Earth Space Service Space Marines Boxed Set

by James David Victor

  The Selerid nodded again, rapidly. “Yes!” she said, as if she had just remembered it. “There is obviously something affecting us, and it’s station-wide. It must be something in the air?”

  “It seems unlikely,” Andy countered. “There were no toxins in the air.”

  “But...” Roxanna seemed clearer with her focus, although the skin around her eyes and mouth were tight. She was struggling. “If we didn’t pick up on the life signs, then maybe we wouldn’t have picked that up on sensors either.”

  Andy tilted her head. She looked at Anallin, who was staring at Dan’s still unconscious form in a way that made her nervous. She kept on. “Fair point,” she agreed. “It seems unlikely that some sort of airborne toxin could also have been hidden from the scans that Anallin did, however. The scans didn’t find any abnormalities in the bodies and those three were human, so recognizing what was abnormal or not would have been straight forward.”

  “Fair point,” Roxanna echoed. She pressed her lips together again and looked on the verge of emotional collapse again. Andy put her hand on her shoulder and the Selerid snapped back to focus. “That’s it!”

  “What’s it?” Andy asked, blinking at the sudden change. Roxanna had gone from looking upset to looking inspired.

  “The Colirnoid,” Roxanna said, this time gripping Andy’s shoulders amid her flash of inspiration in a way that Andy knew she had never done before. The Selerid normally avoided physical contact, because it increased the intensity of her empathic senses and made it harder to “shield” herself from someone’s feelings.

  Andy stared back. ”The Colirnoid?” she repeated. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of them.”

  Now Roxanna was talking fast again, but at least not too fast for her translator to keep up, which allowed Andy to follow her. “Almost no one has! It’s to the point where they are barely more than rumor, although my people have encountered them occasionally over the course of our history. It’s enough that we’re told of them, but they are almost never spoken of because they are almost never seen.”

  “They exist in a system far from here and even in the scattered stories of my people, I have never heard of them being this far out and yet... Yet they can do everything that we are talking about here! They feed off of chaos. It’s like...” She gasped softly. “It’s like a drug and they can’t get enough. Like an addict. But have only done so closer to their own system.”

  Andy nodded slowly. “If one of these Colirnoid have ended up this far from their home system, we need to know more. We have to know how to stop this sort of neurological trauma.” She wasn’t sure if ‘trauma’ was the right word, but it was the best she had.

  Roxanna nodded, and the fear was back in her eyes, but she was still focused. “It has to be a Colirnoid! They are telepathic, and with telepathic damage, it won’t show up on any scans until it’s been long-term, so nothing they’ve done will show up on our scans for months. Fear and anger and violence is the chaos they like best, which has made my people stay as far from their system as possible.”

  “Could they obscure sensors?” Andy asked.

  “Yes!” Roxanna cried, bringing her arms back to wrap around her waist. “Sort of. It’s part of their telepathy to have obscured my abilities. And a powerful enough telepath could obscure the minds of people reading the scans, so it’s not the sensors that are wrong but the brain of the person reading it.”

  So they were being driven mad by a rumor. Great. “Okay. So. We have a good theory. We need to know what to do about it now.”

  “The Colirnoid are a hive species, if I remember the stories correctly. A hive species, so each unit has...has one, you know, one at the top who links with the others. They would be driving the others. They would...” Her breathing grew rapid and her eyes began to lose focus again.

  “Roxanna!” Andy snapped. “If there is one leader with other...satellite aliens, then they are going to want to be somewhere where they can direct the others. The most central location of the station, the core.”

  The Selerid gasped for breath, but she nodded. “You humans have that phrase, you know, about cutting the head off a snake?” She paused, waiting for Andy to agree, and then went on, “It’s just like that. Kill the center and the rest will flee or die. They will lose their power.”

  “Are you sure about this?” Andy asked urgently.

  Selerid did not cry, but Roxanna had either been around humans too much or was feeding off Jade’s muted wailing because she looked like she was going to. “No, but it’s all I’ve got, Sergeant. Sorry.”

  Andy patted her on the shoulder. “You did well, Corporal. So, now we just have to figure out how to cut the head off the snake.”

  “Not ‘we,’ Sergeant,” Roxanna said. “You.”

  12

  “Sergeant,” Roxanna said to Andy’s shocked expression. “You are the one who isn’t coming apart, can’t you see? There is something about you that is resisting their power.” Before Andy could say anything, Roxanna went on. “I don’t know what it is! I just know that it is so. There is only one of us that can do it and that’s you.”

  Andy wanted to argue, but she knew that she couldn’t. “Can you handle these three alone?” she did ask.

  Roxanna smiled weakly. “I don’t know, but there’s no choice. We’re all going to end up like them, or we’re going to die.”

  Again, she wanted to argue, but she couldn’t.

  “Do your best, Corporal.” There wasn’t anything else that needed to be said. Roxanna nodded and brought up her rifle. For the first time, her own eyes moved toward the three other members of the team in the room with her.

  Andy turned to survey the space around her and figure out how she was going to do this. She knew she couldn’t go through the door, they were still there. Her dark eyes swiftly surveyed the room and then lifted, spotting a panel near the ceiling.

  Air ducts.

  Damn.

  She slung her rifle to her back and hurried across the room, climbing on a table and just barely reaching the edge of the panel. She pulled a utility blade from her uniform holster and jammed it into the seam. If any engineer saw her, they would have a fit, but she couldn’t care about that just then.

  Wedging the panel up, she put away the blade and then dug her finger under it to pull it off and let it clatter to the floor. She glanced back quickly, but no one seemed to notice except Roxanna. All for the better, then. She curled her fingers around the newly found ledge, finding a groove where the pieces were welded together. With a grunt, she pulled herself up, finding other grooves to pull her frame up into the duct. Once inside, she started crawling forward.

  This was definitely not where she had expected this mission to end up, but when did things go as expected?

  She thought back to the schematic of the station that she’d read and tried to place the room where they had found themselves just now. The central most part of the station would be an engineering area called the core, and she knew that it was at least two decks down.

  There was no time to waste thinking about it so she pushed forward. The duct was barely large enough for her to crawl through. In some places it wasn’t even large enough for that. She ignored the way the hard floor felt against her hands and knees, the scrapes on her torso from where she pulled herself through tight spaces. She ignored how worried she was about her team back in that room, her uncertainty about whether this was even the right course and whether she would actually be able to make any difference.

  She ignored the whispers at the edge of her thoughts telling her she would fail...

  All she could do was keep her head down and move forward. She almost crawled into the stations core before noticing the duct ended. A ladder extended in both directions as far as she could see.

  Andy climbed down until she reached the engineering level. Before going back into the ductwork, she checked the schematic on her scanner to see where she was. Then, she moved off again.

  The whispers grew louder a
s she got closer and she had to stop, squeezing her eyes shut against the mental intrusion. Andy breathed deeply, forcing the whispers away. She had to focus on the task at hand.

  Despite her best efforts, questions filled her mind. What was a Colirnoid? What sort of fight would she have before her? Could she win that fight?. And if she won that fight, what would happen then to the others? She was crawling through this duct based on rumors of the Selerid race, or at least one Selerid who might be crazy.

  Andy pushed through the doubts and kept going until she reached the panel that she knew would let her into the core. There could be no stealth and a very limited amount of guns blazing. She grunted as she twisted in the narrow duct and turned herself so her feet were toward the panel, then she kicked and followed through as fast as she could.

  She hit the deck and immediately rolled forward to avoid potential fire, but there wasn’t any. Rolling back up to her knees, she swung her rifle, searching for the enemy. No attack materialized.

  Instead, there was a single alien standing in front of a glowing, pale-blue column. It was over seven feet tall with glistening, smooth mottled skin. There was no nose or mouth that she could see and...three eyes. Some silly part of her brain wondered if that was where the “third eye” phrase came from. Had ancient humans met the Colirnoid?

  The three eyes, all pure silver without a pupil or separate iris, seemed to focus on her. If there was any emotion, Andy couldn’t read it. There was no weapon that Andy could see. The head rose and fell, like it was looking her up and down. The alien held up one of its hands.

  As she stared at it, she felt a wave of fear brush over her. Sweat broke out over her entire body and she began to tremble; her stomach clench with terror. Still kneeling, she bowed her head and inhaled slowly. It’s just their power. It’s not real. You have nothing to fear.

  The terror began to subside and she opened her eyes again, feeling anger take over, but this was her own. This creature had infected her team and made them nearly kill each other. Who knew how many of the detachment were still alive? And they had destroyed the people of this station!

  What gave them the right?

  Gritting her teeth, she rose to her feet and trained her rifle on the alien. It lifted its head and then stepped back, bumping into the railing around the core.

  A fresh wave of horror washed over her and she felt her knees weaken. The rifle began to lower. But then she focused on the anger. Used it to take back control. Andy lifted the rifle again.

  What are you?

  The words echoed in her mind and she knew that they were not her own. She felt fear, but it was not her own and it was not being projected at her.

  The alien was afraid. It didn’t understand why its overwhelming power wasn’t sending her to her knees or making her flee in terror. She now knew that it had no fight in it if its powers to sow fear and chaos had no effect. It had no defense...against her.

  “I am Sergeant Andrea Dolan and you messed with the wrong Marine,” she whispered and squeezed the trigger.

  Andy only looked at the body once and knew that the alien was dead. She had felt a psychic wail fly through her brain as it died and knew that it had filled the whole station. Did the others die or flee, she didn’t know. She just knew that her job was done.

  She left the core through the door this time and walked through the corridors. Along the way, she saw people in station uniforms. They were either unconscious, maybe dead, or were waking up like from a bad dream. She stopped to explain what she could, but she needed to get back to her team.

  On the way, she heard from the other teams. Everyone was in the same state, but they all agreed: get back to the ship.

  When Andy finally got back to the room, she stood outside the door and pressed her earpiece to tell them she was outside. Moments later, a confused and embarrassed looking Dan along with a...Hanaran looking Anallin were opening the door with the furniture pushed to either side.

  “What happened?” Dan asked.

  “It’s a long story,” Andy said wearily.

  Epilogue

  An emergency medical team was dispatched to Starbase Zenith, while the Marines returned home and were subjected to extensive medical texts. The doctor insisted on a thorough workup on all of them. The captain himself sought out Andy while she was waiting for her turn to be scanned, poked, and prodded.

  “Why didn’t you go crazy like the rest of them?” the captain asked, not accusatorily but earnestly perplexed.

  “Sir, if I knew, I would tell you,” she replied tiredly. “All tests have shown me as totally normal, but...I don’t know who my father is. My mother never would tell me, so who knows what might be going on?” The topic of her parents was normally exhausting on its own, and now, even more so.

  The captain nodded. “I’m just glad you’re okay, Sergeant,” he said sincerely. “And thank you for your hard work and getting this taken care of. We now know more about this race and what they can do. We’ll make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

  She sat up as straight as she could. “Thank you, sir.” She paused. “Sir? May I ask what happened to the other Colirnoid that were around the station?”

  “As far as we can tell, they fled when you killed the leader,” he replied. “Head off the snake and all that.”

  That brought a faint smile to Andy’s face.

  “That they were even here is worrisome, though. Who knows where else they may have been and the results blamed on other things? It will all be in my report up the chain, though, that we may have a new threat.”

  “Lucky us,” Andy said mirthlessly. Just then, she saw the doctor making a beeline for her and the captain nodded, heading off. The chief medical officer was the only one that could make the captain flee. As he left and she waited for the doctor, she looked toward the space station she had just liberated.

  In her heart, she knew this was just the beginning of something bigger.

  Daikon

  ESS Space Marines, Book 2

  I

  Daikon

  Prologue

  An obnoxiously loud buzz sounded and orange lights flashed.

  Andy pursed her lips as the snap of electricity told her the energy field had been dropped. A moment later, the old-fashioned metal-bar door slid back. She apprehensively looked at the field of orange-uniformed humanoid bodies just ahead of her as the door slid into the wall.

  “Proceed,” the stern voice from the protected box to her left said.

  She looked at him through the window and nodded once, not wasting any time as she moved away from the foyer and into the hallway.

  At twenty-six years old, Andrea “Andy” Dolan had been in buildings like this dozens of times since she was born, including the time she actually was born. This infirmary and the nursery attached to it filled her earliest memories, and she had no love for any of it.

  Members of more species than she could count lined the cells on either side of the corridor, and she heard a wild combination of languages coming at her, all of which she ignored. At the end of this hall was the visiting room. She was in no hurry to get there.

  But she was a Marine, and a squad leader. She wasn’t going to shy away from this either.

  Andy reached the door and waited again for the containment field to drop and the door to open. Once it was open, she stepped into a sterile room with mirrored windows, a table, and two chairs.

  Harnari Penal Colony was a medium security facility that layered on its protections not because of the severity of the criminals inside, but simply because of the disparity of the races it housed. The only thing they had in common here was that they were humanoid—and criminals.

  Andy’s mother, however, was human. That was it. She just was a very badly behaved human, and maybe a kind of stupid one. Andy loved her mother, but she also was entirely honest about the woman’s foibles. Among other things.

  On the other side of the room, the door opened from the prison interior and she watched a guard escort her moth
er in.

  The woman was older by about twenty years, but mother and daughter shared many physical similarities. They had the same light brown skin, the same dark eyes, and the same dark hair. They were of a similar height and body type, although where Andy had the toned, strong body of a soldier, Leta Dolan’s body was more wiry, slightly underweight. Andy thought that this latest stint in prison wasn’t doing her mother any favors.

  Leta approached with an insolent swing to her body as she crossed the room and sat down. Everything about her demeanor said that she wasn’t happy to see her daughter, but that wasn’t shocking. She never was.

  Andy sat down across from her mother, noting the guard remaining at the door. The energy field snapped back up, but the barred-door remained open, teasing the occupants with a glimpse of an unreachable escape.

  “What do you want?” Leta asked without any preamble.

  Her daughter sighed. “Hello, daughter. Why, it’s been a while. Have you been busy? I’m glad that you’re not dead. It’s nice to see you,” she mocked before she could stop the words from coming out of her mouth, then she pinched her eyes shut.

  “So you want me to lie?” her mother asked.

  “I don’t know why I ever expect you to be any different,” Andy said, opening her eyes and blowing out a breath. “I thought it might be a nice change of pace to have you act like you’re actually my mother, but I realize that’s asking too much.”

  Leta didn’t reply. She pursed her lips and lifted one brow, waiting for Andy to go on. For a moment, the younger woman recognized an expression that she made and was caught off-guard, but she soldiered on.