The Alliance Rises: A Military Sci-Fi Series (The Unity Wars Book 3) Read online

  The Alliance Rises

  ©2021 PETER NEALEN

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  Contents

  ALSO IN SERIES

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

  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

  Epilogue

  Thank you for reading The Alliance Rises

  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.

  Chapter One

  If not for many years of discipline, Centurion Erekan Scalas would have been stifling a yawn behind his visor. The Regonese flock leaders, war chiefs, and politicians had been talking at Brother Legate Dravus Maruks for three hours, while Scalas and his other three brother Centurions had stood by and listened. If not for the climate controls in the Caractacan Brothers’ combat armor, they would have been freezing in the cold, whispering winds that sifted across Kego City’s Peace Plaza. Maruks had his helmet off, and his squarish, sun-blasted face was red with cold and wind-burn.

  Maruks looked tired. As well he might. Regone was the fifth such system that the Avar Sector Legio of the Caractacan Brotherhood had needed to visit recently. It seemed that every brush fire in the galaxy was flaring up since Valdek had fallen to the so-called “Galactic Unity,” two thousand hours before.

  The Brother Legate was in the midst of telling the gathered Regonese leaders that the Caractacan Brotherhood was not a mercenary company that they could hire to crush the Exiles on the third planet. The fifty, three-meter-tall avian nashai gathered around him at the base of the towering stone spire that formed the center of the Peace Plaza didn’t seem happy with the statement. They were clearly agitated, feathers rising and falling, hopping from clawed foot to clawed foot, beaks clacking.

  “Should we be concerned about this?” Centurion Undon Rokoff asked. He was speaking over the private channel in Latin, his voice pitched low so that it couldn’t be heard beyond his helmet, especially since the Centurions were standing in a half-circle several meters from the meeting itself. “They are getting awfully excited.”

  “No,” Scalas replied, just as quietly. Rokoff was the junior Centurion in the Avar Sector Legio, and was still getting used to his command. “That’s just the Regonese way. They get loud and expressive when they’re upset, and these Exiles have them very upset. But they aren’t likely to try to get violent with outsiders, much less Caractacan Brothers whom they’re trying to ask for help.”

  “You’ve been here before?” Rokoff asked.

  Scalas didn’t turn to look at him; they were in formation, standing statuesquely still, providing another image of Caractacan discipline and unshakability to the Regonese. “Yes, about three years ago.” Much of the galaxy had gone to using kilohours and megahours to measure longer spans of time, but the Caractacan Brotherhood was nothing if not traditional, and they still used old Earth years, even though Earth was long gone. “For much the same reason.”

  “Erekan is one of the more widely traveled and well-read Centurions in the Legio,” Centurion Virgil Costigan put in. “He’s been on worlds I’ve never heard of. If he says it, you can trust that it’s true.”

  Scalas said nothing. Costigan was an old friend; the two of them had served their novitiate together. But Costigan had been a rising star in the Brotherhood for some time, and Scalas couldn’t help but feel as if the other man had overshadowed him. Even when Costigan himself insisted that such feelings were nonsense.

  “They certainly make enough noise to make on
e wonder.” Centurion Maximilian Soon towered over his fellows, standing a head taller than Scalas’s own not inconsiderable two-meter height. “Though much of it seems to be more concerned with fears of what might happen rather than anything that already has.”

  He had barely finished speaking when a powergun bolt split the sky. Everyone, human and nashai, froze.

  Every Regonese head turned to stare as the bright, green-white bolt shattered the peace and quiet over the ancient city. Their feathers rippled, and wide, golden eyes stared, blinking rapidly. Beaks clacked.

  Then the shockwave washed over the Peace Plaza with a roaring clap of thunder, and they scattered toward the hardened structures that ringed the historic plaza. The threat from Exile-sympathetic terrorists had apparently been considered significant enough that the various flocks had taken steps to fortify the central monument of Regonese history.

  None of the Caractacan Brothers on the Plaza bolted. They were Caractacans. Discipline was a by-word, part of the Code. “Never to flee before an enemy.” Maruks simply lifted his casque and lowered it into place, sealing it as another trio of bolts rained down out of the clear, blue sky. One struck a distant spire, similar to the stone chimney in the center of the Peace Plaza, but built of steel and glass. The lower half of the spire shattered, and the structure cracked, beginning to fall toward the ground, dropping slowly in the three-quarters of a G that was Regonese surface gravity.

  Maruks reached out under Feygeil’s partly outstretched wing to grasp his arm, as the big Regonese started to rush past him. “Stay with us,” he said in Trade Cant, the de facto lingua franca of the spaceways, particularly out in the Carina Arm. “Centurions.”

  Bright sparks were starting to flicker in the sky above, as those Regonese ships in orbit capable of combat began to take the hostile ship under fire. Scalas fell in with the other Centurions around the squat, thickset Brother Legate, and they started toward the bunker on the far side of the Plaza from the bombardment.

  They had gotten about twenty meters toward the rim of the great circle when the main gate blew up. Dust and fragments billowed into the sky with a heavy, ground-shaking thud.

  The Centurions turned almost as one, each man dropping to a knee and bringing his powergun to bear. There was no cover in the Plaza; the entire circle was open ground, sloping slightly down from the central spire.

  “By twos, fall back to cover!” Maruks bellowed, even as hard shot fire started to hiss and snap through the cloud of dust and smoke. A bright flash in the sky above heralded the end of the orbital bombardment, as the attacking ship died in a spectacular explosion. Maruks had his own powergun in his hands; no Caractacan Brother went anywhere unarmed. They often limited themselves to sidearms while in their Sector Keeps, but they were not in a Sector Keep at the moment.

  The Centurions answered the gunfire with the bright blue-white flashes and thunderclap reports of powergun fire. Tiny sections of copper wire turned to plasma and accelerated to a substantial fraction of the speed of light, blinking across the Plaza and seeking out targets that were only vague forms highlighted in Scalas’s visor.

  Scalas held his position, dropping two charging nashai—presumably Exiles—with two shots, as Soon and Maruks pounded back toward the hardened overhang behind them, Feygeil in tow. As soon as another bolt scorched the air and hammered at him with the shockwave of its passage to his right, he rose, pivoted, and charged back to pass the Brother Legate and the other Centurion, where they were pouring fire into the gate.

  He might have gotten another five paces before the entrance to the bunker ahead was filled with the armored forms of more Caractacans, a squad of Scalas’s own Century XXXII, boiling out into the Plaza behind their weapons, quickly identifying where the friendlies were and returning fire toward the gate. But there were a lot of attackers in that gateway.

  Something heavier than the lighter small arms fire suddenly spoke in the gateway, and heavy slugs cracked overhead, shredding the cloud of dust ahead of the vehicle bulling its way through the wreckage of the shattered gate.

  “Backblast!” an amplified voice roared in Latin, a moment before an HV missile streaked across the Plaza in an eyeblink and struck the vehicle like the hammer of some legendary god. The six-wheeled gun truck blew apart, flattening the nearby attackers and throwing fragments whickering high in the air.

  The Plaza suddenly went quiet, which only made it easier to hear the rattle of gunfire and the thump of more explosions farther out in the city.

  Scalas got to his feet. Before he could issue any orders, Maruks’s voice came over his comms.

  “Soon, Rokoff, get to your Centuries and secure that gate,” he said. “Costigan, Scalas, we will get Feygeil inside and see if we can’t sort this mess out.”

  Even before they could acknowledge, the Brother Legate was striding toward the bunker, ushering the war chief of the Dreje flock ahead of him. Feygeil went along meekly. Even though he overtopped Maruks by almost a meter and a half, the Brother Legate’s sheer force of personality had taken over in the face of the crisis.

  Scalas jogged behind them, signaling his men to fall in as he went. He hardly needed to; they had heard the orders, and quickly closed into a diamond formation around the Brother Legate and his charge.

  He glanced at Maruks as they went. It hadn’t been four months yet since the Draeyeenan had taken command of the Avar Sector Legio. He was no Michael Kranjick, but no one ever would be. Kranjick had fallen on Valdek. But if anyone had to take the reins from him, Scalas was glad that it had been Maruks.

  He made a concerted effort not to think about the fact that it might have been him. That simple possibility brought up a storm of conflicting feelings of resentment, self-doubt, and relief that was better left alone.

  The sounds of combat redoubled outside, and more powergun fire thundered from the gate. The attack wasn’t over. Maruks didn’t flinch, didn’t speed up, though even given the short length of his stride, he could move with remarkable swiftness without seeming to. In moments, the knot of Caractacan Brothers and a few more Regonese who had been swept up in their passage got through the hatch and into the bunker, beneath the steelcrete overhang.

  “Herald of Justice, Maruks,” the Brother Legate called over the comms. “Status report.”

  “The ships are secure, Brother Legate,” Captain Valdorius Titus replied. “Though it was touch and go there for a moment. A grounded freighter came apart and started pouring out troops and fighting vehicles. Most of them headed into the city, however.”

  “A freighter?” Costigan asked.

  “Yes sir, an older Sagmarion-class,” Titus replied. “The strange thing about it was that the attackers weren’t all nashai.”

  “Who else, Captain?” Maruks asked sharply.

  “Humans, velk, and a few yeheri,” Titus replied.

  Scalas frowned behind his visor, watching Maruks. Even with his helmet on, the Brother Legate looked pensive. And Scalas had gotten to know the man well enough since he’d taken command to suspect that they were all thinking along the same lines. “Tell me about the orbital bombardment,” Maruks said.

  “It appears to have been another freighter, sir,” Titus said, “with two 30cm powerguns mounted in her hold. She was destroyed by the Regonese orbital defense constellation only a few minutes after she opened fire.” He paused. “Wait a moment.” The line went dead for several seconds. Maruks appeared to be staring at the wall, though there was no telling how much data he was calling up in his visor’s display. Feygeil and two of the other Regonese, a Yeg flock leader named Uyibel and a lesser functionary of the Geg flock whose name Scalas hadn’t caught, were clattering into their own comms in Regonese. Unlike most worlds and races in the galaxy, Regone had a single language shared across flocks.

  “Sir, the Exiles’ defensive constellation just opened fire on the blockading Regonese vessels, aided by three starships. They did serious damage; at least fifty of the Regonese ships were destroyed outright. And the starships ar
e currently inertialess, inbound at about Point Five C.”

  “Lift and render the Regonese what aid you can, Captain,” Maruks said grimly. “We will be secure here on the ground.”

  “Acknowledged, sir,” Titus answered. The comm connection cut out.

  Maruks looked at Scalas. “Thoughts, Centurion?”

  “I think it’s clear that this is no longer simply about the Exiles, sir,” Scalas replied. “The Regonese may have thought they managed to keep them bottled up on the third planet and keep Bergenholm tech out of their hands, but clearly someone got through the blockade. And that someone has a vested interest in sowing chaos.”

  “You have a theory.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Valdek is only forty parsecs away,” Scalas said. “Given the timing, the Unity is the only culprit that makes sense. The more they keep the brushfires burning across the Avar Sector, the less organized resistance they’ll face as they continue to move on other systems.”

  Maruks nodded. “You may well be right,” he said. “According to your reports, however, the Unity forces on Valdek were entirely made up of human clones.”

  “So they were,” Costigan put in. “But if they are only out to cause chaos, then they might not commit that kind of massive force. The clones on Valdek seemed to be primarily trained for massed human-wave assaults, not special operations. If they only want to divert us, then they might use mercenaries.” Costigan was maintaining his bearing with admirable skill, but to Scalas, who had known the older Centurion for years, he could see that he was uneasy. His tanks and combat sleds were back at the spaceport with the starships; they had been a bit too much to bring to the Peace Plaza. The rest of his Brothers were trained as superb infantry fighters, of course, but they were cavalrymen, first and foremost. As much as the Brotherhood cross-trained, a certain level of specialization was almost inevitable.