Jack of Harts 2.5: Wolfenheim Rising (6 page)

BOOK: Jack of Harts 2.5: Wolfenheim Rising
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Captain Wyatt cleared her throat in something that sounded suspiciously like a laugh.  “Keep that recording,” she ordered in a light tone.  “I’m going to want to watch it later.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” Jones returned, and one hand flashed across her console.  “Sent to your
personal
storage.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Wyatt said, gave Malcolm a sidelong glance with amused eyes, and turned back to the forward display.  “Now let’s see how she likes
them
apples.”

It would take at least a minute for Alan’s transmission to speed across space to Murphy’s squadron, and for her response to come back.  And that entire minute they would spend accelerating away from Alan’s shipyard, getting one minute closer to escape.  There were times when Malcolm appreciated that science fiction’s faster-than-light communications were still science fiction.  It allowed for some purely amusing ways of giving someone the
digitus maximus
.  It was almost enough to make him giggle.  Almost.

“Give Alan my thanks,” Malcolm whispered for only Dawn’s ears.

“He accepts them,” she answered after a short pause.  “He just has one request.”

Malcolm turned to meet her gaze and said, “Anything,” without hesitation.  At her look of surprise, he raised an eyebrow.  “Alan’s not the kind of man to ask for something I’d object to,” he noted with a shrug.

Her eyes softened at the explanation, and she nodded slowly.  “He wants you to say hello to his family when we reach the other side.”

“Done,” Malcolm said in the tone of a man giving a solemn oath, and turned back to watch the fun.

It took twenty minutes to reach the edge of the gravitic distortion field the Peloran yard generated, and they spent the entire time listening to Jones relaying increasingly annoyed transmissions between Alan and Murphy.  Wyatt stopped asking for copies after the third set of transmissions, but only because Jones preempted her with what had to have been an actual giggle.  The tension that had filled the bridge evaporated as reports of recovering the shuttles carrying
Hastings’
crew arrived, and even the grey-coveralled yard dogs joined in the banter that took over.  Not a single one of them stood up to leave, telling everyone where they stood without a single word.  Or in this case, where they crawled under consoles still in need of work.

“All ships confirm crossing The Red Line, Ma’am,” Jones finally reported, and all eyes turned to Captain Wyatt.

“Lieutenant Lee?” Captain Wyatt asked, her voice somehow mixing strength with amusement, hovering over an inner core of iron.

“Sensors confirm, Ma’am,” the officer manning the sensors returned.  “All ships are safe to dive.”

The Captain glanced at her first officer.

Commander Hill met her gaze and nodded.  “All stations report ready to dive.”

“Very well, then,” The Captain said and turned to her helm officer.  “Lieutenant Lopez.  Commence diving operations immediately.”

“Diving now, Ma’am,” Lopez answered, hands running over his controls.  Then the ship twisted around them, and Malcolm’s stomach took a hard turn to the left while the rest of his body went right.  At least that is what it felt like.  He’d never cared for going in and out of hyperspace, especially at the kinds of speeds that twenty minutes of hard acceleration could generate.  He held on to his breakfast through force of will.  It had been a very good breakfast, after all, and he didn’t want to remember it splashed all over the deck.

And then his eyes registered the sight all around them.  Rivers of light made of every color of the rainbow flowed around
Normandy
and the other ships of the fleet.  Gravity itself shivered and bent as their powerful gravitic fields smashed the rivers before their prows, and wakes of disturbed gravity radiated away from the fresh intruders into its domain.

“Lieutenant Lopez.  Set course for the New Earth–Sunnydale Run and take us to maximum depth.”

“New Earth–Sunnydale Run, aye Ma’am,” Lopez responded and
Normandy
began accelerating again.  “Maximum depth, aye Ma’am,” the helm officer added, and the brightly colored gravitic waves became muted as they dove away from the wall between hyperspace and normalspace.

Malcolm watched the fleet pick up their skirts and dance away from their pursuers.  The Captain turned her chair and their eyes met.  He saw Olivia in them again, softer now than the persona she’d used to hold the bridge crew to her command.  And he saw something new over the haunted look that still resided back there.  Now he saw pleasure in a job well done, and confidence that she hadn’t lost her touch.  There were still doubts there, worries that perhaps some of the charges against her were right.  But in the first test of her mettle since the court martial that ended her career as a Captain in the United States Navy, she’d risen to the challenge.

Malcolm smiled.  They’d all made it out of Alpha Centauri.  And whatever the future held, he had a feeling they would all remember that until the day they died.  Whenever that day came for them.

Hyperspace is a strange place.  I grew up with it.  I spent my youth traveling to most of the Core Worlds.  I thought I understood it.  But then The War came for us all, and I learned that I knew very little about hyperspace at all.  It is an alien universe, literally, and we travel its paths with great care.  We must learn more about it, if we are to ever break out of our tiny corner of the galaxy.

 

 

IV

 

When mankind first discovered hyperspace, they found a panoramic view of multicolored rivers of gravity flowing beneath the surface of the normal Einsteinian universe everyone was born in.  Humanity soon discovered that those rivers ran from star to star, linking the galaxy from edge to edge.  And those early explorers learned a secret that brought the stars within reach.  The gravitic currents, and any ship that sailed them, traveled faster than the speed of light itself.  But the rivers were treacherous.

The first ships to Alpha Centauri rode a slow, calm river away from Earth, moving perhaps two or three times the speed of light as those in normalspace measured their progress.  But as they approached the Alpha Centauri trinary star system, the river rushed in at speeds approaching ten times the speed of light.  The ships followed a dangerous series of twists and turns as the currents shot past Proxima Centauri like an ancient slingshot and then fell into the whirlpool of the binary star system at the heart of Alpha Centauri.  There they found multiple worlds, brimming with life and waiting for us to colonize them.

And they learned why the river between home and Alpha Centauri was so much stronger than any other.  Early scientists assumed it was simply because Alpha Centauri was closer.  But Alpha Centauri’s three suns twisted the gravitic currents of hyperspace more than mankind’s home star, spraying out torrents of gravity far more powerful, and far faster, than any other.  For a hundred years, every ship from Earth sailed to Alpha Centauri first, and only then did they go to the stars.

And then the Peloran made Contact.  They brought faster and more powerful hyperdrives that could break out of the tiny streams connecting stars, and forge their own paths through the true depths of hyperspace. 
Normandy
and the other starships of the Wolfenheim Project used the best Peloran hyperdrives, built into them by Peloran shipyards and powered by Peloran reactors.  After months of being ripped apart and put back together by Peloran hands, they were Peloran starships in every way that mattered, built to spend a lifetime in hyperspace.

They’d spent the last thirty-four days traveling across the ninety-four lightyears between New Earth and Sunnydale at a thousand times the speed of light, as the outside world measured time and space.  Aboard
Normandy
, a mere seventeen days passed by, and none of her sisters ever accelerated past a hundred measly kilometers per second by their measurements.  Now
Normandy
rose up through the multicolored currents of gravity like a shark, watching for enemies.  The giant whale of
Wolfenheim’s
bulk crested another current nearby far less gracefully.  The colony ship was slow and clumsy compared to the tiny piranhas that surrounded her, ready to kill anything that threatened her as they searched for their destination.

The New Earth–Sunnydale Run had been mapped out for decades, with survey ships scanning every conceivable current in the area.  It was updated every month, as new ships arrived to add their navigational information to the database.  But it was always changing.

And the only way to be sure where you were on the Run was to obtain a solid read on a nearby star.  Most stars could be detected in hyperspace at least a few lighthours away.  Giants could be detected significantly farther out, while main sequence stars like our Sun could be detected ten or twenty lighthours away.

The F1V star named Sunnydale was one of the brightest stars that mankind had colonized, and it had a more energetic interaction with hyperspace than most stars.  It could be detected a full two lightdays away, making it an effective beacon star for long-range travel.  A ship on the New Earth–Sunnydale Run followed the mapped gravitic currents for seventeen days subjective, across nearly a hundred lightyears, and then spent several hours moving “up” towards the wall in hopes that they could detect the gravitic fingerprint of a single star’s effect on hyperspace.  If they didn’t get thrown off course by a current that wasn’t there the last time a ship came through, and if they calculated the right time-dilation factor, they just might find that they arrived in the vicinity of their target.

It was like throwing a dart across the yard, during a windstorm, and trying to hit a dime attached to the fence.  Very few humans had ever shown the natural aptitude it required to do that.  Modern navigational computers
usually
hit their targets.  Usually.

Malcolm sat at the rear of the bridge, watching as
Normandy
and her little fleet snuck up into the shallows of hyperspace, scanning for threats as they followed Sunnydale’s scent.  His squadron should be the first arrivals from New Earth since the confrontation with Commodore Murphy.  Through some highly serendipitous events that couldn’t possibly be tracked to him, no couriers had been available at New Earth to warn anyone at Sunnydale of their imminent arrival.  And he had reason to believe that Murphy would “just happen” to receive an old hyperspace map when she asked for a cartography update.

But if, despite all the preparations he could swear up and down he had nothing to do with, Murphy’s squadron had managed to make better time than
Normandy
, they could be lying in wait.  And Olivia was a very careful captain.  She hated surprises, and so they very carefully rose towards the hyperspace wall.

“Contact!” The single word shot through the bridge and Malcolm turned to look at Lieutenant Anton Lee as even more words tumbled out of the man’s lips.  “Contact!  Single ship, directly above at six five zero zero meters.  Designating Bogey One.”

“Does she see us?” Olivia asked, her voice hardening into her captain’s alter ego as she spoke.  On one display, Malcolm glimpsed an on-duty recon fighter already accelerating towards the target.

“Bogey One moving.”  The report came quick, words short and clipped as the officer communicated as rapidly as possible.  Displays flashed on the man’s stations and he tensed.  “Identified Shang scout!  Running.”

“Firing solution?” Wyatt demanded as even Malcolm’s untrained eyes caught the scout ship beginning to pull away.

“Bravo,” Lee answered without hesitation.

Wyatt hadn’t waited for his word though, having already turned to her tactical officer.  “Guns?” she asked, the moment Lee’s mouth closed.

Malcolm nodded in approval.  It was amazing to see them react so quickly and professionally.  He could see in their training the instincts that must have brought them out of Epsilon Reticuli alive.  But a proper cybernetic intelligence on the other side would have killed them already in the seconds it was taking to respond.  He glanced at Dawn as Lieutenant Thompson confirmed Fire Plan Bravo, and saw the grim smile as she met his eyes.  Yes, she could have fired already.

“Fire,” Wyatt ordered without any hesitation.

Thompson hit the button and missiles poured out of
Normandy’s
forward bow to streak out after the fleeing scout at the equivalent of point-blank range.  Seven more waves of missiles from the other ships of the fleet converged on the scout at the same time, within a second of launching.  It was like tanks firing at ten paces, and the Shang crew had no time to even realize they were under attack.  Only the Shang computers saw the missiles coming in time to react, and if they weren’t cybernetic minds their artificial intelligence was perfectly suited to operating point-defense batteries in an emergency.  The scout’s laser clusters came to life without waiting for orders that would never come from the crew, strobing on and off faster than most eyes could register.

Missile after missile ripped apart in less than a second, victim of the scout’s point defense, but there were a dozen more missiles for each one that fell, and they bore in on their victim.  The first to breach the point-defense grid exploded outside the scout’s deflection grid, reaching out with talons of focused gravity to rip the concentrated bands of gravitic shielding apart.  Missiles following them sailed through the shredded deflection grid with impunity, though three actually hit sections of the grid still online.  Those missiles disappeared without a trace, twisted and ripped apart by gravitic shear measured in the thousands of gravities.

The other missiles found their target easy prey, though, and erupted into miniature black holes that tore through the scout with impunity.  They only had enough power to maintain their attack for a fraction of a second, but in that time they twisted and tore at the scout and the streams of hyperspace around her without mercy.  Gravity, the very fabric of hyperspace itself, vibrated with the assault, and gravitic whips lashed against both missiles and the nearby scout.

“Firing, Ma’am,” Thompson finished repeating her order, in accordance with standard Navy doctrine, as the missiles tore the scout apart before their eyes.  That particular protocol seemed rather pointless to Malcolm as anybody with working eyes could see they were firing.  But the Navy had their regulations.  As he watched, the wreckage of the scout began to drift apart, victim of the gravitic currents swirling around the devastation.

“Good job, guns,” Wyatt congratulated, and turned to Malcolm with a smile.  “Well.  That was exciting.  Did you enjoy your first hyperspace ambush?”

“It was…quick,” Malcolm responded, holding Dawn’s gaze for another second.  She nodded back without a word.  It could have been them under surprise attack.  Four years of planning, wiped out in seconds by a chance meeting, and he couldn’t have done a thing to stop it.  It was a humbling realization.  “Meeting ships in hyperspace is…dangerous.”

Wyatt nodded very slowly, expression sober.  “It’s incredibly rare.  But yes.  Very dangerous.”  She turned back to her crew with a sigh.  “Lieutenant Lopez.  Bring us up into normalspace now,” she ordered, her voice under complete control.

“Surfacing now, Ma’am,” Jorge Lopez acknowledged, and the fabric of hyperspace began to twist around them as
Normandy’s
hyperdrive flexed her muscles.  Every exterior display blinked out for a moment, and when they came back online an inky darkness filled by pinpricks of light surrounded them.  One by one, the other ships of their fleet flashed into being around them, a rainbow of light radiating from them as they bled off the excess energy of their transit.  In a matter of seconds, every last member of the Wolfenheim Project had arrived at their destination.

Sunnydale was the last major colony short of the Hyades Cluster, the linchpin in a network of military bases that kept pressure on Shang forces holding the cluster.  Malcolm knew that intellectually.  News reports of the brave stand of Sunnydale were legion, after all.  But as the massive network of fortifications began to populate the sensor displays, he truly began to realize what it meant.  Most of the stations were mere sensor platforms, scattered throughout the star system to keep track of starship traffic, but many others displayed the symbols of true forts inside jamming bubbles that disrupted hyperspace a lightminute across.  The forts ringed both inhabited planets, protecting the inner system from the sneak attacks the Shang had become famous for.

Normandy
and her charges had arrived far outside that cluttered part of the system though, near a single massive gas giant that dominated the view of nearby space.  One display showed a zoomed-in view of the world, revealing the spiraling bright orange and red storms that gave it the name Torchdale.  Another display came to life, and Malcolm had to suppress a gasp of amazement.  Someone else on the bridge failed to suppress the urge, and he couldn’t blame them.

Hundreds of warships from every nation of the Western Alliance orbited the gas giant, icons proudly proclaiming their country of origin.  Entire fleets of British, German, French, and American warships held formation near the fortified moons, ready to respond to any Shang incursion.  Individual squadrons from other countries dotted the edges of the larger formations, and a few single ships held station next to one of the larger forts.  Shuttles and fighters appeared as pinpricks of light, moving around the larger starships in a never-ending dance that betrayed the energy running through the fleet.

Malcolm whistled when he recognized the icon for
Columbia
, flagship of the American fleet.  Far larger than any of the twenty or so dreadnoughts he could see, she didn’t even have an official class name.  The newsies joked that it was because there
was
no other ship that could match her, and as one display zoomed in on her, Malcolm had to admit they had a point.  The largest warship ever built by America, she dwarfed the “mere” battleships surrounding her in defensive positions.  The scores of cruisers, destroyers, and frigates supporting them looked like mere toys next to her bulk, but reinforced how seriously America took the buildup at Sunnydale.

The display shifted again, this time showing nearly fifty brilliant white spires floating in the darkness.  Malcolm swallowed and licked lips that were suddenly dry.  He’d seen ships like that before, in orbit over Earth, but he’d never seen more than nine at a time. 
Nobody
this side of Independence had ever seen more than nine.  Aneerin’s single battle squadron had been the symbol of Peloran support of the Alliance for a hundred years.  Now two more battle squadrons floated nearby.  He blinked and reread the display to make sure he understood it.  Yes.  Someone on the other side of The Gateway had shaken loose an actual carrier squadron, and what looked like two escort squadrons, as well.

It wasn’t a true battle fleet.  Nothing short of two hundred Peloran warships could ever be a real battle fleet.  But those fifty warships were the most powerful collection of Peloran might seen in Terran space since Fifth Battle Fleet disappeared into the Hyades Cluster five years before.  Which was what made the fleet assembled here at Sunnydale so very important.  They had to fight an enemy that somehow wiped out two hundred Peloran warships at Hyades with no survivors.  And as if that wasn’t enough to make anyone nervous about The War, that same enemy had destroyed over
three
hundred Alliance warships at Epsilon Reticuli with
almost
no survivors.

BOOK: Jack of Harts 2.5: Wolfenheim Rising
2Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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