In Dread Silence (Warp Marine Corps Book 4)

by C. J. Carella

  A moment later, the starship-sized seashell rising up from the ocean fired a big-ass grav beam at the Humboldt.

  “Fuck,” Russell commented as flames poured out of a glowing hole on their only ride home.

  “Too rich for my blood,” Grampa said.

  * * *

  “What the Hell is that?” Lisbeth Zhang. She might be half-human, half-Pathfinder and half-Marauder, not to mention all Marine, but she’d started her adult life as a Navy officer, and the sight of the Humboldt reeling from a direct hit by a Marauder graviton beam brought back some very bad memories.

  “That, Christopher Robin, is a Marauder War Galleon; the smaller floating creatures are its Prey Collectors. The Galleon crashed into the sea as Redoubt-Six shattered and the Flayer took its revenge on those who’d dared summon it to this world. And now, powered by the tormented spirits of its former pilots, it lives to fight once more.”

  “Now that’s the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard. It crashed. It was dead. Systems down. You can’t be operational after two hundred thousand years.”

  “Your pathetic blather only shows your ignorance,” Vlad the Marauder said. “The Galleon had our most advanced Starless Path systems, the closest we ever got to match the Pathfinders whose corpses we enslaved. Within the Path, time doesn’t matter. And when the desire is great enough, the past can become the present.”

  Lisbeth’s mind flashed images of the dead ship, its hull pierced in a dozen places, lying quietly in the cold ocean floor. Everything that could corrode, rust or dissolve was gone, and even the impossibly hardy alloys the Kranxans used for armor and structural supports were pitted and weak, overwhelmed by entropy like everything else in Creation. Only a small ember still burned in the utter darkness, unaffected by the waters’ abrasion or the crushing pressure of the ocean above. A self-powered engine, relying on the energies of the Starless Path to survive, waiting for its hour to come round at last.

  Then came the signal, and that time was at hand.

  The warp engine roared to life, traveling not through space but time, somehow. Lisbeth watched the ship’s hull reknit itself. Thousands of years rewound as if in a video. Barnacles and other sea life disappeared as the War Galleon repaired itself and came to life. Finally, guided by entities with no physical form, ghosts that could yet send commands and direct the reborn ship, it rose to fight a final battle.

  “Goddamn ghost ship. The ultimate spacer story come to life. Fuck me.”

  “That is as close as your language can approximately describe what is happening, although I know there are less crude ways of expressing it,” Atu said. “The ship is a shadow of the past, ephemeral but yet capable of inflicting great harm.”

  “I like my way of saying it better, Pooh. How do we kill it?”

  “We free the Keeper, so that it is no longer required to devote all the surviving resources of this planet to stop us intruders.”

  “In other words, less bitching, more working.”

  The big three-eyed alien nodded.

  Doctor Munson was still at it, unconcerned by everything going on in the real world. Lisbeth cold appreciate the single-minded determination, even though in this case the super-genius might wake up to find a pack of undead monsters – or starships – in the process of taking a big bite off his ass.

  I better help him get this done.

  It was a great idea, except she still didn’t know what the big guy was doing.

  From where she was standing, Munson was playing one of those brain-twister games she hated, the one where there is only one right way to arrange all the little squares, squiggles or smiley-faces and if you miss a step you have to go back to the beginning. Or something like that; she hated them enough not to even bother trying to figure out the rules. Give her a good shooter scenario, or even better, a tactical simulator where she got to run a virtual fleet, and she was in hog heaven. This was too abstract for her.

  Her Marauder memories were of little help, beyond giving Munson access to the language. Vlad had been a fighter, not to mention a moron. As far as he was concerned, system design and programming were the kind of stuff weaklings did for their betters, and even if he had the brains for it, he’d be literally damned before he deigned to learn any of it.

  Atu wasn’t much better, either. The Pathfinder would have never dreamed of enslaving a Warpling, and had never even wondered how it would go about doing such a thing. In that sense, both of her alien companions were in total agreement: that sort of thing was well below them.

  Leaving me to watch the smart guy do all the work. Can’t leave, since I need to hold his coat while he does it.

  That wasn’t all she could do, of course. She could tap into her regular implants and watch as the Humboldt beat a hasty retreat into high orbit, trailing smoke where the War Galleon had breached its hull and killed a dozen crewmembers. The converted battlecruiser kept hammering the Marauder ship, and its twenty-inchers were taking apart the unshielded Marauder vessel – but the ghost ship was repairing itself by going back to a time when it wasn’t damaged. Fucking unfair, it was.

  “I’m reversing the imprisoning process,” Munson announced. “I need five more minutes.”

  “That’s great. I think the Humboldt is going to buy it in three. I have to stop the ghost ship.”

  Maybe having a split personality would finally pay off.

  “Atu, keep a leash on Vlad and help the professor. I’m going to make a mental sortie, so to speak.”

  “Not the best idea, Christopher Robin. If you fail, the portion of your mind that is Lisbeth Zhang will be gone, leaving only myself and Vlad to wrestle control over your moral remains.”

  “I will defeat you, Pathfinder! And the first thing I will do is to shove a…”

  Lisbeth ignored them both. It wasn’t easy to do – in warp space everyone can hear you scream – but she had to figure out a way to sink the ghost ship, and she needed all her concentration for the job. By now she was used to walking on the Starless Path. Too much so: her gift would likely disqualify her from flying a Navy or Marine vessel ever again. Any psych eval would end with a couple dozen orderlies carting her off. Her only hope was to do something so extraordinary that the higher-ups would waive just about every mental fitness requirement in the book, on the grounds that if it was crazy and it worked it wasn’t that crazy after all.

  Something extraordinary like sinking an alien battleship with the power of her mind, perhaps.

  From the warp side, the ghost ship looked like a swirling maelstrom made of howling faces, just the kind of thing that would give her nightmares for the rest of her life. Since she was already somewhere on the stark raving mad spectrum, the imagery didn’t bother her all that much, so she had the presence of mind to notice the flock of Warplings surrounding the ghost ship like so many seagulls following a garbage scow. They looked pissed off at the vortex of souls or whatever it was, but something was keeping them from getting in there and kicking its ass. It took her a moment to figure it out.

  They needed an invitation from this side. Like vampires, they couldn’t enter the physical world without someone’s permission, and the Galleon was still part of that world. She had to let them in.

  Only question was, did she really want to do it?

  This sort of situation begged for Atu’s wisdom, but her buddy was busy making sure Vlad didn’t take over her body and made her do things to herself. She had to figure this out on her own.

  Every time Lisbeth had encountered Warplings, she’d tried to avoid them like the plague. Once, while piloting a Corpse-Ship, she’d managed to shoot them down. This was the first time she would try to talk to them out in their natural habitat, as opposed to the Kranxan slave in the Black Tower.

  “Hey, you!”

  Some of the ever-shifting shapes hovering on the edges of the ghost ship’s vortex turned towards her. They immediately assumed forms taken from her memory, none of them pleasant: schoolyard bullies, nasty aliens, and, worst of all, the USS
Wildcat’s dead crewmembers. Not very nice of at all. Why couldn’t pick up a nice memory? Doogie Shaw, for example: dumb as a rock, but man did he look great, and screw even better than he looked. That’d be a blast from the past she wouldn’t mind seeing.

  “You want a piece of that?” she told them, pointing at the ghost ship.

  At least they didn’t have any trouble understanding what she meant. The all glanced towards the vortex at the same time, then turned their ugly mugs back to her and nodded, also at the same time, which was a bit unnerving. But at least they were listening and not attacking, which was better than any previous interaction she’d had with the damn things.

  “You’ve got to agree to my conditions before I let you in.” She had to think about them. “First, you only have permission to destroy that ship, nothing else on my side of the universe. Second, you will go back where you came from after you are done, or five minutes of physical-world time have passed, whichever comes first, so you better make it snappy.”

  She thought about adding, ‘Third, you owe me a favor,’ then decided against it. That might be pushing her luck.

  “Understood, Captain,” the Warpling wearing Lieutenant Omar Givens’ face said, sounding just like the Wildcat’s second in command. “We agree to your terms, both in letter and spirit. Those damned souls have eluded us for too long, as you corporeal entities understand time. We are hungry.”

  “That’s great. Go ahead.”

  The Warplings moved closer, and Lisbeth felt something leaving her mind and passing on towards them. Something like an access code that let them reach an object bound to physical reality. She had opened the door for them.

  They poured in, falling upon the vortex of souls; their shapes changed back to something she couldn’t make out, maybe because she wasn’t quite crazy enough to see, at least not yet. The souls of the Marauders screamed in horror as the Warplings fell upon them and began to feed.

  “Oh, and Captain?” the Givens-shaped Warpling said, turning away from the slaughter to face her.

  “Yes?”

  “We owe you a favor. Try to collect it before you die.”

  Seventeen

  Redoubt-Five, 167 AFC

  One second, the big tentacled ship was flying after the Humboldt and shrugging off multiple hits. The next, it fell apart like a trash bag hit with a plasma gun.

  “Crazy,” Russel said as flaming bits of debris rained from the sky. The tango ship hadn’t been anywhere near them when it went up, luckily, so the only ones on the receiving end of those falling chunks of flaming metal would be the local alien critters, and they all had it coming as far as he was concerned. Whole planet could fall into the local sun for that matter. He’d been in plenty of shitholes – that description usually applied to most Marine ports of call – but this one was the worst. Not a hooker or a bar anywhere and every living thing on it wanted to kill them. Having warp ghosts on top of that just took the cake.

  The tank platoon had been about to take a swipe at the giant flying seashell when it died. Even for Devil Dogs, that had taken balls. The Normies’ guns could put a hole on a starship, assuming they got in range, but the return fire wouldn’t be survivable. Still, better to try than let their only way back to the World get shot down. Plan B would have been to warp-drop a platoon of infantry into that ugly ship, which was close enough to a suicide mission that half or more of those poor suckers wouldn’t even arrive at their destination.

  “There’s more animals headed this way, but they’re a good ways away, so it’s going to take a while,” Sergeant Fuller said. Out in the distance, whatever jungle had survived the previous days’ bombing was burning merrily.

  “Guess we managed to piss off every last motherfucker on this planet,” Gonzo said. “That’s gotta be some sort of record.”

  “Telepathic,” Grampa said. “Only way they could even know about us.”

  “Warp witchcraft,” Russell explained. He was the local expert, given his relationship with a genuine warp witch. Gonzo had lost his shit when he’d finally figured out who Russell was writing emails to.

  “The Humboldt’s orbital drones are watching activity on every continent. Critters are throwing themselves into the ocean and trying to swim here.”

  “The ones who make it there will be some tough mothers.”

  “Long trip just to get killed,” Russell said. The crew working inside the big black building had triggered some alarm, but at least it looked like the worst was over. He didn’t say that out loud. Grampa had a thing about jinxes.

  Then again, considering everything that had gone down here, he should be more careful about dismissing anything as superstitious crap. At this point, he was about ready to become Catholic or something.

  He’d seen enough devils to begin to think there just might be a God.

  * * *

  “The Keeper is free,” Doctor Munson announced.

  “That’s my cue,” Lisbeth Zhang said.

  Heather stepped away from the control node, and stoutly avoided listening in on the conversation between her friend and the Keeper. There were alien species, and then there were entirely different orders of being, creatures you might as well call angels or demons. She had no desire to become more closely acquainted with any of them.

  Peter walked up to her. “There are no more signs of activity in the area. Most of the drones survived the firefight, so as soon as the Major clears it, I’m going to send them to the next level down.”

  She nodded. “One more stop, and we are done.”

  Neither of them mentioned the second Warpling, the one that had caused most of the destruction inside the Black Tower. It hadn’t made an appearance yet. Maybe freeing the Keeper would release it as well.

  It’s never that easy.

  “We’ll take care of it,” he said. “We’ve handled everything else.”

  Neither of them believed in endless streaks of good luck, but they might as well pretend otherwise. Pessimism rarely accomplished anything useful; preparing for the worst wasn’t the same as always expecting it.

  “This could be it, Peter. Even if a couple of those Corpse-Ships are functional, they could tip the scales long enough for everything else to come together.”

  A few victories would buy enough time for Starbase Malta to come online and start cranking out ships. The new designs the handful of engineers in Xanadu had thought of would be the next best thing to invincible, and the shipyards she’d helped get started would produce them in numbers. Throw in the resources the income generated by the same base could buy, and humanity would be able to stand up to the Alliance.

  Just a little more time, that’s all we need.

  How many people, facing defeat, had made that wish, only to be disappointed? Most of them, she guessed.

  * * *

  Five Corpse-Ships lay in their cradles, gleaming in the overhead light, good as new. Just as the Keeper had promised.

  The enslaved Warpling had said its goodbyes quickly. Just as well; talking to it had been like chatting with a storm front. The critter was just too big, too massive. Its emotions had more weight than her own; Lisbeth had almost cried like a baby when the Keeper sent out a burst of pure joy at being set free. It was gone a moment later, leaving her and Doctor Munson in a semi-comatose state for several minutes. Even after getting some rest, the crazy-haired scientist was still uncommonly silent. He would probably need some quality time at a mental health facility when this was all over.

  But it’d been worth it. They had made it to the hangar bay. Seeing the now familiar shapes – each ship was made of a gigantic partial skeleton, its gleaming black skull, spine and rib cage fused with artificial components of the same color – was a bit like coming home to an abusive spouse. She knew it was going to be bad, but she’d grown somewhat used to it.

  The Marine squad spread out, weapons ready. Lisbeth could have told them not to bother, that this chamber had lain untouched since the time Neanderthals wandered the Earth, but they wouldn’
t have paid her any attention. She couldn’t even blame them; this place had turned out to be full of nasty surprises.

  The Keeper had turned off the stasis fields as a parting gift. The entire level was intact. The overhead lights had gone on when they entered, and a startled private had almost emptied his gun on the ceiling before a corporal stopped him. In the bluish illumination the overheads provided, the hangar wasn’t much to look at: there were assorted devices and cranes placed around the cradles, some of them much like what one would find in any Starfarer facility, others so strange she would have to tap into her stolen Marauder memories to figure them out. She didn’t feel like doing that now; maybe before they left, just in case there was something the US Navy couldn’t reproduce easily, in which case they’d add it to the cargo they’d be warp-transporting to the Humboldt.

  “Guess we hit pay dirt,” Heather McClintock said.

  “Pretty much.”

  Lisbeth had shot down the better part of a Lamprey Sector Fleet with one of those grotesque little fliers, and that one had been a decrepit specimen that had fallen apart after a few minutes. The five Corpse-Ships here were intact, preserved inside warp space, where time was as meaningless as distance. They would fight for as long as their pilots could endure the experience. And unlike War Eagles, these bastards didn’t need a carrier vessel; they were starships in their own right.

  The last time she’d been in the presence of a Corpse-Ship, she had to touch its surface to communicate with the Pathfinder trapped inside its mutilated corpse. Now, she could see the five enslaved souls at a glance. Like her buddy Atu, these were in a dormant state, which was a lot less peaceful than it sounded. They were in a state of unconscious torment, spending an eternity in a nightmare from which they couldn’t wake up.

  “There they are,” Atu said. “My poor brethren, doomed to slavery.”

  “Not anymore.”

  Lisbeth hadn’t been sure about her secret plan, not until she saw the Pathfinders trapped inside their desecrated bodies. She’d figured the US could use the Corpse-Ships until the war was won, and then release the aliens.