* * *
Emergence.
Flight B came out shooting: a cloud of superheated gas burst from the warp nacelle of the Gimp superdreadnought, marking the spot where six 20-inch blasts had struck. Gus kept his eyes on the target while he squeezed a second shot, hoping for the brighter flash that indicated a secondary explosion, but nothing happened; the only lights he saw were the multihued flickers from dozens of point-defense lasers slashing the space around the fighters. Time to vamoose.
Transition.
Hey, Gus. I’m still under your bed.
He didn’t have time for this. “Go to Hell.”
The Foo laughed. Where do you think you are?
Emergence.
Enterprise was illuminated by its warp shield and the flashes from nearby explosions. Missiles were arriving every few seconds, and the Big E’s CIWS batteries were taking them out a mere few hundred klicks away. Gus ignored the fireworks display as he went through docking maneuvers. Everyone on Flight B was present and accounted for, although SOL’s crate had a few scorch marks on its fuselage. Some of those lasers had gotten through. Things were getting hairy.
The Gimps were still suffering from warp shock, so most the shooting was being coordinated by automatic systems. That didn’t mean as much when it came to space defense artillery, which was mostly automated anyway. The ETs’ sensors were getting better at locating and engaging warp emergences, too. The only good news was that the aliens weren’t in a proper battle formation, with their cruisers and destroyers arrayed closely enough to engage fighters form multiple angles. When the tangos finally woke up, things were going to get a lot worse.
The grav grapples took Gus’ War Eagle and carried it to its cradle. Flight crew rushed forward and started working their magic. New power plant, new capacitor for the main gun, and a quick patch on a spot a laser had melted. Gus hadn’t noticed that. SOL wasn’t the only one who’d gotten singed on that pass.
“We’re going back to finish off Sierra-Seventeen,” Papa told them. “Us and First Squadron. We gotta take it out: that bastard is spewing five thousand missiles per volley, and it’s hurting our guys badly. So we’re going to stay on it until we splash it.”
They knew what that mean.
“We have to ghost, don’t we?” SOL said, being obvious as usual.
“Yep. We have to pour it on, and that’s the only way we’re going to do it.”
“Be nice if we got an assist from a battleship,” Gus pointed out.
“Almost half of them are gone or too damaged to fight,” Papa said.
“Already? Fuck.”
They’d caught the Gimps with their pants down, and they were still getting pounded. This wasn’t going to end well.
“It’s up to us,” the squadron leader went on. “If we don’t knock out the big missile platforms, we’re done for. So we ghost and we stay on target. What do you say?”
“Hooya.”
“I can’t hear you!”
“HOOYA! GO NAVY!”
There was a hysterical note in the mental shouts of the squad, but it was better than the feeling of doom that had been creeping up on them. If they were going down, they would do it screaming their defiance. Jarheads weren’t the only ones crazy enough to go into the fire with a smile on their faces.
“That’s better.”
“Cleared for launch,” the flight controller announced. “Starting countdown.”
Nobody mentioned the Foos that were circling the fighter pilots like so many sharks every time they went into warp. Navy pilots believed that talking about them made their appearance more likely. Superstitious, sure, but they were all surrounded by Fucking Magic, where the difference between superstition and good common sense was blurry or even nonexistent.
Transition.
Gus expected Monster Under The Bed to start talking to him as soon as he went in, but instead all he heard was laughter. Mocking, very human-sounding laughter. He ignored it and put his mind to the task at hand.
Non-Emergence.
Flights A and B hovered in the threshold between null-space and the ‘real’ universe and opened fire on the damaged but still operational superdreadnought. Sierra-Seventeen’s automated systems shot back, but the storm of lasers and plasma bursts had no effect. The War Eagles weren’t there, not really, but their graviton beams most definitely were. Five shots apiece: thirty battleship-grade corkscrews of singularity-level tidal forces tore through the Gimp’s outer and inner hulls, probing for the enemy’s vital systems. The final volley did the trick.
A torrent of pure whiteness washed over the fighters before they shuttered their warp apertures and returned to null-space. The dying souls of twelve thousand aliens followed them there.
Non-Transition. They had never left.
The newly-dead were all around Gus. He felt the aliens’ shock and terror, the echoes of their final agony buffeting him like hurricane winds. Sorrow and regret gnawed at him. That sort of thing had happened before, but never this badly. For a moment, he wanted to die. But only for a moment.
Not everybody was so lucky.
Gus and everyone else in Flight B stood by helplessly as a pack of Foos descended over Dan ‘Dude’ Kelsey. Grinner tried to reach him, but didn’t make it in time.
Commander Kelsey was devoured body and soul. His screams followed them all the way back.
Emergence.
Gus’ breath came out in ragged, harsh sobs. For several seconds, the only thing that mattered was the fact that Dude was dead and worse than dead, that his immortal soul had been seized by devils and consigned to the true darkness of deep warp.
“Bingo,” Grinner said.
He shook his head and savagely wiped the tears on his face.
“I’m here, Grinner. I’m okay.”
The overwhelming feelings were fading away, like memories of a bad dream. He knew how terrible those moments were, but in his head, not his heart. Which was a very good thing, or he wouldn’t have been able to go on living, let alone fighting. He focused on the here and now, and as he returned to the Enterprise he noticed the carrier had a jagged hole on its bow. A nasty one, big enough to fit a couple of fighters. A missile or heavy energy beam had gotten through. He could picture the rest: the fireball that would have consumed anybody unlucky enough to be near the breach, and the even less lucky bastards who’d been spared the flames but been sucked out into space by sudden decompression. Vac-suits were too cumbersome to be used for most ship duties, so those spacers had experienced death by hard vacuum. Nasty way to go.
Nothing like what Dude had suffered, though. Their horror had ended at some point. Gus wasn’t sure if Kelsey’s horror would ever end.
* * *
The battle still hung on the balance, and Kerensky decided it was time to go all-in.
More and more enemy crewmembers were beginning to recover from warp shock. Their reaction times and coordination were still sluggish, but were improving with every passing minute, and their missile launches were now under the control of live fire directors. The volleys were much smaller, but they were going after single targets, increasing the chance that some leakers would inflict damage.
Odin had been targeted by as many as twenty thousand missiles at a time; flagships always earned that dubious distinction, and they were always easy to single out because of the amount of comm traffic they generated. Both surviving superdreadnoughts had suffered a great deal of damage, and continued to be pounded by continuous barrages. By the same token, those ships had the most defenses, so the result had been a wash. The fate of the Athena served as a reminder that the heaviest defenses could be breached, however.
“New launch. Fifteen thousand vampires.”
“They’re running dry,” Kerensky said. “About damn time.”
The two fleets had been hammering at each other for over an hour, but the Imperium – the Lampreys were all gone except for a handful of drifting derelicts – had finally exhausted its missile reserves. It was time to play h
is final card.
A handful of fighter pilots had been left behind at Capricorn-Two, to serve as liaisons between Seventh Fleet and the tactical reserve Kerensky had left there: the Pan-Asian and Hrauwah contingents. All it took was a few orders and a few minutes: an additional fifty-three ships appeared from a new angle, effectively flanking the enemy force.
The Puppies were addled for a few seconds, but their missile magazines were full, and they volley-fired them at the surprised Gimps, while the Pan-Asians closed in behind their warp shields, their graviton batteries slashing into the surviving enemy capital ships. Neither formation would have survived for long under the hammer of Sun-Blotter missile swarms, but those were no longer a factor, and the new arrivals changed the balance of forces considerably.
The question is, will they change it enough?
Half of the enemy capital ships had been destroyed, but the remainder still out-massed and outgunned Seventh Fleet and the tactical reserve combined. The American formation was being savaged, and the enemy began to maneuver to counter the new threat. The Pan-Asians had warp shields, but the Hrauwah were going to suffer heavily when they started trading broadsides with the Gal-Imps. Their combined throw weight was a welcome addition, but even with them along, his fighter forces were the only factor that would win the battle, if the battle could be won at all.
This is it.
All his forces were committed. It was do or die time.
* * *
Everything the humans touch turns into bitter ashes.
King-Admiral Grace Under Pressure didn’t pause to reproach herself for the thought, an echo of her musings during her previous battle. The horrors that she was watching were too raw and immediate. Once again, if two other more rational or civilized combatants had been involved, one side would have fled into warp. This far from the star whose gravity imprint created the fractures in spacetime that allowed FTL travel, such maneuver would be extremely dangerous, but the losses the retreating fleet would have incurred would be much lower than the damage this battle had caused. Both combatants had been worse than decimated; losses on both sides already exceeded forty percent, with no end in sight. The Lampreys whose ships had comprised a mere auxiliary force had already been annihilated.
And I fear my own ancillary fleet will soon follow the same fate.
Fleet Admiral Kerensky had conducted a masterful ambush, and his use of humanity’s new warp witchery to coordinate multiple formations across vast distances was truly revolutionary, but the correlation of forces remained extremely adverse for the Americans.
Still, they did far better than the Wyrashat, Grace considered as her flotilla concentrated the fire of all its heavy guns on a single Gal-Imp superdreadnought. The invincible armada that had run rampant over the Wyrms had been brutalized. Even if every American ship in the system perished in the next few minutes, the enemy would be crippled and unable to advance much further into human space until it was heavily reinforced and resupplied. Could the Imperium carry on after this battle? Grace wouldn’t have thought it capable of doing this much in the first place, so she couldn’t discount the possibility. Such fanaticism shook her to her core, and forced her to consider a gnawing question:
What if they are right to do this?
It was clear the Imperium’s leaders believed in the rightness of their cause to the point they were willing to destroy themselves to achieve their purpose. Such determination deserved some consideration. That would have to wait until today’s task was done, however.
The energy signature of the enemy vessel dimmed noticeably: its main reactors had shut down to avoid containment losses. The drifting hulk ceased maneuvers and slowed down to a crawl, protected by minimal shields. Most of the thousands of crewmembers inside were likely dead, the survivors helpless.
“Let them be,” Grace ordered. “Shift fire to the new designated target.”
Her court obeyed, sparing the dying vessel. It had been a small mercy in the midst of this orgy of death-dealing, but one any spacer could appreciate. There were practical considerations involved as well, of course. Other enemy ships were firing on hers, and their guns must be silenced.
The GACS Nanjin, one of the Pan-Asian battleships fighting beside hers, spun along its central axis before breaking into three pieces, one of them ablaze. A heavy energy volley had struck something vital. Grace blinked twice and bowed her head in her species gesture of commiseration. She found the Nanjin’s killer: a ‘mere’ dreadnought with double the displacement of the Undying Defender. That was clearly a worthy target. Both Hrauwah and Pan-Asian ships engaged it with the full fury of their main batteries. Before their gunnery could inflict much damage, however, the enemy ship burst into flames.
“American fighters,” the Lord of Tactics explained. “Ten of them took the target under fire.”
“Demons,” someone muttered. Grace decided to do the grumbler the favor of not learning of his or her identity.
“We shall not speak ill of our allies,” she said out loud.
Even if they are demonic indeed.
* * *
Ghosting.
They were doing it all the time now. They didn’t take any more losses due to enemy fire, but the Foos were doing plenty of damage on their own.
Fourth Squadron was down to nine pilots down. Flight A had lost two people. The only reason Flight B was holding steady after Dude’s death was Grinner’s constant help. But nobody knew how long she could keep it up. Gus could feel the strain threatening to overwhelm the flight leader. Witch or not, she was reaching the end of her tether.
From a purely tactical point of view, he knew they were doing the right thing. Now that they could hit the enemy with impunity, the fighter wings were eating the Gimps’ lunch. Flight B’s fighters would get to paint three superdreadnoughts, six dreadnoughts and eight battleships on their hulls. The Space Wings had cut a swath through the enemy capital ships. They were going to win this battle.
Assuming they could survive the Foos.
All this killing while inside warp was bringing in a horde of monsters. More Warplings had come, whole packs of them, and every once in a while they’d reach out and pluck out some poor bastard while in transit. Prayers helped a little: Gus had driven a Foo away by reciting Psalm 23 at it. But each time he and his squadron sank a dreadnought and sent a few thousand tangos to Hell, the Foos got a little bolder.
They couldn’t stop, though. And even if they could, they didn’t want to stop. Gus certainly didn’t. Every time he fired his gun and felt a bunch of aliens die under the blast, he got a rush. He wasn’t sure when that had started. Maybe after the big shock he’d felt during the sortie where they’d lost Dude Kelsey. That shock of sadness and pain had given way to something completely different. Before, killing a target had been just part of the job, something unpleasant that had to be done. Now, however…
I’m getting off on it.
The realization should have upset him. He knew that, in a vague, intellectual way. But he didn’t feel it. All he felt was a desire to go back out there and keep killing. Everybody in the squadron felt the same way. Except Grinner. Grinner wasn’t getting off, and she didn’t like what the others were feeling, not one bit. And that was a problem, because she was keeping the squadron alive.
“You all right?” he asked her while they were back on the Enterprise. The carrier had got a few more holes, but it was still holding together. Two light carriers hadn’t been so lucky; one of them, the Tripoli, had been blasted to hell with its entire fighter compliment aboard. They’d been in the process of refitting its squadron when a missile had hit something vital. Poor bastards.
“Grinner?” he said when she didn’t answer.
“This is wrong,” she finally said. “All of it.”
“What are you talking about? We’re getting it done. Gimps are on their last legs. Couple more sorties and it’s all over.”
“Don’t let them in, Bingo.”
“Don’t let who in?”
&nbs
p; “The Warplings. They are getting to you.”
“Wrong. They got Kelsey, not me. And Butch and Fredo over Flight A. I’m fine.”
“You aren’t. Don’t stop praying, Bingo. I’m not much of a believer, but I think you’re going to need God at your side. Especially after today is over.”
“Sure thing, Grinner.”
Gus was just blowing smoke up her ass, and she knew it, but that was about all he could say. They had a new target, one of the few dreadnoughts still in the fight. The guys from the Exeter had sunk the last super-dread. They’d won the fight, and it was all due to them, the wing-wipers. Navy and Marine aviators had won the biggest space action in US history.
In his mind, he pictured himself flying over an enemy planet, blasting their ground-based defenses into dust so that their cities would burn.
I’m gonna watch you burn, all of you, he thought, and smiled.
* * *
“Confirmed kill on Sierra Three-Zero-Niner, sir. That’s the last one.”
The Gal-Imps had died hard, but died they had. Seventh Fleet held the system. The enemy had been obliterated, except for a dozen ships that had managed to flee into warp. Kerensky supposed that this space action would be counted as a victory of sorts.
Another victory like this, and we are ruined.
Half of his ships were nothing but condensing clouds of sublimated metal. All the survivors had been damaged to some extent. Twenty-seven ships were being abandoned; they were crippled and unable to maneuver, let alone perform a warp jump. One of them, the battlecruiser Hamilcar Barca, was still in one piece, but completely bereft of life. It was rare for a ship to lose its entire crew without being destroyed outright, but it happened on occasion; in this case, a cracked gluon plant core had released a massive dose of neutrons no amount of shielding could contain. The resulting irradiation had killed everyone aboard in less than an hour.
In Dread Silence (Warp Marine Corps Book 4) Page 16
