The Defense of Provenia: A Military Sci-Fi Series (The Unity Wars Book 2)

by Peter Nealen

  Movement stirred beside him, and he turned involuntarily to find himself looking into a quartet of completely black eyes, like obsidian marbles, set in a round, bristled face with a strange, three-sided mouth.

  He managed to minimize his start. He took a hand off his coilgun and made a quick series of signs in the air.

  [I wish you would stop doing that.]

  If the indig scout had a facial expression, it was impossible for a human to read. [I am sorry,] Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff signed back. [I will never get used to human startle response.]

  Communication with the indig tribes of Provenia had been difficult at first, since their mouthparts could not imitate human speech of any language, and vice versa. Over time, some humans and indig who had been dedicated to ending the constant brush wars in the aftermath of the first Families’ settlement had developed a sign language that both races could come to understand. It was the only way to communicate, except with expensive—and often unreliable—computer programs.

  [What did you see?] Gaumarus signed, after indicating that he accepted Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff’s apology. Those sorts of manners were important, even among the indig who had accepted human presence on Provenia and begun to integrate with the human settler’s society.

  [They are barricaded around the central power substation,] Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff reported. [They have explosives with them, and have taken several of the local residents hostage.]

  That was a little strange; in the news reports of clashes with the rebels, if they took hostages, they tried to communicate with the authorities. To the best of Gaumarus’s knowledge, there hadn’t been any such attempt. There should have at least been calls over loudspeakers when the PDF had arrived. That had been the way it had always gone before.

  Of course, a moment later, just as the Tancredus Knights’ skimmer got within a few meters of the first run-down prefab, a loudspeaker did start crackling from within the settlement.

  “PDF pawns!” a shrill voice speaking Oxidanese shouted. “Is this how little the Families care about human lives? We have tried to negotiate, but you don’t answer! Do you want us to start killing the hostages now?”

  “What does he mean, they’ve tried to negotiate?” Verlot asked Yuusen, still looming behind Gaumarus. “I’ve heard nothing.”

  “I think that the Council has PDF Tech jamming their comm signals,” Yuusen said grimly. “They want an example made.”

  “That’s too costly a message!” Verlot snarled. “They’re really just going to sacrifice the hostages?” Gaumarus was a little bit surprised at that, but he reflected that Verlot was old-school. He was merciless to his subordinates who failed, but his code of honor was the PDF’s, and that meant protecting civilians.

  Yuusen’s silence spoke volumes.

  “So, we will be vindicated!” the voice over the loudspeaker shrieked. “When the word of this gets out, it will show all the emigrants and the downtrodden on this world what they can expect at the hands of the Families! This is our world, and all the so-called Latecomers will rise up with us, when they see how callously you sacrifice them!”

  “Pell?” Yuusen asked. “Are the hostages really villagers?”

  Gaumarus exchanged a rapid series of signs with Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff, then turned to address his platoon leader. Yuusen, as he’d expected, was bareheaded, the wind stirring his brown hair, his mustaches and pointed goatee impeccably waxed.

  “He says that they appear to be, sir,” he said. “One of the scouts, at least, saw the rebels dragging a mother and child out of one of the prefabs, just as we arrived.”

  Yuusen nodded, his eyes cold, his lips tightly pressed together. Gaumarus understood. The rebels were going to see their own slaughtered to make their point.

  He turned back toward the village just as the Tancredus Knights’ skimmer entered the outskirts, the Knights themselves piling off and lifting their powerguns. More tech that the Provenians couldn’t afford.

  Gaumarus settled in behind his coilgun, watching for an ambush to materialize. He was sweating, far more than he should have been with the cool breeze coming off the distant mountains to the east. His hands were trembling a little. He’d never actually shot at a human being, or even an indig, before.

  The Knights were spreading out, their red armor glinting slightly in the sun. They formed a line abreast and began to advance into the village.

  A shot rang out and was answered by a storm of powergun fire, which thundered like a lightning storm in the early afternoon. Gaumarus imagined he could smell the ozone, though the village was too far away. He just kept his eyes on the village, looking over his coilgun’s sights as he waited, trying to ignore the crawling feeling in his stomach, which was only getting worse.

  The Knights were mostly obscured by the prefabs and shacks of Bar by then, but their skimmer was still hovering on its ground effect bubble just outside, the turret traversing slightly from side to side. The twin powerguns in the turret suddenly spoke, sending white-hot lances of plasma into the village, and Gaumarus found himself blinking the greenish-purple afterimages of the brilliant discharges out of his vision.

  Something exploded deeper inside the settlement, a deep, heavy whump that vibrated through the ground even as a great, dark cloud of dust and smoke billowed into the sky above the shantytown. More powergun fire crackled and thundered, answered by the lighter barks of the scrounged, surplus PDF rifles that the rebels were using, accompanied by a few different, deeper cracks that sounded like coilguns.

  The skimmer’s gunner opened fire again, pouring brilliant, golden-hued discharges into the prefabs and shacks. Thunder rolled and rumbled across the open ground, and Gaumarus had to shut his eyes against the bright flashes. Even his polarized face shield wasn’t quite enough to block out the sun-hot brightness of the powergun bolts.

  Several more explosions thumped down in the town, and more powergun fire crackled and thundered, but the return fire sounded more and more sporadic. Gaumarus squinted down the slope, but the village of Bar was increasingly obscured by smoke. It seemed that several of the structures were on fire, belching ugly black fumes into the air.

  The shooting started to die down. The skimmer’s gunner was no longer punching bursts of plasma fire into the prefabs. From the sound alone, it appeared that the rebels’ resistance had ceased.

  Gaumarus glanced to his right. Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff was still there, watching with his unblinking, vaguely insectile eyes. His compact, rounded torso was close to the ground, his long, bristled arms and legs splayed out in the curiously arachnid-like position the indig tended to adopt when at rest. They did not sit like humans did. His old rifle was clenched in one clawed hand, off to one side. The scouts’ rifles were probably considerably older than anything the rebels had had down in Bar. Blue Moon Above the Salt Cliff’s was old enough that the patina on the metal was turning brown.

  The fires below seemed to be spreading. The sun was now a weak, washed-out orb in a sky increasingly gray from the smoke. Gaumarus could see a few figures moving around down there, occasionally silhouetted by the rising flames. It looked as if the entire village was on fire, or soon to catch.

  The red-armored figures were coming out of the smoke and climbing back into the skimmer, which was kicking the ground-level smoke into strange patterns as air leaked out of the ground effect bubble beneath its skirts. The Knights seemed unaffected by the blasts of air, but simply grabbed handholds and lifted themselves up into the skimmer’s troop compartment. Once it was loaded full, the skimmer rotated and started back toward the cordon.

  Gaumarus felt the same fluttery, sick feeling in his stomach. He hadn’t seen the Knights bringing any of the hostages out with them.

  2

  The PDF base was a sprawling complex of barracks, administration buildings, armories, garages, and ranges that covered nearly fifty square kilometers of the top of the Casca Plateau. Table-flat, the wind often whipped and shrieked across the base, kicking
up clouds of dust churned up from the trails that stood in for roads by the halftracks, artillery carriers, and the PDF’s precious handful of tanks.

  While the headquarters and administration buildings were built from brick and native stone, the rest of the base was almost entirely prefabs, not unlike the buildings that had made up most of the village of Bar. It often seemed like half of the PDF’s muster time was spent repainting the prefabs with the same cheap white paint, that started to turn yellow and flake off within a month.

  The 121st’s muster area was typical of the rest of the base; a small headquarters building, facing a parade ground covered in prickly gray ground cover that was quickly trampled to dust, flanked by ten prefab barracks and unit muster buildings on either side. The garages for the halftracks were set in a grid at the far end of the parade ground from the headquarters building.

  It was a place that most of them saw once a month. Gaumarus had to admit that he was not fond of the place. It was a scene of boredom, drudgery, and occasional crushing pain, as Verlot was a strong believer in corrective physical training when one of his soldiers screwed up. And when one of the men screwed up enough to merit a session in the dirt outside the barracks, his fireteam leader was going to be right there beside him.

  The men were quiet as they parked the halftracks and got to work stripping the equipment and cleaning the dust off the vehicles. The 121st’s muster buildings were looking dingy again, but their noncoms made sure that their equipment, at least, was immaculate.

  It was well after dark by the time Verlot was satisfied with the state of their five halftracks. “To the barracks,” he snapped. “Weapons maintenance.”

  There were a few groans, quickly stifled as the sergeant’s baleful glare turned on them, searching for the culprit. The coilguns had few moving parts, and none of them had fired a shot, so there shouldn’t have been any oxidation in their workings. Furthermore, without cartridges or ejection ports, the weapons couldn’t really become fouled by dust, though the bores still needed to be kept as clean as possible. But it was PDF doctrine that a certain amount of time had to be spent on weapons maintenance after deployment, and so they would spend the next three hours wiping down parts that had not seen dust or any other contaminant.

  “At least we can call home,” he muttered to Tillens. He’d joined just after Tillens, and they had known each other for years beforehand.

  “True enough,” the burly miner said. “Some of these guys should consider that a blessing. I’ve known sergeants who wouldn’t allow any private comms until muster was over.”

  “Verlot at least is good about that,” Gaumarus agreed, hefting his coilgun, disconnected from its power pack, out of the rack in the halftrack garage where he’d stowed it while they worked on the vehicles. He stifled a groan of his own, though that was tiredness and stiffness.

  “It’s kind of surprising really,” Tillens said quietly as they left the garage, their coilguns over their shoulders, equipment bags with their vests and helmets slung on their backs. “To the best of my knowledge, Verlot doesn’t have any family. I think he even lives here on base. Why he cares that the rest of us have time to talk to ours is a bit of a mystery to me.”

  Tillens had a big family: a wife, three daughters, four sons, his mother-in-law, and ten assorted nieces and nephews he’d taken in after his brother and sister-in-law had been killed in a fire. It certainly seemed like he and Verlot had nothing in common, and Verlot shouldn’t have cared whether Tillens got to talk to his family or not. But he did.

  “Maybe it’s because there’s such a thing as ‘leadership,’ where you are supposed to see to the morale and welfare of your men when it doesn’t interfere with the mission,” Verlot’s sour voice said from behind them. Both men stopped dead, stiffening to attention. Gaumarus felt his face flush as he realized that Verlot had heard every word.

  “What are you two idiots doing?” Verlot asked as he walked past them. “The more time you waste out here on the parade ground, the later it’s going to be before weapons maintenance is finished. I’m sure the rest of the men will be very happy with you about that.”

  Gaumarus stared after him as the short, skinny noncom continued on toward their barracks, not even bothering to glance back at them. Tillens began to laugh, quietly. Gaumarus just shook his head, embarrassed, as he started after the sergeant.

  “He is a piece of work, isn’t he?” he whispered.

  Gaumarus waited until he had his coilgun stripped down to its basic components before he pulled out his tablet, checking to make sure it was connected to the base network and that he had authorization to connect off-base, and called the Pell farmhouse.

  The screen lit up with a view of the great room. The house had been built of native brick, plastered over, with false sconces set into the wall to provide a reasonable facsimile of candles and lanterns. Since it was night, the sconces were all lit, casting a golden glow over the scene.

  The chairs were mostly synthetic; there weren’t a lot of trees on the Monoyan Plain, and the Pell Family was rich enough to afford the synthetic stuff. Most of the throws were woven from local nuyak hair, while a full pelt was spread on the floor in front of the semicircle of seats.

  Dagarius Pell, Gaumarus’s father and current head of the Family, was sitting in the middle chair, with his wife and Gaumarus’s mother, Rothardae, sitting in the chair next to him. His sister, Whenna, was sitting next to their mother, while old Waldenius, his grandfather, was visible at the right edge of the screen, bent, withered, and scowling as always.

  “Gaumarus!” Whenna exclaimed, prompting an even deeper scowl from Waldenius. It wasn’t the children’s place to start a conversation, even though Whenna was just past her age of majority. She had always been a pretty child, if slightly plump, and while her body was steadily widening as she entered womanhood, she retained a certain beauty in her face. Of course, she was his sister, so Gaumarus would always hold a particular affection for her.

  And he’d happily beat that scowl off his grandfather’s face for her, if he ever got the chance.

  Of course you would. If you ever got up the courage. Which you won’t.

  “We heard there was fighting!” Whenna was saying. “Were you there?”

  “I was on the cordon,” he said. “That was all. We didn’t do any of the fighting ourselves. The Knights went in and did it all.”

  Waldenius snorted derisively. He leaned forward in his chair, his unnervingly bright eyes focused on the comm’s vid pickup. “Of course you didn’t,” he snarled. “Bad enough that a Pell is in that joke of a ‘Planetary Defense Force.’ You even hide from the Latecomers under the guise of ‘orders,’ I suppose.”

  “Father,” Rothardae began, but the old man ignored her.

  “There was a time when no Pell worth his salt would go running around at the beck and call of a bunch of jumped-up bureaucrats claiming to represent the Families,” he continued, acid in every syllable. “And if a fight came, he certainly wouldn’t simply sit on a ‘cordon’ and let a bunch of damned outsiders handle the fighting. Why not turn over the PDF to these Latecomer scum? It’s the same thing.” He looked like he wanted to spit on the floor, but even Waldenius Pell’s vicious temper would not allow him that kind of loss of decorum. “Fah! That I fought the spiders for twenty years, all while working the land and killing the Latecomers who tried to horn in on the Pell claim, just for the family to be reduced to this in a generation!”

  To most of the Provenians, the Latecomers were those off-worlders who had come looking for an established society to be a part of—to leech off of, in most opinions—instead of finding new land and establishing themselves. To Waldenius Pell, the Latecomers were anyone who had arrived on Provenia after the first descent of the Epoch, eighty years before.

  And the less said about his opinion of the indig, the better, in Gaumarus’s mind.

  The human settlers on Provenia had not set out to displace the indig. The Epoch, her systems failing, had made landfall
on the first habitable world she had found, which had happened to be Provenia. And they had thought they were landing on an uninhabited world with its own ecosystem. There had been no indications of the indig society visible from orbit.

  Only after they had landed and begun building a settlement did they discover that Provenia was, in fact, inhabited. The indig just had not possessed technology sufficient to be seen from orbit. Different families reacted in different ways, and the resulting brush wars had lasted for two generations.

  Gaumarus looked at his father. Dagarius had said nothing to his own father as the old man had ranted, but simply looked down at his hands. To attempt to interject himself into the conversation would not have gone well. Dagarius was a good farmer and a good administrator, but even more of a disappointment to Waldenius than Gaumarus was. At least, to Waldenius’ mind, Gaumarus was a soldier, if an unworthy one.

  Dagarius Pell had served his stint in the PDF as a supply clerk. Waldenius would have disowned him, had his brother, Radigus, not been killed in an accident.

  “Command thought that the Knights’ involvement would overawe the rebels,” Gaumarus explained, even as he wondered just why he was trying. His grandfather’s mind wouldn’t be changed, and his father wouldn’t especially care one way or another. “And as long as the rebels are dead, what does it matter who did the killing?”

  “Pells do their own killing,” Waldenius spat. “We built what we have. We fought for what we have.” He sneered. “Now that other, even lazier Latecomers have started stirring up trouble and demanding what isn’t theirs, now the so-called ‘government’ gets excited. And still doesn’t have the guts to handle things themselves.”

  Gaumarus didn’t want to consider exactly what Waldenius would consider “handling things themselves” would mean. He’d heard some stories about the lengths the old man had gone to in the old days. He didn’t know for sure how true they all were, but several of the younger Families feared the Pells for good reason.