Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series

by C. J. Carella

  “Those fuckers ain’t getting past us,” one of the DS agents said. He sounded pretty sure of himself. Another Devil Dog, probably. They turned up at any job where there was a chance someone would get shot.

  Unfortunately, the Lampreys figured out the same thing.

  A destroyer came to a gentle stop, a mere three meters away from the habitat’s exterior, and opened fire with the three twelve-inch guns that could bear on the target. The triple blasts ripped through three hundred meters of internal bulkheads and compartments, including the intersection where the Marines and DS agents waited for the enemy.

  Howard ‘Suckass’ Montero never saw it coming.

  * * *

  “It’s almost ready,” Heather said. Nobody believed her.

  “We’ve got about a thousand tangos inside, and another thousand about to board us,” Mario Rockwell said. “You are literally out of time, McClintock.”

  “Screw it,” she growled. Ten or fifteen more minutes would have been ideal, but ideal wasn’t on the menu today. “Send out the word. We’re a go in forty-five seconds.”

  * * *

  “Repeat. Go to laser-comms only. Shut down all grav-wave systems. Repeat. Shut down standard communications. Do not keep any regular channels open. Photonic comm only.”

  “Fucking laser comm don’t work for shit inside a starbase, man,” Gonzo bitched. His words had the slight stutter-reverb that came from being converted into light pulses. “Line of sight only, that’s no good in here.”

  “I’m sure they’ve got their reasons,” Russell replied. “And never mind that shit. Here they come.”

  The bulkhead they were watching began to glow red. Someone on the other side was using a short-ranged plasma beam to burn through it and its protective force field.

  “Wanna wait for them to break through?” Grampa asked.

  “Nah. Let’s give them a nice surprise.”

  The fireteam leveled their portable cannons at the bulkhead, taking care to respect the one-meter clearance around their weapons. They could ding a starship, so they were going to make a mess of the tangos on the other side, and most anything for several klicks downrange.

  Not that it mattered. As soon as they killed enough Lampreys to make themselves noticed, they’d end up like the poor bastards from Second Platoon. The Lampreys wanted the station, but they were willing to blow up some of it to get rid of the humans inside.

  I shoulda sent out that email, he thought.

  “Been nice, Russet.”

  “Yeah, brah. Fire.”

  * * *

  When a habitat the size of a moon began to shake, you knew you’d run out of time.

  “Force Field Three is down. Multiple penetrations. Someone just depressurized about ten percent of the inhabited sections of the station.”

  The forty-five second countdown wasn’t finished. Some people might still have their comms up. No choice.

  Heather hit the switch.

  At one point, Xanadu had been able to communicate and guide thousands of ships at the same time, back during the heyday of galactic civilization. The grav-wave communication array had fallen into disrepair, but even the fraction that still survived had as much available bandwidth as any heavily-developed planet in the known galaxy.

  Heather used it to send the Executioner devices’ killing signal to every active receiver within one light-year of the habitat.

  The device the Tah-Leen had used to murder their living toys required enormous amounts of power to be effective on a large scale. Distributing that power among the twelve hundred Executioner devices Heather had located had been a bitch and a half, and she hadn’t been finished by the time she was forced to pull the trigger. As a result, two of the thirty-six active power plants in Starbase Malta failed catastrophically. The station shuddered yet again as several dozen cubic miles of its internal volume were consumed by a pair of runaway gluon reactions. Fortunately, most of the damage was contained in the uninhabited sections of the habitat.

  If she’d had another ten or fifteen minutes to spare, that wouldn’t have happened. But in ten minutes the Lampreys would have destroyed the command center and killed every human in the habitat. Heather had to roll the dice or lose everything, and every minute she’d spent getting the weapon ready had been paid for with someone’s life.

  “All enemy ships are drifting in space. No life forms detected.”

  Heather slunk down in her chair while everyone around her cheered wildly. All she wanted to do was close her eyes and sleep.

  * * *

  “That’s something you don’t see every day,” Russell said.

  “Join the Corps, see the universe,” Grampa replied.

  They’d been about three layers deep inside the habitat when they fired their grav cannons, and the triple blast carved a hole all the way out into space, a hole twenty meters wide and three hundred meters long. A Lamprey battlecruiser was on the other end of the jagged tunnel; it was beginning to drift away now that nobody was at the controls. Further out, a frigate was spinning along its axis like a toy. Then something impossibly huge flashed right by the opening, obscuring everything for almost a minute before it was gone. Whatever it was, it gleamed gold and silver and was moving very fast; Russell thought it might have been one of the fancy-looking thousand-klick-long wings he’d seen on the outside of the station. Something or other must have broken a piece of it.

  “How’d they do that?” Gonzo asked. There was no enemy movement anywhere. Something had wasted every tango as far as the eye could see.

  “No clue. Guess it had something to do with turning off our comms.”

  A couple poor bastards hadn’t gotten the word or decided to be assholes about it, and whatever happened to the Lampreys happened to them as well. Shit happened. You were just as dead if friendly fire got you. Sucked to get killed that way, though.

  “I really thought we were done,” Grampa said.

  “Yeah. Been happening a lot lately.”

  Okay, I’m sending that goddam email as soon as we get comms back, Russell decided.

  “Is it too late to transfer to the Navy?”

  * * *

  The cavalry arrived a day late and a dollar short.

  Admiral Gabriel Verdant had been in a somber mood when he set off for Xanadu. The sight that welcomed Third Fleet as it emerged into normal space cheered him up at little. There were dozens of dead Lamprey warships drifting aimlessly along the habitat’s orbital path. A few of the hulks were still streaming gas, but a surprising number of them appeared to be intact. Finding enough prize crews for all those vessels was going to be difficult, but that was the kind of problem you wanted to have.

  Starbase Malta looked very little like the gigantic jewel it once had been. One of its massive wings had been sheared off, and much of its ornate façade had been ripped apart by enemy fire and what appeared to have been some impressive internal explosions. It was still operational, however: Third Fleet was greeted by a nineteen-gun salute, fired by one hell of a gun.

  I’ve got to get me one of those, the admiral thought as he prepared to address the base’s current command team.

  The welcoming ceremony had been muted. Malta’s survivors had been through too much. A reinforced platoon of Marines was all that remained of the company that had arrived to Xanadu; everyone else was a casualty, dead or too badly injured for duty. The naval losses had been even worse; an ensign from the USS Churchill was the highest-ranking surviving officer on the base. That wasn’t the only reason the mood at the meeting was glum, however. Third Fleet had arrived bearing bad news.

  The reason his command had been late to the party was that Verdant had been forced to detach almost a third of his ships and send them off to a new battleground. The only US ally in the war, the Wyrashat Empire, was under heavy attack. They’d needed every ship he could spare, and more.

  The Galactic Imperium had finally entered the fray.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began to say before a gasp of sur
prise interrupted him. He turned around.

  A shimmering swirling light appeared out of thin air, a few feet away from him. Impossible colors flashed brightly, moving in a circular rippling motion any Starfarer would recognize.

  “Warp emergence!” someone shouted in the same tone one would use to announce the unexpected arrival of a live grenade.

  Verdant didn’t try to scramble for cover as many others did. There was no escaping the chaos and destruction the rip in reality would inflict on everyone around it. Warp Marine boarding actions did a great deal of damage on arrival, and this couldn’t be any different.

  Except it was. Instead of implosive tidal waves that should have devastated the entire room, a humanoid figure stepped out of the aperture. For a brief moment, Verdant thought he saw something looming from inside the swirling portal: an impossibly-large three-eyed alien. The gate and the giant within vanished like a mirage in the space of an eye blink. All that remained was a naked human female.

  “Major Lisbeth Zhang, reporting for duty, sir,” the woman said and saluted him. Verdant returned the salute, despite the fact that the alleged officer was obviously out of uniform.

  She started giggling a moment later.

  For some reason, the sound sent shivers down the admiral’s spine.

  In Dread Silence

  Warp Marine Corps, Book Four

  By C.J. Carella

  Copyright @ 2017 Fey Dreams Productions, LLC. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced, displayed, modified or distributed without the express prior written permission of the copyright holder. For permission, contact cjcarella@cjcarella.com

  Cover by: SelfPubBookCovers.com/Fantasyart

  This is a work of fiction. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Through the mists of the deep, where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes…

  - The Star-Spangled Banner, Francis Scott Key

  I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all.

  - General James N. Mattis, USMC, Ret.

  Prologue: Dragon’s Fall

  Drakul-Six, Wyrashat Empire, 166 AFC

  King-Admiral Grace-Under-Pressure, commander of the Hrauwah Volunteer Flotilla, felt the weight of despair pressing down on her.

  She let none of it show, of course. Everyone in the Fleet Command Court aboard the dreadnought Undying Defender could see her sitting in the centrally-located throne from which she oversaw the flotilla’s operations. To rule crews and ships, one must put up a good front: proper officers never bared their teeth, allowed their hackles and tails to rise, or otherwise displayed strong emotions. A leader should treat even the most harrowing circumstances with dispassionate calm. The phrase ‘Never let them hear you growl’ had been old when the Royal Navy had gone to war in wind-propelled wooden ships and used their iron cannon to unify all five continents of the homeland under the Crown. Four millennia of tradition demanded respect.

  Retaining her composure in the face of an unending stream of bad news wasn’t difficult; the problem was that doing so had begun to feel futile. Howling in impotent rage was as likely to accomplish anything of worth as pretending nothing was wrong.

  The more experienced members of the Court sensed her worsening mood as she quietly read the message that had been uploaded into her cybernetic implants. Grace could see them tensing up ever so slightly; the younger officers’ tails puffed up involuntarily as old fight-or-flight instincts asserted themselves. They knew that whatever news the Grand Dame had received likely portended disaster, despite her best efforts to appear unconcerned.

  “Our hosts have denied Fleetmaster Klem’s request for reinforcements,” she announced. “It appears a second Imperium armada has entered Wyrashat space on the Outer Quadrant. The Supremacy Himself sent a personal note along; in it he expressed ‘the utmost confidence in the Joint Star Fleet.’ We are on our own, in other words.”

  Better to tell everyone the truth than to let their imaginations conjure something even worse for morale. The facts were bad enough: the Wyrashat Empire had just abandoned the combined forces guarding Drakul System against the imminent Imperium invasion. She paused for a moment, letting her officers absorb the implications.

  “What are our orders, King-Admiral?”

  “We hold here, of course. The final words of His Supremacy were ‘They shall not pass.’”

  It is a brave thing, to make such grand pronouncements while knowing your life’s blood will not be spilled in upholding them.

  Such thoughts could not be voiced out loud, of course. The ruler of the Wyrashat Empire might have left them to their own devices, but he was owed a modicum of respect. From the tense and angry body language displayed by the bridge crew, she didn’t need to say anything.

  “We still hold the advantages of our position,” she went on. “The Wyrashat are masters of defensive warfare, and Drakul-Six is heavily fortified. Their great asteroid-fortresses are second to none, and Fleetmaster Klem is as good a commander as any non-Hrauwah I’ve met. We will give a good accounting of ourselves and teach the Galactic Imperium a harsh lesson.”

  None of what she said was a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth, either. Again, except for a few young bushy-tailed junior officers, her Fleet Court knew it. Much like the shifts in pressure that preceded one of the great tornadoes on the plains of her homeworld, there was a sense of inevitable disaster in the air, fast approaching and impossible to deny.

  “We fight beside humans and their warp fighter craft,” Lord of Tactics Relentless Determination said, supporting his monarch-commander. “We have all seen the reports of the damage they inflicted on the Vipers, shattering dreadnoughts in a single pass. Their presence is likely to make moot all other tactical considerations.”

  A rumble of subvocalized thoughts followed the statement. As King-Admiral, Grace was entitled to listen to them, to better know the minds and hearts of her subjects. As part of the Royal Compact, no private messages short of plans of outright mutiny would be allowed to affect a crewmember’s career. The warriors and technicians who had agreed to fight and die many warp transits away from home were of three minds about the Human Expeditionary Force. A slight majority were friendly towards the hairless aliens, of course. They would not have volunteered to join the Flotilla and fly under the American flag otherwise. The rest were here out of ambition – combat offered assured advancement to the competent – or simple sense of duty. Their ranks were evenly divided between those who resented humans for dragging the Kingdom into a likely losing war, and a growing number who had become afraid of them. The warp fighters Lord Relentless had spoken of were indeed wonderful weapons, but they also awakened ancient fears that predated the Hrauwah’s expansion into the stars.

  It was I who brought Earth into the Starfarers’ fold. All that has transpired since is marked with my scent.

  A much younger Grace-Under-Pressure had sat on a much smaller throne, aboard the cruiser Wisdom of War, on the day humanity had made contact with the greater universe beyond its shallow gravity well. Her actions had led to the deaths of billions of humans and the salvation of the rest. And over the course of a century and a half, the benighted natives of Sol System had become a force to reckon with – and a source of dread.

  If humans and Hrauwah hadn’t found it so easy to get along, things would have turned out differently, of course. Although most Starfarers would deny it, most relationships between species were based on little more than how pleasant they found each other’s company. It so happened that humans reminded Hrauwah of their beloved tree-brothers, thin-haired near-sapient primates who had shared the great forests with them and become beloved pets and fellow hunters and scavengers. In a rare equivalency, humans found the Hrauwah very similar to the canid species they had brought into their social order back when they’d hunted prey with stone-tipped sp
ears. Their nicknames for each other reflected this: the Hrauwah were commonly known as ‘Puppies,’ and humans were in turn dubbed ‘Tree Cousins.’

  We liked humans from the beginning. And we liked Americans best of all the survivors. If we hadn’t found that footage of wolves being hunted from helicopters in Russia, would we have befriended them instead? Probably not. Nowhere else was the level of devotion to canids greater than in America.

  From that mutual liking, much had followed.

  In the normal course of events, the Hrauwah, being the older and more powerful species, would have taken the fledging apes into their pack as junior members, to be taught the ways of Starfarers and, after centuries of apprenticeship and service, released to thrive or flounder on their own. Circumstances had prevented that, however. At the time they made contact, the Hrauwah were fighting a war against the Risshah. Commonly known as the Snakes, the repulsive aliens comprised a minor but well-armed civilization, thanks to their Lamprey patrons. It had been the Snakes who, thinking Earth was a Hrauwah ally, had unleashed untold devastation on the planet’s innocent inhabitants.

  Having discovered Sol System by accident, the Hrauwah couldn’t hold it while the Risshah threatened their lines of communication. The Kingdom’s help had been limited to some technical advice and a few trinkets: some light weapons, a handful of power plants and fabbers, along with instructions on how to make more, and a basic defense system to prevent America’s rivals from using their atomic weapons to finish what the Snakes had started. A dozen volunteers had stayed behind to teach humans what they could. After that, Grace’s ship had left, and no further contact had been had for a decade.

  When a Hrauwah ship revisited Sol System a decade later, it was greeted by crude spacecraft bearing the American flag, and a nation determined to make its own way in the universe. There had been some tension but even after the war with the Snakes was over, the Kingdom didn’t have the resources needed to establish full suzerainty over Sol System. The fact that the human home system was in a disputed territory made laying a claim on it impossible. There was more technical assistance, but little more.