One thing she knew without question, however: this was the face of evil. Its existence was based on the hunger for life and the infliction of suffering, suffused with hatred and mindless rage. It wanted to hurt all things. It needed to hurt all things. One could not parlay with such a thing. Only destruction would put an end to it.
“Highly unbalanced,” Atu the Pathfinder said behind Deborah, startling a cry of shock from her.
“Don’t do that, Pooh!”
“My apologies, Deborah Grinner Genovisi. It took some effort to break through the decision-making blocks the Flayer had created around your mind, and in my haste I failed to forewarn you.”
“You mean this time-freeze thing?”
“As you know, time doesn’t function in the same way as it does in relativistic space. The Great One is delaying your actions, but only from a subjective point of view. When you act, assuming you survive long enough to do so, no time will have passed in relation to the physical universe. This is the best description of your situation I can provide, given your language’s dependency on linear time as perceived by sophonts at your level of development.”
“I see. Now that I can act, what do you suggest I do? Where’s Lisbeth?”
Colonel Zhang hadn’t shared her full plan with the rest of the squadron, which in retrospect had been a pretty bad idea. Deborah knew they were supposed to take their ships into the aperture, where something would be done to stop it. But what?
“She has been detained by the Flayer, who is trying to seduce her into its service. When it fails to do so, it will destroy all of you.”
“Which brings me back to my first question.”
“The weaponry aboard your vessel will only provide an annoyance to the Flayer. However, your mind can serve as a conduit for an entity capable of matching it. One you have met before.”
She’d been praying to Him. Had been ever since her encounter during that hopeless jump. But He hadn’t answered.
“The angel.”
“Yes, although that term does not fully convey what the entity in question embodies. What is important, however, is that its power vastly exceeds the Flayer’s. Securing its intervention would greatly contribute to restoring Balance to the Path.”
Deborah was struck by one of her premonitions. She understood what Atu was asking her to do and, more importantly, the price it would entail.
“I can call Him. Can I? I’ve tried before, and it’s been about as effective as praying ever is,” she finished bitterly.
“You have just expressed two mistaken notions, but there is no time to disabuse you of them. The third one is correct. You can call upon the Michael entity. By doing so here, you will allow it to cross onto this level of the Path, and reach its Adversary. The ensuing confrontation will help balance out much of what has transpired here.”
“But there is a price.”
“Both entities demand a sacrifice. The Flayer demands its servants sacrifice others to further its ends. And Michael demands its followers sacrifice themselves.”
Her ability to sense the future showed her everything she would be giving up, all the things that would have happened in a slightly-different universe. Perhaps a different version of herself would have the chance to do those things, and be reunited with this Deborah at the end all of things. Or not.
“Show me what to do.”
* * *
“Dear God,” Sondra Givens whispered.
Three enemy battlecruisers staggered out of warp space, and blew up seconds later. Both Third Fleet and the Imperium forces were no longer engaging the Black Ships, so those ships either self-destructed or something had gone terribly wrong during the boarding actions. Close to three battalions’ worth of her troops were aboard those vessels. Twelve hundred Marines had just died before her eyes.
“Enemy fire is flagging all along the battle wall, ma’am.”
The surviving renegades were too busy fighting off the boarding parties to fight their ships, she supposed. If they followed in the battlecruisers’ footsteps, she would win, but at a terrible cost. Assuming, of course, that the giant gateway shut down at some point. More Warplings were emerging from that gaping wound in spacetime. So far their combined firepower had destroyed the monsters as quickly as they arrived, but the aperture kept growing, and the Gal-Imps were running low on missiles. That was too bad; Sondra had been glad to be on the right side of a Sun-Blotter swarm for a change. Watching a seemingly-endless stream of ship-killers shredding the giant monstrosities had helped buttress her eroding sanity. Whatever those things were, they weren’t all-powerful. Their embodiments were immensely strong, but they broke after enough force was applied. They weren’t supernatural. They could be killed.
Doesn’t mean they won’t kill us all if enough of them come over to this side.
Most Warplings hadn’t lived long enough to fire their energy blasts, but every time one of them did they scored critical hits. The Thermopylae was limping along at one-quarter flank speed; three of its six main power plants had been shut down to avoid integrity losses that would have turned the entire dreadnought into a cloud of sublimated matter. The shields keeping the minds of her crew safe were holding, however, and her main guns were still in play, and that was all that mattered. Third Fleet’s flagship kept fighting. A flotilla of Imperium STL monitors from Primus-One joined the fray. The heavily-armed vessels had nearly burned out their graviton drives in a mad interplanetary dash; their energy and missile broadsides were welcome additions.
The Gimps can fight, Sondra admitted to herself. I can understand why Kerensky was driven into despair after facing them.
She could sympathize with her friend, and even understand the reasons that had led to the mutiny and the devil’s deal with the Warplings. God only knew if she’d have been able to resist the temptation to do the same if she’d been in his shoes. None of that would stop her from doing her duty here, however.
I wish we could have spoken one last time, old friend.
The Black Ships hadn’t tried to parley; they’d come out of warp, weapons hot, ready to fight. She doubted Kerensky would be inclined to negotiate even now that Marine boarders were a within a few meters of the Odin’s CIC. Maybe it was for the best.
“Ma’am, we’re detecting unknown warp signatures coming from inside the Odin.”
And maybe her old friend still had one more card to play.
* * *
“Something’s happening,” one of the grunts from Charlie-Two said.
“How about you tell us what you’re seeing, boot?” Russell growled at him. Before the outraged newbie could reply, he peeked through his video feed. “Never mind, I can see for myself.”
His fireteam was huddled around the corner from the guys on point. They were in a cleared passageway, still hot enough after a plasma shower to make the air shimmer a little. The grunts on point had been trading fire with a pack of rebels while the rest of the squad took a breather before moving to flank the enemy. But now something was going on with the enemy. Looking through the grunt’s feed, Russell saw a multicolor display flashing inside the compartment they were about to assault. The kind of weird colors you got when someone was dropping from warp.
“We supposed to get reinforcements?”
“Don’t think so, Russet.”
“Then we’re about to get company. The shitty kind.”
Even through the steady crackle of gunfire, they all heard the screams coming from the enemy sector. Whatever was happening over there, the rebels weren’t liking it one bit.
“Move out!”
The fireteam followed the imps’ projected vectors and began the flanking maneuver. A bulkhead was in their way, but the guys from Two were loaded with breaching rounds. A few short bursts from their Iwos made a man-sized hole. Back at the main group, the shooting got more intense. Things were getting hot over there, but Russell didn’t have time to sneak a peek through their sensors, not when they were about to make contact on their end. You could get ki
lled trying to see everything that was going on instead of focusing on the shit in front of you.
They blew through two doors before reaching the section that led to the enemy. Grampa sent out their last recon drone. It flittered around the corner and spotted a couple rebel Marines standing behind a porta-shield, fifteen meters ahead. A moment later, something vaporized the drone and went on to blow a hole through at least one bulkhead. It looked like a grav beam, but bigger and nastier than anything the deserters had in their inventory.
“The fuck was that?” Gonzo asked.
“No clue.” Nothing in the Marines’ TOE fired large-bore beams of pure white energy. It’d flashed so brightly Russell’s anti-glare systems had nearly overloaded. Whatever that was, it was bad news.
“You’re up, Grampa.”
The old-timer rounded the corner, area shield ready, with Russell and Gonzo behind him. Two energy blasts hit the force field; Russell saw the counter go from a hundred to forty-seven in the time it took him to level his flamer and let them have it. The yellow glare of plasma filled the hallway. He let it pump for three seconds, just to be safe.
Return fire drained their shield to fifteen percent. What the fuck?
“Back around the corner!” Russell yelled. The fireteam made it back just as their area force field was knocked down. The two traitors were still up and shooting after eating a double dose of plasma. And according to Russell’s sensors, they were moving forward. Wasn’t possible, but it was happening anyway.
“Grenades,” he told the grunts from Second. Two of them pulled out hand grenades – one frag and one plasma – and rolled them down the hallway. One of them almost lost a hand when one of the rebs took a shot at him with those massive beams.
Grenades had micro-cameras mounted on them. The Marines took a gander during the three seconds between arming and detonation. Nobody liked what they saw.
Both enemy Marines had been deep-fried by the plasma burst. The two figures walking towards them were little more than half-melted suits of armor. One was missing one arm; the other its head. Their weapons were gone, and they couldn’t possibly be alive, let alone walking forward. One of them looked at one of the grenades, and a multicolor light flashed in front of it. The grenade blew up instantly.
“They don’t have guns,” Grampa said in a calm voice that didn’t match his vital signs. “But they are shooting energy beams at us. Out of where?”
“Out of their ass. Who gives a fuck? Fall back,” Russell told them. “Grampa, set up by the door behind us and reload the gennie; we’re gonna need it.”
While the rest of the assault element pulled back, Russell and Gonzo filled the junction with more plasma. Without a shield to protect them, they felt the heat and drained their personal force fields a bit, but hopefully that second helping of hellfire would take care of the undead traitors. They didn’t wait to find out, though.
They were running towards the fallback position while a single enemy blip made it to the corner. They hit the ground when they saw their side leveling Iwos at the zombie behind them. Four Marines fired long bursts of 4mm, punctuated with several grenade blasts. Russell crawled forward while bullets and energy crackled overhead, expecting to get killed at any second, but he and Gonzo reached the safety of the portable shield. He finally glanced back and saw that the walking corpse had finally dropped. Very little remained of what once had been an armored grunt.
“The fuck was that?” Gonzo asked again.
“I think it was a zombie.”
“Again?”
Russell looked at the scattered remains of the critter. It’d walked through a squad’s worth of firepower and almost gotten them.
“Worst zombie yet.”
* * *
Fromm watched his Marines do battle with enemies that wouldn’t die. Enemies that created warp micro-apertures that released impossibly-powerful energy discharges. The renegade humans had become something else. Bad memories from the expedition at Redoubt-Five went through his mind as he looked over the tactical situation. The transformed rebels were concentrated around the bridge, protecting the leading mutineers. The area Charlie Company had been assigned, in other words.
All he had left in reserve was the assault section from Charlie-Three. It was time to play the last cards in his hand.
“With me,” he told the nine assaultmen. They shouldered their missile launchers and followed him towards the fighting. Desperate times called for desperate measures.
With a minimum arming range of twenty meters, LML-10s weren’t very practical for shipboard operations, but they’d brought the weapons along to handle strongpoints, and the enemy’s warp-based energy attacks had punched massive holes on doors and bulkheads, conveniently providing the missile teams with useful lanes of fire. The only problem was living long enough to deploy and shoot the weapons.
The portable force fields the boarding party had brought along were proving to be insufficient against the possessed crewmembers’ energy beams. Marine casualties were mounting up, and the other forces tasked with taking the Odin were heavily engaged elsewhere. If Fromm’s men could take the bridge, they could help everyone else overrun the ship with minimal additional casualties. They would just have to be a little unorthodox to get the job done.
The missile team reached a passageway junction, waited until a force field was set in place, and stepped into the line of fire. Blasts of blindly white energy struck the shields, but they held – just barely – long enough to fire one volley. The assaultmen rushed back into cover the moment the self-guided projectiles left the launching tubes. One of them didn’t make it before the area field failed; the man – PFC Corrigan – screamed briefly and died.
Fromm looked at the mutilated remains, barely noticing the ship shaking beneath his feet as the thermobaric missiles filled the enemy compartment with explosive gas and ignited it. He only looked up when a cloud of flames filled the junction and was barely held at bay by the second set of force fields protecting his section. The enemy icons disappeared all the way to the ship’s bridge; several icons there also vanished.
“Charlie-Actual to all Charlie elements: advance towards the bridge.”
He led the way.
* * *
Lisbeth Zhang felt Atu’s presence nearby.
“We are good to go, Christopher Robin.”
She smiled at the Flayer’s human mask. “No deal, asshole.”
The Warpling’s human form disappeared, and she found herself confronting the Flayer in its true form, or as close as her mortal perceptions could make of it. It was large and fractal, and extended into multiple dimensions, including time. On some level, this encounter would play on forever, Lisbeth realized with a thrill of terror. Win or lose, a part of her mind would relive this moment for all of eternity, and that terrible knowledge almost caused her to give up right then and there.
She didn’t, of course.
The three parts of her soul – human, Pathfinder and Marauder – struck as one, and even something as great and powerful as the Flayer could not withstand that assault with impunity. The vast ever-shifting construct recoiled in surprised agony. For one brief moment Lisbeth thought she might win this fight without help. The next moment, pure burning agony paralyzed her; Vlad went into psychic convulsions and even Atu screamed in torment. The ant had bitten the toddler, but the toddler had crushed the ant.
Hungry.
There were no further attempts to communicate. The Warpling cast aside all its masks, including the pretense of sapience, and behind them there were only wants and desires. Reason and thinking were simple tools to satisfy its cravings, no longer necessary now that Lisbeth had declined to be used and was available for consumption. In the end, that was all it was. Hungry. As she felt herself being dragged towards the Flayer’s ravening maw, she understood this, too, would last forever.
NO.
This mental voice was louder and deeper than anything she’d heard before. It made the Flayer sound like a petulant child w
hining about a spilled ice-cream cone. Lisbeth became aware of a new presence, also reaching through multiple dimensions. Unlike the Flayer, she saw something so beautiful it hurt to look at it for more than an instant. Her pain and terror were washed away and she found herself reliving every good moment of her life in one continuous rush.
“So that’s what an angel looks like,” she said. Maintaining her staunch atheism was getting to be a pain in the ass. “Okay, super-powerful benign aliens,” she told her skeptic self. “So there.”
Whatever the new entity was, the Flayer wanted no part of it. The toddler had met an adult. It tried to run away, its fear washing over her like a wave of freezing water. Unfortunately for the monster, its attempt to consume Lisbeth had created a link between them, a link that she turned into an anchor of sorts that prevented it from escaping. By rights, her little ol’ self should have no chance to slow down the Warpling, let alone stop it, but impossible things were par for the course, here on the Starless Path. She held on like grim death, and felt the creature’s terror intensifying. Fear was the most human-like emotion she’d sensed from the Flayer. She found it very satisfying.
“Gotcha, fucker,” she said as the Archangel moved closer.
Nestled within Michael’s multidimensional wings was a human presence. Lisbeth recognized Deborah Genovisi. Grinner had led the Archangel to the right ‘place’ in warp space, using her connection to Lisbeth as a guide. Doing so had come with a heavy price, Lisbeth realized with a sinking feeling. Deborah wasn’t going to come back from this trip.
“Grinner!” Lisbeth called out to her fellow pilot.
“Take care, Zhang. Tell Russell I’m going to a better place. No bullshit.”
“He won’t believe me.”
“He will. I’ll make sure of it.”
And with that, Grinner was gone. Angel and demon – or Great Warpling and Greater Warpling – grappled with each other, and although there was no doubt as to who was stronger, or what the outcome would be, the contest would be long and brutal, and it was no place for mere mortals to watch. Lisbeth beat a hasty retreat. She dimly sensed the presence of the other two Corpse-Ships, frozen in time. She woke them up and ordered the remnants of her squadron to return to real space.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 150
