In Dread Silence (Warp Marine Corps Book 4)

by C. J. Carella

  Good thing it’s not my job to figure out that shit.

  His job at the moment was to make sure his team’s Widowmakers were set up properly. They were on top of a hill, and positioned so they could fire both in and out of the valley where the buried building was located. If some giant sea monster came on by, they’d take under fire as soon as it came into range, unless otherwise ordered. Until then, they could chill out.

  The Humboldt was coming down to engage the contact, so it must be something big.

  Russell didn’t have access to the ship’s sensors, but he took a peek of the sensor feed from the shuttles flying towards the contact. Whatever had dragged itself from beneath the ocean’s floor was big. Spaceship big. The vid feed showed their ride home hovering near the edge of the atmosphere and opening up with its main batteries. Multiple bolts of black lightning struck the sea, vaporizing entire cubic kilometers of water. Grav beams didn’t produce heat directly, but the side effects of the sudden tidal forces they generated did all kinds of messed-up stuff to fluids and atmospheric gases, especially when fired from 640mm guns, over twice the size of a Marine tank cannon and with five times the effective punch.

  Hopefully the starship would take care of whatever was coming up, but Russell wasn’t holding his breath.

  He was about to ask Gonzo what movie this all reminded him of, when the world disappeared. There was nothing but darkness all around, but he wasn’t alone. The dead were there. Not zombies, just all the people he’d killed over the years. He’d seen them plenty of times, whenever he caught a ride on a starship or was catapulted into a target. But this time they’d come visit him here, in the real world. They could touch him here.

  They could kill him here.

  Fifteen

  New Texas System, 167 AFC

  The USS Mount Whitney died hard, but die it did.

  For nearly an hour, the Great Peak-class battleship had traded broadsides with three Wyrm dreadnoughts. The former US allies crewing those ships had paid a savage price for their treachery – one of them was a drifting derelict, left without power and shields and barely any life support – but they had sunk their target, once the pride of First Fleet, and for three decades one of the most powerful combat units of the US Navy. Sixty years of history and five thousand souls were devoured in an instant when several power plants brewed up at once, unleashing subatomic fires hot enough to ignite tungsten. A flash of pure white shut down the visual sensors for several seconds; when it dissipated nothing remained; whatever solid fragments had survived the explosion were flying in every direction at meteoric speeds.

  Fleet Admiral Nicholas Kerensky filed away the spectacle as yet another data point, of some significant in the strategic picture but nothing to be dwelt upon at the moment. Like any great battle, the space action raging along the orbital path of New Texas-Six was full of acts of heroism and heart-breaking tragedies, all of which would be pored upon by future human historians, assuming there was a future that included humanity.

  Seventh Fleet was holding. Perhaps even winning, if one put a favorable spin to the casualty figures on both sides. Both formations had suffered losses in the thirty percent range. Kerensky had just enough discretion that not retreating at this point wasn’t technically in violation of his orders, but he knew his superiors would disagree. By rights, he should have packed it in a good while ago. On the other hand, the enemy had suffered just as badly. Even more importantly, the inherent problems of a coalition of diverse species and cultures were beginning to become apparent.

  After the Leegor ships and their troublesome miniature missile barrages had been taken care of, Kerensky’s fighters had turned their attention back to the Gimp capital vessels and killed them all. Fighter losses had been surprisingly low, a blessed bit of news amidst the carnage his regular formations had endured. Without the coordination from the Imperium ships, each ‘volunteer’ flotilla had begun to falter. A few more determined pushes and those lukewarm allies might break.

  The problem was, Kerensky had only one thing left to make that push: the warp fighters that had done everything that was humanly possible, and more. All the guidelines meant to keep pilots from collapsing due to exhaustion and warp exposure had been tossed out the airlock. The surviving two hundred and sixty-three people manning those War Eagles were now operating under a near-toxic combination of Wide-Awake stimulants and Melange. Two senior medical officers had resigned in protest at the orders to keep pumping the pilots full of drugs; one of them was in the Odin’s brig. Doctor Terence Ness was an old friend and colleague of Kerensky’s, but he’d tried to relieve the fleet admiral in the middle of a battle. Doctor Ness was going to be undergoing a psych eval of this own, when this was over.

  Just three or four more sorties, and we’re done.

  He hated doing that to men and women who’d already given everything they had, but there was no alternative. Seventh Fleet’s ships of the line were barely hanging on. Although only thirty percent of his total tonnage had been destroyed outright, all the survivors were so heavily damaged that their main gun batteries could no longer maintain a steady rate of fire. What little energy they had left after half or more of their power plants were shut down was needed to maintain their warp shields and force fields.

  Every missile from both sides had been fired, but the enemy could still deliver full-power broadsides while Kerensky’s ships were firing sporadically and relying mostly on their weaker secondary armament, which had been repurposed for anti-missile duty and lacked the punch to inflict critical damage on even a battlecruiser, let alone a capital ship. Without its fighters, Seventh Fleet in its current state had the effective firepower of a frigate formation.

  The orders went out. There were only enough intact carriers to support a half of the surviving fighters, but a few bright officers had set up a rotation system that allowed them to supply every surviving War Eagle in the fleet, provided none of them spent more than five minutes being tended to. That meant lowering maintenance standards and increasing the risk those little flying cannon would suffer malfunctions during their attack runs, when trying to return to the carriers, and worst of all, during warp transit.

  Three more sorties. Four at most.

  There were no protests. Every surviving Space Wing – most of them had been reorganized, combining the remains of squadrons that had been decimated or worse – launched as scheduled, and alien ships began to die in earnest.

  * * *

  My copilot is the Devil.

  There was still enough humanity left inside Gus ‘Bingo’ Chandler to cringe at the thought and the truth behind it. He’d made the deal, along with most of the other warp pilots, and he would pay the price for the rest of his life. And possibly a good long while beyond that.

  Grinner Genovisi was gone. Not dead, though, and a small part of him was grateful for that; the rest of him was pissed off. She’d fled into warp space after her own squadron tried to murder her. It was amazing how quickly you could turn on people who’d saved your life. Grinner deserved better than that, but there was no other way. Once everybody else in the Fourth Carrier Space Wing decided to make their bargain, they couldn’t risk having a potential traitor in their ranks. Grinner had to go.

  She was still somewhere out there. Maybe she’d even manage to come out the other side alive; her navigator skills might be enough to let her emerge somewhere survivable, although that seemed impossible. As far as Gus knew, War Eagles could only jump five light-hours at a time, with a maximum transit time measured in seconds. Chances were she’d never emerge into real space. Too bad, but it had to be done.

  His shrug turned into a shiver. Not his problems. They had their orders, and every swinging dick was on their way to finish this fight once and for all. After everything they had done, winning this battle – winning the whole war – was the least they had earned.

  Transition.

  As soon as he entered warp space, his own personal Foo was by his side. No, not by his side. Inside his head.
Gus didn’t have to create illusions anymore. He could see what was really in warp space. He could see what he had become.

  This will be a fine meal.

  The thought was his own, but the impulse behind it was alien in a way no ET in the galaxy could be. Even the Class Four silicon-based critters that lived in planetary systems nobody else wanted didn’t draw nourishment from devouring souls. Or whatever it was Warplings took from their victims. You could call it information, the sum total of some poor bastard’s thoughts, emotions and actions. Gus wasn’t sure what the Foos did, but he knew that it was wrong in an absolute, fundamental way. He had damned himself.

  It happened during his first sortie. He’d ghosted, forcing his fighter to stay in warp space while he hammered a Gimp superdreadnought. The Foo had come after him; in Gus’ head it was as if he’d been treading water on the surface of some bottomless sea and noticed a huge dark shape rising from the depths and reaching for him. Panic had almost made him bail out of warp, where the enemy’s point defense would have shredded him instantly. Instead, he’d done what Beak Dokhai had taught him.

  “Wait!” he shouted with his mind at the impossibly large thing about to engulf him. “Wait!”

  Incredibly, it had worked. The Foo had stopped just short of consuming him.

  “What do you want?” he asked the monster.

  Eat. Want to eat.

  The mental sound was still the distorted voice of his nightmares, but the meaning had come through clearly enough. Gus had understood what he had to do, what the Foo meant about eating, and how to satisfy its hunger.

  “All right,” he said, felling like he had crossed a line he’d never be able to uncross. “Do it.”

  He was still ghosting, still shooting at the Gimp ship, but the Foo was looking through his eyes, and as his cannon broke through the enemy’s hull, killing a dozen ETs in the path of the beam, he felt the Foo reach into the physical world and take something from the recently dead. Disjoined images flashed through his eyes, scenes from the lives of those dead aliens. Most of them should have made little sense to a human, but he somehow understood them all. Moments of joy and sorrow, triumph and loss, experiences that made those tangos what they had been: soldiers, parents, workers. They were gone in an instant, absorbed by the Warpling using Gus the way a fisherman would use a boat or a pier by the shore.

  Good.

  Gus blasted the target two more times; the coordinated fire of Flight B stabbed deep into the super-dred, killing Eets by the thousands, and the Foos devoured every single one. By the time he closed the aperture, the target was heavily damaged and the Warplings were feeling pretty damn good. Gus himself felt almost at peace. Yeah, it’d been bad – no, it had been fucking horrible – but it was over. He’d paid the toll, and now he could keep on fighting with zero risk to himself. Sure, he sort of felt bad for those aliens the Foo had absorbed, but they deserved it. The part of him that hated all nonhumans was fine and dandy with feeding them to the Devil, if that’s what they were dealing with. Nobody had forced them to make war on humanity. Whatever they got, they’d asked for it.

  Once he took the first step, he found that the next one was a bit easier, and the one after that even more so. His squadron was kicking ass. The Foos were protecting them now, and ghosting had never been easier. Impervious while firing from warp, they could take their time and line up their shots perfectly. Six or twelve cannon hits in the same spot would bend even a superdreadnought. Each sortie they racked up a couple of kills or assists. The only one dragging them back was Grinner. Even after Papa got on with the program, she refused, and the Foos were beginning to get pissed off about it.

  On the seventh sortie – they were on triple doses of Melange to keep it together by then – the Warpling flashed an image of Grinner.

  Food. Not helpful. If not helpful, then food.

  “You can have all the aliens you want – except the Puppies, they’re okay – but Grinner’s American. Not food. Capice?”

  Food.

  They made it through two more sorties – they sent two battleships to hell, and the Foos ate all nineteen thousand-plus crewmembers in them – before the demands for Grinner’s soul became too much to ignore. That’s when Papa and the rest of the squadron decided she had to go. They’d held an impromptu meeting while in transit. It hadn’t been a happy one.

  “We all owe her, man.” That had been SOL, who’d turned out to be a good pilot after all, thanks to Grinner. But he didn’t mean what he said, and everyone knew it. Soledad was scared, and he was trying to talk himself into doing what he had to do to escape being eaten by the Foos.

  “We all do,” Mooch agreed, also meaning nothing. Hard to be a hypocrite when your mind was linked to everyone else’s. “But she’s going to mess up the deal. We’re making our runs with near-zero casualties now. Most of the people we’re losing as the ones who don’t want to deal with the Foos. So Grinner is good as dead, no matter what we do.”

  “So why not wait? Let things, you know, take its course?”

  “Because then the Foos will know we’re not reliable. That we’re not willing to go the distance.”

  Gus was shocked to realize the words were coming from him, but he kept on going. Each step got easier than the last. “Look, we’re all making sacrifices for the greater good. Grinner not going along, well, she’s being selfish. She’s hurting everybody. After all we’ve done.”

  He let them think about it for a bit. They all felt guilty about their deal with the Foos, but at the same time they all felt like they were part of something bigger, something important.

  “We did what had to be done, but she acts like she’s too good for that. She could ruin everything. She has to go.”

  After that, all that was left was figure out how to do the deed. The only time they could have a ‘friendly fire’ incident would be while docking with the Enterprise, and they couldn’t shoot her down in front of witnesses. None of their other ideas panned out, and they were about to give up. That’s when the Foos crashed their virtual meeting.

  SOL stood up and screamed briefly before he changed. Nothing they saw in the warp illusion was real, of course, but watching their buddy’s eyes turn solid black was still scary as hell. And his voice when he spoke was worse. But the Warpling solved their problem. All they had to do was let their Foos have her. A simple mental signal from the pilots and their new buddies would do the rest. They had all agreed, freely and of their own free will. The Foo had let SOL go, but the pilot didn’t look well afterwards. Nobody did, after agreeing to kill one of their own.

  Except Grinner saw it coming somehow, and when the squadron jumped she vanished. Tricky bitch.

  “Not a bitch,” Gus muttered. “A witch.”

  Hungry.

  “Almost there.”

  Emergence.

  A Wyrm ship this time, one of the dreadnoughts that had sunk the Mount Whitney. Killing those turncoats was a pleasure. Nine War Eagles fired as one and let the big Wyrashat dragon-ship have it. Forty-five blasts at point-blank range, coordinated so each successive volley went right into the breach the previous one had opened; that was more than enough to make it burn. The Foos fed upon the dying, and it was like watching a school of piranhas going on a blood-frenzy. Ten thousand alien souls were devoured, and watching them go didn’t feel bad anymore. Gus actually enjoyed it.

  After that, he didn’t talk to his Foo anymore. Its thoughts were just another part of him.

  * * *

  “They are trying to run, Your Highness!”

  The Lord of Tactics was exhausted, but surprise and shock livened up his tone. Grace-Under-Pressure watched the data herself on the holotank, unwilling to believe her eyes. The enemy fleet, the hundred or so ships still able to maneuver, reversed course and tried to open the range in order to return to their departure point. The American and Hrauwah ships left – the entire Pan-Asian contingent had perished in the battle – wouldn’t be able to mount an effective pursuit, not in their current condit
ion. Even the fighters…

  “Multiple warp emergences detected around the enemy ships: American fighter vessels. It appears Fleet Admiral Kerensky isn’t willing to let them escape.”

  “They must be out of their minds,” Grace said. Those pilots had been fighting continuously for nearly eight hours. She’d been briefed on the maximum number of transitions they could perform safely; that number had been exceeded halfway through the fight, and their operational tempo had actually increased after that. By rights, all the pilots should be dead or hopelessly insane by now; instead, their casualties had come to a halt and the little flying cannon had pounded the enemy into scrap without taking any further losses.

  As she watched, the last remnant of the grand alliance against humanity – half a dozen civilizations, most of which had never cooperated with one another – fell one by one until none remained. Once again, a battle ended with the total annihilation of one side. What had been something of a rarity in Starfarer affairs had turned into the normal state of affairs when humans were involved.

  With those fighters, they do not need us.

  That thought wouldn’t have been so alarming before humans had demonstrated how truly dangerous they were – and how angry they must be at all Starfarers. Grace was certain the Wyrashats wouldn’t have willingly sent their ships to fight side by side with an enemy that had threatened their very existence a few months before. The Alliance must have coerced them, and even then those ships had sailed to battle under the flag of the Galactic Imperium, and not their own. Such quibbling might not matter, however. Every polity that had joined that ill-fated fleet would pay a price, now that the humans had gained the upper hand.