Message for the Dead

by Jason Anspach

  “Captain… Black Fleet jamming prevents us from distributing this message to the people it needs to go to. And there is every chance this fleet will not survive this battle. I can’t take that chance. Therefore I am ordering you to take this message and get out of this system. Once you are in the clear, you will broadcast to an operative codenamed Wraith. Colonel Speich will give you a broadcast code.”

  He paused, the muscles in his jaw clenching. “Colonel Speich, please record audio. I have a message of my own I wish to append to this.”

  Legion Commander Keller recorded a brief closing message, right there in the middle of the docking hangar. Desaix was shocked by his commander’s words—and the cold intensity with which he delivered them.

  When he was done, Keller removed the message device from the datapad and returned it to Desaix. “Captain. You are to deliver this message at all costs. You know the stakes.”

  As Desaix saluted, the commander turned and strode away like a thundercloud, crossing a hangar deck littered with the wounded and dying. Fighting a battle he knew was lost now. There was no other way than the way that was before him.

  Within minutes Audacity was clearing mooring lines and running for jump.

  23

  502nd Legion, Bravo Company, Third Platoon

  Assault Ship Inbound on Imperial Flagship Imperator

  “Awww, we’re gonna get it goin’ in,” whined Rebound from the crash seat he was strapped into on the assault transport.

  “Cut it, Leej,” snapped Sergeant Harmoor, who everyone tagged as Hardcore. “So we don’t get to HOLO our way in. Statistically this is much safer. Or so they told me at platoon sergeant school. Told me I was supposed to tell young babies who got all bunched up in their emotional wires that very thing. They even gave me a bunch of numbers that was supposed to mean something. I told ’em never mind no numbers. Ain’t no leej of mine gonna jump HOLO and be afraid. No sir.”

  The transport shook violently from a nearby explosion.

  “Thirty seconds to insertion,” called the crew chief from his crash seat next to cockpit.

  “You afraid, Rebound?” asked Sergeant Harmoor.

  The transport was trembling, emitting a thousand little squeaks and one awesome groan as it passed through the wake of what no doubt was a fleet destroyer going up in an apocalyptic ball of fire.

  “No, ain’t afraid, Sarge,” muttered the leej through fear-gritted teeth.

  “That’s right!” shouted the platoon sergeant of one of the most highly trained assault teams the Legion had to offer. The 502nd was an ancient unit. Some said older even than Rechs’s Dogs. Maybe even Earth old. If there ever was such a place.

  “Ain’t no one in Hardcore’s Social Club afraid a’nuthin!” said the sergeant. “You afraid, Turtle? Payday? Selfie?”

  The legionnaires beamed broadly back at their sergeant. “No, sir!”

  “Fifteen seconds! Stand up!” shouted the crew chief.

  “To be honest, Sarge,” offered another leej everyone tagged as Two Cents. “I’m a little afraid.”

  “Face the rear of the transport!” cried the crew chief.

  The legionnaires all shuffled to face the rear of the transport. Through the hull and the deck, they could feel the powerful thrum of the engines whining. Then the thrust reversers engaged, and a massive whump shook the entire airframe.

  “Combat disembark, Leejes!” barked Hardcore. “Just like in training. And don’t be ashamed of your fear, Two Cents. Takes a man to admit he’s afraid when he’s about to do somethin’ that’s probably gonna get him kilt dead. No shame in that!”

  “Rear ramp down!”

  As the legionnaires of the 502nd left the transport to take the Black Fleet flagship Imperator, they looked back at the smashed hull section the transport had flown through. Ship oxygen was still venting into the twilight velvet of space where a million broken pieces of distant glass seemed not to care about the life-and-death struggle taking place. Other transports were coming in through the rent as well, and were landing on what looked like a wide stores section. The ship’s internal damage control systems were still trying to contain the damage and sustain life by flooding the area with atmosphere and sealing all blast doors.

  “Move! Move! Move!” shouted Sergeant Hardcore as the legionnaires surged from the transport. The onsite tac team was busy setting up assault paths deeper into the ship and assigning objectives. Within seconds the platoon sergeant had his team’s objective. Their LT, a point, had been purged, and Hardcore had been acting as OIC ever since.

  “All right, gunfighters. We got us an objective. Follow me.”

  They passed through the secured breach into the main corridors that linked with the outer hull. There, Third Platoon found itself in a wide main passage that had been set up as a casualty collection point. Wounded legionnaires, after being treated, were either sent back with the departing assault ships or returned to duty somewhere among the Legion’s assault into the guts of the cyclopean battleship.

  The more badly wounded legionnaires were holding up their charge packs and fraggers to the passing squads entering the maze and warrens of the massive ship. Assuring their brothers they would need those items soon.

  “Command says we are to take a passage up ahead and link up with a transport tube that makes a direct run up the command stack. From there we’ll link up with other units and try to take the bridge. Our boys got pushed out of there already, so resistance is expected to be heavy. Gonna be dark down in there, Rebound, so make sure someone holds your hand.”

  Three minutes later the squad of legionnaires was levering out panels in the wall at the direction of the platoon sergeant and shining their lights into the darkness beyond.

  “Looks real dark in there,” Two Cents said.

  Sergeant Hardcore just laughed and set the order of march.

  Soon they were threading their way through the transport tube. The sound of a distant blaster fight trickled through to them, but here, in this never-ending dark tunnel, it sounded ghostly and ethereal, like it, too, had gotten lost in the darkness.

  ***

  Imperial Admin Shuttle

  Arriving at Cybar Mother Ship

  The Imperial shuttle danced into the strange shuttle bay seconds after the SSM strike rocketed into the gleaming silver hull of the gigantic bulbous saucer that was the Cybar mother ship.

  Bright flashes from the cockpit windows caused Kat to shield her eyes as she took the ship in for landing. The blast waves rocked the shuttle, but Kat held course. Lights flickered on and off throughout the cabin, and the shock trooper captain in the co-pilot’s seat turned his bucket and asked in the middle of the worst part of the turbulence if they were going to make it.

  “You’ll be the first to find out,” said Kat as she moved the shuttle out of the way of a piece of erupting hull section that was larger than the shuttle itself.

  The explosions from the missiles blossomed like roses of fire and destruction, and Kat lost her orientation to the hangar bay she’d been aiming for. But then the airless cold of space ate enough of the fiery maelstrom to reveal the open bay, and Kat pushed the shuttle in at quarter throttle.

  “Watch it!” shouted the captain. “You’re too…”

  Kat blocked him out as she threaded the needle of the rapidly approaching shielded portal. She distantly wondered if it was set to atmospheric barrier, or would it be dialed up to full repulse? If the latter, she and the rest of the ship were about to get a nasty lesson in physics.

  Some instinct told her to reach out and grabbed for the reversers. There was still time…

  “The repulsor barrier is down,” intoned the emperor as he leaned in from the main cabin.

  His voice calmed Kat, and she flew the approach, just barely getting the shuttle inside the bay before yet more missiles detonated against the hull. She lowered the gears and set the ship down on the empty deck. Not a soul moved out there. It was like being a fly inside a giant clean room.

 
; “You have done well, Lieutenant Haladis,” said the emperor. “Stay with the ship. If we do not return within the hour, lift off and save yourself.”

  Kat’s pain was gone.

  Or, she thought, it was probably still there, but buried by the fact that her body was shaking with fear. From the approach, she told herself—because that’s what she wanted to believe.

  And then the emperor was gone.

  The captain pushed past her in the cramped cockpit. “Good flying, Lieutenant. Thanks for not killing everyone.” He handed her his sidearm. “Use this. I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

  And then he too was gone.

  ***

  Goth Sullus led the Praetorians forward into the belly of the Cybar mother ship. If it had taken any damage, there was no sign of it. It was hard to fathom that this ship had been the target of a full fleet alpha strike. Everything looked pristine, cold, impersonal… and orderly.

  “Curious…” muttered the emperor to himself.

  But of course… it was a ship full of robots. Of course it would be ordered and symmetrical. They did not have the same needs, goals, or weaknesses.

  Sullus had never much subscribed to all the theories about AIs being sentient, living beings. To him they were just advanced forms of bots playing a game they’d been coded to play. When he reached out to manipulate them, sense them, or destroy them, they didn’t feel like life to him. They felt empty, blank.

  And now he would crush them.

  The first wave of Titans came at Sullus and the Praetorians before they even reached the main blast doors that led away from the hangar deck. Six of them, moving in two groups of three, each carrying a massive tri-barreled N-50, of the type that was normally mounted to a vehicle of servo-harness.

  The sheer volume of fire they emitted was impressive. But their shots were reflected away from those standing nearest the emperor.

  The Praetorians fired back almost instantly. Some took a knee or unloaded from the hip to lay down suppressive fire while marksmen threw themselves to the deck to set up for targeted shots.

  Three shock troopers went down almost instantly. One of the troopers made the mistake of attempting to protect the emperor. Sullus physically tossed him aside, and with a gesture employed the unreal power of the Crux against the nearest Titan. A wave of force knocked the spitting tri-barreled N-50 from the metallic monster’s hands. Then with the merest of waves from Sullus, the Titan’s internal circuitry released in a machine part–laden volcanic eruption.

  Even as that bot was dying and the Praetorians were slamming blaster bolts into the other Titans’ sturdy hyper-alloy forged frames, Sullus took two steps forward to engage the next one. Though it easily weighed in at a full three tons, a simple push from the Crux sent it hard into the wall halfway up the twenty-meter-high bulkhead. It crashed to the floor, immobile.

  Sullus turned to the next group of three. Holding up one knife-edged palm, he again leveraged the invisible power of the Crux, this time to sweep all three off their legs and send them careening across the deck of the hangar.

  The Praetorians had managed to take out the remaining Titan collectively, by concentrating all of their blaster fire on the one war bot. And even then, it had not gone down easily. Even when every limb had been blasted away from the thing, it had merely sat down and glared at them until additional blaster fire at last brought about its destruction.

  Leaving the six destroyed Titans and three dead Praetorians behind, Sullus led his strike force deeper into the mysterious ship.

  ***

  502nd Legion, Bravo Company, Third Platoon

  Imperial Flagship Imperator

  The deck within the wide tunnel that led from Imperator’s main transportation bridge to its bow was clean save for the mag-lev rails that ran its center. Despite the darkness, the legionnaires were able to switch to low-light imaging and advance swiftly up the ship.

  They would have been eviscerated by the anti-personnel mines the troopers had set up to use against any Legion units choosing this method of assault on the command bridge, but Payday, who always walked point because he was sharp on levels that verged into the unreal, spotted the chained system of mines that lay alongside the rails. The 502nd had done a lot of duty out on worlds gone insurgent, so they were more than familiar with IEDs and mines.

  It wasn’t until the mag-lev rail began a steep curve up into the stories-tall command stack that the 502nd came under fire from a unit of shock troopers. Rebound was just preparing to remote-detonate another chained mine system with a comm scrambler he carried when the shock troopers opened up from the darkness above.

  A couple of the 502nd were hit, but they were able to pull back under cover of the curve of the tunnel while Hardcore assessed the situation, called in to command, and came up with a plan.

  The troopers were fighting from a superior position—they had taken up positions in the stories-tall bridge stack that dominated the rear of the Black Fleet battleship, where the rail system climbed steeply to near vertical. But within two minutes the sergeant had the squad-designated marksmen pinning down those entrenched troopers so that the teams could run forward and began to climb the steep grade. When the teams were close enough, they used fraggers to knock out the emplaced firing positions.

  “These troopers ain’t so bad,” remarked Sergeant Hardcore.

  Ten minutes later they finished the arduous climb—the rail system went almost vertical toward the end—and ingressed into the main hab of the battleship.

  Payback, backed up two other legionnaires, took point. So he was the first to see the destruction at the first landing on one of the lower bridge levels—the remains of a furious battle between leejes and troopers. Apparently some forward element, possibly one of the first to board the battleship, had made it this far. The fighting had been brutal and intense, with both sides annihilating each other to the point of zero unit viability. If there had been survivors, they had escaped off into the darkness, or to other battles.

  Turtle surveyed the carnage. “Got so bad that they ran out of charge packs,” he remarked. “Real knife and gun show near the end.”

  “Musta been,” added another leej, looking down at a dead trooper with the hilt of a combat knife sticking out from under his bucket.

  “All right, forget this,” said Sergeant Hardcore as though shaking off some chill that had crossed the room. “Form up. Other teams are getting ready to hit the Oh-Be-Jay.”

  Above them, somewhere along a not-too-distant part of the outer hull, came a groan and the clamp of something heavy. It sounded as though a machine had attached itself to the hull.

  The chatter over L-comm fell to silence as the platoon proceeded, weapons ready, checking corners, and prepared for it to be “on” at any second.

  ***

  Praetorian Strike Team

  Cybar Mother Ship

  Captain Sturm led the emperor’s strike team deeper into the bizarre ship. The farther they went, the more Titans they encountered. Always in waves. And always more in number, as though the machines weren’t quite sure how many Titans was the exact and required number to be used for optimal destruction of an invading enemy force. With Sullus fighting alongside the Praetorian shock troopers, the number the Cybar provided was never enough.

  Their biggest scare, at least as far as Sturm was concerned, occurred in a strange room that looked like the inside of a giant rotating keylock, except that the tumblers were pearlescent pink and the room seemed to be rotating this way and that, and no matter how hard the mind tried to make sense of it, the mind could not.

  It was here that twenty of the towering Titans had attacked from every direction. Sullus had used his arcane and invisible powers to destroy most of them. But in the end, as a Titan who’d just rushed the emperor had been hoisted into the air above the firing Praetorians by some unseen invisible hand, Sullus had been unsatisfied to merely toss the war bot aside like he had so many others. Instead he rushed forward, pulled free the
torch he carried on his belt, sliced the thing in two with its fiery blade.

  After that encounter, Captain Sturm studied the emperor. No obvious damage had been done to their sovereign, but there was something… something fatigued… about the way he stood.

  And then Captain Sturm had to remind himself that they were all fatigued. All tired. And they were leaving a trail of dead behind them that their own minds weren’t keeping up with. The Imperial strike team was already down to half strength.

  The Praetorians had been a decorated unit at Tarrago. They had all trained together since before the war. Had trained for these battles out their in the private training camps and schools along galaxy’s edge. To be a shock trooper was to leave behind whatever life you’d once lived within the Galactic Republic. Forever. This was your life now. These were your brothers.

  And now over half of them had been slaughtered by metal nightmares become real. The old war bots had returned from legend, more fearsome than ever. And Sturm suspected he was not alone in having a sinking feeling that they, the strike team of Praetorians, were now lost inside the massive alien ship. That the emperor was leading them too deep to ever return… even if he did.

  “They can’t figure out the right number to use to crush us,” gasped Captain Sturm after another firefight that saw five more Praetorians die badly. He noted that his exhaustion was obvious in his voice, even through the electronically modulated speaker of his bucket.

  The emperor, who was still holding his burning torch, switched off the beam that came from the hilt. He turned to the captain. His voice was cold and hollow. Tired. Old.

  “No,” said Goth Sullus. “They’re testing us, Captain Sturm. Testing me, to be more specific. Whatever this intelligence is, it wants to know what I’m capable of. So it’s using its resources incrementally so that it will have the perfect data set once it’s finally beaten us.”