by Peter Nealen
The drives growling at the base of his spine, the G forces shoving him down into his acceleration couch, Mor tipped the ship’s nose toward the horizon where the caldera loomed. Even as he did so, the Dauntless and her sister ships rising on tongues of bluish flame, the blasted landscape of the stricken world falling away below them, the enemy starship was already coming into view, even though targeting was still iffy.
“Carne?” he grunted.
“Working on it,” Carne replied. “It’s going to have to be lasers and powerguns. Our troops are too close for anything else.”
“Then use lasers and powerguns. We’re only going to get one shot.”
Weapons fire was already starting to reach up for them, the brilliant streaks of powergun bolts flickering between ground and space. But the enemy fire was mostly wild, and as they rose higher and started to get visual scanning on the Unity’s position, the reason why became more evident.
Tank cannons were hammering at the grounded starship and the surviving crawlers from the rim of the caldera, and the enemy gunners were evidently divided between trying to shoot at the Brotherhood ships and at the tanks. Costigan clearly wasn’t playing games. He was keeping his vehicles moving, firing once or twice before quickly shifting to a new position.
But there was only so much that distraction and jamming could do when the targets were ships the size of buildings, rising into the sky on brilliant plumes of fusion fire.
A searing bolt of coherent copper plasma passed so close to the Dauntless’s hull that alarms screeched in protest at the heat. “Damage report?” Mor snapped. Every doubt, every fear was now submerged in the moment-to-moment business of flying and surviving.
“Minor damage to hull plating in Section Twenty,” the damage control officer replied. “No breach. All systems still showing green.”
“The Vindicator has taken a hit,” Fry rapped out. “Severe damage to their ventral missile cells.” He paused, listening, even as the data scrolled up in the holo tank. “They are still combat capable.”
“Carne,” Mor called out, “now would be a good time.”
“Firing,” was all the weapons officer said.
The lasers were soundless, even through the hull, but the powergun batteries, their turrets extended on long booms that telescoped out from the ship’s flanks, thumped heavily. Blue-white bolts momentarily connected the rising starship with the ground.
“Two possible hits,” Carne reported, frustration evident in his voice. “Precise targeting isn’t going well, not with the level of noise down there.” The powergun turrets fired again, the faint thuds of the discharges rumbling through the Dauntless’s hull. Answering fire snapped up at them, and there was a sudden, faint bang, followed by red flashing warnings in the holo tank.
“We just lost Number Three turret,” Carne reported, before Damage Control could. “We might have taken out one of their powergun turrets. But I don’t dare fire any more, not at this distance, and with the Brothers on the ground getting that close.”
“Hopefully we bought them some time,” Mor said, turning his attention skyward and feeding more power to the drives. “Best we can do for the moment. Time to worry about that fleet.”
He didn’t like leaving it at that. But there weren’t any good choices available to them.
He kept an eye on the holo tank’s display of the Unity positions on the ground as the four Brotherhood ships climbed away from Mzin’s World, hoping that maybe, between the four of them, they’d done some damage. It looked like they had, but not enough. The display was fuzzy and kept jumping from the radiation, but it was clear enough in visual that there was still a lot of powergun fire being exchanged down there.
But the incoming ships were going to simply blast everything on the surface to paste if they didn’t stop them.
As they got away from Mzin’s World and the seething radiation coming off the surface, the picture got a little clearer. He studied the formations of symbols in the tank, and started to frown.
There were close to a hundred ships racing toward the planet, mostly clustered behind more of the big, deployable radiation shields. From what little the scanners could make out, there were at least three of the bigger, five-sided command ships, among a lot of the smaller, standard-pattern cruisers. There was no sign of the massive dreadnaught they’d faced over Valdek.
But there was something strange about their deployment pattern. “Herald of Justice, Dauntless,” he called. “Does it look like they’re deploying in an assault formation to you?”
“No, it doesn’t,” Titus said pensively. “At least, not quite. They’re clearly aware of us, but they’re not focusing in on the Alliance fleet the way you’d expect. It’s almost as if…”
“As if they’re running from something.” Mor finished. “Pride of Valdek, Dauntless.”
Horvaset’s voice was scratchy and staticky over the roar of background radiation. “We see it too, Dauntless,” she said. “Either they’re running from something, or they’re waiting on reinforcements.”
“What reinforcements do they need?” a sefkhit voice put in. The image of one of the Vukh-Rutii captains, Votan Boral Kherokh, appeared in the holo tank. “They already have us outnumbered.”
“The Unity does not seem to be content with ‘outnumbered,’ Captain,” Hwung Tsi replied. “Not if they can manage ‘overwhelmed.’”
“There’s still something off about this,” Horvaset said. “Maintain formation and be prepared for tachyonic maneuvers. We may not be able to stay in the vicinity of the planet.”
“Fry?” Mor asked. “How long until we can engage?”
“With the amount of noise in this system, another three minutes,” Fry replied. “The Vukh-Rutii ships have moved out to the edge of the planet’s umbra, and should be able to open fire within another ninety seconds.” In truth, they could open fire at any time, but when the combination of distance, countermeasures, and electromagnetic noise made the targets’ probability cones too large, it became counterproductive past a certain distance. All firing would do would be to help pinpoint their positions and possible vectors to enemy targeters.
Fry had barely finished speaking when new, amber symbols suddenly appeared in the holo tank, another three light-minutes behind the incoming Unity fleet. “New contacts! Five of them, coming in on the same vector as the Unity fleet.”
The data was fuzzy and unclear, even as the Dauntless began closing the distance, going inertialess as she got clear of Mzin’s World. The fire from below had all but ceased.
“They’re big, whatever they are,” Fry said slowly. “At least five times the tonnage of the command ships.”
Mor knew what he was thinking. The image of that massive metal ziggurat, descending on Valdek on sullen tails of red flame, leapt to mind. The one had been nearly untouchable, shrugging off even a planetary fortress’s particle beam cannons. To face five of those behemoths…
“Look at the Unity ships,” Carne said suddenly. “I don’t think they’re on the same side.”
Indeed, the Unity fleet was redeploying rapidly, and their formation appeared to be focused on defending against the incoming monsters.
“All Alliance ships, this is Rehenek,” the young man’s voice came over the net. “We don’t know who the newcomers are, but if the Unity is their enemy, then they might be our friends. Stay within the planet’s umbra as much as possible and watch your fire; until we know who the new arrivals are, I don’t want to fire on them, even accidentally. Focus on the Unity ships. Let’s be the hammer to the newcomers’ anvil.”
Acknowledgements chorused over the common command net. And then drives were flaring in the shadow of Mzin’s World, as the Alliance task force began jockeying for position to meet the oncoming Unity forces.
Far out in the distance, against the gossamer red and purple of the nebula, powergun fire was starting to flicker between the Unity ships and the hulking masses of the incoming unidentified objects. Battle had already been joined.
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Chapter Twenty-One
Scalas dropped to a knee in an impact crater, his powergun already against the shoulder stop on his pauldron, tracking toward the nearest clone, a faceless, doll-like figure only a few dozen meters away. He knew that cone-bore rounds were speeding past him like a metal hailstorm, but in the silence of the vacuum, there was no sign of it aside from the dim muzzle flashes all along the clone troops’ front and the sparks and puffs of impacts against the rocky ground.
Even as he opened fire, pulsing blinding powergun discharges across the line of identical, swarming troops ahead of him, an armored figure dashed past him only to be struck by a trio of hypervelocity bullets. The Brother’s armor stopped two of them. The third went through his vision slit, shattering the polycarbonate and smacking through his skull. His helmet snapped back and he fell heavily, his armor bouncing off the rocks as he hit.
But even as his Brother fell, Scalas was reaping a similar grisly harvest. Each bolt found a target in that swarming, writhing mass of humanity. A domed helmet burst into glowing shards, taking the skull beneath with it. A molten hole was punched through an armored vest, obliterating the clone’s heart. Another blasted an arm off.
The clones’ equipment had always been cheap, in the few instances that the Brothers had been able to examine it. It made some sense if they were to be mass-produced cannon fodder, which was the way they were utilized. But even high-end armor could hardly stand up to a direct hit from a powergun bolt.
It was an eerie firefight. Dozens, hundreds of men were dying in complete silence. Those who had a moment to scream in agony did it alone, the sound trapped inside their helmets. Powergun bolts, that thundered in an atmosphere, were simply silent lines of sun-bright destruction in the shadow of Mzin’s World’s night.
Heavier charges were flashing overhead, as Costigan’s tanks continued their deadly duel with the starship’s gunners. The fire from the caldera’s rim seemed to have tapered off slightly; if Scalas could have spared his attention from the fight in front of him, he might have noticed that that had to mean more of Costigan’s tanks having succumbed to Unity fire.
Cone bore rounds chipped grit off the rocks in front of him as the clones intensified their own fire, forcing him back even as a round skipped off his pauldron. All around him, the assault was slowing and stopping, as the Brothers were forced into cover by the sheer volume of flying metal that the clones were hurling at them.
Directly to his left, one of his support gunners threw himself flat as a projectile smacked off his armor, with a noticeable explosion of chipped metal and synthetic. The Brother scrambled up to the lip of the crater and laid his MT-41 on its bipods before unleashing a storm of discharges into the crowd ahead of them. Clones fell by the dozens, but there were more behind them, clambering over the dead, firing their blocky rifles from the hip as they came.
Even as he continued firing from his own little pocket of cover, the barrel of his powergun beginning to glow faintly red in the darkness, Scalas could see what was happening. There was no running into that blizzard of fire, not with any hope of survival. Once again, the Unity’s callous disregard for its men’s lives was proving to have a certain brutal quality all its own. The assault was as effectively stopped as if it had never begun.
And that meant that it was only a matter of time before the Brothers were surrounded and annihilated.
He had seen the ships lifting, and heard some scraps of the comm traffic. He knew that they were alone. So did the rest of his Century. Only years of discipline and the Brotherhood’s adherence to courage in the face of certain death kept them focused, driving forward into the enemy, even as the claws of despair had to be scrabbling at many a Brother’s mind.
Kahane scrambled over the broken ground, projectiles kicking up grit and rock chips around him, and threw himself down next to Scalas.
“Is there any end to them?” he asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” Scalas said. He returned his attention to his powergun, blasting another rapid series of shots at the oncoming clones, the discharges so close together that they looked like sheet lightning. Clones dropped where they struck.
“We can’t stay pinned down here,” he barked. “They’re going to overwhelm us in the next few minutes if we don’t do something.”
“What?” Kahane asked. It was especially weird that none of them needed to raise their voices to communicate. The strange silence of the void eliminated many of the usual cues of combat. “There are only so many we can kill with powerguns, and there’s no atmosphere to propagate blast waves, so HV missiles and grenades aren’t going to be as effective as we’d probably like.”
Scalas was already thinking about it, and unfortunately, he didn’t have an answer. But he knew that hunkering down in the craters until their ammunition ran out wasn’t an option.
Risking a glance to right and left, lifting his helmeted head just far enough to see over the crater’s rim, he could tell that Rokoff’s Century was similarly beleaguered, though not to the same extent as his. Century XXXII was closest to the enemy ship, and closest to the clones’ exit point.
That got his attention. The clones swarming at them weren’t coming around the grounded command ship from the battle with the Fortunians. They were coming up out of the ground. And while it was hard to see, he hadn’t spotted another lift before having been driven to ground by the oncoming horde.
To his right, the MT-41 suddenly ceased fire. A glance over showed the gunner, Geroges by the looks of it, slumped over the weapon, rapidly crystalizing atmosphere leaking from a hole in his helmet.
Scalas scrambled over to him, heaved the corpse off the support powergun, and got it back into action quickly, raking the oncoming enemy troops with incandescent bolts. But they had gained a precious dozen meters in the time that the MT-41 had been down.
“Costigan, Scalas,” he called, his voice rasping in his own ears. “I need fire on the lift that came up next to the starship, and I need it thirty seconds ago.”
“On it,” Costigan replied. “Give me a second; we’re still playing hide-and-seek with the ship’s gunners. I’ve knocked out two of their turrets, but the others are being tricky.”
In truth, it seemed to take much longer than that, though it was probably only a few heartbeats before a brilliant lance of coherent, ionized copper, so bright that it made the infantry Brothers’ 1cm discharges seem like mere sparks, stabbed down at the opened dome that was the top of the Unity’s personnel lift. Glowing metal and rock went flying, and for a brief moment, the clone counterassault faltered, as it was caught between red-hot fragments from behind and powergun fire from in front.
Scalas knew from bitter experience that it wouldn’t be enough to break them. Nothing broke the Unity’s clones but death. He didn’t know what kind of indoctrination they had been subjected to, but it was clearly effective.
But all he needed was an opening. It could well be that he died anyway in the next few moments. He crossed himself briefly, lifted the MT-41 and Geroges’ ammunition bandolier off the ground, got his feet under him, and lunged forward.
A powergun was much easier to control than a hard-shot weapon like the clones’ cone-bore rifles. And the MT-41s had been carefully balanced to increase that control, even when firing on the move.
Scalas was not going for accuracy, but volume of fire. Even so, as he charged forward, his legs pumping, quickly breaking into a dead run within the first few strides, he had the 1.5cm support powergun in his shoulder, keeping the scything bursts of ionized copper bolts punching into clones at chest height, even if he wasn’t really aiming.
There comes a point when enough training and practice have made a man preternaturally skilled, without thinking about it. Scalas had reached that point concerning marksmanship a long way back.
He wasn’t looking to his right or left. He was concentrating on shooting and running. He was charging into certain death, and he knew it. But there was no other way.
In a real way,
he was using the Unity’s own tactics against them. But it was only one of a multitude of bad choices available.
His breath was rasping in his ears, his throat getting raw as his legs burned. It had been a hard run to get into position to launch the assault, and combat takes it out of a man all on its own. His armor was upping the oxygen mix, but his lungs still burned and his heart pounded as he ran.
Six clones went down in front of him in only a handful of seconds, transfixed by sun-hot bolts that punched through torsos, helmets, and limbs. And then he was at the front, storming over fallen bodies, still pouring fire into the thinning mob ahead of him.
To his considerable surprise, the clones were starting to scatter in front of him. The volume of cone-bore fire coming at him was dropping, as some of the clones stared in shock. Those that weren’t immediately gunned down started trying to get out of the way, though they quickly got tangled up with their fellows behind them, who were soon either dying or staring in shock at the insane charge.
It was as if they couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing. They would willingly throw themselves at an enemy, en masse, until either they or the enemy were dead, but this was something new, something their indoctrination had not prepared them for. The shock effect of their swarming hordes was supposed to pin their enemies in place. They were confused, and Scalas was taking full advantage of it.
More clones were falling around him, but he hardly noticed. He was focused on getting through and getting to that lift.
A clone suddenly lunged at him from the side, reaching for his powergun. The Unity soldier’s gloves burned away as he grabbed the muzzle, but he held on, trying to drag the weapon down. Even as the two of them struggled, cone-bore rounds punched into the clone’s body and struck Scalas’s armor with painful impacts.
The clone’s faceplate was suddenly nearly pressed against Scalas’s helmet. He got a brief glimpse of terrified eyes through a mist of blood against the inside of the clone’s visor, and then he was kicking the dead man off his weapon and bringing it back to bear, sweeping the muzzle across the swarming enemy soldiers as he held down the trigger. Clones died in droves.
