by Peter Nealen
The cables couldn’t be disengaged quickly enough from above, so Soon’s men had launched more to the tops of the lower levels, providing their Brothers with a path down to the bottom. The mercenaries and retreating Caractacans hardly slowed down as they ran from cable to edge and off.
By the time Scalas and Maruks reached the bottom, side by side, Costigan had gotten almost the entire contingent aboard his sleds and tanks. The vehicles were heavily loaded, with armored forms clinging by mag locks to every open surface. Their fans howled in protest as the cavalry Brothers gunned their engines and roared out through the breach.
Scalas and Maruks hit the ground together and sprinted toward the last tank. Predictably, it was Costigan’s, marked by the command wand waving above the turret. Costigan wouldn’t have gone out first; the Hero of Tide’s Point Station didn’t have it in him to get out of harm’s way before all the rest of his Brothers were away.
Centurion and Brother Legate leaped together, striking the hull with a muted clang and locking their mag locks in place. “We’re the last!” Maruks yelled over the comm. “Go!”
Costigan’s driver sent the tank surging toward the breach in the outer wall, accelerating almost hard enough to dislodge the mag locks. Wind and grit blasted the huddled, armored Brothers who clung to the tank’s hull as the vehicle shot out onto the rocky plain around Ieg, pushing with all it had for the end of the ridgeline.
Scalas knew that ridge wasn’t going to be enough if five ten-gigaton bombs all went off at once. That kind of a blast would crack the planet open. Nothing that wasn’t well off the surface and burning hard for interplanetary space would stand a chance.
A missile streaked down from the sky above, only to be swatted out of the sky by one of the dropships’ point defenses. Some of the descending Exile spacecraft had spotted the vehicles, and were trying to destroy them. Apparently, the Exiles’ desire to destroy their entire race extended to anyone else in the system as well.
Explosions rippled in the sky above as missiles were knocked out by lasers and railguns. Kinetic rounds struck near the vehicle column, blasting towering gouts of ash and rock into the air, but they didn’t seem to be well aimed. And powergun fire was starting to flash upward in response, as the gunners replied in kind. A massive explosion bloomed in the sky above, and a descending spacecraft began to drop more quickly, its drive knocked out, trailing smoke and debris as it plunged toward the volcanic plain. It struck with a catastrophic impact just before Costigan’s tank whipped around the end of the ridge and roared up toward the low saddle that led to the landing zone. The shock of the crash rippled through the ground, and a billowing cloud of ash and smoke obscured the crashed ship until its reactor ruptured, lighting up the clouded scene with a brilliant flash. The shockwave sent a hurricane of grit and radiation roaring over the top of the ridge.
The dropships were only fifteen kilometers away, visible as specks of dirty gunmetal gray against the darker lava plain. The column was spreading out as the drivers poured on everything they could eke out of their sleds’ and tanks’ powerplants. Fifteen kilometers wasn’t that far, but when the fuse had figuratively been lit on fifty gigatons of destruction, it was much too far.
It took consummate skill to bring an air cushion vehicle to a precise halt within meters of a dropship, especially in the boiling clouds of ash and dust kicked up by the fans, but Costigan’s drivers had trained for years, and Costigan himself was well known for drilling his Century relentlessly. Costigan’s driver slowed the tank to a crawl less than three meters from Scalas’s dropship, and Costigan called out, “I believe this is your stop, Erekan.”
Scalas disengaged his mag locks and leaped off, almost stumbling as he hit the ground. He’d been tensed up for the entire ride, and now he had to get his legs adjusted to running in low gravity again. But there was no time to take it gently and he launched himself toward the dropship. “Century XXXII, head count!” he snapped on the internal net.
One by one, the Squad Sergeants sounded off as he threw himself in his open acceleration couch. By the time he was strapped in, the ramps were already closing and he could feel the drive rumbling at the base of his spine.
“Brother Legate, this is Scalas. All accounted for, we are lifting,” he reported.
“Go,” Maruks ordered. “The ships are entering orbit now. We will be right behind you.”
“Launch, Lathan!” Scalas bellowed, but he hardly needed to. With a growling, mind-shredding roar, he was slammed down into the acceleration couch’s deep padding, as the dropship started clawing for the sky.
Breathing in short, fast grunts, he cleared the fog from his vision and was able to watch the display overhead. Ash and dust streaked by, the drive flames of the other ships barely visible as distant glows through the volcanic murk. Grit hissed and roared against the hull; the dropship was going to need a new coat of paint later on.
Then they were out of the clouds and pulling for orbit, Lathan keeping the Gs on. The horizon fell away, rapidly curving into a black-and-golden line, flickering with crimson glows. Above, the display highlighted the spearhead shape of the Dauntless, her own drive blazing blue white as she dumped velocity to enter orbit.
Scalas wondered about the wisdom of entering orbit, when a quarter of the planet might soon be annihilated, but the G forces were too intense to speak. Fortunately, he saw the plan after a few more moments of watching the starships get closer.
The rest of the Regonese ships that could were already burning for interplanetary space, most of them inertialess and speeding away at high fractions of the speed of light. The Caractacan ships were stooping toward the planet to retrieve the dropships, and were coming in at such an angle that they could make their escape with the bulk of the planet between them and Ieg.
Lathan cut the drive. Shortly thereafter, the other drive plumes flickered out on the screen as the rest of the dropships reached low orbit. The starships’ drives were still burning, the ships matching velocities with their charges as quickly as possible even as they slipped lower to rendezvous.
It was a masterful bit of flying from both sides. And in moments, the Dauntless was a looming, silvery cliff overhead, blocking out most of the feed on Scalas’ display, just before the dropship was clamped into the retrieval armature and drawn inside.
There was no time to unload. “Stay in your couches, gentlemen, we will be maneuvering,” Mor called out. And as soon as the last dropship was aboard, the Bergenholm flicked on and the Dauntless flipped her tail toward the planet and blasted away at half the speed of light. The other three ships were right behind her.
Behind them, dwindling quickly, Borogone was a dark, dirty ball of black, gray, and sullen orange. But on that surface, a brighter, lurid spot of light began to grow and grow. It slowly resolved, even at that distance, as a massive, roiling fireball five hundred kilometers across. It wasn’t just the nuclear fire either. The bombs had blasted a hole clear through the planet’s crust. Massive clouds of glowing dust and molten, radioactive rock were thrown clear into orbit, some of the more energetic debris attaining escape velocity. The planet’s crust cracked, the fissures running for thousands of kilometers in all directions, ash, pyroclastic flows, and molten lava spewing into the already poisonous atmosphere.
Ieg was gone. And with it, the Exiles.
Chapter Six
The Angelos-class was a newer class of starship out of the Nakalla Shipyards, bigger even than the Sarissa-class, like Costigan’s Challenger. In a civilian vessel, that might have meant more space and more luxury, and it appeared that the designers had initially had such things in mind.
However, the Caractacan Brotherhood held luxury cheap. The Angelos-class ships that had joined the Brotherhood’s fleet had been refitted to be the spare, ascetic ships of war that the Brothers expected.
A full four hundred meters from thrust bells to nose, the Herald of Justice was packed with fuel tanks, weaponry, nearly two Centuries of Brothers, and sensor suites that would put th
e older Spear-class ships like the Dauntless and the Vindicator to shame. Entire bulkheads had been torn out during her initial refit upon being accepted by the Brotherhood to make room for more of the tools of war and austere but livable quarters for more Brothers.
The sole luxury aboard, aside from the chapel where Father Corinus could lead the crew and the Centuries in prayer and say Mass, was the command conference room. Brother Legate Kranjick’s Boanerges had not had any such chamber; he had conducted his planning consultations either face-to-face on the ground or via comms.
And ordinarily, Maruks would have done the same. But with all four ships presently grounded on pads of the Kego spaceport, there was no reason not to have his Centurions join him aboard the Herald of Justice.
The room looked a bit like a scaled-down command deck, mainly because it was dominated by a central holo tank hanging from the overhead. The table beneath was surrounded by chairs that could double as acceleration couches in an emergency. That was likely to be superfluous; Maruks wasn’t going to be holding a meeting in the middle of a battle. But the Brotherhood believed in being prepared, and there was little that they owned that was of only one purpose.
Maruks entered, clad in the dark red tunic of his rank, glancing over the room as he came. Scalas, Soon, Costigan, and Rokoff stood as he entered. All four Centurions were dressed in their white tunics and black trousers, sidearms belted at their waists.
Soon towered above his brother Centurions. A native of the low-gravity world of Nantak Ro, he had the long-limbed, wiry build of a light-worlder who had worked brutally hard to meet the Brotherhood’s physical standards.
Rokoff was a thoroughly unimpressive-looking man, half a head shorter than Scalas, his dark hair buzzed close to his skull, his features flat and heavy. His quietness added to the impression of mediocrity, but in the short time he had commanded Century XLIV, he had stepped up to take over and try to mitigate some of the damage done by his predecessor’s disregard for Brotherhood discipline. Rokoff was steady, when he had his commander’s support. And Maruks had made it clear that there was still no room for the so-called “New School” of the Brotherhood in what had been Michael Kranjick’s Legio.
Finally, Costigan was the very image of a holo-epic hero. Brown haired, tall and rangy, he would have almost looked pretty if not for the hard lines of his jaw and the crow’s feet around his eyes.
Maruks waved them to their seats. “At ease, Brothers,” he said as he lowered himself into his own chair. The Brother Legate looked exhausted, as well he might. Scalas could feel the sting of fatigue in his own eyes. There had not been time to rest much since launching the assault on Borogone.
“The numbers are in,” Maruks said heavily, once the Centurions were seated. “That blast did indeed alter Borogone’s orbit, though not nearly as drastically as the Exiles perhaps hoped. It pushed it into a slightly higher orbit around Canimic 3452; a Borogonese year will now be approximately five hundred hours longer.”
“How will that altered orbit affect Regone?” Soon asked.
“That has yet to be seen,” Maruks replied. “The Regonese scientists have a number of conflicting theories, ranging from ‘no discernable effect at all’ to ‘we’re all going to die.’” He smiled slightly as a faint chuckle circled the table, then sobered. “There will definitely be some effect,” he said. “I suspect that at the very least, Regone will experience altered seasons and some slight tidal effects, since it will pass closer to the wreck of Borogone. There might be some increased meteorite activity in years hence as well, though I think that most of the debris was blasted sunward.”
He sighed. “An utter catastrophe was averted, though mostly because the Exiles miscalculated. If their math had been better, they might have succeeded. In which case there would have been nothing we could have done but attempt to launch the biggest evacuation since Keder M’ell.
“Which brings us to our main concern.”
“The mercenaries,” Scalas said grimly.
Maruks nodded. “The mercenaries. And they really are mercenaries; as I said, I’ve encountered Yerok’s Irregulars before. They are unscrupulous peddlers of violence, who don’t generally give a damn who they’re working for or what they have to do for their paycheck.
“That said, the fact that they were equipped with Sparatan ships and equipment bears scrutiny. The Sparat system has never been particularly eager to sell their ships; I don’t know of any examples before this recent incident of Lykurgon-class starships in private hands. However, it could still be that they simply sold older ships to finance more of their modernization. The fact that there are no clones among this group tends to suggest that this is not a direct Unity provocation.”
Maruks was watching his Centurions keenly as he spoke. Scalas was thinking as he watched the Brother Legate in turn. He’d seen this before; Maruks wasn’t dismissing Unity involvement in the nashai civil war. He was prompting his Centurions to think, fishing for ideas.
It wasn’t actually all that different from Kranjick’s style. And given that he’d learned that Maruks had counted Kranjick a friend, that made some sense.
“It makes sense though,” Soon pointed out, leaning forward and putting his pointed elbows on the table. “The clones we encountered on Valdek weren’t exactly the greatest of soldiers; they relied on sheer numbers and massed firepower more than tactics and skill. If the majority of clones are like that, then they wouldn’t exactly be the first choice for a long-distance, semi-autonomous special operation.” He was echoing what Costigan had said before.
Costigan was nodding. “And if real military expertise is that rare, then Vakolo must be hoarding his trained Sparatan personnel to train and control the clones. The ratio of trained people to clones has to be huge, just from what we saw on Valdek and on that recon to the Sparat system. If they wanted to stir up trouble away from their front lines, then mercenaries would make the most economic and military sense.”
“And they were using what appeared to be all new designs on Valdek,” Scalas said. “So, they might consider the older ships and equipment to be obsolete, and therefore they could be handed off to mercenaries and proxy forces elsewhere, while they build new ships and equipment.” He looked around at the others. “We saw it from the Pride of Valdek. The entirety of the Sparat system has been thoroughly industrialized. Just from that one system alone, they could have built hundreds of thousands of those ships we saw over Valdek. Older ships might well be surplus to them.”
Maruks leaned back in his chair, nodding with some satisfaction. “I happen to agree with you, gentlemen,” he said. “Thank you for confirming that my reasoning is not off in deep space somewhere.” He sighed. “Unfortunately, we don’t have any concrete confirmation from the surviving mercenaries that the Unity hired them. They’ve been making the usual excuses that they only took an advisory mission, that they didn’t know it was going to turn out to be arming and aiding terrorists until they were already too deep, etc, etc. I don’t believe any of it for a moment. They are trying to save their skins, especially after the Regonese took over the interrogation. They hoped that we would hold onto them and protect them.”
Rokoff snorted. “They launched a first-strike orbital bombardment of civilian targets on a non-belligerent world,” he said. “What did they expect to happen?”
“Never underestimate the capacity for the mind to construct elaborate justifications as to why consequences should be lesser in this case,” Maruks pointed out. “We might have kept them in our custody longer, if only to wring them dry of information, but War Chief Feygeil is making sure that the Regonese share everything with us. They are extremely grateful for our assistance, and many of the war chiefs, at least, recognize that they never could have ended the war with the Exiles as decisively as it happened without us.”
“Never mind that that wasn’t the plan in the first place,” Scalas muttered. “And it isn’t as over as they seem to think it is.”
“But Borogone was destroyed,�
� Rokoff pointed out.
“Of course, most of the Exiles are dead,” Scalas said. “But there will be a few holdouts who believed in the cause, but weren’t quite suicidal, here on Regone. And after a while, you’ll get the younger people, who didn’t see the violence or the horror, who start to rebel against their own culture out of ego, and start to think that maybe those Exiles weren’t so bad after all. Eventually, you might even start to see stories about how the blast that destroyed Ieg was actually set up by the Regonese, not the Exiles at all.”
Maruks was eyeing him. “You are getting cynical in your old age, Centurion Scalas,” he said.
Scalas leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “I’ve seen it too many times.”
Maruks nodded. “As have I. But for the time being, that is not our concern. Eventually it might become so again, but for now, the mercenaries and their broker are our chief matter of interest. Especially given the message that came via courier missile while we were on Borogone.” He touched a control, and the holo tank flared to life, displaying the major systems of the Avar Sector.
Nearly fifty of them glowed red, indicating serious trouble.
“It seems that every brush war and interplanetary conflict in the Avar Sector is suddenly flaring to life,” he said. “Not just in the Avar Sector, either. This pattern is growing, spreading even as traders and messengers carry the word between the stars. Violence is flaring up for a hundred parsecs to spinward, counter-spinward, and coreward from the rimward edge of the Carina Arm. I don’t think I have to tell you gentlemen that I hardly think this is a coincidence, given what happened on Valdek.
“Furthermore, the Unity does appear to be on the move. No more high-profile systems have been attacked yet; Valdek seems to have been their test case. But they are moving.
“Tuleron fell only two hundred hours after your escape from Valdek, though word only just reached the Avar Sector Keep a hundred eighty hours ago. It’s a small world, with a population still only numbering in the millions, but it is Unity territory now.” Another light flashed. “Shondara surrendered just over a thousand hours ago, as soon as the Unity’s ships appeared in orbit. And those are only the two we know for sure about.