Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series

by C. J. Carella

  She cut off the communication, suppressing a surge of irritation amidst the other feelings brought about by defeat. The young pup should not have contacted her directly for such a request, but he was dealing with a situation beyond his experience and training, so she wouldn’t hold the breach in protocol against him. It did not matter. The two defeated forces would be conducting a long retreat through half a dozen warp points. In their haste, some of those wounded – both Hrauwah and human – wouldn’t survive.

  Five hours later, the tattered remains of the HEF made ready to depart. Their destination was Paulus System; that would be their first stop but almost certainly not their last. Grace doubted that the forces being assembled there would suffice to stop the armada that had overwhelmed the Joint Star Fleet.

  She doubted anything would.

  Transition.

  The Undying Defender entered warp space and Grace-Under-Pressure found herself surrounded by the spirits of the dead. Her own people, who’d laid down their lives helping pay off a debt she had incurred on behalf of her entire species. And humans in endless numbers – the victims of First Contact, and perhaps every human still living, if this defeat was a harbinger of what was to come.

  It was almost too much to bear.

  One

  Starbase Malta, Xanadu System, 167 AFC

  He tried to play it safe, and it cost him. Again.

  Captain Peter Fromm watched the tactical display as if glaring at the numbers and symbols could somehow alter the outcome of the scenario. He knew what Colonel Brighton would say during the Field-Ex analysis the next day. It’d been a simple mission. Lead Charlie Company against two dug-in platoons of simulated Galactic Imperium infantry. Instead of doing what he knew would work, he’d done what he thought would reduce his casualties to a minimum. He’d been slow. Downright timid. Adopted a belt-and-suspenders approach. Just so he could keep those red and black icons from showing up on the roster.

  Even in simulations, it was becoming too hard to send his people to their death. And when First Sergeant Goldberg not-so-subtly called him on it, Fromm overcompensated and rushed his Marines forward, which he never would have done in real life. The result: the two enemy platoons had stopped his company cold after notionally inflicting twenty-nine casualties – including twelve KIA – on it.

  He’d lost his nerve, and he wasn’t sure if he was going to get it back.

  “Can’t win them all, sir,” First Lieutenant Hansen said, loyally blowing smoke up his ass. Goldberg didn’t say anything, but his silence spoke volumes. This was the third FX Fromm had blown by being overcautious. The first two times, his company officers and NCOs had snatched victory out of the jaws of defeat, but this screw-up had been beyond redemption.

  Fromm shrugged, watching the ‘casualties’ pick themselves up from where the simulation had left them for dead and start heading back to the transport lift that would take them back to base, some hundred klicks away from the huge chamber they’d been using for the exercise. He tried to set aside his despondency and marvel at the lifelike holograms that turned the huge compartment – large enough to fit an entire Earth city – into a near-perfect replica of an alien planet, complete with skies overhead, a distant horizon and even variations in weather. Malta’s former owners had belonged to a hyper-advanced civilization with access to better toys than most Starfarer species could dream of.

  In the end, those toys hadn’t saved them. The Tah-Leen were no more, making them the fourth species the United Stars of America had rendered extinct in its hundred-and-sixty-seven-year history. Not exactly something to be proud of, although in all fairness the Tah-Leen had deserved death as much if not more than anybody Fromm had ever met. There was a team of intelligence weenies doing nothing but cataloguing the aliens’ atrocities over the previous eighty millennia; that was a job he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy. A much larger team was busily trying to unearth as many advanced technologies as it could. The US was going to need every scrap it could extract from their latest conquest.

  The three Marine formations currently stationed at Malta had enjoyed some of the fruits of victory. For the 101st, the 44th and 210th Marine Expeditionary Units, Xanadu System was home. They were the best-outfitted units in the Corps, and probably the deadliest ground force their size in the galaxy. Not that they would be seeing action any time soon. The three units had suffered severe losses at the battle of Parthenon two years before, and all of them needed some time to rest and refit. Malta seemed like a safe enough posting, now that the former Habitat for Diversity’s weapon systems were back online. Probes by the Imperium and the Lampreys had been met with overwhelming force and sent back running. In fact, Xanadu was probably the safest human-inhabited system in the universe, and a steady trickle of immigrants had begun to show up in the months since its seizure. They included some four thousand Marine dependents who’d been relocated there.

  If things didn’t improve soon, the system and its artificial habitat might become humanity’s last redoubt. Fromm fervently hoped that wouldn’t be the case. He’d seen what happened to the previous owners, and it hadn’t been pretty. Being bottled up in a single system, unable to ever set foot beyond its confines, had driven the locals insane. Granted, the Tah-Leen had probably been halfway there before the mysterious Elder Races had marooned them for all eternity, but he didn’t think humanity would fare much better.

  Fromm shrugged. All of that was out of his hands. His battalion would spend months getting ready for action, and the war might be over by then. It would be up to others to save the day.

  To his shame, he was glad of that. He and his Marines had done enough.

  He didn’t want to write any more letters of condolence.

  Secret Facility, Venus, Sol System, 167 AFC

  “Can you please tell me your name?”

  “Major Lisbeth Beatrix Zhang, US Warp Marine Corps, Serial Number 0259-1913108. And this is the one hundredth time I’ve been asked the same question. Congratulations!”

  “How did you survive direct exposure to warp space?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How did you return to Starbase Malta after your spacecraft was destroyed?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Tell us everything you remember from the time of your last warp transit aboard the Totenkopf until your appearance at Starbase Malta.”

  She did, for the hundredth time. The questions were always the same, and her answers were always unsatisfactory. The truth was, everything was a blur after the cockpit of her dying ship collapsed and a sea of many colors came pouring into the cabin. The bogeyman of her nightmares had been there, yes, and a host of ghosts, most of them belonging to the ninety-odd aliens she’d executed a few days before, and they’d all been out for blood. Her blood.

  The critters in question might not have been ghosts. They could have been Warplings. Creatures born and raised in null-space. Some pilots called them Foo Fighters or just Foosm, but she hated both nicknames with a passion. Most Warplings weren’t very smart or dangerous; all they did was assume the shape of their victims’ memories and try to scare or otherwise annoy them. But a few could kill you. The ones who’d ripped open her ship had been more than dangerous enough.

  Lisbeth had fought back, she knew that much. At one point, a gigantic three-eyed alien had fought beside her: Atu, the Path Master whose consciousness had become entangled with hers. Then again, she sometimes suspected her invisible friend was a Warpling who’d assumed the shape of the dead alien for its own purposes. Either way, Atu had been a major badass, shooting beams out of its third eye and shredding Tah-Leen ghosts left and right. It might have been fun, except for the fact she’d been scared shitless the whole time. At one point, she’d become the alien, a bizarre experience she hoped never to repeat. The way Atu thought was too different; the experience hadn’t been good for her mental health.

  The alien ghost was still around. She’d come back with a giant invisible monkey on her back. The thought made he
r giggle, which made her current interviewer nervous. For some unfathomable reason, nobody liked it when she laughed. That sucked, because as of late she found it very hard to deal with the universe with a straight face.

  “Are you all right, Major?”

  They asked that a lot, too. She didn’t have a good answer, either. Physically, she felt fine, although her brain wasn’t normal anymore. The unusual growths her previous checkup had uncovered had turned into large whorls of grey matter growing in perfect symmetry on the inside of her skull, which incidentally had developed two noticeable bulges to accommodate them. They weren’t easily visible under her medium-reg haircut, but if she ever decided to shave her head, they would be.

  A doctor had commented that the bulges looked a little bit like horns.

  “I said, are you all..?”

  “Yes,” Lisbeth answered, shaking her head. It was hard clear her mind from visions of the past; every once in a while she went back there. She belatedly realized that the contradictory word and gesture made her look crazy.

  “You are giggling again,” her current debriefer said. It was a civilian this time, some sort of psychiatrist they’d flown all the way to Venus to talk to her. She’d scared off the last couple of interviewers – a Naval Intelligence weenie and a CIA interrogator – with a few off-hand comments.

  Must be my winning personality, she thought, and giggled once more. The shrink just looked at her, waiting for an answer.

  “Sorry, doc. My mind wanders when I’m bored.”

  “Please try to concentrate. We’re all here to help you, you know.”

  Time to run him off, she decided. He was getting on her nerves.

  “I know. Speaking of helping, I can answer a question that’s been on your mind.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Your wife.”

  From the way his face changed, she’d scored a point.

  “What about my wife?”

  “She is cheating on you.”

  “What?”

  “She’s been seeing someone at the ad agency she works at. Her boss, as a matter of fact.”

  “Wait a moment. What..?”

  “It all started when she found out about your own affair – well, affairs, but she only knows of the last one – so I can’t really blame her. By the way, I’m flattered you like the way I look, but I hope we can keep this professionally.”

  Lisbeth batted her eyelashes at him.

  The shrink left and didn’t come back.

  She enjoyed a few quiet days inside her spacious and comfortable cell, fifty meters beneath Venus’ hellish surface. The only inhabitants in that festering boil in the solar system’s ass were terraforming crews, most of them convicts doing hard labor, and a few subjects that needed to be out of sight and mind. She wasn’t technically a prisoner, but she wasn’t allowed to wander off on her own, not that strolling outside was an option without a haz-con suit. They’d been terraforming Venus for decades, but the planet’s average temperature was still enough to turn ice into steam or broil a human being even before its corrosive atmosphere had a chance make its presence known. It was going to take another century or so to make the place habitable, and she wasn’t planning on hanging around that long.

  On her next interview, there were two of them, male and female, in matching Navy uniforms and a no-nonsense look about them that she could appreciate. At this point, she’d welcome a straightforward enhanced interrogation session. Anything but the constant blathering.

  “Major Zhang,” the guy began.

  “That’s me. And I appreciate you not asking my name is for the hundredth and first time.”

  “Sorry about that. Honestly, we didn’t know what to make of you. Your story was hard to believe, even with all the witnesses.”

  And all the imp recordings, she thought. A dozen people had immortalized her appearance in the Situation Room at Starbase Malta on the day she’d strolled through a warp aperture wearing nothing but a smile. Not exactly the kind of exposure she would have chosen. There must be dozens of VR pornos ‘inspired’ by those visual records making the rounds in cyberspace. Plus a bunch of religious and mystical movements. Whore and Madonna at the same time.

  The bubbleheads waited until she was done giggling before continuing.

  “The decision has been made to accept your recollection of events,” the female officer said.

  “Thank you, ma’am.” Might as well stick to military courtesy before they changed their minds and kept her in this hellhole for a few more months.

  “This brings us to the proposal you’ve been making all along.”

  Lisbeth nodded. If they were willing to listen to her theories, the situation was even more desperate than she’d thought. She’d been following the news – they let her do that much – and things had been looking pretty dire, with the Imperium pressing forward and the Lampreys massing up along the Wyrm borders, presumably to link up with their allies for one big push into American space. Things might just be bad enough to make even her insane ideas worthy of some attention.

  “You claim that your connection to the Kraxan starship gave you access to a great deal of data, including astrogation maps of their territory.”

  “Yes, sir. Including the location of a remote system that served as their last place of refuge. That’s where they took their last fleet of Corpse-Ships. Nearly a hundred of them.”

  Both naval officers winced visibly at the name. No red-blooded American would be comfortable with the idea that a ship made with the bones of a dead and yet somehow aware alien slave had proven to be more effective than anything in the Navy’s arsenal – or anything in the known galaxy for that matter.

  “I can lead you there,” Lisbeth went on, for the eighty-sixth time; a few of her interviews had stopped before she got to that part. “There is a warp chain from Xanadu System that leads straight to it. I think there’s a good chance at least some of those ships are still operational. And I know how to activate them and train others to use them.”

  She pictured dozens of Corpse-Ships flying the Stars and Stripes and sweeping the skies clear of enemies. From the way the two officers looked at her, they were seeing something similar. Maybe the exact same thing: sometimes she could make people see what was inside her head, instead of the other way around.

  “What price victory, if the cost is your soul, Christopher Robin?” Atu the Happy Alien whispered in her ear. The Pathfinder had turned Lisbeth’s childhood memories of A.A. Milne’s stories into a constant source of annoyance.

  Shut up, you. I have a plan.

  “We would like to hear more about your ideas,” the male officer said.

  “Of course, sir.”

  Lisbeth ignored the disapproving looks from her invisible friend as she spoke.

  She might be crazy, damned, or both, but she was going to do her part.

  Starbase Malta, Xanadu System, 167 AFC

  “Lieutenant McClintock, you are hereby relieved from duty.”

  Finally, Heather thought, suppressing a relieved sigh.

  After the ancient alien habitat now known as Starbase Malta had been secured and become a US possession, Heather had spent several months running the place, mostly because only her t-wave implants allowed her to bypass the security blocks protecting the alien network that ran all its systems. After taking one look at the mess the US had inherited, the admiral in command of Third Fleet had reactivated her at her old Navy rank of Lieutenant and put her in charge. It had been an exhausting and unnerving situation, especially since the Lampreys and the Imperium had launched attacks on Xanadu after the system had been ‘secured.’ That had been a little too exciting for her taste. Turning the impossible job over was something of a relief.

  “Thank you, Captain Gupta.”

  The new commandant was an experienced orbital facility administrator who’d grown up in a mining colony in Sol’s asteroid belt and spent most of his Navy career crewing and eventually running space fortresses. His confident expre
ssion as he accepted the official handoff worried her, however. The poor bastard had no idea what was waiting for him, and she was worried he would screw things up.

  Nobody’s indispensable, she told herself. She’d made sure someone else could do the job, after all. It had taken a lot of work but now ordinary computers and technicians could run the massive station. More or less. Acting like everything depended on her wasn’t very mature; she smiled at her own conceit.

  “Something funny, Lieutenant?”

  “Not at all, sir. I’m just happy to leave this post and return to civil service.”

  “I see. You have done an adequate job so far, and I’m sure your assistance during the transition period will be valuable.”

  Heather was still one of a handful of people with any idea of how the massive alien habitat worked, and who knew how little they really knew about it. Just keeping its weapons and shields working had taken the efforts of dozens of trained personnel. To restore Malta to even a fraction of its former glory would probably take thousands. Captain Gupta had brought in five hundred Administration specialists with him, which would help a lot, as soon as they figured out that running the incredibly-large facility was unlike anything they’d encountered before. She would try to teach them as much as she could before she was reassigned, but after that…

  Not my circus, not my monkeys.

  For the last six months, she’d been so busy she’d hardly seen Peter for more than an hour or two before rushing off to deal with a new crisis. The problems involved in running an ancient habitat half the size of Earth’s Moon were legion, especially when the alien intelligence charged with keeping it in working order had died during the takeover. Been killed in cold blood by a rather deranged Marine, to be precise. That the poor creature had been lobotomized and largely mindless was beside the point. And its absence had been felt when the whole structure promptly began to fall apart.

  The fact that a Lamprey fleet had shown up just after the Americans had seized the habitat hadn’t helped, of course. The aliens shot the ever-living crap out of the place before Heather came up with a last-ditch method to kill them all. Fortunately, the ancient civilization knew how to build them tough, and the habitat had survived, for some values of ‘survived.’ Two thirds of its volume currently didn’t have any atmosphere, power or other amenities. The remaining third still had more usable space than every human-made orbital facility combined, and keeping it in working order had turned out to be a full-time job.