Exodus: Empires at War: Book 7: Counter Strike (8 page)

“We will have some army brigades coming through
in their transports,” said Lenkowski as they disembarqued and walked quickly to
the next gate room.  “We’ll want them assigned to the proper convoys, ready to
offload when they reach the planet.”

They approached the door to the gate chamber
they wanted, this one guarded by a squad of Marines in full battle armor.  All
of the gates in this room led to ships or military installations, not to be
accessed by the common traveler who might wander in.  Len thought that there
would soon be more guards on chambers like this, as well as upgraded security
on all gate rooms. 
We almost lost this thing due to not having sufficient
security
, he thought as the guards scanned his DNA, then poked him with a
needle for a deep scan, making sure he wasn’t one of the shifters.

And I hope to God they catch that damned shape
shifter that was impersonating Admiral O’Hara.
  He had been
classmates with the real Fleet Admiral Benjamin O’Hara on Peal Island.  He had
never really liked the man, but he had been a competent officer, who had risen
to his rank through merit and ability.  And now he was most probably dead,
since the damn shifters tended to kill those who they would imitate.

“This way, sir,” said the Captain, leading the
way to one of the gates, this one with a pair of Marines guarding it as well,
as were about a dozen more portals that must have led to other flagships.

Len hesitated a moment after the Captain
preceded him. 
God, but I hate this.  But I’ll hate it whether I go through
now or wait, so might as well do it
.  He stepped through the portal, and
once again experienced the stretching of time and space, feeling disoriented as
he stepped onto the deck of the superbattleship at the other end.

“Admiral on the deck,” yelled out a voice, and
Len turned to see a line of officers waiting, hands raised to berets in
salute.  One wore the red beret of a ship’s captain, and beyond them were a
line of red coated Marines holding ceremonial rifles at the ready.

“Permission to come aboard, Captain?” asked
Len, returning the salute.

“Permission granted, sir,” said the Captain,
dropping the salute as soon as Len had, then extending his hand.  “Captain
Vincent Oldenburg, commander of the
King Edward II.”

“Named after an Earther,?” asked Lenkowski,
trying to remember where he had heard that name before.

“Yes, sir.  One of the Kings of old England,”
the man said with pride in the name of his ship.  “Not the nicest man in the
world, but a true warrior king.”

“Is Admiral Kelvin aboard?”

“No, sir,” said the Captain.  “The Admiral
moved his flag to the
Pharaoh Ramses I
, since he figured you would want
Edward
for your flag.”

Len grunted a reply as he pulled up the ship on
his link that the Captain had just designated. 
Ramses
was also a
superbattleship, twenty million tons of warship, same as
Edward
, and the
largest class of ship he would have in this command.  He would have liked to
have a couple of the new dreadnaughts, a name he knew the Emperor despised. 
Maybe
we could call these ships heavy battleship, and redesignate the new vessels superbattleships.

“Let me see your flag bridge.  I want to have a
look at the tactical holo.”  That was something he could do on his link, now
that he was aboard the ship and officially in command of the fleet designated
as Battlefleet Sector III.   He stilled like to look at the full sized holo in
its tank, though he scanned the dispositions on his link on the way to the flag
bridge and its huge holographic tank.

“Your bridge, Admiral,” said Captain Oldenburg,
leading him into the large chamber, which had scores of stations, half of them
manned at the time.

Lenkowski waved the men and women back into
their seats as soon as they jumped to their feet.  He would take the time to
meet with them later, once they started on their way.  Now, he wanted to see
what he had and what he needed to do.

The holo showed the G4 star that was at the
center of this system, as well as the eight planets that orbited around it. 
The fourth world was the system prize, one which had until recently been a
border outpost of the Fenri.  That world was green and blue, and with a thought
the Admiral expanded it on the holo, looking at the shape of large continents
sitting amidst deep oceans.  A world they had freed from the Fenri, all of its
slaves now free citizens of the New Terran Empire.

It would be so easy to just fortify this system
and let them come at us
, thought the Admiral.  That the territorial xenophobe
carnivores that were the Fenri would try to take this system back was a given. 
Such a plan would have the greatest chance of success.  They could totally
crush the bulk of the enemy fleet, with minefields, orbital fortifications, and
well hidden fleet units that could engage when they wanted to.

The only problem was they had troops trapped
behind enemy lines, a lot of soldiers.  And the Empire was not about to leave
them in that position. 
So we have to fight our way there, relieve the Army,
and defeat the enemy so totally that they are out of this war.

He continued to look at the holo, moving his
view out to beyond the hyper barrier, where the warships were gathered, almost
a thousand of them, the remains of the original expeditionary force, with some
reinforcements.  And a couple of hundred ships that were recognizably not those
of the Empire.

“Do my eyes deceive me, or are those Magravi
ships?” asked the Admiral, looking at a battleship that, while built along
general human lines, was still subtly different.  The Empire supplied them with
the tech they had needed to build up their own fleet, after their liberation
from the Lasharan Autocracy.

“That they are, Admiral,” said the Captain,
nodding toward the ship the senior officer was studying.  “They arrived seven
hours ago, and we are expecting some Klashak as well.”

Both were really unexpected additions to his
order of battle.  The plan had been for both alien forces to contain the
Lasharans, but many in the Admiralty were sure that the religious fanatics were
well and truly contained, after the total defeat of their fleet, and the
merchant ships they had tried to use to smuggle guerilla fighters across the
borders.  Obviously, the two alien governments had thought they had more ships
than needed for that task.

The Klashak were an interesting species, one of
live bearing amphibians who required a humid environment to survive, whether
that was on their planets, ships or suits.  Klashak were physically strong and
mentally agile, and had been valued slave labor to the Lasharans.  Until the
Empire had interfered, and taken all of the amphibians’ systems away from the
Autocracy.

The Margravi were even more interesting.  A ten
limbed insectoid race, their exoskeletons only allowed them movement on light
gravity worlds.  Their muscular systems required a higher level of oxygen than
most species, and the number of worlds that suited their forms were limited. 
Instead, they used other species as allies to farm their worlds, while they
mostly inhabited great space habitats and asteroids, low gravity environments
that allowed them freedom of movement.

The most unusual attribute of the insectoids
was that they were a true group mind.  An individual Magrav was about as
intelligent as a Terran cat, the old, unimproved variety.  With their minds
linked together with the radio emitting organs of their brains, they were
frightfully intelligent.  The only weaknesses of the group mind was the limited
range of their transmissions, and the susceptibility of their linkage to
jamming.  On ships that was not a problem.  Their strength was that each
military unit fought as a whole, with little regard to the fate of any single
member of the swarm, as long as the mission was accomplished.  The weakness to
their organization was that the makeup of the mind changed according to its
number of living members, and that makeup could change with illnesses and
death.  It was like a huge brained organism going into battle, and losing some
of its mind, memory and processing power with every death.

Because of that difference from other species,
Len knew he would have to think carefully about how he deployed the aliens. 
That he would use them was a given.  The insectoids were totally fearless,
incapable of feeling any kind of individual sense of self-preservation.  Only
the species was important, and only the mission of the group was vital to its
existence, as it affected the survival of the race.

About a light minute in from the flagship was
the most important construct going up.   The frame was almost completed, three
kilometers on a side, able to handle even the huge superfreighters that would
be bringing materials to this area.  Lenkowski looked at the information below
the still uncompleted gate, seeing that the estimated time of completion was a
little under three hours. 
And then we can start bringing in ships from the
Supersystem
, thought the Admiral.  Many of those ships would come from the
same force that had just won the battle against the Ca’cadasans, those with
little to no damage.  None would have wormholes on board, since it was
considered much too risky to send ships through a wormhole gate with other
holes aboard.  Other ships could bring more wormholes out to this region, in
about three weeks to a month, long after the operation had started, and
hopefully finished, successfully.  But the technology of wormhole gates would
be primary to this battle, allowing communication between task forces, and in
bringing major fleet forces to bear that could be sent back to the Supersystem
after the battle to be redeployed for the next operation against the Cacas.

We’ll be doing most of our planning on the way
, thought Lenkowski,
trying to will the gate to get finished faster, and of course failing to have
any effect on its construction time.

“Show me to my office,” he told one of the
bridge officers, then followed the man to his day cabin just off the main
corridor leading to the flag control room.  The office was spacious enough for
several admirals to work in, with holographic windows on the walls looking out
over the local space, beyond the hull that was five hundred meters away from
this most protected area of the ship.  It had the feel of an observation room,
without any of the drawbacks.

Len sat at the huge desk and opened the
holographic control panel, getting to work on setting his dispositions and
strategies for the attack.  He already knew what was coming through the gate,
and what he had in hand, and now his task was to come up with the best
allotment of forces to get the job done with maximum damage to the enemy, and
the least possible harm to his own fleet.

The time passed by quickly with the mental
effort of work.   So quickly that the Admiral was not aware of how much had
gone by, until the com signal brought him back to the here and now.

“They’re coming through, Admiral,” said the
voice from the flag bridge.

Lenkwoski didn’t need to ask who they were.  He
got up from his desk after shutting down the holographic control panel, then
headed up the corridor to the flag bridge.  More of the stations were manned
now, people monitoring the new arrivals and transmitting their gathering points
to them.  The central holo tank showed a couple of new icons moving from the
gate to the outer system, identification text under each.  A viewer on the
forward wall was centered on the gate, and the next ship coming through.

It was a standard battleship, fifteen million
tons, with the ID
Prince Walter Konev
underneath.  It came through
almost sedately, since there was no emergency on this end, and no one wanted a
massive warship slamming into the frame of the gate.  As soon as it was
completely through, moving at a half kilometer a second, it accelerated away at
a hundred gravities, clearing the vicinity of the gate at almost a kilometer
per second per second.  Moments later the nose of the next ship poked through,
repeating the procedure as it headed off on the tail of the last vessel.  The
third battleship in that squadron came through soon after, then the first unit
of the next group.

A couple of minutes later the first of the
ships that Len had been waiting for with anticipation.  A twelve million ton
hyper VII fleet carrier that was not intended to engage other ships in close
combat.  No, each carried over a hundred inertialess fighters, just like the
ones that had caused so much damage to the Cacas at the Battle of Congreeve. 
None of these ships had been blooded in that battle, but they were four more
ships and attack wings that would gain their experience against the Fenri,
before being later unleashed against the Cacas.

Two hours into the transfer the scout force
started off, over a hundred battle cruisers, two hundred light cruisers and
four hundred destroyers, the eyes of the fleet.  They would sweep space in four
task groups, each with one wormhole equipped flagship, giving Len near real
time intelligence.  Hopefully they would be able to blast through anything the
Fenri tried to put in front of them.  If not, they would at least fix the enemy
forces so the main fleet could come up and destroy them in detail.

After four hours all of the warships that were
going to come through had exited the hole, one every ten seconds on average, with
a few longer breaks as new units maneuvered into place.  Over fourteen hundred
ships, predominantly heavier units.  And Len looked over his new order of
battle, over four thousand ships, besides the scout force.  He figured the
Fenri would still outnumber him in total units, but not in tonnage and
firepower.  And even if they did outnumber the humans in the last two
categories, Len was still sure the New Terran Empire’s tradition and tactical
flexibility would carry the day.