Exodus: Empires at War: Book 9: Second Front Read online

  “And what happened to the alien species who were already in this region?” asked Gunnery Sergeant Janowitz, the question that was on all of their minds, a troubled look on her face. Laaksonen felt sure he knew how she was feeling, because those same thoughts and emotions were running through his own mind.

  “The Council ordered the extermination of all sentient alien life within our borders,” said the holo with a bowed head. “It happened after a few of the alien races we had conquered revolted, and ships were intercepted that were on a course into Ca’cadasan space. The Council, in its paranoia, decided that we could not risk the beings that hated us, justified if I was to be asked, telling the Ca’cadasans who we really were.”

  “So you committed, genocide?” asked Janowitz in a choked voice. “You slaughtered intelligent life, wiped out whole genomes?”

  “The Klavarta did the actual killing,” said Slardra, looking down in shame.

  Janowitz turned an angry gaze on the Klavarta, and again Laaksonen knew how she felt.

  “On the orders of the Immortal Psychopaths who run our government,” said Jernigan. “None of these Klavarta is responsible, since they were not alive at the time, though they still feel the guilt. And the repercussions.”

  “Repercussions?”

  “Yes, Commander. We are anathema to the other species of this sector. Those who were powerful enough to resist being conquered before we became entangled with the Monsters, as the Klavarta like to call them. To them, we are the monsters, and they shoot at us on sight, even though we are fighting an enemy that would love to enslave them as well.”

  “What do you want of us, Mr. Jernigan?” asked Laaksonen, getting to the point. “Why arrange for this meeting in the first place, unless you want us as enemies to your people?”

  “Not enemies to our people, Commander,” said Jernigan, his image blurring for just a moment. “Enemies to our government, yes. I mean to see the Klavarta free to pursue a destiny fitting of intelligent beings.”

  “And the war with the Cacas?” asked Briggs.

  “Would have to continue,” said the holo. “Lest the, Cacas? I kind of like that term. Lest the Cacas enslave them as well. But they will fight for their own freedom, with the long life promised to other humans.”

  “How will your Pures think about this?” asked Briggs.

  “Some will be behind us, some will oppose us, same as most peoples. But many see the injustices that have been done to the Klavarta, and would like to redress them.”

  “But your immortal, psychopathic leaders stand in the way”

  “Yes, Commander. That they do. And we don’t have the power to overthrow them on our own. They command the loyalty of the majority of our warrior class, which is the only class that really matters in a battle on the planet. And they have all the ships in the system locked down with codes only they and the heads of the military, all Pures, can access.”

  “And I’m not sure what we can do,” said Laaksonen, shaking his head. “I don’t have the authority to promise you anything. I have to ask the Commodore what she wants to do, and she will probably have to contact the Empire before she can make any kind of promise.” The Commander realized he had made an error as soon as the words left his mouth. He didn’t see any recognition of his mistake with the Klavarta or their cybernetic leader, and he hoped they wouldn’t catch on.

  “All I can ask is that you take this information to your Commodore,” said Cyber-Jernigan. “I just hope you come to the right decision, one that will benefit both of us.”

  Laaksonen realized that this meeting was over. He got up from his chair and followed Slardra from the room with the rest of his people on his tail.

  “How much do you trust that memory from the past?” he asked Slardra as they headed for the stairs back up to the store.

  “He is under a death sentence from the Council,” said the Klavarta Alpha as they walked the steps. “They purged him from the memory of the Council computer, but a copy of him had escaped before they could make sure. My people, at least those who yearn for freedom, trust him with our lives.”

  Slardra cut them loose on the street with instructions to walk along as if they were just curious tourists. The warriors in the uniforms of the police came for them a half mile from where they had exited the shop. The Commander was sure they wouldn’t be harmed, but the stern looks and the drawn weapons of the police made him wonder if he might be wrong.

  * * *

  Finally, thought the Yugalyth known as Lila Abernathy. The still live body of the subject she had taken lay on the bed, unconscious from the injection she had given her, pushing her sting into the back of the young woman’s neck. It had been a task to get away from her party, and she was sure she would be facing punishment when she returned. She had a cover story, that she wasn’t sure would be totally believed, and she would probably not be allowed back on the moon.

  That’s fine, the creature thought, looking at the cell culture she had removed from herself and planted on the body. The job is done. The culture was eating the body a little bit at a time, creating more of itself. In two days there would only be Yugalyth on this bed, and exact copy of this female, at least on the surface. It would have all the memories of the human, and it would find the memory disk that would fill in the background and give it its mission.

  Time to leave, it thought with one last look at the body. A moment later it was out the door, locking it behind it. It checked its com link, finding it was still disconnected at her command, then reactivated it.

  “Lt. Abernathy,” came the call from the ship. “Where have you been?”

  “Some man tried to abduct me while I was on a bathroom break,” she said over the com. “I need to find one of our shore leave parties. Please. I think they are still after me.”

  * * *

  FENRI SPACE, MAY 20TH, 1002.

  “Next stop, the Fenri capital,” said the Grand Fleet Admiral Duke Taelis Mgonda to his subordinate over the wormhole com.

  We sure paid the price, thought Fleet Admiral Theodosius Glaven, nodding to his superior as he thought about the battle he had just waged, forty-six hours of long range warfare that had degenerated into a knife fight at the end. He had lost almost a thousand ships in that fight, and over three million crew, the great majority of them permanently killed, not enough left for resurrection.

  “Wasn’t it Wellington who said that nothing was more melancholy than a battle won except for a battle lost?” asked Glaven, his burning eyes looking at the com.

  “I think the exact quote was, ‘Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won’, Admiral,” said Mgonda. “And yes, our losses were terrible.”

  Glaven looked at the tactical viewer that showed the icons of his still working ships, as well as the navigation hazards of all the derelicts and pieces of vessels that cluttered his space.

  “But remember this, Admiral,” continued Mgonda. “Today you broke the back of the Fenri fleet. Over three thousand ships destroyed, another thousand boarded and captured. As far as we can tell, the only Caca ships in their force destroyed. It would have been much worse, and probably including many tens of millions of civilians, if we had fought them in the kind of defensive battle they would have preferred.”

  “I’m just exhausted, Admiral,” said Glavin, rubbing his eyes.

  “Then get some rest. I will have the rest of the fleet at your location within the next forty-eight hours. We’ll organize then, and move in our attack formations to their capital.”

  “So you think they are beaten?”

  “I think they might have some fight left in them, especially when they see us approaching their homeworld. But they can’t have a lot left to fight with, at least in space. It might be a different story when we start landing the troops, but with control of space, we should have all the advantages.”

  So only another couple of million casualties to go, and maybe a billion or so of the enemy, and this war will be over, thought Glavin, walki
ng off his flag bridge and heading for his cabin. He shook his head before returning the salute of the Marine guard on the door, then retreated to the relative solitude of his private space.

  He tried to sleep after a hot shower and some chocolate. But sleep would not come as his mind was preoccupied with images of ships exploding, multi-megaton vessels fading from the plot as they and everyone aboard converted to plasma. And not just from this last battle, but images from fights he had been in through his career, from his time as a weapons officer up until his command of this fleet.

  Glavin finally decided he was not going to get any sleep. Even the reticular activating system module of his implant was fighting a losing battle, the first time that had ever happened. Pulling himself out of bed, the Admiral made his way to his attached office and sat at his desk, pulling up a holo of an accelerated compilation of the fight.

  He was proud of his battle plan, and the results had borne out that pride. The decoy force, the bait, had performed to perfection, luring the bulk of the Fenri fleet deep into the gravity well of the system they had chosen for the fight. He still felt some guilt at the choice of the task group that had been used as bait. He had almost let someone on his staff choose those ships, but it wouldn’t have been fair to those subordinates. It was his responsibility to choose those who would be most likely to lose their lives in the operation, and he had tried his best to make a dispassionate, objective decision about who to put on that hot seat. The choice had to go to who he thought was best able to pull off the deception while being pounded by the enemy fleet. The woman he had put in charge had not survived the battle, and he wasn’t looking forward to writing the letter he was charged with producing, expressing his sympathy at the death of the Vice Admiral.

  The battle replayed on the holo. The seven hundred ship task group, really a small fleet in itself, was large enough to lure a much larger force into the well, and small enough to give the Fenri the confidence they needed to go after it. The group had played its part to perfection, looking like a panicked force that was trying desperately to escape the system, with no hope of relief. The bulk of the Fenri fleet was well into the system, over a half light hour in from the hyper I barrier, eight hours from escape. That was when the rest of his fleet had moved in, catching most of the Fenri fleet in normal space, chasing the majority of what they had left outside the barrier in hyper as they tried to get away.

  The decoy group had lost over five hundred ships, half of his losses overall, well over seventy percent of that total force. And, as Admiral Mgonda had said, he had broken the back of the Fenri Battlefleet.

  Glavin studied the playback for a good four hours, trying to find his mistakes, of which there were more than a few, and tried to determine what he could have done differently. After much soul searching he was sure that he had done the best that he could possibly do. He might have been able to shave off a few more casualties, maybe ten thousand or so. Even one saved life was significant. But he had to admit that changing decisions, even if they were correct, would not have guaranteed fewer casualties.

  At the end of his self-study he was satisfied that he had done the best that he could do, and that those under him had given their best as well. With that, he went back to his bed, and this time his implant had no problem putting him into a deep sleep. His only hope was that nothing would disturb his sleep before the ten hours he had programmed in with a thought passed.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The more a general is accustomed to place heavy demands on his soldiers, the more he can depend on their response.

  Carl von Clausewitz.

  KLAVARTA SPACE: MAY 22ND, 1002.

  “We have two more groups coming in on interception courses,” called out the Tactical Officer.

  The Great Admiral grunted as he watched the two formations appear on the plot. Both were coming in through hyper VII. There would be no surprise jump with this attack. Those only appeared from directly ahead, or at no more than twenty degrees from their own axis of approach. That comprised only about ten percent of the attacks, while the rest came in on other axes that didn’t allow a fast translation and acceleration to contact. The enemy ships could still fire long range missiles, but they couldn’t catch up and do a close in attack.

  “Target Alpha comprised of about two hundred vessels, most in the thirty to fifty thousand ton range, a few larger. Target Beta has about one hundred and forty small attack ships, in the same range as Alpha.”

  Which had been the composition of all of the attack waves as far as class of ships went. Some waves were larger, some smaller. And none of them had done more than chip away a little bit at his massive fleet. He had lost ninety-seven ships, most of them scouts, a score of supercruisers, and a pair of superbattleships. And the enemy had lost an estimated seven thousand of their attack ships, about two hundred and forty million tons of warships.

  If they hit us in a larger wave, they might get a more favorable exchange, thought the Ca’cadasan Great Admiral. But they haven’t been able to organize such an attack with us plunging into their space at high velocity.

  “Firing on Alpha, now,” called out the Tactical Officer. The ships closest to that attack force, about two thousand of them, each released one missile, and the two thousand weapons headed toward the enemy wave, accelerating at eight thousand gravities. They would close with the attack ships at point six light, not the most effective attack profile, but good enough to take out most of the wave when there were ten missiles to each small attack vessel, which had nowhere near the defensive firepower of a proper warship.

  Before those missiles reached their targets, another group of ships fired on the Beta force. Minutes after both attack groups opened fire with their own missiles, sending a wave of eighteen hundred weapons toward the Ca’cadasan fleet. A minute later they launched the rest of their missiles, another eighteen hundred, and continued in at their own maximum acceleration, trying to close to knife fighting range.

  “It’s suicide,” exclaimed the Great Admiral’s Chief of Staff. “Even if they get some ships into beam weapons attack range, they won’t do more than superficial damage. And surely none of them will escape.”

  “No,” hissed the Great Admiral. “They won’t.”

  The missiles came in onto their attack profiles on both enemy groups within a minute of each other. When it was over the one attack group had ceased to exist, while the other had a mere twenty-three ships, two starting to drop back from reduced acceleration, unable to keep up with their mates.

  The waves of the enemy missiles came in, easy pickings for the integrated defensive fire of the massive fleet. A few got close enough to cause some damage, but not enough to even drop any of the Ca’cadasan ships out of formation. And as the surviving ships got close to their own beam range, the massed fire of the fleet turned them all into vapor that was quickly evacuated from hyper back into normal space.

  “Maybe we can have some peace for a short time,” said the Chief of Staff with little conviction.

  It is fortunate they don’t have the instantaneous communications we’ve heard the other humans possess, thought the Great Admiral. Otherwise, we might get swarmed under before we reached our target.

  “We have multiple translations from straight ahead,” shouted out the Tactical Officer. “More than two thousand objects.”

  “Size?” asked the Great Admiral, leaning forward in his chair to look at the thousands of icons that had appeared several light minutes ahead.

  “Mostly in the thirty to forty thousand ton range, same as the other waves, my Lord. There are several hundred smaller ships, and a couple score vessels over a million tons.”

  And these are in a position to really hurt us, thought the Great Admiral. Even though the enemy had translated at point three five light, the closing speed was going to be just below light speed, and at that velocity, anything they fired was going to be coming in on optimal attack profile.

  “Hit them with everything we have,” he ordered his Tact
ical Officer. “I don’t want any of them to fly through our formation.”

  That was almost what happened, almost. The several score ships that made it into the Ca’cadasan formation destroyed over a score of warships, mostly by colliding in suicide attacks. It was only a sting, but a painful one, as the Klavarta took out the Ca’cadasans at a tonnage exchange of two to one.

  * * *

  “I wish you hadn’t taken such a chance, Exec,” said Commodore Natasha Sung, giving her Exec a disapproving look, her hands on her hips. “Chairwoman Pallion was so mad I thought the moon was going to spontaneously combust.”

  Laaksonen sat there, not saying a word, which was probably the best thing he could have done. Sung wanted to make a point for the record, but she also was sure that the Exec had actually done the right thing. All they had been getting from the official organ of the Party was the same old song and dance about the wonderful they were, how happy their Klavarta servants were, and how well they were fighting the Cacas. While she had no doubt that they were doing a bang up job against the Cacas, she was also sure that the big aliens were giving them all they could handle. As far as how wonderful they were, and how happy the servants they had created were? Well, now they knew a little more of the truth. The whole truth? Or just what the Klavarta resistance and their cyber leader wanted them to think.

  “That said, it was a good call. The official line of the Party was not the truth we needed to hear. We weren’t getting anything out of them but platitudes and lies.”

  “What’s with this Party thing, ma’am?”

  “Some of the crew have taken to calling the government here the Party, because they remind some of the ancient Marxist governments of Old Earth. Oh, not exactly,” she continued, standing up from her seat and coming from behind her desk. “But the closest analogy we can come up with.”

  “It seems to fit,” said Laaksonen, turning to look at her while maintaining the position of attention. “Or at least what the Soviet Union could have been with what are essentially immortal rulers.”