Exodus: Empires at War: Book 12: Time Strike

by Doug Dandridge

  “My Lord. The other warp fighter wing is coming at us. ETA, forty-one seconds.”

  “Prepare to fire counters to intercept. And all ships are to fire all missile tubes facing when they are five seconds from intercept. All ships are to close up as best as they can before they strike.”

  The tactical and com officers both gave head motions of acknowledgement and went to their tasks. The high admiral watched the objects on the plot coming closer, wondering if his improvised defense would do any good, or if they would again fly over his formation with impunity.

  * * *

  “Admiral. Second warp fighter wing has struck and flown through. They report losing nine of their ships to enemy fire.”

  Len cursed under his breath, something he had been doing a lot of lately. He knew the enemy would figure out something. Even a species as slow as the Cacas had their exceptional thinkers, and unfortunately they seemed to have one in charge here.

  “How many enemy ships did they take out?”

  “They killed seventy-one enemy ships, including seven battleships this time. They damaged another forty-one.”

  Len almost cursed again, reminding himself that not everything was going to go his way. Killing battleships meant that multiple missiles had hit each ship. That was the only way they could account for killing one of those big bastards. While a clear kill was a plus, he would have rather have had twenty-eight or so battleships damaged and falling behind where they were still easy kills.

  “The wing commander is reporting that they will try something different this time, just to change it up. She also reports that the enemy did close up on that attack, and as far as they can tell, they are closing up their formation even more.”

  “Yes,” shouted Len, slapping his hand on the arm of his chair. Closing up the formation really didn’t do any good for the warp fighters, but it would help significantly for the next thing coming.

  He watched the plot as the fighters headed for the enemy, then turned at the last second and shot to the rear. Two more shifts in three seconds and they were closing on the Cacas from behind. More icons blinked on the plot, some disappearing, others losing acceleration. And three more fighters were gone. It had worked. Maybe not as much as they could have hoped, but it had worked.

  And what will they have in place the next time we fight them? he thought. He liked playing with the new toys, but it had been planned that the first the Cacas would see of them was when the Fleet was pushing into their space. Now the enemy would know some more of what they had, and would develop countermeasures for it. The old game was played, invent, deploy, then get ready for the countermove. It was a constant fight to stay ahead of the enemy. He knew about some of the new weapons and equipment on the board, not ready for deployment, maybe four months or so from that point. And with that they would jump ahead again.

  At least they’ll never catch us in wormhole production, he thought, remember what Director Yu had told the Admiralty. It would take at least a decade for the Cacas to come up with the manufacturing planets to match the Donut. And they would still be so far behind in inventory that they would never catch up.

  “First warp fighter wing is reporting that they are approaching the carriers,” called out one of the com techs.

  They would mate with the carriers, be rearmed, and would be heading back into the system within ten minutes. Or at least that’s how long it had taken in training. They could only hope it would take about the same time in the real deal.

  “First wave of inertialess fighters are coming into range. Strike in one minute, thirty-one seconds.”

  Now this would be something to see. The inertialess fighters could still only do point two light, and they still had to decel down to their entry speed before they could drop their bubble. They were old new, compared to the new warp fighters. Still, the Empire could produce eight of them for every warp fighter, and they were about to show the Cacas a new wrinkle.

  “Sir, we’re picking up the background signals of the Caca inertialess fighters. They’re close, and starting to decel. They’ll be within striking range in eighteen minutes.”

  “That fast?” exclaimed Len. They had launched their fighters well after he had launched his, and that meant they had a higher top speed. An improvement on what the Empire had, something to be expected at times. The enemy was always trying to compete at every level, technology, strategy, production, and sometimes they would win one of the fights. Now to see if they had solved the problem of finding a target that wasn’t where you expected it to be. Something his own inertialess fighters had solved, thanks to the singular beings they carried aboard.

  * * *

  “Enemy inertialess fighters on approach,” shouted out the tactical officer. “Something’s wrong, my Lord. The distance resonances are changing too fast.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t think they are decelerating, my Lord. The resonances match a velocity still well above light speed.”

  “What the hell can they be thinking?” It was known that it was a disaster for craft to come out of the negative matter bubble at a higher velocity than they went in. And since they had to be going slower than light when they went in, any warp drop above light speed would result in the maximum inertial rebound possible. Due to the effects of the quantum foam that made up the universe, the highest the rebound could possibly be was just below light speed, enough that all the matter of the ship would convert to energy, just as if it were made of antimatter.

  “It could be a suicide attack, my Lord,” answered the tactical officer. “I know humans don’t usually engage in those, but we have records of them doing so when they fled their home system.”

  The high admiral didn’t think so. He had seen the videos from that event. Those were desperate times, and the only way the human refugee ship could get away was if some of their warships rammed the Ca’cadasan pursuit vessels. No, there was something else going on here, and he was sure he was not going to like it.

  “When you think they are close enough,” he told the tactical officer, “all ships will put out all the defensive fire they can.”

  The male gave a head motion of acknowledgement and went back to staring at his board. Inertialess fighters didn’t warp space. Very small objects that hit their negative matter bubbles would disappear, taking an equal amount of the negative matter with them. Larger objects would penetrate the bubble and most likely strike the ship within. So the tactic was to put up as much fire as possible. The area was large, the targets small, and the chances of a hit to any one remote. But some might still be hit, and that was better than nothing.

  At what he thought was the proper moment the tactical officer shouted the command for all ships to fire. Every weapon aboard came to life; lasers, particle beams, offensive and counter missiles, even close in magrail projectile weapons, filling space with obstacles to run into. Moments after launch the missiles detonated, spreading plasma and particles through space, the only way they could possibly get a hit on one of the fast-moving fighters.

  And then it happened. An enormous blast ripped through space, well away from any of the ships, far from the fleet, and registering in the four pentaton range, the equivalent of four thousand of the one gigaton shipkiller warheads most missiles carried.

  More explosions rippled through space in less than a second, two thousand of them. Over a thousand detonated where they did little harm other than sending heat and radiation out in a globe around them. Some did minor damage to closer ships, others nothing at all. But almost a thousand detonated within the close packed mass of the fleet.

  Normally the ships would have been twenty kilometers apart or further. Now they were within ten kilometers of each other, and the four pentaton blasts went off among them. Over five hundred ships came apart, too close to the detonations to survive the flash of heat, even if there wasn’t much in the way of concussive effect. Two thousand more took damage serious enough to reduce their acceleration significantly. In one strike,
the Caca fleet was crippled. And another wave was coming in behind the first.

  * * *

  Again the fleet was gathered by the wormhole gates, moving one through each every thirty seconds. Len watched the egress of his force from the space, back to the rally system, where they would enter more gates to go to the next system where battle would be joined.

  The new weapon systems had won the fight. A few of the enemy ships had escaped the system and made it to hyper VII. He had sent enough of his VII ships after them to keep a watch to make sure they didn’t get up to any mischief.

  He hadn’t gotten off without loss. The decoy fleet had been a total loss, although all of the crews had gotten away. The habitable planet had taken three hits, and now its surface was a hellish landscape of magma and spewing volcanoes. It would return to habitable state in a score of years, though the only samples of the life that had spawned there were in Republic cryo-storage.

  The Caca inertialess fighters had missed the mark, the first time. But they kept trying, and he had lost some ships to them. He had lost more to the Caca missile storm, though not as many as he had feared. Over seven thousand ships, fully capable, only needing missile resupply, had made it through, and they would form the nucleus of his next force, fighting an even larger Caca fleet in another system. And after that? Another fight. And another, until this invasion force was defeated and the Republic secure.

  Taking a last look at the viewer he wondered how his friend Mgonda was doing on the Fenri front.

  * * *

  “We are looking over the data from the battle lost on the flank,” said the chief of staff, walking up to the great admiral of the bridge of the flagship.

  “And?”

  “They hit us with a couple of new weapons. One was those new warp ships of theirs.”

  “And how are they different than the other impossible ships they use?”

  “The inertialess fighters don’t really warp space, my Lord,” spoke up the tactical officer from his station. “They cut themselves off from our universe in a field that’s similar to warp, but not exactly the same. Then they accelerate at an incredible rate. Just like the ones we now have.”

  “Very good, youngling,” said the chief of staff with a sneer. “Now, if you will let your betters speak.” The chief of staff turned a quick glare toward the tactical officer, then bowed to his superior. “He is correct on that aspect. The warp ships they used against us use a very different means of propulsion. They don’t actually move.”

  “Then how in the hell do they get from A to B so fast?” growled the great admiral.

  “They warp the space before them, shortening it to the front, then lengthening it behind, in a narrow corridor. Like a bead running down a cord. And as far as we can tell, they are not cut off from the universe like the inertialess fighters. They can track and be tracked.”

  “For all the good it did us,” said the admiral with a grimace.

  “They can be killed, if we put enough out there to hit them. The problem is, the warp field acts like a singularity for just a moment, crushing and then ripping the mass apart. But anything large enough will still get enough matter through to cause considerable damage. If they hit a planet or a ship, they are gone. If they hit a missile, that’s all for them.”

  “So, all we have to do is lure them into hitting a planet?” scoffed the admiral. “And what about their weapons?”

  “They seem to use the same drive as the ships. They turn off their drives for a moment, lock onto a target, then go back into warp. Since they get there in less than a second, it’s hard for them to miss. They don’t carry momentum, which is a good thing, my Lord. First of all, it would violate the laws of physics, since nothing can carry that much momentum, not multiple times the speed of light. So they don’t do as much damage as a ship killer missile. Still, the warp field disrupts enough of the armor of the warship that the warhead goes off deep inside the ship. With a scout, they actually blow up inside the vessel. A battleship? They might get through the armor, or they might not. Unfortunately, we don’t have any ships to look at to see if my conjecture is accurate.”

  The great admiral stood there making a head motion of denial. He thought it more unfortunate that they didn’t have the ships, not that they didn’t have something to study. He thought his chief of staff thought too much like a researcher, which was not a compliment in Ca’cadasan society, since those males were the ones with above average intelligence and below average physicality, not fit to be warriors.

  “The good news is we will be able to duplicate these ships in the near future, so the humans will have to deal with their own invention in our hands.”

  “And that does me no good during this offensive, you dolt,” roared the admiral, advancing on the male, then stopping himself before he could strike out in anger. He needed this male, whose insight was greater than anyone else’s in his command. He stood there for a moment shaking, noting through his rage that the male didn’t seem to be afraid. Another instance of his insight and intuition. The great admiral looked away. His anger should be directed at the insufferable humans, who, though brave enough, didn’t fight like warriors. Instead of pitting their power against an enemy, they tried to outthink their foe. And they were very good at that.

  “What about their other weapon? Those impossibly powerful warheads?”

  The great admiral almost laughed at himself. So many times they called the human weapons impossible. But if they worked, they were not impossible. The humans had a knack of looking at things that were very difficult and making them work.

  “Those are not new tech, not really,” said the other male. “We know about inertial rebound from our own tests of the fighters. What goes into the field must come out of the field with the same inertial energy. If they come out with more, we get an enormous rebound of energy, and the ship is destroyed.”

  “And if they come out with less?”

  “Not as spectacular, my Lord. Not to the common observer, but to those on the ship, just as deadly. All of the vibrational energy of the matter stops, dead, and it falls apart.”

  “But not a very good weapon.”

  “No, my Lord. Really just a very expensive method of suicide. But these new missiles take advantage of that inertial rebound by going into transit with their fighters at a very low velocity, then coming out at a very high velocity. Essentially, I believe the matter is converted to energy, much like a matter/antimatter explosion. But we’re talking a hundred tons of conversion here, making it more powerful than our quark warheads, and much smaller. But also not very accurate.”

  “Which they really don’t have to be with that much power,” said the great admiral, thinking about what a disaster it would be if they ever solved the accuracy problem. “And from what I heard, our inertialess fighters didn’t do well either.”

  “No, my Lord, they didn’t. They couldn’t find the targets. If we had some of the instantaneous communications assets the humans have we might be able to rectify that.”

  And those resources are a species from we know not where, thought the admiral. They had no idea how that species worked the miracle they did. And until they had some to study, they would never have any idea. The problem was capturing any of the enemy. The opponent didn’t like to surrender to the Ca’cadasans, and the admiral didn’t blame them for that. If he were in their place, he wouldn’t want to surrender either.

  * * *

  “I understand that the warp fighters performed to expectations, Admiral,” said the young man looking out of the holo.

  “If I had ten thousand of them I could kick the Cacas out of the Republic in a day,” said Lenkowski, talking around the stem of his pipe. “As it was, we still have to kill most of them the old-fashioned way, which let them kill entirely too many of my people.”

  “I’m afraid it’s going to be that way for the entire war, Admiral.”

  “They can’t stop the damned fighters,” said Len, his voice rising. “So why don’t we build
a hundred thousand of the damned things and kill their fleets?”

  “Calm yourself, Admiral. You know as well as I do that the warp effect is useless in hyperspace. There’s nothing to prevent them from translating in and sending waves of missiles against our planets. They might not be willing to do that now, but if we give them no other choice of tactics, they might resort to that. And eventually they’re going to have warp fighters as well. It’s really old technology, and Chan said she would have been surprised if they didn’t have something like it in their past.”

  “And when they start making them, we’re in the shit,” growled Len. Why did things have to change so much? Wouldn’t it be better if they were still fighting the war his grandfather had?

  “Oh, we have a way of stopping them,” said the Emperor. “And this is to not leave this com, Admiral. Understood?”

  “Understood.” Len prepared himself for the bad news he knew was coming. Nothing ever came without a price, after all.

  “We do know of a defense against the warp ships. It’s big and expensive, and only large warships will be able to carry it, unless someone comes up with a way to miniaturize it. Which won’t happen in the near future.”

  “So, when they develop warp fighter, we have a way to stop them,” said Len, nodding. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “Except then they will know that we have a way to stop warp fighters, and the missiles they fire. And from there they will be able to develop a method of their own.”

  “Making our fighters useless,” grunted Len, knocking his pipe on the ashtray on his desk.

  “Not useless. We’ll have to figure out new tactics for them, and they will always be useful for scouting. But they will no longer be the wonder weapon, and we will be back to slugging it out, heavy ship to heavy ship.”