Exodus: Empires at War: Book 11: Day of Infamy (Exodus: Empires at War.) (15 page)

Each central capsule had
a skin of ten meters of carbon fiber impregnated alloy armor, and was buried a
kilometer or more beneath the ground.  Each was shielded by a number of lower
tech inertial compensators that would protect those within from concussion. 
They would handle a surface blast of over a hundred megatons.  Unfortunately,
the same could not be said of major kinetic strikes.  One that hit directly
over a shelter would still blast through all of the covering earth and
plasticrete, through the armor, and into the heart of the capsule, killing
everyone within.

“Here,” said Tomas,
throwing a small pistol to the woman before he pulled a larger version and slid
it into his belt.

“Why do we need these?”
asked Margo, looking at the small protector in her hand.  Capitulum was a
weapons restrictive city, like most on core worlds.  The Protector was one of
the weapons allowed, a moderate velocity magrail carrying twenty rounds maximum
in the sealed magazine.  When fired it would transmit a location signal to the
nearest law enforcement agency.  It was a perfect weapon for self-defense in an
area where the greatest threat would be petty criminals. And not so great a
weapon for committing crimes.

“We’re under attack,
sweetheart,” answered Tomas, throwing her the jacket she had worn this day,
then picking up his own.

“From who?”

“We’re at war, honey. 
Guess?”

“The Cacas?  So what in
the hell are these pistols going to do for us?”

“This is life or death,
Margo.  And we may have to defend ourselves against our competition in trying
to survive.  Now let’s get the hell out of this death trap while we can.”

*     *     *

“Alert,” yelled the
speakers on the base.  “All pilots to your craft.  This is no drill.”

Chief Warrant Officer
Debra Visserman looked up from the game she was playing, her implant kicking
her out of the virtual reality world she had been inhabiting for the last
twenty minutes.  She was just about to attack the dragon with the sword of
power that was throbbing in her hands. 

[What’s the situation?]
she sent over her implant.

“The system is under
attack,” came back the voice of the group commander.  “We believe it’s the
Cacas.”

“Shit.”  Visserman was on
her feet in an instant, grabbing her flight jacket and running from the room. 
“Do we know how they got here, sir?”

“We have no way of
knowing that at the moment.  Just get to your ship and get her in the air. 
We’ll worry about the rest after we’re in position to attack.”

The signal died, and Debra
knew the Group Commander had no more time for her.  He had to get himself
ready, as well as coordinating his sixty-three other aircraft and pilots.

The ready room was total
confusion, all of the pilots in her squadron trying to get to their cubbies at
once and everyone getting in the way of everyone else.  She elbowed her way
past a frightened looking second lieutenant, then made her way to her own
cubbie.  Backing in quickly, ignoring the shouts of the offended officer, she
let her battle armor suit close up around her.  Without a second look at the
officer, who was not in her flight, she was out the door of the ready room and
running across the tarmac to her revetment.

Her F-48 Peregrine was
sitting in the revetment, the crew chief and another enlisted rating making the
last minute settings to prepare her for a combat flight.

“Give us one more minute,
ma’am,” said the Sergeant, tapping a button on the control panel by the wall. 
“She’ll be good to go.”

Visserman wanted to yell
at the Sergeant, to get him to hurry up, but she knew the man and knew he was
doing his best at the moment in a tense situation.  She nodded as she looked
over at the other enlisted soldier as he slid a pair of proton packs into the
nose compartment of the ship.  At the same time a pair of sealed tubes rose up
from two hatches that had opened on the tarmac underneath the plane and
inserted themselves into the weapons bays of the fighter.

“She’s ready to go,
ma’am,” said the Sergeant, pulling off the last attachments that linked the
aircraft to the diagnostic system.

The cockpit cover
retracted while the Chief Warrant Officer lifted her suit off the ground and
maneuvered over the seat, lowering herself into place.  As soon as her butt hit
the seat the locks in the cockpit grabbed her suit and held it in place.  She ran
a quick diagnostic on her fighter over her HUD, then powered up the ship.  The
Sergeant and his subordinate moved away from the ship, the NCO raising his hand
in the air in a farewell gesture.  She only hoped it wasn’t a final farewell,
and that her ground crew, and the base, would still be here when the mission
was over.  And that she would still be around to return.

Well, you wanted a combat
tour
,
she thought as the fighter lifted off the tarmac and she nudged it forward for
a moment. 
Looks like your wish has come true, though you didn’t want it to
be in the capital system.

She pulled the joystick
back and pushed the throttle forward, rocketing upward into hypersonic speed in
seconds.  Debra tapped into the com net, getting a situation report so she could
see what she was up against.  As the data came over the link she realized that
her worst fears had not been bad enough.

Chapter Eleven

By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.
Benjamin Franklin

The brand new hyper VII
missile defense destroyer
Marta Jornell
was the first ship to eat a
missile.  A ship purpose built for missile defense, she probably would have
survived the single missile homing in on her if she had been loaded with
weapons and crew.  As it was, she was empty of any kind of munitions, and had
nobody aboard except from builders putting on the finishing internal touches. 
None of her sensors were active, and the construction crew didn’t even have
time to know that they had been targeted before a five hundred megaton warhead
detonated amidships, vaporizing several thousand tons of the destroyer and
sending the rest on a fast tumble out of the ecliptic of the system.

After that more ships
were hit, some unmanned, others with enough crew and weapons to mount a
defense.  It was still a one-sided slaughter, here and there a Ca’cadasan
fighter taking a beam hit or running into the stream of a close in weapons
system, exploding in the emptiness of space.  Most of the hits were on Imperial
ships, and within minutes a task group worth of vessels were so much scrap. 
The enemy weapons hadn’t the time to generate the velocity for the kind of
kinetic kills that normally shattered ships, and warships, even the lighter
varieties, were very tough beasts.  Cruisers took multiple hits before they were
killed, while some of the battleships took a half dozen detonations and were
still salvageable.

Over a thousand
Ca’cadasan fighters were now engaged in attacking the Fleet repair and
construction center which had been caught flat footed.  There had been no
reason to believe the Cacas were capable of attacking them here, and now they
paid the price.  Ships that had taken from six months to a year to construct
were destroyed in seconds.  Crew were killed before they could get to their
stations, while valuable ship builders were wiped out aboard ships getting
ready for trials, or on shuttles taking them back to their habitats.  One of
the habitats, a huge spinning structure that was home to twenty thousand
workers and their families, lit up the targeting computers of a Caca ship
attack craft, and ate a ship killer missile that reduced its unarmored hull to
millions of fragments, the bodies of helpless civilians floating among them.

Space was sprinkled with
the flares of antimatter explosions.  The first minutes went to the Cacas. 
After that the ships that were crewed and armed started coming to ready
stations, while the many forts started launching their fighters and adding
their beam weapons to the mix.

*      *      *

“Missile impact in
eighteen seconds,” called out the Duty Officer, Captain Victoria Crenshaw, who
had now assumed the position of tactical officer on a platform that had never
been intended to fight a battle.

“Engage,” ordered Admiral
Hoshi Nakama.  “Pull out all the stops.”  With that order he gave his Captain
permission to fire everything she had that would bear, no matter what might be
in the background that could be hit as well.  There was a lot of valuable
equipment out there, but the Central Station was the most valuable piece of
property in this space, and the Admiral was not about to lose it on his watch.

Sixteen weapons were
coming in.  The station was too big for one of them to destroy it, but four
would probably do the job of putting it out of commission for a year or more. 
Now the lasers aboard started swinging through space, seeking the missiles that
were coming in on evasive paths.  One weapon evaded at the last second,
crashing into a cutter that was trying its best to get out of the way.  Four
more detonated from direct laser hits from batteries that wouldn’t have been
out of place on a battleship.  Eleven came on, into the firing arcs of the
close in weapons systems.

Close in weapons systems
were based on an old idea that had never gone out of style.  Each weapon
consisted of three fifty meter long magrail tubes that were extended when in
use.  Each tube would accelerate the thirty-five millimeter shells to an exit
velocity of point three three light, at the rate of three hundred rounds per
minute.  Fifteen rounds would leave each weapon each second, arming as soon as
they were free of the tube.  Each round was a simple casing around a class IV
crystal matrix power cell, more powerful than any explosive this side of
antimatter.  It powered the blast of the round as its simple sensor system
calculated the closest approach of a material object.  If all worked well that
detonation occurred in front of the missile, and the resultant puff of plasma
was enough to destroy the sensor head of the incoming weapon.  With a little
more luck the missile would be knocked off course, or even destroyed as its
warhead breached.  In the seven seconds it took the missiles to close with the
station, the two hundred and ten autoweapons that could bear had put out over
twenty-two thousand rounds, streaming them in cones that took up the most
area.  Eight missiles detonated far enough away that they had minimal effect. 
A laser took out one more, and two got close enough to cause damage.

One missile detonated
within five hundred meters of the station, sending waves of heat and radiation
into the twenty centimeter thick hull.  Alloy vaporized, holes opened, and
atmosphere and people came streaming out of the openings.  Those who been able
to get into battle armor had a chance of survival, a chance of making it back
to the station or another platform.  The ones who hadn’t were either killed
instantly, or choked out their last breaths in the vacuum.  There was no one to
rescue them, everyone else busy trying to fight back or survive themselves.

The second missile hit
dead into one of the lower sections of the station, an area of quarters and
several hundred repair hangars.  The missile penetrated the hull and went in to
a depth of a hundred meters before the one gigaton warhead went off, sending a
blast wave out that ruptured thirty cubic kilometers of station and incinerated
everything flammable within the area.  The hundreds of destroyers and cruisers
in the repair hangars also sustained variable damage.  They were all tougher
than the station, but they weren’t invulnerable, and the substance of the
station perpetuated the blast like a vacuum couldn’t.  Scores of ships were
ravaged by the explosion, damaged to the point where it would take what was
essentially a rebuild to be put back into service.  The others all sustained
some damage, from major to minor.

“That was a hit,” called
out Crenshaw as the deck jumped underneath their feet.

No shit
, thought the Admiral as
the damage klaxons sounded.  He looked at the damage schematic that showed
almost an eighth of the station for all intents and purposes gone.  Bulkheads
cracked, blast doors blown in, thousands of life monitors offline in a chilling
technological display of death.

“We have nine more
incoming,” shouted out one of the Techs manning a tactical board.

Nakama stared at the
icons coming toward his station, fewer than in the first spread, but then
again, he had fewer weapons to try and take them out.

“Splash three,” shouted
out the gleeful Tech.  “Splash two more.”

The Admiral looked over
at the tactical plot, watching as fast accelerating icons came in from the side
and three more missiles fell off the plot.

“Those are our fighters,”
said Captain Crenshaw, a smile on her face.

Every fortress in the
dock area, every platform that carried them, had been launching fighters as
fast as they could get pilots into them.  They had been able to get less than a
thousand into space, from the five thousand or so that were stationed at
Central Docks.  But they were joining the fight.

As the Admiral watched
the plot, a unit of seven Ca’cadasan attack fighters, six hundred ton vessels,
fought to change their vectors to get away from a full squadron of human short
range birds.  Unlike the long range attack fighters that massed up to a
thousand tons, these smaller craft were made for close in system defense, and
were capable of over twelve hundred gravities acceleration.  The squadron had
been making a head on approach, and now boosted on a vector change that curved
them in from the side and behind the Caca fighters.  An exchange of weapons and
all of the Cacas were gone, along with three of the human fighters.

“We have Cacas heading
for Jewel,” called out one of the Techs.  He looked back at the Admiral. 
“Orders, sir?”

Nakama stared back for a
moment, trying to make the most important decision of his life.  His command
was Central Docks, and it was one of the most vital facilities in human space. 
It was also the place his very important carcass happened to be at the moment. 
He might wish that didn’t make a difference, but it did.  He knew the
Donut
was
under attack at this time as well, but there was absolutely nothing he could do
about it, so it was out of his mind.  But Jewel was also important, the most
heavily populated planet in the Empire, as well as the seat of Government.  The
Empress and the heirs were there, and the damage to the morale of the Empire
would be unimaginable if they were killed.

“Order a fighter strike
to go after those fighters,” he ordered, a sick feeling running through his
stomach as he spoke.

“That will degrade our
own defenses,” said Crenshaw, doing her job in letting him know the
consequences of his orders.

“I know.  And we will
just have to do the best we can.”

The Captain smiled in
return, letting him know she had also thought out the harsh equations of battle
and approved of his decision

“Have we found where
those damned fighters are coming from?” the Admiral asked his command crew.

“I think they are coming
from that freighter,” said one of the Techs, looking back at the Admiral.

“How in the hell are they
getting so many fighters out of that one ship?” asked Crenshaw, pinpointing the
vessel on the tactical plot.  They couldn’t actually see the ship, not with all
of the other objects in their space, especially with all the added flotsam and
jetsam about.  Which meant they couldn’t hit the ship with any of their
defensive lasers.

“They have a wormhole,”
said Nakama in a hushed voice.  The intelligence people had floated it as a
possibility, but he had dismissed it in his own mind.  After all, it had taken
his own civilization decades to perfect the technique of generating the
shortcuts through space.  And they had only become practical with the
completion of the
Donut.

“I didn’t think they had the
capability to make them,” said Crenshaw, mirroring his own thoughts.

“Made it, found it, or
shit it out their oversize asses, I think we are dealing with one.  Send…”

The station shook again,
this time from several minor hits in the five to ten megaton range, fired from
some of the faster space superiority fighters that were mixed among the ship
attack craft.  These missiles were made to take out other fighters, but any
damage done to the station had to be a plus as far as the Cacas were
concerned.  The lights blinked on the control deck, then went out completely
for a moment before the emergency lights came on.

“Send a signal out to
whoever we have that’s combat ready,” continued the Admiral, knowing that he
had to get this order out before anything else happened.

“All communications are
down, sir,” called out the Lt, Commander in charge of the com crew.  “I’m
receiving nothing.  I think that last hit must have cut us off from any of the
com arrays.”

“I think everything has
been cut off, Admiral,” said Captain Crenshaw, looking up from the board she
had been monitoring, a worried expression on her face.  “We’re strictly on
local emergency resources at this time.”

“Dammit,” growled the
Admiral, slamming his hand down on a chair arm.  He looked around the control
room for a moment, amazed that any of them were still here.  All were still in
their skinsuit duty uniforms, none had had the time to get into their battle
armor.  None had had the presence of mind to even think about it.  They had
periodic drills, but no one had really thought this station would ever come
under attack.  Nakama looked at his Com Officer.

“Commander Jingar.  Get
together a team.  I need to get a message out to the nearest section that still
has com access.  And get us connected back into the net.”

“Yes, sir,” agreed the
Commander, getting up from his seat and heading for his armor cubby, pointing
at two of his people to follow suit.

“I should go, sir,” said
Crenshaw, waving for the commander to go back to his seat.  “I know this station
better than anyone here.  Even better than you, sir.”

Nakama looked at his duty
officer for a moment, all of the things that could go wrong running through his
mind.  But there was no guarantee any of them would be here after the next few
moments.

“Go,” he said, waving her
toward her battle armor.  “But be careful.”

The Captain smiled and
ran to her cubby, backing in and letting it put her armor on over her skinsuit.

“Everyone get into your
armor,” ordered the Admiral.  There was nothing they could do at the moment
anyway, and the armor could be the difference between life and death.