In Dread Silence (Warp Marine Corps Book 4)

by C. J. Carella

  And yet, it was victory. The great armada that had run rampant through Wyrashat space was gone. Over a million citizen-soldiers from a dozen species and the pride of the largest polity in the known galaxy had fallen. But at what price?

  American losses had been worse than what Fifth Fleet had suffered at Heinlein. More ships had been destroyed here than in any previous space action in US history. But Kerensky had run away at Heinlein, surrendering the system to the Vipers. Nobody had run here.

  Kerensky looked around the CIC. Every face he saw was marked with exhaustion and sorrow. There was no cheering. You couldn’t cheer this sort of carnage. The Odin’s crew had suffered over three hundred casualties. Thirty-seven of them had been the result of overexposure to warp shields, unfortunates who had been driven mad, possibly permanently, or simply dropped dead without any visible wounds, their faces twisted in expressions of utter horror. A hundred and sixteen fighters were gone as well, and too many of those had disappeared while in warp transit.

  And then there was the fate of the fleet carrier Exeter to consider.

  In the heat of the battle, Kerensky had noted that the ship’s icon had turned black along with so many others. But when he had the leisure to go over the sensor readings, he’d seen something that defied comprehension.

  The carrier had taken some damage before its strange end: a number of missile hits penetrated its shields and blotted out a point-defense battery and killed several crewmembers. Sensor records from nearby ships showed a fighter emergence that had turned into… what? Kerensky ran the footage back and forth in his imp; this was not something he wanted on a view screen. He’d already ordered a security lock on the footage, and admonished the handful of sensor techs who’d witnessed the incident to keep it to themselves. Numb as he was, the strange sight filled him with dread.

  The warp aperture through which the fighter had arrived should have closed an instant later. It hadn’t. Instead, it’d grown larger. The Exeter was maneuvering at two-thirds of flank speed at the time, so the stationary warp hole should have been left behind at two hundred kilometers per second. Instead, the aperture had kept station and somehow touched the carrier’s warp shields, which began to grow in size as well. A few moments later, something had reached out from warp space and engulfed the ship.

  The admiral tried to freeze the high-resolution video at the proper moment. He couldn’t. There was a hint of movement but then the video seemed to jump frames, or be obscured by something. He tried other ships’ visual feeds from different angles, and they all showed the same glitch, despite being taken from different positions and distances, anywhere from five to ten thousand kilometers away, which given current optics would allow him to zoom in closely enough to recognize individual faces. Not this time. If he zoomed in, all he could see was a blur or a shadow. A growing suspicion gnawed at him: he felt that whatever he was seeing was something organic. Alive. And larger than the nine-hundred-meter long starship it had touched.

  A fraction of a second after that shadow showed up, the Exeter was gone.

  Kerensky slowed down the visual feed down to a millisecond per frame and was able to see the carrier vessel surrounded by sinuous bands of darkness and being dragged into its own shields. A solitary frame saw the Exeter’s outline being distorted into a shape small enough to fit the gaping maw awaiting it.

  As if its hull was being warped, in other words.

  “What is this?” he whispered. “What have we done?”

  “Sir?”

  Kerensky shuddered and turned towards the crewman who’d overheard him.

  “Never mind, Spacer. Carry on.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  The admiral sealed all records of the Exeter’s demise and marked them as classified. Something terrible had happened, but plenty of terrible things had happened today. Whatever that was, it could wait.

  Logic did not diminish the feeling that something worse than mere death and destruction had taken place in that shadowy instant before the carrier vessel ceased to exist.

  Seven

  Redoubt-Five, 167 AFC

  Even monsters will run when the Devil goes hunting.

  The fleeing Kranxans were all warriors, barely humanoid grotesqueries made of flesh, synthetics and metal. Any workers in their midst had long been trampled under their feet or hooves, and the Overlords had escaped into the Path – uselessly, since their pursuers also waited for them there, but panic had blinded them all. Warriors could not follow their masters, so they simply ran, the dying cries of those behind them spurring them on.

  There was no escape at the end of the long flight up the spiral staircase, only the unyielding surface of the Tower’s ceiling and skylights. The crowd’s sheer numbers and mindless terror kept them moving, forcing more and more of them into the viewing alcoves, crushing furniture, artwork and the weaker among them until there was no more space, nowhere to go. Talons, blades and blunt fingers that could rend steel clawed at the barriers keeping them penned in, to no avail: the Tower’s final orders had been to shut off all exits, and none of the Marauders present had the authority to countermand them.

  Death found them howling mindlessly like so many penned beasts. One by one, they fell silent and their minds and souls were ripped from their flesh and cast into the Burning Void, where eternal punishment awaited.

  Finally, all was still, but not peaceful. There was no peace to be found anywhere.

  “Lisbeth?”

  Heather’s voice broke through the trance: Lisbeth shuddered and found herself swaying on her feet. The bulk of the Tower loomed over her and she instinctively recoiled from it. Only Heather’s strong grip kept her from falling on her ass.

  A couple of the Spacers and Marines working on the dig gave her the Look, but most of them were too busy examining their find. Lisbeth shook her head and steadied herself. She was an officer and a gentleperson, and swooning like some Victorian damsel was conduct most unbecoming. Then again, she figured that the things she’d seen would have given pause even to the likes of Puller or Mattis. Especially when she hadn’t just seen them, but felt everything a pack of the terrified monsters had experienced before their death and eternal damnation.

  “Lisbeth?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay. Thank you. It’s the Tower. It recorded, or memorized, what happened at the end there, and I just got the whole show.”

  “What happened?”

  “Justice.”

  Blinking flashes of white light coming from a plasma cutter filled the pit as she spoke. They’d dug up an eight-meter tall section of the round black tower, trying to find a way in. There were more transparent sections like the one they discovered on the top level, also choked with corpses, but so far nothing that looked like a door, hatch or any other access point. After a gentler approach had failed, the Marine engineers had broken out a plasma cutter, whose jets of pure heat could melt through warship armor.

  “Any luck?” she asked Heather, wondering how long she’d been in a fugue state.

  The spy shook her head. “Fifteen minutes, and they’ve barely heated the surface. Lieutenant Perez is thinking about using a grav gun from one of the shuttles next. That got Doctor Munson howling about damaging the ruins, of course.”

  “Glad I missed that.”

  “Any ideas why the material is so tough?”

  “Sort of.” Dead Kranxan memories tried to bubble up inside her head once again, but she pushed them down, with some help from her invisible alien friend. “The building is alive, and it draws power from warp space. I think the walls are protected by a force field.”

  “Sensors aren’t picking it up. Just some graviton leakage, nothing like what a force field produces.”

  “It’s like what the Corpse-Ship had. A more refined version of warp shields, and it only becomes active at the point of impact, whenever something hits it – or just before; it sort of sees into the future and pops up the moment it’s needed. Hard to get a read off that.”

  “We’d bett
er share that with Lieutenant Perez and Doctor Munson.”

  They did.

  “Sounds crazy,” the Marine engineer said. Perez hadn’t been happy when his platoon was detached from the 101st MEU and sent on this mission, and his mood hadn’t improved since he’d landed. Lisbeth picked that up without intending to. “But it’s par for the course in this cruise.”

  “Is the building sentient, then?” Doctor Munson asked. “Will violence cause it to react in kind?”

  “Probably,” she admitted. “From the looks of it, the Tower was put on stand-down mode when its controllers – the Kranxan Overlords – ran away. The same entity that blew up Redoubt-Four came here to finish the job. Still not sure who that was, but it was tough enough to scare the crap out of the Marauders. The good news is that the Tower’s defenses are also down. This shielding is part of the structure, not an active system.”

  “We need to study this technology. Now that we know what to look for, we can try to identify the force field and learn the principles behind it.”

  With that, the scientist turned to his team. They grabbed their sensors and surrounded the engineers trying to cut into the circular wall. The motions they made with the scanners made Lisbeth think of a pack of shamans waving their totems at some suspected demon.

  “Any ideas of what to do next?” Lieutenant Perez asked. “I was half kidding about using grav cannon, but if the cutter doesn’t work, that might be Plan C. Plan B involves using high-explosive breaching charges. Lasers haven’t even raised the material’s temperature, and plasma is barely warming it up.”

  Lisbeth had an idea, but it was most definitely not a good one. Her Plan B was to try to contact the Tower and get it to open its doors. Thousands of dead Marauders inside had tried to do just that and failed miserably, and she wasn’t sure what the attempt would do to her. But they didn’t have time to waste, and she was almost certain that the answers she was seeking were somewhere inside those shiny black walls.

  Just as she was about to mention it, a burst of psychic noise froze her in place.

  “The building just sent a signal of some sort.”

  “Yes, I heard that too,” Heather added. “That can’t be good.”

  “Hopefully nobody’s around to answer the call.”

  Heather looked grim. “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  * * *

  “We’ve got local critters approaching the valley, sir.”

  Fromm connected his imp to the sensor feed from the Schwarzkopf tanks conducting air patrols over the valley and its surroundings. The thick jungle canopy beyond the scorched kill zone around the valley obscured the ground from normal sight, but not from thermal and grav scanners. The imp processed the readings into visuals just as clear and detailed as if the herds and packs of beasts heading in their direction were out in the open.

  The approaching fauna included groups of pseudo-hominids that might be primal Kranxans. According to Major Zhang, the Marauders had once been Class Two humanoids, not very different from other species of their kind, befitting their common ancestry. The troops of ape-like creatures swinging from tree to tree or running hunched down on the ground were slightly taller than the average human, with broad shoulders and stooped postures. Stuff one in a business suit and put a hat on his head and he might pass as a body-modded high-gee human colonist, except for the orange cast to their skin and their too-close-together eyes and the single thick eyebrow above them. Their hair was copper-red, thick and curled, and they wore no clothing or carried tools. If they’d once possessed sentience, that was no longer the case. More likely, these were some other primate-equivalent rather than debased Kranxans, not that it really mattered.

  The pseudo-apes weren’t alone. Sleek predators like long-legged crocodiles were running besides herds of rhinoceroses’ analogues and two-legged feathered raptors. Hunter and prey were moving as one, converging on the valley from dozens of klicks away. And floating over their heads were swarms of winged insects of assorted sizes and species.

  “Bugs. Lots of them.”

  Fromm opened another virtual window just in time to see the small fliers rising above the canopy and heading for the pair of tanks above them.

  “Pull back and open fire,” he ordered.

  The Stormin’ Normies rose up in the air, faster than the insects chasing them: volleys of 15mm area-effect plasma grenades met the fliers and consumed them by the hundreds. Other sensors showed more swarms getting even closer. Some of them had crawled on the ground and waited until they were close to the valley before taking flight. Those bugs were going to reach the valley long before their larger counterparts.

  “All Charlie elements! Engage the hostiles!”

  Fromm sent a set of coordinates to his mortar section. Their first string of 100mm bomblets was on its way towards moments later. He also contacted the shuttles with their own fire mission.

  There were hundreds of kilometers of jungle all around their position. If he had to, Fromm would burn every last bit of it down to the bedrock.

  * * *

  As it turned out, watching other people digging holes was only slightly more fun than digging the holes yourself.

  Digging holes and filling them back in was as natural as breathing to any jarhead in the universe; it almost felt unnatural to let others do it. They’d been watching bubbleheads and Marine 1371s do all the kinds of hard labor for a few days. Sooner or later someone would figure out they could use the grunts’ strong backs for something useful, and put them to work. For now, Russell and his fireteam were off-duty, with nothing better to do than smoke and look around the valley, where the tip of a big-ass black building poked out of the ground. Word was that the rest of that thing was about fifty times bigger. It’d been buried since long before the Pyramids of Egypt were built, or anything else on Earth for that matter, but it looked shiny and new. That bothered him a bit.

  “They’re taking their own sweet time,” Gonzo commented as the engineers used a plasma cutter on the round wall. They’d been at it a good while, but the spot they were cutting into hadn’t melted. “You’d think they’d just use some demo to blast a hole in the damn thing and go in.”

  “They are being meticulous, that’s all,” Grampa said. “They want to take a good look at it before they smash it open. Basic archeology stuff. It’s nothing like them Indiana Jones movies.”

  “Indiana who?”

  “Before your time. Old movies; that franchise sort of died after First Contact, not like the Star Wars stuff.”

  “They had Star Wars before First Contact?”

  “Woogle it.”

  Russell tuned out the friendly argument and checked the clearing. The engineers and some Navy pukes with earthmoving equipment had piled the charred remnants of burned-out trees against the gaps in the surrounding hills, fencing them in. They’d also cleared another hundred meters or so around the exterior. That was a little too tight for comfort, since beyond the clear ground visibility turned to shit after about twenty meters even with enhanced sensors. There hadn’t been enough time to set up a proper killing ground around the valley. There were too many trees, big bastards, each with a thick trunk or stem that went up as high as thirty meters, topped with a mushroom-like circular cap, about five to ten meters wide, which was covered with a leafy kind of fur. The plants were clumped closely together, touching cap to cap. In between the trees were shorter mushrooms, except these ones didn’t have the leafy fur and didn’t seem to need sunlight to live, because they were completely shaded out by the big ones.

  The Hellcats doing patrol duty among the valley had reported some of the big mushroom trees would drop lianas down on anything that got to close, long flexible limbs that would tighten around their victims, stabbing them with hundreds of poison-filled thorns. Against the four-legged Hellcat battlesuits, protected with a good three inches of armor around their five-hundred pound bodies, the tactic hadn’t worked out too well. The ‘cats had cut down all the grab-ass trees. They hadn’t had the tim
e and personnel to do the same to every other plant in the area, though.

  Other than a couple of narrow footpaths the Hellcats used to get in and out, he only way out of the valley was up, via shuttle. Russell didn’t like being hemmed in like that. Granted, the LAVs and all their other vehicles had anti-grav and could float away, but Russell was used to enemies that could engage anything that poked its head out of cover from klicks away. Flying made you into a target, and even the Stormin’ Normie tanks they’d brought along weren’t invulnerable. He’d seen just how not-invulnerable they were at Parthenon-Three. It didn’t matter how tough your can was; there was always a can-opener big enough to do you in. That’s why he preferred being leg infantry; grunts could hide.

  He shrugged, the motion all but invisible under his body armor, and puffed on a cigarette to pass the time until it was time report for duty. It sucked, the way you could be both bored and tense on the job. You couldn’t relax when you knew you could be killed without warning. He’d gotten too many oak leaf clusters on his Purple Heart, and a few of those had nearly put him in the ground for good. Nineteen-year-olds fresh from Ob-Serv might think they were invincible, but Russell was old enough to know better. Old enough to wonder why the hell he was still putting himself in harm’s way.

  After this war is over, I’m done. That wasn’t the first time he’d had that thought. His original plan had been to do a full fifty years so he could enjoy a twenty-five-year pension, but that had been several Purple Heart oak clusters ago, including four times where he’d been knocked out cold – not at all like in the movies; when everything went black it was because something really bad had happened to you – and come back with fewer bits and pieces than he’d started out with. The docs had put him back together every time, but he still had scars to remind him how close he’d been to never waking up at all. It was getting old.