Where the tank had stood there was only burning hole in the ground. The one to the rear had suffered the same fate and the other three had been damaged by the explosions. Against the Marines TAS-1 rifles, alien fighting vehicles were just bigger targets than infantrymen and just as easy to kill. The other three tanks, their force fields depleted by the detonation of the others’ destruction, fell to the tactical element’s combined firepower a few seconds later. The foot soldiers, caught in the open by the destruction of the tanks they’d been tasked to protect, hadn’t fared any better. The ones who survived the tank platoon’s demise were cut down by a string of anti-personnel grenades: a dozen tiny puffs of smoke blossomed over the aliens, who promptly fell still, torn apart by ceramic shards traveling at hypersonic speeds.
The whole thing felt as dangerous as an easy-mode game of Call of Duty. Nobody had to use their weapons’ heavier ordnance missiles to finish the job; there were no living aliens left to kill.
We’re done here, Kinston said. Return to base.
Their third transition in about five minutes got them back to the forward operating base where they’d started the exercise. The rest of the MSOT was back as well; the fourteen Marines had engaged and killed a Lamprey reinforced battalion without taking a single casualty.
“This exercise was meant to test our warp systems under combat conditions,” Kinston told her team, speaking out loud for the first time since the exercise had begun. “So don’t get overconfident. They aren’t going to deploy us to take out alien infantry. And we’re definitely not taking out any Lampreys, either, since they are extinct like good little tangos.”
Kinston had a big hate-on for all aliens; surviving a raid on her home town had sort of affected her viewpoint, one might say. Jason was a lot more easygoing about things. As with most people, aliens could be good or bad, and he treated them accordingly.
“Lots of E.T.s are still running around with Lamprey tech,” Sergeant Edison noted. “They used to sell a lot of weapons before the Jellies finished them off.”
“Any alien who buys tech from someone we smacked down is plain dumb,” Corolla said.
“We ain’t selling, so that was the only stuff they could get. Mostly minor league civs.”
“And they better remember not to mess with the best.”
“Oorah.”
Jason ignored the byplay; he was too busy feeling a combination of anticipation and worry. That had been the final test. After they were done analyzing the exercise to death, their unit would be deemed fit for duty. All those months of training and learning everything from small unit tactics to ancient yogi meditation techniques had paid off; he and the rest of his unit were Wraith Marines, with all the know-how of a Critical Skills Operator plus special warp abilities.
He wondered what it would be like when they did it for real.
Eight
Goldman System, 198 AFC
Emergence.
Commander Tamir Givens, captain of the USS Anzio, exhaled in relief. Warp travel had gotten a lot safer and less unpleasant than in his great-great-grandmother’s time – he’d heard the stories more than enough times – but he’d never enjoyed the sensory deprivation involved. It was just one of the many things he’d gotten used to while trying to make the family proud. Trying and succeeding: at forty-three, he was one of the youngest battlecruiser commanders in the Navy. Making records without trading on the family name was sort of a Givens tradition, at least among the part of the family that didn’t avoid the Navy like the plague. Great-grandma Givens had been an admiral for decades and was currently serving as Vice-President; Tamir figured it would take him a couple of centuries to catch up to her but was willing to try.
A glance at the Anzio’s holotank banished his idle thoughts and replaced them with shock even as a sensor tech confirmed what he was seeing:
“Contacts! Seventeen contacts in orbit around Goldman-Six!”
The Anzio had conducted a practice combat approach towards the American colony, emerging nearly a warp hour away from it. The Sierra blips around the system’s only inhabited planet had been there for at least fifty-six minutes, the time it would have taken those images to reach his vessel. If Tamir’s ship had made a regular emergence less than a light second away from the planet, he would know exactly what was going on – and his ship would have likely been shot down on sight.
“What are we dealing with, Spacer?” he asked the sensor tech.
“Horde ships, sir.”
It shouldn’t be possible. Goldman System was linked to the rest of the galaxy through a single warp chain; the next star in the chain was a dead end, with no other ley lines leading out of it, and was inhabited only by a few hundred asteroid miners, since it had no planets worthy of the name. Givens and his ship had just left the previous stop on the chain, Felix System, a peaceful colony far removed from any potential trouble spots. You didn’t assign a single cruiser to patrol anything other than the most placid sectors of American space. Goldman was too far from any frontier to ever be in danger. Or so had everyone thought until now.
Never mind, Tamir told himself. Deal with reality.
“Analysis,” he demanded.
“Sir, Sierra One and Sierra Two have the energy signatures of cruisers or light cruiser equivalents. The remaining fifteen ships are commerce raiders, with less firepower than a corvette.”
I think we can take them.
The prudent course of action would be to make transit back to Felix, have the locals send a QE-telegram to the Navy base at Xanadu, and wait for reinforcements. Anzio was part of Third Fleet, the second largest and most powerful formation in the US; a couple of battleships with cruiser and destroyer squadrons in support would be dispatched to deal with the incursion, and that would be that. Of course, that would take at least thirty-six hours, more likely forty-eight. The fifty thousand inhabitants of Goldman-Six would be massacred in that time; the Horde didn’t go for full genocide but they would happily kill anyone they encountered while they plundered every facility they could find.
Screw prudence.
“General quarters. All hands man your battle stations. We will make transit to one light-second from Goldman-Six and engage the pirates,” Tamir announced.
A couple of the bridge crewmembers looked unhappy about the orders, but nobody complained. Lieutenant Martins, his XO, nodded his approval before getting back to work. So did most of the older hands on the bridge. Tamir’s great grandmother had been fond of one phrase: The most noble fate a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war’s desolation. The Navy didn’t sail off and leave Americans to suffer and die.
The Anzio entered warp and emerged a few seconds later. The situation hadn’t changed much: all of Goldman-Six’s handful of weather and communication satellites had been reduced to floating debris, and the Horde flotilla remained in place around the planet while dozens of shuttles traveled to its surface, bringing armed marauders to the world below and plundered goods back to their ships. The ship’s fire-control officers had set up preliminary firing solutions and made any needed adjustments in a couple of seconds: the Horde pirates barely had time to notice the battlecruiser’s presence before the first broadside was fired.
Field of Battle-class vessels were armed with eight 25-inch high-intensity graviton guns and twelve 10-inch particle beam shield-shredders. The latter fired a fraction of a second before the former, allowing their charged particles to disrupt the force fields protecting the targets so that the main guns could unleash their full fury on the enemy’s hulls. The salvo was split evenly between the biggest Horde ships, two mismatched hulks made with bits and pieces of assorted vessels welded crudely together. Their shields failed in a colorful flash and the twisting black beams of the Anzio’s heavy cannon tore into them like the wrath of the Almighty.
One of the Horde cruisers vanished in a blinding explosion; the other broke apart into four pieces, one of them burning brightly for a second before exploding as w
ell. The only vessels in the enemy formation able to threaten his ship were gone.
“Well done,” Tamir said. “Fire at will.”
I want all those pirates polluting American space sent to hell where they belong.
Sierras Three to Fifteen remained; the tiny ships were little more than tramp freighters with tacked-on shields and weapon systems. Most of the cobbled-together ships began to maneuver in a futile attempt to flee. A handful tried to fight back. Each raider had a heavy gun or two; a few had a couple of turrets with destroyer-grade weapons. Dozens of plasma, graviton or photon blasts were swallowed by the Anzio’s warp shields or splattered uselessly against the warships’ conventional force fields. The American ship’s return fire reaped the meek and the brave with equal efficiency. The raiders who’d been on the opposite side of the planet lived a little longer but none escaped.
The job wasn’t done, however. Hundreds if not thousands of Horde warriors were still on the planet’s surface. Tamir had his cruiser hover on the edge of the atmosphere and use its secondary armaments to pick off any grounded shuttles or enemy forces. His communications department made contact with the survivors of the human settlement. The news was as bad as he’d expected: the largest town on the planet had been hit hard and most of its twelve thousand inhabitants had been killed by either initial bombing runs or by the rampaging landing parties that followed them. The rest of the planet’s population was scattered in small farming settlements; the people there had broken out their militia’s weapons and gone to ground. Attempts to resist the invaders had been largely unsuccessful: the barbarians had better weapons and gear than anything the militiamen could deploy.
Tamir considered the situation. He had a platoon of Marines on board and about as many Navy masters-at-arms; between those and his two assault shuttles, he should be able to clear the planet, using the Anzio as on-call mobile artillery to deal with any large pirate concentrations. It would take time, however, and the US needed to be alerted.
“Dispatch a pinnace to Xanadu,” he ordered.
Warp-capable pinnaces were a relatively-recent invention, but they’d proved their worth in the decade or so since they’d been fielded. The tiny ships were shuttle hulls with oversized power plants and warp systems; unlike the commerce raiders he’d just killed, the pinnaces had very little cargo space and needed a full overhaul after every warp jump. Using them was expensive, and the Anzio only had two of the little vessels available. Still, if you didn’t have a QE-telegram system available – Goldman-Six didn’t – it was the only way to deliver messages quickly.
Even after the remaining pirates were dealt with, Tamir couldn’t leave Goldman System. The Horde had come from an unknown warp entry point, and the Anzio would have to defend the planet from any further incursions until reinforcements showed up. His ship wasn’t going anywhere until reinforcements arrived.
The Navy was the shield of the Republic.
Star System Claw, 198 AFC
The Chief Oracle hung his head. “The last Oracle with the raiding fleet has fallen silent. Our brethren are dead.”
Fann Blood-Drinker of the Crimson Sun Clan shrugged at the news. Raiding fleets were expendable, and thanks to the wisdom of the Oracles they would aid the Clan even in dying, for their messages could traverse the impossible gulfs of deep space and be shared with him. Fann now knew that this chaos road led to a defended system. Even more importantly, the system belonged to the greatest tribe of dirt-huggers in this region of the galaxy.
That left him with three options, none of them desirable. They could wait for more Clans to arrive, they could strike in a few days with everything they had, or they could use another Chaos lane – except all the other lanes they had mapped so far led back towards the encroaching Nemeses. No matter what, he must choose soon. The Crimson Sun Clan could only tarry here for so long.
“Get some rest, Old One,” he told the High Oracle. Although he’d never been trained in the Chaos Sight, Fann knew that communicating across the stars was an exhausting process. And dangerous; opening oneself to Chaos could and often did invite its dwellers, especially the dark spirits that the Nemeses worshipped. Many an Oracle had died, gone mad, or even been possessed by a dweller. Their gifts came with a high price.
As the Oracle left, Fann turned to the gathered war chiefs. “We will wait here for another three months. If more Clans heed our call, well and good. If not, we strike with what we have. Our Oracles will continue to trace other Chaos Lanes in the meanwhile; perhaps a better route will be found.”
There was some grumbling, but no one spoke openly against the plan. It was worth the wait, for they would need more numbers before braving the core worlds of the planet-bound civilizations they must loot if they were to continue their long flight.
They’d already been joined by a small flotilla of the People. They newcomers belonged to the White Dwarf Clan, but their scattering of ships had been adopted by the Crimson Sun. If more Wandering People came to this place, Fann hoped they would all agree to work together. If not, the Clans would war until one prevailed. That would be bad, perhaps disastrous, for the winner would be weaker and much would be lost. That was the way of the Host, however. To the strongest went the spoils.
This system had once been a great trade nexus for some dirt-hugger civilization. The previous owners must have been destroyed, or perhaps they had Transcended and left for parts unknown. Fann found the mere idea of Transcendence disturbing, for it meant becoming something other than what he was; change of such magnitude was anathema to the Host. The important thing, however, was that the departing Not-People had left behind a vast network of Star Roads, several dozen paths into the galaxy. The Oracles and the Memory Keepers had records of only a few of those, but they were busily mapping the rest.
The lane the raiding party had used led to a chain heading deep into the worlds of the Outer Spiral Arm, a collection of civilizations the Host had once plundered at their leisure before being forced out. Three later attempts had been rebuffed, the last one only a few decades ago. The important thing was that the Nemeses had never ventured there, content with securing their control over other parts of the galaxy. That meant that safety could be found there, if only temporarily.
Difficult as it would be, the Clan had to force its way through, replenish its ships’ cargo holds, and flee to the edge of the Galaxy. Only then would the Wandering People find respite for a few centuries, until the Nemeses found them again. Until the Nemeses found them again: those words summarized the entire history of the Host. Forever hunted, doomed to never call a star its home, for safety lay only in eternal flight.
“Warlord! Many ships will arrive soon. The Oracles have received word of a great Host fleet.”
“How many ships?”
“Three thousand, Warlord! Perhaps more. Some are very large indeed, great Homes beyond anything we have.”
Fann growled. No Clan he knew of commanded that many vessels, not even if every sub-Clan gathered together.
“Can the Oracles tell which Clan they belong to?”
“They are trying, Warlord.”
It took some hours before an answer was forthcoming. “They hail from nine Clans! And one of them is the Crimson Sun! They are led by a Lord of Warlords.”
A great gathering of clans. Such things had happened in the long history of the Star Host, but not often. Not once in Fann’s lifetime, and he was one of the oldest in the Clan at three thousand years of age. The very title of Lord of Warlords was the stuff of legends from times of the Host’s greatest glories – and greatest disasters. Desperate times indeed.
“Let us prepare a warm welcome for our brethren, then. Have supply ships at the ready to help restore their consumables; we have some to spare.”
“What does this mean, Warlord?” War Chief Kaan asked.
“It means the Host will soon fly through the planet-bound’s systems and loot them empty. It means the Host will prosper as it never has before.”
A chorus of che
ers filled the hall.
Nine
Starbase Malta, Xanadu System, 198 AFC
“This is an extraordinary claim, Ms. McClintock,” Guillermo Hamilton said.
“And it demands extraordinary evidence, yes. Which is why we wanted to run it by you before passing it on.”
Heather glanced at Professor Morrison, who seemed content to let her deliver the bad news. Fair enough. She’d been the one who’d spotted the pattern, although the academic had done the bulk of the data sifting.
“You are telling me the Horde can communicate across interstellar distances via warp telepathy,” the DCI said. “Something not even the Kraxan civilization managed to do, at least not with any reliability.”
“We have found a lot of data that seems to point in that direction, Deputy Chief. Thanks to the Tah-Leen and Kraxan archives, we have access to more records of Horde incursions than anyone else in the known galaxy. They show dozens of instances where a Horde formation in one system appeared to react to events transpiring in another one. Either they’ve managed to develop Quantum-Entanglement systems that can be used inside starships, or they are using some form of t-wave technology to do so.”
“All right, run some of that data by me.”
Heather activated a multimedia presentation she’d prepared for this eventuality. The PowerPoint system projected a star map into everybody’s implants. Stars were highlighted as she spoke:
“This incident occurred some two thousand years ago, during a relatively minor Horde incursion into the known galaxy. In this case, several raiding bands struck Gremlin, Dann and Wyrashat space. The Wyrms destroyed one of them – and the rest all turned tail and fled, even though they had been operating several warp transits away from where the battle took place. The remaining Horde formation somehow learned of the first one’s fate and took action immediately. Without a working QE system, that should have been impossible.”
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