Neither Russell nor Gonzo asked any questions. Poor bastard had done all his killing on humans, and a lot of it on fellow Americans. Nothing Russell wanted to think about.
He checked the edge he’d given the e-tool’s spade. You couldn’t exactly shave with it, but that wasn’t what he was planning to use it for. You wanted it sharp enough it would cut into flesh or crack a skull open, but not so sharp it might turn on bone. He knew how that kind of thing worked; most of his experience with blades came from before he joined the Corps. Growing up in the Zoo, you picked up quite a few tips on how to cut and stab people, in no small part because there were plenty of assholes ready to use something sharp or pointy on you.
“Anybody done close-up work with Lampreys?” Gonzo asked, getting back to the business at hand.
“Buddy of a buddy did. He’s the one who gave me the tips on how to kill them,” Russell said. “Some alleged Fang-Face renegades were playing pirate at Mishna System. Our guys had to clear a mining facility. Too many volatiles had gotten loose to use standard plasma tips, and solids don’t do shit against force fields. In the end, they had to club the Lampreys to death.”
“And?”
“They’re big and ugly, but they don’t fight for shit when it comes to hand to hand. Not like the Vipers or their Snake cousins.”
“That’s good. Those fuckers are tough.”
Dealing with Vipers at close quarters was like wrestling with an octopus who knew how to use knives. Not an easy way to earn a living. Best thing to do was use an e-tool and chop their tentacles off one by one. Or even better, shoot them. Shooting was usually the best way to deal with an Echo Tango.
Burning them would work too. Russell looked at the pile of improvised fire-bombs, using assorted containers. They’d been treated to break apart on impact and filled with flammable liquid. He sighed. Everyone who’d been toting hard alcohol had contributed to the cause, but his cache of Vyrlian brandy was providing the bulk of it. They’d mixed it with assorted other flammables and some soap to make a proper burning mixture, but he still figured those Molotov cocktails would retail at four hundred bucks apiece. What a waste.
“You know,” Grampa said after a few moments of quiet. “Going after the Lampreys doesn’t make much sense now. We’re all in the same boat. The Tah-Leen want us killing each other so they can get their rocks off.”
“Sure,” Gonzo agreed. “And?”
“Well, maybe we should try to work together. Us and the Lhan Arkh.”
Russell and Gonzo burst out laughing.
“What?” Grampa asked. He looked a little pissed off.
“You’re serious.”
“I’m not saying become best friends with them. But maybe if we joined forces, we’d have a better chance to survive this mess. It’d be in everyone’s best interest.”
“Yeah, that’s the kind of shit you see happen in movies, especially pre-Contact sci-fi. That’s where you got the idea, right?” Russell asked him, not unkindly.
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
“It sounds nice, but it’s all bullshit. And I’ll tell you why.”
“I’m all ears.”
“Lampreys ain’t people. They ain’t humans. They ain’t even human-like. That kind of deal, it might work with some of the more people-like aliens, like the Puppies or even the Imperials. But a lot of tangos, they don’t think like we do. They don’t give a shit about ‘best interests.’ Maybe at flag rank they do, sometimes. The grunts over on the other side of those hills, they got orders not to talk to us. Any of them does anything other than kill us on sight, their own side will take them out. They think all Class Two bio-critters like us are a plague.”
“But they’re working with the Imperium,” Grampa protested. “And most of its member species are Class Two. A couple could pass for human in a bad light.”
“Only reason they are allies with the Imperials is ‘cause they hate us extra special, enough to make them work with critters they hate only a little bit less. So tell me, Starfleet, what do you think their reaction to us showing up waving a white flag is going to be? Hugs and kisses?”
Grampa shrugged. “It was just an idea.”
“It’s not even a bad idea,” Russell said, trying to ease any hurt feelings. “If we were dealing with people. But they really ain’t. Lampreys, Vipers and Snakes are about the worst of the lot; they all believe there can be only one kind of biology in the galaxy, and it ain’t ours.”
“The Wyrms are our allies, though.”
“They are the nicest Class One species. Well, them and the Butterflies. And they’re nice to us mostly because the Gal-Imps were leaning on them even before the war and they figured jumping in on our side might help them get a few licks in.”
“Shit, Russet, I had no idea you were an expert in Galactic politics,” Gonzo said. “Me, I don’t give two fucks. If it comes at me with a gun in its hands, it’s dead. Furry, scaly or smooth. Don’t give a shit why it’s doing it.”
“Just like to keep up with what’s going on,” Russell said, beginning to regret speaking up. He normally didn’t let on that he actually read briefings and news bulletins when he wasn’t chasing pussy or money. Too many assholes would give him a hard time about it.
“So do I,” Grampa said. “But I guess I’ve been listening to the civvie stuff for too long.”
“It’s a tough universe. The only Starfarers who live long enough to Transcend are the ones who’re too tough to exterminate.”
“It’s a shitty universe, is what it is.”
Russell couldn’t disagree with that.
* * *
I found it.
There was no sense of triumph in the thought. Lisbeth Zhang might have found her weapon, but she wasn’t sure it’d been worth the price she’d had to pay for it.
Digging through the Marauders’ records had been like being trapped inside a horror flick. She’d seen – and heard and smelled – things nobody should have to experience. The worst part had been the creeping realization that she wasn’t watching recorded imagery but that her perceptions had been thrown into the distant past, and was witnessing them as they actually occurred.
Her suspicions were proven right. During the sack of a great city that covered an entire continental mass, a rampaging warrior, a bipedal horror covered in chitin, feeding tubes and metal spikes, stopped tearing its victims apart and looked directly at her.
WHO-WHAT-ARE-YOU?
Each word felt like an icepick driven into her skull. Lisbeth flinched and found herself back inside the cockpit of the Corpse-Ship. Blood was running down her nose; the throbbing agony pounding on the left side of her head felt all too real. It took a massive dose of painkillers to bring her back to something approaching functionality. Dreams or time-traveling or whatever, this Woogle search from Hell was killing her. Good thing she was done. That final foray into ancient history had given her the last pieces she needed to complete the puzzle.
She’d learned many things along the way.
Warp space was far more than a convenient way to violate physical laws. Anybody who’d ventured there could tell you that, of course, but she now had some understanding of the meaning of ‘more.’ It was a realm of the mind, or to be more accurate, of consciousness, the kind of place that Jung and Penrose had hinted at in their wildest theories. Thoughts and memories became objects of sorts, capable of being manipulated, and to come alive. Time was as arbitrary as distance inside that dimension; past, present and future could be observed from there.
Most importantly of all, it hosted its own native life.
Lisbeth didn’t know what to call them. She’d come up with Warplings as a catch-all nickname. Spirits or demons was probably just as good a term. Or maybe gods. Maybe even God. She had never been religious, but she figured that if some all-powerful deity truly existed, it would probably make its home in a place that wasn’t bound to time or space.
Whatever they were, Warplings borrowed their shapes from the minds of normal-
space dwellers, or maybe that was the only way mere mortals could perceive them. Which of course meant that it was nearly impossible to tell apart a memory come to life from one of those creatures. For all she knew, everything she saw while in warp transit was some incarnation of the spirits that lived there.
Her atheism was being shaken to the core. The more she learned about warp, the more she found evidence that consciousness was something that wasn’t limited to the material realm, that in fact it took place outside of it. A part of her resisted the idea. She was sure – or maybe just hopeful – that there was a materialistic explanation for all this. Tachyon waves or particles sounded better than souls or psychic emanations. The universe was full of forces and concepts the human mind couldn’t really understand or even perceive, but that didn’t make them supernatural. In fact, if they existed at all, they had to be part of the natural universe. Or so she told herself, over and over.
“Stop acting some bored sorority girl,” she told herself. “Things to do, people to kill.”
Alongside assorted great revelations, she’d uncovered the weapon the Scholar had been looking for. It was called the Mind-Killer, and it was tailor-made to kill Tah-Leen.
How do you kill beings who could inhabit dozens of bodies at the same time? You destroyed their shared consciousness. The Tah-Leen, as it turned out, hadn’t mastered the art of uploading their minds. Like everyone else, they’d discovered that any electronic copy they made of themselves, no matter how detailed it was, had no consciousness or volition. Instead, they’d bio-engineered a personal storage device, made of brain matter held in a nutrient vat, linked to its drone bodies through a gravity-wave network. The physical locations of those ‘brain-jars’ were so well-protected that only the complete destruction of the Habitat for Unique Diversity had any chance of damaging them, and they might survive even that.
All those defenses were useless against someone that could reach them from warp space. The Mind-Killer exposed its victims directly to the horrors of warp space. The Tah-Leen were the perfect targets for the device. A human might survive such an attack, but the warp-blind Snowflakes would be completely helpless against it.
The problem was that as soon as the Scholar discovered what she’d found, he would kill her. His quest had been inspired by some half-forgotten legends. In those stories the Marauders murdered enemy leaders who’d been behind seemingly-impregnable defenses. He hadn’t expected that the weapon system in question could be used against his entire species, not just a few individuals. Such a device was too dangerous to be used, or allowed to exist for that matter. So was the pesky Marine pilot who’d stumbled into the secret.
She, and every human in Xanadu, were as good as dead.
Unless I pull the trigger first.
Nice thought, except she was armed with an unloaded pistol, so to speak. The Corpse-Ship was missing its power plant. She had no way to activate the Mind-Killer.
Lisbeth checked the time. The Snowflake had given her a thirty-six-hour deadline, after which it would be all over for her. Time was running out, and if she didn’t have something to show the alien she’d be discarded like so much trash. About the only piece of good news was that her last dip into the Marauder’s collective memories had taken her a whole fifteen minutes, even though it had felt like days, if not weeks. She had the better part of a day to come up with something useful. Heather McClintock was going to hack into the habitat’s network; if she could somehow help Lisbeth power up the Mind-Killer, they’d be able to make the aliens pay. She had to prepare herself to seize any opportunity that came her way.
Lisbeth needed to learn more, but she needed to find an alternative to the Marauders. Those murderous psychopaths were of no further use to her.
They weren’t the only ghosts she could reach from this ship, however.
* * *
“We found them, all right,” LC Howard ‘Suckass’ Montero said as lasers filled the air above him or tried to burn through the pile of rocks and dirt sheltering him.
“I see them. Three Battle Bugs,” Sergeant Weiner said next to him. “All right. Team leaders: load up one twenty-mike-mike each, armor-piercing, on my mark.” He waited for several seconds to make sure the volley was properly coordinated. They had to make every round count, because they didn’t have any to spare.
“Lasers are getting through this chunk of hill, Sergeant,” Suckass said after his imp reported his personal force field was being drained.
“Did it get you?”
“I’m still alive, ain’t I? No, it didn’t get me.”
“Then quit yer bitching,” Weiner said before going back on the squad channel. “Fire!”
The four team leaders opened up with their 20mm launchers just as a mortar barrage and a missile volley from the rear landed on the Lamprey mobile units. The triple combo had the intended effect: one mechanical bug brewed up when its battery case was breached; a second war machine stopped firing, still more or less in one piece but out of action.
“Not bad. Suckass, you’re up.”
Sergeant Weiner had sacrificed all his remaining 4mm ammo to let Howard reload the SAW. A whole fifty rounds.
“Aye,” he said, moving up to the edge of the small rise as soon as the portable force field went up to keep him alive. He ignored the glare of lasers impacting on the shield and swung the gun towards the designated target, the last Battle Bug still standing; a handful of Lamprey grunts were dug in around it. His first burst splashed plasma all over the BB’s shield before it failed with a bright flash. Howard poured it on and stitched the fighting vehicle with multiple plasma discharges that chewed through its tough metal armor like heavy rain hitting an ice sculpture.
A second, much brighter flash temporarily blinded him. When his helmet sensors cleared up his vision, the Bug was nothing but scattered flaming bits. There was no sign of the infantry that had been surrounding it. If they were smart, they started running the second their mobile unit’s force field went down. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be anyone’s problem anymore.
Another Lamprey position further back opened up as soon as the smoke cleared, forcing him to scramble back behind the hill. The incoming wasn’t as heavy as it’d been before they took out that fighting position and the three Bugs dug in there. The Lampreys were almost out of juice.
“Not bad at all,” Sergeant Weiner repeated. “We done found and fixed them in place. Now it’s time to give them the other two ‘Fs.’”
* * *
Russell was used to life in the Suck hitting new and unexpected lows, but this one took the cake.
Walking through the forest with nothing but a spear in his hands and a couple of overpriced Molotov cocktails hanging from his belt just wasn’t right. ETs loved to call humans a bunch of primmie barbarians, but this was ridiculous.
It could be worse, though. At least his personal shield was at near a hundred percent, and his suit’s twin power packs were two-thirds full. Sergeant Fuller was toting a loaded IW-3a, so they wouldn’t be completely helpless if it came down to a firefight. It was still a hell of a way to earn their combat pay.
Their point man signaled at them to stop, so they did. A quick laser-comm conversation with the sergeant followed. Sergeant Fuller passed on the word the same way.
“Listen up. There’s three Lampreys watching their flank, forty meters out from the tree line. No portable fields, but they’re in fighting holes and all three have lasers. I’ll keep them busy while the rest of you go around the clearing and engage them in close combat.”
“Aye, aye,” they all said. This was the moment Russell had been dreading: rushing energy weapons with a pig-sticker in his hands. The ETs must be almost dry, though, and maybe they’d use up their power packs killing the sergeant. Best possible outcome would be if FOS and the aliens took each other out, which meant Russell would get this gun as the next senior man in the squad. He liked Fuller well enough, even with all his bullshit motivational stuff, but he liked the idea of having an Iwo a lit
tle more.
The eleven troops started moving through the trees and underbrush as the sergeant opened up, trying to stay behind cover and concealment for as long as they could. Short bursts of laser fire flashed from the fighting holes, all aimed at FOS. Eventually, though, the Marines had to get out into the open with about forty meters to go. They rushed forward, screaming like a pack of maniacs. Russell knew his Marine history as well as any other leatherneck. Oorah originally meant ‘charge.’ So it made perfect sense to shout that while they ran to their deaths.
“OORAH! OORAH!”
Sergeant Fuller popped a can of 15mm whoopass on the aliens, trying to suppress them. It mostly worked, but a few laser bursts reached towards them.
Off to Russell’s left, Lance Corporal Bruno grunted before face-planting between one step and the next. His status went from green to black, do not pass ‘Go’ or collect two hundred bucks. Nothing to do but keep going. He finally got close enough to crouch down, grab one of the liquid-filled containers on his belt, and use the lighter app in his glove to fire it up. A laser pulse burst made Russell’s personal shield flash brightly. The power meter on the left corner of his eye changed from ninety-eight to sixty-three percent.
Russell threw the bottle at the fucker who’d almost killed him. It landed in the fighting hole, and the burning mixture of Vyrlian brandy, lubricant oil and hand soap spread all over the Fang-Face’s lower torso and legs. It stopped shooting and dropped its gun, beating on the flames spreading flames with both sets of hands.
“Burn, motherfucker!”
Throwing the Molotov cocktail meant he was the second grunt to reach the fighting hole. First place went to PFC Jimenez, who got shot in the face for his troubles. Turned out there was a fourth Lamprey nobody had seen, crouched inside the hole, and it tagged the private with a full laser burst. Steam came out of the three holes the laser had drilled into the Marine’s helmet as the corpse toppled back. Russell rushed past the falling body. All he cared about was the Lamprey who’d killed Jimenez, the fucking Lamprey that ignored the pool of fire and the trashing tango at its feet. It turned its laser towards him.
Advance to Contact (Warp Marine Corps Book 3) Page 21