Lisbeth had fought back, she knew that much. At one point, a gigantic three-eyed alien had fought beside her: Atu, the Path Master whose consciousness had become entangled with hers. Then again, she sometimes suspected her invisible friend was a Warpling who’d assumed the shape of the dead alien for its own purposes. Either way, Atu had been a major badass, shooting beams out of its third eye and shredding Tah-Leen ghosts left and right. It might have been fun, except for the fact she’d been scared shitless the whole time. At one point, she’d become the alien, a bizarre experience she hoped never to repeat. The way Atu thought was too different; the experience hadn’t been good for her mental health.
The alien ghost was still around. She’d come back with a giant invisible monkey on her back. The thought made her giggle, which made her current interviewer nervous. For some unfathomable reason, nobody liked it when she laughed. That sucked, because as of late she found it very hard to deal with the universe with a straight face.
“Are you all right, Major?”
They asked that a lot, too. She didn’t have a good answer, either. Physically, she felt fine, although her brain wasn’t normal anymore. The unusual growths her previous checkup had uncovered had turned into large whorls of grey matter growing in perfect symmetry on the inside of her skull, which incidentally had developed two noticeable bulges to accommodate them. They weren’t easily visible under her medium-reg haircut, but if she ever decided to shave her head, they would be.
A doctor had commented that the bulges looked a little bit like horns.
“I said, are you all..?”
“Yes,” Lisbeth answered, shaking her head. It was heard clear her mind from visions of the past; every once in a while she went back there. She belatedly realized that the contradictory word and gesture made her look crazy.
“You are giggling again,” her current debriefer said. It was a civilian this time, some sort of psychiatrist they’d flown all the way to Venus to talk to her. She’d scared off the last couple of interviewers – a Naval Intelligence weenie and a CIA interrogator – with a few off-hand comments.
Must be my winning personality, she thought, and giggled once more. The shrink just looked at her, waiting for an answer.
“Sorry, doc. My mind wanders when I’m bored.”
“Please try to concentrate. We’re all here to help you, you know.”
Time to run him off, she decided. He was getting on her nerves.
“I know. Speaking of helping, I can answer a question that’s been on your mind.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your wife.”
From the way his face changed, she’d scored a point.
“What about my wife?”
“She is cheating on you.”
“What?”
“She’s been seeing someone at the ad agency she works at. Her boss, as a matter of fact.”
“Wait a moment. What..?”
“It all started when she found out about your own affair – well, affairs, but she only knows of the last one – so I can’t really blame her. By the way, I’m flattered you like the way I look, but I hope we can keep this professionally.”
Lisbeth batted her eyelashes at him.
The shrink left and didn’t come back.
She enjoyed a few quiet days inside her spacious and comfortable cell, fifty meters beneath Venus’ hellish surface. The only inhabitants in that festering boil in the solar system’s ass were terraforming crews, most of them convicts doing hard labor, and a few subjects that needed to be out of sight and mind. She wasn’t technically a prisoner, but she wasn’t allowed to wander off on her own, not that strolling outside was an option without a haz-con suit. They’d been terraforming Venus for decades, but the planet’s average temperature was still enough to turn ice into steam or broil a human being even before its corrosive atmosphere had a chance make its presence known. It was going to take another century or so to make the place habitable, and she wasn’t planning on hanging around that long.
On her next interview, there were two of them, male and female, in matching Navy uniforms and a no-nonsense look about them that she could appreciate. At this point, she’d welcome a straightforward enhanced interrogation session. Anything but the constant blathering.
“Major Zhang,” the guy began.
“That’s me. And I appreciate you not asking my name is for the hundredth and first time.”
“Sorry about that. Honestly, we didn’t know what to make of you. Your story was hard to believe, even with all the witnesses.”
And all the imp recordings, she thought. A dozen people had immortalized her appearance in the Situation Room at Starbase Malta on the day she’d strolled through a warp aperture wearing nothing but a smile. Not exactly the kind of exposure she would have chosen. There must be dozens of VR pornos ‘inspired’ by those visual records making the rounds in cyberspace. Plus a bunch of religious and mystical movements. Whore and Madonna at the same time.
The bubbleheads waited until she was done giggling before continuing.
“The decision has been made to accept your recollection of events,” the female officer said.
“Thank you, ma’am.” Might as well stick to military courtesy before they changed their minds and kept her in this hellhole for a few more months.
“This brings us to the proposal you’ve been making all along.”
Lisbeth nodded. If they were willing to listen to her theories, the situation was even more desperate than she’d thought. She’d been following the news – they let her do that much – and things had been looking pretty dire, with the Imperium pressing forward and the Lampreys massing up along the Wyrm borders, presumably to link up with their allies for one big push into American space. Things might just be bad enough to make even her insane ideas worthy of some attention.
“You claim that your connection to the Kranxan starship gave you access to a great deal of data, including astrogation maps of their territory.”
“Yes, sir. Including the location of a remote system that served as their last place of refuge. That’s where they took their last fleet of Corpse-Ships. Nearly a hundred of them.”
Both naval officers winced visibly at the name. No red-blooded American would be comfortable with the idea that a ship made with the bones of a dead and yet somehow aware alien slave had proven to be more effective than anything in the Navy’s arsenal – or anything in the known galaxy for that matter.
“I can lead you there,” Lisbeth went on, for the eighty-sixth time; a few of her interviews had stopped before she got to that part. “There is a warp chain from Xanadu System that leads straight to it. I think there’s a good chance at least some of those ships are still operational. And I know how to activate them and train others to use them.”
She pictured dozens of Corpse-Ships flying the Stars and Stripes and sweeping the skies clear of enemies. From the way the two officers looked at her, they were seeing something similar. Maybe the exact same thing: sometimes she could make people see what was inside her head, instead of the other way around.
“What price victory, if the cost is your soul, Christopher Robin?” Atu the Happy Alien whispered in her ear. The Pathfinder had turned Lisbeth’s childhood memories of A.A. Milne’s stories into a constant source of annoyance.
Shut up, you. I have a plan.
“We would like to hear more about your ideas,” the male officer said.
“Of course, sir.”
Lisbeth ignored the disapproving looks from her invisible friend as she spoke.
She might be crazy, damned, or both, but she was going to do her part.
Starbase Malta, Xanadu System, 167 AFC
“Lieutenant McClintock, you are hereby relieved from duty.”
Finally, Heather thought, suppressing a relieved sigh.
After the ancient alien habitat now known as Starbase Malta had been secured and become a US possession, Heather had spent several months running the place, mostly because only
her t-wave implants allowed her to bypass the security blocks protecting the alien network that ran all its systems. After taking one look at the mess the US had inherited, the admiral in command of Third Fleet had reactivated her at her old Navy rank of Lieutenant and put her in charge. It had been an exhausting and unnerving situation, especially since the Lampreys and the Imperium had launched attacks on Xanadu after the system had been ‘secured.’ That had been a little too exciting for her taste. Turning the impossible job over was something of a relief.
“Thank you, Captain Gupta.”
The new commandant was an experienced orbital facility administrator who’d grown up in a mining colony in Sol’s asteroid belt and spent most of his Navy career crewing and eventually running space fortresses. His confident expression as he accepted the official handoff worried her, however. The poor bastard had no idea what was waiting for him, and she was worried he would screw things up.
Nobody’s indispensable, she told herself. She’d made sure someone else could do the job, after all. It had taken a lot of work but now ordinary computers and technicians could run the massive station. More or less. Acting like everything depended on her wasn’t very mature; she smiled at her own conceit.
“Something funny, Lieutenant?”
“Not at all, sir. I’m just happy to leave this post and return to civil service.”
“I see. You have done an adequate job so far, and I’m sure your assistance during the transition period will be valuable.”
Heather was still one of a handful of people with any idea of how the massive alien habitat worked, and who knew how little they really knew about it. Just keeping its weapons and shields working had taken the efforts of dozens of trained personnel. To restore Malta to even a fraction of its former glory would probably take thousands. Captain Gupta had brought in five hundred Administration specialists with him, which would help a lot, as soon as they figured out that running the incredibly-large facility was unlike anything they’d encountered before. She would try to teach them as much as she could before she was reassigned, but after that…
Not my circus, not my monkeys.
For the last six months, she’d been so busy she’d hardly seen Peter for more than an hour or two before rushing off to deal with a new crisis. The problems involved in running an ancient habitat half the size of Earth’s Moon were legion, especially when the alien intelligence charged with keeping it in working order had died during the takeover. Been killed in cold blood by a rather deranged Marine, to be precise. That the poor creature had been lobotomized and largely mindless was beside the point. And its absence had been felt when the whole structure promptly began to fall apart.
The fact that a Lamprey fleet had shown up just after the Americans had seized the habitat hadn’t helped, of course. The aliens shot the ever-living crap out of the place before Heather came up with a last-ditch method to kill them all. Fortunately, the ancient civilization knew how to build them tough, and the habitat had survived, for some values of ‘survived.’ Two thirds of its volume currently didn’t have any atmosphere, power or other amenities. The remaining third still had more usable space than every human-made orbital facility combined, and keeping it in working order had turned out to be a full-time job.
Handing it off to someone else would give her a chance to do her real job: gathering information. The records of the oldest known civilization in the galaxy were a priceless intelligence find, even if most of the data would be useless to all but the most dedicated historians. That aside, the system was a major trade nexus where a sizeable portion of the known galaxy’s commerce passed through. The opportunities to buy, steal or cajole valuable information would provide work for hundreds of intelligence officers. The CIA had so far sent her five. She needed to get on top of that.
Captain Gupta had been droning on about something while her mind wandered. She smiled and nodded while her imp provided her with an instant replay.
“Yes, sir,” she said after a barely perceptible pause. “Our first priority was to see to the defenses in Malta, and to the security of the warp network around it.”
“Now that you have activated its weapon systems and the power plants needed to operate them, the system’s defense should be easy enough.”
Something about the man’s tone told Heather the good captain didn’t think she’d done either of those things quickly enough to suit him. Perhaps he blamed her for all the death and destruction that had ensued during the first Lamprey attack. The victims had included an entire destroyer squadron and over a hundred Marine, Navy and State Department personnel. The fact that she blamed herself didn’t make it any easier to accept the unspoken reproach.
“Yes, sir. Once the systems were up, we were able to deal with the follow-up enemy attacks easily enough.”
The second Lamprey attack had been a complete disaster for the aliens. Third Fleet had been on the scene, and the Lhan Arkh force had been weaker than the one she’d helped destroy during the First Battle of Xanadu. Third Fleet would have been able to handle the sixty-ship enemy formation on its own. Paired with the gigantic habitat’s devastating firepower, it’d been over in a matter of minutes. The useless sacrifice had surprised her. Perhaps the Lhan Arkh hadn’t believed the initial reports. They certainly believed them now.
In any case, the loss of two fleets had cost them dearly: Third Fleet had launched a counterattack into Lamprey space, and destroyed two enemy colonies before pulling back. Further attacks would have to wait until reinforcements arrived, however, and most new ships were being funneled into more important fronts.
The Imperium had attempted a reconnaissance in force a couple of months later. Twenty medium vessels had warped in, their energy signatures masked to simulate a civilian freighter convoy from a neutral polity. Their attempt at subterfuge hadn’t fooled Malta’s sophisticated sensors, however. The luckless Gal-Imp ships had been shot down on arrival, while their crews were still recovering from transit. After that fiasco, nobody had sent hostile forces into Xanadu. Its reputation as an impregnable target was now fully restored.
“Security should no longer be an issue,” she said. “And we’ve been gradually restoring power and life support to more areas of the habitat. At this point, we could easily house ten times as many people as we’ve already got.”
Gupta nodded. “Good. We are going to be relocating an increasing number of personnel here. Mostly displaced civilians with the proper mix of skills and experience. Our main problem is securing enough transport to bring in everyone who is able and willing to move here. Even with those limitations, the current plan is to resettle a hundred thousand workers and their dependents within twelve months. And to increase that number tenfold over the ensuing year.”
Mighty ambitious, not to mention optimistic, Heather thought. The Navy officer would soon find out just how big a job he had ahead of him. Even with most automated systems up and running, too many things could and would go wrong on a nearly hourly basis, and after the destruction of most of the stations’ army of service robots, just building replacements would require more fabber operators than they had.
Still, she’d done what she could. Two of the massive fabricators in Malta – out of several dozen they’d discovered – were working three shifts now, and the scratch crew of Navy personnel and civilian volunteers she’d been bossing around for the previous few months had made a good start in setting up a naval shipyard. Once Gupta managed to bring a hundred thousand workers here, Xanadu System could start building the best ships in the galaxy.
On paper, what they had accomplished here should have all but won the larger war. The Hrauwah Kingdom – a.k.a. the Puppies – were sending massive amounts of supplies and ship components now that they had a direct line to American space. Even more importantly, the massive Galactic Credit accounts the US force had ‘liberated’ from the former owners of the system had been large enough to pay all the debts owed to the Kingdom, with plenty to spare. It was always better to settle things
in cash than to depend on the kindness of even friendly aliens. Xanadu generated enormous revenues from transit tolls collected from dozens of polities that depended on the multiple warp lines linking the system to most of the known galaxy. With one swift stroke – and the sacrifice of hundreds of American lives – humanity had gone from being poor up-and-comers to wealthy and powerful Starfarers. The only problem was, capitalizing on those advantages was going to take time, time they might not have.
News of the disaster at Drakul had reached them just a few days after their victory here. Two Gal-Imp armadas were ponderously pushing through Wyrashat space, and word was that the Wyrms, Earth’s only official allies, would soon give up completely. Their surrender would allow the Imperium to consolidate its forces and mount an assault directly into US space. The only question remaining was whether humanity would be able to stop them long enough for the rearmament program to matter.
All she could do is her job. She’d consult with the new base commander, of course, but she looked forward to returning to her real job.
“By the way, Lieutenant, your new orders came in the same ship that brought me here. I’ll upload them to you now.”
It only took a few seconds to find out that she wouldn’t be going back to her old job any time soon.
* * *
“Can you believe this shit?” Lance Corporal Raymond ‘Gonzo’ Gonzaga shouted. The little bastard looked about ready to start throwing punches.
Corporal Russell ‘Russet’ Edison was just as outraged as his buddy, but he’d learned the hard way not to take things personally. Gonzo was normally a cool customer, but their new marching orders had turned several months of hard work into shit. At this rate they were both going to leave the Corps as broke-ass as they had gone in, other than their short-lived pensions.
In Dread Silence (Warp Marine Corps Book 4) Page 5