Where did they get those crews? Grace wondered. A superdreadnought needed no less than five thousand sophonts to man all its systems; the need to provide for multiple shifts meant at least two or three times that base number. By the most conservative estimate, a million warp-rated beings were manning that armada. Automatic systems could only do so much: true artificial intelligences were not only frowned upon by the Elder Races, they were also hideously vulnerable to warp space and prone to going insane when confronted with what they perceived as the meaninglessness of existence.
Even for a two-hundred-billion strong polity, this was a sizable fraction of its spacer population. Those million spacers had been drafted from less warlike occupations, at near-ruinous expense. The ships themselves represented trillions of sophont-hours of fabricator and assembly work and enormous amounts of raw materials, with all the economic costs such entailed. The Imperials had been surprisingly slow in joining the crusade against humanity; they must have been patiently building a force they thought would be unstoppable once it was set in motion.
And they might well be right.
“Enemy formation is two light-seconds away.”
Everyone tensed up at the announcement. The two ‘battle walls’ were now close enough for missiles to be launched, and even for long-rage energy fire. The battle could start right then and there.
“No incoming fire. Enemy is maintaining course.”
“They’ve decided not to waste their missiles, I suppose,” Grace said. Over the previous year, the Galactic Alliance had relied on massive missile barrages to overcome the humans’ warp shields. Humanity and its allies had developed very sophisticated defenses in turn. Waiting until the flight time to their target was shorter was a sensible reaction. That would also allow the advancing armada to back up their so-called Sun-Blotter swarms with direct fire.
Humans had a particularly apt phrase, a sarcastic prayer of thanks used when on the receiving end of heavy artillery fire. ‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.’ Grace could sympathize with the sentiment as the Imperium forces advanced for another fifteen minutes of peace and quiet, the deceptive calm that always preceded the deadliest storms.
One light second.
“Multiple launches.” The Lady of Tactics’ voice grew hoarse with tension. “Three hundred and eighty thousand missiles.”
Grace exhaled and took a slow and deliberate breath, fighting the natural impulse to pant. She absently stroked the fur behind her ears with one hand while she relayed the Fleetmaster’s orders.
“Launch defensive missiles on rapid-fire mode.”
That would deplete her flotilla’s ready magazines, but they needed to thin out that impossible volley or they would end up scattered among the Seven Hells. “All vessels will engage assigned targets with main guns.”
Her dreadnought had been given a worthy target: an enemy battleship. The rest of her flotilla’s relatively paltry weapons would focus on light ships and the upcoming missile swarm. It was disappointing, but necessary. The enemy cruisers’ numbers must be winnowed down, since they would be tasked with protecting the heavy ships from missiles and, more importantly…
“CSG-11 has launched its fighters.”
… from the dreaded American warp fighters.
* * *
“Clear for launch.”
Fernando ‘Hulk’ Verdi tried not to tense up. He and Dicky had a target, and in five seconds they would be catapulted through time and space to come up a mere handful of kilometers away from it, hopefully on a matching course and speed. The mechanics of warp targeting were beyond him. He just used his brain to make sure the ship emerged where the techies in charge told him he should.
“Launch.”
Transition.
No warp ghosts showed up. Fighter pilots had learned to scare them off early on, and the critters didn’t even bother with them anymore. Not that it was all peaches and cream, though. Fernando felt an unknown presence nearby, something more dangerous than a mere hallucination.
“Flak’s going to be heavy as fuck,” Dicky said; his mental voice came through as calm and unconcerned as if he was talking about the weather, but underneath it his true feelings came through. Dicky didn’t think they were going to make it.
“Stow it, brah,” Fernando told him. Despair was downright dangerous in warp space. If you were truly suicidal, you wouldn’t come out the other side.
“Roger that.” Dicky set aside the gloomy attitude; Fernando could tell from the way the mental signature of his wingman firmed up, no longer in danger of falling adrift in the place between spaces.
Emergence.
From five km out, the Gimp starship looked huge: a dreadnought, six thousand meters long, gleaming bronze in the light produced by energy weapons going off all around it. Fernando cut loose with his 508mm cannon. At that range, he could see the effect of the graviton beam as it struck the target. Force fields twisted and failed in a dazzling spray of colors; armor tore apart an instant later. A flaming dot appeared on the target’s surface, which meant one hell of a fireball to show up on his display. Dicky had struck the exact same spot. Even for something that big, it had to hurt.
The enemy flak was as bad as they’d feared: the dreadnought was blanketing the entire area with lasers, enough to find spots unprotected by warp shields. Fernando saw his War Eagle’s force fields drop by fifty percent in the time it took him to fire that single shot and jump away.
Transition.
No ghosts were waiting for him in the dark, but he could hear something: a moaning sound, as if thousands of people were sobbing and whimpering. He somehow knew they came from the ETs he and Dicky had just blown to hell during the sortie.
“Shut up,” he hissed. “Shut the hell up.”
It wasn’t that their crying bothered him all that much – this was war, after all – but he worried the dead aliens’ belly-aching might attract something else’s attention. Warp navigators and now fighter pilots all knew the truth about null-space: there were things in there, and they weren’t ghosts or hallucinations, but something else altogether. And if they noticed you, they would hunt you down.
Emergence.
They came out right where they were supposed to, a thousand meters off the USS Kenneth Walsh. The rest of their flight – six fighters total – were already there, but two of them were falling out of formation. One of them was on fire. It was Missy ‘Bombshell’ Brady’s fighter.
“Fuck! Eject! Eject!” Fernando shouted, both through his comm and via telepathy.
She did, but before the tractor beams from the Walsh could grab her – tricky during the best circumstances at the ranges and speeds involved – the fighter blew up. Bombshell was too close to the blast. Her status icon turned black.
Fernando didn’t realize he was biting his lower lip until he tasted blood. He ignored the pain as he guided his bird until the tractor beams took over and dragged it the rest of the way inside the ship. Nothing to be done. At least the other damaged fighter managed to keep control of his wounded bird until it was snagged and brought in. Two losses in a single sortie were downright terrible, though.
“Stop trying to unload on a target, people!” shouted Major Harry ‘Eel’ Hendrix, the squadron commander. “One and done! They’ve got hundreds of lasers on continuous fire all around them. No more than three seconds between transitions. Is that understood?”
“Aye, aye, sir,” they all dutifully replied. They all knew that three seconds barely gave them time to land one hit, maybe two if they were lucky, and even their twenty-inchers couldn’t punch through a dreadnought’s armor and shields in one shot, not reliably. The Gimp big hitters took a lot of killing, and the super-dreds were supposedly worse, with multiple layers of armor and force fields that had to be defeated before you hit something vital.
He tried to relax while the flight crew replaced the power pack for the 508mm cannon and checked on the rest of the War Eagle’s systems. Everything appeared t
o be green, and his gluon plant was good for another six sorties before he was bingo power and had to head back to get a new one. Problem was, with the amount of flak the enemy was putting up, he didn’t think Flight A was going to live through six sorties.
His flight orders came in. The five survivors would be hitting a single target this time. A super-dred: hopefully five blasts hitting within a couple of meters from each other would stab deeply enough into the tango’s innards to achieve something useful.
“Clear for launch.”
Transition.
Bombshell’s voice followed him in the darkness, and that wasn’t fun at all. She sounded angry.
Emergence.
Flight A fired their single volley and dropped out in under two seconds. Even that wasn’t quite good enough. Fernando’s force field got depleted by ninety percent by a lucky glancing hit by a plasma weapon, a secondary gun meant to burn holes in cruisers, and more than enough to turn his crate into a molten puddle of components if it hit him dead on. They all made it back in one piece, but they had to hold for almost five minutes while they replaced several force field gennies; too many components had burned out under the unrelenting enemy fire. Next time they were going to lose another guy.
Time to try ‘the thing.’
“We’re gonna have to go full ghost, sir,” he told Eel.
The officer’s mix of fear and doubt came loud and clear through the psychic connection; so did the final decision.
“We’ll talk about it on the next sortie, but I think you’re right. God help us all.”
* * *
The Imperium battleship shattered into a thousand burning fragments when a salvo from the Undying Defender’s main guns caused a chain reaction that devoured the enemy ship. A visual display showed the massive bronze vessel being consumed by white fire. A few crewmembers barked in triumph, but quickly stopped under her steely gaze. This was no time for celebration. The Sun Blotter swarm was a mere thirty seconds away.
Admittedly, her ships had performed some excellent long-range gunnery, aided by their targets’ inexperience. A competent shield-management crew would have been able to shift their strength to match the Defender’s volleys with negligible damage to their ship’s hull, let alone its power plants. Their contemptible performance had doomed everyone aboard the battleship. Half a dozen other capital ships, two of them superdreadnoughts, had also gone up in flames, most of them at the hands of human fighter pilots. So far, all the losses had been on the enemy’s side; their energy weapon fire had been ragged and poorly coordinated. The lack of skill would become less important as the range shortened, however, at which point the balance would tip the other way.
Grace turned to the more immediate problem, the flight of missiles headed their way. The Joint Star Fleet had done its best, and destroyed nine-tenths of the first salvo; they would probably kill nine-tenths of the remainder during those final seconds. Which still left some three thousand missiles, and probably twice as many from the second wave, which was smaller but had been shielded by the first one. The Joint Star Fleet had launched its own anti-ship rockets, but their much-weaker volley would be lucky to score more than a handful of kills.
The human warp fighters had done well, but at great cost: out of a hundred and forty-four, half a dozen had been destroyed outright and another ten damaged. At that rate, they would all be gone before they could inflict enough losses to affect the battle’s outcome.
The Imperium armada continued its relentless advance and began to concentrate its fire on specific targets. Wyrashat light vessels were struck by main gun salvos; no destroyer or frigate could survive those even at long range. The tactic was simple and brutal: those ships were hideously vulnerable to even inaccurate fire, and their losses reduced the anti-missile defenses nibbling away at the approaching Sun-Blotter swarm.
The Undying Defender engaged a new target, an enemy dreadnought this time: her twenty-eight main guns hammered at the bronze monolith mercilessly, but without dealing a killing blow. The Imperium ship contemptuously ignored the Hrauwah’s fire and continued picking off one destroyer after another. Shortly afterwards, the remains of the Sun-Blotter swarm arrived.
Thirty-one-hundred missiles struck the Joint Star Fleet, and ships began to die in earnest. False stars flared up all around Drakul-Six, each burst of light marking the death pyre of a vessel. The Hrauwah were not spared this time; Grace winced as nine of her destroyers were torn apart out in quick succession. The ship-killers were following the same pattern as the enemy artillery, concentrating on point defense platforms and clearing the way for the next volley. The light vessels of the JSF suffered crippling losses in a few moments.
Their first fire mission accomplished, the Imperium heavy ships began to switch targets, going after the American carrier vessels, which were held as far back as practically possible and defended by the HEF’s destroyer screen. Destroy them, and the fighters would quickly become useless; the tiny gunboats required replenishment after every sortie. Distance and the carriers’ warp shields made them difficult targets, however, and they incurred no losses – for now. Several of their escorts weren’t so lucky; destroyers could be severely damaged even by glancing hits from a capital ship.
A mere thirty seconds later, the second missile volley arrived. Four thousand ship-killers reached the battle-line. Last-ditch short-range lasers reaped many of them before they could strike, some of them close enough to weaken force fields. The rest struck their targets head-on.
The Undying Defender shook like a small prey animal in the jaws of a Hrauwah blood-lizard. Grace held onto her throne, ignoring the barks of shock and fear coming from the Fleet Court crew. Her attention was on the tactical displays; she continued issuing orders, hiding her fear that the battle was lost.
Half of her light vessels were gone or unable to fight, and all the flotilla’s other ships were damaged to some extent. The Wyarashat Wing had suffered even more: four of their mighty dreadnoughts were no more, and only a dozen destroyers remained of their light forces. The humans, despite their warp shields, had lost half of their point defense ships.
In return, they had destroyed or crippled two Imperium superdreadnoughts, five dreadnoughts, twenty battleships, and fifty battlecruisers: easily ten times the tonnage the JSF had lost, but the balance of power had, if anything, tilted further in favor of the enemy.
“Missile launch detected,” the Lord of Tactics announced. “Two hundred thousand this time.”
* * *
Fernando Verdi and the rest of the Third Squadron were holding an impromptu last-second planning session while inside warp space, the kind of discussion they couldn’t have in the real world, where higher might overhear them and get creeped out. The top brass knew warp fighter pilots could do all kinds of weird stuff, but they still hadn’t figured out how to deal with it. Out of sight, out of mind seemed like the best way to handle things.
A two-light-second jump happened just about instantly in ‘real time,’ but the squadron’s two flights had learned how to spend a good five, ten minutes in warp space when they wanted to without altering their transit time. And right now they wanted to.
Instead of the sensory deprivation most people experienced inside null-space, the pilots were in a simulacrum of their usual briefing room. They could see each other, hear each other, even smell the stinking cigar ‘Hardhat’ Rodriguez liked to puff on at every opportunity. It all felt real enough that Fernando often wondered whether being stranded in warp would be so bad after all. Maybe you could spend eternity living in a fantasy world of your own creation. He dismissed the idea, though: nothing good ever lasted very long. Warp or real space, it made no difference.
“You’ve seen their formation,” Eel said. “Lots of light ships all around, so no matter where we show up, they’ll spot us, and they’ve mounted light guns all over their hulls. If their gunners were as good as their tactics, we would have taken worse losses.”
Captain Turner ‘Big Tuna’ Jamieson nodded
in agreement. He commanded Flight B of Third Squadron.
“The lasers ain’t so bad, but the close-in plasma weapons will wash over the warp shields every time. Soon as we pop out, we’ve got two seconds, tops, before they blow us away.”
Big Tuna had fought in the Battle of Hades before getting reassigned to the HEF. He’d learned his lessons the hard way, but anybody who bothered to read the reports could see how bad things had gotten. The ETs had improved their countermeasures, and the resulting losses had climbed until the last few fights had resulted in ten percent killed or damaged birds per sortie. After ten sorties you might as well blow your own brains out.
They’d talked about going full ghost before, and had tried it out a few times. Nobody liked it, and with good reason.
“We’re gonna lose people either way,” Big Tuna went on. “But doing the thing means we can actually get some licks in before we go.”
“Yeah, that’s how I see it,” Eel said.
“Getting killed isn’t the problem,” ‘Wild Thing’ Moretz said. “It’s what happens every time we ghost. It’s the Warplings, brah. We’ve got to go deep to ghost, and that’s where the Foos are.”
Foo Fighters was a term from pre-Contact aviation, unidentified bogeys that some had thought were ET ships coming to visit, although that had turned out to be bullshit. Fighter pilots had taken to calling the warp inhabitants by that name. The scientists insisted the Foos were nothing but vivid hallucinations, but everyone who’d spent enough time in warp space knew better. Getting killed was one thing, but what the Foos could do to you was something else.
Fernando had seen them twice. The first time happened during training, when something had shown up in the skin of a dead Marine. The second one had come after him while he was training some Foxtrot-Novembers. That had been a lot worse, despite all the safeguards they’d set up to prevent just that sort of thing. Wild Thing had a good point. Getting killed was bad, but losing your soul was a lot worse.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 97