Intergalactic Union by D. L. Harrison

Author:D. L. Harrison [Harrison, D. L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-06-15T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

The command center was quiet as I got back and considered a few things. I was down to four fleets, and a million ships now. The six million I’d take from the Atans border leaving just a million in each spot as a token guard, would put me back up to almost six fleets with twenty-three million ships.

There was also the matter of the fleet on the border between us and the Vrok. That fleet wouldn’t be required anymore if we could take down the rest of the Vrok ships, so I wasn’t so worried about it and could use those in the hunt if we located the rest of their ships. That’d be twenty-seven to twenty-four million, in our favor, and didn’t count the hundreds of trillions of platforms.

Honestly, I wouldn’t even mind if we lost most of them in the trade, I didn’t need a large internal fleet after all. Once the Vrok were taken care of the outer fleets were enough, and a million ships in the void would be a whole lot of future colony packages.

“Hey Cassie, what do we do when we find them? Assuming they have always on quantum resonance pulse beacons, we couldn’t jump right on them and blast them. We’d have to jump in at the light second border and move forward, then open fire. But that’d give them plenty of time to open up wormholes. If we do find them in a galactic void between stars, how do we make them stand still long enough to kill them all?”

Cassie said, “Ask nicely?”

Jessica snickered, then threw me an apologetic look.

Cassie quirked a smile, “I don’t know. The void in galaxies makes the most sense though, either in the middle of nowhere, or very close by a system but outside the FTL line. It’s more tactical than out between galaxies if they’re close to tactical targets or places to protect, rather than two hours away by wormhole or more. Point is, that seems the likeliest scenario, we’re not lucky enough to find them all inside an FTL boundary.”

I snickered, “I came to that conclusion as well, I think Mel’s plan will find them, which is why I asked what I asked.”

Cassie got up to refill her coffee.

She sighed, “Too bad we can’t just prevent wormholes forming, the way they jam our jump drives.”

I tilted my head, and called Diana, just in case it was that easy.

Of course, it wasn’t. After I got done explaining why I was bugging her again, she said, “In theory a powerful enough gravity sheer could collapse a wormhole as it’s forming, but out from a light second there’s no way we could do it. It’s just too far to project the intense gravity fields it would require.”

Cassie said, “What if we took a page from their book. Cloak the whole damned fleet, jump just outside of a light second radius, then take your time and slowly move in over an hour or two so they don’t pick up the gravity drive.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.