by P. L. Nealen
“What is it like, joining one of the brotherhoods?” Viloshen translated.
“That depends on the brotherhood,” Scalas replied. “Some still hold to their code and the principles they were founded on—to protect the weak and defenseless, to punish aggressors, to provide some kind of deterrent to the pirates, megalomaniacs, and M’tait of the galaxy. Others have become mercenaries, hiring out to the highest bidder. Others are little better than pirates themselves.”
“They say the Caractacans hold to their code,” Viloshen ventured.
Scalas nodded, even as he thought of Dunstan, and even Volscius, in his own Century. How much longer will that be the case? “The Caractacan Brotherhood takes as much care in our training to pass on as much of our philosophy and principles as to train in the arts of war,” he said. “Caractacus Regnus, our founder, wanted to call it the ‘Artorian Brotherhood.’” When he got blank stares from both Valdekans, he explained.
“Artorius was a legendary figure from Old Earth,” he said. “He was a warrior king, who gathered all the finest warriors of his country around him, and gave them a code and a purpose. He said that Might must always serve Right. Caractacus believed in that, down to his very bones, and he gathered Legates and Elders around him who believed the same. They handed down the Code to the novices and the Brothers who followed.”
His gaze moved far away as he recited the words he’d known by heart after the first few months of his novitiate. “To fear God and obey His commandments. To protect the weak and defenseless. To help the poor whenever possible. To refrain from the wanton giving of offense. To live by honor and for glory. To despise pecuniary reward. To fight for the welfare of all. To obey the superiors of the Brotherhood. To guard the honor of our Brothers. To eschew unfairness, meanness, or deceit. To keep faith with our given word. To always speak the truth. To persevere until the end any enterprise begun. Never to flee before the enemy.”
The Valdekans in the pillbox listened quietly to Viloshen’s translation. Dravot and Powell, stationed at the firing slit with their BR-18s, and Geroges with his MT-41, listened in silence. Scalas spared the younger Brothers a glance. He remembered that Kranjick had always led his Century in the Code before insertion, and felt a momentary pang of failure as he realized that he had let his mentor’s tradition slip. He really should start doing that again.
One of the younger Valdekan soldiers, a skinny kid whose fatigues seemed to almost hang off his bones, asked a question. Viloshen looked at Scalas. “Was it hard?”
All the Caractacans in the pillbox chuckled at that. “It was the hardest thing I had ever done,” Scalas said, “and I had been a Vitorian Commando.” That drew a whistle from Raskonesh when it was translated. The Vitorian Commandos were not nearly as well-known as the Caractacans, but their own actions against the cultist insurgents that had nearly taken over the Vitor system were known for parsecs around. They were hardened, ruthless men of war, driven nearly to collapse in the selection process. To hear a former Commando admit that the Caractacan novitiate was harder was an eye-opener.
“To be a Brother isn’t just about memorizing the code,” he continued. “You have to learn all the arts of war, whether in space, in the air, on the ground, or even on the water. That is why the novitiate is so long. Five years of training and fighting, right alongside full-fledged Brothers, in every environment and every situation your Elder can find to throw you into. You learn what it is like to march for a week on two days rations. You discover just how long you can last in vacuum without a suit. And when you are done, and you take your oath as a Brother, you learn that there is still more to endure, more training to go through.”
Viloshen had been translating as he’d talked. A few of the Valdekan soldiers on watch had turned to look at him, only to be snapped at by Raskonesh. Heads snapped back toward the front.
Raskonesh asked another question. “What about family?” Viloshen interpreted. “When is your term of service over? Or does your family stay at your headquarters?”
But Scalas shook his head. “There is no term of service,” he said. “Once you finish your novitiate and take that oath, you are a Brother for life. Or until you disgrace yourself and your Century badly enough to be cast out. As for families…they are not forbidden, but few have attempted to start them. Our patrols are too long, too far out. Those who have married and tried to raise children have had a hard time of it. It is…not frowned upon, necessarily, but unofficially discouraged.”
One of the soldiers, a squat, slovenly-looking young man, asked a question. Raskonesh upbraided him acidly, but Viloshen translated anyway. “What must a man do to be cast out?” he asked.
“Show open cowardice in the face of the enemy,” Scalas said flatly. “Lie. Cheat. Steal. Break his word.”
“Murder?” Viloshen asked. “Rape?”
“Those are not punished by exile,” Scalas said grimly. “Each Sector Keep has its own gibbet.”
There was a hush in the pillbox at that, broken only by the continuing rumble and thunder of the bombardment.
“What about the other brotherhoods?” Viloshen asked, apparently to change the subject somewhat. “You said that not all were the same.”
“There are many,” Scalas said. “More than any man can really say. The galaxy is a big place.”
“Have they ever fought each other?” Viloshen translated another young soldier’s question.
“It has happened,” Scalas admitted. “It is a great shame and is not spoken of. No matter how far the opposing Brotherhood has fallen.”
He cocked his head, listening. The others all suddenly followed suit. The noise of the bombardment had changed, subtly. It was less intense.
“They are coming,” Viloshen announced.
“Vrykolok,” Raskonesh spat, heaving himself to his feet and moving to the firing slit, his powergun at the ready, though he kept back from the slit itself.
“What does that mean?” Dravot asked Viloshen.
Their interpreter was moving to the slit himself, squinting out into the hellscape of no-man’s land. “The vrykolok is dead man that has gotten up and walks around,” he said. “No mind, only puppet strings. Old fairy tales, from before times. From Old Earth. But name fits these soldiers. You will see.”
Scalas moved to the firing port, letting his helmet’s imagery enhancers work. They could not see through all the smoke and dust, but the view was still slightly less murky than it had been. For the most part, no-man’s land was still just a blasted field of wrecked vehicles, craters, and less-identifiable detritus. Costigan’s tanks and combat sleds had withdrawn back through the breach; they would be needed as a react force if things got too hot. Kranjick had no intention of letting his heavy support get pinned down by digging them in on the enemy’s side of the wall.
He thought he saw movement, and focused on it. After a moment, he thought he made out a human shape, or part of one, scuttling behind one of the still-smoldering hulks of a Unity armored assault carrier. If that was one of the Unity soldiers, he wasn’t wearing the more visible spacesuit and flak vest that had been seen before. He was camouflaged, and well.
Scalas continued to scan the battlefield. Now that he had some idea of what to look for, he thought he could see more of them. Draped in grayish camouflage ponchos, the Unity soldiers were slipping through the craters and the wrecks, keeping behind cover and concealment as much as they could, even while the bombardment was supposed to keep their enemies’ heads down.
He thought he spotted one, and lifted his powergun to his shoulder. The holographic sight was slightly offset to make it easier to fire with an enclosed helmet.
There. He fired, the ear-splitting crack of the powergun’s discharge muted inside his helmet, the flash lighting up the gloom cast by the flying dust and smoke. The running Unity soldier was knocked off his feet, a blackened hole through his torso, his camouflaged poncho catching fire.
It was as if that powergun shot was a signal. The ground before the wall sudd
enly erupted with muzzle flashes, as the Unity soldiers opened fire en masse at any opening in the wall they could see, their cone-bore rifles flinging a storm of hissing, high-velocity projectiles to smack into steelcrete with a noise like a heavy rain.
One of the Valdekan soldiers was too close to the slit. He toppled backward, his head snapping back with a spray of blood and fragments as a needle-tipped projectile punched through helmet and skull. His corpse fell heavily to the floor, even as a second man died the same way. The cone-bore shots were moving just barely slower than a coilgun round.
As he reflexively ducked below the lip of the firing port, forced back by the sheer volume of fire being directed at the defensive positions, Scalas saw what looked like the entire stretch of no-man’s land get up and charge forward. There were hundreds of the enemy soldiers, clad in grayish camouflage ponchos, open-face helmets, and camouflaged balaclavas, running toward the wall, firing from the hip on full automatic. The sheer volume of fire was enough to guarantee that they would hit something.
Bracing himself, reminding himself of the Code, and the admonishment never to flee before the enemy, knowing that his helmet was better-made than the Valdekan infantry helmets, Scalas straightened, shouldering his powergun and opening fire.
His first bolt took the closest man in the face, the energy dump blowing his helmet and a good portion of his skull off. The corpse dropped to the ground, only to be stepped on by the horde behind him. The second shot took the next man high in the chest. Whatever body armor the Unity troops might have been wearing, it was no proof against a 1cm powergun.
A cone-bore round glanced off his helmet with a brutal impact. His head immediately started to hurt, though it was far preferable to the damage that would have been done had that shot penetrated. He answered with a rapid string of powergun bolts, line-straight lightning hammering running, camouflaged figures off their feet with ravening, explosive bursts of sun-hot energy.
Geroges opened fire, the thunderous crackle of the rapid cycling of his MT-41 sounding like the very air was being torn apart. In a way it was. Powergun charges sheeted across no-man’s land, blasting apart what they touched and burning everything around the impact points.
Another Valdekan fell. Powell crashed onto his back, a splintered hole through his vision slit. Caractacan armor was good, but it did not make a man invulnerable.
There was nothing in this life that could.
Then Raskonesh heaved a blocky, multi-barreled grenade launcher against the firing slit, ignoring the roar of gunfire hitting the wall and snapping through the firing port, and opened fire.
Compared to the world-ending noise of the powergun bolts, the grenade launcher sounded muted, almost silent. But it fired rapidly, each barrel pumping a fat lozenge of molecular explosive wrapped in notched, monomolecular wire for as far as Raskonesh wanted it to.
The Valdekan Warrant Officer was a good shot. He gauged his distance and his spread with a precision that spoke of long practice. Some of the grenades didn’t make it to their targets; there was too much powergun fire roaring through the air, and it was inevitable that a few of the tiny bombs fell into the line of a bolt and were instantly vaporized. The aerial detonations were still impressive, though.
The rest landed in a sweeping pattern across the Unity front, which was now less than a hundred meters from the breach. Thunderous explosions that made the cracks of powergun bolts sound like popguns rocked the defensive positions with their shockwaves, as overpressure and hypersonic fragmentation tore Unity clones to bloody shreds, armor or no.
Even then, the Unity troops did not disengage. The fire slackened, as fewer and fewer bodies were able to continue the charge, or even keep shooting. But they kept coming. It was just like Viloshen had said. These men acted like they had no sense of self-preservation at all.
Then the first of them were at the breach.
“Dravot, Geroges, Viloshen, with me,” Scalas snapped. He pulled away from the firing slit. The cooling fins around his powergun’s muzzle shroud were glowing dull red, and heat waves were rippling off the weapon. He keyed his comm. “All Squad Sergeants, I need reinforcements at the breach. Now.”
His chosen position had been the last intact pillbox on the east side of the breach. He had chosen it deliberately. He had to suspect that Raskonesh had, as well. The Warrant Officer was already moving, cradling the heavy grenade launcher in his hands, reloads hanging in several satchels from his narrow shoulders, hefting the launcher so that he could reach the last hatch before the breach. Scalas reached around him and grabbed the latch, prying the armored door open.
Beyond, the passageway ran a short, angled twenty meters before it opened up on nothing.
Well, not exactly nothing. Twisted reinforcement bars and shattered steelcrete, still warm hours after the hit that had taken out the sub-fort framed a long drop toward the crumbling slope that led down to the bottom of the debris-choked crater that formed the breach. Both Caractacan and Unity tanks had crushed paths through the rubble, but it was still going to be an obstacle course for infantry, and they were going to be on the low ground.
At least, they would be if the defenders could stay in that little hole in the wreckage of the wall and fire down at them. But there was room for maybe two or three Valdekan soldiers in that hole. One would get uncomfortable next to the armored bulk of a Caractacan. So Scalas shouldered his powergun and, careful of his footing, started down the uneven, unstable fan of debris that had sloughed off the shattered wall and down toward the crater bottom.
The first of the clones was clambering down the inside of the crater. There were more behind them; more than he’d thought there would be, after the slaughter unleashed from the wall.
Some men might have been sickened by the mass death that had just been unleashed. Others in Scalas’ place might have come to revel in it; there is a sense of power that comes with killing that not all men can resist. Scalas had fifteen years of training and guidance in the Code. He shut down any emotional involvement in the fight. While in combat, he was a machine; cold, relentless, analytical. He killed those who presented threats to himself, his men, and those he was tasked to protect. He spared those he could, when it would not endanger those he was responsible for. He was a warrior, not a butcher.
Yet even his practiced detachment was becoming shaky, faced with these hordes of clones. There was something inhuman, something unnatural about them, that went far beyond the fact that they would all look exactly the same up close. As he found a larger chunk of rock that would serve as cover even from the high-velocity cone-bore shots and leveled his powergun, he saw the swarm coming down the sides of the crater, and was struck by the way they moved.
That wave of replicated humanity was not a unit of individuals, each man finding his next piece of cover, moving to it, and firing on likely targets to cover his comrades’ advance. These men moved more like insects, or flocking birds. Where the lead moved, all the rest followed, almost without thought. Wherever the lead fired, the rest blazed away.
It was almost as if none of them were really trained. They acted like they were moving on instinct, not thought.
He understood then, what Viloshen had meant when he’d called the clones “living dead.”
But the enemy’s bizarre behavior was a matter for analysis at another time. In such numbers, they could still easily overwhelm the defenders, swamping them under in a tidal wave of bodies and gunfire. He quickly opened fire.
More of the Caractacans, along with some of the braver Valdekans, were scrambling down the slope behind him, taking up firing positions and pouring powergun and coilgun fire down into the mass of bodies pouring into the crater. Raskonesh skidded to a halt in a small avalanche of debris next to him, cramming more of the molecular grenades into the launcher before snapping it shut and heaving it to his shoulder. Another chorus of faint thumps heralded the grenades’ passage toward the enemy, punctuated by more terrifying explosions, the detonations seeming to batter and bruise eve
n Scalas in his armor, two hundred meters away.
Still the clones came on, scrambling over the pulped, crisped, and shredded remains of their dead.
And still Caractacans and Valdekans continued killing them.
The clones were still shooting, blazing away with their cone-bores, most not even bothering to aim. They pointed in the general direction of the defenders and held down their triggers. The air was as full of flying metal as it was of sun-hot copper plasma. Even through his helmet, Scalas imagined he could smell the ozone, the smoke, and the stink of bodies blasted apart and torn asunder.
Then, almost drowned out by the thunder of gunfire, a howling roar started to rise from behind them. A flash brighter than any of the 1cm or 1.5cm powergun bolts suddenly lit the crater, dispelling the gloom of the pall of dust and smoke that hung over the entire fortress and slapping the infantry down into the dust with its tooth-rattling shockwave.
Costigan’s own tank was gliding down the inside of the breach, billowing dust and ash roiling up from its fans. The main gun fired again, the concussion slapping the sides of the crater, even a hundred yards to either side.
Where those bolts touched, clones died by the dozens. Often, there was nothing left that was recognizably human.
With a seemingly unending, sky-cracking roll of thunder, Costigan’s gunner fired again and again, traversing the turret from one side of the breach to the other, firing as fast as the powergun could cycle. Against the Unity armor, the Destrier’s firepower had been impressive.
Against infantry, it was like the wrath of God.
In minutes, it was all over. The outside of the breach was glowing and smoking, a hellscape of twisted, charred remains, heat mirage rippling above it and obscuring the no man’s land beyond. The tank gunner and the infantry ceased fire, simply because there was no longer anything left to shoot at.
The clones had just kept coming until they were all dead.
But as the fight died away, Scalas became aware that not all the shooting had stopped. There was intense fire sounding from somewhere off to the east. And someone was calling him over the comm.