Exodus: Empires at War: Book 11: Day of Infamy (Exodus: Empires at War.) (29 page)

“We have the one weapon
they can’t match, Jimmy,” said Lucille as she gestured to the vending area, as
if giving him permission to get more food.

“And what is that?” said
the Agent as he got up from the table and headed over to the dispenser.

“Our brains.  Those
damned bastards have been in the conquest business for thousands of years, and
we have almost caught up with them in technology.  Actually passed them in
quite a few areas.  And we will continue to pass them, leaving them behind,
until their numbers and ships mean nothing.”

*     *     *

The High Admiral looked
at the plot that showed the disposition of the forces in the system.  The huge
station, the most important object in view, was in the center of the plot. 
There were still some of the tiny icons of Ca’cadasan fighters and attack ships
circling the station.  They had no more missiles, no more proton packs for
their particle beams.  All they had left were lasers, and those were mere
pinpricks on the station.  Most did not even have the time to attack, busy as
they were trying to avoid thirty times their number in enemy craft.

He still had seven
superbattleships, enough for another strike on something.  They could kill a
planet, take out a strong enemy force.  But all of their power would just sting
that station, and there was an enemy fleet on the way, one that would arrive at
the object well before they could kill their momentum and return.

We should have brought
more
, he
thought.  But the Admiralty and the scientists had thought that one of the
wormhole bombs would be enough to destroy the station.  And then the humans
would have to spend a hundred years to build another.  But the humans had come
up with something, like they always seemed to, and the plan had not worked. 
The sad part for the Empire was that they had not brought enough for a plan B. 
And they were paying for it.

Now all we can do is run
from this system and try to hit something else of value
, he thought, hoping that
they could avoid the impossible fighters of the enemy and whatever the new hell
weapons they had wielded were.  They had known from the beginning that they
would not be returning home, but it had been thought that they would already be
dead.  Now the future, short as it would probably be, was an unknown.

*     *      *

“We’re ready to raise the
inertial bubble at your command, sir,” said the Pilot, looking back at his Wing
Commander.

Captain Chavez nodded,
looking at the plot that showed the enemy ships pulling away from the station
at point four eight light and piling on the acceleration.   They had been
boosting for four hours now, and had reached well over a light hour distance.

“I still think we should
go back to the carrier and load up on missiles, sir,” said his acting second in
command, Lt. Commander Wilma Streeter.

Streeter had actually
been the senior squadron commander in another wing.  That wing had sustained
over seventy percent casualties, while his own had lost over half their own
strength, including their own senior squadron leader.  Now he had a small wing
of seventy-nine ships, none carrying missiles, proton stores exhausted.  All
they had were the lasers that were always the last resort in combat.

“I want us letting those
bastards know they are not welcome here,” said Chavez, shaking his head.  “And
I want them heading where we want them to go.”

The Klassekian Com Tech
had brought word that a scout group was boosting at maximum acceleration to a point
six light hours in from the hyper I barrier.  They would get there four hours
before the enemy, then lie in wait with everything powered down.  The enemy, of
course, would have been decelerating at that point so they could be down to
point three light by the time they hit the barrier, so they could do an
immediate jump.  His force was the only one capable of catching up to the enemy
from behind at the moment.

The Lt. Commander nodded
her head in acknowledgement, though the lack of expression on her face showed
how she felt about the order.  With missiles they could actually kill some of
the Caca ships, if not all of them.  With lasers, they could at most harass
them, while the enemy ships could still blow them out of space when they were
out of the bubble.

“I have calculated our
course, sir,” said the junior officer who was his Navigator.  He fed the
numbers, course, acceleration, deceleration and time, to the Pilot of the
fighter and to the Com Tech, who made sure all the information got out to the
other ships.  The calculations called for them to jump in one point three
minutes, and that information went out as well.

“Preparing to raise
bubble, sir,” called out the Pilot five seconds before the timer ticked down. 
As it hit zero every ship in the force released the negative matter from their
tanks.  The negative matter was pulled into the bubble that gave the drive its
name, cutting the ships off from the normal universe.  The craft were already
moving at point six light, which would be the maximum velocity they could be at
when they finally came out of that bubble.  The inertialess drive was a
wonderful invention, but like all such discoveries it had serious limitations. 
One of those limitations, the rebound effect of inertia coming back as they
left the drive, was the basis of the new weapons they had used against the
Cacas this day.  The weapons that had been as inaccurate as feared.

“Starting boost,” called
out the Pilot as the grabber units started pulling the fighter forward at one
hundred and ninety-six kilometers per second per second, the equivalent of
twenty thousand gravities of acceleration.  The first wonder of the drive was
that they felt none of those gravities, which would normally have been well
above the capability of a fighter’s compensators to handle.

In fifteen minutes they
achieved the second miracle of the drive, passing the speed of light. 
Twenty-five minutes after that they reached their maximum cruising speed of
twice the speed of light and were catching up with the enemy force.  They were
only in cruise for a short period before they started their deceleration,
timing it so they would come out in front of the enemy ships at the proper time
to allow them to attack.  And so it would go over the next four or five days,
unless they had no more craft left to attack.

*     *     *

“We will have the station
back up and running by tomorrow, your Majesty,” said the blond haired woman on
the holo.

“That fast, Director?”
asked Sean, not sure if he could believe it.

“It’s true we took a lot
of damage,” she said, her face falling.  “And lost a lot of people.  But the
station came through better than I had feared.  We only lost one of the six
support cables in one small area, we still have ninety percent of our grabbers
and an even higher percentage of our electromagnetic generators and crystal
matrix batteries.  Of course we’re now missing the micro-black holes that ran
one of our production stations.  It will take a couple of weeks to create the
sixteen replacements we need.  And I would like to build another backup set
just in case.”

“We’ll see what we can
do,” said Sean.  “So we will not be producing as many as we were?”

“We should be able to
hold up our end, your Majesty.  We’ve always been running with one extra
production facility, so we could perform maintenance on one while running the
other four.  For now, we will just have to run the eight satellites
continuously in four production sets until we can get the fifth set up and
running.”

“I think our priority now
is to repair the damage to the station, and at the same time fortify the
defenses of the structure.  The next enemy fleet that closes with that monster
will regret coming within range of its weapons.” 
Which doesn’t mean they
won’t try, or that they won’t succeed
, he thought.

“I understand, your
Majesty,” said the Director, nodding.  “I think we can handle the strain of
continued production.  At least I hope we can.”

“We need those wormholes,
Director.  Research and development has big plans for them.” 
And that’s all
I can say about that
, he thought.  He trusted Lucille Yu as much as anyone
in his Empire.  But
need to know
had been formulated for a very good
reason.  What one didn’t know, they couldn’t let slip.

“Your Majesty,” came a
call over the com.  “You need to see this.”

“I have to go, Director. 
We’ll talk when I get back to the Capital.”

“Let me say how very
sorry I am about your son, your Majesty,” said Yu just before the holo died.

Sean found himself
staring at the empty air where the holo had just held the image of the
Director.  He had been busy the last day, too many things going on, and the
thought of his heir being dead had been pushed to the back of his mind.  Yu had
brought it forward with her condolences.   He knew she hadn’t meant to hurt
him, that she had only wanted to express her deepest sympathies, something that
obviously hadn’t come easy for her.

My poor darling Jennifer
, he thought, closing his
eyes.  She was alone with her grief.  Oh, she had people around her, people who
cared for her.  But that wasn’t the same as having her husband and her dead
baby’s father with her.

“Your Majesty?”

“Show me.” Sean opened
his eyes to see a scene from the multi-system battle that had been raging for
the last two days.  The Caca were still pushing hard, and taking heavy losses,
as were his forces.  He wasn’t sure who would break first.  If the Cacas did he
would have a respite, time to get his forces back together and prepare for the
next wave, while getting his new plans in motion.  If his forces broke the
Cacas would again take the Kingdom of New Moscow.  And it was still looking
like that system would not be able to hold up to the attack of a large force of
Cacas heading their way.   And if they had a wormhole, they would have a base
from which to continue their offensive into the Empire, reinforcing at will
from the heart of their Empire.

The ship he was looking
at was a Caca superbattleship.  Only this one had laser rings instead of the
domes they normally carried.  That in itself was bad news, since the domes,
while giving good all-around firepower, also limited their capacity to put
laser fire on a single target.  That had been an advantage to the Empire.  The
Cacas had learned, and now were imitating.  The ship was still losing the
fight, taking a pounding from the human ships around it.  One ring exploded as
it absorbed a blast of protons from a particle beam, while lasers boiled away
hull alloy.  There was a flash on the hull, too large to be a beam weapon.  It
could only have come from a missile.  While the blast was still expanding the
effect became manifest as the ship’s hull bulged outward, then ruptured.  In an
instant the ship was gone in a flash, replaced by plasma speeding out from the
source of the explosion.

“I could wish we had
taken that ship,” said Sean, thinking of the other secrets the vessel might
have held.  They had captured ships the last time the Cacas had been in the
Empire, but it was obvious that they had made changes.  It would be helpful to
know what those changes were.

“We can order our
captains to try and make a capture,” came the voice of Admiral Lenkowski over
the com.  Len was leading a third of the fleet in this battle, holding an
entire flank and fighting to hold onto a half dozen systems.

“Try to make a capture,
if possible,” ordered Sean.  “I would really like to get a look at what’s
hidden in those ships.  But not at a risk to the crews or ships.”

This was the second
surprise of the day.  The first had been even more disturbing.  One mass attack
by inertialess fighters had met with disaster as the enemy had somehow placed
fire on their exit point from their warp bubbles.  A third of the attack force,
the equivalent of an entire wing, had gone up in a wave of fire.  The remainder
had suffered further casualties, no surprise there.  There was always a risk in
any action where small fragile craft mixed it up with massive warships.  The
disturbing part had been that the enemy had seemed to know when and where the
fighters would emerge.

We’ll have some new
surprises for them in the near future as well
, he thought.  The inertialess drive was
really a variation on the Alcubierre warp drive, something that had eluded
mankind in the early days of interstellar travel, and then forgotten as
subspace was discovered and exploited.  Then the entire concept had faded into
oblivion as humanity had used the much more efficient method of
hyper-dimensional travel.  Now possibly its time had come again, if not for
interstellar travel, then for moving quickly in battle.  There were still some obstacles
to conquer, but the research and development people were saying they would have
it in the coming year.  Right now that sounded like music to the Emperor.

But if they can track
them, somehow, we might have more problems than we can handle, and one of our
most potent weapons might not be as effective as hoped.

“Anything else?”

“We also have this view
of an enemy ship, your Majesty, taken from a distance,” said the Chief Analyst
over the com.