To The Strongest

by C. J. Carella

  What did my darling Peter use to say? Oh, yeah. Learn to embrace the Suck.

  Psychic combat with the Horde telepaths wasn’t like anything else she had done. The enemy’s attacks tried to overload the minds of their targets with hyper-intense input – intense enough to induce heart failure or fatal strokes. The speedy reaction of the Navy corpsmen watching over the gestalt had saved some lives, but most of the casualties had been fatalities. The adepts had counterattacked, using t-waves to create psychic beams that injured and killed several Horde telepaths and their Warpling pets.

  The aliens had also deployed warp-capable soldiers against the Wraith Marines; thankfully their numbers were limited and their weaponry inferior. They had been killed before regular Marines began warp-dropping into the asteroids to support the attacks. The Horde adepts remained a threat, though, and the only thing keeping them at bay was the CIA gestalt.

  Heather closed her eyes; her mind returned to warp space. They were winning the battle – only a handful of enemy adepts remained – but two more telepaths had died during the time she took a brief break. And something else was joining the fray.

  So far, Warplings had left the adepts alone; the entities had been focused on the Wraiths, who had entered null-space physically. Whatever was confronting them had the psychic signature of a Warpling, a powerful one, but one linked to a Hordeling. It was the same entity they had detected during the gestalt’s first foray against the Horde. Possession or symbiosis? Heather wondered as the remaining telepaths prepared to deal with the new threat. There was something familiar about the looming presence standing watch over the Horde flagship. The last time she’d felt something like that she’d engaged a Kraxan Battler in psychic combat. She still had nightmares about it.

  Lisbeth, if you’re going to drop by, now would be a really good time.

  Nothing happened. Heather was still struggling with the idea that her friend had reached out to her from a different star system multiple warp jumps away. Maybe she’d dreamed up the whole thing. Or maybe it was going to take a while for Zhang to save the day. All of which meant Heather needed to deal with the new threat by herself, at least for the time being.

  When telepaths sent their minds out into warp space, they looked like their physical selves, although the more experienced adepts could alter their apparent clothing and maybe take off a few pounds or add a little muscle, creating an idealized version of themselves. The Horde warp-wizard facing the CIA gestalt looked like a monstrous hybrid of a member of its original species and something out of a nightmare. The tentacles and extra limbs extending from its body and the grotesque growths disfiguring its face were neither natural nor cybernetic; nobody would look like that willingly, nobody sane at least. It had lost all traces of gender identity and its thoughts appeared around its misshapen form like energy constructs, full of power and malice. It was the leader of the Horde; every adept in the CIA gestalt realized that at a glance.

  It began its attack with a simple command: DIE.

  One of the telepaths in Heather’s ship whimpered weakly and did just that.

  * * *

  Emergence.

  Jason staggered out of warp and fell to one knee. The spot where an anti-tank rocket had hit his left shoulder was smoking; the smell of vaporized composite armor got through his helmet filters and made him cough. Enough kinetic energy had gotten through to wrench his shoulder out of its socket; the pain was overwhelming.

  “Hold still.”

  Two Navy corpsmen and a few techies worked on him. Jason didn’t remember them dragging him to a bed – well, more like a slab for battlesuits – or taking off his helmet, but they had; breathing un-canned air felt great, even if the smell of burned synthetics filled his nose. He’d warped to a first-aid facility in a planetary defense base on Felix-Five. Going back to the stealth ships was too risky; the Horde had dispatched several warships around the system, scanning for warp emissions.

  A rumbling outside the facility meant fighting on the planet was still going on, and getting closer. The Wraiths might have nowhere to warp to if they didn’t finish the job.

  “This is going to hurt,” one of the corpsmen said; he and a buddy were about to straighten Jason’s dislocated shoulder.

  “Do it.”

  It was bad, especially since he refused a shot for the pain; he needed to get back to his unit and couldn’t risk being slowed down by pain meds. While he was malingering down here, Kinston and Russell were fighting for their lives. Corolla was dead. TE-2 was gone. Captain Teller had bought it, too. There were five Wraiths left of Marine Special Operations Team One, including Jason, and when he’d gotten tagged by a missileer team, what was left of the Wraiths and two reinforced Marine battalions had been about to assault the biggest rock in the enemy fleet. The last target had turned out to be the toughest one.

  Things went gray for a minute, but by the time they’d fixed all his injuries and replaced the damaged components of his armor, the pain had receded to a dull throbbing and he was good to go.

  Things are bad up there, Woof told him.

  He didn’t think they could get any worse. The Wraiths had jumped time and again, fighting growing numbers of Hordies. The enemy was learning fast; mobile reaction forces armed with heavy weapons had been waiting for them. The cakewalks of the first wave of attacks were a fond memory. Casualties had mounted up quickly.

  At least the CIA teams were keeping the Horde from interfering with the warp drops. An entire Marine platoon had vanished in null-space when the enemy adepts had shut down its emergence point; luckily most of those adepts were dead now. All the Marines had to worry about were hundreds of thousands of Hordies.

  The corpsmen put his helmet back on; they’d scraped off most of the blood and other crap on the inside; the smell of disinfectant was an improvement, but not by much. They had also removed the damaged armor plate on his shoulder.

  “You’re cleared to go.”

  “Thank you,” Jason said. He waited until everyone had stepped away from him and jumped.

  Transition.

  Corolla’s ghost and his guardian angel greeted him.

  There’s some Warplings nearby, kid, the dead Wraith said. But we’ll keep ‘em off of you. Happy hunting.

  Thank you, bro. And sorry.

  Wasn’t your fault. Just stay frosty. Being dead ain’t no fun.

  Jason kept going. He followed Staff Sergeant Kinston’s mental voice; she gave him an emergence point, as well as a warning that the landing zone was hot as hell.

  Emergence. Jason came out in a cavern that someone had made by blasting a hole with some heavy ordnance. Wounded and dead Marines crowded the space, with more being dragged in. The lone exit led to a tunnel full of the sounds of battle. He found the remnants of his unit huddled behind a mound of debris. Both Edison and Kinston had patched-up spots on their suits, not badly enough to require a jump back to base but bad enough; every time their armor took damage meant they’d come close to buying it. Enemy fire was hitting the force fields protecting the unit. Jason had to rush to cover and even then he got lit up by a laser that drained off ten percent of his outer shield.

  Master Sergeant Kong was in charge of MSOT-1, which with the Wraiths that were left – Jason and his buddies, plus Gunny McAllister – was only slightly larger than a tactical element. He was talking things out with higher while the team took a break. Jason crouched down next to Staff Sergeant Kinston.

  Made it back just in time, Dog-Boy, Kinston said.

  What’s the deal, Staff Sergeant?

  Kinston showed him via a combination of mental and implant-generated images. The Marines were launching a three-company assault on a Horde bunker, but the black-armored bastards who’d been giving them grief had stopped them cold. From the looks of it, the enemy had a multilayered defense with multiple supporting strongpoints. Every time the Marines tried to advance down a tunnel, they were taken under fire. Attempts to clear the way had been thwarted by extensive force fields that woul
d have done justice to a dreadnought.

  Nothing we’ve got can take their defenses, Kinston explained. So we’re going through them and taking them out from the other side.

  Who’s ‘we?’

  Jason couldn’t see the NCO’s face but he pictured the humorless grin on her face as she replied: All the Wraiths fit to fight. A hundred and ninety of us.

  There’d been over four hundred of them when the battle started. Most units became combat-ineffective after taking over ten percent casualties. The Wraiths shared the Marine virtue of being too dumb to quit, though.

  The tangos have thousands of troops protecting their facilities, but it’s close quarters, Gunny McAllister said. They won’t be able to send a lot of them at us. Not at once. And if we keep jumping, we should stay ahead of them.

  Edison’s mental chuckle told Jason how highly the man thought of the plan.

  It is what it is, Kinston went on. We’ll have tangos on both flanks, ahead and behind us, and over and under us for that matter. To quote the man, they can’t get away this time.

  We’re a go, team, Master Sergeant Kong announced. We’re taking a field generator, then bouncing back here to wait for new orders.

  Woof started to growl. After a moment, Jason joined in.

  * * *

  Three railgun rounds hit Russell right in the chest.

  He didn’t know that at first, of course. All he knew was that one moment he’d been unleashing hell on a platoon of entrenched tangos and the next there’d been a flash of multicolored lights and he’d been knocked flat on his back. Kinston dragged his ass out of the line of fire while Dog-Boy and Whitey provided covering fire, and one of them must have gotten the railgun emplacement, because it didn’t fire again.

  Not that he was thinking much about that; the pain on his chest had his full attention. Broken ribs, at least. Russell had his imp give him a diagnosis, waiting to see if the round had sent pieces of his own armor through something too vital for the nanites to fix. No, he was good. His internal force field had kept the railgun rounds from penetrating, but just enough force had bled through to crack his ribs; the nano-meds would take care of that. He’d be good to go in a minute, assuming the E.T.s didn’t overrun their position in that time.

  The Hordies’ field generators were chock full of infantry with heavy weapons. The black-armored bastards had damn good equipment, even the ones who couldn’t enter warp space. And the tangos in this rock had positioned a lot of troops around their key facilities, with plenty of room to maneuver, which meant they had faced something very much like warp marines or even Wraiths. Something for the intel weenies to figure out.

  You good to jump, Edison? Kinston asked him as she went continuous beam on her TAS-1.

  Russell gritted his teeth. Yeah. Why?

  Containment field around this power plant is dropping in ten secs. When it goes, we want to be at least two klicks away.

  Gotcha. Say when.

  When.

  Russell and the other four Wraiths jumped into warp just before the explosion devoured a big chunk of the asteroid. He looked around for Deborah, but his dead girlfriend was nowhere to be found. They emerged at a Marine rally point, still inside the giant rock. The ground was shaking under their feet when they came out, so that explosion had been something else. The tremors didn’t stop. Looked like the explosion had triggered sympathetic detonations. Big ones.

  Master Sergeant Kong shouted inside their heads. We got to evacuate! Looks like that explosion knocked out another containment field, one keeping a mother-loving black hole from going critical. It’s gonna get loose and eat everything around it in a few mikes.

  Shit. There were a couple of Marine battalions fighting tangos all over the station, and unlike Wraiths the grunts could only leave by making it to one of the warp catapults at the rally point. A few minutes wasn’t going to be enough. Especially for troops in the middle of a firefight.

  We’re going to help the ground-pounders break contact, Kong added. Then grab everybody we can and warp ‘em home.

  Russell grunted. Those orders didn’t sound survivable at all. But he found himself nodding. Those were his fellow Devil Dogs out there.

  Let’s roll, Kong said, and they did.

  * * *

  Matthew Fromm couldn’t believe his eyes. “Who the hell are those guys?”

  A couple dozen armored figures warped behind the Marine entrenchments shortly after a big explosion shook the entire asteroid and the Hordies decided to bury the invaders under a wave of charging bodies. The newcomers engaged the aliens with a continuous hosing of heavy graviton beams that turned the charge into a slaughter.

  “Got new orders!” Sergeant Hansen told them. “We’re withdrawing by echelon towards the rally point. We’ve got to jump the hell out before this whole place implodes.”

  That was great, except Matthew’s platoon was on the first echelon, closest to the enemy and thus the last to pull out. The new arrivals had shown up to bolster the defenses and help cover the withdrawal. Maybe that would be enough. For the time being, Matthew kept his eyes front and serviced targets. The Hordies seemed to know they were dead men walking and were determined to take as many humans to hell with them. More and more tangos came running into sight, shooting wildly before being cut down. Some of the rushing figures weren’t even soldiers: civilians with improvised weapons charged the Marine lines, dying in droves but also soaking up fire that might have killed someone with a beam weapon.

  “Target,” Sergeant Hansen called. Matthew followed the aiming dot and spotted a wheeled artillery piece with a heavy force field being moved into position. The entire platoon – all twenty-two of them still around – plus the new arrivals took it under fire and blew it up pretty good; the ensuing fireball consumed most of the Hordies in a sixty-meter radius and stalled the enemy attack.

  Just as the explosion faded away, the whole area shook again. A noise like metal flexing, only impossibly loud, managed to overwhelm his helmet’s ear protectors. That wasn’t good at all.

  One of the guys who’d warp-dropped earlier ran up to Matthew and Staff Sergeant Hansen and grabbed them by the handholds built into their back plates.

  Hold on, Marines, she said, not through her imps but straight into their heads.

  The floor was beginning to sink under his feet, but the super-Marine grabbing him yanked Matthew and Hansen into warp without using a catapult. Matthew saw something dark and swirling, like a wave of shadows, follow them into warp; he felt himself falling towards it. The woman dragging him and Hansen grunted and kept pulling them away from the wave, fighting it for their lives. She was cursing softly under her breath. Then someone else joined in and helped drag the two Marines away from the darkness: a grizzled man in antiquated body armor without a helmet or life support. He shouldn’t be alive, but he was there, and with his help they made it out the other side. They landed hard on solid ground.

  Matthew’s hands were shaking. He looked around and saw they were at the Marine deployment point on Felix-Five. The woman who had warp-dropped them was still there, down on one knee and breathing heavy. The old jarhead who’d helped her was nowhere to be seen.

  “Where’s the old guy?” Staff Sergeant Hansen asked.

  “He’s in warp space where he belongs,” the woman said. Her virtual ID tag was blank. “I’m sorry I couldn’t grab more of your buddies, Staff Sergeant.”

  The voice was distorted but Matthew recognized it. “Staff Sergeant Kinston?”

  “Forget you saw me, kid,” Kinston said, and she disappeared into warp haze.

  Twenty-Four

  Felix System, 200 AFC

  Officer Melendez whimpered weakly and died.

  And then there was one, Heather thought as she fended off another psychic attack. To her mind’s eye, it looked like hundreds of razor-sharp icicles flying towards her at hurricane speeds. The hideous Horde leader slowly raised its hands; the icy shards increased in number and intensity. The mental walls Heather had e
rected in front of her cracked under the relentless onslaught. She had to devote all her strength to stay alive, but if she couldn’t counterattack, all she was doing is delaying the inevitable.

  She was tempted by the idea of breaking contact, but only briefly. For one, there were no guarantees that she could sever the link between her and the warp adept. Even if she could, that would mean abandoning the Marines fighting and dying aboard the great asteroid where the battle would be won or lost.

  Matthew, are you still alive?

  She couldn’t let her concentration waver to scan the humans aboard the asteroid and find if her son was among the living. Instead, she gathered what little strength she could spare from her defenses and sent a rapier-thin energy spike towards her opponent. A howl of angry surprise echoed in her mind; the barrage of icicles eased off. She’d hurt it. But not enough.

  The Warpling hybrid was about to finish her off when something dark and massive rose up behind her enemy. The Witch-King, former Oracle turned warlord, master of the Ways of Chaos and mutant prodigy, looked into the expanding abyss and had time for a brief screamed before being consumed by the encroaching darkness. The mental construct facing Heather exploded into thousands of fragments; she felt the mind behind it die at the same time. The inky wave – a singularity briefly unleashed into the physical and mental planes of existence – pulled at her for several terrifying seconds before it dissipated. Heather returned to her body, spat out the mouth guard, and was noisily sick.

  It was over. And damn Zhang hadn’t ever showed up.

  Not quite true, Lisbeth whispered in her mind. Been here a while. I just didn’t want to distract you while I kept you alive.

  Heather wiped her mouth and collapsed back on her seat. The only occupied seat; Navy corpsmen had removed the bodies of her fellow officer. She was the lone survivor.