“Like someone’s breathing and heartbeat,” Grinner Genovisi said. “It looks like whoever is doing it is strong enough to kill humans.”
“I feel it now,” Kong said. “Like the song of a siren. It might not kill you, but it’ll put you in a daze, and then the Jellies can slit your throat. Not good.”
“We’ve got to put a stop to it.”
Marine boarding parties had hit six enemy ships. The ‘Jellies’ – Lisbeth picked the nickname/slur from the leathernecks’ minds – hadn’t used their psychic attack until after they’d gotten their asses kicked. Maybe the effect was an improvised, last-ditch effort. Whatever it was, if they didn’t do something six Marine battalions were going to get mind-fucked.
“Grinner, you and Preacher team up. Kong and Jenkins. I’ll be with Atu.”
Each team picked a ship and reached towards it with their minds, searching for the source of the painful signals. They hadn’t practiced this sort of thing very much. Lisbeth had shared her experiences fighting Marauders and Tah-Leen, and shown them how to project their thoughts beyond their bodies. Hopefully that would be enough to deal with these ETs, or Third Fleet would need to find a new set of pilots for their gunboats.
Lisbeth’s perspective shifted and turned into something alien and cold. She was swimming in the poisonous seas of a world partly covered by oceans of liquid ammonia. On land, a species of spindly creatures vaguely resembling Earth’s jellyfish learned to tame fire, forge metals and eventually send crude spaceships into orbit. The oceans’ depths concealed a second species, one that had branched off from the land-dwellers early in its evolutionary history. The Aquatics lacked fine manipulators but not intelligence, and at some point in their evolution developed a mutation that allowed them to communicate telepathically.
She learned all of this from the mind of the single Aquatic in the ship, encased in a fluid-filled glass tank in an armored compartment in the center of the ship. That was not a prison but a control room, from which the telepathic alien oversaw the actions of its slaves. The land-dwellers – known derisively as the Walkers – had the edge in technology but they were helpless to resist their cousins’ mental abilities. The conquest had been swift and decisive. Under the guidance of their new Aquatic masters, the Walkers had developed warp drives and spread beyond their home system.
The Aquatics’ control over the Walkers was so great they could turn their slaves into willing sacrifices who would gleefully die for their masters. That was the secret behind their warp cannon. Lisbeth saw the parasitic relationship between the two species in all its depravity. It was worse than any human slave society. The poor Walker bastards didn’t even know what freedom was; their entire existence and sense of self had been subverted telepathically. She wanted to do something about it, but first she needed to deal with the situation at hand.
Faced with human invaders, the Aquatics had tried to use their abilities on them, but found human minds difficult to communicate with, let alone control. Desperation had driven them to greater efforts, until one of them had found a combination of mental signals that affected the enemy, and instantly passed on the knowledge to the rest. Most Marines had been disabled already, and the surviving Walkers had already begun to slaughter them.
“Ask me what day is today, Atu.”
Her spirit friend sounded resigned. “What day is today, Christopher Robin?”
“It’s the day we burn this motherfucker to the ground!”
Lisbeth unleashed the two entities trapped inside her skull: Atu, who hated violence but was rather good at it, and the very angry and downright evil Kraxan she’d named Vlad the Impaler. The Aquatic had never encountered anything like them. Its mind was ripped to shreds by the two alien thought-forms. The Walkers under its control collapsed like so many unstrung puppets.
“One down. five to go.”
The mental battle took less than three seconds of real time. Grinner and Preacher cleared two ships; Kong and Jenkins had some trouble getting into the groove, and only managed to take out one of the aliens. It didn’t matter: Lisbeth and her spirit allies finished off the rest quickly enough. There had been only one Aquatic per ship: Lisbeth had learned during her brief communion with the aliens that the controllers were relatively young members of their species. The telepathic creatures considered warship duties to be beneath them for the most part. Maybe their older counterparts were better at telepathic combat. The ones the Death Heads encountered turned out to be pushovers. The Jellies were done; the Marines had recovered and taken over six enemy ships, and the other cloud-ships had been destroyed.
The five pilots returned to their bodies, their work complete. Lisbeth sent a brief report to the Admiral, explaining what had happened, and was granted her request to take her squadron and finish off the remaining Lamprey ships. Most of her squadron, that was; Jenkins’ ride wouldn’t be fit to fight until this battle was over. Helping kill the Super-Jellies had been a decent consolation prize, though.
“All right, boys and girls,” Lisbeth called out when she got back a terse affirmative from CINC-Three. “Let’s go hunting.”
* * *
The Lhan Arkh Fifth Congressional District was burning.
After disposing of the last Lamprey defenses, Third Fleet had taken its time. Sondra had spared her Marines, who’d taken worse losses than expected during the boarding action, and used the Death Heads to take care of the ground defenses. That took four days, plus another day for the deployment of thermal weapons on the system’s two populated planets. Clearing all mining and industrial facilities in the rest of the system was the work of two more days. The mop-up operations had been typical of their kind: brutish, tedious and repulsive. But at least it was done.
CDC-5 had been reduced to scorched ruins and drifting space debris. Third Fleet had delivered a telling blow to the Lhan Arkh Congress. Not quite as bad as Sondra had managed against the Vipers, but pretty close. The Lampreys weren’t going to be in any shape to prosecute their war against the US. It was less than they deserved, but needs must when the devil rides.
And there’s a good chance the Lampreys are going to have other things to worry about, Sondra thought, turning away from the scenes of destruction playing on every screen and holo display in the fleet bridge. She’d been too busy overseeing the scorched earth campaign to deal with the new alien species they’d encountered. Now that her job was done, she had time to study the data the Office of Naval Intelligence had gathered.
The aliens called themselves the Enlightened Circle; their language was not sound-based so there were no attached words to the lofty title. The Marines who’d seen the creatures firsthand just called them the Jellyfish or simply the Jellies. The Jellies were two distinct Class Three species: land-dweller technologists who’d been taken over by aquatic telepaths. Genetically they were as closely-related as humans and dolphins. They lived in ammonia-based worlds, too cold for water to exist as anything but perennial ice, the kind of place found most commonly among red dwarf stars.
ONI had been poring over the ships’ captured records, but were hampered by the fact the Circle’s information-storage device were mostly tachyonic and utterly incompatible with standard Starfarer systems. The aliens had discovered gravitonics only recently, and used them only for the most basic effects, mainly propulsion and some weapons. Their discovery of warp technology appeared to have been the result of communication with Warplings. The Circle were, to put it succinctly, a coven of warp witches.
I almost feel sorry for the Lampreys.
The records they’d unearthed from Lhan Arkh ships and facilities after the battle showed First Contact with the Enlightened Circle had only occurred sometime during 167 AFC, slightly over a year ago. At around the time of the Xanadu incident, give or take a month. The Circle had been allegedly eager to help, and the Lampreys had been desperate enough to allow one of its fleets to enter Congressional Space.
Only question is, what percentage of their total tonnage did those thirty-seven shi
ps represent? Was it a mere flotilla, a sizable portion of their total force, or something in between?
None of the information they had recovered answered that question. The Circle had purposely scrubbed their data of anything that could provide potential hostiles with a clear idea of its strength. There wasn’t even a list of the systems the Circle controlled. They hadn’t been able to interrogate any Jellies, either. All the Aquatic masters had been killed in action, and the Walker crews had committed suicide en masse within seconds of their rulers’ deaths. The Marines had grabbed all the data storage devices they could find, with a lot of help from a handful of ONI operatives equipped with t-wave implants; they and the Death Head Squadron were the only people who could even identify those devices, let alone sort through them.
From the looks of it, the Jellies were playing their cards close to the vest. The Lampreys probably knew only what the telepathic Medusozoans in charge wanted them to know. Did the Lhan Arkh realize they were dealing with someone just as bad as humans were supposed to be? Their Imperium allies wouldn’t have stood for that, so they almost certainly had no clue.
The Circle might prove to be trouble sometime down the line, but the US had plenty of things to deal with for the time being.
Starbase Malta, Xanadu System, 169 AFC
“Nice to finally see you,” Heather told Peter. He and the rest of Third Fleet had arrived at Malta almost a week ago, but this was the first time they’d been able to be alone with each other since then. “Welcome home, by the way.”
“Closest thing to home since we deployed out of New Parris, at least,” he said.
He looked happy but tired, which pretty much matched Heather’s own state. They’d both been up to their eyeballs in urgent business. Now that they’d discovered another species that could use t-waves, the services of her newfangled implants were more in demand than ever. Peter, meanwhile, was busting his own behind passing on the lessons integrating the new replacements that brought his company back to full strength. Not to mention generating reports about the performance of all the new gadgets they’d used during the Lamprey campaign. Most of them had worked very well, but there were always kinks that needed to be ironed out, kinks that had cost casualties when theory had met reality.
“Well, let’s make the most of it while we can,” she said.
Peter nodded. He had five days of leave, and then he’d be busy getting his company ready for the next cruise. Third Fleet would be leaving for the Imperium in another two weeks, just enough time to repair the damaged ships, integrate the carrier strike group that had joined the fleet, and load up on consumables.
And an extra two weeks is probably too many, she thought.
After depopulating Bizzik, Kerensky’s Black Ships had disappeared without a trace for a nearly a month – and then struck at another system, twelve transits away. The target this time had been a planet-less warp junction and supply depot. Way Station 15 had held six starbases orbiting a white dwarf star; the bases serviced traffic passing through to four other destinations within the Imperium. The Black Ships had arrived unexpectedly, savaged the battlecruiser squadron protecting the system, and proceeded to loot the stations and over a hundred civilian vessels trapped in the system. The death toll had been minimal compared to the carnage at Bizzik – a ‘mere’ three hundred thousand victims – but some sensor recordings that had survived the raid showed that many of them had been stuffed into cargo freighters and then sent into warp space, never to emerge.
More sacrifices.
Peter noticed her expression.
“Hard not to think about stuff, eh?” he said.
“I’m sorry. We got a big infodump from an indie trader a couple of days back, and I’m still digesting it.”
“Kerensky’s raid.”
She nodded. “It’s all but confirmed; they are feeding victims to the Warpling allies.”
He lay down next to her; his presence was solid and warm, just what she needed right now.
“Some of the guys are wondering why we’re so upset about it. It’s not like we’re going to spare the Gimps when we go on our cruise.”
“You know why.”
“Yeah. Bad enough when you are blowing up some poor bastards just because they happened to be born on a different corner of the galaxy. But turning them over to the Foos is something else. It’s worse than killing.”
“If there is such a thing as souls, it’s the sort of thing that damns yours forever.”
He shrugged; they avoided talking religion most of the time, and she wondered if this was a good time to start.
“Not sure either way,” he said after a few awkward seconds. “But I do know that when you start seeing living, thinking beings as nothing but expendables, it changes you. After a while, you can end up extending that designation to everybody except your closest friends and family. But I think it’s worse than that.”
“Probably.”
She suspected the corruption worked on both sides of reality. The Marauders had been driven collectively insane even as they did the same for their Warpling allies. In the end, an even crazier Null-Space Sophont had crossed over and killed them all.
“We’ll stop them.”
He could have meant the Imperium, or Kerensky, or even the factions in the US who might in desperation follow in the Black Fleet’s footsteps. Heather was sure that he was talking about every last one of them.
* * *
“Have a seat, Lisbeth,” Colonel Marvin Brunden said after welcoming her to his office. The strained smile on his face was merely the tip of the iceberg; the man’s emotions were in total turmoil, and she couldn’t blame him.
“This conversation is on the record,” the commander of the 25th Carrier Space Wing went on. That meant their every word, action and facial tick would be saved on file. It also meant he didn’t want to discuss the problems facing his fighter pilots via telepathy. If he had, this appointment wouldn’t have been necessary; the two Marine officers could have teleconferenced via tachyon interface like two proper warp-mutated freaks.
Lisbeth sat down and went through the official files on Brunden while she waited for him to have his say. Marvin Brunden had started out in the Corps as a shuttle pilot, moved into Logistics after OCS, and joined the Langley Project as a major. After flying a War Eagle during Sixth Fleet’s campaign against the Vipers, he’d risen quickly in rank. This was his first wing command. The man’s warp rating had been marginal for fighter duty, but he’d responded well to Melange treatments. Well enough to fly and blow shit up, at least. The man could barely shield his own thoughts from Lisbeth, however, and only because she was letting him have his privacy. For the time being. She picked up enough of his brain to guess this meeting was the first battle in a turf war.
“I read the memo you submitted to Admiral Givens,” Brunden began. “And while I concur with some of your broader points, such as the need to closely monitor dosages and side effects of my flight crews’ warp-mitigation treatments, I do not think that having your squadron act as some sort of inquisition makes any sense.”
“Sir, with all due respect – “
“You’re going to bring up Kerensky’s mutiny, aren’t you?” Brunden broke in. “I am aware of what went on at Seventh Fleet. Massive drug overdoses, enabled through a black market that Kerensky himself allowed to exist through either carelessness or criminal complicity. The reliance on so-called ‘ghosting’ to avoid casualties was also a major factor. None of that is going to happen with the Twenty-Fifth. Everybody is being monitored carefully. Drug tests and implant log examinations every hundred and twenty hours. No more than one ‘ghosting’ use per sortie will be allowed. I have this under control.”
Lisbeth stayed quiet. Might as well let the remfie finish what he had to say.
“I know you have Admiral Givens’ ear, Zhang. You probably think you can go over my head and have her order me to comply with your requests. Well, I have friends in high places too, and as far as they are concerned, you
and your fancy gunboats work for me, not the other way around.”
“It’s okay to be scared, sir,” Lisbeth said.
“What did you just say?”
“You’re scared shitless. Your wing is the first fighter unit to see action since the New Texas Incident. Carrier ops have been on hold ever since, and with good reason, despite the fact that it’s costing us ships and people.”
The war was still raging on in half a dozen ancillary fronts. Skirmishes with the Imperium, the Lampreys and, even more importantly, assorted ‘pirates’ and ‘irregular’ units being fielded by alleged neutrals as they began to take a side in the conflict. Nothing major, mostly squadron-level engagements, but if fighters had been deployed, many of those encounters would have ended in undisputed victory for the US. Problem was, the top brass was rightfully worried about using fighters after the events in New Texas.
“What you don’t seem to get, Colonel Brunden, is that the only reason the Twenty-Fifth was given a chance to go out and fight is because I’m here, along with my little imaginary friends.”
Brunden’s reply turned into a gasp when the massive shapes of Atu the Path Master and Vlad the Impaler suddenly appeared behind Lisbeth. Neither alien should have fit in the compartment, but they somehow managed. The sight of a three-eyed legless giant and a slightly smaller flesh-and-cybernetic hulk brimming with weapons froze the Marine officer.
“Don’t worry, none of this is on the record,” Lisbeth went on. “Back in the real world, we’ll stare silently at each other for less than two seconds. We’ll be done here by then.”
“How…?”
“T-wave shield implants are a neat idea, and kudos to the techies who thought them up and installed them inside the heads of all senior officers they could get their hands on. Problem is, you aren’t dealing with some Spice-addicted freak here. I’ve played head games with the mother-loving Warp Marauders of Kraxan. Getting past your defenses isn’t a big deal.”
“Listen, you –”
“No, you listen. We can’t afford a pissing contest this late in the game. I can keep your pilots alive, and you can’t. Drug tests and stupid tactics aren’t going to do it; you’ll just get them killed faster. How many dead pilots do you think it’ll take before the rest start ghosting despite any orders to the contrary? On my first day at Annapolis, I was told never to give an order you knew would not be obeyed. I got the same advice when I went into the Corps.”
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 137
