by P. L. Nealen
As the enemy ships neared the planet, locked into their approach vectors, a storm of fire started to rise from the planet below. The lead ship was suddenly connected with the cloud tops by a bright, gossamer line of greenish light, and was abruptly cut in half lengthwise. A moment later, its reactor, breached by the particle beam, detonated in a brilliant, silent flash.
Caught between groundside defensive fire and an unexpected attack from above, the remaining ships suddenly went inertialess and flashed away, rapidly accelerating to near-lightspeed, making for the L4 point, between Valdek and its second moon. The ship that had been holed by multiple HEL pulses continued on its previous vector, apparently dead.
Mor was about to issue the order to follow suit; the X-ray laser pods that had been deployed were few enough to be expendable, given the circumstances, so he was not concerned with retrieving them. Staying inert above the planet would only invite a counterattack from one of the Lagrange points, and the Caractacans would then find themselves in a similar position to their recently-deceased adversaries.
But before he could, Kranjick’s face appeared in the holo tank again. “All Caractacan ships, stand by for high-gee braking maneuver,” he said. “We have been contacted by the General-Regent, and he has requested that we descend to the surface.”
“Brother Legate,” Hwung-Tsi protested, “that will put us at a disadvantage. We would be at the bottom of the gravity well.”
“He has assured me that the situation is far more dire on the surface than in orbit,” Kranjick said. “We may require the starships for close support.” Kranjick paused. “It is true that we will not have the velocity or mobility advantage that we might have in space,” he conceded. “But if the planet is lost under us, we will have accomplished nothing. Prepare to descend.”
Mor clenched his jaw, as much in anticipation of the upcoming maneuver as in dissatisfaction with the prospect of descending to a planetary surface while there was still a space battle going on. But he was a Caractacan Brother, and he followed orders. He keyed the “All Decks” comm.
“Stand by for high-gee maneuvers,” he said. “Six gees to commence in…three minutes.”
Chapter 7
The descent was rough, but the ferocious buffeting of a steep dive into the roiled, storm-wracked upper atmosphere of Valdek almost seemed gentle compared to the extended six-gravity braking maneuver that had been necessary to slow the ships to below escape velocity, to where they could be captured by the planet’s gravity. The descent had turned into a powered dive when they had whipped around the far side of the planet to see the formation of another twenty long, pyramidal ships plunging toward them from the L2 point.
HELs and powergun bolts stabbed at them from above as the enemy ships soared past overhead, their brilliant light scoring lines through the attenuated air that would have been impressed on retinas for some time thereafter if anyone had looked directly at them. The thunderous concussion of an energy weapon’s passage through the air, superheating even the thin atmosphere at that altitude explosively, rocked the Dauntless with a near-miss. Only the persistence of the decoys above, the high relative velocities, and the increasingly heavy counter-fire from the surface kept the enemy ships from scoring a direct hit.
Even so, Mor saw the blast of a powergun bolt pass close enough to the Vindicator that it tossed the starship hard to one side, almost knocking her out of control. He could not spare the attention for a close examination, having to concentrate on piloting the Dauntless, but he expected that the Dauntless’ sister ship probably had sustained some serious damage on one flank from the blast and thermal effects alone.
Particle beams lanced up from below, hammering their own tunnels through the atmosphere, and he had to thrust hard to steer the Dauntless around the narrow columns of high-energy ions and their accompanying hurricane turbulence. He was tempted to curse the gunners down below, until he saw one of the attacking cruisers above pinned by three beams, a fraction of a second before it exploded.
Then they were plunging into a billowing thunderstorm, and he had even more to worry about.
Lightning nearly as intense as the powergun and particle-beam fire flashed through the clouds, and thunder rocked the starship, even as the intense winds, well over three hundred kilometers per hour, tried to spin the vessel out of control. If not for the starship’s powerful sensors, she would have been blind, as dark gray clouds swirled violently around her hull in the howling winds, lashing the ship with hail, rain, and particulate matter thrown into the atmosphere by the bombardment.
Even though he was doing little more than tapping controls, Mor was drenched in sweat as he tried to compensate for every gust, especially as the ship’s velocity continued to fall as she got deeper into the atmosphere. The red glow of her meteoric descent into the stratosphere had faded, and soon she would be standing on her tail, descending on her drive plume. Fully vertical, flight would become even more treacherous, as the tearing winds tried to snatch the ship off balance.
The Dauntless dropped out of the clouds, descending into driving rain that was instantly turned into steam and plasma by the white-hot flame of her drive. The wind was still intense, made more so as the gray of the storm was suddenly lit by another brilliant line of blazing green as another of the groundside particle beam weapons fired on the enemy ships overhead, invisible to the naked eye through the swirling overcast.
Mor spared a brief moment to switch the holo tank to an enhanced view of the scene below. He needed to know where they were going, and what they were dropping into.
The Dauntless was currently three thousand meters above the ground and dropping. Below stretched a broad plateau, on the shoulder of Gorakovati, the gigantic northern shield volcano.
The entire plateau was a war zone.
The top of the plateau, just where the steeper slopes of the volcano began to flatten out, was dominated by a sprawling fortress, an edifice that looked like it would have dwarfed the Avar Sector Keep. A gigantic central dome dominated the complex, surrounded by multiple concentric rings of defensive emplacements, including the massive, spherical emitters for particle beam weapons and HELs. Long, crane-like structures mounted on the mountain slopes above had to be the railguns.
Outside of the third defensive ring, the plateau was a nightmare. The ground had been churned and cratered by armored vehicles, artillery, and explosives. If there had been any vegetation growing there before, it had been crushed, blasted, or burned to ash. Nothing lived for kilometers around the planetary fortress except what was contained in armor.
The remains of at least three outer defensive rings could be seen, broken and in some cases still burning. Despite the rain and the wind, fires were raging fiercely down there. The enemy dropships were clearly visible on the edge of the plateau—those that were still intact. The landers were smaller, squatter versions of the starships; blunt, angular pyramids squatting on heavy landing jacks. The intact dropships were surrounded by dug-in artillery, supply dumps, and vast troop and armored vehicle staging areas.
“Gunnery,” Mor called out, “I want powergun batteries deployed for atmospheric employment. If we’re going to fly over those positions, I expect we’re going to take some fire.” Especially since they weren’t moving as fast as he would have liked. They were still moving laterally at considerable velocity, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t be targeted and hit, especially with the blinding light of their drive to shoot at.
Kranjick’s face appeared in the holo tank again. “Valdekan Command is transmitting a flight path, gentlemen,” he said, his voice as slow and bored-sounding as ever, even after what they had just been through. Mor knew some of what the Brother Legate had seen during his long years of service, and he supposed that the air of boredom was honestly come by, even though he had always suspected that it was simply part of Kranjick’s leadership style. The men shouldn’t get overly excited as long as their commander sounded bored. “They strongly suggest that we stick to it, as ground-based ba
tteries will be engaging the enemy on the ground to help cover our approach.”
Almost before he had finished speaking, elevated gun positions on the flanks of the mountain opened fire, the railgun rounds dimly visible as streaks of dull red as they went hypersonic before leaving the barrels. They struck the fortifications set up around the dropships and several of the breaches in the fallen defensive rings with catastrophic force, hitting with brilliant flashes that looked almost like small thermonuclear charges.
Mor wasn’t going to leave it at that, however. The Dauntless had a better vantage point, anyway. “Gunnery, identify probable powergun and railgun positions and engage at will. Prioritize what can do more damage to the ship.”
“Yes, sir,” Gunnery Chief Carne replied. A moment later, the thunder of the powergun discharges started to rumble faintly through the hull. In the holo tank, brilliant blue-white bolts flickered down from the sky, striking so fast that they seemed like lightning flashes rather than discreet projectiles. Armored vehicles and gun emplacements erupted into brilliant fireballs wherever the bolts touched.
They could not suppress all the fire, however. Even with the starships’ more powerful batteries, elevated position, and more capable scanners, they only had so many weapons in opposition to the myriad below them. Answering plasma packets stabbed skyward, foiled only by the inclement conditions and the Caractacan starships’ countermeasures, which should be making hash of any active targeting systems.
But there was only so much that countermeasures could accomplish when the target was a ship the size of a skyscraper, balanced on a pillar of actinic fire.
The Challenger was hit, nearly a dozen powergun bolts hammering into her hull as she roared overhead. Fortunately, they weren’t ship-killers, like the guns the starships themselves mounted, but the ship shuddered under the impacts, and noticeably slowed and began to drop.
All five ships replied with a withering storm of powergun fire, every shipboard battery opening fire so that it looked almost like sheet lightning descending to the ground. The emplacement that had scored a hit on the Challenger vanished in a superheated cloud of atomized metal and rock.
Then the ships had passed over the enemy lines, and were descending on the fortress itself. They kept up the fire, adding to the defenders’ rocket artillery and railguns.
The starships had all been slightly tilted toward the mountain, utilizing their main drives for both lift and forward thrust. As they neared the massive, clamshell doors of the armored spaceport’s landing pads, they started to come fully vertical, their lateral velocity slowing to a near standstill, and began to slowly drop toward the enclosed pads. As they descended, the starships’ batteries ceased fire, though the roaring flames of rocket exhausts and the dully glowing streaks of railgun rounds were still sailing off into the gray of the storm, toward enemy emplacements now invisible to the naked eye.
Mor ceased to pay attention to the fire; they were only receiving sporadic laser, powergun, and missile fire from the enemy lines, and the missiles were being easily swatted out of the air by the Valdekan fortress’s and Caractacan starships’ point defense lasers. Mor had to concentrate on flying the ship; now that he had a better view, the holo tank was showing him that the pad below him was sunken a good three hundred meters below the surface, and the silo above it was not exactly spacious. If he had been flying on visuals alone, he would never have dared it; the pad was completely obscured by clouds of vapor from the silo’s cooling systems. He was, after all, about to land on the sun-hot drive plume.
He was momentarily thankful that he was not trying to land the damaged Challenger or even the Vindicator in such a small bay.
A tap of a finger fired thrusters for a split second, nudging the big ship to one side, bringing the dotted line-of-thrust in the holo tank more in line with the centerline of the silo. This was now entirely an instrument approach; the storm, the billowing clouds of condensation from the pad’s cooling system, and the fact that everything was happening beneath him would have rendered an approach by eye impossible.
Slowly, her drive thrumming through every beam and plate of her structure, the Dauntless descended into the dimness of the landing silo. The roar of the drive began to reverberate in the enclosed space, and shook the ship’s hull even more, turning into an all-consuming blast of noise that only became tolerable when the faint jar of contact and the indicator in the holo tank demonstrated that the starship had come to rest on her landing jacks.
He was suddenly aware that a voice was talking over the comms. The thunder of the drive had been simply too overwhelming to hear anything over it. “All Caractacan starships,” the voice was saying, in accented Trade Cant, “be advised that we will be closing the overhead bay doors. This is for your protection. We are being bombarded regularly by Unity ships in space, and receiving some effective rocket artillery fire from their positions beyond the defenses. Do not attempt to launch without coordinating with Planetary Defense Central.”
Mor did not acknowledge the transmission right away. He was busy; there was a great deal still to do to shut the Dauntless’ drives down and make it safe for anyone to step outside her hull.
***
Scalas did not enjoy space combat. He could not say he especially enjoyed spaceflight at all. When he was on the ground, leading his Century, he was somewhat in control of his own fate. Strapped into an acceleration couch amidships aboard the Dauntless, feeling every thruster burn and maneuver, unable to lift a finger to aid or hinder anyone, was not to his liking.
He knew he was not alone in the sentiment. Most of the Caractacan ground fighters felt the same. The fact that all of them had received cross-training in space and atmospheric flight only made matters worse for some. Scalas was honestly unsure if that applied to him or not. All he could say for certain was that he could not wait to get out of the couch and on the ground, his feet under him and his powergun in his hands.
Once the light above his couch turned green, he slapped the release on his safety harness and got up. His joints creaked slightly as he stood. The life of a Caractacan Brother was not an easy one, and the maneuvering to enter the atmosphere had not been gentle. But he rolled his shoulders, drew his powergun from its rack next to his couch, and, protesting joints and muscles notwithstanding, strode toward the exit hatch.
More of the Brothers were ascending from the lower troop decks. Being on the ground meant only one exit hatch would be usable, which meant that only one squad could debark at a time. Scalas suspected that there would be a great deal of coordination that would still have to be made with the Valdekans before the Brothers descended on the battlefield.
He was not ignorant of what had taken place, or what they had flown over. He had had a replica feed of Mor’s holo tank display piped to him as the space battle and the descent had unfolded. He knew what they were facing out there on the defensive lines, and knew that even five hundred Caractacans would be hard-pressed to put a dent in that.
“Squad Sergeants!” he barked, his voice amplified by his exterior speakers. “Squads Two through Five muster on the troop decks and stand by. Squad One will debark with me, until we can determine where we are going, and make liaison with our hosts.”
He got his acknowledgements as he came to the debarkation hatch, and touched the opening control with one gauntleted hand. The Caractacans had all been in full combat armor during the entire battle and approach to the planet; no further preparation needed to be made.
True to their training, the Caractacans had landed ready to fight.
The hatch irised open, revealing a gangway reaching through still-swirling clouds of coolant mist to come within a few centimeters of the Dauntless’ hull. There was no one on the gangway, and it vanished into the murk beyond.
Scalas squinted behind his vision slit. He did not expect that the Valdekans would attempt to betray them and set an ambush, but nothing in Caractacan training taught that the Brothers should ever allow themselves to get complacent, even among
friends.
There were no friends, really. There were Brothers, enemies, and those the Brothers were sworn to protect. That was all.
And enemies often were not above using those under Caractacan protection to try to get at them.
He allowed none of these thoughts to show in his body language or his actions as he strode out onto the gangway. His facial expression hidden behind the jutting prow of his helmet’s visor, his powergun held easily in his hands, the barrel slanted down and to one side, but ready to be snapped to the butt-stop on his shoulder pauldron in a split second. His eyes searched the fog, his every muscle just tensed enough to throw him into a sprint as soon as a shot came out of that mist.
Above, he was dimly aware of the thunder of the continuing exchanges of artillery fire, along with the even deeper crash of orbital bombardment. The ships that had come after them from the L2 point were taking the opportunity to fire the salvo that their predecessors had not been able to. Even so, the noise was muted, as the great clamshell doors over the landing pit closed.
The portal at the far end of the gangway loomed out of the haze, lit by yellowish glow rods. A trio of figures were standing there, stiffly at attention and well back from the coolant gases—which a glance at the display in his helmet showed him was still hotter than any human being outside a suit could breathe in and live. The center one had a sidearm at his hip, the two on either side holding coil guns at port arms, the power cables arching over their shoulders to their power packs with parade-ground precision.
Scalas was well aware of the figure he cut as he came out of the billowing coolant fog. His armor would have taken on a shifting shade of dark gray to black, his vision slit a dark line of faceless watchfulness. Ammunition packs bulked around his belt-line, and his Centurion’s bars were a faded, slightly lighter shade of the same gray on his pauldrons. His powergun was shorter and stubbier than the long-barreled coil guns the honor guard carried, but powerguns were capable of much more than the gauss weapons.
