by P. L. Nealen
He looked left and right. The four tactical squads were deploying quickly, spreading out and finding cover, setting security around the drop zone and watching for an enemy counterattack. There had been no way to miss the detonations in the sky, let alone the meteoric descent of the dropships. The yeheri pirates knew they were coming.
Fifth Squad was acting as the heavy weapons squad, and was already lugging the rocket mortar batteries out of their dropship, deploying the bulky weapons in the center of the drop zone. They wouldn’t have much to shoot at until the tactical squads got eyes on the enemy positions, but the fire support would be welcome.
Satisfied that the landing had gone according to plan, and that his men were oriented as they should be, Scalas rose and started jogging toward the crater rim.
The slope turned out to be steeper than it looked, and by the time he was halfway up, most of First Squad spread out in a loose wedge behind him, he was down to a slog, even in the relatively light gravity. His armor’s articulation meant that most of the weight was well-supported and distributed, and the oxygen tank in his sustainment pack meant he wasn’t even breathing hard, but the footing was difficult and treacherous. The crater wall had had centuries to erode away, and sand and dust threatened to slip out from under his boots.
He slowed as he neared the lip of the crater rim. It appeared to be the highest point of the surrounding terrain, and while the Caractacan Brotherhood had a well-deserved reputation for aggressiveness on the battlefield, none of them were stupid. There would be no screaming charge here. He got to the edge, dropped to a knee, and crept up to peer down the slope beyond.
The Quarisian mining camp was a scattershot collection of squared-off prefabs, about as expected. Quarisia was a relatively poor world, and couldn’t afford much more. Which only made the yeheri attack that much more indefensible.
Presently, at least three of the prefabs near the open-pit mine had been destroyed. It appeared that the Quarisian defenders had dug in along the edge of the pit, and were still trading fire with the yeheri troops on the relatively open ground around the prefabs. The yeheri force was centered on a group of mushroom-shaped landers squatting haphazardly between where he knelt and the Quarisian camp.
Some of the yeheri forces, having watched the dropships descend, were already trying to reorient to face the incoming Caractacans. A combination of blocky, balloon-tired armored fighting vehicles and foot soldiers were milling around the landing area, trying to get organized. Scalas’ eyes narrowed behind his vision slit. Mor had spoken disparagingly about the yeheri’s reputation as space fighters. This band, at least, didn’t appear to be much better on the ground.
He brought his powergun to his shoulder, finding the holographic sight with his eye. The yeheri combatants were still a good distance off, but the powerguns fired their bolts very nearly line-straight, and at a substantial fraction of the speed of light.
Even so, a small target is a small target, and the plasma packets tended to attenuate more in an atmosphere. He had little doubt that he could hit at that distance, but it was always better to be sure. The small arms cartridges weren’t anywhere near as powerful as the big charges the Dauntless had fired at the battlecruisers in orbit.
Searching for the next bit of cover, he went up over the lip of the crater rim and dashed down the slope, dropping to a low knee behind a boulder. The rest of the squad followed, bounding forward in short dashes, either finding rocks to take cover behind or cracks in the ground, or even simply dropping prone when no better cover presented itself. Fire discipline held; the Brothers would open fire when they were sure of kill-shots, not before.
He paused just before a landslide, where part of the outer crater wall had slumped away, and checked distances and azimuths before relaying them to the heavy weapons squad back in the crater. He got a terse acknowledgement, and a moment later, the noise muted by the thin atmosphere, the rocket mortars were coughing skyward, each warhead aimed precisely, sight unseen.
The wave of Caractacan Brothers was hard to see, dusty-red figures visible for a handful of seconds before dropping behind cover or out of sight altogether. That did not stop the yeheri from opening fire anyway.
A ragged fusillade of laser fire, powergun bolts, and solid bullets ripped out from the equally ragged yeheri formation, blasting pits in the dirt and rocks around the advancing Caractacans. Many of the bullets were falling short, but the lasers, sometimes dimly visible in the drifting dust, and the brilliant powergun bolts, were getting much closer.
The Caractacan Brothers usually preferred precise, accurate fire, but there were simply times when volume counted for a lot. The Squad Support gunners began returning fire with their MT-41 heavy powerguns, sending sheets of brilliant discharges across the open ground and forcing the yeheri back into cover. But while the rate of incoming fire slowed significantly, it did not die out altogether; some of the yeheri were crouched in cover and shooting blind.
Blind fire is rarely effective, but sometimes luck turns strangely.
Scalas dove into the dirt a moment before a powergun bolt slammed overhead, slapping him with the thunderclap shockwave of the plasma’s passage and searing the surface of his armor with its heat. The next Brother who tried to bound past him, Korvan, was not so lucky. The next bolt caught him in the faceplate. His helmet exploded, taking most of his head with it, and his armored body plunged into the dirt, rolling another two meters downhill before coming to a stop in a cloud of grit.
There are few defenses against a direct hit from a powergun bolt. And as good as it was, even Caractacan armor wasn’t good enough in the face of that kind of firepower.
It was about that point when the rocket mortars reached the top of their trajectory, turned over, and ignited their secondary engines, plunging toward the ground at twenty gees.
The rounds that hit landers and vehicles were moving fast enough to punch through most of the thin armor. After that, the molecular explosives did the rest.
The leading edge of the milling yeheri company that was moving to engage the Caractacan skirmish line disappeared in a cloud of smoke, dust, and debris. The shockwaves slammed through the thin atmosphere, washing over the Caractacan warriors and shaking the very ground beneath their feet. Landers and vehicles exploded, belching billowing fireballs and clouds of dust and smoke as they died. Most of the clumped-together vehicles and landers died in seconds.
Scalas was on his feet and moving forward before the dust had even begun to settle. None of the rest of his squad was far behind. The yeheri fire had died away to almost nothing in the wake of the bombardment. This was the time.
He plunged into the dusty murk left behind by anemically burning vehicles and airborne dust that was slowly starting to settle back toward the surface. The dust was going to shorten the range of his powergun, but that was a small price to pay.
With Maldon, Brunuk, and Squad Sergeant Kahane close behind him, he advanced on the nearest yeheri lander.
A dazed yeheri, its long tail and hammer head distinctive even in the murk and hardly disguised by a wildly impractical, spiked battlesuit, staggered out from behind the shattered wreckage of a crawler. The vehicle was burning, but the flames were guttering and going out, strangled by the dust and the low oxygen content of the atmosphere.
The yeheri must have spotted some movement, because it turned toward the advancing Caractacans and froze. Then, with a faint yawp, the staggering alien lifted its stubby weapon, at which point four powergun bolts thundered through the dust and smoke to blast its head completely off with a cataclysmic flash. The smoking remains of the corpse collapsed to the dirt.
The line of armored figures continued their advance through the destruction.
Chapter 2
The pall of dust and smoke formed a massive pillar in the sky, only slowly dissipating under the assault of Iabreton II’s weak, languid winds. In a dispersed crescent, the Caractacans closed in on the wrecked landers and burning vehicles. They still moved cautiously, from
cover to cover, avoiding exposing themselves for too long.
A man in a Quarisian spacesuit, a bulky, ribbed construct of orange composite that could have been built a century before, ran toward the wrecked lander where Scalas crouched with his Squad Sergeants. The man was carrying a blocky PS-19 caseless rifle that could have been as old or older than the spacesuit.
He was also trying to move too far without taking cover. A powergun bolt nearly took his head off, and he sprawled on his face in the dust, before the Caractacans leaned out of cover and replied to the shot with a crackling fusillade of fire that at least temporarily silenced the yeheri shooter, and simultaneously blasted away more of the remaining yeheri lander’s plating to superheated scrap.
The man in the spacesuit scrambled back to his feet and sprinted the last few meters to cover. Squad Sergeant Cobb grabbed the man and propelled him farther back behind the wreckage. If Cobb perhaps put a bit more force behind the shove than necessary, Scalas didn’t bother to say anything about it, and none of the rest of the Brothers appeared to notice.
About fifteen more armed Quarisians were huddled in a knot at the edge of the half-wrecked settlement, mostly crouched behind wrecked vehicles and in folds in the ground. Their generally orange spacesuits actually served as halfway decent camouflage against the reddish dirt, though the white fittings stood out a bit more.
They made for a motley assortment, especially since they weren’t all the same shape. Quarisia had been founded as a joint colony after humans and ekuz arrived there at nearly the same time, and the hexapodal ekuz looked wildly different from the humans. An observer would need to know something of their history to understand that both races together were Quarisians.
Scalas took note of the local militia, but kept his attention on the remaining yeheri lander. He knew he could not discount them entirely; in a way, the Quarisians were as much a danger to his men as the yeheri, especially since these miners had their blood up after being under attack for days. He certainly understood their mindset. But he also knew just how dangerous it could be. The yeheri were cornered and cut off; there had been at least one more flare in the sky, dimly visible through the dust and smoke, which had doubtless heralded the death of another of the frigates. The Caractacans had carved through the assault force relentlessly, one hundred men reaping far higher numbers through a combination of discipline, fire, maneuver, and use of cover. The survivors were going to be on the ragged edge of panic, and with nowhere left to run, they would likely be willing to sell themselves dearly.
He wasn’t willing to sacrifice Brotherhood lives to finish them off. Not at that point. But he knew that if the Quarisians tried to assault the lander, the Caractacans would likely have to go in, to keep both sides from getting slaughtered for nothing.
“We can take this last one!” the man in the orange spacesuit exclaimed, in Trade Cant. He was breathing heavily, his breath rasping through his exterior speaker. “We appreciate how you’ve helped us, but now it’s time for payback!”
Scalas did not turn to look at him, but only held one gauntleted hand up to forestall him. “No,” he said, in the same language.
“Maybe we should let them,” Squad Sergeant Volscius suggested, in Brotherhood Latin. “If they want to die in a blaze of glory for their own colony, why should we interfere? At least the rest of the miners will be secure.”
“No,” Scalas repeated. “And that is final. This battle is over. The yeheri know it, and we know it. I will not stand by and let the people we came here to protect be slaughtered trying to continue a fight that is already finished.” He continued to watch the last semi-intact yeheri lander. There was some movement around the still-open boarding ramp, which appeared to have been disabled by gunfire, but none of the hammerheaded aliens were showing themselves. Which was wise of them, after the results of that last pot-shot.
He touched a control on his gauntlet, and his voice boomed deafeningly from his external speaker. “I am calling any yeheri survivors,” he bellowed in Trade Cant. It was not certain that any surviving pirates understood it, but it was the closest thing to an interstellar lingua franca there was. “I am Centurion Erekan Scalas of the Caractacan Brotherhood. Your ships have been disabled or destroyed. The rest of your force is dead or dying. If you surrender now, there is a chance that you might be shown leniency. If my Brothers and I have to come in and take that lander by force, no one will survive. I am offering you a chance to surrender.”
His words were met by silence at first. The yeheri might not have known the identity of their armored attackers at first, but the confirmation that they had just been steamrolled by the Caractacan Brotherhood had to give them pause. Of all the military brotherhoods in the galaxy, it was safe to say that the Caractacans were the most feared and respected, and justly so.
The fact that his words were not immediately greeted by a powergun bolt was a good sign, too.
“Do you really think they’ll accept?” Cobb asked quietly in Latin. “They must know the usual penalty for piracy.”
“And that is why I only said there was a possibility of leniency,” Scalas replied. He and Cobb had served their novitiate together, and if any of his Squad Sergeants deserved his own Century, it was Cobb. “It’s a chance. They are cornered, and they know it. To give an enemy a perceived way out is usually a wise move in such circumstances.”
Cobb only nodded. He understood the logic. He only doubted whether it would work. Scalas did, as well, but he had to try. It was part of the Brotherhood’s Code. They were, ultimately, protectors and defenders. To avoid wholesale slaughter where possible and reasonable was expected of a Caractacan Brother.
There was more movement at the ramp. Powerguns lifted fractionally. They might hope for a surrender, but none of the Brothers were going to let their guard down. Certainly not when a moment’s inattentiveness could mean instant death.
Dimly lit, half-shrouded in the dark shadows of the lander’s hold, a yeheri was standing at the top of the ramp. It still held its weapon in its hands, though it wasn’t pointing it at anyone.
Unfortunately, at that moment, one of the Quarisians saw the same figure. There was a yell, barely audible through the thin air, and then the Quarisian militia opened fire.
A hail of bullets, flechettes, lasers, and a couple of powergun bolts thundered at the lander. The yeheri at the top of the ramp toppled backward with a spray of orange fluids, its faceplate shattered by a laser pulse. Then the rest of the surviving yeheri were shooting back, ducking around the edges of the hatchway to return fire.
Scalas cursed. That was what he’d been afraid of.
Leave it to amateurs.
Now they had no choice. They had to finish this. Scalas pointed at the lander. “Covering fire!” he snapped, then turned and looked for the two armored forms with their distinctive, bulky weapons. “Torgan! Rostov!” he bellowed, over the sudden ripping thunder of at least a dozen powerguns opening fire on the lander. “Turn that lander’s bay into scrap!”
The two men dashed out into the open, lugging the heavy tubes of their launchers. They each took care to make sure their backs and their lines of fire were clear; HV missile shockwaves could easily pulp a man in armor, never mind the lighter Quarisian spacesuits.
Rostov was a fraction of a second ahead of Torgan. With shrieking roars that drowned out even the lightning-bolt crash of the powergun fire, the two HV missiles slammed into the lander’s open hatchway.
While they traveled at considerably slower velocities than a powergun bolt, to the naked eye, there was little difference, particularly at that range. The HV missileers fired, and almost instantaneously, the lander belched white-hot sheets of flame and crumpled, as the shockwaves blasted dust and smoke away, knocking nearby wreckage askew and nearly flattening the men themselves.
Everything was quiet in the aftermath, almost as if the entire world had stopped at that cataclysmic wham. But as soon as the shockwave had washed over him, Scalas was up on his feet, driving toward the wrec
kage with his powergun’s buttstock solidly against the rest on his shoulder pauldron, the sight just below his eye.
The lander was beginning to lean hard to one side; the blast had crumpled one of the landing legs. The hatchway was wider than it had been, a jagged wound in the side of the mushroom-shaped craft. The odds that any of the yeheri in the troop compartment had survived were slim to none, but there might still be one or two above, in the cockpit.
The footing on the ravaged ramp was treacherous, but long training and conditioning kept him balanced and moving quickly. Fortunately, the HV missile fire had been enough of a shock that the Quarisian militia had ceased fire.
He intended to demand punishment for the man who had opened fire first. This could have been ended quietly.
His vision slit adjusted as he entered the troop compartment, the integral night vision brightening the scene before him. There were massive gouges in the hull, open to the outside, where the overpressure had split the metal and composite like a bursting balloon. Everything was scorched, and only the faintest nubs remained of acceleration couches, weapons racks, and equipment cases.
Some of the shadows on the outer hull were likely all that remained of the shooters who had been in the troop compartment. The HV missiles’ molecular explosive warheads were capable of awe-inspiring destruction.
The ladder leading up to the cockpit was a twisted, mangled mess where it hadn’t been completely flayed away by the blast. This was going to be tricky. Fortunately, Caractacan Brothers were prepared for all sorts of eventualities.
There wasn’t a bulkhead for a Brother to brace himself against, or at least there wasn’t enough of one left. Scalas realized that there had actually been a shaft around the ladder, that had evidently been blasted away by the HV missile warheads. That probably also accounted for some of the twisting of the remains of the ladder that had survived.
Dravot and Powell were behind him, and stepped forward, understanding what needed to be done next. Dravot took a knee, and Powell stood behind him, reaching up and clamping an armored fist around the warped remains of the ladder. Dravot braced himself against Powell’s back and nodded.