CLANG! The graviton beam impact on her hybrid shields felt as if God’s own baseball bat had tried to knock her out of the park. The Corpse-Ship lurched in mid-air, and enough G’s got through the inertial dampeners to whip her back and forth with brutal force.
Some Lamprey cannon-cocker team had turned out to be not smart at all.
Grinner Genovisi lashed the now-unmasked gun position with her secondary guns; the shield-piercing particle beam weapons turned the self-propelled cannon and a three hundred-meter swatch of forest around it into molten, lifeless patch of lava.
Lamprey stealth systems were among the best in the known galaxy; the easiest way to find the hidden guns had been to offer her ships as decoys. Luckily the Corpse-Ship’s shields were powerful enough to shrug off a heavy graviton blast without any damage. It still hadn’t been much fun.
“And that’s that,” Lisbeth said. “RTB, people. Well done.”
It hadn’t been much of a fight, at least from her perspective; the Marines who’d helped take out the three Planetary Defense Bases on the surface would likely disagree, of course. The space action had been the next best thing to a cakewalk: Third Fleet had been met by a frigate squadron backed by a couple of dozen STL monitors, about as well-armed as battlecruisers but unable to warp, and two orbital fortresses. Her gunboat squadron destroyed them all before the rest of the Navy formation even got into range; it had been about as dangerous as a training run. After that was over, it’d been time to deploy field-encasement thermal weapons on every major population center.
Transition.
The Starless Path was quiet on the way home. Lisbeth had given orders that any Warpling that approached the squadron was to be shot on sight. The Corpse-Ships could engage targets inside warp space, including the natives. So far, the only ‘Foos’ foolish enough to show up had been minor apparitions, the kind that could embody bad memories. Blasting them away had been a pleasure, but she knew the weapons wouldn’t be as effective against one of the Big Kahunas. The Marauders had spent centuries looking for ways to kill Greater Warplings without success.
And no angels or saints have shown up so far. Maybe that’s for the best. It would suck if we shot one of them by mistake.
“I would alert you before you did something you would regret,” Atu assured her.
“The Starless Ones will torment you for ten thousand eternities, meal-on-legs,” another voice growled inside her head.
That was Vlad the Impaler, her other spirit guide. The ghost of a Marauder, for some values of ghost. Lisbeth had been sharing an intimate psychic moment with the Kraxan when he died, and his memories and thought patterns had been imprinted onto hers. Atu kept the murderous alien muzzled for the most part, but he occasionally broke free to regale her with detailed descriptions of death by torture.
“Atu, if you please?”
The good alien fell upon the bad one and overpowered him. Lisbeth could still hear the faint echoes of their struggle as her ship emerged from warp and settled down gently unto the cradle aboard the Laramie. The maintenance crew approached her gunboat like a pack of natives in the face of an ancient idol, one that might suddenly come alive and claim a living sacrifice. Even after dozens of training missions, the skeleton-shaped ships still made most everyone unease, even the people who thought they were the coolest damn things in the known galaxies.
Word was that a couple of Warmetal songs dealing with the Death Head Squadron were already out, although they hadn’t caught up with Third Fleet before it sailed off, worse luck. Having one of her favorite bands sing about her deeds was a dream come true, the kind of thing that made all the shit she’d been through seem worth the trouble.
“Vanity is a frail motivator, Christopher Robin.”
“Quiet, you. And keep your half-brother quiet, too.”
“I assure you we bear no relation to one another,” Atu replied in a prim tone before shutting up.
After their AAR, they would be able to relax for a bit. Third Fleet would spend a day or two foraging for consumables in-system before moving on, which would take another day or so. Three days of relative calm, assuming the Lampreys didn’t send their Quadrant Fleet here, which she doubted. The Lhan Arkh would no doubt made their stand two warp transits away, in the system known as Greater Congressional District Five. With a population of two billion, and the sixth largest shipyards of the polity, that was a system the enemy had to defend. A quick victory there would severely weaken the Lampreys and free Third Fleet to prepare for the next job at hand. If all went well, they’d be back to Xanadu ahead of schedule, in three weeks instead of four.
The Lhan Arkh would be waiting for them with everything they could muster, of course. Just because Lisbeth couldn’t think of anything the enemy could do to change the outcome of the next battle didn’t mean they wouldn’t.
* * *
Admiral Sondra Givens opened the courier-delivered dispatch and idly wondered how long it had been since a stealth corvette catching up with her flagship had brought unqualified good news. Not since the war began, she thought.
The electronic file she downloaded was a mixture of good and bad tidings. Bad news first: intelligence reports indicated the Lamprey forces at Congressional District Five had been reinforced by a flotilla of unknown origins. The reports were all marked as ‘unverified,’ which meant they depended on somewhat untrustworthy sources. Alien spacers who’d sold their sensor data to American agents, most likely. The alleged ‘thirty to fifty-ship formation’ detected maneuvering around one of the three Lhan Arkh inhabited worlds in the system had been observed by civilian sensors at long range; the energy signatures were too faint to even identity possible ship classes. Civilian vessels didn’t gather in such numbers and dispositions, however: those bogeys were warships, and their transponder readings weren’t Lhan Arkh or Imperium but something the informants hadn’t been able to identify.
Flag officers positively loathed surprises, and that was what awaited them at CD-5.
Much of the rest of the report was filled with things anybody with a star map and basic literacy could think of, plus a variety of wild guesses. The Lhan Arkh Congress had ‘borders’ with five other Starfarer polities: the Galactic Imperium, the Vipers, and the Wyrashat Empire were three of them, and it was vanishingly unlikely that any of them was the source of the unidentified fleet.
The Byriam, a.k.a. the Butterflies, were a possible but not probable suspect. They had contributed ships to the doomed Interstellar Armada that Kerensky had obliterated at New Texas, but the consensus was that they’d done so under duress from the Imperium. They also didn’t have a lot of ships to send; their system defense doctrine was based on STL ‘meteor showers’ – vast formations of unmanned space rocks with rudimentary guidance and control systems which would pelt any invader foolish enough to enter their worlds. Not the sort of weapon system you could pack up and use to project force elsewhere, in other words.
The Donn-Hee could also be safely eliminated. They were a small and generally despised civilization. Known commonly as the Diggers, the Class One species had been ground down by the Lampreys and other rapacious Starfarers and were confined to only a handful of systems, all containing only airless rocky planets made inhabitable only by the expedient of burrowing deep belowground and using geothermal and fusion power to provide life support. The Diggers were still around only because they had nothing worthwhile to steal. Even the Lampreys had figured it was easier to pay for warp transit rights through those systems than to spend ships and treasure conquering a bunch of near-useless planets. In any case, the Diggers had no ships to send; they had a frigate navy, barely good enough to fend off any pirates desperate enough to try to rob them.
From there, the guesses went from the merely useless to the fantastic. It was pointless to speculate; all she knew was that the enemy had been reinforced by an unknown actor, and she would have to adjust her plans with no knowledge beyond that.
The good news, such as they were, didn’t quite make
up for the bad: the Navy was sending a carrier strike group to Xanadu to rendezvous with Third Fleet after it returned there in preparation of the second phase of the campaign. It was a small force: one first-generation fleet carrier and five light carriers, plus a destroyer squadron for escorts, with a total fighter strength of a hundred and sixty. The same number she’d had at the Battle of Parthenon, in other words. Once Third Fleet was out of contact and beyond resupply, the relative handful of War Eagles would be quickly attrited, unless they used the new ‘ghosting’ tactic, which had caused so much trouble already. Something else to worry about.
Before that, however, she had a decision to make.
Third Fleet could proceed with its original plan and fight whichever forces were present at CD-5; it could leave the Lampreys be, withdraw to Xanadu and head to the Imperium, or it could retreat, join up with the carrier task group plus any other reinforcements she could get, and then return to CD-5.
“That would add three weeks to Phase One,” she muttered. The only option that stuck to the schedule was the first one. And after seeing the Death Head Squadron in action, she’d come to trust Zhang and Genovisi. If the two warp witches said time was of the essence, she had to believe them. Option One was it.
Every day they delayed was another opportunity for Kerensky and his Black Ships to do something unthinkable.
* * *
Nobody died.
Nobody in his company, that was. Charlie’s losses had been limited to seven wounded-in-action, two of them badly enough they’d be out of commission for several days, but Bravo had been less fortunate, with three KIAs when their assault element ran into an unexpected Lamprey patrol, leading to a close range firefight. For all that, the 101st had accomplished its mission with minimum casualties, due to a combination of training, the new weapon systems they’d brought along, and pure good luck. The latter would never last.
Operation Larvae Stomp had been an unqualified success. Five MEUs had reduced three Planetary Defense Bases in the kind of land assault that was becoming unnecessary with the advent of fighter aircraft. If Third Fleet had been able to deploy a hundred or so War Eagles, those teleporting cannons could have destroyed all PDBs with minimal losses. They didn’t have any, however, and the handful of Death Head gunboats they’d brought along couldn’t do the same job, not in an acceptable length of time. The Marines had taken care of the ground defenses the old-fashioned way, except with better warp catapults and weapon systems.
The only unit that didn’t get the job done flawlessly was the 89th MEU, which had ended up facing a brigade equivalent of mechanized infantry. Bad intelligence was the inevitable end of rushed operations, and this had been no exception. The 89th had to be rescued by two gunboats that engaged the PDB and the enemy ground forces at close range. The final score had been sixteen dead and twenty-one injured Marines versus some five thousand dead Lampreys and an obliterated defense base.
Fromm knew his company could just as easily have dropped into that meat grinder.
Set it aside, and put the mission first.
Five
Star System Sokolov, 168 AFC
It is eerie, how quiet things are now, Nicholas Kerensky thought as he walked through the halls of the Odin.
Even after decades of living with thought-activated imp-to-imp communications, most humans found it more comfortable to talk out loud to each other. For one, implants with that level of sophistication were still beyond the reach of many civilians – you only got a full set imps if you enlisted past the Obligatory Service’s four-year term – and for another the thought-to-comm conversion wasn’t perfect, leading to garbled transmissions and the occasional stray thought being sent out by accident, often leading to what amounted to uncomfortable levels of honesty. Even the Navy relied primarily on audible or audiovisual transmissions.
Among the crewmembers of the Black Fleet, however, real telepathy was universal. Using it exclusively was becoming second nature, and hearing actual speech was growing rarer with every passing day. It was too convenient, not to mention instantaneous, which at distances greater than one light-second made it extremely useful.
The old Kerensky would have found the silence pervading the CIC unnatural and disturbing. The man he had become was mildly amused. Even the ordinary telepathic chatter he could normally ‘overhear’ was muted; everyone was intently awaiting his orders.
The time to act had finally come.
He settled down on the fleet commander’s chair, noticing a tingling sensation in the back of his head that warned him he needed a new dose of Melange; a quick command to his medical implants sent the drug coursing through his bloodstream, quenching the cravings. For the first few seconds after getting dosed, his awareness expanded a hundredfold and he could feel the mood of every man and woman in the fleet. A small percentage was afraid, and a smaller number still couldn’t help feeling regret for what they had done and soon would do, but even they were committed to the cause. There were no doubters and second-guessers left; they had been weeded out in the last few months since their odyssey had begun.
Remembering the fate of those potential traitors wasn’t good for his mood, however, so he forced himself not to dwell on it. He carefully composed his thoughts before transmitting them to every crewmember in the fleet:
“When we set off on this mission, I promised you justice. Justice for a century and a half of violence and hatred, justice for unprovoked attacks culminating in the Days of Infamy and a Galactic Alliance dedicated to the extermination of humanity.”
Intense imagery followed his words: many of his crew had memories of slaughter and loss, and Kerensky took those intimate moments – the shock of hearing about the death of loved ones, funerals where the coffins lowered to the ground had been heartbreakingly small, sights and sounds no human should ever experience but which too many of the had – and shared them with everyone, making them feel the pain their comrades had suffered. The mental roar that followed was full of rage and bitterness. That was all to the good: that rage would serve them well in the dark days ahead.
“The galaxy has decided there is no place in it for mankind. For decades, we tried to be good neighbors. We traded peacefully when we could, and only defended ourselves when attacked. We never started a war; every conflict since First Contact was initiated by our enemies. And every attack they launched on us was repulsed at great loss to them. Even then, we mostly refrained from doing what our enemies wished to do to us. The two lone exceptions – the Snakes and the Gremlins – were the result of necessity. It was them or us. And now, it appears that the great Starfaring Powers have made the same determination. It is them or us. Either we accept extinction, or we visit it upon those who wish us dead.”
Another mental roar washed over him, and it made him feel almost godlike – and at the same time, humbled. They would die for him, kill for him, and follow him to the Gates of Hell itself. He must prove himself worthy of their loyalty, for they had sacrificed everything to become the terrible swift sword of humankind.
“Today, we march forward to destroy those who would destroy us. They called us demons and devils, but I call us Crusaders, fighting for something greater than survival. We have put everything on the line for this moment, and future historians will remember us, because without us there will be no future for humanity.
“Today, we sail forth and bring justice to our enemies.”
The cheers that followed were heard on this reality and the strange realm from which the Black Fleet drew its power.
Imperial Star Province Bizzik, 168 AFC
“The Insects are getting on my nerves, Captain,” Senior Watch-Stander Branck said.
“You know that ‘Insect’ is a demeaning term, Branck,” Captain Hentel said in a bored tone of voice. “A clear sign of bigoted wrong-think. I should report and denounce you.”
The two Taro soldiers laughed at the old joke, the sensory cilia on top of their heads waving in merriment. You developed a sense of humor quickly in the
service of the Imperium, particularly when you belonged to one of the Junior Races, the dozen or so species who had been a little late in joining the Founding Trio on the path towards Unity. It was a choice between gallows humor and quiet desperation.
Captain Hentel was as unhappy with their current posting as his second in command. Bizzik was a Kreck system; its main planet was one of those rare low-gravity and thick-atmosphere worlds that the Insects liked to infest with their teeming hordes. The Kreck weren’t very good soldiers, however, and they preferred to staff their orbital fortresses with hardier sophonts. The Taro were happy to oblige, trading tax exemptions for military service. Once Hentel’s twenty-eight-year term ended, he would not have to pay income or life-support taxes for twenty-one years; if he played his cards right, in a decade or two he might even have enough money to purchase a Vote and become tax-exempt for life.
That was how the Ladder of Life worked; most Imperium denizens were Taxpayers doomed to penury and sacrifice; the Voters were spared from such duties due to their power to elect Proxies, who in turn selected the Mega- and Giga-Proxies whose decisions actually mattered, except where the Triumvirate was concerned, of course. The Three Rulers answered to no one.
And the Triumvirate, in its infinite wisdom, had made war on the Humans. The demand for military personnel had skyrocketed, giving Hentel the chance to rise from lowly Taxpayer to the (temporarily) tax-exempt status of Soldier, and from there to the officer sub-class. Duty on a major province was a plum assignment. Unfortunately, it happened to be in an Insect world. Becoming a Voter might be worth the hardship, but that was in the future, and he was suffering here and now.
Havoc of War (Warp Marine Corps Book 5) Page 7