Odin shuddered as several grav cannon struck its force fields. Kerensky skimmed over the damage reports while he oversaw the overall action. Nothing major; Captain Cochrane hadn’t been happy about sending the fleet’s flagship on a raid, but he was fighting the superdreadnought as well as anyone could.
Without their orbital forces, the defenders of Hoon-Six had no chance beyond some faint hope their frenzied quantum-telegram messages could summon help in time. The Lhan Arkh surely had a fleet in reserve somewhere, and it might even be already en route after news of the defeat at Capricorn had reached it, but they weren’t here, and they probably wouldn’t reach Hoon in time. If Kerensky was wrong, of course, the Special Attack Force would have to conduct a fighting retreat.
You pays yer money and you takes yer chances, he thought. Admiral Carruthers had been fond of the saying, whenever he wasn’t spouting less vernacular quotes from Earth’s colorful military history.
Ground installations had a number of advantages whenever they confronted spaceborne attackers. The rules imposed on all Starfarers by the Elder Races limited the firepower starships could bring to bear on the heavily-shielded dirtside facilities, which had no such restrictions. The traditional way to eliminate those fortifications was to land enough troops to take them by storm, a brutal and lengthy process. Even humans’ ability to use warp catapults to send Marines into combat was of limited utility. Like pre-Contact paratroopers, warp-dropped forces were lightly armed and equipped; they couldn’t take ground held by dug-in enemies, except in the few places where they could achieve local superiority. Reducing planetary defenses could take days or even weeks, and those surface gun emplacements would endanger any attempts to use the warp lanes leading further into enemy space. Kerensky’s attack force hadn’t bothered to bring any assault vessels; they didn’t have the time to besiege the enemy.
He had another card to play, though.
* * *
Ghosting.
Gus watched the world through the distorted warp aperture that was his only link to the physical universe. His cannon hit targets from less than a hundred meters away; he and the rest of Flight B – five fighters strong – were attacking inside the enemy’s force field perimeter, firing starship-grade weapon directly into buildings and weapon emplacements protected only by weaker shields that buckled under a single direct hit, let alone the five shots each fighter could unleash on them. The close-range cannon fire was soon lost in a firestorm of secondary explosions as power plants were torn open and released strange matter particles into the air, with catastrophic consequences. The planetary defense base and much of a nearby city ceased to exist, swallowed up by multiple conflagrations with yields equivalent to multi-kilotons of TNT.
The waves of fire would have swallowed all five fighters if they’d been in normal space. Even from warp, residual energy buffeted Gus’ ship and reduced its shields by fifteen percent. Time to boogie.
Transition.
The butcher bill from that sortie had been in the millions, and devastating enough it came close to the limits of what the Elders’ rules allowed to be unleashed on a planetary surface. That didn’t particularly concern him. With extinction being the only alternative to victory, the US was prepared to push the envelope, and damn the consequences.
What concerned him was the creatures that might hear the psychic noise those deaths transmitted into warp space. The Foos were nearby. They seemed more interested in hovering near the spot – if such a term applied in null-space – where the fighters had kept open a doorway between the two universes. Maybe they wanted to come out and play.
Emergence.
They all made it back into orbit, next to the comforting bulk of the Big E. The Enterprise and the Macon were both alive and well; the fleet carriers had stayed as far out as possible and not been targeted by the confused Lamprey defenders. Gus goosed the War Eagle’s engines, matching velocities with the Enterprise as a space traffic controller guided him in until the grav grapples took over. All he had to do after that was sit back and relax.
I’m out of grav-cannon juice, but my plasma secondaries are full. If I opened up, they’d never know what hit them.
A brief vision of death and destruction flashed through his mind: shocked Navy flight crews torn apart into burning chunks of flesh and bone; the carrier shuddering under the hammer of the War Eagle’s guns; a final apocalyptic blast when he turned on his warp shields and rammed his fighter through t the insides of the Big E. That would be…
Gus shook his head, scattering the evil thoughts away. He realized his imp had painted targeting icons on the hangar bay, in preparation for the order to open fire on his own people. Shock and terror struck him like a wave of freezing water.
That wasn’t me, he told himself. The Foos. The damn Foos almost got to me.
A couple of other pilots had spoken of having sudden murderous urges. As far as he knew, everybody had saved them for the enemy. Sooner or later, though, someone would lose it. Maybe it’d be him.
Time to double up on Melange.
The chemical concoction helped fighter pilots stave off the insanity and worse that resulted from excess exposure to warp. After a while, you needed to up the doses to get the same effect. A word with the pharmacist mate in charge would take care of it; the Navy and the Marines had learned that risking a ‘spice’ overdose was better than having someone behind a twenty-inch gun go psycho at the worst possible moment.
Gus thought about talking to Grinner about it, but he figured it could wait.
Let’s see if the drugs do the trick first.
Like most lies, it sounded comforting but didn’t quite reassure him.
* * *
“Ready the special munitions,” Kerensky ordered when the last planetary defense base had been destroyed.
“Special Munitions code accepted. Status is Weapons Free, sir.”
Only fleet admirals had the authority to order the deployment of field-encasement thermal weapons. That was the ostensible reason he’d led this raid rather than one of his task force commanders. Every cruiser-class or larger vessel in the US Navy had at least a few dozen city-busters in its magazines – the genocide devices were surprisingly compact – but only his release codes would activate them. Most Starfarers had similar restrictions, but there were exceptions. The Risshah who’d nearly made humanity extinct let any ship captain deploy genocide weapons at their discretion. The Lampreys did the same, which made what he was about to do slightly less repellent.
I never thought I’d be doing this.
The Navy’s primary purpose was defensive. It was configured to intercept invading forces and prevent the use of those weapons on American cities. But the best way to deny the enemy an avenue of attack was to destroy its supply lines, and the industrial infrastructure necessary to produce those supplies. The Lamprey system was the nearest such source of comfort and support to the enemy. Destroying it would keep the Lhan Arkh from sending another fleet down this warp line to join any Imperium forces readying for a rematch.
Well, Paulus System is another supply base, and closer to the US border than Hoon; that’s where the Gal-Imp fleet came from. But I’m not going to destroy a Wyrashat population center. I’m not that far gone yet.
Depopulating a Lamprey planet, on the other hand, he had no fundamental problems with, beyond the regret any human would feel when consigning millions of sophonts to their deaths.
Sending the release codes took a few seconds. After the weapons were released, the process was simple enough. The attack force conducted a low-orbit pass over the planet, deploying the tiny missiles as it went. Each munition package homed in on the energy signature of a city or town, communicating its destination to its murderous siblings so that none of them wasted themselves on the same spot. The planetary defenses that could have intercepted the city busters had all fallen silent; nothing interrupted their flight down. Within minutes, force field domes ten to thirty kilometers in diameter surrounded their targets. All large met
ropolises were encased by overlapping domes of force. Only heavy military ordnance could open a temporary breach, and most of those weapons had been destroyed along with the planetary defense bases. The civilians inside were trapped.
The burning began shortly thereafter. Flames rose on the outer perimeter of the force domes, and began to roll steadily inward. The damage to the environment outside the domes was minimal: just some vented atmosphere when the work was done. The superheated gas be expelled beyond the atmosphere, where it wouldn’t affect weather patterns. Very efficient, if one didn’t mind burning people to death.
The Special Attack Force wouldn’t stay around long enough to make multiple passes, targeting smaller population centers with more thermal weapons, or finishing the job with direct fire. A small percentage of the inhabitants would survive despite their best efforts, of course. All sophonts were by definition hardy, persistent species; like weeds, exterminating them all was a job that took time and dedication, more than the SAF had. A few of the most stubborn or luckiest Lampreys would live to watch the end of their world.
How merciful of us.
Of course, mercy had nothing to do with it. The raiding force couldn’t tarry very long. The military value of the system would be reduced to near-zero regardless of the survival of a few inhabitants. Without cities or orbital facilities, a fleet would find precious little support there.
“Our work here is done,” he said. “Prepare for warp transit.”
The dark presence was waiting for him, its hatred sated for the moment.
He embraced it as if greeting an old friend.
Nine
Redoubt-Five, 167 AFC
The stench produced by the raging forest fire seeped through the filers in Fromm’s armor. The acrid smoke tasted like failure.
Thankfully, the prevailing winds were pushing the flames away from the valley, so an evacuation hadn’t been necessary. Some additional firefighting equipment was being brought down in case conditions changed, but he didn’t think they would need it this time. And nothing bigger than a microbe was alive for miles around. Achieving that had taken two-thirds of his ordnance reserves, but more was being manufactured by the Humboldt’s fabbers. He’d be back to full stores within forty-eight hours. They were safe for now.
Problem was, he’d thought the same thing this morning, and he’d turned out to be dead wrong.
A civilian – Daniel Tompkins, age 39 – had died on his watch. Three Navy Spacers and two Marines had been injured but were expected to recover. His job was to protect the personnel working on the ruins, and he had screwed up. Nobody had expected an uninhabited Class Two planet to be very dangerous. He had taken precautions nonetheless, establishing a secure base and deploying a covering and reaction force, just in case. And none of his measures had kept Tompkins from ending in a body bag, half of his skull melted off.
“New orders,” he found himself saying. “We’ll increase the air patrols, using the LAVs and combat shuttles. Fourth Platoon will stay inside the valley; those Hellcats will be our new reaction force. And I’m going to see if Humboldt’s other shuttles can be reconfigured for combat missions.”
Doing so shouldn’t be too difficult: modular weapon packs could be added in a matter of minutes. The only problem was risking in combat the vehicles they would need to ferry equipment and personnel back and forth between the starship and the planet. The Humboldt wasn’t built for planetary landings; no starship larger than a destroyer was. Lose too many shuttles, and bringing everyone back would take a good while, a recipe for disaster if an emergency evacuation became necessary.
Despite that, he figured Spears would agree with his recommendations; the mission was important and the Navy tended to listen to the people on the ground, even if the bubblehead thought Fromm was being over-cautious. Fromm didn’t care. Better to be thought a Nervous Nellie than to have to see more of his people shipped home in boxes. He was sick and tired of it.
Burned out.
The losses at Xanadu had been the tipping point. All those months spent rebuilding his savaged company, only to see one in five of his Marines end up in flag-covered coffins. Learning the names of the replacements felt like a fruitless chore. Invariably, most of the casualties happened among the newbies, so it felt pointless to know them. But when a veteran died, especially one of the happy few who’d been with him at Jasper-Five, the loss felt like someone had carved a pound of flesh out of him, and he didn’t have that much more give. Half of his lieutenants and non-coms were gone, all killed in action.
Everybody had a breaking point, and he was sure he was close to his. If he hadn’t already reached it.
* * *
Knock-knock joke time.
The air was still thick with smoke. Forest fires had run rampant all night long; only a monsoon-level downpour at dawn had doused them. The combination of high humidity and burnt organic matter stunk to high heaven. Even with filters on, the whole area smelled like days-old corpses doused in chemical waste.
Bad for the environment, but not enough to incur the wrath of the Elder Races, Lisbeth thought. Forest fires happened all the time. The ecosystem would survive the carnage and recover. A few of the eggheads had complained, but not very loudly, not after what the bugs had done to one of their own. If the Marines hadn’t been on the ball, things would have been a lot worse.
As it was, they’d lost the rest of the day. Keeping the fires at bay and killing most everything in a fifty kilometer radius had kept everyone too busy to do any more digging. Breaching the Black Tower had been postponed until the next morning. The night had passed in relative peace, if one didn’t mind hearing distant explosions when one of the shuttles found a worthy target. The entire local ecosystem had declared war on the invaders and had gotten the wages of war in return.
Her borrowed Kranxan ‘memories’ hadn’t included jungles full of acid-spewing bugs and other nastiness; someone must have come up with them sometime after the records of her Corpse-Ship had been made. And there were probably other surprises waiting for them. The dead didn’t rest easy in this corner of the galaxy.
Wondering about the bugs triggered something inside the Tower and she got a bunch of information she hadn’t asked for or wanted. Images from the distant past came to her: dozens of sophonts from species she didn’t recognize, running through the jungle. They were chased by swarms of poisonous bugs while Marauders watched from floating platforms above them, enjoying the spectacle of helpless victims dying one by one. The deadly critters had been pets. One would think that would tell you everything you needed to know about the Kranxans, but you’d be wrong. Death by bugs was what the kinder, gentler Kranxans did for kicks. The stuff that really got their average citizen’s motors going was much worse.
“You all right?” Heather asked her. Lisbeth realized she’d been swaying on her feet and fighting the urge to throw up. The flashbacks had been bad.
She shrugged. “Got another peek at the local historical records. From the looks of it, I can fake being a Kranxan enough that their version of Woogle will send info my way. I’ll be all right. Someday.”
Her invisible alien friend winked at her with two of its three eyes. All aboard the crazy train.
“I can only imagine how bad this is,” Heather told her. “I’m picking up mostly meaningless noise through my implants, and that’s bad enough. Like eavesdropping in on a conversation in a language you don’t know. But I still feel some of the nastiness. Worse than the Tah-Leen, and I thought nobody could be more twisted than the Special Snowflakes.”
“You got it. But if I can fake it long enough, I can get the door open. Hopefully before its defense systems really get going.”
Lisbeth turned her attention to the work going on down below. She was on the Tower’s roof, along with Lisbeth and two Navy spacers recording them with about a dozen different systems. The jarhead engineers were arrayed at the bottom of the pit. They were ready to start blasting into the structure with shaped-charge demo packs, the kind
of stuff they used to bust into bunkers and armored bulkheads. Even shielded super-masonry wouldn’t last long under that kind of punishment, but she was worried the Tower would react badly to it.
The living building was still slumbering. The plasma cutters had made it send out a distress signal, and the local fauna had heard it and come running. The critters had reacted like white-blood cells trying to deal with a possible infection. A more forceful attempt to breach the Tower would probably wake it up, and its reaction would be a lot worse. Lisbeth wanted to figure a way in before that happened.
Captain Spears had given her one chance to do it her way. She’d better not screw things up.
“Ready?”
Lisbeth nodded to Heather and sat down in a lotus pose. Even inside her Marine-issued body armor, she felt the cold material of the Black Tower under her butt, and something else, a strange vibration like what you felt if you got too close to a ship’s thrusters and were touched by the tidal pull of artificial gravity waves.
Her initial attempts hadn’t worked, so she was going to try something new.
“I’m going in,” she told Heather and closed her eyes.
An eyeblink later, she and Atu were standing in front of an ominous-looking metal door, dark and full of spikes. The mental construct was a product of her pitiful mostly-human brain, an attempt to make sense of what she was facing in null-space: a blocked path leading to the mind of the entity trapped inside the great tower from which the Kranxans had ruled this planet. The entity who could unleash all kinds of hell upon any invaders who dared disturb its rest.
In Dread Silence (Warp Marine Corps Book 4) Page 19
