Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series

by C. J. Carella

  The energy signature of the enemy vessel dimmed noticeably: its main reactors had shut down to avoid containment losses. The drifting hulk ceased maneuvers and slowed down to a crawl, protected by minimal shields. Most of the thousands of crewmembers inside were likely dead, the survivors helpless.

  “Let them be,” Grace ordered. “Shift fire to the new designated target.”

  Her court obeyed, sparing the dying vessel. It had been a small mercy in the midst of this orgy of death-dealing, but one any spacer could appreciate. There were practical considerations involved as well, of course. Other enemy ships were firing on hers, and their guns must be silenced.

  The GACS Nanjin, one of the Pan-Asian battleships fighting beside hers, spun along its central axis before breaking into three pieces, one of them ablaze. A heavy energy volley had struck something vital. Grace blinked twice and bowed her head in her species gesture of commiseration. She found the Nanjin’s killer: a ‘mere’ dreadnought with double the displacement of the Undying Defender. That was clearly a worthy target. Both Hrauwah and Pan-Asian ships engaged it with the full fury of their main batteries. Before their gunnery could inflict much damage, however, the enemy ship burst into flames.

  “American fighters,” the Lord of Tactics explained. “Ten of them took the target under fire.”

  “Demons,” someone muttered. Grace decided to do the grumbler the favor of not learning of his or her identity.

  “We shall not speak ill of our allies,” she said out loud.

  Even if they are demonic indeed.

  * * *

  Ghosting.

  They were doing it all the time now. They didn’t take any more losses due to enemy fire, but the Foos were doing plenty of damage on their own.

  Fourth Squadron was down to nine pilots. Flight A had lost two people. The only reason Flight B was holding steady after Dude’s death was Grinner’s constant help. But nobody knew how long she could keep it up. Gus could feel the strain threatening to overwhelm the flight leader. Witch or not, she was reaching the end of her tether.

  From a purely tactical point of view, he knew they were doing the right thing. Now that they could hit the enemy with impunity, the fighter wings were eating the Gimps’ lunch. Flight B’s fighters would get to paint three superdreadnoughts, six dreadnoughts and eight battleships on their hulls. The Space Wings had cut a swath through the enemy capital ships. They were going to win this battle.

  Assuming they could survive the Foos.

  All this killing while inside warp was bringing in a horde of monsters. More Warplings had come, whole packs of them, and every once in a while they’d reach out and pluck out some poor bastard while in transit. Prayers helped a little: Gus had driven a Foo away by reciting Psalm 23 at it. But each time he and his squadron sank a dreadnought and sent a few thousand tangos to Hell, the Foos got a little bolder.

  They couldn’t stop, though. And even if they could, they didn’t want to stop. Gus certainly didn’t. Every time he fired his gun and felt a bunch of aliens die under the blast, he got a rush. He wasn’t sure when that had started. Maybe after the big shock he’d felt during the sortie where they’d lost Dude Kelsey. That shock of sadness and pain had given way to something completely different. Before, killing a target had been just part of the job, something unpleasant that had to be done. Now, however…

  I’m getting off on it.

  The realization should have upset him. He knew that, in a vague, intellectual way. But he didn’t feel it. All he felt was a desire to go back out there and keep killing. Everybody in the squadron felt the same way. Except Grinner. Grinner wasn’t getting off, and she didn’t like what the others were feeling, not one bit. And that was a problem, because she was keeping the squadron alive.

  “You all right?” he asked her while they were back on the Enterprise. The carrier had got a few more holes, but it was still holding together. Two light carriers hadn’t been so lucky; one of them, the Tripoli, had been blasted to hell with its entire fighter compliment aboard. They’d been in the process of refitting its squadron when a missile had hit something vital. Poor bastards.

  “Grinner?” he said when she didn’t answer.

  “This is wrong,” she finally said. “All of it.”

  “What are you talking about? We’re getting it done. Gimps are on their last legs. Couple more sorties and it’s all over.”

  “Don’t let them in, Bingo.”

  “Don’t let who in?”

  “The Warplings. They are getting to you.”

  “Wrong. They got Kelsey, not me. And Butch and Fredo over Flight A. I’m fine.”

  “You aren’t. Don’t stop praying, Bingo. I’m not much of a believer, but I think you’re going to need God at your side. Especially after today is over.”

  “Sure thing, Grinner.”

  Gus was just blowing smoke up her ass, and she knew it, but that was about all he could say. They had a new target, one of the few dreadnoughts still in the fight. The guys from the Exeter had sunk the last super-dread. They’d won the fight, and it was all due to them, the wing-wipers. Navy and Marine aviators had won the biggest space action in US history.

  In his mind, he pictured himself flying over an enemy planet, blasting their ground-based defenses into dust so that their cities would burn.

  I’m gonna watch you burn, all of you, he thought, and smiled.

  * * *

  “Confirmed kill on Sierra Three-Zero-Niner, sir. That’s the last one.”

  The Gal-Imps had died hard, but died they had. Seventh Fleet held the system. The enemy had been obliterated, except for a dozen ships that had managed to flee into warp. Kerensky supposed that this space action would be counted as a victory of sorts.

  Another victory like this, and we are ruined.

  Half of his ships were nothing but condensing clouds of sublimated metal. All the survivors had been damaged to some extent. Twenty-seven ships were being abandoned; they were crippled and unable to maneuver, let alone perform a warp jump. One of them, the battlecruiser Hamilcar Barca, was still in one piece, but completely bereft of life. It was rare for a ship to lose its entire crew without being destroyed outright, but it happened on occasion; in this case, a cracked gluon plant core had released a massive dose of neutrons no amount of shielding could contain. The resulting irradiation had killed everyone aboard in less than an hour.

  And yet, it was victory. The great armada that had run rampant through Wyrashat space was gone. Over a million citizen-soldiers from a dozen species and the pride of the largest polity in the known galaxy had fallen. But at what price?

  American losses had been worse than what Fifth Fleet had suffered at Heinlein. More ships had been destroyed here than in any previous space action in US history. But Kerensky had run away at Heinlein, surrendering the system to the Vipers. Nobody had run here.

  Kerensky looked around the CIC. Every face he saw was marked with exhaustion and sorrow. There was no cheering. You couldn’t cheer this sort of carnage. The Odin’s crew had suffered over three hundred casualties. Thirty-seven of them had been the result of overexposure to warp shields, unfortunates who had been driven mad, possibly permanently, or simply dropped dead without any visible wounds, their faces twisted in expressions of utter horror. A hundred and sixteen fighters were gone as well, and too many of those had disappeared while in warp transit.

  And then there was the fate of the fleet carrier Exeter to consider.

  In the heat of the battle, Kerensky had noted that the ship’s icon had turned black along with so many others. But when he had the leisure to go over the sensor readings, he’d seen something that defied comprehension.

  The carrier had taken some damage before its strange end: a number of missile hits penetrated its shields and blotted out a point-defense battery and killed several crewmembers. Sensor records from nearby ships showed a fighter emergence that had turned into… what? Kerensky ran the footage back and forth in his imp; this was not something he wanted on
a view screen. He’d already ordered a security lock on the footage, and admonished the handful of sensor techs who’d witnessed the incident to keep it to themselves. Numb as he was, the strange sight filled him with dread.

  The warp aperture through which the fighter had arrived should have closed an instant later. It hadn’t. Instead, it’d grown larger. The Exeter was maneuvering at two-thirds of flank speed at the time, so the stationary warp hole should have been left behind at two hundred kilometers per second. Instead, the aperture had kept station and somehow touched the carrier’s warp shields, which began to grow in size as well. A few moments later, something had reached out from warp space and engulfed the ship.

  The admiral tried to freeze the high-resolution video at the proper moment. He couldn’t. There was a hint of movement but then the video seemed to jump frames, or be obscured by something. He tried other ships’ visual feeds from different angles, and they all showed the same glitch, despite being taken from different positions and distances, anywhere from five to ten thousand kilometers away, which given current optics would allow him to zoom in closely enough to recognize individual faces. Not this time. If he zoomed in, all he could see was a blur or a shadow. A growing suspicion gnawed at him: he felt that whatever he was seeing was something organic. Alive. And larger than the nine-hundred-meter long starship it had touched.

  A fraction of a second after that shadow showed up, the Exeter was gone.

  Kerensky slowed down the visual feed down to a millisecond per frame and was able to see the carrier vessel surrounded by sinuous bands of darkness and being dragged into its own shields. A solitary frame saw the Exeter’s outline being distorted into a shape small enough to fit the gaping maw awaiting it.

  As if its hull was being warped, in other words.

  “What is this?” he whispered. “What have we done?”

  “Sir?”

  Kerensky shuddered and turned towards the crewman who’d overheard him.

  “Never mind, Spacer. Carry on.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  The admiral sealed all records of the Exeter’s demise and marked them as classified. Something terrible had happened, but plenty of terrible things had happened today. Whatever that was, it could wait.

  Logic did not diminish the feeling that something worse than mere death and destruction had taken place in that shadowy instant before the carrier vessel ceased to exist.

  Seven

  Redoubt-Five, 167 AFC

  Even monsters will run when the Devil goes hunting.

  The fleeing Kraxans were all warriors, barely humanoid grotesqueries made of flesh, synthetics and metal. Any workers in their midst had long been trampled under their feet or hooves, and the Overlords had escaped into the Path – uselessly, since their pursuers also waited for them there, but panic had blinded them all. Warriors could not follow their masters, so they simply ran, the dying cries of those behind them spurring them on.

  There was no escape at the end of the long flight up the spiral staircase, only the unyielding surface of the Tower’s ceiling and skylights. The crowd’s sheer numbers and mindless terror kept them moving, forcing more and more of them into the viewing alcoves, crushing furniture, artwork and the weaker among them until there was no more space, nowhere to go. Talons, blades and blunt fingers that could rend steel clawed at the barriers keeping them penned in, to no avail: the Tower’s final orders had been to shut off all exits, and none of the Marauders present had the authority to countermand them.

  Death found them howling mindlessly like so many penned beasts. One by one, they fell silent and their minds and souls were ripped from their flesh and cast into the Burning Void, where eternal punishment awaited.

  Finally, all was still, but not peaceful. There was no peace to be found anywhere.

  “Lisbeth?”

  Heather’s voice broke through the trance: Lisbeth shuddered and found herself swaying on her feet. The bulk of the Tower loomed over her and she instinctively recoiled from it. Only Heather’s strong grip kept her from falling on her ass.

  A couple of the Spacers and Marines working on the dig gave her the Look, but most of them were too busy examining their find. Lisbeth shook her head and steadied herself. She was an officer and a gentleperson, and swooning like some Victorian damsel was conduct most unbecoming. Then again, she figured that the things she’d seen would have given pause even to the likes of Puller or Mattis. Especially when she hadn’t just seen them, but felt everything a pack of the terrified monsters had experienced before their death and eternal damnation.

  “Lisbeth?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay. Thank you. It’s the Tower. It recorded, or memorized, what happened at the end there, and I just got the whole show.”

  “What happened?”

  “Justice.”

  Blinking flashes of white light coming from a plasma cutter filled the pit as she spoke. They’d dug up an eight-meter tall section of the round black tower, trying to find a way in. There were more transparent sections like the one they discovered on the top level, also choked with corpses, but so far nothing that looked like a door, hatch or any other access point. After a gentler approach had failed, the Marine engineers had broken out a plasma cutter, whose jets of pure heat could melt through warship armor.

  “Any luck?” she asked Heather, wondering how long she’d been in a fugue state.

  The spy shook her head. “Fifteen minutes, and they’ve barely heated the surface. Lieutenant Perez is thinking about using a grav gun from one of the shuttles next. That got Doctor Munson howling about damaging the ruins, of course.”

  “Glad I missed that.”

  “Any ideas why the material is so tough?”

  “Sort of.” Dead Kraxan memories tried to bubble up inside her head once again, but she pushed them down, with some help from her invisible alien friend. “The building is alive, and it draws power from warp space. I think the walls are protected by a force field.”

  “Sensors aren’t picking it up. Just some graviton leakage, nothing like what a force field produces.”

  “It’s like what the Corpse-Ship had. A more refined version of warp shields, and it only becomes active at the point of impact, whenever something hits it – or just before; it sort of sees into the future and pops up the moment it’s needed. Hard to get a read off that.”

  “We’d better share that with Lieutenant Perez and Doctor Munson.”

  They did.

  “Sounds crazy,” the Marine engineer said. Perez hadn’t been happy when his platoon was detached from the 101st MEU and sent on this mission, and his mood hadn’t improved since he’d landed. Lisbeth picked that up without intending to. “But it’s par for the course in this cruise.”

  “Is the building sentient, then?” Doctor Munson asked. “Will violence cause it to react in kind?”

  “Probably,” she admitted. “From the looks of it, the Tower was put on stand-down mode when its controllers – the Kraxan Overlords – ran away. The same entity that blew up Redoubt-Six came here to finish the job. Still not sure who that was, but it was tough enough to scare the crap out of the Marauders. The good news is that the Tower’s defenses are also down. This shielding is part of the structure, not an active system.”

  “We need to study this technology. Now that we know what to look for, we can try to identify the force field and learn the principles behind it.”

  With that, the scientist turned to his team. They grabbed their sensors and surrounded the engineers trying to cut into the circular wall. The motions they made with the scanners made Lisbeth think of a pack of shamans waving their totems at some suspected demon.

  “Any ideas of what to do next?” Lieutenant Perez asked. “I was half kidding about using grav cannon, but if the cutter doesn’t work, that might be Plan C. Plan B involves using high-explosive breaching charges. Lasers haven’t even raised the material’s temperature, and plasma is barely warming it up.”

  Lisbeth had an idea, but it was
most definitely not a good one. Her Plan B was to try to contact the Tower and get it to open its doors. Thousands of dead Marauders inside had tried to do just that and failed miserably, and she wasn’t sure what the attempt would do to her. But they didn’t have time to waste, and she was almost certain that the answers she was seeking were somewhere inside those shiny black walls.

  Just as she was about to mention it, a burst of psychic noise froze her in place.

  “The building just sent a signal of some sort.”

  “Yes, I heard that too,” Heather added. “That can’t be good.”

  “Hopefully nobody’s around to answer the call.”

  Heather looked grim. “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  * * *

  “We’ve got local critters approaching the valley, sir.”

  Fromm connected his imp to the sensor feed from the Schwarzkopf tanks conducting air patrols over the valley and its surroundings. The thick jungle canopy beyond the scorched kill zone around the valley obscured the ground from normal sight, but not from thermal and grav scanners. The imp processed the readings into visuals just as clear and detailed as if the herds and packs of beasts heading in their direction were out in the open.

  The approaching fauna included groups of pseudo-hominids that might be primal Kraxans. According to Major Zhang, the Marauders had once been Class Two humanoids, not very different from other species of their kind, befitting their common ancestry. The troops of ape-like creatures swinging from tree to tree or running hunched down on the ground were slightly taller than the average human, with broad shoulders and stooped postures. Stuff one in a business suit and put a hat on his head and he might pass as a body-modded high-gee human colonist, except for the orange cast to their skin and their too-close-together eyes and the single thick eyebrow above them. Their hair was copper-red, thick and curled, and they wore no clothing or carried tools. If they’d once possessed sentience, that was no longer the case. More likely, these were some other primate-equivalent rather than debased Kraxans, not that it really mattered.