Exodus: Empires at War: Book 3: The Rising Storm

by Doug Dandridge

  The rifleman turned back toward the car, his face a mask of rage, and started to raise the rifle. He stopped and his expression changed as he found himself looking at Jennifer, leaning on the top of the windscreen with her pistol pointed at him.

  “That was murder,” she said in a cold voice, her finger on the trigger. The people near the man saw what was happening and moved away quickly. Jennifer had never killed a sentient being before. She still wasn’t sure she could pull the trigger much as she wanted to.

  The man must have noted her hesitation. A smile grew on his face and he jerked the rifle to his shoulder, his last move in this world.

  There was no hesitation now as Conway pulled the trigger. The barrel of the pistol and the head of the man were linked by the red beam. To the observers it looked instantaneous, the time frame being too small for the human eye to distinguish. The man’s head exploded in blood, bone fragments, pieces of brain and a red tinted steam that flowed out from the strike. The body fell to the ground as soon as conscious control was removed.

  “Doug?” Croaked the crying woman, looking over at the doctor.

  “He couldn’t have survived that shooting,” said Jennifer, closing the canopy and lifting the car into the air. “Now, everyone hold on.” She accelerated the car forward, wondering if she had really accomplished anything there, with the deaths of two men resulting from her act. She looked over at the five year old child, peacefully asleep in the seat, and decided that she had.

  * * *

  MASSADARA ORBIT, MARCH 18TH, 1000.

  Great Admiral Miierrowanasa M'tinisasitow crossed both sets of arms across his chest and bowed his head. The quartet of priests to his front solemnly said the words of the mass funerary service, while another threw pieces of Cacada meat into the braziers around the altar, reminding those present that they were sending the spirits of warriors of the race to the heaven, where they would commune forever with the souls of Emperors and heroes past. Would that I ascend into the heaven when my time comes.

  The High Priest stepped to the fore and intoned the words of the ancient language that only the religious cast knew. The Admiral hated this part, not because the words were not beautiful in their structure and intonation. No, he thought it silly to recite things to the officers and crews that they had no way of understanding. He thought it was intended to invoke a sense of awe in the non-religious cast Cacada, but to him in only made them think the priests were a class of arrogant fools who considered themselves better than anyone else.

  The service ended when the bells rang and the braziers flared, and the priests walked off of the altar and through the archways to the place where only they were permitted. The Admiral looked at his timepiece and cursed under his breath. A Cacada could never tell how long the service was going to run. That was up to the High Priest. But today they had pushed the limit and the service had lasted over two hours.

  The Admiral walked out of the chapel, and chalked up his obligatory weekly attendance as over. Many could get away with not going, but he was too noticeable to do such. And he did not want to be branded a heretic, especially as outspoken as he was against some of the church’s policies that impacted on his ability to make war.

  “Admiral,” called out another officer as M'tinisasitow walked the corridor to his office. “May I have a word?”

  “Of course, High Admiral,” said the higher ranking officer to his subordinate who was in charge of the fleet’s supplies. “What can I do for you?”

  “It’s the antimatter, Admiral,” said the worried looking male. “With all of our ships moving from system to system on quick strikes as they are, we will soon be running short. We need to capture a production facility, or get one of our own up and running.”

  “We have tankers on the way,” said the Great Admiral, thinking about the problem. “Or at least I have sent orders for such to come our way.”

  “And that is one of the problems, Great Admiral,” said the logistics officer as they walked side by side and other males got out of the way. They ignored the slaves, who made way or got trampled, as was their lot. “We are at the end of as long a supply line as the race has ever faced. Two years back to the heartland and capital. Over six months to our nearest logistics base. While this enemy has internal lines of communications. They can ship equipment and supplies from their core worlds in two months or less.”

  “What would you have me do, High Admiral?” asked the Great Admiral, giving a head shake of confusion. “The situation is as it is. I do not think the primates are going to give up a production facility that easily. I have some of my special ops looking at the possibilities of a raid that gains us an antimatter storage facility, but I do not hold out much hope.”

  “Have you seen the extent of these primates’ Empire?” asked the other officer in a low voice. “I know that the higher ranking prisoners were all mind wiped before capture, but even their ordinary spacers know much about the extent of their Empire, and their history, much more than I would expect one of ours to know. And while it is not near as large as ours, not a twenty-fifth the size, it still is much more than we can expect to take in one bite. We may be fighting this war for decades, if not longer.”

  It better not last decades, thought the Great Admiral. We’re only a little bit more advanced than they are as it is. In a decade, maybe less, they will have caught up. We can still probably roll over them with numbers, but there will be a lot of Cacada dead, and many will be the fathers who will cry for their sons.

  “There must be some connection between a short life span and innovation,” said the other Admiral, mirroring the Great Admiral’s thoughts. “How else did these creatures advance as fast as they did? When we met them in their home system they were little better than primitives, barely able to leave their system.”

  And all we have done is envelop such species from the beginning of the Empire, thought the Great Admiral, who was confident he was one of the most intelligent of his species. While they have been fighting wars in which it was advance or be defeated. And so we run into the second worthy opponent of our era, right after we run into the first, on the other side of the Empire.

  “I hate to tell you, High Admiral, but we will not be the priority front at this time. Things do not go well along the other arm.”

  “What’s the latest news?”

  If you can call news six months old the latest, thought the Great Admiral with an internal laugh. Light speed was still the limiter, even in hyper, and VIII was the best they could do with communications relays. “The enemy is strong, from what I’ve heard, and as advanced as we are. They are not a conquering species, but still have a considerable holding of volunteer species.”

  “Then they are doomed to lose,” said the lesser Admiral, giving a head nod of assurance. “They face a true warrior race.”

  And that’s what the fools in the other arm thought when they attacked without doing a thorough job in gathering and analyzing intelligence. Now we are in the fight of our lives over there, while the opportunity to destroy the humans is here, and may not last long.

  “We will discuss this later, High Admiral,” said the Great Admiral, stopping before the soldiers guarding his office. “Bring up your questions for the staff, and I will see that they address them.”

  The other Admiral gave a quick bow and moved away, while the Great Admiral gave his guards a perfunctory salute as they presented arms, then moved through the door and into the outer room of his suite.

  The Friesi slave jumped up from her seat at the reception desk and bowed low to the Great Admiral. The Admiral preferred warmed blooded furred sentients to work around him, but really didn’t care about their reproductive methods. The round eyed eight limbed Friesi laid eggs, but of course this slave was sterilized, so she wouldn’t become distracted by the whole mating thing. The Admiral barely glanced at her, other than to make sure her collar was intact. To him she was no more a living thing than the station computer, and much less valuable.

  T
he main office, his home on the station, was luxury such as he was not used to. The room was huge, with comfortable furnishings of great worth, and a huge viewport looking out of the station. The Great Admiral preferred the bridge of a flagship, but until he organized a campaign and sent a fleet off that was worthy of his personal command, this was his working space.

  The Admiral accepted a drink from the slave that was waiting in the room, serving tray in hand. Another of the thousand or so species the Empire owned, the Admiral didn’t even remember what it was called. That it delivered drinks of an intoxicating nature to the officer was all he cared about it. The Admiral had not a thought about how the drinking of so much alcohol affected his mind. It was something the race did, all members of the race, as it had always been, from back in the day when the first armies marched with shouldered pikes out of the Imperial Capital to subjugate the planet.

  Looking down on the blue and white globe below the Admiral thought of how good it was to add more living worlds to the Empire. Cacada preferred to be in the open air of a living world, with the light of a day star on their faces, something that could not be duplicated aboard a space ship, or even a great habitat. Worlds were sacred to his race, and they had only destroyed two in their history. One was the planet of the hated humans, who had violated the most basic rule of war, at least as the Cacada fought it, and killed an Imperial heir in the process. The first had been the world of the first to resist the Ca’cadasan Empire, who actually had the effrontery to severely damage the home world of the race.

  He wished he were down on the surface of that world. His ground officers had told him that it was too dangerous. A bright pinpoint flash on the terminator between night and day emphasized that point, and he linked into the system to see what was going on, a kinetic strike or something from the enemy. What he saw shocked him, and he immediately linked with the ground command, sending out a request to the commanding general.

  “Yes, Great Admiral,” answered the ranking ground commander in the system, who had established his HQ on the surface. “What can I do for you?” The sounds of something burning and the shouts of males were in the background, never a good sign.

  “What is going on down there?”

  “The humans are what is going on,” said the fatigued voice of the General. “Sorry bastards left a nuclear mine in place among the ruins we were using as a supply dump.”

  “What’s the damage, General?”

  “I have lost over five hundred warriors and a couple of thousand slaves. The slaves are meaningless for the most part. I can conscript humans for the job, and work them until we’re ready to kill them. But I need more warriors, and not just to replace those killed in the blast. The humans fight like Graata, hiding in the shadows and shooting when they are sure of a kill.”

  “Can’t you find them from their equipment emissions?”

  “Oh, we can find the regular soldiers right enough, at least most of the time. What we cannot find are their civilians and special troops who snipe at us endlessly. They use these.” An image of the General formed on a nearby holo projector, holding what looked like a toy weapon, until one remembered that to the scale of the humans it was actually a good sized gun. “This thing is made out of some kind of a non-aromatic plastic compound that our sensors cannot pick up. It fires a high velocity chemically propelled projectile, and is deadly at long range.”

  “Can’t you track it by the chemical residue of the propellant?”

  “It’s difficult, but can be done,” said the General with a head nod of assent. “But only after it has been fired, and then I have a dead warrior on my hands.”

  “You will get more warriors,” said the Admiral, cursing to himself as those would be males he couldn’t use on the next phase of the campaign. There were a series of flashes on the night side of the planet, and checking the Admiral made sure these were kinetic strikes from his people. “And how many humans do you think are left on the planet?”

  “Humans weren’t the only sentients here,” said the General with a frown. “We’re having as much problems with some of the others.” Another image appeared on the holo of a centauroid creature with scaly skin and an alarming set of jaws. Next to it for scale was a Cacada warrior, and the alien, though not as tall, was the larger. “This is a Phlistaran.”

  “Formidable. But it should make an easy target.”

  “But some of the other sentients are even smaller than the humans, and able to hide from us until they fire.”

  “So how many sentients in all, General? I read from the data banks we recovered that there were about thirty million of them on the planet when we invaded.”

  “And we probably still have a million out there in the wilderness to take care of,” said the General. “And they never congregate in large groupings, so we have to go into the brush and hunt them out.”

  “A million,” said the Admiral, the feeling of being overwhelmed coming over him. Not an absolutely enormous number, and we hold the orbitals. Still, if it’s estimated that we need a soldier for every two of them, that’s a half million warriors. “Keep at it, General. We want this planet, and we don’t want humans on it anymore. So keep at it.”

  I wish I could just blast this planet’s atmosphere into space, but the priests would have a fit. There are too many witnesses now. Maybe another world, when I only have a couple of priests to deal with, but not now. And the image formed in the Admiral’s mind of missiles missing their target and hitting a world instead. He was shocked that he was thinking heresy, but not so shocked as he was at letting a ragtag bunch of civilians kill his warriors.

  Chapter Four

  No one wants to fight in hyperspace. Shields do not work well, the limit of light amp weapons and even visual is almost at ludicrous, while particle beams and plasma weapons basically send their energy out of hyper and into normal space almost as soon as it leaves the hyperdrive field. Only missiles are really effective, but not at the same range that they are in normal space. And any major interruption in a ship’s generating power or hyperdrive field means a catastrophic translation back to normal space. So fighting in hyper is like a knife fight between two poorly armored, blind and fearful drunks, in which a major injury is the same as death. Grand Fleet Admiral Constance Kowalski.

  HYPERSPACE, AREA BETWEEN MASSADARA AND CONUNDRUM, MARCH 19TH, 1000.

  Sean found himself sitting in yet another acceleration couch on yet another bridge. The couch was the same as the last. The bridge was smaller, as befit a destroyer. It was still a very modern layout, as the ship was brand new. He could tell looking in the holo tank that the electronics were also new. But with the yearly nanotech upgrades to all fleet ships, every bridge had electronics that were at most a year old, keeping the entire fleet up to date on the systems and subsystems that kept a ship running.

  “She’s putting out, isn’t she,” said the captain, Commander Maurice von Rittersdorf, looking over the holo from his command couch.

  Sean looked over at the sine wave graph that was showing the hyperwave static being put out by Jean de Arc. The big battle cruiser was simulating resonance problems with her hyperdrive as she decelerated at maximum rate. Her signal was messing up the tracking systems of everything near, and hopefully covering up the resonance signature of the smaller destroyer.

  The destroyer was also decelerating at maximum rate. It had to be glowing like a small star with its radiated heat. Fortunately that heat would only travel so far before its photons dropped through hyper and back into normal space.

  “We’re almost ready for first translation,” said the helmsman from his console.

  Sean looked at the velocity display and saw that they were at point two one light. At the rate they were dropping they would be at point one in just a couple of minutes. Then they would see if the plan worked.

  “What do you think their chances are?” asked Sean of the captain, looking again at the hyperwave sine.

  “Not good,” said the Captain with a grimace. “I kn
ow the Commodore will do all she can to win. But I don’t think it will be enough. And winning isn’t her mission,” said the young officer with a trace of bitterness. “She doesn’t need to win to accomplish it.”

  No, thought the new Emperor of the New Terran Empire. She just needs to die gloriously, so I can skulk away to safety. He thought for a moment about one of the things the Captain had said. Commodore. She had been in charge of a convoy that had stumbled into a battle. How many of those other ships had gotten away?

  “Captain,” said Sean in a quiet voice, waiting for the man to look at him. When he did it was with cold eyes that made the Emperor flinch just a bit. After all, just a very few days ago this man would have been his superior, capable of giving Sean any order up to and including sending him to his death. Now the roles were reversed. “I didn’t ask for any of this,” said Sean.

  “I know you didn’t,” said the Captain, his eyes softening. “I know you didn’t. But the job is yours, by right of birth. And this job is mine, by obligation of oath. We’ll try and get you out of here, your Majesty. I just hate leaving a damned good officer, and damned good woman, behind.”

  “I know,” said Sean, feeling his own eyes mist up. “I had to leave a lot of shipmates behind, including the CPO who rode herd on me. It’s not easy to run when others are dying to keep the path open.”

  “Just remember that when you sit the throne,” said the Captain, turning back to look at the main viewer display. After a few moments the Captain straightened up in his chair. “Drop to six. Try to make it as smooth as possible.”

  A black maw opened in front of the ship on the viewer, looking out into a reddish dimension very much like the one they were in. A queasy feeling passed through Sean, and he knew that they were dropping down to VI. On the viewer the space looked just a little less bright. The black pinpoints of gravity wells were visible in the distance, the shadows of the stars in normal space reflected in this dimension.