by Peter Nealen
He didn’t dare say any of this to anyone. Particularly not after Dunstan’s mutiny on Valdek. Most of the Legio was going to look at any perceived criticism of the Code askance. The New School, the so-called “pragmatists” who had begun to question how wise the Code’s adherence to honor and the moral law really was after Pontakus IX, had cost the Avar Sector Legio dearly, and the Brothers were less than welcoming to it. He didn’t want to voice his worries and his fears, lest he be seen as no better than Dunstan.
But burying the thoughts didn’t make them go away. What if being on the side of Right is only going to get us killed? Because the other side doesn’t care about what is Right.
It doesn’t matter. We’re all going to die eventually. That’s what the Code is all about. So that we can die well.
It didn’t stop the dread.
The countdown started to flash in the holo tank, breaking him out of his reverie. “Thirty seconds,” he announced, proud that his voice sounded even and controlled, almost bored. His hands were poised over the controls, even though he had already set the flight computer to handle just about every step of the tachyonic jump to come. The timing was going to be too tight to try to fly it manually.
The display in the holo tank showed the rest of the task force hanging in the dark, surrounded by the red and purple streamers of the nebula. Rather than the tight, clustered formation they had maintained before, packed behind the Pride of Valdek’s radiation shield, the ships were now in a big, spread-out X formation, the ends jutting toward the pulsar, ahead of the Pride of Valdek herself. They had salvaged four more deployable radiation screens from the space station, and those were now unfurled in front of clusters of ships. Each screen had been big enough to shield the entire station itself, before the task force had stood off and pounded it to fragments of spinning, superheated metal no bigger than a human hand. Fitting ten or eleven starships behind each hadn’t been difficult, though it still presented problems for weapons deployment once they went inert. Most combat starships needed a lot of space to deploy their full weapons constellations.
The countdown blinked zero, the Bergenholm field snapped on, the drives lit, and then the entire scene was compressed to a circular smear of light directly ahead, as the Dauntless, along with every other ship in the task force, outran sluggish light, racing back down toward the pulsar.
The leap was a short one, only a few seconds. Almost as quickly as it had begun, it was over, the Bergenholms flicking off and dropping the ships inert barely five light-seconds from Mzin’s World.
Just as the reconnaissance drones had recorded, there were two Unity cruisers floating above the midnight black sphere of the dwarf planet. Both of them were shrouded by more of the deployable radiation screens that they had captured from the space station on the edge of the system, but they seemed to be station-keeping on the dark side of the planet, shielded by the incredibly dense mass of heavy metals from the relentless onslaught coming from the corpse of the star.
Much like their fellows on the edge of the system, the Unity cruisers were caught flat-footed as thirty-four starships suddenly appeared within long engagement range. It was next to impossible to spot an incoming tachyonic ship before it was either right on top of the observer, or well past. That ship was outrunning any emissions that were reflecting from its hull as it barreled through space.
The Alliance formation had dropped inert with Mzin’s World, and therefore the Unity ships, directly between it and the pulsar. As soon as their Bergenholms cut out, all thirty-four ships started deploying their weapons constellations while opening fire with those lasers and powergun turrets that were unmasked from the radiation screens.
The Dauntless had two turrets that could reach beyond the edge of the screen ahead of her. Missiles and X-ray laser pods were already moving out to firing positions, but it would take them a few seconds. “Fire at will, Carne,” Mor commanded.
The two turrets opened fire, the streaks of ionized copper accelerated to a sizeable fraction of the speed of light looking like straight-line lightning bolts, even at that distance. There was enough radio noise that deep in the system that precise targeting was difficult, but they were close enough that the blizzard of powergun bolts had to hit something.
One spent its fury uselessly in a coruscating flash as it struck a decoy drone that one of the Unity ships had spat out as soon as they’d appeared. Many of the others missed. Three painted glowing patches on the hull of the leftmost ship, even as they shoved it toward the planet below, hard.
“They’re inertialess!” Fry snapped. “It’s going to have to be lasers.”
Having neutralized their inertia, the ships were only going to be shoved one way or another by any kinetic energy thrown at them. They’d even bounce off the surface of the planet, if it came to that.
But directed energy weapons were another beast altogether. Mor was already hitting the maneuvering thrusters to get the Dauntless past the edge of the Pride of Valdek’s radiation shield, unmasking her main laser emitters.
“The Pride is launching remote weapons platforms,” Fry announced. “They must have figured it out, too.”
Mor didn’t dare maneuver too violently that close to the Pride of Valdek and the Vindicator. So it was taking some time to get around that big, domed mass of polymer, metal, and ice out front of the dreadnaught. But if he over-thrust, he could potentially nudge the Dauntless out into the direct radiation coming from the pulsar, and then they’d be in trouble. “Commence laser fire as soon as we’re unmasked,” he ordered.
All his earlier doubts and fears were gone, consumed by the action at hand. He was distantly grateful for it, even as he concentrated on flying the ship.
“Drive flares on the surface!” Fry snapped. “Five…six…eight ships, lifting from the surface. They’re firing!”
Mor could see it in the holo tank. So, they’d left two of their ships on high watch, while the rest hunkered down on the surface. He wasn’t sure it made sense, given the loss of maneuverability from being that deep in a gravity well, but it had certainly caught the task force off guard.
Powergun fire was flashing upward at them, even as laser beams started to flare brilliantly against the spaceborne ships’ hulls. Five bolts transfixed one of the Valdekan ships, blasting glowing holes through her hull and deep into her decks. Secondary explosions winked along her flank, and then her reactor was blowing off its emergency vent.
Unfortunately, the emergency vent wasn’t designed for that kind of close formation. Sun-hot plasma splashed against the Dahuan star cruiser only a few hundred meters to her flank.
Hull metal sublimated and plates buckled. In a moment, a substantial portion of her flank scoured away by the Valdekan ship’s reactor dump, the Dahuan ship was tumbling away, unpowered, breaking up, and glowing fiercely across the spectrum. It was unlikely that any of the crew had survived.
Even as the Dahuan ship died, two more ships, both older Valdekan cruisers, were impaled on multiple powergun salvos. The Valdekan Antares III shuddered, glowing holes punched through hull plating and multiple decks. One of those bolts of coherent copper ions struck something vital. The Antares III’s reactor couldn’t dump in time, and lost containment. The ship suddenly turned into a small sun, an actinic white flash that lit up the entire night side of Mzin’s World.
As it did so, the sheer energy dump of the explosion crashed into the other four ships holding formation behind the deployable radiation screen. One exploded in a bright echo of the first, but the others tumbled away, no longer anything but blackened, stricken hulks.
The Pride of Valdek was returning fire. The dreadnaught couldn’t bring its primary spine-mounted particle beams to bear, not with the radiation shield deployed ahead of its nose, but a nine-hundred-meter long warship could carry a lot of remote weapons platforms, and most of the Pride’s were currently deployed.
A blizzard of destruction in the form of laser pulses, powergun bolts, and hypervelocity kinetic projectiles rained do
wn on the ships near the surface. One was destroyed outright in the first few moments, flashing into an incandescent flare as it, too, lost reactor containment. Another lost control and crashed into the surface with another bright flash, though one that seemed muted in comparison to the more spectacular detonations around it.
Mor was fighting to keep the Dauntless right at the edge of the radiation shield. The sky had suddenly gotten extremely crowded. The two unmasked powergun turrets were hammering bolts down at the ships near the surface, while the lasers pulsed more fire at the ships in space.
The ambush from below had almost diverted attention from the two inertialess ships they had first encountered. One was already clearly out of action, tumbling and glowing white-hot where the concentrated laser fire from a dozen starships had torn its hull open. The other was still in the fight, though it was diving for the surface now.
“What good is going deeper into the gravity well going to do?” Carne muttered.
“There’s a lot of clutter down there, and while we can localize the drive flares, there’s also a lot of dust and obscurement being kicked up, too,” Fry said through clenched teeth. “Between that, ECM, and the radiation noise, targeting is getting difficult.”
“Now what are they doing?” Mor asked, staring at the tank. Two of the Fortunian maulers had broken formation and were thrusting toward the surface, pursing the fleeing ship.
“Letting their aggressiveness get the better of their judgement,” Titus growled over the comm. Mor hadn’t realized that his had been open as he’d spoken; he’d forgotten Maruks’s current policy of keeping the comm channels between ships as open as possible when engaged or soon to be engaged. “If one of them gets damaged…”
Titus didn’t finish the sentence, but he hardly needed to. Given their current vectors, getting too close to the planet would mean getting caught in the gravity well. By itself, that wouldn’t be fatal, but if they took a bad enough hit and lost power…
He could only spare part of his concentration to watch what happened next. The Unity ships near the surface were almost as obscured as Fry had said, hiding behind clouds of either dust or deliberately deployed obscurant, and they were moving, hopping from point to point with short bursts of thrust. They could see and target the ships above them much more easily than they could be targeted.
The two maulers roared down on the fleeing ship, which had apparently switched off its Bergenholm and was trying to brake for an inert descent. Powergun fire flickered through the void between them, as the bright points of laser pulses flared against the Unity ship’s hull. Missiles streaked in both directions; some were detonated by point defense fire, others missed.
One hit.
It struck the Unity ship just forward of its drive with a catastrophic impact. The ship’s spine cracked in half as the warhead detonated, a bright flash shortly followed by a spray of shattered, twisted debris as the ship began to tumble. Already on a terminal descent trajectory, the plot showed that it was going to hit the surface some four hundred kilometers from the oncoming terminator, in a matter of a few minutes. All fire from the stricken ship ceased.
No escape pods were seen deploying from the falling wreck.
The two maulers did not adjust their own vectors though, continuing on their high-velocity descent toward the planet. Intense particle beam fire began to pour from the maws of their spine-mounted cannons, tearing glowing furrows in the crust of the planet below as they reached for the nearest of the low-level spacecraft.
Even as the beams tore through their target, sending glowing debris sailing through the airless sky to crash violently against the heavy-metal surface of the dwarf, something went very wrong.
The faint coronal discharge that was characteristic of a railgun firing in an atmosphere was absent in the vacuum that wreathed Mzin’s World. The only warning was the sudden series of bright flashes that hammered against the Whirlwind’s hull, blasting through her armor and deep into her vitals.
“We’re hit,” Captain Throsoltr, the Whirlwind’s commander, reported tersely. “Main drives are out. We have maneuvering thrusters only, and we’ve been captured by the gravity well. We are going down. I am abandoning ship for the surface.”
Even as he finished the words, the first of the Whirlwind’s landers were already spilling from their docking ports along the ship’s spine. The plot was already tracing the mauler’s trajectory; she was going to hit in less than five minutes.
“Where did that fire come from?” Mor demanded. He might have been mistaken, but it didn’t seem like it had come from the Unity ships hovering above the surface.
“Unknown,” Fry answered. “I’m trying to backtrack the trajectories…”
The second mauler, the Stormhawk, was already rotating and driving hard for space, her point defenses spitting fire at anything that looked like it might be hostile. More powergun fire flickered after her, but it was a particle beam that was her death. A gossamer line of faint purple light reached up from one of the dimly underlit clouds of dust on the surface and cut the mauler in half, right through the hab module.
The Stormhawk was avenged quickly enough. A ravening torrent of powergun and particle beam fire tore everything in the vicinity of that beam’s point of origin into glowing debris. It was too late for the Stormhawk’s crew, however.
“I’ve got something,” Fry announced. “Not a ship. It looks like the biggest crawler I’ve ever seen. And I think it’s firing on the Whirlwind’s landers.”
The image came up in the holo tank. It was a crawler, all right, a massive, blocky construct the size of a cathedral, rolling slowly across the rough terrain of the surface of Mzin’s World on enormous treads. And it was heavily armed; there were railgun turrets sticking up from each corner. It was impossible to see the projectiles or the drive fields on visual, but two of them were definitely oriented toward the falling landers.
“That must be one of their mining machines,” Mor said. “It’s mobile so that it can stay on the dark side and keep from getting fried by the pulsar’s radiation.” His lips tightened. “Knock it out.”
“Already done,” Carne reported grimly. A moment’s glance showed Mor that a missile was already heading for the surface at max thrust. A moment later, the mining crawler disappeared in a brilliant flash.
Another semi-obscured Unity ship near the surface erupted in a blast of plasma as more fire found its mark. The fire directed toward the attacking starships was tapering off; if any of the Unity ships remained down there, they had grounded and gone quiet to avoid drawing fire.
The comm crackled. The transmission was weak and nearly overwhelmed by the sheer amount of electromagnetic noise in the system, but the words were just clear enough.
“This is Captain Throsoltr of the Whirlwind,” the Fortunian commander called. “I am on the surface with about fifty percent of my crew. We are setting up a defensive perimeter, but we appear to be surrounded by at least six more of the Unity’s mining machines, and a grounded starship.
“And I think they are deploying ground troops.”
Chapter Eighteen
“Brother Legate,” Scalas called over the Brotherhood net. “Request permission to launch a drop to relieve and extract the Fortunian personnel on the surface.”
“Stand by, Centurion,” Maruks said shortly. “Some of our allies are insisting that the risk is too high, and that we should simply bombard the mining platforms from orbit. I need to convince them otherwise.”
Scalas fumed behind his visor. The Fortunian attack might have been foolhardy, but if it was at all possible to get those men off the surface, they had to try. To simply write them off and blanket the surface with orbital strikes would be safer, but it wouldn’t be right.
But the Code mandated obedience to rightful authority. So, he had to wait.
Weapons fire was still being exchanged between the surface and the task force in space. He could see the flickers of powergun bolts and laser beams striking dust and fragments in t
he display above his couch. The picture was becoming somewhat clearer. There appeared to be one more ship on the ground, and six more mining platforms, all within a few kilometers of it. From what they could tell, the mining crawlers were converging on the ship, which wasn’t far from the Fortunians’ drop zone.
In addition to the starship, those mining platforms were extremely heavily armed. Even so, since they had given their positions away by firing, it would be easy enough to wipe them off the surface of the planet, but it would mean sacrificing the Fortunians to do it.
Cobb’s voice came over his Century circuit. “What are we waiting for, Centurion?” he asked. “We’re losing momentum fast.”
“The Brother Legate has to convince our allies in space not to murder our allies on the ground for the sake of taking out the rest of the mining platforms,” Scalas replied. “He has instructed us to stand by.”
He could imagine Cobb’s reaction, but the squad sergeant kept his thoughts to himself.
Abruptly, his display cleared to show a cloud of faces, and a babble of voices filled his ears. Maruks must have opened the main conference circuit to his Centurions.
“The numbers do not lie, Legate Maruks,” one of the velk was saying. “We cannot risk the rest of the task force for the sake of a mere handful of men.”
“I think you are simply impatient, Bolar,” Maruks replied shortly. “The armaments on the surviving platforms are certainly potent, and the starship even more so, but altogether they present less of a threat than the starships that we have already neutralized. We have the upper hand. To abandon those men down there to their deaths out of cowardice would hardly be a fitting beginning to this Alliance, would it?”
“You are not in command of this force, Legate,” one of the Dahuan commanders said.
“No, I am not,” Maruks replied. “Nor, for that matter, is the commander of the Alliance forces in command of my Brothers.”