Exodus: Empires at War: Book 11: Day of Infamy (Exodus: Empires at War.) Read online

  Exodus: Empires at War

  Book Eleven

  Day of Infamy

  by

  Doug Dandridge

  Dedication

  This novel is dedicated to my loyal fans and friends who stood by me, encouraged me, and showered me with good wishes while I struggled with health problems. This book, produced during a trying time, is for you. Thanks to all of you.

  Contact me at [email protected]

  Follow my Blog at http://dougdandridge.com

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  Copyright © 2016 Doug Dandridge

  All rights reserved.

  Please respect the hard work of this author. If you found this book for free on a pirate site, please visit Amazon and buy a copy of your own. I feel that I charge a reasonable price for this work.

  For more information on the Exodus Universe, visit http://dougdandridge.net for maps, sketches and other details of this work.

  The Story So Far is now located at the back of the book, on the recommendation of many fans.

  Books by Doug Dandridge

  Doug Dandridge’s Author Page at Amazon

  Science Fiction

  The Exodus Series

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 1

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 2

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 3: The Rising Storm.

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 4: the Long Fall.

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 5: Ranger

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 6: The Day of Battle

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 7: Counter Strike:

  Exodus: Empires at War Book 8: Soldiers

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 9: Second Front.

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 10: Search & Destroy.

  Exodus: Tales of the Empire: Exploration Command:

  Exodus: Tales of the Empire: Beast of the Frontier.

  Exodus: Machine Wars: Book 1: Supernova.

  Exodus: Machine Wars: Book 2: Bolthole.

  The Deep Dark Well Series

  The Deep Dark Well

  To Well and Back

  Deeper and Darker

  Theocracy

  Others

  The Shadows of the Multiverse

  Diamonds in the Sand

  The Scorpion

  Afterlife

  We Are Death, Come for You

  Five By Five 3: Target Zone:

  Fantasy

  The Refuge Series

  Refuge: The Arrival: Book 1

  Refuge: The Arrival: Book 2

  Refuge: Book 3: The Legions

  Refuge: Book 4: Kurt’s Quest:

  Doppelganger: A Novel of Refuge

  Others

  The Hunger

  Daemon

  Aura

  Marathon

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  Cast of Characters

  The Capital

  Emperor Sean Ogden Lee Romanov: Emperor of New Terran Empire.

  Empress Jennifer Conway Romanov: Sean’s Wife and Physician.

  Grand High Admiral Sondra McCullom: Chief of Naval Operations.

  Captain Xiun: Sondra's aide.

  Admiral Ekaterina Sergiov: Chief of Imperial Combined Intelligence Service.

  Countess Esmeralda Zhee: Member of the Lords’ Opposition Party.

  Angel Sergio Martinez: Former Naval Commando, and now assassin known as The Angel of Death.

  Tomas Gijardo: Business Analyst and citizen living in Capitulum.

  Chief Warrant Officer Debra Wasserman: Imperial Army fighter pilot.

  Nick Stumpfield: Leader of the Temporal Realignment Faction.

  Admiral Hoshi Nakama: Commander, Central Docks.

  Captain Victoria Crenshaw: Duty Officer, Central Docks.

  The Fleet

  Grand Fleet Admiral Duke Taelis Mgonda: Admiral in command of Hyper VII battle force.

  Grand Fleet Admiral Gabriel Len Lenkowski: Commander: Battle Fleet.

  Commander Xavier Jackson: Captive of the Ancients.

  Admiral Mikas Silveski: Imperial Commander Second Front.

  Vice Admiral Mashara Ignoa: Gryphon Commander on Second Front.

  Admiral Mikal Kalashnikov: Military Commander of the Donut.

  Captain Javier Chavez: Imperial Fleet Inertialess Fighter Wing Commander.

  Vice Admiral Mei Lei: Scout Force Commander.

  Captain the Duke Maurice von Rittersdorf: Commander, Scout Force Destroyer Squadron.

  Imperial Army

  Cornelius Walborski: The Count. Ranger Lt. Colonel and three time holder of the Imperial Medal of Heroism.

  Klavarta

  President Manstara: President, Nation of New Earth.

  Thallia Thrann: Klavarta Underdirector of Interspecies Relations.

  Admiral Regis Larista: Commander, Klavarta Fleet.

  Ngerita Olsaf: Larista’s Chief of Staff.

  Ca’cadasans

  Jresstratta IV: Supreme Emperor of the Ca’cadasan Empire

  Great Admiral Ljarritta’ran: Ca’cadasan Admiral in charge of New Terran Front.

  Great Admiral Mgananawan K’lantariana: Commander: Second Front

  Doctor Ivan Smirnov: New Moscow Scientist, working on wormholes for the Ca’cadasans.

  Tom Jasper: Captain of the Ca’cadasan Infiltration Ship Laughing Troll.

  Others

  Devera Walborski: Warrant Officer Medic and the wife of Cornelius.

  Rebecca Walborski: Sean and Devera’s adopted daughter.

  Dr. Kenji Guatarrez: Time Travel Researcher.

  Klorasof: Ancient.

  Prologue

  “Everything is almost in place, Supreme Lord,” reported the Supreme Admiral, the overall commander of the Ca’cadasan fleet.

  The Supreme Emperor of the Ca’cadasan Empire Jresstratta IV looked at the trio of males on the holo, trying to determine how they really felt about this plan through the normal wooden expression of their kind. The Supreme Admiral seemed to be showing a little excitement, while the other two were stone-faced. No, that wasn’t quite true. The Great Admiral who had come up with the plan, the Chief of Operations, appeared to be slightly nervous. Not surprising, since failure would fall upon his head.

  The Emperor looked at the holo plot hanging in the air to his front. The locations of the two infiltration ships were just within the space of the human Empire, transmitted to the capital by the wormholes they carried. The other groups, many of them, were still positioned on the Ca’cadasan side of the frontier, except for the forces that had already snuck across.

  “What of our human pawns?” asked the Emperor.

  “They know what they need to know,” answered the Great Admiral who had formulated the plan. “They think there is a chance that they might return from their mission, the fools. And once they aid us in destroying the Empire of their own people? Then what need for them?”

  Then they will follow their people into oblivion, thought the Emperor. Not a just reward for the service they would perform, but what had been decreed by the last Emperor, the current Monarch’s father. And as unjust as he felt it to be, he saw no reason to reverse it. His people believed without reservation that the human species needed to be exterminated, and he felt no need to steal their well-deserved revenge from them. It would be hard on the human species, but they had brought it on themselves. The Emperor dismissed thoughts of justice and again focused on the plot hanging in the air.

  It’s a complicated plan, thought the Emperor with some trepidation. If it su
cceeded, the human Empire was sure to collapse, and his fleet would roll over them. If it didn’t? Then he could lose a fleet, but then again, he had plenty of ships to form other fleets.

  It was an audacious plan, something the Ca’cadasans didn’t excel at. The plan for the main battle was something that most commanders of the past would recognize. With the exception of the wormholes those forces would be carrying. Not enough for what the Emperor wanted to do, but all he had at the moment. They couldn’t do what the humans did with their thousands of portals. They didn’t have the weapons that the humans fired through their wormholes, weapons that gave the enemy a great advantage. But if used wisely they could still serve as a force multiplier, and catch the humans off guard. And that was the audacious part of the plan, not simply depending on the firepower of the massive fleet.

  If the second part of the plan worked they would take the advantages away from the humans. They would no longer have their wonderful and terrible wormhole weapons, nor would they have the ability to shift forces across their Empire like they had in the past. That they would still have some wormhole gates was a given, but they would not have the network they had built up over the war. They would find themselves scrambling to work around the collapse of that network.

  If the second part of the plan worked, it really didn’t matter if the fleet won its battle. It would probably be the last victory of the human fleet in this war. If it didn’t work, it also might not matter if the fleet won its battle, but it would hasten the end of the humans if it did.

  “Proceed,” ordered the Emperor, his teeth showing in a predatory smile. “Cut the head off the beast, and give my people a victory. Give me a victory.”

  * * *

  “We still advise that we wait until the Cacas launch another offensive, your Majesty,” said Grand High Admiral Sondra McCullom, Chief of Naval Operations for the Imperial Fleet.

  “I was always taught that the offensive was the only way to win a war, Admiral,” replied the Emperor of the New Terran Empire, Sean Ogden Lee Romanov, the first of his name.

  “The defense still has its advantages, your Majesty,” said the senior officer of the Fleet. “It’s true that we will eventually have to take it to the enemy, but I would rather wait until we have more of the technological advantages we are developing before we start pushing our fleet into their space. If we can engage them in some battles that play to our defensive advantages, we can whittle them down a bit. But don’t worry. I think that in another year we can go on an offensive that will eventually take us to their home world.”

  “And then we can beat them in what? A year? Five?”

  Sondra smiled at the naiveté of the Monarch, who, though extremely intelligent, was still very young. He was a budding military genius, well read on all of the aspects of warfare. But all of the wars that he had studied had been relatively short lived affairs, from one to six years. An artifact of fighting either on the surface of a planet, or across a relatively reasonable distance through space. This would not be such a war.

  “At least a decade, your Majesty,” said the CNO.

  “But, it’s only six months travel time from our frontier to their capital.”

  “And if there was no resistance, we could go from our frontier to their capital in that time. Just a nice hyper VII cruise. Unfortunately, we will have to fight our way through an enormous fleet and hundreds of well-fortified systems. Sure, we can bypass some of them, and the wormholes will take some of the pressure off of our supply lines. But it would be foolhardy to thinks these beings are just going to roll over and die once we start penetrating their space. And if we take their capital? We still could have an enormous empire to conquer if they don’t decide to surrender.”

  “And I doubt they would,” said Sean. “After all, there are a lot of species in this Galaxy that are looking for payback. And they will try to avoid that at all costs.”

  Sondra nodded. Something she liked about this Emperor was the way he tried to look at the facts before making his decisions.

  “We have a long hard road ahead of us. Thank God we have the tech advantages we have, and we will only increase our lead. If we don’t jump into any frivolous offensives and waste our forces, and if we hit them where they are weak, we will win this war. But against an opponent so large, nothing is a given, and I advise caution.”

  “Then that is what we will do,” said Sean, nodding. “We will do as you and your planning staff think best.”

  As long as we are correct, thought the CNO. As soon as we make a mistake, we’re fired, and someone else will take charge.

  Chapter One

  You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. Winston Churchill

  CAPITULUM, JEWEL: NOVEMBER 10TH, 1002. D-52.

  Warrant Officer First Debra Visserman pulled the stick of her F-48 Peregrine and banked through the high clouds. She was cruising at eighteen thousand meters over the city, her airspeed set at Mach two. She wanted to push it harder. The sixty ton aircraft felt like a hobbled stallion to her experienced touch, wanting to break free and gallop across the sky. At her present altitude she could push up to Mach thirty-five, except she would then be breaking a dozen regulations against such speeds over an occupied area of the planet. There were also rules against attaining that kind of speed over any of the wilderness areas of the world, lest the aircraft frighten the wildlife. In fact, just about the only place she could open it up was over the ocean deeps.

  She looked down at the nighttime cityscape below, several hundred thousand square kilometers of the most occupied land in the Empire, the capital, with over three billion inhabitants. Toward the center were the towering megascrapers, many reaching above five thousand meters in height, interspersed with lower archologies that still towered over a kilometer into the sky. Radiating out from the central region was a lower sprawl of skyscrapers and smaller buildings, set among neighborhoods of low rise and single family housing. The huge urban area was one of the reasons there were so many rules in place restricting her handling of her hot fighter. Not only the way in which her hypersonic booms might disturb the populace, but the threat of an out of control aircraft falling into the city like a kinetic weapon.

  Like I would let that happen, thought the confident young woman, who had placed at the head of her class in Imperial Army flight school among almost five hundred classmates. She had almost five hundred hours in the Peregrine, a thousand overall among all types of atmospheric craft. It was like a part of her, and she felt like she was wearing leg shackles under all the restrictions.

  “You are entering a restricted air zone,” said the craft’s computer voice, what they all called Bitching Betty, a term that had come down from the antiquity of prespace civilization. “You are entering a restricted air zone.”

  “OK, you bitch,” replied Debra, making sure that it wasn’t going out over the com. She banked the fighter over again, moving out of the airspace of the Constance the Great spacesport, the largest and busiest landing field in the Empire, before she started getting complaints from the air-space controllers of the facility. There were at least a dozen shuttles always on one or another stages of approach, and an equal number on their way up to high orbit and beyond.

  “This is Alpha Three Seven,” she said over the com, connecting to her own base, just outside of the city. “Permission to ascend to two hundred thousand meters.”

  “Permission granted,” came back the voice almost immediately.

  She was not surprised, as she was out on a training mission, and extra-atmospheric flight was one of the areas she needed more time on. The Peregrine, like most advanced atmospheric fighters, used an array of grabber units for propulsion, and really could function as a short range spaceship at need. Flying back into an atmosphere was a trickier proposition than heading out, and it was a skill that all atmospheric fighter pilots were expected to master, since they might be assigned to an assault carrier in the future, flying support and air superiority
missions from orbit.

  Visserman set her plane on its tail and rocketed upwards, rising high above the planet until she was in low orbit, watching as the partial globe of the star poked over the horizon. She checked her tactical display, made sure nothing was in the way, and pushed the craft up to thirty thousand kilometers an hour, flying out to sea and into the rising sun for ten minutes, then quickly decelerating back down to four thousand kilometers an hour and pushing her nose down, heading back for a reentry. In about a minute the fighter was biting back into the atmosphere, and shook with the turbulence of hitting the gas envelope of the planet.

  The pilot leveled the craft off at twenty thousand meters, then banked again and went into a steady descent until she could see the ocean waves below, then leveled off again, kicking in the acceleration until she was flying Mach ten only a couple of hundred meters above the water. Her computer cautioned her on her speed as she approached the coast line, and she was down to just below the speed of sound as she crossed one of the popular city beaches and headed for her base.

  The base, Paulus Sevestal Field, was an operational fighter field tasked with the defense of the city and this hemisphere of the planet. Not that there was much need of defense at this, the veritable center of the Empire. It was laid out with the protection of the based aircraft in mind, with covered revetments spaced out around the runway. Laser, particle beam and missile emplacements surrounded the field, there to protect the aircraft and crews from attack. Or at least to provide training for the soldiers still learning to master those systems.

  “The Colonel would like to see you, ma’am,” her mechanic told her as soon as she climbed out of the aircraft. “At your earliest convenience.”

  Crap, thought the Warrant, wondering what this might be about. She couldn’t think of anything good, unless her transfer to a unit aboard an assault carrier had come through. With that thought came a smile, and she hurried across the field to the administration building. Capitulum was situated in the tropics, and always seemed hot to her. Debra was from Frisco, the city on the peninsula in the upper temperate zone of this same continent, and was used to cooler temps, except for the winters that were downright cold. She had worked up a sweat through her flight suit by the time she had gotten to the building.