Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series

by C. J. Carella

  This particular Canine and Equestrian Theater presentation was unusually simple, without the holotank on the podium that meant a PowerGram™ presentation was at hand. In fact, it looked as if the general was going to speak without using any multimedia add-ons, which was somewhat unusual.

  “My name is Dennis Singh, and I’m in charge of the Langley Project. A long time ago, I used to be in the Air Force. Made it to bird colonel a few weeks before First Contact. After a century and a half, it turns out my old skill set has become useful again.

  “You’ve seen them. Yes, they are warp-capable attack ships. And yes, we want you to fly them.”

  There was the beginning of a cheerful roar, but the general quickly put a stop to it.

  “This is going to be no picnic, ladies and gentlemen. We are fielding a genuinely new weapon platform, the first since we developed warp shields and catapults, before most of you were born. As all of you know, Starfarer technology has been stable for thousands of years: ship designs that came out when we hairless monkeys were hunting mammoth with spears are still in service, with only a few tweaks here and there. Through Providence or random chance or what have you, humans have certain unique capabilities that have allowed us to develop new technological applications that no one else even considered, simply because no other known species can make use of them. Count your blessings: it is the only reason we’re still here.”

  The enthusiasm of the crowd dimmed somewhat. Everyone knew that humanity’s continued survival was as close to a miracle as you could get: without their species’ tolerance to warp space, Earth would have been depopulated by the Lampreys when they came back to finish the job they’d started during First Contact. And that miracle hadn’t been cheap, either. No matter what one’s warp rating was, nobody enjoyed the experience of leaving standard four-dimensional reality and plunging into a place that nobody really knew much about, other than that it provided the only way to break the laws of relativity and move from one point to another faster than the speed of light. There were myriads of side effects: temporal distortions, hallucinations and extreme psychological stress were just the most common. And they got worse the more frequently you jumped, especially without adequate time to recover between transitions. Humans handled those side effects better than everyone else, but they still paid a price for the privilege of traversing astronomical distances in the blink of an eye.

  A civilian starship’s crew could expect to perform two or three warp jumps a week during routine operations. Military maneuvers required multiple transits, often separated by minutes instead of hours, with vastly increased risks. Even human crews took casualties after more than four or five jumps in a day.

  They’d seen the warp fighter demonstration outside. The tiny ships had done two warp jumps in a matter of seconds. The implications of that feat began to sink in.

  “Why are humans different from the rest of the inhabitants of the galaxy?” General Singh asked rhetorically. “To begin to address that question, I must go on a brief foray into Galactic history. We are not the first to have this distinction, just the only ones in recent history. As Fermi’s Paradox suggests, many thousands of technologically-advanced species have risen in the billions of years since the formation of the Milky Way Galaxy. And as anyone who took Gal-Hist 101 knows, Starfaring species generally spend one to ten thousand years playing with starships and colonizing planets, after which they either Transcend or die out. What happens when you Transcend is unknown; the species or civilization in question simply goes somewhere else, leaving only well-policed ruins behind. Over millions of years, most of their records have been lost as well.

  “From the fragments that remain, however, there are stories about ‘warp-wizards,’ species that could use warp-space in ways most others cannot. They tend to spread rapidly and dominate much of the galaxy before moving on or being destroyed. Which helps explain why so many Starfarers have a hair up their butts when it comes to us.

  “Our ability to resist warp transit appears to be both biological and cultural. At some point in our evolution, humanity developed a mutation that enables our minds to cope with warp space. Our studies show that this mutation is directly related to the human brain’s ability to enter a trance state. As it turns out, most sophonts are not capable of going into trances or similar altered states of consciousness, unless they are well and truly insane, as in nonfunctional, chewing on the walls insane. Which I suppose means you don’t have to be crazy to travel into warp space, but it surely helps.”

  Some chuckling followed the comment, but it had a nervous edge.

  “The cultural aspect is related to that biological trait. Humans have an over-developed ability to believe in things that cannot be proven to exist. Most of our cultures are more religious than just about every other Starfarer civilization, for example. Call it faith or delusion; we’ve got more of it than the rest. And it seems to help us endure exposure to warp space. We’ve been working to enhance that ability through chemical and psychological means. Our goal was to enable humans to endure multiple transits over a short time span.”

  That sounded dangerously close to brainwashing, Lisbeth thought. People took all kinds of stuff to make warp transitions easier, from common sedatives to mixtures of uppers and downers, some of them highly illegal. She wondered what kind of witches’ brew was in store for the pilot candidates.

  “The Langley Project – named after the first US aircraft carrier, by the way – got started at the same time as the initiatives that gave us our spiffy warp shields and Marine assault catapults. Unlike those developments, it took us a long time to get any traction. The Navy gave up on the program, and the Corps picked up the ball, although with a tithe of the original budget. The initial hurdles were in engineering: miniaturizing warp generators so they would fit inside a small fighting platform took some work. Same with graviton thrusters powerful enough to let fighters keep up with capital ships. But most of those problems were solved a good fifty years ago. The hardware wasn’t the main problem; the software, the human element, was. To be effective, a warp fighter pilot must be able to endure multiple jumps over a short period of time. Dozens of jumps an hour, to be exact.”

  Here we go, Lisbeth thought. She liked to listen to Warmetal music, especially the original German stuff, as her way to cope with warp transitions, but there weren’t enough metal tunes in the universe for the kind of stuff the jarhead general was talking about.

  Once you were inside warp space and the initial shock didn’t cripple you mentally or physically, you could endure as long as thirty hours of exposure with only a slightly-increased chance of suffering adverse side effects. But each transition performed without at least a few hours to recover added cumulative strains on the crew and passengers. More than two of them within an hour was highly unadvisable.

  If you jumped too many times in too short a time, very bad things happened. The story of the cruiser Merrimack was the most-quoted case. A series of unfortunate events, involving pirates, a multi-system chase, and an ambush, forced the ship to conduct six warp jumps spread over a mere seventy minutes. On the seventh jump, only about thirty percent of the cruiser emerged on the other side – and a single crewmember, the navigator, who died shortly thereafter, stark raving mad the whole time. The rest, all thirty-two hundred of them, were listed as missing, presumed dead.

  Death was the best fate you could hope for the missing crew. For all anyone knew, the Merrimacks were still trapped somewhere in warp space.

  And that’s what you’ve signed up for.

  “We’ve learned a lot,” General Singh went on. “It wasn’t easy, or cheap. But we have made several breakthroughs and are finally moving from R&D to full implementation. We are putting the finishing touches on what will become the first space-capable Carrier Strike Group. You will be the last candidate class before we go on our first shakedown cruise. The project is being fast-tracked; I think you all can figure out why.”

  They all did. Anybody who could do math knew
just how bad the odds against the USA were. The question was whether fast-tracking the Langley Project would produce anything of use in time to change the outcome of the war.

  Problem was, she was unlikely to find out the answer until it was too late to change her mind. Not that it mattered. As far as she was concerned, she’d been living on borrowed time ever since her XO sacrificed himself to save her life aboard the USS Wildcat. Death didn’t scare her all that much.

  Failure did.

  * * *

  Lisbeth had to use every ounce of willpower left in her to make sure her legs didn’t wobble on her way out of the flight simulator room.

  One big reason regular fighters had no place in space combat was simple: graviton engines had a relatively fixed performance, and they didn’t scale down very well. A small ship couldn’t go much faster than a big one, and shuttle-sized craft were actually much slower than a full-sized starship. The reactionless grav thrusters that propelled virtually all manned spacecraft had an effective top speed of one thousandth the speed of light. You could move that maximum up by a few tenths of a percent, but that was it. Alternative methods using reaction mass were just impractical for manned vessels. Missiles could reach ten times that speed through the use of magnetic or gravitonic catapults that imparted tremendous initial velocity, along with standard reaction rockets that accelerated them further and gravity or impeller thrusters for steering. Try that with a fighter and you’d be scraping its pilot out of the cockpit, not to mention that a return trip would be somewhat difficult, given that its reaction mass would be exhausted covering any normal engagement distance.

  It’d taken some amazing engineering to provide the fighters with enough thrust to keep up with regular ships, but that didn’t matter. A slower-than-light fighter was just too slow and small to survive space combat. With a warp drive, the equation changed radically, of course. Warp fighter combat was unlike anything pilots from pre-Contact day would recognize, except for the constant risk of death. Fighters emerged into normal space at a pre-determined speed and heading, usually matching or slightly exceeding the target’s, fired a spread of weapons over five to ten seconds, and warped out of existence. During those brief seconds, it would be exposed to return fire, but its warp shields would protect eighty percent of its surface area. The very brief time to acquire and engage the unexpected target would make things very difficult for the defenders. Those warp systems were what made the fighters so deadly.

  They were also the reason she was having trouble walking in a straight line.

  The simulator couldn’t quite replicate what you felt when you performed a warp jump. Instead, if messed with your sense of balance to produce a similar sense of disorientation. It was plenty to make even the simplest things difficult, and when you got that jolt every five seconds or so, things got funky.

  She was getting used to it, which left her feeling proud and somewhat dismayed at the same time. After the first round of simulated combat, she’d puked her guts out, along with just about everyone else. They’d had their second flurry of washouts after that. The first one had happened when about half a dozen pilot candidates were deemed physically or psychologically unfit. Unfortunately, the fitness tests were classified, so those poor bastards had traveled all the way here only to be rejected and assigned other duties for the duration of the project. It wasn’t scut work; the washouts would end up in other occupational specialties in support, maintenance and flight control. But they weren’t going to be flying missions, and Lisbeth knew most of them would feel like losers; she certainly would have if she’d been in their shoes. All in all, they were down seventeen pilots from the original two hundred and twenty-three, and real warp endurance training hadn’t even started yet.

  “Best rollercoaster ever, isn’t it?”

  Lisbeth turned toward the speaker, who had just walked – well, staggered – out of another simulator.

  “I’m getting used to it,” she said. “This time I managed to keep breakfast down.”

  The fact that she’d skipped breakfast that morning had helped a lot, of course.

  “Yeah, I guess I’m getting jaded, too,” Lieutenant Fernando Verdi agreed. The Marine pilot was even more of a newbie than she was; he’d gotten roped into the project from the infantry, and any flying he’d ever done before had been while playing Halo of Duty’s aerial missions. He grinned at her. “Feel up for a second breakfast? I kinda went light on the first one.”

  “Yeah, me too. Let’s go.” Now that it was over she actually felt a little hungry, and her schedule was free until mid-morning.

  A few minutes later, they were scarfing down some ersatz eggs and bacon while enjoying the view from the mess hall. Clear sapphire-alloy windows looked down on the largely-barren planet where Groom Base – informally known as ‘Area 52 2.0’ – was located. Bacteria living in assorted bodies of water generated some oxygen, which made it cheaper to generate basic consumables for the base. The star system’s location at the end of a single warp line deep inside American space made it ideal to build an anonymous, self-sustaining facility. With very few exceptions, everyone who arrived at Star System 3490 was there for the duration. That was one way to ensure word never got out until Project Langley, a.k.a. the Flying Circus, was ready to show the ETs a thing or two.

  You could send emails or vids out, but only after a team of censors and decryption specialists went over every scrap of data to ensure nothing indicating the nature of the posting made it through. And they got the usual infodump of news, mail and gossip from the rest of the country whenever an American ship arrived bringing supplies. Other than that, they were completely cut off. It would be a boring posting without all the training and tests.

  “I looked at your service jacket,” Fernando said after a few minutes of eating in companionable silence.

  Lisbeth nodded. She’d have been surprised if he hadn’t. Everyone checked everyone’s public records and Facettergram profiles the second they lay eyes on each other. She knew, for example, that Fernando Verdi had been born in Memphis-Seven, was forty-three years old, had served in the Corps starting on his third year of Obligatory Service and had seen action on five occasions, earning a number of medals and commendations. He also liked to post cute kitty videos and play full-sensory MMOs in his spare time. With a little effort, she could find out what kind of porn he liked, but generally prying to that level was considered impolite.

  “I mean, I did a little digging,” he went on.

  Her grin turned into a frown. That meant requesting access to her full personnel records, which should have resulted in her being notified someone was snooping around. Living in the Second Information Age meant anybody could take a close look at you, but not anonymously. If you peeped on somebody, your identity was revealed to the one you were peeping on. Turnabout was fair play when it came to personal information. At least, that was the theory. There were ways around it.

  “I was just curious, okay? Not too many O-4s joined this program; we mostly got shuttle pilots. So I asked around, called in a few favors, unofficial-like.”

  “So you know the sordid truth. That I had my first command blown up right from under me,” she said, not fighting to keep the anger and bitterness out of her voice. If he wanted to pick a fight, he’d get one.

  Fernando’s expression didn’t show any contempt or hostility, though. “It would have happened to anyone, Zhang. The threat board was clear when you made your approach to Jasper-Five. Nobody could have seen that coming. And the stuff you pulled off after surviving those mines, well, I think you’ll fit in just fine in the Corps. And you have starship command experience. Guess where that’ll take you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re refitting a whole bunch of assault ships for the Carrier Strike Group, plus a larger vessel, I think a cruiser although that’s still classified, to serve as the flagship. If this takes off, they’ll be building a lot more. And they’ll need people to captain them. You being a former bubblehead and no
w a fighter pilot, that puts you on the fast track to command rank.”

  She had thought about it during her precious spare time, but had dismissed the idea as highly unlikely.

  “The Navy will take over as soon as the program is successful,” she said. And the Navy wasn’t likely to forget her record.

  “Maybe. I think the Corps may get to keep the fighters for a good while. For one, they’re not just good for blowing starships to smithereens. They’re going to be very useful for ground-attack missions, too. Close air support might make a comeback.”

  “We’ll see.”

  The Navy clearly hadn’t wanted anything to do with this program. She could guess the admirals were all asking for more battleships and dreadnoughts while bitching about every penny spent on this ‘boondoggle.’ But if it proved its worth, they’d be falling over themselves to take over.

  None of that mattered though. She’d get to fly, one way or another.

  Assuming she learned how to survive multiple warp exposures per minute. They were starting those next week.

  Sometimes her job sucked.

  Three

  Associated Star Province Doklon, 164 AFC

  Why does the job always suck?

  Heather McClintock knew the answer to that, of course. Her previous assignment had sucked ass, but she’d handled it as best as could be expected. And her reward had been an even suckier job, which she’d handled yet again. And her reward for that was her current mission. The laughing faces of her parents and siblings mocked her during the seeming eternity of warp transition, ridiculing all the choices that had led her here.

  Emergence.

  The USS Narwhal (currently posing as the private freighter Cordero) arrived in the middle of the thick atmosphere of Doklon-Eight, a gas giant in the periphery of the local star system. The ship’s physical speed had been close to zero upon emergence, and its military-grade shields held against the impact, but turbulence made it shake uncomfortably. The winds outside were in excess of four hundred miles an hour, and the Narwhal’s inertial compensators couldn’t quite cancel them out. It was unpleasant but necessary: the massive bulk of Doklon-Eight would mask the energy signature of their jump from enemy sensor systems.