“We could warn the planet,” said the chief of the security detail. “If they know it is coming they will be able to locate it and stop it.”
Sean shook his head. The agent was trying to help, but he didn’t really understand what was going on, not having been briefed on exactly what was happening here. No message they could send would reach the world months in the past. Only one sent through this wormhole would get there, and at the moment Stumpfield controlled it.
“Get me Director Yu, now. And figure out how to get through this door.”
“But they threatened to…”
“Not to do it, yet. But we need to know how to get through if we need to. So figure it out.”
* * *
“Do you not see, Xavier Jackson?” said Klorasoft, tentacles pointing at the tactical holo. “They are approaching the nexus of the change in the timeline. Too many lives will go on that wouldn’t have otherwise. The stars are becoming unstable, their gravities shifting. If this happens, the stars in orbit around this black hole will render their worlds lifeless. And you will lose, just as we lost all those millennia ago.”
“I agree that you need to stop the launch, but you don’t need to destroy the station.”
“When we fire on the missile launcher they will know that we are here,” said Klorasoft, his tentacles waving his agitation. “We will only have minutes to close with the station, get within range of our beam, and destroy it as well. And they will be firing on us the entire way. So, no, we cannot afford to let this chance pass. Or your foolish race will try again, and disaster will again strike.”
“But this ship?”
“Is more powerful than anything that you have, yes. More powerful than your entire force? Probably not. And then there are these.”
The holo showed a large object, as long as a battleship, though easily twice the width.
“We think these are laser weapons, more powerful than the broadside of fifty of your capital ships. And we can guess that there are more of them aboard the station. Plus, your wormhole launched missiles. We can probably hold out for some time against your weapons, but even our graviton screens will eventually fall.”
“I cannot ask my people to not fight,” said Jackson, his spine stiffening. He liked these people. They were normally very kind, ethical, and more than helpful. But he was not going to help them hurt his Empire.
“Then we will begin the attack on the launcher, and follow with that attack on the station. I am sorry that it has come to this, but it is necessary.”
The captain barked out some orders in their own tongue, and the Ancients on the bridge tensed. The holo changed, zooming in on the missile launcher, with markers showing when they would be within range. Jackson stared at the holo, then looked around the bridge, his gaze landing on several objects that might come into use in the near future. He thought his odds slight, but that had never stopped a Fleet officer before.
* * *
“We’re picking up unknown graviton emissions, sir.”
“Show me,” ordered Admiral Winfield Sung, turning in his command chair. The military control room, the bridge as the military called it, was tapped into all the sensor systems and weapons controls of the great station.
“It’s near this missile launch tube, within four light seconds.”
Sung did the math in his mind, coming up with one million two hundred thousand kilometers. Almost point blank range for a laser shot. But the return itself was faint, and hard to localize.
“Can you get a firmer return?”
“We’re trying, sir. There’s a lot of graviton interference out there. We’re trying to get the closest warship to give us a better look.”
Sung nodded. Graviton emissions were difficult to read in the best of times, which these weren’t. Gravitons couldn’t be captured, they could fly through a light year of solid substance without slowing down. The sensors aboard ships, sitting in special vacuum chambers, registered gravitons as they flew through. It didn’t take many to register, a good thing, since most signals were attenuated by the inverse square law. And most gravitons had resonances imparted by their sources, distinctive resonances. The sensors converted the signals to sounds, almost like music, and a specially trained and talented organic could pick out the distinctive tones and interpret them. From there it was an easy step to get direction. Some likened it to old Earth ocean sonar operators, listening for the engine sounds of enemy ships, trying to pull them from the noises of a living sea.
“Any idea what it might be?”
“All the chief can say is it’s like nothing she had ever heard before.” The officer leaned over his board for a moment, obviously listening to something. “And, it’s gone. But Damocles is on the way to the area. She might be able to develop the contact.”
Sung sat in his chair, chewing on his lower lip. He didn’t know what was out there, and his chair shook under him once again, reminding him that he had another problem on his hands that he didn’t have a clue about. Somedays, even an admiral could wish he were still a duty officer, and that everything didn’t fall on his shoulders.
* * *
“So what the hell is going on, Dr. Yu?” asked Sean, barely controlling his rage. He wasn’t angry at her, though he didn’t like the idea of her and her security chief taking down his agents. He was angry at Stumpfield and Guatarrez for leading him to this place. Oh yes, he was angry at them, but that wasn’t even a fraction of the rage he felt. Most of it was directed at himself, for allowing his feelings to follow such a fool’s hope, to lead his people to disaster. But now was not the time for self-recriminations.
“As far as I can tell, your Majesty, the action your friends are taking is disrupting the time stream. If they complete their plan, we will have a disaster on our hands.”
“But we haven’t done anything yet,” pleaded Sean. “We only have the two ends of the wormhole existing in different times. One isn’t even in our Universe. So what the hell is doing this?”
“I’m not an expert on this, your Majesty. I…”
“Oh, stop with all the honorific ass kissing, Lucille. Just tell me what you know. As far as I can tell, you are the only expert we have outside of that control room, and I wouldn’t trust any of them if they told me space was a vacuum. So, tell me what you think.”
“You have a wormhole anchored in different parts of the time stream. The one here is affecting the black hole with its disruptions. The one in the past is just across a dimensional barrier from Jewel near the time when a momentous event occur, and three hundred million lives were cut from the time stream. So they are also experiencing disruptions. And the disruptions radiate out from there, encompassing all the stars of the Supersystem.”
“But you don’t think anything irreversible will occur if the Caca ship is not taken out?”
“I don’t think so, since the timeline will have been untouched except for us observing the events.”
The station shook again, stronger than before, but still not enough to threaten its destruction. Sean thought that if the Caca ships were destroyed, and the timeline altered, the gravity of the black hole would tear them apart and suck in the pieces. He knew from the legends that the Ancients had a station around the hole, and that it was gone without a trace. Had the same thing happened to it, and if so, why had the stars around it survived?
“The fact is, your… I mean, we just don’t know what will happen if we stop the interference from happening. But I think we can guess what will happen if it does, so the best course of action is to stop it.”
“How much time till they shoot?”
“In six minutes the other end of the wormhole will have passed the time in which the Caca ship entered the system,” said Lucille, looking at a small holo over her board. “They will then have to move it into our dimension in order to be in the same time frame. They could shoot then, or they could wait for up to two days to strike.”
“And what happens if they wait?” asked Sean, his eyes narrowing. �
�Do the fluctuations of the natural laws continue, getting worse by the moment?”
“And again, we don’t know,” said Lucille, obviously biting off the your majesty at the end.
“Your Majesty,” said a voice over the com, just before the holo of Admiral Sung came up on a holo. “We are tracking an unknown object near the missile acceleration tube of interest.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“No, sir. We think it’s a ship of some sort, but we’re having a difficult time getting a firm fix on it. One of our destroyers is heading there to check it out.”
“Admiral. Can you turn off the wormholes in the acceleration tube?”
“I think we can, your Majesty. But it might cause some unintended consequences. The missile will go through the launch wormhole before it’s time.”
“And that would be perfect,” said Yu, nodding. “It will shoot out into the negative time dimension and it will no longer be a problem.”
“We’ll get to working on that, your Majesty,” said the admiral, and the holo died.
“If we can stop them, I’m almost positive everything will go back to normal. But you have to understand, your Majesty. I mean, Sean. Now that we know how it’s done, the temptation will be there to do it again. But this time with more safeguards, if that’s even possible. I would recommend that this never be attempted in the future.”
Sean nodded. He could already see the possibilities, putting the entry wormhole in a system far from any inhabited worlds, then moving the exit hole to a Caca planet. In that case the damage would have to occur to unused real estate and Caca territory. Would that be a workable strategy? Or would something else happen, just as bad. She was right. They must never do this again, if it wasn’t too late to stop it from happening now.
“You Majesty,” came the call from Admiral Sung. “Bad news. We transmitted the code to close those wormholes, to no effect. They’re still open, and we don’t know why.”
“Can you contact the crew aboard?”
There were always people aboard any structure that might be used as a weapon, even if said installation was fully automated. An organic must authorize any action that might cause harm to anything else, machine or organic. A crewmember would have to touch the approval panel. Which meant Stumpfield would have to have someone aboard to do so, and they could have taken down the rest of the crew.
“We have been trying, your Majesty. And so far, no one has answered.”
“We have to stop that launch, Admiral. I am ordering you to destroy that launch tube, with whatever it takes.”
“If we still have people aboard, sir?”
“Then they will become collateral damage, if they are even still alive. But the missile must not launch, or we stand to lose a lot more people.”
“I don’t understand, your Majesty.”
“We don’t have time to explain it now, Admiral. Talk to me or Dr. Yu afterwards. Just do what I’m ordering.” Sean checked the time, and found that it was now only three minutes till the predicted launch time.
“We hadn’t planned on firing on any of our own structures, sir. It might take a few minutes to move the platforms to take the launch tube into their firing arcs. We’re charging them as we speak, so as soon as they have the angle, we can fire.”
Sean stopped himself from cursing. He realized that most beam weapons were not kept at full readiness unless there was a perceived need. And here there hadn’t been. There hadn’t been a perceived need for the kind of security in place now before the Caca strike in the Supersystem either. Sean made a determination at that moment to make some changes. If they lived past this event, that was.
“Can the Damocles destroy the launch tube?” he asked the admiral.
“She could, but any missile she fired would take minutes to get there, and her lasers aren’t powerful enough,” replied the admiral, setting off more cursing from the monarch.
“We still have time,” said Yu, reaching across the table and laying a hand on Sean’s forearm. “If we can knock it out before the shot, everything will be fine.”
Sean looked in the director’s eyes and could tell that she wasn’t sure about what she was saying. It was only a hope. At that moment the station shook, and this time it was much stronger than before.
“Director Yu,” came a call over the station com. “That last shock tore some of the inward facing from the station. The material is on a fast course into the black hole.”
“How the hell could that happen?” blurted Sean. He wasn’t an expert on the station, but he knew it was a sturdy construction, and that pieces shouldn’t be falling off of it unless the pull reached many times what it was.
“We’re still a patchwork of repairs after a couple of attacks,” said Yu, shaking her head. “We still have patches on the hull from the first Caca attack, when they brought the warheads aboard.”
“But the supports are still strong enough?” asked Sean, wondering if he might die as his father, mother and brothers did, crushed out of existence below the event horizon of a black hole.
Chapter Nineteen
The bottom line is that time travel is allowed by the laws of physics. Brian Greene
“Initiating the drop of the wormhole into our dimension,” said one of the techs who had come aboard with Stumpfield and his people.
The man sat at one of the consoles that had been configured to control their wormhole. Stumpfield was glad that he had thought ahead. He had known that he couldn’t trust the damned monarch who had lost the count’s home system and the billions who lived there. It had taken months, but with inside connections he had been able to get his people into what were not considered vital positions by most. Electricians aboard the station, crew aboard the missile launcher. It had all worked out, and in a little over a minute they would be firing the shot that would kill the Caca ship, save three hundred million people, and prove the concept. Then they could work on the next stage, saving Cimmeria and its sister planet, Aquilonia.
“Wormhole moving into our dimension, now.”
The other end of the wormhole was on a specially constructed spaceship that could go not only through the dimensions of hyper, but also a number of other dimensional barriers. It was unmanned, controlled over the wormhole. Now it ripped apart the dimensional barrier and returned to their space, and its positive timestream. The station shook once again, to the point where several of the people standing in the chamber fell to the deck.
“We’re getting an image.”
A holo came to life in the center of the chamber, showing a star field, while a second holo projected a tactical view.
“Where is it?” yelled Stumpfield, walking around the holos, trying to get a view that would show him the enemy.
“It’s not there yet,” said the tech. “Wait. I’m picking up a hyper translation from the area it should be coming through.” The man played with the controls for a moment. “There it is. Sending coordinates and resonance patterns to the missile. Firing.”
I’ve won, thought the count as the command went out.
* * *
“Admiral. The instability of the star has increased by eight-four percent in the last couple of seconds. Antimatter production sats are being pulled out of orbit toward it, and there’s nothing we can do.”
McCullom sat in her office chair, silent. She didn’t know what to say. They could try evacuating the system. Anything within an hour of the hyper limit could most likely get away. A number of people could go through wormhole gates, but not enough. Ninety-nine percent of the population of this system would die soon after the star went completely off the deep end and exploded. And this time she didn’t feel like deserting them.
“Admiral?”
“Order everything that can get away to do so.” She knew that many vessels that didn’t have a chance of getting out would still try. That was human survival instinct, no matter how hopeless it was.
“Should we prepare a ship for you, ma’am? We can get it through the ship
gates at Central Docks before the shock wave gets here.”
“Get as many out as you can, but I will stay, thank you.” Something nagged at her for a moment. “Where is the Emperor? And are we evacuating the Empress and the heirs.”
“The Emperor in on the Donut, ma’am. Her security detail is getting the Empress and heirs aboard shuttles now.”
And pray to God that they get her out in time, thought the CNO. Now where do I want to be when the star blows?
* * *
“Fire,” yelled out Admiral Sung as soon as the targeting holo showed the missile launch tube entering the firing arc.
The first of the laser projectors released a blast of photons from a light second away. Grav lenses that could keep the beam together for almost a light minute focused the beam on the structure, striking the forward end of the launch platform. A second later another laser platform fired, this time targeting the center. Both quickly ate through the thin armor hide of the launch tube. Not quickly enough it would seem, and Sung was about to order a missile battery to shoot when the launch tube blew into two pieces along its center point.
* * *
“Fire,” said the commanding officer of the Ancients.
The vessel was within twenty thousand kilometers of the target, and Jackson was wondering at the lack of range of the weapon. A bright purple beam linked the ship with the missile launcher in an instant. An instant later the center of the missile launcher flashed, an unbearably bright explosion as a hundred kilograms of matter converted to energy. Four gigatons of explosive force, four times that of a shipkiller warhead, ripped through the structure. A moment later a second beam struck, then a third, and the structure came apart.
“The humans were already firing on it,” said another of the crew, pointing to a screen. “They were firing lasers at the structure. If given enough time they would have destroyed it.”
“So, they thought better of it,” said Jackson. “That must mean something.”
“It means that they are not total fools, but still not to be trusted,” said Klorasoft.
Exodus: Empires at War: Book 12: Time Strike Page 28
