Still, the division commander stared at his HUD as he ran to the bunker, worried about his plan, and the people under him, who would be fighting and killing, or fighting and dying. And the Cacas, who would not roll over and die, no matter the odds. They were still living creatures, no matter their sins. And it was his job to make sure than none of them ever saw home again.
* * *
Captain Svetlana Komorov sat in her command chair with her eyes locked on the her tactical display. Two minutes until we drop our bubble, she thought, her stomach flip flopping with anxiety. Up to this point they had been all but invulnerable, forging into a war zone, the only real risk that they might run into something solid on the way. When they dropped the bubbles they would again be less than a hundred very small ships, attacking a group of over two hundred that were heading their way.
“All weapons armed and ready,” said the Weapons’ Tech.
“Preparing to raise cold plasma field,” came the call from back in engineering.
Which will protect us for about a hundredth of a second against a full power warship beam. Don’t get cold feet now, Svetlana. You know you’re going to hammer these assholes.
The two minutes seemed to simultaneously stretch into forever and run like a speeding animal. It almost caught her by surprise when it ticked to zero.
“Dropping bubble, now,” called out the Pilot. The magnetic field pulled the negative matter back to the side pylons of the ship, where it was sucked into storage. A second behind the cold plasma ejected into the strengthening magnetic field, and the fighter had as much protection as possible.
“What the hell?” blurted out the Weapons’ Tech as something flared on the screen to their port.
The Captain looked over in time to see another of her ships flare into plasma as something struck. She looked forward, seeing the ships they had come to strike, forty-five light seconds ahead, fifty-six seconds at their current velocity of point eight c. And those ships were already firing on them, when they couldn’t possibly be seeing them for another forty-five seconds. Radar was picking up millions of small objects in flight, projectiles fired from close in weapons systems, exploding as they traveled from between ten and twenty light seconds from the firing ships. The electromag fields were able to repel the metallic objects that were under a gram. Anything larger, at the speeds the fighters were traveling, and they would have a pellet ripping through their ships at point nine five light closing.
There were one hundred and ninety-seven enemy vessels, about what they expected. And every one of those ships was putting out every beam weapon they had in sweeps across the space from a position about ten degrees to port, and forty-five degrees in a circle around that position. Which meant that every one of her ships was in that cone of fire. The only thing saving them now was that the cone covered such an immense volume of space.
Another fighter exploded, this too far to the side and rear for her to see, only noticed as its icon blinked twice and disappeared. And a hell of a way to mark the deaths of brave crew.
“Fire first volley of missiles,” she ordered. “Send that command out to all ships.”
The Weapons’ Tech looked at her in surprise. Doctrine called for them to fire when they had entered the visual range of their enemy, at the point where they were seen, still forty seconds away. But we may not last that long, she thought, as the ship bucked under her slightly from the release of the short ranged missiles, which boosted at ten thousand gravities while they acquired their targets.
A trio of weapons exploded ahead, hit by the enemy defensive fire, their huge warheads filling space with heat and radiation. More objects exploded, including some more of her ships, and she cried inside at the damage her command was taking. The Pilot was now maneuvering frantically, trying to avoid the objects their sensors were showing in their way. The ship’s computer was helping immensely in categorizing and prioritizing targets. They bore in closer, the ships now adding vector to carry them over the enemy formation, it now considered much too dangerous to punch through as originally planned.
Warheads started to explode among the enemy ships, some direct strikes. Some near misses. But not enough kills. “Fire second salvo,” she ordered, and the fighter again bucked as two more missiles were released. Moments later the other ships of the force released.
We’re going to make it, thought the Captain as her ship’s vector pulled on a course that would take them over the enemy force at five light seconds range. There were only forty ships left in her command, disastrous losses, and another ship blinked off the holo as she watched. But the second salvo was savaging the enemy vessels.
We’re going to make it, she thought once again, an instant before a laser from an enemy battleship swept through her ship. Only a thousandth of a second contact, and all that was needed to convert the fighter into exploding plasma, some of which disappeared as it contacted the now freed negative matter which cancelled it out.
Thirty-one ships made it past the enemy formation, leaving behind only forty-one fully functional enemy vessels, a score of drifting hulks, and the plasma remains of the rest.
Chapter Twenty-six
I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell. William Tecumseh Sherman
CONUNDRUM SPACE. JANUARY 9TH, 1002.
Sean stood on the deck of his command holo room, looking over the remains of the battle for Massadara space. There were very few enemy ships remaining. Most of those were drifting hulks, in the process of being boarded. Always a risky proposition, as the ships could be ordered to self-destruct while the humans were aboard. But there were always some captures, and hopefully some Caca tech to examine.
“How is your ground offensive going, Colonel General Sapatra?” he asked the commander of the Massadara planetary ground forces on the com.
“Splendidly, your Majesty,” replied the General, his face appearing on a com holo. “We are rolling them back on all fronts. It helps that they didn’t have the time or the transport to bring their heavy equipment down when they abandoned ship.”
Sean pulled up a tactical holo of the planet. All of the fighting was raging over the largest continent, the one that had been the primary habitat of the colonists. There were Cacas on the other continents, maybe a couple of thousand, but nothing that couldn’t be taken care of later, after the main continent was secure. “Let me know as soon as you have taken all objectives, General. Sean out.”
He switched the tactical holo back to the Conundrum system, the focus of this day’s action, and the battle that would decide whether the offensive was success or bust.
“The first of the inertialess fighters should be going in any second, your Majesty,” came Kelso’s voice over the com.
Sean looked at the holo, cursing under his breath that he wasn’t getting the real time info he was used to. Not at that remove. That was part of the price of using the cover of the supernova. They were picking up almost nothing on graviton emissions, which meant they had no idea what was happening outside the range of the visual sensors of his wormhole equipped ships. Or at least not at any time scale that made sense.
“Are the subspace com links up?”
“Not at this time, your Majesty,” stated Kelso. “Subspace is not degraded quite to the point of hyper, but it’s bad enough where transmissions are almost completely static. Garbage.”
“Keep me appraised of any changes Admiral,” said Sean, not really expecting any, and not really knowing what else to say.”
He switched to the feed from the closest of the attack/stealth ships to the strike, cursing again as he saw the lag time between it and the enemy force, seven light minutes. That frustrated him to no end, so he switched to the forward force, coming in on a forty-eight degree angle to the spinward ecliptic from the main enemy force. Over seven hundred vessels, they included all of the Elysium ship
s in this prong of the attack, as well as a hundred Klashak vessels, and two hundred human ships. They were on his plot in real time, their information transmitted through the wormhole coms of the several equipped ships of the task group. And they were locking on, or as well as they could without graviton tracking, and releasing swarms of missiles into space on a heading toward the same enemy force the fighters were about to strike. After several salvoes, fourteen thousand missiles, they took aim at the force further into the system, releasing twenty-one thousand more weapons.
So, they have to know that force is here, as well as the one Lenkowski is about to hammer them with. But the rest of us are still from minutes to hours away from visual detection. Everything seemed to be going perfectly according to plan, which really worried him.
He switched the view once again, this time to the tactical holo of the Sestius system, a place still near and dear to his heart. The place he had met his wife, who was now the Empress. There was also a space battle going on there, ships of both sides pounding each other at long range with missiles. Right now it looked like his side was going to win that fight as well, though they would be hurt in the exchange. And there was a land battle going on at the surface of that world as well. But a very different one than that going on at Massadara and Conundrum.
* * *
SESTIUS.
Walborski raised a hand in the air and pumped it down twice, signaling the other men to go down on a knee in front of him. The jungle was quiet, unusually so. And hot, which was not unusual in the least.
The Ranger in front of him turned and starting moving his fingers, signing the information he was passing on from the forward scouts. Fifteen Cacas in a clearing, around a landed shuttle. Seem unaware that we’re here.
Cornelius signaled back, ordering the man to move up to the scout and let him know that the platoon was moving into position. The man nodded, turned, and moved in a crouch, careful to not make any noise. The Lieutenant motioned to his first squad leader, who dropped back for a second, then came up with the other two squad leaders.
The LT motioned to third squad leader to take his men to the right flank, then for second squad to go to the left. He would take first squad up the center with himself, while SanJames stayed in the rear with the two men from platoon headquarters to secure their rear.
Cornelius moved slowly and quietly through the brush, his thermal covering over his head, sweat pouring from his face. His men moved beside him just as quietly. They came up on the scouts and went prone, pointing their weapons into the clearing.
The Cacas were all armored up, the look of ground warriors about them. The shuttle was down in a clearing it had made when it crashed through the jungle canopy. Several large trees had come down with it, and there was still smoke rising from a few small fires.
The Lieutenant raised his rifle to his shoulder, looking right and left to make sure that the men on either side were doing the same. After a nod he looked through his scope, aiming for a weak point on the armor, where it covered the throat of the Caca in flexible plates. He put some tension on his trigger, let out a partial breath, and squeezed. The rifle pushed hard into his shoulder, and a hole instantly appeared at the striking point of the twelve millimeter round. Cornelius put two more shots into the creature from his suppressed rifle as it was going down, all of its fellows following it to the ground.
Cornelius leapt to his feet and ran for the shuttle, jumping over a couple of obstacles in the way, two other men on his flanks. He turned and slid his back against the side of the shuttle to the right of the hatch, dropping his rifle to hang by its strap while he pulled the monomolecular blade from its sheath on his thigh. A Caca came running out of the hatch, to catch the blade in the back before his off foot had made it outside. The Ranger on the other side of the hatch prepped a stun grenade and tossed it into the shuttle. As soon as it went off two Rangers ran into the ship, while the rest of the platoon got up from their positions and fanned out, looking for any of the Cacas they might have missed.
The first Ranger came out of the shuttle. “It’s clear, sir. We got all of them.”
“Mark the ship for recovery,” he told his com specialist, who was carrying the small beacons they would use to tag recoverable alien equipment. “Then we move out.” He took the com from his specialist and activated it, looking at the electronic map of the area, noting that there was another shuttle down twelve kilometers to the south. So we have an opportunity to kill some more before nightfall, he thought with a smile. That last thought troubled him just a bit, as he wondered how his wife and family would think of him if they knew of the darkness in his heart.
* * *
CONUNDRUM SPACE.
“Prepare to jump,” called out the Helmsman’s voice over the com.
Commander Marc Dawson looked over the power graphs of the reactor systems. They were at fifty percent of capacity, what was needed for transit through hyper I. The power graphs rose to sixty percent, and the lights dimmed slightly as almost all of that energy was transferred to the hyperdrive projector that opened the hole between hyper I and normal space.
And if everything works properly, we’ll be only light seconds from the enemy force, he thought, closing his eyes and looking at the tactical holo that was coming in over his uplink. There was some guesswork involved, and so some chance that they might come out much farther from the enemy than predicted, or even possibly within the Ca’cadasan formation.
“All reactors to full power,” he called out over the engineering command circuit, more for the information of the people working around those energy generating devices than to order anything. He controlled the process from this board, and with the push of some panels he had the system up and running at one hundred percent power.
All combat systems across the ship were already fully charged, all batteries at one hundred percent capacity. But that energy would be sucked down in minutes without the matter antimatter reactors pushing more power into the system.
“Electromag fields at full power,” called out the Tactical Officer over the com. “Cold plasma injection commencing. Laser rings locking on to targets.”
Dawson closed his eyes, pulling up the plot his link was feeding to his occipital lobe. Shit, he thought. The laddies at the top actually got this one right for a change. They were within five light seconds of the enemy force, which had not been able to track them through hyper. Targeting data was beginning to flood the tactical plot as sensors picked up information on the enemy force. And they’ve already been stung a wee bit, was his next thought, as he saw that some of the icons were blinking orange, the indication that they had taken battle damage, some of them red for severe harm. The harm caused by the attack of the intertialess fighters, and the missiles launched from the task force to spinward.
Augustine shuddered slightly, releasing missiles, firing her on board particle beams. She was also letting loose with all six of her laser rings, which had no recoil, but would still be doing severe damage to whatever targets they hit at the range they were striking from.
And then the superheavy battleship shook some more, the recoil of the wormhole fed particle beams ripping out at point nine nine nine five light, imparting their antimatter loads into the hulls of two target ships.
“Reactors are handling the load just fine,” Dawson reported to the bridge, as the liaison officer in that compartment asked for verification of the readings they were getting. “Number four is fluctuating a wee bit, but I’m adjusting the feed manually to smooth that out.”
Augustine shook again, this time in a different way. She had been hit by particle beams, a number of them, ripping gouges in her thick armor, here and there penetrating into the areas below. A laser ring went offline as two of the emitter units were destroyed, with three breaks in the circular focuser itself. A missile detonated nearby, one of her own, struck by a laser when only thirty thousand kilometers outside the tube.
One of the enemy ships exploded, a particle beam eating deep into th
e superbattleship and causing onboard antimatter to breach containment. It was followed by a scout ship, then a human destroyer that got in the way of a couple of incoming missiles that had targeted a standard battleship.
Now the forces were intermingled, moving past each other, letting their enemies have the full power of their broadsides, every weapon aboard capable of hitting an opponent’s ship. The enemy force was moving outward at point one c, while the allied force was moving at point two c in the opposite direction, and decelerating at their maxim rate to keep proximity as long as possible. Still, they were only intermingled for ten seconds or so, and then the ships were moving away from each other.
Augustine shook again, this time with a heavy hit. Dawson caught a flash out of the corner of his eye on a side holo, turning just in time to see the entire crew of the number six reactor cut down, turned to ash and steam by a particle beam that ripped through the hull armor, machinery, and the redundant armor of the reactor compartment. It shouldn’t have been possible to get that kind of penetration. By chance a dozen beams had hit that area of the hull, blasting through, leaving an opening for another, capital ship beam to slice through the open space, which hadn’t self-repaired yet, and hit the armor of the reactor compartment.
The crew all died, and the reactor itself was hit. It was a tough piece of equipment. It had to be, to handle the reaction of matter and antimatter. But the casing took damage, severing many of the incoming power leads, welding metals together, totally trashing the compartment.
“Containment breach imminent,” called out the voice of the computer that monitored all engineering operations. “Containment breach imminent.” Which means the damned system can’t tell me when it’s going to blow. “Captain. One of the reactors is about to blow. I’m going to have to jettison it.”
“Go ahead, Chief Engineer,” said Captain Javier Montoya, the expression on his face over the holo showing a man who was already handling all he could. “Do what you need to do, just keep giving me power.”
Exodus: Empires at War: Book 7: Counter Strike Page 37
