The Fall of Valdek

by P. L. Nealen

  Scalas watched the holo display in the troop compartment, thinking that he had spent entirely too much time lately in the back of a combat sled. The cramped quarters aside, he wanted to be able to stick his head out and see, to be able to run and fight and maneuver, instead of feeling like cargo in a truck.

  The holo showed the glowing threat indicators of a pair of Unity fighters flying overhead, but he couldn’t hear the distant scream of their engines over the pitched howl of the sled’s fans. He just watched, his eyes riveted to the blood-red darts on the holo display.

  The two transatmospheric fighters were skirting the higher slopes of the mountain, circling off to the northwest. They seemed to be flying a search pattern, from what Scalas could see. He wanted to point them out, but knew that it would be superfluous; everyone else in the command elements was watching the same holo display, seeing the same craft, and well aware of the threat they represented.

  A remote sensor drone, launched from one of the starships, was providing the bulk of the sensor data that was keeping the holo updated. It was a tiny craft, hopefully too small to be noticed by the fighters, but the ships on the ground would be far too large to go unremarked, either by the ships in orbit, or the fighters circling above.

  “We have just been painted by a targeting scan,” Captain Trakse announced over the comm. “The orbitals are still clear at the moment; it appears they have not deployed their ships to cover the entirety of the planet yet. But the drone is picking up a major launch from the direction of the command ship. It appears that at least two entire wings of transatmospheric fighters are coming this way.” The holo zoomed out, to show a cloud of crimson advancing quickly from the east. “We are launching to provide direct support. I suggest that you gentlemen get to that mountain as quickly as possible.”

  “Is the Boanerges ready to launch?” Kranjick asked.

  “We have gotten her weapons back online,” Trakse replied. “She is not spaceworthy, though; the damage taken in that last attack was too extensive. We would not be able to get out-system without major groundside work. The plan at the moment is to provide top cover for the column en route to the target installation, then land, evacuate the ship, and rendezvous with you to lift with the dreadnaught.”

  “Understood,” Kranjick said. “Godspeed.”

  “And to you as well, Brother Legate,” Captain Trakse said. “Be advised, it appears that one of the enemy ground formations has penetrated nearly ten kilometers into the forest, and appears to be about five kilometers from your planned line of march at this moment. They are moving slowly, but they are making headway.”

  Scalas peered at the holo display. Sure enough, there was a blob of red on the ground, pushing into the woods and the rougher terrain of the mountains. The Unity vehicles were definitely having a harder time of it; they didn’t have the maneuverability of Rehenek’s mountain terrain vehicles, or the sheer power of the Caractacan blowers. But they had the advantage of numbers, as well as that same unsettling, single-minded persistence that the clones had displayed from the moment the Caractacans had first engaged them.

  He was fairly sure the display didn’t show infantry patrols, either. The Unity forces could be a lot higher than they appeared, if they’d pushed their foot-mobile forces out ahead of the vehicles. They would be a lot harder for the sensor drone to spot, being smaller targets even in their swarming mobs, and better concealed by the trees and the terrain.

  Once again, he wished that he was out on the ground, on his feet. The requirements of speed made it impractical; they could cover a lot more distance a lot more quickly in the vehicles. But he still didn’t have to like it.

  ***

  The Dauntless leapt for the sky, keeping close beside the wounded Boanerges. Mor had shifted the holo display so that the wider situational view was now in its own window, off to the side. He was facing a closer-in, nose-cone view from the Dauntless herself. If anything, he needed to be even more one with his ship for the maneuvers ahead.

  The four ships rose on tails of fire made even more brilliant by the darkness of early night. They spread out as they climbed, turning toward the oncoming fighters and roaring at them at blistering velocity, passing the speed of sound in seconds. The hammering shockwaves of their passage blasted the mountainside below, making the trees bend and sway violently, some even being nearly flattened to the ground.

  Powergun fire turned the sky into a curtain of blue and green tinged light. The oncoming fighters opened fire on the starships as soon as they rose above the ridgelines, and the starships answered. Thunder rolled in a continuous, crashing roar as destruction flickered back and forth between the opposing formations.

  Entire flights of fighters were blasted to glowing wreckage by single 20cm powergun bolts. Answering 3cm bolts seemed like ineffectual pinpricks by comparison, but enough hits could even bring down one of the silvery behemoths streaking across the sky.

  The Boanerges had pulled ahead of the other three ships, and was the focus of more of the enemy fire. Bolts peppered her hull where her ECM systems had not spoofed the enemy targeting scanners. What was invisible to the naked eye was the intense hash of electromagnetic noise that filled the atmosphere around the ships and the fighters alike. When the weapons employed were as deadly as powerguns, HELs, and the like, the best defense was not to get hit. And when the weapons fire moved at the better part of the speed of light, the best way to avoid being hit was to make the enemy shoot at ghosts and shadows.

  While the two formations started several hundred kilometers apart, they closed within minutes, the starships plunging through the center of the fighter formations in a brief few seconds. Nearly a dozen more fighters exploded in that brief few instants, and fire gouted from the flank of the Boanerges, as a burst of powergun fire found a hole in her already compromised defenses and punched deep into her hull.

  Then they were kilometers past each other, racing away at a combined velocity many times the speed of sound. Compared to space combat, the fighters and starships alike were moving cripplingly slowly, but that close to a planetary surface, at such close engagement ranges, it was still nearly too fast to think.

  Mor punched the thrusters and pulled on the main drives’ thrust vectoring, dragging the Dauntless’ nose around to circle back toward the fighters. More powergun and laser fire was starting to reach for the starships from below, as they came entirely too close to the grounded command ship. A few blue-white stabs of light flashed down from the Dauntless, as Fry, grunting under the gee forces of the turn, swiveled the starship’s powergun turrets to return fire. Mor was too tightly focused on flying the hurtling missile that was his ship to see if Fry had hit anything.

  The fighter formations had similarly split and banked hard to either flank, trying to come around fast to reengage the starships before the big, fast-moving craft could come around. It was, ultimately, futile, as the starships’ weapons were far more mobile than the fighters’; they weren’t fixed forward like the fighters’ wing-mounted powerguns.

  Mor found himself facing a formation of nearly an entire wing of fighters. The Vindicator was just off his starboard side, but under the circumstances, that seemed somewhat less than comforting. The enemy force was still less than half the number that had come after them initially, and he could just barely hear Fry muttering to himself as he assigned targets and firing arcs.

  Mor glanced at the wider display. They had to finish this quickly; the nearest formation of Unity starships in orbit would be over the horizon in a matter of minutes. He didn’t dare climb too high, lest the Dauntless be targeted by orbiting starships and fighters at the same time.

  He very nearly flinched at the sudden deep ka-chunks of missile launches. Fry’s call of, “Missiles away,” came rather too late to counteract the surprise.

  “Missiles?” Mor grunted. Those were anti-starship weapons, built with enough punch to knock a battlecruiser out of the sky from long range. They hadn’t been designed for anti-fighter fire.

&n
bsp; But Fry knew what he was about. The missile engines ignited with roars heard through the ship’s hull, barely a few meters away, and leapt away. Less than a second later, both of them detonated, very nearly right in the middle of the fighter formation.

  The double, sun-bright detonations would have blinded anyone looking at them. The nearest fighters simply disappeared in the bright flashes. The shockwaves, however, did the most damage.

  The twin explosions were so intense that they nearly created a vacuum at the point of detonation, forcing the atmosphere away in nearly solid spheres at substantial mach numbers. Where the twin shockwaves hit the Unity fighters, it sent them spinning out of control, where it did not crush them into scrap immediately. White-painted, wedge-shaped darts tumbled wildly, some already breaking up, others colliding with their wingmates in fiery conflagrations that still seemed dim compared to the incandescent fury of the missile warheads.

  The Dauntless hit the shockwave a split second after the explosions, unable to avoid the superheated blast wave. The massive starships were shaken and rattled like leaves in a stiff wind. Mor clenched his teeth as his fingers danced over the controls, fighting to keep from striking the wrong key or control as the ship was slapped and shaken. He thought he could actually feel the rise in temperature as they bored through the still-dispersing fireballs.

  The sky felt strangely calm once they were through. Mor took a deep breath, almost a gasp, as he released the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “A little more warning would be appreciated next time, Fry!” he called.

  “Sorry,” the weapons officer replied, sounding almost as breathless. “It was a stroke of genius, and there wasn’t time.”

  Mor was about to retort acidly, but held his peace as he began to bring the Dauntless around in a wide arc to come to the aid of the Boanerges and the Challenger. It might have been risky, and they might very well all have died in the resulting crash, but Fry had, in fact, cleared out their entire opposition with one shot. He’d have to remember that, if they ever found themselves in a similar situation again. “Well, make sure you log what you did, so next time we’ve got some advance warning,” he said.

  Then he had to concentrate on flying. The Boanerges was in trouble.

  ***

  The Boanerges had a tighter turning radius than the far bigger Challenger, and so had found herself facing the second wing of fighters nearly alone. It was more an illusion than anything else; the firing arcs and ranges of the starships’ weapons made dispersion at those altitudes and distances nearly irrelevant. But that didn’t negate the fact that the Boanerges, being closer, became the sole target for nearly a hundred Unity transatmospheric fighters.

  Even as the distance to the enemy closed and her onboard powergun turrets ravaged the formation ahead of her, each bolt blasting as many as three or four fighters out of the air, the fighters’ lighter weapons hammered at her hull, tearing glowing wounds in her plating for more bolts to penetrate more deeply, blasting into the inner hull and penetrating to more vital systems. One powergun turret took a hit, then was sheered away by a second. Even the starship’s ECM wasn’t enough against that volume of fire. With such a blizzard of plasma tearing through the sky, some of it couldn’t help but hit.

  The ammo feed for the destroyed powergun shut down automatically, preventing a catastrophic explosion. Chain reactions could happen, and had been known to tear ships into subatomic bits in the past. Even so, the shock nearly made the ship spin out of control; only Captain Trakse’s skill kept her on a steady course.

  Her remaining powergun was still spitting bolts, her point defense lasers scoring less spectacular kills, and the Challenger’s full batteries were tearing the fighter formation to shreds. But even as the Dauntless and Vindicator added their own fire, swatting the remaining fighters out of the air with brilliant explosions that momentarily lit the forest below through the growing pall of smoke from fires set by earlier crashes, the Boanerges was in serious trouble.

  Engine power was dropping in the Number Two drive. The hull was breached in too many places to count. Several of the main maneuvering thrusters were holed, fused chunks of scrap, where they hadn’t been blasted completely off the hull. Trakse was fighting just to maintain control, and had to lift the nose to try to bring the ship to a hover and stabilize her that way, even as the Challenger swept past, her supersonic shockwave threatening to throw the Boanerges against the mountainside.

  Struggling mightily against the ship’s degrading handling, Trakse slowly started to bring the Boanerges down.

  ***

  Mor watched the Boanerges’s descent helplessly, even as he brought the Dauntless’ nose up and throttled back, not quite hovering over the mountain, but slowing significantly from the headlong velocity of the fight. Fry was still engaged, blasting powergun bolts at the armored formation creeping its way up the mountainside toward the friendly column’s line of march. But he was going to have his line of fire cut off shortly, because the Boanerges was drifting directly toward that formation. Already, she was starting to take fire from tanks and assault guns, though the Unity ground vehicles didn’t seem to be armed with powerguns. Even so, the faint flickers of muzzle blasts and the snap and shudder of impacts against the starship’s hull were evident in the holo tank.

  Only in the last few moments did Mor realize what Trakse was up to. Dropships began to blast away from her ports. The bulk of the ship’s crew had to be aboard them.

  Part of the Boanerges’s landing gear had been hit, and was not lowering. There was no good way to land the ship. So Trakse was getting the last bit of fight out of her that he could.

  The Boanerges dipped lower, her drive flames flickering, and began to drift directly over the Unity formation. Mor couldn’t help but imagine that being under a starship’s main drives at that distance must be very close to what hell was like.

  At least for a moment.

  Vehicles burned and detonated under the assault of sun-hot plasma and hard radiation. Ground fire intensified, as the rest of the Unity forces realized what was happening and tried desperately to bring the starship down before it cooked them all.

  Explosions rippled along the starship’s hull, and she shuddered. Then a white-hot fireball gouted from her midsection and broke her spine. Trakse lost all control.

  The Boanerges twisted in midair, her drives stuttered, and then she was tipping over. No, not tipping. She was thrown violently by a thrust imbalance, and impacted with the force of a falling mountain in the center of the Unity formation.

  The resulting explosion lit the side of Gorakovati as bright as day. A sheet of white fire leapt skyward as the reactor safety dump went off. The shockwave blasted trees to splinters, even as it swept most of that Unity spearhead into oblivion.

  Swallowing the sudden hard lump in his throat, Mor steered the Dauntless toward the buried installation. There was nothing more they could do for the Boanerges or Captain Trakse. The dropships had punched out and flown toward the same destination.

  Even though it had been the plan all along, Mor found that he’d somehow hoped that they could have gotten the Boanerges off the planet. Maybe they could have gotten her repaired enough in the outer system to get away. That hope was now dashed. They had to get the Pride of Valdek into the sky, now. There were only three of the five Caractacan ships left.

  To make matters worse, a warning chime sounded. Mor had expected it; the first formation of Unity starships was due to crest the horizon at any moment. But when he looked up at the red indicators in the holo tank, his blood ran cold.

  The Unity cruisers were indeed over the horizon. Not by far, yet, and they would have considerable difficulty targeting at that angle and so close to the mountain.

  But the dreadnaught was also soaring over the peak of Gorakovati, following a very similar flight path to the one the Caractacan ships had taken to get there.

  ***

  The feed from the starships had continued, though somewhat sporadically, durin
g the aerial battle. So, the ground element saw the dreadnaught coming, as well. Scalas hoped that the Valdekans, already battered by defeat after defeat, didn’t simply break in panic at the sight, though he then remembered that the Valdekan vehicles weren’t getting the same information feeds that the Brotherhood blowers were.

  He saw Viloshen staring at the display, though, and read the man’s near-despair through his translucent visor. There was little doubt that that behemoth had destroyed the last standing planetary defense fortress in a matter of minutes. Three starships and a column of tanks, tracked fighting vehicles, and combat sleds would stand no chance at all.

  Scalas knew that he had to say something. The column hadn’t stopped while the fury of the battle had raged overhead; time was pressing and Kranjick was not one to dawdle. If anything, the death of the Boanerges had cleared the way; there did not appear to be any more Unity forces close enough on the ground to intercept them.

  “We can still make it,” was all he said. “We’re almost there, and it will take even that monstrosity time to blast through the thousands of tons of rock over the Pride of Valdek.”

  “What about our other ships?” Torgan asked. For the first time, there was a note of uncertainty, almost fear, in his voice.

  “If that ship’s as big as Rehenek’s holo made it out to be,” Scalas answered, “we can send the other ships ahead as soon as we’re inside. We’ll all fit aboard the Pride.”

  He didn’t know for sure if they believed him or not. He wasn’t sure if he believed it. All signs pointed to that Unity dreadnaught having accomplished in minutes what entire squadrons of starships and regiments of troops hadn’t managed. But he knew that while there was even the merest hope, Kranjick would not give up, and would not want his men to, either.

  By then, they were passing the smoking, flame-lit crater that was the Boanerges’s final resting place. It was still most of four kilometers down the slope, but the shock of the impact had flattened trees clear to their position. It was taking some extra maneuvering to get some of the tracked vehicles over or around the blow-downs, but they were still making headway, their passage lit by growing forest fires and the brilliant blue-white flames of the remaining starships’ drives.