The Fall of Valdek

by P. L. Nealen

  ***

  Mor lay on his couch, feeling every shudder and vibration that ran through his ship from the surrounding silo, his fingers poised just off the controls in his armrest, his eyes fixed on the holo tank. He had zoomed the tank out, so that most of the planet was now framed in it, with the spaceport marked, as well as the enemy dreadnaught and its escorts. Most of the rest, while still important, was less vital than the relative positions of the Brotherhood ships and the Unity’s heavy hitter.

  The clamshell doors above the ship were still closed. It would take them a few moments to open—provided they didn’t take a hit like before—but the Port Authority had ruled that all silo doors were to remain shut during orbital bombardment. Mor chafed at the extra time it would take to launch, but had to admit that a direct hit while the doors were open probably would not end well.

  The dreadnaught was nearing the horizon. They would have to be careful not to lift too high too soon; the Caractacan starships could easily rise above the dreadnaught’s horizon and into the arc of its weapons.

  Mor had seen the data; he knew that the groundside weapons hadn’t even scratched that thing. He felt an uneasy twist in his guts at the thought. They would be helpless if they had to face it. He had to remind himself that their mission wasn’t to try to knock it out; their mission was to get to Commander Rehenek and get out.

  There was a warning chime, and a wider view window opened in the holo tank, showing more of local space around the planet. Swarms of blood-red symbols were moving, descending on the planet from the Lagrange points. There were hundreds of them. It looked like most of the Unity fleet was closing in on the planet, now that the dreadnaught had entered the fray.

  They had less time than they’d hoped.

  A countdown suddenly appeared in the top of the tank, starting at twenty seconds. The dreadnaught had just passed below the horizon, and the clamshell doors were already starting to open.

  “I don’t need to tell you that we need to fly fast and low, gentlemen,” Captain Trakse said over the comm. “I take it everyone has seen the incoming vampires?” “Vampires” was an old, old code phrase for hostile ships.

  There were acknowledgements from the Vindicator and the Challenger. Mor added his own. “From the Brother Legate,” Trakse added before signing off, “’Fly fast, fight hard, and God go with us.’”

  Then there was no more time. The doors were open, the countdown was nearly at an end. Mor tapped keys on his armrest, bringing the drives from standby to lit, feeling the rumble through his bones. For a moment, he took a deep breath, letting himself feel his ship, the massive structure of metal alloy and composite becoming an extension of his body. He keyed the intercom.

  “I suggest you keep your teeth together, Brothers,” he called. “This is going to get rough.”

  The countdown hit zero, and Mor throttled the engines up, the thrust exceeding the weight of the ship and starting it moving skyward. The throaty roar of the engines vibrated through every fiber of the ship’s structure, and blue-white flame splashed against the hardened steelcrete below them, vapor billowing as the automatic systems in the silo fought to keep the internal temperatures down. The Dauntless rose quickly out of a roiling cloud of steam and smoke, weirdly underlit by the sun-hot blast of her engines.

  As soon as they were clear of the silo, Mor rapidly throttled up, feeling a heavy, invisible hand squash him down in his acceleration couch as he hurtled the ship skyward at nearly six gees. There was doubtless going to be some damage to the spaceport below; that kind of high-energy lift was not usually encouraged around established installations, since they had a tendency to blast molten craters in the landscape. But time was pressing, and the fortress was probably doomed, anyway. At least he was sure that the Valdekans were out of the way; they’d been warned beforehand.

  He started the axial tilt early, while still barely a few hundred meters above the ground. They had to keep their trajectory relatively flat, so he was maneuvering tightly. Soon, the Dauntless, with the Challenger and the Boanerges on one side and the Vindicator on the other, was blasting across the slope of Gorakovati, almost like a bullet fired at the towering peak itself.

  As he fought to breathe and keep from being overwhelmed by the task of keeping his ship steady, Mor reflected that it was not an un-apt simile. The Dauntless had a pair of radiators that might be easily mistaken for fins, but they had limited-to-no aerodynamic utility. She was effectively a missile; Mor was flying by brute force of drives, thrusters, and gyros.

  It was going to make deceleration interesting.

  The sky behind the four ships was torn asunder as every remaining battery in the fortress opened fire on every Unity target they could find, throwing a storm of destruction skyward to cover for the four starships flying fast and low over the peak of the shield volcano.

  Mor was largely flying on instruments. The swirling storms, smoke, and dust had not dispersed from around the fortress for days. As they rose higher, ferocious winds buffeted the ship, threatening to throw her higher, ram her sideways into one of her sister ships, or suck her down to smash her wreckage against the mountainside, barely three kilometers below.

  Lightning flickered and flashed around the ship in the plain visual window that he had opened. It was, perhaps, less detailed and informative than the holographic representation that was supposed to be the flight display, but Mor preferred it, even if only to momentarily glance at. He liked to see what he was flying through.

  The Dauntless burst out of the clouds a third of the way up the volcano’s side, and she was briefly surrounded by a panorama of towering clouds, black, white and gray, the looming, shadowed bulk of Gorakovati, still wreathed with other storms even higher up, and the thumping, brilliant lines of weapons fire further whipping and scourging the clouds. And above, between the storms and the lines of beam weapons and streaks of superheated railgun rounds, was the dark blue of the sky, fading to indigo at its zenith.

  It was a breathtaking view, but one that Mor could not afford to linger on. He fought to keep the ship on course, as the tortured jet stream around the higher elevations of the volcanic peak threatened to snatch her from his control. Then they were plunging into another flat, wind-whipped storm that wreathed the upper elevations of the mountain, and the visual feed dropped to a few meters of hazy gray, lit only occasionally by a distant flicker of lightning.

  When they broke out again, they were nearly in the stratosphere, above the highest clouds, yet the mountaintop still loomed above them. Mor hadn’t quite realized the sheer size of the volcano until then. The four ships hurtled higher into the thinning air, finally curving over the caldera itself, the last clouds nearly a kilometer below.

  The caldera was a vast bowl of bare, naked rock, far too high for plant life or even snow. In fact, a glance below revealed that it was, in fact, a network of overlapping craters; the volcano’s eruptions had never come at exactly the same spot over the millions of years of its growth.

  Passing over the caldera was the high point of the starhips’ trajectories. It was also where they were most vulnerable.

  “We’re still in the clear,” Fry reported in a strained, grunting voice, though Mor hadn’t asked. It had been understood that if there had been any Unity ships within range and above the horizon at that point, they could be engaged. “Some of the closer ships coming from L2 have opened fire, but between the distance and our countermeasures, they’re still hitting wide.” Mor saw that fact vividly illustrated a moment later, as a kinetic kill munition struck the caldera below them with a flash. Shortly thereafter, the impact spot started to glow a dull orange; it seemed that the magma was a lot closer to the surface in the caldera than they’d thought.

  “We might be able to hit one with a powergun bolt,” Fry mused.

  “Negative,” Mor replied. “We can’t afford the time or the added attention. Let them think we’re transports trying to flee the inevitable fall of the fortress.”

  Their planned landing zo
ne was coming up fast, even as they plunged through another storm. This one, almost three hundred kilometers from the fortress, and therefore most of the energy being dumped into Valdek’s atmosphere, seemed almost gentle in comparison to what they’d gone through on the way up. It was still powerful, though, and still dangerous.

  Then it was time. “Stand by for maneuvering!” Mor grunted, a moment before he hauled back on the controls.

  The gee forces intensified as he hauled the Dauntless’ nose toward the sky, dragging at the Brothers’ bodies even as they were flattened deeper into the carefully padded couches. In seconds, the ship was effectively flying sideways, her nose up, her main drives pointed at the ground below, air resistance helping to slow her hypersonic forward rush. He kept tilting her back, until she was angled nearly thirty degrees from vertical in the direction she had come, her nose pointed back toward the towering peak of Gorakovati behind her, her engines roaring and blazing to help arrest her forward momentum even as she dropped toward the forests and meadows below.

  A powergun bolt thundered through the air, missing the ship by meters. “Well, we’ve spotted that grounded command ship,” Fry reported. “And it’s spotted us. It’s still over two hundred kilometers east, but we’re taking fire. And there might be transatmospheric fighters scrambling shortly.”

  “Target and engage as needed,” Mor ordered, fighting to keep the ship steady. A wrong move at that altitude, and they were all dead.

  “The Boanerges has been hit!” Fry reported, even as the sound of powergun shots thrummed through the ship, brilliant streaks of plasma flashing away toward the distant enemy. Mor checked the display. The Boanerges did appear to have taken a direct hit from either a powergun bolt or a high energy laser. There was a wound in her hull, and she was struggling to keep upright on her drives.

  The Challenger had opened fire. The big, Sarissa-class ship wasn’t just the cav carrier. She was considerably larger than the more common Caractacan Spear-class, and had power and batteries to match.

  A furious storm of blue-white lightning flickered from her guns, replying to the intensifying powergun fire coming from the east, even as the Vindicator and the Dauntless opened fire on the incoming fighters.

  Fighters usually had little use in space, which was why the Brotherhood rarely used them, preferring their starships for close support when possible. But in certain circumstances, they still had a niche to fill, and the Unity had apparently come prepared.

  There were those who would scoff at the idea of fighters, with considerably lesser powerplants and weapons, being able to hurt a combat starship, a behemoth capable of reaching out and striking another ship with annihilating force from across a planetary orbit, but Mor was not one of them. He knew that sheer numbers could count for a lot, and while an individual fighter might not have the punch to severely damage or destroy one of the Caractacan ships, the entire squadron that was flying toward them at the moment could.

  The fighters were compact, wedge-shaped darts with stubby, forward-swept wings. And they were coming fast, outrunning sluggish sound and already opening fire with green-tinged powergun bolts.

  The Dauntless’ point defense lasers lashed out, and the lead fighter exploded violently, scattering glowing wreckage across the blue-tinged forest below and starting several fires across nearly three kilometers. At the same time, a spray of 3cm powergun bolts hammered against the ship’s hull, and the damage control officer started calling out reports.

  “Hull breach in Section Four, losing power in ventral thruster hub Sixteen,” he reported. “Direct hit on Bay Three’s hatch.” He paused. “Hatch is damaged, but still operational.”

  In the time it had taken him to report, four more Unity fighters had been swatted out of the sky by the Dauntless alone. The Vindicator had taken more, and the Challenger was reaping a swath of destruction through any formation that dared get close to her bulk. The survivors flashed past in a roar of sound, a scattered burst of powergun bolts, and then were diving close to the deck, skimming the trees and racing away, already banking to come at the descending starships from a different angle.

  But by the time they were in position for another pass, the Boanerges was nearly to the ground, though she was still shaky, wavering slightly as her drives and thrusters pulsed unsteadily. Mor frowned briefly at the symbol for the other ship. She must have been hit harder than he’d thought. She hadn’t fired upon any of the fighters nor returned fire against the distant command ship.

  They were descending toward a valley on the shoulder of the mountain. The jagged ridge of ancient, tree-swathed lava that must have once been a rivulet from a particularly massive eruption had already masked the wounded Boanerges from the Unity command ship; in fact, it appeared that the Challenger was the only Caractacan ship still with line of sight on it, as none of the rest were taking fire from starship weapons any longer.

  They only had to worry about the fighters that were coming around at the end of the valley, where the land dropped off in a sheer cliff nearly half a kilometer high.

  The fighter pilots seemed to be as suicidally dedicated—or indoctrinated—as the ground troops that the infantry Centuries had engaged. They came in without hesitation, low and fast, their supersonic shockwaves battering the trees below them, spraying brilliant powergun fire at the silvery ships descending on columns of fire.

  Mor couldn’t see Fry from his couch, but he could imagine his tactical officer’s squinting frown. He could also imagine what was coming next, and he wasn’t wrong.

  The Dauntless opened fire on the fighters with her main powergun batteries.

  The blue-white lightning was powerful enough that even a near miss threw the lead fighter out of control, sending it spinning into the mountainside, where it exploded in a drawn out, rolling fireball. That same bolt impaled a second fighter, which was suddenly just gone, vanished in a brilliant, actinic flash. A second bolt took out three fighters at once; they had been holding close formation, and the explosion of the middle ship’s demise from a direct hit engulfed the other two.

  The last few kept coming, straight into a blinding wall of powergun fire from the Vindicator, Dauntless, and Challenger. There was very little in the way of debris that finally struck the ground.

  The Boanerges was down, nearly hidden in clouds of vapor as her onboard cooling systems tried to bring the ground and the surrounding atmosphere down to livable temperatures. The other three ships descended in a protective triangle around the damaged ship.

  The sheer weight of a starship would have seemed to make it unwise to land on anything but a prepared and reinforced platform, but it had been found, centuries before, that the blazing thermonuclear fury of the ship’s drive had a tendency to vitrify the soil beneath it, fusing any manner of planetary surface into rock solid enough to support the ship. It wasn’t perfect, however, and it required no small amount of skill to safely set a starship down on unprepared ground. Mor was eyeing the landing zone carefully, deftly drifting the Dauntless back and forth, trying to level out his chosen landing spot. He had never seen it happen, but he had heard about a ship that had landed on ground that was ever so slightly too steeply angled. A starship tipping over on the ground was rarely survivable.

  Finally satisfied that he had burned a mostly flat pad of fused mineral into the ground, Mor gingerly settled the Dauntless to the surface.

  Her massive landing jacks lowered, coolant vapor pouring from their ports and raising a billowing, blinding cloud. Then they touched, the massive hydraulics compressing under the weight, and they were down.

  “Touchdown,” he announced over the intercom. “I suggest you gentlemen get moving, while we do what we can to get the Boanerges back in action.”

  Chapter 17

  Deploying dropships while on the ground wasn’t something that was done regularly, but it was still doable, and one of many things the Brotherhood trained for. There were times, such as this one, where an in-air shot was less than ideal, and deemed to present too
high a risk that the landers would simply be shot out of the sky. So, the ships had been designed to be able to deploy the dropships while grounded.

  It took some finesse on the part of the dropship pilots. The landers had been rotated as soon as the starships touched down, so that they were no longer pointed out the hatches, but their noses were aimed up, toward the sky. The hatches opened, and armatures moved the landers outside the ships, atop hardened pads that could withstand the heat, radiation, and pressure of the dropships’ drives, at least for a few moments.

  Grounded on the uneven hillside, the launch had to be carefully timed to keep the starships balanced as the weight was redistributed and thrust briefly pressed on the armatures. The ship’s captains had their hands on thruster controls to compensate, but the dropship pilot who was off on his timing and made it so that the captain had to compensate would not live it down soon.

  Scalas just breathed and tried not to chew the inside of his lip as he lay strapped into his acceleration couch, watching the operation on his own holo feed. If anything, he thought, this was worse than a combat drop or short-range shot. At least then, it was all shock and fury, and you didn’t have time to think. This was delicate and risky, and there wasn’t a thing that he could do except lie there in his couch and think about all the ways it could go wrong.

  He took a deep breath as the pilot slowly and carefully throttled up, lifting the dropship delicately off its launch plate. You are a Caractacan Centurion. Have the mental discipline demanded of one.

  For a brief moment, they seemed to wobble in the air, then started to drift away from the Dauntless. There was a momentary slip, then they steadied, and were descending toward the ground at a sedate, stable pace. The pilot set the dropship down as lightly as he ever could. Scalas imagined that the pilot was as thankful to make a soft landing as he was, considering the bone-jarring shock that was usually a combat touchdown.