Bell was okay. She could tell that much without delving too deeply into his thoughts. His boss, on the other hand, wasn’t. Lisbeth glanced at the big guy with the crazy hair, currently filling two front row seats by his lonesome. Munson, his name was, the nerd in chief. She’d met him at the preliminary briefing in Starbase Malta, and they hadn’t liked each other from the get-go. He had a set of t-wave implants, making him the only one other than Heather McClintock. He’d caught a few glimpses of her psyche and all its major malfunctions, and that was bad enough. Even worse, he had blocked her attempts to see what was going on under all the crazy hair.
The second he does something to endanger the mission, I’m going to shoot him. She’d seen too many flicks where the crazy scientist ruined everything, and she was in no mood to go through one of those in real life.
Lisbeth realized she’d been quiet too long and Professor Bell was giving her another Look, although a slightly kinder version.
On the other hand, I’m playing the role of crazy non-scientist. Maybe someone will have to shoot me.
“I have seen a few things about this planet,” she admitted. She didn’t go into any details, though: the poor guy might not take it well. “I might be able to pick up more once we’re down on the ground. Between that and your team, maybe we can find what we’re looking for.”
“Those Corpse-Ships of yours,” Bell said. His face briefly twisted with something that might be revulsion or fear. “I’ve seen the footage from the Battle of Malta. It was…” He trailed off.
“Yeah,” she said. “It was something else. And the Kraxans weren’t nice people, even by Starfarer standards.”
“Some standards. Most civilizations seem to have less ethics than the Roman Empire or the German Nazis, to use human yardsticks. Ruthless exploitation and casual genocide.”
“Pretty much.”
She found himself liking the guy. A lot of academics thought humans were the worst at everything, despite all the evidence to the contrary. They didn’t go around saying those things out loud, of course, since tenure had gone the way of the dodo and lifetime pension plans, and people got fired for spouting off that crap. But they thought it, and aired their opinions out in subtler ways. Professor Bell, on the other hand, actually meant what he was saying. Lisbeth was a living lie detector even when she didn’t mean to. That had made her like people even less.
“Well, the Kraxans were worse. A death and torture cult. They didn’t just kill for profit or convenience. It was their main form of entertainment, plus a source of power.”
“There are some parallels in Earth’s cultures. The Aztecs, for one. The Romans delighted in murder and torture as spectator sports, too.”
“Sure. And the Kraxans made them all look like the Boy Scouts. Trust me.”
She paused, fighting off another flashback before it overwhelmed her. The Marauders’ record storage systems were more like living memories, or even outright time travel. You didn’t so much read or view their history as you experienced it, and she’d experienced enough to drive her nuts even without all the other crap that had rained down on her during the worst diplomatic mission ever.
“I’m sorry if I’m dredging up bad memories,” Bell said. He was a pasty, soft-faced guy. His big brown eyes would have been more fitting for a critter at a petting zoo. He looked unsure of himself, as if trying to console someone was beyond his core programming. The feelings she sensed from him were mixed: apprehension fighting with curiosity and sympathy.
“If there’s any species in the universe that needed killing, these bastards were it. Worse than the Snakes or the Lampreys.”
The Kraxans hadn’t just committed atrocities, they had somehow tainted warp space itself for eons to come. The Starless Path had never been a very nice place, but the Marauders had turned it into a constant horror show. And she was leading the way in an expedition meant to poke around their remains, trying to uncover their secrets. She wasn’t crazy enough to think it was a good idea.
On the other hand, her idea had gotten her out of Venus, and it might save humanity in particular and the galaxy in general. So maybe it wasn’t so bad after all. Assuming it all worked as she’d planned.
“Well, looks like we’re here,” Bell said.
The shuttle shuddered as it landed. It didn’t plummet like the ones bearing the Marines charged with prepping the LZ, but it hadn’t done a slow majestic descent, either. It was never a good idea to loiter in an unknown airspace.
“This mesa doesn’t look natural.”
“You’re right,” she said. “The locals cut off the top of a hill and flattened it. They also treated the rock floor with something that still inhibits plant grown, thousands of years later. That’s why clearing the brush off it was so easy.”
The flat hill was also big enough to house all three hundred or so visitors, and high enough off the ground that any dangerous critters in the area would find it difficult to come visit them. At least the smaller ones. The sensors had picked up a few that might be able to scale the forty-meter tall sheer walls of the mesa. But all the big beasties nearby had been burned out, and if any more wandered into the area, a shuttle or a grav tank would take care of them.
They were all in danger, though. She’d known that back in Venus, but it hadn’t deterred her from coming here, or bringing all these people along with her, including some friends. They had to do this, risks or not.
“Repulsive culture or not, I’m dying to see what a quarter-million-year-old Starfarer city looks like,” the professor said.
I hope it doesn’t come to that, she thought.
“Hope in one hand and shit on the other, Christopher Robin,” Atu whispered in her ear. “And see which hand fills up first.”
* * *
Fromm went over the camp’s dispositions one more time, trying to find a reason for the unease he felt.
“Everything looks good,” he forced himself to say.
Lieutenant Hansen and First Sergeant Goldberg nodded, but neither of them looked very reassured. They were as worried as he was, and like him they couldn’t figure out why.
Camp Discovery was as secure as they could make it. In addition to his reinforced company, Fromm had a platoon of Marine Engineers, a full Navy medical section, and a good hundred Navy Spacers to do fetch-and-carry, and he’d put everyone to work. Self-building tents, enough to house everyone, were arrayed in neat rows on the mesa they had selected as their base of operations. The position was protected with a battalion-level set of force fields, more than enough to withstand several hours’ bombardment from a regiment of artillery or even an orbiting battlecruiser. A tank platoon gave him plenty of firepower of his own; about the only thing he was lacking was long-range artillery. In terms of actual fighting power, this was the strongest force he’d ever commanded, and with no major threats to face it.
The planet’s sophonts might have been legendary monsters, but they were long gone; no natives had been found anywhere on Redoubt-Five. The animals and some plants were nasty, but the few critters that had approached their position after the initial clearing operation had been dealt with easily enough. The lightest weapon in his company’s TOE, the 3mm pistols issued to rear echelon personnel or officers in dress uniform, would probably deal with all but the largest predators they’d seen so far. The next lightest, the trusty Infantry Weapon Mark 3, would kill anything else.
The atmosphere wasn’t perfectly suited to humans and there was some risk of contaminants and disease, but the Marines’ suits and armor provided full protection against bacteriological or chemical threats. The rest of the personnel in the shore party were wearing hazardous-conditions suits and personal force fields. Everybody was safe from anything the initial survey had found.
From the looks of it, sending a company-plus with the expedition had been overkill. A couple dozen master-at-arms Navy ratings would have been enough. Fromm didn’t mind, though. Very few military operations failed because they were assigned more forces than nec
essary, especially since it was often impossible to know just how many troops were needed beforehand.
The platoon of Marine Engineers would do most of the grunt work, assisted by the Humboldt’s crewmembers, while his shooters mostly stood around and tried to look busy. All things considered, this was the closest thing to a vacation Charlie Company had enjoyed since its deployment to Parthenon, almost three years back. His main concern should be finding ways to keep his Marines from trying to fight boredom by pulling off one idiotic stunt after another.
And yet, his instincts were telling him the expedition had walked into a trap, and he’d learned never to ignore them.
“We’ll have a full watch rotation,” he said. “And we’ll patrol aggressively around the perimeter. The Hellcats will have one squad out at any given time. I also want observation posts all around the valley.” He highlighted hills overlooking all possible avenues of approach. It was going to take most of his infantry to man those OPs, but he didn’t want any surprises.
“If anything looks at all dangerous, kill it.”
Both his XO and the company sergeant looked relieved to hear his orders. It might seem like overkill, but the setup felt right to them.
“The tank platoon and the combat shuttles will maintain continuous air coverage, working in shifts. We’ll hold the LAVs on the camp as a mobile reserve. I want at least two shuttles or tanks overhead at any time.”
Both the tanks and the Light Assault Vehicles that served as troop carriers had anti-gravity engines that allowed them to fly, although neither vehicle did so as quickly or easily as combat shuttles. They normally operated closely to the ground, since most likely enemies wielded weapons that could engage them anywhere over the horizon. Doing so in this case should be safe enough: if a high-tech force could conceal its presence from a survey ship’s deep scans, they were all screwed anyway.
“Yes, sir.”
“That leaves the warp signatures scattered around the planet. They seem to be the work of automated systems left behind by the locals. So far they don’t appear to pose a threat.”
Seem. Appear. Slippery words that he didn’t like one bit.
“Everybody in the expedition is warp-rated, obviously, and according to the Humboldt’s science officer, openings of the sizes they’ve detected don’t pose a physical threat.” Warp apertures didn’t form inside living beings; they were either big enough to swallow them whole or they didn’t affect them otherwise. “They might damage equipment, however, or cause minor explosions. And there might be psychological effects. Hallucinations and the like.”
“Like a bad warp jump,” Goldberg said.
“Correct. Nothing we haven’t been through before.”
“We can handle that, sir.”
“Very well. Dismissed.”
He might as well get some sleep. Alone, worse luck. Fromm couldn’t abuse his rank by enjoying a personal vacation with Heather.
The feeling of imminent danger wouldn’t go away, though, and he spent a good while tossing and turning in his cot.
* * *
The whispering was stronger now that they were on the planet’s surface, and Heather McClintock didn’t like it one bit.
She glanced at Lizbeth Zhang.
“Yeah, I feel it too.”
They were using regular imps, partially because t-waves might trigger something in the ruins, but also because Heather was worried about linking her mind with Lisbeth’s. The Marine pilot had been having flashbacks with increasing frequency, and the one time it’d happened when they were using telepathy had been… unsettling.
Unsettling, as in I may stop having nightmares about the Kraxans a few years after my death.
The Marauders made the Lampreys or even the Tah-Leen look harmless by comparison. Heather was in no rush to have them in their head. Studying the aliens’ ruins and artifacts with clinical detachment was a far better option. She set aside the ghostly mental sounds and looked around the dig site.
The combined efforts of Navy and Marine engineers had produced results very quickly. By mid-morning, they’d dug a large hole on top of the largest buried structure the orbital survey had discovered. The building in question was a cylinder a hundred meters wide and three hundred and fifty meters tall, still standing and completely buried by volcanic ash. About as big as the typical skyscrapers you could find in any major Starfarer city, except none of them would have survived intact for hundreds of millennia. Nothing should have.
A massive caldera five hundred kilometers to the west had produced the ash deluge that buried the city beneath their feet. A meteorite had struck there and reached deep into the planet’s mantle to trigger a volcanic eruption that must have wiped out most life on the planet, not to mention the local civilization. The meteorite had been a piece of Redoubt-Six, the world that had been reduced to scattered debris circling the system’s star.
Destroying a planet wasn’t difficult to do with Starfarer technology – all it took was finding a suitable asteroid and accelerating it into a collision course – but it was forbidden by the Elder Races, the legendary group of species whose technology or wisdom had turned them into something akin to mythological gods. Which meant that whoever had shattered Redoubt-Six had been punished for it – or that this was the work of the Elders themselves. She wasn’t sure which possibility was worse. Either someone had hated the Marauders enough to accept their own extinction as long as they could finish them off, or what passed for gods in the galaxy had condemned the last Kraxans to death. The latter possibility had been mentioned in some of the legends she’d studied in the vast databases of Xanadu.
Heather would be the first to admit there hadn’t been much to study. The Marauders’ decline and fall had happened ages before the Tah-Leen who’d compiled those records had risen to Starfarer status. All they had were third- or fourth-hand accounts, fragmentary at best and pure fantasy at worst. In them, the Kraxans had been described as demonic beings with miraculous powers. The Kraxans had been able to perform multiple warp jumps in the space of seconds – which human fighter pilots could already manage – and kill their victims with their thoughts, which sounded like mumbo-jumbo until you discovered weapons like the Mind-Killer Lisbeth had used at Xanadu. Doctor Munson’s claim that the Marauders’ species name formed the root for several words for ‘evil’ had some evidence backing it up. A few Starfarer languages had lasted longer than the civilizations that first spoke them, and among them certain sounds and glyphs appeared to be related to the word ‘Kranx,’ at least if one was an expert linguist. In any case, if half of the myths about them were true, she couldn’t imagine how the Marauders had been defeated except by what passed for divine intervention in the known galaxy.
And here we are, trying to follow in their footsteps. Doesn’t sound like a recipe for a happy ending.
Once the tip of the cylinder – one might call it a tower – had been uncovered, the archeological team had wasted no time setting up a variety of devices to examine it. The Marine and Navy contingents were conducting their own scans, using every sensor system available. The Humboldt was on a stable orbit around Redoubt-Five, invisible in the local daylight and nothing but a bright dot in the sky at night; the ship began lashing the building with a constant stream of graviton scanning signals. They’d been at it for hours, and all they’d discovered was the basic outline of the tower; no sensory device had penetrated its outer walls so far, which was ominous enough. Throw in the whispered gibberish only Heather, Munson and Lisbeth could hear, and the whole thing began to feel like a trip to a haunted house.
The ‘voices’ were probably nothing but some sort of echo from dormant data storage systems. The Kraxan Corpse-Ship they’d encountered in Xanadu had used t-wave recording devices, still in working order after an impossible length of time. She wouldn’t be surprised to find similar systems on this planet. The microscopic warp events were most likely another manifestation of that technology, the equivalent of long-forgotten stone carvings.
; Lisbeth agreed only in part. Her senses were more developed than Heather’s, and she thought at least some of the strange echoes they were picking up came from active, living minds. They would find out soon enough.
“We’ve reached the structure.”
“Stop everything!” Doctor Munson all but roared as he rushed towards the center of the pit, moving surprisingly fast for someone of his heft. Lisbeth and Heather were a few steps behind him.
A dark patch of polished material stood out amidst the dirt, looking shockingly untarnished by age. Even vivoconcrete would deteriorate with time, especially when buried underground: most nanite-based structures relied on solar energy to keep them running, with a power plant for backup. The Kraxans had used something else to keep the building in one piece.
Munson wielded a static dust remover with exaggerated care, delicately brushing off the last of the soil cover as if expecting the ancient surface to corrode away at any moment. Heather could have reminded the man that they would soon be blasting their way through the roof, but she decided to let him have a few seconds to play archeologist. He cleared a section about three meters wide. Just like the initial patch the engineers had unearthed, it was jet black and polished to a bright sheen; the volcanic ash, even after millennia of being compressed against its surface, hadn’t marked it in any way.
Heather picked up a flash of recognition from Lisbeth: the Kraxans’ Corpse-Ship had also been as dark as obsidian.
Most species with visual senses considered black to be a color to be feared, representing lightless places that could conceal danger. Like most truisms, it wasn’t universal, but wearing black was likely to make a bad first impression. Even without knowing the Marauders’ history, discovering a pillar of solid darkness the size of a skyscraper was a good indication they weren’t nice people.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 108