Heather could tell Peter was already thinking about ways to do that. Scorched-earth tactics, most likely. Marines were good at those.
Captain Spears took over.
“The initial landing area will be on the Southeastern quadrant of the planet, on the largest continental landmass.” A holographic planetary map reappeared briefly before the image narrowed down to the patch of ground they would be visiting, a roughly Australia-shaped continent. There was a noticeable circular divot on the lower western corner of the land mass in question. The captain highlighted it as he went on:
“As it turns out, Redoubt-Five did not quite manage to escape the disaster that destroyed its sister planet and rendered the third one uninhabitable. It looks like a number of fragments from Redoubt-Six struck in a number of places. The gulf on the southwest was made by the largest impactor, something roughly half the size of the ‘dinosaur killer’ alleged to have hit Earth during the Cretaceous Period.”
He gave them a few moments to digest the information. Lisbeth was certain the extinction event hadn’t been an accident. Which meant someone had broken the Elder Races’ commandments about damaging inhabitable planets – or that the disaster was the work of the Elders themselves.
The Marauders deserved that, if anybody ever did. Problem was, digging around their ruins may place us in the crosshairs of whoever did that to them.
The map zoomed in onto a section of jungle surrounded by hills. A single flat-topped hill stood near the center of the valley, its shape clearly different from the rest of the other peaks in the range.
“Graviton scans have detected the remains of a large city buried in this valley, including a relatively intact tower. The mesa near the center also seems to be an artificial creation. There is some t-wave activity emanating from belowground, along with those miniature warp events
“We will set up a base camp on the central mesa and proceed to dig in selected spots. Our primary objective is to find any Kraxan combat vessels. Given their unique characteristics, there is a good chance those ships may be still operational even after all this time.”
A couple of the Humboldt’s officers all but rolled their eyes at the captain’s words. While nobody could dispute the reality of the Corpse-Ship Lisbeth Zhang had used at Xanadu, the idea that these buried ruins could hold anything useful after millennia of weathering sounded ridiculous. Even Heather thought the chances of finding those ships were slim at best.
“In the interests of speed, we are going to cut corners, which means we’ll be incurring greater risks. A normal Navy Survey vessel would spend months analyzing a new system’s planets for any possible hazards before a human being ever set foot on them. We do not have that luxury. Time is of the essence, and I don’t need to remind you that we are at war.”
“It’s going to be difficult enough to make any sense of any remains we find without adding carelessness to the process.”
Everyone turned to look at Doctor Munson, who had risen to his feet – with some effort – and interrupted the captain.
“I understand that preserving any artifacts and minimizing disturbances would be a top priority in a normal archeological dig, Doctor,” Spears replied in a more patient tone than Heather would have used in his place. “In this case, they are secondary to our primary mission. Like I said, we have to take shortcuts because we can’t afford the time to do otherwise.”
“This isn’t a matter of not disturbing ruins, Captain. What awaits us on the surface of the planet is not comfortably dead. There are active systems on that planet, as my fellow t-wave sensitives have indicated.” He nodded towards Heather and Lisbeth. “The Kraxans doubtlessly left behind several rather dangerous surprises for any intruders, and some of them may still be active. There is a reason their race-name has survived in several galactic languages as the root for various terms for ‘evil,’ ‘devious’ and ‘sadistic.’ We have to be very careful.”
“Needs must when the devil drives, Doctor.”
“Yes, this is all very urgent. But think of the knowledge contained in those ruins. By all accounts, there are buried buildings still in one piece, despite being over three hundred millennia old, and having been abandoned for at least half that long. Do you understand what that means?”
“I’m sure you will tell us,” the captain said.
Undeterred, Munson went on: “Even metal-ceramic honeycomb walls – the most commonly-used building material in known space – isn’t rated to survive more than ten thousand years without active maintenance. The only alternative is vivoconcrete, a nanite-rich compound that can regenerate damage somewhat like living tissue does.
“As you may or may not know, vivoconcrete is extremely expensive, requiring Level Six fabricators to manufacture, which is why it’s only used in a select few buildings, even by the wealthiest Starfarer civilizations. The material also requires an energy source. Your scans show none are active. In other words, whatever those ruins were built with is something superior to the best construction materials we know of. Rather than merely blasting it apart, we should try to spend some time analyzing it. And that is merely one example of the amazing discoveries that we could carelessly destroy if we aren’t careful.”
“You have a point, Doctor. And we will try to record and analyze any finds as best we can – as long as doing so does not interfere with our primary objective.”
“Of course. Do keep in mind, however, that the activity below us emanates from warp interactions that only three members of the expedition, myself included, can even detect, let alone evaluate. And those emanations can be dangerous. We have to be prepared for such things as hallucinations, loss of concentration, possibly even psychotic breaks.”
Munson glanced at Lisbeth as he spoke.
Everyone suspects Lisbeth is not in perfect mental health, but I have a feeling the good doctor knows just how badly she is doing.
Heather’s implants hadn’t given her more than a few glimpses inside Lisbeth Zhang’s head, for which she was thankful. The traumatic events at Xanadu had left a lot of scars in the Marine pilot’s psyche, and t-wave implants didn’t allow you to read minds so much as to share what was going on inside them. Doctor Munson had received a second-generation set which supposedly protected its wearer’s mind from trauma. Heather wasn’t sure the new sets were any better than the last; untried technologies rarely performed as advertised. But if he could look into Lisbeth’s mind without losing his, those implants were damn good.
“And I would like to point out how unlikely it is that we’ll find any warp craft in pristine condition,” Munson said, thankfully leaving Lisbeth’s possible insanity out of the discussion. “Hurrying up only adds to the total risks without improving our odds of making useful discoveries.”
The Science officer was nodding in agreement, and even Captain Spears seemed to be considering the archeologist’s words. Neither officer thought very highly of the mission at hand. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t do everything in their power to make sure it succeeded, of course.
“Like I said, Doctor, we will do our best. We have our mission, which we must accomplish in the shortest time possible.”
When the Humboldt had left Xanadu, the Wyrms were still fighting the Imperium armada and the Lampreys were reeling from near-crippling losses. The most realistic estimates had the Wyrashat suing for peace within three months, and signing a final accord after two or three more months. The wheels of diplomacy wouldn’t turn much faster than that, given the limits of interstellar communications. After that, the Gal-Imps would have an unobstructed path into American space. It would take the enemy an additional month or so to make its final approach, pun intended. Call it two hundred days all told.
That had been two months ago. They really didn’t have a lot of time to find something, given that getting back to the US would take another two months. If they wanted to return before the Gal-Imps did irreparable damage, they couldn’t spend more than a month or two in Redoubt System. That estimate had been unoffic
ial – the orders left the timing to the discretion of Captain Spears – but she had no doubts that was the deadline the Humboldt’s commander was planning to follow.
None of this seemed to have occurred to Doctor Munson. “This sort of short-sighted thinking is one of the many reasons we are considered barbarians by all higher civilizations,” he said.
“Better to be a live barbarian than a dead cosmopolite.”
The captain’s tone brooked no further argument, and it seemed to finally sink in. Munson sat down in a huff, although that was possibly because the effort to stay upright was proving to be too much for him. Word was that he spent most of his time in a microgravity environment; being at 1-g was likely tantamount to torture, and he either wasn’t wealthy enough to afford a personal gravity-field generator – those went for a million Galactic Currency Units, give or take – or had better uses for that kind of money.
“Any other questions or concerns? No? Very well. Let’s go over the details. We’ll conduct a final sweep of the initial landing area, using more drones. This should take five more days. After that, we’ll make the initial landing.”
And hopefully all this will be worthwhile.
Four
New Texas System, 167 AFC
USN Lieutenant Gus ‘Bingo’ Chandler walked out of the briefing room along with his fellow warp pilots. Their mood was subdued. The ebullience of the last few days had evaporated as reality set in. They would be flying their first combat missions very soon, and everyone had done the math: casualty rates among warp fighter pilots made their new jobs an effective death sentence.
One percent losses per jump.
In the handful of space actions involving warp fighters, pilots had done an average of ten sorties, each involving a minimum of two and a maximum of five warp jumps. Given the adjusted estimates after the Battle of Drakul, you might as well flip a coin to see if you lived or died in a single battle. Of course, casualties tended to happen to new and inexperienced pilots – a category that included almost every Navy pilot, with the exception of a few veterans like Grinner Genovisi and a handful of former Marine aviators who’d jumped ship and joined the Navy (in some cases jumped ship for the second time to rejoin the Navy) when warp fighters stopped being the jarheads’ sole province.
Grinner had been flying missions for a year before joining Bing’s squadron, first with Sixth Fleet, which had been largely uneventful except for one skirmish against a renegade Viper flotilla, and then with CV-7 near Lamprey space, mostly hunting down a few enemy squadrons probing around American borders. Back then, the American fliers had it all their way. The enemy still hadn’t figured out how to deal with warp fighters, and attacking them had been as hard as clubbing baby seals. Things had changed.
In no small part, things had changed because warp space was claiming as many victims as enemy fire.
God and the Virgin protect me, Gus thought/prayed, clutching the crucifix hanging from his neck.
He’d never been much of a Catholic before he became a naval aviator. A lot of people relied on prayer to get them through warp travel, but that never bothered him that much. Handling regular warp transit with a big starship wrapped around you was one thing: flying in a dinky little fighter was something else altogether. Doing multiple jumps in a matter of minutes or even seconds took a lot out of you. Prayer helped. That wasn’t the only reason he’d found himself turning back to half-forgotten memories of catechism classes and going to Mass with the family every Sunday.
There are demons out there, and if there is a Devil, there must be a God. Right?
He hoped very badly that the answer was yes.
Three hours later, flying alongside the rest of Carrier Space Wing Four, he almost got the chance to find out first-hand.
They’d been doing training missions nonstop since the carrier group had joined Seventh Fleet at New Texas System. Their practice runs concentrated on multi-squadron strikes on a single target. The Imperium new superdreadnoughts were bigger than anything the Navy had fought before, and the reports they’d gotten from the Wyrms before they threw in the towel were sobering. Those big mothers had triple hulls, each of them as well-armored as the outer shell and with internal force fields to match. A twenty-incher had no chance of getting through that. Even a flight of six firing as one wasn’t likely to do significant damage. That meant sending two or three dozen fighters on a series of closely-spaced passes, all going for the same ship and, ideally, striking the same section on the ship.
The War Eagle designers had never expected such coordination was possible; they’d counted on the fighters’ ability to appear in the rear of the enemy to hit their targets’ least-protected sectors. That had worked great at first, but the ETs had quickly adapted and spread their ships’ force fields evenly around their entire volume. This degraded their overall protection but made it hard for a single fighter to do much damage. Then again, nobody had expected fighter pilots to link their minds via what the eggheads liked to call ‘tachyon waves’ and the pilots themselves just referred to as FM Systems.
FM worked great; the main problem with it was that you had to get inside the heads of everyone involved. When it was just you and your wingman, it was easy enough. Getting an entire flight of six fighters to act as one took a lot of work, and you ended up learning a lot more about your buddies than you wanted to. And now the carrier ops bastards wanted them to coordinate multiple squadrons. The Navy might not understand what was going on, but they sure as hell were trying to squeeze every last drop from it.
So far, that wasn’t working out very well. Twenty-four or thirty-six minds were just too many to link at once. A couple of the spookier pilots could pull it off and act as fire coordinators for the rest, but the resulting fire was a bit ragged. They’d done three sorties on a simulated target, and the simultaneous volleys had been spread over a fifty-meter radius. That would be amazing accuracy for any other weapon platform, of course, but they were hoping they could narrow the gap to ten meters or so.
All of which meant more practice sorties, which meant more time spent in warp space, and more time using FM to remain in mental contact. In other words, it meant putting up a big beacon for the Foos.
They’d lost two people in the two weeks since they’d started the exercise, out of four hundred and change. A transport with about a hundred replacements and a freighter with two hundred spare War Eagles were on their way, so those losses would be made good.
Good for everybody except the poor bastards who didn’t make it, Gus thought. And their buddies who’ll have to deal with it.
Emergence.
Grinner’s mind was like a pillar of cold flame. She acted as a network node for Third and Fourth Squadrons: Gus and all the other pilots, squadron commanders included, followed her lead and fired at her command. Twenty-four War Eagles came out of warp and opened fire within half a second of each other, hitting impossibly close together. Not quite within ten meters, but a lot better than fifty. Nobody lingered to cheer, though. Staying in real space for more than three seconds meant the Eeets’ point defense would acquire your bird, resulting in a bent or dead bird.
Transition.
Heading back to the Enterprise took a fraction of a second in ‘real’ time, but a lot longer inside warp space.
Gus.
“Shit.”
He’d heard that voice before, and knowing it was a Foo pretending to be his childhood’s bogeyman didn’t stop the thrill of terror that ran through him like a bolt of lightning.
Gus, I’m hungry.
It’d been his fucking brother’s brilliant idea, to put a little communicator under five-year-old Gus’ bed and use a voice-distort system to produce the most demonic, inhuman voice he’d ever heard. Gus had woken up to those words, and had nightmares about them for years.
So hungry, Gus. So very hungry.
“Hail Mary full of Grace, the Lord is with Thee.”
Mary can’t help you, Gus, the Foo said, still using the monster voice. I ate he
r up. You’re all alone with me.
Gus kept praying. He should be concentrating on his emergence point, focusing his will on getting the fuck out of warp, but the Foo was getting closer, and he was losing track of where he was, where he should be. If he missed his exit, he’d be…
Trapped. All alone with me, the Foo said with monstrous glee. It was reaching for him with a claw-tipped hand or something even worse, and Gus knew if it got a grip on him he’d never come out of warp.
Grinner showed up. Her cold fire washed over the Foo, and Gus heard a cry of rage and pain.
“Exit! Do it now!” Lieutenant Genovisi shouted in his head.
Emergence.
The Enterprise was a mere five klicks away, the sweetest thing he’d ever seen. It was like seeing home for the first time in years.
“Grinner,” he sent to her. “You…”
She’d saved his ass, again. Nothing he could say or even think was enough.
“You’ll do the same for me some day, Bingo.”
He was terrified at the thought of trying to help her, and failing.
* * *
Seventh Fleet stood ready for its new admiral’s review.
It had been two hectic months, and it would only get worse for one Nicholas Kerensky, Fleet Admiral, CINC-Seven and lord and master of the arrayed forces he beheld, as well as all the orbital, planetary and deep space forces of a dozen planetary systems. Much of that time had been spent overseeing staff work, as well as meeting with everyone in his staff, all his task force commanders, and, last but not least, the skipper of the flagship of the fleet, the USS Odin. He hadn’t worked with Captain Victor Cochrane before, but on short acquaintance he’d found the man to be a competent officer.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 105
