by Peter Nealen
Only then did he see that more powergun fire was pouring into the massed clones from either side of him. His Brothers weren’t quite caught up with him, but they had followed.
He’d known they would. He had simply been so focused on his own charge that he hadn’t seen them follow him.
More powergun fire was hammering at the clones on either flank, and suddenly the way to the wrecked lift was clear.
Kahane was beside him then, smoothly swapping magazines before pouring more fire into the clones off to their flank. Powell was on the other side. The survivors of Century XXXII formed a tight wedge and drove forward, sweeping the enemy’s resistance ahead of them with a storm of powergun bolts.
The dome atop the lift had been blasted to still-glowing scrap, and the platform itself appeared warped, where it hadn’t been smashed to molten shards. There was a gap leading down that was just large enough for a single man in armor.
Going through that in single file was going to be suicide. “Grenades,” Scalas snapped, pulling one of the molecular explosives off his belt. He almost would have preferred having Torgan fire an HV missile down the shaft, but that might not be that wise. There might not be an atmosphere to propagate the shockwave, but fragmentation in a tight space should be sufficient to do the job.
Even as he pulled the dark-colored lozenge off his belt, a clone’s helmet appeared in the hole, along with the muzzle of his cone-bore rifle. A half-dozen powergun bolts blew the clone’s head off, and his corpse slid back out of sight.
Three grenades followed the falling body.
There was a brief, dim flash from down below, and then Scalas was leaping down through the hole, before the clones who had survived the grenade detonations and their slashing clouds of shrapnel could recover.
It was dark down in the shaft, but his helmet’s light amplification quickly took over, casting the scene below him in pale echoes of real colors.
While the lift itself appeared frozen, the main lift shaft in fact looking slightly bent from the impacts of Costigan’s 30cm powergun bolts, there were ladders set in on either side, with landings at one-story intervals. Someone had put some serious thought into this.
The top landing was littered with bodies, some still outgassing from smashed and shredded spacesuits. They shook as he landed on the steel grating, the impact of his armored form making the entire platform shudder.
Another clone was climbing through the opening, and Scalas shot him through the helmet. He dropped out of sight, and more beneath him opened fire. Cone-bore rounds smacked silently into the grating and the rock walls, but the bodies lying on the landing blocked most of the fire, serving as grisly sandbags.
More armored shapes dropped through the hole above as Scalas moved toward the ladder, pulling out another molecular explosive grenade and prepping it before dropping it down the ladderwell.
Actually, he didn’t quite drop it. He hooked it just far enough that it landed on the next grating down, and when it detonated, the fragmentation shredded the half dozen clones who had piled onto the landing, firing up the ladder.
Then he and four more Brothers were at the ladder, firing down at anything that moved. Brilliant streaks of blue-white light left flickering afterimages even through the protection of the Brothers’ helmet visors, and lit the scene of death and destruction with strobe-light still images.
A clone, impaled on a bolt of ionized copper, his cone-bore rifle falling from his fingers just before he toppled off the edge of the landing and down the shaft.
An autocannon gunner transfixed through the helmet and falling on top of his weapon.
Yet another, shot through the knee, crumpling as his finger tightened spasmodically on the trigger, sending a burst of needle-tipped projectiles through another man next to him.
Then two more grenades were tumbling down the ladder, to pass through the opening and detonate near the next landing down, and Scalas was following, with Kahane and Rogers right behind him. If the ladder had been built with rungs stamped into the wall, he might not have been able to descend as fast as he did. But it was a normal, shipboard ladder, that had been apparently pulled out whole and fastened to the wall of the shaft. Scalas hastily slung his appropriated MT-41, clamped his boots and armored palms against the sides and slid down, throwing himself clear at the last second and unfastening the support powergun from the side of his sustainment pack.
Another clone had peeked around the central lift column just as Scalas lifted the MT-41. The clone’s face was obscured by his helmet, but there was a decided panic in his movements as he whipped his cone-bore rifle up and fired a wild burst, flechettes smacking off the rock walls above Scalas’s head.
The answering burst of 1.5cm powergun bolts blasted glowing craters through his chest before a final bolt blew his head off.
Kahane and Rogers were pouring more powergun fire down the ladderwell as more of the Century, squads all but forgotten in the chaos of the assault, dropped down into the shaft. The clones, for all their numbers, were constrained by the narrow confines of the lift, and one-to-one, no clone trooper was anything close to a match for a Caractacan Brother.
Scalas suddenly found he had a brief moment to breathe and take in the situation. He still couldn’t quite believe that he’d survived that reckless charge.
In another place, it might have been foolish. Here and now, it had been a choice between death cowering in a hole, or death with courage.
The Code was clear. To live by honor and for glory. To be overrun while pinned down in a crater was no death for a Caractacan Brother.
The shaft wasn’t nearly as deep as it had initially appeared. The final landing was directly below, a grate set atop raw rock. And a hatchway leading toward the grounded starship was visible, only a few meters below him.
Even as he fixed his eyes on it, it was suddenly filled with more clones, firing wildly as they pushed through the portal in a tight knot. They didn’t have much of a target; he knew that he and his brothers were little more than darkened specters above them, the chameleonic armor even more effective in the dark. He hefted the MT-41 and opened fire before the first one had crossed the threshold.
They didn’t even have a chance to correct their aim. The first half dozen were blasted off their feet in seconds by a storm of high-energy bolts before they had even seen that he was there. Those behind them were tangled up with the corpses of their fellows, and died just as quickly.
Rogers and Powell took up the fire, and Scalas looked down, momentarily taking his finger off the heavy powergun’s trigger. Going down the ladder would be what a normal man might do; even in articulated combat armor, there was a good chance of serious injury if he just jumped off the landing.
But it would also take more time, and the ladder was a target zone. So instead, he stepped off the edge of the landing, catching himself by one hand as he fell, clenching his muscles and praying that the articulation in his armor’s shoulder and elbow joints functioned the way it was supposed to.
He still hit full extension with a jarring, painful impact, but it wasn’t bad enough to wrench anything out of its socket. He paused for a fraction of a second, just enough to ensure that he had arrested the momentum of his fall, then let go, dropping the rest of the way to the ground.
The hatchway was still filled with a blinding torrent of powergun fire, but through it he got glimpses of the figures of clones falling, while the ones behind them tried to push forward, even shooting their fellows in the back in the hope of hitting the Caractacans.
Dimly, he could see another figure behind them, some few meters back in the tunnel. That one caught his eye, even through the flashing discharges and the milling bodies. In full combat armor instead of the plate carrier over a spacesuit that the rest of the clones were wearing, that one was different.
He lifted the MT-41 to his shoulder and triggered a burst down the tunnel, aiming for the faceted helmet he’d glimpsed in the chaos.
He didn’t know if he’d hit the
figure, but the clones’ cohesion suddenly seemed to falter. He pressed the advantage, striding toward the hatch while angling slightly away from it, keeping clear of the fatal funnel of the enemy’s line of fire, along with his own men’s from above, pouring more powergun charges into the breach.
Most of the rest of the Brothers were descending the ladder, covered by Scalas’s own advance and the fire from above. One, however, had dropped to the floor the same way Scalas had.
He didn’t need to look to know who it was. It had to be Cobb.
They pressed toward the hatch together and stacked up beside it. Even without an atmosphere, Scalas thought he could almost feel the heat coming from the powergun bolts slashing through the portal. Glowing pockmarks in the walls marked where bolts had struck.
It was hard to tell by visual cues alone, but his helmet’s sensors told him that the rifle fire through the hatch had all but completely died away. He still did not let complacency lull him, waiting as the powergun fire from above slackened as Kahane and Rogers saw that the Brothers were stacked on the hatch, and prepping his last grenade.
Beside and behind him, Cobb did the same, holding the explosive lozenge out where Scalas could see it.
As one, they armed the grenades and lobbed them through the hatchway with hard, hooked throws. Shouldering their weapons, they followed, plunging into the tunnel just after the grenades detonated.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Mor was throttling the drives up, the faint nimbus of particulate radiation scattering against the electromagnetic fields already beginning to form around the Dauntless, when his comm pinged.
“Mor, Titus,” the Herald of Justice’s captain called. “I have an idea.” A data packet dumped into the Dauntless’s computers by laser comm. “Horvaset and Rehenek want to stay within the umbra, and I can see why. But tying ourselves down to the planet is going to be suicide with this disparity in numbers, especially until we can determine who owns those big monsters coming in behind the Unity fleet.”
“I know,” Mor replied, “except that leaving the umbra means leaving a straight path for the Unity to get to the men on the ground. And they have problems enough of their own at the moment.” He was, nevertheless, pulling up the data packet and examining the vector lines of Titus’s plan in the holo tank, his eyes narrowing slightly. “I can see your plan working, except that the rest of the Alliance ships will hardly stay put if we start ranging away from the planet. They’re frightened enough of staying here as it is.”
“Agreed,” Titus said. “It is a concern. But we won’t buy the Brother Legate and the ground Centuries any more time by being squashed like insects. It will require tight timing, but I think that if we get started soon enough, we can engage the Unity far enough out from the planet. The longer we wait, the more untenable this position becomes.”
Mor was chewing his lip as he studied the plan. “Hwung-Tsi, Karmenov, what do you think?”
“I agree with Titus,” Hwung-Tsi said. “Horvaset is playing this too defensively. We will be crushed if we try too hard to stay within the umbra.”
“The radiation is also an issue,” Karmenov put in. “Not all the allied ships have sufficient radiation shielding, especially if they are thinking solely in terms of engaging while inertialess. Captain Titus’s plan provides for that deficiency. I am in favor.”
“That’s quite a vector shift,” Mor pointed out. “You’re right, Titus, we need to start now if we’re going to have any chance of making this work.”
“Which one of us is the most diplomatic?” Hwung-Tsi asked wryly. “It is going to take some talking to convince Horvaset and Rehenek to abandon their plan in favor of ours.”
“That would be Captain Titus, I am sure,” Mor said. “I will contact the Brother Legate, if I can, and explain the situation. But I think that Rehenek will see things our way. He already owes the Brotherhood a great deal.”
“I hope he agrees,” Titus said grimly. “Herald of Justice, out.”
In the end, it didn’t take nearly as much talking as Mor had feared. Horvaset was, indeed, reluctant to leave the shelter of Mzin’s World’s umbra, and some of the Dahuan captains were even more so. But Rehenek, even though he was a ground commander by training, was quick to grasp the urgency and greater survivability of the plan. There were risks, certainly, but they were risks that he was more comfortable with than simply holding station above the planet, waiting for a force three times their size to descend on them.
It was Titus’s plan, but it was Rehenek’s intensity and force of personality that drove the briefing, battering down the allied captains’ reluctance. Rehenek quickly recognized the time constraints and brooked no objection, bulldozing over those who tried to object.
In minutes, the plan was finalized. Mor had been unable to reach Brother Legate Maruks; the combination of jamming and ambient radiation was getting worse on the planet’s surface. That was assuming that the Brother Legate was even still alive.
So, he and the other captains had had to make the decision themselves. Mor was uncomfortable with it. He knew that Scalas had confidence in Maruks’s leadership, but he had yet to truly feel out their new commander, especially when it came to a ship captain’s autonomy to effectively leave the ground troops unsupported and exposed to an oncoming enemy fleet.
Scalas trusted Maruks, and Scalas had been Kranjick’s protégé. It should be enough. But Mor had not yet learned to read him, and it bothered him.
But there was no time. Reaching out to the controls, he turned the Bergenholm tachyonic.
In small formations of five or six ships, mostly divided by homeworld and clustered around what deployable radiation screens they had, the rest of the Alliance fleet went tachyonic moments later, flashing away from Mzin’s World with streaks of faint bluish light that quickly vanished against the chromatic sky of the nebula. The Pride of Valdek and its escorts were the last to leave, the massive cylinder darting out of sight, leaving the sky above the blasted dwarf empty except for the distant flashes of the battle that was steadily moving toward it.
The sky was still a lambent red and purple when Mor dropped the Dauntless inert again, though the pulsar was only an infinitesimally tiny point of bluish-white light. The radiation counters recorded that background levels were still elevated, but nowhere near the flensing lethality of the storm of particulate and gamma radiation closer to the dying remnant of the star.
“All hands, brace for acceleration in ninety seconds,” he announced over the all-decks intercom. “This will be a bit rough.”
He had been inputting the vector change burn even as he’d been speaking. It was indeed going to be a rough burn. To reach the assault vector intended, they were going to have to burn the drives at six Gs for a considerable amount of time. His concerns about the delta-v involved in the attack plan had not been idle worries. They were only going to get one shot at this.
The ninety seconds ticked down quickly, and then the drives lit with their full ferocity, crushing Mor down into his acceleration couch with six times his bodyweight. He could only tighten his muscles and concentrate on breathing.
It was going to be a long burn.
They were far enough out from the pulsar that the light from the Unity fleet’s arrival had not reached them yet. They were even outside the light cone from their own arrival in the system and the attack on the depot. Space around the pulsar seemed strangely calm.
It wasn’t going to last.
After what felt like an eternity, the burn reached its end. The drives cut out, leaving the silvery hull of the Dauntless, next to her sister ships and more of the Alliance fleet, spread out over a massive hemisphere of space, but still tiny in the perspective of the nebula, in relative darkness.
Then it was time. Mor took a deep breath, activated the Bergenholm again, and sent his ship hurtling toward the enemy.
It was a short hop, the starships dropping inert after a few milliseconds. Variances in course calculations meant that they were slightly
more raggedly spread out than their initial formation had been, but there was still enough distance for the ships to start deploying their weapons constellations. Missiles drifted out of launch cells and X-ray laser pods moved on small maneuvering thrusters, jetting for open space and safe distances from their motherships.
It might have appeared odd to an observer. The entire fleet was flying at an angle, their rear quarters pointed at their direction of movement, keeping the long axis of each ship solidly behind a deployed radiation screen, while their weapons unmasked and prepared for battle.
Ahead, the Unity fleet and the unidentified ships were fully engaged, albeit at extreme range. The Unity ships were trying to keep their distance, and it soon became evident as to why.
“Those aren’t ships,” Fry said, staring up at the holo tank. “They’re asteroids.”
As the sensor data coalesced in the tank, it became evident that he was right. The five behemoths moving in-system were small asteroids, with dozens or hundreds of drive units grafted on.
“Asteroids with planetary defense weapons,” Carne commented, as a powerful particle beam lashed out from the lead asteroid ship, a lumpy mass with the drives arranged in what looked like a haphazard scattering of glowing points. The faint, reddish beam missed initially, burning past a formation of the smaller, white-painted Unity cruisers, but the gunners quickly corrected, and one of the targeted starships was impaled with the next shot, disintegrating into a cloud of glowing shrapnel. The fragments tore into its sister ships and the radiation shield ahead of it.
But then there was no more time to examine the asteroid ships. They were nearly within engagement range, and the Unity was going to realize that they were under attack on their flank soon enough.