Exodus: Empires at War: Book 8: Soldiers (Exodus: Empires at War.) (3 page)

The
Ca’cadasan strike force makes it to Elysium space, commandeers a Brakakak light
cruiser, and takes the station in orbit around that Empire’s capital
world.  The Cacas jump through the wormhole to the
Donut
, bringing
thousands of troops and four Quarkium devices, intending to destroy the
station.  The Knockermen destroy the Brakakak station with the device that
they were given by the huge aliens.  And Walborski, heading through the
Donut
on a short leave to see his wife and children, finds himself involved in
another battle.

Sean lures
the Ca’cadasan main fleet into battle, springing his ambush, and ravaging the
enemy fleet.  They turn into a tougher opponent that he planned on, and
some of the enemy fleet escapes to head back to their base, leaving the
Imperial fleet with a lesser victory than wanted, and higher casualties than
expected.

Cornelius
organizes a team to keep the Cacas from exploding one of their devices on the
Donut,
and only one of the bombs is detonated.  The station, though damaged,
survives.  Meanwhile, Baggett’s force in Fenri space resist the ground
assault with heavy casualties, until relieved by the Fleet, and the Fenri are
all but knocked out of the war.  Natasha Sung is meanwhile closing in on
her goal, the aliens who are also fighting the enemy at the other side of their
empire.

The alliance
fleet reorganizes and prepares to attack the Cacas, while they are still
reeling from their defeat.  Using the cover of a supernova explosion,
which covers the resonances of ships transiting hyperspace, Sean launched a
multi-winged assault on the remaining Ca’cadasan forces in the Empire. 
The fleets strike without warning, bringing the Cacas to battle and all but
annihilating their forces.  The Caca commander orders his remaining ships
to get away as they can, then is incapacitated during the escape.  The
Great Admiral’s second in command does the unthinkable and surrenders the
remaining fleet.

Prologue

NEW MOSCOW SPACE, JANUARY 25
^TH
,
1002.

Narwhal
was
the stealthiest vessel ever built by any known power.  Her grabbers and
her hyperdrive were tuned to especially tight tolerances, giving off as little
in the way of graviton emissions as possible.  Her built in wormhole
whisked away all but the merest hint of radiation, heat or other.  And she
was the first dual drive equipped vessel in generations, carrying not only a VI
dimension hyperfield generator, but also a subspace drive which could be used
to sneak up to systems without the characteristic signal of translation from
hyper to normal space  She needed all of that stealth capability for the
current mission, scouting out a system well behind enemy lines.

And it would
have to be a system crawling with enemy shipping
, thought Commander Ariella
Ben Gurian, the captain of the vessel.  Her Jewish family had given her a
name which meant
lioness of God
, but she was feeling very sheepish at
the moment.  Seeing over a hundred Ca’cadasan warships moving about the
system while in a one eighty thousand ton ship tended to do that to even the
most aggressive commanders.  And there was no telling how many more were
powered down and out of detection range.

They had come
out of subspace a week before, and spent the entire time creeping into the
system, coasting at point zero one light.  If they were spotted it would
soon be realized they were not a natural object, not moving at three thousand
kilometers a second.  They needed to get through the system and out the
other side, though, and with their stealth, being spotted was of low
probability.

“We’re in range
for a good view of the planet, ma’am,” called out the Sensor Officer.

“Then let’s see
what we have.”

The holo
changed, showing a blue and white orb, the one habitable planet in the
system.  They were looking at a globe that was half dark, half light in
its current orientation to the ship, which was coming in at a ninety degree
angle from the orbit of the planet.  The night side was unusual in that
there were no lights showing, on a world that had recently been the home to
seven billion people.  There were rumors that there were still people on
this world, New Moscow, once the capital of a small Empire.  Less than
there were.  Probably less than a half billion.  But still there, and
still alive, for now.

“Get some close
up views from the day side,” Ben Gurian ordered the officer.  A moment
later they were looking at the surface, a view equivalent to being in low
orbit.  The gravitic lens adjusted, and the view clarified, showing the
web of rivers, cities scattered around them, and the heavy transport net
linking the habitations.

The lens focused
to higher resolution, and one of the cities, a very large one, resolved on the
holo.  Resolved to become ruins, the smashed remnants of a city. 
Several large craters occupied the center and the west side of the former
metropolis, the sign of either kinetics or large nukes, possibly
antimatter.  Most of the tall buildings had toppled despite being made of
superstrong alloys reinforced with carbon fibers.  Those that still stood
leaned drunkenly, some of their supports still intact, most stressed to the
breaking point.  The city was otherwise deserted, nothing moving on the
rubble strewn streets.

The view moved
up the river that was flowing over the fallen bridges, to a smaller city, also
damaged, if in a different way.  Here were the signs of ground fighting,
buildings holed, the smaller craters of bombs and shells.  Still, it was
just as dead as the capital city.

“Keep looking,”
Ariella told her Sensor officer, glancing for a moment at the tactical holo
that showed the enemy shipping.  They were coming up on the closest
approach of a pair of those vessels, supercruisers, four million ton warships
that could take
Narwhal
in an instant.  It was the closest
approach, thirty-one light seconds, unless the enemy ships moved their
way.  There was no reason for them to do so, but reason didn’t always have
anything to do with reality.

The scene kept
changing as it moved over the surface of the world, the Sensor Officer
adjusting the view based on a larger image being pulled in by another gravity
lens.  More cities, towns, villages, small farms, all deserted.  Some
wild areas, and the dinosaur sized wildlife that occupied them.  And then,
on a wide area of field, they found what they were looking for.

“My God,”
whispered the Captain to the deity of her ancestors.

The camp covered
hundreds of square kilometers, and must have housed tens of thousands of
tents.  The tents were not of human manufacture, and seemed large even for
something the Ca’cadasans would use.  The view shimmered a moment as the
Sensor Officer adjusted the focus on the grav lens, and the inhabitants of the
camp became recognizable.  Humans.

“What’s the
estimated count?” asked the Captain.

“At least a
million,” said the Tactical Officer, who was monitoring the take and feeding
the data into the ship’s computers.  “Maybe two.”

The ship
continued to coast into the system, her grav lens telescope looking over the
surface, finding more of the camps, some larger than the first.  And, with
many of the camps, some large structures with smoke pouring from the stacks.

“That matches up
with what we got from the Republic,” said Xavier Patton, the Exec.

“Yes,” said the
Captain in a flat voice.  “It does.” 
Death camps, with food
processing centers nearby.
  The Ca’cadasans were turning human beings
into rations, processing them and storing them for future use.

“How many do you
estimate are on the planet, Xavier?” she asked, her eyes glued to the image of
the largest camp they had found, one that must have had ten million or more
within its fences.

“Seven hundred
million,” answered the Exec in a hushed voice.  “Maybe eight
hundred.  And they have to be processing them at a couple of hundred
thousand a day.”

And this is
what command sent us here to find out
, she thought, looking over at her Com
Officer, who was busy making sure that all of their information was getting
back to headquarters through the wormhole.

There had been
rumors of people being rounded up, and not just slaughtered and eaten in place. 
Which made sense, since the Ca’cadasans couldn’t have eaten that much meat, and
most would have gone to waste from spoilage.  It made her wonder how many
other planets might have the same activity on them.  In the Republic the
Cacas had set up camps on every major world they had taken.  They hadn’t
followed the same pattern in the Empire, where the casualty rates among the
planet dwellers had been much higher, and there were fewer survivors to bother
with.

Now we just have
to hope that command can do something about this.  I don’t know what, but
they don’t pay me to consider those possibilities.
No, they paid her to
sneak into enemy held systems and view atrocities like this first hand. 
This would be one system she would be glad to leave, though she had suspicions
that command would keep her here as an observer to whatever they had in mind
for the last humans of the Kingdom of New Moscow.

Chapter One

The only thing necessary for the
triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Edmund Burke.

CAPITULUM, JEWEL, JANUARY 30
^TH
,
1002.

“Attention,”
yelled out the Command Senior Master Chief of the Fleet, watching as the men
and women in the chamber, all of whom outranked him, surged to their
feet.  “Emperor on deck.”

The Emperor Sean
Ogden Lee Romanov, Sean the First, came through the door behind the most senior
enlisted man in the Imperial Fleet.  Resplendent in his naval uniform, the
eight stars of a supreme commander on each shoulder board, he looked over the room
for an instant, recognizing all of the faces standing around the table. 
They included two officers of service leading rank, Grand High Admiral Sondra
McCullom of the Navy, and Grand Marshal Mishori Yamakuri of the Army, both with
seven stars on their collars.  Standing to the side of McCullom was Field
Marshal Betty Parker
,
a five star, the
Commandant of the Imperial
Marine Corps.  Across the table from them stood a pair of Grand High
Admirals, six star rank, his senior fleet commanders, Grand Fleet Admiral Gabriel
Len Lenkowski
and Grand Fleet Admiral Duke Taelis Mgonda
.
 
Next to Len was Senior Marshal Beatrice Sanginawa, the newly appointed Imperial
Army commander of Sector IV.  Down the table was Lord T’lisha, the
Phlistaran Head of Intelligence, right next to Ekaterina Sergiov, the Chief of
the Imperial Intelligence Agency.

The last person
at the table was the lowest ranking.  Lt. General Walther
Preacher
Jodel
was the Chief of Special Ops in Sector IV, in command of the joint force of
Army Rangers, Marine Force Recon and Fleet Commandos that operated against the
Cacas.

All of the faces
looking back at him showed their shock, the same disbelief he felt. 
Eight
hundred million of them
, he thought as he waved everyone back to their
seats and took his own. 
Men, women, probably tens of millions of
children.  Maybe more than that on other planets.  There can’t be too
many more than a billion, can there?  Out of, what, fifty billion citizens
of the kingdom?

“This is really,
unbelievable, your Majesty,” rumbled Lord T’lisha.

“What’s so
unbelievable about it,” said Lenkowski, turning a baleful eye on the
civilian.  “We know the bastards are the next best thing to obligate
carnivores.  Why would they waste the protein.”

“We have a
tremendous problem, ladies and gentlemen,” said Sean, looking again from face
to face.  “We have about a billion humans at serious risk of death, and we
need to save them.”

“I really don’t
see how, your Majesty,” said Grand High Admiral McCullom.  “If we try to
take the planet, the Cacas are just going to kill them all.”

“We might be
able to get strike teams in to take out the Caca guard force,” said Grand
Marshal Yamakuri in disagreement, shaking his head.

“And how do you
think we’re going to sneak a fleet in to take out their ships, so we can get
your grunts onto the surface.”

“That’s the
Fleet’s problem,” said the Grand Marshal.  “Just get us there, and we’ll
do it.”

“I don’t...”

“I don’t want to
hear how we can’t do it, Sondra,” said Sean, staring down the commander of his
Navy.  “What I want to hear is how we are going to do this.”

“They aren’t
even our people,” said Senior Marshal Saginawa.

“They’re human,
Goddammit,” yelled Mgonda, slamming a hand on the table.

“We let enough
of our own people die for tactical considerations,” shot back Saginawa, who was
a native of Cimmeria.  “What’s less New Muscovites than lived on my
homeworld, more or less?”  As she said this last she aimed a short glare
at the Emperor.

Sean felt a
combination anger and guilt flow through him.  Yes, Cimmeria, and her sister
world, Aquilonia, had been sacrificed, along with the over seven billion people
who had lived there, because it would have been disastrous to have made a stand
at that time.  The Cacas would have wiped out any force he could have
deployed there, and that would have weakened the Fleet to the point where the
later victories would not have been possible.

“I am sorry
about your homeworld, Beatrice,” he said in a calm voice, forcing down the
rage, and the thoughts of sacking the Army Group commander.  She was good
at her job, and had every right to be angry at the man who had made the
decision to let her world die.  He truly didn’t believe she would give
less than her all to any operation, despite her feelings, and that was all he
could ask.  “The strategic situation at the time demanded that
action.” 
Or inaction. 
“That is not true at this time. 
In fact,” he said, looking around the table.  “The situation at this time
calls for the exact opposite.  The enemy is weak, at this time and
place.  And the time is ripe to wipe out another of their fleets.”

“That’s not the
problem, your Majesty,” said Lenkowski, looking over at his fellow
admirals.  “We’ll go in and kick the Caca’s asses.  I don’t doubt
that.  The problem will be getting in, clearing the orbitals, and landing
enough of a force to take their camps, before they kill all of the civilians.”

“I think we can
handle that part,” said
Preacher,
a smile on his face.  “After all,
I have twenty thousand of the toughest troops this side of hell under me.”

“And how do you
plan on getting them onto the planet?” asked Yamakuri, doubt written on his
face.  “Not that I doubt the quality of your people, General.”  He
looked over at Parker and McCollum.  “Even the Fleet and Marine pukes.”

There was some
muted laughter at the table over the good natured ribbing of the other
services.

“Remember the
advantage we have, your Majesty,” said
Preacher.
  “In a word,
wormholes.”

*    
*     *

PLANET NEW MOSCOW.

“I want all of
the humans processed before the spring comes to this hemisphere,” ordered Great
Admiral H’rastarawaa, looking across the camp where they were housing the
despised creatures.  The stench of their unwashed bodies offended his
sensitive sense of smell.

That gives
these lazy males seven months to process these useless sacks of protein,
he
thought, looking at the males and females of the species that cowered under his
glare.  There were very few younglings visible.  The humans kept them
hidden.  Not that it did those mouths any good to hide.  The cart of
bodies being wheeled out of the camp contained humans of all sizes, from adults
down to infants, being sent to the processing factory.  Another cart came
rolling in, containing the vegetable matter and grains they were feeding the
humans, food that was mostly less than garbage to the Ca’cadasans.

“Yes, my Lord,”
said the underofficer, rendering a small bow.

He thinks
that the humans of the large Empire will be coming here
, thought the Great
Admiral, turning to walk away from the crowded camp, heading for the
entrance. 
And he may be right.  But until they do, we will
continue to do our duty.

The males in the
headquarters came to their feet as he entered.  With fist to chest he
returned their salutes, then moved into the Commandant’s office, which was
temporarily his as long as he was here.  The Great Admiral plopped down in
the chair behind the desk, his eyes moving to the holo that showed the New
Moscow system. 
What a pitiful collection of ships
, he thought,
watching the icons of his warships moving through the system, mostly in orbit
around the star or one of its planets.  In the entire kingdom of New
Moscow there was only a fifth of the tonnage that had come here to actually
take the polity.  A mere two hundred and forty-one superbattleships, less
than half of them in the system.  Almost seven hundred smaller vessels,
again, only half in this system.  And he wasn’t sure if he would be
receiving reinforcements or not.

If not for
that idiot, M’tinisasitow, we wouldn’t be in this mess,
thought the other
Great Admiral, who had been assigned to this post as soon as forward base had
found out about the male’s surrender.  They knew that he would not follow
the example of the cowardly male, though H’rastarawaa hoped he would also not
have to die at his post.  But if he did, he did.  It was all a part
of his duty to the Emperor, something that other cowardly male seemed to have
forgotten.

There was always
the chance that he would be reinforced.  Just as there was always the
chance that the humans wouldn’t come to this kingdom.  He thought both
chances were remote, and that there was a higher probability that he would be
reinforced than there was that the humans wouldn’t come. 
And when they
come, they shall find none of their own to rescue.  I will see the camps
vaporized first, hit with kinetics from orbit, or blown to atoms by nuclear
warheads underneath them, before I will see the first child of the humans taken
from the camps.
  The camps on the other worlds had the same
orders.  If they were to lose this territory, then the humans who had
lived here would not be around to enjoy their freedom.

The howl of a
siren split the silence. 
What now
? thought the Great Admiral,
getting to his feet and running from the office to the outside.  At first
he saw nothing, but he heard some screams and shouts over the siren coming from
the compound.  And the angry buzzing of particle beams.

“What is the
situation?” he demanded over the com, cursing under his breath when a reply
wasn’t forthcoming immediately.

“Some humans
tried to fight back when we came to harvest the tender meat, my Lord,” came the
voice of an underofficer working the interior of the great camp.  “When we
shot them down there was a general uprising.  We are putting it down at
this moment.”

“Waste as little
meat as possible,” ordered the Great Admiral, thinking of what particle beams
could do to hundred kilogram bags of flesh.  “Any killed are to be rushed
to processing immediately.”

“It shall be
done, my Lord,” said the underofficer.

“And maybe we
should start issuing your people stunners,” said the Admiral, thinking about
the implications of such an order.  It might embolden the humans to
greater resistance, but he didn’t think that would do anything for them except
get them to the meat processing plant sooner, and with much more intact
protein.  He switched frequencies on the com and was soon talking with the
camp Commandant.

“I’m not sure
that is a good idea, Great Admiral,” said the male, who held the rank of Low
Admiral.

“What you think
really doesn’t matter, Low Admiral,” growled the Great Admiral, anger rising at
the challenge of a subordinate.  “Issue your guards and harvesters
stunners immediately.  Only the reaction force is to have particle beams.”

“And if humans
from outside the camp attack?”

“There are no
such humans,” said the Great Admiral after a short barked laugh.  “The
only humans here are under our control.  This will never again be a human
planet.”  He would see this world burned to a cinder before the humans got
it back, even in violation of the edicts protecting worlds. 
The
priests can go to the hells if they think I will let the vermin reestablish
themselves here.  I would rather suffer a thousand years tormented by
demons in punishment.

The big male was
still outside, looking into the camp, when the first cart of the badly burned
bodies were rolled out.  Most of the human cadavers were missing twenty or
more kilograms of mass, vaporized away by the particle beams.  Among those
bodies were a few smaller forms, some with only a torso or lower body remaining. 
Not only had the humans not protected their children when the adult protectors
had been burned down.  They had also lost the ones they had been trying to
guard.  The Great Admiral gave a satisfied snort as he looked over them,
the tantalizing smell of cooked meat coming to his snout.
 
If we
can just get this over with, and ship all of this protein out of here and back
to forward base, perhaps command will order our recall. 
He smiled at
that hopeful thought, knowing he would rather meet the humans as part of
another conquest fleet, rather than the commander of an outnumbered occupation
force.

*    
*     *

KINGDOM OF NEW MOSCOW SPACE.

This deployment
was much easier than the last.  Commodore Natasha Romanov still wished
that they were deploying back to the Republic, where she could again connect
with friends and family, what were left of them.  Unfortunately, they were
at war, and for the duration her ships and her life were not her own.  The
light cruiser
Orleans
, her flagship, was still in top condition despite
being on station for over a year.  With modern technology, especially
nanotech, wear and tear was not a common phenomenon.  Battle damage,
yes.  But most modern systems were self-repairing and maintaining. 
Skilled technicians were able to take care of the rest.  They could
recycle food, water and air as long as they had power.  As long as they
were resupplied with antimatter, they were good to go for as long as the crew
was alive.

They had been
resupplied before moving, which resupply included another light cruiser and
three more destroyers, all Imperial ships.  They joined her flagship and
the five Republic destroyers already assigned to her force.  This was the
first time she really worked with Imperials, who she had always seen as
competitors, if not enemies, in the past.  She was finding them very
competent, at least those she had communicated with, which were mostly the
command staff of the ships.  The lower decks, as they were called, were,
according to the scuttlebutt, already bandying about her name in jest, since
Romanov was a very aristocratic moniker in the Empire.  Even their damned
Emperor had a Romanov somewhere in his name.