What War Had Wrought (Rise of the Empire Book 7) Read online

  “How unlikely are they?” Aileen asked.

  “Very. They are large enough to cover an entire system, for sure, but our normal-space and hyperspace are not perfectly aligned. For the storm to perfectly cover an entire system is improbable.”

  “How long ago did the alert go out?” Aileen asked.

  “Twenty-two minutes ago,” Khan answered.

  “That’s six minutes after I left the meeting,” Aileen said slowly.

  “Coincidence?” Adept Garani asked from behind her.

  “Maybe,” Aileen said, thinking hard. It could be a coincidence, but her instincts told her otherwise. And she had survived for a long time by following her instincts. “The Sowir once blocked our communications through hyperspace. Does this look like that?”

  Khan frowned and turned to his station, after a few swipes a series of graphs and things that Aileen couldn’t even begin to understand appeared. “It’s…it’s similar, for sure, but I don’t know what a hyperspace storm looks like. I have no point of reference.”

  Aileen turned to the adept. “Get Björn, and activate protocol G-39,” Aileen ordered. The adept turned immediately and left running.

  “Normal-space communications still work?” she asked Khan, who nodded.

  “Get me the Jewel.”

  A few seconds later, a hologram of Jewel’s Ship Master appeared.

  “Sentinel?” Ship Master Vota asked from her command chair.

  “Vota, I need you to get the ship ready for departure from the system, and for you to get the ship to high alert. We might not be leaving quietly,” Aileen ordered.

  The Ship Master merely nodded and started executing her orders. “We’ll be ready to depart in ten.” With that, she closed the connection.

  “Contact the shuttle crew at the port, let them know to be ready. Then go to the armory, get suited up, and meet me in the main room.”

  Aileen turned and went straight for the armory, picking up her rifle and then going to the main room where she found Björn already dressed up in light armor. Adept Garani sat at the table and was checking his weapons.

  “You sure that they are planning something?” Björn asked.

  “No, but I’d rather err on the side of caution,” Aileen answered as she triggered the command for her Sentinel armor to go into combat mode. A few moments later, Khan, dressed in the same armor as Björn, joined them.

  “Did you set everything up?” Aileen asked.

  “Yes, I already put in the command,” Björn answered. That meant that all the Empire’s computers would delete their data, just as nanites were released to dismantle every piece of technology. The dismantling took a few minutes, so the data scrub was an added precaution.

  “Alright. I might be wrong about all this, but I doubt that Erasi will change their minds. If I’m wrong, we’ll just wait out the remainder of the day on board the Jewel,” Aileen said.

  “And if you are right?” Björn asked.

  “Then they don’t want us to leave, or to contact our people. They might not know that we are aware of their reinforcements, so they need to keep us stalled until they are ready to attack.” Aileen looked around the room. “Let’s go, we’re using the back door,” she said, and started towards the room in the back of the compound. The Tarabat officials had offered the Empire a prime real estate as their embassy, but Adrian had refused and had purchased this compound. Under Erasi laws, that was acceptable, and the compound that he’d found had everything that they needed. It had once been a place of business for a criminal element, which was exactly why it suited them. It was in fact three small buildings smashed together. It had enough room for everything a diplomatic team would need, and it had been planned that trading elements from the Empire could set their business there as well for protection. Sadly, they hadn’t reached that point.

  But one of the things that wasn’t on any scans of the buildings was the ‘back door.’ It had been added by the previous owners as a means of escape, and it would serve Aileen and her people now. She reached one of the back rooms and approached a wall. She put her hand on a seemingly ordinary piece of the wall, and a moment later a door slid open. She and her people entered and went down into the tunnel, which eventually led them to a small alley behind a building across the street from the Empire’s compound.

  Aileen took the lead and they started towards the port, which was about twenty minutes away on foot. They stepped into the street and walked in the open. They didn’t really stand out that much; in their armor, the only thing that others would see was a biped, like the majority of other races. And they were among the throng of other aliens all moving about their business. Aileen debated calling for a grav-car but decided against it. She didn’t know if the Erasi were monitoring those services or not, and didn’t want to tip her hand. When they were about halfway to the port, three Erasi military shuttles flew over their heads going in the direction of the Empire’s compound.

  “Pick up the pace,” Aileen said over their suit comms.

  They started walking faster toward the port, but then Aileen noticed several transports moving towards the port.

  “Crap,” she said, and opened a channel to the shuttle crew. “The Erasi are moving on you. Lift off and come pick us up.”

  “We’ll be at your location in three minutes,” the shuttle pilot responded.

  Aileen motioned for her group to take positions in a side alley and wait. The port might have defensive guns, but Aileen doubted that they would try to shoot the shuttle down; there was too much traffic and too large of chance of debris hitting the streets, a drawback of having a port in the middle of a city. A few minutes later, she saw the shuttle approach towards them on her HUD, and she commed and told the pilot to land in the street. Hopefully the people on the street would move.

  Just as the shuttle was preparing to land, she saw it jerk upwards as three streaks of light entered her view. The first one missed, but the last two struck the shuttle’s shields and exploded, making a part of the shields visible and engulfing the shuttle in flames. For a moment, Aileen thought that the shields had failed, but after the explosions cleared, she saw that it was still there.

  She quickly opened a channel. “Get to the Jewel right now,” Aileen ordered.

  “I doubt that we can get to atmosphere, Sentinel,” the pilot said.

  “Skim to the Jewel, don’t let them catch you,” Aileen ordered. She couldn’t believe that they had attacked the shuttle over the city, and she knew that it couldn’t stay there for even a second more. The Erasi seemed unconcerned with the damage they could inflict upon the city if they destroyed the shuttle.

  “But that would…Yes, Sentinel,” the pilot responded, and closed the comms. He understood what skimming from the atmosphere would do to this part of the city. The pulse that occurred when a ship entered skim was much greater inside the atmosphere; the shuttle’s drives would blow all running electronics through a large radius around it. But Aileen saw no choice. Either the Erasi destroyed her shuttle, killing her people and who knew how many others on the ground, or they skimmed from the atmosphere. Which she knew would cause deaths as well; inside the range that the pulse would cover, shuttles and grav-cars would lose controls. But Aileen laid the blame for any death at the Erasi’s feet. They hadn’t even warned her shuttle to land, they’d just opened fire. Not that her people would’ve obeyed, but still. It told her that they were prepared to do anything to stop them from leaving or contacting her people.

  Aileen then opened a comm to the Jewel. “Ship Master, as soon as you pick up the shuttle crew, you are to leave the system, skim away immediately, I don’t care about the damage that you could do; if you need to fight your way out, then do so. Get to Sol and let our people know. Hopefully you will be able to come get us later with more ships,” she ordered, just as the shuttle oriented towards the orbit while it evaded another wave of missiles.

  Aileen turned to her group. “Shut down all your suit electronics, set your suits to shield mode
s,” she ordered over the comms, and then did the same. Her implant was shielded extremely well inside her brain, but the suits would suffer if they were hit with the pulse. Even though they did have defenses against EMPs, the skim pulse this close was something more powerful than what those defenses could handle.

  The shuttle skimmed. In a blink of an eye, it shimmered and then disappeared, leaving behind a shockwave that spread all over the city. In a moment the lights on the streets died, grav-cars lost their controls and crashed into each other. Chaos was all around her. Aileen turned to her group as she rebooted her suit’s systems.

  “Let’s go,” Aileen said, and together they disappeared into the masses.

  ***

  Ship Master Vota sat on board the Jewel, her crew working furiously to get them away from the planet.

  “The shuttle is on board, Ship Master.”

  “Good,” Vota said. “Lucas, did you find it?”

  “No, Ship Master. They trapped us,” her Navigation Handler reported grimly.

  Vota shook her head. The Erasi must’ve set this up days ago. Her ship was unable to skim away from the planet because the Erasi had stealthily moved traffic to block their path. The Jewel was surrounded by stations on the sides, and traffic was constantly moving ahead of them in unpredictable ways, making it impossible for them to skim with no risk of hitting something. There was a reason why the Empire’s ships always moved away from everything and skimmed only when they had a clear line of sight. The ship in skim could survive small objects in its paths—dust or small pebbles were simply evaporated by the forward field—but anything more massive than a shuttle and the result was much different. The energy released related to the amount of mass inside the skim field, and Jewel was large enough that any collision would release energy sufficient to blow a small station apart. Although the energy released was nowhere near the size it should be for an object traveling at speeds faster than the speed of light. The skim field bent the space and time around the object, so technically they were not moving at FTL. When a field impacted an object large enough to disrupt it, the field broke, tearing apart the object inside of it and throwing it back into normal space.

  “Keep looking,” Vota ordered, then turned to her Communications Handler. “Anything?”

  “They are still not responding, Ship Master.”

  Vota grimaced. There were three Erasi battleships on their way, and they would enter firing range in less than a minute. The station had surprisingly not yet fired on them, but Vota assumed that they didn’t want to provoke her ship. The stations were not solely military in nature; there were traders from many different races on them, both from the Erasi and independent. They must have believed that she wouldn’t fire on them unless fired upon. And they were right. The Empire was ready to make hard choices when forced to, but firing upon a station filled with innocents with no provocation from them was another thing. The battleships, on the other hand, were another story entirely—they were military ships.

  “The enemy battleships have fired missiles, Ship Master!”

  Vota looked over her c-board. There was no way out. They could risk and try to skim, but she wasn’t yet ready to order that.

  “Bring the point defense net online. Lock proton turrets three through eight on the closest battleship—designate B-1, four seconds cycle,” Vota ordered. Her ship’s proton beams were already in range. “Arm missiles, swarm-type loadout. Navigation, put us on a course out of high orbit.”

  The crew followed her orders immediately. Her c-board updated as her people targeted the Erasi battleship, and she designated the two other battleships as B-2 and B-3. She couldn’t use her ship’s kinetic weapons; she couldn’t risk hitting some of the civilian stations or ships, and most of their other weapons were close range, which meant that they were forced to use only proton beams and missiles.

  “Proton beams and missiles locked, Ship Master.”

  “Fire missiles.”

  Vota watched as her ship fired four standard loads of missiles, while the enemy missiles sped towards her ship from two different directions. There were a little more than a thousand enemy missiles coming for her ship, with about half that following behind the first wave. Each of her ship’s loads contained one hundred missiles, for the total of four hundred Swarm MK IX missiles, the newest in the Swarm series. She had a load of ion missiles as well, designed to take down shields, but they were very situational. They simply stood out too much, and she had too few of them for this instance. The Erasi would take them down before she could utilize them. Her Swarm missiles, on the other hand, were faster than that of the Erasi, and soon they crossed two thirds of the distance.

  Suddenly the tracks on her c-board increased in number as the first load of the Swarm missiles entered their second phase and each missile split into six smaller ones. Instead of one hundred missiles, the enemy battleship was faced with six times that number. Vota knew what that could do to a defensive system. Their computers would be confused for a moment, and then they would try to acquire targets that were no longer there, and then finally they would start targeting the new missiles.

  And that was exactly what happened. The Erasi defensive net started firing on the new missiles, but it was too late; dozens of missiles from the first wave passed through to impact the shields. Each missile had less power than what the Empire’s other types had, but these missiles were designed to overwhelm enemy point defense and shields.

  “Watch their shields. As soon as you see an opening, open fire with proton beams,” she ordered just as the enemy missiles reached the range of her ship’s point defense.

  The Jewel’s point defense opened fire and lasers started taking down missiles, but there were too many of them coming from three different directions. Soon the missiles started hitting the Jewel’s shields.

  Vota glanced at her c-board and watched as the second wave of her missiles struck at the enemy battleship, then the third and the fourth. The consecutive hits paid off and Vota saw the battleship’s forward shields fail, several missiles passing through to impact the hull. In the next instant, her Weapons Handler opened fire. Proton beams struck the enemy ship, gouging holes into the Erasi battleship that was rotating its saucer shape to bring to bear an area where they still had shields.

  “Ship Master, I have a possible course,” the Navigation Handler said. “It’s not a clear path, but it is the best I can do.”

  Vota glanced at the course and saw that this course had a sixty percent chance of successful skim, but that it would require them to get through the Erasi battleship.

  “Change course, full power towards that battleship,” Vota ordered. “Charge ion turrets and k-turrets three and four.”

  The Jewel had already left the planet’s high orbit, and the ship veered off towards the Erasi battleship. The other two battleships were coming in from behind her now, and Erasi drives were better. They would overtake them eventually.

  “Incoming fire from B-1!” the Sensor Handler reported.

  Vota saw that they were now in the range of the Erasi battleships’ particle weapons. Her shields were still taking a beating from the enemy missiles as their second wave reached them. The shields had dropped to 53% and were dropping even faster now that the enemy battleships’ particle weapons were in range.

  Vota did the math in her head. She knew that the shields wouldn’t survive until she entered point-blank range of the Erasi battleship, and she needed to get past it.

  “Power down all weapons. Switch to shimmering field and then depower the shields,” Vota ordered. “Bring the weapons back online as soon as you switch.”

  Her crew immediately went to work. The Sentinel ships had both defensive kits, the shields and the shimmering field, but they could only power one of them and the weapons, or power both without weapons. Vota was tempted to try focus all power on defenses and forsake her weapons, but she knew that unless she took down that battleship, it would keep pouring fire into her ship and overwhelm both of the Je
wel’s defenses before they could attempt to skim. The shimmering field technology was one that the Empire stole from the Ra’a’zani. It wasn’t as effective as the shields at stopping incoming fire, but it would dissipate any impact, lessening the force of the attack. Vota only hoped that that would be enough for them to survive long enough to get away.

  The Jewel’s weapons fire died off as the crew of the ship worked to switch power from the weapons to the shimmering field, and Vota wondered what the Erasi battleships thought about her ship’s silence.

  As the Erasi battleship grew close, the shields on the Jewel dropped below 20%. Just as Vota was about to ask the status of the power switch, the shields went down, and she saw her crew working to bring the weapons back online. Suddenly the fire from the Erasi battleships stuck far closer to the Jewel’s hull, but the shimmering field did its job and dissipated the enemy fire.

  A sudden lull in the battle appeared as Vota assumed the Erasi were trying to figure out what had happened. And that lull gave her people enough time to bring her weapons back online.

  “We’ll be in point-blank range in twenty seconds for ten seconds as we pass the battleship, Ship Master,” her Sensor Handler said.

  Vota nodded. The Erasi battleship had been slowing down, presumably preparing to change course and follow her ship as she went past theirs.

  She watched on her c-board as fire kept pouring into her ship. Damage reports started popping up as the fire accumulated and the Jewel started venting atmosphere. Vora had nothing else to do until they entered the point-blank range of her ion turrets. Point defense kept taking down enemy missiles that now came in smaller waves, but every now and then a few would get through and hit the shimmering field or the hull where it had failed. Her proton beams kept firing on the Erasi battleship in front of them, blasting holes in the hull where their shields failed or hitting the shields where they didn’t.

  Then they entered the optimal range of her ion turrets, and she raised her head from her c-board to look at her crew.

  “Fire ion turrets,” Vota ordered, and immediately six ion beams designed to punch through energy shields struck and punched through their shields. The entire side of the Erasi battleship suddenly found itself without shields.