“All enemy vessels have been destroyed.”
It is over.
The thought didn’t bring the mixed feelings of relief, sorrow, and satisfaction that normally followed the end of a fleet action. Something inside her was growling in apprehension. What was wrong?
“There is some unusual activity among the American vessels. Their warp shields are fluctuating.”
Not even humans cared to be in close proximity to a warp aperture any longer than they had to. With no threats present, those devilish shields of theirs would have been shut off right away.
It is not over.
* * *
“Cut power to all warp systems! Do it!”
Captain Cochrane wasn’t given to raising his voice. The shouts ringing over the command channel were just another symptom of the growing tension affecting everybody aboard Odin and the rest of Seventh Fleet.
“The generators are off, sir. The apertures appear to be drawing power from an outside source.”
Kerensky listened in to the reports from the Odin’s bridge silently. He had nothing useful to say. Every vessel’s warp shields were still open despite having been shut down. They were growing larger, in fact.
“All our projectors are off-line,” the Defense Coordinator said. “Nothing is feeding those shields. They have to collapse.”
It took a great deal of power to punch a hole in spacetime, and even more to keep it open for any amount of time. In the Odin’s case, a full fifteen percent of its energy output was dedicated to the maintenance of its sixteen warp shields. As soon as their power was shut off, reality should have reasserted itself. There was no possible way for those shimmering lights around the ship to remain.
Something on the other side is keeping them open.
Impossible. And yet, there they were, and if they grew much larger every ship affected would be completely engulfed and would cease to exist. All the warnings from other Starfarer species about the insane risks humans took with warp space were about to come true.
Kerensky had begun to order all his ships to turn their shield projectors back on – better to try to regain some measure of control over the runaway spatial distortions around them – when a flash of blinding light and a sharp pain in the base of his skull froze him in place.
A chorus of cries and curses from the CIC crew filled his ears as he blinked and shook his head. Everybody had been affected. Everybody was blind, another impossibility when their implants could create images in their brains even if their retinas had been burned off. Sightlessness was a thing of the past.
The only place where that didn’t apply was warp space, of course.
His vision came back slowly, filled with afterimages of shapes and colors he couldn’t identify. Officers were barking orders in a desperate attempt to make sense of what had just happened. The first thing they discovered when they regained their senses was that the warp shields were gone. The second was that several crewmembers were unconscious.
There had been one more change, but only about a third of the spacers aboard Third Fleet noticed it. Kerensky was among them.
The exhaustion that had threatened to overwhelm him was gone, replaced by a feeling of exhilaration. As soon as the initial shock wore off, he was filled with resolve and certainty. He dismissed the bizarre warp malfunction; let the astrophysicists among the crew figure out what happened there. The only thing that mattered was that he now knew how to win the war. He, and certain elements of Seventh Fleet. He would leave the rest behind; he didn’t need them.
He looked around the CIC. His gaze was met mostly with confusion and unease, but here and there he was rewarded with nods and smiles of agreement. Those men and women understood. They would suffice to do what was necessary. He cast about with his mind, and discovered he could reach across all of Seventh Fleet and touch those like him. They included every warp pilot still alive in the fleet. Good. He would need them most of all.
“Transmit on all fleet channels,” he said; his imp obeyed the verbal command, giving him the ears of all surviving members of Seventh Fleet. “Once again, we have stood. Despite the treachery of our enemies, and the misguided vision of certain elements in our command structure, we have prevailed.”
He couldn’t say what he really had in mind: that there were as many traitors in New Washington as among the aliens that infested the galaxy. Not yet, not until all untrustworthy elements of Seventh Fleet were purged. A brief pause allowed him to send a subvocalized set of commands to a number of officers in the Security Department; his newly-sharpened instincts told him who he could count on.
“As soon as essential repairs are completed, I will lead a task force on a new mission. To ensure a smooth process, there will be a reallocation of personnel among functional vessels. Detailed orders will follow shortly.”
There was more confusion among the crew of the fleet bridge, except for those who’d shared the same epiphany Kerensky had. That was all right. The unenlightened would obey his orders, enough of them; the doubters and second-guessers would be dealt with.
It was time to put an end to the ongoing threat to humanity, and he knew exactly how to do it.
Sixteen
Redoubt-Five, 167 AFC
The reanimated metal undercarriages walked, staggered or crawled forward, ignoring the drones that followed and monitored their advance.
“Splitting up in two groups,” Gunny Freito called out. “Jackson, you got three tangos coming your way. Uris, the rest are yours.”
“Copy that.”
Everybody had been repositioned to acquire the best fields of fire available. That wasn’t saying much; Sergeant Jackson’s fireteam looked down a thirty-meter long corridor that the shambling robots coming his way had to use; Uris’ approach had twenty. At those close ranges, any area explosives would endanger the shooters almost as much as the targets. Time to improve the odds a little more.
“Send out the Sparrows,” Fromm ordered.
Each Marine in the squad had carried six 100mm ‘Sparrow’ mortar bomblets. Meant to be launched by a magnetic rail system over great distances before their self-propelling thrusters engaged to direct their final approach, these munitions had been reprogrammed to go on flight mode automatically. Used that way, their range was a tiny fraction of normal, and their speed too low to survive in the open against any high-tech forces. In the enclosed spaces of the alien building, neither shortcoming would matter.
“On the way.”
Thirty-six bomblets set forth, their warheads dialed for anti-armor work. They split evenly and headed towards the two enemy groups. The drones providing guidance for the approaching munitions sped away to get to a safe distance. Their visual feed blacked out to protect their electronic eyes moments before the shaped-plasma explosions went off.
The building trembled slightly under the multiple explosions, shaking dust off the walls and ceilings around Fromm’s unit. On the receiving end, the effect was rather more noticeable. It took a few seconds for the clouds of superheated gas and pulverized debris to clear enough for the drones to report on the damage to the enemy units.
Three of the reanimated Marauders were done, shattered into pieces; a pair that had been struck by nine bomblets apiece, and one of the larger group. The two survivors were in worse shape than they’d started with. One was only a headless torso being dragged forward by its single remaining tentacle; the other was sneaking forward on one leg after losing all its other limbs. Neither of them appeared to be much of a threat.
“Very well,” he said. “Let’s…”
“You’ll screw everything up, Petey. Like you always do.”
He turned around and saw the grinning face of June Gillespie, mere inches away from him. Blood stained her perfect teeth; more red rivulets ran down her nose and ears. She looked just like she had the last time Fromm had seen her, just before Navy corpsmen bagged her dead body and wheeled it away.
June had been killed during the Battle of Xanadu. He was looking at a ghost.<
br />
She laughed; the sound was deafening, chilling.
Someone was trying to raise him on his implants, but he couldn’t hear the words. He couldn’t do anything except stare into the eyes of the dead woman.
He was dimly aware of First Sergeant Freito screaming in terror, and more cries of shock from others nearby, but most of his attention was focused on June, and the ghosts that began walking up behind her.
* * *
Mind-Killers.
Heather recognized the Marauder weapon the moment the world plunged into absolute darkness and her dead uncle appeared in front of her.
Uncle Bert lunged at her and she cringed away instinctively.
“You’ve filled up, Heather,” he said in a breathless voice. “You look good enough to eat.”
“Go to hell,” she told him, focusing her will like a weapon. The hallucination popped out of existence like a punctured balloon. A moment later, she was back in the Marauder building. Everybody else was staring at something that existed only in their minds, trapped by hallucinations created by the Kranxan weapon.
Not quite everybody. Lisbeth Zhang and Doctor Munson appeared to be fine. Heather knew better than to joggle their elbows; she wished them the best of luck and went about her business.
Mind-Killers opened miniature warp gates and exposed the targets to them, triggering the same effects anybody who engaged in FTL traveled experienced: vivid hallucinations and potentially-lethal physical reactions, everything from spikes in blood pressure to autonomic system failure. Against non-warp-rated beings, those effects were invariable fatal. Everybody in the task force could withstand exposure to null-space, however, so for the most part they would only suffer debilitating but not lethal symptoms, unless exposure lasted a long time.
She’d seen the weapon in action at Xanadu, when Lisbeth Zhang used it against the Tah-Leen aliens threatening the human delegation there. She wasn’t sure if the cybernetically-enhanced corpses coming their way or some other building system had deployed them against the invaders. Either way, nobody was in any shape to handle the remaining two techno-zombies. A Marine started shooting at something only he could see. He was only hitting a wall, but any second now they’d start getting blue-on-blue casualties.
It was worse than that, she realized with a sick feeling when her mundane imp picked up emergency transmissions from the surface, bounced along the fiber-optic transmitter they’d brought down. The team aboveground was also under attack, both physically and mentally. If someone couldn’t stop the Mind-Killers, the human forces wouldn’t be able to defend themselves.
She reached out towards Peter Fromm first. Selfish of her, but also practical; she’d communed with him several times already, so establishing contact was relatively easy. It took a moment before she could see through his eyes. Several ghosts, including June Gillespie’s, were tormenting him. She blotted them out of existence with a thought.
“Warp illusions,” she explained to him as he recovered.
“Got it. Can you help everyone else?”
“Yes,” she said with a certainty that she didn’t feel.
“Best get to it, then. We’re about to have company,” he said, moving towards the enemy, rifle in hand.
Neither of them wasted time in saying endearing parting words, no last ‘I love you’ or whatever. Mission came first. Which was one of the reasons they loved each other.
She rescued a handful more Marines, beginning with the team closest to the reanimated Marauders. That took about five seconds; too slow. She had to send out the equivalent of an all-hands broadcast, and she had no idea how to pull that off.
Then again, maybe all she needed to do was figure out how the Mind-Killers were doing it, and copy them.
Heather shifted her perceptions, fighting a surge of vertigo-induced nausea as her body reacted to the altered sensory input. Her ‘warped’ senses spotted the source of the Mind-Killer emissions. Tachyon waves were shooting out of the buried building, reaching every mind in range instantly, unfettered by relativistic constraints. It took her a few moments to identify the source, and to piggyback her own signal into it. She used all her strength to send out a simple command:
WAKE UP!
It shouldn’t have worked. The Mind-Killers tapped into warp space itself for their power. The Marauders had in effect an inexhaustible energy supply. A single human mind couldn’t hope to match that. And still her shout carried through and not only dispelled the hallucinations but closed all the microscopic apertures that had caused them in the first place. She felt something greater than herself giving her a push; it was like being washed over by a massive wave. When it was over, she found herself shaking uncontrollably.
Screw this. I’m not wired to be some sort of shamanistic priestess or whatever the hell you need to be to deal with this crap.
Intelligence work she could do just fine. Combat wasn’t her favorite, but she could handle it. This mystic mumbo-jumbo – which, worse luck, had plenty of real-world applications – just made her angry, whenever it didn’t scare her half to death. The shaking subsided after a few seconds, and Heather shrugged. She’d accomplished the mission, and that was the only thing that mattered. Her hurt feelings were irrelevant.
The Marines recovered in plenty of time to meet the two remaining Marauders with a storm of aimed fire. The cybernetic skeletons were tough, but not tough enough. They melted under the liberal application of plasma-tipped rounds and died a second and final time.
The fight on the surface wasn’t going quite as well, however.
* * *
“We’ve got more bugs and critters coming this way, plus whatever the big mother is.”
Russell shook his head and tried to get his shit together. Whatever juju the locals had used was nasty stuff. He’d gotten a bad case of warp nightmares, along with everyone else. Every rat bastard he’d plowed under had come back, calling for his blood. Luckily someone or something had helped him snap out of it, just in time to find out that there was plenty of real shit to worry about.
There were hostiles everywhere, all converging on their valley, which was turning just as nasty as the place made immortal by Psalm 23:4 (Russell’s only memorized quote from the Good Book). If they didn’t stop them, nobody was getting off this rock alive.
Training took over. He had a sector to watch over, and enough faith that the rest of the company would take care of the shit he couldn’t deal with. His Widowmaker was locked and loaded, his position at the top of the hill gave him a clear field of fire, and there were more than enough targets for everybody. A couple million more bugs were flying over the scorched no-man’s land around the valley, alongside hundreds of animals that had traveled a long way to get there, and out in the distance he could see giant floating shapes like spike-covered turtles, if turtles could grow up to be the size of elephants and sprout dozens of tentacles, each long enough to cover a football field. He had no idea where they had come from. Russell figured the three tanks they had left could take care of those. Their starship was busy with the big thing rising up from the sea: he’d taken one look at it and decided he didn’t want any part of that shit.
Sergeant Fuller marked targets for everybody. Russell got a few hundred monkey-dog critters the size of quarter horses, coming into view two klicks away. He put the Widowmaker on continuous beam and hosed them. That was massive overkill; the galloping monsters ceased to exist anywhere within two meters of the graviton beam’s path, and although there were a lot of them, there weren’t enough to handle an energy firehose playing back and forth their ranks. Against a weapon designed to kill main battle tanks, nothing made of flesh and blood had a chance. It was damn unfair, just the way he liked his fights.
The mortar section was handling the clouds of bugs just fine, too. Whoever thought a bunch of critters could take Marines firing from prepared positions didn’t know jack. Of course, they’d probably figured everyone would be too freaked out by the spooky juju to do anything about them.
; Lasers, grav beams and old-fashioned plasma rounds churned the ground and created patches of steamy lava. Clouds of greasy smoke that had once been part of the local biosphere rose up towards the sky. By the time the big floating mothers came into range, all the smaller critters were gone.
The flying giant turtles were more than flesh and blood. They could generate their own shields. Russell saw one of them stagger when a Stormin’ Normie landed a hit with its main gun, but keep on going.
Wonder why they waited until now to deploy ‘em, the part of his brain that insisted on thinking like a goddamned officer whispered in his head. The rest of him was wondering when the goddamn officers would order them to…
“Check fire! Coordinate TOT by platoons!” Lieutenant Hansen sent out to every Devil Dog in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Russell figured the skipper wouldn’t have waited that long, but maybe he was prejudiced.
Not that it mattered. The flying turtles didn’t have ranged weapons, so they had plenty of time to line up their shots and focus the firepower of multiple units on a single target. ‘Time-on-target’ had started out as an artillery command, where all the guns in a battery timed their barrages so they all arrived at the same moment, achieving maximum carnage and not giving the enemy time to react. Energy weapons and targeting implants allowed direct-fire weapons to do the same thing. The monsters were nasty bastards, but not nasty enough to survive it when a weapons squad, a tank and an infantry platoon poured it on like they were a single shooter.
“We’re the meanest motherfuckers in the valley,” Russell muttered to himself.
“Bet your ass,” Gonzo added.
“Gung-ho bullshit,” Grampa said, reloading their weapons.
“You’re just bitching on account you ain’t fired a shot yourself,” Gonzo told him. “Don’t worry, this is a tango-rich environment.”
In Dread Silence (Warp Marine Corps Book 4) Page 28
