Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series

by C. J. Carella

  The steady march brought back comforting memories of PT, back when he’d been young, half-crazy and mean as a snake, before the first couple years of Ob-Serv and the much harder boot camp knocked most of the stupid out of him. Eventually, the lessons had begun to sink in: the people marching with him would have his back when the chips were down. He hadn’t believed any of it at first; he’d figured it’d be every man for himself as soon as shit got real. But he’d learned better, learned it well enough that on his first firefight as a Marine, he’d done his job and expected everyone else to do theirs. And most of them had; the few exceptions were punished for it, officially and unofficially. Knowing you could depend on your buddies was worth all the other bullshit you had to go through.

  They came to a stop in front of a seemingly ordinary hill, which stopped being so ordinary when a section of it rose up and revealed an access corridor, narrower than the one they’d used to get there, but wide enough to fit four or five humans abreast. A squad from Second Platoon went first, then the Skipper and the headquarters section, and then Third Platoon, led by the assault section. Russell knew why. The assaultmen didn’t just fire missiles, they were trained in demo, and they might be out of ammo and almost out of juice, but he’d bet his life they’d saved up some explosive ordnance, just in case.

  The aliens might be super-advanced sons of bitches, but when it came down to blowing shit up there was nobody better than a pissed-off Marine.

  * * *

  “I’m in the system. Still sorting through the Scholar’s files to find out his plan,” Heather lied to the Seeker. “I should have something for you within the hour.”

  “Then get to it,” was the Snowflake’s curt reply. Heather caught a flash of sensory input: a Lamprey writhing in agony while half a dozen bizarre-looking creatures did something to it. She wasn’t sure if they were eating the unfortunate alien or having sex with it, but from the brief glimpse she got, it was probably a combination of both.

  I so didn’t want to see that.

  And she shouldn’t have seen it. That had been extrasensory perception. Clairvoyance. Tachyon waves. Magic, for lack of a better term.

  “Do not bother me again until you have something concrete to offer,” the Seeker said before breaking the connection. He was clearly having too much fun to focus on anything else. You’d think someone who could literally be in multiple places at once could devote one of his personas to watching her work, but delaying gratification seemed to have become a lost art among the Snowflakes.

  Peter and his Marines were moving through the maze of access tunnels beneath the huge park that had served as both prison and gladiatorial arena. The Tah-Leen had no idea their living toys had escaped their fifty square-kilometer cell. They were too busy finishing off the Lampreys now that their zombie drones had all been destroyed. Heather had made sure the automatic sensors in the simulated battlefield weren’t raising the alarm. She’d reached their control panels via her tachyon interface and used the Seeker’s own security codes to take them over. For the time being, any Tah-Leen spying on the American troops would be treated to a loop of them having dinner, repeated every forty minutes or so.

  The subterfuge wouldn’t last very long. Fooling the sensors in the playground or the mostly-abandoned sectors the Marines were using to escape was relatively easy, but the moment they came close to the Tah-Leen’s quarters, active scanners would detect their presence, and those systems couldn’t be controlled at her access level.

  Heather had to give herself full sysadmin privileges. She just couldn’t see a way to do it.

  To reach the Master Conduit that ran all vital systems in the Tah-Leen habitat, you needed a security key, something roughly equivalent to pre-Contact usernames and passwords. Normal Starfarer keys were based on biometric IDs, using everything from DNA to brain waves to identify authorized users. There were ways around those defenses, and Heather had mastered most of them. Xanadu’s version was something completely different, however.

  Tah-Leen identification codes couldn’t use biometrics, since the Snowflakes wore bodies like other species wore clothes. The aliens had developed technologies that could detect and analyze consciousness itself: what materialists would call the mind and the more mystically-inclined the soul. The Snowflakes believed that consciousness used the brain as a receiver of sorts but could exist independently from it, and even share multiple brains at once. And, unlike mere brain scans or other biological markers, consciousness couldn’t be counterfeited.

  Heather soon realized that those consciousness markers were what her CIA benefactors had dubbed ‘tachyon particles.’ The Tah-Leen had learned to use t-wave signatures like a psychic version of fingerprints, but unlike the US, the aliens hadn’t developed any other technologies based on them. She suspected their inability to access warp space had something to do with it. In any case, her new super-implants wouldn’t help her gain access to the Master Conduit; those scanners were the one system that could detect her, as a matter of fact. Getting through was going to require some good old-fashioned hacking.

  There were only four individuals with access to the Master Conduit: the Hierophant, the Priestess, the Seeker, and a fourth Snowflake known simply as the Monitor. The Monitor didn’t just have access to the Conduit; it ran the whole thing, the only Tah-Leen with full access to everything from life support to the single surviving energy cannon that defended the entire system from attack.

  Heather rifled through Xanadu’s archives, looking for information on the mysterious system administrator. From the looks of it, the Monitor didn’t have a leadership rank, even though it literally held the power of life and death over everyone inside the habitat. Its status wasn’t so much a secret as something the other Tah-Leen didn’t talk about very much, almost as if they were ashamed of it. After a few precious minutes of stealthy data-sorting, she found her answer.

  The Monitor was a slave.

  Take a Tah-Leen. Strip its consciousness from the things that make it an individual with volition or even self-awareness. Strap the mostly-mindless construct to your habitat, and use its brain as the Conduit’s sysadmin. That’s what the Snowflakes had done. The poor bastard was a biological computer, granted full access to everything because it could not deviate from its basic programming, which could be summarized as ‘observe, report and, when necessary, deal with any threats.’ The moment the alarm was raised, the Monitor would take action. There were Executioner devices located all over the inhabited sections of the station, smaller than the ones they had used on the Marines and Lampreys during the first game, but just as effective. One command, and every human in the habitat was as good as dead.

  If Heather tried to reach the Master Conduit, she’d be immediately identified as an unauthorized user. At which point her life expectancy could be measured in nanoseconds. The enslaved alien could also be used to take over the habitat, however. Danger and opportunity rolled into one. If she could reach the Monitor, she might be able to trick it into granting her access. She might even figure out how to reprogram it.

  She needed help, though, and she only knew of one person with experience in communicating with alien minds.

  * * *

  Time to change her mind. Literally.

  Lisbeth Zhang lost all sense of time as she tried to apply the dead alien’s lessons.

  Drawing power from warp space was theoretically possible, but creating an aperture consumed more energy than it could possibly generate, and the extraction process was dangerous and unreliable. Sort of like trying to power an electrical vehicle by having it struck by lightning. Using one’s mind to do so was the stuff of superhero and fantasy flicks, not physics. And yet the Pathfinders had done exactly that, and the Marauders had used their dead bodies to do the same. It could be done. The only problem was that only a Fifth Circle Master of the Starless Path could do it, and she was master of no damn circles at all.

  Her teacher had shown her a way to overcome that little shortcoming. All she had to do was rew
ire her synapses, taking entire gray matter clusters and forging new connections between them. All humans did that to some degree, but those changes usually took years, not minutes or seconds. The metabolic cost was extreme; the long-term consequences would be permanent and irreparable. So far, her body was wearing out faster than she was altering her brain.

  Somebody who was as smart as she thought she was would have quit already. Maybe becoming a Devil Dog had drastically reduced her IQ. Or maybe her damn stubbornness had finally gotten her somewhere from which there was no coming back. FUBAR or not, she wasn’t going to stop now.

  She pushed her mind with all she had left, and her body finally quit on her.

  Her medical implants came into action when her heart stopped. If she’d still been in the Navy, nothing would have saved her, but Marines carried combat implants designed to keep you going even in the midst of multiple organ failures, if only for long enough to pull a trigger a few more times, or turn a dead man’s ten seconds into a full minute. Electrical shocks kick-started her heart as drugs were released into her bloodstream. Lisbeth’s limp body convulsed once, twice, then fell still again for several moments. Her status icon went from red to black – and then started blinking red again. She came back from the dead, drawing a desperate breath in as she sat up, eyes wide. A few seconds went by, marked only by her labored breathing.

  Finally, she giggled. Coming from her parched lips, her laughter sounded like a harsh cackling, or even a death rattle.

  It only hurts when I laugh, she thought, and giggled-cackled again.

  Her body was tingling all over. Her head was spinning as she saw and understood a whole gaggle of new things. She felt a trickle of energy of unknown origin passing through her and grounding itself on the Corpse-Ship. Systems came to life. One of them was the Mind-Killer. It was a weapon designed to destroy those who couldn’t withstand warp space. A perfect way to get rid of the Snowflakes, in other words. She laughed like the madwoman she’d become.

  “Lisbeth.”

  An imp call? No, she couldn’t take calls anymore. She was incommunicado; the Scholar had seen to it. The word bounced around inside her head. Incommunicado. Never used it in a sentence before. Probably never use it again. Or the words ‘and’ and ‘the’ for that matter. Where she’d been before her implants brought her back, there were no words. She cackled like the Wicked Witch she had become.

  “Lisbeth!”

  “Busy,” she said. “No rest for the wicked. Wicket. Sticky wicket. Stinky wicket. Wicked stinky.”

  “Snap out of it, Major Zhang!”

  The lessons she’d learned during the abbreviated Marine officer’s course had sunk in enough to bring her back to her senses, at least for a little while. Lisbeth found herself inside the shared illusion that Heather had used to reach her, a few hours and a lifetime ago. The spy was back in her armchair; she looked shocked when she saw Lisbeth.

  “You look…” Heather said.

  “Like death warmed over? Like shit?”

  “I was going to say ‘like I feel’ but I don’t think that’s fair to you. Whatever you’re going through is worse.”

  Lisbeth giggled. “It’s not so bad. Just finished beating my brain into the right shape.”

  She felt… weird. Things that weren’t funny made her want to laugh. Everything seemed… lighter, less important. As if she was living in a simulation, a game, and nothing really mattered all that much. Lisbeth wondered if that was how the Snowflakes felt. That would make them insane and not really responsible for their actions. She would kill them all anyway. After all, she was probably insane and not responsible for her actions, either. She giggled again.

  “I hate to ask you for help, Major,” Heather said, maybe hoping using her rank again would help keep Lisbeth steady. Didn’t work. “But we’re running out of time. I found the control center for the entire habitat. A Tah-Leen is in charge of the whole thing. It’s been lobotomized, sort of. But if we can reach it and…”

  “Sure,” Lisbeth interrupted her. “No problem. I can handle that.”

  She plucked the information right out of Heather’s mind, not noticing her friend’s face contorted in sudden pain. Lisbeth finally had a target, the mind-killer weapon, and a brain that was ready to use it.

  The Monitor was as sad as the dead Pathfinder. Maybe even sadder, and worse still, it had no idea why it felt that way. Putting it out of its misery felt like an act of kindness.

  “Done.”

  “Done with what?” Heather asked.

  Why does she look so worried? Lisbeth wondered.

  “Done with the Monitor. Done-zo. It’s dead. Dead-o. Killed it like a mad dog. It’s pushing up daisies. Searched and Destroyed, yessir. First to fight. Oorah.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Oh shit indeedio. No, the Pathfinder said that to me. Why ‘oh, shit?’”

  “I didn’t want you to kill it! You just destroyed the system administrator of this entire habitat!”

  That got through to Lisbeth even in her current semi-insane state.

  “Oh, shit.”

  * * *

  The lights flickered. They flickered everywhere, but Fromm didn’t know that yet. He still figured it was bad news. Redundant systems were supposed to make that sort of thing impossible in a properly-maintained space facility. Any malfunction meant trouble, the kind that could kill you.

  Charlie Company was making its way towards the small inhabited section of the gargantuan space station. Heather had informed him that the Tah-Leen numbered less than a hundred individuals, although each of them controlled as many as several dozen bodies. For all that, there were too few of them to occupy more than a tiny fraction of the massive structure. Most of the aliens were gathered in a relatively contained area, along with however many Lampreys were still alive. From what Heather had said, there wouldn’t be many of the latter. Even as they sent the zombie drones after his company, the Snowflakes had been busily torturing the remaining Lampreys to death.

  The Tah-Leen were fairly close to the Brunhild, where the rest of their human ‘guests’ had retired for the night. The plan was to take the aliens out before they knew what was happening. It assumed that a pack of Marines armed with improvised melee weapons could overpower aliens equipped with technology that put normal Starfarers to shame. But he was willing to give it a go. Heather was inside their system and she had a few cards up her sleeve.

  If that flickering had happened all over the habitat, they’d just lost the element of surprise.

  Heather called him a few moments later and confirmed his fears.

  “Just had a hiccup,” she said. “The Tah-Leen know something is going on.”

  “What’s the plan?”

  “Keep following the route I sent you. I’m going to try and clear the way for you, and keep the Snowflakes too busy to hurt anybody. I may hit some snags along the way, though.”

  Fromm wondered how many casualties those ‘snags’ would inflict on his command, but didn’t bring it up. Everybody was doing what they could.

  “Be careful,” he told her.

  “I will. June’s running interception for me, and Zhang’s gone on a killing spree. If everything goes well, you guys won’t have anything to do by the time you get here.”

  “Wouldn’t mind that one bit.”

  “Not making any promises, though.”

  “No worries. See you soon.”

  He could tell she wanted to scold him for making promises he might not live to keep.

  “Okay, Peter,” she said instead “See you soon.”

  Fourteen

  The Hierophant was planning the next stage of the games when the lights went out.

  All that was left of Syndic Boosha was a collection of internal organs, neatly organized on a metal table covered with the former leader’s uncured hide. A cleaning robot vacuumed off the last unseemly droplets of vascular fluid that had spilled out during the procedure. The Lhan Arkh had lived through most of disassembling process, u
ntil the Hierophant grew bored and put an end to the miserable creature’s existence.

  Lampreys weren’t very satisfying victims. Their perpetually grim outlook on life was to blame; the Lhan Arkh saw existence itself as a series of struggles between competing memes and species, culminating in temporary victories that soon devolved into new struggles. Beneath that cyclical worldview was a dejected certainty that there was no meaning to existence: nothing really mattered, and entropy ruled reality. Torturing the aliens only produced a modicum of animal suffering, followed by catatonia. Syndic Boosha had been beyond pain before the Hierophants – five of its twenty-seven expressions of individuality had been involved in the operation – had gotten even halfway through the organ removal process. The other twenty-two reported similarly unsatisfying results on other victims. A hurried melding allowed them all to share their experiences and hold a virtual conference to discuss what to do with the Americans.

  The zombie attack – the concept itself, borrowed from the Earthlings’ own charming mythology, had been amusing in a quaint way – hadn’t done as much damage as they’d expected. In fact, the damned Marines’ survival rate had been as surprising as it had been frustrating. And the damn human warriors had dared to cheat. That still sent ripples of rage through all the Hierophant’s personas.

  The Americans would pay for that, and their suffering would not be over any time soon. The Tah-Leen’s medical technology could keep a toy alive for quite some time, and unlike Lampreys, humans didn’t have the option to flee into catatonia. With a little finesse and a sprinkling of hope here and there, one could prolong their torment almost indefinitely.