“We have to be alive to care about what others think of us.”
“And we’ve had the same argument enough times already,” POTUS cut in. “People are looking into it. We’ve got entire multidisciplinary teams working on all the data we’ve collected in the past couple of years.”
“Top men,” Tyson said, eliciting a chuckle from his fellow senior citizens.
“We’re not sticking anything in Warehouse Thirteen, Ty. We’ll get answers, sooner or later. But meanwhile, we have a war to win.”
Tyson nodded. The planned Lamprey offensive should work, and finally rid humanity of a major threat. But the enemy, that dirty rat, had its own plan.
One
Starbase Malta, Xanadu System, 168 AFC
“I wish I was going with you,” Heather told Captain Peter Fromm, USWMC.
They were enjoying a dinner date for the first time in months; for the first time since his brief leave shortly after the USS Humboldt’s return to Xanadu, as a matter of fact. That was one of the problems with two workaholics trying to have a relationship.
On the other hand, we both want to make things work, and are more than willing to put in the effort, Fromm thought.
“Not much need for an intelligence officer in a straight fight,” he said. “You’ll be a lot more useful here.”
“I know. Captain Gupta was nearly sobbing with relief when I offered to help him out in my spare time. Turns out that running the biggest artificial habitat in the galaxy isn’t as easy as he thought.”
They shared a less-than-nice smile. Fromm had some vague idea of the heroic task Heather had undertaken after a series of unexpected events led to the US takeover of the former Habitat for Diversity. The new commandant had been confident he could do a better job than she had, and made it be known in no uncertain terms. Half a year later, Captain Gupta was eating a well-deserved serving of crow.
“And that’s only a side job,” Heather went on. “I still have some ten thousand years’ worth of Kraxan records to analyze, and only two t-wave rated assistants to help me do it.”
“The stuff you’ve already developed is damn impressive,” he said. He wasn’t blowing smoke up her ass, either. The new weapon systems they’d built thanks to her research were game-changers. Assuming they worked as advertised, of course. His company would be among the first to try them out under field conditions.
“I think we’ve picked all the low-hanging fruit, though, tech-wise at least.” She grimaced. “And here we are, talking shop in our free time.”
“Do we have anything else to talk about?”
“One would hope so.”
“We agreed not to get into what happens after,” he added, somewhat cautiously.
“I know.”
They knew too well that the chances there would be an ‘after’ – after the war was over, after they could look forward to a life outside the service – weren’t great. He was due to depart with the 101st MEU, currently attached to Third Fleet. They were headed for Lhan Arkh space to settle scores with the architects of the Days of Infamy. The infamous Lampreys knew what awaited them, and they weren’t likely to go gently into the night. He’d fought them before, most recently for the amusement of the former owners of Xanadu System, and he knew they were going to have one hell of a fight in their hands.
Fromm had seen too many men and women die, and too many of them died because of orders he gave or mistakes he made. He knew how easily he could be next. Lately, he’d started to believe he should be next. He’d all but courted death recently, and only a small miracle – courtesy of Lieutenant Colonel Zhang – had saved him. Next time his death wish might come true.
“Stop it,” Heather said. She couldn’t read his mind, even with her near-magical tachyon-wave implants, but she could sense his emotional state, and she knew him well enough to not need any gadgets to figure him out.
“Sorry.”
They’d tried to talk things out, but in the end talking only led to wallowing in their problems rather than solving them. Better to set that garbage aside and keep it buried under a steady avalanche of hard work. Those gloomy thoughts kept resurfacing, though; not often, but more than often enough. There was no magical cure.
Fake it till you make it. Probably the best advice. If you pretended everything was all right, you might just make it so.
“No forlorn hopes,” she said. “No heroic last stands. No ‘die trying.’ That crap is for losers. Let the Lampreys die trying, Peter. Come back in one piece. That’s an order.”
“I will.”
Dubois System, 168 AFC
Lieutenant Colonel Lisbeth ‘Lamia’ Zhang gritted her teeth as she led her squadron into yet another precedent-setting maneuver.
“Ready to dance, boys and girls?”
“Oh, yeah,” Captain Desmond ‘Kong’ Franz said in a throaty voice. The massive heavy-worldler Marine was shaping up to be the second-best pilot in the squadron.
“Deus Volt,” Ronnie ‘Preacher’ Johns whispered. A religious fanatic, but sharp and fearless.
“Up and at them.” That was Leroy ‘Jenkins’ Rodriguez. The clown of the team, but all business where it counted.
“Roger,” was all Grinner Genovisi said. Lisbeth’s own warp-witch, able to tell fortunes, talk to angels, and pull the occasional miracle out of a hat.
“Kong, follow Grinner’s lead. Preacher, Jenkins, you’re with me.”
The bizarre Corpse-Ships – still looking creepy even after getting painted in red, white and blue colors – were zooming through real-space at 360 km per second, better than a light cruiser going at flank-plus with all engines redlined, and they were about to go a lot faster than that.
Transition.
From the cockpit of a Corpse-Ship, warp space was a bright rainbow river, a swirling flow of strange energies, a place where imagination could impose its own reality if your will was strong enough. At the moment, the five pilots were too busy concentrating on their flight plan to do anything fancy. What they were about to try was supposed to be impossible, and would in any case be risky. Perhaps too risky for the irreplaceable quintet of ships, but if it worked, it’d be more than worth it.
Sun-Blotter tactics – massive missile swarms designed to overwhelm the defenses of warp-adept warships – had been developed many millennia before the current conflict. The Lampreys – the reputed developers of the technique – had either reinvented it or somehow stumbled on some ancient records and stolen the idea. The enemies of the Warp Marauders of Kraxan had used saturation missile volleys against the murderous aliens, and for the same reason: to deal with warp shields that made direct fire weapons all but useless at most ranges.
Naturally enough, the Kraxans had come up with countermeasures of their own. Lisbeth was about to plagiarize the hell out of one of them. When you stole, you stole from the best.
“Grinner, you’re up.”
The two-ship element led by Commander Deborah ‘Grinner’ Genovisi performed the first part of the evolution, creating a warp aperture with a two light-second diameter. They kept it open, hanging on the threshold between real and null space. The maneuver was similar to what warp pilots called ‘ghosting,’ except it worked on a much larger scale – the warp ‘door’ those two ships were holding open was hundreds of thousands of kilometers wide, although only about a dozen meters tall. It drew a rainbow of shifting light between the two vessels over a longer distance than that between the Earth and the Moon. And that was just the first stage.
“Our turn,” Lisbeth told the other two pilots. The three Corpse-Ships assumed a triangular position and performed the same maneuver. The three ships emerged from warp in a triangular formation, also two light seconds apart and on the same plane as Genovisi’s element; new linear warp apertures formed, connecting all five ships. The roughly A-shaped configuration now turned into a five-pointed star, or a pentagram, if you would. A moment later, the apertures grew in size and the area in-between filled up with light. A five-sided polygon of con
stantly-shifting colors larger than any planet broke through the darkness of space.
Just one little push…
Something like an electric current burned through her nervous system. She nearly lost consciousness, but held on with the stubbornness that had kept her going in many situations where a more reasonable person would have curled up and died. Somewhere rather far away in real space but nearby via telepathic link, she felt the other members of the squadron go through the same process.
A flaming five-sided wave of flames burst into real space. A torrent of superheated ionized gas – plasma, in other words – poured forth for several seconds before the warp gates shut down.
Like all warp apertures, this massive pentagon reached two points in space at the same time. The other side of the warp gate was on the inside of the local star. A torrent of plasma that had moments before been part Dubois’ G-type main-sequence star, which was busily fusing hydrogen some ten light-minutes away. The warp aperture on that end had been much narrower, sucking in the highly-pressurized plasma and then shooting it out of the wider five-sided emergence point like a shotgun blast.
The Corpse-Ships were incredibly hardy, but they couldn’t survive a maneuver that placed them within the corona of a star, ghosting or not. The Pathfinder slaves whose bodies, and until recently their souls, comprised the cores of those vessels had enough control over warp space to isolate them from the wave of star-stuff coming through the massive aperture. Lisbeth still didn’t know how the whole thing worked, despite hours-long explanations from the Pathfinder ghost that resided somewhere in her brain. And work it did, the proof being that the five ships were holding station on the corners of a wall of flames that could be seen with the naked eye from the farthest planet in the system. By rights they should have turned into crispy critters, but there they were.
Enough residual heat got through to turn her cockpit into an oven. That wasn’t supposed to happen, but she’d been half-expecting it. What had been routine for Pathfinders wasn’t quite so easy for a pack of human apprentices. They’d all been practicing the multidimensional folding that enabled them to survive the maneuver, but this was their first live run. Lisbeth ignored the discomfort and concentrated on the complicated mental acrobatics necessary to make it all happen. There was one way to do it right, a dozen others that would fail miserably, and several that would destroy all five ships in an instant.
“Now!”
The Death Heads flew away from the wall of fire at full speed, moving on perpendicular vectors from the cloud of superheated gas they had created. The pentagon quickly lost its initial sharp edges as plasma, no longer bound by the gravity of its star, began to expand normally.
It worked!
The cloud wasn’t dense or hot enough to destroy any warship heavier than a corvette or even some civilian vessels: medium-grade force fields would hold off plasma at those densities, unless something else had weakened them to near-collapse. Missiles, on the other hand, had very basic force fields, far too thin to let them survive in the environment Lisbeth’s squadron had created over a volume of space that would envelop even the largest volley the enemy could launch. The curtain of fire they’d created would have consumed tens of thousands of missiles before the plasma dissipated.
“Well done, everyone! Now let’s make our attack run while we wait for the scores to come in.”
Unlike War Eagles, Corpse-Ships did most of their fighting in normal space. That took some getting used to; it was very different from the jump-shoot-jump fighter pilots were used to. Luckily, the pilots of her unit, all hand-picked by her, were very good at their jobs. They were several uniquely-minded individuals: you didn’t have to be crazy to fly on the Death Head Squadron, but it helped.
A short jump took the five ships past the Fire Wall and closed in with a notional enemy formation on the other side. The Death Heads let fly with their high-grade graviton cannon, unleashing enough power to shred a superdreadnought on a single pass. The Kraxan Corpse-Ships might be antiques, but you couldn’t call them antiquated. They were products of ancient super-tech that made them, pound by pound, the deadliest things flying in the known galaxy. If the American expedition Lisbeth had been a part of had found a few more, the war would be as good as won. Even five Corpse-Ships would make a huge difference, though, especially when they could pull tricks like the anti-missile wall of fire that was just beginning to dissipate behind them.
The only thing I wish is that the damn thing didn’t look like a giant pentagram!
That was purely by necessity, not design. The Marauders typically used a full squadron – seven Corpse-Ships – to create the defensive plasma wave. But she had five, and had to modify the maneuver accordingly.
“First time the ETs see that flaming star appear, they’re going to flip out,” she muttered.
“Pentagrams have no mystical significance among most Starfarer cultures,” her spirit guide told her. That would be Atu, the giant three-eyed Pathfinder whose memories and thought patterns were irrevocably linked to her own.
“Sure, but a simple search will let them know that we humans thought it was used to summon demons and all other kinds of sorcerous crap.”
“Some human cultures, for a brief period. The pentagram has a multitude of meanings even on Earth, including…”
“Nobody cares. They’ll just know we drew a witchy sign in space, and a wall of fire showed up. Ergo, we are witches. Hell, we’ll probably get some trouble from the Bible and Cross brigade at home!”
Atu said nothing to that. Just as well. Lisbeth still hated the seemingly supernatural aspects of her new military career. That had only been compounded by several long conversations she’d had with Grinner Genovisi. The former navigator had made an interstellar transit aboard a fighter that just didn’t have the legs to do so. The things Grinner had seen during that impossible jump had shaken Lisbeth to the core.
There wasn’t much she could do about it at the moment, though. She might as well concentrate on her job.
The simulation’s reports came in, based on sensor readings from several light vessels monitoring the practice run at a prudent distance. The maneuver hadn’t been quite as successful as she’d expected. The plasma cloud hadn’t been quite as large as the plan called for, probably because the five-ship formation hadn’t been able to keep the trans-dimensional gate open as long as they’d expected. According to the final tally, about twenty to thirty percent of a hundred-thousand missile volley would have survived the Wall of Fire.
Lisbeth wanted to grumble, but decided to keep a positive outlook. Killing seventy percent of a missile swarm would allow the fleet’s conventional defenses to wipe out the remainder. The maneuver had performed its primary mission.
More practice runs would help improve the result, but there was a reason the Death Heads couldn’t stabilize the giant warp gate as efficiently as the Corpse-Ships’ original operators. The Kraxans had relied on the enslaved minds of Atu’s fellow Pathfinders to perform the maneuver. Lisbeth had set them free shortly after discovering the squadron in the ruins of a lost city in ass-end of the galaxy. Instead of five obedient alien ghosts to do the work, her squadron had to make do with their minds and the lessons of the one alien ghost who’d volunteered to stay behind.
“Your species may one day match mine,” Atu said. “Assuming you do not turn into monsters, are exterminated, or simply decide to follow a different path of development. You could achieve significant progress after no more than twenty, twenty-five generations of intensive breeding and rigorous gene-triggering via exposure to the right environmental stressors.”
“That sounds painful. And not exactly a short-term solution.”
“Patience is a cornerstone of Balance, Christopher Robin.”
“We don’t have time to be patient, Pooh.” For some reason, the Pathfinder had latched onto her childhood memories of Winnie the Pooh. She’d learned to deal with it after a while. “We’re sailing out in four to six weeks. Getting a new flag office
r at the last second bought us a little more training time, but not much. And we’ll be joining in an all-ship fleet-ex, which is going to eat a good chunk of that time. The Death Heads may get maybe four or five more practice runs over the next two days before we have to return to Xanadu to prep for the exercise. Ask me for anything but time.”
“One makes use of the tools one has at hand, nothing more or less.”
“True. True enough that you didn’t have to bother saying it.”
They’d been having their mental conversation while the Death Head Squadron made a second attack run. The simulated sortie went off flawlessly. No problems there. All in all, it’d been worth the trouble to send the training flotilla to this uninhabited system three warp jumps away from Xanadu, where Third Fleet was preparing to go to war.
“And we’re done, people. RTB and AAR.”
Returning to base took no time at all. The squadron warped to their custom-built cradles, deep in the bowels of a supply freighter, the USNS Laramie, which had enough space to fit all of them while still carrying the beans, bullets and fabbers Third Fleet needed to operate in foreign space. The refit meant the ship could be reclassified as a commissioned vessel, but since the Corpse-Ships were only supposed to return to it after combat operations were over, or if too damaged to continue fighting, the powers that be had kept its non-combatant status. That hadn’t prevented the officers and crew of the Laramie to put on airs; as far as they were concerned, they were a carrier vessel, facts be damned.
It could be worse, of course. They could be scared instead of proud.
A lot of people were; there’d been a rash of transfer requests among the crew. Spacers were prone to superstition, and the idea that their ship was ferrying ancient vessels made with the bones of dead sophonts had proven to be too much to handle for many of them. Luckily, a dissenting faction considered the ships to be lucky charms instead; there had been almost as many requests to transfer to the Laramie. BuPers had wisely reassigned the faint of heart and brought in more enthusiastic replacements.
Havoc of War (Warp Marine Corps Book 5) Page 2