On the other hand, vanquishing the Imperium and the Lhan Arkh Congress would provide plenty of spoils for the winners, and even the Hrauwah’s lukewarm support would be rewarded: systems would change hands, along with warp lines that would open up trade routes and access to natural resources. The Kingdom could use them. Over the centuries it had found itself hemmed in by assorted rivals; no new colonies had been founded in a long time, and several systems had been lost on the treaty table or the field of war. Sooner or later, one of its neighbors would grow strong enough to do more than merely encroach on the Kingdom’s borders, and existential war would follow. A few defeats later, and the Hrauwah could well end up suffering the ultimate fate of the losers in the game of stars.
Starfarers knew of only three possible outcomes marking the end of a polity’s history: grow in numbers, power and technology until Transcendence was attained, to become a lesser client to a greater race and be carried on its shoulders towards the same goal, or be overwhelmed and destroyed. Oblivion. Even when total extinction was avoided, the losers of the galaxy could only hope to control a handful or systems or, worse, live only as small groups of survivors, scattered in isolated communities on foreign planets, existing only at the sufferance of others.
Will humanity – and the choices I made – help us achieve Transcendence? Or did I doom my people when I saved Earth?
Those questions would not likely be answered while she still lived. Unless, that was, the current conflict resolved the human question once and for all.
* * *
“The evacuation is proceeding according to plan,” Kerensky’s chief of staff reported.
Kerensky glanced at the readouts. The details confirmed the overall assessment: Capricorn System would soon be empty of human life. The system was the first US possession beyond Paulus, which had been declared an open system just before the Wyrms surrendered. He’d decided to assemble his combined forces – American, Pan-Asian and Puppy – in Capricorn rather than try to establish a presence in Paulus. For one, the system was still inhabited by Wyrashat citizens, and their loyalty could not be counted on. For another, Capricorn was a backwater and it had a single point of access from outside American space, while Paulus could be reached by both the Lampreys and Gimps. While coordination over stellar distances was difficult at best, the risk of having a second enemy fleet show up while he was engaged in combat was too great; better to wait for the enemy at a place where it could only come from only one direction.
Ideally, the place in question would also be empty of innocents. He couldn’t evacuate the aliens at Paulus. He could remove the civilian population in Capricorn.
Dozens of merchantmen and passenger ships were on their way to the warp exit that would lead them deeper into human space. Their compartments were filled to capacity with refugees. Capricorn-Five and the system’s asteroid belt had held some four hundred thousand inhabitants; the convoy on its way out would reduce that total by nine-tenths. More ships would soon arrive and carry off the last forty-odd thousand people, a mixture of personnel whose skills and duties required them to stay until the last moment – and the small minority of warp-intolerant humans in the system. A mere five percent, in this young colony. Most of them were children, born in-system.
Normally, the fate of those unfortunates was to be abandoned to the tender mercies of the invaders. A recently-developed technology might change things. But at a price. There were no free miracles in the universe.
Melange, the drug issued to warp fighter pilots, had been shown to increase warp tolerance among its subjects. A medical officer had suggested trying it among those who normally couldn’t endure FTL travel, and Kerensky had backed him up. A ‘generic’ dosage – the need to tailor the drug mixture to individuals didn’t apply in this case – had an eighty percent chance of minimizing or eliminating warp-induced trauma on humans. That meant that of the twenty thousand civilians currently being prepared for the trip, a mere four thousand would be driven mad or killed outright by the evacuation. And that assumed there would be enough time to manufacture and distribute the drugs.
Seventh Fleet’s job was to buy the evacuees that time, by making sure no enemy arriving to Capricorn System lived long enough to reach the second planet and interfere with the process.
He looked at his line of battle once more. Neither the Hrauwah nor the Pan-Asian ships were likely to survive a Sun-Blotter barrage, so his plan was to hold them in reserve. If everything worked out as expected, they would play a crucial role in its final phase. If not, they should be able to flee the system and try to mount a defense at New Texas, the next stop in the warp chain. Kerensky had no idea whether those forces, together with anything else the US could scrape together, would stop the Gimps if Seventh Fleet failed. He wouldn’t be around to find out, however. If things went badly, he would order a retreat, of course, and try to save as many ships in his command as he could. But he and the Odin would be part of the rear guard that protected any such retreat.
No matter what happened here, he was done running.
Five
Redoubt-Five, 167 AFC
There was nobody home, supposedly, but the shuttles still came in hot.
A combat landing is nobody’s idea of fun. Even with inertial dampeners working overtime to ensure the shuttles’ human cargo didn’t get crushed into a thin paste, you still got compressed and stretched, felt your organs being crushed by the massive accel and deccel. Breathing became a chore, and the final pre-landing stop kicked you ass something fierce. Even when you were pretty sure nobody was trying to shoot down your ride, and you weren’t worried that at any moment the compartment could get filled with plasma or hypervelocity fragments, it sucked.
Of course, it could be worse. They could have done a warp drop. Those sucked worse than anything.
The shuttle hit the ground in something closer to a controlled crash than a proper landing, rocking everyone in their seats hard enough to make Russell grunt. The straps holding him down sprang loose a moment later and he was up and moving before the exit ramp slammed open and the squad leader’s shout hammered into everyone’s ears. “Go, go, go!”
They came out by the numbers, nobody tripping on their own feet or slowing down the rush towards the outside. There was a reason you practiced that evolution until you could do it in your sleep. Without all the practice, all it took was a moment’s bad luck and the orderly charge could turn into a traffic jam, the rushing Marines stuck on the ramp, begging for some Echo Tango to slaughter them all with a well-placed burst from a crew-served weapon. The shuttle projected a wide area force field that would stop some artillery and direct fire, but you didn’t want to bet your life on it.
Nobody was supposed to be home, and their landing spot was supposed to have been ‘prepared’ by burning everything on it from orbit. but ‘supposed’ had a nasty way of turning into ‘oops,’ and ‘oops’ into a ‘We regret to inform you’ e-mail to your next of kin. So the skipper had decided to play it like it was for real.
The reinforced squad came out of the shuttle running, following imp-highlighted icons towards preassigned spots. Russell caught a glimpse of gunmetal-gray skies and a pale sun overhead, but mostly looked where he was going. Sometimes the sensors got things wrong and if you blindly followed your imp’s directions you could run right off a cliff. Not this time, though. He had a clear path to a rock outcropping overlooking the near-sheer wall of the big hill they’d landed on. The rocky surface had been scoured clean with low-intensity plasma, hot enough to reduce anything organic to ashes without melting stone. Any dangerous critters on their landing zone were gone.
Everyone in his fireteam knew what he was doing; the three of them reached their firing position and set up their Widowmakers and portable force field without any problems. A couple of infantry squads had debouched from another pair of shuttles; they and the Weapons squad formed a perimeter while swarms of recon drones released during the shuttles’ final descent scanned every square millimeter of the g
round around them, looking for any surprises.
Nothing. They were on a flat-topped hill overlooking a long valley with a river running down its middle. The valley around them had been full of big trees or giant mushrooms, but they were all gone now, burned down from orbit. The drones’ visual feed showed clumps of carbonized biomatter that was all that remained of any large trees and animals. The smaller critters were scattered ashes, just like anything that had been hanging around their LZ. Always nice to have a starship do all the heavy lifting for a change.
“Clear,” Sergeant Fuller said over the squad channel. “But nobody relax just yet.”
Nobody did. First and Third Platoons had landed first; their job was to secure the LZ for the rest of Charlie Company, a full complement of Light Assault Vehicles, and a tank platoon. Once they were down, the rest of the shore party from the Humboldt would follow up: a Marine Engineer platoon, a bunch of bubbleheads, a handful of civvies and their one-and-only warp witch.
He wondered what his personal witch would make of this place as he kept his eyes on his assigned fire sector; so far, all he could see were the burnt-out remains of a forest covering the valley floor. There were no ETs in the area, but something was making weird warp emissions, so there could be all kinds of crap hiding in the planet. The briefings had been pretty sparse, and this time it probably was because the top brass had no clue what was down here, rather than their love for giving grunts the mushroom treatment: kept in the dark and fed a steady diet of horseshit.
Word was they were looking for more ships like the one Major Zhang had used to maul a dozen Lamprey warships during the Battle of Xanadu. That weird-ass ship had been made with the bones of some ancient race of super-aliens. The kind of shit you expected to see in a Warner-Disney flick, but for real. Wonders never ceased.
“Guess nobody’s home after all,” Gonzo muttered. Russell’s partner in crime sounded almost bored.
“Nothing on the drone sensors, at least,” Grampa said. His job, when he wasn’t lugging the field genny and extra power packs for the fireteam, was to act as a spotter, and he was scanning the area below, poring over the data stream from the drones overflying the area. “Plenty of animals, some of them pretty big, but no people.”
“Fine with me,” Russell said. “Even the Navy can handle beasties and plants. If the beasties ain’t too big. Or the plants ain’t too smart, that is.”
“Don’t go and jinx us, man,” Grampa said. He sounded a little nervous.
“This is your first exoplanet landing, right?”
“Other than a couple weekends on Mars during training, yeah,” the Earth-born old-timer said. “And Mars isn’t much to look at. Great parasailing, though.”
“Sol System don’t count.”
“In that case, nope. Earth and local space all the way. Never felt the urge to leave the home office and go where no man has gone before and all that good shit. Didn’t even like sci-fi, back in the day.”
‘Back in the day’ was before First Contact, when the first aliens to visit Earth had bombed the shit out of it. Grampa was old as dirt, not that you could tell unless he stopped dying his hair and let its natural white color show. He’d grown up believing aliens and starships were make-believe.
“So how’s it feel to be living in a sci-fi movie?” Gonzo asked him.
“You get used to it after a while. Lately, though, it’s beginning to feel like we’re all living in a horror show.”
“Shit,” Gonzo said. “Now you’re gonna jinx us.”
Old guy had a point, though. Digging through some dead planet for ships made of alien bones sounded just like the kind of story where monsters picked your group off one by one until only the chick with the nicest tits was left. Russell and his fellow Marines had fought zombies not too long ago, and that had been too much like a horror show for his liking, too.
“I don’t care what kind of movie this is,” Russell said, figuring he’d help lighten the mood. “If we’re in it, it’ll end the same way.”
“How’s that?”
“The Devil Dogs killed ‘em all. The End.”
Everyone laughed, even though they knew Russell was full of shit. But even fake gung-ho was better than biting your fingernails and letting the bad shit get to you. There were plenty of reasons to worry. The company was on its own, with nothing but a converted battlecruiser for overhead support. On top of that, they were a hell of a long way from any reinforcements or supply. It’d taken three warp jumps from Xanadu System to get to this mudball. The trip to get there had lasted two months of real time and thirty-one hours of warp transit, and nobody would come looking for them, not with the biggest war in American history going on.
For all they knew, the war was already lost and good ole planet Earth was as empty as this fucking mudball.
“Kill bodies,” Gonzo added.
“Oorah.” Grampa almost sounded like he meant it.
Sometimes gung-ho was all you had.
* * *
Six Kraxan War Galleons made a slow descent towards the cheering crowd.
Each vessel had been grown, not built. Great sea creatures had been bred to reach impossible sizes, gene-engineered to withstand the rigors of outer space, and finally exposed to the Starless Path to further mutate them. Their outer shells were suffused with heavy metals and could turn a heavy plasma bolt without damage; their insides had plenty of cavities in which to store engines, power plants and other systems, as well as humid and warm compartments for the crews operating them. Her human mind, trying to make sense of the obscene masses coming closer, saw them as something like demonic snails, five hundred meters long and nearly as wide, festooned with energy weapons and trailing long tentacles ending in gripping claws.
The Kraxans on the ground were even more grotesque than in previous visions. These were the culmination of millennia of insanity made flesh. By this point, the Marauders had learned how to drag their victims into the Starless Realm and alter them physically as well as mentally. Their latest – and last – fashion had consisted of wearing the still-living bodies of their victims, much like normal sophonts wore clothes. Each Kraxan citizen-soldier was an amalgam of two, three or as many as five bodies, with useful limbs and organs from other species grafted on for biological advantages or simply for decoration. They watched the treasure-laden living hulls through multiple sets of eyes, each absorbing different light spectra; the resulting composite view would have been enough to induce madness on any being not already insane. She was forced to listen to the sound of thousands of monsters laughing, each using two or more mouths apiece.
The first Galleon reached the paved surface of the great plaza. A sphincter-door opened, and its precious cargo poured out.
Hundreds of alien prisoners, of a species she hadn’t seen before were thrown onto the ground, expelled by compressed air like so many spitballs. About half of them had died in transit, but the rest were alive and making noises she knew were cries of horror and agony; their eight limbs flailed weakly as they landed.
The awaiting crowd surged over their prey, eager to feast.
There were no words in most languages for what happened next.
Lisbeth sat up with a start and tried not to scream. Atu’s calming presence in her head kept her from going into all-out hysterics, but it was close.
“Are you all right?”
The man sitting next to her in the shuttle was giving her the Look. The one that meant he wasn’t sure if she was going to start howling or ripping people’s faces off. She’d gotten all-too-familiar with the Look.
Why the hell did they put me with the civilians?
Lisbeth knew why: she was too valuable to risk on the front lines, so they’d kept her aboard the Humboldt until the landing zone had been secured, and then sent her down with the other VIPs, which included the six civvies they’d brought along. She’d much rather have been surrounded by her fellow Marines. They might not know exactly why she was freaking out, but they at least understood about peopl
e freaking out for no apparent reason.
“Sorry,” she said. She’d been saying that a lot. “But yes, I’m okay.”
“If you say so,” Professor Bell replied, relaxing minutely in his seat. “I understand you are still suffering from temporal dislocation episodes.”
“Pretty much. Jumping back and forth. Sometimes way back. It can be a little confusing.”
“Of course,” the older man said, trying to sound sympathetic. He was too tense and nervous to pull it off, even if Lisbeth hadn’t picked up on his surface emotions. She didn’t do much mind-reading, because for one it wasn’t so much mind-reading as mind-blending, which was almost as bad as the temporal dislocation stuff. It was too easy to get sucked into other people’s way of looking at things.
“I’ll be fine,” she said, putting a little Marine gung-ho attitude in her voice, and that seemed to reassure the civvie a little more.
“Of course,” he repeated. “It’s a pity that your ability to look into the distant past is restricted to a rather unsavory species.”
“You can say that again.”
Professor Gustav Bell was a galactic archeologist, which made him a member of a small and largely ignored group among Earth’s scholars. There was just too much galactic history to study, so most people didn’t bother. Nobody could get a handle on it, nor any database or computer for that matter. The oldest Woogle equivalent they’d found, in the Habitat for Infinite Diversity the US had recently seized, only covered some three hundred thousand years, and the stuff older than a hundred millennia was woefully incomplete. Even so, there was enough information in that database to keep every historian in human space busy for the rest of their multi-century lives.
Bell was a rarity, a rocks-and-ruins kind of guy who wanted to go to strange planets and poke at the bones of dead civilizations. There wasn’t much call for that kind of stuff in the US, and even less funding available for it. The only reason he and the other weirdos had gotten this all-expense trip courtesy of Uncle Sam was that they knew the proper procedures to find and unearth ancient remnants from past ages. His specialty was in Starfarer ruins. That sort of archeology had a few practical applications: when a civilization Transcended or was destroyed, it occasionally left behind bits of high technology that might be better than the current state of the art. Which meant the archeologist was also versed in assorted types of engineering, materials science and advanced technology. Those skills would come in handy.
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