The Fall of Valdek: A Military Sci-Fi Series (The Unity Wars Book 1) Read online

  THE FALL OF VALDEK

  ©2021 PETER NEALEN

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  Contents

  ALSO IN SERIES

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Thank you for reading The Fall of Valdek

  ALSO IN SERIES

  More In Sci-Fi

  About the Author

  ALSO IN SERIES

  1. THE FALL OF VALDEK

  2. THE DEFENSE OF PROVENIA

  3. THE ALLIANCE RISES

  1

  “The data from the first scans is coming in, Centurion,” Captain Brecan Mor reported over the Dauntless’s intercom. “The yeheri ‘task force’ is in orbit above the second moon of Iabreton, as expected. Initial assessments have tentatively identified two battlecruisers, two frigates, and what appears to be a heavy transport.”

  Centurion Erekan Scalas was strapped into his acceleration couch aboard the Dauntless’s lead dropship, roughly amidships and several decks below the command deck where Captain Mor was watching the starship’s holo-tank from a not dissimilar position. Every Caractacan Brother aboard the starship was armored, sealed, and strapped in. Anything else would be tantamount to suicide. They were about to go into combat.

  He did some quick math in his head. That many ships could mean that there was as much as a regiment of yeheri fighters on the ground. After all, they’d already had some time to deploy.

  “How far out are we?” he asked.

  “Still sixty-two light-minutes,” Mor replied. Which meant that the information was likely outdated. The Dauntless was still fully inertialess, though the Bergenholm fields had been turned down to the point that she was no longer tachyonic. The drive was pointed toward the gas giant Iabreton, the system’s sole major body, firing just hard enough to gradually slow the ship. None of the Brotherhood aboard could feel it; they would have to go fully inert for the acceleration to register, and that wouldn’t happen until they were far closer to their target.

  Scalas looked around the interior of the dropship. The First Squad of Century XXXII of the Caractacan Brotherhood, twenty consummate soldiers encased in the best armor that human ingenuity could produce, was strapped into the cramped circle of the hold. They were faceless behind their helmets’ vision slits, looking like little more than gray-green automatons, dull, matte armor festooned with ammunition packs, comm antennas, and other specialized gear. Weapons were secured in racks alongside their acceleration couches.

  “Two battlecruisers, two frigates, and possibly one heavy transport,” he relayed to the rest of the squad, and to the squad sergeants in their separate dropships, with the rest of the century. “That means we could be facing up to a regiment in strength on the ground.”

  There were no complaints, no exclamations, no chest-thumping displays of bravado. There were some nods of faceless helmets. Scalas was not a man given to much emotion, but he felt a surge of pride and satisfaction at the calm way his hundred men received the news that they would probably be terribly outnumbered. He might not be able to see their faces, but he knew every Brother in that compartment by sight, even in armor. They were Caractacan Brothers. They were supposed to be outnumbered.

  “We will engage the ships on the first pass, and if conditions merit, deploy you and your century before returning to mop up,” Mor continued.

  “Understood,” Scalas replied. Behind his visor, he allowed himself a half-grin. “Are you certain you’re not biting off too much for only one pass?”

  “The yeheri are not known for the quality of their so-called ‘battlecruisers,’” Mor replied tartly. “Nor for their skill at space combat. You worry about the ground deployment, Centurion. Leave the orbitals to me.”

  There was a general chuckle around the dropship’s troop compartment; the exchange had been on the century’s open comm circuit. Scalas smiled as he flexed his shoulders and settled himself a bit more comfortably in his acceleration couch. “Brace yourselves, gentlemen,” he said. “Captain Mor’s admitted mastery notwithstanding, this could get a little bumpy.”

  Captain Mor was not quite as stoic as his friend Erekan Scalas. He was grinning tightly behind his sealed helmet visor as the exchange ended. It was rare, usually only in the tense moments before combat, that he could get Erekan to come far enough out of his shell to actually banter with him. The man was usually as quiet and dour as a cloistered monk. Granted, such temperament and deportment were encouraged in the Caractacan Brotherhood, but it sometimes seemed as if Scalas took his bearing as a Brother slightly too seriously.

  Mor turned his attention fully to the task at hand. The distances and timeframes of space battle were deceptive. A moment’s lapse in concentration could mean instant death for all aboard.

  The Dauntless had already executed her synchronization maneuver, going fully inert just outside the system and matching her base velocity to Iabreton’s star. At the same time, the attack vector had been laid in. The maneuvers had been done far enough out that the yeheri would not detect the drive plume for another ninety-seven minutes. That time to detection would steadily decrease as the ship plummeted closer to Iabreton, but for the moment, they were still in the “blind spot” of the enemy’s light cone.

  Iabreton swelled steadily in the command deck’s holo-tank. The command crew’s couches were bolted to the deck in a circle around the tank, granting each officer a clear view of the overall situation in addition to their more specialized displays projected on plates in fr
ont of them. Controls were close by their hands, allowing for every function of the ship to be handled even when under high gees.

  “Now,” Mor snapped.

  The Dauntless’s Bergenholm fields shut down. All the inertia set in during the synchronization maneuver returned, and she hurtled toward the gas giant’s second moon at hundreds of kilometers per second.

  As soon as the inertialess field was off, the starship’s weapons constellation began to deploy. Hatches along the outer hull opened, and a string of egg-shaped X-ray laser pods drifted outward, propelled by tiny gas charges. At the same time, canisters in the starship’s nose cone fired, sending clouds of pellets and reflective chaff ahead, drifting a few hundred meters per second faster than the ship. Point-defense lasers were unshrouded, powergun turrets rose from the hull on long, telescoping booms, and missiles drifted out of their launch cells, stabilizing a few dozen meters from the hull. The missiles didn’t need to be nearly as far away as the bomb-pumped X-ray laser pods.

  Iabreton loomed large, a massive, roiling, green-and-orange crescent of storms and exotic gasses. The dark side flickered with lightnings the size of planets. The second moon was currently a tiny point of light, just over the limb of the gas giant, but was quickly growing larger.

  As the Dauntless closed, the moon grew to a reddish, rocky ball, with the faint flickers of drive flares in space above it. The yeheri had clearly noticed the starship plummeting toward them, and they were now maneuvering to meet the coming attack.

  “Focus on the battlecruisers first,” Mor instructed. “We can clean up the frigates later, if need be.”

  He watched the tank closely, counting down in his head even as the weapons officers worked out their firing solutions. The X-ray lasers would fire line-straight and light-swift, but even then, at that distance their targeting could only project probability cones for enemy positions. The missiles and powergun bolts would be even trickier.

  Mor didn’t concern himself with the firing solutions. His command crew was just as skilled and finely honed as Scalas’ armored ground pounders, ensconced in their dropships below. His responsibility was timing and strategy. Engaging any farther out than a light-minute was generally folly; there were too many variables that couldn’t be accounted for based on information that old. And yet, waiting too long to engage could give the enemy a chance to get in a kill shot first.

  It was jousting, just like armored knights on long-lost Terra, thousands of years before. Only with energy weapons, guided kinetic kill munitions, and high explosives, at velocities that a man on horseback could never have imagined.

  “Open fire.”

  The first wave of missiles ignited their drives and streaked away at fifty gees. Moments later, actinic flashes out in the dark on the ship’s flanks announced the deaths of X-ray laser pods as the weapons immolated themselves with the nuclear explosions that drove the powerful directed energy weapons. They were one-shot devices, just like the missiles.

  A moment later, the powergun batteries opened fire, pulsing blue-white streaks toward the reddish orb of Iabreton II. At these distances, the relativistic packets of copper plasma actually appeared as discrete bolts.

  A ravening storm of high-energy destruction blazed toward the enemy ships in orbit over Iabreton’s second moon.

  The yeheri battlecruisers were ugly, ad hoc constructs, with mushroom-shaped forward hulls kept far away from temperamental reactors and drives by long, slender booms. And they were about as high-tech as they looked. As a race, the yeheri were relative newcomers to the galaxy at large. They didn’t have centuries of starship design behind them.

  This particular band was also led by a fat, slovenly, careless lout who had been far more focused on cracking the last of the Quarisian resistance in the main mining settlement than in maintaining security for his “task force.” As a result, the self-styled warlord had detected the Dauntless’s drive flare only minutes before. So now his ships were relatively low in the gravity well, barely maintaining orbital velocity—which wasn’t high, given Iabreton II’s gravity—and with half their weapons not yet ready to deploy.

  For the flagship, there would not be time to remedy that mistake. The battlecruiser suddenly flared with incandescent brilliance as the boom took a direct hit from one of the Dauntless’s X-ray lasers. Alloy flared to plasma in a fraction of a second, and the energy dump shattered the rest of the boom with the force of a small nuclear weapon. The battlecruiser detonated silently with a titanic flash, only a fraction of a second after the laser touched it. The four missiles, two more laser beams, and salvos of powergun fire were wasted in the atomized debris.

  The second battlecruiser fared rather better. That ship’s captain was somewhat more conscientious than their leader—which of course meant that the warlord kept her on an extremely short leash. As soon as the Dauntless’s drive plume had been detected, the second battlecruiser’s captain had disregarded orders and started accelerating out of the gravity well while deploying the first of her ship’s countermeasures. That was why the first salvo of X-ray laser beams missed. Mostly. One struck the chaff cloud deployed above the climbing starship, spending most of its energy in a coruscating display of brilliance all but drowned out by the titanic flash of the flagship’s demise. Radiation scoured away the top layers of the surviving battlecruiser’s hull, melting sensors and weapons emplacements.

  Then the powergun salvo arrived.

  White-hot, coherent packets of copper ions flashed around the starship. Several missed, either tearing off into space where they would continue for nearly a light-year before becoming too attenuated to do much damage to anything, or else spending their fury against the thin atmosphere and crust of Iabreton II. Three struck home, detonating through hull and decks, venting entire compartments to space at the same time that the sheer thermal and kinetic energy release turned the crew inside into scorched debris. A fourth struck the reactor. The battlecruiser turned into a small sun, bringing a third dawn to the surface below.

  Then the Dauntless was overhead, whipping past the moon at well over escape velocity, her drive plume a blinding dagger of blue-white fire ahead of her, dropships spilling from her hatches as her powerguns hammered at the two frigates that were either just rising above the moon’s horizon or beginning to dip below it. A glancing hit on one killed a dozen yeheri in a fraction of a second. The other managed to get enough chaff in the way that the hull held when the remains of the plasma bolt got through. Then the Caractacan starship was gone, dwindling into the distance toward the dark limb of the gas giant even as the dropships decelerated savagely, falling toward the reddish surface below.

  Scalas endured the gees as the dropship fell atop a thundering pillar of fire. The Brothers were trained to endure prolonged entries at up to six gees, and this was only five. Furthermore, his armor was designed to keep its weight off his chest under acceleration. Still, it was difficult to breathe. For a man to suddenly weigh half a metric ton is not easy on the human body, no matter how well-trained and honed that body is.

  A holographic representation of the descent was being projected on his eyeslit. The five truncated cones of the century’s dropships were beginning to glow and shake from the increasing friction of the moon’s meager atmosphere. Still, this was nothing compared to the fiery blaze of atmospheric entry on a larger world. Besides, the drive plumes were also carving their way through the upper atmosphere, lessening the air resistance on the ships themselves.

  “Five minutes!” came the warning from the cockpit.

  The acceleration didn’t lessen; if anything, the pressure seemed to increase. The pilot was throttling up, trying to dump as much velocity as possible before slamming into the ground below. Scalas’s vision darkened, but he forced himself to stay conscious. The minutes ticked away with agonizing slowness. The shaking intensified, then started to smooth out.

  “Thirty seconds!”

  The pressure eased as the pilot throttled back. They were now descending at only one gee, and
the Brothers quickly unclasped their weapons and prepared to deploy.

  It was not a gentle landing. The dropship hit hard, the pistons in the landing legs compressing fully to absorb some of the shock of the multi-ton lander’s impact. Every armored form in the troop compartment was hammered deeper into his acceleration couch.

  Then the dropship doors were falling open. Scalas punched the release on his harness and rolled out of his couch, heaving himself to his feet and charging down the still-descending ramp, sprinting for the nearest cover. In four-fifths of a gee, it was more a series of long bounds than a proper sprint, but in seconds, he was down on a knee behind a rise, his powergun in his shoulder, scanning the broken ground around them.

  The dropships had landed some distance away from the enemy emplacements, the pilot having picked the drop zone on the fly as he observed the visible enemy dispositions from above. All the information had been relayed to the ground troops via holo display on the descent, so they all knew where they were, as well as where the enemy was.

  Scalas found himself and his century deployed on the bottom of what might have been a meteorite crater. The crater rim rose slowly above them and fell away to the west, where it had collapsed at some distant time in the past. The dusty ground underfoot was reddish, though there was plenty of iron-gray mixed in. There was no sign of vegetation. If there ever had been any on this moon, it was long since dead, killed by a waning atmosphere, or perhaps by the radiation sleeting from nearby Iabreton. The Brothers’ armor would shield them from the radiation, at least until the job was done.