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

by Doug Dandridge

  Angry red beams cut through the dust, crossing at places. The Rangers were entrenched in fighting positions the engineers had dug with their heavy suits. Most held their weapons above the berms, tracking their targets by the HUD on their faceplates.

  Beams returned from the Cacas, striking berms, flaring into wider beams as they hit electromagnetic fields and were slightly attenuated. One Ranger screamed out as a beam struck one of his gauntlets, vaporizing some of the armor and superficially burning the hand underneath. Mecha fired with their more powerful beams, high velocity autocannon joining in.

  Now the Rangers had real targets, their targeting systems tracing beams back to suits and highlighting them through the static of jamming and the other spoofing systems. The tanks were able to locate the mecha, locking them in. The targeting information came in through Cornelius’ suit. He waited a moment while the targeting information firmed up, letting the Cacas get closer as he assigned assets and set up his fire plan.

  “All units, open fire,” he yelled into the com, raising his own rifle over the berm and letting his suit comp assign it a target.

  Beams struck out, multiples crossing through the center areas of a score of suits, rupturing the armor, burning through to vaporize the Caca underneath. The tanks all fired on the command, sending hyper velocity penetrators through five of the mecha, blasting apart their operator section, spraying molten alloy and gore out the rear. Each tank also fired their twin mounted heavy proton cannon. The tanks swept the oncoming Cacas with these heavy beams, each ten times more powerful than the heavy beamers used by the squad heavy support troopers. Where one of those beams hit a portion of the suit the armor converted to vapor, along with the being underneath.

  Grenades exploded over advancing Cacas, while mortars fell from the sky, launched from the tanks. The exchange of fire went on for a minute, the Rangers under cover, the Cacas out in the open, some squatting to make of themselves less conspicuous targets, some falling to their stomachs into a prone position. The Cacas got the worst of it, losing over a hundred troopers during the exchange, while the Rangers lost nine. All twelve of the mecha were taken out by the fast firing tanks. Several had gotten hits to two of the tanks with their own particle beams, with the result of burning shallow craters into the tough armor. The heavier combat vehicles had won their part of the battle with ease, and the tanks concentrated on the enemy infantry.

  Something exploded up in space, a blast that made the ones that came before look like fireworks. The Rangers looked up as the firing slackened for a moment, the men wondering whether that explosion presaged a victory or defeat in space. The Cacas looked up too, and it must have been enough to cause most of them to break. In seconds they were on their feet, some pausing to fire before they took off, others just running as fast as their mechanical legs would take them.

  “Sustain fire,” ordered Cornelius, rising up in his position and aiming for the back of a Caca. They were again obscured by their stealth systems. The rest of the Rangers joined in, firing away, mostly missing, but still getting some hits. Walborski smiled in satisfaction as one of his shots connected with a Caca and held, burning through the armor and blasting the body forward as some of it converted to steam and blasted out of the hole like a rocket.

  “Got the bastard,” said the officer under his breath. He truly hated the Cacas, and would never turn down a chance to kill one. Because every one of the bastards he killed was one he didn’t have to take care of later.

  The hypervelocity missile seemed to come out of nowhere, moving too fast for the degraded sensor systems to pick up in time for any kind of defensive reaction. It slammed into the turret of the tank furthest south, hitting right where the main gun joined the body of that turret. It burst through the armor, killing the tank commander in his compartment and rocking the tank back with the imparted force. Each tank had three separate armored compartments, making the crew as a whole very hard to kill. The commander and gunner were in one compartment at the front of the turret, the assistant commander and tactical tech in one to the rear, while the driver and sensor tech were in yet another at the front of the tank hull. The round, from a vehicle mount, came through the forward part of the turret armor and blasted a jet of molten alloy straight through the light combat suit of the commander. The molten metal bounced around the compartment, destroying electronics, injuring the other tanker in the compartment.

  Cornelius looked over his casualty figures with a sinking heart. He had lost ten killed, including the tank commander, and had less than twenty injured, most superficially. More important than the injured were the damaged suits. They had caused over a hundred Ca’cadasan dead, as well as the twelve knocked out mecha. But each of his people, with the exception of the tank commander, had been someone he knew, someone he trained with. Even the tank commander had been on the same side, a Malticon who served the Empire at the cost of her life.

  “We have eight objects incoming,” called out the tank platoon leader. “Aircraft, coming from the southeast at one point four kilometers a second. Altitude, five thousand meters.”

  Cornelius looked at the objects on his HUD, eight aircraft coming up on the camp from a range of forty kilometers. Those icons blurred for a moment as their own jamming fought the sensors that were trying to lock them in. In fact, the entire atmosphere was filled with jamming from both sides, obfuscating the returns on the thousands of sensor platforms that were searching the surface and the sky.

  Box launchers rose on all of the tanks. The aircraft were now at thirty kilometers. The box launchers rotated, spitting out a pair of hypervelocity missiles each. The missiles streaked off at over a thousand kilometers a second, aiming at the spot where the fighters were calculated to be a microsecond after launch.

  The missiles were impossible to avoid, if they were on target. They were also impossible to adjust onto the target, unable to turn due to their high velocity in anything near the turning radius of the highly maneuverable fighters. The fighters were too close for their own target acquisition and defensive systems to engage, but for the most part they were not needed. Ten missiles flew up through their formation. Two struck targets, and the fighters dissolved into expanding clouds of plasma. Eight were clean misses. The six fighters continued to speed in, as the tanks lowered their box launchers.

  “Why have you ceased fire?” asked Walborski in frustration as the fighters flew overhead and into the airspace of the camp. Their grabber propulsion made no sound, though the roar of the aircraft rushing at eight times the speed of sound followed behind them.

  “That was a quarter of our AA missiles,” replied the Malticon platoon leader. “We may need those for later. And the suits in the camp will now engage them.”

  Even as he spoke missiles rose from the camp, fired from the heavy suits of the weapons company scattered throughout the huge facility. These were slower moving weapons, capable of tracking onto their targets, but also vulnerable to the laser systems of the aircraft. At least ten missiles exploded in midair as the lasers of the aircraft took them out. Three of the aircraft followed suit, hit by the missiles, or the shrapnel from proximity kills.

  Objects dropped from the aircraft, headed for the camp. Particle beams took out half of the objects, blasting them out of the sky. But three hit, probably fifteen kilometers inside the camp, and balls of fire rose into the sky. The com net came alive with panicked calls, soldiers calling for medical help for the thousands of civilians who now writhed in pain on the ground from the horrible burns they had received, while ten thousand or more dead piled on the ground.

  Where’s our air support? thought the Captain as he watched his HUD for other incoming air vehicles. They were supposed to already be in the air, contesting the sky with the Cacas.

  “Incoming missiles,” called out someone on the com net, and the icons of a trio of weapons, streaking in at fifty thousand kilometers an hour, up high at a range of two hundred kilometers, showed up on the tac net. And Cornelius was sure these would be car
rying something much more deadly than conventional firebombs.

  * * *

  “Get those people moving,” said the tense voice over the com net.

  Captain Stella Artois sent her acknowledgement back over the net to the Ranger regimental combat team commander, along with every other officer on the net. She looked over at the nearest hole leading down to the artificial caverns below. People were disappearing down the hole, stepping over the opening and then floating downward. Five or six at a time could go down to the relative safety of the caverns. Relative, in that the ten meters of earth over the cavern was just that, soft earth, held in place by a thin layer of nanogel that had hardened to a carbon fiber reinforced plasticrete. That was fine for keeping the caverns from collapsing. It would not do much against bombs or missiles coming down from above.

  Artois linked into the suit of one of the medical people who was standing by the wormhole. They were moving people through as fast as possible, six or seven at a time. That cavern was full of people trying to push forward and get to the safety of another planet in a different star system. The refugees were shuffling forward, trying to get from a mass thirty people in width to that of the narrow gate. And the caverns leading in were also packed, with a traffic jam to rival that of an old Earth rush hour.

  What the hell can we do? thought the Captain. She thought about recalling her first and second platoons, which were on their way to the east and west sides of the camp to build fighting positions for the Rangers. And if we can’t get these people out of here, it’s all a waste.

  The Captain sent in a com request to the Brigadier in charge of the other end of this evacuation, then sent a conference request to the Ranger commander on site.

  “What’s going on, Captain?” asked the Brigadier.

  “We need to stop the evacuation through the gate in the center of the camp, so we can expand it to accommodate more people.” She sent her own figures and calculations through the com. “As you can see, we would not be able to evacuate several hundred people while we do the expansion, but we will increase the evacuation rate by four or five thousand an hour.”

  “Do have the means to expand the gate?” asked the Ranger commander.

  “Oh yes,” said the Brigadier. “We’ll need to get more frame structure in place. That will be your job on that end, Captain.”

  “Yes, sir. And there’s another bottleneck we need to take care of, but I can have some of my people handle that.” She explained how the entrance leading into the gate cavern was also a bottleneck, or would become one when the gate had been expanded. The gate room would empty quickly, and not refill quickly enough.

  “Go ahead and get that done,” said the Brigadier.

  “But keep your focus on the fighting positions my men need,” said the Colonel. “If the enemy breaks through, it doesn’t really matter how many we can evacuate per hour.”

  “What about moving the gate from the caverns under the mountain to the open area outside the camp,” suggested Artois while she still had the two senior officers on the com. “We could expand it as well, and get more civilians out per hour at that point too.”

  “I don’t think so,” replied the Colonel, who had operational control at this point. “Bringing the gate out in the open just makes it a potential target. We’ll keep it where it is for now, and pack the refugees into the caverns prior to evac.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Artois. A large flash caught her attention, and she looked up to see an enormous blast out beyond the atmosphere. Her suit visual system stepped it down twenty fold, and it was still painful to look at. Which meant to people with no protection?

  “Do not look at that light,” she yelled over her suit speakers, slaving the speakers of very suit in the camp to her com with an override. “Close your eyes, and do not look at the light.”

  Of course, for a good number of the camp inhabitants it was too late, and some looked anyway, curiosity getting the better of them. Now they had the added problem of blindness in hundreds of thousands of people to deal with. Their blindness could of course be cured with nanotech, but not at the moment.

  The heavy suit floating near her position pivoted in the air, the launcher on his back rising into position, then firing a small missile into the air. All of the nearby suits, out to a couple of kilometers, fired as well. Six aircraft streaked overhead, a tremendous roar following them. Missiles exploded in the air, hit by the lasers of the planes. Some of those beams touched into the camp and more civilians were killed. Three of the aircraft exploded in the air, their burning hulks turning in curving paths that would take them to landfall outside the camp. Objects fell from the remaining three aircraft before they flew out of the camp and into the distance.

  The six bombs fell, three exploding at a thousand meters above the camp as particle beams struck them. The other beams were clean misses, and the bombs fell to the ground to explode into waves of flame that spread in a circle around each weapon, enough to cause thousands of casualties. And now they had another problem, and not enough medical personnel to handle them.

  * * *

  The Lt. General stood in a hasty fighting position dug by the engineers, forty kilometers from his command post. Baggett had moved to observe the attack of a combat team of the First Brigade of the 47th Heavy Infantry Division. Normally he would have just observed through a link with the brigade, but the static, both from dedicated jamming and the roiling of the atmosphere from the high altitude bursts of nuclear and antimatter weapons, made that problematic.

  The fortress they were attacking was within eight kilometers of one of the camps, much too close to use heavy weapons on. The enemy had no such constraints, and the fortress had to be pressured quickly before it could start firing its own heavy weapons into that camp. Which meant they had to eliminate it as soon as possible.

  “We could definitely use some air support for the assault,” said the Lt. Colonel in charge of the combat team.

  “I know you could, Colonel. And as soon as we have it, I’ll allot some to you. But until then, we have to take that fort in order the neutralize it.” Before it thinks of lobbing mortars and missiles into the camp.

  “We’re kicking off in one minute,” the Team Commander told his Corps Commander.

  Baggett grunted as he looked across the five kilometers they would have to cover to get into the fortress. His men were heavily armed, heavily armored, but the Cacas were in reinforced bunkers sheltering under strong electromagnetic fields, with heavy weapons of their own. The bodies of a couple of the scouts, their suits cracked open by particle beam and high velocity weapons, lay on that open area. He looked over the bunkers that held the perimeter of the fortress. There were sixteen of them on this flank. His HUD tagged them with what they knew about them. Those bunkers contained over twenty heavy particle beam weapons, nine high velocity guns, plus the rifles from any number of troops.

  Mortars and artillery were set in the central portion of the fortress, the keep, and could range any spot around the perimeter for up to a hundred kilometers. Those were the weapons most concerning where the safety of the refugees was concerned. At the moment they were firing sporadic volleys as the Imperial Army lines. Almost all of those shells were destroyed by laser defenses before they could hit their targets. It was obvious that the enemy wasn’t firing at their best rate of fire. That would come, of that Baggett was sure.

  To take the fort the Team Commander had his own organic battalion, four companies of heavy infantry and a heavy weapons company, as well an engineer company and two companies of tanks. It seemed like enough force for the job, but it remained to be seen if it really was. While a small fight in the overall battle for this planet, and the war as a whole, they would learn important lessons from this confrontation.

  “Now,” yelled the Lt. Colonel into the com, and his heavy weapons company, as well as a battery of artillery to the rear, fired a couple of ranging rounds, then went into rapid fire. Scores of shells burst over the fort, most taken out by t
he laser domes in the interior of the facility. A few hit, causing some superficial structural damage. The mortars were firing a round a second, going through their thirty round magazines in half a minute, putting six hundred rounds on the fort in that time. The larger artillery tubes, firing armor piercing guided munitions, shot a round every two seconds, with three minutes of sustained fire per gun before they had to reload.

  The fortress was obscured by the explosions and the smoke they generated. About half the rounds were landing in front of the bunkers, throwing up earth and helping to obscure their line of sight. Two seconds after the barrage started the tanks and infantry came over the low rise and started toward the fortress. The tanks floated a quarter of a meter above the ground, infantrymen and engineers dispersed among the twenty-eight heavy vehicles. All had their full stealth packages activated, their electromagnetic fields bending light and making them essentially invisible, while holographic projectors created the images of many more blurry suits and tanks. Small robots floated along with them, radiating heat to create more decoys.

  The enemy opened fire, mostly shooting at decoys, but, due to the laws of averages, hitting some real targets as well. The enemy artillery now opened fire at its fastest rate, raining hundreds of shells down on the advancing human forces. Suits were knocked back by weapons fire, or blown upward by artillery. In the first minute the casualties started to mount. Sixty-five suits put out of action, one tank, which seemed to be an artillery magnetic, dropping to the ground and stopping.

  The human force returned fire into an enemy position using much the same deception technology as they were. But they had the positions tagged on their systems, and could look by the decoys to the real targets. Rifle and heavy beam fire was mostly ineffective, unless it hit a firing port, which was mostly a matter of luck. The area between the forces was filled with the buzzing beams of protons, and the shining lasers made visible by the heavy dust in the air. It looked like hell on earth, with the combatants both trying their best to kill each other and to avoid their own deaths. Here and there an eye hurting flare showed where the crystal matrix battery pack of a suit had popped under a hit to that portion of the battle armor. Those were sure death, since the suits used level three batteries, those with the second to most powerful charge of that type of power unit, and also almost as unstable as four.