Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series

by C. J. Carella

  “They organized the mutiny, arrested or otherwise detained all loyal officers and enlisted personnel who opposed them, and stole those ships,” Grayson summarized. “By some miracle, nobody was killed during the takeover, although there were some non-fatal casualties. None of your vessels were involved, of course. And you wouldn’t have been expected to interfere with such a situation.”

  “We were never aware of it until Kerensky spoke privately with me via an encrypted imp-to-imp conference. By then, he had secured control of the vessels he wanted and transferred all his followers to them. Even if I had chosen to interfere, my four-ship formation would have been helpless against his warp fighters. I have given you the full records of that conversation.”

  Grace paused, Kerensky’s words echoing hauntingly in her mind:

  “Please tell my former superiors the following: we do this in the name of the United Stars of America and all of Humankind, but accept we are acting on our own, without the blessing or direction of any human government in the galaxy. I suppose that makes us pirates or terrorists. So be it.”

  At one point, the former Fleet Admiral’s eyes had become solid orbs of darkness. That sight would haunt her for a long time.

  “He is insane,” Grayson said. “They all are.”

  “I do not disagree. He made his intentions clear: his Black Ships – the name he’s given his flotilla – intend to sail all the way to the Galactic Imperium’s Primus System and immolate all its inhabited planets unless every member of the Alliance surrenders unconditionally. Note that among other things, his vessels took all the field-encasement thermal weapons in Seventh Fleet’s inventory.”

  They all fell silent for a moment. That inventory included enough genocide weapons to depopulate a thousand planets.

  “I still cannot believe he expects to get there. Primus System is twenty-three transits away from New Texas. Six of those run through Wyrashat territory; the rest are inside the Imperium proper. Even if the Wyrms decline to interfere – highly dubious after they sent their ships to fight us – the Gimps most certainly won’t. Most of those systems are heavily defended. He’s got less than ten warships. The Imperium may have suffered enormous losses, but the system defense forces on every stop will outnumber and outgun those Black Ships, and that’s before they concentrate to deal with an invasion.”

  “There is the matter of the modifications he made to those ships before the mutiny,” Grace said. “Modifications masquerading as repairs.”

  The American officer had glossed over the events leading to the mutiny. He took a few seconds to take a closer look at the details.

  “Warp generators,” he said when he was done. “He stripped them from dozens of damaged ships. Even salvaged several more from damaged enemy hulls. But…”

  “I think Kerensky believes he can use those warp generators to enhance his ships beyond the capabilities of normal human vessels.”

  “But…”

  Whatever objections Grayson was going to make died as he thought it through. All the mutineers appeared to have the abilities – might as well call them powers – of fighter pilots, who had to a man joined the mutiny. The biggest obstacle to making multiple warp jumps over short periods of time – other than the power requirements, which would remain a problem – was the inability of most humans to handle the physical and mental stress involved.

  “Only shows the man has gone insane. None of his ships have the energy budget to activate that many generators. In any case, this is a disaster. At best, he will lead those naval assets to their pointless destruction. At worst…”

  He stopped himself, realizing who he was speaking with. Not that he had to complete the thought. At worst, Kerensky would unite the entire galaxy against humanity. Every sophont’s worst nightmares would come true – warp demons loose among the stars; total war between Earth’s natives and everyone else, with nothing but extermination awaiting the loser.

  “We have to stop them,” he concluded.

  You must stop them indeed, Grace thought. But how?

  Cascadia System, 167 AFC

  “Warp emergence detected. Four hours until emergence. Something funny about it, though.”

  There was a note of interest – and concern – in the star traffic controller’s normally bored voice.

  “Unscheduled, for one. And coming from a potential combat theater.”

  “What else, lieutenant?” the watch commander asked, not bothering to look up the information himself. Micromanaging was as bad as letting subordinates do everything, and Lieutenant Commander Jimenez was still struggling to find a happy medium. Acting as XO of an orbital fortress was part of the learning process; if he didn’t do well, he’d never move up to command a damn thing.

  Unscheduled arrivals weren’t unknown, and New Texas System was relatively quiet – there was some SNAFU involving Seventh Fleet, but the enemy had been well and truly smashed over there. Things should be safe enough on this sector.

  “The signature doesn’t match any space combatants in the Navy, sir,” the controller said. “Or any civilian vessels, either. It’s too small, for one.”

  “Spy ship?”

  “It’s arriving right smack in the mouth of the warp valley, Lieutenant Commander Jimenez. No stealth system is letting it disappear from our sensors at those ranges.”

  Jimenez had found that when the enlisted used his name and rank, he was being called an idiot. Under the circumstances, he let it pass.

  “I suppose we’ll find out soon enough,” he said instead. “I’m going to kick this upstairs. Keep an eye on it.”

  The unusual readings were enough to put the system at DEFCON 2 – they had been at level three since the war began. The bogey was due to appear within two light seconds of Cascadia-Three, ‘north’ of the orbital path of the three planetary fortresses around the planet. Weapons went hot; if the small boat had bad intentions, it would get splashed in a matter of seconds.

  Some five minutes before its arrival, the air traffic controller spoke up: “I think I know what it is, sir. Except it’s impossible.”

  “Don’t keep me in suspense, Spacer.”

  “That signature matches a War Eagle, sir.”

  “The fighter? They can’t do interstellar jumps.”

  “It’s the only thing that matches. That or a shuttle, and those can’t warp at all.”

  Jimenez didn’t see the need to argue the point, not with the bogey about to arrive and dispel any doubts. “We’ll see. Carry on.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As it turned out, the spacer had been right. A War Eagle emerged into normal space. It should have never gotten there, even if a pilot in a craft that size could survive four hours of exposure to warp space. And yet, there it was.

  “It’s hailing us, sir.”

  “Onscreen.”

  The pilot had removed her helmet. A woman’s face, drawn and haggard, appeared on the visual display.

  “This is Lieutenant Commander Deborah Genovisi, call-sign Grinner. I have a message for Major Lisbeth Zhang, Warp Marine Corps.”

  Her ID flashed on the screen: she was with Seventh Fleet, MIA, presumed KIA during the last space action in New Texas.

  “Very well, Commander. Stand by for Search and Rescue to pick you up.”

  Jimenez wondered what that was all about. Probably something that would make one hell of a spacer story.

  * * *

  Commander Fred Grayson tried not to get his hopes up as he walked into the interrogation room. Things were so bad that anything, even this insane incident, was worth investigating, in the hopes it would help shed some light on the disaster looming over the entire human race.

  He had been putting out fires for the US Navy for a good ten years; the only reason he hadn’t risen up in rank was that he was damn good at his job, and he liked putting out fires. Running a ship was tame by comparison, and command had never appealed to him. When he did his job, he made admirals dance to his tune. But when things went wrong…
r />   The door closed behind him, leaving him alone with the woman in the flight suit. A new flight suit; word was she’d been a hot mess when she arrived to Cascadia after an impossible warp transit. Genovisi still didn’t look fit for duty; the emaciated looks were matched by the haunted expression in her eyes. If any of her story was true, her condition was understandable enough. Having her flight mates try to kill her, followed by a suicidal warp jump and being saved by some entity in warp space… It was one hell of a spacer tale, if nothing else.

  “I need to speak with Major Zhang,” she said as soon as she set eyes on him. That would make it about the two hundredth time she’d made that request.

  “We are trying to find the Major, Lieutenant,” Fred said in a patient tone. He was good at reading people – most of the time, he corrected himself, remembering the fiasco with Kerensky. The fighter pilot would behave better under a gentle hand than a clenched fist, and he needed information, not winning a pissing contest.

  “It appears she is on a long-term mission. A classified one. Reaching her may take some time.”

  “I know where she is. And what she did, when she found the Marauder Corpse-Ships. They told me what happened.”

  Fred’s eyebrows went up. The details of the mission were beyond his need-to-know clearance, but he knew about the Corpse-Ship at Xanadu, as well as Major Zhang’s involvement in the incident. From there, making a guess as to what her classified mission entailed wasn’t that hard. But this Navy aviator didn’t have access to any such information.

  “How did you learn about that operation, Genovisi? Who are ‘they’?”

  “The Warplings. They are at war with each other, and our actions are causing that war to spill into our reality. If Major Zhang cannot stop Kerensky and his Black Ships, humanity is doomed.”

  Genovisi had gone on her lengthy warp trip a week before Kerensky’s mutiny. Fred’s first instinct was to assume the pilot had been part of the conspiracy. Except that didn’t explain how she knew about Major Zhang. Coming face to face with something without any possible explanation would have been more of a shock if he hadn’t just had to deal with literally dozens of other unexplainable events in the past couple of days.

  “Tell me everything you know, Lieutenant Commander.”

  “If Kerensky unleashes the Warplings into this universe, the Elder Races will intervene. Entire worlds will burn. Do you understand what I’m saying? The galaxy will face an apocalypse. And I’m not being metaphorical. You have to get me to Major Zhang!”

  She was looking directly at him as she spoke. In those haunted eyes, Grayson saw the end of humankind.

  Havoc of War

  Warp Marine Corps, Book Five

  By C.J. Carella

  Copyright @ 2017 Fey Dreams Productions, LLC. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced, displayed, modified or distributed without the express prior written permission of the copyright holder. For permission, contact cjcarella@cjcarella.com

  Cover by: SelfPubBookCovers.com/VISIONS

  This is a work of fiction. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  And where is that band who so vauntingly swore

  That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion

  A home and a Country should leave us no more?

  - The Star-Spangled Banner, Francis Scott Key

  “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”

  - Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche

  Prologue: Paint It Black

  Star System Sokolov, 168 AFC

  Sixty-three ships emerged from warp space into the cold darkness of space, prepared for the worst.

  And expecting the best, although it always pays off to be prepared. More than expecting: we know good things await us here.

  Nicholas Kerensky chuckled at the errant thought. Moments later, everyone in the CIC read his mind and laughed with him.

  The augurs had been good, after all. The entities that had guided Kerensky’s Black Ships to this uncharted system had promised as much, and everyone aboard the rogue fleet trusted them, inasmuch as one could trust unknown and likely forever unknowable beings with truly alien goals and desires. Dealing with Warplings wasn’t easy, but so far they appeared to keep their promises. Kerensky had an obscure suspicion that their new guides and advisors would stick to the letter of any agreement, but like the demons and fairies of myth and legend would seek to pervert their spirit.

  Spirits! Next thing I know I’ll be spitting for good luck and avoiding ladders and black cats!

  No chuckles this time. Kerensky had taken the trouble to hide that thought from the group gestalt. Some things were not to be shared.

  An atheistic materialist for all his adult life, the former Commander in Chief of Seventh Sector was convinced there was a mundane explanation for everything, including the bizarre warp phenomena that had first led his fleet to victory and ultimately to mutiny. Warplings appeared to crave something the superstitious might call souls but the more pragmatic could define simply as information. A sophont’s mind contained a great deal of information and it appeared the natives of null-space could make use of it even after the death of said sophont. That made Warplings something less sinister than devils: one might call them Psychovores, Thought-Eaters. By allowing those entities to feed on tens of thousands of aliens during the Battle of New Texas, Kerensky’s and his followers had been rewarded handsomely.

  Among other things, they’d been led to this system, via a warp connection nobody had discovered before, providing his fleet – a rather fanciful name for a force composed of nine warships and fifty-five logistics, repair and support ships – with a hiding place where it would make preparations for the war to come. The Warplings had guided the Black Ships, and predicted no danger awaited them there.

  “We have concluded an initial survey of the system, sir.”

  Kerensky dismissed his fanciful thoughts. “Proceed.”

  The system he had named after his grandmother consisted of a standard K-type orange dwarf star and seven planets. The CIC’s main holotank provided visuals: two gas giants, three airless rocky midgets, a near-miss planet that could have held life if it had been able to retain a slightly-thicker atmosphere, and one life-bearing world. One radiating in a multitude of electromagnetic wavelengths that were a sure sign of technological life.

  “It appears we may be about to make First Contact,” the admiral commented as his communications specialists analyzed the streams of information emanating from the second world from the local sun.

  “Radio signals. Sound and audiovisual. They appear to be fully industrialized, but haven’t developed graviton technologies of any kind.”

  Little surprise there. The knowledge that allowed Starfarers to manipulate the very stuff of spacetime for myriad purposes had been discovered only a handful of times and then handed down from one civilization to the next. The fundamental theories behind gravitonic science were beyond the grasp of every Starfarer civilization in the known galaxy; they knew it worked, and how to use it, but not why it did. Humanity could have spent its entire existence blissfully unaware of such technologies if no Starfarers had come to visit.

  “I believe we will implement a policy of benign neglect towards the natives,” Kerensky said, images from Earth’s own First Contact flashing through his mind. Over half of humanity had died on that day. He had no interest in inflicting such horrors on innocent primitives.

  Hungry.

  Warplings could communicate in complete sentences when they so wished – one of them had assumed the form of Kerensky’s grandmother to speak with the admiral – but most of the time they simply expressed their feelings in the crudest and simplest terms. Perhaps every time they conveyed information in more detail they lost some of what they stole from their victims.

 
“We will not sacrifice those sophonts to you,” Kerensky replied, his mental voice loud enough to be ‘heard’ by everyone in the fleet. Most of the men and women under his command – slightly over sixty thousand all told – agreed with his statement, but a sizable minority grumbled about it. The idea of killing innocent aliens didn’t hold much revulsion for the dissenters; to them, all nonhumans were potential enemies at best, and threats to be destroyed on sight at worst. They would obey his orders, but didn’t like them.

  The Psychovore didn’t reply, but Kerensky felt the entity’s acquiescence to his pledge. For now.

  We are riding a tiger. Dismounting is not an option.

  “You all know why we are here,” he said, his mental voice reaching everyone in the renegade fleet. “We need time. Time to refit our ships and enhance them with new systems. Time to learn how to use them. Time to prepare. We will keep our distance from the locals – they haven’t left their native planet’s gravity well – and gather whatever resources we need from the asteroid belt, as well as the gas giants and their moons. We will be ready to resume combat operations in four months, six months at the outside.”

  More grumbles followed, and among a larger percentage of the ships’ crew. His unruly children were growing impatient.

  “We have the time. Neither the Gimps nor the Lampreys are in any shape to attack America again, not anytime soon. Even if the Galactic Alliance garners new members, it will take them months to launch a new offensive. We saved America at New Texas. Remember that in the dark days to come. Our job now is to make sure nothing like that ever happens again.”

  Unanimous support from everyone washed over him: it had the intoxicating effect of being cheered by a full stadium, but on a far deeper and personal level. He could feel their approval enveloping him, empowering him. Kerensky waited until the mental chorus subsided and went on:

  “We are no longer part of the United Stars Navy. We made that sacrifice willingly, forsaking our careers and the chance to return home. I called our vessels the Black Ships; there is a reason for that.