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

by Doug Dandridge

  The craft were small, fragile, but very fast in normal space. Lacking hyper capability, that was the only place they could operate. These New Earth built craft could pull six hundred gravities with their inertial compensators. Add on another thirty due to the liquid environment the Alphas and Engineers would be riding in, and they had blazing fast acceleration. Their reason for being were the four, one-hundred-ton capital ship missiles that were their offensive armament. Capable of accelerating at fifteen thousand gravities over a short run, they would start out with the velocity imparted on them by their launching ships.

  Not really fast, thought the officer. They couldn't move at any higher velocity than the capital ships they were built to attack. At point nine light and above the normal slow-moving particles of space became fast moving packets of energy, radiation. Capable of penetrating any electromagnetic field, and all but the thickest of armor. A thickness the little ships couldn't handle. They could out accelerate the larger ships, though even smaller fighters could outdo them. What they were was quick and fragile. They could outrun some missiles if the distance and vectors were to their advantage. And they could move quickly through and out of the engagement basket of light amp weapons. Of course, a hit that a larger ship wouldn't even notice would leave a spreading cloud of plasma in space where the attack craft had been.

  Quick attack craft would be more fitting, thought Plisias, shaking his head. He would still have been happier aboard a multi-million-ton warship, but the officer assignment bureau hadn't asked his permission to be given this command.

  “Well, sir,” replied Warrant Officer Janaris, the helm of the Charlie five, their particular fast attack craft. “It's what we have, so we better come up with a plan to use it.”

  There was a plan, but the ensign didn't like it worth a damn. They were to swoop in, using their maneuverability and speed to avoid enemy fire, and launch. Hopefully taking out a single enemy ship. The idea of maneuvering such a fragile craft into the face of that much firepower was terrifying. Sure, the exchange of a dozen or so fast attack craft for millions of tons of warship was considered a bargain. But not to a young Alpha just out of officer's training, who had his whole life ahead of him. Not if he was one of those who were on the harsh side of the exchange.

  “Get ready,” said Janaris, just before the craft plunged into the wormhole.

  Plisias had never been through a wormhole. He had been told that his genetic line was able to handle the physical aspects of the translation better than most. No one had mentioned the mental.

  The trip seemed to go on forever, day after day trapped in his mind, visions of death and destruction coming close to ripping his sanity from him. And then it was over, leaving him in shock in his command chair.

  “How long?”

  “According to our timer, much less than a second,” said Janaris in a hushed voice.

  I don't want to go through that again, thought the ensign, shaking his head. Of course, if he could get out of this looming battle alive, he would ride through the gates of hell to return home.

  * * *

  “Keep digging in,” ordered Captain Canara, looking over his company as they dug in on the heights overlooking the landing field.

  The men were using everything from power excavators to handheld entrenching tools to dig the foundations of the fortifications they would fight from should the Cacas try to use the field. The engineers would be along later to install the bunkers, which the troops would then cover and camouflage. They might allow the men to live a few more minutes once battle was joined, if it was. There was always the possibility that nothing would come down here, and all of this work would have been for nothing. Still, it was better to expend sweat in vain than blood for real.

  The shuttles continued to land, one every couple of minutes. Men in heavy exoskeletons walked up and removed pallets of equipment, while vehicles rolled off the shuttles they had ridden down on. Hover trucks filled with materials mostly, though there were also some heavily armored vehicles with the barrels or tubes of weapons protruding from the superstructure or turrets.

  “You ready for us to start putting in the bunkers,” said a shorter Klavarta who looked much like an Alpha. The being wore powered armor, in his case to aid him in heavy lifting more than anything.

  “Almost,” replied Canara, looking down from his well over two meter height.

  Like all of his people he eschewed powered armor. Klavarata warriors were almost three times stronger than the other classes of their people, and twice as fast. They were the equivalent of human special warriors, the Rangers and Naval Commandos, only the entire Klavarta army was made up of this sub-species. They wore a light strap-on armor that enhanced their own naturally hardened skin. There were openings in the armor for their spikes and claws. It allowed them to move at blinding speed across the battlefield, striking down their enemies before they could react. They were not, however, invulnerable, and with the Cacas controlling space, the two divisions of Klavarta warrior infantry could expect heavy casualties before they even had a chance to fire on the landing troops. If they landed troops, and didn't just bombard the planet into rubble beneath them.

  “What are those?” asked Lieutenant Jrising, one of his platoon leaders, pointing over at a bunch of missile bodies being removed one by one from a cargo compartment of a heavy lift shuttle.

  “Counter missiles? Anti-aircraft weapons? I'm not sure,” said the captain. The one thing he was sure they weren't were offensive weapons, ship killers. No one was insane enough to put weapons with one gigaton antimatter warheads on an inhabited planet. Or at least he hoped not.

  If they were what he thought, command was determined to prevent as many surface strikes as possible. Though to his mind a hundred megaton warhead going off in the air overhead was almost as bad, especially for the lightly protected civilians.

  Chapter Eleven

  There are heroes in evil as well as in good. Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  “The scouts are about to make the final jump, my Lord,” said the com officer, looking back at Mrastaran. He was reading a last second grav pulse from the lead scout, the only way they could transmit information at the moment.

  I wonder if they're going to try to pull an ambush, thought the admiral. The humans had used that tactic so often in the past, it was almost their standard play when they were anticipating an invasion. It allowed them to get in a couple of devastating volleys before the Cacas could react, and had resulted in some instant wins in the past for the humans.

  They had started backing away from that tactic when the Ca'cadasans had come in expecting it, which didn't mean they wouldn't try it again if they thought their enemies had dropped their guard. Because of that, three hundred scout ships had built up some separation over the last day, and were now approaching the hyper I barrier, while the rest of the fleet was still on approach to V. That would give the main fleet some time to maneuver if needed. In fact, they could jump out at one of the other barriers, or even before, and start lobbing missiles into the system.

  “They're jumping now,” called out the sensor officer, picking up their translation graviton wave.

  Mrastaran gripped the arms of his chair with his lower hands while he crossed the upper pair over his chest. He was trying to act nonchalant, composed, and failing miserably. He was about to face the humans from their New Terran Empire, a force which had become the boogie man for the Ca'cadasans. Even though he outnumbered them, he couldn't be sure they wouldn't pull something out the Ca'cadasans hadn't seen before, whether a tactic or some new tech. Frankly, it terrified him. And that made him feel ashamed.

  Before the current war the Ca'cadasan Empire had an unbroken string of victories stretching back for seven thousand years. They had gone into the war with the humans, on both fronts, confident, secure in the knowledge that these would be easy victories. The human nation on this front first, who through the reckless courage of their genetically engineered warriors had fought the Ca'cadasans to a standsti
ll for decades. Still, the altered humans hadn't been able to push the conquerors out of their hard-fought gains.

  Then the Ca'cadasans had met the humans on the other front. They were also improved, in a different way. Not in specific genetic lines, they were still overall stronger, faster and smarter than the people the Ca'cadasans had chased away from their home system. At first the Ca'cadasans had earned easy victories against those humans, overrunning world after world and slaughtering the inhabitants. The New Terran wormhole technology had kept them in the war, then shifted the balance, until they had at first ejected the Ca'cadasans from their space, then invaded. The Ca'cadasans still liked to act like they were superior to any other intelligence species. It was a lie. They had met their match, and were well on the way to defeat, unless something changed drastically.

  If Mrastaran won this campaign and knocked the Klavarta out of the war that might be the drastic change his Empire needed. If not, if he lost here, or even fought to a draw, it could spell the end to the seven thousand year reign of his people across a large expanse of this Galaxy. He would either be remembered as the admiral who had saved the Empire, or the one who had lost it.

  “Grav pulse from scout leader,” called out the com officer. “Nothing contesting their emergence, so far.”

  Those ships would have come out in a wide spread, giving them the best sensor coverage of the system, but also putting them too far apart for optimal mutual defensive fire. But if nothing was coming at them? Mrastaran knew better than to assume that the enemy had decided to not contest this system. Or had they? Maybe they had decided that it wasn't worth the cost, and were preparing to bring his fleet to action in some other place. But they wouldn't know where that other place would be, and if the humans had hit him in hyperspace they would be giving up one of their most effective weapons, the warp fighters.

  They've got to be there, he thought, looking over at the com officer, waiting for the next report. That report would, of course, be sparse, as befitted grav pulse.

  “Scouts are reporting that they are picking up graviton emissions in the system.” The officer went silent, reading the next part of the message while his admiral fretted over the delay. “Not enough to indicate a fleet. A system defense force? Possibly.”

  “Was that part of the transmission, or are you asking a question?”

  “A..question?”

  “Just give me the damned information,” growled the great admiral, glaring at his subordinate. “When I want conjecture, I'll ask for it.”

  The com officer looked away, shaking slightly. The admiral couldn't blame him, since a commander had the power of immediate life or death over all of his subordinates. Not that Mrastaran was such a bastard that he would have a junior officer killed for untoward curiosity.

  “Order one of the supercruisers to drop into normal space and get a read on that system. Fifteen seconds, then they are to translate back up and lascom us with the information.”

  The fleet would not be to the V barrier by that time, and the lascom would catch them before they jumped.

  The translation signal of the selected supercruiser came onto the sensors. The admiral counted off the time until sixteen seconds went by. He was about to ask for a grav pulse to the ship when it translated back up into hyper V. Seven seconds later the lascom reached them, the high bandwidth signal feeding all of the ship's sensor readings into the flagship.

  “Hitting hyper IV translation,” called out the helmsman, a second before the lights dimmed and the translation nausea hit.

  Only four more translations to go, thought the admiral as he fought to keep the contents of his stomach in.

  * * *

  “The only thing that's come in so far admiral,” said the com officer, who was parsing the transmissions from all of the scouts in the outer region of the system. Since everything was coming in from Klassekians, there was no way the Cacas could trace them back to their sources, ships that were sitting cold in space.

  Nothing else was moving, with the exception of some small frigate style ships and a couple of dozen civilian vessels. Some of her commanders had requested that the admiral shut down all traffic within the system, presenting a dead plot to the enemy. Beata thought it would be more enticing for the enemy to see something in the system. After all, there was an inhabited planet here, as well as thousands of installations on moons, asteroids, or in orbit. It wasn't like they were going to fool the enemy into thinking there was no defense. But if they only accounted for the fixed defenses they knew had to be there; it gave her more of a chance of pulling off her surprise.

  If only it works, she thought. There were no guarantees. The Machines were probably easier to fool, lacking as they did the Gestalt of an organic mind. The Cacas might see clues that would sail right past an AI and make a connection. She couldn't think of anything they might see, which didn't mean it wasn't there, and wouldn't appear at the worst possible moment.

  “Are any of them near the minefields?”

  “They came in on a wide dispersion, but the closest are more than ten light seconds from the closest flanking weapons.”

  Beata did the calculations in her mind. The mines, really mobile weapons platforms, were as stealthy as human science could make them. A sensor platform would have to be closer than a light second to pick them up on passive, and even that was iffy. They were powered down, with only their own passive sensors and grav pulse receivers online, putting out a minimum of heat. At six light seconds a powerful active sensor sweep would pick them up. That still might happen at ten light seconds, though the odds were against it.

  She had ten thousand mines out there, though not all in position to make a kill. But most were. They were not all the same, unlike minefields in the past. About a third of them were Terran Empire made, holding one capital ship missile that could kill an enemy with a hit. Unfortunately, they didn't generate a whole lot of hits, maybe one in a hundred if they were lucky. She could have expected maybe a dozen kills with the weapons she had, enough to gall the enemy, but not enough to accomplish much more.

  The two other types of mines were the product of Klavarta research and development, untested in combat. Still, she was curious to see how they did. One carried ten counter sized missiles with twenty megaton warheads. Not enough to kill a ship, but a near miss could still cause some damage, while a hit could really hurt. The other type was the one she had really high hopes for. A fusion device would trigger a gamma ray laser in the terrawatt range, for a less than one second burst. The mine would have locked onto a target, its computer brain powerful enough to lead it, and send the beam directly into the enemy ship. Not enough to destroy it without a lot of luck. A hit could do some damage, maybe a lot, crippling the ship in question. Multiple hits could put it out of action.

  It wasn't the only minefield she had deployed, but it would be the most important for a couple of reasons. It was most likely to cause critical hits. And it would make the enemy think, making him move cautiously about the system. She also had all of her warp fighters deployed out there, light minutes away from the predicted emergence point and powered down. And a couple of hundred fast attack craft. Not all she had, but the majority of them.

  There was one other surprise waiting out there, something the scouts couldn't detect, and that hopefully would stay off their sensors even after it fired. It was the risk of one of her precious irreplaceable wormholes, but she thought it a worthwhile gamble.

  “We have a translation out near the V barrier, ma'am.”

  That set off alarm bells in the mind of the admiral. Had they sniffed out something and their commander had ordered his fleet to come out at that distance. From there they could take the entire system under fire, taking on fat unmoving targets, while whatever she sent out could be avoided by translation into hyper.

  “It's only one supercruiser, ma'am. I think it popped out to get a look at the system. And..it's popped back into hyper. The rest of the enemy fleet is coming in on their same profile.”
/>   Beata let out a breath she had been holding in while waiting for the bad news.

  “The scouts are boosting in at three hundred gravities, ma'am. On a heading for the Pleisia planet.”

  Walking right into my trap, thought the admiral, hoping that she got maximum return for her investment of lives and equipment. She would have preferred that all of the targets were battleships, but she would take what she could get.

  * * *

  Not every one of the hastily deployed fast attack craft had a Klassekian com tech aboard. There weren't enough of them to go around, when every one of the more effective warp fighters needed one to navigate, and it was more important to keep the major warships in the com loop.

  So we get to sit and wait, and not know what the hell is going on, thought Ensign Kallaris Plislas, looking at the holo plot with anxious eyes.

  The plot was set to their passive sensors, picking up graviton emissions, including those of the four hundred thousand ton Caca scout ships that were so near. Each of those two hundred odd vessels were forty times more massive than his ten thousand ton fast attack craft. Any one of them could swat him out of space with minimal effort, like an insect. Of course, this insect had a sting, but stings didn't always do the things that carried them any good.

  “Don't worry, sir,” said Warrant Officer Janaris, occupying the pilot’s seat. “We're going to do fine.”

  But does that mean we kill an enemy warship, then die ourselves, thought the young Alpha. That wasn't the kind of fine he was hoping for.

  Five people occupied the small bridge. Himself, the warrant/helmsman, and the weapons, sensor and com techs. There were three more people in the engineering section, giving him a total crew of eight. He didn't know how the people in engineering were feeling, but he could smell the fear on the bridge.

  “The enemy is ten minutes to translation to normal space, sir,” said the sensor tech, a young female who had even less experience than her officer.