“Maintain course. Raise Colonel Zhang.”
Running away wasn’t an option.
* * *
“Short version is, we’re going to poke the hornet’s nest and see what kind of hornet comes out to play.”
Commander Deborah Genovisi barely paid attention to the pre-mission briefing. Something else was calling to her, a premonition of danger she couldn’t afford to ignore. If she couldn’t glean what her instincts were trying to tell her, people were going to lose their lives. Unfortunately, she’d never been able to force a vision into being: they happened or not, as random chance dictated or perhaps at the whim of some ineffable Deity.
“It’s a trap,” she finally said as her feelings became certain.
“What do you have for us, Grinner?”
“They are expecting a fighter attack, and the Death Heads. I think… No, I know. They’ve got some weapon system designed to deal with fast-warp ships.”
Nobody asked her if she was sure. They’d come to accept her hunches as actionable intelligence.
“Okay, then. We’ll play it as safe as we can. Emerge at two light-seconds from the edge of their formation. Take one potshot each, and vamoose back into warp. Minimizes their target acquisition and delivery time.”
“They might refuse to fire if the conditions are too averse,” Deborah pointed out. Her premonition had given her a sense of the commanding officer. A Denn male, one beset with anxiety; he didn’t think the new weapon should be used until it could deal the enemy critical blow. In fact, he had asked to deploy it first against Kerensky’s Black Ships. She’d caught a fleeting memory of a Warmaster meeting where he’d said as much.
“Then we rinse and repeat. Even at long range, we’ll start racking up some kills. We can do that all day long. The rest of Third Fleet is going to advance at one quarter flank, so we’ll have a good four hours to play that game. Admiral figures if anyone can take whatever the Gimps have over there, it’s us.”
It was the best they could do with the information they had available. The Death Heads left the mental meeting and concentrated on the final pre-sortie checklist. They were inside the Laramie, back with the rest of the support fleet, four light hours behind Third Fleet’s battle wall. For the Corpse-Ships, a jump anywhere in the system was a trivial exercise.
Transition.
“Jesus. Will you look at that?”
Warplings. Lots of them. Hovering out of range, as it were, just close enough to watch the Death Heads. Deborah felt a combination of patience and eagerness coming from the distant horde. They knew something was up, and were ready to take advantage of it.
“Not our problem,” Zhang said. “If they get close enough, pop ‘em one. Otherwise, ignore them.”
Emergence.
To the naked eye, the only noticeable feature was the greenish blue orb of Kezz-Three. Her Marauder-American sensor systems did a far better job of displaying her target: a Gimp battleship. The squadron hit it with a single volley before returning to warp. They jumped to Third Fleet’s battle wall without taking any return fire.
“We punched some holes on Sierra-One. Nothing critical, but those ETs know they’ve been kissed,” Lisbeth said. “And something pinged us with a rangefinder. We were in real-space for a whole second and a half, so whoever targeted us was a lot closer than the main enemy fleet.”
“Their fighters?”
“Yep. They must have more of them than we thought, conducting patrols while on stealth mode. Passive sensors are good enough to detect an emergence, but they had to switch to active scans when they tried to shoot us. Getting the feed from Fleet. Hang one.”
Deborah took a deep breath. The feeling of impending doom was getting stronger.
“Yes, it was one of their improved shuttles, about half a light second from our emergence point. Too far out to be part of the squadrons that we saw scramble out of those platforms, so they must have been already out and about. Figure they had ten to twenty percent of their force out on Combat Space Patrol at any given time: that’s another three or even five hundred bandits out there, almost impossible to detect until they open fire or go active.”
“Impossible to detect conventionally,” Deborah broke in, speaking as the idea occurred to her.
“You mean using FM to pick them up?” Preacher asked. Deborah didn’t like the term – short for Fucking Magic – but sent out a mental nod.
“Should work. In theory,” Lisbeth agreed. “Not so sure about how to actually do it. Our crates can pick up tachyon emissions, but the enemy’s only sources of t-waves are their brains. It’s gonna take a lot for us to pick up their minds from warp and correlate their location in space.”
“True,” Deborah said. “Working out the details is going to take a while.”
“It’s a good idea, though. We’ll keep picking at it, in our plentiful spare time.”
Everyone laughed at that.
“Meanwhile, we’re going back there. Same range and target, different emergence point, one and done. Maybe they won’t have fighters at that point, but figure they might. Let’s see if we can sink that boat. Expect to take fire.”
Transition. There were even more Warplings out there, watching silently like spectators at a tense moment during a football game. Or a gladiatorial contest.
They came out and took more shots at the battleship. Enemy Foxtrots were, unfortunately, nearby and ready for them. Targeting warnings went off: someone had a lock on Deborah’s gunship. She jumped back into warp. Or tried to.
Chaos. The entire ship shook and spun like a barrel caught in a tornado. Her body was pulled painfully against the five-point safety harness holding her to her seat and she felt the entire vessel flexing against massive stresses. She was in warp space, but some force she’d never encountered before was tossing the craft about. The shouts of surprise and pain from the rest of the squadron told her she wasn’t the only one having a bad time.
“I’ve lost my emergence point,” Jenkins said.
Deborah checked. She had as well. The ‘tunnel’ she’d created was gone. Her ship was adrift in null-space with no designated way out.
“That makes two of us,” she said, trying to project calmness and barely making it.
“And Preacher makes three,” Preacher said. Three out of five wasn’t bad; it was disastrous unless they could figure out a way to get back.
“We have an exit, but it’s way off-course,” Lisbeth said, speaking for herself and Kong. “Latch on to us and let’s get the hell out of Dodge. The natives are getting restless.”
So they were. A swarm of Warplings was rushing forth. Whatever had destabilized the Death Heads’ transition had sent them to a region in null-space where the entities had more energy to draw upon. Deborah shot at them, but hits that had destroyed similar entities only seemed to anger them. Something began to pound on her hull. Fortunately she was able to follow Lisbeth out.
Emergence.
The welcome sight of stars against the dark of deep space didn’t do much to relieve her. Her cockpit was leaking atmosphere and a sensor module had been ripped clean off the ship; several other systems were damaged.
“That sucked,” Preacher said. He’d emerged a light minute away from her position. So far he was the only one back.
Two other warp openings formed up in quick succession, both within twenty light-seconds from Deborah’s position. Lisbeth and Kong had made it.
Jenkins was the last one. And he wasn’t alone. Even from a light-second away, Deborah could feel a cold, slimy presence right alongside the pilot. A Warpling had crossed over.
She watched in on visual a moment later. Jenkins’ Corpse-Ship was wrapped by something translucent and multi-limbed, a pulsing deep-purple thing with a myriad of black vein-like lines crisscrossing its surface. Its tendrils were battering the hull even as its psychic roars struck everyone who could hear them with an almost physical force.
Deborah almost began to shoot before the realization she’d be blasting Jenkins
as well stopped her. Before she could think of something, Lisbeth sent the entity back into warp with a forceful thought, with a lot of help from Atu.
“My crate is shot to shit,” Jenkins said.
“Yeah, we all took a beating. RTB and see what needs to be fixed.”
“You mean go back into warp?”
“We’ll be all right. Whatever the tangos did destabilized our return jump, but that’s not going to happen now. We can’t sit here: we are about three light-hours away from the fight, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
Deborah hadn’t. A quick look at her positional finder confirmed the squadron commander’s words. They’d been knocked way off course.
“What the hell did they do to us?”
* * *
“It’s a graviton emitter, ma’am. A modified grav-cannon, meant to disrupt warp processes.”
Admiral Sondra Givens grimaced. She shouldn’t have been surprised. Opening a hole in spacetime was an exercise in applied gravity. It only stood to reason that it could be affected by the proper application of g-forces. Of course, actually putting those theories into effect was, like rocket engineering, a whole other kettle of fish. The enemy seemed to have managed it fine, though.
“Fourteen Foxtrots were close enough to use the emitters against the gunship squadron,” the Tactical Officer went on; sorting through the data had taken some time but he could finally offer some conclusions. “Five of them appeared to strike the apertures effectively. Three appear to have had no effect. And six of them malfunctioned critically.”
Those six luckless STL fighters had been torn apart by tidal stresses when their wonder weapons created micro-singularities inside their hulls. Starfarers rarely deployed experimental weapons with forty percent failure rates, but the Gimps were desperate enough to cut corners. After all, losing six modified shuttles for the chance to wipe out the Death Head squadron was a more than fair trade. At least to anybody other than the luckless shuttle crews who’d briefly experienced life near a black hole.
Third Fleet had paused its advance while its commander reassessed her plans.
“What happens when one of those disruptors hit our warp shields?”
“We are not sure, ma’am. Threat Assessment hasn’t reached a consensus.”
“Screw consensus. Give me what they’ve got.”
“There are four prevailing theories. The disagreements are about which one is the most likely.”
“Let’s hear them.”
“There is a chance the disruptors will have no effect on warp shields, since we don’t actually jump through them.”
Warp shields, like all such constructs, had an entry and emergence point, but the latter was in a random direction one light-minute away, and ships were in a perpetual state of free fall in relation to the aperture, never quite reaching it.
“So that’s the best case. Next.”
“The destabilizing effect may cause us to lose the affected shield, either by triggering a shutdown or forcing us to shut them down ourselves to prevent one of the other two possibilities.”
“Which are...?”
“The apertures may grow large enough to swallow the ship, causing it to emerge on the other side. Or, lastly, the unstable aperture may allow something from the other side to come in, at either or both ends.”
Sondra had seen the footage from the Death Heads’ sensors, showing the monstrous hitchhiker that had almost destroyed one of the gunboats. Having one or more of those things – or something even larger – make an appearance wasn’t something she wanted to even think about.
“Give me an estimate of what happens if we go in without warp shields.”
The Tactical Officer had been expecting that question. He sent her the predicted loss assessments. They weren’t great, but they weren’t catastrophic. American ships had moved away from relying primarily on their warp shields, since the enemy had kept getting better and better at finding ways to avoid them. Third Fleet was going to pay dearly for the privilege of taking that system, but it was a price she could afford. This time.
“This is Fleet Admiral Givens, to all Third Fleet elements. We will proceed with our attack plan, with some modifications. Task force commanders, stand by for new orders.”
Her ships began moving forward.
* * *
“Son of a bitch.”
Watching a battle unfold in real time while sitting in the rear with the gear was an unfamiliar and unpleasant sensation.
Lisbeth and her Death Heads could see what was happening from the Laramie, parked with the rest of the support ships some five light-hours away, courtesy of a warp navigator who was sending them the sensor take telepathically. Watching the battle unfold in real-time was great (not to mention a major violation of General Relativity), but Lisbeth wanted to do something. Having her squadron benched in the middle of a major fleet action was driving her into a frenzy.
Third Fleet had pushed its way past three Sun-Blotter volleys, each in the half-million missile range. Unable to use warp shields, the American ships had taken a beating: two battlecruisers were gone, along with half a dozen destroyers.
We were supposed to protect the fleet. They hadn’t dared to use the Wall of Fire, not with enemy fighters waiting for the chance to mess with their warp jumps. The Carrier Strike Group had withdrawn from the battle wall; without its fighters those ships were little more than big targets, and Admiral Givens had sent them packing.
The two forces had entered direct energy weapon range. The Gimp fighters’ grav cannon turned out to be dual-use; they could fire standard graviton beams as well as those warp disruptors. They weren’t as powerful as a War Eagle’s twenty-inchers – they packed maybe one fifth the punch – but thousands of peashooters still added up to a real bad day. On the other hand, the converted shuttles were being massacred. Opening fire revealed them to even the most cursory sensor scan, and their life expectancy after being acquired by an American ship was measured in seconds. On the other hand, the Gimps were still volleying thousands of missiles from all their weapon platforms, and the harried American defense gunners had more targets than they could engage at any given moment. Even under those constraints, half of the enemy fighter force had been wiped out.
“We could pile on just about now,” Jenkins said. “Our birds are patched up, and as long as we stay in real space their warp disruptors can’t do shit to us.”
“Maybe. Our force fields are hybrid, remember? Warp shields sandwiched between two standard fields. No telling what those things can do if they hit us.”
“Shit.”
Through the eyes of their fleet contact, they all saw the Thermopylae shudder under multiple energy impacts. Her fore force fields failed and clouds of vaporized ablative foam rose from two direct hits. Shield power was restored a moment later, but at least one of those hits had burned all the way through her hull. Lisbeth could imagine what happened to anybody unlucky enough to be on those decks: a quick, messy death at best, or living long enough to be sucked into space, burn to death, or both. You rarely walked away from a capital ship hull breach if you were anywhere near it. Even people in surrounding compartments risked injury or death from secondary effects.
“Colonel,” Grinner said. “I’ve been thinking about how those disruptors work.”
“Go on.”
“They add energy to the targeted warp aperture, causing it to fluctuate. Maybe we can use it in our favor.”
“I’m listening.”
Chances were nothing they could think of would affect this fight, but there was always the next one.
Eleven
“Seals are all good,” Russell told Grampa. “The local ETs’ air mix is good enough for us, but you still don’t want to leak life support. Them little platforms will get filled with vacuum PDQ, once you start shooting inside them.”
“Loving it,” the old guy said. “I already got my badge. Been there, done that, and I’m getting the warms and fuzzies at the thought of doing it again.”
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You got a Warp Assault Badge after you teleported into an enemy ship and kicked some ass. This time they were going after the towed weapon platforms, but those counted. Anything surrounded by hard vacuum counted. And this drop wasn’t going to be fun at all.
“You sure those disruptors can’t fuck up our jumps?” Grampa asked for the third time.
“Only their fighters have ‘em,” Russell explained for the third time.
“Guess they are so unreliable they don’t want ‘em on anything larger,” Gonzo added. He wasn’t trying to break Grampa’s balls for a change, which meant he was as nervous as the oldster. And he wasn’t kidding; from what they’d heard the warp disruptors killed the shuttles firing them almost half the time. Nobody with any sense would want to mount them on something expensive like a starship.
“Step on up, Marines,” Sergeant Fuller said. Russell’s fireteam, plus one from the Assault section and six grunts from First Platoon were doing this jump, along with Fuller. They were sending one squad-sized assault detachment per target; supposedly there were only twenty to thirty tangos manning the platforms, and they’d have light weapons, if they were armed at all. At least, that was what they’d been told, not that anybody with sense counted on it being true. If Russell had a buck for every time someone in charge had ‘known’ something and turned out to be full of shit, he’d be able to retire already.
They stepped on the platform and did the transition bit. This time Russell got a brief visit from Nacle’s ghost, who looked very disappointed in him. It was over quick, and he and the rest of the squad emerged on Echo Tango land. Their arrival tore a hole in the platform’s hull; atmo was leaking at a good clip, buffeting the Marines with high-speed winds. Good thing they’d checked the seals of their suits. The winds died down when the compartment vented all its air.
“Shit! Clamp down, everybody, it’s gonna start again when we blow the door.”
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 140
