Exodus: Empires at War: Book 2

by Doug Dandridge

  Can’t be something the man wanted to hear about, thought the Emperor. Especially in front of the VIPs. But things happen, especially in a brand new operation.

  “If you’ll follow me, your Majesty,” said the Director, leading them to the center of the room and motioning to a series of couches. As he gestured the roof of the room became transparent.

  Looking straight up and out the Emperor could see a couple of small objects with blinking strobes in the space outside the ring. His vision adjusted for a moment until the distortion straight up came into focus.

  “The black hole?” he asked, pointing up.

  “Yes,” said the Director, nodding his head. “Not much to look at is it? But watch this.”

  Suddenly lines of electric blue came snaking from thousands of contact points on the surface of the Donut spinward and antispinward from the observation room. After several seconds delay the points erupted from the surface thousands of kilometers further in both directions. As more and more of the points came into focus the lines nearest began to join, to form larger lines of electron fire.

  “The speed of light it the limiting factor here,” said the Director, as the beams of electrons moved toward the event horizon over seven million kilometers away. “You will not see a true image of the process further away as it is occurring many seconds out of phase with the image coming to your eye. Even the central computer will not see the process in real time. Instead it uses algorithms to predict what is happening further along the ring and keep the timing of the process within parameters.”

  The long lines moved closer to the event horizon. Within an instant of the first one touching an electric nimbus grew into existence around the horizon. More of the large lines touched, until there were over twenty of them in view.

  “There are in fact fifty of the electron beams that will wrap around the event horizon of the rotating and charged black hole,” said the Director. “The actual intensity of the beams are being filtered out by the polarized observation skin. Now comes the real fireworks.”

  The beams began to bend as the swirling gravitation force swept them around the hole. The nimbus around the event horizon brightened, becoming almost painful to look at despite the polarized observation skin. The beams coming out of the nimbus brightened as well, as the black hole became the largest electric dynamo in the history of the human race.

  “We’re at full output now,” said the Director. “The energy is being shunted in the banks of quantum matrix batteries. Until…”

  The lights on the station dimmed imperceptibly for just a moment, then strengthened. The nimbus faded slightly, then faded out. A few arcs of electricity flared between the horizon and station, and from point to point on the inner skin of the station. Looking small with distance, each was the equivalent of all the major lightning strikes on a gas giant in a year.

  “The majority of the energy was beamed off of the station,” said Director Baxter, his own attention fixed on the diminishing light show. “The wormhole generator took the energy and created a wormhole that was kept open with negative matter before it could close.”

  “And how does the generator open a wormhole?” asked the Empress, smiling, then taking a sip of champagne.

  “The energy is beamed to a series of graviton projectors that increases the gradient of space for a few moments, Majesty,” said the Director, his face glowing as he talked about his element. “It forms a temporary black hole, which rips open space and attaches to the rip formed by another black hole formed just a hundred kilometers away. They link through a wormhole that we keep open with gravitons as the holes collapse to nothing.”

  “What’s going to happen to that wormhole?” asked Dimetre, looking at a replay of the generation event on a wall viewer.

  “It’s probably going to be used as a naval vessel heat sink,” said the Director. “We plan to start making some passenger transport gates next week and move them around the capital system.”

  “All of that energy to create one worm hole?” asked Henry, expanding his flat comp and inputting some information.

  “Most of it,” said Baxter. “We probably moved some of it to antimatter and negative matter production. Those are also commodities that the Empire needs as much as can be made. So we make it.”

  “What’s that?” said Dimetre, pointing up and to spinward. Something bright flared there in space.

  “I’m not sure,” said the Director, getting a distant look as he tapped into his com link.

  “Your Majesty,” yelled one of the security personnel, running up while holding his hand to his temple, obviously linking into something. “We need to get you out of here. We…”

  Augustine looked up to where Dimetre and the Director were looking, seeing the small dying sun of a MAM explosion, and felt his heart sink.

  * * *

  The Imperial Fleet Protection Squadron had only dispatched a few ships to the locale of the Donut. A heavy cruiser, two destroyers and their compliment of eight space fighters had seemed enough to guard the Imperial Family when they were on a completely secured space station of enormous proportions. A space station protected by its own squadron and a series of orbiting forts, as well as built in defenses. Especially when they were over thirty light hours within the hyperlimit of the black hole. Nothing was going to sweep out of hyperspace and surprise the Imperial Family on their tour.

  Only four of the space fighters were on patrol while the tour was going on. The other four were being held as a reserve. Two of the fighters were in formation between the station and the hole; the other two were in a flight above the station. The larger warships were stationed to the side of the ring, where they would be out of the way of the planned display.

  The fighters moved their six hundred ton bulks to the sides of the ring when warned that the fireworks were about to begin. No one wanted to be caught in the energy bath that would soon be washing over that region of space. Set into a following orbit around the hole that matched the rotation of the station, the crews sat back and watched the display.

  Ensign Mark O’Brien was sitting in his chair in the copilot/weapons officer’s seat of fighter Heraklion III watching as the display began. He felt calm and excited at the same time. Excited to be in a front row seat at a demonstration of the Donut’s power. Calm that his mission was such a milk run, the Emperor as protected as a human being could be.

  The light show began; space filled with enormously large and bright electron beams that were like the filaments of stars. Mark kept his eyes on the viewer, feeling awe at the release of energies that could bend the laws of physics. Then something changed. He felt a lurch in his stomach. He felt the viewer fading as if into a distance, and then a covering blackness as consciousness faded.

  Viper felt like he had awakened from a long sleep. He could remember images of life that had passed in the last months. He could not remember any clear images that would have been the memories of waking life. It took a second to orient himself. Only a second and his mind was functioning at peak level.

  He quickly punched in a protocol through his weapons board. Receiving an interrogative from the ship’s computer he punched an accent, followed by another code. The board flashed its acknowledgement. The crew’s vitals, normally sent out to the mother ship over a close range link, were now masked with a false overlay that showed all’s well.

  Satisfied with that part of the takeover, Viper looked around the tiny bridge of the fighter. Lt. Commander Phoenix was staring at the display, all his attention riveted to the screen. The pilot, Warrant Three Jurviscious, was relaxing in her chair as if watching a movie. He glanced back over his shoulder and saw that Petty Officer Flounce was hunched over staring at her own view screen.

  The com/sensor tech was the greatest initial threat. Viper quietly reached his hand down to his sidearm and by feel set the frequency. Then in one smooth motion he stood, drew and pivoted in place, the pistol coming up to point at the back of the tech’s head. Hair burst into flame as flesh va
porized and the invisible beam cut into the skull and through the brain below. It exited through the forehead and reflected off of the viewer as it struck. The reflected energy flash burned the dead tech’s face before it fell forward.

  The programmed assassin turned the pistol toward the Commander, who was staring at him with a shocked expression. The beam had been set to a frequency that would be absorbed by flesh and bone, and reflect from the plastics and alloys that made up the bridge. He swept the beam into the Commander’s neck, slicing through skin, muscle and bone. The man’s head fell from his neck, the cauterized wound showing no blood. The body followed an instant later.

  As the pilot tried to get out of her seat and pull her weapon at the same time, Viper hit her in the face with his right elbow, sending her back into her seat with a bloody mouth and broken teeth. As she tried to clear her head he shot her between the eyes, driving her into the permanent blackness of death.

  “Chief Ferrel,” he called over the com link as the pilot’s body slumped in her chair. “We need you on the bridge immediately. Please respond.”

  “On my way,” came the voice of the engineer from his rear compartment. Moments later the man came through the opening hatch to the bridge. His eyes registered shock for a moment before the assassin shot him through the head.

  The assassin overlay that controlled Ensign O’Brien sat the man’s body in his chair. The Viper persona looked over the display, noting the other fighter, the flight leader, ten kilometers to the front and a couple of kilometers to the side. He noted the position of the heavy cruiser Heraklion, the mother ship of the fighters, about twenty thousand kilometers to the stern, and one of the escorting destroyers thirty thousand kilometers to the bow. And he made sure the primary target was where he was supposed to be.

  Fingers flying over the weapons board, Viper assigned all of his offensive missiles to targets. The computer flashed a warning over his screen, reminding him that he was targeting friendlies. The assassin persona punched in a series of override codes that he wasn’t supposed to have access to. Codes that allowed one man without voice recognition to override the safety protocols of the system. The board flashed readiness and part of the panel started flashing a red commit. Viper pushed down on the panel and grabbed the fighter’s control stick.

  The two access hatches on the bottom of the fighter opened and the four antiship missiles dropped into space. It took a millisecond to orient onto targets. Then the drives kicked in and sent the missiles toward their targets at five thousand gravities of acceleration.

  In a little over half a second the first missile screamed into the small frame of fighter Heraklion II. The velocity of the missile itself was enough to blast into the hull of the fighter, kinetic energy superheating the structure and tearing the small object apart. The hundred megaton warhead detonation was almost an afterthought, vaporizing materials and crew and mixing their gases together. Within a millionth of a second after detonation the fighter’s carried warheads and fusion plant went critical, adding five hundred megatons of energy to the blast.

  At fifteen kilometers distance there was enough density of gas coming back to rock Heraklion III. And some larger particles, one of which hit the port wing of the craft and tore a hole in the structure. Viper already had the fighter turning toward the primary target. As the craft shook he kicked in full military power, one thousand gravities of acceleration, on a vector that would take him under the Donut in a couple of seconds.

  The second missile, targeted on the heavy cruiser, sped on a trajectory that would intersect the warship in twenty-nine seconds. The cruiser was not at alert status, her Captain and crew believing that they would not be called on to fight any threat to their charge on this day. To their credit they had targeting systems and laser rings up and running within ten seconds of one of their fighters exploding in space. Within fifteen seconds both forward laser rings were pouring full power into the antiship missile. At sixteen seconds the missile detonated in a bright point of light.

  Missile three was on course for the closest destroyer, arrival time just under thirty-five seconds. That ship was even faster on the draw than the cruiser, taking the missile out over twenty seconds from impact. Both missiles targeting warships had failed to reach their targets. They had accomplished their secondary mission as distracters, taking the ships’ attentions off of missile four which was on a heading toward the surface of the ring.

  Viper oriented the fighter toward the ring as she came underneath. Locking onto the region where he knew the target to be, he triggered the nose and wing lasers at full power into that section. Made up of superconducting alloys just like Imperial warships, the laser energy was transferred quickly out from the point of impact, not allowing the heat to burn through. The point of impact was still much hotter than the surrounding absorbing area. And it formed the target point for the incoming missile.

  The missile struck the station at over four hundred kilometers per second, imparting a considerable amount of kinetic energy into the impact point. The warhead went off on impact, dwarfing the kinetic energy as a hundred megatons of explosive power ripped into the station. The tough skin was penetrated, vaporized, allowing the flood of heat and other radiation to enter the interior of the station. On such an enormous object this was a pinprick. In the couple of square kilometers of surface nearest the blast it was Armageddon.

  The observation room was near the edge of the Armageddon, as the hotspot generated by the fighter was not precisely on target, so the missile was not precisely on either. The rooms under Armageddon were scoured clean of anything they contained. The observation room was merely broken open to space and flooded with radiation. The occupants were probably dead from radiation poisoning eventually. They were surely dead from being sucked out into space.

  The Emperor and his family might have survived the exposure to space for several minutes, while they were pushed toward the black hole by the explosive force of atmosphere leaving the observation deck. They didn’t survive the gigawatts of laser energy the fighter played over the opening once the assassin picked up his target’s tracker leaving the station.

  Seconds after the explosion that killed the Emperor, Empress, Heir and Spare, the Heraklion opened up on its detached fighter with its A and B rings. The fighter shimmered for a brief second as terawatts of heat transferred into her. Then she went up in a bright flash as her fusion bottle ruptured. A fraction of a second later the lasers from the destroyer reached the spreading plasma cloud, stirring up the mess. Within an hour all of the debris would fall into the black hole, unrecoverable by man. The only thing that remained was the mystery of why a crew sworn to protect the Emperor had murdered him and his family.

  * * *

  The call went out to the Central Naval Base through the wormhole. Within minutes naval personnel were coming through the gate to investigate what had happened. Within an hour another wave of investigators, this from the Imperial Secret Service and the Imperial Investigation Bureau, were roaming the station. There was not much to investigate with the bodies of victims and perpetrator gone. Even the murder weapon had been destroyed. But someone had to be responsible, and the investigators went about their jobs with fire in their eyes.

  Dr. Lucille Yu was brought into an impromptu office where several investigators from the civilian organizations sat with a pair of Naval Intelligence officers. The eyes of the men were a combination of hard and shocked, and the scientist could imagine what was going through their minds. Their beloved Emperor, the one they had been charged with defending with their lives, was gone. Along with him had gone the one who would have succeeded him.

  “We have some questions for you, Doctor Yu,” said a hard faced black man in a suit which screamed government agent.

  “And you are?” she asked.

  “Senior Inspector Jiminez with the IIB,” said the man, looking down on her as if he wanted to step on her. “And from here on I will be asking the questions. Is that understood?”

  “M
aybe I should have a lawyer present,” she said, trying to appear confident and knowing that she was failing miserably.

  “You can talk to your lawyer later,” said the man with a cold smile. “Right now you need to talk with us.”

  “But my rights.”

  “Damned your rights, woman,” growled the large man, glowering down at her. “We’ve have the sovereign of the Empire assassinated while visiting your station. Along with the Heir and the Empress.”

  “And all the chief staff of the station,” chimed in another of the investigators.

  “With the exception of you,” said Jiminez. “Why did you leave the tour before the assassin struck, Dr. Yu?”

  “I was called away,” she said, a shiver coming over her as she thought about how close she had come to death. And sorrow at all that had died, especially her friends and colleagues. “There was a problem with the negative matter production that they wanted me to look at.”

  “And they couldn’t have sent you the information?” asked Jiminez. “Or asked the negative matter expert? Dr. Gomez I believe. And please sit down before you fall over.”

  Yu sat in the offered seat, with the investigators all circling her like a pride of carnivores waiting for the kill.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking,” said Yu in a quiet voice. “I had to be near the central control room in order to look at the data in real time and suggest the adjustments,” she said in a strengthening voice. “And Dr. Gomez was such a fan of the Imperial Family I thought he might enjoy their company more than I.”

  “So you didn’t like the Imperial Family?” asked one of the military investigators, looking at a flat comp and making notes.

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like them,” said Yu, shaking her head. “I adored the Emperor. But I don’t really like parties all that much. And Gomez always went on about wanting to talk with the Emperor.”