The Fall of Valdek (The Unity Wars Book 1)

by P. L. Nealen

  As soon as they were down, the outboard hatches hinging open, Scalas hit his harness release and got up. Kranjick had sent the assembly signal as soon as the Boanerges had set down, but even so, Scalas had seen enough on the way down to know just how little time they had. “On me,” he barked, snatching his BR-18 out of its cradle and starting down the ramp.

  The landing zone was still oppressively hot, though his armor was still doing a respectable job of moderating its internal temperature. But the air rippled between still-roiling clouds of coolant vapor, and he could feel the heat of the fused soil beneath his boots. He ignored it, jogging toward the Boanerges, most of his Century already on his heels. The Valdekans were still holding back; their battle suits weren’t quite as high-quality as the Caractacan armor, and they would need a few more minutes before they dared brave the hostile environment that was a starship’s landing zone.

  Kranjick was standing at the ramp of his personal dropship, towering over every other Brother in sight. Through the clouds of fog, the howl of Costigan’s vehicles could be heard, as the remainder of Century XXXV made its way over from the grounded Challenger.

  “Board the sleds as they come,” Kranjick ordered, his voice booming out over the LZ. “Costigan’s tanks will lead out, with the sleds and the assault guns in the rear. We have a tentative contact point, where we should be able to get the Commander on comms.”

  “Do we have a general location?” Scalas asked over the comms as he approached.

  Kranjick’s visor turned, and he seemed to look straight at Scalas through the coolant murk. “A general one, yes,” he replied. “We were able to get some fragmentary comm contact with him while in flight, but only enough to give us a general direction and distance.” That was no surprise; there had been far too much energy flying around for comms to have gone unaffected. “It was enough to determine where to go so that we can try again.”

  The first of the sleds appeared through the mists, a flattened ovoid hovering on a roaring air cushion. Its turret was set far forward, with the troop compartment in the rear. The driver brought it to an easy halt, swinging the vehicle around on its fans to present the rear troop hatch to the armored figures of the infantry Brothers.

  Scalas looked back at Cobb and Kahane, who were closest, and pointed. The Squad Sergeants started getting their men on board.

  Kunn and Volscius directed their squads, both keeping their distance from Scalas. Kunn might have glanced over at him, but otherwise seemed to pay him no notice, wrapped up in the workings of his own squad. Volscius, however, did not even look at Scalas, or any of the other Squad Sergeants.

  What are you thinking of doing? Scalas watched Volscius for a long moment. He knew it was not a good sign that he didn’t trust his own Squad Sergeant, but there had been something off about his lone “pragmatist” ever since Dunstan’s desertion. He knew that Volscius had looked up to Dunstan, and agreed with him about the need to make the Code more “flexible.” He would have thought that the cost of Dunstan’s hubris might have had a sobering effect on his subordinate, but Volscius had withdrawn from the rest of the Century, except for the few in his squad whom he had groomed. His brief words with the others had been clipped, formal, and laden with a sort of resentment.

  He watched as the rest of the combat sleds, along with the handful of comparatively blocky Valdekan Infantry Fighting Vehicles, gathered around the battered Boanerges, and the men boarded. Kahane was standing on the ramp of the first sled, watching him, but he waved at the man to tell the driver to wait. He would be the last one to board, and the first one off in combat. He also had his eye on his Squad Sergeants.

  “Squad Sergeant Volscius,” he called.

  The other man paused at the ramp of his own sled, then stiffly turned and marched over to Scalas.

  “I am detaching Diego, Marsdan, and Farlander from your squad,” Scalas told him. “Tell them to report to Squad Sergeant Cobb.”

  Volscius did not move, but stood straight and stiff. “May I ask why you are taking from my squad?” he asked. He had tried to keep his voice stiffly formal, but there was a note of petulance in it that Scalas did not like.

  “That should be self-evident,” he said grimly. “Cobb took the heaviest losses on the wall. Your squad took the lightest. So, Cobb gets some of your men.” He stared at Volscius for a moment. “Why else would I pick yours?”

  “Because of my friendship with Centurion Dunstan,” Volscius said defiantly. “I know that all the rest of the Century considers him dishonored.”

  Scalas momentarily wished that his visor was transparent, so that Volscius could see the scowl of contempt that crossed his face as he glared at the other man. “And if the rest of us took honor as lightly as you and Dunstan, then you would have a reason to suspect that,” he said coldly. “Tell those three to report to Squad Sergeant Cobb and get to your vehicle.”

  If anything, Volscius seemed to have stiffened still further. “Yes, Centurion,” he said, sounding almost like he was about to choke on the words, before turning on his heel and stalking away.

  Yes, I definitely need to keep an eye on him. Kunn perhaps should not have been promoted simply because he lacked the charisma of a leader, but Volscius was dangerous.

  Something made him turn, and he could have sworn that Kranjick was watching him. But he might have only imagined it.

  He turned and jogged up the ramp, ducking his head and swinging onto a combat seat. “All in,” he called to the driver, and the troop door began to swing shut.

  After only a few minutes more, the vehicles were heading uphill, toward the crest of the gigantic ridge that was providing the landing zone some cover from the enemy command ship. The fans howled and roared, and the tanks began bulling their way through narrower areas in between the widely-spaced trees. A few blue-fronded trunks fell away with a crash, fifty to one hundred years of growth succumbing to a hundred tons of metal and composite driven by irresistible force.

  The clock was ticking, and every man in the convoy knew it.

  ***

  Scalas joined Kranjick and Costigan on the ridgeline. Their armor had turned to a vague grayish-blue, to blend with the rocks and the few stunted, wind-swept trees that clung to the top of the ridgeline. The three Centurions crouched beneath the limbs of a hoary old pseudo-conifer, that had been bent almost double by the wind over the years, its roots splitting rocks as it held on against the fury of the mountain’s storms.

  He lifted his magnifiers to his visor. The forest continued for some distance down the ridgeline, before reaching the cleared farmland and plains of the flatter lowlands. With enough magnification, he could even see the ominous, squat silhouette of the grounded Unity command ship outside of a small city in the distance. It appeared to be a larger version of the standard cruisers they had fought in space, if thicker in beam and, if he was looking at it right, five-sided instead of four.

  But the command ship did not command his attention for long. There was a lot of activity on the plain. Two large formations of armored vehicles were trundling through the fields, sending up great plumes of dust behind their tracks. And there were more transatmospheric fighters spooling up for launch, with another flight arriving from somewhere off to the south.

  “They sure don’t lack for numbers, do they?” Costigan muttered.

  “No, they do not,” Kranjick agreed. “One has to wonder where they are getting all the materiel? How long has this been in the offing, to grow this many clones and build this much war machinery?”

  “I guess we don’t know how long it takes to grow the clones, do we?” Scalas pointed out. “If they have discovered a way to accelerate growth…” It had been a theoretical advance that had been talked about for centuries, usually by those with more ambition and curiosity than ethics.

  “Does it matter?” Soon asked as he joined them. He’d heard part of the conversation as he’d climbed to their perch. The column of vehicles was still about two hundred meters below them, hidden from the enemy
by the bulk of the ridge, turrets turned skyward and searching for fighters. “They are here, in numbers that no one has ever seen before. I think we had better see the mission through and then worry about strategy and the implications of cloning tech.”

  “Soon is right,” Kranjick said. “Time enough for speculation and planning once we are off the planet and far away from this system.” He tapped his gauntlet, tying his armor’s comm unit in with his vehicle’s. “Commander Rehenek, this is Brother Legate Kranjick of the Caractacan Brotherhood,” he called. “We have been sent by your General-Regent to rendezvous with you.”

  There was a long pause. Faint static hissed over the comm channels. Given the amount of disruption, radiation, and stray energy in the atmosphere, it was actually somewhat surprising that it was that faint.

  “This is Commander Rehenek,” a faintly accented voice replied in Trade Cant. “Stand by for rendezvous coordinates.”

  Scalas bristled a little at the young man’s tone. They were there as allies, not subordinates. He forced himself to calm his thoughts. Humility was a virtue to a Caractacan Brother. As was patience.

  Rehenek rattled off a series of numbers. All the Centurions and the Brother Legate were quickly calculating the position he had given. They would have to go over the ridge and about halfway down the mountain, through the woods, to reach the rendezvous.

  And they were going to be moving very close to where one of the Unity armored columns appeared to be headed.

  There was nothing for it, though. Kranjick tapped several controls on his gauntlet, and a holographic representation of the ridgeline appeared in the Centurions’ visors. He traced a glowing line to show their planned route. “There appears to be a saddle here,” he said, indicating a notch in the ridge. What kind of geologic catastrophe had created the gap in the massive rivulet of lava was long lost to time. “We should be able to get through without skylining the vehicles on top of the ridgeline. From there, we can move to the rendezvous point.” Which, upon closer examination, was another hanging valley, not unlike where the starships had landed.

  Kranjick looked up over the ridge. There were small dots in the air, coming in fast. Another air attack. He slapped another key, and the holo vanished. “Get to your vehicles,” he ordered. “Time is flying.”

  The armored officers scrambled back down the slope and spread out to their designated sleds. As soon as Scalas was aboard his, the driver was already pulling the troop door shut and revving the fans, getting the vehicle ready to move. The sense of urgency was palpable.

  The first of the angular darts of the Unity fighters flitted overhead, followed a moment later by the rolling boom of its supersonic shockwave. Then the rest of the flight followed. Powergun turrets tracked them, but the gunners held their fire. The vehicles had much the same chameleonic coating as the infantry armor, and though it was scarred, there was still a chance that they might blend into the mountainside.

  Of course, the starships would still be targets, but even grounded, they could still put up a ferocious fight as long as their reactors were hot. And none of the captains would have shut down their reactors, not that deep in hostile territory.

  But any hope that the vehicle column had gone unnoticed was lost when one of the Valdekan IFVs opened fire.

  To the gunner’s credit, it was a good shot. A 3cm powergun bolt punched into the last fighter’s engine, and the ship exploded, burning wreckage plunging down toward the forest in a fiery arc. A moment later, with no other choice left, every vehicle in the column that had a line of sight on the aircraft opened fire in turn.

  A veritable blizzard of blue- and green-tinged lightning blazed up out of the woods. The pilots had started maneuvering as soon as the first ship had been destroyed, but they had been caught flat-footed. Six more ships were swatted out of the sky in a few seconds. One took a burst of bolts across its wing root and seemed to fold in half before spinning down toward the mountainside to impact with a thunderous explosion, the roiling fireball of its demise setting the nearby trees ablaze. Another took a hit in the nose and seemed to flip end-for-end before going into a flat spin and falling toward the ground. Yet another showed no smoke, no wound where it had been hit, but simply rolled over and began to fall. The pilot must have been killed.

  The others exploded as high-energy plasma packets struck their powerplants.

  They had not killed the entire formation, however, and soon the survivors were diving for the treetops and banking sharply to come around for an attack run.

  One stayed too high, and vanished in a white flash, struck by a starship’s 20cm powergun bolt. The rest stayed low, skimming the terrain, and rushed at the column, powergun fire spitting from their wing roots.

  The Valdekan IFV that had started the fight died spectacularly, its turret blown off and greenish fire blazing from its upper deck as its ammunition supplies detonated. A Caractacan tank avenged the Valdekan vehicle a moment later, a powergun bolt blowing the fighter’s angular cockpit canopy to molten shards and reducing the pilot to a headless chunk of charred meat. The fighter bored into the ridgeline above the column, impacting with enough force to shake the ground beneath the vehicles.

  The Valdekan vehicles did not have the same chameleonic camouflage that the Caractacan vehicles did, and they suffered more. By the time the fighters swept overhead and disappeared over the ridgeline, three of the five Valdekan armored vehicles were burning. One of the Caractacan assault guns had also been hit and was smoking, even as three of its six-man crew bailed out and ran to the nearest sled. The others did not emerge, presumably already dead.

  “Keep moving,” Kranjick’s dispassionate voice commanded over the comm. “If they come back, best not to provide them with sitting targets.” In response, Costigan’s tanks started driving ahead once more, heading for the saddle, ten kilometers up the ridge.

  Turrets continued to turn, powergun barrels elevated toward the partly-cloudy sky, scanners looking for signs of the enemy. But the fighters did not reappear. Scalas watched from the holo display inside his sled, and frowned behind his visor. So far, the enemy seemed to have been perfectly satisfied with sending swarms of their clones to die in droves to accomplish their objectives. This seemed like a change in tactics. Were they getting low on clones?

  Or had the commander simply decided that he needed more numbers, and didn’t want to waste the resources he had? Somehow, from what he had seen so far, he doubted that the decision not to press the attack had anything to do with preserving clone lives.

  The column forged ahead, climbing the mountain slope and driving through the dark, bluish trees, ramming massive trunks down where needed.

  “I’m hoping that those clone tanks can’t make this kind of headway,” Kahane commented, as the holo showed a trunk nearly a meter in diameter getting cracked in half. “Those tanks at the breach didn’t seem to have nearly the weight or power that ours do.”

  “Cheap vehicles, mass-produced for massed assaults,” Scalas agreed. “But they will find a way through, sooner or later. I expect that eventually they’ll just start using their main guns to knock the trees out of the way.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Kahane said. “I guess if they’ve got munitions to spare…”

  “We will deal with them when we come to them,” Scalas said. He looked across the troop compartment. “Torgan! Keep that HVM launcher close; I think we’ll end up needing it.”

  The younger Brother nodded, and clapped the tube with a gauntleted hand. “I never let it get far, Centurion,” he said. “Quirinus might steal it if I did.”

  “I don’t want to lug that heavy thing,” Quirinus protested. “I’ll let you carry it, then steal it when there is a really juicy target.”

  Torgan shook his head in mock sorrow. “Do you hear that, Centurion?” he said. “Stealing from another Brother!”

  Scalas just nodded. The banter was a good sign, but there was a brittleness to it, a forced tone underlying the jokes. The men were trying to keep
their spirits up with levity, though he could tell that none of them were really feeling it. The direness of their situation was weighing on all of them. The fact that Torgan’s and Quirinus’ byplay only drew a handful of forced chuckles said that much.

  Even so, he was not as worried as he might have been, had he still been a regular soldier. Caractacan Brothers were no regular soldiers. They were warriors of the highest degree, and no matter how dim their spirits might feel, they would fight the hordes of clones as fiercely and as staunchly as if they were fresh and rested, facing a handful of rag-tag pirates.

  Discipline, honor, and courage did not rely on feelings. And discipline, honor, and courage were what made a Caractacan Brother.

  The fans roaring, the column neared the saddle in the ridgeline. The rendezvous wasn’t far ahead.

  Chapter 18

  The sky stayed clear as the column started down the slope. Mostly clear; the distant specks of aircraft or transatmospheric fighters were circling over the distant command ship, dimly visible through gaps in the taller trees. But they were keeping their distance, at least for the moment.

  Scalas had a sudden, gut-wrenching thought, imagining the command ship opening fire on the column with its primary weapons. Certainly, they would be hard to detect at that distance, especially masked by trees and terrain from time to time, but all it would take would be a single missile to wipe the entire column off the face of the planet. Or a handful of 20cm powergun bolts. But the command ship stayed quiescent, and they were soon down among the fingers and draws along the side of the ridge.

  In another hour, as the sun began to dip toward the horizon, blazing briefly through gaps in the clouds, the column reached the hanging valley. Another ridge masked them from the command ship and all but the highest of the aircraft circling above it.

  As they came out of the trees, Costigan’s tanks spread out, their turrets swinging freely to cover every centimeter of the open ground. Bluish grass grew on the banks of a clear rivulet of a stream running down through the valley.