by Peter Nealen
“Carne, target that nearest command ship and fire at will,” Mor said. The order was almost unnecessary; the gunnery officer had started his targeting solutions as soon as they had dropped inert.
Bright white flashes blinked in the red-and-purple sky around them, as X-ray laser pods detonated their thermonuclear charges. Invisible, collimated beams of X-rays hammered at their targets with the concentrated energy of tiny suns.
Missiles ignited their drives and blasted away at fifty Gs. And where possible, high-energy lasers flickered and powergun turrets thumped their bolts outward, the distances making what often looked like a line-straight beam connecting weapon and target actually into discreet projectiles, if only for a brief fraction of a second.
Lasers scintillated in clouds of dispersing chaff, bleeding their energy before they could reach their targets. Powergun bolts spent their fury on decoys. Missiles struck defensive “sand” or were targeted by point defense lasers and detonated far from their targets.
But even with the hash of electronic countermeasures and physical defenses, some of the fire was getting through. A missile crashed into the flank of a standard-pattern cruiser, breaking its spine and blasting fragments away from it at lethal velocity. Only luck, and what dispersion the Unity ships could manage while staying behind their radiation shields, kept the ship just a few dozen meters away from succumbing to the same fate.
The targeted command ship suddenly flared brilliantly as an X-ray laser found its mark. Its entire flank erupted in white fire as the equivalent of a ten-megaton blast was vented directly against the hull. The remainder shattered, just before the ship’s reactor lost containment, dwarfing the initial explosion in a dazzling sunburst, that devoured the two standard cruisers on either side.
The Alliance ships were closing fast, and the Unity was shooting back, though their targeting was split between the starships that had suddenly appeared almost on top of them and the hulking asteroid ships behind them. A Dahuan star cruiser just off to the Vindicator’s flank suddenly split down the middle just before shattering into a million pieces, the ship’s violent death sowing shrapnel among her fellows. The Vindicator shuddered, and an amber ring blinked around her in the holo tank.
“Vindicator has taken a hit,” Fry reported. “Multiple hull breaches, severe damage to her number two drive. Possible structural damage, as well.”
Mor grimaced. That was going to make it difficult to arrest the Vindicator’s headlong rush. Even if they got the number two drive all the way back up, if the structural damage was too severe, it could shatter the ship as soon as acceleration was applied.
But that was a worry for another time.
The Alliance fleet plunged into the center of the Unity formation, lashing out at every target within reach. Missiles streaked across vast distances that nevertheless were covered in eyeblinks at that relative velocity. Powergun discharges connected ships with brilliant flickers of hypervelocity plasma.
It was utter chaos for a few moments. The two forces were completely intermingled for several seconds, though traveling on radically different vectors. Carne was unreadable behind his helmet’s faceplate, but his body language was tense and almost frantic. Fry was helping with targeting and engagement. There were simply too many targets, too many threats from all quarters, for one man to handle, no matter how skilled.
A standard-pattern cruiser flashed past, only fifty kilometers away. Briefly, powergun and HEL fire flickered between them. Several resounding bangs echoed through the Dauntless’s hull, and the damage control officer snapped, “Hull breach, section nineteen. Hull breach, missile cell five. Damage to environmental cells in sections twelve and thirteen.” He paused a moment. “Damage contained; we’ll be all right until we get clear.”
If we get clear was never said.
Even as he had been speaking, Carne had been pouring fire at the Unity ship. He had one powergun turret and two laser emitters that he could bring to bear, and he raked the white-painted pyramid with as much destruction as he could in the brief heartbeat as they passed each other. A powergun bolt punched through the enemy ship’s nose, tearing it off with a paroxysm of sublimated metal and plasma, detonating one of its onboard missiles in the process. Two laser beams carved into its drive bells, and when the drive lost containment, a chain reaction suddenly blasted the cruiser apart.
Then it was past and falling rapidly away, obscured by their radiation shield.
A Fortunian mauler, sheltered behind the same radiation shield, took the risk and rotated on its short axes, bringing the big particle cannons to bear on a swarm of four cruisers that were flashing past “above” them. Green lines of coherent particulate radiation slashed across two of them, cutting one in half and sending the other tumbling as hull plating was blasted to gas and plasma. Clustered close together behind their own radiation screen, there was no time or room to maneuver, and the tumbling cruiser slammed into a third, blotting both of them out in an explosion of glowing debris.
And then, as quickly as they had met, the two formations were past each other and moving away at breakneck velocity.
It did not mean the battle was over, however. Carne still had several of the Dauntless’s X-ray laser pods in play, and he spun them around on their axes and fired. At the ends of their booms, the powergun turrets rotated, bringing two of them to bear, and thumped more bolts back at their enemies.
Mor had just seen another standard-pattern cruiser detonate under the assault of three X-ray laser beams when he started the count. “Thirty seconds!”
A lot could still happen in thirty seconds. The mauler that had taken down three cruisers in one shot took a laser hit to the drives, and started to tumble. A Vukh-Rutii ship exploded, impaled by no fewer than a dozen heavy powergun bolts. Missiles were less effective, but some were still arrowing after them.
Then the countdown ended and the entire fleet went tachyonic again, outracing light toward the edge of the system.
It was a ragged, battered task force that dropped inert on the far side of the system, the pulsar once again nearly invisible, nothing but an infinitesimal spark in the distance.
More than one ship was leaking atmosphere, shuddering when the damage unbalanced her thrust when she tried to change vector. Two of the Valdekan ships and one of the Vukh-Rutii battlecruisers would have to be evacuated; there was no way to repair the damage sufficiently to arrest their headlong path out into the nebula in time.
There was no sign of the mauler that had been beside the Dauntless during that frenzied contact. Whether it had simply been blasted apart when trying to escape, or its drives had simply failed, there was no way to know. Her crew was lost either way. If the ship had not exploded, her crew was doomed to death by radiation poisoning. Even if they went back immediately, finding one wounded ship in the vastness of even interplanetary space was a losing proposition.
“Thirty-two percent losses,” Mor murmured, looking at the data as it streamed in, the Dauntless’s sensors catching up after having been effectively blinded by the faster-than-light jump. In truth, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. But it was devastating, nevertheless.
“All ships, this is the Pride of Valdek,” Rehenek called over the fleet comm. “We have taken a beating; there’s no doubt about that. But from the records that our computers are piecing together, we inflicted damage out of proportion to our numbers.
“Our friends are still down there on Mzin’s World,” he continued grimly. “We will not abandon them. If they maintain their current vector, the Unity fleet should not reach the planet for another seventeen hours. Conduct what repairs are possible and stand by for a vector adjustment burn.”
“Some of these ships won’t survive it, repairs or no,” Fry muttered.
“And I’m afraid that the Vindicator might be one of them,” Mor replied. “She got hit pretty hard.”
But necessity was what it was. They could not abandon the fight, not then. Even if the rest of the Alliance ships did, t
he Brotherhood starships would have to go back in there to extract their Brothers. “Damage control,” he called, “let’s get patched up and ready for thrust. And if we can spare anyone, I’m going to move us over to rendezvous with the Vindicator.”
What repairs could be conducted in deep space took longer than hoped for or anticipated. In the end, they couldn’t hope to reverse vectors in time to intercept the Unity ships again before they reached Mzin’s World.
“Then we don’t change vectors,” Karmenov said. His voice sounded hoarse, and no wonder. His ship was battered and scored by enemy fire, seemingly held together in places by spit and sheer determination. “We go tachyonic, run back across the system, adjust our insertion point as needed, and hit them along the same inert vector that we are already following. If anything, it might surprise them; they can’t be expecting us to hit them from the same direction a second time, not after we came out this way. It would make sense to simply reverse vectors and come back at them.”
“It’s not as if they have displayed a great deal of military ingenuity so far,” Hwung-Tsi put in. “They are used to brute force and little else.”
“I don’t have a better idea,” Horvaset admitted. She sounded worse than Karmenov; exhausted and worn down. Mor could imagine why, as little as he knew her. She had survived to escape the Unity’s initial invasion of the Valdek system, if only to return with the Brotherhood to escape again, aboard the Pride of Valdek. She had seen utter carnage visited on friendly forces by the Unity’s vast numbers too many times already.
“That is our attack profile then,” Rehenek declared. “We launch in ten minutes.”
They dropped inert, clustered behind the remaining radiation screens, barely two light-minutes from the point the Unity fleet was projected to have reached.
Mor felt battered and weary, his mouth as dry as a desert. But he blinked against the ache in his eyes and watched the holo tank like a hawk as it slowly filled in the details of the space around Mzin’s World.
His eyes widened as he took it in. Fry uttered what might have been an awestruck curse.
The rest of the Unity fleet was little more than debris and dead hulks. The asteroid ships were passing through the middle of the detritus, shouldering it aside like raindrops.
Whoever was flying those ships had finished the job for them. Now there was only one question:
Who were they?
Chapter Twenty-Three
Scalas pushed down the tunnel, blistering bolts of powergun fire flashing past him on either side. The clones were still pouring into the tunnel, but their numbers seemed to finally be dwindling, especially as they were cut down as quickly as they appeared.
He smoothly changed cartridge drums as he dashed ahead to the next hatchway. A clone soldier suddenly appeared as he neared the threshold, and the shrouded muzzle of his powergun was only a handspan away from the clone’s faceplate as he pulled the trigger. The clone’s helmet fairly exploded, taking his head with it.
He didn’t turn down the passage, but sent a torrent of 1.5cm bolts down it as he passed. The Brothers on the ground were simply too few to systematically clear the entire place. He was aiming for the entry to that starship. His target was her command deck. With control of the starship, he might be able to force a surrender and end this. He was by no means certain that any such thing would happen; the Unity forces had yet to display that sort of reasonable behavior. But he had to try.
It hadn’t been part of the plan. He was adjusting the plan as he went. Maruks hadn’t ordered him back yet; he could dress him down later. They had to keep moving, keep taking advantage of the shock of their assault.
The passage wasn’t that long, though it was noticeably larger than would be normal for a human installation. Maybe it had been carved for heavy equipment to pass through.
The doors at the end of the corridor were massive. They stood five meters tall and another six wide. They were also sealed tight.
More of the Brothers were flooding into the corridor behind him. MT-41 gunners had set up on the cross-passages, and were cutting down any clones trying to regain the main corridor. Blockaded against the rock walls, the gunners were practically untouchable, and the clones that kept throwing themselves at them hardly had a chance to bring their own weapons to bear.
Maruks appeared, stumping down the corridor, pausing just long enough to ensure that he wasn’t about to run into a stray burst of cone-bore fire, then crossed the side passages to join Scalas, Cobb, and Solanus at the portal.
“This might account for the collapse of their resistance,” Rokoff said. “If they’re trying to seal off the ship…”
“Then we burn through it,” Maruks said. “I hope we brought breaching charges?”
“We have two heavy cutter charges, Brother Legate,” Solanus said quickly.
“Get them up here,” Scalas instructed, hoping that the men carrying them had not fallen in the chaos of the assault. He hadn’t had time to conduct head counts yet.
“Gorvun, Heller!” Solanus barked out over the comms. There was a brief pause, and then two armored figures, one short and slight, the other towering and bulky, loomed out of the dark, pulling the flexible tube charges off their backs.
“What did you do to get extra gear duty, Gorvun?” Scalas asked as the smaller man started setting the charge against the door.
“I asked for it, Centurion,” Gorvun drawled as he hastily but skillfully started slapping the explosives against the door. “I’ve got less mass to pack around, so I can be more useful than some of these meat mountains in the squad.”
The brief moment of levity was a welcome relief after the frenetic battle of the last few minutes, but none of the Brothers were quite able to laugh. Scalas found he was still too keyed up to even grin behind his faceplate.
“Ready,” Heller snapped.
“Ready,” Gorvun echoed. The cutting charges had been set in a rough arch around the center of the doors, twin detonators inserted on either side.
“Stand by,” Maruks growled. The Brothers fell back toward the walls and the side passages, powerguns trained on the doors. The cutting charges were supposed to be directional, but some splashback was not unknown.
A gauntleted hand tapped Scalas on the arm, just before the charges blew. It was Granzow, holding out his BR-18. “I’ll take the MT-41, Centurion,” he said. “This will be easier to use shipboard.”
Scalas nodded and took the proffered powergun. He handed off the bandolier of reloads with the MT-41, even as the cutting charges flared white and blasted a chunk of thick steel, nearly as tall as a man and twice as wide, back into the passage beyond.
If he hadn’t known Granzow, Scalas might have taken the offer as an attempt to stay back out of the line of fire. But Granzow wouldn’t shrink from battle; he’d proven himself many times under Scalas’s command. He was offering his powergun and staying back to cover down on the side passages because he knew that his Centurion was going in at the head of the main assault, no matter what, and so he had thought to offer a more suitable weapon, even at the cost of his own honor, staying back on security.
Hefting the BR-18, he bid Granzow farewell with a hard clap on the shoulder pauldron and drove toward the breach. He paused just long enough to see that Cobb was with him, and then he was going through, barely avoiding brushing the still-glowing edges.
He went left, and Cobb went right, moving rapidly away from the breach, scanning with eyes and powergun muzzles around and above them as more armored Brothers flowed into the space beyond the doors.
It was a loading bay of some sort, or so it appeared. A massive cavern, easily fifty meters high, had been carved into the side of what appeared to have been one of the voids created when the hardening, molten metal and rock of the planet’s crust had trapped a gas pocket. Cargo containers and support machinery for the massive, elevated landing pad packed most of the open space.
The pad itself was less than seventy-five meters away, a titanic white metal moun
tain squatting on landing jacks easily three meters across atop it. A spidery gantry led up to the launch and recovery bay halfway up the towering slope of the ship’s hull.
There was a flicker of movement at the top of the gantry, and a cone-bore shot smacked sparks off the cargo container near Scalas. Having seen that the immediate section of the cavern in front of him was clear, he was already swinging his own muzzle toward that gantry. He had bare centimeters left to twitch the muzzle toward the source of the shot and fire.
A bright line of ionized copper briefly connected him with the tiny figure of a clone soldier standing at the top of the gantry. The clone’s limp body fell forward, striking the side of the starship’s hull and sliding down to fall out of sight below the lip of the landing pad.
More bolts stabbed up at the launch bay as the Brothers scattered to covered positions behind the cargo containers and the less-volatile-looking machinery. Some had definite targets, and more clone soldiers followed their comrade in death. Others were simply suppressing the enemy as best they could. The clones had an elevated position, and the advantage that went along with it.
“Granzow, Fieran!” Scalas barked over the comm. “Get those MT-41s in here!”
Granzow pushed his way through the breach and dashed to a heavy crate to take cover before looking around and finding Scalas. The bandolier of heavy powergun charges was slapping against his breastplate as he ran across the rough stone floor and skidded to a kneeling position behind the cargo container where Scalas and Bor had taken cover.
“Get me some covering fire on that launch and recovery bay,” Scalas ordered, pointing. “I don’t want to get shot to pieces going up that gantry.”
Granzow just nodded, hefting the thick support powergun to lay it over the top of the container. Silent flashes stormed at the side of the ship, quickly joined by more as Fieran followed suit from off to the right.
