Exodus: Empires at War: Book 7: Counter Strike (41 page)

“Yes, sir,” shouted the General into the com,
then switched to the broadcast circuit for his brigade commanders.  “The word
is go,” he said into the com, listening to the jubilant acknowledgements that
came back.

Not very professional
, he thought with a
smile, not about to castigate anyone for the feelings he knew were going
through his commanders. 
They want payback, for family, friends, even the
strangers they had taken oaths to protect. 
Thoughts of Sestius, of his
losing battle against the Cacas, giving ground as his attached units, his
people, bled out.  As the civilians he was supposed to be protecting died by
the thousands. 
And now we get some.

The holo projector came to life, rolling into
position beneath an opening, then firing a powerful blast of laser light in a
wide cone up into the sky.  The clouds overhead flared with bright light, the
clear areas with a canvas of colors.  The other projectors added their light,
until an area of hundreds of thousands of square kilometers were no longer
under visual observation from space.

The electronic jamming commenced at the same
time, each unit putting out megawatts of static across all frequencies,
blotting out enemy communications, covering up the electronic emissions of
Imperial battle suits and vehicles.  The division’s main battle computer,
secreted in a secure cavern, was keeping track of all the changes to the
electronic jamming, switching the division’s com through frequencies that were
clear for seconds at a time.

At the same moment the ground based equipment
powered up, a hundred hypervelocity rockets flew into the air, pulling a
thousand gravities.  A couple of seconds after launch, over fifteen kilometers
into the sky, the rockets detonated.  Two thirds of them blew out clouds of
particulate matter that added more obscuring potential to the atmosphere. 
Thirty-two of them detonated with the flash and crack of nuclear warheads,
ionizing the atmosphere, adding even more
junk
to look through.

The shore guns fired next, sending up their
shells and beams to hit the bombardment ships that still sat in orbit.  As soon
as all the obscurants were in place they lost target lock, and continued to
fire on where the targets were predicted to go in the next several minutes.

“Artillery, open fire,” was the next command
over the com net.  The hundred and twenty tubes of division artillery opened
fire, sending their one hundred millimeter shells on shallow high velocity arcs
into the enemy targets.  Most of the shells had warheads in the kiloton range,
rippling with nuclear fire across the Caca positions.  Some were heavier
rounds, carrying hundred kiloton warheads meant to ravage fortifications and
destroy armored vehicles, their preferred targets.

The tank behind him rumbled into life, lifting
on its grabbers, its electromag field coming up in a shimmering bubble.  The tank
moved forward, between the trees, knocking down one that got in the way.

Baggett walked away from the projection unit
and back to his command bunker.  It was not his role to close with the enemy,
that was only a desperation move, with no place in this battle.  His job was
oversight, to make sure his brigades were doing what he wanted them to do.  As
it was the brigade commanders’ jobs to see to the dispositions of their
battalions, to accomplish their missions, while the battalion commanders saw to
the employment of their companies.

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 9
^TH
, 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 ships 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 the 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.