by Peter Nealen
Scalas’s own armor was already starting to shift to the same reddish hue as the dust. At least, in most places. The armor’s chameleonic surfacing was always the first victim of wear and tear, impact, and in many cases, battle damage. Many of the Caractacan Brotherhood bore their armor’s scars as badges of honor, often to the armorers’ exasperation. Scalas’s was as scarred as anyone’s, but where the coating was still intact, it would soon be a perfectly camouflaged dusty red.
He looked left and right. The four tactical squads deployed quickly, spreading out and finding cover, setting security around the drop zone and watching for an enemy counterattack. There had been no way to miss the detonations in the sky, let alone the meteoric descent of the dropships. The yeheri pirates knew they were coming.
Fifth Squad was acting as the heavy weapons squad, and was already lugging the rocket mortar batteries out of their dropship and deploying the bulky weapons in the center of the drop zone. They wouldn’t have much to shoot at until the tactical squads got eyes on the enemy positions, but the fire support would be welcome when the time came.
Satisfied that the landing had gone according to plan and that his men were oriented as they should be, Scalas rose and started jogging toward the crater rim.
The slope turned out to be steeper than it looked, and by the time he was halfway up, with most of First Squad spread out in a loose wedge behind him, he was down to a slog, even in the relatively light gravity. His armor’s articulation ensured that its weight was well-supported and distributed, and thanks to the oxygen tank in his sustainment pack, he wasn’t even breathing hard, but the footing was difficult and treacherous. The crater wall had had centuries to erode, and sand and dust constantly threatened to slip out from under his boots.
He slowed even further as he neared the lip of the crater rim. It appeared to be the highest point of the surrounding terrain, and while the Caractacan Brotherhood had a well-deserved reputation for aggressiveness on the battlefield, none of them were stupid. There would be no screaming charge here. He got close to the edge, dropped to a knee, and crept up to peer down the slope beyond.
The Quarisian mining camp was a scattershot collection of squared-off prefabs—about what Scalas had expected. Quarisia was a poor world and couldn’t afford much more, which only made the yeheri attack that much more indefensible. At least three of the prefabs near the open-pit mine had already been destroyed.
The Quarisian defenders had dug in along the edge of the pit and were trading fire across relatively open ground with the yeheri troops, who were centered on a group of mushroom-shaped landers that squatted haphazardly on the plain between the Brotherhood and the Quarisian camp. Some of these forces, including a collection of blocky, balloon-tired, armored fighting vehicles, were attempting to reorient to face the incoming Caractacans. Scalas’s eyes narrowed behind his vision slit as he watched. Mor had spoken disparagingly of the yeheri’s reputation as space fighters. This band didn’t appear to be much better on the ground.
He brought his powergun to his shoulder and found the holographic sight with his eye. The yeheri combatants were still a good distance off, and even though the powerguns fired their bolts very nearly line-straight at a substantial fraction of the speed of light, a small target is still a small target, and the plasma packets tended to attenuate more in atmosphere. Scalas had little doubt that he could hit at this distance… but it was always better to be sure.
He took his finger away from the trigger and got ready to move.
Searching for the next bit of cover, he went up over the lip of the crater rim, dashed down the slope, and dropped to a low knee behind a boulder. The rest of the squad followed, bounding forward in short dashes, either finding rocks to take cover behind or cracks in the ground, or even simply dropping prone when no better cover presented itself. Fire discipline held; just like their centurion, the Brothers would open fire when they were sure of kill shots, not before.
Scalas paused just before a landslide, where part of the outer crater wall had sloughed away, and checked distances and azimuths before relaying them to the heavy weapons squad back in the crater. He got a terse acknowledgment, and a moment later, the noise muted by the thin atmosphere, the rocket mortars were coughing skyward, each warhead aimed precisely, sight unseen.
The camouflaged Caractacan Brothers were practically invisible, dusty-red figures against a dusty-red backdrop, popping up for only a few seconds before dropping behind cover or out of sight altogether. That did not stop the yeheri from opening fire anyway.
A ragged fusillade of lasers, powergun bolts, and solid bullets ripped out from the equally ragged yeheri formation, blasting pits in the dirt and rocks around the advancing Caractacans. Many of the bullets were falling short, but the lasers, sometimes dimly visible in the drifting dust, and the brilliant powergun bolts, were getting much closer.
The Caractacan Brothers usually preferred precise, accurate fire, but there were times when volume counted for a lot. The squad support gunners began returning fire with their MT-41 heavy powerguns, sending sheets of brilliant discharges across the open ground and forcing the yeheri back into cover. The rate of incoming fire slowed significantly, but it did not die out altogether. Some of the yeheri were crouched behind cover and shooting blind.
Blind fire is rarely effective, but sometimes luck turns strangely.
Scalas dove into the dirt a moment before a powergun bolt slammed overhead, slapping him with the thunderclap shockwave of the plasma’s passage and searing the surface of his armor with its heat. The Brother who tried to bound past him, Korvan, was not so lucky. The next bolt caught him in the faceplate. His helmet exploded, taking most of his head with it, and his armored body fell to the dirt, rolling another two meters downhill before coming to a stop in a cloud of grit.
There are few defenses against a direct hit from a powergun bolt. And as good as it was, even Caractacan armor couldn’t stand up to that kind of firepower.
It was about that point when the rocket mortars reached the top of their trajectory, turned over, and ignited their secondary engines, plunging toward the ground at twenty gees. The rounds that hit landers and vehicles were moving fast enough to punch through most of the thin armor. After that, the molecular explosives did the rest. The leading edge of the yeheri company that was moving to engage the Caractacan skirmish line disappeared in a cloud of smoke, dust, and debris. The shockwaves slammed through the thin atmosphere, washing over the Caractacan warriors and shaking the very ground beneath their feet. Landers and vehicles exploded, belching billowing fireballs and clouds of dust and smoke as they died.
Scalas was on his feet and moving forward before the dust had even begun to settle. The rest of his squad wasn’t far behind. The yeheri fire had died away to almost nothing in the wake of the bombardment. This was the time.
He plunged into the murk left behind by burning vehicles and airborne dust that was slowly starting to settle back toward the surface. The dust was going to shorten the range of his powergun, but that was a small price to pay.
With Maldon, Brunuk, and Squad Sergeant Kahane close behind him, he advanced on the nearest yeheri lander.
A dazed yeheri, its long tail and hammerhead distinctive even in the haze and hardly disguised by a wildly impractical spiked battlesuit, staggered out from behind the shattered wreckage of a crawler. The vehicle was burning, but the flames were guttering, strangled by the dust and the low oxygen content of the atmosphere.
The yeheri must have spotted some movement, because it turned toward the advancing Caractacans and froze. With a faint yawp, the staggering alien lifted its stubby weapon, at which point four powergun bolts thundered through the dust and smoke to blast its head completely off with a cataclysmic flash. The smoking remains of the corpse collapsed to the dirt.
The line of armored figures continued their advance through the destruction.
2
The pall of dust and smoke formed a massive pillar in the sky, only slowly dissi
pating under the assault of Iabreton II’s weak, languid winds. In a dispersed crescent, the Caractacans closed in on the wrecked landers and burning vehicles. They still moved cautiously, from cover to cover, careful to avoid exposing themselves for too long.
A man in a Quarisian spacesuit—a bulky, ribbed construct of orange composite that might have been built a century before—ran toward the wrecked lander where Scalas crouched with his squad sergeants. He carried a blocky PS-19 caseless rifle that looked even older than the spacesuit.
He was also trying to move too far without taking cover, and a powergun bolt nearly took his head off. He sprawled on his face in the dust before the Caractacans leaned out of cover and replied to the shot with a crackling fusillade of fire that at least temporarily silenced the yeheri shooter while simultaneously blasting more of the remaining yeheri lander’s plating into superheated, glowing scrap.
The man in the spacesuit scrambled back to his feet and sprinted the last few meters to cover. Squad Sergeant Cobb grabbed him and propelled him farther back behind the wreckage. If Cobb perhaps put a bit more force behind the shove than necessary, Scalas didn’t bother to say anything about it.
About fifteen more armed Quarisians were huddled in a knot at the edge of the half-ruined settlement, mostly crouched behind wrecked vehicles and in folds in the ground. Their generally orange spacesuits actually served as halfway decent camouflage against the reddish dirt, though the white fittings stood out a bit more. They made for a motley assortment, especially since they weren’t all the same shape. Quarisia had been founded as a joint colony after humans and ekuz arrived there at nearly the same time, and the hexapodal ekuz looked wildly different from the humans. An observer would need to know something of their history to understand that both races together were Quarisians.
Scalas took note of the local militia even as he kept his attention on the remaining yeheri lander. He knew he could not discount the Quarisians entirely; in a way, they were as much a danger to his men as the yeheri, especially since these miners had their blood up after enduring days of assaults from the pirates. He certainly understood their mindset. But he also knew just how dangerous it could be.
The yeheri were now cornered and cut off. There had been at least one more flare in the sky, dimly visible through the dust and smoke, doubtlessly heralding the death of another of the yeheri frigates, and the Caractacans on the ground had carved through the assault force relentlessly, one hundred men reaping far higher numbers through a combination of discipline, fire, maneuver, and use of cover. The yeheri survivors were likely on the ragged edge of panic by now, and with nowhere left to run, Scalas expected they’d be willing to sell themselves dearly.
He wasn’t willing to sacrifice Brotherhood lives to finish them off. Not at this point. But if the Quarisians tried to assault the lander, the Caractacans would likely have to go in, just to keep both sides from getting slaughtered for nothing.
“Leave this last one to us!” the man in the orange spacesuit exclaimed in Trade Cant. He was breathing heavily, his breath rasping through his exterior speaker. “We can take it ourselves!” While his face was disguised by the helmet’s faceplate, his thirst for vengeance was impossible to miss.
Scalas didn’t turn to look at him, but only held one gauntleted hand up to forestall him. “No,” he said, in the same language.
“Maybe we should let them,” Squad Sergeant Volscius suggested, in Brotherhood Latin. “If they want to die in a blaze of glory for their own colony, why should we interfere? At least the rest of the miners will be secure.”
“No,” Scalas repeated. “And that’s final. This battle is over. The yeheri know it and we know it. I will not stand by and let the people we came here to protect be slaughtered trying to continue a fight that is already finished.”
He continued to watch the last semi-intact yeheri lander. There was some movement around the still-open boarding ramp, which appeared to have been disabled by gunfire, but none of the hammerheaded aliens were showing themselves. Which was wise of them, after the response to that last potshot.
He touched a control on his gauntlet, and his voice boomed from his external speaker. “I am calling any yeheri survivors,” he bellowed in Trade Cant. He couldn’t be certain that the surviving pirates understood it, but it was the closest thing to an interstellar lingua franca there was. “I am Centurion Erekan Scalas of the Caractacan Brotherhood. Your ships have been disabled or destroyed. The rest of your force is dead or dying. If you surrender now, there is a chance that you might be shown leniency. If my Brothers and I have to come in and take that lander by force, no one will survive. I am offering you a chance to surrender.”
The yeheri might not have been sure of the identity of their armored attackers before now, but the confirmation that they had just been steamrolled by the Caractacan Brotherhood had to give them pause. Of all the military brotherhoods in the galaxy, it was safe to say that the Caractacans were the most feared and respected, and justly so.
His words were met with silence. For now. But they weren’t immediately greeted by a powergun bolt either, and that was a good sign.
“Do you really think they’ll accept?” Cobb asked quietly in Latin. “They must know the usual penalty for piracy.”
“And that is why I only said there was a possibility of leniency,” Scalas replied. He and Cobb had served their novitiate together, and if any of his squad sergeants deserved his own century, it was Cobb. “It’s a chance. They’re cornered, and they know it. To give an enemy a perceived way out is usually a wise move in such circumstances.”
Cobb nodded. He understood the logic. He only doubted whether it would work. Scalas doubted as well, but he had to try. It was part of the Brotherhood’s Code. They were, ultimately, protectors and defenders. To avoid wholesale slaughter where possible and reasonable was expected of a Caractacan Brother.
There was movement at the ramp. Around Scalas, powerguns lifted fractionally. The Brothers might hope for a surrender, but none of them were going to let their guard down. Certainly not when a moment’s inattentiveness could mean instant death.
Half-shrouded in the dark shadows of the lander’s hold, a yeheri was standing at the top of the ramp. He still held his weapon in his hands, though he wasn’t pointing it at anyone.
Unfortunately, the Quarisians saw him too. There was a yell, barely audible through the thin air, and then the Quarisian militia opened fire.
A hail of bullets, flechettes, lasers, and a couple of powergun bolts thundered at the lander. The yeheri at the top of the ramp toppled backward with a spray of orange fluids, its faceplate shattered by a laser pulse. Then the rest of the surviving yeheri were shooting back, ducking around the edges of the hatchway to return fire.
Scalas cursed. This was exactly what he’d been afraid of.
Leave it to amateurs.
Now they had no choice. They had to finish this.
He pointed at the lander. “Covering fire!” he snapped, then turned and looked for the two armored forms with their distinctive bulky weapons. “Torgan! Rostov!” he bellowed over the sudden ripping thunder of at least a dozen powerguns opening fire on the lander. “Turn that lander’s bay into scrap!”
The two men dashed out into the open, lugging the heavy tubes of their launchers. They each took care to make sure their backs and their lines of fire were clear; HV missile shockwaves could easily pulp a man in armor, never mind the lighter Quarisian spacesuits.
With shrieking roars that drowned out even the lightning-bolt crash of the powergun fire, the two HV missiles slammed into the lander’s open hatchway.
While the missiles traveled at considerably slower velocities than a powergun bolt, to the naked eye there was little difference, particularly at that range. Almost instantaneously the lander belched white-hot sheets of flame, the shockwaves blasting dust and smoke away, knocking nearby wreckage askew and nearly flattening the men themselves.
Everything was quiet in the aftermath, almost a
s if the entire world had stopped at that cataclysmic blast. But as soon as the shockwave had washed over him, Scalas was up on his feet, driving toward the wreckage with his powergun’s buttstock solidly against the rest on his pauldron, the sight just below his eye.
The lander was beginning to lean hard to one side; the double explosion had crumpled one of the landing legs. The hatchway was wider than it had been, a jagged wound in the side of the mushroom-shaped craft. The odds that any of the yeheri in the troop compartment had survived were slim to none, but there might still be one or two still alive in the cockpit above.
The footing on the ravaged ramp was treacherous, but long training and conditioning kept Scalas balanced and moving quickly. Fortunately, the impacts of the HV missiles had been enough of a shock that the Quarisian militia had ceased their own fire.
He intended to demand punishment for the man who had opened fire first. This could have been ended quietly.
His vision slit adjusted as he entered the troop compartment, the integral night vision brightening the scene before him. There were massive gouges in the hull, open to the outside, where the overpressure had split the metal and composite like a bursting balloon. Everything was scorched, and only the faintest nubs remained of acceleration couches, weapons racks, and equipment cases.
Some of the shadows on the hull were likely all that remained of the shooters who had been in the troop compartment. The HV missiles’ molecular explosive warheads were capable of awe-inspiring destruction.
The ladder leading up to the cockpit was a twisted, mangled mess where it hadn’t been completely flayed away by the blast. Scalas realized as he studied the wreckage that the ladder had originally been encased in a hollow shaft, evidently blasted away by the HV missile warheads. That probably accounted for why some twisting remains of the ladder had survived. Still, getting up there was going to be difficult. Fortunately, Caractacan Brothers always dropped prepared for all sorts of eventualities.