“You need to listen, walking carcass,” Vlad said in what Kraxans considered to be a reasonable tone. “She is your superior in every way.”
“Settle down, Vlad,” Lisbeth told her pet monster before turning back to the colonel. “My squadron can keep the Warplings off your back, at no small risk to ourselves, mind you, and while carrying out our own missions. We are also working on ways to fight off NSSs, maybe even kill them, something that so far only my three-eyed pal can do. And once we figure them out, we’ll try to teach those techniques to your people as well.”
Atu grinned at the colonel. Since its mouth had been fused closed at around the same time it learned how to survive without breathing or eating, the result was ghastly. It kept the jarhead officer quiet while Lisbeth went on:
“But I’m gonna need your pilot’s full cooperation. And I’m going to get it, with or without your consent. I don’t need to go over your head, either. The Admiral tolerates me, but she wouldn’t appreciate my bucking the chain of command. Luckily, I don’t have to. My people can communicate with yours and you wouldn’t even know it, especially with those t-wave shields cutting you off from the rest of us. But that wouldn’t be good for discipline. If your pilots realize their only chance to stay alive and sane is by ignoring your orders and following mine, we might as well start our own mutiny.”
“You’re doing exactly that!”
“No, sir. I’m trying to avoid that. I need your cooperation so we can preserve the chain of command. If you follow my lead – my unofficial lead – you will keep casualties to a minimum. I will make it publicly clear that you are in charge, and that any orders I issue have undergone your approval. You will get full credit for the success of the Strike Wing, and I will assume full responsibility for any failures. Your career will be just fine. And the mission will be accomplished.”
Brunden folded; Lisbeth saw the mental surrender as clearly as if he had started waving a white flag over his head. He would make a fuss a little while longer, but only to save face. Which was very fortunate for everyone concerned; he wouldn’t have liked Lisbeth’s Plan B one bit.
“What do you mean conventional phase?” he asked.
“At some point, we are going to take part in the conflict brewing in null-space, sir. Especially since we’re partly to blame for it. The Kraxan began to upset the balance of forces in warp, and humanity’s making things worse. Kerensky’s Black Fleet has strengthened a faction of warp entities that we most definitely do not want to win.”
“What happens if they do?”
“Best case, FTL travel becomes much more dangerous throughout this portion of the galaxy. As in, one in ten ships never completes warp transit. Maybe more.”
Lisbeth didn’t have to peek past the colonel’s inadequate mental shields to see the man put two and two together. That sort of loss ratio would end faster-than-light transport and doom Starfarer civilization.
“And that’s the best case,” Lisbeth went on. Might as well drive the point home so even this careerist son-of-a-bitch got it. “Worst case, the Warplings will come out to play here. You’ve seen the reports of what one of them did at Redoubt System. Now think about hundreds of those things loose in the galaxy with us.”
“I get the picture, Zhang. Very well, I will let you follow your plan. I hope it works as advertised, or we’re all FUBAR.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
Brunden didn’t know just how bad things would get if the greater war within the Starless Path went pear-shaped. Only she and Grinner Genovisi had any inkling, thanks to the latter’s angelic visitation. Before either of those possibilities came to pass, the Elder Races would intervene. And among their first acts would be the eradication of everyone involved. The just and the unjust, the wicked and the innocent. America, the Imperium and even neutrals like the Ovals. This entire section of the galaxy would be purged, except for a few minor polities on the periphery of known space, a remnant who would eventually resettle the empty worlds left behind by the rest. The meek would inherit the galaxy, in other words.
We’d better not screw this up.
Nine
Imperial Star Province Mellak, 169 AFC
“Looks like nobody’s home, ma’am.”
“Pretty much,” Sondra Givens agreed, going over the data icons taking shape inside the CIC’s central holotank. Mellak was a relatively-young colony – it had been discovered a year before Earth’s First Contact – and she hadn’t expected to encounter much resistance there. On the other hand, she hadn’t expected to encounter no resistance at all.
“No mobile force,” she said. “This is supposed to be the Sixty-Seventh Provincial Flotilla’s headquarters. They aren’t here. There should be two orbital fortresses around Mellak-Six. From the looks of it, they disassembled them and took them away.”
“They appear to have evacuated most of the civilian population as well, ma’am. The sixth planet held two million sophonts at the time of the last census, mostly belonging to the Denn species. The initial scans indicate less than a hundred thousand inhabitants remain, unless the rest have cut their technological footprint down to nothing.”
“Doubtful. Mellak-Six is barely habitable. Without a reliable source of power, the planet can’t support even the hundred thousand sophonts we can detect, let alone twenty times that number. No, they’ve run for the hills and taken everything that wasn’t nailed down. Not a big deal for only two million people, but if they do the same further down the line, it’ll take a big chunk of the available shipping in this sector. Not good for the Gimps’ economy.”
Sondra had become something of an expert in the logistics involved in planetary evacuations. Not by choice, of course, but the US Navy had learned a lot about packing up and moving large numbers of civilians during the early phases of the current conflict. Some sixty million Americans and nineteen million Pan-Asians had become homeless refugees since the Days of Infamy. Better than dying, of course, but the ensuing disruption of shipping and trade and the humanitarian issues involved were hurting both countries. The damage would take decades to fix even if the war ended soon. Having the Imperium experience some of what it had gleefully dished out should make her feel vindicated, but it only depressed her. The enormous waste that depopulated planet represented was nothing to feel good about.
War’s desolation. Nothing she would wish on anybody. Her job was to prevent it from reaching her people. Unfortunately, sometimes that meant visiting its horrors on the enemy.
“I didn’t think they could evacuate ninety percent of any planet’s population, ma’am. Warp intolerance being what it is among most aliens.”
“That was new colony: most everyone got there via starship in the first place, so leaving wasn’t a problem. The poor bastards left behind are the native-born who can’t survive warp. The next system up the chain has, what, eleven million inhabitants?”
“Kezz System, that’s correct, ma’am.”
“Older province. Less than two million warp-rated inhabitants, probably. They’ll make their stand there.”
The fleet bridge crew paused, waiting for her orders.
“Destroy any military targets in the system,” she said. Which in this case would mean a couple of landing pads on the ground and a handful of satellites still in orbit. “We’ll scan the outer worlds, just in case they are trying to hide something in there, and move on afterwards. No point wasting thermal weapons on some scattered villages.”
No sense in bringing war’s desolation to those hapless colonists.
* * *
Transition.
Commander Deborah ‘Grinner’ Genovisi took twelve War Eagles to dance with the devil.
Third Fleet had four days of down time while its light squadrons scouted the two gas giants on the far reaches of the local system, and that gave the Death Heads an opportunity to train with the 25th CVW. A badly needed opportunity, since they would very likely be seeing action on the next system over. She tried not to dwell on the missed tim
e that the wing commander’s foot-dragging had cost everyone. In the end, Colonel Zhang had to put the fear of God into the stubborn jarhead. Deborah only hoped it wasn’t too late.
The nine men and three women of Third Squadron all had some experience in dealing with Warplings. You couldn’t go through Marine Flight School – still being conducted at Groom Lake System – without having a few close brushes with NSSs. New guidelines had reduced the number of jumps pilot candidates had to undergo before getting their wings, but even the new minimum meant that sooner or later everyone would come into contact with something nastier than a mere figment of one’s imagination. Except for its squadron commander and two flight leaders, none of those eager Marine aviators had been in a life-or-death situation involving Warplings. Deborah was going to do her best to prepare them for that eventuality.
“Stand by for NSE,” Major Mike ‘Hound’ Bassett ordered.
Null-Space Engagement was the official term for ghosting. It sounded better on reports, Deborah supposed. A more accurate acronym would have been Partial Emergence Engagement, but PEE just wasn’t something you wanted to see in a write-up. Interacting with the physical realm without leaving warp space required pilots to anchor themselves to a different, deeper section of null-space. One that was home to more powerful and aggressive entities. At least, that was the half-assed explanation fighter pilots had cobbled up when trying to figure out what was happening to them. Scientists were still fiercely debating whether the phenomenon was real, let alone what it meant.
The effects were real enough. While ghosting, fighters couldn’t be struck by most weapon systems, and even those that managed to spill over through a warp aperture – plasma and some of the most powerful graviton-based weapons – only inflicted a tiny fraction of the damage they did back in the ‘real world.’ The side effects were also real enough, unfortunately. After a few ghosting runs, Warplings would start to congregate around the intruders, picking off the unlucky or weak-willed among them. There were ways around that; one of them was to make a deal with the entities and somehow feed them those killed by the ghosting runs.
Deborah had seen it happen. Had been tempted to go along with it. At some point, however, she had realized that doing so would not only damn whoever delivered those victims to the Warplings, but that the process strengthened those monsters and would eventually help them manifest physically in the material universe. She suspected a near-miss had resulted in the destruction of the carrier vessel Exeter, swallowed up with all hands in what the official reports called a ‘freak warp event.’ Lisbeth Zhang had shown Deborah some top secret footage of the last microseconds of the doomed starship’s destruction, and it looked as if long tendrils of darkness had reached out from a warp aperture and dragged the whole vessel into it.
Here be dragons. Ancient cartographers had written that warning on blank areas of their maps, meaning the place depicted was unknown and likely dangerous. That fit null-space perfectly. Dragons and monsters filled the impossible universe where distance and time were, if not meaningless, at least very different than in the physical universe.
Deborah had been transformed by multiple exposures to warp space, first as a navigator, and more recently as a fighter pilot. Sometimes she wondered if she was still fully human.
Non-Emergence.
Thirteen War Eagles hung in the threshold between N-space and their native reality. Deborah’s Corpse-Ship remained in transit. Her Kraxan sensors let her monitor the American ships: to her, it looked as if each fighter was standing near a ragged window amidst the swirling colors of the Starless Path. On the other side of the window was the squadron’s target: a luckless asteroid that had been seeded with transponders to simulate an enemy warship. The squadron volley-fired in perfect unison, and kept shooting until their seven-shot capacitors – up from the original five when Deborah had driven one of those crates – were empty.
By the third volley, they had attracted their first visitor.
Deborah saw it as a dark, sleek shape, darting through the rainbow chaos like an eel on the prowl. It reached towards one of the fighter pilots: what she perceived as an impossibly-long tentacle was a communications link through which the entity could terrorize, feed on or even kill its target. She shot it: the Kraxan graviton beam cut the tendril in two: the section no longer attached to the Warpling dissipated like a heat mirage.
The Starless One turned towards her. This time she struck with both guns and her mind, using the techniques Lisbeth Zhang and her alien friends had passed on. The monster changed shape as it tried to close in on her. One moment it looked just like an old schoolyard bully who’d terrorized Deborah as a child; the next, a twisted version of Russell Edison; finally, it turned into something that conformed to no geometry a sane mind could perceive, let alone understand.
She shot it again, and again. It finally withdrew in bewildered pain, badly wounded, perhaps even dying.
Third Squadron hadn’t even noticed the exchange. Their guns empty, they shut the warp gates and completed the transit that would take them back to the USS Crimson Tide. Deborah watched them go; she sensed a few other Warplings lingering nearby, but the fate of their fellow had discouraged them. They would probably leave the fighters alone for the next few sorties. Mission accomplished.
“Not quite yet, Commander Genovisi,” someone said behind her.
Deborah didn’t bother turning around. There wasn’t enough space behind her seat to accommodate anyone; whoever this was had reached her mind, not her ship. A quick shift in perceptions brought her face to face with the newcomer.
It looked like a man. A morbidly-obese man with a wild shock of white hair atop his head. The presence behind the illusion loomed impossibly large, like a whale – or a mountain – trying to hide behind a human mask. She’d only encountered something this powerful and deadly once before.
“It is a pleasure to finally meet you, Commander Genovisi. I have longed for this moment ever since your meeting with the fake Archangel you call Michael.”
The monster’s mention of Michael made her angry, but she contained herself. Her life and more than her life were in danger.
“What do you want?”
“To take you into the fold, of course. To make you part of something bigger than anything you could accomplish on your own. To join something great and beautiful.”
“Not interested.”
“For the time being, your choices matter. Just remember I treat those who come unto me willingly far better than any I have to take by force. The process in the latter case is much more traumatic.”
“Get out of my head, or I’ll kick you out. The process in the latter case is much more traumatic.”
The Warpling grinned, revealing multiple rows of shark-like teeth. His eyes became pools of pure darkness.
“You will learn to regret your decision, Deborah. For now, be a dear and pass a message along to Lisbeth Zhang. She briefly made my acquaintance not too long ago. Tell her sending me back home only made me stronger. Tell her one day I’ll do to Sol what I did to Redoubt.”
Deborah was back in the real world. Nobody had noticed her brief chat with the entity known as the Flayer, just as she hadn’t sensed the Warpling’s presence until it contacted her. She closed her eyes and prayed to Michael, knowing he wouldn’t respond, not yet. He had promised her they would meet one final time, but that time was yet to come.
It wouldn’t be much longer, however.
* * *
Fromm sent his last email to Heather as Third Fleet began to maneuver towards their next transit coordinates. There was nothing particularly special or poignant in it. They’d both agreed not to do that whole ‘in case this is my last email’ thing. That was loser talk. At least, that’s what they told themselves.
The courier ship heading towards a different warp valley in the system would bear the fleet’s final messages back to the US. They weren’t leaving a holding force in-system, which meant that after this transit they would be out of contac
t for however long it took to accomplish their mission and reestablish communications. It was something of a historical event: no Sector Fleet had ever advanced into enemy territory without a logistical support chain leading back to American territory. Given the breadth and depth of the Imperium’s warp network, it would be impossible to secure such a chain, even if the US could dedicate all its naval assets to the task. The fleet would have to fight and survive with what it was bringing along and what it could forage along the way.
Like so many Horde raiders, he thought.
He should be used to operating on his own by now. This time, he actually had a chain of command, even if it only consisted of his battalion commander, the general in charge of the Marine forces in the fleet, and Admiral Givens herself. Nothing extraordinary about that, except that getting replacements and resupply was going to prove a tad difficult.
Only lost two people during the boarding action at CDC-5.
Private Murray Mancuso, and Private First Class Rick Holyfield, both from the same squad in Second Platoon, both killed by a Jelly laser gunner. The Marines had been stunned by the telepathic attack that almost cost Fromm his whole company. Luck, Major Zhang’s timely intervention, and their improved equipment had saved their asses. Fromm’s orders hadn’t been intended to minimize casualties; the alien ships needed to be taken out, and a Marine company or two had less tactical value than a cruiser, let alone a battleship. If half his people had died while taking the objective, the action would still have been deemed a success.
Not by me, though.
The two dead Marines, and a third whose injuries would take too long to mend, had been replaced at Xanadu. All the MEUs were back to full administrative strength. From now on, however, losses would have to be made up by reassigning personnel from rear-echelon units until that was no longer practicable, and then there would be no more replacements.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 138
