Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series

by C. J. Carella

  “Miss! Dude, stop jumping around!”

  “Dude, there’s a glowing crater where we just were,” Jessie said. “I stop dancing, we die.”

  “Shut up and do your jobs,” Zimmer told them; his sense of humor had evaporated not too long after the Butcher and Bolt did. They shut up.

  The gunner had been too focused to make her shot to notice the Dragon was shooting back, but Zimmer had watched the twisting singularity beam as it missed his tank by less than a foot, close enough to make its shields flare up and lose ten percent of their power. The Fimbul Winter went turret-down and shifted positions; Zimmer kept an eye on the fighting while tapping into other units’ sensors.

  Three Bufords had burned a hole in one of the Dragon’s sides by switching on continuous beam and staying still to remain on target, turning the 90mm guns into giant blowtorches. That had been ballsy, and had cost them: two of the tanks had been shredded, one by a main gun blast that’d left behind nothing recognizable as a vehicle, the other by a railgun burst that didn’t do much visible damage. The Buford simply stopped moving; a thin column of smoke rose from its turret, which meant one or more of the railgun rounds had gotten through and bounced all over the interior, pureeing everyone inside. The insides of that tank had been turned into what the heartless called a ‘hose and bucket job.’ Zimmer didn’t know which of those ways to go was worse.

  “Hit! Got you, motherfucker!” Mira shouted.

  “Dragon Slayer! Good going, Valkyrie!”

  The shot had penetrated right above the alien tank’s main gun pod. The Dragon stopped moving and shooting even as more American soldiers and vehicles engaged its still form.

  “Jessie, back us up a bit,” Zimmer said. He had a bad feeling about this, for all that they were nearly two klicks away from the target.

  “Going hull-down, aye.”

  “Make that turret-d…”

  The Dragon blew up in an apocalyptic, multihued light explosion that indicated a catastrophic gluon plant failure like the one that had consumed the mine-destroyed field genny. The difference between the two power plants was at least an order of magnitude, however. The conflagration killed everyone caught in the open for a good mile in every direction. One LAV had its turret ripped clean off and a Buford was tossed into the air like a child’s toy, smashing into a hillside with a sickening sound like a giant beer can being crushed. Metal shrapnel moving faster than a railgun round slashed at everything around the dying super-tank. Viper and human alike were scythed down. A heavy fragment struck the Fimbul Winter and made it ring like a giant gong.

  “Frontal and side shields are down!” Jessie cried out. They hadn’t moved fast enough.

  The force fields weren’t just down, they were out. Overloaded and drained; the diagnostic system estimated it would take ten minutes to come back online. Jessie maneuvered the tank behind some cover. Until the shields regenerated they were hideously exposed. The dash for safety inadvertently put them in view of an enemy firing position five miles away. The Viper gunners tracked the vehicle and lined up a perfect shot.

  A hypervelocity missile quartet caught the Fimbul Winter on the side.

  The last tank of the 101st MEU shuddered under the impacts; an instant later it dropped to the ground and fell still, thin pillars of smoke rising from the two spots where its hull had been pierced.

  A Marine on a nearby hill saw the sight of the unmoving tank and shook his head.

  “That’s a hose and bucket job,” he said. “God have mercy on their souls.”

  Sixteen

  Romulus, Wolf 1061 System, 165 AFC

  The shipyards around Romulus were as busy as Lisbeth Zhang had ever seen them.

  The planet (formerly known as Wolf 1061c) was Earth’s oldest colony, a rocky ‘super-Earth’ with a marginally-useful atmosphere, a Class Two biosphere whose largest life forms had been shockingly similar to Earth’s pre-Cambrian trilobites, and a local gravity slightly below 1.5 G-standard. Its close location to Sol System (a mere twenty-minute warp transition away) had made it the focus of intensive colonization and terraforming efforts early on. The system now held three hundred million people, mostly clustered in Romulus and the system’s asteroid belt, making it the second-largest extra-terrestrial population center in the US, as well as its fifty-ninth state. Its economy was based on ship-building, both civilian and military, and as a major trading point, with six warp-lines leading to other American star systems.

  At the moment, just about everyone who could operate a fabber, or swing a hammer for that matter, was working on warships, either building them from scratch or refitting them. Lisbeth could see the outlines of the Zeus, the largest American dreadnought ever built, an impressive-looking ship that could actually hold her own in a slugfest with enemy vessels in her weight class even without warp shields. It still wasn’t ready, however, and would not be accompanying CSG-1 and the rest of Task Force 43 as it headed towards Parthenon System. The ragtag formation had taken longer than expected to assemble and prepare for combat. Some yard remfies had been loath to divert their construction efforts into outfitting existing ships, and they’d dragged their feet until the dreaded GAO Inspector General herself had made an appearance. Shortly thereafter, two admirals and a dozen civilian executives had lost their jobs (two of them had been arrested) and things had moved a lot faster.

  They were due to leave in four hours. Fifty more minutes in warp space, and the fighters would endure their baptism by fire.

  Lisbeth felt Fernando’s presence behind her as he entered the Nimitz’s largely-deserted viewing room. She hadn’t heard him, but she knew who it was, just as she knew where all sixty-three fighter pilots aboard the carrier were, as well as the ten warp navigators in the crew and a couple of older naval chiefs who’d done the warp-dance enough times for their psyches to become accessible to her and others like her.

  She didn’t know what to call her kind. Something with the word ‘warp’ in it, of course. Clearly navigators had undergone a similar transformation a good while ago, but they’d been very good at not advertising their otherness, and the brass hadn’t seemed too inclined to pry. She hoped things would work out the same for the… What? Warp Adepts, maybe.

  “Better than Warp Demons,” Fernando said, replying to her unspoken thought out loud.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey yourself.”

  “Looks like we’ll get there in the proverbial nick of time.”

  “Hopefully.” The reports from the last courier ship hadn’t been comforting. Parthenon-Three’s PDBs were being taken down one by one; the planet would be rendered defenseless and depopulated in no more than three, maybe four days. She’d heard that Admiral Givens had threatened to launch an attack without the promised reinforcements, and had only relented when the new timetable had been confirmed. They would arrive in Parthenon and go to war within minutes of their emergence. There was no time to lose.

  “We should get some rest,” Fernando said.

  “Too wired to sleep.”

  She’d also found herself needing less sleep of late, without suffering any adverse side effects. At least, none that affected her performance, and that was all that mattered at the moment.

  “No sleep for me,” she said. “But this could be the last time we are together.”

  “In this reality, at least. But yes, let’s make it count.”

  They headed towards their quarters, hand in hand.

  Parthenon-Three, 165 AFC

  Davistown was burning.

  Morris Jensen absently noticed the general store’s collapse in a cloud of smoke while he scanned Main Street for targets. The Marines were retreating by echelon, half of them moving while the other half covered them. The Vipers were still too far for Morris to engage; for the time being he and the rest of the platoon were simple spectators. And the show sucked.

  Remembrance Park was on top of a shallow hill overlooking Davistown, lined with Earth trees and decorated with stone and metal plaques listing the tow
n’s dead sons and daughters, the honored fallen of a dozen conflicts from the past seventy years. Several of the monuments had been blasted into rubble. The Viper’s heavy weapons were hitting their positions with enough energy ordnance to punch through the area shields every other minute or so. An Army fire team had been on the receiving end of a graviton blast. The lone survivor had lost an arm and leg; everyone else had been turned into something that looked like a modern art sculpture made of metal, plastic and flesh.

  Above and behind Morris’ position, a 70mm mortar team emptied its five-shot clip in rapid succession; the light weapon lacked the authority of the Marines’ hundred-mike-mikes but they would kill aliens well enough. Somewhere near the town, a gap in the enemy field coverage had provided a target of opportunity: plasma explosions went off over the heads of a handful of aliens caught in the open. A few ETs went down. Not enough. Never enough.

  Morris wanted to hope they could halt the Vipers here, but he couldn’t delude himself. Might as well hope for Santa and the Easter Bunny to show up, wielding light sabers and kryptonite. You couldn’t feel any hope when you had access to a battle map and could see what the situation was.

  The enemy forces were steadily pushing forward, undeterred despite taking over triple the casualties they inflicted. Only the presence of Copperhead Rapids to the south and the sheer walls of Mount Kenner to the north kept the enemy from outflanking a lone platoon of the 101st and a few Army units supporting it. Like all towns on Parthenon-Three, Davistown had been planned with defense in mind, and the aliens had been forced to make head-on attacks against prepared positions to gain their objectives. But you could crack the toughest nut if you didn’t mind paying the cost.

  Morris switched screens to check the casualty rosters. There were too many yellow, red and black icons there. Hundreds, thousands. Now that there was no room to maneuver, the casualty exchange rate was a lot less one-sided, and the enemy had troops to spare.

  Two more Army divisions were digging in at the other end of the valley, blocking the direct path to the Planetary Defense Base. The Marines were buying them time to deploy with their lives; one company was somewhere to the south, conducting hit-and-run attacks on the flanks of the advance, but it hadn’t made a difference. The original defense plans had assumed it would take a month for the Vipers to reach the end of the valley. The aliens had made it in a week, thanks to the loss of PDB-12 and the fact they had brought more troops than anyone had thought possible. Aliens didn’t have enough warp-rated people to transport entire armies, but that didn’t matter if you brought millions of fertilized embryos, accepting the deaths of nine-tenths of them during transport, and fast-grew the survivors in-system.

  A quartet of Marine LAVs darted towards the hill, their turrets firing to their rear. Morris spotted the four-legged shapes of half a dozen Hellcats running between the armored personnel carriers. And further back, he saw the looming pyramidal shape of a Viper land battleship. More than enough to crush all resistance if they couldn’t take it down quickly.

  The combined fury of several Marine and Army artillery batteries engaged the Dragon, unleashing sheaves of shield-piercing missiles in staggered waves. Air-defense lasers caught half of them in mid-flight, but the rest slammed into its force fields and, eventually, armor. The giant vehicle disappeared behind multiple explosions. When the smoke drifted off, its pyramidal shape was missing several large chunks, and the massive fighting vehicle had stopped moving or fighting. Call that a hard kill, and that was the last super-heavy tank the Vipers had brought to the game.

  They still had plenty of mobile guns and missile launchers, though. They raked Remembrance Hill with dozens of heavy weapons, from hypervelocity missiles to grav guns. The hill began to come apart, some impacts carving out divots of earth and stone wide enough to fit an assault shuttle. The ground shook under Morris’ feet as he fired at the lead Viper infantrymen, moving with the abrupt motions of striking reptiles as they entered Main Street. They’d brought an area force field, but each shot that hit the invisible force bubble would weaken it and hopefully allow a heavy gun or missile to do some actual damage. The LAVs and Hellcats were adding their fire as well.

  Not a single building stood in the town’s Green. The churches and City Hall were smoking craters or flaming husks. No humans remained there.

  The Vipers kept coming.

  “I think it’s time to bug out, Gator,” Nikolic said.

  “They’ll tell us when it’s time to go,” Morris said while he sent five plasma grenades downrange. Half a dozen Vipers who’d gotten ahead of their shields went down; only four got up again and scurried for cover. Counter-fire made the militiamen duck into their fighting holes and keep their heads down for a bit.

  “What’s the point in running when all you’ll get is a field court martial and a bullet in the head? Or end up in the city and get burned to a crisp?”

  “I suppose no point at all,” Lemon admitted. “Unless we head out into the wild. Hunker down somewhere, wait out the war.”

  “If the Vipers win, they’ll hunt us down. If we win, the Army’ll find out we deserted and it’s back to the whole court martial thing. You were a Marine, Lemon. What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

  “Dunno.” Nikolic was quiet for a second. Enemy shots were going overhead, but neither man paid attention to them. “I was never yellow, back then. They didn’t call me Lemon ’cause I was yellow.”

  “I know,” Morris said, hoping Nikolic would shut up. Hell of a conversation to have with the enemy less than a klick away and rolling closer by the second.

  “I’m just tired, Gator. Never been this tired before.”

  “I know. Just keep it together, all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  Lemon started shooting again, pausing only to switch mags. Morris erased the private channel conversation. That kind of record was never really erased, not unless you knew more tricks than he did, but it would take a lot of court orders to unearth it. Hopefully none of Lemon’s idle talk would see the light of day. By rights he should report Nikolic for plotting to desert, but he wasn’t about to rat on his friend. Not for a momentary lapse, at least.

  Something made the air shake a few feet over his head. The trench force field glowed for a second before it shut down. Morris was showered with debris from behind. He looked back and saw that a couple of the few remaining trees had been turned into kindling by the near miss. A hundred inches lower and he and Gator and everyone in between would have become ground chuck.

  As Morris rushed to replace the portable genny’s power pack, he reflected that Lemon’s defeatism mattered about as much as last season’s Little League scores. Cowards and heroes, the just and the unjust, they were all probably going to die horribly before the day was over.

  Sixth Fleet, Parthenon System, 165 AFC

  “Warp emergence in fifty-three minutes. Contacts identified as Task Force 43.”

  “About goddam time,” Admiral Givens said.

  She had spent much of her time reading the just-declassified briefings on the new ship classes and trying to figure out what to do with them. Since enemy sensors would identify all of them except the Nimitz as Marine Assault Ships, her plan was to place them among those vessels, which were arranged to provide point defense, the only thing they were good for, now that their troop holds were empty. The Vipers tended to ignore the troop transports as long as there were higher-value targets around. Hopefully the carrier vessels would be similarly dismissed. The Nimitz would also be mixed in among the transports; her lack of offensive capabilities would probably make her another low-priority target.

  Rear Admiral Burke, the commander of the first-ever space carrier fleet, had drafted a detailed set of proposals on how to use his ships and fighters. She remembered the man as a solid officer, a pre-Contact Wet Navy man who had made the transition to space relatively well, although his career had stalled after being passed over by newer generations of spacer-born commanders. If he thought there was something
to this Star Wars nonsense, Givens would give him plenty of leeway and concentrate on the ships she was used to, the ones that would trade broadsides with the enemy at ninety thousand miles, the way it'd been done for millions of years.

  Of course, the chances of a positive outcome for Sixth Fleet in a conventional battle were less than twenty percent. Only if they did everything just right and the Vipers made every possible mistake could she hope to eke out something that could be called a victory, and even then there wouldn’t be enough hale ships to call her formation a fleet. Maybe Burke’s wonder carriers would save the day, but she doubted that.

  Not that there was any choice but to meet the enemy in battle.

  * * *

  All off-duty personnel usually went under sedation for warp jumps lasting more than thirty minutes, but none of the pilots of Carrier Space Wing One bothered. Warp transit no longer disturbed them.

  Lisbeth Zhang watched a flow of impossible geometries with something other than her eyes as the USS Nimitz navigated through them. Somewhere ‘ahead’ lay their destination, if such terms had any meaning in a place where distance didn’t exist, a place that couldn’t be sensed or even conceived by a normal human mind. In some ways, warp transit was a form of time travel. They currently existed in the moment before universal expansion began, when all points were superimposed and all matter and energy in the universe were more closely-knit together than the deepest core of an atom. But even that was nothing but a crude metaphor, because time inside warp was as irrelevant as space. Neither physicists nor mystics had the vocabulary to describe it, let alone comprehend it.