Screw this. I’m not wired to be some sort of shamanistic priestess or whatever the hell you need to be to deal with this crap.
Intelligence work she could do just fine. Combat wasn’t her favorite, but she could handle it. This mystic mumbo-jumbo – which, worse luck, had plenty of real-world applications – just made her angry, whenever it didn’t scare her half to death. The shaking subsided after a few seconds, and Heather shrugged. She’d accomplished the mission, and that was the only thing that mattered. Her hurt feelings were irrelevant.
The Marines recovered in plenty of time to meet the two remaining Marauders with a storm of aimed fire. The cybernetic skeletons were tough, but not tough enough. They melted under the liberal application of plasma-tipped rounds and died a second and final time.
The fight on the surface wasn’t going quite as well, however.
* * *
“We’ve got more bugs and critters coming this way, plus whatever the big mother is.”
Russell shook his head and tried to get his shit together. Whatever juju the locals had used was nasty stuff. He’d gotten a bad case of warp nightmares, along with everyone else. Every rat bastard he’d plowed under had come back, calling for his blood. Luckily someone or something had helped him snap out of it, just in time to find out that there was plenty of real shit to worry about.
There were hostiles everywhere, all converging on their valley, which was turning just as nasty as the place made immortal by Psalm 23:4 (Russell’s only memorized quote from the Good Book). If they didn’t stop them, nobody was getting off this rock alive.
Training took over. He had a sector to watch over, and enough faith that the rest of the company would take care of the shit he couldn’t deal with. His Widowmaker was locked and loaded, his position at the top of the hill gave him a clear field of fire, and there were more than enough targets for everybody. A couple million more bugs were flying over the scorched no-man’s land around the valley, alongside hundreds of animals that had traveled a long way to get there, and out in the distance he could see giant floating shapes like spike-covered turtles, if turtles could grow up to be the size of elephants and sprout dozens of tentacles, each long enough to cover a football field. He had no idea where they had come from. Russell figured the three tanks they had left could take care of those. Their starship was busy with the big thing rising up from the sea: he’d taken one look at it and decided he didn’t want any part of that shit.
Sergeant Fuller marked targets for everybody. Russell got a few hundred monkey-dog critters the size of quarter horses, coming into view two klicks away. He put the Widowmaker on continuous beam and hosed them. That was massive overkill; the galloping monsters ceased to exist anywhere within two meters of the graviton beam’s path, and although there were a lot of them, there weren’t enough to handle an energy firehose playing back and forth their ranks. Against a weapon designed to kill main battle tanks, nothing made of flesh and blood had a chance. It was damn unfair, just the way he liked his fights.
The mortar section was handling the clouds of bugs just fine, too. Whoever thought a bunch of critters could take Marines firing from prepared positions didn’t know jack. Of course, they’d probably figured everyone would be too freaked out by the spooky juju to do anything about them.
Lasers, grav beams and old-fashioned plasma rounds churned the ground and created patches of steamy lava. Clouds of greasy smoke that had once been part of the local biosphere rose up towards the sky. By the time the big floating mothers came into range, all the smaller critters were gone.
The flying giant turtles were more than flesh and blood. They could generate their own shields. Russell saw one of them stagger when a Stormin’ Normie landed a hit with its main gun, but keep on going.
Wonder why they waited until now to deploy ‘em, the part of his brain that insisted on thinking like a goddamned officer whispered in his head. The rest of him was wondering when the goddamn officers would order them to…
“Check fire! Coordinate TOT by platoons!” Lieutenant Hansen sent out to every Devil Dog in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Russell figured the skipper wouldn’t have waited that long, but maybe he was prejudiced.
Not that it mattered. The flying turtles didn’t have ranged weapons, so they had plenty of time to line up their shots and focus the firepower of multiple units on a single target. ‘Time-on-target’ had started out as an artillery command, where all the guns in a battery timed their barrages so they all arrived at the same moment, achieving maximum carnage and not giving the enemy time to react. Energy weapons and targeting implants allowed direct-fire weapons to do the same thing. The monsters were nasty bastards, but not nasty enough to survive it when a weapons squad, a tank and an infantry platoon poured it on like they were a single shooter.
“We’re the meanest motherfuckers in the valley,” Russell muttered to himself.
“Bet your ass,” Gonzo added.
“Gung-ho bullshit,” Grampa said, reloading their weapons.
“You’re just bitching on account you ain’t fired a shot yourself,” Gonzo told him. “Don’t worry, this is a tango-rich environment.”
A moment later, the starship-sized seashell rising up from the ocean fired a big-ass grav beam at the Humboldt.
“Fuck,” Russell commented as flames poured out of a glowing hole on their only ride home.
“Too rich for my blood,” Grampa said.
* * *
“What the Hell is that?” Lisbeth Zhang. She might be half-human, half-Pathfinder and half-Marauder, not to mention all Marine, but she’d started her adult life as a Navy officer, and the sight of the Humboldt reeling from a direct hit by a Marauder graviton beam brought back some very bad memories.
“That, Christopher Robin, is a Marauder War Galleon; the smaller floating creatures are its Prey Collectors. The Galleon crashed into the sea as Redoubt-Six shattered and the Flayer took its revenge on those who’d dared summon it to this world. And now, powered by the tormented spirits of its former pilots, it lives to fight once more.”
“Now that’s the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard. It crashed. It was dead. Systems down. You can’t be operational after two hundred thousand years.”
“Your pathetic blather only shows your ignorance,” Vlad the Marauder said. “The Galleon had our most advanced Starless Path systems, the closest we ever got to match the Pathfinders whose corpses we enslaved. Within the Path, time doesn’t matter. And when the desire is great enough, the past can become the present.”
Lisbeth’s mind flashed images of the dead ship, its hull pierced in a dozen places, lying quietly in the cold ocean floor. Everything that could corrode, rust or dissolve was gone, and even the impossibly hardy alloys the Kraxans used for armor and structural supports were pitted and weak, overwhelmed by entropy like everything else in Creation. Only a small ember still burned in the utter darkness, unaffected by the waters’ abrasion or the crushing pressure of the ocean above. A self-powered engine, relying on the energies of the Starless Path to survive, waiting for its hour to come round at last.
Then came the signal, and that time was at hand.
The warp engine roared to life, traveling not through space but time, somehow. Lisbeth watched the ship’s hull reknit itself. Thousands of years rewound as if in a video. Barnacles and other sea life disappeared as the War Galleon repaired itself and came to life. Finally, guided by entities with no physical form, ghosts that could yet send commands and direct the reborn ship, it rose to fight a final battle.
“Goddamn ghost ship. The ultimate spacer story come to life. Fuck me.”
“That is as close as your language can approximately describe what is happening, although I know there are less crude ways of expressing it,” Atu said. “The ship is a shadow of the past, ephemeral but yet capable of inflicting great harm.”
“I like my way of saying it better, Pooh. How do we kill it?”
“We free the Keeper, so that it is no longer required to devote all th
e surviving resources of this planet to stop us intruders.”
“In other words, less bitching, more working.”
The big three-eyed alien nodded.
Doctor Munson was still at it, unconcerned by everything going on in the real world. Lisbeth cold appreciate the single-minded determination, even though in this case the super-genius might wake up to find a pack of undead monsters – or starships – in the process of taking a big bite off his ass.
I better help him get this done.
It was a great idea, except she still didn’t know what the big guy was doing.
From where she was standing, Munson was playing one of those brain-twister games she hated, the one where there is only one right way to arrange all the little squares, squiggles or smiley-faces and if you miss a step you have to go back to the beginning. Or something like that; she hated them enough not to even bother trying to figure out the rules. Give her a good shooter scenario, or even better, a tactical simulator where she got to run a virtual fleet, and she was in hog heaven. This was too abstract for her.
Her Marauder memories were of little help, beyond giving Munson access to the language. Vlad had been a fighter, not to mention a moron. As far as he was concerned, system design and programming were the kind of stuff weaklings did for their betters, and even if he had the brains for it, he’d be literally damned before he deigned to learn any of it.
Atu wasn’t much better, either. The Pathfinder would have never dreamed of enslaving a Warpling, and had never even wondered how it would go about doing such a thing. In that sense, both of her alien companions were in total agreement: that sort of thing was well below them.
Leaving me to watch the smart guy do all the work. Can’t leave, since I need to hold his coat while he does it.
That wasn’t all she could do, of course. She could tap into her regular implants and watch as the Humboldt beat a hasty retreat into high orbit, trailing smoke where the War Galleon had breached its hull and killed a dozen crewmembers. The converted battlecruiser kept hammering the Marauder ship, and its twenty-inchers were taking apart the unshielded Marauder vessel – but the ghost ship was repairing itself by going back to a time when it wasn’t damaged. Fucking unfair, it was.
“I’m reversing the imprisoning process,” Munson announced. “I need five more minutes.”
“That’s great. I think the Humboldt is going to buy it in three. I have to stop the ghost ship.”
Maybe having a split personality would finally pay off.
“Atu, keep a leash on Vlad and help the professor. I’m going to make a mental sortie, so to speak.”
“Not the best idea, Christopher Robin. If you fail, the portion of your mind that is Lisbeth Zhang will be gone, leaving only myself and Vlad to wrestle control over your moral remains.”
“I will defeat you, Pathfinder! And the first thing I will do is to shove a…”
Lisbeth ignored them both. It wasn’t easy to do – in warp space everyone can hear you scream – but she had to figure out a way to sink the ghost ship, and she needed all her concentration for the job. By now she was used to walking on the Starless Path. Too much so: her gift would likely disqualify her from flying a Navy or Marine vessel ever again. Any psych eval would end with a couple dozen orderlies carting her off. Her only hope was to do something so extraordinary that the higher-ups would waive just about every mental fitness requirement in the book, on the grounds that if it was crazy and it worked it wasn’t that crazy after all.
Something extraordinary like sinking an alien battleship with the power of her mind, perhaps.
From the warp side, the ghost ship looked like a swirling maelstrom made of howling faces, just the kind of thing that would give her nightmares for the rest of her life. Since she was already somewhere on the stark raving mad spectrum, the imagery didn’t bother her all that much, so she had the presence of mind to notice the flock of Warplings surrounding the ghost ship like so many seagulls following a garbage scow. They looked pissed off at the vortex of souls or whatever it was, but something was keeping them from getting in there and kicking its ass. It took her a moment to figure it out.
They needed an invitation from this side. Like vampires, they couldn’t enter the physical world without someone’s permission, and the Galleon was still part of that world. She had to let them in.
Only question was, did she really want to do it?
This sort of situation begged for Atu’s wisdom, but her buddy was busy making sure Vlad didn’t take over her body and made her do things to herself. She had to figure this out on her own.
Every time Lisbeth had encountered Warplings, she’d tried to avoid them like the plague. Once, while piloting a Corpse-Ship, she’d managed to shoot them down. This was the first time she would try to talk to them out in their natural habitat, as opposed to the Kraxan slave in the Black Tower.
“Hey, you!”
Some of the ever-shifting shapes hovering on the edges of the ghost ship’s vortex turned towards her. They immediately assumed forms taken from her memory, none of them pleasant: schoolyard bullies, nasty aliens, and, worst of all, the USS Wildcat’s dead crewmembers. Not very nice of at all. Why couldn’t they use a nice memory? Doogie Shaw, for example: dumb as a rock, but man did he look great, and screw even better than he looked. That’d be a blast from the past she wouldn’t mind seeing.
“You want a piece of that?” she told them, pointing at the ghost ship.
At least they didn’t have any trouble understanding what she meant. The all glanced towards the vortex at the same time, then turned their ugly mugs back to her and nodded, also at the same time, which was a bit unnerving. But at least they were listening and not attacking, which was better than any previous interaction she’d had with the damn things.
“You’ve got to agree to my conditions before I let you in.” She had to think about them. “First, you only have permission to destroy that ship, nothing else on my side of the universe. Second, you will go back where you came from after you are done, or five minutes of physical-world time have passed, whichever comes first, so you better make it snappy.”
She thought about adding, ‘Third, you owe me a favor,’ then decided against it. That might be pushing her luck.
“Understood, Captain,” the Warpling wearing Lieutenant Omar Givens’ face said, sounding just like the Wildcat’s second in command. “We agree to your terms, both in letter and spirit. Those damned souls have eluded us for too long, as you corporeal entities understand time. We are hungry.”
“That’s great. Go ahead.”
The Warplings moved closer, and Lisbeth felt something leaving her mind and passing on towards them. Something like an access code that let them reach an object bound to physical reality. She had opened the door for them.
They poured in, falling upon the vortex of souls; their shapes changed back to something she couldn’t make out, maybe because she wasn’t quite crazy enough to see, at least not yet. The souls of the Marauders screamed in horror as the Warplings fell upon them and began to feed.
“Oh, and Captain?” the Givens-shaped Warpling said, turning away from the slaughter to face her.
“Yes?”
“We owe you a favor. Try to collect it before you die.”
Seventeen
Redoubt-Five, 167 AFC
One second, the big tentacled ship was flying after the Humboldt and shrugging off multiple hits. The next, it fell apart like a trash bag hit with a plasma gun.
“Crazy,” Russel said as flaming bits of debris rained from the sky. The tango ship hadn’t been anywhere near them when it went up, luckily, so the only ones on the receiving end of those falling chunks of flaming metal would be the local alien critters, and they all had it coming as far as he was concerned. Whole planet could fall into the local sun for that matter. He’d been in plenty of shitholes – that description usually applied to most Marine ports of call – but this one was the worst. Not a hooker or a bar anywhere and every living
thing on it wanted to kill them. Having warp ghosts on top of that just took the cake.
The tank platoon had been about to take a swipe at the giant flying seashell when it died. Even for Devil Dogs, that had taken balls. The Normies’ guns could put a hole on a starship, assuming they got in range, but the return fire wouldn’t be survivable. Still, better to try than let their only way back to the World get shot down. Plan B would have been to warp-drop a platoon of infantry into that ugly ship, which was close enough to a suicide mission that half or more of those poor suckers wouldn’t even arrive at their destination.
“There’s more animals headed this way, but they’re a good ways away, so it’s going to take a while,” Sergeant Fuller said. Out in the distance, whatever jungle had survived the previous days’ bombing was burning merrily.
“Guess we managed to piss off every last motherfucker on this planet,” Gonzo said. “That’s gotta be some sort of record.”
“Telepathic,” Grampa said. “Only way they could even know about us.”
“Warp witchcraft,” Russell explained. He was the local expert, given his relationship with a genuine warp witch. Gonzo had lost his shit when he’d finally figured out who Russell was writing emails to.
“The Humboldt’s orbital drones are watching activity on every continent. Critters are throwing themselves into the ocean and trying to swim here.”
“The ones who make it there will be some tough mothers.”
“Long trip just to get killed,” Russell said. The crew working inside the big black building had triggered some alarm, but at least it looked like the worst was over. He didn’t say that out loud. Grampa had a thing about jinxes.
Then again, considering everything that had gone down here, he should be more careful about dismissing anything as superstitious crap. At this point, he was about ready to become Catholic or something.
He’d seen enough devils to begin to think there just might be a God.
* * *
“The Keeper is free,” Doctor Munson announced.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 123
