Exodus: Empires at War: Book 8: Soldiers (Exodus: Empires at War.)

by Doug Dandridge

The General cursed as he watched the plot that showed four unknown aircraft coming in from above and to the rear.

  “Can we evade them?” he asked the pilot, looking through the rear port of the transport as if he would be able to spot them better that way.

  “We’re running full ECM and stealth, my Lord,” shouted the Pilot, checking his board to make some adjustments to those systems. “I’m afraid they have a sensor lock on us, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  The two gunships turned away, angling up and around to come at the attacking fighters from the front. The General thought that a brave maneuver, and foolish as well. The gunships were ground support craft, and the diving fighters were obvious air superiority craft. But then again, what else could the gunships do? They were there to defend the transport, and flying along beside it while providing the attackers more targets was not going to accomplish that mission.

  The gunships fired, ripples of dual purpose missiles and a pair of particle beams each. The fighters dodged the particle beams and took out the missiles with their own lasers and several counter missiles. Two of the fighters launched hypervelocity weapons that streaked in a fraction of a second toward the gunships, blasting them out of the air with the kinetic energy they propelled into the aircraft fuselages.

  The fighters all turned as one, dropping further down and moving into the rear. One fired a missile, streaking in on the stern of the transport. The stern laser reached out with the speed of computerized fire control, hitting the missile on the right forward body and vaporizing just enough of that body to send the weapon corkscrewing off target, to fly into the ground, raising a ball of fire.

  The fighters moved closer, almost like they were toying with the transport they could fly circles around. The General stared at them on the viewer, knowing that they were his death, and there was only one way he could avoid it.

  “General, what are you doing?” asked the Pilot as the General hit the door release and the hatch on the side of the transport slid open. He didn’t answer, but simply activated his full stealth package and jumped from the aircraft, letting gravity and wind pressure pull him away from the transport.

  He looked up to see the transport explode, the deaths of the Pilot, Copilot and Flight Engineer masked by the heavy concussion and fireball of the blast. The fighters flew over, the wind of their passage pulling the General up and toward them for a moment before he continued his fall.

  The General continued his fall, watching the approaching ground, refusing to use any active sensors that might give him away. At the last moment he activated his grabbers, killing his velocity a mere hundred meters up, then turning them off again as he hit the canopy and crashed through branches and leaves. He landed on the hard ground, his suit taking up the impact.

  Where in the hell am I? thought the General, looking around, then pulling up the location on his inertial system. Satisfied with where he was, he got to the next order of business, and starting thinking about where he needed to go to link up with some of his own forces.

  * * *

  The Maurid Leader set the device on top of the communications board and activated it.

  “Hurry,” he told the others. The sounds of particle beams sounded through the thick door, followed by an explosion. He only had the pair out there now, and good as they were, he was afraid they were not going to be able to hold out long.

  The other two of his group put devices on more of the board and activated them, slaving them to the one the Leader had set. The Leader pulled another device from his harness and set it.

  “You know we are not going to get out of this alive,” he told his subordinates.

  “We knew that going in,” said the female. “It’s for the race, and that’s all that matters.”

  And I hope the humans are the deliverers were have been praying for, thought the Leader. Or we might bring retribution on our people for nothing.

  The sounds outside stopped, and the Leader knew that the Ca’cadasans would soon breach the door. “Take up your defensive positions,” he ordered, crouching behind a heavy cabinet with his particle beam pistol in hand.

  The others got into their cover and held their weapons at the ready, pointing them at the door. The sounds of something doing something to the door came clear to their sensitive ears. The sounds ceased, and the Leader knew the explosion would be coming, now.

  The blast pushed the door in, tearing off the lock and one of the hinges. The door flew inward, catching on the one hinge and swinging against the wall with a clang. The roar of the explosive was deafening to the sensitive ears of the hunters. The odor of chemical explosives was overwhelming to their noses. The Leader’s eyesight was blurred for a moment, and his hands wanted to betray him and drop his weapon to the floor.

  The doorway only allowed two Cacas through at a time, or one in battle armor. That first one came through, his eyes searching for targets. He did what the Leader was hoping, not shooting as he entered on risk of destroying the communications equipment in the room.

  Three particle beams converged on the Caca soldier, all hitting within centimeters of each other. They burned through the armor in a second, converting the torso of the Caca within to steam that blasted through the hole like a rocket, propelling the dead soldier and his suit from the doorway. A second Caca tried to come through the same way, but this time he collapsed in the doorway after he was killed. The room was filling with foul smelling smoke and steam from the particle beam kills, and all the Maurids were coughing and gagging.

  A pair of stun grenades came flying into the room next. The Leader tried to hit one of them with a beam, missing and scarring the wall above the door. The stun grenades detonated with blinding flashes and thunderous noise, as well as a cloud of nauseating vapor. Another Caca pushed through the door, and this time the beams from the Maurids all missed as the creatures tried to fight through blindness, deafness and severe illness. The Caca raised his own rifle and burned half of one of the Maurids to ash and steam. A second sidled into the room at the back of the first, firing at another Maurid with a magrail rifle and killing her instantly. The first aimed at the Leader, while the second stepped forward.

  “The officer will want this one alive,” said the second Caca. “He will want to interrogate him and see why he betrayed us.”

  The Leader could not see, but he heard enough to know that he did not want to be captured alive. He raised his pistol, held down the trigger, and stood up from his crouch. The Caca with the magrail fired at him, now in fear that the crazed Maurid would kill them. The magrail rifle spat a hypervelocity pellet that hit the Leader in the torso, severing his spine and dropping him to the floor. As his vision faded he knew that the devices would soon go off, as soon as his heart stopped beating.

  Moments later the five devices on the com board detonated, small antimatter bombs that totally demolished the entire communications chamber, killing the two Cacas, even damaging the superconducting cables that ran under the chamber. The Ca’cadasans had captured the com room that contained the equipment that they needed to link their units through the jamming. But it would be days before they had replaced the equipment.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Our pleasures were simple - they included survival.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower.

  CAPITULUM, JEWEL, AND TRANSIT POINTS, APRIL 8TH, 1002.

  “I need to be there,” said Sean over the com to Jennifer as he walked through the corridor to the gate room of the Hexagon.

  “You are not going to go into that war zone,” yelled Jennifer, her face in his mind through the com link. “Do you hear me?”

  “I am not going into the war zone,” he replied. “No, ma’am. I am going to one of the assembly systems, though. I want to see the refugees with my own eyes.”

  “Will that really do any good? Can’t you let your people handle this? Let someone else deal with the shit this war is generating?”

  “I need to be there,” said Sean, glancing at the woman walking
beside him, his Chief of Detail, Karillia Sverdlov. The small woman walked alongside the Emperor, her eyes constantly in motion, while her eyes had the half focused look of someone in link. Four of her detail walked ahead, twenty meters down the corridor, while another five followed behind. Sean knew there were other agents of the detail who had already gone ahead, and more that would follow a little later. “Don’t you understand. These people will be coming through those gates scared and disoriented. And they will need someone to reassure them that their nation will live again. I really can’t think of anyone better suited to give them that reassurance.”

  “Just don’t do anything stupid, and come back to me.”

  “When have I done anything stupid?”

  “You mean like allowing yourself to be captured by terrorists and shape shifters so you could pull off a one man rescue of a commoner,” she said with a mental laugh that came over the link.

  “And what else? And don’t you dare answer that.”

  They came to the doorway to the gate chamber, newly fortified after the attack on the Donut. One of the walls of the corridor facing the door had firing ports, and the Emperor knew those positions were manned. A fire team of Marines in heavy armor stood guarding the door, along with a Fleet duty officer and a rating with the scanner.

  The young rating ran the scanner over everyone in the party, looking embarrassed as she did the same to the Emperor. But regulations were regulations. The scan included the newest strategy for detecting shifters, communicating with the nanites already within their systems to get a deep DNA profile.

  “They’re clear, sir,” said the rating, and the officer saluted, then motioned for the Marine sergeant in charge of that detail to open the heavy hatch into the gate room. The door slid open, and the one gate in that chamber was revealed, its mirror surface shining under the bright lights of the room. Three more armored marines stood in the room, along with three ratings and an officer behind a control panel that could be used to call up myriad defensive systems, or shut the gate down entirely.

  The Emperor looked with approval on the setup. Not that they had to go through such a setup for security, but that it was in place, since it was now necessary for the protection of the Empire. This may eyes, including the people who were watching from other rooms, this much firepower, assured that no one was just going to sneak on by to cause trouble. Since similar security was in place on the other end of the hole, he expected that nothing would be pushed through the portal that wasn’t supposed to be.

  Sean returned the salute of the officer, who, as the leader of the detail, was the only one who was required to turn his attention from the task at hand. The rest continued to focus their attention on their charge, the wormhole gate.

  “You’re cleared to transit, your Majesty,” said the officer. Sean nodded with a smile, watching as the first quartet of his security detail went though. A moment later Karillia looked up at the much taller man.

  “We can go through now, your Majesty,” she said, gesturing to the portal.

  Sean walked through, once again experiencing the feeling of disorientation, the seeming to be stretched across time and space, to be everywhere at once. The next he was aware he was stepping onto the floor of the gate room in Central Docks, another high security area. There was an entire squad of Marines in this chamber, and three of the mirrored portals, the one leading back to the Hexagon, and two to elsewhere.

  They went through the same procedure and appeared in a much larger room, this one a long, wide hallway with gate portals across every side on two levels. Only the lower level gates were active, thirty to a side. Each had a pair of Marines standing to their fronts, while another squad stood in a central location as a reaction force. Naval oversight of this chamber was housed in a chamber that overlooked the room high on one of the end bulkheads.

  “Welcome to the Donut, you Majesty,” said the Commander in charge of this chamber, walking quickly toward Sean as she rendered a hand salute. “We have an escort to the chamber that contains your egress portal.”

  Sean smiled back as he returned the salute, his eyes running over this chamber and all the people in it. As he watched for a short minute he saw over fifty people transit out of the room, while forty came through from the other ends of their portals. The chamber was a buzzing beehive of deployment and redeployment, and his security detail was taking great interest in everything that moved.

  “Lieutenant Pah will lead you to your next embarkation point,” said the Commander, as a small Asian man stepped forward with a pair of armed ratings.

  The Commander looked like she wanted to say something, but hesitated.

  “Did you want to ask me something, Commander?” asked Sean, raising an eyebrow.

  “Not really ask,” said the officer, an embarrassed look on her face. “I, just wanted to tell you how proud the Fleet is to be serving under you, your Majesty. We are so glad that you are the one in charge.”

  Sean nodded, feeling the heat of embarrassment flushing his own face. He turned away and followed the younger officer down the length of the chamber, heading for the tram station that would take them the thousand kilometers to the gate room he would need to transit to get to the next stop.

  * * *

  Here they come, thought Commodore Bryce Suttler as he watched the missile storm on the tactical plot. Eighty-four hundred red vector arrows appeared on that plot, screaming in from out system at point seven one light. Not the fastest possible attack speed, but the best the weapons had been able to develop over a twenty plus light minute flight path. Still, over eight thousand weapons was a large attack wave, not one they were guaranteed to be able to weather.

  If only we had all of the gates operating, thought Suttler as he turned his attention to what stood between the two remaining gates and the planet. Normally the ships would be worrying about themselves, trying to protect the capital ships that were the striking power of the Fleet. Now the priorities were the gates, without which continued reinforcements couldn’t come through. And the planet, on which hundreds of millions of civilians still awaited rescue.

  In between them and those missiles were a hundred and forty-three destroyers, about half of them the new antimissile class, sixty-one cruisers, again about half the new classes, and thirty-eight capital ships. The four assault ships that had made it through the gates were closer in to the planet. They didn’t add much to the missile defense screen, and had another purpose. The twelve older destroyers and three heavy cruisers were there to defend the assault carriers, themselves priority targets.

  “Range, thirteen million five hundred thousand kilometers,” called out the Tactical Officer. “ETA, sixty three seconds.”

  Of course the range and ETA were to the ships on the edge of the screen, four hundred thousand kilometers further out. Which meant that any leakers would hit a little under two second later.

  “Screen is firing counter missiles,” said Tactical, and the plot blossomed with thousands of green arrows. Seconds later, thousands more were added, until over twenty thousand counter missiles were on the plot, accelerating at fifteen thousand gravities toward the oncoming missile storm. They could only endure at that acceleration rate for minutes, but that was all they needed.

  For centuries counter missile doctrine called for accelerating the weapons through tubes to give them the maximum boost, while attempting to vector them in for a close kill. The density of missile storms in this war had demanded a change in doctrine. The new doctrine was to put as many weapons into space as possible, with no thought for maximum accuracy. Mass proximity kills would be the new standard, and the new ships carried their missiles in cells so they could put the maximum into space in the shortest amount of time. Launch cells were not a new idea, but they were an idea whose time had come again.

  Counters went in the kill. Thousands detonated in moments, killing a thousand missiles. Thousands more detonated over the next ten seconds, and less than four thousand missiles made it through. The second wav
e of counters struck out at those leakers, taking out another thousand.

  The lasers on all of the ships now went into action, firing at missiles that were fifteen light seconds away. Most were still misses, but laser rings pumped out a cumulative thousands of shots a second. Two thousand made it through, to run into the line of plasma torpedoes that lay in wait. That took out another five hundred, and fourteen hundred came on at eight light seconds, eleven seconds flight time.

  The ships let loose with everything they had, lasers, particle beams, tube launched counter missiles, tens of thousands of fast firing projectile weapons. More missiles detonated, flaring suns bright against the star fields. Four hundred made it through, seeking for the targets they had been programed to kill, the capital ships of the enemy. First they had to get through the screens, and the destroyers and cruisers boosted to interpose themselves between missiles and targets while firing everything they possessed. Some caught damage from friendly fire as projectiles came ripping in after missing targets. That was a price the Fleet was willing to pay, pinpricks of damage to prevent ship killers from making it through.

  Two hundred made it through the final barrage, and thirty-eight screening ships died in blasts of fury that converted them to plasma, while fifty more sustained damage from near hits. Thirty-seven missiles made it through the screen and started seeking the battleships, which put up their own final defensive fire. That fire was almost good enough. Almost. And only three battleships were destroyed, another half dozen damaged.

  Suttler leaned back in his chair with a sigh of relief. They had weathered the storm much better than he had thought they would. That thought brought the associated guilt. They had lost over eighteen thousand spacers and Marines. Men and women who had wanted to live, and not become the numbers necessary to safeguard the invasion force. He knew the important thing was that the gates survived, and the assault ships. More ships would come through the gate, including the vessels needed to resupply those ships which had almost shot themselves dry of counter missiles.