Deborah hadn’t. A quick look at her positional finder confirmed the squadron commander’s words. They’d been knocked way off course.
“What the hell did they do to us?”
* * *
“It’s a graviton emitter, ma’am. A modified grav-cannon, meant to disrupt warp processes.”
Admiral Sondra Givens grimaced. She shouldn’t have been surprised. Opening a hole in spacetime was an exercise in applied gravity. It only stood to reason that it could be affected by the proper application of g-forces. Of course, actually putting those theories into effect was, like rocket engineering, a whole other kettle of fish. The enemy seemed to have managed it fine, though.
“Fourteen Foxtrots were close enough to use the emitters against the gunship squadron,” the Tactical Officer went on; sorting through the data had taken some time but he could finally offer some conclusions. “Five of them appeared to strike the apertures effectively. Three appear to have had no effect. And six of them malfunctioned critically.”
Those six luckless STL fighters had been torn apart by tidal stresses when their wonder weapons created micro-singularities inside their hulls. Starfarers rarely deployed experimental weapons with forty percent failure rates, but the Gimps were desperate enough to cut corners. After all, losing six modified shuttles for the chance to wipe out the Death Head squadron was a more than fair trade. At least to anybody other than the luckless shuttle crews who’d briefly experienced life near a black hole.
Third Fleet had paused its advance while its commander reassessed her plans.
“What happens when one of those disruptors hit our warp shields?”
“We are not sure, ma’am. Threat Assessment hasn’t reached a consensus.”
“Screw consensus. Give me what they’ve got.”
“There are four prevailing theories. The disagreements are about which one is the most likely.”
“Let’s hear them.”
“There is a chance the disruptors will have no effect on warp shields, since we don’t actually jump through them.”
Warp shields, like all such constructs, had an entry and emergence point, but the latter was in a random direction one light-minute away, and ships were in a perpetual state of free fall in relation to the aperture, never quite reaching it.
“So that’s the best case. Next.”
“The destabilizing effect may cause us to lose the affected shield, either by triggering a shutdown or forcing us to shut them down ourselves to prevent one of the other two possibilities.”
“Which are...?”
“The apertures may grow large enough to swallow the ship, causing it to emerge on the other side. Or, lastly, the unstable aperture may allow something from the other side to come in, at either or both ends.”
Sondra had seen the footage from the Death Heads’ sensors, showing the monstrous hitchhiker that had almost destroyed one of the gunboats. Having one or more of those things – or something even larger – make an appearance wasn’t something she wanted to even think about.
“Give me an estimate of what happens if we go in without warp shields.”
The Tactical Officer had been expecting that question. He sent her the predicted loss assessments. They weren’t great, but they weren’t catastrophic. American ships had moved away from relying primarily on their warp shields, since the enemy had kept getting better and better at finding ways to avoid them. Third Fleet was going to pay dearly for the privilege of taking that system, but it was a price she could afford. This time.
“This is Fleet Admiral Givens, to all Third Fleet elements. We will proceed with our attack plan, with some modifications. Task force commanders, stand by for new orders.”
Her ships began moving forward.
* * *
“Son of a bitch.”
Watching a battle unfold in real time while sitting in the rear with the gear was an unfamiliar and unpleasant sensation.
Lisbeth and her Death Heads could see what was happening from the Laramie, parked with the rest of the support ships some five light-hours away, courtesy of a warp navigator who was sending them the sensor take telepathically. Watching the battle unfold in real-time was great (not to mention a major violation of General Relativity), but Lisbeth wanted to do something. Having her squadron benched in the middle of a major fleet action was driving her into a frenzy.
Third Fleet had pushed its way past three Sun-Blotter volleys, each in the half-million missile range. Unable to use warp shields, the American ships had taken a beating: two battlecruisers were gone, along with half a dozen destroyers.
We were supposed to protect the fleet. They hadn’t dared to use the Wall of Fire, not with enemy fighters waiting for the chance to mess with their warp jumps. The Carrier Strike Group had withdrawn from the battle wall; without its fighters those ships were little more than big targets, and Admiral Givens had sent them packing.
The two forces had entered direct energy weapon range. The Gimp fighters’ grav cannon turned out to be dual-use; they could fire standard graviton beams as well as those warp disruptors. They weren’t as powerful as a War Eagle’s twenty-inchers – they packed maybe one fifth the punch – but thousands of peashooters still added up to a real bad day. On the other hand, the converted shuttles were being massacred. Opening fire revealed them to even the most cursory sensor scan, and their life expectancy after being acquired by an American ship was measured in seconds. On the other hand, the Gimps were still volleying thousands of missiles from all their weapon platforms, and the harried American defense gunners had more targets than they could engage at any given moment. Even under those constraints, half of the enemy fighter force had been wiped out.
“We could pile on just about now,” Jenkins said. “Our birds are patched up, and as long as we stay in real space their warp disruptors can’t do shit to us.”
“Maybe. Our force fields are hybrid, remember? Warp shields sandwiched between two standard fields. No telling what those things can do if they hit us.”
“Shit.”
Through the eyes of their fleet contact, they all saw the Thermopylae shudder under multiple energy impacts. Her fore force fields failed and clouds of vaporized ablative foam rose from two direct hits. Shield power was restored a moment later, but at least one of those hits had burned all the way through her hull. Lisbeth could imagine what happened to anybody unlucky enough to be on those decks: a quick, messy death at best, or living long enough to be sucked into space, burn to death, or both. You rarely walked away from a capital ship hull breach if you were anywhere near it. Even people in surrounding compartments risked injury or death from secondary effects.
“Colonel,” Grinner said. “I’ve been thinking about how those disruptors work.”
“Go on.”
“They add energy to the targeted warp aperture, causing it to fluctuate. Maybe we can use it in our favor.”
“I’m listening.”
Chances were nothing they could think of would affect this fight, but there was always the next one.
Eleven
“Seals are all good,” Russell told Grampa. “The local ETs’ air mix is good enough for us, but you still don’t want to leak life support. Them little platforms will get filled with vacuum PDQ, once you start shooting inside them.”
“Loving it,” the old guy said. “I already got my badge. Been there, done that, and I’m getting the warms and fuzzies at the thought of doing it again.”
You got a Warp Assault Badge after you teleported into an enemy ship and kicked some ass. This time they were going after the towed weapon platforms, but those counted. Anything surrounded by hard vacuum counted. And this drop wasn’t going to be fun at all.
“You sure those disruptors can’t fuck up our jumps?” Grampa asked for the third time.
“Only their fighters have ‘em,” Russell explained for the third time.
“Guess they are so unreliable they don’t want ‘em on anything larger,” Gonzo added. He wasn�
��t trying to break Grampa’s balls for a change, which meant he was as nervous as the oldster. And he wasn’t kidding; from what they’d heard the warp disruptors killed the shuttles firing them almost half the time. Nobody with any sense would want to mount them on something expensive like a starship.
“Step on up, Marines,” Sergeant Fuller said. Russell’s fireteam, plus one from the Assault section and six grunts from First Platoon were doing this jump, along with Fuller. They were sending one squad-sized assault detachment per target; supposedly there were only twenty to thirty tangos manning the platforms, and they’d have light weapons, if they were armed at all. At least, that was what they’d been told, not that anybody with sense counted on it being true. If Russell had a buck for every time someone in charge had ‘known’ something and turned out to be full of shit, he’d be able to retire already.
They stepped on the platform and did the transition bit. This time Russell got a brief visit from Nacle’s ghost, who looked very disappointed in him. It was over quick, and he and the rest of the squad emerged on Echo Tango land. Their arrival tore a hole in the platform’s hull; atmo was leaking at a good clip, buffeting the Marines with high-speed winds. Good thing they’d checked the seals of their suits. The winds died down when the compartment vented all its air.
“Shit! Clamp down, everybody, it’s gonna start again when we blow the door.”
An imp command later, Russell’s boots were bonded to the compartment’s floor at the molecular level, with an additional 1.2 gees of focused gravity for good measure. The designated door-knockers let fly with two bursts of breaching rounds, turning the door into spalling fragments that bounced around the hallway before the sudden decompression sent them back into the vented compartment. Russell’s shields sparkled when bits of metal flew quickly enough to trigger them.
An alien body came flying in as well. A Denn, humanoid except for the miniature elephant trunks they had instead of noses. Dead already, leaking from several holes from the blast that had turned the door into bouncing shrapnel. Grampa dodged the hurtling body with a curse. The tango did them all a favor, though; his carcass plugged the hull breach, and the winds stopped.
“Connor, Mariano, tape him in place.”
Two Marines headed for the tango’s corpse, space tape at the ready. That sort of bio-patch wouldn’t last long, but it was better than nothing.
“The rest of you, move on.”
A live Denn was huddled around a corner, where he’d been holding onto a handrail when the corridor depressurized. He managed to squeeze a shot from a beamer before an Iwo burst sent him to Jesus, but he didn’t hit anybody. Two down, twenty-eight to go. Allegedly.
As it turned out, there were more like fifty Eets in the miniature station. They only had pistols, though, low-power beamers that didn’t pose a threat to a grunt in armor. Most of them tried to run, hide and eventually surrender. A couple officers and a few enlisted with guts stood and fought. They all got the same result for their troubles.
“Clear,” Sergeant Fuller called out after twenty minutes of slaughter. There might be one or two Gimps hiding in service tunnels or other remotes parts of the platform, but they wouldn’t be a problem.
Bringing enough demo along to blow even a small target was difficult, but the assaultmen knew their business. A few carefully emplaced charges around the power plant, plus a virus program uploaded into the Gimp systems would ensure a runaway gluon reaction that would vaporize the whole thing. By the time they were done, the squad had set up their catapult for the return trip. They left with fifteen seconds to spare.
“Target destroyed,” Lieutenant Hansen told them when they returned to the Mattis. “Good job, people.”
A hundred and eighty targets destroyed, as a matter of fact. The Marines had taken out every surviving platform in the system. Two boarding parties didn’t make it back. Either they didn’t warp back in time or they got lost in transit. Twenty-six dead Marines. Nobody from the 101st, but it still sucked. The bosses would consider those losses ‘acceptable.’ It was a bit more personal for Russell. Acceptable was another word for ‘no skin off my ass.’ Fucking remfies.
“Shit,” Grampa said when he checked the casualty list.
Russell tried to shrug, but found himself shaking his head instead.
* * *
“Are you sure, Colonel?”
Admiral Givens looked like hell. A major battle was hard for everyone, and CINC-Three wasn’t happy to take time off from the fight to get into a conference call with Lisbeth, mediated by an ONI agent with t-wave implants. Her feelings came through very clearly; telepathy made poker faces irrelevant.
“Yes, Admiral,” Lisbeth said. She tried to project gung-ho all over her words. “Every Foxtrot that’s fired a disruptor left behind a t-wave signature. Commander Genovisi has figured out a way to trace them. All we need is a t-wave capable person working targeting on your ships, and we can send them the coordinates of all of them.
“Very well. There’s still some twelve hundred fighters out there, and they’ve gone back into stealth. Probably waiting until we get a little closer. I’ll send orders to all point defense fire directors. Make it happen, Colonel. Out.”
“All right, Grinner. Work your magic.”
Deborah’s mind was already wandering. Using her warp-mutated senses, Lisbeth saw it as a thousand of glowing tendrils launching off from the image of the Navy pilot like so many scouting drones. They reached out over millions of kilometers instantly, in utter defiance of physics. Lisbeth wondered if you could do even weirder stuff with t-waves, like see into the future and violate causality. Then she realized Grinner already could see into the future. Poor Einstein must be doing about 600 rpm in his grave.
When Genovisi prompted them, the rest of the squadron pitched in. None of them could match the spooky bubblehead’s clairvoyance, but they could add the psychic version of muscle to assist her, especially Lisbeth, who had them all beat in terms of raw power.
“You are learning rather quickly, Christopher Robin,” Atu told her. The alien ghost was watching over Genovisi’s process, occasionally sending her telepathic pointers. “This sort of Seeing is something my kind developed after centuries of study. The Marauders never developed it at all, relying instead on their Starless masters to provide them with information.”
“You know what they say, the prospect of being hanged focuses the mind wonderfully.”
“There is that. Although I suspect Deborah Genovisi is a unique case, made even more so by her time spent with one of the Greater Starless.”
“The angel,” Lisbeth said, focusing on keeping the conversation private from the other Death Heads.
The whole story about Grinner’s warp trip and her encounter with the being she called Michael was still deemed need-to-know only. There were possible religious implications there that the top brass didn’t want to deal with, especially in the middle of a shooting war. Lisbeth thought of what someone like Preacher might do if he heard that an archangel had spoken to Grinner. It could range from total awe to outrage at what he’d see as blasphemy. Best to keep that can of worms closed. People knew the Navy pilot had met with a seemingly angelic being, but not exactly what he’d told her.
“We always tried to minimize our dealings with the greater powers of the Path,” Atu went on. “The few of us who did were changed. Unbalanced.” The last word sounded like a curse. For the Pathfinders, abandoning Balance was the greatest sin.
“Well, we’re dealing with a whole renegade fleet that sold its collective soul to the devil. Maybe a little unbalance from the other side might be just what the doctor ordered.”
“Perhaps,” was all her spirit friend said.
“I see them,” Grinner said. A moment later, so did the rest of the Death Heads. Thirteen hundred points of light, along with their exact location, vector and speed. Their warp weapons had betrayed them, and the minds of their pilots had provided enough of a beacon to pinpoint their location.
Th
e rest was rather anticlimactic. It was just a matter of sending the information to a dozen point defense directors through tachyon-rated crewmembers. Firing solutions were set, and some three hundred anti-missile guns began picking off stealthed targets. In less than two minutes, every Foxtrot was destroyed.
Third Fleet’s warp shields came back online.
“All right, kids,” Lisbeth told the squadron as soon as the go-ahead came through. “We’re back in action.”
Her grin became feral.
“Let’s go hunting.”
* * *
Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.
Wellington’s words – and one of Admiral Carruthers’s favorite quotes – was on the forefront of Sondra Givens’ mind as she surveyed the fruits of victory. They were bitter fruits: Kezz System had fallen, and she’d incinerated eighteen cities and untold numbers of civilians, but the price had been steep. Third Fleet’s losses weren’t crippling, but had been significant: the dreadnought Merrimack was severely damaged and she’d lost three battlecruisers and seven destroyers. All her other ships would require repairs. If Zhang’s and her gang of creepy warp wizards hadn’t pulled another miracle out of their hats, it would have been a lot worse.
Fortunately, the Marines had seized two orbital shipyards relatively intact; those facilities would speed up things considerably. Even so, they were looking at a week’s stay in the system before they could resume operations. Being cut off from the US meant that any ship that couldn’t stay with the fleet would have to be scuttled. And with no replacements or reinforcements available, she needed to carefully nurse her forces. She wasn’t afraid of a counterattack; if the Gimps had any more mobile formations in this sector, they would have been waiting for her here. A reaction force would need to make several transits to get here, giving her at least a couple of weeks, according to the best estimates of the Intelligence department. The Imperium had proved to have more ships than anybody had thought or even suspected, however, so an earlier arrival wasn’t out of the question.
Havoc of War (Warp Marine Corps Book 5) Page 16
