Exodus: Empires at War: Book 17: The Rebirth

by Doug Dandridge

  “And we hate you for it,” said Cornelius, his eyes narrowing as he scowled. He could keep it up no longer than his alien partner, and soon he was laughing out loud.

  “We love you humans, despite your shortcomings,” said the Maurid. “You come as liberators, not conquerors. And I can assure you that my people will repay your trust with undying loyalty.”

  “Then why are some of your people flocking back to the Caca fold?” asked Walborski, this time his angry expression legitimate.

  Shadow rotated his shoulders back, what Walborski took to be the Maurid equivalent of a shoulder shrug. “Who knows why fools act the way they do? And make no mistake, Walborski. Both of our peoples have their share of fools. People who would rather hold on tight to the familiar than embrace what could be a life expanding experience. Rest assure that me and mine are on your side.”

  “I trust you, Shadow,” said Cornelius, nodding. “All of your people? No. So I'm counting on you to let me know who I need to watch out for.”

  “And if you catch a traitor?”

  Cornelius thought about that for a moment. How did they define traitor here. He decided that it meant a being who had pledged his allegiance to the Imperial cause, then purposely betrayed it.

  “I guess we'll question him, or her. And when we're sure we've gotten all they have, I'll kill them, with my bare hands.”

  “I, believe you,” said Shadow.

  “So, what's our plan?”

  “We let my agents scour the surface of a selected planet, along with the soldiers you brought along. When we find someone who might have information, our alpha teams move in. That's you and me, plus other teams made up of my top people and those you select from yours.”

  “You think this is going to get us anything?”

  Shadow gave the same shoulder rotating motion. “We can hope. The Masters, uh, I mean the Cacas, at least the lower rank and file, treat their slaves like furniture. Like they had no ears, no minds. They tend to talk in front of people who understand their language, even if they give no sign of it. We'll get information. Will it be helpful? I can't answer that. As your people say, only time will tell.”

  “When do we start?” asked Walborski, anxious for some action.

  “When do you want to start?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  “Then let's jump through that mirror and go to where the action is,” said Shadow, grinning.

  Well, there's that, thought Cornelius with a grimace. More nightmares. However, if it let him kill Cacas, even indirectly, it would be worth a lifetime of sleepless nights.

  * * *

  “We've finish recovering the fighters, ma'am,” came the voice of the Fighter Boss, calling in from his control room near the rearmost hangar.

  Commodore Tanya Hough looked over at a screen to her side, checking the status of the craft that were the reason in being for the fleet carrier Northrup. While not technically the commander of the ship, the carrier and its eight escorts were hers, including the reinforced fighter wing.

  The wing consisted of fourteen squadrons of sixteen craft each. All were of the most advanced type, capable of twenty-three light pseudospeed, and carrying missiles that could move away at twenty-six. Eight of the fighter squadrons were the space superiority variety. Still, they carried four anti-ship missiles with fifty megaton warheads. Not capable of killing a capital ship by itself, but able to inflict severe damage if they struck the proper point.

  The remaining six squadrons were the new bomber class. Not technically a bomber, since they carried missiles, they were fifty percent larger than the fighter class. They had the same turn of speed and carried eight of the up-gunned missiles made especially for them. Those missiles carried one hundred megaton warheads, still not enough to kill a battleship by itself, but able to inflict even great damage than the fighter weapons. Hough couldn't wait to see those ships in action, probably the only action they would see.

  Standard carrier tactics called for her ships, along with the other carriers and escorts, to hang out just outside the hyper barrier. The system assault fleet would go in the system, while the system warning force, the ships that would look out on anything that the enemy might try to insert, would deploy light hours out. The carriers need do nothing more than launch fighters when the invasion force commander called for them, and service them when they came back. Not very exciting at all, though Hough preferred it that way.

  “Did they spot anything?” she asked of the Fighter Boss.

  “Nary a thing,” replied the captain. “With your permission we're sending our findings, or lack of, to the task group commander.”

  “Very good.”

  Hough was sure that Rear Admiral Kasagama, the overall commander of the carrier force, would also be relieved, as there was little to threaten the four carriers and thirty-six escorts in his force. Like most carrier admirals, Yogama Kasagama preferred to strike from a distance with his fighters.

  “Admiral Garasra is reporting that he is sending his scout groups in,” called out the task force com officer.

  “About time,” said Hough under her breath.

  Vice Admiral Garasra was the overall commander of the battle group. It was split into three commands under their own admirals, though Garasra preferred to move with the battle group and its four task forces. Each of those forces had between sixteen and twenty battleships, a squadron of battle cruisers, forty smaller cruisers, mostly lights, and eighty destroyers. Scout force, which had just sent in the destroyers, and was providing the back stop out from the carrier force, had twenty battle cruisers, forty-six light cruisers, and ninety-three destroyers. Garasra's command was one of nine battle groups assigned to Grand Fleet Admiral Mgonda's fleet. Mgonda himself controlled over a thousand ships in the main battle fleet, making up his heavy strike unit. It was poised to come in at the sighting of any significant Caca forces.

  Twelve hours later the scouts reported all clear, and the troop transports, escorted by one of the battle group task forces, moved in to take the planet. No one knew if that world was completely undefended, or if a swarm of ground troops waited for any landing attempt. Hough would have nothing to do with the landing. A couple of years before there would have been carriers with normal space fighters and some orbit to atmosphere birds. Both of those could have provided fire support for the landing, but the valuable warp fighters were not suitable for such a task. There were orbit to atmosphere fighters aboard the assault ships that would handle air superiority and ground attack duties.

  Each of the six assault ships carried a reinforced brigade, three infantry battalions with attached tanks and artillery. With orbital strike support they would likely be able to handle anything the Cacas might have on the planet. If they ran into more trouble than they could handle more ships would enter orbit to provide overwhelming fire support.

  It was a tried and true set of maneuvers that worked on ninety percent of systems. It ensured that there were no ambushes waiting for the group, including the nova producing projector ships. Yeah, it worked, but it slowed the Imperial forces down, making the advance tedious. The Cacas contested some systems, rarely, and normally with a force that was too large for the battle group, which would fall back and wait for Mgonda to send more ships in. As long as it worked the forces would continue to do it.

  But I wonder if we're setting something up with our predictability, thought Hough, pulling up the region plot and looking at the overall deployments. Command seemed to think they were taking every precaution, but they had to be missing something. Didn't they?

  “How goes the ship?” asked the commodore, contacting the captain of the Northrup, Gail Merkle.

  “All system are running at peak efficiency,” said the ship's captain, smiling. “We can give you boost whenever you ask for it, ma'am.”

  Hough grunted. She knew the captain would have preferred to have her ship moving. All carrier commanders were suspicious of sitting in one place for too long. It made them an easy target, but
as long as the rest of the fleet did their jobs, that shouldn't be a problem.

  * * *

  “We're receiving reports from another pair of systems at the front, Supreme Lord,” called out Admiral Trostara, the chief of staff.

  “Are the Imperials deploying in the same way?” asked Mrastaran, looking up from the report he was reading from his eldest son.

  Mashrata was still having problems with many of the traditionalists. The newly assassinated Emperor would have simply threatened them, emphasizing his threat by placing a selected number of heads on pikes, or bodies on crosses. Mrastaran didn't want to implement that kind of punishment in his Empire. He wanted males who weren't afraid to speak their minds, lest they refuse to come forth with vital information that their leader might not wish to hear. This Emperor wanted to hear everything, no matter how disconcerting it might be. He needed to feel the pulse of the Empire if he was going to make the changes he wanted.

  “Yes, Supreme Lord. Exactly the same.”

  “Call me Admiral while I am aboard ship, Trostara,” said Mrastaran, waving a finger in the air.

  “But you are the Emperor, Supreme Lord. I mean Admiral.”

  Mrastaran thought this might be a losing battle. He wanted the males under him to think of him as a combat commander. Nothing more, nothing less. But he had been named Emperor. If there had been anyone else to do it, he would have passed, but the Empire couldn't survive without leadership at the top. He was hoping, someday, to form other bodies of government, like most of the rest of the powers they were at war with. The Emperor had too much power for any single being as far as he was concerned.

  As long as they fall into habit, he thought, focusing on the problem at hand, they're vulnerable. Now, if only we get the stealth/attack craft ready in time to use them before they overrun too many systems.

  Mrastaran was planning for the long term in his next series of moves. Eight systems behind the lines had wormholes, collapsed to a tiny radius and hiding. But monitoring the systems as well. Those wormholes would be used in the second act future. There were also four wormholes hidden in systems the human had yet to get to. Those would get the stealth/attack. And the first of ten missile accelerator tubes was almost completed. It was taking more resources than he felt comfortable committing, but his Empire needed them.

  Wormhole production had increased again, to five a day, giving him enough of a surplus that he could spend them on what he hoped were precise strikes against the human fleet. Still, compared to the humans and their estimated thirty a day, his Empire would never catch up. He would never have a hundred ships in the line sending twenty consecutive streams of wormhole launched missiles at the enemy. It almost seemed hopeless, but the Emperor believed that smart planning and creative deployment could make up for a lot of the discrepancy.

  I don't have to win any battles, he thought, a strategy that was totally foreign to most Ca'cadasans. All he had to do was engage the humans in situations that cost them more tonnage and lives than he lost. And then he would offer to negotiate with their Emperor. From what he understood, he was a reasonable being who really cared about his people. Why wouldn't he talk peace if it saved lives, and the Ca'cadasan Empire offered concessions that would give the humans most of what they wanted.

  The first step was to take out the majority of their front line carriers. Both sides were powerful in ship to ship combat, in hyper and normal space. The warp fighters gave the humans a decided advantage in normal space, with their fast speed and striking ability. Their weakness was the fact that they couldn't travel in hyper, and needed a carrier to bring them into a system. Fighters were not ship killers, not really. But they could damage ships, sometimes critically, and any battleship that couldn't accelerate or jump into the highest level of hyper with the rest of the fleet was normally a total loss. They would still find a way to transport them into star systems on other ships, but the loss of so many carriers would have to be a hit to their morale.

  After several more hours of looking over plans, production, and sending coms off to the people in charge of implementing those assets, he felt tired. With an order to not be disturbed unless the capital came under attack, he crawled into his bed and fell into a deep sleep, oblivious to the Universe.

  Chapter Four

  No nation ever had an army large enough to guarantee it against attack in time of peace, or ensure it of victory in time of war. Calvin Coolidge

  JUNE 9TH, 1004. KLAVARTA SPACE AND THE KLAVARTA FRONT.

  Grand Fleet Admiral Beata Bednarczyk rubbed her eyes with her knuckles, fighting off the fatigue that threatened to have her sleeping with her head on her desk. The woman was still fighting the effects of the severe radiation poisoning she had been afflicted by when her fleet had sheltered behind the graviton shield. The shield was a wonder, having saved a planet and her entire fleet from the nova storm the Cacas had set off. Unfortunately, it hadn't been completely radiation proof, and most of the crew of the fleet had found themselves impacted by trillions of fast moving particles, the very definition of radiation.

  But we won, she thought. The graviton shield, and the massive laser they had employed, both powered by the generators on the Donut, had beaten a fleet more than ten times her mass. Not only defeated it, all but destroyed it, as a full seventy percent of the Caca tonnage had been vaporized. The rest had tucked their nonexistent tails between their legs and headed back to Caca space as fast as their drives could carry them. The only reason they had entered her trap was because their commanding admiral, one of the smartest Cacas any human had ever run into, had been relieved of command by their Emperor, and a lesser intellect put in charge.

  That had been the good news. The bad? That male, heading back for an execution, had been instead elevated to Emperor, placing one of their best and brightest in charge. While the young idiot in charge had been taken out by assassination.

  “Reporting in, ma'am,” said a familiar voice as a holo bubble sprung into existence over her desk. “All quiet on the front.”

  Beata looked into the stunning face of the redhead, emerald green eyes looking back at her from the holo. Mara Marie Montgomery was physically everything that Beata was not, tall and petite, with an easy manner that made her the master of any social situation. And a temper that was legendary.

  “I really didn't expect anything to happen for awhile,” responded Beata, nodding. “But I am very glad that you are out there keeping a watch.”

  Mara had been offered leave after the battle, but had turned it down. Beata wished her prime subordinate had taken the rest. On the other hand she was glad that the scout force commander hadn't.

  “Well, we won't let them through without detection,” said the newly promoted fleet admiral.

  Bednarczyk trusted her subordinate to do a good job out there on the frontier. Mara had all of the battle cruisers that had survived the fight, plus the lions share of the light cruisers and destroyers, including many of the smallish Klavarta ships. She even had the last of the ten million ton Klavarta battleships.

  “I don't think we're going to see much for the time being,” said Beata, looking back at the region plot that showed all known Caca deployments. The objective words there were all known. The Cacas would keep all of their deployments secret until they decided to move.

  “I'm not going to take any chances,” said the other admiral, brows furrowing. “Klanarat got caught off guard, and look what happened to him, and his fleet.”

  He got his ass shot off, thought Beata with another grimace. She had been able to salvage the situation, with some swift deployments, some luck, and some new technologies. That was twice in recent years that some new tech had come along to save her, and she doubted that would continue to happen.

  “That's why I have you out there, Mara. Keep an eye on the bastards. And if anything comes over the frontier, I'll be there with everything I have.”

  Which was little enough. Beata frowned as she looked at her battle fleet on a side screen. She still had
her two superheavy battleships, along with seventy-three of the standard sixteen million tonners. Fifty-one were in dock, either at the New Earth home system or at Central Docks. She would be getting some of those back soon, but there was no telling with many of the others. She had a normal complement of screens and scouts, enough for the moment. And twenty-one of the warp fighter carriers that had proven so instrumental in her past successes on this front.

  The alien contribution to her fleet made up the majority, as always. She had thirty-eight of the new Klavarta battleships, and would be getting more as soon as they launched and worked up. Twenty a week were coming out of the building slips, And after a two week work up cruise they were reporting to her force at Pleisia. Most came through her wormhole gate, but those equipped with their own portals had to come out the long way. The admiral would have preferred a longer work up period, but was making up for that short span by holding daily tactical problems to get the training in. The Alpha line of Klavarta were, to put it frankly, better spacers than their counterparts from the Empire. They had been engineered for space, better able to handle gee forces and radiation. Their ability to breath an oxygenated liquid also went a long way to making them the preferred spacers on this front, as they could handle thirty gravities above the limits of their compensators in that environment.

  The main problem with New Earth was the population. The Empire had over a trillion intelligent beings among its citizens, with more added from the liberated systems. New Earth had just under forty billion. Four billion of those were the unaltered humans that had made up the ruling class under their old regime. There were about six billion Alphas, and they wouldn't be running out of spacers anytime soon. Two billion of the frightening warriors, a billion of the laborer subspecies, built for heavy lifting, and twenty-seven billion of the smallish engineer class. Those last were the most important to their industry, as well as for shipboard repairs and maintenance. About half the size of the Alphas, with dexterous fingers, they were born to operate machinery. Which made them the perfect beings for manufacturing and construction. They put the muscle into the Klavarta war machine, but they were beginning to hit bottom with most of the subspecies already in positions.