The USS Thermopylae and El Alamo had been outfitted with a couple of three-gun batteries, mounting ultra-heavy graviton cannon taken from Malta’s defenses; those weapons alone gave the dreadnoughts more firepower than the Pantheon-class super-dreds that until very recently had been the pride of the Navy. Their force fields had been improved nearly twofold, and layers of ablative applique armor – a technology beyond current Starfarers’ state of the art – doubled its resistance to attack, at least for as long as those layers of metallic foam coating lasted. Said foam had been applied to all the ships in Third Fleet, giving them an unusual – one might say furry – appearance, but Sondra didn’t care. Her furry ships were tougher than anything else in the galaxy, and that was all that mattered.
The fleet’s lighter space combatants hadn’t gotten similar weapon upgrades, since even the dreadnoughts had barely enough on-board power to shoot those massive cannon, but their point defenses had been improved and were now equal or superior to those of any American ship of their class, and their missile magazines had been filled with improved munitions that she couldn’t wait to spring on the enemy. Six of the assault ships had also gotten upgrades, including some unusual gadgets recently discovered on a remote system. Sondra was still figuring out what to do with them, but it appeared large-scale boarding actions had become feasible for the first time in sixty years.
And then there was the Death Head Squadron.
The Navy had hastily renamed the so-called Corpse-Ships (not exactly the kind of name that generated good PR). The alien retreads were entered into the annals of the fleet as Totenkopf-class gunboats. Despite a new and colorful paint job, they still looked like the partial skeleton of a gigantic alien grafted onto a sinister-looking hull, simply because that was exactly what they were. The creepy little ships were nothing much to look at, but the after-action reports of the Battle of Xanadu made it clear that each of those gunboats had more firepower than even her up-gunned dreadnoughts. When you added their throw weight to the rest of Third Fleet, you got a fairly impressive total. It almost made up for not having any carrier vessels.
Almost. Even though the gunboats were far deadlier than War Eagle fighters, five ships could only sink a relatively small amount of enemy tonnage at a time; Sondra had grown used to two and three hundred fighter sorties. Tough and lethal as they were, each Death Head couldn’t destroy more targets than a dozen fighters in the same amount of time. That meant the rest of Third Fleet would have to endure a longer pounding by the enemy’s guns and missiles, which meant more casualties. And her bench had very little depth: if she lost one of her precious dreadnoughts, there went about a fourth of her conventional firepower. Lose both, and Third Fleet was little better than a frigate navy. The Totenkopfs could pull some nifty tricks, but she needed more ships.
The Navy, in its infinite wisdom, had agreed. The cupboard was bare, however. The situation had been made worse by a temporary halt in the fighter training program: Top Gun had been shut down until the techies figured out why warp pilots were losing their minds and developing supernatural powers. After Kerensky’s mutiny, Sondra couldn’t blame them. No carriers were available, and neither were any standard fighting vessels, either.
What she was getting instead was a bunch of converted Lamprey ships.
The Lhan Arkh Middle Quadrant Armada had tried to seize Xanadu System shortly after an American diplomatic mission performed the boldest conquest this side of Pizarro’s expedition and took it over. Much of the Armada was destroyed in the ensuing fight, mostly by a single Corpse-Ship, although a US destroyer squadron had died gallantly while pitching in. The remainder, over fifty Lamprey vessels in total, had reached Starbase Malta and been neutralized by an alien weapon that killed their crews without damaging the ships. In their spare time, the work crews of Malta had begun the long process of converting those captured hulls into something the US could take into combat. Those ships would supplement Third Fleet.
There hadn’t been enough time or personnel to refit all or even most of them, of course, but the ships they had refurbished were hers for the taking, as soon as their crews arrived. They included a slightly-used and abused People’s Choice-class dreadnought, a Workers’ Might missile battleship, and four Grievance Committee-class battlecruisers, all but the dreadnought in near-mint condition. The Lhan Arkh turned out some very nice warships: they were all larger and better armed and armored than the US Navy’s class equivalents. Repairing the damage on the dreadnought – it’d been perforated several times during the fleet action – had been the biggest project, followed by life support conversion. Lampreys were Class One creatures, whose preferred atmosphere was toxic to humans; changing that had taken time.
In addition to those modifications, the budding shipbuilders of Xanadu had added warp shields on all the prize ships; they lacked the coverage of American warships – in no small part because of the larger size of the alien vessels – but they were a damn sight better than no shields at all. They’d even laid on a coat of ablative armor on them, giving them the same fuzzy look that the rest of Third Fleet had. There hadn’t been time for weapon upgrades, but they had filled the huge missile magazines of the battleship with one and a half million guided munitions of all kinds. The dreadnought held half a million missiles as well. The converted Lamprey vessels couldn’t unleash a Sun-Blotter swarm on their own, but it would come closer than anything else flying the Stars and Stripes.
Those six alien ships required twenty-nine thousand people to operate all their systems. She’d found six thousand volunteers within Third Fleet, and filled those slots and the rest of her manpower needs with a mix of reactivated veterans and fresh-faced spacers who’d just finished their second year of Obligatory service. Getting a decent mixture of experienced personnel and newbies had taken a lot of staff work, but after months of preparation they had managed, more or less. Sondra still found herself going over crew manifests and wondering which of those ships would fail to perform because the people manning critical systems had no idea what they were doing, especially when dealing with alien designs nobody had trained on. Cybernetic implants helped immensely – all Starfarers used near-identical software and hardware – but the crews of the new ships would have to learn the kinks of their new postings the hard way. They’d been training for a whole month: the last batch of personnel had arrived just that long ago. It wasn’t enough, but they couldn’t wait much longer.
In the short term, time was against America’s side. If the Galactic Alliance convinced other polities to join in, the US would be overwhelmed before it could produce enough new toys to alter the balance of power. If the Lampreys were eradicated, on the other hand, that would give everyone pause. At least, that was the reasoning of the War Department, the President, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They’d given Sondra her marching orders, and even a Sector Commander in Chief couldn’t question her final directives.
Her fleet, and some hundred and twenty thousand men and women under her command, would soon be underway.
Two
Ship clearing missions sucked ass.
It didn’t matter what kind of alien you dealt with: big or tall, two legs or six, they all built their ships as small as possible, and that meant lots of narrow passageways, tight corners and cramped compartments. Unless you planned on blowing up the tangos’ ride while you were inside it, you couldn’t spray gravitons and plasma any which way. That meant Corporal Russell ‘Russet’ Edison couldn’t carry a Widowmaker portable energy cannon. Nope, when he went ship-clearing, he got either an Alsie or a flamethrower.
Granted, they’d been issued some fancy new ammo which did all kinds of interesting stuff, but it still sucked ass.
“Door,” PFC ‘Grampa’ Gorski called out as he rounded a corner. The rest of the two fireteams – Russell’s, plus four riflemen from First Platoon – spread out to cover the passageway. Lance Corporal ‘Gonzo’ Gonzaga took a position behind Grampa, watching their six while his fellow Marines dealt with the door.
Grampa fired a burst of 4mm into the hole, to discourage any ETs still standing from doing anything while Russell selected a new ammo type for the Alsie. The Automatic Launch System had three twenty-round magazines, giving him a variety of choices. The damn thing weighted thirty pounds when fully loaded, but it was worth its weight in gold as far as he was concerned.
“Fire in the hole!” Russell shouted before popping a trio of 15mm grenades through the hole the breaching charges had made. Everybody turned away before they went off.
A plasma grenade had a lethal radius of five meters for unshielded targets. Any armored targets would probably survive the triple explosion, but the bright flashes would overload their sensors and keep them distracted, not to mention draining their force fields.
The grunts from First led the way into the compartment, with Russell close behind. There were no live tangos inside. Two enemy spacers with no armor or force fields had been inside, and the grenades had done them in. Lampreys looked just as ugly cooked well-done as they did in life. Russell’s helmet filters kept the smell of burned alien off his nostrils. That was good; he’d smelled roasted Lamprey before, and it’d been worse than broiled skunk, not to mention toxic enough to make a human keel over.
The rest of the compartment was a mess, but Russell spotted a wall-mounted commo terminal that appeared to have survived the two sets of explosions. He pointed it at the Lance Coolie in charge of the grunts from First. LC Hoover nodded and went to work. For this mission, they’d brought along data spikes, universal commo connectors filled with all kinds of nasty computer viruses designed to mess with a ship’s systems. Hoover jammed the spike into an access port and let the nanites and software do the rest.
A green light flashed thirty seconds later, and Russell relaxed a bit. They’d achieved their objective.
“Simulation over.”
“That was easy,” Gonzo commented as they walked down the corridor. They had to keep their helmets on; the local atmosphere was still set to Lamprey standards, guaranteed to strip the lining of your lungs in a minute or so.
“You know, when I joined the Corps, I was told that boarding actions just didn’t happen anymore.”
“New gear, new missions. It’s called progress, Gramps,” Gonzo told him.
“I always thought the whole idea of warping into a ship with light weapons was insane. Even if that’s why they changed the name of the Corps.”
“All before my time,” Gonzo said.
They cycled through the airlock and made it to the staging area.
“Two more days,” Gonzo said as they began to stow their gear. “Two more days and we’re free.”
“Yeah, if by free you mean three days of liberty, plus up to another two days, as long as we take it off our accrued leave,” Russell said. “Not exactly a vacation.”
“Better than nothing, brah. We’ll have fun.”
“Sure,” he told Gonzo, but something in his voice gave him away. The little guy had known Russell too long, which was why playing cards with him was a stone-cold bitch.
“So it’s going to be like that,” Gonzo said, but left it at that.
“Like what?” Grampa asked.
“Nothing.”
Gorski was okay, but he still wasn’t one of them, even after going through hell and high water. Russell trusted the guy with his life, but trusting him with stuff that violated the UCMJ was a whole other kettle of fish.
“Sure, whatever,” Grampa said. He knew what the score was, if not the details, and he was fine with being left out of any shady stuff. Had to give it to Grampa, he didn’t bitch about it, either.
A few hours later, at a recently-opened establishment that went by the comforting name of The Burning Shuttle, Russell and Gonzo settled down for a talk. His buddy had been dying to say something, but it was best to wait until they were off-duty and their imp recorders were offline. All the way offline; many idiots who thought their implants stopped recording everything they saw, did or said when they commanded them to stop had found out the truth the hard way. It took some work and specialized know-how to make sure Big Brother and Uncle Sam weren’t looking over your shoulder.
They looked around to make sure they were the only Marines in attendance. The Burning Shuttle didn’t cater to the uniformed services; the dive bar catered to civilians, who were flocking to Malta by the cartload now that the giant starbase was open for business. Thousands of new jobs became available every day, and a lot of people showed up with nothing but their life savings and hopes of finding work, or motivated by the belief that the impregnable system might provide a safe haven even if the war was lost. Xanadu was supposed to be impregnable; it might become the last refuge for humanity.
Stupid fucks, Russell thought as he looked the current patrons over. No place was safe. He’d helped take this base away from the previous owners, which meant it could change hands again. Not that the crowd here looked like the hopeful bunch. Mostly men and a few rough-looking women. Most of them were civvie spacers or building contractors, from the social media pages that popped around each face as he looked at them. He and Gonzo had set theirs to ‘private.’ Nobody here was likely to mess with a couple Marines, but it was best if nobody knew who they were.
“You’re still with that chick,” Gonzo said after they got their drinks. He sounded as he’d caught Russell having carnal congress with some alien barnyard animal.
“Sort of.”
“Of all the women in this fucked up galaxy, you had to fall for an officer.”
“It ain’t like that.”
“A warp fighter pilot.”
“Shit happens.”
“An actual witch.”
Russell shrugged. Neither Marine was given to heart to heart talks; they weren’t teenage girls.
“You’ve lost your fucking mind.”
“Probably.”
“All right. Good luck.”
“That’s it?”
“Pretty much. Watch your six. Fraternization will cost you, brah, so don’t get caught. It’ll cost her more, so if you give a shit about her, you gotta worry about that, too.”
“I know.” They were both fairly good barracks lawyers; they knew the rules, if only so they could get away with breaking them. They knew that not being in the same chain of command wouldn’t mean shit if Russell and Deborah got caught. Officers and enlisted didn’t mix, not unless their relationship predated one’s commission date, and even then they only had a year to marry or end it.
Not for the first time, Russell wondered what the hell he was doing. Deborah wasn’t just everything Gonzo said, she was also part of a very elite, experimental unit, the kind of posting that got extra-special scrutiny by the top brass, which meant lots of eyes on her. Stealing a night together every blue moon took more work than some of the hairiest scores he and Gonzo had pulled over the years. It helped that Deborah was a witch, the kind that could see the future, more or less. If Russell ever convinced her to use her powers for good, as in the good of their bank accounts, he’d marry her for sure.
“When it finally hits you, it hits hard,” Gonzo said with the confident wisdom of someone who’d married twice, divorced twice, and was one drunken blackout away from Round Three.
“Sure, whatever.”
Russell wasn’t sure he was in love. Far as he could tell, th
at sort of shit was a lie you told yourself until the truth finally hit you in the face. But when he found out Deborah had been stationed at Xanadu, he couldn’t stay away from. And she’d felt the same way, to be fair about it. If she’d told him to get lost, he would have. At least, he thought so. But she hadn’t.
Thinking about their last time together, the way they’d gone at each other… It was like a fever dream. Like getting high on some exotic ET drug while going through a VR sex fantasy, except too real to dismiss.
“Just watch your six,” Gonzo said again.
He didn’t know if he could.
* * *
That can’t be right.
If she’d been perusing an ordinary data file, Heather McClintock would have simply reread it just to make sure she hadn’t misunderstood. You had to do that often as an intelligence officer: something as simple as a translation error could lead to all kinds of trouble, and in her chosen profession even small mistakes could cost lives.
Problem was, she wasn’t reading a document, or even reviewing a multisensory virtual recording. The contents of the jet-black sinuously-curved box on her desk were living memories, and accessing them meant experiencing them fully. She felt as if she had lived through those events, in other words, and if her friend Lisbeth’s theorizing was right, she might have actually traveled back in time on some level to live through them.
Her eyes were watering and she felt light-headed.
I think I’ll skip a second look for now.
The box was a Kraxan device, one of the many souvenirs from their expedition to the Redoubt, the last stronghold of the Marauders of Kraxan. Genocidal murderers with a penchant for sophont sacrifice, the Kraxans had come to dominate much of the galaxy, not because of their savagery – hardly an uncommon quality among Starfarers – but their affinity to warp space. The Marauders had conquered half the known galaxy before the other half joined forces against them, and the ensuing war of extermination had led to a dark age that still affected known space, two hundred millennia later. The parallels with humanity were unsettling.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 128
