Then Fedic and the convoy were gone, heading out into space at their best possible speed. At the first opportunity the freighters initiated star drive, and headed for the outer planets, then the safety of deep space. Fedic took up a station at the gas giant, not far from the spot where he had destroyed an Invardii drone on the way in.
Ahead of him the Reaper ships had slowed, and changed their heading. Fedic watched the overhead screen in fascination. It was not long before he was presented with more things to ponder. What were they doing approaching the fifth planet, a sterile wasteland with two moons? In the meantime the freighters sped on, putting more distance between themselves and the Reaper ships.
A small force of Sumerian warships, ready before the others, assembled at a common point near the space stations above Rokar. It left orbit and headed for the Reaper ships, but was barely underway when a brilliant flash silhouetted the smaller moon of the fifth planet. It was an ice world, far from the system’s sun. Moments later there was another flash, and then another.
Fedic checked his long-range scanners. It took a while until he realized what the Reaper ships were doing. He felt sickened as he saw they intended to drive the moon into one of the planets, or possibly the sun. It could be any of them, but he knew in his heart it was going to be Rokar.
There was already a small deviation perceptible in the trajectory of the small moon. The bright flashes repeated. Fedic opened a sub-space channel to Cordez, and in a flat voice told him what was happening.
“How long before the moon hits Rokar?” he said, repeating Cordez’ question. “I don’t know.”
Cordez was having trouble putting his thoughts into a sentence, but he eventually asked Fedic to guess how long it might take.
“A day or two,” said Fedic, “not enough time for us to do anything. Then the moon of the fifth planet will break Rokar open like an egg.”
It seemed the Invardii were changing their approach to planetary warfare. Their attempts to subdue the Sumerian home planet with ground ships had cost them too much, and now they had figured out there was an easier way.
“Slag-spawn Invardii,” murmured Fedic to himself. Would he have the nerve to destroy a planet of innocent non-combatants, if they were all Invardii?
Maybe he wouldn’t have been able to bring himself to do it once, but that was starting to change. A shiver ran down his spine.
Once a fighter started down the path of indiscriminate destruction, it wasn’t long before he was swallowed by the darkness in his own heart. What would the Alliance have to do, and have to become, to win this struggle? he thought. Would those who fought on the front line ever find their way back to a normal life?
He knew that depended largely on others. Family, and community. Love could trump darkness, but there were no guarantees.
“What about the space stations?” said Cordez in his ear. He had to repeat himself to get Fedic’s attention.
“No propulsion systems,” said Fedic, understanding what he was getting at immediately, “and they’ll be too close to the planet when it’s destroyed.”
He wondered for a moment how many Sumerians could be transported up to the huge space stations in time. Each one was normally home to a full Barauk of 80 warships, and all their crews and maintenance divisions. What energy source could possibly propel the stations far enough away from the planet to save the Sumerians on board?
The flashes of light from the small moon had stopped. Whatever the Reaper ships were using to move the moon – some device brought especially for the task it seemed – it must have already put in enough energy to shift the moon out of its orbit. Even a small shift was probably enough. Fedic checked the new trajectory, knowing what he was going to find.
The ship’s AI had to factor in a number of gravitational forces, but it confirmed that the moon would intercept the orbit of Rokar. The more important question for Fedic was when, exactly, it would do that.
His scanners needed to see the rate of movement to work it out, and the change was very slow at this stage. The sun’s gravitational pull would accelerate the moon as it got closer to Rokar.
The wait was agonizing. The data slowly improved over time as the margin of error slowly fell. Fedic finally had a reasonably precise time when the moon would intercept the planet.
“A little over 57 hours,” he said to Cordez. “Which is more time than I had thought, but I don’t see how we’re going to get the population off the planet.”
“Start getting those space stations loaded with Sumerians,” said Cordez firmly, “and we’ll find a way to move the stations. I’ll get a few Prometheus specialists patched into the sub-space link to help you. Keep this channel open.”
He paused, speaking to someone in the background, then continued. “The Javelins have finished unloading refugees from Uruk at Seenirok. Whether they can load supplies and armaments, and make it to Rokar in time is an open question. At the least they might be able to make the Invardii pay for this atrocity.
“I’ll let you know what’s happening at this end, Fedic. Better get moving with those stations, you’re going to be busy.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“I couldn’t think of anyone more qualified to make the impossible happen,” said Cordez. “Do whatever you need to do, and I’ll clear it with the Sumerians later. Transmission end.”
HetuParBrahmad, the Para’Par’Brahmad heading the government on Rokar, took a lot of convincing. For one thing he didn’t believe sub-space radio could possibly exist, and then there was the embarrassing point that if it did the Humans had it, and the Sumerian empire did not.
The situation would have become more difficult if Fedic had said the technology was a gift from the Druanii. The Sumerians thought the Druanii were nothing more than tales for children. In the end Fedic said nothing, and let the Sumerians think what they liked. He told them he was in contact with Earth by an instantaneous communication system and left it at that.
HetuParBrahmad eventually accepted him as a legitimate spokesman for Regent Cordez of Earth. Cordez was understood to be a close ally of Parapsanni, the new leader of the Sumerian government, and that counted heavily in Fedic’s favor.
But all this took time, and every moment of it a large mass with a massive kinetic energy was bulldozing its way through space on a collision course with Rokar.
The Sumerians had no answer to the question of how to move the space stations and dry docks out of orbit before their planet was destroyed. They did eventually undertake to ferry the population of Rokar up to the vast structures in orbit, at Fedic’s urging, in the faint hope that something might be possible.
Rokar was largely an automated planet, the industrial center of Sumerian power, with few Sumerians willingly living there. Centuries of mining had never been repaired, and much of the surface was a mixture of desert and eroding slag heaps.
Rokar had become a convenient outpost where industry could expand without the limitations of nearby cities, and the Sumerian military arm could be based without too much concern for civilian traffic through the permanently gray skies.
By contrast many millions of Sumerians had been left to their own devices on the surface when the home planet of Uruk had been evacuated. That problem had yet to be overcome, and the armada in orbit above the planet made any resolution in the near future unlikely.
On Rokar, a population of less than half a million Sumerians could just about be lifted into orbit, and crammed into every available space on the space stations and on anything that had a life support system. How they would then be moved away from the imminent destruction of Rokar – and then transferred to something with star drive for the trip to other worlds – was another question yet to be answered.
Further out in the Rokar system, half a Barauk of Sumerian warships circled the fifth planet and reported it free of Reaper ships. Then they watched on long-range scanners as the Invardii departed the system. HetuParBrahmad ordered them back to Rokar to defend the evacuation of its po
pulation if the Reaper ships should return.
After a day and a half the stream of shuttles had managed to move more Sumerians into orbit than were left on the ground. Fedic had recalled the freighters, and looked carefully at the cargo manifesto for each one. Surely something in the industrial hardware the freighters carried would be useful. The pilots would be very useful, each one a K’Sarth engineer who had been assigned pilot duty when there was a shortage of Sumerian pilots to fly the freighters.
He was also discussing ways of moving the space stations away from the planet with a group of K'Sarth engineers, using a conference channel from the Lucky Streak to their home planet. The K’Sarth were more open to novel solutions than the Sumerians would ever be.
CHAPTER 13
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The K'Sarth engineers knew every machine and every instrument they had loaded into the holds of the freighters for the Sumerian war effort. They were Fedic’s best hope of putting together a solution for the space stations. Requests to HetuParBrahmad still had to go through intermediaries, despite the urgency of the situation. Nothing would get done on Rokar in a hurry if it involved the Sumerian government.
Fedic was back on the conference channel, and the K’Sarth engineers seemed to have arrived at some sort of consensus. He looked again at the list of resources on board the freighters, and listened to the plan they were putting forward.
The engineers had a rather brutal approach to the problem, and Fedic struggled to understand the way they went about it. They didn’t seem interested unless something needed welding, cutting, bending or blowing a hole in. Then again, perhaps that was the only thing to do when there were so few hours left and so much to do.
The engineers had come up with a solution. Not a sensible solution, or even a solution likely to work, but a quick way to get a result. Fedic listened in amazement as they told him what it was. Perhaps, after all, there was a way!
Two squadrons of Javelins had now arrived at Rokar, mostly to show the concern of Prometheus for the Sumerian predicament. There was little they could do to help now the relays of shuttles had almost completed the exodus off the planet.
At the beginning of the third day, the moon towered over Rokar. Glare from its icy surface was an additional hazard as the last of the evacuees rushed to reach the spaceports. Quakes shook the ground continuously as gravitational tides raced around Rokar’s thin crust. The shuttles managed to complete their work before conditions at the ground terminals became too dangerous to land there.
“Five hours to impact,” said Fedic over the commslink to the engineers. “We’ve got less than three hours if we’re going to initiate the reactor rings in time to be clear of the shock wave, and avoid the debris from the collision.”
“Testing the first set of engines in ten minutes,” reported the chief engineer.
Among other things, the freighters had been bringing fusion reactor chambers to Rokar. This was technology dear to the K'Sarth, as their whole underground way of life depended on the ring of reactors they had buried deep within their planet. It had been done in preparation for the Invardii attack on their cities across the surface.
The reactors from the holds had been welded to the inside of the cargo bays in the space stations, and each bay had been sealed off and reinforced. The engineers weren’t after the power such reactors might produce – the space stations supplied more than enough power for what they had in mind – they were after the electromagnetic rings that kept plasma at sun-like temperatures inside the reactor rings.
With a slight modification these had been changed into a rough and ready doughnut-shaped propulsion system. Anything metal was about to became an ionized fog as it approached the wall of the cargo bay, and then be accelerated at unimaginable speeds through the center of the reactor and out into space. This would provide propulsion for the stations.
Fedic watched closely over a vidlink as the first test was carried out. Camera feeds had been set up from a number of angles both inside and outside the cargo bay. The fusion reactor growled hungrily as it warmed up. The electromagnetic coils came on, and the wall of the cargo bay within the torus just evaporated as the heat built up.
The air inside the cargo bay was the first to go, and then a series of quickly constructed airlocks on the inner wall began to eject an assortment of mineral ores and metal tailings into the bay. They floated across the space to the outer wall, beginning to glow as they approached the reactor. They reached the event threshold and were instantly gone.
A bright tail of fire burst into life on the outside of the cargo bay. It danced through a series of colors as the mixture of metals entering the reactors varied haphazardly.
“Three point five and climbing,” called one of the engineers. “Five, seven, reaching target, holding at the mark, force of eight point one Glau.”
“Bracing holding, hull integrity holding,” called another engineer.
“Better than we’d hoped,” said the chief engineer.
Fedic was impressed.
The only problem with the propulsion system was the need for materials to drive it. There had only been so much time to bring up useful materials from Rokar, and the space stations didn’t carry that much on board. Would there be enough fuel to get them clear of the planet?
An hour later they were ready to find out.
Tails of super heated gas burst into life from every cargo bay on each of the space stations, and the two dry docks, and the ponderous behemoths began to move. There were over eighty thousand Sumerians crammed into each of the giant black structures as they began to crawl across the sky, moving away from the crumbling, icy stare of the oncoming moon.
Unstable ice fields of water and methane gases were already being torn from the frozen moon under the growing gravitational attraction of Rokar, and these were now reaching out with long fingers for the atmosphere of the planet.
Fedic urged the space stations on. Their trajectory had been planned to pass as close as possible to the moon on its way in. Most of the ejected material from the collision would continue along the moon’s present path, and the stations needed to be going in the opposite direction when it hit.
In theory the plan was fine – hell’s teeth, it was an astounding achievement to get this far, thought Fedic – but the real problem would be getting enough fuel for the reactors. It was an unforgiving equation. The more weight they lost by firing it through the reactors, the faster they would go, and the more they fed through the reactors, the more mass would be flung into space behind them, driving them forward. The space stations would have to eat themselves alive, if they were to have any chance to escape.
On the space stations the crews, greatly enlarged by the influx of Sumerians from the surface, were cannibalizing everything they could find that might be fed through the incandescent rings in the cargo bays. The refugees from the planet had brought little enough with them, but they too realized their lives depended on the reactors. They began sorting through personal effects for anything metal that might serve as fuel, anything to drive the stations forward.
Fedic looked at the overhead screen. It was an unlikely fleet that struggled to reach enough speed to leave the planet. The seven black giants, space stations and dry docks alike, were trailing tiny jets of fire behind them and looking hopelessly inadequate.
Interspersed with them were the eleven freighters he had brought to Rokar, the two squadrons of Javelins, and half a Barauk of Sumerian warships. There was nothing they could do to help except give moral support. The smaller ships could easily and quickly have taken themselves out of danger, but none of them was going to abandon the people of Rokar in their most desperate hour.
One hour later the struggling fleet passed the moon on its way to its own destruction, and perhaps the beginning of a new, bigger planet. The stations are traveling too slow, thought Fedic, as he calculated the distance they had already traveled. There was too little time left to get clear of the coming impact. He paused as he watched the
surface of the moon roll through beneath the Lucky Streak.
It was an eerie experience for everyone in the fleet, and the level of background chatter across the space stations fell to zero. The icy, crumbling, scarred surface of the moon passed slowly below them. It took a long time, as cratered ice fields and long, shattered mountain ranges swept by.
Fedic noticed a green coloration along a huge fissure in one of the ice fields. Was it the beginning of life on the surface below, or a metallic compound scraped off one of the mountain ranges by the ice? Whatever it was, the heat and pressure of the collision ahead would destroy it completely.
There was little more the stations could do to increase their speed. The Sumerians had fed everything they had into the reactors in the cargo bays, and all they could now was prepare themselves for the shock wave that would follow the collision of the moon with Rokar.
Fedic closed down the data array he had been working on. According to the figures, the fleet wasn’t far enough from Rokar, and the larger ships weren’t built to take the pressures they would soon experience. But then, God willing, moons running into planets didn’t always go according to plan either.
He wondered idly whether he should pray, and whether it would make any difference. He settled in the end for the idea that God looks after the good, and strapped himself in.
The explosion was spectacular. It looked at first as if the moon had been the softer material, and it smeared itself across the face of Rokar like a spreading snowball. But that was an illusion. The moon had hit squarely and punched deep into the planet, piling up surface material around itself.
Then the planet turned inside out, the molten core streaming out into space. The gravity of the combined mass was already tugging at the flying debris, but it would describe an impressive arc through space before it returned. Then the shock wave of super heated gases and vaporized debris rippled across space. It hit the fleet like a giant fist, the ships rolling and bucking, then finding themselves flung away from each other in an instant.
Invardii Box Set 2 Page 8
