The Catherine Kimbridge Chronicles #4, Retribution (20 page)

The anti-proton beam the WhimPy fired struck the other ship. Amazingly, the beam was simply absorbed by the other shi
p’
s shields. Sensors on the
WhimPy
platform detected no significant change in its shield emitter output. In essence the other ship shrugged off the attack without even noticing.

The
Retribution
fired on the WhimPy platform again. This time it used a hyperfield conduit as an envelope to deliver an antimatter warhead. The
WhimP
y’
s
shields resisted the onslaught for the better part of twelve milliseconds before the tiniest of fluctuations occurred. It was this fluctuation that the
Retributio
n’
s
AI was watching for. Once it occurred, an antimatter payload was materialized a kilometer deep within the Heshe platform. The explosion blew a full third of the platform away.

“
Holy Mother of Go
d
… what was that
!
” Jason yelled, as picked himself up from across the room where he had been thrown.

“
Tha
t…,
” the WhimPy platform answered, with a tangible sense of awe in its voice
,“
should not have been possible
.
”

“
Possible or not, it happened
,
” Jason yelled
.“
Our priorities have just shifted
,
” he said, resolutely
.“
This is a game changer. The GCP needs to know what we are facing
!
”

The massive AI deployed emergency countermeasures in the form of additional shield nodes, active obfuscation signal decoys, and continuous-fire kinetic, energy, and antiproton beams. The combined output severely taxed the WhimPy platfor
m’
s reserves, but it bought him the precious seconds he needed to run a comprehensive situation analysis. The results were not good.

Another hyperfield conduit began to test the WhimP
y’
s shields.
101
made a decision. He deliberately perturbed his shields ever so slightly. As predicted, the
Retribution
attempted to jump another antimatter bomb deep inside the WhimP
y’
s ablative shielding. One picosecond before the weapon materialized, the WhimPy translocated to a point one kilometer deep within the su
n’
s corona. The backwash through the hyperfield conduit was effectively hidden by the antimatter explosion. With any luck, the
Retribution
would assume the WhimPy platform had been destroyed.

***

Cat bent a steel girder out of the way. Private Ston
e’
s bunker-buster had opened a hole in the street that reached down thirty-plus meters. The placement of the charge had been critical to its effectiveness. Cat had used ground-penetrating radar to position it above a series of subterranean tunnels. The resulting hole that the shaped charge created was deep, but it was still a long way from the power source they had detected. That said, it was enough to get them into some type of underground ventilation system. Hopefully, the conduits would get them to where they needed to go.

“
More importantly
,
” Cat though
t
,
“
it gets us out of the immediate field of fir
e
”
’

Because of Ca
t’
s greater strength and smaller size, she led the way. As she crawled through the often constricted space, she used her quickly dwindling power reserves to expand the opening for the larger Private in his Mark Six combat suit that was following behind her.  

“
Watch the end of that pipe
,
” Cat called, over her shoulder
.“
It will do a number on your rucksack if it gets caught
.
”

“
Got it, m
a’
am.
I’
m showing us a little over a hundred meters from that power source
.
”

“
Wha
t’
s your status
?
” Cat asked as she eased a collapsed girder out of their way.

“
Not good, admiral. My mains are about gone, and my reserves are just under two percent. I seem to have a short that my sui
t’
s AI ca
n’
t isolate. I
t’
s draining my systems even faster than normal. Another ten or fifteen minutes and I may have to abandon the suit
.
”

Cat thought for a second before answering. If Private Stone abandoned his armor, he would be without weapons and defense. Even strapped in an immobile suit, he would be safer than walking unprotected in this environment.

“
Let me know when you get down to half a percent. At that point w
e’
ll deactivate your Stark and
I’
ll take your exhausted spare power pack with me. Hopefully
I’
ll be able to find the power source; top off your spare and get it back to you before our friends up there get too curious about the hole we made in the street above us
.
”

The journey as a team lasted only another few minutes. As the private had indicated, the short in his suit was draining his power pack at an alarming rate. The irony was that if his power pack been fully charged it would have been able to power the maintenance systems that could have repaired the short.

Cat left the private near a small utility cabinet about sixty meters from their target. Unfortunately, the going was getting progressively tougher. Many of the ventilation conduits had collapsed due to the heavy bombardment and the resulting collapse of buildings in the city above.  

Ca
t’
s own energy reserves were critically low. She allowed her protective metallic skin to slough off. It simply required energy she no longer had to spare.

“
Cal
,
” Cat signaled her AI
.“
How much progress have we made parsing through the Syndicate data net? Do we have a map of the surrounding area yet?
"

“
Affirmative, Admiral. I can provide a complete map of Harromog including infrastructure. In addition I can now provide you with the exact location of the systems you will need to access in order to disable the planetary sterilization system
.
”

“
Wonderful
,
” Cat said, as a detailed map of her immediate surroundings superimposed itself on her vision. A few meters ahead there was a common wall between the corridor Cat was in and the one that led to the emergency backup generator that supplied the Headquarters computer complex.

Cat touched the section of wall in question. A small stream of construction nanites flowed from her fingertips. They immediately began to attack the seams that held the aluminum wall panel in place. With very little effort she was able to force the weakened panel out of place. Behind it was another panel that belonged to the adjacent corridor. Again a small number of construction nanites flowed forth from her fingertips. In a moment she eased the second panel out of the way and stepped through the newly created opening. 

She quickly consulted her internal map. She was surprised to see she was actually closer to the administrative terminal where she needed to enter the stand-down code than she was to the power source. She checked her power reserves and decided to address the stand-down issue first. The terminal room was just down the hall and around a bend.

“Anthony… you still on comm?”

“Affirmative, Admiral.”

“I’m going to take a little detour. The terminal room we were looking for seems to be right down the hall. I’m going to send the ‘stand-down’ code before I make my way to the generator. I should only be a few minutes longer than anticipated.”

“I’ll continue to guard our rear, Admiral. Please be careful, ma’am. I can’t imagine the first sergeant taking kindly to me losing a flag officer on my first deployment.”

“I understand your concern, Private. I’ll be careful.”

The corridor was lit with subdued emergency lighting. The walls were the same stone gray that seemed to be a favorite of the Modos. Cat made her way forward carefully. She was uneasy but if pressed she couldn’t say why. Her entire sensor array was on active scan. There were stray readings that seemed to materialize and then disappear. None appeared long enough for a definitive reading. It could be stray radio frequency noise or it could be something more. She just couldn’t tell.

The door to the room she needed to enter was sealed. A keypad and biometric scanner were inset just to the right of the door. They appeared to be powered down. A quick scan confirmed that the power feeds to the circuits in the scanner and keypad were dead. They were low power systems, so Cat decided to try feeding current directly into the system from her ever dwindling reserves.

The panel lit up. Professor Debbu had known about the security measures, but had not known the appropriate pass code, nor would the codes have helped without the correct biometric signature. Cat’s nanites probed the system looking for the correct pathways. In a few seconds they had found them and the door swished open.

“Abbra Ka-Dabra,” Cat said, as she walked into the room. It was filled with computer consoles designed to monitor a large number of locations simultaneously. The displays completely occupied two of the four walls. Many, but not all of the displays were dead. Those that were still receiving feeds told a horrific story of carnage and suffering. Naanac’s bid for freedom had come at an immense cost.

Cat pulled the memory stick from a hidden front pouch. She was eager to eliminate this final threat to the Naanac people. Perhaps that was why she failed to notice a second set of nanites floating silently into the room. They were cloaked, so it was unlikely they would have been detected by anything less than a deliberate effort to locate them. As it was, they headed for a secondary panel behind Cat. There was the briefest of EMF pulses as the panel came alive. Although the equipment into which the cloaked nanites flowed appeared to be of Modos origin, it was in fact a sophisticated piece of Uruk technology.

The memory stick felt cold in Cat’s hand. Later, she would remember being curious why that was. It would be one of the last things she would remember for a very long time. She reached forward to plug the small device into its receptacle. Before her hand finished moving, the room was filled with an electro-magnetic pulse powerful enough to register on the surface-facing sensors of the starships in orbit above the planet. The officers manning those sensors had no idea what had caused the pulse, nor the result in the subterranean room where Cat now stood completely immobile.

A magnetic flux density on the order of 10
23
Amp Meters flowed through Cat. Every nanite system in her body was immediately overloaded and wiped out. The only exception was a small, heavily shielded reserve buried deep within her now useless Heshe encounter unit. As the nanites died, they inadvertently sent a powerful electrical shock through Cat’s cerebral cortex. Completely discombobulated, the woman who had been Cat Kimbridge now stood in a room filled with unfamiliar equipment. She was dazed, confused, and had no idea who she was.  A useless memory stick fell from numb fingers and hit the ground with a hollow clatter.

Chapter Seventee
n
– Victory Denied...

"Run!" Snatch Bait yelled. The situation was rapidly turning into a disaster of unprecedented proportions. The battle had begun along the lines they had anticipated. The Galactic Coalition forces advanced toward a seemingly inferior Syndicate fleet. A great deal of time and effort had gone into collecting and moving cloaked GCP probes from the current battlefield to a supposed staging ground some forty light years distant. The bulk of the GCP fleet was supposed to follow these probes in the mistaken belief that they were still attached to Syndicate ships. They were not. The very same Syndicate ships were still in-system around a star the GCP called Sol. They had powered down and were running as silent as they could in the hopes of luring the GCP forces into attacking the small number of still active decoy ships.

The GCP armada was orders of magnitude larger than intelligence reports had indicated. Even when his cloaked ships fully engaged in the battle they were grossly outnumbered. Even worse, reports coming in from the other task forces that were attacking the other GCP member worlds, were that the same situation was occurring in those systems.