Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series

by C. J. Carella

  The scream was familiar enough: Russell had heard the same kind of cry, mostly from people on their way out. A moment later, PFC Lee went flying up through the air as if he’d stepped on a heavy-duty mine. His torso went one way; his lower half went another, legs flailing as if trying to run.

  “The fuck?”

  The SAW gunner on the OP cut loose, hosing the area where Leo had bought it with three-round bursts. The plasma rounds illuminated the area, not that they changed what everyone saw: there were a few loose boulders, two carbonized tree trunks, and a whole lot of dirt. Nothing else. No sign of whatever had ripped Leo in two and tossed both halves into the air.

  “Check fire!”

  They did. There was nothing to shoot at, but Leo was still dead. He’d seen something, and it’d killed him.

  “Sergeant said it was a warp ghost,” Russell muttered.

  “Warp ghosts don’t do that.”

  “They can still kill you, Grampa.”

  “Yeah. Heart failure. Aneurysms. They don’t tear you a new asshole.”

  A couple of Navy corpsmen reached Lee, not that there was anything they could do for him. His status had gone black just before he was cut in two. Russell kept scanning the area through the sights of his Widowmaker, but there was nothing down there.

  “What the fuck, Russet?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Major Zhang is coming through. Hold positions, and fire only on my command.”

  “Copy that.”

  Maybe their warp witch could handle it.

  * * *

  The look Captain Fromm had given her after waking her up had spoken volumes.

  “Hey, I promised him there were no more Kraxan Battlers around, and I was right,” she said to herself – and the voices in her head – as she headed to the spot where one luckless Marine had gotten dismembered. “This is a Warpling. I’m guessing it’s the Warpling that killed all the Kraxans back in the day.”

  “You are correct,” Atu told her. “The entity is still trapped in the Tower, but it can reach our minds and through them our bodies.”

  “Which means he can kill us all before the night is over. Maybe we should pull up stakes and get the fuck out of Dodge.”

  “That is the most likely plan to ensure your survival. For the short term, at least.”

  “Yeah, until the ETs win the war and kill us all. Or I go completely crazy, now that I have a monster bouncing around my skull.”

  “You will die slow, harlot,” a harsh voice whispered in her head. “First, I’m going to make an incision on the back of your head, just long enough to get a good hold on your skin. And then I’m going to peel it off cleanly, all of it. And then…”

  Speak of the devil. Two invisible friends were not better than one, not when the second one was a Marauder of Krax. It wasn’t the whole Battler’s mind, just most of his memories and a hefty chunk of his damned soul, which was bad enough. It was sort of like sharing a room with a serial killer with a bad case of rabies, except less fun. His name – he was very proud of his masculinity – wasn’t easy to translate: the closest she’d managed was ‘Blade That Cuts, Stabs, Slashes…’ with about sixteen variations on terms for using sharp implements on others, along with a string of obscenities designed to be offensive or revolting to every species in the galaxy. She called him Vlad (as in ‘the Impaler’) for short. The murderous ET had died while their minds had been connected, and now he was stuck in her head. Every once in a while, he would break into her train of thought and regale her with threats and descriptions of torture.

  “Atu, can you shut him up?”

  “I’m trying, Christopher Robin. He’s stubborn and single-minded, like a shark, not to mention a fairly unintelligent specimen even compared to other Battlers, none of whom were selected for their wit.”

  “You will die screaming, Pathfinder,” Vlad interjected, apparently feeling left out. “I’ll start with your upper eye, take my time with it…”

  “Oh, bother. If you only understood the suffering you inflict upon others, you could yet achieve Balance. Here, allow me to show you, my dear Eeyore...”

  Vlad began to scream in agony when Atu forced him to feel the things he’d done to his victims. His cries sounded like a dozen cats sharpening their nails on a chalk board. Lisbeth did her best to tune out the two aliens’ argument as she approached the spot where PFC Lee had been killed. An infantry squad was covering her, for all the good they would do.

  Other than some extra smoldering holes where Marine Iwos had uselessly chewed up the area, the burned-out patch of ground looked much like the rest. She had no explanation why or how the Warpling had lured Lee to his death. She concentrated on her warp senses, and finally got something.

  It was like a footprint, a place where the Warpling had briefly intersected with the physical world. Lisbeth picked up the entity’s scent, or energy signature; it was different from the Keeper’s, much like a rat and a whale are different despite both being mammals. And the Keeper was the rat, even though it was powerful enough to keep thousands of Marauders locked inside the Black Tower while its big brother hunted them down. The other one was a whale by comparison.

  Her personal Marauder stopped screaming in pain. He was terrified.

  “We must flee, Meal-on-Legs. The Flayer of Souls was here.”

  “That’s what you call it?”

  “One of its many titles. It is still trapped, but it sought information. It took one of your servants, read his mind, and discarded him. Count him lucky; he merely ceased to exist in the corporeal realm and most of his essence moved on. The Flayer was in a merciful mood. Now that it knows who you are, it will be waiting for you in the Tower.”

  The Kraxan word for mercy meant mostly ‘weak’ and ‘foolish’ with undertones of doing something forbidden. They deserved getting their souls flayed and filleted. Of course, if the Flayer decided humans had it coming as well, she didn’t know what they could do to stop it.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “Some Marauder weapons can hurt Warplings. When I was in my Corpse-Ship, I shot some of them.”

  “The ones you destroyed were minor manifestations, Christopher Robin. Little more than scattered bits of information from the memories of dead things, given a semblance of volition by the weakest dwellers in the Path.”

  “I suppose being called Christopher Robin is better than Meal-on-Legs,” she told Atu. “So nothing in this world can kill those things?”

  “Some of the weapons you found in the Battler I regrettably slew might cause some pain and discomfort, distracting it for a brief time.”

  “Better than nothing, I guess.”

  She contacted Captain Fromm, not looking forward to trying to explain what had happened here, and what would happen in the morning.

  * * *

  Fromm went over the names and stats of the fourteen Marines he was about to lead into the Black Tower.

  Gunny Freito had insisted on accompanying him. So had Staff Sergeant Goldberg and Lieutenant Hansen, but he couldn’t spare them from the responsibilities he was shirking, so Freito would have to do. The Gunnery Sergeant was built like a fire hydrant, short and with disproportionately broad shoulders, the result of muscle enhancements. He was carrying a salvaged Marauder weapon, a particle beam weapon that Major Zhang believed could hurt the Warpling that had killed Lee the night before. The heavy weapon fired powerful but short-ranged blasts, ideal for close-quarters combat. Some jury-rigging allowed it to feed from standard power packs, but it went through them very quickly. Three to five shots would empty a pack. Freito had draped a bandolier of spares over his armor, giving him a piratical look.

  Three Marines in the squad wielded plasma flame-throwers. Zhang thought extreme heat might also fend off the entity. The rest of the squad made do with their regular Infantry Weapons.

  Heather was wearing a set of Marine combat armor; she was familiar with the system and its limitations. She was armed with a beamer shotgun, well-suited for urban combat. Their
one civilian volunteer, Doctor Munson, would make do with a haz-con suit, a personal force field and a hand beamer.

  All in all, they wouldn’t be bringing along a great deal of firepower, but anything heavier would be as likely to kill his own people as the target when fighting in enclosed spaces. If more of the Marauders who’d savaged his company and destroyed two shuttles and one tank were waiting for them, they would have to count on Major Zhang’s magic tricks to take care of them. Fromm didn’t like counting on the half-crazy woman – despite her reassurances, they’d lost one Marine the previous night – but she was all they had.

  Except for Heather, he corrected himself. She had helped fight off the Marauders with her implants. And she would do whatever was necessary to get the job done. He could count on that.

  “You’re in charge, Hansen,” he told his second in command. “Good luck.”

  “Happy hunting, sir.”

  Fromm nodded and turned towards the Black Tower. Zhang was standing near it, waiting for everyone to get ready. Once they were, she started working her voodoo.

  The previous two attempts had resulted in increasingly violent responses. If it happened again…

  A circular opening appeared on the wall’s surface, more than tall and wide enough to fit two or three Marines in full battle rattle. Nothing else happened.

  If something is too easy, it’s almost certainly a trap.

  They went in.

  * * *

  The only thing worse than taking the express elevator to Hell was having to climb down a vertical shaft to get there. Not that anything was going to stop Lisbeth Zhang, USWMC. She had things to do, Kraxan tombs to plunder, and one nation indivisible to save.

  At least there were plenty of handholds. More than enough, since the access shaft designers had to take into account that its likely users would come in all sizes and shapes. When the Black Tower was built, there were hardly any normal Kraxans left, courtesy of the mutating effects of overexposure to warp space, their love for cybernetics, and their habit of grafting other species’ limbs and organs onto themselves. Their service tunnels could be accessed by anybody except Battlers and Overlords, whose dimensions just didn’t fit anything you could call a ‘tunnel’ or ‘shaft’ and who considered such places to be beneath them anyway.

  The American team had to use the servants’ entrance because the first seven or eight levels of the Black Tower were choked with corpses. Removing thousands of bodies would take more time than they had. The same final directives that had locked in the dead Kraxans had also shut them off from the service tunnels, so those areas were clear. Once they got past the top levels, the number of dead aliens should drop off noticeably. Among other reasons, because the thing they’d been running away from had left no remains of the unlucky bastards it had caught.

  Lisbeth still didn’t know exactly what had happened, but some of the memories she’d absorbed from the Tower’s partially functional security systems had shown her fleeing Marauders exploding into clouds of particles like so many dandelions in the wind. Their shields and armor had turned to dust as easily as their flesh when they were touched by long shimmering tendrils that seemed to appear and disappear at random. The manifested Warpling was something that extended beyond the normal three dimensions of space, or the fourth dimension of time. Not even the Kraxans’ enhanced senses could really see their tormentor. The few who had stood and fought hadn’t even slowed it down, either.

  Can’t wait to meet it, she thought as she kept climbing down. I’m sure that’ll be a memorable experience, all two seconds of it before it makes me go ‘poof.’

  “Have some faith,” Atu told her. “Even the fiercest Warpling can be swayed by those who have achieved Balance within them.”

  “That’s your job. I’m many things, but balanced ain’t one of them.”

  Her invisible friend fell silent for a bit, and she had some moments of blessed silence on the long climb down. Lisbeth was lugging over half again her body weight in armor, weapons and gear. The exoskeleton of her standard-issue Marine suit was doing most of the work, but the fifteen percent of so that fell to her own muscles was no picnic.

  There were seven people below her; half the Marine squad, plus Captain Fromm. Heather was right above Lisbeth, then Doctor Munson – who was being belayed down by half a dozen extra safety lines fastened to his suit – and the rest of the squad behind him, with Gunnery Sergeant Freito bringing up the rear. She should have been the first one in, but they’d decided she was too important to take point. They better not blame her if one of those grunts got killed because she wasn’t there to deal with something they weren’t equipped to handle. She had their sensor feeds running through her imp, so she could see what they did, but it was hard to concentrate on them and make her climb, let alone dealing with the voices in her head.

  The Marine on point – Lance Corporal Schwartz – stopped at a landing, the ninth one they’d encountered on the way down. Only six more to go before they reached the hangar level.

  Another Kraxan infodump hit her – from the Tower or Vlad; she wasn’t sure which – and it was a doozy. Corpse-Ships arriving to their cradles, effortlessly slipping into the physical realm from the Starless Path. Their pilots uncoupled themselves from the attachment points that connected them to the undead Pathfinder bodies they’d enslaved. The Kraxans used their Corpse-Ships like hermit crabs, wearing the skeletons like shells. The Marauders’ bodies had been hardened to survive the rigors of vacuum and warp space both, so they no longer needed cockpits, carrying their ships more like backpacks than vehicles.

  The sudden vision almost made her lose her grip and drop until her safety line broke her fall, which would have been painful and humiliating.

  Guess piloting those ships is going to take some doing.

  The old Corpse-Ship had a cockpit of sorts, but the newer models didn’t. Something else to figure out when she found them. Lisbeth grunted and kept climbing. If that was her only problem, she’d be elated. She added it to the pile that started with ‘freeing the Keeper’ and was followed by ‘dealing with the Flayer of Souls.’

  So far, neither Warpling had bothered her party. The Keeper had accepted the access codes she’d stolen from Vlad’s memories. She suspected that wouldn’t last long, however. The Corpse-Ship hangar was off-limits to everyone except pilots, technicians with the proper clearances and Overlords. Battlers weren’t on the list.

  I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it.

  “You will burn, most certainly you will burn,” Vlad told her. “Done carefully, a sophont can be cooked to perfection and remain alive long enough to watch as the carving of her body begins…”

  “It appears my last lesson didn’t sink in,” Atu interrupted him.

  Vlad started screeching again. For a master torturer, he sure whined a lot.

  Just a little longer.

  * * *

  Heather McClintock ignored the insanity echoing from Lisbeth’s mind and concentrated on climbing down.

  She’d been avoiding telepathic conversations with the Marine pilot since that nightmarish fight against the Kraxan Battlers. After Lisbeth became linked with a Marauder as it died, she had been on the edge to a total psychotic breakdown. Heather was afraid of what might happen if Lisbeth lost her mind while they were in contact.

  And yet you vouched for her. We could be on our way back to Xanadu instead of going off to fight ghosts and demons in a haunted tower. This is clearly a case of the insane leading the stupid.

  Heather shrugged. It was a little late in the game to change her mind. Besides, they were almost there.

  “This is it, boys and girls,” Lisbeth said over the squad channel. “The next landing down is our objective, but we’re going to stop on the level above, for reasons I’ll go into soon. Stay frosty.”

  They were fourteen levels – about twenty stories if this was a human building – down, twelve of those belowground. Their armor’s environmental controls kept them cool enough, but the
temperature was higher than on the surface: a hundred and nine degrees Fahrenheit versus eighty-five up above. One might say it was getting hellishly hot down there. The shaft was about ten meters wide, and seemed ordinary enough, just a cylindrical hole descending endlessly into the darkness, featureless except for a variety of hand- and footholds. Even the Kraxans didn’t care to get fancy with areas only lowly minions would normally use. On every level, there was a landing and a catwalk around the edge of the shaft. Heather couldn’t see any doors, but there had been no sign of the entrances that had led them there, either. The building’s materials could retract open on command and close seamlessly in reverse. Another bit of advanced technology that had been lost to the current crop of Starfarers.

  Lisbeth reached the landing, squeezed past one of the Marines and touched the featureless surface. A flurry of t-waves passed between her and the building. She was speaking with the enslaved Warpling that controlled the entire tower. Although she couldn’t quite make out the conversation, Heather had a feel that Warpling’s ‘voice’ was very loud and very angry. The last time, a gang of Battlers had attacked the landing party. Hopefully Lisbeth would do better this time.

  By the time Heather reached the landing, a door had opened. A Marine fireteam went through the door first. Everything seemed to be clear on the tunnel leading further into that level.

  “Everything okay?” Heather asked Lisbeth, using her regular imp.

  “No. But we’re inside, and that’s all that matters. I couldn’t get us directly to the hangar level. There were complications.”

  “What kind of complications?”

  “Short version: we need to free the Keeper before it will let us enter the hangar. I sort of woke it up, but it is trapped by its programming. I have to release it.”

  “Any idea how to do that?”

  “Yes, but it’s going to take you, me and the big scientist guy. And the Marines will have to watch out for the other Warpling and any other surprises that might be around. There aren’t any live Kraxans left on this planet, but they might still be trouble. Let’s get everyone inside and I’ll explain.”