“And?”
“A direct hit will wash over the warp shields of any ship smaller than a battleship. Damage will depend on force field strength, but will be very likely to be severe on cruiser-class vessels, and critical on lighter classes. On an unshielded target, it’s an all-but-certain kill or disabling shot for all medium or lighter classes. Except for the ablative foam armor, which will be stripped away but keep the hull relatively undamaged. For the first plasma strike, that is.”
“In other words, the first hit is free, but don’t get hit twice.”
“Pretty much, Admiral.”
“We’ll have to make sure they don’t get more than one shot, then.”
“The energy stream is also slower than conventional beam weapons. Evasive maneuvers will greatly reduce those weapons’ accuracy.”
“And reduce our own, although to a lesser degree,” she said. “Very well. We will proceed as planned, except we will start firing main guns at three light-seconds. Only her dreadnoughts had the range to score telling hits that far, but she might as well start getting her licks in early, and that extra range would render the warped plasma beam weapons even less effective. They needed to destroy those cloud-ships as quickly as possible.
There were grim nods all along the CIC. Sondra’s orders focused most of Third Fleet’s firepower on the cloud-ships. That would leave the Lampreys able to volley missiles and energy weapons with relative impunity – or so they would think. The Death Heads would attack the Lampreys, staying as far away from the cloud-ships as possible. And the gunboats wouldn’t be alone.
The Warp Marines would launch a mass boarding action against the Lhan Arkh vessels as well.
* * *
“Oh, man,” Grampa Gorski said in a small voice as Russell’s fireteam conducted a final gear check.
“Relax, Grampa,” Gonzo told him. “We’ve got alien super-tech on our side. Next best thing to having Jesus as our wingman.”
Russell resisted the impulse to tell Gonzo to cool it on the blasphemous talk. That was the sort of thing he’d done back when Nacle was part of the crew; the Mormon kid had been good people but didn’t like hearing that sort of stuff. Neither Grampa nor Russell himself cared, though. Funny how things reminded you of someone’s absence. No telling who’d be the next one to be missed, or if it’d be Russell who would be fondly remembered by any survivors.
He shrugged. Remembered, maybe, but few people would think fondly of him. Gonzo, sure, but he didn’t think Gorski cared that much. Russell wasn’t the sort of guy who made best friends with people. The thought didn’t bother him too much. Very few things did.
“It’s all good,” he said. The fireteam was all suited up, all the suit seals were good, power packs were at full, and the extra gear they were carrying was all stowed safely and well-balanced on their backs. You made warp drops with everything you needed; you didn’t get many resupply runs during boarding actions.
“We’re gonna fuck some shit up,” Gonzo said, trying to sound gung-ho and almost pulling it off.
“Craziest shit in the universe,” Grampa commented, not even trying. “Two ships traveling at a good fraction of the speed of light, and we’re gonna be dropped from one to the other. Crazy.”
“You want safe duty, you’re in the wrong outfit, dabrah. Shoulda joined the Guard or the Army.”
“Save the shit talk for the enemy,” Russell told Gonzo. No sense antagonizing the old timer, who was griping about it but wasn’t backing out, which was all you could ask of anyone. Gorski was also weighed down by close to five hundred pounds of gear; the flame thrower Russell was bringing to the party went through power packs in a hurry; Grampa was toting two charging units on top of dozens of spare packs. He could barely clear the doors connecting the armory to the catapult compartment, which were taller and wider than anything else in the assault ship for exactly that purpose.
“We’re dropping in five,” Sergeant Kruger from Charlie-One announced. Russell’s fireteam and two short squads from First Platoon were waiting for their turn on the catapult. Twenty-five leathernecks at a time; word was they’d be dropping three battalion equivalents on eight Echo Tango ships. Biggest ship-to-ship drop since long before Russell joined the Corps. Making history was nice and all, but he’d been doing a little too much of it lately. Keep that up and sooner or later he was going to be history.
“Step onto the platform,” a bored-sounding bubblehead petty officer said.
“I’ll step onto your mother, cabron,” Gonzo muttered under his breath but he and the rest of the Marines did as they were told.
The USS Mattis shuddered. Something had winged their ride.
“Oh, man,” Grampa said.
“Easy, Gorski. We’re about to get off this boat, aren’t we?”
“Be nice if it was still around when we get back.”
“Worst case, we’ll take over the Lampreys’ ride. Think of the salvage bonus.”
Grampa just tilted his head, but the message came through: you had to be alive to spend a salvage bonus. Russell just shrugged again.
“Drop in ten, nine, eight…”
Russell took a deep breath, and let it go slowly as the countdown completed.
“One.”
Transition.
The ride was fairly smooth for a two light-second drop; the new tech Russell and the other Marines had helped liberate at Redoubt-Five was working like charm. He only saw one warp ghost the whole trip, the bastard he’d killed back when he was a snot-nosed teenager; the dead kid was grinning and drawing his finger across his throat, which opened up and started spilling blood just the way it had when Russell had done it for real. It didn’t bother him; it hadn’t bothered him when it’d happened, either, not much.
Emergence.
The warp aperture had torn a chunk from one bulkhead, but otherwise the place didn’t look all that different than the interior of the Mattis, except the doors were a little wider than normal. Russell knew that the Lampreys’ lights came in a reddish and fainter wavelength than what humans liked, but his helmet filtered them and made everything look fine, just as his sealed suit made sure he didn’t keel over dead after breathing the toxic brew that passed for atmo among the Ass-Faces.
“Right on target,” Sergeant Kruger said. “Move it, people!”
Four grunts from First went through the door first. Enemy alarms only began to sound after they made it all the way into the passageway; the Lampreys hadn’t been expecting that move. Always nice to drop in unexpectedly on people you intended to kill.
The point man opened fire a moment later: a weapon mount at one end of the corridor sputtered smoke and died before it could lock on a target. The three-round burst was followed by a volley from two other Marines, using squash-head grenades to burst open the door ahead of them. After that it was Russell and Gonzo’s turn.
Gonzo was on the Alsie this time; he filled the compartment with frag grenades. Russell gave it one pump with his plasma-thrower. Nobody wearing less than fully-shielded battle armor could survive that double dose of hell. There was a secondary explosion, adding insult to injury. That was the only sound he heard over the roar of the flames; any Lampreys in there didn’t even have a chance to scream.
A couple Marines went in as soon as the plasma died down.
“Clear.”
Russell and Gonzo followed them after Grampa replaced Russell’s power pack and put the partially-spent one on the charger on his back, cursing when he nearly overbalanced under the full load. The compartment’s walls looked partially melted, although most of that was stowed equipment, secondary piping and whatever was left of its occupants; the plasma charges were carefully designed not to melt bulkhead-grade materials except under continuous, focused streams.
“That one,” Sergeant Kruger ordered, pointing at one of two other doors leading out. Gonzo opened it with a three-round burst. Russell saw a Lamprey trying to run for it at the end of the suddenly-unmasked passageway, but the grunts on overwatch stitched
the tango before it got very far. The ET hadn’t been wearing even a light force-field; the plasma-tipped bullets tore him to bits.
“Move it, ladies,” the squad leader said. “Things to do and tangos to kill.”
They moved.
Seven
“You’re cleared for launch, Death Heads.” The space traffic controller sounded a little bit frantic.
Commander Deborah ‘Grinner’ Genovisi couldn’t blame him. Everybody who wasn’t too busy with their job was aware that a flight of sixty-five thousand missiles was headed towards Third Fleet. It was up to the now-reduced gunboat squadron to make that Sun-Blotter Swarm go away, and Deborah wasn’t sure they were up to the job.
Transition.
Null-space, as viewed through the cockpit of a Corpse-Ship, was a very different place than the one Deborah had grown used to. Here, it appeared as an ever-shifting liquid medium in a thousand different hues. The bright panorama was no less alien or dangerous, of course, and out in the ‘distance’ she could see more Warplings were gathering. Most of them were busy feeding on the willing sacrifices the cloud-ship people were sending their way, but a growing number was beginning to gravitate towards the gunboat squadron.
“Let them have it,” Colonel Zhang ordered. Deborah and her squad mates shot the closest entities, hurting them badly enough to make them flee. The rest withdrew as well but didn’t run very far. She could feel them growing bolder; they were also getting stronger after devouring the souls the enemy had provided for them. They weren’t going to stay away. She was certain of that.
“They’re going to jump us on the way back, Lamia,” Deborah told the squadron leader. Zhang probably knew that already; the woman’s connection to null-space was stronger than Deborah’s. But it was better to be safe than assume her superior knew about the danger already.
“Something else to worry about,” the Marine pilot said. “We’ll deal with them later. Everyone ready?”
‘Aye, aye.”
“Let’s do this.”
Deborah and Kong did their part, ghosting about one light-second ahead of the approaching missile swarm and creating a complex warp conduit between their planned emergence point and the local star. Two cloud-ships were in range, and they detected the growing warp aperture with impossible speed; they must have some sort of tachyon-based sensor system. Their plasma streams reached for Kong’s gunboat, but their target was in warp space. Some plasma leaked through, but not enough to inflict damage. If more cloud-ships had followed suit, it would have gone worse for them, but almost half of them had been destroyed already, and the rest were busily trading broadsides with the rest of the American force. The Lamprey capital ships that could have targeted the gunboats had problems of their own, in the form of thousands of Marines who had teleported aboard and were busily killing people and breaking things: in short, doing what Marines did best.
Russell was out there. She could faintly feel his presence as he let the merciless warrior inside him have free rein.
May God have mercy on any aliens he encounters, for he’ll have none, she thought.
Zhang and Jenkins emerged from warp, completing the circuit. A four-sided star of plasma one light-second tall and wide appeared in the path of the missile swarm. The squadron retreated into warp an instant later.
“Dammit!” Zhang said. “We couldn’t hold the gate long enough. That plasma cloud isn’t going to last even half as long as planned.”
“Better than nothing,” Kong said.
They’d run through enough simulations and dry runs to know the short-lived flame shield would only destroy twenty, maybe thirty percent of the enemy missiles. Third Fleet should be able to eliminate the rest of the swarm, but it was a subpar result. Even worse, the Lampreys now knew about it, which meant that sooner or later so would the Imperium and any new members of the Grand Galactic Alliance.
Before anybody could reply to Kong’s optimistic comment, however, the squadron realized they had problems of their own.
The Warplings had made their move.
It was worse than Deborah had imagined. There were a lot more entities than before, and they advanced in a solid phalanx. Even in a place where time didn’t work normally, such a gathering seemed to have happened at a rapid pace. She wondered if the aliens who rode the cloud-ships had their own means to communicate with the dwellers of null-space.
“Just shoot the bastards!” Zhang shouted.
They did. Most of the Warplings fell back after being hit, but a few of the larger ones pressed on. Where the lesser creatures assumed shapes from the pilots’ memories, the larger ones were masses of darkness with flailing pseudopods that waved threateningly as they advanced. Those leaders or archdemons were interfering with their emergence, as well. The squadron wouldn’t be able to run away from this fight. Deborah felt Kong and Jenkins begin to grow apprehensive, if not afraid.
“I got this,” the squadron commander said.
Deborah had grown used to Atu after seeing it during virtual meetings or while in transit. She’d never like this, though. The gigantic Pathfinder spirit appeared in front of the squadron and smote the advancing Warplings. Beams of white light erupted from all three of the alien’s eyes, and where the Corpse-Ships cannon had failed to make a lasting impression on the archdemons, the alien’s gaze blasted holes on the shadowy entities and set them ablaze. One of them disappeared into nothingness; the rest drew back.
Deborah had seen something like that once before. The being she knew as Michael – a name she hadn’t shared with anybody, not even Lisbeth – had glowed with the same white light. Now she understood the true nature of the Pathfinder spirit, or thought she did. Lisbeth liked to call the alien her ‘invisible friend.’ Guardian Angel was a far more accurate term.
Maybe it can teach us how to kill the demons.
Emergence.
She lifted her helmet and wiped sweat off her forehead. That had been a little too close for comfort. Even the familiar sights and smells of the Laramie – shouting spacers, the stench of cutting lasers busily removing damaged sections from Gunboat-Four, the bright lights of the converted cargo hold – felt hazy and dreamlike, as if all of it was an illusion and she was still trapped in what her squadron leader called the Starless Path.
But worse than that was the growing fear that the Path was now a battleground between the forces of Light and Darkness, and that Darkness appeared to be winning.
* * *
“All vampires have been destroyed, ma’am.”
Sondra Givens didn’t let her relief show; instead, she merely nodded as if hearing some routine news.
“Not bad. Not bad at all,” she said. Everyone in the CIC beamed with pride.
The Fire Shield hadn’t worked as well as expected – that it’d worked at all with one gunboat short was miracle enough – but the Sun-Blotter hadn’t been very big to start with, and the wall of plasma had destroyed enough vampires to make the job of Third Fleet’s defenses manageable, if not easy. The large-capacity missile batteries on her captured Lamprey ships hadn’t hurt one bit, either, since she’d filled their magazines with counter-ballistic missiles, advanced models using captured Tah-Leen technology that could kill over a dozen targets apiece. Not a single enemy missile had made it through, and now most of the enemy missile platforms were under attack by Marine boarding parties. All the Lamprey dreadnoughts had ceased fire and were drifting out of formation, ripped apart from the inside by the Devil Dogs.
The rest of the battle wasn’t going quite as well, unfortunately.
Twenty-three cloud-ships were gone or dead in space. The fire from the fourteen vessels that had lived long enough to engage Third Fleet had been more than bad enough, however.
Two luckless destroyers were burning wrecks; not even their ablative armor had spared them when a wave-front of plasma had washed over its shields and consumed them. The battlecruiser Anaheim was beating a limping retreat at one-quarter flank speed, the best its surviving engines could make; two plas
ma blasts had killed one fifth of her crew and silenced half her guns. And even the Thermopylae had lost twenty spacers after three hits in a row managed to burn through its defenses. The dreadnought’s ablative armor was gone, and one of the flagship’s irreplaceable Tah-Leen gun batteries had been melted into slag. The remaining ones were still very much on the game, however.
The admiral nodded in grim satisfaction when a volley from the Therm tore through another cloud-ship’s defensive drone swarm and the hull beneath. As it turned out, the unknown vessels weren’t much tougher than battlecruisers under their nebulous protection. The flagship claimed another victim even as the former Lamprey dreadnought – renamed the USS Merrimack – blew apart two more. That still left twelve, however. Ten of them vomited forth new torrents of plasma, all aimed at the Thermopylae.
Sondra was thrown against the straps holding her to the command seat as the flagship’s evasive maneuvers generated enough g-forces to swamp the inertial dampeners. Then the ship staggered under a direct hit, shaking her even more brutally. The lights on the CIC dimmed noticeably.
A brief glance at the status readouts told her the extent of the bad news. One third of the flagship’s warp generators were off-line, one of its primary power plants had been shutdown to avoid a catastrophic failure, and nearly a hundred spacers were dead, with about three times that number wounded. Life support was down for two entire decks of the dreadnought.
She forced herself to set that aside; the Thermopylae’s captain would deal with the ship. Her job was to run the battle.
“New orders for General McWhirter,” she said. “Divert all available Marine boarding parties to the following targets.” A list of new targets followed: six of the cloud-ships. Sondra had forgone using the Marines against targets whose ship layouts and capabilities were utterly unknown, but she was out of options. The gunboats were too vulnerable to those plasma torrents even while ghosting, and her fleet was losing the broadside exchange.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 135
