“We have movement from the ships at both stations as well,” called out the Sensor Officer.
The holo shifted out, and they could see the vector arrows under more than a score of ships at each of the two stations. They were both moving out from their stations, into the outer reaches. With a burst of gravitons they disappeared from the normal Universe and into hyper I. The burst of gravitons from near the far station came moments later.
“Make sure command is getting all of this,” Suttler ordered his Com Officer.
A short time later twenty of the ships that had disappeared from the second station reappeared with another burst of gravitons just out from the fleet gathering point. Twenty minutes later the other force appeared nearby, and it was obvious that the ships were about to join the fleet.
“What do you think that is about?” asked the Helmsman.
“I think their big brass are getting involved,” said Ngovic. “They were at the station, and decided they wanted to lead the mission that gets them what they want.”
“I think that’s a good guess, Tactical,” said the Commodore. He looked over at the Com Officer. “Send that assessment up to HQ, and credit it to Mr. Ngovic.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Ngovic, smiling.
“We’ll just watch what happens,” said Suttler. “But I don’t think we see much more movement except for this realignment for the next couple of days.”
And we get to go to work when it does.
Chapter Fourteen
SECTOR IX SPACE. NOVEMBER 5TH, 1001.
“I have someone who wants to talk with you,” said the man known as Shadow.
What the hell is it now, thought Sonia Rupert, the local agent of the IIA on the frontier world of Steinway. Shadow was well known to the agent, and to most of local law enforcement on the sparsely populated planet. They called him another name, Snitch. He was a well-known informant on a world where being such was hazardous to health. Everyone on this world was armed, and even if most were law abiding, there were enough exceptions to keep the small constabulary busy. And, since the world was in a relatively quiet region, part of Sector IX, on the north of the galactic plane just above the Core Worlds, the Cacas weren’t active in this area, yet.
I should have stayed on the Imperial Protection Detail, she thought, remembering the excitement of Jewel. But she had gotten burned out on the continuous stress of the detail, and then Augustine and his family had been killed, and she had requested the quietest assignment possible. Planet chief on an out of the way world. And on a world like Steinway, that meant being the only IIA agent.
“What is it this time, Snitch?” asked the agent. “Another shipment of illegal links. Not really something I would be interested in. Maybe you should go talk to the Chief Constable.”
The man frowned and shook his head. “She told me to get in touch with you, and no one else.”
“And who is she?”
“She didn’t give me a name, but she said to tell you that it concerns the Cacas.”
“Human?”
“Nope,” said the man with a smile, shaking his head. “She’s a… well, she’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. You’ll have to see her to believe her.”
An unknown alien? Here? Involved in something having to do with the Cacas? “Maybe I should contact someone at the militia barracks,” she said, grabbing a hold of Shadow’s shirt so he couldn’t flee.
“She said she would be watching, to make sure you came alone,” stammered the Snitch, trying to pull away.
Rupert was augmented, stronger and faster than any unaugmented human. Shadow found himself held in a grip he could not break.
“I swear. You’ve never seen anything like this alien. She moves through the dark like a, like a, shadow. You won’t find her if she doesn’t want to be found. And she swore it would be worth your while to talk with her. That it would benefit the entire Empire.”
“Ok, Snitch. We’ll play it your way. How do I find this alien?”
“I’m to lead you to her. That’s what she said.”
“OK.” Sonia released the man’s shirt, then reached under her jacket to check her pistol. It was a standard mag pistol, capable of sending an eight millimeter pellet at up to five thousand meters per second. Not really a military class weapon, but good enough to handle most situations she would find on a frontier world. If she needed military firepower, she had access to it too. “You lead the way. But if you’re playing some kind of game with me, I will ring your neck.”
“No game,” said Shadow, leading the way out of the bar. “You’ll see.”
The town was alive at this time of the evening, despite its small size. Ten thousand people called this, the capital city of Humphrey, home. There was a landing field to the north, and scrublands surrounding the town on all sides. People worked the farms, or the mining concerns in the mountains to the south. The majority of the planet’s ninety thousand residents lived on the coasts of the one supercontinent, where the climate was much more pleasant, and the seas abounded with life. The people who lived in Humphrey were mostly homebodies, but the miners and ranchers who worked the lands had a hard life, and Humphrey was a place to blow off steam.
Several men with the look of miners gave her looks of appreciation, but didn’t try the come on. There were whores walking the street, and Sonia was not dressed like them, but in casual business wear. In a small town, where most people were known, she had a reputation as someone not to be messed with. A couple of men she didn’t recognize started to follow her down the street, but a hard stare turned them around. Damn scum, drifting onto the planet to get away from the draft, she thought. Not everyone was patriotic, including small time criminals who thought they had better things to do than fight for the Empire. And they tended to run for places where they could continue to prey on society, and not get caught up in the military.
“We need to take a car,” said Shadow, pointing at the parking garage down the street where Sonia stored her government vehicle.
“How far away is she?”
“Out in the desert,” said the small man, nodding. “She said she didn’t want to be around so many humans.”
“Very well,” said Sonia, leading the way through the garage and her vehicle, a brand new Mercedes aircar that looked just like an unarmed civilian model, and was anything but. She started the car and taxied to the central elevator, which lifted her to the roof. With a whir of fans she took the car into the air.
“Which way, Snitch?”
“To the southwest. Aim for the twin hill with the saddle. You want to go over the saddle, and land in a small canyon just beyond.”
Sonia grunted acknowledgement and turned the car that way, speeding over the scrublands that dominated the center of the supercontinent. Below, the sparse trees and brown grass like plants rocked in the wind of her passage, and one of the mollusk like giants of the world trumpeted as it took off on its single foot, its shell gleaming in the light of the rising moon, its twin antenna twisted back her way on the head that towered twenty meters above the ground, following every move of her car.
Strange how they look like giant snails, she thought of the creatures. But they were not snails. They had an endoskeleton, and a scaly outer covering, and were very moisture tight. They superficially looked like mollusks, and that was all. And had been the dominant form of life on this world, before the coming of humans.
The saddle came quickly, and soon she spotted the canyon in question, about forty meters wide with a stream running through it, and much more vegetation than the surrounding lands. She found a flat area large enough for her car and set it down in a cloud of dust.
“Where to from here?” she asked Shadow, opening the cockpit of the car.
“Walk up the canyon,” said Shadow, pointing toward the saddle. “She will meet you there.”
“And you?”
“I’ll stay right here,” said the man, shivering. “Meeting her once was enough.”
“Very well,”
said Sonia, closing the cockpit and locking it with Shadow within. “You can stay here till I get back.”
“Hey, what are you doing?” yelled Shadow, pounding on the plastisteel of the cockpit cover. “Let me out of here.”
“I’ll let you out when I come back,” she said, turning the way he had indicated.
“What happens if you don’t come back?”
“Then you get to wait a bit longer,” she said with a laugh, striding toward the base of the canyon.
After walking a hundred meters from the car, and now in a denser stand of vegetation, she slowed down, sniffing the air and using her heightened senses to scan the darkness. There was a slight odor to the air, different than anything she had ever smelled, but too faint to get a fix on. Sonia drew her gun, keeping it down by her side, ready for use but not in clear sight.
“Do you really need that?” asked a strange voice in heavily accented Standard English, the language of the Empire.
Sonia sucked in a breath with a start. She hadn’t seen anything. She searched the shadows with her eyes, still not discerning any movement.
“I asked you here to talk, human. Not to provide a target.”
“Who are you? Come out where I can see you.”
“You have almost no scent,” said the voice, this time from another direction. “You are one of the augmented humans. I did not realize there were so many of you.”
Damn, but she moved silently. I didn’t hear a rustle of a leaf.
“Since you are one of the augmented, you are a physical match for me. Or at least the ones you call Rangers were when they fought my people. So you have nothing to fear.”
Damn. She’s one of those new aliens. The ones our men fought on Azure. Hunters? “If you have a weapon that would not be true.”
“I do have a weapon, but it is not drawn,” said the voice, moving through the brush around her and to her front. “If I wanted to kill you, it would be done. Now holster that weapon, and I will present myself.”
Or else you’ll just fade away, and I’ll never find out what this is about. “Very well,” she said, pushing the gun into her shoulder holster. “It’s away.”
The leaves rustled slightly, and a dark form moved out into the open. It was about a meter high at the shoulder, and moved like a very stealthy dog, or some kind of running cat. The fur was striped orange, what parts of her weren’t covered by a shifting stealth suit. She moved to within five meters of the agent and stood up on her hind feet. Now she stood over two meters in height, and her forward paws extended into hands.
“You are one of the Hunters?”
“We are called Maurid. We are a servant race of the Ca’cadasans.”
“And what are you here for?”
“To establish a spy network in your Empire, so we can gather information for our masters.”
Oh shit, thought Sonia, tensing, trying to figure out the best way to take the creature down.
“Do not reach for your weapon,” said the creature, what looked like razor sharp claws extending from the second knuckle of each finger.
Sonia stared at those hands with her advanced vision, noting that the claws would be deadly weapons in both configurations of the members. What kind of things are these. Genetically engineered. But she remembered the reports she had seen on the creatures, the genetic scans of bodies that had been recovered on Azure. The creatures used a DNA structure similar to that of humans. And there were none of the characteristic markers of genetic manipulation.
“So, what are you here for? And why did you want me? I’m just a local planet agency chief. I don’t have anything you want.”
“The human called Shadow told me that you were once on the security detail for your Emperor. And have some contacts high in your agency.”
Sonia stared at the creature in shock. What in the hell did Snitch get me into?
“I am not here to try to force information from you. I am here to make an arrangement.”
“I will not be a traitor to my people.”
“And I am not asking you to. The offer is to give your people information.”
“Why?”
“Why?” said the creature, showing its teeth in a grin that looked anything but humorous. “To get rid of the yoke we have worn so long. To throw off our servitude to our masters, the Ca’cadasans.”
“So you will turn traitor against your own?”
“They are not my own, human,” growled the creature. “And we see you as the best chance we have ever had to rid us of them.”
“Ok,” said Sonia, thinking fast. “I think we can work something out. And you will, of course, expose your own network.”
“No,” said the Maurid. “I will not expose my network. That is not negotiable. They will continue to gather information on your Empire, and feed it back to our masters. But it will be a selective feed. While we feed you information as well.”
And play both sides against the middle, thought Sonia. Smart. And still to our advantage, since they would have been spying on us anyway, and now we get some extra intelligence into the Caca command.
“I will have to talk with my superiors,” she told the creature. “But I think we can work something out. And what should I call you?”
The creature made an undulating growling noise. “But since you cannot call me that, as your vocal apparatus is incapable of producing such, you can call me Mephisto,”
“Catchy name.”
“I learned it from one of your people. I liked the name, and it is good as any.”
“When can I meet with you again? Once I get permission to deal with you.”
“I will contact you,” said the creature, handing over a small unit that looked like some kind of communication device. The creature studied her face for a moment. “Do not try to capture me to get the information from me. It will not work.”
“I wouldn’t think of it. I…”
“Do not lie to me, human. Of course it is something you are capable of, so it is something you have thought of. But any attempt at trying to force information from me will result in my immediate death. Believe me. I am capable of destroying my own brain with a thought. I will not explain. Just believe I am telling the truth. Otherwise, we will both regret it.”
With that, the creature turned, went to all fours, and disappeared in a leap into the brush.
Well, that was interesting, to say the least, thought the agent as she walked back to her car. I’ll wonder tomorrow if I dreamed this. If not, this is a dream for our intelligence gathering. I can’t wait to get a response back from Director Sergiov.
* * *
SECTOR IV SPACE. NOVEMBER 7TH, 1001.
High Admiral Kellissaran Jarkastarin grinned with joy as he watched another world die on his holo. This one had been a legal kill, a terraformed world. The orders of his third cousin, the Emperor, was that all worlds that had predominantly Terran life were to be destroyed, entirely, not a microbe left. That this had been a developing world, with over a hundred million of the vermin infesting the surface, was a bonus. He had robbed the humans of an industrial node that was aiding their war effort.
The blast waves were still working their way across the surface of the world. The largest ocean had several glowing red spots in the center where missiles, moving at relativistic speeds, had punched through the crust at the same moment their gigaton class warheads had detonated. The glows were muted, shining through the columns of superheated steam that were rising from the interaction of seawater with magma. And a ring of multi-kilometer high tsunamis were radiating outward in all directions from those hits, several having run into each other and rebounded, sending the walls of water back toward the penetration points.
The waves had already flowed over several large islands, scouring them clean. Some of the modern buildings might have survived the impact of the water, but they were still washed away into the ocean, most to fall to the bottom. Humans might even survive that, but most buildings didn’t have the emergency gear to allow the
ir occupants to make it back to the surface through thousands of meters of water. Waves had hit the coast of one continent, rushing up to the base of the coastal mountains and flowing through low passes.
More satisfying to the High Admiral were the holes through the crust of the continents, spouts of high pressure magma rising high into the atmosphere, blasts waves moving out at supersonic speed to incinerate everything in their way. As the world was turning more missiles, timed to hit as the surface came into sight, slammed into the planet.
“What is that?” asked the High Admiral, zooming the holo in on a small portion of the surface where the firewall of the blast wave had already passed. The bare surface became clear, showing a large structure still standing.
“That appears to be some kind of bunker,” said the Tactical Officer. “It must have been covered by a hill that was scoured clear by the blast wave.
“Then I guess we will still have to orbit the planet,” said the High Admiral in a hiss. “I want all signs of life obliterated by kinetics.”
“They’re likely to die anyway, my Lord,” said another of the officers.
“Not true,” said the Tactical Officer, earning a glare from the other officer. “That bunker likely has its own power and life support, and plenty of supplies.”
“Then I want it, and every surviving structure, destroyed.”
“That will delay us from the rendezvous,” said the Helm Officer, looking back at the Admiral with a worried expression. “The Great Admiral will not like that.”
“The Great Admiral can go bugger himself,” growled the High Admiral. The Helm Officer cringed under his glare. Low born oafs, all of them. He knew what the Great Admiral wanted. All of his ships under his thumb, and all glory his. Jarkastarin, of a long and noble line closely related to the Imperial Family, disapproved of the cautious approach that the Conquest Commander pursued. If he had been in charge, he would have spread the fleet and hit as many human systems as possible, sending them reeling into an early defeat.
Exodus: Empires at War: Book 06 - The Day of Battle Page 19