Space Marine Apocalypse (Extinction Fleet Book 3) Read online

  Once Jorah saw the smears he began to realize that there were a great many of them, all leading in the direction of the mess hall, as indicated by the signage on the wall. Reports started coming back of empty cells and evidence of hard close quarters fighting as marines filled the seemingly empty facility and Jorah's hackles raised.

  "I have no sense of the garm here, the presence is weak and that static yet more potent," growled Jorah as he raised his rifle and started moving along the path left by the smeared blood.

  "Those shooters were not entirely human," said Hart as he slung his sniper rifle and slid his sidearm from its holster while he followed the marine, "Something in the way they moved, the shape of them as they died. It feels familiar despite being so odd."

  "Maybe we have seen this before," mused Jorah, as he signaled for a fire team of four marines to join him and the sniper. "On Tankrid. I cannot say for sure, but I feel that familiarity."

  The fire team moved through the bent metal of the caged doors that lead out of the central chamber and then found themselves in a massive cellblock. The signage insisted that the mess hall was at the other end.

  As the marines moved into the cell block, the doors at the other end burst open, and the shock at what came out of them forced even the hardened marines of Gorgon Company to hesitate.

  Skald Hart suffered no such pause, snapping his pistol up to fire three tightly packed rounds into the chest of this new nightmare confronting them.

  The monster still had pieces of a convict's jumpsuit clinging to its warped flesh and if a human and a ripper drone could be combined in the body of the same creature, this was the marines now looked upon. The skald's rounds punched into the unarmored meat of the beast's chest and in a flash of gore, the thing exploded.

  Jorah blinked as he noticed how the hands of another convict flapped weakly against the outer edge of the scything bio-blades that appeared to have emerged from inside the man's body. It was as if the ripper drone had grown inside the human, and finally, too large for the casing of human flesh to hold it in, had burst through and merged with its host. Sickeningly, the face, while marred by hinged mandibles and jet-black eyes, was still human looking.

  Jorah realized, horrified, that this was now a single creature, not one being taken over by another. That was much worse, and as he squeezed the trigger he found that he was screaming.

  The fire team unleashed a wall of bolts that filled the cell block and turned the swarm of hybrid human/garm abominations into a churning mass of shattered bodies and flailing limbs.

  They were not armored the way ripper drones were, and the super-heated plasma projectiles were devastating. As the marines paused to vent their weapons, more shooting sounded behind them, as the entire complex was suddenly bursting with the hybrid creatures.

  "Arrow on me!" snarled Jorah, his previous hesitation and terror swiftly replaced by a growing fury at the hideous implications of what he was witnessing. "Purge this compound, marines! Nothing lives!"

  The fire team tried not to look too closely at the corpses they stepped over, wanting to spare themselves too much of an intimate view of the abhorrence before them.

  It was a vain tactic.

  When they entered the mess, they discovered what had become of those convicts who, apparently, were not hybrid creatures.

  It was a sickening bit of humor, thought Jorah, that these creatures had turned the mess hall into a charnel house filled with piles of half-eaten flesh. The marines recognized it as evidence of a mass combat feeding, a garm war tactic that was sometimes witnessed during protracted engagements when the garm organisms needed to top up their caloric reserves in between attack waves.

  Sudden gunfire rang out, the sharp crack of carbines and the resultant muzzle flash lighting up the dismal room. The fire team hurled themselves behind the metal serving counter as a group of men rushed them from an access door that led to the staff quarters and security supply chambers.

  The men all appeared to be wearing Odessa security outfits, like the hostile shooters outdoors, and they all carried the carbines that Jorah realized must have been standard issue from Odessa Corp.

  One of the marines didn't make it to the counter, as he was struck in the leg from the first salvo, then peppered with rounds as the enemy spread out into the room.

  Jorah returned fire, blasting one of the men off his feet. Hart worked his pistol fluidly and dropped two more of the enemy before ducking back into cover. More marines came in from the cellblock, and Jorah's fire team caught the hostiles in a crossfire that wiped them out in seconds.

  Jorah came around the counter as 'all clear' reports started coming in from across the compound.

  The hybrids with the bio-blades were apparently just as single-minded and suicidal as the ripper drones they so resembled, but without the speed and body armor that made them so deadly. Marines had died, and though Jorah was saddened to receive casualty reports, not nearly as many perished as would have had these hybrids been rippers.

  The marine walked up to the body of one of the hostile shooters and looked down upon it. The man had taken a round in the throat from Hart, and it appeared to have killed him.

  As Jorah peered closer, noticing the man's eyes were the same jet black as the berserker hybrids, the man’s face split apart at the jaws, garm mandibles bursting forth and he sprang up from the ground. The flesh of his arm parted bloodily and a bio-blade slid out, unfolding in the double-jointed way that the ripper drones would when attacking.

  The beast was fast, taking advantage of Jorah’s momentary shock to sink the bio-blade into the meat of his thigh. Jorah was just as fast though, and his pulse rifle roared, obliterating the beast's skull.

  Jorah fell to the blood-slick floor, wounded, but not fatally so. Hart and another marine helped him up and pumped him with a stimulant while the medic applied an anti-coagulant. Jorah found that he almost did not notice the attention of the other men, he just kept looking at the bodies of the shooters.

  "Men who are not men," said Hart, his voice just above a whisper, and Jorah's blood ran cold.

  THIRD SHIFT

  Gunnar woke suddenly from a rather fitful sleep as the speakers embedded into the ceiling called all men to their battle stations.

  His eyes were sticky as he blinked the sleep from them and he swiftly applied moisture drops with a practiced hand. Gunnar's eyes no longer produced tears, one of the handful of unpredictable side effects the body forge had on shunts like him.

  Shunts, thought Gunnar as the lights in the barracks strobed red and the other twenty men who shared this berth with him roused themselves, was a dirty word. It was a bit of self-depreciating slang that Gunnar and the men like him sometimes used to describe themselves. No space marine would ever say that to Gunnar's face, ever the honorable infantry, those immortal bastards, yet he knew some of them thought it just as he did.

  Gunnar tugged a service vest over his duty shirt and then leaned down to lace up his deck boots. The rest of the men in the barracks did the same, transforming themselves from weary men sleeping soundly to the sharp third shift crew of Battery 12. They might not have had what it took to stand in the mud with rifles and fight the garm one on one, but that did not mean they were not without use. When Gunnar stood up and stepped over to the edge of his bunk, he was joined by twenty others who were just as fast, just as ready, as he was.

  The hatch to the barracks opened and the men nearest it turned sharply on their heels and marched out of the chamber. There was a discipline to their movements, even here in their sleeping quarters, and it would be more so once they reached their duty station. Routine was critical for such men, with their myriad of mental and physical side effects of failure in the body forge, as it encouraged them to push past such things in service to humanity. Shunts were the multitudes of volunteers who joined the army of the All-Father yet were found wanting when placed in the crucible of the body forge.

  Less than marines yet more than men.

  At least
that was the saying.

  And most of the time Gunnar agreed.

  The legions of Einherjar were vast, with marines fighting the garm invaders on a thousand battlefields across the universe every day. The warriors of humanity died all the time and found themselves reborn in the body forge. Recycled soldiers being hurled into combat on an endless loop, and it was barely enough to keep the ravenous aliens held back.

  The United Humanity Coalition had relied on volunteers to fill the levies for the All-Father's army, and though recruitment had been on a steady decline once the extinction fleet was fought to a stalemate, many men still answered the call.

  Not all of us were born to carry a rifle, thought Gunnar as he and the rest of the men rushed down the hallway, swift, yet orderly, towards the hatch for Battery 12.

  He had been such a man, a volunteer from the slums of Hittia. His skin still bore the crude tattoos of his time as a ganger in that urban nightmare, a reminder of who he used to be. That was perhaps both a blessing and a curse, in Gunnar's mind, as the marines tended to lose a part of their identity with every fresh resurrection. He would always be Gunnar, a widower, a criminal, an absent father, just another Hittia lowlife. He had come to the All-Father a broken man, ready to give himself to the cause, to atone for his lifetime of ill-deeds by making corpses of the garm. He wanted to forget, but the body forge would not allow it. He was a resurrection reject.

  A shunt.

  There was a reason that resurrection technology was something reserved for the armies of the All-Father and none other amongst the UHC. It was an imperfect process, mostly due to the frailty of the human psyche being out of balance with the hardiness and mutability of the human body.

  Gunnar did not presume to know anything about resurrection science, but from what he'd gathered, the minds of most men rejected the reality of resurrection. The body forge engaged with the human mind in a quantum state, a cauldron of probability in which the collective memories that yielded a man's consciousness and identity awaited. The torcs were customized for each individual, and for most men, when the chemicals of the forge brought them into that trancelike quantum state, their minds were unwilling to accept the consequences of endless death and rebirth.

  The official line was, that in order to be a marine who could rise and fall with the body forge, a man must meet specific and yet highly classified criteria. Women, for whatever reason, had a one hundred percent rejection rate. Some theorized it had something to do with their ability to create life. It was a complex synchronicity of physiology and psychology that allowed those destined to become marines to endure the resurrection with their sanity, mostly, intact.

  To Gunnar, it was all fuzzy science that went far beyond his simple compulsory education. He realized he understood it in only the broadest of terms, but what he did know, was that most people thought it was a man's soul that rejected the body forge, not the other way around. In the quantum state, many believed, a man's soul was faced with the reality of being a single consciousness that was copied and recopied onto a vat-grown brain that controlled a vat-grown body. The ‘real you’ died the first time, and whatever came out of the forge afterward was just a copy of you, and every time you resurrected that copy got more and more flawed.

  Gunnar tried not to dwell on it too much, and when his mind was in the quantum state, the denial of resurrection had been firm and extreme. That was the part nobody liked to talk about, the trauma of entering the quantum state and then rejecting the procedure. The torcs would melt on their platforms, and the men would rise screaming from the thick nutrient soup of the coffin-like resurrection pods.

  That violent rejection came with a cost. For Gunnar, it wasn’t just his inability to produce tears, but also severe brain trauma. He, like so many others, emerged without much in the way of a sense of taste, smell, or the ability to fully read the emotions of others. Some men, even a few of his current crew, had lost the ability to speak, on top of everything else.

  For every marine who could cope with the body forge, there were hundreds of shunts who could not, and these broken men became the support elements of the Einherjar military. They were the mechanics, cooks, ship's crew, and gun servants. Many came looking for glory and most found only sacrifice and toil. Such was the grim cost demanded by the All-Father and the Wolf at the Gate, or so it was said.

  "Third shift, on the ready line!" barked the voice of Jarl Edwin, the harsh master of Batteries 10-15.

  As Gunnar and the others mustered on the gun deck after pouring in through the hatch, Jarl Edwin began walking up and down their ranks. He always did this, the sizing up of each crew member before they took to the gun. While third shift, Gunnar's current group, was mostly comprised of hardened veterans, it was Edwin's way to treat everyone as if it was their first day.

  "Brave men of the Bifrost," Edwin said, his powerful voice vibrating against the walls of the gun deck, a sloping chamber devoted to housing the four anti-air weapon systems that comprised Battery 12, "The wolves have returned for another assault on our ramparts. Apparently, they got a taste of Battery 12 and want some more."

  The joke was a cruel one, as third shift had lost seven men only a month prior, during a probing assault by several garm spine frigates. The three ships had been focused on destroying gun batteries aboard the Bifrost, as opposed to the expected all-out assault that was more common. Usually, the spine frigates would swap artillery salvos with human guns while other types of ships either tried to assault the fortress with boarding parties or slip through the blockade all together. Or at least that was what Gunnar had been told, as for the majority of his military career the garm had been launching small strikes against a wider array of targets. For the last four years or so the garm had been doing things differently.

  The Hive Mind had shifted its tactics, which alone, was a terrifying fact to consider, and was launching multitudes of small attacks along the battlefront, instead of focusing all its might upon massive assaults, usually against the Bifrost.

  Gunnar knew, like every other warrior in the All-Father's army, Einherjar and shunt alike, that the conventional garm tactic was to assault the strongest enemy element first and work its way down the line. The strongest point in the human battlefront was the star fortress Bifrost, named after the mystical bridge of ancient Norse mythology that connected the realm of the gods with the realm of men.

  Gunnar remembered the titanic space battle, which had been his first as a crew member, that had occurred roughly five years ago. When the mighty Ajax of Hydra Company, a legend among the support crews as much as he was with his fellow marines, was battling Grendel on Heorot, the Hive Mind dispatched a great force to break the Bifrost. That force had failed, and Gunnar remembered with crystal clarity the haunting sight of so many broken enemy ships floating in the void, the surviving attackers already cannibalizing the dead and dragging their corpses back into the darkness of garm space.

  "We've had it easy lads, for years the Hive Mind has only seen fit to hit us with small attack groups. The Watchman, may he be ever vigilant, determines that these have been screens for their supply raids," said Jarl Edwin as he checked the last of the crew and came to stand in front of Gunnar, looking into the man's eyes as he spoke to the room. "Some of you remember what it was like to take on an entire star swarm, and you know, as well as I do, that every skirmish since then has been weak tea."

  "Take heed, gentlemen, the Einherjar did their best to stop the raids, but they couldn't catch all of them," growled Edwin as he turned away from Gunnar and approached the command lectern so that he could activate the viewports.

  As the void shields parted to reveal the vast emptiness of garm space in front of them, he added, "Out there a fleet of ships is coming for us, flight trajectory puts them on a collision course with the Bifrost inside the hour. Whatever they were gobbling up supplies to feed, has finally hatched. I will be in circulation between batteries, and armsmen have been stationed at every hatch in the event of a boarding action. Gunnar, t
he deck is yours. Good hunting."

  "Good hunting, sir," responded Gunnar, his voice nearly cracking from the surge of adrenaline roaring through his system. "Third shift, man your battle stations."

  Jarl Edwin nodded curtly and left the deck as men scrambled to their various posts.

  Gunnar thought he was a serviceable deck chief, a low-level command element that lived and fought alongside his small crew, even if he had risen to the post over the bodies of better men. Battery 12 had taken a beating during that titanic conflict years ago, and the only two crew to survive were Gunnar and Mateo, the lead triggerman. While the void seals had held, preventing massive decompression, several direct hits from a spine frigate had wiped out the crew.

  Spine frigates, shuddered Gunnar at the memory even as he fed activation commands into the lectern which brought Battery 12 online, were aptly named. Most of them were mid-size ships, like the skirmish corvettes that sometimes accompanied the larger warships like Bright Lance or Reaper's Lantern. The enemy vessels made Gunnar think of giant sea urchins, even if they were more oblong than perfectly circular. They were bristling with ordinance and seemed to have evolved to perform only the one task. They would fire their bio-spines through the void, like giant railgun projectiles. Then the spines, or pieces of them that penetrated the outer armor, would explode in a tempest of deadly splinters.

  "Zeke, let's get eyes on," said Gunnar to the lead spotter, a man who ran the four-person targeting team positioned near his command lectern at the top of the downward sloping gun deck, "The jarl said within the hour, so instruments will already ping them, but I want visual as soon as possible, should be any minute now."

  Zeke nodded and fastened a full faced helmet over his head, a device that would give him a continuous feed from both the Bifrost’s central system but also the individual feeds from each of the guns in Battery 12. There were four of them, the larger equivalents of the notorious infantry chain-fire support weapons, wicked looking anti-air quad cannons that fired tremendous bolts. Each one was run by a five-man crew, one triggerman, one target master, one tech, and two loaders.