Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series

by C. J. Carella

  A bug had reached one of the unconscientious objectors in the middle and landed on his head. People were shooting at it, but now the critter was protected by the same force field that kept the screaming student from getting fried by friendly fire. Lisbeth Zhang pushed her way through the civilians but by the time she used the barrel of her beamer to slap the bug aside, it had already stung its victim, piercing the tough synthetic fiber of his bodysuit and the skull underneath.

  Sizzling smoke rose from the puncture. The young man’s screams turned into shrieks of agony, his body convulsing and his hands gripping his face as if trying to squeeze the impossible pain away. Heather’s t-wave implants caught his final thoughts.

  No-no-hurts-hurts-not-like-this-NO!

  By the time they pried his hands away and sprayed the wound with cell-repair gel, his convulsions had turned into mindless muscle impulses. The sting’s chemical secretions had bored a hole clear through skin and bone; Heather could see a dark brown mass beneath, brain tissue turned into digested mush. She turned away and kept shooting. Everybody was firing as fast as possible, and thankfully they only had to deal with a handful of the creatures. Soon enough, they were all gone.

  Only one bug made it through and managed to sting a victim. For that victim, one had been too much.

  Eight

  Star District Hoon, Lhan Arkh Congress, 167 AFC

  Seventh Fleet’s Special Attack Force emerged into real space half a light-second away from the Lamprey Star District’s main planet, its arrival as sudden and unexpected as a bolt of lightning from a clear sky.

  Kerensky watched the holotank display intently. All thirty-three ships had made their second transit safely and were moving into formation. The SAF was comprised by the Odin, two battleships, ten battlecruisers, two fleet carriers and twelve destroyers. It was an all-teeth formation, meant to savage the closest Lamprey system it could reach. None of the ships were operating at one hundred percent (the most charitable average would put the SAF’s readiness at seventy percent), but time had been of the essence. Kerensky had waited for basic repairs – and for extra doses of Melange, the wonder-drug given to fighter pilots, to be prepared and distributed to the attack force’s crews.

  And it worked.

  The nine-hour warp jump had gone through shockingly well; very few ghosts or hallucinations had tormented his crews. There’d been none of the usual casualties from a transit of that length. All Kerensky had experienced during transit was the oppressive presence that had confronted him on his previous jump, but he’d ignored it and concentrated on what was to come.

  Retribution was at hand.

  The SAF had arrived on the edge of the system, recovered in record time, and made the final jump a mere five minutes after their first emergence. The Lampreys had no warning they’d been invaded until the multicolor display announcing the second emergence appeared over the night sky of Hoon-Six like a harbinger of doom.

  Enemy contacts appeared in the tactical displays as fast as Odin’s sensors detected them. Determining the exact classes and tonnages of the vessels and orbital facilities around Hoon-Six would take a few minutes, but Kerensky wasn’t planning to wait that long. If this was to be done, it must be done quickly.

  “Fire at will.”

  Every ship had been assigned a target ‘basket’ and any vessel – military or civilian – unlucky enough to be within the basket was engaged by main gun batteries as soon as the Weapons Department crews had targeting solutions for them. The battlecruisers’ twenty-inch graviton cannon – a hundred and twenty guns in total – struck at eighty-three contacts, most of them civilian freighters and equally helpless military support vessels, the cargo and factory ships which provided the lifeblood of the Lhan Arkh task force that had joined the Imperium fleet and sailed to its doom less than thirty hours ago. Single main gun blasts were more than powerful enough to cripple or kill the massive but thinly-protected targets. A dozen escort destroyers were arrayed around the Lamprey support elements like so many sheepdogs; they survived one or two hits apiece before joining their charges in hell.

  Hoon System’s outer defenses were not spared, either. Odin and the battleships engaged twenty planetary defense monitors – heavily armed ships without warp drives – and fourteen space facilities, six of them orbital fortresses, the rest civilian docking stations and orbital habitats. A hundred and eighty fighters struck those contacts from all angles almost simultaneously. In less than a minute, all the soft targets had been destroyed, and the military ships and bases had taken heavy damage.

  The Special Attack Force advanced relentlessly towards the planet, engaging any surviving vessels or installations with its full firepower. The fighter wings continued hammering the orbital defenses as the warships’ secondary guns went into action. Plasma and lasers completed the work graviton batteries had begun. Depleted force fields gave way, and hulls burst open under the steady fire. The startled Lamprey spacers didn’t have time to go into battle stations before being obliterated. Within ten minutes, only scattered debris shared Hoon-Six orbital lanes with the invading force. Then it was the turn of the ground defense bases, which had just begun to fire at their tormentors.

  “Caught you napping,” Kerensky said in the tone of a judge passing a death sentence.

  It had been a risky move, leading this retribution raid into Lhan Arkh space, but he had bet that the raid, coming thirty-six hours after the ET fleet’s destruction, would take the enemy by surprise. The extermination of over a hundred enemy vessels made for a nice payoff, although the full play had yet to be resolved. He only wished he could be visiting this destruction on the Galactic Imperium instead, but the Gimps were protected by distance: over ten warp transits separated New Texas from the nearest District Capital, most of them through Wyrashat space. The repulsive Lampreys were closer, and killing them might be less satisfying, but equally necessary. All enemies of humankind must be dealt with.

  As it was, his ships had to enter Paulus System, officially open to all comers but still under the control of the Wyrashat Empire. The startled Wyrms hadn’t done anything to prevent the SAF from reaching the inner orbits around the star and making transit into Lamprey territory. No Imperium forces had been at Paulus; they must have fled as soon as the surviving enemy ships had returned, fearing something like what had happened. It appeared the Gimps hadn’t bothered to warn their Lhan Arkh allies of the disaster at Capricorn, allowing the SAF to surprise them. It was time to make the bastards understand they were in a fight, not conducting an execution.

  Odin shuddered as several grav cannon struck its force fields. Kerensky skimmed over the damage reports while he oversaw the overall action. Nothing major; Captain Cochrane hadn’t been happy about sending the fleet’s flagship on a raid, but he was fighting the superdreadnought as well as anyone could.

  Without their orbital forces, the defenders of Hoon-Six had no chance beyond some faint hope their frenzied quantum-telegram messages could summon help in time. The Lhan Arkh surely had a fleet in reserve somewhere, and it might even be already en route after news of the defeat at Capricorn had reached it, but they weren’t here, and they probably wouldn’t reach Hoon in time. If Kerensky was wrong, of course, the Special Attack Force would have to conduct a fighting retreat.

  You pays yer money and you takes yer chances, he thought. Admiral Carruthers had been fond of the saying, whenever he wasn’t spouting less vernacular quotes from Earth’s colorful military history.

  Ground installations had a number of advantages whenever they confronted spaceborne attackers. The rules imposed on all Starfarers by the Elder Races limited the firepower starships could bring to bear on the heavily-shielded dirtside facilities, which had no such restrictions. The traditional way to eliminate those fortifications was to land enough troops to take them by storm, a brutal and lengthy process. Even humans’ ability to use warp catapults to send Marines into combat was of limited utility. Like pre-Contact paratroopers, warp-dropped forces were lightly armed
and equipped; they couldn’t take ground held by dug-in enemies, except in the few places where they could achieve local superiority. Reducing planetary defenses could take days or even weeks, and those surface gun emplacements would endanger any attempts to use the warp lanes leading further into enemy space. Kerensky’s attack force hadn’t bothered to bring any assault vessels; they didn’t have the time to besiege the enemy.

  He had another card to play, though.

  * * *

  Ghosting.

  Gus watched the world through the distorted warp aperture that was his only link to the physical universe. His cannon hit targets from less than a hundred meters away; he and the rest of Flight B – five fighters strong – were attacking inside the enemy’s force field perimeter, firing starship-grade weapon directly into buildings and weapon emplacements protected only by weaker shields that buckled under a single direct hit, let alone the five shots each fighter could unleash on them. The close-range cannon fire was soon lost in a firestorm of secondary explosions as power plants were torn open and released strange matter particles into the air, with catastrophic consequences. The planetary defense base and much of a nearby city ceased to exist, swallowed up by multiple conflagrations with yields equivalent to multi-kilotons of TNT.

  The waves of fire would have swallowed all five fighters if they’d been in normal space. Even from warp, residual energy buffeted Gus’ ship and reduced its shields by fifteen percent. Time to boogie.

  Transition.

  The butcher bill from that sortie had been in the millions, and devastating enough it came close to the limits of what the Elders’ rules allowed to be unleashed on a planetary surface. That didn’t particularly concern him. With extinction being the only alternative to victory, the US was prepared to push the envelope, and damn the consequences.

  What concerned him was the creatures that might hear the psychic noise those deaths transmitted into warp space. The Foos were nearby. They seemed more interested in hovering near the spot – if such a term applied in null-space – where the fighters had kept open a doorway between the two universes. Maybe they wanted to come out and play.

  Emergence.

  They all made it back into orbit, next to the comforting bulk of the Big E. The Enterprise and the Macon were both alive and well; the fleet carriers had stayed as far out as possible and not been targeted by the confused Lamprey defenders. Gus goosed the War Eagle’s engines, matching velocities with the Enterprise as a space traffic controller guided him in until the grav grapples took over. All he had to do after that was sit back and relax.

  I’m out of grav-cannon juice, but my plasma secondaries are full. If I opened up, they’d never know what hit them.

  A brief vision of death and destruction flashed through his mind: shocked Navy flight crews torn apart into burning chunks of flesh and bone; the carrier shuddering under the hammer of the War Eagle’s guns; a final apocalyptic blast when he turned on his warp shields and rammed his fighter through t the insides of the Big E. That would be…

  Gus shook his head, scattering the evil thoughts away. He realized his imp had painted targeting icons on the hangar bay, in preparation for the order to open fire on his own people. Shock and terror struck him like a wave of freezing water.

  That wasn’t me, he told himself. The Foos. The damn Foos almost got to me.

  A couple of other pilots had spoken of having sudden murderous urges. As far as he knew, everybody had saved them for the enemy. Sooner or later, though, someone would lose it. Maybe it’d be him.

  Time to double up on Melange.

  The chemical concoction helped fighter pilots stave off the insanity and worse that resulted from excess exposure to warp. After a while, you needed to up the doses to get the same effect. A word with the pharmacist mate in charge would take care of it; the Navy and the Marines had learned that risking a ‘spice’ overdose was better than having someone behind a twenty-inch gun go psycho at the worst possible moment.

  Gus thought about talking to Grinner about it, but he figured it could wait.

  Let’s see if the drugs do the trick first.

  Like most lies, it sounded comforting but didn’t quite reassure him.

  * * *

  “Ready the special munitions,” Kerensky ordered when the last planetary defense base had been destroyed.

  “Special Munitions code accepted. Status is Weapons Free, sir.”

  Only fleet admirals had the authority to order the deployment of field-encasement thermal weapons. That was the ostensible reason he’d led this raid rather than one of his task force commanders. Every cruiser-class or larger vessel in the US Navy had at least a few dozen city-busters in its magazines – the genocide devices were surprisingly compact – but only his release codes would activate them. Most Starfarers had similar restrictions, but there were exceptions. The Risshah who’d nearly made humanity extinct let any ship captain deploy genocide weapons at their discretion. The Lampreys did the same, which made what he was about to do slightly less repellent.

  I never thought I’d be doing this.

  The Navy’s primary purpose was defensive. It was configured to intercept invading forces and prevent the use of those weapons on American cities. But the best way to deny the enemy an avenue of attack was to destroy its supply lines, and the industrial infrastructure necessary to produce those supplies. The Lamprey system was the nearest such source of comfort and support to the enemy. Destroying it would keep the Lhan Arkh from sending another fleet down this warp line to join any Imperium forces readying for a rematch.

  Well, Paulus System is another supply base, and closer to the US border than Hoon; that’s where the Gal-Imp fleet came from. But I’m not going to destroy a Wyrashat population center. I’m not that far gone yet.

  Depopulating a Lamprey planet, on the other hand, he had no fundamental problems with, beyond the regret any human would feel when consigning millions of sophonts to their deaths.

  Sending the release codes took a few seconds. After the weapons were released, the process was simple enough. The attack force conducted a low-orbit pass over the planet, deploying the tiny missiles as it went. Each munition package homed in on the energy signature of a city or town, communicating its destination to its murderous siblings so that none of them wasted themselves on the same spot. The planetary defenses that could have intercepted the city busters had all fallen silent; nothing interrupted their flight down. Within minutes, force field domes ten to thirty kilometers in diameter surrounded their targets. All large metropolises were encased by overlapping domes of force. Only heavy military ordnance could open a temporary breach, and most of those weapons had been destroyed along with the planetary defense bases. The civilians inside were trapped.

  The burning began shortly thereafter. Flames rose on the outer perimeter of the force domes, and began to roll steadily inward. The damage to the environment outside the domes was minimal: just some vented atmosphere when the work was done. The superheated gas be expelled beyond the atmosphere, where it wouldn’t affect weather patterns. Very efficient, if one didn’t mind burning people to death.

  The Special Attack Force wouldn’t stay around long enough to make multiple passes, targeting smaller population centers with more thermal weapons, or finishing the job with direct fire. A small percentage of the inhabitants would survive despite their best efforts, of course. All sophonts were by definition hardy, persistent species; like weeds, exterminating them all was a job that took time and dedication, more than the SAF had. A few of the most stubborn or luckiest Lampreys would live to watch the end of their world.

  How merciful of us.

  Of course, mercy had nothing to do with it. The raiding force couldn’t tarry very long. The military value of the system would be reduced to near-zero regardless of the survival of a few inhabitants. Without cities or orbital facilities, a fleet would find precious little support there.

  “Our work here is done,” he said. “Prepare for warp transit.”
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br />   The dark presence was waiting for him, its hatred sated for the moment.

  He embraced it as if greeting an old friend.

  Nine

  Redoubt-Five, 167 AFC

  The stench produced by the raging forest fire seeped through the filters in Fromm’s armor. The acrid smoke tasted like failure.

  Thankfully, the prevailing winds were pushing the flames away from the valley, so an evacuation hadn’t been necessary. Some additional firefighting equipment was being brought down in case conditions changed, but he didn’t think they would need it this time. And nothing bigger than a microbe was alive for miles around. Achieving that had taken two-thirds of his ordnance reserves, but more was being manufactured by the Humboldt’s fabbers. He’d be back to full stores within forty-eight hours. They were safe for now.

  Problem was, he’d thought the same thing this morning, and he’d turned out to be dead wrong.

  A civilian – Daniel Tompkins, age 39 – had died on his watch. Three Navy Spacers and two Marines had been injured but were expected to recover. His job was to protect the personnel working on the ruins, and he had screwed up. Nobody had expected an uninhabited Class Two planet to be very dangerous. He had taken precautions nonetheless, establishing a secure base and deploying a covering and reaction force, just in case. And none of his measures had kept Tompkins from ending in a body bag, half of his skull melted off.

  “New orders,” he found himself saying. “We’ll increase the air patrols, using the LAVs and combat shuttles. Fourth Platoon will stay inside the valley; those Hellcats will be our new reaction force. And I’m going to see if Humboldt’s other shuttles can be reconfigured for combat missions.”

  Doing so shouldn’t be too difficult: modular weapon packs could be added in a matter of minutes. The only problem was risking in combat the vehicles they would need to ferry equipment and personnel back and forth between the starship and the planet. The Humboldt wasn’t built for planetary landings; no starship larger than a destroyer was. Lose too many shuttles, and bringing everyone back would take a good while, a recipe for disaster if an emergency evacuation became necessary.