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Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series

Page 98

by C. J. Carella


  “Odds are still better if we ghost than what’s waiting for us back there,” Big Tuna said. “I’m ghosting.”

  “Same here,” Hardhat and Dicky said at the same time.

  Wild Thing and a guy from Flight B that went by Cowpoke stayed quiet. Either thinking about it or just saying no without speaking out loud, Fernando figured. He could have peeked into their heads and found out for sure, but decided not to. It was their decision.

  “I’m not going to order you to do it,” Eel told everyone on Flight A. “You do what you think best. For what it’s worth, I’m going to ghost.”

  The major could have made it an order, but if those two didn’t want to do it, they’d lose all hope and likely never come out. If you went into warp expecting to die, you’d disappear in transit nine times out of ten, or even more often than that. Better to let them make their own decision. Worst case, if they did their attack run normal-like, they’d get in a shot or two before they died. The job was risky no matter what, and it had to be done no matter what.

  “Your choice. Y’all know the target. Let’s go.”

  The shared illusion dissolved and they were back in their cockpits, alone in a way they rarely were anymore. They all had to concentrate on their emergence. And for those who chose to do ‘the thing,’ it was a lot more complicated. Ghosting was something completely different, something they still had trouble understanding.

  A pilot from Sixth Fleet had discovered the technique by accident. He’d been about to emerge in a spot that he ‘knew’ was going to be hit by a main gun battery, but once you’re in warp, your only choices are to either emerge at the selected coordinates or stay in warp forever. What he did was sort of a compromise between the two.

  As it turned out, if you willed it strongly enough, you could sort of remain in warp and still reach out and touch reality through the aperture you’d normally come out of. Sort of like opening a door and poking your head out without crossing the threshold to the other side. To do that, you had to anchor yourself in a ‘deeper’ part of warp space, though. The places where the Foos lived.

  Fernando had ghosted twice before, and each time had been scary as hell. He went for number three. Everyone in Flight A did, even Wild Thing.

  Emergence. Sort of.

  It was like seeing the world at the end of a tunnel, if a tunnel was made of every color of the rainbow and a few others that couldn’t be seen with normal eyes, and if the walls were swirling around like the inside of a tornado. Everything in the real-world side was murky and distorted, but he could see the target, a damn Gal-Imp superdreadnought. Flight A fired at the exact same time, and five 20-inch blasts of graviton death came out of the warp apertures and struck within a few meters of each other, punching through heavy-duty force fields and about four feet of hyper-dense armor to spread death and destruction inside.

  The Gimps had been waiting for them, just as they’d feared. Their emergence points were struck by several dozen plasma blasts apiece less than two seconds after they showed up. If they’d come out the usual way, they’d have lost one or two War Eagles. But they hadn’t. None of the fighters were really there, so all the plasma bursts and laser beams hit nothing but vacuum or were swallowed into null-space without touching them.

  Just as if they were a pack of ghosts.

  They fired three more volleys from their invulnerable position, and the super-dred began to burn as its internal power plants brewed up. Splash one bandit.

  Transition.

  The peephole into reality closed, leaving him back in the deep end of the pool. And something had noticed him. It was large and deadly and hungry, and it reached out for him. Fernando felt like a child swimming away from a dark fin in the middle of the ocean.

  Nando.

  The voice sounded just like his dead mother’s.

  Nando, come here. I want to kiss you goodnight.

  He wanted to curl up in a corner and rock himself to sleep, and the urge almost froze him in place. Almost.

  Emergence.

  They all came out, flying in formation behind the Walsh. Everyone was fine. Fernando knew that without having to check their status readings on his imp or cockpit displays. Wild Thing had a close encounter of his own with a big nasty, but he’d managed to escape as well. Everyone else had made it out without incident. As they maneuvered to enter the carrier, Flight B emerged. Five out of six: Cowpoke hadn’t ghosted and gotten deep-fried in plasma.

  It was going to be one of those days.

  * * *

  The battle became a dance of sorts, one where the music accompaniment was provided by an orchestra of the insane.

  Status icons changed colors in the holotank as vessels stopped maneuvering, crippled, dying or dead. The Undying Defender swayed back and forth every few seconds, each sudden move marking a missile strike powerful enough to overcome the ship’s inertial compensators. The enemy fleet was firing volleys individually as it closed the distance, resulting in a continuous storm of fire. The incremental damage on the flagship of the Hrauwah Volunteer Flotilla was mounting steadily. Soon, it would join the fallen.

  “Shields down to thirty percent,” the Lord Protector announced.

  “Shift power from secondary weapons to force fields. And find the source of those missiles and tear out his throat with our primary guns!”

  Grace let the King-Captain do his job; his curt orders were not what she would have given under the circumstances – reducing point defense would lead to more hits on those force fields – but that was a matter of taste, and valid arguments existed for each choice. In any case, the Undying Defender was unlikely to live up to its name.

  It had been as brutal a battle as any she’d witnessed before. Both fleets had suffered losses that under most circumstances would have led one of both of them to break off and retreat before fleeing into warp. Most rational foes didn’t fight on after the loss of more than one fifth their tonnage; at that point the difference between victor and vanquished became academic. When the winner was weakened badly enough, defeat in the next battle would be all but inevitable. Starfarers knew when to cut their losses.

  Ah, but this battle involves humans.

  That thought was not unfair, unfortunately. Almost every major space action where the US Navy had been involved ended in the utter destruction on one side and horrendous losses for the other. In some cases, the Tree Cousins and their tormentors had annihilated each other. Fighting Americans was a bloody affair at best, a disastrous one at worst.

  They have always had good reasons for fighting to the death, of course. Most of those battles were fought at their doorstep. They had nowhere to run, and battles where no avenue of retreat is available are the deadliest of their kind.

  So was the case here. The Imperium armada and the JSF had no intention of retreating, and were slashing at each other with wild abandon as the range closed to under a quarter of a light second. Humans referred to such engagements as ‘a knife fight in an elevator.’ Crude, but apt. With flight times below thirty seconds, missile volleys got through in far greater numbers. The Imperium fleet could no longer unleash hundreds of thousands of ship-killers in every salvo, but it didn’t need to do so. And direct energy weapons struck with their full power. As the two formations became mingled, ships could target vulnerable points in their foes.

  Even the proud Wyrashat winged superdreadnoughts came apart under the relentless bombardment. One after another, they were reduced to drifting masses of metal or glowing clouds of incandescent gases. Even the oversized orbital fortresses around Drakul-Six were falling silent as their weapon hardpoints were immolated one by one. They were all fighting on heroically, but she feared this was nothing but a gallant last stand.

  The enemy was suffering a terrible toll as well. The American fighter craft were as deadly as Grace had been led to believe, and more. Their losses had actually decreased as the battle went on, and they had accounted for over sixty capital ships. The problem was that their carriers were being taken o
ut: half of them were already out of the fight. The orphaned fighters were being tended to by the survivors, but the situation couldn’t last long.

  Who will break first?

  The Imperium’s casualties were worse than anyone would have expected, and its leaders might decide that it would be too costly to continue the offensive. Drakul-Six’s planetary defense bases remained relatively unscathed and their steady fire would become more effective at close range. What good would be achieved if the winners were too weak to continue their offensive?

  We might still turn the tide.

  The Defender’s shuddering as more missiles struck it seemed to give the lie to her thoughts.

  * * *

  Flight A was down to four pilots now. After a couple of close calls with the Foos, Wild Thing had stopped ghosting. Fernando could sympathize with him; the Warplings were getting closer with every sortie. The one chasing him kept using his mother’s voice, and each time it got harder to resist it. There’d been tears in his eyes when he’d made it back to the Walsh. But sad and scared still beat dead, as far as he was concerned. He didn’t know what his buddy had seen or heard, though. Maybe he’d decided it wasn’t worth it.

  Whatever his reasons, Wild Thing bought it the first time he fully emerged from null-space. A near miss from a plasma cannon set his cockpit on fire; he lived long enough for the flames to get him. Not a good way to go, and Fernando felt the whole thing happen, almost as if he was going through it.

  That was a big problem with what the science remfies were calling tachyon-wave communications. Being linked to people as they died was almost as bad as dying yourself. Just as bad was the knowledge those dead buddies would eventually show up in his dreams, or even while wide awake. Warp ‘hallucinations’ didn’t bother Fernando while in transit, but hit him in the real world instead. Then again, if things kept going this way, he wouldn’t have to worry about having nightmares, because his own shade would be out there haunting someone else.

  Emergence.

  He and two others made the return trip. Dicky didn’t. A Foo had gotten him, and Fernando hadn’t even noticed. He’d been too busy trying to outrun his own warp demon. And that was only half the bad news waiting for him.

  The Walsh was burning.

  While Flight A had been carrying out the sortie, something or other had bent their ride. A big explosion burst out of the aft section of the carrier. The Walsh was a goner. Fernando could see escape pods leaving the dying ship like so many fleeing rats. Called “mom pods’ – as in, ‘See, Mom? If anything goes wrong we’ll get to safety in them pods’ – the little flying coffins would most likely only delay the inevitable, because chances were no US or allied ship was going to be around to rescue them by the time the battle was over..

  A stray graviton burst went by a little too close for comfort, less than a hundred meters away. Hanging out in space was no place to be in a small crate.

  Orders came in. They were to keep fighting until they were out of power and then match up with the USS Cunningham, which had lost most of its birds and thus had plenty of spare room. Eel ran a status check on the survivors of the flight. They all had two shots left and enough juice to do the requisite number of jumps. One final sortie and they could go to the Cunningham for resupply. Hopefully it’d still be there when they were done.

  Transition.

  The Foos were all but nipping at their heels. Fernando felt ghostly fingers brushing the back of his hair, and he almost lost it. Only reciting Psalm Twenty-Three got him through to the other side. He and his buddies fired while ghosted, and they put a big hole in one of the superdreadnoughts. Not a kill, though; three fighters firing two shots apiece just didn’t have enough firepower for the job. Their guns ran dry, and they returned to null-space.

  Where the Foos were waiting.

  They took Eel first. Fernando heard the squadron leader howl in unbearable agony for what felt like forever. And then it was Fernando’s turn. The Foos were right on top of him, his mother leading the chase, and this time she was touching him, grabbing him, dead fingers tightening around the back of his neck.

  He panicked. There was only one way to escape, and the fact that it was impossible didn’t matter. Fernando focused everything he had on one thing: emerging from warp, even though he wasn’t at the designated exit point. It shouldn’t have worked – a panel full of FTL travel experts could have spent hours listing all the reasons why it shouldn’t – and yet his fighter tore a hole through reality fifty thousand kilometers off-course. Right into the path of a Gimp battleship.

  He didn’t emerge alone.

  In the brief instant before the War Eagle crashed into the enemy vessel, the Imperium crewmembers had their minds destroyed and overwritten with something from beyond reality. Only the surviving warp fighter pilots and some of the more sensitive navigators on both fleets noticed something was amiss. The battleship was heavily damaged, and the fighter’s sudden arrival turned out to be the last straw; a power plant collapsed and caused a chain reaction that engulfed the Imperium vessel. The invaders’ foothold in reality was destroyed when their hosts were obliterated, leaving behind only a hint of horrors to come.

  Blissfully unaware of their close brush with something worse than death, the rest of the battling forces carried on with their business.

  * * *

  Fleetmaster Klem was a professional to the bitter end.

  “You have my orders, King-Admiral,” he told Grace on a personal vid-call. The Wyrashat’s head was deeply tucked between his shoulders, his species’ instinctive posture of defense. Smoke rose up behind him as crewmembers fought a fire somewhere in the command center. For all that, his demeanor remained calm; Grace knew enough about Wyrm body language to tell that Klem was not letting his people hear him growl. She could admire that.

  “We understand, Fleetmaster,” she said. The beleaguered Wyrashat commander could have relayed his orders through the highest-ranking American officer left in the HEF, since her flotilla was technically attached to it. Choosing to speak to her personally was a gesture of respect she could appreciate.

  “As I told Captain Clements, I am releasing all auxiliary forces from our previous agreements,” Klem added. “The Galactic Imperium has agreed to a cease fire in preparation for a formal surrender.”

  The translation software could not convey the shame the Wyrashat must be feeling. Klem would be forever remembered as the officer who had lost Drakul System to an invading force. Grace tilted her head in a Hrauwah gesture of deferential sympathy.

  “By releasing your forces during the cease-fire, you will be allowed to depart in peace. Otherwise the Imperium would have seized your ships and interned your crews. The Americans would have fared a rather worse fate, of course. I cannot honorably turn them over to the enemy.”

  “You have our utmost gratitude, Fleetmaster,” she said. Only a scant dozen American vessels survived; they had lost all their carriers and fighters, at which point the battle had been officially lost. Klem could have surrendered honorably then; his superiors would probably wish he had done so before incurring further losses. But the Wyrashat commander had only stopped fighting when the Imperium agreed to let the surviving Americans and Hrauwah leave.

  “You fought very well, King-Admiral. I hope you will perform great deeds in the future. Farewell.” The visual feed disappeared.

  Grace-Under-Pressure followed her new orders. Her remaining seven ships prepared for warp transit in coordination with the human survivors after hastily rescuing survivors and scuttling any vessel unable to make warp transit. The Imperium host did not interfere, perhaps gratefully. Their losses had been much lower only as a percentage of their initial line of battle: some seventy-five enemy capital ships had been destroyed or heavily damaged, along with over a hundred light vessels. Many of them would be repaired and returned to action, however, and even if they weren’t, the remaining behemoths were more than enough to defeat any Wyrashat formation in existence. The Imperium had allowed the
cease-fire only to save its strength for its main goal: the extinction of humankind. Allowing the ragged remnants of the HEF to escape would do little to change the balance of power, especially now that they had shown they could defeat the vaunted American warp fighters.

  This wasn’t the first time Grace had been forced to flee a system in the face of an enemy. Another shameful retreat had led her to Sol System and the subsequent destruction of over half its population. This time, the civilians in Drakul System would be spared. The battle had been won before any damage was inflicted on Drakul-Six’s surface, although its orbital defenses were in shambles.

  “The human commander has hailed us, Your Highness.”

  “Send the call to my personal link.”

  Captain Alois Clemens’ face appeared in front of her; the visual communique was projected into her retinas by her implants. The man’s expression was one of shock and near-despair, as could be expected from a battlecruiser captain who found himself in overall command by virtue of being the highest-ranked survivor. The Imperium had concentrated their fire on the American capital ships towards the end, destroying all of them, and slaughtering their thirty-five thousand crewmembers, including Admiral Del Toro, who had commanded the HEF until a deluge of missiles had ended him and everyone aboard the battleship Nova Scotia.

  “King-Admiral,” Clemens said. “My surviving space assets lack the facilities to accommodate all the wounded we managed to rescue from the wrecks we will have to leave behind. I was hoping you might have some room to spare among your vessels. I have some twelve hundred wounded spacers and can only take care of half of that number.”

  “We will do what we can, Captain. Fortunately our life support requirements are similar enough, and two of my battlecruisers survived with minimal damage. We should be able to accommodate your wounded.”

  “Thank you, Your Highness. I will make the necessary arrangements as quickly as possible.”

  “You are quite welcome.”

 

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