“I know, sir,” said Mei, her smile growing. “I gave his Majesty his own as a gift, since he seemed to like mine so much.”
“That is the other thing, Admiral,” said Mgonda. “The Emperor will be announcing his wedding to Duchess Coventry as soon as he gets back to the capital. The wedding will occur a week after his arrival, and he has requested your presence.”
“I don’t see how I could, Admiral. My command….”
“Can probably do without you for a day or two. Which is all the time it will take for you to come in by gate, attend the wedding, and take a portal back to your command. Not like the old days, Admiral, when you would have been away for two or three weeks. So pick the commodore you want in charge while you’re gone, and make your preparations to come to Jewel. That’s an order from on high, and not one I want to try to disobey.”
“Yes, sir,” said Mei, laughing.
“Keep up the good work, Admiral. And someday you might be in my position. Or even CNO. Mgonda out.”
The holo went blank, and Mei shooed the cat away from her sandwich. Not that she felt very hungry after hearing all of the news Mgonda had given her. But she had to fuel her body, so she took another bite of sandwich.
Sean and the Doctor, she thought as she ate. They were already engaged, but we all thought the actual marriage would be at least another year in the future. I guess the idea of an heir has come up, and it would be a good idea for Sean to get one into the world, if he plans to keep leading from the front.
“I would like to talk with Commodore Lacy,” she told her com officer over the link. And won’t he be surprised by the bomb I’m about to drop on him.
* * *
Commodore Bryce Suttler sat in his captain’s chair and watched as the enemy force translated into normal space. In the past, such an event would be the signal for his six stealth/attack ships to get ready to engage. At this point that would be suicide. There were over a thousand ships coming, according to the reports of the Battle Fleet Scout Force. The survivors of the Battle of Congreeve. They were mad as hornets, and looking for something to smash. Since Suttler did not have orders to attack them, he decided that discretion called for him to sit and watch, and send his observations back to headquarters.
This might be my last time commanding one of these ships, he thought, wishing he did have a target he could stalk and kill. News of his permanent promotion to Commodore had come through the day before, and he hadn’t been given the option to refuse. And just how do you refuse a promotion that came down from the hand of the Emperor himself? he thought, realizing that there really was no way to do so. But he wanted to stay in the ships, and there was no place for a commodore aboard one of the small vessels that normally operated singly, or at most in teams of two.
They promised me I could stay in command of Seastag, he thought, looking at the plot that showed the enemy ships congregating where one of their stations used to be, a station his ships had destroyed. But I know how these things work. Contingencies of war, needs of the Fleet. I could find myself sitting a desk for the rest of the war. And it is totally beyond my control.
“Another group is translating in,” called out Suttler’s Tactical Officer, Lieutenant SG Walter Ngovic. “This one looks to be mostly those big battleships of theirs.”
Suttler grunted, and looked over at his Com Officer to see that worthy sending the information up the line. The first two enemy forces had been made up of mostly four million ton supercruisers, with a scattering of their scout ships. He had expected more scouts, and had informed command of his thoughts. They had told him that the enemy scout ships had taken inordinate casualties in the battle.
“How many do we have, Ngovic?” he asked his officer.
“Looks like almost a hundred in this group. Some of them are sending out abnormal hyperdrive resonances, probably battle damage, so I’m having a hard time singling all of them out.”
“That’s OK, Tactical,” said Bryce, nodding. “We’ll get a visual count on them soon. Any look like they’re coming into our backyard?”
“No, sir,” said Ngovic, shaking his head. “I’m pretty sure they don’t know we’re here. They all seem to be vectoring toward that one gathering point.”
And if I were them, and came back to a system that didn’t have the assets still in place that I had left there, I would be fanning out on a search pattern as soon as I could get organized. But at the moment they looked to be safe, sitting half a light hour away from the gathering point.
An hour later everything changed. “I was afraid of this,” said Ngovic, pointing to the tactical plot that showed hundreds of enemy ships starting to fan out in teams, their sensors on full power as they tried to ferret out the invisible vessels they had to know were in the system.
“Move us further out,” ordered Suttler, leaning forward in his chair. “Slowly. Send orders to the other ships to do the same.”
Besides Seastag he only had two other ships in his immediate group. The other three were five light hours away, across the system, but in instantaneous com link through the wormholes.
“Some of the enemy ships are moving out from the gathering point,” said Ngovic. “We have translations back into hyper.”
And that means they will be moving around the outer fringes of the system and translating back, so they can try and catch us. Suddenly Suttler was not so sure that his dispositions had been wise. That maybe they would have been better served to have sat another five light hours out, or even further.
* * *
Captain the Duke Maurice von Rittersdorf didn’t really like the placement of his command in the screen around the Conundrum System. Not that they were close in, because compared to many of the scout force ships James Komorov was actually pretty far out, five light years from the star system. No, it was the orientation of his ship, and the other four destroyers that formed his part of the picket. They were on a direct path from the border region the Cacas were known to come through, all the way in to Conundrum. As such, they were likely to see a lot of traffic coming up the pike. That wasn’t the problem, as it showed that the powers that be trusted him and his command.
The real problem was that his was the only wormhole equipped ship in his command, and as such the only one that had a connection back to headquarters. His other ships were spread out in a pattern to catch any signals that Komorov might miss. But since they didn’t have a wormhole com, the only way they could communicate was by either subspace com, or by grav pulse. Subspace com was very short ranged, not more than a light month. Grav pulse could be heard out to a few light months, and gave away the presence and location of the transmitting ship.
Which meant that effectively he had the only ship that could detect and send their information up the line.
It was bitch enough sneaking in here, he thought, remembering a tense couple of days at hyper I to get to their final translation point. Then translation, then waiting several hours to see if anything had detected them and was going to jump back into hyper and come after them. They had never heard that translation, which didn’t mean that something hadn’t picked them up and crept away out of detection range. It’s enough to drive someone mad, all this guess work. And we live or die with good or bad guesses.
“We’re picking up ships coming in from anti-spinward,” called out the Tactical Officer, giving the direction up the Perseus arm as it curved away from the Galactic disc. The direction of the Ca’cadasan Empire.
“How many do you have?”
“Looks like twenty-two. No, make that twenty three contacts. Seven of them are capital ships.”
They followed the contacts for the next couple of hours, until they had moved out of detection range. But an hour after that there were more contacts, coming out of the system and heading directly anti-coreward. “It looks like they’re not going to hunker down completely,” said von Rittersdorf, watching the ships on the plot. “Would have been nice if they had.”
Of course the Cacas were the aggressors
in this war, and were probably not comfortable going completely on the defensive. And there was still a lot of lightly defended Imperial space out there. Easy pickings for Caca task forces. Unless the information we get to HQ can be developed into an intercept, he thought, watching as the contacts moved away and off the plot.
“We want you to configure your wormhole into a delivery gate,” came the command from headquarters later that day. “We have some special weapons for you.”
Maurice sent out the order to engineering to configure the hole they used for com, after moving it to the forward missile magazine, which was almost empty after the weapons they had expended in the running battle to and from the Congreeve system.
The first of the reloads came through, only they weren’t exactly the kind of missile they had already used up, the hyper VII/normal space dual drive they had used in the battle. These were slightly longer, and a little more massive.
Maurice pulled up the schematics on the missiles as they came across, a smile on his face. These will do nicely, he thought, looking over the specs, which included a more efficient crystal matrix battery system.
Three hours after taking the first missile aboard, James Komorov was deploying the first twenty of the weapons, making room for more. The missiles boosted out under minimal power, coming to rest several light minutes from the launching ship, set in a semicircle that covered most of the approaches to the system. They powered down after decelerating to a stop, the only system still working the com feed that would accept orders from its launching ship.
Now we just have to get the orders to use them, thought the destroyer force commander. He for one couldn’t wait to spring the surprise on some Caca ships that wandered into the trap fat and sassy.
* * *
Great Admiral Miierrowanasa M’tinisasitow growled deep in his throat as he looked at the system he had made his headquarters. A system that had contained two of the giant base stations they had needed to support their conquest. One was to have moved to another system. One was to have stayed here. And now, according High Admiral Kellissaran Jarkastarin, his subordinate and rival, both had been destroyed by the cursed invisible attack ships of the humans.
I should have left a larger defensive force here, he thought, standing with his upper arms crossed over his deep chest, lower arms clasping their hands behind his back. He looked back at the armed males that were his bodyguards, scowling at their presence, here, looking at his shame. I shouldn’t have stuck my horns into that damned trap in the first place, he thought, turning and throwing his goblet at the wall. It hit the hard alloy and bounced way, liquid flying everywhere. And I don’t even get the satisfaction of a good shattering.
“Throwing a tantrum will help nothing,” said an accursed voice from the doorway.
The Great Admiral spun and pointed both right index fingers at the other officer. “How dare you come here,” he growled.
High Admiral Jarkastarin stood there with both sets of arms crossed to his front. His body language showed his challenge to the authority of the Grand Admiral. Normally that would have resulted in an attack by one male or another, if they had been lower ranking youths. As high ranking adults they were expected to keep their emotions under control, despite the pheromones that were filling the room. Even the guards were bristling at the heavy scent of male aggressiveness that was part of the genetic heritage of their species.
“How dare you come here, Kellissaran,” yelled the Great Admiral, his fists clenched.
“I have every right to be here, on this ship,” said the other Admiral in a cold voice. “I am, after all, nobly born, and a friend of the Emperor.”
“A hanger on is all you are. And you have no authority on my flagship.”
“You have failed, Miierrowanasa,” said the other officer. “The Emperor gave you the sacred duty to crush these vermin, and you have failed. I warned you about trying to fight the decisive battle, when you should have simply fanned out and crushed as many of their systems as possible.”
“And I told you, such a strategy was doomed to failure, as it allowed this enemy to pick and choose targets of opportunity. We would be bled from a thousand cuts.”
“And look at your conquest force now, oh Great Admiral M’tinisasitow,” snarled the other male, glancing at the Great Admiral’s guards, who had interposed their bodies between himself and his rival. “It lies in ruins before you, the once great force, now only a shadow of itself.”
“Leave me,” roared the Great Admiral. “Before I have you arrested for insubordination.”
The other male glared for a moment, then turned to walk away. “The Emperor will be notified of your actions, Great Admiral,” said the High Admiral as he stalked away. “And I will have your position.”
The Great Admiral stared down the corridor for minutes after his rival had walked away. He was tempted to send males to have him arrested. Maybe even assassinated. He gave a head gesture of negation at that thought. The High Admiral did have many friends at court, and many allies in the conquest fleet. The Great Admiral was afraid that doing anything to the powerful male might lead to a revolt in his fleet, and then there would be literal hell to pay when the Emperor found out. A commander who could not keep his subordinates in line was of no use to the Empire.
Hours later the Great Admiral was sitting at his desk when a priority com came through. “Great Admiral. We have reports of multiple hyper tracks from around the system. It appears the humans are putting a scout picket around us.”
I would, were I them, thought the senior Ca’cadasan. “Are they staying in hyper? Or dropping down into normal space?”
“Dropping down into normal space, as near as we can tell,” said the officer on the other end of the com. “Do you want us to sweep space for them.”
“I can’t see where that would do any good,” said the Admiral, imagining the huge volume of normal space within light years of the system. “They will just hide, without giving off the kind of emissions we would need to find them.” And they’ve probably got enough of those damned invisible ships around us anyway. “Any word on the system sweeps?”
“So far, nothing, my Lord,” said the officer. “But we have to this point covered so little of the system.”
“Well, keep looking.” Though I really doubt we will find anything.
An hour later a human was brought before the Great Admiral. A young male, not an imposing physical specimen, but one with intelligence shining from his eyes.
“And what are you bringing this one to me for?” asked the Great Admiral of one of his science advisors.
“This is Doctor Ivan Smirnov,” said the advisor, as if those words would mean anything to the Admiral. “He was working on the New Moscow wormhole project.”
The Admiral’s ears perked up when he heard that word. “The small power had its own project?”
“Tell him,” said the Science Advisor, tapping the human in the back.
“Well, yes, er, my Lord,” said the man in a tremulous voice. “We didn’t want the Empire to be the only ones producing wormholes.”
“I thought a black hole was needed to make these constructs,” said the Great Admiral, leaning over his desk. Seated, he still towered over the human.
“The black hole is needed to generate the energy, my Lord,” said the human. “But not for the actual generation of the hole. We were working on building up an industrial planet for the same purpose. Sort of like the generating complexes needed for supermetal production. We couldn’t make as many of them in a specified time period as the Imperials could, maybe one a week. But we also found that the Imperials were using more energy than they needed to form their holes.”
“How, much more?” asked the Great Admiral, clasping his upper hands on the desk.
“Twenty percent. Maybe more.”
So, we could make wormholes without having to spend a century building a station around a black hole, thought the grinning Admiral, the implications of such obvious. They couldn’t make n
ear as many as the humans, and probably couldn’t use them in so many ways. But a ship gate back to a major fleet system was just one of the many advantages it would give them. We could send reinforcements through whenever we wanted, without having to run the gauntlet of the human fleet. And instantaneous communications with headquarters. That last could be a double edged sword, as sometimes it was better for headquarters to be months away.
“And what do you want for this knowledge?”
“Safety for myself and my family,” said the human, dropping his eyes to the floor.
“Anything else?”
“I don’t care for anyone else in the whole damned kingdom,” said the human, raising his pain filled eyes to look into those of the Ca’cadasan. “Or the Empire or Republic. Just get me and my family to safety, and you can do what you want with everyone else.”
The Great Admiral stared at the man for a moment, forcing the human to look back at the floor. It was something no Ca’cadasan would do, sell out his own people for safety. But, as he was learning, the human species was a contradiction in thought and behavior.
“Very well,” said the Admiral, looking at his Advisor. “I want this male and his family members on a ship back to the Empire immediately. With a strong escort.”
“Are you sure you want to spare the ships?” asked another officer who was in the chamber.
“We need this technology,” said the Great Admiral, glaring at the officer. “It may be the most important gift to fall our way, and I want to see it safely in the hands of our own scientists.” As poor as they may be, he thought. The Ca’cadasan version of scientists were those males too old to still serve in the military. Unlike the human model, where young people with flexible minds were in the positions of discovery.
“Yes, my Lord,” agreed the Advisor, giving a head nod of accent. “We’ll put him on a supercruiser and get him to our space. With an escort of another cruiser.”
“Double the number of cruisers,” ordered the Great Admiral. “And add double their number of scouts. And they are to go through the remains of the smaller kingdom.” The Admiral was well aware that some of his ships were disappearing in transit through the corridor that most of them traversed to get to the front.
Exodus: Empires at War: Book 7: Counter Strike Page 12
