by Peter Nealen
A particle beam bored a hole through the atmosphere just above them, and the shockwave nearly sent the dropships tumbling. Scalas just felt the bottom drop out for a moment, and felt the sickening feeling of being in freefall, before Lathan got the dropship back under control, just above another roiling ash cloud drifting across the surface from the north.
Scalas eyed that black cloud dubiously. They were dropping toward it, but that wasn’t a storm cloud made up of ice and water vapor. That was hot, pulverized rock. The dropships were tough, but he really wasn’t sure how well they’d stand up to that hellish sandblasting.
But Lathan was already ahead of him. The dropship tilted forward and, with a harder kick of the main drive, bounced toward the edge of the cloud. The others were following suit, up to the point when another beam flashed, and one of the Vindicator’s dropships vanished in a brilliant fireball.
Please don’t be Soon’s. Losing an entire squad in one go was bad enough. Soon’s senior squad sergeant would step up if the Centurion had gone over the veil with his First Squad, but Scalas hoped that his friend was still alive.
May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. The G forces had dropped off enough that he could cross himself, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw the Brothers to his right and left doing the same.
Then they were on their final descent, the ash cloud looming above them, blotting out the light of the sun. Their drive flares were brilliant points of light in the gloom as they dropped toward the rough, tumbled sheet of rock below.
They hit hard, typical for a combat drop. They had slowed enough to make the impact survivable for Brothers and equipment both, but they still made the descent as fast as possible, to make it harder to hit the dropships on the way down. The landing jacks compressed deeply, dust and fragments of rock thrown into the air by the impact, as the Brothers were slammed back down into their acceleration couches.
Then they were down, the sides of the dropship folding out like metal flower petals, revealing the barren landscape around them. Scalas had already punched the release on his straps and was heaving himself upright, his BR-18 in his hands, surging down the ramp.
The scene before him was hellish desolation. The sky, where it was not blanketed by the closest ash cloud, was a sullen orange, above blackened plains and towering volcanoes. Rivulets of lava glowed luridly under the shadows of the ash plume above. The volcano still spouting the massive cloud of ash and smoke into the sky was over a hundred kilometers away, yet loomed ominously over the tortured landscape, belching orange lava and black ash high into the sky. The ash was coming down like gray, abrasive snow.
He took all of it in in an instant. He wasn’t on the ground to look at the scenery, except as it pertained to the mission. The dropships had landed on a relatively flat spot, the lava flow that had formed it having hardened to a rippled blackness. So far, they were not at risk of being inundated by another lava flow, but from what he’d seen, it was only a matter of time on Borogone.
First Squad was spread out around him, the chameleonic coating turning their armor into mottled gray and black, shading toward orange in places. They were spread out, down in crouched kneeling positions, their powerguns trained outward, searching for the enemy. No Brother would expect that any foe would let that landing go unanswered. Their security was fleeting.
He didn’t need the tactical overlay; he’d studied the target zone closely enough. Ieg, the single, centralized Exile city on Borogone, was just over the jagged ridge of volcanic rock to the west. It was a tightly-packed fortress, ringed by defensive emplacements, with even more hardened fortresses installed around the ring of ground-to-space weaponry that had already swatted several Regonese starships out of the sky, despite the clouds of dust and ash floating through the poisonous atmosphere.
Those ground-to-space weapons were their targets. And none of them imagined that it would be an easy fight to get to them, let alone knock them out.
“Century XXXII, sound off,” he called.
“First Squad, up,” Kahane replied.
“Second Squad, up,” Cobb barked.
“Third Squad, up.” That flat, emotionless voice was Kunn’s, showing as little inflection or character as ever.
“Fourth Squad, up.” Bruhnan sounded confident and in control. Maybe there was hope for Fourth Squad, after all.
“Fifth Squad, up,” Solanus snapped out.
A keening, roaring howl rose nearby, and grit blasted against Scalas’s armor as a ferocious wind tore at his legs. The hulking, smooth-lined tank that glided on its cushion of air toward him, accompanied by two combat sleds, was as blackened as his own armor, with the wand above its rounded turret signaling that this was Virgil Costigan’s own tank.
“Ready when you are, Erekan,” Costigan called over the comms. “You and your men can ride in the sleds, at least until we get over the ridge.”
Scalas’s first impulse was to decline. He was an infantryman, and had been even in the Vitorian Commandos before he’d joined the Brotherhood. Riding might be easier, but he was never entirely comfortable in a vehicle. He wasn’t in control, and he was never confident that he could see everything, even when every bit of the vehicle’s sensor feed was being piped to him.
Not only that, but a vehicle made for a big target. He liked to be able to run to cover when the situation called for it.
But time was of the essence. They had to get to those batteries before they eviscerated the rest of the strike force. “Mount up!” he ordered. “On the double!”
Armored forms sprinted for the sleds. It was a tight fit; they were big vehicles, but two tanks and four sleds were barely going to be enough to carry a Century, even one that was light a few bodies already. But they’d make it work.
Scalas saw most of the men into the sleds, then, with the bulk of Kahane’s squad, reached up and climbed onto the back deck of Costigan’s tank. Though he knew it wouldn’t be heard inside, he clapped an armored gauntlet on the turret before calling, “All in, Virgil. Let’s go.”
“Hold on to your teeth,” Costigan said, even though the infantry Brothers’ armor had mag-locks that were currently holding them down to the deck. “This could get bumpy.”
With a roar, the tanks and their flanking sleds surged ahead, toward that forbidding ridge of blackened rock. Costigan’s turret was facing forward, its 30cm powergun shifting smoothly from side to side, like a hound questing about for the scent of its prey. Costigan was keeping a close eye on the approaching ridgeline, watching for the Exiles to come over it, seeking the enemies who had landed on their doorstep.
As advanced and powerful as their weapons were, and as highly trained and disciplined as the Caractacan Brothers themselves might be, the fact remained that there were still hundreds of thousands of the Exiles, and if the Regonese intelligence had been accurate, they were nearly as brainwashed as the Unity’s clones on Valdek had been. They were outnumbered and outgunned by virtue of that same disparity in numbers.
But Caractacan Brothers always expected to be outnumbered.
“Contacts, coming in high, bearing two seven four,” Costigan said flatly. A moment later, as Scalas looked for the incoming aircraft, that stubby main gun spoke.
Infantry powerguns were impressive for their bright flash and thunderous report. The tank’s main gun going off was like the very sky being split asunder. Scalas’s vision slit darkened almost to opacity to compensate for the searing brilliance of the bolt, and the thunderclap shook his very bones. Dust, ash, and poisonous air was violently blasted away from the path of that chunk of ionized copper in a nearly solid wave, washing over the anchored infantry Brothers and scouring a bit more of their chameleonic coating off their armor.
As his vision slit cleared, Scalas could just see the clouds of sublimated metal and blasted debris fluttering toward the ground over the ridgeline ahead. There was no fire; the predominantly sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide atmosphere wouldn’t allow it.
/> “Sky is clear, at least until they start calling fire from low orbit,” Costigan remarked.
But the elimination of the Exiles’ air support hadn’t ended their problems. As they got closer to the ridge, it became more and more evident just how steep and riddled with knife-edge rock formations and gaping crevasses that formation really was.
“Virgil?” Scalas called. “I don’t think your vehicles are going to be able to get over that. Not without spilling every bit of their air cushions.”
“I think you’re right,” Costigan said, sounding frustrated. “This is a setback. If I’m reading this map right, we’re going to have to go almost thirty kilometers out of our way to go around it.”
“Better to have to cover more territory than to get stuck,” Scalas pointed out. “And we’d be coming from a direction they might not expect. The nashai are flyers, remember? They won’t really think of a ridge like that as an obstacle.”
“The humans, velk, and yeheri working with them might,” Costigan said, “but you’re right.” With a smoothness that belied its abruptness, the tank swiveled to the north and began to speed along the base of the ridge, heading for the low spot where it almost ended. Ash and dust swirled from beneath the vehicles’ skirts as they raced toward battle.
The Exiles might have been paranoid and militant, having had decades of local time to dig in, but the combination of the nashai’s avian mindset and the Regonese blockade meant that their ground fortifications were not nearly as impressive as they first appeared. The nashai simply didn’t seem to be well adapted to ground fighting, and they paid for it.
The tanks swept down from the north, opening fire as soon as they had clear lines of sight. The outer fortifications were momentarily linked with the roaring vehicles by actinic lines of searing destruction. Concrete blew apart and rock melted and flowed. Those few batteries mounted on the defenses around the particle beam cannon that could be brought to bear on ground forces were blown apart in seconds.
Armored Exiles, their beaks covered in long respirator masks, rose into the ash-choked sky, weapons in their claws. They didn’t last nearly as long as the fortifications, as powergun bolts from the sleds and the infantry Brothers still clinging to the tank hulls knocked them smoking to the ground. Hardly one got a shot off; the Brothers had been alert and ready.
The tanks slid to a halt just outside the breach they’d blasted in the fortified ring around the particle beam cannon, even as another beam lanced skyward. The air seemed to crackle and hum, and if not for his armor, the hair would have been standing up on Scalas’s arms. Hurricane winds whipped around the beam as it punched a hole in the atmosphere, searing through the dust and choking clouds of sulfur.
Scalas released his mag locks and leaped down to the ground. Gravity on Borogone was even lighter than that on Regone, so he landed easily, his BR-18 already in his shoulder. Careful practice had taught him over the years how to run in low gravity without bounding too high and into an enemy’s gunsights. Pushing off carefully, he glided over the rocky ground and through the breach, his powergun muzzle just below his line of sight.
The edges of the breach were still hot, heat mirage rippling off the blasted rock and concrete. The Exiles might have managed to get advisors and support from out-system, but the Regonese blockade seemed to have still managed to keep them from getting advanced materials like steelcrete.
Bullets snapped and cracked around him as he got through the breach and onto the open ground between the outer ring and the particle beam cannon emplacement. He swiveled, spotted the masked Exile rising over the shoulder of the emplacement itself, and blasted a glowing hole through the nashai’s torso with a single shot. The avian folded around the bolt and fell out of the air, tumbling in a tangle of broken wings toward the emplacement. It struck halfway down the concrete and basalt structure, bounced, and crashed to the ground.
The Brothers of Century XXXII flooded into the fortified ring, spreading out quickly and just as quickly engaging any Exiles showing a weapon. Powergun bolts flashed and thundered, thumping the air around them and briefly illuminating the interior of the fortified ring starkly. Wherever a bolt split the air, an Exile fell.
Scalas led the way around the emplacement, looking for the way in. He found it in moments. But that didn’t solve the problem.
The entrance was almost a full story up the wall of the emplacement. Like most things nashai, it had been designed for flyers.
He looked quickly to either side. “Torgan! Geroges! I need a ladder.”
The two Brothers didn’t hesitate. Both were hulking monstrosities of men, which was why Geroges carried an MT-41 support powergun like most of the rest carried their lighter BR-18s, and Torgan was often a self-selected HV missileer. Both men regularly provided their Brothers with boosts over obstacles or up to higher vantage points.
They both slung their weapons, placed their backs to the emplacement wall, and cupped their gauntleted hands in front of them. The articulation in their armor would take most of the weight, even in the low surface gravity on Borogone.
Scalas was first. He was the Centurion; it was his place. A leader in the Brotherhood did not stand back and direct his men; he led them. He put a boot on Torgan’s cupped palms, then another on Geroges’ shoulder pauldron, and heaved himself up to the hatchway.
As he’d rather expected, it was locked. He pulled a breaching charge off his belt, slapped it on the latch, and keyed it for a two-second delay before dropping back down.
The charge went off with a loud crack, and he was clambering back up again, using one hand to brace himself, the other hefting his powergun, muzzle up, so that he could quickly drop it down and engage any hostiles in the hatchway.
The hatch had been blown partway inward by the charge, and as soon as he got up into the portal, a sharp kick knocked it the rest of the way open. The passage ahead was lit with deep red lights; it seemed as if living on Borogone had led the Exiles to get used to the bloody light of the sun shining through the perpetual volcanic haze, rather than the cleaner, whiter light that shone on Regone.
He took two strides inside, his powergun up and ready, but he waited for Kahane, Powell, and Rogers to get in behind him. The short passage ahead of him terminated in a T-intersection only a few meters in. There was clacking in Regonese ahead, but nothing that he could decipher, and there was no sign of resistance inside.
So far.
With the other Brothers behind him, Kahane’s powergun muzzle extending into his peripheral vision beside him, he began to push toward the T.
Reaching the intersection, he and Kahane paused for a fraction of a second before each one hooked around the opposite corner to point their powerguns down the passageway to either side.
Scalas found himself looking down a sharply curving hallway, with two hatchways visible just ahead. He heard no powergun fire behind him, so he had to assume that Kahane’s side was just as empty as his own.
“On me,” he called, and started down the passage.
The first hatchway was on the inside of the ring, and was as sealed as the one they’d breached to get inside the emplacement. Another breaching charge solved that quickly, the sharp crack reverberating down the ring-shaped hall. Before the dust and smoke had begun to settle, Scalas was bulling his way through the hatchway.
As he went, he felt the crackling, hair-raising sensation of the cannon firing again. Then he was inside, sweeping the room with his muzzle, looking for targets.
They had clearly just breached the cannon’s control room. Displays glowed in the dimness, and a large flat screen showed a tactical display highlighting the sky above Ieg, showing firing arcs and known or guessed orbital trajectories. The symbols were strange, and the spectrum of the display seemed slightly off, being designed for red-adapted nashai eyes rather than human.
There were a dozen Exiles inside, manning the consoles. They were all staring, blinking rapidly, their beaks clacking in distress, as the armored forms of the Caractacan Brot
hers flooded inside. None were wearing armor, though they did have respirators on, presumably in case the fortification was breached.
There were no weapons in evidence either. The conclusion was pretty clear; these were techs, not soldiers. Scalas hadn’t actually known that the Exiles made the distinction.
“Step away from the consoles and keep your hands where we can see them,” Scalas boomed in Trade Cant. It wasn’t a certainty that any of them spoke it, but given the fact that the Exiles were trying to force their people to be like aliens, then it seemed likely. And in fact, they all slowly and carefully lifted their clawed hands, keeping their wings tightly folded, and moved away from the consoles.
“Is this the only command center for this battery?” Scalas asked.
“Yes,” one of the nashai said. He couldn’t read Exile insignia, but that one was wearing a crest on his breast that was different from all the rest. He was probably the head tech.
“Cobb?” Scalas called on the internal net. “We’ve secured a control center. Check the rest of the emplacement and make sure it’s the only one.”
“Yes, Centurion,” Squad Sergeant Cobb replied. Scalas and Cobb had been novices together. Scalas had long felt slightly guilty about being promoted to Centurion ahead of his Brother, but Cobb had upbraided him for it more than once. Cobb liked being a squad sergeant.
A few moments passed quietly before Cobb loomed in the hatchway. “The battery is secure, Centurion.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “The other hatch leads to what looks like crew quarters and supply areas. No secondary command center that we can find.”
Scalas nodded and keyed his comm. “Brother Legate, Scalas,” he called. “Target secured.”
“Acknowledged, Centurion,” Maruks said. “Targets Two and Three have also been captured. Leave a squad with your prisoners and meet me within the secondary ring.
