In Dread Silence (Warp Marine Corps Book 4) Read online

  In Dread Silence

  Warp Marine Corps, Book Four

  By C.J. Carella

  Through the mists of the deep, where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes…

  - The Star-Spangled Banner, Francis Scott Key

  I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all.

  - General James N. Mattis, USMC, Ret.

  To Gracie.

  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 [email protected]

  Cover by: SelfPubBookCovers.com/Fantasyart

  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

  Havoc of War (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)

  In Dread Silence

  Prologue: Dragon’s Fall

  One

  Two

  Interlude: Imperial Decisions

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  GLOSSARY

  Prologue: Dragon’s Fall

  Drakul-Six, Wyrashat Empire, 166 AFC

  King-Admiral Grace-Under-Pressure, commander of the Hrauwah Volunteer Flotilla, felt the weight of despair pressing down on her.

  She let none of it show, of course. Everyone in the Fleet Command Court aboard the dreadnought Undying Defender could see her sitting in the centrally-located throne from which she oversaw the flotilla’s operations. To rule crews and ships, one must put up a good front: proper officers never bared their teeth, allowed their hackles and tails to rise, or otherwise displayed strong emotions. A leader should treat even the most harrowing circumstances with dispassionate calm. The phrase ‘Never let them hear you growl’ had been old when the Royal Navy had gone to war in wind-propelled wooden ships and used their iron cannon to unify all five continents of the homeland under the Crown. Four millennia of tradition demanded respect.

  Retaining her composure in the face of an unending stream of bad news wasn’t difficult; the problem was that doing so had begun to feel futile. Howling in impotent rage was as likely to accomplish anything of worth as pretending nothing was wrong.

  The more experienced members of the Court sensed her worsening mood as she quietly read the message that had been uploaded into her cybernetic implants. Grace could see them tensing up ever so slightly; the younger officers’ tails puffed up involuntarily as old fight-or-flight instincts asserted themselves. They knew that whatever news the Grand Dame had received likely portended disaster, despite her best efforts to appear unconcerned.

  “Our hosts have denied Fleetmaster Klem’s request for reinforcements,” she announced. “It appears a second Imperium armada has entered Wyrashat space on the Outer Quadrant. The Supremacy Himself sent a personal note along; in it he expressed ‘the utmost confidence in the Joint Star Fleet.’ We are on our own, in other words.”

  Better to tell everyone the truth than to let their imaginations conjure something even worse for morale. The facts were bad enough: the Wyrashat Empire had just abandoned the combined forces guarding Drakul System against the imminent Imperium invasion. She paused for a moment, letting her officers absorb the implications.

  “What are our orders, King-Admiral?”

  “We hold here, of course. The final words of the His Supremacy were ‘They shall not pass.’”

  It is a brave thing, to make such grand pronouncements while knowing your life’s blood will not be spilled in upholding them.

  Such thoughts could not be voiced out loud, of course. The ruler of the Wyrashat Empire might have left them to their own devices, but he was owed a modicum of respect. From the tense and angry body language displayed by the bridge crew, she didn’t need to say anything.

  “We still hold the advantages of our position,” she went on. “The Wyrashat are masters of defensive warfare, and Drakul-Six is heavily fortified. Their great asteroid-fortresses are second to none, and Fleetmaster Klem is as good a commander as any non-Hrauwah I’ve met. We will give a good accounting of ourselves and teach the Galactic Imperium a harsh lesson.”

  None of what she said was a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth, either. Again, except for a few young bushy-tailed junior officers, her Fleet Court knew it. Much like the shifts in pressure that preceded one of the great tornadoes on the plains of her homeworld, there was a sense of inevitable disaster in the air, fast approaching and impossible to deny.

  “We fight beside humans and their warp fighter craft,” Lord of Tactics Relentless Determination said, supporting his monarch-commander. “We have all seen the reports of the damage they inflicted on the Vipers, shattering dreadnoughts in a single pass. Their presence is likely to make moot all other tactical considerations.”

  A rumble of subvocalized thoughts followed the statement. As King-Admiral, Grace was entitled to listen to them, to better know the minds and hearts of her subjects. As part of the Royal Compact, no private messages short of plans of outright mutiny would be allowed to affect a crewmember’s career. The warriors and technicians who had agreed to fight and die many warp transits away from home were of three minds about the Human Expeditionary Force. A slight majority were friendly towards the hairless aliens, of course. They would not have volunteered to join the Flotilla and fly under the American flag otherwise. The rest were here out of ambition – combat offered assured advancement to the competent – or simple sense of duty. Their ranks were evenly divided between those who resented humans for dragging the Kingdom into a likely losing war, and a growing number who had become afraid of them. The warp fighters Lord Relentless had spoken of were indeed wonderful weapons, but they also awakened ancient fears that predated the Hrauwah’s expansion into the stars.

  It was I who brought Earth into the Starfarers’ fold. All that has transpired since is marked with my scent.

  A much younger Grace-Under-Pressure had sat on a much smaller throne, aboard the cruiser Wisdom of War, on the day humanity had made contact with the greater universe beyond its shallow gravity well. Her actions had led to the deaths of billions of humans and the salvation of the rest. And over the course of a century and a half, the benighted natives of Sol System had become a force to reckon with – and a source of dread.

  If humans and Hrauwah hadn’t found it so easy to get along, things would have turned out differently, of course. Although most Starfarers would d
eny it, most relationships between species were based on little more than how pleasant they found each other’s company. It so happened that humans reminded Hrauwah of their beloved tree-brothers, thin-haired near-sapient primates who had shared the great forests with them and become beloved pets and fellow hunters and scavengers. In a rare equivalency, humans found the Hrauwah very similar to the canid species they had brought into their social order back when they’d hunted prey with stone-tipped spears. Their nicknames for each other reflected this: the Hrauwah were commonly known as ‘Puppies,’ and humans were in turn dubbed ‘Tree Cousins.’

  We liked humans from the beginning. And we liked Americans best of all the survivors. If we hadn’t found that footage of wolves being hunted from helicopters in Russia, would we have befriended them instead? Probably not. Nowhere else was the level of devotion to canids greater than in America.

  From that mutual liking, much had followed.

  In the normal course of events, the Hrauwah, being the older and more powerful species, would have taken the fledging apes into their pack as junior members, to be taught the ways of Starfarers and, after centuries of apprenticeship and service, released to thrive or flounder on their own. Circumstances had prevented that, however. At the time they made contact, the Hrauwah were fighting a war against the Risshah. Commonly known as the Snakes, the repulsive aliens comprised a minor but well-armed civilization, thanks to their Lamprey patrons. It had been the Snakes who, thinking Earth was a Hrauwah ally, had unleashed untold devastation on the planet’s innocent inhabitants.

  Having discovered Sol System by accident, the Hrauwah couldn’t hold it while the Risshah threatened their lines of communication. The Kingdom’s help had been limited to some technical advice and a few trinkets: some light weapons, a handful of power plants and fabbers, along with instructions on how to make more, and a basic defense system to prevent America’s rivals from using their atomic weapons to finish what the Snakes had started. A dozen volunteers had stayed behind to teach humans what they could. After that, Grace’s ship had left, and no further contact had been had for a decade.

  When a Hrauwah ship revisited Sol System a decade later, it was greeted by crude spacecraft bearing the American flag, and a nation determined to make its own way in the universe. There had been some tension but even after the war with the Snakes was over, the Kingdom didn’t have the resources needed to establish full suzerainty over Sol System. The fact that the human home system was in a disputed territory made laying a claim on it impossible. There was more technical assistance, but little more.

  Two decades later, humanity fought and won its first war against the Snakes, using mostly warships of their own design, and relying on their uncanny ability to endure exposure to warp space. The Tree Cousins were nobody’s pets, and the two species’ liking and mutual respect had become tinged with more than a little apprehension. Humanity’s rapid advancement into independent status was as worrisome as its seemingly unnatural resistance to the Chaotic Void ships must endure to traverse the vast distances between stars.

  Demons. Witches.

  Starfarers shared a mythology developed over millions of years, passed down in fragments of incomplete information. Much was lost when civilizations either fell into Oblivion or Transcended into Elder status, abandoning their worlds and departing towards the center of the galaxy. That mythology spoke of cursed cultures that dealt with forbidden technologies. Humanity’s ability to resist the madness of warp transit had no equivalent in recent galactic history – the thirty thousand years or so that was all that even the largest databases could hold in any detail. Outside history, however, there were plenty of cautionary tales about older species who had turned into monsters in deed and appearance, and whose sins had precipitated periods of darkness and strife.

  The Hrauwah liked humans, but they tempered their feelings with caution. There was never a formal alliance between the Kingdom and America or any other Earth polity. Trade aplenty and a great deal of technical support, yes, but never a formal agreement to fight for each other. Even now, when humanity’s destruction might result in the Hrauwah’s own, the High King would not commit to that degree. There were almost a hundred Royal Warships fighting alongside Americans on several war theaters, but they were all volunteer formations like Grace’s own flotilla.

  Only fitting I should lead one such group, Grace thought. Her choice to prevent humanity’s extinction had led to this.

  Strange how a decision made so quickly could impact so many lives over the ensuing decades.

  * * *

  “In conclusion, we are at DEFCON-One, people. Enemy emergence is categorized as imminent. All birds are loaded and ready to go.”

  Captain Fernando ‘Hulk’ Verdi, USWMC, shrugged at the news. Everyone in the briefing room knew what was going to happen. The Joint Star Fleet had been given its final orders: stand or die. Which pretty much meant ‘stand and die,’ unless the fighters of CSG-11 could pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat. It appeared that their Wyrm allies were counting on them doing just that.

  Sometimes getting a rep for kicking ass and taking names means they’ll give you more asses to kick than you can handle.

  “What do you think, Hulk?” asked Richard ‘Dicky’ Morales, Fernando’s wingman. They weren’t moving their mouths, or even subvocalizing the way people did when using ordinary comm implants. Their conversation was happening entirely inside their heads, unbeknownst to the colonel giving the briefing or anybody except other warp pilots. One of the many benefits of being the few, the proud and batshit crazy Marine aviators. Nobody had expected fighter pilots to become telepaths, but that was exactly what happened.

  “I think we’re going to have to try the thing, Dicky,” he said. They both knew what ‘the thing’ was, but had developed a superstitious urge not to refer to it directly.

  “That bad, eh?”

  “You saw the scout reports. Almost five hundred distinct contacts. Too far to make out the actual classes, but the energy signatures showed hundreds of heavy-weights. Looks like they’re bringing in more battleships than we’ve got ships, brah.”

  “Yeah. And nobody’s talking about running.”

  “Nowhere better to fight them, not for three warp transits, and that means leaving like three billion Wyrm asses hanging in the wind. If they were Americans, would you run?”

  “Shit, no. You’d think we’d have gotten more reinforcements, though.”

  “The Gimps just opened a second front. The Wyrashat Empire may be bigger than the US, but they only got so many ships, and they can’t be everywhere at once. If we can’t help them hold this system, they might quit on us. They can make a deal with the Galactic Alliance. We can’t.”

  “Can’t trust nobody,” Dicky groused.

  “In the end, you look out for your own. And we’ve got a bunch of Puppies fighting alongside us, even though they don’t have to.”

  “They owe us, man. Do you know their flotilla commander...?”

  “… is the one that led the Snakes to Earth?” Fernando finished for him. “Yeah. Everyone knows. She was also along for the ride when we burned down the Snake core worlds. She’s been lobbying for a full alliance all this time. Don’t be talking shit about the Bitch Queen.”

  Dicky replied with the telepathic version of a shrug. The two pilots didn’t usually discuss politics, which was just as well. Dicky was a Humanist, a faction that considered aliens to be a necessary evil at best and pure evil at worst. A lot of Marines were part of the movement, which made some sense given that their primary job was to make war on assorted ETs. The Navy was supposed to be a little more nuanced. Fernando, who’d been a jarhead throughout his career, sometimes wished the Corps could be more like the senior service.

  “Yeah, easy for you to think,” Dicky said, picking on Fernando’s thoughts. Hard to keep things to yourself when engaged in a psychic chat; his opinion had leaked through. “All due respect, Hulk, but you used to be a pogue shuttle pilot. You ain’t
been in the dirt dodging plasma.”

  “Fuck you very much,” Fernando said, but without much heat. His wingman had a point. Even a so-called ‘assault shuttle’ rarely performed hot landings. Shuttles mostly waited until orbital bombardment and Marine warp-dropped attacks had secured a landing zone, and then ferried troops and equipment to the surface. Hard to do anything else in the face of energy weapons that traveled at the speed of light and had a range measured in light-seconds. The only combat ops Fernando had performed in his former MOS had been against primitives who couldn’t threaten a civilian lander, let alone an armed and armored one.

  “You still think any aliens are our friends, Hulk? After all this shit?”

  “People are people. And if it wasn’t for the Wyrms and the Puppies, we’d have gotten swarmed under before we even came up with warp fighters.”

  “Sure. Let’s hope they don’t change their minds while we still need them.”

  “Let’s,” Fernando agreed, putting an end to it. Not a good time for breaking their rule about talking politics.

  He knew why they’d done it, though: so they wouldn’t talk about ‘the thing.’ The new trick warp fighter pilots had come up with shortly before this deployment. When it worked, it worked great, but it came with a price. If the US had enough time to develop the new tech – or new magic, the way some of their scientists spoke about it – they would be able to beat anybody.

  “Battle stations. All hands report to battle stations. This is not a drill.”

  The Gimps had arrived. On Drakul System, time had run out.