“First thing is, if you ever use them again, you need to learn to be quiet and sneaky.”
“I think I’d rather leave them alone.”
“I don’t think that’s an option. Even if you figure out how to remove or turn off the implant, your brain is now attuned to that sort of thing. Without the implant, things might even get worse. You’d better learn how to deal with it.”
“You’re right,” Heather admitted, sounding none too happy about it. “Besides, if the Snowflakes turn out to be a problem, we’ll need all the help we can get. Even these things in our heads.”
“Who’s the other one, by the way? I know there are two of you. Three before Ms. Smith died.”
“June Gillespie? She’s in her cabin, indisposed. She doesn’t want to have anything to do with this anymore. Can’t even blame her. She’s not trained to handle dangerous situations. She’s a field agent, but not an operator; some data snooping and maybe seduction or fast-talking is about the best she’s capable of. Some asshole upstairs decided giving her those implants would turn her into a combat hacker.”
“Well, she’s going to have to learn how to cope, or there’s going to be another body in cold storage pretty soon. Or worse.”
“All right. I guess we can get together after we transit from Lahiri to Bethlehem.”
“Why wait? She doesn’t need to be anywhere near me, as a matter of fact.”
“We’re jumping in an hour.”
“I know. Three-hour jump. Plenty of time to give you two some lessons on basic safety. And working while in warp space may be actually safer than staying in the real world. Going into warp inside a big, well-shielded ship is fairly safe; it keeps your mind at a safe distance from warp itself. Using a catapult like a Marine is more dangerous, because the only thing between you and the outside is your suit. Still not too bad, though. Both forms of transport use a… I don’t know exactly how to explain it. Like a shallow area of the ocean. Too shallow for anything big to swim around in, so all you have to deal with is small stuff. When you’re using your brain instead of an artificially-created warp aperture, on the other hand, you’re swimming in the deep end of the pool. Until you learn not to splash around and make noise, the shallow end is a lot less risky.”
“I hated taking swimming classes when I was a kid,” Heather said.
“You’re going to hate this even more, at least until you learn how to swim.”
* * *
Transition.
Most warp-induced hallucinations consisted of disjointed forms of sensory input: a single figure appearing from the surrounding darkness; a scenario from the past, looking oddly distorted; often, just sounds and whispered words.
Not this time. Heather found herself in a rec room: ping-pong and pool tables, several wall screens, and a gaming holotank, surrounded by a couple of couches lining the walls. An airlock door on one of the walls – bulkheads, really – made it a ship’s compartment. June and Lisbeth were also there. Lisbeth was relaxing on one of the couches. June was looking around like a bird surrounded by snakes.
“Welcome to my little oasis,” Lisbeth told them. “Took me a while to learn this trick, but it’s paid off handsomely since then.”
“You made this?”
“Yeppers. Everyone knows warp space affects your mind. Thing is, your mind can also affect warp space.”
“Can you just send me back and leave me alone?” June asked.
“Not in your current state, ma’am,” Lisbeth said in the tone of voice military personnel used when dealing with clueless civvies. “You’re still wide open, and even here in the shallow end, you could pick up something bad. Don’t worry. You’re in a safe space now.”
“How did you manage this?”
“Part of pilot training. You learn to make warp ghosts go away. From there, making things show up seemed like a logical step. It takes some work. I’ll try to teach you.”
“I can’t believe the Agency put these death traps in our heads!” June said.
“That sort of episode isn’t normally that bad, ma’am. I think one of you is unusually sensitive to warp influence. Ms. Smith tried to intervene and unfortunately the interaction between the three of you was enough to attract something bad.”
“A warp ghost, you mean.”
“Possibly. Or something worse.”
“Like what?”
“I’m not sure. I’m learning on the job, Heather. There is no rulebook. But I think there are things in here, and they aren’t hallucinations. They are attracted by certain negative emotions – that’s one reason why sending people on one-way warp drops with bombs strapped on their backs results in ninety-nine-percent-plus transfer losses. People without hope get picked off first. People with certain mental issues go next.”
“Agent Smith was in New Roanoke when a pirate raid seized the colony,” Heather said. “They murdered most of the adults and used the children for… amusement. She never shared the details with me, we were never that close, but the official reports were bad enough.”
Lisbeth nodded. “That might explain what I saw. Some kinds of trauma provide entry points for these things. Warp demons is as good a name as any, I suppose. I’m trying to get people to use the name Warpling, but most people think I’m on drugs.”
“Warplings isn’t bad,” Heather said “And I thought we were the warp demons.”
“If only. I haven’t really seen them, but they are something else. And as far as I can tell, they can’t come here. I figured if they could, we’d all know about it by now.”
June shuddered.
“But I can teach you to send the ghosts away, and that’s what you will be dealing with, most all of the time. Almost the entire time.”
And if it turned out to be a demon, they would probably die, Heather realized.
She shrugged. You had to die of something.
Six
Habitat for Unique Diversity, Xanadu System, 166 AFC
“Impressive,” Heather said. The word was wholly inadequate for the sight her imp was piping into her optic nerves, and she knew it.
The so-called Habitat for Unique Diversity was a space station, the largest wholly-artificial structure Heather had seen. There were stories of mysterious titanic objects beyond the Orion-Cygnus Arm that explorers and astronomers had discovered, things that might be ring-worlds or Dyson Spheres or something beyond imagination. Attempts to further examine those structures had been gently but firmly rebuffed by their creators, who were either the Elder Races themselves or some intermediate stage between them and planet-dwelling primitives. Compared to those unknown and unknowable creations, the habitat wasn’t all that impressive. Compared with anything modern Starfarers had accomplished, on the other hand…
The Wyrms liked to take planetoids and build space facilities on them. They could be as big as a thousand kilometers in diameter; beyond that size, the energy costs to propel something with such mass became prohibitive, not to mention the need to reinforce its structural integrity so moving it around didn’t cause it to crumble like a wheel of soft cheese. The Horde built warren-like communities in asteroids up to fifty kilometers in length, propelled by thousands of graviton thrusters. They were the largest structures capable of performing warp transit, using means unknown; attempts to capture one of their wandering communities always led to their self-destruction, and interrogations of captured Horde pirates had yielded no useful information.
Xanadu’s sole celestial body was an artificial construct three thousand kilometers long and fifteen hundred kilometers wide. Its inner core might have originally been a planetoid or moon, but there was no sign of it. All that was visible was a myriad of wings and struts extending from the cylindrical main body by as much as another thousand kilometers, looking deceptively frail in comparison to the sheer bulk of the main structure. The engineering prowess displayed in the habitat’s size would have been impressive enough; the artistry involved in its decoration was awe-inspiring.
Most space st
ations had simple lines and designs, practical to an almost brutalist degree. There were a few differences between cultures, of course; some favored straight lines and sharp edges, while others went for curves and spheres. But beyond a handful of stylistic choices, once you’d seen a few space stations you’d pretty much seen them all. Until now.
“Like a Gothic cathedral,” Peter commented, and that was a hell of a lot better than ‘impressive,’ although it still didn’t do justice to the sight captured by the Brunhild’s sensors.
The structure on the screen was as much a work of art as anything else. Its outlines were covered with crystalline statues in a dizzying variety of colors, each depicting creatures of several thousand species. To be visible at the magnification level she was using, the smallest one would have to be the size of the Statue of Liberty before its slagging at the hands of the Snakes. They were more than statues, however; they were animatronic. The inhuman figures performed complex movements, reenacting battles or scenes from histories she knew wouldn’t be found even in an in-depth Woogle search. The gossamer-looking extensions were wider than a dreadnought and nearly as long as the main body. Gold and silver were the predominant colors, in variant gradients of shade and intensity, interspaced with mosaics of what appeared to be stained glass. And nothing about the gorgeous shapes betrayed the fact that this was a colossal city suspended in space, a sealed habitat large enough to house hundreds of millions of people and massive enough to generate an impressive natural gravity field: about 1.4 m/s^2, according to her imp’s calculations. It made the great orbital fortresses around Earth look like a child’s marbles.
“So that’s what a near-Transcendence civilization builds when it feels like it,” she said.
“Guess they can’t blow all their dough on booze and hookers,” Fromm said, startling a laugh out of her.
“Guess not.”
“Either they’ve hidden all their weapon hardpoints extremely well, or they don’t have any,” he went on. “And I believe a lot of things, but not that a station that size is unarmed. Not in this universe.”
“Yeah. Maybe some of those wings are weapon mounts. Or maybe those statues just come to life and attack intruders.”
He chuckled. “That’d be something.”
“It’s also a honking great big station, Peter. They could have a thousand hundred-inch guns in internal mounts and we’d never spot them until they rolled them out.”
“True.”
There was very little ship traffic nearby, and other than the Brunhild and her escorts, it was all shuttle-sized, downright microscopic at that scale. Most of Xanadu’s shipping happened away from the Habitat for Unique Diversity, in fifteen conventional stardocks built near the entry points of the system’s multitude of warp lines, all within two light-seconds from the main structure. That fact begged a lot of questions. Warp line terminus points tended to occur close to planets within a couple Astronomical Units of their main star. Sol System’s five warp gateways for example, were all located around Earth, Mars or Venus. Those wrinkles in spacetime followed those planets along their orbital paths. This habitat, large as it was, didn’t generate enough natural gravity to hold onto those gateways, and yet they followed it slavishly. That suggested they were created rather than natural, and no known technology could do that. Something else to think about.
Xanadu’s system was a desert of sorts. Other than the station itself, its only other components were a sparse asteroid belt about six AU from its star, and the quark star itself. Quark stars were so dense that normal atoms or even subatomic neutrons couldn’t exist within its closely-packed confines. The ten-kilometer wide sphere packed as much mass as Sol and generated an equivalent gravitational field. It was a tiny blue dot at this distance, and didn’t provide any meaningful illumination. Which meant all the light and energy in the habitat was being generated by other means.
There was no Tah-Leen fleet in evidence, either. The intelligence reports had claimed Xanadu’s inhabitants didn’t have starships of their own.
And yet they have destroyed anybody who’s come here looking for trouble, she thought, feeling downright humbled, both by the sight of the artificial planet and the might it implied. All their hopes and plans seemed childish in the face of the ancient aliens’ works.
“If they were all that great, they’d be ruling over half the known galaxy by now, or would have transcended like everyone else their age, at least the ones that didn’t end up getting blown up along the way,” Fromm noted, picking up on her mood and countering it with his typical pragmatism. “Just because they can build big doesn’t mean they’re gods. This is a tiny remnant of an empire. At some point they ran into somebody or something tougher than them, and they ended up huddled up in a corner of the galaxy.”
She smiled at him. “Spoken like a true Marine. Have you drafted an attack plan to take the station yet?”
“This is a diplomatic mission, remember?”
“I thought your job was to estimate capabilities, not judge intent,” she said sweetly, paraphrasing a similar conversation they had on Jasper-Five, on another diplomatic mission. He’d said something similar mere minutes before they had to fight for their lives against the local ‘friendlies.’
“There is that,” he admitted. “Well, give me enough jump-rated Marines to catapult a three-division assault near its main power facilities, and we can probably take this oversized clubhouse, or at least shut down the lights. Assuming we have decent blueprints of where all the important bits are. Depends on what sort of internal defenses they have, of course. Maybe it’s more of a four division job. Or maybe it would take more Marines than we’ve got.”
“In other words, you have no idea.”
“Just by looking at a giant piece of spun glass and gold trimmings? Of course not. I thought your job was to provide us grunts with actionable intelligence,” he added with a grin of his own.
“Well, there is that.”
Smith’s sudden death had left Heather in charge of the CIA assets within the diplomatic mission. Herself and June Gillespie, in other words, armed with those experimental tachyon devices that might or might not give them an edge. And perhaps some unofficial help from Lisbeth Zhang and her own bizarre abilities. The warp pilot’s classes during the voyage here had proven invaluable. Even June was willing to try out the new toys, needs must. Heather hoped it wouldn’t come to that, though. Wars were uncertain enough affairs even when you had a good idea of your enemy’s strengths. Dealing with a complete unknown would be catastrophic for at least one side of such a conflict.
Peter’s grunt alerted her that something was wrong even before she saw the large starship emerging behind the massive space habitat, looking like a tiny speck by comparison until her imp zoomed in and brought it into focus. The ship’s outline was sinuously organic, long and narrow with curves that made her think of a coiled snake. She hadn’t served in the Navy very long, but she’d kept up with the vessel recognition charts that listed the visual profiles of all major powers’ warships.
“That’s a Lamprey dreadnought,” Fromm said. “Either a Class Justice or…”
“A People’s Choice-class,” she said; reciting the information helped steady her nerves a little. “The pointy ‘tails’ on the warp nacelles are the chief visual difference between those two classes. And the smaller ships around it are Hatchling-class frigates. Six of them.”
“Guess they were invited to the party as well. I’m no bubblehead, but I don’t think our destroyer squadron has the chops to take on those ships.”
“It doesn’t. Their combined throw weight might scratch the dreadnought’s paint. Even with our warp shields, we’d be out of luck.”
“And the Tah-Leen let them hide behind their station so we couldn’t detect them even on our final approach. I don’t like surprises. They must have known we wouldn’t be happy about sharing space with them. Great. If our hosts decide they don’t want us around, they don’t even have to spend any ammo to get rid of us. They
can let the Lampreys intercept us on our way back to the warp exit point and blow us all to hell. The destroyers might get away, but not this civvie boat.”
“Guess we’ll have to be extra-charming,” Heather said.
His hand squeezed hers. “Or extra sneaky.”
She grinned. “Count on it.”
There were bad days in this job. And then there were days when you might have to tackle a quarter-million-year-old species with some borrowed Starfarer tech and an experimental device that had already proven to kill thirty-three point-three percent of its early adopters.
She had a feeling one of those days might be coming up.
* * *
Lisbeth Zhang checked her uniform one more time after using her imp to provide her with yet another three-sixty view of herself in her dress blues. She always liked to look her best during formal functions. Humans being what they were, making a good impression for some VIP could do more for your career than a row of commendations. Making a good impression with the higher-ups and having several rows of commendations was even better, of course.
A part of her wished her dress uniform included a standard issue pistol, but Sec-State had been adamant about behaving like proper dignitaries. Everyone on the Secretary’s Security Detail would be packing, of course, and most of the Marine company aboard the Brunhild were standing by in full battle-rattle, ready to serve as a reaction force, just in case. Sharing the station, no matter how big it was, with a Lamprey fleet had made everyone more than a little jumpy. But having everybody show up with weapons would only reinforce the stereotype of humans as uncouth barbarians. Most Starfarers had something very similar to the Russian concept nekulturny and put a great deal of stock in it. Inappropriate behavior was, to many of them, a worse crime than murder or cannibalism. Little was known about the Tah-Leen, but odds were they would be just as punctilious as your average Eet.
Nobody knew for sure. Hell, nobody knew what the damn Snowflakes looked like, even. Woogle didn’t have any visual depictions of the species, which meant no Starfarer had seen them and lived to tell the story or post their pics on social media. Or if any had, they had decided not to share the information with anybody, although that was highly unlikely. Secrets leaked; that was true across the known galaxy.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 72
