Exodus: Empires at War: Book 8: Soldiers (Exodus: Empires at War.)

by Doug Dandridge

  Something flared in the sky, high up, where it had to be above the atmosphere. Cornelius recognized it as a massive explosion in vacuum as seen from a distance. He looked back down in his glasses and saw several of the Cacas looking up as well. They knew something was going on, but were probably still confused as to what it was.

  “Power up,” came a voice over the command net that hadn’t been up an instant before. The enemy would probably pick it up in seconds, but the jamming that came up at the same time ruined their chances of getting any information from it.

  Cornelius ordered his armor to power up on his implant, and in less than a second all systems were up and running, while the diagnostic program took another second to report back that all was a go. His faceplate HUD came up, and he saw that all the suits in his company were now online. The com frequencies were filled with static, except for the swiftly rotating frequencies the Imperial military was now communicating on.

  The Captain felt a wave of confusion from the information overload his suit was feeding to him. Not only through his heads up display, which was limited in its ability to show information by the need of the faceplate to also show the real world around him. Also through direct feed into his visual and audial centers. He was getting a feed from every single one of the men in his company, with emphasis on his officers and senior NCOs. And information passed down from battalion and regiment, who were filtering the feeds of the wakening net. A regular infantry officer who had come up through the suits would have had specialized training in handling this information tsunami, along with the experience to pick and choose what was important while ignoring the rest. Cornelius and his officers had the benefit of two months of training with the suits, and no combat experience.

  Cornelius was still struggling with the information, getting some control, when the first stage kicked off.

  “Fire,” whispered the command over his link to the battalion net.

  “Fire,” shouted Cornelius over his company net, and as far as the Cacas were concerned all hell broke loose.

  The particle beam weapon in the sniper’s hand, powered up at the same time as his suit, spat a bright red beam at his target, one of the guard towers around the camp. The beam ripped through the tower walls and into the suited Caca within, carbonizing half the large body under the armor. As soon as he had serviced that target the sniper moved his weapon in search of targets on the ground, while his spotter scanned with a wider aperture for Cacas in need of killing.

  Within three seconds of the command to engage going out every tower on the perimeter of the camp was destroyed by the two battalions in assault formation around it. Over five hundred guards joined them, while hyper velocity missiles flew out to spear the doors of the barracks and garages at the guard camp. With the destruction of the doors the easy way to the surface was gone, though selected rangers kept them in their sights in case some made it out later.

  Engineers launched a number of platforms while the Rangers were taking care of the guards. Fifty discs shot into the sky, gaining altitude before turning on and connecting to the net, providing wide coverage com and sensor capabilities. Another six hundred smaller discs rose a couple meters above the ground and shot into the minefield, their sensors locating the mines so the remotes could land near them and neutralize the deadly weapons.

  The Rangers continued to fire at targets as they presented themselves, and most of the Cacas were so confused that they wandered into line of sight of a soldier. But not all, and the Rangers knew there would still be Cacas in the camp among the populace. And that they needed to be neutralized, fast, before they could start taking out too many of the civilians, or decide that they needed to round up hostages to surround themselves with. There was, however, something missing from the assault.

  “The gate is open,” called out the Regimental Commander, and Cornelius looked over to the large gully where the frame of the wormhole had been erected to see the barrel and front of a heavy tank poking through. The one thousand ton monster sped through the hole on its grabbers, followed by another, then a third. The tanks ran out onto the plain, providing targets for the Cacas that most would be ill equipped to deal with. As soon as the entire platoon was in place they started forward in a shallow v.

  “Rangers,” yelled Walborski over the com. “Follow me.” He jumped up in his armor and engaged the grabbers, speeding to the outer side of the tanks, where his company was stationed to prevent Caca reinforcements from hitting that flank.

  Fire started coming in, automated positions that had placed to take out escapees now turning to strike at the incoming enemy. These were light weapons, made to kill unarmored civilians, and any hits they did generate did nothing to the medium battle armor suits, and less than nothing to the tanks. Suits and tanks moved rapidly, a hundred kilometers an hour. Unfortunately, the mass of civilians in the camp were obscuring what targets were left. The battalion and their armor support stopped at the fence line, engineers taking down the barrier so the civilians could be extricated.

  * * *

  “Power up,” came the command over the awakening net into her implant. Captain Stella Artois opened her eyes, which she had closed to try to get away from the almost panic she was feeling from being trapped in her suit, which was trapped in the underground cavern. With a thought she brought the suit computer online, then ordered all systems to the on position. Her HUD came up, as well as the direct feed into her implant, and she became aware of every one of her suited engineers, as well as the engineering robots each controlled. Her own pair of robots came online and reported in as ready and able to operate according to their maximum capabilities.

  With another thought she powered up the small recon robots that were waiting just below the surface. They pushed their way through the last layer of earth and broke free, floating into the air on antigrav and feeding their information back into the net.

  Stella immediately made the decisions that she was paid to make, picking out the optimal pathways upward, assigning her people to each task, her brain working a hundred times faster than normal through the link with her suit comp. Seconds later the digging robots started tunneling up through the soft dirt, making a three meter wide hole a meter a second. In ten seconds the first of the bots broke the surface, their operators right on their tails. The bots jumped into the air to make room for the troops to follow, calling out on their speakers for the refugees to back off and move away from the holes, which were all situated in the walkways of the area between the tents.

  Most the Cacas within the huge compound were caught off guard. The sounds of the attack on the outside of the camp were just reaching them, along with the confused babble over the com net, which was partially drowned out by jamming static. Add to that the bright points in the sky that could only be signs of some kind of impossible space battle, and the average male didn’t know what to think. They didn’t know what was going on. When the robots, about twice the size of a human in heavy battle armor, came popping out of the ground and rose into the air, many males stood there staring in shock at something that couldn’t possibly be there. The few hundred within sight of the robots who did react fired on them.

  Unfortunately, the Cacas within the compound were equipped with light armor and weaponry, all it was thought they needed for controlling the unarmed humans. What shots, mostly moderate velocity pellets, that did hit the robots bounced from their armored hides. The robots were not authorized to fire back, for fear that they would slaughter the human captives while killing some of the Cacas. The first Caca died as one of the civilians, a member of the underground operating in the camp, fired a slow moving short range shape charge round into a Ca’cadasan soldier. The chemically powered weapon, made of non-metallic carbon fibers, had been almost impossible to detect. Within seconds over three hundred Cacas across the camp were killed, holes blown through their armor and into their flesh.

  The robots, three hundred and sixty of them, two for each controlling engineer, fanned out over the compoun
d, activating their electromagnetic field generators and placing a weak shield over the camp. Now lasers came on line, and rocket launchers rose into place over the backs of the robots, while tracking systems looked for weapons that the enemy might fire into the camp from above.

  “Up,” yelled Captain Artois as she watched the first company of the armored Rangers rise up through the holes. Her own people moved into position, clumsily. Each heavy battle armor suit massed a half ton, and every engineer carried a two ton device with them. As the last of the Rangers rose to the surface, her force started the rise behind them.

  The scene that greeted her eyes was one of almost total chaos. Three of the Ranger companies were in the air, heading outward in all directions, several firing down at targets below as they moved. The other company was on the ground, trying to organize the civilians and get them to the holes in preparation for evacuation. She checked her link and made sure that all of the drop units were engaged, so that everyone who stepped into one of the holes would float to the bottom, and not fall the fourteen meters straight down.

  “Everyone spread out and get those units in place,” she ordered, moving her own suit to a point only a score of meters from the hole she had come up from. “The sooner we get them in place, the sooner we can protect these people.”

  Acknowledgements came back, and she moved her own unit into place after shooing away some children away who seemed to be paralyzed in place just where she wanted to go. The kids scattered, and she landed with her unit, separated it from her suit, and activated the two tons of electronics and crystal matrix batteries. Several dishes rose from the unit, and it started to hum, projecting another electromagnetic field underneath that being deployed by the robots. After that she stood back, checking in with the rest of her people to make sure everything was going according to plan.

  The first of the specialized anti-air suits rose out of the ground, the forerunners to the entire company that would be deployed to the camp. These suites were fifty percent larger than the heavy suits the engineers were equipped with, with a large boxy construction on the back. Each trooper carried a heavy particle beam rifle that could use the suit’s targeting systems to hit aerial targets. The boxy construction on the back carried a dozen hypervelocity anti-air missiles. The gunners boosted into the air and headed for positions from which they could cover all the air approaches to the camps. One landed twenty meters away from the Captain and activated his defensive suite.

  Now all we have to do is weather the Caca attack that will come at us eventually, thought the Captain. That, and evacuate fifteen or twenty million people from this target.

  * * *

  Cat looked up at the sky as she noticed the people around her staring upwards. She had been trying to lay low, hoping that the Cacas wouldn’t be looking for her. That was a forlorn hope, and she knew it. She had been picked for harvest for some reason, and she had escaped, for the moment. The Cacas couldn’t afford to let any resistance be successful, lest the populace gain some hope and resistance grow. They knew that resistance really couldn’t get the civilians their freedom, but harvesting parties could be overwhelmed by numbers and males killed.

  Dropping the units at the perimeter before had been an extreme risk, but one she had been willing to take to strike back. Now that her mission was completed, she had decided to try and fade back into the population. There was no use in getting killed for no purpose.

  The child saw the small dot of brilliant fire in the sky, a point that was too painful to look at for any period of time. Around it other pinpoints sprung into existence, and people were pointing and talking excitedly. Cat looked at the crowd, wondering what the hell it all meant, when she saw a trio of Cacas, two looking at the sky, one directly at her.

  She readied herself for death. There was no way she could get to her feet and run before they brought their weapons to bear. The sadness of not living another day overwhelmed her fear, and she felt as if she didn’t have the strength to resist.

  The one looking at her raised his weapon, and she closed her eyes, not wanting to see her death coming. Suddenly there was shouting, both humans and Cacas, and she opened her eyes to see what looked like a human in a huge combat suit rising from the camp a hundred meters away. She then noticed that the ground was shaking, and realized it had been for a few moments. More of the robots rose into the sky, and the Cacas from all over the camp started firing on them. Everything they hit the robots with bounced from their armor, but the robots didn’t shoot back. Instead, they rose high into the air and moved out in all directions, only a few staying within sight.

  The Caca who had been threatening to shoot her looked back and raised his weapon again, taking aim as if he would kill her if it was the last thing he was going to do. A sharp explosion sounded close, answered by a smaller blast behind the Caca. The penetrator came bursting through the front of the Caca’s thin armor with a spray of gore. The remaining pair of Cacas turned quickly, obviously searching for the human who had killed their leader. When that assassin did not immediately appear the Cacas started firing at random into the camp, weapons on full automatic, blasting people down like scythes reaping wheat.

  Cat, realizing that they might be rescued after all, was on her feet in an instant. She didn’t want to be killed by the Cacas when freedom was right on the horizon. She turned and ran, moving away from the Cacas and toward the perimeter of the camp, ten kilometers away. She didn’t see the battle suited humans rising up into the air and killing the Cacas she was running from. Instead, she ran away from her rescue.

  * * *

  “You’re loaded Commander,” said his assistant, tapping Nahuel Runningdeer on the shoulder.

  “Acknowledged,” said the Lt. Commander, looking through the sight of the launcher. As soon as the net came up they had taken one of the munitions from its shielded case and placed it in the launcher, which was still powered down at the moment. On the still dark horizon to the west the flashes of massive warheads detonating in space were brilliant points. Some expanded for a moment, and once something truly huge flared and lit up the still dark valleys below.

  The sun had already risen in the east, and the tops of the mountains glowed orange from the reflection of the local star on their snow topped peaks. The lower parts of valleys were still pitch black. His target area was now lit with the twilight of the coming day, and he wondered how long it would be before the battery cleared for action and started firing at the human ships that had to be overhead.

  “That one,” called out the spotter, looking up from his scope and pointing to one of the domes. Runnigdeer could feel the attraction of the electromagnetic field being generated by the battery on every piece of metal on his body. Even the launcher, which had a minimal metallic component, was pressing into his hands as that field tugged at it. And now one of the domes that housed an energy weapon was rotating while its top aperture opened. Getting ready to fire, or in the lingo of naval warfare, clearing for action.

  He wanted to wait for the weapon to finish opening, giving him the best chance of a shot. But if he waited too long and it fired, the warhead would be detonated by the beam before it could enter the dome.

  “You can engage now, sir,” said the spotter, obviously nervous at the hesitation of the platoon leader.

  “I know,” was all he said, but he went ahead and powered up the launcher, pretty sure that the new heavy jamming coming over the com circuit would cover its signature. He looked through the sight, locking it onto the target, holding fire just one more instant. The aperture reached a point where it didn’t look like it could open any further.

  “Firing,” said the Lt. Commander, warning his people so they could look away. All had selective ear plugs in that allowed them to talk with each other while hopefully protecting their sensitive hearing from what was about to happen.

  The other men ducked down into the depression and covered their eyes. Runningdeer held his breath and squeezed the trigger, one eye stuck to the sight, the other
shut tight. The range indicator showed that target was at a distance of twenty-three thousand and fifty-one meters, kind of close to what he was about to hit it with.

  Almost by surprise the weapon fired, sending the hypervelocity missile out at a speed of a thousand kilometers per second. It looked like a streak of light, if a beam of light could curve. The missile dropped down and followed the ground at a height of a hundred meters, the wind of its passage actually tearing trees up from their roots to be pulled behind as the wood of their trunks was torn to shreds. The missile then curved up and came down on the aperture of the beam weapon, flying into the opening and detonating inside the dome as it hit the first solid object it contacted.

  The missile had come in too fast for any of the battery’s defensive systems to react. By the time the weapon had reached the target it was too late. The antimatter warhead’s containment field failed at impact, and the small amount of antiprotons in the rocket flew into the matter around it. With a flare of light twenty megatons of explosive were released. Fire flew to the aperture, flaring out in a blinding wave. The carbon fiber reinforced dome resisted for an instant before blowing outward. The thermal wave torched every tree within kilometers. The blast wave following behind it tore those trees from the ground and threw them as splinters for further kilometers.

  Fire flared from the apertures of two of the other domes, a sign that the blast had reached through the underground fortress into those weapons emplacements. Two of the domes were still intact, and one fired a red line up into the sky, a particle beam.

  “Reload,” yelled out the Commander, raising himself back up from the cover and turning the weapon toward one of the intact domes while the hot wind of the blast wave blew over his face. They were much too close to the blast, even with the cover they had, the Runningdeer knew he would have some burns on his face after this mission.

  “Up,” called out the loader, and Runningdeer turned the sight toward the dome that had just fired. The sight looked through the rising base of the mushroom cloud, and the Commander locked onto the second target, then sent that missile into the dome. Dropping the launcher he rolled back under cover, feeling the skin on his face blister from the heat and radiation.