Exodus: Empires at War: Book 11: Day of Infamy (Exodus: Empires at War.) (37 page)

They were still producing
wormholes with the remaining generator chambers, each creating six a day, for a
total of thirty between the five pairs of units.  But they needed this sixth
one so they would have a maintenance rotation that would keep them all
functioning, and avoid the disaster that could come from overworked units.

We lost almost ten
percent of our generators
, thought Yu, walking out of the control room. 
Fortunately,
we had enough redundancy built into the system that it won’t affect our
production, too much.
 They had also lost about eight percent of the
crystal matrix batteries that stored the energy need to push the wormhole
production process over the edge.  Still not a real concern at the moment.  But
possibly worrisome for the future.  Each battery pack massed millions of tons,
and the crystals took a year to grow to that configuration.  The power
generators, each larger that a battleship, could be built in a little over a
month each, but they had been constructed for the station over a period of
fifty years, and that had been during times when the Empire didn’t need all of
their manufacturing capacity to build warships.  She doubted she would see
replacements for either system in the near future, which made protecting what
they had even more important.

We’ll be lucky to get
enough hull plating to repair all the external damage
, she thought, glancing
at Jimmy as the agent came up on her side as an escort.  That wasn’t a
priority.  As long as the structure was solid, the Admiralty didn’t much care
about how the station looked.  They walked into the primary station control,
surprised to see all the Fleet personnel hanging about the place.

“Director Yu,” said the
new station military commander, Admiral Winfield Sung.  “I was just about to
page you.  We’re going to begin reconstructing the station defenses, and I
thought you might want to be privy to the changes.”

“What are those?” asked
Yu, walking up to the holo that was displaying some long piece of machinery
rotating in the air.   “Are those the lasers from the black hole generator?”

“They are indeed.  And as
soon as you are finished making what you need, we’re going to pull them out of
the satellite and install them in the station.”

“But, why?”

“Because, Doctor, we need
all the fire power we can put on this big cow.  And the lasers fit the bill. 
Each of them puts out more photons than a group of battle ships.”

Lucille stared at the
unit.  She didn’t like the idea of gutting the satellite.  What if they needed
it again?  But she had to admit to herself that those beams could take out any
known ship, probably with a single hit.

“We’ll emplace ten of
them around the outer rim of the station, equidistant.  Then five on the top,
five on the bottom, and we’ll have total coverage.  We’ll add in the same
number of wormhole launch ports that can be used for either missiles or
particle beams.”

“You think the Cacas will
be back?” asked Jimmy, raising an eyebrow.

“No reason to think they
will,” said the Admiral.  “No reason to think they won’t.  If they do return,
they’re sure to bring along a lot more firepower, maybe enough to blast through
the system fleet we’re going to station here.  And if they do, we need to have
something that will stop them dead.”

The holo changed, showing
a cylinder that was floating next to a battleship for scale.  The cylinder was
wider than the ship, though not as long.

“And here we have the new
defense satellites we will be emplacing in the next couple of months.  Thirty
of them in a globe around the station, one light minute out.  Each will have a
wormhole launcher for missiles and particle beams, as well as a ninety emitter
laser dome.  That will give it the light amp power of two battleships.”

“And this will stop
them?”

“I think the next Caca
force that comes through here will regret it,” answered the smiling Admiral. 
“For a minute or so, before they are turned into vapor and plasma.”

“Seems like a lot of
resources to place into static defense,” said Jimmy.

Lucille shot her lover a
glare.  This station was her baby, and anything they could do to protect it was
all right with her.

“This station is the
single most important resource in the Empire, son,” said the Admiral, looking
at the Secret Service Agent like he was a complete idiot.  “You are producing
our single most important tech, as well as being the transportation and
communications hub of the Empire.  We’ll have over four hundred particle beam
accelerators in the near future, as well as going on a thousand missile
preaccelerators in orbit.  I can think of no one single structure in the history
of humankind that was as important.”

“I think we’re going to
get along fine, Admiral Sung.  Anything you can do to prevent what almost
happened here the other day, I’m for.”

“Hell, Doctor,” said the
man in a drawl that did not go along with his Eurasian features.  “I wanted
more, and I may still be able to get some additional resources.  But I do
guarantee you that I will defend this station to my last breath.  And since my
wife prefers that I don’t get myself killed, I will do everything I can to make
sure I don’t take my last breath on this station.

“Now, if there aren’t any
questions, I would like to see as much of my command as I can this day.  Even
though I understand I could spend a lifetime here and never see it all.”

Yu smiled at the man,
earning a jealous look from Jimmy. 
Oh, come on lover.  This guy is married,
and he doesn’t seem the kind who would fool around.

Lucille settled into her
command room chair as the Admiral and his retinue left the chamber.  The
control room steward brought her some coffee, and she settled down to review
what had been done, and what still needed to be done.  She motioned for another
coffee.  She felt that she would be drinking a lot of it in the next couple of
months.

*     *     *

Cornelius sat on the side
of the bed and took his wife’s hand.  She smiled at him, then at the toddler
who was scrambling for attention next to his dad while Rebecca tried to hold
him down.

“I can’t seem to remember
anything about that day,” said Devera, shaking her head.

“It was a day most of us
would like to forget,” said Cornelius, glancing around the private room that
was full of flowers from well-wishers.  People in the military, nobles, even
one from his Majesty.  He thought that was probably the work of a secretary,
since their Majesties had much on their minds these days.  He put a hand on
Junior’s head as he thought about his friends losing their child.

“And how did you get me a
private room like this?’ asked Devera, glancing at the window that looked out
on a park.  Humbolt was not a large city, which was why he had brought her
here.  Its hospital, serving a large rural area, was first class.  It was also
overcrowded, like every facility on the planet, and a room like this could have
housed four or five patients at the moment.

“I think being a noble,
an officer, and a friend of the Emperor helped a bit,” said Cornelius.  “And
no, I don’t feel a bit of guilt using those attributes to get my baby the very
best.”

“And our home?”

“I’m afraid the palace
took a beating, though not as bad as it could have.  It will be some months
before we’ll be able to move in, if we even want to.”

“What do you mean?” asked
Devera, her eyes narrowing.

“I’ve bought a house
here, overlooking the ocean,” he told her, hoping she would like this news. 
“Plenty of room for the kids, and we’re not on a bullseye.”

“And my work?”

“You can continue your
studies here, and do rotations at the Army hospital north of town.”

Devra looked doubtful for
a moment.

“Give it a chance,
honey.”

“And where will you be?”
she asked with a catch in her voice.

“I’m afraid I’ll be
shipping out by the end of the week.  You know how the Empire can’t get along
without me.”

He could tell by her
expression that she didn’t like the idea at all, and didn’t see the humor in
it.

“I’ve been given a
battalion.  The second of the two oh fifth Rangers.  And a special mission.”

“I wish you could stay
here, Cornelius.  You’ve given enough for the Empire.  No one else has ever won
three Imperial Medals for Heroism.  You deserve a break.”

Cornelius closed his eyes
for a moment and took a deep breath.  He wanted to tell he that he didn’t want
a break.  That he wanted to get back out there and hit the bastards that had
wrecked Capitulum right in their broad faces.  But that would only cause her
more distress.

“Maybe after this
mission.  I’ll ask for a favor after this one.”

And he could tell that
she saw through the lie, but was too tired to argue.

“We still have five days,
and you’ll be out of here by tomorrow,” he said, scooping Junior up in his
arms.  “I need to get these two some food, before they turn feral and attack us
from hunger.”

Cornelius felt awful as
he left the room with the children.  The mission they were going to give him
was sure to be dangerous.  They always were.  And one of these times he would
not be coming back.  Which would not prevent him from going out on yet another
one, because this was what he was good at, and the Empire needed him to keep
on.

The End

The Story So Far

In 2254 the human species
had spread to eight star systems after the discovery of the Subspace drive,
allowing humankind to achieve pseudospeeds of over eleven times the speed of
light.  That was the year the human species first encountered the long
lived Ca’cadasans, three meter tall horned carnivores whose empire had been
expanding for thousands of years.  That was the year the aliens attacked the
Epsilon
Iridani V
colony.  When the heir to their imperial throne was killed
after the colony had surrendered, the Emperor ordered the complete
extermination of the human species.  After a short, sharp war, humanity
had no other option than to try and flee the killer aliens.  The six
Exodus ships were built, each capable of moving fifty thousand humans in
cryostasis, along with all the knowledge of the human species.  One ship
is known to have gotten away through subspace, a dimension through which the more
advanced hyperspace faring Ca’cadasans are not prepared to follow.  Four
generations of crew navigated the Exodus III over ten thousand light years in a
thousand years, reestablishing humanity in a system of eight stars in orbit
around a black hole, the Supersystem.  Once the home of an extinct species
that had helped raise most of the intelligent races of the area to technical
civilizations, it was also the perfect region for the newcomers.  Over the
next thousand years the New Terran Empire fights, wins and expands in a number
of wars, improving their technology at breakneck speed, becoming the dominant
military power of the region.  Humanity also improves its genome, becoming
stronger, faster and smarter, and seemed destined to rule the Perseus Arm, given
time.

On the thousand year
anniversary of the empire, Emperor Augustine I is having prophetic dreams, the
gift and curse of his line.  He has seen the ancient enemy returning,
finding the human species disunited in its three governments, and utterly destroying
them.  Augustine has fought to expand the military, running into
obstructionism from the Lords House of Parliament.  It is an uphill battle
in the Constitutional Monarchy the Empire has become.  Meanwhile, the
Donut, a century long engineering project, is nearing completion.  The
enormous station, built as a ring around a black hole, and using the swirling
gravitational energy to generate wormholes, has begun to make the many portals
that will be used to eventually link the Empire.  And spies have infested
the Empire, a race of shape shifters who make most security measures moot,
adding sabotage and espionage to the problems facing the Emperor. 

Sean Ogden Lee Romanov,
the third son of the Emperor, is a serving naval officer on a battleship in a relatively
quiet sector, with no thoughts of ever assuming the throne.  He was a
mediocre officer, despite his superior intelligence.  With two brothers
ahead of him in the succession, and a still young father, the throne seems like
the least his worries.  By this time the Ca’cadasans have made contact
with some of the enemies of the Empire, and sent the information back to their
leaders.  The ancient enemy has been found, and can now be
eliminated.  Ships begin to disappear in Sector IV, and sightings are made
of vessels that fit no known description.  Many people refuse to believe
these are the Ca’cadasans, and some think that Empire must have fallen in the
near past.  The Emperor continues to try to rally support for increasing
the size of the human military, while Parliament fights him on the economic
effects of such a move, and alien powers protest that the humans are planning
territorial expansion.

There is an attempted
assassination attempt on Sean, and a successful attempt on the Emperor and his
two older sons during a tour of the Donut.  The assassin is an officer of
the Imperial Protection Detail, causing distrust to grow among the agencies
charged with the security of the Empire.  The same day as the
assassination, the Leader of the House of Lords is killed in his home. 
Sean is now the heir to the Empire, and the man who must be seated as soon as
possible on the throne, but he is almost a week’s one way com range from the
capital.

The Ca’cadasans now
attack, sending large fleets into several industrial or base systems, and
smaller forces to many other stars.  The Massadara system, a major
Imperial base, is one of the systems attacked.  Sean is serving on one of
the battleships that happens to be in that system, and is aboard the vessel as
it heads into combat with the enemy.  Word comes to the system that Sean
is the uncrowned Emperor, and his ship, against his protests, is ordered out of
combat.  His ship, the
Sergiov,
heads out of the system before the
main battle begins, a small Ca’cadasan force on its heels.  The main
battle is joined, and, though it inflicts casualties on the Ca’cadasan fleet
that is only about a decade ahead in technology, it is defeated, and the system
falls.

The
Sergiov
is battered by
the enemy, and Sean is rescued from the ship by Captain Mei Lei and her hyper
VII battle cruiser.  The battle cruiser fights its way out of the system
with the help of Commander Bryce Suttler’s stealth/attack ship, and, along with
Commander Maurice von Rittersdorf and his destroyer, starts on the voyage to
get Sean back to the capital and the throne.  The Ca’cadasans track the
two vessels, and Sean escapes on the destroyer while Mei sacrifices her ship in
a battle with the Ca’cadasan supercruisers.  The battle cruiser
Jean
de Arc
falls out of hyperspace in a catastrophic translation, a low
survivability event, but nonetheless manages to survive and starts the long
journey home.

Rear Admiral Mara
Montgomery is dispatched with her scout force to locate Sean and get him back
to the capital, while von Rittersdorf plays hide and seek against the
Ca’cadasans, trying to get the unseated Emperor to safety.  Von
Rittersdorf catches one of the much larger Ca’cadasan ships in a brilliant
ambush which destroys the enemy ship, while causing severe damage to his own. 
Montgomery’s task force enters the system, and she dispatches the other two
supercruisers, then takes the Emperor aboard her flagship.  Von
Rittersdorf begins the long journey home in his crippled ship with
escorts.  Sean learns that one of the nearby systems is under siege and,
against the protests of the Admiral, orders her to take her ships to break that
siege and evacuate the colonists on the frontier world.  Meanwhile, the
Leader of the House of Lords advances plans to put an Imperial Cousin on the
throne while the true heir’s whereabouts is unknown.  The Ca’cadasans
invade and take the kingdom of New Moscow, and make serious inroads into the
New Terran Republic, the sister governments to the Empire.

On Sestius IV Brevet
Brigadier General Samuel Baggett fights the landing of the Ca’cadasans with his
mixed command.  Farmer and ex-hunter Cornelius Walborski deserts the
militia to get his pregnant wife to safety.  Though bleeding the enemy,
Baggett is forced to fall back into the wilderness before the enemy ground
warriors.  Walborski’s son is born, but his wife is killed while they are
running from the aliens.  The farmer goes mad, and stalks the jungle with
the skills he had learned as an assistant hunt master, killing many aliens in
the jungle.  He meets the legendary Preacher of special ops fame, now a
retired Ranger and current minister on the planet.

Montgomery’s task force
takes the system and the planet, and evacuates all those that want to leave,
just before a larger enemy force enters the system and forces it to flee. 
Sean meets Dr. Jennifer Conway, who has lost her own fiancé’ in the invasion,
and falls in love with her.  The scout force fights a running battle back
to Conundrum base, rescued at the last moment by the fleet of Duke Taelis Mgonda. 
Von Rittersdorf makes it to safety, while Mei Lei and her crew are rescued from
hyper by another battle cruiser.  The XO of the
Jean de Arc,
Xavier
Jackson, falls out of hyper while trying to rescue some crew who could not get
off the ship.  Surviving the translation, he is rescued by beings from
legend, the Ancients that everyone assumes are extinct.

On the Donut it is
discovered that an ancient race known as the Yugalyth, another creature from
legend, capable of changing its very body form over a period of days and
duplicating any creature, is at large.  A Yugalyth agent imitates Dr.
Lucille Yu, the station Director, and attempts to destroy the huge
construct.  Dr. Yu uses quantum teleportation, an experimental technique
that only succeeds in moving about half the material being teleported to its
target, to teleport negative matter to destroy the bomb the creature put on the
station attitude control board.  The new enemy is discovered, one which
originates in the realm of the Empire’s close ally, Elysium.

The Knockermen, a
reptilian race in the Elysium Empire, revolt against the dominant
Brakakak.  The Brakakak eventually curb the revolt, but are forced to
commit their entire fleet to searching out the rebels and breaking the
rebellion.  The leader of Elysium and his family are forced to take refuge
with the Terrans during the battle of the capital.

Sean comes back to the
Supersystem by the wormhole gates that are now being deployed through Imperial
space.  Chief of Naval Operations Gabriel Lenkowski gathers a fleet that
transports Sean to the capital planet, where, with a large force of Marines, he
lands during the coronation ceremony and stops the Lords from crowning his
cousin.  Sean is now Emperor, Commander and Chief of the Imperial
Military, and, given his wartime powers, the most powerful Monarch in a
century.  His companions go off to other commands; Mei Lei to a battle
cruiser squadron, one equipped with new wormhole launched weapons; von
Rittersdorf to lead a new destroyer squadron; and Baggett to command of a heavy
infantry brigade.  Cornelius Walborski, on the recommendation of Preacher,
joins the Imperial Army with hopes of being augmented and becoming a Ranger.

The Ca’cadasans hit
Conundrum, the HQ of Sector IV, hours after Sean jumps through the wormhole
from there.  They take the system, and land troops to complete the
conquest of the planet.  Sean is forced to engage in a hit and run war
against an enemy that is still more advanced, and more powerful, than his own
fleet.  He orders his units to refuse combat when possible, and only to
fight when they can inflict maximum damage on the enemy.  Q-ships,
militarized merchant vessels with quantum teleporters capable of sending
antimatter into the interior of an enemy ship, bait and destroy Ca’cadasan
raiders.  The Lords go on the warpath against Sean, demanding that he
commit his fleet to a major battle.  His prophetic dreams indicate that
one of the core worlds, the heavily populated industrial planets at the heart
of the Empire, is a target.  But the dream does not tell him when.

Wormhole gates are
dropped in occupied systems, then maneuvered to planetfall, allowing ground
forces to insert.  This is done on most of the occupied worlds, allowing
the units to engage the aliens in Guerilla warfare.  Preacher leads a
Ranger brigade against the Ca’cadasans on the surface of Conundrum, and the
campaign forces the enemy off the planet.  The Lasharans, religious
fanatics, are again attacking the frontiers of the Empire, and Baggett’s unit,
as part of a heavy infantry corps, is sent to take their home planet and occupy
their primary temple, breaking their will.

The Ca’cadasans strike at
the Cimmeria system, utterly obliterating the two inhabited industrial worlds
located there.  Sean retaliates by sending forces through wormholes to
strike behind the main enemy fleet and destroy their bases.  The Fenri
Empire, old enemies of the humans, sign an alliance with the Ca’cadasans, and
the New Terran Empire launches a spoiling attack on those aliens.  The
logical beings of the Crakista Empire, seeing the Ca’cadasans as the greater
threat, join the human cause, ordering their military to offer all possible aid
to the humans.  Things are beginning to look up until the Ca’cadasans
launch yet another assault, almost overrunning all of Sector IV.

Sean and Jennifer become
lovers, a fact taken advantage of by the Yugalyth agents, who kidnap her and
threaten to kill her if Sean does not place himself in their hands.  Sean
agrees, and has himself equipped with a pair of small wormholes that allow him
to kill the kidnappers when they think they have him in their power.

Cornelius completes
Ranger school, finds a new love himself, and is assigned to the planet Azure,
one of the deadliest in the Empire.  He and his men stalk the Ca’cadasans
through a jungle that is an enemy to both, and encounters a new client race of
the Ca’cadasans, the supremely competent hunters called Maurids. 
Cornelius saves and is saved by a young girl, Rebecca, and completes the
mission his company couldn’t, destroying a Ca’cadasan headquarters.  He
returns to the capital system again a hero, one of the few to win the Imperial
Medal of Heroism twice.  He marries, and gains a new mom for his baby son,
and his adopted daughter, Rebecca.

Sean, in need of a victory,
plans an ambush for the Ca’cadasan fleet in the Congreeve system, a frontier
world made up to look like an industrial developing planet.  The Cacas,
using the Knockermen, send in a strike force to take out the
Donut
.  And the
Empire sends in a strike against the Fenri Empire, the new ally of the
Ca’cadasans.  Cornelius attends Officer Candidate School and is well on
his way to becoming an officer, while the Opposition Party of the Lords
continues to cause trouble for the Emperor, threatening a No Confidence Vote in
Parliament.