* * *
Clean sweep! Lead Operations Officer Melendez announced, his exhilaration apparent to all the telepaths in the network.
Thirty-two Marine teams had hit sixteen asteroids; one team performed the entry while the second one acted as a reserve. Without fail, each attack had worked, leading to the destruction of the devices and the killing of many if not most warp adept near the targets. Over a fourth of the crystalline t-wave weapons were gone.
In four cases, the targets were literally gone. Destroying their crystal weapon had triggered some sort of chain reaction and those asteroids had vanished in a flash of Hawking radiation. The Horde’s secret had become clear when those planetoids and the teeming millions living inside them had been obliterated. Hawking radiation was emitted by black holes. There was a miniature singularity inside each of those rocks, generating as much gravity as a far more massive celestial body; the aliens had somehow developed technologies to tap that gravity for everything from propulsion systems to powering their super-heavy beam weapons to creating oversized warp apertures. No other known Starfarer had that technology. If they could capture one of those asteroids – Heather dismissed the idea. Many had tried; the Horde always preferred destruction to surrender.
The Wraiths were going back out at T-plus-ten minutes. The initial attacks had all been resolved with amazing quickness. The Horde had just begun to alert its forces in the asteroids when the Marine adepts had arrived and made it through the two hundred meters separating them from their targets, shooting anything in their way. Those new units would be as revolutionary as Marine warp catapults back in the early years after First Contact, assuming they could be scaled up in number, although that would take a while. The four hundred Marines launching the initial phase of the assault had been found through a search that combed through the records of tens of millions of current and former Marine personnel. Finding more was going to be hard.
The CIA gestalt quickly sensed an increase of t-wave activity among the surviving asteroids. The Horde was stirring like a kicked-over hornet’s nest.
Moments later, Heather felt a burst of power slam against her mind. She shunted the attack aside, but one of the officers on her team screamed in agony and died, his mind snuffed out like a candle in a strong wind. More attacks followed, all coming from the adepts in the Horde flagship. Not only direct mind-to-mind attacks, either. Warplings were being sent against the CIA telepaths. The celebration turned into a fight for survival.
The easy part was over.
Twenty-Two
Felix System, 200 AFC
“They are killing us!” the Chief Oracle shouted. “They have destroyed the weapons and nearly wiped out every Oracle in twenty-nine Clan Homes already, with fighting still going on in three others. Their soldiers can walk through Chaos just like the Nemeses.”
Fann grunted at the news. Losing too many Oracles would doom the Host as surely as if every Home was torn to shreds. Only the combined efforts of hundreds of adepts could manipulate the Hearts that moved the massive planetoids through Chaos; their loss would leave the Host stranded in this system, except for the tiny percentage that could be ferried aboard conventional ships – ships that in any case would not survive combat with the dirt-huggers’ fleets.
We fled the Nemeses only to find something just as deadly, he thought, and had to fight off a surge of despair that nearly overwhelmed him.
“We will station all our warriors around the Chapels and the crystals we placed there,” he said out loud.
“What few warriors remain here,” a lesser war-chief noted with bitterness. “Over half of our strength is fighting on that accursed mudball below us.”
“It may not matter,” the Chief Oracle said. “Most of the Homes that were struck had not deployed any warriors to the planet’s surface. The enemy tore through guards and Oracles alike.”
“Those complacent fools weren’t prepared,” Fann countered. “We will do better. We’ll position heavy weapons and cover every likely entrance. Make it so!”
His sub-chiefs scattered, each barking commands. The preparations would take time, but it seemed the accursed dirt-huggers did not have the numbers to strike all fifty-seven Homes at the same time. Even with total success, the enemy would have to repeat the same Chaos assault two more times before destroying all the special weapons. By the time he’d finished issuing orders, the chief Oracle announced a third wave of attacks had begun. The Crimson Sun’s Home was spared once more; the next attack would certainly strike it.
The Witch-King’s orders arrived a few minutes later. The land assault would go on and the five clans that had sent their warriors to the planet – including the Crimson Sun – would have to fend off the attacks as best they could. Everyone else was mobilizing and preparing to repel the boarding parties. The Witch-King and his priesthood were preparing to deal with the invaders in a more direct way.
Fann wondered what the new ruler of the Host could do against such foes, then remembered what he had seen in the great monolith that served as the Endless Void Clan’s Home and grimaced in distaste. The Witch-King had become something very much like the Nemeses in order to fight them. It seemed that no matter which way Fann turned, he found himself facing the very thing he wanted to escape. Oblivion or becoming the bloodless monsters he hated above all other things.
Fann forced himself to hide his feelings. The bargain was made, and he would have to live with the consequences.
* * *
Transition.
More Warplings were waiting for them this time. And, mixed among them, something else.
Who the hell are those guys? Corolla asked a moment before a beam of red light almost took his head off.
‘Those guys’ were six bipedal figures clad in black armor. Hordies from their long arms and stunted legs, shooting some sort of weapon the Marines had never encountered before. Corolla was alive but his force field had been nearly drained; Jason stepped in front of him and returned fire. The black-clad aliens took direct hits from his TAS-1; a shield of the same red energy protected them, and it absorbed his first two shots without wavering.
“Pour it on, don’t piss on them!” Kinston shouted, following her own advice.
The three Wraiths still on their feet went to continuous beam mode, sending a steady stream of gravitons which, given time, would drill right through a battleship. There was no cover, nowhere to maneuver. The two groups of warp adepts stood off and traded shots in what would have been mutually assured destruction if it wasn’t for their force fields. Whoever’s shields were drained first would lose.
Jason saw his shield counter go down steadily. He concentrated and sent warp energy into his batteries even as his steady beam cut through a black-clad figure’s red force field and tore him apart. One down; five to go. Corolla recovered and joined the fight. Six to three became five to four, and, not too soon afterwards, four to one. The last Hordeling still on his feet tried to retreat and got nailed by all four Marines for his troubles. The Warplings supporting them stopped fighting the Marines’ totems and skedaddled.
The tactical element had been lucky. MSOT-One had lost one Marine from the other element. One out of fourteen Wraiths was down and they hadn’t made it to the other side yet.
* * *
Emergence.
Nothing easy this time. Their warp arrival put them in the middle of a hasty barricade. The warp implosion took it out, but there were lots more Horde troopers on both ends of the long corridor, and the Wraiths took fire from the moment they made it out. Their personal fields handled the incoming okay but they couldn’t hold out forever. Only way to deal with them was fill both ends with high-power ordnance. They burned through half their missiles and grenades clearing out their landing point.
TE-Two emerged a moment later and kept an eye on one end while Russell’s element watched the other. The two tactical elements kept a good fifty-meter separation between them, because they were about to have company. A signal from Staff Sergeant Kinsto
n was all it took.
A warp gate opened in the vacant spot and a squad of regular Marines came through. More would arrive soon and would support the Wraiths now that the Hordes had gotten wise to the attack. Fighting alongside old-school leathernecks almost made Russell feel nostalgic. Almost. The Wraiths led the way. The Marines’ standard comms filled his helmet with noise as they followed.
The drones scouting ahead spotted a strongpoint twenty meters around the next corner. The video feed showed several hulking armored figures in mismatched armor of many colors waiting behind a barricade, the shimmer of a heavy force field blurring their outlines. A moment later all the drones went off the air. Swatters or direct fire had gotten them all. The Wraiths sent a couple dozen smart munitions around the corner. Whatever had killed the drones fried them as well; the special rounds dropped to the ground without detonating. Shit. They were going to have to do it the hard way.
“Plasma grenades, everyone,” Kinston ordered, using standard commo so the other Marines heard her. “We’re tossing them, old-fashioned like, to mask our follow-up. Dog-Boy and Edison, follow them in.
Russell had his suit eject a grenade into his waiting hand. The 15mm projectile was small but heavy, and everyone had practice throwing them, since sometimes launching them wasn’t feasible. The regular grunts handed him more explosives. A quick command through his imp dialed their explosive yield to maximum level. His underhand throws bounced the grenades off a wall and sent them downrange. The rest of the element did the same and a dozen high-yield grenades blew up five meters into the corridor. That wasn’t close enough to do anything to the force fields protecting the barricade but that wasn’t their purpose. The cloud of plasma temporarily blinded the enemy’s sensor systems. Only for a second or two, but that was long enough for two Wraiths to step out of cover and fill the corridor with high-intensity grav beams.
They took fire, of course. Blind or not, the Hordies knew what was coming and opened up with everything they got. The operators’ high-quality force fields held up, though. The enemy’s area shield didn’t, not after Russell and Dog-Boy delivered as much energy as a starship’s cannon onto the target. The ETs dove for cover when their area shield failed, except for a luckless bastard that got caught by the edge of the beam and turned into something like stretched taffy before the superheated composites materials in his armor burst into flames.
The two Wraith Marines kept pouring on gravitons until nothing remained alive. Then the whole group moved on, stepping over the mangled remains of the Hordies. More fighting was raging on behind them. A whole platoon of Marines had dropped in and was helping TE-2 hold off Horde reaction forces. More Devil Dogs were on the way, but they were going to be outnumbered no matter what. Any one of those asteroids held more troops than the Marines had in the system, or the whole universe for that matter. If things got too hot, the grunts couldn’t just teleport away; they would have to exfiltrate via their portable catapults, which took time to set up, or die in place.
They’d better get things done before anybody had to make that choice.
* * *
“We’re up,” Sergeant Hansen said.
PFC Matthew Fromm and the rest of the squad stepped on the warp catapult. They’d watched as most of the battalion jumped ahead of them, but he hadn’t minded one bit. Warp drops always bothered him, even if they were a lot safer than in his father’s day. It was all part of the ‘W’ in USWMC, of course. He and a few hundred of his closest friends paying a visit to the Horde. The drop was the least of his problems.
“Are we dropping in hot, Sergeant?” Brock asked. The SAW gunner was making sure the power packs hanging from his tactical bandolier were good.
“No. They’ve secured the LZ, or so they tell me. But stay frosty.”
The ten-second countdown began. Fromm closed his eyes and exhaled slowly. He’d already seen combat, so he had an idea of how bad it could get, but he’d learned that as long as he concentrated on his training, things weren’t all that scary. It all became part of a dance, sort of. Enemy does X, so you do Y, and most of your attention was on getting Y done rather than on your feelings.
Transition.
There’d been word that the Hordies could attack people in transit, but either they’d been cleared out already or someone was bullshitting, because nothing bothered them during the few seconds they spent in null-space. So far so good.
Emergence.
The passageway they appeared on was wider than anything he’d seen aboard a ship. They must have landed in a major avenue. There were spent power packs everywhere, and although Matthew had his helmet on he knew what the smell outside would be like: he’d become familiar with the stench of burning plastic, ozone and blood. There was blood on the floor and the walls. Casualties were being carried to a triage station set up further back in the corridor, where warp-capable Navy corpsmen decided who got catapulted back to Felix-Five and who got patched up and sent back to fight. Some of the prone figures were struggling or screaming in pain; others were unconscious. The dead were piled up away from the medics; Matthew quick-counted them. Five bodies so far. There were at least two companies from the 192nd MEU already engaging the enemy. Five out of three hundred, call it two percent KIA. That wasn’t good, not good at all.
“Move out,” Sergeant Hansen ordered. The squad had its marching orders.
The twelve Marines walked to an intersection and headed down a narrower passageway that was still larger than what you found in an assault ship, where everything was packed up tight and the only ample spaces were outside the hull. It made sense; having an asteroid bigger than any starship to build in gave the Hordies lots of room to play with. The passageway was wide enough to let the squad make room for a couple of corpsmen dragging away another fallen Marine; this one’s status icon was black. That made it six KIAs.
The sounds of fighting were growing louder as they jogged forward. The crack and thunder of grav guns, the sizzling sound of plasma interacting with air, the whine of lasers. The deck was trembling slightly under his feet; Matthew forced himself not to think about what sort of ordnance could make a piece of a multi-trillion-ton asteroid shake like that.
They turned a corner and found a utility tunnel that had been carved into a hole big enough to fit four or five Marines at a time. A crudely-made ramp led down; it had been clearly made by someone getting creative with his grav gun.
“Keep your heads down or the Hordies will shoot ‘em off,” Sergeant Hansen said as he led the way down the ramp.
Energy weapons were going off right above them, so the warning was on point. The Marines had made it to a large railcar tunnel – the two sets of maglev tracks were still visible amidst the debris of combat – and were making their stand behind a barricade made with the remains of a rail car that had been shot up, turned on its side and reinforced with quick-hardening concrete foam and force fields. A large number of Horde units were coming down the rail tunnel; the Marines behind the barricade were engaging them with direct and indirect fire.
The squad took positions on the far end of the barricade. There were only a couple of fireteams there, and the tired Marines gratefully made room for the new arrivals. Just as they were setting up, the Horde sent in a fresh attack, led by a hover tank that barely fit in the tunnel, followed by a few hover-barges with field gennies. The Marines took them under fire the second they stepped into view. The tangos were three hundred meters away, knife-fighting range with modern weapons. Matthew started servicing targets on his own, waiting for Sergeant Hansen to start calling out group shots.
It was hard to see: so much plasma was impacting the force fields protecting their position that it was like standing too close to a star. His imp let him know the outside temp was over 150-degrees Celsius. Even with his suit’s cooling systems, he was sweating buckets. He ignored the heat, ignored everything but a target his sensors picked out through the plasma haze: a Hordie carrying some sort of crew-served weapon. He took aim, waited till his imp told him th
e area force field protecting the enemy had gone down, and squeezed out a triple burst. The tango personal shield sparked away into nothingness and his body splashed away in five pieces. A couple meters to Matthew’s left, Brock was firing the SAW and screaming obscenities.
“On my target,” Sergeant Hansen called out. The squad focused all its fire on one of the force field gennies. They hit at the same time as a sheaf of missiles from somebody’s Weapons Platoon. The generator brewed up and the shower of plasma washing over the Marines’ barricade stopped for a few seconds, replaced by the more intense glare of a gluon-matter explosion. When that cleared up, Matthew saw the tank, the generators and every alien in the tunnel were gone, replaced by scattered vehicle parts and tar-like biological residue. Everybody was replacing their area force field’s power packs; the explosion had nearly drained them. If those shields hadn’t held, Matthew and the reinforced two companies of Marines would have ended like the aliens: more tarry slurry for someone to mop up.
That didn’t matter. More tangos were coming, and Matthew knew how that dance would go.
Twenty-Three
Felix System, 200 AFC
Fifty-four down. Three to go.
A corpsman walked up to Heather’s seat and handed her a drink. She removed the mouth guard and gratefully gulped down the electrolyte-loaded flavored water. It was T-plus-three hours, and she could use the hydration. She could also use a miracle.
Two of the CIA officers in the room were gone; their corpses had been carried away while Heather had been busy in warp space, fending off the latest attack from the enemy adepts. They were down to forty telepaths in the gestalt; every ship had lost at least one adept. The Marines were taking a lot of losses in the desperate close-quarters fighting in the physical realm, but the casualty ratio had been worse among the CIA t-wave specialists. And they were about to engage the Horde flagship, the one with the most adepts and a horde of attached Warplings.
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