In Dread Silence (Warp Marine Corps Book 4)

by C. J. Carella

  * * *

  Not letting them hear her growl was becoming rather difficult.

  The King-Admiral tried not to snarl at the liquid-filled transparent pillar and the holographic display within. The holotank readings illustrated the information that she’d already received via her cybernetic implants and confirmed her worst fears.

  “Warp emergence detected! Three light-seconds away. Five hundred vessels of all types.”

  “Battle stations,” Grace ordered, echoing the commands she received from the leader of the Joint Star Fleet of which her flotilla was but a minor element.

  The enemy force couldn’t have arrived directly from its original point of departure on Vendack System. A twelve-hour warp transit would leave their crews incapacitated for as much as three hours, plenty of time for defenders to tear their vessels apart. To avoid detection and recover from transit, the enemy force must have arrived no less than fifteen light-hours away from the terminus of the ley line connecting the two systems.

  A human scientist, one of the first to grasp the concepts inherent to faster-than-light travel, had likened the process to swimming under a sheet of ice. One entered through a hole in the ice, and emerged from another hole. It was theoretically possible to exit somewhere other than the ‘hole’ in question, but it required massive energy expenditures to claw one’s way through the ‘ice,’ which was a metaphor for regular spacetime. The further one was from a hole, the harder it was. That had been a daring move, to arrive so far away from the system’s single white dwarf star and the handful of inner planets whose gravity fields’ interactions created the network of ley lines that allowed relatively safe access in and out of warp space.

  One percent of the ships that made the high-risk jump would never return from the bizarre realm where distance and time were meaningless, their crews doomed to death or some worse fate. The enemy was willing to suffer significant casualties for the privilege of denying the defenders the advance warning a more sensible approach would have provided.

  Five hundred vessels. Their warp jump into the periphery of Drakul System must have cost them at least five or six ships. That sort of determination was rare in the known galaxy.

  Grace glanced at the icons of the Joint Star Fleet while sensors identified and cataloged the emerging enemy armada. Following Wyrashat tradition, friendly forces were marked in dark green, the enemy in a deep purple. There were a few nervous whines among the bridge crew as the purple icons grew in number and size and the correlation of forces became clear.

  The Joint Star Fleet was centered around the Wyrashat Upper Quadrant Defensive Wing: ninety-three vessels strong, including half a dozen superdreadnoughts, eight dreadnoughts, nine battleships and twenty battlecruisers, with the rest of the formation composed of light cruisers, destroyers and a smattering of frigates. The Wing had been reinforced by the Human Expeditionary Force: six battleships, twenty-four cruisers of assorted tonnage, six carrier vessels and fifty lighter ships, evenly divided between destroyers and frigates. Grace’s Volunteer Flotilla was a semi-independent adjunct to the HEF: her single dreadnought, thirteen battlecruisers and twenty-eight light vessels were not particularly modern or well-outfitted. Some had considered her post as its commander to be an insult of sorts; she disagreed rather strongly, although she still wished the Hrauwah Kingdom had seen fit to be more generous with its assistance.

  The two-hundred-plus vessels were arrayed around the sixth planet of the system, a rocky giant surrounded by five warp entrances that led deep into Wyrashat space. A dozen orbital facilities circled the planet, including four massive fortresses, each bristling with three times the firepower of a superdreadnought. On its surface dwelled some fifty million colonists; due to Drakul-Six’s inhospitable atmosphere, they were mostly confined to a handful of underground cities. Each city was protected by a formidable Planetary Defense Base capable of engaging targets up to two light seconds away with its battery of super-heavy graviton cannon and well-stocked missile launchers.

  The system was named after a legendary Wyrm warrior-king; humans had replaced the long and unpronounceable name with one that meant ‘Dragon’ in one of their languages as well as being the title of an ancient warlord in their own history. By any other name, Drakul lived up to its reputation as a deadly bulwark against anyone daring to invade the Wyrashat Empire.

  Every door has a key, and it is shaped like an axe. The old Hrauwah refrain flashed through Grace’s mind as the Galactic Imperium’s formation came into focus.

  Four hundred and ninety ships. Numbers alone meant little, of course. Tonnage and energy signatures were the only meaningful metrics to assess the threat each vessel represented. Grace had to fight an atavistic urge to whimper as the raw data was converted into tangible designations.

  Forty-nine superdreadnoughts. Eighty dreadnoughts. A hundred and seventeen battleships.

  The icons’ sizes were proportional to each ship’s estimated class and firepower. Capital vessels looked massive in the display. Grace couldn’t credit what her eyes were seeing; for several seconds, she believed there had been an error, some glitch in the fleet’s sensors. The oversized icons remained on the holotank, however. Each superdreadnought was three times the size of the largest ship in the Joint Star Fleet.

  The rest of the Imperium force appeared to be comprised of light cruisers or oversized destroyers, tightly arrayed around the larger ships. Their contribution to the force’s broadside weight would be negligible, not that it mattered. Drakul’s defenders would be woefully outgunned by each of the three categories of capital ships facing them. With all sets of ships combined, the situation was beyond hopeless.

  The King-Admiral cast a hopeful glance at the icons of the Human Expeditionary Force. Earthlings were notorious for winning spectacular victories against seemingly impossible odds. Humans, led by the American tribe, had fought numerous wars against several larger and more prosperous polities and won most of them. If anyone could deliver a miracle, it would be them.

  She glanced at a visual display focused on several HEF vessels. Their outlines were obscured by glowing multi-hued clouds. Those warp shields rendered human ships invulnerable to most direct-fire weapons, at least until ranges closed enough that the enemy could probe for the gaps between them. No other species in the known galaxy could endure the constant exposure to desecrated spacetime those shields represented.

  Warp Witches.

  The unfair thought lingered in her mind for a moment. Perhaps that’s what humans were. The Galactic Imperium certainly believed so. That belief had been strong enough to forge an alliance with humanity’s enemies. Witches or not, the American ships would determine whether Drakul could hold against the impossible armada bearing down on them.

  Grace-Under-Pressure dutifully passed on the orders from the leader of the Joint Star Fleet. Fleetlord Klem Angarar was four hundred years old and had fought the Imperium and its clients in no less than five conflicts of varying intensity during his multi-century career. His long-necked, pseudo-reptilian image filled several screens as he addressed the JSF.

  “The so-called Galactic Imperium has arrived. A dozen times in our history, it has tried to force its way past the gates of Drakul. A dozen times, it was forced back, earning nothing, their crippled hulls filled with hisses of grief for their dead and maimed. Today, our enemy will be taught for the thirteenth time that Drakul is forever closed to invaders. Empire, Republic and Kingdom: we all fight together against a common foe. Our joint efforts will be successful. Carry on.”

  Grace’s Hrauwah’s culture would have found such plain words downright offensive, but the Wyrashat prided themselves in their terse and simple speech, saving their creative energies for visual arts and crafts. Grace sighed and uttered a commonly-used phrase out loud, to help mollify any ruffled fur among her crews.

  “Diversity is the universe’s way to test our patience.”

  Every sophont in the galaxy had evolved from small tribal groups, where everyone looked and behaved
alike and ‘stranger’ was synonymous with ‘enemy’ or ‘dangerous.’ It took considerable energy to deal with different cultures, let alone species, and most people didn’t bother except when circumstances forced them to do so. Most polities’ citizens spent their lives without ever meeting an alien in person. The Galactic Imperium had unified dozens of species into their fold, but only through a determined effort to stamp out all native cultures and replace them wholly with its own.

  As part of the small minority that could endure faster-than-light travel, Grace had grown to appreciate different ways of doing things, however. Having nothing better to do while her well-trained crewmembers performed their duties, she indulged herself for a few moments and watched the visual displays of the Joint Star Fleet’s varied vessels.

  Wyrashat designs followed biological motifs: their warships resembled great beasts covered with glittering emerald or azure scales, their warp nacelles and weapon ports skillfully concealed beneath spreading wings and sharp talons; each ship was a sculpture as much as a tool of battle. American vessels, by contrast, were functional almost to a fault: their lines were meant to magnify internal space, which meant spherical chambers connected with a latticework of struts and tunnels. The Kingdom’s aesthetics lay somewhere between the two extremes, with functionality being the primary but not sole concern. Grace liked to think that her dreadnought’s elegant lines, somewhat similar to pre-Contact humans’ fictional depictions of what rocket ships would be like, were a sensible compromise between style and substance.

  The Wyrashat could afford their extravagance, being one of the wealthiest polities in the known galaxy. Those beautiful sculptures hid extremely efficient shields and weaponry, with a good twenty percent more firepower and resiliency than Hrauwah’s ship-type equivalents, and thirty percent greater than the Americans, at least when you removed warp shields from the equation, something most Starfarers wished they could do in reality. Humans, on the other hand, were poor up-and-comers, with barely enough industrial capacity to meet their defense needs, and able to survive only because of their extraordinary ability to survive exposure to warp space.

  One’s status was never fixed in time, of course. Like a segment of a wheel, what was on top today could well be on the bottom tomorrow. This battle would likely determine which way the wheel would turn.

  Grace watched the Galactic Imperium’s ships as they moved into range. Like the Wyrashat, they were works of art, their facades the color of burnished bronze and seemingly made of riveted plates covered with intricate bass-reliefs depicting scenes related to each ship’s name and history. Several of the advancing superdreadnoughts and battleships had fairly plain decorations, which meant they were new vessels with no great deeds attached to their names. Unsurprising, given their number. New ships meant green crews, who even if experienced elsewhere had likely not spent much time learning the ways of their current spacecraft. That might be turned to the Joint Star Fleet’s advantage.

  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 o
n 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 carat 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.