“Well, first we have to find him, sir.”
“Yes. And I guess in the meantime, we can just keep killing their ships.” And losing more of our own people in every engagement. It didn’t really matter to him if they were losing people at the rate of one to every ten of the Fenri, thanks to their numerical and technological superiority. What mattered to him was that he was losing people, and that was a bleeding wound he wanted to eliminate.
* * *
IMPERIAL PALACE, CAPITULUM.
“I wish Cornelius could be here,” said Rebecca Walborski after blowing out the candles on her cake. She still wasn’t comfortable with celebrating her fifteenth birthday according to the Imperial Standard Calendar. On Azure they had celebrated events on the local calendar, but Jewel, being the center of the Empire, used the standard means of timekeeping to tie everything together.
“Your Daddy is busy with training, Honey,” said Devera Walborski, her adoptive mother. “You know he would be here if he could.”
Rebecca nodded, really wishing that she was doing something for the war effort. She was exactly six years away from being able to enroll in one of the Fleet Academies. Seeing as her adoptive father was friends with the Emperor, she didn’t doubt she would get into Peal Island, if she made the grades. Without the academic background, it wouldn’t matter who she knew. Fortunately, she was at the top of her class in the prestigious private academy she attended. Some of her classmates thought she was a teacher’s pet. She really didn’t care what they thought about her, as long as she became a Fleet officer, and was able to get some payback for her parents and brother, victims of the Cacas on Azure.
“Cake. Cake,” said Cornelius Junior, waving his fork in the air while staring at the birthday cake.
Junior was going on three himself, less than a half year away, and was becoming quite the pain in the neck for Rebecca. But as obnoxious as he could be, she still loved him. She loved all of her adoptive family, who had saved her from going into the system of foster homes that was the fate for most child survivors of the war. But it still wasn’t the same as biological family.
“What are you thinking, honey?” asked Devera, leaning forward to hand a knife to Rebecca.
“That I still have so long to go before I can start killing Cacas, like Cornelius.”
Devera gave her a concerned look, silent for a moment. “You need to enjoy being a child while you can, Rebecca. You’ll be an adult soon enough. And I doubt the war will be over before you graduate from the academy. So just let yourself be a child and enjoy life.”
How can I? thought Rebecca, smiling at Devera, faking it so that her adoptive mother wouldn’t become distressed at the thought that all the child could think of was visiting death on the enemy. Much like her adoptive father, who was probably the best killer she knew. And he only wanted to be a farmer, until the Cacas came and killed his wife, Junior’s mother.
“I’ll try,” she told Devera, knowing it was a lie. Meanwhile, she had some cake to eat, while remembering to make sure she stayed in shape. Because the Fleet didn’t just demand mental fitness in its officers, but athletic physical fitness as well.
Chapter Thirteen
Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.
Mark Twain
IMPERIAL ARMY TRAINING BASE, PLANET RUBY SEPTEMBER 3RD, 1002
The rain was coming down hard, a true downpour hitting high in the trees and dripping in rivulets through the leaves to the ground. The kind of rain a soldier hated, even if encased in the dry comfort of battle armor. It was the kind of rain that obscured the senses and the sensors, making it hard to see or to hear what was moving.
The sentry was well placed, in a position where he was hard to see, but he could observe his surroundings, in normal conditions. In the rain he could only hear the rain, and even infrared systems were not working to full efficiency.
The Ranger moving into position was not much better off. Even a soldier in medium armor was difficult to see or hear in this kind of downpour, even with the augmented senses of a special ops warrior. What made the difference was experience. The Ranger knew the sounds of the wild, even in the rain. And the soldier could not hold still. He shifted his feet, moved his hands to try and wipe his faceplate, everything that the Ranger had been taught not to do when his life depended on it.
The Ranger made one last check of his passive stealth cloak, making sure to make only slow, deliberate movements that kept his hands close to his body. Even in the rain the stealth cloak was hot, holding in his body heat so that he wouldn’t give himself away on infrared. He couldn’t keep it sealed for too long, lest he cook in his own heat. He didn’t think he would need it for long, as this kill was almost in sight. With short, soft footsteps he moved a couple of meters, then stopped, checked the target, then moved again. He was almost to the target, coming up from the side and partially to the rear, knife out. He thought he was home free, until the armored soldier moved, swinging his rifle toward the Ranger.
The Ranger moved in a blur, faster than the eye of the soldier could follow. He grabbed the man by the helmet and spun him around. The soldier tried to resist. He was wearing light battle armor, augmenting his strength by a factor of three. Against an ordinary opponent he would have won the fight. But the Ranger was stronger still, and with the advantage of surprise he wrenched the soldier around and buried his knife in the man’s throat, the monomolecular blade sliding easily through the armor. The body of the man tensed, then relaxed, the sign of a sure kill.
“Good job, Colonel Walborskis,” called out a voice, just before a number of armored men and women appeared from out of the forest. “Now you men know why the Colonel is known as the Hunter.”
Cornelius shook the water off of his face and engaged the switch on the knife, turning off the holographic projection that had made it look real. The soldier he had killed rose up from the ground, his armor no longer locked down.
“I thought he almost had me there at the end,” said Walborski with a smile, slapping the young infantryman in training on the shoulder. “I must be getting old.”
“Turning and seeing you there, sir,” said the trainee with the shake of his head. “That about scared me to death.”
“I’ve never seen anyone move like you, Hunter,” said Brigadier General Wallace, the commander of the Infantry School at Fort Dismal, one of the training bases on the planet Ruby. “Seems like a waste to have promoted you to battalion command. You would serve the Empire better as a stalker.”
“That’s what I tried to tell them, General,” said Walborski with a laugh. “But they just wouldn’t listen to sense.”
Walborski looked at the people gathered out here in the rain, all field grade and higher, except for the trainee who had been the sacrificial lamb. He had been the only one who hadn’t been totally dialed in on what was going to happen. He had only been told that he was on guard duty, and that nothing was to pass. His suit sensors had been rigged so there would be no trace of the ten stealthed holo cameras that had recorded the scene.
“Hopefully your demonstration will teach these newbies to stay alert on sentry,” said a full Colonel from the infantry school.
“Either that, or it will give them nightmares,” said Wallace with a smile.
“I don’t seem to remember it being so wet on Ruby,” said Walborski, shivering slightly in the cold now that his cloak was no longer trapping his body heat. “All I remember is desert. Cold desert, but desert nonetheless.”
“It’s a planet, after all,” said Wallace after a chuckle. “With all that a planet has to give.”
“You trained here as a private, didn’t you, my Lord?” asked a Lt. Colonel.
“No need for the bowing and scraping among us,” said Cornelius. “And yes, I was a private here, getting my ass reamed out by DIs and wondering what in the hell I was doing here.”
“And now a Lt. Colonel, a Count, and only the second man in the history of the Empire to hold three awards of our hi
ghest military honor,” said Wallace. “I would say you made out very well.”
“And I miss being that newly made Ranger private, sir,” said Walborski, remembering those days when all he to worry about was his own hide, and his buddies and squad mates. “I miss going out on patrol and taking Cacas by the surprise, the way I took your young trainee.”
The General nodded. “I wish I could say the same, but frankly, serving as a platoon leader on the Lasharan Front was terrifying for this young man. I’m more than happy to be an educator at this point.”
And that’s probably the best place for you, thought Cornelius, not saying a word. He didn’t begrudge the General his training command. They needed such men, and he had proven himself under fire. For leadership they needed men like his friend Samuel Baggett. Last he had heard, that soldier was now an army commander, a huge rise from his role of brigade leader, which post the man held when Walborski met him. People of talent were rising quickly, if they didn’t die along the path.
The Ranger changed into a clean uniform when he got back to his quarters. One thing he didn’t miss from being a private was sharing his quarters with others. As a light colonel he rated field grade quarters. As a holder of the Imperial Medal of Heroism, and a noble, he rated more. The VIP quarters normally given to a brigadier or higher. He had tried to decline, saying all he needed were clean quarters with privacy, but the base commander had insisted.
Dressed in a fresh set of field fatigues, a static cloak over his shoulders against the rain, Walborski called for his driver. Another perk that came with rank. The Sergeant picked him up on the roof the quarters and they started out for the training range, passing over the heart of the base.
Fort Dismal was a brand new facility, one of scores that had sprung up on Ruby, one of thousands that had been constructed across the Empire. Old training bases got new barracks, new ranges, until they couldn’t hold any more. So new ones were built, as fast as the contractors could put them up. Soon they were passing by some of the ranges, where infantry trainees in light armor were practicing fire and maneuver. Holographic representations of particle beams lanced out. Troopers hit froze in place as their armor locked down.
Better to learn it here than in the field, thought Hunter. Even so, many of these young men and women would die in their first action. That was one of the immutable laws of warfare. The people with the least experience died in disproportionate numbers. Which didn’t mean veterans couldn’t get killed as well. Sometimes even the best combat soldier bought it.
On one of the ranges the forms of more infantry trainees were dwarfed by the armored vehicles they were training with. Tyrannosaurs, over a thousand tons of main battle tank, seemingly invulnerable to all but the heaviest of weapons. The infantry were training with them not only to learn how to use the armored vehicles to their own advantage, but how to destroy such vehicles when used against them.
He thought back to the battle he had watched on Sestius between an Imperial tank and some armored vehicles of the Cacas. The Cacas hadn’t had heavy tanks on Sestius, only some light tanks and the walking machines known as mecha, something the humans no longer used. The Imperial heavy tank had eaten those mecha alive, and he had heard that the Cacas still didn’t employ any kind of heavy armored vehicle. He wondered if that would change, if the Cacas would field heavies of their own in the future. The damned tankers would probably love that, thought the ground pounder. Like something out of the past, when armored armies fought it out for years over thousands of kilometers of territory. The hell with that, he thought. His type of warfare was sneaking up on an unsuspecting enemy, not duking it out in a fair fight in the open. Fair fights were for idiots.
The air car swept over the hill and they were in the training area that had been assigned to him and his men. A large forested area, nothing but wilderness, and a perfect training ground for Rangers. Some of his officers and senior NCOs ran out to the landing field as the air car set down. No one saluted. This was the field, after all, and Rangers did not do anything to give away the identity of their leaders in the field.
“Did you enjoy yourself, sir?” asked Major Tashika, his second in command for this experimental training.
“Like drowning kittens,” said Walborski with a frown. “Too damned easy. Now, I’m ready to get out into the woods and have some real fun, against some real competition.”
All of the men smiled as he said that. Everyone in the unit wanted to go against him, to prove themselves with the man they all thought was the best of them all. That was not the reason they were here, of course. Walborski looked over at the one alien in their midst, a strange looking creature of the Klassekian species. And the reason they were here.
So far the Army was not getting any of the quantumly entangled com techs. There wasn’t a great need for them, since the Army operated on a planetary scale, where the light speed barrier was not really a concern. And anything between commands, between systems, could be handled by the Fleet. If there had been enough Klassekians to go around the Army probably would have gotten their share on the general principle that anything the Fleet had, they needed in equal measure. Sean was not standing for that nonsense. The Army had the com assets they needed, for the most part. With the exception of Special Ops.
Rangers and Marine Force Recon operated in a mostly electronics absent environment. It was important in a Galaxy where almost any electronic signature could be picked up and in most cases interpreted, that units were able to move behind enemy lines undetected. And because of that they were totally out of touch with any headquarters. Which was where the aliens came in.
Only they aren’t Rangers, thought the Lt. Colonel. While it was true that they could move faster than any unaugmented human, they couldn’t move as fast as Rangers. They didn’t have the strength to carry the same load, nor were their senses as sharp. Though they could aid in communications, they were otherwise a liability in the field. He was afraid he was going to have to report the experiment a failure. Command wouldn’t like it, but that was the reason he had been put in charge of this project. They knew he wouldn’t be afraid to tell the truth, no matter how they might not want to hear it.
There might come a day when the Klassekians could keep up with augmented humans. That would require augmentation of their own, which would require significant research into their genome. And that would require volunteers, to donate their version of eggs and sperm, and eventually to go through the augmentation process itself. Informed volunteers who knew what was being done, the risks and benefits to themselves and their people. And of course there was no guarantee that Klassekians could be augmented to the same level as humans. Not all species had genomes as easily malleable as those of humans. It might take years, it might never happen.
Not my call, or my worry, thought Walborski as he followed his officers out into the brush. Someone higher up would make that call. And he still had a job to do evaluating the aliens as combat soldiers. Because he had a feeling that these beings would still make damned fine combat soldiers, even if they didn’t have what it took for special ops.
* * *
IMPERIAL SPACE.
“We’re picking up ships coming toward us in VII, sir,” said the Sensor Chief over the com.
Terrence Zhukov looked over at the central holo tank, configured as a tactical plot. Angela Collins and Scranton were at the center of that plot, the Fenri battle cruiser and its light cruiser consort slightly ahead. And now, on the edge of the plot to spinward, two icons had appeared, moving through hyper VII at point nine light, decelerating as they came.
“Looks like a light cruiser and a destroyer, sir. No, make that two light cruisers, with three destroyers following. No.”
“I see it, Chief,” said Zhukov with a short barked laugh. There were two light cruisers and five destroyers on the plot, now at maximum decel as they attempted to match courses with the two Imperial ships following the Fenri. “It looks like our first reinforcements have arrived. Make sure Scranton knows
they’re there.”
“We’re getting a message from the Scranton, sir,” said the on duty Com Tech. “I believe they know.”
It took several hours for the other force to catch up to the pair, actually overshooting them at first before working their way back. Now they had enough of a force to worry the enemy, even if it really wasn’t sufficient to go toe to toe with them.
Zhukov waited for Pasce to interrogate the other ships, determining who was in charge. Five minutes after they reached laser com range, the captain of the Scranton was on the com with Zhukov.
“It looks like I’m the senior officer, Terrance,” said the full captain from his bridge. “I’ll be in charge, while Captain Hernandez of the Tandridge will be my second.”
“Any idea on when we’ll be engaging, sir”
“Not until we get some heavier units in contact,” said Pasce.
Preferably a battleship or two, thought Zhukov, shaking his head at the thought. We couldn’t be that lucky.
As if reading his mind, Pasce offered what he had heard from one of the other ships.
“Supposedly we have a couple of heavy cruisers heading this way. Along with some more light cruisers and destroyers. At least we’ll have a chance.”
* * *
“It looks like we’re no longer quite so alone, Winston,” said Petty Officer Second Jazmin Boros, walking up to the Engineer as he checked out the status boards for the reactors.
Ships really didn’t have a single or group of engines located in one part of the vessel. Warships had the dorsal and ventral hyperdrive arrays and from eight to fourteen grabber arrays. What was called engineering was really the central power generation facility for the ship, the matter-antimatter reactors which fed energy to all of those systems, as well as weapons and life support. Most ships carried two of the reactors, and only needed one up and running for most processes. Running along in hyper seven, even at maximum acceleration, only needed the one reactor. The second would be brought up online if they needed to jump into or out of hyper VII, a process that would consume over four times the amount of energy needed to just maintain station in that dimension.
Exodus: Empires at War: Book 10: Search & Destroy Page 20
