by Peter Nealen
The Dauntless burst out of the clouds a third of the way up the volcano’s side, and was briefly surrounded by multiple layers of towering clouds that wreathed the peak of Gorakovati in a tumultuous riot of black, white, and gray. The clouds were lit by flickering, brilliant flashes of lightning, both natural and manmade, and the dark blue of the sky, fading to indigo at its zenith, peeked through the gaps in the overlapping storms high above.
It was a breathtaking view, but one that Mor could not afford to linger on. He was too busy fighting to keep the ship on course, struggling against the tortured jet stream around the higher elevations of the volcanic peak that threatened to snatch her from his control. And then they were plunging into another flat, wind-whipped storm that wreathed the upper elevations of the mountain, and the visual feed dropped to a few meters of hazy gray, lit only occasionally by a distant flicker of lightning.
When they broke out once again, they were nearly in the stratosphere, above the highest clouds, yet the mountaintop still loomed above them. Mor hadn’t truly appreciated the sheer size of the volcano until then. The four ships hurtled higher into the thinning air, and by the time they were curving over the caldera, the last of the storms was nearly a kilometer below.
The caldera was a vast bowl of bare, naked rock, far too high for plant life or even snow. In fact, a glance below revealed that it was, in fact, a network of overlapping craters. Apparently the volcano’s eruptions had never come at exactly the same spot over the millions of years of its growth.
“We’re still in the clear,” Fry reported in a strained, grunting voice, though Mor hadn’t asked. It had been understood that if any Unity ships had been within range and above the horizon at that point, they could be engaged. Passing over the caldera was the high point of the starships’ trajectories. It was also where they were most vulnerable. “Some of the closer ships coming from L2 have opened fire, but between the distance and our countermeasures, they’re still hitting wide.”
Mor saw that fact vividly illustrated a moment later, as a kinetic kill munition struck the caldera below them with a flash. Shortly thereafter, the impact spot started to glow a dull orange; it seemed the magma was a lot closer to the surface in the caldera than he’d thought.
“We might be able to hit one with a powergun bolt,” Fry mused.
“Negative,” Mor replied. “We can’t afford the time or the added attention. Let them think we’re transports trying to flee before the fortress inevitably falls.”
Their planned landing zone was coming up fast, even as they plunged through another storm. This one seemed almost gentle in comparison to what they’d gone through on the way up. Mor guessed that was because they were almost three hundred kilometers from the impact zone where orbital and ground fire were still dumping megajoules of waste energy into the atmosphere. It was still powerful, though, and still dangerous.
Then it was time. “Stand by for maneuvering!” Mor grunted, a moment before he hauled back on the controls.
The gee forces intensified as he hauled the Dauntless’s nose toward the sky, flattening the Brothers deeper into the carefully padded couches. In seconds, the ship was effectively flying sideways, her nose up, her main drives pointed at the ground below, air resistance helping to slow her hypersonic forward rush. He kept tilting her back until she was angled nearly thirty degrees from vertical, her nose pointed slightly back toward the towering peak of Gorakovati behind her, her engines roaring and blazing to help arrest her forward momentum even as she dropped toward the forests and meadows below.
A powergun bolt thundered through the air, missing the ship by meters. “Well, we’ve spotted that grounded command ship,” Fry reported. “And it’s spotted us. It’s still over two hundred kilometers east, but we’re taking fire. And they might be scrambling transatmospheric fighters shortly.”
“Target and engage as needed,” Mor ordered, fighting to keep the ship steady. A wrong move at that altitude and they were all dead.
“The Boanerges has been hit!” Fry reported.
Mor checked the display. The Boanerges did appear to have taken a direct hit from either a powergun bolt or a high-energy laser. There was a wound in her hull, and she was struggling to keep upright on her drives.
The Challenger returned fire. The big, Sarissa-class ship wasn’t just the cav carrier. She was considerably larger than the more common Caractacan Spear-class, and had power and batteries to match. A furious storm of blue-white lightning flickered from her guns, replying to the intensifying powergun fire coming from the east. At the same moment, the Unity fighters appeared, compact, wedge-shaped darts with stubby, forward-swept wings. They were coming fast, outrunning sluggish sound and already firing green-tinged powergun bolts. The Vindicator and the Dauntless both sent brilliant streaks of plasma flashing away toward the enemy in reply.
Fighters had little use in space, which was why the Brotherhood rarely used them, preferring their starships for close support when possible. But in certain circumstances, they still had a niche to fill, and the Unity had apparently come prepared.
There were those who would scoff at the idea that single- or double-seat fighters, with considerably lesser powerplants and weapons, could possibly present a serious threat to a combat starship, a behemoth capable of reaching out and striking another ship with annihilating force from across a planetary orbit. But Mor was not one of them. He knew that sheer numbers could count for a lot, and while an individual fighter might not have the punch to severely damage or destroy one of the Caractacan ships, the entire squadron that was flying toward them at the moment could.
The Dauntless’s point defense lasers lashed out, and the lead fighter exploded violently, scattering glowing wreckage across the blue-tinged forest below and starting several fires across nearly three kilometers. At the same time, a spray of 3cm powergun bolts hammered against the ship’s hull, and the damage control officer started calling out reports.
“Hull breach in Section Four, losing power in ventral thruster hub Sixteen,” he reported. “Direct hit on Bay Three’s hatch.” He paused. “Hatch is damaged, but still operational.”
In the time it had taken him to report, four more Unity fighters had been swatted out of the sky by the Dauntless alone. The Vindicator had taken more, and the Challenger was reaping a swath of destruction through any formation that dared get close to her bulk. The survivors flashed past with a roar of sound and a scattered burst of powergun bolts, and then they were diving close to the deck, skimming the trees and racing away, already banking to come at the descending starships from a different angle.
But by the time they were in position for another pass, the Boanerges was nearly to the ground, though she was still shaky, wavering slightly as her drives and thrusters pulsed unsteadily. Mor frowned; she must have been hit harder than he’d thought. Her batteries had been all but silent during the last few moments of airborne violence.
They were descending toward a valley on the shoulder of the mountain. A jagged ridge of ancient, tree-swathed lava that was probably once a rivulet from a particularly massive eruption had already masked the wounded Boanerges from the Unity command ship. In fact, it appeared that the Challenger was the only Caractacan ship still with line of sight on it, as none of the rest were taking fire from starship weapons any longer. They only had to worry about the fighters that were coming around at the end of the valley, where the land dropped off in a sheer cliff nearly half a kilometer high.
The fighter pilots seemed to be as suicidally dedicated—or indoctrinated—as the ground troops that the infantry centuries had engaged. They came in without hesitation, low and fast, their supersonic shockwaves battering the trees below them, spraying brilliant powergun fire at the silvery ships that descended toward the woods on columns of fire.
Mor couldn’t see Fry from his couch, but he could imagine his tactical officer’s squinting frown. He could also imagine what was coming next, and he wasn’t wrong.
The Dauntless opened fire on
the fighters with her main powergun batteries.
The blue-white lightning was powerful enough that even a near-miss threw the lead fighter out of control, sending it spinning into the mountainside, where it exploded in a drawn-out, rolling fireball. That same bolt impaled a second fighter, which was suddenly just gone, vanished in a brilliant, actinic flash. A second bolt took out three fighters at once; they had been holding close formation, and the explosion of the middle ship’s demise from a direct hit engulfed the other two.
The last few kept coming, straight into a blinding wall of powergun fire from the Vindicator, Dauntless, and Challenger. Only a faint scattering of glowing debris survived to finally strike the ground.
The Boanerges was down, nearly hidden in clouds of vapor as her onboard cooling systems tried to bring the ground and the surrounding atmosphere down to livable temperatures. The other three ships descended in a protective triangle around the damaged ship.
Given the sheer weight of a starship, it would seem unwise to land on anything but a prepared and reinforced platform, but it had been discovered, centuries before, that the blazing thermonuclear fury of the ship’s drive had a tendency to vitrify the soil beneath it, fusing any manner of planetary surface into rock solid enough to support the ship. However, it still required no small amount of skill to safely set a starship down on unprepared ground.
Mor was eyeing the landing zone carefully, deftly drifting the Dauntless back and forth, trying to level out his chosen landing spot. He had heard about a starship tipping over after landing on ground that was slightly too steeply angled. That would likely not be survivable.
When he was satisfied that he had burned a mostly flat pad of fused mineral into the ground, Mor gingerly settled the Dauntless toward the surface. Her massive landing jacks lowered, coolant vapor pouring from their ports and raising a billowing, blinding cloud around her hull. Then they touched, the massive hydraulics compressing under the weight, and they were down.
“Touchdown,” he announced over the intercom. “I suggest you gentlemen get moving, while we do what we can to get the Boanerges back in action.”
17
Deploying dropships while on the ground wasn’t common practice, but neither was it unheard of. The starships had been designed for the possibility, and the Brotherhood trained for the task. There were times where an actual launch simply presented too high a risk that the landers would simply be shot out of the sky.
The landers had been rotated as soon as the starships touched down so that they were no longer pointed out the hatches, but had their noses aimed up at the sky. When the hatches opened, armatures moved the landers outside the ships, dangling them from super-strong cables that were clamped into housings at their noses. The dropships hung in the air, swinging slightly, then the cables slowly let out, lowering them toward the ground at a sedate, stable pace and setting them down lightly. Scalas imagined that the dropships’ pilots were as thankful as he had been to make a soft landing, considering the bone-jarring shock that was usually a combat touchdown.
Scalas hit his harness release and got up. Kranjick had sent the assembly signal as soon as the Boanerges had set down, and Scalas had seen enough on the way down to know just how little time they had. “On me,” he barked, snatching his BR-18 out of its cradle and starting down the ramp.
The landing zone remained oppressively hot. His armor did a respectable job of moderating its internal temperature, but he could see the air rippling between still-roiling clouds of coolant vapor, and could feel the heat of the fused soil beneath his boots. As he jogged toward the Boanerges, his century was on his heels. The Valdekans were holding back for now, as their battle suits weren’t quite as high-quality as the Caractacan armor, so they would need a few more minutes before they were able to brave the hostile environment that was a starship’s landing zone.
Kranjick was standing at the ramp of his personal dropship, towering over every other Brother in sight. The howl of Costigan’s vehicles could be heard as the remainder of Century XXXV made its way through the clouds of fog from the grounded Challenger.
“Board the sleds as they come,” Kranjick ordered, his voice booming out over the LZ. “Costigan’s tanks will lead out, with the sleds and the assault guns in the rear. We have a tentative contact point where we should be able to get the commander on comms.”
“Do we have his general location?” Scalas asked over the comms.
Kranjick’s visor turned, and he seemed to look straight at Scalas through the coolant murk. “A general one, yes. We were able to get some fragmentary comm contact with him while in flight, but only enough to give us a cardinal direction and approximate distance.” That was no surprise; there had been far too much energy flying around for comms to have gone unaffected. “It was enough to determine where we need to go to try again.”
The first of the sleds appeared through the mists, a flattened ovoid hovering on a roaring air cushion. Its turret was set far forward, with the troop compartment in the rear. The driver brought it to an easy halt, swinging the vehicle around on its fans to present the rear troop hatch to the infantry Brothers.
Scalas looked back at Cobb and Kahane, who were closest, and pointed. The squad sergeants started getting their men on board. Kunn and Volscius directed their squads as well, both keeping their distance from Scalas. Kunn might have glanced over at him once or twice, but was otherwise wrapped up in the workings of his own squad. Volscius didn’t look at Scalas even once, or at any of the other squad sergeants for that matter.
What are you thinking of doing? Scalas wondered as he watched Volscius. He knew it was not a good sign that he didn’t trust his own squad sergeant, but there had been something off about his lone “pragmatist” ever since Dunstan’s desertion. Volscius had looked up to Dunstan, had agreed with him about the need to make the Code more “flexible.” And now… Scalas might have thought that the cost of Dunstan’s hubris would have had a sobering effect on his subordinate, but instead Volscius had withdrawn from the rest of the century—except for those few in his squad whom he had groomed to his way of thinking. His brief words with the others had been clipped, formal, and laden with an undertone of resentment.
Scalas would have to keep an eye on him.
The rest of the combat sleds, along with the handful of comparatively blocky Valdekan infantry fighting vehicles, gathered around the battered Boanerges, and the men boarded. Kahane was standing on the ramp of the first sled, watching him, but Scalas waved at the man to tell the driver to wait. As the centurion, Scalas would be the last one to board, and the first one off in combat.
But he also had another reason to wait. This needed to be addressed.
“Squad Sergeant Volscius,” he called.
Volscius paused at the ramp of his own sled, then stiffly turned and marched over to Scalas.
“I’m detaching Diego, Marsdan, and Farlander from your squad,” Scalas told him. “Tell them to report to Squad Sergeant Cobb.”
Volscius stiffened. “May I ask why you’re taking from my squad?” He had tried to keep his voice flat and formal, but there was a note of petulance in it that Scalas didn’t like.
“That should be self-evident,” Scalas replied. “Cobb took the heaviest losses on the wall. Your squad took the lightest. So Cobb gets some of your men.” He stared at Volscius for a moment. “Why else would I pick yours?”
“Because of my friendship with Centurion Dunstan,” Volscius said defiantly. “I know that the rest of the century considers him dishonored.”
Scalas wished that his visor was transparent, so that Volscius could see the scowl of contempt that crossed his face. “And if the rest of us took honor as lightly as you and Dunstan, then you would have a reason to suspect my motives,” he said coldly. “Tell those three to report to Squad Sergeant Cobb and get to your vehicle.”
For a moment Volscius neither moved nor replied. Then, almost choking on the words, he muttered a quick, “Yes, Centurion,” before turning on his heel
and stalking away.
Yes, I definitely need to watch him. Kunn perhaps should not have been promoted simply because he lacked the charisma of a leader, but Volscius was dangerous.
Something made him turn, and he could have sworn that Kranjick was watching him. But he might have only imagined it.
He turned and jogged up the ramp of his own sled, ducking his head and swinging onto a combat seat. “All in,” he called to the driver, and the troop door swung shut.
A few minutes later, the vehicles were heading uphill toward the crest of the gigantic ridge that loomed over the landing zone. The fans howled and roared, and the tanks occasionally had to force their way through the trees, sending blue-fronded trunks falling away with a crash, a hundred years of growth succumbing in seconds to a hundred tons of metal and composite driven by irresistible force.
The clock was ticking, and every man in the convoy knew it.
Scalas joined Kranjick and Costigan on the ridgeline. Their armor had turned a vague grayish-blue, blending in with the rocks and the few stunted, wind-swept trees that clung to the top of the ridgeline. The three centurions crouched beneath the limbs of a hoary old pseudo-conifer that had been bent almost double by the wind over the years, its roots splitting rocks as it held on against the fury of the mountain’s storms.
Scalas lifted his magnifiers to his visor. The forested slope stretched away below them for some distance before reaching the cleared farmland and plains of the flatter lowlands. With enough magnification, he could even see the ominous, squat silhouette of the grounded Unity command ship just outside a small city in the distance. It appeared to be a larger version of the standard cruisers they had fought in space, but thicker in beam and, if he was looking at it right, five-sided instead of four.