Camp Discovery was as secure as they could make it. In addition to his reinforced company, Fromm had a platoon of Marine Engineers, a full Navy medical section, and a good hundred Navy Spacers to do fetch-and-carry, and he’d put everyone to work. Self-building tents, enough to house everyone, were arrayed in neat rows on the mesa they had selected as their base of operations. The position was protected with a battalion-level set of force fields, more than enough to withstand several hours’ bombardment from a regiment of artillery or even an orbiting battlecruiser. A tank platoon gave him plenty of firepower of his own; about the only thing he was lacking was long-range artillery. In terms of actual fighting power, this was the strongest force he’d ever commanded, and with no major threats to face it.
The planet’s sophonts might have been legendary monsters, but they were long gone; no natives had been found anywhere on Redoubt-Five. The animals and some plants were nasty, but the few critters that had approached their position after the initial clearing operation had been dealt with easily enough. The lightest weapon in his company’s TOE, the 3mm pistols issued to rear echelon personnel or officers in dress uniform, would probably deal with all but the largest predators they’d seen so far. The next lightest, the trusty Infantry Weapon Mark 3, would kill anything else.
The atmosphere wasn’t perfectly suited to humans and there was some risk of contaminants and disease, but the Marines’ suits and armor provided full protection against bacteriological or chemical threats. The rest of the personnel in the shore party were wearing hazardous-conditions suits and personal force fields. Everybody was safe from anything the initial survey had found.
From the looks of it, sending a company-plus with the expedition had been overkill. A couple dozen master-at-arms Navy ratings would have been enough. Fromm didn’t mind, though. Very few military operations failed because they were assigned more forces than necessary, especially since it was often impossible to know just how many troops were needed beforehand.
The platoon of Marine Engineers would do most of the grunt work, assisted by the Humboldt’s crewmembers, while his shooters mostly stood around and tried to look busy. All things considered, this was the closest thing to a vacation Charlie Company had enjoyed since its deployment to Parthenon, almost three years back. His main concern should be finding ways to keep his Marines from trying to fight boredom by pulling off one idiotic stunt after another.
And yet, his instincts were telling him the expedition had walked into a trap, and he’d learned never to ignore them.
“We’ll have a full watch rotation,” he said. “And we’ll patrol aggressively around the perimeter. The Hellcats will have one squad out at any given time. I also want observation posts all around the valley.” He highlighted hills overlooking all possible avenues of approach. It was going to take most of his infantry to man those OPs, but he didn’t want any surprises.
“If anything looks at all dangerous, kill it.”
Both his XO and the company sergeant looked relieved to hear his orders. It might seem like overkill, but the setup felt right to them.
“The tank platoon and the combat shuttles will maintain continuous air coverage, working in shifts. We’ll hold the LAVs on the camp as a mobile reserve. I want at least two shuttles or tanks overhead at any time.”
Both the tanks and the Light Assault Vehicles that served as troop carriers had anti-gravity engines that allowed them to fly, although neither vehicle did so as quickly or easily as combat shuttles. They normally operated closely to the ground, since most likely enemies wielded weapons that could engage them anywhere over the horizon. Doing so in this case should be safe enough: if a high-tech force could conceal its presence from a survey ship’s deep scans, they were all screwed anyway.
“Yes, sir.”
“That leaves the warp signatures scattered around the planet. They seem to be the work of automated systems left behind by the locals. So far they don’t appear to pose a threat.”
Seem. Appear. Slippery words that he didn’t like one bit.
“Everybody in the expedition is warp-rated, obviously, and according to the Humboldt’s science officer, openings of the sizes they’ve detected don’t pose a physical threat.” Warp apertures didn’t form inside living beings; they were either big enough to swallow them whole or they didn’t affect them otherwise. “They might damage equipment, however, or cause minor explosions. And there might be psychological effects. Hallucinations and the like.”
“Like a bad warp jump,” Goldberg said.
“Correct. Nothing we haven’t been through before.”
“We can handle that, sir.”
“Very well. Dismissed.”
He might as well get some sleep. Alone, worse luck. Fromm couldn’t abuse his rank by enjoying a personal vacation with Heather.
The feeling of imminent danger wouldn’t go away, though, and he spent a good while tossing and turning in his cot.
* * *
The whispering was stronger now that they were on the planet’s surface, and Heather McClintock didn’t like it one bit.
She glanced at Lizbeth Zhang.
“Yeah, I feel it too.”
They were using regular imps, partially because t-waves might trigger something in the ruins, but also because Heather was worried about linking her mind with Lisbeth’s. The Marine pilot had been having flashbacks with increasing frequency, and the one time it’d happened when they were using telepathy had been… unsettling.
Unsettling, as in I may stop having nightmares about the Kranxans a few years after my death.
The Marauders made the Lampreys or even the Tah-Leen look harmless by comparison. Heather was in no rush to have them in their head. Studying the aliens’ ruins and artifacts with clinical detachment was a far better option. She set aside the ghostly mental sounds and looked around the dig site.
The combined efforts of Navy and Marine engineers had produced results very quickly. By mid-morning, they’d dug a large hole on top of the largest buried structure the orbital survey had discovered. The building in question was a cylinder a hundred meters wide and three hundred and fifty meters tall, still standing and completely buried by volcanic ash. About as big as the typical skyscrapers you could find in any major Starfarer city, except none of them would have survived intact for hundreds of millennia. Nothing should have.
A massive caldera five hundred kilometers to the west had produced the ash deluge that buried the city beneath their feet. A meteorite had struck there and reached deep into the planet’s mantle to trigger a volcanic eruption that must have wiped out most life on the planet, not to mention the local civilization. The meteorite had been a piece of Redoubt-Four, the world that had been reduced to scattered debris circling the system’s star.
Destroying a planet wasn’t difficult to do with Starfarer technology – all it took was finding a suitable asteroid and accelerating it into a collision course – but it was forbidden by the Elder Races, the legendary group of species whose technology or wisdom had turned them into something akin to mythological gods. Which meant that whoever had shattered Redoubt-Four had been punished for it – or that this was the work of the Elders themselves. She wasn’t sure which possibility was worse. Either someone had hated the Marauders enough to accept their own extinction as long as they could finish them off, or what passed for gods in the galaxy had condemned the last Kranxans to death. The latter possibility had been mentioned in some of the legends she’d studied in the vast databases of Xanadu.
Heather would be the first to admit there hadn’t been much to study. The Marauders’ decline and fall had happened ages before the Tah-Leen who’d compiled those records had risen to Starfarer status. All they had were third- or fourth-hand accounts, fragmentary at best and pure fantasy at worst. In them, the Kranxans had been described as demonic beings with miraculous powers. The Kranxans had been able to perform multiple warp jumps in the space of seconds – which human fighter pilots could already manage – and kill th
eir victims with their thoughts, which sounded like mumbo-jumbo until you discovered weapons like the Mind-Killer Lisbeth had used at Xanadu. Doctor Munson’s claim that the Marauders’ species name formed the root for several words for ‘evil’ had some evidence backing it up. A few Starfarer languages had lasted longer than the civilizations that first spoke them, and among them certain sounds and glyphs appeared to be related to the word ‘Kranx,’ at least if one was an expert linguist. In any case, if half of the myths about them were true, she couldn’t imagine how the Marauders had been defeated except by what passed for divine intervention in the known galaxy.
And here we are, trying to follow in their footsteps. Doesn’t sound like a recipe for a happy ending.
Once the tip of the cylinder – one might call it a tower – had been uncovered, the archeological team had wasted no time setting up a variety of devices to examine it. The Marine and Navy contingents were conducting their own scans, using every sensor system available. The Humboldt was on a stable orbit around Redoubt-Five, invisible in the local daylight and nothing but a bright dot in the sky at night; the ship began lashing the building with a constant stream of graviton scanning signals. They’d been at it for hours, and all they’d discovered was the basic outline of the tower; no sensory device had penetrated its outer walls so far, which was ominous enough. Throw in the whispered gibberish only Heather, Munson and Lisbeth could hear, and the whole thing began to feel like a trip to a haunted house.
The ‘voices’ were probably nothing but some sort of echo from dormant data storage systems. The Kranxan Corpse-Ship they’d encountered in Xanadu had used t-wave recording devices, still in working order after an impossible length of time. She wouldn’t be surprised to find similar systems on this planet. The microscopic warp events were most likely another manifestation of that technology, the equivalent of long-forgotten stone carvings.
Lisbeth agreed only in part. Her senses were more developed than Heather’s, and she thought at least some of the strange echoes they were picking up came from active, living minds. They would find out soon enough.
“We’ve reached the structure.”
“Stop everything!” Doctor Munson all but roared as he rushed towards the center of the pit, moving surprisingly fast for someone of his heft. Lisbeth and Heather were a few steps behind him.
A dark patch of polished material stood out amidst the dirt, looking shockingly untarnished by age. Even vivoconcrete would deteriorate with time, especially when buried underground: most nanite-based structures relied on solar energy to keep them running, with a power plant for backup. The Kranxans had used something else to keep the building in one piece.
Munson wielded a static dust remover with exaggerated care, delicately brushing off the last of the soil cover as if expecting the ancient surface to corrode away at any moment. Heather could have reminded the man that they would soon be blasting their way through the roof, but she decided to let him have a few seconds to play archeologist. He cleared a section about three meters wide. Just like the initial patch the engineers had unearthed, it was jet black and polished to a bright sheen; the volcanic ash, even after millennia of being compressed against its surface, hadn’t marked it in any way.
Heather picked up a flash of recognition from Lisbeth: the Kranxans’ Corpse-Ship had also been as dark as obsidian.
Most species with visual senses considered black to be a color to be feared, representing lightless places that could conceal danger. Like most truisms, it wasn’t universal, but wearing black was likely to make a bad first impression. Even without knowing the Marauders’ history, discovering a pillar of solid darkness the size of a skyscraper was a good indication they weren’t nice people.
Almost every Starfarer culture has legends involving Dark Towers, she thought idly while the team tried more scans, this time concentrating on the surface of the structure.
“Amazing,” Munson commented. “The material isn’t vivoconcrete. It looks like an arrangement of carbon crystals, but more complex than normal nanotubes or graphite alloys.”
“I’m getting some energy readings.” Professor Bell, an archeologist, had an expensive Puppy multi-scanner in his hand. “Graviton particles – too weak to be detected beyond close range, and they seem to be mostly contained within the structure itself. They might be what is interfering with our sensors.”
“It’s alive,” Lisbeth sent to Heather through their tachyon link, undetectable by the rest. “It’s asleep, but it’s alive.”
“What is? The whole building?”
“Uh-huh. I’m not sure what it is yet.”
“Maybe we should stop, then. Waking up sleeping giants rarely pays off.”
“Too late for that. I’m probably going to have to try to talk to it. Wanna join in?”
“I’d rather not,” Heather sent back, clamping down on her t-wave implants and shutting Lisbeth off. No way she was going to try to make telepathic contact with something that had been buried a few ice ages ago.
“Don’t blame you,” Lisbeth went on via her normal implants. “Let me give it a try.”
Even through her dampened implants, Heather sensed a link opening between the Marine and something below them. She looked back at the engineers and archeologists clearing the top of the building, half-expecting something terrible to happen. Her first impulse was to tell everybody to run away, but just as she was about to do so, Lisbeth piped in:
“It’s not very smart, I don’t think,” Lisbeth went on. “But it’s drawing power from the Starless Path. Microscopic links to warp space, the stuff we’ve been picking up. And it hasn’t noticed us yet. I’ll keep an eye on it.”
“I don’t like this. Do those systems include defenses? Anti-personnel weapons?”
“Knowing the Marauders, yes to both. Now that I’ve made contact, I’ll know it if anything goes active.”
“Please do.”
Heather used her imp to call Peter. He needed to know what was going on.
“We may have found the source for the warp activity on the planet,” she told him.
She explained what Lisbeth had discovered as the archeologists kept working, pausing every once in a while to marvel at the black material of the tower. The seamless surface looked brand-new, and whatever it was made of was totally impervious to gravitonic and sonic scanners. Just as she was done telling Peter, Professor Bell uncovered a section that was transparent – a skylight, perhaps – and shone a light into it.
“Jesus Christ.”
Rather than try to force her way past the gawking scholars, Heather broke into their imp feeds and looked through their eyes.
The transparent section was maybe a couple of inches thick. An unmistakable corpse was on the other side.
“Jesus Christ,” Bell repeated, backing up a step, the flashlight still focused on the dead alien.
Half its head had been crushed flat against the glass-like surface, but the rest was humanoid enough. It was a Kranxan, similar to other Class Two primate equivalents, based on the shape of its skull. Something was wrong with it, though.
“Light. We need more lights,” Doctor Munson said. Normal imp sensors couldn’t penetrate the gloom, but regular flashlights did, and more people backed away when they got a good look at the spectacle on the other side of the skylight.
The dead Kranxan wasn’t alone: the misshapen corpse was only one of dozens, hundreds. So many that the press of their bodies had pressed the ones on top against the unyielding transparent surface until their bones broke. Trampling people underneath the feet of a mob was common enough, but a crowd climbing up until they crushed each other against a ceiling was something else altogether. Some of the dead were frozen in the act of tearing into each other. As more lights peered through the clear wall, another thing became clear. Many of those bodies weren’t right, even when accounting for the injuries that had killed them.
“Look at them,” a female member of Munson’s team said breathlessly. “Just look at them.”
“Not like this.”
Samuels was right. Evolution hadn’t produced the creatures on the other side of the skylight. Most of them had grotesquely altered their bodies. Cybernetic limbs were in evidence, but most of the additional arms, tentacles and heads looked biological and somehow attached together like something out of a horror movie. Some had horns protruding from their heads, and many had more than one head. Heather saw mummified skulls with four or five eye sockets, often badly misaligned, and wondered what it would be like to see through them.
A few of the bodies were desiccated with age, little more than leathery skin over bones, but many others looked almost fresh, as if they’d died a few hours or days ago. Whatever had killed the Kranxans hadn’t spared enough microorganisms for biological decay.
The top floor was packed with well-preserved corpses. She wondered what the basement would look like.
Six
Capricorn System, Year 167
Kerensky’s grandmother had been twenty-one years old the day aliens burned down half the world.
She’d been working as a stripper in Charlotte at the time, one of the many women the Russian Federation exported all over the world to be used and discarded like so many consumable goods. Young Yelizaveta Nikolayevna Sokolov had been, in her own words ‘showing a lawyer a good time’ at The Gentlemen’s Club when fire domes began to blossom around the planet.
‘That was my last lap dance,’ she often would say with a nostalgic grin.
Yelizaveta had regaled her six children and fourteen grandchildren with many a hair-curling story about her escapades during the chaotic years following First Contact. When young Nicholas (Nikolai, his grandmother always called him) had been orphaned at age six, she had raised him. In all ways that counted, she had been his mother.
In Dread Silence (Warp Marine Corps Book 4) Page 14
