“I live to serve the Unity, Your Supreme Benevolence,” she said.
“That is all I ask. I will try to be brief and explain my case. You do know that I have an uncommonly-high warp rating, do you not, Giga-Proxy?”
“I do.”
One could not rule the premier Starfarer polity without the ability to travel between stars. A mere three percent of the citizenship of the Imperium could endure faster-than-light travel at all; a mere fifth of those had the requisite mental affinities needed to navigate the otherworldly space commonly known as the Chaos Lanes or the Twisting Void. Boma was among the most gifted of that elite, someone who suffered minimum discomfort while undergoing warp transit. One might say he had an almost human-like tolerance to the mind-rending energies of the Void.
“It is well-known that while traversing the Chaos Lanes, one can catch glimpses of times and places beyond our own,” the Princeps went on.
“So it is said,” Quinta said, with a lot less certainty. The Imperium’s Chaotic Space experts were deeply divided on that question. The prevailing consensus was that any such input consisted of random waking dreams, but a vocal minority claimed that traversing the Void could instill some degree of extrasensory perception. While warp navigators liked to convey a sense of mysticism around them, their eccentricities were largely dismissed by right-thinking beings as signs of psychological instability. Many Starfarer legends spoke of ‘warp savants’ whose prophecies had influenced entire civilizations, only to be unmasked as mere charlatans or babbling maniacs. The moral of those stories was simple: never surrender logic to the whims of superstition.
“Would it surprise you to know I have had visions of the future, Mega-Proxy?”
“It would, Your Supreme Benevolence.”
The rumors are true. The Denn Princeps is a madman.
“I was very young at the time,” Boma explained. “The Chief Navigator of my father’s star-yacht suffered a seizure while in transition. The co-pilots were able to complete the jump, but we were stranded in the Chaos Lanes for an uncommonly long time. The six-hour trip became an eighteen-hour nightmare, and we had not been sedated for such a lengthy jaunt. Several crewmembers and passengers died; many others were driven insane.”
Including you, Quinta thought.
“I saw the future of the galaxy, written in blood. I saw that the Humans would bring doom to us all, although at first I didn’t know who those creatures were, only that they were very Denn-like, except for their short and motionless proboscis. I couldn’t have named them, you see, because I had my vision many centuries before Earth’s First Contact. In fact, it took a long time before I understood the import of what I had been shown.”
“That is a remarkable tale, Your Supreme Benevolence,” Quinta said.
“And hard to believe, yes. But once Sol System and its Human inhabitants were discovered, I finally recognized the threat. In a surprisingly short amount of time, those creatures have amassed a degree of influence totally out of proportion to their numbers. Did you know that human pilots now help move nearly five percent of all civilian trade between stars? Despite comprising a fraction of a percent of the population of the galaxy?”
“That is due to the species’ surprisingly high warp tolerance, I believe.”
“They are very amenable to the Twisting Void, yes. They can handle its horrors with surprising ease. I believe you have ventured through the Chaos Lanes only sparingly, Giga-Proxy.”
“You are correct, My Princeps.”
Quinta’s warp tolerance was barely adequate to allow her to travel between stars, and she found the experience profoundly disturbing. For the most part, she was content living in Primus System, the capital of the Imperium, which had been designed to house its rulers quite comfortably. Three of Primus’ five inhabitable worlds had been transformed to accommodate its three primary species. Primus-One was perfectly suited for the Kreck, Primus-Two had been transformed into a close replica of the Denn homeworld, and Primus-Three served the needs of the amphibian Obans equally well. The remaining worlds were compromises of sort, not ideal for any species but within everybody’s preferred ranges of atmosphere, gravity and luminosity: uncomfortable but tolerable for all, in other words. She rarely left Primus-One’s confines, and hated it whenever she was forced to do so. This visit to Primus-Four, the seat of the Triumvirate, was proving to be no exception.
“Your aversion to warp travel is understandable. The Chaos Lanes are a necessary evil, but they are indeed evil. They can change those who expose themselves to it for too long. The legends are true. The Void can turn sophonts into monsters. And humans are well along on that path.
“I have something to show you, Giga-Proxy,” Boma went on. “For the time being, this information is restricted to a very select few. Not even your spy was privy to it. Will you do me the courtesy to examine it before you consider my request for your support?”
“I live to serve the Imperium and the Unity,” she repeated, which was truthful enough, if not what the Princeps wanted to hear.
“Then watch, Quinta, and learn.”
The images that flooded her senses came from a direct transmission from the Princeps, a beamed upload that couldn’t be intercepted by normal means. She saw what appeared to be a partial endoskeleton from some species she couldn’t recognize, painted black and fused to some device. A warp aperture appeared behind whatever that was, and swallowed it hole, leaving behind the darkness of deep space.
More imagery followed, telemetry from ships’ sensor systems. In every scene, the skeleton that was also a ship jumped in and out of real space, appearing close enough to other vessels that its small size became apparent, and destroyed them with some form of enhanced graviton beam she’d never seen before. Quinta was not well-versed in military matters, so she wasn’t quite sure what she was seeing, but the tiny vessel – or vessels, although she only saw one of them at a time, and it never seemed to be destroyed – annihilated dozens of enemy warships with contemptible ease.
“What am I seeing, Your Supreme Benevolence? Is it a new human starship?”
“No, Giga-Proxy. Something far worse. An artifact from the past, but also a glimpse of a possible future. If we allow it to come to pass.”
The small ship was incredibly deadly – assuming the footage was real, of course. Her implants identified its prey as Lhan Arkh warships. While Quinta felt nothing but contempt for the ugly aliens and their so-called Congress, their fleet was rather respectable. If the Lhan Arkh could fall prey to the likes of that flying skeleton, so could the One True Civilization.
“My spies acquired this data at great risk and expense. Fortunately the humans who seized Xanadu System were left in a state of confusion and disorganization that enabled us to retrieve it. Some of what you saw came from sensor readings from a number of Lhan Arkh vessels. A single craft tore through its ranks with impossible ease. An ancient craft from a dead race of warp demons. Those beings were no legends, Giga-Proxy. Their culture once dominated the known galaxy and wreaked untold destruction during their reign. And a few months ago, until the ancient ship was destroyed, those demons lived again. Humans brought them back, and are well on their way to becoming just like them, or worse. At that point, the Unity is doomed. The sophonts of the galaxy will be only united by misery and death. We only have one chance of stopping a new Dark Age the likes of which has not been seen for two hundred millennia.”
“Tell me more,” Quinta said, forgetting to use the Princeps’ title in her shock.
He made no note of it, but kept talking.
* * *
Giga-Proxy Tenacious Quinta’s support of the Triumvirate Emergency Measures played a vital role in their passage, ensuring the financial support of both military and diplomatic measures designed to win the ongoing war. She did so willingly, but with a heavy heart, for she feared that they might not be enough to stop that terrible future the Princeps had shown her.
She no longer felt any hope for Unity. Only death. But she woul
d do everything she could to stamp out the Human threat.
Three
Aboard the USS Humboldt (CA-931), 167 AFC
Fromm blinked away the warp-induced nightmares he’d endured for what seemed like an eternity. His body felt different, almost alien. The canned air inside the Humboldt, the pressure of the safety straps holding him to his seat, the noises navigation and control systems made to announce their readiness – all those sensations were familiar, but only as something dimly remembered after years of absence.
He hated long jumps.
According to their ship’s chronometers, they’d spent seventeen hours inside null-space, or what their guide liked to call ‘the Starless Path.’ Subjectively, the trip had lasted more than long enough for every Marine Fromm had led to his or her death to make an appearance and curse him for his failures. More than long enough for dead children from several species to stare him down, mutely reminding him that their blood was on his hands. Plenty of time to relive his biggest mistakes. The shame and self-loathing that accompanied those memories still weighed on him. He’d relived the shock and pain of learning of Sergeant Obregon’s death, the revulsion that had seized him the first time he’d taken a life, the loss of his father, days after they’d exchanged angry words during Fromm’s first leave on Earth.
If there was a Hell, it couldn’t be much worse than that.
Heather was sitting not too far away, behind a sensor workstation. Her welcoming smile matched his own.
“We made it,” she said via private comm. “Check out the screen. It’s not every day humans arrive to an unknown planetary system.”
The images on the ship’s main screen weren’t particularly informative. Their starship had made a stealth emergence, appearing very close to a gas giant a light hour away from the system’s blue-white F-Class star. At the moment, the visual horizon consisted of a near-featureless pea soup-green surface, broken here and there by swirling storms on the massive planet’s surface. The Jovian’s gravity well was strong enough to mask a single vessel’s warp jump, unless the enemy had facilities orbiting around it.
The USS Humboldt shut off all non-essential systems and thickened its force fields to hide its thermal signature, becoming invisible to anything but a close-range graviton scan. The survey vessel, using just enough power to prevent the gas giant from dragging it down into its interior, stayed in orbit as its passive sensors observed the rest of the system. If the locals seemed too dangerous to approach, the ship would fall back into warp and return the way it had come.
More images appeared on the screen as the Science Department techs catalogued all major celestial bodies around them. So far, everything seemed to match Major Zhang’s claims. She had helmed the ship during its seventeen-hour transit, guiding it to the right place and time to make a covert entry. Navigators could only do that when they had extremely precise information about a star, but the fighter pilot had performed the maneuver flawlessly.
The fact that the system didn’t show up in any Starfarer records wasn’t all that remarkable. Even after millions of years of interstellar travel, nobody had a complete map of the ‘known galaxy,’ which itself comprised a small fraction of the Milky Way. Despite their FTL-drives, Starfarers were like ants crawling on a continental mass, unable to fully grasp its size. Finding new warp valleys took a great deal of time, and many stars had never been explored because no pathways to them had been discovered. Thousands or most likely millions of inhabitable worlds, some a few dozen light years away from densely populated systems, remained fallow because without a warp line travel there wasn’t practicable. Additionally, astrogation data was often lost during times of upheaval, requiring new voyages of exploration to rediscover it. In this case, the system owners had kept its existence a secret, and when they disappeared from galactic history some two hundred thousand years ago, so had all information about it.
Fromm had never given such matters much thought until he’d spent some time on Xanadu, where even a casual poring of records going back a third of a million years showed him how ignorant the current crop of galactic upstarts were, humanity chief among them. Starfarer civilization was in recovery from a dark age that had lasted for millennia – a dark age precipitated by a species with warp travel abilities not unlike the ones humans possessed.
“Think we’ll find something here?” he asked Heather, trying to set aside the gloomy thoughts that threatened to overwhelm him.
“Hopefully. Lisbeth is sure this trip is worth the trouble, and she managed to convince the top brass. From what I hear, her dog and pony shows were pretty darn impressive.”
Major Lisbeth Zhang had returned from a long vacation on a detention facility in Sol System, bringing galactic coordinates leading to this forgotten world and new orders for one Captain Fromm and his worse-for-wear C-Company. There was only enough room for about two hundred Marines in the cruiser, and his unit’s upgraded equipment and experience with unconventional operations had gotten them the assignment; Zhang’s recommendation was also a factor; the jarhead pilot seemed to think highly of Fromm’s unit. He didn’t feel particularly honored, but nobody had asked for his opinion.
“Looks nice enough,” he said as data kept coming in.
A projection appeared on the upper right quadrant of his field of vision, showing him the planets and other celestial bodies orbiting the pale blue star, transforming the information from the Humboldt’s sensors into graphics-rich diagrams.
There were seven rocky planets within thirty light-minutes of the star and three gas giants further out, including the one they were orbiting. Initial scans only offered some basic information on the size and composition of the inner worlds, but two of them seemed to be roughly the size of Earth, and both were in the Goldilocks zone where water in liquid form could exist, making them candidates for habitation and the best places to start their search.
There was also a thin asteroid belt within ten light minutes of the star, which was somewhat unusual. The debris was also within the Goldilocks zone, and it had probably belonged to an inhabitable planet before it had been shattered into rubble.
One thing was clear, however. Nobody was home, at least nobody with any tech level of note. The American flotilla wasn’t picking up any gravitonic or electromagnetic emanations anywhere within the system. Either they’d never held high-tech civilizations, or they no longer did. At first glance, the Humboldt had made a long trip for nothing. The ship had gone further beyond Earth than any other human. They had reached the outer edge of the Orion-Cygnus Arm of the galaxy, looking for the remnants of a civilization that had disappeared from the annals of Starfarer history before Homo Sapiens walked the earth.
All of which was nice, except there was a big-ass war going on in the known part of the galaxy, and their expedition had left only a few months after the disastrous news at Drakul System. The Galactic Imperium was steamrolling over the Wyrms and would soon be in a position to threaten American space. Unlike previous attacks by the Vipers and the Lampreys, the Gal-Imp invasion had been delayed until the enemy was sure they had amassed enough force to get the job done, and by all indications they were right. The chances that some research mission in the galactic boondocks would produce anything useful before the US was defeated were slim. On the other hand, a survey ship, a handful of scientists, and a Marine company weren’t going to change the correlation of forces in any meaningful way. If Lisbeth Zhang’s claims were real, they might just find a miracle in one of those empty worlds.
Miracles did happen, if by miracle one meant vanishingly rare occurrences taking place at exactly the right time and place. Fromm hated depending on luck to save the day. Lucky streaks always ended. All his life he’d believed that you made your own luck, by training and hard work. Improvise, adapt and overcome. There were things beyond his ability to control, however, which meant having to rely on the kindness of a cold and uncaring universe.
“We’ll do what we can, Peter,” Heather said. “And maybe that’ll be just
enough.”
“Reading my mind?” he asked lightly.
She shook her head. “I don’t have to, not that I would. My fancy implants don’t quite work that way, and telepathy is… messy.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Being inside my own skull is enough of a pain in the ass. Definitely wouldn’t want to go poking around in other people’s heads.”
“If t-wave tech becomes widespread, we’re all going to have to learn how to deal with it. And it’s going to be tricky.”
“We’re halfway there anyway, with implants that can record our every waking moment and that can be shared with anybody. We learned to deal.” The war between transparency and privacy had been almost as nasty as any of the interstellar conflicts of the post-Contact era, and the solutions had been far from perfect. These so-called tachyon implants would just open up a new battlefront in that war.
“I’m picking up something from the fifth planet, by the way,” Heather added. “It’s pretty faint, thought. Like whispers you can’t quite make out. But there’s something active down there.”
Fromm knew what that meant. Sooner or later, he and the reinforced Marine company the Humboldt had brought along would have to go down there to keep the scientists and spooks safe while they went on their fact-finding mission.
When his Marines were involved, diplomacy had turned out to cause a great deal of bloodshed. He had little hope that archeology would be any different.
* * *
“So far so good, Major Zhang,” Captain Spears said. “Looks like nobody is home.”
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 103
