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

  “And if they use our aid to exterminate more sentient species in their region?” asked Samantha.

  “We don’t know that they have done that,” protested Parker.

  “But if we find out that they have?” asked Samantha, refusing to be dissuaded.

  “Then we will not deal with their leadership,” said Sean. “But we will wait until we find more about them before we jump to conclusions.”

  Sean sent a personal message to Lord T’lisha and Chief Sergiov asking them to come back into conference in a couple of minutes, then dismissed everyone else, except for his wife.

  “See,” he told Jennifer, smiling. “I did not go into the war zone. I kept my promise.”

  “And when will you be coming home?” she asked, her eyes glistening with unshed tears.

  Sean wanted to hold her in his arms, to kiss her, but right now she was only a laser projected image in the room. “Very soon,” he finally said.

  “Please,” she said, a small smile on her face.

  “I know you miss me, but is anything happening on Jewel that I need to know about?”

  “The news people are driving me crazy, as usual. And Parliament seems to get a little crazier every day. Other than that, it’s the same old thing.”

  “I will be back as soon as the situation is under control out here,” he promised, wondering if the situation would ever be under control as long as the Cacas were around.

  “I don’t want you to step foot in that system as long as there is still a threat,” said Jennifer in a stern voice. “Remember, you promised me you would not go to the front.”

  “And I won’t step foot there until we’ve ejected the Cacas,” said Sean, leaving out that there might still be Cacas loose on the ground when he did go.

  “OK. Now don’t pull something on me, or you can expect a cold welcome home.”

  I’m the most powerful man in the Empire, the most powerful star nation in this region, and I still have to worry about how the woman I love feels about me, just like the lowliest commoner in my realm. Sean smiled at the thought as Jennifer faded from the room.

  A moment later he pulled up the holo of the tactical situation in New Moscow, staring at it with total concentration. The situation had improved, a little. But it was still in the balance. And there was nothing he could do about it that he hadn’t already done.

  * * *

  NEW EARTH APRIL 13TH, 1002.

  Chairwoman Marion Pallion looked at the production figures from the eight largest military systems in her Empire. It was so much easier when all I had to worry about were the ships in my squadron, she thought. She wondered why she still even remembered those days, two thousand years in the past, before the coming of the Monsters and the flight of all that was left of humanity.

  The production figures were about what she expected, but not as much as what she had hoped. I must have words with Director Coleman, she thought, though she wasn’t sure what the conversation would avail her. Dennis Coleman was the best man for the job of Director of Production. After all, he had become a self-made billionaire on Earth, building one of the preeminent space based corporations in the Sol system. If he couldn’t squeeze more production out of the facilities they had at hand, no one could. There had been talk of building more, but first they needed more engineers, and the new ones they had bred up would not be ready for working production for another two to five years.

  Marion stood up from her desk, signaling through her implant for a servant to bring her a drink, while she stepped up to the mirror that sat above the credenza. She ran a hand through her medium length straw colored hair, her eyes narrowing as she saw the new wrinkles on her face. There were still decades, maybe forty years, before she would be forced to take a new body. But vanity made her want another right now, to recapture the beauty of her youth, as she had recaptured it a score of times before. Why not, she thought. She had bodies in storage, the clones all the Pure human leaders kept for spare parts in case of accidents, or for emergency transfers Those clones were just meat, with no consciousness, less than animals. Just as this body was discardable, a throwaway, as long as her memories and personality were transferable to the new form.

  “Your drink, my Goddess,” said the servant, a geneformed slave that had more original human in her than the warriors and producers.

  Marion turned toward the slave, who knelt on the floor with a tray in her hands, a moisture beaded glass containing fine scotch on the rocks. The woman had her eyes turned to the floor, knowing she would be punished if she made eye contact with her superior being.

  Goddess, thought the Chairwoman with a smile. Dimitre von Scheldt had come up with that fiction, on the belief that it would reduce the chance of revolt if their subjects thought they were under the command of undying deities. Whether that worked? Marion was pretty sure it didn’t, since the beings they ruled were as intelligent as they could make them. Since the war had started the chance of that revolt had dropped to nothing, since all energies were focused on defeating the monsters.

  We need to meet, she sent out over her implant to the other eleven members of the council. It was time to start planning for the next offensive, and the Directors needed to get on the same page and start their Pure human staffs working on the problem. And they needed to talk again about sending a mission to the other power that was fighting the monsters. There were rumors that they were human as well, though the Chairwoman wasn’t sure she believed that tale. After all, their ship had barely escaped, and at the cost of all of their passengers, and the genetic banks, only a small percentage of the crew surviving. Why would another of the Exodus ships fare any better?

  The acknowledgements came back, and Marion took a sip of her drink, then looked at the slave. They’re all slaves, after all, she thought, staring at the creature who had been raised to servitude. Only Pure humans were considered to be free in this society, and there were only about fifty million of them, descendants of the crew, all, with the exception of several thousand supervisors in other industrial systems, in this one.

  Marion walked into the conference room to see that three of the Council were already in attendance, two physically, one as a holo image. One of the live members was Dennis Coleman, and the almost black eyes of the man glared angrily at her as she stopped for a moment to look over the room. The man’s ebony face was a mask, but the eyes still told of his anger toward the Chairwoman. And what the hell does he have up his ass today, she thought. Kamiko Hyashi, a Japanese woman, was also in the room, while Gokben Tarhan, a female from Turkey, attended by image, since she was actually on one of the other moons of the brown dwarf system.

  Moments later the images of the Englishman, Willard Smyth, and Graca Casimiro, Portuguese, popped in, while Dorothee Chevalier and Ivan Ikanov walked into the room, chatting amicably. Marion waited impatiently for the last four members of the Council to come in. Three popped in over the next five minutes, Chamai Bhandawa, a man from Zimbabwe; Jiang Zhou, a giant of a man from China; and Rajani Dasgupta, a female Hindi. Moments later Tamati Motlap came running into the room, whispering his apologies in his Melanesia accent.

  Marion, who had hailed from America herself, looked around the room for a moment, waiting for everyone to finish their greetings to each other. She looked from face to face, seeing a microcosm of the people of Ancient Earth, a world that no longer existed. That thought brought up a rage that had her clenching her fists and her teeth for a moment before she got control of her emotions. She said her calming words, lowering her blood pressure and taking control of the parasympathetic system. Marion had noticed that the rages had been increasing over the centuries, when they should have been decreasing. She opened her eyes, seeing all the other people in the room staring at her, some with angry looks on their faces. What the hell are you looking at, she thought. You all have the same rages.

  “What did you ask us to come here for, Marion?” said Coleman, the Director of Production, who always seemed to be working.

  �
�We need to come to a consensus about the next ten year plan,” she told him, wishing she could make part of the plan getting rid of him. But even though she had been the leader for the last two thousand years, everyone at this table had power, and blocks of them had much more than she did.

  “First off, we need to industrialize more systems,” said Coleman. “The Monsters have reacted to our success by bringing greater forces against us. To counter this we must produce more of everything. Not just warships and weapons. We can produce all that we are capable of, but if we don’t build up the means of production, we will continue to fall behind.”

  “And if we don’t continue to build those ships and weapons at our best rate we will eventually be overwhelmed,” said Hayashi, the Director of War. “I agree we need more antimatter to power what we have. But building up that production also opens up a new can of worms, since we will need greater forces to defend them.”

  “What about expanding the abilities of our workforce and warriors?” asked Bhandawa, the Director of Personnel.

  “We have reached the end of the genetic rope,” said Tarhan, a biologist and the Director of Biomedical Improvement. “I don’t see how we can squeeze out any more advantages from our genome. Remember, we originally programmed the best possible forms for what we needed. Making the best possible form only made it harder to improve that form, which is not a bad thing. But it is reality.”

  Everyone in the room closed their eyes for a moment, recalling the information from the memory banks of the planetary computers, where most of their memories were stored. That was another problem they had run into with their expanded lifespans. Even though the capacity of their minds had been increased through genetic improvement, it was still not enough. They had solved the problem by only using their organic brains to store salient memories and the memory nodes of everything else they had ever learned. The rest of the information was stored in the local computer system, and when a node was activated by the normal cognitive search function, the computer would download the information into their minds. New information would later be uploaded with connections to the nodes they corresponded to. Over time they would forget that information, as it was no longer needed, but it was always accessible.

  Everyone opened their eyes, the past decisions and conversations replaying in their minds. Marion nodded her head, agreeing that they had talked about what Tarhan had said, and that she had agreed with the goal at the time. It was the only possible correct decision, as making their warriors and workers to a lower standard just so they could be improved in the future made no sense, when they had needed them to be a perfect as possible at the time.

  “So that’s a dead end,” she said, nodding to Tarhan. She looked over at the Director of War. “It seems like we are doing well at the moment. Could we not cut back on military production for a time while we expand our industrial base?”

  “If we hadn’t have backed ourselves into this system in the first place, we wouldn’t have the problem of industrial capacity,” growled Coleman. “You know I lobbied for a more capitalist system, and more use of the Pure strain of our species for our struggle.”

  “And you know that we couldn’t afford to let the Monsters know we still existed,” said Casimiro, the physicist of the group. “We needed something to be the face of our resistance, and the Klavarata forms were it. And we couldn’t give our physical and genetic superiors equal rights without the risk of them taking over.”

  Marion nodded. While the Klavarta forms (and the name had been her idea, more circumlocution to confuse the Monsters they fought), had been the product of the human genome, no one on the Council really thought of them as human, or endowed with any kind of rights that the Pure form enjoyed.

  “I think we may have to rethink our tactics as well,” said Chavalier, the Director of Education and Training. “They may have worked well in the past, but our losses have increased exponentially over the last couple of years.”

  “The swarming tactics are still killing the Monsters’ ships,” argued Hayashi.

  “But isn’t it true that the Monsters are changing their own tactics?” said Zhou, the Director of Intelligence, and a man who should already know the answer to his own question. “They are changing the weapons loadout of their ships to deal with our own tactics, and are killing our ships and warriors in ever increasing numbers.”

  “We are working on new designs,” said Hayashi, shaking her head. “But I do not think building monster ships like the Monsters is the answer.”

  “They can handle a lot more punishment than ours,” shouted Zhou. “Why are you so stubborn? You’re supposed to be our best military mind, but you have no flexibility of thought.”

  “Like you could do better, you Chinese piece of shit,” roared the small woman.

  “At least I’m not a little devil like you, you militant bitch,” countered Zhou.

  “I will have none of this,” yelled Pollion, slamming her hand down on the table. She was glad she had insisted on these two, who were constantly reliving the animosity of their two peoples, not both attend these meetings live. She could imagine them coming to actual blows. “We will have a civil discussion, or I will exclude one or both of you from these meetings, and will pass on the decisions of the rest of the Council to you.”

  Both Directors stared at her resentfully, but she could tell that she had gotten her point across. All of the directors liked their positions and the power it gave them. They might aspire to even more, and Pallion was always looking over her shoulder at Directors who wanted to take her place. None wanted to be excluded from the discourse that in their minds proved their wisdom and ability to rule.

  “We will commission a study by our military scientists of what would be the best configuration and loadout to battle the new Ca’cadasan tactics,” she said, looking from Zhou to Hayashi. “I know that Zhou is not a general or admiral, but he does know weapons.” The Chinese scientist had been one of Earth’s preeminent weapons engineers before the Ca’cadasan attack. “You, Kamiko, will have your brain trust look over the tactical aspects of the designs Jiang will send to you. I want your cooperation. Remember, we need to work together to ensure the survival of the species. We are all that are left, and we must not let personality conflicts get in the way. The only way we are going to win this war is by sticking together. As Franklin said, we must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

  The two Directors in question nodded yes, but still refused to look at each other. Pallion sighed, realizing she would have to be satisfied with their cooperation, no matter how strained. “Anything else we need to talk about?”

  “Yes, Madame Chairman,” said Hayashi. “I think we need to talk about the increasing scout intrusions of the Monsters. We have noted that the scout groups have increased over the last half year. And if we’ve found a couple of hundred of them, I’m sure the real number is double.”

  “I have to agree with Hayashi,” said Zhou to the surprise of them all. Pallion was not surprised. Zhou had been an intelligence officer with the Terran Union before the Monsters came, and was still proud of his professionalism. “In fact, the percentage of what we haven’t found to what we have may even be higher.”

  “And your point is?” asked Ikanov in his heavy Russian accent.

  “That they may have found out more about us than we would wish,” said Zhou, narrowing his eyes at the Russian. “We have a pretty good idea about what the ones we do find have observed, but the ones that sneak in, look, and get away? We have no idea what they may have found.”

  “And how likely are they to look here?” asked Ikanov, whose area was Internal Security. “That was the reason we chose this system for our capital, since red dwarves are so damn common.”

  “It is statistically improbable that they would find this system,” said Zhou. “But definitely not impossible.”

  “And that would be another reason to not keep all of our eggs in this one basket,” said Ikanov, who had always be
en a proponent on spreading out their Pure human assets. “If they happen to find us here, and we don’t know about it, we could experience a full scale attack without any warning.”

  “And how would they find this system?” asked Bhandawa. “There is really nothing here to attract them.”

  “And how much traffic comes into this system on a daily basis?” asked Ikanov. “And who knows who is sitting out there in interstellar space keeping track of the emissions of all those ships.”

  That brought a lot of stares and shocked expressions, and Pallion knew she had to calm them before they started demanding a change in policy. She still thought it was best to keep all the Pure humans here, because it was less likely they would be discovered, and the monsters would redouble their efforts to get at the hated humans if they knew.

  Only seventy-two of the original crew survived, of which sixty-one had agreed to the cloning and mind uplink procedure when it became necessary. Of those, there were only forty-three still around, due to some giving up on resurrection after several iterations. Another couple of hundred Pure humans had been gifted with immortality. They were the ones that ran the facilities in other systems, on the agreement that they would completely destroy themselves before they allowed themselves to be seen by the monsters. With the promise that their mind uploads would be put into another body, and they would live again.

  “We will discuss this at a later date,” said the Chairwoman, looking at each face in turn. “I think we have enough to handle right now.”

  The virtual images blinked out first, then those present started from their seats and toward the door. Kamiko Hayashi stayed for a moment, and Marion knew the Japanese woman wanted to have a word with her that the others were not a part of. Part of the job, thought the Chairwoman. The hardest part was remembering who told her what, so she didn’t breach their trust.

  “Yes, Kamiko?” she asked, looking at the woman with a smile.

  Chapter Seven