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

  Lisbeth had spent the last few months on the beach, stranded on Earth while waiting for new orders. Nobody seemed to know what to do with her, or want to spend much thought on the matter. Even with the massive mobilization going on, there were more available officers than hulls, so she’d probably be stuck on some non-combat assignment when they finally decided to make her earn her munificent pay. It would be decades, if ever, before she went into the dark, and then it’d be somewhere in Logistics, probably as the XO of a supply scow, not anywhere near a combat vessel. If she spent a century doing her best, maybe that would change, or maybe not. A service ruled by near-immortals had a long memory, both institutional and personal.

  “Your record shows a great deal of potential, however,” the jarhead officer went on. “Among other things, you are a superb small-craft pilot. Aced all your shuttle qualifiers as a cadet, and your handling of that escape pod when it came apart over Jasper-Five was impressive.”

  “Thank you, sir,” she said, suppressing a snort. Yeah, she could handle a shuttle. Which had as much to do with commanding a warship as her skills in hand to hand combat, or in basket weaving for that matter. She already regretted agreeing to this interview, but she’d been advised not to miss it by her few remaining friends in the service. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  “And you have a Warp Rating of 3,” the major added. “The Corps is prepared to offer you a position in a new program. A black program, which limits what I can tell you about it, among other things because I don’t need to know very much about it. You won’t be briefed any further until after you accept the offer. Until you are at your new post, to be exact. You would transfer to the Corps, and the move would entail a loss in grade, but I’m told that you will pick up rank rather rapidly. The assignment will involve a remote deployment, mostly out of contact, for an undetermined length of time.”

  Lisbeth’s eyes widened as the Marine officer spoke. The questions and the statement about her warp rating pointed towards something that had long been rejected as impossible. Could it be...? It was the only thing that fit. She fought to keep her face impassive as the leatherneck finished his spiel.

  “Where do I sign up?” she said as soon as he was done.

  Groom Base, Star System 3490, 164 AFC

  USWMC Captain Lisbeth Zhang watched the screens as the transport ship made its final approach and waited to see if her guess had been more than a wild-eyed fantasy.

  Fantasy or not, there she was, at the ass end of the galaxy, some gigabytes’ worth of paperwork later, wearing her brand-new Marine uniform. She’d made Captain at last, although a Marine Captain was a mere O-3, three ranks below a Navy Captain and one rank below her previous pay grade. It sucked, but at least she had a career path of sorts ahead of her. The jarheads would value her ground combat experience a lot more than the Navy, that was for sure. And if she was right about this black project, she might be going into space combat a lot sooner than she’d ever hoped to.

  The transport ship’s viewing room was crowded; most of the passengers were volunteers who knew very little about their mission and who’d rushed to take a gander at their destination as soon as the ship emerged from warp. Lisbeth traded glances with her fellow recruits; her imp revealed the public details of their records, popping up in her field of vision when she focused on any of them. They were all officers. The Marines were mostly 75s – their Military Occupation Specialties were focused on shuttle piloting. There was also a smattering of former Navy personnel, all recent transfers to the Corps, all with high scores in small craft handling. Lisbeth was the only one who had commanded a warship, which made her feel all kinds of special. Not.

  Everyone, Navy or gyrene, had a high warp rating. You needed a WR-2 to serve on the bridge of a starship or be launched from a warp catapult with a reasonable expectation you’d come out the other side. The indispensable and rather strange warp navigators, the men and women who actually willed a ship to come out the other end of a warp point, were rated at 3 or higher. A large percentage of WR-2s ended up in the Corps just so the jarheads could send them to their near-certain deaths, something she found incredibly wasteful. Okay, maybe it wasn’t a near-certain death, but it wasn’t exactly safe.

  All the volunteers in the transport ship had the silver or gold spiral symbol on their profiles that denoted a WR-3 or -4. Even considering that over fifty percent of humanity was warp-rated, about five times the ratio of the next most FTL-adept species in the known galaxy, this group was pretty unusual.

  Everyone in the transport had pointedly kept their thoughts about the project to themselves, but most of them must suspect the exact same thing she did. Just cross-checking their public records was enough. All her life, she’d grown up reading, watching movies and playing games involving a fighting platform that Starfarers didn’t use, that everyone said just couldn’t be effectively deployed in combat. But humans had been breaking all kinds of rules since First Contact. What was one more?

  Star System 3490 didn’t even rate a name and didn’t look all that impressive on the data and viewing screens. It was a red dwarf, and a warp dead end, connected to a minor American colony by a single ley line. The closest thing to an inhabitable world in the system was a Mars-like planet with an unbreathably-thin atmosphere and average temperatures in the twenty-degree Fahrenheit range; its only saving graces were its near-Earth gravity and its Class Two microbiology, which had released some oxygen into the air, even if not in enough concentration to support humans.

  Someone had been spending a lot of time and energy on the planet: there was a ground installation large enough to fit in a good ten, twenty-thousand people, and an orbital starship yard busily at work on a number of vessels Lisbeth quickly identified as assault ships, the troop carriers that could conduct shuttle and warp-catapult deployments and which, while officially Navy property, were largely manned by the Corps. Just the sort of ships the senior service might consider expendable enough to lend to this black project.

  “Holy shit,” one of her fellow Marines said, glancing at another part of the viewing screen.

  Lisbeth had seen plenty of warp emergences before, even at this close range, mere kilometers away. The sight was no longer awe-inspiring, although it was never something you ever got fully used to. People described it as a shimmering glow followed by a display of colors not unlike the aurora borealis on Earth. The glowing colors had a depth to them, though; they inspired the feeling of peering into a vast chasm with no bottom in sight. Everyone felt a brief thrill of vertigo when looking into a warp breach; a few of the spectators in the viewing room wobbled on their feet.

  Twelve tears in the fabric of space-time appeared at the same time, clustered closely together. Twelve tiny ships emerged from them. Her imp provided her with a size estimate: about the same length of a standard combat shuttle, but with a narrower profile. They weren’t pretty. Lisbeth magnified the image, focusing on one of the vessels, and saw what looked like a capital ship’s energy cannon with several graviton thrusters, warp generators and other systems welded all around it. Shimmering warp shields in the front and rear made it hard to pick up details. But the fact that it had warp shields was impressive enough. Nothing that size should be able to mount warp generators.

  The squadron kept station with the transport ship for several seconds. Nobody spoke until they dropped back into warp and disappeared from sight.

  “Warp fighters,” another Marine officer said, wonder in her voice. “They fucking did it. Warp fighters!”

  The common room erupted in cheers.

  Lisbeth cheered along. She’d guessed right, and her life was never going to be the same.

  * * *

  The first briefing was thrilling and sobering at the same time.

  “You’re probably wondering why I’ve gathered you here,” the brigadier general giving the toy-and-pony show said, drawing a few chuckles from the crowd. There were over two hundred of them in the auditorium, about one-third of them female, which made sense
, since shuttlecraft pilot was one of the few combat career paths more or less open to women. The physical requirements weren’t quite as harsh, and few females wanted to undergo the costly and painful muscle-and-bone treatments needed to lug a hundred pounds on your back for extended periods of time.

  This particular Canine and Equestrian Theater presentation was unusually simple, without the holotank on the podium that meant a PowerGram™ presentation was at hand. In fact, it looked as if the general was going to speak without using any multimedia add-ons, which was somewhat unusual.

  “My name is Dennis Singh, and I’m in charge of the Lexington Project. A long time ago, I used to be in the Air Force. Made it to bird colonel a few weeks before First Contact. After a century and a half, it turns out my old skill set has become useful again.

  “You’ve seen them. Yes, they are warp-capable attack ships. And yes, we want you to fly them.”

  There was the beginning of a cheerful roar, but the general quickly put a stop to it.

  “This is going to be no picnic, ladies and gentlemen. We are fielding a genuinely new weapon platform, the first since we developed warp shields and catapults, before most of you were born. As all of you know, Starfarer technology has been stable for thousands of years: ship designs that came out when we hairless monkeys were hunting mammoth with spears are still in service, with only a few tweaks here and there. Through Providence or random chance or what have you, humans have certain unique capabilities that have allowed us to develop new technological applications that no one else even considered, simply because no other known species can make use of them. Count your blessings: it is the only reason we’re still here.”

  The enthusiasm of the crowd dimmed somewhat. Everyone knew that humanity’s continued survival was as close to a miracle as you could get: without their species’ tolerance to warp space, Earth would have been depopulated by the Lampreys when they came back to finish the job they’d started during First Contact. And that miracle hadn’t been cheap, either. No matter what one’s warp rating was, nobody enjoyed the experience of leaving standard four-dimensional reality and plunging into a place that nobody really knew much about, other than that it provided the only way to break the laws of relativity and move from one point to another faster than the speed of light. There were a myriad side effects: temporal distortions, hallucinations and extreme psychological stress were just the most common. And they got worse the more frequently you jumped, especially without adequate time to recover between transitions. Humans handled those side effects better than everyone else, but they still paid a price for the privilege of traversing astronomical distances in the blink of an eye.

  A civilian starship’s crew could expect to perform two or three warp jumps a week during routine operations. Military maneuvers required multiple transits, often separated by minutes instead of hours, with vastly increased risks. Even human crews took casualties after more than four or five jumps in a day.

  They’d seen the warp fighter demonstration outside. The tiny ships had done two warp jumps in a matter of seconds. The implications of that feat began to sink in.

  “Why are humans different from the rest of the inhabitants of the galaxy?” General Singh asked rhetorically. “To begin to address that question, I must go on a brief foray into Galactic history. We are not the first to have this distinction, just the only ones in recent history. As Fermi’s Paradox suggests, many thousands of technologically-advanced species have risen in the billions of years since the formation of the Milky Way Galaxy. And as anyone who took Gal-Hist 101 knows, Starfaring species generally spend one to ten thousand years playing with starships and colonizing planets, after which they either Transcend or die out. What happens when you Transcend is unknown; the species or civilization in question simply goes somewhere else, leaving only well-policed ruins behind. Over millions of years, most of their records have been lost as well.

  “From the fragments that remain, however, there are stories about ‘warp-wizards,’ species that could use warp-space in ways most others cannot. They tend to spread rapidly and dominate much of the galaxy before moving on or being destroyed. Which helps explain why so many Starfarers have a hair up their butts when it comes to us.

  “Our ability to resist warp transit appears to be both biological and cultural. At some point in our evolution, humanity developed a mutation that enables our minds to cope with warp space. Our studies show that this mutation is directly related to the human brain’s ability to enter a trance state. As it turns out, most sophonts are not capable of going into trances or similar altered states of consciousness, unless they are well and truly insane, as in nonfunctional, chewing on the walls insane. Which I suppose means you don’t have to be crazy to travel into warp space, but it surely helps.”

  Some chuckling followed the comment, but it had a nervous edge.

  “The cultural aspect is related to that biological trait. Humans have an over-developed ability to believe in things that cannot be proven to exist. Most of our cultures are more religious than just about every other Starfarer civilization, for example. Call it faith or delusion; we’ve got more of it than the rest. And it seems to help us endure exposure to warp space. We’ve been working to enhance that ability through chemical and psychological means. Our goal was to enable humans to endure multiple transits over a short time span.”

  That sounded dangerously close to brainwashing, Lisbeth thought. People took all kinds of stuff to make warp transitions easier, from common sedatives to mixtures of uppers and downers, some of them highly illegal. She wondered what kind of witches’ brew was in store for the pilot candidates.

  “The Lexington Project – named after the first US aircraft carrier, by the way – got started at the same time as the initiatives that gave us our spiffy warp shields and Marine assault catapults. Unlike those developments, it took us a long time to get any traction. The Navy gave up on the program, and the Corps picked up the ball, although with a tithe of the original budget. The initial hurdles were in engineering: miniaturizing warp generators so they would fit inside a small fighting platform took some work. Same with graviton thrusters powerful enough to let fighters keep up with capital ships. But most of those problems were solved a good fifty years ago. The hardware wasn’t the main problem; the software, the human element, was. To be effective, a warp fighter pilot must be able to endure multiple jumps over a short period of time. Dozens of jumps an hour, to be exact.”

  Here we go, Lisbeth thought. She liked to listen to Warmetal music, especially the original German stuff, as her way to cope with warp transitions, but there weren’t enough metal tunes in the universe for the kind of stuff the jarhead general was talking about.

  Once you were inside warp space and the initial shock didn’t cripple you mentally or physically, you could endure as long as thirty hours of exposure with only a slightly-increased chances of suffering adverse side effects. But each transition performed without at least a few hours to recover added cumulative strains on the crew and passengers. More than two of them within an hour was highly unadvisable.

  If you jumped too many times in too short a time, very bad things happened. The story of the cruiser Merrimack was the most-quoted case. A series of unfortunate events, involving pirates, a multi-system chase, and an ambush, forced the ship to conduct six warp jumps spread over a mere seventy minutes. On the seventh jump, only about thirty percent of the cruiser emerged on the other side – and a single crewmember, the navigator, who died shortly thereafter, stark raving mad the whole time. The rest, all thirty-two hundred of them, were listed as missing, presumed dead.

  Death was the best fate you could hope for the missing crew. For all anyone knew, the Merrimacks were still trapped somewhere in warp space.

  And that’s what you’ve signed up for.

  “We’ve learned a lot,” General Singh went on. “It wasn’t easy, or cheap. But we have made several breakthroughs and are finally moving from R&D to full implementation. We are putting
the finishing touches on what will become the first space-capable Carrier Strike Group. You will be the last candidate class before we go on our first shakedown cruise. The project is being fast-tracked; I think you all can figure out why.”

  They all did. Anybody who could do math knew just how bad the odds against the USA were. The question was whether fast-tracking the Lexington Project would produce anything of use in time to change the outcome of the war.

  Problem was, she was unlikely to find out the answer until it was too late to change her mind. Not that it mattered. As far as she was concerned, she’d been living on borrowed time ever since her XO sacrificed himself to save her life aboard the USS Wildcat. Death didn’t scare her all that much.

  Failure did.

  * * *

  Lisbeth had to use every ounce of willpower left in her to make sure her legs didn’t wobble on her way out of the flight simulator room.

  One big reason regular fighters had no place in space combat was simple: graviton engines had a relatively fixed performance, and they didn’t scale down very well. A small ship couldn’t go much faster than a big one, and shuttle-sized craft were actually much slower than a full-sized starship. The reactionless grav thrusters that propelled virtually all manned spacecraft had an effective top speed of one thousandth the speed of light. You could move that maximum up by a few tenths of a percent, but that was it. Alternative methods using reaction mass were just impractical for manned vessels. Missiles could reach ten times that speed through the use of magnetic or gravitonic catapults that imparted tremendous initial velocity, along with standard reaction rockets that accelerated them further and gravity or impeller thrusters for steering. Try that with a fighter and you’d be scraping its pilot out of the cockpit, not to mention that a return trip would be somewhat difficult, given that its reaction mass would be exhausted covering any normal engagement distance.