Catherine Kimbridge Chronicles 7: Renegades (3 page)

The massive ships shields fluttered briefly as the ship’s energy collector’s greedily absorbed and stored the influx of energy being provided by this primitive race.

The unnamed Uruk weapon’s platform turned its death ray on the blue-green world it was approaching. It would normally have waited to get closer but with the sudden influx of energy there was no need to wait. The beam struck the surface of the planet instantly turning the ocean it hit into plasma. The shockwave traveled at hypersonic speeds around the planet. Within bare moments the collimated matter-antimatter had chewed its way into the bedrock under the ocean and then almost as quickly into the mantle. The semi-fluid rock of the mantle surged forth and tectonic stresses caused massive earthquakes the likes of which had never been seen on the planet Chetee. Those few that survived the initial quakes where soon overcome by the heat and poison gasses erupting from subsurface vents. Their suffering did not last long as the massive ship’s energy beam boiled off the planet’s atmosphere.

The powerful weapon eventually chewed its way through to the other side of the planet. It was an amazing sight but no one on the planet was alive to see it. The only spectators where a handful of miners watching from a distant asteroid field. They would live to tell the tale of their world’s final days. In the end, it took the giant ship barely half an hour to reduce the entire planet and its two moons to rubble.  

Chapter 3: Mardarus III

Commodore Jason Ruck stood on the bridge of
GCP Mador
. He had a towel draped over his neck. He had been running around the exercise track when the call to report to the bridge came in. The
Mador
, and the
Exeter
were cloaked and in orbit around the second largest gas giant in the Antares system. The
Relentless
had previously received orders to rendezvous with the
Yorktown
.

The only other occupants of the system was a hydrogen mining concern that was based on a small moon in orbit around the larger of the gas giants. The miners were the reason the
Mador
and her sister ships remained cloaked. The mining operation was taking advantage of a unique situation that Mother Nature had setup for them. The small moon was in a semi-stable LaGrange point between the gas giant and the host star. For a period of ten years, every fifty years or so, the little moon was captured by the gravity well of the LaGrange point. What made this especially unique was that the gravity well was within the outer reaches of the gas giant’s exosphere. This made it the perfect location to harvest the tritium that was somewhat abundant in the gas giant’s upper atmosphere. With the near universal use of fusion reactors by the GCP member worlds, the need for tritium was unrelenting. 

The Antares system had four jump points. One led to Stanus IV which was the last jump before Hupenstanii space. The others led to Mardarus, Ceti Alpha five and Epsilon Prime.

Admiral Kimbridge and the Yorktown were proceeding to Epsilon Prime in preparation for joining the taskforce in the Antares system in a few hours. The reason he had been called to the bridge was the unexpected surge of hyperfield emissions near the EP jump point. It was too soon for the
Yorktown
to be making the transit.

Jason had his sensor office confirm the readings. The energy spikes were off the scale.  Whatever was coming through was larger than a single ship. In fact, it looked to be larger than an entire fleet. Jason hadn’t seen an emission signature this large since the Modos Syndicate invasion of the Alphaverse. That had involved tens of thousands of ships.
Were the Modos coming again
?

“Signal the
Exeter
,” Jason said. “They are to go completely silent. No extraneous EM emissions of any type. We don’t know that this is and until we know it’s a friendly I don’t want to draw any attention to ourselves.”

The
Mador’s
communication officer, Lieutenant Frost, acknowledged the order and transmitted it via the FTL Quantum Entangled communication network. “The
Exeter
acknowledges ‘silent running’ sir.”

Jason nodded and sat in his command chair. The forward view screen was focused on the EP jump point. The star field behind the jump point began to distort. Suddenly a huge surge of elementary particles erupted from the jump point followed almost immediately by an impossibly large shape. The ship appeared to be a Heshe weapon’s platform. Those ships were the largest in known space… but this ship, although it was generally the correct shape, was several times larger than anything he had previously seen.
WhimPy-101
would be totally dwarfed by this monstrosity.

“What in the…,” Lieutenant Frost began to say before he stopped himself. Jason couldn’t fault the man. The very same thoughts were running through his head. Whatever this was, it was like nothing they had seen before.

“Passive sensors only,” Jason ordered. “Record everything you can and pipe it via FTL comms to the
Yorktown
. If that monster decides to take a pot-shot at us I’m not sure there is going to be anything we can do.”

The First Officer walked over to the command chair. “Sir, what about the miners? Should we warn them?”

Jason shook his head. There was no way to communicate with them that would not give away the position of the taskforce. In addition, even if they could warn them it was unlikely they could do anything constructive with the knowledge. They couldn’t cloak and they certainly were not equipped to defend themselves or run. The best chance they had was to hope the massive ship was friendly or simply did not notice them.

Unfortunately fate was not smiling on the miners. The Mardarus jump point surged briefly and a cargo transport jumped into the system. The transport immediately began transmitting messages to the mining outpost which in turn replied.

Jason and the bridge of the
Mador
watched as the alien weapons platform turned towards the mining colony. A blue particle beam shot out from the massive ship and struck the small moon. The result was virtually instantaneous. The moon, perhaps 30 trillion metric tons, simply ceased to exist. In its place was an expanding cloud of superheated plasma.

The cargo transport practically burned out its VASMR sublight drive in an effort to reverse course and head back towards the Mardarus jump point. They didn’t make it. The same blue beam enveloped the cargo transport. It, too, ceased to exist. There was not even an explosion to signal the transport’s demise.

“Holy Moses,” Lieutenant Front whispered.

The massive ship changed course and headed towards the Mardarus jump point. It accelerated to sixty percent the speed of light and within a few minutes it engaged its jump engines and was gone.

***

Sa’Tra of the Hupenstanii medical corps examined the wreckage of the downed shuttle from the air as his survey craft circled the crash site. The shuttle had been transporting scientists and their samples from a remote island off the north shore of the main continent.

The lead researcher, a female named Triska’nar had contacted his office just prior to taking off. She had been excited. Apparently she had found something that in her words ‘
would redefine the very nature of the plague crisis
’ that had dominated every fiber the Hupenstanii people’s existence for two full generations.

Whatever it was she had found had apparently been lost with shuttle. It was obvious even from several hundred meters in the air that the entire crash site had been consumed by a very intense fire. The plague curse continued to haunt his people. Every time a major discovery was made over the last several decades a tragedy would visit the people making the discovery to wipe out whatever was learned.

Sa’Tra knew there were conspiracy theorists that claimed the whole thing was a giant and cruel GCP plot to suppress his people. At first he had dismissed the very idea but over time he began to wonder if indeed there might not be something to the mad rumors.  

***

Cat looked over Lieutenant Sassi’s numbers. The Ashkelon computer expert had been working with Cat for the better part of a week. Together with the
Yorktown’s
AI they had developed a series of equations that, in theory at least, should allow for the extra-dimensional secondary harmonics that might make unrestricted Hyperfield jumps a reality again

“I’m worried about tertiary perturbations in higher dimensional planes,” Cat said finally.

Sassi’s low-frequency antenna twitched. “In truth, I am too. We can dampen them with a theta wave but we don’t know the proper coupling coefficient.”

“And we can’t know the coupling coefficient without experimental data,” Cat finished. “We’re going to have to try it and fine tune as we go.”

Sassi turned in his interface nest. “I was afraid you were going to say that. The routines have been uploaded to Yorky. When do you want to try it?”

Cat stood and looked around the computer room. Spotting her coffee cup she reached for it before answering. “I think I want to be on the bridge when we make the attempt. I’d like you there too in case we need any fancy code jittering at the last minute.”

“Can I make a suggestion?”

Cat looked at the furry moth-like creature and nodded.

“I think we should ask the
Relentless
to monitor our jump. If we end up in a strange location they might be able to provide critical data via an FTL link to help determine the cause of the anomaly.”

Cat smiled as she headed towards the turbo lift.

“Already ahead of you on that one… I gave Vigit the order an hour ago.”

***

Ken leaned forward in his command chair. The black faux leather creaked slightly as his weight shifted. Lieutenant Sassi sat in his navigation control nest. Admiral Kimbridge was entering some last minute adjustments using a holographic keypad attached to her command chair. Commander Ben was standing next to Lieutenant Zimmerman who was alerting the taskforce to stand ready. The
Yorktown
was moments from attempting an unconstrained jump two light minutes from their current location. The decision had been made to attempt a short test jump before trying to head to the Hupenstanii system.

“Ben, you may want to strap yourself down. This may or may not be a bumpy ride,” Ken said to his First Officer.

Ben nodded his acknowledgment and moved to his own command chair just to the side of the captain’s seat. As he moved he instructed his nanites systems to reconfigure his body to human-normal. It was a mildly disturbing sight to the uninitiated but everyone on the bridge had seen him do this many times. His human form was better suited for the safety features of the chair.

Ken looked at Ziggy. “Mr. Zimmerman, ship-wide if you please.”

“Aye Captain. Channel open.”

“Attention crew of the
Yorktown
. This is the Captain. We are about to attempt an unrestricted hyperfold jump. We may have done many of these in the past but the realities of this universe are different. We have no idea what will happen. We will jump in thirty seconds. Everyone strap in and report any anomalies to the First Officer. Kirkland out.”

“Ziggy, signal the
Relentless
we are ready to go.”

Ken swiveled his chair to look at Cat. She nodded. Ken turned back to face Sassi. He paused a few seconds to give the crew time to batten down the hatches as it were. Finally he said, “Helm, if your board is green you are cleared to jump.”

“Aye Captain,” Sassi chirped.  “Jumping in three, two, one…”

As the Ashkelon Lieutenant hit the jump button the lights on the bridge dimmed slightly and the ship shuddered in a way that caused Ken’s teeth to hurt. Suddenly the world flashed unimaginatively bright colors that felt cold and warm at the same time. Sounds that had smells associated with them filled the room. The synesthesia Ken was experiencing left him feeling disoriented and dizzy. The pain in his head was debilitating. He tried to scream but the sound was transmuted to light flowing from his mouth. He fought a losing battle to stay aware of his surroundings. His last thought before losing consciousness was -
Is this death?
 

The GCP Yorktown was enveloped in an undulating violet hyperfield nimbus. The ship slipped through space-time and arrived at its proper destination… a point less than one tenth of an astronomical unit from their previous location. Unfortunately as a result of the jump every sentient entity on the ship, to include the AI, was rendered unconscious.

They remained unconscious for the better part of thirty minutes. Thus they missed the message from WhimPy-101 declaring an emergency in the Mardarus system.

***

WhimPy-101
struggled to make sense of what was going on. A massive ship of Uruk design had entered the Mardarus star system. The ship was a relic out of Uruk/Heshe distant past. Unless
WhimPy-101
missed his guess… this ship was
Alpha
. The first of the planet killers the Uruk had created. It had run amok and the Uruk had destroyed it millennia ago… or at least that what they had believed.

Alpha
had appeared near the Antares jump point. It had immediately scanned the entire system with a high intensity sensor sweep. A series of collimated anti-proton beams lashed out from hundreds of weapons ports on the massive ship. Each one targeted a different ship or outpost in the immediate vicinity of the jump point. In each case the outcome was the same. The target was destroyed. The massive ship began to accelerate towards the larger population centers with the Mardarus system.