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And where is that band who so vauntingly swore

That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion

A home and a Country should leave us no more?

- The Star-Spangled Banner, Francis Scott Key

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”

- Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche

Prologue: Paint It Black

Star System Sokolov, 168 AFC

Sixty-three ships emerged from warp space into the cold darkness of space, prepared for the worst.

And expecting the best, although it always pays off to be prepared. More than expecting: we know good things await us here.

Nicholas Kerensky chuckled at the errant thought. Moments later, everyone in the CIC read his mind and laughed with him.

The augurs had been good, after all. The entities that had guided Kerensky’s Black Ships to this uncharted system had promised as much, and everyone aboard the rogue fleet trusted them, inasmuch as one could trust unknown and likely forever unknowable beings with truly alien goals and desires. Dealing with Warplings wasn’t easy, but so far they appeared to keep their promises. Kerensky had an obscure suspicion that their new guides and advisors would stick to the letter of any agreement, but like the demons and fairies of myth and legend would seek to pervert their spirit.

Spirits! Next thing I know I’ll be spitting for good luck and avoiding ladders and black cats!

No chuckles this time. Kerensky had taken the trouble to hide that thought from the group gestalt. Some things were not to be shared.

An atheistic materialist for all his adult life, the former Commander in Chief of Seventh Sector was convinced there was a mundane explanation for everything, including the bizarre warp phenomena that had first led his fleet to victory and ultimately to mutiny. Warplings appeared to crave something the superstitious might call souls but the more pragmatic could define simply as information. A sophont’s mind contained a great deal of information and it appeared the natives of null-space could make use of it even after the death of said sophont. That made Warplings something less sinister than devils: one might call them Psychovores, Thought-Eaters. By allowing those entities to feed on tens of thousands of aliens during the Battle of New Texas, Kerensky’s and his followers had been rewarded handsomely.

Among other things, they’d been led to this system, via a warp connection nobody had discovered before, providing his fleet – a rather fanciful name for a force composed of nine warships and fifty-five logistics, repair and support ships – with a hiding place where it would make prepartions for the war to come. The Warplings had guided the Black Ships, and predicted no danger awaited them there.

“We have concluded an initial survey of the system, sir.”

Kerensky dismissed his fanciful thoughts. “Proceed.”

The system he had named after his grandmother consisted of a standard K-type orange dwarf star and seven planets. The CIC’s main holotank provided visuals: two gas giants, three rocky, airless midgets, a near-miss planet that could have held life if it had been able to retain a slightly-thicker atmosphere, and one life-bearing world. One radiating in a multitude of electromagnetic wavelengths that were a sure sign of technological life.

“It appears we may be about to make First Contact,” the admiral commented as his communications specialists analyzed the streams of information emanating from the second world from the local sun.

 “Radio signals. Sound and audiovisual. They appear to be fully industrialized, but haven’t developed graviton technologies of any kind.”

Little surprise there. The knowledge that allowed Starfarers to manipulate the very stuff of spacetime for myriad purposes had been discovered only a handful of times and then handed down from one civilization to the next. The fundamental theories behind gravitonic science were beyond the grasp of every Starfarer civilization in the known galaxy; they knew it worked, and how to use it, but not why it did. Humanity could have spent its entire existence blissfully unaware of such technologies if no Starfarers had come to visit.

“I believe we will implement a policy of benign neglect towards the natives,” Kerensky said, images from Earth’s own First Contact flashing through his mind. Over half of humanity had died on that day. He had no interest in inflicting such horrors on innocent primitives.

Hungry.

 Warplings could communicate in complete sentences when they so wished – one of them had assumed the form of Kerensky’s grandmother to speak with the admiral – but most of the time they simply expressed their feelings in the crudest and simplest terms. Perhaps every time they conveyed information in more detail they lost some of what they stole from their victims.

“We will not sacrifice those sophonts to you,” Kerensky replied, his mental voice loud enough to be ‘heard’ by everyone in the fleet. Most of the men and women under his command – slightly over sixty thousand all told – agreed with his statement, but a sizable minority grumbled about it. The idea of killing innocent aliens didn’t hold much revulsion for the dissenters; to them, all nonhumans were potential enemies at best, and threats to be destroyed on sight at worst. They would obey his orders, but didn’t like them.

The Psychovore didn’t reply, but Kerensky felt the entity’s acquiescence to his pledge. For now.

We are riding a tiger. Dismounting is not an option.

“You all know why we are here,” he said, his mental voice reaching everyone in the renegade fleet. “We need time. Time to refit our ships and enhance them with new systems. Time to learn how to use them. Time to prepare. We will keep our distance from the locals – they haven’t left their native planet’s gravity well – and gather whatever resources we need from the asteroid belt, as well as the gas giants and their moons. We will be ready to resume combat operations in four months, six months at the outside.”

More grumbles followed, and among a larger percentage of the ships’ crew. His unruly children were growing impatient.

“We have the time. Neither the Gimps nor the Lampreys are in any shape to attack America again, not anytime soon. Even if the Galactic Alliance garners new members, it will take them months to launch a new offensive. We saved America at New Texas. Remember that in the dark days to come. Our job now is to make sure nothing like that ever happens again.”

Unanimous support from everyone washed over him: it had the intoxicating effect of being cheered by a full stadium, but on a far deeper and personal level. He could feel their approval enveloping him, empowering him. Kerensky waited until the mental chorus subsided and went on:

“We are no longer part of the United Stars Navy. We made that sacrifice willingly, forsaking our careers and the chance to return home. I called our vessels the Black Ships; there is a reason for that.

“That was the name given to the vessels that, under the command of Commodore Perry of the old US Navy, sailed to Japan and forced that reclusive country to open its borders. I find the term fitting, for my intention is to sail to the heart of the Imperium itself and force it to surrender. The Gimps believe they are the center of the universe. We will teach them they are gravely mistaken.”

Anger and hatred from his crews blazed forth like a solar flare, but instead of burning him the emotions filled him with even more strength than before. They wanted revenge for dead shipmates, murdered friends and relatives, the unprovoked genocidal attack that followed First Contact, and the oppressive threat of genocide that had hung over all of humanity for far too long.

“So we will paint our warships black, and sail under the black flag.”

That borrowed from a different, earlier tradition. When old Terran pirates hoisted the black flag, it meant no quarter would be offered to the enemy. It would be war to the knife. To the death.

 Sixty thousand minds roared in wrathful resolve, and they were joined by other, more alien voices, from the hundreds of Warplings that hovered around the Black Ships like vultures circling high above a battlefield, knowing that soon they would be fed.

Soon they would be very well fed.

New Washington, Sol System, 169 AFC

“Where the hell are they?”

The President of the United Stars of America didn’t raise his voice very often, but when he did most people cringed in response. Chief of Staff Tyson Keller had been on the receiving end of POTUS’ wrath a few times, however, and he wasn’t impressed.

Al isn’t tracking too well, Tyson thought. Unfairly, perhaps, but times like these required a steady hand, and losing one’s temper wasn’t a good idea, not even in the privacy of the Oval Room, where only the Secret Service, Tyson and the National Security Advisor could witness the spectacle.

Albert P. Hewer had never been called handsome even by the most fervent sycophants; the kindest thing one could say about his features was that they had a lot of character. In the last couple of years, the man had aged visibly, despite having the best anti-agathics money and power could procure. The prospect of presiding over the extinction not only of the country but of the entire species was affecting him in ways that medical tech couldn’t cope with.

“Everyone’s doing all that can be done, Al,” Tyson told the Commander-in-Chief.

POTUS composed himself with a visible effort and sat back down.

“We all have the same information you do, Mister President,” Geoff Chappelle said as if the President wasn’t on the edge of a total meltdown. “All we know so far is that the mutineers and their ships made transit somewhere in Paulus System, in full view of the Wyrashat’s sensors, and failed to emerge at any of its warp termini. The most plausible explanation is that the entire formation – sixty-four ships – was lost in warp space.”

“We should be so lucky,” Hewer said. “Having those traitors eaten by warp goblins would be outstanding. But we all know that didn’t happen.”

“The second most likely possibility is that Kerensky’s ships discovered a new ley line somewhere in the system. Now that Second Fleet is stationed at Paulus, we have survey teams searching for it, but those things take time.”

Tyson wasn’t an expert in FTL travel – a concept he still found ridiculous despite having lived with it for a century and a half – but he knew that finding new warp gates was the work of decades or centuries. The weak graviton emanations that betrayed the presence of a crack in the fabric of spacetime could only be detected at minute ranges – meters rather than kilometers – and even the likely search areas, somewhere within the closest planetary orbits around a system’s star, were impossibly large. God only knew how the original Starfarers had discovered the first conduits, millions of years ago. Whatever they’d used back then, it was a lot more effective than the current state of the art.

And maybe Kerensky has figured it out.

“We need to bring that crazy bastard to heel,” Hewer said.

“He did save our collective ass, Al,” Tyson reminded him. “Twice. The last time after the second enemy fleet our analysts swore would take ‘a minimum of fifteen months’ to build up showed up unexpectedly. That doesn’t excuse the mutiny, but maybe we should worry about the fleets that are coming to kill us, rather than one that, even if it’s still around, is aiming to kill our enemies.”

“The problem is, Kerensky’s renegades may turn the entire galaxy against us,” Chapelle said.

“Geoff, the galaxy’s already against us. The only thing holding them back is the noticeable lack of balls among most Starfarer polities. They ‘lent’ entire flotillas to the Imperium. They did that because they’re too chickenshit to commit to a full war, but they want us gone. Everybody does, pretty much. Even the Puppies have turned on us.”

Hewer and Chapelle grimaced in unison. The Hrauwah Kingdom was cutting back their shipments of war materiel, despite the fact that they were getting paid for them, cash on the barrel, for the first time since the war started. The accidental conquest of Xanadu System the year before had left the US flush with hard galactic currency. At first, the Puppies had been ecstatic about it. After the Battle of New Texas, things had changed; the flood of goods had slowed down again, replaced instead by a growing litany of lame excuses. They also recalled all the volunteer formations that had been fighting alongside America; while the loss of fighting power had been relatively small, the statement that withdrawal made wasn’t small at all.

“That is my point, Tyson. Everybody’s scared of us now. If Kerensky’s Black Ships start performing more allegedly-supernatural tricks, or burning down neutral cities, all bets are off. We cannot defeat a unified galaxy.”

“I want to go after them,” Hewer said. “Problem is, they are somewhere in Imperium space, and we can’t get to them. Not until we finish off the Lampreys.”

 “There is that,” Tyson said.

The Lhank Arkh Congress was reeling after a series of defeats, and it had far fewer core systems than the Imperium. One swift offensive could knock them out once and for all, destroying their industrial base and reducing them to a few dozen minor colonies that could be picked off at leisure. Concentrating on the smaller of the two threats made sense.

 “Third Fleet is getting some of the new toys that survey ship found. The Lampreys will finally get what’s coming to them.”

“And when we are done, they will call us the Warp Marauders of America,” Chapelle warned. He’d been strongly opposed to using the ancient weapons of the Kraxan civilization. “We are toying with forces beyond our understanding and very likely beyond our control. The prudent thing to do at this point is cease fighter operations until we have a better grasp on the effect they have on their pilots.”

“In other words, abandon the only weapon system that’s kept us alive.”

“Secretary Goftalu is confident we can secure a cease-fire. Neither the Imperium nor the Lampreys are eager to continue fighting, not after losing over fifty percent of their war fleets – in the Imperium’s case, over a hundred percent of their pre-war forces. The Imperium spent years building up, effectively tripling its naval strength, and lost most of it in two fleet actions.”

“So we get a cease-fire, and as soon as they’re done building up, they’ll come back for a rematch. We can’t afford to give them time to come up with countermeasures. They have three orders of magnitude more R&D resources than we do. Eventually they will figure out some way to neutralize our advantages.”

“Save it for the meeting with the JCs,” Hewer said. “The final dispositions will be determined there, but one thing is set: we’re going after the Lampreys next. We’ll refrain from conducting offensive operations against the Imperium for the time being – and the Sec-State will try to talk them into a negotiated peace. We’ll ground our fighters for the time being while we reevaluate things. Third Fleet has no fighters, so that won’t affect the offensive against the Lampreys. And after we’ve dealt with the Lhan Arkh once and for all, we’ll figure out a way to run Kerensky to the ground. If we’re lucky, the Gimps will settle his hash for us. Then we can try for a negotiated peace.”

Chapelle looked slightly mollified. POTUS went on:

“But if the Gimps come at us again, the fighters will get back to work. I can’t ask the Navy to take losses because we’re scared of using our most effective weapon system.”

“I suppose not,” the National Security Advisor said. “I only hope we don’t go past a point of no return. We might already have done just that.”

“You always were a hard sci-fi guy, Geoff,” the President said, trying to lighten the conversation a bit. “Are you turning mystic on us?”

“SF, not sci-fi, please. And I believe I can develop a properly materialistic hypothesis that explains everything we know and suspect so far. Warplings could simply be some sort of energy beings that derive sustenance from the sophonts they kill. The important thing is that they are trying to use us for their own purposes. If the testimony of Commander Genovisi is to be believed, those entities are largely inimical to us. Except for another faction that might be on the side of the angels. We have no way to verify her account, unfortunately.”

“I spoke with her, before we shipped her off to Xanadu,” Tyson said. “She didn’t seem crazy, but I wouldn’t set policy based on a junior officer’s report.”

“Of course, but we can’t discount it completely, either. In any case, our reputation as ‘warp demons’ is going to be set in stone after this war is over.”

“We have to be alive to care about what others think of us.”

“And we’ve had the same argument enough times already,” POTUS cut in. “People are looking into it. We’ve got entire multidisciplinary teams working on all the data we’ve collected in the past couple of years.”

“Top men,” Tyson said, eliciting a chuckle from his fellow senior citizens.

“We’re not sticking anything in Warehouse Thirteen, Ty. We’ll get answers, sooner or later. But meanwhile, we have a war to win.” 

Tyson nodded. The planned Lamprey offensive should work, and finally rid humanity of a major threat. But the enemy, that dirty rat, had its own plan.

One

Starbase Malta, Xanadu System, 168 AFC

“I wish I was going with you,” Heather told Captain Peter Fromm, USWMC.

They were enjoying a dinner date for the first time in months; for the first time since his brief leave shortly after the USS Humboldt’s return to Xanadu, as a matter of fact. That was one of the problems with two workaholics trying to have a relationship.

On the other hand, we both want to make things work, and are more than willing to put in the effort, Fromm thought.

“Not much need for an intelligence officer in a straight fight,” he said. “You’ll be a lot more useful here.”

“I know. Captain Gupta was nearly sobbing with relief when I offered to help him out in my spare time. Turns out that running the biggest artificial habitat in the galaxy isn’t as easy as he thought.”

They shared a less-than-nice smile. Fromm had some vague idea of the heroic task Heather had undertaken after a series of unexpected events led to the US takeover of the former Habitat for Diversity. The new commandant had been confident he could do a better job than she had, and made it be known in no uncertain terms. Half a year later, Captain Gupta was eating a well-deserved serving of crow.

“And that’s only a side job,” Heather went on. “I still have some ten thousand years’ worth of Kraxan records to analyze, and only two t-wave rated assistants to help me do it.”

“The stuff you’ve already developed is damn impressive,” he said. He wasn’t blowing smoke up her ass, either. The new weapon systems they’d built thanks to her research were game-changers. Assuming they worked as advertised, of course. His company would be among the first to try them out under field conditions.

“I think we’ve picked all the low-hanging fruit, though, tech-wise at least.” She grimaced. “And here we are, talking shop in our free time.”

“Do we have anything else to talk about?”

“One would hope so.”

“We agreed not to get into what happens after,” he added, somewhat cautiously.

“I know.”

They knew too well that the chances there would be an ‘after’ – after the war was over, after they could look forward to a life outside the service – weren’t great. He was due to depart with the 101^st MEU, currently attached to Third Fleet. They were headed for Lhan Arkh space to settle scores with the architects of the Days of Infamy. The infamous Lampreys knew what awaited them, and they weren’t likely to go gently into the night. He’d fought them before, most recently for the amusement of the former owners of Xanadu System, and he knew they were going to have one hell of a fight in their hands.

Fromm had seen too many men and women die, and too many of them died because of orders he gave or mistakes he made. He knew how easily he could be next. Lately, he’d started to believe he should be next. He’d all but courted death recently, and only a small miracle – courtesy of Lieutenant Colonel Zhang – had saved him. Next time his death wish might come true.

“Stop it,” Heather said. She couldn’t read his mind, even with her near-magical tachyon-wave implants, but she could sense his emotional state, and she knew him well enough to not need any gadgets to figure him out.

“Sorry.”

They’d tried to talk things out, but in the end talking only led to wallowing in their problems rather than solving them. Better to set that garbage aside and keep it buried under a steady avalanche of hard work. Those gloomy thoughts kept resurfacing, though; not often, but more than often enough. There was no magical cure.

Fake it till you make it. Probably the best advice. If you pretended everything was all right, you might just make it so.

“No forlorn hopes,” she said. “No heroic last stands. No ‘die trying.’ That crap is for losers. Let the Lampreys die trying, Peter. Come back in one piece. That’s an order.”

“I will.”

Dubois System, 168 AFC

Lieutenant Colonel Lisbeth ‘Lamia’ Zhang gritted her teeth as she led her squadron into yet another precedent-setting maneuver.

“Ready to dance, boys and girls?”

“Oh, yeah,” Captain Desmond ‘Kong’ Franz said in a throaty voice. The massive heavy-worldler Marine was shaping up to be the second-best pilot in the squadron.

“Deus Volt,” Ronnie ‘Preacher’ Johns whispered. A religious fanatic, but sharp and fearless.

“Up and at them.” That was Leroy ‘Jenkins’ Rodriguez. The clown of the team, but all business where it counted.

“Roger,” was all Grinner Genovisi said. Lisbeth’s own warp-witch, able to tell fortunes, talk to angels, and pull the occasional miracle out of a hat.

“Kong, follow Grinner’s lead. Preacher, Jenkins, you’re with me.”

The bizarre Corpse-Ships – still looking creepy even after getting painted in red, white and blue colors – were zooming through real-space at 360 km per second, better than a light cruiser going at flank-plus with all engines redlined, and they were about to go a lot faster than that.

Transition.

From the cockpit of a Corpse-Ship, warp space was a bright rainbow river, a swirling flow of strange energies, a place where imagination could impose its own reality if your will was strong enough. At the moment, the five pilots were too busy concentrating on their flight plan to do anything fancy. What they were about to try was supposed to be impossible, and would in any case be risky. Perhaps too risky for the irreplaceable quintet of ships, but if it worked, it’d be more than worth it.

Sun-Blotter tactics – massive missile swarms designed to overwhelm the defenses of warp-adept warships – had been developed many millennia before the current conflict. The Lampreys – the reputed developers of the technique – had either reinvented it or somehow stumbled on some ancient records and stolen the idea. The enemies of the Warp Marauders of Kraxan had used saturation missile volleys against the murderous aliens, and for the same reason: to deal with warp shields that made direct fire weapons all but useless at most ranges.

Naturally enough, the Kraxans had come up with countermeasures of their own. Lisbeth was about to plagiarize the hell out of one of them. When you stole, you stole from the best.

“Grinner, you’re up.”

The two-ship element led by Commander Deborah ‘Grinner’ Genovisi performed the first part of the evolution, creating a warp aperture with a two light-second diameter. They kept it open, hanging on the threshold between real and null space. The maneuver was similar to what warp pilots called ‘ghosting,’ except it worked on a much larger scale – the warp ‘door’ those two ships were holding open was hundreds of thousands of kilometers wide, although only about a dozen meters tall. It drew a rainbow of shifting light between the two vessels over a longer distance than that between the Earth and the Moon. And that was just the first stage.

“Our turn,” Lisbeth told the other two pilots. The three Corpse-Ships assumed a triangular position and performed the same maneuver. The three ships emerged from warp in a triangular formation, also two light seconds apart and on the same plane as Genovisi’s element; new linear warp apertures formed, connecting all five ships: the roughly A-shaped configuration now turned into a five-pointed star, or a pentagram, if you would. A moment later, the apertures grew in size and the area in-between filled up with light. A five-sided polygon of constantly-shifting colors larger than any planet broke through the darkness of space.

Just one little push…

 Something like an electric current burned through her nervous system. She nearly lost consciousness, but held on with the stubbornness that had kept her going in many situations where a more reasonable person would have curled up and died. Somewhere rather far away in real space but nearby via telepathic link, she felt the other members of the squadron go through the same process.

A flaming five-sided wave of flames burst into real space. A torrent of superheated ionized gas – plasma, in other words – poured forth for several seconds before the warp gates shut down.

Like all warp apertures, this massive pentagon reached two points in space at the same time. The other side of the warp gate was on the inside of the local star. A torrent of plasma that had moments before been part Dubois’ G-type main-sequence star, which was busily fusing hydrogen some ten light-minutes away. The warp aperture on that end had been much narrower, sucking in the highly-pressurized plasma and then shooting it out of the wider five-sided emergence point like a shotgun blast.

The Corpse-Ships were incredibly hardy, but they couldn’t survive a maneuver that placed them within the corona of a star, ghosting or not. The Pathfinder slaves whose bodies and until recently their souls comprised the cores of those vessels had enough control over warp space to isolate them from the wave of star-stuff coming through the massive aperture. Lisbeth still didn’t know how the whole thing worked, despite hours-long explanations from the Pathfinder ghost that resided somewhere in her brain. And work it did, the proof being that the five ships were holding station on the corners of a wall of flames that could be seen with the naked eye from the farthest planet in the system. By rights they should have turned into crispy critters, but there they were.

Enough residual heat got through to turn her cockpit into an oven. That wasn’t supposed to happen, but she’d been half-expecting it. What had been routine for Pathfinders wasn’t quite so easy for a pack of human apprentices. They’d all been practicing the multi-dimensional folding that enabled them to survive the maneuver, but this was their first live run. Lisbeth ignored the discomfort and concentrated on the complicated mental acrobatics necessary to make it all happen. There was one way to do it right, a dozen others that would fail miserably, and several that would destroy all five ships in an instant.

“Now!”

The Death Heads flew away from the wall of fire at full speed, moving on perpendicular vectors from the cloud of superheated gas they had created. The pentagon quickly lost its initial sharp edges as plasma, no longer bound by the gravity of its star, began to expand normally.

It worked!

The cloud wasn’t dense or hot enough to destroy any warship heavier than a corvette or even some civilian vessels: medium-grade force fields would hold off plasma at those densities, unless something else had weakened them to near-collapse. Missiles, on the other hand, had very basic force fields, far too thin to let them survive in the environment Lisbeth’s squadron had created over a volume of space that would envelop even the largest volley the enemy could launch. The curtain of fire they’d created would have consumed tens of thousands of missiles before the plasma dissipated.

“Well done, everyone! Now let’s make our attack run while we wait for the scores to come in.”

Unlike War Eagles, Corpse-Ships did most of their fighting in normal space. That took some getting used to; it was very different from the jump-shoot-jump fighter pilots were used to. Luckily, the pilots of her unit, all hand-picked by her, were very good at their jobs. They were several uniquely-minded individuals: you didn’t have to be crazy to fly on the Death Head Squadron, but it helped.

A short jump took the five ships past the Fire Wall and closed in with a notional enemy formation on the other side. The Death Heads let fly with their high-grade graviton cannon, unleashing enough power to shred a superdreadnought on a single pass. The Kraxan Corpse-Ships might be antiques, but you couldn’t call them antiquated. They were products of ancient super-tech that made them, pound by pound, the deadliest things flying in the known galaxy. If the American expedition Lisbeth had been a part of had found a few more, the war would be as good as won. Even five Corpse-Ships would make a huge difference, though, especially when they could pull tricks like the anti-missile wall of fire that was just beginning to dissipate behind them.

The only thing I wish is that the damn thing didn’t look like a giant pentagram!

That was purely by necessity, not design. The Marauders typically used a full squadron – seven Corpse-Ships – to create the defensive plasma wave. But she had five, and had to modify the maneuver accordingly.

“First time the ETs see that flaming star appear, they’re going to flip out,” she muttered.

“Pentagrams have no mystical significance among most Starfarer cultures,” her spirit guide told her. That would be Atu, the giant three-eyed Pathfinder whose memories and thought patterns were irrevocably linked to her own.

“Sure, but a simple search will let them know that we humans thought it was used to summon demons and all other kinds of sorcerous crap.”

“Some human cultures, for a brief period. The pentagram has a multitude of meanings even on Earth, including…”

“Nobody cares. They’ll just know we drew a witchy-sign in space, and a wall of fire showed up. Ergo, we are witches. Hell, we’ll probably get some trouble from the Bible and Cross brigade at home!”

Atu said nothing to that. Just as well. Lisbeth still hated the seemingly supernatural aspects of her new military career. That had only been compounded by several long conversations she’d had with Grinner Genovisi. The former navigator had made an interstellar transit aboard a fighter that just didn’t have the legs to do so. The things Grinner had seen during that impossible jump had shaken Lisbeth to the core.

There wasn’t much she could do about it at the moment, though. She might as well concentrate on her job.

The simulation’s reports came in, based on sensor readings from several light vessels monitoring the practice run at a prudent distance. The maneuver hadn’t been quite as successful as she’d expected. The plasma cloud hadn’t been quite as large as the plan called for, probably because the five-ship formation hadn’t been able to keep the multi-sided gate open as long as they’d expected. According to the final tally, about twenty to thirty percent of a hundred-thousand missile volley would have survived the Wall of Fire.

Lisbeth wanted to grumble, but decided to keep a positive outlook. Killing seventy percent of a missile swarm would allow the fleet’s conventional defenses to wipe out the remainder. The maneuver had performed its primary mission.

More practice runs would help improve the result, but there was a reason the Death Heads couldn’t stabilize the giant warp gate as efficiently as the Corpse-Ships’ original operators. The Kraxans had relied on the enslaved minds of Atu’s fellow Pathfinders to perform the maneuver. Lisbeth had set them free shortly after discovering the squadron in the ruins of a lost city in ass-end of the galaxy. Instead of five obedient alien ghosts to do the work, her squadron had to make do with their minds and the lessons of the one alien ghost who’d volunteered to stay behind.

“Your species may one day match mine,” Atu said. “Assuming you do not turn into monsters, are exterminated, or simply decide to follow a different path of development. You could achieve significant progress after no more than twenty, twenty-five generations of intensive breeding and rigorous gene-triggering via exposure to the right environmental stressors.”

“That sounds painful. And not exactly a short-term solution.”

“Patience is a cornerstone of Balance, Christopher Robin.”

“We don’t have time to be patient, Pooh.” For some reason, the Pathfinder had latched onto her childhood memories of Winnie the Pooh. She’d learned to deal with it after a while. “We’re sailing out in four to six weeks. Getting a new flag officer at the last second bought us a little more training time, but not much. And we’ll be joining in an all-ship fleet-ex, which is going to eat a good chunk of that time. The Death Heads may get maybe four or five more practice runs over the next two days before we have to return to Xanadu to prep for the exercise. Ask me for anything but time.”

“One makes use of the tools one has at hand, nothing more or less.”

“True. True enough that you didn’t have to bother saying it.”

They’d been having their mental conversation while the Death Head Squadron made a second attack run. The simulated sortie went off flawlessly. No problems there. All in all, it’d been worth the trouble to send the training flotilla to this uninhabited system three warp jumps away from Xanadu, where Third Fleet was preparing to go to war.

“And we’re done, people. RTB and AAR.”

Returning to base took no time at all. The squadron warped to their custom-built cradles, deep in the bowels of a supply freighter, the USNS Laramie, which had enough space to fit all of them while still carrying the beans, bullets and fabbers Third Fleet needed to operate in foreign space. The refit meant the ship could be reclassified as a commissioned vessel, but since the Corpse-Ships were only supposed to return to it after combat operations were over, or if too damaged to continue fighting, the powers that be had kept its non-combatant status. That hadn’t prevented the officers and crew of the Laramie to put on airs; as far as they were concerned, they were a carrier vessel, facts be damned.

It could be worse, of course. They could be scared instead of proud.

A lot of people were; there’d been a rash of transfer requests among the crew. Spacers were prone to superstition, and the idea that their ship was ferrying ancient vessels made with the bones of dead sophonts had proven to be too much to handle for many of them. Luckily, a dissenting faction considered the ships to be lucky charms instead; there had been almost as many requests to transfer to the Laramie. BuPers had wisely reassigned the faint of heart and brought in more enthusiastic replacements.

Lisbeth hoped that her squadron reputation as lucky charms lived up to expectation.

Starbase Malta, Xanadu System, 168 AFC

 USN Fleet Admiral Sondra Givens conducted a final review of the forces she was about to lead into war.

Even after three months spent organizing and training her new command, a part of her resented being separated from Sixth Fleet. She’d spent years honing those ships and crews to a fine edge, led them to victory during a critical juncture, and followed it with the first offensive operations in the conflict. Sixth Fleet had broken the Vipers and knocked them out of the Tripartite Galactic Alliance. It’d fought seven fleet actions over a two-year period and sunk about ten times its tonnage in enemy warships and an equal displacement of civilian vessels and orbital facilities. Along the way, the men and women that comprised the minds and hearts of the fleet had become hardened veterans. Having to start over with a new and un-blooded formation was hard.

On the other hand, Sixth Fleet wasn’t likely to see combat for the remainder of the war. Sixth Sector was safe, its borders secure after the Vipers’ surrender. The last couple of years had been spent monitoring the Nasstah Union to ensure the aliens kept to the terms of the ceasefire, and a few skirmishes with pirates, most of which were thinly-veiled probes by allegedly ‘friendly’ polities. Those skirmishes had quickly taught everyone concerned that Sixth Fleet wasn’t to be trifled with. After that, things had gotten nearly as boring as peacetime duty.

Until the assassination attempt, that was.

The hit team had struck during a formal dinner at Birmingham-Three, a minor US possession whose local sophonts – commonly known as the Birmos – were under American suzerainty. The natives had been at a Bronze Age level of development at the time of First Contact, and for the most part were left alone, except for a few tribes that ruled the lands around the single spaceport on the planet.

Sondra had been invited by a Birmo chieftain to a dinner that turned out to be an elaborate setup. Halfway through the meal, her imps had detected poison in the local booze, just as knives and guns came into play. Unwanted memories flashed through her mind:

The goblet dropped from her hand as Chief Kimmel knocked her off the chair. She barely felt the rough fall – the poison was a nerve agent, and she was numb and half-paralyzed as her nano-med fought the chemical’s effects. She could barely breathe; drool and snot ran down her face as she spasmed on the ground. Her sight was not impaired, however: from her prone position she saw the master-at-arms fire his beamer over the dinner table before a thrown spear went THUNK into his unarmored chest and sent him toppling back. Blood splashed over Sondra’s face, blinding her, and she gasped for breath, fully expecting a blade or club to finish her off…

Only a combination of good luck – for the American delegation – and poor planning by the locals had saved her life. A professional assassin squad – Starfarer mercenaries – had been hiding nearby, armed with energy weapons, but the natives they’d bribed had ‘helpfully’ launched their own attack, thinking their reward would be greater if they did the killing themselves. The alerted Marine platoon watching outside had engaged the mercs in a running battle around the Birmo village even as Sondra’s bodyguards cut a swath through the local warriors inside the chief’s great hall. When the dust settled, the village was a burned-out ruin, its only survivors the handful of natives who’d run for the hills when the fighting started. Besides Chief Kimmel, five humans were killed. Sondra spent several days in sick bay; it’d been touch and go there for a while. They’d ended up replacing about thirty percent of her nervous system.

The attack hadn’t been an isolated incident, but part of a concerted campaign to strike down the leadership of the US Navy. In some ways, it had been a small-scale version of the Days of Infamy, aimed at a few dozen individuals. The final tally had been grim enough: over a thousand fatalities, including five admirals and a dozen other command officers. The worst attack had been at the Hexagon, right in the heart of New Washington: a bomb had gone off inside the building, killing almost three hundred people.

Sondra was convinced the Lampreys had been behind the attacks, although more recent evidence pointed at the Imperium. The only high note in the aftermath was the appointment of her old friend Nicholas Kerensky to Seventh Fleet. Her fellow flag officer had bounced back from a disastrous defeat and – in her opinion – an underserved demotion. At least, she’d thought as much at the time. Recent events had shaken her certainties to the core. Kerensky’s mutiny still rankled.

She shook her head. Dwelling on things beyond her control was worse than useless, and she had plenty of things she could control. The final dispositions of the Third Fleet, for one.

The previous CINC-Three (Commander-In-Chief, Third Sector), Admiral Gabriel Verdant, had survived the decapitation strikes only to lose his command the old-fashioned way: by failing to deliver results. Givens knew Verdant; the man used to be a competent officer, but the years hadn’t been kind to him. Now that humans could live for centuries, they were discovering some could handle the passing of time better than others. Some people learned to adapt to change, overcoming the mental inertia that set in at around age twenty-two or so, while others became stuck. Verdant had turned out to be one of the latter. He’d grown up in a battleship-dominated Navy, and his sense of tactics began and ended with closing into range and trading broadsides with the enemy. His lack of flexibility hadn’t been much of an obstacle back when Sector Three had been a quiet backwater, isolated from other Starfarer polities by Xanadu System and its mysterious owners, who did not allow military forces to pass through it. When the US seized Xanadu, however, it opened numerous routes into enemy space. Verdant’s performance during several raids into Lamprey space had been subpar. He’d been convinced to retire with honors, and Sondra had stepped in.

Her mission was to invade the Lhan Arkh Congress and depopulate its core worlds. She’d led Sixth Fleet on a similar task, except that in the end the Nasstah – better known as the Vipers – had thrown in the towel before more than a tenth of its population had been exterminated. Sondra had found even decimation to be an unpleasant task. As much as she hated the Vipers, slaughtering their civilians had been akin to stepping on a swarm of cockroaches with her bare feet – loathsome, whether it was necessary or not. This time, her orders gave her no discretion: no quarter was to be offered.

The Lhan Arkh had been a constant danger to humanity ever since their clients – the Risshah, better known as the Snakes – had stumbled onto Earth and killed some four billion of its inhabitants. While the Lampreys hadn’t been directly responsible for the attempted genocide, their policies were equally bloodthirsty, and they’d eventually decided humanity had to be exterminated. They’d fought a brief and inconclusive conflict shortly after the US had wiped out the Snakes, and then waged a cold war of sorts, always working hard at undermining human interests whenever possible, and lending support to any enemy willing to strike directly at America and the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, the main Starfaring human nations.

When an enemy openly states its intention to not stop until you are gone, the only reasonable option is to respond in kind. She wasn’t happy about it – massacre had no appeal for her – but she’d follow her orders. Which meant concentrating on the practical aspects involved.

At the time of Xanadu’s conquest, Third Fleet had been far from impressive. Two antiquated Battlefield-class dreadnoughts – with less firepower than the new battleship classes being built on Earth’s shipyards – led a force comprised of four cruiser squadrons (totaling twenty-four ships), thirty-two frigates, and twenty destroyers. Twelve Marine assault ships carrying roughly two divisions of ground troops rounded up the total. None of the ships had been refitted for point defense – a necessity facing enemies firing Sun-Blotter missile swarms – mainly because there was only so much time and money available to do such refits, and a fleet in charge of a peaceful sector was doomed to suck hind tit, to be crude about it.

Things had changed rather dramatically after the seizure of Xanadu, however. The recently ‘liberated’ system had been a treasure trove of unimaginable proportions: if given enough time to exploit its resources, it would forever alter the correlation of forces between the US and the rest of the galaxy. Short-term, those resources – including enough fabricators to be the envy of the shipyards of Wolf 1061 – had been put to work improving Third Fleet.

The USS Thermopylae and El Alamo had been outfitted with a couple of three-gun batteries, mounting ultraheavy graviton cannon taken from Malta’s defenses; those weapons alone gave the dreadnoughts more firepower than the Pantheon-class super-dreds that until very recently had been the pride of the Navy. Their force fields had been improved nearly twofold, and layers of ablative applique armor – a technology beyond current Starfarers’ state of the art – doubled its resistance to attack, at least for as long as those layers of metallic foam coating lasted. Said foam had been applied to all the ships in Third Fleet, giving them an unusual – one might say furry – appearance, but Sondra didn’t care. Her furry ships were tougher than anything else in the galaxy, and that was all that mattered.

The fleet’s lighter space combatants hadn’t gotten similar weapon upgrades, since even the dreadnoughts had barely enough on-board power to shoot those massive cannon, but their point defenses had been improved and were now equal or superior to those of any American ship of their class, and their missile magazines had been filled with improved munitions that she couldn’t wait to spring on the enemy. Six of the assault ships had also gotten upgrades, including some unusual gadgets recently discovered on a remote system. Sondra was still figuring out what to do with them, but it appeared large-scale boarding actions had become feasible for the first time in sixty years.

And then there was the Death Head Squadron.

The Navy had hastily renamed the so-called Corpse-Ships (not exactly the kind of name that generated good PR). The alien rethreads were entered into the annals of the fleet as Totenkopf-class gunboats. Despite a new and colorful paint job, they still looked like the partial skeleton of a gigantic alien grafted onto a sinister-looking hull, simply because that was exactly what they were. The creepy little ships were nothing much to look at, but the after-action reports of the Battle of Xanadu made it clear that each of those gunboats had more firepower than even her up-gunned dreadnoughts.  When you added their throw weight to the rest of Third Fleet, you got a fairly impressive total. It almost made up for not having any carrier vessels.

Almost. Even though the gunboats were far deadlier than War Eagle fighters, five ships could only sink a relatively small amount of enemy tonnage at a time; Sondra had grown used to sending up to two hundred fighters on each sortie. Tough and lethal as they were, each Death Head couldn’t destroy more targets than a dozen squadrons in the same amount of time. That meant the rest of Third Fleet would have to endure a longer pounding by the enemy’s guns and missiles, which meant more casualties. And her bench had very little depth: if she lost one of her precious dreadnoughts, there went about a fourth of her conventional firepower. Lose both, and Third Fleet was little better than a frigate navy. The Totenkopfs could pull some nifty tricks, but she needed more ships.

The Navy, in its infinite wisdom, had agreed. The cupboard was bare, however. The situation had been made worse by a temporary halt in the fighter training program: Top Gun had been shut down until the techies figured out why warp pilots were losing their minds and developing supernatural powers. After Kerensky’s mutiny, Sondra couldn’t blame them. No carriers were available, and neither were any standard fighting vessels, either.

What she was getting instead was a bunch of converted Lamprey ships.

The Lhan Arkh Middle Quadrant Armada had tried to seize Xanadu System shortly after an American diplomatic mission performed the boldest conquest this side of Pizarro’s expedition and took it over. Much of the Armada was destroyed in the ensuing fight, mostly by a single Corpse-Ship, although a US destroyer squadron had died gallantly while pitching in. The remainder, over fifty Lamprey vessels in total, had reached Starbase Malta and been neutralized by an alien weapon that killed their crews without damaging the ships. In their spare time, the work crews of Malta had begun the long process of converting those captured hulls into something the US could take into combat. Those ships would supplement Third Fleet.

There hadn’t been enough time or personnel to refit all or even most of them, of course, but the ships they had refurbished were hers for the taking, as soon as their crews arrived. They included a slightly-used and abused People’s Choice-class dreadnought, a Workers’ Might missile battleship, and four Grievance Committee-class battlecruisers, all but the dreadnought in near-mint condition. The Lhan Arkh turned out some very nice warships: they were all larger and better armed and armored than the US Navy’s class equivalents. Repairing the damage on the dreadnought – it’d been perforated several times during the fleet action – had been the biggest project, followed by life support conversion. Lampreys were Class One creatures, whose preferred atmosphere was toxic to humans; changing that had taken time.

In addition to those modifications, the budding shipbuilders of Xanadu had added warp shields on all the prize ships; they lacked the coverage of American warhips – in no small part because of the larger size of the alien vessels – but they were a damn sight better than no shields at all. They’d even laid on a coat of ablative armor on them, giving them the same fuzzy look that the rest of Third Fleet had. There hadn’t been time for weapon upgrades, but they had filled the huge missile magazines of the battleship with one and a half million guided munitions of all kinds. The dreadnought held half a million missiles as well. The converted Lamprey vessels couldn’t unleash a Sun-Blotter swarm on their own, but it would come closer than anything else flying the Stars and Stripes.

Those six alien ships required twenty-nine thousand people to operate all their systems. She’d found six thousand volunteers within Third Fleet, and filled those slots and the rest of her manpower needs with a mix of reactivated veterans and fresh-faced spacers who’d just finished their second year of Obligatory service. Getting a decent mixture of experienced personnel and newbies had taken a lot of staff work, but after months of preparation they had managed, more or less. Sondra still found herself going over crew manifests and wondering which of those ships would fail to perform because the people manning critical systems had no idea what they were doing, especially when dealing with alien designs nobody had trained on. Cybernetic implants helped immensely – all Starfarers used near-identical software and hardware – but the crews of the new ships would have to learn the kinks of their new postings the hard way. They’d been training for a whole month: the last batch of personnel had arrived just that long ago. It wasn’t enough, but they couldn’t wait much longer.

In the short term, time was against America’s side. If the Galactic Alliance convinced other polities to join in, the US would be overwhelmed before it could produce enough new toys to alter the balance of power. If the Lampreys were eradicated, on the other hand, that would give everyone pause. At least, that was the reasoning of the War Department, the President, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They’d given Sondra her marching orders, and even a Sector Commander in Chief couldn’t question her final directives.

 Her fleet, and some hundred and twenty thousand men and women under her command, would soon be underway.

Two

Ship clearing missions sucked ass.

It didn’t matter what kind of alien you dealt with: big or tall, two legs or six, they all built their ships as small as possible, and that meant lots of narrow passageways, tight corners and cramped compartments. Unless you planned on blowing up the tangos’ ride while you were inside it, you couldn’t spray gravitons and plasma any which way. That meant Corporal Russell ‘Russet’ Edison couldn’t carry a Widowmaker portable energy cannon. Nope, when he went ship-clearing, he got either an Alsie or a flamethrower.

Granted, they’d been issued some fancy new ammo which did all kinds of interesting stuff, but it still sucked ass.

“Door,” PFC ‘Grampa’ Gorski called out as he rounded a corner. The rest of the two fireteams – Russell’s, plus four riflemen from First Platoon – spread out to cover the passageway. Lance Corporal ‘Gonzo’ Gonzaga took a position behind Grampa, watching their six while his fellow Marines dealt with the door.

“I got it,” Russell called out before he opened fire with his ALS-43. At that range, a standard frag, plasma or even a plasma-armor piercing round would singe everyone a little, reducing the power level of their personal force fields. The 15mm munitions in his gun were new and improved breaching rounds, though. The three rounds he sent downrange created a short-lived wall of force between their target and the Marines on the other side just before they exploded, expending the full power of the blasts on the door. Russell saw a squashed-looking wall of flame blot out the door; the deck vibrated noticeably even under his heavy combat boots. When the smoke cleared, there was a jagged, half-melted hole where the door had been.

Grampa fired a burst of 4mm into the hole, to discourage any ETs still standing from doing anything while Russell selected a new ammo type for the Alsie. The Automatic Launch System had three twenty-round magazines, giving him a variety of choices. The damn thing weighted thirty pounds when fully loaded, but it was worth its weight in gold as far as he was concerned.

“Fire in the hole!” Russell shouted before he popping a trio of 15mm grenades through the hole the breaching charges had made. Everybody turned away before they went off.

A plasma grenade had a lethal radius of five meters for unshielded targets. Any armored targets would probably survive the triple explosion, but the bright flashes would overload their sensors and keep them distracted, not to mention draining their force fields.

The grunts from First led the way into the compartment, with Russell close behind. There were no live tangos inside. Two enemy spacers with no armor or force fields had been inside, and the grenades had done them in. Lampreys, looking just as ugly when cooked well-done as they did in life. Russell’s helmet filters kept the smell of burned alien off his nostrils. He’d smelled burned Lampreys before, and it’d been worse than broiled skunk, not to mention toxic enough to require a shot of meds to keep him from keeling over.

The rest of the compartment was a mess, but Russell spotted a wall-mounted commo terminal that appeared to have survived the two sets of explosions. He pointed it at the Lance Coolie in charge of the grunts from First. LC Hoover nodded and went to work. For this mission, they’d brought along data spikes, universal commo connectors filled with all kinds of nasty computer viruses designed to mess with a ship’s systems. Hoover jammed the spike into an access port and let the nanites and software do the rest.

A green light flashed thirty seconds later, and Russell relaxed a bit. They’d achieved their objective.

“Simulation over.”

“That was easy,” Gonzo commented as they walked down the corridor. They had to keep their helmets on; the local atmosphere was still set to Lamprey standards, guaranteed to strip the lining of your lungs in a minute or so.

“You know, when I joined the Corps, I was told that boarding actions just didn’t happen anymore.”

“New gear, new missions. It’s called progress, Gramps,” Gonzo told him.

“I always thought the whole idea of warping into a ship with light weapons was insane. Even if that’s why they changed the name of the Corps.”

“All before my time,” Gonzo said.

They cycled through the airlock and made it to the staging area.

“Two more days,” Gonzo said as they began to stow their gear. “Two more days and we’re free.”

“Yeah, if by free you mean three days of liberty, plus up to another two days, as long as we take it off our accrued leave,” Russell said. “Not exactly a vacation.”

“Better than nothing, brah. We’ll have fun.”

“Sure,” he told Gonzo, but something in his voice gave him away. The little guy had known Russell too long, which was why playing cards with him was a stone-cold bitch.

“So it’s going to be like that,” Gonzo said, but left it at that.

“Like what?” Grampa asked.

“Nothing.”

Gorski was okay, but he still wasn’t one of them, even after going through hell and high water. Russell trusted the guy with his life, but trusting him with stuff that violated the UCMJ was a whole other kettle of fish.

“Sure, whatever,” Grampa said. He knew what the score was, if not the details, and he was fine with being left out of any shady stuff. Had to give it to Grampa, he didn’t bitch about it, either.

A few hours later, at a recently-opened establishment that went by the comforting name of The Burning Shuttle, Russell and Gonzo settled down for a talk. His buddy had been dying to say something, but it was best to wait until they were off-duty and their imp recorders were offline. All the way offline; many idiots who thought their implants stopped recording everything they saw, did or said when they commanded them to stop had found out the truth the hard way. It took some work and specialized know-how to make sure Big Brother and Uncle Sam weren’t looking over your shoulder.

They looked around to make sure they were the only Marines in attendance. The Burning Shuttle didn’t cater to the uniformed services; the dive bar catered to civilians, who were flocking to Malta by the cartload now that the giant starbase was open for business. Thousands of new jobs became available every day, and a lot of people showed up with nothing but their life savings and hopes of finding work, or motivated by the belief that the impregnable system might provide a safe haven even if the war was lost. Xanadu was supposed to be impregnable; it might become the last refuge for humanity.

Stupid fucks, Russell thought as he looked the current patrons over. No place was safe. He’d helped take this base away from the previous owners, which meant it could change hands again. Not that the crowd here looked like the hopeful bunch. Mostly men and a few rough-looking women. Most of them were civvie spacers or building contractors, from the social media pages that popped around each face as he looked at them. He and Gonzo had set theirs to ‘private.’ Nobody here was likely to mess with a couple Marines, but it was best if nobody knew who they were.

“You’re still with that chick,” Gonzo said after they got their drinks. He sounded as he’d caught Russell having carnal congress with some alien barnyard animal.  

“Sort of.”

“Of all the women in this fucked up galaxy, you had to fall for an officer.”

“It ain’t like that.”

“A warp fighter pilot.”

“Shit happens.”

“An actual witch.”

Russell shrugged. Neither Marine was given to heart to heart talks; they weren’t teenage girls.

“You’ve lost your fucking mind.”

“Probably.”

“All right. Good luck.”

“That’s it?”

“Pretty much. Watch your six. Fraternization will cost you, brah, so don’t get caught. It’ll cost her more, so if you give a shit about her, you gotta worry about that, too.”

“I know.” They were both fairly good barracks lawyers; they knew the rules, if only so they could get away with breaking them. They knew that not being in the same chain of command wouldn’t mean shit if Russell and Deborah got caught. Officers and enlisted didn’t mix, not unless their relationship predated one’s commission date, and even then they only had a year to marry or end it.  

Not for the first time, Russell wondered what the hell he was doing. Deborah wasn’t just everything Gonzo said, she was also part of a very elite, experimental unit, the kind of posting that got extra-special scrutiny by the top brass, which meant lots of eyes on her. Stealing a night together every blue moon took more work than some of the hairiest scores he and Gonzo had pulled over the years. It helped that Deborah was a witch, the kind that could see the future, more or less. If Russell ever convinced her to use her powers for good, as in the good of their bank accounts, he’d marry her for sure.

“When it finally hits you, it hits hard,” Gonzo said with the confident wisdom of someone who’d married twice, divorced twice, and was one drunken blackout away from Round Three.

“Sure, whatever.”

Russell wasn’t sure he was in love. Far as he could tell, that sort of shit was a lie you told yourself until the truth finally hit you in the face. But when he found out Deborah had been stationed at Xanadu, he couldn’t stay away from. And she’d felt the same way, to be fair about it. If she’d told him to get lost, he would have. At least, he thought so. But she hadn’t.

Thinking about their last time together, the way they’d gone at each other… It was like a fever dream. Like getting high on some exotic ET drug while going through a VR sex fantasy, except too real to dismiss.

“Just watch your six,” Gonzo said again.

He didn’t know if he could.

* * *

That can’t be right.

If she’d been perusing an ordinary data file, Heather McClintock would have simply reread it just to make sure she hadn’t misunderstood. You had to do that often as an intelligence officer: something as simple as a translation error could lead to all kinds of trouble, and in her chosen profession even small mistakes could cost lives.

Problem was, she wasn’t reading a document, or even reviewing a multisensory virtual recording. The contents of the jet-black sinuously-curved box on her desk were living memories, and accessing them meant experiencing them fully. She felt as if she had lived through those events, in other words, and if her friend Lisbeth’s theorizing was right, she might have actually traveled back in time on some level to live through them.

Her eyes were watering and she felt light-headed.

I think I’ll skip a second look for now.

The box was a Kraxan device, one of the many souvenirs from their expedition to the Redoubt, the last stronghold of the Marauders of Kraxan. Genocidal murderers with a penchant for sophont sacrifice, the Kraxans had come to dominate much of the galaxy, not because of their savagery – hardly an uncommon quality among Starfarers – but their affinity to warp space. The Marauders had conquered half the known galaxy before the other half joined forces against them, and the ensuing war of extermination had led to a dark age that still affected known space, two hundred millennia later. The parallels with humanity were unsettling.

That was only the tip of the iceberg, however. Through the memory box sitting on her desk like some primitive work of art, Heather had seen a Kraxan ship create a ley line that hadn’t existed before. And they had done so after making a massive blood sacrifice to their Warpling allies.

In theory, one didn’t need warp conduits, the cracks in spacetime where null-space was most readily accessible. Any ship with a warp generator and the energy budget could open a tear in reality – two tears, actually, one to enter null-space, and another at the desired destination – and make a jump. The problem was, the energy and time requirements went up exponentially. A single light-year transit without the benefit of a ley line required more energy than anything smaller than a battleship could generate, and took between twelve and fifteen hours. A two-light year jump was beyond any ship’s power plant, and even if possible would take over a hundred hours, longer than any sophont in the galaxy could endure transit, humans included. By contrast, the ley line between Sol and Wolf 1061 – about fourteen light years apart – required only a two-hour jump, and the power requirements could be met by even a fusion power plant, let alone the gluon-based generators used by military vessels.

Those limitations made space warfare a fairly predictable affair: the enemy couldn’t arrive too far from the terminus of a ley line, and to progress any further it needed to reach the entrance to another warp conduit, all of which lay near the core of a system’s primary star. The number of possible approaches was relatively small, which made defending star empires possible in the first place. Finding new ley lines took enormous time and resources, and most civilizations guarded their locations zealously.

The Kraxans had found a way around that. They had laid out new tunnels in spacetime leading to unsuspecting worlds and attacked them without warning. Nobody had the resources to place a large fleet on every system; forces were concentrated at major crossroads, to deny the enemy access to conduits leading deeper into one’s territory. Those defenders had been caught by surprise when the enemy showed up unexpectedly, bypassing fortified worlds and striking deep within their borders.

Even though the history of the Marauders had long been forgotten, the myths they had inspired still lived on. Many legends about warp demons found among Starfarer civilizations were nothing more than garbled accounts of actual events. The records she’d just been reviewing, for example, matched very closely with a ‘fairy tale’ common to half a dozen galactic polities, including the Imperium.

“The devils danced and slew their victims, and with their life fluids opened Ways where none had existed. Through those Ways they came, unwelcome and unbidden into the Realm of the Beddo, the pride of the galaxy, three thousand stars linked as one. Even Mighty Beddo fell under the onslaught; their great cities burned, and the slaughter was very great.”

 On its surface, the story was no different than any number of mythical accounts, including those from Earth’s own lore. The linguistic analysis of the epic ballad revealed a great deal more, however. The root word for ‘devil,’ after processing out the changes time and sound shifts had inflicted, came from the Kraxans’ name. The term had traveled through the rise and fall of a dozen civilizations; it went to show what an impression the Marauders had made.

The key to the Kraxan powers was their dealings with the natives of warp space. The real devils.

What do Warplings get out of it?

The Kraxans didn’t know, and didn’t care. The memory-document she’d experienced listed the number of sophonts that needed to die for the creation of a ley line. The base ‘rate’ started at a hundred thousand sacrifices and went up from there. During their rise to power, the Kraxans would seize a star system and depopulate it to forge a pathway to the next one. The toll had been in the trillions; the dead had numbered more than the current population of the known galaxy. After the Marauders were defeated, only scattered systems on the periphery of the known galaxy remained. Even after all this time, the descendants of those remnants hadn’t reached the population and technology levels of their ancestors.

Along with all the destruction they had inflicted, the Kraxans had tainted warp space itself.

Heather shook her head. One didn’t have to frame the situation in mystical terms. What had happened was akin to throwing vast amounts of chum in shark-infested waters: sharks had grown in numbers, and become accustomed to feeding on anything that fell off a ship. Before millennia of continual sacrificial offerings had ‘spoiled’ them, Warplings had been nowhere near as predatory as they were now. The Kraxans themselves had noted that the ‘Starless Path’ had grown increasingly dangerous over the centuries. A few of their scholars had understood the cause, but the few who had dared to mention it had come to very bad ends.

FTL travel had become very dangerous because of the actions of the last species of warp witches. And if humans made things worse… Heather pictured a future where entering warp became suicidal, dooming entire civilizations to remain days trapped in real space. Slower-than-light travel just couldn’t maintain an interstellar network. All the sophonts in the known galaxy would have to turn inward and do the best with what could be found within their star. None would Transcend; having a minimum population in the hundreds of billions seemed to be a necessary if not sufficient step towards the next level or evolution, in addition to a technological and industrial base no single system could support.

We could wreck everything. And we’re going to be tempted to do it.

Heather almost wished she could destroy the little black box, but she wasn’t the only analyst working on it, not to mention that was one of hundreds of similar devices they’d found at Redoubt-Five, still in working orders after an ungodly amount of time, pun intended. The knowledge was available, and there was no going back. In a few weeks, months at the outside, decisionmakers all through the US would know about a method to defeat any enemy. She didn’t think anybody in authority would go for blood sacrifice, at least for now. But the mutineers currently skulking somewhere in Imperium space would face no such restraints. The fighter pilots that had ‘offered’ their victims to their Warpling tormentors were already well down that road.

We have to stop Kerensky before he turns humanity into the new Marauders.

Unfortunately, the only people who could do so were heading in the opposite direction.

* * *

“We have to go after the Black Ships,” Commander Deborah ‘Grinner’ Genovisi said.

“Sure,” Lisbeth Zhang replied. “I’ll get on my imp and call the admiral. I’m sure she’ll scrap her orders and do as we say.”

“I know you’re being sarcastic, Colonel, but...”

“But nothing. And don’t get formal with me, Grinner. Admiral Givens isn’t going to change Third’s Fleet dispositions and head into the Imperium on my say-so. Not to mention there’s the small matter of finding Kerensky and his merry band. The Gal-Imps control some seven hundred systems, you know.”

“If we started at Paulus System, we could probably find the ley line they used to escape. The one their tame Warplings created.”

Even as she spoke, Deborah knew how insane she sounded.

“Are you telling me our new super-duper senses can locate ley lines?”

“I think so, yes.”

She knew she could do it, but decided not to elaborate. For much of her life, Deborah had known things she had no earthly way of knowing, and had grown used to other people’s reactions when she mentioned them. For many years, she’d secluded herself on the outskirts of a small town, playing a dual role: crazy old lady and part-time fortuneteller. And alleged prostitute, which did her standing in that community no good at all. People rarely listened to her, and when they did they often replaced what she said with what they wanted to hear.

For the last several days, she’d been having visions, glimpses of a future that must be avoided at all costs. She had to convince the Navy to change its plans, or monsters would be unleashed on this side of the warp divide.

“I know it’s going to be hard to sell this to the top brass,” she told Zhang. “But we have to.”  

“Paulus is eleven warp transits away, on Sector Seven,” the Marine officer said. “And we can’t launch an attack into the Imperium from there; don’t have enough forces in-theater.”

“We could transfer the Death Heads to New Texas, use them as the core of Seventh Fleet.”

The Marine shook her head. “Not going to happen, Grinner. We have our orders. We have to wipe out the Lampreys. After that, maybe they’ll send us after the mutineers.”

“It makes no sense. The Lhan Arkh are no longer a threat.”

“That’s not quite right, Grinner. The Lampreys aren’t a threat right now, and that’s only because they’ve lost four fleets in a row. Problem is, they have a command economy, and inefficient and destructive as those are, in times of war they can crank out ships and guns like few others, because they don’t care if their citizens have to eat dirt to survive. If we leave them alone for even a year or two, they’ll come back for a rematch.”

“In a year or two, they won’t dare try.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Plus there is the revenge angle. The Lampreys raised the Snakes, and the Snakes burned half the world. A lot of people have been itching to settle that score for a long time. Plus they are unrepentant assholes even by Starfarer standards, and butt-ugly to boot, what with their toothed sphincters they use for mouths. Killing them is going to be a pleasure.”

“If we don’t stop the Black Ships in time, the galaxy may burn.”

“Prophesizing, or guessing?”

“A little of both. I do know one thing: we don’t have a lot of time.”

“There’s politics involved. The voters wouldn’t understand if we leave the Lampreys alone and send a fleet chasing about a bunch of renegades who, worst case scenario, are wrecking the Imperium. You know, the guys who want to exterminate us. As far as most everybody is concerned, Kerensky can kill them all. We can always court-martial him afterwards.”

“The Warplings are the problem.”

“I know. Heather McClintock agrees with you, by the way. So does my invisible friend.”

Deborah had spoken to Atu, the alien entity that lived inside Zhang’s head. Not too long ago, she would have found the experience daunting. Not anymore. She’d spoken with angels. After that, a mere spirit manifestation didn’t seem quite so important.

“All right, Grinner. I’ll talk to Heather and between the two us we’ll make as big a stink as possible.”

“You mean it?”

“Yes. I’ll send emails to General MacWhirter, my Navy contacts, the few that will return my messages, and if I have to, Admiral Givens her own damn self. Don’t count on it, though. We are small cogs in a big machine. Meanwhile, all this mess has made you forget something.”

“What?”

“Your date with that enlisted jarhead.”

“Oh.”

“I still don’t get what you see in him. I’ve known Russet since I had to play ground-pounder after the Lampreys blew up my ship, and the man is a shifty-eyed thug. A stone-cold killer, too, not that there’s anything wrong with that. He’s not even a bad boy type; he’s just bad.”

“It’s…” Even telepaths needed to have their secrets. Corporal Edison sparked something in her that she’d thought long lost. That was all. Enough to risk a court-martial over, she supposed.

“I don’t need to know,” Lisbeth said with an evil grin. Then, more seriously:

“Have a good time, Deborah. While you can.”

Three

Third Fleet was ready to begin operations. Only one question remained.

Admiral Sondra Givens had conducted extensive consultations with Earth, including some lengthy QE telegrams that had run enough of a tab to put a dent on her budget. In the end, circumstances had given her the deciding vote. She had mostly made up her mind, but wanted to hear one final opinion before she sent her final recommendation to Earth, a recommendation that would almost certainly be approved.

Lieutenant Colonel Lisbeth Zhang entered the office with only a hint of the nervousness a recently-promoted mid-grade officer would naturally feel upon entering the den of a fleet admiral, let alone one with the personal history the two women shared. The Marine gave her a stiff, parade-ground salute and the standard ‘reporting as ordered, ma’am.’

“At ease, Colonel. Have a seat.”

Zhang complied. Her face was carefully blank. Sondra wondered if the former Navy officer was trying to read her mind or use one of her other warp-induced superpowers on her. The new implants recently given to all commanding officers were supposed to render them immune to ‘tachyon wave telemetry,’ the latest technobabble term for psionics, part of a futile attempt to make them sound less fantastical. Whether the special imps worked or not was highly debatable. Kerensky had been outfitted with an earlier version, and it hadn’t stopped him from losing his mind.

“I have a few things I need to discuss with you, Colonel. But before we start, I want to advise you not to refer in any way to the unfortunate events at Jasper System. As far as I’m concerned, all such things are in the past and will stay there. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Admiral.”

Some five years ago, up-and-coming USN Lieutenant Commander Zhang had been in charge of a two-corvette task force. Both ships had been lost in action at Jasper System; Zhang had been the sole survivor. Among the dead was Sondra Givens’ favorite grandson, Omar. None of which had anything to do with the present, of course. Zhang had served under her in Sixth Fleet, and had done a commendable job there. But they hadn’t interacted directly until now, and Sondra figured she might as well get that out of the way.

“I have read your emails, and the appended files from Lieutenant Genovisi and Field Agent McClintock. Your recommendation – some might call it something closer to a demand – is that we abandon our planned offensive into Lhan Arkh space and send Third Fleet straight to Paulus to chase after Kernsky’s renegades.”

“That is correct, ma’am. That is, I made that recommendation based on new information provided by personnel under my command. I wouldn’t presume to dictate policy, ma’am, just provide intelligence that might affect the decisions of those charged with making policy.”

Zhang was acting almost suspiciously normal. The Marine’s file noted that the fighter pilot was suffering from a number of stress-induced mental issues, any of which would have been more than enough to relieve her from duty and possibly commit her to a psychiatric institution, under normal circumstances. On the other hand, circumstances had been anything but normal since the Langley Project had led to the unexpected creation of a race of psionic super-soldiers.

And if I put the term ‘a race of psionic super-soldiers’ in an official report, I’d join Zhang in an insane asylum in zip time, she thought mordantly. Even though that’s exactly what those eggheads created while trying to raise a crop of warp fighter pilots.

Setting aside those thoughts, Sondra went on: “Well, your recommendations have received a great deal of attention. They were the subject of a meeting of the Joint Chiefs, and another one between the President and his full Cabinet. There was a great deal of to-and-froing, and even a hefty amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth at both meetings, or so I’m told. In the end, they put the ball in my court.”

Zhang said nothing; she appeared to be looking at a spot behind and above Sondra’s left shoulder, with a slight twitching in her face that made the admiral wonder if the Marine was trying not to laugh. Or giggle. The reports said the Marine pilot had developed a very unnerving giggle.

 “I want to hear your opinion, in your own words, before I make a decision. You have the most direct experience with warp phenomena, and are probably the only officer qualified to evaluate Commander Genovisi’s story.”

“Yes, ma’am. I believe I am.”

“You have my permission to speak freely, Colonel.”

“Thank you, ma’am. You have read the reports. Grinner, uh, Commander Genovisi spent a great deal of time in warp space while in transit between New Texas and Cascadia. During that time she was in communication with a Warpling, sorry, a Null-Space Sophont.”

Sondra grimaced. That ‘NSS’ nonsense had been recently coined by the scientific community now that the previous consensus that all warp space apparitions were mere figments of spacers’ imagination had been finally abandoned. It had been immediately adopted by the Navy, with general orders to the effect that the terms ‘Warplings,’ ‘Foos’ or ‘demons’ were not to be used in any official communiques going forward. For all their devotion to rationality, a lot of people seemed to be fanatical about the intrinsic power of names.

 “In any case, the NSS in question claimed to represent a faction that opposed what we would consider ‘evil’ practices,” Zhang went on. “It helped Commander Genovisi survive the jump between systems, which her fighter should not have been able to complete successfully. The NSS wanted the commander to contact me with a message: that there was a war being waged inside warp space, and if Admiral Kerensky isn’t stopped in time, the balance may tilt in the favor of its enemies. Who are evil by our standards.”

“Yes. All of that is in the report.”

“Admiral… I have seen one of those NSS in action, on this side of the Starless Path, er, null-space. I am, maybe was, an atheist, but that thing was too much like the Devil for comfort, ma’am. Even my personal guardian angel, Atu, was creeped out, and Atu is the closest thing to a god I’d encountered until then.”

“Yes, your invisible friend,” Sondra said, carefully avoiding anything in her tone that could be construed as mockery or contempt. Zhang had been very reluctant to confide in others about the mental constructs – or spirits – taking up space in her head, for very understandable reasons. Even now, it was hard to give her story any credibility, except for the fact that madwomen didn’t perform miracles. The Marine pilot had, among other things, made a warp jump without benefit of a ship or catapult. Discounting her words as insane was not an option.

“Yes. Atu is most likely a NSS itself, but one that only knows what the Pathfinder alien whose mind it copied knew and thought. I have this theory, Admiral; it’s kind of crazy, so I’ve only discussed it with a few friends.”

“I would like to hear it, Colonel.”

“Well, I think Warplings, er…”

“You can call them Warplings, Foos or pink elephants for all I care, Zhang. Carry on.”

“Yes, ma’am. Warplings are sort of funhouse mirror images of any sophonts who enter warp space. It’s like they only become sentient or sapient by copying our minds, or what is in our minds. These copies, or downloads or what have you, most often disappear when the original mind leaves, but a few of them, the more powerful ones, they sort of grow up, and run with it, with the thoughts or ideas they picked up. If they are gods or demons, they are something we, every Starfarer that is, something we created. Do you see what I mean?”

“I think I do. A number of experts have come up with similar hypotheses.”

“So, for example, Atu thinks it’s a Pathfinder, and for all intents and purposes, it is a Pathfinder, so it only has the dead alien’s memories.”

Zhang paused and looked at that spot over Sondra’s shoulder, and the admiral realized that must be where the invisible friend was standing. She had to fight an urge to look around.

“Anyway, Atu tells me I’m not exactly right, but I like the idea. It means there are no ancient evil monsters living in the Starless Path, plotting to cross over and devour the galaxy, see? It’s just errant thoughts given life somehow. Our dreams made flesh, if you will.”

“And our nightmares.”

“Those too. Doesn’t say much about us, intelligent life in general, does it?”

“Your theory might explain why they prey on sophonts, too. They may derive more strength or power the more minds they copy, download or absorb.”

“Yes. Except it’s also a matter of taste. They, or some of them, they enjoy the feeling of absorbing a life. Of taking a life. Enjoy enough to become addicted to it. Sort of like a vampire.”

Of all the things Sondra had expected to hear in her Navy career, hearing the word ‘vampire’ used for something other than an enemy missile had never made the list.

If it’s crazy but it fits the available data, then it might just not be crazy after all.

“In any case, it appears not all of them are addicted to killing,” she said.

“That is correct, ma’am. You might say some ‘good thoughts’ have also taken form inside the Path. I think that was the so-called ‘angel’ that contacted Commander Genovisi. I think they might derive some strength from our prayers, as a matter of fact. Unfortunately, most Starfarers are staunchly atheistic, so prayers aren’t exactly common in null-space.”

“We are the glaring exception.”

“Yes. Last poll I read, it was like fifty-seven percent of Americans considered themselves to be ‘somewhat, very, or strongly religious.’ Very unusual among starfaring civilizations.”

And most likely only because the great secular bastions of pre-Contact America – the major cities, in other words – also happened to be the primary targets of the Snakes’ thermal bombs, Sondra thought. I don’t know if that counts as some cosmic irony, evidence of a deity with a twisted sense of humor, or both.

“A lot of ‘good Warplings’ seem to have adopted religious, and particularly Christian forms. There are friendly ghosts, angels, saints and the like. There’s always been stories about spacers being visited by Saint Patrick and what have you, and maybe there’s a Warpling out there who thinks it is Saint Patrick.”

“This is going to open numerous cans of worms,” Sondra commented. “Numerous giant cans.”

“Yes, ma’am, which is one reason I’ve kept it mostly to myself. Plus I could be wrong. Maybe warp space is where Heaven and Hell and Great Cthulhu and the Great Pumpkin live. Above my pay grade.”

“Above my pay grade as well. Go on.”

“Of course, ma’am. From the looks of it, the Kraxan civilization did a number on warp space. If my theory is right, their twisted minds created a host of malevolent entities, which they fed with billions of sophont sacrifices. Or maybe the entities already existed and they became stronger. Either way, those evil things are still out there, and when they get the chance they feed on people.”

“I wonder why it doesn’t happen more often.”

“There is an element of choice involved, ma’am. It’s sort of like the old vampire legends, the whole bit about you having to invite them in before they can come into your house. It looks like they can’t just kick the door down and eat your soul. You have to let them in. Or someone from our side has to do it for you.”

Zhang paused to let Sondra digest that bit. It all made a perverse sort of sense. It might even explain why suicide warp runs almost never worked; the hopeless, those already expecting to die, had in effect given up and given Warplings permission to devour them. She shuddered.

“What is worse is that some Warplings can cross over. They can possess people, much like demons are supposed to. I’ve seen that happen twice, the first time during training. It was pretty bad.”

“Yes, I’ve seen the footage of that and other incidents, and yes, it was all pretty damn bad.”

“And some can actually manifest here. Physically. Like the Flayer at Redoubt-Five. You don’t know how close we came to letting it loose on the galaxy. That thing blew up one planet and slaughtered every sophont in another. Once it was on this side, it didn’t need permission to do whatever it wanted. If Atu hadn’t opened a portal to send it back… Well, I wouldn’t be around to see what happened, but nobody would have liked that.”

First vampires, now demons, now monsters than can shatter planets. I’m going to need anti-psychotics after this interview is over.

“You’d think the Elders of the galaxy would frown upon this sort of thing,” she said instead. If they were going to talk about myths, might as well bring them in, since the Elders were something everyone believed in, mostly because they occasionally provided incontrovertible evidence of their existence.

“They do. After ‘reading’ a lot of Kraxan history – reliving it is a lot closer to what she does – Heather, er, Field Agent McClintock thinks that the Elders were involved in the Marauders’ downfall. At the very least, they put their finger on the scale at certain crucial moments. At some point, they decided that Kraxan and all its people needed to go away. And if we don’t stop Kerensky, they may feel the same way about us.”

I’m having a hard time thinking of a happy ending – any kind of ending that can’t be summarized with ‘and everyone died’ – for this story, Sondra thought. Except this isn’t a story, this is history in the making.

“The reason I sent my recommendations is that Commander Genovisi had a premonition indicating that time is running short. She believes Kerensky is going to initiate his attack on the Imperium soon, along with its NSS allies. Psychic visions don’t exactly provide timetables, ma’am, but her sense is that in a matter of months, things will escalate.”

“You are aware of the political considerations involved,” Sondra said.

“Yes, ma’am. Leaving the Lampreys alone isn’t an option. Not after the Days of Infamy.”

“This is what I’m going to do, Colonel. I’m going to split the difference and hope it’s enough. I’m going to sail Third Fleet into Lhan Arkh space, towards the nearest major system – that would be the Fifth Congressional District, to be specific – and depopulate it. Along the way, we will engage and destroy any Lamprey naval assets we encounter. I expect they will send everything they’ve got in the sector to protect CD-5. Once that is done, Third Fleet will return to Xanadu, conduct a quick rest and refit, and enter Imperium territory. I anticipate concluding the first phase of the campaign in no more than five weeks.  

“I realize that’s nowhere near Paulus System,” Sondra went on. “But I figure we won’t have to go to Paulus, will we?”

“No, ma’am. Wherever Kerensky has hidden himself, sooner or later he’s going to fulfill his threat and head towards the Imperium capital system. Primus System.”

“So we’ll either get there first and secure the surrender of the Imperium, or head Kerensky off somewhere in between. Either the Gimps geek and let us through, or they’ll be caught between Third Fleet and the Black Ships. Hopefully they’ll geek before Kerensky’s renegades sacrifice too many sophonts to their dark gods or embodied bad thoughts or whatever you want to call them.”

“That’s… that’s a tall order, ma’am.”

Sondra smiled at the understatement. Third Fleet would be operating largely on its own during the second phase of the operation, a long way from resupply, with a smaller force than had been considered enough for the job, and no guarantees they’d arrive to their objective in time to prevent an unthinkable disaster she’d been convinced was not only possible but highly likely. And first she had to beat the Lampreys and throw billions of them into the flames to appease the American people.

She wondered what would happen if the government put all its cards on the table and announced that a renegade American admiral was consorting with demons and plotting to sacrifice billions of aliens to them, likely precipitating Armageddon. Homeland Security’s estimate was that half of the voting public wouldn’t believe it, and the other half would probably believe it strongly enough to start rioting or going on Crusade their own damn selves. Even if they were wrong about the American people – Sondra wanted to believe they were – should the other Starfarers learn what was going on, they’d all jump on the Imperium’s side, Puppies included. No, getting humanity’s house in order had to be done in secret, at least until the job was done.

“Any comments?”

“I think that’s the best course of action under the circumstances, ma’am. I don’t know if it’s going to be a successful course of action, though.”

“Nobody ever knows until it is over, Colonel, and often not even then. Wars are chancy things.”

“Then I guess we’ll just have to roll the dice and see what happens, ma’am.”

“That we will. Dismissed.”

* * *

Coming aboard the USS James N. Mattis felt like returning home in some ways. A home that had undergone a great deal of remodeling.

Like every company and field-grade officer in the 101^st Marine Expeditionary Unit, Fromm had been given a virtual tour of the changes the budding shipyards of Malta had made on the assault ship that would be ferrying some fourteen hundred Marines into harm’s way. There were a few new systems aboard that would make life even more interesting than usual, which was saying a lot. None of those modifications altered the living quarters, of course: they remained as cramped and uncomfortable as ever. Some of the ship’s volume had been sacrificed to add an extra power plant. The loss of space had primarily affected cargo areas and their assault shuttle complement: the Mattis and the other Commandant B-class ships in Third Fleet would have to make do with only twenty-eight instead of thirty-two combat-rated landers, and twelve cargo shuttles, down from the original sixteen.

That would ordinarily mean that putting the entire expeditionary unit on a planet’s surface would take three trips instead of the usual two, and the total number for ground forces on the first wave – usually two companies plus motorized and armor support – would be cut significantly; they’d probably not get full ground transport, or have to forgo some armor. Except things weren’t ordinary: the initial landing force would now warp onto the target, along with much of its equipment. All thanks to the new tech – actually the ancient tech – the USS Humboldt had unearthed in Redoubt-Five.

Heather had generated most of that intelligence, taking the knowledge contained in the t-wave data storage units they’d taken from the ruins of a lost Kraxan city and transcribing them into something standard systems could ‘read.’ A lot of that work had been done while the Humboldt spent two months navigating between warp lines, and had consumed most of her waking hours. Her efforts had paid off, provided the new systems worked as per specs, and that there were no unintended consequences. Practice runs had been positive, but no new or rediscovered tech showed its hidden flaws until it was battle-tested. Combat always provided new ways to make your gadgets fail, usually at the worst possible moment.

Fromm entered his cabin – as a company CO, he rated a single compartment; everybody else, including his platoon officers, had to bunk up – and went over the last Tactical Exercises Without Troops he and the rest of the leaders of the 101^st had run through. The results had been satisfactory to Colonel Brighton, but not to Fromm. He was still being too cautious. His XO had helped pick up the slack, but that wasn’t Lieutenant Hansen’s job, and wouldn’t be until he was wearing an extra silver bar.

Even knowing it was a simulation, Fromm had hesitated to put his people in situations where he knew casualties were inevitable. Eventually, he did it, but those few seconds spent looking for alternatives started adding up after a while. Making decisions quickly was more important than finding the perfect solution for a given problem; the enemy going to wait for you. Indecision was likely to produce more losses than getting things done quickly. He knew all of this, but the moments of hesitation and second-guessing were still happening. The cruise aboard the Humboldt hadn’t settled anything beyond revealing a death wish to add to his other issues.

 Fromm would have to keep studying his mistakes and learn not to repeat them. They were going after the Lampreys, and they were nasty, tricky bastards. And they’d be on the defensive, which meant the Marines would need close to a three-to-one local advantage in numbers to overwhelm dug-in positions. And that meant sending taking losses; there was no way around that. The last TEWT had resulted in three percent casualties for his company, half of them fatalities. And everything had gone right, despite his moments of hesitation. Overall casualties had been closer to four percent; among the men and women of Bravo Company, who had performed the initial assault, they had been closer to six percent. If things had gone wrong, losses would have likely doubled or tripled. If they’d gone completely FUBAR, of course, they could easily hit a hundred percent.

Of the dozen or so civilizations the US had fought since it’d joined the community of Starfarers, only about half of them had followed such quaint customs as accepting surrenders or keeping POWs alive for any length of time, and even among those the occasional massacre wasn’t unknown. An alien military attaché, back when Fromm had been a butter bar, had once read the Geneva Convention and burst off laughing. Giving up a military advantage for the sake of compassion or even in the hopes that one’s own troops would be treated in kind was seen as amusing at best, and downright stupid or suicidal at worst. If an American unit was cut off and overwhelmed, its personnel would be lucky to be killed out of hand instead of tortured to death.

Fromm had the imp replay a critical moment in the simulation, when a spoiling attack against an enemy relief column had nearly led to his company being encircled and exterminated. Poor intelligence had led to that, and his reluctance to risk his scouting elements had been at fault. He made himself watch the whole thing.

The simulation’s sensory inputs were as close to the real thing as their designers could make it. The Corps removed the normal sensory dampers that civilian VR simulations had implemented for safety and comfort purposes: a hit with a virtual laser in a combat simulator would send pain signals to the brain that would feel as agonizing as the real thing. They also stimulated heart and breathing rates to replicate the effects of adrenaline and strenuous physical action on one’s body and mind. About the only things they never seemed to get quite right were smell and taste, which was just as well. Everybody was all too familiar with the way you stank after a few days running around in combat armor, nanite cleaners or not.

He watched again as a squad from First Platoon lost three men in as many seconds when one of the Lamprey ‘transports’ turned out to be a heavily-shielded tank destroyer. Only luck and Lieutenant Hansen’s foresight in placing an assaultman team nearby had kept those three deaths from becoming ten or fifteen. Seeing the very realistic kills, the all-too-familiar status icons going from green to black, felt just about as painful as the real thing.

Before he went to sleep, he’d play through the scenario one more time. Maybe he’d learn whatever it was he’d forgotten somewhere along the way.