Exodus: Empires at War: Book 8: Soldiers (Exodus: Empires at War.) (20 page)

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.

The second
mushroom cloud rose into the air, joining with the first.  The ground
rumbled from the explosion, and a second vibration could be felt below it from
a blast in the distance, while another mushroom cloud rose in the distance
sixty kilometers to the north.

*    
*      *

“Go, go, go, go,
go,” yelled the battalion Sergeant Major over the com.  The gate to the
front of the troops was large enough to handle a heavy main battle tank. 
It was wide enough to handle twenty soldiers in heavy battle armor at a time,
shoulder to shoulder.  The gate had just opened, dilated by the negative
matter at the same time as the portal was opened on the other side.  The
first line of troops lifted their suits off the ground, their armor reflecting
the light of the rising F class star that was just showing over the horizon.

Lt. General
Samuel Baggett stood off to the side in his own heavy battle suit, watching as
the combat team deployed to New Moscow through the gate.  His link was
showing him the scenes from all of the combat teams going through the gates
simultaneously, and he could switch his view from group to group across all of
the planets his troops were on, or to his own command, or to the feed from the
Fleet over the planet through the wormhole com net.

The second group
went through right on the tails of the first, then the third, and on until the
entire company had gone through.  The first of the tanks followed, the one
thousand ton Tyrannosaur IV lifting on its grabbers and sliding forward,
hitting the mirrored surface and disappearing from this planet.  The next
tank was right on its tail, then the third, fourth and fifth, until the entire
platoon was through.  The next company of infantry flew through, then
another platoon of tanks, these also heavies, followed by the third
company.  The battalion HQ was through next, then a company of six medium
tanks, Allosaurs, the newest armored vehicle in the Imperial armor inventory, six
hundred tons of fighting machine.  The engineering company was rushed
through next, followed by the heavy weapons company and the fourth company of
infantry.  The last thing through on this attack vector was the antiair
company, more vehicles.

Baggett watched those
last vehicles go through, then started switching com views to monitor all of
the other combat teams.  All went through without a hitch, and one worry
was off the corps commander’s mind.  He looked around the plain where the
gate had been deployed, which was set up with tents; hospitals, messing
facilities, sleeping areas.  Everything needed to handle a large influx of
refugees for a short time.  And the Phlistaran battalion that was one of
his reserve units, standing a couple of hundred meters from the gate, chomping
at the bit to get into the action.

“They’re all
away, sir,” reported Baggett to General Arbuckle, looking over at his own
Sergeant Major and nodding.

“I’m heading
through in a moment, Samuel,” said the commander of the army.  “See you on
the other side.”

“Yes, sir,” said
Baggett, waving at the gate and moving his own suit forward.  The one
hundred and sixty people of his headquarters unit followed behind, heading into
the battle zone.

The trip through
the portal was as disorienting as usual.  One second the light of the
rising F class star was lighting the landscape, the next the more mellowed
light of a rising K class dominated the horizon.  Most of the camps were
in a three time zone stretch of the major continent, and it had been thought that
the more hours of daylight they had the better.  The light of the sun was
not needed for military operations, the suits were all weather capable, night
being a weather condition.  But the civilians didn’t have night vision,
natural or technologically enhanced.

He zoomed in on
the fortress/military camp that was their target.  It was five kilometers
north of a camp containing up to fifteen million humans, much to close to use
nukes or kinetics on.  But it still needed to be taken out, before its
troops could deploy and start killing the human prisoners.

“Find a good
place for us to set up, Sarge Major,” he ordered his senior NCO while he
squatted in his suit to get a good view of the developing action.

“Yes, sir,”
replied the NCO, waving some scouts out to look over the terrain.  They
already had a pretty good idea of the best places, but most soldiers wanted to
see the spot with their own eyes before deciding on where to set up.

Baggett watched as
the tanks and infantry moved across the tree covered plain, staying low and
moving fast.  One company of the heavies and the medium tank company were
moving forward, while the other heavy unit was rushing up to the camp with one
company of infantry to take the perimeter and establish their own blocking
force.

“How’s it going
in the camp, Brigadier?” he asked the brigade commander who was supervising the
overall operation of liberating this camp.

“We’ve taken the
far perimeter and placed our people within that side of the camp, sir,” said
the Brigadier in her contralto voice.  “All is a go in the center of the
camp as well.  We’ve had some resistance there, and some casualties among
the civilians, but the Cacas in the camp should be neutralized in the next
couple of minutes.”

“Very
good.  Keep me informed.”  Baggett switched to the division command
circuits and checked up on the overall situation, which seemed to be going as
planned, which in and of itself was worrisome.

The enemy camp
was a boil of activity, as hundreds of Cacas came running out of the barracks,
many in battle armor, but not all.  A door slid open on one of the heavily
fortified garages and a large battle mech stepped out, eight meters tall and
walking on four meter long legs, its weapons moving to track on the prison
camp.

The Empire had
given up the use of mechs, large manned machines that looked much like big
battle robots.  The Cacas still used them, almost to the exclusion of
tanks.  The machines weighed a couple of hundred tons, and were heavily
armored, but were not in the same class as a real tank.

As the first one
walked to the edge of the military base, lining up its heavy beam weapons on
the camp, the first of the main battle tanks broke through the last line of
trees, two kilometers from the perimeter of the base.  Infantry swarmed
around the tank, firing their weapons at the top of the four meter tall, two
meter thick wall that surrounded the base.  The first of the Cacas that
reached the top of that wall, many of them not in armor, were blasted off by
the angry red beams of infantry carried proton weapons, or the bright flaring
explosions of microgrenades launched by the dedicated grenadiers.

The Tyrannosaur
fired, rocking back slightly on its grabbers as its magrail main gun accelerated
a supermetal penetrator at three hundred kilometers a second.  It looked
to Baggett as if the round had teleported instantaneously to its target. 
The center portion of the mecha, where the Caca rider was housed, exploded
outward, vaporized alloy mixed with the reddish steam that was what remained of
the crewman.  The mecha rocked on its legs for a second, then fell over
backward from the force of the hit.

A pair of mecha
were next, both moving toward the wall and seeming to totally ignore their murdered
comrade.  They met the same fate, blown apart by a pair of main battle
tanks.  The next up turned its attention toward the tank platoon, a
different strategy with the same result, as the mecha fell to the ground with
its midsection vaporized.

The infantry
advanced in their heavy suits, staying low to the ground, their stealth systems
making them very difficult to spot.  The tanks flickered in and out of
view in a similar fashion, while decoys and electronic warfare packages
interfered with the exact acquisition of targets.  His own side was having
similar or lesser difficulties, and the fight devolved into the two sides
trading fire, the Imperial soldiers getting the better of it with their
superior ground combat vehicles and targetting.