The Belt Loop_Book Three_End of an Empire

by Robert B. Jones

  He stuck out his massive lower jaw and started to say something but simply shrugged. He knew this transition was going to be difficult for him. At least he was still alive. “Understood. It will take time for you to build your case for me. As I recall more details of the Piru Torgud’s plans I will summon you. The quicker I can get this over and done, the quicker I can start to enjoy some kind of life among you humans. We are not so very different, you know? I would estimate that the Malguur — the Varson as you call us — are roughly five- or six-hundred years behind you technologically, and maybe thousands of years in arrears when it comes to our social attributes. Many of my countrymen would rather make war than anything else. Conquest for the sake of appeasing an ancient religious doctrine.”

  “Yeah, we’ve had our share of crusades and our times of zealotry. In the final analysis, it all amounts to the same thing. Man’s desire to please Gods that don’t care one way or the other. I’m sure your ‘Deliverer’ could give a shit about what goes on in the heads of other species. Makes little sense when you think about it,” Mols said.

  “Our Deliverer, the One Who Casts No Shadow, was borne out of fear. My ancestors worshipped a star. A single star. That was mainly because of our unique position in a group of double- and triple-star systems. Of course, a single sun would cast no shadow. An eclipsing binary does.”

  She nodded. Funny how religions start out. Eventually, science trumps most ancient beliefs, she thought. Cultural exchanges with Inskaap confirmed what she already knew. If they eventually found a billion different sentient species in the galaxy, each one would have a unique view of the divine.

  “How true, how true,” she said as she took a few steps away from the cell. “You know how to reach me should you have anything else that will help us. Help show your commitment to our cause.”

  “Yes. Thank you for the visit, lieutenant. At least I know I have one ally here.”

  She flipped him an informal salute and walked away.

  Inskaap stared at her departing image for several minutes after she was gone, as if he had just missed the last train of the month and he was looking at the receding tail car as it disappeared over the horizon.

  Finally he turned and headed for the coffee pot.

  Chapter 4

  “Point six two of max impulse speed, captain. We’re running at nine seven efficiency. Delta vee on the pursuers negative point one six.”

  “Steady as she goes, Mister Gant.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Mister Hansen, hail the Lake Superior and put the comm on my console,” Captain Haad commanded.

  “Opening the channel, sir,” Max Hansen said.

  Several seconds of static and then the white noise of clear carrier. “Captain Haad, Mark Fuller. Nice of you to join us. I see you brought company.”

  “Roger that, Mark. Looks like six differentiated targets closing at point four five. They lost one boat to our static discharges but the remainder of the incoming ships stayed with us. We managed to put about twenty-five mikes between us, so we’ve got time to set up a little reception committee.”

  “Roger that. I see your plume now, captain. Suggest you slow to one-third and take up a position aft of my group, maybe shoot up a couple of hundred klicks topside. Give them a long, lazy arc to follow you up. When they turn to follow you, we will gut them.”

  While Haad worked out Fuller’s strategy in his head he saw a flaw in the young captain’s plan. “Negative, Captain Fuller. These new captains the Varson are sending against us will see through your curtain easily as soon as you light up your engines. What we should do right now is scatter, let them chase us ship-to-ship and agree to mass up, say, in about four five mikes. We have the tactical advantage, why not use it?”

  Silence from the Lake Superior as Fuller considered Haad’s proposal. Fuller had four Corvette-class attack boats and one oiler with him and could easily outrun the approaching Varson battle group and gain a superior attack profile. “Excellent suggestion, captain. Shall we make for zone one six at three five seven point one five four in, oh, four eight mikes? I’ll send two up and two down and you and I will defend laterally. The tender can head off any escapees.”

  Haad did dead reckoning calculations in his head. He raised an eyebrow at Nono Gant. The helmsman ran his fingers across his console and nodded.

  “Roger. Your coordinates in four eight mikes on my mark. Three, two, one. . . Mark.”

  “Acknowledged, Hudson. See you in the Old Sailor’s Home,” Fuller said and broke the connection.

  Haad repeated the battle plan to his bridge crew and the XO sent the appropriate orders downstream and headed for the CIC alcove.

  “Permission to free the boat, captain.” Gant asked for and received permission from the captain to have free control of the boat during the maneuver so as not to complicate positioning requirements with the endless chain of pass-down commands from the CIC to the captain, then from the captain to the helm. Saved a lot of unnecessary back-and-forth bullshit while under attack preparations. Commander Mason charged the weapons officer with the task of readying the weapons and Blaine Diggs was standing by for further orders from the captain. Twenty minutes into the wide lazy turn at one-third power the XO called for battle stations.

  The Varson battle group was converging on the spot where Captain Fuller’s ships had been and the flanking boats started to peel away from the main group to go after Fuller’s disbursing ships. Haad took the Hudson up and away from the Navy group and started his long spiral back toward the agreed upon coordinates. Fuller took his destroyer down and mirrored Haad’s sweeping arc. Traveling in curved trajectories with an occasional wiggle or two was a proven way to confound targeting computers programmed to solve for static targets. At almost lightspeed an energy burst could cover line ship formations with 20,000-kilometer spacing in a fraction of a second. Distance and movement could counter most attacks.

  Not being familiar with Colonial Navy Fleet protocols, the Varson ships behaved as expected and followed the humans around the bend. Several random bursts were fired at the Navy warships but nothing found its mark. Nuisance fire for the most part. When Haad and Fuller were within two minutes of the meeting place they both executed reverse-loop turns and swung wide of their pursuers. By the time the enemy ships adjusted their trajectories and slowed to make following turns, the Navy battle group had them pretty much surrounded and bottled up in the kill zone.

  “Mister Diggs,” Captain Haad said, “show them a little sunshine. Take the Higgs to max.”

  “Aye, captain. Heliospasm torpedoes away. Proximity burst in three seconds.”

  Haad looked at his forward blister. Two of the Varson destroyers were suddenly caught in the searing light and EMF discharge from the torpedoes. Temporarily blinded, the ships flew headlong into each other and the resulting collision of ships moving at over 65,000 kilometers per hour resulted in a massive explosion.

  “All ahead full. Take us away from that cloud of debris, Mister Gant. Get a track on the other vessels. Make sure they are being driven by Fuller’s boats.” Haad wanted to backpedal from the explosion even though he had his Higgs Field at maximum absorption. Undue exotic pressure on the Higgs could cause it to press inward on the hull of the ship and the resulting pressure could rupture welding scars or blow pressure doors in the ship’s interior. Then there was the problem of the escaping antimatter. With hydrogen being the most abundant element in the known universe, usually a ruptured drive engine would self-destruct once the magnetic bottle was ruptured and the matter/antimatter reaction started in an uncontrolled fashion. Sometimes a partially destroyed ship with a still-functioning magnetic engine coil could be propelled into an inattentive attacker, turning a moment of victory into one of pure horror.

  “Work out the targets, Mister Diggs, you may fire at will.”

  The CIC was very active at this point and the firing solutions were racing across the main CIC consoles. The detection and tracking sensors followed the remainin
g Varson ships and when line-of-sight trajectories presented themselves to the fire control or weapons officers, the batteries came alive.

  Haad watched as two of Fuller’s group got kills. One ship, the CNS Lake Meade traded laser fire with one of the Varson destroyers. The Navy captain swung through a sixty-degree arc and came upon the Varson ship turning in a wider arc just off her starboard flank. Once the Varson’s trajectory was solved and anticipated, the Lake Meade concentrated a line of fire 600 meters ahead of the intruder’s bow and held the fire until the ship ran right through it. The Varson vessel opened up and peeled away like it was a can of sardines, its lid being rolled back and away. When the ship’s momentum carried the drive bottle into the steady stream of the zanith-laser energy blast, the hydrogen tank ruptured and the ship seemed to lose all of its forward inertia at once. It paused in the warming green laser glow and suddenly erupted in a huge gout of pale blue fire as if it was contained in a hollow glass sphere. Then the antimatter escaped and the ship was seemingly sucked in on itself before the massive drive engine explosion sent flames and debris out in all directions.

  The second kill from Fuller’s group belonged to the CNS Columbia River and she put down the Varson ship in a similar manner. That left two enemy ships on the prowl.

  “Continue your arc, helm. Give me a nose-over and let’s try to get below them,” Haad said.

  The Hudson River was immediately taken down in a steep dive and the Higgs Field strained at the impossible load. But it held. The high-energy whine of the field generators could be heard and the thousand-megahertz cycles pulsed the ship with nerve-wracking vibrations.

  “Watch out for the good guys, Mister Gant. Keep the Varson ships on our forward port quarter and stay off her keel. They have down-looking weapons on some of those boats,” Haad reminded him.

  “Your seven, Captain Haad,” the comm link suddenly squawked. “You have a ship on your tail.” It was Captain Fuller’s voice.

  “Roger, that. We see him.”

  “I’ve got a solution on him, captain; on my mark, break to port and push your nose up two zero.”

  “Hudson River, aye,” Haad said and waited for the break point.

  “Three, two, one, Mark!”

  Nono Gant slapped at his control panel and the ship shuddered violently as the lumbering giant executed a high speed maneuver to the left. This kind of maneuvering was best done at burn-in or space trials, not in the heat of battle. The Hudson River was certainly getting her pipes blown out this day.

  “Give me a look behind, Mister Washoe. On screen.”

  The forward blister flickered through multiple images before settling on the wide angle view from the tail. The ship that had been trailing the Hudson River was receding in the image and suddenly the line of intermittent green stitches found their mark and marched across her top decks in evenly spaced intervals. A thin orange glow pushed out at the stitchery and finally erupted into about twenty fountains of sparks and jets of blue flame as the internal combustibles fought for a way out of the sealed can of a ship. When the green line reached the bulge of the drive coil the explosion was immense. A bright blue and yellow ring of fire shot away from the doomed ship before its hydrogen tanks ruptured and the sickly blue-white plume of almost invisible fire consumed what was left of the Varson ship.

  That left only one more intruder and Haad was on him.

  “Thanks for that, Lake. Leave the straggler to me,” Haad said. “I’m running right up his tail pipe.”

  “Happy hunting, Captain,” was Fuller’s reply and it sounded slightly on the sarcastic side.

  Haad paid it no attention and set about his work. The Varson ship was fleeing the scene at a high rate of speed. Was he trying to reach jump speeds? “Where’s he going, Mister Gant?”

  “Ahh, at his present course, sir, he’s heading to the Fringes. Shooting for the Flame Nebula, maybe.”

  “Stay abaft of him, give him all the room he wants. Put us 30,000 meters off his aft quarter and below. Mister Washoe you yell if you see any energy weapons being cycled up over there. CIC, check his configuration and stay out of his destruction cones if you can. I need a target solution on his plume.”

  Lieutenant Commander Diggs acknowledged. Thirty seconds later he sent the information to science, weapons and the helm.

  “Mister Gant, swing us out to port and bring us around in a 6,000 meter turn to starboard. Mister Diggs, when you have the plume locked on to bay four, light up the magazines. Fire for effect. He may be fast, but he can’t outrun our lasers.”

  “Coming around, sir,” Gant said.”

  “Five seconds, sir,” Diggs reported.

  “You may fire at will, Mister Diggs.”

  The Hudson River shuddered and the lighting on the bridge flickered for a brief second. Haad watched as the concentrated light from eighteen zanith-lasers converged at a vanishing point some 100,000 meters off his port flank. The final Varson intruder went nova a second later, the conflagration bright enough to flare out the image on the blister for four or five seconds. To Haad it was like witnessing an evil flower opening its orange and bright blue petals for the world to see, then suddenly closing them in a final act of defiance.

  “Good shooting, gentlemen. Mister Mason, stand down from battle stations. Mister Hansen, get the Lake Superior back up and let’s reform our group. I want to see what kind of stores he has available on that tender.”

  If the collective sigh of relief coming from the bridge could have been just a little louder it surely would have been audible through a volume of space encompassing all of the participating Navy vessels, with or without open comm links.

  Chapter 5

  The weapon was simplistic in design and deadly in concept. Only the Malguur could devise a weapon such as this, Bale Phatie thought. Something that could be shot from orbit, imploded upon descent, and rain down total decimation on his enemies. Perfect. A planet killer.

  “The preparations are complete, my eminence. Standing by for your orders,” Admiral Ceendi Regiid said confidently. He had positioned himself some 250,000 kilometers above a 1,500-kilometer planetoid in a debris field near Nuurhe. The system didn’t lack in detritus. The system was rife with orbiting asteroids, planetoids, pseudo-planets, proto-planets and so forth. Testimony to the violent collisions that had taken place in the planetary disk when the system formed around the young star called Oodiigh by the Malguur. The major planet of the system, Nuurhe had simply been called “secondary target” by the humans during the first conflict. It lay some sixty million kilometers starward from Regiid’s ship, a smoldering orb destroyed by nuclear fire from the Second Fleet of Elber Prime.

  “You may release the weapon at your discretion, admiral. Are you sure we’re at a safe distance?” Phatie said. He was standing in front of the forward blister on the deck of Regiid’s flagship, his hands on his hips, his dark green cloak held back with his elbows. Phatie’s sidearm was on his right hip and the gleaming handle of his ceremonial sword was on his left. In his case, the sword was more than ceremonial.

  “Yes, sir. Once the weapon is released and the rocket engines fire, it will quickly accelerate to the planetoid. If this were a full-sized planet, one with atmosphere, it would be attracted by the gravity of the world and make a controlled entry.”

  “Very well. Release the weapon, Regiid.”

  Regiid walked away from Phatie and stopped at the weapons alcove. He gave instructions to the fire control officer there and ordered his bridge to standby for the demonstration.

  A warning klaxon sounded from somewhere belowdecks and the rising and falling tone added an element of drama to the test. Regiid went through a modified countdown and when he ran out of numbers the weapon was released.

  A small plume of exhaust could be seen on the viewscreen as the rocket spiraled away from the ship. Phatie looked at Regiid and instinctively his right hand moved across the front of his body toward the handle of his sword. “So, when the rocket is near the surface, you detonat
e it with a signal from the bridge?” he asked.

  Walking back to the forward screen Regiid said, “That is correct, eminence. In actual practice, we will equip the real devices with a proximity fuse or a barometric triggering device. When the hydrogen bottle is exploded and the antimatter is released into atmosphere, the resulting matter/antimatter mutual annihilation is tremendous. Since most of the universe is composed of this elementary atom, there are more than enough free radicals in all things to cause extensive damage. The concentrated hydrogen in the supplied magnetic bottle acts as a initiator of sorts.”

  Phatie grunted and relaxed his right hand. On the screen the rocket plume was now only a pin prick of light heading toward the planetoid. “Tell me what I can expect to see, Regiid. Will it destroy the entire asteroid?”

  “Oh, yes, my eminence. I expect the decimation to be complete.”

  “Detonation in twenty seconds, admiral,” the fire control officer said.

  “Why is this any different than what happens when one of our drive engines is exploded in space?” Phatie wanted to know.

  “Ten seconds. . .”

  Regiid held up his hand. “Just a second, sir, only a few more seconds, now.”

  Together they watched the screen. The planetoid was suddenly illuminated by a bright flash and then a preternatural dark spot, a hole, a torus of unbelievable blackness formed. The roiling edges of the torus glowed a sickly bright orange with filaments of blue fire curling around its outer surface. The darkness seemed to pull in all matter it touched and after another second or two, the planetoid expanded briefly, broke apart, and chunks of rock and fiery shards collapsed into the hole. With a contracting pulse the planetoid disappeared into the torus and in an expanding rush of energy, the whole thing ceased to exist. Thin wisps of bright blue flames licked at empty space and tiny sparks of blue energy winked in and out of existence as the last gasp of the antimatter found its matter counterparts, like the aftermath of a starburst fireworks display.