The Code by Doug Dandridge

Author:Doug Dandridge [Dandridge, Doug]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catbrother Publishing
Published: 2019-03-29T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on. Franklin D. Roosevelt

BOLTHOLE SYSTEM.

“The decoy gate is in place,” announced the chief of staff, Captain Cassidy Carson, sitting her station at the far side of the control room.

“Then let’s hope it fools them,” said Admiral Anaru Henare, looking at the construct on the viewer. It was as large as a ship gate, with the same number of grabber units to move it. The shimmering field of a wormhole stretched across the square opening. Thing was, that shimmering image was not a wormhole, but an electromag field infused with magnetic material that mimicked the surface of a portal. Just like the grabbers were not all grabbers, since the mass they needed to move was a twentieth that of the real gate. From close up it looked a lot like a real gate, which hopefully meant that at a distance it would be even more difficult to detect as a fake.

The fake was moving into clear view around the sphere of the asteroid, right into the targeting pips of the enemy ships. The real wormhole gate was still sheltering behind the asteroid, back and toward the closest edge, and another surprise had been prepared for that gate. There were forty capital ships from the home fleet on the other side of that portal. And they would not be transiting that gate.

Henare had come up with the idea after he had looked over battle reports from the war against the Ca’cadasans. The Cacas didn’t have the missile accelerator tubes that the Empire used. It was thought they were developing them, but the complex systems were not that easy to design, and it took considerable industrial resources to build. The Empire had been working with them since before the war, and had gotten to the point where they were able to roll them out by the hundreds every month. The Cacas were forced to use another system, one that was not a tenth as efficient as the one the humans used. But it worked, in its fashion, and the admiral was hoping that a modified form would work here as well.

There was a second structure, also an electromagnetic projector as large as the gate, which would turn missiles slightly in space, enough to make up for the discrepancy between the orientation of the real gate and the fake. There could be some problems with it, but if it worked properly it would fool the Machines to an even greater extent.

I wish we had a second gate to use, thought the admiral, shaking his head at the absurdity of the thing. They actually had three in-system, with the fortuitous arrival of a wormhole equipped battle cruiser. The ship gate and a passenger gate in the Bolthole asteroid that led to the Donut. They might be able to get another gate frame up in a couple of hours. Moving the other ends into frames and erecting them would take

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