Advance to Contact (Warp Marine Corps Book 3)

by C. J. Carella

  “And finding out the Tah-Leen are another exception could get us killed. Not to mention derail the diplomatic mission.”

  “Nobody is going to try anything unless the situation deteriorates or I decide otherwise,” Agent Smith said. “We have the new implants. That may give us an edge even over our ancient super-advanced alien hosts.”

  “Warp telepathy,” June said in a dismissive tone. “I haven’t noticed any difference since the procedure. From what they told me, I thought I would have gained magical powers by now, or lose my mind, most likely both.”

  “Your new imps haven’t been activated yet,” Smith explained.

  Heather frowned at that. “The briefing didn’t mention they needed to be activated.”

  “That was an extra safety feature. It also helped weed out the overly-suggestible among the end users. Anybody who started complaining about hallucinations and other issues had the implants removed before they were activated.”

  “Nice. So when are they going online?”

  “Tonight, as a matter of fact. I want to make sure you are all right before we make our next warp transit, which is due thirty hours from now. The first ten to sixteen hours are the worst. I know that from experience, by the way.” Smith’s grin was utterly humorless. “It was about as unpleasant as my first warp jump, as a matter of fact.”

  “How truly great,” Heather said.

  June looked vaguely ill, but she didn’t demand to have the implant removed, which showed more courage than Heather would have given her credit for.

  “Once they are activated, we are going to run some simulations to see how you handle the new systems. Our contingency plans are directly related to those simulations. If things go south, we will attempt to take over the habitat’s primary systems. If the Tah-Leen decide to kidnap or murder us or both, we’re going to try and turn off the lights – and life support – until they cry uncle or everyone is dead.”

  “Including us.”

  “Sampson and the Temple. Ideally, we convince them to let us go, but if that is not an option, we burn their house down with everyone inside.”

  “I can live with that,” Heather said.

  * * *

  It was chasing her. She ran in the dark, as fast as she could, but it was like moving through molasses, and she could feel it getting closer and closer. A vast presence, cold and merciless. And hungry. One touch and it would devour her, body and soul.

  “Huh!”

  Lisbeth Zhang didn’t scream. The sudden waking exhalation was loud, but it wasn’t a shriek. For several seconds, she leaned forward, hands on her knees, panting, cold sweat running down her face. At least she hadn’t woken up screaming in uncontrollable horror. Progress. The first time she’d almost given Nando a heart attack; it was probably one of the reasons the two pilots had stopped seeing each other. He’d started waking up screaming as well.

  She got herself under control with some effort. The dreams didn’t hit her very often, but every time they did, it was rough. They brought her back to her earliest childhood fears, to the first time she’d felt small and helpless in the face of danger. But that wasn’t the worst part, not by a long shot. What got to her was the certainty, even now that she was fully awake, that what she’d just experienced was as real as the mattress under her body or the canned air she was breathing, as real as the stars in the sky and the dance of the atoms. There were things in warp space, and she’d lingered there long enough to attract their attention.

  The chase was on. Awake and sleep, in warp or in the real world. The chase was on. And sooner or later, it would reach its inevitable end.

  “Just deal with it, Marine,” she told herself. “If they ever catch me, I’ll make them sorry they did.”

  Empty words, but they made her feel a little better. Running in fear had never been her thing, not as a child growing up in the mean streets of Fugeetown in Providence, RI, the second-largest city in New England, which wasn’t saying a lot. Not running away had often gotten her beaten up, but she’d always made sure the bullies went home with a little something to remember her by. A black eye of their own, bruised testicles, a scratched cornea one time. That unwillingness to retreat had gotten her far at New Annapolis and in the Navy, and now in the Corps. In her dreams, she might be driven by terror into running, but if she had any say about it, she’d stand her ground and face whatever came her way.

  Yeah, whatever. Just dreams. You’re hero-signaling over some stupid nightmares.

  She knew that was a lie, but sometimes lies will keep you going in spots where the truth will just paralyze you like a deer caught in the headlights.

  Going back to sleep wasn’t an option. Lisbeth rolled off the bed and to her feet, sat down on her work armchair, and lay back as her imp flooded her senses with sights and sounds. No new emails, unsurprisingly since she’d last checked her inbox a whole four hours ago. No personal or professional business to tend to, since she was on detached duty on a freaking passenger ship, with nothing to do except rub elbows with assorted ‘rats. She’d had a couple of fun evenings with Captain Orlov, but he was in the Cromwell now, and it wasn’t like she could hijack a shuttle and pay him a visit. That only left staying in her room and catching up on her media.

  She hadn’t revisited her C.S. Forester collection in a while; she’d read Mr. Midshipman Hornblower during her first year in Annapolis – it was part of the suggested list – and gotten addicted to the series in short order. Maybe that would help her relax.

  Before she could access her library, a faint but familiar tingling in the back of her head made her sit up. There were others nearby. Others like her. Warp Adepts.

  Until a few moments ago, the seven ships in the task force had one Adept besides herself, and thirty-five Warp Sensitives. The latter were all part of the Navigation Departments of each vessel. Navigators’ exposure to warp was greater than most people; as a result, their perceptions had been altered, even enhanced in some ways. Adepts went beyond that. Lisbeth suspected she and her kind were no longer fully human.

  Ever since boarding the Brunhild, she’d picked up on someone on a higher level than a navigator but not quite as dialed-in as a warp pilot. She even knew who it was: the Secretary of State’s Chief of Staff, of all people. Lisbeth had kept that knowledge to herself, though. For one, the pseudo-Adept in question hadn’t detected Lisbeth, and the last thing she wanted was to bring attention to herself. Only her fellow pilots really understood what she was going through. She’d seen Adepts who’d gotten too chatty about their abilities and ended up being poked and prodded by assorted research weenies, missing out on flight time and in a couple of cases removed from circulation altogether. No way she was going to bring down that sort of crap on herself. She’d left the woman and her mysterious vibes alone.

  And now there were two more. They had sprung into existence at some point after she went to bed.

  That should have been impossible. It had taken months of brutal conditioning, a multitude of warp exposures, and hefty doses of exotic drugs and nanite treatments to turn her into what she was: a human being capable of performing multiple jumps in and out of warp space without losing her life or mind, along with other gifts and curses she was still in the process of discovering. How could someone be exhibiting those traits all of a sudden?

  Somebody’s been playing with fire.

  And, predictably enough, those somebodies had gotten burned. She could feel the two newbies were in trouble. Her connection with them wasn’t as intimate as what she had with her fellow pilots, but it was close enough to feel the waves of terror and pain coming off both of them. Uh, oh.

  To reach out to them would be to risk another bout of nightmares that were probably real enough to hurt her. To mind her own business and ignore their plight was another form of running away, though.

  She reached out.

  Lisbeth immediately recognized one of the people undergoing the frenzied mental struggle. Heather McClintock, the State Department puke who’d tu
rned out to be a better than average grunt and an all-around decent person. Also some sort of spook, although she’d made a point of never admitting to it. And now McClintock’s mind was in turmoil, as her fears came to life all around her. The other newbie was undergoing the same battle. And the third one had jumped in to help them and had gotten caught in the same trap instead. Whatever they’d done to themselves, it’d exacted its price while they slept. She had to help them.

  She used the meditation techniques she’d learned in warp-flight school to detach her perceptions and focus them on the three victims. Flashes of their nightmares flashed through her mind like a poorly-edited VR production, old memories and imaginary fears come to life. They were just like what people experienced during warp travel, except while in the normal space.

  Heather was facing some sort of ghost from her past. A relative, Lisbeth thought, someone who’d taken her to a crude cabin, well-outfitted with rusty tools of torture and butchery. Her terror was painful even experienced second-hand, but she was coping with it. She’d be all right, Lisbeth decided before turning to the next person. Another female, maybe a couple of years older than Lisbeth or Heather, but someone who hadn’t really faced much adversity in her life. A State Department staffer; how someone like that had suddenly become a Warp Adept was beyond Lisbeth. In a way, her sheltered life was protecting the woman; she didn’t have any deep fears for the Warplings – as good a name as any for whatever this was – to exploit. Which left the third person, the Chief of Staff. Her attempt to reach the other two had backfired, and now she was paying dearly for trying to be a good Samaritan. She was in real danger.

  Lisbeth touched the woman’s mind.

  Her luxury cabin at the Brunhild disappeared. She was in a dark, cold room, its ceiling barely high enough for her five feet seven to stand without bumping her head. There were no furnishings, just a drain hole in the center, covered with a metal grille. From the stench that filled her nostrils, that hole served as the latrine for the room’s occupant. At first, she didn’t even realize the room was occupied, not until a barely audible sob made her turn towards a corner. A lone figure was crouched there. A young woman or a child; hard to tell the way she was squatting down, knees drawn to her face, arms tightly wrapped around herself.

  “Not real,” the young woman whispered. “Not real.”

  “Ms. Smith?” Lisbeth called out. “Can you hear me?”

  “Not real.”

  The young version of Deborah Smith whimpered and started rocking her body back and forth. As Lisbeth approached her, she heard a series of sharp, short sounds. It took her a moment to realize the woman’s teeth were chattering in sheer terror.

  “Ms. Smith?”

  A door Lisbeth hadn’t spotted when she surveyed the room slammed open behind her, and the huddled woman screamed. The primal, desperate sound was beyond loud; it seemed to vibrate through everything in the room and its sheer intensity knocked Lisbeth to her knees before she could see who or what had entered the room.

  The scream went on and on, longer than humanly possible, too painful to endure. It made Lisbeth want to reach for the screaming woman and smash her head in, to do anything that would shut her up.

  When that awful keening finally stopped, a deep, throaty sound replaced it, coming from behind her. Something between a growl and a laugh. Lisbeth didn’t need to turn around to know who it was. She’d dreamed about it only a few minutes ago. The warp demon. The bogeyman.

  Blind panic took over. Lisbeth ran and abandoned the woman to her fate.

  Dying screams chased her all the way back into her body. She opened her eyes, fully convinced that the screaming would go on forever.

  There were tears of terror in Lisbeth’s eyes; she squeezed them shut, hating herself for her cowardice. She’d let the poor woman die. When push came to shove, she’d run away like the coward she truly was.

  Dreams. Just dreams. Just my brain trying to make sense of things that can’t be understood.

  She kept repeating those lies to herself but didn’t believe any of them.

  Five

  Guess the side effects were worse than they thought.

  The glib thought did nothing to dispel the cold feeling in the pit of Heather’s stomach as she watched the Navy corpsmen wheel Deborah Smith’s covered body out of the compartment. Heather had rushed there as soon as she woke up, filled with dread that had proven to be completely justified. An emergency team reached the room just before she did, alerted by Smith’s med implants, but they weren’t able to resuscitate the chief of staff. The one glimpse Heather caught of the dead woman’s face before the corpsmen chased her out of the compartment was bad enough. The terror-contorted features she saw looked nothing like the confident covert operative she’d talked to less than six hours ago.

  What the hell did they do to us?

  Whatever it was, it had proven to be lethal to one third of this particular sample group.

  At first, there’d been no problems. The activation process had gone without a hitch. They ran a few tests without incident and spent a few hours doing a simulated base takeover using a mockup of a Wyrm system as a template. The new implants and apps, if they worked as they had in the simulation, were amazing. They could bypass several layers of protection without triggering any alerts, although only if they limited themselves to passive observation. Still, Heather had gone to bed thinking the whole thing had been worth the trouble.

  Then the nightmares had started.

  They’d been just as bad as the worst warp trip she’d experienced. Her dreams had involved a visit to Uncle Bert’s cabin. She’d never been there, but she knew it well; it had played a central role in the McClintock’s family darkest scandal, the place where her father’s brother had taken several women and ritually murdered them. The secret had only come out when Albert McClintock committed suicide just as the police was closing in on him. Heather had been ten at the time; her parents tried to shield her from the facts, but she was bright enough to bypass their search blocks and read the graphic, unvarnished news reports; a year later she’d even managed to watch the ‘Based on a True Story’ movie, too. What she’d learned had left scars that persisted to this day.

  In the dream, she became one of Uncle Bert’s victims. And she now thought that if she’d died in that cabin, she would have ended up like Deborah Smith. Fortunately, her dream-self had managed to escape and she’d woken up, terrified but alive. She also knew that June Gillespie had dealt with a similar night terror. Agent Smith had apparently detected their panic through the new comm system and tried to intervene. And it had gotten her killed.

  “We need to get these things out of our heads,” someone said behind her.

  Heather turned around and saw June, looking like death warmed over. Her fellow agent wasn’t alone: a small crowd had gathered on the corridor; fellow State Department staffers who’d heard the commotion and wanted to see what was going on. Everyone looked shocked at the sight of the corpsmen taking Smith away. People didn’t usually drop dead in their sleep, not unless they were both very old and too poor to afford the medical care necessary to keep them alive. There were a few congenital defects that could linger undetected and strike someone down without warning, but those happened about as often as being struck by lightning. Most people died by accident, suicide or murder nowadays, with accidents outnumbering the other causes by a huge margin. Except in times of war, of course. War could skew those statistics drastically. And Deborah was, in a way, a war casualty.

  “Did you hear me?” June said, more loudly this time. “I want this…”

  Heather resisted the urge to slap the woman – too many witnesses – and instead lunged forward and hugged her tightly. The unexpected move shut June up as quickly as a backhand would have.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Heather subvocalized into June’s imp while squeezing her hard enough to inflict some serious pain. June squirmed for a bit before the realization Heather was muscle-enhanced and stronger than a man her si
ze sunk in. She might have whimpered in pain, too, except she didn’t have enough breath to do so. “You need to shut the fuck up right now.”

  June shut up.

  “We’ll figure it out,” she went on, and relaxed her grip ever so slightly. “But you can’t blab about this while we’re out in public. We still have a job to do.”

  “Okay,” June replied through the private comm link – the ordinary one; neither of them was likely to try the new, improved version that had just killed their boss. “You’re hurting me.”

  “I know.”

  “Please stop.”

  Heather relented and let her go, ready to pounce again if June started speaking out loud. The other onlookers were too busy talking about the sudden death in their midst to pay them much attention, thankfully.

  There was going to be an investigation. And she was going to have to make sure any irregularities in the inevitable autopsy didn’t become part of the public record. A quiet word with the Agent in Charge would probably suffice; her status as a CIA asset was known to the AIC and generally suspected by the rest of the staff. They had to keep their secrets, though. She couldn’t even tell Peter about any of this. She could only confide in freaking June Gillespie, about the last person in the universe she wanted to talk to.

  From the look in June’s eyes, the feeling was mutual.

  There had been somebody else, assuming anything in that terrible – and apparently, near-fatal – nightmare had been real. Heather was certain she’d felt someone else’s presence through the terrifying visit to Uncle Bert’s cabin. Major Lisbeth Zhang, which made sense, given her job. Maybe approaching her discreetly might be good for everyone involved. She needed to get a handle on this, or she might end up like Agent Smith. Hell of a way to end one’s career, killed by an enhancement treatment that had clearly not been vetted enough for safety.