The Fall of Valdek (The Unity Wars Book 1)

by P. L. Nealen

  Rehenek, speaking rapidly into his comm in Eastern Satevic, led out, breaking into a run as he moved down the curving tunnel that stretched all the way around the massive silo that housed the Pride of Valdek. The Caractacans followed, keeping up easily despite the days of fighting behind them. Caractacan Brothers had to keep at their peak, and Rehenek, exhausted by weeks of combat, was not running at a pace that any Caractacan would call fast.

  About halfway around the circle, Rehenek came to a large, circular, armored door in the rock wall. He barked a hoarse query into the comm, and then quickly put the entry code into the pad in the wall as Schukhin rattled it off. The door slid open, rolling back into a recess in the rock. Beyond, overhead lights flickered to life, revealing a short passageway leading to another door. The Valdekans took security for their weapons systems seriously.

  Rehenek sprinted to the next door and got it open. The room on the other side was small, with three consoles and a holo tank. The consoles lit as they entered, and Rehenek moved to the right-hand one.

  “What do you need me to do?” Scalas asked.

  Rehenek pointed to the center console. “Targeting controls,” he said shortly. “All I need you to do is aim.” He turned to his chosen control panel and resumed speaking to Schukhin, asking quick, pointed questions. Schukhin’s replies sounded more and more hesitant, and Rehenek was starting to get acerbic.

  Not sure what was happening, Scalas spared a glance at Viloshen, who had followed them in. Most of the rest of the squad was outside, holding security on the passages to either side, just in case.

  He stopped and studied Viloshen, then looked over at Rehenek. The old corporal had blanched, his face turning white and his eyes wide. “What?” he asked.

  “He is talking to Commander Schukhin about venting secondary reactor into particle beam cannon’s firing chamber,” Viloshen said quietly.

  Scalas turned to stare at Rehenek, who did not look up from the controls. “That thing shrugged off high energy lasers and particle beams,” he said, as he quickly tapped the controls. “I would like to see it shrug off an entire reactor’s worth of plasma, funneled into a coherent particle beam.”

  “Will the weapon even handle it?” Scalas asked, even as he sat at the targeting console and brought up the target acquisition program. There was no time to argue about it; whatever they were going to do, it needed to be done soon. Another faint shudder passed through the mass of the mountain, echoing the high-energy bombardment of anything that looked like it might be a structure.

  “I am overriding several safeties, and supercharging the coolant system,” Rehenek said, as his fingers danced over the controls. “At least, I hope that is what I am doing.” He barked another query at Schukhin, who replied with a faint quaver in his voice. “We will probably only get one shot; I want it to count.”

  “And emitter will probably explode on that one shot, anyway,” Viloshen muttered. He was leaning over Scalas’ shoulder at that point, helping him with the unfamiliar, Eastern Satevic-labeled controls.

  Together, the two of them got the targeting solution set in, the particle beam emitter pointed at the enormous hull of the dreadnaught, which was presently hovering overhead, its own beam weapons burning away the mass of rock and debris that Kranjick had collapsed across the entrance.

  A voice suddenly broke into their comms. The signal sending it had to be extremely powerful to penetrate into the mountain, not to mention break through the encryption.

  “I know you are still alive in there, Son of Rehenek,” Vakolo’s voice said coldly, echoing in every comm. “You have the chance to remedy your father’s mistake. Surrender, join Valdek to the Galactic Unity, and your people will be spared considerable…unpleasantness. This has already gone on far too long. I had meant for your world to stand next to Sparat, one of the jewels of the New Order. Instead, you and your hidebound, narrow-minded parents have forced me to hammer Valdek into submission, doing damage that will take years to repair. End it now. I do not wish to further make an example of your planet.”

  Rehenek did not reply, but continued to work feverishly at the console. “Are we targeted?” he asked.

  “Ready when you are,” Scalas replied. “Provided you are not about to turn us all into radioactive slag.”

  “I hope not,” Rehenek said. He stabbed a key.

  Far below, the Number Two reactor opened one of its emergency shunts. Sun-hot plasma raced through a magnetized tunnel, a tunnel that was supposed to vent directly into the sky above the mountain. But in this case, some creative re-routing directed the plasma toward the primary particle beam cannon’s firing chamber.

  The spherical firing chamber was designed to ionize the reaction mass for the shot, which would then be accelerated by powerful electromagnets through the main vertical shaft before being directed toward its target by the emitter rising out of its armored and camouflaged revetment on the peak, just below the hidden silo doors. Rehenek’s bypasses managed to hold the reactor plasma for a fraction of a second before the chamber’s mechanisms melted down.

  It was just enough time for the shot, however. A torrent of plasma was accelerated to nearly the speed of light and spewed out of the emitter in a brilliant, eye-searing beam of white-hot devastation.

  The beam struck the dreadnaught’s electromagnetic shielding, which coruscated wildly with curtains of multi-colored light before failing. A crater was bored into the thick ship’s plating, punching through and doing serious damage, killing hundreds of clones, before the pilot threw more power to the engines and partially cut in the Bergenholm, flinging the dreadnaught thousands of meters up, out of the line of fire.

  Scalas and Rehenek straightened from their consoles at the same time. There would be no follow-up shot. The particle beam cannon was utterly destroyed. The shaft was a hole, little more than a lava tube lined with radioactive slag. The emitter, as Viloshen had predicted, had exploded, leaving a glowing crater beneath a rising mushroom cloud on the mountaintop.

  “Come on,” Rehenek urged. “We have bought a little time; hopefully it is enough.”

  The Caractacans did not need urging. Together, the little knot of men ran back toward the gangway and the ship.

  The rock was vibrating under their feet, punctuated by more faint shudders as the distant enemy dreadnaught continued firing, though its targeting had to be a fuzz of radiation and thermal blooms at that point. It had been damaged, but the leviathan was far from dead.

  “The silo doors are opening,” Rehenek gasped as they ran through the entryway and down the short, enclosed gangway leading to the massive cylinder of the Pride. Commander Schukhin and the last remnants of his skeleton crew were a few bare paces ahead of them. Through the transparency, light began to filter down from above, wan and orange through the dust and debris in the sky above.

  They rushed aboard, and Rehenek was calling the command deck. “Captain Horvaset!”

  “Are you aboard, Commander?” she asked. “We are ready for launch.”

  “That was faster than you made it sound,” Rehenek said, as they pounded onto the cavernous hangar deck.

  “I did not say we are ready for a safe launch, Commander,” Horvaset said tartly. “I suggest you hurry, get aboard, and find an acceleration couch. Though you might not feel it anyway, as we are activating the Bergenholm in fifteen seconds, and launching a few seconds after that.”

  “Why do I suddenly get the feeling that you’re not talking about just reducing inertia to be able to accelerate more quickly out of the silo?” Scalas broke in. He was breathing hard; the entire squad was making for the center of the hangar, hoping to get to a compartment with acceleration couches. Even with the Bergenholm on, if it wasn’t turned to zero mass—which had its own problems in an atmosphere—enough gees could still crush a man.

  “Probably because I’m not, Centurion,” Horvaset said. “That dreadnaught is already closing again, and already firing on the silo doors. If we cross one of those beams, even inertialess, the en
ergy dump could still kill us. So, we’re going to outrun the beams.” She suddenly sounded distracted. “Hurry up and strap in, gentlemen,” she said. “We’re going to have to time this precisely.”

  Rehenek was muttering what could only be a chorus of vicious profanities under his breath as they raced into the elevator and started up. The lift seemed to be agonizingly slow, even though Scalas knew that it actually moved more quickly than the Dauntless’ elevators.

  The doors swept open, and they were running out, into the circular corridor two decks above the hangar. Rehenek pointed, and they dashed into an empty crew compartment. It actually appeared to be working quarters for the hangar deck crew, but there were enough couches for the understrength squad. The men ran for the acceleration couches, throwing themselves down, even as Horvaset announced, “Five seconds.”

  There wasn’t enough time to strap in. They could only throw themselves flat and hope for the best.

  The Pride of Valdek went tachyonic inside the mountain.

  ***

  What could only be described as a sudden flash blasted out of the top of the mountain. For a brief second, there was a tunnel of pure vacuum from the bottom of the silo to the top of the atmosphere. The superheated shockwave being blasted away from that tunnel by the ship’s passage formed a nearly solid wall of sun-hot air that scoured the eastern slope of Gorakovati down to bedrock. The wave slammed into the Unity dreadnaught, staggering even that behemoth for a moment. The pilot fought to keep the mountainous starship stable, and began to succeed.

  But the Pride of Valdek’s launch hadn’t just bored a hole in the atmosphere. The sudden, explosive departure of the starship blew the silo it had been housed in apart, cracking the mountain asunder and sending most of the peak flying, thousands of tons of molten, rocky shrapnel moving faster than the speed of sound.

  Three boulders nearly the size of starships themselves flew at the dreadnaught. For a moment, had anyone remained nearby to see, it might have looked like they could have knocked the gigantic ship out of the sky. But, even damaged as it was, the dreadnaught’s defenses were hard to get through. Particle beams, high energy lasers, and powerguns quickly cut the fragments of mountain down to much smaller rocks. They still rained against the hardened hull, punching through in a few places, and hammering through the wound left by that single, desperate particle beam shot, and doing even more damage. But while the ship staggered in the air, its drives laboring to keep it up, it was still intact.

  Smoking, the dreadnaught limped off to the west, over the volcano and away from the roaring hurricane of tortured air left by the Pride of Valdek’s escape.

  Chapter 22

  “Are we still alive?” Kahane croaked.

  “If you can ask that question, the answer is yes,” Scalas rasped. Even the absence of gravity didn’t alleviate the aches in his body. That launch had put every hard drop he’d ever done to shame. He was surprised that the passage through the atmosphere at superluminal speed hadn’t simply crushed the Pride. The triamic had built well. Even so, the shock and heat had been transferred through the hull, and it had felt like the starship had been shaking itself apart even as the temperature had spiked painfully.

  He looked around as he drifted up from the acceleration couch. The lights were still on, so there was still power. He checked his visor’s indicators; they still had air, though the temperature was still dangerously high. “All Centurions, report status,” he called over the Legio comm.

  One by one, the others reported in. Soon, Costigan, and Pa’u, who had taken over Century XXX after Kranjick’s and Kratzke’s deaths, reported their numbers. It was sobering; nearly a third of the five hundred men who had deployed to Valdek were gone.

  “Century XXXIV, forty-two, all okay,” Dunstan called.

  Scalas’ eyes narrowed. Did Dunstan really think that he could simply step back into control of his Century with Kranjick dead? Did he have that much disrespect for the fallen Brother Legate’s orders? “Rokoff, report,” he snapped.

  There was an uneasy pause. Scalas felt the eyes of the rest of Kahane’s squad on him. “Acting Centurion Rokoff, report,” he repeated.

  “Century XXXIV, forty-two, all okay,” Rokoff reported nervously.

  “All Centurions to the command deck,” Scalas ordered. There was a great deal to discuss.

  Rehenek was already pulling himself toward the elevator, using the handholds set into deck, bulkheads, and overhead for that very purpose. Scalas was soon right behind him.

  The elevator was still working, though it seemed to make some strange noises as they swept toward the command deck. Scalas wondered what all had been shaken loose in that horrifying first few kilometers of the launch.

  The elevator reached the command deck, and Scalas and Rehenek swam out. Horvaset and most of the command crew, such as it was, were still strapped into their couches, though the Centurions were mostly vertical, boots oriented down toward the engines and the deck.

  Dunstan was hovering there, with Rokoff just behind him, the two men noticeably separate from the other three Centurions.

  “What are you doing here, Dunstan?” Scalas asked quietly in Latin. This was hardly the ideal place to deal with this particular issue; every Valdekan on the command deck was trying not to be obvious about watching and listening. But it could not be put aside that easily, either. Either honor demanded that Kranjick’s orders be followed, or it did not. And Scalas was fairly sure he knew the way Dunstan was thinking.

  “Kranjick is gone,” Dunstan said flatly. “And I am the one whom the Brothers of Century XXXIV know; I’m the one they will follow.”

  “Brother Legate Kranjick gave orders,” Scalas replied coldly. “And does the Code not mandate that we follow the orders of the superiors in the Brotherhood appointed over us?”

  “And while the Brother Legate was alive, his orders held force,” Dunstan replied, making the emphasis on Kranjick’s rank almost a sneer. “Now that we are no longer in a combat zone, I may appeal my unwise demotion to the Conclave on Caerfon.”

  “Tread very, very carefully with your next words, Dunstan,” Scalas warned him. His patience with the arrogant dandy was about at an end. “Appealing a demotion and ignoring it are two separate things. Or do you intend to challenge me as Acting Legate, now? Because you will lose.”

  Dunstan’s eyes flashed, but he paused, and glanced sideways at the other three Centurions who were glaring daggers at him. Costigan was actually cracking his knuckles under his gauntlets. Unsubtle, perhaps, with the Valdekans looking on, but it got the message across. Dunstan was alone.

  He shot Scalas a venomous glare. “This is not over, Centurion.”

  “Acting Legate,” Soon growled.

  Dunstan’s mouth worked as if he wanted to spit. But he finally bit out, “Acting Legate.”

  Scalas jerked his head toward the elevator. “Get below with the rest of your Century,” he said.

  Still managing to appear stiffly angry, Dunstan pushed off for the elevator. No one on the command deck spoke until the doors had closed behind him.

  “What was that?” Rehenek asked.

  “Internal affairs,” was all Scalas said in reply.

  Rehenek studied him for a moment, then seemed to shrug. He turned to Horvaset. “What is our status, Captain?”

  Horvaset unfastened the upper part of her harness and levered herself half upright. “We are currently about three light-hours outside the system,” she reported. “And we will be here for a while; we have some repairs to make.”

  “Did we change vector at all on the way out?” Soon asked. “Can the enemy follow us?”

  Horvaset shook her head, her dark hair swishing about eerily in the zero gravity. “There was neither the time nor the opportunity,” she said. “It’s a miracle that we made it this far without something going catastrophically wrong. I think we passed within a few thousand kilometers of the gas giant.”

  Which would not necessarily have been lethal, not when the ship�
��s mass was effectively negative. It was still something no spacer ever wanted to do.

  “They could follow our vector,” Horvaset continued, “but finding exactly where we went inert will be difficult. They will have to go inert every few seconds to try to find us, and even then they could overshoot by astronomical units. It will take time, and I already have damage control teams trying to fix whatever was damaged during that passage through the atmosphere.”

  “And if they go inert close enough to be within our light cone?” Scalas asked. Horvaset glanced at him, raising her eyebrows. She must not have imagined that a ground fighter would know about concepts like light cones, the space-time coordinates where the light from an event became visible to another observer. It was usually a spacer term.

  “Then we will be in trouble,” she admitted. “The weapons systems were not fully prepped before we launched, and there was some external damage. We can put up a fight, but depending on how many there are, we might not last long.”

  One of the Valdekan crew called something out, and Horvaset snapped her head around. Rehenek peered at the dim holo tank with more intensity.

  “What is it?” Scalas asked Viloshen, who seemed to have become resigned to his position as the Caractacan translator. Possibly because his unit was almost certainly dead to the last man, and he didn’t have another position in Rehenek’s tiny, ad hoc resistance force yet.

  “There is ship incoming,” Viloshen said. “Coming fast. Something about ‘blue’…I do not understand.”

  “It’s blue-shifted,” Soon said quietly. “Meaning whatever it is, it’s not tachyonic, but it’s incoming at a good fraction of the speed of light.”

  That prompted another glance from Horvaset; she seemed to be learning a lot about just how much Caractacan training taught. The armored Brothers weren’t simply uninspired ground fighters. “There is a starship incoming from the edge of the system,” she confirmed. “No identification yet.” She paused as another crewer called out a report. “We are receiving a tight-beam hail,” she said, some surprise in her voice. She must have expected them to come under fire from any ship in the vicinity.