Exodus: Empires at War: Book 05 - Ranger

by Doug Dandridge

  After a half an hour’s work the company was back in their vehicles, heading for the next work site. This was a series of bunkers looking over a large clearing that would be a perfect landing zone for the enemy. If the bunkers survived the initial bombardment that enemy would find this a hot LZ. We have two days before they’re overhead. And then me and my men are just riflemen. There won’t be any more engineering work at that time, not when everything we try to build will be blasted from space.

  * * *

  Rebecca was looking up into the night sky when the first of the Ca’cadasan missiles reached orbit. The first signs were the glows of gigaton range kinetic strikes on the far side of the moon, the flash reaching around the curvature of the body. Bright pinpoints appeared out in space, the counter missiles trying to kill the incoming. There were several brighter flashes as some of those missiles were taken out. Then came the eye hurting flashes of hits on the orbital stations. Moments later the sky lit up with thousands of streaks of light as pieces of stations and missiles hit the atmosphere. The ground rumbled moments later, and a bright light flashed on the horizon as something big enough to make it through the atmosphere hit with the force of a multi-megaton range nuclear weapon.

  As suddenly as it had started it ended, and Rebecca knew there was now nothing in orbit capable of contesting near space with the aliens. Now it would be up to the shore batteries and ground forces to fight a landing. And from what her father had told her that would be an exercise in brave futility.

  “Looks like the show’s over,” said Uncle Saul after the ground shocks stopped. He led the way back into the cabin, which was more crowded than intended with three families staying there. Mom’s sister Kimberly had also come with her kids, while her husband served in the militia. Four adults and seven children made for crowded quarters. Aunt Kimberly and her two small children were staying in the basement, where the mass of storage had been shifted around to make a bedding area. Still, it felt comforting to be among family, and Rebecca had no trouble getting to sleep despite the images in her mind of tens of thousands of people dying above the planet.

  Sunup came early, and the noise of people moving around the cabin woke her. She wiped the sleep from her eyes as she stumbled into the main room.

  “At least we won’t starve for quite some time,” said her mom, reaching into a cabinet to withdraw some military rations that the family had stockpiled.

  It will mostly taste like crap, thought Rebecca, accepting ration pack from her mom. She opened the seal and felt the plastic box heat up in her hands. Steam was rising from the packet as she spooned eggs, potatoes and sausage into her mouth that didn’t taste as bad as she had feared.

  The next show came soon after nightfall two days later, as the enemy ships slid into orbit and the space to surface battle started. It began with more bright pinpoints, as the ships took out the smaller defense satellites that had not been taken out by the long range bombardment. And the ships took a some hits from hyper v missiles and particle beams fired by the satellites. Weapons on the surface took over. Bright red particle beams linked surface with ships, at point nine c looking like instantaneous transmission. Flashes appeared in space, the fast moving protons converting their kinetic energy into blast and heat. Beams reached back down, flashing from ship to ground. The earth rumbled, and bright flares appeared on the horizon. This went on for many minutes, until it seemed as if all the planetary defenses had been silenced. And then it started again, with even greater fury, the explosions of missiles before they reached their targets adding to the show.

  Now the light of lasers was added to the show, visible through the dust that was rising into the atmosphere. It was a display of a planet fighting for its life against those who would kill it. It went on into the night, quiet at times, picking up in ferocity in others. The ground rumbled almost continuously, sometimes the slight tremors of distant hits, sometimes the shaking that almost knocked people from their feet. There was a constant play of flashes on the horizon. Rebecca had read about the wars in the past, the land wars of ancient Earth, and how artillery barrages and massive bombing raids would light up the night. This made her think of those old displays of firepower.

  By dawn the battle was all but over. Very few beams and missiles reached up to orbit. Those that did attracted a firestorm of response. Rebecca knew there were still weapons on the planet. They would stay hidden until the next stage of the fight, where they might accomplish something, if still not enough.

  “It’s time to leave, honey,” said her mom as the sun was rising.

  Rebecca turned around in a daze, seeing her Uncle and Aunts coming from the house, herding the children in front of them. Benjamin was rubbing sleepy eyes and holding his kitten in one hand. The little animal was almost panicking in fear, and Rebecca felt so sorry for it. The tiny thing didn’t understand this world that was coming down around its ears. She followed the adults around the house where they had been moving things all night.

  Four aircars were waiting on the back yard. All were packed tightly, leaving only enough room for their passengers. The trunks were full, and there were containers strapped onto the tops. Everyone old enough to carry one had their personal weapon, and an assortment of rifles were packed within reach if needed.

  They rose into the air and turned to the east, toward the cavern that had been prepared as a refuge. The cavern was already stocked with supplies, brought there by her father and uncles. It was fitted out with lighting and water systems, made as habitable as a house, if much more secure. Once they got there it was hoped they could hide out for the months it took for an Imperial expedition to recapture the planet, if that did in fact occur.

  Rebecca was looking back toward the capital city when the first flash hit. Minutes later the mushroom cloud rose into the sky, reaching for the stratosphere. More flashes and more clouds, and Rebecca knew that hundreds of thousands of people had just died. Those had been big blasts, from powerful kinetic weapons, and any shelter under them was now gone. The flashes and mushroom clouds kept coming. The roar of the hits reached them about nine minutes after the first flash, then the turbulence, which rocked the car in flight.

  Rebecca turned back to her mom, tears in her eyes. “Timmy. Mr. Jaquari. Everyone.”

  “I know, honey,” said her mom, reaching over and giving her a hug. “I know. But now we’ve got to survive, so that the memory of those people lives on.”

  “They’re coming down,” said Uncle Saul over the short range com. “I knew we should have left last night.”

  Rebecca and her mom looked out and up to see the streaks of aircraft in the stratosphere. Their contrails were everywhere. Some were enemy, some friendlies gone up to contest their passage. Particle beams again rose from the ground, along with missiles. Beams came down from above, almost as a replay of the night before. There were some hits on the ground, the Ca’cadasan ships seeking out the ground batteries that were trying to knock enemy craft out of the air.

  “We left too late,” said her mom, shaking her head, echoing what Uncle Saul had just verbalized. “We should have left last night.”

  “Look out,” yelled Uncle Saul over the com.

  Rebecca’s mom sucked in a breath, and the child looked up to see a large aircraft come swooping out of the sky, trailing a thick cloud of smoke. Another aircraft of unknown design followed. It wasn’t shooting at the assault shuttle, and was obviously an escort, though what it was accomplishing couldn’t be determined.

  The shuttle plowed into the lead aircar of their convoy, crushing the civilian vehicle out of existence. The shuttle continued on to the ground, where it hit with a massive explosion that rocked everything in the air above it. The escort took out the second car in the convoy, its particle beams reaching out and cutting the vehicle in half, to fall in two burning pieces into the forest below.

  Rebecca put her hands over her face as she saw two bodies, one adult and one child, fall from the shredded car. There was no hope for the two, who fell
five hundred meters onto a ground that was now churned up with as the burning body of the tough shuttle rolled down the hill and the impact wave moved in all directions, tearing trees up by the roots and starting fires that would burn for days.

  “Hold on,” yelled her mom, just before something hit their car, hard. The vehicle fell off to the right, her mom fighting the controls and trying to right the vehicle. It was soon obvious that nothing was going to right this ship, and the aircar was heading for a group of burning trees, fast.

  The foam came out of the vents just before impact, hardening as soon as it was in place. Then that impact struck, Rebecca’s teeth snapped together and the car stopped moving forward, then stopped sideways motion with a crunch. The smell of smoke was the last thing she remembered before blackness enfolded her.

  * * *

  “Here they come,” yelled out a voice over the com circuit.

  Captain Joseph Goldman thought for a second about his family, who should be to safety by now. If they made it. He came back to the here and now, checking his rifle and making sure that everything was working, for the fifteenth time that morning. Time to play infantryman, he thought, walking to the firing port of the bunker. There were no more engineering tasks, for the moment. What was needed now was firepower.

  The open field was before him, stretching out over several kilometers. Running down the center was a hard landing field. And beyond. Beyond? Beyond was the horror that had been the capital city of Azure. There was not an undamaged building in that metropolis. The hard alloy bones of skyscrapers still reached into the air in places. There were some smaller buildings that were almost intact. Almost. If there were live civilians in that city the Captain would have been surprised. Some of the shelters still undoubtedly survived, now buried, all access to the surface cut. Before they could be opened and evacuated the enemy would be here.

  He knew heavy infantry was at work in the city, digging in and making the city a death trap for the enemy. He had requested that his unit be allowed to work with them. That request had been politely turned down. The regulars that were heavy infantry thought they had no need of the services of part time light engineers.

  Two large shuttles were on approach to the field, escorted by a quartet of support craft. The support craft were there to draw fire and then suppress it. No one fired. The shuttles were what they wanted, not the guard dogs.

  The first shuttle was at the end of the field, moments away from lowering itself for a landing, when a pair of hyper-v rockets came from positions on the hillside overlooking the strip. One rocket was taken out of the air by a defensive laser. The other hit an engine with a thunderous crash, and the shuttle tilted to that side and fell into a slide. Beam weapons reached out to strike the tough armor of the shuttle, none doing much more damage than some scarring of the hull. Some explosive rounds hit with better results, blowing small holes in the armor.

  More rockets reached out for the second shuttle. Two struck, and the ship fell to the ground and hit on the grass beside the hard landing strip. Earth flew into the air as the ship turned over.

  Very large creatures in battle armor came jumping from the hatches of the ships. They were taken under fire as soon as they were visible. Some died as particle beams and heavy high velocity rounds struck them. Others took cover beside the shuttles and returned fire. For a moment it looked like the remnants of these two platoons of Ca’cadasans were doomed. The attack craft swooped over the shuttles and fired rockets and beams into any human positions they could find. They knocked out one bunker, but had a tough time of taking out any of the others, which had been built to withstand this kind of an attack.

  They had not been built to take the kinetic penetrators that now struck from the sky. In moments half the bunkers were gone, while more shuttles came in and deposited their troops, until there were hundreds of the big warriors fighting their way to clear the perimeter of the field.

  When it was apparent that the humans would accomplish nothing more here the retreat began, through the tunnels that led to a rallying point in the forest outside the city. A glance up through the trees showed more shuttles coming in for a landing. The Ca’cadasans had gained their first foothold outside the capital, along with a dozen others around the globe.

  * * *

  Rebecca groaned from the pain before she opened her eyes. Her head was cloudy, though the ache was receding, and she knew that her nanites were taking care of the concussion that must have occurred during the crash. The foam padding was dissolving away, and she guessed from the state of the stuff that they had been down for over ten minutes. Looking at where the pain was coming from her arm she saw an injury which would require more attention than nanites alone. Her left ulna was protruding from the skin. It must have been protruding from the foam when they hit. There had been some bleeding, but the nanites had stopped it before there had been much loss. She choked back a scream as the pain of the injury hit with her movement of the arm. She gave it a thought and the nanites blocked that pain.

  “Mom,” she croaked, looking over at where her mother had been sitting. She screamed as she saw what was left of her mother. That side of the car had struck a tree and caved in. Her mom’s head was crushed, and red and clear fluid was leaking out of an ear. She didn’t need to touch her to know that her mother was dead.

  Rebecca wanted to just sit there and cry. Her mom was dead, and most of her extended family was gone. She had seen two of the four aircars destroyed in the air. Her’s had been downed. She had no idea what happened to the fourth car, but based on what she had seen and experienced it had probably not made it either. So why the hell should I care if I live or die?

  A sound from behind broke her free from her self-pity. “Mommy,” came a soft whine from the back seat. Gritting her teeth she turned in her seat to look into the back. There sat Benjamin, tears rolling down his cheeks.

  “My kitty cat is hurt,” said the younger child, looking up into her eyes.

  The tiny kitten lay still in his lap, her tongue lolling out of her mouth. The cat was dead, and Rebecca thought, looking at where the cat was laying on the seat, that it had been asphyxiated by the protective foam. The tears started to flow freely down her face from this new small tragedy.

  “Help her,” cried the boy.

  I need to be strong for Benny, thought the girl. She was alive, her little brother was alive, and it was up to her to keep them both that way. “Hang on, Benjamin,” she said, reaching for the first aid kit that was attached to the dash of the car. She opened the kit and pulled out the airgun injector. She shifted the dial what she wanted, then pressed the injector into her neck over the carotid artery. She changed the setting and did it again.

  “This is going to hurt like hell,” she whispered, pulling out an adjustable cast. She worked the cast around her arm, set the control panel on the device to her specifications and body part, then hit the engage button. The cast pulled itself into shape, slowly pulling the bones of her forearm into place. The drugs she had injected dulled the pain. It still hurt enough that she grunted as it pulled the injured limb into its natural position. “It’s OK, Benny,” she said when she heard the child whimper.

  She set the injector again and pushed a booster shot of nanites into her veins. After repacking the kit she crawled over the seat and checked out her little brother. She couldn’t find any injuries on the child and breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Help my kitty cat,” said the little boy in a soft voice, picking up the limp form of the kitten.

  “She’s dead, baby,” said Rebecca in a choked voice. “I can’t do anything for her.”

  “Maybe mommy can help her,” said the little boy, reaching a hand up for his mother’s hair.

  “She’s dead, Benny,” said Rebecca, her voice barely audible. “She’s dead.”

  “I want my mommy,” said Benjamin, regressing to the emotional age of a four year old.

  “Me too,” said Rebecca. “But we’ve only got each other. And we are going
to get out of here.” She wrapped her little brother into a tight hug, holding back her own tears. I must be strong.

  Ten minutes later she had the in-cabin rifle ready and was opening the door of the aircar. Outside was a hell of smoke and ash, and Rebecca closed the door and rethought her strategy.

  “We need to get into our survival suits,” she told Benjamin, glancing over at her mother’s body, which was starting to smell. She helped her brother into his suit, checking all the seals, then donned her own. After making sure that both hoods were working she opened the door again.

  It was even smokier out there now. She used the visor on the hood to look through the smoke, gasping at what was revealed of the small valley. Toward the center, a couple of kilometers away down slope, was complete devastation. The assault shuttle had hit there, and every bit of vegetation around it was incinerated. The tail of the shuttle stuck out of a fifty meter wide crater. From where she was she couldn’t ascertain the condition of the rest of the shuttle, but from the other evidence she was sure it wasn’t in good shape. For a kilometer beyond the circle of total destruction was a wasteland of tumbled trees and broken wood, much of it still burning.

  Where the aircar was sitting against the edge of semi-intact trees, its one side caved in against a towering giant it had snapped on impact, was a stand of forest that displayed broken branches and smaller fires. These stands extended for kilometers, growing thicker with distance from the impact, until, at the tops of the hills, the forest looked strong and healthy.

  Rebecca tried to link into the planetary net, wondering why she hadn’t thought of that before. Probably because I was concussed, confused and in shock, she thought. She attempted the link, and found nothing. As far as she could tell the net was no longer in existence.

  She looked up as a pair of aircraft flew over the valley, rumbling along above the sound barrier. They did not look like human aircraft, and they slowed and made a large circle over the valley.