One of the floating Marauders seemed to explode: that welcome illusion was soon shattered when lines of energy and missile contrails erupted from its body. It hadn’t been destroyed; it was returning fire. The rest followed suit moments later, battering the Marine positions with dozens of different weapon systems.
A sudden shockwave threw Fromm a dozen meters sideways, knocking his body through a tent’s hardened walls. The world went black for a moment. Fromm blinked; his imp let him know he’d been unconscious for five seconds and that his personal force field had been reduced by thirty-six percent. The pain from his bruised ribs didn’t need any explanation. His medical implants quenched the pain as he struggled to his feet; he wasn’t dead or unconscious, and as long as that was the case he could fight.
A quartet of Hellcats ran past him, filling the air with anti-armor missiles. Their target staggered in the air but didn’t fall.
It was hurt, though, and if the Marines could hurt them they could kill them.
* * *
“The fuck did they come from?”
Russell ignored Gonzo’s shout. He was too busy shifting every fucking thing around to deal with the tangos that had warped in the middle of the valley. Most of their area force fields were facing the wrong way, and some of the giant aliens were inside the perimeter shield. It was the kind of trick the Warp Marines liked to pull on ETs. Turnabout was fair play, and fair play was a stone-cold bitch.
“On my mark, goddammit!” Sergeant Fuller called on the squad channel. The prick in charge of First Platoon was yelling the same thing at a few grunts who were still shooting on their own. Russell had already seen bursts of Iwo and SAW fire doing fuck-all to the aliens’ shields. Only way to hurt those bastards was to pour it on like they were killing tanks.
And just like tanks, these fuckers could shoot back.
Grampa hit the ground like he was scoring a touchdown, the portable field gennie in his hands. A moment later, a stream of particle beams splattered against the area shield and drained it from a hundred all the way to thirty-two percent. If the old bastard hadn’t gotten there in time, they’d all be dead or wounded.
An infantry fireteam wasn’t so lucky. Their position was swallowed by a burst of graviton beams. Russell noted the sudden splash of red and black among the roster icons, but most of his attention was on the aiming point the squad sergeant had marked for him, right in the middle of a four-headed nightmare that was firing at least seven different guns at the same time. He had to force himself to hold his fire until everyone was lined up. He flipped the continuous beam switch on the Widowmaker. No fucking around here.
Now.
He, Gonzo, the other two fireteams in his squad, and every gun and launcher from First Platoon hit the ugly motherfucker. The tango’s shield shone like a phosphorous flare under the storm and fire. It failed a moment later and the six Widowmakers’ continuous beams got through. The deformed alien exploded like a blood sausage in a microwave.
“Dance fucker, dance,” Grampa yelled as chunks of alien started raining down everywhere. Russell let out a breath he’d been holding through the continuous shot. One down.
A missile struck about ten meters further down the hill. Fire and damnation washed over their area field and filled the world with crushing agony.
Not again, Russell had time to think before the lights went out.
Ten
Redoubt-Five, 167 AFC
A shuttle broke apart in mid-air when its shields failed under a barrage of hypervelocity slugs and graviton beams. Its sensor feed went dead a moment before its flaming hull plummeted to the ground, pieces of torn fuselage trailing behind it, along with a plume of black smoke.
Heather McClintock had a first-row seat to the shuttle’s demise. Unfortunately, all she could do was watch the battle raging all around her. She, Lisbeth and the two hapless spacers with them were crawling towards the edge of the tower, for all the good huddling in the pit with the Marine engineers trying to return fire with their sidearms would do.
Any second now, one of the bloated monsters flying overhead would notice the interlopers on top of the partially-unearthed tower and would erase them from existence with any of its dozens of weapons. Her beamer was clenched in her right hand, but she’d seen the creatures shrug off direct hits from anti-tank rockets, so she might as well hurl insults at her killer as shoot at it.
“Heather,” Lisbeth called to her mentally. The Marine pilot had passed out for a moment, but was back in action, her own service pistol out. The stubby PPK would be only marginally better than Heather’s beamer, but neither woman was in the mood to die without trying something.
“Any famous last words?” Heather replied.
“I want to try something, and I could use your help.”
Last time Lisbeth had tried something, the pack of Marauders about to slaughter them had shown up, but at this point they literally had nothing to lose.
“Sure. What do you need?”
“I’m going on a mind trip. Care to provide backup?”
Something big blew up, close enough to shake them and drain their personal force fields by a sizable percentage. They weren’t going to make it off the tower. Heather nodded.
“I’ll follow your lead.”
The murderous battle disappeared. Heather was back in her personal mental haven, a tea room complete with comfy chairs and hot tea for everyone. Lizbeth was there. So was a gigantic alien with iridescent blue-green skin, three large eyes and no nose, mouth or any eating or breathing apparatus she could see. It had no legs, only a pair of long arms terminating in seven long multi-jointed fingers. It regarded Heather steadily, and she felt certain it was somehow smiling at her.
“Oh, you haven’t met it, have you?” Lisbeth said. “Atu, Heather. Heather, Atu.”
The Marine had mentioned her invisible friend before, but she had never expected to meet it in person, or in virtual space for that matter. To her enhanced senses, the Pathfinder glowed with energy. It wasn’t often she came to face with a being with godlike powers and wisdom.
Well, you’ve been doing that a lot lately, though, she told herself. On the other hand, compared to someone that could travel through warp without a starship, the Snowflakes were second-rate demigods at best.
“Delighted to finally encounter you directly, Heather McClintock, daughter of Eve,” Atu said.
Did he just reference The Chronicles of Narnia?
“It is one of Lisbeth’s favorite childhood books,” the alien replied to her unspoken thought. “Although her favorite growing up was Winnie-the-Pooh.”
She blinked, then shrugged. “All right, we’ll talk about this later. Even if time doesn’t work the same here, we really should hurry up.” She turned to Lisbeth. “You have a plan, I suppose.”
“Yes, ma’am! This Marine will engage the Marauder Battlers in null-space, ma’am, where she will use mental strength and dirty tricks to overcome the enemy, ma’am. Oorah.”
Heather sighed. “Zhang, you outrank me. What are your orders?”
Lisbeth giggled. “Oh, yeah. Sorry about that. When I get us there, use your imagination. Wish them dead. Wish it very hard. Or visualize a weapon and try to kill them; that should work. I figure my invisible friend and I can take two or three of them, but you’re going to have to handle at least one.”
Conjuring up tea and cozies had been easy enough. But killing with her mind? Heather knew only too well how deadly the illusions in warp space could be; maybe she could make them work for her. She tried to picture the most intense fighting in her life. Picking up the right memory was no problem at all.
The trenches at Kirosha, when they came over the wire.
She looked down. A long-barreled slug-throwing rifle was in her hands, a wicked-looking bayonet fixed beneath the muzzle. Memories of the moment she drove its point into the heaving chest of a red-skinned alien came back to her. She could smell the chemicals released by countless shots and explosions, hear the horribly child-like cry th
e alien made when she stuck him, feel the blade grating on bone when she twisted and pulled it. She remembered lifting her head and seeing more of them, swords and spears in their hands…
“Ooh, that’s a good one,” Lisbeth said. “That’s Marine-quality carnage. Are you ready?”
Heather swallowed and nodded.
“Up and at them! Oorah!”
“Hooyah,” Heather said tentatively. Loyalty to her branch and all that.
“Even for a bubblehead, that sucked. Let me hear it!”
“HOOYAH!”
And they were off.
* * *
One of the cool things about fighting in the Starless Path was that you could bring along your own soundtrack.
Back when she’d been a mere cadet, two years of generic military service behind her and the glories of the Navy beckoning to her, Lisbeth had put her love for Kriegsmetall to good use. The harsh, angry tunes, first made popular by German emigrants – survivors of First Contact rescued from the devastated ruins of Europe – had always resonated with her, and the songs of Totenkopf, Panzer des Nibelungen and Pale Horse kept her sane during many a warp transit.
She entered the mind-realm of the Kraxan Battlers with the heavy drums of Totenkopf’s Destroyer of Stars pounding all around her.
Battlers were below the Overlords in the Marauder food chain but were far deadlier, at least in the physical world. Only veteran members of the warrior caste qualified for the role. Their ferocity was rewarded with years of torture as more body parts, cybernetic enhancements, armor plates, and built-in antigrav and shield generators were nailed to their mutated flesh and linked to the Path to provide power and nourishment. Miniature fabbers filled their body cavities, allowing them to generate more weapons and ammunition. These monsters weren’t as disciplined as the Kraxan Phalanxes that were the aliens’ primary infantry forces. They were brawlers, meant to mount warp assaults on enemy ships or fortresses and lay waste to everything around them. They worked in small groups, or even as individuals, priding themselves in their ability to strike in all directions and engage multiple targets at once.
In the physical world, each of those monsters massed fifteen to twenty tons and could take more punishment than a main battle tank. Over there, Lisbeth and her standard-issue popgun had no chance to do anything but annoy them. Things were different here, however.
She spotted six of them: the ground-pounders had accounted for a couple so far. In warp space, the Battlers looked just as big and hideous, but that was just their self-image talking. Only the Overlords liked to fight inside the Starless Path; all other Kraxans viewed that realm with fear, as a useful shortcut and energy source, but a place to be otherwise avoided. Their shared panorama was crude and simple: a large cavern where they could commune with each other while in transit. They’d been trapped there for thousands of years, frozen in some sort of stasis, sleeping watchdogs waiting for an alarm that took two hundred millennia to arrive.
Lisbeth charged the nearest one, closing the distance between them with impossible speed. Totenkopf’s drums kept banging away as she drove a glowing fist into the giant creatures’ midsection.
The Battler howled in agony and recoiled from her blow. It had been caught by surprise, not noticing her approach until she hit it. Now it turned two of its four heads towards its unexpected tormentor: a razor blade-covered tentacle lashed down at her from its right while two pincer-tipped insectile limbs struck from the left. In the real world, either of those attacks would have torn her to pieces. Here, they hurt like nothing she had felt before, but as long as she felt pain, she was alive. She pummeled her tormentor with her flaming hands, setting blubbery flesh ablaze with every punch. She kept hitting it, keeping time with the song, until the creature fell apart and vanished. One down.
Somewhere nearby, Heather was shouting an incoherent stream of obscenities while she stabbed her opponent with the bayoneted rifle in her hands. Lisbeth was aware of the fight without having to turn her virtual head to see it, just as she knew that Atu had reached a third Battler, touched it, and made its worst nightmares come alive.
“All unbalanced beings carry the seeds of their destruction within their souls,” the three-eyed alien explained calmly as the Marauder tore itself to shreds and disappeared.
Two down, but things weren’t easy anymore. The Marauder fighting Heather was aware of its attacker, and was beating the secret agent like a piñata. Another Marauder became aware of the interlopers and charged Lisbeth: the other three were still devoting all their attention to the physical world. Just as well; if all of them had joined the fight, they would have slaughtered Lisbeth and her friends.
Her Marauder was distracted, splitting its attention between the fight in the real world and Lisbeth, but it was ready for her. They traded blows, and she grew weaker with every exchange. Heather was faring even worse; a metal club smashed her to the ground and the antiquated rifle dropped from her hands. Atu hesitated, unsure of where to go next.
“Heather! Go help Heather, you stupid mother…”
A serrated blade as long as Lisbeth was tall and half as wide tore through her midsection in mid-sentence.
The burning light around her hands dimmed into nothingness. The Battler lifted her up, sending new shocks of agony through her as body she dangled from the impaling weapon. The monster’s four faces turned towards her; three opened their mouths in voracious grins, displaying fangs, sharpened teeth and in one case rusty nails protruding from bleeding gums. The fourth head had two sets of cutting mandibles and a prehensile tongue. All of them extended their necks and reached towards her, mouths opening wider. Lisbeth knew that what would follow would be a combination of eating, vivisection, and total absorption, and when they were done she would be part of that monstrous whole.
Atu had saved Heather from a similar fate and destroyed that Marauder, but there was no time for her friends to help her.
Even in the timeless Path, you can run out of time, she thought as the last chorus of Destroyer of Stars played around her.
The dreadful feasting began.
* * *
A Schwarzkopf tank blew one of the aliens out of the sky, but another Marauder took it under fire. Dozens of armor piercing slugs hammered through force fields and armor. The tank dropped back to the ground, smoke rising from several full breaches in its hull. The commander was dead, but the driver and gunner were wounded but alive. Fromm didn’t know how much time they had. He didn’t know how much time anybody had.
Counting that last kill, the Marines had accounted for three of the eight attackers. A fourth one had suddenly collapsed for no apparent reason, but the rest were blasting everything that moved with unstoppable volleys from multiple weapon systems, some of which he couldn’t identify. Even with the improved weapons and armor his Marines had acquired at Xanadu, they were getting hammered.
All Fromm could do was mark targets and hope the bubbleheads up in the sky got their thumbs out of their…
The Humboldt appeared from behind a cloud, its five-hundred-meter bulk casting a shadow over the battlefield. Two 15-inch gun batteries opened fire: multiple twisting corkscrews of energy descended upon their targets. The Marauders were tough, able to survive even a direct hit from a tank gun, but the firepower of naval guns was a cut above most things deployed on a planet. Both monsters were shredded by the multiple impacts.
Six down.
If the aliens had shown even a modicum of coordination, they would have killed every human on the ground long before the survey ship could fire on them. Luckily, they had acted as individuals and spread their attacks over multiple targets at a time. That meant that the command post and the dug-in mortars were still standing. Fromm vectored all the remaining firepower under his control on one the last two targets. Armor-piercing guided mortar bombs weakened its shields; moments later, a volley of antiarmor missiles tore through the alien’s flesh; three of its dozen limbs went flying into the air as the floating monster recoiled in the other directio
n. It wasn’t dead yet, but one of the returning tanks finished it off with two shots from its main gun.
That left one. The Humboldt and the surviving shuttles – two had been shot down – took care of it a few moments later.
The whole battle had lasted less than a minute. Six of Fromm’s Marines were dead, and half of the rest were wounded, some badly. The Navy spacers had suffered far worse casualties; even though they’d been issued personal force fields, they only wore haz-con suits underneath, not body armor that could withstand explosive fragments or small-arms fire. Thirty of them had been killed, and twice as many were hurt.
Heather had survived. She had Major Zhang’s limp body hoisted over her shoulder and was climbing down from the top of the tower. Fromm checked Zhang’s status: her vitals seemed fine but she was clearly unconscious. The Marauder hovering over the unearthed building had collapsed after firing only a couple of shots. Fromm guessed that she or Major Zhang had something to do with it. The two women had a way of pulling off miracles out of thin air.
He looked at the remains of the eight aliens and at the carnage they’d inflicted in a few minutes. Miracles might not be enough.
* * *
“I’d appreciate it if you could run it by me one more time, Ms. McClintock,” Captain Spears said. Lisbeth had explained what happened, but done so in her inimitable way, and her version hadn’t gone over very well. The pilot had emerged from the psychic battle even more unhinged than she’d been before. Apparently the Marauder she’d been fighting had started to eat her before it was killed in the physical world by a hit from the American starship. Lisbeth had survived and claimed she was all right; Heather thought there was more to it, but there hadn’t been much time to check on her friend. After two attacks, the expedition commander was in no mood to waste time. He wanted answers, and he wanted them now.
“Of course, Captain,” Heather said. “The Marauder Battlers were exiled to warp space several millennia ago. It looks like their culture’s version of hardship duty, most likely as punishment for some transgression. Those warriors were in stasis until the building’s controlling intelligence summoned them.”
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 115
