Exodus: Tales of The Empire: Book 2: Beasts of the Frontier. (22 page)

The Admiral
picked up a glass and took a drink.  Cinda was wondering if she would be
offered a seat, or something to drink. 
But why waste courtesy on someone
who has a date with a court martial, and then an executioner.

“That does not
alter the fact that you disobeyed a direct order from a superior officer, young
lady,” said the Duke, placing his glass meticulously on the coaster on the top
of his desk.

“But, I saved a
planet, and destroyed a Ca’cadasan battleship,” she protested, knowing she was
right.

“And you hid
from the Ca’cadasan because you knew you could do that?”

“No, sir,” said
Cinda after a moment’s hesitation.  She looked up at the ceiling for a moment,
then back down into the dark brown eyes of the man.  “What do you want me to
tell you, your Grace?  That I was afraid?  That I didn’t want to die, and to
take all of my crew with me?  That I used my knowledge of the Emperor’s orders
as a way to wiggle out of sure death.  Well, I was afraid.  I was scared
shitless.”

“So why didn’t
you continue to hide?” asked the Admiral.  “You were in a perfect position to
escape notice.  The enemy would have continued on to the planet, killed the
civilians, and left.  And you could have left the system after they had gone.”

“I couldn’t just
let them kill those people,” growled Cinda, fighting back the tears that began
to well in her eyes.  “I just couldn’t.  What would you have done, your Grace?”

“So you saved
fifty thousand people?  Good job, Commander.  Only we have lost over twenty
five billion, that’s billion, so far.  And I have been ordered by my sovereign
Lord to abandon systems with hundreds of millions of civilians in them, so that
I could keep my fleet in being, and not waste it in a battle that would give
the enemy this sector.  So what would I have done?”

Cinda looked
into the man’s face, seeing the pain and anger, his nostrils flaring as the
veins stood out on his neck. 
How can he live with himself?
she
thought.  But of course the answer to that was duty.  He had a duty to the
Emperor, and his own feelings had to be subsumed to undertake the necessary
actions to make a strategy work against an enemy that so far had all the
advantages.

“It was
wonderful that you could save those fifty thousand,” said the Admiral, looking
down at his desk and clenching his fists.  He looked back up at her with red
rimmed eyes.  “Just remember.  That is a drop in the bucket as far as this war
has gone.  We will lose another twenty-five billion in the next year.  Maybe
more.  And if we don’t win this thing, we will lose all of us.”

Cinda stood
silent for a moment, letting that sink in.  The Fleet had never lost a war, not
in nine hundred years of existence.  Now they faced total defeat if they
couldn’t outthink this enemy. 
Which I did
, she thought.

“What’s going to
happen to me?” she asked the Duke, wanting to get her own fate out of the way.

“Normally, you
would go before a board of inquiry,” said the Duke, pointing a finger at her
chest.  “They would probably find enough evidence to recommend a court
martial.  And then you would most probably be convicted of disobedience in the
face of the enemy.  Most likely you would be kicked out of the Fleet, though imprisonment
would also be a strong possibility.  Execution a lesser one.  And if the
Captain of
New Kiev
had survived, he would be facing the same, for
disobedience to his Monarch.”

“You said
normally, your Grace?”

“These are
unusual times, young lady,” said the Duke, reaching into his desk and
withdrawing a small box.  “The Empire is in need of heroes.  We have had enough
goats to last a lifetime.”  The Duke opened the box and withdrew a small medal
attached to a ribbon.  The medal was a sun symbol, and Cinda felt the breath
leave her as she recognized it.

“A Golden Sun,”
she blurted, the thing she least expected to see during a meeting like this. 
It was the second highest decoration that a service member could receive.  Only
the Imperial Medal of Heroism was considered a higher award, for both military
and civilians, and only authorized by a seated Emperor.

“We will have
the formal presentation later,” said the Admiral, reaching back into his desk
and withdrawing another box, which he opened and placed on the desk, revealing
the silver oak leaves of a full commander.  “These you can put on now, then we
will have the presentation of the medal at a news conference.”

“A news
conference,” she said, feeling her legs go weak.

“As I said, we
need heroes.  So you have to face the music.  And for portraying such courage
in front of the press, you will receive another reward.  One I think you will
really like.”  He graced her with a predatory smile.

“Another
reward,” said Cinda in shock.  She had expected to be punished when she entered
this office.  Instead, she was getting a promotion, and an award.  She couldn’t
think of anything else she could want, except.  Her eyes widened at the
thought.

“As you said,”
said the Admiral, getting up from his desk with the oak leaves in hand.  “You
destroyed a Caca supebattleship with a pipsqueak frigate.  That’s a talent
we’re not willing to waste.”

*     *     *

Commander Cinda
Klerk sat in the command chair of her new ship, hands rubbing the arm rests,
still not sure if she could believe that it was hers.  The
Carl Nasher
was a brand new hyper VII destroyer, capable of four times the pseudo-speed
through hyperspace as her last command.  The vessel was eight hundred and
twenty meters in length by two hundred and twenty wide, massing over two
hundred and forty thousand tons.  Her missile magazines held fifty destroyer
class weapons, two and a half times what her old frigate had carried.  It was
still much less than a hyper VI destroyer carried, but something had to be left
out to carry the mass of the more capable hyperdrive projectors. 
And it’s
all mine,
she thought, looking at the viewer as the planet
Amazon
fell away.

“She is a
beautiful ship,” said Lt. Commander Renato Jakardo over the private circuit. 
The exec was ensconced in the CIC, what would be his normal combat duty
station, getting used to the layout and the people he would be serving with, as
well as his new position.

“She sure is,”
replied the Captain, looking over her new bridge crew.  Jakardo was the only
one they had let her keep, the rest being given promotions and new
assignments.  She had wanted to keep her exec, Lieutenant SG Marcus Frobisher. 
That request had been denied.  Frobisher had been bumped up two ranks and given
a destroyer of his own, an older hyper VI ship. 
And I bet he is just as
thrilled to have her for his first command as I am to have this ship,
she
thought.  To a naval officer, any command was a dream come true.

And they
turned me loose for this one,
she thought, reviewing her orders in her
mind.  She would be operating alone, on the fringes of the human controlled
areas, at times forging on into enemy territory, the eyes of the fleet.  Most
times there would be no superiors to bow down to, and she would live or die on
her wits and the capabilities of her crew.  She couldn’t think of a better way
to fight a war.

Some creatures are beyond our
understanding, not life as we know it.  Maybe not even life at all, though they
can replicate all the functions of life.  Life from beyond our Galaxy?  It
would still have to obey our physical laws, wouldn’t it?  If such arrived at
our shores, would we be able to defeat it?  All unknowns, but one day sure to
be something intelligent life in the Galaxy will have to deal with.

Most worlds were
beautiful as seen from space, but there was something special about a planet
that could support carbon based life.  Most of those were a combination of blue
and green, some browns of arid lands, the white of clouds and ice.  New Lemuria
had more of the blue and white than most.  A planet slightly larger than old
earth, with just over six hundred million square kilometers of surface area. 
Five hundred and forty-eight million of those square kilometers were ocean,
with a salinity level approximating that of old Earth’s largest bodies of
water.  Half of the world girdling oceans were shallow seas, no more than fifty
meters in depth, in most cases much less.  The other half was deep water,
thousands of meters, in some places more than fifty kilometers.

The fifty-two
million square kilometers of land, a little larger than the old Earth continent
of  Asia, was divided into three large masses and hundreds of thousands of
islands.  In the northern hemisphere, straddling the shallow sea, was a land
mass slightly larger than Europe, about ten million square kilometers.  In the
southern hemisphere were two Australia sized continents, one in the shallow
sea, the other smack in the middle of the deeps, like a huge mountain plateau
rising from the bottom ten kilometers below.

Major Bergland
Jensen looked on that world through the viewer of her stateroom as the liner
Odin’s
Beard
slid into orbit.  She ran a hand through her short blond hair as her
ice blue eyes stared at the world.  A massive hurricane was raging off the
coast of the deep sea continent, while another as forming three thousand
kilometers away.

It’s almost
like New Tahiti
, thought the Imperial Constabulary Special Team Officer,
thinking of her last assignment.  New Tahiti was also an ocean planet, about
eighty percent water, with only one super continent and various islands, large
and small, in mostly shallow seas.  It was also a developing world, over a
billion people supporting the massive orbital industries that made it an
economic power.  As such, it had major defenses, both on and off the planet,
including a large police force backed up by planetary militia and the Imperial
Army.  Her home planet, Norje, a core world, was of even better protected.

Unfortunately,
New Lemuria was still classified as a frontier world, with a population of less
than five million, with a couple of small orbital forts, and militia, and a
Marine garrison of a battalion to support the Fleet’s presence on the ground. 
But nothing like the team she was leading.

“We’re ready to
shuttle down, ma’am,” came a call over her implant.

“I’ll be there
in a moment, Master Sergeant,” she replied to the man who was her second in
command of the team.  Master Sergeant Tapuarii Kama was a native of New Tahiti,
and had been in the Constabulary longer than Jensen had been alive.  As an
augmented operative, he looked older than his actual age of ninety-seven. 
Bergland looked at herself in the cabin’s mirror as that thought hit her.  She
was only forty-six, but looked like she was seventy.  She was on the far end of
the bell curve for people who accepted augmentation, and had probably lost
fifty years of life.

That was my
choice
, she thought, shaking her head, then grabbing her kit bag and
hefting it on her shoulder with muscles stronger than four humans her size. 
I
wanted to be a superwoman, and so far the price had been worth it.

The shuttle deck
was amidships on the liner.  Several of the basic ship to ground shuttles had
already left, and one was lifting and heading for the cold plasma field that
kept the atmosphere in the hangar from evacuating into space.  The liner was
carrying immigrants to a world that had plenty of room for new settlers, and
tourists for a growing industry. 
And how many of them would have taken this
trip if they knew what was going on down there
, thought the Major, walking
over to her team.

“Attention,”
called out Kama, and the line of eight humans and six nonhumans snapped to
attention, those that could.

Jensen returned
the Master Sergeant’s salute, then looked over her handpicked team.  She didn’t
think they would win any beauty awards, and not every uniform was perfect.  And
that was not the reason she had chosen them for this mission.  All were good at
their jobs, all could think on their feet, those who had feet.  She looked over
the humans first, five men and three women.  He walked past them to the two
standing nonhumans, these Killi, an amphibian species that had been in the
Empire for over four hundred years.  And finally to the large tank floating on
antigravs with the last four members of the team.

“I bet you’re
ready to get into some real water,” she commented to the four bottlenose
dolphins that floated in the tank, giving her curious looks.

“More than
ready, Major,” said the translator that the quartet’s Sergeant, Tomas, was using,
his own high pitched speech coming through the plastisteel of the tank.

Dolphins had
always been intelligent creatures, some said the second brightest animals of
Old Earth, after humans.  Others had assigned that place in the rankings to
chimps, but the improved genome of the dolphin gave them intelligence equal to
unimproved humans.  And these four were specimens on the far end of the bell
curve, easily the equal of all but the brightest humans.

Jensen nodded,
thinking of the risks these members of her team would be taking, though they
would be better equipped than even the amphibian Killi in handling a
Waterworld.

“Let’s get on
board,” she ordered, then waited as her team filed into the shuttle they had
brought along for this mission.  It was a Fleet class assault shuttle, heavily
armed and armored, with a sensor suite more powerful than anything on the
planet below.  The dolphin tank rolled under its own power through the cargo
hatch at the rear of the shuttle.  The Major followed the walking members of
the team into the shuttle, heading for the cockpit, where she strapped herself
in next to the Warrant Officer who was their assigned pilot.

“We have
clearance for Lemuria Base, Major,” said Sarnai Zaya, her fingers working
across her control board and bringing all systems online.  “Incoming message
from the Governor.”

The Major
accepted the transmission, letting the images playing across her occipital lobe
through her link, ensuring the privacy of the com.

“We are so glad
to see you, Major,” said the middle aged man, the expression on his face
showing that he had not felt glad about much for quite some time.

“I’m looking
over your data now, Governor Frieze,” she informed the man, multitasking as she
digested the summary of what had been going on since the message arrived at New
Tahiti by hyper VII courier.  New Tahiti was in the same Sector, VII, on the
upper side of the Empire almost opposite of Sector IV.  It had taken the
courier twelve days to reach New Tahiti, the closest Constabulary base.  And
forty-eight days for the liner to make the return trip.  Which meant two months
had gone by since the Governor had sent his report.  And there had been nine
more
incidents
in that time, with almost a hundred dead, and several
hundred missing and presumed dead.

“And you still
have no idea what’s doing this?”

“Some kind of
animal,” said the Governor.

The shuttle
started to shake as it entered the atmosphere, the pilot dropping them into the
gas envelope, then flattening out into a glide.  The grabbers, their compensator
function converting inertia to heat, smoothed out much of that turbulence.  But
they couldn’t get rid of it all.

“We really can’t
tell what, except that it’s really big, and it’s able to hide in the ocean,”
said Frieze.  “It gives no warning, and seems to strike from nowhere.  We have
some tissue samples that were left behind at the scenes, and they don’t match
anything we’ve ever seen on this world.  The biologists at the University are
not even sure its living tissue.  More like a combination of life and machine
life.”

“And no signals
from the areas this, thing, attacked?”

“No.  Maybe a
couple of words screamed out over a com, then nothing.  Just smashed cities and
some sparse wreckage in the sea.  We’ve ordered all small craft to stay in
harbor, but you know how that goes.”

Yes, I know
how that goes
, thought the Major, imagining what kind of an uproar that
would have caused on an Imperial world.  People had freedoms in the Empire, and
one of those was the freedom to risk their own necks if that was their desire. 
There would be citizens who made their living fishing the rich shallow seas of
this world, supplying their own and other worlds with high quality seafood. 
There would be wealthy citizens who spent their life on their yachts, and who
had no desire to stay in harbor.  The authorities could appeal to their sense
of self preservation, could even come up with some charges to keep some of them
off the water, but there weren’t enough police on a world like this to keep
most of those who wanted to go to sea ashore.

“When are the
other shuttles coming down?” asked the Governor.

“Other
shuttles?”

“Surely your
entire force is not on that one shuttle” asked Frieze, eyes staring at what
must have been her holo on his desk.

“This is all we
brought, Governor Frieze.  There is a war on, after all, and resources are
stretched.”

“I see,” said
Frieze, his voice low.  “Well, I can still hope you might accomplish
something.”  His tone indicated anything but hope.

“We’ll be down
in eleven minutes, sir.  I would like to meet with the heads of your police
force and militia as soon as we disembark.”

“Of course,
Major,” replied the Governor.

And she could
just imagine how well that might go.  The local police and militia were sure to
have a colonel or two, maybe even a general.  She was a mere major, though
according to the laws of the Empire, she outranked anyone not of the
constabulary during an investigation.

“Major,” called
out the Governor over the com, his voice near panicked.  “We’ve received a call
for help from Humbolt Village.  They blurted out that they were under attack,
then, nothing.  We have an aerial patrol on the way to the platform’s
location.”

“Show me,” she
ordered without even considering that she was giving an order to the supreme
authority on the planet.

The holo over
the cockpit control board came to life with an image of the globe of the
planet, a blinking red dot showing where the incident was taking place.  The
aircraft were flying over the coastal mountain range, on their way from the
central base in the middle of the continent, about nine hundred kilometers from
the village.

“Do you have a
satellite view?”

“No, Major.  We
don’t have many surveillance sats in orbit.  We’re keeping them over the  areas
where we our citizens are concentrated.”

A small arrow
appeared on the globe, which zoomed in on that area, showing both the air
patrol and the location on the coastal village that was ground zero for this
latest incident.

“We have no
communications with Hubolt,” came the voice of the in Air Commander of the
patrol.  The viewed zoomed in again, now showing the three aircraft in
formation, their identification numbers underneath.   Jensen knew those craft,
basic planetary search, rescue and defense VTOL, capable of Mach 8 in
atmosphere, with a crew of three and room for seven passengers.  They were
lightly armed craft, with a nose laser and whatever pods the people in charge
felt were right for the mission.

“My God,” said
the Air Commander over the com.  “It’s gone.  The whole thing is just, gone.”

Images started
coming in over the com as the VTOLs circled.  The Major could make out the
remains of foundations, the pillars of plasticrete that had once supported
docks.  There was nothing else.  Not a wall, or a roof, not even a nail.

“What was the
village constructed of?” she asked into the com, her question going out to the
Governor and the Air Commander.

“Most of the
coastal villages are constructed of native materials,” answered the Governor. 
“Wood and stone for the most part.”

“So not as
sturdy as modern materials,” said Jensen, wondering what would have happened to
the place if it had been made of plasticrete and glasssteel, substances that
could withstand any storm of earthquake likely to be found on an Earthlike
world.  Hell, they could handle a close detonation from a nuke or kinetic, most
anything except a direct hit.

“Ship Alpha
Charlie Three,” came the voice of the Air Commander.  “Land your team and recon
on foot.”

Acknowledgements
came back, and the designated aircraft set down in what was left of the
village, not really needing a clear space, since the entire area was cleared. 
As soon as it set down six passengers disembarked, all garbed in the light
armor worn by most search and rescue units, carrying laser rifles, their eyes
constantly sweeping everywhere, the take coming back through their links.

“Only the
plasticrete left from the foundations,” came the voice of the Team Leader over
the com.  The view zoomed in on one of the foundations, which, while still
there, was pitted as if  something had eaten into it.