Every shuttle on the moon was joining in the evacuation, and space was getting damned crowded. Even as she watched a pair of vector arrows converged and blinked out, a midspace collision at high enough velocity to destroy both vehicles and kill everyone aboard. The Admiral gritted her teeth and held down the words she wanted to have sent to the space traffic control center that was aboard this vessel. She held in the retort because it was impossible for any team, even with all the computing power in the world, to control this clusterfuck of an emergency evacuation. There were just too many birds in the air, and they were paying the most attention to the shuttles and larger vessels that were in proximity to each other. A shuttle hitting a freighter and ripping open the hull, exposing thousands of refugees to space, was a much larger problem.
“Where in the hell are those other Klavarta ships?” she groused, trying to locate the promised commercial and logistics ships on the holo.
“There they are,” shouted one of the technical crew who were helping to monitor the traffic, pointing to several vector arrows that were approaching the moon. There were a dozen of them, all smaller than those the Imperials were deploying for the evacuation. More were coming around the moon they were using to sling them into the proper orbit, until over a hundred ships were on approach, more appearing every second.
“Make damn sure they slot into the orbits we want them to be in,” she ordered the Flag Com Officer. The last thing we need is for them to try to insert into the evac pattern without getting permissions. Of course, when the enemy missile flight got here in four hours, all of these ships would need to be through the wormhole before those weapons arrived. Only a few might get through, but even a couple of hits on crowded evacuation ships would be a disaster. They would bring them back after, and after they had unloaded. And the shuttles?
“Send a message to command that we need more wormhole gates, and ships on the other side to unload our shuttles when we have to send them through.” It couldn’t just be a problem of evacuating a heavily populated world, which would be bad enough. But having to do so under threat of fire? They had two other wormholes they could use, just lacking the framework and negative matter to open them up to the size they needed for shipping. The one they had open was already expanded larger than any in the short history of wormhole gates.
“Traffic shut down from the other side, Admiral,” said the Liaison Officer. “We have a go for outbound transit.”
“Order them through,” she said, then watched as the first ship in the queue started to boost toward the hole.
“We think we’ve located the Caca flagship, Admiral,” said the Flag Sensor Officer.
“A flagship, or the flagship?” asked Wallace, raising an eyebrow. There would, of course, be a great number of flagships in a fleet that size. Ships controlling task forces, groups, fleets within the fleet. But there was only one flagship in command of the entire force.
“From the amount of grav wave traffic, we’re pretty sure this is the one,” said the officer, as one of the vector arrows, near the center of the largest leading formation that just behind the scout screen, started blinking.
“Is the wormhole ready to fire?”
“Command gives a go on the missile tubes on the other side,” said a Com Tech, sitting beside the officer in charge of that station.
“Feed them the coordinates to that flagship, along with an estimate of their position at time of interception.” And now we’ll see how well you all coordinate with your head cut off.
* * *
The wormhole sat about five minutes from the gas giant system, and about a light minute to the side of the approaching Caca force. The wormhole had a frame around it measured about five hundred meters to a side, made up of nonreflective material. It had been much smaller when moved into position, using the plasma jet technique that allowed fast acceleration without the giveaway of gravitons. Now it was being held in place by the merest of nudges of the grabber units on the frame, still undetectable from the range that the nearest Caca ship was currently at. On the other side of the wormhole were placed the exit holes of thirty of the missile acceleration tubes that had proven so effective in the recent past. Each launcher had thirty missiles accelerating through a three thousand kilometer long tube over and over between an entry and exit wormhole, building up velocity until they hit point nine light.
Now the operator on the other end nudged the wormhole in the Klavarta home system just a bit, lining it up on the aiming point where it was hoped the enemy target would be at the end of the missile flight. Of course they couldn’t actually aim at the ship in question, and there was no guarantee that the vessel they wanted would be in the right place at the right time. And the missiles wouldn’t go active and start vector changes on targets until they were ten light seconds out. But no matter what, this was something that was going to freak these particular Cacas, who had never heard of this trick, right out of their furry hides.
In the tubes, the exit wormhole shrunk to microscopic size and was jerked out of the way of the line of missiles. They flew through the wormhole gate, across over thirty thousand light years of space, and into the Klavarta home system in an instant of time. Nine hundred weapons, each a ship killer, headed for the Caca fleet at point nine light, undetectable, invisible.
* * *
“I demand you let me and my family get on that shuttle right now,” shouted the red faced man who was trying to jump to the front of the line with a woman and three children in tow.
“Back at the end of the line,” growled Tia’lash, the Phlistaran Platoon Sergeant, whose unit was detailed to control the evacuation at this field.
“But, I’m a Pure,” complained the man, turning to look at the huge dracocentauroid. “I…” The words died in his throat as he looked up at the frightening looking alien.
“You’re more important than these other beings?” asked the Sergeant, gesturing to the mostly Alphas and Warriors standing in line, almost exclusively children and youths. He glared down at the clearly uncomfortable man. “Get back at the end of the line.”
“Do you know who I am?” asked the man.
The Yugalyth known as Davin McCarthy cringed as she/it watched the confrontation. She was a copy of a Pure, the one made by Lt. Lila Abernathy. The original had been a student, a young female who still looked like an adolescent. She was sure she would eventually be allowed to board one of the shuttles, but she was also aware of the need to keep a low profile. And this, fool, was here to make things more difficult for all the Pures.
“I know that you are not going to board any of the shuttles at this field,” said the Imperial Marine. “Now get the hell out of the line. Your wife and children may get to the end, and they will be boarded in order. But not you.”
The man opened his mouth to protest again, and found himself looking down the barrel of a particle beam. He grabbed his wife’s hand and pulled her behind him, the children following.
“Where are we going?” the woman whined.
“Someplace where the damned aliens aren’t in control,” he shouted, storming off.
Davin waited for a beam to strike the man and kill him. But the Marines were too disciplined to let anger lead their actions.
Finally, she was waved onto a shuttle. Now the fate of her mission was no longer in her hands, which was worrisome in and of itself. But she was going to get off the moon, which was a good first step.
* * *
“Can you stop the Monsters from destroying our world?” asked Admiral Manstara, sitting in the defense station in orbit around New Earth, taking the place of the now deceased Pure Admiral. He was now the ranking member of the Klavarta military, at least in this system, the first time one of his subspecies had ever held that rank.
“Not a chance, Admiral,” said Natasha Sung.
“But your technology.”
“We would need just about our entire fleet to stop this Ca’cadasan force,” said Sung. “Unfortunately, we are also fighting a war, and our
fleet is scattered all over our space.” And even if we could get them all here at this time, I don’t think we could survive the mauling we would take, not in the long run. The Cacas are still out there on our front as well, and we will surely see more of them in the near future. “We will do what we can, but the most we can promise is to evacuate as many of your people as possible.” Which doesn’t mean all of them. We’ll be lucky if we get half of them.
“Missiles will be in attack range in seven minutes,” called out the Tactical Officer, Marko Fujardo.
Sung grimaced as she looked at the holo, which was an almost exact duplicate of the ones on all of the other Imperial ships in the system. The formation of light cruisers and destroyers were less than a minute from contact with the missiles. Five light minutes behind them was the barrier of defensive platforms in far orbit around the gas giant, almost in the perfect position to take on the incoming weapons. And behind them, the massive defensive battery of the Klavarta.
“And where are the evacuation ships?” cried the Admiral.
Sung grimaced at the tone of the question, as well as the fact that they had explained this to the Admiral and his staff just a couple of hours ago.
“Those missiles are going to come in seeking the first target they can find, Admiral. And we do not want ships full of refugees in the way.”
“Acceptable losses,” said the Klavarta Admiral. “We are willing to pay the price to get more of our people out of here. Instead of wasting time.”
“The losses are not acceptable to us, Admiral,” said Sung, shaking her head. “Those are our ships you are talking about. Now, if you want to complain to our Admiral, and demand that your own ships continue the evacuation, you can do so. But I advise against it.”
“The missile defense ships are engaging the incoming ma’am,” called out the Tactical Officer.
“I’ll talk to you when this is over, Admiral. Sung out.”
She turned away from the now fading holo and turned her full attention to the Tactical Plot. The icons of the Caca missiles looked like a tidal wave about to overwhelm a shore. Green icons, thousands of them, were leaving the missile defense ships, launched from the cells on their hulls. The waves met, and red arrows started to fall off the plot, as well as the green. At least three green were disappearing for every red, which was not a good sign. Counters were missing, and then self destructing when there was nothing for them to target. Or going off on closest approaches. There were direct hits as well, counters detonating within meters of the target. And some proximity kills, where a counter went off close enough to a Caca weapon to overload its systems and send it spinning out of control.
The duel went on for thirty seconds, the ships firing their lasers as the missiles closed to within fifteen light seconds. Now it was beam weapons trying to hit missiles that had gone into full evasive maneuvers. Eight hundred more were killed, and the remaining thirty-seven thousand closed, most passing through the screen, about a thousand going for the Imperial ships that had not been in their original targeting profile.
Thirty-six thousand missiles continued on, while the plasma of nine light cruisers and nineteen destroyers spread in the space behind them. They flew for about another minute before the hundreds of defense platforms scattered to their front starting cycling their counter missiles or releasing swarms from their launcher cells. Again it was a duel, with missiles doing everything they could to avoid contact, the platforms trying to determine the pattern of the evasives and nailing the weapons.
Twenty-one thousand weapons made it through, while taking out about two hundred of the platforms. Now there was nothing the Imperials had placed in their way, except for the exploration ships and the few warships in orbit. But New Earth was not helpless. The Klavarta had platforms in space, almost ten thousand of them, as well as some ships, and even ground based weapons. They all opened up on the missiles when they were a light minute from impact. First a couple of hundred missiles fell off the plot, then hundreds more, then thousands, until it looked like most of the wave was going to be stopped. The bright pinpoints of antimatter blasts speckled the sky like a fireworks display as the last couple of thousand weapons moved in, leaving behind about half the Klavarta defensive platforms.
Everything that could fire on them was now putting out as much firepower as possible, some to the point of burning out. Ground based weapons made to take on capital ships fired wide beams into the path of missiles, and hundreds detonated as gigawatt laser beams struck for a microsecond. Three score of weapons came streaking in, seeking their targets. Two of the Klavarta cruiser class ships went up in spreading plasma. Two Klavarta liners that had refused to leave until they were fully loaded went up as missiles rushed through their nonexistent defenses, vaporizing them and their passengers. They had warned the Klavarta not to have any of their evacuation vessels in orbit when the barrage came in. The captains of those two liners had ignored the warning, and sixty thousand evacuees had paid for it.
The superbattleship Prince Henry rocked from a trio of near misses. And the Santa Maria took two hits, the second a redundancy that did little but spread the plasma out a little faster.
Sung stared in shock as she watched one of her ships disintegrate with everyone aboard. All the officers she knew, the crewpeople she was familiar with, gone in that microsecond. At least they didn’t feel anything, she thought, though that seemed small consolation to those men and women.
“We are sorry for your loss, Commodore,” said Admiral Manstara as the holo came back to life. “Your losses, I mean. And we lost those two liners with all the people aboard. But the defenses you brought proved their worth.”
“You realize they’re going to hit us with an even more massive barrage, Admiral,” said Sung, staring at the face of the Alpha.
“Yes. I do. Which makes it even more important that we get this evacuation going again.”
As he said that the snout of the first liner poked back through the wormhole. Minutes later a line of ships was coming through, while a second wormhole gate started to expand as framing and negative matter was fed into it.
* * *
The Great Admiral stared with bated breath as he watched his two attacks going in. Against the Klavarta fleet he was at least able to do damage assessment. All of the ships were accelerating his way, trackable by their gravitons. They were also trackable by their disappearing from the plot when they were destroyed and no longer capable of emitting gravitons. Of course, some fell off the plot when sustaining major damage to their drive systems, but those ships were as good as destroyed in the long run.
Now they were tracking their missiles against the habitable moon and the vessels and stations around it. None of those objects were emitting gravitons, and they were still about forty light minutes away, which meant they would only be able to visually observe the attack long after the fact.
“They seem to be taking out a lot of our missiles from range, my Lord,” stated the Tactical Officer.
“But is that because they are able to engage at that range, or do they have ships stationed out there?” asked the Chief of Staff.
There really wasn’t an answer to that question, only the observation that multiple thousands of the missiles were falling off the plot. The same thing happened minutes later, and the Admiral thought it must be because they had run into another layer of defense. Then they were heading into the orbit of the moon, and most of the rest of the missiles fell off the plot, then the rest.
“How in the hell did we do?” asked the Admiral, not really sure how they had done. He didn’t think enough missiles had gotten through to do much damage, and wished that he had launched ten times that amount in the first volley.
“Another volley, my Lord?” asked the Tactical Officer.
The Great Admiral stared at the holo for a moment longer, holding down the rage. Those impossible attack craft had hit one of his logistics groups and hurt him badly. He had also lost several hundred warships to them, and really wasn’t sure t
hat he had hit them back at all.
“A hundred and fifty thousand missiles,” he finally said. “Set to go after whatever target presents itself, no matter the distance from the moon.”
It didn’t take long to send that volley on its way, not with twenty thousand warships firing. Only half of his force fired, a full volley each, and the wave was on the way. He was sure this one would crush that moon and whatever shipping and orbital infrastructure it had around it.
“Missile volley from Klavarta fleet to contact in seven minutes,” called out the Tactical Officer.
The Great Admiral grunted and turned back to look at the tactical holo, which showed the wave of Klavarta missiles heading toward them, and a minute back another equally massive wave, and another behind that, until twelve complete clouds of weapons headed at them. It was a smart move in a way, since missiles were more effective at long range as they built up velocity. It would have been smarter to stagger their acceleration profiles so that all of them came in at the Ca’cadasan fleet in one wave. They had not done that, and the Great Admiral had no doubt that his force would handle each wave. He would still lose ships, but not that many.
* * *
Wallace cursed under her breath as the seventh wave of missiles from the Klavarta fleet impacted the Caca force. Or it might be better to say that they were not impacting the Caca fleet. The Cacas might have lost a hundred ships, for a cost of eight hundred thousand weapons. It was a waste in all respects.
And a hundred and fifty thousand weapons were heading her way. She had no illusions as to the ability of her defenses to stop that wave. And if they did, there would be another one after it. There really was no way to win this battle. The only measure that counted was how many people they got away before the Cacas killed them.
“We need more shuttles,” she said into the com.
“We don’t have any more to give you,” replied Grand High Admiral Sondra McCullom over the com. “We’re in the process of sending you some more liners and freighters, as well as nine old battleships that can take about forty thousand people each. And, course, several thousand more of the volunteer private craft from the various supersystem star systems.”
Exodus: Empires at War: Book 9: Second Front Page 35
