An imp command later, Russell’s boots were bonded to the compartment’s floor at the molecular level, with an additional 1.2 gees of focused gravity for good measure. The designated door-knockers let fly with two bursts of breaching rounds, turning the door into spalling fragments that bounced around the hallway before the sudden decompression sent them back into the vented compartment. Russell’s shields sparkled when bits of metal flew quickly enough to trigger them.
An alien body came flying in as well. A Denn, humanoid except for the miniature elephant trunks they had instead of noses. Dead already, leaking from several holes from the blast that had turned the door into bouncing shrapnel. Grampa dodged the hurtling body with a curse. The tango did them all a favor, though; his carcass plugged the hull breach, and the winds stopped.
“Connor, Mariano, tape him in place.”
Two Marines headed for the tango’s corpse, space tape at the ready. That sort of bio-patch wouldn’t last long, but it was better than nothing.
“The rest of you, move on.”
A live Denn was huddled around a corner, where he’d been holding onto a handrail when the corridor depressurized. He managed to squeeze a shot from a beamer before an Iwo burst sent him to Jesus, but he didn’t hit anybody. Two down, twenty-eight to go. Allegedly.
As it turned out, there were more like fifty Eets in the miniature station. They only had pistols, though, low-power beamers that didn’t pose a threat to a grunt in armor. Most of them tried to run, hide and eventually surrender. A couple officers and a few enlisted with guts stood and fought. They all got the same result for their troubles.
“Clear,” Sergeant Fuller called out after twenty minutes of slaughter. There might be one or two Gimps hiding in service tunnels or other remotes parts of the platform, but they wouldn’t be a problem.
Bringing enough demo along to blow even a small target was difficult, but the assaultmen knew their business. A few carefully emplaced charges around the power plant, plus a virus program uploaded into the Gimp systems would ensure a runaway gluon reaction that would vaporize the whole thing. By the time they were done, the squad had set up their catapult for the return trip. They left with fifteen seconds to spare.
“Target destroyed,” Lieutenant Hansen told them when they returned to the Mattis. “Good job, people.”
A hundred and eighty targets destroyed, as a matter of fact. The Marines had taken out every surviving platform in the system. Two boarding parties didn’t make it back. Either they didn’t warp back in time or they got lost in transit. Twenty-six dead Marines. Nobody from the 101st, but it still sucked. The bosses would consider those losses ‘acceptable.’ It was a bit more personal for Russell. Acceptable was another word for ‘no skin off my ass.’ Fucking remfies.
“Shit,” Grampa said when he checked the casualty list.
Russell tried to shrug, but found himself shaking his head instead.
* * *
“Are you sure, Colonel?”
Admiral Givens looked like hell. A major battle was hard for everyone, and CINC-Three wasn’t happy to take time off from the fight to get into a conference call with Lisbeth, mediated by an ONI agent with t-wave implants. Her feelings came through very clearly; telepathy made poker faces irrelevant.
“Yes, Admiral,” Lisbeth said. She tried to project gung-ho all over her words. “Every Foxtrot that’s fired a disruptor left behind a t-wave signature. Commander Genovisi has figured out a way to trace them. All we need is a t-wave capable person working targeting on your ships, and we can send them the coordinates of all of them.
“Very well. There’s still some twelve hundred fighters out there, and they’ve gone back into stealth. Probably waiting until we get a little closer. I’ll send orders to all point defense fire directors. Make it happen, Colonel. Out.”
“All right, Grinner. Work your magic.”
Deborah’s mind was already wandering. Using her warp-mutated senses, Lisbeth saw it as a thousand of glowing tendrils launching off from the image of the Navy pilot like so many scouting drones. They reached out over millions of kilometers instantly, in utter defiance of physics. Lisbeth wondered if you could do even weirder stuff with t-waves, like see into the future and violate causality. Then she realized Grinner already could see into the future. Poor Einstein must be doing about 600 rpm in his grave.
When Genovisi prompted them, the rest of the squadron pitched in. None of them could match the spooky bubblehead’s clairvoyance, but they could add the psychic version of muscle to assist her, especially Lisbeth, who had them all beat in terms of raw power.
“You are learning rather quickly, Christopher Robin,” Atu told her. The alien ghost was watching over Genovisi’s process, occasionally sending her telepathic pointers. “This sort of Seeing is something my kind developed after centuries of study. The Marauders never developed it at all, relying instead on their Starless masters to provide them with information.”
“You know what they say, the prospect of being hanged focuses the mind wonderfully.”
“There is that. Although I suspect Deborah Genovisi is a unique case, made even more so by her time spent with one of the Greater Starless.”
“The angel,” Lisbeth said, focusing on keeping the conversation private from the other Death Heads.
The whole story about Grinner’s warp trip and her encounter with the being she called Michael was still deemed need-to-know only. There were possible religious implications there that the top brass didn’t want to deal with, especially in the middle of a shooting war. Lisbeth thought of what someone like Preacher might do if he heard that an archangel had spoken to Grinner. It could range from total awe to outrage at what he’d see as blasphemy. Best to keep that can of worms closed. People knew the Navy pilot had met with a seemingly angelic being, but not exactly what he’d told her.
“We always tried to minimize our dealings with the greater powers of the Path,” Atu went on. “The few of us who did were changed. Unbalanced.” The last word sounded like a curse. For the Pathfinders, abandoning Balance was the greatest sin.
“Well, we’re dealing with a whole renegade fleet that sold its collective soul to the devil. Maybe a little unbalance from the other side might be just what the doctor ordered.”
“Perhaps,” was all her spirit friend said.
“I see them,” Grinner said. A moment later, so did the rest of the Death Heads. Thirteen hundred points of light, along with their exact location, vector and speed. Their warp weapons had betrayed them, and the minds of their pilots had provided enough of a beacon to pinpoint their location.
The rest was rather anticlimactic. It was just a matter of sending the information to a dozen point defense directors through tachyon-rated crewmembers. Firing solutions were set, and some three hundred anti-missile guns began picking off stealthed targets. In less than two minutes, every Foxtrot was destroyed.
Third Fleet’s warp shields came back online.
“All right, kids,” Lisbeth told the squadron as soon as the go-ahead came through. “We’re back in action.”
Her grin became feral.
“Time to get some.”
* * *
Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.
Wellington’s words – and one of Admiral Carruthers’s favorite quotes – was on the forefront of Sondra Givens’ mind as she surveyed the fruits of victory. They were bitter fruits: Kezz System had fallen, and she’d incinerated eighteen cities and untold numbers of civilians, but the price had been steep. Third Fleet’s losses weren’t crippling, but had been significant: the dreadnought Merrimack was severely damaged and she’d lost three battlecruisers and seven destroyers. All her other ships would require repairs. If Zhang and her gang of creepy warp wizards hadn’t pulled another miracle out of their hats, it would have been a lot worse.
Fortunately, the Marines had seized two orbital shipyards relatively intact; those facilities would speed up things considerably. Even
so, they were looking at a week’s stay in the system before they could resume operations. Being cut off from the US meant that any ship that couldn’t stay with the fleet would have to be scuttled. And with no replacements or reinforcements available, she needed to carefully nurse her forces. She wasn’t afraid of a counterattack; if the Gimps had any more mobile formations in this sector, they would have been waiting for her here. A reaction force would need to make several transits to get here, giving her at least a couple of weeks, according to the best estimates of the Intelligence department. The Imperium had proved to have more ships than anybody had thought or even suspected, however, so an earlier arrival wasn’t out of the question.
Or maybe they’ll be smart for a change and throw in the towel, she thought. Now that would be unexpected.
The US had made peace entreaties towards the Imperium after each victory. Part of it was public relations, trying to make America look like the reasonable party in the conflict, but the proposals were sincere. The terms the State Department had demanded were harsh – Princeps Boma would have to resign from the Triumvirate and give himself up to the US, for starters – but they were nothing compared to the impossible ultimatum the Gimps had made before the Battle of New Texas. Since the local forces had chosen to fight rather than talk, she could only assume the war was still on. Her ONI team was analyzing all the data compiled from the system’s communication grid, but nobody was expecting to hear any good news.
There were still about twenty million survivors on the planet below, scattered among hundreds of small towns and villages. Sondra had forgone the thorough cleansing that the laws of war considered proper under the circumstances. Doing so was pointless, would spend resources she might need later, and delay the much-needed repairs the fleet needed..
And I’m getting sick of playing butcher.
If she had to, she would. There were thirty-five billion people in Primus, the most populous system in the known galaxy. Kill them all and the Galactic Imperium would die with them. At best, it would Balkanize along species lines and turn into three, or more likely, half a dozen polities. At worst, it would disintegrate into hundreds of smaller star-states, easy pickings for its many neighbors, none of whom loved the Gimps and their stated goal of bringing the galaxy into their so-called Unity. Either way, the war would be over, except for a return trip to Lhan Arkh space to wipe out the Lampreys.
Funny how the idea of massacring Lampreys bothers me so much less than killing Gal-Imps. In the end, it all devolves into a beauty contest, I suppose, and the Gimps are a lot less repulsive.
Sondra hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Surely, the Imperium would throw in the towel rather than lose its capital and the center of its power. Surely, they wouldn’t make her kill them all. It would be great if she had a weapon that would allow her to take out the decision-makers without having to massacre all the worker bees whose main sin was to have idiots for leaders. Unfortunately, even the latest wonder weapons in her arsenal didn’t give her that discretion. If the enemy didn’t give up, she would have to achieve victory by any means necessary.
She shook her head and went back to work. There were hundreds of things that needed doing. Their current mission required them to be scavengers and freebooters as well as warriors, and that only added to her administrative burdens.
And we’re not even halfway to our destination. Assuming we can fight past the next blocking force they put on our path, that is.
They’d found a way of dealing with the STL fighters, but it required the enemy to fire the first shot, which wasn’t an optimal solution. If they didn’t find a better way, they were going to be whittled down to nothing before getting there.
* * *
“They don’t look like much, do they?”
The Gimp warp disruptor, some ten meters long, was not particularly impressive. It was a modified 314mm graviton cannon, the kind of weapon you’d find on the main batteries of Gimp destroyers or their wimpier cruiser classes. Lisbeth could provide chapter and verse of the gun’s main stats without bothering to Woogle it. The basic design had undergone some serious modifications, though. There were dozens of attachments along the gun tube that didn’t serve any purpose she could understand. She was there in the hope that the grinning lieutenant giving her the nickel tour would provide the answers she needed.
A fabber section aboard the repair ship Wayland had been turned over to an impromptu research team working on the disruptor problem while Third Fleet did repairs. Lisbeth and Grinner had taken some time off from the other million things they needed to do and gone to take a firsthand look at the results that Lieutenant Miranda had allegedly achieved.
“We were lucky with this piece,” the Engineering officer said, affectionately patting the gun barrel. “It’s the only intact disruptor we’ve found so far.”
Lisbeth nodded. Shuttles weren’t meant to trade shots with starships. Most ‘fighters’ had been blasted into very small pieces during the battle.
“As you can see, they took a standard GIAP-4300b and added these spacetime distorters,” the lieutenant explained. “I’m sure that you are aware that similar devices are used to create warp apertures by bombarding a volume of space with artificial gravity until the proper conditions are created.”
And if I wasn’t, you sure as hell just educated me, she thought, suppressing a snort. A lot of techie types thought Marines or any fighting Navy personnel were a few notches below trained bears.
“Against a normal target, the modified beam is far less effective than a regular graviton beam,” the officer went on. “This weapon system only generates about half the destructive power of a normal 314mm weapon. What it does instead is create the preconditions for a breach in spacetime. Normally, that would produce no appreciable effects, unless it interacts with an already-existing aperture, such as a ship making or leaving transit, or a warp shield. In that case, the beam adds energy to the event, destabilizing it and causing a variety of possible effects. Anything from a rapid increase in aperture size to a random jump to a different point than originally intended to a complete collapse of the tunnel at both points.”
“We’d figured as much. Anything we can do to counteract it?”
“Warp shields can be adjusted to remain stable even with the extra influx of gravitons. It will require more personnel to monitor them and reduce power when necessary. They will also need to reduce their coverage to prevent unexpected enlargements.”
“Better than no shields at all.”
“Indeed. Another piece of good news is that the disruptor will not affect your gunships’ hybrid shields at all. The outer layer is a standard force field; it will isolate the warp elements from the disruptor’s effects.”
“That is good news.” Maybe not worth coming all the way here, but still.
“And there is more,” Miranda added, playing showman and clearly saving the best for last.
If this isn’t absolutely GREAT news, buddy, I’m going to look into ways to mess you up. It never paid off to annoy a superior officer, even from a different branch of service.
Something in her expression must have betrayed her thoughts, or the lieutenant must have been sensitive enough to pick them up, because he rushed to finish what had clearly been planned as a lengthy dog and pony show.
“Uh, fortunately it turns out that this sort of weapon existed at the time of the Kraxan Wars. Which our research team has been studying. The translations aren’t great, but after some…” He cut himself off and cut to the chase. “In any case, the Mind-Killer devices aboard your gunships can detect and be tasked to fire automatically on any disruptor that shoots at them. And since their effect is instantaneous, it will strike the fighter’s crews before the disruptor beam reaches your ship. Which in any case wouldn’t affect you when you are in normal space.”
“And those fighter crews won’t be warp rated,” Lisbeth finished for him. “The Gimps don’t have enough of those to put on slower-than-light shuttles. The Mind-Killers will slaug
hter them.”
She didn’t like the Marauder weapon, which was designed to murder the warp-blind who comprised the vast majority of most sophonts in the galaxy. The system was mostly useless against starships, since their crews were all warp-rated, but it would do the trick against the Foxtrots. Which made her like it just a little better.
“Thank you, Lieutenant. I will inform the admiral that you and your department have found an effective countermeasure.”
The officer relaxed visibly. Lisbeth barely noticed it, busy with her own thoughts.
We’ve got them.
And maybe Kerensky’s renegades wouldn’t figure out how to deal with the Gimp weapons before it was too late. It’d be nice, to have the Black Ships destroyed by aliens, sparing Third Fleet from firing on fellow Americans.
It’d be nice, but I’m not counting on it.
Angels might be on Third Fleet’s side, but the renegades had their own spiritual guides.
Twelve
Star System Sokolov, 169 AFC
Nicholas Kerensky smashed his fists against his desk, screaming in incoherent rage.
They’d made him run. Destroyed one battlecruiser and seventeen fighters. And there was a high chance that their withdrawal point had been spotted, providing the Gimps with the means to follow his fleet to their base at Sokolov.
He screamed again, images from the battle still burning brightly in his mind. The swarm of modified shuttles that had lain in ambush for him and struck without warning. The massive warp malfunctions that had turned their shields against them, throwing his ships back into transit and scattering them in all directions. The USS Isaac Chauncey had been ghosting when the enemy fighters hit it: the ensuing fluctuations had critically weakened the ship’s structural integrity, tearing it apart. The Warplings that hovered near the Black Ships hadn’t hesitated to feed on the Chauncey’s crew, either. Kerensky could still hear the mental screams of the ship’s four thousand spacers as they were consumed body and soul by their putative allies.
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