Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series

by C. J. Carella

  Unaware of the antics of her invisible friend, the chief went on talking:

  “I’ve been working ship systems for sixty years, ma’am. I keep up with the literature. You can’t power a ship the way you described. It’s impossible.”

  “I suppose we’ll find out soon enough. I suggest you and your department return to the fabber, Chief. This area is probably going to take a beating, and you saw what happened to the Tah-Leen that were in the other room with this ‘art project’.”

  Chief Hong looked a bit worried for a second before his preconceptions overrode his good sense.

  “Aye, aye, ma’am,” he said, saluting her before leaving. There was very little respect in either the tone or the gesture. Oh, well.

  As soon as the spacers had left the room, Lisbeth took a deep breath and slowly let it go, beginning a set of meditation techniques she’d learned as part of the Langley Project. A feeling of approval coursed through her. She smiled and winked at Atu, who winked back, using its upper eye. The alien’s outline had taken an unmistakably cartoonish appearance, just cute enough to star in one of the flicks that Disney-Warner put out on a regular basis. She’d either gone crazy, or her perspective had been forever altered by the changes she’d forced onto her brain. For all practical purposes, there was no difference between the two alternatives.

  “We prepared ourselves thus, in the early days, as we learned to cope with the perils of the Starless Path,” the dead alien said, its words as clear as if it had been standing right behind Lisbeth. For a moment it almost sounded like the old Atu, wise and in love with its own voice. “You are doing well, little sister,” it went on in a sillier tone. “Soon you will perform great deeds. Or die horribly for no good reason. Reality is like that. Six of one and all that.”

  Accepting she would never be normal again wasn’t easy. For the rest of her life, all she had to look forward to was living in a universe where half the things she saw or heard were only in her head. For some reason, the realization made her giggle.

  “Don’t sweat it, kiddo,” her guardian angel told her. It had produced a carrot out of thin air, and was chewing on it philosophically. “You see, Doc – can I call you Doc? – you simply see more deeply than the rest of your kind. In other words, there’s a thin line between a prophet and the crazy guy you find rummaging through garbage for his dinner.”

  “You aren’t really Atu, are you?”

  “I’m many things. I’m Atu’s ghost, and I’m all about balance and all that good stuff. I’m also something that has to use what it finds in your head to communicate with you. I am what I am, as God and Popeye used to say. Unfortunately, you went a little loco back there, so you’ve got a wacky guardian angel for your troubles. It’s okay. You’ll learn to deal. And eventually you’ll teach others.”

  She didn’t want to teach others. She wanted to fly.

  “You will do both. If you live long enough. Reply hazy, try again.”

  The Warpling masquerading as the Pathfinder’s spirit shut up after that. She wondered what happened to the real Atu. It’d probably gone back into its coma. Or maybe she’d absorbed it completely when they did that mind-meld thing.

  Less philosophizing and more flight-prepping, she told herself.

  At this point she would be running through the standard combat sortie checklist, except nobody had handed her an operations manual for an antediluvian alien vessel animated through necromancy and mated to assorted American and Tah-Leen gizmos. If she made it out this in one piece, she was going to have to write it herself. She only hoped they’d let her add illustrations to the manual. Maybe even a cartoon guide.

  All the normal systems that ran on electromagnetic and gravitational waves were up and running; she dutifully double-checked everything anyway. She was crazy, not stupid. Next came the stuff that ran on unicorn farts and bad karma; to check on those, she reached out with her mind, a procedure she still had no idea how to describe to those who hadn’t done it themselves. The ancient bones of the ship began to draw power from the Starless Path; it felt like when you downed a shot of expensive booze and its warmth ran down your body. Or the way an orgasm made your synapses fire off a twenty-one-gun salute.

  Power system, check. She wasn’t exactly sure how much energy was coursing through the ship, other than it was more than the output of a War Eagle’s gluon power plant, by at least a factor of ten. The Corpse-Ship rose from its cradle and floated several inches above it.

  STL propulsion system, check. The little ship was fast. She couldn’t quantify how fast exactly, but the visions suggested it exceed the Rothschild Threshold of 1/1000 c by a fair margin.

  Shields, check. The force-warp field combo that had saved her life during the final battle with the Scholar came online, giving the black ship a nice pinkish-yellow sheen you didn’t see every day, unless you’d had visions of Warp Marauders coming down from the sky, ready to plunder and ravish, oh my.

  Weapon systems, check. The firing ports were the skeleton’s triple eye sockets. They used a trio of gravity beams to compress a small volume of space into a tiny singularity. Tiny, but fierce.

  “Feel the wrath of my dreadful gaze, nasty hobbitses!” she said, and giggled.

  Sensors, check. Her senses reached out beyond her body. She became aware of Starbase Malta and everybody in it. Going out further, she saw the Lamprey armada sailing on, preparing to launch its first missile volley as it moved towards optimal energy weapon range. In between, she saw the five boats of DESRON 91, looking pitifully small by comparison. She’d better hurry up.

  Structural integrity – downcheck. Shit.

  The bio-mechanical frame was old, probably older than any sophont-made structure still standing in the galaxy, and decay had set in. The crystalline-matrix that bound together the skeleton and the Marauder-built cockpit had deteriorated, little cracks forming at the molecular level. Put too much stress on it, and it would break apart. Now that she was running power through the Corpse-Ship, she could feel potential fracture lines all over its frame.

  How long will it hold together?

  “Cannot predict now,” her imaginary friend said. “As little as five minutes of combat operations. No more than five hours.”

  “Gee, that’s not exactly precise.”

  “Too many variables are involved. I’m an angel, not a god. A man’s got to know his limitations, Christopher Robin.”

  “You’re not a man, Pooh. And Christopher Robin was a dweeb.”

  Atu winked at her and popped out of existence. Smartass fairy godmother.

  Well, she bet this old crate could do a lot of damage in five minutes. And going out in a blaze of glory would be a permanent solution to all her temporary problems.

  “Cleared for flight,” she told herself. Her imp started playing her go-to tune for fighter ops, Totenkopf’s riff on Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, the majestic classical opera peppered with harsh War Metal drums and lyrics. She’d named this ancient crate after her favorite band, as a matter of fact.

  Space-time began to bend and twist all around the Corpse-Ship Totenkopf as she poured power into its warp engine and prepared to enter the Starless Path. She sent a terse message to DESRON 91 before she joined the fray.

  “Tally-ho, motherfuckers!”

  * * *

  USN Captain Naomi Benchley was experiencing a lot of new things that day. It was rather refreshing for someone who’d mistakenly thought she’d seen everything.

  For one, she’d never expected to see a Sun-Blotter missile swarm go off close enough to see with the naked eye.

  “Missile launch.” The tac-officer paused for a second before rendering the verdict. “Fifty-three thousand, two-hundred and thirty-six vampires inbound, ma’am.”

  “That’s not so bad,” she said, feeling a thrill of semi-hysterical giddiness as she spoke. “At Parthenon, Sixth Fleet had to deal with three times that number. Launch Interceptors; they’ll thin out the herd.”

  “Yes, ma’am. How about point d
efense?”

  “What would be the point?” she asked rhetorically. A couple of people in the tactical ops center chuckled. “Pun intended. Keep pumping power into our main guns. We’ll place our trust in God, our Interceptors and Tah-Leen technology. Not necessarily in that order, mind you.”

  Her ships had gotten anti-missile upgrades before this cruise: boosted lasers with the same reach as a battleship’s main guns, although with a fraction of their power; improved fire control and targeting sensors which allowed her to track thousands of contacts even when operating outside a fleet’s tactical network; improved missile launchers that could fire volleys of fifty Interceptor rockets every ten seconds, with a total inventory of six hundred anti-missile munitions, each armed with Multiple Independent Targetable Vehicle warheads capable of prosecuting five targets apiece. In this war, the main purpose of destroyers was to help thin out just the kind of massive barrage they were facing, and the Statesman-class ships in the squadron were well-suited for that job. Even without the support of her energy weapons, each of her five ships could easily take out two or three thousand ship-killers in the two and a half minutes it would take them to reach her formation. Make it an even fifteen thousand, best-case.

  If everything performed as advertised, that would leave almost forty thousand vampires in that first volley alone, more than enough to obliterate DESRON 91 ten times over. Might as well run up a white flag as launch the defensive volley; neither action would alter the outcome when the Sun-Blotter arrived. The only reasons she bothered to do so was that it might help the habitat’s force fields last a little while longer, and it would remove some explosive ordnance from her ships, ordnance that might blow up when the squadron began to take damage.

  “Sierra-Eight in range.” The chosen target of her ship’s main guns was a battlecruiser, which was pretty damn ambitious of her. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, though, and if she took out a ship of the line with her tin cans, she’d have earned at least a footnote in the annals of history.

  “Fire.”

  “Twenty-two direct hits. Three partials.” Every ten-inch gun in her squadron had been on target or close enough. Pretty decent gunnery at one light second. “Sierra-Eight’s shields are down by seven percent.”

  “Pour it on,” she ordered. If everyone did their best and they were a little lucky, they’d destroy the Lamprey ship. Not much in the grand scheme of things, but better than curling up in a corner waiting to die.

  Missiles flared up and died in the distance as the squadron’s continuous volleys reaped them by the hundreds. The enemy used its own secondary weapons to pick off her Interceptors, though. In the end, DESRON 91 barely reduced the Sun Blotter swarm by one fifth.

  Not too shabby, she thought. But we could have done better. She made a note in her log to that effect, in case anybody who cared lived through this.

  A few moments later, over forty thousand missiles struck within seconds of each other.

  The comparatively paltry launch from the expendable alien task force had lit up the sky with a cloud of fire. The Sun-Blotter salvo created a continuous raging inferno, two hundred kilometers long and wide – followed almost instantly by a smaller but closer firestorm. The outermost force field had been breached. Hundreds – thousands – of leakers burst against the second layer, a mere fifty kilometers away.

  “Multiple penetrations.” It took a second to calculate the effect. “Six thousand missiles got through Force Field One. FF-1’s power is down to seventy percent. FF-2 down to ninety-five.”

  There were three energy shields protecting Xanadu. Her ships were nestled in the gap between the second and the third ones; the final force field didn’t have enough room to fit a destroyer. Any missile that got though those two barriers would be far too close to engage with point defense. Fifty kilometers was a meaningless distance for space weaponry. Missiles covered three thousand kilometers in one second. They would only know a missile had gotten through when it hit them.

  “Missile launch detected. Forty-nine thousand vampires inbound.”

  “This time they’ll hit those shields with their direct-fire weapons just before the missiles arrive,” she said as if she was lecturing a class of cadets. “A lot of them are going to get through to us.”

  “Divert power to shields, ma’am?”

  “No. It won’t help, not against what coming our way. My orders stand. We’re taking that cruiser with us.”

  I’d hoped to see my first great-grandchild. Lisa had finally taken some time off to become a mother; she was due three weeks from now. Benchley’s chances of meeting little Naomi – Lisa had always been fond of her grandmother – were the statistical equivalent of absolute zero.

  “Major Zhang is hailing us. The… Ah, she’s named her ship the Totenkopf, ma’am. The Totenkopf is ready for action.”

  Maybe the odds had just improved a little.

  “Well, what is she waiting for? Tell her to engage the enemy at her discretion.”

  “She’s already started, ma’am.”

  The captain was experiencing a lot of new things. What she saw next made everything else seem downright pedestrian.

  * * *

  “Major Zhang is conducting an attack run on the Lamprey fleet.”

  “One warp fighter isn’t going to make a difference,” General Gage said. “Even an ancient alien super-fighter.”

  A moment later, the tactical display seemed to give the lie to his statement. The Lamprey flagship’s status icon started blinking yellow before going black. On another screen, they all saw a close up view of the dreadnought, flames erupting from several breaches in its mid-section before its power plant ruptured and it became a short-lived star. Less than a minute later, a battleship suffered the same fate. The little starship had decimated the Lamprey fleet with its first two passes.

  The Marine general stared at the screen for several moments before muttering “Semper Fi.”

  “Enemy is altering its formation. Frigates and destroyers are redeploying to protect their capital ships.”

  “Someone’s been paying attention. Their lightweights are going to be ready for her when she comes back.”

  “I only need fifteen more minutes,” Heather said. Unfortunately, she’d said the same thing twenty minutes ago. “For sure this time. We had a minor hiccup reconfiguring the system. More importantly, we needed to be sure we’d survive its use.” She paused. “The destroyer squadron may take some casualties even after we take precautions, unless we make sure everyone gets the word.”

  “We’ll figure it out when you are ready to deploy the weapon. Meanwhile, we’ll try to buy you as much time as possible.”

  * * *

  “You’re joking. Tell me you’re joking, Sergeant Fuller.”

  “Wish I could, Russet. Orders came from the top.”

  “We only trained with those for like an hour,” Russell protested, gesturing towards the pile of oversized guns neatly lined up on the cargo pallet. “The Gunnies said they were too high-powered to use indoors.”

  “Exactly the point.”

  “Jesus H. Christ.”

  “Look, this is the deal. Our destroyers can’t handle the Lampreys, and in about half an hour we’re gonna have their fleet at our doorstep. They’re working on some defensive systems, but we gotta buy them time. The ETs are being careful not to shoot at the station. They want it in one piece. So after they get here, they are going to maneuver at docking speeds to get past the force fields and send in their shuttles, also at below ninety-six kph. We’ll pick them off before they can breach the hull.”

  “You want us to engage them. To lean out of an airlock and take potshots at starships.”

  “This is crazy,” Gonzo agreed. “Craziest shit I’ve ever heard.”

  “Have to buy time. It’s not that bad. They ain’t gonna send a dreadnought in. Just a few destroyers, frigates and their big intrusion shuttles. Each of them has a Battle Nest aboard. They’ll go for the sections that are under power, which mea
ns where we are at. We can’t let them deploy inside or we’re fucked.”

  “And these guns can actually hurt a destroyer?”

  “According to the specs, yeah. They are anti-tank weapons, and back in the day tanks were built like fucking battlecruisers. These things were designed to open them up. It’s going to be mostly robots outside, but we need a few grunts too. There ain’t enough robots to go around and they can’t shoot the really heavy stuff without frying their circuits.”

  “I don’t like this, man,” Gonzo said.

  Russell didn’t either. The tangos might want to keep the starbase in one piece, but if the Devil Dogs became too much of a nuisance, they’d use their warships for fire support. Even a destroyer mounted bigger guns than a Stormin’ Normie main battle tank. It was going to get ugly.

  “What’s the matter, Russet?” Grampa told him. “Do you want to live fore…”

  “Don’t even start with that shit.”

  * * *

  Transition.

  It was completely different than every other warp jump she’d ever made. Lisbeth could actually see things, not just ghosts jumping in and out of the dark. She and her ship were in a river made of colors instead of water, pushing through eddies and currents that buffeted the Totenkopf as they rushed past.

  “Pretty. Just the way I thought unicorn farts would look like.”

  “Just the way you imagined it. Literally,” her guardian angel said.

  “Great. So it’s my fault I’m swimming in a freaking liquid rainbow.”

  There was something else in the water, or watercolor if you would. She couldn’t see it, but knew it was big and it wasn’t alone. Her nemesis and its ninety-three Tah-Leen minions, a whale-sized shark followed by a school of piranha, all out for blood. Time to get the hell out of Dodge.

  Emergence.

  Totenkopf came out of warp in the middle of the Lamprey formation, a mere thousand kilometers behind the dreadnought serving as its flagship.

  “Eat shit and die,” she said.

  Three solid bars of black light erupted from the eyes of the deal alien, combining into a single point, a miniature singularity moving at close to the speed of light. The twisting beam struck the Lamprey warship and punched a hole all the way through it. A few more shots like that was all it took. The warship went up with an earth-shattering ka-boom that she heard with her mind and not her ears, since sound doesn’t travel in vacuum.