Havoc of War (Warp Marine Corps Book 5)

by C. J. Carella

  Betrayal. The shock was enough to awaken his human side. He couldn’t believe the US government would join forces with the Imperium. With the aliens who mere months before had been about to render humanity extinct. Rage blinded him; amidst the red haze he heard a chorus of animalistic growls coming from the minds of everyone aboard. It became impossible to tell whether the anger was his own, or part of the shared group-think.

  “Traitors.”

  To be disavowed, outlawed even, he could understand. But to find fellow humans fighting alongside their enemies went beyond the pale.

  “Worse than that, Nikolai,” the Prophet whispered in his ear. “They want you dead because they fear your strength. They will court extinction rather than owe their lives to you.”

  The waves of fury coming from every crewmember in the fleet made rational thought almost impossible, but Kerensky managed – barely – to suppress the urge to order an immediate attack on the American fleet. Before he committed his forces, he needed to learn as much as he could about the enemy. If he failed, humanity was doomed. Watching his country make common cause with her executioners made the stakes clear enough. He forced himself to watch the passive sensors’ readouts, data that was several hours old but which might prove vital in the battle ahead.

  “Some of the US ships are Lamprey designs,” he noted out loud, using both his regular voice as well as his mind. The professional demeanor he projected helped restore calm among the rest of his people. The anger was still there, but they wouldn’t let their feelings interfere with their jobs.

  “That is correct, sir. Converted models, with warp shield attachments and some sort of armor enhancement, also present in the American-made ships.”

  “Interesting.”

  He’d read files about new ship systems using technologies seized at Xanadu. Third Fleet, being closest to recently-conquered system, would have gotten them first. They were going to be tough nuts to crack. And dealing with them would allow the Imperium to pile on. The Gimps had another capital ship fleet in the system, at least as powerful as the one he’d obliterated at Vahan. Between them and the Americans, they had more than enough firepower to destroy him. Even warp-ghosting wouldn’t protect the Black Ships forever, and they lacked the firepower to destroy their enemies.

  And they’ve grounded the Gimps’ STL fighters, now that they know their ‘disruptors’ will only help open their way for our allies. Which means we’re going to need another way to bring them over.

  Fortunately, he knew just how to do it. The method would send a few million aliens to hell a little sooner, but wouldn’t change anything otherwise. By the time the Black Fleet left Primus, none of the system’s current forty-three billion inhabitants would be alive to see it.

  The Prophet’s smile told Kerensky his thoughts had been read loud and clear.

  Sixteen

  “Warp emergences! Fifteen of them at one light-second. Fifty inside Primus-Two’s atmosphere!”

  “Activate GHOSTBUSTER,” Admiral Sondra Givens ordered. “Main fleet elements, fire at will.”

  The fifty atmospheric transits would be the Black Fleet’s fighter forces, configured to slaughter civilians with Mind-Killers. GHOSTBUSTER would hopefully deal with them before they could do too much damage. The new force field configurations her miracle workers had devised could only protect a fraction of the people on the ground. There had been only enough time to make the required modifications on the space and orbital defenses, and a few ground installations. It was up to her own fighters and the Death Heads to do protect the rest of the civilians. Sondra wished the fighter and gunship jocks the best of luck and concentrated on her the fleet action.

  Fifteen emergences. Kerensky was only supposed to have ten ships, one of them a converted freighter turned into makeshift carrier. There was only one probable answer, and she wasn’t looking forward to it.

  Eight of the vessels that hung on the threshold of warp were former American warships. The other seven weren’t ships of any kind.

  Can’t be, her mind gibbered. Even after reading the reports from the Battle of Vahan, she found it hard to believe what she was seeing. The black blobs emerging into real space were real, however, real enough to be detected by her sensors, to generate a multitude of emissions in dozens of spectra, and to make her want to claw her eyes out. And they weren’t alone. Even though they couldn’t be seen or detected by the naked eye or any mundane sensor system, there was a flickering on her force fields that told her what her t-wave capable personnel already knew. A horde of disembodied Null-Space Sophonts emerged from those warp openings, leapt towards her ships – and were stopped by their re-attuned force fields. As long as those shields held, Warplings couldn’t play havoc with her spacers’ minds. But when they failed, as force fields invariably did in combat….

  We’ll just have to kill ‘em all before that happens.

  Out loud: “Engage all contacts!”

  By sheer chance, the Thermopylae’s target ‘basket’ included one of the writhing shadowy things that had invaded her universe. Training overcame shock and horror, and the dreadnought blasted away at the entity – designated, somewhat erroneously, as Sierra Eleven – with a full spread from its main guns. High-intensity grav beams tore into the dark substance – flesh? – of the creature. No force fields or warp shields protected them, but even though the target seemed to recoil from the impacts, it wasn’t torn apart. Nothing made of flesh – or stone or steel, for that matter – should have survived exposure to those energies, but the monster did. They had wounded it, but it wasn’t dead yet.

  “We’re detecting warp fluctuations from Sierra-Eleven. It – ”

  An impossibly-wide stream of white-hot energy poured forth from somewhere inside the entity. All sensor screens went blank and Thermopylae was buffeted with enough force to rattle everyone inside like dice in a bucket. Sondra was thrown against the five-point harness holding her to the command chair. Several bridge crewmembers who’d been on their feet for one reason or another were tossed against the nearest object or bulkhead with bone-crushing force. It took a lot to overwhelm momentum baffles, but the beast had managed it.

  “Some sort of spacetime fluctuation,” the Tactical Officer reported, wiping blood from his lip, which he’d bitten through during the impact. “Very much like a graviton beam.”

  A warp-based weapon of some sort. Powerful enough to wash over warp shields and smash through force fields and armor. The flagship had taken some damage; her cursory check showed several hull sensors and weapon turrets had been scoured clean. Thirty-seven spacers were dead, and fifty-three badly injured. The dreadnought’s captain was still fighting the ship, though, and that was all that mattered. Sondra let him do his job while she concentrated on hers.

  Tactical displays came back online, and showed Sierra-Eleven was coming apart under the relentless hammering of dozens of gun batteries. A squadron of Imperium ships and an orbital fortresses were adding their firepower to the mix, and the monster, incredibly tough as it was, still remained limited to some physical constraints. Whatever it was made of couldn’t withstand continuous exposure to high-energy attacks. Gravitons and plasma appeared to have the most effect, and luckily those were the most common power sources for heavy anti-ship weapons.

  Or perhaps luck had nothing to do with it, she considered as the Warpling fired its own weapon, this time at an Imperium superdreadnought. Its multi-megaton mass reeled under the impact. Maybe the Elder Races learned those were the weapons of choice when dealing with those entities, and passed the knowledge along to their descendants.

  Pointless speculation, of course. She watched the giant space monster – somebody in her staff would come up with a proper designation to use in the after-action report – seem to fold into itself and disappear in the flashing multicolor display that accompanied warp events. Destroyed, or merely forced to flee? No way to know. The important thing was that the manifested Warpling was gone. It had taken about as much pounding as a capital ship
to take it down, but down it was, and while it damaged three ships before being banished, it hadn’t destroyed any. Three others were gone as well, but they’d done better, taking five ships – one of them an American vessel – with them. One of the damaged vessels had stopped responding. The Imperium super-dread had lost its shields for a few seconds too long – now it was only crewed by the dead, insane or possessed. Sondra barely suppressed a shudder.

  The Black Ships still stood, protected inside warp space. It would take hours of steady pounding to get through them in their current state. And if their fighters succeeded in feeding the Warplings more victims, those seven monsters would only be the first of many.

  I never thought I’d end my career fighting giant space monsters.

  A few command bridge spacers looked up when they heard her chuckle, then turned back to their jobs, hoping the Old Woman hadn’t lost it.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Gus Chandler basked in slaughter like some pagan god.

  Not too long ago, he’d been terrified of the Foos, the monsters that lurked in warp space. He’d watched them kill his friends, had been chased by them, and almost gotten caught a few times. His own personal demon, the Bogeyman Under the Bed, had been the worst. The idea of what the Bogey could do to him still made him shudder, even now that he no longer had to fear him. The old saying had turned out to be right: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. The Bogeyman was now his copilot.

  The Foos had been willing to make a deal with Gus and his fellow fighter pilots. They ended up doing the same with Admiral Kerensky and a bunch of ships from Seventh Fleet. They’d had to leave the Navy, though, something that still bothered him when he thought about it. That didn’t happen very often, though. At the moment, all he felt was a mixture of joy and rage.

  Now that he and the Bogeyman were fully linked, he got high on killing. He could feel the monster inside him purring like a cat while he turned on his fighter’s Mind-Killers and sent hundreds of thousands of Gimps straight to Hell. The aliens’ souls were absorbed by the Warplings surrounding his Black Eagle, with Bogey taking the lion’s share.

  Gus felt his Foo grow stronger and share its pleasure with him. It was an almost sexual rush. Power was like a drug, and he was riding high on it. They all were.

  Mind-Killers exposed anybody within range of the low-power graviton emission to micro-warp events. Against beings who couldn’t stand exposure to warp space – over ninety percent of most aliens – that meant death or insanity. With Foos hovering just on the other side of those warp pinholes, it meant death for even most FTL-capable creatures. Even better, those victims’ souls went directly to the ravenous Warplings, who grew stronger with every killing.

  At some point, the process would take a life of its own and reach the psychic version of critical mass. An army of Foos would enter the world and cleanse the system of all sophonts. A part of Gus was worried about that. The monsters might turn on their human allies once they didn’t need their help. Another part of him didn’t care. He and Bogey were now so close together that he didn’t think he could die anymore. If the Foos destroyed his body, he’d live as part of the thing that once scared him the most. Gus would become the Bogeyman. And that was fine with him.

  He frowned when he realized more tangos were surviving than expected. He’d been tasked with wiping out a city near a Planetary Defense Base, killing two birds with a stone. Over ninety percent of the ETs groundside should be goners by now, but thousands of them were still alive and kicking, hiding behind some sort of force field umbrella. Shields had never worked against Mind-Killers before. They’d have to do something about that. Blasting them open would probably do the trick, and he didn’t mind treating the aliens to some standard 20-inch cannon blasts. He didn’t mind that at all.

  Somewhere a few hundred miles away, Lieutenant Martin ‘SOL’ Soledad screamed in terror and died.

  His wingman’s mental death-cry hit Gus like a hammer blow to the head. Agony and shock stunned him, and that almost got him killed when some ship he’d never seen before – something like a skeleton wrapped around a capsule – came gunning for him. Came at him from inside warp space. He saw a beam of energy coming at him, which should be impossible except he was in a universe where that sort of thing happened all the time. Reflexes saved his ass; he willed himself to be elsewhere, and his Black Eagle dodged the energy beam. He’d done two impossible things in a row, but the skeleton-ship was coming back for another pass, and he wasn’t sure his luck would hold out.

  His Foos went after the weird fighter. They tried to dogpile it, forced it to turn its attention to them. To Gus’ amazement, its energy blast hurt the Warplings. Killed some of them even, which he hadn’t thought was possible. Didn’t matter. He had to get out of there.

  He popped back to the Enola Gay, the refurbished freighter the Black Fleet had turned into a carrier, along with the survivors of his squadron. Only four out of six had come back.

  “The fuck was that?”

  “Human traitors on some sort of alien fighter,” Captain ‘Papa’ Schneider explained; he’d gotten the word from Fleet. “They can engage us in transit or while ghosting. And they’ve trained regular fighters to do the same. It doesn’t matter, though: we need to deploy those Mind-Killers or we won’t get reinforcements. All the Foos we brought along with us are gone, and our ships are getting shot at by every swinging dick within three light seconds of us.”

  The deck was vibrating slightly, underscoring the squadron leader’s words. When a megaton-sized carrier started to shudder despite its inertial dampeners and the fact it was ghosting, that meant it was getting hammered pretty hard. The Black Fleet had been counting on the Warplings’ support, but they hadn’t killed enough tangos to feed them.

  “We’re sending all our birds on the next run,” Papa went on. “Half of them – that includes our squadron, by the way – are going after the enemy fighters, with heavy Foo support. Our buddies don’t like those assholes any more than we do. The other half will continue the ground-attack mission. They won’t be able to ghost while they do it, either. They’ll get blindsided if they do.”

  Nobody was happy to hear that. Not only had they not trained for combat inside warp, they’d be going after American fighter jocks. The part of Gus that still cared about stuff was pretty sore about turning on Grinner back in New Texas. And this time he’d be doing the killing himself. He figured he’d hear their screams of agony when he did it. The idea bothered him, but not as much as it would have a few months ago. Nowhere near as much as it should. He noticed that, but only about as much as he noticed his eyes turning black when he got angry, or the way he got off on killing people. Just something you got used to after a while.

  “The Foos are going to act as our sensor and guidance systems. Think of them as spotters. Only thing, though, we’re gonna have to let them in. All the way.”

  Gus shrugged. “Way ahead of you guys,” he said. “Me and Bogey have been together for a while now. Told ya it was better that way.”

  Half the squadron nodded. They’d made similar arrangements, and they all had a Foo at their backs. Or on their backs, depending on who you asked.

  “Shit,” Lieutenant Mike ‘Mooch’ Kowalski said. “No way, Papa. They get in, they ain’t gonna leave, man.”

  Mooch had been in the squadron since the beginning, but he’d always been a bit more squeamish than the rest, except maybe for SOL, and Soledad was gone.

  “I’ve been assured they won’t overstay their welcome. And if we don’t we’re dead in there.”

  “I didn’t want to cross this line, man,” Gus told him. “But we’ve crossed every other line, haven’t we? Point of no return is somewhere way behind us.”

  “Point of no return. Roger wilco,” Mooch replied. He sounded like someone volunteering for a suicide mission. “Guess it’s too late for second thoughts.”

  He didn’t know how right he was, Gus thought. The way he figured it, Foos already had their hooks on everyone, M
ooch and the other second-guessers included. They’d all been exposed to null-space for too long, made too many deals with the damn things. All that was left was seeing things through to the end. To the very bitter end.

  They’d stayed in their respective cockpits while the carrier crews did their jobs. The warp coordinates were set: they were going back to Primus-Two, but they were going to spend the entire time inside warp space to deal with the enemy. All the birds were certified ready to fly; time to see if the Foos could save the day.

  Transition.

  Gus’ personal Foo took over completely. It took a while, and it was worse than he expected.

  “Hi, Gus,” it said. It sounded just like the monster under the bed of his nightmares, but it didn’t scare him anymore. He

  “Let’s get this over with,” he told it, more angry than afraid, but not by much.

  “Yes.”

  The Warpling crawled into his brain all the way. Before, Bogey had been more like a roommate he could talk to. Now, it got inside everything. It somehow looked at Gus’ entire life. It was more than seeing, he suddenly realized. The Foo actually traveled back in time and showed up to all the special moments in his life. Gus’ memories changed, and now a dark presence hovered nearby, ruining birthday parties and one-night stands, the joy he felt at graduation or the first time he was promoted. Even worse, he ‘remembered’ both versions of his life, one without the Foo, and one with it, and the second one was a walking nightmare, a violation of everything he was or had been. And then the Foo went one step further and completed the link, and the human bits that had been aware enough to feel violated died or became so numb he didn’t care anymore.

  Gus could see warp space now: more clearly than ever before. He could see an army of Foos forming up on both sides of his fighter. Some of them were bigger than the materialized Warplings that had gone into battle with the Black Ships. Those were Great Ones, vast and unknowable, and they wanted to get out. His old self would have lost his mind right then and there, but the hybrid thing he’d become just smiled and nodded. Soon the doors would open wide enough, and the feast would begin.