by Peter Nealen
But the Alliance ships had already maneuvered to counter the threat. None of them were currently under thrust, and so they had angled their noses outboard, to better facilitate weapons launches. That also brought more of their point defense lasers to bear.
Incoming missiles began to flash into incandescent vapor and fragments as concentrated laser fire swatted them out of the eerie, red-and-purple sky. There were nearly three dozen missiles in flight, and the radiation levels made targeting difficult, but there were enough laser emitters to make the odds of any of them getting through pretty long.
“Why aren’t we launching more missiles?” Torgan asked.
“Because there’s no need to,” Scalas said grimly. “And we might need the ordnance later on.”
It soon became evident as to why. The radiation screen was tumbling away from the station, exposing both it and the starships to the pulsar’s radiation. The third cruiser had been hammered by three missile strikes that had gotten through its point defenses, and it was beginning to tumble. It was moving away from the station and the pulsar, but it wouldn’t be enough to save it. It wasn’t under power, and its Bergenholm was probably knocked out as well. The second was also drifting, its power apparently having failed.
“We survived some direct exposure,” one of the newer men, Brother Cade, pointed out.
“But the Unity puts a premium on quantity, not quality,” Dravot said. “I doubt those ships are particularly well shielded.”
Scalas watched the display, feeling a little sick. The men aboard those ships, clones or not, were enemies, certainly. But they were still men.
And dying of radiation exposure was not a good way to go.
He said a silent prayer for his enemies, as they awaited their deaths.
In the looming shadow of the Pride of Valdek’s radiation shield, the dropships jetted in toward the stricken space station.
It wasn’t a short or a pleasant flight. There was still a lot of debris floating around, and the pilots often had to rapidly maneuver to avoid striking a lethal fragment. Even though radiation had killed the crews of the drifting hulks, there had still been a lot of hull plating blasted off by lasers and missile fragments, and most of it was still localized, not having had quite enough energy imparted to clear it out.
The Pride had thrust forward and was currently station-keeping between the station and the pulsar, replacing the wrecked radiation screen with its own shield. It was barely big enough, and the Brothers and sefkhit shock troops were going to have to be careful. The sefkhit tended to have higher radiation tolerances than humans, but enough hard rads would kill anything.
Lathan was steering the dropship toward the central docking hub. It was bigger than he’d thought, Scalas saw, as he watched the approach. And there was a lot of extraneous machinery and supply modules tethered to it. There might be a lot of useful supplies for their approach to Mzin’s World itself.
Hopefully it wasn’t too radioactive to use.
With a short burst of maneuvering thrusters, Lathan brought the dropship to a relative halt, some one hundred meters from the docking hub. Scalas didn’t need to ask why; he could see the damage in his display. A sizeable fragment of something had smashed into the small-craft docking bay, tearing the cradles into crazed, twisted masses of jagged metal.
“That’s not going to work, Centurion,” Lathan said. “I can get you close, but I’m afraid that we’re not going to be able to dock like we planned.”
Scalas sighed. “When have we done a deep space rendezvous and boarding that did go smoothly and according to plan, Lathan?” he asked.
There was a pause. “Well, there was that Rudregian lighthugger…” Lathan ventured.
“The ship was in near total systems failure, and they were killing each other over whose fault it was,” Scalas said dryly. “I’d hardly call that ‘smooth and according to plan.’”
“But I was able to dock, instead of floating just outside so that you had to go EVA,” Lathan pointed out. “So, in that sense, it did go more smoothly than this.”
“Your qualified definition of ‘smoothly’ is noted,” Scalas said. “I think you should stick with flying dropships.” He sobered. “Radiation readings?”
There was another brief pause. “The station is still pretty hot,” Lathan said. “But as long as you stay buttoned up in your armor—and given the holes I’m seeing in the modules, I wouldn’t advise cracking seal even if the radiation levels were survivable—you should be all right for a couple of hours. Much past that, and we’re looking at dangerous doses.”
“Understood,” Scalas said. “Century XXXII, all out. We’re going EVA.”
Basic Caractacan Brotherhood armor was proof against elevated radiation levels, up to a point. It was some of the finest combat armor made in the galaxy, and could keep a man relatively comfortable in multiple environments that would be trying very hard to kill him. But the intensity of the radiation in the vicinity of a pulsar had meant having to pull out some heavier protection.
So, the Brothers who drifted out of the opened dropship on maneuvering packs looked somewhat bulkier than normal, having attached the extra radiation protective plates to the outside of their armor. Their range of motion was going to be considerably less than normal, which would pose potential problems if any of the Unity personnel aboard the station and the drifting wrecks of the starships were still alive.
But Maruks had agreed with Scalas that the threat of the radiation was higher than that of a still-living, but probably badly radiation-sick Unity ambush.
In a loose pyramid formation, they stooped toward the wrecked docking bay. The hub itself was a massive cylinder, with a central bearing ring that allowed the armatures leading to the habs on the ring to spin without simultaneously turning the central hub. It made the approach a little easier, but clearing the hub itself was still going to be difficult. Especially as damaged as it was.
“Centurion, do you see that?” Solanus asked. He tagged one of the containers tethered to the outside of the hub, and it flashed in Scalas’s visor.
He took a closer look as they drifted toward the cylinder. What had appeared, at first glance, to be a cargo pod, now looked somewhat like a massive, folded umbrella. “That looks like a deployable radiation shield,” he said.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Solanus replied, with that touch of eagerness that his junior squad sergeant still couldn’t help from time to time. “Do you think that we could use them?”
“I am sure that we could,” Scalas said, “though it might take some careful adaptation. Now, let’s concentrate on making sure that the station is clear before we start figuring out what to do with it.”
Solanus fell silent. Scalas grimaced behind his visor. The younger man tried, he really did. And there had been nothing wrong with his observation. But he always seemed to be trying just a little bit too hard, trying to prove that he did, in fact, belong in his billet. And Scalas knew that he himself tended to shut Solanus down a little more curtly than required. There was no sign of hostiles, no Unity transmissions detected anywhere near or inside the station.
He told himself that they still had to be sure, and that misreading a situation had gotten a great many good men killed. Silently, dwarfed by the station’s bulk, the hundred armored forms of his Century approached the smashed docking bay. “Above” him, lit only by the brief flares of their own maneuvering jets but highlighted by his visor, he could just barely see the sinuous forms of the sefkhit shock troops reaching one of the stricken cruisers. After a glance, he focused on the wound in the side of the hub ahead of him.
As he got closer, it became apparent that the opening was a lot bigger than it had looked. This wasn’t going to be nearly as difficult or as dangerous as boarding that unmarked Unity cruiser in the Ktatra system. Flanked by Kahane, Cobb, and Solanus, their squads maneuvering into more of a single-file column behind them to get through the opening, he drifted into the massive, blasted cavern in the station’s hub
.
Some of the lights were still on; the station still had power. There were several small craft, or what was left of them, still docked inside the bay. Most of them shared the angular, no-frills look of the Unity hardware that Scalas had already seen; blunt, brutal wedges of white-painted metal with the blue barred spiral and crossed swords that was the Galactic Unity’s crest on their flanks. They were ugly but functional, at least the ones that hadn’t been smashed to scrap by the hit that had rendered the docking bay impassable for the dropships.
Searching the mottled pattern of light and shadow in the big space, Scalas spotted what had to be the control center. He pointed. “Cobb, Bruhnan, take your squads and secure the central control. Find out what you can about the layout and status of the rest of the station, along with whatever supplies that we might be able to use. Kahane, Kunn, and Solanus, spread out and begin a thorough sweep of the bay; I don’t want to be ambushed by clone troops who managed to get into radiation suits in time.”
Terse acknowledgements came over the comm, and the Brothers began to move as directed, faint puffs from their maneuvering units shoving them onto the vectors they needed to get to their destinations.
He moved toward Cobb, falling in just behind and to the right of his friend and senior squad sergeant. He wanted to see what was in that control room, and determine if a sweep of the outer habs was even necessary.
As he floated through the bay, he checked his visor’s radiation indicator. Even inside, the station was still pretty hot; the indicator was solidly in the yellow. They were going to have to move as quickly as possible, get in and get out.
There was an airlock against the outer wall of the docking bay, just below the massive windows of the control center. Scalas doubted that it was central station control, but it was a start. Two of Cobb’s men, Mentzer and Vrand, entered the lock first, scanning with their powerguns, having to swivel most of their entire bodies in the bulky radiation armor, then waved the next three in. The lock wasn’t terribly small, but the radiation armor was bulky.
He glanced up at the windows as they waited. The lights inside were still on, stark and white. He could clearly see at least one body floating, and there might have been reddish droplets spattered against the transparency.
Given the rad levels coming off the pulsar, he doubted that their deaths had been slow. As quick as they had probably been, however, they had surely been anything but pleasant.
“Cobb, Vrand,” the Second Squad Brother reported. “We’re in the command center. No resistance.” There was a pause. “It’s pretty bad, Squad Sergeant.”
Scalas saw Cobb turn toward him, and nodded. It had to be a somewhat exaggerated gesture to be visible with the bulk of his armor, and it almost set him to tumbling, but a very brief burst of maneuvering thrusters arrested the movement.
“We’re coming up,” Cobb replied. “Does it look like it’s the station control center, or just for the docking bay?”
“I think it’s the whole station’s, Squad Sergeant,” Vrand replied. “I do not read Palawese, but the controls and displays seem to be much more extensive than would be necessary for traffic control. And there are a lot of bodies here, including two in the same white uniforms as the officer that was found dead on the cruiser’s command deck at Ktatra.”
“We are on our way, Vrand,” Cobb repeated as he and Scalas drifted into the airlock. “Start downloading all the data you can. We don’t have a lot of time.”
The lock didn’t take long to cycle; as crude and cheap as much of the Unity’s tech seemed to be, at least that worked well. The inner door slid open, and they moved into the ladderwell leading up to the command center. The shaft was lined with sterile, blue-white lights, set far enough apart to leave nearly meter-long stretches in shadow.
The control center really was larger than it had looked from inside the docking bay. A central holo tank was set back from the windows, with two banks of consoles and zero-G anchor points behind it, while a single row of similar control panels faced the windows and appeared to be dedicated to docking operations.
It was also a charnel house.
Nearly three dozen bodies floated at the consoles or in the air, surrounded by droplets of vomit, foam, blood, and even less wholesome fluids. A few, still anchored to their stations, looked eerily like the corpses they’d found in the mess hall of the captured Unity cruiser at Ktatra; they had clearly seen their deaths coming and taken poison. Others had died harder, convulsing, vomiting, and bleeding from every orifice as the hard radiation destroyed their cells from the inside out.
Two had apparently been shot, drifting against the far bulkhead, scorched holes burned in their coveralls. The white-uniformed man still clutching the laser pistol had the glassy eyes and bulging tongue of a man who had taken poison.
“What do you think?” Cobb asked, pointing to the two who had been executed. “They wouldn’t take the poison, so he shot them?”
“Best guess,” Scalas replied grimly. “But he’d already taken it, so he died before he could shoot any of the others who refused.”
“Most of them look like clones,” Vrand pointed out from where he was floating near the holo tank. He had a small cable plugged into a data port, leading back to his gauntlet. “Except the ones who were shot, or died of radiation poisoning.”
Scalas looked more carefully. Vrand was right. The poisoned crewmen all shared the same two or three faces. The others were more unique. “Maybe the Unity’s indoctrination doesn’t stick so well with normals?” Cobb wondered.
“Maybe,” Scalas conceded. “Get recordings of all of it. We can analyze them when we’re not being slowly cooked in here. How much longer, Vrand?”
The armored Brother looked at an indicator in his visor. “About another ten minutes, Centurion. It looks like they wiped anything that might be strategic, but I’m pretty sure I have a station logistics inventory here.”
“Then we head back in fifteen,” he said. “And then we’re going to blast this tomb to scrap.”
Chapter Seventeen
On the off chance that the station had managed to get a transmission to Mzin’s World, or even if the emissions from the battle for the station had made it through the pulsar’s noise, the entire task force, now bringing along the Unity’s own deployable radiation screens, went tachyonic and raced away from the system, rendezvousing with the ships left behind before swinging around to come in at the target from almost halfway around the pulsar.
Strapped into his command couch, Mor peered into the holo tank, thinking, his hands poised over the controls. Their leap back into the system had to be precisely timed so that all fifty plus ships went inert at roughly the same distance from Mzin’s World itself, preferably within its shadow. They had already conducted their synchronization burns, setting their intrinsic vectors to parallel the dwarf’s own orbit around the pulsar. The trick he’d tried to stay behind the supergiant would hopefully work a second time, even though there were considerably more ships and Mzin’s World’s umbra was considerably smaller.
He was going over each maneuver, each step of the approach and the battle to come, over and over, as he waited. It was what he did before an engagement; it kept him from worrying too much.
But it wasn’t as effective this time. His mind kept wandering.
This was far from his first space battle; he’d been flying the Dauntless for nearly six years. He’d fought pirates and even M’tait Hunterships, though the latter had been more of a delaying action, trying to throw as much firepower as possible at the unreal monstrosities to slow them down while other ships escaped. To the best of his knowledge, no one had ever managed to actually shoot down a M’tait Huntership.
But there was something nagging at him about this war. A deep sense of dread he couldn’t quite shake.
He hadn’t been on the ground for the fighting on Valdek, though he’d certainly been the target of plenty of Unity firepower. But he’d seen the records, and he’d heard Scalas’s accounts, his
voice faintly haunted by the horror of the sight of heedless waves of humanity throwing themselves at the Valdekan lines.
There was something about this war, something deeply horrifying. No force except the M’tait had ever managed to wage a serious war over interstellar distances, at least not past a local group of stars within twenty to fifty light-years. And the M’tait were something like a force of nature; no one could understand why they did what they did. They were something to be weathered, to be survived, so the rebuilding could start once they left. They murdered millions, but there was no stopping them, only slowing them.
But the Unity was human in origin. And yet it was the most inhuman force he’d ever seen. He’d seen the Sparat system through the Dauntless’s sensors, seen the immense explosion of industrialization that had all but completely consumed that system, driven by massed hordes of manufactured human beings. All of them indoctrinated to believe in the Unity and their “Visionary Leader,” to the point of throwing their lives away with abandon.
That sight had shaken him more than anything he’d ever seen.
If he was being dispassionate, he knew that the numbers didn’t matter. Not to the Brotherhood. But he’d never been quite as firm in his dedication to the Code as Scalas had been. He followed it to the best of his ability, and up until recently, his own skill had been more than enough to keep him from becoming overly worried about survivability. Certainly, Brothers died. Ships were lost. But the Brotherhood was good enough that success was far more common than failure. It was easy to pay lip service to the Code when one was reasonably confident of one’s own survival.
But now they were vastly outnumbered, divided, facing a unified horde of made-to-order soldiers, spacemen, and engineers, all fanatically dedicated to the domination of the galaxy.
How did they stand a chance against that? How could any Alliance built in good faith move quickly enough not to be overwhelmed by a group with no scruples, no idea of right and wrong, who would use any tech, any brutality, to win?