Androids and Aliens (Star Runner Series Book 3) by B. V. Larson

Author:B. V. Larson [Larson, B. V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Five

A day or two later, I found myself landing on the northern continent of Ailoth. This section of land was raw and wild. There were no real cities here, just a few outposts. With Jort and Droad at my side, I was again given command of a division of android troops. Unfortunately, there were no replacement soldiers—only a few thousand were in fighting shape.

The Conclave army had no facilities to build new androids, only repair old ones, so I was given no reinforcements. Altogether, I had less than three thousand troops. The good news was that my seven officers had all survived the previous battle. They’d escaped harm largely because we’d missed the heavy combat at the end.

In any case, it didn’t take us long to find a nest in the north. It was in a mine—of all things, a lowly copper mine buried in the slopes of some worn-down mountains. Using LiDAR and various other forms of sensory equipment, we managed to find the fresh tunnels underneath the mine that shouldn’t have been there.

These tunnels wormed down deeper to the enemy nest. Below the original mine we could make out cavernous larvae chambers. Here, the aliens were still in their hungry, youthful stage and not yet differentiated into one of the myriad forms of the enemy. It all reminded me of looking at some kind of an oversized alien ant farm. But… these creatures, I had to remind myself, were far more advanced, intelligent and deadly than any form of ant I’d ever run into.

“You want to know what I’m thinking, Captain Gorman?” Jort asked me as we landed and disembarked on the broad ramps of the transport ship.

“Sure, Jort,” I said. “Tell me what’s on your mind.”

“I’m wondering where all the people are.”

I shrugged. “What do you mean? We’re just out in the countryside looking for nests. This is a pretty large planet. It never was thickly inhabited. You can’t expect there to be cities everywhere, and these aliens have done well to hide themselves in the most remote locations.”

“All of that’s true, sir,” Jort said. “All of that is true. But it’s strangely empty in this part of the planet.”

He was right, of course. The quiet was bothering me, too. We’d arrived before dawn, and when we’d landed on the northern continent, I was alarmed by what I noticed. There were no lights anywhere, few obvious signs of life of any kind. Only the quiet forests stood as mute witnesses to the invasion.

“Hmm,” I said, thinking it over. “Well, perhaps the local towns are trying to hide from the aliens. Maybe they don’t want to give away where they are by burning the midnight oil—or maybe they’ve simply lost power.”

Droad spoke up next. “Jort has a point. When we invaded the southern continent, that city had lights, some signs of human activity. The bodies we discovered when we walked into that town were fresh. Here, I’m not getting the sense that there’s much left…”

“It’s thinly inhabited, yes, but there must be someone alive,” I insisted.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.