Catherine Kimbridge Chronicles 7: Renegades (15 page)

Chapter 18: Planet Killer…

“Bring the cloak up, shields to maximum. Prepare ship for jump,” Captain Kirkland ordered. “Ziggy, give me ship wide.”

“Channel open Captain.”

“All hands we are jumping in sixty seconds. I don’t have to warn you we do not have a lot of experience with
ad hoc
jumps yet. If we get this wrong we may be incapacitated for a few minutes. Those will be minutes where we will be vulnerable should somebody take exception to our presence. Be sharp. Keep on your toes and batten down the hatches. Kirkland out.”

“Coming up on jump point Captain,” Ben announced from his First Officer’s station.

“Very good. Helm engage the jump drive at your discretion.”

“Aye Aye Captain,” Lieutenant Mayweather acknowledged. “Jumping in three, two, one… Jump!”

An undulating violet and crimson spiraling vortex formed in front of the
GCP Yorktown.
Once it had completely stabilized, the ship inched forward until the tip of the
Yorktown
touched the outer edge of the vortex. In a bright flash the ship was suddenly consumed by the swirling mass of energy only to reemerge some one thousand five hundred and fifty three light years distant.

The sun that appeared in the forward viewscreen was a G-type yellow dwarf. It was brighter than about 85% of the others stars in the Milky Way. With a surface temperature of about 5500 degrees Celsius it was a G2V main sequence star. This meant it delivered, on average, about 1300 watts per square meter of energy to surfaces orbiting it at the distance of Earth. 

To Cat the star was beautiful.  It was Sol. But it was not nearly as beautiful as the blue-green marble that appeared centered in the forward viewscreen. Shrouded in swirling bands of misty white clouds, Earth was a sight to behold.

Cat had ordered the
Yorktown
to jump into the system in a near Earth orbit because she wanted to remind the crew what they were fighting for. It did not matter that to the
powers-that-be
in the Earth system that she and her crew were renegades. For the most part they were human. They were fighting for their home world.

“Ziggy, hail Orbital One Operations. Let them know we are here to try and stop the Alpha weapons platform,” Cat ordered.

“Aye Admiral, message sent… Ma’am, Senior Fleet Admiral Imera is requesting a visual.”

“Put him on the main screen.”

Immediately the holographic image of the older man appeared floating in front of the bridge. Cat stepped down from her seat to stand next to Captain Kirkland’s more centrally located command chair.

Admiral Imera’s eyes went wide. “You’re dead.”

“Cats have nine lives Admiral. Surely you know that by now,” Cat said with a wry grin.

The man’s expression changed from surprise to suspicion. “WHAT are you playing at Catherine?” Admiral Imera barked. “Call off your monstrosity. Surely you gain nothing by destroying Earth!”

Cat shook her head. “Admiral, you and I will likely never see eye-to-eye but I assure you that this is none of my doing. I’m here to help. Can we agree to put aside our differences for the duration of the emergency?”

“We were contacted by your pet
WhimPy
. He warned us to leave the damn thing alone.”

“I think you should have, Admiral.
WhimPy-101
faced that thing when it was undamaged. He took out most of its offensive capabilities but was himself nearly destroyed in the process. What you faced was a heavily damaged Uruk weapons platform called
Alpha
… after
WhimPy
had a go at it… and even gravely damaged, it took out your fleet.”

Imera looked at her coldly through the holographic display. “I almost believe you… but… you said ‘I’m here’… You are in the Sol system? You must be cloaked,” he reasoned out loud.  

“We are Admiral. We mean to approach the weapon’s platform covertly and board her.”

“Don’t you think we tried that,” Admiral Imera said in an exasperated tone. “That thing destroyed everything we sent at it. It’s unstoppable. It’s a world killer.”

“We think the platform harvests radiant energy,” Cat said. “We think you may have actually made the situation worse when you fired on it. If there is any good news it’s that the platform likely used most of the energy you fed it fighting your fleet. 

“The bad news is the closer the Alpha platform gets to the sun, the more energy it can harvest. Right now it’s collecting about 60 kilowatts per square meter near Jupiter. Once it gets to the Earth/Moon system that number will be closer 1500 kilowatts per square meter.”

She paused to let that sink in.

“We are attempting to contact
WhimPy
-
101
. His FTL links are down and we suspect he is barely functional. But, we also believe he is already working to gain control of the Alpha platform. The
Yorktown
is going to attempt to help him or, at a minimum, disable the platform from within the vessel.”

Imera walked closer to the holographic pickup. “How in world do you plan to accomplish that?”

“Very carefully,” Cat acknowledged. “Do we have a truce?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Not really sir. If we don’t succeed you can court-martial me.”

***

Senior Fleet Admiral Imera turned to his one of his aids, Trevor Stevens. Stevens was the current acting minister of the Department of Political Stability. The DPS was charged with suppressing civilian unrest within GCP. The former minister had fallen victim to an unfortunate spate of bad timing. He had been at a conference in Greater Los Angeles when the word of the mass evacuation had occurred. He had been overrun by a terrified mob before he could return to his shuttle. He was one of an estimated seventeen million already dead in the panicked rioting that defined life on Earth at the moment.

Imera struggled to get as many people off the planet as he could but they didn’t begin to have the resources. The world had devolved into such a state of anarchy that even if the threat of imminent destruction passed… the world would be years recovering from what had already happened.

“Signal the incoming fleet from the delta sector. They are to cloak and intercept the
Yorktown
at the
Alpha
weapons platform. Make sure they understand to not engage the platform nor to let the
Yorktown
know they are there.  Take no action but be ready to move at a moment’s notice.”

“Are you wanting them to aid the
Yorktown
should the need arise?” Stevens asked in a confused voice.

“Hell no son. The
Yorktown
is our only hope of stopping this thing… but if they succeed I sure as hell don’t want Cat Kimbridge in control of that
Alpha
!”

***

WhimPy-101
detected a breech near access port A12 on the dorsal side of the
Alpha
Platform. It was in one of the sections of the platform that was now under his complete control. His immediate concern was that the breech was caused by an
Alpha
repair droid attempting to reassert control of that section. His fears however were short-lived.

“Well met, Blessed of the Creator,”
WhimPy
transmitted on the local near-field RF band that the
Yorktown’s
away team was using.

WhimPy’s
newly installed optical sensors spotted a lithe woman in a form-fitting silver skin stop and raise a single clenched fist in the air. She had singled the others in her group to stop their advance. All told there were twenty soldiers in the
Yorktown’s
boarding party.

“101?”

“Greeting Admiral Kimbridge. Your arrival is most… fortuitous.”

“101, where are you and how can we help?” The silver woman asked.

“I would prefer not to say Admiral as the
Alpha
AI has most likely detected our transmissions. My quantum communication link is in need of an entangled pair refresh. If I provide visual clues on the deck plating to my position can you repair my secure FTL communication node?”

“Absolutely, lead the way.”

Immediately metallic arrows rose out of the surface of the walls at eye level.
WhimPy’s
nanites had thoroughly infiltrated this section of the massive ship.

WhimPy
directed the group through the maze of corridors until they arrived at the sealed hatch that protected his backup core. He had already instructed the construction nanites in the area to begin unsealing the hatch. He was no longer in any danger of the
Alpha
AI regaining control of this section of the ship. That said, the
Alpha
was intent on carrying out its genocidal mission against the home world of the humans.

Admiral Kimbridge was the first through the opening into the bay that contained what was left of the
WhimPy-101
platform. Her first action was to reach out her hand and touch the side of one of the fusion generators
WhimPy
had tied into his systems to provide power.

A tiny bud of nanites flowed off of the Admiral’s hand and into the surrounding metal. Those nanites contained a series of quantum entangled photons that allowed the Admiral to communicate with her construction nanites.
WhimPy
would be able to clone those pairs and create his own communication node with the admiral and, via an instantaneous relay through the
Yorktown,
to the rest of the GCP FTL network. 

“Thank you Admiral,”
WhimPy
said a moment later through the secure link. “The
Alpha
AI should no longer be able to access our communications.”

“Good to see you old friend,” Cat said warmly. “I must say though that you are looking a bit bedraggled.”

“Humph!”
WhimPy
snorted. “You take on a bear in his den and see how you look after the encounter!’

Cat shook her head. “Can you give me a status update? What’s our best move here?”

“The
Alpha
platform was forced to power down almost immediately after it entered your system. Through a fortunate accident, or the will of the Creator, a small electrical surge caused a power conduit to leak energy near where the
Alpha
had stored my backup cognitive core. It was just enough for the redundant power feeds built by my Heshe designers to bring my systems online.”

Cat waved the rest of her team into the room. “Sergeant Moore, take two men and secure a complete comm package from the
Yorktown
.
WhimPy
will let you know where to set it up for his use.”

“On it Admiral,” the older woman said as she pointed to the two youngest members of the boarding party.

“So your systems came back online… What happened then?”

“I proceeded to take systematic control of the Alpha. Unfortunately once I got external sensors in place I determined the platform was on a dead stick collision course with Earth. I was able to route power feeds to a few of the drive systems. It was enough to accelerate Alpha by 0.002 gravities.”

“I take it,” Cat said, “that that was enough to cause the Alpha to miss hitting the Earth?”

“Affirmative. Unfortunately when I communicated my intent to steer clear of your planet to the GCP Grand Senate they refused to believe me and did the one thing that was essential they not do. They attacked this platform.”

“And in the process supplied enough energy for the harvesters to reactive the
Alpha
AI. I take it you have been in a battle for control ever since,” Cat said, not so much as a question as a statement of fact.

“Prior to their ill-advised attack, the
Alpha
AI would not have come back online until the energy density striking the surface harvesters reached something on the order of 1200 kilowatts per square meter. That would be just shy of Earth’s orbit around your sun. By that time I could have taken complete control of the platform’s offensive weapons and attitude control systems. As a result of Admiral Imera’s interference that is no longer possible.”

“How can we help?” Cat asked.

On the floor in front of Cat and the sixteen remaining soldiers a series of eight metallic cylinders flowed up from the floor.  It was a very strange sight for those that were not familiar with seeing construction nanites in action.

“This is a prohibitively large ship. My nanites are effective at taking control of the
Alpha’s
systems but they must reach them in order to do so. If your people can transport nanite reservoirs to distal locations on this platform I can speed up my efforts to usurp control from the various systems that threaten Earth.”

Cat toggled her internal comm-link. “Captain Kirkland, I need you to scramble a couple dozen transport shuttles for light duty.”