by Peter Nealen
“Brothers!” Maruks bellowed, coming out from cover behind a massive block of support machinery. “On me!”
Scalas was only strides behind him, and caught up easily, sprinting toward the gantry. The storm of powergun fire had driven the clones back from the launch bay, and the Brothers had a clear fifty meters to cross to get to the base of the skeletal structure.
It took seconds to reach it. There was no lift; steel grate steps led up the seventy-five meters to the launch bay. Scalas, Cobb, and Kahane had by then pushed ahead of Maruks, and started taking the steps two at a time. They had to climb quickly; their covering fire couldn’t last forever. Scalas’s Century especially had already expended a lot of powergun charges so far.
The blood was pounding in his veins, the breath was rasping in his throat, and his legs were burning by the time Scalas was halfway up the steps. Charging up seventy-five meters worth of stairs in one G was a challenge, even for a man as fit as a Caractacan Brother.
The whole way up, he was tensed, his shoulders hunched inside his armor, expecting some suicidally brave clone to appear above and drop a bandolier of grenades on their heads at any moment, getting one last blow in for the Galactic Unity and its “Visionary Leader” before he was blasted to pieces by the withering storm of powergun fire.
But he reached the last landing, a lanky man from Cobb’s squad named Anspach right on his heels, without the clones reappearing and taking advantage of the deathtrap that was the gantry’s stairwell. Even as he topped the landing, dashing to the nearest cover in the wide-open launch bay, he barked, “Shift fire!” and the actinic lightning from below ceased.
The bay was packed with angular transatmospheric fighters with forward swept wings, held in cradles along the overhead, blunt, blocky utility shuttles, and the pyramidal Unity dropships. The ship appeared to be fully equipped for combat, even on this far out-of-the-way post.
The Brothers fanned out from the gantry, finding cover behind supply dollies and the landing craft themselves. Powergun muzzles searched the bay, brightly lit by bluish spotlights in the overhead and the bulkheads.
Aside from a few charred corpses lying near the lip of the bay, where clones had fallen short instead of dropping out of the opening, the bay appeared to be deserted.
“Brother Legate?” Scalas murmured, as Maruks took a knee behind a shuttle next to him.
“Rokoff is right behind us,” Maruks said. “He will clear the bay. I want the command deck secured.” He glanced around the strangely empty bay. “I have an evil feeling about this sudden collapse of resistance.”
“So do I, sir,” Scalas replied. This felt wrong. The clones had gotten confused and uncoordinated under the impact of his sudden charge after Costigan had blown the top off the lift behind them, but this was different. This felt like a trap.
“Century XXXII,” he called, “advance by squads. Our target is the command deck. Engage as needed, but don’t get bogged down.”
Suiting actions to words, he got to his feet and dashed to the next shuttle down the row. Anspach was right with him, and most of Cobb’s squad followed suit, moving up, powergun muzzles pivoting to try to cover every angle, every adjacent space.
They held their position while Kahane’s squad moved up one row over, then they advanced again in concert with Solanus’s squad.
The Brothers moved through the bay with deadly purpose, each man finding his next point of cover and sprinting for it, his powergun up and ready, his head on a swivel. Pairs of Brothers supported each other, covering for each advance, and entire squads held their positions to cover the other squads’ movements.
It was careful and deliberate, and nevertheless executed with a practiced speed that had awed and devastated many an enemy.
Scalas stayed with Cobb’s squad, never more than a few meters from Cobb himself. Indicators in his visor showed him where each squad was, even as the chameleonic coatings did their job and turned the Brothers’ armor into mottled gray and white to blend in with the bay and the spacecraft moored inside it.
They reached the personnel lifts, not far from where Scalas had guessed they would be, based on the boarding at Ktatra, in minutes. Not a shot had been fired. No one had spotted a live clone.
“This is a trap,” Cobb muttered over the private command net. “There is no way we killed all of them.”
“They’ve never set an ambush before,” Solanus said. “They always just threw their men at us.”
“There’s a first time for everything,” Cobb replied grimly. “Maybe the smart clone commander got sent to the gulag, which happened to be here.”
“Just keep your eyes open and your heads on a swivel,” Scalas said as Porthoi started the airlock cycle for the lift. “Whatever they have planned, we will deal with it.”
Or we will die. That part didn’t need to be said.
The lift doors slid open, the vibration transmitted through his boots, and he trained his powergun on the widening gap, more than half expecting a barrage of cone-bore fire to pour out of it. But the lift was empty.
Cobb is right. We’re being drawn in. There were clone soldiers aboard this ship. The support by fire element can’t have killed all of them.
But he stepped into the lift, flanked by the bulk of Cobb’s squad, and the doors slid shut. A moment later, air started to hiss into the compartment, and his helmet told him that it was just air, rather than the poison gas he had half expected. Not that gassing them would have done the Unity any good; the Brothers’ armor was proof against most chemical, biological, and radioisotope weapons.
“I can’t believe it,” Porthoi said. He was staring at the control panel. “They haven’t even locked down the lift.”
That was the last straw. Scalas looked up at the overhead. “We’re not taking the lift,” he said. “I refuse to believe that they would be that stupid, so therefore they hope that we’ll use it. I’m sure they will be waiting when the doors open.” He pointed. “Get that hatch open. We’ll climb.” He looked around the compartment. “Domoska, you can read some Palawese. Does it say which level the command deck is on?”
Domoska stepped forward. He was a relatively new Brother; he had joined Cobb’s squad as one of the many novices assigned to fill slots after the devastating losses on Valdek. Medium height and build, he was unremarkable in most ways. But he had studied some of the enemy’s language.
“Here,” he said, pointing. “It looks like it’s…three levels above us.”
“Nine meters,” Cobb said. “Not so bad a climb.”
Scalas just nodded as Mesyats and Xanar lifted Folkvord to open the hatch. He ignored the ache in his muscles and the burn in his lungs. Valdek had been worse.
In moments, Mesyats and Xanar had boosted Folkvord and three more men through the hatch. Scalas stepped up to go next; he needed to be up there before they started climbing.
The hatch was narrow; it had clearly never been designed for a man in full combat armor to clamber through it. He made it, but nearly tore some of his equipment pouches off in the process, and scraped his sustainment pack and breastplate on the coaming. Then he was in the shaft, looking up above them, his powergun pointing wherever his eyes went.
The shaft ran most of the way up the structure of the ship, with hatches dimly illuminated by glowstrips and dull emergency worklights lining the twin ladders that ran up on either side of the hatches.
“Rig for climbing,” he said. As long as there was ferrous metal in the structure, the Brothers could climb it, with a combination of mag boots and deployable mag pads in their gauntlets. It would beat trusting the ladders, especially if the Unity forces had anticipated their use.
He genuinely wished that they had more cutting charges; he didn’t want to go through the hatches into a potential ambush. But they would have to make do.
He led the way, flanked by Folkvord and Beck. Their boots and gauntlets clanked against the hull. After the eerie silence of the fight in vacuum outside, the noise sounded deafeningly loud
, and it seemed inevitable that the enemy would hear them coming and be waiting, weapons trained on the lift doors.
Even given the relative difficulty of climbing that way, they were at the base of the third hatch up within a minute. Muttering a brief prayer to God and St. George, Scalas slung his powergun, Folkvord and Beck keeping their own weapons trained on the hatch from below and beside him, and reached for the seam in the doors.
He had almost expected them to be sealed, but he got his armored fingers into the seam and pulled. The doors resisted, but came apart nevertheless.
Before any of them cleared the lip of the doors, Cobb, clinging to the wall of the shaft just below Anspach, flipped a stun grenade through the opening.
Stun grenades had been a standard part of close quarters battle for millennia. They had been refined somewhat since the first pyrotechnic devices, however. This one was a two-stage device, that emitted a blast of electromagnetic jamming along with a flash and a deafening bang, then vomited out a conductive mist that amplified the jamming. It took advanced targeting systems to see through that murk, and so far, the Unity had not demonstrated such capabilities.
Even if they had, the disruption would still help.
Folkvord and Beck threw themselves through the hatch, and Scalas followed as fast as he could get his powergun back in his hand. It wasn’t the most graceful entry he’d ever made, but he pushed off with his magnetized boots, holding onto the lip of the door with his off hand, and shoved himself up and onto the deck.
The mist was clearing as he clambered through the open hatchway, though it still dazzlingly amplified the flashes of powergun bolts. He was able to see enough to watch Folkvord blast a figure in faceted combat armor through the torso, following it up with a shot to the helmet, while Beck shot another one that was crouched behind an acceleration couch.
“Stop!” an amplified voice speaking accented Trade Cant bellowed. “Cease fire!”
Scalas almost ignored it. His powergun was trained on the figure in gray armor standing by what had to be the commander’s chair, holding a small box in its hand, his finger resting lightly on the BR-18’s trigger. But he had to be sure before he fired. He would not kill a man who was surrendering.
He’d certainly keep an eye on him, and be ready to kill him in a heartbeat if the surrender turned out to be a ploy, but the Code was strict about handling noncombatants.
“I know who you are,” the man in armor said. “And I pulled back my elite guard to make sure that you got this far. Surrender, or I will activate this facility’s self-destruct.” He held up the box, and even though his face was hidden by his flat faceplate, Scalas imagined he could hear the man’s triumphant leer. “I should have done so already, but the chance to capture a unit of Caractacan Brothers for the Visionary Leader to interrogate, and maybe turn, was too good to pass up.”
“You are a fool,” Scalas told him. His sights were centered on that faceplate, right about where the bridge of the man’s nose would be.
“I know you have a reputation,” the Unity commander, whom Scalas was strongly beginning to suspect was not a clone, said. “But reputations are always exaggerated. I am sure that the fact that we are sitting atop fifty megatons of thermonuclear charges will make you see reason.”
“What is it with fanatics and destroying themselves with nukes?” Cobb muttered from behind Scalas.
The Unity commander ignored him. “The Inuans ran from this place like vermin,” he said, “but there was always the possibility that we might have to deny it to them if they returned in enough force. The Visionary Leader sees all contingencies, you know.”
“He didn’t see this one,” Scalas said. “Put down the detonator or die.”
“You don’t understand…” the Unity commander started to say, and Scalas blew his head off.
The shockwave thumped the entire command deck, and the remains of helmet and skull spattered on the bulkhead behind the commander. His armored body crumpled, the detonator falling from a suddenly nerveless hand to the deck.
Cobb crossed the distance in two strides, snatching up the control box. He examined it briefly, then tossed it to Scalas. “It was armed, but there doesn’t appear to be a dead-man switch,” he said.
“I’m sure we’d all be incandescent vapor already if there was,” Scalas said as he caught it in one hand. He pointed to the consoles. “Find the fire control. If we have the firing arcs, I want those clones cleared off the Fortunians’ backs. And that includes those mining platforms.” The hulking crawlers had held their positions since the ground battle had begun, and the Brothers had moved too quickly for them to have rolled into a position to counter the assault.
He glanced at the flatscreen displays that lined the bulkheads in place of a holo tank. The picture wasn’t terribly clear, but the symbols indicating the Unity reinforcements were obvious enough, coming toward the planet. There were a lot more of them than there were Alliance ships. And he had no idea what those big contacts were.
It didn’t matter. They would get the rest of the Brothers and the Fortunians aboard, and then, if need be, he would talk Brother Legate Maruks into taking the ship up to join the fight. He knew something of spaceflight operations, though he was nowhere near Mor’s skill. But if he was to die, he would die fighting.
And every Brother on that blasted world would do the same.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Any Caractacan Brothers alive on Mzin’s World, this is the Pride of Valdek.” Rehenek’s voice was scratchy and nearly washed away by static, but the words were intelligible.
Maruks turned to the comm station. It had taken some time, and Domoska’s continual assistance, to get a grasp of the controls and displays, and Scalas was sure that they still didn’t know half of the Unity ship’s capabilities or control scheme. But it was enough, for the moment.
Outside, displayed on the flat screens, powergun fire was still flickering in the night, even as the horizon began to lighten. They had less than two hours left before the pulsar rose. They had to either be underground or away from the planet altogether before that happened. Or else they would all be dead.
It appeared that Scalas’s shot had decapitated the Unity’s command structure on the ground. Absent orders, the remaining clones were still fighting, but the combination of fire from the starship’s powergun turrets, Costigan’s tanks, and the heavy weapons squads on the caldera rim had scattered and smashed their formations. The ground battle was past the critical point; the Fortunians, Soon’s Century, and the heavy weapons squads just had to fight their way to the ship through pockets of still-dangerous but uncoordinated clones, supported by the tanks and the starship’s batteries.
The rolling mining platforms had been quickly neutralized once the Brothers took control of the starship’s weapons.
Maruks took a moment to identify the transmit key. “This is Brother Legate Maruks,” he replied.
“What is your status?” Rehenek asked. Scalas looked up from where he was coordinating with Rokoff on the final sweeps of the starship’s lower decks. The Unity crew seemed to have been mostly made up of clones, who were just as fanatical as their ground-fighting brethren.
He frowned. The tactical displays were still fuzzy and the overall picture of the situation in space was unclear. But he would have thought that Rehenek might have mentioned whether or not the space forces had succeeded. Especially given the odds involved, it seemed strange.
“We have taken losses, but have mostly secured the installation,” Maruks said, speaking clearly and slowly to hopefully make up for the radiation and comms distortion.
“How long would you need to destroy it?” Rehenek asked.
“We would have to finish securing the Unity command ship here on the ground first,” Maruks said, a faint note of uncertainty entering his own voice. “However, the Unity appears to have already had a self-destruct device installed. It would not be difficult to activate it after we lift.”
An alert blinked on the jumping
, fritzing tactical display, and Scalas glanced up at it. Most of the smaller contacts had blurred out or disappeared entirely. But those big ones that had been visible even at great range by the time they had seized the command deck were still coming, and they were nearing planetary orbit. They were massive, and they clearly weren’t Alliance.
“What is the situation in space?” he put in, stepping up to Maruks’s side. The Brother Legate glanced at him quickly, but said nothing. “We can see the larger contacts from down here. How much time do we have?”
There was a long, uncomfortable pause. “For the moment, we have some time,” Rehenek finally said, a touch of reluctance in his voice, as if he didn’t really want to discuss the details. Scalas’s eyes narrowed behind his visor as he looked at Maruks. He couldn’t read the Brother Legate’s expression from inside his own helmet, but something was clearly wrong.
“Whose ships are those?” Scalas asked. “Are they the Unity’s?”
Another pause. “No, they are not,” Rehenek said flatly. “How quickly can you lift and destroy the installation?”
When he did not appear to be forthcoming with further details, Maruks turned from Scalas to address the pickup. “I think you had best explain, General-Regent,” he said. “We are not going to commit to a course of action without understanding the situation.” The faint tinge of warning in his voice communicated the message that he had not said in so many words.
The Brotherhood did not take orders from outsiders.
The sound that came over the comms might have been a sigh, or simply a wave of electronic noise from the nebula and the pulsar. “Mzin’s World’s mines were not originally a Unity installation,” he said impatiently. “A nearby power called the Inuans began exploiting the planet’s resources first. The Unity seized it from them and drove them away. Those asteroid ships nearing the planet are Inuan.”
Maruks glanced at Scalas, who shrugged. They were outside the Avar Sector, and even he didn’t pretend to know about every world and interstellar power within the Sector, let alone outside it. “So, they wish to reclaim it, and yet you would destroy it instead, even though we’ve secured it from the Unity?” he asked.
