To The Strongest

by C. J. Carella

  * * *

  “They dare to stand against us,” a warrior said in an almost admiring tone.

  “They are sworn to defend their homes and their young,” Warlord Fann replied. “Never expect less from your enemies than you would expect from yourself, whelp, or you won’t live very long.”

  The outspoken warrior crouched down in a gesture of both acknowledgement and shame. Fann turned away from him, sparing the youngster any further embarrassment, and watched the war map. They would soon be in range of the dirt-huggers’ weapons. The heavy guns in the Host’s Homes and War Mountains could have engaged the enemy already, but the Witch-King’s orders had been clear; they were to wait for his word, which would be conveyed instantly through the fleet’s Oracles.

  Do we serve a god or a mere madman, however powerful?

  The end of this battle would go a long way towards answering the question. Fann had sacrificed a third of his strength to the Witch-King’s daring plan, sending stripped-down ships simply to keep the dirt dwellers occupied while the rest of the Host arrived at the system unopposed. Thousands of his warriors had either died or would linger in drifting escape pods, helpless to do anything but wait until someone found them or their life support died out. All for the chance to face enemies who wielded Chaos almost as adroitly as the Nemeses. Much blood would be spilled on this battle, win or lose.

  The Homes of every clan had joined the fray; the great planetoids were the most powerful weapon platforms of the Host while at the same time housing the majority of a clan’s people. To deploy them in battle meant to risk a clan’s very existence. The Witch-King’s own Home led the way, so none of the other clans could refuse. They would rise or fall together. The newfangled weapons had been installed in those Homes, since they needed the power only their Hearts could provide, as well as the abilities of every Oracle available. That was one of the secrets the Endless Void Clan had acquired during its travels. Fann wished he could learn what had transpired during their epic voyages, but so far the only spokesman for the ruling clan had been the Witch-King himself. Attempts to converse with other members of the Endless Void outside what was absolutely necessary had invariably been met with stony silence. And those with Chaos sensitivity, including Fann himself, found something disquieting about the mere presence of those clanspeople.

  They are Chaos-Tainted. Perhaps as badly as the Nemeses themselves.

  Fann glanced at his Oracles even as the unbidden thought came up. Only his Chief Oracle was known for the ability to catch glimpses into others’ minds, but that had been before the new potions and teachings of the Witch-King’s acolytes. The seers of the Endless Void clan wore dark hooded robes that hid their features. They had arrived to oversee the installation of the new weapons and had brought drugs that they claimed would enhance the Oracles’ abilities. None had dared refuse to take them. After the work was done a few weeks later, they had left. The Crimson Sun Oracles now could see deeper into Chaos, among other things.

  Much had changed, and a warrior’s mind was no longer sacrosanct. Speaking or even thinking truths could be dangerous. He needed to guard his thoughts.

  A bright light flashed on one of the war maps and Fann felt a slight tremor beneath his feet. Something had struck the clan’s Home with enough force to make it vibrate.

  “We are taking fire from the enemy ships, War Chief,” one of the watch-standers said.

  Fann ignored the announcement. They had to wait.

  In the central war map, hundreds of tiny craft appeared in the midst of the Host’s fleet, slashing at Homes and warships with tremendous power. Two of Fann’s War Carracks ceased to exist a moment later.

  The Chief Oracle shouted: “The order to attack is given!”

  “Then let us attack,” Fann said, shrugging aside the humiliation of being commanded like a lesser warrior.

  The special weapons went active with a power surge that temporarily dimmed every light inside the Home.

  * * *

  Wilbur’s fighter hammered one of the enemy battleships until it broke apart.

  Shooting fish in a barrel, he thought with a grin. The Hordies’ anti-fighter formation was much better than before – they were learning – but against the Crimson Tides’ warp shields they were nowhere near good enough. There were lots of fish in this barrel, but getting them all wasn’t going to be a problem.

  He jumped towards his next designated target.

  His guardian angel appeared in front of him, shouting a warning. A moment later, a massive graviton beam struck Wilbur’s fighter inside warp space and disintegrated it.

  Fifteen

  Felix System, 199 AFC

  “Warp apertures detected.”

  Do they have warp shields? Givens thought as the impossible sensor readings came through. No, they are too small for that. Then what –

  On the tactical holotank, a dozen American fighters in his sector of the battle ceased to exist. A heartbeat later, another dozen friendly icons vanished.

  “It’s some sort of warp weapon system,” the tactical officer reported. “Targeting our fighters.”

  That didn’t tell Givens anything he couldn’t see with his own eyes, but he resisted the urge to yell at the spacer; you didn’t lose your cool in the middle of a battle. The warp apertures had appeared around the Horde asteroid in the Anzio’s sector, which happened to be the fighters’ target. Whatever the system was, it had destroyed a couple of Crimson Tide squadrons within seconds.

  “Third Fleet is recalling all fighters.”

  Givens glanced at the overall battle status. Two hundred and twenty-six fighters had been wiped out in a matter of seconds. The pride of the Navy had been decimated by the enemy’s opening salvo.

  Third Fleet’s heavyweights had been sniping at the enemy at extreme range. The Horde began retaliating with their massive grav cannon. Without fighters, the battle was going to turn into a standard gunnery contest, and the enemy had ten times as many guns. Even with warp shields, it wasn’t going to be fun.

  “Update our targeting solutions,” Tamir ordered unnecessarily. The enemy fleet was still too far for the Anzio’s guns. That would change in a few minutes at the current closure rate, and he wanted to make every shot count.

  He was about to say something equally inane, just to keep everyone’s attention on their jobs rather than the devolving situation, when a FLASH-CRITIC order was displayed by his implant: turn off all warp shields.

  Tamir passed on the order while he read the rest of the message. Whatever the aliens had used to destroy the fighters had struck Third Fleet’s heaviest vessels and inflicted severe damage. The weapon system somehow linked a warp conduit to the ship’s warp shields and sent a powerful graviton beam through it. The USS Benjamin Franklin’s status icon was flashing yellow. All the superdreadnoughts in the fleet had gotten walloped. None had been destroyed, but damage had been severe.

  The outlandish patina that warp shields put on visual sensors vanished; so did the protection afforded by those walls of chaotic space. A few moments later, the Horde’s war planetoids fired a full volley from their giant grav cannons and began collecting American scalps.

  * * *

  Fleet Admiral Gordon Somoza wiped blood from his eyes. A spacer managed to get some spray-seal on the scalp cut, stopping the bleeding. He could see again.

  The fleet bridge had been shaken by the unexpected graviton blast like a rat in a terrier’s jaws. A couple of crewmembers who hadn’t strapped themselves securely enough had been tossed out of their seats. One of them had clipped the Admiral with his feet as he cartwheeled through the air before smashing against a bulkhead with bone-crushing force. The petty officer hadn’t survived. Three other spacers had been injured on the bridge and two hundred others were dead from the single shot that had emerged from the warp shields meant to safeguard the Franklin. Only sheer luck had kept the massive graviton blast from tearing through a critical system. As it was, a dozen compartments were exposed to vacuum and the ship’
s secondary power plants had shut down. The flagship would fight at less than fifty percent capacity until damage control parties restored that power, assuming they ever managed to do that in the time available.

  None of that mattered. He had a battle to fight.

  “All fleet elements will advance on the enemy until achieving optimal range and will maintain continuous fire on the selected planetoids. Ignore all other targets.”

  It was the only way to wrestle something out of this disaster. The Horde’s sixty-two largest planetoids were the source of the mystery weapons that had slaughtered his fighters and forced the rest of the fleet to abandon their warp shields. The admiral realized his orders had consigned Third Fleet to a slugging match with a superior force. The only alternative was to abandon Felix System and its millions, however, and he could not do that.

  His ships began to move forward. To his dismay, many – much too many – of them delayed following orders and asked for clarification. Others acknowledged them but were downright sluggish getting there. The wall of battle became disorganized, brittle. Not enough drill, not enough veterans showing the new hands how it was done. The hardened spacers of the Great Galactic War would have moved as one without hesitation. But most of them had retired, died or moved to rear-echelon positions. The summer children he led might not be up to the task ahead.

  All my fault, he told himself. He’d asked for more training time, more retention programs for experienced chiefs and officers. But when he’d been told to make do with the budgets the Department of the Navy had deemed sufficient to the task, he’d shut up and followed orders. After all, there were no enemies left in the galaxy, at least none capable of presenting a challenge. He’d grown too complacent to continue complaining in the face of his superiors’ indifference. Now he – and far worse, his country – would pay for that.

  “We have to take out those damned asteroids,” he said out loud. “Without them and their special weapons, we can deploy our fighters again.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  There were a few sidelong looks from the bridge crew, but everyone did as they were told. Maybe he was wrong about the new generation. Maybe they would do him proud.

  “We will advance and engage the enemy more closely.”

  * * *

  The two fleets closed the gap between them and traded broadsides in a throwback to an earlier age, a time before humans showed up and upset Starfarer tactics.

  Tamir Givens felt the Anzio heave and buck under multiple impacts. His ship was engaging one of the Horde planetoids, ignoring the enemy ships – dozens of them – that were shooting at it. Evasive maneuvers reduced the ship gunners’ accuracy, but they were the only thing keeping the battlecruiser alive. He grimaced as the latest salvo from his grav cannon missed the target clean. A moment later, the cruiser shook again when a Horde plasma cannon struck home. The force fields were holding – barely – but only at the cost of redlining all the power plants. Put that much stress on systems and people and engines would break sooner or later.

  One of the friendly icons in the holo-tank went black. One of his support destroyers, the Henley. That left two out of the original five. The lighter vessels were dying at higher rates; without warp shields, they couldn’t handle the firepower the Horde was throwing at them. Not that the heavies were doing much better; even the best shields would give way under enough firepower, and the enemy had plenty of that.

  And the damn planetoids weren’t dying fast enough.

  Three of the monstrous flying mountains had broken apart, but it had taken the combined efforts of all the American capital ships to do it. And Third Fleet had lost the USS John Adams along the way. They’d damaged all of those damned rocks, but they were tougher than they’d expected. Multiple layers of force fields, both external and internal, quickly dissipated the energy of any strike. Even worse, a lot of the American ships’ firepower had been spent destroying inert masses of iron-nickel filler. Anti-shipping weapon systems were like stiletto knives, meant to penetrate deep into the guts of a starship, where everything was tightly packed together to save space. Those asteroids were mostly lifeless rock with a few pockets of equipment and living space. It was like trying to kill an elephant with a bunch of ice picks. If they could deploy their fighters, it wouldn’t have mattered. Instead, the carriers had been sent packing to Felix-Five. Only the carrier-dreadnoughts remained, since their striking power didn’t rely wholly on their fighter complements.

  Anzio opened fire once again. A clean hit this time, not that it seemed to matter. The asteroid was still in one piece. Unfortunately, they got the Horde’s attention. A battery of super-heavy grav guns targeted the ship. Two of the four blasts missed the battlecruiser. The others tore through its aft superstructure and destroyed the gluon power plant powering its main engine.

  Tamir Givens and the eight hundred and thirty-three men and women about the USS Anzio ceased to exist in a single cataclysmic blast.

  Starbase Malta, 199 AFC

  Heather Fromm-McClintock watched the remnants of Third Fleet limp into Xanadu System.

  The largest vessels in the battered formation were its fleet carriers and three battlecruisers. Every other capital ship had died in the futile attempt to destroy the Horde war planetoids. Most of the survivors were support ships, destroyers that had been damaged early in the action and managed to withdraw before the disaster unfolded, and the Marine Assault Ships, which had been busy ferrying civilians out of Felix-Five when the battle started. The Marines aboard them – Matthew included – had been left on the planet to defend the population still stranded on that planet.

  She shook her head, banishing the dark thoughts. Unlike most of those Marines’ parents, she had a part to play in the battle to come. The information she was gleaning from ancient Kraxan and Tah-Leen records could make a difference. She turned away from the window and focused on the t-wave device on her desk.

  The Kraxan interface looked like some post-modern work of art: a black cube covered with intricate decorations carved on its surface. To most sophonts and artificial sensor systems, the cube was completely inert, useful only as a paperweight, decoration or clumsy weapon. To a telepath like Heather, however, the thing was alive with psychic energy: t-waves, the stuff of warp space as well as thoughts and dreams. By focusing her will on it, Heather could access the information stored in hundreds of similar cubes stored in the heavily guarded facility. The entire multi-millennia history of the Kraxan Empire was contained therein. Accessing the data wasn’t easy, unfortunately.

  Heather concentrated and reached out with her mind. For a moment, her senses were flooded with alien inputs – amidst a roaring battle, a monstrous cyborg bit off the head of a feebly flailing insectoid alien – until she clamped down on it and forced the device to show her only what she wanted to see. The cube’s makers had designed their information systems to challenge their users at every step, turning a simple data search into a war game and contest of wills. Heather had to wrestle with the damned machine for every bit of information. All human researchers had that problem – many ended up with assorted psychological trauma – with one exception.

  Speak of the devil, Heather thought as she went through the data cube’s index.

  An icon showing a smiling human female and a gigantic three-eyed alien hovering behind her was blinking amidst the Kraxan entries. Lisbeth Zhang, formerly of the Navy and Warp Marine Corps, had not only accessed this data cube, she had ‘written’ notes on it! Heather hadn’t known that was even possible, but Zhang could do impossible things with annoying frequency.

  Wish you were here, Colonel, Heather thought as she opened the blinking file.

  The one human who could easily access Kraxan records had been treated most shabbily before she eventually resigned her commission and disappeared. What the US government had done to Lisbeth Zhang had been beyond shameful. The woman had saved humanity and possibly the entire known galaxy, perhaps not single-handedly but damn close. Government bureaucrats ha
d reacted to her deeds by treating her like an experimental subject and keeping her confined to a research facility until she’d gotten sick of it all and broken out, leaving a hastily-scribbled resignation letter behind.

  Heather had tried to find Lisbeth, but the former Marine pilot had vanished without a trace. Rumors had placed her in the Botari Rim, a lawless collection of stars under the official control of a handful of Blue Man principalities but ruled mainly by greed and naked force. Heather’s efforts were rewarded with a warning from the CIA not to meddle in military affairs. Reluctantly, she had backed off. Lisbeth remained AWOL, a fugitive from the nation she had saved.

  The file with Zhang’s face flashed when Heather accessed it; a moment later she found herself sitting on a sofa in a shipboard rec-room compartment, complete with ping-pong and pool tables. The illusion was detailed to a fault; she could even smell a mix of stale starship air, coffee, and beer, with a whiff of body odor underlying it all. A smiling Lisbeth Zhang was sitting across Heather, wearing a fighter pilot’s jumpsuit with a Major’s insignia. A gigantic three-eyed alien and a scowling monstrosity made of cybernetic and multiple alien species’ body parts assembled into a killing machine stood behind her.

  “Welcome to A Brief History of the Invincible Kraxan Empire, annotated edition,” Lisbeth said. “Annotated by yours truly, with a little help from my pals Atu and Vlad. You may think of me as an interface to help you navigate this book.”

  Heather sighed. For a moment she’d thought she was talking to her old friend. Still, a simulacrum of Lisbeth would be a lot more user-friendly than normal Kraxan index systems, which you had to force to disgorge their knowledge.

  “I’m looking for details of the Horde incursion of the year seven thousand and ninety-three after the Rise of Kraxan.”

  “Aye, aye, ma’am. Searching.” A few seconds went by. “I’ve got the info. Would you like full sensory access or a verbal accounting?”