Exodus: Empires at War: Book 10: Search & Destroy

by Doug Dandridge

  “Impact in twelve minutes,” called out the Tactical Officer of the Kiroshima.

  There were twenty-four icons heading from the Fenri ship toward the two Imperial vessels. Thirty seconds later there were twenty-four more. Thirty seconds later another twenty-four, then twenty-four more, followed by a final six, until there were one hundred and two hyper capable missiles heading toward the battleship pair. At the same time the Imperial ships had been launching, both putting thirty-six missiles into space, seventy-two heading at five thousand gravities acceleration at the raider.

  “It looks like they shot their wad,” said the young Commander who was McCullom’s assistant.

  Sean smiled at the term, looking over to see McCullom grimace. Such language was more expected among the shipboard enlisted personnel, and the Emperor wondered if the young man had started out in the ranks. He knew what the commander was talking about, though. Most ships carried a limited number of the hyper capable missiles. Changing doctrine was moving the Empire toward putting only dual purpose missiles aboard their ships, missiles that could be configured to carry a hyperdrive or not depending on the situation. Most of the ships at the fronts had gone through the reloading procedure, which resulted in a five percent smaller missile load, but much greater firepower in hyper, where more and more actions were occurring.

  These ships wouldn’t be carrying the dual purpose missiles, not where they had been stationed. Each had eighty hyper capable missiles aboard, and they had just launched almost half of their load. Which gave them both one more good wave if needed.

  “Wasn’t that a lot of missiles from the Fenri?” asked Sean, looking at the incoming icons as seen from the bridge of one of the battleships.

  “We believe the ones they sent out on this mission are carrying a double load of hyper, your Majesty,” said the Commander. “Meaning they are probably carrying about twenty fewer missiles overall.”

  “And why didn’t they just load up on hyper capable missiles altogether?” asked Sean. “It would have given them an advantage in a hyper battle.”

  “Since it seems that their primary missions are to cause as much harm as possible to both our merchant shipping and our frontier worlds,” said McCullom, spitting out the words in distaste, “and they can kill merchant ships with beam weapons, it appears that they wanted the maximum missile load they could accommodate for planet killing. Only they compromised and increased their hyper loadout so they could fight battle like this one.”

  “And they might kill one of our battleships in this fight,” said the frowning Emperor.

  “Hell, they might kill both of them, your Majesty,” said McCullom, shrugging her shoulders. “I doubt it, but it is possible. But this bastard needs killing, and that’s what we build and man ships like these for, to find and kill bastards that need killing.”

  Sean nodded, not saying a word and knowing that she was right. That was the reason for the existence of the Fleet. They might couch it in terms of self-defense and keeping the space lanes open, peaceful terms, ones almost anyone could accept. When it came down to it, the Fleet was there to enforce the will of the Empire, against its neighbors and against those within the Empire who might not want to follow all of the rules that protected the life and liberty of the citizens. Against bastards, some of whom needed killing. These ships were made for the job, and manned by people willing to take the risk to carry out that task.

  The room was silent for minutes, as the vector arrows of the missiles closed on both forces. New arrows appeared on both sides, these with much more massive acceleration figures beneath them, tens of thousands of gravities. Counter missiles, small weapons made to track and destroy incoming threats. Each ship carried thousands of the weapons, though only a couple of hundred of them were hyper capable. That too was changing, but not every ship in the Fleet was there yet.

  The Imperial battleships were cycling counters as fast as they could, forty per launch from all tubes as the ships rotated in space to bring all launchers to bear. In a minute four hundred counters were in space, all trying to acquire the incoming missiles. The Fenri missiles, aware of the tracking sensors of the counters, now went into their best routines for throwing them off the trail. Jamming, sending out false radar and lidar images, shifting their positions at maximum acceleration, they made it as difficult as possible for the smaller weapons to track. The interceptors countered with their own electronics.

  Counter missiles were in the twenty ton range and carried much smaller warheads than offensive weapons, about ten megatons. They left more room for sensor heads, important since their targets were much smaller and faster moving that manned ships. It still wasn’t enough, and the percentage of kills was normally one for ten to twenty counters. Better than nothing, but the Emperor had to think there must be a more efficient way to kill incoming ship killers.

  Imperial tech was better than that of the Fenri, and the counters made more than the statistically expected ratio, taking out sixty-one of the enemy missiles, and leaving forty-one to forge in. Lasers, becoming more accurate the closer the missiles got, took out half before they got into final approach. They continued to shoot, their fire adding to the explosive rounds of the close in weapons systems, essentially autocannon with smart warheads that exploded on closest approach to their targets. Five missiles got through the barrage to move in very close, detonating from a thousand to less than a hundred kilometers from their targets.

  Kiroshima showed minor damage from its two near misses. Ramses was not quite as lucky, and took a plasma hit to the bow that caused major damage to all ships systems in the forward three hundred meters of the vessel. Neither took a direct hit, so both survived, though there were sure to be casualties on both ships, probably over a hundred dead on Ramses alone.

  The Fenri ship didn’t stand a chance against the better human weapons forging in against her overwhelmed defenses. She launched two hundred counters, about what the humans expected, and took out twenty-one incoming. Her lasers and close in defense weapons took out sixteen more, leaving thirty-five to make it to final approach. It was almost a statistical certainty at this point that at least one missile would get a direct hit. What it got was three, and the ship exploded outward in a cloud of superheated plasma as all of its stored antimatter breached. The cloud expanded as a bright flash for two seconds, fading from the start until it was all gone, translated back into normal space.

  “Well, that takes care of that one,” said McCullom with a head shake.

  “Good job, Admiral,” said Sean. “Send my compliments to the crews. They did their duty to the Empire this day. I only wish it hadn’t come at so high a cost.”

  “Part of the job, your Majesty,” said McCullom, rubbing her temples. “Sometimes I wish I didn’t have to send them out into harm’s way. But if I didn’t do it, someone else would be forced to.”

  “Would you rather have a combat command?” asked Sean, looking into the eyes of his CNO.

  “I would, your Majesty,” said the woman, nodding. “I didn’t think I would ever say that after getting this job, but I would prefer to take the risks of the people I order into danger.”

  “Well, you can’t have one yet, any more than can I. But I promise you, when the time comes, you will have one.”

  “Thank you,” said McCullom, the smile returning.

  “Now, what else is going on that I need to see?”

  “Nothing I can think of now, your Majesty. Unless you want me to bore you with the minutia of the Fleet.”

  “Not today, Admiral,” said Sean after a short laugh. “I promised the Empress a quiet evening at home, and she gets cranky when I don’t keep my promises.”

  “Then you better get back home, your Majesty,” said McCullom after a laugh of her own. “You definitely don’t want a pregnant wife mad at you, especially not one with…”

  “Not one with what, Admiral?” asked Sean, wondering why she had cut off like that, with an expression on her face telling of saying too much.

>   “Oh, nothing, sir. Just another thought interrupting. I hear that happens more when you get older.”

  Sean looked at her for a moment, wondering if he should order her to tell him what she was about to say, then deciding against it. If something was wrong with Jennifer, his wife would tell him. Her, or the doctors. Otherwise, he had no right to force the Admiral to tell him something she was thinking that was not operational in nature.

  With a nod he was out of his chair and heading out of the chamber, his security detail falling in around him. He tried to forget about the end of McCullom’s statement, Especially since. It stayed with him all the way home, but the sight of his beautiful wife smiling set everything at ease, and he soon forgot about it.

  * * *

  “You lied to me, Captain,” said the Mother in a loud voice through the inordinately large speaking orifice.

  Imperial Naval Captain Ishuhi Rykio, Intelligence Officer and former Nava Commando, looked up at the huge creature. It was an intimidating mass of flesh to look at. Massing at least three tons, with a mouth that could swallow him whole, the Yugalyth was, well, frightening was the only word that fit. That it was totally stationary was about the only thing that made anyone comfortable enough to approach it. There were some areas of the body that were nothing but scar tissue, the remains of limbs that had been surgically removed from the creature. It could always grow new ones, but it had been told in no uncertain terms that any limbs detected would be removed as well, and not in a painless manner.

  “How did I lie?” asked the small man, looking up into the multiple eyes of a creature that, given time, could look like anything it wanted. It couldn’t change its mass, but it could split into many smaller creatures. It normally did that by the process of budding, a process it was not undergoing at the moment. And that was the problem.

  “You told me that my children would be coming back from the mission you sent them on. And so far, I have not seen a one of them. Not communicated in any manner with them. So I have to assume that they all died.”

  “Or we have them in isolation, preparing for another mission.”

  “I do not believe that. If they were still alive, you would not be asking me to create more of them.”

  “I thought that was your purpose,” said Rykio. “Your kind are constantly reproducing, aren’t they?”

  “We are not animals with no control over our functions. And do not change the subject. What happened to those of my kind that went off on this mission you had for them. The one where you needed them to look and act like Ca’cadasans.”

  “The mission didn’t go as expected,” said Rykio, looking away from the staring eyes. “The Cacas attacked before we could complete the operation, and yes, your children were killed. Along with many thousands of our own, and millions of our new allies.”

  The eyes all extended, going from flush with the flesh of the upper body to push out on stalks. The Captain knew it couldn’t have configured them on the fly, and they must have been that way for some reason. Now they looked down in him like the heads of a hydra on their prehensile necks. He wondered for a moment if they might change still, becoming snake heads striking at him.

  “I do not care about you, or your allies,” roared the creature as it eyes stalks shook with fury. “I care about my own.”

  “And I care about my people, and my Empire,” said the Captain, raising his voice. “You are a prisoner, having been apprehended while in the process of infiltrating my Empire with the intent to cause sabotage and espionage. Add to that an unknown number of kidnappings and murders, and I could have you destroyed in an instant.”

  “I have cooperated with you completely, Captain,” said the creature, its eyes retracting back into its upper body. “I have given you everything you wanted.”

  “There are others of your kind still loose in Capitulum, and who knows where else in the Empire,” said Rykio, pointing a finger at the Yugalyth. “You have not helped us to find them and bring them in.”

  “And while I am stuck here in this facility, there is nothing I can do to help you find them.”

  That might be true, thought Rykio, but it’s not something that’s going to endear you to us. Rykio looked up at the creature, a thing that he had to pretend to connect to. He didn’t think there was any way that a normal human could connect to one of the disgusting creatures, which only lived to take the biomass of other intelligent creatures and convert it to themselves. He knew the strictures against the destruction of intelligent species, but if he had the means, he would be tempted to wipe the Yugalyth out to the last one. Unfortunately, they were a resource, and one that the Empire was not willing to renounce at the moment.

  “Let me put it to you in a manner that you can’t possibly misunderstand,” said Rykio. “You are here in our custody, and here you will stay. As long as you cooperate, we will make things as pleasant as possible for you, short of giving you your freedom. If you don’t cooperate, well…”

  Electricity crackled, and the huge body of the Yugalyth spasmed, its mouth wide open as a high pitched cry shook the room. The pain stopped in an instant. Rykio might have been OK with killing the whole species, but he was not a fan of torture. However, if a little bit of pain made the creature cooperate, there would be no need for more of it in the future.

  “We need more operatives,” he told the creature as its now wide eyes stared at him. “We will need at least forty of the Ca’cadasan constructs. Forty. You will be fed more than enough of the biomass needed to construct them, as well as the genetic samples you need to make the duplicates.”

  “And what will they be used for”

  “For whatever we wish. All you have to know is what is required of you. Do you understand?”

  “I understand, Captain. It will be as you say, and you will have your duplicates.”

  “Very well. What you need will be delivered to you today and tomorrow. The next time I see you I want there to be buds coming out of your body. In two weeks I want there to be ready to be birthed Ca’cadasans attached to that bloated body of yours. As long as you cooperate, you will be treated well, as will be your children. Any disobedience.”

  The creature cringed, and Rykio did not send the signal for another shock. The fear showed that he didn’t need to, and he really didn’t like administering the punishment. He nodded his head, turned, and left the room.

  * * *

  The Yugalyth stared at the human, the images of its fourteen eyes combining into one image of a hated enemy. If it still had its tentacles it would have snatched up the human and plopped him into its huge sharp toothed eating orifice, crunching down to reduce flesh and bone to the biomass it needed. The humans had removed those tentacles though, and rendered it helpless.

  Almost helpless, it thought. The form it was in now was the closest its species had to a natural form. It might have had one before the Ancients had genetically manipulated them, but it couldn’t remember what it was. Now it was trapped in this form. It couldn’t even make the hidden changes that would allow it to send out tentacles and moving appendages. The humans were constantly monitoring its body, sending sensor waves through it to see if it was making any internal changes. They had let it get away with the eye stalks, probably because they were short, and there were no structures attached to them that shouted danger.

  But two score Ca’cadasans, it thought. It would grow them for the humans. They would get what they wanted, or at least the appearance of what they wanted. The minds of the children would be his to shape, and in those structures the humans might get more than they bargained for.

  * * *

  The Empress Jennifer Conway Romanov lay in bed, awake, wondering how she was going to fill the next day. This one had been like many others before, boring beyond belief. She knew she was pregnant, and her husband was feeling very protective. Hell, the Secret Service was feeling just as protective. But it was a normal pregnancy, and she was a strong woman. She could work if need be, and she missed seeing patients and
doing rounds at the hospital, even if it was only the local unit here at the palace.

  If I have to listen to the inane speech of one more noble wife of my so called court, I’m going to go flippen mad, she thought. Maybe if I can get Cornelius’ wife and daughter to spend more time with me? They were at least normal down to earth people, even if Rebecca had a little too much anger in her. The only problem with that was that Devera had classes to attend in her quest to become a physician, doing the things that Jennifer wished she could do. And Rebecca needed to be around the other children in the palace school. That was the best thing they could do for her, and Jennifer would not take that away.

  And Sean was always doing Emperor tasks, things that took him from the palace. She wished he could stay with her more often, but she knew that was not possible. There was a war going on, with the fate of humanity in the balance, and he was at the top of the decision tree. Samantha came by once a day to discuss etiquette and protocol and all of the other things an Empress was expected to know. She liked Samantha, and hated all of the subjects an Empress was expected to know with a passion. She was sure Constance would not have been bothered with all of the fluffery. Then again, she was not Constance, not an Empress born of the Imperial family, with all of that imbibed with her mother’s milk.

  “Are you awake?” asked a voice that started her at first until she recognized it. The room was well carpeted, and Sean moved with silent grace, part of his genetic heritage as a member of the Imperial lineage.

  “Meetings over for the day?” she asked, rolling over and taking him in her arms as he slid into bed.

  “Yes, thank God. Any more and I would have been ordering people lined up against the wall and shot.”

  Jennifer laughed. Sean had a lot of power. The power to order groups of people killed without judicial oversight was not his. And she didn’t believe he had it in him to order such even if he could. If that were the man he was, she wouldn’t be in love with him.