Exodus: Tales of The Empire: Book 2: Beasts of the Frontier. (21 page)

“Well, we
survived,” said Frobisher over the com, relief and fatigue combined in his
voice.

“Yeah,” said
Cinda, checking the emergency beacons of the other crew and determining that
over half her crew made it off, one hundred and twenty-one souls.  Which meant
that over a hundred had already died.

One of the
beacons went offline, and the Captain rotated her suit to look in that
direction, wondering what new calamity had come upon them.  She turned just in
time to see something flare in space, her HUD telling her it was about seven
hundred kilometers away.  The sinking feeling in her stomach told her what it
was, even before calls of panic came over the com net.

“It’s the damn
Caca shuttle,” yelled someone, her HUD identifying it as one of the missile crew.

“Try to hit
them,” yelled the voice of the Sergeant in charge of the small Marine
contingent.  They were armed with rifles, just as the rest of the crew had
particle beam pistols holstered on their suits.  And they would be firing at a
heavily armored shuttle whose fire control systems could track and kill them
with ease.

Another beacon
went off her track, then another, and she screamed out in anger as she watched
the shuttle, a vessel her frigate could have destroyed with ease, killing the
men and women she had ordered to what she had thought was safety.  The beacons
started to move, the crew going into the drill that had been hammered into them
for such unlikely situations, making them harder to hit.  Still, not hard
enough, as more beacons dropped off.

“Hang on,” said
another voice over the com, one that the Captain did not recognize.  “We’re on
the way.”

The shuttle
flared with light, taken under fire by something unseen that had entered the
battle.  It flared again, then exploded outward, destroyed.

“Who are you?”
asked Cinda over the com, still having a hard time believing that there was
anything in the system that could have challenged the shuttle. 
There were
only the two commercial ships,
she thought, looking back at the bright dot
of the planet. 
And their transfer shuttles.

“This is Attack
Fighter
New Kiev Four
,” came the voice over the com.

“I thought you
had been destroyed with the battle cruiser,” she said, trying to spot the six
hundred ton fighter against the star field.  The battle cruiser would have
carried eight of the small vessels, used for scouting and missile attacks.

“We were left
behind,” said the woman on the other side of the com.  “As a last resort
defense of the planet.  Not that it would have done much good.  I have three
flight mates with me, while the other flight goes after the remaining
shuttles.”

“Can you pick us
up?” asked Cinda.  The fighters carried a crew of five each, and could probably
carry fifteen of her crew each in a tight fit.

“We’ll get as
many as we can, ma’am,” replied the pilot.  “But we have shuttles from those
merchies behind us.  Give us a little bit of time and we’ll get all of your
people out of space.”

True to their
word, everyone was picked up within a couple of hours.  Cinda boosted toward
one of the shuttles on her grabbers, insisting that everyone else be picked up
first.  As she boarded the shuttle she felt total relief for the first time in
days.  She didn’t know her fate, but her crew was safe.  And for the moment
that was all that mattered.

*     *     *

Four days later
there was another visit to the system.  There was a moment of panic on the
planet as the ships were picked up moving through hyper VI, then people calmed
down as a sensor tech on the merchant ship in orbit identified them as Imperial
vessels.  A little over an hour later three battleships and a pair of
destroyers entered the system and boosted for the planet on a least time
profile that would get them into orbit in two and a half days.

Cinda worried
the entire time the ships were on the way.  She had been declared a hero on the
planet, the savior of them all.  But the fact remained that she had disobeyed
the orders of a superior officer and had refused combat.  It didn’t matter that
it was a stupid order that would have caused the destruction of her ship, and
would not have benefited the civilians of the system at all.  It might not
matter that the superior’s order went against the directive of the Commander
and Chief of the Empire.  She had committed an offense that could lead to her execution
if she was found guilty by a military tribunal.  The rest of the crew had
already distanced themselves from her, as if she had a terminal disease that
they were likely to catch.

Halfway to the
planet the Commodore commanding the task force ordered the civilian population
to prepare for evacuation.  Most of the civilians were relieved.  Some were
distraught.  And there was a vocal few that were angry that the Empire wouldn’t
devote the resources to defend their frontier planet from the alien menace.  Some
of those would be talked into leaving anyway.  Some few hundred would stay, and
the Marines would make sure they had the weapons to hurt the Ca’cadasan ground
forces if the aliens came back.  Not that they would survive, but if they
killed some Cacas, the Empire would be happy with the return for their
investment of a couple of hundred infantry weapons.

It took sixteen
days galactic standard time to make it back to a secure base.  Due to
relativity the time passed much faster aboard the
Duke Georgi Newberry,
the
flagship of the battleship squadron.  Six days ship time, as the vessel built
up to point nine c in hyper VI.  The ship was crowded with fifteen thousand
extra pairs of lungs, its share of the refugees.  Even the large vessel seemed
crowded with so many more people on board.  Cinda at least could get away from
some of that crowding at mealtime, when she could eat in officers’ country. 
She still had to share a compartment with all the rest of her officers, most of
whom seemed to spend the majority of their time out of the former petty
officers’ quarters, or had locked themselves in their sound proofed sleeping
compartments where they could deal with their fears in private.  The Lt.
Commander felt like she was a leper, and all of her people were afraid that
they might contract her disease.  They were polite when they had to interact
with her, and distant at all times.

Klerk went
through many hours of questioning on the trip, with the Commodore, the Flag
Captain, the Intelligence Officer, she was surprised they didn’t make her talk
with the chief cook.  Her officers talked with the same people, and she was
sure they were making a case against her.  She would not know how good or bad
it was until they made it back to a headquarters.  She thought it might be good
enough to hang her.

Cinda was on an
observation deck when the
Newberry
translated into normal space outside
the hyper barrier, sitting in a comfortable chair and looking at the system
holo as the image of the local space around a developing world came to life. 
She was tapped into the ship’s non-command functions, and could zoom in on
anything she wanted for a local view directly to her occipital lobe.

The Amazon
system
was the home of over two hundred and twenty million sentient beings, mostly humans,
over two hundred million on the inhabitable planet.  The orbit of the world was
filled with stations, forts, factories, even shipyards.  Now that it was the
new sector headquarters it was a system that the Empire was not willing to lose
without a fight, as shown by the more than three hundred warships around the
star.  Along with those vessels were hundreds of freighters and liners, as well
as quite a few antimatter tankers.  What she couldn’t see, but was still aware
of, were the hundreds of thousands of troops that held the surface of the
planet.  Men and women manning surface batteries.  Ready to fight off enemy
ships, or standing by to battle invading troops.

Two hours after
entering the system Cinda was on a fast shuttle heading insystem.  The battleships
were needed out here, where they could prepare for their next mission close to
the hyper barrier.  Cinda linked into the shuttle sensors and saw a trio of
liners heading out from the planet to take the civilian refugees off.  She
wished she could have waited for those liners as well, but someone wanted to
take care of her, and quickly.

The shuttle had
been configured with actual VIP quarters.  What that meant on such a small
craft was that Klerk had a tiny soundproofed cabin with barely enough room for
a bed, and the space to stand up beside it.  At least it allowed her some
privacy.  Her officers and a few of her crew were also along for the ride,
although the enlisted personnel had to use the normal passenger seats that
equipped the main cabin of the shuttle.

After a two day
trip they arrived at the orbital fort that was the sector headquarters.  Over a
hundred million tons of station, thought by some to be a waste of resources
that could have been put into building hulls.  They couldn’t move at more than
one gee of acceleration, enough to allow them to change orbits, and possibly
dodge incoming beam weapons at a distance, though they hadn’t a chance against
swarms of missiles.  Still, the stations packed a lot of defensive weaponry,
and carried thousands of five hundred ton missiles with fusion warheads, the
only kind allowed in close orbit of an inhabited planet, as antimatter weapons
could go off by merely breaching containment, unlike the thermonuclear
warheads, that had to be deliberately triggered.  That information passed
through the Lt. Commander’s mind swiftly before it locked back on the subject
that most interested her at this time, her own fate.

“Lt. Commander
Klerk,” said a full Commander at the head of the armed Marine detail that met her
as she walked out of the shuttle.  “You will come with me.  The rest of you,”
said the man, pointing at a party of six naval officers, “will go with these
people.  They will see to your needs, and will talk with you.”

Interrogate
is more like it,
thought Cinda, falling in behind the Commander while the
Marines, wearing dress reds and equipped with side arms, fell in around her. 
They walked several hundred meters of corridor, crowded with people in uniform
who moved out of their way as soon as they saw the Marines, until they came to
a lift station in which a ready conveyance was waiting.

“Who am I going
to see?” she asked the Commander, who gave her a harsh look and said nothing.

After a couple
of minutes on the lift, which went up, then horizontally, they stopped at
another station, and the Commander motioned her to follow him.  They arrived at
a door that opened at their approach.  Cinda looked at the nameplate over the
door and wondered just what they had in store for her.

“The Admiral
will see her immediately,” said a Petty Officer who was the flag officer’s
secretary.

“We’ll wait
outside,” said the Commander, motioning for the Marines to follow him out.

Lt. Commander
Cinda Klerk would rather have faced another Goliath, one of the Ca’cadasan
superbattleships, than the man she was to face at this moment.  But such a ship
was not before her, and this door was.  She walked toward it on stiff legs,
hoping that something might be wrong with the mechanism.  The door instead slid
smoothly open, revealing the luxuriously appointed office beyond.  Cinda
stepped through that door, walked the ten paces to the desk, and snapped to
attention, rendering a proper hand salute.

“Lt. Commander
Cinda Klerk, reporting as ordered, sir,” she blurted, her eyes locked to the front.

“Following
orders now, are we, Commander?” said the stout man behind the desk.

Cinda’s eyes
drifted down to see a dark skinned man sitting behind the desk, the six stars
of a Grand Fleet Admiral
on the shoulder boards of his dress blues. 
Duke Taelis Mgonda was the commander of Sector IV, the hot district in this
war, as well as the flag officer in charge of the sector battle fleet.  She had
wondered when she saw the name on the door what the man was doing here.  Sure,
the system was the replacement headquarters for the
Conundrum system
,
which had been lost earlier in the war.  He was said to spend most of his time
on his flagship, deployed with the fleet.  But, of course, the station had a
wormhole gate, as did, of course, the Duke’s flagship, so he could be here for
a short time, then step across the light years to his own vessel.

“Cacas got your
tongue, Commander?” asked the Duke in his gruff voice.  “I asked you a
question.”

“I did not think
the orders of the captain of the
New Kiev
made any sense, sir,”
she said, locking her eyes again on the wall behind the man.  A wall that
contained awards, diplomas, even pictures of the man with the late Emperor,
Augustine the First and his wife.  “Besides,” she said, taking her cue from the
picture of the father of the current Emperor, Sean I, “he was in violation of
the orders of the Emperor.”

“So you decided
to disobey the orders of the lawful superior on the spot?”

“His orders made
no sense, your Grace,” answered Cinda, knowing that this was her only real defense. 
“We were not in a position to cause equal or greater damage to the enemy, based
on his combat dispositions.”

“The Captain of
the
New Kiev
was an idiot,” said the Duke, nodding his head.  “The smart
play would have been to have gotten out of the system as soon as possible.  The
Cacas only had the one ship, and they wouldn’t have been able to catch his ship
and yours, and attack the planet at the same time.”

“They could have
still blown us all out of space with missiles.”

“And that they
might have, young lady.  They might also have missed.  But he surely doomed his
command by boosting into the teeth of that enemy ship.”