The Fall of Valdek

by P. L. Nealen

  They had a couple of HV missile launchers, and one of them suddenly blasted from the left-hand bunker, aimed at the shuttles. A chin-mounted point-defense laser crackled, and the missile detonated in midair, still short by nearly twenty meters. It rocked the shuttle with the force of the explosion, but didn’t seem to do it any harm. In response, four more HVMs slammed into the bunker, which suddenly went silent.

  In the meantime, the assault force had bounded forward another fifty meters.

  “Scalas, Kranjick,” he sent over the comm, hoping that it would reach through the installation’s internal relays, which they had synced with on the way down. “Status.”

  “We are aboard, but it looks like it will still take some time to get the ship ready to lift, sir,” Scalas replied.

  That decided that question. They had to hurt the Unity forces, drive them back, or simply collapsing the tunnel would hold them precisely as long as it would take them to blast through the rubble. Which would not be long.

  Kranjick swung out again, and dropped a charging Unity soldier with a headshot. The faceted helmet exploded into glowing shards, along with most of the skull beneath it, and the armored body fell. Another burst from the power-armored figure’s quad-barrel forced him back, a moment before another trio of HVMs from the shuttles brought more fragments of rock and steelcrete down around him.

  “If we get closer to them, the shuttles won’t be able to fire on us without killing them,” Kratzke pointed out between shots.

  “Presuming that they are more solicitous of their soldiers’ lives than they have shown themselves to be so far,” Kranjick agreed. He shot another charging shocktrooper, even as a long burst from an MT-41 tore through a pair of them. They were whittling down the attackers, but not quickly enough.

  The left-hand bunker had fallen silent; the HVMs must have killed or incapacitated everyone inside. The fire from the right-hand bunker was intensifying, while Kranjick and Kratzke found themselves pinned down in the entryway, hunkered behind the largest remaining sections of the gate.

  He hammered another trio of bolts at the power-armored figure, which had slowed. His aim was good, and he knew he was whittling away the center of that plastron. But knocking that monstrosity out wasn’t going to solve the problem of the shuttles and their missiles, never mind the flying ziggurat of the enemy dreadnaught, dipping lower in the sky on columns of fire.

  The man in the power armor suddenly broke into a lumbering run. His forward armor thinning under the Caractacans’ shots must have finally started to alarm him, and now he was trying to close the distance as quickly as possible, fire blazing from his quad-barrel as he came. The power armor looked heavy and unwieldy, but the length of its stride meant that he quickly outpaced the men in unaugmented combat armor, pounding toward the gaps in the gate.

  Kranjick held his ground as a flurry of powergun bolts tore the air apart around him, sending bolt after bolt of his own into that chest plastron. A ravening bolt pierced his knee, exploding the joint in a blast of melted armor and superheated tissues, and he fell. He kept firing. Another bolt blew his shoulder pauldron off, and mind-numbing pain shot through his side. He crumpled, momentarily, losing his grip on his powergun, as the massive armored figure charged closer.

  Gritting his teeth against the pain, Kranjick forced himself to grab his powergun again, bracing it with his almost useless right arm, and shoved himself up to lean against the cover of the shattered gate. Kratzke’s fire had fallen silent, but he did not have time to look. He would have seen the other Brother flat on his back, a smoking hole in his helmet. But he kept his focus on the charging behemoth of metal and composite, got his shaking sights back on the glowing wound in the front armor, and opened fire again.

  A bolt got through. The armored figure staggered. Its sheer momentum kept it from stopping where it was, and it fell forward, plowing into the ground with a catastrophic crash.

  Kranjick crawled out of the gap in the gate, dragging himself toward the fallen power armor. Another HVM struck the bunker off to the right, even as the defenders’ last fusillade of fire tore into the wedge of armored shock troops rushing forward. The bunker vanished in a brief flash and billow of dust. Fragments of rock and metal rained down on the ground before the gate.

  He reached the power armor. He had hoped to turn that quad-barrel against the shuttles. But the weapon was bent and useless, crushed by the impact of the suit when it fell. The mini-HVM launcher mounted to the other shoulder, however, looked like it might be operational.

  He’d wanted the powergun, especially after seeing the shuttles swat a full-sized HVM out of the air. But it was what he had, and he would fight until his last breath. “Kratzke,” he rasped over the comm, still unaware that the other man was dead. “Get clear.”

  He gave Kratzke a few moments that the man was well past being able to use, and then tapped the fateful control on his gauntlet.

  The demolition charge was a molecular explosive. The concussion knocked him unconscious, just for a moment. When he came to, he tasted blood. He couldn’t see anything, and for a moment, he thought he’d been blinded. He knew he wasn’t dead; he hurt too badly. Only after a moment did he realize that the mountainside was shrouded in dust.

  The gateway behind him was gone. A chunk of the mountain that must have weighed more than a starship had slumped and covered the gate and the remains of the bunkers. And his legs. He was buried in boulders the size of his head or larger up to his waist.

  It didn’t matter. He knew he was dying. He whispered a final prayer for forgiveness for all his sins, and for protection over those he had left behind, even as he pried the mini-HVM launcher free of its mount and found its trigger. He twisted it around, searching for the shuttles.

  They were drifting forward, their drives roaring with deep growls that vibrated in his chest. The battle-armored troops were advancing carefully, their weapons up, watchful for any further resistance.

  The launcher hadn’t been built to be mounted on the power armor. That was the only reason it still had an external trigger, with a mechanism built into the mount to activate it. It also had iron sights.

  He waited. He had little other choice; he couldn’t move. Slowly, the enemy troops advanced, apparently increasingly convinced that they had eliminated the defenses, but still assessing how to get through the landslide.

  That was close enough. He triggered all four of the mini-HV missiles at the nearest shuttle, aiming for the directional thruster in the thick, stubby wing.

  The shuttle veered suddenly, and its point-defense laser took out one of the little missiles. The second shuttle got another one. The other two slammed into the tilt-thruster and detonated.

  The drive detonated, sending the shuttle flipping over to fall spinning to a fiery death on the mountainside below, taking out the landing pads where the Caractacan dropships had been abandoned. The shockwave rocked the second shuttle, but it held its fire. The soldiers were too close.

  Dropping the launcher, Kranjick found his powergun. It seemed to still be in one piece, having been shielded from the blast by his body. He opened fire, using the hulk of the dead power armor as cover, and dropped six more of the Unity soldiers in as many shots. They returned fire, blasting superheated bits of armor into his visor as they advanced under fire.

  Kranjick felt his strength waning. He knew that he was bleeding to death. He shot another Unity soldier through the angular chest plate, and then his weapon was empty, the grip giving him its warning vibration through his gauntlet. He dropped the magazine and reached for another one, but his belt was buried in rubble.

  In the momentary pause as he dug for a reload, the masked Unity troops intensified their fire, even as five of them dashed around on the flank. A trio of powergun bolts transfixed Brother Legate Michael Kranjick, piercing his armor and blowing charred holes through his torso.

  He was no longer moving when the lead trooper stepped up and put a last bolt through his helmet.

  Chapter 21
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  The Pride of Valdek’s command deck was laid out strangely to the Caractacans’ eyes. Designed for the triamic, who had been taller and longer-limbed than most humans, the colors were also all slightly off; the triamic had seen deeper into the ultraviolet. The displays all seemed to have been reprogrammed to show all their data in Eastern Satevic, but that was just as much gibberish to the Caractacans as if it had been in one of the triamic languages.

  What had required no translation, however, was the scene being projected in the holo tank. The feeds were coming from defensive casements higher up the mountain, near the silo doors, so it was blurry, but it was enough to see most of Kranjick’s last stand. The image shook, and the view of the mountainside was obscured by dust and smoke when the demolition charge went off, but as the dust settled, they could see the shuttle get shot down and then the powergun fire start up again. Someone was still fighting, and somehow, Scalas knew it was Kranjick. The Brother Legate was less a man and more a force of nature. Or that was how most of his men viewed him.

  Then the last of the firing died away, and the enemy continued to converge on the wreckage of the gates. It was over.

  Scalas felt a hollow feeling in his guts. He wanted nothing else but to run back down there and fight. But he had his duty. And he had given Kranjick his word.

  It’s just you now. You’re on your own. He knew that it wasn’t just that Kranjick had left what was left of the Legio in his hands. Kranjick had been his mentor, his second father. The man who knew more than he ever would, the man he could always ask for advice. Now that support was gone. There were other experienced Brothers, and there were the Elders, but none of them would ever be—could ever be—what Kranjick had been.

  Beside him, Rehenek was watching the holo tank as well. “I had hoped that they would hold out longer,” he muttered.

  Scalas turned on him. He had said it in Trade Cant, which meant he had meant it for Caractacan ears. Deliberately, Scalas grabbed Rehenek by the armored collar of his battlesuit and dragged him around to face him.

  Rehenek’s helmet was off, but Scalas had left his on. The indicators in his visor helped him coordinate his men, especially now that he was Acting Legate. The armored prow of his visor nearly touched Rehenek’s nose.

  “Brother Legate Kranjick and thirty more Caractacan Brothers just died to buy you more time,” he growled. “You are the mission, but I am warning you; show some respect, or keep your teeth together.”

  For a moment, Rehenek’s face went white, and rage blazed in his eyes. But then he subsided, and nodded apologetically.

  “Forgive me, Centurion,” he said. “The strain led me to forget myself. The sacrifice of all the Caractacans who have died here will be enshrined in the memories of all Valdekans henceforth. I will be sure of it.”

  Scalas let go with a sharp nod. He did not know Rehenek except by his reputation among the Valdekan soldiers. He distrusted most such speeches; they usually came from politicians, most of whom were dishonest and insincere. Rehenek had a reputation as a warrior and a fierce fighter. Perhaps he was sincere.

  “We could have used more time, however,” Rehenek continued. “Captain Horvaset?”

  Horvaset was in her element, the alien controls notwithstanding. She did not take her eyes off the displays, but spoke over her shoulder. “The engines are about seventy-five percent of the way through their startup sequence,” she reported, in Trade Cant for the benefit of the Caractacans present on the command deck. “The reactor is at eighty percent, and full checks for launch will take about another hour.”

  “We don’t have another hour,” Rehenek said. “At most, we have thirty minutes before that monstrosity of a ship is overhead.”

  Horvaset spared a dark-eyed glance over her shoulder. A cold, brittle half-smile quirked the corner of her mouth. “Which is why we are taking as many shortcuts as we can, Commander,” she said. “But spaceflight is dangerous enough as it is; if we miss a step and a system doesn’t work as it’s supposed to, it could very well kill us all.”

  “Meanwhile, that dreadnaught will kill us all, if we are still stuck on the ground when it arrives,” Rehenek growled. “We may just have to take our chances, Captain.”

  “And if we ‘take our chances’ and turn into a monatomic smear on the mountainside, Commander,” Horvaset retorted, turning back to the displays, “then we still fail in our mission. Trust me; if it is at all possible to get us off the ground sooner, I’ll get us off the ground sooner.”

  Rehenek subsided, though his fists were clenched and his face was set. He stared at the holo tank, and Scalas found he could do little else, himself. He had the rudimentary spacer training that all Caractacans received during their novitiate, but he was a ground fighter, and the triamic designs were completely foreign to him.

  The ground force at the gateway appeared to have halted; Kranjick’s last stand had gutted them, and they were now faced with tons of rock between them and the main entrance to the installation. The crashed shuttle had choked the landing pads with wreckage; they had already been blocked by the Caractacan dropships, and were not accessible overland, but now they were completely destroyed. There was no way for the enemy to get any kind of sizeable force into the installation that way.

  But the main threat was still the enormous starship that kept descending at a slow, stately pace down the slopes of Gorakovati, on sun-hot drive plumes which the Spear-class ships could have vanished into.

  For all its slow descent, probably due more to the ship’s sheer mass while inert, the dreadnaught’s batteries had already opened fire. Lances of green-white powergun bolts hammered at every emplacement visible on the mountainside, and even more intense HEL beams turned solid rock into flowing lava.

  “Are there any defenses still operational on the mountain?” Scalas asked.

  “I doubt we have anything that could touch that,” Rehenek muttered, but he looked over at the small side screen where the comms were still open with Commander Schukhin.

  “Most of the anti-air batteries have been destroyed,” Schukhin replied. Viloshen was next to Scalas, murmuring the translation. “The heavier batteries are buried deeper, including the main particle beam cannon, but we do not have the personnel to man them. And I doubt also that any of them could harm the dreadnaught, given that it appears to be armored well enough to have shrugged off any of the fortress’s ground-to-space fire. The missiles will not be able to accelerate fast enough to avoid the kind of point defenses a ship that size can bring to bear, either.”

  “Where are the central fire controls?” Scalas asked.

  “On the fifteenth level,” Viloshen translated, after relaying the question to Schukhin. “But…”

  But Scalas had already started for the elevator. “We still might be able to keep it busy for enough time to get ready to launch,” he said. “Viloshen, you’re with me; I’ll need someone to translate the controls. First Squad, on me!”

  He strode into the Pride’s central elevator, a strange, half-sphere arrangement that seemed a bit wasteful of space, dogging his helmet back down as he went. When he turned around, as the doors shut, he saw that Rehenek, his own battlesuit helmet under his arm, had come with them.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “The same thing you are,” Rehenek snorted. “Buying time.”

  Scalas shook his head. “No, the mission is to get you off-planet and out-system. You’re the package. If you go down in the guts of this place, then we’ve failed.”

  But Rehenek’s face was hard, his lips compressed in a thin line, as he shook his head in response. “You are speaking to the General-Regent of Valdek,” he said, “aboard a Valdekan ship. It is not your decision to make, Acting Legate. Your Legate gave his life to buy us time, as did my father. Speaking of whom, my father was on the front lines with us until he was so badly wounded that he had to be put in a medical exoskeleton and confined to the last standing planetary defense fortress. Should I do less?”

  He grinned
like a death’s head as the elevator started down, lifting his helmet to don it. “Besides, if I am along, the Pride is less likely to lift without you. Shouldn’t that be a good thing?”

  “Not if we fail,” Scalas muttered.

  “Then we should not fail,” Rehenek said, settling his helmet in place. “We are alike, you and I,” he continued. “Your Legate sacrificed himself to buy us time. So did my father. We cannot help but follow in our mentors’ footsteps.”

  Scalas studied the shorter man as they descended. Rehenek seemed composed, relaxed. But there was a brittleness to his demeanor, that suggested that the recently-promoted General-Regent of a conquered world was barely keeping himself under control. Having only experienced a fraction of what the Valdekan Commander must have gone through in the last few weeks, Scalas hoped that he could maintain his control, at least until they got off-world.

  Or died.

  The elevator hissed to a halt, and Scalas looked up at the deck indicator, then over at Viloshen in frustration. The old corporal nodded; it was the right deck. Scalas strode out, his boots ringing on the steel decking, with Rehenek half a stride behind him. The airlocks and the massive docking bays were directly ahead, with the gantries leading into the silo beyond.

  It was a short, rapid walk. The deck vibrated under their boots, as the impacts of weapons fire from outside shuddered through the very bones of the mountain.

  Most of the survivors of Century XXXII’s First Squad were already waiting on the far side of the gantry, their armor scarred and blackened, weapons still held ready, though if they needed to use them, the odds were that all was lost anyway. More were coming out of the Pride behind Scalas and Rehenek.

  Scalas looked around. There were only about fourteen of the twenty men of First Squad left. Still better than some of his other squads, but compared to Cobb’s, that wasn’t saying much.

  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.