Exodus: Empires at War: Book 8: Soldiers (Exodus: Empires at War.) (24 page)

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 carrying 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 47
^th
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
the 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.