The Defense of Provenia: A Military Sci-Fi Series (The Unity Wars Book 2) Read online

  THE DEFENSE OF PROVENIA

  ©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

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  Thank you for reading THE DEFENSE OF PROVENIA

  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

  It is the far future. Man has changed. Yet Man has stayed the same.

  Over thousands of years, humanity has spread out amongst the stars. Human worlds now dot the entire expanse of the galaxy, sprawling across every arm. Yet humanity is not alone. Countless alien races have similarly spread out, mingled, traded, clashed, and competed. The galaxy is a vast archipelago of civilization, made up of millions of discrete cultures and civilizations. Some are insular. Some have mingled with their neighbors to create new cultures.

  Sprawling metropolises spread across worlds under strange suns. Vast cities float in orbit over terrestrial worlds, gas giants, and even lonely stars. And yet the independent-minded still find new worlds, scratching out desperate existences in hostile environments. The galaxy is vast, and no one knows what all lies amidst the carpet of stars.

  Or in the darkness in between.

  Starships of unimaginable power speed between the stars, carrying traders, explorers, diplomats, refugees, pirates, and warriors. The distances between stars are vast, and the resources available within a star system are enough to support a civilization for millennia, but there are always those who want more. That is why the Military Brotherhoods were born; bands of soldiers sworn to a higher cause, who step in to defend those unable to defend themselves.

  It can hardly be called an interstellar order. The galaxy is too vast, the space between suns and worlds too deep for any regular order to establish itself. And yet, in a way, though wars still rage, and pirates still raid those they think they can easily overcome, human and alien alike have formed a sort of loose civilization, over the last few thousand years.

  Except now, starting with what might seem to be an isolated incident in the Rimward Avar Sector, everything is about to change.

  1

  The halftrack grumbled to a halt with a lurch; the driver was clearly new, and hadn’t yet gotten used to the slightly different handling. In the turret above, Mertens was knocked against the double coilgun and swore.

  “Who let that fumble-fingered nuyak drive?” Mertens demanded, his voice muffled by armor plating.

  “He needs the road time,” Corporal Gaumarus Pell replied. “I remember your first few musters, Mertens. Don’t make me start telling stories.”

  There was a general chuckle through the halftrack’s troop compartment at that. Gaumarus looked around at his section. Well, not his section. Sergeant Verlot was the section leader. Gaumarus was just a fireteam leader.

  He was glad he’d gotten a chuckle though. It had broken some of the tension, and he’d actually managed to relax a little bit himself.

  On most days, he was responsible for two thousand acres of tillage on the Pell Family farm, both supervising the human workers and the remote tractors. The humans were easy; it was the bots that made him want to tear his hair out. Even after centuries of computer development, they were still frustratingly glitchy, overly literal mechanisms, that could plow up two months worth of crops in an afternoon if not monitored closely.

  He missed that frustration right at the moment. He’d been part of the Provenian Defense Force for six years, ever since he’d attained his majority, like every other able-bodied young man of the Families. But up until two days ago, his entire service had consisted of his initial training, monthly musters, and the two-month yearly drills. He knew his job, almost as well as he knew how to run the farm. He knew it well enough that he’d been promoted quickly. Several of his squad mates were far senior to him in both age and time in service. But facing actual combat, he suddenly realized anew, was something different. And looking around at the rest of the squad, he could see that he wasn’t the only one with a fluttery, crawling sensation in his guts.

  The back doors of the halftrack swung open on hissing hydraulics. “Everyone out!” Sergeant Eudes Verlot barked. Verlot was a grizzled old man, a foot shorter than Gaumarus’s own two-meter height, so skinny that he looked almost like skin and bones when he wasn’t weighed down with his tac vest, power pack, and helmet, like they all were at the moment. He was also the only actual combat veteran in the squad; he had fought rebels and indig mountain tribes both.

  Verlot had been around a long, long time. Gaumarus sometimes believed the rumors told in the barracks after lights out, that he’d made a deal with one of the mountain tribes’ plethora of devils and was actually immortal.

  Gaumarus was one of the first out, hefting his long-barreled coilgun and carefully threading it through the narrow hatchway. The decision to equip all the PDF’s infantry with coilguns had been made a few years before, replacing the more compact, chemically fired rifles they’d been carrying before, and not a few of the PDF riflemen were still grumbling about it. At least, that was the case among the mech troops like Gaumarus’s unit, the 121st Motor Infantry. He was sure the regular footsloggers were still grumbling, but the footsloggers grumb
led about everything.

  His shoulders chafing under the relatively unfamiliar weight of his vest and the coilgun’s bulky power pack, Gaumarus hit the ground and jogged around the left flank of the halftrack, finally able to take in the scene.

  Company Aleph of the 121st was presently drawn up in a rough L-shape on the rocky ridge overlooking the tiny settlement of Bar. They were holding about eleven hundred meters from the nearest structure.

  Bar was a new settlement, only a few kilometers from the spaceport of Furch. As such, it was mostly prefabs, though it already looked well on the way to ruin. Several of the prefab containers/buildings were already dingy and crumbling, with refuse piled against their minimal foundations and drifting through the avenues. Gaumarus couldn’t help but think, in true Family fashion, that that was what one could expect from the Latecomers.

  He hurried to a rocky outcropping just ahead of the halftrack’s front bumper, where he lowered himself to a knee, laying the barrel of his coilgun across his thigh and looking to his right and his left. The rest of the riflemen and the support gunners, lugging their heavy-caliber railguns to firing positions, were forming a rough line, along the edge of the cordon that the halftracks were setting up.

  Verlot strode up beside him. He couldn’t see the sergeant’s face behind his helmet’s polarized face shield, but he could imagine the man’s blunt features twisted into their habitual, semi-permanent scowl. Gaumarus waited for the inevitable, his shoulders tensing a bit as if anticipating a blow.

  “Get your worthless carcasses down on your bellies and find some real cover!” Verlot snarled. “You think that just because these Latecomer scum are lazy nuyaks, living in their own filth, that they can’t still manage to shoot you, standing up straight like parade ground windup toys, skylined against the horizon?” He shook his head in disgust, and Gaumarus was sure that, if not for his helmet’s face shield, he would have spat in the yellowish dirt and prickly, gray groundcover. “This is what we get for driving the mountain tribes away; a bunch of children playing at soldier!”

  Gaumarus sank down behind his rock, his shoulders hunched, feeling Verlot’s venomous eyes between his shoulder blades. Vegetation crunched under the sergeant’s boots, and Gaumarus felt him loom above him. “How are you going to shoot the Latecomers with your weapon pointed at the ground to your left, Corporal Pell?” Verlot asked in a low hiss. Terrible old man he might have been, but Gaumarus knew that he’d pitched his voice just low enough for Gaumarus alone to hear him. Verlot was many things, but unprofessional was not one of them. He might not think that Gaumarus was worthy of his rank, but he wouldn’t let that lead him to dress down one of his fireteam leaders in front of the rest of the men.

  Flushing behind his own face shield, Gaumarus fumbled his coilgun around and aimed it alongside the rock, pointed down at the nearest blocky trailer on the edge of Bar. There was no movement below; the windows were dark, and there were no people on the rough, trash-strewn streets of the settlement. Which could only mean that the Latecomers were getting set to get hit.

  For a long time, the PDF just stayed where they were, weapons pointed down at the ramshackle village. The wind whispered through the low ground cover and the rocks, rattling some of the windows and shutters below, the sound drifting faintly up to the cordon.

  “Where are they?” someone muttered.

  “Waiting for you to do something stupid,” Verlot snapped. “Be quiet.”

  Gaumarus hesitated, but he was a noncom himself, so he turned slightly to ask Verlot, “What are we waiting for, Sergeant? If Central Command is certain that the bombers came here…”

  “We have orders to set the cordon and hold, Pell,” Verlot said, his voice suddenly empty of its usual snarling disdain. “I don’t think that the Council thinks we can handle it.” There was a bitterness in that sentence that had nothing to do with the quality of the PDF soldiers under Verlot’s command.

  Another set of boots crunched behind them, and Gaumarus heard Lieutenant Yuusen’s voice. “Status, Sergeant Verlot?”

  “The squad is set in and ready, sir,” Verlot replied formally. Gaumarus could picture Yuusen, straight-backed and aristocratic, probably with his helmet off. The young officer was given to those sorts of theatrics. When he’d been asked why he insisted that his men keep their helmets on while he regularly removed his own in what was supposed to be combat scenarios, he’d always said that it was to inspire the men with his courage and disdain for death.

  The thing was, Yuusen probably took that seriously. There were stories about him. Young as he was, he’d been on expeditions into the Badlands. He’d never gone so far that he hadn’t come back, but he had to have clashed with the mountain tribes a time or two.

  “Good,” Yuusen said. Gaumarus could feel the platoon leader’s eyes on him. “Unfortunately, the orders have not changed. We are to hold position and wait for the Knights.”

  Behind his face shield, Gaumarus grimaced. He knew that Verlot had a far nastier expression on his face.

  “Why are we waiting for them?” the sergeant demanded. “This is a local matter.”

  “The Council hopes that having the Knights crush this cell will put the fear of God into the rebels,” Yuusen said. He sounded tired, as if he’d been over all this before, and it didn’t get any better with repetition. “They want to make an example, and the Knights are willing enough to help.”

  “Typical,” Verlot grumbled. “I’m sure they kissed the Knights’ feet at great length beforehand.”

  “I’m sure,” Yuusen said dryly. “But we shouldn’t be speaking so of our superiors in front of the men, Sergeant.”

  Gaumarus didn’t dare look around, and knew that he’d just see the dark orb of Verlot’s face shield anyway, but the old Sergeant’s disgust was palpable.

  “So, what is taking them so long?” Verlot asked.

  Yuusen paused, and in the quiet, Gaumarus could just make out a faint howl that wasn’t made by any Provenian vehicle. “While I am sure that the Order of the Tancredus Cluster arrives when it means to, and not a moment before or after, regardless of what we mere mortals might hope for, that sounds like their skimmers now,” the lieutenant said.

  Gaumarus forced himself to watch the village below, as much as he wanted to see the incoming vehicles. It had been a once-in-a-lifetime event when the Misericorde had arrived in the Leuekin system. Up until then, the Order of the Tancredus Cluster had been little more than a legend to most Provenians.

  The howling of the skimmers got louder and louder. It sounded like they were coming straight at the PDF cordon, and if not for the comm headset built into his helmet muffling the worst of it, the rising shriek of the ground effect fans would have been deafening.

  Just as the noise seemed to reach a painful peak, even through his hearing protection, it suddenly tapered off, and the ground beneath him shuddered. The skimmer’s driver must have grounded his vehicle. A moment later, a loud, resonant, artificially amplified voice spoke behind him.

  “Is the cordon set, Lieutenant?” The voice was halting and flat, utterly without inflection. It sounded artificial, like a bot was speaking.

  “Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Yuusen replied. “We are awaiting the scouts’ report, and then we will be ready to advance on the village.”

  There was a long pause, and then the flat, mechanical voice spoke again. “That will not be necessary, Lieutenant,” it said. “Keep your men here, out of harm’s way. My Knights will advance and clear the village.”

  It took Gaumarus a moment to realize, from the strange tone and the long pause beforehand, that the Knight must have a translator program built into his helmet. He probably did not speak Oxidanese, nor did the Provenians speak whatever esoteric language that the Knights probably spoke amongst each other. He was speaking his own language, and his helmet was translating for him.

  “With all due respect, sir,” Yuusen began, but the Knight cut him off.

  “Your Council requested that we take care of this si
tuation, Lieutenant,” he said. “And so we shall. Be thankful that you may stay here, out of harm’s way.”

  Gaumarus could only imagine how much Verlot was bristling at that, but Lieutenant Yuusen simply said, “Very well, sir.”

  The Knight spoke again, his helmet speakers blaring what could only be orders in his own fluid, faintly sing-song language. Then the howling rose again, and dust and grit pelted Gaumarus where he crouched, as the skimmer lifted off the ground once more.

  He got a glimpse of it as it passed through the cordon and started down the long, shallow slope toward Bar. Angular and sharp-nosed, it looked far sleeker and more high-tech than the Provenians’ own halftracks or wheeled assault carriers. The sides were folded up, forming a sort of armored wall around its turret, which had a single, blunt weapon muzzle pointed down at Bar. The Tancredus Knights were crouched in the open flanks of the skimmer.

  They were dressed in full, articulated combat armor, far more advanced—and far more expensive—than anything Provenia could produce, at least as yet. Their heads were encased in faintly peaked helmets with T-shaped vision slits. Their armor, along with the skimmer’s hull, was painted a dull red that stood out against the brown, yellow, and gray dirt and vegetation of the Goderic Plateau.

  They were nothing if not confident. Certainly more confident than Gaumarus felt. While he understood his superiors’ frustration, he couldn’t help but be a little bit thankful that it was the Knights going down into that Latecomer warren, and not him.