To The Strongest

by C. J. Carella

  “We will fight for y’all, of course,” Whitey’s were-bear Bjorni said. The creature rose on his hind legs and waved his arms menacingly. “We can handle any demons the Hordies call to their aid.”

  “Just as importantly, our guidance will allow you to use your personal weapons on any entities we encounter in transit,” Saruman added. “We shall work a dreadful slaughter upon them.”

  Russell looked at Deborah. Unlike the gung-ho totems, she looked worried.

  * * *

  “Are you sure about this, McClintock?” Guillermo asked her. From his tone of voice, he knew the question was pointless but he needed to get it on the record.

  “Yes. I’ve done all the analysis that can be done in time to do us any good. The insertion teams are going to need all the help they can get.”

  Heather had left off Lisbeth Zhang’s telepathic visit. For one, t-wave communication across interstellar distances was deemed to be impossible and she didn’t want to pick a fight with the scientific consensus. For another, knowledge that Lisbeth was alive and well might get ONI and other agencies on her trail. The former Marine didn’t need any more trouble.

  “I have plenty of experience in null-space combat,” she added.

  “More than most of our field agents,” he admitted. “In any case, if you hadn’t volunteered the higher-ups might have figured a way to volunteer you. We are going to be woefully short-handed.”

  Heather nodded. Most of the Company’s psychic assets were stationed near the border with the Enlightened Circle – who had chosen this moment to mobilize its fleet and ‘conduct exercises’ uncomfortably close to American systems. That meant those assets – and any naval forces stationed there – couldn’t be shifted to Xanadu System. Elements from First Fleet were on their way to reinforce the forces in Xanadu while the reserves were activated. Hundreds of decommissioned hulls kept in storage were coming to life as hastily-assembled crews prepared to take them underway. Most of those ships would be obsolete models by modern standards, ships that depended on their warp shields to survive an exchange of fire with alien vessels of the same class. Heather had few illusions about how well they would fare against the Horde unless they could suppress the enemy’s anti-warp weaponry.

  “Very well,” Guillermo said. “The teams are assembling on Deck 87. I’ll adjust your clearance so you can get through security.”

  “How many telepaths have we got?”

  The Deputy Chief grimaced. “Fifty-one, including you. The Marine Wraiths can field two short battalions, call it five hundred warp-adept operators. That’s everyone trained and equipped to do the mission with any chance of success.”

  “Plus the poor bastards on Felix-Five,” Heather added. Those poor Marine bastards would soon be asked to do the impossible.

  The fact her son would be among them only added to the heaviness in her heart.

  Twenty

  Starbase Malta, 200 AFC

  In the immortal words of some pre-Contact guy, ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,’ Captain Teller thought. The thought came loud and clear for all the members of his MSOT.

  LC Jason Giraud shrugged as he watched the flotilla assemble in preparation for transit. The twelve-ship formation carrying the First WRAITT Marine Regiment would execute three warp jumps to Felix System. Once there it would launch an attack against the Horde armada still besieging the planet. If everything went well, the Marines on Felix-Five would provide support for the later stages of the mission.

  Winston Churchill said that, Staff Sergeant Kinston said/though. Tough old bastard.

  “Didn’t know you were an amateur historian,” Brock said out loud.

  “Majored in military history during Ob-Serv. Kept me focused on the mission.”

  “This is going to be fun,” Sergeant Edison said. Behind him, his ghost girlfriend smiled grimly.

  Jason looked at a view screen and watched the tiny ships of the special ops flotilla. They were all stealth corvettes, about two-thirds the size of a destroyer and with fewer than half its shields and weapon systems. Their only saving grace was their ability to hide their infrared signatures for up to eighteen hours before they had to discharge their heat sinks.

  The ships would not engage the Horde directly, of course. The plan was to arrive at the edge of the system, their gravity signatures hidden by the mass of one of the three gas giants orbiting Felix’s star, the sort of maneuver that only worked with light vessels in small numbers. From the hidden ships, the Wraith Regiment would strike at the Horde’s fifty-seven oversized planetoids with the goal of destroying their anti-warp weaponry. Nobody knew what sort of resistance the Wraiths would face. All they knew was that attached teams of CIA spooks would help them along the way and that the closest they could jump to the targets was two hundred meters. Any closer and the device – the pictures they’d gotten in the briefing depicted them as giant crystalline structures that looked more like an art sculpture than a weapon – would be able to engage them in transit. Nobody wanted that.

  “This won’t be much like the Battle of Britain,” Kinston went on. “That was a fighters’ job. This is more like Market Garden, or the Mogadishu raid. Both of which failed.”

  Let’s keep a positive attitude, Kinston, Captain Teller said.

  I’m positive we’ll produce a bumper crop of heroes, Captain.

  Heroes existed because someone screwed up. Kinston had said words to that effect during training, but Jason couldn’t remember the original quote and didn’t want to ask. Still true, though.

  He wasn’t worried about dying a hero. He worried about screwing up.

  Felix-Five, 200 AFD

  “What gives?” Matthew Fromm asked as they boarded the squad’s AFV.

  For two weeks, the defenders of Port Hoover had been slowly but surely pushed back towards the planetary defense base and city they were defending. His battalion had beaten off a flanking maneuver, but another on the other side of the valley had forced everyone to pull back. The Horde had the numbers to take heavy casualties and keep pressing on, and they were adapting rapidly to fighting humans. After fighting big lumbering tanks for several days, a new type of Hordies had shown up. Maybe a different tribe or branch or whatever; nobody seemed to know. But Matthew could tell that the new arrivals had better weapons and doctrine. They used hover tanks that were faster and ever more heavily armored; still not a match for the Corps’ Vandegrifts, but there were a lot of them. Several of the Vans had been lost; last he’d heard there were only three of them out of the eight that had been assigned to Port Hoover.

  Behind them, the Army units that had replaced Matthew’s company were already exchanging fire with the advancing Hordies. He felt bad for them; they were going to take some serious losses holding off the enemy. Assuming they held. A day or two, sure, but unless someone pulled a miracle out of a hat, the Horde was going to own this valley in less than a week.

  “Can’t be another fall back,” Brock said as he got in. The LAV’s rear ramp snapped closed on the sounds of battle. “There’s nowhere to fall back to.”

  The SAW gunner had a point. The Horde had pushed the human defenders to their final redoubts. Only a thin line of bunkers and trenches separated the Horde from the city suburbs. After that, the battle would turn into a house-to-house affair.

  “New orders,” Hansen said. “We are going to rally on PDB Five and do a warp drop.”

  “You gotta be shitting me,” Brock said.

  “I shit you not, ball-sack. Hope you remembered to wear your space diapers.”

  “Where are we going to jump, Staff Sergeant?” Matthew asked the noncom.

  “They don’t tell me shit. Figure they’ll let us know a few minutes before they send us.”

  Everybody in the squad went quiet after that. A couple of grunts took a nap – probably the best thing to do, although Matthew was too wired to follow suit – and the rest checked their emails or social media while the LAV took them to the rear, w
here things were almost peaceful except for the occasional Horde munition breaking through the big area force fields and blowing up something or someone.

  The Marines made it to the planetary defense base, dismounted, and were herded by companies to the armory buildings, where they switched gear to shipboard assault weapons. By the time Matthew and the rest of his squad were ready, they had learned their new mission: to support an attack on the Horde planetoids.

  “You think it’s too late to request a PCS?” Brock said.

  Nobody laughed. Even Staff Sergeant Hansen was grimmer than usual. Matthew looked towards the sky. There weren’t enough Marines on Felix-Five to take one of those planetoids, let alone over fifty of them. As the orders began to come up on his imp, he realized the mission wasn’t quite as suicidal as he’d first thought. A Permanent Change of Station would have been great, but that wasn’t in the cards.

  Things were about to get interesting.

  * * *

  Heather Fromm-McClintock bit down on the rubber mouth guard a Navy spacer had helpfully provided her.

  As it turned out, one of the most common injuries among telepaths undertaking hazardous missions was biting off one’s tongue. The mouthpieces would protect Heather and the four other spooks sharing the compartment with her. Well, they would protect them from biting off their tongues, that was. The foul-tasting contraption wouldn’t do a damn thing for all the hundred other things that could go wrong.

  She settled down on the chair – they’d strapped her in to keep her from rolling off and breaking her neck – and watched the other CIA t-wave adepts. She was by far the oldest among them; they were all in their thirties, three men and one woman, all looking quietly confident. They all had some experience in direct action ops, having tussled with Medusas in several unofficial psychic skirmishes. Heather hoped that would be enough.

  Link up, everyone, Lead Operations Officer Melendez sent out. He was on another stealth corvette several light minutes away, but his mental voice came through as if he was sitting right next to Heather.

  There were twelve teams, one per stealth vessel, each with three to six adepts. Fifty-one minds entered the gestalt. Heather was overwhelmed with the stream-of-consciousness flood from those minds until everyone managed to focus and quiet down, so to speak. They found themselves in a shared illusion – an auditorium with the team leader standing in the center like an orchestra conductor.

  Let’s go.

  The adepts cast their minds out, looking for targets in the fifty-seven asteroids almost one light-hour away. They found most of them quickly enough. Each of the flying habitats had a glowing source of t-waves near their center that matched the psychic signature Heather had discovered in the Kraxan records. The teams could now guide the Wraiths to their targets. With one exception.

  The largest planetoid is surrounded by Warplings, one of the officers reported. And their adepts are beginning to react to our presence.

  Heather ‘looked’ at the mammoth rock that had to be the flagship of the Horde fleet. The place was positively teeming with t-waves. And the ‘tone’ of those emanations was dark as sin. Evil. The last time she’d seen something like that was in the Marauders of Kraxan records. Whatever dwelled in that rock delighted in the suffering of others and lived only to destroy.

  Avoid that bogie, Melendez ordered. We’ll save it for last. Mission is a go.

  It was now or never. The enemy knew something was up and every second the spec-ops team gave them to react was a second too much.

  The telepathic ‘go’ signal was delivered to the waiting Wraiths and the action began.

  Twenty-One

  Felix System, 200 AFC

  Transition.

  The warp-landscape around MSOT-One was alive with colors and sinuous shapes. Jason could see the three other members of his tactical element and their totems clearly; they were all ‘walking’ together through the chaotic mess. The rest of the Marine operators were shadowy figures nearby. This jump was different from anything they’d done before.

  Bad times ahead, Jase, Woof warned him.

  Large shapes appeared around the tactical elements. One of them shifted and turned into Scabs O’Malley, except even more heavily muscled than when Jason had killed him; the wings of his holo-tattoo had become real and were tipped with razor blades. Scabs rushed towards Jason, screaming in wordless rage. Jason froze for a second but Woof leaped at the ghost and bit one of his arms. Scabs growled and his wings slashed at the dog; blood spurted out and Woof whimpered.

  “Don’t fucking touch my dog!” Jason shouted. He double-tapped Scabs with his grav-gun.

  The ghost staggered back, shifting into something liquid and full of teeth before a third shot made it explode into a thousand droplets that scattered into the swirling lights and disappeared. Woof licked his wounds before grinning at Jason.

  All better now. Thanks, Jase.

  Off to his left, Edison’s ghost girlfriend put the spirit of an undead teenager in a headlock and twisted his neck off. A little ahead of both, Kinston and her dead Marine buddy opened fire on another bunch of Warplings while Corolla and his angel stomped a Lamprey to death. More Warplings were coming, however; a lot more. Jason had never seen so many of the things in one place.

  “Time to clear the way, Marines,” Staff Sergeant Kinston called out. “Grav beams only; nothing else will hurt them.”

  Jason leveled his gun and cut loose with a short burst. The graviton stream hit something in the shape of a gigantic eel; it recoiled and squirmed away, glowing bright with hatred. The Marines advanced through the chaos, shooting at anything that moved. Bright lines of blackness spearing out from both sides of the tactical element showed the rest of the Wraiths were in the fight. From somewhere above them, bolts of red lightning rained down on the NSS critters: that was the CIA spooks’ doing, Kinston explained. The new attacks proved to be too much for the weird critters: the few surviving Warplings ran away. The Marines continued their advance towards their emergence point.

  “This is where we get off,” Kinston said. A glowing sphere loomed ahead, a familiar sight to all the Marines.

  Time to get back to work.

  * * *

  MSOT-One came out of warp shooting.

  Russell’s landing point had been occupied by a bunch of aliens, but the warp opening had vacuumed up most of them and the ensuing explosion had shredded the rest. Russell almost tripped over a torn-up body before his suit went into hover mode. He cursed under his breath while he engaged the first targets who came into his field of fire.

  Three soldiers with stubby plasma projectors died before they recovered from the explosion and lightshow from the warp entry. Russell’s second burst cleared a mixed group of fighting aliens and robed priest types who had no weapons but were glowing with t-waves. He didn’t give them a chance to pull off any warp witchery, though. No non-combatants in the bunch, not that it would have mattered one way or another; they needed to clear the way to the target.

  The tactical team had arrived at a four-way intersection. One of the curving corridors led to the warp witches’ coven house or whatever they called it. Their target was there. Now that the tangos knew the Marines had dropped in on them, they would start sending troops their way. MSOT-Two had taken blocking positions to make sure the Horde’s reinforcements wouldn’t make it in time.

  “Fire in the hole!” Corolla shouted before cutting loose with a long burst of area-clearing munitions. Two hundred guided bomblets flew down the corridor and turned the corner before detonating. The flash and rumble were noticeable enough from where Russell was standing, over fifty meters away. Anybody in the area of effect would have been exposed to a fuel-air explosion no portable force field could survive. The only reason a jet of flames hadn’t come pouring out towards the Marines was that the drone munitions had created a short-lived force field behind them that focused the force of the explosions in one direction.

  “Russet, you’re on,” Kinston said.

  Ru
ssell headed down the tunnel; smoke and cooling plasma still filled the area, but the suit handled that easily. Deborah’s ghost peeked around the corner for him.

  “Clear,” she said.

  And clear it was. Clumps of cooling metal and organic matter marked the spots where a heavily shielded trooper had gotten melted down. Anybody without that protection had been vaporized. The poor bastards with the heavy protection had lived long enough to know what being broiled alive was like. And if Russell’s fancy power armor failed, the same would happen to him.

  An armored and shielded door blocked the way to the target. No problem. Russell cut loose with a continuous beam from his TAS. The high-power grav stream tore through everything in its path. The perforated door buckled inward; through the hole he’d made, Russell saw the big crystal they’d come to destroy.

  “Eat it, tangos,” he said before giving it a full dose of everything his weapon could deliver. Grav beams and a full clip of mini-missiles filled the compartment. When the plasma and smoke cleared out, nothing in that place – and any compartments around it – remained.

  Confirmed kill, he sent via t-waves, along with an image of the destroyed target. Three other tactical elements had dropped on the target, but Russell’s team had beaten them to the punch. It was always nice to show off.

  Roger that, Captain Teller replied. RTB for resupply.

  The two MSOTs warped out. Russell felt Deborah’s lips kissing his cheek despite the fact he was still encased in armor. Warp witchery was weird like that.

  That was easy, Dog-Boy said as the four Marines started warp-walking back to their ship.

  The first hit is free, kid, Russell said. We caught the tangos napping. They’re going to be mobilizing every last mother-lover in the other flying mountains.

  Target-rich environment just means more E.T.s to kill, Kinston replied.