by Peter Nealen
“Are you thinking of assaulting the starship?” Rokoff asked.
“I am,” Maruks replied. “At the very least, it would be an effective diversionary attack. At best, we might be able to knock out enough of its weapons to relieve some of the pressure. Maybe even take control and turn it against the enemy. If enough of them are committed elsewhere to make that possible.”
“Those craters are halfway around the caldera,” Soon pointed out. “Will the Fortunians be able to hold out that long?”
Maruks moved back from the edge of the escarpment and straightened. “They will have to,” he said. “We have accepted this challenge, but nevertheless I will not throw my men across open ground at an enemy starship. We will simply have to move quickly.” He looked around at them. “Soon, keep your Century back here and be prepared to link up and get the Fortunians out. We will move around the rim of the caldera and attack from that rough ground. If we can split the enemy’s attention even for a short while, we should be able to get clear. General-Regent Rehenek can then bombard the surface to his heart’s content.”
“Will shipboard weapons reach that underground facility?” Soon asked. “This isn’t exactly soft rock.” It was a question on all their minds.
“It depends on how much firepower he is willing to expend,” Maruks replied. “That part is not our first concern. Our immediate concern is to get the Fortunians off this planet before either the clones or the radiation kills them. If there is anything left once we have retrieved our allies and gotten back into space, then we can revisit the idea of another landing to finish clearing the underground facility. For now, focus on the task at hand.”
There was little more to say. The Centurions saluted briefly, and scattered to their formations. Scalas jogged over to Kahane and knelt next to him.
“We are going to attack the starship,” he said simply. “Follow me.”
He didn’t wait around for an acknowledgement. Hefting his powergun, muzzle toward the sky, he turned and started along the rim at a run.
It was a brutal movement. Within a hundred meters, his heart was pounding and his breath was starting to burn in his lungs. Footing was treacherous. The rock was solid, but flat spots were few and far between.
Armored boots slammed against the rock with heavy thuds that were only transmitted through the fabric of his armor. The alien environment was made even more eerie by the utter silence of vacuum.
The ground fell away after the first two hundred meters, descending into what looked like a counterflow in solid rock. Rilles of black and yellow stone cut through the dark gray of the massif like a river frozen in time. Scalas had to slow down; some of the troughs between the ridges were deep enough to swallow a man in armor.
The fortunate part was that the landscape on this side of the caldera appeared to be too rough for even those massive Unity crawlers to traverse. The way was relatively clear.
His Century was spread out to either side of him. Powerguns were slung to keep them out of the way; a glance toward the crater confirmed that they were in cover. A massive shoulder of hardened metal, which the lava flow which had formed this gully had been unable to cut through, occluded the inside of the caldera, and cut off any view of the Unity forces.
Flickers of light in the sky drew his eye. The heavy weapons squads were doing their work already, launching small but potent rocket-assisted mortars. Some of them were hitting the tops of their trajectories and lighting their terminal boosters, slamming down toward their targets on the ground like meteors from beyond.
Others were detonating in space, picked off by the Unity’s point defenses. Those accounted for more of the flickers he was seeing than the terminal boosters did.
Heaving himself over another rounded, fluid-looking ridge, he turned back and held out a gauntleted hand to Geroges, heaving the MT-41 gunner up next to him before turning and all but sliding downhill.
Ahead, the far side of the massif loomed dark against the multicolored sky. It looked like it was about a hundred fifty meters tall. A not-insignificant climb in a full G.
He just kept going. They were going to have to climb it regardless.
Mzin’s World’s small radius and its strange gravity continued to be somewhat disorienting. Even with the Caractacan Brothers’ image enhancement, unaffected by the radiation or the enemy’s ECM, distances were deceptive, especially in the dimness and the shifting illumination from the nebula.
That was why Scalas suddenly found himself at the edge of the field of craters, some time before he had expected to.
He dropped to a knee behind a shattered boulder, itself an anomaly on a world that had been formed from an entirely molten planetary core, with little in the way of in-system debris to erode it. He signaled for the rest to get into position and take up security as he did so. Shadowy, black-and-purple forms moved quickly to what cover was available, the tanks slowing on their flickering nimbuses of thrust. Costigan had needed to swing far out to the left flank to find terrain that was passable even to his Destrier tanks, which could hover nearly a meter above the ground on those thrust packs.
The caldera rim had been blasted apart at that point. Something had punched deep into the crust and detonated, hurling rubble and dust for hundreds of meters. And, half-buried in the detritus, was what was left of one of the Unity’s mining crawlers.
Kahane was next to him, the squad sergeant’s short, thickset form unmistakeable even in the weird light. Scalas pointed. “Look there,” he said, over the Century’s command channel.
“What happened here?” Kahane wondered. “Did they hit a gas pocket?”
“I’d be surprised if volatiles had survived this planet’s formation,” Scalas said. “That looks like a kinetic strike to me. Or a deep-penetration warhead.”
Kahane didn’t answer, but continued to scan the caldera below them. Scalas did the same, and slowly began to see more details.
There were at least a dozen more deep craters, signs of heavy bombardment from space, along with hundreds of the smaller impacts that they had initially seen from the other side of the caldera. And that wasn’t all.
They hadn’t been able to pick out the crashed starship hulks from a distance before, possibly because they were painted a black or dark gray that blended well with the surrounding rock. The largely metallic composition of the same rock probably had prevented the metal showing up well on other sensors, as well.
They had also been blasted into such wreckage that it was impossible to identify them.
“Somebody’s been here and tried to hit them before,” Kahane said.
“Or someone was here before them, and were either wiped out or driven off,” Scalas answered grimly. “It would explain the size of the force they had stationed here.”
“Centurion,” Maruks said. His transmission was clear enough that Scalas was unsurprised to turn and see the Brother Legate only a pace behind him. “Status?”
Scalas glanced quickly to left and right, even as the squad sergeants, unbidden, reported their squads in position and ready. Even Kunn, who still seemed unaffected by the loss of half his squad.
The Brothers were barely-visible shapes of mottled yellow, purple, ochre, and black, arrayed in a rough crescent along the smashed caldera rim. The tanks had grounded, saving the fuel in their hover packs for when it was more needed, sitting hull-down along the rim itself, their blunt powergun muzzles pointed down into the caldera.
They appeared to have made it undetected. The swarms of clones were all but invisible on the other side of the hulking shape of the Unity starship, their positions only marked by the distant flicker of powergun fire. Three more crawlers were visible, also firing on the Fortunian position, though they were stationary, and still had no better firing arcs than before. They seemed to be good for harassing fire more than anything else.
“We are ready to commence the attack, Brother Legate,” Scalas reported.
Maruks nodded, scanning the battlefield below them. Maruks was a thinker, a
nd while he was perhaps less considered in his decisions than Kranjick had been, he wasn’t going to give the order until he had a solid plan in mind. He would have been forming that plan as they’d run, but a good commander would not finalize it until he had eyes on the terrain he was about to fight over.
Maruks wasn’t Kranjick, but he was a good commander.
He came over the Legio command net then. “All Centurions, on me.”
Rokoff arrived quickly, jogging over the broken ground. Costigan beat him there, lifting his tank on its thruster pack and pivoting around before gliding down the slope to a spot only a dozen meters from where Century XXXII crouched, before disembarking and running the rest of the way. He was carrying a short, stubby VK-40S assault shotgun; not as effective perhaps as a powergun, it had the advantage of being considerably easier to maneuver in tight spaces, and was almost as deadly at close range against most enemies.
“Costigan, I want your armor to provide fire support and be prepared to descend into the caldera to maneuver on the enemy as necessary,” Maruks said. Costigan said nothing, though he had to be somewhat piqued at being relegated to glorified artillery duty. His Destriers were extremely capable vehicles. But Scalas understood Maruks’s reasoning, and he knew that Costigan did as well. Fast, maneuverable, and heavily armored as they were, the tanks would be easy pickings for the starship’s point defenses, which were visibly firing on the incoming mortars. The infantrymen had a better chance, especially in the harsh and electromagnetically noisy environment of Mzin’s World’s surface, of getting in close without being targeted.
“Scalas, you have the main line of attack, up the field of craters,” Maruks continued. “Use whatever cover you can find, but do not stop moving. If any of us get pinned down out there, it’s over. Your target will be the ship itself. Rokoff, I want you to work your way over to those starship hulks, and be prepared to launch a flanking attack on any enemy forces that attempt to come around the starship to attack Scalas and his men. Be prepared to move in to support as necessary.” He looked around at the Centurions. “Questions?”
There were none. It was a simple enough battle plan, and plans that got too detailed and complex broke down more quickly. There was an ancient saying, that said, “No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy.” Every Caractacan Brother present knew that the truth was far more sobering than that.
No plan of battle survives the implementation of its first step.
“Five minutes to step-off, gentlemen,” Maruks said. “I suggest you get to your men and get ready to move.”
Powerguns were briefly snapped soundlessly into salutes, and then they were moving away, toward their men. Scalas quickly shifted to his Century’s internal channel and briefed the Squad Sergeants. Fortunately, he didn’t have far to go to reach their staging point.
Five minutes ticked down very quickly. Then it was time. Hefting his powergun, Scalas went over the rim and plunged into the first crater. The attack had begun.
The Brothers moved in a coordinated wave of rippling movement across the darkened ground. Unlike the Unity’s clones, that moved like flocks of birds or swarms of insects, there was a certain deliberate purpose to the Brotherhood warriors’ movements. No man moved unless he knew exactly which bit of cover he was moving to, and once there, he held his position until he saw that his Brothers would be in position to cover him. Only then did he rise and dash forward, moving to his selected covered position and taking a knee, powergun pointed toward the shadowed bulk of the Unity starship ahead, scanning for enemies.
If anything, the advance was worse than the trip around the edge of the caldera; some of the craters were considerably deeper than they looked at first glance. More than one impact had broken through a thin layer of hardened rock above a void, a gas bubble in the molten rock and heavy metal that had been vented to space. At one G, a fall into one of those voids could well be fatal.
That slowed them, plus the need to maintain security and stay low, to avoid detection. But even as the flashes of the firefight between the clones and the Fortunians flickered in the near distance, it seemed that they might make it all the way to the starship without being spotted. The chameleonic coating on their armor was doing its job, and the radiation and electromagnetic noise was shielding them from other detectors.
Then a powergun bolt from the starship’s blunt nose stabbed out, soundless in the vacuum on Mzin’s World’s surface, and obliterated two of Costigan’s tanks in an actinic flash.
At the same moment, a dome rose out of a shaft just ahead of the starship’s landing pad, opening like a flower. And out of it poured men in spacesuits with armored vests over their vitals, carrying familiar cone-bore rifles.
There were hundreds of them. And they all moved with a weird, flowing sort of coordination, as if guided by one mind.
Chapter Twenty
Mor was preparing to lift again to support the ground troops from the sky. Closer in, they should have less difficulty with targeting, though he’d seen the feed from Scalas and the other Centurions; he wasn’t under any illusions about how much firepower that grounded ship could bring to bear, never mind the mining platforms themselves. After all, it had been ground fire that had disabled the Fortunian maulers.
“They’re taking fire from the grounded starship and under ground attack,” he said as the alert light blinked in the holo tank. “Lift in thirty seconds.”
But the words had barely left his lips when a new alert flashed in the upper hemisphere of the tank. He glanced up at it and cursed.
“Pride of Valdek, Dauntless,” he called, before Titus could transmit from the Herald of Justice. “Am I seeing that alert right?”
The responding transmission was broken and distorted by radiation, but the words were clear enough. “You are seeing right, Dauntless,” Horvaset said. “We have just detected what appears to be anywhere from fifty to a hundred starships inbound, coming from the vicinity of the support depot we destroyed.”
“Any identification?” Mor asked, as he continued to throttle up the engines. Whatever was about to happen, sitting on the ground wasn’t going to be a good idea.
“Not yet,” was the answer. Despite the electronic noise, Horvaset sounded grim. “But it is doubtful that they are friendly.”
Mor just nodded, though the gesture would be invisible to Horvaset at the moment. While he knew that Rehenek had sent a message back to his headquarters, detailing where they were bound, there hadn’t been time for any of the Alliance powers to put together a task force, much less one of that size.
It had to be the Unity. Which meant that they were suddenly badly outnumbered.
He glanced at the situation and cursed again. Those men on the ground would probably need his ship’s guns soon. But if the fleet was wiped out in the sky above them, they were all dead anyway. They didn’t have the kind of groundside batteries that made orbital supremacy useless.
It was a matter of math. The enemy fleet was much farther away than their targets on the ground, but at its closure rate, and given the shortened detection distance that close to the pulsar, they would be on top of the Alliance fleet in a matter of minutes.
Titus had beaten him to the punch, however. “Brother Legate, Captain Titus,” the Herald’s skipper was calling. “An enemy fleet has entered the system and is closing in on Mzin’s World. They appear to have our forces outnumbered by a factor of three.” It was a little bit more uncertain than that, but it never paid to underestimate the enemy. “We can get one pass before they are engaged, and then it will take every ship just to punch a hole through that formation that we can escape through.”
“Without a way off the planet, the ground attack will hardly be more than a potential suicide mission,” Rokoff pointed out.
“We can go to ground in the Unity’s underground complex if need be,” Maruks said a moment later. “If we lose command of space above the planet, then we won’t be able to get off even if the ships are still grounded.”
&nbs
p; Oh, it’s possible. Mor hadn’t been around to witness the Pride of Valdek’s hair-raising departure from Valdek’s surface, but he’d heard about it, and he’d seen the damage done when the ancient Triamic Dreadnaught had gone tachyonic while still inside a mountain. It’s just not something I’d particularly like to try. As well known as the effects of a Bergenholm field at tachyonic setting were, gravity wells could still cause interesting side effects.
“Lift and support the fleet, Captain,” Maruks said. “We will press the attack. If need be, the dropships can get us back up to rendezvous before departing the system. If worse comes to worst, we will find a way to shelter in place and defend our position until a ship can get through to us.”
If a ship ever gets through. Mor knew that Maruks was well aware of the odds. But, true to the Code and what it meant to be a Caractacan Brother, the Brother Legate would not flinch in the face of it.
Death, after all, came to every man eventually.
Mor composed himself, even though no one could see his expression behind his helmet’s faceplate. He would not show fear in the face of the enemy, not on his own command deck.
He knew full well that the odds weren’t good. And more of that creeping doubt and dread that had haunted him ever since Valdek and the glimpse they’d gotten of the Sparat system was still lurking in his mind. But with Erekan and his men down there, knowing that his friend was going to throw himself at the enemy until they killed him, or he accomplished his mission atop a mountain of bodies, Mor didn’t dare do anything else.
The Code was strict. Duty called.
His hands moved on the control pads in his armrests, and the Dauntless’s engines throttled up, the dull rumble turning into a howling roar, transmitted through the ship’s very bones. Weight increased as the ship rose above the blackened plain, the acceleration harder than originally planned. If they’d been moving into firing positions, hovering above the caldera where the ground Centuries had pinpointed the enemy, they could have lifted at less than half a G. But they were heading for space.
