Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series

by C. J. Carella

  Being shaken inside a tin can after nineteen hours in warp was a perfect capper for the three-month long mission. The Narwhal had spent its days traveling from one ley line to another, making an oblique approach towards Imperium space while behaving like the freighter it appeared to be. She’d spent the whole trip surrounded by a team of SOCOM operators, nine-tenths male, two-thirds of whom thought it was their sacred duty to pick her up. Granted, they’d mostly been polite enough to take no for an answer, but the whole thing had grown tedious rather quickly.

  And now, after a final jump from neutral to enemy territory, the real fun was about to begin.

  “Doing a slow orbit around this gas ball,” Captain Douglas announced. They’d emerged on the far side of the planet, keeping the gas giant between the ship and Doklon-Three, their ultimate target. “As soon as we have eyes on the objective, we’ll send out the insertion team and conduct our final approach.”

  Heather gritted her teeth. In less than half an hour, she and the rest of the insertion team would be warp-catapulted towards their final destination, the Satrap’s Office on Doklon-Three. Most infantry warp jumps spanned no more than two light-seconds. This one would cover almost a light-hour. A miniscule distance for a starship, but pushing the limits of survivability for humans protected only by their armored suits.

  All part of the job, she thought as she adjusted the clamshell breast-and-back plates covering her upper torso after checking that the twin power packs supplying her force fields and suit systems were both full. She wasn’t as familiar with combat armor as a Marine or Special Ops trooper, but she’d had a very recent refresher course on Jasper-Five, courtesy of an endless horde of murderous natives. And now she’d be dropping into another hostile system, one populated by well-equipped locals led by actual Starfarers. This time, a moment’s bad luck would result in almost-certain death.

  Assuming she survived the warp drop in the first place, of course.

  After she sealed her helmet, a network of artificial muscles and carbon-nanotube armored fibers slithered out of their housings in the clamshell chest-piece and covered her limbs with a flexible and damage-resistant webbing that allowed her to carry a hundred and twenty pounds of equipment with very little effort on her part. She checked her weapons – a stubby blaster carbine and a pistol, both firing 3mm bullets – and the far more important portable computer, a small armored briefcase containing enough processing power to serve as a battle fleet information center. Everything was in order.

  A short walk through the narrow service corridors led her to the hidden hold where a warp catapult and the rest of the team awaited. Fourteen men and two women, SSEAL – Space, Sea, Air, Land – operators from the US Special Operations Command. Three of the men and both women had the heavy builds indicating extensive muscle-and-bone replacements, enhancements originally developed to allow humans to thrive in heavy-gravity environments but also useful to carry heavy loads and break stuff. Heather had undergone a light version of the procedure, which enabled her to bench press twice her body weight while still looking like a normal human being. The five operators had gone for the full version: they were grotesquely broad-shouldered and thick-limbed, quite capable of wrestling with a gorilla and coming out on top, or rending a normal human limb by limb. More importantly, they could easily carry three hundred pounds of equipment and spare ammo even if their combat suits malfunctioned. One of the women – Petty Officer Faye Deveraux – had her helmet off; her delicate, freckled-skinned face looked absurdly tiny compared to the rest of her body. She caught sight of Heather and gave her a wink before lowering the featureless helm over her head.

  Don’t worry, superspy, the operator sent out via her imp. We’ll take good care of you.

  That’s sweet, Faye, Heather sent back. Just don’t get in my way.

  Funny.

  The rest of the short platoon mostly ignored her. They’d all worked with spooks before, but the two communities didn’t care much for each other, and after rebuffing their advances, Heather had been classified as an ice queen who thought she was too good to fraternize with them. She was fine with that. They were all professionals, and they would all do their jobs to the best of their ability. They didn’t have to be best friends.

  Commander Ben Nalje walked over. The CO of the SSEAL platoon could have just as easily contacted her from the other side of the cargo hold, or anywhere else in the ship, but the physical approach was its own message to the sixteen-man group.

  “Everything’s nominal,” he told her on a private channel. “Ship passives just finished a pre-insertion scan. The visuals are fifty-nine minutes old, but the op-force is right where it’s supposed to be. No enemy starships in the system, just as expected. The next arrival isn’t due for six weeks.”

  “Sounds good,” she said, not sounding very reassured. They both knew this kind of operation could go sideways without warning. The tiniest bit of bad luck could turn months of training and preparation into chaotic and bloody failure. But that was part of the job.

  “We’ve got this,” Nalje added, all but exuding confidence.

  “Prepare for warp insertion,” the Narwhal’s skipper said over the all-hands channel.

  The seventeen men and women stepped onto the circular platform that would catapult them through time and space. The insertion team and their attached CIA officer could have been robots, their features hidden behind gray-black full helmets. Their body language was relaxed as the operators positioned themselves around the platform, weapons held at the ready.

  The countdown began. Heather took a series of breaths calculated to induce the proper state of mind. She closed her eyes in useless reflex; one could not avoid experiencing the reality of warp.

  Transition.

  Her own way of coping was to concentrate on the objective at hand. Heather went over all the data she would need when she came out the other side. As long as she did that, she could ignore the shadowy figures that surrounded her and the disturbing things they whispered to her.

  The Star Province of Doklon was a minor Galactic Imperium domain, a primitive world still in the process of being absorbed and properly colonized. The local species, intelligent tool-using Class Two centauroids, had risen to the equivalent of the Late Bronze Age when the Imperium discovered them. Conquering the planet had followed standard Gal-Imp procedures: the Starfarers had picked a compatible government – in this case, a loose alliance of city-states – and provided it with enough technical aid to take over the world within a few decades. The new ruling classes now served at the pleasure of an appointed System Satrap and sent their children off-world to be educated in the ways of the Imperium, after which they’d come back with more in common with their new overlords than the illiterate masses they would spend centuries uplifting into good proletarian servants. As far as that sort of thing went, the conquest and assimilation process had been rather civilized. The total number of locals murdered, enslaved and otherwise brutalized in the process had been a mere ten percent or so of the total.

  None of that was important to the mission, of course. What made Doklon-Three important was the presence of a Satrap’s Office in the planet’s capital. The administrative center had a full set of imperial systems on-site, their databanks holding exabytes of information the USA badly needed. Contact between the US and the Galactic Imperium had been minimal; the two Starfarer polities did not have a common border, and trade between them had been done through a long chain of middlemen. Most of the information America had about their newest foe was second-hand. This raid aimed to change that.

  Kill you kill you killyoukillyoukillyou…

  The gleeful voice echoing through her head sounded just like Uncle Bert. He’d never said those words to her in real life, but there’d always been something off about him, and her childhood suspicions had been confirmed after his suicide and the ensuing discovery of vast volumes of snuff porn he’d hid inside his implant for all those years – some of which he’d produced himself. Here in warp space,
his ghostly presence promised her the same horrible fate of his other victims.

  The job at hand. That was what mattered. She reviewed the data, ignoring the mad gibbering of the dead serial killer.

  Doklon Province was on a far corner of the Imperium, and its primitive civilization and remoteness didn’t warrant much in the way of defenses. The only modern facilities were in the Satrap’s Office, and they were guarded by a squad of Imperium Legionnaires. There were also two regiments of sepoy infantry nearby, locals armed with laser rifles and light personal force fields. The success of the mission depended on the local troops’ reaction time. The information they’d purchased in preparation for the raid suggested they’d be sluggish enough. If their intelligence was wrong, things would get hairy.

  Emergence.

  Seventeen men and women made the jump. Sixteen arrived.

  “Fuck. Jürgen didn’t make it.”

  Heather hadn’t seen much of Spacer First Class Karl Jürgen during the trip. The taciturn operator had been a quiet professional who’d done his job as the platoon’s heavy machine gunner as well as could be expected. And now he was lost, along with one of the platoon’s three heavy weapons.

  No time to ponder how that loss would affect the mission, let alone mourn the dead. The team had arrived in two groups. Heather and the eight operators on First Squad had emerged in a formal dining room: she recognized the layout from the virtual simulations they’d all trained in. The main difference between the training holograms and reality was that this room’s furniture and elaborate decorations had been destroyed by the warp emergence.

  Second Squad’s landing point had been right inside the building’s communications room, which contained the planet’s only store of quantum-entangled transmission particles. QE telegrams were the only way to send instant messages across interstellar distances. The warp intrusion destroyed everything in the room and killed the night crew manning the QE-telegraph. That had been the most important part of the mission, since an Imperium fleet was stationed only forty warp-minutes away from the system. Now there was no way the locals could alert anybody of the raid until the next scheduled starship visit, six weeks away.

  “Move out.”

  First Squad headed out towards the database core while Second Squad secured the Legionnaires’ barracks and dealt with any on-duty sentries. Alarms were blaring out: their keening was beyond a human’s hearing range, but their suit systems translated them into something they could perceive, just to add to the sense of urgency everyone already felt. Heather followed the team into a wide carpeted hallway, much wider than they would be in a human building, its walls decorated with elaborate native tapestries depicting heroic historical events. The raid had been timed to strike late at night, at the local equivalent of three a.m., when diurnal metabolisms were at their lowest ebb. They were halfway towards their objective before they ran into the first local.

  The Doklon native wore a servant’s livery, a simple purple-white-tunic with six sleeves or trousers. It came from around a corner, froze at the shocking sight, and was cut down by Petty Officer Deveraux. Her carbine fired a burst of subsonic rounds that struck the servant with a trio of barely-audible pops. Despite being almost as large as a Terran horse, the centaur dropped like a rock under the impacts: the 3mm slugs delivered a fast-acting neurotoxin, guaranteed to kill any Class Two species in the space of a heartbeat. The squad moved on while the unfortunate Doklonite kicked feebly a couple of times before expiring.

  The Core Room was around the corner. The point man caught a couple more natives rushing towards its entrance and turned their graceful gallop into a crashing mess of tangling limbs with two center-of-mass bursts of poisoned bullets. Heather watched the killings from a vid-feed up on one corner of her field of vision as she moved up. She turned the corner in time to see one of the operators kicking down the door.

  A lone Imperium civilian was inside, a member of the Taro species, bulky purple-skinned bipeds with a forest of twisting sensory cilia on their heads filling the role of ears, eyes and nose. The alien was sitting by his desk, apparently doing nothing, but Heather’s imp caught a stream of information emanating from his cyber-implants, sending out instructions to wipe out the data cores in the room. He caught two bullets in the chest and one in the head for his troubles, but the systems were already self-destructing.

  Unfortunately for the brave Imperial, Heather had come prepared for such an eventuality.

  Even as the systems running the data cores began to comply with the now-dead ET’s final command, Heather used her implants to hack into them. Access codes that had taken years and millions of dollars to acquire stopped the wipeout orders in their tracks before they could erase more than a fraction of a percent of the priceless data.

  An Imperium Data Core contained all the information needed to run a major settlement and provide it with the equivalent of Earth’s old Internet, as well as the contents of public libraries, databases and government files. Even more importantly, it held the confidential files of assorted government agencies. Not everything, only what the local Satrap would need to know, but that was more than enough to justify risking a special operations starship, a platoon of SSEALs and a CIA agent.

  Heather pushed the corpse off the desk and placed the portable device on it, letting it do the rest of the work. Reams of data flowed into the little case at a transmission speed of hundreds of petabytes per second. The download would take three minutes.

  And from the volume of energy fire coming from outside, that might be more time than they had.

  She peeked through the visual feed of one of Second Squad’s operators, Petty Officer Hernandez, who was busily laying down fire with his Squad Automatic Weapon. The SAW spat short bursts of 4mm plasma-tipped bullets that chewed through force fields and the flesh and bone beneath them: a squad of centaurs in deep blue uniforms went down, their bodies torn apart by multiple hits. There were more aliens behind the fallen, but they quickly realized that rushing forward was suicide. They leaped behind cover and began to fire their lasers.

  The sepoy weapons fired single laser pulses and could not unleash bursts or continuous beams. They were more than deadly enough to suppress any rebels on the primitive planet, but the SSEALs’ personal force fields could handle multiple hits without going down; their return fire tore through walls and vehicles and found the shooters hunkering down behind them.

  The Imperium hadn’t wanted to equip the local levies too well, just in case they decided to turn their weapons on their new masters. The Doklon Imperial Levies were meant to be at a distinct disadvantage against Starfarer enemies. Which was exactly what they were facing.

  The Imperial Legionnaires protecting the Satrap’s Office had been asleep in their quarters when the raid began. Those soldiers would have been a much greater threat if they’d been ready to fight, but Second Squad had murdered them in their beds. All that remained were lightly armed and shielded natives.

  Of course, quantity always beat quality if the quantity was large enough. Heather had learned that the hard way on Jasper-Five. A scan of the local military communication grid confirmed her worst fears: the two regiments stationed nearby were being hastily readied for action and moving with commendable speed. It wasn’t common for garrison troops to be in such a hurry to stick their proverbial dicks into a not-so-proverbial meat grinder, but the Levies were recruited from the planet’s most warlike societies, young males whose entire sense of self-worth was based on showing courage in the face of death. Combine that courage with even second-rate equipment, not to mention the heavy weapons held at the battalion level, and the SSEAL Team’s life expectancy could be measured in minutes – along with one jumped-up CIA intelligence officer.

  Heather strapped the now-priceless portable computer to her chest place and checked the charge on her carbine. She was supposed to leave the fighting to the operators, but if the damn evac didn’t show up in time, she might have to join in the fun, for whatever that was worth.


  “First Squad, move to the courtyard,” Commander Najle ordered, using the slightly-too-calm tone of a professional facing a near-desperate situation. “Second Squad, fall back into the building. It’s considered sacred by the local Eets, so they probably won’t blow it up. Move it!”

  They ran through the deserted corridors as the staccato reports of supersonic plasma-tipped bullets and the whine-crackle of lasers thundered not too far away. The Satrap’s Office building had been originally built as a temple complex for the local priest-kings, and it had a large central courtyard once used for ceremonial purposes. Fortunately for the SSEAL team, it was also just about the right size to accommodate an orbital shuttle. Warp drops were one-way trips; their ticket out would have to depend on conventional means.

  Doklon-Three didn’t have planetary defenses, being a backwater in a peaceful sector of the Imperium, but some of the sepoys’ heavy weapons could take down a shuttle. Not easily – their targeting systems were deliberately primitive – but that wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to take chances on. Fortunately, the USS Narwhal was prepared to deal with the problem.

  Just as Heather reached the courtyard, the dark magenta night skies of Doklon-Three glowed with dozens of new ‘stars’ as a barrage of missiles from the covert ops starship entered the planet’s atmosphere. The sight made her shudder: the hapless people of Earth must have seen something very similar during First Contact, when death rained from the heavens.

  The effect of this orbital bombing run was far less extreme. Except for those actually killed by it, she supposed.

  The missiles targeted the signature emissions of any heavy weapon emplacements capable of threatening the shuttle. Since the ship didn’t have the time or equipment to conduct detailed scans, at least some of the targets were civilian communication systems. Heather tracked the fire mission with her imp: twenty-three installations and vehicles were struck; the intelligence estimate was that there were no more than fifteen weapon systems capable of threatening an orbital shuttle. Fifty missiles struck, each delivering enough explosive force to turn a city block into a flaming crater. The ground shook under her feet; some of those explosions had been close. She tried not to think of the hundreds, likely thousands of soldiers and luckless civilians consumed by the expanding fireballs turning the night into hellish day.