Extinction Fleet 1: Space Marine Ajax Read online

  SPACE MARINE AJAX

  Extinction Fleet

  Book 1

  By Sean-Michael Argo

  Copyright 2017 Sean-Michael Argo

  Edited by T.L. Bland

  Thruterryseyes.com

  Contents

  Title Page

  FAREWELL PROUD MEN

  TRENCH 16

  BLACKOUTS

  THE CHOSEN SLAIN

  THE BODY FORGE

  HEOROT THE CURSED

  WAR WITHOUT END

  ENEMY WITHIN

  DISTRICT 9

  GRENDEL

  NO EASY DAY

  INTO THE NIGHT

  FACE TOWARDS ENEMY

  DEATH SHIP

  WOLVES AT THE GATE

  ONLY IN DEATH

  NO HERO YET

  sample of The Lost Empire

  FAREWELL PROUD MEN

  “Each day in Valhalla they don their war-gear and go down to battle; then do rise again whole in the night to drink mead and eat their fill of meat. Of these einherjar there are many, and yet there will seem too few when the wolf comes.” – Prose Edda of Snorri Sturlson circa 1220.

  The Garm, as they came to be called, emerged from the deepest parts of uncharted space, devouring all that lay before them, a great swarm that scoured entire star systems of all organic life. This space borne hive, this extinction fleet, made no attempts to communicate and offered no mercy. Such was the ferocity of their assault upon the civilization of humanity that our own wars and schemes were made petty in comparison.

  Humanity has always been a deadly organism, and we would not so easily be made the prey. Unified against a common enemy, we fought back, meeting the swarm with soldiers upon every front.

  We were resplendent in our fury, and yet, despite the terrible slaughter we visited upon the enemy, world after world still fell beneath ravenous tooth and wicked claw. For every beast slain in the field, another was swiftly hatched to take its place and humanity was faced with a grim war of attrition.

  After a decade of bitter galactic conflict, it was all humanity could to do slow the advance of the swarm and with each passing year we came closer to extinction.

  The grinding cost of war mounted. The realization set in that without a radical shift in tactics and technology the forces of humanity would run out of soldiers before it ran out of bullets.

  In desperate response to the real threat of total annihilation, humanity created the Einherjar. Fearless new warriors with frightening new weapons who were sent to fight the wolves at the gate.

  TRENCH 16

  The recon scouts had not returned and the defenders were instead met with an enemy force.

  “Spores incoming!” bellowed the Watchman from his elevated vantage point on the hill just behind the earthen network of trenches. “Swarm advancing!”

  Ajax cranked the knob of his respirator to maximum filtration the moment he heard the call, the training of countless artillery drills and endless hours of combat had made the action second nature to him. He then ejected the carbon magazine from his pulse rifle and tapped it against his helmet, settling the inert ammunition firmly in the casing, though functionally, it was more of a pre-battle ritual than a necessary action.

  The marine thumbed the activator on the rifle and the weapon snarled to life in his hands, the unique sound of it echoing through the trench as dozens of other marines engaged in similar rituals.

  After so many years of war, each soldier on the field had developed their own little ways of preparing for impending combat, each of their individual practices ending in the activation of their rifles.

  The combined sound of so many weapons coming online was thrilling. Every soldier in Trench 16 felt the adrenaline pounding through their systems as they heard it. It was the sound of strength, of the power to take life, a burning fire in their hands to keep away the darkness that surged towards them.

  With it ringing in his ears, Ajax found that he was not afraid. The marines were strong in their numbers, their weapons deadly in effect, and they held the high ground. In the back of his mind he knew that the horrific beasts that the marines had taken to calling ridgebacks were out there in the night, along with many other terrors, all of which wanted nothing more than to kill and consume every scrap of organic material on this pitiful forgotten planet. Ajax flexed his armored fingers around the grip of the rifle and took a slow, deep breath, knowing it would be the last easy one he’d have for a long while.

  The other marines of Hydra Company that defended Trench 16 were taking up their fighting positions throughout the network. Most of them were rifles, like Ajax, though of the two hundred and fifty soldiers in the unit, there were several grenadiers as well.

  One of the grenadiers, a man named Boone, stood next to Ajax on the right, his back against the reinforced dirt wall, tapping his fingers against the revolving cylinder of his ordinance launcher.

  Rama, another rifle, climbed up from the bottom of the trench to join the other marines on the firing step near the top of the position.

  “The Watchman has a keen eye tonight, usually we don’t have this much warning before impact,” observed Rama as he planted his feet and held his rifle to his shoulder, setting the wide-barrel on the shooting rest at the top of the trench so that he could crank the knob of his helmet’s filter. “We might get out of this brawl without any ragmen coming back to haunt us.”

  “Your optimism is astounding, Rama,” snorted Boone. “There are always ragmen, but the warning did go up well in advance of impact, maybe there’ll just be a few this time.”

  “Maybe the ridgebacks ate something that didn’t agree with them,” Ajax added with a hollow laugh. “Could be that the Watchman saw a muzzle flash.”

  The marines shared a brief laugh, but were soon interrupted by the familiar whistling sound of incoming spores.

  “Brace!” shouted the voices of several marines across the watch channel, and a moment later the first of the spores reached the trench.

  There were LED stakes embedded in the ground and on the reinforced walls of the trench, giving enough ambient light for the marines to occupy their position without spotlighting any targets for the enemy that lurked in the darkness at the edges of the perimeter.

  In the low light of the stakes, Ajax could see the semi-solid spore streak down from the sky and strike the trench wall opposite the marine.

  The Garm ordinance was more like a hardened sack that was ejected with tremendous force from a barrel-like orifice that jutted up from the spine of the ridgebacks. When the sack struck the wall, it burst apart, spewing its contents in all directions.

  The spores reminded Ajax of the heavy mists he had experienced in his youth, in some far away country on distant Earth. The spore cloud filled the trench but the marines had enough warning to crank their filters so the spores could only cling to the armor of the marines in hopes of a breach.

  More landed around them and Ajax took note of how heavily the enemy bombarded them. It was as if the enemy knew that the marines had prepared for the onslaught and were attempting to make up for that fact by doubling the sheer volume of artillery fire.

  The thought of artillery made Ajax cast his gaze across the hill behind the trench. The Watch Tower was a menacing gun battery that rested inside an armored bunker that had been half-buried in the loamy soil. Rising from just behind the quad-barreled artillery piece was the observation post, an elevated capsule that allowed the Watchman to see the full field, even if he was doing so at some risk, given his exposure.

  In the low light, it was difficult to make out exactly what was happening at the Tower, but Ajax could tell that the bulk of the spores were smashing into the
ground behind the trench.

  “Seems like they’re more worried about the battery than us,” pointed out Ajax as Rama and Boone followed his gaze. “Could be that a shrieker swarm is on the way.”

  “If that’s true, then the Garm would have had to learn the difference between anti-armor and anti-air weapons, not to mention have a forward observer in position to make the distinction,” growled Boone before turning back to face the other direction.

  “Not even they have a way of piercing this gloom. Why humanity settled any of the brackenworlds in this sector I’ll never understand.”

  Ajax was inclined to agree with Boone, and as more spores pounded the trench and the battery, he strained his eyes in vain to see through the palpable darkness ahead of him.

  Brackenworlds were second-rate planets that only warranted partial terra-forming and most of them had similar atmospheric conditions to what the marines were even now experiencing. Marginal light from a distant star that was mostly dissipated by the particle clogged atmosphere, unforgiving landscapes, and only sparse pockets of organic life that rose from the brackish and often fetid water that gave such planets their name.

  The modest outpost city of Heorot was the only real sign of civilization on the planet that shared its name, home to only forty thousand souls. They farmed energy, using large windmills to take advantage of the fetid winds the constantly scoured the planet’s surface.

  It was a testament, really, thought Ajax, that humanity could find something of use even on this backwater world. The planet had little tactical significance, being on the edge of charted space and well removed from the bulk of the besieged human star systems.

  A single hive ship had broken off from the main thrust of the extinction fleet and come to terrorize Heorot. The modest city was still a human settlement, carved out of the wilderness by courageous pioneers, so it was worth defending.

  A single warship, the Bright Lance, had been sent by Command to counter the enemy, bearing in its hold a legion of Einherjar. A brief star fight had delayed the hive ship’s arrival, giving the Einherjar a chance to make planetfall first and prepare their defenses.

  There were now twenty gun batteries that defended the city, each with their own trench networks, meaning that just over five thousand marines had put themselves in the path of the enemy.

  The Watch Tower, positioned at a vantage point over the whole of the battlefield, was meant to harass any enemy flier formations that attempted to flank the main Einherjar forces that defended the city.

  Hydra Company was in place to protect the Tower from any ground swarms that might appear, though Command expected most of the enemy to take the bait and march right into the teeth of Armor One.

  The long war against the Garm had left the forces of humanity with limited battle tanks in operation. There were only a few dozen mechanized war machines that comprised the fighting unit.

  Ajax hoped they would be enough to combat the ultra-Garm, horrific creatures that served as the battle tank equivalent for the swarm.

  The Garm were known, as a fighting force, to attack the strongest point of any defensive position. It was behavior quite unlike the average predator organisms known to humanity, which tended to attack the sick, weak, old, and alone first. However, as the war with the swarm ground onwards, the forces of humanity began to understand the Garm strategy, and it was a troubling discovery indeed.

  It was a psychological ploy, one meant to rob the morale of humanity’s warriors by destroying their best forces at the outset of any battle. In many ways, by killing the strongest prey first, these nightmare predators made it all the easier to mop up the rest of their prey, who were often at a loss tactically without their leader and demoralized by the destruction of their mightiest champions.

  The flash of plasma discharges shone from in and around the battery, and Ajax felt his heart skip a beat, as he realized that it could only mean one thing. At least some of the spores had hit their mark, and even now ragmen were causing havoc for the battery crews. He hoped that his comrades could fend them off, else the guns would be deafeningly silent when the swarm broke against the trench.

  “First wave!” boomed the voice of the Watchman, a welcome sound that indicated that he had not been overcome. “Flares up!”

  Rama pulled a flare tube from his belt and pressed the ignition as he pointed it at the sky. The brilliant round streaked upwards, illuminating much of the area around the marines. Dozens of others joined it as soldiers up and down the line fired their own flares.

  At first, the rounds rose as expected, though instead of reaching their apex and arcing across the battlefield to illuminate the killing ground in front of the trench, many of them were stopped in midair by hundreds of alien bodies.

  Focused artillery fire against an anti-air battery, in advance of an aerial assault, it was simply too complex a maneuver for the Garm, and for a moment Ajax refused to believe what he was seeing.

  The shriekers, like the rest of the myriad lifeforms that comprised the Garm swarms, looked like a cross between the lizards and cockroaches of distant Earth, if each had been the most nightmarish of its kind. They had the bleak countenance and powerfully muscled bodies of reptiles, but were covered in mucus lubricated sections of chitonous exoskeleton. In their clawed hands most of them carried weapons reminiscent of firearms, though each of them was attached to umbilical cords that connected to pulsing glands under their leathery wings.

  There were so many hundreds of them that when the flares struck them, it turned the night sky into a burning tapestry of carnage. Shriekers fell screaming from the sky as holes were burned through their wings. Those slain by the searing hot flares simply plummeting to the ground in silence.

  In the glare of the light, Ajax could see their dull black eyes, each one a seeming abyss of hive intelligence and relentless biological automation. To witness such a primal hunger in so many deadly and nightmarish creatures would surely have sent any other group of soldiers to their knees, yet the marines of Hydra Company stood their ground.

  Many times, each man among them had faced such horror. The days of collapsing and retching in fear were far behind them. Instead, they raised their rifles and began to fire as the swarm descended upon them, each of the Garm weapons spitting death as they dove at the marines.

  Ajax wanting nothing more than to select auto-fire and cut loose with his rifle, spraying plasma projectiles indiscriminately at the horde, yet he knew better than to give into that urge.

  Early in the war with the Garm, most soldiers had done just that, and while it made for a brilliant display of carnage and firepower, the marine would be left with an empty weapon and yet more enemies upon him. It was better to lean on one’s training and maintain fire discipline, selecting individual targets for confirmed elimination, and only then moving to the next opponent.

  The Garm, like the cockroaches of Earth, were notorious for persisting in battle despite being inflicted with grievous wounds. The only Garm you could ignore was a dead Garm. And sometimes not even then.

  The marine used his iron sights to draw a bead on a shrieker and squeezed the trigger. The weapon bucked in his hands and spat a super-heated bolt of plasma at the shrieker.

  The bolt, despite its tremendously high temperature, held just enough of its solid form to impact against the chiton of the beast. The plasma burned its way through the body armor and as it burrowed into the creature’s flesh, it melted into a thick super-heated liquid that rapidly spread throughout the shrieker’s body. The shrieker exploded in midair as all the fluids and gases inside it expanded because of the plasma, raining smoldering pieces of flesh down upon the trench floor.

  Ajax did not pause to revel in his first kill of the day, and instead selected his next target and fired. His aim was true, and another shrieker died in flight.

  The pulse rifles had been designed specifically for combat against the Garm swarms and their deadly efficiency was apparent. Traditional projectile weapons, propelled by ignited pow
der, might have been much more effective at long ranges, but they were a heavy drain on the already strained human military complex. The sheer scale of the conflict against the swarm made it impossible to keep up with production, so a compact and robust plasma-pulse rifle had been created. What it lost in range it made up for in power, not to mention the fact that ammunition could be made from carbon base blocks, so nearly any substance could be forged into ammunition to feed the Einherjar war machine.

  The shriekers reached their firing range and unleashed streaks of viscous fluid from the wicked muzzles of their stubby weapons.

  Ajax shouted as he caught sight of a shrieker firing upon a marine several meters from his position.

  Yao was a rifle and had been rushing along the bottom of the trench, presumably to help another marine who seemed to have been hit by one of the spore globules. Yao was pumping plasma rounds into two wounded shriekers that had landed near his fallen comrade. The shrieker from above missed the first time, and a jet of foul liquid cut a rivulet through the reinforced wall of the trench behind Yao. The rifle took notice and both he and Ajax drilled the shrieker with bolts.

  “On your left!” shouted Rama, and Ajax turned to fire just in time, as several shriekers were swooping down to make a strafing run of the entire parallel.

  “I see them,” came the gravelly voice of Boone as he too swung left. He used his thumb to select the shortest fuse mod on his launcher before lending his fire to the other marines.

  Ajax squeezed the trigger and marveled at the devastating maneuver the shriekers were attempting. While most of the Garm fliers were coming over the trench and diving directly down to attack the marines, a clutch of them had flown in a wide arc that allowed them to strafe the trench lengthwise.

  Ajax saw a marine’s melting corpse falling backwards off a firing step. The man had been slain from behind without even realizing the attack was coming.