“Just relax, Russet. It’s all good. It’s all good, man. Just hang on.”
“Pull the other one,” Russell said – or tried to. His throat was bone-dry, and the built-in water dispenser in his helmet wasn’t working. None of his helmet systems were; all he had was his imp. That was all he needed, though.
A couple mental commands were all it took, and Russell was able to see through Gonzo’s sensors. His buddy was looking down at a charred, mangled carcass, missing an arm and a leg. It took Russell a moment to accept the fact that was him, and another moment to swallow back the scream that tried to force its way past his parched lips.
“Shit. Stop squirming, Russet,” Gonzo said. “You had to look, didn’t you?”
Another wave of coldness washed over him. Either Gonzo had given him another dose of painkillers, or it was time to face the Reaper.
He went into the dark without knowing which.
* * *
“They’ve located all the exits, sir,” Lieutenant Hansen said.
“All right. Have everyone pull back out of the enemy’s fields of fire,” Fromm ordered while he mentally drafted a new fire mission. The Furry cavern complex had included several escape tunnels, but they were all accounted for now. He’d hoped to take some prisoners, but storming the caves would only result in more casualties, and in any case the Vipers rarely allowed themselves to be captured alive. His company already had one KIA and ten WIAs; no sense adding to the butcher bill.
The multi-platoon advance had achieved its objectives, forcing the enemy back and destroying all but one area force field. That would be enough for his purposes. The mortar section switched ammo types as he directed the assaultmen from Third Platoon to prepare to volley missiles. A few seconds later, he gave the ETs in the cave a final dose of hell.
A swarm of light missiles battered the enemy energy barrier with plasma discharges, enough to disrupt it in time for four thermobaric mortar bomblets to reach the interior of the cave. The tunnels were filled with highly volatile chemicals in the space of a heartbeat, and ignited a moment later.
Fromm couldn’t see inside the caverns, other than a grav-wave general layout of the underground complex. The view from outside was impressive enough, as a huge fireball erupted from the cavern’s mouth like some ancient dragon’s breath. All his troops were under cover, but they still were shaken up by the massive detonation. The entire mountainside crumbled onto the cavern’s entrance, sealing it up.
Inside the caves… Well, it would have been mercifully quick, at least.
Most of the tunnels collapsed; the entire mountain shuddered as portions of its interior settled down. By the time it was over, there wasn’t enough space inside the complex to fit anything larger than a mouse. It would serve as a fitting monument to the ETs who’d made their last stand there, and the Marines who’d ensured they died for their cause.
As he watched the smoky ruin and went over the casualty reports, a part of him was refighting old battles. If he’d held back some of those especial munitions during the final fight at Jasper-Five, many Marines would still be alive. Instead, he’d had them broken down by fabbers to make more conventional shells, never expecting the primitives he was facing to ever bring area force fields into play.
It’s not what you don’t know that gets you killed. It’s the things you think you know.
The Vipers had made it clear they wanted to take this system. And they were deploying their full bag of tricks to do so. He’d better make sure his own preconceptions didn’t get him killed, along with everyone under him.
Groom Base, Star System 3490, 164 AFC
The Lockheed Martin SF-10 War Eagle – you could blame the name on a number of notable Auburn University alumni among the design team – didn’t look pretty. It was a sixty-foot long cylinder with two bulbous warp generators at each end, with another bulge in the middle for its power plant and graviton thrusters. The tube of a 20-inch graviton cannon protruded under the frontal warp generator; the weapon ran down the entire length of the fighter and packed the punch of a battleship’s main gun, although the onboard capacitors only allowed it to fire five times before the little ship went Winchester (out of ammo) and had to return to base to reload. A trio of medium lasers and a pair of plasma projectors that comprised the fighter’s secondary armament were hardly visible on the spacecraft’s surface.
It didn’t look pretty at all, but it was the most beautiful thing in the universe.
Lisbeth Zhang watched the line of starfighters arranged neatly on the hangar bay below the viewing window. In less than two hours, she and ten other pilot trainees under a slightly more experienced squadron commander would undertake their first flight mission: to engage and destroy the antiquated and barely-functional battlecruiser Bull Run. She’d taken a little stroll onto the observation deck for one last look at Tenth Squadron: twelve War Eagles, ready for action. At the moment, those twelve fighters represented five percent of the entire Marine Aviation force. A whole two hundred and forty War Eagles had been built, and further production had been halted to prepare for deployment: the same fabbers that could make more fighters were now busy making spare parts for the ones already in service. As it was, going into battle with a single class of vessel was risky as hell. Normally you wanted at least two variants in service, so a single design flaw didn’t ground the entire fleet. But needs must when the devil rides. That should be the motto of the Spacefighters. Needs must.
After she was done sightseeing, Lisbeth headed down to the Ready Room for final pre-flight briefings and prep.
Getting to this point had been no picnic.
She got there early, but there was already a line of pilots waiting to get their medicine, the latest concoction of drugs unofficially known as ‘Mélange’ or simply ‘The Spice.’ Lisbeth had Woogled the terms and discovered they referred to some pre-Contact sci-fi story that’d been long on mysticism and light on science, not to mention based on the idiotic belief that humans were the only intelligent species in the universe. Some idiots in R&D must be either super-geeks or very old geeks, probably both. Whatever.
Normally, the chemical cocktail would have been added to her nano-med pack, to be injected at the discretion of her imp’s medical systems. Mélange usage followed its own rules, however, in no small part because each dose was carefully tailored to each pilot, down to their current physiological state. Before her experiences in the Langley Project, she might have found the whole thing more than slightly ridiculous. Not anymore, though.
They’d lost two more people. One had merely never come back from warp space. The other had…
Lisbeth shuddered.
“You okay, ma’am?” a Lieutenant behind her asked.
“Yes, thank you,” she said absently. She didn’t want to explain. Lisbeth had been there and she still didn’t fully believe it. It’d been over a month since the incident, but it felt like it’d just happened. That sense of immediacy was just one of the many things that were bothering her.
It was her turn. The med-tech ran a full scan of her vitals. A couple of minutes later, an ampoule of Spice was produced. She took the injection on her upper arm, feeling the coolness of the liquid solution as it spread through her body. Other than that, there was no apparent effect, but Lisbeth knew that wouldn’t last. Sooner or later, something would happen.
The amazing thing was, only a handful of candidates had resigned from the program. The effects of Mélange and the visions they induced were disturbing, yes. But they were also fascinating. Maybe even addictive. She still had nightmares about what happened to Captain Brangan, but she hadn’t considered leaving the program. Part of it was patriotism: the fighters were going to make a huge difference in the war, she was sure of it. But that wasn’t the only reason.
Lisbeth relived Brangan’s death while heading towards the locker room. They’d made yet another warp jump, and she’d done a quick headcount. She’d had just enough time to breathe a sigh of relief – everyone was accounted for –
when Brangan had dissolved before her eyes. The poor guy hadn’t had a chance to scream. His body, uniform, everything, had appeared to liquefy and twist into a swirling funnel shape for a fraction of a second before disappearing without a trace. Nothing had been left behind, not even a droplet of blood, a skin cell, nothing. It was as if he’d never existed.
She saw it happen again, this time in slow motion, and felt Brangan’s mind, or maybe his soul, still alive and aware as he was dragged somewhere else, a level of existence beneath warp space, where something was waiting for him. Something bad. She saw all those things, several seconds worth of information, in the time between one step and the next, and she didn’t even slow down or stumble. Her brain absorbed the information in no time at all, without affecting her outwardly.
All the candidates were required to report any hallucinations, fugue states, lost time episodes, and changes in mood or behavior. At first, she’d done so dutifully, but now she was maybe mentioning one out of three of those episodes, and she was certain the same was true of the other candidates. For one, there were so many that she’d spend all her time going over each and every event. For another, the bizarre visions had stopped happening in real time. She’d found herself experiencing minutes’ worth of flashbacks or waking nightmares within the space of an eyeblink. They didn’t affect her performance in any negative way. If anything, her reaction time, spatial awareness and coolness under fire were all improving.
She exchanged knowing glances with the other pilots while they changed into their flight suits. They were all experiencing the same thing, and they all knew better than to talk about it. Someone in higher would get scared and hold things up, and she didn’t want any more delays.
She wanted to fly.
* * *
Lieutenant Colonel Grant Jessup was another former Air Force officer and pre-Contact Ancient, which made him the oldest person in the room with eighty years to spare. He looked pretty good for someone pushing two hundred; his complexion was a bit rugged, but that was about it. The years hadn’t taken the edge off his skills or the casual arrogance with which he displayed them, either. The commander of Tenth Squadron had logged a little over a thousand hours on the War Eagle, which was three times as long as his pilots had. That amounted to over three hundred warp jumps inside the tiny craft.
The squadron leader looked over the briefing room, filled with the pilots and support personnel who had participated in the mission. Tenth Squadron had destroyed the Bull Run, performing six warp jumps per fighter in the process. Nobody had died or gone insane. The room’s central holotank had shown all the details of the combat action in full living color.
“In conclusion, you all did great,” he said after going over all the salient points of the sortie. “Perhaps a little too great.”
Some of the pilots chuckled; the rest traded uneasy glances. They knew what he was talking about: even as they performed their attack runs, each fighter separated from the others by thousands of miles, all the pilots had shared a sense of awareness of what the others were doing. And Colonel Jessup had been at the center of it all, like a spider in its web. It was impossible, but the mission results confirmed it; they’d been able to coordinate the attack even though they hadn’t communicated through conventional means. Nobody said so out loud, not with the ground crew officers in the room. They wouldn’t understand.
“In any case, your performance has been on par with the other squadrons in the task force,” he continued. “Confirmation of your new status is still pending, but unofficially, you are no longer trainees.”
We made it, Lisbeth thought. They’d launched two successful sorties, engaged a target, and destroyed it. They now were part of the Marine Spacefighter branch, the tenth formation to be inducted into it. A part of her was as elated as she’d expected, but the rest was wondering about the price she and her fellow pilots were paying. They were being changed by the multiple warp jumps, the Spice drug cocktail, or both. Everyone joked how warp navigators were all weird, and pretty spooky to boot. She wondered what they would make of fighter pilots once their quirks started to become apparent.
Crazy or not, they are going to use us. We’re going to be deployed, and soon. Ready or not, crazy or not, here we come.
And the funny part was, she didn’t mind one bit.
Seven
Parthenon-Four, 164 AFC
“I think that makes it official.”
Fromm nodded. “This sector is clear, and just in time for Christmas.”
Not to mention the last stage of the evacuation, he thought. The Big Furries had been stubborn, but the destruction of their food stores at another handful of villages had driven home the lesson. Bravery could not stave off starvation. The end result had been mass migration away from the American facilities, the despoiled tribes falling upon those in the hinterlands. The natives were now too busy fighting amongst themselves to consider hindering American operations in the area. Whatever high-tech toys they still had were being used to drive off some other Big Furries from their lands. From satellite and drone surveillance, the ensuing wars of invasion were turning nasty, and would get worse still when the planet entered its winter phase, some ninety days from now. By then, all humans would be off-planet, leaving the natives free to live or die as they chose.
The evacuation had taken longer than expected, mostly because orbital transport had been at a premium and moving the heavy equipment deemed valuable enough to bring along had taken a great deal of time and effort. Even so, it was almost over. The last civilians were due to be evacuated by the end of the month, New Year’s Eve in the Terran calendar. Fromm’s company would get a well-deserved Christmas break, and a few days later they and the rest of the 101st MEU would be the last humans to leave Parthenon-Four.
All the Viper SF teams had been allegedly accounted for. There hadn’t been many of them in the first place, a little under a hundred troops total, operating in small groups scattered around the planet. How they’d been inserted without anyone being the wiser remained something of a mystery, but a lot of trade passed through the system, including a great deal carried by alien-flagged ships. All from friendly polities, sure, but for the right price a tramp freighter’s crew could be convinced to smuggle in a team of Nasstah infiltrators and their equipment. The Intelligence weenies were trying to figure out who and when. They’d probably find a culprit sometime after the battle to hold the system was over and the information didn’t matter.
Fromm went over the take from the overheads one last time before leaving the command center. With the last group of insurgents in full retreat, he could afford to take some personal time off.
He read a new email from Heather he’d gotten that morning. From her account, Thanksgiving hadn’t been much fun. Listening to a bunch of civilians grouse about how hard their lives were never was. Fromm wondered just how much worse it’d been before First Contact, when the vast majority of Americans never spent even a day in uniform. Of course, for the vast majority of US citizens, their Obligatory Service years were only slightly tougher than civilian life; it all depended on where and when you did your time. The current class would not be enjoying their term, that was for sure. They’d be sent out into harm’s way as soon as their trainers were reasonably sure they weren’t a greater danger to their own side than to the enemy. The newbies would be used as replacements and sent into battle, where they’d suffer disproportionately-higher casualties. That was the way things worked.
Conscription made sure there were always warm bodies to throw into the fire, but no laws or regulations could build the ships and guns they would need to actually fight. Heather’s missive mentioned complaints of shortages in the civilian market, everything from car parts to grav-wave communication nodes. Ever since First Contact, the US had been desperately building up its industrial capacity, but most of it ended up supplying the military. Billions of man-hours and mountains of raw materials were spent to produce sophisticated devices that ended up shipped to remote parts of
the galaxy and blown to pieces, with little to no benefit to the workers who’d made them – other than keeping alien ships from darkening Earth’s skies for a second and final time.
Survival was great, but Earth’s living standards were barely higher than they’d been before the ETs showed up; while his Marines relied on antri-gravity vehicles, most civvies made do with electric and internal combustion engines. And it was even worse in the exoplanetary territories and even some of the Star States; in many places ordinary people made do with imported horses or native beasts of burden. There just wasn’t enough production capacity to go around, and the current war was squeezing the civilian side very badly. Fromm’s sister had been complaining about that as well.
If the civvies had a clue of just how bad the situation was, though, they’d spend less time grousing and more praying. The news and even the Marines’ tactical briefings were doing their level best to paint a positive picture, but anybody who bothered to do the math knew what the odds were. The Tripartite Galactic Alliance had such an edge in numbers and industry that they could afford massive losses and keep coming. The US had next to zero margin of error: the war could be lost in one or two battles. The coming fight for Parthenon System, for example. Lose here and the next few years would be nothing but the kicking and screaming of the condemned on his way to the gallows.
“Merry Goddamn Christmas,” he muttered. He wrote Heather back, trying to be as cheerful as possible.
It wasn’t easy. Part of him didn’t think he’d make it to another Christmas.
* * *
“Your turn, Gonzo.”
Gonzaga was looking at the colorfully-wrapped gift just the way he’d stare at a piece of unexploded ordnance. Russell didn’t know what had possessed his buddy to bring the package to the Christmas party; a present from his latest ex-wife was something to be opened in private, if it was to be opened at all. Had Russell ever been married and gotten a package from an ex, he would have deep-sixed it without bothering to check what was inside.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 43