
increased dramatically. “The whole deceleration process should take about six
minutes if we were launched with the correct course and speed, after which the
attitude control systems will keep us in a more or less stationary position
within the
planet’s
atmospheric enveloped.”

“And what happens then?” Masozi asked heavily as apparent
gravity met, and then exceeded, those she had come to think of as ‘normal’ on
Virgin.

“Either someone comes along to pick us up,” Jericho said
conversationally, “or the pod runs out of station-keeping fuel and we discover
just how much pressure this little egg can take before cracking.”

In no way comforted by his reply, Masozi closed her eyes as
the g-forces steadily increased until they were a significant fraction of those
they had experienced during their launch from H.E. One.

Several minutes passed, during which time Masozi fought to
keep her breathing calm and controlled while keeping her eyes closed. She was
able to rationalize several aspects of the craft’s flight—including the
incredible accelerations out of the rail gun, or coil gun, or maglev, or whatever
it had been—but on the whole, the experience was simply more than she could
wrap her brain around. She had never taken much interest in astrophysics but,
as their craft continued to shed its velocity by interacting with Chambliss’
outer atmosphere, she dearly wished she had paid more attention during Mrs.
Anderson’s patient lectures on the subject in school.

“Last jolt,” she heard Jericho say, and this time she
grabbed the harness criss-crossing her torso as she sought something to hold
onto. A few seconds later, some sort of massive explosion occurred near the
craft’s rear and her body was flung violently sideways as the ship lurched
sideways while
the gee
forces more than doubled. Her
vision blacked out, and Masozi was vaguely aware of waking up after what she
assumed had been several seconds.

When her senses returned she noted that the craft seemed to
have stabilized with what felt like a crushing amount of gravity that was very
nearly that of their deceleration’s peak.

“Are you all right?” Jericho asked as he cycled through the
craft’s screens in apparent futility. “I could use some help with the vid
feeds.”

Masozi blinked her eyes hard for several seconds before
nodding and assuming the task of interfacing with the craft’s computer. “I am,”
she replied hoarsely as she found the external video feed of their craft’s
various cameras. “How long do we have?” she asked as she called up the various
feeds and set them to run parallel on the screen.

“You can do the math better than I can, Investigator,” he
replied as he gestured to the craft’s fuel indicator—which was now reading as
only forty percent full. “But we burned up most of our fuel settling into a
relatively stable trajectory to maximize our remaining angular momentum, and
the rest is just going to fight against the planet’s gravity until it’s gone…my
guess is we’re looking at about eight minutes before we essentially go into
freefall.”

“That’s an awfully narrow window,” Masozi said just before a
large, green light began to flash above the console. “What is that?”

“That,” Jericho said with more than a hint of relief, “would
be our ride.”

The light continued to flash, increasing the speed at which
it did so until it was nearly solid—a sequence which took nearly two
minutes—after which time an alarm began to beep urgently.

“There might be a—
“ Jericho
began,
but was interrupted when the craft lurched violently, snapping Masozi’s head to
the left hard enough to crack her neck. The g-forces intensified once again and
the craft assumed a new trajectory. “Little bump,” Jericho finished lamely.

Twenty minutes later, the hatch to their tiny craft popped
open and an insectoid alien’s visage greeted Masozi. It was wearing a similar
uniform to the ones the rest of the H.E. employees had worn, with a white base
and blue trim, and it gestured with an appendage which ended in a trio of long,
narrow pincer-like ‘digits.’ As Masozi was nearest the hatch, she exited first
and descended a short set of moveable stairs to find
herself
inside a small shuttle bay of some kind.

Jericho followed behind her, and Masozi looked around to see
a handful of people—three of which were distinctly different aliens, including
the insectoid which had opened the craft’s hatch from the outside.

“Jericho,” she heard a vaguely familiar man’s voice say,
“right on time. We’ll have to skip the formalities.”

Jericho stood to his full height and Masozi turned to see
the source of the voice. She quickly recognized him as the same man who had
‘captured’ them beneath the Aegis Spaceport, and he was wearing a uniform with
thicker bands of blue trim than the rest of the crew, in addition to a small
series of what looked to be rank insignia over his chest.

“Can we outrun them?” Jericho asked as he moved to join the
other man, who had already begun to move toward the bay’s primary exit.

Masozi turned to see a large, sleek-looking craft seemingly
attached to their egg-shaped pod, and the bay was barely large enough to
accommodate the impressive looking vehicle. Then she realized that it wasn’t
exactly attached to the pod, but it had used a set of grappling
appendages—which had clearly been designed for their current purpose—that had
secured the egg pod to the nose of the craft. She saw a quartet of letters
along the sleek-looking craft’s main body which were ‘NdGT.’

But she didn’t want to be left behind, so she turned and
quickened pace to keep up with the others and heard the H.E. officer reply,
“Yes, but I’ve got two H.E. ships in the area that haven’t yet reached their
Phase Thresholds. If I bug out now the VSDF ship sent to pursue them will
acquire firing solutions before they can escape.”

Jericho looked like he wanted to argue, but instead he said,
“You’ve got your orders just like I do, Captain.”

“Correct,” the other man said with a curt nod as they
entered a lift—which was far smaller than the ones on H.E. One, and barely fit
the three of them without forcing bodily contact. “We’re to destroy the
pursuing ship before assuming a supporting role to your mission.”

“Is there any way we can assist?” Jericho asked.

“Just try to stay out of the way,” the Captain replied
before adding matter-of-factly, “this shouldn’t take long.”