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

by Peter Nealen

  “We have,” Scalas said calmly, more calmly than Mor felt. “And we’re all strapped in. Just don’t push it so far that we get crushed anyway.”

  “Do we need to activate the fluid cells?” Solanus asked. Mor winced.

  The Dauntless had fluid cell acceleration pods for in extremis maneuvers. They were extremely unpleasant to use, especially in the beginning, when the occupant’s lungs were flooded with oxygen-rich fluid to keep them from collapsing. It felt like drowning, and there were stories that the first few test subjects really had drowned, back when the things had first been developed, before the formula for the breathing fluid had been perfected.

  “I hope not,” he replied. “But I’ll know within the next few minutes.”

  “Just as long as we have time to set them up,” Scalas said.

  “I’ll set us to stationkeeping while still inertialess if we have to,” Mor assured him. “Now, I have to fly so that we don’t all get cooked.”

  Two light-minutes from the supergiant, he dropped the Bergenholm to zero mass setting, and they were racing toward the planet almost as fast as the charged particles pouring out of the pulsar’s magnetic poles. The numbers were already whirring on the display, as the computer collected the data necessary to calculate the massive planet’s orbit.

  “It looks like we won’t need the fluid cells,” he announced, “but this still isn’t going to be pleasant. Stand by for an eight-G synchronization burn.” He grimaced, imagining the groans that that announcement should have instigated. Of course, men like Scalas wouldn’t groan. He keyed their personal intercom.

  “I could break the sync burn up into two phases, Erekan,” he said, grinning. “Do part of it at four Gs, go tachyonic again, and come back in to finish it out. If your ground-pounding bones can’t take the strain.”

  “Just get us into orbit, Brecan,” Scalas replied tiredly. Mor grinned even wider.

  “Oh, I’ll get us into orbit,” he said, “but I don’t want to put too much more wear and tear on the old man.”

  “You’ve been aboard for a lot more high-G maneuvers than I have in the last ten years,” Scalas growled. “If anyone should be worried about getting worn out from high Gs, it’s you. I was usually safe and sound on a one- or two-gravity planet when you were lifting to provide support or fight off those raiders who ambushed us in the Ordelman System.”

  “Well, I’ll be,” Mor said with mock surprise. “You’re right. I must be slipping; you don’t usually get to turn these things around on me like that.”

  “I do more often than you’ll admit,” Scalas replied. “Now just fly the ship, will you?”

  Mor grinned again and cut the circuit, devoting his attention to his controls and displays. The amusement faded from his features as he concentrated on what had to happen in the next few moments.

  The Dauntless plunged toward the darkened surface of the supergiant planet, vanishing out of the wan light and scorching radiation coming from the pulsar as it passed into the planet’s shadow. At the same instant, Mor cut the Bergenholm, dropping the starship inert and returning all of her considerable inertia.

  There was so little time to spare that he simply tapped a key on his right-hand control panel, taking a deep breath as he did so.

  The maneuver that he’d programmed into the Dauntless’s flight computer began immediately. Thrusters fired, pivoting the ship’s nose toward the direction of the supergiant’s orbit, and the drives, momentarily dark as he’d brought the ship to a dead stop in space, lit with all their blue-white fury.

  Every muscle clenched to keep from passing out, Mor breathed quickly and shallowly, trying to keep as much air in his lungs as possible as the weight on his chest doubled and redoubled. The roar of the drives thrummed through the ship’s frame, shaking the entire vessel as they ramped up their power to change the starship’s vector to match the planet below.

  Around the command deck, he heard short, panting, explosive breaths as the rest of the command crew did the same. Eight Gs were survivable for a while, but they could still kill a man if he wasn’t prepared or trained. Particularly as the burn went on and on and exhaustion set in.

  The remaining burn time was displayed in the holo tank, slowly ticking down toward zero. As he watched it, his vision becoming distorted as the G forces pressed down on his cornea, it seemed to slow, as if time itself was coming to a halt the longer the awful pressure went on.

  His vision was darkening around the edges, the ache in his bones and his lungs getting nearly intolerable, and the time display seemed to have nearly come to a halt by the time the thrust began to ease.

  Slowly, his vision cleared and breathing got easier. The terrible pressure on his chest lifted, and his limbs were no longer pinned to his acceleration couch by eight times their normal weight. He still felt battered and exhausted, and blinked his eyes a few times to focus on the holo tank.

  Below them, relatively stationary, floated the supergiant. They were about a million kilometers from the surface; even then, periodic engine burns were going to be necessary to keep from being pulled in by the supergiant planet’s gravity.

  It was a darkened sphere, utterly black against the backdrop of red, purple, and blue nebulosity. No, not utterly black. Ferocious, multi-colored aurorae flickered around the poles; the enormous body still had a magnetic field and something of an atmosphere.

  Mor stared at it as he fought to get his worn-out brain working again. How had such an object ended up in orbit around a pulsar? How had it escaped the destruction that had stripped away the outer layers of the gas giant that had become Mzin’s World?

  He’d never know. He suspected that no one ever would. It was a big galaxy, and there were simply too many mysteries for anyone to truly wrap their heads around.

  “Reconnaissance drones, Captain?” Carne was asking him. It took a second to recognize his gunnery officer’s hoarse rasp, and another second to register the words.

  “Yes,” he said, blinking again. His voice sounded like a croak in his own ears. “At least four, one retrograde, one prograde, one each above and below the ecliptic.” He rubbed his aching eyes. “Let’s see what’s out there.”

  Muted clunks reverberated through the ship as the drones were punched out of their launch cells, just below the missile cells. Little more than skeletal constructs of thrusters, fuel tanks, and sensors, they drifted away from the hull until their onboard computers registered that they were at minimal safe distance. Their drives lit, tiny sparks of bluish flame against the darkness of the massive planet below, and they raced away from the Dauntless, burning for the edges of the planet’s shadow, where they could see the rest of the inner system.

  Briefly, at least.

  It took several minutes for them to dwindle out of sight, though the holo tank kept their symbols up on the plot as they neared the edge of the umbra. While they waited, Mor keyed the intercom to the troop compartment again. “Everyone weather the burn all right down there?” He was being serious this time; that had been rough, and if anyone hadn’t been able to keep up, serious injury could have resulted.

  “We’re all fine, Brecan,” Scalas reported. “I just got the last of the headcount.”

  “Good to hear,” he replied. “We should know if we’re going to need to risk going deeper on this run in the next few minutes.”

  “We’re just along for the ride,” Scalas said dryly. “Though there might have been a bit of mental prayer going on down here during that ordeal. If only because verbal wasn’t really a possibility.”

  “I was doing a little, myself,” Mor said, even though he’d forgotten about much of anything besides the pain and the pressure during the synchronization burn. He felt a brief flush of shame at that, but stifled it. He could speak to Father Corinus when they linked back up with the Herald of Justice.

  The holo plot suddenly started to flash with new symbols. The first of the drones was out of the umbra and scanning the inner system.

  There was a surprising a
mount of debris out there, given the harsh environment that he would have expected to blast everything away with that now-distant shockwave. Everything that the supernova’s blast hadn’t vaporized. As more and more of it became visible in the plot, however, he started to see a pattern.

  There was a long trail of asteroids—comets couldn’t survive in the fierce radiation coming off the pulsar—in retrograde behind the supergiant they hovered above. Mor thought he was starting to understand, as little bearing as it had on the mission at hand.

  The supergiant had been a rogue. It must have been. While it couldn’t have been far off from the star when it went supernova, it had been far enough that the blast hadn’t destroyed it. The shockwave had probably only slowed it down enough to allow its capture in the pulsar’s considerable gravity well.

  But that was of purely academic interest. It still didn’t locate Mzin’s World.

  “There,” Fry said, pointing. It was a redundant gesture; Mor could see the indicators just as well as he could.

  Mzin’s World was a dwarf planet in size, barely one thousand kilometers in diameter, but the gravimetric sensors registered it as easily dense enough to have a surface gravity of just over a G. That alone suggested how much of a treasure house it was.

  There was simply too much radio noise in the nebula and the system to pick out starship emissions, but just before the feed from the first and second drones went dark, contacts registered on visual, just above the surface of the super-dense dwarf planet. They were little more than blurry specks on visual; there was no way to determine what they were. But Mor suspected that they were ships. They already knew that the Unity was there.

  He also knew that the feeds from the probes had gathered more information than was currently displayed in the tank. They would have to go over it carefully, with computer assistance, preferably with the help of the various factions already represented in Rehenek’s Alliance.

  “Do we sacrifice another set of probes, Captain?” Fry asked. “Or have we gathered enough?”

  “We know where the target is, and we know the way into the system,” Mor said. “Let’s get back.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The triamic engineers who had designed the ship that would become known as the Pride of Valdek had thought ahead. For all the horrific internecine violence of the fall of the Triamic Hegemony, the pseudo-canine people had been cunning and thoughtful while their order lasted.

  They had planned for the possibility that a mission might send the Astrana-class dreadnaught into a high-radiation environment, near a star or even a pulsar. And they had similarly expected the dreadnaught to have accompanying starships venturing into such a hell right alongside.

  So, the Pride of Valdek flew in the lead, plunging toward the pulsar behind a massive, vaguely domed deployable radiation shield. It was, at its most basic, an inflatable bag filled with water ice from comets harvested in the abandoned system where the fleet had staged. But it was enough to protect the dreadnaught, and the ships flying closely packed in its wake, at least for a little while.

  Even as tightly-packed as the ships were, the shield wasn’t big enough to bring the entire task force. The four Caractacan Brotherhood ships, half of the Dahuan star cruisers, two Fortunian maulers, both Vukh-Ratii ships, and another five Valdekan battlecruisers blasted toward the target in the shadow of the massive radiation shield.

  They did not head for the supergiant, nor did they race straight for Mzin’s World itself. Examination of the data the Dauntless had brought back from her reconnaissance mission had pinpointed another target, one that had to be dealt with first.

  Ahead, barely a speck on their holo tank plots, floated a space station. It was as utilitarian and ugly as Scalas had come to expect from the Galactic Unity’s designs; five octagonal modules had been linked together around a central docking hub and spun up to provide about a half G of spin gravity. The whole construct was shielded from the pulsar, nearly seventy light-minutes distant, by another massive, deployable radiation shield.

  There were ships lurking in the shadow of that shield as well, three more of the angular white pyramids that marked them as Unity cruisers. Those were the first targets.

  Scalas was watching the approach through the display above his acceleration couch aboard his dropship. The Alliance fleet was racing in toward that station, holding their fire even as they passed their maximum effective range. They easily had the firepower to obliterate the station and its escorting starships, but neither Maruks nor Rehenek wanted the station destroyed.

  They wanted it captured. And that was where the infantry Brothers, along with a maniple of Vukh-Rutii shock troops, came in.

  The fleet was approaching from the outer system, keeping the station and its radiation shield between them and the pulsar. It was a straight-on approach, made inertialess, in order to keep the Pride of Valdek’s radiation shield pointed straight at the fiercely radioactive corpse of the dead star. It was going to be an interesting engagement, just judging by the plan as it had been explained to him.

  Five light-minutes out, they dropped the Bergenholms to zero mass. Now moving at sublight speed, they raced toward the station, crossing the vast distance in minutes.

  Only a few light-seconds away, X-ray laser pods were launched, propelled beyond the Bergenholm fields, where every bit of their inertia returned. But the data the Dauntless had brought back had been enough that all the ships had managed to make their synchronization burns while safely light-years distant. The pods rapidly dwindled behind the fleet, but they were already well within their engagement envelope and uncaged to fire as soon as they spread out enough.

  The maneuver that followed needed to be precisely timed. As one, every ship dropped inert, barely three light-seconds from the station. Having already matched vectors, they came to a relative dead stop.

  Missiles were ejected from their launch cells, maneuvering thrusters pushing them out around the edges of the Pride of Valdek’s radiation shield before they lit their drives and roared silently toward the Unity ships, which were still scrambling to come to combat alert, having only realized they were under attack less than five minutes before. Accelerating at fifty Gs, the missiles would be there in seconds.

  But not before the X-ray laser beams. Having reached their minimum targeting angles, their systems already beginning to degrade under the relentless bombardment of charged particles and hard radiation from the pulsar, the pods received their firing signals.

  Within milliseconds of each other, the thermonuclear devices in the pods detonated, funneling nearly seventy-five percent of their energy into the intense beams of coherent radiation. The flickering flashes of their demise reached the station at the same time the deadly beams did.

  One of the Unity ships, which was gingerly trying to thrust away from the station without immolating either the hab modules or the radiation screen beyond them with its full drive, suddenly flared brilliantly as nearly ten thousand gigajoules were dumped into its hull in an instant. The starship’s entire angular nose section flashed into incandescent vapor, the blast sending the drive section tumbling violently away, out of the shadow of the radiation screen.

  The targeters had known what they were about. They had assigned targets in such a way as to stand the best chance of avoiding damage to that radiation shield.

  There was always that chance of error, though, particularly in the fluid environment of a combat situation.

  Part of the radiation shield flared brilliantly, metal and composite boiling away as coherent X-rays dumped most of a nuclear weapon’s yield into it. In a split second, the resulting explosion had started the radiation shield twisting and spinning away from the station.

  “That’s not good,” Kahane muttered from the next acceleration couch over.

  “No, it isn’t,” Scalas replied. “Maruks, Scalas.”

  “I see it, Centurion,” the Brother Legate growled. “Stay on alert, but the boarding operation is postponed until we get this sorted o
ut.”

  Exactly what that was going to entail had yet to be seen. A second Unity cruiser had been severely damaged, mainly by debris from the detonation on the surface of the radiation shield. Five missiles were still inbound, though four more had been shot out of the sky, hammered by laser fire until they had detonated with enough force to drive them off course. The debris from an exploded missile might not do as much damage as its warhead, but it could still be lethal if it hit something vital. Particularly against an inert ship.

  The third Unity ship’s captain had apparently decided that the radiation screen was lost anyway, and was lighting his drives, though still carefully aimed away from the station. Powergun fire was starting to flicker between it and the fleet, which was out of position to return it properly, being sheltered behind the Pride of Valdek.

  And the Pride’s own radiation shield was starting to take hits.

  It was a strange fight to watch. Most space battles were high-velocity jousting matches, either in orbit or in near-planetary space. A close-in, low-velocity slugging match like this was almost unheard of, in large part because it would, under normal circumstances, be suicidal for both parties.

  But the lethal cascades of radiation pouring from the pulsar necessitated it.

  More missiles were rippling from their launch cells and maneuvering beyond the edge of the domed radiation shield in front of the Pride of Valdek before firing their drives and slamming toward the Unity ships. Several of them were shot down, but not enough.

  Both surviving Unity ships were launching missiles of their own, in addition to powergun fire. The water ice inside the radiation shield was mitigating some of the damage, for the moment, but it was only a matter of time. And those missiles could be directed around the edges, to close in on the ships huddled behind the dreadnaught’s shadow.

  “That’s really not good,” someone said halfway around the dropship’s troop compartment. It sounded like Granzow.