In Dread Silence (Warp Marine Corps Book 4)

by C. J. Carella

  Nobody was supposed to be home, and their landing spot was supposed to have been ‘prepared’ by burning everything on it from orbit. but ‘supposed’ had a nasty way of turning into ‘oops,’ and ‘oops’ into a ‘We regret to inform you’ e-mail to your next of kin. So the skipper had decided to play it like it was for real.

  The reinforced squad came out of the shuttle running, following imp-highlighted icons towards preassigned spots. Russell caught a glimpse of gunmetal-gray skies and a pale sun overhead, but mostly looked where he was going. Sometimes the sensors got things wrong and if you blindly followed your imp’s directions you could run right off a cliff. Not this time, though. He had a clear path to a rock outcropping overlooking the near-sheer wall of the big hill they’d landed on. The rocky surface had been scoured clean with low-intensity plasma, hot enough to reduce anything organic to ashes without melting stone. Any dangerous critters on their landing zone were gone.

  Everyone in his fireteam knew what he was doing; the three of them reached their firing position and set up their Widowmakers and portable force field without any problems. A couple of infantry squads had debouched from another pair of shuttles; they and the Weapons squad formed a perimeter while swarms of recon drones released during the shuttles’ final descent scanned every square millimeter of the ground around them, looking for any surprises.

  Nothing. They were on a flat-topped hill overlooking a long valley with a river running down its middle. The valley around them had been full of big trees or giant mushrooms, but they were all gone now, burned down from orbit. The drones’ visual feed showed clumps of carbonized biomatter that was all that remained of any large trees and animals. The smaller critters were scattered ashes, just like anything that had been hanging around their LZ. Always nice to have a starship do all the heavy lifting for a change.

  “Clear,” Sergeant Fuller said over the squad channel. “But nobody relax just yet.”

  Nobody did. First and Third Platoons had landed first; their job was to secure the LZ for the rest of Charlie Company, a full complement of Light Assault Vehicles, and a tank platoon. Once they were down, the rest of the shore party from the Humboldt would follow up: a Marine Engineer platoon, a bunch of bubbleheads, a handful of civvies and their one-and-only warp witch.

  He wondered what his personal witch would make of this place as he kept his eyes on his assigned fire sector; so far, all he could see were the burnt-out remains of a forest covering the valley floor. There were no ETs in the area, but something was making weird warp emissions, so there could be all kinds of crap hiding in the planet. The briefings had been pretty sparse, and this time it probably was because the top brass had no clue what was down here, rather than their love for giving grunts the mushroom treatment: kept in the dark and fed a steady diet of horseshit.

  Word was they were looking for more ships like the one Major Zhang had used to maul a dozen Lamprey warships during the Battle of Xanadu. That weird-ass ship had been made with the bones of some ancient race of super-aliens. The kind of shit you expected to see in a Warner-Disney flick, but for real. Wonders never ceased.

  “Guess nobody’s home after all,” Gonzo muttered. Russell’s partner in crime sounded almost bored.

  “Nothing on the drone sensors, at least,” Grampa said. His job, when he wasn’t lugging the field genny and extra power packs for the fireteam, was to act as a spotter, and he was scanning the area below, poring over the data stream from the drones overflying the area. “Plenty of animals, some of them pretty big, but no people.”

  “Fine with me,” Russell said. “Even the Navy can handle beasties and plants.If the beasties ain’t too big. Or the plants ain’t too smart, that is.”

  “Don’t go and jinx us, man,” Grampa said. He sounded a little nervous.

  “This is your first exoplanet landing, right?”

  “Other than a couple weekends on Mars during training, yeah,” the Earth-born old-timer said. “And Mars isn’t much to look at. Great parasailing, though.”

  “Sol System don’t count.”

  “In that case, nope. Earth and local space all the way. Never felt the urge to leave the home office and go where no man has gone before and all that good shit. Didn’t even like sci-fi, back in the day.”

  ‘Back in the day’ was before First Contact, when the first aliens to visit Earth had bombed the shit out of it. Grampa was old as dirt, not that you could tell unless he stopped dying his hair and let its natural white color show. He’d grown up believing aliens and starships were make-believe.

  “So how’s it feel to be living in a sci-fi movie?” Gonzo asked him.

  “You get used to it after a while. Lately, though, it’s beginning to feel like we’re all living in a horror show.”

  “Shit,” Gonzo said. “Now you’re gonna jinx us.”

  Old guy had a point, though. Digging through some dead planet for ships made of alien bones sounded just like the kind of story where monsters picked your group off one by one until only the chick with the nicest tits was left. Russell and his fellow Marines had fought zombies not too long ago, and that had been too much like a horror show for his liking, too.

  “I don’t care what kind of movie this is,” Russell said, figuring he’d help lighten the mood. “If we’re in it, it’ll end the same way.”

  “How’s that?”

  “The Devil Dogs killed ‘em all. The End.”

  Everyone laughed, even though they knew Russell was full of shit. But even fake gung-ho was better than biting your fingernails and letting the bad shit get to you. There were plenty of reasons to worry. The company was on its own, with nothing but a converted battlecruiser for overhead support. On top of that, they were a hell of a long way from any reinforcements or supply. It’d taken three warp jumps from Xanadu System to get to this mudball. The trip to get there had lasted two months of real time and thirty-one hours of warp transit, and nobody would come looking for them, not with the biggest war in American history going on.

  For all they knew, the war was already lost and good ole planet Earth was as empty as this fucking mudball.

  “Kill bodies,” Gonzo added.

  “Oorah.” Grampa almost sounded like he meant it.

  Sometimes gung-ho was all you had.

  * * *

  Six Kranxan War Galleons made a slow descent towards the cheering crowd.

  Each vessel had been grown, not built. Great sea creatures had been bred to reach impossible sizes, gene-engineered to withstand the rigors of outer space, and finally exposed to the Starless Path to further mutate them. Their outer shells were suffused with heavy metals and could turn a heavy plasma bolt without damage; their insides had plenty of cavities in which to store engines, power plants and other systems, as well as humid and warm compartments for the crews operating them. Her human mind, trying to make sense of the obscene masses coming closer, saw them as something like demonic snails, five hundred meters long and nearly as wide, festooned with energy weapons and trailing long tentacles ending in gripping claws.

  The Kranxans on the ground were even more grotesque than in previous visions. These were the culmination of millennia of insanity made flesh. By this point, the Marauders had learned how to drag their victims into the Starless Realm and alter them physically as well as mentally. Their latest – and last – fashion had consisted of wearing the still-living bodies of their victims, much like normal sophonts wore clothes. Each Kranxan citizen-soldier was an amalgam of two, three or as many as five bodies, with useful limbs and organs from other species grafted on for biological advantages or simply for decoration. They watched the treasure-laden living hulls through multiple sets of eyes, each absorbing different light spectra; the resulting composite view would have been enough to induce madness on any being not already insane. She was forced to listen to the sound of thousands of monsters laughing, each using two or more mouths apiece.

  The first Galleon reached the paved surface of the great plaza. A sphincter-door open
ed, and its precious cargo poured out.

  Hundreds of alien prisoners, of a species she hadn’t seen before were thrown onto the ground, expelled by compressed air like so many spitballs. About half of them had died in transit, but the rest were alive and making noises she knew were cries of horror and agony; their eight limbs flailed weakly as they landed.

  The awaiting crowd surged over their prey, eager to feast.

  There were no words in most languages for what happened next.

  Lisbeth sat up with a start and tried not to scream. Atu’s calming presence in her head kept her from going into all-out hysterics, but it was close.

  “Are you all right?”

  The man sitting next to her in the shuttle was giving her the Look. The one that meant he wasn’t sure if she was going to start howling or ripping people’s faces off. She’d gotten all-too-familiar with the Look.

  Why the hell did they put me with the civilians?

  Lisbeth knew why: she was too valuable to risk on the front lines, so they’d kept her aboard the Humboldt until the landing zone had been secured, and then sent her down with the other VIPs, which included the six civvies they’d brought along. She’d much rather have been surrounded by her fellow Marines. They might not know exactly why she was freaking out, but they at least understood about people freaking out for no apparent reason.

  “Sorry,” she said. She’d been saying that a lot. “But yes, I’m okay.”

  “If you say so,” Professor Bell replied, relaxing minutely in his seat. “I understand you are still suffering from temporal dislocation episodes.”

  “Pretty much. Jumping back and forth. Sometimes way back. It can be a little confusing.”

  “Of course,” the older man said, trying to sound sympathetic. He was too tense and nervous to pull it off, even if Lisbeth hadn’t picked up on his surface emotions. She didn’t do much mind-reading, because for one it wasn’t so much mind-reading as mind-blending, which was almost as bad as the temporal dislocation stuff. It was too easy to get sucked into other people’s way of looking at things.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said, putting a little Marine gung-ho attitude in her voice, and that seemed to reassure the civvie a little more.

  “Of course,” he repeated. “It’s a pity that your ability to look into the distant past is restricted to a rather unsavory species.”

  “You can say that again.”

  Professor Gustav Bell was a galactic archeologist, which made him a member of a small and largely ignored group among Earth’s scholars. There was just too much galactic history to study, so most people didn’t bother. Nobody could get a handle on it, nor any database or computer for that matter. The oldest Woogle equivalent they’d found, in the Habitat for Infinite Diversity the US had recently seized, only covered some three hundred thousand years, and the stuff older than a hundred millennia was woefully incomplete. Even so, there was enough information in that database to keep every historian in human space busy for the rest of their multi-century lives.

  Bell was a rarity, a rocks-and-ruins kind of guy who wanted to go to strange planets and poke at the bones of dead civilizations. There wasn’t much call for that kind of stuff in the US, and even less funding available for it. The only reason he and the other weirdos had gotten this all-expense trip courtesy of Uncle Sam was that they knew the proper procedures to find and unearth ancient remnants from past ages. His specialty was in Starfarer ruins. That sort of archeology had a few practical applications: when a civilization Transcended or was destroyed, it occasionally left behind bits of high technology that might be better than the current state of the art. Which meant the archeologist was also versed in assorted types of engineering, materials science and advanced technology. Those skills would come in handy.

  Bell was okay. She could tell that much without delving too deeply into his thoughts. His boss, on the other hand, wasn’t. Lisbeth glanced at the big guy with the crazy hair, currently filling two front row seats by his lonesome. Munson, his name was, the nerd in chief. She’d met him at the preliminary briefing in Starbase Malta, and they hadn’t liked each other from the get-go. He had a set of t-wave implants, making him the only one other than Heather McClintock. He’d caught a few glimpses of her psyche and all its major malfunctions, and that was bad enough. Even worse, he had blocked her attempts to see what was going on under all the crazy hair.

  The second he does something to endanger the mission, I’m going to shoot him. She’d seen too many flicks where the crazy scientist ruined everything, and she was in no mood to go through one of those in real life.

  Lisbeth realized she’d been quiet too long and Professor Bell was giving her another Look, although a slightly kinder version.

  On the other hand, I’m playing the role of crazy non-scientist. Maybe someone will have to shoot me.

  “I have seen a few things about this planet,” she admitted. She didn’t go into any details, though: the poor guy might not take it well. “I might be able to pick up more once we’re down on the ground. Between that and your team, maybe we can find what we’re looking for.”

  “Those Corpse-Ships of yours,” Bell said. His face briefly twisted with something that might be revulsion or fear. “I’ve seen the footage from the Battle of Malta. It was…” He trailed off.

  “Yeah,” she said. “It was something else. And the Kranxans weren’t nice people, even by Starfarer standards.”

  “Some standards. Most civilizations seem to have less ethics than the Roman Empire or the German Nazis, to use human yardsticks. Ruthless exploitation and casual genocide.”

  “Pretty much.”

  She found himself liking the guy. A lot of academics thought humans were the worst at everything, despite all the evidence to the contrary. They didn’t go around saying those things out loud, of course, since tenure had gone the way of the dodo and lifetime pension plans, and people got fired for spouting off that crap. But they thought it, and aired their opinions out in subtler ways. Professor Bell, on the other hand, actually meant what he was saying. Lisbeth was a living lie detector even when she didn’t mean to. That had made her like people even less.

  “Well, the Kranxans were worse. A death and torture cult. They didn’t just kill for profit or convenience. It was their main form of entertainment, plus a source of power.”

  “There are some parallels in Earth’s cultures. The Aztecs, for one. The Romans delighted in murder and torture as spectator sports, too.”

  “Sure. And the Kranxans made them all look like the Boy Scouts. Trust me.”

  She paused, fighting off another flashback before it overwhelmed her. The Marauders’ record storage systems were more like living memories, or even outright time travel. You didn’t so much read or view their history as you experienced it, and she’d experienced enough to drive her nuts even without all the other crap that had rained down on her during the worst diplomatic mission ever.

  “I’m sorry if I’m dredging up bad memories,” Bell said. He was a pasty, soft-faced guy. His big brown eyes would have been more fitting for a critter at a petting zoo. He looked unsure of himself, as if trying to console someone was beyond his core programming. The feelings she sensed from him were mixed: apprehension fighting with curiosity and sympathy.

  “If there’s any species in the universe that needed killing, these bastards were it. Worse than the Snakes or the Lampreys.”

  The Kranxans hadn’t just committed atrocities, they had somehow tainted warp space itself for eons to come. The Starless Path had never been a very nice place, but the Marauders had turned it into a constant horror show. And she was leading the way in an expedition meant to poke around their remains, trying to uncover their secrets. She wasn’t crazy enough to think it was a good idea.

  On the other hand, her idea had gotten her out of Venus, and it might save humanity in particular and the galaxy in general. So maybe it wasn’t so bad after all. Assuming it all worked as she’d planned.

  “Well, looks
like we’re here,” Bell said.

  The shuttle shuddered as it landed. It didn’t plummet like the ones bearing the Marines charged with prepping the LZ, but it hadn’t done a slow majestic descent, either. It was never a good idea to loiter in an unknown airspace.

  “This mesa doesn’t look natural.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “The locals cut off the top of a hill and flattened it. They also treated the rock floor with something that still inhibits plant grown, thousands of years later. That’s why clearing the brush off it was so easy.”

  The flat hill was also big enough to house all three hundred or so visitors, and high enough off the ground that any dangerous critters in the area would find it difficult to come visit them. At least the smaller ones. The sensors had picked up a few that might be able to scale the forty-meter tall sheer walls of the mesa. But all the big beasties nearby had been burned out, and if any more wandered into the area, a shuttle or a grav tank would take care of them.

  They were all in danger, though. She’d known that back in Venus, but it hadn’t deterred her from coming here, or bringing all these people along with her, including some friends. They had to do this, risks or not.

  “Repulsive culture or not, I’m dying to see what a quarter-million-year-old Starfarer city looks like,” the professor said.

  I hope it doesn’t come to that, she thought.

  “Hope in one hand and shit on the other, Christopher Robin, Atu whispered in her ear. “And see which hand fills up first.”

  * * *

  Fromm went over the camp’s dispositions one more time, trying to find a reason for the unease he felt.

  “Everything looks good,” he forced himself to say.

  Lieutenant Hansen and First Sergeant Goldberg nodded, but neither of them looked very reassured. They were as worried as he was, and like him they couldn’t figure out why.