“Let them have it,” Colonel Zhang ordered. Deborah and her squad mates shot the closest entities, hurting them badly enough to make them flee. The rest withdrew as well but didn’t run very far. She could feel them growing bolder; they were also getting stronger after devouring the souls the enemy had provided for them. They weren’t going to stay away. She was certain of that.
“They’re going to jump us on the way back, Lamia,” Deborah told the squadron leader. Zhang probably knew that already; the woman’s connection to null-space was stronger than Deborah’s. But it was better to be safe than assume her superior knew about the danger already.
“Something else to worry about,” the Marine pilot said. “We’ll deal with them later. Everyone ready?”
‘Aye, aye.”
“Let’s do this.”
Deborah and Kong did their part, ghosting about one light-second ahead of the approaching missile swarm and creating a complex warp conduit between their planned emergence point and the local star. Two cloud-ships were in range, and they detected the growing warp aperture with impossible speed; they must have some sort of tachyon-based sensor system. Their plasma streams reached for Kong’s gunboat, but their target was in warp space. Some plasma leaked through, but not enough to inflict damage. If more cloud-ships had followed suit, it would have gone worse for them, but almost half of them had been destroyed already, and the rest were busily trading broadsides with the rest of the American force. The Lamprey capital ships that could have targeted the gunboats had problems of their own, in the form of thousands of Marines who had teleported aboard and were busily killing people and breaking things: in short, doing what Marines did best.
Russell was out there. She could faintly feel his presence as he let the merciless warrior inside him have free rein.
May God have mercy on any aliens he encounters, for he’ll have none, she thought.
Zhang and Jenkins emerged from warp, completing the circuit. A four-sided star of plasma one light-second tall and wide appeared in the path of the missile swarm. The squadron retreated into warp an instant later.
“Dammit!” Zhang said. “We couldn’t hold the gate long enough. That plasma cloud isn’t going to last even half as long as planned.”
“Better than nothing,” Kong said.
They’d run through enough simulations and dry runs to know the short-lived flame shield would only destroy twenty, maybe thirty percent of the enemy missiles. Third Fleet should be able to eliminate the rest of the swarm, but it was a subpar result. Even worse, the Lampreys now knew about it, which meant that sooner or later so would the Imperium and any new members of the Grand Galactic Alliance.
Before anybody could reply to Kong’s optimistic comment, however, the squadron realized they had problems of their own.
The Warplings had made their move.
It was worse than Deborah had imagined. There were a lot more entities than before, and they advanced in a solid phalanx. Even in a place where time didn’t work normally, such a gathering seemed to have happened at a rapid pace. She wondered if the aliens who rode the cloud-ships had their own means to communicate with the dwellers of null-space.
“Just shoot the bastards!” Zhang shouted.
They did. Most of the Warplings fell back after being hit, but a few of the larger ones pressed on. Where the lesser creatures assumed shapes from the pilots’ memories, the larger ones were masses of darkness with flailing pseudopods that waved threateningly as they advanced. Those leaders or archdemons were interfering with their emergence, as well. The squadron wouldn’t be able to run away from this fight. Deborah felt Kong and Jenkins begin to grow apprehensive, if not afraid.
“I got this,” the squadron commander said.
Deborah had grown used to Atu after seeing it during virtual meetings or while in transit. She’d never like this, though. The gigantic Pathfinder spirit appeared in front of the squadron and smote the advancing Warplings. Beams of white light erupted from all three of the alien’s eyes, and where the Corpse-Ships cannon had failed to make a lasting impression on the archdemons, the alien’s gaze blasted holes on the shadowy entities and set them ablaze. One of them disappeared into nothingness; the rest drew back.
Deborah had seen something like that once before. The being she knew as Michael – a name she hadn’t shared with anybody, not even Lisbeth – had glowed with the same white light. Now she understood the true nature of the Pathfinder spirit, or thought she did. Lisbeth liked to call the alien her ‘invisible friend.’ Guardian Angel was a far more accurate term.
Maybe it can teach us how to kill the demons.
Emergence.
She lifted her helmet and wiped sweat off her forehead. That had been a little too close for comfort. Even the familiar sights and smells of the Laramie – shouting spacers, the stench of cutting lasers busily removing damaged sections from Gunboat-Four, the bright lights of the converted cargo hold – felt hazy and dreamlike, as if all of it was an illusion and she was still trapped in what her squadron leader called the Starless Path.
But worse than that was the growing fear that the Path was now a battleground between the forces of Light and Darkness, and that Darkness appeared to be winning.
* * *
“All vampires have been destroyed, ma’am.”
Sondra Givens didn’t let her relief show; instead, she merely nodded as if hearing some routine news.
“Not bad. Not bad at all,” she said. Everyone in the CIC beamed with pride.
The Fire Shield hadn’t worked as well as expected – that it’d worked at all with one gunboat short was miracle enough – but the Sun-Blotter hadn’t been very big to start with, and the wall of plasma had destroyed enough vampires to make the job of Third Fleet’s defenses manageable, if not easy. The large-capacity missile batteries on her captured Lamprey ships hadn’t hurt one bit, either, since she’d filled their magazines with counter-ballistic missiles, advanced models using captured Tah-Leen technology that could kill over a dozen targets apiece. Not a single enemy missile had made it through, and now most of the enemy missile platforms were under attack by Marine boarding parties. All the Lamprey dreadnoughts had ceased fire and were drifting out of formation, ripped apart from the inside by the Devil Dogs.
The rest of the battle wasn’t going quite as well, unfortunately.
Twenty-three cloud-ships were gone or dead in space. The fire from the fourteen vessels that had lived long enough to engage Third Fleet had been more than bad enough, however.
Two luckless destroyers were burning wrecks; not even their ablative armor had spared them when a wave-front of plasma had washed over its shields and consumed them. The battlecruiser Anaheim was beating a limping retreat at one-quarter flank speed, the best its surviving engines could make; two plasma blasts had killed one fifth of her crew and silenced half her guns. And even the Thermopylae had lost twenty spacers after three hits in a row managed to burn through its defenses. The dreadnought’s ablative armor was gone, and one of the flagship’s irreplaceable Tah-Leen gun batteries had been melted into slag. The remaining ones were still very much on the game, however.
The admiral nodded in grim satisfaction when a volley from the Therm tore through another cloud-ship’s defensive drone swarm and the hull beneath. As it turned out, the unknown vessels weren’t much tougher than battlecruisers under their nebulous protection. The flagship claimed another victim even as the former Lamprey dreadnought – renamed the USS Merrimack – blew apart two more. That still left twelve, however. Ten of them vomited forth new torrents of plasma, all aimed at the Thermopylae.
Sondra was thrown against the straps holding her to the command seat as the flagship’s evasive maneuvers generated enough g-forces to swamp the inertial dampeners. Then the ship staggered under a direct hit, shaking her even more brutally. The lights on the CIC dimmed noticeably.
A brief glance at the status readouts told her the extent of the bad news. One third of the flagship’s warp generators
were off-line, one of its primary power plants had been shutdown to avoid a catastrophic failure, and nearly a hundred spacers were dead, with about three times that number wounded. Life support was down for two entire decks of the dreadnought.
She forced herself to set that aside; the Thermopylae’s captain would deal with the ship. Her job was to run the battle.
“New orders for General MacWhirter,” she said. “Divert all available Marine boarding parties to the following targets.” A list of new targets followed: six of the cloud-ships. Sondra had forgone using the Marines against targets whose ship layouts and capabilities were utterly unknown, but she was out of options. The gunboats were too vulnerable to those plasma torrents even while ghosting, and her fleet was losing the broadside exchange.
God be with you, she prayed for the men and women she was sending into the unknown.
* * *
“All clear, sir.”
Fromm nodded at Lieutenant Hansen and stepped into the Lamprey dreadnought’s bridge. The aliens there had died hard; an improvised barricade, reinforced with portable force fields, marked the CIC crew’s last stand. Armed only with personal weapons and light shields, the aliens’ desperate defense had availed little against his battle-hardened Marines. Several men were dragging the aliens’ corpses out of the way. The only reason the Lampreys had lasted so long was that the Americans’ orders had been to seize the ship relatively intact.
“They didn’t even have time to activate their self-destruct system,” Hansen said, grinning at his own joke.
Fromm chuckled politely in return. Contrary to fiction, starships didn’t have devices that would scuttle a vessel with a single command or the push of a button. A determined crew could do so, with a little time, but it generally required control over a ship’s engine rooms, and the boarding parties had seized those first.
The Lampreys had reaction forces prepared for a boarding attack, but years of neglect had turned those duties into routine, easily neglected assignments. The Lamprey Spaceborne troops had reacted sluggishly at best, and their resistance had been nearly as ineffective as the bridge crew’s last stand. Charlie Company’s only fatality had been one Missing-In-Warp Marine, lost during the initial drop. There were a few yellow icons on the personnel roster window, men and women too severely wounded to continue fighting, but only a few.
“We have an incoming warp arrival, sir,” the company’s commo tech announced. “Headed right here, coming in ten seconds.”
“Clear the area.”
The new warp systems created warp apertures that didn’t inflict damage on the landing area unless it was deemed necessary, but it was better to not tempt fate. The transition happened without incident and a trio of Marines from the headquarters company arrived, bearing orders.
Fromm grunted as he read the uploaded message. The new orders were unexpected.
“Acknowledged,” he told the new arrivals. “Will this work?”
“It should, sir,” the Lieutenant from Battalion HQ said, sounding about as happy as Fromm felt. The man knew he was likely sending Fromm and his people on a one-way trip, and he didn’t like it one bit. “The portable catapult your company brought along will perform as well as the ones aboard the Mattis, and our techs will slave the Lamprey’s sensors to it to ensure a smooth jump onto the new target.
He grunted again. The Marines had been expected to jump to the Lamprey ship, disable it, and then jump back to the Mattis. That by itself would be a historical event. Now they were being tasked to jump from the Lamprey vessel onto one of the unidentified alien ships that were raking Third Fleet with some sort of plasma super-cannon.
“I’ll assemble the troops.”
This had all the makings of a bad day.
* * *
“Tell me you’re joking,” Grampa said.
Russell shrugged. “Don’t know what to tell you. New orders.”
They’d just finished clearing a hangar bay. A pack of Lamprey spacers had been trying to get aboard a shuttle and ended up jettisoned into hard vacuum instead. They Marines had just re-pressurized the compartment when their new orders had arrived: assemble at the field warp catapult they had brought along on their backs, piece by piece, and prepare for another boarding action.
“I mean, how can we board a ship when we don’t know their specs?”
“Been doing that since the beginning brah. Our sensors give us a targeting solution, just like a gun. Only we avoid spots where warp events can’t happen, like near power plants. The techs find an open space, and that’s where we go. They beam us right there. We get there, kick ass, the end. Except this time we also get to jump back rather than wait for a shuttle ride.”
“How do I get out of this chickenshit outfit? That’s a classical reference, by the way.”
“Anything you say, Grampa.”
They reached their assembly area a few moments after their conversation drifted off. Grampa wasn’t the only one fighting a bad case of the nerves. The pucker factor for a raid on an unidentified ET ship was off the charts. Most Starfarers existed along a somewhat-survivable spectrum of conditions, at least if you were in a combat suit or standard haz-con gear, but there were a few notable exceptions. High-g natives whose idea of normal would cripple a regular grunt; radiation-resistant types who filled their ships with unhealthy doses of x-rays; and a couple others just as nasty. Even under ideal circumstances, setting up one of their new portable catapults required six people and five minutes’ work; that could be a mite too long if their armor began to dissolve in a highly-corrosive atmosphere, for example.
From the looks of it, if they didn’t knock out those ET ships, their rides weren’t going to survive, so bitching about the mission was pointless. Russell kept his worries to himself.
They’d set up five mini-catapults in a large compartment. The little bastards were only big enough for three grunts at a time, but they could stay open long enough to let three groups in per launch. They’d dialed them in for maximum mayhem on the emergence point, so hopefully anybody on the other end would be too dead to give them trouble.
The Marines stood patiently in line while a couple of warp-rated pogues they’d brought along for the trip activated the catapults. Unlike the regular version, the insertion teams would have to walk through a colorful gateway. Sergeant Kruger and a couple grunts from First Platoon went in first, followed by another three Marines, and then it was his fireteam’s turn. Russell gritted his teeth – he’d done this a few times already, but he still hadn’t gotten used to it – and walked through.
One step, that’s all it took, but it was a long step and a bad warp trip in between. Before his right foot stepped on something solid and he came out the other side, Russell spent what felt like a good minute watching himself be skinned alive by a couple of tangos from Parthenon-Four. Something that hadn’t happened but might have in another world, maybe. Nothing he wanted to see, let alone hear or smell.
Finally, it was over, and he was through. He had to help Grampa; the old-timer was off-balance from whatever he’d seen during the drop. While Russell steadied him, his imp scrolled down all the sensor data on their surroundings. By the time he’d half-dragged Gorski out of the way, Russell had a good idea what kind of shithole they’d invaded.
Minus thirty degrees Fahrenheit. Nitrogen, oxygen and ammonia atmosphere at low pressure; the air was almost Mars-thin. Point-eight gees. His suit’s thermal systems would keep him cold and uncomfortable instead of frozen and dead, but they’d drain his twin power packs a lot faster than normal, just the kind of shit anybody about to go running around and getting shot at didn’t need. The compartment was a bit torn-up, but even at first glance the distance between decks was pretty high – close to three meters – and the only door he could see was narrow as hell. It was going to be a tight squeeze for one grunt.
Narrow-band comm links were up with the other assault teams. A total of forty-five Devil Dogs had arrived, and that was going to be it for five minutes or so, the time
it would take the mini-catapults to power-up again.
“Get that door open.”
“Copy that.” A burst of three breaching charges blew the door in; a slightly wider passageway lay ahead. It was going to be one Marine at a time.
“You know the drill. Hand Feldman the porta-field,” Sergeant Kruger said.
PFC Jon ‘Jobber’ Feldman got to be point man and shield bearer. He let his Iwo hang from its tactical sling and held the portable force field generator in both hands. If the shit hit the fan, he’d drop to one knee and hope the grunt behind him took care of any problems before enemy fire depleted the area force field he was holding. A shit detail, in other words, but someone had to do it and Russell was glad it wasn’t him; he got to be third in line, though, plenty close to the sharp end.
The NCOs in charge of each assault element had brought a high-power sensor pack along, to help them figure out where to go. Deep grav-wave scans showed where the engine rooms were: two decks below and about fifty meters forward from their position, about as close as you could get to them via warp. They got moving.
Another team not too far away ran into the ETs. Gunfire and shouts erupted from their comm channel. The vid feeds gave them a first look at the tangos: tall and spindly things like jellyfish with stilt-like legs. Russell figured the nickname ‘Jelly’ would stick. Iwo fire tore them up pretty good. Russell took it as a good sign.
“Tangos dead ahead!” Jobber called out. He kneeled down so Lance Corporal ‘Barbie’ Barbour could shoot.
The door at the end of the passageway slid open. Barbie was popping caps the moment it started to move, and the 4mm rounds blew up against the soap-bubble shimmer of a force field. These Jellies were ready for trouble. Three laser beams hit Jobber’s shield, making it strobe in multiple colors.
Havoc of War (Warp Marine Corps Book 5) Page 11
