“They are also impressed by our status as ‘warp demons.’ It appears they have records of the last time a warp-adept species roamed the galaxy, although it happened before even their time. The Imperium has been all but begging to get a look at those records and gotten nowhere.”
“So what’s the deal? We drop by, they get to shake our hands and ask for our autographs, and then they lift the embargo?”
“Then they decide if we’re worthy of their assistance. Which at the least would mean continuing to deny access to our enemies while lifting the embargo on the US. If they let military traffic through – a big if, admittedly – we could actually mount an offensive into the heart of Lamprey territory. The Imperium worlds linked to Xanadu are minor possessions at the end of long warp chains, so it wouldn’t be as big a deal for them. But the Lampreys would be screwed if we can deploy a fleet that way. Most of their forces are concentrated on the opposite side of their empire, preparing for the next big offensive against us and the Wyrms.”
“That’s a lot. Sounds way too good to be true,” Heather said.
“Well, they still have to decide if we’re worthy, whatever that means. God only knows if the Marines will impress or terrify them. We know next to nothing about their culture; the Tah-Leen are one of the most secretive civilizations in the galaxy. So nobody is sure what to expect. The Secretary of State her own damn self is going. That tells you how seriously they’re taking all of this.”
“What happens if they decide we’re not worthy?”
“Best case, the status quo remains in place. Worst case, the Alliance gets their embargo lifted and we have to shift forces to defend that border. Third Fleet is arrayed on that sector; mostly older ships, and currently last in line to get any extra goodies like carrier vessels. It would take the enemy some time to exploit that front, but military and civilian losses are likely to be heavy if – when – they do.”
Heather knew what those innocuous words really meant: ships torn apart and consumed by fire or left open to the cold vacuum of space, cities burned into slag, entire lifetimes of work lost in a few instants, and hundreds of millions dead. Preventing that was well worth risking the lives of the ‘heroes of Kirosha’ or all twenty-five hundred survivors for that matter.
“So who’s going on this diplomatic mission?”
Peter, I would imagine, she thought. That’d be nice.
“You, of course, and as many of the original Embassy staff as we can round up to go. The Marine captain – your Marine captain, yes,” Pinto added with a smirk. You couldn’t keep a relationship secret at Spy Central. “His entire company, including the platoon he had at Jasper-Five. The military contractors are all on a long-term assignment, and they asked for too much money to cover their contract-breaking penalties, so they aren’t going. I don’t think the Tah-Leen will care, though. The mercenaries were cut out of the movie, so the aliens may not even know they were there.”
“That piece of crap,” Heather said. The multimedia flick had largely dismissed her contribution to the fight. The handsome Marine captain’s love interest, played by no other than Heather Spade, had been portrayed as an ineffectual bimbo that the manly man had rescued from the mean aliens in three different scenes. Rat bastards. She’d played the interactive version just for the pleasure of murdering the happy couple in as many ways as she could devise.
Pinto chuckled. “Yes, it wasn’t really flattering to you, was it? In all fairness, the Agency scrubbed your actions from most records. Got to safeguard ways and means, you know.”
“I know.”
Spies didn’t play the Great Game for the glory. If people knew who you were, you had already lost. That was why getting burned at UPS had driven her into a frenzy.
Even her family thought she’d spent her time on Jasper-Five cowering in some sub-basement in the embassy building while Marines did all the fighting and dying. If they’d known she’d been in a trench, a gun in her hands while she fended off homicidal maniacs as they came over the wire, they’d probably drop dead on the spot. Both from shock and outrage: that sort of carnage was beneath the McClintocks. If they had to do any fighting at all, her family was supposed to do so from a proper naval vessel. Hand to hand fighting was for lower life forms.
“All in all, the guest list is about three hundred names long.”
“I see.”
Heather’s eyes widened when some of Pinto’s words sunk in.
“The original Embassy staff? Surely that doesn’t include the Ambassador. Or does it?”
Pinto’s grimace was all the answer she needed before the Deputy Director spoke. “I’m afraid he is going. Didn’t take much convincing, since he’d spent a very tough year in a penal colony on Venus. I don’t think you’ll recognize him.”
“That worthless bastard had it coming. What is he getting for his cooperation?”
“A reduced sentence. Time served, basically.”
Former ambassador Javier Llewellyn had gotten his position through his family connections, much like everything else in his life. The situation at Jasper-Five had been well above his competency level: the man had managed to insult the Kirosha Queen and issue an ultimatum that precipitated the attack on the embassy. That would have been bad enough, but he’d compounded his mistake by trying to surrender to the aliens, despite the fact that he’d witnessed their penchant for judicial torture with his own eyes. Only the last-second intervention of the Regional Security Officer had prevented him from issuing a suicidal order to stand down. That combination of ineptness and cowardice – ordering the surrender of American territory without the express approval of the highest-ranking military officer on the scene was considered an act of treason – had earned him a lengthy sentence in a labor camp on Venus, currently in its hundredth year of a five-century-long terraforming project. Most of the work was being done by convicts because the planet was still a pretty good facsimile of Hell. It was the next best thing to a death sentence.
To hear that the weasel was getting early release just added insult to injury.
“I don’t like this,” she said. “Those aliens are making us jump through hoops in return for some vague promises of support when and if they decide we deserve it.”
“If they mistreat any of you, we’ll declare war on them, for what is worth. I doubt we can take the system, even with a carrier group leading the way. But even a small chance they will do as they say is worth the risk.”
“I agree,” Heather said. Although I and all the guests are the ones at risk, not you and the other ‘rats sitting comfortably in New Washington.
Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time she’d risked life and limb for the job.
Hell, she thought, realizing it’d only been a few days since her ninja suit caper. It wouldn’t be the first time this week.
Three
Moon Orbit, Sol System, 166 AFC
“Are you okay?” the Navy captain sitting next to her in the crowded passenger shuttle asked her.
“Not really,” Major Lisbeth Zhang said, which was much nicer than what she really wanted to say. The bubblehead didn’t deserve to be the target of her misdirected anger, and he outranked her to boot. “What gave me away?” she went on, trying for a neutral tone of voice. “The fist-clenching, or the bite-marks on my lower lip?”
“The subvocalized cursing, mostly,” the officer replied with a smile. He was a good-looking guy, but at the moment his confident grin only made her want to break his square jaw, dimple and all. She fake-grinned back at him instead.
“You got me, Captain. I got a last-minute reassignment I didn’t care for.”
“Been there. Thank you, by the way.”
“You’re welcome. For what, exactly?”
“I was at Parthenon. XO of the Little Rock. Your fighters saved our collective ass.”
“You’re very welcome, then. And congrats on the promotion.” A lot of officers had gotten promotions out of that space action, herself included. It wasn’t every day that an Ame
rican fleet destroyed twelve times its own tonnage with relatively paltry losses.
Relatively. The fighter wing that had won the battle had lost twenty percent of its pilots. It’d been a nasty fight.
“Congratulations right back, Major,” the captain said; her personal profile, visible to anyone with a cybernetic implant, showed an officer’s time-in-grade, a whole six weeks in her case. He offered his hand. “Richard Orlov.”
“Lisbeth Zhang,” she said, shaking it. He was good-looking. She and Nando weren’t seeing each other anymore; things had gotten weird after the battle of Parthenon. And the transport to her final destination wasn’t due to depart for another twenty-four hours. There were possibilities here, possibilities that might need exploring. “What brings you to the USS Lowell?”
“Headed to my new command. The Cromwell, part of DESRON 91.”
A quick mental query revealed that the USS Cromwell was a Statesman-class destroyer and that the six-vessel squadron would accompany the diplomatic mission that had shanghaied her. Small universe.
“We’re all going the same way, then,” she said. “As in all the way to Xanadu.”
Not exactly the same way, of course. He’d be in command of a destroyer, slightly larger than a frigate but just as cramped and uncomfortable. She would spend her time in a cruise liner alongside the other members of the diplomatic mission. She was part of a diplomatic mission. Ghu help them all.
“I see,” he said after she explained. His eyes widened in recognition. “That was you? Piloted a broken pod back and forth all over Jasper-Five?”
Lisbeth shrugged, dismissing those minutes of frantic terror with the simple gesture. She still had nightmares about it. It’d been one hell of a ride. She’d been in shock over the loss of the two ships under her command when she made her final approach into the planet’s atmosphere aboard a damaged escape pod, which had proceeded to come apart while she desperately tried to steer it. By rights she should have died there. By rights she should have died half a dozen different ways from the moment she’d arrived to Jasper System. And now her ordeal had turned her into a celebrity of sorts, notorious enough to be removed from the most important military program in the US and sent out to amuse some superannuated aliens. Even thinking about it got her worked up again.
“Didn’t mean to bring back bad memories,” Captain Orlov said.
“It wasn’t a good day. Still gets to me. And I don’t like being paraded around for propaganda purposes. I’d rather be flying sorties, or at least helping train the next class of pilots.”
The Langley Project had started out as a secret Marine program. The unexpected success of the carrier-based warp fighters it’d developed had transformed it into a massive multi-service effort. Shipyards throughout the US were switching gears to produce dozens of new carrier vessels and hundreds, eventually thousands of fighters. Training pilots was going to be the main hurdle, though. Not least because flying a warp fighter was... different. That was as good a way of putting it as any. If by different you meant a combination of harrowing mental stress combined with something that could be either extreme hallucinations or genuine supernatural experiences.
This was the first time in months that she’d been away from the only people who could truly understand what she was going through. They were hundreds of light years away, at Wolf 1061 or back at Groom Base, where she’d been inducted into the pilot program and become something else altogether. Sometimes she thought she could sense their presence, despite being an impossible distance away.
… and she’d spaced out again. “Sorry,” she told the Navy officer.
“I know how it is,” he said. “The Little Rock took a couple of direct hits at Parthenon. I was on the bridge. Missile hit. Enough of it got through to blast a hole in a bulkhead and send shrapnel flying everywhere. We lost a lot of good people.” He paused. “I still see it, once in a while. You never leave those moments, not really.”
“Yes,” she agreed. Everybody who had survived combat had that much in common. The human mind imprinted moments of great stress and trauma more deeply than anything else. “Bad memories and all, I’d rather be doing my job than this crap.”
“I hear you. Spending my first command babysitting some dignitaries isn’t my first choice, either. I’d rather be blasting Lampreys or Imperials, now that the Vipers have thrown in the towel.”
“Right there with you.” The Lampreys had been behind the events at Jasper-Five. Their mines had blown up her ships. The Fang-Faces owed her two hundred lives, and if she had the chance she wanted to extract a thousand-fold payment from them. Throw in another hundred thousand for her ruined Navy career, and she might call it even. Or not.
“Then again, maybe we could both use some boring duty,” Orlov said. “Recharge the batteries, you know?”
“Maybe.”
She had a bad feeling about the whole mission, though, beyond her anger at being sidelined in the middle of a shooting war. And ever since she’d become a warp pilot, her hunches and feelings had been eerily accurate.
“Maybe it won’t be boring at all,” she added, and earned a sidelong glance from the bubblehead captain.
New Parris Orbital Spacedock, Star System Musik, 166 AFC
They were finally on their way, after more Mickey Mouse crap than he’d thought possible.
Fromm glanced at the status board. Gunnery Sergeant Freito and the four platoons’ guide sergeants were supervising the loading of Charlie Company’s gear into the hold of the civilian luxury liner Brunhild. Colonel Brighton had persuaded the powers-that-be to let the company bring along their full load of weapons and equipment, including the sixteen Hellcat battlesuits of Fourth Platoon. None of it was likely to make much of a difference if the shit truly hit the fan, but after the Days of Infamy he’d learned it was better to have as many options as possible.
Of course, they’d wasted two weeks in something else altogether. Introduction to Starfarer Diplomacy, as a matter of fact.
Fromm and the company officers and senior non-coms had been through the mandatory course, which had eaten valuable hours they could have spent making sure all the other bureaucratic crap involved in detaching the company from the battalion and the rest of the 101st Marine Expeditionary Unit went through smoothly. The course had been a State Department requirement, on the off-chance the Marines were allowed to roam Xanadu without proper adult supervision, and it boiled down to ‘please don’t insult anybody.’ Or shoot anybody without good reason for that matter. The Rules of Engagement under which Charlie Company would be operating were downright murky; basically things were left to the discretion of either the Bureau of Diplomatic Security’s Agent in Charge or the highest-ranking military officer on the ground if the AIC wasn’t available. A Marine one-star general was supposed to be among the delegates. Hopefully he’d be somebody sensible.
At least they’d be traveling to Xanadu in style. His troops and about two hundred VIPs and their staffers, sycophants and dependents would hardly fill the massive cruise ship, which had the displacement of a battleship and could carry six thousand passengers in a style that you couldn’t afford on an O-3’s pay. The crew of the Brunhild had been replaced by Navy ratings, but the lodgings would still be a lot better than what you got in an assault ship.
Using a civilian vessel as their primary means of transport bothered him, luxury or not. He wasn’t an expert in naval affairs by any means, but he knew the main reason warships were, ton by ton, fifteen or twenty times as expensive as regular ships was their ability to jump into warp beyond the ‘mouths’ of warp valleys, allowing them to conduct FTL maneuvers inside a star system. Just as importantly, a military vessel could enter warp in under half an hour or even a few minutes if one was prepared to divert energy from weapon and defense systems. Normal ships took as long as two or three hours, mostly because they didn’t have the reserve power to do otherwise. That fancy cruise liner looked pretty and had plenty of bunk room, but it couldn’t run away if it had to, not u
nless it was in exactly the right place and had plenty of advance warning. The destroyer squadron escorting the Brunhild was little more than a token force, and one that wouldn’t be able to evacuate more than half the passengers in an emergency.
The VIPs wanted their creature comforts, however. And from a military point of view, a cruise liner was more expendable than an assault ship, especially now that most of the latter were being converted into light carrier vessels. If things went wrong at Xanadu, a quick getaway wasn’t an option. Nothing he could do about it, of course, so he might as well concentrate on the things he could control.
Having less than two hundred troops surrounded by about as many civilians, most of whom hadn’t worn a uniform since their teenage years, could lead to all sorts of trouble, some of which could be corrosive to the discipline and good order that separated Marines from a gang of thugs. The NCOs would have their hands full, and the senior NCOs and officers would be pretty busy ensuring the NCOs didn’t fall prey to the same temptations besetting the rank and file. The trip would take twelve days and thirty-two warp hours, the latter spread over six jumps ranging from three to seven hours in length. Musik to Sol, Sol to Drake, Drake to Lahiri, Lahiri to Bethlehem, Bethlehem to New Phoenix, New Phoenix to Xanadu. Nobody was certain how long the deployment at Xanadu would last. That would be up to their Tah-Leen hosts.
He’d like to think that his Marines would stay out of trouble for twelve days, but they could be devilish creative if they didn’t have something better to do. The good thing was, there was enough empty space in the cruise liner to let him run a few ship clearance exercises. That and a few tests and field days would keep his people busy. There were a couple of social functions that included enlisted as well as officers, but he could trust them to behave themselves during those. Mostly. First Sergeant Goldberg would put the worst of the trouble children on guard duty to deliver them from evil.
Advance to Contact (Warp Marine Corps Book 3) Page 5