Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series

by C. J. Carella

  Almost every Starfarer culture has legends involving Dark Towers, she thought idly while the team tried more scans, this time concentrating on the surface of the structure.

  “Amazing,” Munson commented. “The material isn’t vivoconcrete. It looks like an arrangement of carbon crystals, but more complex than normal nanotubes or graphite alloys.”

  “I’m getting some energy readings.” Professor Bell, an archeologist, had an expensive Puppy multi-scanner in his hand. “Graviton particles – too weak to be detected beyond close range, and they seem to be mostly contained within the structure itself. They might be what is interfering with our sensors.”

  “It’s alive,” Lisbeth sent to Heather through their tachyon link, undetectable by the rest. “It’s asleep, but it’s alive.”

  “What is? The whole building?”

  “Uh-huh. I’m not sure what it is yet.”

  “Maybe we should stop, then. Waking up sleeping giants rarely pays off.”

  “Too late for that. I’m probably going to have to try to talk to it. Wanna join in?”

  “I’d rather not,” Heather sent back, clamping down on her t-wave implants and shutting Lisbeth off. No way she was going to try to make telepathic contact with something that had been buried a few ice ages ago.

  “Don’t blame you,” Lisbeth went on via her normal implants. “Let me give it a try.”

  Even through her dampened implants, Heather sensed a link opening between the Marine and something below them. She looked back at the engineers and archeologists clearing the top of the building, half-expecting something terrible to happen. Her first impulse was to tell everybody to run away, but just as she was about to do so, Lisbeth piped in:

  “It’s not very smart, I don’t think,” Lisbeth went on. “But it’s drawing power from the Starless Path. Microscopic links to warp space, the stuff we’ve been picking up. And it hasn’t noticed us yet. I’ll keep an eye on it.”

  “I don’t like this. Do those systems include defenses? Anti-personnel weapons?”

  “Knowing the Marauders, yes to both. Now that I’ve made contact, I’ll know it if anything goes active.”

  “Please let us know when you do.”

  Heather used her imp to call Peter. He needed to know what was going on.

  “We may have found the source for the warp activity on the planet,” she told him.

  She explained what Lisbeth had discovered as the archeologists kept working, pausing every once in a while to marvel at the black material of the tower. The seamless surface looked brand-new, and whatever it was made of was totally impervious to gravitonic and sonic scanners. Just as she was done telling Peter, Professor Bell uncovered a section that was transparent – a skylight, perhaps – and shone a light into it.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  Rather than try to force her way past the gawking scholars, Heather broke into their imp feeds and looked through their eyes.

  The transparent section was maybe a couple of inches thick. An unmistakable corpse was on the other side.

  “Jesus Christ,” Bell repeated, backing up a step, the flashlight still focused on the dead alien.

  Half its head had been crushed flat against the glass-like surface, but the rest was humanoid enough. It was a Kraxan, similar to other Class Two primate equivalents, based on the shape of its skull. Something was wrong with it, though.

  “Light. We need more lights,” Doctor Munson said. Normal imp sensors couldn’t penetrate the gloom, but regular flashlights did, and more people backed away when they got a good look at the spectacle on the other side of the skylight.

  The dead Kraxan wasn’t alone: the misshapen corpse was only one of dozens, hundreds. So many that the press of their bodies had pressed the ones on top against the unyielding transparent surface until their bones broke. Trampling people underneath the feet of a mob was common enough, but a crowd climbing up until they crushed each other against a ceiling was something else altogether. Some of the dead were frozen in the act of tearing into each other. As more lights peered through the clear wall, another thing became clear. Many of those bodies weren’t right, even when accounting for the injuries that had killed them.

  “Look at them,” a female member of Munson’s team said breathlessly. “Just look at them.”

  “No need to be anthropocentric, Doctor Samuels. Sophonts come in all shapes.”

  “Not like this.”

  Samuels was right. Evolution hadn’t produced the creatures on the other side of the skylight. Most of them had grotesquely altered their bodies. Cybernetic limbs were in evidence, but most of the additional arms, tentacles and heads looked biological and somehow attached together like something out of a horror movie. Some had horns protruding from their heads, and many had more than one head. Heather saw mummified skulls with four or five eye sockets, often badly misaligned, and wondered what it would be like to see through them.

  A few of the bodies were desiccated with age, little more than leathery skin over bones, but many others looked almost fresh, as if they’d died a few hours or days ago. Whatever had killed the Kraxans hadn’t spared enough microorganisms for biological decay.

  The top floor was packed with well-preserved corpses. She wondered what the basement would look like.

  Six

  Capricorn System, Year 167

  Kerensky’s grandmother had been twenty-one years old the day aliens burned down half the world.

  She’d been working as a stripper in Charlotte at the time, one of the many women the Russian Federation exported all over the world to be used and discarded like so many consumable goods. Young Yelizaveta Nikolayevna Sokolov had been, in her own words ‘showing a lawyer a good time’ at The Gentlemen’s Club when fire domes began to blossom around the planet.

  ‘That was my last lap dance,’ she often would say with a nostalgic grin.

  Yelizaveta had regaled her six children and fourteen grandchildren with many a hair-curling story about her escapades during the chaotic years following First Contact. When young Nicholas (Nikolai, his grandmother always called him) had been orphaned at age six, she had raised him. In all ways that counted, she had been his mother.

  Two months after the disaster at Heinlein, he’d finally gone back home. And there, when it was only the two of them, he’d broken down in tears.

  His grandmother would have none of it. Her slap had cut off his sobbing with the sudden finality of an executioner’s axe.

  “Don’t you dare cry!” Yelizaveta shouted. “You will not weep like a woman over what you weren’t man enough to defend!”

  The words hurt far worse than the blow, even though it hadn’t been a dainty smack, but a full-body swing that broke his nose. Blood flowed alongside his tears.

  “You are a warrior, Nikolai. You will go back to the stars. You will wash away your failure with the blood of our enemies. Or you are no grandson of mine.”

  That sudden shock had done what weeks of therapy or the kind words of his friends had failed to do. The next day, he’d headed back to New Washington, determined to get a new assignment.

  Thank you, Babushka, he thought as he went over his fleet’s dispositions for the final time.

  The tactics involved in defending a planetary system from attack were constrained by the realities of space travel. The physics of FTL provided advantages and disadvantages for both attacker and defender. An invading fleet couldn’t make the simpler, more efficient warp jumps that took one to the region between a star and its closest planets, because the emergence point would be detected hours in advance, giving the enemy ample time to move its forces to strike the moment the disoriented attackers arrived. To avoid this problem, the aggressors would arrive on the periphery of a system, light-hours away. Distance was time: a warp emergence’s gravity signature propagated at the speed of light. A single ship could hide by appearing near a gas giant or other massive object, but a fleet was too large for such tricks. Their emergence point had to happen as far away as possibl
e, avoiding detection long enough to recover from warp transit. After that, the attackers would make one or more in-system jumps until they finally arrived two to five light seconds away from their ultimate goal: inhabited planets or any installations barring the way to the inner warp gateways, the only way they could travel deeper into enemy space.

  Given that communications were limited to the speed of light – the only exception, quantum-entangled systems, were too fragile to be used anywhere but on planetary surfaces – and the immense volume of space in which an invader might arrive, it was impossible to patrol the edge of a system. The most practical defensive posture was to station one’s ships somewhere close to a star and wait for the enemy forces to reveal themselves. Seventh Fleet should have concentrated its forces near Capricorn-Two until the Imperium or Lamprey fleets (or both of them) arrived.

  Humans had been breaking the rules of space warfare for over a century, however, and they had discovered one more way to cheat.

  * * *

  Gus ‘Bingo’ Chandler had never expected to be bored inside the cockpit of his War Eagle. Killed, yes. Terrified beyond imagining? All too often. But bored?

  Bored, and alone. He was the only living being within two light-hours, about as lonely as it got.

  Back in the days of the wet Navy, one of the first missions given to naval aircraft had been to act as scouts, searching the seemingly endless oceans for enemy ships. Nobody had expected the War Eagles to do that, however. They were ship-killers, and their sensor systems were rudimentary at best, barely good enough to detect and engage targets within a fraction of a light second. The time the fighters spend in flight was minimal: a few seconds holding station with their targets while they fired on them, and no more than a few minutes returning to their carrier after a warp jump. They could fly at their maximum speed of one-thousandth the speed of light for about three hours before they depleted their power plant and became unable to jump into warp, which would leave them stranded in real space.

  Gus had never expected to find himself flying solo in the dark. Unfortunately for him, some genius (word was the bright idea had come from Admiral Kerensky himself) had decided to exploit the fighters’ capabilities (and those of their pilots) in a brand-new way. A way that would completely revolutionize space warfare.

  Which sounds great and all, but it’s still damn boring, Gus thought.

  He was on the furthest reaches of Capricorn System, well past its major planetary components, near the edge of the star’s heliosphere. There was nothing out there; all he had to look at were distant stars. They’d attached an extra power pack to his bird to give it five more hours of endurance, a sensor module that gave him the same capabilities of a regular starship, and sent him out into the dark. Him and some four hundred fighter pilots, flying in twelve-hour shifts. Their carriers were scattered in a sphere with a radius of ten light hours, and the fighters were spread out even further out, within the limits of their warp jump.

  If all they had was standard grav-wave communicators, Kerensky’s bright idea wouldn’t work. Gus’ fighter was sixteen light-hours away from the main fleet. If he detected an emergence, he could either send a message that would take sixteen hours to reach the fleet, or jump back to the Enterprise – a mere four light-hours away, near the limits of the fighter’s warp system – and have the Big E do a second jump all the way back to Capricorn Two. Meanwhile, the rest of the fighter force, scattered over hundreds of light-hours, would have no idea what was going on until a message or the ‘noise’ from the warp emergence reached them, many hours later. Spreading the ships over such distances risked leaving most of them out of position when the enemy showed up.

  Fighter pilots had developed the ability to communicate instantly, however, even over relativistic distances. And that made all the difference. As soon as one War Eagle detected an incoming emergence, all the other pilots would know it. Everyone would warp back to their carriers while the pilots with the main fleet alerted it, and the entire force would be waiting to welcome the enemy with open arms.

  That was the theory, at least. They’d been flying deep space patrol missions for eight days now, ever since a scout frigate in Paulus System had detected enemy forces massing there. The few hundred fighters had to cover an ungodly volume of space, and there was a good chance an emergence wouldn’t be detected until it was several hours in. The War Eagles weren’t meant to conduct sustained operations, and the stress on pilots and machines was beginning to wear on everyone. On the other hand, they were only making two warp transits per shift, which wasn’t too bad. Anybody with flight wings on their suit could handle two jumps in a day.

  Gus was playing a hand of Solitaire on his imp when his sensor board lit up like a Christmas tree. A goddamn mass emergence, fifty light minutes away! He’d found the enemy fleet!

  “Bingo-Four to all CSG elements: warp emergence detected.”

  His mental sending reached across the system and let every fighter pilot know what was happening. Within seconds, he’d made the return warp trip to the Enterprise, along with the rest of the Space Wing. Soon enough, the entire fleet would gather at the emergence point, hours before the enemy fleet arrived.

  The admiral’s crazy idea had worked.

  * * *

  “America expects us all to do our duty,” Fleet Admiral Kerensky said. “To all Seventh Fleet elements: proceed to your selected coordinates and prepare to engage in close combat.”

  Old Man Carruthers would have quibbled at the mangling of Horatio Nelson’s words, but Kerensky wasn’t a purist, and he thought his modified version did justice to the original orders that preceded the Battle of Trafalgar. The stakes here were much higher, of course, he mused as the Odin prepared for warp transit. If Nelson’s fleet had lost its battle, Great Britain would have survived. If Kerensky lost here, the Imperium would be able to penetrate human space almost unopposed.

  Transition.

  The ghosts were waiting for him, as usual, along with the number that would haunt him for the rest of his life. There was something else waiting for him in the lonely darkness, however. He hadn’t encountered it before, in or out of null-space: a shadowy presence whose fury and hatred matched his own. Kerensky saw a dark reflection of himself during the brief jump, an entity lacking any shred of compassion or remorse, capable only of destruction.

  This is what I will become. The thought sent shivers down his spine.

  Emergence.

  Seventh Fleet arrived to its appointed place without incident and or any serious casualties. The carriers of the scouting force were already there, and the two forces maneuvered into position, spreading out in a c-shaped wall arrayed around the enemy’s arrival point. There was plenty of time to prepare. Everyone was in position two hours before the enemy fleet emerged. Nearly two hundred American warships waited patiently to execute the largest ambush in known galactic history.

  When hundreds of vessels arrived from warp at roughly the same time, space rippled with something like Earth’s aurora borealis, except much more brightly. Impossible colors clashed across the display screen as null-space began to disgorge dozens upon dozens of enemy vessels. Seventh Fleet’s sensors could identity a ship before it had completed transit. Even so, it took several minutes to classify the targets filling the holotank’s display.

  They picked up a Lamprey battlegroup along the way, Kerensky mused as the readings came in. This is the first time the so-called Allies have sent a joint fleet. And hopefully the last.

  The Lhan Arkh Congress had taken severe losses in previous space actions but they’d managed to come up with enough ships to present a credible threat on their own. The Lamprey force consisted of five dreadnoughts, fourteen battleships, twenty-five battlecruisers and sixty lighter vessels. All the heavies were missile platforms. And that fleet was barely enough to comprise a minor component of the Galactic Imperium armada that crowded the tactical display like a cloud of locust.

  Sixty-two superdreadnoughts. A hundred dreadnoughts. A h
undred and fifty battleships. Three hundred lesser ships, cruisers and destroyers, most of them fast-attack types designed to outrun the enemy and engage it from multiple angles of fire, which would reduce the effectiveness of human warp shields. The price they paid for their greater speed was lower defenses and weaker armament, but they couldn’t be ignored.

  The Gimp superdreadnoughts were ridiculous; not even the Wyrms went for that sort of mass. The massive enemy globes were five kilometers wide and had three or four times the displacement of his Pantheon-class ships. The costs involved in producing and crewing those behemoths must have been staggering even for the wealthiest polity in the galaxy. The Imperium had beggared itself to produce that impossible fleet, only to find itself emerging right under the muzzles of Seventh Fleet’s guns.

  “We have a target rich environment, ladies and gentlemen,” Kerensky said. “Fire at will.”

  The enemy forces were in disarray, their crews all but crippled from the lengthy warp jump. Even humans would be stunned for five to ten minutes after an eight-hour jump. Gal-Imp species fared far worse after lengthy exposures to null-space. The humanoid Dann would be utterly crippled for thirty minutes and severely impaired for close to two hours; the insectile Kreck and amphibious Obans would suffer even longer: an hour of paralysis, and three hours of diminished capacity.

  Three hours to kill them all, Kerensky considered as the watched the tactical plots; the battleship Sitting Bull fired the first shots of the battle, a sixteen-gun salvo that smashed two Gimp destroyers seconds after they entered real space. And nearly-helpless doesn’t mean utterly helpless. For all that, this is our only chance to win this battle with acceptable losses.

  Seventh Fleet pounced on its confused foe from a light-second away.