“Divert the next fighter sorties onto those contacts,” Admiral Kerensky ordered. A hundred thousand regular missiles were also in flight, but from the looks of it the enemy was going to wait until the Leegor weapons reached their target before they launched a full barrage. This was going to get interesting. The flying crowbars didn’t have warheads, but traveling at two percent the speed of light, they didn’t need them. Those railgun-launched guided missiles represented a wholly-new technological development, something the Leegor had been keeping under wraps until now.
And that’s why wars are chancy affairs. You have a plan, the enemy has a plan, and the Devil’s Grandmother has a plan.
While this new variation of the Sun-Blotter swarm closed the distance, the advancing fleets traded energy blasts at extreme range, the enemy’s greater throw weight balanced by the Navy’s warp shields. No surprises there. The first fighter strikes hit seconds after the missile launches; Kerensky had hoped to land a few blows before the enemy’s missile volleys were launched, but the ETs had a plan of their own, and it included firing off a salvo earlier than normal, spearheaded by a previously-unknown technology.
“Three enemy superdreadnoughts have taken critical damage.”
“A good start,” the admiral said. The first fighter sortie had gone after the Imperium capital ships; they had the most missiles, and once they were gone the allies’ cohesion and morale would suffer, perhaps to a crippling degree. The need to silence the flying crowbars swarming out of the Leegor ships would require a change in plans, however.
When it came to plans, only the Devil’s Grandmother got her way.
Fourteen
Redoubt-Five, 167 AFC
Keep it together, Lisbeth Zhang told herself.
Easier said than done. Focusing on the here-and-now was getting harder with every passing moment. Lisbeth bit her lower lip hard enough to draw blood. Her combat helmet concealed that from the rest of the crew.
“All right, Captain Fromm,” she began formally. She was nominally in charge, being the senior officer and the only one with any idea of what they were doing. “We need to search this level for a command node. Once we find it, I, with the assistance of Doctor Munson and Lieutenant McClintock, will release the warp entity bound to the Tower. In return, said entity will remove all security measures in the area, giving us full access to all its levels. Which include the hanger containing five Corpse-Ships – two were lost in action at some point – and several stasis-preserved arms depots, filled with Marauder weapons and gear. Plus warp transport devices that will allow us to send all the stuff we want to the surface for pickup, or even directly to the Humboldt’s holds. Does that sound good to you?”
“Can we trust the entity to keep its word?”
“Good question. I don’t know. If it tries to cheat, I’m going to kill it. I mentioned that to it during our conversa….”
Captain Fromm’s armored form, the end of the access tunnel where they were having their briefing, and the entire planet they were on vanished in an eyeblink. She was soaring through space with a school of Pathfinders, their massive forms moving through real space faster than any graviton thruster could go. They were using warp apertures to generate an endless supply of reaction mass, and had accelerated to a quarter of the speed of light, fast enough for relativistic effects to affect their perceptions. The eleven Pathfinders laughed as they skirted the outer edge of a red dwarf star, unaffected by temperatures in the mega-degrees Kelvin or the occasional impact with atoms or molecules, each striking with enough energy to punch holes both ways through a superdreadnought’s armored hull. Their joy was meant to balance the sadness they felt at the passing of one of their own, an elder sibling who’d chosen to wander into the depths of the Starless Path, never to return…
“Uh, conversation,” Lisbeth finished. From the surface emotions of those around her, she’d frozen for several seconds. Public displays of insanity were the worst. “So, that’s the plan. Any questions?”
“What would a command node look like?”
“Can’t miss it. It’s like an oversized motorcycle seat, built into a wall recess. The Keeper tried to show me the exact location, but it looks like most of the level was, uh, rearranged by the same event that killed all the Kraxans inside the Tower. All it knows is that there is a functional unit somewhere in there. Up to us to find it.”
“Will do.”
“Okay, then I should open the door. I cannot feel the Flayer of Souls anywhere, but be careful in there.”
One mental command later, the door to the interior opened up and the group made its way inside, operating in full tactical entry mode. This section of the Tower had been through the wringer. There was destruction everywhere, and signs that something worse than mere energy weapons had been at work.
Mundane damage was evident from the moment they stepped into the regular hallways of the building. The Kraxans went for wide, curving corridors and internal walls carved with elaborate bass-reliefs in a dizzying variety of geometric designs, some of which was Kraxan writing, the rest merely decorative. Normally, those hallways would be brightly lit, in wavelengths trending towards the red end of the spectrum. At the moment, they were pitch black; the only sources of light were what they had brought along.
Right across the entrance, she saw a jagged hole big enough to toss a Battler through, and the scorched remains of a room. From the looks of it, someone had fired a high-caliber plasma beam from the hallway. Similar torn-up sections of wall were visible on either side of her. The Marines were moving slowly, in one case avoiding a huge tear on the floor that seemed to go on for several levels.
“Could we try rappelling down that way?” Heather asked her, pointing at the hole on the floor.
“Not until we disarm the security systems. Unless you enjoy sunbathing at three-thousand degrees, give or take.”
“Oh, well.”
They passed another destroyed room, no known weapon system had done the damage. Something had disintegrated everything in a perfectly spherical volume. You could see mirror-smooth sections of wall and floor, cut by whatever had made that ball of total destruction. Everything around it was unaffected, so it wasn’t an explosion. A severed arm lay off to one side: the rest of the dead Kraxan had been inside the sphere when it went off.
The Marauders were many things, but never cowards. Whatever had caused them to run to the top of the tower in mindless fear and crush themselves against its inner walls and ceiling in their desperate rush to escape had been something serious. Now that she knew what to look for, she spotted signs of the Flayer’s work. Its touch seemed to destroy matter down to the atomic level. The holes it made were all perfectly smooth. And other than that arm and a set of legs they found further down, there were no corpses here. Most of the dead had left no trace behind. And Lisbeth had a feeling that what happened to those missing aliens had been worse than death.
At some point, I’m going to see it, and I know it’s going to be bad. Maybe just bad enough to finish what the Langley Project, the Snowflakes and my alien ghost started, and melt my brain beyond recovery.
The Marine squad moved slowly forward, checking each room they passed. Here and there, they found pockets of normalcy. Furniture of assorted sizes and shapes, each piece probably custom-made to fit individually-deformed Marauders. There were workshops and the remains of fabricators. Doctor Munson checked them out and pronounced them damaged beyond repair. That was too bad; a few of them looked large and complex enough to match the super-fabbers they’d liberated at Xanadu.
Fabbers wouldn’t save humanity, though. What was on the floor below might.
“I think I found it, sir.”
Lisbeth peeked through the Marine’s visual feed. Yep, just as advertised, a forward-reclining chair a little bit like that she’d found in her Corpse-Ship, except longer and wider, to accommodate the larger bulk of the Overlords. Kraxans liked to lie on their bellies when doing stuff; most of their furniture was arranged that way. The re
ason could be biological or cultural; it wasn’t like every Earth civilization had sat in the exact same way. Either way, she’d soon be lying on her belly and getting a bellyful of Kraxan culture.
“This is where things get positively dicey, Christopher Robin,” Atu said as Lisbeth headed for the control node.
The three-eyed alien had restrained Vlad and put him on mute, so his cursing and torture descriptions didn’t bounce around inside her brain. “I will have to loosen Eeyore’s leash so you can access his memories; if nothing else you will need to understand the Kraxans’ foul language.”
“Fun. Really looking forward to run that through my brain.”
Kranxans had fourteen words for schadenfreude, and only one word for love that didn’t involve the sex act (sex and rape were linguistically near-identical, too, with just a small extra syllable to indicate mutual consent). The root for the solitary term for love was the word for stupidity, much like their word for mercy. Not exactly the best language for writing greeting cards, or anything other than death threats.
“In the name of fairness of Balance, I must point out that the original Kraxan tongue was far less grounded in sadism. What you see now is the result of millennia of degradation.”
“Too bad I can’t use that instead.”
“No can do, Christopher Robin. The divergence between the original and the debased version is greater than that between English and proto-Indo-European.”
“Makes sense. All right, let’s get this done.”
The control node and its oversized seat were in a room that was largely intact. Only one wall had been sheared off, luckily one on the opposite side of the node.
“Gather ‘round, party’s about to start,” Lisbeth said, straddling the node. Heather and Doctor Munson stood on each side, ready to jump in. “There’s a chance our work here may attract the wrong kind of attention, however.”
Captain Fromm nodded. “We’ll maintain perimeter security.”
Gunny Freito sent off a swarm of recon drones to watch every possible entry point while the Marine squad took firing positions around the building section, except for the captain and a fireteam that stayed in the center, just in case something decided to warp right into the room. The lessons from the Battler attack had sunk in: dealing with a species more warp-capable than humans had turned out to be one hell of a wakeup call.
Doctor Munson was examining the node with the sensor pad he’d carried along. The academic spoke as he worked:
“As expected, there are no active power sources, at least as we understand them. The system has a set of gravity-wave conduits, perhaps to act as a backup to the tachyon systems. But that is unlikely to be important under these circumstances.” He looked at his data pad as if he was about to smash it on the ground. “My instrumentation is all but useless here.”
“Your implants aren’t,” Lisbeth said.
She still didn’t like the man but had come to appreciate his intellect, which was why she hadn’t objected to having him along.
“Using them going to be risky, though,” she added.
He snorted. “Riskier than venturing into a two-hundred millennia structure peopled by warp entities and deadly ancient warriors? I had no idea all those waivers the Navy made me sign would constitute my last will and testament, but here we are. What can I do for you?”
“I will share the Kraxan’s language and knowledge with you and Heather, so you can examine the prison holding the Keeper inside the Tower. I… I’m not tracking as well as I should, and maybe you and Heather can figure out what we need to do better than me.”
“Of course. This is the find of a lifetime. Even if the results are classified for a century. I will do as you ask.”
Pretty decent of him. Although if he turns evil I’ll still shoot him down like a rabid dog.
* * *
This wasn’t Heather’s first rodeo, but things were different here.
She’d matched wits with the Tah-Leen, a race of near-immortal perverts who’d forgotten more about the arts and sciences than humanity had amassed in its entire history. But for all their vices and age, they had been sophonts: sapient creatures who shared certain basic traits with humans and all other Starfarers.
The Keeper was something else altogether.
The only other being who’d affected – all right, intimidated – her like this had been Lisbeth’s Pathfinder companion, and that creature was a ghost in every sense of the word, a fragment of a greater whole. And the Pathfinders had been normal sophonts once, although they had evolved into something greater over time. The enslaved Warpling, on the other hand, was a being of null-space. Even something as basic as three-dimensional reality was utterly alien to its experience.
When Lisbeth psychically introduced everyone, Heather had felt her mind being examined by something that touched all her memories. No, it went deeper than that. It was as if the Keeper had traveled in time and stood watch over her whole life. The entity examined her entire existence in an eyeblink, and learned more about her than anybody, including Peter and her closest friends or relatives had or ever would. No human being could observe the totality of one’s life, not even with modern technology capable of documenting every moment in it. The Warpling knew what she felt and thought every step of the way. It also learned how her actions affected others, and what they thought and felt about her.
She’d never been religious, but the whole thing was like being judged by a god. Or even God. Except the entity wasn’t judging her. This was its version of checking a new acquaintance’s Facettergram profile.
Doctor Munson went through the same process. Heather felt the man wither under the all-knowing gaze of the Warpling. They both came from the greeting feeling thoroughly humbled. That was the only world to describe the realization that all they were and had done could be examined by a third party. Even worse, she suspected the Keeper’s senses extended beyond the past and present. For all she knew, the entity knew the exact time and manner of her death.
“Oh, dear,” Munson mumbled over and over. “Oh, dear.”
“Yeah, it can get to you like that,” Lisbeth said. “Even my pal Atu the Pooh got a little flustered the first time.”
“How could the Kraxans – or anybody – enslave a being like this?”
“Well, Doctor, it happened in the way a warlock controls demons in the old stories. Build a containment device of some sort, lure it there, and trap it. Not exactly pentagrams and Latin incantations, but something like that.”
“That’s superstition. Are you telling me they drew a magic circle and summoned the Warpling there?”
Heather jumped in: “If it helps, think of circuitry acting as a conduit for the flow of energy. Or a battery.”
“It makes for a slightly better metaphor, but we are talking about a thinking, living being here.”
“Harnessing an entity’s energy against its will; that’s the definition of slavery. It’s been done since muscle power was the main source of energy.”
“You are correct, of course, Ms. McClintock.”
With a visible effort, Munson concentrated on the matter at hand. He and Heather examined the Marauder’s psychic prison with the trained eyes of an expert in variant technologies, languages and cultures and a systems operator and hacker.
“Your comparison to circuitry was particularly apt,” he said. “I still cannot fathom how tachyon particles are contained and channeled by these devices, but I see what they are doing. In effect, they have turned the strength of the Keeper against itself. Its struggles only strengthen the trap built to contain it. They also suppress the parts of it that provide intelligence and volition.”
“Glad you can make sense of it.”
Heather could ‘see’ the flow of tachyons being displayed by the control node, but understanding what it meant was beyond her. The Kraxan version of information technology didn’t work like anything she’d seen before. The Tah-Leen systems she’d encountered at Xanadu were more powerful than other Star
farers’ equivalents, but they followed the same basic principles, with a few exceptions, like using tachyon signatures as a security ID. The Marauders, on the other hand, relied on tachyon waves for everything. Their method of giving instructions to their devices was closer to musical composition than computer programming. Munson made the leap before she could.
Assuming I ever will, she thought, watching the man work. There was something in the process that eluded her completely; sticking to the music composing analogy, it appeared that when it came to t-wave programming, she was tone-deaf, or even completely deaf.
Deaf or dumb, she didn’t miss a sudden burst of telepathic energy when Munson began to tear away at the cage holding the Keeper captive.
She knew an alarm when she saw it.
* * *
“You might have company soon. Be on the lookout for anything.”
“Copy that,” Fromm told Heather.
He turned his attention to the drones patrolling the silent halls of the Marauders of Krax. They’d found no activity so far. His squad was ready to go, and if necessary the Marines on the surface had set up a warp catapult that could put two more squads down here, as long as nobody minded some extra damage to the facility. That was a last resort, however, given that the Marauders could do everything humans did and more. The Kraxans might have developed countermeasures to that sort of intrusion. He had no desire to find out how the aliens handled unwanted transits into their buildings.
The four corridors leading to their position were under watch by two Marines each, set up so they had a clear field of fire at least twenty meters out. The drones were deployed much farther ahead, strung out to provide advance warning. The arrangement was far from ideal, but urban settings provided some of the worst conditions for infantry combat. To make things even more difficult, the walls inside this building blocked grav-wave scanners and communications; they had to set up fiber-optic cables and laser ‘bouncers’ along the way to stay in touch with the Humboldt and the rest of Charlie Company, and the drones had to relay their information by passing their signals from one drone to the next until reaching one of the Marine pickets.
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