Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1)

by Carella, C. J.

  After his release a few years later, the former attorney had settled down in a small farm in Minnesota, raised a family – that’s where Adam was born, the fifth and final child – and kept his opinions to himself. The stain of being a convicted troublemaker and traitor stuck to his children, however. Young Adam had been picked on incessantly in school, until he’d loudly and publicly denounced his father and everything he stood for, and pretended to be a true-blue all-American patriot, yee-haw and Ay-men, you betcha.

  Along the way, he’d discovered a sad truth; if you pretended to be something long enough, the role became reality. He hardly ever thought about all the constitutional violations the US government committed on an almost-hourly basis. He certainly wasn’t thinking about any of that shit now, as he cradled the M4 carbine/grenade launcher he would wield during this historical event. All he cared about was killing as many ETs as possible.

  Everything that had happened to him and his family had been the fucking aliens’ fault, after all.

  Adam made sure his sealed helmet was screwed in correctly, and all the attachments on his chest armor, gloves and boots were air-tight. He was about to enter not one but two hostile environments, and a hole in his pressurized suit would kill him. The grunts in the weapons platoon had been issued personal force shields, but the rest of Alpha Company would have to make do with Kevlar, carbon nanotube field fatigues and plain dumb luck.

  “I got a bad feeling about this,” another Marine said behind him.

  “Shut the fuck up, Carl,” Adam said, concentrating on not looking down. He’d done seven drops already, and he’d hated each one a little more than the last. This would be his first combat drop.

  If only they could just teleport some nukes aboard the Snake ships and be done. Neat idea, except for two things. First, warp catapults only worked on people. You needed a living, thinking being to get in and out of warp; they’d tried using animals, and even smart ones like dogs and dolphins couldn’t make the trip on their own. And second, warships had internal force fields that would prevent nukes from doing too much damage. The fields wouldn’t stop troopers from walking through them, though. And forget about opening a warp hole too close to a ship’s grav reactor, because you couldn’t. No idea why.

  “Catapult ready,” an impersonal voice announced through the mike in his helmet. “Launch in ten, nine, eight…”

  The big disk on which the platoon was standing began to vibrate. Adam closed his mouth tightly, clenching his teeth. He’d bitten off the tip of his tongue the first time he’d dropped into warp, so now he always made sure his jaws were locked in place, even if he ended up cracking a tooth, which he’d also done. Twice.

  He fucking hated warp drops.

  “Six…”

  “Hold on to your cocks, here it comes.”

  “I said shut the fuck up, Carl,” Adam said through clenched teeth and hoped the fucker bit his tongue off.

  “One.”

  It started with a fall, or at least a feeling like you were falling. The first thing they taught you during drop training was to fight the urge to flail uselessly against the false sensation. The first time, despite all the lessons and meditation techniques and all that crap, Adam had shit his pants and bit off his tongue. Now he merely closed his eyes and prayed. His father had been born Jewish but had lived life as a staunch atheist; Adam had picked up his prayers from his Catholic neighbors; his other choice had been the LDS but he and the Mormons hadn’t gotten along even after he’d turned into a flag-waving good ole boy.

  The Lord’s Prayer did the trick. He kept saying it over and over; he always tried to keep track of how many times he recited it during a jump, but he always lost count somewhere around the seventh or eighth time.

  The ghosts were the worst. Dead people, live people, people he didn’t know. They capered all around him, and he saw them even though his eyes were tightly shut. They whispered in his ears and made him want to flip open his helmet and let the wild energies of warp space rip his face clean off. He prayed silently instead.

  Deliver us from evil, deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, deliver us from evil, please, please God.

  And it was over, all of a sudden, the horrors receding from his memory like fragments from a forgotten dream. They said you only remembered a little bit of what you saw in warp, and Adam was fine with that, because what he could remember sucked ass. They had landed in a dim corridor, all black shadows and sickening blue and red lights. Snakes breathed all kinds of toxic shit, so a breach in his suit would mean a Deep Regret vid-mail to the folks at home. His father would probably dance on his grave.

  “You didn’t have to become a Myrmidon.” Those had been Dad’s last words to Adam.

  “Sound off,” Sergeant Jimenez ordered, his harsh voice cutting through the haze in Adam’s head. Everyone did. They’d all made it. So far, nobody in Adam’s company had died during a drop, although you heard stories about people who had died, or worse, who hadn’t made it out the other side. Nobody wanted to talk about what happened to you if you ended up stranded in warp space. Adam sure as fuck didn’t. At least he was back in the physical universe, where the worst that could happen to him was death or dismemberment.

  “Let’s move, people.”

  Their arrival had torn a big hole inside the Snakes’ ship – their fucking dreadnaught, that’d been their target – but it was all interior bulkheads, so it didn’t matter. They followed the HUD displays on their helmets towards their target, the Engineering section. They made it through a good hundred feet before they saw their first Snake.

  The Risshah had scaly skin just like their namesakes, but its body plan also included bits and pieces of octopus and spider. Its center of mass was like a boa constrictor’s, a big twisting tubular shape about as wide as a basketball, ending in a prehensile tail. Sixteen tentacle limbs sprouted from the central trunk, and in turn bifurcated into thirty-two smaller tentacles, each of which could serve as a hand or a foot. Its head was bulbous, with big beady eyes and a mouth filled with fangs; it was the ugliest thing Adam had ever seen. The Snake was wearing a purple t-shirt, which made it a petty officer equivalent. It wasn’t armed: Starfarers rarely engaged in boarding actions.

  Sergeant Jimenez took care of him. A short burst from his M4 did the trick. The 5.56mm bullets had plasma-filled tips that blew the hideous alien into bloody chunks.

  “Fucking-A,” Adam said. He’d never felt as happy as he did watching the ET fuck off and die. At that moment, surrounded by his fellow Marines, he felt right at home.

  “Let’s roll. Things to do, ETs to kill.”

  They rolled on.

  * * *

  “Engineering is under attack. Secondary control room is under attack. Troop quarters…”

  “Are under attack,” the Admiral said. “Prepare to repel boarders.”

  The dreadnought had three cohorts of Spaceborne Infantry amongst its crew, but they’d never been meant to be deployed inside the ship. One loaded troops into shuttles and sent them out to board crippled vessels or to attack targets on planets or large space installations. One cohort was in their quarters, without their weapons; the other two had been detached to assist damage control units – also without their weapons, lest they accidentally damage the ship. To arm themselves, the troops would have to reach the central armory – which was also under attack.

  Demons. We are fighting demons.

  Those were its last thoughts before a warp bubble erupted into the bridge, killing it and most of the crew. The few survivors had just enough time to behold their executioners before a storm of explosive bullets wiped them out.

  “Ugly motherfuckers, aren’t they?” a Marine second lieutenant said after the last Risshah crewmember had stopped twitching. His voice broke into an adolescent squeak in mid-sentence, which embarrassed him to no end.

  “Come on,” he said gruffly. “Let’s clear up the rest of this nest.”

  * * *

  It worked. It freaking worked!<
br />
  Commander Givens barely resisted the urge to jump up and down in glee as the last Snake battlecruiser blew up on the screen. Total wipeout.

  A quick glance at the tactical screen quenched her elation. The Lincoln was gone; the Eisenhower and Bush were drifting, engines down, life support barely hanging on, most of their other systems off-line and a good one-third to half of their crews dead or wounded. The Assault Ship Chosin had also been destroyed, all hands lost, along with a Marine Expeditionary Unit. The casualties among the fleet’s frigates were still to be tallied up. The Snakes had kept fighting even after losing their dreadnought, two battleships and seven battlecruisers to Marine boarding actions. Even with the new warp shields, it had been a close-run thing, as Captain Carruthers would no doubt say at some point.

  Rescuing the thousands of Marines now stranded inside the derelict Snake ships would take some doing: warp catapults could send you out, but couldn’t bring you back in; drops were one-way trips. You won or you died, and if you won you were stuck in a captured ship until someone came to get you or you ran out of consumables and died, or the ship self-destructed and you died. Not the kind of job she would have volunteered for. But those Marines had made all the difference in the end, and those captured hulls would make a major different in the fighting to come. Givens wondered if they’d try to refit the Snake ships or simply strip them of useful weapons and other systems.

  Behind her, Captain Carruthers spoke. “We won this time, but we can’t expect them to come on in the same old way. Now they know we’re more than just a primitive tribe to be swept aside. We’ve proven to be a threat.”

  Better a threat than a victim, Givens thought.

  The burning remains of the Snake fleet glowed on the screen like beacons of hope.

  Seven

  Year 163 AFC, D Minus Ten

  “You fools nearly ruined everything.”

  High Magistrate Eereen Leep seethed at the rudeness displayed by the bald statement. The hooded figure facing him hadn’t bothered learning even the basics of Kirosha courtesy. The Star Devil’s arrogance matched his hideousness, which was so abhorrent the only way Eeren could stand his presence was for the alien to keep his features hidden from sight; having seen them once, the Magistrate had no desire to ever do so again. All Star Devils were unpleasant to look at, but this one was shaped like a nightmare made flesh, like a monster from mythology.

  “Errors were made,” Eereen said politely, internally wincing at the loss of face even that neutral statement signified. “Some lesser leaders among the rebels saw an opportunity to strike a blow against the Star Devils. The chance to slay one of their emissaries proved to be too tempting for them. They have paid for their mistake with their lives. Their families will suffer even more.” Their deaths would also provide a convenient scapegoat, should the Queen decide to back the Modernists instead of Eereen’s Preservers. Her Supreme Majesty had yet to make up her mind.

  “I warned you that you would be helpless against the outsiders without my aid,” the hooded Devil said, compounding his insults by belaboring the facts. “Their weapons are too advanced. Their drones spy on your every movement. Without my gifts, you are less than insects to them.”

  “We await your gifts with great anticipation,” was Eeren’s mild reply, his own rebuke tastefully implied and thus completely missed by the monster. Dealing with barbarians was exhausting. “One would wish they had been distributed already.”

  “The items are being assembled even as we speak,” the Devil said, or rather, the machine that did his talking for him did. The monster had a revolting sucker-like mouth, surrounded by multiple rows of teeth and featuring not one but two snakelike tongues; it could not produce sounds like normal people, or even the more Kirosha-like Star Devils. “Smuggling modern devices is rather difficult. Even the notoriously lax Wyrms will check for suspicious energy signatures in their cargos. We had to hide the components among seemingly harmless consumer products, which now have to be extracted and put together, one by one. Only a trained laborer can do so, and you only provided a handful of them. Any further delays are your fault.”

  “Watchmakers and other skilled craftsmen are somewhat scarce and easily missed. I humbly apologize for failing to gather them in sufficient numbers to meet your needs.” At this point, the Star Devil should have replied with an equally fulsome apology, restoring the balance. Instead, he took Eereen’s words as his due, dealing yet another irreparable offense. Barbarian!

  “At the current rate of progress, it will take two, maybe three days to have everything in place. I hope the slaughter the filthy humans inflicted on your cannon fodder will not discourage the rest of you.”

  “A mere three thousand dead? That is nothing, a trifle,” Eereen said confidently. During the last great rebellion, over a million revolting peasants had been slaughtered. There were always more low-caste vermin than were needed, and with the proper slogans and rites you could lead them to slaughter easily enough. “When the time comes, we will command a hundred thousand secret society devotees. The Royal Guard will not stand with us, at least not until Her Supreme Majesty comes to see the wisdom of our cause, but they will not interfere. And enough of the Army will support us to give us many rifles. Augmented by your gifts, we shall slaughter every Star Devil in Kirosha in a day and a night.”

  Eereen’s boasts seemed to mollify the demon.

  “That is good. When my gifts are ready, I will send word to you.”

  The Magistrate watched the retreating hooded figure with a mixture of distaste and relief. The visitors from beyond the sky had brought change and chaos to the High Kingdom, upsetting a millennia-old balance that had maintained peace and harmony for its people, barring a few regrettable incidents. Some had happened recently enough to sting: barbarians had forced trade concessions from the Kingdom, and even launched humiliating invasions. Kirosha had endured, however, and Ka’at, the Way of Things, had been restored.

  Until the Star Devils came.

  This new breed of invaders was far more dangerous than any other, corrupting with offers of wealth and power instead of using naked force, while still retaining the option to use force should the Kingdom refuse to accept their gifts. It was an intolerable situation, one that would lead to changes that could not be undone.

  The hideous Star Devil offered an alternative. His hatred for his rivals, especially the Americans, was so great he would do anything to eradicate them, both in the Kingdom and in other worlds among the stars. Eeren cared little for the universe beyond the realm, of course. Once the outsiders were gone, too busy warring against each other to bother Kirosha again, balance would return to the land.

  If reaching those goals meant dealing with the rudest and least seemly of all the Devils, it was worth it.

  * * *

  The American Embassy in Kirosha had once been the High Monarchs’ Summer Palace. The original building was a good thousand years old, and it had been more of a castle than an actual palace, with utterly functional walls around a solid fortified keep, complete with drafty walls and arrow slits rather than windows. Additions and modifications over the centuries had improved it: the walls and moat had been knocked down, although you could still see their outlines on the colorful gardens that had replaced them. The main building had had additions and entire wings added before High King Jeesha IV had built a nicer place outside the capital some two hundred years ago and turned the old palace into a rooming house for honored guests, a courtesy that had been extended to the US after making Contact.

  The place was still deuced hard to heat up in the winter, however.

  Heather felt a chilling draft run past her – almost through her – although some of what she felt had to be the aftereffects of her first taste of actual combat. She was shaky, cold and ravenous. And rather randy, perversely enough, not that she had anybody to help her work off such frustrations. Not what she’d expected, she considered as she leaned back on the sofa in the antechamber where she waited to be summoned by
the ambassador.

  She’d almost been killed, had helped butcher hundreds of sapient beings, and she felt… what? Grateful to her instructors at the Farm, back on Original Earth, for one. The paramilitary facility had put her through a refresher round of Basic training – she’d done her four years in the Army, beginning at age seventeen – before being sent to the CIA’s version of Ranger School, which she’d only managed to pass thanks to a full muscle-enhancement procedure her fairly wealthy parents had bankrolled even as they decried her awful career choices. After that she’d gone through a full SERE course, combining extremely realistic virtual simulations – they said that after you died during a FVR Sim, the real thing was no longer a surprise – with hands-on drudgery as she learned all about Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. All those hours of pain and suffering had paid off: when the real thing came along, she’d reacted instinctively instead of panicking and losing her composure and likely her life. She reminded herself to send a thank-you e-mail to her instructors.

  Gratitude, yes. Some measure of pride, yes. Guilt? Not as much as she thought she would, or should feel after something like that. The Kirosha she’d killed had chosen to be there, weapons in hand. Her intellectual side could list all their many grievances, both against the High Crown and the US interlopers, but the rest of her didn’t care. They’d made their choice.

  Pacifism had mostly been exterminated during Earth’s First Contact, along with nearly five billion other humans, mostly city-dwellers caught in a merciless honeycomb of force fields and then baked to perfection by the Snakes’ city-busting ‘bloomies.’ The weapons were designed to turn the core of any built-up areas into a flat expanse of mineral-rich slag by the expedient of heating the area to a balmy twenty-five hundred degrees Fahrenheit for several hours and then venting the waste heat outside the atmosphere. Of all of Earth’s great modern monuments, from the Eiffel Tower to the Empire State Building, very little remained; only those far away from cities had survived. The rest had been blended into the many congealed metal-and-concrete ‘soup bowls’ that still dotted much of the planet.