Exodus: Empires at War: Book 7: Counter Strike Read Free

reestablishing humanity in a system
of eight stars in orbit around a black hole, the Supersystem.  Once the home of
an extinct species that had helped raise most of the intelligent races of the
area to technical civilizations, it was also the perfect region for the
newcomers.  Over the next thousand years the New Terran Empire fights, wins and
expands in a number of wars, improving their technology at breakneck speed,
becoming the dominant military power of the region.  Humanity also improves its
genome, becoming stronger, faster and smarter, and seemed destined to rule the
Perseus Arm, given time.
    On the thousand year anniversary of the empire,
Emperor Augustine I is having prophetic dreams, the gift and curse of his
line.  He has seen the ancient enemy returning, finding the human species
disunited in its three governments, and utterly destroying them.  Augustine has
fought to expand the military, running into obstructionism from the Lords House
of Parliament.  It is an uphill battle in the Constitutional Monarchy the
Empire has become.  Meanwhile, the Donut, a century long engineering project,
is nearing completion.  The enormous station, built as a ring around a black
hole, and using the swirling gravitational energy to generate wormholes, has
begun to make the many portals that will be used to eventually link the
Empire.  And spies have infested the Empire, a race of shape shifters who make
most security measures moot, adding sabotage and espionage to the problems
facing the Emperor. 
    Sean Ogden Lee Romanov, the third son of the
Emperor, is a serving naval officer on a battleship in a relatively quiet
sector, with no thoughts of ever assuming the throne.  He was a mediocre
officer, despite his superior intelligence.  With two brothers ahead of him in
the succession, and a still young father, the throne seems like the least his
worries.  By this time the Ca’cadasans have made contact with some of the
enemies of the Empire, and sent the information back to their leaders.  The
ancient enemy has been found, and can now be eliminated.  Ships begin to
disappear in Sector IV, and sightings are made of vessels that fit no known
description.  Many people refuse to believe these are the Ca’cadasans, and some
think that Empire must have fallen in the near past.  The Emperor continues to
try to rally support for increasing the size of the human military, while
Parliament fights him on the economic effects of such a move, and alien powers
protest that the humans are planning territorial expansion.
    There is an attempted assassination attempt on
Sean, and a successful attempt on the Emperor and his two older sons during a
tour of the Donut.  The assassin is an officer of the Imperial Protection
Detail, causing distrust to grow among the agencies charged with the security
of the Empire.  The same day as the assassination, the Leader of the House of
Lords is killed in his home.  Sean is now the heir to the Empire, and the man
who must be seated as soon as possible on the throne, but he is almost a week’s
one way com range from the capital.
    The Ca’cadasans now attack, sending large
fleets into several industrial or base systems, and smaller forces to many
other stars.  The Massadara system, a major Imperial base, is one of the
systems attacked.  Sean is serving on one of the battleships that happens to be
in that system, and is aboard the vessel as it heads into combat with the
enemy.  Word comes to the system that Sean is the uncrowned Emperor, and his
ship, against his protests, is ordered out of combat.  His ship, the Sergiov, heads out
of the system before the main battle begins, a small Ca’cadasan force on its
heels.  The main battle is joined, and, though it inflicts casualties on the
Ca’cadasan fleet that is only about a decade ahead in technology, it is
defeated, and the system falls.
    The Sergiov is battered by the enemy, and Sean
is rescued from the ship by Captain Mei Lei and her hyper