In Dread Silence (Warp Marine Corps Book 4)

by C. J. Carella

  “And I would like to point out how unlikely it is that we’ll find any warp craft in pristine condition,” Munson said, thankfully leaving Lisbeth’s possible insanity out of the discussion. “Hurrying up only adds to the total risks without improving our odds of making useful discoveries.”

  The Science officer was nodding in agreement, and even Captain Spears seemed to be considering the archeologist’s words. Neither officer thought very highly of the mission at hand. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t do everything in their power to make sure it succeeded, of course.

  “Like I said, Doctor, we will do our best. We have our mission, which we must accomplish in the shortest time possible.”

  When the Humboldt had left Xanadu, the Wyrms were still fighting the Imperium armada and the Lampreys were reeling from near-crippling losses. The most realistic estimates had the Wyrashat suing for peace within three months, and signing a final accord after two or three more months. The wheels of diplomacy wouldn’t turn much faster than that, given the limits of interstellar communications. After that, the Gal-Imps would have an unobstructed path into American space. It would take the enemy an additional month or so to make its final approach, pun intended. Call it two hundred days all told.

  That had been two months ago. They really didn’t have a lot of time to find something, given that getting back to the US would take another two months. If they wanted to return before the Gal-Imps did irreparable damage, they couldn’t spend more than a month or two in Redoubt System. That estimate had been unofficial – the orders left the timing to the discretion of Captain Spears – but she had no doubts that was the deadline the Humboldt’s commander was planning to follow.

  None of this seemed to have occurred to Doctor Munson. “This sort of short-sighted thinking is one of the many reasons we are considered barbarians by all higher civilizations,” he said.

  “Better to be a live barbarian than a dead cosmopolite.”

  The captain’s tone brooked no further argument, and it seemed to finally sink in. Munson sat down in a huff, although that was possibly because the effort to stay upright was proving to be too much for him. Word was that he spent most of his time in a microgravity environment; being at 1-g was likely tantamount to torture, and he either wasn’t wealthy enough to afford a personal gravity-field generator – those went for a million Galactic Currency Units, give or take – or had better uses for that kind of money.

  “Any other questions or concerns? No? Very well. Let’s go over the details. We’ll conduct a final sweep of the initial landing area, using more drones. This should take five more days. After that, we’ll make the initial landing.”

  And hopefully all this will be worthwhile.

  Four

  New Texas System, 167 AFC

  USN Lieutenant Gus ‘Bingo’ Chandler walked out of the briefing room along with his fellow warp pilots. Their mood was subdued. The ebullience of the last few days had evaporated as reality set in. They would be flying their first combat missions very soon, and everyone had done the math: casualty rates among warp fighter pilots made their new jobs an effective death sentence.

  One percent losses per jump.

  In the handful of space actions involving warp fighters, pilots had done an average of ten sorties, each involving a minimum of two and a maximum of five warp jumps. Given the adjusted estimates after the Battle of Drakul, you might as well flip a coin to see if you lived or died in a single battle. Of course, casualties tended to happen to new and inexperienced pilots – a category that included almost every Navy pilot, with the exception of a few veterans like Grinner Genovisi and a handful of former Marine aviators who’d jumped ship and joined the Navy (in some cases jumped ship for the second time to rejoin the Navy) when warp fighters stopped being the jarheads’ sole province.

  Grinner had been flying missions for a year before joining Bing’s squadron, first with Sixth Fleet, which had been largely uneventful except for one skirmish against a renegade Viper flotilla, and then with CV-7 near Lamprey space, mostly hunting down a few enemy squadrons probing around American borders. Back then, the American fliers had it all their way. The enemy still hadn’t figured out how to deal with warp fighters, and attacking them had been as hard as clubbing baby seals. Things had changed.

  In no small part, things had changed because warp space was claiming as many victims as enemy fire.

  God and the Virgin protect me, Gus thought/prayed, clutching the crucifix hanging from his neck.

  He’d never been much of a Catholic before he became a naval aviator. A lot of people relied on prayer to get them through warp travel, but that never bothered him that much. Handling regular warp transit with a big starship wrapped around you was one thing: flying in a dinky little fighter was something else altogether. Doing multiple jumps in a matter of minutes or even seconds took a lot out of you. Prayer helped. That wasn’t the only reason he’d found himself turning back to half-forgotten memories of catechism classes and going to Mass with the family every Sunday.

  There are demons out there, and if there is a Devil, there must be a God. Right?

  He hoped very badly that the answer was yes.

  Three hours later, flying alongside the rest of Carrier Space Wing Four, he almost got the chance to find out first-hand.

  They’d been doing training missions nonstop since the carrier group had joined Seventh Fleet at New Texas System. Their practice runs concentrated on multi-squadron strikes on a single target. The Imperium new superdreadnoughts were bigger than anything the Navy had fought before, and the reports they’d gotten from the Wyrms before they threw in the towel were sobering. Those big mothers had triple hulls, each of them as well-armored as the outer shell and with infernal force fields to match. A twenty-incher had no chance of getting through that. Even a flight of six firing as one wasn’t likely to do significant damage. That meant sending two or three dozen fighters on a series of closely-spaced passes, all going for the same ship and, ideally, striking the same section on the ship.

  The War Eagle designers had never expected such coordination was possible; they’d counted on the fighters’ ability to appear in the rear of the enemy to hit their targets’ least-protected sectors. That had worked great at first, but the ETs had quickly adapted and spread their ships’ force fields evenly around their entire volume. This degraded their overall protection but made it hard for a single fighter to do much damage. Then again, nobody had expected fighter pilots to link their minds via what the eggheads liked to call ‘tachyon waves’ and the pilots themselves just referred to as FM Systems.

  FM worked great; the main problem with nit was that you had to get inside the heads of everyone involved. When it was just you and your wingman, it was easy enough. Getting an entire flight of six fighters to act as one took a lot of work, and you ended up learning a lot more about your buddies than you wanted to. And now the carrier ops bastards wanted them to coordinate multiple squadrons. The Navy might not understand what was going on, but they sure as hell were trying to squeeze every last drop from it.

  So far, that wasn’t working out very well. Twenty-four or thirty-six minds were just too many to link at once. A couple of the spookier pilots could pull it off and act as fire coordinators for the rest, but the resulting fire was a bit ragged. They’d done three sorties on a simulated target, and the simultaneous volleys had been spread over a fifty-meter radius. That would be amazing accuracy for any other weapon platform, of course, but they were hoping they could narrow the gap to ten meters or so.

  All of which meant more practice sorties, which meant more time spent in warp space, and more time using FM to remain in mental contact. In other words, it meant putting up a big beacon for the Foos.

  They’d lost two people in the two weeks since they’d started the exercise, out of four hundred and change. A transport with about a hundred replacements and a freighter with two hundred spare War Eagles were was on their way, so those losses would be made good.

  Go
od for everybody except the poor bastards who didn’t make it, Gus thought. And their buddies who’ll have to deal with it.

  Emergence.

  Grinner’s mind was like a pillar of cold flame. She acted as a network node for Third and Fourth Squadrons: Gus and all the other pilots, squadron commanders included, followed her lead and fired at her command. Twenty-four War Eagles came out of warp and opened fire within half a second of each other, hitting impossibly close together. Not quite within ten meters, but a lot better than fifty. Nobody lingered to cheer, though. Staying in real space for more than three seconds meant the Eeets’ point defense would acquire your bird, resulting in a bent or dead bird.

  Transition.

  Heading back to the Enterprise took a fraction of a second in ‘real’ time, but a lot longer inside warp space.

  Gus.

  “Shit.”

  He’d heard that voice before, and knowing it was a Foo pretending to be his childhood’s bogeyman didn’t stop the thrill of terror that ran through him like a bolt of lightning.

  Gus, I’m hungry.

  It’d been his fucking brother’s brilliant idea, to put a little communicator under five-year-old Gus’ bed and use a voice-distort system to produce the most demonic, inhuman voice he’d ever heard. Gus had woken up to those words, and had nightmares about them for years.

  So hungry, Gus. So very hungry.

  “Hail Mary full of Grace, the Lord is with Thee.”

  Mary can’t help you, Gus, the Foo said, still using the monster voice. I ate her up. You’re all alone with me.

  Gus kept praying. He should be concentrating on his emergence point, focusing his will on getting the fuck out of warp, but the Foo was getting closer, and he was losing track of where he was, where he should be. If he missed his exit, he’d be…

  Trapped. All alone with me, the Foo said with monstrous glee. It was reaching for him with a claw-tipped hand or something even worse, and Gus knew if it got a grip on him he’d never come out of warp.

  Grinner showed up. Her cold fire washed over the Foo, and Gus heard a cry of rage and pain.

  “Exit! Do it now!” Lieutenant Genovisi shouted in his head.

  Emergence.

  The Enterprise was a mere five klicks away, the sweetest thing he’d ever seen. It was like seeing home for the first time in years.

  “Grinner,” he sent to her. “You…”

  She’d saved his ass, again. Nothing he could say or even think was enough.

  “You’ll do the same for me some day, Bingo.”

  He was terrified at the thought of trying to help her, and failing.

  * * *

  Seventh Fleet stood ready for its new admiral’s review.

  It had been two hectic months, and it would only get worse for one Nicholas Kerensky, Fleet Admiral, CINC-Seven and lord and master of the arrayed forces he beheld, as well as all the orbital, planetary and deep space forces of a dozen planetary systems. Much of that time had been spent overseeing staff work, as well as meeting with everyone in his staff, all his task force commanders, and, last but not least, the skipper of the flagship of the fleet, the USS Odin. He hadn’t worked with Captain Victor Cochrane before, but on short acquaintance he’d found the man to be a competent officer.

  The Odin was a smoothly-run vessel; its crew had been hand-picked and consisted of experienced officers and chiefs as well as top-rated enlisted personnel. The crew had spent a year of intensive training, including a six-month shakedown cruise months before Kerensky had assumed command of the fleet. The ship had not seen combat yet, however. Neither had many of the new vessels in Seventh Fleet. Their baptism of fire would occur when they confronted the Galactic Imperium armadas currently resting and refitting inside Wyrashat space while the former US ally negotiated its exit from the war.

  Losing the Wyrms had been a foregone conclusion after the disastrous defeat at Drakul System. It had taken four months and two more major space actions before the Wyrashat had thrown in the towel, and even now they were drawing out the peace talks, buying humanity a little extra time. Given that the only alternative to surrender would have been to join humanity on the chopping block, nobody could blame them.

  Despite their best diplomatic efforts, the Wyrms were going to pay a heavy price for fighting alongside the US. Word was that the peace accords would require them to surrender several strategic systems, although that deal had been supposedly sweetened by getting other disputed systems back. Regardless, they would have to demilitarize their border with the Imperium and provide logistical support for its fleets as they proceeded towards human space. Considering the two polities had been enemies long before Earth’s First Contact, this was a disaster for the Wyrashat.

  Kerensky could sympathize with them, but only to a degree. The dragon-like aliens faced a loss of political power or, at worst, the prospect of being absorbed into the multi-species Imperium. Either possibility was a damn sight better than what the Gimps had in store for humankind.

  The admiral set the gloomy thoughts aside and concentrated on the task at hand, even if it was little more than a morale-building exercise as well as a dog and pony show for the embedded press corps. Odin began a slow pass around the arrayed ships of his new command. Seventh Fleet was the largest and most powerful formation ever fielded by the United Stars of America, and they stood proudly for inspection.

  At its core were the flagship and two other brand-new Pantheon-class superdreadnoughts, the largest warships built by human hands. Three kilometers long and bristling with weaponry, the massive vessels exuded menace. Their six main gun batteries, each featuring a quartet of 42-inch graviton cannon, gave them nearly twice the firepower of any other US capital vessel. Its secondary batteries were comprised of four relatively light 10-inchers apiece, but there were forty of them spread evenly on the dreadnought’s surface. Those hundred and sixty cannon were configured for rapid fire and very precise targeting: their primary purpose was to shoot down incoming missiles and the fast-attack ships the enemy would use to threaten their flanks; at close range they also would do a fine job of pecking their way through any enemy vessel’s shields and armor.

  The superdreadnoughts’ own force fields and armored double hulls made them quite capable of exchanging broadsides with any Starfarer warship even without the array of overlapping warp shields that made them nearly impervious to most weapons. Kerensky’s warrior side was looking forward to testing his Pantheon-class warships against the Imperium’s larger counterparts; in a one-on-one fight, he was certain the human super-dreds would prevail. The more sensible part of him knew that the enemy was fielding dozens of capital ships for every one of his. There would be nothing approaching a fair fight in the dark days ahead.

  Seven battleships, looking stunted by comparison, stood around their larger counterparts. They were older designs, a mere twelve hundred meters long, but their sixteen 30-inch guns were still worthy of respect. Like the new ship classes, their secondary armament had been reconfigured to better deal with the devastating missile swarms the enemy was sure to employ. The combined tonnage and throw weight of the fleet’s ten capital ships put to shame Fifth Fleet’s heavies.

  And I must prove myself a better commander than I was then.

  Impressive as the big-gun ships were, they were doomed to be outclassed by the fleet’s Carrier Strike Groups. They comprised three Enterprise-class fleet carriers, each as large as a battleship, and fifteen light carriers. Their total complement of four hundred and sixty-eight War Eagle warp fighters made this the largest concentration of the new wonder weapons ever assembled. One third of the fliers were crewed by newly-minted Navy pilots; the rest were Marines. Finding enough pilots – more replacements were about to arrive, giving him some five hundred War Eagles in total – had required tremendous effort, and a great deal of corner-cutting in training time. Some of that had been patched over with increasing doses of the chemical cocktail colloquially-known as Melange, from some old pre-Contact fairy tale. Knowing thos
e new pilots would be heavily dosed with poorly-understood drugs was worrisome, but the stakes involved made the gamble necessary.

  When you considered each of those dinky little fighters carried a 20-inch naval gun and could engage targets at spitting distance with closely-coordinated volleys, the superdreadnoughts didn’t sound very impressive by comparison. Kerensky had studied warp fighter operations very closely, and he’d come up with a few ideas on how to use them for this campaign. Carrier-based spacecraft would win the battles ahead, if anything could.

  Thirty battlecruisers, fifty destroyers, twelve frigates and twenty assault ships completed the battle array. He’d refused to take any light cruisers and only two squadrons of frigates; the latter were meant to serve only as scouts, support-vessel escorts, or couriers. The antiquated models simply lacked the firepower and defenses to survive the Sun-Blotter missile swarms the enemy had developed as a counter to the American’s warp advantages. They didn’t have a place in space actions.

  Half of the destroyers belonged to the new Aegis-class, hardy missile killers. The rest had been refitted to serve the same purpose. The battlecruisers were a compromise between firepower, armor, and cost: their main virtue lay in being cheaper to produce than battleships, which meant more could be built. The US just didn’t have the industrial capacity to do better, and their firepower was about two-thirds as great at a battleship, for half the cost and one third the survivability. Hammer-wielding eggshells, in other words, and their losses would reflect that.

  Some Navy luminaries had decried the resources spent on the Pantheon-class superdreadnoughts, figuring the nation could use a larger number of smaller warships – or even better, more carriers. Kerensky agreed with them to some degree, especially in regards to carriers. The problem there was twofold: fighters were, pound by pound, far more expensive than capital ships and, more importantly, training pilots took a great deal of time. He already feared the Navy had made too many compromises in their mad rush to match the Marines’ longer-lived program.