Extinction Wars: 02 - Planet Strike Page 23

  “Our lasers must have incredibly short range in hyperspace,” I said, “and they fire much slower. Maybe in comparison, it’s like shooting a bullet into water. The bullet won’t travel nearly as far or as fast as if fired in the air.”

  “And the fighters?” Ella asked. “They would also be slowed, yes?”

  I thought about that, and I might have figured it out. “A bullet shot in the water travels faster than a diver can, but the differences aren’t as stark as an air-shot bullet compared to a sprinter on land. The faster something goes, the more it is slowed, bringing everything down to a similar level.”

  Ella nodded thoughtfully. “You are observant, Commander. Yes, I believe you’re right. I congratulate you.”

  Before the fighters reached the moth-ships, the eyes on the nearest Karg vessels glowed more brilliantly. They seemed to bubble as if made of red-hot lava. Then a red ray beamed. To my eye, it traveled marginally faster than our lasers had. A single touch of the ray melted a fighter. The rest of the fighters began jinking, swerving out of the way.

  “What kind of beam is that?” I asked. “What are you reading on your sensors?”

  N7 worked his panel. He finally looked up. “It must be the graviton beam Venturi told us about.”

  The moth-ships destroyed many of the fighters, their rays like a laser light show at an old rock concert. Fortunately, at the same time, the dreadnought lasers worked over the Kargs, destroying them one by one. Ten fighters made it into particle beam range, and then we had a better estimation of the moth-ship’s size.

  “Commander,” N7 said. “The moth-ships…according to my sensors, they’re a tenth the size of our dreadnought.”

  That slammed home hard. It made the moth-ships massive, bigger than anything I’d seen so far except for the dreadnoughts themselves. Now I realized each Karg snowflake-vessel was many times larger than a dreadnought.

  Of the three original snowflake-vessels, one had completely disintegrated. Yet that was a mistaken observation on my part. The snowflake-ship hadn’t fallen apart, but launched its component warships. Those warships were colossal pods carrying moth-ships each a tenth of the size of a Lokhar dreadnought. It seemed a Karg snowflake turned into one hundred moth-ships, or ten times the mass of one of our vessels. The three Karg snowflakes represented ten times our flotilla’s mass.

  “I’m guessing we can’t win this battle,” I said.

  “Our lasers outrange anything they’ve shown so far,” N7 said.

  “That’s hurting but not stopping the Kargs,” Ella said. “Look, another of their main warships had begun breaking up into its components.”

  Even as we saw that, the last of the initially launched moth-ships neared the dreadnoughts.

  I opened communications with Admiral Venturi. At least, I attempted to do so. The tiger lord ignored me.

  The battle turned disastrous then as the nearest moth-ships beamed Glory. Those graviton rays burned through the dreadnought’s electromagnetic fields in an amazingly short time. Fortunately, the last of the near moth-ships died even as they began churning into Glory’s hull.

  “Admiral Venturi!” I shouted. “I demand your attention. If you want the stone of God to survive—”

  Venturi appeared on my panel. He sat in a command chair, hunched forward, with his right elbow on his knee. He looked stricken and resolved.

  “What do you desire of me?” he growled.

  “Can we win this battle?” I asked.

  He tightened a fist. “We must,” he said in a hoarse voice. “Otherwise, the universe is doomed.”

  Too much struck me as odd about the battle. I was still trying to get a handle on hyperspace. “Visual range must be extremely short here. I think the same holds true for radar.”

  “Yes, yes,” Venturi said in a heavy voice. “The Kargs surprised us. We had no idea they patrolled so far out.”

  “Okay,” I said. “In hyperspace there are short detection ranges. Therefore, if we slipped away now, we might be able to escape from the Kargs.”

  Admiral Venturi blinked at me, as if the idea had never crossed his mind. “It is possible. Yet why are the Kargs out here? If we leave, they might slip into our space-time continuum.”

  “That’s something that has been bothering me for a long time,” I said. “They need the portal planet to break into hyperspace. That would imply they don’t have their own technology to do such a thing. That would mean they can’t possibly break into our universe from hyperspace.”

  A Lokhar marching behind Venturi halted, turned his head and stared at me. A muffled call caused the aide to step out of view.

  Meanwhile, the admiral glared at me. “The portal planet will open the way into our universe. The Forerunner artifact is keyed to us.”

  “Which means I’m right about fleeing,” I said. “On all accounts, we must reach and close the portal.”

  “By the Great Maker,” Venturi whispered. The Lokhar straightened, and he began to issue terse orders. I kept the link open, to listen in, and the admiral did not close it from the other side, so I watched the progress of the battle.

  Our three main lasers concentrated on the second wave of approaching moth-ships. Then a second swarm of tiger fighters appeared. The melee turned bloody as hell, with charred and tumbling fighters breaking apart from the slicing graviton beams. Then an enemy vessel exploded. I don’t mean it burst apart in slow motion. This time, the moth-ship disappeared in a titanic flash that radiated its blast outward in a perfect sphere. Two hundred tiger fighters simply vaporized within it. Another two Karg warships also took direct hits. That left two more, which the lasers finished in short order.

  From farther away wore moth-ships came, though, several hundred more in an unbeatable mass.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I told Venturi. “It’s time to scram.”

  I don’t think the tiger heard me. He was too busy rattling off orders and listening to officers’ reports.

  I felt a bump, though. N7 and Ella swayed at their stations. We must have engaged the main engines. It seemed the Supreme Lord Admiral had some sense after all.

  Thirty seconds later, Venturi roared in anguish. He shot to his feet, and he spoke in a low voice. I don’t know what he said, but soon we felt another bump.

  “What are you doing?” I shouted at Venturi. “What’s the plan?” I looked at the enemy on the main screen. I think we’d slowed down.

  The Lokhar slumped back into his command chair. Then he straightened, and there was fire his yellow eyes. “It is time to fight,” he told me.

  “There are too many Kargs for us to defeat.”

  “I must do my duty,” Venturi rumbled.

  Another look at the main screen showed me Dreadnought Glory by itself, badly wounded, with a ruptured hull along its spine. Vapors billowed out of it into hyperspace. It must not have accelerated with us. Maybe it couldn’t.

  “We cannot desert Glory,” Venturi told me. “The Kargs damaged the outer engines. But given time, we can repair the ship.”

  I studied the main screen. Hundreds of Karg moths-ships accelerated toward the stricken dreadnought. Those hundreds represented a much greater mass than our flotilla. If less than twenty moths had done that to one dreadnought…

  “Admiral Venturi, you must listen carefully. The Lokhars cannot win this head-to-head fight.”

  The tiger glared at me, and he expanded his mighty chest. “You do not know the Lokhars. We never abandon our own.”

  I knew that wasn’t true. I’d seen Lokhars flee before. Heck, I’d seen it in the strategy session chamber. Maybe now wasn’t the best time to remind him of that. I had to use reason—no. That likely wouldn’t work either. There was only one way to appeal to Venturi.

  “I would ask you a personal question, Admiral,” I said.

  “Is this another of your insults?”

  “I am a savage and a barbarian. You’ve told me so more than once. But even I know where my ultimate duty lies.”

  “What a
re you implying?” Venturi asked.

  “We have one goal: to close the portal. If we do, our universe survives and the Lokhars live. If we fail, we all perish. You can save life, Admiral Venturi, but only if you reach the portal planet.”

  “No!” he said. “I can do that only if I can reach the Forerunner artifact in the portal planet. For that, I need Glory’s legionaries.”

  “Yes, you must reach the artifact, and that will take us humans. Do you suppose I foresaw this battle?” I shook my head. “That would be absurd to think so. Then what caused me to insist that all the humans remain aboard Indomitable? Why, the Creator must have moved my tongue.”

  Venturi glared at me with red-rimmed eyes.

  “We have what we need to win, Admiral. If we all perish here, though, it’s over. You must allow Glory the privilege of holding the Kargs at bay while we make our escape into hyperspace.”

  “I have two more dreadnoughts to hurl into the fray. Orange Tamika will survive.”

  “You could be right,” I said. “Yet let us consider the odds. Forget that a fraction of their strength already did this to us. If you lose the coming battle, all is lost for our universe. If you lose Defiant in the fight, it makes our odds of battling down into the portal planet even less than before. If you lose Indomitable and Defiant survives, you have lost the humans the oracle said you needed for success. No, Prince Venturi, you have one duty. That is to reach the portal planet and land us on it. Make our deaths in hyperspace worth something by defeating the Kargs for good.”

  “Do you realize how many Kargs will be at the planet if there are already three such Karg snowflakes out here?”

  I hadn’t thought about that. But it didn’t matter now. “Do you truly believe in the Creator?” I asked.

  “How dare you ask me that?”

  “I am asking. Do you?”

  “Yes!” he roared, pounding the arm of his chair.

  “Then know that He chose you for this mission for a reason. That reason wasn’t to die uselessly. Maybe only you out of all the Lokhars have the sense of duty strong enough to leave Glory to her fate. We have our own to meet. And we can’t win everything here, but we can if we win at the portal planet.”

  “I despise you, Commander Creed. I hate and loathe you to the depth of your being.”

  “That seems to be the way of things,” I said. “I tell the truth too often, and no one really likes to hear it. Well, what’s it going to be, Admiral?”

  The big Lokhar bowed his head. I didn’t envy him. It was one thing to know what to do. It was quite another to leave your friends behind to face certain death. This would weigh on his Lokhar soul for the rest of his life.

  Admiral Venturi stood up, and he quietly issued what must have been the hardest commands of his life.

  Shortly, I felt a bump again. We watched the main screen, as the moth-ships converged upon Glory. Beams began to rage as we fled from the fight. We had a greater destiny than to die today. Before the stricken dreadnought perished, it faded from sight and then from the range of our short-ranged radars.

  There was no such thing as long-ranged radars in hyperspace. The flotilla now had two dreadnoughts instead of three. We had a little less than seven million tiger legionaries and one third fewer tanks, fighters and attack-craft. We also knew that the Kargs would have overwhelming numbers at the planet.

  The success of our mission seemed even more hopeless than before.

  -21-

  I began watching battle video like a Big Ten football coach. Sometimes, N7 joined me. Sometimes, Ella and Rollo sat down. We took notes, compared them and talked late into the night.

  It would have been good to capture a Karg. It would have been better to get hold of their weaponry. Maybe if we could have captured several moth-ships, and they turned out to be regular vessels with crews, we could have slain the Kargs. Then we could have used the moth-ships as scouts.

  All we had were these videos of a losing space battle. So let’s see, from that and from previous data we could figure they had more ships, more troopers, better weapons and already held onto the property. What did we have? We had stout hearts and determination, oh yeah.

  The days passed. We avoided Karg vessels. Each of them headed for the weak spot into our space-time continuum. Did that mean they had a way to break into our universe without the portal planet? If that was true, even if we closed the portal, there were going to be a ton of Kargs in our space-time continuum. I didn’t like to dwell on that, though. One problem at a time was my dogma.

  After one lengthy session of note comparing, and after Rollo had left, Ella turned her chair around, draping her arms over the back. We were in my makeshift office and had watched the battle for the thirteenth time.

  I’d called thirteen my lucky number since grade school. I guess I’d already been contrary then. I recall one of my teachers telling the class to pick a number between one and one hundred. I chose thirteen. The teacher stopped the contest right then. He told us he’d met his wife at table thirteen in college: his lucky number. Anyway, I’d won the right to pen a letter to the President about something the class had done a project on. I can’t remember what the letter was about, since I never wrote it. I’d won the contest but disliked the idea of writing a letter. I’d been eleven at the time, interested in eleven-year-old things like hide and seek, riding my bike and playing sandlot football.

  My luck has always been a mixed bag.

  In any case, Ella let her arms hang down over the back of the chair. I noticed she wore a silver ring on her middle finger. It lacked a gem, being a simple band.

  “I think we have learned all we can from the video,” she said.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe we’re missing something obvious.”

  “Do the Lokhars know more about the Kargs they aren’t telling us?” Ella asked.

  “In case you haven’t noticed,” I said, “the Lokhars aren’t talking to me much anymore.”

  “I will have to ask Ulmoc.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Oh,” Ella said. “I shouldn’t have said that. Ulmoc is the birth name of the Esteemed One.”

  “Are birth names sacred or something?” I asked.

  “Very much so,” Ella said. “A foe can use it to cast evil magic against you if they know your birth name.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Some things aren’t making sense here. First, the Esteemed One has learned to trust you enough to give you that kind of info?”

  “He has.”

  “Secondly, Lokhars believe in magic?”

  “Why should that surprise you?” Ella asked. “They believe in the Creator.”

  “You still don’t?”

  Ella cocked her head. “Why would you think I’ve changed my mind?”

  “Ah…all the time you’re spending with Ulmoc,” I said.

  “I am a scientist. I study where and when I must to achieve my goal. The Esteemed One holds an artifact.”

  “Have you seen it yet?”

  Ella shook her head.

  “Anyway,” I said. “Magic is quite another thing than belief in the Creator.”

  “I profoundly disagree,” Ella said. “Both are rank superstitions.”

  “I don’t get it. How can you fool the Esteemed One with an attitude like that?”

  “I am a scientist. I do what I must.”

  I grinned. “Tell me, Ella, where did you learn to playact like an acolyte? That’s not something that just happens.”

  She drew her arms up to grab the top of the chair. While biting her lower lip, a far-off look drifted into her eyes. “I grew up in Siberia,” she said.

  “I remember you telling me.”

  “My father was Russian Orthodox.”

  I shook my head. I didn’t know what that meant.

  “I thought you were an amateur historian,” she said.

  “One, I don’t know everything. Two, what does Russian Orthodox have to do with anything?”

  “Russia became t
he home of the Eastern Orthodox Church,” Ella said. “The Byzantine Greeks sent missionaries to the Slavic tribes long ago. The Orthodox Christians also warred against the Monophysite Christians in the Middle East. The Copts in Egypt belonged to what the others thought of as a heretical sect.”

  “So?” I asked.

  “When the Muslims came into Egypt, the Coptic Christians liked them better than the Orthodox priests who tried to tell them how to worship. Coptic hatred toward the Orthodox helped the Muslims overrun the land.” Ella shrugged. “In any case, when the Turks finally stormed Constantinople, the Russian tsar and his priests believed that Moscow had become the third Rome. The second one used to be Constantinople.”

  “I know about that,” I said. “The Byzantine Empire was often called the East Roman Empire.”

  “To answer your original question,” Ella said. “I grew up learning Orthodox rites. Once I went to school in Moscow, I learned about the Coptic Christians, the Catholics and Protestants. It was simply another point showing me the foolishness of belief in God.”

  “I don’t see why,” I said.

  “If God is real, why would He allow all these differences?”

  I shrugged. “Not being God, I don’t have any idea. But I do know that people are different. Why not different churches for different folks? Some people like doing their services one way, others another.”

  “I do not accept your theory,” Ella said. “People believe in magic, God and other superstitions. The same is true for the Lokhars. I fooled my father for many years, and he knew me much better than Ulmoc does. It is easy to playact again in the name of science. Soon, now, I will see the Forerunner artifact.”

  My thoughts had already drifted from her preoccupation. I wanted to figure out how to defeat the Kargs on the portal planet.

  “It’s really crazy we’re not coordinating better with the Lokhars,” I said. “We’re probably only going to have one shot to do this. We need to get it down to a science.”

  “Agreed,” she said.

  I dimmed the lights, and I turned on the machine. Ella left, and I resumed watching the battle, trying to find an angle, trying to figure out the Kargs by how they’d fought the dreadnoughts.