The Fall of Valdek (The Unity Wars Book 1)

by P. L. Nealen

  “Five Centuries, even of Caractacans, cannot turn back an army of that magnitude, General-Regent,” Kranjick rumbled.

  “I know,” replied Rehenek, as he switched off the holo and began to stiffly move toward the door again. “At first, I might have hoped that you could help defend us. That was before the Ithogen ships were smashed to floating debris, and every task force since has either fled before entering the system or engaged briefly and then fled when they saw the numbers they were up against. Before we lost hope.

  “I did not ask you down to the surface to help fight our last stand, Legate,” he said. “I asked you down here so that you could help me with one final task.”

  ***

  The Duchess was waiting, Horvaset standing at parade rest at her side, when they came back out into the command center. The holo tank was flashing alerts; there was another wave of ships passing overhead from the L3 point, and the alarm was going out throughout the fortress to brace for another bombardment. More symbols flashed as the ground-side defensive batteries began to fire.

  The stately, gray-haired woman turned as the group reentered the command center. Her face was serene, despite the chaos and destruction that was even then beginning to shudder through the fortress, dimly detectable as faint vibrations in the floor and walls.

  Scalas realized that between the solid encasement of Caractacan armor and the General-Regent’s exoskeleton, they must look like some nightmare assembly of mechanical men, some fever-dream of the Qinglong cultists.

  A new alarm wailed, and the Duchess looked back momentarily to see what it was. When she turned back to them, she said, “Particle Cannon 52B just suffered a meltdown.” She had been speaking to Rehenek, but in Trade Cant so that the Brothers could understand.

  Rehenek grimaced. “That makes three in the last week,” he said. “Casualties?”

  “Fifty percent,” was the calm reply.

  “It could be worse,” Rehenek said, as much to the Caractacans as to himself.

  “Did you tell them?” the Duchess asked quietly.

  “I told them the situation,” Rehenek replied. “They need to see the immediate dispositions before we ask anything else of them.”

  She nodded, and looked at Kranjick, who was standing over her husband, the scarred casque of his helmet under his arm. Kranjick’s bulk and heavy features made him seem an immobile titan in front of the smaller woman. But she betrayed no sign that she was intimidated. She was as collected as she had been when they had entered.

  “As I expect my husband explained to you, Legate,” she said, “Valdek is lost. This is one of two planetary defense fortresses still standing, and we estimate that the other cannot last longer than a few more hours. Soon, we will have no choice but to surrender, or Valdek will suffer the same fate as the rest of our outer system stations and colonies. The Unity will kill everyone, just to ensure that all resistance is crushed.”

  “We have been fighting these last few days only to buy time,” Rehenek said. “Now, our only hope for our people is to get some core of resistance off-world, some Valdekan exile that might, someday, come back to liberate us. That is why I asked you to come down and land.” He turned to Horvaset. “Captain, you will accompany them. We will need a core of spacers to build a new fleet.” Horvaset looked slightly pale, but she inclined her head in acknowledgement of her orders.

  “You wish us to take you offworld?” Kranjick asked. As always, his voice was flat and grim. If he harbored thoughts of reproach for the planet’s leadership fleeing and leaving their people behind, he did not allow them to show.

  “No,” Rehenek said. “I will stay to the end. I am General-Regent of Valdek. My place is with my people.”

  “And I will not leave him,” the Duchess said, as Kranjick turned his eyes on her.

  “Our son will be the General-Regent when I die,” Rehenek said. “He will be our government in exile, along with as many of his troops and their families that you can get off. He is the one I wish you to take away from here, out of the so-called ‘Galactic Unity’s’ clutches.”

  Kranjick only nodded, acknowledging the General-Regent’s wishes, as well as the courage and determination of his insistence on staying. “Is he prepared to depart?” he asked.

  Rehenek smiled grimly, and Scalas could see the combination of pain, weariness, and a deep pride in his face. “Hardly.” He pointed to the holo tank, indicating the outer defensive rings.

  “He is out there. With his men.”

  Even as he said it, blinking, blood-red indicators showed another wave of Unity forces moving forward from the wrecked outer defensive lines, apparently seeking to take advantage of the disruption from the orbital bombardment.

  Kranjick looked at his Centurions. “I think we had best get moving, gentlemen,” he said.

  Chapter 9

  The spaces between the defensive rings of the Valdekan planetary defense fortress had largely been designed to act as staging areas for react forces moving out to the outermost ring. With the notable exception of a M’tait raid nearly a century before, no force in recent history should have been able to get past that first line of defense. The surface-to-space batteries were thick enough that a direct assault from orbit or air should have been wiped out, and the fortifications and firepower available on the outer defenses should have been enough to stop most pirate forces cold.

  The designers had not anticipated the millions of clones and the seemingly endless waves of armored vehicles and firepower that were being thrown at the fortress. Even so, they had still been prudent, and designed a defense in depth, in case the unthinkable ever happened.

  The troops currently dug in along what had been Defensive Wall Three, but was now the front line, were extremely glad that the fortress had been built that way. They had little doubt that they would have all been slaughtered long ago, otherwise.

  Many of the men they had known, trained, and fought beside already had been.

  They had been hunkered down in the deepest parts of the defenses as the ships above and the batteries below had hammered at each other. The entire universe had seemed like it was being torn apart, as plasma packets and projectiles tore howling holes through the atmosphere, with thunderous reports that, even beneath ten meters of reinforced steelcrete, had been loud enough to deafen.

  Some of the fire from above had gotten through. One of the defensive positions, essentially a sub-fort, on Section Eighteen had taken a direct hit. Whether from a kinetic kill munition, a missile, or even a shipboard powergun made little difference. The position was a smoking mass of mildly radioactive wreckage above a glowing crater. And it had been one of the linchpins of the entire Section. With that fort knocked out, there was a gap in the defenses. A small one, but a gap nevertheless.

  The commanding officer of Section Eighteen had been killed the day before. There hadn’t even been enough left of him to bury. The next senior officer had deferred to the senior Warrant Officer; he might have been enlisted, but he had more combat experience, both on- and off-planet than most of the rest of the officers combined. He had been in the Tyrus Cluster.

  As soon as the raving, world-ending destruction of the bombardment ceased, he was moving up and down the line, grabbing soldiers and shoving them toward the still-hot remains of the sub-fort, even though the dust and debris was still coming down from the sky after the impact. He knew enough to know that the end of the bombardment did not mean they had much breathing room. In fact, it meant just the opposite. It meant the next wave was coming soon.

  After weeks of endless fighting, the men did not complain. They knew the next blow was coming with the same certainty that the Warrant Officer did. They hauled their weapons toward firing ports, manning heavy weapons and the controls for remote anti-armor turrets and missile launchers up on the top of the wall.

  ***

  Everyone on the wall was too deaf, and the hurricane winds scouring defenses and blasted landscape alike with ash and dust were too loud, for anyone to hear the rum
ble of vehicles advancing across the pulverized dead zone between Defensive Line Three and what had been Defensive Line Two. There was nearly four kilometers between the lines, but the wind-blown ash, dust, and smoke reduced visibility to less than half a kilometer. Sensors could see, but the naked eye saw only whipping curtains of black, gray, and brown past that narrow strip of visible ground at the base of the wall that had been scoured almost down to bedrock.

  But the sensors didn’t lie. Out there, in the wind-whipped murk, a line of two hundred tanks, three hundred assault vehicles, and three hundred scout tracks rumbled forward. All were based off similar designs; bulky, squared off wedges of armor on shrouded tracks, with pyramidal turrets sporting railguns of calibers ranging from 30mm on the scout tracks to 70mm on the tanks. The bore sizes might not have seemed all that impressive, until one started looking at the muzzle velocities out of those gauss weapons. The Unity’s vehicles might have been ugly, brutal, mass-produced things, that didn’t perform as well as the Valdekan’s lovingly designed and long-since-destroyed armor, but they had power to burn, and there were a lot of them.

  Quantity has a quality all its own.

  The first railgun rounds began to impact the wall near the firing ports, blasting huge chunks out of the steelcrete where they hit, leaving pits glowing with heat from the sheer kinetic energy of the projectiles. Missiles streaked out of box launchers on top of the wall, only to disappear into the murk just before more hypervelocity projectiles obliterated the box launchers, blasting them to fragments that still retained enough velocity to kill a man dead a kilometer back from the line.

  Most of the missiles hit. Some scored kills. Others were shrugged off. Too few of the incoming armored vehicles were stopped, their burning hulks invisible in the smoke and dust.

  The rest continued to advance.

  The Warrant Officer was fighting to keep from despairing. His men had to see him leading, see his faith that they would hold. They had to see his unerring confidence that the Unity would not get through this time.

  But his hopes were waning as more of his heavy weapons went silent. Especially as the scanners, displaying their take on a green-tinted screen set into the wall of his tiny command post, showed him that the tanks were bearing down on the wreckage of that sub-fort. He could engage a handful of them with the firing positions and heavy weapons he had left. Shortly after he did, he would likely lose those positions and heavy weapons in a blizzard of hypersonic steel and tungsten slugs.

  And then it would all be over. The tanks had already shown that, as ungainly as they looked, they were extremely agile getting over debris and obstacles. They would roll over the wreckage of the sub-fort and be in the rear in a matter of minutes. Maybe an hour.

  Then Defensive Line Two would become the front line. Some of the forces manning Defensive Line Three might make it.

  Most wouldn’t. Not once the enemy was running rampant inside the line.

  He kept all these thoughts hidden behind a dull, flat face as he directed fire as best he could. As the tanks got nearer, he left the command post and ran to one of the forward positions.

  If he was going to die, he was going to die fighting.

  By then, the noise of the Unity vehicles’ treads was starting to become audible, even inside the wall. It was a dull rumble that was transferred through the soles of the feet, even over the crackle and boom of the exchanges of missile, powergun, railgun, and coilgun fire. It was why he almost missed the other sound.

  ***

  The dull, earthquake rumble turned heads on the inner walls, away from the increasingly desperate fighting on Defensive Line Three. Not everyone could tell what it was, at first. Only some of the older men knew the sound, and reminded their subordinates and juniors about what had arrived less than a day before.

  Riding columns of actinic fire, five Caractacan Brotherhood starships rose majestically out of their landing pits. No sooner had their nose cones risen above the landing pads’ clamshell doors than their targeting systems were already at work.

  The Dauntless was slightly ahead of the other four ships. Her powerguns were the first unmasked, and her targeting scanners cut through the murk and the storm kicked up by the bombardment to start picking out targets as she thundered toward the sky. Brilliant lines of blinding, blue-white discharge flickered from her emplacements, reaching out toward the savaged outer defenses, slapping the landscape below with vicious cracks of thunder as they passed, just below the speed of light.

  The targets weren’t the tanks and fighting vehicles moving toward that breach in Defensive Line Three. Not yet. The Dauntless wasn’t high enough to have a shot at them yet. But some of the artillery wasn’t deep enough in defilade to protect it from the raving bolts of sun-hot plasma the starship was spitting. Rocket artillery vehicles suddenly turned into pearlescent balls of fire as they were struck. A lander burst, showering fire and fragmentation across an area roughly half a kilometer across, as strobing lightning played across the line of Unity positions, near the edge of the plateau.

  The starships accelerated skyward, continuing to hammer every position that might be able to fire on them with devastating fusillades of powergun fire. Those Unity troops who survived only did so by hugging the earth and diving into trenches and fortifications. Only the vehicles that were well dug-in, or still in their excavated, fortified staging areas, survived that storm of sun-bright destruction.

  Five hundred meters up, the ships began to slow their climb. Their rate of fire did not decrease, only their ascent. They still rained destruction down on any Unity troops and vehicles that they could see.

  Return fire was beginning to reach for the towering ships on their tails of blue-white flame. The Boanerges took several powergun shots and a railgun hit, and staggered under the impacts. All five ships responded in kind, even as a dozen HV missiles were swatted out of the air by point defense lasers.

  The bay doors on the starships’ flanks began to open, as they hovered on their drive plumes. Blunt cones shot out like bullets, before flipping nearly end for end and igniting their own main drives as they plummeted toward the breach in Defensive Line Three.

  The starships began to descend back down toward the spaceport to avoid staying in the line of fire too long, even as the Brotherhood dropships roared toward where the defenders of Section Eighteen were making their final stand.

  ***

  Scalas had to admit that he really, really didn’t like these short-range drops.

  Kahane flat-out refused to call them “drops.” He referred to short-range, in-atmo drops as “shots.” And it was as good a description as any.

  By the time his inner ear had recovered from the abuse of the hard skew-flip and the equally brutal kick of the main engine firing, they were almost on the ground. He had about two seconds to regain his equilibrium before the dropship landed hard, compressing its landing jacks almost all the way to the pneumatics’ limit with the impact.

  Then the doors were falling open, and he was slapping his harness release, ripping his powergun out of its rack, and pounding down the ramp.

  Landing in the midst of the Unity attackers likely would have involved enough shock and awe that they would have done a great deal of damage anyway. It also would have been suicidal, especially against those kinds of numbers. They hadn’t landed in the middle of the yeheri on Iabreton II, and the yeheri hadn’t had tanks.

  So, the dropship pilots had landed them with precision right on the inside of Defensive Line Three, lined up on either side of the breach where the sub-fort had once sat.

  Scalas had been getting the real-time feed of the battlefield piped to him as he’d sat in his acceleration couch, so he knew well what they were getting into. That was why he slung his powergun as he started down the ramp, and grabbed an extra HV missile launcher. They had a lot of tank-busting to do.

  He was at a dead run by the time he reached the bottom of the ramp, lugging the bulky tube of the launcher with him. It was a four-shot job, with ea
ch missile individually encapsulated. He didn’t have the reloads; Torgan had grabbed those while he’d followed his Centurion down the ramp.

  The ground was a mess, a mix of mud, ash, and shattered rock. The blowing dust in the brutal winds kicked up by energy weapons and hypersonic projectiles was sticking to the mud left over from the driving rain of the storm that had passed after they’d landed, but the ground was soft underfoot, making it hard to run. But run he did, making for the edge of the crater, which was still making the air ripple with heat.

  His armor would protect him from the heat and the rads. It wouldn’t protect him from the direct fire of a tank that made it through that breach.

  A fusillade of heavy-caliber fire hit the wall in front of him, where the defenders were still putting up a hell of a fight. Debris shot skyward with the impacts, as the shockwaves rolled over the top of the broken wall, slapping him with wind. He didn’t miss a step, but kept clambering up the pile of detritus toward a firing point.

  Behind him, the thunder of the Challenger’s bigger, hemispherical dropships was dying away. Costigan’s Century had landed farther back, and for good reason.

  He dug in as the slope got steeper and the footing more treacherous. The thunder of the battle on the other side of the wall was getting more intense, and he could feel the rumble of one of the Unity armored vehicles approaching the breach. The defenders were crumbling. The enemy was getting through.

  He reached the top, dropping to a knee just behind the cover of a broken section of wall, where the curving portion of one flank of the sub-fort stubbornly still stood. Hefting the weighty HV missile launcher to his shoulder, he took a deep breath to steady himself, then took a step forward with his off foot and leaned out, searching for a target.

  Immediately, the blunt prow of a battered, gray-and-brown painted tank appeared, not even fifty meters away. It was a short shot, but it was far enough, barely, for the HV missile to arm itself before impact.

  And the sheer kinetic energy of the missile’s impact should do some damage, at least.