by Peter Nealen
“We might have found the ‘advisors.’”
Chapter Five
The winds had shifted while they were inside, and the ash plume in the sky was bending toward Ieg. The city itself loomed on the immediate horizon, a darkened stack of oddly proportioned ziggurats, increasingly obscured by the ash fall.
Maruks was waiting, his own BR-18 looking small in his plate-sized hands, looking toward that imposing edifice. Scalas reflected briefly that it was now slightly less imposing than it had looked at first, based on what they’d seen of the Exiles’ ground defenses so far.
“Those old Sparatan ships showed up in orbit,” Maruks said, as Soon and Scalas closed in on him. Scalas traded quick nods with his fellow Centurion, relieved that Soon was still breathing, and hadn’t gone down with that dropship. His focus on the situation at hand kept the dread of finding out just who had gone down in that hit to a dull roar in the back of his mind.
“They’ve been using the same tactics as we have,” Maruks continued. “They come in for fast, hit-and-run strikes, then they go inertialess and break contact. That alone tells me that they don’t have nashai crews. They know what they’re doing.”
He pointed. “They have, however, been communicating with their fellows on the ground. And those transmissions point to that tower, right there.”
Scalas squinted through the ash sifting down out of the sky. Sure enough, there were several towers at the summit of Ieg, with bright red warning lights blinking in the gloom. “That’s going to be a tough fight, no matter how bad the Exiles are as ground fighters,” he pointed out.
“If we were going to fight through Ieg, I would agree,” Maruks said. Scalas could almost see the tight, wolfish grin behind the Brother Legate’s visor. “But we’re going to go over it.”
Scalas and Soon both looked up at the walls. There didn’t appear to be a lot of external armament mounted on the outside of Ieg itself. Most of the defenses appeared to have been on the outer rings. The walls were high, but the gravity was low, and Maruks had a pack full of ascension lines and launchers at his feet. It could be doable.
And it was the kind of audacious gambit that they were coming to know Maruks for. Coming from any other leader, it might have been considered glory-hounding. With Maruks, they knew that he’d thought it through, and that he would be right there in the front with them.
“Well, then,” Scalas said. It wasn’t quite what Kranjick would have done, but he liked it. “What are we waiting for?”
Maruks clapped him on the arm. Even through his armor, the impact felt bruising. “That’s what I like to hear,” the Brother Legate said. He already had his line launcher in his hand. “Let’s go.”
It wasn’t far from the inner defensive ring to the walls of Ieg, only about three quarters of a kilometer. There were still weapons emplacements on the walls that could be turned downward, but the Exiles were clearly so confident in their defenses that they hadn’t been designed to turn inward. They pointed uselessly out into the volcanic wastes, while the Caractacan Brothers ran amok inside the Exile fortifications.
Meanwhile, Costigan’s tanks were circling Ieg as best they could over the rough terrain, picking off every emplacement they could see with heavy powergun fire.
That seven hundred fifty meters of open ground was bare basalt, covered in a fine layer of ash. Powdered rock puffed up with every footfall, whipped into fantastical whorls by the boiling winds kicked up in the atmosphere by the volcanos and the weapons fire to and from orbit.
The wall itself was a sheer twenty meters high. That might have been daunting, except for the low gravity and the line launchers in their hands.
Maruks was first, slinging his BR-18 and pointing his line launcher upward. The stubby tube coughed, and a self-actuating piton blasted up toward the top of the wall, trailing a thin cable behind it. It smacked into the wall and punched itself into the concrete, blasting out anchors to hold securely. Maruks tugged on the cable, made sure it was firmly attached, and then started to climb.
Scalas, Soon, Kahane, and Cobb weren’t far behind him.
It was a fast, hand-over-hand scramble, but they were at the top in a few seconds. They spread out across the ledge at the top of the wall, powerguns ready.
Another portal had opened somewhere around the north side of Ieg, and armored Exile flyers were soaring out, rifles in their claws and respirators covering their beaks. Scalas spotted them at the same time Cobb did, and both men lifted their powerguns, fingers tightening on triggers.
The Exiles didn’t seem to be coming for the climbers though. They were arrowing for Target One, the particle beam battery that Scalas and his Century had captured.
There were those who would have expected the Caractacans, with their rigid code of honor, to have eschewed opening fire, since the enemy didn’t know they were there. Such people didn’t really understand the Code, or the necessities of combat when weapons with the potency of powerguns were employed. The Code utterly forbade the murder of the unarmed and defenseless. The Exiles arrowing toward the captured battery, however, were neither unarmed nor defenseless. Scalas and Cobb hesitated just long enough to identify their adversaries, then opened fire.
Bolts of blue-white lightning connected Brothers with Exile flyers. The first one lost his head, skull and respirator alike blasted to mist and tiny fragments by the force of Scalas’s shot. He dropped like a stone. The next one lost a wing, but the bolt punched right through the wing root and into his chest cavity. He fluttered to the ground like a falling seed pod.
The Exile fighters reacted quickly, wheeling in the air and spraying fire toward the wall. But they were a split-second too late. A storm of powergun fire blasted them out of the air with a sheet of actinic bolts.
“Well, if they didn’t know we were coming, they do now,” Maruks said grimly. “Let’s keep going.”
He had disengaged his piton and reeled in his line, and was already pointing his launcher up to the next step in the ziggurat of Ieg. The rest of the Brothers followed suit, and soon they were racing up the next face.
More powergun fire cracked and thundered beneath them. The Exiles had suddenly realized that the greatest threat wasn’t in the sky or outside the ring, but in fact right within their fortifications. But the Caractacan Brothers were already well ahead of the Exiles’ reaction cycle.
They reached the base of the tower in minutes. Despite the low gravity and the richer oxygen mix that his sustainment pack was pushing to his helmet, Scalas was breathing a little hard. Some of that was simply adrenaline. The packs of Exile flyers still hadn’t quite figured out where they were, and were being knocked out of the sky quickly by Soon’s Century, which was holding security on the first step of the massive edifice of Ieg. But combat was combat, and as confused and flustered as the Exiles seemed to be, he couldn’t expect the mercenaries in the tower above them to be similarly unprepared.
“Funny, isn’t it?” Kahane said as they paused to retrieve their pitons and rearm their line launchers. He was looking down at the firestorm where another swooping pack of Exiles was being blasted to charred feathers and meat. “They have supposedly tried really hard to remake their people in the image and likeness of the velk, but they still have the same nashai style of building and fighting.”
“Because such attempts at brainwashing never work out well,” Scalas replied, pointing his line launcher up at the fin-shaped tower. “I can only imagine the horror show we’ll find inside, once this is over.”
He fired his line launcher. Along with almost fifty more, the thin cable shot upward, the piton slamming into the side of the tower and anchoring itself. The tower itself seemed to be made of metal, instead of the concrete and basalt conglomerate that the rest of the structure had been built of, but whatever alloy had been used, it wasn’t strong enough to shrug off the self-actuating climbing anchors. Scalas tested the line with a sharp tug, then slung his powergun again and started climbing.
Fifty armored Brothers clambered s
wiftly up the sheer side of the tower, pulling themselves hand over hand in the low gravity. From a distance, they wouldn’t have looked like much more than dark flickers of movement, obscured by the darkened chameleonic coating and the ever-thickening ash fall from the distant volcano.
Scalas reached the top first, just ahead of Maruks and Cobb. He dangled from his cable, just below the thick-glassed observation deck at the top of the tower. Together, he and four others clapped breaching charges against the windows, then slipped a couple of meters down their lines, getting some distance from the charges.
Just before they went off, Scalas hoped that the mercenaries had been ready for combat. If they were in shirtsleeves, they were probably all about to suffocate as soon as that glass was breached. And the Brotherhood wanted them alive.
The charges detonated with heavy thuds, and shattered polycarbonate rained down out of the sky, skipping off his armor in a crystalline cascade. It hadn’t stopped before he was surging upward, throwing himself over the lip of the observation deck and drawing his sidearm. His BR-18 was more powerful, but he could draw the pistol faster.
The mercenaries had, indeed, been ready for combat. They were dressed in full combat armor, sealed and armed.
They also weren’t fools. Faced with a wave of armored Caractacans leaping through the shattered window, the three humans and two velk immediately dropped their weapons on the deck, stepped back from them, and knelt, their hands on their helmets.
Scalas stood with his pistol pointed at the nearest human merc as the rest of the Brothers spread out around the room and secured the lift that led downward. The observation deck had been turned into a de facto command center, complete with more flat screen tactical displays and some heavy duty comm equipment.
“We surrender!” the bigger velk squawked in Trade Cant. “Don’t shoot!”
Maruks stepped up next to Scalas, holstering his own sidearm. “That doesn’t sound much like the Unity troops you described behaved, Centurion,” he commented. He was speaking Trade Cant rather than Latin. He wanted the mercenaries to understand. He was fishing.
“No, it doesn’t,” Scalas replied in the same language. “The Unity’s troops would have committed suicide, or simply thrown themselves at us until we had to kill them all. Very single-minded and utterly dismissive of their own lives.”
“We’re just mercenaries!” the velk said. “We’re with Yerok’s Irregulars. We were hired to do a job, that was all. There’s no money in being martyrs, now is there? We’ll tell you whatever you want to know. We know when we’re outclassed.”
“You seem to have a harder time picking legitimate contracts,” Maruks growled. “I know Yerok’s Irregulars. I’ve put you down before, on Tethannis.”
One of the human mercenaries might have winced. Scalas wasn’t familiar with Tethannis in particular; there were a lot of stars in the Carina Arm, and Maruks had served in the Logar Sector before being appointed the Brother Legate of the Avar Sector Legio. But it sounded as if Tethannis had not gone well for Yerok’s Irregulars.
“This isn’t like Tethannis, I swear!” one of the human mercenaries said. “We didn’t know it was going to be this bad. We were only told that it was a military advisory mission. We were given some additional assets, the system coordinates, and a general overview of the mission, that was all.” He looked up at Maruks, his fingers still intertwined on top of his helmet. He was wearing an ancient suit of Xereyen plate, the helmet resembling little more than a skull with round, red-tinged lenses for the ocular inputs.
“Please,” he pleaded. “We’ll tell you everything. Anything you want to know. We’re your prisoners now. You’ve got to get us out of here. These nashai are crazy!”
“Naturally,” Maruks said phlegmatically. “They are trying to forcibly alter their entire people’s culture and mindset. Only the insane would actually try that.”
“No, you don’t understand,” the mercenary protested. “They’re convinced that if they fail, then their entire race doesn’t deserve to reach the stars. They want to wipe the nashai out entirely rather than admit defeat.”
“And how, pray tell,” Cobb said wryly, “do they propose to do that?” Cobb wasn’t looking at the mercenary, but had his eyes out and down, scanning the flanks of Ieg for more flyers. Given what they’d seen so far, Scalas expected that the Exiles would come at them that way rather than trying to fight their way up through the elevator. But all that met his eyes when he glanced out the opening was more ash sifting down out of the sky.
“They’ve built bombs,” the velk mercenary said. “Big ones. Thermonuclear warheads that could barely be lifted by a starship. Each one is around ten gigatons.”
“If they intend to destroy all the nashai, they’ll need weapons that they can actually deliver,” Geroges pointed out.
“That’s the thing,” the human mercenary said. “The bombs aren’t the weapon. They think they can use them to throw Borogone out of its orbit and into Regone’s.”
Scalas looked at Maruks. “Is that possible?”
“How many bombs have they built?” Maruks asked.
“Five, that we know of,” the velk said.
“Herald of Justice, Maruks,” the Brother Legate called. There was a new note of urgency in his voice.
“Receiving, Brother Legate,” Captain Titus replied.
“I need a calculation, Captain,” he said. “Would fifty gigatons of thermonuclear warheads be sufficient to alter Borogone’s orbit to collide with Regone?”
“Stand by,” Titus answered.
“Where are these bombs?” Maruks asked the mercenary.
The human took one hand off his helmet to point straight down. “Underneath Ieg,” he said. “That’s why we want to get out of here as soon as possible, before they decide that all is lost.”
“All of them?” Kahane asked. “They’re deliberately sitting on top of fifty gigatons?”
“I told you, they’re crazy,” the velk spokesman said. “If we’d known, we never would have taken the job. We only stayed because they had ‘overseers’ around us constantly before we’d figured it out.”
“You had combat starships,” Maruks said grimly. “Hardly an excuse.”
“Brother Legate, Herald of Justice,” Captain Titus called. “Fifty gigatons, if concentrated in one place, will alter the planet’s orbit, but not nearly enough to cause it to collide with Regone. Its year might get a few days longer, but that is all.”
Maruks nodded, studying the mercenaries. “I need you to scan Ieg for radiation sources, Captain,” he said. “We have reports of up to five ten-gigaton thermonuclear devices beneath the city.”
“If they are buried deeply enough, we won’t be able to detect them, Brother Legate,” Titus replied. “But there’s something you should see.”
A data stream indicator flashed in the corner of Scalas’s vision slit. Titus was beaming them something. Maruks fished in his belt kit, and came out with a folding tablet. He activated it, tapped a key, and then looked down at the small screen.
“This is everything?” he asked.
“Yes, Brother Legate,” Titus answered. “Every spaceborne asset the Exiles have left, except for those three starships, began to deorbit, descending toward Ieg. It started five minutes ago.”
Maruks considered that in silence for a moment. Then he called out on the Legio tactical channel.
“All Centurions, get your men back to the landing zone, as fast as possible,” he ordered. “All dropships, be prepared to launch immediately. We may only have minutes to get off the planet and to a safe distance.” He looked at Scalas. “If we even have that much time,” he muttered.
He turned to the mercenaries. “If you want to live, then you move fast, and you follow orders instantly. Any sign of resistance will be taken as an attack after having surrendered, and my men will kill you. Understood?”
All three humans nodded. As nodding was not a velk gesture, they made the curious swaying movement that meant the same
thing. Maruks pointed out the smashed and shattered window. “The cables are still there. Get moving.”
None of the Caractacan Brothers needed any further prompting. It was a testament to how much they believed that they were indeed sitting on fifty gigatons of thermonuclear explosives that the mercenaries didn’t hesitate either, but fairly jumped out, grabbing the cables and fast-roping down as fast as gravity would allow.
Scalas, Rokoff, and Maruks were the last ones out of the window. As he scanned the sky around them before he went out, Scalas saw the flares of drive plumes punching down through the ashen clouds above.
Maruks had reached the same conclusion. The sudden descent to the surface by every still-mobile platform in Borogonese orbit only made sense in light of the mercenaries’ story. If the Exiles had decided to commit mass suicide, it stood to reason—however deranged—that they would try to do it all together. Make a clean sweep.
He almost regretted being able to comprehend such a mindset as he dropped off the observation deck, grabbing his cable as he fell to slow his fall to a controlled, if rapid, descent.
A sudden, cataclysmic roll of thunder boomed from down below. Strobing, actinic flashes accompanied the noise, and as Scalas neared the next step down from the top of the ziggurat, he saw explosions blossom along the north wall of the outer fortifications. A moment later, the wall itself was breached with a brilliant flash, concrete and stone fragments tumbling inward, falling slowly in the low gravity. More flashes followed, widening the breach, and then the first of Costigan’s tanks glided through, kicking up huge clouds of ash and dust from beneath its skirts. Costigan had apparently decided to cut some time by moving his vehicles directly to the inner walls of Ieg.
There were no Exile flyers in the air. Even with the thickening ash fall, they should have been able to see some movement if there had been. It was as if the Exiles had simply given up on defending their outpost.
If they were about to commit spectacular mass suicide, that might explain why.