He knew that was a lie even as he thought it, but sometimes you could turn lies into reality, if you put enough effort into it.
“One.”
* * *
Worst. Drop. Ever.
Russell was used to seeing things during transit. Price of having a brain and all that. The kid he’d killed back in the Zoo was Ghost Number One in this hit list, and he’d gotten used to seeing him, slit throat and all.
But having the dead kid walk up to Russell and stab him in the guts, that was new.
Try to stab him, at least. The sudden rush forward triggered the Marine’s reflexes, and he was twisting aside even as the piece of sharpened rebar darted forth like a striking cobra. The point skidded on his torso armor, scratching the surface with a grating sound that set Russell’s teeth on edge. He swung the Dragonbreath’s barrel sideways and clubbed away the dead kid, never stopping to wonder if this was real or just a very bad trip. Dream or not, if something tries to kill you, you kill it the fuck back.
The ghost was coming back for seconds, shit-eating grin on his face and a bloody smile under his chin. Russell leveled his weapon and cut loose with a blast of fire. The thought that he might be pouring plasma on the backs of the other Marines on the platform didn’t even cross his mind until after he’d fired a two-second burst.
The roar of the flames was drowned out by an inhuman screech that drove spikes of pain right through Russell’s eardrums and into his brain. The dead kid was consumed by the fire. It briefly turned into something else, something made of shadows and nightmares. Whatever it was, it burned up and was gone.
“Fuck,” Russell said, wonder in his voice. He’d never gotten to kill a warp hallucination before. Maybe now he’d never see that damn kid again.
Emergence.
They were in a storage compartment one deck above the ship’s bridge and about a hundred meters away from it. Their arrival had messed up the compartment pretty good, since they’d been using an old-style catapult rather than the nicer ones that didn’t blow up the LZ. They were short one grunt from Second plat. Russell wondered what Private Cordero had seen in his final moments, and shuddered.
Grampa was wounded. He fell to his knees just as Russell noticed his buddy’s icon had turned yellow.
“What the fuck?”
“Shot me,” he said. There was a tiny bullet hole on the top chest plate. Russell opened the diagnostic window: looked like a shallow wound, already closing up, courtesy of their medical nanites.
“Who shot you?” Russell asked as he helpfully sprayed sealant on the hole.
“Some dude I killed way back when.”
“Sucks when that happens, don’t it?”
“What the fuck?” Gonzo asked again. He was gripping the handle of his K-Bar and looked about ready to start slashing away. At least he was fine. Would suck to be back on the duty roster only to get killed in transit.
“Looks like the warp ghosts are pretty frisky around here,” Russell said. “But we made it. Most of us.”
Three other Marines had light wounds. Sergeant Grant had a broken arm, two cracked ribs and a mild concussion. The Skipper had come out of warp with a nasty second-degree burn on his abdomen. Hell of a drop. Not to mention they were supposed to be still in warp space. Things looked normal enough, though.
“Let’s roll, people,” Sergeant Grant said, cradling his damaged arm over his slung Iwo until the nano-meds fixed it. The skipper let the NCO do the talking. He must be on his imp trying to get in touch with the rest of the unit. They’d dropped about eighty Marines from Charlie Company, and a lot more besides. This boarding action involved three whole battalions. Still a tall order, since they’d dropped on the damn flagship of the fleet, a dreadnought with at least five thousand spacers and two hundred Marines aboard.
They began advancing towards their objective. It didn’t take long to encounter resistance.
The point team ran into a storm of 4mm plasma-tipped rounds. Their heavy portable shield held under the barrage, though, and their counterfire tore through the enemy Marines. The deserters were still using old gear; compared to the new stuff they’d built for them at Xanadu, the enemy might as well be a bunch of primmie aliens. Maybe this wasn’t going to suck as badly as he’d thought.
“Edison, you’re up.”
His fireteam moved towards the front: the heavy force field was still glowing after some asshole on the other side had emptied an Alsie at it: the spots where the 15mm rounds had hit it were still bright with burning plasma.
They want plasma, they get plasma, he thought as he and Gonzo took aim over the heads of the shield team.
“Cleared hot!”
The two Marines poked the barrels of their weapons beyond the force field and filled the corridor and the compartments beyond with hyper-heated gas. Even though seeing through the plasma cloud was impossible, Russell could tell when a Marine’s force field and armor failed. A loud pop and a brief flash of red amidst the white, followed by a crunchier pop and a short howl. The latter sound didn’t come from a human mouth, but rather from a brief burst of steam as the luckless bastard was charbroiled and all the water in his body escaped through the ruptured seams of his armor. He counted seventeen pop-flash-pop-howls, plus a few pop-flashes that marked the passing of an unarmored bubblehead.
Nasty way to go, but they shouldn’t have betrayed their oath.
“Clear,” the point team called out. Nothing alive remained on this segment of the deck. Those bastards might have been Corps once, but they weren’t anymore, and they were fucking with the real thing now.
The Marines moved on.
* * *
“You need to destroy them,” the Prophet said.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Kerensky replied. “And I will not remind you again: I am in command here.”
The Warpling puppet didn’t reply, either verbally or mentally, but the mockery in his expression was answer enough. Kerensky considered emptying his beamer into that grinning face and barely resisted the temptation to put an end to it. The realization that his own bridge crew might turn against him if he tried to kill their spiritual leader had a lot to do with his restraint.
They were all armed; armories had been hurriedly opened and weapons dispensed the moment he’d issued the order to repel boarders, but most spacers had been caught by the invaders with no weapons at hand. Kerensky had to admit that the warp drop had taken him by surprise; while he’d acknowledged the possibility of facing Warp Marines at some point, he hadn’t thought drops were possible on a ship still inside null-space. Even if they’d been better prepared, the fact remained that there were only two Marine companies and three hundred master-at-arms ratings aboard the Odin, and they were lightly armed and equipped. The assault force had arrived in multi-battalion strength. There were an additional six thousand spacers aboard the superdreadnought, and they would fight to the end. Kerensky just didn’t know if fanaticism would be enough.
“We have enemy forces en route to the bridge, sir. Two reinforced platoons, converging from six emergence points.”
“What do we have to stop them?”
“Thirty master-at-arms and a Marine squad. They are making a stand at Compartment 1-20-C.”
Kerensky belatedly realized he should have appointed an acting captain for the Odin. He’d figured his telepathic abilities would allow him to fight the flagship and conduct fleet operations, especially given the paltry size of his formation. He’d figured wrong. There were too many things happening at once. The Black Ships were winning the gunnery battle, since all they had to do was weaken the enemy’s shields so the Psychovores could do the rest. And a Great One was about enter the fray, which would settle the matter regardless of who won here. Those boarding parties would make sure the Odin’s crew would not live to see the end of the fight, unless something could be done to stop them.
“They must be destroyed,” the Prophet repeated. “And I can give you the means to do so.”
“What a
re you waiting for? Spit it out!” Kerensky snapped back.
“We tried to stop them in transit,” Dhukai said, leaving no question as which ‘we’ he was referring to. “But the fact that the interior of the ship is part of your reality hampers us. We need an anchor to operate here. The men about to fight the invaders can provide it.”
“What will happen to them?”
“Unfortunately, under the circumstances most of them will not survive the melding. It would take too long to do otherwise. A necessary sacrifice.”
The honesty was almost refreshing.
“Do it.”
Kerensky didn’t even pretend to hesitate. Victory was too close. No matter what, if he tore apart the heart of the Imperium, he would have succeeded in his primary mission. To that end, he was ready to make any and all sacrifices. He had gone too far, done too much. Quitting so close to the end was unthinkable.
“If you tell them the truth, some may balk and refuse to forge the link.”
“I’ll give the orders, Dhukai. You do your part.”
His instructions to the defenders didn’t mention the consequences of letting Warplings into their minds. He allowed them to believe the process would be similar to what the now-dead fighter pilots had undergone – which was the truth – and that it would be reversible in most cases – a lie. It wasn’t easy to lie over a mental communique, but he managed the feat quite handily. They all agreed, and he couldn’t help feeling proud of their loyalty even as he betrayed them.
His shadow self was nearby. Kerensky could hear it tittering inside his head.
* * *
Time had come to a complete stop.
Deborah Genovisi’s Corpse-Ship was suspended in a frozen sea of many colors. The normal flows and ebbs of warp space had ceased, and the reason for it lay in the impossibly huge entity ahead of them. It was defined by emptiness; it lacked something basic, something it craved. That lack created a deep hunger. The monster was an embodied vacuum that only megadeaths could fill. A Great One in all its glory, a thing of enormous power whose essence had been tainted at some distant point in its past. Not even her enhanced senses could actually perceive it; she mostly saw a living void with hints of waving appendages and rending teeth. Even those were metaphors her mind made up to make sense of something beyond comprehension.
One thing she knew without question, however: this was the face of evil. Its existence was based on the hunger for life and the infliction of suffering, suffused with hatred and mindless rage. It wanted to hurt all things. It needed to hurt all things. One could not parlay with such a thing. Only destruction would put an end to it.
“Highly unbalanced,” Atu the Pathfinder said behind Deborah, startling a cry of shock from her.
“Don’t do that, Pooh!”
“My apologies, Deborah Grinner Genovisi. It took some effort to break through the decision-making blocks the Flayer had created around your mind, and in my haste I failed to forewarn you.”
“You mean this time-freeze thing?”
“As you know, time doesn’t function in the same way as it does in relativistic space. The Great One is delaying your actions, but only from a subjective point of view. When you act, assuming you survive long enough to do so, no time will have passed in relation to the physical universe. This is the best description of your situation I can provide, given your language’s dependency on linear time as perceived by sophonts at your level of development.”
“I see. Now that I can act, what do you suggest I do? Where’s Lisbeth?”
Colonel Zhang hadn’t shared her full plan with the rest of the squadron, which in retrospect had been a pretty bad idea. Deborah knew they were supposed to take their ships into the aperture, where something would be done to stop it. But what?
“She has been detained by the Flayer, who is trying to seduce her into its service. When it fails to do so, it will destroy all of you.”
“Which brings me back to my first question.”
“The weaponry aboard your vessel will only provide an annoyance to the Flayer. However, your mind can serve as a conduit for an entity capable of matching it. One you have met before.”
She’d been praying to Him. Had been ever since her encounter during that hopeless jump. But He hadn’t answered.
“The angel.”
“Yes, although that term does not fully convey what the entity in question embodies. What is important, however, is that its power vastly exceeds the Flayer’s. Securing its intervention would greatly contribute to restoring Balance to the Path.”
Deborah was struck by one of her premonitions. She understood what Atu was asking her to do and, more importantly, the price it would entail.
“I can call Him. Can I? I’ve tried before, and it’s been about as effective as praying ever is,” she finished bitterly.
“You have just expressed two mistaken notions, but there is no time to disabuse you of them. The third one is correct. You can call upon the Michael entity. By doing so here, you will allow it to cross onto this level of the Path, and reach its Adversary. The ensuing confrontation will help balance out much of what has transpired here.”
“But there is a price.”
“Both entities demand a sacrifice. The Flayer demands its servants sacrifice others to further its ends. And Michael demands its followers sacrifice themselves.”
Her ability to sense the future showed her everything she would be giving up, all the things that would have happened in a slightly-different universe. Perhaps a different version of herself would have the chance to do those things, and be reunited with this Deborah at the end all of things. Or not.
“Show me what to do.”
* * *
“Dear God,” Sondra Givens whispered.
Three enemy battlecruisers staggered out of warp space, and blew up seconds later. Both Third Fleet and the Imperium forces were no longer engaging the Black Ships, so those ships either self-destructed or something had gone terribly wrong during the boarding actions. Close to three battalions’ worth of her troops were aboard those vessels. Twelve hundred Marines had just died before her eyes.
“Enemy fire is flagging all along the battle wall, ma’am.”
The surviving renegades were too busy fighting off the boarding parties to fight their ships, she supposed. If they followed in the battlecruisers’ footsteps, she would win, but at a terrible cost. Assuming, of course, that the giant gateway shut down at some point. More Warplings were emerging from that gaping wound in spacetime. So far their combined firepower had destroyed the monsters as quickly as they arrived, but the aperture kept growing, and the Gal-Imps were running low on missiles. That was too bad; Sondra had been glad to be on the right side of a Sun-Blotter swarm for a change. Watching a seemingly-endless stream of ship-killers shredding the giant monstrosities had helped buttress her eroding sanity. Whatever those things were, they weren’t all-powerful. Their embodiments were immensely strong, but they broke after enough force was applied. They weren’t supernatural. They could be killed.
Doesn’t mean they won’t kill us all if enough of them come over to this side.
Most Warplings hadn’t lived long enough to fire their energy blasts, but every time one of them did they scored critical hits. The Thermopylae was limping along at one-quarter flank speed; three of its six main power plants had been shut down to avoid integrity losses that would have turned the entire dreadnought into a cloud of sublimated matter. The shields keeping the minds of her crew safe were holding, however, and her main guns were still in play, and that was all that mattered. Third Fleet’s flagship kept fighting. A flotilla of Imperium STL monitors from Primus-One joined the fray. The heavily-armed vessels had nearly burned out their graviton drives in a mad interplanetary dash; their energy and missile broadsides were welcome additions.
The Gimps can fight, Sondra admitted to herself. I can understand why Kerensky was driven into despair after facing them.
She could sympathize with her friend, and even und
erstand the reasons that had led to the mutiny and the devil’s deal with the Warplings. God only knew if she’d have been able to resist the temptation to do the same if she’d been in his shoes. None of that would stop her from doing her duty here, however.
I wish we could have spoken one last time, old friend.
The Black Ships hadn’t tried to parley; they’d come out of warp, weapons hot, ready to fight. She doubted Kerensky would be inclined to negotiate even now that Marine boarders were a within a few meters of the Odin’s CIC. Maybe it was for the best.
“Ma’am, we’re detecting unknown warp signatures coming from inside the Odin.”
And maybe her old friend still had one more card to play.
* * *
“Something’s happening,” one of the grunts from Charlie-Two said.
“How about you tell us what you’re seeing, boot?” Russell growled at him. Before the outraged newbie could reply, he peeked through his video feed. “Never mind, I can see for myself.”
His fireteam was huddled around the corner from the guys on point. They were in a cleared passageway, still hot enough after a plasma shower to make the air shimmer a little. The grunts on point had been trading fire with a pack of rebels while the rest of the squad took a breather before moving to flank the enemy. But now something was going on with the enemy. Looking through the grunt’s feed, Russell saw a multicolor display flashing inside the compartment they were about to assault. The kind of weird colors you got when someone was dropping from warp.
“We supposed to get reinforcements?”
“Don’t think so, Russet.”
“Then we’re about to get company. The shitty kind.”
Even through the steady crackle of gunfire, they all heard the screams coming from the enemy sector. Whatever was happening over there, the rebels weren’t liking it one bit.
“Move out!”
The fireteam followed the imps’ projected vectors and began the flanking maneuver. A bulkhead was in their way, but the guys from Two were loaded with breaching rounds. A few short bursts from their Iwos made a man-sized hole. Back at the main group, the shooting got more intense. Things were getting hot over there, but Russell didn’t have time to sneak a peek through their sensors, not when they were about to make contact on their end. You could get killed trying to see everything that was going on instead of focusing on the shit in front of you.
Havoc of War (Warp Marine Corps Book 5) Page 25