“Stand by for NSE,” Major Mike ‘Hound’ Bassett ordered.
Null-Space Engagement was the official term for ghosting. It sounded better on reports, Deborah supposed. A more accurate acronym would have been Partial Emergence Engagement, but PEE just wasn’t something you wanted to see in a write-up. Interacting with the physical realm without leaving warp space required pilots to anchor themselves to a different, deeper section of null-space. One that was home to more powerful and aggressive entities. At least, that was the half-assed explanation fighter pilots had cobbled up when trying to figure out what was happening to them. Scientists were still fiercely debating whether the phenomenon was real, let alone what it meant.
The effects were real enough. While ghosting, fighters couldn’t be struck by most weapon systems, and even those that managed to spill over through a warp aperture – plasma and some of the most powerful graviton-based weapons – only inflicted a tiny fraction of the damage they did back in the ‘real world.’ The side effects were also real enough, unfortunately. After a few ghosting runs, Warplings would start to congregate around the intruders, picking off the unlucky or weak-willed among them. There were ways around that; one of them was to make a deal with the entities and somehow feed them those killed by the ghosting runs.
Deborah had seen it happen. Had been tempted to go along with it. At some point, however, she had realized that doing so would not only damn whoever delivered those victims to the Warplings, but that the process strengthened those monsters and would eventually help them manifest physically in the material universe. She suspected a near-miss had resulted in the destruction of the carrier vessel Exeter, swallowed up with all hands in what the official reports called a ‘freak warp event.’ Lisbeth Zhang had shown Deborah some top secret footage of the last microseconds of the doomed starship’s destruction, and it looked as if long tendrils of darkness had reached out from a warp aperture and dragged the whole vessel into it.
Here be dragons. Ancient cartographers had written that warning on blank areas of their maps, meaning the place depicted was unknown and likely dangerous. That fit null-space perfectly. Dragons and monsters filled the impossible universe where distance and time were, if not meaningless, at least very different than in the physical universe.
Deborah had been transformed by multiple exposures to warp space, first as a navigator, and more recently as a fighter pilot. Sometimes she wondered if she was still fully human.
Non-Emergence.
Thirteen War Eagles hung in the threshold between N-space and their native reality. Deborah’s Corpse-Ship remained in transit. Her Kraxan sensors let her monitor the American ships: to her, it looked as if each fighter was standing near a ragged window amidst the swirling colors of the Starless Path. On the other side of the window was the squadron’s target: a luckless asteroid that had been seeded with transponders to simulate an enemy warship. The squadron volley-fired in perfect unison, and kept shooting until their seven-shot capacitors – up from the original five when Deborah had driven one of those crates – were empty.
By the third volley, they had attracted their first visitor.
Deborah saw it as a dark, sleek shape, darting through the rainbow chaos like an eel on the prowl. It reached towards one of the fighter pilots: what she perceived as an impossibly-long tentacle was a communications link through which the entity could terrorize, feed on or even kill its target. She shot it: the Kraxan graviton beam cut the tendril in two: the section no longer attached to the Warpling dissipated like a heat mirage.
The Starless One turned towards her. This time she struck with both guns and her mind, using the techniques Lisbeth Zhang and her alien friends had passed on. The monster changed shape as it tried to close in on her. One moment it looked just like an old schoolyard bully who’d terrorized Deborah as a child; the next, a twisted version of Russell Edison; finally, it turned into something that conformed to no geometry a sane mind could perceive, let alone understand.
She shot it again, and again. It finally withdrew in bewildered pain, badly wounded, perhaps even dying.
Third Squadron hadn’t even noticed the exchange. Their guns empty, they shut the warp gates and completed the transit that would take them back to the USS Crimson Tide. Deborah watched them go; she sensed a few other Warplings lingering nearby, but the fate of their fellow had discouraged them. They would probably leave the fighters alone for the next few sorties. Mission accomplished.
“Not quite yet, Commander Genovisi,” someone said behind her.
Deborah didn’t bother turning around. There wasn’t enough space behind her seat to accommodate anyone; whoever this was had reached her mind, not her ship. A quick shift in perceptions brought her face to face with the newcomer.
It looked like a man. A morbidly-obese man with a wild shock of white hair atop his head. The presence behind the illusion loomed impossibly large, like a whale – or a mountain – trying to hide behind a human mask. She’d only encountered something this powerful and deadly once before.
“It is a pleasure to finally meet you, Commander Genovisi. I have longed for this moment ever since your meeting with the fake Archangel you call Michael.”
The monster’s mention of Michael made her angry, but she contained herself. Her life and more than her life were in danger.
“What do you want?”
“To take you into the fold, of course. To make you part of something bigger than anything you could accomplish on your own. To join something great and beautiful.”
“Not interested.”
“For the time being, your choices matter. Just remember I treat those who come unto me willingly far better than any I have to take by force. The process in the latter case is much more traumatic.”
“Get out of my head, or I’ll kick you out. The process in the latter case is much more traumatic.”
The Warpling grinned, revealing multiple rows of shark-like teeth. His eyes became pools of pure darkness.
“You will learn to regret your decision, Deborah. For now, be a dear and pass a message along to Lisbeth Zhang. She briefly made my acquaintance not too long ago. Tell her sending me back home only made me stronger. Tell her one day I’ll do to Sol what I did to Redoubt.”
Deborah was back in the real world. Nobody had noticed her brief chat with the entity known as the Flayer, just as she hadn’t sensed the Warpling’s presence until it contacted her. She closed her eyes and prayed to Michael, knowing he wouldn’t respond, not yet. He had promised her they would meet one final time, but that time was yet to come.
It wouldn’t be much longer, however.
* * *
Fromm sent his last email to Heather as Third Fleet began to maneuver towards their next transit coordinates. There was nothing particularly special or poignant in it. They’d both agreed not to do that whole ‘in case this is my last email’ thing. That was loser talk. At least, that’s what they told themselves.
The courier ship heading towards a different warp valley in the system would bear the fleet’s final messages back to the US. They weren’t leaving a holding force in-system, which meant that after this transit they would be out of contact for however long it took to accomplish their mission and reestablish communications. It was something of a historical event: no Sector Fleet had ever advanced into enemy territory without a logistical support chain leading back to American territory. Given the breadth and depth of the Imperium’s warp network, it would impossible to secure such a chain, even if the US could dedicate all its naval assets to the task. The fleet would have to fight and survive with what it was bringing along and what it could forage along the way.
Like so many Horde raiders, he thought.
He should be used to operating on his own by now. This time, he actually had a chain of command, even if it only consisted of his battalion commander, the general in charge of the Marine forces in the fleet, and Admiral Givens herself. Nothing extraordinary about that, except that getting replacements and resup
ply was going to prove a tad difficult.
Only lost two people during the boarding action at CDC-5.
Private Murray Mancuso, and Private First Class Rick Holyfield, both from the same squad in Second Platoon, both killed by a Jelly laser gunner. The Marines had been stunned by the telepathic attack that almost cost Fromm his whole company. Luck, Major Zhang’s timely intervention, and their improved equipment had saved their asses. Fromm’s orders hadn’t been intended to minimize casualties; the alien ships needed to be taken out, and a Marine company or two had less tactical value than a cruiser, let alone a battleship. If half his people had died while taking the objective, the action would still have been deemed a success.
Not by me, though.
The two dead Marines, and a third whose injuries would take too long to mend, had been replaced at Xanadu. All the MEUs were back to full administrative strength. From now on, however, losses would have to be made up by reassigning personnel from rear-echelon units until that was no longer practicable, and then there would be no more replacements.
Figure three to five actions before I can’t fill open slots even with pogues from support elements. Then the job becomes trying to do the job of two hundred Marines with a hundred and ninety. And take more losses because of it.
His own experiences, combined with combat statistics accumulated after a century and a half of constant warfare made foreseeing the outcome almost too easy. After twenty ground assaults or boarding actions, even if things went as well as possible, he’d be down to two platoon equivalents from the original four. And all the while, the chances that an action wouldn’t go would keep increasing. One bad mission, and he wouldn’t have enough living Marines to bury the dead.
A rational army would run. Heather had quoted that during one of their first nights together at Kirosha. Reason was in short supply everywhere in the galaxy, in no small part because rational peoples didn’t win many wars.
* * *
The Death Heads led the way on what promised to be a rough ride.
Transition.
It’d taken a while to get used to sensing tens of thousands of minds at once. Practice made perfect, however, and Lisbeth was now able to watch over the entire fleet like a shepherd dog. The rest of her squadron wasn’t quite as adept, except for Grinner, but they were learning.
The American starships looked like blobs of pure white in a rainbow sea, their brightness and apparent size determined by how many living minds they contained. By contrast, the Kraxan ‘gunboats’ looked the same inside warp space as they did in the physical realm; they belonged to both places.
Of course, looks meant nothing in a universe where eyes or any other photoreceptors didn’t work. Everything she was seeing was a product of her mind’s attempt to make sense of her surroundings. Thanks to her gifts and the Marauders’ technology, she could perceive more information than the average visitor to the Starless Path, who spent the entire trip enshrouded in utter darkness broken only by nightmarish hallucinations. Conventional wisdom was that the standard three-dimensions didn’t exist in warp space, and yet there were such things as distance and movement; they just didn’t work in the same way.
For instance, all the human vessels were arrayed tightly together, even though they had been spread over tens of thousands of kilometers when they jumped into warp. Their closeness was a matter of kinship, or mental similarity. Emotion and elements that one might consider spiritual or at least psychological became a physical dimension here. Her rational mind hated those nonsensical notions, but she’d found they were useful tools to getting things done. In the end, results were all that mattered.
“We’ve got incoming. Lots of Foos,” Jenkins called out. “Just like Grinner called it,” he added with a touch of awe in his voice.
Case in point. If distance didn’t exist here, how were the Warplings moving towards them?
“Don’t overthink it, Christopher Robin.” Atu told her. “These aren’t friendly ghosts and goblins, and we may need to resort to harsh measures to restore Balance.”
A long-range transit usually didn’t attract many Warplings, but as Third Fleet prepared to depart Mellak, Grinner had one of her visions of the future, warning her that trouble was ahead. Lisbeth, already worried about Genovisi’s encounter with the Flayer, had asked to deploy the Death Heads instead of riding transit inside the Laramie. Admiral Givens had granted the request, although Lisbeth was beginning to wonder how many more chips she had left to cash with CINC-Three.
And there were a bunch of NSSs dead ‘ahead.’ They weren’t minor critters, either: a few of the dark shapes were larger than any of the human ships who sailed the rainbow seas, blissfully unaware of the danger. The rest were smaller but still dangerous. Third Fleet was in the middle of a thirteen-hour jump, which would give the entities plenty of opportunities to snatch a few victims. If a ship’s navigation department was among the casualties, that ship would not come out of warp. NSSs didn’t usually venture on this level of warp space; long-distance transits occurred in a relative ‘shallow’ portion of the Starless Path. This many entities were not only unusual, but could do a lot of damage. Third Fleet might lose more vessels during transit than in combat. Unless Lisbeth and her merry band took care of business.
“Weapons free, boys and girls. Splash me some bandits.”
“Tally-ho, motherfuckers!”
“Looks like the Flayer’s gang wants to come out and play,” Lisbeth said as the Death Heads started firing. It’d taken some time, but Atu had taught them how to focus their minds to turn the Marauders’ nuisance weapons into something that could actually kill a Warpling.
We aren’t just prey anymore. We have power here.
The Kraxans had a stronger connection to warp space than humans, but they’d never quite figured how to fight NSSs. Instead, they had concentrated in placating them with a steady diet of victims. The older and more powerful Pathfinders had learned that sophonts could turn their will and imagination into weapons. The very energy Warplings craved could be turned against them. The squadron’s resident Pathfinder ghost had been busy showing humans how to do it.
Marauder weapons could damage weak warp critters and inflict pain on the greater ones. Turning them into something that could kill wasn’t easy. Lisbeth managed it: her shots ripped their targets to shreds. Grinner and Kong scored kills as well; the rest of the Death Heads weren’t as effective, but they were still hurting if not destroying their targets. Dozens of lesser Warplings and one of the big mothers ceased to exist, their dark substance dissolving in the rainbow sea. Each death sent powerful echoes through Lisbeth. It felt as if she was inside a cathedral’s ringing bell. It wasn’t pleasant, but she didn’t mind. The waves of utter surprise and sudden fear from the rest of the Warplings was worth any discomfort.
“There’s a new sheriff in town!” she shouted at the now-stalled army.
Vlad and Atu fought by her side. The Pathfinder glowed with energy and radiated sadness at the carnage it would inflict. The Marauder boiled with furious glee; Vlad had become a devoted follower when he discovered he could actually kill the gods he’d lived in fear of. He still wasn’t great company, mind you, but at least he was on her side.
The Warplings fled after another big fish got taken out. Wimps.
“All right, people, take a break,” Lisbeth said when the Death Heads had stopped cheering. Beating an army of galactic bogeymen was great, but she knew that was just one victory in what would be a nasty war. The NSSs had expected a hunt and found themselves in a fight. Next time they would be prepared.
She left Vlad on guard duty and met her squadron in their virtual O-club, something their collective minds had created inside warp space. They were joined shortly by the pilots of the 25th CVW, a handful of NIO pukes with t-wave implants, and two dozen off-duty warp navigators. Colonel Brunden had been invited to the shindig but had been unwilling or unable to attend. He’d made sure to let it be known that what Lisbeth had to say had his seal of approval,
though.
Smart of him, she thought, making sure she veiled her opinion from everyone else. He’s figured out that he can’t hide his incompetence inside warp space, t-wave shields or not. And he still gets the credit for everything we do. Lisbeth was now in effective command of all warp Adepts in Third Fleet. As long as she was in charge, there would be no deals with the devil, no trading of sophont souls in exchange for survival.
“I hope you all got a good look at that,” she said to the gathered spacers and Marines.
Everyone nodded. They hadn’t been able to participate in the fight, but their enhanced senses were sharp enough to watch the Warplings get routed. The mood in the O-club was equal parts amazement and eagerness.
“It’s going to take work, but eventually all of you will be able to kick some Foo ass.”
The cheering that followed had an edge to it.
“We have some transit time to kill, so we might as well continue your lessons. Allow me to introduce you to your instructor in null-space combat: Atu the Path Master.”
“Greetings, gentlebeings. I will be happy to help you develop your inborn talents to bring Balance to any Warpling who has fallen prey to the Dark.”
Lisbeth grinned as her spirit friend began its work. They’d been training the fighter crews on the basics of null-space tactics, but this was the first time they would learn how to fight back. It wouldn’t be easy: so far only three of the Death Heads could reliable take out a NSS. But every pilot who could at least defend himself would be one less victim who might be tempted into making a deal to survive.
Havoc of War (Warp Marine Corps Book 5) Page 14