Judas Unchained

He arrived at the open section of hull his schematic indicated, from which an access interstice led deep inside the guts of the frigate. The initiator sat halfway along the narrow gap, a golden sphere with peculiar green triangles jutting up from it. There was a nest of unconnected thermal conductor filaments wrapped around it, with their manufacturer tags still attached. “Okay,” he told Thame. “I’m here. What have the bots tried so far?”

***

Oscar’s starship, the Dublin, was orbiting a thousand kilometers above the Finnish world Hanko when the alert came through. It had been a miserable duty so far, five people spending ten days crammed into a single circular cabin. In theory the cabin wasn’t too bad; it was a good eight meters wide, with three meters between the flat bulkheads. Then you took out the partitioned-off sleeping section, and the laughably titled bathroom facility, and the remaining available volume was considerably reduced. In zero gee such a space was a little less cramped, but that was a relative thing. The five flight couches—bulky padded shelves that had plyplastic secured i-pads, built-in human waste management tubes, and fluid food dispensers—were lined up along the rear bulkhead. Once you’d strapped yourself in, while trying not to jam knees and elbows into the person next to you, the couch slid back neatly into the operations segment. Oscar likened it to lying on the tongue of a dinosaur as it pulled you into its mouth.

Once in place inside the operations section, there was a half-meter space between your nose and the matte-black curving control console with its high-rez display portals that filled the gap with projections of the tactical display and ship-status schematics. Oscar’s first officer, Lieutenant Commander Hywel, claimed that coffins were a lot less claustrophobic, although admittedly not as colorful.

Hywel on Oscar’s left, where he monitored the sensor feeds, left the other three couches for Teague, the engineering officer; Dervla, who had recently qualified as their FTL drive technician; and Reuben, who had been seconded from the Seattle Project in charge of weapons.

Dervla was in the sleep section, and Hywel was eating his meal of microwaved stroganoff goo out in the main cabin as red icons flashed up in Oscar’s virtual vision. Detector stations down on Hanko and in high orbit had detected seventy-two wormholes opening, forming a loose sphere at three AUs distance from the star.

An adrenaline surge quickly banished Oscar’s lethargy and mild depression. “What the hell are they doing out there?” he demanded. Data from their secure link to Base One through Hanko’s unisphere showed that several Commonwealth worlds were now under a similar pattern of invasion. “Dervla, Hywel, get in here now.”

“Ships coming through,” Teague said. “God, they’re fast. The wormholes aren’t switching location like last time.”

“Right.” Oscar watched the graphics unfolding around him, then concentrated on one wormhole. The Prime ships were coming through nose to tail. Ten in the first minute. It was a quantity duplicated at each of the other seventy-one openings.

“Ships identified as space combat type three,” Teague said. “They’re accelerating at eight gees, broad dispersal pattern. Damnit, we’re never going to intercept those wormholes with our Douvoir missiles.”

“Clever,” Oscar muttered. He watched the graphic showing him Douvoir missiles leaping out of Hanko’s ten orbital defense stations, neon-green lines streaking straight out from the planet, aligned on the Prime wormholes. It was going to take them a good eight minutes to reach their targets. “They’ll just switch locations before impact. Damnit!” His virtual hands were racing over icons and speed-control activators, synchronizing with Reuben as they brought the Dublin up to combat readiness. “What’s the planet status?”

“City force fields powering up,” Teague said. “Combat aerobots launching. We have command of orbital defense stations.”

“Much good it’ll do us,” Oscar grumbled.

“The Douvoirs can take out the ships,” Reuben said. “They can’t dodge.”

“Check the dispersal,” Oscar told him. “One Douvoir missile per ship is not good. This deployment is designed to flood the system with their ships, and we don’t have anything like the capacity to knock them out. The Douvoirs were designed to hit strategic targets.”

“The planetary defenses can cope with any approaching hostile,” Teague said.

“Not an armada. They can send ten thousand an hour at us.”

“We can’t evacuate,” Hywel said. “Not again. There’s got to be a way of keeping them back.”

Oscar said nothing. He couldn’t think of any way to repel the bulk of the Prime ships. Dublin could probably take out a hundred or so, but there were already more than that in-system. When he summoned the navy’s overview, he saw that forty-eight Commonwealth worlds were under attack. The Primes were using the same long-range injection strategy in all of them.