by Peter Nealen
Scalas felt his throat tighten as he looked up at the Brother Legate, realizing just how much of a father this big, slow-speaking man had become to him. He didn’t want to be acting legate. If Kranjick was going down there to make a last stand, Scalas wanted to be by his side.
I’m not the one to lead the legio. I’m not that leader. I’m not a good enough strategist. I don’t have the charisma.
I’m no Michael Kranjick.
But almost two decades of discipline spoke for him. “Yes, Brother Legate.” His voice sounded choked in his own ears.
Kranjick now put both hands on Scalas’s shoulders. “Every man has his time, Erekan,” he said. “A time to die. A time to say goodbye to his mentors and stand in their place. Perhaps this is that time. Perhaps it is not. Let it be as God wills it.” He clapped Scalas on the arm, an impact that would have been bruising if not for his armor. “Now, we both have work to do, and time is pressing. Do your duty, Acting Legate.”
Scalas saluted. “Yes, Brother Legate.”
There was nothing more to say.
Michael Kranjick had been living on borrowed time for fifty years. He felt every one of them as he jogged down the tunnel toward the entrance to the mountain installation, hearing the thunder of weapons fire echoing down the passage toward him. The heavy demolition charge that he and Kratzke had pulled out of one of the combat sleds weighed him down and made every joint ache.
As he’d expected, he’d gotten quite a bit more than two squads worth of volunteers. It was not the Caractacan way to shrink from a fight, much less one so desperate and vital. In fact, he was slightly disappointed that he hadn’t had to turn the entire legio away. The bulk of his men wanted to go, but the handful who hadn’t stepped forward made him wonder if he had truly done all he could to lead his Brothers, almost his sons, down the right path.
But it was too late for such regrets. Together with thirty Brothers, he trotted toward what could very well be the last fight of his life.
Trite thinking, old man. Every fight could be the last of your life. It’s in God’s hands. It’s always been in His hands.
Still, the weight of the demolition charge clenched in one gauntlet had a certain finality to it.
The charge was a last-ditch measure. They wouldn’t set it off until it seemed that all was lost. But it was there, as ominous as the faint rumble of the distant dreadnaught’s drives, dimly audible even over the sounds of the desperate fight ahead.
The lights were turning dim and green as they proceeded, and the Caractacan armor darkened along with them. They were armored shadows, specters clumping through the stone passage toward the fight.
The gates had been shut after the vehicles entered, but the Unity forces outside were clearly hammering at them with everything they had; heavy ordnance had already blasted several gaps in the barrier. Intense flashes flickered through the holes, momentarily lighting up the darkened tunnel and filling it with a deafeningly reverberating thunder.
Kranjick and Kratzke moved to the gate and set the demolition charge down. The other men flowed past them, splitting to move to the bunker entrances on either side of the gate and reinforce the beleaguered Valdekan defenders.
Peering through the nearest hole, Kranjick assessed the situation as best he could.
The shuttles hovered on their thrusters at the far end of the causeway, dancing in and out of the cover of the ridgeline as they took the bunkers and the gate under fire from above, while a company-sized force advanced by fire and maneuver across the causeway itself. Even as he looked, a pair of HV missiles slammed out from one of the shuttles, and he had to duck as one punched through the compromised gate above his head, showering him and Kratzke with debris.
He quickly turned his attention to prepping the demolition charge. It was a short priming sequence, followed by syncing the initiation system to a remote control in his gauntlet. Now they could seal the tunnel as they retreated back toward the Pride.
As he turned toward the nearest bunker entrance, another HV missile hit the gate only a few meters in front of him. For a brief moment, the world went black as he was thrown backward, landing heavily on his back with a crash. Only the padding inside his armor saved him from serious injury, and his visor’s display flickered from the shock.
He rolled over in the cloud of dust and smoke and heaved himself up off the ground. Fragmentation had severed his powergun’s sling, and he had to scramble over to pick it up, checking it over quickly to make sure it was still operational. Bright scars had been scored in the metal, but it appeared to be intact. Then he looked toward the gate.
The missile had punched a man-sized hole in the barrier, and it had cracked enough of the rest that a chunk nearly three meters tall fell away with a crash, barely missing the demolition charge as it struck the floor. The gate was completely compromised. The defenders’ fire was the only thing keeping the enemy out.
The nearest enemy soldiers were now less than two hundred meters away. There was little cover on the causeway, but they were still advancing cautiously, rushing forward in short dashes before dropping prone or to a knee and opening fire. They were making up for the lack of cover by sheer volume of fire.
And these weren’t the same barely trained, cheaply equipped clones they had fought at the fortress. They were fully armored, with strange, faceted helmets, and they moved like elite soldiers and carried powerguns and HV missile launchers.
And there was something else.
A single figure stalked forward in the middle of the formation, making no effort to take cover. It was not as quick as the shock troopers making their short dashes, but its bulk was unmistakable. Power armor was rare, because its disadvantages often outweighed its advantages. It wasn’t as flexible or maneuverable as articulated battle armor, it presented a very large target, and it was heavy. But it was actually well-suited for this sort of assault, for one reason: it could soak up an unholy amount of punishment, and could carry a lot of firepower.
This one looked like it was one of the heavier suits, the kind that was even proof against powergun fire, though it was of a design that Kranjick wasn’t familiar with. Instead of having a helmet, its entire torso and head were a single, vaguely egg-shaped plastron of armor—decreasing its vulnerability to precision shots. And the quad-barrel powergun on its shoulder was spitting green-tinged lighting fast enough that it looked like a single, continuous beam of destruction sweeping across the defenses.
Kranjick returned fire, peppering the front of the power armor’s plastron with a tight grouping of six bolts even as he analyzed the overall situation and tried to think of a plan short of simply falling back and detonating the demolition charge. Because as he looked at the firepower the shuttles, the advancing assault troops, and that power-armored figure could bring to bear… he started to think the original plan wasn’t going to be enough.
The power-armored monster staggered as Kranjick’s fire sublimated metal and composite off the front of the plastron, but it didn’t stop. As Kranjick ducked back, a return burst of hypervelocity plasma chewed into the metal and steelcrete above his head, blasting a deep, smoking furrow in the remains of the gate with a crackling roar of thunder.
The Caractacan Brothers had brought a couple of HV missile launchers, and one of them suddenly blasted from the left-hand bunker, aimed at the shuttles. But a chin-mounted point-defense laser crackled and detonated the missile in midair, still short by nearly twenty meters. The armored shuttle was rocked by the force of the explosion, but nothing more. And then four more HVMs slammed into the bunker, which went silent.
In the meantime, the assault force had bounded forward another fifty meters.
“Scalas, Kranjick,” he sent over the comm between rapid shots, hoping his transmission would reach through the installation’s internal relays, which they had synced with on the way down. “Status.”
“We are aboard, but it will still take some time to get the ship ready to lift, sir,” Scalas replied.
That decided it. He had to find a way to hurt the Unity forces, drive them back. Simply collapsing the tunnel would hold them precisely as long as it would take them to blast through the rubble. And that wouldn’t be long enough.
Kranjick swung out from behind cover again and dropped a charging Unity soldier with a headshot. The faceted helmet exploded into glowing shards, along with most of the skull beneath it, and the armored body fell. Another burst from the power-armored figure’s quad-barrel forced Kranjick back a moment before another trio of HVMs from the shuttles brought more fragments of rock and steelcrete down around him.
“If we get closer, the shuttles won’t be able to fire on us without killing them,” Kratzke pointed out between shots from where he was barricaded on the other side of the hole.
“Presuming they’re more solicitous of their soldiers’ lives than they’ve shown themselves to be so far,” Kranjick agreed. He shot another charging shocktrooper and watched as a long burst from an MT-41 tore through two more. They were whittling down the attackers, but not quickly enough.
Although the left-hand bunker had fallen silent—the HVMs must have killed or incapacitated everyone inside—the fire from the right-hand bunker was only intensifying. Kranjick and Kratzke remained pinned down in the entryway, hunkered behind the largest remaining sections of the gate.
Kranjick hammered another trio of bolts at the power-armored figure, which had slowed. His aim was good, and he knew he was chipping away at the center of that plastron. But even knocking that monstrosity out wouldn’t keep the shuttles from simply pounding the resistance to dust and ash with missiles. And that wasn’t even accounting for the enemy dreadnaught, now visible as it dipped lower in the sky on columns of fire.
The man in the power armor suddenly broke into a lumbering run. The thinning of his forward armor under the Caractacans’ hammering must have finally started to alarm him, and now he was trying to close the distance as quickly as possible, fire blazing from his quad-barrel as he came. The power armor looked heavy and unwieldy, but the length of its stride meant that he quickly outpaced the men in unaugmented combat armor, pounding toward the gaps in the gate.
Kranjick held his ground as a storm of powergun fire tore the air apart around him. He dumped the rest of his magazine into that chest plastron as fast as he could pull the trigger. A ravening bolt pierced his knee, exploding the joint in a blast of melted armor and superheated tissues, and he fell—only to heave himself up on his remaining knee and keep firing. But when another bolt blew his pauldron off and shot mind-numbing pain through his side, he crumpled and lost his grip on his powergun.
The massive armored figure charged closer.
Gritting his teeth against the pain, Kranjick forced himself to grab his powergun again. Bracing it with his almost useless right arm, he shoved himself up to lean against the cover of the shattered gate. Kratzke’s fire had fallen silent, but he didn’t have time to look. If he had, he would have seen the other Brother flat on his back, a smoking hole through his helmet. Instead he faced the charging behemoth of metal and composite, got his shaking sights back on the glowing wound in the front armor, and opened fire again.
One bolt got through. The armored figure staggered. Its momentum carried it forward as it fell, and it plowed into the ground with a crash.
Kranjick crawled out through the gap in the gate, dragging himself toward the fallen power armor. The defenders’ last fusillade of fire tore into the wedge of armored shock troops rushing forward, and then another HVM struck the last remaining bunker. The bunker vanished in a flash and a billowing cloud of dust. Fragments of rock and metal rained down on the ground before the gate.
Kranjick reached the power armor. He had hoped to turn that quad-barrel against the shuttles. But the weapon was bent and useless, crushed by the impact of the suit when it fell. The mini-HVM launcher mounted to the other shoulder, however, looked like it might be operational. The powergun would be better—he’d seen the shuttles swat a full-sized HVM out of the air—but this was what he had, and he would fight until his last breath.
“Kratzke,” he rasped over the comm, still unaware that the other man was dead. “Get clear.”
He gave Kratzke a few moments that the man was well past being able to use, and then he tapped the fateful control on his gauntlet.
The demolition charge was a molecular explosive. A charge half its size could vaporize a Destrier tank and knock out an armored man standing nearly three hundred meters away.
Brother Legate Kranjick was less than half that distance from the charge when it detonated.
When he came to, he tasted blood. He couldn’t see anything, and for a moment, he thought he’d been blinded. He knew he wasn’t dead; he was in far too much pain. Only after a moment did he realize that the mountainside was shrouded in dust.
The gateway behind him was gone. A chunk of the mountain that must have weighed more than a starship had slumped down to cover the gate and what was left of the bunkers.
And his legs.
He was buried in boulders up to his waist.
It didn’t matter. He knew he was dying. Whispering a final prayer for forgiveness for all his sins, and for protection over those he had left behind, he pried the mini-HVM launcher free of its mount. The launcher hadn’t been built to be mounted on the power armor, so it still had an external trigger, with a mechanism built into the mount to activate it. It also had iron sights.
He twisted it around, searching for the shuttles. They were drifting forward, no longer flying evasively now that the bunkers’ fire had been silenced, their drives roaring with deep growls that vibrated in his chest. The battle-armored troops were advancing carefully, their weapons up, ready to quickly crush any further resistance.
Kranjick waited. He had no other choice; he couldn’t move. Even if he hadn’t been half buried, he was certain that every bone in his legs had been shattered.
Slowly the enemy troops advanced, apparently convinced they had eliminated the defenses and assessing how to get through the landslide.
That was close enough. Kranjick triggered all four of the mini-HV missiles at the nearest shuttle, aiming for the directional thruster in its thick, stubby wing.
The shuttle veered suddenly, and its point-defense laser took out one of the little missiles. The second shuttle got another one. The other two slammed into the tilt-thruster and detonated.
The drive exploded, flipping the shuttle over and sending it spinning to a fiery death on the mountainside below, taking out the landing pads in the process. The shockwave rocked the closest shuttle, but it held its fire. The clone soldiers were too close.
Kranjick dropped the launcher and found his powergun. It was still in one piece, having been shielded from the blast by his body. He opened fire, using the hulk of the dead power armor as cover, and dropped six Unity soldiers in as many shots. They returned fire, blasting superheated bits of armor into his visor as they advanced.
Kranjick felt his strength waning. He knew he was bleeding to death.
He shot another Unity soldier through the angular chest plate, and then his weapon was empty, the grip giving him its warning vibration through his gauntlet. He dropped the magazine and reached for another one, but his belt was buried in rubble.
In the pause as he dug for a reload, the masked Unity troops intensified their fire, and five of them dashed around on the flank. Three powergun bolts struck Brother Legate Michael Kranjick at once, piercing his armor and blowing charred holes through his torso.
He was no longer moving when the lead trooper stepped up and put a final bolt through his helmet.
21
The Pride of Valdek’s command deck was strange to the Caractacans’ eyes. It had been designed for the triamic, who had been taller and longer-limbed than most humans, and the colors were all slightly off, as the triamic had seen deeper into the ultraviolet. The displays had been reprogrammed to show all their data in Eastern Satevic, but that was just as much gibberish to the Caracta
cans as the triamic languages.
What required no translation, however, was the scene projected in the holo-tank. The feeds were coming from defensive casements higher up the mountain, near the silo doors, so it was blurry, but it was enough to see most of Kranjick’s last stand. The image shook and the view of the mountainside was obscured by dust and smoke when the demolition charge went off, but as the dust settled, they could see the shuttle get shot down and then the powergun fire start up again. Someone down there was still fighting, and somehow, Scalas knew it was Kranjick. The Brother Legate was less a man and more a force of nature. Or that was how most of his men viewed him.
Then the last of the weapons fire died away, and the enemy continued to converge on the wreckage of the gates.
It was over.
Scalas felt a hollow feeling in his gut. He wanted nothing else but to run back down there and fight. But he had his duty. And he had given Kranjick his word.
It’s just you now. You’re on your own.
It wasn’t just that Kranjick had left what was left of the legio in his hands. It was that Kranjick had left him. The man had been Scalas’s mentor. More than that—his second father. The man who knew more than he ever would. The man he could always ask for advice. Now that man’s support was gone.
There were other experienced Brothers, of course. And there were the Elders. But none of them would ever be—could ever be—what Kranjick had been.
Beside him, Rehenek was watching the holo-tank as well. “I had hoped they would hold out longer,” he muttered acidly.
Scalas turned on him. Rehenek had spoken in Trade Cant, which meant he had intended his words for Caractacan ears. Scalas grabbed Rehenek by the armored collar of his battlesuit and dragged him around to face him.