by Peter Nealen
A few of the Valdekan soldiers on watch had turned to look at Scalas as he spoke, only to be snapped at by Raskonesh. Heads snapped back toward the front.
Raskonesh asked another question. “What about family? When is your term of service over? Or does your family stay at your headquarters?”
Scalas shook his head. “There is no term of service. Once you finish your novitiate and take that oath, you are a Brother for life. Or until you disgrace yourself and your century badly enough to be cast out. As for families… they are not forbidden, or even frowned upon, necessarily. But few have attempted to start them. Our patrols are too long, too far out. Those who have married and tried to raise children have had a hard time of it.”
One of the soldiers, a squat, slovenly young man, asked a question. Raskonesh upbraided him acidly, but Viloshen translated anyway. “What must a man do to be cast out?” he asked.
“Show open cowardice in the face of the enemy,” Scalas said flatly. “Lie. Cheat. Steal. Break your word.”
“Murder?” Viloshen asked. “Rape?”
“Those are not punished by exile,” Scalas said grimly. “Each Sector Keep has its own gibbet.”
There was a hush in the pillbox at that, broken only by the continuing rumble and thunder of the bombardment.
“What about the other brotherhoods?” Viloshen asked, perhaps only to change the subject. “You said that not all were the same.”
“There are many,” Scalas said. “More than any man can really say. The galaxy is a big place.”
Viloshen translated another young soldier’s question. “Have they ever fought each other?”
“It has happened,” Scalas admitted. “It is a great shame and is not spoken of. No matter how far the opposing brotherhood has fallen.”
Scalas cocked his head, listening. The others all followed suit. The noise of the bombardment had changed, subtly. It was dying away, the steady drumbeat of impacts no longer making the entire wall shudder.
“They are coming,” Viloshen announced.
“Vrykolok,” Raskonesh spat, heaving himself to his feet and moving to the firing slit with his powergun held at the ready, though he kept back from the slit itself.
“What does that mean?” Dravot asked Viloshen.
Their interpreter was moving to the slit himself, squinting out into the hellscape of no-man’s land. “The vrykolok is dead man that has gotten up and walks around,” he said. “No mind, only puppet strings. Old fairy tales, from before times. From Old Earth. But name fits these soldiers. You will see.”
Scalas moved to the firing port, putting his helmet’s image enhancers to the test. The view was slightly less murky than it had been before, but it was still covered in thick smoke and dust.
For the most part, there was nothing to see anyway. No-man’s land was still just a blasted field of wrecked vehicles, craters, and less-identifiable detritus. Costigan’s tanks and combat sleds had withdrawn back through the breach; they would be needed as a react force if things got too hot. Kranjick had no intention of letting his heavy support get pinned down by digging them in on the enemy’s side of the wall.
But then Scalas thought he saw fleeting movement in the murk. He zeroed in on the area and searched. At first his efforts were in vain, but then he made out a human shape scuttling behind the smoldering hulk of a Unity armored assault carrier. If that was one of the Unity soldiers, he wasn’t wearing the spacesuit and flak vest that Scalas had seen before. This man was camouflaged—and camouflaged well.
Scalas continued to scan the battlefield. Now that he had an idea of what to look for, he spotted more of them. Draped in grayish camouflage ponchos, the Unity soldiers were slipping between the craters and the wrecks, keeping behind cover and concealment as much as they could, even while the waning bombardment was supposed to keep their enemies’ heads down.
He spotted one out in the open, running from cover to cover. Lifting his powergun to his shoulder—the holographic sight was slightly offset to make it easier to fire with an enclosed helmet—he fired.
The ear-splitting crack of the powergun’s discharge was muted inside his helmet, but the flash lit up the gloom cast by the flying dust and smoke. The running Unity soldier was knocked off his feet, a blackened hole through his torso, his camouflaged poncho catching fire.
As if that powergun shot was a signal, the ground before the wall suddenly erupted with enemy muzzle flashes. The Unity soldiers opened fire en masse at any opening in the wall they could see, their cone-bore rifles flinging a storm of hissing, high-velocity projectiles against the steelcrete face of the fortifications with a noise like a heavy rain.
One of the Valdekan soldiers had been standing too close to the slit. He toppled backward, his head snapping back with a spray of blood and fragments as a needle-tipped projectile punched through helmet and skull. His corpse fell heavily to the floor, even as a second man died the same way. The cone-bore shots moved almost as fast as a coilgun round.
Just before Scalas reflexively ducked below the lip of the firing port, he saw what looked like the entire stretch of no-man’s land get up and charge forward. There were hundreds of the enemy soldiers, all of them clad in grayish camouflage ponchos, open-faced helmets, and camouflaged balaclavas, and as one they were running toward the wall, firing from the hip on full automatic. The sheer volume of fire was enough to guarantee that they would hit something.
Bracing himself, reminding himself of the Code’s admonishment to never flee before the enemy, and knowing that his helmet was better-made than the Valdekan infantry helmets, Scalas straightened, shouldered his powergun, and opened fire.
His first bolt took the closest man in the face, the energy dump blowing off his helmet and a good portion of his skull. The corpse dropped to the ground, only to be trampled on by the horde behind him. Scalas’s second shot took the next man high in the chest. Whatever body armor the Unity troops might have been wearing, it was no proof against a 1cm powergun.
A cone-bore round glanced off Scalas’s helmet with a brutal impact. The pain was sharp and sudden, but far preferable to the damage that would have been done had that shot penetrated. He answered with a rapid string of powergun bolts, line-straight lightning hammering running, camouflaged figures off their feet with ravening, explosive bursts of sun-hot energy.
Geroges opened fire beside him, the thunderous crackle of his heavy MT-41 making it sound like the very air was being torn apart. In a way it was. Powergun charges soon sheeted across no-man’s land, blasting apart whatever they touched and burning everything around the impact points.
Another Valdekan fell. Powell crashed onto his back, a splintered hole through his vision slit. Caractacan armor was good, but it didn’t make a man invulnerable.
There was nothing in this life that could.
Then Raskonesh shouldered his way between the Caractacans and heaved a blocky, multi-barreled grenade launcher against the firing slit. Ignoring the roar of cone-bore rounds hitting the wall and snapping through the firing port, he opened fire.
Compared to the world-ending noise of powergun bolts, the grenade launcher sounded muted, almost silent. But it fired rapidly, each barrel pumping out a fat lozenge of molecular explosive wrapped in notched, monomolecular wire. And the Valdekan warrant officer was a good shot. He gauged his distance and his spread with a precision that spoke of long practice. Not all of the grenades made it to their targets—there was too much powergun fire roaring through the air, and it was inevitable that a few of the tiny bombs would fall into the line of a bolt—but even the aerial detonations were impressive, though they did little to slow the oncoming horde.
Those grenades that did find their mark landed in a sweeping pattern across the Unity front, which was now less than a hundred meters from the breach. Their thunderous explosions rocked the defensive positions with brutal shockwaves, and the overpressure and hypersonic fragmentation tore the Unity clones to bloody shreds, armor or no.
Still the Unity troo
ps did not disengage. Their fire slackened, if only because fewer and fewer bodies were able to continue the charge and keep shooting, but they kept coming. It was just like Viloshen had said. These men acted like they had no sense of self-preservation at all.
Then the first of them were at the breach.
“Dravot, Geroges, Viloshen, with me,” Scalas snapped. He pulled away from the firing slit. The cooling fins around his powergun’s muzzle shroud were glowing a dull red, and heat waves were rippling off the weapon. He keyed his comm. “All squad sergeants, I need reinforcements at the breach. Now.”
He had chosen his position, the last intact pillbox on the east side of the breach, deliberately. He had to suspect that Raskonesh had, as well. The warrant officer was already moving, cradling the heavy grenade launcher in his hands, reloads hanging in several satchels from his narrow shoulders, hefting the launcher so that he could reach the last hatch before the breach. Scalas reached around him and grabbed the latch, prying the armored door open.
Beyond, the passageway ran a short, angled twenty meters before opening up onto nothing.
Well, not exactly nothing. Twisted reinforcement bars and shattered steelcrete, still warm hours after the hit that had taken out the sub-fort, framed a long drop toward the crumbling slope that led down to the bottom of the debris-choked crater that formed the breach. Both Caractacan and Unity tanks had crushed paths through the rubble, but it was still going to be tough going for Unity infantry, and the climb out would be even worse. The defenders had the advantage of the high ground, as well. They could barricade themselves in that little hole in the wreckage of the wall and fire down at the enemy.
Unfortunately, there was room for only two or three Valdekan soldiers in that hole. The armored bulk of a Caractacan would be too much. So Scalas shouldered his powergun and started down the uneven, unstable fan of debris that had sloughed off the shattered wall and down toward the crater bottom.
The first few clone soldiers were already clambering down the inside of the crater to his left. There were more behind them; more than he’d thought there would be after the slaughter before the wall. A ragged burst of cone-bore fire crackled past his helmet, and he dashed for what little cover there was.
The impact that had created the crater had come in from above, but at such an angle that it had punched a hole through the top edge of the wall before expanding to form the rest of the crater below. That had left a lip of crumbling steelcrete around the breach itself, some of which had fallen in during the subsequent artillery bombardment. One long, ragged section had dropped and embedded itself in the detritus just below the breach, and that was what Scalas plunged toward and quickly crouched behind as cone-bore shots spat grit and debris off the ground around and behind him.
Some men in Scalas’s place might have been sickened by the slaughter that he had just witnessed and taken part in. Others might come to revel in it. There is, after all, a sense of power that comes with killing, and not all men can resist it. But Scalas had fifteen years of training and guidance in the Code—training that allowed him to shut down any emotional involvement in the fight. When he was in combat, he was a machine: cold, relentless, analytical. He killed those who presented a threat to himself, to his men, or to those he was tasked to protect, and he was merciful when sparing a life would not endanger those for whom he was responsible.
He was a warrior, not a butcher.
Yet even his practiced detachment was becoming shaky now that he was faced with these hordes of clones. There was something unnatural, inhuman about them, something that went far beyond the simple fact that they would all look exactly the same up close. They were a wave of replicated humanity, not a unit of individuals working together. Instead of each man finding his next piece of cover, moving to it, and firing on likely targets to cover his comrades’ advance, these men moved more like… insects. Or perhaps flocking birds. Where the lead moved, all the rest followed, almost without thought. When the lead fired, the rest blazed away in the same direction.
It was almost as if none of them were really trained. Or really men, in the true sense of the word. They acted on instinct, not thought.
He understood then what Viloshen had meant when he’d called the clones “living dead.”
But the enemy’s bizarre behavior was a matter for analysis at another time. Regardless of their mindlessness, in these numbers they could easily overwhelm the defenders, simply by burying them under a tidal wave of bodies.
Scalas took a breath to steel himself, then rose above his cover and opened fire.
More of the Caractacans, along with some of the braver Valdekans, were scrambling down the slope behind him, taking up firing positions and adding their powergun and coilgun fire to his own, hammering bolts down into the mass of bodies pouring into the crater. Raskonesh skidded to a halt right next to him in a small avalanche of debris, already cramming more of the molecular grenades into the launcher. He snapped it shut and heaved it to his shoulder, and another chorus of faint thumps heralded the grenades’ passage toward the enemy, followed by detonations that felt as though they might batter and bruise even Scalas in his armor, two hundred meters away. Then yet more fire came pouring down into the crater from the far side, the west side, where Soon’s century had set in.
And still the clones came on. They scrambled over the pulped, crisped, and shredded remains of their dead, undaunted and uncountable.
The Caractacans and Valdekans, shoulder to shoulder, kept killing them. They just couldn’t kill them fast enough.
The clones blazed away with their cone-bores, most not even bothering to aim. They pointed in the general direction of the defenders and held down their triggers. Given their numbers, it was enough. The air was as full of flying metal as it was of sun-hot copper plasma. Even through his helmet, Scalas imagined he could smell the ozone, the smoke, and the stink of bodies blasted apart and torn asunder.
Then a new noise entered the fray, a howling roar, though it was almost drowned out by the thunder of gunfire. And as it rose from behind them, a flash brighter than any of the 1cm or 1.5cm powergun bolts suddenly lit the entire crater, dispelling the pall of dust and smoke that hung over them and slapping the infantry down into the dust with a tooth-rattling shockwave.
Costigan.
His tank came gliding through the breach, his standard whipping from its wand, billowing dust and ash roiling up from its fans. His main gun fired again, the concussion battering not only the sides of the crater but anything within a hundred yards to either side.
Where those bolts touched, clones died by the dozens. Often there was nothing left that was recognizably human. Against the Unity armor, the Destrier’s firepower had been impressive, but against infantry…
It was like the wrath of God.
With a seemingly unending, sky-cracking roll of thunder, Costigan’s gunner fired again and again, traversing the turret from one side of the breach to the other, firing as fast as the powergun could cycle.
In minutes, it was all over. The outside of the breach was glowing and smoking, a hellscape of twisted, charred remains, heat mirage rippling above it and obscuring the no-man’s land beyond. The tank gunner and the infantry ceased fire, simply because there was no longer anything left to shoot at.
The clones had just kept coming until they were all dead.
But even as the fight died down, Scalas became aware that not all the shooting had stopped. His augmented hearing inside his helmet picked up the sound of intense fire coming from somewhere off to the east. And someone was calling him over the comm.
“This is Cobb!” the squad sergeant bellowed, trying to make himself heard over the cacophony of battle on his end. “We need reinforcements, now! Breach at the junction with Section Nineteen!”
Scalas keyed his own comm. “This is Scalas,” he said. “We’re on the way. Where’s Dunstan?”
“No idea,” Cobb replied grimly. “If they’re on the other side of the breach, they’re not coming to rei
nforce us.”
11
It was a struggle to get back up the slope, and another struggle to get through the narrow tunnels to Section Nineteen. The passages were jammed with wounded being hauled away toward casualty collection points and reinforcements trying to get to the breach. Including more than a few armored Caractacan Brothers. Scalas held his powergun’s muzzle high as he pushed through the passageways, in order to avoid burning any of the less-armored Valdekan allies with the still-hot muzzle shroud.
The tunnels ran along the outside of the defensive wall, with sub-forts at the boundaries between sections. Hatches opened on the outside, allowing access to the smaller revetments or pillboxes set between the sub-forts. Often, men had to duck into those hatches to clear the way; the tunnels weren’t wide enough for two-way traffic.
The noise ahead heralded a desperate fight. The thunder of powergun and hard-shot fire echoed down the tunnels in a continuous roar. He dreaded what he was going to find at the breach. Unless the wall had been broken completely, which he doubted—even over the noise of the earlier fight, they should have heard such a blast—this battle could see no rescue by one of Century XXXV’s tanks. This would be a pure infantry fight, outnumbered as they’d never been before.
He came to the last turn, where the passageway zigged toward the next defensive position. And what he saw was a close-combat nightmare.
The far side of the defensive position was just gone. The corner of the revetment had been cracked open by a catastrophic impact, leaving a gap in the wall and a hole in the floor. Part of the ceiling, weakened by the collapse, had fallen in, leaving a stack of rubble at the breach. Bodies, both Valdekan and Caractacan, lay mangled on the floor just inside—some had died in the blast that had blown the hole open, but others had fallen to the small arms fire as the clones had tried to enter. Clone corpses were piled in the breach, forming a carpet that spread down the slope of debris that had sloughed down from the hole in the wall. The Unity troops were still pushing in, trying to get over the dead, firing long, wild bursts as they came. Cone-bore rounds were smacking off every hard surface in the pillbox, ricocheting around the inside of the hardened space with angry whines that Scalas would never even have heard if not for the enhanced hearing filters of his helmet, not over the painfully loud, crackling thunder of responding powergun fire.