To The Strongest

by C. J. Carella

  “We will volley all our missiles from two light-seconds off,” Admiral Tee-Hee said. “After that, we will warp-jump to Kuna-Three and assist in the evacuation of as many warp-rated personnel as possible.”

  That meant abandoning nine-tenths of the population on Kuna-Three, about three hundred million people for whom warp travel meant death or at best permanent insanity. There was no other choice; a missile volley wouldn’t do much, but waiting to enter beam weapon range would be suicide. An exchange of broadsides when you were that grossly outnumbered could only end in one way.

  “We will launch fighter strikes timed to coincide with your missiles’ arrival,” Kimball said. The enemy would be too busy trying to shoot down the tens of thousands of ‘vampires’ – anti-shipping missiles – the Crab fleet could deliver from long range to bother dealing with the twenty-four fighters that would teleport into point-blank range, fire from within the warp envelopes that rendered then near invulnerable, and disappear a second or two later. CRURON-88’s chosen targets were one of the oversized enemy cruisers and the largest guided asteroid. That was about all that could be expected from two dozen War Eagle Mark-3 fighters; even the far deadlier Crimson Tides – which his squadron didn’t have – wouldn’t be able to do much more.

  Some would criticize his decision to use his fighters at all. Doing the enemy a small injury was never a good idea, and he would be revealing America’s fighter capabilities to someone who might never have encountered them before. On the other hand, the Horde would soon capture the system and no doubt learn everything other Starfarers knew about humans and their devilish weapons. Might as well score some points and possibly learn more about the enemy’s capabilities.

  “The Crabs are launching. Sixty thousand missiles en route towards enemy Sierras.”

  Kimball had served aboard a destroyer when Sixth Fleet had been on the receiving end of several Sun-Blotter missile swarms. He still had nightmares about the seemingly-endless flight of missiles headed towards his ship; no matter how many vampires you killed, there were more behind them. Nice to be on the giving side of that equation for a change.

  The enemy opened up on the approaching missiles with a variety of weapons: lasers, charged particles and plasma beams lit up the vacuum between the two fleets. Railguns fired clouds of metal projectiles like gigantic shotguns. Sixty thousand missiles became forty thousand, became thirty, became ten. Less than a thousand survivors reached point-blank range, where they were met with such a storm of point defense weapons few survived long enough to do damage. Obliterating a Sun-Blotter swarm took lot of firepower; the enemy had plenty of it.

  “Fighters are off.”

  The War Eagles didn’t fly but simply warped to their destination, instantly crossing the two light seconds separating the fleets. Each fighter was little more than a battleship cannon with a cockpit and propulsion system strapped to it. The fighters fired with perfect coordination, each two-squadron formation striking the same point with uncanny timing and accuracy. That was part of the eerie mystique of fighter pilots, men and women whose connection to null-space was nearly – or perhaps literally – supernatural. Kimball suppressed a shudder: fighter jocks always creeped him out.

  “Sierra Ninety-three has been destroyed. Sierra One has taken negligible damage.”

  One out of two wasn’t bad. The Horde battlecruisers weren’t any tougher than other alien warships the Marine and Navy fighter wings had obliterated time and again. The flying asteroids were something else, however. Even the combined firepower of a dozen fighters hadn’t penetrated deeply enough into the massive asteroid’s rocky hide to hit anything vital. The sensor feeds from the returning fighters would provide useful intelligence, but it was clear CRURON 88 couldn’t inflict meaningful damage on the enemy. It was time to get the heck out of Dodge.

  The Crab ships had waited until the missiles had all been destroyed, using active sensors in a futile attempt to guide them towards their targets. They were preparing to go into warp when the enemy returned fire.

  Kimball’s blood ran cold when he saw fifty graviton beams reach out across two light-seconds and strike half the Crab battlecruisers. The massive volley had come from the three large asteroids. The blasts’ energy signatures were off the scale. Not even the Wyrms’ great fortress guns packed that much power. None of the Crab heavies survived the direct hits; the proud ships had been reduced to burning debris.

  “Emergency jump!” he ordered. His warp shields might be able to withstand those volleys, but he didn’t want to risk it.

  CRURON-88 fled into warp. By sheer luck, the next enemy volley had targeted the survivors of the Crab flotilla. By the time the American ships returned to reality in the vicinity of Kuna-Three, their temporary allies’ fleet had been utterly destroyed. Kimball sent a terse status report to the Crab governor before making haste towards the system’s exit point. The Horde wasn’t kidding around and he had to warn the US that a new threat had reached the known galaxy.

  Running from a fight grated. Even worse than that was the worry that there would be a Round Two.

  * * *

  The easy victory was tainted by a surge of terror when the local dirt-huggers used Chaos ships against the Host.

  During that moment, Warlord Fann had feared he’d led his people to a stronghold of the Nemeses. But no, the tiny vessels that had destroyed a war carrack and inflicted cosmetic injuries on the clan’s Home were not the same as the implacable foes who had expelled his people from a galactic spiral arm. It was bad news that some of the local enemies had such control over the dreaded forces of Chaos, but such could be overcome.

  For the time being, all that mattered was the planet near the center of the system, laden with loot for his Makers to build more ships, consumables to restore his fleet’s supplies, and slaves to bring into service should they prove capable to live within the Crimson Sun Clan’s life support parameters. Normally the Host would spend a few months plundering their prize, but staying too long while being separated by a single Chaos leap from the Nemeses, even a long one, was much too risky. The Clan would pause here for a few days, take what it could in that span of time, and move on.

  In a few years at best, and a few months at worst, the Nemeses would arrive. The Clan must remain an elusive prey.

  One

  Marduk-One, 197 AFC (After First Contact)

  Jason Giraud watched the starship rise towards the sky.

  It wasn’t much of a ship. The really big vessels never came down to the surface of a planet; they were built to maximize volume and entering any sort of atmosphere would be like flying into a brick wall. This was a tramp freighter, a mere ten thousand tons of displacement, tiny in comparison to the huge cargo monsters that plied the space lanes and used five-kiloton shuttles to bring their goods dirtside. The tramp freighter had prettier lines, though; its aerodynamic hull gave it a sleeker profile than the largely-globular designs of big ships. Jason imagined that life aboard it would be better than working in one of the super-freighters, where corporations would regulate your life and you’d know exactly how things would go for the next ten or twenty years almost down to the hour. That indie ship’s crew lived day-to-day, knowing only where the next warp jump would take it; everything beyond that would be a surprise.

  He wished he could be aboard it.

  It was a stupid wish; passage off-world cost more than he was worth. Even the tramp freighter he was looking at would charge more than he could afford and he didn’t have the skills needed to work for his berth. Jason had just turned twenty-one and all he had to his name were a couple of weeks’ saved pay from his stint as a pretend-Marine, about enough for a month’s rent at a flophouse. If he wasn’t living with his great-grandfather, he’d be in trouble. His life sucked.

  “Jase,” great-gramps said, snapping him from his thoughts.

  “Hey, Pops.”

  Jason stepped back into the house. He’d been looking out the oversized barred window that passed as a balcony in his great-gr
andfather’s apartment. The three-story building was on the side of a hill that overlooked the huge landing pad used for shuttle and small starship landings. The view came with a price: every other hour, you heard the whooshing sound of a ship or shuttle making its final approach. No supersonic booms – those only happened after the ships reached enough altitude to avoid blasting the town below – but the noise was noxious enough that the well-to-do lived a few miles away from the pad. Jason’s great-gramps was many things, but well-to-do wasn’t one of them. All it took was one look at the cramped, messy quarters the old man and his only living relative called home to tell anybody that.

  Pops’ shift at the fabber center had been over for a couple hours, but Jason hadn’t been expecting him to show up that early. Friday was payday at Olsen’s Assemblies and that meant Pops would scrupulously bank half of his pay towards basic expenses before taking the other half and marching up to the Keno Casino, where he would blow it all at the card table. Some Fridays he’d be back late with triple his weekly pay in blank credit chips; most often he’d show up with nothing but a bad mood. He was early, so he must have gotten wiped out quickly. A hand that had seemed to be too good not to go all in had turned out to be not good enough, was Jason’s guess.

  “Win some, lose some,” the old man grumbled, confirming his suspicions.

  “That’s why they call it gambling,” Jason replied, trotting out the familiar phrase without missing a beat.

  Pops grinned. “True enough.” The smile disappeared a moment later, though. “You still going to that party, Jase?”

  Jason nodded, suppressing a surge of irritation. He was wearing his best outfit – other than his Sunday clothes, which were too stodgy for where he was going – so there’d been no need for the question. The old man – who actually looked old because he couldn’t afford the rejuv treatments this month, and probably not next month either – frowned at him.

  “Those friends of yours ain’t no good, Jase. They’re bums and dodgers. No good can come from associating with ‘em.”

  Jason tried not to sigh. He was used to Pops’ lectures. He’d gone off-world during his Obligatory Service term hoping he’d never come back to Marduk-One except on a rare visit every few years. Instead, he came back for good, tail between his legs, a loser the Corps had tossed away. That meant there was no escaping the old man and his lectures. Not until he got a job that paid enough for him to get a place of his own. Problem was, a reject who’d spent his four years of service in the combat arms didn’t have many useful skills for civilian life. He could make his bed, dig holes, run for miles and miles, use a variety of weapons and clean up after himself; none of those abilities were in high demand.

  “They ain’t got no respect, son,” his great-great-great-grandfather – plus one or two more ‘greats;’ Pops was over two hundred years old – went on. “No respect for God or Country.”

  “It’s just a party, Pops. Cassie invited me, and she’s no dodger.”

  Cassie Dunkel was still doing her ObServ, the four-year mandatory program that everybody had to join before age eighteen if they wanted to be citizens of the United Stars of America. The guys throwing the party were dodgers; they’d never done their service. People didn’t get arrested for dodging ObServ, not in a rock like Marduk-One, which was out in the galactic boonies and had a big underground economy. However, dodgers couldn’t vote, hold down public office or get work from any respectable business. Scabs O’Malley and Juice Perkins – the guys running the party – would never be able to get a regular job, but they made their living throwing parties and selling drugs, so they didn’t care. If they ever got convicted of anything, draft-dodging would add an extra six to eight years to their sentence, but people like them didn’t care.

  “The Dunkel girl’s all right,” Pops admitted. “But you shouldn’t associate with them lowlifes. You got a clean record, son. Don’t spoil it.”

  “Just going to have a couple drinks, dance for a bit and come home,” Jason said. He wasn’t fifteen years old anymore, but darned if Pops remembered that. At twenty-one, he could drink, vote and do anything he wanted. He just didn’t have the money to do most of what he wanted.

  “I wish the Marines had kept you, son. You would have done great things in the Corps.”

  “They didn’t have room for me, Pops. They’re still kicking people out, even long-service vets. ‘Reduction in force,’ they call it. Can’t even blame them for it. There hasn’t been a major war in like forever.” Since before Jason had been born, as a matter of fact. To him, war was something he’d studied in history class or played at a variety of shooter games.

  “People forget,” the old man said, his eyes bright with anger, and Jason steeled himself for the rant that would follow as surely as thunder followed lightning. “The galaxy hates us, son. A trillion and a half of ‘em, barely three billion of us, eight if you count non-American humans, and every last one of them trillion-and-change aliens wish we were dead and gone.”

  “I know, Pops.” Jason had learned better than to argue the point or mention humanity’s handful of alien allies.

  “It’s like people have forgotten First Contact. I was there, Jase. First thing aliens did when they found us was burn down half of our cities. Four billion people dead, and two hundred years later there’s barely more humans living in the universe than the day the E.T.s showed up.”

  Images flooded Jason’s mind as Pops sent him videos of First Contact. He could have refused to watch them but decided to humor the old man. Besides, he agreed with Pops; some things should never be forgotten. The old-style 2-D vid clips showed familiar sights: the contrails of hundreds of missiles descending over Earth’s cities. Those missiles hadn’t exploded but instead landed in circular patterns around major population centers, erecting domes of invisible energy that trapped people inside. Shortly afterwards, they’d started fires, incredibly-hot fires that melted concrete and steel.

  People inside the burning domes had lived for as long as five hours after the holocaust started; six or seven hours for those who hid in underground shelters before their air ran out or they were broiled alive. Millions of them had used their smartphones to record the sights and sounds for posterity. Advancing walls of fire. Buildings collapsing one by one as their structures softened too much to keep them standing. People fleeing the flames, some of them already on fire. Men, women and children choking to death as ashes clogged the air around them.

  Pops always added new tidbits to the snuff films he sent Jason. This one showed people jumping from buildings, choosing a swift death over the rising flames. A man and a woman stepped off holding hands. That sight hit Jason harder than the rest. It made him think of his dead parents.

  “Okay, okay. Please, Pops.”

  The old man relented; the overwhelming video torrent stopped.

  “Don’t you forget, Jase. It can happen again. It did happen again. Four times, the E.T.s have come for us. Cities burned at Heinlein, Parthenon and New Ohio, barely thirty years ago.”

  “I know.” Jason hadn’t been alive yet, of course, but he’d watched the flicks and played the games. Long before his ObServ he’d pretended to be a Warp Marine fighting Eets in a hundred virtual battlefields. He’d longed for the day he would do it for real, when he would be launched from a warp catapult to drop in on a pack of Lampreys or Gimps and deliver some well-deserved payback. The Lampreys were all but extinct and the Galactic Empire had broken up into a dozen pieces, though; neither of them was a threat anymore. And the Corps had rejected him. They only had so many slots open, and he hadn’t been good enough to deserve one.

  The future looked bleak. He could apply for a job at one of the fabber centers. There were three on the planet’s surface; between them and two orbital shipyards they employed about a million people. Pops had worked at one of those for the last sixty years. Problem was, there were half a dozen people trying to get in for every job available, even crap details like cleaning goop off the matter-printers or sweeping floo
rs. If Jason had gotten fabber training during ObServ, he’d have a much better chance to land a good job, but he’d spent his time learning how to shoot the standard Infantry Weapon; knowing how to use and maintain an IW-5 didn’t do him any good when it came to controlling a matter-printing machine.

  Jason shrugged. All of that could wait until tomorrow. He had a party to look forward to, and he wasn’t going to let Pops’ historical flicks or worries about tomorrow bring him down.

  * * *

  Scabs O’Malley sneered at Jason. “Jeez. Look who the rats dragged in.”

  His former classmate had shot up a couple of inches since the last time Jason had seen the guy, and put on a lot of muscle too, although that probably had come from a shot of nanites rather than exercise. Scabs was a big believer in living better through chemistry. He was displaying his physique by going shirtless, which also showed off an extensive set of tattoos: a full sleeve of fluorescent neon designs on each arm and an animated avenging angel holo-tat that rose from his back at a subvocalized command from the smart glasses that served as a poor substitute for imps. Scabs didn’t have cybernetic implants; few who lived on the wrong side of the law did. The more stupid and reckless among them relied on black market imps that rarely worked as advertised; the rest did without.

  Whatever drugs Scabs was on, they weren’t making him mellow. Quite the contrary. Maybe coming to this shindig hadn’t been a good idea.

  The party didn’t look like much. The organizers had taken over an abandoned landing pad, a flat concrete plug three hundred feet wide on the wrong side of town. They’d set up a cash bar and were piping music straight into everyone’s imps or portable devices. Music and visuals: Jason’s implants let him see ghostly dancers mixed in with the real-life kids on the dance floor. People wishing for privacy wandered over the abandoned warehouses on the edge of the landing pad, which wasn’t a good idea; the two dilapidated structures were overgrown with the native version of kudzu, which wasn’t just thorny and known to give humans a nasty allergic rash on contact but also had leafy growths that would get you high if you smoked them – as long as you didn’t mind some brain damage with every inhale.