Exodus: Empires at War: Book 8: Soldiers (Exodus: Empires at War.) (7 page)

The transport
crossed over the end of the small valley and onto the plains beyond.  This
was farming territory, a plain that stretched a hundred kilometers to the next
range and four hundred from north to south.  There were innumerable cities
and towns on that plain between the farmlands, the names of them all, the roads
and streams, even individual farmsteads, popping up on the implant overlay to
his vision.

Ishuhi still
found it strange that actual farming and ranching was a going concern on such a
crowded planet, the only one in the Empire allowed to ignore the conventions
against overpopulation.  There was still a forty percent mandate for land
wilderness, while most of the oceans were maintained in a wild state. 
Every other planet was legally mandated to have fifty percent wilderness, the human
race still dealing with the memory of a homeworld they had almost killed. 
But people, especially those with disposable income, still wanted to eat real
food.  Millions of tons a day came in from other worlds, since the farms
couldn’t produce enough for a population of over twenty billion.  The
protein vats and algae farms could still produce enough to feed half the
planet, and did, for the poorer segments of the population.  Natural food
production was still a lucrative paying industry, especially on a world where
much of the aristocracy spent at least some of their year.

The transport
banked, and the rail line came into sight.  Coming out of a black hole in
the side of the mountain, the continuation of the line into the city.  A
high fence, humming with the noise intended to chase wildlife away, rose on
both sides of the double track.  There were no trains on the track at the
moment, all having been switched to one of the higher speed underground rails
while the investigation went on.

And there was the
investigation scene, a couple of kilometers up from the tunnel, a kilometer
down from the first station on the plain.  Multiple aircars were parked
outside the fence, which had been opened up so people could come and go. 
The flashing lights of an ambulance strobed, and the Lieutenant stared at that
vehicle for a moment, wondering why it was even here.  The thing they had
found would not be traveling in that vehicle, but in the Fleet Intelligence
retrieval van which was still on the way.

“Welcome, sir,”
said the uniformed cop to the officer as he stepped out of the transport.

The words said
welcome, but the attitude the Lieutenant was picking up was one of warning off
an outsider.  He nodded to the cop and walked past him, heading for the
actual scene of death.  He was thinking of shutting down the scene,
chasing all of the civilians away while he waited for the military response,
but decided that he would get a look at what they had first.  It wasn’t as
if the local police hadn’t seen all there was to see.

“Lieutenant
Rykio,” said a woman in plain clothes, walking up to him with her hand held
out, the expression of someone who knew her crime scene was about to be taken
from her on her face.  “I’m Lieutenant Matthers.”

Ishuhi’s implant
interfaced with hers, sending the query through the police net so both could
verify the identity of the other.

“Could you show
me what you have?” he asked, pointing to the spot down the tracks where so many
people were gathered.

“Of course,” she
agreed, leading the way.  “I have to tell you, I thought this was just an
accidental death when I was first called in, after the track alarm
activated.  They don’t happen often, but they do happen.  Then we saw
what we had, and I knew it was one of them.”

Ishuhi was sure
he knew what
them
meant, and as they approached the remains splattered
over the tracks, he had to agree that it probably was a case of them. 
Those were not human organs on the track.  They were the wrong color, the
wrong smell.

“Have you done a
scan on them?”

“Forensics have
scanned them with both remotes and nanites,” she said, puffing up like she was
insulted that he would have to ask.  “Not human, or any other species
we’re used to dealing with.”

The information
had filtered through the planetary databanks within moments, and been matched
within the imperial security secure database.  Which had brought him
here.  He looked over the remains a moment later, including a head that
was miraculously intact, sitting on the grass on the side of the tracks, dead
eyes staring straight ahead.  The head was human, though he was sure that
the brain would turn out to be anything but.

  The
Lieutenant, acting in his role in Fleet Intelligence, sent a signal to the
office on the planet.  A moment later his orders came back, including the
directive recalling him to active duty and putting him in charge of the
investigation.

“I hate to tell
you this, Lieutenant,” he said, sending her his code change over the net.

“You’re taking
over,” she said in a resigned voice, then widened her eyes as she saw that he
was now operating in a new persona.  “Captain Rykio.”

“This is now an
Imperial Fleet investigation scene,” he told her, his eyes looking into
hers.  “Please remove your people from the scene.  I still want you
to secure the perimeter while we’re waiting for my people to arrive.”

The policewoman
nodded, then stormed off, the set of her shoulders tight.  Ishuhi
commiserated with her.  No one liked to have their toes stepped on. 
But this had gone from an investigation of an accidental death, with the
possibility of foul play, to an investigation of a possible spy ring. 
From this moment on it was really not important who this person, or thing, was,
or what they were going to do.  What was important was where they came
from, and where they could find the rest of the Yugalyth colony, before the
shape shifters went to ground again and hid out.

Minutes later
the first of the Fleet air vehicles landed and disgorged the security troops
who would secure the area.  Soon the civilian police were leaving the
area, most of them cursing the Fleet under their breath for taking their case.

“Captain Rykio,”
stated the Lt. Commander who came to attention in front of him.  “I have
two tracking teams here.  Orders?”

“Program your chemo
and genetic sensors for both the human and Yugalyth samples around the
tracks.  Then I want you to try and track them back to the point of
origin.”

“Any idea what
this one was doing here, sir?”

Ishuhi looked
over the tracks, trying to reconstruct what had happened in his investigator’s
mind.  He really couldn’t come up with reason one of the creatures might
have needed to get to the tracks.  And why now?  Why here?  And
why didn’t it realize that the train was coming?

“Nope, and we
can figure that out later, if it becomes important.  Right now, I just
want to locate this nest of roaches and wipe it out.”

The Lt.
Commander nodded at the reference.  Roaches had followed humanity into
space, even making the journey from the homeworld on the
Exodus III
. 
They weren’t really that much of a problem anymore, not with modern pest
control techniques, but there were still enough outbreaks that people
understood the reference.

“I’ve got one
squad of suits to do a high scan, and a squad of Commandos to follow along the
ground.”

“Make sure the
suits are fully stealthed,” he cautioned the other officer, who was also
augmented as a commando, just as Ishuhi was.  “I don’t want them to get
wind of us tracking them.  We have an opportunity here, and hopefully we
can get rid of these things once and for all.”  He really didn’t believe
that.  These things had gotten too entrenched into the area.  Stomp
on one nest and another sprung up.  Nevertheless, he had to try.

Moments into the
search they found what might have chased the Yugalyth onto the tracks, or at
least over the fence.  The body of a Mardog, a wolf like pack predator
that was the bane of these woods.  The beast had been shot by a laser,
then partially eaten, probably by pack members.  Ishuhi thought that the
alien must have run from the predators, taking a shot at one before another
knocked the pistol, which they found a short distance away, out of the
Yugalyth’s hands.  Forcing it to run to the only place it knew it could
get away.  To the fence and over.  It was just bad timing that a
train was already coming, and there was no way it could stop in the hundred
meters it had.

Sometimes things
just happened, circumstances, random occurrences that were the downfall of the
best laid plans.  This seemed to be one of those cases.  And the
Yugalyth had passed through the woods recently enough that they could still
backtrack them.

“We’ve found
something,” called out one of the commandos over the com.  Ishuhi was
about four hundred meters back, and seven kilometers of rough terrain up from
the tracks.

“What have you
got?” he asked, looking through the eyes of the commando and seeing the open
maw of a small cave.  At least small from the outside.  “I’ll be up
there in a moment.  Hang tight.”

By the time he
got there two more of the commandos and two spacers in combat armor were under
cover on the ground, looking at the dark opening into the granite cliff. 
The opening itself was about a meter and a half tall by two wide, and was
partially covered by brush.  Ishuhi looked through the viewpoint of a man
still in the air, grunting as he saw what looked like a normal rock cliff and
vegetation.  He ordered the man to shift, and as the view changed he could
finally see the opening, realizing it was naturally camouflaged, and, for all that,
still very hard to spot from the air.  And unlikely to be spotted from the
ground.

“Send in a
couple of probes,” ordered Ishuhi, looking over at the nearest suited man.

A pair of small
disks lifted from the back of the suit and sped toward the cave opening. 
They slowed for a moment, then slid into the opening, their passive sensors
straining at full power to scan the interior of the cave.  The entrance
continued as a narrow tunnel for about twenty meters, then opened up
dramatically, the ceiling rising to forty meters, while the cave widened to
thirty meters.  The cave continued back to disappear into darkness, and
the sound of dripping water came back over the audio sensors.

“Anything alive
in there?” asked Ishuhi, thinking about what he knew about caves, then
searching the database.  Sure enough, caves on almost every world were
well known as lairs for animal life, and a world like Jewel, with its well
developed land ecologies, as well as some Earth based life, should have no
empty caverns that hadn’t been usurped by intelligent life.

“Not that we can
tell,” said the man who was monitoring and controlling the probes. 
“Nothing on the infrared.  No animal sounds, not even bats in the far
background.”  The spacer was silent for a moment.  “Orders, sir?”

Ishuhi lay
behind cover and thought for a moment, then noticed that his ears were telling
him that the woods were silent around him, when they should have been alive
with bird and tree dwelling animal analogues.  Something had either taken
them, or chased them away.  And if he had to bet money, he would have said
that the animals near this cave had been taken.  The Yugalyth used the
biomass of other creatures to make more of them, and he thought that was what
had happened here, and in the cave.

He looked back
through the sensors of the probes, trying to look into all of the shadows on
the walls and not succeeding.  “Send out a pulse of actives,” he ordered,
and the probes both sent out waves of radar and sonar that covered the walls,
bouncing back to the receiving set.  Now the cavern was revealed, nine
other openings leading into side tunnels, and one at the top leading up in a
chimney.

Ishuhi was about
to order the probes to start investigating the side tunnels when one of them
went off line, and the second showed that first one falling from the air, metal
splashing from the front sensor cluster where it had been hit.  The second
probe swung in the air, searching frantically for the source of the shot, then
blacking out as well.

“Crap. 
Send in nanites on a spread.  Let’s see what they can find.”

Two of the suits
released a cloud of nanites, the microscopic robots shooting straight through
the entrance of the cavern, spreading out as soon as they got through the
narrows.   As they started their spread a laser stabbed out and took
the center from the cloud.  They had just spotted the shooter when an
electromagnetic pulse slapped the nanites out of the air.

“Let’s get some
more people in here,” ordered Rykio over the com.  “I want the entire
mountain side searched before we commit to searching the cavern.”  He
thought that secondary force could work to make sure the Yugalyth didn’t pop up
from some unexpected position, while a company of engineers could do what they
were best suited for.  Search and destroy in a fortified, underground
position.

Chapter Five

It was men who stopped slavery.
It was men who ran up the stairs in the Twin Towers to rescue people. It was
men who gave up their seats on the lifeboats of the Titanic. Men are made to
take risks and live passionately on behalf of others.

John Eldredge

IMPERIAL ARMY TRAINING
FACILITIES, SECTOR IV, MARCH 14, 1002.

“Come on, you
lugs,” yelled Cornelius over the com, watching as his company ran over the obstacle
course, relearning how to use the armor to get through obstacles while
searching for and engaging targets.   Most were using the suits as
well as people just out of basic infantry training, quite an improvement over
their original performance.  But not where they needed to be in order to
have a chance of carrying out their mission and actually saving the survivors.

The first squad,
first platoon went over the first wall, only using enough grabber power to
reduce their overall weight to what they would have weighed without the
armor.  The men grabbed quickly at the slight handholds and pulled
themselves up and over, stopping momentarily at the top to engage the targets
that were trying to engage them.  Twelve of the thirteen men made it over,
one slowly falling back on automatic grabbers after being hit by a beam. 
The Captain replayed that kill on his HUD, noting that the man had done nothing
different than any of the ones who had made it.

Just the luck of
the draw was the Captain’s guess.  It was the same in real combat. 
Some men were better than others at moving, at staying under cover, and
spotting the enemy.  And they could still die because they happened to
move into the sight of an enemy, while a lesser soldier survived the battle. 
There had been several times when he moved right, when he might have moved
left, or vice versa, and survived because of that.

First squad, or
at least its surviving members, continued on across the open, dodging,
swerving, taking advantage of what little cover there was.  They were
getting quite proficient at turning their stealth on and off, levitating at
points, crawling at others, anything to get them though the danger zone, which
all did, getting to the next obstacle.

Second squad
came charging, going over the wall, losing two of their men to enemy
fire.  Walborski cringed at their simulated deaths.  These were his
men, he knew all of them well, and he wanted them all to come back from this
mission.  They wouldn’t, but he still wanted them to, and he tried to
figure out a better way for them to attack that kind of obstacle.  They
could go far around it on this training course, which would not do them a jot
of good if they ran into a long wall on the mission.

At the end of
the obstacle course they deployed the survival suits, minimal packages of light
armor that could protect one from several seconds of laser fire, or a brushing
hit with a particle beam.  They quickly got the manikins into the suits
and attached them to the battle armor they were wearing, then lifted into a low
flight and got them out of there.  A couple of men were
killed
along the way, dropping to the ground as frozen statues, their cargo doomed as
well.

That afternoon
they worked without the suits.  They would perform part of the mission in
soft uniforms, at least some of them, and they wouldn’t be sure who would be
doing that until they were actually into the mission.  For the time being
they practiced moving and hiding, then shooting and scooting, taking advantage
of their strengths as special operations warriors.  Moving quickly,
hitting targets with first shots.  They practiced hand to hand combat
against Caca shaped robots, learning and relearning to take advantage of the
greater mass and slower reaction time of the aliens.

That evening
they went on a night patrol, trying to avoid high tech systems as they
struggled to get through automated defenses.  Some of the men excelled at
this, others were just victims.  And Cornelius kept note of who was who,
and who would be assigned these roles would be up to him.  After that run
through they took a quick meal and hit the racks for six hours of sleep before
starting another training day.  It was a brutal schedule, and everyone
knew why it was.  Every day they delayed, more innocent people died.

That night
Cornelius had one of his dreams, what many people would have called
nightmares.  Katlyn was still with him, at least at the beginning of the
dream.  Again he lived through her death, and again he killed the bastards
that had taken her away from her.  He woke up from the nightmare, sweat
pouring down his face, his muscles shaking.  He knew what the feeling
was.  It was not fear.  It was rage, pure and simple.  He did
not fear the Cacas, he didn’t fear his own death.  He hated the Cacas, and
if his life was the price he paid to kill more of them, he would pay.  The
only thing he did fear was the loss of the people under him. 
I should
have stayed an enlisted man
, he thought before he closed his eyes and
forced himself back to sleep.  At least then he only had to worry about
himself, and the Cacas he had in his sights.

Two days later
the company was aboard a large shuttle heading up to orbit.  Their ride
had arrived, and they were out of planet side training time.  They would
still be able to take in simulators and hangar deck training on the way. 
But the next time their feet hit the ground they would be at the launching
point before going through the wormhole to New Moscow.

*     
*      *

NEW MOSCOW.

Cat Jeffries
tried to hide in the shadows as the monsters walked through the camp, looking
for the next harvest.  Her dirty clothes were coming apart on her thin
body, though she could no longer feel the dirt on her after so long without a
bath.  She frantically searched for that nonexistent sanctuary, but there
was really no place to hide, since the Cacas checked the tents as they went,
and the outsides were set up so that there were really no areas to get away
from their sight.  One of the huge creatures, much bigger than the adult
humans who seemed very large to the child themselves, walked between the tents
and pointed with a pair of right index fingers, picking who would die, and, by
default, who would live.

The Caca pointed
at a woman, who sighed and sat back on the ground, a hopeless expression on her
face.  Another of the Cacas, one Cat thought of as the weapon bearer,
walked up to the woman and put a hypervelocity dart through her forehead. 
The woman fell dead in an instant, all of her muscles going slack at once and
her body slumping over.  Another Caca reached for the body, grabbed the
woman’s hair, and jerked her off the ground, swinging the body into the cart
that was being pulled by four large humans.

The leader
pointed again, and the weapon bearer put another dart through the head of a man
who looked like he had been overweight, until he had been reduced to the
starvation diet of the rest of them.  The powerful gatherer grabbed the
body by an arm and threw it into the cart.  The third victim decided he
would not go quite as easily, and turned to run, knocking down a couple of
people as he started into a run.  He couldn’t outrun the dart, which
plowed through the back of his skull and dropped him limp to the ground in mid
stride.

The leader
looked around a moment, his eyes falling on Cat for a moment, the slit pupils
looking at her like she was a side of beef.  Which to the alien she
probably equated to.  She cringed as she waited for the Caca to point at
her and shout, but his eyes moved on to another target, and the weapon phutted
again, taking another bag of protein.

After taking a
dozen more bodies the cart was pulled out of the camp.  During the day
several others were pulled through, not in sight of the child, but within
earshot.  Cat thanked God every time the harvest missed her, especially
where and when she didn’t have to see it.  When night fell other carts
came into the camp, these filled with grains and vegetables that the Cacas
didn’t eat, along with a broth made with some unknown substance.  There
were various rumors of what it might be, but no one really wanted to know for
sure.

People sat
around outside the tents, talking in whispers, needing to get their fears out
in the open while afraid they might be overheard, and that things might get
worse for them.

“When will the
Imperials come?” was the most asked question, one to which no one had a good
answer.  The next most common question was whether they might be able to
stage an escape by themselves.  The only problem with that was no one
wanted to be the sacrificial lambs that absorbed the Caca fire while others got
away.  And the odds were not good that they would get away for good. 
A few might be able to hide, but no one was stupid enough to think they would
be among them.

Cat thought that
she just wanted someone to take care of things for her.  She hadn’t seen
her parents since the first day of the invasion, when the Cacas had landed and
so many were fleeing for their lives.  She didn’t think her parents would
have left her alone on purpose, which meant they were probably dead.  She
had no adults around her who thought of her as their priority, not like family
would have.  So she kept waiting for someone to do something, and every
day was the same.

*    
*     *

IMPERIAL ARMY TRAINING
FACILITIES, SECTOR IV.

“The damned robot’s
overheated again,” cursed the engineering NCO.  The robot in question was
fifteen meters into the earth above the cavern, with another ten meters to go,
stuck.

Captain Stella
Artois looked over the schematics of the robot on the HUD of her suit of heavy
battle armor.  She immediately found the problem, a cooling system that
had clogged.  This was the second unit with the same problem, something to
be expected when they tried to work an old dependable unit into a new role.

This isn’t
what I wanted to do
, thought the small blond, who was made large by the
half ton of armor encasing her body.  She had decided on engineering as a
career because she had wanted to build bridges, bunkers, dams, things that
could be translated into a civilian career in an ever expanding Empire. 
She had known there might be some combat involved, but now she and her company
were to be dropped right into the middle of the shit. 
Of course they
didn’t ask me what I wanted to do
, she thought as she sent the report of
the problem up the line to the techs who would try and correct the problem.

Seven of the ten
robots completed their mission, cutting all the way to the surface and rising
past the ground and into the air.  The suited engineers shot up the
openings after the robots cleared, moving into deployment. 
And we have
no idea what we will be deploying into
, thought the Captain, looking around
the empty plain that surrounded their training area.  Wherever they went,
she was sure it would not be empty, and she wasn’t all that sure what would be
filling that space.

*    
*      *

JEWEL.

The nanites went
in first, flooding the cavern and providing sensor data and cover for the
probes that came next.  Those machines moved through the tunnel taking in
the feed from the microscopic robots, which winked off line as the EMP blast
hit them.  The probes, with much better shielding, weathered the pulse and
started lashing the large cave with sensors, picking out the five human sized
forms who had taken up firing positions covering the entrance.

Particle beams
reached out and hit two of the probes, while the remaining four, under remote
control, fired back with wide beam lasers that caused severe burns to the
creatures they touched.  Two more went down at the same time as the first
squad of infantry came through the entrance, spreading out and taking the
defenders under fire while the next squad moved through.

One of the
defenders survived to back into a tunnel and get away, while the two squads of
infantry secured the cavern, allowing the rest of the platoon, a squad of
engineers, and a dozen of the naval commandos into the cave.

“Keep up the
pressure,” called Captain Rykio through his com as he pointed toward the tunnel
where the lone survivor had retreated.  A squad started that way, one team
of two leading the way, the rest following in a spread so they wouldn’t all be
caught by an explosive device.

More probes were
launched from outside and came flying through the entrance, then vectored to
one or the other of the side tunnels.  Swarms of pizos and nanites took
off after them, setting up a search pattern that would swarm through the entire
complex.  They had a good idea of the general layout from the deep radar
probing the engineers had conducted, but there were still bound to be some surprises.

The cavern ended
up going kilometers into the earth, hundred meter long tunnels ending in large
caverns with multiple exits, a veritable maze that eventually ended.  That
was when the artificial tunnels started, going deeper into the mountains, until
Ishuhi feared that it might exit on the other side of the range, and all of
this search and destroy exercise would be for nothing.

They finally
found what they were looking for at the end of one tunnel that sloped down at a
steep angle for ten kilometers, ending in a room that had been
barricaded.  Eleven of the creatures that only looked human held that
barricade, and had a heavy particle beam and a mounted grenade launcher. 
As soon as the feet of the Imperial Army troopers came within sight they were taken
under fire.  The heavy beam burned through the armor of the first two men,
taking their feet off at the ankles and sending enough heat into their lower
legs to incinerate them up to the waist.  Those suits continued to float
on their upper grabbers as the armored bodies bobbed up and down, attracting
more fire.  Meanwhile the next pair of troopers flew just over the floor
on their stomachs until they had a clear line of fire under the feet of their
dead mates.