“I can procure two Class Four fabricators,” he said, as much to himself as to the bio-engineer. “Six of them, however, are out of the question.”
“We can trade costs for time, Proxy, but that will push the completion date by six months.”
Time wasn’t in abundant supply, either. Another operation was being carried out and was expected to go off in a little over a year’s time. His plan called for the toxin to be deployed at the same time, to inflict maximum chaos and disruption on the much-despised human race, particularly of the American variety. Equally important was the fact that Noro and his entire operation might need to abandon their current location sooner rather than later.
Noro’s welcome was wearing thin. Hoone System was a Botari province; it was semi-independent but the blue-skinned aliens feared Americans too much to tolerate the troublesome exile for long. The local Blue-Faces didn’t know what Noro and his fellow Denn were doing, not exactly, but they suspected enough. Massive bribes – one of the reasons money had become such an aggravating issue – had bought Noro’s team two to three months of forbearance; after that, the Botari would evict them. His plan – to smuggle the toxin into Sol System and use it against the Americans’ very capital – would only be effective if they had enough poison to kill millions. The goal was to destabilize the enemy’s central government in the middle of a crisis triggered by the operation currently underway. Even more importantly, it would show the rest of the known galaxy that humans weren’t invincible.
“What if we scale down our goals?” he said. “The initial plan called for the demise of at least ten million humans. That was probably too ambitious; the network tasked with dispersing the agent is relatively small and, worse, is almost entirely composed of humans of dubious intelligence. Perhaps a smaller exposure would suffice. Say, two million fatalities?”
Darpa nodded absently for a few seconds, letting his implant do the calculations needed before speaking: “Yes, my Proxy. In that case, two fabricators will produce the necessary toxins and the delivery drones in a month’s time.”
“Excellent.”
The Americans would soon celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of their fledgling nation. The date of the event had initially been a time of sorrow and remembrance, since it marked the day the Snakes had tried but failed to extinguish the human race. Damn the Puppies for stopping the genocide, and damn the humans for not only surviving but thriving! This time, the people of the United Stars aimed to celebrate rather than mourn; they had become the most powerful and influential polity in the known galaxy. Their population was still tiny, but they controlled over a hundred star systems and were poised to expand explosively over the next few centuries, outstripping all other Starfarers. Noro’s plan would tarnish those celebrations and hopefully deal a blow from which humanity would never recover.
At least, that was what he told himself whenever he faced his doubts. Deep inside, he knew that the chances both operations would work without a hitch were slim. In the end, all he wanted to do was to hurt the smug species that had brought down the only hope for civilization in the galaxy. Killing all the vermin was the only fitting reparation for that crime, and he couldn’t achieve that, not yet and perhaps not ever.
Killing two million and throwing their empire into disarray would be a good start, however.
* * *
Well, here goes nothing, Jason thought. First for-real mission.
Silence in the ranks, Staff Sergeant Kinston said.
Neither of them had spoken out loud, of course. Before the Wraith Marines had come along, only warp fighter pilots, navigators and a handful of modified intelligence operatives had displayed telepathic abilities. After the Galactic War, the US had established very tight controls over all t-wave technologies. After living with his abilities for the past year, Jason understood why. Getting into other people’s heads wasn’t good at all.
Everybody was an asshole some of the time, some were assholes a lot of the time, and a sizable minority were assholes all of the time. And when you could catch every errant thought in their heads, those asshole moments grated on you like industrial sandpaper. You began to hate everyone. If the Wraith Marines hadn’t developed ways to manage and control their abilities, they would have all gone insane in short order.
The training had paid off, though. Jason could only ‘hear’ thoughts when they were directed at him or when he actively went rummaging into someone’s heads. It was the difference between being a comm receiver without control of what came through and being able to open apps in his personal system whenever he wanted to. He was aware of everyone in the squad and would remain so even if they were separated by relativistic distances, but he had to concentrate to hear their thoughts. Sometimes his control wavered, however, and his mind would accidentally broadcast in the open where anybody with the right talents could hear. That was why Kinston had admonished him. Jason was more worried than he’d let on, even to himself, and he’d let his mind wander.
They’d run through the op a bunch of times. A mockup of the target area had been built with painstaking detail and they’d gone in and out, in and out, over and over again. Thing was, their intelligence wasn’t perfect; things would not be exactly like in the simulations. They had trained for that, too, run through a dozen different scenarios, trying to prepare for as many contingencies as possible. He was still tense as he ran another system check on his armor.
He wasn’t worried about getting killed. He was worried about screwing up. About letting down his team.
Everyone else seemed cool enough. Kinston’s mental voice sounded almost bored, although she was good enough to hide her true feelings from any of them, telepathy or not. Edison was chatting with his ghost girlfriend; Jason could see her if he wanted to, but that would be like eavesdropping on someone else’s conversation, so he ignored them. Corolla was taking a nap. Lucky bastard.
Jason glanced at the rest of MSOT-One. The twelve Marines crowded the small cargo hold they were using as a stating area. The USS Liberator was a spy vessel, currently configured as the Vehelian freighter Consummate Voyager. The superstructure of the alien merchantman surrounded the Liberator like a giant eggshell; the real ship nestled near its center, its sleek lines, weapon systems and powerful engines masked by the fake vessel around it. A dozen Vehelian mercenaries worked in the outer façade and pretended to be the ship’s officers and crew. As far the as the Blue Men who owned the system knew, no humans were anywhere near the area.
They would learn better very soon.
The headquarters element went first. The Liberator had no warp catapults, which released a very noticeable gravitonic signature when used and would betray its presence to the locals’ orbital defenses. Instead, Captain Teller and the other three men in the HQ element vanished in a brief flash of light without any telltale emissions, drawing energy from warp space to open the way.
HQ Element in position, Captain Teller sent out a moment later. That mean the officer and his assistants had arrived at a rise overlooking the compound where the target resided. Team Two is a go.
The tactical element vanished from the cargo hold. Their job was to take a blocking position on the road leading out of the compound and also to interdict any aircraft departing or approaching the area. To make sure the prey didn’t escape or any outside force intervened, in other words.
Team Two in position.
Our turn, Staff Sergeant Kinston said.
Tactical Element One’s job was to enter the compound and strike the target.
Jason activated his TAS-1; the weapon whined as its systems went live.
Drop.
TE-1 vanished into warp space.
* * *
Tango at three o’clock.
Denn aliens looked almost human except for their lack of body hair and a pair of twisting nostrils that looked like miniature elephant trunks. The one who’d been unlucky enough to catch the tactical element’s arrival was armed with a particle beam shotgun. About as useful a
s a spitball against the armored Wraiths, but you didn’t want to give the enemy a chance to run and come back with something more substantial. Russell let him have it; a single pulse from his gun turned the Denn into soup and blasted a man-sized hole on the wall behind him; the poor bastard didn’t have an active force field, so the only things between him and a megajoule of concentrated gravity were his clothes and skin.
Clear.
The tactical element had ghosted in a central courtyard that looked just like the mock-up they’d trained in: an open rectangle twenty meters long and ten wide, covered with grass and decorated with colorful fountains and floral arrangements. There weren’t supposed to be any guards there, but Russell was used to intelligence remfies being wrong most of the time. A company of former Imperium regulars were in a barracks thirty meters away from the big manor house, but they were being engaged by the HQ element with long-range and indirect fire.
Found the target. Basement level.
Kinston was the best of the team; her warp witchery allowed her to find the tango by sniffing out his mind. Russell could only pick surface thoughts and emotions. Like the emotions from someone both pissed off and determined coming up from his six. He whirled around just as another armed E.T. showed up, this one wearing body armor and holding a heavy laser in his hands. Normally those heavy bastards were crew-served but the alien was big and tough enough to tote one as his personal sidearm.
Russell and the tango shot at the same time. The continuous laser beam sparkled all over the Wraith’s force field, but the his counterfire chopped through the alien’s shields and armor long before the laser could do any damage. The alien dropped, his body twisted into a mess of flesh and bone by the grav beam. Big and tough didn’t cut it against a Wraith Marine.
Now we’re clear, Russell sent out as TE-1 headed towards the alien they’d come to kill.
Eleven
Hoone-Two, Star System Hoone, 199 AFC
Noro Tan looked up from his desk. Thunderous discharges made the entire building shake.
“We’re under attack,” he told himself as his implants accessed the security video feeds.
Most of the sensors were down, destroyed by the invaders, but what he could see was bad enough. The barracks where his most loyal followers slept were nothing but smoking ruins, despite their reinforced walls and the area force fields protecting them. The perimeter guards were all dead, their bodies horribly mutilated. Only gravitonic weapons made such wounds, and only one army in the galaxy issued them to infantry forces. The Americans were here.
His study was buried deep underground and was protected by a slew of force fields and weapon systems but Noro had no illusions that they would keep the damnable warp monkeys from reaching him. He sent a signal via his implants, triggering the command that would delete all the data bases in the mansion. Another signal made sure no information could be extracted from him. The toxins would never be delivered but the first operation was ongoing and he was the only one in the mansion who knew of it. He barely had time to feel regret that he would not live to see his plans come to fruition.
A moment later two faceless figures in combat armor materialized in front of him.
Too late, he thought as the tiny explosive in the base of his skull detonated.
* * *
Ghosting.
To the astonished guards on the outside of Noro Tann’s estate, the Wraiths’ arrival was like something out of a children’s fantasy. A Botari mercenary reacted to the unknown apparitions with lethal quickness: a burst from his plasma shotgun struck the closest figure center-of-mass a fraction of a second after it appeared. Jason noticed the blast of superheated fluid only as a reddish haze that was absorbed by his suit’s force field. The sudden movement and the muzzle flash triggered his reflexes. His single shot struck the Botari a moment later; the Blue Man tumbled to the ground, grotesquely mutilated. Corolla tore the other guard apart; further out, smoke rose from the remains of the barracks holding most of the enemy personnel. The command element had blasted it to cinders. They were clear.
Headed to the target, Staff Sergeant Kinston said. She and Edison jumped to the leader’s position. There were no other living targets left.
Jason glanced at the Blue Man’s corpse. It was the first time he’d killed anybody. Well, other than Scabs back in Robinson System, and that had been an accident. He thought he should be feeling something, but the whole thing had gone down just like the training simulations. The dead E.T.s might as well have been computer-generated graphics.
The head honcho suicided before we could get him, Kinston grumbled. Ain’t nothing left of him from the neck up.
That was too bad. Their first priority had been to neutralize the target, but a live prisoner could provide valuable intelligence. They’d planned for that, though. Kinston’s suit would access the data server in the room, breaking through its security measures with the same ease the Wraiths had penetrated the estate’s defenses.
He started to erase the data before he scragged himself, but we’re getting some, the non-com said, including Captain Teller in the transmission.
There are two high-end fabbers in the next room over, Edison called out. Plus a dozen canisters. Marked with E.T. biohazard symbols.
His mental voice switched to visual, a nifty telepathic trick Jason hadn’t quite mastered yet. Now all the team members could see through the non-com’s eyes. The room was big and hadn’t been in the map of the compound. Must have been built in secret. A dead tango, torn to shreds by a single grav bolt, lay near the fabbers, matter-printing machines that could turn out anything from screwdrivers to plasma guns if you had the proper recipe uploaded into the system. Each of those suckers was worth a good decade of the entire team’s combined salary, hazard pay included.
Burn it all, MSOT-One’s leader ordered. Place your charges and turn the whole place into a hole in the ground.
Copy that.
They’d all practiced that, too. The little sticky balls the Marines pulled out of compartments in their armor held a dollop of highly-reactive subatomic particles, enough to put a hole in battleship-grade armor. The Wraiths walked around the mansion, placing them where they’d do the most good. They had plenty of time. Nobody had approached the compound so far, either by land or air. Which meant the four Wraiths of Tactical Element Two had spent the op twiddling their thumbs while TE-1 did the killing. Jason had been warned to expect a lot of that. Lots of hurrying up and waiting, broken up by occasional terrifying bouts of fighting and dying. This time, the E.T.s had done all the dying.
We’re set here, Kinston sent out a couple minutes later.
RTB, Captain Teller ordered. Another transition took the twelve Wraiths back to the waiting covert ops ship. The charges went off a few seconds later; the visual feed from the orbiting ‘merchantman’ showed a bright fireball devouring all the buildings and a good chunk of countryside around them. The local Blue Man authorities would find nothing to explain what had happened, let alone to implicate the freighter that would finish conducting its business and depart the system with none the wiser.
Jason took off his helmet. “That was too easy,” he said, speaking aloud for the first time since the op began.
“You complaining, fresh fish?” Edison told him. “Our job ain’t to fight ‘em. It’s to kill ‘em.”
“A properly planned op is like a perfect murder,” Kinston expanded. “The target is supposed to die before he can react. Heroes happen when someone on our side screws up.”
“Fair fights are for suckers, kid,” Edison went on as the squad marched off to the armory to return their Wraith armor before going to the post-mission debriefing. “A fair fight means there’s a fifty-fifty chance the other guy wins. Don’t you forget that. If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.”
“Got it,” Jason said.
He shrugged. Those terrorists had been planning to kill Americans and had already killed hundreds of them. They had it coming.
A part of him won
dered whether all the ops would be this easy. That would be almost disappointing.
Starbase Malta, 199 AFC
He looks so serious, Heather Fromm-McClintock thought,
Her son had grown up a lot in the past six years. Physically, he’d shot up in height to pass his father’s six feet by a good inch and a half. But it was the way his face was set that showed Heather the changes his time in the Corps had inflicted. Matthew Fromm’s youthful insecurity was gone. The man sitting across the dinner table was confident, strong, and smart enough not to be overly cocky about it.
“It’s supposed to be a six-month deployment,” he said.
She didn’t have to be telepathic to sense he was trying to reassure her. Funny how roles could reverse in just a few years.
“Third Fleet is going to oversee the evacuation of Goldman System and find the warp conduit the Horde used to invade,” Matthew went on. “They need our Marines in Goldman-Six to help. Mostly by blowing up anything we can’t take with us.”
“Makes sense,” she said, knowing that if it became necessary, Third Fleet would use its Marine ships to launch boarding actions. Those were dangerous enough against ordinary Starfarers; against an enemy that always chose suicide over surrender, they became insanely risky.
“Got any actionable intelligence you can pass on, Mom?” Matthew asked her.
Her current research work wasn’t a secret. Some of her findings were, but not all.
“If the fleet that attacked Goldman was part of a larger force, expect the flying asteroids to make an appearance,” she said. “Maybe bigger ones than anything we’ve seen so far. The Navy has already been apprised of their capabilities. Their oversized grav cannons are nasty, and destroying them is going to take a lot of firepower.”
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