Exodus: Tales of The Empire: Book 2: Beasts of the Frontier.

by Doug Dandridge

  The bulkhead door leading out of the central capsule was closed, and Cinda cursed as she thought how she was going to get that door, as thick as the armor of the capsule, open. In frustration she hit the control opening button, and almost laughed as the door slid open. The CIC was in the rear central capsule, as protected there as the bridge was in the forward one. She jetted through the fifty meters separating the capsules on her suit grabbers. The tube was also evacuated of air, and at first the door would not open, indicating that there was still pressure on the other side. She pushed her code in over the link, overriding the lockout. The door slid open and a blast of air came with it, trying to push her away. Her suit fought the outflow and got her into the capsule, and she boosted away, depending on the crew behind her to close off the door. If anyone isn’t in combat armor they’re idiots, she thought, not really worried about evacuating the corridor atmosphere.

  The Captain ran into the CIC, a room slightly larger than the bridge, with twelve seconds on the clock. The central holo showed the same view her link was feeding into her occipital lobe. For some reason it looked more real to see the physical holo, and in that moment she almost wished she was not looking at it.

  “All weapons are firing at the missiles,” said the Exec, starting to get up from his chair and sinking back down as the Captain waved him back.

  Cinda could see that on her link. The forward laser ring was firing a full powered beam a second, the two remaining counter missile tubes were cycling weapons as fast as possible, even the close in projectile weapons were blasting on full auto, all trying to stop the missiles that meant to kill the frigate.

  “Integrated fire control is down,” said the Exec as the tracks drew closer.

  Which means we’re really screwed, thought the Captain, staring at the holo, the ticker in her mind counting down to three seconds. Everything was firing on local control, with no integration to take advantage of overlapping fields of fire.

  A laser hit one of the missiles, detonating it seven hundred kilometers from target. A gigaton blast spread out from the missile as the antimatter warhead breached contain. There was negligible blast effect, but the hull of Joel Schumacher took a wave of heat and radiation that rocked the ship as armor boiled away and atmosphere vented.

  The other missiles attempted to change their vectors away from the blast that was frying their own systems. One didn’t make it out of the blast before its comp systems fried from radiation overload, and it continued on at an angle that would target nothing. Another ran into a stream of pellets from an auto cannon, losing two forward grabbers and also drifting off target. A moment later a counter missile struck the stern of that missile and destroyed the rear section.

  The fourth missile made it away from the blast with minimal damage, then tried to reacquire the target. It missed the frigate by a dozen kilometers and slammed into the ice ball. The gigaton blast shattered the comet, sending millions of pieces of ice in all directions. Schumacher was hit by hundreds of thousands of chunks of rock and ice, from several kilograms to one twenty thousand ton monster.

  Cinda fell to the floor despite her combat armor as the comet exploded. The frigate was only five kilometers from the surface of the ice ball. The blast effect banged on the hull of the ship, obliterating surface installations like grabber fins, electromag field projectors and auto cannon emplacements. The nanoweave outer skin, the sensory organ of the ship, was eroded away. Any escape pods that had survived the fight with the superbattleship were totally destroyed.

  Joel Schumacher tumbled away from the explosion, power systems fluctuating, gravity going in and out. Inertial compensators blinked off in some portions of the ship, and some crew were flung into the walls at scores of gravities. Their combat armor survived, becoming the coffins for the smashed remains of the spacers who had sheltered in them.

  “Damage report,” yelled Cinda into the com as her link to the ship’s computer systems went down.

  “Damage control is out,” yelled the Exec, his wide eyes looking out at her through his faceplate. He pointed at one of the techs sitting in the room, designating that woman as damage control chief. Which was well and good, except the limited com systems made that an almost impossible job. At this point damage control was more of a local function, crew seeing something that needed to be done and doing it.

  Main power came back on, and with it a working schematic of the ship. Cinda studied that schematic on the holo screen, not sure if her ship was going to survive or not. Then her attention was all taken by the blinking red that covered part of the antimatter reactor section of engineering.

  “Engineer,” she called over the com. “What’s your status?”

  “The Engineer is dead, ma’am,” came back a voice from engineering. “This is Petty Officer First Faraday,” continued the young woman. “I’ve taken over.”

  “What’s your status?” repeated the Captain, looking at that blinking red overlay of the reactor and unable to pull up any other information.

  “We’re having some problems with the reactor, though I think we can get it under control,” said the rating. “But we’ve got a bigger problem. One of the antimatter storage containers was hit when we were slugging it out with the Cacas. I don’t know why it didn’t blow then, but I don’t think it’ll be long.”

  “Can you jettison the container?” asked the Captain, looking at the schematic and seeing the answer to that question herself. Christ, but we’re screwed again.

  “Maybe. Probably not. I’m not sure ma’am, but if I had to stake my life on it, I’d say no. There’s a lot of damage back here.”

  “Do what you can to stabilize it, then get out of there,” said Cinda, making her mind up in an instant. She looked over at the Exec. “Order abandon ship. I don’t think we’re going to save her, and I won’t lose any more people in a lost cause.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” agreed the Exec. The call went over the com circuit as soon as his agreement left his mouth, and acknowledgements came back almost instantly.

  Strobes started to flash across the vessel, and klaxons sounded in every compartment that still had atmosphere. A countdown timer appeared on every implant, though the time was of course just an estimate. The fact was, the ship was living on borrowed time, and the antimatter could breach at any moment.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she ordered the people in the crowded CIC. “You lead them out, Exec.”

  “What about you, ma’am?” asked Frobisher, turning his helmeted head her way.

  “Captain’s prerogative,” she said with a smile, wishing she could lead the way off the ship. “First one on, last one off.”

  The Exec nodded and moved quickly to the hatch, the relocated bridge crew close on his heels while the CIC people abandoned their stations. Cinda tried to link into the ship’s systems and hit a blank wall. There’s nothing I can do here, she thought, realizing that the system had gone down completely. As soon as the last crewman left the chamber she followed.

  It was eighty straight meters from the CIC to the outer skin of the vessel, about one hundred and ten by the shortest route. That route no longer existed. The corridor toward the stern was a wreck, bulkheads crushed inward to close much of it off. The corridor forward was still useable, by one person at a time. The Exec led the crew that way, squeezing his armored suit through a space not much bigger than it was. The lights were flickering, even the emergency systems too badly damaged to function without failure.

  There was still atmosphere in the corridor, and when they reached a crossway that headed out the sounds of people banging on a door came to their suit pickups. Armored fists beating against an armored hatch that was sealed shut. The suits gave them many times the strength of a normal human, but it was not enough. Metal glowed at the edge of the door, the sign of suit lasers being employed to cut through the hatch. It would also not be enough, not in time. Voices called over the local com circuit, suit to suit, begging for aid.

  Cinda recognized the door as leading i
nto the stern area infirmary. There were undoubtedly medical personal behind that door, and maybe some injured. She activated her own suit laser and started to work on the edge of the door. The laser was made to cut through hull metal, but it was asking a lot to cut through this much alloy.

  “We’re coming for you,” she shouted over the local suit to suit com. “Keep working your end.”

  Frobisher and Jakardo were suddenly there with her. Frobisher activated his suit laser, while the Tactical Officer pulled the damage control cutter he had carried all the way from the corridor outside the bridge. His unit cut through the alloy at six times the rate of the suit lasers, and sparks flew into the air as he moved the beam from the left top side of the door down.

  “Let me have that,” she told her Tactical Officer. “I’ll take it from here while you two get off the ship.”

  “No, ma’am,” replied Jakardo, continuing to work the laser, while the Exec kept going at the top of the door.

  “That’s a direct order, Mr. Jakardo,” growled Cinda, continuing to cut with her suit unit.

  “And you’re not the only one who can ignore those kind of orders, ma’am” said Frobisher.

  Cinda smiled, and glanced back in relief to see that the rest of the crew had left them, heading out of the ship. They worked in silence, concentrating on making the cuts in the most efficient manner possible, until they had circled the door, all the while wondering how much time they had.

  “Shove,” yelled the Captain, pushing with her suit arms against the door.

  The three of them pushed it into the room, to fall with a hard clang to the floor. There were a pair of sick bay orderlies and one injured crewman, all in battle armor, the two hale crewman helping the hurt one.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” yelled Cinda into the com, herding the three they had rescued to follow behind her Exec and Tactical Officer. Shit, she thought, looking at the timer on her implant. Over six minutes had passed since they had left the CIC, well past the estimated lifetime of the antimatter container.

  She felt relieved when they reached the outer hull. The door to the airlock was still intact, though without power. She wondered why the crewmen who had gone ahead of them had closed it, then realized that it was set to always have one hatch shut to the outside, unless it had been overridden. She tried to signal the override, with no success. Frobisher reached the emergency manual override first, pulling open the panel and pushing the rotating tool on his left gauntlet into the interior and mating it with the ratchet. The door started to slide open immediately, air rushing through the widening gap.

  “Lock your boots,” yelled Jakardo to the others as the pull increased. It was obvious why when the rest of the airlock was revealed, or the space where one would have been if something hadn’t have scooped it off the side of the ship.

  “Is anyone still aboard?” yelled Cinda over the local com after bonding her boots to the deck by its magnetic locks. She was greeted with static. “Maybe I should do another check of the ship,” she said over the com to the people with her.

  “Not on your life, ma’am,” said Jakardo, grabbing a hand hold on the chest of her suit, boosting his armor, and pulling her out of the ship. “The old girl is going to blow any second now. Everyone’s out who’s going to get out.”

  Cinda nodded her head, knowing the man was right, but still wishing she could go back in. If the damned ship blew up around me, at least I wouldn’t have to worry about the future.

  Everyone now boosted on their suit grabbers, trying to put as much distance between themselves and the gigaton class bomb the ship was about to become. The suits could pull twenty gees with their inertial compensators, twenty-five max, putting the extra gravities directly onto the passenger. All were trained spacers, with the improved systems of all modern humans. They could handle ten gravities for several minutes, while their undergarments compressed and forced blood back to the brains. Still, in space it seemed like they were standing still with only the stars in the background.

  The Captain turned her suit around as she boosted, until her ship was again in her view as she backed away. Now she had a frame of reference, the small form of the ship getting smaller by the moment. She zoomed in on the ship, gasping at the revealed damage to its surface. And this is the side that was facing away from the enemy ship and the comet. Though it had faced the incoming missiles, which had done significant damage, even detonating hundreds of kilometers away.

  There was a small flash about a hundred meters to the stern of the midsection, engineering. The small flash erupted into a large one, and the ship was gone in an instant in a burst of eye hurting plasma. Her faceplate darkened immediately.

  “Shit,” yelled one of the crewmen close by, and Cinda lightened her visor, then cursed herself as she saw the small dark blotches against the growing, fading plasma field. Those were solid objects propelled outward, pieces of the ship, and where she could see the larger ones there had to be thousands of smaller that she couldn’t.

  The Captain cringed in her suit. Her HUD showed the mass of objects, and there was really nothing she could do about them, other than move her suit out of the way of the larger ones. They passed by without a sound, except for a couple of screams over the com that stopped with chilling suddenness.

  “Well, we survived,” said Frobisher over the com, relief and fatigue combined in his voice.

  “Yeah,” said Cinda, checking the emergency beacons of the other crew and determining that over half her crew made it off, one hundred and twenty-one souls. Which meant that over a hundred had already died.

  One of the beacons went offline, and the Captain rotated her suit to look in that direction, wondering what new calamity had come upon them. She turned just in time to see something flare in space, her HUD telling her it was about seven hundred kilometers away. The sinking feeling in her stomach told her what it was, even before calls of panic came over the com net.

  “It’s the damn Caca shuttle,” yelled someone, her HUD identifying it as one of the missile crew.

  “Try to hit them,” yelled the voice of the Sergeant in charge of the small Marine contingent. They were armed with rifles, just as the rest of the crew had particle beam pistols holstered on their suits. And they would be firing at a heavily armored shuttle whose fire control systems could track and kill them with ease.

  Another beacon went off her track, then another, and she screamed out in anger as she watched the shuttle, a vessel her frigate could have destroyed with ease, killing the men and women she had ordered to what she had thought was safety. The beacons started to move, the crew going into the drill that had been hammered into them for such unlikely situations, making them harder to hit. Still, not hard enough, as more beacons dropped off.

  “Hang on,” said another voice over the com, one that the Captain did not recognize. “We’re on the way.”

  The shuttle flared with light, taken under fire by something unseen that had entered the battle. It flared again, then exploded outward, destroyed.

  “Who are you?” asked Cinda over the com, still having a hard time believing that there was anything in the system that could have challenged the shuttle. There were only the two commercial ships, she thought, looking back at the bright dot of the planet. And their transfer shuttles.

  “This is Attack Fighter New Kiev Four,” came the voice over the com.

  “I thought you had been destroyed with the battle cruiser,” she said, trying to spot the six hundred ton fighter against the star field. The battle cruiser would have carried eight of the small vessels, used for scouting and missile attacks.

  “We were left behind,” said the woman on the other side of the com. “As a last resort defense of the planet. Not that it would have done much good. I have three flight mates with me, while the other flight goes after the remaining shuttles.”

  “Can you pick us up?” asked Cinda. The fighters carried a crew of five each, and could probably carry fifteen of her crew each in a tight fit.<
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  “We’ll get as many as we can, ma’am,” replied the pilot. “But we have shuttles from those merchies behind us. Give us a little bit of time and we’ll get all of your people out of space.”

  True to their word, everyone was picked up within a couple of hours. Cinda boosted toward one of the shuttles on her grabbers, insisting that everyone else be picked up first. As she boarded the shuttle she felt total relief for the first time in days. She didn’t know her fate, but her crew was safe. And for the moment that was all that mattered.

  * * *

  Four days later there was another visit to the system. There was a moment of panic on the planet as the ships were picked up moving through hyper VI, then people calmed down as a sensor tech on the merchant ship in orbit identified them as Imperial vessels. A little over an hour later three battleships and a pair of destroyers entered the system and boosted for the planet on a least time profile that would get them into orbit in two and a half days.

  Cinda worried the entire time the ships were on the way. She had been declared a hero on the planet, the savior of them all. But the fact remained that she had disobeyed the orders of a superior officer and had refused combat. It didn’t matter that it was a stupid order that would have caused the destruction of her ship, and would not have benefited the civilians of the system at all. It might not matter that the superior’s order went against the directive of the Commander and Chief of the Empire. She had committed an offense that could lead to her execution if she was found guilty by a military tribunal. The rest of the crew had already distanced themselves from her, as if she had a terminal disease that they were likely to catch.

  Halfway to the planet the Commodore commanding the task force ordered the civilian population to prepare for evacuation. Most of the civilians were relieved. Some were distraught. And there was a vocal few that were angry that the Empire wouldn’t devote the resources to defend their frontier planet from the alien menace. Some of those would be talked into leaving anyway. Some few hundred would stay, and the Marines would make sure they had the weapons to hurt the Ca’cadasan ground forces if the aliens came back. Not that they would survive, but if they killed some Cacas, the Empire would be happy with the return for their investment of a couple of hundred infantry weapons.