You were bullshitting yourself. They – the Navy, the government – would never allow you to let them go. This is your only chance to do the right thing.
“And lose your war,” Vlad said, so shocked by her intentions he didn’t toss in any insults or threats. “Are you insane? You will risk your species’ extinction over a handful of alien souls?”
“There are worse things than extinction.”
“What was that?” Heather asked her, and Lisbeth realized she’d spoken out loud.
“Sorry,” she said.
If I’m right about all of this, doing the right thing might also be the best strategic course of action.
Hopefully the board of inquiry would agree.
Lisbeth walked up to each cradle and lay hands on the smooth, cool surface of the ships. The whole thing took about thirty seconds per ship, and nobody stopped her. They probably thought she was checking on them. Only Heather or Doctor Munson could see the massive tachyon wave emissions passing between her and the Corpse-Ships and guess something was up, but neither of them said anything. Some two minutes later, it was done.
“Thank you,” Atu said.
Her invisible friend had lots of company now. Five other Pathfinder ghosts stood beside him. They were chattering among themselves; she couldn’t make sense of their telepathic language, but she thought they sounded happy. Vlad, outnumbered and sullen, withdrew to some dim corner of her psyche.
“What did you do?” Heather asked her, using their mental link for the first time in a while.
“What do you think?”
“You… you dragged us halfway across the galaxy, got dozens of people killed and risked everybody else’s lives, just to disable the Corpse-Ships? They are inert. I’m not picking any t-waves from them.”
Heather didn’t sound angry, just shocked. Maybe when everything sunk in, that would change.
“Had to be done. Had to do my bit to restore the balance of things. Jeez, I sound just like Atu.”
“I have to admit the idea of enslaving a sophont’s mind or soul never felt right, but…”
“If I may interrupt,” Atu said; Heather’s eyes widened and she took a step back. The three-eyed giant must have made itself visible to her, and seeing it in the real world instead of inside a warp space illusion must have been a shock.
“Did I guess right?” Lisbeth asked the alien.
“To some degree. Without our essence, the Corpse-Ships’ systems will require other sources of power. A pair of your gluon energy plants should be enough to activate some of them, albeit with reduced performance. The weapons and shields will not be as effective, I am afraid. And you will need to draw power from the Starless Path itself to move through it. That is something you already know how to do, but you will have to teach others.”
“Wait. I don’t know how to do that.”
“Not Lisbeth Zhang, but your Atu-self certainly can. I am as much a part of you as your human consciousness. I’m here to stay, Christopher Robin.”
“That’s just great. I’m going to be schizo for the rest of my life?”
“It will be hard to reach a proper balance, yes. Especially when you have to deal with fragments from a Marauder’s mind as well.”
“No good deed goes unpunished, does it?”
“Sometimes a deed is rewarded with utter fairness,” said someone behind her.
She turned towards the smiling Doctor Munson. His voice had sounded distorted, as if he was speaking under water.
His eyes were solid pools of darkness.
Oh, shit.
“The Flayer of Souls, I presume,” she said, trying to sound nonchalant. Inside her head, Vlad was doing the psychic equivalent of crying like a little girl while clawing at the walls. Her Atu self was standing by her side, but even the ancient three-eyed alien was scared.
“That is one of my titles,” the Warpling said. Doctor Munson was dead, consumed by the Flayer at some point; his body was little more than a sock puppet at this point. “Do you want me to show you why?”
“What do you want?”
“To finish what I started.”
Another vision. This time, Lisbeth looked down on a large room filled with incomprehensible machinery, operated by dozens of Overlords and servants. A company of Battlers and a full Legion of warriors stood by, ready to intervene should anything go wrong. Many things had gone wrong already: mighty Kranx was no more, its vast fleets broken and scattered, its core systems taken and depopulated. Only the Redoubt remained, a mere two billion Kranxans out of a hundred times that number. A vengeful galaxy had struck back, unmindful of the terrible losses incurred to cleanse the universe of the Marauder menace.
The Overlords had, for once, been in full agreement. There was only one way out, and it lay in the Starless Path. Every resource in the system was devoted to a single purpose: to remove its three inhabited worlds into a pocket universe hidden within the Path. There, the Kranxans could hide and grow until they were ready to return and avenge themselves. The largest warp gates ever devised had been built for the task. A billion slaves had been gruesomely sacrificed to gain the favor of the Starless Ones. A billion more victims waited for the signal when the gates would be opened. Their suffering would be offered as a token to buy passage for the Kranxans and their worlds.
Everything went as planned until the gates opened.
The skies over the three planets shimmered with the impossible colors of warp apertures. On each world, millions of warriors proceeded to ritually slaughter the sacrificial victims while the Overlords used every art and science at their disposal to guide their worlds into the Path. Every predictive model and psychic vision asserted the process would be successful. They were all wrong.
Something emerged from the gates around Redoubt-Six, lured beyond its realm by the butchery being committed on the other side. The Flayer of Souls beheld the Marauders’ actions and found them displeasing. It made its displeasure known in swift, direct ways.
Lisbeth’s perspective pulled away until she found herself looking at Redoubt-Six from high orbit. That spared her from the view on the ground as the planet broke apart. She watched as massive pieces of the broken planet fell onto Redoubt-Four, erasing all life in it. And she saw the slaughter the Flayer brought down on Redoubt-Five, a three-week-long orgy of destruction between the death of the other two worlds and the cataclysmic meteorite strikes that finished off the last survivors of the Kranxan race, except for three companies of Battlers slumbering away in warp bubbles, unaware of what had transpired to their entire species.
Vlad howled in anguish. He had slept through it, and seeing the end of his universe would have broken his heart, if he had one.
Atu sheltered Lisbeth from the worst of it. Without the Pathfinder, she would have probably fainted or dropped dead on the spot. Her knees felt a little wobbly, but she stood her ground. Off to one side, Heather had signaled Captain Fromm and his Marines, and they were aiming their weapons at the Warpling inhabiting Doctor Munson’s corpse.
“Your job is done,” she told the Flayer. The Kranxans are dead. We took care of the Battlers that survived, all eight of them. Even the ghosts in a War Galleon are finished. I fed them to a bunch of your cousins. I’ll be happy to help you go home if you want.”
“Home.”
“Yeah. The Starless Path. Home.”
“I am not finished with my task. I have dwindled to a mere fragment of my former self, barely strong enough to reach a few of your minds at a time, but now that I am free I can grow again. After I am done with you.”
He started laughing.
* * *
“We’ve got to kill it.”
Heather’s warning got Fromm moving. His Iwo stuttered with two three-round bursts, ripping through the civvie’s personal force field and ripping through Munson’s chest and head. The hits made the target stagger and stop laughing, but he didn’t fall, not even when Freito slammed three particle beam blasts into him. Everybody backed away from the alien as they
fired at it whenever they had a clean shot. Something like a dark fog was crawling out of the burning corpse.
“Now that wasn’t very nice,” the mutilated corpse said, even though it no longer had a mouth or lungs with which to form words. Fromm ignored the taunts.
“Burn it.”
The flamethrower team cut loose with a stream of plasma that enveloped the trashing figure. A moment later, a glowing limb lashed out from the flames and touched a Marine, disintegrating him instantly.
The particle beam weapon blasted the Warpling again. Freito had reloaded and was advancing on the alien, firing from the hip. The weapon caused the indistinct blob of energy to recoil with every hit, but didn’t appear to do lasting damage. They weren’t going to make it. Fromm caught up with the gunnery sergeant, firing as he walked, knowing it was futile. He wasn’t going to let his people die this time, though. Not while he was alive. He didn’t flinch when another tendril reached out for him.
Major Zhang created a warp aperture over the Flayer of Souls.
A sudden implosion sucked the creature and the still-burning remains of Doctor Munson into it. The rush of air knocked Gunny Freito off his feet and nearly dragged him into the vortex, but Fromm managed to grab him in time. The aperture closed with an audible pop a few inches away from the two Marines.
“That was close,” Zhang said.
Fromm glanced to the spot where Lance Corporal Miller had ceased to exist. For the unfortunate Marine, it had been more than close enough.
Aboard the USS Humboldt (CA-931), 167 AFC
Heather found him in his compartment, writing emails to the families of the dead.
“Some vacation, uh?” she said.
“I’d demand a refund, except all of this was on Uncle Sam’s dime.”
She sat down next to him. The starship would be getting underway in a few minutes, laden with the treasures they had found in the Black Tower. Spending transit in someone else’s quarters wasn’t strictly kosher, but Heather felt they’d earned the privilege. If nothing else, she would help Peter through warp transit. The ghosts of the fallen would be waiting for him, and she’d be glad to banish them. It was the least she could do.
“It was worth it,” she told him.
“I know. Assuming we get back in time.”
“Lisbeth believes we still have some time left. That things have gotten worse, but there is still a chance. And I’m not going to argue with our official warp witch.”
“I’ll be glad when it’s all over,” Peter said. He sounded tired.
“Me too.”
They held hands as they entered the Starless Path.
Eighteen
New Texas System, 167 AFC
“What happened here, King-Admiral?”
Commander Grayson’s words and tone were respectful, but Grace Under Pressure was versed enough in human body language to know the officer was in the throes of near-blinding fury. His questions hadn’t been adequately answered by the American officers in what remained of Seventh Fleet, and he was reduced to interrogating her, an ally, about what was the largest mutiny in American history. Not exactly the sort of droppings one would want to unearth in front of others.
“It was some form of collective madness, I think,” she said. “Very likely caused by the warp event at the end of the battle. But it was more than that. The mutineers weren’t just insane. They all had unusual abilities, including Admiral Kerensky.”
Grace repressed a shudder at the memory of her last conversation with Kerensky. She was unsure that the man who’d issued those final directives had been human anymore. Or any kind of sophont as Starfarers understood such things.
“I still cannot understand how the Odin, two battleships, six carrier vessels and their fighter complements – all the fighters left in this sector, as a matter of fact – along with every logistic support ship in the fleet just abandoned their post and sailed off for parts unknown,” Grayson said, his frustration apparent even to the other Hrauwah at the meeting. “And did so right under the noses of the rest of Seventh Fleet!”
“Kerensky had most ship commanders arrested and held incommunicado,” Grace explained, not using the mutineer leader’s rank for the first time in the conversation. “He had the aid of anywhere between a third and half of every crew of the ships in question. Furthermore, the mutineers coordinated their actions without relying on regular grav-wave communications. They were all using what you refer to as ‘tachyon’ systems, even though the term only refers to a fictional particle based on your pre-Contact understanding of physics.”
Grace didn’t add that what the mutineers had done would meet most Starfarers’ definition of warp witchcraft. Of demonic, forbidden acts. A part of her was afraid that if she wasn’t careful with her words, Commander Grayson, who was acting in the name of America’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, would issue orders to ensure news of this debacle never reached the Hrauwah Kingdom. She had to pad very careful around this festering carcass.
“They organized the mutiny, arrested or otherwise detained all loyal officers and enlisted personnel who opposed them, and stole those ships,” Grayson summarized. “By some miracle, nobody was killed during the takeover, although there were some non-fatal casualties. None of your vessels were involved, of course. And you wouldn’t have been expected to interfere with such a situation.”
“We were never aware of it until Kerensky spoke privately with me via an encrypted imp-to-imp conference. By then, he had secured control of the vessels he wanted and transferred all his followers to them. Even if I had chosen to interfere, my four-ship formation would have been helpless against his warp fighters. I have given you the full records of that conversation.”
Grace paused, Kerensky’s words echoing hauntingly in her mind:
“Please tell my former superiors the following: we do this in the name of the United Stars of America and all of Humankind, but accept we are acting on our own, without the blessing or direction of any human government in the galaxy. I suppose that makes us pirates or terrorists. So be it.”
At one point, the former Fleet Admiral’s eyes had become solid orbs of darkness. That sight would haunt her for a long time.
“He is insane,” Grayson said. “They all are.”
“I do not disagree. He made his intentions clear: his Black Ships – the name he’s given his flotilla – intend to sail all the way to the Galactic Imperium’s Primus System and immolate all its inhabited planets unless every member of the Alliance surrenders unconditionally. Note that among other things, his vessels took all the field-encasement thermal weapons in Seventh Fleet’s inventory.”
They all fell silent for a moment. That inventory included enough genocide weapons to depopulate a thousand planets.
“I still cannot believe he expects to get there. Primus System is twenty-three transits away from New Texas. Six of those run through Wyrashat territory; the rest are inside the Imperium proper. Even if the Wyrms decline to interfere – highly dubious after they sent their ships to fight us – the Gimps most certainly won’t. Most of those systems are heavily defended. He’s got less than ten warships. The Imperium may have suffered enormous losses, but the system defense forces on every stop will outnumber and outgun those Black Ships, and that’s before they concentrate to deal with an invasion.”
“There is the matter of the modifications he made to those ships before the mutiny,” Grace said. “Modifications masquerading as repairs.”
The American officer had glossed over the events leading to the mutiny. He took a few seconds to take a closer look at the details.
“Warp generators,” he said when he was done. “He stripped them from dozens of damaged ships. Even salvaged several more from damaged enemy hulls. But…”
“I think Kerensky believes he can use those warp generators to enhance his ships beyond the capabilities of normal human vessels.”
“But…”
Whatever objections Grayson was going to make died as he thought it through.
All the mutineers appeared to have the abilities – might as well call them powers – of fighter pilots, who had to a man joined the mutiny. The biggest obstacle to making multiple warp jumps over short periods of time – other than the power requirements, which would remain a problem – was the inability of most humans to handle the physical and mental stress involved.
“Only shows the man has gone insane. None of his ships have the energy budget to activate that many generators. In any case, this is a disaster. At best, he will lead those naval assets to their pointless destruction. At worst…”
He stopped himself, realizing who he was speaking with. Not that he had to complete the thought. At worst, Kerensky would unite the entire galaxy against humanity. Every sophont’s worst nightmares would come true – warp demons loose among the stars; total war between Earth’s natives and everyone else, with nothing but extermination awaiting the loser.
“We have to stop them,” he concluded.
You must stop them indeed, Grace thought. But how?
Cascadia System, 167 AFC
“Warp emergence detected. Four hours until emergence. Something funny about it, though.”
There was a note of interest – and concern – in the star traffic controller’s normally bored voice.
“Unscheduled, for one. And coming from a potential combat theater.”
“What else, lieutenant?” the watch commander asked, not bothering to look up the information himself. Micromanaging was as bad as letting subordinates do everything, and Lieutenant Commander Jimenez was still struggling to find a happy medium. Acting as XO of an orbital fortress was part of the learning process; if he didn’t do well, he’d never move up to command a damn thing.
Unscheduled arrivals weren’t unknown, and New Texas System was relatively quiet – there was some SNAFU involving Seventh Fleet, but the enemy had been well and truly smashed over there. Things should be safe enough on this sector.
In Dread Silence (Warp Marine Corps Book 4) Page 30
