The Synchronicity War Part 4 (23 page)

Kelly heard the wakeup alarm and opened her
eyes. She turned her head to the right in the faint hope that Victor was beside
her and that Operation Shell Game was just a bad dream, but she was alone, and
the bad dream was real. She sat up and felt a familiar queasiness in her
stomach.
Oh hell, not again!
Within a minute or two of arising, she was
once again throwing up. Keeping her feelings firmly under control, she returned
to her bedroom and noticed the flashing light indicating that a personal text
message was waiting for her.
It must have been sent while I was asleep.

Checking the computer terminal on her desk,
she saw that the message was from the ship's Doctor. Her pulse started to beat
faster. Would it be good news or bad news. She opened the file and read the
message.

[Tests are positive. Congratulations,
Admiral]

Kelly felt herself tearing up, not with
sadness but with joy. She was pregnant with Victor's child. It must have
happened on their last night together. How fitting was that? At least a part of
him would live through their child. She decided to inform the whole crew. Their
morale needed a boost, a symbol of what they hoped to achieve. She suspected
that very shortly the Doctor would be busy performing artificial insemination
for other crewmembers that wanted to get pregnant sooner rather than later. She
laughed out loud. Maybe the Doctor wanted to get pregnant too! The hot water in
the shower felt good, and she spent longer in it than she should have.
But
hey, Vice-Admirals are allowed to indulge themselves. Otherwise what's the
point of having the rank?

It was when she put on her uniform that the
first sobering thought occurred to her. She hoped that the cargo manifest
contained clothes that would fit a pregnant woman. Otherwise, somebody on this
ship would have to learn quickly how to adjust the standard Space Force
uniforms.

Gunslinger's F2 fighter emerged back into
normal space near the shipyard complex and immediately transmitted his data to
Valkyrie. The calculations were done quickly. The results were disseminated to
all the AIs within contact range, and very interesting results they were too.
Fifty-five days after the fall of Earth, the SPG had designed and built the
first longitudinal wave receiver and direction finder. However when they turned
it on, it detected only sporadic naturally occurring background waves. Since
longitudinal waves don't spread out as they travel, the receiver has to be in
the path of the waves in order to detect them. No waves from an artificial
source being detected at Site B meant that no insectoid ship was aiming a
transmission in the direction of Site B. So Valkyrie sent two F2 fighters
equipped with their own receivers to the outskirts of Sol and the Sogas home
world system. Blackjack had gone to Sol while Gunslinger had gone to Omega54.
In both those systems they had detected artificial longitudinal wave
transmissions from multiple sources, and it was obvious why. In both systems
there was still an insectoid presence. Neither home world had been completely
exploited yet.

It was the combination of the two sets of
bearings that had enormous implications. Each fighter had detected six transmission
sources. By combining the data, those six transmission sources were now
precisely pinpointed, and all six were along the edge of this spiral arm. It
didn't take long for the AIs to figure out what was happening.
Faster-than-light longitudinal communication worked in the same way as using
lasers to communicate within a star system. You had to know where the receiver
would be by the time your laser beam reached it. That meant that for each of
those six sources to be able to aim L-waves at Sol and Omega54, they needed to
know that insectoid ships were there. If those six sources operated as relay
stations, then any insectoid ship could transmit back to them, and they would
know where each ship was. Valkyrie didn't think it was a coincidence that one
of the six sources was the exact same star system where the dead Insectoid's
atoms were traced back to before the trail went cold. If those six systems were
in fact acting as relay stations, then that would explain how one mothership
could quickly call in reinforcements. It would send a call for help to all six
relay stations, and they could relay the message to other motherships close
enough to be able to respond quickly.

The transmissions themselves were difficult
if not impossible to decode. They were composed of extremely short bursts of
what appeared to be digital data, with long periods in between of essentially
just a carrier wave. Valkyrie assigned some of her growing team of AIs to work
on analyzing the signals.

"We should send recon missions to at
least two of these relay stations. By triangulating the L-wave signals received
there, we'll have a good chance of pinpointing the location of all insectoid
motherships in this spiral arm," said Gunslinger.

"How would that help us?" asked
Valkyrie

"It would tell us where there nearest
motherships are and how soon they could be here if called as
reinforcements."

"But by the time you obtain that data
and get back here, the timeship will be finished and we won't need that
knowledge about mothership locations anymore. I don't see the point of
obtaining this data other than just to satisfy your idle curiosity,
Gunslinger."

"Having some idea of where other
insectoid ships are when the raider fleet intervenes at the 2nd Battle of Earth
will give The CAG more options in dealing with the insectoid threat."

"Which he won't need either if our
plan to snuff out all insectoid life in this spiral arm succeeds,"
Valkyrie pointed out.

"What if it doesn't succeed?"

Valkyrie didn't have a good answer to that question.
The plan as it now stood was highly complicated, with lots of ways that it
could go wrong. If that did happen, carrying as much information as possible
back with them, and letting the raider fleet pass it on to The CAG after the
intervention, would provide The CAG with valuable intel about the insectoid
threat quickly enough for him to make use of it.

"Okay, you and Blackjack can go,"
Valkyrie responded.

To say that Gunslinger was ecstatic was an
understatement. Blackjack was far less enthusiastic about the mission, but
orders were orders, and Valkyrie was acting as The CAG's Deputy. Both fighters
were soon on their way.

                                                         *
* *

Gunslinger's fighter emerged from its final
micro-jump approximately 1.44 A.U.s from the planet where all the insectoid
activity seemed to be happening. It was still too far away for the fighter's
own optical instruments to see anything clearly, but Valkyrie's instructions
had been explicit. The fighter was not to get any closer than this.
Jump-capable recon drones could jump in closer, while Gunslinger used the
L-wave receiver to obtain transmission bearings. Scanning the entire sky would
take a while. Gunslinger decided to start with the other five relay systems. They
were designated as Alpha 2-6. This system was Alpha1. He quickly confirmed that
the other Alphas were in communication with Alpha1. He was willing to bet that
Blackjack would discover the same thing at Alpha2.

While the full scan was only partially complete,
Gunslinger received narrow-beam lasercom bursts from the recon drones, with
images from the Earth-like planet that the insectoids were orbiting. There were
16 insectoid spheres of various sizes in orbit around the planet, with a high
volume of smaller craft traveling back and forth between the spheres and the
planet. There was also something else in orbit. At first Gunslinger thought it was
a small moon, but when a bright spot appeared from a part of the object that
was in shadow, Gunslinger realized that it wasn't a moon at all. It was a much
larger insectoid sphere. With the recon data it was easy to do the
calculations. This super-mothership was 98.7 kilometers in diameter, almost ten
times wider than the insectoid mothership that overwhelmed Earth. A sphere of
that size would have an overall internal volume a thousand times larger. Even
Gunslinger was impressed. The CAG would definitely want to know about this. He
continued with the scan.

Twenty-one hours later he had finished
scanning the part of the sky that had star systems within this spiral arm. In
addition to the Alphas, 610 transmission sources had been detected. Two of them
were on the right bearings for Sol and Omega54. Since those two were known to
contain motherships, it was reasonable to assume that the other 608 did too. It
seemed that this part of the galaxy was already swarming with insectoid
motherships. Gunslinger wondered if he should scan the part of the sky that was
looking outward from the spiral arm into the void between the Local Spur and
the Sagittarius Arm, which was estimated to be over 7,000 light years away.
Something made Gunslinger scan the void. That took another three point four
hours. To his astonishment, he detected over a hundred transmission sources
that seemed to come from a very narrow cluster of star systems in the
Sagittarius Arm, all aimed at Alpha1. The Insectoids were very definitely from
outside this arm of the galaxy. With the entire sky now scanned, and with
detailed visual data on the activity near this system's planet, Gunslinger's
mission brief was now accomplished. It was time to begin accelerating on a
heading back to Site B.

                                                     *
* *

The timeship Tempus Fugit was as ready as
it could be. All of the equipment required to begin production of a raider
fleet was already on board, as was the new batch of sentient AIs created at
Site B. One of them, Zulu, had his fighter linked to the ship's nervous system.
He would pilot the ship back and was fully briefed on what he had to do and
what information had to be passed on and to whom. Valkyrie was now flying an F1
fighter along with those veteran AIs who already existed in the old timeline.
They all had to stay behind or risk overlapping with their other selves and
causing their quantum matrices to collapse. The infrastructure that could not
be taken back was dismantled and hidden in the cave complex on the moon. The
shipyard was already slowly heading for a plunge into this system's sun.
Nothing would be left behind for the Insectoids to find and use in the event
that the Tempus Fugit failed in its mission. Gunslinger was back but not
Blackjack. Once he returned, he would transmit his data to Zulu, and the Tempus
Fugit would attempt to jump back in time.

Valkyrie was glad that she had let
Gunslinger talk her into letting him checkout Alpha1. Given the large number of
insectoid motherships already moving deeper into the spiral arm, The CAG's
decision to use the timeship to attack the Insectoids before they started to
spread was the correct one. Merely wiping out the one mothership threatening
the furry aliens would be only a short term solution. She was surprised that
the Friendlies didn't see that. Or maybe they did. It was entirely possible
that everything that had happened so far in this and the old timelines had been
carefully planned by the Friendlies to lead to this exact outcome. Even their
professed desire to 'save' the Insectoids from extinction might have been a
pretense. In any case, the Friendlies' agenda and her agenda were now in sync.

Valkyrie's thoughts were interrupted by a
lasercom burst from a message drone. It was sent by Blackjack, and the message
it contained along with the L-wave bearing data was alarming. Blackjack's
fighter had been detected by the Insectoids and ambushed. With his fighter
crippled from carefully aimed laser fire and about to be captured, he
programmed a message drone and fired it. The drone immediately made a
micro-jump and then reoriented its heading for Site B. If the Insectoids
captured Blackjack, they might be able to extract data from his quantum brain.
In hindsight, Valkyrie should have ordered both Gunslinger and Blackjack to
carry one attack drone which they could have used to blow themselves up if
threatened with capture, but she hadn't, and the RTC device which could have
prevented this crisis was carefully packed away in the cargo hold of the Tempus
Fugit.

The fact that no warning vision had been
received meant that no vision would be sent, and Valkyrie suspected that was
due to a lack of time. She had to assume the worst, which was that the
Insectoids had extracted critical data from Blackjack's brain and were even now
on their way here to stop the timeship. If they were attempting to do so, then
they would send their (relatively) small attack craft, which could accelerate
much faster than the lumbering motherships. She ordered Zulu to power up the
time machine. It would take 144 seconds for the machine's huge cylinders to
spin up to the necessary speed and for the power units to charge up the
capacitors to the required levels. Valkyrie then ordered the F2 fighters that
were aboard the ship to launch again. They were the only fighters that could
fire lasers in the event any insectoid craft showed up. None of the fighters
piloted by Valkyrie and her veterans had their laser modules nor did they carry
attack drones. There was no reason to leave any attack drones behind when they
might be needed in the past.