Chapter 1
the solar empire had settled into a posture that made it possible to continue a war fought by people who had never known anything else. indeed, after a generation of war, those that had known it had almost forgotten what peace felt like.
—author unknown,
The Dark Crusade: A History,
early fragment published circa 2430
February 2422
Tamarind System
In the weird half-light of the alien ship corridor, Sergeant Sam Navarro turned to face his squad of Imperial Marines. His suit helmet didn't show his face clearly; a swirling pool of color a meter away reflected in his faceplate.
"This is it," he said. "Everyone ready?"
Grunts and nods of assent replied on suit-comm. The troopers looked weary—and for good reason: they'd been aboard the half-built hive-ship for nearly four hours, making their way forward from where their landing-craft had breached it.
The most tired figure was Alan Howe, Sensitive Specialist 9. He was standing as still as he could: Navarro assumed that he was working hard to shut out the voices that had been talking to him all the way forward.
"Colonel Howe?"
"Still here, Sam." Howe's voice came softly through the squad leader's suit-comm. "It wants me to run through the door all by myself, but . . . I'm okay."
"We're going to do this by the numbers, sir," Navarro said. "You do your part, we'll do ours."
"Sounds good to me."
"Becker and Czernowski are in place." Navarro put one gauntlet near his right ear, as if to indicate that he was in comm contact with them. "We're all in position.
"On my mark, ladies and gents."
There was a moment of unusual silence. Howe stood straighter, as if he was gathering his strength.
"Mark," Navarro said, and opened fire on the wall in front of them. The rest of the squad fired at the same point and the wall zipped apart. Navarro and the two best marksmen in the squad dove through first, firing and rolling, while the others followed behind. At the same time, another squad—Becker's—burst through, a quarter of the way around the circular room.
Directly after Navarro's lead troopers burst into the hive-ship's control center, Alan Howe dashed through, his weapon held in his hand. His primary weapon wasn't his firearm, however: it was his mind, using it to help fend off the vuhls' mental attacks. From the time they'd come aboard he'd heard the insistent voices in his head. There was one in particular that had eventually supplanted all of the others, crooning to him; it had paused for a moment just before they burst into the control room where they now stood.
The flight bridge was cast in actinic blue light, weirdly misshapen to human eyes, all curves and odd soft angles. The walls and ceiling were intermittently lit by swirls of colored light that moved, stopped, and moved again. There were no viewers, no tables, no chairs, just rounded projections and irregular solid things suspended in midair. The floor was sticky with something that didn't bear thinking about, which lapped up slowly against the soles of their boots.
In the middle of it stood a vuhl Drone, encased in a tight-fitting transparent pressure suit. Alan hadn't seen too many living ones, and none of them this close-up; there had only ever been one captured alive. That was during the first year of the war, and it had died in captivity from some sort of a stroke.
It was black with a gold-flecked carapace, standing on four strong legs, jointed in the middle. Past its midsection the alien stood upright; its two arms, ending in many-fingered hands, held a transparent ball—some sort of control device, Alan supposed; its head was a rounded cone with short eyestalks that darted back and forth within the head-bubble of the pressure suit. Its fanged mouth had large mandibles, and was framed by waving tentacles.
Alan, he heard in his head. Welcome.
It echoed from every corner of his mind; it was as if it were coming from every piece of equipment in the room. It came through the soles of his boots and the sticky stuff that was undulating between them; it seemed to flicker along the force-lines of his suit's energy field.
The tech that made it possible for the Drone to throw its power from one ship to another was in full force: From a few meters away, it was almost unbelievably powerful. The fifteen or so Marines in the room were all in its thrall: Navarro's and Becker's troops had all stopped moving, their weapons ready but frozen in place.
Everyone other than Alan Howe had gone completely immobile.
This is not good, he thought.
Come closer, the Drone said.
No thanks, he answered. I'll stay where I am. It was like shouting into a stiff wind.
For a moment, Alan had a scrap of visual impression: a transparent cubical box filled with multicolored fog with a silver sphere floating near the top. From within came a rasping, scraping sound of . . . laughter?
The Ór would like to examine you more closely, the Drone said. It is ready to—
Ready to what? Alan didn't really want the answer to that question; he wasn't sure what the hell an Ór was, but was in no hurry to find out.
He hoped that General Agropoulous aboard Kenyatta II was watching closely—and sending reinforcements.
The rushing wind in his mind suddenly died down. The thought-shape of amusement was replaced by another: apprehension, wariness, even fear. The weird box-image vanished.
No, the Drone said in Alan's mind. No—
He was able to look aside. Sam Navarro's rigid form twitched slightly, as if the Drone's hold was slipping.
There was a flash of light—bright, blinding for a moment, consisting of all the colors of the rainbow. Then all hell broke loose: weapons-fire erupted that had been stopped dead when the Drone had taken hold of the Marines. It crisscrossed the room and struck the Drone in two dozen places.
Within Howe's mind the Drone's screams were amplified by the projection tech. But its last words were seared into his consciousness:
Better to die than to awaken the Destroyer.
Then, mercifully, he passed out.
"General."
Jim Agropoulous turned around to see Gyes'ru HeKa'an's chya drawn, held a few centimeters from the chest of the patient in the hospital bed.
The patient's eyes were open, but other than the occasional blink he was immobile. He clearly recognized the danger the zor's blade presented to him.
"Name," Jim said, approaching the foot of the bed.
"Alan Cleon Howe," the man in the bed said, looking from the zor threatening him to the Marine general addressing him.
"Rank."
"Look, Jim, you know—"
"Rank," the general repeated.
"Sensitive Specialist 9. Colonel, Imperial Army."
"Serial number and designation."
"392AH2397-04143-209. Special attaché to Imperial Marine Group 127."
"Recite section 124 of the Uniform Code. Start with paragraph two."
"What?"
"You heard me. Let's hear it."
"I have no idea what the hell is in section 124, Jim, and you know it. Now, would you ask se Gyes'ru to put his chya back in its scabbard before he hurts someone, specifically me?"
"All right." Jim Agropoulous let out a sigh and nodded to the zor. "Put up your blade, se Gyes'ru. It's really him."
The zor warrior sheathed his chya and assumed a more relaxed posture, stepping back from the bed. "Eight thousand pardons, se Alan. You understand the need."
"Of course."
Jim sat on the edge of the bed. "I swear, if you'd started reciting the Uniform Code, I'd have shot you myself. Gyes'ru said that he didn't perceive you as a vuhl but you can never be too sure."
"Well, thank God I don't have any nervous twitches. And you wouldn't just use a Guardian because—"
"You know the reason." Agropoulous frowned. "Or you ought to."
"Because you don't trust the slimy bastards."
"Not even the ones we like. So how are you feeling?"
"I have a headache like you wouldn't believe, but I'd guess that I'm generally in far better shape than most of the casualties. How long have I been—"
"Sixteen hours."
"What's our status?"
"The battle's over. After you took out the Drone on the bridge, there wasn't much fight left in them."
"After I—" Alan Howe looked at his hands. "I'm not convinced that I 'took it out.' I— Well, it . . . gave up."
"Explain."
"You must've had a report by now. The vuhl Drone was killed by a burst of high-energy fire from numerous autorifles while I was fighting it But— I was losing, damn it. It had me."
"It had you? Then why was it distracted enough that the troopers were able to kill it?"
"You wouldn't believe it."
"After this many years, I'd pretty much believe anything. Tell me what happened."
"It gave up. It told me something, Jim. Just before it . . . let itself be killed . . . it said something to me."
"Out with it."
"'Better to die . . .' it told me. 'Better to die than to awaken the Destroyer.'"
"What the hell does that mean?"
"About the Destroyer? Well, you know that they fear the—"
"I know about the Destroyer legend, Alan. What did it mean, 'Better to die than to awaken the Destroyer'?"
"I don't know. But I do know it was frightened. Something scared it more than the idea of being killed—something that might affect the vuhls as a whole. We know that they don't think of themselves much as individuals, so I suppose that a Drone might give up its own life rather than . . ."
"' . . . to awaken the Destroyer'? Look, Alan, we all know the legend, but who knows what it really means? What did he fear? What the hell was the Drone trying to say?"
"I don't know."
"We have to figure this out, Alan. We have to know."
"I don't know."
"Maybe we'd better start from the beginning. All the details."
"Look, I just woke up—"
"I'll order some coffee. I need your report, and I need you to start providing it right now." He drew a comp out of a pocket and set it on the edge of the bed. "Start with the drop."
Alan looked from Jim to Gyes'ru, his fellow Sensitive. The zor's wings did not change position, but he seemed to shrug his shoulders. Outnumbered and outflanked, Alan heaved a sigh.
"All right. We were here to capture a hive-ship . . ."
Tamarind lay at the edge of what had been Imperial space when the war began. There had been three previous battles in Tamarind System: one when the vuhls seized it at the outset of the war; one when Admiral Erich Anderson's fleet had knocked out a base there a few years later but had been forced to retreat; and a third one two years ago—a bloody, costly affair that left the vuhls still in possession of the system and had accomplished nothing of merit, like so many battles in this war.
Unlike the last attempt, however, there was a clear objective this time. Intel had reported that the vuhls were building a hive-ship at Tamarind, at a graving-dock located on an asteroid. The First Lord of the Admiralty, His Grace the Duke of Burlington, initially ordered an expedition to destroy it before it could be completed: if this had continued to be the plan, there wouldn't have been any Imperial Marines involved at all.
But there'd been a change. In twenty-five years of war, the Imperial Navy had never gotten a good look inside a hive-ship. These fearsome vessels, some more than three kilometers long, were the biggest thing in the vuhl navy's arsenal; early in the war, they were frightening not just for their massed firepower but also for their ability to aid the vuhl Sensitives' Domination abilities. They were equipped with tech that permitted Sensitives to project across hundreds of millions of kilometers—tech that had been captured by Commodore Jacqueline Laperriere at Cicero when the war began, then recaptured and destroyed by the vuhls when they took—and lost—Adrianople a few months later. The spooks had no idea how it worked, but if it could be captured and put to use by the Empire it could have a profound effect on the seemingly endless war. The trick was to capture it intact—when the hive-ship was nearly complete.
And that made it a job for the Imperial Marines.
"I read the briefing. Hell," Agropoulous growled, "I helped write some of it."
Howe ran a hand through his hair. "Do you want me to tell the story or not?"
"I don't see as we need to start with—"
"ha General," Gyes'ru interrupted. "Sir, if I may suggest, it is wise to permit Colonel Howe to fly the path. It is possible that something has been overlooked. If the General pleases."
"Fine." Agropoulous pulled a chair near the bed and sat backward, leaning his arms on the back of it. "A point taken, se Gyes'ru." The zor nodded, his wing-position moving slightly. "All right, Alan. Go on."
The vuhls realized the strategic significance of the hive-ship, and defended it tenaciously. The Admiralty, for its part, put the battle-plan on the fast track and allocated extra resources to it—in a war that had lasted a generation, there weren't too many things that offered any opportunity to change the basic equation. Admiral Erich Anderson had been assigned a task force of nineteen ships, including his own flagship Emperor Ian, to take the system and neutralize any defending force. Still, it took nearly sixteen hours before landing-craft could be launched at the asteroid base where the hive-ship was nearing completion.
"I suppose he was at the conn for the entire battle," Howe interrupted himself. "Just like his great-great-grandfather."
"I suppose so. I was on Kenyatta II at the time. Can we get to—" Agropoulous glanced at Gyes'ru and paused. "All right, fine. Tell it your way."
Kenyatta II, a sixth-generation fleet carrier, had closed on the asteroid in order to launch a dozen Marine landing-craft under cover of its aerospace fighter wings. The landing-craft were big ungainly things with little in the way of defense or maneuverability. They had one job: Reach the objective, breach, and allow Marines to get aboard. Their target was the hull of the nearly complete hive-ship, where each craft would create its own hatchway through which Marines could attack. The fighters' job was simple: Screen the craft and keep them from being hit.
Twelve landing-craft left the secondary hangar deck of Kenyatta II. Ten of them reached the hive-ship intact; the other two were hit by enemy fire, with one able to maneuver well enough to continue and one being forced to go back. Tactical on Ken's flight bridge judged that reducing the fighting force by 8 percent wasn't enough to abort the mission, and soon the remaining eleven had breached the outer hull of the vuhl ship. A few minutes later more than four thousand Marines were aboard, their vacc-suit transponders registering on a holo-model in the Marine command center aboard the carrier.
The Marines were at least partially protected from enemy Sensitives, by field modulators on their suits—similar to the ones mounted on every combat vessel. It didn't completely protect against Domination attempts by vuhl Sensitives; for that, there were human and zor Sensitives among the Marines. One of them was Alan Howe.
He'd been dropping with the Marines for nineteen years, both from atmosphere and in landing-craft like the ones they were using for this assault. He was no infantryman, but he and his fellow Sensitives performed a critical role in a war with aliens capable of controlling minds.
Target, Alan Howe thought to himself as he braced himself against the impact of the landing-craft with the hive-ship. Big fat target.
He'd counted to eight before he was through the hatch and had his weapon ready. Most of the regulars were two or three seconds ahead of him; but that was an improvement on his first drop into atmosphere from Masaryk at Mashore Reach—he'd taken half a minute to become disentangled from his drop capsule, and had spent the next minute-and-a-half throwing up: all while under enemy fire. At least he wasn't a danger to the troop anymore.
"Report by numbers," he heard in his helmet comm as he moved into position. Troopers began to call out their IDs.
When his turn came, he called out, "24 okay." A few comm signals later, he'd verified that his two fellow Sensitives had made it safely inside. Already he could feel the insistent buzz of the alien mental probes—not that he needed a reminder why he was here.
That's why I'm here, all right, he thought to himself.
"That all sounds normal so far. We tracked your progress and saw you establish yourselves inside the hull with minimal casualties."
"We lost half a dozen Marines just getting in—Sam Navarro lost two—but it went pretty well. I don't need to tell you how spooky it was in there: you saw the vid we were sending." Howe looked away at a blank wall, as if he expected it to spring to life. "First off, it was low and tight. Our squad landed amidships, near what would have been starboard gunnery section on a starship. But it was nothing like a starship: it was hundreds of little chambers—and there wasn't a straight line in sight. Everywhere we looked were curved surfaces and shimmering pools of color, like offline vid equipment."
He looked back at Agropoulous. "I could hear them, Jim. In my head, whispering. The hull decompression at our breach point killed a half-dozen of them, but they were in the next chamber, down accessways, on the other side of walls. It was as if I were listening to a thousand comm channels at once."
"Was it affecting the troopers?"
"No, I don't think so. The vuhls weren't focused—it wasn't like a Sensitive team; these weren't Drones, at least not most of them. They were techs and engineers. Workers. They didn't have any trouble disguising their hate, but they weren't able to Dominate us."
"What happened next?"
"Once we secured our flank positions we began to move forward. Everyone that made it over started moving toward their objectives. We'd given up far aft once we lost the twelfth lander, so it left one group without a flanker, but that seemed to be under control.
"But it was slow going. It took us several tries to figure out their doors—there were no obvious controls: the wall would just zip apart and the warriors would charge through. After a while we found some kind of mechanism that would cause the wall to part if we concentrated fire on it. Of course it would stay open then, so we would have to leave a rear guard to watch behind. . ."
After almost three hours, they came through a wall into a vast empty space, unpressurized and with no internal gravity. It was spanned by dozens of metal beams, some of them partially covered by the gray plasterlike material that made up the walls. The scale of the scene was hard to determine: it was hundreds of meters of open space in every direction, like a huge hangar—totally opposite to the close, claustrophobic chambers they'd been fighting through since boarding. It seemed that the vuhls weren't fond of it, either: they were mostly sticking to the walls and away from the vast emptiness in the middle of the unfinished part of the ship.
Far down the curve of the open space, Alan could see worker teams that seemed to be continuing the construction job despite the battle obviously continuing far above—or below—their position. He flipped up the magnification on his suit helmet to watch for a moment: there were six vuhls, moving slowly along an unfinished beam; they seemed to be crawling along, holding tightly as they moved, and in their wake gray plaster was forming up behind. He couldn't figure out at first how they were laying the stuff down; they didn't seem to be carrying any tools or supplies—they were just crawling along the beam, six vuhls side by side. Then, all of a sudden, he figured it out.
"I didn't believe it when you first said it, and I don't believe it now. That stuff—the stuff the walls are made of—is coming from their—"
"I don't think they properly have one," Howe interrupted. "But yes, it serves the same purpose. I'd guess that they have a special type of worker that is bred for the task, to make the stuff. Lord only knows what they have to eat to turn it into that."
"It's on the inside walls, and it coats their hulls as well. Is it airtight?"
"It dries like granite. It's . . . Look, I don't really want to discuss that aspect any further right now, okay?"
"Fine." Agropoulous couldn't help but smile for a moment. As repulsive as the idea was, it solved a mystery that had baffled intel and the Navy since the war started.
Now, he thought to himself, we can tell them exactly what that crap really is.
The vuhls didn't like the open space in the unfinished part of the hive-ship. Intel knew that they were intensely agoraphobic: They designed their ships to be a mass of small compartments, sometimes with scarcely enough room for two vuhls to pass without touching. A generation ago, Admiral César Hsien—one of the first people to be Dominated and live to tell about it—reported that they seemed incredibly frightened of the open spaces aboard human ships.
By comparison, Imperial Marines were used to operating in open space and zero-g. Their orders were to fire at will and eliminate any enemy they encountered.
Alan Howe and the other Sensitives had another mission: to protect the Marines from Domination. Toward the aft end of the ship it had been techs and warriors, but now they could feel the insistent buzz of the vuhl Sensitives' mental probes. They were somewhere forward of the open structure, and they were getting ready for a final assault.
Back aboard Kenyatta II, the battle looked like it was going the humans' way, but Alan Howe knew better.
"Maybe we should've just blown the fore end off the ship. The admiral suggested it."
"You could've just done that in the first place and skipped the assault. We had nothing when we came out into the unbuilt space: there was nothing new in the aft sections. We were there to capture the tech, remember?"
"Yeah, I remember. But it was a turkey shoot in the open structure—they were awful in free-fall, and the jar-heads knew all the moves."
"But it didn't matter. They weren't the real enemy, Jim. It was the Sensitives in the fore section, especially the lead Drone. If they got control of us and killed enough Marines, it would make their deaths worthwhile.
"We were going to kill them anyway. We knew it, you knew it. What happened in the process was what mattered. We could hear them—it was a trap, like the middle of a spider's web."
The sounds of the Sensitives in Alan Howe's mind grew louder and more insistent as his squad moved carefully through the corridors in the command section of the ship. They hadn't gone quickly thus far, and now it seemed like they were moving through some thick fluid. Alan was sweating in his suit, fighting against the probes of the aliens trying to turn him aside, to make him do insane things.
There was one voice that was more insistent than the others. It was not merely a chilling voice looking for an opening in his defenses; it was more like a sly, insidious one that seemed to know him very well. It seemed to bring forth memories of his earliest encounters with the aliens. He was especially reminded of his first brush at Josephson aboard the Duc d'Enghien, a lifetime-and-a-half ago, when he'd passed out after the image of a past Gyaryu'har had suddenly vanished, leaving him open and unprotected against the onslaught of vuhl Sensitives.
A hundred times, five hundred times since then, he'd faced this situation. It shouldn't have been any different, but somehow it was. Sensitives fight panic all the time: it gnaws at the mind, pulling down defenses and undermining confidence.
There was someone powerful behind this attack. He'd not felt this level of power or skill very often, thank God. It was difficult to keep it from the Marines close by; it was almost impossible to shield it from the other Sensitives. They all felt it.
"It was calling me toward the main flight bridge. It was waiting for me," he told Jim Agropoulous, the hospital room seeming strangely quiet as he recalled the last several minutes aboard the mostly built hive-ship. Gyes'ru and the general were watching him carefully, listening intently now. There was no scope for jokes about where the hull material came from.
"You fought it."
"From a distance. Every step. It was all I could do to take it slow, to let Sam Navarro call the squad's moves. I almost couldn't keep myself from running toward the flight bridge like a crazy man. I was the only one who was managing any sort of resistance against it. We were being pulled—dragged—toward the center of the spider-web. Hundreds of Marines in the fore section, and a dozen Sensitives with them."
"It must have been the enhancement tech."
"Well, of course it must have been the damned enhancement tech. Otherwise it would have had no chance. Too many laser rifles, too many minds to control, and not all in line of sight. But for the tech it would've been overwhelmed."
"So then you reached the bridge . . ." Agropoulous said.
"That's right." Alan Howe shuddered a bit at the memory. "It was waiting for us. And it knew my name . . ."
The flight bridge was cast in actinic blue light, weirdly misshapen to human eyes, all curves and odd soft angles. The walls and ceiling were intermittently lit by swirls of colored light that moved, stopped, and moved again. There were no viewers, no tables, no chairs, just rounded projections and irregular solid things suspended in midair. The floor was sticky with something that didn't bear thinking about, which lapped up slowly against the soles of their boots.
In the middle of it stood a man, wearing a uniform that looked a lot like an Imperial one, but a century or more out-of-date. He had a sort of glowing multicolored aura about him that gave him an unearthly appearance; it must have been some kind of enviro-suit, protecting him against the vacuum. Still, it wasn't like anything Alan Howe had ever seen—it was more like an energy field that surrounds a starship.
"Hello, Alan," the man said. "Glad you could make it."
"You know me," he answered.
"Oh, yes. I've been waiting for you, in fact. For all of you." He spread his arms wide as another group of Marines burst through a hatch a quarter of the way around the circle. They stopped immediately, transfixed.
The Marines with him were stopped as well. It was as if the scene were some sort of tableau, like a still from a vid.
"You can't control all of us."
"I don't have to. I'm not here to do that." He leaned against one of the curved walls, tilting his head slightly to one side as if he were listening to something. He crossed his arms in front of his chest. "In fact, the vuhl whose body I'm borrowing right now is going to be surprised as hell as soon as I give it back to him."
"'Borrowing'—" Alan began, but the man cut him off.
"The best part"—he smiled to himself—"the absolute best part of all of this, my friend, is that you're not going to remember a damn thing from this exchange until later. You'll recall getting here, and whatever happens after I leave, but our conversation—" He laughed; it had a sound like breaking glass in Alan Howe's audio pickup. "Nothing. At least for a while.
"Things are about to change. They've waited a long time to change—since the beginning of the war, really. The vuhls have lost control of their war already—and soon the 'meat-creatures' will lose control as well. In a few moments, my Drone friend is going to commit a selfless act that he thinks will forestall something. But it's just plain inevitable."
"What is?"
"The Destroyer." The man smirked. "The Destroyer is already here."
Alan stopped himself then, his eyes wide. Agropoulous hadn't moved; he had a surprised look on his face. The zor seemed impassive but a motion of his wings betrayed a change in attitude.
"I didn't remember any of that until just now."
"It sure as hell didn't make it into your report." Agropoulous tapped the comp. "We've got it now, though."
"You believe it."
"Do I have a choice?"
"Of course you do. None of it appears on the vidrec. You can send me to the happy farm."
"Tell me what happened next," he answered, without indicating whether sending Alan Howe to the happy farm might be a good idea or not.
"The—man—vanished. There was a bright light, or rather a spray of different-colored light, and he disappeared. Where he was standing was a vuhl Drone. I'm not sure of the markings, but the comp should identify it in some way. It looked around, in the split-second before the troops came out of their stun, and said what I heard. 'Better to die than to awaken the Destroyer.'"
"And then crossfire killed it."
"That's right."
"This man. Could you identify him if you saw him again?"
"I guess so. He was short and thin—gaunt, really. And he was dressed like something out of an old 3-V. Man-zor war era, I'd guess, though I couldn't be sure without some research."
"All right." Agropoulous waved a finger near the comp, then picked it up, and tucked it into a pocket. "Get some rest, Alan. We've already got new orders, and this"—he patted the pocket—"confirms it. We're going to go talk to the foremost expert on the Destroyer legend. Admiral Anderson has detached us to go to Zor'a."
"Jackie."
"That's right, old pal. Your old friend, and my old commanding officer—the Gyaryu'har of the High Nest, Jackie Laperriere."