by Peter Nealen
The Sword of the Brotherhood. What was left of her.
Scalas took all this in even as he plummeted down the steps and hit the ground running. He realized that the only reason Lathan had been able to pick this spot as a landing zone was because the outbuildings had already been flattened, either by artillery or orbital strikes. Ash puffed from beneath his armored boots as he jogged toward the far side of the LZ, dodging the jagged, snapped-off structural members and twisted, blasted sections of wall that still jutted from the ground. The dropship pilots had needed all their skill to steer around those ruins to find a place to land.
Unslinging his powergun, he headed straight for the dark shape of the wreck, already deploying his squads to the flanks. Through the drifting smoke, his enhanced vision could make out movement in the container yards ahead.
They had clones to fight. And if he was seeing things right, there were a lot of them.
14
Though Caractacan internal comms codes were supposed to be unbreakable, many of the centurions still preferred to use hand and arm signals where possible. Technology was a useful tool, but it was not infallible. That was one thing that every novice learned in his first year. Especially when he was tossed into a survival situation without half his armor’s systems working.
Scalas pointed to Cobb and Solanus and signaled for them to set up a base of fire on the pile of rubble overlooking the nearest avenue through the container yard. To Kahane, Volscius, and Kunn, he indicated that they would move down the next avenue over, leapfrogging as they went. They could probably hold their position and run their ammunition stocks dry if that was what they were there to do—but it wasn’t. The objective was to get to the wreck, not to kill clones.
“Lathan,” he called, risking the comm. “Hold on the LZ as long as you can. We’ll extract as many of Dunstan’s men as possible and be heading back here as fast as we can. If you have to lift, just make sure you let me know beforehand.” The Brothers on the ground would have to adjust on the fly if that happened. Scalas didn’t really want to think about it.
“I’m deploying the defense guns, at least until the enemy starships get within low orbit,” Lathan replied. “After that, we’re going to have to run for shelter or risk getting pasted.”
“Understood,” Scalas said. “We’ll be quick.” I hope.
He jogged through the drifting smoke toward the nearest cover. That proved to be the one remaining wall of a wrecked outbuilding that was still smoking. Considering it appeared to have been made of vitrified concrete, that meant that whatever had hit it had been packing a lot of energy.
Of course, he reflected as he crouched behind the ruined wall and peered around it, there were plenty of weapons being utilized on Valdek that fit that description. He had been in some brutal fights in his time, but this was the worst he had ever seen. Even worse than the handful of times he’d gone up against the M’tait.
The lane ahead was clear for the moment. Smoke and dust clouded the air, cutting visibility to less than a hundred meters. Kunn and his squad ran past, ducking into the gap between two stacks of containers across the lane from where his own squad had halted. Kunn stood in the center of the gap as three of his men set in, covering down the lane. One held high, the other low, and the third leaned out beside the two of them, exposing himself somewhat more but putting a third powergun muzzle on the danger area. The fact that he was one of the MT-41 support gunners helped.
Kunn, standing ramrod straight behind the Brothers covering the cross lane, looked around to make sure that all angles were covered before signaling to Scalas that they were set. His motions were stiff and precise, as would be expected from Kunn. The man was a machine.
Scalas got up, brought his powergun to his shoulder, and glided out into the lane. Behind him, Kahane’s squad followed, spaced out in a rough file, weapons trained on every gap and overhead that wasn’t filled by a Caractacan. Target identification was going to be crucial over the next few minutes, as they were moving toward other Brothers, who were presently engaged with the enemy. They had to be absolutely certain what they were shooting at before they fired.
That was part of Brotherhood training as well.
As he moved down the lane, Scalas swung to cover each opening he passed, keeping his muzzle trained down cross-passages until another Brother moved up to replace him. With visibility as limited as it was, they could not afford to take chances. An enemy might appear within a few meters at any moment.
He reached an intersection, or what had once been one. It looked like a high-energy weapon had struck the top of the nearest container stack, blasting one container in half and knocking the entire stack into an avalanched heap across the lane. He quickly took a knee facing down the left-hand lane, while Volscius took his squad and set up on the opposite opening.
The roar and crackle of weapons fire filled the smoky air. There was quite a fight going on, but it was shrouded in dust and smoke and obscured behind piles of wreckage.
The eerie quiet of the lane was suddenly broken by the snarling thunderclaps of powergun fire. Someone in Volscius’s squad had just opened fire.
With a glance to make sure that Kahane’s squad was covering their sector, Scalas lifted his muzzle and turned, looking back toward Volscius’s position. He couldn’t see much, only the flashes of powergun bolts flickering into the murk beyond. Then a cone-bore round skipped off the ground not far from his boot with a nasty buzz, confirming that Volscius’s men weren’t shooting at shadows.
A moment later the lane was filled with projectiles, shredding the tattered whorls of smoke and dust, the sharp cracks of their passage muted by his helmet. Scalas threw himself behind cover. His armor could stand up to a lot, but that didn’t mean that standing in the open under fire was a good idea.
Yet he knew they couldn’t afford to get bogged down there. There were going to be a lot of clones between them and the wreck of the Sword, but there were also starships inbound, ready to rain destruction down on their heads. Time was short.
Taking a deep breath, he heaved himself to his feet, bellowed, “On me!” and began to run forward, right into the teeth of the clone rifle fire.
A shot spanged off his pauldron, but didn’t penetrate. He answered with a fast trio of powergun bolts.
As he neared Volscius’s position, he could make out the dim shapes of clone troops in the murk. There were a lot of them, as he’d come to expect. But they weren’t using fire and maneuver. They were simply rushing forward, firing from the hip, just like their assault on the breach back at the wall.
Volscius’s support gunners opened fire with their MT-41s, and the bulky, heavy powerguns raked the oncoming mob of clones with almost continuous, blue-tinged beams of destruction. The clones fell as fast as they came, mowed down like grain, but they kept charging, kept shooting.
Scalas added his fire, dropping two more with as many shots, as he came abreast of Volscius, who was barricaded against a container, leaning out to fire on the mass of clones.
“We need to push through,” Scalas said. “We can’t stay here!”
“There are too many of them!” Volscius protested, his voice amplified by his helmet to be heard over the thunder of powergun fire. “Even if we kill one with every shot, they’ll mow us down!”
Scalas shot three more, as fast as he could transition between targets. Heat was already starting to ripple off his barrel, though it was nothing compared to the support guns. That was what the MT-41s had the thick cooling sleeves for. “If we push forward, some of us die, but we get to the Sword,” he said. “If we stay here, eventually we either get overrun anyway, or the starships kill us from the upper atmosphere. And I wasn’t suggesting. Move!”
Scalas might have been justified hanging back to coordinate his men. But that was not the Caractacan way. Firing as fast as he could switch targets and cycle the trigger, he ducked out into the lane and ran for the next available cover, a narrow gap between containers. Two more cone-bore rounds skipped o
ff his armor, and a third struck his breastplate almost dead center, staggering him, but then he was in the alcove, dumping the rest of his magazine into the mob of clones still milling beyond the stacks of smoking bodies that the support gunners had laid in windrows in the lane in front of him.
A sudden flickering, thunderous hurricane of powergun bolts tore into the flank of the clone unit, through the next lane over. It seemed that Cobb had moved the support by fire element up as soon as he’d heard the shooting.
A crackling voice speaking an unfamiliar language—or maybe a code—boomed out through the smoky alleyway. Almost instantly, the clones still standing started falling back behind a blizzard of gunfire. The Caractacans kept up their own fire, answering hypervelocity bullets with sun-hot plasma bolts.
Then the last of the clones disappeared into the smoke, and there were no more targets. The powergun fire slackened; the Brothers only shot at what they could see.
“Status reports!” Scalas barked.
The squad sergeants reported in. Volscius had taken some losses. Urien, Tommas, and Borgin were down. Fredrich had taken a bullet through a joint in his armor and was out of action, though he looked like he’d survive.
A lot of ammunition had been expended. And they still had a long way to go.
“Move up, and watch for flankers,” Scalas instructed. He didn’t know what that voice had been, but his suspicion that the clone cannon fodder had trained commanders was getting stronger. It was a horrific, inhuman way of waging war, but he supposed that if one viewed the clones as expendable, easily replaceable assets, it made a cruel kind of economic sense.
Ducking down the next lane, he led the way toward the Sword. The sounds of battle coming from the wreck were only getting more intense.
Scalas dashed for another half-destroyed hunk of machinery, the purpose of which was lost to time and the powergun bolt that had shattered it. Crouching in the lee of the warped and blackened metal, he peered out, his helmet’s enhanced vision helping paint a picture of what he was looking at.
They had broken out of the container yard after only a few more sporadic clashes with clones. Each time, the clones themselves seemed almost mindlessly aggressive, yet they were completely obedient to the commands blasted out by some unseen loudspeaker. Scalas had yet to glimpse one of the commanders, but he’d already resolved to put a powergun bolt through the helmet of the first one he saw.
Most of the area surrounding the wreck of the Sword of the Brotherhood had been blasted to dust. It was apparent that there had been buildings here—the remnants of foundations were still clear among the rubble—but little now remained that stood more than knee-high. The destruction appeared to be the result of heavy ground fighting, rather than starship bombardment, since the whole yard wasn’t a single, massive, vitrified pit of blackened glass.
The Sword had clearly come down at an angle, striking near the engine bells and then tipping over to hit the ground. The impact had burst the hull in several places, and there were even more gaping holes along her visible flank from weapons fire. The area around the reactor was still glowing, and was no doubt ferociously hot, both in terms of thermal energy and hard radiation, even if the emergency dump had kept most of the contamination down. Without an emergency shutdown, there wouldn’t have been a starship left at all. Or much of the surrounding landscape, for that matter.
The crash had thrown up a humped berm of debris, and the survivors appeared to be using that for cover. Ferocious powergun fire was blasting out from the crater rim, looking like an intense lightning storm at ground level, centered around the wreck of the Sword.
And the defenders certainly had no shortage of targets.
The ground around the crash site was swarming with clones and Unity fighting vehicles. The angular tanks that the Brotherhood had fought at the breach were closing in, even as hundreds of infantry fired on the defenders from almost every direction.
Kahane leaned out from behind Scalas and scanned the open ground between them and the wreckage. He whistled. “That’s going to be interesting.”
Scalas watched a platoon of tanks rumble past, apparently oblivious to the now grayish-brown armored forms hidden in the dust and ruins. He was wracking his brain, trying to think of a plan. They had three less-than-intact centuries, and there were thousands of clones out there on the four hundred meters of open ground between them and the remains of Century XXXIV. The Brothers could do a lot of damage, that was for certain; but could they win through to their beleaguered brothers and get back out, without getting slaughtered to a man?
A voice rumbled over the comm. “Costigan, this is Kranjick. Report your position.”
Costigan’s reply followed—a set of numbered coordinates.
At the touch of a few keys set into his gauntlet, Scalas brought up a faint overlay map in his visor, pinpointing the cavalry century’s position relative to his own.
“We have been slowed by obstacles and dense structures,” Costigan continued. “We should have line of sight on the crash site within the next five minutes.”
“I need your tanks to go hull-down to provide direct fire support,” Kranjick said. “There are enough enemy vehicles out on the open ground between our last covered and concealed positions and the crash site that I do not want to risk a direct attack. I’ve identified a covered route that should allow the infantry centuries to cross to the crater, provided your vehicles can keep the enemy occupied.”
Even as Kranjick said it, Scalas’s helmet overlay flashed with an indicator that showed him the path that might provide enough cover to cross to the beleaguered defenders. It would be extremely risky, but if the tanks could keep the enemy’s attention…
“Acknowledged,” Costigan replied. “Any chance of direct support from the starships?”
“Not yet,” Kranjick said. “It’s obvious that the enemy in this vicinity can present enough massed fire to bring down a Spear-class. I want to thin them out a bit before we risk losing another of our starships.”
“Confirmed,” Costigan said, a note of resignation in his voice. Scalas understood the other man’s misgivings. The starships packed far more firepower than Costigan’s tanks, especially the Challenger. But losing the Sword of the Brotherhood had already placed them at a severe disadvantage, making the surviving ships that much more precious. It was a delicate balance that the Brother Legate had to strike, and Scalas admitted to himself that he was glad the decision didn’t lie on his own shoulders.
“Infantry centurions,” Kranjick called, “begin to converge on my position, but keep behind cover. Engage only if necessary. Once Century XXXV’s vehicles are in position, we will move. This is going to be a dead sprint through enemy fire, gentlemen. When I say go, you move hard, you move fast, and you do not hesitate. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Soon replied. Scalas added his own acknowledgment, then turned away from the fight around the wreck to brief his squad sergeants.
That was when the whole world split asunder.
The flash could have blinded anyone looking directly at it. Even turned away, Scalas’s visor dimmed to compensate. The thunderclap was a physical blow that almost knocked him off balance. Flying grit hissed against his armor.
He and Kahane turned back toward the wreck, only to see a scene of utter devastation.
A faintly glowing furrow had been blasted through the middle of what had once been a formation of Unity tanks. Most of those tanks were now burning wreckage, and the rest weren’t moving. Either they had taken damage that wasn’t immediately apparent, or their crews had been shocked into immobility by the magnitude of the blast.
A second blast raved through the dust, a little farther away. Fortunately this one wasn’t as bright as the first, though Scalas’s visor still nearly blacked out to compensate for it. The concussion, however, was nearly as intense, and the wave of high-velocity grit just as brutal.
“Those are starship powerguns,” Kahane said. “Got to be.”
Scalas agr
eed. But they seemed to be coming from the wreck…
With a sudden sharp crack, a brilliant flash darted upward from the crater rim, near the crash site.
Scalas suddenly understood.
“They managed to dismount a shipboard powergun and fire it,” he said, faintly amazed at the combination of audacity and desperation needed to try such a stunt. “And I think it just failed.”
Kranjick must have reached the same conclusion, though he didn’t comment on it. “All infantry centuries, that’s our opening,” he said. “Go, go, go!”
There wasn’t time to fine-tune who would go where. They had to move fast to take advantage of the sudden lull in the fight. Even the seemingly mindless clones appeared to have been stunned by the twin heavy-caliber powergun blasts.
Now that the hard-shot fire had died away to nearly nothing, the Brotherhood powerguns from the crater blazed away as intensely as before. No, not quite; there was nothing coming from the vicinity of that last flash.
“By squads, fighting wedge, on me!” Scalas snapped over the century comm. Then he was moving, ducking out from behind the wrecked machinery and running for the next hummock in the dusty, windswept ground.
It was not a straight-line sprint. Even after the twin shocks of those massive powergun bolts, that would have been suicide. At least some of the clones would have recovered by the time they covered four hundred meters, no matter how hard they ran. So the Caractacans moved forward in short dashes, moving from furrow in the ground to unidentifiable debris to wrecked vehicle, their armor shifting shades to make them dim shadows flitting through the smoke and dust.
Dravot had pushed hard to get in front and take point, but Scalas was right behind him. The haze thickened as the debris thrown up into the atmosphere by the powergun blasts began to settle. It wasn’t enough to cover their sprint, but nor was it so bad that they couldn’t see where they were going.
That crackling, amplified voice speaking that unfamiliar language roared out over the battlefield once more, audible even over the rolling thunder of powergun bolts. It sounded angry, strident, and Scalas was struck by the sense that the voice was having to push the clones harder than before. Maybe they weren’t quite as mindless as they appeared. Maybe a sharp enough shock could actually break them, make them huddle in cover and not want to move.