“Oh, you haven’t met it, have you?” Lisbeth said. “Atu, Heather. Heather, Atu.”
The Marine had mentioned her invisible friend before, but she had never expected to meet it in person, or in virtual space for that matter. To her enhanced senses, the Pathfinder glowed with energy. It wasn’t often she came to face with a being with godlike powers and wisdom.
Well, you’ve been doing that a lot lately, though, she told herself. On the other hand, compared to someone that could travel through warp without a starship, the Snowflakes were second-rate demigods at best.
“Delighted to finally encounter you directly, Heather McClintock, daughter of Eve,” Atu said.
Did he just reference The Chronicles of Narnia?
“It is one of Lisbeth’s favorite childhood books,” the alien replied to her unspoken thought. “Although her favorite growing up was Winnie-the-Pooh.”
She blinked, then shrugged. “All right, we’ll talk about this later. Even if time doesn’t work the same here, we really should hurry up.” She turned to Lisbeth. “You have a plan, I suppose.”
“Yes, ma’am! This Marine will engage the Marauder Battlers in null-space, ma’am, where she will use mental strength and dirty tricks to overcome the enemy, ma’am. Oorah.”
Heather sighed. “Zhang, you outrank me. What are your orders?”
Lisbeth giggled. “Oh, yeah. Sorry about that. When I get us there, use your imagination. Wish them dead. Wish it very hard. Or visualize a weapon and try to kill them; that should work. I figure my invisible friend and I can take two or three of them, but you’re going to have to handle at least one.”
Conjuring up tea and cozies had been easy enough. But killing with her mind? Heather knew only too well how deadly the illusions in warp space could be; maybe she could make them work for her. She tried to picture the most intense fighting in her life. Picking up the right memory was no problem at all.
The trenches at Kirosha, when they came over the wire.
She looked down. A long-barreled slug-throwing rifle was in her hands, a wicked-looking bayonet fixed beneath the muzzle. Memories of the moment she drove its point into the heaving chest of a red-skinned alien came back to her. She could smell the chemicals released by countless shots and explosions, hear the horribly child-like cry the alien made when she stuck him, feel the blade grating on bone when she twisted and pulled it. She remembered lifting her head and seeing more of them, swords and spears in their hands…
“Ooh, that’s a good one,” Lisbeth said. “That’s Marine-quality carnage. Are you ready?”
Heather swallowed and nodded.
“Up and at them! Oorah!”
“Hooyah,” Heather said tentatively. Loyalty to her branch and all that.
“Even for a bubblehead, that sucked. Let me hear it!”
“HOOYAH!”
And they were off.
* * *
One of the cool things about fighting in the Starless Path was that you could bring along your own soundtrack.
Back when she’d been a mere cadet, two years of generic military service behind her and the glories of the Navy beckoning to her, Lisbeth had put her love for Kriegsmetall to good use. The harsh, angry tunes, first made popular by German emigrants – survivors of First Contact rescued from the devastated ruins of Europe – had always resonated with her, and the songs of Totenkopf, Panzer des Nibelungen and Pale Horse kept her sane during many a warp transit.
She entered the mind-realm of the Kranxan Battlers with the heavy drums of Totenkopf’s Destroyer of Stars pounding all around her.
Battlers were below the Overlords in the Marauder food chain but were far deadlier, at least in the physical world. Only veteran members of the warrior caste qualified for the role. Their ferocity was rewarded with years of torture as more body parts, cybernetic enhancements, armor plates, and built-in antigrav and shield generators were nailed to their mutated flesh and linked to the Path to provide power and nourishment. Miniature fabbers filled their body cavities, allowing them to generate more weapons and ammunition. These monsters weren’t as disciplined as the Kranxan Phalanxes that were the aliens’ primary infantry forces. They were brawlers, meant to mount warp assaults on enemy ships or fortresses and lay waste to everything around them. They worked in small groups, or even as individuals, priding themselves in their ability to strike in all directions and engage multiple targets at once.
In the physical world, each of those monsters massed fifteen to twenty tons and could take more punishment than a main battle tank. Over there, Lisbeth and her standard-issue popgun had no chance to do anything but annoy them. Things were different here, however.
She spotted six of them: the ground-pounders had accounted for a couple so far. In warp space, the Battlers looked just as big and hideous, but that was just their self-image talking. Only the Overlords liked to fight inside the Starless Path; all other Kranxans viewed that realm with fear, as a useful shortcut and energy source, but a place to be otherwise avoided. Their shared panorama was crude and simple: a large cavern where they could commune with each other while in transit. They’d been trapped there for thousands of years, frozen in some sort of stasis, sleeping watchdogs waiting for an alarm that took two hundred millennia to arrive.
Lisbeth charged the nearest one, closing the distance between them with impossible speed. Totenkopf’s drums kept banging away as she drove a glowing fist into the giant creatures’ midsection.
The Battler howled in agony and recoiled from her blow. It had been caught by surprise, not noticing her approach until she hit it. Now it turned two of its four heads towards its unexpected tormentor: a razor blade-covered tentacle lashed down at her from its right while two pincer-tipped insectile limbs struck from the left. In the real world, either of those attacks would have torn her to pieces. Here, they hurt like nothing she had felt before, but as long as she felt pain, she was alive. She pummeled her tormentor with her flaming hands, setting blubbery flesh ablaze with every punch. She kept hitting it, keeping time with the song, until the creature fell apart and vanished. One down.
Somewhere nearby, Heather was shouting an incoherent stream of obscenities while she stabbed her opponent with the bayoneted rifle in her hands. Lisbeth was aware of the fight without having to turn her virtual head to see it, just as she knew that Atu had reached a third Battler, touched it, and made its worst nightmares come alive.
“All unbalanced beings carry the seeds of their destruction within their souls,” the three-eyed alien explained calmly as the Marauder tore itself to shreds and disappeared.
Two down, but things weren’t easy anymore. The Marauder fighting Heather was aware of its attacker, and was beating the secret agent like a piñata. Another Marauder became aware of the interlopers and charged Lisbeth: the other three were still devoting all their attention to the physical world. Just as well; if all of them had joined the fight, they would have slaughtered Lisbeth and her friends.
Her Marauder was distracted, splitting its attention between the fight in the real world and Lisbeth, but it was ready for her. They traded blows, and she grew weaker with every exchange. Heather was faring even worse; a metal club smashed her to the ground and the antiquated rifle dropped from her hands. Atu hesitated, unsure of where to go next.
“Heather! Go help Heather, you stupid mother…”
A serrated blade as long as Lisbeth was tall and half as wide tore through her midsection in mid-sentence.
The burning light around her hands dimmed into nothingness. The Battler lifted her up, sending new shocks of agony through her as body she dangled from the impaling weapon. The monster’s four faces turned towards her; three opened their mouths in voracious grins, displaying fangs, sharpened teeth and in one case rusty nails protruding from bleeding gums. The fourth head had two sets of cutting mandibles and a prehensile tongue. All of them extended their necks and reached towards her, mouths opening wider. Lisbeth knew that what would follow would be a combination of eating, v
ivisection, and total absorption, and when they were done she would be part of that monstrous whole.
Atu had saved Heather from a similar fate and destroyed that Marauder, but there was no time for her friends to help her.
Even in the timeless Path, you can run out of time, she thought as the last chorus of Destroyer of Stars played around her.
The dreadful feasting began.
* * *
A Schwarzkopf tank blew one of the aliens out of the sky, but another Marauder took it under fire. Dozens of armor piercing slugs hammered through force fields and armor. The tank dropped back to the ground, smoke rising from several full breaches in its hull. The commander was dead, but the driver and gunner were wounded but alive. Fromm didn’t know how much time they had. He didn’t know how much time anybody had.
Counting that last kill, the Marines had accounted for three of the eight attackers. A fourth one had suddenly collapsed for no apparent reason, but the rest were blasting everything that moved with unstoppable volleys from multiple weapon systems, some of which he couldn’t identify. Even with the improved weapons and armor his Marines had acquired at Xanadu, they were getting hammered.
All Fromm could do was mark targets and hope the bubbleheads up in the sky got their thumbs out of their…
The Humboldt appeared from behind a cloud, its five-hundred-meter bulk casting a shadow over the battlefield. Two 15-inch gun batteries opened fire: multiple twisting corkscrews of energy descended upon their targets. The Marauders were tough, able to survive even a direct hit from a tank gun, but the firepower of naval guns was a cut above most things deployed on a planet. Both monsters were shredded by the multiple impacts.
Six down.
If the aliens had shown even a modicum of coordination, they would have killed every human on the ground long before the survey ship could fire on them. Luckily, they had acted as individuals and spread their attacks over multiple targets at a time. That meant that the command post and the dug-in mortars were still standing. Fromm vectored all the remaining firepower under his control on one the last two targets. Armor-piercing guided mortar bombs weakened its shields; moments later, a volley of antiarmor missiles tore through the alien’s flesh; three of its dozen limbs went flying into the air as the floating monster recoiled in the other direction. It wasn’t dead yet, but one of the returning tanks finished it off with two shots from its main gun.
That left one. The Humboldt and the surviving shuttles – two had been shot down – took care of it a few moments later.
The whole battle had lasted less than a minute. Six of Fromm’s Marines were deal, and half of the rest were wounded, some badly. The Navy spacers had suffered far worse casualties; even though they’d been issued personal force fields, they only wore haz-con suits underneath, not body armor that could withstand explosive fragments or small-arms fire. Thirty of them had been killed, and twice as many were hurt.
Heather had survived. She had Major Zhang’s limp body hoisted over her shoulder and was climbing down from the top of the tower. Fromm checked Zhang’s status: her vitals seemed fine but she was clearly unconscious. The Marauder hovering over the unearthed building had collapsed after firing only a couple of shots. Fromm guessed that she or Major Zhang had something to do with it. The two women had a way of pulling off miracles out of thin air.
He looked at the remains of the eight aliens and at the carnage they’d inflicted in a few minutes. Miracles might not be enough.
* * *
“I’d appreciate it if you could run it by me one more time, Ms. McClintock,” Captain Spears said. Lisbeth had explained what happened, but done so in her inimitable way, and her version hadn’t gone over very well. The pilot had emerged from the psychic battle even more unhinged than she’d been before. Apparently the Marauder she’d been fighting had started to eat her before it was killed in the physical world by a hit from the American starship. Lisbeth had survived and claimed she was all right; Heather thought there was more to it, but there hadn’t been much time to check on her friend. After two attacks, the expedition commander was in no mood to waste time. He wanted answers, and he wanted them now.
“Of course, Captain,” Heather said. “The Marauder Battlers were exiled to warp space several millennia ago. It looks like their culture’s version of hardship duty, most likely as punishment for some transgression. Those warriors were in stasis until the building’s controlling intelligence summoned them.”
“So those eight things were their equivalent if a security reaction force.”
“Yes, sir. As it is, we were lucky. Those eight were the only survivors of a force numbering in the hundreds. It appears that most of them died off over the years as their stasis fields broke down and warp exposure took its toll.”
Everyone at the meeting looked sick at the thought. A hundred of those things would have wiped them out and likely dragged the Humboldt down as well. Only Doctor Munson appeared unaffected by any of it. For someone who’d been grandfathered out of military service, he was surprisingly calm after having a ringside seat to a brutal fight that had killed almost forty people in as many seconds, and wounded three times as many. If anything, he looked fascinated by the whole thing. Heather discreetly broke into his implants’ feeds and wasn’t surprised to discover he was constantly replaying footage of the Marauder Battlers on one window display.
Better keep an eye on him.
“Next question,” the Humboldt’s skipper went on. “Do you have a plan for getting inside that building? The first two tries have resulted in casualties. I lost thirty-four crewmembers down there. At this point, I don’t know if another try is worth the risk.”
“The Corpse-Ships are there,” Lisbeth said.
“How can you be sure of that?”
“The Battler that started to eat my face told me. When he died, well… I guess turnabout is fair play. I had him for lunch instead. Now I know what he knew. Trust me, I wish I didn’t.”
“I would like a concise answer, Major.”
“I absorbed most of his memories. I know what’s inside the Black Tower. There is a squadron, seven Corpse-Ships, stationed there. Their hangar is located on the fifteenth level. Sir,” she added belatedly.
Captain Spears looked at Heather, hoping to get confirmation from someone sane. Heather wasn’t sure she qualified anymore. She’d seen Atu the Pathfinder, fought Marauders in the Starless Path, and barely survived. None of those experiences had been exactly conducive to good mental health.
Just another fine mess you’ve got me into, Zhang, she thought, and saw Lisbeth suppress a giggle when she ‘heard’ the thought.
“I agree with Major Zhang’s assessment of the situation, and I witnessed the encounter with the Battlers. As you know, we have one intact corpse to examine thanks to her efforts.”
“And that find alone is worth everything we’ve gone through,” Doctor Munson broke in. “I have tentatively identified no less than three weapon systems not found in current Starfarer inventories. They include a particle beam accelerator that can bypass standard force fields. We were extremely fortunate only one the aliens appeared to have it, or we would have been exterminated! But if we could replicate that technology…” He didn’t finish the sentence; he didn’t have to.
“I concur with Doctor Munson’s assessment,” the Science Officer added. “Reverse-engineering the technologies we’ve found so far could prove invaluable.”
“Years down the line, Lieutenant,” Captain Spears reminded him. “Years America may not have. In any case, if Major Zhang is correct, our objective is attainable.”
“It is,” Lisbeth said. “And now I can open the doors. The Marauder I ate knew the codes. Which means I know them now. Sir.”
“Maybe you should have begun your report with that information, Major.”
“You are right, sir. No excuse, sir.”
“Since no further digging or demolitions are required, we don’t have to have to land a large crew. Unless you think we’ll en
counter more hostiles once you’ve gained access to the building, Major.”
“We won’t run into any more Battlers, sir. They were all stationed outside. Once the alarm was given, they sent everybody they could send.”
“That’s something, at least.”
“The only things we have to worry about are the two Warplings in the Tower. Sir.”
“Two?”
“Yes, sir. The one the Kranxans bound to the Tower to act as its mind and soul, the Keeper. And then there is big one. That is the entity that materialized in our universe and destroyed Redoubt-Six. After that, it killed all Marauders in the Tower and most of the population of Redoubt-Five.”
That was news to everyone there. Captain Spears started to say something but sighed and shook his head instead.
“It’s still down there,” Lisbeth went on. “Now that I have a half-Kranxan mind, I can hear it, doing its rounds. It keeps waking up the dead and killing them. It’s how it keeps itself entertained, you see.” She giggled.
“Major Zhang,” Captain Spears said. “Report to sick bay. I want to have the Medical Department conduct a thorough check on you.”
“Yes, sir.” Lisbeth stood up. “I should remind you that the findings of such an exam need to be classified, sir.”
“Noted. You may go.”
The naval officer turned to the rest of the room after she had left.
“All right. I’ve half a mind to put Major Zhang under sedation and head back to Xanadu System as fast as we can make our warp connections. I’d like to hear any reasons why I shouldn’t do just that. Well, like is too strong a word.”
Heather took a deep breath before piping in.
“Captain, Major Zhang is suffering from a great deal of stress, as you can imagine, but so far all the intelligence she has gained through her – experiences, let’s call them – has been accurate and actionable.”
“Granted. Even if she’s telling the truth, however, she’s talking about sending another shore party to confront an entity that supposedly destroyed a planet. Given that, I don’t see how we can hope to successfully complete the mission.”
In Dread Silence (Warp Marine Corps Book 4) Page 21
