Cascade Effect (Edge of Imperium Book 2) by Peter Nealen

Author:Peter Nealen [Nealen, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WarGate Nova
Published: 2024-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 21

Bannon watched the Afa Thura struggle through the jungle to catch up before sharing a look with Sergeant Summ. The younger man had been the junior squad sergeant on Zhogalgan, but he was thoroughly growing into his position now, and combat doesn’t allow a man to stay young for long.

It wasn’t that the Afa Thura were incompetent. From what they’d seen on this movement so far—never mind the assault on the Suta Thura’s joint base with the Zolarians—they were quite accomplished at infantry movement and tactics, augmented by the heavy weapons they could carry with those exoskeletons. One power-armored Afa Thura soldier could do as much damage as a Corvanite heavy weapons team, and Third Phalanx didn’t have one of those, given their reconnaissance mission.

But there are always tradeoffs, and the Afa Thura would have been better off going lighter and faster. They had battered their way through the jungle—avoiding detection at the time—to launch their first surprise assault, but now the power armor was slowing them down. The bulk forced them to tear their way through the vegetation in a way the Corvanites didn’t need to, even in the thicker stuff.

Summ’s voice was low, possibly still loud enough that the Afa Thura’s helmets could pick it up, but it was doubtful that they spoke Anglisch, and even if their onboard computers could have figured the language out, there hadn’t been enough communication to give them a baseline. At least, Bannon hoped not. “They’re going to give the game away as we get closer. There’s no way the Zolarians won’t pick up all this noise, never mind the thura.”

Bannon could only nod. “We’ve got a few miles to go before we hit the assembly area. I’ll bring it up with Belonging.” That name really was cumbersome, even shortened the way he’d done. Some of the men were starting to simply call the Afa Thura leader The Boss, which fit, even though his actual name seemed to imply a certain servitude. Even after being around the thura for nearly a week, he still didn’t have much of a grasp of exactly how they thought. There were some things that were simply common sense. Every sapient being had to accept reality as it was. But there was a surprising amount of leeway around those things, and the differences in language and experience could make understanding difficult.

That worried him a little bit. The Corvanites had had some dealings with aliens. Space was unimaginably vast, and the distances between homeworlds far enough that any people could spread out pretty far before they encountered aliens. For the most part. The thelons had been a nasty surprise early on in human history, especially with contact coming as close to the first wave of Newlander Wars as they had. But Corvan Prime was far enough out that there had been few aliens near enough for the Corvanites to deal with aside from the otuchans. Most of the factions the sons of Corvan had faced or allied with were human.

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