Exodus: Empires at War: Book 8: Soldiers (Exodus: Empires at War.) by Doug Dandridge Page B

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