Advance to Contact (Warp Marine Corps Book 3) Read online

  Advance to Contact

  Warp Marine Corps, Book Three

  By C.J. Carella

  Published by Fey Dreams Productions, LLC

  Copyright @ 2016 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 [email protected]

  Cover by: SelfPubBookCovers.com/ Saphira

  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.

  Books by C.J. Carella

  Warp Marine Corps

  Decisively Engaged

  No Price Too High

  Advance to Contact

  In Dread Silence (Forthcoming)

  Crow and Crew

  Acts of Piracy (Forthcoming)

  New Olympus Saga:

  Armageddon Girl

  Doomsday Duet

  Apocalypse Dance

  The Ragnarok Alternative

  The Many-Worlds Odyssey (Forthcoming)

  New Olympus Tales:

  The Armageddon Girl Companion

  Face-Off: Revenge (Forthcoming)

  Beyonder Wars:

  Bad Vibes (Short Story)

  Shadowfall: Las Vegas

  Dante’s Demons

  Chupacabra (Forthcoming)

  Prologue: Let It Burn

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  GLOSSARY

  Prologue: Let It Burn

  “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

  - Percy Bysshe Shelley

  “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”

  - Cool Hand Luke

  Star System Hades, Nasstah Union, 165 AFC

  Transition.

  Sixth Fleet entered warp space ready and willing to endure twelve hours of hell for the privilege of delivering their own dose of eternal damnation unto the enemies of humankind.

  USN Admiral Sondra Givens held on to the command chair and steeled herself for a seeming eternity surrounded by ghosts and evil spirits. The USS William Halsey Jr. ceased to exist in the physical universe, the universe as understood by Newton and Einstein, and entered a new realm, one hinted at by the wilder hypotheses of quantum mechanics but never fully understood by any human scientist, even after a century and a half using it to traverse the vast chasms between the stars. Most warp transits lasted less than ten hours: the maximum length of time most thinking beings could withstand exposure to the bizarre reality outside the physical realm was somewhere in the thirty-hour range. A longer stay all but guaranteed death, insanity or, worst of all, being marooned in the space between spaces, for however long one could survive there.

  Twelve hours was bad enough. All nonessential personnel aboard the Halsey – the lucky third of the crew who had just completed their watches – had been heavily sedated to ease their passage. The rest couldn’t afford that luxury; they were headed towards a hostile world, and there was always a chance their arrival would be detected, in which case the enemy would be lying in wait for them, ready to strike when Sixth Fleet was most vulnerable. They would come in hot, ready to fight at a moment’s notice.

  Their mission was worth the risk: they were finally on the attack, bringing the war to those who had decided humanity should be exterminated.

  Payback is a bitch.

  The thought almost made her break out in maniacal gales of laughter. Almost three years of pent-up rage bubbled inside of her, beginning when three Starfarer polities attacked the US without warning, slaughtering seven million people before deigning to send a declaration of war. Her grandson Omar had been among the victims. The ‘deeply regret’ notification, delivered in person by the Secretary of War in deference to her rank, had followed the initial news of the attack by less than twenty-four hours, while she was still trying to accept the fact that hundreds of American outposts around the galaxy had been targeted for destruction by murderous mobs or sneak orbital attacks. No one had been spared. The goal from the beginning had been clear: to make the human race extinct.

  “You were so proud of me, Grammie,” the shade of Omar Givens whispered in her ear. She’d been expecting him, or someone like him. Seeing dead people was a common side effect of warp transit. The accepted wisdom was that all such visions were mere hallucinations created by minds being deprived of all physical input, as meaningless as any dream. Those who experienced those visions firsthand weren’t so glib about them, however.

  “First member of my class to win a slot as a ship’s XO,” Omar went on, grinning despite having a large piece of ceramic-metal alloy sticking out of his chest. Blood seeped from his mouth as he spoke. “All that hard work, only to get killed on my first cruise. Do you know that the Wildcat’s captain is in your fleet? The bitch that let me die while she ran away is serving under you. As a Marine pilot. Funny how things turn out, isn’t it?”

  The ghost was mixing lies with half-truths. Yes, the former Lieutenant Commander who’d led the USS Wildcat to her doom was currently part of Sixth Fleet. But the woman hadn’t run away from her post; Omar himself – the real man, not this mocking apparition – had dragged her unconscious body to an escape pod, and managed to launch it to safety before his death. Givens would never forgive the former naval officer for allowing both ships under her command to be destroyed, but the unfair accusation of cowardice offended her sense of fair play. Disputing the facts with a hallucination was pointless, however. Nothing she would say would change his ranting, or whatever else followed in his wake.

  And yes, Sondra had been very proud of Omar. About a third of her five children and twenty-one grandchildren had made a career of the Navy, but none had gone so far so fast as Omar, and none had shown the promise she’d seen in the young man. She’d made it abundantly clear that none of her descendants could trade on her name for their benefit, and come down hard on any signs of favoritism, to the point that being a Givens in the Navy guaranteed that everyone would be tougher on you than anyone else. Most youngsters had gotten discouraged and moved on to civilian life, or switched services. A few had learned to cope and done well. And her grandchild had been the best of them all – until his ship had been destroyed by a Lamprey stealth mine.

  The mocking ghost of her dead grandson vanished. She was glad to see him go.

  Her perceptions shifted. Givens found herself surrounded by the ruins of Heinlein-Five, the stench of death all around her. She’d insisted on visiting the fallen colony in person, although she could have easily stayed in orbit, safely removed from the carnage. The Navy had failed in its primary mission to protect the worlds of the United Stars of America, and she owed it to the dead to take a good long look at the results of that failure. She’d made every commissioned officer in Sixth Fleet do the same. The lesson of those tours had been simple: this is what awaits us all if we don’t do our duty.

  The fifth planet from the star Heinlein had been a ‘near-Goldie’ world, with an atmosphere well within the ideal ranges of temperature, oxygen-nitrogen mix and pressure for normal humans. It was also well-situated for trade and transportation, with one warp ‘valley’ connecting it to an even larger American colony; two other ley lin
es led to small outposts that in turn provided links to other galactic nation-states, all allegedly friendly.

  One of those friendly polities had allowed the Vipers to cross into their territory and invade the US. A massive battle had been fought at Heinlein System between Fifth Fleet and the Nasstah Armada. Fought, and lost: Fifth Fleet had been forced to retreat, leaving Heinlein-Five at the mercy of the invaders.

  The Nasstah species was very similar in morphology and culture to humanity’s original tormentors, the Risshah, better-known as the Snakes. Like the Snakes, the Vipers’ preferred method of dealing with enemies was genocide. There had been eight major cities and about a hundred towns in Heinlein-Five; they all had been turned into shallow craters, coated with the slag of molten concrete, steel and whatever remained of living things after being subjected to temperatures in the thousands of degrees for eight to ten hours. When Sixth Fleet had expelled the last invaders from the system, search and rescue operations had found three hundred thousand survivors, scattered in small groups that had hid in mining tunnels, thick jungles or forests, remote mountain valleys, or the depths of the planet’s two oceans. That so many still lived after several months of Viper occupation was a small miracle, due mostly to the fact that the aliens had been too preoccupied planning the next phase of their invasion to do a proper cleansing of their conquest.

  One might say that after you’d seen one of the ‘soup bowls’ left behind by thermal bloom depopulation weapons, you’d seen them all. Just a big round expanse of gray-and-black that would eventually fill with water if conditions were right; for very large cities, you got several overlapping circles of destruction, meant to catch as much of the population as possible. The worst sights were on the periphery of the strikes, the suburbs or nearby villages that hadn’t warranted full destruction. Most of them had burned down by conventional fires sparked by the conflagrations inside the death-domes. Although force fields kept most of the heat inside the sphere of destruction, some leakage occurred, enough to ignite anything flammable nearby.

  Givens relived her walk down one such suburb: neat rows of houses surrounded by lawns and picket fences. It had been the kind of community you could find in any of nearly thirty American worlds, anywhere population had grown to the point urban sprawl became inevitable. Fire had destroyed those neat wood and brick homes and taken the lives of the people who’d owned them. Here and there, houses that had been spared from the initial flames had been struck by shuttle flybys, Viper small craft conducting kill sweeps to finish the job the thermal weapons had started. A two-story Colonial had taken a hit from a graviton blast: half of the structure was still standing, and Givens had been able to see individual rooms lain bare by the barrage: the children’s bedrooms had been the worst, the gaily decorated walls and the Little League trophies providing glimpses of their lives before death had come for them.

  The warp vision took her memories and twisted them: here she saw corpses everywhere, male, female, old and young, butchered a hundred different ways. A row of heads on spikes welcomed her. She shook her head: none of that had happened at Heinlein-Five. The Vipers didn’t go for such flamboyant displays of brutality; simple death was enough to satisfy them. The sight was just as revolting and disturbing as if she was experiencing it in the real world, however.

  Why? Why is space travel the stuff of nightmares?

  Every species who had ventured into the stars had spent millions of hours – possibly millions of years – trying to answer that question. The leading theory was that sapient minds, bereft of physical input while inside warp space, began to feed on itself, much like when exposed to other forms of sensory deprivation. Givens was unconvinced. There was something else at work, something that seemed motivated primarily by malice and sadism.

  For what seemed like an eternity – twelve hours by the ships’ clocks, but far longer from her point of view – they finally emerged into reality. Her body – including, thankfully, her bladder – felt as if no time had passed. It took a few minutes to clear her mental cobwebs, but soon she and everyone else on the bridge was ready for action, except for a young ensign who fell into convulsions and had to be carried to sick bay. The rest of Sixth Fleet reported another dozen or so warp-induced casualties: par for the course, when you put some thirty thousand spacers through twelve hours of transit. None of the injuries seemed to be serious or permanent, which was a little better than average. She decided to take it as a good omen.

  Nasstah-125 (designated Hades System by US Fleet Command) appeared on the tactical holotank. The Vipers didn’t bother naming their star systems, simply assigning them a number. Of their four hundred or so colonies, N-125 was the fifth largest, a major trade and manufacturing center, with three inhabited worlds, a massive asteroid mining operation, and a network of ley lines connecting the Nasstah Union to half a dozen other polities. Its population, nearly eight billion strong, outnumbered every nation on Earth and their colonies combined. A sobering fact, especially when you considered that the Vipers were the junior member of the triple alliance that had sworn to eradicate humanity.

  Sixty billion to seven, if one counted not just the US’ population but every human drawing breath in the galaxy. Almost four hundred billion to seven when you added the populations of the Lhan Arkh Congress and the Galactic Imperium. Granted, none of those empires could devote their entire resources to the war, not without risking leaving their other frontiers unprotected, but even a fraction of it would likely be enough to do the job. At least, it would if Givens and the US Navy failed to do theirs.

  “The Nasstah Quadrant Defense Fleet is deployed around Hades One, Two and Three,” her Chief Tactical Officer reported. “Just about evenly spread between the three planets.”

  He who defends everything, defends nothing. The wisdom of Frederick the Great didn’t seem to have made it to this part of the galaxy. The smart play would have been to concentrate all their forces in one spot and jump her ships wherever she decided to attack. On the other hand, their plan was likely to wait until she engaged one of their formations and then have the other two try to box her in by attacking from three sides.

  “Enemy order of battle confirmed. Displaying it now.”

  Numbers and symbols replaced the star map in the holotank. Givens nodded approvingly at what she saw there. For a change, the intelligence briefings appeared to have been accurate. The force facing Sixth Fleet was substantial – nine dreadnoughts and twenty battleships, with the usual complement of battlecruisers and lighter space combatants – but it was comprised of older ships, largely obsolete compared to the ones she’d faced at Parthenon. Only about a dozen of the newer missile-heavy ships were in evidence. The Vipers had sent out their varsity to Heinlein and Parthenon; those elite divisions and their crews were now scattered gas and debris in those star systems.

  This was going to be no picnic, however. The enemy ships were holding positions close to their main planets, where they could be supported by ground and orbital fortresses who could unleash missile volleys just as massive as the armada that had nearly destroyed Sixth Fleet. Fulfilling her mission would require some fancy footwork.

  Her orders were to obliterate Nasstah-125 unless the Vipers offered their unconditional surrender.

  “Set a course for the main asteroid belt,” she ordered. “We’ll start around the edges and see if they feel like coming out to play.”

  Whatever reservations she might have felt about the devastation her ships were about to inflict on sixty million asteroid miners had been effectively stilled by what she had seen at Heinlein.

  “You really should have left us alone,” she muttered.

  * * *

  “Pretty cold-blooded of them,” Admiral Givens commented, three days later. All exoplanetary facilities in N-125 had been destroyed. The Viper fleets had remained in place around the three inhabited worlds, refusing to meet her in a deep space battle. She didn’t think she could have done the same, even with direct orders to that effect.

  It
had been a massacre. The miners had almost no defenses, and what they had seemed mostly designed to destroy meteors and other system debris rather than to engage starships. They had done their best, though, inflicting no serious damage but dying with their faces to their enemy and weapons in hand, which Givens had to respect. She still hadn’t hesitated to blow up their homes or destroy their power and life support systems, dooming any survivors to a long lingering death. There would be nightmares – or warp visions – later, but they wouldn’t stop her from doing her job.

  “Time to start the dance. Engage.”

  Sixth Fleet emerged from a brief warp jump a mere two light seconds away from Hades-Two, an ocean-covered planet about ten percent larger than Earth, located right in the Class-F star’s Goldilocks Zone, ideal for human habitation if the Vipers hadn’t filled its atmosphere with assorted noxious gases to fit their biological needs. This was the most heavily-populated world in the system. Its land masses glowed brightly with the light pollution of hundreds of massive cities. Six billion Nasstah called the planet their home, almost as many people as had lived on Earth before First Contact.

  “Enemy maneuvering to engage. Planetary and orbital defense bases launching.”

  “Very well. Carry on,” Givens said calmly. Having an actual enemy to fight rather than helpless civilians made her feel better. Slightly less unclean, even.

  The attack plans Sixth Fleet had refined since the Battle of Parthenon worked as advertised. They’d had some practice already, at N-311 and N-92, two lesser Viper worlds they’d struck on their way here. Learning how to use the newfangled space fighters had taken some doing, especially since she only had a bit over a hundred of the little wonder-weapons to play with and no chance of reinforcements any time soon.

  “Carrier Strike Group One has launched its first sortie,” the CTO announced.