A flaming five-sided wave of flames burst into real space. A torrent of superheated ionized gas – plasma, in other words – poured forth for several seconds before the warp gates shut down.
Like all warp apertures, this massive pentagon reached two points in space at the same time. The other side of the warp gate was on the inside of the local star. A torrent of plasma that had moments before been part Dubois’ G-type main-sequence star, which was busily fusing hydrogen some ten light-minutes away. The warp aperture on that end had been much narrower, sucking in the highly-pressurized plasma and then shooting it out of the wider five-sided emergence point like a shotgun blast.
The Corpse-Ships were incredibly hardy, but they couldn’t survive a maneuver that placed them within the corona of a star, ghosting or not. The Pathfinder slaves whose bodies, and until recently their souls, comprised the cores of those vessels had enough control over warp space to isolate them from the wave of star-stuff coming through the massive aperture. Lisbeth still didn’t know how the whole thing worked, despite hours-long explanations from the Pathfinder ghost that resided somewhere in her brain. And work it did, the proof being that the five ships were holding station on the corners of a wall of flames that could be seen with the naked eye from the farthest planet in the system. By rights they should have turned into crispy critters, but there they were.
Enough residual heat got through to turn her cockpit into an oven. That wasn’t supposed to happen, but she’d been half-expecting it. What had been routine for Pathfinders wasn’t quite so easy for a pack of human apprentices. They’d all been practicing the multidimensional folding that enabled them to survive the maneuver, but this was their first live run. Lisbeth ignored the discomfort and concentrated on the complicated mental acrobatics necessary to make it all happen. There was one way to do it right, a dozen others that would fail miserably, and several that would destroy all five ships in an instant.
“Now!”
The Death Heads flew away from the wall of fire at full speed, moving on perpendicular vectors from the cloud of superheated gas they had created. The pentagon quickly lost its initial sharp edges as plasma, no longer bound by the gravity of its star, began to expand normally.
It worked!
The cloud wasn’t dense or hot enough to destroy any warship heavier than a corvette or even some civilian vessels: medium-grade force fields would hold off plasma at those densities, unless something else had weakened them to near-collapse. Missiles, on the other hand, had very basic force fields, far too thin to let them survive in the environment Lisbeth’s squadron had created over a volume of space that would envelop even the largest volley the enemy could launch. The curtain of fire they’d created would have consumed tens of thousands of missiles before the plasma dissipated.
“Well done, everyone! Now let’s make our attack run while we wait for the scores to come in.”
Unlike War Eagles, Corpse-Ships did most of their fighting in normal space. That took some getting used to; it was very different from the jump-shoot-jump fighter pilots were used to. Luckily, the pilots of her unit, all hand-picked by her, were very good at their jobs. They were several uniquely-minded individuals: you didn’t have to be crazy to fly on the Death Head Squadron, but it helped.
A short jump took the five ships past the Fire Wall and closed in with a notional enemy formation on the other side. The Death Heads let fly with their high-grade graviton cannon, unleashing enough power to shred a superdreadnought on a single pass. The Kraxan Corpse-Ships might be antiques, but you couldn’t call them antiquated. They were products of ancient super-tech that made them, pound by pound, the deadliest things flying in the known galaxy. If the American expedition Lisbeth had been a part of had found a few more, the war would be as good as won. Even five Corpse-Ships would make a huge difference, though, especially when they could pull tricks like the anti-missile wall of fire that was just beginning to dissipate behind them.
The only thing I wish is that the damn thing didn’t look like a giant pentagram!
That was purely by necessity, not design. The Marauders typically used a full squadron – seven Corpse-Ships – to create the defensive plasma wave. But she had five, and had to modify the maneuver accordingly.
“First time the ETs see that flaming star appear, they’re going to flip out,” she muttered.
“Pentagrams have no mystical significance among most Starfarer cultures,” her spirit guide told her. That would be Atu, the giant three-eyed Pathfinder whose memories and thought patterns were irrevocably linked to her own.
“Sure, but a simple search will let them know that we humans thought it was used to summon demons and all other kinds of sorcerous crap.”
“Some human cultures, for a brief period. The pentagram has a multitude of meanings even on Earth, including…”
“Nobody cares. They’ll just know we drew a witchy sign in space, and a wall of fire showed up. Ergo, we are witches. Hell, we’ll probably get some trouble from the Bible and Cross brigade at home!”
Atu said nothing to that. Just as well. Lisbeth still hated the seemingly supernatural aspects of her new military career. That had only been compounded by several long conversations she’d had with Grinner Genovisi. The former navigator had made an interstellar transit aboard a fighter that just didn’t have the legs to do so. The things Grinner had seen during that impossible jump had shaken Lisbeth to the core.
There wasn’t much she could do about it at the moment, though. She might as well concentrate on her job.
The simulation’s reports came in, based on sensor readings from several light vessels monitoring the practice run at a prudent distance. The maneuver hadn’t been quite as successful as she’d expected. The plasma cloud hadn’t been quite as large as the plan called for, probably because the five-ship formation hadn’t been able to keep the trans-dimensional gate open as long as they’d expected. According to the final tally, about twenty to thirty percent of a hundred-thousand missile volley would have survived the Wall of Fire.
Lisbeth wanted to grumble, but decided to keep a positive outlook. Killing seventy percent of a missile swarm would allow the fleet’s conventional defenses to wipe out the remainder. The maneuver had performed its primary mission.
More practice runs would help improve the result, but there was a reason the Death Heads couldn’t stabilize the giant warp gate as efficiently as the Corpse-Ships’ original operators. The Kraxans had relied on the enslaved minds of Atu’s fellow Pathfinders to perform the maneuver. Lisbeth had set them free shortly after discovering the squadron in the ruins of a lost city in ass-end of the galaxy. Instead of five obedient alien ghosts to do the work, her squadron had to make do with their minds and the lessons of the one alien ghost who’d volunteered to stay behind.
“Your species may one day match mine,” Atu said. “Assuming you do not turn into monsters, are exterminated, or simply decide to follow a different path of development. You could achieve significant progress after no more than twenty, twenty-five generations of intensive breeding and rigorous gene-triggering via exposure to the right environmental stressors.”
“That sounds painful. And not exactly a short-term solution.”
“Patience is a cornerstone of Balance, Christopher Robin.”
“We don’t have time to be patient, Pooh.” For some reason, the Pathfinder had latched onto her childhood memories of Winnie the Pooh. She’d learned to deal with it after a while. “We’re sailing out in four to six weeks. Getting a new flag officer at the last second bought us a little more training time, but not much. And we’ll be joining in an all-ship fleet-ex, which is going to eat a good chunk of that time. The Death Heads may get maybe four or five more practice runs over the next two days before we have to return to Xanadu to prep for the exercise. Ask me for anything but time.”
“One makes use of the tools one has at hand, nothing more or less.”
“True. True enough that you didn’t have to bother saying it.”
They’d been having their mental conversation while the Death Head Squadron made a second attack run. The simulated sortie went off flawlessly. No problems there. All in all, it’d been worth the trouble to send the training flotilla to this uninhabited system three warp jumps away from Xanadu, where Third Fleet was preparing to go to war.
“And we’re done, people. RTB and AAR.”
Returning to base took no time at all. The squadron warped to their custom-built cradles, deep in the bowels of a supply freighter, the USNS Laramie, which had enough space to fit all of them while still carrying the beans, bullets and fabbers Third Fleet needed to operate in foreign space. The refit meant the ship could be reclassified as a commissioned vessel, but since the Corpse-Ships were only supposed to return to it after combat operations were over, or if too damaged to continue fighting, the powers that be had kept its non-combatant status. That hadn’t prevented the officers and crew of the Laramie to put on airs; as far as they were concerned, they were a carrier vessel, facts be damned.
It could be worse, of course. They could be scared instead of proud.
A lot of people were; there’d been a rash of transfer requests among the crew. Spacers were prone to superstition, and the idea that their ship was ferrying ancient vessels made with the bones of dead sophonts had proven to be too much to handle for many of them. Luckily, a dissenting faction considered the ships to be lucky charms instead; there had been almost as many requests to transfer to the Laramie. BuPers had wisely reassigned the faint of heart and brought in more enthusiastic replacements.
Lisbeth hoped that her squadron reputation as lucky charms lived up to expectation.
Starbase Malta, Xanadu System, 168 AFC
USN Fleet Admiral Sondra Givens conducted a final review of the forces she was about to lead into war.
Even after three months spent organizing and training her new command, a part of her resented being separated from Sixth Fleet. She’d spent years honing those ships and crews to a fine edge, led them to victory during a critical juncture, and followed it with the first offensive operations in the conflict. Sixth Fleet had broken the Vipers and knocked them out of the Tripartite Galactic Alliance. It’d fought seven fleet actions over a two-year period and sunk about ten times its tonnage in enemy warships and an equal displacement of civilian vessels and orbital facilities. Along the way, the men and women that comprised the minds and hearts of the fleet had become hardened veterans. Having to start over with a new and un-blooded formation was hard.
On the other hand, Sixth Fleet wasn’t likely to see combat for the remainder of the war. Sixth Sector was safe, its borders secure after the Vipers’ surrender. The last couple of years had been spent monitoring the Nasstah Union to ensure the aliens kept to the terms of the ceasefire, and a few skirmishes with pirates, most of which were thinly-veiled probes by allegedly ‘friendly’ polities. Those skirmishes had quickly taught everyone concerned that Sixth Fleet wasn’t to be trifled with. After that, things had gotten nearly as boring as peacetime duty.
Until the assassination attempt, that was.
The hit team had struck during a formal dinner at Birmingham-Three, a minor US possession whose local sophonts – commonly known as the Birmos – were under American suzerainty. The natives had been at a Bronze Age level of development at the time of First Contact, and for the most part were left alone, except for a few tribes that ruled the lands around the single spaceport on the planet.
Sondra had been invited by a Birmo chieftain to a dinner that turned out to be an elaborate setup. Halfway through the meal, her imps had detected poison in the local booze, just as knives and guns came into play. Unwanted memories flashed through her mind:
The goblet dropped from her hand as Chief Kimmel knocked her off the chair. She barely felt the rough fall – the poison was a nerve agent, and she was numb and half-paralyzed as her nano-med fought the chemical’s effects. She could barely breathe; drool and snot ran down her face as she convulsed on the ground. Her sight was not impaired, however: from her prone position she saw the master-at-arms fire his beamer over the dinner table before a thrown spear went THUNK into his unarmored chest and sent him toppling back. Blood splashed over Sondra’s face, blinding her, and she gasped for breath, fully expecting a blade or club to finish her off…
Only a combination of good luck – for the American delegation – and poor planning by the locals had saved her life. A professional assassin squad – Starfarer mercenaries – had been hiding nearby, armed with energy weapons, but the natives they’d bribed had ‘helpfully’ launched their own attack, thinking their reward would be greater if they did the killing themselves. The alerted Marine platoon watching outside had engaged the mercs in a running battle around the Birmo village even as Sondra’s bodyguards cut a swath through the local warriors inside the chief’s great hall. When the dust settled, the village was a burned-out ruin, its only survivors the handful of natives who’d run for the hills when the fighting started. Besides Chief Kimmel, five humans were killed. Sondra spent several days in sick bay; it’d been touch and go there for a while. They’d ended up replacing about thirty percent of her nervous system.
The attack hadn’t been an isolated incident, but part of a concerted campaign to strike down the leadership of the US Navy. In some ways, it had been a small-scale version of the Days of Infamy, aimed at a few dozen individuals. The final tally had been grim enough: over a thousand fatalities, including five admirals and a dozen other command officers. The worst attack had been at the Hexagon, right in the heart of New Washington: a bomb had gone off inside the building, killing almost three hundred people.
Sondra was convinced the Lampreys had been behind the attacks, although more recent evidence pointed at the Imperium. The only high note in the aftermath was the appointment of her old friend Nicholas Kerensky to Seventh Fleet. Her fellow flag officer had bounced back from a disastrous defeat and – in her opinion – an undeserved demotion. At least, she’d thought as much at the time. Recent events had shaken her certainties to the core. Kerensky’s mutiny still rankled.
She shook her head. Dwelling on things beyond her control was worse than useless, and she had plenty of things she could control. The final dispositions of the Third Fleet, for one.
The previous CINC-Three (Commander-In-Chief, Third Sector), Admiral Gabriel Verdant, had survived the decapitation strikes only to lose his command the old-fashioned way: by failing to deliver results. Givens knew Verdant; the man used to be a competent officer, but the years hadn’t been kind to him. Now that humans could live for centuries, they were discovering some could handle the passing of time better than others. Some people learned to adapt to change, overcoming the mental inertia that set in at around age twenty-two or so, while others became stuck. Verdant had turned out to be one of the latter. He’d grown up in a battleship-dominated Navy, and his sense of tactics began and ended with closing into range and trading broadsides with the enemy. His lack of flexibility hadn’t been much of an obstacle back when Sector Three had been a quiet backwater, isolated from other Starfarer polities by Xanadu System and its mysterious owners, who did not allow military forces to pass through it. When the US seized Xanadu, however, it opened numerous routes into enemy space. Verdant’s performance during several raids into Lamprey space had been subpar. He’d been convinced to retire with honors, and Sondra had stepped in.
Her mission was to invade the Lhan Arkh Congress and depopulate its core worlds. She’d led Sixth Fleet on a similar task, except that in the end the Nasstah – better known as the Vipers – had thrown in the towel before more than a tenth of its population had been exterminated. Sondra had found even decimation to be an unpleasant task. As much as she hated the Vipers, slaughtering their civilians had been akin to stepping on a swarm of cockroaches with her bare feet – loathsome, whether it was necessary or not. This time, her orders gave her no discretion: no quarter was to be offered.
The Lhan Arkh had been a constant da
nger to humanity ever since their clients – the Risshah, better known as the Snakes – had stumbled onto Earth and killed some four billion of its inhabitants. While the Lampreys hadn’t been directly responsible for the attempted genocide, their policies were equally bloodthirsty, and they’d eventually decided humanity had to be exterminated. They’d fought a brief and inconclusive conflict shortly after the US had wiped out the Snakes, and then waged a cold war of sorts, always working hard at undermining human interests whenever possible, and lending support to any enemy willing to strike directly at America and the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, the main Starfaring human nations.
When an enemy openly states its intention to not stop until you are gone, the only reasonable option is to respond in kind. She wasn’t happy about it – massacre had no appeal for her – but she’d follow her orders. Which meant concentrating on the practical aspects involved.
At the time of Xanadu’s conquest, Third Fleet had been far from impressive. Two antiquated Battlefield-class dreadnoughts – with less firepower than the new battleship classes being built on Earth’s shipyards – led a force comprised of four cruiser squadrons (totaling twenty-four ships), thirty-two frigates, and twenty destroyers. Twelve Marine assault ships carrying roughly two divisions of ground troops rounded up the total. None of the ships had been refitted for point defense – a necessity facing enemies firing Sun-Blotter missile swarms – mainly because there was only so much time and money available to do such refits, and a fleet in charge of a peaceful sector was doomed to suck hind tit, to be crude about it.
Things had changed rather dramatically after the seizure of Xanadu, however. The recently ‘liberated’ system had been a treasure trove of unimaginable proportions: if given enough time to exploit its resources, it would forever alter the correlation of forces between the US and the rest of the galaxy. Short-term, those resources – including enough fabricators to be the envy of the shipyards of Wolf 1061 – had been put to work improving Third Fleet.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 127
