This is a pre-edited sample, so it may contain tyops [sic] and may be different from the final draft. Read at your own risk!

@2019 Fey Dreams Productions, LLC. All rights reserved..

They Shall Not Pass

The Bicentennial War, Book Two

By C.J. Carella

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved - I do not expect the house to fall - but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.

- Abraham Lincoln

May God have mercy on my enemies because I won’t.

- George S. Patton Jr.

Prologue: All One Thing

New Washington, Earth, Star System Sol, 200 AFC

“I, Sondra Henrietta Givens…”

One hand was on the Bible and the other over her heart; in her mind all she saw were the burning ruins of Air Force One, the heavily armored and shielded shuttle that conveyed the President to and fro the fallen universe humankind had been cursed to inhabit. She could have sworn that nothing short of a full broadside from a capital ship could have taken down that shuttle. But the damn bastards had managed.

“… do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United Stars…”

They had found the body of a suspected member of the Earth Liberation Front near the attack site and had captured a Denn alien, surgically modified to appear human, just as he was about to board a passenger vessel heading out of the system. The Secret Service and Homeland Security had worked with their usual efficiency, tracking down the suspect in the time it took him to reach the nearest starport. Interrogation was still ongoing, of course. The President’s murder had only happened two and a half hours ago; the fires around the burning shuttle had yet to be put out.

“…and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United Stars.”

Sondra Givens, second President of the United Stars of America, looked up from the Bible and stared at the array of recording and broadcast devices aimed at her like the guns of a firing squad. One might have said she hadn’t signed up for the job, being the twelfth Vice President to serve under Al Hewer. Every previous VP’s term in office hadn’t involved anything more strenuous than being present at ceremonies POTUS couldn’t be bothered to attend and breaking the very rare deadlocked vote in the Senate. She had always known it might come to this, however. Nobody loved the USA, and even fewer loved its leader. Al Hewer had been called a tyrant, a genocide, a dictator who hid behind a hastily-rewritten Constitution devised by his cronies at a time when America was at its lowest ebb. People across the known galaxy, including a fair percentage of humans, would soon be dancing in the streets or drinking a toast to the funeral pyre of the dead president. Some would even call it a perfect ending to the two-hundredth birthday of the nation.

The Bicentennial Celebration had gone off without a hitch. All hundred-and-five star systems in the country had turned the formerly somber occasion – the date commemorated the day aliens had shown up to rain fire from the sky – into a time of pride and accomplishment. America had survived everything a hostile galaxy had tossed her way. No enemy capable of threatening her existence remained. It had only been a few weeks since an unprecedented Horde invasion had been stopped cold. That should have been a wake-up call: America only controlled a very small slice of an enormous galaxy. Its apparent security could be nothing but an illusion. Perhaps everyone had been too proud. The death of her leader was a clear indication of that.

“Much is lost,” she told the waiting cameras. “But much remains.”

Hewer himself had used that line a day after a hundred and fifty million Americans had been burned to death by an alien ship. It was a garbled, misremembered Tennyson quote; Al Hewer had not taken the time to write and memorize a speech but instead had given an off-the-cuff speech. He had wanted his oath and initial words to go out to the surviving public as soon as possible. Vast swaths of the country had not been directly affected by the attack and keeping order as the enormity of what had happened sunk in had been the most important thing. The same applied here, although on a much smaller scale. Losing the President was nowhere near the disaster First Contact had been. The aliens who’d engineered the assassination had not understood that.

“We remain. The country remains. The Constitution remains. The perpetrators of this attack will be found and dealt with. We will honor our fallen and keep on living. I will be back online with more information. That is all.”

Al Hewer’s Chief of Staff was waiting for her. Tyson Keller was little known outside the circles of power, mainly because journalists were terrified of even mentioning his name. Sondra did not care for the Chief of Staff at all; he had been Hewer’s hatchet-man and graveyards were filled with the bodies of those he’d decided were better off dead. She’d considered firing him on the spot as soon as she took the oath, but had quickly dismissed the idea. She was going to need that shark to navigate the dark waters ahead of her.

“That could have gone better,” he told her as they headed towards the Oval Office.

“I’ve never been much for speeches. And there is too much to do.”

She had her imp do a quick scan of the headlines being blared out across Earth and, in an abbreviated from via Quantum-Entanglement Telegrams, through the hundreds of systems that flew the Stars and Stripes. The most used word was UNPRESIDENTIAL. Often, but not always, with a question mark attached.

There was blood in the water and other sharks were reacting to it.

* * *

Ula-tom, former Eye of the Galactic Imperium and currently a Denn without a country, examined the restraints holding him to a chair and pretended to relax. He knew what fate held in store; trashing and bleating in terror would not change one iota of the outcome. Bravery was a quality held in high regard by both his species and the thrice-damned humans, so he might as well retain his dignity and perhaps earn his torturers’ grudging respect.

He had no idea how long he had been in the room. His jailers had deactivated all his cybernetic implants, including several sophisticated devices designed to evade detection. Without them, the only way to tell time was to watch ambient signs which the enclosed room did not provide. In ancient times, simple mnemonic exercises could give one a measure of the passing of time, but he had never bothered to learn one. He merely waited.

Finally, a human came in. The male was neither tall nor very prepossessing by his species standards. Ula-tom recognized the breed. An officious public servant who tried hard to remain invisible except to his immediate superiors. Dangerous within the purview of his duties, which unfortunately included breaking down Ula-tom and extracting all available information out of him.

“Mind if I smoke?” the man asked before producing a cigarette and lighting it without waiting for Ula-tom’s answer.

The Denn felt his amputated nasal trunks wave in irritation at the smell of burning leaves, a ‘ghost limb’ reaction that was as acutely uncomfortable as the stench of the foul human herb. Humans loved inhaling the noxious vapors; they’d done so even before medical technology allowed them to do so without destroying their lungs. The damned human blew smoke in Ula-tom’s general direction; he had to restrain himself from coughing.

“How long have you been part of the Sleeping Imperium?” the human asked next.

“I do not know what that is,” Ula-tom lied. He hadn’t expected the humans to know the name of his organization, but he wasn’t wholly surprised. The Sleeping Imperium was comprised largely of fanatics, and some fanatics liked to brag. Someone had done so in front of the wrong people.

“Who are your contacts with the Earth Liberation Front?”

“Again, I have no knowledge of what you speak.”

His sole direct contact with ELF was safely dead, terminated by a single beamer shot to the back of the head while exulting about the president’s death. The madmen of ELF were worse than the most zealous follower of the Sleeping Imperium; the latter wanted revenge for their polity while the former wished the eradication of their own species. Insanity of such intensity demanded careful handling.

“Are you aware of Noro Tann’s demise?”

The leader of the Sleeping Imperium had died several months before the assassination. Unfortunate, since Noro had been working on a mass-casualty event to take place as the American president died. If that project had come to fruition, the damned Earthlings would have been too busy dealing with millions of deaths to find and capture Ula-tom. It didn’t matter; the important part of the overall mission had been carried out successfully.

“I think the name is familiar to me,” he told the interrogator just to add some variety to the proceedings. “If I had access to my implants, I could tell you more.”

One of those implants had included a self-immolation cartridge installed at the base of his skull. Unfortunately. human security agents had induced a sleep state in him before he realized they had found him. Unconsciousness caused by a stun gun would have triggered the suicide implant, but not normal sleep. He had no idea how they had accomplished that. By the time he had woken up all his implants were gone.

The human stubbed out his cigarette on the table. “Okay, we’re done here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Alien minds are a little more difficult than humans to read telepathically. My team of teeps got some info from your sleeping brain, but most of it was too garbled. When you woke up, it became easier to access your mind. And after a few minutes of being awake and thinking hard about the things you didn’t want to say? Piece of cake. They’ve already got ninety percent of the actionable info in your head. The last ten percent is going to require close contact and, well, more painful methods.”

As he spoke, the door opened and two men and a woman walked in, wearing the same style of civilian suits as the interrogator. One man and the woman looked different, though. Ula-tom had spent enough time among humans to tell a few things from their expressions, and the look on those two’s faces was downright feral. ‘Lean and hungry,’ one of their poets had described it. Dangerous.

“I’ll leave you to it,” the interrogator said before getting up and leaving the room.

The ordinary human grabbed Ula-tom and put him in a headlock as the other two placed their hands on the Denn’s head. For the first time, fear made him trash around and scream. A few moments later, pain like nothing he had ever imagined made him lose all control.

The two telepaths tore his memories apart while they sifted through them. His very identity was slashed to ribbons. He died knowing all his actions had done was awaken the terrible demons that dwelled in the hearts of humans.

And the demons were hungry.

Albany (NY), Earth, Sol Star System, 200 AFC

“Okay, we are clear.”

Everyone in the room relaxed a little bit. In a world where just about everyone paid good money for the privilege of installing bugs that tracked and recorded everything they did every second of every day of their life, securing an area of total privacy was close enough to a miracle to merit the name. When Elric Bussard flicked the switch that cut off graviton emissions in a twenty-meter radius bubble, he performed that miracle.

“Good,” Ignacia Grillo said. “Now will you tell me why you called his meeting? Getting here without leaving a trace wasn’t easy, you know.”

The three other women and two men in the room looked as annoyed as Iggy sounded. Elric couldn’t blame them. They all had legitimate business that took them to the same skyscraper – three had gym memberships, another was a frequent visitor to an art gallery and Iggy and Elric worked for the same fabber blueprint design company. It was the final few meters to the shielded basement room that were the hardest, though. They needed to use imp spoofers that hid their movements and they were both expensive and not one hundred percent effective.

Being part of ELF was no picnic.

Instead of answering Ignacia – they didn’t have time to bicker – Elric got down to business: “We’ve lost Bernice in Montana and her entire cell.”

“Bullshit,” Antoine said, looking about ready to start throwing punches.

“It was in the news; the press didn’t name names but the numbers match. A car accident that left five dead. Since Bernice had fallen silent for a couple of days, that got my attention; not to mention that car accidents happen once in a blue moon. I did a little digging – and yeah, Ant, I was careful – and found out she was named as the driver. Except I know she didn’t drive at all. Never bothered to learn.”

“How could they find her? She was the best of us.”

“It’s the telepaths. The new president has let them off the leash to hunt us down.”

“Then we are fucked.”

“Pretty much. I called this meeting because we’ve got to get the hell out of Dodge. I have fake papers and imp databases for all of you,” Elric told them. The way their anger dissolved into pathetic hopefulness annoyed him, even though he could sympathize with it.

“We are all signing on a tramp freighter as crew. Wyrashat, so the life support is going to suck ass, but the captain has been paid off to get us out of American space. Seven warp jumps and we’ll be free and clear. After that, we’ll have to earn our keep.”

“We’ll be back soon enough,” Iggy said. She was the most idealistic of the bunch. “There’s been demonstrations in a dozen cities already. Earth is tired of the militaristic Eagle Party. That Givens woman doesn’t scare people the way Hewer did.”

“She’s quite literally killed billions of aliens,” Ant told her. “We should be fucking scared of her.”

“We’ll see. The calls for a special election are getting louder. She’s not going to finish her term, I’m certain of it.”

“Let’s get moving or we’ll never find out,” Elric said, cutting off any responses. There simply wasn’t time. He started to open his briefcase. “Here’s the stuff you need. We’ve got to leave at separate times, figure fifteen minutes apart, give or take, and get to the spaceport. Keep your imps turned off and pray they haven’t got any teeps near you.”

Iggy started to say something in return but was interrupted when a bunch of flash-bang grenades went off in the room.

Impossibly intense light and sound stunned everyone. By the time Elric’s vision cleared, he was face down on the floor, bound up with restraints that made fighting or running impossible. All Elric could see from his prone position were the combat boots of the cops who had sent the micro-drones laden with stun grenades to interrupt the meeting. Bastards. Two pairs of strong hands hauled him to his feet. Another pair of armored figures, faces hidden under tactical helmets, did the same for Iggy.

An unarmed and unarmored woman walked into the ‘secure’ room that had turned to be not secure at all. Her stringy gray hair was unkempt and wild-looking; she also was unhealthily thin and had what Elric’s mother had liked to call ‘a bad case of the crazy eyes.’ She grinned at the helpless captives as she spoke:

“You are all under arrest for sedition, terrorism and conspiracy, with more charges to be announced later. Ignacia ‘Iggy’ Grillo, I have a warrant to search your mind for information. Time is of the essence, so I’m doing it right here and now.”

“Lawyer!” Iggy shouted, twisting in the arms of the cops holding her. “Lawyer!”

“Request for an attorney denied. You are being held as an unlawful enemy combatant. Neither the Constitution nor any treaties or conventions apply to you. You have forfeited your citizenship. The evidence of your crimes has been presented to a duly appointed court and judgment was passed fifteen minutes ago.”

“Fuck you,” Iggy hissed.

“Amusingly enough, you are my type, darling,” the woman with the crazy eyes said. “I appreciate the offer, but we don’t have time to play.”

She placed her hands over Iggy’s temples and the struggling stopped as if a switch had been flipped off. Iggy went limp, except for a leg that kept twitching at random. For several seconds, all was quiet. Then Iggy started to scream, the loudest and most terrifying sound Elric had heard coming out of her or any human being for that matter.

The telepath gestured at one of the cops holding Iggy’s trashing body. The flash of a stun gun silenced Iggy. The cops dragged her unmoving form away. Dead or unconscious, Elric didn’t know. He dimly noticed he had pissed himself.

“Elric Bussard,” Crazy Eyes said, moving towards him. “I have a warrant to search your mind for information. Time is of the essence, so I’m doing it right here and now.”

The end wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. It was much worse.

New Washington, Earth, Star System Sol, 200 AFC

The dead had received their due. It was time to tend to the living.

Sondra Givens had been to very many funerals. That sort of thing came with the territory for anyone her age – she had been a child during First Contact – but doubly so for someone in her chosen occupation; mortality in the Navy was much higher than in civilian life, where only bad luck or poor lifestyle choices prevented people from seeing their hundredth or two hundredth birthday. The past year had been particularly bad, though. She had personally watched several dozen naval officers be given a proper send-off to the Great Beyond. One of them had been her great-grandson Tamir. All killed by the Horde in the last round of unpleasantness that would enter the history books as the Second Horde War.

Burying Al Hewer was a very different affair, of course. Emissaries and in some cases rulers from all across the known galaxy had attended. Among them had been the High King of the Hrauwah; Sondra would be meeting with Earth’s oldest ally the next day. The previous forty-eight hours had been spent in pomp and ceremony, everything from greeting VIPs that rated POTUS’ personal attention to attending and giving a speech at the funeral. Finally, the flag-draped coffin containing what little remained of Al Hewer’s body after his burning shuttle crashed had been lowered to the ground. It was over. She took a nap during the shuttle trip back to the White House.

That would be the most sleep she’d get for the rest of the week. She had a lot of work left to do. The brief State of Emergency in the days following Hewer’s death had concluded; the telepaths she had sent forth to bring to justice the Presidents’ murderers and their associates had been recalled, their hunting licenses rescinded. She hated using telepaths but had deemed it necessary. The effectiveness of the new breed of warp-rated adepts had surprised and scared her. That would have to wait, however. She had other matters to attend to, such as undoing the damage the Horde had inflicted.

Sondra looked at the handful of men and women in her office, the ‘inner Cabinet’ as she liked to call it. This was a very informal briefing; she’d get plenty more the next morning.

“Let me hear it,” she told the Secretary of the Navy.

“The latest estimates are in. It’s going to take us three years to replace the tonnage losses we suffered at the Battle of Felix System and that is only if we focus our entire construction budget towards ships of the line. The personnel losses are even worse; almost a third of our long-service naval officers and enlisted are dead. And to top it all, before the invasion we had retired over a thousand senior officers and most of them aren’t eager to come back. The Navy’s current strength is at seventy percent of what it was before the Horde attack.”

“Unacceptable. We’ve got to do something about that,” Sondra said.

“That means raising taxes,” Chief of Staff Tyson said. “We have the votes to pass a ten percent increase in shipping tariffs and five percent to personal income taxes, but there’ll be some horse-trading involved. The Majority Leader can handle that. Only problem is, that isn’t enough for what we need.”

“Which is?” Sondra asked.

“A general mobilization. Increase our pre-invasion fleet strength by fifty percent. Double would be better.”

The room exploded. Sec-Navy and Sec-War blurted out variations of “Are you fucking kidding me?” Interior started laughing until she realized Tyson Keller hadn’t been joking. Sondra shushed everyone with a curt gesture.

“Please go on, Tyson.”

“The Intel and State weenies are still compiling the long version,” Tyson Keller said. “But I got the Cliff Notes, as did most of you. The Horde was running away from someone they had no chance of beating. And those nomadic bastards have led them to our corner of the galaxy. They expect them, the Nemeses is what they call them, to show up at any time. A decade or two at best, but we might be talking months rather than years. If we don’t prepare for that, we could all be dead before the next electoral cycle. By which I don’t mean the people here in this room but every damn taxpayer in the galaxy. Dead.”

They’d all known, of course, but even Sondra had been thinking of the short term first. Keller’s blunt words shook everyone for several seconds.

“We don’t know if the Horde leader is telling the truth,” Sec-Navy argued. “As they were negotiating a surrender, it was in their best interest to present us with an imminent threat to get a good deal out of us. And there is no way we can handle such an expansion, even if the funds were available.”

“Which they won’t be,” the Secretary of the Treasury said. “The economy would crash under the sort of levies you’d need for that. We would have to freeze civilian ship construction and activate millions of reservists. Popular opinion is already heavily against military expenditures. You all heard what that asshole Grierson said last night.”

Senator Bertrand Grierson was the senior member of the Federalist Party. He’d commented that the government should have negotiated with the Horde to allow it to pass peacefully through US territory instead of wasting lives and treasure in pointless fighting. The fact that the Horde had only negotiated when it was literally cornered with nothing but death as an alternative seemed to elude him.

“He couched things very careful as hypotheticals so we can’t arrest him for perjury,” Tyson said. The Truth Act of 35 AFC had declared that any public declaration by a government official was considered to be given under oath and was therefore subject to anti-perjury laws. That had cut down somewhat on outright lying by politicians by forcing them to carefully separate factual statements from opinions.

“The problem is, a lot of people are listening to him,” Treasury went on. “Public sentiment in the core worlds is that defending some thinly-populated colonies isn’t worth all the taxes they pay. They want the government to use the money provide financial assistance for longevity treatments.”

Everyone looked glum at that. The economics were brutally simple: anti-aging meds had to be tailored specifically to each individual and required expensive chemicals, manufactured only by Class Four or higher fabbers that required valuable operator-hours to create. Treatment costs continued to rise with the age of the patient. Fighting against billions of years of evolution, all pushing towards an expiration date for advanced organisms, wasn’t easy. More importantly, it wasn’t cheap.

Given the per capita income in the US, the average citizen could hope to live a hundred years simply by saving a reasonable portion of his income and investing it. Beyond that, the equation forced people to choose between health and youth. By age one-fifty, even health support was no longer affordable on an average salary. Deterioration and death within one or two decades became inevitable. People who worked their asses off and invested wisely or started a successful business could greatly extend those limits, of course. Military and other high-value government personnel had their treatments subsidized, but they represented a small portion of the population and their pay and other benefits were reduced accordingly. For the same reason, they were not allowed to unionize or demand pay or pension increases. They got what they got, and since what they got included potentially-eternal life, most of them were happy with the exchange.

Problem was, the government couldn’t subsidize longevity treatments unless it cut defense spending to the bone. At which point nobody was going to get any older on account aliens would kill them all. That wasn’t exactly the sort of declaration she could utter during her first State of the Union address.  

POTUS let the cabinet argue over things for a few minutes before chiming in.

“The way I see,” Sondra said. “We face one of two possibilities:

“First possibility: these Nemeses are so powerful that this is another First Contact situation. Doubling the old US military budget wouldn’t have made a difference when the Snakes’ starship arrived and bombed the crap out of the planet two hundred years ago. Having a couple dozen extra F-35s wouldn’t have changed the outcome one iota. If I remember correctly, we were so primitive the Snakes didn’t even notice our efforts to shoot at their ships. If that’s the case, nothing we do matters.”

Everyone nodded at that.

“Second possibility: what we face is something within our capabilities to withstand. In that case, we owe it to our citizens and to future generations to do everything in our power to defend our country and our species. We are going to approach things as if the second possibility is true.”

“Yes, Madame President. The only question is how.”

“We start with contingency planning. Start drafting the basics of mobilization and what we will need to make it happen. We’ll get the country ready. While that happens, we will start laying the groundwork to get the nation behind us.”

She didn’t have to add ‘and hope we are ready in time.’ Everyone knew that.

“What’s next on the agenda?”

Kunah System, Crab Oligarchy, 201 AFC

King-Admiral Grace-Under-Pressure bared her teeth and felt her hackles rising.

The death and devastation on the screen made her wish she had an enemy to attack, or an avenue of escape. Having neither, all she had left was the effort of will necessary to suppress a primeval growl of rage and, she had to admit to herself, fear.

“As you can see, there are no survivors,” District Fleet Commander Eevee-Chut told her.

The dominant species of the Oligarchy of @#@$@#-Tung! – the sounds were unpronounceable by Grace’s species – were crustaceans averaging four feet in height. Grace towered over the officer and the low-to-the-ground tactical holotank at the center of the ship’s command bridge. She politely stepped back so she wouldn’t loom over him. Normally, the situation would have sparked some amusement in her. Her Hrauwah species was known for having a slightly mischievous sense of humor. At the moment, however, there was nothing to be amused about.

Where the Oligarchy’s provincial capital stood, only a blackened crater remained. Superficially, the site resembled the remains of a city subjected to Starfarer genocide weapons. This crater was deeper, however, and it was not lined with the molten remains of the city’s structures. Instead, the empty hole appeared to be carved straight out to the bedrock underlying the capital.

“There are no recordings of the event,” Eevee-Chut said. “Genocide weapons are slow. The citizens should have survived long enough to memorialize their slaughter. Instead, everyone was destroyed at once, as if slain by single beam weapon.”

“No weapon in any known polity’s inventory has enough power,” Grace said. “A fleet could approximate the damage, although doing so would greatly damage the planet’s ecosystem and be in violation of the Elders’ Edicts. The weapon that did this was both immensely powerful and precise, wiping out the city without spreading its damage into the atmosphere around it.”

“You are correct, King-Admiral. Unfortunately, we have not been able to recover any sensor readings of the attack.”

“Surely people survived the initial bombardment,” Grace said. “Every citizen has implants capable of recording sensory date in a multitude of spectra. Nobody escaped?”

“Nobody did. And all their data storage devices, both implanted and external, were destroyed by an area weapon we have not encountered before. We believe it was a graviton wave emitter, modulated so its energy traveled through our communication systems and destroyed memory drives down to the molecular level. It should have been easy to block the radiation, but unfortunately no one was alive to do so.”

“This was not the Horde’s work,” Grace said. It wasn’t a question.

“No, although we are working on the assumption that the aggressors used the same warp link that brought the barbarians here. We have yet to locate it, unfortunately.”

Grace tilted her head in the affirmative gesture of her culture. Locating warp gateways was neither quick nor easy. One or two of them were usually found in fairly obvious gravity confluences between a system’s star and its closest planets; beyond those, however, it became a matter of literally stumbling into them. Statistically, it was the work of years, unless fortune provided a once-in-a-million occurrence. One such miracle had led a ship under her command to Sol System some two centuries ago; from it, much had followed.

“When the Horde came here, they stole what they could, murdered those who got in the way, and moved on. There strangers came only to kill.”

“Yes,” Grace agreed. “And they departed, most likely after obtaining information about the state of the known galaxy.”

“And they will most likely return,” Commander Eevee-Chut said. “That is why I asked you to see this with your own eyes.”

“I have seen enough and more than enough, Fleet Commander. I will convey the Star Oligarchy’s message to the High Court and attach my personal endorsement. Whoever this new foe is, it must be confronted with overwhelming force. An alliance between the Kingdom and the Oligarchy must be forged, given that the closest Hrauwah star system is a mere four transits away from Kunah System.”

Her endorsement would carry little weight in the Kingdom, unfortunately. Grace had been relegated to the role of military attaché and observer ever since the Hrauwah and America had suffered a falling out three decades ago. On the other hand, the gravity of the situation would be obvious no matter who bore the bad news to the High King’s attention.

 “The O-Vehel Commonwealth will likely agree as well,” she went on. “And I will, of course, add my endorsement carries to any entreaties you make to the United Stars government.”

There, her words would carry some weight. Even though the Kingdom and the United Stars were no longer friends, humans still remembered her with some fondness.

Eevee-Chut’s eyestalks quivered in agreement. “Yes, the humans. They must be alerted to this, even though there are factions in the Oligarchy that are reluctant to enter in an alliance with them.”

It always came to that. Humans – especially the inhabitants of their dominant polity – were always feared and often hated by other starfaring civilizations. Part of it was envy; humans had gone from being simple primitives, alive only through the Hrauwah’s intercession, to becoming the most advanced Starfarer polity. To add insult to injury, the process had taken an indecently short time. Two centuries; that was how long it took them from huddling around the burning ruins of half of their single planet’s cities to defeating the combined power of the three leading empires in the known galaxy. The Americans had become impossible to humble, let alone destroy.

On the other hand, Grace reminded herself that a small group of terrorists had managed to inflict a non-trivial wound on the Americans. Everybody could be hurt, although the injury would likely be small.

“You are quite familiar with the United Stars,” the Oligarchy officer said. “What do you think of their recent troubles? Will the loss of their supreme leader cause their polity to fall apart?”

“Their president was not a supreme leader. Legally, his power was far less than my own High King’s, or even the Consensus Manager of your own Oligarchy. The man was truly formidable, of course. I met him several times.”

The first time, Hewer had suffered a near-fatal allergic reaction; some humans could not handle the dander produced by Hrauwah and the President had been among them. The memory brought the ghost of a smile to her face. The issue had been easily solved, but Hewer had always joked about it whenever he met her. She had also been present when humanity had extracted a full measure of revenge on the species that had nearly exterminated it. Hewer had been merciless towards his enemies, even when they belonged to his own species. Grace would not call the man a friend, but he had earned her respect.

“Humans are rather resilient,” she said. “President Givens, Hewer’s successor, led the fleet that ended the Great Galactic War. She is a highly regarded war leader and she can rely on Hewer’s advisors, most of whom she has retained. Some factions have sought to take advantage of the situation, yes, but they will be handled in due course.”

Everything she had said was true, but she still worried. There had been a lot of discontent brewing since the end of the war. Humans wanted to enjoy the fruits of victory, even if that meant squandering said victory and paving the way to future disaster. In a chaotic system where the whims of the voters could affect policies whose repercussions might take decades to be fully understood, anything was possible. Hewer had managed to steer a steady course over two centuries, often by bending or even breaking the law. Would his successor prove equally adroit?

The murder had come at a bad time. Billions of Horde nomads were still in American space after offering a conditional surrender, the first time they had done so in recorded history. Furthermore, before giving up the raiders had nearly destroyed the second largest naval formation fielded by the US. In the year since the end of the Second Horde War and the assassination of the US President, the polity was still in the process of recovering. This new crisis couldn’t have come at a worse time.

“If the American reports about the Horde’s pursuers are true, an alliance with the humans will be necessary,” she added.

“Of course. But many in the Oligarchy are unlikely to trust those reports, even in the face of this,” Eevee-Chu said, gesturing towards the devastation clearly visible on the display. “I hope that wisdom will prevail. An enemy with unknown capability is best met with overwhelming force.”

“I will do what I can to help make your hopes come true,” Grace promised.

For decades, the known galaxy had enjoyed a modicum of peace. Now those uneventful years felt like the setup for a cruel joke perpetrated by a sadistic universe on the gullible sophonts condemned to dwell within it.

One

Starbase Malta, Xanadu System, 201 AFC

“This is a headache we don’t need,” Central Intelligence Agency Deputy Chief of Intelligence (Xanadu System) Guillermo Hamilton said.

“Which is why I waited for the better part of a year to bring it to you,” Heather Fromm-McClintock replied.

Truth to tell, it had taken her that long to get a possible fix on Lisbeth Zhang’s location. Her friend had disappeared years ago and all Heather had to work with had been a cryptic telepathic message. She had finally a place to start her search and she had waited long enough to get moving. Perhaps too long.

“I’ve set everything up so my team can handle things after I’m gone,” she added. “This is bigger than me. We are talking about Zhang. The woman who saved humanity and won the Great Galactic War.”

“Well, she hardly did that single-handedly,” Hamilton said. “And last I heard Zhang was a wanted fugitive.”

“Which is why I’m making my case to you first, so you can help me sell it upstairs. Not to mention get ONI’s approval.”

“Yeah, this needs to go all the way to the Director. This is so far above my pay grade I’m getting altitude sickness just thinking about it.”

“Well, I did happen to learn the Director was scheduled to visit Xanadu System next week, so we don’t even have to travel to Earth to resolve this situation.”

“She’s going to be here on vacation! For the first time in fifteen years. She’s not going to thank me for ruining her trip. By the time this is over, I’ll be Station Chief of Venus.”

“This is important, Guillermo. You heard the news about Kunah System.”

That gave Hamilton pause. “Yes. What has Zhang got to do with that mess? She was long gone before we even heard of the Nemeses.”

“She knew something about it. And if anybody can do something about these Chaos Masters, as the Horde refers to them, she can. You don’t know what she’s capable of. The reports don’t do it justice.”

“I’ve seen the videos of her walking out of a warp aperture without using a ship or even a vacc suit. I have the clearance to read the stuff that didn’t make it into the movies and video games. But nobody’s indispensable, McClintock. We’ve learned a lot since then.”

“So has she. She contacted me telepathically from another star system, something we hadn’t even suspected was possible until we ran into the Horde.”

“Which you didn’t report until just now,” Hamilton said, but he was fighting a losing battle and he knew it. “You might end up in a holding cell having a team of telepaths going through every last neuron in your skull with a fine-tooth comb, you know. Getting you a meeting with the Director is going to burn through every favor I’ve got. If she decides to hand you over to ONI or arrest you herself, there’ll be nothing I can do for you.”

“I have a few favors of my own, too, you know. I could have gone over everyone’s heads and made a quick trip to Earth. POTUS has fond memories of Lisbeth Zhang. Owing her life to one pesky Marine pilot made a favorable impression.”

“Jesus, McClintock. Bringing up President Givens might do the trick, but neither Director Pulver nor COMONI Valencia will react kindly to having their chains yanked like that.”

“I could honestly give a rat’s ass about my career, Guillermo,” she said, meaning every word. “When you reach a certain age, you stop caring about the little things. I honestly believe that if I can’t find Zhang and bring her back to the US, we may not survive what’s coming. You have seen Warlord Fann’s transcripts.

The DCI nodded. “Assuming they are true, the Nemeses use warp-based technologies and have exterminated everyone they’ve encountered. They are over a million years old, which makes them the oldest civilization in the galaxy by an order of magnitude. If Fann is to be believed, they own a larger portion of the Milky Way than every Starfarer we know of combined. That’s a big if.”

“You said it yourself, Guillermo. Whoever pushed the Horde around had to be worse. Whoever or whatever they are, the Nemeses should have Transcended by now. For some reason they haven’t, which may make them the most advanced species we’re likely to encounter. They just showed up on the heels of the Horde and wiped out an entire Crab system before disappearing. Do you want to bet they won’t be coming back soon?”

“I am aware of all that, Heather. It keeps me awake at night. I just don’t see how anyone, let alone a literally certifiable Marine, can do anything about it.”

“Well, you’d better pray you suffer from a limited imagination, Guillermo, or all the fighting and sacrifices we’ve made will be for nothing.”

Hamilton sighed. “All right. Clear your calendar for next week. I’ll get you your meeting with the Director. And may God have mercy on our souls.”

Heather agreed with the sentiment, although not exactly for the same reasons.

May God have mercy on our souls, because the Nemeses will have none.

Marduk-One, 201 AFC

For Jason Giraud, stepping down the shuttle’s ramp onto his former home’s soil was a form of time travel.

The sights from the plateau overlooking his hometown were achingly familiar. The massive dome of Planetary Defense Base Two rose in the background, dwarfing the shapes of the ramshackle buildings that comprised Newport; most of the structures had been made of repurposed cargo containers reinforced with self-forming concrete. The streets between them were plasticized dirt; the sights and noises of people headed home after a hard days’ work made him feel sixteen again, the day he had first left home to begin his Obligatory Service Term. His life had never been the same again, and the past four years had been something beyond his wildest dreams – and nightmares.

“Jase! Over here, Jase!”

A small crowd had gathered at the concrete landing pad to greet the passengers disembarking from half a dozen shuttles and a couple of starships small and nimble enough to brave a trip into a planet’s atmosphere. A skinny gray-haired man waved at Jason; it took him a moment to recognize his great-great-grandfather. Pops had never been tall, but he looked smaller than ever.

“Heya, Pops,” he said as the old man embraced him. Pops felt frail even when considering Jason’s bone-and-muscle replacements.

“Jase! Look at you, son! You look twice the size you did when you left!”

“How are you doing, Pops?” Jason asked him as he hefted his travel bag and politely but firmly refused Pops’ offer to carry it for him.

“Well, you know how it is, Jase. Had a good streak at the Casino last year, but got a little too greedy and flushed it all down the toilet.”

“Are you okay for money?”

“I’m good, son. Always bank half of my pay away; that rule is what kept a roof over our heads and I’ll stick to it until the day they bury me.”

They walked down the staircase that spiraled down around the landing pad rather than wait in line for the dozen crowded elevators that would have conveyed them down for less effort. To Jason, the walk was downright pleasant, although he noticed Pops’ breath became labored before they made it halfway down. It was clear the old man hadn’t been keeping up with his rejuv treatments, and not just the cosmetic stuff he normally eschewed.

He’s not banking half his pay anymore, Jason thought. Not now that he doesn’t have to take care of me.

By the time they reached Main Street, Pops was wheezing heavily. “Sorry, son,” he said. “I thought the walk would be good for me but I’m going to need to sit down for minute before we go home.”

“I’ll get us a Lyfter,” Jason said. He sent a couple of subvocalized commands into his implants; a couple of minutes later, a self-propelled hovercar came to a stop in front of them. The robot vehicle rose over the crowd and darted towards their apartment building. Back in the day, the fifteen-buck ride would have been an unaffordable luxury. Things had changed a lot.

“Hey, Pops,” he said as Gramps gratefully leaned back against the padded chair. “Why don’t we go to the clinic tomorrow and get you a full rejuv?”

“Can’t afford it.”

“It’s on me, Pops. I’ve got more hazard pay saved up than I know what to do with it. And I’ll get a serviceman discount, so it’ll be fine.”

His great-gramps had a good poker face, but Jason sensed the emotions warring behind the old man’s impassive features: shame, a bit of anger, and a dash of hope. If he wanted to, he could dig deeper into Pops’ mind but he’d learned the hard way that peeking into other people’s thoughts was never good for anyone involved.

“I don’t think I can take money from you, son.”

“Please, Pops. You took care of me most of my life. Let me return the favor.”

“You sure you can afford it?”

“Yeah. I got base housing and the mess hall’s tray rats are plenty good enough. I hardly spend any of what I make.”

And I don’t spend money on hookers. Or gamble, he thought but didn’t say out loud, afraid of offending Pops. He really wanted to help him out; that was the main reason for taking leave long enough to visit him.

“We’ll see,” Pops said.

They spend the rest of the Lyfter ride making small talk. Pops’ gossip about his fellow workers at Olsen’s Assemblies was as boring as always but Jason didn’t mind. It was comforting, knowing that some things hadn’t changed in the past few years. Too much had.

“A lot of the younger guys have quit,” Pops said. “They had land claims in Westria and figured they’d try their luck there, now that they terraformed the continent, at least well enough to let people settle there. You could have gotten a job at Olsen’s lickety-split, if it wasn’t for, you know.”

“I know.” Four years ago, back from ObServ with few prospects and little to do, Jason had gone to a party and gotten dosed with some bad drugs without his knowledge. The drugs had nearly killed him but he’d not only survived but discovered they’d awakened some latent abilities that the US military – the Warp Marine Corps in particular – was very interested in.

Jason had tried to join the Corps before the accident but gotten rejected. After that party, he was recruited by a special subbranch of the service. Now he’d done what he had often fantasized about as a child: he’d gone to war, stared Echo Tangos in the face and killed a whole lot of them. And seen friends and many strangers die along the way, too. He still wasn’t sure how he felt about it all.

They made it home okay. The small apartment seemed smaller somehow. Jason didn’t think he could stand staying there longer than a few days. Good thing he’d only be on Marduk for a week and half of that time would be spent on Westria, where he had an old friend to catch up with.

“You’ve changed, son,” Pops said over dinner. “Are you okay?”

He shrugged. “It’s nothing.”

“I can’t begin to say how proud I am of you. Like I was of your father. You both served our country. I can’t begin to thank you for your service.”

Jason looked at his great-great-grandfather, unsure of what to say. Pops had never served. He’d been a teenager during First Contact and had spent the ensuing decade working in a farm, helping feed the survivors of the attack. By the time the new Constitution was drafted along with the new Obligatory Service rules, Pops had been old enough to be grandfathered out of the draft. He’d never spent a day in uniform. His sons, grandsons and now Jason all had, and Jason suddenly understood Pops felt guilty about not having served. Nothing had stopped him from joining up after his children were all grown up, but he hadn’t done it.

“It’s okay, Pops.”

“You fought those Horde aliens, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” he said. That much he could share. Most of the details of his deployment were classified, though.

“Did you get hurt? Was it bad over there?”

He thought about how to explain what had happened and found he didn’t have the words

“It was tough, sometimes,” he finally said. “Lost some buddies.”

Two thirds of his unit, for one, but even if that info hadn’t been classified. he wouldn’t have wanted to share that.

“You – the Navy and Marines – you saved a lot of lives, son. I hope you know that.”

“I do.”

The truth was, during the thick of the fight Jason hadn’t been thinking about the rest of America. It was all about the mission and his people, the guys and girls fighting and bleeding next to him. Corolla, for one, who’d been part of Jason’s tactical element and had bought it when a Horde plasma cannon had blasted him into cinders. All the Hordies he’d killed afterward had been for Corolla, not America or the human race. Don’t make it personal, Russet had told him, but Jason hadn’t been able to help himself. He’d made it damn right personal. He was still angry the US had made peace with the Horde.

“I don’t understand why the Navy didn’t kill ‘em all,” Pops said, echoing Jason’s thoughts. “They’re pirates. And now we’ve got like a billion of them in American space, eating and getting life support on our dime.”

“They surrendered, Pops,” Jason said, as much to himself as to his great-gramps. “And higher thinks they have useful intelligence about something worse.”

“What can be worse than giant asteroids armed to the teeth? Those bastards sank half of Third Fleet!”

“The Horde was running away from somebody,” Jason said. That info wasn’t secret but the government was downplaying it for now. “We are trying to learn more about them from the Hordies.”

“So it’s not over, then.”

“No, Pops. It’s not over, not by a long shot.”

* * *

He found Cassie on the other side of the world, two days later.

All his life, Westria had been a no-man’s land, a place unsuited to human habitation by its deadly native insects. It had taken decades to remove them altogether and reformat the local ecology the way the larger eastern continent had earlier, but the job was finally done. The bustling starport and the town that had sprung up around it were not as big as the one back home, but in the past three years they had managed to get a lot further than Jason would have believed possible.

There was a crowd waiting for the shuttle passengers. At first, Jason didn’t spot Cassie; it wasn’t until she all but ran towards him that he realized she no longer sported a medium-reg haircut. Her hair was long and curly, longer than she’d ever had it even before she did her Obligatory Service. They hugged; she felt smaller than before, too.

“So good to see you!” she said. “Henry wanted to be here too, but his shift doesn’t end until eight.”

Henry was her husband, another friend from high school. Jason idly wondered how things would have turned out if someone hadn’t slipped him the drugs that had awakened his warp abilities. Would Henry be visiting Cassie and him instead? Oh, well, done was done and he wished them both the best.

“I’ll see him later. After we are done.”

Her smile faltered. “You are right. Probably for the best he’s not around for that stuff. He wouldn’t understand.”

Jason had rented a room at a cheap motel not too far from the landing pad. They ignored the knowing look the guy at the front desk gave them as they came in. Cassie sat on the bed while he stowed his bags away – years in the Corps had taught him there was a place for everything and everything should be in its place. The fact that what he was about to attempt could be construed as a serious breach of the regulations he normally followed to a fault didn’t bother him as much as he thought it would; Cassie was a friend; more than that, she was the closest thing he had to family outside of Pops and a few people in his unit. You didn’t leave your buddies in the lurch because of regulations.

“Okay, just lay back, close your eyes and relax,” he told her.

She did so with a sly grin on her face. “Does that line work for you a lot?”

“First time I’ve tried it. Now hush.”

Cassie took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly. Jason could pick up her nervousness, mixed in with frightful memories of the night she had been tricked into taking some highly illegal drugs. The same drugs that had given Jason the abilities that had gotten him a berth at the Corps. Cassie hadn’t been so lucky; she’d ended up in a coma for several months. She woke up just around the time Jason was completing the Individual Training Course to become a full-fledged operator.

They’d written and sent media messages to each other ever since. She’d been smart about what she said, only making vague references to bad dreams and trouble sleeping; Jason had understood what was happening. They’d given her meds to help with the mental trauma she’d undergone, but she was still having trouble dealing with it. The second he’d laid eyes on her his t-wave senses had told her all he needed to know. Cassie was still linked to warp space. She wanted to have children and was worried that the meds she was taking her might affect them.

She’s hurting, Jase, Woof told him.

Jason turned towards the dog only he could see. The original Woof had been his family pet, dead years ago. Something out of warp had taken Jason’s memories – or traveled back in time to interact with the original dog; things got weird in warp space – and assumed the dog’s identity, sort of. Totems was the official term for the guardian spirits that bonded and protected Wraith Marines, some warp fighter pilots and a few lucky others. The unlucky linked up with destructive and hostile entities; the results resembled hauntings or demonic possession.

The drugs opened pathways into warp, the totem explained. But she can’t handle the input. We can close those pathways. Unless you want to teach her to access them better.

Jason thought about it. If he did that, he would turn her into an adept. The US government was very interested in finding and recruiting new warp sensitives. That would be the end of any sort of normal life for Cassie, though. They’d probably reactivate her – everybody who underwent Obligatory Service was a reservist for life, subject to being recalled to duty, although that didn’t happen often – and she’d have to say goodbye to Henry and the life she was building on Westria. She’d gotten a job with a construction firm and was doing well enough to consider having children in her twenties, something most people put off for decades.

The Navy can do without her, he thought. She doesn’t need this.

Protecting people like Cassie was the main reason he’d wanted to be a Marine.

Let’s get to work, then, Woof said. Jason felt an undercurrent of approval coming from the dog.

The totem did most of the work. It took the better part of an hour; when they were done, Cassie was no longer attuned to warp space. She’d be able to travel in a starship without ill effects, but she would no longer see things that weren’t in the physical realm. More importantly, Warplings wouldn’t be able to see her. The things that lived on the other side of the divide were often mischievous and cruel. Best to be able to ignore them.

“It’s done,” he told her.

Cassie sat up. “I can already feel the difference. Before, it was as if someone was always looking over my shoulder.” She smiled at him. “Thank you so much.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Dinner with Henry was nice enough. All in all, it was the best leave he’d had. He needed the relaxation; he had a feeling things were about to get very interesting over the next few months.

Two

Starbase Malta, Xanadu System, 201 AFC

Fleet Admiral Leroy Burke, Commander in Chief, Third Fleet, ran the numbers one more time. They still didn’t add up to anything good.

The Navy’s second most powerful formation had taken a dreadful beating at the hands of the Horde invasion less than two years ago. The previous CINC-Three had gone down with his ship at the battle of Felix System and Leroy had been recalled from New Annapolis’ Fleet Academy to take his place. As the man said after being tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail said, if it wasn’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk. His task was to take the mauled remains of Third Fleet and prepare them for a possible conflict with an alien force of unknown size. An alien force that was at the very least vastly superior to the Horde armada that had broken the pride of the US Navy and only been stopped by Marine boarding parties in the largest infantry-versus-starships engagement in Starfarer history.

It was a good thing he’d made a habit of shaving his head or he’d have torn all his hair off.

He’d arrived at Xanadu six months ago, to relieve the interim commander, aboard the single Founding Father-class superdreadnought-carrier assigned to the fleet. The only other capital ships left under his command were a dozen antiquated battleships, twenty battlecruisers with equivalent firepower but weaker armor, and six fleet carriers. Leroy’s specialty was carrier-based fighter operations. He had led the USS Nimitz into battle during the last crucial months of the Great Galactic War in a tradition that had started with his captaincy of the ocean-spanning USS Nimitz two centuries ago.

In many ways, his experience in the pre-First Contact Navy was as alien to modern naval warfare as pike tactics were to World War Two tank warfare. The new fighters operated at vastly greater speeds could perform feats that were the next best thing to magical. Teleporting weapon platforms whose telepathic pilots could deliver battleship-grade firepower to targets with astonishing precision had as much to do with the Super Hornets of his earlier career as with bows and arrows. The principles that mattered remained the same, however: fighters gave a fleet commander a ‘bubble’ where targets could be detected and engaged; the size of said bubble was much bigger than before, but the important things – detection, sortie arrangements and turnaround times – remained the same.

The Horde had neutralized Third Fleet’s fighters with a weapon system that allowed the aliens to engage targets through warp space. Leroy had been assured the new countermeasures developed over the last eighteen months would prevent any new enemies from pulling off that trick. He would take them at their word and concentrate on how to use his assets. The fighters and their carriers had been spared, so they were the fleet’s chief source of firepower.

Leroy had spent those six months organizing Third Fleet around that fact. Then the news from Kunah System had arrived. The Nemeses the Horde had warned them about had struck. According to the space nomads, the initial probe would be followed by others within six months to a year.

There no time to replace lost battleships, dreadnoughts and carrier-dreadnoughts. The capital ships the Horde had destroyed in a few hours had taken a decade to build. The most optimistic estimate, assuming a drastic increase in the Navy’s budget and construction rates, would see those losses made good in two years; three to five was a more realistic estimate. Raising fleets couldn’t be done quickly; the great armadas the Galactic Alliance had unleashed against the US in the last shindig had taken the better part of a century to assemble.

Instead of begging for more capital ships, Leroy had asked for light carriers. Old plans for emergency construction were dusted off; their prime star was the Township-class carrier. The ship was a converted freighter with a couple of extra power plants and warp shields tacked on. Its civilian warp drives wouldn’t allow it to perform quick warp jumps and its weapon systems other than their fighter complements were negligible. The Townships were purely defensive platforms that would not be able to disengage and flee if the tide of battle turned against them.

On the other hand, dozens of Townships could be built for the price and man-hours it took to lay down a single dreadnought, and the forty-eight fighters each ship brought into battle gave them more firepower than any standard capital ship. Their main problem was survivability, of course, but the plan was to keep those ships far behind the main battle wall, outside the range of the enemy’s guns. By the end of the year, Third Fleet would have fifty Township-class carriers; added to the fleet’s existing carrier assets those modified freighters would allow him to deploy over four thousand fighters, more than triple the number that the original formation had at its disposal.

Most of Third Fleet’s fighters – and most importantly, their pilots – had survived the debacle at Felix System. Building an additional three thousand fighters in that time frame was possible thanks to the new technologies humanity had gained during the Great Galactic War. Starbase Malta’s shipyards could assemble thirty Crimson Tide fighters a week while; other shipyards would take care of the rest with plenty of time to spare. And that didn’t take into account thousands of antiquated but still-serviceable War Eagles that could were warehoused away, ready to be reactivated. Getting the hardware wasn’t a problem. Finding enough warm bodies to put into those fighters’ cockpits was.

By shifting in-service personnel and reactivating anyone who knew how to fly a warp fighter, Third Fleet could get about fifteen hundred pilots in addition to the thousand he already had. The rest would have to be trained from scratch. Leroy had overseen the Navy’s Warp Fighter Pilot program himself, so he knew exactly what to expect. The standard Navy pilot course took forty-two weeks. The Marine equivalent took forty-five. There were three warp flight schools in the US: New Parris, New Annapolis, and Groom Base. Their combined programs produced five hundred pilots a year – about a third of the personnel he needed, even if Third Fleet got the entirety of the next graduating class. It wasn’t enough.

Leroy knew what the answer would be. The training program would be expanded and abbreviated. He had seen the tentative plans: they were reducing the course’s length to thirty weeks while increasing the number of pilots per course to eight hundred. Cutting corners to that degree was going to cause problems. A lot of those eager and brave kids weren’t going to be ready for combat if the enemy showed up in the predicted twelve to fifteen months from now. Which meant a lot of them were going to die.

The admiral shook his head and drafted a proposal to the Navy. In it he suggested turning Third Fleet into a training center of sorts. He would have partial graduates of the program sent to him and have his own veterans finish off the course. If time allowed, every new pilot would get the equivalent of the standard course, not to mention constant additional training. The cost would not be insignificant, but it was worth it. He would do his best to prepare his people to withstand whatever catastrophe came their way.

Leroy had another asset, of course: the hundreds of millions of Hordelings and the dozen giant planetoids and thousands of warships that had signed up as auxiliaries to the US Navy. The diplomatic part was fortunately not in his hands. Strategy and tactics were. He thought of several ways he could integrate the Horde into Third Fleet, but a lot would depend on how much he – all of humanity – could trust the marauding aliens. The nomads might be the solution to his manpower problems but only if they were given access to weapons and technologies that would make them incredibly dangerous to everyone in the known galaxy.

Life is getting a little too interesting, he thought.

Prime Home of the Crimson Sun Clan, 202 AFC

Apprentice Oracle Hoon instinctively reached for a weapon when the humans walked into the room. A moment later, he lowered his head in shame at his own stupidity.

There were no weapons at hand and, for the first time in history, the Crimson Sun Clan – the vast majority of the Star Host – had offered its surrender. The dirt-huggers were no longer prey to be despoiled or predators to flee from. They were something else: allies who were not of the Host, a concept so alien it made Hoon’s head hurt if he considered if for long.

“I recognize you, Scholar Melendez, Commander Schmidt,” he said both out loud and mentally. Both humans were telepaths, which made communicating with them easier and dissembling or lying next to impossible.

“And we recognize you as well, Apprentice Oracle,” Melendez returned the Host’s greeting. “It is good to see you, Hoon,” she added.

The Apprentice Oracle nodded in the human way. “Shall we procced? I have the records you requested.”

“Good,” the male – Schmidt – said. “I’m still not sure what ancient records have to say that the sensor data your warlords gave us haven’t told us already.”

“The sensor systems of our ancestors were far better than the crude makeshifts my people use,” Hoon explained. “Unfortunately, much of the data has been lost over millennia. Our storage facilities are sturdy but nothing last forever. As time went on, we did not have the space to preserve all of it. All we have left are fragments, but one such fragment records the first battle between the Nemeses and the Folk, back when we huddled over planetary surfaces like all other dirt-huggers.”

Even now that his clan had been defeated, Hoon found it hard to hide his contempt for those who sacrificed mobility to dwell on dirt globes forever anchored to their stars. Neither human reacted to that; they had grown used to it in the year they had interacted with the Host. No matter. In the end, the Host had been left at the mercy of dirt-huggers. Escape was impossible, not until the Nemeses were defeated.

Attempting to do what the Host had failed to accomplish for untold eons was both terrifying and exhilarating to the Oracle. He set aside his reservations and did his best to help the Host’s new allies and possible saviors.

Images and data streams came to life; the input was delivered directly to the humans’ nervous system as well as Hoon’s. The Americans started downloading the information into their own implants as they watched one of the Nemeses’ great ships confront a fleet from the Folk. Diagrams and measurements flowed down one side of the mental display, translating the flashes of light and the dimly seen shapes of the enemy into something that could be understood. The Nemeses vessel had a vague teardrop shape and was half the length of the Great Home of the Crimson Sun Clan. Unlike a Home, however, that vessel had been built rather than carved from a wandering planetoid. It wrapped itself in Chaos and was barely harmed by the combined firepower of dozens of war vessels.

“Those are warp shields,” Schmidt said. “Nothing we haven’t done ourselves. They don’t cover the ship’s entire surface, though.”

“Too big for that. Thirty klicks long. The warp shields reduce the target profile and would degrade incoming fire. Guess it’s good enough.”

“Their force fields are the type the Kraxans used, way back then. A hybrid between standard fields and warp shields. About three times more effective than what we’ve got.”

Hoon felt the humans’ frustration. Their civilization had not been able to replicate the shield technology they spoke of. They didn’t like being thwarted any more than Hoon’s folk.

“Their weapons – graviton cannon, big ones, and lots of them. Nothing exotic, but nasty enough.”

“The power requirements… I need to consult some engineers out of BuShips, but I don’t think even a bottled singularity would be enough to provide power for all its systems.”

“They feed on Chaos,” Hoon explained.

“That’s poetic and all, but it doesn’t help us much,” Schmidt said.

“No, listen to what he’s saying,” Melendez replied. “Not chaos as in disorder. Chaos as in warp space.”

“Oh.”

“We already run several systems that tap their energy from warp space. The difference is one of scale.”

“This is beyond anything we’ve done. Or the Kraxans, for that matter.”

The woman nodded. “On the other hand, we have ways to deal with warp tech. Maybe we can come up with our own tricks.”

Hoon allowed himself to feel some hope. Perhaps the only way to deal with a Chaos wielder was with someone with the same power. Assuming that in doing so the Chaos wielders did not damn themselves.

Three

Starbase Malta, Xanadu System, 201 AFC

“Tangos at three o’clock,” Gunnery Sergeant Kinston announced as the Special Operations Team moved down a huge hangar filled with long-dead starships.

“Got ‘em,” Staff Sergeant Russell Edison said. “Pack of Kraxan Battlers.”

None of the seven massive forms moving between the derelict ships looked the same, except for the fact they each wielded half a dozen weapon systems. The Marauders of Kraxan had started out as Class Two lifeforms, bipeds who might have passed for humans in a bad light. Not that bunch, though: Battlers had been extensively modified by cybernetics and biotech. They’d been turned into a deformed monsters with mechanical limbs and alien body parts sticking all over their bloated bodies, in other words. The smallest one was three meters tall and probably weighed a metric ton and change. A couple of the biggest ones packed enough weapons and shields to qualify as combat vehicles.

The leader was a flesh-and-synthetics thing covered in strips of black plasteel studded with metal spikes. Its legs were gone, replaced by a hovering bowl-shaped device that projected heavy-duty force fields thick enough to distort light around it, making the critter ripple the air as it moved. Instead of arms the Kraxan had two weapon hardpoints – a particle beamer and a missile launcher – and a set of metallic pincers protruding from its shoulders. Right behind him was a twelve-foot tall thing made of the bodies of three different alien species stitched together into a four-legged, six-armed nightmare. One of its three heads spotted the mini-drones that the Marines had sent their way and destroyed them with a wide-dispersal blast of photons.

Russell turned off the drone feed as the last of the tiny devices died. He and ‘Dog-Boy’ Giraud took cover behind the remains of a warp nacelle and waited for the first monster to come into view. The staccato bursts of Gunny Kinston’s gun fifty meters behind him told him the second tactical element had problems of its own. He ignored the sounds; Kinston would deal with whatever was going on over there.

“On me,” he told Sergeant Giraud as he placed a targeting dot on the floating fatso’s center of mass. He and the other non-com fired simultaneously, their continuous graviton beams striking the spot at the same time and pumping enough energy to breach the front glacis of a tank. The Kraxan’s force field collapsed in a rainbow flash. The grav beams tore his body apart an instant later. One down. Russell walked the continuous beam to the misshapen giant, who was moving crabwise while returning fire. Giraud sent a sheaf of micro-missiles towards the tango; the combo did the trick; the critter burst open, leaving nothing but a big mess behind.

Russell and Dog-Boy moved under the covering fire of Petrov and O’Malley, the other two members of his tactical element. Experience had taught the operators not to stay in one place for long. Marine Wraiths had the best armor the US government could buy, but the Kraxans had enough firepower to crack it open. You didn’t want to stand there and trade shots with them. On the other hand, Battlers weren’t a bit sluggish when they were surprised. Russell and Giraud were long gone by the time the Kraxans’ energy blasts tore through the warp nacelle they’d been using for cover.

Problem was, one of the big ugly aliens launched himself into the air, trusting his armor to keep him alive while he looked for targets. He spotted Russell and tagged him just as he dived behind a section of starship hull. Anti-shield particle beams washed over him in a burst of bright lights. Russell’s imp let him know his force field was down to sixty percent. Not great, but he was alive. Dog Boy blasted the floating Kraxan. The aliens were used to being invulnerable to small arms fire. Unfortunately for them, the Wraiths’ standard-issue weapon, the TAS-1, was designed to provide the firepower of a weapons platoon in a compact package. The giant critter vanished in a huge flash when his power plant cracked under the hammer of a continuous graviton beam. The explosion’s overpressure threw Russell down, but that was okay; he was alive to feel the bruising impact and the tango wasn’t.

More Battlers rushed forward to give chase – and O’Malley and Petrov took them in the flank. A few seconds later, four more Marines struck them from the other flank. The Gunny and her tactical element had dealt with their handful of Kraxans and pitched in. Russell took aim at a Kraxan that looked like a weaponized vacuum cleaner, but before he could fire. Kinston exploded it like a blood sausage. The team leader liked killing aliens more than anything else, so Russell didn’t begrudge her taking the shot. As long as the tangos got dead, he didn’t care who did the deed.

“Warp drop,” Captain Flores warned them. Russell felt the aliens’ arrival some twenty meters to his left. It was like an itch inside his brain. Battlers were used to outflanking enemies by teleporting around them. Against Wraith Marines, the tactic was worse than useless; they could sense the flow of t-waves that presaged the arrival, giving them plenty of time to reorient towards the new threat. The Kraxans came out of warp only to find themselves under fire. Once again, their armor and shields were not tough enough to handle it. The aliens were torn apart before the warp apertures they’d used to deploy had closed behind them.

“Clear,” Kinston called out.

“Clear,” Russell agreed after doing a sensor sweep. The only energy signatures left belonged to rapidly-cooling slag, all that was left of a squad of Battlers designed to invade capital ships and tear them apart from the inside. The bizarre aliens were nasty, but the Marines had their number.

SIMULATION OVER.

Good, Russell said, taking off his helmet and catching some fresh air. No matter how much cooling systems they stuffed into the suits, you always ended up sweating like a pig whenever things got exciting. The atmosphere in the massive training room smelled better now that the simulation had cleared the burning piles of cybernetic aliens; there was even a decent breeze going. Living in the largest space station in the known galaxy had plenty of perks like that. The place was as long as Earth’s Moon was wide; the larger compartments had actual weather.

The four Marine Wraiths in his tactical element shouldered their gear and started walking towards their rally point. They could have warped there but there was always a small but greater-than-zero chance of things going wrong, so you only jumped when you had to.

“I still don’t get why we’re fighting Kraxans,” Petrov said. “They’ve been gone for hundreds of years.”

The newbie – newbie to the Wraiths; he’d been in Recon for a decade before joining the team – was good and smart but thought he was better than the rest of his unit by virtue of his being in special ops longer than they had. It was going to take a while to disabuse him of such notions.

“Longer than that,” Giraud said. “Although some were still around a few years back.”

“The Marauders were the toughest mother-lovers in the known galaxy,” Russel explained. “And yeah, we ran into some of them not too long ago. I saw a squad of them take on a Marine company with tank support and the only reason we won is that we had none other than Lisbeth Zhang running interference for us. If we can beat them, we can beat anybody.”

“And we can’t train against the Nemeses because nobody knows much about them,” Kinston added as the tactical element joined the rest of the team. “All we know is that they’ve beaten every civilization they’ve encountered. They might be worse than the Kraxans.”

“Probably are. They were tough enough to make the Horde run for their lives.”

“We beat the Horde,” Petrov said.

“And maybe that don’t mean nothing when the other guys show up.”

“Only one way to find out,” Russell said.

Star Fortress One, Star System Myrpok (Botari Rim), 201 AFC

The Eradicator is coming.

In the dream, a single teardrop shape approached a blue planet. Vast and terrible and so dark it was mostly visible by its blocking of the stars behind it, the unknown vessel did not respond to the greetings, pleas and threats of the planet’s inhabitants. Neither did it react to the fleet forming up to meet it. The defenders’ wall of battle opened fire: plasma, photon and graviton streams reached out towards the dark vessel, lighting up the space around it but inflicting no discernible damage.

It returned fire, reaping a tenth or more of the opposing fleet with every volley. In a matter of minutes, no defending ships remained. The Eradicator continued on towards the helpless world. Deep inside its bowels, the dark god within laughed in anticipation of the slaughter and feasting to follow.

Lisbeth Zhang woke up.

The usual moments of disorientation followed. Her jailers kept the illumination in the room to a bare minimum and refused to provide any means to tell the passage of time. She had no idea how long she had slept, but she knew that soon the robed maniacs who’d kidnapped her would be along for another round of interrogations. They rarely left her alone for long.

She tried to reach out with her mind. As usual, she failed. Her cell was right on top of a gluon power plant; the subatomic reactions that provided power for the star fortress also had the side effect of reinforcing the integrity of spacetime around them. Opening a warp gate near a power plant was impossible. Dreaming seldom happened around them, either, and sophonts who lingered too long near a gluon plant tended to start suffering the symptoms of sleep deprivation even when they got enough rest. All those things had a common link, one poorly understood by Starfarer science. Even more advanced civilizations like the Kraxans or Pathfinders had only partially grasped the necessary concepts.

It was all gibberish to Lisbeth Zhang, who had barely passed the Naval Academy’s required courses on Astrophysics, Intro to Subatomic Dynamics and Principles of Hyperdimensional Travel. She knew a lot of things on an instinctual level, but she didn’t have the words to explain them, even to herself. For example, she knew it should be impossible to have the vision she had experienced while she slept. She didn’t dream; the damn power plant one level down made sure of that.

When they’d first captured her, they had thought drugs alone could contain her. She’d overcome their effects, though, and might have escaped, except that as soon as she regained her abilities, she sensed the presence of a vast armada of aliens with tens of thousands of warp adepts. She picked up the presence of the Horde from multiple warp transits and thousands of light years away. Lisbeth had reached out and linked briefly with a friend and fellow adept, Heather McClintock, and used that link to help her friend defeat the Horde’s leader, who had forged a symbiotic link with a Warpling of considerable power. Defeating him had taken everything she had – and her captors had realized what she was doing and taken measures to keep her from repeating the feat.

The fact that she had that dream despite those measures told her… what? That she was slowly going insane, perhaps. Occam’s Razor pretty much demanded it; when your senses told you something you knew wasn’t true, the simplest explanation was that your senses were faulty. Sometimes the simplest explanation wasn’t true, though. Occam’s Razor allowed for that, although most people ignored that part. But if that dream had happened, maybe she could do things despite the gluon plant.

I’ve got to get the hell out of here before I lose my last remaining marbles.

Thinking was getting harder by the hour, though. The lack of REM sleep alone would see to that, but her captors had kept her drugged up for good measure. Those damn fanatics. Killing them would be a pleasure.

The Terrible Trio appeared shortly afterwards as if she had summoned them. She didn’t know their names, so she had given her nicknames based on their looks. She glared at them as they came through the door, and only the fact that the room had half a dozen pain-inducing nerve disrupters aimed straight at her kept her from pouncing on them.

The Old Man was human and hadn’t been getting his rejuv treatments, which made him dirt poor or crazy; he looked like shit, with flaky, liver-spotted skin and patches of faded hair on his head, what little he could see under the hooded robe he liked to wear. His smile had more gaps than teeth and his breath smelled like the back alley behind a soup kitchen with a little extra dead rat stench thrown in.

Always to his left stood Elephant Girl. She didn’t know the alien’s species. She – Lisbeth was sure the alien was female – was shaped roughly like an Oval, broad of shoulder and round of head, but instead of the barely-there ridges on an Oval’s face, Elephant Girl had a retractable snake-like trunk in the middle of her face, a toothed trunk that served as both nose and mouth. Snake-nose was a good telepath, too, one that specialized in rummaging through people’s memories and triggering traumatic moments for fun and profit.

Behind them floated the fluid-filled tank that housed the third member of the gang, the Jelly. The alien was a Medusa, one of the few that could be found away from its people. Medusas were extremely social, in the same sense that slaveholders were social. They were comprised of two related species: aquatic telepaths and mind-blind but technologically-adept land dwellers. The former had enslaved the latter. Jellies were almost always surrounded by a pack of their larger six-legged mind-thralls and did not like solitude. This one was an exception.

All three of them were puppets of the true leader of the Chaos Delvers, the cult of telepathic whackos who had kidnapped her. A Warpling, an entity from null-space that had managed to cross over and live in a host body. Actually, a series of hosts bodies, since the possessed victims didn’t live long. The entity didn’t have a name, just an identity: its fellow Warplings considered it a being that feared destruction too much and whose first choice was to flee rather than fight. Lisbeth called it the Coward.

“Good morning, Colonel Zhang,” the Old Man said. “We are here for our daily lessons.”

“Fuck you,” she told him. That was the typical start to their routine. She’d curse them out, they would laugh politely, and the torture session would begin. Lisbeth liked routines. When people got used to things happening in a certain order, they got knocked off-balance when something unexpected happened.

The telepaths attacked.

Even three on one wouldn’t have mattered if it wasn’t for the drugs. That was how they’d captured her. She’d hired on as a navigator for a freighter and her shipmates had figured who she was and sold her out. Some concoction in her food had done the trick. Concentrating was almost impossible. She hadn’t been able to talk to her invisible friends for a long time.

But she had dreamed last night. And they didn’t know that.

That meant something, but it would have to wait until the torment was over.