“Demo.”
The members of the assault and guns sections moved forward. The assaultmen used their training to arrange the mortar bombs they’d saved for the occasion into a shaped-charge configuration, setting up their last portable force field so it would channel the force of the multiple blasts into a narrow front. Heather had shut off the internal shields protecting the bulkhead. The Marines’ improvised breaching charge should defeat the physical barrier.
“All set, sir.”
The demo team moved around a corner and hunkered down. The rest of the company was already well away; under the circumstances only a dozen troops would be able to deploy effectively. A countdown flashed past Fromm’s eyes. The explosion was relatively muted, or maybe he’d grown so used to ordnance going off that he wasn’t easily impressed anymore. He hoped it’d been powerful enough to do the job.
“Go, go, go!”
Fromm wanted to be in the lead but it just wasn’t practical. He let the first rush of armored men go past him before following them into the smoke. Tah-Leen’s construction materials were tougher than he’d thought: the hole the explosives had punched into the bulkhead was smaller than expected, barely wide enough to accommodate two crouched humans at a time. The assault force was mostly crowded around the opening, feeding troops into the fight a couple soldiers at a time. On the other hand, their targets hadn’t been expecting a section of wall to fly inward at bullet speeds. Force fields would keep the shrapnel from slaughtering all the Tah-Leen inside, but the explosion’s overpressure, sound and light should stun them for a few critical seconds.
Even before the echoes of the explosion faded away, Fromm could hear the now familiar sound of edged weapons hitting flesh, along with screams of agony – and the thunder-like cracks of gravity beams.
The butcher’s bill was going to be high, but it had to be paid.
* * *
Russell ‘Russet’ Edison was the sixth man through the breach. He’d much rather have been number twelve, on the grounds that he wanted to live a little while longer.
There were nine ETs in the room. The aliens had been laying on big plush chairs while using their imps to work on some big project, if all the flashing diagrams in the central holotube were any indication. They were wearing human bodies, all dressed in the fancy costumes from the big gala the grunts hadn’t been deemed good enough to attend. Now it was their turn to party.
Problem was, the fuckers were armed.
Private ‘Jaime’ Janacek and Corporal ‘Redneck’ Travis were the first two in. Jaime’s rush carried him right on top of a Snowflake in a fancy white and gold uniform; they ended up wrestling on the floor, Jamie holding onto the alien’s gun hand with both of his own and while trying to rip his throat out with his teeth. Redneck drove his spear right through the screaming face of some bitch in an evening gown. Other Marines pushed on, and they managed to hack a few Snowflakes to death before they could react. Just as Russell entered the room, though, a tango shot Redneck. Center of mass. Poor bastard never had a chance.
The blast went through Travis’ personal shield and his body armor like they weren’t there. Russell had a first-row seat to the sight of his fellow Marine’s midsection disappearing in a horizontal tornado of torn flesh and bone before the bits that were left flew apart in two different directions. A bucketful of blood splashed Russell’s helmet as he charged forward.
The alien who’d done for Travis was pivoting towards him, but Russell beat him to the punch. He slammed his e-tool into the Tah-Leen’s stomach and tore his guts out the old-fashioned way, with a brutal twist and tug that made almost as big of a mess of the alien as his grav-gun had done to Redneck. The tango squealed like a stuck pig until Russell drove his weapon under the fucker’s chin, silencing him for good.
Another grav gun fired. Another carat went straight from green to black. He didn’t have time to see who it was. Russell took a couple of steps forward to clear the entrance as more Marines rushed into the room. A savage swing brought the sharpened spade down on a Snowflake as he leveled his gun at someone. Russell didn’t get the alien’s wrist; the e-tool crunched into the Eet’s hand at the thumb joint instead, but that was good enough. Thumb and gun went spinning off. The Snowflake screamed; he was dressed like a Catholic priest, black with a white collar, and that pissed Russell off even more. He shouldered the tango to the ground and let him have it. More blood and guts, more screaming and trashing around. “Fuck you, padre,” he growled at the Snowflake just before he all but chopped his head off.
Russell was stumbling around, off balance from the killing blow, when he got tagged. The movement saved his life; he only got winged with the grav beam, right on the edge of his force field. That was bad enough. All his systems went down as every bit of power left in the suit was drained by the dying shield. His field of vision shrank down to the little transparent slit in front of his eyes, and the sudden full weight of his armor knocked him to the ground.
“Shit, shit, shit.”
He was a sitting duck.
They made you train with unpowered armor. You could move and fight with fifty pounds of nanotubes and composite plates on you, but it wasn’t easy or fun. First thing he did as he got up on his knees was reach behind him and work the so-called quick-release catch so he could get rid of the useless power packs. It wasn’t all that quick; his fingers had to flip the little lever open and twist it, left, right, left before yanking it back. They made it complicated so you wouldn’t drop your power packs by accident, which probably got a lot of poor fuckers killed while trying to remember the sequence in the middle of combat.
Nobody shot him, although he heard at least two more graviton discharges. He couldn’t see worth shit out of his helmet unless he kept moving his head side to side; his peripheral vision sucked. The power packs finally dropped free, lightening him by a good thirty pounds. He pulled out one of his knives instead of trying to find his e-tool. In this confined space, a short blade was a better choice.
The fight was almost over: most of the tangos and about half the Marines who’d come into the room were down. Russell walked up behind an alien wrestling with a guy from the assault section and cut his throat in one quick motion that brought him back to the good old days in the Zoo. The tango was still trashing around, so he held on to him and drove his knife in a few more times until he finally lay down like a good Eet. By the time the Snowflake hit the floor, no living aliens remained. His imp could check the roster to who was down, but he didn’t want to: there were five torn-up corpses in grey uniforms and body armor, and they’d all been in his platoon. Hard work.
“We got them,” Gonzo said behind him.
Russell turned and saw him and Grampa, both covered in fake human blood. His own armor looked just as bad. Cleaning their suits was going to be a pain in the ass.
“Yeah,” he said. “Except we got him, not ‘them.’ That was just one ET, remember? They each have a bunch of bodies.”
“Fuck.”
Form what they’d been told, there were only ninety aliens running around the station, but at this rate they were going to run out of Marines long before they got them all.
* * *
Killing all the host bodies of a Snowflake didn’t actually destroy them, unfortunately. The Core still remained.
Each death made an impact on the primary consciousness linked to all his many personas, however. Being killed was a traumatic experience, and the Seeker of Knowledge had endured nine such shocks in the span of forty seconds, courtesy of the Warp Marine Corps. The Prime Seeker was still reeling from the traumatic event when his brain-jar was discovered by one Lisbeth Zhang, formerly of the Navy, more recently a Devil Bitch, and currently a human-alien hybrid whose current role could best be described as Reaper of Souls.
Killing the Scholar after destroying all his bodies had been sweeter, but taking out the Seeker was a close second. Those two bastards had been responsible for luring the American delegation to Xanadu. Lisbeth had checked on Cha
rlie Company’s casualties during one of her enforced breaks; they’d been worse than the losses it’d taken at Parthenon. All those deaths, just because two aliens had decided to play out their feud using humans as their pawns, and because the rest of their species got off watching sentient beings die.
She was able to read the Seekers’ last thoughts and emotions in the brief seconds before warp exposure drove him insane. Most of what she got from the Snowflake was disbelief. He had really believed he would live forever. He couldn’t accept the idea that the universe would go on without him in it.
“You really should have left us alone,” she said as his Prime Core died.
Hopefully humanity wouldn’t have to kill everyone in the galaxy before someone finally got the message. The Tah-Leen, on the other hand, weren’t going to live long enough to learn from their mistake.
* * *
They found the Hierophant’s last functional body, the fat smiling Buddha, sitting on the throne in the replica of the Kirosha Queen’s audience chamber. It was big enough to accommodate all of Charlie Company, especially when only two platoons’ worth of troops were still on their feet.
The Buddha smiled at them. It was trying furiously to activate the room’s defenses while it spoke. Trying and failing.
“Well, I guess we all have learned a valuable lesson,” the alien said. “I trust we can part ways amicably, after suitable reparations are paid. We are prepared to be quite generous. Full transit rights, for starters. Riches beyond your wildest dreams, both for each of you and for you great nation. Whatever you wish.”
Fromm raised the Lamprey officer’s sword, still stained with the blood of the other Tah-Leen they’d encountered on their way here. He figured the sight would be answer enough. On their way there, the Marines had found a few of the human victims the aliens had kidnapped on the first day. Those sights would always be with them.
The Hierophant’s eyes narrowed as it tried once more to activate the room’s Executioner device. Nothing happened. Nothing would, now that Heather had shut the alien out from the station’s controls.
“You don’t understand,” it said as if nothing untoward had happened. Its tone grew frantic as it went on, however. “Yes, we have some flaws, but we are too valuable a resource to be destroyed! We are a repository of wisdom that can’t be matched anywhere in the galaxy. And you will never be able to run this station without us! Especially not after killing the Monitor. You need us.” It paused for a moment. The grin was still there, but it looked as phony as everything else about the alien. “Or you could spare me. I can help you. You can do what you want to the rest. You have to spare me.”
Stony silence was the only response.
“You don’t understand! We are artists, creators, following our unique visions. Maybe we went too far, but it was in the name of aesthetics!”
Fromm tightened his grip on the sword hilt as he and the other Marines stepped forward.
What happened next was not artistic at all.
Fifteen
“We can’t leave,” General Gage said.
“I concur, General. We have seized Xanadu after its people engaged in acts of war against the United Stars of America. This system now belongs to our nation by right of conquest.”
Secretary Goftalu’s declaration made it official. Heather felt a rush of satisfaction. All the bloodshed had accomplished something after all.
“Glad to hear we’re all in agreement,” the Marine general said. “For one, this is a major strategic asset. For another, and this is going to sound mercenary as hell, holding this warp nexus is a major financial coup.”
“You can say that again,” Heather said. “Among other things, I’ve secured the Tah-Leen treasury after downloading the access codes from the Hierophant’s database. Transferring the electronic currency to the US is going to take some doing, but when we do it will triple our Galactic Credit Unit holdings.”
“Triple?”
She nodded. “At least. I haven’t gone through all the accounts yet. The Tah-Leen banking system was rather primitive, and they spent money like drunken sailors on leave, but compound interest over millennia still adds up. On top of their cash reserves, the transit fees the Snowflakes collect are equal to twenty percent of our GDP, all in hard currency. And that’s a conservative estimate.”
“That’s… Well, I suppose if we must be piratical, we should strive to be successful pirates,” Sec-State said. “The question remains, however: can we hold the system? How long before we can expect help to arrive?”
“The message we sent back should reach Third Fleet in three days,” General Gage said.
The diplomatic mission had brought along about a thousand bytes of quantum-entangled particles, heavily shielded so they could survive FTL travel, just for this sort of eventuality; QE-telegrams allowed for instant communication across interstellar distances, albeit at great expense. Unfortunately, they’d discovered the Tah-Leen had rendered the QE-system inert somehow. They’d been reduced to using one of their six destroyers as a courier instead.
“Which means we have to hold this system on our own for at least six days.”
“Ten days is a more realistic estimate., Madam Secretary,” Captain Naomi Benchley said. “I’m sure that the Navy will rush forward to occupy Xanadu as soon as it is made aware of the current situation, but deploying a force that size takes time. Five to seven days at a minimum to get ready, after the courier reaches them.”
“We could dispatch another destroyer to the Hrauwah Kingdom and appraise the Puppies of our situation,” Heather said. “They can send ships here faster – probably five days from the moment we send the message – but that has its own risks. The Kingdom might decide to take over Xanadu as their price for defending it.”
“Which would severely strain our relationship with our best friends in the galaxy,” Secretary Goftalu concluded. “Best to not lead them into temptation. Now, assuming we can maintain the charade that everything is normal in Xanadu until Third Fleet arrives, will it be enough to defend the system?”
“Probably. It would depend on who tries to take it from us,” Benchley said after getting a nod from General Gage, who was senior but a ground-pounder by trade. “Most polities wouldn’t even consider an invasion. Xanadu’s reputation is a big deterrent.
“If they knew only Third Fleet stands between them and Xanadu, that would change things, however. The Lamprey’s Middle Quadrant Armada is the nearest enemy formation. I’d say their odds of beating Third Fleet are less than fifty-fifty. But if the Imperium sends a couple hundred of the thousands of ships they have been hoarding for some unknown reason, then we are all in trouble.”
“Nobody knows what happened here, fortunately,” General Gage said. “All space traffic occurs between one and two light seconds away from the habitat. So far we’ve been able to maintain the illusion that the Tah-Leen are still running things.”
“That was easy enough to do,” Heather added. “Most traffic control is automated, and those systems weren’t damaged during the takeover.”
In the past twenty-four hours, a dozen vessels had arrived to the system, paid their tolls as usual, and departed for their next port of call. That portion of Xanadu was working just fine. The rest of it was still utterly screwed up.
Heather had won the cyber-war, but it had been a near-Pyrrhic victory. The Master Conduit had several safeguards in place to prevent an ambitious Snowflake from seizing control of the habitat’s weapon systems. The struggle to seize the base had triggered those safeguards, locking access to several key components. Both sides had also destroyed much of what they couldn’t control. The Tah-Leen’s robot army was a case in point. When Heather was about to take it over, the Hierophant had send a self-destruct command. Thousands of war machines now were little more than fancy metal sculptures, their internal components burned out beyond repair. Only a few hundred combat robots remained, partially built or damaged automatons that hadn’t been linked to the Conduit at the time.
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“Of course, if we had access to the Tah-Leen’s weapon systems, we could fly the Stars and Stripes and hold the system even without Third Fleet,” General Gage said. “We all saw what they did to that Lamprey dreadnought. And if we can use and implement that technology elsewhere, we might have just won the war, right here and now.”
“Two big ‘ifs,’ I’m afraid,” Heather said. “I’m still locked out of the habitat’s Battle Conduit, which controls all its weapon installations, but I have been able to read their specs. As it turns out, they were in a terrible shape even before we took over.
“Originally the habitat fielded thirty-two super-heavy graviton cannon, each as powerful as the one that destroyed the Lamprey task force. Over the last several millennia, however, most of them have been rendered inert. Only one main gun is in working order. Half a dozen others might be salvageable, but not quickly or easily. The Tah-Leen apparently were too lazy to do more than basic maintenance, mostly the sort of things their robots could take care of. Over the time frames we’re talking about, that wasn’t nearly enough.”
“That’s insane. They were down to a single working gun?”
“Not exactly. The base also has a hundred functional secondary weapons, much smaller but still powerful enough to take out anything smaller than a cruiser with a single shot. Unfortunately, those weapons are also locked out. From the records I’ve been able to salvage, they’ve been relying on their single main gun and the secondary emplacements for the last five thousand years. They were good enough to deal with the last few incursions, so they never bothered repairing the rest of them.”
“Insane,” General Gage repeated.
“On some level, I think they all wanted to die,” Heather said. “They’d been trapped here for some eighty thousand years, and their civilization had been terminally decadent for longer than that. They were taking insane risks, possibly in the hopes that someone would do what they weren’t strong enough to do to themselves.”
Advance to Contact (Warp Marine Corps Book 3) Page 27
