Judas Unchained

One of its wormholes in the Wessex system was abruptly subjected to exotic interference as eight human wormholes transected it. MorningLightMountain was expecting that; it diverted power from reserve magflux extractors to help stabilize its wormhole. After analyzing the nature of the attack humans had used last time, it believed it could now counter them effectively. Certainly, it had modified its generator mechanisms to make them less susceptible to the instability overloads. Thousands of immotile clusters focused their attention on the wormhole, ready to counter whatever interference pattern was inflicted on the exotic fabric.

There was none. This was different. The human wormholes were somehow merging with its own, their energy input helping to maintain the fissure through spacetime. For a moment, MorningLightMountain didn’t understand at all. Then it realized it was now unable to close the wormhole. The humans were injecting so much energy into it they were stabilizing the fabric; they were also locking the exit in place within the Wessex system. There was a hole open directly into its staging post that it didn’t control.

MorningLightMountain tried to introduce instabilities, inducing resonances, modifying power frequency. The humans countered it all with ease. Sensors located a relativistic missile racing for the wormhole exit. MorningLightMountain strengthened the force field that covered the exit, and started pulling back the ships that had just gone through, clustering them in a defensive formation. Force fields inside the staging post area were strengthened. It had prepared for a relativistic explosion like last time in case the humans managed to engineer a strike. The damage should be minimal.

A starship materialized inside the force field covering the wormhole exit. It was difficult to detect: the hull was completely black, absorbing all electromagnetic radiation. MorningLightMountain knew it was there only because it partially eclipsed the drive contrails of its own ships outside. There had been no warning of its existence, no detectable superluminal quantum distortion waves that were the signature of human ships and missiles. They had built something new.

The ship moved swiftly into the wormhole exit. MorningLightMountain switched every available power source it had into the generator in one last frantic attempt to destabilize the wormhole. Nothing happened; the wormhole fabric remained perfectly constant as the humans countered every power surge. MorningLightMountain gathered its own ships around the generator, ready to fire. Sensors were also aligned in an attempt to learn something about the nature of the new drive.

The human ship emerged from the wormhole. MorningLightMountain’s ships fired every beam weapon they had at the intruder. It vanished.

“Second batch of flare bombs coming through,” Anna reported.

“Oh, Jesus,” Wilson exclaimed. The display showed him over thirty new devices had emerged, accelerating at a hundred gees toward their target stars. “Natasha?”

“If you can’t intercept the devices with Douvoir missiles, hit them with quantumbusters.”

“Son of a bitch.” Wilson nodded at Anna. “All right, authorize that; divert every Douvoir we have in proximity. Some of them must be able to hit a flare bomb.”

“Yes, sir.”

“One of us will run out of superweapons before the other,” Dimitri said. “That will decide who wins today.”

“That decides who wins, period,” Rafael said.

“Yes, Admiral.”

Nigel’s image flickered back into life. “I’ve done what I can,” he said. “We should see a result in the next quarter of an hour.”

Wilson quickly checked the Wessex section of the tactical display. One of the Prime wormholes had vanished. One? “What did you do?”

“Sent a ship through to Hell’s Gateway.”

Wilson looked at Anna and then Rafael, both of whom looked equally perplexed.

“What sort of ship?” a fascinated Dimitri asked.

“Warship,” Nigel said. “Heavily armed.”

“With what?” Natasha asked.

“Advanced quantumbuster.”

“Advanced?”

“You’ll see.” He paused. “If it works.”

***

MorningLightMountain could not detect the human ship anywhere within the staging post system. Most of its sensors had recorded nothing as it emerged from the wormhole. The visual images were strongest, and most informative, showing a black ovoid sucking in light. There was no quantum signature, nothing on the mass detector. Most puzzling and alarming, there was no detectable wormhole. Whatever the human scientist class had come up with, it was radically different from anything they employed before.

Now MorningLightMountain was left wondering what the ship would do. Some kind of attack was surely imminent. It couldn’t understand why the humans hadn’t simply set off a superbomb as soon as the ship was through. What could be more damaging than that? Certainly a large proportion of the equipment and ships at the staging post would have been destroyed. Even the interstellar wormhole would have been threatened.

Why did it never truly understand humans?