Ure Infectus (Imperium Cicernus Book 4) Read online

  President Blanco leaned back in his chair and shook his head as though in dismay, “Then you leave me no choice but to suppress your open rebellion against our most sacred laws. May the gods have mercy on your souls.”

  The channel cut out and before Hadden could issue any commands each of the one hundred men, women, and aliens manning their stations within H.E. One stood—or similarly adjusted their posture to one of respect—and applauded, whistled, or cheered in their own way for their Director’s representation of their interests.

  After the applause had begun to die down fractionally, Hadden increased the speaker volume on his chair. “I am authorizing the deployment of the Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Stephen Hawking, Max Born and Roger Penrose,” he said, and the chorus of cheers, hoots, and applause quickly died down. “Admiral Berggren, you may fight your assets as you see fit.”

  “Thank you, Director,” Berggren replied before snapping out commands to his subordinates as the first of the VSDF fleet encroached into the H.E. One’s zone of control.

  The Virgin vessel—a battleship named Congress which led a pair of destroyers and an aged cruiser in tight formation—opened fire as soon as Hadden had done likewise with his ground-based weaponry. Eight of his massive cannons lashed out defiantly and rammed home against the Congress, causing its tactical icon to flicker briefly before once again solidifying.

  Damage reports streamed into Hadden’s custom-built, virtual reality interface and he prepared for another volley. His VR interface allowed him near-total control of H.E. One’s defensive assets as though they were merely pieces on a game board, and in a sense that was all they were. He would need to modulate power plant output in a perfectly-coordinated dance of destruction as he fueled his powerful defensive weaponry with every last joule of energy his plants could produce.

  He saw—or perhaps ‘saw’ is the wrong term, since his VR interface allowed him to process most sensory input in a decidedly abstract faction—the five remaining vessels of Admiral Berggren’s ‘fleet’ come into formation and move to flank the approaching squadron. Everyone knew it was only a matter of time before the VSDF fleet overcame their defenses, but the Hadden Enterprises security branch took their jobs very seriously. They had planned for every possible eventuality with the grim determination to take as many of the enemy down as possible while allowing the rest of the corporation’s employees the chance to flee.

  So it was with little fanfare, or even acknowledgment from the assembled officers within H.E. One’s Command Center, when the Roger Penrose was struck by a perfectly-directed volley from a second formation of VSDF vessels and its icon winked out of existence. Seventy three people had bravely manned that vessel, and they had died without even firing a single shot at the enemy. It was an insult to their memory and years of dedicated service—an insult which Hadden fully intended to repay.

  While he knew his sentiment was shared by the majority of those around him, he also knew they would not allow that sentiment to interfere with their duties. As soon as they were charged, he lashed out with another bank of his longest-range weaponry and was rewarded when a pair of the enemy fleet’s smaller vessels was annihilated just as rudely as had been the Roger Penrose. But Hadden’s thirst for vengeance was nowhere near slaked.

  He felt three of the ten weapons he had just fired wink out as they were destroyed by incoming fire, the weapon systems of the enemy locking onto them almost as soon as his firing them had revealed their location. Hadden also felt three dozen of the concealed weapons embankments scattered throughout the nearby rings unleash their pent-up fury on the approaching VSDF vessels, and another pair of smaller, lighter vessels was destroyed in a wave of high-powered plasma fire.

  It had been wise of Blanco to send his fleet when he had. With H.E. One at its orbital apex relative to Chambliss’ rings, approximately twenty percent of the embedded weapons systems had been removed from the tactical equation. Most of those weapons were high-powered, single-shot plasma cannons and their relatively short range made them useless this far from the icy rings of the gas giant.

  It also cleared the widest approach angle for the VSDF fleet, which meant they could more easily exploit whatever gaps in the defensive grid were created by the destruction of Hadden’s moon-based artillery.

  Even Hadden had to appreciate the brutal simplicity of Blanco’s thinking, but he was betting that same simplicity would play into his hand later. Besides, while Hadden Enterprises had stockpiled the most impressive supply of Imperial-grade technology, to have deployed it in this battle would have been simply to throw it away in a lost cause. Those assets would find their way onto the board soon enough, and ensuring they were protected long enough to do so was now Hadden’s primary focus.

  He felt a savage thrill as he saw that one of the battleships—a vessel named the Alexander Hamilton—came perilously close to the field of fire for one of his more creative weapons. Hadden diverted significant power from the rest of the defense grid to his ‘secret weapon,’ and even the lights of the command center dimmed as he prepared to unleash a killing blow on the warship.

  The instant the Alexander Hamilton entered the perimeter of his narrow firing arc, Hadden diverted all power from the primary and secondary grids to Rail Gun Number Three and fired his improvised mass driver. In a matter of seconds he sent eight thousand kilograms of iron pellets slamming into the unaware battleship in rapid succession, with enough force to shatter its shields and literally sheer the vessel in two—which it did. The two halves spiraled briefly out of control and then exploded in a flash of blue-white light—before Rail Gun Three went dead, several of its coils having fused due to overload from the sustained energy output.

  But RG3’s loss was of little consequence since Hadden knew the attacking fleet would log the weapon’s location and firing arc so it could not be used against them again. And while he had five more rail guns in his arsenal, the odds of even one more of them coming into play were incredibly remote—he had been lucky to get that particular shot in when he had, especially against such a high-value target.

  He restored the primary and secondary grids to their full power and unleashed another volley of long-range fire at the approaching fleet’s optimal target—this time, a destroyer named the Monitor. He opened fire with six of his ground batteries, and the Monitor was destroyed in a flash of nuclear fire—but five of Hadden’s six batteries were destroyed before he could redirect them toward new targets.

  The battle continued for several minutes as, one by one, Hadden’s surface-based artillery was snuffed out by the approaching fleet. The Stephen Hawking became separated from its formation after suffering major drive failure due to a focused barrage of a nearby squadron. Not long after it had been separated from its allied ships, the Virgin Fleet snuffed the Hawking out of existence with a torrent of well-coordinated fire, just as the Max Born likewise succumbed to a direct hit on its power plant from the Battlecruiser C.C. Pinckney’s long guns.

  “I would be remiss if I did not order you all to abandon the station,” Hadden said, his voice piped through the base’s intercom system. “You have fought bravely, but there is no need for all of us to die here.”

  Admiral Berggren stood up from his post at the bank coordinating the free assets of H.E. One and looked Hadden sternly in the eye, “Permission to speak freely, Director?”

  “Of course, Admiral,” Hadden replied through the intercom.

  Berggren grabbed a nearby microphone and, after piping into the same intercom system, said, “I’ll be fucked bloody if I turn my back on the only fight I’ve ever been in that actually meant anything—I’m taking as many of those bastards with me as I can!”

  There was a resounding chorus of cheers which quickly became ‘fucked bloody’ repeated over and over. Though Hadden disapproved of his senior Commander’s chosen liberty of speech, he could not help but feel a rare moment of connection with the people who had remained with him at H.E. One.

  “Very well,” Hadden acquies
ced as he unleashed another, less-coordinated, volley of fire from his shorter-ranged plasma cannons. He had reconfigured them to provide for maximum range while sacrificing a significant portion of firepower, but he knew that if he did not at least try to bring them into the fight the Virgin fleet would simply pulverize anything which even remotely appeared man-made on the moon’s surface.

  He was pleasantly surprised when the volley struck a corvette which had apparently believed itself outside of the range of such weaponry. Before the enemy vessel could recover, the Albert Einstein poured everything its plants could generate into the vessel and destroyed the Virgin corvette’s drive systems. The enemy corvette went into a bow-over-stern tumble which saw a spray of shrapnel fly off the ruined vessel’s aft section before it exploded. A roughly spherical shower of debris expanded from the point of its death, until that cloud was no longer recognizable as once belonging to a ship.

  Not long after that corvette had been destroyed, however, the Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton each came under more fire than they could absorb. Within seconds of each other, the mightiest of the vessels which had fought in H.E. One’s defense were destroyed. And in that moment, the mood in the Command Center turned from one of barely-controlled savagery to one of tacit resignation that their turn had come and gone. They all knew that it would only be a matter of time now that their most powerful mobile assets had been destroyed.

  Nearly all of his plasma cannons were destroyed just a few seconds later, and Hadden knew that the bulk of whatever damage they had hoped to cause had already been done. He continued to fire whatever batteries he was able until he quite literally was defenseless. Admiral Berggren’s efforts with the embedded plasma cannons, while initially effective, had become markedly less so when the remaining vessels maneuvered to follow the same basic paths as those vessels which had been struck had followed.

  Naturally, Admiral Berggren had anticipated this and had therefore been circumspect in which weapons he had fired and in what sequence they had been activated, but his adversaries were just as capable as he was. It was only half an hour before the moon had been functionally surrounded, and the fleet began scouring its surface with deliberate, patient strikes which destroyed what remained of Hadden’s defense grid in a methodical ‘scraping’ of the moon’s surface.

  Hadden remained alert throughout, however, and even managed to land a few crippling blows with well-hidden batteries during the VSF’s scouring of the moon-base’s surface, but no more of the enemy vessels were destroyed by his efforts.

  “Admiral Berggren,” Hadden called out when the last of his weaponry had gone offline, “give me the count, if you please.”

  “Yes, Director,” Berggren replied curtly, clearly fighting to keep his voice steady. Hadden saw that the man’s eyes were filled with tears as the weight of reality came crashing down on him. The recently-retired Rear Admiral—who had served with distinction and honor for thirty six years in the Virgin System Defense Force before retiring in protest of recent political shifts—called up the tally on his own monitor and mirrored it on each screen in H.E. One’s labyrinthian compound. “Last count,” the Admiral said, his voice threaded with unyielding resolve once again, “thirty six enemy warships entered H.E. One’s zone of control; of those thirty six, only fourteen remain.”

  The pride in his voice was something Hadden actually shared—and apparently the rest of the Command Center’s personnel did as well, as they erupted into a chorus of ‘fucked bloody’ for several minutes as the tally cycled across their view screens.

  “Well done, Admiral,” Hadden congratulated over the intercom, “indeed, well done to you all. We have done something remarkable this day and we must now ensure that our defiance cannot be ignored by those who would cover up this atrocity. I take great pride in standing…or, rather, sitting,” he corrected sheepishly, having been caught up in the moment, “with you here today.”

  Another chorus of mixed cheers and laughter went up, and this time Admiral Berggren joined them as little more than a common soldier. If Stephen R. Hadden had been physically able to do so, he would have done likewise but using his speakers to usurp the natural mood seemed disrespectful. He would not take this moment away from them.

  And so it was with more than a sliver of regret that he set the massive power generators buried deep within the moon-base’s rocky interior to an irreversible overload cycle while simultaneously accessing the highest-security protocols in the base’s computer. Those protocols would set the station’s entire store of delicately-contained antimatter—which, since Hadden Enterprises was the most powerful corporation in the Sector, was more than any other location this side of the now-collapsed wormhole could boast to possess—free to annihilate with the nearby matter in a carefully-calculated chain reaction that would leave Hadden’s mark on the Virgin System and, he hoped, the entire Sector.

  The truth, of which Hadden had been convinced for over a century, was that President Han-Ramil Blanco and those who had gone before him were nothing but a puppet. Whether he was aware of that fact was irrelevant, because Hadden had already taken aim at the real architect, or architects, guiding the Chimera Sector’s fate. While Blanco’s blatant assault on the rights and privileges afforded the citizens of the Virgin System had succeeded in destroying Hadden Enterprise’s base of power, Direction Stephen Hadden knew that, as with any competitive game of chess, difficult sacrifices needed to be made.

  Blanco, the short-sighted fool that he was, believe he had pinned Hadden’s most crucial piece and was about to destroy his organization root and branch. But Stephen R. Hadden had known this day would come for a hundred years…and he knew that the only piece in the game which truly mattered would remain in play long after the Director of Hadden Enterprises was gone.

  Just as the cheers and boisterous mood in the Command Center reached its crescendo, Hadden flipped the proverbial switch and said, “Check…your move.”

  Several hours passed as Masozi and Jericho hurtled toward Chambliss, and the tactical feed of the tiny pod kept track of the events at H.E. One throughout the epic battle which unfolded between the moon base and the VSDF fleet. As she watched the battle rage, and counted twenty distinct flares which could have only been created by the destruction of warships, Masozi felt her spine stiffen.

  She had distanced herself from her family precisely because she had feared to someday be associated with an event like the one she was watching, and now that she was viewing a tragedy of this kind up close—and from a vantage point she had never thought possible—Masozi felt something change deep within her.

  Just when it seemed that H.E. One would surrender, the inexplicable occurred and Masozi shrieked in horror as the entire station was enveloped in a flash of orange and white light, which quickly saw the rocky moon’s body fly apart in a shower of molten rock.

  The explosion seemed almost sluggish from their vantage point, but Masozi knew that any explosion capable of destroying a body the size of that moon would have been powerful beyond her limited ability to comprehend. The blast wave of molten moon fragments was completely asymmetrical and, as she looked at it with tear-brimmed eyes, actually looked like a giant weapon’s discharge—a weapon aimed directly at the beautiful, iconic rings of Chambliss.

  As she watched the aftermath, the tactical display went dead. The screen through which she and Jericho had watched the battle unfold had simply been relaying information from H.E. One’s own systems, most of which no longer existed as anything but a rapidly expanding cloud of their constituent atoms.

  Then she saw the nearby section of Chambliss’ rings interact with the wave of molten debris, which caused a chain reaction among the icy particles that made up the massive, beautiful rings. It was not a huge change, but even with her naked eye she could see the effect the explosion had caused as it began to clear out a roughly ovular region of the ring’s surface.

  “They can’t sweep that under the rug,” Jericho said quietly, and she looked over to see his fists
clenched tightly at his sides before he deliberately reached up and returned the screen to a view of the approaching gas giant.

  For the first time since Masozi had met Jericho she emotionally connected with him in that moment, and they shared the rest of their journey toward the gas giant’s atmospheric envelope in relative silence.

  Chapter XIX: Time and Pressure

  Masozi awoke with a start as the image of H.E. One’s destruction interrupted her surprisingly tranquil dreams, and she looked over to see that Jericho was cycling through the various data feeds the tiny pod’s systems provided.

  “I’m no good with this crap,” he grumbled as he cycled through a seemingly endless chain of menus in apparent futility. Masozi was then vaguely aware of the sensation of gravity pulling her forward against the restraints in her harness. It was barely enough to notice, but it was there.

  “I’ll do it,” she said after rubbing her eyes and rolling her shoulders, which was as much stretching as was possible in the cramped compartment. Jericho gestured in disgust toward the screen and Masozi began to flip through the various data feeds. “What were you looking for?”

  “The external thermometer,” he replied irritably, and as Masozi flipped through the menus she came across a feed which showed that the egg-shaped craft had entered the outer region of Chambliss’ atmosphere. “Everybody at H.E. One was trained to operate the standard escape pods and this thing’s been fitted with the same interface, but…”

  “You’re no good with ‘this crap’,” Masozi concluded after fighting down her rising nerves.

  Jericho nodded, “Exactly.”

  “Well,” she said as she flipped through the menus before finding the proper subset of commands, “I think it’s….here”

  The thermal gauge expanded to fill nearly a third of the screen, and it was represented by a vertical bar which was still very near the bottom. The color of the legend beside the bar indicated that once the external temperature exceeded what looked to be the 80% mark, the craft would have gone beyond its operating thresholds and permanent damage would occur.