To The Strongest

by C. J. Carella

  Tyson was of two minds about that. Telepathy was worrisome enough – everyone needed to keep secrets – and while there were countermeasures, they required expensive implants only VIPs could afford. Add in the potential to summon entities one might as well call demons or devils, and he could understand why the Joint Chiefs didn’t want to delve into tachyon-wave technologies. Current policy was to keep those abilities under strict control, with suppressants given to adepts who left the military or government service. So far, that had worked, given the small number of people with those abilities. But more research was needed. Once Pandora’s Box was cracked open, it couldn’t be slammed shut.

  Tyson chuckled. Seeing Al’s frown, he explained: “Thirty years ago, we were wondering if any of us would be alive in a few months’ time. Now we worry we’ve become too complacent. I think it’s a fair trade of headaches.”

  “Sure, Ty. But if we don’t stay frosty, we’ll be back to those bad old times.”

  Tyson had to nod at that as well.

  Five

  Groom Base, Star System 3490, 197 AFC

  The scarred man grinned at the small group in the auditorium. The expression was more feral than welcoming.

  “I’m Colonel Ronald T. Johns,” he said. “Back when I flew a Death Head, my call-sign was Preacher.”

  Jason used the Woogle app in his implant to check on his new commanding officer. Preacher had been one of the literal handful of people who flew the legendary – and long-since decommissioned – alien super-fighters known as the Death Heads. Little was known about the ships, at least by the general public, but rumor had it that they had been built with the bones of an extinct E.T. species that could travel through warp without using starships. Most of the details about them had been classified but the Death Head Squadron had played a major role in winning the Great Galactic War. All of that was ancient history to Jason and most of the other dozen Marines in the room. By now, even the multimedia flicks celebrating the conflict were old hat.

  “You have volunteered to try out for a spot in a special MARSOC unit. Each of you has displayed some unique qualifications for the job. That doesn’t mean you will all make it. For the next four months, you will go through a screening process and training course to determine if you can make the cut. After that, those of you who remain will take the Individual Training Course to make you ready for actual operations. If you pass both courses, you will become a special kind of Marine Raider. A Wraith Marine.”

  Someone raised his hand.

  “You’re gonna ask me what a Wraith Marine is. Don’t bother.”

  The hand went down.

  “The full answer is classified. You’ll have to earn that clearance level.” He went on in a tone that suggested he was prattling on a memorized speech: “Short answer: you have a number of unusual abilities related to tachyon waves or null space, which are in some sense both sides of the same coin. Wraith Marines are trained to harness those abilities and operate specialized equipment that allows them to conduct special missions beyond the scope of ordinary Marines or even Critical Skills Operators.”

  He grinned at the gathering. “Only half of you will make it. The rest will get a happy pill prescription and ordered to forget what they saw and did.

  “But if you make it, you’ll become something else.”

  * * *

  Ain’t this something?

  When Russell had been an ordinary grunt – well, a heavy gunner, MOS 0331– Marines had gone to war with what aliens considered primitive weaponry. Slug-throwers, the lowest of the low, even if the slugs were tipped with shaped-charge plasma warheads that could penetrate force fields and body armor and make a mess of anything underneath. Nowadays they fought tangos with the most advanced small arms in the known galaxy.

  Graviton weapons were very difficult to scale down, so most aliens used them only in heavy ordnance, stuff you mounted on large vehicles and starships. A few years before Russell mustered out, the weapons platoons had started to use mini-graviton weapons, courtesy of the Tah-Leen aliens who’d considerately left humanity all their technological wealth after their well-deserved extinction. Russell had assisted said extinction and had the honor of wasting a few of them up close and personal. Stabbed his last kill in the guts with an entrenching tool, as a matter of fact.

  Now, every ground-pounder got to carry a miniature grav cannon that cut through most alien shields and armor like they weren’t there. And Marine Warp-Rated Assault, Intelligence and Tactical Teams (WRAITT, although the nickname Wraith had stuck even in official communiques) got something even better, to make up for the fact they would often operate far from support.

  He went over the three-barreled weapon in his hands one more time. The Tactical Assault System Mark I weighted thirty pounds loaded, the kind of monster gun that was useless to anybody outside a suit of power armor. Lucky for him, that was what he was wearing. The part of him that knew how easily things went to hell in actual combat worried about running out of juice; if the battlesuit ran dry or was otherwise disabled, he’d be down to his field skivvies, a light personal force field, and a hand beamer. FUBAR, in other words.

  On the other hand, as long as it worked, the TAS-1 would fuck up just about everything that could move inside a planet’s atmosphere. Its 15mm grav gun was almost as deadly as the Widowmaker he’d toted during his last deployment and two micro-missile tubes slung underneath gave him as much firepower as a mortar tube and assaultman team combined. The weapons package would be considered overkill if it wasn’t for the fact that Wraiths were meant to operate on their own most of the time. If you couldn’t rely on artillery or other support assets, you had to bring most of your ordnance with you. Russell was happy with that; having to rely on some remfie to not drop an artillery barrage onto his head instead of the enemy’s had never sat well with him. Now he could deliver his own dose of hell and the only screw-ups he needed to worry about were his own.

  Russell ran a final check of his TAS-1. Everything green. His WRAITT Combat Armor was also good to go. The suit had a lot more bells and whistles than even the new infantry model. It could carry a five-hundred-pound load in addition to the Marine inside it and its own two-hundred-pounds of weight without slowing down and it had three layers of force fields – external, armor-surface, and internal – that made them immune to anything smaller than an anti-tank weapon, not counting the actual armor shell, which could stop most incoming by its lonesome. The suit cost about as much as Russell’s entire twenty-five-year pension package; in both cases, it was money well-spent as far as he was concerned.

  Time to see what the new toys could do. He was practicing firing prone, which took some getting used to since the WRAITT armor was bulkier than what he’d worn back in the day. As soon as he was ready, targets popped up. Two hundred, five hundred, and two thousand meters out: darting images of assorted ETs, ducking in and out of cover. The smart sights built into both armor and gun guided him to his first target: at 200 meters, the magnified image of the E.T. – a Lamprey, its hideous toothed pseudo-head covered in a bubble helmet – looked big as life. Russell fired and sent three pulses of concentrated gravity into the target. Scratch one Lamprey.

  The 500- and 2K-meter shots were a little trickier, but the sights did most of the work. Even with the targets simulating stealth systems and other countermeasures, Russell shot an Expert set. He’d be surprised if any of the members of his team didn’t. Range shots from a prone position were the easiest test; when they were on the move and fighting targets that shot back, accuracy would go down. More training would follow until every Wraith Marine shot an Expert score while taking fire.

  This was the fun part of the training. Running with a sack of rocks on your back was the shit part. Or listening to lectures for that matter.

  * * *

  “Warp travel is the only way to travel beyond the confines of a star system, unless you are prepared to spend centuries or millennia getting from point A to point B,” the lecturing officer began. “
The way it works is poorly understood. The short version: if you apply enough gravity to spacetime, you can create cracks in it leading to warp space, where the laws of physics work differently. The easiest way to come back to the ‘real’ universe is to find a gateway, a pre-fractured spot in reality. Those gateways are linked in pairs. Each pair creates a warp lane, also known as ley line or dragon road. Every known star system has at least one warp lane leading to another system. Travel between gateways takes a few minutes or at most some hours, allowing us to cross hundreds or thousands of light years in a single transit.”

  Hologram images illustrated the officer’s words, showing crisscrossing lines along a map of the Orion-Cygnus arm of the Milky Way galaxy. The warp network looked like some crazy kid with a holo-marker had connected star systems at random. Systems that were thousands of light years away were ‘warp neighbors’ while stars in close proximity had no connections and might as well be on opposite sides of the galaxy. The whole thing required a computer to map out.

  Jason forced himself to pay attention. So far, the lecture sounded like what you’d get during a basic intro to starfaring tech course, but hopefully there would be more to it.

  “What we’ve discovered more recently,” the officer went on. “Is that cracking open spacetime through applied gravity isn’t the only way of accessing warp space. As it turns out, sentient minds can reach it all the time. Some scientists are coming to believe that consciousness itself resides in warp space rather than the physical realm we thought of as the sum total of reality.”

  Okay, that last bit was new, sort of.

  “All starfaring species find null-space troubling and dangerous. Most sophonts cannot survive warp travel: only between one to ten percent of most species’ population have survivable levels of warp tolerance. Humanity has been blessed with the highest rate of warp tolerance among existing Starfarers: fifty percent. New drugs, mostly developed in the last twenty-five years, have increased those percentages a great deal – humans now have near-universal warp tolerance thanks to them – but to most aliens, it remains a realm only a minority can enter without risking insanity or death.

  Get to the point already, Jason thought, getting bored again. He was tired – everyone in the unit was working on less sleep than they wanted, or needed – and the droning voice was putting him to sleep.

  “Some ancient alien species like the Marauders of Kraxan or the Pathfinders discovered ways to access null space and tap it for energy, as well as to interact with the entities that inhabit it. We have learned to incorporate those methods into a few pieces of technology. Including the WRAITT Combat Armor you have trained with. As you should know by now, the three power packs in your suits allow for twelve hours of combat operations. Powering the null-space transition system in the suit would drain a full fifty percent of its full power reserves.

  “To use the WAB Suit to its fullest potential, you need to draw additional energy from warp space.”

  Jason grunted. All the meditation techniques they’d been learning while being fed a steady diet of mind-altering drugs, all the trips in and out of warp space and the time spent communing with their ‘totems’ were making sense now.

  “All of which leads us to today’s exercise,” the officer said, and the roomful of half-asleep Marines stirred up. Nobody had told them there would be an exercise. A group of Navy techies entered the auditorium and began handing out power packs to the gathered trainees. Jason examined his: it looked like the ubiquitous square batteries used for weapons, force fields and the myriad other devices the Corps relied on to get the job done. The only difference was a set of tiny antennae on one side of the pack.

  “First, summon your totems,” the officer said.

  The term ‘totem’ had been adopted after the brass decided that ‘guardian angel’ or ‘spirit animal’ were either inaccurate or too controversial. Nobody seemed to know what the totems were, either. They came from warp space; that much was evident. Were they Warplings who had assumed the identities of the totems, mental construct that had been given life by the minds of their creators, or actual spirits or ghosts? The official story was that they were Warplings (Null-Space Sophonts in official parlance), with the caveat that those conclusions were tentative and subject to change. Whatever the totems were, all the Wraith Marines had one. Most had summoned or dreamed up a totem before starting the training course and the rest had picked up one early on.

  At first, calling Woof to his side had been difficult. His ghost dog had shown up when he felt like it, or when the stars were right or whatever. After a month of mental exercises, he could summon Woof at will. The dog appeared next to his desk, his head cocked to one side, a doggy grin on his face. More totems appeared, each near a Wraith Marine. Some looked human, but those were the minority. Most of them appeared like animals, real or mythological, while the rest ran the gamut from monsters to angels. The auditorium got crowded with all the summoned critters, although only someone sensitive to warp emanations would be able to see them. To normal humans, the gathered Marines were talking to or looking at stuff that wasn’t there.

  What’s up, Jase? Woof asked him.

  Not sure yet, but it looks like we’re going to try something new.

  The Marines were instructed to enter a trance; doing so took little time or effort after weeks of intensive training. They were next ordered to open a link to warp space, with their totems watching the connection to make sure no uninvited guests showed up. Creating a conduit between the power packs and warp space was trickier, but Jason managed to do it after a couple of tries. Power began to flow into the battery; Jason watched the readout on the casing go from zero to fifty percent in a few seconds.

  That’s incredible, he thought.

  A loud bang nearby broke his concentration and the warp conduit snapped shut. Jason turned towards the sound and saw that one of the power packs had exploded, and the Marine working on it was on the floor, hands covering his face as blood seeped from between his fingers. Cries of ‘Corpsman!’ were quickly heeded and a medical team wheeled the wounded man out. The docs would fix him up, but if a piece of the power pack’s casing had cracked the Marine’s skull, things would have been different. Medical tech couldn’t quite bring back the dead.

  They clearly were going to need more practice.

  Six

  Star System Claw, 197 AFC

  Emergence.

  The Crimson Sun Clan exploded from the chaos gate after a six-hour leap. Most warriors would be stunned for a few minutes, but Fann was Chaos-Blooded, with gifts that might have set him on the Oracle’s path if he hadn’t been the heir to the warlord throne, and he was unaffected by the voyage. He and the Oracles and Acolytes who likewise kept their wits about them began to analyze the data showing up on the war maps. The Host had visited the system some eighty millennia in the past, cutting a swath through the dirt-walker realms they encountered, but a lot could change in that time. During that far-off incursion, the system had held three inhabited worlds. Now, however….

  “Dead,” Fann said as if passing sentence on those long-gone dirt-walkers.

  Of the three planets, one was devoid of even the traces of an atmosphere; from the looks of it, its parent star had flared up and devoured it many millennia ago. The other two were in only slightly better shape: one had turned into a hot hell-world through runaway emissions of greenhouse gases, and the other had gone cold, an ice-ball planet with glaciers visible even at its equator. Their life-support systems were no more; nothing larger than bacteria or the lowest multicellular entities could survive those conditions. Nothing would grow there, not for millions of years, or perhaps not before entropy consumed the universe.

  Life was fragile, especially when subjected to the whims of stars and planets. Better to control one’s destiny, limited only by one’s will and power.

  “There are two gas giants in the system,” Fann said. “We will gather some basic consumables there.” Hydrogen for the fusion plants would be there aplent
y. Comets further out could be tapped for water. “That will be enough. We seized what we needed from the last few dirt-hugger planets.”

  For now, he thought. Our supplies were low when we fled the Nemeses, and we didn’t have time to fully replenish them.

  Nevertheless, this was a good place to stop. The Clan had despoiled two worlds before finding a path leading away from the dirt-huggers before they could amass a fleet large enough to overwhelm Fann’s people. His ships and Homes had performed several leaps, each time finding dead systems even less inhospitable than this one. This was a major hub, however, a place where several Chaos Roads converged; it had once been used as a rallying point for the Host. It was also seven Chaos crossings away from the last place they had encountered the Nemeses. Back in the distant past, the Host had considered this entire sector to be safe, so far away from its ancient enemies there was no need to fear them. In the ensuing millennia their travels had shown the Nemeses had steadily spread out, blocking lanes once thought to be secure. Seven leaps should be far enough for the moment, though. They could abide here for a time, perform some much-needed repairs, and, most importantly, summon help.

  A Great Call needed to be sent forth. The ritual involved would be taxing and likely kill many Oracles and their disciples, but it was necessary. Fann’s people had been the first to run into the Nemeses encroaching on a previously safe path, but other clans would soon suffer the same fate. Their ancient enemies now sat astride one of the Host’s traditional travel routes. Analysis of the information plundered from the dirt-siders’ worlds showed that there was only one great power left in the region. The other civilizations were weak and would be easily overcome after said great power was cast down.

  This was the place for the Host to assemble and launch a great migration.