Exodus: Empires at War: Book 2 (9 page)

He quickly punched in a
protocol through his weapons board.  Receiving an interrogative from the ship’s
computer he punched an accent, followed by another code.  The board flashed its
acknowledgement.  The crew’s vitals, normally sent out to the mother ship over
a close range link, were now masked with a false overlay that showed all’s
well.

Satisfied with that
part of the takeover, Viper looked around the tiny bridge of the fighter.  Lt.
Commander Phoenix was staring at the display, all his attention riveted to the
screen.  The pilot, Warrant Three Jurviscious, was relaxing in her chair as if
watching a movie.  He glanced back over his shoulder and saw that Petty Officer
Flounce was hunched over staring at her own view screen.

The com/sensor tech was
the greatest initial threat.  Viper quietly reached his hand down to his
sidearm and by feel set the frequency.  Then in one smooth motion he stood,
drew and pivoted in place, the pistol coming up to point at the back of the
tech’s head.  Hair burst into flame as flesh vaporized and the invisible beam
cut into the skull and through the brain below.  It exited through the forehead
and reflected off of the viewer as it struck.  The reflected energy flash burned
the dead tech’s face before it fell forward.

The programmed assassin
turned the pistol toward the Commander, who was staring at him with a shocked
expression.  The beam had been set to a frequency that would be absorbed by
flesh and bone, and reflect from the plastics and alloys that made up the bridge. 
He swept the beam into the Commander’s neck, slicing through skin, muscle and
bone.  The man’s head fell from his neck, the cauterized wound showing no
blood.  The body followed an instant later.

As the pilot tried to
get out of her seat and pull her weapon at the same time, Viper hit her in the
face with his right elbow, sending her back into her seat with a bloody mouth
and broken teeth.  As she tried to clear her head he shot her between the eyes,
driving her into the permanent blackness of death.

“Chief Ferrel,” he
called over the com link as the pilot’s body slumped in her chair.  “We need
you on the bridge immediately.  Please respond.”

“On my way,” came the
voice of the engineer from his rear compartment.  Moments later the man came
through the opening hatch to the bridge.  His eyes registered shock for a
moment before the assassin shot him through the head.

The assassin overlay
that controlled Ensign O’Brien sat the man’s body in his chair.  The Viper
persona looked over the display, noting the other fighter, the flight leader,
ten kilometers to the front and a couple of kilometers to the side.  He noted
the position of the heavy cruiser
Heraklion
, the mother ship of the
fighters, about twenty thousand kilometers to the stern, and one of the
escorting destroyers thirty thousand kilometers to the bow.  And he made sure
the primary target was where he was supposed to be.

Fingers flying over the
weapons board, Viper assigned all of his offensive missiles to targets.  The
computer flashed a warning over his screen, reminding him that he was targeting
friendlies.  The assassin persona punched in a series of override codes that he
wasn’t supposed to have access to.  Codes that allowed one man without voice recognition
to override the safety protocols of the system.  The board flashed readiness
and part of the panel started flashing a red commit.  Viper pushed down on the
panel and grabbed the fighter’s control stick.

The two access hatches
on the bottom of the fighter opened and the four antiship missiles dropped into
space.  It took a millisecond to orient onto targets.  Then the drives kicked
in and sent the missiles toward their targets at five thousand gravities of
acceleration.

In a little over half a
second the first missile screamed into the small frame of fighter
Heraklion
II
.  The velocity of the missile itself was enough to blast into the hull
of the fighter, kinetic energy superheating the structure and tearing the small
object apart.  The hundred megaton warhead detonation was almost an
afterthought, vaporizing materials and crew and mixing their gases together. 
Within a millionth of a second after detonation the fighter’s carried warheads
and fusion plant went critical, adding five hundred megatons of energy to the
blast.

At fifteen kilometers
distance there was enough density of gas coming back to rock
Heraklion III
. 
And some larger particles, one of which hit the port wing of the craft and tore
a hole in the structure.  Viper already had the fighter turning toward the
primary target.  As the craft shook he kicked in full military power, one
thousand gravities of acceleration, on a vector that would take him under the
Donut
in a couple of seconds.

The second missile,
targeted on the heavy cruiser, sped on a trajectory that would intersect the
warship in twenty-nine seconds.  The cruiser was not at alert status, her Captain
and crew believing that they would not be called on to fight any threat to
their charge on this day.  To their credit they had targeting systems and laser
rings up and running within ten seconds of one of their fighters exploding in
space.  Within fifteen seconds both forward laser rings were pouring full power
into the antiship missile.  At sixteen seconds the missile detonated in a
bright point of light.

Missile three was on
course for the closest destroyer, arrival time just under thirty-five seconds. 
That ship was even faster on the draw than the cruiser, taking the missile out
over twenty seconds from impact.  Both missiles targeting warships had failed
to reach their targets.  They had accomplished their secondary mission as
distracters, taking the ships’ attentions off of missile four which was on a
heading toward the surface of the ring.

Viper oriented the
fighter toward the ring as she came underneath.  Locking onto the region where
he knew the target to be, he triggered the nose and wing lasers at full power
into that section.  Made up of superconducting alloys just like Imperial
warships, the laser energy was transferred quickly out from the point of
impact, not allowing the heat to burn through.  The point of impact was still
much hotter than the surrounding absorbing area.  And it formed the target
point for the incoming missile.

The missile struck the
station at over four hundred kilometers per second, imparting a considerable
amount of kinetic energy into the impact point.  The warhead went off on
impact, dwarfing the kinetic energy as a hundred megatons of explosive power
ripped into the station.  The tough skin was penetrated, vaporized, allowing
the flood of heat and other radiation to enter the interior of the station.  On
such an enormous object this was a pinprick.  In the couple of square
kilometers of surface nearest the blast it was Armageddon.

The observation room
was near the edge of the Armageddon, as the hotspot generated by the fighter
was not precisely on target, so the missile was not precisely on either.  The
rooms under Armageddon were scoured clean of anything they contained.  The
observation room was merely broken open to space and flooded with radiation. 
The occupants were probably dead from radiation poisoning eventually.  They
were surely dead from being sucked out into space.

The Emperor and his
family might have survived the exposure to space for several minutes, while
they were pushed toward the black hole by the explosive force of atmosphere
leaving the observation deck.  They didn’t survive the gigawatts of laser
energy the fighter played over the opening once the assassin picked up his
target’s tracker leaving the station.

Seconds after the
explosion that killed the Emperor, Empress, Heir and Spare, the
Heraklion
opened up on its detached fighter with its A and B rings.  The fighter
shimmered for a brief second as terawatts of heat transferred into her.  Then
she went up in a bright flash as her fusion bottle ruptured.  A fraction of a
second later the lasers from the destroyer reached the spreading plasma cloud,
stirring up the mess.  Within an hour all of the debris would fall into the
black hole, unrecoverable by man.  The only thing that remained was the mystery
of why a crew sworn to protect the Emperor had murdered him and his family.

*     *     *

The call went out to
the Central Naval Base through the wormhole.  Within minutes naval personnel
were coming through the gate to investigate what had happened.  Within an hour
another wave of investigators, this from the Imperial Secret Service and the
Imperial Investigation  Bureau, were roaming the station.  There was not much
to investigate with the bodies of victims and perpetrator gone.  Even the
murder weapon had been destroyed.  But someone had to be responsible, and the
investigators went about their jobs with fire in their eyes.

Dr. Lucille Yu was
brought into an impromptu office where several investigators from the civilian
organizations sat with a pair of Naval Intelligence officers.  The eyes of the
men were a combination of hard and shocked, and the scientist could imagine
what was going through their minds.  Their beloved Emperor, the one they had
been charged with defending with their lives, was gone.  Along with him had
gone the one who would have succeeded him.

“We have some questions
for you, Doctor Yu,” said a hard faced black man in a suit which screamed
government agent.

“And you are?” she
asked.

“Senior Inspector
Jiminez with the IIB,” said the man, looking down on her as if he wanted to
step on her.  “And from here on I will be asking the questions.  Is that
understood?”

“Maybe I should have a
lawyer present,” she said, trying to appear confident and knowing that she was
failing miserably.

“You can talk to your
lawyer later,” said the man with a cold smile.  “Right now you need to talk
with us.”

“But my rights.”

“Damned your rights,
woman,” growled the large man, glowering down at her.  “We’ve have the
sovereign of the Empire assassinated while visiting your station.  Along with
the Heir and the Empress.”

“And all the chief
staff of the station,” chimed in another of the investigators.

“With the exception of
you,” said Jiminez.  “Why did you leave the tour before the assassin struck,
Dr. Yu?”

“I was called away,”
she said, a shiver coming over her as she thought about how close she had come
to death.  And sorrow at all that had died, especially her friends and
colleagues.  “There was a problem with the negative matter production that they
wanted me to look at.”

“And they couldn’t have
sent you the information?” asked Jiminez.  “Or asked the negative matter
expert?  Dr. Gomez I believe.  And please sit down before you fall over.”

Yu sat in the offered
seat, with the investigators all circling her like a pride of carnivores
waiting for the kill.

“I don’t know what I
was thinking,” said Yu in a quiet voice.  “I had to be near the central control
room in order to look at the data in real time and suggest the adjustments,”
she said in a strengthening voice.  “And Dr. Gomez was such a fan of the
Imperial Family I thought he might enjoy their company more than I.”

“So you didn’t like the
Imperial Family?” asked one of the military investigators, looking at a flat
comp and making notes.

“I didn’t say I didn’t
like them,” said Yu, shaking her head.  “I adored the Emperor.  But I don’t
really like parties all that much.  And Gomez always went on about wanting to
talk with the Emperor.”

“So you really don’t
know anything about this assassination?” asked Jiminez, looking down at her. 
“I would like to believe you.  I really would.  But I can’t take that chance. 
We have some techs with a mind probe here.  So I guess we’ll just have to use
them.”

“But,” said Lucille,
thinking of the very unpleasant procedure which some people equated with mind
rape.  “I’m telling you the truth.”

“Perhaps you are,” said
Jiminez, motioning for one of the other plainclothes investigators to come
over.  “But we can’t take that chance right now.  I need to know as much as I
can about what happened here.  I’ll apologize later if I’m wrong.”

The other large man
grabbed Lucille Yu by the arm and pulled her out of her chair.  Before she
could gain her balance or protest she was hustled from the room.

*     *     *

“You really think she
had anything to do with this mess?” said one of the naval investigators.

“I don’t know,” said
Jiminez, frowning as he thought of a seated Emperor killed on his watch.  “It
may not really matter.  We need someone to point the public outcry at, and she
may have to do.  I think we need to send her to Purgatory for a while no matter
what the probe shows.  As a guest of course, if she warrants it.”

"Why not let her
go if the probe shows her to be innocent?" asked the first naval
investigator.

"I believe whoever
was aboard that fighter had been cleared by standard deep probe," said
Jiminez, staring at the naval officer who nodded his head.  "Well,
obviously something slipped by the probe where that officer was
concerned."

"Impossible,"
said the Commander.  "The system is foolproof."

"Never
underestimate the power of fools," said Jiminez with a tight smile. 
"But whatever the cause, there was an unreliable on board that fighter who
was not caught in the standard deep mind probe.  So a negative result in this
case proves nothing.  And we may need the facilities of Purgatory to actually
break whatever deep conditioning she may be under."