The Alliance Rises: A Military Sci-Fi Series (The Unity Wars Book 3)

by Peter Nealen

  “Space superiority is a misnomer,” Maruks replied. “Just the ground-based defenses that your intelligence knows about can still render the orbitals untenable. And I guarantee that there are more batteries down there that you do not know about. They have to be dealt with as well, or any ship in orbit will be a sitting duck.”

  “Our intelligence is better than you presume, Legate,” War Chief Oegef clacked. “The Exiles are vicious, but they do not have anything that can deny us the orbitals for long. We will reduce the geosynchronous stations and then proceed to clear the orbitals before landing troops.”

  “Your intelligence didn’t notice three Sparatan starships among the Exiles’ forces,” Maruks pointed out dryly. “What else did it miss, I wonder?”

  “There was no sign that such ships were based on Borogone,” Oegef said defensively.

  “Perhaps,” Maruks replied. “Or perhaps you see less from a distance than you think. Are you going to take my advice, or not?”

  There was a long pause. “We cannot risk leaving the stations intact,” Oegef said. “We respect your experience and training, but as long as the Exiles have defenses in space, we cannot proceed to the surface. Once we have control of the orbitals, we can bombard any site on the surface that we need to.”

  Scalas was shaking his head. The Dauntless was inertialess, so he wasn’t feeling the acceleration that would have rendered the gesture next to impossible.

  “They didn’t see how much damage one planetary fortress on Valdek could do, did they?” Mor asked him over their private circuit.

  “No, they didn’t,” Scalas replied. “Brother Legate, Scalas,” he called.

  “Go ahead, Centurion,” Maruks replied. His voice was tight and angry. He hadn’t been on Valdek, but he’d seen the records that the surviving ships had brought back, and this was hardly his first planetary assault. It clearly was Oegef’s.

  Briefly, fleetingly, Scalas thought that Kranjick would never have sounded that perturbed. His old mentor had always been phlegmatic to the point of sounding genuinely bored, even in the middle of a fight. But Maruks was a different man, and a different commander.

  “We could still land, once Station Three is out of commission,” he said. “If they have that much firepower in orbit, I can only imagine what they have arrayed around Ieg.”

  “Agreed, Centurion,” Maruks said. “But our allies seem to be committed to their plan, and we need to be ready to act to salvage the situation when it goes pear-shaped. Personally, as much as I think you are right, I don’t particularly want to be alone on the surface when the Regonese squadrons get gutted.”

  Scalas grimaced behind his visor, but had to agree. As Maruks had said, space superiority was often a misnomer, especially if there were any kind of substantial ground batteries in play. A ground-based HEL, railgun, or particle beam cannon could be hooked up to a far larger reactor and have a lot longer accelerator chain on a planetary surface than could ever be mounted on a starship. But that didn’t mean that ceding the sky to the enemy was a good idea, either. They could very well land to find themselves trapped.

  “Orders, Brother Legate?” Mor asked. They were rapidly approaching the point of no return. Borogone was halfway around the star from Regone at that time of year, and the combined force of Regonese and Caractacan starships were passing perihelion, Canimic 3452 blazing off to their flank. Borogone was ahead, less than five light-minutes away. And with every ship inertialess, they were going to be within engagement range in less than ten minutes.

  “Engage Stations Three and Four,” Maruks said heavily. “Hit and run; we are not getting sucked into a close fight within the orbitals until the heavy defenses are reduced. Stand by to move to assist the Regonese when they get into trouble.” It was noted that he said “when,” not “if.”

  “Confirmed,” Mor called. Hwung-Tsi, aboard the Challenger, replied in the same way, as did Karmenov, aboard the Vindicator. Scalas took a deep breath. Things were probably going to get a bit bumpy soon, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. He was little more than a passenger until the dropships hit the surface.

  It wasn’t a comfortable feeling, and as many times as he’d endured it over the last fifteen years, he didn’t think he’d ever get used to it.

  Spread out in a concave wall almost twenty light-seconds across, one hundred four starships stooped on Borogone.

  Just over one and a half light-seconds from Borogone, the strike force went inert. Combat from within a Bergenholm field was sharply limited; high-energy lasers were about the only weapons that could be used. Even particle beams ran into problems due to the often sharp changes in intrinsic velocity once the beam got outside the inertialess field. And missiles and X-ray laser pods were quickly left behind as soon as they exited the field.

  All one hundred four ships had previously adjusted their vectors before departing Regonese space, so they were now on their pre-planned attack vectors, rushing in on Borogone and its defensive constellation at twenty kilometers per second faster than Borogone’s escape velocity. Hatches began to open along the flanks of the massive ships, and missiles and egg-shaped X-ray laser pods began to drift outward, propelled by minute puffs of gas. Armatures began to fold outward, lifting heavy powergun turrets to their full firing arcs.

  The missiles only got a few meters away from their hulls before igniting their main drives and arrowing toward the planet at up to fifty Gs. The X-ray lasers kept moving; they needed to be well away from their ships before they immolated themselves in bursts of nuclear fire, the bulk of the energy of the fusion blasts funneled into a coherent beam of radiation.

  Almost five hundred missiles arrowed toward the armored space stations, quickly leaving the starships behind. In short order, they had accelerated to the point that they no longer required explosive warheads to do catastrophic damage, yet each was tipped by a shaped, molecular explosive charge.

  There was no question of stealth; the strike force had gone inert well within the Exile defenders’ light cone, and having been moving at sublight speed on the way around Canimic 3452, they had been detected some time before. So, the Exile defenses were ready.

  The stations were nothing fancy; little more than armored cans in orbit, bristling with missile launch cells, particle beam cannon emitters, and point defense lasers. The satellites below them were even more bare bones in design.

  The stations opened fire almost as soon as the starships went inert. Given the velocities of the weapons, only the fact that space around Borogone was a hash of electronic noise and false positives from decoy drones meant that the entire battle didn’t end in a sudden cataclysmic orgy of destruction and hard radiation in the first few minutes.

  Beams of intense, coherent light flickered and pulsed from the dark-gray cylinders of the battlestations. Many were aimed at sensor ghosts. Many others found missiles in flight, the sheer energy dump cracking them apart in brilliant explosions, that still seemed tiny against the vastness of the backdrop. In the same moments, more missiles arrowed up out of Borogone’s gravity well toward the attacking ships. Those, however, were at more of a velocity disadvantage, and were quickly swatted out of the sky by the oncoming ships’ point defenses.

  The X-ray laser pods started to reach their minimum safe distances. Blinding, actinic flashes began to flicker in the dark spaces between starships, and the beams started to wreak havoc on the orbital defenses below.

  That was when the Caractacans started to notice that something was wrong.

  “What are they doing?” Mor muttered. The Dauntless was currently in free-fall, so he could mutter all he wanted without having to grunt against the G forces crushing him down into his acceleration couch. That could change in an eyeblink if he had to alter the ship’s vector, but for the moment, he was simply floating against his straps, watching the battle unfold. “They’re not even concentrating on the battlestations.”

  “It looks like they’re trying to reduce as much of the orbital constellation as possibl
e on the first pass,” the weapons officer, Fry, said.

  “Except it isn’t working,” Mor pointed out.

  And it wasn’t. The Exile ECM was nearly as effective as the Regonese. For every beam or missile that struck, ten missed. When multiple ships were firing on the same target, then more firepower was concentrated in a smaller probability zone. Spreading it out with each ship individually targeting individual satellites, fighters, and space stations, the effectiveness of the massive barrage of projectiles, plasma, and coherent energy being thrown at the orbitals was being vastly reduced.

  The Exiles were concentrating more of their fire, despite the fact that they had easily as many targets as the Regonese did. Two of the smaller cruisers erupted in sun-bright explosions. Another was holed by a spray of projectiles blasted out from a missile’s warhead just before a point defense laser cut the missile out of the sky. A particle beam sliced yet another in half, just before another beam, barely visible on the holo display as a faint, reddish line, punched straight through a Piekej-class battlecruiser, burning through three quarters of her decks and smashing through most of her control circuitry. An explosion gouted from the battlecruiser’s flank and she started to tumble.

  Deep and distant thumps thrummed through the Dauntless’s hull, as sun-hot powergun bolts lanced out from her extended turrets, arrowing toward the battlestation that the allies had designated Station Three. The turrets cycled, one after the other, sending a strobing, vaguely helical stream of brilliant blue-white destruction at the target.

  All four Caractacan Brotherhood starships had focused their fire on Station Three. Clouds of chaff, decoy drones, and ECM diverted some of the bolts, which either spent their fury on decoys that were instantly annihilated, or missed altogether, venting their thermal and kinetic energy in the sulfurous atmosphere of Borogone below.

  But the Exiles aboard that station simply didn’t have enough countermeasures to keep that blizzard of hypervelocity plasma away.

  Bolts punched glowing craters in the station’s armor plating. The sheer thermal energy dump, along with the kinetic energy of the copper ions pelting the hull, began to erode the station’s structural integrity.

  A defensive node took a glancing hit, blasting the laser emitters to fused lumps and sending a vicious power surge through the controls. Power conduits exploded under the load, killing a dozen Exile gunners.

  Then a bolt struck a missile launch cell, which exploded. Fire raced through the sections of the station that still had atmosphere, as the shockwave reverberated through the hull, splitting it open in a dozen places.

  The next dozen bolts that hit within the following fraction of a second reduced the entire station to spinning, glowing debris and hard radiation.

  By then, the starships were nearly to the upper levels of Borogone’s orbitals. The Brotherhood ships were shifting their fire to Station Four when Fry blurted out, “What are they doing now?”

  Mor didn’t have to ask what Fry was talking about. Almost as one, the Regonese ships had flipped end for end, shifting their formation into a long, trailing column, even as they lit their drives, slowing their mad dash as they got closer and closer to the planet.

  “They’re starting an orbital insertion burn, the idiots,” Mor said. The Regonese had apparently decided to completely disregard everything that Maruks had told them. They were going to descend into Borogone’s orbit and try to slug it out with not only the remaining orbital defenses, but anything on the ground.

  The folly of the plan should have been obvious. The decelerating starships were pouring fire into the orbital defensive constellation, and they were scoring hits, but they were also taking nearly as many or more. As Mor watched, five more Regonese ships erupted into bright explosions as their reactors lost containment. Even more were taking hits that weren’t nearly as spectacular, but clearly as fatal. He counted three that were breaking up under thrust, and almost ten more that were already tumbling, their malfunctioning, dying drives throwing them away from their initial vectors, some tumbling toward the atmosphere below, others out into interplanetary space.

  “What are we doing?” Fry asked.

  “Maintain fire on Station Four,” Mor replied. “We’ll pass within five hundred kilometers, and I want it to be glowing scrap by then.”

  “We’re not going to enter orbit with the Regonese?” the comms officer asked.

  “Negative,” Mor said, confident in the answer. None of the other three Brotherhood ships had skew-flipped, either. “An alliance isn’t a suicide pact.”

  Even as the Caractacan Brotherhood ships flashed past the planet and Station Four erupted in a soundless spray of debris, the first particle beams reached up from the vicinity of the Exile city of Ieg. They were shooting just over their horizon, but they pinned another of the Piekej-class battlecruisers on their beams. Two of three punched clear through the torpedo-shaped hull and sliced out one side. The ship snapped in half as the energy dump shattered her skeleton on one side.

  Then the Brotherhood ships were speeding out of the gravity well, leaving the destruction behind. A few beams and railgun rounds followed them, but aside from a glancing laser strike on the Challenger, they all missed. Then the four ships went inertialess and raced away at a substantial fraction of the speed of light.

  The Exiles seemed to be focused on the Regonese ships closer in, anyway.

  Almost ten light-minutes away, the Brotherhood starships went inert again and immediately started reversing vectors.

  “Fools they might be, but we committed to helping them,” Maruks said grimly. “We will conduct another high-speed pass and take out as much of the defensive constellation as possible while launching dropships. We must take those groundside defenses down, before they carve all of the Regonese ships to pieces.”

  “Incoming!” The call sent a shock through Mor, and he looked up at the holo tank, searching for the Sparatan ships that they hadn’t seen yet. Pressed down in his acceleration couch by five Gs of acceleration, he wasn’t quite panicking—a Caractacan Brother did not panic—but he knew that mid-vector-reverse-burn was one of the worst positions to get into a space battle.

  But the contacts in the tank soon resolved themselves. They weren’t the Sparatan cruisers after all. They were Regonese ships. And there were far too few of them.

  “Caractacan Brotherhood ships, this is Dehig, of Flock Iapefeg,” the hail came.

  “Go ahead, Dehig,” Maruks said shortly. He gave no sign of what was on his mind, though Mor could certainly guess. The assault had already been badly botched.

  “We are the few ships that managed to get out of orbit. Several others are still there, having managed to get into orbital slots where the destroyed battlestations were, but they are still under heavy fire.”

  “Change your vectors and form up with us,” Maruks said. There was no commiseration, not sympathy in his voice. “We are going back in, and this time we will conduct the assault the way we planned and suggested, that you ignored. I suggest you stay close.”

  Chapter Four

  The hatch in front of the dropship’s nose irised open, and the display in front of Erekan Scalas’s visor showed him a scene out of nightmares.

  Powergun fire flickered soundlessly in the vacuum of space, briefly connecting ships at war. The Exile satellites were following both prograde and retrograde orbits, leading to a confusing web of rapidly moving shapes, points of light, and flashing bolts of white-hot destruction. Debris flickered in the light of the distant star.

  Below, half of Borogone’s surface was in sunlight, half in darkness. Great plumes of ash and dust drifted across the face of the planet, and the dark side was webbed with the sullen, red glowing lines of open lava fissures. It did not look inviting, especially not when faint, gossamer lines of red and green stabbed up from the cluster of lights around Ieg, carving through ships wherever they touched.

  And yet, that was where they were going.

  With a sudden kick at the base of his spine,
the launch catapult threw the dropship out into open space. A moment later, the view in front of Scalas, projected on a plate braced by an over-engineered armature above his acceleration couch, whirled crazily, as Lathan tumbled the conical ship to point its drive back along the Dauntless’s vector. A heartbeat later, the shock of the launch seemed like a gentle nudge, as Lathan kicked in the dropship’s full drive, braking at five and a half Gs.

  Scalas grunted as the sudden weight of his body threatened to drive the air out of his lungs. Darkness started to close in on his vision, and he breathed carefully and forcefully to keep enough oxygen in his lungs and brain to keep from blacking out. It was by no means his first high-G drop, but high acceleration was something that didn’t get better with familiarity.

  As Lathan killed the dropship’s velocity, Borogone’s gravity took hold, and it started to arc down toward the ash-choked atmosphere below. All around, more dropships, both the conical infantry dropships and the hemispherical cavalry landers, carrying Costigan and his tanks and combat sleds, fell toward the volcanic surface.

  The weapons fire did not abate as they fell on blazing tails of white-hot flame. If anything, it seemed to intensify, but Scalas found himself detached. A hit at that point would only mean the end of the nearly intolerable pressure on every centimeter of his body. He would never know what had hit him.

  Beams, bolts, and projectiles raved through space around them, but none seemed to be actively aimed at the landers. The groundside and orbital batteries were still trying to slug it out with the starships, and at that range, only the hash of ECM emissions that was turning some of his own tactical display to electronic fuzz was keeping most of those ships intact.

  It didn’t take long before they were hitting the upper atmosphere, fiery nimbuses starting to flare around their hulls. The roaring vibration started to give way to heavy buffeting. Scalas clamped down on the mouthguard inside his helmet; he’d known Brothers who’d nearly bitten their own tongues off on a rough drop.