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

by J. A. Cipriano

  I cleared my throat as my heart raced. I had been trained not to fire until I could see the tips of their antenna, until I was sure I wouldn’t miss. There were too many of them to miss this time though. Besides, I was Mark Ryder. I didn’t miss.

  My finger pressed hard against the trigger. My pulse laser pulsated in my hand as the beams flew from the barrel, spraying across the expanse. They could say what they wanted about new age tech, about psionic bows, mental overrides, and nanite dispensers. When it came down to it, with everything being everything, there was just no replacement for a good old-fashioned laser that shot huge, high-energy beams that could punch a hole in the side of a goddamned spaceship.

  Red-hot lasers lit up the darkness, the better to see what you’re doing, and you know, watch the bugs die. Energy poured out of my gun in an eye blink as I moved it back and forth. I was barely aiming. Everything that was in front of me basically wanted me dead or to do me harm, so I didn’t give a shit which one of them I hit.

  As it turned out, they didn’t much care either. Elites had harder exoskeletons than other bugs. Add that to the ridiculously effective armor they wore, and even my barrage of lasers wasn’t doing much good. As the beams bounced off them to reflect into the cave walls, the elites did little more than stumble backward a bit. I bet it hadn’t even hurt them.

  “That’s not going to work, Mark,” Mina said from beside me. “I know you have a head with roughly the same density as a cement block, so I’ll say this plainly, hoping you might understand. If you stay here, all of us die.”

  “You want to run up that wall, I’ll do my best to cover you, but I’m not going anywhere,” I said through gritted teeth, watching the elites shake off my salvo and rush toward us again.

  Part of me was glad for it. Elites didn’t use blasters or plasma. No, they wanted to get all up in your guts with their melee weapons and claws to rip you limb from limb. It was strangely comforting, knowing they wouldn’t try to blow us away unless we ran.

  “Then we’ll all die for nothing,” she said. “You’re the only one who can get out of here, and the Alliance needs to know what we’re up against. They need to get that sample. Hell, for all we know, it could change the course of the war.”

  “We both know that’s not going to happen,” I scoffed.

  “Not if you don’t get it to them, it’s not,” she huffed. Then, screaming, she added, “Mark! You can’t kill these things. No one alive could fight their way through more than one elite.”

  “Mina John,” I said, letting my gun retract back into my suit. I’d decided to go with something a bit more primal. “You aren’t giving me near enough credit.” I extended my right arm. “Annabelle, give me my fucking warhammer, and spike it with something awesome.”

  “Do you have any preferences?” she asked me, directly into my head.

  “Surprise me.”

  “Oh good,” my suit responded. “I love it when we do that.”

  “Mark, listen to me!” Mina said, her voice tinged with desperation. It wasn’t that she thought she was going to die. At least, that wasn’t what it sounded like to me. She was a Marine. She knew death was just a bad day away. No. She had the same fear that I did, the same fear all good Marines had. She didn’t want to die for nothing. Luckily for her, I wasn’t about to let that happen.

  “Cover yourselves,” I responded, biting my lip. “Annabelle, thrusters on. I’m about to get my smash on.”

  My feet lit up, throwing me into the air and pushing me toward my enemies. They weren’t like the other bugs. The elites were trained the same way we were. They were informed with the same knowledge we had. Though, because of their insanely long lifespans, they averaged a couple of hundred years of practice over on us. Not that it mattered. They were about to learn what it was like to come up against the best Earth had to offer.

  I scanned the group, looking for the weak link. Every squad had one, and I couldn’t imagine bugs were too different. You could always tell who they were by the way they moved; a half a step behind everyone else, too afraid to be in front of the front lines, too unsure of themselves to ever want to land the first blow. It had always been my experience that if someone was unsure of themselves, there was a good reason for that.

  I found the bug in question quickly, moving just a little slower than the rest, not enough to be noticed by anyone who wasn’t looking for it.

  “Far left,” I said to Annabelle. “Whatever you put into my hammer, I want it to hit him first.”

  I had a plan. Most people go for the big guns first, for the leaders. They live by that whole ‘you cut a snake’s head off and the rest of the body falls away’ type mentality. I knew better.

  Mina wouldn’t be half the Marine she was if she didn’t surround herself with the best she could find. Fighting is a dance and, like any other dance, there’s a rhythm to it. You screw with that rhythm and everything falls apart. My thought had always been to knock stuff out of balance as quickly as possible, and to that end, I always went for the weakest warrior. They might not have been as integral as many of the others, but they were still useful and, what was more, they were easy pickings.

  I slid toward them in the air as they took sight of me. The one I was after, the frightened one, stayed back. That didn’t surprise me and, what was more, I was ready for it.

  “Tether the warhammer to me, Annabelle,” I said, trying to seem stoic and brave and not nearly as excited as I was.

  “Affirmative,” she answered. “Tethering complete.”

  I took a swan dive toward the first one, the obvious leader of the squad. It was the pragmatic move because it was what most people considered the necessary one. Head of the snake and all. They would be prepared for it. What they might not be prepared for though was for me to completely juke this bastard out.

  I could practically smell the son of a bitch when I flung the hammer. I could see its antenna raise as it watched me. Obviously, it didn’t expect me to let go of my weapon. That, however, was where the tethering came in.

  The leader raised its staff to block the hammer, but the joke was on it. I had angled my warhammer to go right over it and smash right into the scaredy cat. As the blunt end smashed into the bug’s mouth, or the place where its mouth would be if it was human, the bastard crumpled. Then something strange happened. It lifted off the ground and started floating helplessly.

  “Annabelle,” I said, a smile spreading across my face as I twirled upward and away from the sword stabs of the other elites. “Did you lace my warhammer with gravity manipulation, you beautiful, beautiful creature?”

  “Affirmative, Lieutenant Ryder. I thought you would find it useful or, at the very least, amusing.”

  “You know me too well.” The Gravitec tether brought my hammer right back into my hand. It smacked against my palm as I flew toward the floating bug. He struck at me, though he obviously wasn’t prepared for something like this and his attack went wide.

  “You know what?” I said to Annabelle. “Let’s ping pong these fuckers.”

  “Searching database.” A second later, she added, “Ping Pong found. Action initiated.”

  The warhammer flew from my hand without me even throwing it. It slammed against the floating elite and knocked him back toward the ground, his body moving quicker than it normally would thanks to the gravity manipulation.

  It slammed against another elite, pounding the bug into a crater it made with its body and then flying back up toward me like a… well, like a ping pong ball.

  “Would you like another go, Lieutenant Ryder?” Annabelle asked as my hammer slapped against my palm again.

  “You know it, sweet thing,” I said, and the warhammer flew from my hand again. “No.” I grabbed it as the elite came back toward me. “I want to do it myself.”

  Flying toward the helpless creature, I reared back and slammed the warhammer into the thing’s chest. The blow dented his armor and sent him exactly where I wanted him to go.

  The bug slammed ag
ainst another elite, knocking the bastard into another makeshift crater.

  I smiled as I watched it, realizing it had likely taken out more than a few leeches. Sadly, I didn’t receive any immediate coins or commendations for what was likely the first kill of a new bug subspecies. I’d have to wait for the science guys to figure out their importance before they got a value.

  Still, that smile was nothing compared to the look Mina John must have had on her face. No Marine had ever taken out a single elite, eh? I had taken out two elites, three if you counted the one I was using as a living, breathing wrecking ball. Maybe they weren’t dead, but they were going to be any moment now. I had them on the ropes, after all.

  I looked over in Mina’s direction with the intention of sending her a smirk before I took them out, but then I saw something that completely gutted me.

  The other two elites had made their way to Mina and the others while I was busy, bypassing my assault and deciding not to help their fallen brethren.

  The Artemis squad hadn’t fared nearly as well as me. Jill was on her back with one of the Elite’s boots on her throat. Claire had a sword at her temple, courtesy of the other elite. Mina had probably put up the best fight. She was bleeding, and her chest looked like it’d practically been caved in as she lay against the far wall, trying to get to her feet and failing.

  The elites were looking up at me, and their silent message was clear. Surrender or the girls would die.

  I thought about that for a second, about what Mina had said about all of us dying for nothing, but I knew she wasn’t right. If the elites wanted us dead, the girls would already be dead. They wanted us to give up. Though I didn’t know why, I knew I had to. I couldn’t let these women die if I could help it, even if they wanted me to. After all, at the end of the day, as much as I wanted to kill all these bastards with my bare hands, I also didn’t want to be responsible for the death of Mina John and her squad.

  So, I flew down to the ground, warhammer in hand.

  “Mark, run!” Mina cried, collapsing back to the ground. “Get the specimen to the Alliance.”

  “Sorry, Mina,” I said, setting the warhammer on the ground as a show of cooperation before raising my hands. “Let’s get this over with.”

  29

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Mina said, walking in front of me as the four of us were prodded into a straight line and marched through a corridor of maze-like tunnels.

  As it turned out, even the map given to us by the Alliance was wrong. It made me think they’d known nothing about this place or who we were up against. That made me uneasy. It left me to wonder if the Alliance had ever really known anything or if, like in my worst fears, we were all just playthings for the bugs to stomp on whenever they got tired of us.

  We all knew the truth. In the back of our minds, in our guts, we knew there was only one reasonable way any of this could ever truly end, and I wasn’t even talking about this mission or my life in general. I was a Marine. I was damned comfortable with the idea of dying on some space rock one day. Hell, part of me would have even been a little disappointed if it didn’t happen (though that didn’t seem like something I needed to worry about right now).

  I was talking about the war itself, the battle for my planet and my people, the battle we were all but certainly going to lose.

  And that was the sick, twisted thing. We rush off into the void and vacuum of the black, filled to the brim with stories of glory, valor, and honor. Even then though, as children with our feet pressed to the fire and foam coming from our anxious mouths, we knew the truth. It was right there in black and white, as unyielding and uncomplicated as numbers. We couldn’t win this. We were kids swiping at shadows and, on the day when the shadows had enough of it, they would swipe back and end us all.

  Didn’t mean we could stop fighting though. No, if I had to give humanity credit for anything, it was for clawing and fighting its way into that dark good night. That was something I could get behind, something I understood.

  “I did what was right,” I said from directly behind Mina. Even now, captured by the two uninjured elites and being brought to God knows where, we followed the positional protocol. Claire was in front, Mina and I in the middle, with Jill pulling up the rear.

  At least the three I had smashed around were so hurt they couldn’t move under their own power. They’d been hauled off by a few normal walkies while we had been prodded off. It was some small comfort in all this.

  The bugs were silent, except for a noise or two passed back and forth between them that my suit still probably didn’t recognize. Then again, the instant I’d passed through the open expanse where I’d fought the elites, my suit went quiet. I had lost connection to the Alliance and perhaps to the entire battle suit. Not that I would try to attack. There was still a sword pressed against Jill’s back. One wrong move and she’d be skewered. I couldn’t risk it.

  “You did what was stupid,” Mina answered, frustration obvious in her voice. “I gave you an order and—”

  “And I don’t follow your orders. I already told you that,” I responded. “I saved your life. I saved your girls’ lives. For now anyway.”

  “I know that.” Mina shook her head, exhaling sharply. “Honestly, I appreciate it, but that wasn’t what the mission was, and it wasn’t what was important.”

  “Maybe I disagree with you about what is and is not important.” I shrugged. “Though something tells me we fall closer on that point than you’d like to admit.”

  “What does that mean?” Though she didn’t dare, I could tell she wanted to turn toward to me.

  “Back at the sandstorm, you shouldn’t have done what you did either.”

  “Save you? That was different. I didn’t have cargo the Alliance needed on my person then. If I had—”

  “You’d have still saved me,” I said confidently. “In truth, you shouldn’t have come back at all. Even if you didn’t want to be known as the woman who let Mark Ryder die, you should have sent one of the others back. They’re your subordinates. They’re more expendable in the eyes of the Alliance. That’s certainly what protocol would have dictated.”

  “Things were moving too quickly,” she answered, flustered, “and I didn’t want them to get themselves killed.”

  “Bullshit. You didn’t send them because you knew they wouldn’t be able to do it, and you knew they knew that, Mina. They’d have never dared to get close enough to that thing to attack it, let alone put themselves in harm’s way. You came back because you knew you were the only chance I had, and you didn’t want me to die.”

  “Is that such a bad thing?” she asked, her voice suddenly softer.

  “Of course not. Just don’t act like it is when I want to return the favor.”

  She stayed silent for long enough for me to wonder exactly what it was she was thinking about.

  “It was impressive though,” she finally said, nodding forward, though she almost certainly meant it for me. “I have never, in all my years of service, seen someone do what you did back there. I would have been inspired if I wasn’t so busy getting my ass kicked.” She shook her head. “If I’d have just been able to fight those other two off—”

  “Then two more might have come,” I said, swallowing hard, “or five more, or ten. The truth is, we have no idea what we’re up against down here, and that’s not our fault. I get that you’re used to being able to depend on the Alliance. After all, they’ve obviously have taken a liking to you.” I shrugged, unaffected. “I mean, otherwise, how would you get to choose your own squad, but they dropped the ball on this one.”

  She was quiet again. I was about to open my mouth to add to what I had just said, probably with a general complaint about the state of upper management in the Alliance, when she spoke.

  “His name was Adam,” she said plainly. “I met him when we were in training and, contrary to what people might have thought, nothing happened between us then. It wasn’t until after, when we were both stationed at the same
post, that things started moving forward between us. It was quiet things at first. He’d leave a flower for me or write a coded note I’d have to figure out. Only the third letter of every other word would mean something. You know, crap like that.”

  “You loved him?” I asked, narrowing my eyes.

  “Eventually,” she answered. “And then, sometime after I came to that realization, he got down on one knee and asked me to marry him.”

  The revelation surprised me. “I never knew you were married.”

  “You wouldn’t have,” she admitted. “It was all very hush hush. He wanted a life in command, and I wanted to stay in the infantry. He wanted to shout it from the rooftops, but I told him that marrying a roughneck would give him trouble. People would look at him as conflicted. He’d never be able to make decisions about what battles to fight without some donor or politician suggesting he was just looking out for his wife.”

  She sighed. “So, I convinced him to keep it quiet, and he did. I was right too. With most of the Alliance assuming he was single, he moved up the ranks. He became Security Commissioner, and he kept that position until the bugs blew up the outpost he was stationed on.”

  “Wait a second,” I said, searching through the cockles of my brain. “You were married to Adam Roscoe?” I remembered that story. I remembered the funerals televised worldwide after the outpost was attacked and destroyed, and I remembered I knew that particular commissioner, the one who died. He became something of a tragic celebrity after that. “I met him once. Went on a mission with him.”

  “I know. He told me. He was impressed by you. He even told me he thought I’d like you. Said you were a man after my own—”

  She never got a chance to finish that sentence. The bugs had taken us down a long tunnel and, now that we were at the end of it, there were two sets of staircases, one leading up and the other down.

  The bug in front spun, grabbing Claire and thrusting her down the first set of stairs. She stumbled onto the steps but managed to stop herself from falling down them.