Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series

by C. J. Carella

  Despite that, he figured Spears would agree with his recommendations; the mission was important and the Navy tended to listen to the people on the ground, even if the bubblehead thought Fromm was being over-cautious. Fromm didn’t care. Better to be thought a Nervous Nellie than to have to see more of his people shipped home in boxes. He was sick and tired of it.

  Burned out.

  The losses at Xanadu had been the tipping point. All those months spent rebuilding his savaged company, only to see one in five of his Marines end up in flag-covered coffins. Learning the names of the replacements felt like a fruitless chore. Invariably, most of the casualties happened among the newbies, so it felt pointless to know them. But when a veteran died, especially one of the happy few who’d been with him at Jasper-Five, the loss felt like someone had carved a pound of flesh out of him, and he didn’t have that much more give. Half of his lieutenants and non-coms were gone, all killed in action.

  Everybody had a breaking point, and he was sure he was close to his. If he hadn’t already reached it.

  * * *

  Knock-knock joke time.

  The air was still thick with smoke. Forest fires had run rampant all night long; only a monsoon-level downpour at dawn had doused them. The combination of high humidity and burnt organic matter stunk to high heaven. Even with filters on, the whole area smelled like days-old corpses doused in chemical waste.

  Bad for the environment, but not enough to incur the wrath of the Elder Races, Lisbeth thought. Forest fires happened all the time. The ecosystem would survive the carnage and recover. A few of the eggheads had complained, but not very loudly, not after what the bugs had done to one of their own. If the Marines hadn’t been on the ball, things would have been a lot worse.

  As it was, they’d lost the rest of the day. Keeping the fires at bay and killing most everything in a fifty kilometer radius had kept everyone too busy to do any more digging. Breaching the Black Tower had been postponed until the next morning. The night had passed in relative peace, if one didn’t mind hearing distant explosions when one of the shuttles found a worthy target. The entire local ecosystem had declared war on the invaders and had gotten the wages of war in return.

  Her borrowed Kraxan ‘memories’ hadn’t included jungles full of acid-spewing bugs and other nastiness; someone must have come up with them sometime after the records of her Corpse-Ship had been made. And there were probably other surprises waiting for them. The dead didn’t rest easy in this corner of the galaxy.

  Wondering about the bugs triggered something inside the Tower and she got a bunch of information she hadn’t asked for or wanted. Images from the distant past came to her: dozens of sophonts from species she didn’t recognize, running through the jungle. They were chased by swarms of poisonous bugs while Marauders watched from floating platforms above them, enjoying the spectacle of helpless victims dying one by one. The deadly critters had been pets. One would think that would tell you everything you needed to know about the Kraxans, but you’d be wrong. Death by bugs was what the kinder, gentler Kraxans did for kicks. The stuff that really got their average citizen’s motors going was much worse.

  “You all right?” Heather asked her. Lisbeth realized she’d been swaying on her feet and fighting the urge to throw up. The flashbacks had been bad.

  She shrugged. “Got another peek at the local historical records. From the looks of it, I can fake being a Kraxan enough that their version of Woogle will send info my way. I’ll be all right. Someday.”

  Her invisible alien friend winked at her with two of its three eyes. All aboard the crazy train.

  “I can only imagine how bad this is,” Heather told her. “I’m picking up mostly meaningless noise through my implants, and that’s bad enough. Like eavesdropping in on a conversation in a language you don’t know. But I still feel some of the nastiness. Worse than the Tah-Leen, and I thought nobody could be more twisted than the Special Snowflakes.”

  “You got it. But if I can fake it long enough, I can get the door open. Hopefully before its defense systems really get going.”

  Lisbeth turned her attention to the work going on down below. She was on the Tower’s roof, along with Lisbeth and two Navy spacers recording them with about a dozen different systems. The jarhead engineers were arrayed at the bottom of the pit. They were ready to start blasting into the structure with shaped-charge demo packs, the kind of stuff they used to bust into bunkers and armored bulkheads. Even shielded super-masonry wouldn’t last long under that kind of punishment, but she was worried the Tower would react badly to it.

  The living building was still slumbering. The plasma cutters had made it send out a distress signal, and the local fauna had heard it and come running. The critters had reacted like white-blood cells trying to deal with a possible infection. A more forceful attempt to breach the Tower would probably wake it up, and its reaction would be a lot worse. Lisbeth wanted to figure a way in before that happened.

  Captain Spears had given her one chance to do it her way. She’d better not screw things up.

  “Ready?”

  Lisbeth nodded to Heather and sat down in a lotus pose. Even inside her Marine-issued body armor, she felt the cold material of the Black Tower under her butt, and something else, a strange vibration like what you felt if you got too close to a ship’s thrusters and were touched by the tidal pull of artificial gravity waves.

  Her initial attempts hadn’t worked, so she was going to try something new.

  “I’m going in,” she told Heather and closed her eyes.

  An eyeblink later, she and Atu were standing in front of an ominous-looking metal door, dark and full of spikes. The mental construct was a product of her pitiful mostly-human brain, an attempt to make sense of what she was facing in null-space: a blocked path leading to the mind of the entity trapped inside the great tower from which the Kraxans had ruled this planet. The entity who could unleash all kinds of hell upon any invaders who dared disturb its rest.

  “Wake up! Wake the hell up!” Lisbeth shouted. She slammed her fist on the door, careful to avoid the spikes.

  “The Keeper isn’t listening, Christopher Robin,” the three-eyed giant standing by her said.

  “I told you to stop calling me that.”

  “I’ll stop when it stops bothering you. Regardless, I don’t think it can hear you. The Marauders have made it deaf and mostly blind. When it was ordered to shut down, its sensors went down as well. Only extreme input will elicit a reaction.”

  “So what do I do now, Pooh?” she asked the friendly ghost. Atu had once been a Pathfinder, an ancient species whose members had mastered warp travel to a degree beyond any other known species. Towards the end, the three-eyed aliens’ Path Masters had been able to dispense with starships and jumped from one world to the next by the power of their minds alone.

  “I’m thinking, my human friend. And in the process I am reliving some very unpleasant memories. What the Kraxans did to my slumbering remains was rather brutal and painful. In some ways it resembled what your culture thinks of as Hell: an eternity of inescapable torment.”

  “I’m sorry to ask you to do this, but maybe you can help me free the poor bastard on the other side of this door.”

  Lisbeth knocked on the big door for emphasis.

  This time, there was a reaction. The metal surface heated up without warning and burned the skin of her knuckles. The input may have been metaphorical or psychic or whatever, but it felt just like the real thing.

  “Motherfucker!”

  “Such language,” the Pathfinder said.

  “I’m a Marine, Pooh. ‘Fuck’ is our go-to word.”

  “That such a profane term for copulation can be given so many layers of meaning indicates an unhealthy fixation with the sexual act.”

  “That’s humanity for you. A pack of nasty fuckers.”

  Atu sighed.

  “Are you done thinking about it, three-eyes?”

  “More or less. You were able to reach me in m
y near-mindless state by using the mental pathways left behind by my former masters. For a while, you aped the thought patterns of a Marauder of Krax, the likes of which I was forced to listen to. You must do the same thing here.”

  “Shit.”

  “Ah. Defecation: the other human fascination.”

  “Never mind that. I don’t know if I can do that again. Last time I was inside a Marauder ship and linked to their operating system. And getting inside their heads almost killed me. This is going to suck.”

  “You are inside the Starless Path, my friend. Here, the past is as accessible as the present. Whatever you did or experienced before, you can do again.”

  “Great.”

  The mystical bullshit was truly getting on her nerves. Lisbeth had been a fairly cheerful atheist most of her life, starting when she figured out Santa Claus was a fantasy at the tender age of five. Even while exposed to warp space after joining the Navy, she’d relied on good plain Warmetal music to get her through it, instead of the prayer and meditation most people used. Ever since joining the Langley Project and being exposed to more non-corporeal experiences than any living being ought to, her belief system had taken a thorough beating. That didn’t mean she had to like the new version of reality she’d been forced to accept.

  Liking stuff had nothing to do with it. You did what you had to, no matter how unpleasant or disgusting, or you failed, and failure was the one thing she hated above all others. If succeeding required singing Hosannas or spinning prayer wheels, then by Ghu she’d do either or both.

  Going into a trance while inside warp space took very little time at all, unsurprisingly enough. Reaching for the nasty, largely-forgotten Marauders memories she’d briefly relived during her tour of duty aboard the starship Totenkopf happened just as quickly, inasmuch as time had any meaning inside this fucked up universe.

  The Marauders had been Class Two humanoids, distant genetic cousins to humans, the Puppies and thousands other sophonts in the galaxy. That had been before they ventured into the depths of the Starless Path, however. The Kraxans who built the Black Tower and buried a powerful entity deep within its foundations looked nothing like the shape God, evolution or the DNA-blueprint of the Original Races had bestowed upon them. Warp exposure had mutated them into myriad shapes, each more grotesque than the last. Further disfiguration had been caused by their penchant for body modifications, cybernetic enhancement and, towards the end, chimerical bioengineering. Only their lowest classes, the drone workers and serfs, resembled the originals in any way, and only because they spent most of their lives in normal space, being unworthy of entering the Path.

  The Kraxans had a strict caste system. At the top were the Overlords; every member of that caste was a monster, physically and spiritually. Warriors and Techno-Priests came next, and they were only slightly less unpleasant to look at. Tumorous growths sprouted at random through their bodies, pushing through their skins, a source of constant pain that had to be cut off and cauterized every so often to prevent crippling deformities. Tentacles, extra arms and spines were also common, the product of warp mutations, artificial limbs, or grafts from other species; those had uses, unlike the tumors, but constantly hurt. Being a Marauder meant enduring a state of constant pain and discomfort, to the point that most of them accepted the aches as part of normal existence. That might explain their utter lack of empathy towards the suffering of others, although sadism had become endemic to their species and culture long before the physical changes.

  To swim in the aliens’ stream of consciousness was to be surrounded by contradictory, nonsensical thoughts, interrupted by sudden bursts of laughter or fits of paralyzing depression, and constantly beset by strange voices. Interpersonal violence was almost routine, triggered by anything or nothing at all. No Marauder went a day without exchanging blows with another, and only their advanced medical technology kept deaths to a tolerable minimum; even so, their murder rate was higher than what you’d find in the worst Earth slum or even among hunter-gatherers.

  It should be impossible to achieve anything in that kind of society, but the Overlords rode herd over the upper castes, who in turn kept some sort of order among the rest. The Marauder rulers were functional psychopaths, focused on gathering power and becoming living gods. Their vision of Transcendence involved bringing warp and normal space together and creating a new realm of existence where their thoughts and emotions would become as real as light or gravity. If they had succeeded, the universe would become Hell, with them as the devils on top.

  The Overlords hadn’t gotten there, but at the peak of their power they were able to open gates into warp space by the power of their will alone, although they could only travel for relatively short distances through them. Compared to the Pathfinders, they were bush-league; next to everyone else, they were the closest things to gods. And those godlike bastards had attained a degree of control over even more powerful beings: the natives of warp space. They had even enslaved some Warplings. The entity trapped inside the Black Tower was one of them.

  Crap. Sometimes no amount of profanity would serve.

  The Warpling in the basement had been lobotomized; all it had left were its instructions and a growing, never satisfied rage that it could only vent against any intruders. A category which certainly included Lisbeth and her merry band of soldiers and explorers. Mindless as it was, the construct could still enjoy a nice massacre. Waking it up didn’t sound like a good idea.

  “Wake up!” she shouted at it. Her mind was finally attuned to the Marauders’ frequencies, and her call reached the dead Overlord.

  IDENTIFY YOURSELF.

  The simple instruction was laden with menace. The entity was waiting for a chance to strike, held back only by the psychic leash its creators had put on it. If the answer wasn’t satisfactory, it would be free to act.

  Lying through a telepathic connection was nearly impossible. Lisbeth sank deeper into the group memories of the Marauders she’d communed with during her own tour in hell, wrapped herself in the aura of the Overlords, and did her best to imitate one of them. She also threw in a bit of drill instructor into it for good measure.

  “I am your master! You dare question me, you pathetic maggot? You’re a disgrace. Now open up!”

  The words were automatically translated into the closest Marauder equivalents. That was the positive thing about telepathy: meaning came through, avoiding the hurdles imposed by different languages and cultures. For a long moment, the enslaved warp demon was taken aback. Lisbeth sensed confusion and fear; the poor bastard couldn’t think or remember, but it could still be made to suffer, and failure to obey its creators was punished with massive doses of agony. She might have just pulled it off.

  The Keeper turned its full attention to her. That’s all it took. Lisbeth found her life flashing past her eyes – and past the Keeper’s eyes. Her Marauder disguise was ripped off and she found herself completely exposed to the entity.

  INTRUDER ALERT. COUNTERMEASURES INITIATED.

  Motherfu…

  Before she could finish, the word vanished in a wave of white-hot pain.

  The earth shook, lights flashed and the dormant guardians of Redoubt-Five came awake.

  * * *

  The hazy morning light turned into a bursting rainbow display all over Camp Discovery and the valley around it.

  “Multiple emergences detected.”

  Fromm noted the calm notification from the Humboldt while he tried to figure out what was going on. He’d seen plenty of warp drops from both ends, but the apertures he could see some thirty meters up in the air weren’t generating the air vortices – and follow-up explosive effects – that warp openings normally triggered in an atmosphere. The tremors under his feet weren’t normal either. Normal or not, he knew that nobody on the ground would like whatever came out of those gates.

  It took him two seconds to take the compiled data from multiple sensor sources and turn it into a situation report: eight apertures had appeared, all above ground,
and all inside his defensive perimeter. Another second to order everyone to open fire on the incoming visitors; his imp’s command processor assigned fire sectors based on proximity to target and prevention of blue-on-blue incidents. Most of his Marines were positioned to fire outwards, with their backs to the apertures. And the LAVs, the tank platoon and the shuttles were anywhere between five and twenty klicks away, bombing the native flora and fauna.

  He’d fucked up, in other words.

  Four seconds after they’d appeared – half as long as a normal warp catapult launch took to materialize – the colorful hell-gates disgorged their passengers, one apiece.

  Small arms fire greeted the newcomers: eight floating masses of flesh, bone and chitin, bound in cables and straps, no two alike except in their grotesqueness. Like the corpses they’d discovered in the unearthed tower, the monsters had multiple limbs and heads, parts from dozens of sophonts and animals grafted together and enhanced with cybernetic implants. Fromm’s range-finder app measured the closest one: five meters long and wide, with three heads and a dozen limbs, most of them holding or tipped with assorted weaponry. What bits of clothing and armor they wore were uniformly black, with the same polished obsidian sheen of the tower.

  A handful of Marines from Second Platoon were the first to react. Spherical shields flared up around the Marauders as bursts of 4mm plasma-tipped rounds detonated around their targets. A volley of 20mm Plasma Armor-Piercing rounds created bigger fireballs at the points of impact, but Fromm couldn’t see any damage when it dissipated.

  “Targets are hardened. Repeat, hardened targets.”

  That was enough information for trained veterans. They would coordinate and concentrate their fire to beat through heavy shields and armor.

  Fromm ran for the command post. No time to think about Heather and Major Zhang, horribly exposed atop the Kraxan building, or the only slightly less vulnerable Navy and civilian personnel clustered around it. No time for anything but to reach his prepared position and coordinate the fight.