Exodus: Empires at War: Book 15: All Quiet on the Second Front?

by Doug Dandridge

  “Firing,” called out his tactical officer, who was controlling the fire of this part of the fleet.

  The ship shook slightly as it accelerated several score missiles through the launch tubes. Missiles appeared on the plot coming at the Ca'cadasans as they returned fire. The disparity in missile weight was telling, with the Ca'cadasans putting out ten times the number of weapons.

  The battle was short lived. The Klavarta didn't have the defensive firepower to survive more than two volleys, and what was left was a bunch of drifting wreckage fallen into normal space. And a few crippled vessels limping along. There were no calls for surrender. These people knew the Ca'cadasans too well to even bother with such a forlorn hope.

  The Ca'cadasans didn't get off unscathed of course. Their defensive fire knocked most of the Klavarta missiles out of space, but as always, some got through. A lucky hit on a hyperdrive array dropped a twenty-five million ton ship into normal space, a total loss with all hands. Some other ships took serious damage, and a supercruiser took a direct hit, converting to plasma that immediately disappeared from hyper.

  “Send out orders to the fleet,” said Mrastaran, looking over at his com officer. “I want everyone to congregate at this system, here.”

  The great admiral pointed at a close system that had an inhabited planet, though the data said it was rich in resources, the sophonts who lived there were reportedly useless. Still, it had orbitals that could be used in the short term, and a rich asteroid belt that could fuel the small factories aboard each of his battleships.

  “Once we are gathered we will forge into Klavarta space and sweep everything from in front of us. The target is this system.” The star in question started to blink on the plot, three days away at best speed. Pleisia.

  * * *

  “The reactors are about to breach, sir. We need to get you out of here.”

  Klanarat wasn't sure he wanted to survive this debacle. He had lost over seventy percent of his fleet, which amounted to almost half of his nation's navy in total. How could he face the president and tell him that the plan had failed, and because of Klanarat's judgment the fleet was crippled.

  But I don't want to die, thought the admiral, getting up from his command chair and following the young lieutenant off the flag bridge. The bridge was a wreck, screens black, holo projectors dead, even some ruptured bulkheads. Several of the bridge crew were laying at odd angles, obviously dead. Others were moaning on the deck, coughing up the liquid in their lungs as they tried to draw in air. Medics were working on the people that could still be saved. If the reactors breached their efforts would be for naught, but duty kept them at their jobs.

  “Come along, sir,” said the young officer, his voice rising in alarm.

  He doesn't want to die either, thought the admiral, trying to hurry up through the shock that was trying to slow him down.

  Of course no one wanted to die. The ship had survived the improbable, a catastrophic translation from hyper into normal space. None of the other ships in his force, one of the unfortunate groups that had been caught by the Caca main force, had survived. Those other ships were expanding clouds of plasma. They had been within tens to hundreds of kilometers of the flagship when they had been hit hard enough to drop their hyperfields. Now they were fields of plasma tens to hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, in some cases millions.

  It didn't seem fair to be one of the improbable survivors of that kind of translation, only to be facing destruction from an oncoming reactor breach. The result would be the same. The ship would be plasma.

  “Can you get me to a hyper capable pinnace?” he asked as he stepped over some debris that had fallen from the ceiling onto the deck.

  “No, sir,” said the lieutenant, shaking his head. “Those ships were destroyed when we got hit. All we have are some transfer shuttles in hangar three.”

  “Transfer shuttles,” hissed the admiral, coughing a moment later as he breathed in some of the thickening smoke in the corridor. A transfer shuttle would strand him in this space. At most it could get up to one tenth light, which meant it would take from decades to centuries to get anywhere.

  “It's better than the escape pods, sir,” said the officer, whose name tag said he was one Gresater.

  The young male continued to hurry along the corridor, stopping at one of the lift banks and pushing the button to call the car. Nothing happened, and Klanarat started to feel his near panic ramp up.

  “Here, sir.” The officer pushed the doors open of another lift, already gaped.

  At that moment the artificial gravity died, and the admiral found himself floating above the deck. He started cursing before he remembered to engage the magnetic soles of his boots.

  “We're in luck, sir.”

  “In luck?”

  “We can go down to the hangar level through this shaft.”

  That was luck, since Klanarat didn't think he was in any shape to climb down a shaft in a gravity field.

  After some minutes of struggle they were down and the hatch to the hangar was just ahead. There was a crush of crew waiting to get into the hangar and get off the ship.

  Why aren't these people using the escape pods, he thought. He knew the answer to that as soon as the thought ran through his head. The outer layer of the ship had to have taken severe damage, many of those pods wouldn't have survived, and people would be trying to get off the ship by any means possible.

  “Reactor breach imminent,” came a computer voice over the intercom. “Reactor breach imminent.”

  At the same time the lights went dark and air started rushing toward some new hull breach. The panic increased as crew started to fight to get into the hangar.

  “Move out of the way,” shouted the lieutenant, playing a stunner over the people in front.

  Many dropped to the deck as the sonic hit them in the central nervous system. Gresater pushed crew out of the way, and Klanarat wormed his way through the gap. There were several transfer shuttles still on the deck. As they entered the hangar one left the deck, turned, and flew out through the cold plasma field that was still holding in the atmosphere. A moment later that field fell and the air rushed out, pulling several people out with it.

  Klanarat ordered his faceplate down through his implant before all of the air was gone, squatting down so he would provide the least amount of wind resistance. Crew were still trying to get to the last two shuttles, and it was looking like there wouldn't be room for them all.

  “Come on, sir,” yelled Gresater, pulling the admiral along. “We've got to get on.”

  The shuttle was only half full, but the lieutenant hit the panel that shut the hatch before anyone else could get aboard.

  “Get us out of here,” yelled the lieutenant.

  “Belay that order,” shouted the admiral. “Get that hatch open. We'll take everyone we can aboard before we leave.”

  “But, Admiral.”

  Klanarat wondered what he was trying to prove. The fewer people aboard, the longer they could last on the emergency supplies. But he wasn't about to run out on the people he was responsible for if he could get any more of them out. He still had that much honor at least.

  “Get on board,” he shouted out as the hatch slid open. “Get on board, now.”

  Crew started to push aboard, until there were no more seats left. And still they came, until there was standing room only. Finally someone pushed the pad that closed the hatch before more could get on board. It was cruel, but the shuttle's life support could only handle so much. It might already be over that limit, but Klanarat was happy to take as many as he could, for now. In a couple of days he might regret the decision, but for now it was important to get as many off the doomed ship as possible.

  “Everyone hang on,” called out the pilot.

  The shuttle lifted, moved out into space at the limit of its inertial compensators, then rocketed off well over that limit. Everyone not in a seat was thrown around, most often on top of someone in an acceleration chair.

>   The people around Klanarat fended off the people who would have crushed him, still showing their respect for their leader. He pulled up a holo in the front of his seat, looking back at the flagship. It looked very rough, with many noticeable pieces of hull missing. Then, suddenly, it disappeared in a flash of brilliant fire.

  “What do you want us to do, Admiral?” asked the pilot.

  “I really don't know,” he said, thinking of the possibilities and coming up with nothing. Unless something came along with hyper capabilities they were screwed. And if it was the Cacas that showed up, they might have wished that they had stayed aboard the flagship and died with it.

  * * *

  “We're picking up a faint graviton emission, Lord.”

  Sub-commander Carvanus still had trouble with people calling him Lord. Even though he was the younger son of a noble family in the Empire, until he had assumed command of the scout ship he had been forced to call common born assholes Lord. Even though he still had to call superiors by that appellation, he had earned his rank through merit.

  “What do you think it is?” he asked the sensor officer, a young male with the lowest rank a Cacada could have and still be considered an officer.

  “I'm thinking a small shuttle,” said the male in an anxious voice. It was also his first assignment, and everyone in the fleet knew that failure could lead to severe punishment.

  “Calm down, Lrastar,” said the sub-commander, putting a hand on the shoulder of the younger male. “This isn't a battleship, and you are here for training as much as anything. So, tell me why it's there?”

  “Probably one of their ships survived the catastrophic translation, Lord. And that is a ship that bailed from the vessel that had been carrying it.” The male looked over at the helm for a moment, then back at his commanding officer. “Should we drop down into normal space and capture some prisoners.”

  “For what purpose,” said the grinning sub-commander, patting the younger male on the shoulder once again. “Those people will be low ranking ratings, scrambling to get off a ship that was about to explode. What use are they to us?”

  “Food,” said Lrastar, a hungry smile on his face.

  “Our orders are to scout along the flank of the fleet. I'm not about to waste time getting down to translation velocity just so we can capture some useless drones.

  “Helm,” he ordered, turning to that male. “Proceed to our rendezvous point.”

  Chapter Eight

  An ethical man doesn't need a consensus of his allies in order to act against something he finds reprehensible. Joseph Brodsky

  “We've lost all contact with Grand Fleet Admiral Klanarat,” said the President of the Nation of New Earth over the holo com. “We still have some links to the other groups in his command, but he suddenly dropped off the net. And no one has any idea what happened to him.”

  The Cacas took him off the board, thought Beata, trying to keep that thought off of her expression. While she didn't like the idea that any officer had died, even though literally millions had in that ill-advised battle, his being missing in action made things much simpler for her. Or did it?

  “What are your plans, Admiral?” asked the president, his eyes narrowing.

  “I'm hoping to break the Cacas when they assault Pleisia.”

  “And can you be sure they will attack that system?” asked the president, an eyebrow rising.

  “Nothing is a sure thing, Mr. President,” she said, trying to appear confident. “I think it's a good plan. If it doesn't work, I'll come up with something else.”

  “Very well,” said the president after huffing out a breath. “Since you are currently the highest-ranking commander in this theater, you are in charge. I will order all of my commanders to obey your orders without reservation.”

  Beata sucked in a calming breath and let it out slowly. This was what she had been hoping for the entire time, but definitely not expecting. She hadn't liked the situation from the start, being placed under another officer of equal rank. She understood why that officer was in charge, since this theater was his nation’s. His home. But the problems that kind of rank structure brought with it were almost insurmountable.

  “Thank you, Mr. President. Now, if there isn't anything else, I need to get onto sending out orders and getting everything I can here.”

  “Are you already at Pleisia?” asked the president, looking off holo for a moment, as if checking out the plot.

  “We'll be there within the next eight hours, sir. And then we will start arranging our greeting for the big bastards.”

  “We'll be gathering everything we can at the capital system, in case you don't succeed. And I'll send you whatever we can spare.”

  Beata thought that was a reasonable precaution. The capital system was over ten days from Pleisia at best speed. The closest core world was five days. If she could stop the Cacas in the Pleisia system all the better. If not, maybe they could damage them enough that the next force sent against them could handle them.

  “Good luck, Admiral,” said President Klanarat, his tone sincere.

  The holo faded, leaving Beata alone with her own thoughts. She didn't have enough of a force to beat the Cacas in an open battle in hyper. She still had over eighty percent of the Imperial ships that had been deployed out here, those that she had met and those that she had brought along. It was still a powerful force. Unfortunately, she only had forty-five percent of the wormholes that had been assigned to her. The rest had either been aboard Klavarta ships or aboard Imperial vessels assigned to Admiral Klanarat's fleet. There were still some ships out there that had survived the battle, on the other side of the Caca fleet. And no way they would get to Pleisia in time to join in the battle.

  The wormholes being convoyed out from the Empire would reach the capital in another eight days, then it was twelve days to get to Pleisia. Twenty days, and they wouldn't get to her in time to do any good. Thirteen more of the homemade version were on the way up, to arrive in six days. The problem with those were they were not connected to the Empire. New Earth had built some accelerator tubes, not quite as efficient as those around the Donut. They wouldn't give her the kind of fire support she was used to receiving from the Empire.

  We beat the Machines, even outnumbered, she thought, trying to find the silver lining to her situation. The only problem with that thought was the situation was not the same. The Machines hadn't been as advanced as the Cacas. And the Cacas, though not the smartest creatures in the Galaxy, still possessed organic brains, gifting them with imagination. A quality the Machines hadn't possessed.

  “I want a conference with all group commanders that are within range of Pleisia,” she told her com officer. “One hour.”

  * * *

  “Congratulation on a wonderful victory, Great Admiral,” said the adolescent Ca'cadasan male on the other end of the wormhole transmission, a self-satisfied smirk on his face.

  “Thank you, Supreme Lord,” said Mrastaran, down on a knee, bending before the male he had sworn his oaths to. That all officers in the Ca'cadasan military had sworn their oaths to, even if many did not feel that this being was worthy of that kind of loyalty. Still, the Ca'cadasan Empire ran on loyalty to the Emperor. No matter how worthy or not that Emperor was.

  “Now, what are your plans from this point?” asked the young male.

  Mrastaran wondered if the young fool would understand the strategy the admiral was about to espouse. Unlike most Emperors, this Jressrata had never served in the military. He had been too young at the time of his father's death. Most heirs served in the fleet. Oh, they served in carefully protected positions that would give them a feel for what it was like to be in the military, without putting them at risk. However, that had not been the case here, and the youngest Emperor in Ca'cadasan history had no idea of how the military ran. The only thing he knew was that he could give commands and they would be carried out, without a second thought.

  “I will drive toward a system they have to defend and push past
it. This will isolate part of their force, while I continue on to the capital.”

  “Pleisia?” asked the Emperor, his eyes narrowing. “Our fleet base, our most prosperous colony in that region. The point from which we had launched our greatest penetration into Klavarta space?”

  Mrastaran tried to fight the feeling of helplessness that was gnawing at the edge of his consciousness. He knew the order that was coming, and he wanted to refuse. To do that would seal his doom. The young fool would order his immediate execution, and there would be many males aboard his fleet who would be more than willing to carry out that order. It would advance all the senior officers.

  “I want you to take that system back, Great Admiral. To the exclusion of all other objectives. Is that understood?”

  “But, Supreme Lord. That could allow their forces further in their nation to prepare for us. Let me carry out my plan and I will bring them to their knees.”

  “Pleisia,” growled the Emperor, glaring out of the holo. “That system was once our crown jewel on that frontier. I want it back, now.”

  “But...”

  “Now,” screamed the Emperor.

  The holo died, leaving Mrastaran to contemplate how close he had come to dying in those moments. Those orders had been heard by everyone on the flag bridge. He could no longer sweep around the system, daring the humans to come out and challenge him in hyper, where he would have the advantages. Now he would have to enter the system and take it. Playing into the advantages of a fortified system with a mobile force in support.

  “Send out the orders,” he said to the com officer, storming over to stand above that male. “All ships are to gather at a point one light year out from the Pleisia system. Then we will assault and take the system.”

  I still have the numbers, he thought, growling low in his throat. I can take that system, and then move in on their capital. But what an opportunity wasted.

  * * *

  The President of the Nation of New Earth waited for the com to go through, thinking of what had come to pass over the last twenty-four hours. He had never really liked the idea of his distant cousin assuming command of the entire New Earth fleet. The Alpha had been known within the fleet as arrogant and uncompromising. Unfortunately, he had a spotless record, and was considered a master of tactics. The president had known the admiral when he was a subordinate of his in the fleet, and had always held reservations about him. The senior officers of the fleet had disagreed, and Admiral Klanarat had been voted to his status. The president had then had the choice of letting him run the fleet, or dismissing him from the service.