The Fall of Valdek by P. L. Nealen

Author:P. L. Nealen [Nealen, P. L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-07-13T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Four massive, spearhead-shaped starships rose once again into the smoke-shrouded Valdekan sky, for the second time in only a few hours. This time, they rose from within a pall of smoke and dust, riddled with the passage of rocket artillery and railgun rounds. But no sooner had the ships’ noses risen above the levels of their silos than their own point defenses went to work, helping the Valdekan lasers clear the rockets out of the sky, at least.

The thunder of their drives shook the ground for kilometers around as they accelerated up into the atmosphere. And then their powergun batteries opened fire.

Line-straight, blue-tinged lightning, that made the Caractacan infantry powerguns seem like little more than sparks in comparison, lanced out, seeking the artillery emplacements that were still hammering the defenses and the starport. Vehicles detonated with actinic flashes as powerful plasma packets impacted, dumping thousands of ergs of energy into materials that simply were not designed to hold up to them. In seconds, the incoming fire had slackened to almost nothing in the face of the power of the ships rising into the sky.

Tilting slightly, the starships drifted toward the battered section of defenses where the Avar Sector Legio had held the line. More powergun fire licked out, hammering at several assault columns that were already starting to crawl across no-man’s land, blasting armor into glowing scrap and reducing men to their constituent atoms.

The dropships, those that had survived relatively undamaged, began to launch, plummeting toward the inside of the wall on tails of roaring, blue-white fire.

***

The light strobing through the firing slits of the most intact surviving pillbox heralded deaths in the hundreds, if not the thousands. And yet Scalas could not help but feel relieved.

He turned to Raskonesh. “Some of the pressure should be off for a while,” he said. “I expect that the enemy commander, at least, will rethink matters after having two assaults destroyed in a matter of a few hours. If nothing else, we can hope that he does not have the assets left to launch a serious attack after this. At least not for a while.”

Viloshen passed his words along to the Valdekan Warrant Officer, who grunted.

“They have clones,” Viloshen translated Raskonesh’s reply. “They will only grow more.”

But Scalas shook his head, as one of his dropships settled only a few dozen meters away, on the other side of the wall, its drive vibrating the floor beneath them. “Even if they could grow them in a matter of days, they still have to make the weapons and equipment, too,” he pointed out. “I can’t guarantee that we’ve bought you a significant breather, but maybe we’ve bought a few extra hours.”

Raskonesh suddenly smiled. If there was a certain brittleness, a bleakness in the expression, it could only be expected after what the man had been through. He held out his hand, and Scalas folded it in an armored gauntlet. He said something in Eastern Satevic and motioned to Viloshen. The older man protested in the same language, but Raskonesh held his ground.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.