Exodus: Empires at War: Book 7: Counter Strike

by Doug Dandridge

  “Order Maes and Grimm to take that freighter and board her,” ordered the Captain, looking at the side holo that showed the commercial vessel, which as yet hadn’t reacted to the presence of the human ships nearby.

  “Captain of the Grimm is asking the rules of engagement,” said the Com Officer.

  “He can’t destroy her,” said English. “But he is ordered to disable her if she resists.”

  “We have graviton emissions from the pirate base,” said Banks. “Three ships are starting to boost.”

  The roaches reacting to the light, thought the Captain with a slight smile.

  Over the next hour the rest of the pirate vessels got under way, as their crews transferred from the moon to them. She hoped the enemy ships would come for her, hastening the missile attack. She should have known better. They scattered, trying to escape. But there was no escape, as the missiles had been targeted on their individual vessels in case they tried such a tactic.

  “They would have done better if they had stayed together,” said Banks, as the vector arrows on the plot showed the enemy ships all on separate courses.

  “They aren’t military vessels,” said English, watching as her missiles started tracking the individual ships.

  A little over three hours later the missiles started to make contact with ships that were still trying to build up their velocity. There was no way they could outrun the missiles. The pirate vessels started to fall off the plot as their primitive missile defense systems tried to deal with modern weapons, and failed. They got some of them, but never enough. The only exception was the battle cruiser, which, though battered by near misses, was a survivor.

  “We’re receiving a transmission from Grimm, ma’am,” said the Com Officer, and Stella motioned for her to put it on the screen.

  “We’ve boarded the freighter, ma’am,” said the Captain of the DD Grimm, looking out of the com holo. “My Marine commander is reporting that it’s, sickening aboard. Lots of human equipment. And, they tried to get rid of the human prisoners they had, with, particle beams.”

  English felt her stomach turn as she thought of the terror that must have been the last feelings of those people as the Vergasa started vaporizing them with beam weapons. Unfortunately for them, that was not the way to get rid of all evidence. There was almost always a residue.

  “Clap the bastards in irons, Captain,” she told the other officer. “We’ll let a Naval Magistrate decide their fate. Were there any survivors?”

  “No, ma’am,” said the Commander who was the captain of that destroyer. “Not a one.”

  “What do you want us to do about the big bastard?” asked Banks, pointing to the icon of the battle cruiser that was coasting in space with no acceleration. “Capture him?”

  “No,” said Stella, her nausea over the death of prisoners turning into rage. “I’m not risking any of my ships getting close to that thing. Light him up with another spread.”

  She looked over at her Helmsman. “Put us on a course toward that base. We’ll let our Marines search it, and I hope to God for their sake that the bastards haven’t committed more atrocities on the base.”

  Hours later she knew that was a forlorn hope. All of the pirates had evacuated, and so were dead aboard the remains of their ships. While the dead slaves lay all over the base, where the pirates had left them, not even bothering to try and dispose of the bodies.

  Chapter One

  There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others. Niccolo Machiavelli

  THE DONUT. NOVEMBER 21ST, 1001.

  “Did we really have to bring along so much of this shit?” asked Petty Officer First Satrusalya, holding one end of the large container by a handle. “This stuff gives me the shakes.”

  Cornelius looked at the man, who was larger that he was. Being an augmented Naval Commando, using the same process the Ranger had undergone, that meant he was stronger, and just a bit slower due to his mass.

  “I don’t really like it either,” said the Cadet Lieutenant, eying the tube that was a magnetic containment device filled with one of the deadliest known substances, negative matter. Only antimatter was more feared. Negative matter canceled out itself and normal matter on contact. Once out of its containment there was nothing that was proof against it. The only positive thing about the negative matter was that it could only cancel out the same mass. “But I like the idea of a hundred gigaton or larger bomb going off near me even less, and this stuff may be the only thing that will cancel it out before it kills us.”

  They were moving quietly along the wall that separated the corridor from the kilometer thick supercable that was one of the supports the aliens had to sever to destroy the station. Five Rangers and the other Naval Commando were in the lead, crouched low, weapons ready. Cornelius walked just ahead of the two men carrying the container, while the last Ranger took up the rear, thirty meters behind and his watch covering that direction.

  All of the men were veterans, and Cornelius trusted them to do their jobs competently. Cornelius had been in special ops for a far shorter time than most of the men, and was not yet a commissioned officer. The double award of the Imperial Medal of Heroism made him a trusted leader, however, someone these tough warriors were in awe of.

  The Commando in the front, Petty Officer First Khrushchev, the leader of that element due to his experience operating aboard spaceships, held his hand up and knelt down, waving the officer trainee forward. Cornelius ran to him, making no sound, and came to a kneel beside him. He didn’t even have to ask the man what was going on. His hypersensitive ears picked up the sound of fighting, both directly ahead and to the left down another corridor. The Marines must be to the front, and Chung and his people to the left, he thought. The Marines, in heavy combat armor, would be trying to blast their way through the Cacas arrayed to protect the bomb. The IIA Agents were a decoy force, hitting the Cacas down another angle of approach, trying to draw the enemy away from this one.

  “We’re getting close,” he whispered to the Commando, who nodded back. They were avoiding com link for the moment, thinking that the enemy might pick it up so close to their lines. Rangers and Commandos were trained to operate without electronics. At this time they were carrying more powerful weapons than they usually did, and two of the men had the backpacks of laser cutters on their backs, just in case.

  “I hope they don’t set the damned thing off before we get to it,” said Sergeant Pasco, one of the Rangers.

  “I wonder why they haven’t already?” asked Specialist Owusu, his eyes scanning the corridor ahead.

  “They want to set them all off at the same time,” said Cornelius. “Not give us a chance to make repairs before they sever another cable.”

  He listened for a second more, then waved his hand to get everyone moving. They hadn’t gone more than fifty meters before Khrushchev was again raising his hand and stopping the formation.

  “They’re right ahead,” said the Petty Officer, gesturing with his rifle down the corridor.

  Cornelius listened carefully, the movement of the armored Cacas sounding from ahead. We need to get through them quickly. Then hit the Cacas that are facing the Marines from behind. He was starting to wave the other men forward when a particle beam came ripping down the corridor and struck Khrushchev in the chest.

  * * *

  The General was in communication with both of his forces that had gone after the lower side cables of the station. The com was going in and out, even though he had men stationed along the way to relay the signal. The enemy jamming was getting more powerful, and he was afraid they might also be listening in.

  And what in the hell is keeping those dolts from getting to their target? he thought, following one of his groups on a tactical holo. The other battalion, almost four hundred males, was already in position, their weapon ready to take out that support. But the battalion he was watching had run into opposition, and were having to fight their way through. They were still over ten kilometers from th
eir target. That might be close enough to take out the cable, but probably not.

  The other bombs were set four kilometers to either side of the central cable, close enough for the dual explosion to take it out, and also destroy much of the lower hull of the station, weakening it further.

  They only have another hour and a half to get to the target, he thought, feeling the stress of the situation, almost overwhelming anxiety that his mission might fail. We can’t allow it to fail, he thought, linking into the com and sending reinforcements to the bogged down unit. That meant weakening the defense of the port central side bomb, but it was more important to get that peripheral weapon to its target. If only I had those other males, he thought. But the Knockermen had set off their bomb on the Elysium station before he had gotten all his troops off. Those males would have died anyway if they had gotten to the human station. But they would have died for a purpose.

  “The humans are increasing their pressure,” said the commander of the troubled battalion. “They are attacking with increased ferocity, no matter the loss.”

  Of course they are. Because they know if we destroy this station, they have lost their war. “I am sending you reinforcements, Battalion Commander. Keep pushing forward. You must get that weapon to its target.”

  I wonder if we could have sent the warriors through space to the target, thought the General, second guessing his own orders. Then he thought about what would have happened if he had sent hundreds of males and the weapon through space, where the enemy would have been able to attack them with ship borne weapons. He would have lost the attack force, and the weapon.

  “We’re pushing ahead,” said the officer. “But I can’t guarantee we’ll get there before the weapon goes off.”

  The General growled, recognizing a plea to stop the countdown. He wouldn’t respond. The Commander had his orders, and would follow them to his death. Stopping the countdown meant that the other weapons were at greater risk. And he wasn’t about to take that risk.

  He followed the progress on the com, sweating out the lack of progress as the armored males fought armored humans. The humans were skilled warriors with powerful weapons, and the progress started to bog down, while the reinforcements also ran into an enemy that was determined to keep them from linking up with their comrades.

  Minutes ticked by, and the icons of his troops continued to fall off the plot, while the humans icons, representing the soldiers that were engaged with his males, continued to increase. It was looking like a losing battle on that front. It could still work, he thought, his denial that this mission was a failure kicking in. It has to work.

  “We’re starting to lose our perimeter,” came the call of the Regimental Commander who was holding one of the bombs. The one I took the warriors away from, he thought. He had robbed the successful force to reinforce one that was already a failure.

  The General looked at the manual detonator, determined that all the bombs would go off before the humans got to them. He reached for the arming switch, then pulled his hand back. The bombs are fused so they will go off if they are tampered with. There is nothing they can do to them. He pushed the cover back over the remote detonation switch, and left it in the hands of the Gods.

  * * *

  “We’ve got one of the bombs, Dr. Yu,” said the Marine Colonel that was leading the force that had stopped the port side Caca battalion from getting their bomb to the support cable that was their target.

  Yu looked over the holo at the bomb behind the Colonel, taking in the structure of the device. Superficially, it looked much like the devices she had seen in Admiral Chrone’s presentation. She pulled up the schematic of those devices, and compared them to the bomb that was now in the center of the holo.

  “You need to spray the center of the device, Colonel, making sure to hit the control box on top and through to the center, where the quarkium device is actually located.”

  “What about the ends of the device?”

  “Do not allow any of the negative matter to come in contact with anything past thirty centimeters of the centerline. The ends are antimatter weapons used to set off the quarkium reaction, which sets off the subquark detonation.”

  “How much antimatter?”

  “Up to a kilogram at each end. About eighty megatons if it breaches containment.”

  “I guess I need to evacuate everyone but the engineers and myself.”

  “You don’t have time for that, Colonel,” said Lucille, concerned about her station and its safety more than a battalion’s worth of men. Which is awful, she thought. But if that bomb goes off as a subquarkian device, it will kill many more. “Take the tank and spray that device, in the manner I told you.”

  The officer stared back at her for a moment, and she afraid he was going to order an evacuation anyway, wasting precious time. “Colonel, if I were there I would spray the device, without hesitation. Unfortunately, I am not there, because they needed someone who could talk to several attack groups at one time. But believe me, we don’t have the time.”

  “Right,” said the Colonel, turning to his engineers and grasping one of the spray devices himself. He spoke to the engineering sergeant who was holding the other device, and they both aimed at the center part of the device. “On the count of three. One. Two. Three.”

  Both men pulled the triggers on the sprayers and sent streams from the nozzles that funneled the negative matter through magnetic fields to the outside world. The streams shot out, under high pressure as the magnetic field in the tank squeezed. It only took a couple of seconds to send out kilograms of negative matter. It hit the normal matter of the device and cancelled both out. The center of the bomb disappeared up to twenty centimeters into the case, including the entire control mechanism. The men sprayed again, destroying more of the bomb. A third spray ate over halfway through the bomb, negating much of the material and sending metal vapor into the air as much of the rest of the matter broke up under the assault.

  “I think that should do it, Colonel,” said Yu.

  “I’m on the spot, Ma’am, and I would prefer to be safe,” said the officer. He and the other man sprayed again, and once again, until there was no more negative matter in the tank.

  That was a waste, thought the Director, looking at the bomb that was more or less gone through its center. We could have used that material for wormholes. But I can’t say I blame the men on the spot. Now we just need to get those other three bombs, and we’re good.

  * * *

  The force that hit the bomb where the troops had been pulled from the perimeter struck on five axes, from three sides on the level of the bomb, as well as from above and below. It would have taken a division to hold all the approaches, and the above and below routes were covered by mere platoons, not enough to seal off all avenues, especially when the assault was launched in force down all avenues at once.

  The outer perimeters of the Cacas were still fighting the Marines coming at them on their level, while the assault force of Naval Commandos came from above and took the bomb in seconds of intense fighting. They duplicated the techniques of the Marines who had disposed of the first bomb, and then there were two.

  * * *

  The beam converted the torso of Khrushchev to red tinted vapor, while his head and shoulders, arms still attached, fell to the floor. The legs tottered for a second before they joined his staring head on the floor. The beam continued on in a sweep that the other men ducked under, then flew down the hall to hit the canister of negative matter being carried up the corridor. The beam sliced into the tank and released the compressed gas.

  The trailing man yelled out and ran back as the gas dissolved everything it touched. Petty Officer First Satrusalya moved as soon as the gas started billowing out of the rent in the tank, bits of the skin on his hands and parts of the sleeves on his uniform disappearing, disintegrated by the negative matter. He still moved fast enough to jump forward and away from the disaster, which caught the other man who had been carrying the canister full in
the body. The Ranger disappeared, taking almost the same amount of mass of negative protons with him. The rest ate at the walls, ceiling and floor, as well as the air around the tank, until it had all cancelled out.

  Cornelius stared in horror at the place where a man had ceased to exist, not even an apparent atom of his body left. It was horrible what had happened to Khrushchev, but there were still identifiable remains there. And even worse, the means of disposing of the bomb were gone. That’s why we brought along the laser cutters, he thought, trying to drive the images of the death of two men from his mind, especially the total elimination of one. If that damned bomb goes off, we’ll all be just as gone, even if it does leave some of our atoms to fall into the black hole.

  The Cacas continued to put fire into a position that was untenable from its lack of cover. The beam flew overhead, forcing Cornelius to attempt to push the atoms of his body into the floor, unsuccessfully of course. He fired his own weapon, sweeping it at chest level a hundred meters down the straight corridor. “We need to get out of here,” he yelled to his men. The negative matter and its heavy container were the reason they had taken a corridor in the first place, that and the need for speed. “Put something on them that will take their attention off us, and someone find us an alternate route.”

  “Fire in the hole,” called out Specialist Owusu, just after a beam forced Sergeant Pasco to roll into the wall to avoid it. What looked like a streak of light came through the center of the corridor. Something exploded about two hundred meters up the corridor, followed by a cloud of smoke and the shimmering of a falling invisibility field.