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

by Peter Nealen

  Rehenek’s helmet was off, but Scalas had left his on. The indicators in his visor helped him coordinate his men, especially now that he was acting legate. The armored prow of his visor nearly touched Rehenek’s nose.

  “Brother Legate Kranjick and thirty more Caractacan Brothers just died to buy you more time,” he growled. “You are the mission, but I am warning you: show some respect, or keep your teeth together.”

  For a moment, Rehenek’s face went white, and rage blazed in his eyes. But then the fires subsided, and he nodded apologetically.

  “Forgive me, Centurion. The strain led me to forget myself. The sacrifice of all the Caractacans who have died here will be enshrined in the memories of all Valdekans henceforth. I will be sure of it.”

  Scalas let go with a sharp nod. He distrusted most such speeches; they usually came from politicians, most of whom were dishonest and insincere. But Rehenek had a reputation as a warrior and a fierce fighter. Perhaps he was sincere.

  “We could have used more time, however,” Rehenek added. “Captain Horvaset?”

  Horvaset was in her element, the alien controls notwithstanding. She’d reached the command deck minutes after Rehenek and Scalas, and had gone to work with barely a word to acknowledge even Rehenek. She didn’t even take her eyes off the displays as she spoke over her shoulder. “The engines are about seventy-five percent of the way through their startup sequence.” She spoke in Trade Cant for the benefit of the Caractacans on the command deck. “The reactor is at eighty percent, and full checks for launch will take about another hour.”

  “We don’t have another hour,” Rehenek said. “At most we have thirty minutes before that monstrosity of a ship is overhead.”

  Horvaset spared a dark-eyed glance over her shoulder. A cold, brittle half-smile quirked the corner of her mouth. “Which is why we’re taking as many shortcuts as we can, Commander. But spaceflight is dangerous enough as it is; if we miss a step and a system doesn’t work as it’s supposed to, it could very well kill us all.”

  “And that dreadnaught will kill us all if we are still stuck on the ground when it arrives,” Rehenek growled. “We may just have to take our chances, Captain.”

  “And if we ‘take our chances’ and turn into a monatomic smear on the mountainside, then we still fail in our mission.” Horvaset turned back to her displays. “Trust me, if it’s at all possible to get us off the ground sooner, I’ll get us off the ground sooner.”

  Rehenek’s fists were clenched and his face was set, but he merely stared at the holo-tank. Scalas did the same. He had the rudimentary spacer training that all Caractacans received during their novitiate, but he was a ground fighter, and the triamic designs were completely foreign to him. The holo-tank was the only thing on the command deck that he understood.

  The ground force at the gateway appeared to have halted. Kranjick’s last stand had gutted them, and they were now faced with tons of rock between them and the main entrance to the installation. The landing pads below might have offered a way into an airmobile assault force, but the crashed shuttle had obliterated two of them, and the third was damaged enough to be unviable. The installation was effectively sealed off.

  But the main threat was still the enormous starship that kept descending at a slow, stately pace down the slopes of Gorakovati, its sun-hot drive plumes so wide that one of the Spear-class ships could have vanished into it. Even as it descended, its batteries had already opened fire. Lances of green-white powergun bolts hammered at every emplacement on the mountainside, and intense HEL beams turned solid rock into flowing lava.

  “Are there any other defenses still operational on the mountain?” Scalas asked.

  “I doubt we have anything that could touch that,” Rehenek muttered, but he looked over at the small side screen where the comms were still open with Commander Schukhin.

  “Most of the anti-air batteries have been destroyed,” Schukhin replied. Viloshen was next to Scalas, murmuring the translation. “The heavier batteries are buried deeper, including the main particle beam cannon, but we don’t have the personnel to man them. And even if we did, the missiles can’t accelerate fast enough to avoid the kind of point defenses a ship that size can bring to bear. Besides, I doubt that any of them could harm that thing, seeing as it appears to have shrugged off the fortress’s ground-to-space fire.”

  “Where are the central fire controls for the particle beam cannon?” Scalas asked.

  “On the fifteenth level,” Viloshen translated, after relaying the question to Schukhin. “But…”

  Scalas had already started for the elevator. “We might be able to keep that dreadnaught busy long enough to finish getting the Pride ready to launch,” he said. “First Squad, on me! Viloshen, you too. I’ll need someone to translate the controls.”

  He strode into the Pride’s central elevator, a strange half-sphere arrangement that seemed a bit wasteful of space, dogging his helmet back down as he went. When he turned around and the doors shut, he saw that Rehenek, his own battlesuit helmet under his arm, had come with them.

  “What are you doing?” Scalas asked.

  “The same thing you are,” Rehenek snorted. “Buying time.”

  Scalas shook his head. “No, the mission is to get you off-planet and out-system. You’re the package. If you go down in the guts of this place, then we’ve failed.”

  Rehenek’s face was hard, his lips compressed in a thin line, as he shook his head in response. “You are speaking to the General-Regent of Valdek, aboard a Valdekan ship. It’s not your decision to make, Acting Legate. It’s mine. Your Legate gave his life to buy us time, as did my father. And seeing as my father fought on the front lines with us until he was so badly wounded that he had to be put in a medical exoskeleton and confined to the last standing planetary defense fortress, I myself could hardly do less.” He grinned like a death’s head as the elevator started down. “Besides, with me along, the Pride is less likely to lift without you. Shouldn’t that be a good thing?”

  “Not if we fail,” Scalas muttered.

  “Then we should not fail,” Rehenek said, donning his helmet. “We are alike, you and I. Your legate sacrificed himself to buy us time. So did my father. We cannot help but follow in our mentors’ footsteps.”

  Scalas studied the shorter man as they descended. Rehenek seemed composed, relaxed. But there was a brittleness to his demeanor that suggested that the recently-promoted General-Regent of a conquered world was barely keeping himself under control. He’d experienced too much defeat in the past few weeks.

  Scalas only hoped that he could maintain his own control, at least until they got off-world.

  Or died.

  The elevator hissed to a halt, and Scalas looked up at the deck indicator, then over at Viloshen in frustration. The old corporal nodded; it was the right deck. Scalas strode out, his boots ringing on the steel decking, with Rehenek half a stride behind him. The airlocks and the massive docking bays were directly ahead, with the gantries leading into the silo beyond. All around them the impacts of weapons fire from outside shuddered through the very bones of the mountain.

  Most of the survivors of Century XXXII’s First Squad were already waiting on the far side of the gantry, their armor scarred and blackened, weapons held ready, though if they needed to use them, the odds were that all was lost anyway. The rest were coming out of the Pride behind Scalas and Rehenek. All told, only fourteen of the twenty men of First Squad were left. Still, it was better than some of his other squads. Much better than Cobb’s.

  Rehenek, speaking rapidly into his comm in Eastern Satevic, led out, breaking into a run as he moved down the curving tunnel that stretched all the way around the massive silo that housed the Pride of Valdek. The Caractacans followed, keeping up easily despite the days of fighting behind them. Caractacan Brothers had to keep at their peak, and Rehenek, exhausted by weeks of combat, certainly wasn’t running at a pace that any Caractacan would call fast.

  About halfway around the circle, R
ehenek stopped at a large, round, armored door in the rock wall. He barked a hoarse query into the comm, then quickly put the entry code into a pad beside the door as Schukhin rattled it off. A light lit and a series of beeps sounded, but the door didn’t move. Schukhin said something else and Rehenek put his eye to a retinal scanner with a curse. The light blinked out and the door slid open, rolling back into a recess in the rock, and in the short passageway beyond, lights flickered to life, revealing another door. The Valdekans took security for their weapons systems seriously.

  Rehenek had to go through much the same process to get that door open, though apparently with a different code. The room on the other side was small, containing nothing but three consoles and a holo-tank. The consoles lit up as they entered, and Rehenek moved to the right-hand one.

  “What do you need me to do?” Scalas asked.

  Rehenek pointed to the center console. “Targeting controls. All I need you to do is aim.” He turned to his chosen control panel and resumed speaking to Schukhin, asking quick, pointed questions. Schukhin’s replies sounded increasingly hesitant, and Rehenek was starting to get acerbic.

  Scalas spared a curious glance at Viloshen, who had followed them in. Most of the rest of the squad was outside, holding security on the passages to either side, just in case. “He is talking to Commander Schukhin about venting secondary reactor into particle beam cannon’s firing chamber,” Viloshen said quietly.

  Scalas turned to stare at Rehenek, who tapped at the controls as he spoke. “That thing shrugged off high-energy lasers and particle beams—well, I’d like to see it shrug off an entire reactor’s worth of plasma.”

  “Will the weapon even handle it?” Scalas asked. He sat at the targeting console and brought up the target acquisition program. There was no time to argue about it; whatever they were going to do, it needed to be done soon.

  Another faint shudder passed through the mass of the mountain. Considering how much rock there was between them and the outside…

  “I’m overriding several safeties and supercharging the coolant system,” Rehenek said, his fingers dancing over the controls. “At least, I hope that’s what I’m doing.” He barked another query at Schukhin, who replied with a faint quaver in his voice. “We’ll probably only get one shot. I want it to count.”

  “And emitter will probably explode on that one shot, anyway,” Viloshen muttered. He was leaning over Scalas’s shoulder at that point, helping him with the unfamiliar, Eastern Satevic-labeled controls.

  Together, the two of them got the targeting solution set in, and the particle beam emitter pointed at the enormous hull of the dreadnaught, which was hovering overhead, its own beam weapons relentlessly burning away the mass of rock and debris that Kranjick had collapsed across the entrance. The whole mountain shook under the bombardment.

  A voice suddenly broke into their comms. The signal sending it had to be extremely powerful to penetrate into the mountain, not to mention break through the encryption.

  “I know you’re still alive in there, Son of Rehenek,” Vakolo’s voice said coldly, echoing in every comm. “You have the chance to remedy your father’s mistake. Surrender, join Valdek to the Galactic Unity, and your people will be spared considerable… unpleasantness. This has already gone on far too long. I had meant for your world to stand next to Sparat, one of the jewels of the New Order. Instead, you and your hidebound, narrow-minded parents have forced me to hammer Valdek into submission, doing damage that will take years to repair. End it now. I do not wish to further make an example of your planet.”

  Rehenek didn’t reply, but continued to work feverishly at the console. “Are we targeted?” he asked Scalas.

  “Ready when you are,” Scalas replied. “Provided you’re not about to turn us all into radioactive slag.”

  “I hope not,” Rehenek said. He stabbed a key.

  Far below them, the Number Two reactor opened one of its emergency shunts. Sun-hot plasma raced through a magnetized tunnel, a tunnel that was supposed to vent directly into the sky above the mountain. But some creative rerouting had instead directed the plasma toward the primary particle beam cannon’s spherical firing chamber. The chamber would ionize the reaction mass for the shot, which would then be accelerated by powerful electromagnets through the main vertical shaft before being directed toward its target by the emitter rising out of its armored and camouflaged revetment on the peak, just below the hidden silo doors. Rehenek’s bypasses managed to hold the reactor plasma for a fraction of a second before the chamber’s mechanisms melted down.

  It was just enough time for the shot. A torrent of plasma was accelerated to nearly the speed of light and spewed out of the emitter in a brilliant, eye-searing beam of white-hot devastation. The beam struck the dreadnaught’s electromagnetic shielding, which coruscated wildly with curtains of multi-colored light before failing. A crater was bored into the thick ship’s plating, punching through and doing serious damage, killing hundreds of clones, before the pilot threw more power to the engines and partially cut in the Bergenholm, flinging the dreadnaught thousands of meters up and out of the line of fire.

  Scalas and Rehenek straightened from their consoles at the same time. There would be no follow-up shot. The particle beam cannon was utterly destroyed. The shaft was now little more than a lava tube lined with radioactive slag. The emitter, as Viloshen had predicted, had exploded, leaving a glowing crater beneath a rising mushroom cloud on the mountaintop.

  “Come on,” Rehenek urged. “We’ve bought a little time. Hopefully it’s enough.”

  The Caractacans needed no urging. Together, the little knot of men ran back toward the gangway and the ship.

  The rock was vibrating under their feet, punctuated by faint shudders as the distant enemy dreadnaught continued firing, though its targeting had to be a fuzz of radiation and thermal blooms by now. It had been damaged, but the leviathan was far from dead.

  “The silo doors are opening,” Rehenek gasped as they ran through the entryway and down the short, enclosed gangway leading to the massive cylinder of the Pride. Commander Schukhin and the last remnants of his skeleton crew were a few paces ahead of them. Through the transparency, light filtered down from above, wan and orange through the dust and debris in the sky.

  They rushed aboard, and Rehenek called the command deck. “Captain Horvaset!”

  “Are you aboard, Commander? We’re ready for launch.”

  “That was faster than you made it sound,” Rehenek said as they pounded onto the cavernous hangar deck.

  “I didn’t say we’re ready for a safe launch, Commander,” Horvaset said tartly. “I suggest you hurry and find an acceleration couch. Though you might not feel it anyway, as we’re activating the Bergenholm in fifteen seconds and launching a few seconds after that.”

  Scalas broke in. “Why do I suddenly get the feeling you’re not talking about just reducing our inertia to accelerate more quickly out of the silo?” He was breathing hard; the entire squad was making for the center of the hangar, hoping to get to a compartment with acceleration couches. Even with the Bergenholm on, if it wasn’t turned to zero mass—which had its own problems in an atmosphere—enough gees could still crush a man.

  “Probably because I’m not, Centurion,” Horvaset said. “That dreadnaught is already closing again, and already firing on the silo doors. If we cross one of those beams, even inertialess the energy dump could still kill us. So we’re going to outrun the beams.” She sounded distracted. “Hurry up and strap in, gentlemen. We’re going to have to time this precisely.”

  Rehenek was muttering what could only be a chorus of vicious profanities under his breath as they raced into the elevator and started up. The lift seemed agonizingly slow, even though Scalas knew it actually moved more quickly than the Dauntless’s elevators.

  When the doors swept open, they dashed out into the circular corridor two decks above the hangar. Rehenek pointed, and they sprinted into an empty crew compartment. It appeared to be working quar
ters for the hangar deck crew, but there were enough couches for the understrength squad. The men ran for the acceleration couches and threw themselves down just as Horvaset announced, “Five seconds.”

  There wasn’t enough time to strap in. They could only throw themselves flat and hope for the best.

  The Pride of Valdek went tachyonic inside the mountain.

  A sudden flash blasted out of the top of the mountain. For a brief second, there was a tunnel of pure vacuum from the bottom of the silo to the top of the atmosphere. The superheated shockwave blasted away from that tunnel by the ship’s passage formed a nearly solid wall of sun-hot air that scoured the eastern slope of Gorakovati down to bedrock. The wave slammed into the Unity dreadnaught, staggering even that behemoth for a moment. Its pilot fought to keep the mountainous starship stable, and almost succeeded.

  But the Pride of Valdek’s launch hadn’t just bored a hole in the atmosphere; the starship’s sudden, explosive departure had blown the silo apart, cracking the mountain asunder and sending most of the peak flying, thousands of tons of molten, rocky shrapnel moving faster than the speed of sound. Three boulders nearly the size of starships themselves flew at the dreadnaught, and had anyone been on the ground to watch, it must have looked like they would knock the gigantic ship out of the sky.

  Yet damaged as it was, the dreadnaught’s defenses were still hard to penetrate. Particle beams, high-energy lasers, and powerguns quickly cut the fragments of mountain down to much smaller rocks. They rained against the hardened hull, punching through in a few places; some hammered through the wound left by that single, desperate particle beam shot, doing even more damage. But although the ship staggered in the air, its drives laboring to keep it up, it was still intact.

  Smoking, the dreadnaught limped off to the west, over the volcano and away from the roaring hurricane of tortured air left by the Pride of Valdek’s escape.

  22