Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series

by C. J. Carella

  “Tango!” he shouted and charged the critter, machete in hand.

  Well, technically the heavy blade was called a Standard Clearing Tool, but now that he’d used it to dismember several Lampreys, both alive and undead, he just thought of it as a machete. The alien or robot or whatever skittered to a stop, but its momentum kept it going forward long enough for Howard’s rush to close the distance. A tentacle and a multi-jointed arm with a pneumatic hammer instead of a hand reached for him. He slashed at them with his machete. Metal sparked on metal; the impact numbed his arm to the elbow, but the severed hammer-hand went flying.

  The tentacle clobbered him good, though.

  Howard managed to block the blow with his left arm. Didn’t help. He got slammed against a wall, bounced off it and faceplanted. From his prone position, he saw several booted feet rushing past him and heard more metallic hammering sounds, along with assorted shouts, everything from ‘Oorah’ to that old standby, ‘Fuck you, motherfucker!’ Someone cried out in pain, and Suckass redoubled his efforts to get back to his feet.

  “You okay, man?” PFC Barton asked him, helping him sit up. “Don’t try to move. You got a broken arm.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. Just hold still.”

  Suckass looked at his left arm. Yep, it was bent the wrong way and his suit had gotten torn up; air was leaking through it. Seeing the wound triggered a wave of pain that made him dry-heave. Thankfully, he didn’t quite throw up inside his helmet. The suit would vacuum most of the vomit out of his way, but it would still leave some puke on his face, and removing his helmet to wipe it off wasn’t a good option in the airless corridor.

  Barton sprayed some quick-set gel on the wounded arm to seal off the tear in the suit before he lost all his atmo. Howard gritted his teeth, knowing what was coming next.

  “Sorry, brah,” Barton said, and pushed the broken arm the way it was supposed to go. That sent a new burst of pain through it, enough to make him black out of a second. When he opened his eyes again, he looked past his buddy and saw the tango was resting in pieces. It had been an alien in a suit; some of the pieces were definitely meat and bone of some kind. A spreading pool of assorted fluids, both artificial and organic, had reached his boots. More shit to clean up after this was over.

  “That sucked ass,” he said.

  “Embrace the suck,” Staff Sergeant Weiner replied. “How’s Ramirez?”

  “Out cold. Concussion. And Suckass got a broken arm.”

  “Get them moving. Can’t leave nobody behind here.”

  “Come on, man,” Barton said, helping Howard to his feet. The pain was fading away, but his imp notified him he was running low on nano-meds. He hadn’t been hurt badly until now, but a bunch of small injuries along the way had steadily depleted his reserves, and they were out of spares. He checked his suit power packs: thirteen and fourteen percent, respectively.

  Could be worse. He looked at Ramirez, who was struggling to his feet after someone gave him a double-shot of stims that got him moving, concussion or not. Suckass knew the poor bastard would be nursing the mother of all headaches for hours even after the pain meds kicked in. Howard wouldn’t have traded his broken arm for that.

  The important thing was, his right arm was fine, which meant he still could kill.

  “Let’s roll.”

  * * *

  Nature abhors a vacuum.

  The Monitor’s death had left a huge gap in the highly complex network running the Habitat for Unique Diversity. While most systems kept working normally after the brief outage that marked the demise of their administrator, problems would eventually start to crop up as entropy began its patient work, miniscule errors compounding gradually until they eventually snowballed and became critical. Someone needed to take charge, and soon.

  Heather and June were doing their damnedest to claim that honor. Their combined efforts had tricked the Tah-Leen system, now being run by mindless ‘AI’ machines, into providing them with provisional IDs that granted them access to the Master Conduit. They were now inside the system, although they still didn’t have the full access that the Monitor had been granted. Getting there wasn’t going to be easy. For one, the Seeker, the Priestess and the Hierophant were also going for the brass ring. If the aliens had worked together, they would have won the race. Fortunately, the Priestess and the Seeker had decided to seize the chance to become the indisputable leader of their species, and they were spending as much energy keeping the Hierophant – and each other – out as they were on the upstart Americans.

  The five-sided struggle was fought virtually, but was no less deadly than any other war. The two CIA operatives were able to survive those first frenzied minutes thanks to their special implants. The t-wave devices let them spy on their enemies without being detected, allowing them to anticipate their moves.

  The Priestess released several software constructs, hunter-killer agents programmed to shut her out of the system and send a lethal pulse through her implants. She countered by unleashing a hundred Puppy-designed cyber-worms, little virtual engines of destruction that started overloading vital systems by sending millions of fake messages to their connection nodes. The hunter-killers had to stop chasing her and divert their attention to the worms before they broke something important.

  That would only buy her a few minutes, however. Lisbeth was still killing the Tah-Leen one by one as fast as she could find their Cores, but getting them all would take too long, and getting the important targets would be a matter of pure luck.

  There wasn’t a single control center, now that the Monitor was gone. Each major hub could serve as a secondary one, however; the system was evenly distributed. The Hierophant took over of one of them, but June was ready for him. Playing with the local power distribution system, she sent an energy surge through the physical server, burning it out and temporarily stunning the alien. The move revealed June’s virtual presence in the system, however, and the hunter-killers surrounded her and struck.

  Heather was too busy fighting for her own life to see what happened. In the real world, June Gillespie shuddered and went limp, blood running down her nose and ears. In cyberspace, the analyst’s last message informed Lisbeth Zhang of the Priestess’ Core location. A moment later, the co-leader of the Especially Unique was gone as well.

  That left the Seeker. The spy had a dozen bodies working in concert, a team of counter-hackers who could try multiple approaches at once. Their combined efforts were about to seize control over another node, hammering through the blocks Heather had left in their path. When he/they did, it would be all over.

  She had one card left to play, however. Time to bring a little real war to the cyber-battle.

  * * *

  “New marching orders, Marines,” Fromm called out after acknowledging Heather’s message. He fed a new route through the corridors to their imps.

  They’d incurred a handful more casualties as they ventured deeper into the station, none of them fatal. The Snowflakes had no idea of where the company was, but they’d run into a few aliens along the way, mostly alone or in small groups. None of the Tah-Leen had been geared for combat; their personal shields made them invulnerable to most ranged attacks, but not to knives and spears. Of course, that advantage would vanish as soon as the enemy engaged them with energy weapons.

  They didn’t have to detour very far. Led by Third Platoon, the company reached their destination after a few minutes’ jog. Their target was on the other side of an interior bulkhead. Unfortunately, there were no access hatches nearby; the nearest one was over a hundred meters away, and using it would spoil the surprise.

  “Demo.”

  The members of the assault and guns sections moved forward. The assaultmen used their training to arrange the mortar bombs they’d saved for the occasion into a shaped-charge configuration, setting up their last portable force field so it would channel the force of the multiple blasts into a narrow front. Heather had shut off the internal shields protecting the bulkhead
. The Marines’ improvised breaching charge should defeat the physical barrier.

  “All set, sir.”

  The demo team moved around a corner and hunkered down. The rest of the company was already well away; under the circumstances only a dozen troops would be able to deploy effectively. A countdown flashed past Fromm’s eyes. The explosion was relatively muted, or maybe he’d grown so used to ordnance going off that he wasn’t easily impressed anymore. He hoped it’d been powerful enough to do the job.

  “Go, go, go!”

  Fromm wanted to be in the lead but it just wasn’t practical. He let the first rush of armored men go past him before following them into the smoke. Tah-Leen’s construction materials were tougher than he’d thought: the hole the explosives had punched into the bulkhead was smaller than expected, barely wide enough to accommodate two crouched humans at a time. The assault force was mostly crowded around the opening, feeding troops into the fight a couple soldiers at a time. On the other hand, their targets hadn’t been expecting a section of wall to fly inward at bullet speeds. Force fields would keep the shrapnel from slaughtering all the Tah-Leen inside, but the explosion’s overpressure, sound and light should stun them for a few critical seconds.

  Even before the echoes of the explosion faded away, Fromm could hear the now familiar sound of edged weapons hitting flesh, along with screams of agony – and the thunder-like cracks of gravity beams.

  The butcher’s bill was going to be high, but it had to be paid.

  * * *

  Russell ‘Russet’ Edison was the sixth man through the breach. He’d much rather have been number twelve, on the grounds that he wanted to live a little while longer.

  There were nine ETs in the room. The aliens had been laying on big plush chairs while using their imps to work on some big project, if all the flashing diagrams in the central holotube were any indication. They were wearing human bodies, all dressed in the fancy costumes from the big gala the grunts hadn’t been deemed good enough to attend. Now it was their turn to party.

  Problem was, the fuckers were armed.

  Private ‘Jaime’ Janacek and Corporal ‘Redneck’ Travis were the first two in. Jaime’s rush carried him right on top of a Snowflake in a fancy white and gold uniform; they ended up wrestling on the floor, Jamie holding onto the alien’s gun hand with both of his own and while trying to rip his throat out with his teeth. Redneck drove his spear right through the screaming face of some bitch in an evening gown. Other Marines pushed on, and they managed to hack a few Snowflakes to death before they could react. Just as Russell entered the room, though, a tango shot Redneck. Center of mass. Poor bastard never had a chance.

  The blast went through Travis’ personal shield and his body armor like they weren’t there. Russell had a first-row seat to the sight of his fellow Marine’s midsection disappearing in a horizontal tornado of torn flesh and bone before the bits that were left flew apart in two different directions. A bucketful of blood splashed Russell’s helmet as he charged forward.

  The alien who’d done for Travis was pivoting towards him, but Russell beat him to the punch. He slammed his e-tool into the Tah-Leen’s stomach and tore his guts out the old-fashioned way, with a brutal twist and tug that made almost as big of a mess of the alien as his grav-gun had done to Redneck. The tango squealed like a stuck pig until Russell drove his weapon under the fucker’s chin, silencing him for good.

  Another grav gun fired. Another icon went straight from green to black. He didn’t have time to see who it was. Russell took a couple of steps forward to clear the entrance as more Marines rushed into the room. A savage swing brought the sharpened spade down on a Snowflake as he leveled his gun at someone. Russell didn’t get the alien’s wrist; the e-tool crunched into the Eet’s hand at the thumb joint instead, but that was good enough. Thumb and gun went spinning off. The Snowflake screamed; he was dressed like a Catholic priest, black with a white collar, and that pissed Russell off even more. He shouldered the tango to the ground and let him have it. More blood and guts, more screaming and trashing around. “Fuck you, padre,” he growled at the Snowflake just before he all but chopped his head off.

  Russell was stumbling around, off balance from the killing blow, when he got tagged. The movement saved his life; he only got winged with the grav beam, right on the edge of his force field. That was bad enough. All his systems went down as every bit of power left in the suit was drained by the dying shield. His field of vision shrank down to the little transparent slit in front of his eyes, and the sudden full weight of his armor knocked him to the ground.

  “Shit, shit, shit.”

  He was a sitting duck.

  They made you train with unpowered armor. You could move and fight with fifty pounds of nanotubes and composite plates on you, but it wasn’t easy or fun. First thing he did as he got up on his knees was reach behind him and work the so-called quick-release catch so he could get rid of the useless power packs. It wasn’t all that quick; his fingers had to flip the little lever open and twist it, left, right, left before yanking it back. They made it complicated so you wouldn’t drop your power packs by accident, which probably got a lot of poor fuckers killed while trying to remember the sequence in the middle of combat.

  Nobody shot him, although he heard at least two more graviton discharges. He couldn’t see worth shit out of his helmet unless he kept moving his head side to side; his peripheral vision sucked. The power packs finally dropped free, lightening him by a good thirty pounds. He pulled out one of his knives instead of trying to find his e-tool. In this confined space, a short blade was a better choice.

  The fight was almost over: most of the tangos and about half the Marines who’d come into the room were down. Russell walked up behind an alien wrestling with a guy from the assault section and cut his throat in one quick motion that brought him back to the good old days in the Zoo. The tango was still trashing around, so he held on to him and drove his knife in a few more times until he finally lay down like a good Eet. By the time the Snowflake hit the floor, no living aliens remained. His imp could check the roster to who was down, but he didn’t want to: there were five torn-up corpses in grey uniforms and body armor, and they’d all been in his platoon. Hard work.

  “We got them,” Gonzo said behind him.

  Russell turned and saw him and Grampa, both covered in fake human blood. His own armor looked just as bad. Cleaning their suits was going to be a pain in the ass.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Except we got him, not ‘them.’ That was just one ET, remember? They each have a bunch of bodies.”

  “Fuck.”

  From what they’d been told, there were only ninety aliens running around the station, but at this rate they were going to run out of Marines long before they got them all.

  * * *

  Killing all the host bodies of a Snowflake didn’t actually destroy them, unfortunately. The Core still remained.

  Each death made an impact on the primary consciousness linked to all his many personas, however. Being killed was a traumatic experience, and the Seeker of Knowledge had endured nine such shocks in the span of forty seconds, courtesy of the Warp Marine Corps. The Prime Seeker was still reeling from the traumatic event when his brain-jar was discovered by one Lisbeth Zhang, formerly of the Navy, more recently a Devil Bitch, and currently a human-alien hybrid whose current role could best be described as Reaper of Souls.

  Killing the Scholar after destroying all his bodies had been sweeter, but taking out the Seeker was a close second. Those two bastards had been responsible for luring the American delegation to Xanadu. Lisbeth had checked on Charlie Company’s casualties during one of her enforced breaks; they’d been worse than the losses it’d taken at Parthenon. All those deaths, just because two aliens had decided to play out their feud using humans as their pawns, and because the rest of their species got off watching sentient beings die.

  She was able to read the Seekers’ last thoughts and emotions in the brief seconds before warp ex
posure drove him insane. Most of what she got from the Snowflake was disbelief. He had really believed he would live forever. He couldn’t accept the idea that the universe would go on without him in it.

  “You really should have left us alone,” she said as his Prime Core died.

  Hopefully humanity wouldn’t have to kill everyone in the galaxy before someone finally got the message. The Tah-Leen, on the other hand, weren’t going to live long enough to learn from their mistake.

  * * *

  They found the Hierophant’s last functional body, the fat smiling Buddha, sitting on the throne in the replica of the Kirosha Queen’s audience chamber. It was big enough to accommodate all of Charlie Company, especially when only two platoons’ worth of troops were still on their feet.

  The Buddha smiled at them. It was trying furiously to activate the room’s defenses while it spoke. Trying and failing.

  “Well, I guess we all have learned a valuable lesson,” the alien said. “I trust we can part ways amicably, after suitable reparations are paid. We are prepared to be quite generous. Full transit rights, for starters. Riches beyond your wildest dreams, both for each of you and for you great nation. Whatever you wish.”

  Fromm raised the Lamprey officer’s sword, still stained with the blood of the other Tah-Leen they’d encountered on their way here. He figured the sight would be answer enough. On their way there, the Marines had found a few of the human victims the aliens had kidnapped on the first day. Those sights would always be with them.

  The Hierophant’s eyes narrowed as it tried once more to activate the room’s Executioner device. Nothing happened. Nothing would, now that Heather had shut the alien out from the station’s controls.

  “You don’t understand,” it said as if nothing untoward had happened. Its tone grew frantic as it went on, however. “Yes, we have some flaws, but we are too valuable a resource to be destroyed! We are a repository of wisdom that can’t be matched anywhere in the galaxy. And you will never be able to run this station without us! Especially not after killing the Monitor. You need us.” It paused for a moment. The grin was still there, but it looked as phony as everything else about the alien. “Or you could spare me. I can help you. You can do what you want to the rest. You have to spare me.”