In Dread Silence (Warp Marine Corps Book 4)

by C. J. Carella

  “Wake up! Wake the hell up!” Lisbeth shouted. She slammed her fist on the door, careful to avoid the spikes.

  “The Keeper isn’t listening, Christopher Robin,” the three-eyed giant standing by her said.

  “I told you to stop calling me that.”

  “I’ll stop when it stops bothering you. Regardless, I don’t think it can hear you. The Marauders have made it deaf and mostly blind. When it was ordered to shut down, its sensors went down as well. Only extreme input will elicit a reaction.”

  “So what do I do now, Pooh?” she asked the friendly ghost. Atu had once been a Pathfinder, an ancient species whose members had mastered warp travel to a degree beyond any other known species. Towards the end, the three-eyed aliens’ Path Masters had been able to dispense with starships and jumped from one world to the next by the power of their minds alone.

  “I’m thinking, my human friend. And in the process I am reliving some very unpleasant memories. What the Kranxans did to my slumbering remains was rather brutal and painful. In some ways it resembled what your culture thinks of as Hell: an eternity of inescapable torment.”

  “I’m sorry to ask you to do this, but maybe you can help me free the poor bastard on the other side of this door.”

  Lisbeth knocked on the big door for emphasis.

  This time, there was a reaction. The metal surface heated up without warning and burned the skin of her knuckles. The input may have been metaphorical or psychic or whatever, but it felt just like the real thing.

  “Motherfucker!”

  “Such language,” the Pathfinder said.

  “I’m a Marine, Pooh. ‘Fuck’ is our go-to word.”

  “That such a profane term for copulation can be given so many layers of meaning indicates an unhealthy fixation with the sexual act.”

  “That’s humanity for you. A pack of nasty fuckers.”

  Atu sighed.

  “Are you done thinking about it, three-eyes?”

  “More or less. You were able to reach me in my near-mindless state by using the mental pathways left behind by my former masters. For a while, you aped the thought patterns of a Marauder of Kranx, the likes of which I was forced to listen to. You must do the same thing here.”

  “Shit.”

  “Ah. Defecation: the other human fascination.”

  “Never mind that. I don’t know if I can do that again. Last time I was inside a Marauder ship and linked to their operating system. And getting inside their heads almost killed me. This is going to suck.”

  “You are inside the Starless Path, my friend. Here, the past is as accessible as the present. Whatever you did or experienced before, you can do again.”

  “Great.”

  The mystical bullshit was truly getting on her nerves. Lisbeth had been a fairly cheerful atheist most of her life, starting when she figured out Santa Claus was a fantasy at the tender age of five. Even while exposed to warp space after joining the Navy, she’d relied on good plain Warmetal music to get her through it, instead of the prayer and meditation most people used. Ever since joining the Langley Project and being exposed to more non-corporeal experiences than any living being ought to, her belief system had taken a thorough beating. That didn’t mean she had to like the new version of reality she’d been forced to accept.

  Liking stuff had nothing to do with it. You did what you had to, no matter how unpleasant or disgusting, or you failed, and failure was the one thing she hated above all others. If succeeding required singing Hosannas or spinning prayer wheels, then by Ghu she’d do either or both.

  Going into a trance while inside warp space took very little time at all, unsurprisingly enough. Reaching for the nasty, largely-forgotten Marauders memories she’d briefly relived during her tour of duty aboard the starship Totenkopf happened just as quickly, inasmuch as time had any meaning inside this fucked up universe.

  The Marauders had been Class Two humanoids, distant genetic cousins to humans, the Puppies and thousands other sophonts in the galaxy. That had been before they ventured into the depths of the Starless Path, however. The Kranxans who built the Black Tower and buried a powerful entity deep within its foundations looked nothing like the shape God, evolution or the DNA-blueprint of the Original Races had bestowed upon them. Warp exposure had mutated them into a myriad shapes, each more grotesque than the last. Further disfiguration had been caused by their penchant for body modifications, cybernetic enhancement and, towards the end, chimerical bioengineering. Only their lowest classes, the drone workers and serfs, resembled the originals in any way, and only because they spent most of their lives in normal space, being unworthy of entering the Path.

  The Kranxans had a strict caste system. At the top were the Overlords; every member of that caste was a monster, physically and spiritually. Warriors and Techno-Priests came next, and they were only slightly less unpleasant to look at. Tumorous growths sprouted at random through their bodies, pushing through their skins, a source of constant pain that had to be cut off and cauterized every so often to prevent crippling deformities. Tentacles, extra arms and spines were also common, the product of warp mutations, artificial limbs, or grafts from other species; those had uses, unlike the tumors, but constantly hurt. Being a Marauder meant enduring a state of constant pain and discomfort, to the point that most of them accepted the aches as part of normal existence. That might explain their utter lack of empathy towards the suffering of others, although sadism had become endemic to their species and culture long before the physical changes.

  To swim in the aliens’ stream of consciousness was to be surrounded by contradictory, nonsensical thoughts, interrupted by sudden bursts of laughter or fits of paralyzing depression, and constantly beset by strange voices. Interpersonal violence was almost routine, triggered by anything or nothing at all. No Marauder went a day without exchanging blows with another, and only their advanced medical technology kept deaths to a tolerable minimum; even so, their murder rate was higher than what you’d find in the worst Earth slum or even among hunter-gatherers.

  It should be impossible to achieve anything in that kind of society, but the Overlords rode herd over the upper castes, who in turn kept some sort of order among the rest. The Marauder rulers were functional psychopaths, focused on gathering power and becoming living gods. Their vision of Transcendence involved bringing warp and normal space together and creating a new realm of existence where their thoughts and emotions would become as real as light or gravity. If they had succeeded, the universe would become Hell, with them as the devils on top.

  The Overlords hadn’t gotten there, but at the peak of their power they were able to open gates into warp space by the power of their will alone, although they could only travel for relatively short distances through them. Compared to the Pathfinders, they were bush-league; next to everyone else, they were the closest things to gods. And those godlike bastards had attained a degree of control over even more powerful beings: the natives of warp space. They had even enslaved some Warplings. The entity trapped inside the Black Tower was one of them.

  Crap. Sometimes no amount of profanity would serve.

  The Warpling in the basement had been lobotomized; all it had left were its instructions and a growing, never satisfied rage that it could only vent against any intruders. A category which certainly included Lisbeth and her merry band of soldiers and explorers. Mindless as it was, the construct could still enjoy a nice massacre. Waking it up didn’t sound like a good idea.

  “Wake up!” she shouted at it. Her mind was finally attuned to the Marauders’ frequencies, and her call reached the dead Overlord.

  IDENTIFY YOURSELF.

  The simple instruction was laden with menace. The entity was waiting for a chance to strike, held back only by the psychic leash its creators had put on it. If the answer wasn’t satisfactory, it would be free to act.

  Lying through a telepathic connection was nearly impossible. Lisbeth sank deeper into the group memories of the Marauders she’d communed wi
th during her own tour in hell, wrapped herself in the aura of the Overlords, and did her best to imitate one of them. She also threw in a bit of drill instructor into it for good measure.

  “I am your master! You dare question me, you pathetic maggot? You’re a disgrace. Now open up!”

  The words were automatically translated into the closest Marauder equivalents. That was the positive thing about telepathy: meaning came through, avoiding the hurdles imposed by different languages and cultures. For a long moment, the enslaved warp demon was taken aback. Lisbeth sensed confusion and fear; the poor bastard couldn’t think or remember, but it could still be made to suffer, and failure to obey its creators was punished with massive doses of agony. She might have just pulled it off.

  The Keeper turned its full attention to her. That’s all it took. Lisbeth found her life flashing past her eyes – and past the Keeper’s eyes. Her Marauder disguise was ripped off and she found herself completely exposed to the entity.

  INTRUDER ALERT. COUNTERMEASURES INITIATED.

  Motherfu…

  Before she could finish, the word vanished in a wave of white-hot pain.

  The earth shook, lights flashed and the dormant guardians of Redoubt-Five came awake.

  * * *

  The hazy morning light turned into a bursting rainbow display all over Camp Discovery and the valley around it.

  “Multiple emergences detected.”

  Fromm noted the calm notification from the Humboldt while he tried to figure out what was going on. He’d seen plenty of warp drops from both ends, but the apertures he could see some thirty meters up in the air weren’t generating the air vortices – and follow-up explosive effects – that warp openings normally triggered in an atmosphere. The tremors under his feet weren’t normal either. Normal or not, he knew that nobody on the ground would like whatever came out of those gates.

  It took him two seconds to take the compiled data from multiple sensor sources and turn it into a situation report: eight apertures had appeared, all above ground, and all inside his defensive perimeter. Another second to order everyone to open fire on the incoming visitors; his imp’s command processor assigned fire sectors based on proximity to target and prevention of blue-on-blue incidents. Most of his Marines were positioned to fire outwards, with their backs to the apertures. And the LAVs, the tank platoon and the shuttles were anywhere between five and twenty klicks away, bombing the native flora and fauna.

  He’d fucked up, in other words.

  Four seconds after they’d appeared – half as long as a normal warp catapult launch took to materialize – the colorful hell-gates disgorged their passengers, one apiece.

  Small arms fire greeted the newcomers: eight floating masses of flesh, bone and chitin, bound in cables and straps, no two alike except in their grotesqueness. Like the corpses they’d discovered in the unearthed tower, the monsters had multiple limbs and heads, parts from dozens of sophonts and animals grafted together and enhanced with cybernetic implants. Fromm’s range-finder app measured the closest one: five meters long and wide, with three heads and a dozen limbs, most of them holding or tipped with assorted weaponry. What bits of clothing and armor they wore were uniformly black, with the same polished obsidian sheen of the tower.

  A handful of Marines from Second Platoon were the first to react. Spherical shields flared up around the Marauders as bursts of 4mm plasma-tipped rounds detonated around their targets. A volley of 20mm Plasma Armor-Piercing rounds created bigger fireballs at the points of impact, but Fromm couldn’t see any damage when it dissipated.

  “Targets are hardened. Repeat, hardened targets.”

  That was enough information for trained veterans. They would coordinate and concentrate their fire to beat through heavy shields and armor.

  Fromm ran for the command post. No time to think about Heather and Major Zhang, horribly exposed atop the Kranxan building, or the only slightly less vulnerable Navy and civilian personnel clustered around it. No time for anything but to reach his prepared position and coordinate the fight.

  One of the floating Marauders seemed to explode: that welcome illusion was soon shattered when lines of energy and missile contrails erupted from its body. It hadn’t been destroyed; it was returning fire. The rest followed suit moments later, battering the Marine positions with dozens of different weapon systems.

  A sudden shockwave threw Fromm a dozen meters sideways, knocking his body through a tent’s hardened walls. The world went black for a moment. Fromm blinked; his imp let him know he’d been unconscious for five seconds and that his personal force field had been reduced by thirty-six percent. The pain from his bruised ribs didn’t need any explanation. His medical implants quenched the pain as he struggled to his feet; he wasn’t dead or unconscious, and as long as that was the case he could fight.

  A quartet of Hellcats ran past him, filling the air with anti-armor missiles. Their target staggered in the air but didn’t fall.

  It was hurt, though, and if the Marines could hurt them they could kill them.

  * * *

  “The fuck did they come from?”

  Russell ignored Gonzo’s shout. He was too busy shifting every fucking thing around to deal with the tangos that had warped in the middle of the valley. Most of their area force fields were facing the wrong way, and some of the giant aliens were inside the perimeter shield. It was the kind of trick the Warp Marines liked to pull on ETs. Turnabout was fair play, and fair play was a stone-cold bitch.

  “On my mark, goddammit!” Sergeant Fuller called on the squad channel. The prick in charge of First Platoon was yelling the same thing at a few grunts who were still shooting on their own. Russell had already seen bursts of Iwo and SAW fire doing fuck-all to the aliens’ shields. Only way to hurt those bastards was to pour it on like they were killing tanks.

  And just like tanks, these fuckers could shoot back.

  Grampa hit the ground like he was scoring a touchdown, the portable field gennie in his hands. A moment later, a stream of particle beams splattered against the area shield and drained it from a hundred all the way to thirty-two percent. If the old bastard hadn’t gotten there in time, they’d all be dead or wounded.

  An infantry fireteam wasn’t so lucky. Their position was swallowed by a burst of graviton beams. Russell noted the sudden splash of red and black among the roster carats, but most of his attention was on the aiming point the squad sergeant had marked for him, right in the middle of a four-headed nightmare that was firing at least seven different guns at the same time. He had to force himself to hold his fire until everyone was lined up. He flipped the continuous beam switch on the Widowmaker. No fucking around here.

  Now.

  He, Gonzo, the other two fireteams in his squad, and every gun and launcher from First Platoon hit the ugly motherfucker. The tango’s shield shone like a phosphorous flare under the storm and fire. It failed a moment later and the six Widowmakers’ continuous beams got through. The deformed alien exploded like a blood sausage in a microwave.

  “Dance fucker, dance,” Grampa yelled as chunks of alien started raining down everywhere. Russell let out a breath he’d been holding through the continuous shot. One down.

  A missile struck about ten meters further down the hill. Fire and damnation washed over their area field and filled the world with crushing agony.

  Not again, Russell had time to think before the lights went out.

  Ten

  Redoubt-Five, 167 AFC

  A shuttle broke apart in mid-air when its shields failed under a barrage of hypervelocity slugs and graviton beams. Its sensor feed went dead a moment before its flaming hull plummeted to the ground, pieces of torn fuselage trailing behind it, along with a plume of black smoke.

  Heather McClintock had a first-row seat to the shuttle’s demise. Unfortunately, all she could do was watch the battle raging all around her. She, Lisbeth and the two hapless spacers with them were crawling towards the edge of the tower, for all the good huddling in the pit w
ith the Marine engineers trying to return fire with their sidearms would do.

  Any second now, one of the bloated monsters flying overhead would notice the interlopers on top of the partially-unearthed tower and would erase them from existence with any of its dozens of weapons. Her beamer was clenched in her right hand, but she’d seen the creatures shrug off direct hits from anti-tank rockets, so she might as well hurl insults at her killer as shoot at it.

  “Heather,” Lisbeth called to her mentally. The Marine pilot had passed out for a moment, but was back in action, her own service pistol out. The stubby PPK would be only marginally better than Heather’s beamer, but neither woman was in the mood to die without trying something.

  “Any famous last words?” Heather replied.

  “I want to try something, and I could use your help.”

  Last time Lisbeth had tried something, the pack of Marauders about to slaughter them had shown up, but at this point they literally had nothing to lose.

  “Sure. What do you need?”

  “I’m going on a mind trip. Care to provide backup?”

  Something big blew up, close enough to shake them and drain their personal force fields by a sizable percentage. They weren’t going to make it off the tower. Heather nodded.

  “I’ll follow your lead.”

  The murderous battle disappeared. Heather was back in her personal mental haven, a tea room complete with comfy chairs and hot tea for everyone. Lizbeth was there. So was a gigantic alien with iridescent blue-green skin, three large eyes and no nose, mouth or any eating or breathing apparatus she could see. It had no legs, only a pair of long arms terminating in seven long multi-jointed fingers. It regarded Heather steadily, and she felt certain it was somehow smiling at her.