Exodus: Empires at War: Book 3: The Rising Storm Read online

  3724 to 3733 AD (Year 463 to 472): First Crakastan War, human victory.

  3744 to 3762 AD (Year 483 to 501): First Lasharan War, human victory.

  3772 to 3784 AD (Year 511 to 523): Second Lasharan War, human victory.

  3797 to 3801 AD (Year 536 to 540): First Margravi War, human victory.

  3803 to 3808 AD (Year 542 to 547): War of Revolt, Imperial Victory, 150 million humans leave Empire to found Republic of Mankind.

  3809 to 3814 AD (Year 548 to 553): Civil War, Constance the Great triumphs over Cassius the Terrible (II).

  3815 AD (Year 554): New Constitution establishes Constitutional Monarchy. (Bill of Freedoms added in Year 607).

  3841 to 3846 AD (Year 585 to 590). Machine Revolt. Human built autonomous robots rebel against humanity. Billions die before revolt stopped, Man in the Loop Law enacted.

  3848 to 3853 AD (Year 587 to 592). Second Crakastan War, human victory.

  3873 to 3876 AD (Year 612 to 615): Third Cracastan War, human victory.

  3892 to 3897 AD (Year 631 to 635): Second Margravi War, human victory, ends with alliance of Margravi and Klashak with human empire.

  3913 to 3936 AD (Year 652 to 673): First Galactic War (against Lashar, Crakasta and Fenri).

  3984 AD (Year 723): Donut Project approved and construction planning begins.

  3984 to 4000 AD (Year 723 to 739): Elysium War, marginal human victory.

  4007 to 4008 AD (Year 746 to 747): War of Man, humanity (Imperium) against humanity (Republic). Political pressures bring an end to short, sharp war.

  4009 to 4114 AD (Year 748 to 853): The Century of Peace. Empire involved in no extra empire or border hostilities.

  4065 AD (Year 804): Dissidents from New Terra Republic found the Grand Duchy of New Moscow.

  4114 to 4131 AD (Year 853 to 870): Second Galactic War, Elysium, Lashar and Fenri against Empire, New Terra and Margrave/Klashak, human victory.

  4167 to 4180 AD (Year 906 to 921): Third Galactic War, humanity's victory.

  4206 to 4216 AD (Year 945 to 955): Klang Consortium attacks New Moscow. Empire of Terra and Republic of New Terra come in on New Moscow’s side.

  4256 AD (Year 985): Donut Generates first working wormhole gate.

  4261 AD (Year 1000): Empire celebrates 1000 years of existence and growth. January 1, 1000 local Galactic calendar.

  March 15th, 4256, Ca’cadasan invasion of Empire begins in earnest with the attack on Sestius and Massadara.

  Prologue

  What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also. Julius Caesar

  PLANET JEWEL ORBIT AND CAPITULUM, CAPITAL CITY OF THE NEW TERRAN EMPIRE, MARCH 18TH, 1000 STANDARD CALENDER.

  High Fleet Admiral Sir Gabriel Len Lenkowski, Chief of Naval Operations, sat at his desk in the shipboard office, seemingly looking out over the huge park that stretched to the north of Imperial Naval Headquarters. Seemingly in that this was only a holographic projection on the wall of the office. Seemingly in that the High Admiral was really at feverish work within his mind, tapped into the databanks of the Super-battleship Valkyrie. These were in turn capable of tapping into every military and governmental database in the Capital City below, which meant that most of the information known to man was at his mental fingertips.

  He gazed out over the maples and oaks in the park, their leaves rippling in the breeze coming off the bay a half dozen kilometers distant. From his height in the imaginary building on the hill he could see the miniature sails of larger pleasure vessels upon that water. He sighed as he looked at those ships, thinking back to his history lessons, learned so earnestly in the Academy so many years ago.

  In some ways we are no more advanced than they were in the days of sail, he thought, his mind turning inward. Oh, we can travel almost infinitely faster, but the distances are almost infinitely greater as well. And just like the frigate captains of old, the men who commanded the pickets of the fleet were powers unto themselves. They had no way of knowing when they entered a system and saw an alien ship ahead if it was friend or foe. Or if their actions might make it one or the other. They had to be on their toes, but not too provocative. And directions from headquarters might take months to reach them, on the closest approaching ship, whose orders might also be out of date. Many times it was months before ships on patrols to the less densely populated regions were known to be missing. It might be many more months before they were discovered, if at all.

  I don’t even know all of my admirals, much less my captains, thought the man as he scrolled through the personnel lists in his mind. Oh, he could bring up their names, as well as a dossier on every man and woman in the fleet. But he truly didn’t know them. He wouldn’t even think to look at them unless someone further down the chain tagged them for his attention. So he was more insulated from the men who actually fought for the Empire than any leader in history.

  The High Fleet Admiral dismissed the thought from his mind as he concentrated on the most important sector of the Empire at this moment. The sector that was under assault by the ancient enemy, returned to attack the human race once again. All he knew right now was the information that had been sent to sector command over the series of hyperlinks that were this era’s equivalent to telegraph lines strung between the colonies. And the return reply of the sector commander with his dispositions. And really nothing else, except that the new Emperor of Terra was aboard one of the warships that was likely to meet the enemy. And that the young man didn’t know he was Emperor yet. And maybe never would, if he died in combat.

  We have to make sure that doesn’t happen, thought the CNO, looking back into his office. But how? The CNO buried his face in his hands for a moment as he agonized over the situation. The new Emperor in waiting was a very young man. But he was a young gentleman of the Fleet, who had undergone fleet training and a deployment to a warship. The next in line, a distant cousin, had none of the training that the military instilled in their young ladies and gentlemen. The military’s sense of honor and duty. And from what the High Admiral had heard, the man was a fop who was beholden to several members of the Imperial House of Lords.

  “We’ve just received a message from Sector 12 HQ,” came a voice over the intercom. “I think you will want to see it before we upload it into the databanks.”

  “On my way,” said the Admiral, slapping his hand on his desk and hoping the news was something that would allow him some action. Because no matter how long it had been since he had been at the spear point of the fleet, it was still hard to sit and wait, while others took the action that caused a win or a loss.

  * * *

  “What a fricken mess,” said Capital Police Lieutenant Ishuhi Rykio as he walked into the room. It was definitely a murder, though there was no body in evidence. But then bodies tended to disappear when subjected to large amounts of laser energy. All that was left of this one was the fine ash that was the remains of bones, and the vapor that had been whisked from the room by the house’s environmental controls.

  “So, what do you have, Robbie?” he asked the forensics man who was kneeling down and looking at some diagnostic equipment.

  “Definitely someone wanted whomever they vaporized to be gone,” said the forensics man. “Same with the house staff. There had to have been a couple of perps for them to do this and get out before rescue arrived.”

  Especially in a high security neighborhood like this, thought the detective, shaking his head. This was a Lord’s house, for God’s sake. Nothing short of a warship’s laser batteries would have been able to get through the roof or walls. And no one could have brought a weapon in, unless he was authorized by the homeowner to do so.

  “Military class laser?” he asked, looking around the room and visualizing what must have happened. The plastics and some of the metals in the room were partially melted. All of the rugs and tapestries, which in all modern dwellings were fire resistant to the point of being virtually fireproof, were gone, burned to ash. The walls and ceiling had
a scorched look.

  “Definitely,” said Robbie, nodding to the small smudge of ash where the victim had been standing. “Powerful enough to vaporize the victim and leave no genetic trace.”

  “Crap,” cursed the detective under his breath. They might have a real case here, involving an important member of the House of Lords. In fact, Grand Duke Carlos Maldonado of New Spain, while not the highest ranking Noble on the planet by any means, was one of the senior members of the Lords, the leader of the Brotherhood Party. And they couldn’t even be sure if he was one of the victims in this house. The Lords had many privileges, and being able to move around without monitoring was one of them.

  “Yeah, crap,” agreed Robbie, looking up from his viewer. “Hey, make sure you spray that wall.”

  The officer Robbie had yelled out to waved and started spraying down the wall with nanites. They would investigate anything on and in the wall, sending their findings back to Robbie.

  “We have no suspect,” said Robbie. “The room was basically burned of any kind of organic substance as far as we can tell. So no DNA or other markers to identify the murderer. No footprints on the carpet, carpet’s gone. And the halls around here have so many scuff marks through the day it will be one hell of a bitch to identify anything not supposed to be there.”

  “Why couldn’t he have used a nice, normal KE weapon?” asked the detective. “Then we could just take out the slug. Or even a civilian version of a laser.”

  “Because he was a professional,” said Robbie, arching an eyebrow. “Same reason no alarms went off on house or weapon during its use.”

  Ishuhi nodded and looked around the room again. Of course an assassin would make sure that any weapon he used had no alarm function, making it illegal as hell. Any normal killing with a civilian and even most military weapons would cause a signal to be sent to the nearest police station. And of course an assassin, or even just a murderer, wouldn’t really care if what he or she was using was illegal.

  “The whole room must have been filled with steam, ash and fire,” he said to Robbie.

  The forensic investigator turned his head, his eyebrow arching as he nodded. “Your point.”

  “The assassin must have been wearing some protective gear if he didn’t want to be burned or scalded. Maybe that’s something we can look into.”

  “In a city of three billion people,” said Robbie with a laugh. “On a planet with over fourteen billion. Yeah, we can look for that. But I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for an answer.”

  “No,” said Ishuhi, nodding as he reached for his secure communicator. “No, but I just thought of something.”

  “Well, don’t keep me waiting,” said Robbie as Ishuhi linked to the Ministry of Defense computer to see if he could gather any information, and ran into a secure firewall that wouldn’t recognize his clearance.

  Now that’s interesting, he thought. He looked over at Robbie. “Just that this is the second high profile political murder in less than a week, in a city that normally doesn’t see more than one a decade.

  * * *

  MASSADARA SYSTEM, 100 LIGHT YEARS FROM THE OUTER IMPERIAL BORDER OF SECTOR FOUR.

  Captain Bryce Suttler stared at the viewer as it brought the scene from light hours away into the bridge with crystal clarity. Resolution was not a problem. He wished it were in real time, but the laws of physics must be obeyed. At least for now, he thought, remembering the briefings he had received on the up and coming wormhole technologies before he took command of Sea Stag. There were a lot of things on the drawing board that excited the R & D people. But the drawing board was not the here and now.

  Sea Stag sat just inside the hyper limit of Massadara, grabbers powered down, her stealth skin absorbing all radiation that might give her away to prying eyes. Heat had always been the problem with stealth operations. Space vehicles tended to radiate like small stars when they were going about their business. Several solutions had been tried in the past to get rid of waste heat in a surreptitious manner. Some had worked, after a fashion, such as converting heat to microwaves and beaming them away from the enemy. Until that enemy blundered upon the beam and the game was up. Small holes to hyper had also worked to a point, but limited a stealth ship to the outer reaches of most solar systems.

  The wormhole in the center of the ship was still disturbing in some ways to captain and crew. It messed with the mind to look at it, even if it measured less than a meter in diameter. It just looked wrong, sitting there in its frame of negative matter, suspended in the air in magnetic fields. Various wires and conduits passed into it, and across the almost infinite distance of space to its point of origin. The main conduit passed almost all of the waste heat and other radiative energies of the ship back to an absorbing station, rendering Sea Stag almost totally invisible at anything but right on top of it range. That invisibility aided the ship in its two primary functions. It had fulfilled one of those functions during the battle for this system, destroying one alien destroyer, and seriously damaging another, striking out of nowhere with lasers and missiles. And being in on the destruction of an enemy battleship, along with the battle cruiser that had been carrying the Heir who was to be Emperor. The dream of every stealth/attack ship, to take out a capital vessel. Now it was fulfilling its other primary function, spying on that same enemy as they went about occupying the system they had just conquered.

  “Hope this gives them some idea of what we’re facing,” said the exec over the circuit from his station in CIC.

  “I just wish the feed were going to sector HQ, instead of the home system,” said the Captain, watching the seemingly tiny shapes of the alien ships swing in orbit around the planet. A planet that had been a human possession up to a couple of days before. “It’s all well and good that home gets the information, but sector could act on it faster.”

  “Something really big is moving up through hyper VII, sir,” came the voice of the sensor tech over the link.

  “Another one of their super-battleships?” asked the Captain, calling up the sine wave graph of hyper signals. They were all over the place, showing the local hyperspace a swarm of enemy activity. Activity that made it too hot for the Sea Stag to attempt to leave the area. And one wave was really huge, like a tsunami among regular combers.

  “I think we’re about to see something new,” said the Captain over the general link. “All crew, remain on alert.”

  “And here we are with only two missiles,” said the Exec with a groan.

  Only two is right, thought the Captain, shaking his head. The Sea Stag was not a large ship, only about destroyer size at two hundred thousand tons. She carried thirty ship killer missiles when fully loaded out. Almost all of those had been expended in the battle three days before. And though the planners were talking about using the wormholes for resupply, that hadn’t happened yet. Not enough to even dent that thing, unless we fire them from far enough away that they can build to relativistic speeds. And something that big will probably have a lot of protection.

  The Captain drove the new arrival from his mind and focused back on the system. Several of the huge alien ships that had been dubbed super-battleships, though they were even larger than the human ships of that designation, were accelerating down into the system, along with the escorts that always accompanied them. He looked back at the planet and noted the shuttles constantly boarding and leaving the ships in orbit, no doubt bringing ground forces onto the surface. The planet itself, where he could see the day side, was partially obscured by dust. After the terminator line, on the night side, patches on the continent glowed with heat from the bombardment that had taken out installations and facilities, and maybe some of the cities that had been growing on the frontier world.

  So much promise, he thought, looking at the scans that showed the debris in orbit that used to be space docks and forts. So many dreams shattered. This system had been chosen to be a major base of the Fleet here on the frontier, which guaranteed it the fast track for growth and development. All t
hat development’s gone, thought Suttler. Damn them. We’ll just have to come back here and push them out. Make them sorry they ever followed us from old Earth.

  “Sir,” came the voice of the sensor tech over the link. “We have a revised estimate on that thing.”

  “Bigger or smaller?” asked the Captain, hoping for the latter.

  “Well over two hundred million tons,” said the tech, awe in his voice. “It’s starting the step down sequence.”

  Damn, thought the Captain, trying to imagine an object that big moving through hyper. The biggest thing the Empire had that would travel through Hyper was one of the forward bases, which maxed out at sixty million tons, and traveled at the Hyper V rate of tramp freighters, at a crawl compared to modern ships.

  He watched the hyper sine waves as the behemoth continued to move down, then erupted into normal space.

  “Mass reading puts it at just under three hundred million tons,” called the excited sensor tech.

  Suttler whistled to himself. That was larger than the big forts used to defend the core worlds. And it had been moving through hyper VII.

  “Do you have a track on it yet?” he asked the tech.

  “It’s about two light hours to spinward,” answered the man.

  So two hours until we actually see it, thought the Captain. He cursed again from impatience. But there was nothing he could do about physics.

  The two hours passed, like they always do. A lot of information came in, not good. There was nothing good about a successful enemy consolidating his hold on what had been a friendly system. But information was information, and they had gathered enough signals intelligence to get a good grasp on both the enemy’s language and their security procedures. Still, the Captain had trouble keeping his patience until the light from the new arrival reached them.

  “It looks like some kind of fortress or space dock,” said the Exec over the link as they both looked at the monster on the viewer.