The Catherine Kimbridge Chronicles #4, Retribution Read Online Free Page A

headphones."
    "The system is not perfect," Maasin-Tuk added. "But it increases by several orders of magnitude the number of jumps that can be conducted safely."
    ***
     
    Ricky stood in the board room of the Modos Syndicate on Naanac. The room occupied the entire south-facing side of the twenty-eighth floor of the Syndicate headquarters in the city of Harromog. The southern wall was a massive sheet of sapphire glass. Almost as hard as diamond and reinforced with a low-level force field, the one-way glass prevented light from escaping the room while allowing an unencumbered view of the ocean and black sand beaches.
    Ricky found the view intoxicating. A sound across the room caught his attention and he turned back to face the others. The room was filled with Bearephants and their various personal aides. All told there were twenty-three members of the Syndicate board in the room. Well actually that number was more like twenty, Ricky mused silently. He and Honey were impersonating Admiral Rockclam and his new aide, a blue-skinned humanoid named Ordi. 
    The real Admiral Rockclam was sedated and under the care of Captain Takei in a GCP safe house a few kilometers away. A neural interface gave Ricky surface level access to the Admiral's memories. An edited recording of the meeting would be implanted in the Admiral's memory before he was released and allowed to wake up later in the day. He would awake with hazy memories... thinking he had actually attended the meeting after getting a little drunk the night before.
    Ricky's purpose in attending the meeting had already been accomplished. Each board member, to include the chairman, was now infected with ENO s— GCP surveillance nanites. These microscopic machines were linked with quantum entangled communication nodes that were themselves tied into a cloaked WhimPy defense platform located several light years away.
    One of the GCP's major tactical advantages in their battle with the Modos Syndicate was their ability to communicate instantly across interstellar distances. FTL communication was not in the Modos bag of tricks yet.
    Ricky listened to the Chairman, a Modos called Snatch Bait, as he detailed the invasion strategy. In a nutshell, it was an invasion in force. Mind-numbing numbers of ships would make the transition between universes using the hyperfield conduit at SgrA. The bulk of the first several thousand ships would be lightly armored older vessels. Their sole purpose was to wear down the GCP defenses by virtue of sheer numbers. There seemed to be little concern for loss of life on these ships, as they were piloted by slave crews. To make matters worse, Ricky knew the GC P’ s most powerful weapons syste m – the SJ missile would be unreliable this near a super massive black hole. The GCP would have very little control over the weapons and could easily destroy large numbers of their own ships with friendly fire.
    Once the GCP defenses were depleted, the main invasion with the Syndicate's Conqueror-class battle cruisers would begin. These ships were formidable weapons of war, with adaptive shielding and an impressive array of beam and kinetic weapons available.
    These ships would form a beachhead and prevent any remaining GCP forces from getting close to the SgrA conduit. At this point the troop carriers would arrive. This was the bulk of the Syndicate forces. The standing armies from virtually every major Syndicate world had been pulled for this invasion. The size of the invasion force staggered the imagination.
    The only thing that kept the Modos Syndicate from overwhelming the GCP immediately was the bottleneck caused by the need to use the transdimensional conduit to move between the two universes.
    While it was true that the GCP had better technology in the form of nanites, FTL communications and, thanks to the Suthian Federation, the ability to jump between universes without the need to use the massive gravity well at SgrA, it was also true that none of these things