by P. L. Nealen
The double file of similarly armored figures looming out of the pit behind him would be no less intimidating. Especially since the honor guard was only partially armored; they were dressed in mottled camouflage utilities, with open-faced helmets and chest armor only, lightweight exoskeletons strapped to their hips and legs.
Scalas knew the design; they were light, unpowered, and intended only to support the not inconsiderable weight of the coilgun power packs. They were also stiff and limiting; they did not have the full articulation that Brotherhood combat armor did.
The man with the sidearm saluted stiffly, bringing a hand to his temple, palm out. “I am Major Athanasi Stojanek,” the officer announced in halting Trade Cant, “Valdekan Ground Forces.”
“Centurion Erekan Scalas, Century XXXII of the Caractacan Brotherhood,” Scalas rumbled in reply.
The Major cut his salute. “We are glad to have you here, Centurion,” he said. “Come with me, please.” He turned on his heel and started down the vaulted corridor behind him. “The starport commander is meeting your Legate in the central staging area. I am instructed to bring you there.”
Scalas paused, and turned to Kahane. “Pick five men to come with me,” he said. “The rest stay here and secure the gangway until we know where the rest of the Century will be going.”
Kahane nodded, and turned to call out the Centurion’s escort. The five Brothers, one of them toting an MT-41 1.5cm support powergun, stepped forward and joined Scalas as he turned and followed the Valdekan honor guards.
Kahane was not going to get complacent, either. Sending one of the two Squad Support Gunners along with the Centurion was a message. And from the look on one of the honor guards’ faces, the message had been received. That heavy powergun could do some appalling damage.
The officer led them down the corridor to what was unmistakably a tram station of some kind. A car was already waiting, and in moments, the honor guard and the Caractacans were aboard and being whisked away, down the long length of the starport. More stations flashed by, one for every cluster of three or four landing pits.
The car hissed smoothly to a halt after only a few moments, and the officer stepped out, waiting at attention for the Caractacans. Scalas followed him out, looking around at the gigantic underground staging area before him.
The entire space was presently a mass of seething humanity, all of it in various levels of camouflage and combat armor. One entire quarter of the chamber appeared to have been turned into a field hospital, and wounded were being hauled from the defensive station. Screams of agony contended with the murmur of nervous soldiers wondering what was going to happen next, along with the unintelligible shouts of officers and NCOs directing their men.
Vaulted, armored windows let in a dim, gray light from above, momentarily brightened by the flash of an explosion or the ripping, glowing passage of a railgun round. The artillery battle was still going on. The gigantic chamber might have been a grand lobby for a civilian starport, if it hadn’t been on the flanks of a planetary defense fortress. The Valdekans seemed to have designed it as such, anyway. Carved pillars held up the domed roof, studded with glowing sconces elaborately sculpted and programmed to flicker as if they were ancient lanterns. The floor was marbled tile, as opposed to the utilitarian gray metal of the gangway, back in the landing pit. There were dark stains in many places on the tile, as well as deep scratches. The Valdekans had not been overly careful moving equipment while under siege, and these were definitely not the first wounded to have passed through.
There were train stations at each corner of the compass, and Scalas quickly figured out where each one led. One led to one side of the spaceport, the other to the opposite. A third led back to the central dome of the fortress, while another still led out, toward the outer defensive rings.
The liaison officer led the way through the crowd, shouting in the local dialect to clear the way. A glance was usually enough to get the Valdekan soldiers to step aside; the looming, armored forms of the Caractacans were as threatening as they were reassuring.
Brother Legate Kranjick was soon visible, his sheer size allowing him to stand out amid the sea of humanity. Often Legates had standards that could be lifted on telescoping mounts to serve the same purpose, but Kranjick had always foregone that particular bit of heraldry. He was not a man for display, even in this situation, where some display might have bolstered the locals’ morale.
Kranjick’s emotionless vision slit turned like a gun turret to lock onto Scalas as the six men from Century XXXII approached. “Centurions,” he called over the battle net, “with me. The General-Regent wishes to speak with us before we deploy. The rest can wait here. I will leave it to individual initiative if they wish to render aid to the wounded, but they will not stray far.”
As he got closer, Scalas saw that Soon was already standing next to Kranjick, along with a tall, pale Valdekan officer. Horvaset and her bridge officers had joined them as well, dressed in their suits. Costigan and Dunstan were making their way through the crowd, only a few more paces away, each with the same five-man honor guard.
The pale officer was standing stiffly at attention, his head only barely coming to Kranjick’s shoulder pauldron. He clicked his heels together as the Centurions gathered around. “The Duchess and the General-Regent are in the command center, gentlemen, madam,” he said. “If you will follow me?”
He turned and led the way toward the tram station that Scalas had pegged as the one leading back toward the central dome of the fortress. He kept his back ramrod-straight and did not spare a glance for the hordes of wounded men, many of them missing limbs, charred, nearly flayed alive by shrapnel. Scalas was not a squeamish man, but he was momentarily glad that his suit filtered out the odor of burnt flesh and blood.
He glanced at the crowded mass of wounded and harried, over-worked medics. Putting the field hospital there was not a good idea. How many of the men embarking for the defensive perimeter had to go past that screaming charnel house, on their way to fight and die? Morale would already be at an all-time low before they even got on the train.
Either the Valdekan commanders were not all that competent, or they were even more hard-pressed than the Caractacans knew.
Chapter 8
The command center was not a large room. It was roughly the size of the Dauntless’ command deck and appeared much the same, dominated by a central holo tank, with numerous smaller consoles arranged around it, all facing the tank. The air crackled with comm chatter in Eastern Satevic, a babble of what must have been status reports, requests for support, targeting instructions for the artillery and the planetary defense batteries, and coordinating instructions. The holo tank was a mass of symbols, though none were so different from those used by the Caractacans that Scalas could not decipher them.
He took a half step closer to the holo tank, peering at the picture of the battle within it, as the officer led Kranjick toward a pair of figures on the far side.
The situation was worse than he’d thought.
The picture that he had formed on the way down had been incomplete, as it had been focused on targeting and getting to the fortress without being shot down even though he hadn’t been in control of the descent or the defenses. Now, he could take in more of the information.
There were legions of enemy troops and armor surrounding the plateau. The army besieging this particular Valdekan planetary defense fortress had to number in the hundreds of thousands, and that was not taking into account the size of the fleets in the Lagrange points, or ground forces on other parts of the planet.
Who can afford to carry this kind of strength across interstellar space to make war? Even with an entire system’s resources available, the logistics alone were mind-boggling.
He took the situation in with a glance as he followed Kranjick, Horvaset and her officers, and the rest of the Legio’s Centurions toward the far side of the massive holo tank. He turned his attention toward the two figures the officer was presently saluting.<
br />
The first was a squat, thickset man with white hair, a stubby nose that looked like it had been broken many times without reparative surgery afterward, and a thick mustache. In his prime, he must have been a formidable man. Yet at that moment he was pale and wan, held upright by a medical exoskeleton, which in turn was pumping several tubes worth of fluids into him. He was dressed in a white coverall beneath the exoskeleton, but it was clear that he had been badly wounded. His body bulged strangely beneath the coverall, where bandages and healing packs had been placed.
The second figure was a woman, taller than the man, her graying hair pulled back behind her head in a tight bun, wearing a high-collared, vaguely military tunic over a white coverall. She moved to stand close behind the wounded man’s shoulder as the Caractacans approached.
Scalas saw her glance at the older man in the exoskeleton. There was concern in that look, quickly disguised as she adopted a cold, businesslike mien to greet the armored warriors who had advanced into the command center.
“You must be the Legate,” the old man said. His voice was scratchy and hoarse, but Scalas recognized it from the recording of Horvaset’s message. This was Rehenek, the General-Regent of Valdek. “I would welcome you, but it would seem hollow, given what is happening here. Not that we are ungrateful that you have come, but I fear that there is little you can do for us now.”
“What exactly is happening here, General-Regent?” Kranjick asked. He had removed his helmet, and Scalas reached up to do the same. One by one, the other Centurions followed suit. “Who is this ‘Galactic Unity?’ Where are they getting the resources for a campaign of this magnitude?”
Rehenek sighed, and motioned for them to follow him. “This is a tale better told away from all of this,” he said, waving to indicate the cacophony of activity in the command center. He led the way toward a narrow door in one wall, opposite the lift they had entered by.
They entered a small, private briefing theater. Rehenek walked—or steered his exoskeleton—stiffly toward a small console on the wall to one side of the door. “It will be easier to show you than tell you what we know, I think,” he said.
The lights dimmed. A holo sprang up from the floor, surrounding the small group of armored Brothers. The entire room was a holo tank, one that a viewer could stand inside of.
As the holo flickered to life, the room seemed to vanish.
***
They appeared to be standing in space, above a deep-space station. If the size of the star was any indication, they were nearly another five light-minutes out from Goran 54. The station was a bog-standard ring construct, with just enough radius to give about a half-gee spin gravity without too much Coriolis effect destroying the crew’s equilibrium.
There was nothing particularly interesting about the view. The station could have been a research station, or a listening post, or even a comms repeater. Some systems still used manned repeater stations, reasoning that failures could be fixed more quickly by a living crew.
But after only a few moments of the station rotating placidly in the dark of space, lit by the distant sun on one side, space was suddenly full of ships.
There had to be five hundred of them, at least. The same blunt, brutal, elongated pyramids that the Caractacan ships had fought above the planet. All of them painted white with a blue emblem of a barred spiral, surrounded by what might have been either wings or laurels, backed by crossed swords.
The ships had cut their Bergenholms within less than a light second from the station. A moment later, the leading starships opened fire with powerguns, not even bothering to deploy a weapons constellation. The blue-white plasma packets flickered between starships and station, and in moments the station itself was dead, blackened and holed in a hundred places, spewing atmosphere. The ships did not cease fire, however. They continued to bombard the ring station until it was blasted into fragments no larger than a personal air skiff.
The recording froze. “That was Research Station Five,” Rehenek said, “a private concern owned by one of the universities here on Valdek. The holo you just watched was recorded by its remote sensor satellites, which were transmitting constantly not only to the station itself, but to the university here on the planet.”
“If it was a research station,” Soon asked, “why destroy it?”
“As a message,” Rehenek said grimly. “Watch.”
The holo abruptly changed. None of the Caractacans so much as flinched as a gigantic face filled half the briefing room. The face was male, human, roughly middle aged. There was a tired sort of wisdom in the expression, though when Scalas looked at the man’s eyes, he was struck by a nearly inhuman coldness.
“By now, you will have detected the destruction of thirty of your outer-system space stations,” the man said. He was using a strange variation on Trade Cant; it was understandable, but only just. “While the loss of life is regrettable, it was necessary that you understand the gravity of your situation. The Galactic Unity is here to take possession of the Valdek system. While this is, ultimately, for the greater good, the object lesson in the short-term consequences of resistance should adequately communicate that you must cooperate. While I am certain that, given time, you will come to see the salutary effects of joining with the Unity, understand that any resistance must be crushed. And will be, without mercy. The establishment of the Unity is far too important for sentiment to get in the way. And the Unity is already powerful enough that one system alone cannot stop it.
“Nothing can stop it.”
The recording ended. The briefing room was still and silent for a long moment.
“You have seen only a small fraction of their forces,” Rehenek continued, his voice heavy in the stillness of the darkened briefing theater. “There were over three thousand ships in the first attack. Some have left. Some have come into the system since. They are not the most advanced designs; they are not even the best-built ships, so far as we can see. But their numbers are overwhelming. Our defense fleet was destroyed in a matter of hours. The Ithogen task force that came to our aid five days before you arrived was wiped out in less time than that.
“They have little tactical subtlety, either in space or on the ground. Massed movements and massed firepower is the key to their success. And they have more bodies and more firepower than we can withstand.”
“Why did that man look familiar?” Costigan asked thoughtfully.
“Probably because he was once a hero,” Rehenek said. Scalas glanced at him keenly, hearing the bitterness in the man’s voice. “Geretesk Vakolo and I fought the M’tait from one end of the Tyrus Cluster to the other. I counted him a friend. Once.”
But Costigan was nodding. “Yes, Vakolo,” he mused. “I remember now. I hadn’t realized he was still alive.”
“He was badly wounded on Nekophor,” Rehenek said. “But he was not killed. I was there when we retrieved him and got him off the planet. I had not seen or heard from him since. Until only these short few days ago.”
“Where is he from?” Kranjick asked.
“The Sparat system, only about five parsecs away,” Rehenek said.
Kranjick frowned. “I thought Sparat was relatively sparsely populated. How could they muster this kind of force to cross light years?”
Rehenek’s face got even more haunted, if that was possible. “This is how,” he said quietly, and pressed another control.
A holo image of a body appeared on the floor. It was in the same cheap space suit and armored vest that had been visible in the recording Horvaset had brought. A weapon lay next to it, a cheap, crude-looking cone-bore rifle. The helmet had been removed, revealing an olive-skinned, heavy-browed face, clean shaven. The head had been shaved.
The holo disappeared, and was replaced by another. The Caractacan reactions were all carefully controlled through discipline and practiced military bearing, but Scalas frowned slightly. The corpse was clearly in a different place, and the man had likely died from the massive trauma of having the lower half of his bod
y completely blown off, but that helmet had also been removed.
The face was identical to the one before it.
Rehenek continued to flick through more images. The faces changed, but only rarely. Scalas only counted four distinct sets of features amidst nearly two dozen bodies.
“We have not retrieved more than a tiny fraction of the remains on the battlefield, but the trend is clear,” Rehenek said. “These are not recruits. They are clones.”
“I still don’t see how it’s supportable,” Costigan said. “The resources to raise this many clones, the time…this had to have been started a generation ago.”
But Rehenek shook his head. “I was on Sparat several times during the Tyrus Cluster campaign,” he said. “I saw no installations that could be raising and training this many clones. Even the way we understand cloning, there simply were not enough people on Sparat to produce this many, even were they convinced to ignore the moral and ethical issues inherent in the practice.” He shook his head again. “No, something has changed. Vakolo has discovered something…some technology that allows for rapid gestation. There is no other explanation possible.”
“How is that possible?” Soon asked. “Genetic copies or not, they are still humans, are they not? They are not simply bots that one puts together on an assembly line.”
Rehenek looked like he might have shrugged, had he not been immobilized by his medical exoskeleton. “We do not know. All we know is what is before us; hordes of the same few men, over and over and over again, in such numbers that Vakolo’s threat is quite true. We cannot resist them, not for much longer.”
His words seemed to hang in the air, as the Caractacans considered the ramifications. They were on the surface of a doomed world.
