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

by Doug Dandridge

  It took sixteen days galactic standard time to make it back to a secure base. Due to relativity the time passed much faster aboard the Duke Georgi Newberry, the flagship of the battleship squadron. Six days ship time, as the vessel built up to point nine c in hyper VI. The ship was crowded with fifteen thousand extra pairs of lungs, its share of the refugees. Even the large vessel seemed crowded with so many more people on board. Cinda at least could get away from some of that crowding at mealtime, when she could eat in officers’ country. She still had to share a compartment with all the rest of her officers, most of whom seemed to spend the majority of their time out of the former petty officers’ quarters, or had locked themselves in their sound proofed sleeping compartments where they could deal with their fears in private. The Lt. Commander felt like she was a leper, and all of her people were afraid that they might contract her disease. They were polite when they had to interact with her, and distant at all times.

  Klerk went through many hours of questioning on the trip, with the Commodore, the Flag Captain, the Intelligence Officer, she was surprised they didn’t make her talk with the chief cook. Her officers talked with the same people, and she was sure they were making a case against her. She would not know how good or bad it was until they made it back to a headquarters. She thought it might be good enough to hang her.

  Cinda was on an observation deck when the Newberry translated into normal space outside the hyper barrier, sitting in a comfortable chair and looking at the system holo as the image of the local space around a developing world came to life. She was tapped into the ship’s non-command functions, and could zoom in on anything she wanted for a local view directly to her occipital lobe.

  The Amazon system was the home of over two hundred and twenty million sentient beings, mostly humans, over two hundred million on the inhabitable planet. The orbit of the world was filled with stations, forts, factories, even shipyards. Now that it was the new sector headquarters it was a system that the Empire was not willing to lose without a fight, as shown by the more than three hundred warships around the star. Along with those vessels were hundreds of freighters and liners, as well as quite a few antimatter tankers. What she couldn’t see, but was still aware of, were the hundreds of thousands of troops that held the surface of the planet. Men and women manning surface batteries. Ready to fight off enemy ships, or standing by to battle invading troops.

  Two hours after entering the system Cinda was on a fast shuttle heading insystem. The battleships were needed out here, where they could prepare for their next mission close to the hyper barrier. Cinda linked into the shuttle sensors and saw a trio of liners heading out from the planet to take the civilian refugees off. She wished she could have waited for those liners as well, but someone wanted to take care of her, and quickly.

  The shuttle had been configured with actual VIP quarters. What that meant on such a small craft was that Klerk had a tiny soundproofed cabin with barely enough room for a bed, and the space to stand up beside it. At least it allowed her some privacy. Her officers and a few of her crew were also along for the ride, although the enlisted personnel had to use the normal passenger seats that equipped the main cabin of the shuttle.

  After a two day trip they arrived at the orbital fort that was the sector headquarters. Over a hundred million tons of station, thought by some to be a waste of resources that could have been put into building hulls. They couldn’t move at more than one gee of acceleration, enough to allow them to change orbits, and possibly dodge incoming beam weapons at a distance, though they hadn’t a chance against swarms of missiles. Still, the stations packed a lot of defensive weaponry, and carried thousands of five hundred ton missiles with fusion warheads, the only kind allowed in close orbit of an inhabited planet, as antimatter weapons could go off by merely breaching containment, unlike the thermonuclear warheads, that had to be deliberately triggered. That information passed through the Lt. Commander’s mind swiftly before it locked back on the subject that most interested her at this time, her own fate.

  “Lt. Commander Klerk,” said a full Commander at the head of the armed Marine detail that met her as she walked out of the shuttle. “You will come with me. The rest of you,” said the man, pointing at a party of six naval officers, “will go with these people. They will see to your needs, and will talk with you.”

  Interrogate is more like it, thought Cinda, falling in behind the Commander while the Marines, wearing dress reds and equipped with side arms, fell in around her. They walked several hundred meters of corridor, crowded with people in uniform who moved out of their way as soon as they saw the Marines, until they came to a lift station in which a ready conveyance was waiting.

  “Who am I going to see?” she asked the Commander, who gave her a harsh look and said nothing.

  After a couple of minutes on the lift, which went up, then horizontally, they stopped at another station, and the Commander motioned her to follow him. They arrived at a door that opened at their approach. Cinda looked at the nameplate over the door and wondered just what they had in store for her.

  “The Admiral will see her immediately,” said a Petty Officer who was the flag officer’s secretary.

  “We’ll wait outside,” said the Commander, motioning for the Marines to follow him out.

  Lt. Commander Cinda Klerk would rather have faced another Goliath, one of the Ca’cadasan superbattleships, than the man she was to face at this moment. But such a ship was not before her, and this door was. She walked toward it on stiff legs, hoping that something might be wrong with the mechanism. The door instead slid smoothly open, revealing the luxuriously appointed office beyond. Cinda stepped through that door, walked the ten paces to the desk, and snapped to attention, rendering a proper hand salute.

  “Lt. Commander Cinda Klerk, reporting as ordered, sir,” she blurted, her eyes locked to the front.

  “Following orders now, are we, Commander?” said the stout man behind the desk.

  Cinda’s eyes drifted down to see a dark skinned man sitting behind the desk, the six stars of a Grand Fleet Admiral on the shoulder boards of his dress blues. Duke Taelis Mgonda was the commander of Sector IV, the hot district in this war, as well as the flag officer in charge of the sector battle fleet. She had wondered when she saw the name on the door what the man was doing here. Sure, the system was the replacement headquarters for the Conundrum system, which had been lost earlier in the war. He was said to spend most of his time on his flagship, deployed with the fleet. But, of course, the station had a wormhole gate, as did, of course, the Duke’s flagship, so he could be here for a short time, then step across the light years to his own vessel.

  “Cacas got your tongue, Commander?” asked the Duke in his gruff voice. “I asked you a question.”

  “I did not think the orders of the captain of the New Kiev made any sense, sir,” she said, locking her eyes again on the wall behind the man. A wall that contained awards, diplomas, even pictures of the man with the late Emperor, Augustine the First and his wife. “Besides,” she said, taking her cue from the picture of the father of the current Emperor, Sean I, “he was in violation of the orders of the Emperor.”

  “So you decided to disobey the orders of the lawful superior on the spot?”

  “His orders made no sense, your Grace,” answered Cinda, knowing that this was her only real defense. “We were not in a position to cause equal or greater damage to the enemy, based on his combat dispositions.”

  “The Captain of the New Kiev was an idiot,” said the Duke, nodding his head. “The smart play would have been to have gotten out of the system as soon as possible. The Cacas only had the one ship, and they wouldn’t have been able to catch his ship and yours, and attack the planet at the same time.”

  “They could have still blown us all out of space with missiles.”

  “And that they might have, young lady. They might also have missed. But he surely doomed his command by boosting into the teeth of that enemy ship.”

  The
Admiral picked up a glass and took a drink. Cinda was wondering if she would be offered a seat, or something to drink. But why waste courtesy on someone who has a date with a court martial, and then an executioner.

  “That does not alter the fact that you disobeyed a direct order from a superior officer, young lady,” said the Duke, placing his glass meticulously on the coaster on the top of his desk.

  “But, I saved a planet, and destroyed a Ca’cadasan battleship,” she protested, knowing she was right.

  “And you hid from the Ca’cadasan because you knew you could do that?”

  “No, sir,” said Cinda after a moment’s hesitation. She looked up at the ceiling for a moment, then back down into the dark brown eyes of the man. “What do you want me to tell you, your Grace? That I was afraid? That I didn’t want to die, and to take all of my crew with me? That I used my knowledge of the Emperor’s orders as a way to wiggle out of sure death. Well, I was afraid. I was scared shitless.”

  “So why didn’t you continue to hide?” asked the Admiral. “You were in a perfect position to escape notice. The enemy would have continued on to the planet, killed the civilians, and left. And you could have left the system after they had gone.”

  “I couldn’t just let them kill those people,” growled Cinda, fighting back the tears that began to well in her eyes. “I just couldn’t. What would you have done, your Grace?”

  “So you saved fifty thousand people? Good job, Commander. Only we have lost over twenty five billion, that’s billion, so far. And I have been ordered by my sovereign Lord to abandon systems with hundreds of millions of civilians in them, so that I could keep my fleet in being, and not waste it in a battle that would give the enemy this sector. So what would I have done?”

  Cinda looked into the man’s face, seeing the pain and anger, his nostrils flaring as the veins stood out on his neck. How can he live with himself? she thought. But of course the answer to that was duty. He had a duty to the Emperor, and his own feelings had to be subsumed to undertake the necessary actions to make a strategy work against an enemy that so far had all the advantages.

  “It was wonderful that you could save those fifty thousand,” said the Admiral, looking down at his desk and clenching his fists. He looked back up at her with red rimmed eyes. “Just remember. That is a drop in the bucket as far as this war has gone. We will lose another twenty-five billion in the next year. Maybe more. And if we don’t win this thing, we will lose all of us.”

  Cinda stood silent for a moment, letting that sink in. The Fleet had never lost a war, not in nine hundred years of existence. Now they faced total defeat if they couldn’t outthink this enemy. Which I did, she thought.

  “What’s going to happen to me?” she asked the Duke, wanting to get her own fate out of the way.

  “Normally, you would go before a board of inquiry,” said the Duke, pointing a finger at her chest. “They would probably find enough evidence to recommend a court martial. And then you would most probably be convicted of disobedience in the face of the enemy. Most likely you would be kicked out of the Fleet, though imprisonment would also be a strong possibility. Execution a lesser one. And if the Captain of New Kiev had survived, he would be facing the same, for disobedience to his Monarch.”

  “You said normally, your Grace?”

  “These are unusual times, young lady,” said the Duke, reaching into his desk and withdrawing a small box. “The Empire is in need of heroes. We have had enough goats to last a lifetime.” The Duke opened the box and withdrew a small medal attached to a ribbon. The medal was a sun symbol, and Cinda felt the breath leave her as she recognized it.

  “A Golden Sun,” she blurted, the thing she least expected to see during a meeting like this. It was the second highest decoration that a service member could receive. Only the Imperial Medal of Heroism was considered a higher award, for both military and civilians, and only authorized by a seated Emperor.

  “We will have the formal presentation later,” said the Admiral, reaching back into his desk and withdrawing another box, which he opened and placed on the desk, revealing the silver oak leaves of a full commander. “These you can put on now, then we will have the presentation of the medal at a news conference.”

  “A news conference,” she said, feeling her legs go weak.

  “As I said, we need heroes. So you have to face the music. And for portraying such courage in front of the press, you will receive another reward. One I think you will really like.” He graced her with a predatory smile.

  “Another reward,” said Cinda in shock. She had expected to be punished when she entered this office. Instead, she was getting a promotion, and an award. She couldn’t think of anything else she could want, except. Her eyes widened at the thought.

  “As you said,” said the Admiral, getting up from his desk with the oak leaves in hand. “You destroyed a Caca supebattleship with a pipsqueak frigate. That’s a talent we’re not willing to waste.”

  * * *

  Commander Cinda Klerk sat in the command chair of her new ship, hands rubbing the arm rests, still not sure if she could believe that it was hers. The Carl Nasher was a brand new hyper VII destroyer, capable of four times the pseudo-speed through hyperspace as her last command. The vessel was eight hundred and twenty meters in length by two hundred and twenty wide, massing over two hundred and forty thousand tons. Her missile magazines held fifty destroyer class weapons, two and a half times what her old frigate had carried. It was still much less than a hyper VI destroyer carried, but something had to be left out to carry the mass of the more capable hyperdrive projectors. And it’s all mine, she thought, looking at the viewer as the planet Amazon fell away.

  “She is a beautiful ship,” said Lt. Commander Renato Jakardo over the private circuit. The exec was ensconced in the CIC, what would be his normal combat duty station, getting used to the layout and the people he would be serving with, as well as his new position.

  “She sure is,” replied the Captain, looking over her new bridge crew. Jakardo was the only one they had let her keep, the rest being given promotions and new assignments. She had wanted to keep her exec, Lieutenant SG Marcus Frobisher. That request had been denied. Frobisher had been bumped up two ranks and given a destroyer of his own, an older hyper VI ship. And I bet he is just as thrilled to have her for his first command as I am to have this ship, she thought. To a naval officer, any command was a dream come true.

  And they turned me loose for this one, she thought, reviewing her orders in her mind. She would be operating alone, on the fringes of the human controlled areas, at times forging on into enemy territory, the eyes of the fleet. Most times there would be no superiors to bow down to, and she would live or die on her wits and the capabilities of her crew. She couldn’t think of a better way to fight a war.

  The Deep

  Some creatures are beyond our understanding, not life as we know it. Maybe not even life at all, though they can replicate all the functions of life. Life from beyond our Galaxy? It would still have to obey our physical laws, wouldn’t it? If such arrived at our shores, would we be able to defeat it? All unknowns, but one day sure to be something intelligent life in the Galaxy will have to deal with.

  Most worlds were beautiful as seen from space, but there was something special about a planet that could support carbon based life. Most of those were a combination of blue and green, some browns of arid lands, the white of clouds and ice. New Lemuria had more of the blue and white than most. A planet slightly larger than old earth, with just over six hundred million square kilometers of surface area. Five hundred and forty-eight million of those square kilometers were ocean, with a salinity level approximating that of old Earth’s largest bodies of water. Half of the world girdling oceans were shallow seas, no more than fifty meters in depth, in most cases much less. The other half was deep water, thousands of meters, in some places more than fifty kilometers.

  The fifty-two million square kilometers of land, a little larger than the old Ear
th continent of Asia, was divided into three large masses and hundreds of thousands of islands. In the northern hemisphere, straddling the shallow sea, was a land mass slightly larger than Europe, about ten million square kilometers. In the southern hemisphere were two Australia sized continents, one in the shallow sea, the other smack in the middle of the deeps, like a huge mountain plateau rising from the bottom ten kilometers below.

  Major Bergland Jensen looked on that world through the viewer of her stateroom as the liner Odin’s Beard slid into orbit. She ran a hand through her short blond hair as her ice blue eyes stared at the world. A massive hurricane was raging off the coast of the deep sea continent, while another as forming three thousand kilometers away.

  It’s almost like New Tahiti, thought the Imperial Constabulary Special Team Officer, thinking of her last assignment. New Tahiti was also an ocean planet, about eighty percent water, with only one super continent and various islands, large and small, in mostly shallow seas. It was also a developing world, over a billion people supporting the massive orbital industries that made it an economic power. As such, it had major defenses, both on and off the planet, including a large police force backed up by planetary militia and the Imperial Army. Her home planet, Norje, a core world, was of even better protected.

  Unfortunately, New Lemuria was still classified as a frontier world, with a population of less than five million, with a couple of small orbital forts, and militia, and a Marine garrison of a battalion to support the Fleet’s presence on the ground. But nothing like the team she was leading.

  “We’re ready to shuttle down, ma’am,” came a call over her implant.