by Peter Nealen
A few of the other commanding officers started to look a little nervous, as if wondering what was coming next. Scalas, unseen by the rest, who probably didn’t know that the rest of the Caractacan Centurions were watching and listening, grinned tightly. He knew.
“Battle has been joined,” Maruks continued. “Those men are down there unprepared and underequipped for ground combat. Every moment we continue to delay and debate, their deaths get closer, either from enemy action or direct exposure to the pulsar’s radiation at sunrise.
“The Caractacan Brotherhood answers to no chain of command but its own, to no ultimate authority but the Code and the Laws of God.” His voice had gone hard. “The Code demands that we come to grips with the enemy and aid our friends. We are descending to the surface to rescue the Fortunians and end this.
“I would strongly suggest you avoid even thinking about bombarding the surface while my Brothers and I are on it. The rest of the Brotherhood will find out.” The Brother Legate cut the circuit. The faces, still looking somewhat shocked, vanished from Scalas’s display.
“You heard, Centurions?” Maruks asked grimly.
“We did, Brother Legate,” Scalas called. One by one, Costigan, Soon, and Rokoff replied in the affirmative.
“Good,” Maruks said. “Prepare for battle, Brothers. Captains, take us down.”
The four Caractacan starships’ drives flared blue-white, and they pulled away from the rest of the formation, beginning their dive toward the black, bleak, radiation-scoured surface below.
There was no one way to conduct a planetary assault. The starships could release their dropships on a high-velocity pass, or they could do so while remaining in orbit to provide orbital fire support and observation. Or, in some cases, the ships themselves might descend to a staging area and deploy troops and tanks from there.
With orbit untenable, and time of the essence, the Caractacan Brothers were doing something different. The four starships and their flock of dropships were descending together, the dropships flying in formation with the starships themselves.
Since they had been velocity-matched with the planet below them, the descent was one of the stranger ones that Scalas had ever been through. They were dropping in freefall for a few minutes, no retrofire necessary until they were nearly at the surface. The initial burst of thrust had been enough to put them on a relatively high-velocity trajectory to intersect a point on the surface some five kilometers from the Fortunians’ redoubt.
The lack of G forces made it easier to study the terrain as they stooped toward the surface. It was going to be rougher than he’d thought.
Much of the asteroidal debris that was a normal part of most star systems had been swept away by the supernova, so there was very little cratering. However, the surface of Mzin’s World had been molten, first from the enormous pressures of the gas giant’s atmosphere, and then again from the energy of the blast that had scoured that atmosphere away. The landscape below was a tortured lava bed for as far as the eye could see, covered in ridges, hills, bubbles of hardened heavy metal lava, and deep craters where those bubbles had collapsed. Their landing zone was on a raised bed of hardened lava, mostly flat but still potentially treacherous. The five kilometers between them and the Fortunians was a brutal stretch of jagged rock that would take every bit of endurance they had to get across it.
He could see the starship and four of the six crawlers on the plot. Of the other two, one had hunkered down in the lava, and was obscured by bizarre zigurrats of black rock. The other had been blown apart by concentrated powergun fire on the descent.
The other four were too close to the Fortunians to risk firing on them, and had stopped. Given the rate of Mzin’s World’s rotation, he suspected that they knew that the Caractacans would not fire on them if it meant killing the Fortunians, and were staying close deliberately.
It was one more reason to bring the Unity crashing down.
He was studying the terrain closely, tracing possible ground routes and forwarding the tracks to Maruks and the other Centurions, when a comm call chimed. He glanced at the notification. It was meant for him and him alone. And it was coming from Rehenek.
With a faint sigh, suspecting that he knew what this was about, he answered.
“Centurion Scalas,” he said.
“Erekan,” Rehenek said urgently, “I know why you and your Brothers are doing this. But is it worth the risk?”
“The risk to ourselves, Amra?” he asked mildly. “Or the political risk to the Alliance of losing four Centuries of Caractacan Brothers on a raid?”
Rehenek’s mouth thinned at that, but he didn’t object, which was telling. “You said it yourself; this is a raid,” he said. “A fast, dramatic strike to hurt them and let the rest of the galaxy see it! Get in, smash their mining operation, and get out. We don’t have the assets for a major campaign. That’s the whole point! If we get bogged down on the surface, when the next Unity ships come to investigate, or even just to pick up the next shipment of heavy metals…”
“We won’t get bogged down,” Scalas assured him, though he wondered at the wisdom and honesty of saying that. Battle was inherently unpredictable, as had already been amply demonstrated so far. “We will remain on the surface long enough to extract the Fortunians. Then you may bombard the mining platforms as you please.” His face was hidden by his helmet, but he still gave Rehenek’s image in the display a hard stare. “This is our way, General-Regent,” he said. “We do not sacrifice men simply for expediency.”
“It’s war, Erekan,” Rehenek protested. “Men die in war. They knew the risks.”
“And so do we,” Scalas pointed out. “We will be on the ground shortly.”
Rehenek nodded, his face tight. “Good luck then,” he said. “May the Universe watch over you.”
It will not, but I hope that God will.
Then the first of the Unity platforms opened fire on the descending ships.
It was difficult to dodge railgun projectiles in vacuum. Radar and lidar could pick the projectiles themselves out, to some extent, but space above the surface of Mzin’s World was a seething storm of electronic countermeasures and jamming. Some of the projectiles were bound to get through.
One of Third Squad’s dropships suddenly shattered, scattering glowing debris in a vicious arc around and in front of it. Scalas was suddenly slammed back into his couch’s padding as Lathan gunned the drive to get the dropship out of the danger zone from the fragments of the stricken dropship. Others were following suit, accelerating toward the surface below. Better to get low fast than to spend more time in the enemy’s firing arc than necessary. Fortunately, the grounded starship had been eclipsed by the terrain early from the angle they had descended.
Then the blackened, tortured surface was coming up fast. Lathan cut the drive, tumbled the dropship to point its nose toward the nebula above, and then fired the drive again savagely.
Scalas had had only a mere instant to brace himself before they were under five Gs of deceleration. Even that seemed gentle when the dropship’s landing jacks hit the lava with a crushing impact a moment later.
Then the weight was gone, the shock had dissipated, and he was slamming an armored fist against the strap release, acting almost more on instinct and trained reflex than anything else. He surged to his feet, fighting against the unfamiliar feeling of a full G of gravity, grabbed his powergun, and was already hitting the unfolding ramp as it touched the surface outside.
The scene before him was as alien and as desolate as anything he’d ever seen. Fantastical rock formations stood black against the curtain of luminescent gas and dust in the sky.
A quick assessment showed him that the rest of his Century, sans the one dropship of ten men that had been hit, had made it to the ground. “Squad Sergeants, rally up on that dome,” he called over the internal comms, indicating a great bulge of reddish rock a hundred meters ahead. Suiting actions to words, he started toward the hardened bubble of faintly radioactive rock a
t a trot.
The sky was a swirling miasma of color, lending more light to the scene than would be normal under starlight on the night side of a planet. The silence was jarring, broken only by comms chatter, the faint rattle and rustle of his own armor as he moved, and the rasp of his own breath. There had not been an atmosphere to transmit sound on Mzin’s World in a very, very long time.
The four Caractacan starships squatted on their landing jacks, surrounded by the dropships, their silvery hulls reflecting the weird colors of the nebula above. All weapons fire had ceased, aside from the occasional flash from above, where the rest of the strike force remained in space. The mining platforms were now occluded from the landing zone.
The Brothers themselves were only visible as faint flickers of movement in the darkness, their chameleonic armor having darkened to match the blasted surface of the planet. They were moving in tight formations, leapfrogging forward to find covered positions on the edge of the plateau.
Faint, bluish light glared, drawing the eye toward the bigger, hemispherical cavalry dropships. Smooth-lined, oval Destrier tanks were drifting down the loading ramps, held aloft by the rocket packs designed to substitute for their fans in vacuum. Scalas eyed them skeptically; he knew that the tanks and combat sleds were some of the most powerful and maneuverable armored fighting vehicles in the galaxy, but the terrain ahead was infantry territory. He doubted that even the tanks, their rockets at maximum thrust, would last long on that tortured landscape in a full G of gravity.
He pounded to his chosen rally point, reaching it just ahead of Cobb. Kahane was some distance behind, staying with his squad, even though the powerful little man could easily have reached the rally point in half the time it had taken Scalas. A mere one G was child’s play to him.
Kunn arrived, faceless in his armor, with the half a squad he had remaining. “Status, Kunn?” Scalas asked.
“We are at half strength, but we can still fight,” was the emotionless response. Scalas stared hard at his enigmatic squad sergeant for a moment. He had rather expected it, but it was still unnerving to hear not a single note of grief or remorse at the losses he had taken.
“You will take up rear security,” Scalas told him. He was almost more concerned for the rest of the squad than for Kunn. Kunn might try to take them right into the teeth of a firefight, without even noticing the effect of the losses on his men.
“Yes, Centurion,” was all Kunn said in reply.
A glance right and left, augmented by the small tactical display he could bring up in front of his right eye, showed him that the rest of the infantry Centuries were spread out on a line to either side of his own, poised to descend the broken slope of the lava plateau toward the Fortunians and the mining platforms. “Maruks, Scalas,” he called. “Century XXXII is ready to move.”
“Copy, Scalas,” Maruks said gruffly. “Stand by.”
There was a faint click over the comms, suggesting that Maruks had just switched to an all-call. “Captain Throsoltr, this is Brother Legate Maruks. We are on the surface and moving toward your position from the southeast.”
Throsoltr’s reply was weak and riddled with static. “Hurry…over…un…coming…all sides…”
“You heard the man, Centurions,” Maruks said grimly. “Double time.”
Scalas stood and led the way.
It became apparent after only a few dozen meters that the planet’s density was causing some strange perspective problems. The gravity suggested a body far larger than Mzin’s World was, and therefore the distances were shorter than expected. Even as they clambered down the rippled face of the lava cliff below the landing zone, the glow of weapons fire flickered off the rocks above them, occasionally back-lighting the razor-edged ridge ahead with brilliant blue or green light.
Of course, there was still a great deal of ECM in use on the surface, in addition to the ferocious radiation sleeting through space around the pulsar. Scalas’s tactical display in his helmet visor continually jumped and fuzzed, to the point that he finally paused halfway down the slope to turn it off. It was more a distraction than a help.
It made it difficult to keep track of his own Century, never mind the others. He could see armored men moving by movement more than anything else, and even then, it was difficult. The chameleonic coating was quite effective, especially on the planet’s dark side.
He signaled to Kahane to angle to the south of the knife-edged ridge ahead of them, and to be prepared for action. He had a sudden hunch, given the deceptive distances around them, that they were going to be right on top of the enemy long before they expected to be.
Moving in alternating bounds, the squads moved over the tortured ground. There was plenty of cover, and Bruhnan, who had taken the heavy weapons role for his squad, set up just in the lee of the ridge where they started deploying the rocket mortars, while Scalas led the way around.
The other side opened up on a massive caldera. One of the mining platforms was starkly silhouetted against the nebula, almost ten kilometers away. The others were moving toward the center of the caldera itself.
He crouched in the cover of a misshapen lump of hardened lava, scanning the depression ahead in the light of the nebula.
The Fortunians’ position was easy to pick out. Powergun fire was stabbing from a pile of rubble and debris where part of the caldera wall had collapsed, about a quarter of the way around from his position. They were clearly surrounded, swarms of spacesuited figures surging toward them, only to be beaten back by flickering storms of powergun charges like sheet lightning.
The Fortunians’ ammunition supplies couldn’t last long at that rate.
Throsoltr had picked his position well though; they were taking fire from two of the mining platforms, but neither had a direct shot at them, only blasting rubble from the cliffside above them with each shot. Still potentially lethal, but not as bad as a direct hit.
He took all of that in in a moment. Because his eye was quickly drawn to the greater and more immediate threat.
The starship on the ground hadn’t been clearly visible on the way down, and the countermeasures, not to mention the natural noise and terrain, had made it impossible to make out just what type it was. The others, including the wrecked one on the surface that he’d seen on the way down, had been the standard-pattern cruisers, four-sided pyramids with single, massive thrust bells. This wasn’t any standard-pattern Unity cruiser though. It was about twice as big, and five-sided.
It looked like the command ship that had been grounded on the far side of the Gorakovati volcano on Valdek. And it was only four kilometers away, with nothing but open ground, easily covered by the ship’s powerful weapons, between the Caractacan Brothers and the Fortunians.
Chapter Nineteen
“This is a problem,” Maruks said. Even from an arm’s length away, his comm signal was distorted and scratchy. The radiation and the obscuring formations of heavy metals were wreaking havoc with communications on the ground, which presented yet another problem. They couldn’t get through to the Fortunians. And simply appearing on the bluff above them without comms was not likely to end in anything but an exchange of friendly fire.
The three infantry Centurions had met with Maruks in the cover of an escarpment on the edge of the caldera. They could see most of the crater floor, without exposing themselves to enemy observation. And with the radiation wiping out much in the way of scanners, the likelihood that they would be spotted was slim.
“There are far too many clone troops down there,” Scalas said. “Why would they station so many to guard a mining complex, so far off the beaten path?”
Maruks didn’t reply right away, but only looked down the slope. There did appear to be entire regiments of the Unity’s mass-produced soldiers down in the caldera, leaving windrows of their dead at the feet of the slope where the Fortunians had made their stand, but getting a little bit higher with each charge.
“This is a strategic target,” Soon suggested. “Perhaps, given the numbers
at their disposal, they felt that they could spare a larger contingent to guard the mining facility.”
“But if their mining facility consists of mobile crawlers…” Rokoff began.
“The crawlers aren’t all,” Scalas said, pointing. “Look.”
It took a moment for the other Centurions to see what he’d noticed almost immediately. The Unity starship wasn’t sitting on the ground, it was perched on a massive platform. A platform that appeared to be able to sink into the ground. “They dug deep to build a central facility,” he said. “One that I would assume is well shielded and can cover itself over to survive a trip around the day side. The mobile platforms return to it at night to deposit their ore for the day.”
“And it is probably well defended too,” Soon mused.
“Look over there, past the ship, near the far side of the caldera,” Maruks said, pointing. “Do those look like impact craters to you?”
Without the tactical display, Scalas had to strain his eyes to see what the Brother Legate was pointing to.
There was, in fact, a field of craters and debris to the southwest of the Unity starship. While he couldn’t see much, something about the pattern of the detritus scattered across the darkened ground did look different from the volcanic features they had seen so far. He frowned, scanning what he could see of the caldera. He wondered just how they had gotten there.
“I think the ground might be broken enough there to allow us to approach at least within two hundred meters of the ship without too much risk of detection,” Maruks continued. “Especially if we can call fire from our ships. Now that we are on the ground, coordination will be far easier than it would be from up there.” He stabbed an armored finger toward the purplish-blue sky above them. “The ships might even be able to thin out the ground troops somewhat.”