Alien Empire

by Anthony Gillis

  “I don’t think we can afford to wait much longer,” said Varen, “He’s only got six rift ships. Sooner or later he’s going to capture more. He’s got over a hundred fifty Warden Ships and growing. We can’t let him continue to hide behind that bunker he’s built, striking when he pleases. Not when we’ll have the Grand Fleet to deal with sometime soon.”

  “Then perhaps,” said Abida, “Tempting him to capture more is precisely how we can trap him. It would have to be convincing… parking ships around one of our worlds will LOOK like a trap. But, we could launch an offensive against Anish, a feint…”

  “We’re not going to send a lot of good men to their deaths, knowingly, as bait in a trap,” replied Varen.

  “Why must the ships be manned?” said Abida, “They are merely the bait. We can send them through their rifts on autopilot.”

  “All right, but if that is the bait, what is the trap?” posed Varen, “At the first sign of an incoming rift, Shirazi is going to rift away. That half-second between a rift opening and the ship coming through is all the time he’s needed thus far.

  Karden had been quietly listening to the discussion. They couldn’t continue like this. Abida’s idea was a good one, but in addition he’d arrived, almost in passing, at a key insight. All this time, they’d focused on getting ships of one kind or another through rifts to then bring weapons to bear for attack. But Abida had just reminded them…

  The rifts were not engines, they were gates. Why did what went through the rift have to be ships at all?

  “Everyone,” Karden said, pausing to give them time to turn their attention, “I think I may have an answer.”

  ///

  Twenty thousand light years away, Vazquez and his little squadron were running a step ahead of enemy pursuit. The Grounders and their League allies had built a shockingly extensive network of secret spy satellites. They’d planted them in every world of any size along the way.

  It was amazing to him that in a galaxy of three hundred billion stars, they could find him at all. But they could, because they knew as well as he did that only some tens of thousands of worlds would be able to create enough antimatter to refuel his ships. And of those, most were nowhere near the route he would be likely to take. And it also meant that somewhere, out on rarely visited uninhabited star systems, or in deep interstellar space, the League had bases where they themselves were refueling.

  It was frustrating too that this far from the front, they would or could dare attack at all. If a Warden Ship or a ground battery were ever to get a clear shot at them, their little pursuit ships, duplicates of his own, would not last long. But they didn’t need long. They only needed to find him and catch up to him for a few seconds before he could react and rift out himself.

  He’d had some near escapes, but when they got to the Sol System, they could hide inside the vast hangars of heavily defended Luna. And then the scientists could go to work.

  ///

  Fleet Admiral Shirazi was on board one of his Liberty starships, powering up and preparing for a raid. A signal came in.

  An officer further forward in the cramped bridge spoke. “Admiral Sir, rifts coming in past the fourth solar orbit! Here are the coordinates.”

  His spy satellite showed close to a hundred ships of what he now knew to be the older Avenger type, and another hundred of a smaller, cruder type he hadn’t seen before. It looked like they had rift generators strapped into missile launchers.

  “All ships! Bridge officers, prepare for rift.”

  This could be the beginning of the enemy’s long-delayed full assault, or it could be a feint. In either case, what he was seeing could be a trap. In fact, it felt like one. However, he could still make a feint of his own, from a safe distance, and find out with time to escape.

  Shirazi’s little squadron rifted tens of kilometers away from the advancing fleet. He fired a volley of nuclear missiles and prepared to rift again. If those ships were going to do something, he was ready.

  But they weren’t the trap.

  Rifts opened close all around him, tiny ones, quickly opened, and what came through moved too fast to allow time to react. His squadron fell into pieces as dozens of railgun shots struck them from all directions. The doors sealed on the bridge bulkheads as the outer parts of his ship disintegrated. He was momentarily glad for the Grounder design that put the bridge, heavily fortified, in the very center of the ship.

  As he found himself and his surviving bridge officers floating helplessly in space, amidst the wreckage, he wasn’t so sure. They’d lost visibility with the destruction of the external scanners. The self-contained emergency life support for the bridge module was keeping them alive, but it wouldn’t last long. With fatalistic Elder resignation, he and his men folded their hands and waited for the inevitable.

  But somewhat later, they heard strange noises. Something was clamping onto their module. They felt motion, then more clamping, and something being attached to one of their bulkheads. As this went on, he opened the small weapons locker and handed side arms, air masks, and ballistic vests to his men. They calmly took what cover they could, as something cut a small hole high in one of the doors from outside. Shirazi guessed what the enemy was up to, and darted forward.

  Too late.

  A grenade popped through the little hole and burst with a flash and a bang. He stepped back momentarily blinded, as were his men. Along with it came another grenade spilling some kind of gas, but his men’s masks protected them. The door blasted open, and a volley of stun gun fire was followed by soldiers of various races in full ballistic armor. As he lay paralyzed, he could see them bind his hands and feet, and load him onto a floating stretcher.

  He was a prisoner.

  Sometime later, an Ara’kaa with reddish feather- scales, in an elaborate but unfamiliar uniform stood over him. “Welcome Admiral, my name is Atsra’aak. How does it feel being bested by a mere Squadron Commander?”

  ///

  “Without Admiral Shirazi, and his captured ships, I sincerely hope we can count on the rest of the Elders at Anish to sit tight for a while,” said Karden, working in the temporary office they’d set up in the basement of a nondescript building in a backwater Tadine town.

  “That was quite an idea, firing those railguns through small rifts,” said Varen, on the other end of the line.

  “The latter was Neem’s idea. I merely suggested firing them through the rifts. It was he who pointed out they’d open faster and use less antimatter if we modified the rift generators to scale the rifts to railgun shot rather than ships.”

  “Well it worked! Too bad we don’t have a way to easily switch them back and forth,” added Varen.

  “Neem thought of that. He said it could be done if he designed them from the beginning to do that, but the generators would be a lot more expensive.”

  “Still, there’s got to be some use to make of that idea. There is a lot to be said for firing at your enemy from fifty million kilometers away, like we did, when they don’t know where you are, and can’t fire back,” continued Varen.

  Karden considered that. Indeed there was.

  He also noted that Varen had started using the Elder system of measurement in meters, rather than steps. It was strange how even if they won, his world would end up having absorbed much from the Elders. His thoughts were interrupted by a second call, from Abida.

  “Karden! I have some most amazing news! When we blasted Shirazi’s squadron, Atsra’aak noticed there was an intact bridge module in the wreckage. He picked it up and brought it back to his operating base. You will not believe who was inside!”

  “Shirazi?” said Karden.

  Abida laughed “Yes Professor, it is he!”

  “I’ll be back on my way to GDC headquarters. This should be very interesting.”

  ///

  Viris and her now multi-world network of code-hacking friends were continuing their battle against the Protectorate’s best efforts to keep them out. It was getting harder to intercept m
essages. The worst was Shirazi’s rare, but she had no doubt, crucial correspondence. Besides the usual safeguards, all the outbound and most of the inbound were in some unknown language.

  On the other hand, other inbound transmissions still occasionally came in using Elder.

  “Hey Sader, take a look at this.”

  On the other end of a data line, he did.

  “Yep. That is some extra heavy-duty encryption they’ve got on this message. Haven’t seen anything like that from them before! I can see why you think it’s too tough for you Viris.”

  “Slag you! Just thought I’d torture you by showing you something beyond your skills, as I finished it.”

  “Ha! We’ll see.”

  They got to work. It proved to be more than they’d expected, and despite the competition, they started bouncing ideas off each other. After several grueling hours, they had it.

  “That’s not good,” said Sader.

  Viris let out a long string of spectacular curses. Eventually, she managed to get a few non-expletive words together in sentences.

  “Those murderous slagging scum! Level Three Retrogression huh? A bland name for plans to exterminate our entire planet! And I thought what Karden and Viris found back in Bacchara was bad. We’re getting this out to the League, slag, the galaxy NOW!

  “Do you want to talk to Karden first?”

  “No! I had to hold back and wait last time. This time, we’re going viral. I’m calling Marit… and… we’ll need a narrator who won’t worry about causing havoc… Giuseppe McCoy!”

  And with that, she ended the call.

  ///

  McCoy was sitting in his lavish new top-floor apartment, enjoying the view of his home city at night, and sipping one of the cheap rotgut drinks he’d gotten used to in his years of hiding.

  A call came in, one that was through the rift network. Whoever it was wasn’t worried about cost… ah! Viris Nane. This, he thought, should be interesting.

  “Viris, it is an honor to…”

  She was speaking fast, and cursing as she went.

  “Viris, please calm down, I know what to do.”

  “Calm down? Calm! How... what? How do you Elders stay so cool under pressure?”

  “A lifetime of training and indoctrination, endlessly and relentlessly reinforced on us from infancy.”

  “That was a rhetorical… ah, never mind! So, will you help?”

  “Yes, but I do not recommend you bypass Karden. In fact, I think you should recruit him as your narrator.”

  “Have you finally cracked, McCoy?”

  “By Elder standards, I did that a long time ago. What I mean is this - the message will not have quite the impact you want. We’ve already sent videos far and wide documenting Level One Retrogression in detail. This message is a simple order, with no images attached with it, and thereby lacks visceral power.”

  “Moreover,” he continued, “It will be following in the wake of the others. Viewers, readers, will already be desensitized toward additional shocks. Therefore, you want to try for a different effect. I suggest you seek sympathy for you, rather than additional hatred for the Protectorate.”

  “Hate is what they have coming!” she replied.

  “Perhaps so, but I think Karden, as the leader of a simple backward planet fighting bravely for the freedom of everyone else, while threatened with complete annihilation, will present a very sympathetic picture. He should make a personal appeal for help. As an Elder, I can give it some additional credibility through an introduction, but it needs to come from him.”

  “Who said Karden was leader of my planet?”

  “No one, but I am here speaking of reality, not formality. Even if none of you on Ground call him such, it is clear to the rest of us that, in practice, he is.”

  “McCoy, I don’t know what the slag to make of you sometimes. Anyway I think your plan makes sense. I’m calling Karden, but don’t you dare give him any ideas about being world leader!”

  52

  On an open stretch of Tadine highway, a motorcade was headed toward the city of Delta. In the heavily armored vehicle at the center sat a driver, two guards, a staffer, Karden and Tayyis.

  In the comfortably appointed seat farthest back, Karden sat side by side with Tayyis. His left hand held her right, while each of them had phones in their other hands. The staffer, a southerner from Kaleknan, sat organizing notes, but ready for instructions. The armed guards further up were ready for orders, or any trouble that might come. It was the very picture of political power in a modern Grounder society, but Karden was unaware of any of it. He was busy.

  Harker was on the other end of the line, speaking.

  “I’ve got to say, Karden, that was well done catching Shirazi! We were starting to crack under the strain of doing things the hard way, using rifts every time. Planetary rifts, even in Neem and Jat’s portal rings, use up a lot of antimatter. The ships we were assembling in deep space were costing roughly twenty times what one did on the ground!”

  “And even with all the saved fuel and transit time, we’ve figured out the rift portal trains and trucks were actually more expensive than shipping in space. It was killing us. One person who is looking at a way around it is Ilyar. His company is working on a long low unmanned high speed train, more like a missile on tracks really, that needs a smaller aperture, yet at the same time, doesn’t need the rift open as long.”

  “That being said, he and everybody else are going wild building freighters to operate in space. One of the Free Traders that joined us already has people working on what she says are huge improvements to the Freedom transport design.”

  “Communications are even better though, Karden. There are a lot of engineers and scientists on several planets working on the original Neem-Jat designs now. One of the new companies on Solidarity has a prototype rift portal too small to be seen with the eye. Used on a satellite in space, it might bring the cost of an interstellar message down to twice or less that of one on the planet.”

  Karden processed the amazing implications of all that, wished he had more time to discuss in detail how the economy was doing, to review the detailed report compiled by staff on several planets, and get a grand picture of all the astounding new ideas being generated by newly unleashed minds and creative energies.

  But right now, his time was limited, and his job was to identify, out of everything, what pieces of information were most useful in their fight for survival. He thanked Harker and ended the call. Several thoughts kept recurring, bouncing around in his mind. He decided to organize them in a list.

  First, smaller aperture rifts were cheaper. Second, short rifts were cheaper than sustained ones. Third, rifts in space were cheaper than those near massive objects. Fourth, rifts inside portal rings were cheaper than those projected externally. Fifth, the potential range of a rift increased as one applied more power, but that increase was from a base determined by the previous four factors.

  How to apply that to war?

  He had a corollary piece of information. Abida had pointed out the obvious fact they’d all been missing, they didn’t need to go through the rifts to fire weapons through them. Done correctly, they could shoot at an enemy that couldn’t shoot back.

  There was one person on the twenty-six planets of the League best suited to help him put it all together! He called Neem, and on second thought, patched Jat in as well. It was midday and Jat was likely to be taking the brief nap he called his sleep. That was even better.

  ///

  As it turned out, Jat was not taking a nap.

  Though Neem-Jat Labs, by virtue of the severe governmental pressures put on it when it was first formed, was a nonprofit research institution, Harker had encouraged Neem and Jat themselves to launch any number of side ventures. They had as a consequence become immensely rich.

  One of the uses they found for that money was a private operating base in deep interstellar space, about a light year from Ground. They were currently watching and controlling auto
mated activity at that base through rift communications.

  “Right. Everything in place?” said Jat.

  “That’s it. The wormhole generators are set up, one feeding right into the other, and back again. Let’s see if it works!” replied Neem.

  They powered up their wormhole loop. The exit of one was directly into the entrance of the other. They could in theory send something cycling through for as long as power would last. Two wormhole openings glowed serenely in space, a kilometer apart.

  “All right,” said Neem, “power down. We know it works. It is strange to think that in the half second or so before the timer activates on the rift transmitter, it will have passed through that loop millions of times.”

  “Strange?” replied Jat, “Only way to observe what happens without putting observation satellites across a light year of space. It’s the obvious solution.”

  Neem looked at his sometimes baffling friend, and then spoke, “So now that you’ve had time to sleep on it, what DO you think will happen?”

  Jat considered, “Either the two will ignore each other and keep working, or the rift will destabilize the wormhole, or it will cause space-time to collapse, and destroy the universe.”

  Neem seemed to levitate in his chair.

  “WHAT?”

  “That last part was a joke.”

  “oh…”

  “Ready now, Neem?”

  With a bit less enthusiasm than before, Neem agreed. He launched the small rift transmitter, which went floating toward the wormhole target zone. They activated the wormholes, and it zoomed in. A half second, and millions of loops, later, the timer activated…

  The wormhole openings disappeared. The rift transmitter reappeared in real space about three quarters of the way between where the two had been. As it appeared, it shattered into tiny pieces and went flying off into the void at near-relativistic speeds.

  “Slag!” said Jat, “The universe is still here. Better luck next time. Well at least we now know how to intentionally destabilize wormholes.”