“Fire in the hole!” Barbie shouted; he cut loose with a 20mm breacher.
The whole corridor shook and filled with smoke, although Jobber’s shield kept the blast away from the Marines. Two lasers stopped firing, but the third one kept pecking away at their force field.
“Barbie, hit the deck. Russet, light ‘em up!”
“Copy that,” Russell said. Barbie was crouching down behind Jobber, but he still had to lift his plasma thrower to make sure he didn’t blue-on-blue anybody. The smoke from the twenty-mike-mike was clearing, and he could see shapes moving at the far end. He sent a continuous stream of fire towards them. The laser stopped shooting: the Jelly gunner must have ducked for cover, for all the good it would do.
The plasma blast shattered the ET’s shield on impact and began to fill the compartment with superheated gas. Russell caught a glimpse of a dozen semi-transparent tentacles failing briefly above the flames before everything in the area of effect disappeared in a yellow-white glare. He shut off the beam and stepped back a pace.
“Clear,” he told Barbie, who rose to his feet and fired a string of mini-grenades down the room for good measure.
“Now it’s clear,” the grunt said.
“Move on, but watch it,” Sergeant Kruger added.
The compartment was clear. The combination of bursting plasma and explosive ordnance had also turned the door at the other end into scattered wreckage. Russell could see a large clear space on the other side of the opening, with a catwalk along one long bulkhead and a long drop-off on the other side. A cargo hold, he figured. Lots of fire sectors for any ETs willing to make a stand.
The Marines spread out into the compartment. Grampa placed his own porta-field on the next door while Jobber changed power packs on his; it was down by forty percent from just a few laser hits: the Jellies’ guns packed some serious punch.
And a bunch of lasers were in play out there. Grampa pulled back; his porta-field had been hit multiple times and was sparkling like a Roman candle. They must have a platoon-equivalent somewhere down below, and they had the exit onto the catwalk bracketed pretty well.
They were going to earn their hazard pay.
Eight
Fromm arrived at the alien ship with the second wave: thirty-three Marines plus himself to reinforce the forty-five already in combat. He ignored the frigid atmosphere and the sound of fighting somewhere ahead as he concentrated on the overall action.
The attack on the ship’s engines stalled at a large open section that lay beneath a massive tube; the structure was the ‘barrel’ of the massive plasma gun the Marines had been sent to silence. The five-hundred-meter long pipe compressed and accelerated the superheated star matter brought through a warp gate. The resulting jet of plasma left the muzzle of the gun at half the speed of light. It hadn’t fired since the boarding action had started, so his people had accomplished that much. The job wouldn’t be complete until the ship had been captured or disabled, however.
The alien ‘Jellies’ had concentrated below the catwalks running on both sides of the massive gun and were sweeping the Marine positions with sustained laser fire and fragmentary munitions. The catwalks had been wrecked beyond repair; their absence wouldn’t hamper the Marines or any personnel with directional-gravity generators, but they needed to take out the ETs before they could proceed. The relatively short-ranged plasma throwers the heavy weapons section was armed with weren’t up for the job. The reinforcements Fromm had arrived with carried a different weapon mix, however.
First Sergeant Goldberg sent the assault section forward: three seven-man squads, each able to deploy two Light Missile Launchers Mark Eleven. They ran through still smoldering passageways and compartments the first wave had cleared, took positions behind the portable force fields being steadily depleted by the enemy, and volley-fired on command.
Six anti-shield missiles struck the alien positions, their duplex warheads designed to obliterate the force fields the desperate defenders had erected around their spacers. They were followed a split-second later by a deluge of grenades and self-propelled munitions that turned the lower level into a hell of high-explosives and slashing fragments. There’d been close to a hundred aliens there, huddled behind structural pylons and cargo containers. By the time the smoke cleared, there were a dozen survivors; most of them tried to flee or were too stunned to do even that, and the few that tried to resist were cut down by the advancing infantrymen.
“Clear.”
Marines moved forward, their grav fields turning the sides of the vessel into walking surfaces, in defiance of the ship’s artificial gravity. They fired on the move, busting open the doors on the other end. Fromm looked through the eyes of the point men and saw a few more Jellies, their translucent tentacles holding small arms and they tried to form a perimeter past the broken doors. That only lasted for as long as the Guns sections from Third Platoon used their plasma throwers on them.
“Clear.”
Most of the components in the engine room would remain operational despite the damage; they were designed to survive space combat. While Fromm moved forward, he followed the Marines’ progress: his XO, officers and senior non-coms used their imps in an attempt to ‘handshake’ with the alien systems: the Jellies’ technology diverged enough from Starfarer standards to make the process difficult. From the way Lieutenant Hansen was cursing, perhaps impossible.
Where did the Lampreys find them? Fromm wondered. New species were discovered infrequently, and they rarely were advanced enough to become short-term allies or threats. Whoever the so-called Jellies were must have come into contact with the Lhan Arkh fairly recently, very likely after the current conflict had started. The Lampreys were too cautious and paranoid to start a war with humanity at the same time they had encountered a new Starfaring polity.
He shrugged. The intelligence weenies, including his girlfriend, could sort that out. His job was to determine whether they could capture the ship or would have to scuttle it instead. They second wave had brought enough warp catapults in place to evacuate the entire assault force in fifteen minutes, which made him favor destruction over capture, even if the troops would grumble at the loss of salvage bonuses.
By the time he reached the engine room, the area had been secured. Lieutenant Hansen was hard at work coordinating the ‘hacking’ evolution. From the looks of it, he wasn’t having much success.
“Their comm systems aren’t standard, sir,” Hansen reported. “No grav systems. Looks like they only use tachyon-based tech.”
“We’d been warned of that. No way to take the ship over, then. We’ll set scuttling charges.” The assault section would take care of that. “Start moving the men back towards the catapults. Time to blow this Popsicle stand.”
“Copy that.”
The enemy had pulled back, ceding the engine room to the human invaders, but Fromm didn’t think they would remain passive for long. A feeling of impending danger grew stronger with every passing second. It didn’t make sense, but his heart was racing. His imp warned him that his blood pressure was beyond normal levels and released a med dose to bring it down. It didn’t work, and he could feel his pulse pounding against his head.
“Something’s wrong,” Hansen said, stepping away from the comm station. His hands were shaking. Elsewhere in the compartment, several Marines were swaying on their feet. Their status icon were beginning to turn yellow.
We’re under attack.
Fromm glanced at the sensor readings, forcing himself to look past the red haze that obscured his vision. The enemy was beginning to move forward, unimpeded by the incapacitated Marines. He tried to give orders but couldn’t concentrate enough to activate his imp. He could barely stand upright.
T-waves, was his last conscious thought as the red haze began to fade to black.
* * *
“Big trouble, Christopher Robin.”
“I know!” Lisbeth shouted at her invisible friend. She and the rest of the squadron had returned to the Laramie
after wiping out the last Lamprey heavyweight, and were taking a short break while their gunboats got some maintenance. Lisbeth had been drinking some electrolyte-enriched Tang when she felt it. A psychic ‘sound’ that made her think of alien voices singing. The song made the inside of her head itch, and she felt a slight numbness trying to spread through her body. It took an effort to shrug off the effects. Atu explained what was happening a moment later.
“Everybody rally on me!” she called out. The pilots’ bodies didn’t move from where they’d been sitting, but their minds jumped to a virtual assembly point. They’d practiced the maneuver often enough they could do it even while in normal space.
“Looks like the new ETs are telepaths, or at least some of them. They are hammering the Marine boarding parties.”
“The technique was not unknown to my people,” Atu explained. “It uses mental impulses that disturb the target’s physiological balance. If powerful enough, the technique can shut down a sophont’s autonomic functions.
“Like someone’s breathing and heartbeat,” Grinner Genovisi said. “It looks like whoever is doing it is strong enough to kill humans.”
“I feel it now,” Kong said. “Like the song of a siren. It might not kill you, but it’ll put you in a daze, and then the Jellies can slit your throat. Not good.”
“We’ve got to put a stop to it.”
Marine boarding parties had hit six enemy ships. The ‘Jellies’ – Lisbeth picked the nickname/slur from the leathernecks’ minds – hadn’t used their psychic attack until after they’d gotten their asses kicked. Maybe the effect was an improvised, last-ditch effort. Whatever it was, if they didn’t do something six Marine battalions were going to get mind-fucked.
“Grinner, you and Preacher team up. Kong and Jenkins. I’ll be with Atu.”
Each team picked a ship and reached towards it with their minds, searching for the source of the painful signals. They hadn’t practiced this sort of thing very much. Lisbeth had shared her experiences fighting Marauders and Tah-Leen, and shown them how to project their thoughts beyond their bodies. Hopefully that would be enough to deal with these ETs, or Third Fleet would need to find a new set of pilots for their gunboats.
Lisbeth’s perspective shifted and turned into something alien and cold. She was swimming in the poisonous seas of a world partly covered by oceans of liquid ammonia. On land, a species of spindly creatures vaguely resembling Earth’s jellyfish learned to tame fire, forge metals and eventually send crude spaceships into orbit. The oceans’ depths concealed a second species, one that had branched off from the land-dwellers early in its evolutionary history. The Aquatics lacked fine manipulators but not intelligence, and at some point in their evolution developed a mutation that allowed them to communicate telepathically.
She learned all of this from the mind of the single Aquatic in the ship, encased in a fluid-filled glass tank in an armored compartment in the center of the ship. That was not a prison but a control room, from which the telepathic alien oversaw the actions of its slaves. The land-dwellers – known derisively as the Walkers – had the edge in technology but they were helpless to resist their cousins’ mental abilities. The conquest had been swift and decisive. Under the guidance of their new Aquatic masters, the Walkers had developed warp drives and spread beyond their home system.
The Aquatics’ control over the Walkers was so great they could turn their slaves into willing sacrifices who would gleefully die for their masters. That was the secret behind their warp cannon. Lisbeth saw the parasitic relationship between the two species in all its depravity. It was worse than any human slave society. The poor Walker bastards didn’t even know what freedom was; their entire existence and sense of self had been subverted telepathically. She wanted to do something about it, but first she needed to deal with the situation at hand.
Faced with human invaders, the Aquatics had tried to use their abilities on them, but found human minds difficult to communicate with, let alone control. Desperation had driven them to greater efforts, until one of them had found a combination of mental signals that affected the enemy, and instantly passed on the knowledge to the rest. Most Marines had been disabled already, and the surviving Walkers had already begun to slaughter them.
“Ask me what day is today, Atu.”
Her spirit friend sounded resigned. “What day is today, Christopher Robin?”
“It’s the day we burn this motherfucker to the ground!”
Lisbeth unleashed the two entities trapped inside her skull: Atu, who hated violence but was rather good at it, and the very angry and downright evil Kraxan she’d named Vlad the Impaler. The Aquatic had never encountered anything like them. Its mind was ripped to shreds by the two alien thought-forms. The Walkers under its control collapsed like so many unstrung puppets.
“One down. five to go.”
The mental battle took less than three seconds of real time. Grinner and Preacher cleared two ships; Kong and Jenkins had some trouble getting into the groove, and only managed to take out one of the aliens. It didn’t matter: Lisbeth and her spirit allies finished off the rest quickly enough. There had been only one Aquatic per ship: Lisbeth had learned during her brief communion with the aliens that the controllers were relatively young members of their species. The telepathic creatures considered warship duties to be beneath them for the most part. Maybe their older counterparts were better at telepathic combat. The ones the Death Heads encountered turned out to be pushovers. The Jellies were done; the Marines had recovered and taken over six enemy ships, and the other cloud-ships had been destroyed.
The five pilots returned to their bodies, their work complete. Lisbeth sent a brief report to the Admiral, explaining what had happened, and was granted her request to take her squadron and finish off the remaining Lamprey ships. Most of her squadron, that was; Jenkins’ ride wouldn’t be fit to fight until this battle was over. Helping kill the Super-Jellies had been a decent consolation prize, though.
“All right, boys and girls,” Lisbeth called out when she got back a terse affirmative from CINC-Three. “Let’s go hunting.”
* * *
The Lhan Arkh Fifth Congressional District was burning.
After disposing of the last Lamprey defenses, Third Fleet had taken its time. Sondra had spared her Marines, who’d taken worse losses than expected during the boarding action, and used the Death Heads to take care of the ground defenses. That took four days, plus another day for the deployment of thermal weapons on the system’s two populated planets. Clearing all mining and industrial facilities in the rest of the system was the work of two more days. The mop-up operations had been typical of their kind: brutish, tedious and repulsive. But at least it was done.
CDC-5 had been reduced to scorched ruins and drifting space debris. Third Fleet had delivered a telling blow to the Lhan Arkh Congress. Not quite as bad as Sondra had managed against the Vipers, but pretty close. The Lampreys weren’t going to be in any shape to prosecute their war against the US. It was less than they deserved, but needs must when the devil rides.
And there’s a good chance the Lampreys are going to have other things to worry about, Sondra thought, turning away from the scenes of destruction playing on every screen and holo display in the fleet bridge. She’d been too busy overseeing the scorched earth campaign to deal with the new alien species they’d encountered. Now that her job was done, she had time to study the data the Office of Naval Intelligence had gathered.
The aliens called themselves the Enlightened Circle; their language was not sound-based so there were no attached words to the lofty title. The Marines who’d seen the creatures firsthand just called them the Jellyfish or simply the Jellies. The Jellies were two distinct Class Three species: land-dweller technologists who’d been taken over by aquatic telepaths. Genetically they were as closely-related as humans and dolphins. They lived in ammonia-based worlds, too cold for water to exist as anything but perennial ice, the kind of place found most commonly among red dwarf star
s.
ONI had been poring over the ships’ captured records, but were hampered by the fact the Circle’s information-storage device were mostly tachyonic and utterly incompatible with standard Starfarer systems. The aliens had discovered gravitonics only recently, and used them only for the most basic effects, mainly propulsion and some weapons. Their discovery of warp technology appeared to have been the result of communication with Warplings. The Circle were, to put it succinctly, a coven of warp witches.
I almost feel sorry for the Lampreys.
The records they’d unearthed from Lhan Arkh ships and facilities after the battle showed First Contact with the Enlightened Circle had only occurred sometime during 167 AFC, slightly over a year ago. At around the time of the Xanadu incident, give or take a month. The Circle had been allegedly eager to help, and the Lampreys had been desperate enough to allow one of its fleets to enter Congressional Space.
Only question is, what percentage of their total tonnage did those thirty-seven ships represent? Was it a mere flotilla, a sizable portion of their total force, or something in between?
None of the information they had recovered answered that question. The Circle had purposely scrubbed their data of anything that could provide potential hostiles with a clear idea of its strength. There wasn’t even a list of the systems the Circle controlled. They hadn’t been able to interrogate any Jellies, either. All the Aquatic masters had been killed in action, and the Walker crews had committed suicide en masse within the seconds of their rulers’ deaths. The Marines had grabbed all the data storage devices they could find, with a lot of help from a handful of ONI operatives equipped with t-wave implants; they and the Death Head Squadron were the only people who could even identify those devices, let alone sort through them.
Havoc of War (Warp Marine Corps Book 5) Page 12
