by Peter Nealen
At the moment, the entire vast space was a mass of seething humanity in various levels of camouflage and combat armor. One quarter of the chamber appeared to have been turned into a field hospital, packed with wounded who were being hauled in from the defensive station. Screams of agony contended with the murmur of nervous soldiers wondering what was going to happen next and the unintelligible shouts of officers and NCOs directing their men. The marbled tile floor, a contrast to the utilitarian gray metal of the landing pit, was spattered with dark stains and scored with deep scratches. The Valdekans had not been overly careful moving equipment while under siege, and these were definitely not the first wounded to have passed through.
The liaison officer led the way through the crowd, shouting in the local dialect to clear the way. Not that his shouts were particularly necessary; the looming, armored forms of the Caractacans were as threatening as they were reassuring, and the Valdekan soldiers stepped aside quickly.
Thanks to his size, Brother Legate Kranjick stood out clearly even amid the sea of humanity. Often legates had standards that could be lifted on telescoping mounts to serve the same purpose, but Kranjick had always foregone that particular bit of heraldry. He was not a man for display—even a situation like this, where some might have bolstered the locals’ morale—and yet he was something of a morale-boosting display unto himself.
The legate’s emotionless vision slit turned like a gun turret to lock onto Scalas as the six men from Century XXXII approached. His laconic voice crackled over the battle net. “Centurions, with me. The General-Regent wishes to speak with us before we deploy. The rest can wait here. I will leave it to individual initiative if they wish to render aid to the wounded.”
Scalas saw that Soon was already standing next to Kranjick, along with a tall, pale Valdekan officer. Horvaset and her bridge officers had joined them as well, dressed in their shipboard spacesuits. Costigan and Dunstan were making their way through the crowd. Costigan had the same five-man honor guard as Scalas, Soon, and Kranjick. Dunstan, however, had half a squad with him.
The pale Valdekan officer was standing stiffly at attention, his head only barely coming to Kranjick’s pauldron. He clicked his heels together as the centurions gathered around. “The Duchess and the General-Regent are in the command center, gentlemen, madam. If you will follow me?”
He turned and led the way toward the tram station that Scalas had pegged as the one leading back toward the central dome of the fortress. The Valdekan kept his back ramrod-straight and didn’t spare a glance for the hordes of wounded men—men with limbs blown off, their flesh charred, or nearly flayed alive by shrapnel. Scalas was not a squeamish man, but he was glad that his suit filtered out the odor of burnt flesh and blood. Putting the field hospital here was not a good idea. How many of the men embarking for the defensive perimeter had to go past that screaming charnel house on their way to fight and die? Morale would be at an all-time low before they even got on the train.
Perhaps the Valdekan commanders were simply not all that competent. Or perhaps they were even more hard-pressed than the Caractacans knew. Scalas wondered at that as they headed deeper into the fortress. And he wondered if any of them would leave this world alive.
8
The fortress’s command center was not large. It was roughly the size of the Dauntless’ command deck and looked much the same: a central holo-tank ringed by two dozen smaller consoles, all facing it. The air crackled with comm chatter in Eastern Satevic, a babble of what must have been status reports, requests for support, targeting instructions for the artillery and the planetary defense batteries, and coordinating instructions.
Scalas took a half step closer to the holo-tank, peering at the picture of the battle within. It glittered with a mass of unfamiliar glowing symbols, but none were so different from those used by the Caractacans that he couldn’t decipher them. And if he was reading the symbols right, the situation was worse than he’d thought.
The picture that he had gotten on the way down had been incomplete. He’d had only the Dauntless’s targeting information and flight data to work with, and that had been limited by the weather and the electronic warfare seething invisibly throughout the atmosphere and the orbitals. Now there was more information available. The tank was being fed not only by direct observation, but also from reporting that was coming in from the surrounding defensive positions.
And according to that reporting, vast legions of enemy troops and armor surrounded the plateau. The army besieging this particular Valdekan planetary defense fortress alone numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and that wasn’t even taking into account the size of the fleets in the Lagrange points, or ground forces on other parts of the planet.
Who can afford to carry these numbers across interstellar space to make war?
Even with an entire system’s resources available, the logistics alone were mind-boggling. It took massive numbers to try to control only one planet; to attempt to exert control over multiple worlds… This was why most attempts at interstellar empire in galactic history had collapsed relatively quickly, and none of those had tried to conquer by brute force.
Scalas took all this in at a glance as he continued to follow Kranjick, Horvaset and her officers, and the rest of the legio’s centurions toward the far side of the command center, where two figures awaited them.
The first was a squat, heavyset man with white hair, a stubby nose that looked like it had been broken many times without reparative surgery afterward, and a thick mustache. In his prime, he must have been a formidable man, but now he was pale and wan, held upright by a medical exoskeleton that was pumping several tubes worth of fluids into him. The white coverall he wore beneath the exoskeleton bulged in several places, where Scalas assumed bandages and healing packs had been placed. It was clear this man had been badly wounded. And yet here he was, on his feet, his eyes still alert despite the pain that was written on his craggy features.
The second figure was a woman, taller than the man, her graying hair pulled back behind her head in a tight bun, wearing a high-collared, vaguely military tunic over her own white coverall. As the Caractacans approached, she glanced at the wounded man and moved to stand close behind his shoulder. There was concern in that look, but it was quickly disguised as she adopted a cold, businesslike mien, facing the advancing armored warriors.
“You must be the legate,” the old man said. His voice was scratchy and hoarse, but Scalas recognized it from the recording of Horvaset’s message. This was Rehenek, the General-Regent of Valdek. “I would welcome you, but it would seem hollow given what’s happening here. Not that we are ungrateful that you have come, but I fear that there is little you can do for us now.”
“What exactly is happening here, General-Regent?” Kranjick asked. He had removed his helmet, and Scalas reached up to do the same. One by one, the other centurions followed suit. “Who is this ‘Galactic Unity’? Where are they getting the resources for a campaign of this magnitude?”
Rehenek sighed and motioned for them to follow him. “That is a tale better told away from all of this,” he said, waving to indicate the cacophony of activity in the command center.
He led the way through a narrow door, directly opposite the lift they had entered by, and into a small, private briefing theater. Rehenek walked—or steered his exoskeleton—stiffly toward a small console mounted to the wall to one side of the door. “It will be easier to show you than tell you, I think,” he said.
They stood together, the centurions encased in their armor, the General-Regent in his exoskeleton, a nightmare assembly of mechanical men, some fever-dream of the Qinglong cultists, as the lights dimmed. Then a holo sprang up from the floor, surrounding them. The entire room was a holo-tank, one that a viewer could stand inside.
The holo flickered to life, and the room seemed to vanish.
They appeared to be standing in space, above a deep-space station. If the size of the star was any indication, they were another five light-minutes ou
t from Goran 54. The station was a bog-standard ring construct, with just enough radius to give about a half-gee spin gravity without too much Coriolis effect destroying the crew’s equilibrium, and there was nothing particularly interesting about it. It could have been a research station, or a listening post, or even a comms repeater. Some star systems still used manned repeater stations, reasoning that failures could be fixed more quickly by a living crew.
But in an instant, everything changed. As the station rotated placidly in the dark of space, lit on one side by the distant sun, the space around them was suddenly full of ships.
There had to be at least five hundred of them—the same blunt, brutal, elongated pyramids that the Caractacan ships had fought above the planet. All of them painted white with a blue emblem of a barred spiral, surrounded by what might have been either wings or laurels, backed by crossed swords. The ships had cut their Bergenholms within less than a light-second of the station.
Without pause, the leading starships opened fire with powerguns, not even bothering to deploy a weapons constellation. The blue-white plasma packets flickered between starships and station, and in moments the station itself was dead, blackened and holed in a hundred places, spewing atmosphere. Still the ships did not cease fire. They continued to bombard the ring station until it was blasted into fragments no larger than a personal air skiff.
The recording froze. “That was Research Station Five,” Rehenek said, “a private concern owned by one of the universities here on Valdek. The holo you just watched was recorded by its remote sensor satellites, which were transmitting constantly to the university here on the planet.”
“If it was a research station,” Soon asked, “why destroy it?”
“As a message,” Rehenek said grimly. “Watch.”
The holo abruptly changed. None of the Caractacans so much as flinched as a gigantic face suddenly filled half the briefing room. The face was male, human, roughly middle-aged. There was a tired sort of wisdom in the expression, though when Scalas looked at the man’s eyes, he was struck by their nearly inhuman coldness.
“By now, you will have detected the destruction of thirty of your outer-system space stations,” the man said. He was using a strange variation on Trade Cant; it was understandable, but only just. “While the loss of life is regrettable, it was necessary that you understand the gravity of your situation. The Galactic Unity is here to take possession of the Valdek system. While this is, ultimately, for the greater good, the object lesson in the short-term consequences of resistance should adequately communicate that you must cooperate. While I am certain that, given time, you will come to see the salutary effects of joining with the Unity, understand that any resistance must be crushed. And it will be, without mercy. The establishment of the Unity is far too important for sentiment to get in the way. And the Unity is already powerful enough that one system alone cannot stop it.
“Nothing can stop it.”
The recording ended. For a long moment, the briefing room was silent and still.
Then Rehenek spoke, his voice heavy. “You have seen only a small fraction of their forces. There were over three thousand ships in the first attack. Some have left. Some have come into the system since. They are not the most advanced designs, or the best-built ships, but their numbers are overwhelming. Our defense fleet was destroyed in a matter of hours. The Ithogen task force that came to our aid five days before you arrived was wiped out in less time than that.
“They have little tactical subtlety, either in space or on the ground. Massed movements and massed firepower are the keys to their success. And they have more bodies and more firepower than we can withstand. Than you can withstand.”
“Why did that man look familiar?” Costigan asked thoughtfully.
“Probably because he was once a hero,” Rehenek said. Scalas glanced at him keenly, hearing bitterness in the man’s voice. “Geretesk Vakolo and I fought the M’tait from one end of the Tyrus Cluster to the other. I counted him a friend. Once.”
Costigan nodded. “Yes, Vakolo,” he mused. “I remember now. I hadn’t realized he was still alive.”
“He was badly wounded on Nekophor, but not killed,” Rehenek said. “I was there when we retrieved him and got him off the planet. I hadn’t seen or heard from him since—until now.”
“Where is he from?” Kranjick asked.
“The Sparat system, about five parsecs away.”
Kranjick frowned. “I thought Sparat was sparsely populated. How could they muster this kind of force, not to mention the support infrastructure to send it across light-years?”
Rehenek’s expression grew even more haunted, if that was possible. “This is how,” he said quietly, and pressed another control.
The holographic image of a dead body appeared on the floor. It was dressed in the same cheap space suit and armored vest that Scalas had seen in Horvaset’s recording. A weapon lay next to it—a cheap, crude-looking cone-bore rifle. The helmet had been removed, revealing an olive-skinned, heavily browed face with a shaved head.
The holo disappeared and was replaced by another—another corpse. This one was in a different place, and the lower half of this man’s body had been completely blown off. But once again the helmet had been removed, and the face…
The face was identical to the one before it.
The Caractacan reactions were all carefully controlled through discipline and practiced military bearing, but Scalas frowned slightly.
Rehenek flicked through more images, more dead bodies. The faces changed occasionally, but all told, Scalas counted only four distinct sets of features among nearly two dozen bodies.
“We have retrieved only a tiny fraction of the remains on the battlefield,” Rehenek said, “but the trend is clear. These are not recruits. They are clones.”
“I still don’t see how it’s supportable,” Costigan said. “The resources to raise this many clones… Even just the time involved. This had to have been started a generation ago. Maybe more.”
Rehenek shook his head. “I was on Sparat several times during the Tyrus Cluster campaign, and I saw no installations that could be raising and training this many clones. There weren’t even enough people on Sparat to produce this many, at least if they used the methods we understand, even were they all convinced to ignore the moral and ethical issues.” He shook his head again. “No, something has changed. Vakolo has discovered some new method, some new technology that allows for rapid gestation. There is no other explanation.”
“How?” Soon asked. “Genetic copies or not, they’re still humans. They’re not simply bots that one puts together on an assembly line.”
Rehenek looked like he might have shrugged had he not been immobilized by his medical exoskeleton. “We don’t know. All we know is what is before us: hordes of the same few men, over and over and over again, in such numbers that Vakolo’s threat is far from idle. We cannot resist them, not for much longer.”
His words hung in the air as the Caractacans considered the ramifications. They stood on the surface of a doomed world.
“Five centuries, even of Caractacans, cannot turn back an army of that magnitude, General-Regent,” Kranjick rumbled.
“I know, and I am sorry,” Rehenek replied. He switched off the holo and stiffly moved toward the door. “At first I hoped you could help defend us. But that was before the Ithogen ships were smashed to floating debris and every other force since has either fled before entering the system or engaged briefly and then fled when they saw the numbers they were up against. Before we lost hope.”
He turned, slowly, to face Kranjick once more. “I did not ask you down to the surface to help fight our last stand, Legate. I asked you down here so that you could help me with one final task.”
The Duchess was waiting, Horvaset standing at parade rest at her side, when they came back out into the command center. The holo-tank was flashing with alerts; another wave of ships was passing overhead from the L3 point, and an alarm was going out through
out the fortress to brace for another bombardment. More symbols flashed as the ground-side defensive batteries began to fire. Yet the stately, gray-haired woman was serene among the chaos and destruction that was shuddering through the fortress, causing faint vibrations in the floor and walls.
“Particle Cannon 52B just suffered a meltdown,” she announced calmly. She was speaking to Rehenek, but in Trade Cant so that the Brothers could understand.
Rehenek grimaced. “That makes three in the last week. Casualties?”
“Fifty percent,” was the calm reply.
“It could be worse,” Rehenek said, as much to the Caractacans as to himself.
“Did you ask them?” the Duchess asked quietly.
“Not yet,” Rehenek replied. He turned back to the Caractacans, putting his arm stiffly around the Duchess. It looked like it pained him, and the concern that crossed her face as she gently leaned into him, obviously trying to take some of the tension off his arm, spoke volumes.
“We have been fighting these last few days only to buy time,” Rehenek said. “As you have seen, Valdek is lost. When we sent the Mekadik, we hoped that the Caractacan Brotherhood might lead a coalition of allied forces to drive the enemy off. That is no longer possible, I think you can agree. So, now we ask not that you fight for us, but that you help some of us escape.”
“You wish us to take you off-world?” Kranjick asked. As always, his voice was flat and grim. If he harbored thoughts of reproach for the planet’s leadership fleeing and leaving their people behind, he did not allow them to show.
“No,” Rehenek said. “I will not leave my world. I will stay to the end. I am General-Regent of Valdek. My place is with my people.”
“And I will not leave him,” the Duchess said, as Kranjick turned his eyes on her.
“We wish you to take our son,” Rehenek said. “He will be our government in exile, along with as many of his troops and their families as you can take. Please, take him away from here, out of the clutches of this so-called ‘Galactic Unity.’”