Doomed Space Marine: A Space Adventure (Bug Wars Book 1)

by J. A. Cipriano

  Doomed Space Marine

  Bug Wars Book #1

  J. A. Cipriano

  Conner Kressley

  Copyright © 2017 by J. A. Cipriano & Conner Kressley

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

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  Also by J. A. Cipriano

  Also by Conner Kressley

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Thank You for reading!

  Author’s Note

  Litrpg

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  Also by J. A. Cipriano

  World of Ruul

  Soulstone: Awakening

  Soulstone: The Skeleton King

  The Legendary Builder

  The Builder’s Sword

  The Builder’s Greed

  Elements of Wrath Online

  Ring of Promise

  The Vale of Three Wolves

  Kingdom of Heaven

  The Skull Throne

  Escape From Hell

  The Thrice Cursed Mage

  Cursed

  Marked

  Burned

  Seized

  Claimed

  Hellbound

  The Half-Demon Warlock

  Pound of Flesh

  Flesh and Blood

  Blood and Treasure

  The Lillim Callina Chronicles

  Wardbreaker

  Kill it with Magic

  The Hatter is Mad

  Fairy Tale

  Pursuit

  Hardboiled

  Mind Games

  Fatal Ties

  Clans of Shadow

  Heart of Gold

  Feet of Clay

  Fists of Iron

  The Spellslinger Chronicles

  Throne to the Wolves

  Prince of Blood and Thunder

  Found Magic

  May Contain Magic

  The Magic Within

  Magic for Hire

  Witching on a Starship

  Maverick

  Planet Breaker

  Also by Conner Kressley

  Immortal Mercenary

  Mark of Cain

  Curse of Cain

  Rise of Cain

  1

  Even after all these years, my band going off still scared the hell out of me. I wasn’t sure why they called them bands since they were stitched into your damned skin. I could easier pluck the eyes out of my head than rip the band from its place along my wrist. At least my eyes wouldn’t have a detonation mechanism that would render me a splatter of meat and bones all over this floor if I removed them. That was the way the New World Alliance liked it though. Once you were in, you were in for life.

  Sure, you could leave if you didn’t mind constant ridicule, scorning from your peers, and a life of being politely rejected for service in any reputable Earth establishment. How could they tell you used to be infantry, you ask? Well, that part was easy. The band stayed on. It sat there forever, a metal cuff on your hand telling all the world how cowardly you were, how you backed out on your promises. I had heard tales that century-old corpses had been found with the bands still looking as pristine as the day they’d been made. It made sense. The damned things were made out of Ellebruim; the strongest stuff in the universe and the reason for this God forsaken war with the bugs in the first place.

  I looked down at my band, a ring of silver with a screen at the top, setting my mop against the wall and sighing. Since it was still on and I wasn’t a pile of meat and bones marking up the floor I had just spent the better half of an hour cleaning, I could read what the glowing letters said as they ran across it, like the blinking signs on Times Square Station.

  I didn’t need to read them though. I wasn’t some grassfed. I had been with the NWA for nearly ten years now; double the amount of time my father had served before he was killed by the bugs, and two years longer than my brother who had lost the lower half of his body in a raid gone wrong. He still had his band on, of course, but it was tinted purple now, a sign of his sacrifice in duty. You know, in the case the complete lack of a lower body wasn’t enough of a clue.

  Let’s just say he didn’t get refused for service anywhere.

  I took a deep breath and looked at my band once more.

  No. There was only one reason they’d call me. If my band was buzzing, it was because they needed me for a mission. You might be asking why a soldier like myself would be moping floors or why he might need to be called out for a mission as opposed to already being on one. The truth was, missions were strategic things, chess moves at this point. A guy like me, even if I was a lowly janitor in a addition to a living legend, didn’t get called for just any old thing. I was important, more or less. And, if they were calling me, it meant this was important too.

  Looking down, I saw the confirmation scroll across my band, disappearing as it circled out of sight.

  Mark Ryder. Report to the deployment depot for briefing and mission assessment. You are required to stop what you are doing immediately and comply with these orders. – New World Alliance.

  “Immediately, my ass,” I muttered, picking my mop up to finish off the floor. If this entire place wasn’t clean enough to lick by the time the inspectors came to check on it, I wouldn’t get paid for this hour’s work.

  Hell, if they were feeling frisky, I might not get paid for the entire day, and I needed that money to survive. I might have been one of the longest-serving infantrymen in NWA history, but I was also as poor as a man who valued his life over the salary the Alliance paid you for your missions.

  It was why, instead of stockpiling as much money as possible to buy myself out of my contract (a common mistake I’d seen too many grassfeds make over the years), I did the smart thing and blew every dime and dollar I had on suit and weapon upgrades. There was an entire sect of people, protesters who argued that the Alliance should provide weapons and upgrades to all their soldiers, regardless of their earnings. They might have had a point, but having a point without having the power to back it up never got anything done. So, while I might have believed the protesters when they spoke about how every person willing to risk their life for their home planet should be given all they needed to do that job free of charge, I also knew that was probabl
y never going to happened.

  I needed those weapons. I needed those upgrades. They helped me in battle. Helped me survive. Besides, you couldn’t buy your way out of your contract if the bugs ripped out your spinal cord. At least, that was the way I saw it. It was why I was working as a janitor, and it was also why I was going to finish up this floor.

  It wouldn’t be much of an issue. It was an open secret among lifers that the Alliance padded its schedule ten minutes. I was done, with my janitorial supplies packed away, in five.

  In seven minutes, I was walking toward the deployment depot, receiving salutes from fellow servicemen, most of whom I had predated but who outranked me, while still wearing my janitor’s uniform.

  It was a strange juxtaposition, my life. I had these people’s respect. There were stories of what I’d done against the bugs, of my April march on the Ellebruim mines of Fenal that every grassfed had heard at least once before deciding to take the plunge and join up.

  Hell, that story was probably the reason half the younger folks in this damned infantry decided to join. They all wanted that glory. They wanted stories told about them, wanted their name remembered. They had no idea that the person wearing that name, the person who led the fight against the bugs in what could be considered our first big win in Fenal, was also the guy cleaning up their piss and emptying their trashcans.

  Life was a strange thing, and it took you in strange places.

  “Captain Ryder,” a voice I didn’t recognize said from beside me as I neared the deployment depot.

  “I’m not a captain. I’m a lieutenant,” I corrected, something I had to do a lot of. The kids here, they had heard so much about me that they naturally assumed I’d worked my way up the ranks like so many others who had managed to survive as long as I had.

  They would be wrong though.

  They didn’t know the way the system worked, not really. They assumed that this fight was straightforward, that it was humans versus bugs in an all-out fight for our planet, and you couldn’t blame them for that. There was twenty-four-hour news coverage filled with loudmouth commentators who screamed at each other as they fought over their differing views on battle plans that never held up once the shit hit the fan anyway. Worse than that, politicians all told them that this was the case. It was us against them, and only one species could survive.

  While that might be true, it’s far from the only thing that is. I’ve lived in this place long enough to see it change, and I’d talked to enough lifers who came before me to know that the way things are now isn’t the way they had always been. When this war first started, when the bugs decimated that city in Colorado and put our entire planet on notice, we all stood together.

  When they enslaved forty percent of the world’s men, we all mourned our losses together and, when we finally came up with the technology to beat them back off our shores, we were a single line in the sand, all of mankind standing together.

  At least, that’s what the stories said.

  All of that happened over a thousand years ago.

  In that time, the bugs had kept hitting us hard. We might have pushed them off our shores and knocked them back into space, but they were still there. Little by little, they were getting closer to taking over our planet once and for all.

  And, what was worse, it was the same damned bugs. Their lifespans were infinitely longer than ours. So, while the great-great-great-great grandchildren of the first people who fought these things were in the trenches today, the very same creatures that plagued us from the starting line were still in play.

  We might have had passed down knowledge of what to do and how to fight them, but theirs was all firsthand. They didn’t have to worry about grassfeds and prissy little children who had no idea what they were getting into. Their soldiers had a thousand years of experience. It really put my tenure into perspective.

  If that wasn’t bad enough, mankind wasn’t really united anymore. As the centuries rolled on, people did what people do best. They learned how to monetize the situation. Companies took over, companies that built suits and weaponry, companies that charged us to give us the best suits and weaponry. Companies that changed the way things were done.

  I had passed up on higher positions before, decided to stay on the ground while people I’d come up with moved into more influential spheres. By the time I thought that might be a good idea for me, things were different. What I’d done before didn’t matter. Everything had been reset, turned into a points system, and- though I had more experience and kills than nearly anyone in the Alliance, I was starting from zero.

  What was worse in my eyes was that they had made the war a goddamned game. You earned coins for kills, for completing missions, and the Alliance actually ranked you based on those earnings.

  Grassfeds came in with big dreams of racking up huge piles of money and the glory of being a high scorer instead of giving the good fight. They even complained about kill-stealing, as the coins and credit were awarded by whoever the mission sensors recorded as getting the killing blow.

  Madness, I tell you.

  I finally focused on the person who had talked to me. “You lost?”

  He was a young guy with sandy blond hair cut close to his scalp, and a smile on his face that told me, if he had seen any action at all, it wasn’t much. You didn’t smile like that after you see a friend or two reduced to corpses in front of you. You didn’t move that freely. There was not as much pep in your step. “No shame in it, son. This place can be a maze if you don’t know where you’re headed.”

  It was true. At that moment, both of us were headed down a hallway that served as a spiraling ramp meant to help us descend the floors of the Alliance Hall as quickly as possible. Still, there were dozens and dozens of those spiraling lanes jutting off at each floor, some moving upward, some going down, and some that stayed parallel to provide a straight shot to the other side of the building.

  It took me years to figure out the layout of this place, and I didn’t look down on anyone who still hadn’t.

  “No, sir,” he replied. “I just wanted to introduce myself.” Looking at him, I saw how nervous he was. He was biting his lower lip, and his eyes wouldn’t meet mine for long. He must have been a huge fan of the stories about me. Great. I wasn’t exactly in the mood for a fan right now. I had already spent about nine of my ten-minute padding. I didn’t have time to do the whole ‘handshake and picture’ thing.

  “Look,” I started. “I’m sure you’re—”

  “My name is Billy Langham. I think you knew my father.”

  My heart stuttered in my chest as I heard that name.

  “Bill Langham?” I narrowed my eyes. “You’re Bill Langham’s son?”

  I looked at the kid again, this time really looking at his features. I hadn’t seen it before, hadn’t been paying enough attention, but now that I was, I saw the way his face looked just like his father’s, the way his smile was just as bright as Bill’s, just as free before he’d died.

  Bill Langham was my best friend when I joined the Alliance. A farm boy from Iowa, he and I had a lot in common. We had grown up in awe of what the Alliance stood for. Brainwashed by commercials and veterans who whitewashed what was really going on, we both wanted to make a difference.

  He’d told me about his girl back in Dubuque, about the baby she was carrying. He said he was going to go back to them, to buy his way out of his contract and use his status as a veteran to go into politics. He wanted to change the world.

  He was the first man I’d ever seen die with my own eyes. The bugs shoved their claws into his guts and tore him in half almost as soon as we’d stepped foot on the dirt on their homeworld. He wouldn’t change the world. He would never even see it again, and he would never see his son either. It didn’t seem fair I got to now.

  “Yes, sir. I am,” he answered, nodding firmly.

  “How old are you?” I asked, narrowing my eyes.

  “Seventeen,” he said quickly, smiling at me.

  �
��Seventeen,” I repeated. My God. I was thirty-four years old. I was too young to see the kids of those I’d served with coming up in the ranks. Still, he was the same age I was when I joined the infantry, the same age his dad was when he died.

  “I was hoping you might have some stories about my father,” he continued as I stepped onto the deposit lift. For whatever reason, he stepped onto it with me; a long plank that shot downward before lowering us into the War Room, where I’d be given details about the mission I was about to be sent on. “I never got to know him, and in his letters, he told my mother how you and he were such good friends. I thought that maybe—”

  I cut him off with a shake of my head. “Why are you here?”

  “I told you. I was wondering if you could tell me about my fath—”

  “No. Why are you here? In the infantry? Didn’t your family have a farm to tend to? Couldn’t you have gotten out of service?”

  “Gotten out of it?” Confusion creeped over his face. “Why would I want to do that? My father was a great man. You’re a great man. Why wouldn’t I want to follow in your footsteps?”

  Damn. It looked like the commercials were still in rotation.

  “Look, kid,” I sighed. “Your father was one of the best men I ever knew, and he was really excited to meet you. It’s horrible that he never got to.” I nodded. “I have a lot of stories about him. I don’t mind telling you most of them, but I can’t do it right now.” The lift skidded to a stop, and the door to the War Room opened, revealing the inner sanctum of the Alliance’s military mindset. “And you can’t be here. I have a mission. If I make it back, we’ll talk.”