Imperator by Timothy Ellis

Author:Timothy Ellis [Ellis, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 2019-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

Twenty Seven

“Hey, they took a shot at us!” exclaimed Jane.

“Who did?” I asked.

“The Nazis. Fourth jump into their space, and they fired missiles at us.”

“Why not the first?”

“No idea. They still had a fleet at the jump point, even though nothing can come through it. I guess they sent a message we were coming, and by the fourth jump someone had time to expect us.”

“Waste of missiles.”

“Quite. But I guess it explains why we haven’t heard from them.”

Hot on the heels of my discussion with Jane, had come requests from the Japanese, Russians, Chinese, and Indians, for us to visit and discuss issues of mutual interest. So we’d left Stars behind, with key people organizing the movement of troops and pilots to Haven. I still had Lacey and the four squadrons of Excaliburs on board in case someone got rowdy.

But I hadn't expected those whose space we were crossing to get narked about it. In hindsight, maybe I should have. We’d thwarted the Nazis making war on the Americans after all. One would expect them to be a bit narked about that.

What I truly hadn't expected though, was the Germans firing on us as well as we crossed their space, and even more surprisingly, the Earth fleet took a serious shot at us as well.

Mind you, the Earth sector was at war with the German sector, so maybe they were firing on anything which seemed to be coming through the shared jump point. And they had it staked out pretty well. We didn’t use it, but they were hair trigger anyway. Neither had tried to contact us that we were aware of, and so we didn’t stop.

Jane jumped us from Barnard’s Star clear over Earth to Wolf 359, in a single jump, so as to avoid the fairly massive fleet around Earth itself, and spread across the system between the two jump points. Which was impressive given the sector was a small fraction of what it had been before the time line change, and the serious lack of resources in the system itself. Ship building relied on mining from the systems on either side, but they did have the population to support the fleet.

We’d not heard from the Arabs, French, Italians, or Spanish either. The Arabs didn’t have a spine system, so we saw nothing of their ships, but knew they had them from the navmap. Paris was still in the same system, and all three jump points had fleets at them. Switzerland had still managed to grab their own system, and there were only police vessels in there. The Scandinavians had carved themselves the same four spine systems, and they had token forces, but nothing major. And Gibraltar and Portugal were also single systems. It made a line of seven independent systems, none of which seemed to have any problems with the others.

There were vacant systems off Portugal and Gibraltar, but neither seemed interested in finding them. The rest seemed content with what they had, although if I started changing the trade routes, they might suddenly have something to say.

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