Even the proud Wyrashat winged superdreadnoughts came apart under the relentless bombardment. One after another, they were reduced to drifting masses of metal or glowing clouds of incandescent gases. Even the oversized orbital fortresses around Drakul-Six were falling silent as their weapon hardpoints were immolated one by one. They were all fighting on heroically, but she feared this was nothing but a gallant last stand.
The enemy was suffering a terrible toll as well. The American fighter craft were as deadly as Grace had been led to believe, and more. Their losses had actually decreased as the battle went on, and they had accounted for over sixty capital ships. The problem was that their carriers were being taken out: half of them were already out of the fight. The orphaned fighters were being tended to by the survivors, but the situation couldn’t last long.
Who will break first?
The Imperium’s casualties were worse than anyone would have expected, and its leaders might decide that it would be too costly to continue the offensive. Drakul-Six’s planetary defense bases remained relatively unscathed and their steady fire would become more effective at close range. What good would be achieved if the winners were too weak to continue their offensive?
We might still turn the tide.
The Defender’s shuddering as more missiles struck it seemed to give the lie to her thoughts.
* * *
Flight A was down to four pilots now. After a couple of close calls with the Foos, Wild Thing had stopped ghosting. Fernando could sympathize with him; the Warplings were getting closer with every sortie. The one chasing him kept using his mother’s voice, and each time it got harder to resist it. There’d been tears in his eyes when he’d made it back to the Walsh. But sad and scared still beat dead, as far as he was concerned. He didn’t know what his buddy had seen or heard, though. Maybe he’d decided it wasn’t worth it.
Whatever his reasons, Wild Thing bought it the first time he fully emerged from null-space. A near miss from a plasma cannon set his cockpit on fire; he lived long enough for the flames to get him. Not a good way to go, and Fernando felt the whole thing happen, almost as if he was going through it.
That was a big problem with what the science remfies were calling tachyon-wave communications. Being linked to people as they died was almost as bad as dying yourself. Just as bad was the knowledge those dead buddies would eventually show up in his dreams, or even while wide awake. Warp ‘hallucinations’ didn’t bother Fernando while in transit, but hit him in the real world instead. Then again, if things kept going this way, he wouldn’t have to worry about having nightmares, because his own shade would be out there haunting someone else.
Emergence.
He and two others made the return trip. Dicky didn’t. A Foo had gotten him, and Fernando hadn’t even noticed. He’d been too busy trying to outrun his own warp demon. And that was only half the bad news waiting for him.
The Walsh was burning.
While Flight A had been carrying out the sortie, something or other had bent their ride. A big explosion burst out of the aft section of the carrier. The Walsh was a goner. Fernando could see escape pods leaving the dying ship like so many fleeing rats. Called “mom pods’ – as in, ‘See, Mom? If anything goes wrong we’ll get to safety in them pods’ – the little flying coffins would most likely only delay the inevitable, because chances were no US or allied ship was going to be around to rescue them by the time the battle was over..
A stray graviton burst went by a little too close for comfort, less than a hundred meters away. Hanging out in space was no place to be in a small crate.
Orders came in. They were to keep fighting until they were out of power and then match up with the USS Cunningham, which had lost most of its birds and thus had plenty of spare room. Eel ran a status check on the survivors of the flight. They all had two shots left and enough juice to do the requisite number of jumps. One final sortie and they could go to the Cunningham for resupply. Hopefully it’d still be there when they were done.
Transition.
The Foos were all but nipping at their heels. Fernando felt ghostly fingers brushing the back of his hair, and he almost lost it. Only reciting Psalm Twenty-Three got him through to the other side. He and his buddies fired while ghosted, and they put a big hole in one of the superdreadnoughts. Not a kill, though; three fighters firing two shots apiece just didn’t have enough firepower for the job. Their guns ran dry, and they returned to null-space.
Where the Foos were waiting.
They took Eel first. Fernando heard the squadron leader howl in unbearable agony for what felt like forever. And then it was Fernando’s turn. The Foos were right on top of him, his mother leading the chase, and this time she was touching him, grabbing him, dead fingers tightening around the back of his neck.
He panicked. There was only one way to escape, and the fact that it was impossible didn’t matter. Fernando focused everything he had on one thing: emerging from warp, even though he wasn’t at the designated exit point. It shouldn’t have worked – a panel full of FTL travel experts could have spent hours listing all the reasons why it shouldn’t – and yet his fighter tore a hole through reality fifty thousand kilometers off-course. Right into the path of a Gimp battleship.
He didn’t emerge alone.
In the brief instant before the War Eagle crashed into the enemy vessel, the Imperium crewmembers had their minds destroyed and overwritten with something from beyond reality. Only the surviving warp fighter pilots and some of the more sensitive navigators on both fleets noticed something was amiss. The battleship was heavily damaged, and the fighter’s sudden arrival turned out to be the last straw; a power plant collapsed and caused a chain reaction that engulfed the Imperium vessel. The invaders’ foothold in reality was destroyed when their hosts were obliterated, leaving behind only a hint of horrors to come.
Blissfully unaware of their close brush with something worse than death, the rest of the battling forces carried on with their business.
* * *
Fleetmaster Klem was a professional to the bitter end.
“You have my orders, King-Admiral,” he told Grace on a personal vid-call. The Wyrashat’s head was deeply tucked between his shoulders, his species’ instinctive posture of defense. Smoke rose up behind him as crewmembers fought a fire somewhere in the command center. For all that, his demeanor remained calm; Grace knew enough about Wyrm body language to tell that Klem was not letting his people hear him growl. She could admire that.
“We understand, Fleetmaster,” she said. The beleaguered Wyrashat commander could have relayed his orders through the highest-ranking American officer left in the HEF, since her flotilla was technically attached to it. Choosing to speak to her personally was a gesture of respect she could appreciate.
“As I told Captain Clements, I am releasing all auxiliary forces from our previous agreements,” Klem added. “The Galactic Imperium has agreed to a cease fire in preparation for a formal surrender.”
The translation software could not convey the shame the Wyrashat must be feeling. Klem would be forever remembered as the officer who had lost Drakul System to an invading force. Grace tilted her head in a Hrauwah gesture of deferential sympathy.
“By releasing your forces during the cease-fire, you will be allowed to depart in peace. Otherwise the Imperium would have seized your ships and interned your crews. The Americans would have fared a rather worse fate, of course. I cannot honorably turn them over to the enemy.”
“You have our utmost gratitude, Fleetmaster,” she said. Only a scant dozen American vessels survived; they had lost all their carriers and fighters, at which point the battle had been officially lost. Klem could have surrendered honorably then; his superiors would probably wish he had done so before incurring further losses. But the Wyrashat commander had only stopped fighting when the Imperium agreed to let the surviving Americans and Hrauwah leave.
“You fought very well, King-Admiral. I hope you will perform great deeds in the futur
e. Farewell.” The visual feed disappeared.
Grace-Under-Pressure followed her new orders. Her remaining seven ships prepared for warp transit in coordination with the human survivors after hastily rescuing survivors and scuttling any vessel unable to make warp transit. The Imperium host did not interfere, perhaps gratefully. Their losses had been much lower only as a percentage of their initial line of battle: some seventy-five enemy capital ships had been destroyed or heavily damaged, along with over a hundred light vessels. Many of them would be repaired and returned to action, however, and even if they weren’t, the remaining behemoths were more than enough to defeat any Wyrashat formation in existence. The Imperium had allowed the cease-fire only to save its strength for its main goal: the extinction of humankind. Allowing the ragged remnants of the HEF to escape would do little to change the balance of power, especially now that they had shown they could defeat the vaunted American warp fighters.
This wasn’t the first time Grace had been forced to flee a system in the face of an enemy. Another shameful retreat had led her to Sol System and the subsequent destruction of over half its population. This time, the civilians in Drakul System would be spared. The battle had been won before any damage was inflicted on Drakul-Six’s surface, although its orbital defenses were in shambles.
“The human commander has hailed us, Your Highness.”
“Send the call to my personal link.”
Captain Alois Clemens’ face appeared in front of her; the visual communique was projected into her retinas by her implants. The man’s expression was one of shock and near-despair, as could be expected from a battlecruiser captain who found himself in overall command by virtue of being the highest-ranked survivor. The Imperium had concentrated their fire on the American capital ships towards the end, destroying all of them, and slaughtering their thirty-five thousand crewmembers, including Admiral Del Toro, who had commanded the HEF until a deluge of missiles had ended him and everyone aboard the battleship Nova Scotia.
“King-Admiral,” Clemens said. “My surviving space assets lack the facilities to accommodate all the wounded we managed to rescue from the wrecks we will have to leave behind. I was hoping you might have some room to spare among your vessels. I have some twelve hundred wounded spacers and can only take care of half of that number.”
“We will do what we can, Captain. Fortunately our life support requirements are similar enough, and two of my battlecruisers survived with minimal damage. We should be able to accommodate your wounded.”
“Thank you, Your Highness. I will make the necessary arrangements as quickly as possible.”
“You are quite welcome.”
She cut off the communication, suppressing a surge of irritation amidst the other feelings brought about by defeat. The young pup should not have contacted her directly for such a request, but he was dealing with a situation beyond his experience and training, so she wouldn’t hold the breach in protocol against him. It did not matter. The two defeated forces would be conducting a long retreat through half a dozen warp points. In their haste, some of those wounded – both Hrauwah and human – wouldn’t survive.
Five hours later, the tattered remains of the HEF made ready to depart. Their destination was Paulus System; that would be their first stop but almost certainly not their last. Grace doubted that the forces being assembled there would suffice to stop the armada that had overwhelmed the Joint Star Fleet.
She doubted anything would.
Transition.
The Undying Defender entered warp space and Grace-Under-Pressure found herself surrounded by the spirits of the dead. Her own people, who’d laid down their lives helping pay off a debt she had incurred on behalf of her entire species. And humans in endless numbers – the victims of First Contact, and perhaps every human still living, if this defeat was a harbinger of what was to come.
It was almost too much to bear.
One
Starbase Malta, Xanadu System, 167 AFC
He tried to play it safe, and it cost him. Again.
Captain Peter Fromm watched the tactical display as if glaring at the numbers and symbols could somehow alter the outcome of the scenario. He knew what Colonel Brighton would say during the Field-Ex analysis the next day. It’d been a simple mission. Lead Charlie Company against two dug-in platoons of simulated Galactic Imperium infantry. Instead of doing what he knew would work, he’d done what he thought would reduce his casualties to a minimum. He’d been slow. Downright timid. Adopted a belt-and-suspenders approach. Just so he could keep those red and black carats from showing up on the roster.
Even in simulations, it was becoming too hard to send his people to their death. And when First Sergeant Goldberg not-so-subtly called him on it, Fromm overcompensated and rushed his Marines forward, which he never would have done in real life. The result: the two enemy platoons had stopped his company cold after notionally inflicting twenty-nine casualties – including twelve KIA – on it.
He’d lost his nerve, and he wasn’t sure if he was going to get it back.
“Can’t win them all, sir,” First Lieutenant Hansen said, loyally blowing smoke up his ass. Goldberg didn’t say anything, but his silence spoke volumes. This was the third FX Fromm had blown by being overcautious. The first two times, his company officers and NCOs had snatched victory out of the jaws of defeat, but this screw-up had been beyond redemption.
Fromm shrugged, watching the ‘casualties’ pick themselves up from where the simulation had left them for dead and start heading back to the transport lift that would take them back to base, some hundred klicks away from the huge chamber they’d been using for the exercise. He tried to set aside his despondency and marvel at the lifelike holograms that turned the huge compartment – large enough to fit an entire Earth city – into a near-perfect replica of an alien planet, complete with skies overhead, a distant horizon and even variations in weather. Malta’s former owners had belonged to a hyper-advanced civilization with access to better toys than most Starfarer species could dream of.
In the end, those toys hadn’t saved them. The Tah-Leen were no more, making them the fourth species the United Stars of America had rendered extinct in its hundred-and-sixty-seven-year history. Not exactly something to be proud of, although in all fairness the Tah-Leen had deserved death as much if not more than anybody Fromm had ever met. There was a team of intelligence weenies doing nothing but cataloguing the aliens’ atrocities over the previous eighty millennia; that was a job he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy. A much larger team was busily trying to unearth as many advanced technologies as it could. The US was going to need every scrap it could extract from their latest conquest.
The three Marine formations currently stationed at Malta had enjoyed some of the fruits of victory. For the 101st, the 44th and 210th Marine Expeditionary Units, Xanadu System was home. They were the best-outfitted units in the Corps, and probably the deadliest ground force their size in the galaxy. Not that they would be seeing action any time soon. The three units had suffered severe losses at the battle of Parthenon two years before, and all of them needed some time to rest and refit. Malta seemed like a safe enough posting, now that the former Habitat for Diversity’s weapon systems were back online. Probes by the Imperium and the Lampreys had been met with overwhelming force and sent back running. In fact, Xanadu was probably the safest human-inhabited system in the universe, and a steady trickle of immigrants had begun to show up in the months since its seizure. They included some four thousand Marine dependents who’d been relocated there.
If things didn’t improve soon, the system and its artificial habitat might become humanity’s last redoubt. Fromm fervently hoped that wouldn’t be the case. He’d seen what happened to the previous owners, and it hadn’t been pretty. Being bottled up in a single system, unable to ever set foot beyond its confines, had driven the locals insane. Granted, the Tah-Leen had probably been halfway there before the mysterious Elder Races had marooned them for all eternity, but he didn’t
think humanity would fare much better.
Fromm shrugged. All of that was out of his hands. His battalion would spend months getting ready for action, and the war might be over by then. It would be up to others to save the day.
To his shame, he was glad of that. He and his Marines had done enough.
He didn’t want to write any more letters of condolence.
Secret Facility, Venus, Sol System, 167 AFC
“Can you please tell me your name?”
“Major Lisbeth Beatrix Zhang, US Warp Marine Corps, Serial Number 0259-1913108. And this is the one hundredth time I’ve been asked the same question. Congratulations!”
“How did you survive direct exposure to warp space?”
“I don’t know.”
“How did you return to Starbase Malta after your spacecraft was destroyed?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Tell us everything you remember from the time of your last warp transit aboard the Totenkopf until your appearance at Starbase Malta.”
She did, for the hundredth time. The questions were always the same, and her answers were always unsatisfactory. The truth was, everything was a blur after the cockpit of her dying ship collapsed and a sea of many colors came pouring into the cabin. The bogeyman of her nightmares had been there, yes, and a host of ghosts, most of them belonging to the ninety-odd aliens she’d executed a few days before, and they’d all been out for blood. Her blood.
The critters in question might not have been ghosts. They could have been Warplings. Creatures born and raised in null-space. Some pilots called them Foo Fighters or just Foosm, but she hated both nicknames with a passion. Most Warplings weren’t very smart or dangerous; all they did was assume the shape of their victims’ memories and try to scare or otherwise annoy them. But a few could kill you. The ones who’d ripped open her ship had been more than dangerous enough.
In Dread Silence (Warp Marine Corps Book 4) Page 4