The Catherine Kimbridge Chronicles #1, Inception (31 page)

Timing would be critical once that happened. Their plan to deal with the Uruk essentially came down to buying Earth time. The Earth's population was too massive to easily move off planet. Moving the entire planet on the other hand, while once the wildest of fantasies, was now vaguely within the realm of possibility. Unfortunately, even moving the entire planet to a compatible orbit around a different star would buy humanity very little, if humanity did not reconfigure the Earth's technological infrastructure to eliminate or mask radio emissions.

One of the mandates the exploration teams had been given, was to locate a dense dark nebula or Bok globule with a suitable sol-type star distal to the galactic core. The cosmic dust contained in these types of structures could aid in obscuring any radio signals the human technology produced. Finding such a structure was time consuming, and time was something humanity had in very limited supply.

"I'm afraid I must leave you to your thoughts Commodore." Ben said, while beginning to slow down.

"Sorry, Ben... My mind wants to be everywhere but here today."

"With the cubs and not the kitchen, my people would say." Ben said, as the two of them stopped near the entrance to the locker-room. "The plan is a good one. Regardless of what happens my people have a better future today than they did yesterday. "

"There is so much riding on timing... And even if everything works as planned, will they react as we hope? Every minute we can buy Earth is another life saved."

Ben paused to wipe synthetic sweat from his brow. "My father used to tell us as kids that the universe had two things. A temper and a sense of humor. The best way to live in it was to laugh when it was angry."

"What does that mean?" Cat asked.

"I have no idea, and I was always afraid to ask."

***

The Master Uruk AI woke when its countdown timer determined an eradication override was not forthcoming. Per its ancient protocols, it issued the orders that would purge the galaxy of a competing sentience. Three massive weapons platforms awoke. Once there had been dozens of such units but over the centuries even the sophisticated Uruk self-repair mechanisms had started to fail. Three of the massive engines of death were all that remained, but they would be enough for many generations to come.

As the weapons platforms came online and performed their prescribed diagnostics, the master AI invoked yet another subroutine. It learned the dominant language of the race to be subsumed, and constructed transmitters capable of saturating the target race's communications with a simple message...

"
Send monitoring and recording teams to the coordinates provided within the next 24 hours or face total and complete destruction.
"

Within moments of sending this message, the three weapons platforms jumped to the target system to await the arrival of their audience.

***

Sensors on the Yorktown detected the three immense weapons platforms as they jumped into D'lralu space.  "That's it! Battle stations!" Cat yelled. "Ken, decloak us... Ziggy open a channel to those bastards."

"Channel open, Ma'am."

"Attention Uruk craft. We are aware of what you intend to do. We will not allow you to destroy our enemies... Therefore, monitor the D'lralu worlds and be advised we will defend ourselves if provoked. Chief Wroblewski, fire main batteries on the designated targets."

Immediately a pair of tightly constrained hyper field conduits were opened to a point in space near the event horizon of the galactic core. Surrounding this conduit was a parabolic hyper field designed to reverse momentum and reflect radiation. The curvature of this hyperbolic field was precisely tuned to force anything striking it to coalesce at a position some four light seconds away. 

Incredibly intense beams of almost pure energy lashed out of the bow of the Yorktown towards the inhabited but fully shielded moons containing the remaining D'lralu population. The moons simply disappeared as the energy beams hit them. The remaining energy boiled away most of the gas giants’ atmosphere in the fraction of a second before the beams stopped.

"Helm, pivot us to face those behemoths. I want a full tactical scan... Yesterday! Move it people!"

"Yes, Ma'am." the various stations yelled back in unison.

"Holy Molley! Cat, you have got to see this!" Ken said from his station. He must have realized he hadn't used her rank as a title in his excitement and started to apologize when she waved him off.

"Don't ever sweat the little stuff... What have you got?"

"Take a look at these energy signatures... Do they remind you of anybody we know?"

"Cal, access Commander Kirkland's station. Can you identify the energy signatures?"

"
Affirmative. The pattern of energy output seems consistent with obsolete pre-diaspora Heshe technologies. The Uruk may have interacted with the Heshe sometime in the distant past
."

"Commodore," Chief Wroblewski interjected. "Those platforms are powering up something really big on those dorsal arrays."

"I see it," Cat said while looking at Ken's monitor. "Analysis?"

"I bet they go bang." Commander Ben said from his station.

"I agree with our furry friend." Ken echoed. "I recommend we take an aggressive posture."

"Shoot first, ask questions later?"

Cat paused for the briefest of moments before turning to Chief Wroblewski. "Chief, knowing you as I do, you already have a lock on these guys... Target the one of the left, their energy signature seems slightly more erratic. We may be able to break thru whatever shielding they are using."

"Lock confirmed, Ma'am."

"Light'm up chief."

"Roger that, Ma'am. Lighting up. I have three SJ deploying immediately and two core beams following six point two light seconds later."

"Helm begin a series of random micro jumps centered around those three.... No closer than two light seconds."

"Yes, Ma'am."

The forward display went wild as the relative position of the Yorktown started to rapidly fluctuate.

"Cal, tie into astrometrics... Give me a simulated real time fixed position display on the main viewer with a one fourth size actual display in the lower left corner."

Immediately the forward view screen stabilized and became useful again.

"The SJs are hitting the target, Commodore." Wroblewski reported.

"Minimal effect. There was a two percent increase in harmonic oscillations of their shields... Stabilizing back to a one point two percent cumulative delta."

"Keep us moving." Cat said. "Chief, I want you to continuous firing SJ triplets every two to three seconds. Beam weapons too if you can get a lock fast enough."

Suddenly the ship rocked throwing everyone but Cat and Ben from their stations. Only her nanite enhanced muscles and his cybernetic strength allowed them to remain seated.

"Cal, report!"

"
The Uruk have very good AIs. No random number sequence is truly random, and they calculated our probable location with sufficient accuracy to get a shot off that grazed us. The active nanite skin has already healed the damage. I took the initiative to jump us another four light seconds out. It is unlikely they will be able to duplicate their targeting success, as the potential number of random locations is a squared function of the radius
."

"Good initiative, Cal."

"Ken, are we having any impact on their shields?"

"Definitely... They are down sixteen percent... The problem is going to be ammo. We are going to run out long before we take them out and we haven't even fired a shot at the other two."

"Commodore the primary target just jumped to inside the solar corona," Trifa reported.

"That's going to greatly decrease the effectiveness of our targeting sys..." Ken started to add as the bridge shook with a thunderous clap that burst several eardrums. The lights flicked and stabilized momentarily before the entire ship shook again and then again.

Cal reported before being asked. "
The Yorktown was just grazed three times. None were direct hits, but the ship sustained considerable damage to its superstructure. Repair systems are compensating, but we will continue to vent atmosphere for another thirty two seconds. Beam weapons are offline. Active shielding is marginal. We will not survive another round like that.
"

"How'd they hit us?" Ken asked.

"They outsmarted us." Cat answered while helping a bleeding Lieutenant Zimmerman back to her seat. She tapped Ziggy's open scalp with the tip of a finger and flowed a couple thousand repair nanites into her wound to staunch the flow of blood and repair the skin.

"When they jumped their ship into the corona, we automatically changed our jump pattern to retain a line of sight for our beam weapons.  This limited the range of random jump points and all three of their platforms were able to take advantage of it -- until Cal jumped us out of range." She added.

"Commodore... Drop an SJ into the convection zone just outside the sun's core" Ben yelled.

"Ben that will nova your sun... We can't do that." Cat said while scanning the displays looking for another road to victory.

"Ma'am," the D'lralu commander said calmly. "You must. With all the SJ rounds going off in this system and with the previous destruction of our home world... There is nothing for us here. Let us have this one victory... Please."

Cat turned to the weapons console. "Chief, have Cal help you. Target the convection zone between that Uruk platform and the solar core. Drop a SJ when ready and signal the helm to jump ten AU out as soon as it’s done."

"Aye, Ma'am, SJ away."

"Jumping 10 AU now." the Helm echoed.

***

Weapon Platform 23 and 41 watched as the relatively young star in this system unexpectedly went nova. The primary eruption was located to engulf Weapons Platform 6.  Normally this would have been of little concern to the massively shielded machine, but Weapon Platform 6 was currently functioning well below specification, which is why it maneuvered itself into the star's corona. In this way it could concentrate its primary defenses outward. 

The ejected superheated star mass slammed into the minimal shielding of the weapon platform and overloaded it before the machine's AI could take defensive action. A series of cascading overloads quickly overwhelmed the ancient machines redundant repair mechanisms, and it's power generation systems went offline. This exposed the craft to the full and unabated wrath of the nova, which reduced the now inert weapons platform to several billion tons of molten metal.

Weapon Platform 23 took command of the assault. A single Earth vessel had done what no race in countless millennia had done. They had defeated an Uruk weapon. There was no protocol for handling such an event. Weapon Platform 23 ordered a retreat to the home system to consult with the creators.

Yarin viewed the console in front of him. It seemed incredible that the home-world had been found. The Heshe had left this system millions of years before the first microbe had formed on many of the worlds in this part of the galaxy, which now supported intelligent life.