@2019 Fey Dreams Productions, LLC. All rights reserved.
These chapters are not finalized yet and may vary from the final version.
High Warlord Fann of the Crimson Sun Clan watched his ships burn and despaired.
My Star Clan dies today, he thought as he watched a Battle Carrack be consumed by subatomic flames. The Nemeses, the relentless nameless foes the Host had fled for millions of years, had cornered Fann’s people in a fallow system. His great Home Fleet was huddled near the cold light of a neutron star, hoping that the twisted spacetime around it would provide an escape from the invincible force bessetting it. Hunting Fann’s people. Fifty million clansmen and thrice that number of women and children were now little more than penned cattle, to be slaughtered at leisure.
“Send the order to all fighting vessels,” he ordered his herald. “Nay, not just them. Anything that can generate thrust and has a plasma gun mounted on its hull! We fly towards the center of the Nemeses’ fleet, to exact the maximum price for our lives!”
The lesser warlords voiced their agreement with a chorus of high-pitched battle yells and Fann felt briefly transported to the glories of the distant past, when his ancestors had ridden to battle atop war-beasts and used spear and bow to best all lesser peoples and unify a planet under its red-and-gold banner. Millennia later, Fenn’s people had ventured beyond the system’s confines and conquered distant stars. An empire had risen – and then the Nemeses had come. The Host had fought and lost. A small remnant had fled, embarking on an eternal journey through the galactic arms, never staying in one place long enough to attract the Nemeses’ attention. Along the way they’d met and traded with other clans fleeing the same enemy. The Oracles kept the past alive even as they helped the thousand Clans of the Star Host navigate new paths between the stars. In their dreams, the history of the Host lived on.
It was a pity that the Oracles would be no more. The Crimson Sun Clan would lose everything after this battle was over: its past glories would be forgotten when the last warrior and singer were as cold and dead as the pitiless vacuum that filled the universe. His ships, built from bits and pieces of loot stolen along the way or equipment purchased from those too powerful to steal from, were mighty indeed, but they were as helpless as unblooded children against the might of the nameless monsters who had cornered them. He spared a moment to grieve his people before preparing to offer battle.
“Warlord!” a minor herald shouted. “I bring word from the Oracles! They have found a Star Road!”
“Belay my last order!” Fann shouted. Hope burned hot within his chest. “Escape is found! The Clan shall live!”
If we can survive long enough to enter the Sea of Chaos, that is, he reminded himself.
He surveyed the Home Fleet’s condition reports with the calculating engine mounted on his brow; the tiny machine buzzed and drew figures and vessel depictions in the air in front of his eyes. Eighteen war carracks and a Battle Mountain had already engaged the enemy at long range, in a futile attempt to delay the inevitable. They would do for a sacrificial rear guard to keep the Nemeses away from the Clan as it made its escape.
“All chosen vessels: advance towards the enemy,” he declared on the War Cry channel. “Today you die so the Clan may live. Your names will be written on the great walls of our Homes. You will never be forgotten as long as a clansman still draws breath!”
A chorus of roars signaled the commanders’ agreement. The nineteen warships broke away from the Clan’s formation and used reaction thrusters to make speed towards the approaching Nemeses. If the Fates were kind, their shields would hold long enough for their weapons to bite on the enemy vessels and their deaths would buy enough time for the Oracles to open the Star Roads.
The Fates were rarely kind, but this time they were sated with the destruction of the heroic rear guard. Fann watched the duel on one of the screens in the Command Room. The doomed warriors tried their best, but the Nemeses’ chaos shields withstood their attacks with ease. Their return fire blasted the proud ships into drifting, burning debris. One by one they fell without inflicting significant damage on the relentless enemy. Only the War Mountain lasted long enough to open fire at close range. One of the enemy ship’s energy signatures vanished, but the War Mountain was melting away under a relentless barrage. It was very hard to kill a War Mountain, a five-kilometer-long iron-nickel asteroid, reinforced with force fields and fielding thousands of firing points. The Nemeses would take a little time to do so, time that would save the rest of the Clan.
Fann had lived over a thousand years and ruled the Crimson Sun Clan for half as long, but never had he seen the Nemeses so close, a mere handful of light seconds away. The sight of the vast, monstrous shapes was a stark reminder of why the Host must always remain on the move. The old Star Roads the Clan had relied on were now choked off by the enemy and the dead. His people’s only hope was to venture somewhere new.
“The Way is open, Lord of Hosts. A long Road – twenty hours at least.”
Many would die during a trip of that length. The old, the very young, those too weak to endure the long exposure to the wildling energies of pure Chaos. Still a better fate than awaited them at the hands of the Nemeses.
“To all ships: Go into Chaos Mode. May we all meet on the other side.”
The remnants of Crimson Sun Clan fled into the Chaos Sea. The spirits of the dead greeted Fann. They seemed angry and afraid. He ignored them while he pondered what the future might bring.
Will they follow us? Yes. Not right away, though. They lack the Oracles’ skill at finding Chaos roads. Finding our track will take years. Perhaps even decades. Time enough to flee deeper into the Star Roads beyond.
If Fann could feel any pity for those outside the Host, he would save it for the dirt-siders at the other end of the Star Road, for they would eventually come to grips with the Nemeses and know true terror before their inevitable demise.
* * *
Amazing how things quickly could go from routinely boring to horrifyingly hectic.
Captain Hiram J. Kimball, commander of CRURON-88, had been looking forward to saying goodbye to his alien hosts and sailing towards US space. The show-the-flag cruise had gone as well as could be expected – the Crabs weren’t fans of the US, but that was par for the course – but he was tired of having to deal with all the annoying minutia of conducting fleet ops in non-human space. His XO had done the bulk of the work, but some still found its way to the top.
There’d been plenty of annoyances to go around: the latest one had involved the discovery that the cruiser squadron’s latest shipment of consumables had been contaminated. Determining if the damage had been accidental or intentional had taken a great deal of effort. It’d been the former, thankfully, just some Crab techie who hadn’t figured out the proper oxygen-nitrogen mix for human-breathable air and added a couple of elements that would have sickened everyone aboard his twelve-ship formation. The Crabs – their name for themselves was unpronounceable by humans so they accepted being called by their nickname – had been properly apologetic, and now were giving the American squadron a royal sendoff. The provincial governor of Kunah System himself led the festivities.
The US and the Crabs’ Star Oligarchy had fought a brief but intense war back in AFC 65, a couple of decades after humanity had exterminated the Snakes. The conflict had ended with the annihilation of an entire Oligarchic fleet and the return of the status quo ante bellum. Since then, the two civilizations had given each other a wide berth, except when the Oligarchy had allowed the Galactic Imperium free passage to attack the US during the unpleasantness known as the Great Galactic War. Reprisals had left two Crab star systems in ruins and led to a number of reparation payments and other concessions. Since then, relations between the two polities had been ‘correct.’
“Pretty ships,” Kimball commented as the Crab flotilla onscreen began their 15-gun salute, an honorific normally reserved to the Crab’s allies, not a neutral nation that was far more feared than loved. It was good to be top dog; nobody in the known galaxy was in a position to threaten the United Stars of America. Those too stupid to know that had been schooled the hard way.
“Pretty big, too,” LCDR Marina Castro-Cheng said. The XO had a point: each of the six Crabs’ Snapper-class battlecruisers in the local quadrant-defense flotilla out-massed his flagship by a considerable margin.
“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight,” he said with a smile.
The lieutenant commander grinned back. “But the size of the fight in the dog that matters, aye aye, sir.”
The USS Pershing’s high-intensity grav cannon gave it twice the ‘throw weight’ of any of those ships despite having half the number of gun batteries. And that was just the tip of the iceberg: most of CRURON-88 total firepower came from the two light carriers that formed the core of his formation. Its twenty-four fighters could wipe out the Crabs’ entire flotilla in one or two passes from well beyond the maximum range of its guns. Carrier-based fighters were the main reason the usually-arrogant Crabs were willing to eat crow for making a mistake. The two battlecruisers, two cruisers and six frigates of the squadron were there mainly to protect the carriers and to help mop up any survivors of their fighter sorties. The Great Galactic War had driven that lesson home, some twenty-odd years ago, and a few minor conflicts in the following years had confirmed it. Peace had followed and would remain as long as the US Navy kept reminding the aliens that humans were the meanest dogs in the yard.
Time to give a brief speech thanking the Crabs before heading for the warp gateway that would take them back to America – to Conway System, to be exact, and from there to Starbase Malta, where a new assignment awaited.
“I thank you for this honor, Illustrious Provincial Governor Ooh-chat,” he began. “In the name of the United Stars of America, I…”
A sensor tech cut him off: “Multiple warp emergences! Ninety-eight light minutes from the primary exits. Dozens, hundreds of ships!”
“Sound general quarters,” Captain Kimball said in a calm tone that disguised the shock he was feeling Nobody arrived that far out from the gravity wells where warp entry and exit points existed unless they were there to launch an attack. And over a hundred ships? That wasn’t a raid or a probe: that was an act of war.
The Crabs are at peace with everyone. Pirates don’t go after provincial seats and can’t field fleets of that size. Who are they?
“Those are Horde energy signatures,” Castro-Cheng said as the first bits of analysis appeared on the command center’s main display.
Kimball grimaced. The Horde were space nomads. They drifted across the Known Galaxy in dribs and drabs, ravaging settled peoples wherever they went. Their flotillas were rarely large enough to threaten major systems, however; the last time they’d done so had been almost a century ago. The Horde War had been the first time the US had joined other Starfarers in battle; a loose alliance of civilized star nations had confronted a massive Horde invasion. Over two years, a series of battles and a hunt for landing forces that infested several planets ended with the extermination of tens of millions of the violent aliens. Since then, the Horde had been a continuous low-level nuisance. You never knew when they would show up next. They came from the galactic ‘northwest’ and used undiscovered warp lines to drop in unannounced. And they’d decided to do so right on Kimball’s lap, and in greater numbers than ever before.
“Admiral Kimball,” Governor Ooh-Chat said. “We are not allies but I beseech you, in the name of civilization and compassion: will you aid us to contain this invasion?”
Fleet commanders were granted a lot of discretion when outside US space; the only way to communicate with their superiors was through courier ships. QE-telegrams, the only method to send instant messages, were hideously expensive and impossible to use aboard ships. The decision to help or not was Kimball’s alone; so was the responsibility for the outcome.
He didn’t hesitate. “Of course, Governor. We will lend you all the aid and support we can provide.”
The Crabs weren’t friends and probably would never be, but helping crush a Horde incursion would earn the US some good will. Since the most common nickname for humans in the known galaxy was ‘those damned warp demons,’ the US could use some positive press. Besides, helping one’s neighbors wasn’t just Kimball’s Christian duty; the Horde would happily plunder any American systems further down the warp chain after they were done with the Crabs. Better to stop them here.
Kimball ignored the governor’s effusive thanks and turned his attention to his squadron. Bored spacers rushed to their battle stations; dormant auxiliary power plants went online and guns began to ‘warm up’ as their crews got them ready. For the first time in its existence, CRURON-88 prepared to go to war. He had done his share of fighting with Sixth Fleet during the Great Galactic War – as a wet-behind-the-ears ensign – but less than a tenth of his crews had seen combat. Training would have to replace experience.
“More warp emergences detected,” the Surveillance Sensor Officer reported. “We have confirmed IDs on targets, designated Sierra One to Sierra Seven-Hundred-Eleven.”
Seven hundred ships. Heavenly Father protect us.
“Might be a mite too rich for our blood, sir,” the ship’s XO subvocalized so only Kimball could hear her words.
“Well, the Crabs just gave us a fifteen-gun salute. Least we can do is send a few Hordelings to the afterworld for them.”
“Not really the least we can do, sir, but I hear you.”
“Admiral Tee-Hee wishes to speak with you, Captain.”
Kimball suppressed a chuckle. Crab names had a way of being unintentionally hilarious to human ears. The admiral no doubt wanted to work out a plan of action; it wouldn’t do for Kimball to burst out laughing, even if Crabs were unable to read human body language or social cues. In any case, there would be very little to laugh about in the hours to come.
“Onscreen.”
* * *
“Big bastards,” someone muttered in the CCC room.
Kimball let it go; things were unusually tense and some offhand profanity was as good a way as any to relieve some stress. And the guided rocks – some were large enough to qualify as planetoids – that appeared in the tactical holotank were massive by any standard. Fifty-three guided sub-planetary bodies. Most were five to ten kilometers in length and about a third of that in width, but two monster vessels in the center were forty kilometers in length and thirty in diameter, and their ‘flagship’ was a hundred km long and seventy-five wide. They were moving at starship cruising speeds – a few percentage points below one thousandth the speed of light – courtesy of tens of thousands of graviton thrusters powered by an equal number of fusion, fission and gluon plants; the energy budget of any of those flying rocks surpassed the power output of both the human and Crab fleets preparing to intercept them.
“The Horde has used powered asteroids before, but never on that scale,” LCMDR Castro-Cheng said.
“Looks like this is the first time we’ve run into their varsity,” Kimball said. “Time to get a feel for what they can do.”
Besides the flying rocks – hammering through multiple kilometers of nickel-iron crust to get at something vital was going to be a job of work – the Horde fleet comprised three hundred warships of roughly battlecruiser to pocket battleship size; the motley armada of jury-rigged hulks bristled with a varied array of heavy weapons. The remaining four hundred vessels appeared to be armed freighters, equally large in size but with much weaker armament, armor and shields. And if that wasn’t bad enough, a few hundred corvette-sized lightweights had deployed from the flying rocks when the Horde spotted the combined fleet standing in their way. He now had over twelve hundred Sierras to deal with. Target-rich environment did not begin to describe it.
Kimball was willing to fight the Horde, as long as the fight didn’t risk the destruction of his command. If things reached that point, he’d skedaddle. The Crabs in this system were doomed, at least those who didn’t evacuate in the week or so it would take the invaders to reach the system’s inhabited worlds and the warp lines around them and the yellow star at its core. All the American and Crab fleets could do was sting the Horde before choosing between flight or death.
“We will volley all our missiles from two light-seconds off,” Admiral Tee-Hee said. “After that, we will warp-jump to Kuna-Three and assist in the evacuation of as many warp-rated personnel as possible.”
That meant abandoning nine-tenths of the population on Kuna-Three, about three hundred million people for whom warp travel meant death or at best permanent insanity. There was no other choice; a missile volley wouldn’t do much, but waiting to enter beam weapon range would be suicide. An exchange of broadsides when you were outnumbered by a factor of a hundred in terms of firepower could only end in one way.
“We will conduct fighter strikes timed to coincide with your missiles’ arrival,” Kimball said. The enemy would be too busy trying to shoot down the tens of thousands of ‘vampires’ – anti-shipping missiles – the Crab fleet could deliver from long range to bother dealing with the twenty-four fighters that would teleport into point-blank range, fire from within the warp envelopes that rendered then near invulnerable, and disappear a second or two later. CRURON-88’s chosen targets were one of the oversized enemy cruisers and the largest guided asteroid. That was about all that could be expected from two dozen War Eagle Mark-3 fighters; even the far deadlier Crimson Tides – which his squadron didn’t have – wouldn’t be able to do much more.
Some would criticize his decision to use his fighters at all. Doing an enemy a small injury was never a good idea, and he would be revealing America’s fighter capabilities to someone who might never have encountered them before. On the other hand, the Horde would soon capture the system and no doubt learn everything other Starfarers knew about humans and their devilish weapons. Might as well score some points and possibly learn more about the enemy’s capabilities.
“The Crabs are launching. Sixty thousand missiles en route towards enemy Sierras.”
Kimball had served aboard a destroyer when Sixth Fleet had been on the receiving end of several Sun-Blotter missile swarms. He still had nightmares about the seemingly-endless flight of missiles headed towards his ship; no matter how many vampires you killed, there were more behind them. Nice to be on the giving side of that equation for a change.
The enemy opened up on the approaching missiles with a variety of weapons: lasers, charged particles and plasma beams lit up the vacuum between the two fleets. Railguns fired clouds of metal projectiles like gigantic shotguns. Sixty thousand missiles became forty thousand, became thirty, became ten. Less than a thousand survivors reached point-blank range, where they were met with such a storm of point defense weapons none survived long enough to do damage. Obliterating a Sun-Blotter swarm took lot of firepower; the enemy had plenty of it.
“Fighters are off.”
The War Eagles didn’t fly but simply warped to their destination, instantly crossing the two light seconds separating the fleets. Each fighter was little more than a battleship cannon with a cockpit and propulsion system strapped to it. The fighters fired with perfect coordination, each two-squadron formation striking the same point with uncanny timing and accuracy. That was part of the eerie mystique of fighter pilots, men and women whose connection to null-space was quite literally supernatural. Kimball suppressed a shudder: fighter jocks always creeped him out.
“Sierra Ninety-three has been destroyed. Sierra One has taken negligible damage.”
One out of two wasn’t bad. The Horde battlecruisers weren’t any tougher than other alien warships the Marine and Navy fighter wings had obliterated time and again. The flying asteroids were something else, however. Good enough; the sensor feed from the returning fighters would provide useful intelligence.
The Crab ships had waited until the missiles had all been destroyed, using active sensors in a futile attempt to guide them towards their targets. They were preparing to go into warp when the enemy returned fire.
Kimball’s blood ran cold when he saw fifty graviton beams reach out across two light-seconds and strike half the Crab battlecruisers. The massive volley had come from the flying asteroids. The blasts’ energy signatures were off the scale. Not even the Wyrms’ great fortress guns packed that much power. None of the Crab heavies survived the direct hits; the proud ships had been reduced into so much burning debris.
“Emergency jump!” he ordered. His warp shields might be able to withstand those volleys, but he didn’t want to risk it.
CRURON-88 warped. By sheer luck, the next enemy volley had targeted the survivors of the Crab flotilla. By the time the American ships returned to reality in the vicinity of Kuna-Three, their temporary allies’ fleet had been utterly destroyed. Kimball sent a terse status report to the Crab governor before making haste towards the system’s exit point. The Horde wasn’t kidding around and he had to warn the US that trouble was headed its way.
Running from a fight grated, but he was sure there would soon be a Round Two.
* * *
The easy victory had been tainted by a moment of terror when the local dirt-dwellers had used Chaos ships against the Host.
During that moment, Warlord Fann had feared he’d arrived to a stronghold of the Nemeses. But no, the tiny vessels that had destroyed a War Carrack and inflicted cosmetic injuries on a Battle Mountain were not the same as the implacable foes who had expelled his people from the Spiral Arm. It was bad news that some of the local enemies had such control over the dreaded forces of Chaos, but such could be overcome.
For the time being, all that mattered was the dirt-home near the center of the system, laden with loot for his Makers to build more ships, consumables to restore his fleet’s supplies, and slaves to bring into service should they prove capable to live within the Crimson Sun Clan’s life support parameters. Normally the Host would spend a few months plundering their prize, but staying too long while being separated by a single Chaos jump from the Nemeses, even a long one, was much too risky. The Clan would pause here briefly, take what could be taken in that span of time, and move on.
In a few years at best, and a few months at worst, the Nemeses would arrive. The Clan must prove to be an elusive prey.
Marduk-One, 197 AFC (After First Contact)
Jason Giraud watched the starship rise towards the sky.
It wasn’t much of a ship. The really big vessels never came down to the surface of a planet; they were built to maximize volume and entering any sort of atmosphere would be like flying into a brick wall. This was a tramp freighter, a mere ten thousand tons of displacement, tiny in comparison to the huge cargo monsters that plied the space lanes and used five-kiloton shuttles to bring their goods dirtside. The tramp freighter had prettier lines, though; its aerodynamic hull gave it a sleeker profile than the largely-globular designs of big ships. Jason imagined that life aboard it would be better than working in one of the super-freighters, where corporations would regulate your life and you’d know exactly how things would go for the next ten or twenty years almost down to the hour. An indie ship crew lived day-to-day, knowing only where the next warp jump would take it; everything beyond that would be a surprise.
He wished he could be aboard it.
It was a stupid wish; passage off-world cost more than he was worth. Even the tramp freighter he was looking at would demand a nice chunk of change to keep the likes of him alive during the three-day trip to the nearest stop on the warp chain leading out of Marduk System. Jason had just turned twenty-one and all he had to his name were a couple of weeks’ saved pay from his stint as a pretend-Marine, about enough for a month’s rent at a flophouse. If he wasn’t living with his great-grandfather, he’d be in trouble. His life sucked.
“Jase,” great-gramps said, snapping him from his thoughts.
“Hey, Pops.”
Jason stepped back into the house. He’d been looking out the oversized barred window that passed as a balcony in his great-grandfather’s apartment. The three-story building was on the side of a hill that overlooked the huge landing pad used for shuttle and small starship landings. The view came with a price: every other hour, you heard the whooshing sound of a ship or shuttle making its final approach. No supersonic booms – those only happened after the ships reached enough altitude to avoid blasting the town below – but the noise was noxious enough that the well-to-do lived a few miles away from the pad. Jason’s great-gramps was many things, but well-to-do wasn’t one of them. All it took was one look at the cramped, messy quarters the old man and his only living relative called home to tell anybody that.
Pops’ shift at the fabber center had been over for a couple hours, but Jason hadn’t been expecting him to show up yet. Friday was payday at Olson’s Assemblies and that meant Pops would scrupulously bank half of his pay towards basic expenses before taking the other half and marching up to the Keno Casino, where he would blow it all on the card table. Some Fridays he’d be back late with triple his weekly pay in blank credit chips; most often he’d show up with nothing but a bad mood. He was early, so he must have gotten wiped out quickly. A hand that had seemed to be too good not to go all in had turned out to be not good enough, was Jason’s guess.
“Win some, lose some,” the old man grumbled, confirming his suspicions.
“That’s why they call it gambling,” Jason replied, trotting out the familiar phrase without missing a beat.
Pops grinned. “True enough.” The smile disappeared a moment later, though. “You still going to that party, Jase?”
He nodded, suppressing a surge of irritation. Jason was wearing his best outfit – other than his Sunday clothes, which were too stodgy for where he was going – so there’d been no need to ask him. The old man – who actually looked old because he couldn’t afford the rejuv treatments this month, and probably not next month either – frowned at him.
“Those friends of yours ain’t no good, Jase. They’s crimmies and dodgers. No good can come from associating with ‘em.”
Jason tried not to sigh. He was used to Pops’ lectures. He’d gone off-world during his Obligatory Service term hoping he’d never come back to Marduk-One except on a rare visit every few years. Instead, he came back for good, tail between his legs, a loser the Corps had tossed away. That meant there was no escaping the old man and his lectures. Not until he got a job that paid enough for him to get a place of his own. Problem was, a reject who’d spent his four years of service in the combat arms didn’t have many useful skills for civilian life. He could make his bed, dig holes, run for miles and miles, use a variety of weapons and clean up after himself; none of those abilities were in high demand.
“They ain’t got no respect, son,” his great-great-great-grandfather – plus one or two more ‘greats;’ Pops was over two hundred years old – went on. “No respect for God or Country.”
“It’s just a party, Pops. Cassie invited me, and she’s no dodger.”
Cassie Dunkel was still doing her ObServ, the four-year mandatory program that everybody had to sign up before age eighteen if they wanted to be citizens of the United Stars of America. The guys throwing the party were dodgers; they’d never done their service. People didn’t get arrested for dodging ObServ, not in a rock like Marduk-One, which was out in the galactic boonies and had a big underground economy. Dodgers couldn’t vote, hold down public office or get work from any respectable business. Scabs O’Malley and Juice Perkins would never be able to get a regular job, but they made their living throwing parties and selling drugs, so they didn’t care. If they ever got convicted of anything, draft-dodging would add an extra six to eight years to their sentence, but people like them didn’t care.
“The Dunkel girl’s all right,” Pops admitted. “But you shouldn’t associate with them lowlifes. You got a clean record, son. Don’t spoil it.”
“Just going to do some dancing, have a couple drinks, and come home,” Jason said. He wasn’t fifteen years old anymore, but darned if Pops remembered that. At twenty-one, he could drink, vote and do anything he wanted. He just didn’t have the money to do most of what he wanted.
“I wish the Marines had kept you, son. You would have done great things in the Corps.”
“They didn’t have room for me, Pops. They’re still kicking people out, even long-service vets. ‘Reduction in force,’ they call it. Can’t even blame them for it. There hasn’t been a major war in like forever.” Since before Jason had been born, as a matter of fact. To him, war was something he’d studied in History class or played in a variety of shooter games.
“People forget,” the old man said, his eyes bright with anger, and Jason steeled himself for the rant that would follow as surely as thunder followed lightning. “The galaxy hates us, son. A trillion of ‘em, barely three billion of us, eight if you count non-American humans, and every last one of them trillion aliens wish we were dead and gone.”
“I know, Pops.” Jason had learned better than to argue the point or mention humanity’s handful of alien allies.
“It’s like people have forgotten First Contact. I was there, Jase. First thing aliens did when they found us was burn down half of our cities. Four billion people dead, and two hundred years later there’s barely more humans living in the universe than the day the E.T.s showed up.”
Images flooded Jason’s mind as Pops sent him videos of First Contact. He could have refused to watch them but decided to humor the old man. Besides, he agreed with Pops; some things should never be forgotten.
The old-style 2-D vid clips showed familiar sights: the contrails of hundreds of missiles descending over Earth’s cities. Those missiles hadn’t exploded but instead landed in circular patterns around major population centers, erecting domes of invisible energy that trapped people inside. Shortly afterwards, they’d started fires, incredibly-hot fires that melted concrete and steel.
People inside the burning domes had lived for as long as five hours after the holocaust started; six or seven hours for those who hid in underground shelters before their air ran out or they were broiled alive. Millions of them had used their smartphones to record the sights and sounds for posterity. Advancing walls of fire. Buildings collapsing one by one as their structures softened too much to keep them standing. People fleeing the flames, some of them already on fire. Men, women and children choking to death as ashes clogged the air around them.
Pops always added new tidbits to the snuff films he sent Jason. This one showed people jumping from buildings, choosing a swift death over the rising flames. A man and a woman stepped out holding hands. That sight hit Jason harder than the rest. It made him think of his dead parents.
“Okay, okay. Please, Pops.”
The old man relented; the overwhelming video torrent stopped.
“Don’t you forget, Jase. It can happen again. It did happen again. Four times, the E.T.s have come for us. Cities burned at Heinlein, Parthenon and New Ohio, barely thirty years ago.”
“I know.” Jason hadn’t been alive yet, of course, but he’d watched the flicks and played the games. Long before his ObServ he’d pretended to be a Warp Marine and fought Eets in a hundred virtual battlefields. He’d longed for the day he would do it for real, when he would be launched from a warp catapult to drop in on a pack of Lampreys or Gimps and deliver some well-deserved payback. The Lampreys were all but extinct and the Galactic Empire had broken up into a dozen pieces. And the Corps had rejected him. They only had so many slots open, and he hadn’t been good enough to deserve one.
The future looked bleak. He could apply for a job at one of the fabber centers. There were three on the planet’s surface; between them and two orbital shipyards they employed about a million people. Pops had worked at one of those for the last sixty years. Problem was, there were half a dozen people trying to get in for every job available, even crap details like cleaning goop off the matter-printers or sweeping floors. If Jason had gotten fabber training during ObServ, he’d have a much better chance to land a good job, but he’d spent his time learning how to shoot the standard Infantry Weapon; knowing how to use and maintain an IW-5 didn’t do him any good when it came to controlling a matter-printing machine.
Jason shrugged. All of that could wait until tomorrow. He had a party to look forward to, and he wasn’t going to let Pops’ historical flicks or worries about tomorrow bring him down.
* * *
Scabs O’Malley sneered at Jason. “Jeez. Look who the ‘rats dragged in.”
His former classmate had shot up a couple of inches since the last time Jason had seen the guy, and put on a lot of muscle too, although that probably had come from a shot of nanites rather than exercise. Scabs was a big believer of living better through chemistry. He was displaying his physique by going shirtless, which also showed off an extensive set of tattoos: a full sleeve of fluorescent neon designs on each arm and an animated avenging angel holo-tat that rose from his back at a mental command from the smart glasses that served as a poor substitute for imps. Scabs didn’t have cybernetic implants; few who lived on the wrong side of the law did. The more stupid and reckless among them relied on black market imps that rarely worked as advertised; the rest did without.
Whatever drugs Scabs was on, they weren’t making him mellow. Quite the contrary. Maybe coming to this shindig hadn’t been a good idea.
The party didn’t look like much. The organizers had taken over an abandoned landing pad, a flat concrete plug three hundred feet wide on the wrong side of town. They’d set up a cash bar and were piping music straight into everyone’s imps or portable devices. Music and visuals: Jason’s implants let him see ghostly dancers mixed in with the real-life kids on the dance floor. People wishing for privacy wandered over the abandoned warehouses on the edge of the landing pad; the two dilapidated structures were overgrown with the native version of kudzu, which wasn’t just thorny and known to give humans a nasty allergic rash on contact but also had leafy growths that would get you high if you smoked them – as long as you didn’t mind some brain damage with every inhale.
“What’s going on, O’Malley?” Jason asked Scabs, trying to keep things on an even keel. He wanted to see Cassie.
“All kinds of shit’s going on. Nothing a mil-spec slavey needs to know.”
Those were fighting words. Jason figured he had two choices: knock the grinning ass-munch out – and get a nasty beating from his friends in return – or turn around and walk away. Pops had taught him how to fight, and his time in the Crotch had refined those lessons, but getting into something he couldn’t win wasn’t a good idea. This part of town didn’t get a lot of police supervision, and the first thing the party’s organizers had done was set up a privacy field that prevented imps from transmitting outside the area or recording anything for posterity. That meant any criminal activity would go unobserved, with only unreliable witness testimony for the authorities to go on. Best to get out. He was about to when Juice stepped in:
“Take it easy, Scabs.”
Juice Perkins was a good five inches shorter than Scabs, but he made up for it by wearing his hair in half a dozen multicolored spikes that protruded from his head in every direction, making him look like some sort of exotic fish or even more exotic plant. He was also the alpha of his pack: Scabs O’Malley stepped aside and lowered his head when he heard his boss show up.
“It’s nothin’, Juice. Just playing around.”
“Don’t be dissing paying customers, Scabs. Bad for business,” Perkins said before turning to Jason. “Good to see ya again, Giraud. Been a while.”
They fist-bumped and for a second it was just like when they’d been at P.S. 7 way back then, just a couple neighborhood kids trying to avoid learning stuff and have some fun. All Jason had to do was subtract the crazy hairdo and remove the tattoos and age lines that made Juice look a good fifteen years older than he really was. Jason managed to smile back at his old friend, but the expression was more of a disgusted grimace than anything else. However bad his prospects were, at least he wasn’t an undocumented junk-peddler with a taste for his own merchandize.
“Have some fun, Marine,” Juice added. “First drink’s on me.”
He offered Jason a cup filled with punch and God knew what else. Jason shook his head, his fake grin pasted on his face like a Halloween mask.
“Mind if I help myself to a beer instead?”
Scabs and Juice exchanged a look before the latter grinned again.
“Sure thing, Giraud. Anything you want.”
What was that about? Jason wondered while he got a beer – one with its cap firmly on – and opened it. Just a plain ice-cold Coors, locally-made and plenty good enough for him. Perkins wasn’t called Juice because he loved his citrus drinks; he was a serious dope dealer, the kind that liked to hook the unwary. Jason had no desire to sample those wares. He took a tentative swallow, tasted nothing but honest beer, and drank some more.
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world,” said someone behind him.
Jason turned around, a genuine grin on his face. “Hey, Cassie.”
Cassandra Dunkel’s normally long and lustrous black hair had been cropped to a medium-reg length. It gave her face a boyish look that her lipstick and the sundress – and the figure hinted at under it – belied.
“Hasta la vista, baby,” he told her.
She laughed. “That means goodbye, dummy.”
“I know.” He liked making her laugh.
They both loved old-timey movies. Casablanca, The Terminator, Groundhog Day – those 2-D flicks were windows to the past, to a time before aliens had shown up and burned down half of humanity. That had happened on Earth, the original homeland where humans had risen from the primal muck and wondered if they were alone in the universe. They had watched dozens of flicks set on Earth but never visited it. Jason’s only sojourn off-world had taken him to New Parris, a planet that barely counted as inhabitable and was filled by Marine boots, drill instructors and units on rotation.
“How’s ObServ?” he asked her. Cassie still had a year left in the military; she’d opted to do her term in-system.
She shrugged. “Army Corps of Engineers; nothing too exciting but I’m learning a lot. Might stick at it. I like building stuff.”
“Sounds like fun.”
Another shrug. “Not really; lots of hard work, but it means something. Spent the last year in Westria.”
Jason nodded. The second largest continent on Marduk-One still wasn’t fit for human habitation; the flora and fauna were decisively hostile and clearing them out and making the ground suitable for earthlike plants was the work of decades if not centuries.
“The good news is, we did it,” Cassie said, and that got his attention.
“You mean it’s done?”
“Pretty much. Last summer they brought some new tech from Xanadu System. My unit helped deploy it. The nano-swarms cleared the worst of the bugs. Word is they’ll start expanding the beachheads by the end of the year.”
Jason felt hopeful for the first time since he’d been rejected by the Marine Corps. There would be plenty of jobs available there now that the most hostile lifeforms – an insect species whose sting was uniformly lethal – were cleared out. Even security jobs, because some of the local fauna in the western landmass would likely survive and could be downright dangerous. A guy who knew which way to aim a rifle could probably find employment once the first land claims were accepted and people started moving there. Maybe things weren’t as bad as he’d thought.
“Buy you a beer?”
“I probably shouldn’t, not being legal and all,” she demurred before grinning again. “But hey, why not?”
At twenty, Cassie couldn’t drink, couldn’t vote, couldn’t do much of anything. It was darned unfair as far as Jason was concerned; he’d crossed the line into legal adulthood a couple of months before.
“I won’t tell if you don’t,” he said after paying the guy at the bar.
“Cheers.”
They drank.
At first things were great. They talked and danced; after a few drinks, Jason’s normal awkwardness about dancing in public didn’t seem so important. He looked dorky as heck but Cassie didn’t mind and that was all he cared about. Neither of them noticed anything was amiss for an hour or two; that was when his vision started to blur around the edges.
“Whoa,” Cassie said when he tripped on his own feet and almost fell on her. “Easy there, liger.”
“Napoleon Dynamite,” he said, slurring his words. “Ligerrrrrs.”
“I have you thinked enough,” Cassie told him. She looked confused and was slurring her words, too. “Think you had enough. Thinked isn’t even a word.”
“Didn’t drink that mush. Much,” Jason said. “Mushhhh.” He giggled at himself.
“Me nether. Neither?”
They were leaning on each other for support in the middle of the dance floor. A kid a few feet away was spinning around, faster and faster, out of synch with the music; he looked scared.
“I can’t stop!” he shouted as he spun past them. “Can’t stop!”
A couple other people were on the floor. One of them was having convulsions.
“What did they do?” Jason said.
Cassie collapsed in his arms and he fell under the sudden weight. He had barely enough coordination to shield her head with his body so she didn’t smack it on the concrete floor. They’d put something in their drinks. What? How?
“Semper fi, dumbass!”
Jason looked up and saw Scabs looming over him. “Have a nice trip, Giraud.”
“What… did...?”
“Too good to drink the punch, were ya? Well, we laced the outside of the bottles, too. You trippin’ on some Warp Spice, baby! The stuff they give fighter pilots, plus a little extra. You gonna see stars!”
Cassie shuddered in Jason’s arms. He lay her down on the floor as gently as he could and tried to get up; he ended on his hands and knees, too dizzy to move. They’d poisoned everybody. If that stuff was real Spice, no telling what it would do to people. Especially the one percent of humans who weren’t warp-rated. They could go crazy or die.
Jason, somebody said behind him. Except he didn’t hear the voice with his ears. It just sort of echoed inside his head, like a stray thought. He turned around.
His dead dog Woof was standing there, looking just like he had at his best, when Jason had been eleven years old and Woof had been six. The scrappy mongrel pooch had a bit of German Shepherd and some Labrador, a floppy-eared lovable bastard. He’d died the year before Jason had gone off for Ob-Serv, and that had been harder than losing his parents, mostly because he’d been old enough to understand what death was.
Woof was dead. And Woof had been a good – a great – dog, but he’d never talked. Only some heavily-modded dogs could talk, and Jason’s great-gramps couldn’t have afforded one on his best day.
You can call me a dog-ghost, Woof said, and the mental voice was just what Jason would have imagined Woof would sound like, gruff and smart-assed. Or even Ghost Dog like that old-timey movie you liked so much.
I’m going nuts, Jason thought.
Not exactly, Woof told him. Your senses are wandering into warp space, where ghosts are real and dreams can come true. Nightmares, too. Be careful or you’ll fall right in, body and soul.
Jason felt like he was teetering on the edge of a cliff. He closed his eyes tightly and tried to make the insanity go away. Scab started laughing; he could hear the mocking sounds and he somehow knew that spraying the bottles had been his idea, all part of a dumb plan to create more addicts. Anger overcame dizziness and fear.
“You.” Jason struggled to his feet and marched towards Scabs; he felt as if he was floating there. “You fucking asshole!”
“You want to dance, Giraud?” Scabs shouted back, flexing his enhanced muscles. “Come on!”
He took a swing at Jason, but he was moving in slow motion for some reason. He slapped the druggie’s fist away and got his hands around Scabs’ neck.
“You…”
Jason blinked, ignoring the choking sounds Scabs made or his futile attempts to get loose. The world was being washed away by colors, by impossible colors that swirled around him like a tornado. Scabs began to scream. They were falling through the ground. Impossible.
Damnit, Jase, Woof growled as Jason fell into warp space.
The last thing Jason remembered was Scabs being torn apart by the lights.
* * *
Jason knew he was in trouble. They didn’t keep you in the hospital for days on end if you weren’t in trouble.
Most of the time, unless you showed up dead at the town’s clinic, they fixed you up in a few hours, a day tops, and they sent you home. The rare exceptions happened when there were too many patients for the clinic’s six auto-docs to tend at once. Jason had woken up in one of the dozen beds in the clinic, Pops hovering worriedly nearby. The first thing he’d done is ask about Cassie. She was a few beds down, hidden from view by a curtain. Still in a coma, Pops had said.
Two nurses had spent the next two days poking and probing him, occasionally joined by the clinic’s staff physician. Jason knew Doctor Chaffey as the guy who showed up in school to do lectures about keeping up with the nano-meds regimen that kept most everyone healthy if not good-looking – cosmetic meds cost extra, and they weren’t cheap. According to Pops, Chaffey was a glorified technician who mostly let the auto-docs do all the work. He certainly didn’t seem to know what had happened to Jason; he provided a lot more questions than answers.
That was why Jason knew he was in trouble. Scabs was dead. All they’d told him was that the drug dealer was missing, but he knew better. Whatever had happened during the party hadn’t left a body behind, but he hadn’t survived. Juice had been arrested but Scabs was dead. The only thing that made any sense was too crazy for Jason to tell anybody, not even Pops. Spice. That drug had done something to him, turned him into a warp demon, the sort of critter you saw in horror flicks, except for real. Sooner or later, they’d take him away before he could hurt anybody else. He’d started to see things that weren’t there. So far, he hadn’t told anybody about them.
And if you’re smart you’ll keep it that way, Woof told him.
The ghost dog had been haunting him ever since he’d woken up. Every few hours, he’d see the pooch staring at him from another bed, or floating over his head. Jason closed his eyes and tried to make the ghost go away.
“Hi, Jason.”
He opened his eyes and saw a stranger standing by his bed. A uniformed stranger, wearing the field grays of the Warp Marine Corps. For a moment, he worried that he might be hallucinating again, but the man looked too normal and he heard him with his ears rather than his mind.
“I’m Major Martin Howard,” the man said. “I’m here about the incident on Friday.”
“I didn’t mean to take those drugs. I didn’t mean to hurt anybody.”
“I know. We got the whole thing on tape. Their privacy blockers weren’t as good as they thought. You and your friends were poisoned without your knowledge or consent.”
“What was in that stuff?”
“A knock-off of some of the chemicals the military provides for warp-rated personnel to ease transitions, along with some designer psychotropics. We’ve gotten some samples from Mr. Perkins, who has decided to cooperate to avoid the death sentence.”
It sounded like Juice was going to get what was coming to him. Dealing drugs was bad enough, but trying to hook people by dosing their drinks could get him a short meeting with a court-appointed executioner or a few decades doing hard labor in some hellhole or another. Cooperation would spare him from the former but not the latter.
“The important thing, however, is the effect the drugs had on you, Jason. They altered your brain, you see. You’ve been seeing stuff, haven’t you?”
“How did you know?”
“You’ve been closely monitored since the incident. Some of your micro-expressions show your eyes focusing on things no one else can perceive.”
Behind the Marine officer, Woof grinned at him.
Jarhead knows his stuff, the dog said.
“Am I crazy? I think I killed Scabs. I think I took him somewhere and he died there.”
And now you’ve gone and spilled the beans, dumbass, Woof chided him.
“No, you’re not crazy, Jason. But you are probably right about the other guy.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“Like I said, we have the whole thing on tape. No charges will be filed against you.”
Jason slumped back against his pillow. At least he didn’t have to worry about that.
Major Howard wasn’t done, however: “I know your father was in the Corps – fighter pilot. Fought in the Great Galactic War.”
Jason nodded. He didn’t really remember very much about his parents. They had died in a hovercar accident when Jason had been five. Pops had a large library of video and images of them, but that wasn’t the same. He had some vague memories of screaming fights. His father had been angry all the time. During his darkest moments, he wondered if the aircar accident that had taken their lives had been an accident at all. Dad had disabled the automatic controls because he claimed he could pilot anything that ever rose in the air under its own power. Had an argument got out of hand badly enough that he’d done something crazy?
It wasn’t like that, Woof said. Your father didn’t try to hurt your mother of himself. He was overconfident and got distracted.
How do you know that? Jason sent back.
You were curious, so I took a look. But never mind that, pay attention to the gyrene.
Unaware of the talking dog, Major Howard went on: “You are not crazy Jason, but your symptoms represent something rather unique. Your medical exam results triggered a priority alert and I received a set of sealed orders instructing me to approach you.”
I thought medical records were supposed to be confidential, Jason thought as the Marine continued talking. Woof tilted his head to one side, clearly amused.
“This isn’t my kind of assignment – I’m actually on leave before heading back to New Parris for reassignment – but as the highest-ranking Marine in the system, it’s my job to come here and inform you of your options.”
“My options?”
“Yes. I can instruct the doctor to treat your symptoms and suppress them. You’ll undergo some intensive drug therapy until the hallucinations and unusual phenomena go away. The treatment may take years, and it’s not a hundred percent effective. There are also some side effects, including reduced motor control and inability to concentrate on tasks for long periods of time.”
They’d done just that to his father after he mustered out. Warp fighter pilots needed to take all kinds of medications to stop seeing things, and they probably had made things worse for him. Finding a decent job while on drugs, legal as they might be, would be next to impossible. Jason was no dummy, though; he figured the reason the officer was making the first option look downright terrible was that he wanted Jason to pick the second one.
“Alternatively, I can get you back into active duty, effective immediately,” Howard said. “I’ve seen your records; you applied to remain in the Corps at the end of your Obligatory Service term. If we weren’t in the process of an across-the-board reduction in forces, you’d have been a shoo-in.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Under the new circumstances, we can find you a place in the Corps. Only thing is, this isn’t an ordinary enlistment; you’d be joining a classified government program. I can’t tell you any more until you agree, I’m afraid. To be honest, I don’t know very much about it myself. Except that it won’t be an easy berth. Or a safe one.”
It didn’t sound like a difficult choice. He would have to talk to Pops first, but Jason already knew what he was going to do.
He nodded again.
Conway-Two, 197 AFC
“This stick’s empty,” the bartender said, letting the credit stick drop to the floor.
“It’s all good, brah,” Russell Edison said, reaching into his pocket. He had three or four sticks on his person, each containing a portion of his life savings; he didn’t believe in bank accounts. Unfortunately, all the cred sticks together didn’t amount to much. He was nearly broke.
To add insult to injury, Russell had owned this very establishment not too long ago. This asshole hadn’t been around then, though; to him, Russell was just another drunk without enough cash to his name. The thought almost got him angry enough to do something about it, but he forced himself to grin at the bartender.
“Here ya go,” he told the unfriendly-looking fuck behind the bar and handed him another cred stick.
The bartender accessed it with his imp and frowned. “That’s just enough to square you up. Not counting a tip.”
Russell was about to tell the bartender where he could shove the tip when a woman sat down next to him. “Put it on my tab,” she said, defusing the bar fight before it started. “And give yourself twenty bucks for your troubles.”
The bartender relaxed. “You got it.”
Russell recognized the newcomer as soon as he turned his head and got a good look at her. The shock of short silver hair over the elfin face was unmistakable. So was the thin-lipped grin she always had on her face.
“Whitey McAllister,” Russell said. “Been awhile.”
“Been twenty-two years, Russet,” the short, wiry woman said. Her grin was as mean as the rest of her. “Last time I saw you was when you mustered out and swore you were done with our beloved Corps.”
“Like I said, awhile,” he told his fellow Marine.
McAllister had been an LAV gunner way back then. Her fighting vehicle platoon had been attached to the 101st MEU, Russell’s unit, during the last big war. She’d gotten her ride blown up at Parthenon-Three but gotten well in time to join in the fun of the last campaign. Russell had dealt with her a few times, helping liberate bits of loot that the assholes in charge didn’t need to know about. They’d put money in each other’s pockets and neither had tried to screw the other, literally or figuratively. About as good as it got. They weren’t friends, but they’d been out there together, killing E.T.s and blowing up their stuff. That made her family, sort of.
Russell’s mood was improving; before Whitey showed up, he’d been considering grabbing both the bartender’s ears and using them for leverage to smash the asshole face-first into the bar. He always got his dander up when a business deal fell through and his cash reserves began to dip to dangerous levels. Russell wasn’t an angry drunk, not usually, but his life had been on a nasty downward trend for a few years.
All that work in the Corps, wasted. Fifty years of being on the wrong end of assorted alien weapon systems, everything from bronze-tipped spears to telepathic death beams. Keeping his nose clean during his last five years in service, long enough to make it to E-5 – sergeant, the first time he’d risen so high – and staying clean so he didn’t get busted down, which had happened to him every time he’d made corporal.
That had been the worst part, those five mind-rotting, boring years when he hadn’t even cheated at cards so he could retire with a good twenty-fifty-year pension package at E-5 rank. About the only fun he’d had during that time had been the rare visits from the girl of his dreams. Finally, twenty-five years and nine months ago, he’d turned in his gear, done all the required paperwork, and walked out of Parris Planet a civvie and a free man.
Problem was, he’d sunk all his savings into this bar on Conway-One and run the place into the ground in less than ten years. The whole thing had disappointed him so much he’d spent the rest of his pension time drinking himself into a stupor, doing shady deals that turned into shit more often than not, and generally missing the good old times. He didn’t miss the danger, the stupid regulations, or all that crap. In fact, most of the stuff in the Corps he didn’t miss at all. But things had made some sort of sense back then. Do this, and that happens.
In civvie life, you did something, and you rarely know how it would turn out. Kind of like combat, but without the payoff of seeing the bastards on the other side get killed. Well, most of the time. A few times his shady deals had ended with Russell standing over a bleeding and weeping bastard. Twice, they’d ended with a dead body. That had been almost like coming home again.
With one big difference. As a Marine, he could rely on the people in his platoon, his company, even Battalion, mostly. People had his back, and he had theirs. Someone might hate your guts but when the chips were down they’d drag your half-dead ass to cover because they knew you’d do the same thing for them. Civvies didn’t work that way. He couldn’t trust anybody, and nobody had his back. That made him miss his old life a lot.
Worst part was, when he’d tried to reenlist, the Corps had turned him down.
Russell downed his drink. It’d be the last one of the night, since there were business to attend to.
“What brings you to this shithole, Whitey?”
“You, Sergeant.”
Russell snorted. “You ain’t pretty enough to be a recruitment officer.”
Not to mention that recruiters didn’t pay house calls, and that he’d been rejected already. The Corps was being downsized. Gutted was closer to the truth. There was no room in it for the likes of him.
“This isn’t a regular recruiting drive, Russet.”
“Step into my office, then,” Russell told Whitey and headed for a booth. As they sat down, he engaged a special app on his imp that would garble their conversation for anybody more than a foot away from them. He didn’t know if what Whitey wanted was illegal, but few deals had gotten screwed because of too much secrecy. Best to keep stuff on the down-low.
Whitey noticed his security measures and grinned again. “Still cagey, I see. I got my own privacy suite, though. Military grade. Nobody’s going to listen in or record this meeting.”
“Good to know.”
“This is the deal,” she said, getting right to business. “I’m part of a new unit. Not much I can tell you about it until you pass the eval, though. Covert.”
“MARSOC?”
The Marine Corps Forces Special Ops Command were top dogs, especially if you heard them talk about themselves. There were a few problems that couldn’t be solved by blasting them with artillery and direct fire, and MARSOC could handle them.
“More or less,” Whitey said. “Are you interested?”
Russell thought about it. Special Ops types had always struck him as glory hounds who got more money and attention than they deserved. Sure, they might be a little better than a grunt, but drop a plasma shell on them and they died just like anyone else. He’d never been tempted to try out for the Raiders or FORECON, not to mention he’d racked up enough non-judicial punishments during his career that he probably wouldn’t have qualified even if he had. The extra grand a month wasn’t worth the extra work and danger.
Whitey’s offer didn’t smell right, though. Marine’s special forces got new personnel from active duty idiots who tried out for the job. Having someone approach him in a bar wasn’t how this sort of thing got done. His first guess had been Whitey wanted to hire him as a civilian contractor. A merc, in other words. He’d been wrong about that.
“This is a black project,” Whitey said, answering his unasked question. “Lots of extra training and probably quite a bit of action. And that’s more than I should be telling you, except that I’m pretty sure you’re going to say yes.”
Pension was gone. Savings, too. He had a couple irons in the fire but they were risky enterprises. If anything went wrong with any of them, he might end up dead or in jail, and jail meant kissing off the Corps forever. Alien propaganda to the contrary, the Marines didn’t let felons in. And the sad fact was, he missed life in the old gun club. Didn’t hurt that he’d get the full rejuvenation package when he signed up. Getting old sucked if you didn’t make enough money to pay for the increasingly expensive anti-aging treatments.
Chances were he’d regret doing it; the first time he found himself getting shelled while cowering in some muddy hole in a god-forsaken part of the galaxy, probably. But he nodded anyway.
“All right, Whitey. You got me to volunteer. So where do I go for my eval?”
She looked at him for a long moment and he felt something like an itch inside of his head. It wasn’t a completely unfamiliar feeling, although it definitely wasn’t something he’d expected or wanted to feel again.
“Oh, shit,” he said, already beginning to regret his decision. “You’re a warp witch.”
Whitey shrugged. “The official term is ‘tachyon-wave adept,’ Edison.”
Warp travel exposed the mind of sophonts to a lot of weird stuff. Most aliens couldn’t handle it at all; only a small percentage of them could travel via FTL at all. Humans did a lot better, but people who had too much exposure – people like navigators, fighter pilots and Warp Marines who did too many combat warp jumps – ended up with weird abilities. The kind of stuff people used to call magic or telepathy.
“You’re a T-adept as well, by the way,” Whitey told him.
“Me? But I never…” Russell caught himself from blurting out an easily-caught lie; after all, he could still see and talk to his dead girlfriend. And he knew it wasn’t a hallucination, because hallucinations didn’t provide him with actionable intelligence. Deborah’s ghost had saved his life twice since he’d left the Corps. If she hung around him more often, he would be a lot happier.
Whitey went on: “When you mustered out, you got a full physical. There were some unusual things in your brain scans. Twenty-five years ago, those readings didn’t mean anything, but we’ve learned some stuff since then.”
“I thought they’d canned all that witchy stuff since the war.”
“They mostly did,” Whitey agreed. “Except for the warp travel drugs and the fighter program. Top brass didn’t like the idea of letting everybody read minds and see the future. Didn’t think humanity could handle that stuff. Maybe nobody could. But they couldn’t shut it all down. For one, the Medusas are still a potential threat.”
“Fucking Jellies,” Russell said, using the more common nickname for the boneless ammonia-breathing aliens. Telepathic aliens. He’d been among the first humans to make contact with them, although he’d mostly seen them through the sights of his gun, and only for as long as it took to send them to hell. His opinion of them hadn’t changed one bit.
“Yeah. Because of them, and a few other reasons, they kept a few programs around to study t-wave abilities. One of them is part of the MARSOC.”
“And they want me.”
“Among others. People like you are pretty rare. Or like me, for that matter.”
“So did you read my mind?” he asked her. There was enough dirt in his memories to get him in serious trouble.
“Nah. Just did a surface scan and found plenty of t-wave activity. You qualify for entry in the unit. We can get you reenlisted at your previous rank, pay you a nice bonus for the privilege, and you’ll get to play with some nifty toys.”
“And then we’ll go to other planets and blow shit up.”
“Well, it is a Marine program.”
Yeah, there would be plenty of regrets. But instead of bitching about it, he ordered another drink and signed on the dotted line.
His ass belonged to the Corps once again.
New Parris, 197 AFC
A hypervelocity missile tore through the Land Assault Vehicle’s force field and made its hull ring like the mother of all bells.
USWMC Private First Class Matthew Fromm – First Platoon, Bravo Company, 192nd Marine Expeditionary Unit – gritted his teeth at both the painful sound and the knowledge of what would have happened if the dense-alloy arrow had penetrated the vehicle’s armor. Fragments bouncing around the troop compartment at escape velocity would have churned everyone inside into tomato soup. The image made him gag for a second; he cast a furtive look to see if anyone had noticed before remembering his face was hidden behind the featureless helmet of his Mark-17 battlesuit.
A junior noncom across Matthew’s bench turned his head towards one of his buddies. It was a private communication, but from their body language it was clear the men were laughing at something. Probably at the boots who still had no clue how things worked. Boots like Matthew, in other words.
The LAV shuddered again, this time because it was shooting back with the 65mm autocannon on its top turret. Each time the gun accelerated a piece of depleted uranium to relativistic speeds, it made the entire sixty-ton vehicle shake a little, despite the inertial dampeners built into its hull. Whoever was on the receiving end would hurt a lot worse, of course. A single hit with one of those mothers was guaranteed to gut most alien main battle tanks.
“Time to unass,” Staff Sergeant Kinston said. “By the numbers, go, go, go!”
The ramp on the rear of the LAV dropped and the twelve-man squad ran out in a well-coordinated maneuver. Matthew took the time to make sure his Iwo (short for Infantry Weapon) Mark Five was locked and loaded. Nobody shot at him when he stepped on the grass-covered ground; most of the tall stalks around the LAV hadn’t been disturbed by the vehicle’s passage, so he couldn’t see much as he followed his imp’s instructions and reached a slight rise that the squad was using for cover. Laser pulses struck the area force field protecting the squad in a dizzying array of colors. Nothing got through, though.
Lance Corporal Brock returned fire with his Squad Automatic Weapon; the steady three-pulse bursts painted lines of blackness as they sent graviton packets downrange. A burst tore through an energy shield and hit something vital. Just as Matthew’s weapon sights framed the enemy fighting hole, the ground swelled up and burst about five hundred meters from their position; the aliens’ dug-up entrenchment vanished in a flash of fire and a pillar of smoke. Matthew swung his weapon leftward, looking for fresh targets within his fire sector. He spotted movement behind some scrawny shrubs and sent a short pulse burst towards it. There was a colorful burst of light and the shrubbery and whatever was behind it went up in smoke. The explosion’s thunder reached him a moment later.
Further downrange, an enemy laser cannon emplacement was visible only as a flashing light. The Iwo’s sights automatically magnified the image until he saw the stubby cannon firing from the slit of a dug-in bunker. The soap-bubble shimmer around it indicated a heavy force field protected the weapon emplacement. Without missing a beat, Matthew dialed up his gun’s energy yield and fired. The continuous graviton beam wiped out the force field and cracked the bunker open. As an even larger explosion made the ground tremble under him, the Iwo ejected the spent power pack it’d burned through during the continuous beam. Matthew followed up with three plasma grenades; the high-speed explosives left the lower barrel of his weapon before he felt the recoil. The ruptured bunker vanished in a cloud of superheated gas. His mind pictured the tangos inside being vaporized and he shrugged before reloading and looking for new targets. It would have been quick, at least.
His personal shield crackled and flared, becoming visible as it shed the energy it had struck it. Someone was shooting at him. Matthew ducked behind cover as more laser bursts tore through the rocky outcropping. He rolled off to one side and raised the Iwo above his head, looking through its sights. He spotted a Gimp fireteam firing from a hill five hundred meters out. Before he could do anything about it, the company’s weapons platoon took the hill under fire. The Americans’ heavy grav cannons shredded the top of the hill. Nothing short of a starship could have survived that storm of fire.
“Move out!” Staff Sergeant Kinston ordered as the shooting died out.
The holographic display in Matthew’s helmet showed him where to go. He followed the directions while also keeping an eye out on the actual terrain: sometimes the system screwed up and if you followed it blindly you might run into a tree – or off a cliff. He and the rest of the squad dashed forward, darting from one piece of cover to the next and pausing long enough to cover the advance of the rest. No more Imperials rose up to challenge them; the American infantry and support vehicles had wiped out most of – maybe all – the enemy firing positions.
The temporary lull in combat gave him some time to think about what was ahead. The aliens weren’t dumb; they wouldn’t have unmasked all of their heavy weapons. Maybe the battalion’s artillery should soften up the target before the infantry moved forward. Problem was, he wasn’t an officer. Officers got paid to think about that sort of stuff. Grunts followed orders and hoped the bosses didn’t screw up. Matthew’s father had been an officer; he wanted to follow in his footsteps but had chosen to do it the hard way first – five to eight years as a grunt, then apply for OCS and re-enter the service as a second loot who’d been there and done that. Mustangs weren’t uncommon in the Corps, but from what Matthew had heard it took a lot of work to unlearn some of the stuff he’d picked up during his enlisted time. He was looking forward to it.
Several minutes of tense boredom passed. No new targets offered themselves as the Marine battalion moved forward. After reaching its initial objective, Matthew’s squad got new orders. The LAVs came up and they got back in. Bravo Company was going to advance until it made contact with the enemy. There was a whole brigade of E.T.s somewhere among the rocky hills and the 192nd Marine Expeditionary Unit had to clear them out. Assaulting prepared positions manned by three times as many aliens as there were Marines sounded crazy, but the fact was, the aliens were the underdog in that fight.
The LAV shuddered again, but it was shooting this time. The stealth drones orbiting the formation had spotted something. The vehicle kept moving after firing a single burst, so whatever it’d been, it wasn’t there anymore. American troop carriers could slug it out with alien tanks and come out ahead. You could almost do away with the infantry inside. Almost.
Something blew up close enough to push the vehicle to one side. Even strapped in, Matthew felt the impact, followed by more of the same when the LAV hit the ground at two hundred kph, bounced, and hit again, this time hard enough to kill its force field and regale its passengers with the full impact of its hull smashing into the hardpan covering the hilly valley. The armor’s inertial dampeners saved people from whiplash and concussions, but nobody enjoyed that.
“Holy shit!” LCL Brock yelled, his voice weirdly distorted. “I bit my fucking tongue off!”
Matthew ignored the complaint and concentrated on the fainter sound of multiple laser bursts impacting on the LAV’s hull. The sound was a bit like raindrops but with a crackling tenor that reminded him that this sort of rain would eventually peck through the composite alloys protecting them.
“We’re taking fire!” Sergeant Kinston said. “Everyone out!”
A couple of the squad’s boots hesitated as the rear ramp descended. The harsh ringing of an HVM hitting the LAV got them moving. A grounded vehicle attracted fire like a wounded whale attracted sharks. Sooner or later something would crack it open and turn the compartment into a slaughterhouse.
Matthew came out facing to his left as his imp indicated. Some two hundred meters away, another LAV was burning with a bluish fire intense enough to be dazzling even through the polarized sensors in his helmet. Those poor bastards had never gotten the chance to get out. There were lasers everywhere. His personal force field kept sparkling as he was hit half a dozen times. The shield counter on the left corner of his field of vision kept running down. It was down to twenty percent by the time he reached the cover of a crater and dropped out of sight. Kinston and Corolla jumped in next to him.
“They’ve got an antishipping artillery battery somewhere out there,” the sergeant growled. “Big mothers. Thirty inchers or worse.”
Brock cursed colorfully. His nanites must have fixed his tongue already.
Matthew looked for his fireteam. In the mad dash out of the LAV, the other three men had ended up behind a boulder about fifteen meters away. All the squad members’ status icons were green, but the crew of the LAV hadn’t been so lucky. One of the drivers was wounded – his icon blinked yellow – and another one had bought it while getting out of the damaged vehicle. Drivers didn’t get powered armor, and their light force fields couldn’t survive the firepower being poured into their position. Bravo Company had stuck its collective dick into a beehive.
Something massive broke out from the ground, making the Marines in the crater bounce up and down. Matthew peeked through the surviving recon drones and caught a glimpse of a gigantic metal sphere rising from its hiding place. Seven hundred meters in diameter and bristling with weapons, its forcefields burning bright as every Marine in range took it under fire. Kinston had been wrong; the tangos didn’t have an antishipping battery in there, they had a freaking starship. Couldn’t be anything bigger than a destroyer to enter a planet’s atmosphere and live to tell about it. But that was more than big enough.
The Imperium battle globe turned its weaponry on the Marines below it. Matthew had time to empty a power pack into the floating sphere before the world flared white and then sunk into darkness.
* * *
Dying sucked. Even in a simulation.
FIELD EXERCISE OVER.
Matthew blinked as his armor came back to life. When you were administratively ‘killed,’ the training battlesuit shut down, leaving the wearer trapped in an inescapable metal coffin. No VR, no comms, nothing but darkness and your own rank body odor. Real combat suits didn’t have that feature, for obvious reasons, but Marine trainer armor was designed to make death as uncomfortable and painful as possible. Used to be that ‘dead’ Marines would get to enjoy some free time while the exercise went on, time they could use playing games or catching up with their social media. Not anymore. Someone had figured some people would try to get killed early to enjoy the downtime. Now everyone avoided training deaths as if they were the real thing.
He sat up and removed his helmet, savoring some non-canned fresh air. Well, kinda fresh, that was. The atmosphere on New Parris, a.k.a. Marine Planet, was breathable but barely so. The air was both thin and hot, but it was better than what he’d been inhaling for the past hour since he’d gotten notionally blasted by a goddamned starship. The scenery looked pretty much the same, except with none of the smoke and battle damage the training simulation had projected into his helmet.
“That ain’t right,” Brock groused next to him. “Who the fuck buries a ship to spring an ambush? Nobody, that’s who.”
“Stow it, Brock,” Kinston said.
The non-com’s helmet was off as well, revealing her high-and-tight cut blonde hair. Jason wasn’t sure if the woman was attractive or not, since he’d only seen two expressions on her face: a cold ‘I’m gonna kill you’ stare and a smile that was even scarier than the killing look. Word was that Lori Kinston had wasted a dozen E.T. pirates while still in pre-school and that her biggest regret was missing the Great Galactic War because she wasn’t done killing aliens, not by a long shot.
She was smiling now. “As a matter of fact, numb nuts, this field-ex is based on captured orders the Gal-Imps issued to several colonies. Bury some light starships that would only get killed in a space action and use them as mobile artillery. They wouldn’t have lasted long, but they’d have done some damage before dying. Gotta respect that.”
Matthew nodded. If you had to die, best you could do is make sure you took some of the bastards with you. ‘Git yerself an honor guard on the way to Valhalla,’ was how one of his father’s friends, another retired Marine, had put it.
“Not fair, setting us up for a fight we can’t win,” the grunt persisted.
“Shee-it, Brock,” Kinson said. “Who told you life’s fair? Besides, we won the F/X. The tank platoon blasted the enemy starship fifteen seconds after it came out of hiding. Their three-hundred-mike-mikes grav cannon will punch through anything lighter than a battleship.”
“Didn’t help us any.”
“Achieving the objective is the only thing that matters. The survival of your miserable carcass – or mine for that matter – comes a distant second.”
The Marines put their helmets back on and formed up while their LAVs – back in working order – opened their ramps to let them in. Time to get back and catch some z’s; the next week would be spent analyzing the results and going over everyone’s actions while coming up with ways of doing things better. Matthew could already think of a couple things the squad could have done that might have saved his miserable carcass and even helped achieve the mission.
“I’m gonna miss y’all,” Kinston said as they sat down. “Even you, Brock.”
Word was the non-com had been selected to join some special unit. Not the Raiders, but something even more elite. Nobody was sure and Kinston wasn’t telling. Matthew would miss her, too. She’d been a good sergeant; her replacement would have some pretty big shoes to fit.
Not that it mattered much. The Marines saw very little action nowadays. The occasional scuffle with primitive or crazy E.T.s or pirates who got too big for their britches. Nothing like what his father had faced. Peter Fromm rarely spoke about those times, but Matthew had Woogled plenty of information. He’d even played that old classic, Thirty-One Days at Kirosha, trying to get a feel for what his father had gone through, commanding a reinforced platoon of Marines and facing tens of thousands of murderous aliens. Even though he knew that the peace he and all Americans enjoyed was exactly what his father had fought and almost died for, a part of him felt obscurely disappointed for not having to face similar ordeals.
“Won’t miss your stink, Brock,” Kinston said. “But I’ll miss the easy-ass deployment y’all are getting.”
Word was the 192nd was going to Camp Puller in Starbase Malta, where it would be attached to Third Fleet, possibly the most prestigious assignment in human space besides the forces guarding Earth itself. Camp Puller had the best training facilities in the Corps and, best of all, was in a base with millions of people in it, with all the attractions of a big city. Matthew’s only issue with the deployment was that his mother lived and worked in Malta. That meant he was going to spend at least some of his leave time visiting with her, which he didn’t mind so much other than the fact the other Marines would give him a hard time for it. No big deal, though. He’d keep training, and after he made E-5 he’d apply to OCS and make the transition to officer.
Preparing for war was the best way to ensure peace was the only logical option for the rest of the galaxy.
Starbase Malta, Xanadu System, 198 AFC
Funny how this place still manages to surprise me.
Heather Fromm-McClintock looked out of her office window and enjoyed the spectacular view. It’d been five years since she’d been back, but Starbase Malta was something that took a lot of getting used to. The largest artificial facility in the Known Galaxy had once belonged to an ancient, reclusive and rather depraved alien species until an American diplomatic mission had seized the place – in self-defense, admittedly – and claimed it for the US. A lot had changed in the three decades since the system had become an American Star State, but the decadent beauty of the moon-sized station remained the same.
The gorgeous floating sculpture continued to dazzle in a multitude of shapes and colors; a three-thousand-kilometer-long structure that resembled something out of a jeweler’s table instead of a functional structure that currently served as the home of eighty million people. Gold and silver predominated, interspaced by detailed mosaics of stained glass. Animatronic statues depicting long-extinct alien species performed complex movements you could watch for hours before they began repeating themselves. Even after years of watching the station, you could find new things along its three thousand kilometers’ length.
The station was a major trade hub between the US and several dozen Starfarer nations, as well the largest shipyard in existence. A few kilometers from Heather’s window, thousands of workers and machines labored on a Founding Father-class starship; the USS Benjamin Franklin and its brethren were the largest combat vessels ever assembled by human hands. The three-kilometer long ships didn’t quite have the displacement of the defunct Galactic Imperium’s infamous super-dreadnought classes, but they possessed three times their firepower without adding their hundred and forty-four starfighter complement to the equation. With ten Founding Fathers dreadnought-carriers up running, the US Navy would had no equal.
We’re the meanest, toughest so-and-so’s in the Known Galaxy, Heather mused. Problem is, too many people have forgotten that pride goeth before a fall.
The end of the Galactic War had left the United Stars of America in an unassailable position, but only if one didn’t consider that a nation of three billion was still woefully outnumbered by the one trillion other star-faring species in the local branch of the Milky Way galaxy. And that a strong plurality of that trillion hated humans with a passion and an overall majority wouldn’t mind seeing humanity go extinct. The fate of the three empires that had conspired to destroy humankind had made everyone else too scared to give rein to that hatred, but after decades of relative peace, the lessons of that war were being forgotten, not least by Americans themselves.
There should be twenty of those ships showing the flag across American space, she thought bitterly. As it is, the initial order of fifteen has been pared down to ten. Only eight have been completed and construction of the last two has slowed down because the Navy’s budget keeps shrinking.
Peace had reigned in the galaxy for twenty-odd years, the time from the end of the big war. There had been some mop-up operations to tamp down on some recalcitrant Viper and Lamprey ‘pirates’ and a handful of incidents before the Medusas’ Enlightened Circle learned not to impinge on American and allied space. For two decades, the US Navy and the dreaded Warp Marines had fought a few minor skirmishes, so few that the majority of the current crop of spacers and Marines had never fired a shot fired in anger. About half of the rank-and-file troops had been born after the end of the Great Galactic War; the rest were older and hopefully wiser. The situation was even worse among civilians, who in the past decade or so seemed to have forgotten the armed forces’ role in keeping them safe and prosperous. And they’d been electing people who had also forgotten, or at least pretended to.
Heather hadn’t forgotten a damn thing, which was the main reason she’d accepted the Central Intelligence Agency’s offer and returned to duty after a long retirement, which she’d spent raising a family and building a business alongside her former-service husband. She hadn’t spent all that time rusticating, though; she had done a great deal of consulting work for the Agency during that time. Her son and daughter were all grown up, though, and she wanted to get back to the thick of things, especially now that the US was growing dangerously complacent.
Her husband had understood her desire without sharing in it; Major Peter Fromm, USWMC (ret) had seen enough action – a thin euphemism for carnage and slaughter – to last him a lifetime. He’d come to visit as often as he could afford it, but he had no intention to relocate to Starbase Malta. He had led the Marines who’d seized it, and the place was haunted by too many ghosts of fallen companions for him to ever feel comfortable there.
Malta has changed a lot, though, and more so with every passing year.
When Heather had first been there, as part of the same diplomatic mission turned conquering force, the gigantic station had been little more than an ornate façade hiding a mostly-empty ruin. A tiny remnant of immortal aliens had withdrawn into a world of perversions and sick fantasies and let their home decay over millennia of neglect. Under its new management, Malta had flourished. In the process, the US had gone from poor primitives to one of the most technologically-adept civilizations in known space. Nothing like finding a super-advanced species’ treasure trove to jump-start one’s capabilities.
Of course, shortly afterwards we found another species’ treasure trove, although the second one was something of a two-edged sword.
A chime from her implant reminded Heather it was time for her meeting with the Deputy Chief of Intelligence (Xanadu System). Time to get to work.
The DCI’s office was just a few doors down from hers; naturally, it was far larger and had an even better view of Malta. Deputy Chief Hamilton was there, alongside someone Heather wasn’t expecting. Professor Arthur Morrison was sitting across the DCI’s desk; he was an academic she didn’t care much for. You didn’t last long at the Agency without learning to hide your feelings, of course, so Heather smiled warmly at both men and took the last remaining seat.
Guillermo Hamilton smiled back at her. Her former fellow agent had gone far in the CIA during the years Heather had been away. Luckily, he didn’t seem to harbor any hard feelings for the way she’d ridden roughshod over him during some tense episodes while in the field. Morrison, on the other hand, just nodded absently at her, not bothering to conceal his distaste.
After the usual pleasantries, they got right to business. Heather still didn’t know why the Galactic historian was there, but she presented the report she’d assembled:
“First of all, I can confirm that the Lhan Arkh Congress has ceased to exist. Along with about eighty-percent of the entire species. The survivors are mind-controlled slaves, except for a few thousand expatriates outside their former colonies.”
“Their last star system is gone, then.”
She nodded at the DCI. “The Fourteenth Congressional District fell three weeks ago. I have sensor records from a Hrauwah merchantman that got stranded in the system during the final attack by the Enlightened Circle. For a change, the ship’s neutral status was respected and the Medusas didn’t blow it out of the sky.”
“What were the Puppies doing in Lamprey space?” Hamilton asked, using the common slang terms for the Hrauwah and the Lhan Arkh, respectively.
“It was a tramp freighter trying to make a fast buck, basically. The last surviving Lhan Arkh Syndics were paying a premium for weapon systems. The Puppy ship dropped off its cargo just before the attack, for all the good it did the Lhan Arkh. The merchantman also got some decent telemetry of the invasion and its aftermath.”
Heather strongly suspected the ‘tramp freighter’ was actually a Hrauwah covert intelligence vessel, but she hadn’t bothered to confirm those suspicions and the ship’s captain had been willing to share the information for a reasonable price, which meant the Puppies were still playing nice with their human friends, even if their relationship had turned chilly in the last few decades.
She projected some of the visual data into Hamilton’s implant. The bizarre-looking Medusa ‘cloud ships’ were unmistakable: so was the Lamprey battlecruiser that was torn apart by a massive plasma blast from one of the aliens’ solar-flare weapons. That cruiser was the last capital ship of the People’s Republic; its destruction marked the end of what once had been one of the top five Starfarer civilizations.
“Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch,” Guillermo said without a trace of sympathy.
Heather couldn’t disagree. The Lampreys had been one of humanity’s worst enemies. One of their clients, the Risshah (a.k.a. the Snakes) had initiated First Contact with humanity by murdering over half of Earth’s population in an unprovoked orbital attack. The Great Galactic War had indirectly led to the Lhan Arkh’s destruction when its ruling People’s Congress unwisely made an alliance with the Medusa species. The jellyfish-like telepathic species had quickly turned on the Lampreys and in the ensuing three decades ground them down to nothing. The Fourteenth Congressional district was the last major system under Lhan Arkh control. Now its fifteen billion citizens were dead or, worse, had been turned into mind-slaves. As the DCI had noted, they had that coming to them. Only problem was, the Medusas’ Enlightened Circle weren’t any better, and they’d been growing steadily, going from a minor polity with a handful of systems under its control to an up-and-coming contender, mostly at the Lampreys’ expense. Their preference for ammonia-based ecosystems meant they didn’t covet the same worlds as humans and other Class Two species, but since terraforming technologies were readily available that didn’t mean much.
“Wish we had more intelligence on the Jellies,” Guillermo said.
“Unless we revisit the Psyche Program, it’s not going to happen. We barely have enough people able to read their mail.”
During the last war, humanity had discovered the ability to communicate directly between minds by using so-called tachyon-wave systems. The technology started out very promisingly – perhaps too much so – before its terrifying implications sunk in. Further research and development had been frozen; giving people the ability to read each other’s thoughts was deemed too risky. Early adopters like Heather were put on a drug regimen designed to suppress their newfound abilities; only a small group of adepts – all employed by government agencies or the military – remained. By and large, the US had decided to set aside those technologies except for a narrow set of uses.
Only problem was, they were neighbors with a telepathic species. The Medusas had been scrupulously cordial towards humanity after a few skirmishes had shown them fighting humans wasn’t a good idea, so they weren’t considered an imminent danger. Now that they had disposed of the Lampreys, however, they were beginning to encroach on Hrauwah space. If they threatened the Puppies, the US would intervene in favor of its oldest ally, and Heather figured the need for telepaths would outweigh the risks. Too bad only a few very ‘black’ projects were still working on developing t-wave systems.
Guillermo was thinking the same thoughts. Heather still could pick up other people’s emotions and thoughts, often without meaning to; the suppressing drugs had never quite worked on her. She didn’t let any of it show in her expression, though: nobody knew she was still a telepath, not even her closest family. It made things a lot less stressful for everyone concerned.
“Moving on,” the DCI said. “The problem of the day is the Horde incursion. What’s the latest?”
Heather switched gears; the Medusas were her main purview, but she always kept a close eye on any possible threats to the US.
“The Horde fleet has dived deeper into Crab space. We ducked a bullet this time; they could have easily followed CRURON 88 into US territory. The invaders plundered Kunah System, although they spared most of its population. After that, they plundered the next province along the warp chain – and vanished. They must have found or known of a previously unknown warp conduit and used it to disappear. The Crabs’ provincial fleet was destroyed during the initial attack but reinforcements are on the way and they’ll try to track down the invaders. That’s the good news.”
“What’s the bad news?”
“That’s only the largest Horde incursion to date, and it’s part of a pattern of increasing frequency and size. There’s been sixty-seven incidents over the last two centuries; almost half of them, thirty-two in total, have happened over the last decade. Twenty in the last five years. Six this year alone, culminating in this incident. We’re seeing a lot of their planetoids, too, more than ever before. These aren’t mere pirate raids; I think we are looking at a Volkerwanderung – a migration-invasion event.”
“Yes!” Professor Morrison said. “Exactly what I’ve been saying. And this is not the first time such mass migrations have happened, either.”
Ah. So that’s why he’s here.
“As it turns out,” the academic continued. “The Tah-Leen who built this great station were not the oldest extant civilization in the galaxy. The Horde has that honor, even if one might hesitate to call scattered bands of thieves and scavengers a civilization. Their tribes or bands – we unfortunately have very little knowledge about their social or political structures – have been drifting in and out of what we refer to as the known galaxy for as far back as any records go. They are an ancient and recurring threat and have been so for eons. Even the Kraxan histories mention them, and they go back nearly a million years.”
Starfarer history rarely went that far. Most starfaring civilizations lasted only a couple to a handful of millennia before either becoming extinct or Transcending to a higher state of being that remained a mystery to younger species. That process had been going on for untold millions of years, and most of that history was lost. Unavoidable when one considered detailed records of thousands of species spanning those time scales would overtax even the most advanced data storage systems in existence. The US had accidentally acquired the oldest chronicles of the known galaxy almost thirty years ago, and in that time hadn’t been able to examine more than a fraction of it, despite having put thousands of scholars and analysts to the task.
“Do those records provide us with anything actionable?” Heather asked.
Morrison nodded. “The Horde mass migrations appear to be cyclic. Their cause is unknown – unfortunately, in all that time, nobody has established meaningful communications with the Horde – but if they follow previous patterns, the raids will grow in size and frequency as more clans or tribes follow the trailblazers. Interestingly, each incursion propagates from a different sector of the known galaxy.”
Warp ‘ley lines’ crisscrossed the Orion-Cygnus arm of the galaxy, a volume some ten thousand light years long and a third as wide. Theoretically, nothing prevented warp conduits from reaching further out, but none going beyond those limits had been found. But if the Horde kept arriving from different places, it might mean they came from somewhere further out. Interesting, as Morrison had said, and also worrisome. Nobody knew what might be lurking beyond known space.
The academic went on: “The migrations will last until they encounter enough resistance to convince them to try their luck elsewhere. Of the last three great migrations, one was stopped by a major galactic alliance known as the Peacekeepers. That happened over half a million years ago.”
“What stopped the second one?”
The academic looked down. “Nothing, I’m afraid. The Horde cut a swath of destruction through several civilizations before moving on. The galactic balance of power was fundamentally altered – the Starfarer states that followed the Tah-Leen era were mostly destroyed by the invasion; their successors were minor client species who were spared merely by not being in the path of the invasion.”
“Which makes the third incursion the Horde War of 115 AFC.”
“That would appear to be the case. But that should have been the end of it for thousands of years. Instead, less than a century later, they are back. I fear the Horde War wasn’t the full migration event but rather an opening move. The previous ones were much larger, so that makes sense.”
“We dealt with the last major incursion easily enough,” Hamilton said. “Maybe this is a new group that didn’t get the word they aren’t welcome here.”
“We should do well not to underestimate the Horde,” Morrison said. “Some of their technologies are surprisingly advanced. Nobody still knows how they can move their asteroid-sized ships through warp space, for example. This group has come from an unknown section of the galaxy. There is no telling what they might have picked up along the way.”
“And outside the US, the Known Galaxy is weaker than it’s ever been,” Heather noted. “The Imperium and the Lhan Arkh no longer exist. The Vipers and Wyrms are a shadow of their former selves. The Lutarri and the O-Vehel are the largest polities around, but their space forces are nothing compared to what we fought during the Great Galactic War.”
Even after its own round of cutbacks and reductions in force, the US Navy could defeat all the other Starfarer fleets combined, at least if one didn’t add the Medusas to the equation, and nobody was crazy enough to form an alliance with them, not after what they did to the Lhan Arkh. Most alien civilizations had given up any hope of competing with humanity, or even among themselves. They’d adopted largely defensive postures, reducing their forces accordingly. Which was great and all until a big barbarian armada showed up.
“Well, we are definitely not underestimating the Horde,” Hamilton said. “That’s why you are here. You two are going to lead a team to analyze past and current data on the Horde. We are running this analysis instead of the Office of Naval Intelligence because the Agency has more experience working with the Tah-Leen and Kraxan libraries on Malta. The bubbleheads will be backstopping us and providing us with current data. McClintock, I want you to be the point person here. Hand over all your other projects; this has top priority.”
Great, Heather thought.
She had a lot of other irons in the fire and didn’t appreciate abandoning them. And she and Morrison had butted heads before when dealing with the immense reams of data still being cataloged at Malta: tens of thousands of years of extremely detailed records from two very different cultures took a lot of parsing and her implants made her one of a few dozen people able to access them directly. Unfortunately, her style of data analysis clashed with Morrison’s methodical – one might say plodding – approach. Working with him wasn’t going to be fun.
On the other hand, intelligence analysis was a lot safer than the stuff she used to do for the Agency. No more dropping onto hostile planets or doing daring ninja raids on enemy facilities. She’d leave that sort of stuff to newer generations.
Then again, my most dangerous assignments started out as data analysis. Let’s just hope history doesn’t repeat itself.
@2019 Fey Dreams Productions, LLC. All rights reserved.
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