Exodus: Empires at War: Book 8: Soldiers (Exodus: Empires at War.) (27 page)

“You’re welcome,
Sean.  Just use my people well.  I don’t expect for all of them to
come back, but if they don’t, please don’t waste them.”

“I can guarantee
that we will treat them the same as we do our own.”

The holo
blanked, and President Graham realized that the Emperor of her larger ally had
more on his plate than anyone should have to deal with. 
Well, I’ve got
the same
, she thought.  She never thought she would be the President
of the Republic during its direst hour, when her people faced a merciless enemy
in a war of annihilation.  Again she thought of the camps she had toured
on her own capital planet after they had recaptured it from the Cacas. 
That image alone would have pushed her into making this decision.

“Admiral,” she said
as the holo came back to life, showing the reptilian face of the commander of
her joint battle fleet.  “I have a new mission for you.”

Chapter Nineteen

Survival is a privilege which
entails obligations. I am forever asking myself what I can do for those who
have not survived.

Simon Wiesenthal.

NEW MOSCOW SPACE, MID DAY, APRIL
8
^TH
, 1002.

Suttler watched
the viewer as a ship came out of the gate attached to his ship.  The gate
had been down for almost twenty minutes, the wormhole dilated to a couple of
meters across, while the engineering crew had hastily laid down some new
superconductor cable to replace the section which had been damaged by the heavy
radiation influx.  It had been tense, watching the Assistant Engineer and
his twelve people, along with some robots, lay in that cable while a space
battle was going on around them.  The force had only had two gates to
bring ships through during that time period, and they were far behind the
buildup time table.  But now they were back to three gates, and while they
would never catch up, at least they wouldn’t be falling behind as fast.

The near enemy
force had been sending missile volley after missile volley at the human force,
damaging many of the ships that were gathered around these wormhole
gates. 
They have to be running through their magazines
, he
thought.  The Caca ships had no way of resupplying their missile magazines
at this time.  When they fired off all they had on board they were no
longer capable of attacking from long range.  And he couldn’t see them
coming in close for a beam to beam fight.  Not when they had been getting
pounded in return throughout the exchange.  There wasn’t an intact warship
in that group, and he could only imagine what kind of damage they had taken to
their laser and particle beam systems.

The destroyer
finished its transit and moved away, curving its vector to get into place to
defend against the massive missile storm heading in from further
outsystem.   That force was still on a vector to meet up with the
human task group coming in from the outer system.  They still outnumbered
that force, and obviously wanted to defeat it before turning back in and
fighting the human task group in orbit.  Or maybe they would just continue
out of the system and save themselves.

Another ship
came through almost immediately.  Another destroyer, another specialized
missile defense ship.  The destroyers were coming through faster than
capital ships.  They were more maneuverable, and command seemed willing to
risk faster transits with the smaller screening vessels.

He looked over
at the tactical holo, which showed all of the Imperial ships that were now in
orbit around the planet, most in the one large group in far orbit that
surrounded the three working gates.  There were two score capital ships
among that group, now joined by almost the same number of smaller screening
vessels, and the one assault ship.  Many of those vessels had sustained
damage already, some severe, especially those who had taken on the massive
orbital fortress.

The next ship to
come through was a surprise to the Commodore, who had been expecting more
screening vessels to deal with the incoming missile storm.  Obviously
someone higher up the chain of command had decided that another assault ship
was needed by the ground forces.  While it was probably a good decision as
far as those ground forces were concerned, Suttler was a naval officer, and to
him the most important part of this operation was the naval battle to control
the space in the system.  If the naval component failed, the whole
operation failed.

The assault ship
completed its transit and boosted toward the planet, moving to take up its own
launch station.  The assault ship that had come through earlier, the
damaged vessel, was still moving into position, a pair of destroyers riding
herd.

“Watch it,”
called a voice over the com net.

Suttler’s head
whipped around, focusing on the tactical holo that showed a dozen missiles from
the most recent volley breaking through the defensive screen.  And all of
them were ranging on one of his ships, one with its own gate, which was
currently transiting a fleet carrier.

“Get them,” he
whispered under his breath as two of the missiles disappeared from the plot,
detonated by defensive lasers.  Moments later another pair disappeared,
then three more.  Two disappeared when the wave was within five seconds of
hitting its target.  Suttler was beginning to think they might get them
all when one more disappeared, until the last two made it into final
approach.  One of those missiles was taken out by the underpowered close
in defense systems of the stealth/attack.  The other came in unerringly,
hitting amidships on the vessel, just forward of the gate on the same side it
was housed, detonating with a blinding flash.

The gigaton
class warhead vaporized the ship in and instant, the explosion reaching out to
completely destroy the framework of the gate in the same instant.  The tip
of the nose of a heavy cruiser was poking through at that instant.  It
caught the brunt of the blast, blowing through its armor and into the body of
the ship.  The wormhole disappeared a microsecond later, which was all
that saved the crew in the forward half of the ship.  The ship continued
forward in the space it was in, no longer transiting a wormhole that wasn’t there
anymore.

Suttler stared
at the disaster, his eyes squinting to handle the brightness of the explosion
that was already stepped down a hundred fold.  Hundreds of people died in
that blast, a tragedy in and of itself.  But even worse, they were already
behind in getting ships across from their deployment points into the battle,
and now they had lost half of their deploying capability.  In the long run
that could lead to the death of millions, and the loss of this battle.

*     
*      *

Captain Nora
Kevista sat in the cockpit of her F310 orbit to atmosphere fighter, the
Pteranodon, waiting for the permission to take off.   Her flight
mates were up on her console, three faces looking out of the screens while the
status of their craft were indicated on the bars beneath them.

Nora anxiously
waited.  They should have already been sent into action, but when
Kharkov
was damaged right after coming through the gate the entire timetable had
gone to hell.  A third of the wing had been destroyed or damaged when the
hanger they had been housed in had been damaged by that blast.

Kharkov
shook as she was hit by something coming up from the planet.  The Captain
had no idea what it was, as that information was not coming over her system,
but if it was enough to send vibrations through the eight million ton vessel,
it had to be something big. 
Let us off this big bitch
, she
thought, wanting to shout over the com.

“Alpha tango
seven two one,” came the call over her com.  “You are cleared for
launch.  Good luck Nova.”

Hot damn
,
thought the Captain, checking to see that her flight was also ready. 
“We’re on, Joey,” she told Warrant Three Thomas
Joseph
Jasper.

“About time,”
said the sensor/weapons officer, sitting in the second cockpit behind her own.

“Here we go,” she
replied as the counter on her dash went from three to zero in what seemed to be
slow motion.  The fighter flew out of the hanger, its three flight mates
around it, all under control of the ship until they were well clear.

Something hit
the assault carrier moment after they left, a bright flash by the bow.  A
destroyer that was moving between the carrier and the planet was firing back,
trying to interpose itself and its defensive systems to protect the injured
vessel.  A particle beam shot up from the planet and hit the
electromagnetic screen of the destroyer.  The beam was spread by the field
from a meter wide to five meters, still pushing through the screen, but
striking the armor of the destroyer in a more attenuated beam that still pushed
the energy into the hull.  But, being a wider beam, it lacked the
penetration of a weapon that would have put twenty-five times the energy per
meter that this beam did.  It still blew through much of the armor, being
a battleship grade weapon, and the destroyer spun on its long axis to turn part
of its still intact armor toward the planet.

Shuttles were
leaving the carrier on the tails of the fighters.  Much larger craft, with
heavier armor, they were carrying double squads of heavy infantry. 
Hundreds of smaller capsules, each carrying an individual infantryman, were
being fired out of the ships by acceleration tubes, veering onto a course that
would bring them down close to their landing zone on the planet.

And then she had
no time for anything but her own entry into the atmosphere, which she was
approaching at twenty kilometers per second.  That was almost slow motion
as compared to space flight, but for something about to come slashing into the
thick gas blanket of an inhabited planet, it was fast indeed.

Nora twisted her
stick, moving her ship out of the way of a beam that was firing up from the
planet and being swept in an arc in an attempt to destroy the incoming
fighters.  All of her flight mates followed suit, and the beam missed
them.  A fighter in another flight, part of her squadron, didn’t move in
time, and the particle beam swept through the aircraft and turned it into an
expanding cloud of plasma.

The fighter
starting bucking as it hit the outer atmosphere, the outer skin heating up
quickly, rising to over several thousand degrees.  She applied her
grabbers, decelerating at five hundred gravities for several seconds, bringing
her speed down to ten kilometers per second.  She banked on her grabbers,
her wingman pulling in close, the other team of the flight closing up on each
other and taking up station several hundred meters to her starboard.

“Transitioning
to atmospheric flight,” she called out over her com, hitting the panel which
caused her craft to covert from a reentry vehicle to a true air combat fighter. 
The wings swept out from the fuselage, adding their lift and maneuverability to
her profile, while staying in close enough to not interfere with the hypersonic
flight.

“Bogies, south
by southeast, range three hundred kilometers, bearing, due north,” said Joey
from the rear.  “Missile launch, missile launch.”

The scope showed
six missiles leaving the three Caca atmospheric fighters.  The return was
blurry, all of the jamming interfering with the sensors of her aircraft. 
They were still very high in the upper atmosphere, on the edge of space, and
they were catching the jamming of both ground and space based platforms.

“Tracking,” said
Joey, and Nora looked at her holographic screen to see several of the incoming
weapons firm up on the plot.  They were high velocity weapons, capable of
boosting or turning at hundreds of gravities.  While not in the same class
as warship weapons, in atmosphere they were still very effective.

“Firing,” called
out the back seater as the missiles, traveling at Mach thirty, came within
fifty kilometers.  The aircraft bucked slightly as it released a pair of
counter missiles, which streaked out at a similar acceleration as the incoming
weapons.  Two missiles also left each of the other craft under her
command.  The missiles were not really set to intercept.  Instead,
they flew a pattern that brought them in a wall in front of the incoming
missiles.  At a kilometer range, less than a fraction of a second from
contact, the counter missiles sent out a hundred small balls each, which exploded
a fraction of a second later, putting up a wall of shrapnel that the incoming
weapons had to negotiate.  Five exploded as they hit that wall, one making
it through by dumb luck.  An instant later the lasers on the human
fighters hit that weapon with enough power to blow it out of the sky.

“Let’s get
them,” yelled Nora into her com.  She and her wingman vectored to the
right, the other team from the left, coming into an approach that scissored in
on the trio of Caca fighters.  Each fighter launched a missile as the
Cacas tried to maneuver away, dropping altitude and turning in a manner that
would get them the largest payoff in gaining distance.

Three missiles
found targets, blowing two Caca aircraft out of the sky.  The third veered
at the last second and launched a multitude of decoys, the missile chasing that
Caca homing in on those sources instead.  At the last second it turned
away from the decoys and back onto the real target, just in time to catch a
counter missile.  The Caca straightened out and hit the acceleration,
disappearing into the static filled atmosphere.

“Good job,
people,” said Nora, setting her craft to drop lower and slower, looking for
more targets.  She felt some relief from her anxiety.  She had never
faced the Cacas before, and had no idea what their aircraft were going to be
like.  She found them to be not as responsive as her own, but still
nothing to be dismissive about.

“Let’s go get us
some more.”  That was their job, shooting enemy aircraft out of the sky so
the ground support craft could operate without interference.  It would
help if they had some more of their own flying this mission, but they had what
they had, and the job was still theirs.

*    
*     *

Sevastopol
shifted
into a geosync orbit high above the planet.  The ship had been battered
into almost hulk status from the fight with the orbital fort.  Three
quarters of her crew were dead or wounded, most of her secondary weapons were
gone, and she was in no shape to either battle it out with other capital ships,
or to help form a missile screen to guard other vessels.  In both of those
tasks she would be more of a liability, something to protect.  But she
still had two laser rings and a particle beam accelerator, and there were
ground targets that desperately needed servicing.