The grunts from First led the way into the compartment, with Russell close behind. There were no live tangos inside. Two enemy spacers with no armor or force fields had been inside, and the grenades had done them in. Lampreys looked just as ugly cooked well-done as they did in life. Russell’s helmet filters kept the smell of burned alien off his nostrils. That was good; he’d smelled roasted Lamprey before, and it’d been worse than broiled skunk, not to mention toxic enough to make a human keel over.
The rest of the compartment was a mess, but Russell spotted a wall-mounted commo terminal that appeared to have survived the two sets of explosions. He pointed it at the Lance Coolie in charge of the grunts from First. LC Hoover nodded and went to work. For this mission, they’d brought along data spikes, universal commo connectors filled with all kinds of nasty computer viruses designed to mess with a ship’s systems. Hoover jammed the spike into an access port and let the nanites and software do the rest.
A green light flashed thirty seconds later, and Russell relaxed a bit. They’d achieved their objective.
“Simulation over.”
“That was easy,” Gonzo commented as they walked down the corridor. They had to keep their helmets on; the local atmosphere was still set to Lamprey standards, guaranteed to strip the lining of your lungs in a minute or so.
“You know, when I joined the Corps, I was told that boarding actions just didn’t happen anymore.”
“New gear, new missions. It’s called progress, Gramps,” Gonzo told him.
“I always thought the whole idea of warping into a ship with light weapons was insane. Even if that’s why they changed the name of the Corps.”
“All before my time,” Gonzo said.
They cycled through the airlock and made it to the staging area.
“Two more days,” Gonzo said as they began to stow their gear. “Two more days and we’re free.”
“Yeah, if by free you mean three days of liberty, plus up to another two days, as long as we take it off our accrued leave,” Russell said. “Not exactly a vacation.”
“Better than nothing, brah. We’ll have fun.”
“Sure,” he told Gonzo, but something in his voice gave him away. The little guy had known Russell too long, which was why playing cards with him was a stone-cold bitch.
“So it’s going to be like that,” Gonzo said, but left it at that.
“Like what?” Grampa asked.
“Nothing.”
Gorski was okay, but he still wasn’t one of them, even after going through hell and high water. Russell trusted the guy with his life, but trusting him with stuff that violated the UCMJ was a whole other kettle of fish.
“Sure, whatever,” Grampa said. He knew what the score was, if not the details, and he was fine with being left out of any shady stuff. Had to give it to Grampa, he didn’t bitch about it, either.
A few hours later, at a recently-opened establishment that went by the comforting name of The Burning Shuttle, Russell and Gonzo settled down for a talk. His buddy had been dying to say something, but it was best to wait until they were off-duty and their imp recorders were offline. All the way offline; many idiots who thought their implants stopped recording everything they saw, did or said when they commanded them to stop had found out the truth the hard way. It took some work and specialized know-how to make sure Big Brother and Uncle Sam weren’t looking over your shoulder.
They looked around to make sure they were the only Marines in attendance. The Burning Shuttle didn’t cater to the uniformed services; the dive bar catered to civilians, who were flocking to Malta by the cartload now that the giant starbase was open for business. Thousands of new jobs became available every day, and a lot of people showed up with nothing but their life savings and hopes of finding work, or motivated by the belief that the impregnable system might provide a safe haven even if the war was lost. Xanadu was supposed to be impregnable; it might become the last refuge for humanity.
Stupid fucks, Russell thought as he looked the current patrons over. No place was safe. He’d helped take this base away from the previous owners, which meant it could change hands again. Not that the crowd here looked like the hopeful bunch. Mostly men and a few rough-looking women. Most of them were civvie spacers or building contractors, from the social media pages that popped around each face as he looked at them. He and Gonzo had set theirs to ‘private.’ Nobody here was likely to mess with a couple Marines, but it was best if nobody knew who they were.
“You’re still with that chick,” Gonzo said after they got their drinks. He sounded as he’d caught Russell having carnal congress with some alien barnyard animal.
“Sort of.”
“Of all the women in this fucked up galaxy, you had to fall for an officer.”
“It ain’t like that.”
“A warp fighter pilot.”
“Shit happens.”
“An actual witch.”
Russell shrugged. Neither Marine was given to heart to heart talks; they weren’t teenage girls.
“You’ve lost your fucking mind.”
“Probably.”
“All right. Good luck.”
“That’s it?”
“Pretty much. Watch your six. Fraternization will cost you, brah, so don’t get caught. It’ll cost her more, so if you give a shit about her, you gotta worry about that, too.”
“I know.” They were both fairly good barracks lawyers; they knew the rules, if only so they could get away with breaking them. They knew that not being in the same chain of command wouldn’t mean shit if Russell and Deborah got caught. Officers and enlisted didn’t mix, not unless their relationship predated one’s commission date, and even then they only had a year to marry or end it.
Not for the first time, Russell wondered what the hell he was doing. Deborah wasn’t just everything Gonzo said, she was also part of a very elite, experimental unit, the kind of posting that got extra-special scrutiny by the top brass, which meant lots of eyes on her. Stealing a night together every blue moon took more work than some of the hairiest scores he and Gonzo had pulled over the years. It helped that Deborah was a witch, the kind that could see the future, more or less. If Russell ever convinced her to use her powers for good, as in the good of their bank accounts, he’d marry her for sure.
“When it finally hits you, it hits hard,” Gonzo said with the confident wisdom of someone who’d married twice, divorced twice, and was one drunken blackout away from Round Three.
“Sure, whatever.”
Russell wasn’t sure he was in love. Far as he could tell, that sort of shit was a lie you told yourself until the truth finally hit you in the face. But when he found out Deborah had been stationed at Xanadu, he couldn’t stay away from. And she’d felt the same way, to be fair about it. If she’d told him to get lost, he would have. At least, he thought so. But she hadn’t.
Thinking about their last time together, the way they’d gone at each other… It was like a fever dream. Like getting high on some exotic ET drug while going through a VR sex fantasy, except too real to dismiss.
“Just watch your six,” Gonzo said again.
He didn’t know if he could.
* * *
That can’t be right.
If she’d been perusing an ordinary data file, Heather McClintock would have simply reread it just to make sure she hadn’t misunderstood. You had to do that often as an intelligence officer: something as simple as a translation error could lead to all kinds of trouble, and in her chosen profession even small mistakes could cost lives.
Problem was, she wasn’t reading a document, or even reviewing a multisensory virtual recording. The contents of the jet-black sinuously-curved box on her desk were living memories, and accessing them meant experiencing them fully. She felt as if she had lived through those events, in other words, and if her friend Lisbeth’s theorizing was right, she might have actually traveled back in time on some level to live through them.
Her eyes were watering and she felt
light-headed.
I think I’ll skip a second look for now.
The box was a Kraxan device, one of the many souvenirs from their expedition to the Redoubt, the last stronghold of the Marauders of Kraxan. Genocidal murderers with a penchant for sophont sacrifice, the Kraxans had come to dominate much of the galaxy, not because of their savagery – hardly an uncommon quality among Starfarers – but their affinity to warp space. The Marauders had conquered half the known galaxy before the other half joined forces against them, and the ensuing war of extermination had led to a dark age that still affected known space, two hundred millennia later. The parallels with humanity were unsettling.
That was only the tip of the iceberg, however. Through the memory box sitting on her desk like some primitive work of art, Heather had seen a Kraxan ship create a ley line that hadn’t existed before. And they had done so after making a massive blood sacrifice to their Warpling allies.
In theory, one didn’t need warp conduits, the cracks in spacetime where null-space was most readily accessible. Any ship with a warp generator and the energy budget could open a tear in reality – two tears, actually, one to enter null-space, and another at the desired destination – and make a jump. The problem was, the energy and time requirements went up exponentially. A single light-year transit without the benefit of a ley line required more energy than anything smaller than a battleship could generate, and took between twelve and fifteen hours. A two-light year jump was beyond any ship’s power plant, and even if possible would take over a hundred hours, longer than any sophont in the galaxy could endure transit, humans included. By contrast, the ley line between Sol and Wolf 1061 – about fourteen light years apart – required only a two-hour jump, and the power requirements could be met by even a fusion power plant, let alone the gluon generators used by military vessels.
Those limitations made space warfare a fairly predictable affair: the enemy couldn’t arrive too far from the terminus of a ley line, and to progress any further it needed to reach the entrance to another warp conduit, all of which lay near the core of a system’s primary star. The number of possible approaches was relatively small, which made defending star empires possible in the first place. Finding new ley lines took enormous time and resources, and most civilizations guarded their locations zealously.
The Kraxans had found a way around that. They had laid out new tunnels in spacetime leading to unsuspecting worlds and attacked them without warning. Nobody had the resources to place a large fleet on every system; forces were concentrated at major crossroads, to deny the enemy access to conduits leading deeper into one’s territory. Those defenders had been caught by surprise when the enemy showed up unexpectedly, bypassing fortified worlds and striking deep within their borders.
Even though the history of the Marauders had long been forgotten, the myths they had inspired still lived on. Many legends about warp demons found among Starfarer civilizations were nothing more than garbled accounts of actual events. The records she’d just been reviewing, for example, matched very closely with a ‘fairy tale’ common to half a dozen galactic polities, including the Imperium.
“The devils danced and slew their victims, and with their life fluids opened Ways where none had existed. Through those Ways they came, unwelcome and unbidden into the Realm of the Beddo, the pride of the galaxy, three thousand stars linked as one. Even Mighty Beddo fell under the onslaught; their great cities burned, and the slaughter was very great.”
On its surface, the story was no different than any number of mythical accounts, including those from Earth’s own lore. The linguistic analysis of the epic ballad revealed a great deal more, however. The root word for ‘devil,’ after processing out the changes time and sound shifts had inflicted, came from the Kraxans’ name. The term had traveled through the rise and fall of a dozen civilizations; it went to show what an impression the Marauders had made.
The key to the Kraxan powers was their dealings with the natives of warp space. The real devils.
What do Warplings get out of it?
The Kraxans didn’t know, and didn’t care. The memory-document she’d experienced listed the number of sophonts that needed to die for the creation of a ley line. The base ‘rate’ started at a hundred thousand sacrifices and went up from there. During their rise to power, the Kraxans would seize a star system and depopulate it to forge a pathway to the next one. The toll had been in the trillions; the dead had numbered more than the current population of the known galaxy. After the Marauders were defeated, only scattered systems on the periphery of the known galaxy remained. Even after all this time, the descendants of those remnants hadn’t reached the population and technology levels of their ancestors.
Along with all the destruction they had inflicted, the Kraxans had tainted warp space itself.
Heather shook her head. One didn’t have to frame the situation in mystical terms. What had happened was akin to throwing vast amounts of chum in shark-infested waters: sharks had grown in numbers, and become accustomed to feeding on anything that fell off a ship. Before millennia of continual sacrificial offerings had ‘spoiled’ them, Warplings had been nowhere near as predatory as they were now. The Kraxans themselves had noted that the ‘Starless Path’ had grown increasingly dangerous over the centuries. A few of their scholars had understood the cause, but the few who had dared to mention it had come to very bad ends.
FTL travel had become very dangerous because of the actions of the last species of warp witches. And if humans made things worse… Heather pictured a future where entering warp became suicidal, dooming entire civilizations to remain days trapped in real space. Slower-than-light travel just couldn’t maintain an interstellar network. All the sophonts in the known galaxy would have to turn inward and do the best with what could be found within their star. None would Transcend; having a minimum population in the hundreds of billions seemed to be a necessary if not sufficient step towards the next level or evolution, in addition to a technological and industrial base no single system could support.
We could wreck everything. And we’re going to be tempted to do it.
Heather almost wished she could destroy the little black box, but she wasn’t the only analyst working on it, not to mention that was one of hundreds of similar devices they’d found at Redoubt-Five, still in working order after an ungodly amount of time, pun intended. The knowledge was out there, and suppressing it would be impossible. In a few weeks, months at the outside, decision makers all through the US would know about it: a way to defeat any enemy, provided one was willing to pay the price. She didn’t think anybody in authority would go for blood sacrifice, at least for now. But the mutineers currently skulking somewhere in Imperium space would face no such restraints. The fighter pilots that had ‘offered’ their victims to their Warpling tormentors were already well down that road.
We have to stop Kerensky before he turns humanity into the new Marauders.
Unfortunately, the only people who could do so were heading in the opposite direction.
* * *
“We have to go after the Black Ships,” Commander Deborah ‘Grinner’ Genovisi said.
“Sure,” Lisbeth Zhang replied. “I’ll get on my imp and call the admiral. I’m sure she’ll scrap her orders and do as we say.”
“I know you’re being sarcastic, Colonel, but...”
“But nothing. And don’t get formal with me, Grinner. Admiral Givens isn’t going to change Third’s Fleet dispositions and head into the Imperium on my say-so. Not to mention there’s the small matter of finding Kerensky and his merry band. The Gal-Imps control some seven hundred systems, you know.”
“If we started at Paulus System, we could probably find the ley line they used to escape. The one their tame Warplings created.”
Even as she spoke, Deborah knew how insane she sounded.
“Are you telling me these new super-duper senses we’ve got can locate ley lines?”
“I think so, yes.”
She knew s
he could do it, but decided not to elaborate. For much of her life, Deborah had known things she had no earthly way of knowing, and had grown used to other people’s reactions when she mentioned them. For many years, she’d secluded herself on the outskirts of a small town, playing a dual role: crazy old lady and part-time fortuneteller. And alleged prostitute, which did her standing in that community no good at all. People rarely listened to her, and when they did they often replaced what she said with what they wanted to hear.
For the last several days, she’d been having visions, glimpses of a future that must be avoided at all costs. She had to convince the Navy to change its plans, or monsters would be unleashed on this side of the warp divide.
“I know it’s going to be hard to sell this to the top brass,” she told Zhang. “But we have to.”
“Paulus is eleven warp transits away, on Sector Seven,” the Marine officer said. “And we can’t launch an attack into the Imperium from there; don’t have enough forces in-theater.”
“We could transfer the Death Heads to New Texas, use them as the core of Seventh Fleet.”
The Marine shook her head. “Not going to happen, Grinner. We have our orders. We have to wipe out the Lampreys. After that, maybe they’ll send us after the mutineers.”
“It makes no sense. The Lhan Arkh are no longer a threat.”
“That’s not quite right, Grinner. The Lampreys aren’t a threat right now, and that’s only because they’ve lost four fleets in a row. Problem is, they have a command economy, and inefficient and destructive as those are, in times of war they can crank out ships and guns like few others, because they don’t care if their citizens have to eat dirt to survive. If we leave them alone for even a year or two, they’ll come back for a rematch.”
“In a year or two, they won’t dare try.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Plus there is the revenge angle. The Lampreys raised the Snakes, and the Snakes burned half the world. A lot of people have been itching to settle that score for a long time. Plus they are unrepentant assholes even by Starfarer standards, and butt-ugly to boot, what with their toothed sphincters they use for mouths. Killing them is going to be a pleasure.”
Havoc of War (Warp Marine Corps Book 5) Page 4