“That would be unwise, Admiral,” Dhukai said.
“Perhaps. So would overindulging our friends. The targeted city has nine million inhabitants. That is enough and more than enough. We will deal with the other population centers through standard munitions. Is that understood?”
For a moment, the Prophet met his stare before looking down in a show of meekness. Dhukai might have amassed a great deal of power through his dealings with the Psychovores, but Kerensky embodied the full strength of the Black Fleet. In a contest of wills, the Warpling puppet would come in a distant second, and wouldn’t survive the experience: Kerensky would make sure of that. The only way one could rule a crew of mutineers was with an iron hand.
“As you wish, sir.”
The superdreadnought that served as Kerensky’s flagship hovered over the helpless world below, her warp shields easily shrugging off the volleys of energy fire coming from the last planetary bases. Dozens of ghosting fighters hammered them at point-blank range with their enhanced graviton cannon. The enemy facilities soon fell silent. The ‘Black Eagles’ had undergone a number of modifications during their time off at Sokolov: the repair ships Kerensky had stolen from Third Fleet had provided the resources, and the Foos had contributed the actual designs. The original designers had been a long-extinct species known as the Kraxans, a name Kerensky had heard in passing during a Top-Secret briefing, shortly before the mutiny. Whoever those ETs had been, their expertise in weaponry and warp travel systems had been unsurpassed. Kerensky had done their best to emulate them.
One of those weapons was of particular interest to Warplings. Kerensky would deploy it, but only on one city. Even he had limits, and understood that when you supped with the Devil, you used the longest spoon you had.
An hour later, all resistance in Bizzik-Two had come to an end. Two billion sophonts inhabited the planet, most of them members of the Kreck species, better known to humans as the Scarabs. Several million were dead already, collateral damage resulting from the destruction of the planetary defense bases. The rest would soon follow.
Hundreds of field-encasement thermal weapons began to descend on the planet’s cities, condemning their inhabitants to brutal, blazing end. The one exception was a coastal city that Kerensky had selected at random. He vectored two fighter squadrons towards it, with orders to deploy their Mind-Killer systems.
A part of him wished he could ask God to have mercy on his soul. On all their souls.
* * *
Lieutenant Gus Chandler ghosted over the target. A hungry host of Warplings were gathered around him like so many piranhas. He thought they were laughing: the mental sound came across like the tittering of a horde of sadistic children playing with a wounded bird. The monsters would be just as happy to dine on Gus and the rest of his squadron as they would on the Scarabs on the ground. He was still afraid of the Foos, but above all he’d learned to hate them with a passion he’d only reserved for the aliens who wanted humanity extinct.
Hate them or not, he was going to use them to get the job done, and learn to live with himself after it was over.
“Fire at will,” he ordered. The eleven pilots under his command acknowledged and released the Mind-Killers on the city.
The weapon system looked more like a sensor pod than anything lethal; the techies in the fleet had mounted it above the muzzle of the Black Eagle’s 20-inch grav cannon. Its effect wasn’t visible to the naked eye, or any sensors other than the most finely-tuned graviton systems, and then only as some miniature warp aperture. Its effects were immediately apparent, however.
Gus’ visual feel zoomed in on the city below. One road was clogged with wheeled transport and skittering six-legged creatures trying to flee on foot. They began to drop dead without any visible wounds. There weren’t many Scarabs in the open, though; the majority were huddled inside their homes or secure shelters. He didn’t have to see them to know they were dying as well. No shields or structures could protect them against the Mind-Killers.
Here or there, a Scarab would keep on running as its fellows died around it. Mind-Killers exposed the victims to the effects of warp space. Anybody with a warp rating high enough to survive FTL travel would be exposed to terrifying hallucinations and some potentially harmful side effects, but would be otherwise fine. Unfortunately for the Kreck, over nine tenths of them weren’t warp rated. A few thousand survivors – many of them driven insane by warp exposure – would find themselves in a city choked with the corpses of the less fortunate. Better than being on one of the cities being burned by standard bloomies, he figured, trying to be glib about what he was doing and failing. None of this was right.
Killing the Scarabs by the millions wasn’t the problem. That was part of the job, and Gus had no illusions about it. The problem was that the Mind-Killers allowed Warplings to eat their victims. And Gus and all the pilots involved in the operation had a front-row seat to the terrible feeding frenzy.
As they died, something left the Kreck and entered warp space. Gus saw them as ghostly points of light; if he concentrated on them he felt the dead aliens’ thoughts and emotions trapped inside. The Foos ripped those lights to shreds, and Gus knew they were taking the Krecks’ memories, their identities, everything they had been and done, and absorbing them. And as they did, they became stronger. They were like demons growing larger the more souls they devoured.
At first, Gus was sickened. The first few hundred, thousand feedings made him want to turn his weapons on the monsters he was helping. The feeling passed as the death toll mounted up, however. At some point, he stopped feeling disgust. Not too long after that, a part of him began to enjoy the spectacle. It was as if whatever pleasure the Foos gained from their feast was contagious. After a while, he felt a brief jolt of pleasure each time a light was extinguished. He’d felt that before, at New Texas, when he’d started feeding the Gimps he killed to the Foos. Here, it became a continuous high. Maybe that was what being a god felt like.
The rest of him was wracked with guilt and horror, but that part was getting weaker every time Gus let the Foos feed on his victims, and this was the biggest meal he’d ever served. Millions of ETs, instead of a few thousand. He was shaking in the cockpit by the time it was done. It took him a while to realize the shaking was hysterical laughter.
And that he wasn’t the only one laughing.
* * *
Transition.
Their mission accomplished, the Black Ships fled into warp space like thieves in the night, followed only by the wails of despair coming from the few survivors it left behind.
It wasn’t a kind thought, and the handful of people who picked it up from the admiral’s mind gave him curious looks, but Kerensky ignored them. It might be unkind, but it was also fair. There was little to be proud of. One of his instructors at New Annapolis had said that a properly planned and executed military operation was something more akin to murder than a straight fight, and he’d lived by that maxim, but this… this felt dirty, somehow.
He should find the whole thing even more distasteful than he did. In fact, his mild disgust worried him more than the deed itself, mainly because he should be utterly revolted, not somewhat concerned. Kerensky wasn’t the man he’d been before embarking on this journey, and he didn’t like what he had become. Or at least he thought he shouldn’t like it. It was all very confusing.
It doesn’t matter. We have saved humanity.
In effect, this attack had made it clear to the Imperium that a powerful hostile force was operating within its borders, one that could strike without warning and from unexpected directions. The enemy didn’t know – couldn’t know – the price Kerensky had to pay for those abilities. The Warplings that had built a ley line for his fleet had demanded the sacrifice of millions of aliens. He had agreed, after haggling down the total, an experience made doubly disturbing by the fact the Warpling in question had assumed the shape of his grandmother, who was alive and well back in the US.
“Nikolai, what do you care how ma
ny aliens we kill? They are not of your people. They are your enemies. It is a good thing, to kill your enemies, is it not?”
The voice had been perfect, the accent that became more pronounced when she got mad or excited even more so. The only difference was that this version of the woman who’d raised Kerensky seemed younger somehow. His grandmother had partaken of rejuvenation treatments as soon as they became relatively affordable, but they hadn’t quite turned back the clock; she’d always looked like somebody in her early fifties, beautiful in a stern, intimidating way. The monster masquerading as Yelizaveta Sokolov could pass as twenty, or even younger, and her suggestive poses and mannerisms had bothered him. He guessed that the entity had plucked memories of old photographs from his head, or at least he hoped that was the case. There were things the monster had said and done that made him suspect it had somehow seen into his grandmother’s past. If warp space existed outside spacetime, such things were possible.
“You were going to kill them, no? Then what does it matter?”
Except it did, somehow. He’d stuck to his guns and refused to turn an entire planet to his allies. The Warplings coveted the lives of sophonts, or perhaps something attached to those lives: data or some form of energy, perhaps in the form of the so-called tachyon waves that were scientists’ weak attempt to explain something beyond their knowledge. Regardless of why they desired those things, he’d understood that give in to them invited disaster. Psychovores coveted power, and if he gave them too much, they might no longer need him or his ships. At that point, humanity’s only value would be only as yet another meal to devour.
Beneath the practical considerations, there was something else, however. A part of him suspected that what happened to the aliens on that city had been worse than the fate of those caught in the unyielding force fields of his genocide weapons. The suffering of the latter was over; Kerensky feared that the Warplings’ victims hadn’t been so lucky.
Dead is dead. He didn’t believe in such things as immortal souls. He wouldn’t have hesitated to burn down that city like all the others on the planet. His attempts at reassuring himself didn’t work. He knew whatever had happened to those aliens had been worse than death.
Have we dammed ourselves?
If so, at least they’d gotten a good deal for their souls, he half-joked to himself. This attack would send the Imperium reeling. The Gimps would spend time and energy trying to find the warp connection the Black Ships had used to attack Bizzik. They would be wasting their time, since the ley line would collapse as soon as the Warplings stopped supporting its existence. The actual mechanism remained a mystery to Kerensky, and to the team of FTL engineers aboard the Odin. He’d put his techies to work trying to glean as much useful information as possible, but all they had been able to learn was that their benefactors could create temporary fractures in spacetime that worked like normal ley lines except for some important limitations. Distance was a factor. While ley lines could connect two points thousands of light years apart Warplings could only ‘tunnel’ for relatively short distances. The only world they had been able to reach from Sokolov had been Bizzik, a mere three hundred light years away in Einsteinian terms. That meant the Black Fleet couldn’t simply sail on to Primus System and besiege the capital. Not yet, at least. Not for a price Kerensky was willing to pay. He suspected his benefactors might have an alternative proposal. At some point, they would make him an offer he might not be able to refuse.
He didn’t have to wait long. It was impossible to tell time while in warp, but in what felt like a short time he found himself facing the entity wearing the face of his grandmother.
“You did well, Nikolai,” the fake babushka said, the pride in her voice making him feel better despite his knowing better than to trust a Psychovore.
“I did my duty.” He still believed that, despite having betrayed his oath.
“That is good. Much works remains to be done, by you and those who follow you. They should hear what I have to say, and perhaps contribute their opinions.”
A crowd emerged from the darkness, surrounding Kerensky and the Warpling. Everybody in the fleet was there, except for the warp navigators keeping the ships on course. This time, his bargaining would not happen in private. He was trapped. If what he did or said next did not meet with their approval… Well, they had mutinied before, hadn’t they?
There is no spoon long enough to sup with the devil.
The monster behind his grandmother’s face laughed.
Six
Starbase Malta, Xanadu System, 169 AFC
Happy New Year to None.
The halls of Malta – the tiny fraction of Malta that had pressure, life support and people to appreciate both – were alive with celebration, but Heather McClintock was deliberately avoiding the festivities. Watching the public channels, she thought she detected a patina of tension and forced merriment among the crowds commemorating the hundred and sixty-ninth year since First Contact. The ‘New’ New Year’s Eve had started as a day of remembrance, one very different from January 1st on pre-Contact’s calendars. The date marked the day almost five billion people had died. It was observed as an affirmation: humanity lived on. Over time, it had grown into a time to party and have a good time, but in a time of war the true meaning of the date made itself felt.
This would be the sixth year of the war, one of the longest since humanity’s rise to Starfarer status. A lot of people were wondering about their chances to see 170 AFC.
We will, she told herself, taking a brief break from work and fortifying herself with a fresh cup of coffee. Worst case, Malta will be around next year, and for years afterwards.
She’d helped accomplish that much, at least. Not even the massed fleets of every civilization in known space could take Xanadu System, not unless those polities devoted decades of work and enormous expenses to bury its defenders under sheer weight of numbers. She only wished she could say the same for the rest of American space. They had won some time, but if the trends she’d been following didn’t change significantly, all the hard-won victories had merely delayed the inevitable.
Heather placed the steaming cup on her desk and went back to work.
The attack on Bizzik System hadn’t made the news yet; Heather had only learned of it from neutral ships traveling through Xanadu some two weeks after the battle. The reports would be made public sometime after New Year. The government had no choice in the matter: trying to keep Kerensky’s deeds a secret would be impossible, not to mention counterproductive. Most people would view the blow against the Imperium as nothing but excellent news; alien mass media had referred to humans as ‘Warp Demons’ for so long that everyone automatically filtered out the slur. Opinion polls showed that the mutineers still commanded a sixty percent approval rating, higher than both the President and the military. The fact that the renegades had somehow discovered yet another unknown ley line would be dismissed as a combination of luck and good American know-how.
Except the whole thing smacks of good Marauder know-how.
The Imperium was keeping the details of the Bizzik incident under wraps, but the official reports and unofficial gossip that had made it through the galactic news network were troublesome enough. The now-depopulated system was many transits inside Imperium territory. The attack was only possible if some unknown warp technology was in play. Just the kind of thing the Demons from the Endless Void would pull: humans, in other words.
Starfarer polities were falling into two camps: those who were so scared of humans that they favored accommodation for at least the short term, and the ones who were so scared of humans that they wanted to join up the effort to stamp them out once and for all. The O-Vehel Commonwealth had joined the first group; their peace initiatives were beginning to sound almost like pleas for mercy. There was no pro-human camp anywhere. Even the Puppies could no longer be considered friends but rather terrified acquaintances.
Let them hate, so long as they fear. Caligula had said that. Not exactly Heather’s
idea of a role model.
She sighed and went back to her latest intelligence briefing. This one was from a Lutarri (a.k.a. Lizard) tramp freighter who’d happily uploaded all its logs, newsfeed archives, and every bit of data stored in its crewmembers’ implants, all for a mere ten percent discount on Xanadu’s hefty transit fees. Sorting through the mostly useless files took some work even with her implants’ expert systems doing most of the heavy lifting. A few useful tidbits showed up: the Lutarri Assembly had made a resolution not to enter into any binding military pacts with other galactic powers. Although the resolution was generic, it was obviously aimed at the Imperium. The Lizards had joined the ‘too scared to attack’ camp.
The relief she felt at the news made her realize that Caligula might have had a point after all.
On the other hand, if Kerensky’s renegades were doing what she suspected, the consequences would be beyond the worst nightmares of a mad Roman emperor. Opinion polls notwithstanding, the renegades had to be stopped. It wouldn’t happen until sometime in 169 AFC, however; the only force with a chance to stopping the Black Ships was spending New Year’s Eve in Lamprey space, fighting on an unimportant front instead of focusing on the greater danger.
She wished Third Fleet luck and a speedy return.
Lhan Arkh Fifth Congressional District, AFC 168
Third Fleet emerged from warp space ready to fight.
It normally took several minutes to shake off the effects of a trip of that length; the new drugs reduced warp disorientation by over ninety percent. Sondra Givens had reluctantly allowed their use; she still had misgivings about them, but winning this fight and heading home would require every trick in the book, old and new.
The American force had arrived six light hours away from the inhabited worlds in the system. By the time their emergence was detected the battle would be well underway, if not already over. Sondra waited for the last hallucinations to vanish from her mind. She had already forgotten many of them, although she knew her grandson Omar had been there, taunting her. It took a little longer to shake off a feeling of impending doom. By the time she did, everybody in the Combat Information Center was hard at work.
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