Havoc of War (Warp Marine Corps Book 5)

by C. J. Carella

  Heather had gone through a great deal of trouble to arrange a private meeting aboard one of transshipment stations orbiting Starbase Malta. This information was ears-only, knowledge that had not been recorded by any device and was stored only inside Rolls’ head, safe from monitoring.

  At least, until t-wave implants become commonplace, although that is growing increasingly unlikely. Telepathy had turned out to be both harder and more laden with side effects than anybody had expected.

  “My cousin was able to skim through the tentative proposals,” Rolls went on. “They include a full trade embargo against the US and the Pan-Asians, the withdrawal of all volunteer forces in human space, and travel restrictions into Hrauwah space, as well as the tightening of residency requirements within the Kingdom.”

  At the start of the conflict, there had been some fifteen million humans living in the Kingdom: spacers, traders and their families, students, and tourists. The new policies would likely result in their expulsion. Not a severe problem in itself, but just another sign that the times were changing. Humans had always been welcome at the Doghouse. The loss of military support had been expected ever since Grace-Under-Pressure’s flotilla had gone home bearing news of Kerensky’s mutiny. The trade embargo just added one extra fly on the ointment.

  “How long?” she asked the agent.

  “Humans still have friends, even if they no longer stand in the Privy Council. The Assembly of Kings will hold debates before approving the High King’s decision, causing some delay. My personal estimate is that four to six months will elapse before the embargo is enacted. Current contracts will be honored until that time, but no Trading Guild will accept new ones.”

  That is just wonderful. For the first time in its history, the US was flush with hard currency, but it was having trouble finding sellers willing to do business with any human organization. The Puppies had been America’s largest trading partner. This embargo would hurt.

  We still control a major trade nexus, though. Traffic through Xanadu System was down, but it was still three times heavier than anywhere else in the US; too many Starfarers depended on those warp lines to abandon them completely, which meant that they couldn’t stop trading with humans, much as they wanted to. The Puppies would pay a stiff financial price for their decision: a good fifteen percent of their trade passed through Xanadu, and using alternate routes would be fairly expensive.

  A lot could happen in four to six months, too. The Puppies might find themselves forced to reverse course before they could implement their new policies. If the Galactic Imperium threw in the towel, for example. Second-hand news of Third Fleet’s victories were trickling in, shared by passing neutral ships. The Gimps claimed the American force had suffered ‘devastating losses,’ but the battles where those losses occurred kept happening deeper and deeper into Imperium space. Maybe the Puppies wouldn’t have time to do something that would taint their relationship with humanity. She fervently hoped so.

  “Thank you, Rolls-Onto-Leaves,” she said formally.

  A couple of hours later, she was back in Malta, just in time to get another info package from a different source, this time from a passing Biryam freighter. The Butterfly ships had brought news from Lhan Arkh space. It appeared that the Lampreys’ new allies had turned on them.

  Couldn’t have happened to a nice bunch of guys.

  The aftermath of the Battle of CD-5 had been as disastrous for the Lampreys as if Third Fleet had proceeded further into Congressional territory and blasted all their major worlds into cinders. The Circle – a.k.a. the Jellies – had begun attacking Lamprey worlds. Considering the Lhan Arkh’s penchant for treachery, the war might have been their fault, although the Jellies themselves didn’t sound like the most trustworthy species, either. Whatever the cause, a new war was breaking out, and for once it was happening nowhere near American space.

  The was good news, at least for the short term. The Lampreys were reeling and unable to carry on their attack on humanity, and having an invasion force to deal with would remove them from the threat board for a good while. The only problem was, if the Jellies won, their new borders would bump against the US, and nobody knew their capabilities or intentions.

  Something to worry about down the line, perhaps, but her current concerns were a lot more immediate. Heather spared a few more moments wishing good luck on the men and women of Third Fleet. One man in particular, of course. But they would all need it.

  She went back to work.

  Imperial Star Province Kezz, 169 AFC

  I’m dreaming.

  Russell usually didn’t remember his dreams. Probably just was well; there was enough bad shit bouncing around the inside of his head to drive most people crazy, and he saw enough of that during warp transits. He figured whatever ran through his mind while he slept wasn’t the sort of thing that brought joy to one’s life.

  This was different, though. He knew he was dreaming, for one. And he remembered the place he was dreaming about very well, and in a good way. He was standing outside the witch’s house on Parthenon-Three. That was where he’d met Deborah, not that he’d gotten her name that night. It’d been one of the weirdest times of his life, but also among the best. If he could pick a time to dream about, this would be it.

  The front door swung open. Russell smiled and stepped in.

  She was there, wearing the plush bathrobe she’d had on, her hair tightly wound up in a bun. Back then, he’d found her unsettling. Now all he felt was a rush of heat like some alien fever.

  “Good evening,” she said. Her smile was softer than it’d been then.

  “Evening, ma’am.”

  “Are you here for a reading, or just some screwing?”

  His grin got bigger. That hadn’t been in the original script.

  “Yes, ma’am. We were told you did that sort of thing.”

  The asshole bartender who’d steered Russell and Gonzo that way had been trying to teach the two horny Marines a lesson. If things had gone off differently, he and his buddy would have landed in a heap of trouble. Luckily it hadn’t worked out that way.

  “I could tell,” Deborah said, getting to her feet. The robe slid down, and this time she was wearing nothing beneath. “The bartender was also hoping you might teach me a lesson. It was a mean, petty thing to do, telling two dangerous strangers that the local fortuneteller was a prostitute on the side.”

  “Deborah?”

  This had to be a dream, but it felt too real.

  “More than a dream, but less than real,” she said, in that witchy way that both pissed him off and turned him on. “I saw both of us were sharing the same down time for a change, and decided to visit you.”

  They were on two different ships, and nobody was going to allow a Navy officer to grab a shuttle and pay a call to an enlisted jarhead, not in this universe. But she was a witch. She’d helped spot over a thousand stealth fighters, if half the stories he’d heard were true. A dream visit wouldn’t make it to her top twenty on her miracle list. Maybe not even the top fifty.

  “Are you going to gape in wonder all night, Marine?”

  “No, ma’am, I’m not.”

  They lunged at each other.

  Afterwards, they talked for a bit. That felt good, too, which always surprised him. He’d never been good at the talking bits. Negotiating prices and making a quiet exit when he was done was how he got things done usually. He’d never been like Gonzo, who fell for women and had ended up married twice. Both times the wifey had grown into a regular dependapotamous with a personality to match. Russell figure keeping it all business had spared him from a great deal of trouble. Until now.

  They talked shop at first. He told her about Grampa and Gonzo. She told him about her squadron. There was something she wasn’t telling him about, and it hung between them for a bit. He knew she’d done some crazy impossible shit, and that along the way she’d seen something big. Something that had changed her. She was setting that aside and being her old self with him, though, and
it wasn’t bullshit. That part of her was still there, and he didn’t care what the other stuff was.

  Being in that house with her, even knowing it was a dream, it felt like being home, and that was the weirdest thing of all. He’d never had a home before the Corps. Not growing up in the Zoo, where he’d been a street rat living in some abandoned property or another until a bigger gang or the cops threw him out. Home had been wherever he got sent, or back to New Parris when he wasn’t on deployment. He’d figured that after he put his fifty years in, he’d finally settle down somewhere. And now he knew who he wanted to settle down with.

  “Listen,” he began to say.

  “I know. Me too.”

  Best thing about being with a witch was, she knew what he meant.

  “But let’s wait until after, okay?”

  It was sensible. They needed to survive this cruise before they could start thinking about the future. And something about her tone made him think she wasn’t sure there would be an after.

  “It’s going to be bad, isn’t it?”

  She nodded, and the way she held him, tightly and shuddering, scared him more than anything ever had.

  “That bad, uh?”

  “Afraid so, Marine. It’s going to go hard on all of us.”

  “Hard Corps. We live for this shit,” he said, trying to lighten things up with some gung-ho bullshit.

  Deborah smiled.

  “We’ll talk. After.”

  The did what they did best, and for a while nothing else mattered.

  Thirteen

  Imperial Star Province Ugo, 169 AFC

  Admiral Sondra Givens watched the Imperium fleet waiting to meet hers with undisguised pity.

  So this is what the bottom of the barrel looks like.

  Calling the collection of frigates, antiquated battleships and converted merchantmen forming a battle wall around the only inhabited world in the system a fleet was insulting. Even augmented with a hundred or so towed platforms and an still-unknown number of STL fighters, it represented about thirty percent the fighting power of the force she had defeated at Kezz. There were some indications that the land-based defenses were formidable, but initial sensor scans hadn’t revealed them.

  Ugo System was the birthplace of the Obans, one of the Founding Races. One would think that would qualify the red-dwarf star and its accompanying planets for core system status, but one would be wrong. The Obans had spread out beyond their homeworld fairly quickly, being among the scant handful of civilizations that had developed FTL drives independently. They’d held a thriving star empire for about three centuries before running into the Kreck-Denn Alliance. Two centuries and three wars later, the three species had forced the Galactic Imperium. Long before then, Ugo had become a backwater, a place of little more than historical value, and hosting only five percent of the overall Oban population. The system was poor in resources, and climate change in Ugo-Two had covered most of the planet’s surface with inhospitable deserts and arid terrain. The Obans’ preferred marshlands had mostly dried up, and the expense necessary to reverse the ecological changes had been deemed too high to be worthwhile.

  Must be nice to have so much real estate available you can abandon your original system, Sondra thought. Humanity, hemmed in by larger polities, was doing its best to exploit every inch of Sol System. The plan was to turn Mars and Venus into fully Earth-like worlds, more than doubling the system’s carrying capacity.

  She doubted the Obans would be happy to lose their birthplace, however. At the very least, the blow to the prestige of the Founding Races would be severe. The fact that this was the best the Imperium had been able to cobble together to defend the system showed how bad things were. The Gimps were using most of their remaining mobile forces to hunt down Kerensky’s renegade fleet, now that they had apparently bottled it up at the end of a previously-unknown system.

  It’d be nice if they can take care of him. Save me the trouble of bringing him to heel.

  The truth was, she had little desire to fight the mutineers. Except for the occasional pirate hunt, no human fleet had faced another. The Pan-Asians were trade rivals, but the discrepancy of forces was so lopsided in the US’ favor that the GACS would be insane to try anything. Ships had gone rogue before, but the Navy had never faced mutiny on that scale before. If the aliens dealt with the Black Ships, they would be doing her a huge favor.

  For the time being, however, she had to deal with this fight. Victory here would place Third Fleet a mere three transits away from Primus System. All she had to do was beat those cast-offs and their fighter swarm. The trip there had been almost uneventful: each of the five warp transits between Kezz and Ugo had led to partially-evacuated worlds. Third Fleet had bombed a few cities and blown up every space facility of military value, but for the most part kept going, leaving millions of live Gimps behind. Primus was where the war would be decided, and she’d been relieved to get this far without another fight.

  “Still can’t confirm numbers and disposition of Foxtrot-class assets, ma’am. The towed platforms give us an estimate of their numbers, but they are maintaining commo silence and running on stealth mode.”

  “We know how many their towed stations can support, and some of those converted freighters look like their version of carrier vessels. We’ll assume the worst.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The worst was four thousand converted shuttles. Even the relatively paltry facilities in Ugo Province could easily build and crew that number of boats, for all the good it would do them, assuming Lieutenant Colonel Zhang’s mousetrap worked,.

  “Engage.”

  Transition.

  It could be her imagination, but Sondra felt a looming presence nearby, something far worse than a warp hallucination. Given the reports of vast hordes of Warplings keeping watch over her ships, she feared her imagination was, if anything, understating things.

  Emergence.

  Third Fleet reentered normal space at three light seconds and began firing at extreme range moments later. A converted Gimp super-freighter was the first ship to die: larger than a dreadnought but with a fraction of its armor and internal compartmentalization, its souped-up shields weren’t enough against hits from a quartet of high-yield graviton cannon. Three other vessels were torn apart within seconds. Five more were torn apart by the time the enemy finally began to react.

  “Missile launches detected. Five hundred thirty-eight thousand vampires inbound.”

  “Send the gunships in.”

  Zhang’s Death Heads went into action. The five gunboats emerged one light-second from the enemy wall of battle. The lure worked: the Gimps’ STL fighters came out of stealth and unleashed their disruptors on the squadron. By the hundreds, they shot up the gunships, with no effect; although their bizarre hybrid force fields looked like warp shields, they were immune to the disruptors. And by the hundreds, the Foxtrot crews died as the Mind-Killers struck back. The tiny icons vanished from the holotank almost as quickly as they appeared. Warships joined in with conventional attacks, but the heaviest surviving ship’s main guns weren’t powerful enough to damage the gunships. The handful that might have posed a threat were being pounded into scrap by Third Fleet’s own heavy-hitters.

  “Three thousand five hundred Foxtrots are drifting in space.” The converted shuttles’ four-man crews would be all dead, catatonic or utterly insane. Mind-Killers were a hell of a weapon when used against system-bound sophonts. “That seems to be all of them, ma’am.”

  “Initiate Wall of Fire.”

  The Death Head Squadron disappeared into warp and returned a minute later with a massive wave of flame. The light-seconds wide conflagration temporarily blocked the sight of the Sun-Blotter missile swarm rushing towards her ships. This was the first time the gunboats had been able to perform a by-the-book evolution, and never mind that the book had been written a mere few weeks before. Time to see if the Sun-Blotter could handle a close encounter with a the actual sun.

  It took some time
for the fleet’s sensor departments to make sense of the intense light show. Sondra realized she was holding her breath, and forced herself to exhale. It wasn’t as if her ships couldn’t handle a Sun-Blotter or three on their own, although it would be nice if…

  “Twenty-seven thousand vampires remain.”

  A cheer ran through the fleet bridge. The Wall had worked. The tithe that had survived the plasma wave front would be picked off by point defense long before it reached any targets. Meanwhile, the heavy guns continued to reap enemy ships. A dozen Sierras were down, along with thirty-odd barges. No new Foxtrots appeared, which meant her ships could maintain course under the full protection of their warp shields.

  Third Fleet continued its advance. Three more missile launches were met with plasma waves and accurate point defense. By the time the American force had closed to two light seconds, half of the enemy ships were gone, including anything larger than a large cruiser. The frigates and corvettes that remained would only provide some gunnery practice for her spacers. The towed platforms had been obliterated, along with Ugo-Two’s handful of orbital fortresses. Which left…

  “We’re being acquired by ground-based defenses. Multiple facilities are coming on-line.”

  You could hide a lot of power plant signatures from anything but an active graviton sweep simply by placing them underground, and stealth force fields would deal with active scans. Hundreds of points of light appeared on the darkened surface of Ugo-Two. Thousands.

  The Thermopylae staggered under a hit that struck at a gap between her warp shields. A swatch of ablative armor dozens of meters wide was vaporized, along with the hardened plating beneath it. No major hull breaches, she noted at a glance, but a point defense turret and the nine people manning it were gone, mangled into gruesomely twisted metal and flesh by the graviton beam.