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

by Peter Nealen

  Brilliant actinic flashes began to strobe off to the Misericorde’s flanks. Kor Ban was firing the X-ray laser pods, cascading the entire constellation in a few seconds. The concentrated energy of two hundred thermonuclear devices was pumped at the speed of light toward the oncoming Hunterships.

  One of the Hunterships, a medium-sized spike of black, stone-like material about four hundred meters long, suddenly flared an incandescent yellow and shattered. Glowing fragments whickered silently through space and high velocity, but somehow none of the nearby ships were hit.

  Other bits of bright luminescence flared out there where beams found their marks. There were too few, though. At most two dozen out of two hundred beams had hit. The M’tait’s ECM was too strong, the distances still too long for good visual targeting.

  The particle beam cannon was warming up for another shot when a hot, prickling sensation started across every inch of Gaz Orr’s body.

  The feeling quickly mounted, until it felt like he was on fire. He writhed, trying to keep a scream from escaping his throat. It was finally wrenched out of him, even as he vomited inside his helmet. He was pressed too deeply into his acceleration couch, and too consumed by the burning, wrenching pain to notice that the rest of the command crew was similarly afflicted, at least until the first ragged screams made it through the continuing roar of the alien voice over the comms.

  The pain and nausea mounted, and his vision started to blur, turning red before he suddenly couldn’t see anything. And still the burning got worse and worse until finally he lost consciousness.

  Less than five minutes later, Gaz Orr and every other man and woman aboard the Misericorde were dead, their flesh bubbling away into a viscous liquid as the ship continued to accelerate, little more than a dumb missile, toward the stars. In a few hours, the derelict starship passed through the swarm of M’tait Hunterships, streaking on still-burning drives within six hundred kilometers of the flying mountain that led them.

  A beam of purple, of a shade that would have looked strangely almost black to a human eye, had anyone still been alive to see it, licked out from the gigantic, stony ship. It cut the Misericorde in half from nose to tail, then flickered out. The ship’s reactor ruptured, and the wreck disappeared in a bright flash.

  Spreading out, the M’tait fleet descended, unopposed, toward Provenia’s surface.

  5

  “What in the name of the Way is going on?” Diricks asked loudly. The younger man was fidgeting as he leaned against the side of the halftrack, fingering his weapon. “We’ve been sitting here for hours.”

  “Command is trying to get everything sorted after the PDF control building got blown up,” Yuusen said, before Verlot could snap at the trooper. “Things are by necessity a bit confused at the moment. Be patient. It could be worse. You could be getting shot at.”

  Diricks at least had the good sense not to talk back to the lieutenant, especially not with Verlot glowering at him, but he muttered something as he ducked his head. Gaumarus suspected that Diricks would rather be getting shot at than waiting around in the staging area hastily set up outside the wreckage of the Altgeld Market.

  They’d been sitting there since just before daybreak. There was still a lot of cleanup to do within the Market, but after sweeping it for more rebels, the PDF had been pulled back to laager outside and await further instructions. Something big was happening, that much was obvious. They’d been told to get ready to move five times in the last three hours, only to be told to stand down again.

  “We have been trying to determine where the rebels might have come from, so that we could launch a follow-up attack,” Capitan Desmeth said, stepping around the back of another halftrack. The entire platoon stood abruptly, the men scrambling to attention in surprise. He waved them down.

  “Has there been any luck, sir?” Yuusen asked.

  Desmeth shook his head wearily. He was an older man, already nearing retirement from the PDF, his hair going gray and his face getting lined and jowly. His evident exhaustion only made him look older. He looked like he belonged in a rocking chair, watching his grandchildren, instead of in uniform, trying to hunt and fight the enemies of the Provenian Central Government.

  “The interrogations of the captured rebels have given us the same picture all around,” he said. “There was apparently a new faction that came on a ship from somewhere on the far side of the Rift. They used rebel resources, but always kept to themselves. And, according to the rebels we captured, they all moved to a new staging area, away from the usual rebel slums, almost a week ago. None of the prisoners know where it was.”

  “How sure are we that they don’t know?” Verlot asked coldly.

  “Three of them have died under questioning,” Desmeth said flatly, his displeasure with the fact evident in his tone. Even Verlot raised an eyebrow at that. “That’s how sure we are.”

  The troopers looked around at each other. “I’ve never heard of that happening before, sir,” Gaumarus ventured cautiously. When did we start torturing prisoners, even Latecomer rebels?

  “It hasn’t,” Desmeth said bluntly. “The Powers That Be are in a panic. The rebels have never managed to do this much damage before. The Emergency Resolution was passed in Capitol less than an hour after the PDF Headquarters was destroyed.”

  “So,” Yuusen said in the sudden quiet, “what is the word, sir? Do we have a target?”

  But Desmeth shook his head. “Not that I’ve been told. We do have marching orders, however. Our company is to be at Vatuse in the next two and a half hours.”

  “What?” Tillens blurted. Verlot glared at him, and he subsided guiltily, but Desmeth only looked even more tired.

  “I know, trooper,” he said tiredly. Vatuse was on the edge of the Monoyan Plain, and almost three hundred kilometers away. It was also outside the 121st’s usual area of responsibility. “But the orders come from General Rollo himself. So, mount up. We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “You heard the man!” Verlot bellowed. “Get your kit and get aboard! We leave in five!”

  Even then, it was going to be next to impossible to get the 121st’s halftracks clear to Vatuse in two and a half hours. But they’d try. Or else Verlot was going to flay the skin off their backs.

  Gaumarus was ushering his squad into their halftracks when a familiar howling whine announced the approach of one of the Order’s skimmers. He looked over at the same time Verlot was passing by, and started to flinch back, to make sure he was focusing on his squad. The sergeant wasn’t looking at him, though; he was also facing the oncoming ground effect vehicle. “What do they want now?” he muttered, before he realized that Gaumarus was close enough to hear him. Verlot gave him a glance that promised a thoroughly miserable hell of an existence if he ever breathed a word of what he’d just overheard, and Gaumarus gulped and looked away.

  The skimmer came to a halt just on the other side of Gaumarus’s halftrack, dust billowing from beneath its skirts as it settled. One of the Knights, still in full armor, swung down from the open-topped compartment, and his mechanical voice cut through the rumble of engines and the still-howling noise of the skimmer’s fans.

  “Where is your commander?” he asked.

  “Up by the command track,” Verlot answered, pointing. “But we’re getting ready to move out; we have orders to be out on the Monoyan Plain in two hours.”

  “We will be coming with you,” the Knight said grimly. “The Monoyan Plain is about to become a battleground.” He strode forward. “Has word reached you yet?”

  Verlot frowned. Gaumarus found himself mirroring the expression, even as he wondered who the Knight was. He suspected, somehow, that this was the same scarred Knight who had turned the prisoner over to him in the Market the night before.

  “Only orders,” Verlot said. “Everything else is only rumor.”

  The Knight actually looked pensive, even in his armor. “Perhaps it is not my place to tell,” he said. “I would speak with your commander.” He raised a gaun
tleted hand as it looked like Verlot was about to say something. “I know, you are about to move. But this is urgent.”

  Verlot studied the man for a moment, then, with uncharacteristic quiet and deference, motioned toward the command track. “I’ll take you to him.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” the Knight replied. Together, the sergeant and the Knight started toward the command track at a fast walk. Before they got far though, Verlot turned back and glared at Gaumarus, who was still standing there, watching them go.

  “Hurry up and get your men and tracks ready to move, Pell!” he snarled. “We don’t suddenly have extra time!”

  Gaumarus felt his face flush at being caught out staring like a kid. “Yes, Sergeant!” he snapped, then turned to his squad. But they were all already on the halftracks; he was the last one to mount up. He scrambled up the ramp, ducking his head to avoid cracking it on the coaming, hoping that his face shield and the dimness inside the troop compartment disguised his discomfiture from his men. He pointed to Seggers, who banged on the driver’s compartment, and the ramp began to whine upward. Gaumarus keyed his radio.

  “Fireteam Two, ready to move,” he called.

  One by one, the rest of the platoon reported in. It took longer than it should have, but surprisingly, Sergeant Verlot did not say anything threatening or acerbic. He simply acknowledged check-ins as they happened, and a few seconds after Fireteam Four checked in, Yuusen gave the order to move out.

  It took a few more minutes before Gaumarus’s halftrack lurched into motion, and the driver had to jockey around, backing and turning several times before he could clear the Order skimmer still parked in front of the halftrack. Then they were moving out, the tracks rattling and squealing on the other side of the steel hull, the halftrack rocking as it moved over the uneven ground. They were going to take a straight-line course to the nearest high road, and that meant going over some of the nearby fields.

  They hadn’t been moving long before the radio crackled with Capitan Desmeth’s voice. “Charlemagne Company, attention.” Gaumarus froze. The capitan’s voice didn’t just sound weary, like it had before. It sounded old, brittle. Like the capitan was about to break down and cry, or scream. Like he was barely holding himself together. “Knight Companion Kan Tur has informed me of more of the overall situation. And…well…there’s no easy way to say this.” There was a long pause.

  “Provenia is under attack by a M’tait raiding fleet,” he said, in the voice of a man looking down into his own grave. “The Misericorde has been destroyed, so the Knights are stranded here with us, for whatever that is worth. All of our own armed lighters have apparently also been destroyed. We don’t believe that anyone made it out of the system. Which means that we are on our own.

  “The Hunterships are already entering the atmosphere, and are expected to make planetfall in the next half hour. Their landing target appears to be the Monoyan Plain. We are moving to join the main line of resistance that General Rollo is setting up along the Vatuse axis. Every available PDF and Order of the Tancredus Cluster unit is moving to join us. If we move quickly enough, we may be in position to resist the first M’tait ground attack, if it comes that way.”

  Gaumarus looked around the troop compartment. Most of the men had their face shields up, the better to talk and joke amongst each other.

  He didn’t see the fear and horror he might have expected. Instead, he only saw more of the disbelief and dawning sense of unreality that he was feeling.

  None of them had ever seen a M’tait. Oh, there were pictures of them, but there were pictures of dragons from Old Earth too. Nobody particularly believed in the dragons, and while the M’tait were a matter of historical record, they weren’t anything like the immediate threat of the hill tribes, or the Latecomer rebels. They were bogeymen, spooks and monsters lurking out in the dark that had struck other worlds, including neighboring Gdan, but hadn’t been seen in years and years, and had never come near their home. The M’tait were legendary horrors that struck elsewhere, never here.

  Gaumarus was sure that Capitan Desmeth wouldn’t lie about such a thing, or be tricked into believing it if it was a lie. The Capitan was old, steady, and level-headed. But he still couldn’t feel the horror he knew that he should be feeling. The reality of the M’tait was just too distant from his experience.

  But what did start the seeds of that horror, deep within his mind, was the fact that the vast majority of the Monoyan Plain was Pell land. If the M’tait were really coming, then his family was right at Ground Zero.

  Gaumarus looked around the staging area. Set on the long, shallow slope leading onto the flatland of the plain, there was nothing to see but the materiel of war for kilometers to the northeast and southwest. If there was a PDF unit on the continent that could still be reached for muster, it had been called up and ordered to Vatuse. Artillery, a handful of tanks, and vast numbers of the halftracks and gun trucks that made up the majority of the PDF’s fighting vehicles were milling about on the plain, churning the pseudo-grass to mulch and sending up vast clouds of dust.

  If it looked confused, Gaumarus knew from personal experience over the last few hours that the reality was even worse.

  The 121st had gotten caught in a traffic jam on the main road, and had spent almost two hours just trying to get the last four kilometers into the staging area. Then, in the dark, they’d been given a spot to laager up, only to get there and find their place already occupied by a battery of the 14th Artillery that seemed to be completely orphaned from its parent unit, without comms to their headquarters. The artillerymen didn’t even seem to know whether their headquarters company had even mobilized.

  From there, the 121st had been shuffled from one end of the staging area to another. They’d actually halted, laagered up, and set a watch twice, each time being hailed by a puffing, overwrought corporal who told them they needed to move again.

  Now that the sun was coming up again, Gaumarus was wondering just why they had needed to rush to get to Vatuse in the first place. They had seen the enemy ships descending, an ominous shower of red glowing trails in the night sky, and from the slope, they should have been visible in the distance. But no bombardment had begun, and in fact, the M’tait ships—if that was, in fact, what they were—seemed to be quiescent, simply sitting far out on the plain like ancient, cyclopean monuments rather than ships.

  He stretched and yawned, his coilgun rapping against his knees as he moved. His eyes felt gritty; he might have managed about an hour of sleep. But Capitan Desmeth was supposed to have word for them in the next half hour, so he had to be up.

  As he walked toward the front of the halftrack, where Mertens was sleeping on the armored hood, he looked out at the plain again, only then beginning to see the dim shapes of the distant starships, like tiny, black teeth standing up against the grayness of dawn. He looked back and forth, and for the first time since arriving, he started to get a better idea of the lay of the land.

  And as he did, his blood ran cold. He slowly turned and stared out toward the distant spines of the M’tait Hunterships, but he wasn’t looking for them. He was looking for a particular, partially forested hill.

  There it was, a good three kilometers away, on the far side of the defensive line. The main Pell Family steading was between the PDF and the M’tait.

  Mertens forgotten, he turned, half in a panic, and looked for Yuusen, or even Verlot. Anyone in charge that he could find. He dashed back toward the headquarters halftrack, where Lieutenant Yuusen should be awake.

  The lieutenant was indeed awake, just finishing up shaving on the back ramp, his eyes on the tablet in front of him, doubtless getting what fragmentary version of a morning briefing the confused command cell had put out. He looked up as Gaumarus pounded up to the halftrack, panting. “Lieutenant…sir,” Gaumarus gulped. He hadn’t even run that fast, but his throat felt constricted, as if he couldn’t quite draw breath. His mother and father…his sister…

  “What is it, Pell?” Yuusen ask
ed. “Calm down and talk.”

  “Sir, my Family’s steading is out there,” he pointed, “on the far side of the defensive line. I have to…I request permission to see if they are in the evacuation area.”

  But Yuusen shook his head. “I can send an inquiry to see if they made it in, Corporal, but I can’t spare you to go running around the refugee camp. We’re going to be stepping off in the next hour. I need you with your fireteam and your track.”

  Gaumarus gulped past the hard lump in his throat. “But, sir…” he began, but Verlot stepped around the halftrack and cut him off.

  “You heard the Lieutenant, Pell,” he growled, though there might have been less of the sergeant’s usual malevolence in his voice. “If you want to help your family, the best thing you can do now is to stick with the task at hand, lead your fireteam, and fight these monsters with everything you have. Because if we don’t beat them back, then you could find your family among the refugees only to die helplessly with them.” Verlot glowered at him, but there was something else behind the old noncom’s gaze. He wasn’t just glaring, he was studying his subordinate, to make sure he was going to stand up when the stress of combat hit them. “Now, get back to your track and get ready to move. General Rollo wants to address the entire force in five minutes.”

  Unable to speak, Gaumarus nodded curtly, turned on his heel, and stiffly walked back toward his halftrack. Once he was a few steps away, he looked down at his hand, holding it just above the barrel of his coilgun.

  It was shaking like a leaf.

  The fear he’d felt at Bar, and again in the Altgeld Market, was nothing compared to this. He hadn’t realized he could be so nearly paralyzed with terror, not for himself, but for someone else, people he cared about. The thought of never seeing any of his family again kept whirling around his head like a black storm. His chest felt like it was wrapped in slowly tightening steel bands.