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

by J. A. Cipriano

  “They’re coming,” Claire said, moving beside me. Her eyes weren’t on Jill. Instead, they were trained on the alley we’d just came down, inches away from the flickering energy wall. “Dozens and dozens of them.”

  My heart dropped as I looked up. I mean, she was one girl, and she was for all intents and purposes dead as a fish on dry land. Why the hell did they need to bring so many bugs to subdue her? She was already subdued.

  “Get to the rounded room,” I said, looking back at Mina and Claire, my heart racing. I had made my decision. The metal might have been more important to the Alliance than the life of one of its Marines, but I didn’t share that philosophy. Sure, I could be court marshaled for this if I survived it, but at least I would go through that indignity knowing I did everything I could to save the life of one of the bravest and most capable women I had ever known. “I’ll fight them off. Annabelle, how long until the defibrillator is powered enough to shock her back to life?”

  “Twenty seconds,” my suit answered. “Though, I must remind you there is no guarantee her heart will ever start pumping again. Technology may be consistent, but your human bodies are definitely not.”

  “Think happy thoughts,” I said, sensing an air of superiority in Annabelle’s words.

  “No,” Claire said, stepping in front of me and pulling out her fire whip. “I’ve got this.”

  “What are you doing?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at her.

  “My job,” she said as the horde of bugs moved toward us. It was clear they only saw Jill, only a harmless unconscious woman on the ground. If they had seen the rest of us, standing there and waiting for an attack, they’d have moved a lot faster and with a lot more initial force.

  “This is a horde, Claire,” Mina said to her underling, “and it’s not practice. You could die. You probably will.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you not to treat me like a child?” she asked, her eyes trained on the enemies ahead. “I know what I’m up against, and I know what my chances are. I also know that we have a mission that needs to be accomplished. If the shit hit the fan out here, I can only imagine what’s waiting for whoever goes into that rounded room. That’s the heart of the city, obviously the most dangerous place. I can’t think of any two people I’d rather have in the most dangerous place on this whole fucking moon than the two of you. If we’re going to win this, it’ll be with Mark Ryder and Mina John at the helm, dammit.”

  She shook her head. “Jill will be awake in a minute. I just know it. She’ll help me fight these bastards off but, until then, I’m an invisible chick with a badass whip and a lot of anger issues.” Her eyes cut over to me. “This should be fun.”

  Without another word, Claire rushed toward the unsuspecting horde, whip cracking as she brought it down on one of them. The arc of white-hot, magnetically-guided wires ripped the poor bastard in half, and as its superheated chunks hit the ground, I turned toward Mina.

  “You heard her,” I said, moving forward. “We’ve got a job to do.”

  She nodded once before following me through the empty alley. Thankfully, since all the bugs had been drawn to Jill, we didn’t meet any resistance on our way to the heart.

  Mina and I rounded the exterior of the room almost completely before we found a tiny door with a circular lock. Two pinhole indentations with another two on either side of the circle and I knew what it meant.

  “Fucking claw markings,” I said, looking over at Mina.

  Undoubtedly, she had heard of these too. Back in the day, when we first started fighting back against the bug menace, they took to locking their most sensitive areas with locks that could only be opened by the claws of a certain type of bug, claws I didn’t have.

  “Stand back,” Mina said, pushing me backward. She pulled a bobby pin from her hair, broke it in two and took either piece to the holes.

  “You’re being ridiculous,” I scoffed. “That’s stupid. It’s never going to—”

  Of course, the door twisted and opened, making a fool of me. We were in though, and that made all the difference. I’d rather be a successful fool than a defeated man of logic any day. Still, I didn’t have to like it.

  “You’re going to tell everybody at the Alliance about this, aren’t you?” I asked, eyeing her as we walked through the door.

  “Only if we survive.” she smirked. “So, look on the bright side. Probably not.”

  I sprang into the room, my pulse laser ready for anything and found… absolutely nothing.

  The rounded room was completely empty. It was nothing more than old cobblestone walls marked with symbols I didn’t understand and a floor of soft sand looking up into the open-air room.

  “What the hell is this?” Mina asked, her own gun in hand. “We could be helping Claire right now! Where the fuck is the Ellebrium?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, moving toward the wall and the etchings on them. Like the spoken words these bugs were using, the printed dialogue was in a language Annabelle could translate. She did so as I looked it over. “This is a throne room,” I muttered. “It says for us to kneel in the presence of the great queen.” I shook my head as the word transformed in my line of sight. “No, not great. Massive. Kneel in the presence of the massive queen.”

  Mina looked over at me, her laser at the ready. “If she’s so massive, then where the hell is she?”

  “I have no idea,” I admitted. “But—”

  And just like that, the ground started to give way, the soft dirt collapsing into a sinkhole beneath our feet. Reading my situation and my neurological impulse, Annabelle turned my thrusters on and lifted me from the ground.

  I twirled, grabbing Mina’s hand. I wouldn’t be able to carry her, the suits weren’t made for that, but I was able to toss her clear through the still open door.

  She landed hard against the solid ground outside and, looking at her as I heard horrible noises of crunching and crashing behind me, I saw her face go white and her eyes go wide. The great Mina John was afraid right down to the bone, but what on this or any other planet would be enough to do that?

  I turned to find the answer but wasn’t prepared for what I saw. There, as tall as any building back on Earth, was the largest fucking praying mantis I had ever seen in my life, and she was covered in armor made of pure, refined Ellebruim.

  “You know something,” I muttered to myself, realizing I had just found out where all the metal was. “That is pretty damn massive.”

  36

  “God above,” I muttered, looking over at something out of a monster movie and wondering just how something like this could have stayed hidden. Sure, I knew that the Alliance hadn’t been able to actively study this moon and, with the main base of the alien menace somewhere else entirely, they probably didn’t see this lunar outpost as much of a threat. Still, bugs like this shouldn’t have existed. A huge, skyscraper-sized beast with blade-like claws that could take out entire cities in a single swath? We should have known about them.

  To put it bluntly, we knew so little about this thing that the HUD could only generate a nameplate that said Massive Unknown Acburian. As with the leeches, there was no projected coin reward, no leaderboards, no nothing. That fact was the sole point of comfort I had here. This was something untainted by the system, unknown to the big brass and the corporations. In a way, that meant this visage of pure death was strangely… pure.

  Still, for all that unknown, I had heard stories. We all had, of monsters so enormous they could destroy our biggest armies with a few lithe movements. That’s all they were though, as far as anyone with a working brain stem was concerned.

  I’d always thought that if the Acburians had those kinds of bugs at their disposal, they would use them and take us out all at once. Or so I had rationalized to help me sleep at night.

  I brushed aside the fact that destroying our planet would likely destroy what they needed from it and besides, bugs like this required more metal than anything I could have ever imagined. That alone was probably
reason enough for the Acburians not to deploy them.

  Whatever the truth of the matter was, this was real. There was at least one bug as tall as the tales suggested. She was the queen, she was covered in the Ellebruim we had come here for, and she looked pissed.

  “Mark,” Mina said, swallowing hard. She was still looking up at the thing, her face still white, and her eyes still wide. There was no end to the sentence. It was just my name, like a plea, like a prayer.

  I couldn’t blame her. I didn’t know what to do either. How do you fight a giant? How do you stop a tidal wave, especially a tidal wave you knew nothing about?

  That’s when I remembered what the Alliance had always said about information, about how it was more important than anything else in the universe.

  “Annabelle,” I choked out as the mantis made her way out of the earth, stepping over the open-air roof and freeing herself from the room entirely. She stood over us now, a goddess of green horror wrapped in elemental iron. “Go through the databases, all of them. Find anything you can about giant bugs, about huge ass praying mantises,” I commanded, diverting energy to my thrusters and lifting into the air. “Even debunked and disproved theories. Do you understand me? I want to know anything anyone has ever said about something like this, and go as far back as you can.”

  “Affirmative,” Annabelle said.

  The next voice I heard was that was Mina John, legend in her own time and- at this very moment- scared shitless.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing? You’re going to get yourself killed. We have to run. We have to go.”

  “The Ellebruim,” I said flatly.

  “Fuck the Ellebruim,” she cursed. “We retreat and try to stay safe until the ships get here.”

  “Unless we strip the metal from Teela here, the queen who sent us is going to shoot those ships out of the sky. No one else gets to die here today, Mina. Promise me that.”

  “How do you expect me to make promises to you when we don’t have anything close to a plan?” I could practically hear the wheels in her head spinning.

  Just then, as though it was the answer to a prayer, a flood of information poured into my line of sight. Stories, myths, and old wives’ tales came crashing into me, downloading themselves into my cerebral cortex and filling me with generations’ worth of knowledge about what I was looking at. Most of it was nonsense, ridiculous trappings of people who didn’t know what they were talking about.

  But not all of it. As Teela took a swipe at me, her enormous talon cutting through the air like a jet plane on a collision course with my person, I saw something else.

  A man, a Marine who later graduated and became a doctor claimed to have come across the body of something like this. The corpse was ordained with etchings and words of praise, words of reverence, as if it had been a holy monument to some ancient bugs of the distant past. Having a scientific mind, the son of a bitch cut right into it, and I’m glad he did.

  Now, this was before the days of recorded optic implants. Most of these sorts of sightings were, so none of what he saw was actually archived. What had been archived though, and what had been subsequently lost to common knowledge, was a sketch he’d made of the bug and the way its anatomy was laid out.

  The archives remembered though, and so I saw the sketch as well as notes and theories about how the thing worked and how to best destroy it.

  “As with humans,” the note said, “the heart seems to be the epicenter of continued life. Piercing the heart should be the quickest way to destroy the creature should the awful day that it reaches our planet ever come to pass.”

  Then, looking at the sketch again, I saw the placement of the heart, right under the neck. Of course, the bug in front of me had that part of her covered with a thick layer of Ellebruim. Getting to the heart wouldn’t be easy, but I had an idea.

  “I do have a plan,” I said to Mina as I momentarily cut the power to my thrusters, dropping out of the way as Teela’s scythe-like talon sliced through the space where I’d been. “I’m not sure if it’s a good one, but it’s better than nothing. Get to the girls. If Jill is still alive, make sure they both stay that way and get as far away from the center of the city as possible. When this thing falls, I don’t want you to be in its path.”

  “When it falls? How on Earth—”

  “We’re not on Earth, Mina,” I reminded her. “Not even close. Now go and let me deal with this.”

  I cut off our communication and turned my attention back to the matter at hand. Teela was coming at me again, her huge talons glinting in the light of the sun. This time. I took a preemptive measure and twirled backward, darting out of its path.

  “How can she see me, Annabelle?” I asked. “My cloaking is still up.”

  “I’m not sure, Lieutenant Ryder, but it seems she can.”

  “Yeah,” I muttered. “I know. Annabelle, cut off alpha cloaking and distribute power to shields and weapons, then patch me through to Della.”

  “I’m afraid she’s off hours at the moment, Lieutenant Ryder,” she chimed in.

  “I don’t give two fucks about her hours. Initiate emergency protocol and get her on my comm immediately!”

  I knew she would still be there. Della was a workaholic. She may have been off hours, but she’d have never left the Halls with a mission of hers actively running, especially a mission that had gone off the rails like this one had.

  I wasn’t surprised when she popped into my head.

  “Mark,” she said. “What’s wrong? Two ships are on their way to you now, and should be there in minutes.”

  “It won’t be enough,” I stammered. “There’s more metal than you originally thought, and it’ll have to be pulled from a corpse.”

  “A corpse?” I knew her too well. She questioned me in that ‘you are so full of it’ sort of way she usually reserved for grassfeds too big for their britches.

  “Tap into my optic sensors,” I said, “and get a load of what you sent me into.”

  “Jesus!” she exclaimed as I ran my eyes up and down Teela, giving her a full view of the monster.

  “We’ve found ourselves in the middle of a damn bug gang war,” I explained hurriedly as I ducked another talon swipe. “If I don’t take this thing down, this bitch’s rival is going to shoot our ships down in retaliation. The thing is, I need something from you to take this behemoth down.”

  Teela roared, the noise she made some of like a ticking in the throat. The reverberation was some kind of natural sonic weapon, loud and forceful enough to drown out my words and send me shooting toward the ground.

  “Mark? Are you there?” Della asked frantically.

  “Send four ships,” I got out through clenched teeth. “Keep them all out of the atmosphere until further notice. What I need in the fucking atmosphere is an unmanned Bullet.”

  “A transport ship?” she balked. “They’re not made for retrieval, just for drop offs. It won’t be able to get you out.”

  “I’m not using it for that.” I pulled forward enough to reverse course before I crashed against the ground. Teela was moving, her jagged feet coming toward me, the huge claw tips moving right for me. She had knocked me back so I would be low enough to be skewered. I needed to move fast.

  “Then what are you using the bullet for?” Della asked.

  “As a damn bullet, Della!” I answered, swerving quickly and just missing the point of the foot. “How long will it take to get it down here?”

  “Expedited?” she asked. “They move faster than ships. So, thirty seconds? Can you hold on for thirty seconds?”

  I looked up at the monster. “I can try.”

  I flew around the giant bug, shooting my pulse laser at it and watching as my beams bounced off its armor. It was kind of pissing me off.

  “Good luck, Mark,” Della said. “I’ll get it done.”

  Another swipe came toward me, and as I dodged by it, I let my laser retract back into my suit. The damned thing wasn’t worth a goddamn, anyway.
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br />   Part of me wanted to grab my warhammer and go to town on the bitch, just fly up to her stupid ugly face and smash her skull in. That would be foolish though. While my suit might have given me increased strength, if the notes I’d just read were even half true, I wouldn’t be able to scratch her exoskeleton, let alone, puncture her armor.

  Teela was still coming toward me, but she was slow. Only, she was out of the hole now, and it wouldn’t be long before she had directed a throng of elites to me. Still, I got the distinct impression she wanted to be the one to kill me, and well, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  “Annabelle, give me my robusta rang and fuse it to a stun lasso,” I said, cutting my thrusters again to avoid her attack. Once again the attack passed over my head, only this time, I didn’t re-engage the thrusters. I hit the ground hard, absorbing the impact with my calves.

  “Fusion complete,” Annabelle said as the boomerang appeared in my hand. “What exactly are you planning, Mark?”

  “Well, you know the old saying,” I said, letting the boomerang fly, a glistening tail of energy shimmering behind it. “The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

  As the boomerang arced through the air, I took a few quick steps back to give myself some distance before initiating my thrusters once more.

  “Match speed with the ‘rang,” I said, flying after it as Teela raised her massive foot angling to squash me like, well, a bug.

  “Affirmative,” Annabelle said, and I felt my speed change instantly. I darted forward after the boomerang which veered in midair, its arc shifting to chase after me. Only as it did, Teela brought her massive foot down.

  I dodged, barely, but the shockwave was enough to throw me backward through the air. I hit the ground hard, stars flashing through my eyes moments before the boomerang hit the dirt beside my outstretched hand. As it did, the noose left behind the lasso tightened around the bug queen’s legs.

  She fell backward, huge scythe-like limbs reaching out to catch herself. The massive blades buried themselves in the ground, keeping her from falling as her massive legs struggled to break the energy lasso.