The Kranxan word for mercy meant mostly ‘weak’ and ‘foolish’ with undertones of doing something forbidden. They deserved getting their souls flayed and filleted. Of course, if the Flayer decided humans had it coming as well, she didn’t know what they could do to stop it.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Some Marauder weapons can hurt Warplings. When I was in my Corpse-Ship, I shot some of them.”
“The ones you destroyed were minor manifestations, Christopher Robin. Little more than scattered bits of information from the memories of dead things, given a semblance of volition by the weakest dwellers in the Path.”
“I suppose being called Christopher Robin is better than Meal-on-Legs,” she told Atu. “So nothing in this world can kill those things?”
“Some of the weapons you found in the Battler I regrettably slew might cause some pain and discomfort, distracting it for a brief time.”
“Better than nothing, I guess.”
She contacted Captain Fromm, not looking forward to trying to explain what had happened here, and what would happen in the morning.
* * *
Fromm went over the names and stats of the fourteen Marines he was about to lead into the Black Tower.
Gunny Freito had insisted on accompanying him. So had Staff Sergeant Goldberg and Lieutenant Hansen, but he couldn’t spare them from the responsibilities he was shirking, so Freito would have to do. The Gunnery Sergeant was built like a fire hydrant, short and with disproportionately broad shoulders, the result of muscle enhancements. He was carrying a salvaged Marauder weapon, a particle beam weapon that Major Zhang believed could hurt the Warpling that had killed Lee the night before. The heavy weapon fired powerful but short-ranged blasts, ideal for close-quarters combat. Some jury-rigging allowed it to feed from standard power packs, but it went through them very quickly. Three to five shots would empty a pack. Freito had draped a bandolier of spares over his armor, giving him a piratical look.
Three Marines in the squad wielded plasma flame-throwers. Zhang thought extreme heat might also fend off the entity. The rest of the squad made do with their regular Infantry Weapons.
Heather was wearing a set of Marine combat armor; she was familiar with the system and its limitations. She was armed with a beamer shotgun, well-suited for urban combat. Their one civilian volunteer, Doctor Munson, would make do with a haz-con suit, a personal force field and a hand beamer.
All in all, they wouldn’t be bringing along a great deal of firepower, but anything heavier would be as likely to kill his own people as the target when fighting in enclosed spaces. If more of the Marauders who’d savaged his company and destroyed two shuttles and one tank were waiting for them, they would have to count on Major Zhang’s magic tricks to take care of them. Fromm didn’t like counting on the half-crazy woman – despite her reassurances, they’d lost one Marine the previous night – but she was all they had.
Except for Heather, he corrected himself. She had helped fight off the Marauders with her implants. And she would do whatever was necessary to get the job done. He could count on that.
“You’re in charge, Hansen,” he told his second in command. “Good luck.”
“Happy hunting, sir.”
Fromm nodded and turned towards the Black Tower. Zhang was standing near it, waiting for everyone to get ready. Once they were, she started working her voodoo.
The previous two attempts had resulted in increasingly violent responses. If it happened again…
A circular opening appeared on the wall’s surface, more than tall and wide enough to fit two or three Marines in full battle rattle. Nothing else happened.
If something is too easy, it’s almost certainly y a trap.
They went in.
* * *
The only thing worse than taking the express elevator to Hell was having to climb down a vertical shaft to get there. Not that anything was going to stop Lisbeth Zhang, USWMC. She had things to do, Kranxan tombs to plunder, and one nation indivisible to save.
At least there were plenty of handholds. More than enough, since the access shaft designers had to take into account that its likely users would come in all sizes and shapes. When the Black Tower was built, there were hardly any normal Kranxans left, courtesy of the mutating effects of overexposure to warp space, their love for cybernetics, and their habit of grafting other species’ limbs and organs onto themselves. Their service tunnels could be accessed by anybody except Battlers and Overlords, whose dimensions just didn’t fit anything you could call a ‘tunnel’ or ‘shaft’ and who considered such places to be beneath them anyway.
The American team had to use the servants’ entrance because the first seven or eight levels of the Black Tower were choked with corpses. Removing thousands of bodies would take more time than they had. The same final directives that had locked in the dead Kranxans had also shut them off the service tunnels, so those areas were clear. Once they got past the top levels, the number of dead aliens should drop off noticeably. Among other reasons, because the thing they’d been running away from had left no remains of the unlucky bastards it had caught.
Lisbeth still didn’t know exactly what had happened, but some of the memories she’d absorbed from the Tower’s partially functional security systems had shown her fleeing Marauders exploding into clouds of particles like so many dandelions in the wind. Their shields and armor had turned to dust as easily as their flesh when they were touched by long shimmering tendrils that seemed to appear and disappear at random. The manifested Warpling was something that extended beyond the normal three dimensions of space, or the fourth dimension of time. Not even the Kranxans’ enhanced senses could really see their tormentor. The few who had stood and fought hadn’t even slowed it down, either.
Can’t wait to meet it, she thought as she kept climbing down. I’m sure that’ll be a memorable experience, all two seconds of it before it makes me go ‘poof.’
“Have some faith,” Atu told her. “Even the fiercest Warpling can be swayed by those who have achieved Balance within them.”
“That’s your job. I’m many things, but balanced ain’t one of them.”
Her invisible friend fell silent for a bit, and she had some moments of blessed silence on the long climb down. Lisbeth was lugging over half again her body weight in armor, weapons and gear. The exoskeleton of her standard-issue Marine suit was doing most of the work, but the fifteen percent of so that fell to her own muscles was no picnic.
There were seven people below her; half the Marine squad, plus Captain Fromm. Heather was right above Lisbeth, then Doctor Munson – who was being belayed down by half a dozen extra safety lines fastened to his suit – and the rest of the squad behind him, with Gunnery Sergeant Freito bringing up the rear. She should have been the first one in, but they’d decided she was too important to take point. They better not blame her if one of those grunts got killed because she wasn’t there to deal with something they weren’t equipped to handle. She had their sensor feeds running through her imp, so she could see what they did, but it was hard to concentrate on them and make her climb, let alone dealing with the voices in her head.
The Marine on point – Lance Corporal Schwartz – stopped at a landing, the ninth one they’d encountered on the way down. Only six more to go before they reached the hangar level.
Another Kranxan infodump hit her – from the Tower or Vlad; she wasn’t sure which – and it was a doozy. Corpse-Ships arriving to their cradles, effortlessly slipping into the physical realm from the Starless Path. Their pilots uncoupled themselves from the attachment points that connected them to the undead Pathfinder bodies they’d enslaved. The Kranxans used their Corpse-Ships like hermit crabs, wearing the skeletons like shells. The Marauders’ bodies had been hardened to survive the rigors of vacuum and warp space both, so they no longer needed cockpits, carrying their ships more like backpacks than vehicles.
The sudden vision almost made her lose her grip and drop until her safety line broke her fall, whi
ch would have been painful and humiliating.
Guess piloting those ships is going to take some doing.
The old Corpse-Ship had a cockpit of sorts, but the newer models didn’t. Something else to figure out when she found them. Lisbeth grunted and kept climbing. If that was her only problem, she’d be elated. She added it to the pile that started with ‘freeing the Keeper’ and was followed by ‘dealing with the Flayer of Souls.’
So far, neither Warpling had bothered her party. The Keeper had accepted the access codes she’d stolen from Vlad’s memories. She suspected that wouldn’t last long, however. The Corpse-Ship hangar was off-limits to everyone except pilots, technicians with the proper clearances and Overlords. Battlers weren’t on the list.
I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it.
“You will burn, most certainly you will burn,” Vlad told her. “Done carefully, a sophont can be cooked to perfection and remain alive long enough to watch as the carving of her body begins…”
“It appears my last lesson didn’t sink in,” Atu interrupted him.
Vlad started screeching again. For a master torturer, he sure whined a lot.
Just a little longer.
* * *
Heather McClintock ignored the insanity echoing from Lisbeth’s mind and concentrated on climbing down.
She’d been avoiding telepathic conversations with the Marine pilot since that nightmarish fight against the Kranxan Battlers. After Lisbeth became linked with a Marauder as it died, she had been on the edge to a total psychotic breakdown. Heather was afraid of what might happen if Lisbeth lost her mind while they were in contact.
And yet you vouched for her. We could be on our way back to Xanadu instead of going off to fight ghosts and demons in a haunted tower. This is clearly a case of the insane leading the stupid.
Heather shrugged. It was a little late in the game to change her mind. Besides, they were almost there.
“This is it, boys and girls,” Lisbeth said over the squad channel. “The next landing down is our objective, but we’re going to stop on the level above, for reasons I’ll go into soon. Stay frosty.”
They were fourteen levels – about twenty stories if this was a human building – down, twelve of those belowground. Their armor’s environmental controls kept them cool enough, but the temperature was higher than on the surface: a hundred and nine degrees Fahrenheit versus eighty-five up above. One might say it was getting hellishly hot down there. The shaft was about ten meters wide, and seemed ordinary enough, just a cylindrical hole descending endlessly into the darkness, featureless except for a variety of hand- and footholds. Even the Kranxans didn’t care to get fancy with areas only lowly minions would normally use. On every level, there was a landing and a catwalk around the edge of the shaft. Heather couldn’t see any doors, but there had been no sign of the entrances that had led them there, either. The building’s materials could retract open on command and close seamlessly in reverse. Another bit of advanced technology that had been lost to the current crop of Starfarers.
Lisbeth reached the landing, squeezed past one of the Marines and touched the featureless surface. A flurry of t-waves passed between her and the building. She was speaking with the enslaved Warpling that controlled the entire tower. Although she couldn’t quite make out the conversation, Heather had a feel that Warpling’s ‘voice’ was very loud and very angry. The last time, a gang of Battlers had attacked the landing party. Hopefully Lisbeth would do better this time.
By the time Heather reached the landing, a door had opened. A Marine fireteam went through the door first. Everything seemed to be clear on the tunnel leading further into that level.
“Everything okay?” Heather asked Lisbeth, using her regular imp.
“No. But we’re inside, and that’s all that matters. I couldn’t get us directly to the hangar level. There were complications.”
“What kind of complications?”
“Short version: we need to free the Keeper before it will let us enter the hangar. I sort of woke it up, but it is trapped by its programming. I have to release it.”
“Any idea how to do that?”
“Yes, but it’s going to take you, me and the big scientist guy. And the Marines will have to watch out for the other Warpling and any other surprises that might be around. There aren’t any live Kranxans left on this planet, but they might still be trouble. Let’s get everyone inside and I’ll explain.”
“All right.”
Heather didn’t think anything was all right, but they’d come too far to turn back.
Thirteen
New Texas System, 167 AFC
The reconnaissance flotilla emerged from the warp valley linking New Texas to Capricorn. Some of the nimble frigates were damaged; the scouts had waited until the enemy was within two light seconds before jumping away, and they’d taken fire in the process. Their patience had paid off, even if their detailed report contained nothing but bad news.
It is hard to gloat about being proven right when the evidence is about to come crashing upon you like the wrath of the Almighty.
“The scouts’ sensor scans identified three hundred and seventy contacts,” the Tactical Officer reported before the holotank display came alive with ship icons and statistics. Admiral Kerensky absorbed the information calmly. Only the way his face became set and expressionless betrayed his feelings, but enough of the fleet bridge’s CIC crew had grown to know him enough to understand they’d been all condemned to death, and Earth and humanity along with them.
It’s a smaller fleet than the one we destroyed, at least. Although the disparity in tonnage is actually worse than last time.
The enemy formation was top-heavy. Two hundred of them were battleships, dreadnoughts or superdreadnoughts – about sixty of each. The rest were battlecruisers whose displacement and energy signatures were enough to classify them as pocket battleships. Their firepower nearly matched the Imperium-Lamprey armada the US had destroyed two weeks ago, and this time there was no possibility of a deep space ambush. Seventh Fleet was still repairing the damage from the previous battle, and even if Kerensky’s diminished fighter force could have maintained a patrol around New Texas, there hadn’t been time to arrange it. They’d just evacuated Capricorn and were still in the midst of doing the same for New Texas-Two and -Six, the two inhabited planets of the system. The Imperium’s impossible speed in assembling a new fleet had given them the initiative.
That was only half of the bad news. The reason the enemy force had arrived so quickly was that only a tenth of those hulls had been built by the Imperium. The rest of the enemy fleet was comprised of ships from other Starfarer polities. Polities that had not been at war with the United Stars as per the latest threat board update, twenty-four hours ago.
Kerensky forced himself to examine the data dispassionately. The scout squadron had taken its time identifying the enemy. The contacts were all flagged as Imperium ships, although their sensor profiles gave the lie to the transponder emissions. Which meant…
Volunteers. Or maybe purchased, borrowed or gifted ships. I suppose the Puppies aren’t the only one willing to play that game.
The Hrauwah Kingdom hadn’t committed to a full alliance with the US but instead contributed funds, materiel and entire ship formations that, while built and crewed by Puppies, flew under the Stars and Stripes. The Imperium must have persuaded other polities to do the same, except on a larger scale. The diplomatic maneuvering to make that happen must have been epic. Starfarers didn’t play well with each other; those shops included contingents of hated enemies and rivals sailing together in battle. Just as one example, a battlegroup of Lizard ships was sailing alongside a Blue Men squadron; the two civilizations that fought two nasty wars in the last century.
The mysterious Class Four species known as the Leegor – better-known as ‘Shellheads’ because they were rarely seen outside their massive armored suits – had sent seventeen massive vessels; Kerensky had to do an imp search just to familiariz
e himself, because everything the US knew of them was second-hand. As far as he knew, the Leegor had never fought against carbon-based life forms.
Even the Butterflies, who considered war an evil choice even when necessary, were represented: a squadron of oversized battlecruisers that served as their capital ships were there. The Ovals, who’d been swinging back and forth between friendly and hostile neutrality, had sent three dozen battleships to the dance. Thirty of those dreadnoughts were Wyrashat, for Christ’s sake! The Wyrms who’d fought alongside the US a few months ago and had only reluctantly surrendered to the Imperium had sent their ships along.
The event he and every other flag-rank officer in the US had dreaded had come to pass. The Starfarer community had decided the time to deal with humanity was at hand. Even though none of those other nations – seven of the fifteen major species of the galaxy were represented in the approaching armada – had declared war on the US, their ships made their position clear enough. Even if only minority factions within those polities had thrown in with the Galactic Alliance, relations between them and the US would be poisoned for the foreseeable future. Diplomats could mouth off all kinds of platitudes, but nothing could change the fact that those ships were coming over to rain death on human cities. It would be hard to do business with a species whose members had conspired to commit genocide.
Of course, if all humans were gone, their feelings on the matter would be irrelevant.
The QE telegraph on New Texas-Six would be passing on the information to Earth in real time, for what little that was worth. Even at best speed, the closest reinforcements at hand were four warp transits and at least a week away. The enemy wasn’t going to give them that much time. The enemy fleet would be arriving in a day or so, maybe sooner.
“Incoming emergence detected, five hours away. Single contact, energy signature matching a battlecruiser. Estimated arrival point at two light seconds from Warp Point Three.”
In Dread Silence (Warp Marine Corps Book 4) Page 24