Exodus: Empires at War: Book 14: Rebellion.

by Doug Dandridge

  With the pace of combat operations about to ramp up, he wasn’t sure he would get many opportunities for lovemaking. He wasn’t sure he would get many full night’s sleep either. So he might as well make the most of this opportunity for both.

  * * *

  APRIL 12TH, 1004. CA’CADASAN SPACE.

  “This seems to be the place, ma’am,” said the tactical officer, zooming in on the system in question on the plot.

  “And they have to know we’re here,” said Mei in a low voice. “So, are they just going to sit there and let us bring in more to attack them?”

  What she had at the moment was three of her squadrons, including her own. Nine battle cruisers and thirty-one lighter ships. On the face of it a powerful force. But she didn’t know what was waiting in that system. She did know that it consisted of more than her force had tracked here. Another force, slightly smaller, had been tracked by one of the other scout squadrons. So there was at least that in the system as well.

  “What do you want to do, ma’am?”

  “Sit and think about it a moment, without having a subordinate try to rush my decision,” growled the admiral.

  The tactical officer flushed and turned away.

  “I’m sorry, Commander. But please don’t try to rush me. I’m not sure what I should do. I want to find out what they have there, in case we need to call in the battle fleet.” Though there won’t be any units of battle fleet available for another month, at the very least. She understood the need to refit and reorganize the fleet. If they were fresh and rested, with ships that were fully functional, they would be a formidable force. Especially if going against Caca ships that were damaged and crews that were battle weary.

  But won’t they be able to enact repairs while we do the same? She really didn’t like the idea of the Fleet standing down for so long. It gave the Cacas a chance to bring up reinforcements. Of course, those were ships they would have to fight eventually. She didn’t think that the Cacas were going to surrender. They would have to be beaten into submission. Keeping the pressure on was what she would have done. But is that only because my people don’t get to stand down?

  That the scout force had to remain active made sense as well, in a military sense. It didn’t mean she had to like it, since it involved her people. Someone had to keep a watch on the enemy, and the scout force was the best group available. Still, she didn’t like it, just as she wasn’t going to like the decision she was about to make.

  “Order a pair of destroyers forward. They are to approach the system at point three light in hyper and drop out at the two barrier. They are to look over the system while they coast, then jump back in well before they get to the one barrier and veer off.”

  She thought that gave them the best chance of developing a picture of the system and getting away. If the enemy had ships waiting in ambush they could have them anywhere. The most logical place was the hyper I barrier. If they fired from a distance the destroyers would be able to jump back into hyper and avoid the missiles.

  The com officer nodded and sent off the instructions. Both of the destroyers would of course have wormholes, so she would be able to follow them in real time.

  “We’re picking up nothing ma’am,” came back the com from the lead destroyer. “No grabber emissions, no com signals. Not a thing.”

  “And we’re sure this is the system the Maurids warned us about?” said Mei in a quiet voice, looking over at her intelligence officer, then looking around to make sure no one else was overhearing. The officer was also cleared for knowledge of the species that was spying for them while at the same time acting the role of intelligence officers for the Ca’cadasan.

  “It has to be,” said the commander, looking at a holo over his board. “Though there does seem to be a discrepancy in the mass of the star.”

  “How much of a discrepancy?” asked Mei, a chill running up her spine as her instincts warned her that something was very much not right.

  “About a thousandth of the total mass of the star is missing.”

  “Could that be a result of faulty data from our friends?” Stellar measurements were something that most spacefaring species took pride in, taking them to a ten thousandth of a decimal place.

  “Could be. I can’t really think of any other reason the mass would be missing.”

  The admiral couldn’t either. Some species star mined, extracting plasma from the photosphere of the stellar body. And in over a thousand years of major effort they might remove a billionth of the mass. Not a thousandth, ten thousand times greater magnitude.

  “You need to see this, admiral,” came the voice of the captain of the lead destroyer. The central holo of the flag bridge changed, showing the view from the visual sensors of the destroyer. A globe sat in the middle, the name overhead. According to their records, this had been a living world, if not the most hospitable. Primitive life, just starting on the road to evolution. Now it was a dead planet, the bare surface visible through the near vacuum that now dominated the surface.

  The view zoomed in, showing the dead sea bottoms, moving up to the shoreline for a look at the dead surface. There was no sign of the water that had been there, no indication of the atmosphere that had carried much of that moisture. Some parts of the crust glowed with heat. Not the type of heat from an asteroid strike. That would have left a magma field, possibly molten rock still arcing high into the sky.

  “What in the hell?” whispered the admiral, leaning forward in her chair. “What in the hell could have done that?”

  She could think of several possibilities. A large enough antimatter bomb? Yes, or even several of them. The wormhole bomb could do the job. It had been done by the Empire in Klavarta space. The Ca’cadasans had attempted to do it to Jewel and failed. But why here? As a test? They already knew that the weapon worked, so why test it out here? And didn’t this, the killing of a living world, go against their religion?

  They hadn’t always followed the tenants of their religion in the past. In fact, from what their friends had told them, the Ca’cadasan population was not as faithful as they had been in the past. The numbers of unbelievers had been growing, and the casual believers were also reaching a critical mass. Which didn’t mean that there still weren’t enough fanatical believers to make actions such as this problematic.

  “We have another one, ma’am. This was described to us as a frigid world with ammonia seas and a methane atmosphere.”

  The viewer zoomed on the indicated moon, showing a surface that resembled that of the last planet, too much so. And another moon that was described as having a snow and ice covered surface, and was now just a rocky core.

  “We know it wasn’t a supernova,” said her science officer, looking over from his station. “The star is still here, as are all of the other bodies. Everything would have been gone if the star had exploded.”

  “What about a standard nova?” asked the admiral.

  “Not possible for any phenomenon we know about,” said the officer, shaking his head. “A nova isn’t that powerful. It might blow off some atmosphere, but this is way beyond that.”

  “So it’s something new,” said Mei, leaning her chin into her hand and closing her eyes. “But what?”

  “Maybe we need to get a look at the past.”

  “Good thinking, Commander. Order the rest of our destroyers to make a hyper run away from this system. I want one or more to drop out periodically and look back.”

  “Out to how far?” asked her flag captain.

  “Our friends indicated that this, test, of whatever it was supposed to be, hadn’t occurred two months ago. So have ships drop out at one light day intervals out to three light months. If something happened that we can see, it should be apparent by that limit.”

  The ships started off within the hour, killing their velocity inward and starting to vector outward in hyper I. It would still take some time for them to cover the entire distance, since they had to stay at just above point three light most of the way, gettin
g down to it to jump in and out.

  Mei waited for the first couple of reports, one she didn’t get too much out of. Finally, she decided that sitting here on the bridge was not doing anything, and she needed a break. Making sure that all of the data was being sent back to Fleet, she left the bridge and repaired to her quarters.

  “Hello, baby,” she greeted her Himalayan cat, Satin, as she entered her cabin. The cabin was the most luxurious she had ever occupied aboard ship, with four chambers covering over two hundred square meters of floor space. A large living room, a dining room that could host all of her senior officers for meals, a good sized bed chamber, and of course her office. She also had a smaller day cabin nearer to the flag bridge. Satin seemed to enjoy the extra space, though she thought he would be content with the cabin she had occupied as a destroyer captain, as long as he got his treats and human contact.

  The com indicator chimed while she was getting a cup of coffee from the machine in the small kitchen attached to the living room. She waited a moment to finish making her cup, certain that it was too early to have gotten anything of interest back from the scouts. Sitting down on her couch, she took a sip, put her other hand on the cat, and accepted the com.

  “We’re picking up some strange readings in hyper, ma’am,” said the science officer, his face appearing on a holo that appeared over the coffee table.

  “What kind of strange?”

  “Like nothing I’ve ever heard of, though cross checking the database shows a close match with the echoes of a supernova. Not as strong, which means it either happened some time ago, or was not as powerful.”

  “Or possibly both?” asked Mei, sitting up straight and putting down her cup.

  “That’s my thought. I think someone was playing around with stellar forces out here.”

  “But definitely not a supernova, or we would have noticed the turbulence traveling here,” said the admiral. Actually, if it had been recent, they might not have been able to transit in or out of hyper. They would be trapped there until they reached sufficient distance from the epicenter, or enough time had passed. And besides, all the bodies were still here.

  “And what we saw on those planets was too much to be caused by a flare star or a standard nova.”

  So, something we have never heard of, she thought, pursing her lips in thought. That could be bad, if they couldn’t pick up the event that signaled that whatever had happened was about to go off. And if they didn’t have any idea of its power or range?

  “I want every ship to start scanning for anything unusual. Start with the hyper resonances, then look for anything that might be out of the ordinary.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what we pay you science people for.” She cut the com before she lost her temper, then shook her head while a slight smile played across her lips. The science officers of warships were not doctoral level anything, though some did eventually get to that level. Still, they were not at the same level as university professors or think tank scientists. They could think of things that might escape someone who had risen through the ranks as a tactical officer, which was all she could ask.

  “Make sure that Fleet R and D gets this information,” she said after briefly connecting the com again with her implant. She fully expected the science people to do so, but better to be sure than to find out at some later time that they had done no such thing, and let the blame fall on her.

  Mei pulled up the scanner results the science officer had spoken of, looking them over. The admiral was not a hyperspace physicist, and she doubted she would spot anything they hadn’t. Still, as commander of the force, she felt it was her responsibility to at least give them a look. The wave forms did look unusual. Her time in engineering, a required rotation to reach command, had given her enough of an eye to see that. However, she was not an engineer.

  “Captain Yankovick,” she said into the air, making the connection with the battle cruiser’s commanding officer. “Get your engineering people to look over these scans. Maybe they can see something the rest of us are missing.”

  “Right on it, ma’am,” replied the officer, leaving his commander to ponder the scans.

  After ten minutes of looking she decided there was nothing there jumping out at her, and went back to what she was qualified to do. The positions of her ships came up on a holo, and she studied those icons, wondering what might unexpectedly come at her in the present deployment, and what she could do about it. Time passed, quickly, and she was startled when another com chimed in.

  “Murphy is reporting in, ma’am. Their captain thinks you need to see this.”

  A holo came up to replace the tactical she had been looking at. It showed the star, only it wasn’t the star they were currently in proximity to. It had flared to thousands of times its ordinary magnitude. If not for the filters in place it would be blinding in the true sense of the word. As she watched the corona of the star expanded, slowly.

  “Speed up,” she ordered.

  The view sped up, the gas envelop pushing out until a mass broke away and flew out from the star.

  “That looks like the missing mass, ma’am,” said the science officer, looking on from his station.

  “It looks almost like a supernova.”

  “Not the same magnitude, but still something fierce.”

  “Speed it up some more.”

  The view continued to show the gas envelop expanding, moving much faster than would be possible in real time. Another view replaced the one she was looking at, showing the star from a greater distance, the star normalized. The scene before the star flared.

  The view zoomed again. Showing close ups only obtainable with the most modern of optics. The grav lensing of the ships, the same tech that allowed the laser systems to target over light minutes with full power, also formed the most efficient optical system possible. And this time they were centering on something above the star. Something very familiar.

  “My God,” blurted the admiral, staring at what had to be a Ca’cadasan superbattleship. Only different somehow. A moment later the star started sending out massive flares, enormous prominences that out massed whole terrestrial worlds. Coming close to the ship overhead, but not quite yet.

  “We need to get this to Fleet, immediately,” she ordered, looking over at the faces of her officers in a series of holos lined up around the couch. “Tag it for the Emperor’s attention.”

  “We’re still gathering data, ma’am.”

  “Then keep gathering the damned data, and send what we have. They need to see this ASAP.”

  Mei leaned back in her chair, a shiver running up her spine. The destructive power on display was terrifying. Not only that, but whatever it was, it was beyond the science of the Empire. There wasn’t even a theory to cover this, as far as she knew. The people who dealt with this kind of thing needed to see it and get to work on replicating it. Which sent another shiver through her. Was any species capable of controlling such a force, and did any have the wisdom to not use it once they had it?

  * * *

  APRIL 18TH, 1004. JEWEL.

  “So, what are we looking at here, Admiral Chan?” asked Sean, leaning back in his chair and concentrating on the images playing on the holo.

  Jennifer was sitting next to her husband in the Octagon conference room, while the rest of the room was taken up by high ranking officers. A couple of them, including Sondra McCullom, the Chief of Naval Operations, were present in the flesh. Most attended by holo projection, their solid seeming bodies actually light years away in most cases, transmitted by wormhole.

  “What we are seeing, your Majesties, is something I wouldn’t have thought possible before seeing this,” said Vice Admiral Chuntoa Chan, the Fleet Chief of Research and Development, widely considered one of the brightest humans in the Empire. The diminutive woman was attending by holo, of course. Her work on the R and D planetoid sitting between the stars of the Supersystem was too important to take her away. Not when she could attend
from her own office in real time.

  “I’m still not really sure how it works, but I’m kicking it over to some of the best stellar and hyper physicists I know of. Hopefully they can give me something in a few days.”

  Sean grunted as he watched an elapsed replay of the Event, as they were calling it for lack of a better name. The surface of the star started to roil over a period of an hour, minutes in the elapsed time, huge promences rising into space and falling back. Until some were not falling back, but were heading out into the system. Those were energetic enough to cause some serious problems if they hit a planet as a solar storm. Not enough to kill a world, but enough to really screw up an early technic civilization.

  Minutes later, about an hour real time, the entire outer shell of the star blew off, heading into space, blotting out the ships that were generating whatever it was that was causing the Event. The Emperor wondered if the ships were manned, or if this was an automated system. Knowing the Cacas, he wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been a suicide mission. Maybe not with full crews, but still hell on whoever had been aboard.

  The photon storm, the cascade of photons that transferred the heat of the star outward, sped before the plasma cloud at the speed of light. It was much like the normal radiation of the star, only a thousand times more powerful. It started hitting planets in less than a minute, all the way up to eight minutes for the once habitable planet. Atmospheres were ripped away, water blasted into its constituent gases, ice covers melted to water.

  “Wasn’t Admiral Bednarczyk doing something similar against the Machines?” asked Jennifer, her own brows narrowed in thought.

  “She’s using magnetic projection, Your Majesty,” said Chan, nodding, frowning, then shaking her head. “Not the same thing, and with nowhere near this kind of effect. But good job connecting it, since I hadn’t thought of that.”

  The time elapse moved on, as a thousandth of the mass of the star moved out in a killing globe of plasma. The first planet to be hit was a barren rock. It was still a barren rock when the wave passed, though anything that would have been on the surface would surely have been destroyed. The second was a hell world of too much atmosphere. Most of that was already gone from the photon storm, but not all. When the globe of destruction that was the plasma passed it was an airless rock. The third world was life bearing, a primitive planet on the extreme edge of survival. One day more advanced life would develop there. Or it would have, if not for the photon storm that stripped away its atmosphere and boiled its seas. The plasma took care of what gas was left. The same happened to the next planet out, then the first gas giant. There was not much effect on the Jovian world, though the clouds were roiled and there some were torn away. The moons of the planet were a different matter, and they suffered the same fate as the inner planets. Atmospheres torn away, icy surfaces melted, water disassociated.