Havoc of War (Warp Marine Corps Book 5)

by C. J. Carella

  We’re still going to take losses, and we may lose, but it will be a fight, not a slaughter.

  Ten

  Imperial Star Province Kezz, 169 AFC

  “We have thirty-six Sierra-class contacts, ma’am. Eight orbital fortresses. And three hundred unidentified contacts.”

  “Nobody likes surprises,” Sondra Givens muttered as she glared at the holotank. The data wasn’t intimidated into compliance, unfortunately, and the small question marks on display refused to give up their secrets. Passive sensors could only detect so much from eight light-hours out, which didn’t help. The Imperium fleet was arrayed in a tight defensive pattern around Kezz-Three, a full-goldie planet that held most of the system’s nine hundred million inhabitants, as well as its shipyards. Three warp ley lines opened up some two light seconds from the planet: one led to Butterfly territory, the other two reached further into the Imperium. One of them was only five transits away from Primus System. The capital of the Imperium and their ultimate goal.

  “The bogeys have no warp drives. Heavy power signatures, but no apparent propulsion system; they are being towed by starships or are slaved to orbital facilities. They have shields, though: battlecruiser grade at least.”

  “A bunch of hard, mostly immobile targets. Missile platforms?”

  “That’s the most likely possibility, ma’am. And you can power up a lot of shields and weapons with those energy signatures.”

  Cheaper to produce in quantity, and their crews don’t have to be warp-rated, so they can draft anybody to man them. Cheaper than monitors, too. Necessity is the mother of invention, and the Gimps are in dire need of some inventiveness.

  The Galactic Imperium had lost a staggering amount of ships during its thrust into American territory. Those destroyed fleets couldn’t be replaced in a few months, or a few years: even if there were enough shipyards around to do the job, finding and training crews would take time, and a significant percentage of the Gimps’ warp-rated population had been killed in the course of several massive fleet actions.

  Building lots of immobile fighting satellites was a solution for a heavily-industrialized polity, as long as it didn’t mind neglecting the needs of its civilian population. At this point, the average Imperium citizen must be living pretty rough, relatively speaking. War-boom theorists to the contrary, economies didn’t prosper by building huge stockpiles of military gear and destroying it on some battlefield, along with its operators. Wars were wasteful, terrible things, to be avoided unless there was no reasonable alternative. Anybody who’d seen war first hand would agree, except for the few psychos that actually got off from hurting others.

  “Very well. We’ll make our final emergence at four light-seconds and proceed from there. Once we have a better idea of those bogeys’ capabilities we’ll vector our fighter strikes accordingly.”

  Zhang had all but guaranteed Third Fleet’s fighters would be able to make ghosting sorties with minimum losses, provided they had a gunboat providing close support. That would reduce the Death Heads’ number of attack runs, but protecting the fighters was worth it. Her other vessels would have to survive unending waves of missiles while her long-range assets battered the enemy into scrap. It was a throwback to pre-Contact wet Navy tactics, back in the days when the carrier group had been the undisputed ruler of the seas.

  Even then, the enemy eventually discovered ways to counter that, she reminded herself. Starfarers weren’t big on innovation, but they could come up with engineering solutions to tactical problems just as well as humans. In any case, she only had one Space Wing, a little over a hundred fighters plus the five miracle gunboats. Her capital ships would still have to close to two light-seconds and use their main armament to finish the job.

  “Engage.”

  Her dead grandson greeted her in warp space.

  “You’re making a mistake, gran-mama.”

  He hadn’t called her that since he’d been eleven. She remembered that birthday party vividly; it had been one of the few celebrations she’d been able to attend.

  Her viewpoint shifted and she was back there, enduring the blazing summer solstice on New Louisiana-Four, its primary sun aided and abetted by the secondary star in the system; that year it made the closest pass it would in the next three centuries. The air had been still and nearly unbreathable, and Sondra had wished she could wear a haz-con suit without offending anybody. The children playing around the yard seemed comfortable enough, but they’d been bred to endure the harsh conditions of the colony. The trip had been worth it, though. Young Omar’s smile when he saw his grandmother had melted her heart.

  The ghost child wasn’t smiling. He regarded her with cold hostility for several moments. Sondra didn’t respond. No sense in engaging a manifestation of her own mind.

  “You are making a mistake,” he repeated. “You are listening to Zhang. The woman who got me killed. She’s going to lead you to disaster.”

  Sondra had thought she’d buried the hatchet with Zhang, but if this ghost was a reflection of her own doubts and fears, she might not have buried it deeply enough. She suspected this was something else. Warplings might have been scared off, but they could still communicate with sophonts through dreamlike visitations.

  Omar changed the child grew larger and older, shifting to the now-familiar form of a dead junior officer, his uniform torn and covered in blood. They said you forgot most of what you experienced while in transit. Hopefully she wouldn’t remember this ghastly apparition; she’d seen it too many times already.

  “You’ll remember, gran-mama. And you will regret not listening to me.”

  Emergence.

  She blinked and shook her head, but the image of dead Omar lingered for several seconds, longer than normal for a brief jump. By the time she recovered, everyone in the fleet bridge was hard at work, firming up real-time sensor data and comparing it with the observations they’d made from eight light-hours away.

  The towed platforms came into view. Their starkly utilitarian lines showed they’d been rushed into production; the Imperium loved to mix aesthetics with engineering, and only desperation would explain these hastily-assembled structures. As expected, they were crammed with dozens of box launchers, each capable of disgorging five to eight hundred ship-killing missiles. There were other attachments protruding from the ungainly pseudo-ships: lots of point defense turrets, a couple of battleship-grade gun emplacements, and what appeared to be several shuttle hangar bays.

  Shuttles? Are they going to try to send them out against fighters?

  The idea seemed ridiculous: ordinary shuttles could fly at only a small fraction of a starship’s speed. Then again, if American engineers could cram enough thrusters in a Warp Eagle to let it keep up with a warship, the Imperium’s designers could do the same. What they couldn’t do was give those vehicles enough force fields or armor to survive an engagement, not without warp shields.

  “The platforms are deploying smaller vehicles.”

  Her initial suspicion was quickly confirmed. A display zoomed in to reveal dozens of small fliers departing from those hangar bays. They were modified shuttles, with outsized thrust generators nearly as large as their main hulls, and equally massive gun mounts. Somebody had been ‘inspired’ by the War Eagles.

  “We’re picking up a large number of contacts, classified as STL fighters, designated Foxtrot contacts. Two thousand so far, with more deploying.” The Tactical Officer paused for a moment. “The Foxtrots are deploying stealth systems. We’re losing track of them within seconds of their deployment. Deployment has stopped. Minimum of three thousand Fox contacts, maximum of five thousand.”

  Now it gets interesting.

  “Maintain course. Belay all fighter and gunboat sorties. Have point defense sections start acquiring targeting solutions for the Foxtrots.”

  The original plan called for the CVW 25 to start hitting the Gimps as the rest of Third Fleet closed the range. Like most such plans, it hadn’t survived contact with the enemy. Those thre
e thousand bogeys changed the equation in unpredictable ways. Not only did the little ships have the potential to increase the enemy’s firepower by an order of magnitude, if they spread out throughout the formation their sensors might pick the War Eagle’s arrival earlier than the main fleet. Even a second or two of extra warning would let them open fire on their emergence points. Even ghosting fighters could take damage if enough energy struck them.

  On the other hand, even with stealth systems those improvised fighters were going to be slaughtered as soon as her warships got into range. An anti-missile laser would tear a shuttle apart in one or two hits; the little craft couldn’t mount enough shields to increase their survivability by any meaningful measure. And American point defense had gotten extremely good after years of experience dealing with Sun Blotter swarms.

  And I’ve run out of hands. There was the small matter that any light gun battery tasked with hunting for Foxtrots would not be able to shoot down incoming missiles.

  We could actually lose this fight. Or win a Pyrrhic victory, which for a force behind enemy lines with no quick or easy way to resupply meant the same thing.

  Withdrawing meant failure but would keep her command intact. The way back was largely unobstructed; any fleet nimble enough to ambush Third Fleet on its return trip wouldn’t be able to deploy those platforms, or as many STL fighters. She could fight her way back to American territory. But that just meant a slightly-delayed defeat.

  “Maintain course. Raise Colonel Zhang.”

  Running away wasn’t an option.

  * * *

  “Short version is, we’re going to poke the hornet’s nest and see what kind of hornet comes out to play.”

  Commander Deborah Genovisi barely paid attention to the pre-mission briefing. Something else was calling to her, a premonition of danger she couldn’t afford to ignore. If she couldn’t glean what her instincts were trying to tell her, people were going to lose their lives. Unfortunately, she’d never been able to force a vision into being: they happened or not, as random chance dictated or perhaps at the whim of some ineffable Deity.

  “It’s a trap,” she finally said as her feelings became certain.

  “What do you have for us, Grinner?”

  “They are expecting a fighter attack, and the Death Heads. I think… No, I know. They’ve got some weapon system designed to deal with fast-warp ships.”

  Nobody asked her if she was sure. They’d come to accept her hunches as actionable intelligence.

  “Okay, then. We’ll play it as safe as we can. Emerge at two light-seconds from the edge of their formation. Take one potshot each, and vamoose back into warp. Minimizes their target acquisition and delivery time.”

  “They might refuse to fire if the conditions are too averse,” Deborah pointed out. Her premonition had given her a sense of the commanding officer. A Denn male, one beset with anxiety; he didn’t think the new weapon should be used until it could deal the enemy critical blow. In fact, he had asked to deploy it first against Kerensky’s Black Ships. She’d caught a fleeting memory of a Warmaster meeting where he’d said as much.

  “Then we rinse and repeat. Even at long range, we’ll start racking up some kills. We can do that all day long. The rest of Third Fleet is going to advance at one quarter flank, so we’ll have a good four hours to play that game. Admiral figures if anyone can take whatever the Gimps have over there, it’s us.”

  It was the best they could do with the information they had available. The Death Heads left the mental meeting and concentrated on the final pre-sortie checklist. They were inside the Laramie, back with the rest of the support fleet, four light hours behind Third Fleet’s battle wall. For the Corpse-Ships, a jump anywhere in the system was a trivial exercise.

  Transition.

  “Jesus. Will you look at that?”

  Warplings. Lots of them. Hovering out of range, as it were, just close enough to watch the Death Heads. Deborah felt a combination of patience and eagerness coming from the distant horde. They knew something was up, and were ready to take advantage of it.

  “Not our problem,” Zhang said. “If they get close enough, pop ‘em one. Otherwise, ignore them.”

  Emergence.

  To the naked eye, the only noticeable feature was the greenish blue orb of Kezz-Three. Her Marauder-American sensor systems did a far better job of displaying her target: a Gimp battleship. The squadron hit it with a single volley before returning to warp. They jumped to Third Fleet’s battle wall without taking any return fire.

  “We punched some holes on Sierra-One. Nothing critical, but those ETs know they’ve been kissed,” Lisbeth said. “And something pinged us with a rangefinder. We were in real-space for a whole second and a half, so whoever targeted us was a lot closer than the main enemy fleet.”

  “Their fighters?”

  “Yep. They must have more of them than we thought, conducting patrols while on stealth mode. Passive sensors are good enough to detect an emergence, but they had to switch to active scans when they tried to shoot us. Getting the feed from Fleet. Hang one.”

  Deborah took a deep breath. The feeling of impending doom was getting stronger.

  “Yes, it was one of their improved shuttles, about half a light second from our emergence point. Too far out to be part of the squadrons that we saw scramble out of those platforms, so they must have been already out and about. Figure they had ten to twenty percent of their force out on Combat Space Patrol at any given time: that’s another three or even five hundred bandits out there, almost impossible to detect until they open fire or go active.”

  “Impossible to detect conventionally,” Deborah broke in, speaking as the idea occurred to her.

  “You mean using FM to pick them up?” Preacher asked. Deborah didn’t like the term – short for Fucking Magic – but sent out a mental nod.

  “Should work. In theory,” Lisbeth agreed. “Not so sure about how to actually do it. Our crates can pick up tachyon emissions, but the enemy’s only sources of t-waves are their brains. It’s gonna take a lot for us to pick up their minds from warp and correlate their location in space.”

  “True,” Deborah said. “Working out the details is going to take a while.”

  “It’s a good idea, though. We’ll keep picking at it, in our plentiful spare time.”

  Everyone laughed at that.

  “Meanwhile, we’re going back there. Same range and target, different emergence point, one and done. Maybe they won’t have fighters at that point, but figure they might. Let’s see if we can sink that boat. Expect to take fire.”

  Transition. There were even more Warplings out there, watching silently like spectators at a tense moment during a football game. Or a gladiatorial contest.

  They came out and took more shots at the battleship. Enemy Foxtrots were, unfortunately, nearby and ready for them. Targeting warnings went off: someone had a lock on Deborah’s gunship. She jumped back into warp. Or tried to.

  Chaos. The entire ship shook and spun like a barrel caught in a tornado. Her body was pulled painfully against the five-point safety harness holding her to her seat and she felt the entire vessel flexing against massive stresses. She was in warp space, but some force she’d never encountered before was tossing the craft about. The shouts of surprise and pain from the rest of the squadron told her she wasn’t the only one having a bad time.

  “I’ve lost my emergence point,” Jenkins said.

  Deborah checked. She had as well. The ‘tunnel’ she’d created was gone. Her ship was adrift in null-space with no designated way out.

  “That makes two of us,” she said, trying to project calmness and barely making it.

  “And Preacher makes three,” Preacher said. Three out of five wasn’t bad; it was disastrous unless they could figure out a way to get back.

  “We have an exit, but it’s way off-course,” Lisbeth said, speaking for herself and Kong. “Latch on to us and let’s get the hell out of Dodge. The natives are getting restless.”


  So they were. A swarm of Warplings was rushing forth. Whatever had destabilized the Death Heads’ transition had sent them to a region in null-space where the entities had more energy to draw upon. Deborah shot at them, but hits that had destroyed similar entities only seemed to anger them. Something began to pound on her hull. Fortunately she was able to follow Lisbeth out.

  Emergence.

  The welcome sight of stars against the dark of deep space didn’t do much to relieve her. Her cockpit was leaking atmosphere and a sensor module had been ripped clean off the ship; several other systems were damaged.

  “That sucked,” Preacher said. He’d emerged a light minute away from her position. So far he was the only one back.

  Two other warp openings formed up in quick succession, both within twenty light-seconds from Deborah’s position. Lisbeth and Kong had made it.

  Jenkins was the last one. And he wasn’t alone. Even from a light-second away, Deborah could feel a cold, slimy presence right alongside the pilot. A Warpling had crossed over.

  She watched in on visual a moment later. Jenkins’ Corpse-Ship was wrapped by something translucent and multi-limbed, a pulsing deep-purple thing with a myriad of black vein-like lines crisscrossing its surface. Its tendrils were battering the hull even as its psychic roars struck everyone who could hear them with an almost physical force.

  Deborah almost began to shoot before the realization she’d be blasting Jenkins as well stopped her. Before she could think of something, Lisbeth sent the entity back into warp with a forceful thought, with a lot of help from Atu.

  “My crate is shot to shit,” Jenkins said.

  “Yeah, we all took a beating. RTB and see what needs to be fixed.”

  “You mean go back into warp?”

  “We’ll be all right. Whatever the tangos did destabilized our return jump, but that’s not going to happen now. We can’t sit here: we are about three light-hours away from the fight, in case you hadn’t noticed.”