Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series

by C. J. Carella

  Her imp’s clock timed the attack. Ten seconds from beginning to cataclysmic end. Ten seconds to turn one of the most advanced warships in the Lamprey inventory and its twelve thousand crewmembers into scattered wreckage.

  The six surviving frigates of the escort fleet were given the chance to fight back, for all the good it did them. The light vessels raked the station with their twelve-inch guns and every missile they could launch. Dots of light seemed to appear from thin air when their salvos struck a force field that extended over a hundred and fifty kilometers around the massive habitat. The light vessels’ barrage had as little effect on it as the Lampreys’ personal weapons had against the Tah-Leen themselves. The devastating grav-beam lashed out, and each time it struck, a frigate vanished like a moth touched by a blowtorch’s flame.

  Only one blast at a time, the analytical part of her mind noted while she resisted the urge to scream. Maybe that was the only active weapon in the station. Knowing the enemy might have some limitations helped her maintain her composure.

  “Your own escorts are preparing to fight, Madame Secretary,” the Hierophant told the American delegation leader. All the Lamprey ships had been reduced to fading specks of cooling gas. “I will allow you to contact them and tell them to stand down. It would be anticlimactic to slaughter your ships now, don’t you think?”

  Secretary Goftalu did so, her features twisted in a mixture of terror and rage as she gave the orders.

  The masters of Xanadu laughed as they advanced towards the Lamprey delegation. Heather didn’t need her imp’s xeno-psych app to know the Lhan Arkh were falling prey to panic and despair. Anyone would. Those who’d managed to reload their beamers kept shooting at their tormentors until hands, claws and tentacles dragged them down. Each Lamprey was soon tackled by several Tah-Leen. She turned her gaze away from the screen. No need polluting her soul with what was happening in the other room.

  “You are free to stay and watch, of course,” the Priestess said. “We will be here all day. Or you can retire to your ship until we call for you.”

  “Let’s go,” Sec-State said. The Americans walked out of the hall just as the first screams began.

  “We will be distracted for several hours,” the Seeker of Knowledge told Heather through their private channel. “Tonight, some of us will play another game with your Marines while the rest of us use the Lhan Arkh to express ourselves. Tomorrow or whenever the Marines are used up, we will start on your civilian leaders and their staffs, including you. That is all the time you have remaining to fulfill your task and earn your life. Do you understand, Heather McClintock?”

  “I understand,” she transmitted back.

  Better than you know.

  * * *

  They were short of everything, but they still had enough MREs to last them a couple days. Russell had a feeling they’d be dead long before they ran out of chow.

  As it turned out, spear work was hard. His arms were sore. Stabbing tangos to death used different muscles than lugging around gear and shooting an Iwo. The whole thing had been nasty, like stepping on a bug with your bare foot. Now that they were a couple klicks away from where they’d left the Lampreys to rot, the disgust had faded away, though. He was hungry enough to enjoy field rats, and it was their turn to take a break and have a meal and a smoke.

  He tore open the wrapper and checked the contents, making a face when he read the label. They insisted in keeping what you got a surprise, so people didn’t eat the same favorite meal over and over. Remfie assholes.

  “What’d you get, Gonzo?”

  “Chicken a la fucking king. Twice in a row, man.”

  “I got beef chili, and I’m sick of that shit. Trade ya?”

  “Ran out of hot sauce last night. Got any?”

  “Yeah.”

  ‘Then it’s a deal.”

  They switched packets and Russell handed over a hot sauce dispenser. He didn’t mind; he always packed three or four of the little red or green squeeze-bottles, on the grounds that a shit sandwich with hot sauce beat a regular shit sandwich. He pulled the tab at the bottom of the container and waited for its contents to heat up, relishing the smell of warm food. He didn’t mind the Marines’ version of chicken a la king, but he’d improve the bland concoction with a few squirts of green sauce.

  Grampa was already working on his MRE main course. Beef stew, from the smell of it. If he minded the lowly fare, it didn’t show, not the way he was scarfing it down.

  Russell went through the rest of the meal. Pre-buttered cornbread. Nice. He munched on it while he kept looking. Six chocolate chip cookies for dessert; he saved a couple of those for later, because he’d gone through all his personal snacks after the fight with the dinos. He’d needed the sugar to help with all the stress. At least, that was his story. That, and the candy kept him from chain-smoking all his cigs; they didn’t issue those with MREs, the cheap bastards.

  Once the meal was done, he lit up and savored the first long drag.

  “You guys and your cancer sticks,” Grampa said, wrinkling his nose. Typical golden oldie.

  “They don’t give you cancer anymore, Gramps. And this is a multivitamin pack. It’s good for you. All them nutrients go right into your bloodstream with every puff. Here, have some.” He blew some smoke Grampa’s way, and grinned when the old bastard flinched by reflex.

  “They’d almost gotten rid of that shit back in the day. I can’t believe they brought it back.”

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy a smoke back when you were chasing insurgents in Fallujah or Normandy or whatever,” Gonzo told him.

  “Both before my time. And I didn’t smoke back then. Good thing, too. Cigs were one of the first things we ran out of. No, I was chasing insurgents near the Juarez Soup Bowl, and later in Orlando. Nastiest firefight I ever got in was inside one of the D-world rides, ‘It’s A Small World.’ Fucking surreal, that was.”

  “Worse than this shit?”

  “No force fields. Just an old Interceptor vest without ballistic plates, ‘cause they didn’t have any to give us. Try chasing a bunch of former gang bangers between all them animatronic figurines while lead is flying all over the place and your NVGs are on the fritz.”

  “Yeah, that must have sucked.”

  “Although getting chomped to death by animatronic dinosaurs is a close second. Sticking a bunch of Lampreys with spears barely rates after that.”

  “Well, at least we won’t be dealing with any more Lampreys,” Gonzo said. Word had come down that the Snowflakes were doing something fucked up to the civilian Fang-Faces.

  “You probably just done jinxed us,” Grampa replied.

  * * *

  Suckass was on watch when it happened.

  Even with his helmet on, Howard could smell someone’s hot dinner somewhere back in the camp. His squad was due to be relieved in half an hour, and it couldn’t happen soon enough. He was starving. Starving, and pissed off. His beloved SAW had been left behind after they got rid of the Lampreys. Now all he had was his entrenching tool and his Ka-Bar. They’d lost their drones before the dinos attacked, so they needed extra picket lines around the camp, which meant more duty for everyone. All of which sucked ass.

  “Got movement at three hundred meters,” PFC Barton called out. “Same direction the Lampreys were at.”

  “The fuck?” Howard wondered while he scanned the area. Nothing was showing on thermal, and it was dark as shit out there. He switched to low-light, magnifying the fake stars’ illumination, and saw them.

  Lampreys. Except there was something wrong with them.

  “They ain’t moving right,” Barton noted as Howard passed the news along. Sergeant Weiner joined them a moment later with the only loaded gun left in the squad, and loaded with only twenty rounds of 4mm instead of the usual fifty, and no grenades either.

  “Shit,” Weiner said.

  Lampreys normally moved at a steady pace not too different from the way those T-Rexes had walked. The ones coming from the line o
f hills further out – from where they’d left the dead aliens stacked like cordwood, as a matter of fact – were sort of shambling forward, just like a bunch of…

  “Zombies,” Howard gasped. “They’re moving like zombies.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” the NCO growled.

  “They’re at room temperature, Sergeant Weiner. No weapons. No shields. See that one leading the way? It’s missing one of its upper arms. It’s the Lampreys we just killed. They’ve come back from the dead.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “I’m counting twenty-five so far. Make that thirty. And another bunch coming from the north. Make that sixty.”

  “I’m letting higher figure this out,” Sergeant Wiener said.

  “Make that seventy-five.”

  * * *

  “Somebody’s got a fucked up sense of humor,” First Sergeant Goldberg commented.

  Fromm ignored the words and concentrated on the problem at hand while his Marines discarded their half-eaten meals and grabbed their weapons – which for most of them consisted of spears, machetes and entrenching tools. He had two hundred rounds of 4mm left in the entire company, and a dozen 15mm munitions, all high-explosive fragmentary. He raised the squad sergeants, the only troops holding loaded guns.

  “Aim for their brain cases,” he said, prompting a chuckle from Lieutenant Hansen, which he also ignored. His imp highlighted the target area for everyone. The shambling dead aliens were behaving like zombies, so he might as well treat them like the traditional monsters.

  “Single shots only. Fire.”

  A steady crackle of gunfire followed, followed by the sharp crack-woosh of plasma-tipped rounds unleashing foot-long jets of superheated death.

  Even without their imps and helmet sensors, the NCOs would have been able to hit their targets at those ranges. With them, it was child’s play. A dozen alien chests exploded in as many seconds, followed by another dozen.

  Except none of the Lampreys were ‘killed.’ All the shots had hit the spot where their brain was located, roughly where a human collarbone would be. Some of the targets fell, but Fromm could see they were struggling back to their feet despite the burning holes in their upper chests. In some cases, direct hits had torn their feeding maws clear off their shoulders, but that didn’t stop them either. Zombies they might be, but they didn’t die when you shot their heads off.

  “Switch to grenades,” he ordered. “Fire at will.”

  Six puffs of light and smoke burst over the limping figures now filling the valley below the Marine camp. Once again, there was nothing wrong with the gunners’ aim: each 15mm round exploded at the ideal ten-meter height, lashing the area with lethal ceramic fragments traveling fast enough to degrade force fields or tear through body armor. He zoomed in in time to see a Lamprey lose both of his left arms, ripped off at the torso junction – and only miss a step before moving on.

  “Jesus Mary and Joseph,” Lieutenant Berry of Second Platoon said on the command channel.

  Fromm could think of a couple ways the Tah-Leen were reanimating the alien corpses without requiring a more-or-less intact brain. Nanotechnology could build miniature engines inside the bodies, which would make dead muscle tissue expand and contract through electrical stimulation. A more thorough nano-tech job could build mechanical grafts onto their skeletons, turning them into carrion-covered robots. Either way, destroying their brains wouldn’t do any good; the ‘zombies’ were being controlled remotely like so many drones. There was probably a grinning Tah-Leen at the controls of each of the walking dead.

  “Aim for limb junctures,” he ordered, very likely too late. They’d gone easily through half of their remaining ammunition if not more, and inflicted minimal casualties on the enemy.

  “All right, Marines,” he added on the general channel. “We’re going to have to chop them to bits. We already killed them once. Let’s make it stick this time! Who’s with me?”

  “Oorah!” they shouted as he raised the captured Lamprey sword over his head; a couple of NCOs had reworked its hilt and balance to make it more suitable for human hands. He intended to put it to good use.

  “Are we ready to kick some zombie ass?” he yelled at them.

  “OORAH!”

  The last few shots dropped a dozen zombies, legless or armless or both, but the rest kept coming. When they’d reached the base of the hill, the Marines charged down to meet them.

  “OORAH!”

  * * *

  Well, here goes nothing, Heather thought.

  She’d done all she could in the Common Conduit, the public Tah-Leen’s network. Penetrating the Scholar’s personal node had been another matter altogether. Using all her regular tricks, she’d managed to break into some low-security sections, where she’s stumbled into the largest collection of galactic porn – most of it of the snuff variety – she’d ever had the displeasure of encountering. The sheer size of it was staggering, and the few bits she’d sampled had been enough to give her nightmares for years to come. Other than proving that the Snowflakes were unique only in sheer depravity, she’d found nothing useful there. None of that mattered, of course, since she already knew the Scholar’s secrets.

  That left the restricted-access network, the Master Conduit that controlled the essential systems of the Habitat for Unique Diversity. Even trying to contact the Master Conduit without the proper keys would immediately notify the system administrator while a pack of virtual hounds tracked down and identified the would-be intruder. That left only the tachyon-wave system.

  So far, she’d used the gadget to communicate with Lisbeth and June without being detected by the Tah-Leen. The t-waves operated on a completely different level from regular comm systems; the enemy might as well try to detect graviton waves using a pre-Contact radio set. Supposedly. Time to find out just how good the Snowflakes’ network security was.

  She started small. Nothing too complex, just a simple ping from a public access hub.

  Ping.

  Nothing happened. The Master Conduit hadn’t noticed the connection.

  It works.

  She was able to do a passive scan of the system’s menu without attracting any attention. It was like reading the information on a screen as opposed to trying to access it via a communication link. The computer had no idea it was happening. Any actual commands would use g-waves and be detected, so she would have to pick the time to act very carefully. On the other hand, she had the Seeker’s access codes, which could open a surprising number of doors. Including the ones leading out of the giant prison the Marines were in. All she had to do was find them.

  Her implants processed the information before her and transformed it into a visual simulacrum, a web of lines and colors, bright spots for nodes, flashing spikes for firewalls and protected areas. Navigating the maze without doing anything to alert the network wouldn’t be easy, and she needed help.

  “They’ll kill us if they find out,” June Gillespie protested after Heather dragged her into another virtual tea room for a private discussion.

  “They are going to kill us anyway. Nobody the Snowflakes have abducted has ever made it out alive. Now we know what’s been happening to all those missing starships. The Tah-Leen are like a bad horror movie’s cannibal clan.”

  “I know,” June said. “But I’ve only run cyber-ops in training. I’ll screw things up.”

  “I’ll do most of the actual grunt work. I need you to analyze the information and help me navigate. You are the only one with a secure system the Tah-Leen can’t read whenever they feel like it. Just have your normal imp run something harmless, a romance interactive or whatever floats your boat. That will cover your tracks while you do data crunching for me.”

  “How about the Marine pilot? She can help you.”

  “Lisbeth is busy.” And might be dead at any moment, she didn’t add. The last time Heather had checked on the major she’d been in a trance state that she hadn’t dared to disturb, and her life signs had been on a distressingl
y low ebb. Snooping around the Warp Marauders’ database was even more dangerous than playing around the Tah-Leen’s Conduit.

  “I’ll do what I can,” June finally said.

  “Good. We have to spring the Marines before the Snowflakes kill them all.”

  * * *

  Russell screamed a string of mostly incoherent obscenities as he charged down the hill.

  He used to love zombie movies. His favorite flick had been Alien Dead, a particularly tasteless flick where First Contact didn’t burn four billion people into slag but instead turned them into ravening shambling corpses. Alien Dead II through XXI had never managed to capture the trashy fun of the original, but he’d watched them all anyway. He’d grown up playing the interactive versions of all those productions, and he still indulged in the occasional nostalgic zombie run when he was bored and no card games beckoned.

  Not anymore. Not after this.

  The line of screaming leathernecks washed over the undead Lampreys. The charge stalled when the zombies bunched up. Russell was in the second rank; he heard the clatter of metal on metal or metal on flesh as he reached the line. A couple of Marines in front of him had spitted a Lamprey on their spears. The zombie alien kept coming even though half its guts were pouring out of a massive torso wound, and it was forcing them back.

  “Fuck this shit,” Russell said. He’d left the spear behind and brought his e-tool instead, expecting just this sort of Charlie-Foxtrot. Stabbing the dead wasn’t going to work.

  He raised the entrenching tool in both hands and brought it down with all his strength.

  You had to hack them to pieces.

  The crunch of hard steel on flesh was now familiar to him, but this time no blood spurted out, which he didn’t mind; he’d spent an hour cleaning Lamprey juice off his armor earlier today. His blow hit one of the zombie’s big arms near its shoulder. Bone cracked but didn’t quite break. Mindful of the two guys holding the critter back with their spears, he hacked it again, and again, until the arm finally fell off. One limb down. Five to go.