The Fall of Valdek: A Military Sci-Fi Series (The Unity Wars Book 1)

by Peter Nealen

  Mor shook his head without looking away from the holo-tank. He had maneuvers to plot.

  The smashed, ragged hull of the stranded vessel loomed a mere two hundred meters away as Scalas and First Squad exited the exterior lock. They could have gotten the Dauntless closer, but there was a respectable amount of debris following the hulk, and no reason to risk colliding with it. The Brothers, with their maneuvering units strapped around their armor’s sustainment packs, could avoid the debris much more easily than the starship could.

  Scalas led the way, pumping little jets of compressed gas out of his propellant bottles with the control stick that was strapped to his left gauntlet. The Dauntless had precisely matched velocities with the hulk, so the transit was easy—a simple, straight-line vector between hulls.

  Lettering adorned the stricken starship’s flank. The enhanced vision projected on Scalas’s visor slit showed him the first few letters, but he didn’t recognize them—they were neither Latin nor Trade Cant. Not only was he not sure what language the Valdekans spoke, he wasn’t even sure whether the Valdekans were human. He knew only that Valdek was well to Rimward, nearly fifty parsecs.

  The main airlock was, as Mor had indicated, blasted to scrap, apparently by a near-miss by a powergun bolt. A direct hit would likely have broken the ship’s spine. Whoever the Valdekans were, either their opponents were horrifically incompetent at ship-to-ship combat, or the Valdekan crew was very good at countermeasures and point defense.

  Scalas retrofired as he came closer, bringing himself to a relative standstill about twenty meters from the mangled hull, directly opposite the blasted remains of the airlock. Scanning for another way in, he spotted a possibility—doors to what was probably a shuttle or lander bay. A fragment or kinetic projectile had punched a long, ragged scar through those doors, leaving an opening that should be just big enough for a man in space armor to get through.

  Triggering his jets, he began to drift slowly toward the hole. Even as well-armored as he was, he had to be careful. Strike a structural member or a heavy enough bit of hull plating, and he risked severe injury or decompression. Behind him, the rest of the squad followed in a loose wedge. None of them expected to get into combat aboard the wreck, but enemy boarders inside the hull weren’t outside the realm of possibility. Besides, they were Caractacans. If there was one thing they never lacked, it was vigilance.

  Scalas came to a relative halt two meters from the breach. It was slightly larger than he’d thought, as the ship was bigger than the Dauntless and distances were deceiving in the murky artificial lighting projected on his visor. Still, it could be hazardous to navigate, especially since the space beyond it was dark as the tomb, so he prepared a grapple. The “hook” was a small but powerful electromagnet charged by his suit’s power supply, and the gossamer line, impossibly thin, was stronger than two-centimeter-thick steel cable. A quick flick of his wrist sent the magnet flying toward the bay doors. Only long practice and coordination kept the throw from setting him spinning.

  The magnet caught and held, and Scalas reeled himself in. As he did, grapples from the rest of his team impacted the hull soundlessly around him.

  When he was close enough, he rotated himself so that his boots were pointed at the bay doors, and he triggered their mag-locks. The clunk of impact was transmitted through his armor, muted as it was. The mag-locks were tuned to his movement, so he could walk across the warped remains of the bay door relatively smoothly.

  He pulled a hand light from his belt kit and shone it through the rent in the door. Unhindered by atmosphere, the light blazed brightly. Just inside he saw a docked transatmospheric shuttle, but whatever had penetrated the bay doors had turned the shuttle’s nose into a twisted mass of shredded metal and composite. Farther in, a handful of backup emergency lights emitted a dim glow around the bay’s central lift/ladderwell, so Mor was right—there was some sort of functioning power source on board, even if the main reactors and drives were cold.

  Bending “down,” Scalas took a firm but cautious grip on the edge of the puncture. As tough as the metal weave inside his gloves’ palms was, it was never a good idea to take chances in hard vacuum.

  He released his mag-locks and torqued himself around the edge and into the bay, keeping one hand locked on the edge of the torn metal, the other on his powergun. Then he let go, pointed his boots at the inner side of the bay doors, and triggered the mag-locks again.

  His boots slammed down on the metal, and he could move with relative safety. Kahane came through the hole next, immediately identifiable by his height and girth. The other Brothers were stacked behind him, waiting their turn.

  Scalas worked his way around the breach, heading for the nose and the command deck, if it was still intact. This would have been disorienting to someone who hadn’t trained in such maneuvers to the extent the Caractacans did. There was a reason the novitiate lasted five years. Like any starship, this ship, when under thrust, was not unlike a tower or a tall building: the drives were “down” and the decks were stacked like floors above them. But in zero gravity, there was no “up” or “down,” and Scalas was effectively walking on the inside of a slightly tapering cylinder toward what could, depending on one’s perspective, be a ladder up or down or even a bridge or catwalk.

  Faint vibrations through his boots told him the other Brothers were following. Again, he knew they would be in a loose wedge. Rescue mission or not, the Caractacans always moved as if ready for a fight.

  He reached the catwalk and started to move along it, reorienting himself ninety degrees by first releasing his mag-locks and grabbing the railing before reengaging the locks. Unfortunately, the lift hatch was sealed shut, and it seemed it was going to stay that way as long as the bay remained depressurized.

  “We need an emergency lock pod,” he said over the short-range comm.

  “Coming up, Centurion,” a Brother replied. It sounded like Harris. A few moments later, an armored figure appeared through the breach, pulling a compact package behind him. He plodded along the inside of the hull, following roughly the same route that Scalas had.

  While they waited, Kahane cast his hand light around the damaged shuttles and the rest of the bay. “Do you notice anything strange, Centurion?”

  “Aside from the fact that there are only three shuttles in a hold easily big enough for five times that many?” Scalas asked.

  “Yes, aside from that. I don’t see any bodies,” Kahane said.

  “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Scalas replied. “There wouldn’t be many personnel out and about in the launch bay during a space battle. They would have been on one of the command decks, strapped in for acceleration and armored, just like we would.”

  “I suppose.” Kahane didn’t sound especially convinced. In fact, he sounded slightly spooked.

  Scalas had to admit that the nearly empty, darkened launch bay of a stricken starship in hard vacuum was an eerie place. Every once in a while, the light from one of their lamps would glint weirdly off a bit of wreckage, making it seem like there was movement where there should be none. Even Scalas was feeling the disquiet.

  It was indeed Harris who was hauling the emergency lock, and as soon as he arrived, he started setting it up. It was little more than a synthetic tube with a sealer at one end and an overlapping, airtight membrane at the other, hooked up to a compact atmosphere tank that was good for about a dozen cycles before it failed. Which meant they wouldn’t be able to get the entire squad inside. Especially if they wanted to get back out without blowing the hatch off.

  “Kahane, Harris, Maxon, and Granzow, you’re with me,” Scalas instructed.

  “Fillegron,” Kahane said over the comm, “you’re acting squad leader here in the bay. Pick five men to hold the breach, and send the rest back to the Dauntless.”

  Fillegron saluted by slapping the buttstock of his powergun, then began to assemble the men in the bay.

  Scalas slipped through the barrier and into the emergency lock. Maxon an
d Granzow were able to fit in with him, though it was decidedly cramped. It took a few minutes for the small pack to pressurize the lock enough for the safety interlocks on the hatch to release. Scalas, unsure what to expect, kept his powergun ready as he stepped through.

  The door opened onto a lift shaft that dwindled into the distance in both directions. The lift itself was nowhere near them, not that it would have helped if it were. Fortunately, using the ladder was no hard task in freefall. Under thrust, it would have been a long, grueling climb, but as it was, Scalas glided up easily, his powergun clamped to his side, only occasionally needing to reach out and briefly grab a rung to straighten his course or continue to propel himself along.

  About halfway to the nose, he looked back down at the line of Brothers following him. “Can anyone tell what language these decks are marked in?” he asked. “It looks vaguely familiar, but unless we can decipher some of it, we’re going to have to clear the entire ship, deck by deck, looking for survivors.”

  “I think it’s Eastern Satevic,” Maxon said. Maxon should know; he had been a professor at the University on Careyn III before the M’tait raid that had killed over eighty percent of the population. “Some of the symbols look familiar.”

  “Can you read it?” Kahane asked.

  “No.” Maxon shook his helmeted head. “I might recognize a word or two, but Careyn III was a long way Coreward from any of the worlds where the Satevic languages had taken root.”

  “We don’t need to read the signage,” Granzow said. “I served on an Antares III for two years before my novitiate. I know the layout.”

  For a moment, all four Caractacans looked at Granzow.

  “That’s quite a coincidence,” Kahane said.

  Granzow, holding a rung with one hand, shrugged slightly, the motion barely visible in his armor. “There are a lot of Antares IIIs floating around. They were one of the most popular hulls that the Waiyungari Shipyards turned out in the last thirty years, and at least fifteen major system fleets purchased them in bulk.”

  “You’re a fountain of occasionally useful but otherwise pointless information, Granzow,” Harris said.

  “Well, this time it turned out to be useful,” Granzow said dryly. “And I can’t help it if you don’t have interests.”

  “I have plenty of interests,” Harris countered. “Starship trivia simply doesn’t happen to be one of them.”

  “Enough,” Scalas said. “Granzow, how far are we from the command deck?”

  “Another three levels, I think. The primary command center will be wrapped around the lift shaft, with weapons emplacements and auxiliary mech compartments around it.”

  Scalas looked up the lift shaft. That was fairly standard design for a starship that could be expected to enter combat. Placing the command center deep inside the starship’s structure lessened the chance that it could be taken out with a single shot—presuming that a direct hit from a bomb-pumped X-ray laser or kinetic kill munition didn’t reduce the entire ship to atomized debris in a fraction of a second anyway.

  Scalas pulled himself another three decks up and steadied himself in front of what he hoped was the command center hatch. The Eastern Satevic writing was still indecipherable, but the lights here were green, indicating pressure on both sides of the hatch. He keyed the hatch open, bringing his powergun to the ready as the portal irised wide.

  A few dim, blue emergency lights glowed in the alcoves in the overhead, but they didn’t illuminate much beyond the general layout of the space that lay beyond. The command center layout was fairly standard for a starship. There was the usual arrangement of acceleration couches and consoles arranged in rings around the compartment, all of which were currently dark. Scalas pulled himself through the hatch and triggered his mag-locks again. His feet solidly on the deck, he moved forward.

  That was when the commander’s acceleration couch began to turn.

  A figure in an armored spacesuit was strapped into the couch. The figure’s visor was down, presenting only a dim, featureless, reflective face, and the suit was of an unfamiliar design, blue and green, though definitely of considerably newer manufacture than the old orange suits the Quarisians had been wearing back on Iabreton II.

  A distinctly feminine voice crackled from the figure’s external speakers in stilted, heavily accented Trade Cant. “You are Caractacans?”

  “We are,” Scalas replied in the same language. “We received your distress signal.”

  “Thank the universe!” the woman exclaimed.

  Scalas ignored the pantheism. His concerns were with the crew and the ship. “Where are the rest of your crew?”

  “I sent all but a skeleton engineering crew to the mid-decks, where we have two decks of hibernation pods,” the captain replied, unstrapping from her couch. “We had taken so much damage that I was afraid we wouldn’t be able to maintain full life support until help arrived.” If it arrived went unsaid. “I am Captain Kateryna Horvaset, commanding the RVC Mekadik on behalf of the General-Regent of Valdek.”

  “I am Centurion Erekan Scalas, Century XXXII, Caractacan Brotherhood,” Scalas replied. He glanced around at the darkened consoles. “The Brotherhood starship Dauntless is just a few hundred meters away, awaiting survivors.” He pinned the captain with a stare as best he could through the polarized slit of his visor. “What happened to your ship, Captain?”

  “That is why we were making for the Avar Sector Keep, Centurion.” She straightened, her own boots’ mag-locks fastening securely to the deck. Her helmet came just about to Scalas’s chin. “I have a formal message for your commanders, but the short version is that Valdek is under attack by an unknown force, and we are in desperate need of help. We nearly did not escape the system to seek help.”

  “Then let us evacuate your crew and return to the Keep,” Scalas said. If she was telling the truth, that was certainly a grave enough matter that it needed to be discussed with the Brother Legate, not in casual conversation on the wreckage of a starship’s command deck. “Do you have enough spacesuits for all of them? It appears that EVA will be the only viable method of transfer.”

  “We do,” she replied. “This is—was a Valdekan ship-of-the-line, Centurion. We were all equipped for combat, including explosive decompression, and as you can see, we certainly experienced some of it. I assure you, everyone has their own suit.”

  “Very well, Captain,” Scalas said. “Lead the way. We will evacuate your crew and return to Kaletonan IV. There you may deliver your message to the Brother Legate and the rest of the centurions currently planetside.”

  There were surprisingly few remaining crew. Horvaset admitted that they had lost several sections’ worth to enemy fire when the hull was holed. The starship had also lifted with a short crew—time had been pressing, and she hadn’t been due to lift for nearly a week—and the Mekadik had been on maintenance cycle when the attack had begun.

  Still, it took several hours to get everyone across to the Dauntless and situated to Captain Mor’s satisfaction. Then, going fully inertialess, the starship lit her drive and left the hulk of the Mekadik behind, drifting toward the distant sun.

  5

  For the second time in as many days, the Dauntless descended toward the Sector Keep on a thundering pillar of blue-white fire. This time she carried survivors of a desperate space battle with a dire plea for help.

  Scalas hadn’t seen the message; Horvaset had insisted that it was for the Brother Legate’s eyes only. But she had told him and Mor something of what had happened in the distant Valdek system, and both men were grim as they descended. If what she’d said was true, this could have the potential to be another Pontakus IX.

  “Look,” Mor said, pointing. There was a new spire standing on one of the distant landing pads. “The Challenger arrived while we were in the outer system.”

  The Challenger was one of the Brotherhood’s newer starships, a sharp-nosed blade nearly fifty meters longer than the spear-shaped Dauntless. She was the charge of Centurion Virg
il Costigan, who was only still a centurion because of his time in service and his own humility. The man who had almost singlehandedly held off a medium-sized M’tait Huntership’s boarding party at Tide’s Point Station could easily be seen as a candidate for legate, but Costigan had, if anything, been even more reluctant than the Brotherhood Conclave for that to happen. They, because of his junior status—having only been a full-fledged Brother for just over six years at that point—he, because he did not consider himself worthy of the post in the first place. He now led one of the Sector’s two cavalry centuries.

  “If we’re going to Valdek,” Scalas said, “I expect we’ll be very glad to have Brother Costigan and his tanks along.”

  “If this tale is true, you mean,” Mor muttered.

  Scalas glanced back to ensure Horvaset was not on the command deck. She wasn’t, of course; the command deck of a Brotherhood starship was a place for Caractacans only.

  “You think it isn’t?” he asked.

  “Where would any force in the galaxy, aside from maybe the M’tait—who are an entirely different sort of nightmare—get the kind of manpower and ships that she described?” Mor asked by way of reply. “I know, it’s a big galaxy, but there’s no way any one system can afford to commit that kind of resources just to cross interstellar distances to attempt to conquer another system. It makes no sense. The logistics are ridiculous.”

  Scalas shrugged. “We shall see.”

  The Dauntless touched down, and Scalas, Mor, and a guard of Century XXXII’s Brothers, still in armor and carrying powerguns, descended with Horvaset and her first mate as soon as the pad was cooled enough. This time there were combat sleds waiting—not because the Valdekans were considered a threat, but because the combat sleds were faster. Details had not been sent ahead—that could wait for the formal presentation of Horvaset’s message—but the urgency of the visit had nevertheless been communicated, as had the general indication that the stricken Mekadik had come looking for Caractacan help.