Time Strike

by Doug Dandridge

  “Shit,” hissed Walborski under his breath. If Sean himself had ordered him off the planet, there was no ploy that would keep him here.

  “But my men,” he said anyway, hoping it might get him somewhere.

  They weren’t only his men. There were two more regiments of Rangers on the planet, as well as naval commandos and Marine Force Recon. Between them they were leading over a million insurgents, former Fenri slaves who were equipped with light infantry weapons, with some crew served mixed in. His eyes followed a Fleet commando who was carrying a small box over his shoulder, covered in warning tags, including one that made most people steer clear. A pocket nuke, small enough to fit in a briefcase, though with explosive power in the multimegaton range. It was totally harmless in its secure and padded case, but most people would still want to avoid proximity.

  “The Emperor feels that you are too valuable to waste here,” said one of the men, a captain in the military police by his suit insignia. “We also have a message from someone called, Preacher. He said, quote, tell that dumbass farmer to get his butt through the wormhole, before I have to come and kick it through, unquote.”

  The Preacher, Major General Walther Jodel, was one of the few men that Cornelius actually looked up to. He had met the man on Sestius IV, where Jodel had been an actual minister and a retired colonel. The war had led to his being called back to active duty, and being placed in command of all Sector IV special ops. If Preacher told him to jump, he wouldn’t even ask how high. He would just jump to the best of his ability.

  “Look, Colonel. We’re not getting anywhere standing here arguing. The damned Cacas are about to land and we need to get the hell out of here.”

  “Afraid, Captain?”

  “I resent that, Colonel. You might be the most courageous soldier in the Imperial Army, but with all due respect, you have no right to question the courage of myself of my people. Now, are you going to go with us, or do I have to force you along.”

  Cornelius glared at the captain. He thought about ordering his men to put these two in their place. That thought was still in his head when he dismissed it. The other officer didn’t deserve that, and though Cornelius would have liked to have stayed and killed more Cacas, he had been ordered to leave.

  “Let’s go then, Captain,” said Cornelius, flashing a smile of reconciliation. And at the next stop I will find a way to stay.

  * * *

  The Ca’cadasan ships went into close orbit around the world, the once capital of the Fenri Empire, and one they planned to install the government of their allies back on. They had a suitable male of the species to sit on the throne, and they had a million Fenri soldiers to lend him credibility. The Fenri had told them that the planet, with a large Fenri population, would be ideal, though the numerous other species, the slaves, actually made up a majority of the population. Being a slave empire themselves, the Ca’cadasans thought they knew what to expect from a cowed populace seeing their masters return.

  The first shuttles set down in front of cheering crowds of Fenri, the small, furry mammalians showing sharp teeth in smiling faces. Other visages stared out, long snouts, flat faces, covered with scales or fur or hard plates. Those faces didn’t smile and laugh. They stared their anger and hatred at the masters who were returning.

  The Fenri soldiers marched from the shuttles, striding forward in their powered armor, heading through the crowd toward the center of the city and the palace complex. The crowd followed, joining with the other Fenri gathered on the slidewalks along the way. The other species seemed to fade away. None of the Fenri thought anything of it. Slaves were known to be subservient and beneath notice, and so none of the superior species thought about them at all.

  After the troops had secured the palace complex and the route there, the male who had been chosen to be the sitting emperor came along in an armored groundcar. The vehicle was proof against small arms fire, the most that was expected of any possible resistance. What was not expected was that the resistance would have nukes, or that they would use them in the city.

  * * *

  “We have a problem on the surface, my Lord,” said the officer who was in charge of watching events unfolding on the planet.

  “What is it?” growled the low admiral, stepping away from the plot of his fleet in deployment through the system. He was satisfied with his deployments, though not really all that happy with his total force structure. If the humans had left a large number of ships lying hidden somewhere, his command was gone.

  The low admiral stopped in shock as he looked at the holo showing the rising mushroom cloud over the Fenri capital.

  “It just went off along the route from the landing field to the palace,” said the officer. “I’m not sure how many casualties, but it has to be in the tens of thousands, possibly over a hundred k. We lost several hundred males, while most of the Fenri honor force was destroyed.”

  The soldier leaned over his board for a moment, listening. “We have reports of numerous attacks within the city, and in several other cities.”

  “Can we hit them with some kinetic strikes?” asked another of the officers.

  The low admiral turned a look of murderous rage on that male. They were here to reconstitute the Fenri empire, at least for the time being. Later they would go ahead and absorb it into the Ca’cadasan Empire, but for now they wanted the cooperation of another fighting species. Striking cities filled with their people was not a strategy formulated to get them on the empire’s side.

  “If we land troops in the cities, we will get mired down in a blood bath,” said the same officer, who this time had a point to make.

  “Land our troops at the airfields and at strategic points around the cities. The Fenri troops will go into the urban areas. It is their land, after all, and they should be honored to liberate it.”

  * * *

  Captain Jiang Wen used his augmented eyes to get a good look at the Fenri patrol moving down the center of the street. All of the aliens were geared in their smallish battle armor suits, particle beam rifles in their hands. There were some heavy weapons suits among them, though not in the proportion of a human heavy infantry unit.

  Wen was an observer, which meant he was supposed to avoid combat, if possible. The only problem was that it was not really possible to avoid combat in this situation, unless he wanted to watch the people he had trained die because he didn’t join in, and that was not going to happen.

  None of the former slaves had anything that would be considered high tech by most militaries, though they were heavily armed with the best chemically powered weapons that Imperial tech could build, which made them very advanced indeed by their standards. Wen carried a rifle of the same make that the guerillas were using, though theirs were configured for a variety of alien physiognomies. Its magazine carried forty rounds of ultra-high velocity ten millimeter ammo with micro-shape charged warheads. It also featured an underslung thirty millimeter grenade launcher with a six round attached drum. Some of the aliens were equipped with rocket launchers, not as effective as hyper velocity weapons, but still deadly. And none of the equipment gave off the electronic signal clutter of lasers and particle beams, or even the slight emissions of magrail weapons.

  There would be no active electronic broadcast communications on this strike, at least as far as the front-line fighters were concerned. Many had earbuds that would pick up transmissions, including the one the captain wore. There were communications nodes that were scattered about, microdrones that would grab the ultralow power signals sent toward them and boost them. They might be tracked down, but the enemy would only find burned out drones that had self-destructed.

  “Taking the shot,” came a communication over the earbud. Web looked that way, knowing who was going to take the shot. One of his people, an expert sniper who almost never missed. A man who would take that one shot, then back away and go into hiding.

  A crack sounded out, faint in the distance. The captain focused his eyes and on the street in time to
see the flash of a small explosion on the armored helmet of a tank commander. The round itself didn’t have the power to penetrate that being’s armor. The micro shape charge in the round could, sending a tiny sliver of supermetal through the hard armor and into the head of the Fenri underneath. The sliver blasted through the skull and into the brain below, the kinetic energy instantly pureeing the organ. The Fenri slumped in his hatch, while thousands of eyes turned his way.

  At that moment hundreds of other shots rang out. Many missed, hurried attempts by beings not well trained in weapons use. But there were also many hits. Most bounced from armor that was too tough for them to penetrate. Some hit the weak points and blasted through to kill or injure. Other rounds, these of much heavier caliber, hit and punched through. Several rockets flew out to explode among groups of Fenri. Few were killed, but there was much damage to the high-tech suits they were wearing.

  The firing went on for about ten seconds, until the volume of return fire started to beat down on the rebels.

  “Falling back,” came the voice through earbud.

  Wen fell back himself, pulling his body into the building, then getting up and running down the steps to the basement levels. The steps weren’t made for his long legs, and he took them three at a time, going down the fifty floors in a few minutes and jumping to the floor of the basement. Ducking his head to avoid bumping the low ceiling, he then ran and slid into the passage leading to the sewers underneath the city. There were thousands of guerillas taking the same path to different areas of the underground. They would not wait for the enemy to start tracking them down. They would surface again within minutes, hitting the flanks of the Fenri troops. And this would go on and on until the Fenri fed more troops into the city. When the guerrillas would strike again, where the Fenri and the Cacas were not.

  * * *

  The Quasit was a cold-blooded creature, not showing up on the landing field infrared scans. That was the reason he had been chosen for this mission. He hadn’t been forced into it, like he had been all of his life when he had been a slave to the Fenri. He knew he was unlikely to survive this mission, and he was okay with that. His family had been promised protection by the revolutionary committee, and that was all he needed.

  Twelve shuttles had already landed at this field, and the large armored forms of Ca’cadasans were moving toward the ground transports that had been gathered for them. Another shuttle was coming in to one of the few open spaces in the already crowded field. That was the target, and the being knew it had to move.

  The large reptilian creature, blending in with the workers at the field, rose up to his full five meter height, one hand reaching for and grabbing the rocket launcher that was on the ground and raising it like a toy to his shoulder. The other workers scattered for cover, into the open access holes that led to the sewers. One of the Cacas noticed him and yelled something out. In seconds a trio of particle beams hit the being, ripping holes in his tough hide and vaporizing the tender flesh below.

  The Quasit roared his agony, but continued to aim the rocket launcher until he was sure he had it aligned with the target. A reflexive squeeze of the trigger and the rocket flew from the tube, igniting as soon as it was ten meters away so that the engine wouldn’t harm the being using it. Not that it mattered, as a particle beam had already entered the head of the Quasit, and it was falling backwards, its tail folding up underneath it.

  The missile accelerated to the target, striking the nose of the shuttle, then detonating with megatons of force. The heat wave proceeded the blast by a millisecond, and every armored Caca on the field died in an instant as thermal energy beyond the capabilities of their armor suits to deal with flooded them. Metal melted on the shuttles, just before the blast wave lifted and threw them from the field. The mushroom cloud rose over the area, letting the invaders know that another of their forces had been destroyed.

  Chapter Five

  Time travel was once considered scientific heresy, and I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a 'crank.' Stephen Hawking

  FENRI SPACE. MAY 15th, 1003.

  “The antimatter transport is coming out of hyper,” said the sensor officer of the Caca superbattleship, the flag of the force that had been left at the barrier.

  The captain grunted as he looked at the plot that showed the large tanker and its six escorts approaching the barrier at the proper jump speed. As far as they could tell there were no enemy ships within range. In fact, it was felt that there were no enemy ships within light years of this system, they having fled before the Ca’cadasan fleet days before. But since antimatter was a precious and necessary substance for fleet operations, it was also thought better to be safe than sorry.

  “Tanker will be translating in five thousand kilometers to port.”

  The captain gave a head motion of acknowledgement. That was an acceptable distance, since the incoming convoy knew exactly where the battleship and its four accompanying cruisers were sitting, thanks to the graviton pulses they were all sending out.

  The seven holes opened between the dimensions, and the nine-million-ton tanker and her escorts came through on time and on station. The cruisers began to move, to take up station around the convoy so they would be well protected, again, just in case.

  “Missile launch,” yelled out the tactical officer in a panicked tone. “We have missile launch.”

  “Where?” yelled out the captain, the last thing he would ever say.

  The missile came streaking in at point nine-five light, to strike the tanker dead center, its gigaton class warhead going off as an afterthought to the kinetic energy released, as a forethought to the massive blast of hundreds of thousands of tons of antimatter breaching. The blast wave obliterated the tanker and its escorts, then reached out to totally destroy the superbattleship and the four cruisers. The brilliant flare would be seen in the system two hours later.

  * * *

  Captain Melvin Sedgewick nodded his head with a smile on his face.

  “Wormhole reconfiguring to heat sink,” shouted out his executive officer, who was back in engineering supervising that process.

  The stealth/attack ship had been waiting for just the moment that something worth shooting at would arrive. They had lain in stealth, engines powered down, drifting from two million kilometers’ distance. As soon as the tanker was in normal space the ship had fired, releasing a preaccelerated missile through its wormhole that had coasted for twenty seconds before powering up. The Cacas hadn’t had a chance to react, and so the Stingray had accountted for not just the vital tanker, but a superbattleship, four cruisers and six escorts as well.

  “Orders, sir,” asked the helm officer.

  “As soon as we’re sending our heat through the wormhole power up the reactors. Then move us away at slow speed until we’re ten light minutes from here.”

  “And then, sir?” asked the exec.

  “And then we wait for more targets of opportunity. Maybe we can kill something else before the fleet returns and spoils all the fun.”

  * * *

  ONE THOUSAND LIGHT YEARS OUTSIDE OF KLAVARTA SPACE.

  “I think this is a dead end, ma’am,” said Lt. Commander Timothy Bonaventure, the force com officer. There were nods around the flag bridge of the Count Gregor Samnovich, the lead ship of the group.

  Rear Admiral Natasha Sung found herself agreeing with her officers. They had come this way on the advice of the Slarna, a hyper VI spacefaring race that she still hoped would sign on with the alliance. The Slarna had said that this space belonged to the Ancients of this region, a people they called the Wise Ones. Samnovich, a sixteen million ton hyper VII battleship, was sitting just outside the system, along with a light cruiser and two destroyers. The two battle cruisers, three light cruisers and four destroyers that made up the rest of her command were divided into three more scouting groups. In the past that would have meant they were out of com range, and she would not know if they had found anything, or even if they still existed. With K
lassekian com techs she was in constant com with them, while her own wormhole gave her the comfort of contact with home base. That contact didn’t mean just com, but also the ability to add significantly to her firepower if need be.

  The viewer was showing the signal that had just come in from the probe they had launched fifteen hours before. The probe, in the body of a two hundred ton capital ship missile, had gone into orbit around the inhabited planet, then launched a quartet of atmospheric drones to scout out the surface while it looked on from orbit. The picture it was showing was not one to inspire confidence that they had found what they were looking for.

  Right now they were looking at what appeared to be a nomad village, aborigines of a basic biped variety, covered in scraggly fur. Females were smoking meat on a rack by a fire, while males rode in on scrawny looking long legged beasts and naked children played in the dirt. One of the males threw something he had been holding into the middle of the camp, and the view zoomed in to show the severed head of another native.

  Sung shook her head as the view switched to another camp, this one obviously in the midst of a plague. Sick looking natives lay about, while those still hale enough hauled bodies to a fire to burn.

  “Civilization here,” said Bonaventure as the viewer switched.

  Sung felt slightly hopeful until she had digested the view. It showed what looked like step pyramids, the square between two of them filled with indigenes. A group was at the top of the pyramid, smoke rising from a hole in the center. As they watched in horror an intelligent being was forced to lay on a stone altar while another in a feathered robe cut open its chest and threw a piece of organ meat into a brazier. The body was pulled from the altar and thrown into the smoking hole, while another was led up to the stone sacrificial platform.

  “This can’t be a planet in the zone of an ancient race,” said Sung with finality. In minutes she had seen suffering on a grand scale. War, plague, the killing of thinking beings in ceremonies of religious savagery. The Empire wouldn’t let a species like this suffer. They would have reformers and educators backed up by troops on the surface in a heartbeat. In a couple of generations disease and war would be a memory on a world like this. Some would complain that they were stomping on the natural development of the species, but by the way of thinking in the Empire, suffering was to be alleviated, and thinking beings were to be uplifted. There were still planets with aborigines who refused advancement, but they were monitored and prevented from making war on each other, while nanites wiped out disease.