The Fall of Valdek: A Military Sci-Fi Series (The Unity Wars Book 1)

by Peter Nealen

  The General-Regent shook his head. “The techs are looking for one, but comm security has been paramount since the war began. It should have been detected.” He shook his head again, his eyes haunted. “No, it was as if he simply reached down and took control.”

  Scalas knew of no way that was possible without some kind of virus attack, but he realized that the fear and the strain of the last weeks—being forced to watch one’s defenses crumble under a never-ending onslaught—would make even the most hardheaded of rationalists start to see unnatural power in their enemy.

  He suddenly thought of the inhuman, swarming behavior of the clones on the battlefield, and a shudder went through him. Perhaps there was more to the Valdekans’ fears than just the grinding strain of shell-shock and the seeming inevitability of defeat. There was something strange, something disquieting on a deep, fundamental level about the so-called “Galactic Unity’s” forces. And he had no doubt that this was by design.

  The General-Regent looked at Kranjick. “There is something different about him,” he said hoarsely. “That is not the Geretesk Vakolo I knew in the Tyrus Cluster. He has changed, somehow. Geretesk was a hero of his people, and with good reason. But now…” He stared at nothing for a long moment. “We were of an age, all those years ago. But he seems young, hale. Whereas I…” He gestured at the contraption that kept him upright. “And I never heard of a man who survived a M’tait borer who came out of it stronger.”

  “He was hit with a borer?” Scalas asked in some disbelief. He’d seen the damage the wicked M’tait weapons could do. A borer was a near-miracle of micro-engineering, a projectile that slowed just before it hit, then slowly tore its way through the victim’s flesh. It was designed to avoid vital organs for some time, prolonging the agony of the victim’s death for as long as possible. And it wasn’t even the cruelest of M’tait weapons.

  Rehenek nodded gravely. “I saw him just before they lifted him off the asteroid. They had managed to seal his suit, but there was blood all over his leg. It had gone in his foot, you see.” Every Caractacan, hardened combatants though they were, winced a little at that. An entry wound in the foot would give the borer the most time to slowly shred its victim from the inside. It was not a pretty way to die. “That was the last I saw of him. They told me that he had been taken back to Sparat for treatment. Well… that was the last I saw of him until a few weeks ago.”

  The floor beneath their feet shuddered. It was slight, but given the great mass of reinforced steelcrete and solid stone that formed the fortress, it portended something far, far worse.

  A tinny voice reported from the control panel. Rehenek answered, then turned to the holo, which zoomed back in to highlight the fortress. A billowing mushroom cloud was rising above an emplacement on the upper tier, near the steeper slope of the volcano.

  “That was Particle Cannon Five,” Rehenek said. “That dreadnaught just hit it with an X-ray laser. Through the atmosphere, the dust, and the smoke. And they aren’t even to high orbit yet.”

  Kranjick glanced at Scalas. That was not good news. Whatever that dreadnaught was packing, it was far more powerful than anything the Caractacans had heard of before. And to be able to target such a small target from that distance…

  Kranjick studied the holo-tank. “Can you display the dreadnaught’s trajectory?” he asked.

  Rehenek frowned, apparently nonplussed by the question. Perhaps he expected the Caractacans would get moving at once rather than continue to ask questions. But he nodded and touched a series of keys.

  A gossamer, glowing golden line traced out from the holographic dreadnaught, passed close to the planet, and curved around it.

  Kranjick said nothing, but a few voices murmured quietly at the altitude where the ship’s trajectory curved around its lowest point.

  “Low orbital insertion,” Soon said quietly.

  “And if it’s entering orbit, then there’s our window,” Kranjick said. He looked down at Rehenek. “I understand your concerns, General-Regent. But you have said it yourself: Valdek is ready to fall. Should I leave my ships here and this fortress fall to the enemy while we are in transit, then it’s all over. The war, the Valdekan resistance, Caractacan assistance… all of it.” He pointed to the holo. “If that ship enters low orbit, then we will have roughly a thirty-minute window while it’s below the horizon to launch and get over the mountain. From there, we can rendezvous with the commander, get him aboard, and get off the planet.”

  He laid a heavy hand on the old man’s shoulder. Rehenek was no longer looking at him, but staring at the holo-tank, his face weary and haunted. “I gave you my word that we would see him off this planet. This is the best way I can do that.”

  Rokoff’s stance looked a little uncertain. He looked back and forth between the two older men, as if he was wondering why his superior wasn’t just laying down the law. But Scalas knew. If Kranjick didn’t persuade Rehenek of the wisdom of this course of action, the General-Regent could give orders to prevent the ships from getting launch clearance.

  After a long pause, Rehenek bowed his head. “I suppose,” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper, “that I had hoped to see my son one more time before I die. But you are right, Legate. Go. Prepare your ships. And may the Universe be on your side.”

  The landing silo shuddered and shook with the pounding the fortress was taking from above. Deep, thrumming vibrations heralded the Valdekan return fire. They were taking a beating, but they weren’t giving up. Scalas was impressed. These were a tough, stubborn people. They would go down—their eventual defeat was now impossible to stave off—but they would keep fighting until they no longer had the means left to do so.

  And they would do whatever they could to buy time for the Caractacans to get their core resistance force off-world. Their sacrifice would be remembered for ages. He hoped. But first the Brothers had to make it off world with the younger Rehenek.

  The thought of what would happen to the survivors once resistance finally collapsed was haunting. He doubted that the harrowing of Valdek would end when the guns fell silent. Again, the sense of inhumanity and alien strangeness that clung to the Unity’s clone forces sent a crawling shiver up his spine.

  His men, those who were left, were finalizing their own loading. It wasn’t just his own century in the troop bay, either; Valdekans were coming with them, and the survivors from Century XXXIV, including Dunstan, had been spread out among the four remaining ships. The Valdekans had offered supplies as well, including more powergun ammunition, and the Caractacans had accepted gratefully. Their numbers were severely depleted, but more firepower would be welcome where they were going.

  Scalas’s eyes found Dunstan, sitting with about half a squad of his remaining century, his centurion markings still on his pauldrons. He didn’t look nearly as dirty as the rest of the men of the century, and the sight set Scalas’s jaw a little. The disgraced centurion would have been in a holding cell aboard the Boanerges if they didn’t need every Brother for the fight to come.

  Spotting Viloshen and Cobb talking to another man in the green and black of the Valdekan commandos, Scalas walked over to join them.

  Viloshen turned. “Centurion, this is Warrant Officer Atelevek. He commands company of First Force commandos. He will be with us on trip over mountain.”

  Atelevek was a younger man with a flat, pugnacious face and small, mean-looking eyes. He seemed to wear a permanent grimace on his face, a cruel one, his mouth slightly twisted by a vicious scar that had nearly taken one of his eyes. He looked at Scalas dully, without the borderline awe that some of the other Valdekan troops had displayed. There was something predatory about the man—like a sullen brutality was just waiting for an opportunity to be let loose. Scalas had met such men before, including in the Vitorian Commandos, and had always been wary of them.

  In fact, he had always had a contingency plan in mind to kill such men before they could do too much damage.

  Of course, it was possible that he was judg
ing too much by Atelevek’s appearance. The man might just be ugly. Brother Simonum, whom he had trained with, and who had departed to the Poran Sector Legio many years before, had been the ugliest man Scalas had ever met, and had also been one of the most staunch, honorable friends he had ever known. But when Atelevek looked at the centurion’s outstretched hand, sneered, and then shook it with such a perfunctory manner that it was almost an insult, Scalas suspected that he wasn’t judging the man harshly enough.

  “Our launch window should be opening soon,” Scalas said coolly. “We should start getting equipment secured and strapping in.”

  Viloshen translated his words, and Atelevek looked at Scalas as if he was insulted to have been told that. Scalas kept his expression carefully neutral. He would not let this man see that his attitude had succeeded in irritating a Caractacan centurion.

  Atelevek then said something in a careless tone to Viloshen, waved at him casually, and walked away toward the dropships that had been detailed to carry the Valdekan ground troops.

  Viloshen watched the warrant officer go, then glanced sidelong at Scalas. Scalas did not meet his eye, but as he watched Atelevek warily, he asked the question the old corporal was obviously waiting for.

  “Will he be a problem?”

  Viloshen shook his head. “I do not think so. He will follow his orders.”

  “Do you know him?” Scalas asked.

  Viloshen shook his head again. “No. But he is First Force commando. There is selection process.”

  Scalas watched Atelevek’s back. “Perhaps.” He had certainly seen murderers and conscienceless killers slip through selection courses before. He’d also seen some men become such after selection. He resolved to keep an eye on Atelevek, as much as he could. “Get to your dropship and strap in,” he said. “We’re leaving soon, and I need my interpreter.”

  Viloshen nodded resignedly, and followed Kahane toward First Squad’s lander.

  Scalas found his own couch, dogged down his helmet, and strapped in. He brought up his holo display in front of his visor. It displayed the curve of the planet and the location of the spaceport. The enemy starships coursed above, the fearsome dreadnaught at their center, still firing on the fortress, but nearing the horizon.

  Soon, the enemy would be below that horizon. Then they would launch.

  16

  The massive Galactic Unity dreadnaught was of a radically different design from the swarms of blunt, angular, pyramidal ships that formed its escort. It out-massed them by an order of magnitude at least, and resembled a monstrous, eight-sided ziggurat, slightly flattened on two flanks. Its mountainous hull bristled with HEL emitters, powergun turrets, and missile banks.

  Its enormous drives, each thrust bell nearly large enough to swallow one of the smaller Unity starships, were currently pointed along its line of travel, glowing a brilliant blue, slowing the enormous ship so that Valdek’s gravity could swing it into low orbit. Yet its weapons still rained destruction down on the planet’s surface, flickering lines of plasma and coherent radiation stabbing down into the storm-wracked and dust-laden atmosphere, aimed with inhuman precision at targets the naked eye could never resolve.

  Return fire was barely visible, just faint glowing pulses of superheated air and dust as beams punched skyward through the roiling atmosphere, but many of these shots were nevertheless finding their targets. One Unity cruiser of the brutal white pyramid variety took a direct hit from a particle beam that carved off a fifty-meter chunk of its flank. Outgassing and sublimating metal started the ship tumbling, and an HEL strike a moment later snapped the ship’s spine in half. Out of control, it tumbled along its previous course, pulling ahead of the decelerating formation. It would continue on an unstable orbit until it eventually struck the atmosphere several years hence.

  A brilliant point of light appeared on the dreadnaught’s flank, as another HEL beam struck. But this beam did not punch through. It merely created a glowing bright greenish dot on the huge ship’s hull, growing then fading as the beam cut out. A few kilometers away, a similar beam punched through a cruiser’s reactor, detonating it in an actinic flash. And when the faint, bluish line of a particle beam reached up from the planet below and struck the dreadnaught dead on… it had no effect either. Less than a meter from the hull, the beam broke up into coruscating curtains of blue and green light. It never actually touched the hull.

  The fire control techs on the ground had to see how ineffectual their fire was against this behemoth. Not that it mattered what they saw or didn’t see. A second later far more powerful beam weapons momentarily linked the leviathan with the groundside weapons that had dared fire on it. X-ray lasers blasted the HEL and the particle beam cannon into glowing dust in a fraction of a second.

  Finally reaching its ideal velocity and altitude, the great ship’s drives cut out, and it rotated to bring still more of its weapons to bear on the surface.

  The Unity’s dreadnaught had entered low orbit over Valdek.

  Mor lay on his couch, feeling every shudder and vibration that ran through his ship from the surrounding silo, his fingers poised just off the controls in his armrest, his eyes fixed on the holo-tank. He had zoomed the tank out so that it now framed most of the planet, with the positions of the spaceport and the enemy dreadnaught brightly marked. A great deal of other information was displayed as well, but none was as vital as the relative positions of the Brotherhood ships to the Unity’s heavy hitter.

  The clamshell doors above the ship were still closed. It would take them a few moments to open—provided they didn’t take a hit like before—but the Port Authority had ruled that all silo doors were to remain shut during orbital bombardment. Mor chafed at the extra time it would take to launch, but he had to admit that a direct hit on the silo while the doors were open would not end well.

  The dreadnaught was nearing the horizon. They would have to be careful not to lift too high too soon; if they weren’t careful, their starships could easily rise above the dreadnaught’s horizon and into the arc of its weapons. And they would be helpless if they had to face it. Mor had seen the data; he knew that the groundside weapons hadn’t even scratched that thing. He had to remind himself that their mission wasn’t to knock it out, but to evade it. As soon as they rendezvoused with Commander Rehenek, they would get off the planet and out of the system.

  A warning chime sounded, and a wider view window opened in the holo-tank, showing more of local space around the planet. Swarms of blood-red symbols were moving, descending on the planet from the Lagrange points. There were hundreds of them. It looked like most of the Unity fleet was closing in on the planet, now that the dreadnaught had entered the fray.

  The Brothers had less time than they’d hoped.

  A countdown suddenly appeared in the top of the tank, starting at twenty seconds. The dreadnaught had just passed below the horizon, and the clamshell doors were starting to open.

  “I don’t need to tell you that we need to fly fast and low, gentlemen,” Captain Trakse said over the comm. “I take it everyone has seen the incoming vampires?”

  “Vampires” was an old, old code phrase for hostile ships.

  Acknowledgments came in from the Vindicator and the Challenger. Mor added his own. “From the Brother-Legate,” Trakse added before signing off, “‘Fly fast, fight hard, and God go with us.’”

  Then there was no more time. The doors were open, the countdown was nearly at an end. Mor tapped keys on his armrest, bringing the drives from standby to lit, feeling the rumble through his bones. He took a deep breath, letting himself feel his ship for a moment, the massive structure of metal alloy and composite becoming an extension of his body. Then he keyed the intercom.

  “I suggest you keep your teeth together, Brothers,” he called. “This is going to get rough.”

  The countdown hit zero, and Mor throttled the engines up, their thrust quickly exceeding the weight of the ship and starting it skyward. The throaty roar of the engines vibrated through every fiber of
the ship’s structure, and blue-white flame splashed against the hardened steelcrete below them, vapor billowing as the automatic systems in the silo fought to keep the internal temperatures down. The Dauntless rose quickly out of a roiling cloud of steam and smoke, weirdly underlit by the sun-hot blast of her engines.

  As soon as they were clear of the silo, Mor throttled up further. A heavy, invisible hand crushed him into his acceleration couch as the ship hurtled skyward at nearly six gees. There would be some damage to the spaceport below—that kind of high-energy lift wasn’t usually encouraged around established installations, since low-altitude, full-power drive plumes tended to blast molten craters in the landscape—but time was pressing, and the fortress was probably doomed anyway. The Valdekans themselves were out of the way; they’d had plenty of warning to take shelter.

  He started the axial tilt early, while still barely a few hundred meters above the ground. They had to keep their trajectory relatively flat, so he was maneuvering tightly. Soon they were blasting across the slope of Gorakovati, the Boanerges and the Challenger keeping pace on one flank, the Vindicator on the other, like bullets fired at the towering peak.

  As Mor fought to breathe and keep from being overwhelmed by the task of keeping his ship steady, he reflected that this was not an inapt simile. The Dauntless had a pair of radiators that might be easily mistaken for fins, but they had limited to no aerodynamic utility. She was effectively a missile. Mor was flying by brute force of drives, thrusters, and gyros.

  It was going to make deceleration interesting.

  The sky behind the four ships was torn asunder as every remaining battery in the fortress opened fire on every Unity target they could find, throwing a storm of destruction skyward to cover for the four starships flying fast and low over the peak of the shield volcano.

  The swirling storms, smoke, and dust hadn’t dispersed from around the fortress for days, and as the Dauntless rose higher, ferocious winds buffeted her, threatening to throw her higher, ram her sideways into one of her sister ships, or suck her down to smash her wreckage against the mountainside, barely three kilometers below. Lightning flickered and flashed around the ship in the plain visual window that he opened. It was, perhaps, less detailed and informative than the holographic representation that was supposed to be the flight display, but Mor preferred it, if only to momentarily glance at it. He liked to see what he was flying through, even when, as now, he was largely flying on instruments.