“Shuttles are coming in.”
Fromm watched the descending transports with a mixed feelings. Relief and shame, mostly. His company had been on the edge of defeat, along with thousands of other Marines. Being rescued by the unexpected cessation of hostilities was better than the alternative, but it didn’t change the fact that they’d been staring at disaster.
They were writing the book on large-scale warp drops on a planetary surface, and finding out the hard way what worked and what didn’t. Entire sections would need to be rewritten after this operation. His company had been running critically low in ammo when the cease fire orders came in. An enemy counterattack would have wiped it out. His people had fought as well as anybody could have expected, but even Marines can’t make bricks without straw. Losing one of their supply trucks during the drop hadn’t helped, of course.
Losing one of his platoon commanders hadn’t helped, either. Twelve men MIW, another eight KIA. Charlie had been decimated. All because some remfies had miscalculated how long the Marines would need to fight before additional support reached them. And to make matters worse, the carnage had turned out to be unnecessary. If the attack had been delayed by a whole eight hours, the Gimps would have surrendered without firing a shot.
Whining is for losers, he told himself. Shit happens.
Time to get back to work. The Gimps had been cooperative, if not friendly, despite having suffered a hundred times as many casualties as the Marines. Most them had been inflicted from orbit or the air, but the Marines had contributed their share. For all that, the Obans had returned wounded and captured personnel, which was more than he would have expected from most aliens. They had also provided additional transport to help bring all the heavy equipment back to the waiting American ships. Fromm’s company was heading up in US shuttles, but Imperium ships would bring up most of its vehicles. Coordinating the effort had taken some work, but it was getting done. His people would be back on the Mattis in under two hours.
Just a few hours, and we wouldn’t have set foot on this planet at all. And Lieutenant Berry would still be alive.
He shook his head. Raging over the waste of war was pointless. Especially since there would be plenty more to come.
* * *
“Glad I’m never setting food on that dirtball again,” Grampa said.
Russell nodded tiredly. That hadn’t been fun. Gonzo had gotten laser-tagged and was making the trip back in a medical pod. Only his improved armor had kept the little guy alive; his force field had failed at the worst possible time. About half of the guys in Third Platoon had gotten hurt. Russell had a nice set of second-degree burns from a plasma explosion. Worst part was, that had been friendly fire, from a Marine mortar bomb that went off right on top of his fighting hole. Sergeant Fuller had called for a strike right on top of their positions when about a hundred tangos had come pouring out of the last bunker they’d busted. The Eets had gotten the worst of it, but danger close sucked for everyone involved.
“If the War Eagles hadn’t been around, we wouldn’t be getting off this rock alive,” Grampa said, which was nothing but the truth.
“Must be nice, doing ghosting runs and shooting the shit out of the ETs without getting shot back.”
“Funny thing. Back in the day, ‘ghosting’ meant you stopped texting someone,” the old guy said.
“I thought back then you old fuckers wrote letters on paper,” Russel said. Since Gonzo wasn’t around, the duty to make fun of the newbie fell to him.
“Nah, we had most of what’s around now. No imps, but everything else: email, video calls, even some VR just before the aliens bombed us to hell. Kinda surprised there haven’t been more advances along those lines. I guess after you make it to full VR, there is nowhere else to go.”
“There’s the stuff fighters got,” Russell said. He’d been getting an up-close look at what warp witches could do. Deborah had come ‘visit’ a handful of times since Kezz System, whenever their schedules had them sharing some down time. They’d been memorable, every one of them. Not better than the real thing, but probably just as good. Made standard VR look like absolute shit by comparison, and people got addicted to VR, so much so that there were legal cutoffs to how much time you could spend hooked up.
“Faster-than-light telepathy,” Grampa mused. “Just what we need. Spam getting beamed right into our brains.”
You don’t know the half of it, Russell thought, but kept it to himself. He’d had plenty of experience in all that witchy stuff. There would be all kinds of angles to play once the new tech made it to the civvies. Maybe something to think of. New tech would make some people rich, and fuck others over. A smart guy could figure out ways to be among the first group.
“Won’t have to worry about that for a while, though,” he said. “Gotta make it past the next fight, at least.”
Grampa chuckled for a second, then got serious. “We’re going up against humans.”
“Deserters, you mean. Fuck ‘em”
Russell wasn’t a flag-waver, but he’d learned about being loyal to your own back in the Zoo, where your life depended on it. You didn’t betray your gang. Shooting the renegades wouldn’t bother him any.
“You don’t know how bad it gets, when you’re shooting your own,” Grampa said. “Even if they are traitors. I’ve been there.”
“They’re gonna try to kill us. That makes them the worst rat bastards in the universe.”
Primus System, Galactic Imperium, 169 AFC
“That’s a pretty fleet they’ve got. Be a shame if something happened to it,” Lisbeth said, running a visual feed from the Laramie’s sensors focused on the so-called Galalctic Guard.
Those ships, all dreadnought-sized or bigger, were the crème de la crème of the aliens’ Navy. They looked pretty tough, she had to admit. Even a squadron of War Eagles would need a couple of passes before splashing one of them. And of course, talking about doing so would be very undiplomatic, since those massive behemoths would be fighting alongside Third Fleet when Kerensky’s renegades showed up.
She’d feel better about the reinforcements if she hadn’t read the reports about the Battle of Vahan. Almost half of the Galactic Guard had sailed there to destroy the Black Ships, and those proud warships had lasted about five minutes before being wiped out. The details were sketchy: all they had to go on were QE-telegram messages from Vahan’s ground facilities, which kept sending out status reports until suddenly falling silent, at around T+2 hours. That was how long it took. A scout ship’s long-range scans had found drifting hulks in space, and a mostly lifeless planet below them. That disaster had been bad enough to make the Imperium overthrow the Princeps who’d gotten it into the war. The coup had turned the Gimps into allies of sorts. Pretty weird, considering they had started the war, but sadly enough it wasn’t even in the top ten weirdest things about this conflict.
The best estimate from the intelligence weenies was that the renegades would arrive in fifteen to twenty days. In between training every warp-rated bubblehead they could in anti-Warpling combat, her squadron had been tasked with thinking of ways to keep NSSs from simply wiping out the minds of anybody they could reach.
Fortunately, one of her spiritual buddies had the answers she needed.
“We were not helpless food-creatures, foolish human,” Vlad the Impaler was trying to be helpful, but the former Marauder of Kraxan couldn’t help dropping off an insult or two along the way. His method of training people in mental combat would put a Marine drill instructor to shame. And now he seemed to think Lisbeth’s questions were the kind of thing a five-year old would know.
“One of the first things we discovered was a method to keep the Starless Ones from invading our minds,” Vlad went on. “How do you think we enticed those entities to make Pacts with our kind? One does not buy what one can simply take by force. Everyone knows that.”
“That’s wonderful. All I need now is some details on what you used, and how we can jury-rig our technology to replicate it.”
She wasn’t very hopeful. Even if the Marauders had come up with an answer, their technology had been centuries ahead of current Starfarer state-of-the-art. The chances the alien ghost could think of something that could be easily reverse-engineered and, more importantly, implemented in the available time were next to nothing.
At least, that was what she thought before Vlad told her.
“That’s it?”
“Why do you think all ships have force fields, human?” Vlad said. “Or that warp generators aren’t allowed to go off if a ships’ shields fall beyond a minimum threshold? Did you think that was to prevent foreign object damage? There is no risk of that while on the Starless Path. No, even ordinary force fields confer a modicum of protection from the Starless Ones. Not enough by themselves, but if they are properly attuned, they should hold them at bay even if they enter this side of the Divide.”
The details were lacking, of course. Vlad was a warrior, not a techie, and was even more ignorant of how things worked than even the dimmest human spacer or grunt. She’d put Lieutenant Miranda to work. The annoying officer had an uncanny way to make things happen. As she drafted a memo for all concerned parties, she turned to her other alien taking up space in her brain.
“How come you didn’t know that?”
Pathfinders didn’t shrug – their shoulders weren’t built that way – but Atu somehow managed. By the time I was born, shield technology had been abandoned for millennia. Looking back, however, I realize now that one of the reasons it was set aside was its interference with true methods of communication.”
“T-waves, in other words. Force fields can interfere with tachyon comms.”
“Yes, although the term ‘tachyon’ as you understand it is woefully inaccurate to describe the medium you describe. Then again, most Starfarers also misunderstand what light and gravity are. It is when they finally discover their true nature that they can progress to the next level of development.”
“When this is over, maybe I’ll have you teach a course on New Physics at Annapolis. I’m sure they’ll think you’re a hoot.”
“Not bloody likely, Christopher Robin. Some things I cannot teach your kind. You are no less than three paradigm shifts from fully understanding what I know. Two, rather, now that you have glimpsed the truth about the relationship between the Mind and the Starless Path.”
“That’s not very helpful, Pooh.”
“Your kind will get there. If you survive the current crisis.”
Lisbeth sighed. It was up to the techies, and some trial-and-error, to see if their current force fields could be rejigged to keep out Warplings. If they couldn’t, it was going to be a short fight. All American ships would have a handful of tachyon-rated personnel aboard, and those might be enough to fight off an evil spirit boarding party, but the Gimps would get hosed in short order, unless Miranda and his army of brainiacs could come up with an engineering solution in the time available.
If they don’t, we’ll have to think of a way to take out an army of NSSs before they came drop by our universe. As in, me and my four Death Heads, with a little help from two alien ghosts.
Funny thing was, those weren’t the worst odds she’d beat. Didn’t mean she’d come out on top this time, of course. All winning streaks came to an end.
* * *
The Black Fleet arrived at their final destination. It didn’t come alone.
From twelve light-hours out, the heart of the Galactic Imperium looked like any other planetary system. It amused Kerensky to realize how frail and invisible the work of mortals was, when viewed from a distance. Six thousand years of Starfarer labors couldn’t be spotted with the naked eye at this remove. And six thousand years after his Black Ships finished their terrible work, nothing would remain to be detectable even at close range. Once they were rendered lifeless, cities would crumble into dust, orbital facilities would plummet back to the ground, and asteroid bases would be battered into shapeless lumps of matter, indistinguishable from other space debris.
So ephemeral. Pointless, and little better than the Stone Age primitives that comprise most intelligent species of the galaxy.
The depths of his own contempt, not only for his enemies but for his own people, surprised him a little. The part of him that still could analyze information dispassionately understood those feelings weren’t his own. His human side was shrinking steadily. Soon it would be gone.
While his tactical officers analyzed a long-rage sensor scan of the system, Kerensky examined the disposition of his fleet. Fifty-nine vessels – only ten of them warships – barely deserved to be called a ‘fleet.’ The Odin remained a formidable vessel in its own right, and the rest of his formation was, pound by pound, as deadly as anything else in the universe, but even with their ability to ghost those ships didn’t have the firepower to defeat any major space formation. Luckily, they didn’t have to. They had been joined on emergence by seven vast shapes. Manifested Warplings, each more powerful than a dreadnought even if one only counted their physical capabilities, which formed only the tip of the iceberg.
The nebulous forms held station at a noticeable remove from his ships. They might be allies, but nobody wanted them nearby. Even the normal separation between FTL ships felt a little too close for comfort. For one, nobody wanted them showing up on visual displays. Even the altered humans among his crew enjoyed looking at them. Best to just see them as blank icons on tactical maps. That made it easier to pretend they were something that belonged in this universe.
Kerensky forced himself to take a good look. The things floating near the fleet were larger than the ones he’d summoned at Vahan System. Their forms appeared to be in constant flux, portions of their kilometer-long bodies vanishing from sight and new sections appearing from nowhere, much like heat mirages, and it was hard to look at them for long before nausea and a feverish trance set in. Like Kerensky’s ships, the Warplings were dark, but in their case their inky blackness seemed to have depth, as if their outlines contained some endless chasm. They were deadlier than the lesser monstrosities he’d summoned before: these beings could lash at their victims’ minds and wipe out entire ship crews without touching them.
Many more awaited on the other side, preparing to cross over once the conditions were right. The vast majority of those weren’t powerful enough to craft a material body for themselves, but would be happy enough to rewrite a hapless sophont’s neural network to serve as a temporary home. The weakest and most numerous among them could only stay long enough to kill, to jump from one victim to the next for a few brief seconds, feasting on the horror and agony they inflicted before being forced back to the other side. Those beings were nowhere near as fearsome as the great beasts hovering in space, but their actions would be decisive. Their kind had inflicted most casualties at Vahan, turning dozens of ships into lifeless derelicts in a matter of seconds.
Ten warships, seven monsters, and an invisible host of murderous spirits. That should be enough, for as long as the monsters lasted and the spirits could be brought over.
Manifested Warplings required enormous amounts of power to remain in the physical realm. The initial sacrifices at Sokolov had created the conditions for their initial embodiment, and the three hundred million he’d slaughtered at Vahan had provided the necessary power for another summoning. The Prophet had informed him that the entities wouldn’t last for more than a few hours unless more nourishment was provided. The disembodied Psychovores were individually ‘cheaper’ but in aggregate would require even more power. At Vahan, the enemy had unwittingly helped to transfer those entities over, by increased the size and depth of his warp signatures. He should be able to use them on the enemy fleet. After that, Primus System’s billions would be more than enough to empower them, and many others. Perhaps even the far greater entity that ruled them all.
Kerensky gritted his teeth. He’d encountered the leader of the Host that followed his fleet only once. It’d appeared to him in the guise of a human, a morbidly-obese man
with white hair and an arrogant expression, but the entity beneath had been so awe-inspiring it made the lesser being now using the Prophet as its meat-puppet look tame by comparison. The brief meeting had left the admiral shaken to his core. Even now that he was no longer a mere human, he was beginning to understand his place in the new order of things, and it wasn’t very impressive at all.
“Don’t fret, Nikolai. Soon all your enemies will be gone.”
Kerensky turned to the familiar, hated figure. The Prophet had not been invited to the CIC, and the admiral wasn’t sure if what he was seeing was a mental image or if Dhukai had been allowed in by the security detachment watching the fleet bridge. For all he knew, the Warpling-possessed bastard had simply transported himself there. There’d been rumors that the spiritual leader of the Black Fleet could perform warp jumps without the need for catapults or starships. He idly wondered if he would one day learn that trick.
Assuming I don’t outlive my usefulness after this battle is over. Despite his efforts to guard his thoughts, the Prophet’s widening smile told him he’d been overheard.
“You will always have a place with us, as long as you remain willing to cooperate.”
That might even be true, but he suspected that once enough of those creatures manifested themselves, humans would become mere servants, or even slaves. There was enough humanity left in him to care about that, but not enough to care greatly. It was easier to let things unfold. Once you started an avalanche or a great forest fire, the time for action was over and you became a mere spectator for what followed. He hadn’t reached that point yet, but it was getting closer.
“Sir, some of the ships around Primus-Three have American signatures!”
Kerensky turned his attention to the tactical display, where identified enemy vessels were listed by class and configuration. Sure enough, there were about fifty US Navy vessels in orbit around the Imperium’s capital. He knew many of them: the USS Thermopylae had been Third Fleet’s flagship, and many of the other ships had been in that formation. IFF transponders and the sensor scans confirmed it. The Navy had joined forces with the very enemies the Black Ships had sacrificed everything to stop.
Havoc of War (Warp Marine Corps Book 5) Page 22