Black Dawn (Blood on the Stars Book 8)

by Jay Allan

  “You are right, Commander,” he said, trying to sound as encouraging as he could. The tactical officer had remained focused on duty better than he had, and Winters was a man who could admit when he was wrong. He’d have continued the hopeless fight, led his people to meaningless deaths. That was still likely their fate, but pulling back offered a chance to delay that final eventuality…and he’d take few more hours if that was all he could get. “All ships…set a course for the dust clouds…320.109.078.” He paused. “All ships at their own maximum thrust.”

  He didn’t know if the enemy would follow. His gut told him no, that they would focus on gaining control of Dannith’s orbital space and launching a ground assault. His fleet was virtually combat ineffective, and there was no way to sneak back…if he led his people back toward Dannith, the enemy would have plenty of time to react.

  They’ll probably be content staying in place and bombarding the planet to oblivion…

  Winters had considered that the enemy might choose genocide over conquest…but there was still nothing he could do to stop it. And, his gut told him any invader new to Confederation space—even to the whole Rim—would want intel. And, that meant prisoners…and intact records on the ground.

  He had no knowledge at all about the enemy’s ground combat capabilities, but he guessed that the Marines—and various planetary forces and militias—waiting down there were in for one hell of a fight.

  He whispered to himself, a silent battle prayer for those down on Dannith’s surface, sitting in bunkers and trenches, waiting for the battle in space to be over…and for theirs to begin.

  Now, their wait was almost over.

  “Commander…all fleet units, execute withdrawal order. Now.”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Blackstone Heights

  Outside Port Royal City

  Planet Dannith, Ventica III

  Year 316 AC

  “We’re picking up multiple contacts now, Captain. Moving in from high orbit and approaching the upper atmosphere.”

  Blanth was sitting along the wall of the command bunker, leaning back against the cold concrete behind the rugged bench. Sitting felt unnatural, as tense as he was, but he’d been standing for the last hour, and his back and neck were aching from being hunched forward under the low roof of the fortification. He’d had the shelters and defensive positions built as quickly as possible, requisitioning virtually every construction crew and piece of equipment on the planet—through another series of illegal orders—to do it. His hastily-organized effort had been more successful than he’d dared to hope, but not without cutting a few corners, one of which was making ceilings high enough to accommodate his well above average height of nearly two meters.

  “Have you confirmed they are landers?” Stupid question…what else would they be? Blanth and his people had hunkered down for the past six hours while the enemy blasted Dannith’s surface. At first, he’d thought the enemy was just going to glass the planet. That might leave a few survivors, some of his people in their deep entrenchments, and maybe one or two percent of the population…but for all practical purposes, Dannith would cease to exist. But, then he’d realized the bombardments were far more targeted, mostly ignoring inhabited areas of the cities and concentrating on military positions, and anything that even looked like something of tactical significance. There had been some attacks on civilian areas, enough to scare the people, and to keep them passive and hiding terrified in their homes, but it had quickly become apparent the attackers weren’t trying to wipe out the population, but only to soften up the defenders.

  And, they had done quite a good job at that. Blanth was still trying to get over his surprise at the quality of the enemy’s targeting. They rooted out a large percentage of his positions, and they hit them hard. He had no idea how many Marines had been killed in the last few hours, or how many of the local troops he’d so carefully organized and prepared…but he knew it was a lot. His defenses were badly battered, even before a single enemy soldier had landed.

  “Impossible to tell, sir. We’ve lost contact with all orbital assets…” Blanth knew that was because the enemy had destroyed them all. He doubted there was anything larger than a chunk of melted and refrozen metal floating around up there from what had once been the planet’s defensive array and satellite network. “…but what else could they be?” It was a logical conclusion, and it made sense to Blanth, even if it did lack the details of a typical military report.

  Blanth was about to reply when the officer added, “Captain…one thing we’re picking up is…” The man paused. “Sir, these things are big. They outmass our own landers by five or ten times.”

  Blanth sat quietly, but inside he felt his stomach clench. The earlier report had specified over a hundred incoming craft…and if all of them were that big, he was facing one hell of a lot of enemy troops.

  Or something else huge.

  What could those things be carrying?

  “Very well, Lieutenant. Relay this report to all other command stations still on the air.” That was a minority of those he’d started with, though he was still clinging to hope that the ‘missing’ commands had just lost their comm feeds, and that at least some of their personnel were still in the field, combat ready. He wasn’t sure where the line between realism and desperation stood, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Not just then.

  “Alright…let’s see what Peterson’s people can do with those big guns.” Blanth had nurtured high hopes for the heavy artillery the Marine division had brought with them, but the bombardment had been particularly hard on those positions. He’d had the guns dug in and fortified as heavily as possible, which was why he had any of them left at all. But, he’d still lost more than half, and veteran Marines or no, he couldn’t imagine the crews of the remaining guns had avoided some level of degradation, casualties or simply disorder and some level of morale decline. It was hard to endure a pounding like that the one the enemy had just unleashed, and Blanth didn’t think anything less of Marines who were shaken up by it.

  “Yes, sir…sending out orders to fire now.”

  Blanth exhaled hard and leaned backwards, hitting his head against the rough concrete as he did. It was the third time he’d done it, and he swore bitterly as he felt the pain. He was distracted, trying to focus on so many things he was becoming completely unfocused. He’d been in battle before, numerous times, but he’d never been responsible for more than one hundred twenty Marines. Now, he had thousands looking to him, even if they did have their own officers who matched or even exceeded his rank, not to mention he also controlled the vast numbers of the planetary defense forces. It was too much, and for all he had rigidly obeyed Barron’s orders to take charge, he could feel it tearing him apart. He hadn’t even considered yet, save for a passing analysis of his declining military power, how many men and women under his command were dead already. There would be time for that if he survived the fight…an end result that seemed less likely than ever.

  “Send runners to all batteries as well, Lieutenant.” He needed every gun he could get, every shot at the attack force coming to engage his people…and he couldn’t risk a functional gun crew remaining idle because they didn’t receive the order to fire on their blasted comm units.

  “Yes, Captain. I will see to it now, sir.”

  Blanth just nodded, realizing in some hazy way how useless a gesture that was on an audio line. He opened his mouth to make some kind of verbal acknowledgement, but he realized he’d already closed the line. He shook his head and set the unit down on the bench next to him, standing up—careful this time not to hit the ceiling—and he moved toward the small hatch that led out, and up to the surface. If the enemy was coming, it was time for his people to come out of their holes and get ready to fight.

  He’d just reached the opening when he heard muffled cracking sounds in the distance.

  The batteries had opened fire.

  * * *

  Luther Holcott ran up the steep hill, gasping
for breath as he did. The full set of battle armor was a heavy load, and he’d been up and down the hillsides around his position a dozen times in the last hour.

  It was midday…and Goddamned hot.

  “Keep those guns firing. I want shots going off as quickly as you can reload.” He was shouting, but the hoarseness of his voice was reducing the volume that reached his Marines. That was too bad, because he was pissed, and he wanted them to know it. “You’re leaving too much time between rounds.”

  “The guns are hot, sir.” The respondent was a non-com, a sergeant with the—misfortune?—to be closest to the raging captain. “If we fire any faster, we’re going to start losing some of them.”

  “And what do you think these people coming down here are going to do? Let us keep them? The useful life of these guns is measured in minutes, and we either get something out of that time or we don’t. Now, stop wasting my damned time and get these things firing faster.” Hoarse or not, he was sure every Marines within twenty meters had heard that.

  “Yes, Captain.”

  Holcott turned and looked for his aide. The Marine was just a few meters away, but the captain felt a flush of anger nevertheless. The aide must have felt it, because before Holcott could growl out an order, the junior lieutenant had almost jumped across the small space and was standing right next to him.

  “Lieutenant, where’s that tabl…” The words stopped as he realized the Marine was there, holding out the very object he was requesting. Quarrel was a good aide, one who probably deserved more praise and fewer angry words…but he was a Marine, too, and as far as Holcott was concerned, if he couldn’t take whatever an angry captain dished out, he had no place in the Corps.

  Holcott grabbed the tablet and checked the hit assessment reports. They were of limited value—none at all, he might have said in an especially angry moment—but they were the best available on a planet virtually stripped of its communications assets. Six landers…his batteries had taken down six of the enemy ships. As much as his pessimism was rising, Holcott knew it was likely there had been additional hits scored by other artillery units cut off from what remained of the data net. That wasn’t a bad result—and it became an even better one, as he heard one of the nearby crews let out a series of primal howls that could only mean another kill had been added to the roster—but it wasn’t enough. The ships coming in were huge, and it looked like eighty or more of them were going to hit ground.

  And, with the disorder and casualties from the orbital bombardments, the beachheads were going to be met with scattered and disorganized counterattacks from the defenders, and not the kind of coordinated, large assaults that could defeat the invaders before they could fully organize their own formations.

  Holcott shook his head, a way of letting out some of his frustration, and then he turned quickly as yet another of his crews, this one right next to his position, let out a series of wild yells.

  This time, he added his own worn voice to the mix. His people weren’t going to take enough of those ships out…but every hit helped nevertheless.

  * * *

  Blanth ran along the blackened dirt of the ridge, waving his arms to one group of Marines and then another. A dozen enemy landers had come down near his position, and he’d rushed out to organize the counterattack himself. If he could pin the enemy down, drive them back on their landers and keep them from breaking out and moving against his scattered defenses, maybe, just maybe, his people could hold.

  Along this ridge, at least. He knew the same dance was being played out in multiple places, but all he could do for those was hope the commanders on the scene were aggressive—and lucky.

  “Move out,” he shouted into the com unit hanging in front of his mouth. He wasn’t sure how many of his people were getting the signal. The enemy didn’t seem to rely heavily on communications jamming—a break, and maybe the only one he’d get—but the bombardment and the residual radiation were both playing havoc on his comm capabilities. He wasn’t sure why the enemy wasn’t jamming the entire planet, whether they’d decided the effects on their own communications outweighed the benefits, or if, for whatever reason, their combat doctrine simply differed from that of the Rim nations.

  Still, even with minimal jamming, there were widespread comm outages, and the over-air frequencies were as affected by the aftereffects of the bombardment, especially in the areas where the enemy had deployed nuclear weapons.

  The Hegemony forces had stopped far short of a planet-killing nuclear holocaust, but they had committed a hundred moderately sized fusion bombs to the toughest sections of Blanth’s defensive perimeter. Some of his deepest installations had still survived, even in the most heavily bombed areas, but the combat power of the units positioned there had been severely degraded by the radiation and the utter devastation on the surface all around them. His own command post had escaped such focused attention from the enemy—pure luck, he knew—and his bunker, and the units deployed there, were still in decent shape.

  Which was a good thing, since the position seemed to be close to one of the enemy landing areas.

  “Let’s go…we hit them, and we hit them hard. Let’s send these bastards back where they came from.” He gripped his rifle tightly, and he ran toward the enemy landers, his head jerking from one side to the other, checking to see how many Marines he had with him.

  About two hundred. Not bad, considering some of his people were almost certainly still digging out from buried bunkers. And, he was surprised to see about forty of the locals as well, mostly the planetary regulars, but a few of the militia as well. The vast numbers of the garrison and part-time soldiers were still dug in, clinging to their fortifications and foxholes and frozen by fear, but his training had gotten through to some of them. He felt anger toward the others, but it was controlled, muted. He was scared himself, and he didn’t expect some Dannith local ‘soldier,’ who’d never done more than restore security around a rowdy crowd, to rush out and charge what almost certainly would be real professionals, armed and armored. And, much less even, the militias, men and women who did normal jobs, whose military capability was usually measured in one or two weeks of annual training exercises.

  Confederation Marines, on the other hand, he trusted, and he expected them to charge into the mouth of hell without question if they were ordered to do so. He’d never seen that particular situation arise, but he could remember a few from the war years that came close.

  War years? We’re back at war even now. The politicians might not have made it official yet, but when whatever is in those ships comes out, we’ll be trying like hell to kill each other. That’s war, more than some label a bunch of Senators put on it…

  He was moving forward in a zigzag pattern, doing all he could to make up for the fact that he was basically running across an open plain. He didn’t know if the landers themselves were armed. Confederation craft went both ways, some mounting a few support weapons and others unarmed. It didn’t look like any of the ships had opened fire, as far as his limited scanning ability could detect, but he wasn’t ready to bet his life on that.

  He could see the ships now…and they were big. Bigger, even, than he’d thought. He tried to guess how many soldiers one could hold. He wasn’t sure how accurate his numbers were, but he was damned sure that once the troopers aboard the closest one all managed to get out and deploy, they’d outnumber his own forces. And, there were six other ships close enough to hit his people within minutes.

  He picked up the pace, realizing his only chance was to get his Marines close enough to pin down the enemy as they tried to evac. He didn’t have much time. He could see the ramps coming down already, and he knew the occupants would be racing out any second.

  But, his people were in firing range now.

  “Open up…everybody. Keep that area hosed down with fire.” He yelled into the comm unit, and then he did the one thing he suspected would get the message to any of his people who didn’t receive the order. He pulled his rifle around and opened
fire himself.

  He stared with three shot bursts. There were no visible targets yet, and he didn’t want to waste ammunition he suspected he’d need later. He expected to see enemy troops coming out any second, but there was still nothing there, save the shots from his rapidly advancing line, slugs slamming into the metal of the landing ship, ricocheting all around.

  A nervous feeling settled on him as the seconds passed. There were still no enemy soldiers visible, nor any fire from the landers. He’d expected to feel excitement about that, hope that his people could get into position and pin the enemy in their ships. But, instead, there was something ominous about it all. The enemy’s technology was top grade, and their actions in the space battle had been efficient and well-planned. Why would their landing forces be any different?

  He had almost reached the nearest ship, coming up directly behind. He could see the ramp, and the darkness of the inside of the craft. It was still…no, there was something there. Movement.

  He tightened his grip on the rifle, and his eyes darted back and forth, looking for anything he could use for cover. The lack of enemy activity had lured him in, and now he was close.

  Too close. And, there was no cover.

  He was about to fall back, perhaps twenty meters, where there was a gully that offered some protection, when he heard a loud crash…and then he saw something coming down the ramp.

  Something huge.

  Blanth stayed where he was, frozen by shock, even after his brain had sent signal after signal to his legs to run. His eyes were fixed on the giant rear hatch of the lander, dropped down now to the ground and transformed into a ramp of sorts. And, rolling down that ramp was a vehicle. It looked like a tank, except it was bigger than any tank he’d ever seen. The thing was five meters broad, and from what he could see, more than ten deep, and it was bristling with weapons.