by Peter Nealen
The man did not look at him. As well he might not. Scalas forced himself to check on Volscius’s squad anyway. They were still his Brothers.
The ground shook and shuddered as the starships above rained down destruction.
Powergun bolts, HELs, and railgun rounds the size of groundcars hammered at the defenses, blasting glowing craters in the landscape and the wall. Fountains of dirt, ash, and smoke rose hundreds of meters into the atmosphere, where it was whipped into a frothing fury by the storms still raging from the passage of so much energy. Beams of near-light-speed particles and collimated light stabbed skyward in reply, punching through the clouds and adding to the storms’ fury.
Unseen by the men underground, eleven of the twenty starships above were hit. Particle beams carved two into separate pieces that continued to fly, unpowered, off into the depths of the system. A high-energy laser penetrated straight through the hull of another, setting it spinning. Two more were struck by both HELs and particle beams, and the energy dump shattered them into thousands of spinning fragments.
The others lost reactor containment and detonated. Their radioactive particles would continue on their current trajectories, following the wreckage of their similarly stricken sister ships into the void.
The fight for Valdek went on, no matter how inevitable its end might be.
12
Captain Mor cursed as a world-shaking impact rocked the Dauntless on her landing jacks. The catastrophic noise reverberating through the hull that followed actually made him flinch. “Status!” he snapped.
It took a moment to get a reply. “The overhead hatch took a direct hit on one side,” the damage control officer reported. “The shot penetrated, and debris fell into the silo.”
“Damage report?” Mor found he was gripping the arms of his acceleration couch.
“Most of the debris seems to have fallen alongside the ship and missed the hull. We have minor hull damage in Sections Four, Six, and Seven. One of the spaceport umbilicals was destroyed. Umbilical Port Three is gone.”
“Can we lift?” Mor asked, even as he called up the displays in a window on the side of the holo-tank.
“Provided the remains of the hatch can be moved out of the way. All ship’s systems appear to be functional, though we’ll have to run the reactor hotter to make up for the loss of the umbilical.”
We would, except that we’ve been running hot ever since we set down. They’d never drawn the Dauntless’s primary reactor all the way down to standby, because they’d had no way of knowing when they might need to lift on short notice.
“Contact the Port Authority,” Mor said. Port Authority in the fortress was controlled by the Valdekan military, and so was directly involved in the defense. “Ask if they can get that hatch out of the way, or if we’re going to have to blast our way out to go support our infantry Brothers.”
“Blasting out would likely do far more damage to the ship,” the executive officer, Commander Fry pointed out. “If we do need to self-extricate, might I suggest a slightly more careful course of action? Like work crews?”
“Not the point, Fry!” Mor snapped.
“Caractacan Starship Dauntless, this is Valdekan Port Authority.” The woman who appeared in the small comm window in the holo-tank was stiff-necked and formal, her blond hair drawn back severely behind her head. But she was quite attractive, despite the scowl that she probably thought made her look more professional. “Be advised, the protective hatch on your silo has been disabled, and we cannot open it remotely. Do not attempt to launch. Work crews are on their way.”
“Acknowledged, Port Authority,” Mor replied. “We are deploying our own work crews to assist.”
The woman’s frown deepened. “Starship Dauntless—”
Mor cut her off. “My Brothers are out there on the line, under fire, Port Authority,” he said. “We need to be able to lift to support them. Time is pressing, and many hands make light work. I’m sending my work crews up. Have yours rendezvous with us as soon as they arrive. Dauntless out.”
He cut the transmission, reached down, and punched the release on his harness. The ship rocked again as he swung his legs off the side of the acceleration couch.
“Captain?” Fry asked. “Are you really going to do that much good up there? Shouldn’t you stay here, on the command deck?”
“I was turning a wrench while you were still in school, Fry,” Mor replied. “I’m pretty sure I can still remember how to run a cutting torch and a winch.” On the way to the lift, he called over his shoulder to the comm officer, “Contact Centurion Scalas and Brother Legate Kranjick. Inform them that we won’t be able to lift to provide support or launch the dropships again for some time.”
The comm officer replied without looking up. “We won’t be the only ones. The Vindicator has been heavily damaged, and the Boanerges is as trapped as we are.”
“Then we’d best get to work, shouldn’t we?” Mor said.
“Acknowledged,” Scalas called over the comm, almost at the same time that the heavy impacts of starship weapons stopped. Brother Quinias’s transmission had been faint and broken through the weight of rock and fortifications, but Scalas had gotten the gist.
“Brothers,” he said, his voice echoing through the bunker, “we’re going to have to hold our positions for a while longer. The Dauntless is trapped in her landing pit and cannot launch the dropships to retrieve us. We could start back on foot, but Brother Legate Kranjick has decided that we will hold. If another assault comes before the Valdekan reinforcements arrive, we might be our allies’ only hope.”
Getting murmured acknowledgments from his squad sergeants, he started across the underground chamber toward Raskonesh. A new series of heavy impacts or explosions vibrated through the ground under his feet. But these seemed… lighter somehow, he thought, looking up. Not as much dust and grit was sifting down from the steelcrete ceiling.
“Artillery,” Viloshen said as he approached, noting the movement of Scalas’s helmet. “They must not be quite ready to launch next attack yet.”
Raskonesh said something, which got a feral chuckle from most of the Valdekan soldiers gathered nearby.
“Maybe they saw how we chewed up last assault, and some shiver of fear has even reached blank minds of vrykolok,” Viloshen translated wryly.
“Maybe,” Scalas replied coolly. He looked up again. He was not given to the chest-thumping that some men needed to get their morale up before a fight. He was colder, more calculating than that. “Somehow, I doubt whoever is directing these ‘living dead men’ is as mindlessly aggressive and loyal as they seem to be. The clone soldiers on the assault might not care, but I expect that their commander has recalculated, and is not in a hurry to waste quite so many of his resources.”
Viloshen shook his head before even translating. “They have thrown thousands of them at us,” he said. “They do not care about their soldiers’ lives. If they even have lives.”
“They are human, are they not?” a familiar voice asked through Caractacan helmet speakers. “They breathe, they bleed, they move themselves. They have lives.”
“Father Corinus,” Scalas said, turning to the familiar voice. The legio chaplain was clad, as always, in black armor, with a white cross above the star-and-crossed-rifles emblem of the Brotherhood. He carried no weapon, but he walked the battlefield without fear, nevertheless. He must have landed with Kranjick and the rest of his century. His armor was as dusty and scarred as all the rest.
Viloshen pointed at the wall, indicating the devastation beyond. “They swarm like insects, heedless of their own lives, and kill with as little conscience as wolves. How can they be human? They do not act like humans.”
“And that is one of the great sins we look upon here,” Father Corinus said, sitting down on an ammo crate. “Whatever tinkering made these men the way they are, it has robbed them of their very dignity, made them little more than cogs in a machine, instead of children of God.” He shook his helmeted head sadly. “I
weep for them as much as I weep for the devastation they have wreaked upon the Valdekan people.”
Coming from a politician, the words might have been mere platitudes. Coming from Father Corinus, Scalas knew they were sincere. If there was any Caractacan who took his moral duty completely seriously, it was Father Corinus. And given that no man joined the Brotherhood without knowing that moral duty, that was saying something.
Nearby, Squad Sergeant Volscius spoke up even as Viloshen was still translating what Father Corinus had said to the Valdekans.
“Men?” Volscius scoffed. “How can you call those things ‘men’? They are clones. Copies of human beings.”
Scalas snapped around, ready to put his subordinate in his place, but Father Corinus replied mildly. “Copies?” he said. “Yes, I suppose they are, in a way. In the same way that an identical twin is a copy of his brother. But is a twin any less of a man because he shares a genetic code with his sibling? Is he a carbon copy, a ghostly echo? Or is he his own person?”
“That’s different,” Volscius insisted.
“Perhaps in origin,” Father Corinus said. “I will not deny that the enemy must be doing terrible things to produce these clones. To play God, to artificially force life into one’s desired template, all for that life to be used as an expendable pawn from birth… that is a great crime. But it does not make these men any less human. It only makes them the victims of someone else’s manipulation.”
“If they are human, then they still have free will, do they not, Father?” Kahane asked. Most of the men in the bunker had begun to gather around the priest as the discussion continued, even as the enemy artillery pounded at the defensive positions above them. “Then they must know what they’re doing.”
“I will not dispute that on some level, yes, they must know,” Father Corinus said. “Nor do I dispute the necessity of killing them in combat. A man may understand his enemy, even have compassion for him, and still be required by the moral imperative of defending his home and his people to kill that enemy. I do not say that they are victims in order to argue that we must lie down before them. But the greater crime lies with whoever has brainwashed them, presumably from the first moment of their birth, and thrown their lives away in the pursuit of power.”
Viloshen had been translating as Father Corinus spoke, and now Raskonesh spat and snarled something. “We have seen more of vrykolok than you have,” Viloshen interpreted. “They are monsters, nothing more. We will kill them, all of them, wherever we find them.”
“Even if they surrender?” Father Corinus asked mildly.
“They do not surrender,” Viloshen said flatly, not even bothering to translate the question. “They do not know how.”
“And if they do not, and they still present a threat,” Father Corinus allowed, “then you truly have no other choice.” He sighed. “And so I fear what this means,” he added quietly. “What this war heralds.”
Scalas couldn’t see the older man’s features behind the black casque of his helmet, but he knew the man’s sorrowful expression. Father Corinus saw all men, ultimately, as brothers. Brothers estranged, to deadly extent, but brothers nevertheless. Yet he was a warrior’s priest. War was his parish, but he saw war as all Caractacans should; as a sometimes-necessary evil. He would not preach nonviolence where such would leave the defenseless at the mercy of the aggressive and the cruel.
A heavy hand descended on Scalas’s pauldron, and he turned to see the massive, armored frame of Brother Legate Kranjick looming over him. The legate was taking the time they had hunkered down under the bombardment to check on his legio. All of it.
Kranjick didn’t say anything. He simply inclined his helmeted head toward the far corner of the bunker, near the tunnel leading to the next such shelter, where one of the overhead lights was out, and away from the group gathered around Father Corinus, debating the ethics of killing clones in job lots.
Scalas nodded and slipped away from the edge of the knot of battered, dusty survivors.
“Hold it!” Mor barked, his voice amplified by his helmet’s comm. His armor was different from the infantry suits—sleeker, slimmer. A wider vision slit. It needed to protect him in case the hull was breached, not from close combat. It was still designed along similar lines, though. “Don’t cut that yet! Connors hasn’t secured the lines! You want to be the fumble-fingers who dropped half a ton of steelcrete on the Dauntless’s nose?”
He wasn’t impressed with the Valdekan work crew that the Port Authority had sent him. They were nervous and hasty, and their urgency to get the job finished as quickly as possible had already nearly crippled the Dauntless with falling debris twice. They were scared, and they were sloppy.
Of course, as another rocket buzzed overhead to slam into a more distant part of the spaceport, he had to admit that he understood. These people had been under bombardment of some form or another for days on end, and more and more of the rocket artillery was getting through the spaceport’s rapidly degrading network of point-defense lasers.
He’d probably be jumpy and trying to spend as little time in the open as possible if he was them, too. But understanding them didn’t get the Dauntless freed from her damaged silo any quicker.
The damage to the clamshell meant that they needed to set up winches to pull the doors apart. These had been provided by the Valdekan work crews, who anchored the powerful motors with their big cable reels to the roof of the silo before deploying the lines to pry the damaged silo hatches apart. The anchoring had gone according to plan, mostly, but actually freeing the damaged hatches and getting them open was proving more difficult.
And the language barrier wasn’t helping. Mor was doing a lot of pointing and makeshift sign language to get his directions across. He was still shouting and carrying on, in both Trade Cant and Latin, but it was mostly noise to the Valdekans. He thought wryly that it would have provided considerable entertainment to his own crew had the situation not been so dire.
Another pair of rocket projectiles roared overhead. The first went long, but the second impacted against another closed clamshell hatch only a few hundred meters away with a tooth-rattling wham. Fragments whickered through the air and came pelting down around them. Mor flinched just as much as the rest when a chunk of errant steelcrete smacked off the still-intact clamshell with a bang and fell into the silo. It probably wasn’t going to do much more damage to the hull, but he lamented every impact on his beloved starship. This was no way for a ship to die, slowly crushed underground while she sat on her landing jacks.
“Connors, hurry up and get those last two lines secured and get tension on them,” he snapped. “Our friend with the cutter there doesn’t look like he’s all that certain he should wait.”
His crewman was already hard at work, trying to set the pitons that would anchor the lines to the jagged edge of the damaged hatch. The pitons were designed to punch into steelcrete and then practically weld themselves in the hole, nearly becoming a part of the material itself. But they needed to be placed right, especially given the damage that had already been inflicted on the hatch, or they wouldn’t be able to keep the heavy, armored door from falling onto the starship below.
Connors got the first one placed, but as he tried to punch in the second piton, the steelcrete, already damaged, crumbled. Unfortunately, the Valdekan worker really didn’t intend to wait. He already had the cutter running, and when yet another rocket salvo came in from the outer defenses, knocked out of the sky by laser hits, creating a rippling curtain of explosions only a few short kilometers away, he instinctively ducked and put his cutter to the hatch.
Mor started to dash across the uneven top of the silo, trying to stop the Valdekan, visions flashing through his mind of a half-ton of steelcrete falling and permanently disabling his ship. He reached out to grab the local and throw him away from the hatch when Connors yelled at him.
“Captain, we’re set! Let him cut!”
Mor snatched his hand away just before seizing the worker, who was n
ow looking up at him, wide-eyed behind his safety goggles.
“Go on,” Mor said, waving at him to continue, convinced the man didn’t understand a word. But the Valdekan set the cutter to the hatch and began expertly, if a little sloppily, cutting the damaged hatch free.
Mor looked out at the pall of smoke and dust that hung over the outer defenses. The infantry Brothers were out there, probably getting hammered by the bombardment, and they currently had only one ship that could even lift. The Sword of the Brotherhood wasn’t even answering comms, so he had to assume she was even more badly damaged than the others.
We’re coming, Brothers. We’re coming as fast as we can.
Kranjick leaned against the wall under the burned-out ceiling light, unsealed his helmet, and pulled it off. Faced with his mentor’s heavy-lidded, blank expression, Scalas did the same. If the Old Man wanted to talk face-to-face, he’d talk face-to-face.
Kranjick, as ever, looked kind of sleepy and bored. But Scalas knew the legate too well to ever believe that his seeming disinterest was anything but a façade. The Old Man saw more than anyone would ever expect.
“How are you holding up?” Kranjick asked, in that same heavy monotone he always used.
“I lost a lot of men,” Scalas admitted.
Kranjick nodded slowly. “Yes. You did take a heavy hit, didn’t you?” He continued to watch Scalas. “As I said, Dunstan will answer for it, in this life or the next.”
“Do you know where he is?” Scalas asked.
“I have some idea of the general area. But let me worry about that. You worry about your men. Prepare for the next step in the fight.” His expression did not alter a whit, but it seemed as if his gaze sharpened. “Do not let this drag you down, Erekan. You did not fail them—Dunstan did. And the same could have happened even if Dunstan had held his post. It is appointed to each man his time to die, and those men died defending others. ‘No greater love,’ remember?”