Exodus: Empires at War: Book 11: Day of Infamy (Exodus: Empires at War.) (14 page)

When that wave was done
the freighter pivoted in space and launched the first of the wings toward the
rings of gates.  Each group was almost forty-four hundred craft, each targeted
on one ring.  These moved out of the gate at point one five light, ignoring the
momentum of the freighter moving in the other direction.  There was no
expectation that they would fight their way through the defenses to take out
the entire ring, but any gate they could destroy would help the overall
strategic situation for the Ca’cadasan Empire.

As soon as that first
gate ring attack wave was released the freighter pivoted once more, releasing
another twenty-two thousand attack platforms toward the
Donut
.  In all
it would launch over a hundred thousand attack ships and fighters at the huge
station, and twenty-two thousand toward the ring forts.  Even those numbers
weren’t enough to win a sustained battle, but they didn’t need to.  They needed
to strike, to put as many powerful weapons into targets as possible.  Enough
weapons in the right place and the Ca’cadasan Empire would win a battle and a
war.

*     *     *

“Talk to me, Admiral,”
said Lucille Yu into the com over the sounding klaxons.

“We have an incoming
attack wave of fighter class craft heading at us,” said Admiral Mikal
Kalashnikov, looking out of the holo.  “Five thousand so far, with more
appearing on the plot every ten seconds.”

“Where the hell are they
coming from?” asked Yu, a shiver of fear running up her spine.  She had thought
that something was going to happen, but this was the last thing she had in
mind.

“We were tracking this
tramp freighter on approach to the station at one light hour distance.  We
contacted them by grav pulse and demanded identification.  When they couldn’t
give us a satisfactory response my duty officer vectored a destroyer toward
their location.  Moments later they started launching.”

“Can you stop them?”
asked Lucille, the only thing she really wanted to know.

“We should be able to,”
said the Admiral, doubt on his face.  “It’s a suicide mission.  It has to be. 
Bu then again, they can’t expect to launch an attack this deep into this
gravity well and get out.  Which means they will be harder to stop.”

Lucille pulled up the
tactical plot on the wall of her office, watching as more icons appeared by the
freighter, and icons started to appear from the
Donut
and the forts that
guarded her.  She didn’t see what a freighter full of fighters was going to be
able to do against all the firepower the Empire had in the system.  She watched
as the counter got up to ten thousand fighters, wondering if a freighter could
really carry that many.  She quickly looked up some information on the
database, checking at the carrying capacity of a ten million ton fleet carrier,
a larger ship than the freighter.  She cursed under her breath as she saw that
the largest of the carriers could carry a little more than two hundred
fighters, and that by cramming more into the hangars than they were built for. 
And almost fifty times that number had already come through.

Could they have
wormholes?
she thought in alarm.  That had been the greatest fear that she and her
production teams had had since news came that the Cacas had captured scientists
from New Moscow.  The creation of wormholes wasn’t a great secret among the humans
people.  It just required industrial resources and a great power source.  The
Donut
was their power source, which enabled them to make up to thirty wormholes a
day.  But it had taken them over a century to construct the huge station, and
there were other industrial concerns that required tremendous power generating
facilities.  Such as supermetal manufacturing planets.

“Admiral,” said Lucille,
linking back into the com with the Station Commander.  “I think you’re going to
need to target that freighter as soon as possible.”

“What’s your thinking,
Director?” asked Kalashnikov.

“I think they have a
wormhole on that freighter.  And as long as it’s active, they can keep pumping
their resources out into the system.”

*     *     *

Jennifer was enjoying the
unit of Highlanders that was marching in front of the reviewing stand, high
stepping it as they raised their rifles in salute, the bagpipers and drum major
leading the way.  Suddenly sirens sounded over the city, drowning out the pipes
and all the other music sources along the parade route.

“What’s going on?” asked
the Empress of her Chief of Detail, looking down at her twins, who were still
both asleep, though anything but peaceful.  Both infants were jerking in their
carriers, their eyes moving back and forth rapidly under the lids   They were
both having dreams, from their expressions more like nightmares.

“We’re getting a report
that the Central Docks are under attack,” said the Chief of Detail, a shocked
expression on his face.

“From who?”

“We don’t know yet, but
they have launched on our ships.”  The Secret Service Agent looked out with
unfocused eyes for a moment, obviously in link.  “We need to get you and the
heirs to safety.”

“Are they coming here?”

As soon as the words left
her mouth both children opened their eyes, not in the normal manner of infants
having difficulty coming into the world of the awake, but from tightly closed
to as wide open as they could get in an instant.  Both babies were soon
screaming at the top of their lungs, their fear filled eyes moving back and
forth, then locking upwards into the sky.

Did they have a prophetic
dream?
thought the Empress, staring down at her children.  She had studied the history
of the phenomenon, and it had never before been seen in children this young. 
Then again, how would anyone know if they had or not.  Obviously, whatever they
had dreamed was scaring the hell out of both Augustine and Glen, and there was
an attack going on in the system.  It seemed like too great a coincidence.

“We need to get you out
of here, your Majesty,” said the Chief of the Detail, nodding to the nurses. 
The two women came forward, holding attachments that they put on the carriers. 
As soon as they were in place they closed up and sealed them in armored
containers.  Inside they released light sedatives that calmed the children and
put them back into a deep sleep.

“Get into your armor,
your Majesty,” said the Chief of the Detail as an unmanned suit walked forward,
then opened up for her.

“What about the rest of
these people?” asked Jennifer, gesturing at the city.

“They’ll be opening the
shelters,” said the Chief of Detail, motioning her along after the armor closed
up around her.  The nurses followed, herding the two floating armored carriers
along with them.  “Now, we need to get you to the shelter under the palace.”

“No,” said Jennifer,
stopping for a moment and shaking her head.  “I won’t have my children closed
up underground in a target area while an unknown enemy drops kinetics on us.” 
She stood for a moment thinking.  “Get us out to the Imperial Compound.”

“OK,” said the Chief of
Detail, moving his charges along until they got down to the landing pad and
into the vehicles.  Again, Augustine went into one of the cars, while his
Mother and twin brother went into another.

“I want to see Glen,”
said Jennifer as the aircar left the ground.

“Not until we get you
both to safety,” ordered the head agent, holding up a hand to stop the nurse
from doing anything.

“The baby will be fine,
ma’am,.” said the Nurse, smiling at Jennifer.  “The armored compartment will
see to all of his needs, and keep him calm and sedated.  If he does need
anything the monitors watching him will let us know.”

He needs his mother
, thought Jennifer,
looking away and out through the side window of the car as the city dropped
below.  So far everything still looked peaceful, with the exception of numerous
aircars heading up and out at maximum velocity, and the packed squares and
streets starting to empty as citizens headed into buildings or ran for
transportation hubs that would take them to their homes.

“We have enemy craft
heading for Jewel,” stated the aircar pilot over the intercom.  “Fighters are
scrambling, and we are receiving instructions to follow a course back to the
palace.”

“Not the palace,” said
Jennifer, sure that going back there would be a mistake.  It was, after all, a
major target, noticeable from space.  It was a well defended target, but those
defenses were intended to take on maybe a squadron of insurgents, not a major
attack.  “Tell them we are going to the Imperial Retreat.”  The image of the
Retreat was on her mind, over eight hundred kilometers to the northwest of the
city in the Rainbow Mountains, overlooking one of the large tributaries of the
mighty Capitulum river that flowed through the capital.

“Get on the com and tell
central command that we are heading out of the city on a northwestern course,”
said the Chief of Detail over the com.

“What if they ask for our
destination?” asked the Pilot.

“Need to know.  Tell them
only our general heading, and that this is the Empress’ business.”

Jennifer looked nervously
through the camera function of her suit’s HUD, panning the view upward, to
where bright pinpoints were appearing in the daytime sky.  Jewel was locked
into a mutual orbit with New Terra, and this hemisphere was always pointed
toward the center of gravity where sat the Central Docks.

I wish Sean were here
, was her next thought,
revised even as it passed through her mind.  In a way she was glad he wasn’t
here, because if this thing went completely south, at least he was out of
danger.

*     *     *

“What the hell is going
on?” asked Tomas Gijardo as the emergency broadcast came breaking through the
privacy block of his implant.

He looked down into the
eyes of his lover as she came out of the ecstasy of love making, her own orbs
with a confused expression in them.  “What?” Margo asked in an out of breath
voice.

“This is an emergency
broadcast,” came the voice over the link, at the same time as it came vocally
over the apartment entertainment system.  “All citizens are ordered to take
shelter in the nearest available facility.  Repeat, all citizens are ordered to
take shelter.  This is a life or death situation, and for your own safety you
are ordered to the shelters.”

Tomas tried to tap into
the planet wide database system, something that every citizen was supposed to
be able to access at any time, and ran into a blank wall.  The only thing
coming over was the same maddening warning, overriding everything else.

“What’s going on?” asked
Margo again, pulling the sheets around her as she sat up in bed, her eyes
following her naked lover as he walked quickly to the large window overlooking
the city.

“I don’t know, but it
can’t be good,” he answered as he looked out from the window of his eight
hundred and sixty-third level apartment, over twenty-five hundred meters above
the street.  The view of the city was spectacular from this vantage, though it
was too high to make out any details of the streets.  There did seem to be an
inordinate number of aircars hitting the sky, with more joining them every
moment.

Won’t do any good to try
to get an aircar
,
thought the businessman, who didn’t have one of his own, and doubted there
would be any for hire by the time he had gotten dressed and down to the garage
level or up to the rooftop landing pad.

“Get dressed,” he told
Margo, pulling his own clothes off the chair where he had flung them and
pulling everything on as fast as possible.

“Where are we going?”

“The closest shelter,” he
replied, sealing up his shoes, then pulling on a shirt.  He tried linking into
the net again, this time with some success, as the list of shelters came up,
along with the numbers of people who had already taken cover in each one.  The
numbers changed as he looked, and it appeared that the closest shelter was not
going to be available by the time they got there.

The shelter system had
been in place for centuries, expanded through the years by the rightfully
paranoid human government.  The two hundred and seventy thousand linear
kilometers of transport tunnels were part of the system, used for overflow
after the deeper, more secure refuges were filled.  The heart of the system
were the eighteen thousand deep shelters, made up of the central capsules of
battleships manufactured by the same companies that build them for Fleet use. 
Each capsule was four hundred meters long by the same in width, with a height
of two hundred and forty meters, giving each capsule an area of over thirty
million cubic meters.  Each had its own water supply and food synthesizer, with
power reserves that would last for several years, and, most importantly of all,
the excavating equipment to dig a way back to the surface if needed.  Each
shelter could hold a hundred thousand people, since they were devoid of most of
the machinery that was installed on the central capsule of a warship.  That
gave the entire system a capacity of one point eight billion people. 
Impressive, but the population of the city was over three billion, which left a
lot of people out in the secondary and not nearly as well protected overflow.