Exodus: Empires at War: Book 06 - The Day of Battle

by Doug Dandridge

  Komorov grabbed her chair arms, trying to stay calm and failing. It’s going to be OK, she thought. Just like the drill. Just like the drill. Just like the drill.

  “Bubble drop, now,” yelled out the Pilot as the timer hit zero.

  Bubble drop was handled by the computer, trying to get the ship as close to the same velocity as it was when it went in as possible. The grabbers powered down as soon as that velocity was attained, and the actual transition occurred while the fighter was coasting. The electromag field went to its weakest setting, and magnetic fields from the craft scooped up the negative matter in another microsecond, returning it to the containment bottles where it was stored between uses.

  There was a gut wrenching shudder as soon as they returned to normal space, the tiny bit of inertial difference between entry and exit rolling through the ship. The inertial compensators went into overload for that fraction of a second, absorbing all that they could. Still, there was enough to make the hull creak, and throw the crew backwards and forwards in their chairs. It was worse than the transition through hyper dimensions. Everyone who went through it agreed with that assessment. And it felt wonderful to Komorov, who knew the only other possibility was instant death as the ship imploded, then exploded, with the inertial overload.

  The grabbers powered up immediately, the electromag field strengthened, and cold plasma was pumped from its tanks into the shield. All passive sensors went to maximum gain, and the ship’s computer presented a snapshot of the Universe around them, collating, assessing, and marking the salient features.

  “Shit,” hissed Komorov as she saw that two of her ships hadn’t come back intact, their nearby plasma clouds moving in their direction of travel at point nine five light. She didn’t have time for those regrets. She had a job to do, and no time for anything else.

  “There they are,” shouted the Weapon’s Tech with an excited voice.

  Komorov saw them at the same time. Her force was not exactly on target, the Caca Fleet was about a light minute further in than they had estimated. Fortunately, the formation was large enough, spread out enough, that there were still ships directly to their front, by less than thirty light seconds.

  “Target acquisition,” called out the Weapon’s Tech.

  Komorov nodded as the tactical holo showed the distribution of fire from her wing, coming in over the subspace com as the unit once more became a coherent whole. They wanted to make sure they hit as many ships as possible, without committing the kind of overkill that would waste their firepower. She only had a couple of seconds to look over that information, linking her mind with the ship’s computer so she could use its processing speed.

  “Target acquisition approved,” she said, sending the code to the other ships over the com. “Fire, fire, fire. All ships, evasive.”

  From each ship two missiles dropped, going the same velocity as launching craft, then boosting at ten thousand gravities toward their targets. Each missile massed a hundred tons, with one gigaton warheads, the same as the weapons carried by battleships. The grabbers and crystal matrix batteries were of a different class though, made to accelerate on overdrive for no more than five minutes. Some of the other wings had been equipped with missiles with multiple warheads, but hers hadn’t been. It was thought that the unitary warheads would perform just as well at this velocity and distance, and Komorov hoped they were right.

  These missiles only had a twenty-five second flight time on average. They were only able to build up a little less than another percent of light speed before they hit their targets. They were still difficult to acquire, difficult to hit, as they jammed and evaded their way into the targets. Of the two hundred and twenty missiles fired, only twenty four were taken out by defensive fire. The rest made it to their targets, one hundred fifteen making proximity detonations that caused light damage to superbattleships, serious damage to scouts. Eighty-one made direct hits on seventy-three vessels. Seventy-three kills, shattering the smaller ships to particulate matter, sending the larger as spinning hulks into the void. Three battleships received multiple hits and went up in spectacular balls of plasma.

  The attack fighters sped through the enemy formation, having a mere twelve seconds to fire their beam weapons. Those weapons were not powerful enough to do much damage, mostly scarring hulls or destroying small weapons’ installations. Still, every bit of damage counted.

  Komorov lost eleven ships on the fly through. The ninety-nine ships that made it through immediately sucked in their cold plasma and replaced it with negative matter, again cutting them off from the normal Universe. Each ship started their acceleration up to sixteen thousand gravities. In a bit over a minute they were past the speed of light, heading for the reorganization point, where they would have decelerated to rest and plan their next move.

  Komorov played a holo on the way to that point, showing the attack from the perspective of her ship, hoping to glean information to use in the next strike. She felt a moment of regret at the loss of her crews. Not as much for the ships, they could always be replaced. But the regret was overpowered by the elation. They had destroyed hundreds of millions of tons of enemy shipping. Not much of a loss to that massive fleet, but definitely a galling strike. Multiplied by twelve wings, if they all were as successful as hers, and they had really hurt that force.

  * * *

  Not all of the wings were, of course, that successful. One wing came out of their bubbles a full three light minutes behind the last formation in the Ca’cadasan force. It still launched, and got a couple of hits, but nowhere near the sting that Komorov’s group did. Another came into normal space fifteen light minutes away. It also launched. It also flew through. And it lost almost a third of its strength for little return. Two did as well as Komorov’s, one not quite as well, but with fewer casualties than the one disaster.

  The wings from Carrier Group Five came into normal space eight minutes after the craft from Four. Two groups were in perfect orientation for an attack, and, despite the warning given the enemy by the attack from Four. They did almost as much damage as the best attacks from Four, with only slightly more casualties to their own wings. Four wings came out in frankly horrible orientations, unable to do more than launch missiles that had a less than even chance of reaching target, due to their less than optimum long range acceleration profile. Most of the missiles died in space before they could complete their vector change, while some were able to make the course shift, only to have their grabbers die on approach. A missile that couldn’t maneuver on final approach had only one designation. Easy target. Despite their velocity they could be tracked, and accurate beam fire could destroy them.

  But still, several hundred enemy ships were destroyed by the attacks, while an almost equal number were damaged, something that seriously weakened the enemy force.

  * * *

  “And here the enemy ships surrounded themselves with, something, my Lord,” said the Tactical Officer, pointing to the craft on the holo. “I’m not sure what it is, but it absorbs almost all of our sensor scans. Almost. We were still able to track it as long as we kept our scan focused on it in a tight beam.”

  Which means we can’t see them coming until they drop that field,” thought the Great Admiral, staring at the faint icon that they had tracked. So we’re going to have trouble seeing them until they start their attack, and after.

  “The ship is going point nine five when it erects that field. And here comes the frightening part, my Lord. Point nine six. A few moments later point nine seven. Point nine eight. Point nine nine. And then, they completely disappear from our scan.”

  “Well, what in all the hells happened to them?”

  “We think they exceeded light speed, my Lord. They were then outrunning our scanning beams.”

  “Exceed light speed? But, that’s impossible, isn’t it?”

  “Not if they figured out how to do it,” said the Admiral’s Senior Advisor. “And these humans seem to be very good at doing the impossible.”

&nbs
p; The Great Admiral thought about that for a moment, realizing what was happening. “It is a trap, and they think they can destroy us.” He looked around at the faces in the conference chamber. “I want all ships to decelerate. I want us out of this system.”

  “We won’t come to a stop until we reach the planet,” said the Tactical Officer.

  “It might be a better idea to just boost through the system and come out the other side,” said the Advisor.

  “We will still have to decelerate before we can jump on the other side,” said the Tactical Officer. “And we will have to vector around the star, as well as slow our velocity in its intense particle field.”

  “The Tactical Officer is correct,” said the Great Admiral. “This is an energetic star, mid F-class. At greater than point three light, our fields will not be able to handle the particle radiation. No, we’ll decelerate to the planet, then head back out. And we can drop some kinetics on those cities before we leave.”

  “And if there’s an enemy force waiting for us outside the system?” asked the Advisor.

  “Then we fight them. We still have a mighty force here, and a major battle force waiting at the edge of the system. We…”

  Klaxons sounded, and the Admiral stopped himself from mouthing the rest of what he was going to say. Something else was happening, and he knew it couldn’t be good.

  * * *

  Admiral Lenkowski had been waiting for this moment. His battle fleet had been hiding behind the many snowballs of the Kuiper Belt of the system. Some had even burrowed their way into the ice, those closest in, those that might be picked up by Caca ships coming into normal space from further out.

  “All ships, begin Plan Four Alpha. Repeat, Four Alpha.”

  The acknowledgements started coming back immediately through the wormhole coms, just a bit longer for those that had to be transmitted by subspace com to the wormhole equipped vessels. He saw their icons change color on the holo, indicating that they had received the command and were starting to carry out their part of the operation.

  Anastasia Romanov was herself buried under a kilometer of ice on one of the bigger iceballs, a Plutino several thousand kilometers in diameter. Now her laser rings glowed with power as they sent out wide beams that melted the ice overhead. It took a minute to pump enough heat into almost three cubic kilometers of frozen water, sufficient to turn much of it to liquid water, the rest into a slush. Before that time was up the superbattleship was pushing through the ice under her grabbers. As she rose above the Plutino the forms of a dozen other battleships, thirty cruisers and fifty-three destroyers that had also been buried in the ice came up with her, the local squadrons of her task group.

  The ships moved around the Plutino and formed up, starting their boost for the outer system. Len didn’t worry so much about what this task group was doing, except inasmuch as it was part of his battle fleet; and the ships that were protecting his personal hide. The rest of the vessels were forming up in their task groups across several square light hours of space. They formed a hemisphere around the enemy, all of the ships a couple of light hours out from that force. Vector arrows started to appear in the place of the stationary icon of each ship, and soon acceleration and velocity figures filled in below the arrows. The lowest acceleration was four hundred and eighty gravities, the rate of the standard fifteen million ton battleships, the most common capital ship in the force. The faster ships accelerated at the same rate, keeping the force together.

  “Open fire,” he ordered, and moments later the vector arrows of missiles appeared in front of each ship, everyone sending off a volley, even the destroyers. Soon there were tens of thousands of arrows, then tens of thousands more, all heading for the enemy force. Now it’s your move, thought Lenkowski, waiting to see if the enemy would stand and fight, or jump into hyper. He thought it would be the former, since they were tasked with guarding that space for the return of their main force. But it could always be the latter, and then he would have to jump his force to hyper, and call up Mgonda’s fleet in support.

  “Enemy is launching missiles,” called out the Fleet Tactical Officer, just a moment before tens of thousands of red arrows started heading their way. “Should we launch more, sir?”

  “Follow the plan, Tactical,” said the Admiral, holding up a finger. “The fire plan has already been plotted, and deviating from it now will just cause confusion.”

  * * *

  “The enemy fleet is continuing in, decelerating for a least time insertion to the planet,” came the voice of Kelso over the com.

  “Just like we were hoping,” said the Emperor, nodding.

  “And what if they did something else?” asked Jennifer, her eyes narrowing as she looked at the oncoming enemy fleet, now on vid mode and looking even more intimidating.

  “We were pretty sure they wouldn’t try for a straight shot through the system,” said Sean, looking around and reaching for the bright point of the star, which expanded into the awesome splendor of a globe of fusion fire. Flares rose from the surface, large enough to engulf entire planets. “This is a very energetic star, an F8 in the process of going into a heat up cycle. It would take a lot of daring to try and go around that star at relativistic speed. A ship traveling at such velocity would turn the particles into relativistic missiles, a trillion trillion of them per second per ship. The electromag fields would not hold up, and the ships would be flooded with deadly particle radiation. And if they tried to go around the star at a safe velocity, they would take longer to leave the system than if they kept on their original heading and stopped at the planet’s orbit, prior to accelerating back out to the hyper barrier.”

  “I thought the planet was undergoing an ice age. How could it freeze with a F class star that’s starting to heat up?”

  Sean looked at her for a moment, remembering where he had met her, Sestius. That planet orbited an F class star, and was hot as hell. And that was her total experience with that type of stellar body. “The ice age is on the way out, or soon will be. A couple of hundred more years, and it will be a normal temperate world again.”

  Jennifer nodded, and he could see that she understood the concept. Then her forehead wrinkled in thought. “And what if they had tried to curve out onto another path?”

  “That was our biggest worry. And they could still do that. But we hoped they would see the situation as one or the other. And if they curved their vector it would still not take much time off their trip, and would force them to try an area of the hyper barrier perimeter that was not being guarded by the ones they left out there. And now that they see we have a fleet out there, their best choice, from the data they have, is to continue in their present path.”

  “You thought of everything,” said Jennifer with a smile.

  Not everything. Just everything we could come up with.

  “Enemy fleet is firing on us, your Majesty,” said Kelso.

  Sean changed the view to a top down look at the system and zoomed in on the leading edge of the enemy force. Red arrows were blossoming there, more each second, on a heading toward the planet.

  And now comes the part I was really worried about, thought Sean. This planet is precious. He looked at Jennifer. You, even more so.

  “Simulate fortress launch. And bring the ships through the gate at the same time.”

  Augustine I started to shake slightly as it cycled missiles from its magazines through its tubes. The stations nearby had some cell launched fusion weapons, but they were not really forts, only the illusion of them. The three Dreadnought class ships, still in disguise, did the launching for them. The enemy, still a light hour away, would see the graviton tracks of the missiles, not the actual visuals of them, and would not be able to tell from what structure they were originating. They would see missiles, and what looked like forts, and make the logical conclusion. And the three superfreighters in orbit would look like what they were assumed to be.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, the ship gate that was hidden from
enemy sight was disgorging the ships that would make up the Emperor’s force. One hundred battleships, coming through one every twenty-five seconds, it would take them forty-one minutes to completely deploy to the system, in hiding behind the planet on minimum grabber activity. After them would come as many anti-missile cruisers and destroyers as they could get through.

  “Missile impact in one hour, twenty-one minutes,” said Kelso over the com. The enemy weapons were launched from ships that were still pulling point seven light while decelerating, and the missiles were now accelerating at eight thousand gravities. They would be coming in at point nine three light, deadly weapons capable of penetrating most defenses in the swarm of which they were composed. But they had been fired against a perceived three forts, three lightly armed commercial vessels, and whatever defenses the planet possessed. By a force that would be facing a major battle when they made their way back out of the system. So only a thousand missiles were inbound, not truly enough for the real job.

  * * *

  ELYSIUM SPACE.

  “Push forward,” yelled the General into the com. “We don’t have time for this.”

  The avians were putting up a harder fight than he had thought possible. His troops were larger, had stronger armor and more powerful weapons, and the fighting spirit of the Cacada. And, as he was finding out, the enemy was faster, more agile, and fighting on a station that was more suited to their smaller forms.

  And now the damned Birds had his lead element pinned down, a mere fifty meters from the entrance to the chamber that contained the wormhole. Heavy particle beams buzzed overhead and melted holes through the walls. Grenades popped with explosive power. Bodies, both large and small, lay in the grotesque angles of death, holes burned through their armor, smoke rising from the holes.

  And that damned wormhole could be cut off at any moment, thought the General. Destroying this station would be a minor accomplishment, not what he was hoping for. The real prize lay beyond that barrier of Birds, as his men had come to call them.