The Fall of Valdek (The Unity Wars Book 1)

by P. L. Nealen

  “No,” Cobb said coldly. “But there is fighting dirty, and then there is mass murder. This appears to be the latter.”

  “Any sign of the Boanerges?” Scalas asked Mor, forestalling any further bickering between his subcommanders.

  “Not yet,” Mor replied. “We have been looking, but if Brother Legate Kranjick is being cautious, it may take time.”

  Almost as if it had been timed, the comm console chimed. “We are receiving a tight-beam communication from the Boanerges, Captain,” the crewman announced.

  Mor grimaced slightly, as Kahane and Solanus chuckled. Scalas permitted himself a slight half-smile. “Of course we are,” Mor muttered. Raising his voice, he asked, “Content?”

  “Only a rendezvous vector, sir,” the crewman said. He read off the string of numbers that described a direction, distance, and velocity relative to the ecliptic and the Valdekan sun, Goran 54.

  “Navigation?” Mor asked.

  The navigator did not answer immediately, instead calculating the trajectory and where it led. Then he whistled. “Impressive.”

  “Just relay the information, Nav,” Mor said testily.

  “Sorry, sir,” the navigator replied. A point blinked in the tank, with the faint gossamer line of the vector track leading to it. “It appears that the Boanerges is presently station-keeping inside the tail of a comet, approximately fifteen light-minutes from the planet Valdek.”

  Scalas raised an eyebrow. Staying within a comet’s tail was a risky maneuver, and only partially effective as camouflage. The gas giant they were currently orbiting was putting out enough radioactive noise to mask their own ships’ signatures, but a comet was a relatively inert ball of ice and rock. If someone was really looking, there would be no disguising the ship’s neutrino signature or heat emissions. Even so, if it was the only concealment available that close…

  “That is, they were there ninety minutes ago,” Cobb pointed out. “Is there any sign of ships moving toward them?”

  Mor motioned toward the holo tank. “You can see the display as well as I can, Squad Sergeant,” he said. “So far, it looks like the Boanerges is still undetected.”

  “Can all four ships fit in the tail with the Boanerges?” Scalas asked.

  Mor squinted at the holo tank, bringing up a sensor readout of the comet. It was on its downward fall toward Goran 54, its tail billowing out at an angle to its orbit with the solar wind. It still had a very long way to fall before it reached perihelion, so the tail was only about a third as large as it was going to get. His lips moved slightly as he ran numbers in his head.

  “I think we can, provided the clods driving the Sword and Vindicator don’t collide with one of us in the murk,” he said. His facetious jibe fell flat among the Brothers present, and he shrugged slightly. “I suggest you get to your acceleration couches, gentlemen, and strap in. We will be maneuvering shortly. Provided that is your chosen course of action, Centurion?” he added, as if just remembering that Scalas was the acting Legate.

  But Scalas only nodded. “We will be below,” he said, as he gestured to the Squad Sergeants and started toward the lift hatch.

  ***

  After a brief exchange of tight-beam burst communications, the four starships went inertialess, lit their drives, and moved out of orbit, pushing to the far side of the gas giant. There, in deep space, with the gas giant and all its radiation between them and the enemy forces surrounding Valdek, the four ships made their vector changes, matching the trajectory and velocity given for the comet, before once again activating their Bergenholm fields and pushing deeper into the system at just below the speed of light.

  ***

  When the Dauntless’ Bergenholm field cut out completely, she was a very precise two hundred meters from the Boanerges, just inside the comet’s tail, velocities matched to the point that neither starship appeared to be moving at all.

  Mor nodded in satisfaction, especially when he checked the holo tank and saw the Vindicator and the Sword of the Brotherhood maneuvering to close the distance and match velocities more carefully. The fact that the Challenger was holding station on the other side of the Boanerges, nearly as relatively motionless as the Dauntless, wiped a little bit of the triumphant smirk off his face.

  A small portion of the holo tank lit with Brother Legate Kranjick’s heavy, immobile face. “Welcome to the Valdek system, gentlemen,” he said. “Full remote conference, all Centurions and ship captains.”

  In moments, that side of the holo tank filled with the images of the respective commanders. Mor thumb-clicked an icon, and knew that his own face was appearing in the same cloud on the other ships, and below, where Centurion Scalas was strapped in.

  “We are downloading the Boanerges’s sensor logs for the last forty-eight hours,” Kranjick said. “But I will sum up what we have seen. The planet is under near-continual bombardment, though there are no ships actually in orbit that we have observed. It appears that the planetary defenses are still formidable enough that staying in the low to medium orbitals would ultimately be suicidal. The enemy forces appear to be staging in the Lagrange points and making high-velocity runs past the planet to launch dropships, transatmospheric fighters, and kinetic kill munitions, and to keep up the bombardment. They are being answered with powerguns, heavy particle beams, heavy railguns, and high-energy lasers.”

  That made sense. Missiles would be too vulnerable at the early stages of launch, as they struggled to build their velocity from that low in the gravity well. Though Mor wondered at how well railguns heavy enough to be effective from the surface could be precisely aimed at starships moving at or over escape velocity.

  “There is a significant amount of debris in high orbit,” Kranjick continued, “some of it highly radioactive. Captain Horvaset informs me that the density and pattern of the debris is consistent with nearly seventy-five percent of Valdek’s fleet having been wiped out in space.”

  “Rehenek’s message said that he was sending similar pleas to every ally they had within a hundred parsecs,” Soon put in. “Is there any indication of allied fleets arriving to lend their assistance?”

  “There have been a few neutrino signatures consistent with small squadrons of starships on the fringes of the system over the last few hours,” Captain Trakse, the Boanerges’s commander said. “So far, however, they seem to have been reluctant to come deeper in; either they are waiting for more of a critical mass of ships or…”

  “Or they are too afraid to face that swarm down there,” Scalas said coldly.

  “No one has seen a fleet this size since the Qinglong Wars, if then,” Kranjick pointed out. “There are at least five hundred ships per Lagrange point down there. That would give any starship commander with sense pause.”

  “Except for us,” Dunstan put in, a bitter note in his voice.

  Kranjick’s expression did not change, though his eyes might have turned several degrees colder. “Indeed,” he said. “Suggestions, gentlemen?”

  “If we are going to attack, we have very little time to act,” Mor said. “The emissions from our passage in-system will reach their sensors in less than ten minutes. At that point, surprise will be impossible.”

  “Misdirection might still be possible, however,” Hwung-Tsi, the Challenger’s captain, pointed out. “A series of short, tachyonic dashes could place multiple false neutrino signatures along multiple vectors around the planet in only a few minutes. They won’t know where the real attack is coming from until we are right on top of them.”

  “Which raises the question,” Costigan put in, “what is the attack plan? We simply do not have the firepower to take on five hundred ships at once.”

  “The Lagrange points are out as targets, for now,” Trakse said. “You’re right; the disparity in numbers is too high. However, looking at the take from the probe on the far side of the comet, a strike force just launched from L2, heading down toward the planet. I suggest that would be an appropriate first target.”

  “How long unt
il they are on target?” Kranjick asked.

  “They do not appear to be engaging their Bergenholms,” Trakse said, looking off camera. He watched for a moment, apparently gathering data. “At their current acceleration, they will pass perigee with the planet in approximately ten hours.”

  Mor frowned. Engaging the enemy ships when at their lowest point in the gravity well—and also when they were most likely to be target fixated on the planet—was the most tactically auspicious point to attack. It would also be almost ten hours after the Caractacan ships’ presence in the system was detected.

  But Hwung-Tsi was smiling. “I think we can kill two birds with one arrow here, gentlemen,” he said. He explained the broad strokes of his idea, and soon the ship captains were nodding in agreement. Most of the Centurions were somewhat more blasé about the plan; any Caractacan commander had to be somewhat versed in all spheres of conflict, be they space, air, or ground, but there were still areas where each had their specialization, and the Centurions were ground fighters.

  It took a short time to determine the plan. There was a great deal of hard work and calculation ahead to put it into action, but the general plan of attack had been determined. It would be up to the starship Captains and their crews to execute it.

  “We have little time before our emissions reach the enemy, gentlemen,” Kranjick said. “Let us be away from this comet before that happens.”

  The faces vanished from the holo tank, and Mor got to work.

  ***

  Only a few minutes later, the Dauntless, Vindicator, and Challenger went inert barely thirty light-seconds from L3. They immediately lit their drives and began their vector changes. A minute later, just long enough for their presence to have registered to the nearest ship hanging in the Lagrange point, and all three ships went tachyonic again and flashed away.

  ***

  It was a short hop, only about ten milliseconds. In that time, they found themselves out past the system’s Oort cloud. Goran 54 was a speck of light behind them, lost in the vast starfield. Beyond lay the Rim and the myriad points of light that were even more distant galaxies and globular clusters.

  It took a few moments for the navigators to pinpoint their coordinates and relative vector. Then they turned the Bergenholms to negative mass once more, and plunged back inward toward Valdek.

  ***

  Again and again, for hours, they continued the maneuvers. The two elements of starships would go tachyonic, suddenly go inert within a light-minute of one or another of the Lagrange points the so-called “Galactic Unity” was using as staging points, conduct a delta-v burn, then go tachyonic again, outrunning sluggish light and skipping to the edge of the system, before returning to a different place. They could sometimes time their dashes to present the enemy scanners with neutrino signatures close enough together that it appeared that a single, large element had appeared and fled all at once, rather than a smaller element coming and going several times. Such was the advantage to short, superluminal hops, at least leading up to final engagement.

  Every time they cut their Bergenholms, they adjusted their inert vectors to come closer and closer to the attack vector they would need to finally intercept the strike force that was accelerating toward the planet. After just over nine hours, all five ships had, by way of numerous carefully calculated burns, reached their equally carefully calculated inert attack vectors. It was time.

  The Dauntless was once again skimming through deep space, out past the distant gas giant they had first approached when entering the system. That enormous failed star was invisible in the black, too far away to be seen without a telescope, even if one of the Brothers had tried to look out a viewport.

  “Stand by all gunnery stations,” Mor snapped. He was still strapped into his acceleration couch, his helmet and armor sealed, as he had been the entire past ten hours. Fortunately, the armor had been designed with such unpleasant possibilities in mind, so he had not had to forego certain bodily functions for that long. “Gentlemen,” he said, his voice echoing through the ship, “when we go inert again, we will be on final attack vector. Stand by for combat maneuvers.” He looked at the holo tank, tapping controls built into his couch’s armrest. “Bergenholm engaging in five…four…three…two…one.”

  The Dauntless’ substantial mass was, for a fraction of a second, measured in negative numbers. She crossed half the system in a tiny fraction of the time it would take a photon of light to make the journey.

  The Bergenholm cut out too quickly for human reflexes. Mor prided himself on his consummate skill as a pilot, but tachyonic trajectories had to be precisely programmed into the flight computer. Any human pilot would never be able to control it manually with the precision necessary. A starship with its Bergenholm set to tachyonic flight would travel light hours in the time it could take to tap a button.

  The crowded circle of light that was all an unaided observer could see ahead of a tachyonic starship suddenly exploded into the full starfield, the planet Valdek leaping out until it was a noticeable sphere, only just over a light-second away.

  The planet was unremarkable as inhabited planets went, at least from what the scans and the information contained in the Brotherhood’s records said. The seas only covered about fifty percent of the planet, and were almost entirely self-contained, landlocked. Still volcanically active, though not tectonically active, there was a string of shield volcanoes stretching across the southern hemisphere, though all were dwarfed by the largest in the northern hemisphere. Gorakovati almost reached beyond the atmosphere, it was so tall.

  Little of the surface was visible at the moment. Massive storms had been kicked up by the orbital bombardment, and most of the visible hemisphere was wreathed in flickering clouds, swirling with wildly conflicting eddies as the atmosphere was cooked and hammered relentlessly by high-energy weapons.

  Mor took the image in at a glance. The planet was not presently his chief concern. “Deploy the weapons array,” he ordered. They were hurtling toward the planet at hundreds of kilometers per second, and closing with the enemy ships at a decent fraction of that. Time was now of the essence.

  Her drive flaming white-hot before her, the Dauntless’ weapons constellation began to deploy. X-ray laser pods drifted outward, held in their relative positions by inertia and careful thruster burns. Missiles were deployed, their seeker heads already looking for targets according to the instructions programmed by the gunnery chief. Decoy bots rushed out to fill the space between ships with thermal, radioactive, and neutrino signatures similar to the starships’.

  Local space was crowded, even though none of the starships were close enough to one another to be observed with the naked eye, even if someone had been looking for them. The Caractacan ships were spaced tens of thousands of kilometers apart, and even then, there was hardly enough space for all of their weapons constellations not to interfere with each other.

  Scanners and remote telescopes painted an enhanced, magnified view in Mor’s holo tank. The enemy ships were sharp-edged, angular, elongated pyramids, painted white with blue markings. They were also much deeper in the gravity well than the Caractacan starships that were presently stooping upon them.

  There appeared to be about ten ships, though the appearance could be deceiving. While it was impossible to hide a ship in open space, there were ways to fill space with so much noise that it could cost a gunner the vital few seconds to sort out the junk from the targets. Because at those ranges and velocities, with the power of the weapons involved, life or death hung on a margin of milliseconds.

  “Powergun batteries and HELs open fire as soon as solutions are reached,” Mor commanded. “Missiles as well. X-Ray Lasers, fire upon minimum safe arming distance.” That was not “minimum safe distance” from the target, but from the Dauntless.

  The powergun batteries and High Energy Laser emitters were just reaching the ends of their deployment booms, and soon invisible lines of intense collimated light and lightning-colored bolts of copper plasma were
stabbing toward the enemy ships.

  The holo tank flashed red, and an alarm whooped as the ship shuddered and rang like a bell. “Grazing hit, HEL, Quadrant Four,” the damage control officer reported. “Hull breach.” He paused, listening and scanning his screen. “Contained; no major damage.”

  It had more than likely been a snap-shot that had just barely managed to burn through the hull. The Caractacan ships had one major advantage over the enemy starcraft. The enemy had to have known they were coming, after the last ten hours of ghost echoes, but they would not have known exactly when or where. The attacking Caractacan starships had outrun the light-speed signals that would have warned their targets they were coming, right up until the point they had cut the Bergenholms. They had a handful of seconds’ head start, and that could be all it would take.

  In the holo tank, the bright, flashing lines of laser pulses and powergun bolts rained down on the enemy craft. One took a powergun bolt to the drive bay and detonated silently, as high-velocity plasma destroyed the drives’ magnetic plasma containment fields. Another caught half a dozen laser pulses that punched through hull metal and anything on the other side. A gout of vapor puffed from the ship’s flank, but it otherwise was apparently unhurt.

  Many of the shots were being wasted, either misses based on faulty predictions of where a ship would be when the shot got there, or because they had been aimed at decoys. When fractions of a second count, every target that can be engaged, must be.

  Two more starships flared white and vanished, turning into miniature suns under the impact of X-ray lasers, which transferred as much energy as a direct hit from a thermonuclear weapon. Meanwhile, the distance was closing rapidly; the Caractacan ships were braking at less than a half gee—in no small part to present their drive plumes as additional defensive measures—but they were still moving several times faster than the ships that had been focused on attacking the planet’s surface.