Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series

by C. J. Carella

  “We’re getting reports of similar attacks at other landing zones, sir,” Lieutenant Hansen said. “Looks like four missile teams.”

  “Casualties?”

  “Two other shuttles damaged. Twelve WIAs.” Hansen paused for a second. “Two confirmed KIAs from Bravo.”

  Fromm shook his head in frustration. The Vipers had been busy. They’d either armed the natives or inserted a covert team – or teams – sometime before the Days of Infamy. Some equivalent of the US Green Berets was his guess, special forces operators specializing in training and outfitting native troops to conduct asymmetric warfare operations. Getting them past local security wouldn’t have been easy, but Fromm had seen first-hand how devious the enemy could be. They’d managed to provide enough advanced weapons and support systems to wipe out two US corvettes at Jasper-Five, not to mention nearly annihilate the Starfarer legations on that planet. That had been the Lampreys’ work, but the Vipers were just as sneaky.

  They’re trying to ensure we’ll never have anything but war between us and any natives under our influence.

  Relations with the so-called Big Furries had never been good. Some local ETs would engage in trading with human settlements, but only after they’d been taught that raiding didn’t pay off. Most of their clans had rebuffed any attempts to deal with them. A handful of missionaries had been brutally murdered even after reprisals made it obvious that doing so was an elaborate method of suicide. Current policy was to avoid them, but a few greedy bastards had sold them guns in exchange for a variety of luxury goods. The Furries’ favorite trade weapon had been a – very illegal – .60 caliber breech-loading single shot rifle, perfect for hunting or killing their fellow Furries, but harmless against armored troops, although a few civilians who’d ended up on the receiving end of sniping attacks would disagree. No American smuggler would have been crazy enough to sell mil-spec weaponry to the natives, though. That had to be the work of the enemy.

  And now we’re going to have to conduct COIN ops, and find out the hard way what else they’ve got waiting for us.

  Anything that slowed down the evacuation of Parthenon-Four and inflicted casualties would be a net gain for the Vipers. Likely more than enough to justify smuggling a few SF teams and their equipment.

  We’ll just have to wipe them out with as few losses as possible.

  Unfortunately, the cheapest methods to achieve that goal were also the most brutal.

  Five

  Groom Base, Star System 3490, 164 AFC

  “Drop initiated. Transition in ten, nine…”

  Lisbeth Zhang glanced around the warp catapult. She and twenty-seven of her closest friends were crowding the big circular pad. Her flight suit felt rather inadequate for the trip she was about to undertake, a hundred-mile jump that would take no time at all in the physical universe but which would feel rather longer from her personal point of view.

  She’d never understood how Marines did it, forgetting for a moment she was a member of the gun club now. Oh, they didn’t do it often, and only a fraction of them were warp-drop certified, but doing it at all seemed insane. Lisbeth didn’t mind traveling through warp when she had a spaceship wrapped around her, protecting her from the bizarre world outside four-dimensional reality. Back during her Obligatory Service term, she’d been rated as a level 3, good enough to perform FTL navigation. Not that she’d ever considered going for Warp Propulsion as a career. That was a restricted officer designation, not qualified for commanding vessels, in no small part because warp navigators soon became rather eccentric. She belatedly realized that fighter pilot might become a similar dead end, for the same reasons.

  No sense worrying about that now. Contemplating the odds of surviving this warp drop was slightly more comforting. The chances of death, irreparable psychological damage or simply never returning to the real world were low, well under a hundredth of a percent for WR-2 ratings, and an order of magnitude lower for every higher level; things had improved a great deal from the early days of the new Marine Corps and the desperate boarding actions that had helped lead the US to victory against the Snakes. Back then, the odds of a negative outcome had been a shade under one percent. Not great betting odds when your life, sanity or very existence were on the line.

  “…one.”

  Off to Neverland.

  A short jump only took a few seconds of subjective time. Normally, she powered through them by blasting Warmetal right into her eardrums. This time, however, she went in cold; part of their training regimen involved not relying on the usual crutches – music or prayer or doing math in your head. The bloodless corpse of Lieutenant Omar Givens was waiting for her in the darkness, looking just as he had after sacrificing his life to save hers.

  Guilt and terror washed over her – until she threw a mental switch, banishing all emotion and all but one thought, focused on a single word:

  Stop.

  Weeks of meditation, drugs and bizarre mental exercises turned the word into a spell of sorts. The ghost vanished without a trace, leaving her alone in the dark.

  It worked! It freaking worked! She’d thought the whole warp prep program had been nothing but pseudo-mystical crap. Lisbeth and her fellow candidates had been conditioned into entering trance states nearly at will. Doing so inside warp had turned out to be shockingly easy. She spent the rest of the trip in quiet serenity, no ghosts or hallucinations anywhere.

  Emergence.

  Lisbeth staggered a couple of steps when her feet touched the ground and stumbled into another Marine, almost knocking both of them down.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled.

  “No worries,” the guy – Lieutenant Garcia; he was in her squadron – said. He shook his head. “Weird; I feel fine now. It usually takes longer.”

  “Yeah.” Even trained Marines usually took a second or two to recover from a warp drop, but other than a moment’s clumsiness, she was fine. Her mind was clear. Maybe the brainiacs in charge actually had a clue.

  A moment after she had that thought, the screaming started.

  People were backing away from something near the center of the pad. Lisbeth pushed her way past a couple of startled candidates and saw the brawl. One trainee had jumped another and was biting him despite the efforts of two other Marines trying to restrain him. He was tearing the poor bastard’s throat open!

  “Lar! Stop it!” one of the men shouted, doing his best to pull the man’s head back from his victim. He had two inches and a good twenty pounds on the nutjob, but he wasn’t making much progress. Another Marine stumbled back when he caught an elbow in the face. Blood spurted from a pressure cut over one eye; the blow had broken skin and probably bone as well.

  The growling candidate ripped off a chunk of his victim’s flesh. There wasn’t the telltale burst of blood you got if the carotid had been torn open, but the madman was leaning over to take another bite and finish the job.

  Lisbeth dove in before he got the chance.

  She’d never gotten muscle-enhanced: her family didn’t have the cash to spare, and if she needed a strong back, that was what ordinary spacers were for. So she’d learned to fight dirty to compensate for the mass and strength differential between her and the average dickhead. A quick jab to the throat distracted the berserker before he could chomp down on his victim a second time. The blow should have stunned him for at least a second; the kidney-punches the guy holding him from behind was delivering should have disabled him even more decisively, but the berserker didn’t stop. He turned to Lisbeth, and she froze when she met his eyes. They were solid orbs of darkness: she felt in her heart that she was looking at the stuff of warp space.

  The thing wearing the Marine’s body like a costume dropped his victim and lunged at her, dragging the two men holding him as if they weighted nothing. He reached for Lisbeth’s face, and she barely ducked away, sickly realizing that if he grabbed her he would rend her limb from limb.

  Fernando Verdi shouted a Karate kiai and delivered a full-power sidekick into the monster�
��s chest. Lisbeth heard ribs break under the impact. Fernando’s well-braced blow knocked the man-who-wasn’t backwards; he and the other two fell back in a tangle of flailing limbs. The Marine who’d called the berserker’s name managed to put him in a half-Nelson, but the struggling figure kept twisting around, oblivious to the pain that should be immobilizing him.

  Lisbeth kicked him in the balls with all her strength. There was a sickening squishing sound as her boot’s steel toe connected with the pelvic bone, and she felt the impact rupture something, but the thing didn’t stop. He was growling – no, he was speaking in some language she couldn’t understand, and was turning his head to bite the Marine holding him; vertebrae cracked as he twisted his neck beyond a normal human’s range of motion.

  Lieutenant Garcia stepped up from the side, a standard-issue multi-tool held tightly in a white-knuckled grip, its cutting blade out. He grabbed the madman’s hair with one hand and drove the tool right through his temple with the other.

  “Jesus God,” Garcia whispered as he twisted the little knife inside the monster’s head. “God.”

  That did the trick. The maniac collapsed as more Marines dogpiled him. Corpsmen and a security team finally showed up – the whole thing had taken maybe ten seconds, although it’d felt like an eternity – just in time to save the Marine with the chewed-up neck and to declare the other guy dead.

  People were cursing and milling about. Lisbeth mostly just stood there, watching the aftermath unfold with an eerie sense of detachment.

  That wasn’t someone going crazy. That poor bastard dragged something back from warp space.

  Part of her knew those thoughts might be signs she was losing her own mind. But a bigger part was certain that she was right.

  * * *

  “They’re canceling the tests until they figure out what went wrong,” Fernando said as they tried to relax over drinks at the officers’ club.

  “Yeah.” She’d gotten the same announcement he had. “Figured they would.”

  “They’ve put three hundred pilot-trainees through the same process already; over six thousand warp drops with hardly an incident,” he went on. “They had a couple of psychotic breaks – both temporary; they’re back on duty after being treated – but nothing like this.”

  She wanted to share her suspicions with him, but she was afraid he might think she was having a psychotic break of her own.

  “That was crazy,” was all she added to the conversation.

  He nodded. “Well, that’s the dark side of trance states. It can lead to things like berserker rages, or the kind of thing people called spirit possession.”

  Maybe that’s exactly what it was.

  “Someone going stark raving mad out of six thousand warp drops isn’t the worst odds, I suppose,” she said. Except if they ever went out to fight, they’d be conducting dozens of jumps per sortie, and dozens of sorties per deployment. Six thousand divided by those numbers didn’t look like such a tiny chance after all.

  “Not the best, either,” Fernando replied. “Hopefully they’ll be able to figure out why things went pear-shaped and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  “Or they won’t and they’ll still send us out there,” she said.

  “What, you thinking about dropping out?”

  A few people had asked to leave the program, and after some counseling to decide how serious they were about quitting, they’d been allowed out. They were now working alongside the washouts on other specialties. The new Marine Aviation branch needed logistics clerks, space traffic controllers and cockpit-wipers, too.

  She shook her head. “Getting blown up into plasma or going batshit crazy or breaking your neck stepping out of the shower, we all got to go sometime.” Even the longevity treatments didn’t guarantee immortality. Actuarial studies based on other Starfarers’ statistics predicted that sheer bad luck would kill you before you made it very far past the eight-century mark. No human had had the chance to live that long yet, of course, but plenty of geezers had kicked the bucket long before that. Lisbeth had seen enough death to know that your time could come at any moment.

  Only one thing you could do about that. Live your life like it all could be over tomorrow.

  Speaking of that… She finished her drink and grinned at him.

  “How about we move this somewhere more private?”

  He smiled back at her.

  Later, as they drifted off to sleep in her compartment’s bed, she felt able to share the truth with him.

  “I looked into the guy’s eyes, Nando. They weren’t normal. I think there was something inside of him, some thing he picked up in warp space.”

  A soft snore was her only answer. Figures.

  Already regretting the thankfully unheard outburst, Lisbeth curled up next to him and closed her eyes.

  Cambridge, Ohio, 164 AFC

  The drive between the Columbus Interplanetary Spaceport and the McClintock ancestral home took a little over half an hour. Nobody met her at the airport, which suited Heather fine. She didn’t mind the alone time.

  The Hertz rental whirred merrily down the interstate, a two-door Camaro Coupe. She’d picked it up as much for its bright red coat of paint as for its sporty electric engine, which allowed her to barrel down the self-drive lane at a good ninety mph; she passed dozens of autopilot cars along the way, their passengers watching movies, reading or surfing the web, except for a couple engaged in some back-seat loving. Heather could have easily engaged the Coupe’s autopilot and done something other than driving, but that would have been less relaxing than pushing the car for all it was worth. If all she wanted was a short trip, she could have rented an aircar for an extra thirty bucks a day and gotten there in five minutes. Driving helped dispel the tension growing inside her as she got closer to home.

  Well, her parents’ home. And to some degree her siblings’, since neither of them had left Earth or even Ohio. It wasn’t her home, though. Not for a good long while.

  I wish I’d gone to Parthenon instead.

  Heather shook her head. The timing wouldn’t have worked out. After making it back to Earth and finishing her debrief, she was between assignments and really had no excuse to avoid visiting her parents. She wasn’t sure where her lords and masters would send her next, but it could well end up being the place where she earned a posthumous star at the CIA Memorial Wall in Langley. This Thanksgiving might be her last.

  Her parents had sounded happy enough about the visit. Dad had offered to pick her up at the spaceport, but she’d talked him out of it. She needed the quiet drive to get ready for the family gathering. A copious amount of alcohol would help even more, but her family wouldn’t approve, and they already had plenty of reasons to be disappointed in her, starting with her career choices.

  She drove past the new Mosser Glass factory after she got off the exit. The company was the biggest employer in the region, and had kept growing steadily over the years, turning Cambridge into one of the wealthiest cities of the state. Her father had been Mosser’s CEO for over forty years; he’d retired a few months before Heather officially joined the State Department after being unofficially inducted into the Central Intelligence Agency. Retirement wouldn’t last very long, not with private pensions only lasting fifteen years and anti-aging treatments growing steadily in price the longer they kept you alive, but for the last seven years he’d been putzing around the house with nothing to do. Which hadn’t improved things at home; her last visit, three years ago, had made that abundantly clear.

  Well, at least Peggy and Donald will be there this time, along with their better halves. It’ll be nice to see the kids, too.

  That thought helped, a little. By the time she pulled up to the pre-Contact ‘McMansion’ and parked in front of the six-car garage, she felt a little better. Walking up to the kitchen door brought back several memories, good, bad and indifferent. She let herself in.

  Mom was in the kitchen, subvocalizing something while she poured herself a glass of Pinot. H
er Norwegian-immigrant servants – Heather didn’t recognize either of them; her mother never kept the help around for very long – were busy at work. Mom was in their way, but they just stepped carefully around her.

  The tall, platinum-blonde woman looked thirty-something, about the same as she had all of Heather’s life. She smiled at her.

  “There you are,” her mother said. Her eyes weren’t fully focusing on anything in the real world. Heather’s suspicion that she was split-screening was confirmed with a quick check of her mother’s Facettergram profile, which included her current status: half of Mom’s attention, if not more, was focused in a Regency Romance MMO. Bernice McClintock had always preferred to spend her time in assorted virtual realities. Legally, you couldn’t be in full VR for longer than six hours a day; most people got around that limit by eschewing total sensory immersion and simply switching back and forth between the real world and whatever fantasy they preferred to live in.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  The women exchanged a dutiful hug and pecks on their cheeks.

  “You look healthy, at least,” the McClintock matriarch said. “We were so worried when we heard you were caught up in that horrible thing out in the colonies.”

  Jasper-Five wasn’t technically a colony but rather a free associated system, but Heather saw no point in correcting her mother, who turned away for a moment and subvocalized something only her fellow gamers could hear. She poured herself a glass of whatever her mother was having and the two women made their way out of the kitchen, past the still-empty dining room, and into the den where the rest of the family awaited.

  The room was filled with a full hologram of today’s game, the Jets versus the Vikings. Montana was up by three. Watching the massive shapes of the players reminded Heather of the muscle-enhanced SSEALs she’d recently worked with. She’d attended Jürgen’s funeral, watched as they lowered a ballast-filled coffin into the ground in lieu of the corpse nobody would ever find. Warp space never gave back its victims.