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

by Peter Nealen

  Scalas nodded, looking somewhere far away. “Yes,” he replied. “‘No greater love hath a man, than he lay down his life for his brother,’” he quoted. He met Kranjick’s gaze again. “But if they did not need to die…”

  “It does not matter if we see the needs or the causes. You know that. We do not see all ends. We cannot live on might-have-beens or should-haves. We can only act according to what is right, given what we know at the time. Those men who died today did that. And they stopped the assault. You can see that much good, at least.”

  Scalas nodded again, though reluctantly. He knew why Kranjick had sought him out, knew that he wanted to hold on to the resentment, particularly against Dunstan. Kranjick had led him through many battles as centurion, and knew his strengths and weaknesses. The Old Man knew what needed to be said, knew that his subordinate commanders sometimes needed that extra reminder to get their heads right for the fight.

  “We will mourn the fallen when the time is right,” Kranjick added. “Remember that. Remember that they died as Caractacans, in battle, facing their enemies. As any one of us might at any time. And then clear your mind so you can lead the rest of these men properly.”

  “I will, Brother Legate,” Scalas said firmly.

  Kranjick nodded, his face as impassive as ever. He heaved himself away from the wall and replaced his helmet. “Good. I think we should go join the discussion around Father Corinus for a moment, but then we need to start getting the men back up to the defensive positions, at least those that are still intact enough to withstand the bombardment. There will likely be another assault coming soon.”

  Mor hadn’t realized how much he’d been sweating under his armor as he’d worked with the work crews to clear the silo doors. Only as he clambered back into his acceleration couch did he catch a whiff of himself and grimaced. He ignored the acrid smell as he quickly strapped himself in.

  “Tell me we’re ready to lift!” he demanded.

  “We’re ready to lift,” Fry replied. “The hull damage won’t slow us down, and aside from some backlash when that umbilical port got wiped out, all systems are intact. The Vindicator, Challenger, and Boanerges are also ready to lift, though the Vindicator indicates she’s taken severe damage and is at roughly seventy-percent combat effective.”

  “Then we’re lifting in five,” Mor snapped, his hands dancing over the controls in his armrests. “Contact the ground force and tell them to be ready to move.”

  13

  For the second time in only a few hours, four massive, spearhead-shaped starships rose once again into the Valdekan sky. This time they rose from within a pall of smoke and dust, riddled with the passage of rocket artillery and railgun rounds. But no sooner had the ships’ noses risen above the levels of their silos than their own point defenses went to work, helping the Valdekan lasers clear the rockets, at least, out of the sky.

  The thunder of their drives shook the ground for kilometers around as they accelerated up into the atmosphere. And then their powergun batteries opened fire.

  Line-straight, blue-tinged lightning that made the Caractacan infantry powerguns seem like little more than sparks in comparison, lanced out, seeking the artillery emplacements that were still hammering the defenses and the starport. Vehicles detonated with actinic flashes as powerful plasma packets impacted, dumping thousands of ergs of energy into materials that simply weren’t designed to hold up to them. In seconds, the incoming fire had slackened to almost nothing in the face of the power of the ships rising into the sky.

  Tilting slightly, the starships drifted toward the battered section of defenses where the Avar Sector Legio had held the line. More powergun fire licked out, hammering at several assault columns that were already starting to crawl across no-man’s land, blasting armor into glowing scrap and reducing men to their constituent atoms. And then the dropships, at least those that had survived relatively undamaged, launched and plummeted toward the inside of the wall on tails of roaring, blue-white fire.

  The light strobing through the firing slits of the most intact surviving pillbox heralded deaths in the hundreds, if not the thousands. And yet Scalas couldn’t help but feel relieved.

  He turned to Raskonesh. “Some of the pressure should be off for a while. I expect the enemy commander will rethink matters after having two assaults destroyed in a matter of a few hours. We can even hope he doesn’t have the assets left to launch a serious attack after this. At least not for a while.”

  Viloshen passed his words along to the Valdekan warrant officer, who grunted a reply.

  “They have clones,” Viloshen translated. “They will only grow more.”

  But Scalas shook his head as one of his dropships settled only a few dozen meters away, on the other side of the wall, its drive vibrating the floor beneath them. “Even if they can grow them in a matter of days, they still have to make the weapons and equipment too,” he pointed out. “I can’t guarantee that we’ve bought you a significant breather, but maybe we’ve bought a few extra hours.”

  Raskonesh suddenly smiled. If there was a certain brittleness, a bleakness in the expression, it could only be expected after what the man had been through. He held out his hand, and Scalas folded it in an armored gauntlet.

  Raskonesh then said something in Eastern Satevic and motioned to Viloshen. The older man protested in the same language, but Raskonesh held his ground. Scalas looked from one to the other, painfully aware that he was going to have to break away soon. The dropships were on the ground, and they had to move.

  Viloshen, looking quite unhappy, turned to Scalas. “I am being reassigned,” he said slowly. “I am being your interpreter now.”

  Scalas studied the man. “And you are not happy about this?”

  “This is my unit,” Viloshen explained. “I belong here. But Raskonesh says that they must protect old uncle, because I am too old to be here any longer.”

  Scalas looked at Raskonesh. The warrant officer’s face was grave, and his eyes held little more than a distant hope—a hope that by sending Viloshen with the Caractacans, he might save at least one of his command.

  Scalas couldn’t bring himself to remind the man that going with the Caractacans was no guarantee of survival either. They weren’t going where the fighting was lighter, after all.

  Raskonesh clapped a hand against Viloshen’s shoulder, speaking as he did so. His voice was simultaneously reassuring and gruff, even though Scalas couldn’t understand the words.

  “He says that you need interpreter,” Viloshen translated reluctantly, “and that I should not worry so much about leaving. He says there will be plenty of opportunities to die for Valdek for all of us.”

  “I don’t doubt he’s right about that,” Scalas replied drily. “Well, if you’re coming, then we need to move. The dropships are here, and they can’t linger. Sooner or later, those enemy starships will be back overhead.”

  Viloshen spoke rapidly to Raskonesh. His voice was earnest, and it was clear that the thought of leaving his unit pained him a great deal. But Raskonesh replied in the same reassuring tone, taking the corporal now by both shoulders. Finally Viloshen nodded, though he was tight-lipped and unhappy. He turned to Scalas and squared his shoulders under his dirty combat tunic.

  “I am ready,” he said.

  “Good.” Most of the century was already out on the open ground of the landing zone, jogging toward the cone-shaped dropships. “Let’s go.”

  It took some doing to get back out into the open; part of the stairs leading down the inside of the wall had been obliterated by the bombardment. Scalas was confident that his armor’s articulation would let him jump the rubble-choked gap without destroying his knees, but he wasn’t so sure about Viloshen. Fortunately, some of the gear in the underside of their sustainment packs was carried for just such a purpose.

  Scalas pulled free a rappelling cable and secured it to Viloshen’s combat harness. “Hold on to this,” he said, putting the cable in Viloshen’s hands. “Otherwise this is goi
ng to get very uncomfortable, just before you fall out of your harness.” There wasn’t time to rig a seat, and it wasn’t all that far to the ground, anyway. Far enough to break bones, but not enough to kill a man.

  Viloshen looked momentarily confused, then looked down and nodded. He grabbed the cable, and Scalas braced himself against the wall and began to play it out. Viloshen must have rappelled at some point in his past, because he expertly put his feet against the side of the steps, eased out, and disappeared over the edge.

  Scalas held the tension even as he watched the rest of his squads board their dropships. The squat, truncated-cone-shaped ships had opened their middle thirds like flower petals for rapid boarding. When the sides were folded down, the steps set into the inner sections stretched down to the ground, and armored forms were now swarming up those steps. The dropship pilots could be dimly seen in the cockpits above them, preparing for a rapid takeoff. Beneath them, the ground still smoked and steamed beneath the thrust bells, which were showing faint blue glows; the pilots were keeping the drives as hot as they could without cooking the men as they boarded.

  The cable went slack, then was tugged twice. Viloshen was on the ground. Scalas triggered the tiny winch to reel it back in even as he started toward the gap in the steps. He cinched his slung powergun down tight to his back, got a running start, and leapt over the gaping hole in the stairs left by a projectile.

  He landed hard, right on the edge of the crumbling steelcrete. If not for his armor, his knee might well have been crushed by the impact. As it was, he merely teetered on the edge before flinging his weight forward to regain his balance. Then he was running down the remaining steps, hitting the flats at a sprint, and heading for the dropship with XXXII-A in large red characters just below the cockpit.

  He pounded up the steps and paused at the top, right in front of an empty acceleration couch. There were going to be quite a few of those, he realized. He keyed his comm on the century channel. “Squad sergeants, head count. Let me know when we’re ready to lift.”

  As he spoke, he craned his neck to look up toward the sky. There was little to see; the storms were still roiling above, mixed with dust and smoke kicked up by the titanic impacts of starship weapons and massed artillery. But he knew, even without seeing, that there were more of those white, pyramidal ships coming. The enemy had plenty of them to throw at the defenders. Just the brief glimpse they’d gotten in space was enough to tell him that.

  Time was running out. For the Valdekans, and for the Caractacans who had come to help them.

  “First Squad, up,” Kahane reported.

  Cobb’s voice came right on Kahane’s. “Second Squad, up. I have Viloshen, as well.” He sounded like a man walking through a graveyard.

  “Third Squad.”

  “Fourth.”

  “Fifth Squad, up.” Volscius managed to sound arch even giving such a simple report. But Scalas ignored the man’s tone. He was stuck with Volscius, and just had to deal with it. At least until they got back to the Sector Keep.

  Presuming any of them even made it off Valdek.

  He threw himself into the acceleration couch in front of him and quickly strapped in. “Century XXXII, all go,” he reported to the pilots.

  “Good copy,” came the reply. “Stand by for a rapid lift. Brother Legate Kranjick says we are going straight for the Sword of the Brotherhood’s last known location, so you had best replenish now.”

  The dropships weren’t just insertion vehicles; they also carried considerable stores of food, water, air, medical supplies, and ammunition, all of which were available through dispensers next to the acceleration couches. Brother Lathan, the chief dropship pilot aboard the Dauntless, would have made certain they were topped off before launching again. So as the dropship’s sides folded up and the rumble of the drive intensified, Scalas began filling his water and drawing fresh magazines from the dispenser just off his armrest. He had to hurry; dropships could take off with some considerable gees, and even with his armor’s articulation, it would not be a good thing to have his arm hanging off the armrest when that happened.

  Lathan had the countdown on the overheads, flashing in bright red lights. Scalas hastily stuffed the fresh magazines into his ammunition carriers, then braced himself for lift.

  The rumble rose to a mind-shredding roar, and then he was squashed down into his couch as the dropship leapt for the sky on a brilliant column of blue-white fire.

  Almost immediately, Lathan was tilting the dropship’s nose over, pushing the lander’s trajectory away from the wall and toward their target. Scalas felt the hard kick of acceleration ease more quickly than he’d expected, even as the drive maintained its throaty roar, and realized that Lathan was trying to stay low, balancing lift and forward thrust with the drive, a tricky maneuver in one of the ballistic craft. The dropships’ only lift came from their drives. They had no wings or rotors.

  He found himself tilted backward, the blood starting to flow to his head, as Lathan skimmed the dropship over the battered defenses and toward the spaceport. Scalas was all but blind; the dropships didn’t have windows in the troop compartments, and Lathan was too busy flying to worry about piping his sensor feed to the displays that could fold down in front of the acceleration couches.

  Scalas momentarily wondered how Viloshen was doing. He didn’t know what exploits the older man might have experienced as a merchant spacer, but doubted that something like this was among them. Still, it was a big galaxy, and one never knew. He decided the old corporal would be able to adapt. He certainly hadn’t seemed like the type to panic while they’d been on the wall.

  The first sign that something was amiss was when the dropship started to rock in flight. Then it suddenly dropped precipitously before steadying again. Scalas could dimly hear what might have been the crackling thunder of powergun bolts or missile detonations outside the hull, just barely audible over the rumble of the dropship’s drive.

  “We’re taking fire, Centurion,” Lathan reported. “There appears to be a sizeable enemy force around the target landing zone. And that’s not all.”

  Lathan paused as if uncertain how to say what came next. Scalas felt a tightness in his chest as he waited for the worse news.

  “The target zone is right next to what appears to be a large impact site, Centurion,” Lathan continued. “It’s mostly obscured by smoke, dust, and weapons fire, but the size is consistent with the low-level crash of a starship.”

  Scalas’s mouth was suddenly dry.

  “It would appear, Centurion, that the Sword of the Brotherhood has been brought down by enemy fire.” Lathan’s voice was strained, and with good reason. Not only was he flying the dropship under difficult conditions, but one fifth of their ship strength appeared to have been destroyed.

  “Is there any sign of Century XXXIV?” Scalas asked. They were talking on a private command circuit. None of the rest of the century was hearing this.

  “If the intensity of weapons fire near the wreck is any indication, there are definitely survivors,” Lathan reported. “But we cannot land close to them. The nearest safe LZ is nearly a kilometer away, directly south of the wreck. Anything closer is either obstructed or under too much fire.”

  “Understood,” Scalas replied. “Set us down where you can, and we will proceed to the wreck on foot.” He felt his guts twist a little at the thought. He was going to lose more men. “What does the terrain look like?”

  “This section appears to have mostly been devoted to auxiliary support structures for the spaceport. Expect built-up—” Lathan stopped suddenly, and the dropship rocked hard to one side as a nearby explosion shook it like a leaf. When he spoke again, it sounded like he was talking through clenched teeth. “Expect built-up industrial areas, with a lot of debris and wreckage. It looks like when that ship hit, it spread a lot of pieces over the area.”

  It sounded like a nightmare to fight in, but Scalas was confident in his Brothers. They were well trained—far better trained than the cl
ones—and being able to maneuver would give them an advantage they hadn’t had while holding the static defenses on the wall.

  “Opposition near the LZ?” he asked.

  “Not as heavy as it appears to be near the wreck. Though that’s not saying much. Stand by. Touchdown in one minute.”

  Scalas switched to the century’s channel. It was as good a brief as he was going to get. “One minute to touchdown,” he called. “We’re landing approximately one kilometer south of what appears to be the wreckage of the Sword of the Brotherhood. We will land, debark, secure the LZ and then proceed to link up with whoever survives of Century XXXIV. Once we’ve secured our Brothers, we’ll attempt to rendezvous with Commander Rehenek and fall back to the spaceport.”

  There was no time for further explanation. He felt a momentary weightlessness as Lathan dropped the lander straight toward the ground as fast as he could, trying to get below the firing arcs of any heavy weapons that might be out there. It was a standard combat drop, but it never got any more comfortable.

  The landing jacks hit hard, the impact jarring even as the hydraulics absorbed some of the shock. Then the sides fell away, unfolding to reveal the landing zone around them, and Scalas was hitting the quick release on his harness.

  Lathan’s description hadn’t done the industrial area justice. Directly ahead as Scalas stood was a fiercely burning tank farm, belching black petrochemical smoke from shattered holding tanks twice the size of the dropship. A tangle of pipes stretched out in all directions, some intact, others smashed and twisted into jagged webs of metal. To the north were dense grids of containers, vast machines dedicated to the spaceport’s workings, and various outbuildings. And above all this loomed a dark shape, smashed and broken, wreathed in smoke, and yet still bearing enough of the outline to identify it as a Spear-class starship.