Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series

by C. J. Carella

  The pod started shuddering violently during its final approach. As it turned out, it hadn’t escaped the Wildcat’s destruction unscathed after all, and its upper quadrant’s force field failed. Pieces of fuselage peeled away, no longer protected from the laws of physics. Lisbeth tried to reduce its speed further, and the overstrained and, as it turned out, also-damaged graviton drive shut down.

  “Too fast!” the ground controller shouted. “Veer off! Veer off!”

  The world seemed to slow down as she set aside all emotions – mostly pure panic – and concentrated on the task at hand. She created a checklist in her mind and went over each entry. Use the emergency attitude thrusters to climb over the spaceport’s force fields before the pod splattered against them. Restart the grav engine without engaging it, not until she could slow down enough to avoid another shutdown. The attitude thrusters were her only means of steering the ship until the engines came back online, and all they could really do was impart slight changes in course. She used them to aim the pod skywards, letting the planet’s gravity reduce her velocity, and hoped the pod didn’t come apart.

  Her altered course took her over the city. Three sets of sensors painted her craft; her imp identified them as American, Wyrm and Oval systems. It appeared the alien embassies had air defense systems in place, which meant that her IFF transponder was the only thing keeping her from eating a laser or graviton burst. To add to her worries, more pod pieces broke off; nothing vital so far, but that couldn’t last; most of the pod was made of important or essential systems.

  Nothing she could do about either problem, so she concentrated on her flying. The pod left the big city behind; she found herself soaring over dark countryside with only a few scattered pinpricks of light indicating the presence of fire or electricity down below. Out in the distance, a smaller town’s lights flickered weakly. A few moments later, she left the land mass entirely; she was over the ocean, and if she couldn’t fly back she was going to have to swim home.

  Gritting her teeth, she engaged the graviton engine once again. Another emergency shutdown might result in catastrophic damage which would leave her with nothing but momentum and the attitude thrusters, neither of which would keep the aircraft aloft for very long. She idly wondered what the local sea life would make of her.

  The engine caught on; the pod started vibrating violently, but she was in control again, instead of trying to steer a missile. Her imp sent her the result of the system’s diagnostics: the news wasn’t great. She had maybe two, three minutes before the engine gave up the ghost. That might be enough to get her back to the spaceport. Might. There were cracks in the outer fuselage; the pod might fall to pieces before the drive died.

  “Here goes nothing,” she said to herself as she changed course and headed back the way she’d come.

  * * *

  “Figgered I had to share this,” the smuggler said.

  Fromm looked at the neatly-stacked crates that filled the basement of the warehouse. A hidden basement, shielded from a possible custom inspection by a rather fancy stealth system. One of the crates was open, revealing its contents.

  “Ruddy designs,” he said, picking up one of the assault rifles from the crate and hefting it. It looked just like a Royal Armory’s CR-11: .29 caliber, 20-round magazine, able to fire single shots and 3-round bursts. It was the cutting edge of Kirosha’s small arms technology. Unlike normal CR-11s, though, this model had an integral electronic scope, a pistol grip, and a folding wire stock. “But improved.”

  “Yessir,” the smuggler said. “We added a decent rangefinder with a lowlight and laser-targeting scope; figger they’ll increase accuracy a good fifty, sixty percent. We was gonna sell ‘em to the Ruddies in exchange for gold and other heavies, plus silk and some organics.”

  “I see.” Technically, it wasn’t illegal. The current trade treaty forbid the sale of modern weapons to the locals, but these weren’t modern, technically speaking; even the electronic sights weren’t state of the art, although they were easily fifty years ahead of Kirosha’s technology. The rifles had been fabricated in some US planet for little more than the cost in materials and fabber time, brought in hidden with other cargo, and stored in the sub-warehouse until a buyer could be found. It’d all been done covertly to avoid the risk that some officious bastard in the diplomatic service would object to the sale of weapons to the natives and scuttle the whole operation. Or possibly because Crow had been toying with the idea of selling them to Kirosha’s enemies instead.

  “How come you haven’t sold them already?” he asked the free trader.

  Howard Crow’s personal files identified him as an independent trader, co-owner and licensed operator of a small freighter, the five-thousand ton Alan Dean Foster. The starship was currently in transit to Lahiri; its cargo allegedly consisted of ingots of assorted metals plus a variety of luxury Kirosha goods: artwork, several tons of a local variety of silk with several potential uses, and a number of ‘medicinal’ organic compounds, including a variety of intoxicants and narcotics. The FDA, like most non-military government agencies, was chronically underfunded and understaffed, so new drugs could be sold with impunity for decades before being declared controlled substances, if they ever were.

  The same files claimed he’d only served his obligatory four years in the service, and that his record was perfectly clean. Fromm suspected those files were as trustworthy as a politician’s promise. It was hard to cheat the system, but not impossible. At the moment, however, he was only interested in the smuggler’s weapon cache. He wasn’t a cop and had much bigger fish to fry.

  “I had a deal all set up, but the Ruddy bigwig who agreed to buy the fuck’n guns got the chop last week,” Crow explained. “He was too chummy with us Starfarers, mebbe, or pissed off the wrong VIP. Whofuck knows?”

  “How many?”

  “Two thousand rifles. Million rounds, full metal jacket .29 caliber. Better’n what the locals make.”

  “Good.” His platoon only had a couple dozen or so spare IW-3 rifles. The fabbers could make more, but doing so would eat up on their feedstock supplies, and they needed those to replace all the ammo they’d spent stopping the attack. While the antiquated rifles were nowhere near as effective as Starfarer weapons, they were infinitely better than nothing. “I’ll take them.”

  “Hoped you’d say that,” Mr. Crow said.

  “I e-mailed you a War Department voucher. Verify that you got it.”

  Crow took a second to read it and smiled, revealing several gleaming gold and grav-transistor teeth. “Looks good. Figger I can pay this year’s taxes with it.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Crow,” Fromm said. “I’ll send a work detail to come pick up the guns.”

  The smuggler hesitated for a moment before speaking again. “Ah… there’s one more thing, ser.”

  Fromm had a feeling that the smuggler’s semi-illiterate speech patterns were as genuine as his official files. “What is it?”

  “Gots a piece of military gear you might find useful. And since I figger yer boys are gonna toss the place anyways and find it, might’s well tell ye.”

  “Smart of you.”

  Fromm followed him to the other side of the warehouse, where several large containers were piled up. Crow was right; his Marines would have gone over those boxes sooner or later. And when he opened the nearest one he understood the smuggler’s reluctance. The round white surface and the circuit-board ridges were unmistakable.

  “Those are components of a warp catapult’s launch pad.”

  “Yessuh. Figger I kin let you have it for cost.”

  “Figure I won’t charge you for holding stolen goods and just take it instead. And I won’t even ask you which of my Marines sold it to you.”

  “I was holding it on consignment. They ain’t gonna be happy ‘bout not getting’ paid.”

  “Feel free to pass this on: I don’t give a fuck who they are, but if they make any sort of stink, I’ll start giving a fuck.”

  Crow smile
d. “Gotcha.”

  There were a good half-dozen problem children in the platoon; any or even all of them could have been involved in taking the device and trying to sell it in the black market. If nothing else, its components could be ground down into fabber feedstock, but if the catapult could be made whole again, that opened up a number of possibilities. He’d detail Staff Sergeant Tanaka to it, and maybe some of the civilian engineers, some of whom might have worked with warp engines.

  As Fromm left the warehouse, he reminded himself to order the work detail to check the rest of the building for any usable cargo; the place was near the three legation buildings, in an area that hadn’t been under fire during the last attack, but it was outside the force field perimeter, which meant it would be lost sooner or later. If necessary, he’d write another voucher for Mr. Crow.

  He sat down on the rear of the grav-limo, which had become his command vehicle, and headed back to base. A call came through just as he arrived.

  “A survivor from Task Unit Fifteen is attempting to land, sir,” CPO Donnelly said.

  “Only one?” Feline-class corvettes had eighty-nine crewmembers apiece, and the task unit had been ferrying two platoons of marines besides. One survivor out of almost three hundred was better than he’d expected, but not by a hell of a lot.

  “Yes, sir. The captain of the Wildcat.”

  “That’s one lucky bastard,” Fromm said, calling up the skipper’s files as he walked to his office. LC Lisbeth Zhang. On the young side for the rank, but she had a decent record, until now. The Navy wasn’t going to feel kindly disposed to someone who’d gotten two ships blasted under her. It wasn’t even her fault, considering the threat board had been clear when she emerged into Jasper, but somebody had to be held accountable, and it wouldn’t be the flag-rank assholes who’d allowed the Lampreys to launch a mass attack on America without anybody being the wiser. Heads would roll; he could only hope some of them deserved it.

  All above his pay grade, of course. He sat down and went back to work on his plan to rescue the spaceport’s personnel. It mostly depended on the fifty or so Caterpillar and Star Mining volunteers currently working on a new fleet of technicals. He’d have preferred to launch the operation tonight, before the Ruddies could get their shit together, but Rockwell still wasn’t convinced. The poor bastards on the port would have to fend for themselves for at least another day.

  “Sir, the escape pod has entered the atmosphere.”

  He watched the spectacular reentry through his imp. The ship started coming apart in midair, veered off course, and flew over Kirosha like a rogue comet before making a wide turn to head back towards the spaceport. She almost made it there.

  “She’s calling in a mayday, sir. Losing engines once again.” A brief pause. “She’s gone down, sir,”

  Fromm lowered his head. Nothing he could do, but it really sucked, surviving the attack on her ship only to die on an alien world a few hours later.

  “She made it, sir! Survived the landing, and will attempt to reach the spaceport on foot. Looks like she’s ten miles away.”

  He considered launching the rescue mission right then and there for a moment, but the vehicles weren’t ready and the RSO wouldn’t go for it.

  “Hope you’ve kept current on your E&E procedures, Commander,” he said to himself, hating the situation, hating the idea of a fellow officer out in the wild with no hope of rescue.

  Hope she saves a round for herself, just in case, he thought.

  Being captured by the Kirosha would be a hard way to go.

  * * *

  Any landing you could walk away from didn’t count as a crash in her book, although most people looking at the deep smoking furrow that the pod had carved in a fallow field would likely disagree.

  Lisbeth Zhang hadn’t died. She only wished she had.

  When the graviton drive failed for the second and last time, she’d had just enough time to use the attitude thrusters for a desperate attempt to nose up the tiny craft. About half of the pod had been torn loose, luckily the half she hadn’t been sitting on, and the force fields on the bottom quadrant had held just long enough. She hit the ground at a shallow angle rather than head on, and the force fields shunted off just enough of the impact’s kinetic energy to keep the craft more or less in one piece. The shield hadn’t protected her from massive whiplash when the pod came to a rather sudden stop. The impact had nearly snapped her spine and made her pass out for a couple of minutes.

  She woke up feeling as if she’d been beaten to within an inch of her life. It took everything she had to crawl out of the crash chair, grab a first-aid kit and give herself a couple of shots: an extra dose of nano-meds to repair the damage, and a hit of Walking Dead, a mixed cocktail of painkillers and stimulants designed to keep you going even if you had one foot in the grave. As soon as the WD shot took effect, she stuffed herself with protein and energy bars; the meds’ metabolic costs were huge. Even chowing down on six, seven thousand calories wouldn’t keep her from crashing into a near-coma as soon as the Walking Dead wore off. Additional doses would only postpone the inevitable for a few minutes, at the cost of an even nastier crash. She figured she had thirty, forty minutes before she had to lie down. Not a lot of time to E&E.

  Evade and Escape. That was the name of the game. Every Eet within a hundred miles would have seen her fiery final descent. Anybody nearby only had to head towards the flaming spot the pod had created to find her, and given that the locals were intent on killing every American they could find, she definitely didn’t want to be taking a nap when they arrived. She had to move as far away as possible and find a hiding spot.

  Luckily, escape pods were outfitted with the expectation that their passengers might land behind enemy lines. The first thing Lisbeth did was replace her standard uniform with a stealth bodysuit; the escape pod carried two of those. The smart nanofiber outfit stretched to fit her body, and included a full head covering that turned her into a featureless figure. The suit was skin-tight except for two bulges at her waist for the batteries that powered the suits’ systems and a leg holster that would fit a standard issue beamer. The outfit could change colors to match its surroundings and use a photon field to blur her outline, making her effectively invisible at most ranges, especially when standing still. The nanite fibers it was made of would protect her from most weather extremes while also obscuring her IR signature and preventing any body particles from leaking into the environment, making her impossible to track by scent or most enhanced vision systems. Her main problem would be leaving footprints behind, and if she moved slowly enough, the suit could project a static stream that would sweep after her, erasing her tracks. Against gravity-wave sensor systems, a stealth suit would only reduce the range of detection; when dealing with low-tech alien civilizations, however, it was pretty much a cloak of invisibility.

  The stealth suit’s only drawback was that all those features consumed too much energy to accommodate such necessities as force fields. The energy packs would only last for twenty-four hours of continuous use, after which the bodysuit would revert to its natural grayish-green color. Hopefully she’d be somewhere safe before then.

  She quickly grabbed all the supplies she could scavenge. Lisbeth stuck a standard issue beamer in the suit’s integral holster. She hadn’t fired one of those since Basic, but with her imp doing her aiming for her, she didn’t need to rate Expert to hit a target most of the time. She grabbed a backpack with similar stealth capabilities and filled it with food, water, medical nanites and four spare energy packs which could be used for the bodysuit or the pistol.

  By the time she’d outfitted herself, exhaustion had begun to creep over her. That thirty-minute estimate might have been a tad optimistic.

  Time to go. She followed the path of wreckage and disturbed soil the pod had left on the field, where her footprints would be harder to identify without taking the time to sweep after herself. There was a stream nearby; she thanked her lucky stars as she waded into it and walked
through the water. She stayed in the stream for as long as she could; it wasn’t deep, and the current wasn’t too strong, but it was a slog nonetheless. Five minutes into her hike, she sent a self-destruct signal to the pod. She felt bad about consigning Omar’ body to the flames, but she couldn’t leave the pod and its contents to the natives. When this was over, she would do her best to recover the XO’s ashes and send them to his family.

  Each step was harder than the last. Her suit’s smart-fibers were waterproof and their environmental controls warmed her lower extremities, but her feet were going numb nonetheless. She had to find shelter.

  A wooded hill to her left beckoned to her. Lisbeth left the stream and headed there, trying not to leave too many telltale signs of her passage, but she could barely keep her eyes open so she probably messed that up. She’d messed everything up. Her career was as good as over. Her first ship command, lost with all hands. She was a failure.

  Lisbeth shook her head, trying to clear it of evil thoughts. Depression was a sign the Walking Dead was wearing off. A mental command accessed her music playlist and piped it directly into her eardrums. The harsh melodies of Flaming Totenkopf got her heartbeat up and helped her walk the rest of the way to the tree line.

  The local tree trunks looked like a collection of stacked rings, with two or three trunks linked together at their base and thick leaves sprouting all along their length. No branches, and she didn’t think she could climb very high anyway. She squeezed herself between one the largest trio of trunks and drifted off to sleep while Flaming Totenkopf screamed in her ears about the Children of Winter, come to wash the world in blood.