Exodus: Empires at War: Book 8: Soldiers (Exodus: Empires at War.) (2 page)

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.

The strike
into Fenri space is a success, taking the heart out of their fleet and capturing
several of their industrial planets, sending the small mammalians into a
frenzy.  The Fenri still have some power in their fleet, and organize an
offensive that kicks the NTE naval force out of their space, stranding Baggett
and his soldiers on the surface of one of the planets.