And that was going to happen sooner rather than later.
Grinner hadn’t said it in so many words; neither had the squadron’s commander, Captain ‘Papa’ Schneider, but everyone had figured it out: they were getting rushed into combat, ready or not, because they needed fighters very badly, and they needed them now, not in the seventy-three weeks the manual had called for originally. As it was, training attrition had been nasty: of Bingo’s class of three hundred candidates, only two hundred and twenty had made it to graduation. This last shakedown might cause a couple more – SOL among them – to lose their wings, reducing that number even more.
That’d be a shame: they’d all gone through their naming ceremony a few days before, after getting certified and licensed like a pack of good doggies. Gus had earned the handle Bingo during a training sortie; he’d miscalculated and barely managed to return to base with a near-dry bird, a.k.a. bingo power. The War Eagle’s miniature gluon power plants could run out of power on you if you weren’t careful, and he hadn’t been. Still, he’d made it back, and that was good enough to keep him in the program.
Of course, there were worse things than washing out. Like a close encounter with a Foo. He still had nightmares about his first time. And the second and third, for that matter. Being chased by Warplings wasn’t the sort of thing you got used to.
Warp ghosts were nasty, but all they could do was scare you or bum you out. Warplings, Foos, or demons, whatever you wanted to call them, were different. If you did enough jumps in a row, they spotted you and started giving chase. The one that had come after Bingo had been like a giant shark; he hadn’t really seen it, but that was what his gut had told him. Huge, hungry, and cold.
Gus shook his head as the flight went through docking procedures. While in theory it might be possible to warp directly into a carrier, warp arrivals were as destructive as a large bomb, so it was easier to arrive near the mothership and make a conventional entry instead. Of course, in combat that meant trying to enter a hangar bay when you and your target were moving at three hundred kilometers per second, give or take, and the neighborhood was full of energy beams and missiles. Graviton grapples did most of the work once you got close enough, but your ass still hung out in space for several nerve-wracking seconds. Some mornings, Bingo woke up wondering why the hell he’d ever volunteered for the Navy fighter pilot program. Marines were crazy enough to do this kind of shit, but those in the senior service were supposed to have more sense than that.
He guided his ship until the grapples took over. That gave him a few moments of peace and quiet. Truth was, he wouldn’t trade being a pilot for the world. Ever since he’d undergone the treatments to increase his warp tolerance to superhuman levels, he’d changed. Improved, you might say. It was worth it, even if you could get killed in two dozen different ways in the course of a sortie.
At least, that was what he kept telling himself.
“You all right, sir?”
Gus sat up. A team of spacers was done servicing the outside of his bird and was waiting for him to get out of their way. From the tone of that imp-to-imp call, he’d spaced out a little too long for their liking.
Their thoughts popped into his head. He sleeping in there? Fucking space cadet.
“Heading out,” he said. An imp command released the hatch over the cramped cockpit. The War Eagle wasn’t much to look at, or fun to be inside of for that matter. It was little more than a big-ass battleship main gun with a pilot compartment welded on top, plus miniaturized warp generators and power plant, and a few other gizmos, mostly converted from orbital shuttle systems. A teleporting cannon, in other words, driven back and forth by a crazed warp pilot who might be getting crazier with every jump. Despite all those shortcomings, a flight of six of those mothers could reduce a dreadnought to boiling plasma in two or three passes. Pound by pound, that made them the deadliest things to ever fly in space.
The spacers let him climb down in grudging silence. He caught a couple of unspoken comments – mostly variations of ‘Asshole’ – with his special powers. He wondered what was going to happen when more people learned how to look inside the minds of their fellow humans. Nothing good, he figured.
Gus shrugged at his own thoughts as he joined up with the rest of the squadron. Most of them were laughing and joking around, except Grinner, who was kind of half-smiling and looking all wise and enigmatic. She’d been doing witchy stuff for a long time, so if anyone knew what the future held for humanity, it would be her.
Not that he was going to ask her. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear her answer.
* * *
They had their sailing orders at last.
“Seventh Fleet,” Bingo said. He and the rest of CSW-4, all forty-eight fighters of it, had been assigned to a brand-new fleet carrier, the largest one ever built. The USS Enterprise; the ‘Big E’ would ferry two full Space Wings into battle, ninety-six fighters total, effectively giving her more firepower than any ship in the galaxy. The carrier had originally been designed as a dreadnought, her plans changed halfway through construction after the Battle of Parthenon. They’d taken out all its main gun batteries, made room for fighter bays, and added a ton more point-defense emplacements and two layers of force fields; between those and its overlapping warp shields, the Big E was going to be very hard to sink.
Good thing, Bingo thought. Because as soon as the enemy figures out what it is, every motherlover in range is going to try and sink her.
The carrier and the rest of the fleet were headed for New Texas System, which was threatened by the Lampreys and, now that the Wyrms were giving up, the Gimps. They might even get to fight both sets of ETs at the same time. Talk about a target rich environment.
“Under Kerensky,” Lieutenant Mike ‘Mooch’ Kowalski groused. “Bastard had one fleet shot off from under him. That’s not good.”
“They wouldn’t give him a second chance if they didn’t think he could cut it,” Gus said.
“He’s good,” Grinner joined in. “I served under him my first time around, in the Ohio.”
The USS Ohio had fought in the Gremlin War and been decommissioned after it was over. At the time, Bingo’s father had been in second grade. Just another reminder that Grinner Genovisi was pushing a hundred and had been a weirdo even before becoming a fighter pilot. She’d started out as a warp navigator, and those had been the weirdest peeps in the fleet until the War Eagle jocks had come around.
“Good skipper, good man in a storm,” Grinner went on. “He’s still hurting after the Battle of Heinlein, but he’s up for the job.”
Nobody asked her how she knew that last bit. They didn’t have to. Spooky shit, but they were all getting used to it. Gus was still a noob when it came to Warp Hoodoo, but he could pick up other people’s feelings if he put his mind to it. Nobody played poker with fighter pilots anymore. He couldn’t blame them.
Word was that the Navy was working on ways to give normal people the same abilities as warp pilots, at least when it came to mind-to-mind chatter. And they had already figured out a way to keep them out of the minds of flag officers. A couple idiots who’d tried to take a peek into the carrier task force’s commander had come back sorry and sore, and been unwilling to share any details, beyond telling everyone that they shouldn’t try it.
For the time being, though, only pilots had those special abilities. The whole thing fell under the heading of ‘FM Systems’ – Fucking Magic, in so many words.
Considering what they were going up against, they would need every last bit of magic they could get.
Interlude: Imperial Decisions
Primus-Four, Galactic Imperium, 167 AFC
Tenacious Quinta, Proxy of Six Billion, was, in her own fairly-accurate estimate, one of the twelve most powerful people in the Galactic Imperium. As a result, she was seldom thwarted, and when it happened, it usually involved one of the relative handful of sophonts who outranked her. The combination of factors made those occasions incredibly vexing.
“Is he serious?” she said, instructing her implants to display her true emotions when translating her words into something her interlocutor could understand. While only one language was spoken in the Imperium, each species had its own spoken version, due to biological limitations. That was but one of the many obstacles the One True Civilization had learned to overcome on its quest towards Unity.
Her own species, the Kreck, communicated through a combination of clicks and pheromone emissions few other beings could perceive, let alone understand. Her current visitor, a male called Tor-Netten, was a Dann, a species of mammalian bipeds who mostly made sounds by pushing air through their vocal cords and expelling it through their largest facial orifice. In addition to their inability to understand spoken Kreck, the Denn found their pheromones to be unbearably vile. The feeling, in Quinta’s case, was completely mutual. She loathed all endo-skeletal beings, particularly bipedal ones.
All paths can lead to Unity.
The Litany of the Imperium helped her set aside the unworthy hate-thought – expressing such out loud was punishable by a fine for someone of her rank, or by a lengthy stay in prison for a mere Voter – and wait for her guest’s answer.
“I am afraid Princeps Boma is unwavering in his decision, Giga-Proxy,” the overly-tall, offensively soft-skinned creature said. “Not only will the Triumvirate agree to accept the Wyrashat’s terms, but the One True Civilization has pledged to cede three additional planetary systems to the Wyrms by way of recompense for their cooperation in ongoing operations.”
The Denn prattled on, listing each system’s name, location and economic data. Quinta ignored the irrelevancies – her implants would record the information for later perusal – while she considered what to say next. Tor-Netten was her highest-placed agent in the Triumvirate, privy to the inner workings of the rulers of the Imperium. The disgusting biped had reached his lofty position through his ability to sexually stimulate the Princeps without interfering with his deliberations. The details involved were revolting to Kreck sensibilities; the Denn’s title, Kisser of the Supreme Arse, was bad enough.
All paths. Unity.
Some paths are highly unpalatable, she replied to herself.
“More importantly,” Tor-Netten added after the pointless litany was over, “the Princeps has convinced his counterparts to liquidate a full third of the Triumvirate’s holdings to help finance the war.”
“Insanity.”
Surrendering Imperium territory to a defeated foe was deplorable, not to mention a breach of centuries of precedent. But the Triumvirate had parted with its property only a handful of times since three warring polities had decided to become one, embarking on the ambitious path that would one day lead to the union of all Starfarers under the Triple Sunburst Sigil. Almost every Triumvirate since the founding had made its assets grow; the exceptions to that rule had happened during the One True Civilization’s darkest times.
Like every other polity, the Imperium relied on taxation to finance its vital services, but the Triumvirate’s vast holdings were a source of discretionary funds meant to be used for the betterment of all. When the leaders of the nation spent not merely their assets’ interest but also the actual principal, it was a portent of doom.
“The Masters of War have revised the conflict’s resource-allocation estimates yet again, Giga-Proxy,” the agent explained. “According to them, subduing the humans will cost nearly twice as much as the previous figures indicated.”
“Which in turn were triple the initial estimate Princeps Boma presented to the Proxy Council,” Quinta noted. “A six-fold increase, and we have barely begun to fight.”
“Much of the initial outlay was passed on to our allies, the Nasstah Union and the Lhan Arkh Congress.”
“And the Nasstah surrendered after one disastrous campaign, and the Lhan Arkh will need to be bailed out after losing four entire fleets in quick succession.”
Anger was an alien emotion to the Kreck, but she was feeling a near-frantic urge to inflict violence on everything around her that could be nothing else. Repressing it took some effort, and it filled the chamber with pheromone emissions that drove Tor-Netten into a coughing fit. The sight of the soft-skinned, disgusting biped’s reaction to her secretions almost pushed her over the edge.
Bipeds! Their bodily structure was inherently unstable; they had to make a continuous effort to remain standing, and their walking motions resembled more a controlled fall than anything a sensibly-designed creature did. Always on the verge of toppling over, it was no wonder they could not find value in stillness or balance but needed to constantly stir things up. Repellent creatures, and the Denn’s leader was the worst of them all.
Humans were bipeds as well. That was something to keep in mind, if only to vent her aggressiveness in their direction.
“I suppose predicted losses will also be commensurably greater,” she pointed out.
“Indeed, Giga-Proxy. Our victory at Drakul System resulted in thirty percent more casualties than anticipated even in the most pessimistic forecasts. And only a small fraction of the enemy force was comprised of humans. Once we enter their space and face their main fleets, our victories will prove to be far more expensive. It is the Princeps intention to do so only when truly overwhelming forces are put in place. A great deal of progress has been made in the effort to gain the assistance of other Starfarer polities. Many civilized peoples cannot fully commit themselves to the conflict but may provide aid. This will require the Imperium to make concessions to them, the costs of which cannot be easily measured.”
“Costs in treasure and blood. Costs in political bribery to Non-Unity outsiders. In both cases, costs that cannot be borne for long.”
The spy made a gesture of agreement before continuing. “As an aside, it pleases me to report that an operation aimed at killing the enemy’s War Masters was recently carried out. Its success is likely to reduce the final costs involved in removing Humans from the galaxy.”
“Insanity,” Quinta repeated. Killing leaders was never a good idea. It could inspire all kinds of wrong-thought among others, leading to the targeting of those whose breeding and status placed in leadership roles. People like herself, in other words.
“I…” the agent began to say before freezing in mid-word. He was in some form of distress, if his bulging single-faceted eyes and sudden loss of skin color were any indication. Before Quinta could do or say anything, Tor-Netten went into convulsions for several seconds before collapsing in a heap on the ground, as bipeds were wont to do. A proper six-legged creature like a Kreck would have simply settled down and died with some semblance of dignity, she thought amidst the shock at the sudden demise of her spy.
Just as the corpse stopped moving, the door to the private chamber – the highly-secure and shielded door – slid open as casually as the entrance of a public establishment. Through it entered Princeps Jan-Boma, First Among the Denn and senior member of the Triumvirate.
Kreck expressed panic by fully extending their sensory antennae and freezing in place, in a last-ditch attempt to find a means of escape certain death. Quinta didn’t succumb to the base emotion, however, and deliberately lowered her body in the proper form of obeisance one of her rank conferred upon the most powerful being in the Imperium. If these were to be her last moments, she would at least live through them with the proper deportment.
“My dear Giga-Proxy,” the Princeps began to say, then paused as his olfactory organs – a pair of short pseudo-digits placed over his mouth – recoiled in disgust. “My apologies. It appears that the traitor Tor-Netten voided himself as he died. I’m sure the stench is even more unpleasant to someone with your refined senses.”
So it was. Denn expelled a great deal of water along with their wastes, and the resulting swampy smell had the same effect on her chemical receptors as a continuous ringing sound would to a Denn’s ears. Quinta set her discomfort aside as readily as the fear she still felt. She was a Giga-Proxy, trusted by six billion sophonts to speak and act on
their behalf, and she would go to her death without losing control over her base impulses.
“How may I serve you, Your Supreme Benevolence?” she asked without deigning to mention either the killing or the chemical secretions of its victim.
“I must confess to eavesdropping on your conversation with my treacherous arse-kisser,” Boma said. He sat down on a different chair, well away from the oozing corpse. “I was not amused by having our councils spied upon, even by someone as respected as yourself. Perhaps especially by someone of your rank, since you should have known better. Some things must be left to the Triumvirate.”
“You are of course correct, Your Supreme Benevolence. I have erred, and crave your forgiveness,” Quinta said meekly, feeling a spark of hope.
He wants something from me.
A Princeps had too many demands on his time to waste it on someone guilty of spying on the Triumvirate’s secret meetings. This whole display – activating the kill-switch on the unfaithful servant, and the follow-up personal appearance – was meant to intimidate her into submission. The Proxy Council had no control over foreign affairs, but the ongoing conflict was making harsh demands on Voters from all walks of life. Without the full support of the Proxies who spoke for the Voter class, the Imperium would not be able to continue waging this insane war.
Threatening her life wouldn’t change her mind, either. Everything Tor-Netten had told her before his untimely demise still stood: the Triumvirate was leading the One True Civilization to disaster and financial ruin. And over what? Fear of a minor civilization, a fear based on ancient legends and religious beliefs? Absurd!
Quinta relished her power and prestige. As a Giga-Proxy, she influenced the lives of all those who entrusted her to that role, and many more besides them. Her wealth and power effectively set her above the law, provided she was adequately discreet. But along with that power came an equally great responsibility. Her Voters supported her only as long as she acted on their behalf – or at least appeared to do so. Lose their confidence, and it would all come crashing down. It wasn’t quite that simple, of course – power, once delegated, was not easily or quickly retrieved – but if she failed her people, she would eventually pay the price. And beyond the merely practical, she was committed to the welfare of the Imperium, not least because it was irrevocably bound to her own.
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