No Price Too High (Warp Marine Corps Book 2) Read online

  No Price Too High

  Warp Marine Corps, Book Two

  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/VISIONS

  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

  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

  No Price Too High

  Prologue: A Hasty Defense

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eigtheen

  GLOSSARY

  “Legionnaires, you became soldiers in order to die, and I’m taking you to a place where you can die!”

  - General Francois De Negrier

  “The most noble fate a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war’s desolation.”

  - Robert A. Heinlein

  “Our arrows will blot out the sun!”

  “Then we will fight in the shade.”

  - Exchange of words before the battle of Thermopylae, 480 B.C.E.

  Prologue: A Hasty Defense

  Star System Melendez, Year 163 AFC

  BATTLE STATIONS. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

  Rear Admiral (Upper Half) Horacio Elba was halfway down the corridor leading to the Tactical Flag Command Center before the all-hands alert had fully filtered down to his brain; the keening sound of the General Quarters alarm hammered his eardrums and finished waking him up. He’d been sleeping in his uniform ever since the war began, like every other officer in CRURON 56. They’d been on full alert for two months, and their worst fears had finally come true. The aliens were coming.

  “Warp emergence, forty light-minutes,” the Space Watch Officer announced as Elba walked into the TFCC. The specialist hesitated for a second before delivering the rest of the bad news. “Sir, we’ve evaluated the energy signatures of the opforce. Given the number of hulls detected entering the system, this has to be the entire Lhan Arkh Upper Quadrant Fleet.”

  Despair is a sin.

  The thought did little to comfort Admiral Elba as he glanced at the holotank display, where the sensor data that had taken the better part of an hour to reach his fleet was being assembled into icons representing the enemy ship classes. Three dreadnoughts. Five battleships. Nine battlecruisers. Twenty destroyers and twenty-five frigates. This was a main thrust into human space, and all he had to oppose it was a pitiful fifteen-ship formation.

  His squadron consisted of the City-class battlecruiser USS Charlotte, six antiquated President-class light cruisers, and eight escorts, evenly split between frigates and destroyers. Until a few months ago, this sector, centered around Star System Melendez, had been considered ‘safe;’ his ships were there to prevent piracy and to keep an eye on the Butterflies and Lizards, the two Starfarer nations with warp lines leading into the system. Both polities had been relatively friendly, but good fences – and decent-sized fleets – made for the best neighbors. The Days of Infamy had changed everything. Several human outposts inside Butterfly and Lizard territories had been attacked and destroyed by angry mobs covertly supported by the Lampreys. The fact those massacres had been allowed to happen turned those Starfarer nations into potential hostiles, and CRURON 56 was far too weak to protect the sector in the face of a serious attack from either of them.

  The decision had been made to evacuate Melendez System before one of those notional neutrals switched sides or allowed the Lampreys to move through their territories. They’d hoped there would be enough time to save most of the civilians and merge CRURON 56 with other picket squadrons further down the warp-line.

  The Lampreys’ arrival meant that the aliens had bribed, bullied or otherwise persuaded one of the two neighboring Startfarers to allow a fleet to enter their territory. Admiral Elba’s guess was it’d been the Lizards, who had skirmished with the US a few decades back and were known to hold a grudge. For all he knew, the scaly little bastards might have joined the anti-human coalition.

  The admiral shook his head. None of that mattered at the moment. He had a system to defend.

  There were twelve million people on Melendez-Four, the only inhabitable planet in the system. An additional million spacers who’d lived and worked on the star system’s asteroid belt had been evacuated in the two months since the order was given. Removing the planet’s inhabitants was taking far longer. Spacers knew how to travel light and move fast. Dirtsiders had no clue, most of them, anyway. Elba had spent ninety of his hundred-and-fifteen years inside some artificial vehicle or installation, always knowing that the hard vacuum of space was never further than a few dozen feet from where he slept. He understood how quickly things could go hell far better than those who spent their lives at the bottom of a planet’s gravity well and took basic life support for granted.

  To make matters worse, twenty percent of Melendez-Four’s inhabitants, a little under half of those who had been born on the planet, could not endure warp space. Leaving them behind was a death sentence, but taking them into warp, even under full hibernation, would result in over seventy percent fatalities, and any survivors would become incurably insane. Abandoning two million Americans to the tender mercies of the Lampreys would haunt Elba and everyone in CRURON 56 for the rest of their lives.

  Removing the nine and a half million who could be saved was proving to be difficult enough. Every freighter, passenger vessel, troop transport and logistical support ship in range had been mobilized and had spent two months ferrying refugees out of Melendez System. Their efforts had saved one million refugees from the planet proper in addition to the spacers. More ships were joining the effort, but it would take three more months to evacuate those that could and would flee.

  Time had run out.

  “Warp emergence! Ten light minutes from M-4. Same energy signatures.”

  That would be the enemy’s next to last jump. The final warp emergence would put the Lamprey Fleet some ten to twenty light seconds away from Melendez-Four, which would give the enemy time to recover from warp transit and maneuver towards the target, three to five hours away at normal sub-light cruising speeds.

  “All ships. Prepare for warp transit,” Admiral Elba ordered. His cruiser squadron would emerge in geosynchronous orbit around Melendez-Four. Normally he would have tried to engage the enemy fleet as far out as possible to thin out its numbers, but given the disparity in firepower he decided to operate under the umbrella of the
planet’s defenses.

  Melendez-Four had two orbital fortresses, four Planetary Defense Bases and a local defense fleet comprised of eight monitors, STL ships unable to warp but as heavily armed as a cruiser. Those installations would double CRURON 56’s available firepower. If their combined forces inflicted enough losses on the Lampreys, the aliens might break off the attack and allow the evacuation to continue. The hideous ETs weren’t known for their intestinal fortitude when it came to pitched battles; they preferred to rely on trickery and would attack only when victory was certain. From what he knew about Lamprey capabilities, his chances of achieving a stalemate were maybe one in three. Not exactly gambling odds, but it was the hand he’d been dealt, and he intended to play it as well he could.

  He could order the squadron to run, of course. A simple change in warp coordinates, and his ships would be on their way to the Memphis System, nine warp-hours away. All civilian ships capable of warp transit had already fled, but the eleven million civilians still on the planet would be at the mercy of the Lampreys. The admiral shook his head minutely and let his orders stand.

  Transition.

  Elba found himself surrounded by the dead. Hundreds of solemn figures looked at him, and he found it difficult to meet their steady gazes, in no small part because he recognized every face he saw. They were the crew of the Charlotte and the other ships of CRURON 56. All of whom had been alive and well when the squadron had entered warp space. He was overwhelmed with the certainty those ghosts came from the near future. They were all going to die. And they were going to die at his hands.

  Emergence.

  It took a few seconds to recover. The admiral shook off the disconcerting vision – They’re only hallucinations, he sternly told himself – and oversaw the preparations for the battle to come. The monitor squadron moved closer to support his ships and the cruiser squadron rearranged its formation to provide fire lanes for the STL ships and orbital fortresses. When the Lampreys began their slow and ponderous final approach, they would get a warm reception.

  “Emergence! Half a light second away!”

  “What? Are they insane?”

  Lampreys – like all other Starfarer species – took far longer to recover from warp transit than humans. The enemy fleet had arrived at ideal combat range, and the crews of those ships would be incapacitated for as long as thirty seconds. Automated systems could only do so much – true artificial intelligence was not only frowned upon, but turned out to be even more vulnerable to warp space than biological sophonts. Usually the best a ship could do upon emergence was to fire a volley of missiles in the general direction of a target. And even capital ships didn’t have enough launch tubes to make such a volley count for much.

  These dreadnoughts and battleships were different.

  Even as CRURON 56 and the planetary defenders began to fire on the invaders, Admiral Elba peered closely at the alien ships, now that they were close enough for a full sensor scan. Their outlines bulged with box launchers everywhere; they vomited a massive missile volley upon emergence, each ship unleashing as many salvos as a dozen normal ones. Traveling at 0.01 c, that swarm of ship-killers would reach the squadron in less than a minute.

  “Divert all fire to point defense!” Elba ordered. Every ship and orbital platform stopped targeting the Viper ships and turned their guns against the unexpected onslaught. CRURON 56 could have handled an ordinary volley from an enemy fleet that size, three to four thousand missiles. Point defense emplacements on the Charlotte alone could destroy twenty missiles per second at the current range. The rest of his ships were somewhat less capable, but their combined fire would reduce four thousand ‘vampires’ to a mere handful that couldn’t hope to inflict much damage.

  Fifty thousand missiles were headed towards Melendez-Four and its defenders.

  They did their best. Main and secondary guns shifted their aim and went into rapid-fire mode, risking their tubes and energy modules in a desperate bid for survival. Their laser and graviton charges were grossly overpowered for the job, but their accuracy was just as good as the lighter point-defense weapons. Every missile Elba’s ships and the planetary defenses had at hand were hastily reprogrammed to intercept their counterparts and launched. For fifty seconds, starships, monitors, fortresses and planetary defense bases threw everything they had against the impossibly-massive barrage.

  At T-minus-thirty seconds, nineteen thousand missiles were left. At T-minus-ten, as the swarm began to converge, presenting better targets, only two thousand remained.

  Post-battle calculations estimated some seven hundred and fifty missiles struck CRURON 56 and the orbital defense units.

  Charlotte heaved under multiple impacts. Her warp shields swallowed several missiles, but others – too many others – targeted her unprotected sectors, breaching her ordinary force fields and armored hull. Entire compartments were emptied into space or engulfed in plasma fires; the ship shook like a beast in pain. Elba slammed against the harness securing him to the command chair; the impact knocked the breath out of him. Lights flickered for a moment before stabilizing again. His imp dispassionately ran the fleet’s damage reports as quickly as they were generated.

  All the fortresses and monitors were gone; unprotected by warp shields, they’d been easy prey despite their heavy conventional defenses. Of the light ships, only one badly-damaged frigate remained. A light cruiser had been destroyed outright. The Charlotte and the rest of the survivors were all damaged but functional, for whatever that was worth. The admiral had some cracked ribs; two of the tactical center’s specialists were down, one of them badly injured, but everyone else was fit for duty.

  The Lampreys had plenty of time to recover from warp transit; they began advancing steadily as their beam weapons engaged the survivors of the overwhelming salvo.

  Elba was faced with a simple choice: CRURON 56 could stand and die, inflicting negligible losses on the enemy, or it could flee.

  No.

  A third solution suggested itself.

  “Attention all ships,” he announced. “Cease fire. Divert all offensive power toward force field generation. Prepare for warp transit.” Elba transmitted the coordinates directly to the squadron’s warp navigators; they would be the only ones who would know with certainty what was about to happen. All of them understood the situation, and all of them acknowledged the orders without protest. He allowed himself a moment of pride in them. Twenty seconds went by as the enemy ships fired on the silent squadron. Most of the hits were absorbed by the ships’ warp shields; the rest didn’t inflict enough damage to stop Elba’s plan.

  “It’s been an honor serving with y’all. Engage.”

  CRURON 56 performed the first warp ramming maneuver in known galactic history.

  Five ships entered warp space. The lone frigate tried to follow and died in the attempt, preceding the rest of the squadron’s demise by a brief instant.

  Each vessel appeared in the path of a Lhan Arkh capital ship. With closure speeds in excess of three hundred kilometers per second and total surprise, there was no chance of avoiding a collision. The American cruisers’ warp shields devoured huge chunks of the Lampreys’ vessels as they ran into each other. That didn’t save the attackers, however. The catastrophic explosions unleashed as each Lamprey warship was destroyed flowed over their shields and onto the unprotected sections of the American ships, consuming them in turn. The Lamprey dreadnoughts and one battleship were destroyed outright. Two others were crippled by near misses.

  During his final foray into warp-space, Rear Admiral Elba saw the dead nod at him approvingly.

  Earth, Sol System, 163 AFC

  “The surviving Lhan Arkh’s vessels withdrew without finishing their attack run on Melendez-Four, which still retained its planetary defense bases,” Admiral DuPont said as he concluded the report. “There has been no additional enemy activity in the system since then. Given their losses, coupled with the ones sustained at the Battle of Paulus, the Lampreys have been neutralized for at l
east a year, possibly more. Most of their capital ships in this sector are gone, and their other fleets cannot be reassigned without risking attack from their neighbors. They haven’t been quite reduced to a frigate navy, but it’s close, and it will take them time to rebuild.”

  White House Chief of Staff Tyson Keller had always thought kamikaze tactics were for losers, in every sense of the word. CRURON 56 had made their sacrifice count, though. They had saved some ten million people, and given those left behind extra time to hide and hope the Lampreys didn’t find them right away when they finally came back. Long-term, however, exchanging a cruiser squadron for three dreadnoughts and a battleship was not worth it. The ETs could replace those hulls and even their crews faster than the US could.

  It also means we may or may not be losers, but we sure as hell are losing.

  Even worse, the suicide run was the kind of trick that only worked that well once. The JCs figured that the easiest way to deal with warp-ramming was to keep some thrust power in reserve to perform radical maneuvers the moment a close warp emergence was detected, allowing the target to ‘dodge’ the kamikazes. The end result would be a loss of five to ten percent available power for the enemy, which would lower the chance to ram by over sixty percent, after which the wannabe suicide ship would be a sitting duck with a survival time measured in seconds.

  All things considered, however, Tyson couldn’t condemn the squadron commander’s choice. Elba had sacrificed his command to save millions of civilians. They had lain down their lives between their people and the desolation of war. That’s what it all came down to in the end.

  “Thank you, Admiral. Keep us appraised.”

  President Albert P. Hewer terminated the conference call, leaving him alone with Keller in the new and improved Oval Office, located in the District of Nebraska, a patch of marginal farmland that had become the capital of the United Stars of America.