Ghost Ship (Gene Soldiers Book 4), page 1
GHOST SHIP
GENE SOLDIERS, BOOK 4
JAMES DAVID VICTOR
Copyright © 2022 James David Victor
All Rights Reserved
Except for review quotes, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the written consent of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. All people, places, names, and events are products of the author’s imagination and / or used fictitiously. Any similarities to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.
Cover Design by J Caleb Design
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Thank You
1
Arukeh, UTA System 8
Carl Sebastian, unofficial United Terran Pillarman and genetically enhanced WarDog, hurried past the press of people and emergency alarms and considered that somehow, all wars were the same.
Around him, the Terran Alliance station raged full tilt to get into battle readiness. Arukeh 1 was the main transport hub for this sector, so every avenue, loading bay, dome, and launch pad had been taken over by the nervous activity of the Alliance war effort. Large screens over the plaza displayed the rolling headlines of this world or that moon attacked by their archrivals, the Palacians. These reports merged with the Arukeh Base announcements.
“Palace Attacks Tranquility Complex, System 14—updates on missing and wounded follow . . .”
“Division 4 Engineering Debrief starting at 0830 hours . . .”
“General Evacuation Order on System 18. Palacian Attack Expected Imminently . . .”
Arukeh 1 itself wasn’t yet on the front line. It was still several systems back from the contested frontier worlds—but Carl knew from previous experience how easily and quickly that front line could advance with just the blink and roar of an Enhanced Feynman FTL Drive.
Yeah, all wars are the same. Except, y’know, when they aren’t . . . His mind flashed back to the strange biological, almost-fungus, almost-coral metal structures that he had seen on Philas B.
Were they created by the Palacians?
Was it some new bioweapon?
The screens weren’t showing those images, Carl thought as he hurried past the crowd. What would these regular staffers and civilians think when they saw the strange, nightmarish constructs? Was Philas B classified intel? Did anyone but himself and the Special Ops Pillarmen know that Philas B had happened at all?
The young man was filled with these unanswered questions as he dodged yet another tracked loader delivering the deadly promises of silver missiles. He waited for another contingent of blue-clad service workers to race past on some always-urgent mission. Arukeh 1 had always been an industrial place with loads of haulers and dock workers. Now, all of that brusque energy had only been enhanced by the arrival of three thousand Alliance Marines, support staff, command staff—and specialist units such as the Pillarmen team he was assigned to.
“Sebastian!” A voice growled abruptly at him from the throng. There, all of a sudden, was the small but intense form of Specialist Mendiata, the demolitions expert on their Pillarman team. Carl didn’t think that he had ever seen the small woman, always wearing fatigues with a short, rat-tail haircut, ever look relaxed. About anything.
“Meeting started three minutes ago! You’re late!” she snapped at him, turning on her heel and escaping towards the open stairs as Carl struggled to keep up.
“Uh, but so are you?” he offered as he joined her in jogging down the steps past the river of recruits new and old alike.
“Yeah, but I’m great,” she offered with a cackle, turning to the next door on the stairs. It was made of solid steel and currently had one very large Alliance marine with the implacable face of a man who was very good at not letting people pass.
“Move it, big guy. Special hearing,” Mendiata said to the man unceremoniously.
In response, the very large marine—who, Carl saw, literally had biceps bigger than his own head—just flicked a look at her.
“Restricted,” the man intoned. “ID.”
“You’d think they’d recognize me,” Mendiata grumbled. She offered her wrist for the man to take another blinking look at them both. With titanic slowness, he raised his handheld scanner to check them both in.
“Hmm.” The man checked the readout, nodded, and allowed Mendiata to move past him before raising the scanner to Carl’s wrist.
Blip!
Carl made to step forward, but the guard was suddenly in front of him, not-so-gently shoving him backwards.
“Hey!”
“Halt!” the guard said, rechecking the scanner and then staring back up at Carl once more.
“What? I’m a Pillarman!” Carl said, making a face. Am I technically a Pillarman or actually still one of the WarDogs? Or even now, after his time at the Facility, classed as the new and updated Exalted genetic soldiers . . . ?
“I don’t care who you say you are,” the large man growled as something rippled through his frame.
What!? Instinctively, Carl’s heightened senses read the signs even before he thought them. This man was preparing to fight. His weight had shifted to his back leg, he had taken an involuntary deeper breath . . .
The strange designer battle chemicals that Carl’s body created were released in one rush of euphoria, strength—and anger.
“I wouldn’t.” Carl hissed as he saw the guard’s hand start to move towards his holster. In return, the man froze, and Carl knew that he was contemplating whether to go for it or not.
“I’m Corporal Sebastian under Lieutenant Abrams, and I have been ordered to attend a special hearing with Colonel Forrest.” Carl said the words tightly. “And you had better explain exactly why you are getting in the way of that.”
“Hey! What’s going on here?” Mendiata’s voice came back from down the avenue.
“Mutant!” the guard said with a hiss, still not moving, but Carl could see that the man wanted to.
Oh, so that’s it, the WarDog thought. This guard was one of the many who regarded his kind—regular soldiers just like him who had signed up to be better soldiers, better fighters—as little more than monsters. Probably because of the high rate of ex-WarDogs not doing so well in the civilian space and with a reputation for trying to kill everyone in sight after so much as being served the wrong type of coffee, but still.
“Hey! Hey—he’s with me!” Mendiata was at the guard’s side and looking warily between the guard and Carl. Even though the staircase was busy behind them, the altercation was starting to attract stares.
“Marine—” The guard flickered a look between them, now taking in quick breaths and almost panting as his anger climbed towards panic.
Yeah, you’ve probably heard how dangerous WarDogs are, right? Carl thought. You’ve heard the stories about how we can walk through rooms of combatants, can break entrenched positions . . .
“I’ve got a Stop and Detain notice on my control,” the guard growled at Mendiata. “He’s one of them. One of the WarDogs. He isn’t human,” the guard was saying, then there was a sudden, authoritative snap of a voice from behind them.
“Marines! What is the meaning of this!? Stand down immediately!”
The guard instantly stepped aside (as did Mendiata) to reveal the thin, taut form of Colonel Forrest, dressed in her deep black uniform decorated with blue piping and enough medals and bars to make most other people blush. She had to be north of fifty, her blonde hair held in a braid behind her—and every inch of her radiated displeasure.
“Colonel, sir!” The guard flinched into a salute with Mendiata and Carl doing the same. “Sir, my control port. He didn’t register as human. He registered as a WarDog . . .” the guard started to explain.
“A WarDog who has been invited to a special hearing, Private!” Forrest glared at the man. Carl could almost feel sorry for anyone under that withering stare. Almost, but not quite.
“Now, you’re both already late.” Forrest turned back on her heel. Mendiata shot a victorious look at the guard before she and Carl walked down the short corridor past him.
I’m still labelled as a WarDog, Carl thought in alarm. He followed as the colonel led them down a narrow corridor to another steel door. She had to wave her own wrist to open it, and inside was a simple, rounded room with windows that overlooked the airless rock-and-boulder canyons outside. Arukeh itself looked like a black-and-white image out of some ancient space exploration propaganda. The only difference was the constant gleam of thruster lights from the busy space traffic above.
But why didn’t I register as human? Carl was still freaked even while he nodded and took a seat beside the other members of their team already there: the ever-calm Specialist Tucker and the always-large Lieutenant Abrams.
The mistake had to be something with
There was a quick hiss from the door and a small bleep as an electronic voice sounded over the speaker system.
Privacy seals activated.
“People,” Forrest said from the front of the room while Mendiata took a seat. The colonel held their gaze for a long pause as if debating what to tell them.
“Marines and soldiers of the United Terran Alliance, I don’t have to impress on you the confidentiality of this meeting. But you are reminded that what I am about to show you is considered beyond top-black level. The only reason any of you are in this room at all is because of your personal involvement on Philas B.”
The colonel paused again, her eyes roaming the room as each of those assembled there remembered: weird biological forms made of bone or metal or lichen. Evidence of the xenomutation everywhere. And the unexpected treachery of their own shock troops, the Terran Alliance Exalted.
2
“We believe that we are looking at a weapon that we have no known defense against,” the colonel said. “The military high command has ascertained that we are looking at a weaponized use of the xenomutation.”
“What!?” Abrams was the first to respond, moving forward in his seat, his voice full of outrage. “They’re crazy. The Palacians are crazy,” he said.
Carl had to agree.
The xenomutation was widespread throughout the entirety of human-colonized space. It did not respect whether the planet or station was Palacian or Terran. First the mammalian host showed signs of stupendous rage, and then the body was slowly encapsulated by a hardened, metal-like exoskeleton. No one was sure what happened after that stage. Generally, any humans or animals encountered at such a late progression of the disease were too intent on killing you to stop and let you study it.
“They won’t be able to control it,” Carl heard himself say. All eyes turned towards him.
If anyone here should know, it would be him. He cleared his throat.
“I worked as a xeno hunter between the wars,” he said. “A lot of us ex-WarDogs did. It was the only work we could get.”
The only work where having an insane amount of bravery and ferocity counted as a success, he considered. Carl told them how he would be hired—usually by station managers—to clear an outbreak of the xenomutants, whether they be mutant dogs, rats, or even humans.
“It just spreads. You kill them, you burn the site so no organic particle remains. That’s all you can do,” Carl said. He didn’t have to tell them what happened to entire habitats when an outbreak had ripped through the population. Those infected had usually killed the others before ten days were up.
“If the Palacians have found a way to release it large scale on Alliance populations . . .” Carl shook his head, unable to even say what came next. Entire cities becoming infected by the xenovirus in a matter of days. Not just domes, but entire habitats. Entire worlds.
It could spell the end of the Alliance.
“These are the scenes from across the front line,” Forrest said. Holograms flickered into the air at a wave of her hand, showing, at first, scenes that Carl thought he had destroyed on Philas B.
There was a scraggle of forest with tall, thin trees reaching twenty or thirty feet into the sky. Carl struggled to recall if he remembered them from some battle or another.
But then, the camera panned out to show that between the trees were . . . shapes. The freakish biological shapes that Carl and the other Pillarmen had seen on Philas B, some looking like gigantic mushrooms, others looking like strange coral reefs. Their skins were greens, yellows, blues, and purples, and yet they were strung through with buttresses of the metal plate that was characteristic of the xenovirus.
“We blew that up!” Abrams sneered at the image in alarm.
“You did,” the colonel said, rather confusingly in Carl’s opinion. “This is from System 11, a frontier world named Garamond,” she said. Then the image changed—this time, a wide-angled shot of a desert canyon with blood-red sands and dark, iron-rich rocks.
And there, growing out of the canyon, was an entire colony of the xeno structures, their metal-coral configurations branching out like antlers towards the orange skies.
“All in all, we are seeing at least twenty recognized sites across the frontier where this is happening,” Forrest said. “We’ve temporarily pulled back our forward troops to a one-system distance while we consider our response.”
The images kept changing, showing different worlds and battlefronts in the war, all with more of these alien superstructures.
“We only have a very short time until the news gets out, what is happening amongst the general Alliance population,” Forrest warned. “And then, there will be panic.”
The next holoimage showed a series of regular square buildings that appeared to be UTA under blue skies—only half of the outpost had been colonized by the same alien outgrowth.
And there were figures moving there, walking and moving between the buildings. Carl recognized the cyborgs of the Palacian Fomorians, moving in their staid, mechanical manner.
And there were others there too. Figures that moved entirely differently, that stalked and loped with a predator’s grace. They wore crimson versions of the very same suits that Carl and the other Pillarmen wore.
It was the Exalted. The new type of WarDogs.
“Traitors!” hissed Mendiata beside Carl, and the super soldier could have said he felt the same, but there was something else that was niggling in his gut. Some sense of it not being quite right.
“Yes, Specialist Mendiata,” Forrest confirmed. “Everywhere that the Exalted were dispatched to deal with the Fomorian Brigade, instead of facing them, the two units appeared to join forces and turn on any other troops or civilians present. After they had cleared the ground, these structures started appearing.” The colonel’s voice was drab and steady.
“We cannot understand how these forces are communicating with each other or why the Exalted would turn on the rest of the Alliance. They haven’t made any demands. They don’t appear to have ringleaders.”
A traitor decides to go against their own people, don’t they? he thought. From what Carl remembered of Fodova and the others in the Exalted unit—none of them had even managed to string two sentences together!
“It was like they were connected together,” Carl said.
“What? Stand up, Corporal Sebastian!” Forrest said. “If you have information, then we need to hear it!”
Carl gulped. He’d always considered himself to be more of an average trench filler, not as someone who had important information to give to senior officers.
But the eyes of his team were on him, so he stood.
“You know I was dispatched to Philas B with the rest of the Exalted,” Carl said. “I did not see any signs or hints of a conspiracy amongst them. If anything, they appeared to be drugged.”
“Drugged? You think the Palacians poisoned them somehow?” Forrest demanded.
“No.” Carl shook his head. “Not drugged as in intoxicated, more like under the influence of the very same chemicals that all of us WarDogs are,” he said. “But not only that . . .” He struggled to put it into words.
“Spit it out, Marine!” Forrest said, not gently but not altogether unkindly either.
“The chemicals that we WarDogs produce,” Carl said a little hesitantly, “That I produce, seem to make me more primal, more instinctual—closer to an animal nature,” he said cautiously. His eyes flickered over Abrams, Mendiata, and Tucker to discern any trace of disgust there. Each of his team mates merely stared back at him—whether cold or accepting, Carl couldn’t quite tell.
“It seemed to me that, instead of their bodies releasing the chemicals that they need at certain points, the Exalted live in that animal state. One that’s prelanguage. That is why I don’t think that they could be capable of conspiracy.”
“Well, they certainly are working with the Fomorians!” Forrest said. “We have dead UTA civilians as evidence of that!”
“Colonel, sir, if I may,” Carl said briefly. He tried to remember back to what had happened when he had been deployed. There had been that unusual pain, that buzzing sensation that ran through his body several times. The way that all of the Exalted and the Fomorians had apparently moved to the same tune . . .
