Starbase Malta, Xanadu System, 197 AFC
Watching Horde warriors at work was horrifying.
The bulky humanoids’ long arms and relatively short legs gave them a simian appearance and their equipment could best be described as ‘motley,’ with no two sets of matching gear among them. There was nothing ungainly about the way they swarmed out of the molten hole they’d carved into a starship’s hull, however. They acted with grace and coordination Heather had only seen among US Marines and other elite forces. Their weapons consisted of plasma shotguns, bulky short-ranged weapons that instead of power packs relied on cartridges; primitive but brutally effective, much like the Hordelings themselves.
The crew of the doomed merchantman didn’t stand a chance. Heather didn’t recognize the species – some sort of Class One four-legged centauroids – but could sympathize with their futile struggle. An internal force field failed after a single volley of plasma blasts and the Horde warriors pressed forward, ignoring the light laser fire the alien spacers poured on them. Lightly armored and equipped, most of the centauroids burned like wax candles exposed to a blast furnace. They were the lucky ones.
The few survivors were dragged to a room and butchered with the short axes the Hordelings liked to use at close quarters. In all the millennia the Horde had rampaged through the known galaxy, it had never offered quarter or expected any. The best any prisoners could hope for was to be dragged off to one of the ravagers’ ships to an unknown fate. Slavery, perhaps, although ritual torture could be just as likely.
Heather Fromm-McClintock dismissed the 2-D video display. The footage had been carried aboard a lifeboat that had launched from the merchantman moments before its engineering crew deliberately caused a runaway reaction of its gluon power plant, turning it into a funeral pyre for both themselves and their tormentors. The videos had been passed down through centuries before ending in the Tah-Leen historical database that she was currently studying.
For months on end, Heather and a team of historians and CIA analysts had combed through millennia’s worth of data, looking for actionable intelligence. They’d discovered quite a lot of information, although how useful it would be remained to be determined.
The team had learned that there were several sub-groups among the Horde. Tribes or familial clans or whatever. While they all used jury-rigged ships and powered asteroids, their tech level varied a great deal. Weapon systems ranged from well below the current Starfarer state-of-the-art to items beyond it. Comparing the data from previous invasions, it appeared that the most recent incursions had involved the more primitive groups. The fleet that had invaded Crab space, on the other hand, had used high-yield graviton weapons almost on par with the guns defending Starbase Malta. They were not going to be easy to defeat.
And nobody knows where they went, or when they’ll show up again.
That was something the ancient records agreed on: the Horde had an uncanny ability to find warp gateways. For most Starfarers, discovering the cracks in spacetime that made interstellar travel possible required decades of meticulous work and a good dose of luck. Every system had one or two easily-found gateways at specific confluences of the gravity wells of planets and stars. Theoretically there could be several dozen more, but finding those became a matter of groping around empty vacuum until stumbling into them. Space was big and even the most advanced sensors could only detect the minute disturbances in gravity generated by a gateway a few hundred meters. Some Warplings could help such searches, but the price they required – the sacrifice of thousands of sophonts – was a devil’s bargain in an almost literal sense. The Horde had somehow found an easier way.
The other mystery surrounding the elusive species was its ability to move massive asteroids through warp space. The mass of an object going into transit determined the energy budget necessary: there was an ideal range below or above which the energy costs grew rapidly. Warp fighters, for example, required as much power for their short jumps as a destroyer’s interstellar jumps. And the largest warships hit a ‘wall’ of diminishing returns where a ten percent mass increase required five times as much power to move through warp space. And yet, the Horde could move objects thousands of times more massive than the largest superdreadnought.
Scientists in hundreds of specialties had analyzed every kilobyte of data relating to the Horde mobile planetoids and come back empty. Heather’s research teams had found similar inquiries undertaken by older civilizations, none of whom had done any better. Sensor readings only detected enormous power surges before the asteroids entered into warp. Since nobody had been able to capture an intact planetoid, the mechanism behind the energy flares remained unknown.
The Horde didn’t surrender. Planetoids self-destructed if they couldn’t escape, or rather, the warrens of living space within them did, leaving nothing behind but a lifeless rock with charred tunnels and compartments where its previous residents had worked and dwelled. Ships had been captured, but their databases had been impossible to decipher. Living prisoners were taken rarely – Horde warriors fought to the death unless incapacitated – but the captives spoke no known language and sought only escape or death. Very little information had been extracted from them. It was frustrating.
Heather shook her head and continued examining the records involving the doomed ship. It appeared that the Horde had started destroying all vessels from that civilization after the self-destruction of the merchantman in the video recording. That made sense, although something started nagging at her mind as she built a timeline of events. A Horde fleet in a system several warp jumps away had started destroying all centauroid ships mere days after the first incident. That suggested the two fleets had been in communication, which normally required courier ships; the only faster-than-light communication system available, quantum-entangled particle ‘telegrams,’ could only work within the confines of a planet’s gravity well. Even the largest planetoids the Horde used didn’t count for that purpose. Not to mention that warp jumps degraded quantum entanglement.
There might be something there. She started looking through other records, looking for patterns.
Seven
Groom Base, Star System 3490, 198 AFC
Russell was getting tired of being tired.
“Need more coffee, Edison?” Staff Sergeant Kinston asked him.
“Thanks, I’m good.”
The food was better than ordinary tray-rats; the mess hall at Groom Base serviced not only the WRAITT trainees but test pilots and lots of civilians, mostly scientists and techies whose tender palates needed to be satisfied. Russell wasn’t complaining. Good chow was the least the remfies could do for them.
The past year and change had been a pain in the ass. The six-week Assessment and Selection Process Course had been brutal and only twenty of the thirty-two fresh fish in the class had made it through. The failed candidates would end up as warp navigators, fighter pilots, or maybe ONI; they had good warp ratings but couldn’t hack the physical bits. ASPOC had been rough; even with their nano-enhanced bodies, everyone had been ready to drop at the end of each day. That had been followed by a twelve months’ long Individual Training Course. Russell had aced the first three Phases (Basic Skills, Small Unit Tactics and Close Quarters Battle) and done okay on Phase Four (Irregular Warfare). As it turned out, he could have been an operator if he’d applied himself or been interested in the job.
Phase Five (Null-Space Tactics) was what differentiated the Wraiths from regular Marine Raiders, though. They’d lost eight more people along the way. Six of the washups ended up in standard MARSOC slots; they were good troops but couldn’t hack the warp witchery involved. One of them got a full medical discharge and would hopefully recover after years of psychotherapy. The last one was a fatality.
Meditation techniques, long-term exposure to warp space, and all kinds of weird mystical crap were mixed with steady doses of P.T. just to make sure nobody forgot their primary purpose. Phase Five had been a bear. But he’d made it. He hadn’t had
a lot of sleep, but he was used to it, especially now that his body was twenty-five again, and a nano-enhanced twenty-five at that. He could run ten-minute miles without breaking a sweat – so of course they made him run five-minute miles until he was ready to puke.
Russell finished his breakfast and glanced at the rest of his Tactical Element, the three people he’d be spending most of his on-duty time with.
Staff Sergeant Kinston was the team leader. She was tough, didn’t talk much, and was about as motherly as a battleaxe. Just the way Russell liked his women in uniform, the ones he depended on keeping him alive, that was. Kinston knew her stuff, had plenty of brains and brawn, and would only quit about fifteen minutes after she was clinically dead. She had thirty years in the Corps, and the only reason she hadn’t picked up more rank was that advancement had nearly frozen since the end of the last big war. That, and she liked being where the action was more than being a boss.
Sergeant Joe Corolla was okay. Catholic and a bit of a Jesus freak, but he didn’t push things too far and Russell was used to working with that sort of guy; plenty of devout something-or-other types in the Corps. Corolla had fought in the Great Galactic War, retired and worked as a civilian warp navigator for twenty years before he rejoined the Marines. Whatever his reasons for the change in careers were, he kept them to himself.
Lance Corporal Jason ‘Dog-Boy’ Giraud was the youngest Marine in the team, barely in his early twenties. Unlike the others, he’d only done two years in the Corps, and that during the second phase of his Obligatory Service. He’d made it through ITC with flying colors, though. Russell would have preferred to have someone with more experience, but you got what they gave you. Dog-Boy was a bit straitlaced, but not as bad as Corolla. Russell was trying to teach him how to live, without much success so far.
WRAITT units were based on a twelve-man Marine Special Operation Team. MSOTs were smaller than a standard Marine spec-ops team – no corpsmen, for one; Wraiths had to heal themselves – but packed as much firepower as a regular platoon. They were led by an O-4; Russell had never thought he’d get chummy with an officer, but Captain Braxton Teller was a good enough guy, someone who’d started out as a private and worked his way through the ranks in a sixty-year career that had involved lots of instances of getting right in E.T.’s face and shooting him in the eye. His Operations SNCO was none other than Whitey McAllister. The Gunny would keep Teller honest. The senior non-com, Master Sergeant Kong, was a rat bastard but he had a full century of experience in Spec-Ops. His totem was a bulldog killing machine. It fit him to a t.
Four MSOTs made a Wraith company – fifty men including its command element. A Wraith battalion had four companies, less than three hundred swinging dicks all told. No artillery or heavy assets; anything like that would be provided on an ad-hoc basis by other units. The Wraiths deployed mostly by companies or MSOTs, sometimes working with ‘normal’ Raider units, or as part of a Marine Expeditionary Unit or a regiment, depending on the mission. It wasn’t the way he was used to doing things, but special ops were like that. Their mission didn’t involve seizing beachheads or assaulting fortified positions.
Their mission was something else.
“Gonna be glad to leave this rock,” Corolla commented.
Once their training was done, the newly-formed company was going to join the rest of the First WRAITT Regiment at Starbase Malta in Xanadu System. Russell didn’t have many fond memories of the place, but he’d heard things had improved a lot in the ensuing decades.
“I never thought I’d miss New Parris,” Corolla went on.
“I hear you,” Russell said. New Parris was no picnic, but Groom Base’s thin atmosphere and utter desolation reminded him of Mars before terraforming turned it into livable real state.
“We have to pass the field ex-first,” Kinston said. “If the company fails, we get four more weeks before they make us take it again. So concentrate on that.”
“Kill bodies,” Russell replied. You could never go wrong reciting Marine mottos.
He didn’t feel as sure as he sounded, though. The last field exercise was scheduled for the next day. It would involve multiple warp drops and the extensive use of their gear and abilities. Casualties weren’t uncommon and if the entire company didn’t perform adequately – maxed out at one hundred percent, in other words – everyone would pay for it. Until then, the Wraiths would enjoy a full day of P.T. and more training, just so they were properly tired for the field-ex.
You’ll sleep when you’re dead, his ghostly girlfriend whispered in his ear.
* * *
We jump in two minutes, Staff Sergeant Kinston ‘told’ her tactical team.
Jason heard her voice with his mind. All the Marines in the unit had gotten used to telepathy. It had huge advantages over all other forms of communication: you couldn’t be overhead by non-telepaths, it had no effective range limits, and no alien commo system could even detect it, let alone jam or intercept it. On the other hand, it was very hard to lie or hide anything when you spoke mind-to-mind, and sometimes people ended up saying more than they meant to.
The four suited figures were on top of a small mountain. They’d gotten there on ‘foot,’ or rather, they’d used their armor’s on-board antigravity systems to slide or hover over obstacles. To reach their objective, however, they would have to jump through warp space. Jason put his mind in a semi-trance and felt his perceptions begin to shift.
There you are, Jase. Come on in, the water’s fine.
He still saw the tactical display in front of his face, but was also looking into a realm of swirling colors and moving shapes. Woof was there, standing on an invisible surface and wagging his tail. Jason had been told it wasn’t really Woof, or even Woof’s soul, assuming dogs had them or that there was such a thing as a soul. The talking dog was a warpling, a creature that had somehow imprinted on Jason’s memories of his pet, or maybe traveled back in time and observed him and his pet; for some reason, it had decided to make friends with him.
Used to be the only Warplings that contacted people were anything but friendly; they were sort of like vampires who lived on suffering and terror. Something had changed near the end of the Great Galactic War, though. The vampire types were still there, but their numbers were down, and there were plenty of nicer ones around.
The good Warplings could still be dangerous, though: people who acquired a guardian angel risked losing their minds, in some cases literally: their consciousness could end up stranded in warp space, in which case their bodies would go into comas and die without life support. Sometimes the victim ended up vanishing into thin air, transported body and soul into null space. Warp navigators, fighter pilots, and Marines who’d done a few too many drops were the most common victims.
Woof is a good dog, Woof said proudly. Jason mentally petted the pooch’s head.
Focus, numbnuts, Sergeant Kinston called out. Her curt mental voice cut through the daze. Jason turned his mind to the task at hand. The four Marines flipped a telepathic switch in their suits, which promptly began to draw energy from warp space. The suits were the first human-made devices that could power all their systems that way. Only someone with the proper warp attunement could do that, though. Thanks to his father’s warp-mutated genes and the Spice that had triggered them, Jason was one of them. About four hundred people shared that honor, all the line animals of the two battalions that made up the First WRAITT Regiment.
By the numbers, kids, Staff Sergeant Kinston continued. Jump.
The miniature warp drives in the armor flared to life and the squad vanished in a colorful flash. They spent a fraction of a second in null-space, but from Jason’s perspective it lasted long enough to watch Woof chase his own tail on the small fenced yard around Pops’ apartment building, just as he had when Jason had been a child. The flashback was utterly real, affecting all of his senses. He understood the temptation to surrender to the illusion and stay in it forever. Luckily, he knew better than that.
The four c
ombat suits returned to the physical universe fifteen kilometers from their transition point. This was a hostile-territory drop, so their arrival was marked by an implosion-explosion sequence powerful enough to kill infantry in the open or damage civilian or lightly-armored vehicles. The tactical element arrived in the midst of a dug-in Lamprey company. Well, a notional alien company, although the robotic training dummies behaved very much like the real thing. The surviving tangos – the ones at ground zero had been turned into scattered body parts – were stunned for a few seconds. Plenty of time for Jason to target a fighting hole to his left and cut loose with a long burst from his grav-gun. The 15mm energy blasts tore through area and personal force fields and several meters of dirt, killing an entire alien squad. The other three Marines were busy shooting at two entrenched heavy gun emplacements behind the infantry line. By the time Jason was done with his targets, the alien cannon had been obliterated.
A heavy infantry laser engaged the Wraith Marines from two thousand meters out, hitting Staff Sergeant Kinston with a continuous beam. The weapon did zilch against her external force field. Counterfire from the Marine team took out the firing position and a second one that unmasked itself a moment later, its laser fire serving only to provide a new target.
We’ve got a tank platoon and an infantry company on the way, the NCO said; she was getting the feed from a swarm of micro-drones she’d deployed as soon as the team completed the drop. Giving you new jump coordinates.
The team jumped again – more visions of Woof by his side – and arrived behind a hill overlooking the advancing alien unit. Five big Lamprey tanks, bristling with force fields and heavy guns, floated over the ground a steady pace, surrounded by over a hundred ugly E.T.s with bubble helmets and four-legged bodies. Jason opened fire on the lead tank. Graviton pulses splashed on the force field before knocking it down in a multicolor flash; the next burst smashed through the tank’s armored hull, the dense composite degrading under the high-intensity beams like a sand castle under heavy rain. The third burst hit a power plant; Jason’s visual feed darkened as flare compensators kept the impossibly bright explosion from blinding him.
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