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

by Peter Nealen

  “His escape is our world’s only hope.” The Duchess’s voice was low and full of pain.

  Kranjick nodded, acknowledging both the General-Regent’s request and his courage in staying behind. “Is he prepared to depart?”

  Rehenek smiled grimly, and Scalas could see a combination of pain, weariness, and deep pride in his face. “Hardly.” He pointed to the holo-tank, indicating the outer defensive rings. “He is out there. With his men.”

  Even as he spoke, blinking, blood-red indicators showed another wave of Unity ground forces moving forward from the wrecked outer defensive lines, seeking to take advantage of the disruption caused by the latest orbital bombardment.

  Kranjick looked to his centurions. “Then I think we had best get moving, gentlemen.”

  9

  The spaces between the defensive rings of the Valdekan planetary defense fortress had largely been designed to act as staging areas for react forces moving out to the outermost ring. With the notable exception of a M’tait raid nearly a century before, no force in history had been able to get past that first line of defense. The surface-to-space batteries were thick enough that any direct assault from orbit or air would be wiped out, and the fortifications and firepower available on the outer defenses were more than enough to stop any pirate forces cold.

  Even so, the designers had been prudent, not relying only on that first line of defense but creating a more robust system in case the unthinkable ever happened. And the troops currently dug in along Defensive Line Three, which was now the front line, were extremely glad of it. They would have all been slaughtered long ago otherwise. Many of the men they had known, trained, and fought beside already had been.

  They were hunkered down in the deepest parts of the defenses as the ships above and the batteries below hammered at each other. The entire universe seemed like it was being torn apart. Plasma bolts and kinetic projectiles tore howling holes through the atmosphere, with thunderous reports that were loud enough to deafen even beneath ten meters of reinforced steelcrete.

  And then one of the defensive positions, essentially a sub-fort on Section Eighteen, took a direct hit. Whether it was from a kinetic kill munition, a missile, or even a shipboard powergun made little difference. All that mattered was the position was now a smoking mass of mildly radioactive wreckage above a glowing crater. And that position had been one of the linchpins of the entire section. With that fort knocked out, there was a gap in the defenses. A small one, but a critical gap, nevertheless.

  To make matters worse, Section Eighteen’s commanding officer had been killed the day before. There hadn’t even been enough left of him to bury. The next senior officer had wisely deferred to the senior warrant officer; he might have been enlisted, but he had more combat experience, both on- and off-planet than most of the rest of the officers combined. He had even been in the Tyrus Cluster. And now, as soon as the raving, world-ending destruction of the bombardment ceased, the warrant officer was moving up and down the line, grabbing soldiers and shoving them toward the still-hot remains of the sub-fort, even though the dust and debris was still coming down from the sky after the impact. He knew that the end of the bombardment didn’t mean they had breathing room. In fact, it meant just the opposite.

  It meant the next wave was coming soon.

  Everyone on the wall had been too deafened by the world-shaking exchanges of firepower, not to mention the hurricane winds scouring defenses and blasted landscape alike, to hear the rumble of vehicles advancing across the pulverized dead zone between Defensive Line Three and what had been Defensive Line Two. Nor could they see the approaching convoy; the wind-blown ash, dust, and smoke reduced visibility to less than half a kilometer. Sensors could penetrate the miasma, but the naked eye saw only swirling curtains of black, gray, and brown.

  But the sensors didn’t lie. Out there in the wind-whipped murk, a line of two hundred tanks, three hundred assault vehicles, and three hundred scout tracks rumbled forward. All were based on the same basic design: bulky, squared-off wedges of armor on shrouded tracks, with pyramidal turrets sporting railguns of calibers ranging from 30mm on the scout tracks to 70mm on the tanks. The bore sizes weren’t impressive until one took into account the incredible muzzle velocities those gauss weapons could produce. The Unity’s vehicles were ugly, brutal, mass-produced things, but their weapons had power to burn.

  And there were a lot of them. Quantity has a quality all its own.

  The first railgun rounds began to impact the wall near the firing ports, blasting huge chunks out of the steelcrete and leaving pits that glowed with the heat of their sheer kinetic energy. In reply, missiles streaked out of box launchers on top of the wall and disappeared into the murk. Most hit. Some scored kills, the fiery deaths of armored vehicles visible as dim flashes and lurid glows out in the smoke and dust. But too few of the incoming armored vehicles were stopped, and the rest continued to advance. A second wave of hypervelocity projectiles then obliterated the box launchers, blasting them to fragments that still retained enough velocity to kill a man dead a kilometer behind the line.

  The warrant officer was fighting back despair. His men had to see him leading, to see his faith that they would hold. They had to see his unerring confidence that the Unity would not get through this time.

  But his hopes waned each time another of his heavy weapons went silent. The scanners, displaying their take on a green-tinted screen set into the wall of his tiny command post, showed the tanks bearing down on the wreckage of his sub-fort. He could engage with the firing positions and heavy weapons he had left, but he would likely lose those positions almost immediately, and with them his remaining heavy weapons, in a blizzard of hypersonic steel and tungsten slugs.

  And then it would all be over.

  The tanks had already demonstrated that, as ungainly as they looked, they were extremely agile. They could easily climb over debris and obstacles. They would roll over the wreckage of the sub-fort and be in the rear in a matter of minutes. Maybe an hour.

  Defensive Line Four would become the front line. Some of the forces manning Defensive Line Three might make it back to join the remaining defenders there. Might. But most wouldn’t. Not once the enemy was running rampant inside the line. And these men facing the assault at the breach point… they certainly wouldn’t.

  The warrant officer kept all these thoughts hidden behind a dull, flat face as he directed fire as best he could. And as the tanks got nearer, he left the command post and ran to one of the forward positions.

  If he was going to die, he was going to die fighting.

  By then, the noise of the Unity vehicles’ treads was audible even inside the wall. He could feel their dull rumble through the soles of his feet, while the crackle and boom of missile, powergun, railgun, and coilgun fire thundered outside.

  It was why he almost missed the other sound.

  The dull, earthquake rumble turned heads on the inner walls, nearly a kilometer away from the increasingly desperate fighting on Defensive Line Three. Not everyone could tell what it was at first. Only some of the older men knew the sound, and they reminded their subordinates and juniors about what had arrived less than a day before.

  Riding on columns of actinic fire, five Caractacan Brotherhood starships rose majestically out of their landing pits. No sooner had their nose cones risen above the landing pads’ clamshell doors than their targeting systems were already at work.

  The Dauntless was slightly ahead of the other four ships. Her powerguns were the first unmasked, and her targeting scanners cut through the storm kicked up by the bombardment to start picking out targets as she accelerated toward the sky. Brilliant lines of blinding, blue-white discharge flickered from her emplacements, reaching out toward the savaged outer defenses, slapping the landscape below with vicious cracks of thunder as they passed, just below the speed of light.

  The targets weren’t the tanks and fighting vehicles moving toward that breach in Defensive Line Three. Not yet. The Dauntless wasn’
t high enough to have a shot at them yet. But some of the artillery wasn’t deep enough in defilade to protect it from the raving bolts of sun-hot plasma the starship was spitting. Rocket artillery vehicles suddenly turned into pearlescent balls of fire as they were struck. A lander burst, showering fire and fragmentation across an area roughly half a kilometer across, as strobing lightning played across the line of Unity positions near the edge of the plateau.

  The starships accelerated skyward, continuing to hammer every potential enemy heavy weapons position with devastating fusillades of powergun fire. Those Unity troops who survived only did so by hugging the earth and diving into trenches and fortifications. Only the vehicles that were well dug-in, or still in their excavated, fortified staging areas, survived that storm of sun-bright destruction.

  Five hundred meters up, the ships slowed their climb, but their rate of fire didn’t decrease. They still rained destruction down on any Unity troops and vehicles they could see.

  Return fire was beginning to reach for the towering ships on their tails of blue-white flame. The Boanerges took several powergun shots and a railgun hit, and she staggered under the impacts. All five ships responded in kind, even as a dozen HV missiles were swatted out of the air by point-defense lasers. The bay doors on the starships’ flanks irised open, and blunt cones shot out like bullets before flipping nearly end over end and igniting their own main drives as they plummeted toward the breach in Defensive Line Three.

  Only then did the starships begin their descent back down toward the spaceport to get out of the line of fire. Meanwhile, the Brotherhood dropships roared toward the breach where the defenders of Section Eighteen were making their final stand.

  Scalas really, really disliked these short-range drops. Kahane flat-out refused to even call them “drops;” he referred to these short-range, in-atmo drops as “shots.” And it was as good a description as any. They happened so fast they were over almost before they started. By the time his inner ear had recovered from the abuse of the hard skew-flip and the equally brutal kick of the main engine firing, they were almost on the ground. He had only about two seconds to regain his equilibrium before the dropship landed hard, compressing its landing jacks almost all the way to the pneumatics’ limit with the impact, and then the doors were falling open and he was slapping his harness release, ripping his powergun out of its rack, and pounding down the ramp.

  Landing in the middle of the Unity assault force would have been suicidal, especially against those kinds of numbers. Even facing the yeheri on Iabreton II, they hadn’t landed in the midst of the opposing force—and the yeheri hadn’t had tanks. Instead the dropship pilots had landed them with precision right on the inside of Defensive Line Three, lined up on either side of the breach where the sub-fort had once loomed above the wall.

  Scalas had been getting the real-time feed of the battlefield piped to him as he’d been strapped into his acceleration couch, so he knew precisely what they were getting into. That was why he slung his powergun and grabbed an extra HV missile launcher as he moved down the ramp. They had a lot of tank-busting to do. The bulky, slightly boxy launcher was a four-shot job, with each missile individually encapsulated. He didn’t have the reloads, but Torgan had grabbed those while he’d followed his centurion down the ramp.

  The ground was a mess, a mix of mud, ash, and shattered rock. The blowing dust in the brutal winds kicked up by energy weapons and hypersonic projectiles was sticking to the mud left over from the driving rain of the storm that had passed after they’d landed, but the ground was soft underfoot, making it hard to run. Yet run he did, making for the edge of the crater, where the air still rippled with heat.

  His armor would protect him from the heat and the rads. It wouldn’t protect him from the direct fire of a tank that made it through that breach.

  A fusillade of heavy-caliber fire hit the wall in front of him, where the defenders were still putting up a hell of a fight. Debris shot skyward with the impacts. The shockwaves rolled over the top of the broken wall and the wind snatched at him as he ran into its teeth, but he didn’t miss a step, just kept clambering up the pile of detritus toward a firing point.

  Behind him, the thunder of the Challenger’s bigger, hemispherical dropships was dying away. Costigan’s century had landed farther back than the infantry units, and for good reason.

  Scalas dug in as the slope got steeper and the footing more treacherous. The battle on the other side of the wall was getting more intense, and he could feel the rumble as one of the Unity armored vehicles approached the breach. The defenders were crumbling. The enemy was getting through.

  He reached the top and dropped to a knee just behind the cover of a broken section of wall where the curving portion of one flank of the sub-fort still stubbornly stood. Hefting the weighty HV missile launcher to his shoulder, he took a deep breath to steady himself, then took a step forward with his off foot and leaned out, searching for a target.

  Immediately, the blunt prow of a battered, gray-and-brown-painted tank appeared, not even fifty meters away. It was a short shot, barely far enough for the HV missile to arm itself before impact.

  And the sheer kinetic energy of the missile’s impact should do some damage, at least.

  The missile launcher had a shoulder pad specifically designed to fit against Caractacan pauldrons. It nestled against the powergun shoulder stop perfectly, and the flip-out sight was easy to acquire, even as he hastily put the crosshair on the advancing prow of the armored vehicle. Someone up on the wall was peppering the tank with powergun fire, blowing pits in the armor, but an infantry powergun just didn’t have the juice to get through a tank’s hide.

  Scalas held his fire for a fraction of a second, waiting for a better shot. The front glacis plate of a tank was a bad target, even for an HV missile. Too much chance that it would glance off. But if he waited too long, that thing was going to get through the breach.

  “Backblast!” he roared, his helmet’s exterior speakers amplifying the words, and then he fired, just as the base of the turret came into view.

  The fat, pyramidal turret had already been turned toward him, and it looked almost as if he was staring right down the barrel of its long railgun. He half expected to die right then and there. As good as Caractacan armor was, a direct hit from a 70mm railgun would turn him to mist. But the Unity gunner either didn’t see him—the armor’s chameleonic coating him amid the rubble—or was simply too slow.

  The HV missile struck the turret ring so close to its firing that it almost seemed instantaneous. In the same heartbeat that Scalas squeezed the trigger, the tank’s turret blew apart, the sheer force of the HV projectile blasting the debris away from the breach, tumbling and whistling through the air.

  The tank’s power systems surged in the backlash of liberated energy from the destroyed turret—the railgun must have been charged up for a shot—and capacitors in the back deck exploded with a rippling series of bright flashes, even as Scalas switched to his secondary tube and inched forward, looking for another target.

  He was just behind two of his men who had formed a similar hunter-killer team, crawling up the slope of the crater inside the breach itself. The gunner lifted just his head and his launcher above the lip of the crater, sighted in, and fired. A booming detonation sounded on the other side of the wall as another tank exploded under an HV missile impact.

  Caractacan Brothers always hit what they aim at.

  Scalas shifted his aim, spotting what looked like an infantry assault carrier trying to move around the far side of the tank he’d killed, and fired. This HV missile had a bit longer to arm, and it blew a glowing hole through the carrier’s flanks. The men inside were sucked out through the exit hole. What was left of them, at any rate.

  Then a powergun bolt slammed past his head from behind with a blinding flash and a tooth-rattling thunderclap, accompanied by a howling roar that was definitely not the rattle of Unity treads.

  The lead tank of Century XXXV would always be Cos
tigan’s. Its rounded prow looked sleek and deadly compared to the blocky wedges of the Unity tanks, and its domed turret seemed to almost blend into the hull. It glided forward on a thin cushion of air, its fans roaring, dust and ash billowing out from beneath. The stubby powergun muzzle protruding from the turret flashed again, and the shockwave slapped more dust away from its path, scouring the Caractacan infantry’s armor with grit.

  The lead tanks formed a wedge as they pushed up the slope toward the crater, and the two infantry Brothers on the crater lip had to scramble to get out of the way. The Destrier was well-designed, but as with any tank, it had limited lines of sight. A friendly could get turned to mangled paste beneath the steel skirts of one of those one-hundred-fifty-ton behemoths just as easily as an enemy.

  Three heavy powerguns quickly turned the breach into a hellstorm of sheet lightning. The gunners traversed their muzzles back and forth, tripping the weapons as soon as their sights crossed an enemy vehicle, and the autoloaders dropped in new cartridges as soon as the remains of the first were ejected. The R-17 Destrier’s main gun was semi-auto, designed to facilitate rapid engagement, and built to the highest tolerances.

  As Costigan’s tanks drove through the breach, continuing to lay down a curtain of powergun bolts, the rest of the century’s tanks followed. They were badly outnumbered, but Costigan was holding to the Caractacan battlefield doctrine of speed, surprise, and aggressiveness.

  Scalas didn’t wait around to watch. “Squads One and Two, with me!” he roared. The other three would take cover inside the wall and stand by until he knew where to deploy them. He turned and dashed along the wall, heading for the nearest set of stairs. The fight wasn’t going to wait for him and his men to gawk at the power of the Caractacan tank charge.