Walborski had slithered forward about a kilometer when he heard the movement of heavy objects to his front. Actually, he felt the vibrations of their walking through the ground before he actually heard them, and he was sure that no matter how sensitive their audio receptors they were not going to hear him or his men. He waved his hand to Top, who was only a couple of meters away. He could barely see the NCO from even that close a range, and was hoping that the enemy would never spot them until they got within a similar distance.
Something exploded in the darkness, a muffled crump and a flash that mimicked the lighting that was going off almost continuously in the clouds. Cornelius smiled for a moment, then grinned as a dozen more blasts sundered the night. Those were his men, throwing heavy blast grenades into the enemy wherever they could see them. Each grenade had the equivalent of a ton of explosive in it, and would throw darts of hardened supermetals at high speeds, capable of penetrating even the armor of a suit if they hit right.
The Captain went to a knee as he picked up the shadowy figures of suited Cacas. They had their stealth systems engaged, and would have been nearly invisible under normal circumstances. The rain outlined their forms, and though Cornelius could only pick out the forms of the trio nearest him clearly, he could see the indistinct silhouettes of more beyond.
Cornelius pulled a grenade from his webbing and twisted the cap off, then hit the trigger three times before throwing it with all his strength toward the Cacas. In the rain most of them couldn’t even see the small object that came flying into their formation, until it had gone off with a deafening roar. Three of the Cacas went flying through the air, tossed by the explosion, while several others fell into the mud. Walborski aimed his rifle at one of the Cacas who was struggling to get up from his knees, aiming for the faceplate that was one of the weak points on the armor. He squeezed his trigger once, the chemical rifle phutting out a round, most of the sound captured by the suppressor on the front of the barrel. The round hit the faceplate, the microshape charge shooting a splinter of supermetal through the armor and into the head of the Caca. The large soldier went down in a quivering heap. Cornelius wasn’t sure if he had killed the creature, but the injury he had inflicted would put him out of action.
Walborski spent the next fifteen minutes stalking and killing, using up all of his grenades, then closing for the kill. On a couple of occasions the spooked Cacas fired at ghosts, their proton beams hissing through the rain. On at least one occasion one group of Cacas fired at another, and a lively firefight developed in which at least a half dozen of them were killed.
Empty of grenades, now he stalked them in earnest, shooting them at their weak points from close range. Stabbing them with his monomolecular knife at the joints. He was like a ghost in the dark, coming from nowhere, leaving a dead or dying Caca behind. He hoped that his men were doing the same, and the Cacas refusing to move forward seemed to point to that result. The augmented reflexes of the Ranger meant that he moved faster than the Cacas, had better reaction time, more precise hand eye coordination. While he couldn’t stand up to them in an open battle, in this type of fight he had all the advantages.
As the rain started to slacken a bit the Rangers withdrew, leaving terrified Cacas to their rear. Walborksi and his Top Sergeant made their way back to their own lines. Over the next half hour the rest of the Rangers returned, or at least those who were going to return. Eighteen of his men didn’t come back, and he was sure that what was left of them littered the mud in front of his positions.
When they had counted down the probables, the number of dead and wounded Cacas topped three hundred. Most important, their attack had been blunted, and they had slunk back to their jumping off point. He was sure that they would be coming back, though. And with the storm starting to break up, he wasn’t sure that the same tactic would work on them again.
* * *
Cat had only been in the jungles around the capital city a couple of times. And both of those had been field trips with her classmates, with plenty of armed forest rangers to escort them. Now she was walking in the line of refugees through that jungle, her rags of clothes soaked through to her skin from the rainstorm they had just endured.
There were animal calls through that jungle that brought chills down her spine. She couldn’t tell if they were predators looking for a meal, or harmless arboreal forms that fed off the leaves of the forest.
“Keep moving,” said an armored soldier standing on the side of the gully. The soldier was in the medium battle armor that the ones called Rangers were wearing, and not the heavy suits worn by the engineers. He held a particle beam rifle in his gauntleted hands, and continually looked over his shoulder at the jungle behind. “Don’t keep the people behind you bunched up. Walk quickly.”
Cat looked at the empty water bottle in her hand. She had sweated the entire way out to this point, even during the rain, and despite the humidity she had a raging thirst. At least her hunger was at bay. The meal bar she had eaten had enough calories to last an adult for several days.
“Can we have some water?” a man ahead asked the soldier, standing in place and looking up, stopping the flow of traffic as people had to walk around him, into the path of the next line over. “We’re dying of thirst here.”
“The caves are just a short distance ahead. You can get water there, before you go through the gate. Now keep moving.”
The man stared at the soldier for a moment, then turned and kept walking with slumped shoulders. Cat thought the man walked like she felt, exhausted. Worn out from the privation of the camp. She didn’t think anyone was in shape to walk the twenty or more kilometers they were being forced to move. It’s almost like they’re trying to kill us, since the Cacas didn’t get around to it, she thought, then cursed herself for such thoughts. The soldiers had come to save them, and many of them had already paid in blood for the people of New Moscow’s freedom.
* * *
“I think we were way too optimistic on how fast we could evacuate these people,” said Colonel Marcie Thunderfoot, the officer in charge of the Fifteenth Army Engineering Brigade. “At the rate we’re moving them now, we’ll be lucky to get fifty million a day off planet. So we can get all of them off in two weeks, if nothing else goes wrong, and I’d hate to count on that.”
General Lucius Arbuckle thought about that for a moment. They had planned on getting the civilians off the planet in about ten days, except for those who might want to stay and try to rebuild the system as the major military base and staging area they needed in this space. That presupposed that the Fleet would take and hold the system, and support the Army in taking the planet.
But now, with the threat of a larger Caca force moving in, the evacuation took on a new significance. If the Fleet lost control of the system for even days the Cacas would be bombarding this planet, and would most probably kill the hundreds of millions of civilians still here.
“We need to expand all of the gates on both ends,” said the engineering officer. “Double their capacity. Or, even better, triple it. Then we can get more of the civilians to safety.”
Which means shutting down all of the gates while we move some of them, and increase the size of the framework for the others. The General agonized over the decision. Even if they worked as fast as possible, and nothing unforeseeable came up, they would still have all the gates down for hours, the ones they needed to move for up to five or six hours. And that would translate into millions of people who wouldn’t get off in that time. And they still wouldn’t get them all off, while, when the Cacas came, they would have to move the gates again to remove them from line of sight of orbital bombardment.
“Leave the gates where they are, for now,” ordered the General. “We’ll keep getting them out as fast as we can, and trust that the Fleet will handle their part of it.”
Chapter Twenty-three
The rules of survival never change, whether you're in a desert or in an arena.
Bear Grylls.
NEW MOSCOW SP
ACE.
“We have two hundred and sixty-one objects,” called out the Tactical Officer. “Range, two point three light minutes. Velocity point nine four light. Acceleration, nine hundred gravities.”
High Admiral Lisantr’nana turned quickly in his seat to stare at the tactical plot, which showed the new objects as vector arrows. If they had been smart, and just coasted in from wherever they came from, we wouldn’t have spotted them so soon, he thought. They had only picked up the objects from their graviton emissions. They could possibly have gotten within fifteen or twenty light seconds if they hadn’t been putting out gravitons from their grabbers. He looked at the vector arrows and realized that only one of the groupings was actually pointing at his force.
“Which are the most danger to us?” he asked his Tactical Officer, already pretty sure of the answer, but wanting to verify his assumption.
“That group there, my Lord,” said the officer, indicating the force closest to outsystem. It was a large group of over a hundred, just like the one closest to the system star. The one in the middle was made up of just over fifty craft, and the High Admiral thought that must have been the wing that had attacked them earlier.
“Open fire with all defensive weapons on that force,” he ordered the officer. “I want them blown out of space before they launch.”
The Tactical Officer acknowledged while the Com Officer sent out the order. The ship shuddered just a bit from the launches. Moments later several thousand green vector arrows appeared, heading for the enemy ships at fifteen thousand gravities. All of the ships that had a clear shot fired their lasers, followed by particle beams. At the range of two light minutes they were not very accurate. Still, some of the enemy vector arrows fell off the plot, then more, before the craft started going into quick evasive maneuvers. That did not save all of them, and eighty-four continued on to greet the missile storm coming at them.
Many of those missiles disappeared, taken out by the defensive lasers and the few counters each craft carried. But over twelve hundred got into attack range, and nine hundred and fifty made it to final approach. It was too much, with over nine missiles targeting each fighter. The fighters still took out several hundred, but at the second of contact all but four of the attack craft disappeared, killed before they could launch. Those four launched, from one and a quarter light minutes. Sixteen missiles, easily picked off by the defenses of a fleet.
“Target that closest group,” he then ordered his officer, pointing at the smallest, the wing that had been previously mauled.
“We won’t generate a lot of hits of those craft,” cautioned the Tactical Officer.
“Do it anyway. The more we kill here, the fewer we will have to face in the future.”
Another storm of counter missiles went out, these at a target almost four light minutes astern of the fleet. The missiles were fired on an interception course, accelerating to come in ahead of the enemy. The Admiral realized as soon as they were fired that none of them were going to kill the enemy. They were going too fast, and the counters, while having enough acceleration to eventually catch them, if they didn’t transit into whatever strange place they had come from, lacked the endurance. A moment later it didn’t matter.
“They’re gone, my Lord. Both groups have just disappeared off the plot.”
“Did they turn off their grabbers?”
“No, my Lord. We were tracking them from their heat as well, and they had been decelerating for the last couple of minutes. The heat signatures are still there, since we won’t see the cessation of those for several minutes. .”
“What do you have on visual?” As the Admiral asked that, he realized he should have asked what they would have, since they wouldn’t see the actual event of disappearance for minutes now.
“We have some blurry visuals on those ships, my Lord. I’m not sure what we’ll see when we get to the point where they disappeared. Perhaps with some enhancement we might see what happened.”
“Very good,” said the High Admiral, sitting back in his chair. He zoomed out the central holo so he could watch the missile storm approaching the enemy fleet. So he saw the enemy launch at the same time the Tactical Officer shouted out the warning.
* * *
“Missile contact in twelve minutes,” called out the Fleet Tactical Officer.
Fleet Admiral Jerry Kelvin stared at the plot that showed the enemy missile storm, over twenty thousand weapons, heading for his force. Statistically he was sure most of his command would survive, though the death and destruction that would visit his fleet was something he really didn’t want to think about.
“Launch all weapons,” said the Admiral, looking over at the Tactical Officer, then at the Com Officer.
After listening to the Com Officer start relaying his orders he looked back at the plot, at the thousands of enemy missiles that were coming in at point seven eight light. And now it was also filling with green vector arrows, thousands of them as well, as the ships of his fleet started launching through all of their tubes. As soon as the first volley was off, they fired another, and another, until ten volleys were in space. That left only a few volleys in their magazines, something counterintuitive when facing a force as large as the one coming at them.
At the same time as the missile launch the nine hundred attack fighters launched by the six fleet carriers with the fleet powered up their grabbers and boosted ahead at eight hundred gravities, the limit of the larger attack craft that made up half the swarm.
“Missiles are on the way, sir,” reported the Tactical Officer, turning from his board to look back at the Admiral. “Signals have been transmitted by grav pulse to the other weapons.”
“Time till we launch?”
“Thirty-five minutes, sir,” said the Tactical Officer with a worried look on his face.
There were three of the super heavy battleships, each carrying two of the wormhole missile tubes, with launch capacity only limited by how many weapons could be sent through from the other side. And the missiles would come through at whatever velocity they had been pre-accelerated to by the magnetic launch tubes on the other side. The Admiral wanted to save those weapons as an ace in the hole and a final surprise. Which meant his three largest ships needed to survive the coming storm.
“Fighter wings are reporting in,” called out the Com Officer. “They are moving into position and getting ready to launch.”
“Missile contact in eleven minutes.”
And our missiles will reach them in an hour and a half, thought the Admiral. They’ll would know for over an hour how much they hurt the human force, while the humans would not know how effective their attack was until they had been savaged by the enemy. Many of those humans wouldn’t be around to find out what happened.
Kelvin sat in his chair and stared at the holo over the next five minutes, watching as the enemy storm approached the fighter screen. He could feel the tension on the bridge, the smell of fear as brave men and women faced their mortality in the form of weapons launched by beings who wanted them dead. Who did not care that these spacers had plans for their lives, families, dreams. Who only saw them as obstacles to their own plans, and obstacles that needed to be removed.
He could only imagine what the feelings were like on the fighters who were about to contact those missiles, and on the screening ships and cruisers, whose mission was to do whatever they could to protect the heavy hitters of the fleet from harm, so they could do more of the same to the enemy. They knew the mission, which didn’t mean that any of them wanted to die performing that mission, any more than the crews of the capital ships did.
Please, dear God, he prayed silently. I ask not for safety for myself, but for the people that serve under me. It would be too much to expect for all of them to make it through. All I ask is that no one dies because of poor planning on my part, because I dropped the ball. I ask that this plan will work as well as possible, and most of my people make it through.
The Admiral opened his eyes to stare at the plot
, watching things in real time as missiles and ships maneuvered through use of their grabbers. The missiles were within a light minute of the fighters now, and those craft went into action, using everything in their arsenal to disrupt the missile storm.
Every fighter, attack and space superiority, turned up both their jamming and their stealth systems to full power. Electronic signals lashed the sensors of the missiles, which boosted their own ECM suites to full. Normally they wouldn’t do this until they were much closer to the target, and doing so at this time gave the ships they were about to attack more information about their capabilities and jamming patterns.
Now all of the fighters launched every missile they carried. None carried anti-ship weapons, having been loaded with anti-missile birds instead. Over ten thousand of the small counter missiles launched, immediately seeking targets. Many never got a lock through the jamming of the missiles. Others were hit by the defensive systems of the incoming two hundred ton weapons, small laser rings built into the body to give the missiles more of a chance of getting through just this kind of defense. At the same time the fighters were attempting to lock onto the missiles and get some hits with their lasers.
Four thousand missiles were destroyed in the outer defense, while almost two hundred fighters went up in small bursts of plasma as missiles targeted them instead. Sixteen thousand missiles made it through, right into the face of the ship launched counter missiles that now screamed from their launching vessels at fifteen thousand gravities. The fleet lacked the specialized missile defense ships, they being needed elsewhere, like above the planet, so the screens were not able to put up the numbers that the new ships would have been able to.
Thirty thousand counters tried to stop the incoming weapons. They ended the flights of almost seven thousand missiles in bright bursts of fire, leaving over nine thousand to move into attack range, where the lasers and particle beams started to pick up and prosecute targets. Or, in many cases, where they thought weapons were going to be, their ships’ targeting systems spoofed by the missiles’ ECM systems. Still, they took out another two thousand weapons, while counter missiles fired from close in took out two thousand more, leaving three thousand to reach the final approach stage, where the close in systems took over.
Exodus: Empires at War: Book 8: Soldiers (Exodus: Empires at War.) Page 34
