To The Strongest

by C. J. Carella

“The ones with sixty million ETs apiece,” Corolla said. “You gotta be shitting me.”

  “We could bet on it, but you’d lose. Besides, I’m not just guessing. My girl told me.”

  “Fuck.”

  He hadn’t wanted to mention it, but he might as well prepare everyone. Deborah had come to him last night. It’d been fun, but afterwards she’d shown him a vision of what was going to happen. That sort of thing was risky, because seeing the future could change it in unexpected ways. That was what she’d told him, too. The whole thing made his head hurt, but one thing was clear.

  The Wraiths were going to go after the planetoids.

  Eighteen

  Felix System, 200 AFC

  “This is taking too long,” Warlord Fann grumbled as he watched the planet below on his war map.

  Several cities had been abandoned by the dirt-huggers before the Host landed; they had taken most valuables and left mines and booby traps for the Host’s search parties. Dozens of smaller settlements had been seized relatively intact, however. Their goods had been distributed among the clans after the Endless Void Clan claimed its share, a share so overlarge that at any other time it would have sparked off a war between the clans. Half of everything collected by foraging parties was to be sent to the oversized Home of the Endless Void. The Witch-King was held in such awe by all the Clan Chiefs that no one, not even the hotheads of the Fallen Stars, had voiced an objection.

  None of that mattered, however, next to the length of their stay. The Host had been orbiting the damned dirt ball for over a week. Resistance in the inhabited cities was fierce. Many warriors had perished for no good reason. When forced to retreat, the dirt-huggers took all their equipment with them or destroyed it in place, denying the Host any loot.

  “We should bomb them from orbit and be done with it,” he said.

  “We can’t risk damaging the things we need,” Noo said, reasonably enough.

  Wealth consisted of useful things: power plants, life support, fabricators and raw materials, all of which made starfaring possible. Wealth required components that took many craftsman-hours to manufacture, or exotic materials that took many miner-hours to extract from asteroids or planets. In time, the Host could find and make those things, but time was always in short supply. The Host must stay on the move: the months or years it would take to make the things it needed were a luxury it could never afford. The only option was to find someone who had invested that time and effort to produce what the Host needed – and take it by force. Thus had the Wandering People survived for uncounted centuries, by taking from those too weak to protect their wealth.

  Fann spared a thought for the teeming millions of the lowest castes, the low-skilled workers – and enslaved aliens who survived to reproduce – who dwelled in tightly-packed warrens deep in the bowels of the Great Homes. Those miserable crowds lived and died in poorly-lit and vented alcoves and did the simple jobs that wealthier civilizations used robots and powered tools to perform. The best and brightest among them were selected to try for better things: positions among the upper castes and, for the rare mutation, the ranks of the Oracles. The rest merely survived. Thousands of them had died when the dirt-huggers’ ships fired upon his Crimson Sun’s Home; the powerful graviton beams had been searching for vital targets but had struck one of the living warrens, killing many of the lowly. Small loss – they bred fast and were easily replaceable – but it was another facet of their general misery, to be placed between the surface and more valuable areas so they could serve the Host by absorbing energy that might strike something vital. Some of the wealth the Host would take from the dirt-huggers would go toward improving the lower castes’ lot, but not very much. The Wandering People were proud but poor; even Fann’s life wasn’t overloaded with luxuries.

  The abandoned cities and villages had provided some loot, but not enough; the defended ones would be richer prizes, provided they were taken relatively intact. Massive bombardment from above would destroy too much, and if done too extensively it risked angering the Elder Races, who valued dirt-huggers more than the Wandering People. That was patently unfair, but the three most common things in the universe were vacuum, hydrogen, and injustice. It all meant the Host would soon have to choose between continuing to besiege the surviving cities or departing from this system. The primary prize was the great nexus three transits away. A great Chaos Lane lay there, one leading beyond the spiral arm of the galaxy, one so far from all previous journeys that it would be many millennia before the Nemeses reached them. The Host would be safe for a good while. A part of him dared to hope for more: the dirt-siders in this region were powerful and highly adept in the ways of Chaos. Maybe the Nemeses would meet their match here, and trouble the Host no more.

  Of course, by the time the Host was done, they would leave behind little more than devastation and misery; he doubted the dirt-huggers would recover in time to deal with the Nemeses. For a brief moment, the Warlord considered the idea of forging an alliance with these deadly dirt-huggers to confront his people’s ancestral enemies. He laughed at his own conceit. Even uttering words to that effect would doom him in the eyes of the other warlords and, more importantly, the Witch-King. The Wandering People and dirt-huggers were too different. Long before Fann was born, some Clans had tried to communicate with outsiders. All such attempts had been met with outright hostility or, even worse, treachery. Dirt-huggers could not be trusted. Any relationship between predator and prey could be nothing but inimical, after all.

  “War Chief, the Witch-King commands us to send another legion to reinforce the next attack on the dirt-huggers.”

  Fann clenched his teeth but dropped his head in the affirmative. Already seven of his fifteen legions were committed. And while he sent half of his land warriors into danger, several other Clans kept their own troops in orbit. The War Chief understood that those legions would be needed to seize a far more valuable target: the great station at the Chaos crossroads, one that dwarfed even the largest Home of the Host. If it could be taken, the station would provide the People with everything they needed for their great journey into the far reaches of the galaxy.

  Does any of it matter if my Clan is reduced to near-nothing?

  Perhaps not, but since the only other option was oblivion, there wasn’t much he could do about it. He gave the necessary orders to send another ten thousand warriors to fight and likely die on the dirt below.

  Felix-Five, 200 AFD

  Matthew Fromm opened his ration pack. Mac and cheese. Not too shabby.

  While he waited for the self-heating package to do its thing, he did a suit and weapon check. He’d slept in his armor for the past week. The Hordies had been launching intermittent attacks since their last major offensive had turned into a rout, and word was they were going to go all-in again. Everything checked out. He removed his helmet and took a whiff of the grub. The smell was appetizing enough to make him forget his own body funk.

  “How dumb can they be?” he wondered out loud before proceeding to stuff his face.

  “Not dumb enough to fall for the same trick twice,” Brock said. The Lance Corporal had fully recovered from being nearly broiled in plasma and was back on the SAW.

  The Marines had led an alien army – something like twenty thousand tangos – into a section of the valley accessible only by two narrow passes, and then used hidden units on its flanks to cut it off, trapping it in a cauldron of fire. The aliens had been moving in tightly-packed columns, anticipating a pursuit rather than an ambush, and most of them had been massacred without being able to fire a shot in self-defense. Matthew’s company had engaged the aliens from the top of a hill, and it had been the closest thing to shooting fish in a barrel. The Marines had taken some casualties holding off the Hordies’ attempts to break out of the cauldron, as well as a relief force trying to break them out, but they’d destroyed a good two enemy divisions in return.

  Got to hand it to them, the Army did good, too.

  Not everything had gone great, tho
ugh. There were plenty of coordination problems. Most Marine units weren’t used to working at regimental levels. Fire support had often taken longer than it should have. And a platoon of Marines had somehow bungled its orders, gotten caught out in the open by the Horde, and been wiped out to the last man. Not from Matthew’s battalion, thankfully, but dead Marines were dead Marines.

  Breakfast was done. Matthew policed his eating area and went back to his fighting hole. A sound like distant thunder echoed out; that was artillery, opening up the festivities. A lot of artillery, which meant the tangos were coming out to play in large numbers. He grabbed two spare power packs from the charging station and slid them into their slots in his suit. Everything was at one hundred percent.

  “This one’s for real,” Brock muttered from his firing position.

  The Horde didn’t send scouts this time; the quick-movers died too quickly to do much good. Instead, they sent tanks with marching infantry in-between, protected by heavy-duty shields deployed from floating barges. Matthew watched a four-gun volley from their tank platoon disperse against one of those force fields and grunted; those had to be capital-ship grade to stand that punishment.

  “On my mark,” Sergeant Hansen said. “Fire.”

  Piercing those area force fields took a company-level effort, weapons platoon included. One enemy tank lurched into a halt, smoke pouring out of an entry hole; nobody got out. A group of scurrying Horde infantry ate a sheaf of plasma mortars and ceased to exist. But the advancing tangos were shooting back, and they were coordinating their attacks as well. An Army laser gun emplacement was targeted by multiple tank guns and blew up, taking out a squad of dug-in soldiers around it. Matthew gritted his teeth and kept shooting. The company shifted fire to one of the barge-borne field gennies, but the damn things were behind multiple force fields.

  “Again,” Sergeant Hansen called out. “Fire!”

  This time an artillery battery supported the volley; a couple of shield-piercing shells cracked the defenses open, followed a split second later by the combined firepower of Bravo company. The barge went up, its power plant releasing enough energy to knock a Horde tank ass over teakettle. The poor bastards moving on foot never had a chance. Army and Marines poured it on, taking advantage of the gap in the enemy defenses, and scored several kills.

  “We’re heading back to the LAVs,” Sergeant Hansen ordered, surprising Matthew. The Horde was still advancing but they were taking heavy losses.

  Nobody questioned the orders, but the non-com deigned to explain. “They launched a second attack south of our position. National Guard unit was watching that pass, and the E.T.s broke through. We gotta move or we’re getting flanked.”

  Brock grumbled something about weekend soldiers fucking things up as the squad mounted up and their Light Assault Vehicle carried them to their fallback position. Matthew kept quiet, thinking about the way things could go wrong even if he and his unit did everything right.

  He wondered what else could go wrong.

  Nineteen

  Starbase Malta, 200 AFC

  “This is total B.S.,” Kinston told Captain Teller right in the middle of the mission briefing.

  “Take an even strain, Staff Sergeant,” the team leader said before Master Sergeant Kong could interject.

  “You are asking us to drop on a completely unknown target, with no intelligence on what’s waiting for us on the other end.” She paused long enough to make her point. “Sir.”

  The MSOT leader sighed. “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m telling you to do, Kinston. You may have noticed I’m dropping with the rest of y’all.”

  “It smells like a suicide mission, sir.”

  “The Corps doesn’t do suicide missions, Kinston. The plan is to go into those big hunks of rock, mess some stuff up, and come back.”

  “Oorah, sir. I just want to understand how any of this is survivable.”

  Russell kept quiet, although he agreed with Kinston’s assessment. After a year in Spec-Ops, he’d learned that the way small groups of operators did near impossible stuff was like the old joke about how you got to Carnegie Hall: practice. You trained in every step of the mission until you could do it in your sleep. To do that, you needed good information about the mission: locations, enemy resources and operational patterns, and so on. If the intel was wrong, the op was almost always a failure, and failure when you were in a small unit far from support usually meant a bunch of coffins draped in American flags. Usually empty coffins, ‘cause the actual bodies had been reduced to scattered molecules somewhere in Echo Tango Land.

  Kinston was no coward; one look at her service record would tell anyone that. She was more worried about the lives of the people in her squad. You wanted a non-com who gave a shit if you lived or died, or at least who didn’t send you off to die without a good reason. Beyond that, she wanted the mission to succeed; their briefing had convinced her this was going to be nothing but Charlie-Foxtrots all the way down.

  Only thing was, Russell knew they were going to jump into those planetoids. Deborah had predicted it and his ghost girlfriend was never wrong. Kinston could object all she wanted, but the unit – the entire Wraith Regiment – was going to drop on those rocks.

  “How can we be sure we won’t take fire as soon as we open a warp conduit to those ships, sir?” the NCO persisted. “Like they did to our fighters?”

  “I was going to get to that. Third Fleet left behind most of its Marine complement to help protect Felix-Five. However, a few units, platoon-sized or smaller, were left aboard. They launched warp drops on the Horde planetoids. At that point, the battle was going so badly that the chance of damaging the planetoids was worth the risk. In all cases, they encountered stiff resistance and were forced to withdraw. The ones who survived long enough to withdraw, that is.”

  Everyone shared a moment of silence over those dead Marines.

  “The important thing is, those drops were not detected by the enemy and did not take fire through their warp apertures. The most likely explanation was that they happened behind force fields that masked their presence. Does that ease your mind, Staff Sergeant?”

  “Sorry for the outburst, sir,” Kinston said before sitting down, somewhat mollified.

  “Now, some of the Marines reported being attacked in transit and taking casualties before emergence. The enemy has t-wave adepts of their own. Unlike those forlorn hopes, however, we will have more protection and a better idea of what to do. We’re going to be working with CIA assets. Telepaths. They will guide us to our targets and help us engage any null-space threats we encounter en route.”

  Russell nodded to himself. The Agency’s field spooks were all prior service, many from the old gun club themselves. They had warp witches of their own, too. Good thing, since they were going to need every last one of them.

  “The initial entry is likely to be contested by the enemy’s warp-sensitive assets,” Teller went on. “And I’m not going to lie to you: we do not know what the Horde’s adepts can do. The intel weenies think they are mostly commo experts relying on some unknown tech to take over warp openings. They might have other abilities, however. In addition to the CIA telepaths, we will rely on our totems to get through them. In fact, it’s time to bring them in for the briefing.”

  Everyone relaxed in their seats. A few moments later, Russell found himself in an almost identical room, except this one was large enough to accommodate an additional fourteen occupants, few of which looked human. None of them were human, of course. Not even his girlfriend.

  “Don’t be a bigot, darling,” said Deborah Genovisi, Navy pilot, warp witch and now a warp ghost.

  She smiled as she sat beside him. Here in the shared illusion created by all the Marines in the room, she looked completely undistinguishable from the woman he’d fallen for. According to the techno-geeks who tried to explain such things, she wasn’t really Deborah but a Warpling who’d assumed her form and personality using Russell’s own memories as a template. Russell knew that was bul
lshit. Ghost Deborah had told him stuff about her past he hadn’t known beforehand, stuff he’d looked into and discovered was true. There was no way she’d gotten that information from him. Ghost or alien, Deborah sounded, behaved and, sometimes, felt the same as the old one. As far as he was concerned, they were one and the same.

  Only one other Marine in the tactical squad had a human for a warp totem: Sergeant Kinston’s warp buddy was an old, hard-as-nails jarhead – a FORECON sniper as a matter of fact – who’d helped her wipe out a gang of pirates a few decades ago. He was like a ghostly father figure to her, one with several decades of combat experience under his belt.

  The rest had a variety of animals like Giraud’s dog or Jessup’s condor, plus a handful of angels like Corolla’s and a couple of pagan entities for the resident Warmetal fans in the squad. The whole thing looked like a bad movie, except the weird-looking or cartoonish critters were as real as a graviton blast and just about as dangerous in the right – or wrong – circumstances. There were plenty of horror stories about warp adepts who picked the wrong spirit guide and ended up dead, insane or, worst of all, nothing more than a meat puppet for the critter in question. Russell wondered if the old stories about vampires and werewolves came from warpling possessions.

  Captain Teller’s were-pterodactyl – he’d named it Saruman for some reason – was the informal leader of the squad’s totems. Good thing, too; sometimes the head totem didn’t belong to the highest-ranked team member, which could lead to no end of trouble.

  “We will aid you as much as we can, Captain,” Saruman said. “Unfortunately, none of us have encountered the Horde nor the weapons they wield. And we cannot ask those who have. When we bonded with you, we became something else that can no longer communicate with our former brethren.”

  “Yeah, I figured as much,” Teller said. “We will need your help in the boarding evolution, which is the main reason I asked you to come.”