by Peter Nealen
He keyed the “All Decks” comm. “Stand by for high-gee maneuvers,” he said. “Six gees to commence in… three minutes.”
7
The descent was rough, but the ferocious buffeting of a steep dive into the roiled, storm-wracked upper atmosphere of Valdek seemed almost gentle compared to the extended six-gravity braking maneuver that had been necessary to slow the ships to below escape velocity so they could be captured by the planet’s gravity. They whipped around the far side of the planet—only to encounter a formation of twenty more long, pyramidal ships plunging toward them from the L2 point.
As their descent turned into a powered dive, HELs and powergun bolts stabbed at them from above, their brilliant light scoring lines through the attenuated air that would have been impressed on retinas for some time after, had anyone looked directly at them. The thunderous concussion of an energy weapon’s passage, explosively superheating even the thin atmosphere at that altitude, rocked the Dauntless with a near-miss. Only the persistence of the decoys above, the high relative velocities, and the increasingly heavy counter-fire from the surface kept the enemy ships from scoring a direct hit.
Even so, Mor saw the blast of a powergun bolt pass close enough to the Vindicator that it tossed the starship hard to one side, almost knocking her out of control. He couldn’t spare the attention to watch more closely, but he expected that the Vindicator had sustained some serious damage on one flank from the blast and thermal effects alone.
Particle beams lanced up from below, hammering their own tunnels through the atmosphere, and Mor had to thrust hard to steer around the narrow columns of high-energy ions and their accompanying hurricane turbulence. He was tempted to curse the gunners down below —until he saw one of the attacking cruisers above pinned by three beams, a fraction of a second before it exploded.
And then Dauntless was plunging into a billowing thunderstorm, and he had other problems to worry about.
Lightning nearly as intense as the powergun and particle beam fire flashed through the clouds, and thunder rocked the starship. Intense crosswinds, moving at well over three hundred kilometers per hour, tried to spin the vessel out of control. If not for the starship’s powerful sensors she would have been blind in the dark gray clouds that swirled violently around her hull, lashing her with hail, rain, and particulate matter thrown into the atmosphere by the bombardment.
Though physically he was doing little more than tapping controls with his fingertips, Mor was drenched in sweat as he tried to compensate for every gust, especially as the ship’s velocity continued to fall as she got deeper into the atmosphere. The red glow of her meteoric descent into the stratosphere had faded, and soon she would be standing on her tail, descending on her drive plume. At that point she would be fully vertical, and flight would become even more treacherous as the tearing winds tried to snatch the ship off balance.
The Dauntless dropped out of the clouds, descending into driving rain that was instantly turned into steam and plasma by the white-hot flame of her drive. The gray of the storm was lit by another brilliant line of blazing green as another of the groundside particle beam weapons fired on the enemy ships overhead, invisible to the naked eye through the swirling overcast.
Mor spared a brief moment to switch the holo-tank to an enhanced view of the scene below. He needed to know where they were going, and what they were dropping into.
The Dauntless was currently three thousand meters above the ground. Below stretched a broad plateau on the shoulder of Gorakovati, the gigantic northern shield volcano.
The entire plateau was a war zone.
At one end of the plateau, just where the steeper slopes of the volcano began to flatten out, hulked a sprawling fortress, an edifice that dwarfed the Avar Sector Keep. A gigantic central dome was surrounded by multiple concentric rings of defensive emplacements, including massive spherical emitters for particle beam weapons and HELs. The long, crane-like structures mounted on the slopes above had to be the railguns.
Only three of those defensive rings now stood, though the remains of at least three more could be seen, broken and in some cases still burning fiercely despite the rain and wind. The ground beyond the third ring had been churned and cratered by armored vehicles, artillery, and explosives. If there had been any vegetation growing there before, it had been crushed, blasted, or burned to ash. Surely nothing lived for kilometers around the planetary fortress except what was contained in armor.
The enemy dropships stood on the opposite edge of the plateau. These were smaller, squatter versions of the starships above—blunt, angular pyramids squatting on heavy landing jacks—and were surrounded by dug-in artillery, supply dumps, and vast staging areas for troops and armored vehicles.
“Gunnery,” Mor called out. “I want powergun batteries deployed for atmospheric employment. If we’re going to fly over those positions, I expect we’re going to take some fire.” Especially since they weren’t flying as fast as he would have liked. They were still moving laterally at considerable velocity, but not so fast that they couldn’t be targeted and hit, especially with the blinding light of their drive to shoot at.
Kranjick’s face appeared in the holo-tank again. “Valdekan Command is transmitting a flight path, gentlemen,” he said, his voice as slow and bored-sounding as ever, even after what they had just been through. Mor knew about some of what the Brother Legate had seen during his long years of service. The man’s air of boredom was come by honestly, though he had always suspected that it was also simply a part of Kranjick’s leadership style. Kranjick knew the men couldn’t get overly excited as long as their commander sounded bored. “They strongly suggest that we stick to it, as ground-based batteries will be engaging the enemy on the ground to help cover our approach.”
Almost before he had finished speaking, elevated gun positions on the flanks of the mountain opened fire, the railgun rounds dimly visible as streaks of dull red as they went hypersonic before leaving the barrels. They struck the fortifications set up around the dropships and several of the breaches in the fallen defensive rings with catastrophic force, hitting with brilliant flashes that looked almost like small thermonuclear charges.
Mor wasn’t going to leave it at that, however. The Dauntless had a better vantage point anyway. “Gunnery, identify probable powergun and railgun positions and engage at will. Prioritize what can do the most damage to the ship.”
“Yes, sir,” replied Gunnery Chief Carne. A moment later, the thunder of the powergun discharges rumbled faintly through the hull, and in the holo-tank, brilliant blue-white bolts flickered down from the sky, striking so fast that they looked more like lightning flashes than discrete projectiles. Armored vehicles and gun emplacements erupted into brilliant fireballs wherever the bolts touched.
Even so, the Caractacans couldn’t hope to suppress all the enemy ground fire. The starships had more powerful batteries, elevated position, and more capable scanners, but the enemy had more weapons by far. Answering plasma packets immediately stabbed skyward at the approaching hulls.
The Caractacan starships’ countermeasures kicked in just as quickly, making hash of any active targeting systems. The inclement conditions helped. But when the target is a ship the size of a skyscraper, balanced on a pillar of actinic fire, there is only so much that countermeasures can accomplish. The Challenger was hit the hardest, hammered by nearly a dozen powergun bolts as she roared overhead. The bolts weren’t ship-killers, but she shuddered under the impacts, her drive flickered, and began to drop faster. Mor hoped that meant that she was trying to get lower to evade, not that she was losing power.
All five ships replied with a withering storm of powergun fire, every shipboard battery opening fire until the assault looked almost like sheet lightning. The emplacement that had scored its hits on the Challenger vanished in a superheated cloud of atomized metal and rock.
And then the ships had passed over the enemy lines and were descending on the fortress itself. They had all been tilted slightly to
ward the mountain, utilizing their main drives for both lift and forward thrust, but as they neared the massive, clamshell doors of the armored spaceport’s landing pads, they started to come fully vertical. Their lateral velocity slowed to a near standstill, and they began to slowly drop toward the enclosed pads. Only then did their batteries cease fire, though the roaring flames of rocket artillery exhausts and the dully glowing streaks of ground-based railgun rounds were still sailing off into the gray of the storm, toward enemy emplacements now invisible to the naked eye. They were now receiving only sporadic laser, powergun, and missile fire from the enemy lines, and the missiles were being easily swatted out of the air by the point defense lasers of both the Valdekan fortress and the Caractacan starships.
Mor turned his attention to landing the ship. The pad below him was completely obscured by clouds of vapor from the silo’s cooling systems—he was, after all, about to land on the sun-hot drive plume—but the holo-tank showed him that the pad was sunken a good three hundred meters below the surface, and the silo above it was not exactly spacious.
He was thankful that at least he was not trying to land the damaged Challenger or even the Vindicator in such a small bay.
A tap of a finger fired thrusters for a split second, nudging the big ship to one side and bringing the dotted line of thrust in the holo-tank more in line with the centerline of the silo. This was now entirely an instrument approach. The billowing clouds of condensation made an approach by eye impossible.
Slowly, her drive thrumming through every beam and plate, the Dauntless descended into the dimness of the landing silo. The roar of her drive reverberated in the enclosed space, shaking the ship’s hull even more and creating an all-consuming blast of noise that was almost intolerable. But at last Mor felt the faint jar of contact, the indicator in the holo-tank demonstrated that the starship had come to rest on her landing jacks, and the thunder quieted.
He was suddenly aware that a voice was coming over the comms. “All Caractacan starships,” the voice said in accented Trade Cant, “be advised that we will be closing the overhead bay doors. This is for your protection. We are being bombarded at semi-regular intervals by enemy ships in space and are receiving some effective rocket artillery fire from their positions beyond the defenses. Do not attempt to launch without coordinating with Planetary Defense Central.”
Whatever came next, they were committed.
Scalas did not enjoy space combat. He couldn’t say he especially enjoyed spaceflight at all. When he was on the ground, leading his century, he was in control of his own fate—as much as a man ever could be. But strapped into an acceleration couch aboard the Dauntless, feeling every thruster burn and maneuver, he was helpless, unable to lift a finger to aid or hinder anyone. And that was not to his liking.
He knew he was far from alone. Most of the Caractacan ground fighters felt the same. Every one of them had received cross-training in space and atmospheric flight during their novitiate, but for some, that only made the lack of control worse. Like Scalas, they couldn’t wait to get out of the couches and on the ground, their feet under them and their powerguns in their hands.
As soon as the light above Scalas’s couch turned green, he slapped the release on his safety harness and got up, his joints creaking slightly, his muscles protesting. The life of a Caractacan Brother was not an easy one, and the deorbiting maneuver, followed by atmospheric entry, had not been gentle. But with a roll of his shoulders, he drew his powergun from its rack next to his couch, drew himself up straight, and strode toward the exit hatch. Most of his First Squad joined him, while the others began to ascend from the lower troop decks. They faced the hatch with a grim silence that mirrored his own.
He’d had a replica of Mor’s holo-tank display piped to him throughout the space battle and the descent, so he knew what they were facing out there on the defensive lines. Even five hundred Caractacans would be hard-pressed to put a dent in that.
“Squad sergeants!” he barked as he walked, his voice amplified by his exterior speakers. “Squads Two through Five, muster on the troop decks and stand by. Squad One will debark with me and make liaison with our hosts.”
He got his acknowledgments as he came to the debarkation hatch and touched the opening control with one gauntleted hand. Like the rest of the Caractacans, he was in full combat armor already; true to their training, the Brothers had landed ready to fight.
The hatch irised open, revealing a gangway reaching through still-swirling clouds of coolant mist. There was no one on the gangway, and it vanished into the murk beyond. Scalas squinted behind his vision slit. He didn’t expect the Valdekans to betray them and set an ambush, but Caractacan training taught the Brothers never to allow themselves to become complacent, even among friends.
There were no friends, really. There were Brothers, enemies, and those the Brothers were sworn to protect. That was all.
And enemies often were not above using those under Caractacan protection to try to get at them.
He allowed none of these thoughts to show in his body language as he strode out onto the gangway, and even though his face was hidden behind the jutting prow of his helmet’s visor, he kept his expression neutral. He held his powergun easily in his hands, the barrel slanted down and to one side, but ready to be snapped to the butt-stop on his pauldron in a split second. His eyes searched the fog, his every muscle tensed just enough to throw him into a sprint as soon as a shot came out of that mist.
As he moved along the gangway, he was dimly aware of the distant thunder of friendly and enemy artillery batteries continuing to exchange fire. When a heavier series of impacts shook the decking beneath his feet, he assumed that the ships that had come after them from the L2 point were taking the opportunity to fire the salvo that their predecessors had been unable to. The noise was increasingly muted, however, as the great clamshell doors over the landing pit slowly closed.
The portal at the far end of the gangway loomed out of the haze, lit by yellowish glow rods. A trio of figures were standing on the other side, stiffly at attention and well back from the coolant gases; his helmet display indicated those gases were still hotter than any human being outside a suit could survive.
The central figure wore a sidearm at his hip, while the two on either side held coil guns at port arms, the power cables arching over their shoulders to their power packs with parade-ground precision.
Scalas was well aware of the figure he cut as he came out of the billowing coolant fog. His armor had taken on a shifting shade of dark gray to black, his centurion’s bars a faded, slightly lighter shade of the same gray on his pauldrons. His vision slit was nothing but a dark line of faceless watchfulness. Ammunition packs bulked around his belt-line, and in his hands he carried his powergun, shorter and stubbier than the long-barreled coil guns the honor guard carried, but capable of much more than the gauss weapons.
The double file of similarly armored figures looming behind him would be no less intimidating. Especially since the honor guard was only partially armored, dressed in mottled camouflage utilities, with open-faced helmets and chest armor. Lightweight exoskeletons were strapped to their hips and legs, unpowered, intended only to support the not-inconsiderable weight of the coilgun power packs. The downside of the exoskeletons was that they were stiff and limiting, lacking the full articulation of Brotherhood combat armor.
The man with the sidearm saluted stiffly, bringing a hand to his temple, palm out. “I am Major Athanasi Stojanek,” he announced in halting Trade Cant. “Valdekan Ground Forces.”
“Centurion Erekan Scalas, Century XXXII of the Caractacan Brotherhood,” Scalas rumbled in reply, raising the muzzle of his powergun to return the salute.
The major cut his salute. “We are glad to have you here, Centurion. Come with me, please.” He turned on his heel and started down the vaulted corridor behind him. “The starport commander is meeting your legate in the central staging area. I am instructed to bring you there.”
Scalas turned to
Kahane. “Pick five men to come with me. The rest stay here and secure the gangway until we know where the rest of the century will be going.”
Kahane nodded and turned to call out the centurion’s escort. The five Brothers he’d chosen, one of them toting an MT-41 1.5cm support powergun, stepped forward and joined Scalas as he turned and followed the Valdekan honor guards. Kahane wasn’t getting complacent, either; sending one of the two squad support gunners along with the centurion was a message. And from the look on one of the honor guards’ faces, the message had been received. That heavy powergun could do some appalling damage.
The officer led them down the corridor to what was unmistakably a tram station. A car was already waiting, and in moments the honor guard and the Caractacans were aboard and being whisked down the long length of the starport. More stations flashed by, one for every cluster of three or four landing pits.
The car hissed smoothly to a halt after only a few moments, and the officer stepped out and waited at attention for the Caractacans. Scalas followed him out, looking around at the gigantic underground staging area before him.
The chamber might have been a grand lobby for a civilian starport if it hadn’t been on the flanks of a planetary defense fortress. Carved pillars held up the domed roof, studded with glowing sconces elaborately sculpted and programmed to flicker as if they were ancient lanterns. Vaulted, armored windows let in a dim, gray light from above, momentarily brightened by the flash of an explosion or the ripping, glowing passage of a railgun round. Train stations stood at each corner of the compass, and Scalas quickly figured out where each one led. The north and south stations led to either end of the spaceport. Westward led back to the central dome of the fortress while the eastern station led outward, toward the outer defensive rings.