A thousand kilometers was a wee close for safety.
Totenkopf shuddered. Shockwaves didn’t carry worth spit in vacuum, either, but shrapnel moving at near relativistic speeds traveled quite well. Most of the fragments that hit the Corpse-Ship were nearly microscopic, but they packed a wallop. The multi-spectrum radiation waves coming from the explosion were far worse. A War Eagle would have been vaporized by the deluge, but the Marauder ship handled it like a champ, at least for the fraction of a second it took her to jump back into warp.
Transition.
More watercolors. And the bogeyman was closer.
“I don’t have time for this.” Lisbeth flipped the ship to face her pursuer and shot it.
She hadn’t expected anything to happen. Plenty of ships had fired their weapons inside warp space, and none had reported having any effect on their surroundings.
The triple-beam behaved differently in the ether or whatever medium filled the Starless Path. The three beams lashed out like a whip, or maybe a pseudopod, striking the submerged figure coming in her direction. It screamed in pain and dove deeper into the rainbow sea, where it disappeared completely. The school of dead Snowflakes followed suit, except for a handful that got hit by the energy whips and were torn into itty bitty pieces.
“Holy shit.”
“You didn’t know? They can hurt you, but you can hurt them, too.”
“Wish you’d told me earlier.”
“You didn’t ask.”
“Asshole.”
Emergence.
A battleship this time. The massive vessel was vomiting hundreds of missiles from the tacked-on box launchers that broke its original, elegant outlines. She flew alongside her target as she fired a weaker pulse this time. No singularity struck the Lamprey vessel, just an impossibly-powerful three-pronged graviton beam. The two ships’ relative motions turned the energy blast into giant sword that gutted the doomed vessel. She jumped before the first flames started pouring out of the gaping slash along the ship’s hull.
Transition.
No sign of the bogeyman and its little helpers. She’d killed it or scared it off. Either way worked for her.
Emergence.
The Lampreys were on the ball this time. She was greeted with a barrage of close-defense lasers and plasma from the fleet’s frigates and destroyers. That barrage would have shredded an American fighter, warp shields or not. The Totenkopf’s hybrid force field shunted aside ninety percent of the energies that struck it and absorbed the rest without any appreciable damage. She ignored the enemy fire and concentrated on hitting another dreadnought. She missed its power plant this time, but the punctured warship became a drifting hulk, pouring atmosphere from the through-and-through breach in its hull, dead in space.
Transition.
“Are you having fun, Christopher Robin?”
“It’s a totally unfair fight. I love it,” she replied, grinning like a fiend.
Emergence.
Five more jumps. Five more ships, destroyed or crippled, including all the dreadnoughts and most of the battleships. The Corpse-Ship was hit dozens of times, once by a twenty-inch grav cannon, and survived. She could do it. She could destroy the entire enemy fleet. There wouldn’t be enough room on the surface of the Totenkopf to stencil all her kills. Lisbeth Zhang was going to win this battle by herself. Screw the battle, she was going to win the entire damn war. She laughed maniacally.
Take that, Navy!
Final Transition.
“Oh shit.”
“Oh shit indeed, Christopher Robin.”
The Corpse-Ship had lasted for nine minutes of combat operations before it fell apart.
The fracture lines became wide fissures, concentrated at the points where dead alien and grafted hull met. Pieces of bone and superstructure peeled away, reminding her of the time she’d flown a broken pod over Kirosha. Except this time there was no land or even sea below her, just endless watercolors everywhere. The Totenkopf trembled. She felt it when it finally shattered. The Pathfinder bones broke away into a million shards, leaving her drifting aimlessly inside the modified Marauder cockpit.
Leaving her stranded in warp space.
Guess I’ll finally find out what happens to all the poor bastards that didn’t make it out.
The bogeyman was coming back, and she couldn’t shoot it this time.
Something huge bumped the sinking capsule and held it in place. Smaller critters began banging on its hull, making the whole cockpit shake. Cracks began to form on the inside as the tough alloy bent inwards under the continuous blows.
“Come and get some,” she growled.
The hull caved in. Colors flooded the interior.
* * *
“Totenkopf is gone, ma’am. The last detected transition was ten minutes ago.”
Captain Benchley started to speak but a coughing fit interrupted her. The bridge of the Ataturk was filled with smoke. Damage control parties had put out the fires sparked by a direct hit that penetrated the upper quadrant shields, but the atmosphere scrubbers hadn’t quite cleared the air yet.
“She did well,” Benchley said after hawking out a wad of sooty phlegm. Not exactly a fitting epitaph for the Marine pilot but they’d be comparing notes soon enough.
Major Zhang’s little alien ship had cut a swath through the Lamprey heavy hitters. All the dreadnoughts and all but one battleship were gone. The battlecruisers had also taken serious losses. Win or lose, the ETs had paid a heavy price. And DESRON 91 had managed to kill the battlecruiser they’d picked for their escort to Valhalla and inflicted severe damage on several frigates. Unfortunately, Starbase Malta’s outer shields had been battered down and her squadron had gotten pounded to pieces.
“Churchill is launching escape pods, ma’am. Seventy-one survivors.”
“Hope they make it.”
With Churchill gone, only two destroyers remained. Her own Ataturk and the Carl Gustav. The others had been hammered to bits as the Lampreys stood off and pounded her squadron with coordinated salvos that tore through the Tah-Leen shields. One by one, her ships had fallen. It wouldn’t be long now. They were so closely packed together that when the Cromwell went up, pieces of flying debris damaged the Churchill, weakening her shields and hastening her demise. You weren’t supposed to fight with your ships a few tens of kilometers apart from each other.
“Sierra-Twenty-three has been destroyed,” the tactical officer reported, absently dabbing at a still-seeping pressure cut on his scalp. Onscreen, a Lamprey frigate burned merrily in the distance; their third kill in this battle so far.
“Not bad. Shift all fire to… oh, let’s make it Sierra-Thirty-one.”
“Aye, a…”
Ataturk lurched like a derailed locomotive. The direct hit overwhelmed the destroyer’s inertial compensators and flung Benchley out of her chair. She’d unstrapped herself during the bridge fire and forgotten about it. She didn’t have time to curse her stupidity; a crushing impact against the nearest bulkhead knocked her out for several seconds.
When she came to, the bridge was on fire again. She could taste blood in her mouth, and her vision was narrowing into a tunnel.
We failed.
That bitter thought followed her into the darkness.
Eighteen
“Remember, these bastards fire a wider beam than anything we’ve used before,” Russell told his buddies. “And the grav effect extends for a meter all around it. You can’t see it, but anything too close will sure as fuck feel it. Make sure you keep your distance from anything you don’t want to destroy. Anything within a meter of the blast is SOL. You ever heard the term spaghettification?
“Not really, no,” Grampa said.
“You ever seen an old-style spaghetti maker? Imagine you’re the dough. That’s what happens to you if you get too close to the beam.”
“Shit.”
All three of them were carrying portable grav cannons and their attached backpacks. They were still inside, behind Malta’s nice
thick hull and the last remaining force field protecting the station. Sooner or later, though, they were going to open the airlock and shoot out of it. Russell had that lightheaded, this-ain’t-happening feeling he usually got when he was scared shitless. Funny how some things hit him worse than others. He’d felt less afraid at the pass on Parthenon-Three, even though he’d known the Vipers were minutes away from killing every motherfucker in the valley. The idea of having nothing between him and hard vacuum other than a force field, not matter how strong, was gnawing on him.
“Be cool,” he told himself.
“I’m cool,” Grampa said, thinking Russell had been talking to him. “Problem is, it’s going to get hot as hell in here.”
“What, got no stories about how hard you had it back in the day?” Gonzo asked. “Never picked a fight with a destroyer before?”
“Never even saw the ocean before I got posted to Orlando,” the goldie said. “And never walked in hard vacuum until boot camp. Still getting used to it.”
“Here they come,” Russell told them.
The Lampreys had matched speeds with the habitat as it orbited its bizarre quark star, and now they were slowly approaching it, too slowly to be stopped by its force fields. The tango ships creeped past the burning wrecks of the destroyer squadron, occasionally firing on any escape pod that hadn’t made it back to the base. The Fang-Faces weren’t taking prisoners. They rarely did.
It was Third Platoon’s turn to do something.
“Target is Sierra-Thirty-one. Engage at four thousand meters.”
Sierra Thirty-one was a Lamprey frigate. A pretty small one, but at six hundred meters in length, it was the biggest thing Russell had shot at in his career. This would be one for the books, assuming he lived to tell the story.
He shifted his grip on the portable cannon, a massive tube that weighed about twice as much as he did in full battle-rattle. The power pack strapped to his back was good for ten pulses or a five-second continuous beam. The fireteam’s plan was to hose the tango ship for the full five, then run for their lives. As a plan, it blew dead donkey farts.
Three hundred robots clinging to the exterior of the station followed his aiming point. A grav cannon would fry their delicate computer-brains, so they were armed with lasers powerful enough to degrade a starship’s shields. Their sensors fed their data into his imp. The destroyer was four klicks away. Close enough for government work.
“Hit it,” he told Gonzo.
His buddy had already entered the unlocking codes into the airlock’s control panel. He pushed the last button and a section of hull slid open, large enough for all three Marines. Elsewhere, the rest of the weapons platoon was picking their own targets. They would be engaging three destroyers and four frigates before the tangos launched their shuttles. Too bad they didn’t figure out bonuses by tonnage, the way they did in the Navy.
Russell locked his knees in place; they’d started to shake when the airlock door opened. He saw stars and burning wreckage in the distance and the tango ship four klicks away. His helmet sensors magnified the distant shape. It looked a bit like a snake with a large egg on each side, except for the head, which was more like a porcupine, each spine marking a spot for a sensor or comm antenna – or a big gun. Twelve-inchers, 304mm if you wanted it metric. Either way, nothing he wanted to see pointed in his direction.
“Fire!”
The recoil was a bit of a surprise even after putting an hour into a simulator to qualify for the damn things. The robots’ lasers hit the target a split second before the graviton blasts; the energy shield became visible as it sparkled in every color of the rainbow. It popped like a soap bubble a moment later. The three Marines played the three continuous beams back and forth, careful to stay well away from the airlock’s frame or each other. The destroyer’s hull glowed cherry-red for a few seconds before it ruptured, spewing smoke and flames.
“Nailed that bitch!” Gonzo yelled as they stepped back and closed the hatch.
“Annoyed that bitch is more like it,” Russell said. “Move it!”
They ran down the corridor. Russell could still see the frigate through the robot’s sensors. They’d done more than scratch it. In fact, it’d stopped moving forward and more fires were breaking through its hull. They’d hurt it bad, maybe actually scragged it, but there were other ships behind it and they were launching shuttles – and returning fire. Here and there, a robot’s sensor feed went dead when the enemy warships’ light guns breached the last force field around the station and turned an expensive war machine into burning garbage.
The fireteam made it through the second airlock and closed the door a moment before the outer one blew inwards. A plasma blast had gotten through. Russell watched, hypnotized, as a wall of white fire rolled towards the second airlock door.
“The fuck you doing?” Gonzo yelled and yanked Russell away just before the second airlock burst open. Lucky for them this whole section was depressurized or they’d been shot right back out the now open airlock. Some fire vented into their corridor, but not enough to get through their new personal force fields.
“Sorry,” Russell said as the two Marines picked themselves up. Grampa was waiting for them around a corner, where they all were supposed to be.
“You froze up, brah,” Gonzo told him. “Snap out of it.”
Russell shrugged. He’d been so sure he was dead that he’d almost let it happen. Fucking vacuum always got to him.
“Let’s go,” he told his buddies. “Two hundred meters to the next airlock.”
Outside, the robots were picking off shuttles as they approached the station at crawling speeds. They were running out robots faster than the enemy was losing shuttles, though. The only good bit of news was that the frigate they’d tagged exploded and took several shuttles down with it. They felt the deck floor vibrate slightly when it went.
One bandit down.
How many Marines could say they’d shot down a warship? If they made it out alive, they’d have one hell of a story to tell.
Or someone else would get to tell it next time they drank to fallen comrades.
* * *
The docking bay that had once been mated to the Brunhild was empty except for two understrength squads of Marines from Second Platoon. The cruise liner had been sent away before the Lampreys arrived, carrying off those too badly wounded to fight, the lucky bastards. The bay’s external doors blew up under concentrated energy fire. A moment later, a shuttle rushed inside, its open side doors already disgorging the Spaceborne Popular Front troopers it had brought to the battle.
“Fire!”
Suckass had traded his SAW for a heavy laser gun. He flipped the selector to its highest setting and drew a continuous beam at waist level, hosing the dozen or so Lampreys rushing out of the shuttle’s left ramp. Force fields and the tangos behind them popped and burned like overloaded lightbulbs. The beam kept going, cutting into the rear of the shuttle and sending it crashing into a fireball a moment later.
“Yeah!” he yelled while he dropped the spent power pack and reached for a reload.
The rest of the squad mowed down the few surviving tangos just as another shuttle came through the hole and fired its plasma cannon at them.
They were behind the squad’s area shields plus the station internal ones. One energy bubble went down, but the other held long enough for Howard and the other heavy gunner to reload and tear the second shuttle apart. A few Lampreys managed to scurry away and find cover behind some machinery, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that a third and fourth shuttles were coming through.
“Fall back!” Sergeant Weiner called out. A moment later, a plasma blast got through and turned the NCO into gobbets of burning meat and flying shards of ceramic-metal alloy.
“Fuck!”
Even their new and improved armor and personal shields did you no good if a plasma cannon tagged you.
The squad pulled back through the airlock. A Lamprey shooting behind cover volley-fired six rocket
s. Three splashed against the area shield before draining its power pack. The other three got PFC Barton. The new armor couldn’t handle three armor-piercing rockets, either.
All in all, nine Marines made it through the airlock before it slid shut. Howard was the highest ranking grunt left. Which sucked ass.
“Come on!” he yelled, leading them to their next rally point, an intersection fifty meters further down. Internal force fields came to life behind the remains of the squad. They would help keep the incoming down for as long as they lasted, but they weren’t much tougher than the ones you’d find at a regular starbase. From the looks of it, the Snowflakes hadn’t figured enemies would ever make it that far into their big fancy home. Their internal fields were there mostly to prevent explosive decompression, not hold off lasers and plasma.
They ran into reinforcements along the way. Agent in Charge Petroysan and a dozen Protective Detail pukes, all in full body armor and carrying Iwos. The AIC took over from Howard, which was fine by him. They didn’t pay him enough to be a boss.
Petroysan was a jarhead and she’d trained with Charlie Company. She quickly arranged the twenty-odd troops along the intersection and set multiple overlapping fields of fire to welcome the Lampreys before the tangos at the docking bay rallied and broke through the airlock door. It was always good to work for someone who knew what the fuck she was doing.
They had a few seconds to chill out. Suckass spent them thinking about Barton. Damn it. He’d liked that fucker. He was going to make the Eets pay for that.
The first few Lampreys that stepped into the hallway got shredded. That made the rest hang back and think things over. Just to keep them busy, AIC Petroysan sent a volley of 20mm guided munitions flying down the hall, where they turned a corner and blew up inside the docking bay. The ensuing explosion was a lot bigger than what normal twenty-mike-mikes produced, so she must be using enhanced Snowflake ammo.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 94
