Son of the Wolf, page 1
Son of the Wolf
Book Seven of the Last Marines
By
William S. Frisbee, Jr.
PUBLISHED BY: Theogony Books
Copyright © 2023 William S. Frisbee, Jr.
All Rights Reserved
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Get the free Four Horsemen prelude story “Shattered Crucible”
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License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events, or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
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Cover Design by J Caleb Design.
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Contents
Chapter One: Recap
Chapter Two: Time to Leave
Chapter Three: SOG Fleet
Chapter Four: New Masada
Chapter Five: Guard
Chapter Six: Council
Chapter Seven: AERD
Chapter Eight: The Major
Chapter Nine: Mission
Chapter Ten: Ground Commander
Chapter Eleven: AERD Bunker
Chapter Twelve: NMDF
Chapter Thirteen: Marine
Chapter Fourteen: Departure
Chapter Fifteen: Quantico
Chapter Sixteen: Imprisoned Demon
Chapter Seventeen: Breadcrumbs
Chapter Eighteen: Chechen Scouts
Chapter Nineteen: Stalking the Bunker
Chapter Twenty: Father
Chapter Twenty-One: Peacekeepers
Chapter Twenty-Two: Quantico
Chapter Twenty-Three: Orbital Assault
Chapter Twenty-Four: Trapped
Chapter Twenty-Five: Quantico Base
Chapter Twenty-Six: A Ship
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Skipsbat
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Quantico Command
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Delta Troopers
Chapter Thirty: 2nd Lieutenant Stathis
Chapter Thirty-One: New Command
Chapter Thirty-Two: The Eagle
Chapter Thirty-Three: Hakala
Chapter Thirty-Four: Vili
Chapter Thirty-Five: Departure
Chapter Thirty-Six: Avoidance
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Zugla Approach
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Bureaucracy
Chapter Thirty-Nine: Assassination
Chapter Forty: Zugla Search
Chapter Forty-One: The Jungles
Chapter Forty-Two: Guide
Chapter Forty-Three: Expedition Planning
Chapter Forty-Four: Sixteen
Chapter Forty-Five: The Jungle
Chapter Forty-Six: Attacked
Chapter Forty-Seven: Hakala
Chapter Forty-Eight: Leopard Man
Chapter Forty-Nine: Hunted
Chapter Fifty: Failed Assassin
Chapter Fifty-One: Androids
Chapter Fifty-Two: The Facility
Chapter Fifty-Three: The Collective
About William S. Frisbee, Jr.
Excerpt from Book One of The Prince of Britannia Saga:
Excerpt from Book One of The Sergey Chronicles:
Excerpt from Book One of the Abner Fortis, ISMC:
Excerpt from Book One of The Combined Service:
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Chapter One: Recap
Zale Stathis
My name is Zale Stathis. I am the first, and possibly last, commandant of the Wolf Legion.
The gunny once said, when I was the one making the decisions, we were screwed. I suppose it could be worse, but we are screwed blue and tattooed like little pink ponies.
We are leaving Mother Earth to save the human race. If we don’t? In just one year, humanity will disappear. You will find this final recording in Quantico, Virginia, the last bastion and finest fortress of the United States Marines. When it falls, so does the last hope for the human race.
All our lines are collapsing. The Moon has been overrun. Mars, Saturn, all gone. Earth may soon be lost to the ancient hordes. Only fortress Quantico on Earth remains strong and the vanhat probe our lines daily. White Heron Fortress in Jupiter also stands, but we don’t know for how much longer. I’m not going there.
We thought we could turn Sol into a fortress, but we were wrong.
I have little time, so I need to fill you in. Hopefully, you are not some bug-eyed monster that evolved from humanity after we failed to stop the vanhat. If you are, nothing personal, but I hate you, and I think you’re ugly.
These are dark times, and so much has occurred, I don’t know where to begin. These aren’t my last words, though. I hope to engrave those on some demon’s forehead like Sergeant Levin. We’ll see. I now have a trusty Ka-Bar like he did. Hopefully, you don’t know what I’m talking about, but in time you will. I’m rambling though. I’m several hundred years old, so I’m entitled. For us humans, that is a super-duper long time and to go that long without… um, never mind.
I don’t know who will find this or if you can even speak this language. You will learn the songs of my people or go extinct as well. The vanhat don’t understand anything else.
Starting too far back won’t help you. As a googly eyed alien, I doubt you really care about my childhood and how I got conned into being an infantry Marine. You need to know how to avoid the fate that is coming for you. I hope you have better luck than humanity.
Let me start with my military service. I enlisted hundreds of years ago in the most elite fighting force known to man. We were the ultimate life-takers and heart breakers. Our magnificent uniforms were panty droppers. We were United States Marines, and I was one of them. I ended up as a private in the US Marine Raiders, something of an elite force within that elite force. Those were some of the best years of my life, though I never got laid.
As an organization, the Raiders had changed a lot from World War Two and the War on Terror. I joined right before the AI revolution, before we even knew it was brewing. I was with a unit that got bleeding-edge Sentient Cybernet Biological Implants, AIs that are part computer and part organic, using some of our cloned brain cells for processing and stuff. These SCBIs are our best buddies for a couple of reasons. We are inseparable, for starters. They are super loyal to whoever’s skull they are planted in, and they help us excel in so many ways. Maybe it is the organic component or maybe it is the programming, but the SCBI is loyal.
My platoon, led by some lieutenant and the super-badass Gunnery Sergeant Wolf Mathison, was being deployed to Europa. The Asiatic Union wasn’t playing nice, and they needed Raiders to pay them a visit and slap them back into line. It didn’t work out like we expected. We got on a ship, the USS Jefferson, arrived in orbit around Jupiter, and never woke up. The US squidberts flew us into an ambush and the ship got torn up. Me, the gunny, my squad leader, Sergeant Levin, and a shuttle pilot, Warrant Officer Diamond Winters, ended up trapped in stasis for a couple of hundred years. It wasn’t fun, but I don’t remember much. For the first time since joining the Raiders, I was able to catch up on my sleep, but as luck would have it, the green weenie struck, and we didn’t get any back pay.
During our nappy time, the United States had a civil war where the AIs rebelled, and in the end the USA ended up nuking itself and a lot of American owned real estate around the world. This did super bad things to the climate and made the USA very unpopular with the survivors.
Humanity finally made it into outer space. Probably not the biggest surprise considering we couldn’t grow petunias and you couldn’t go to the beach and see pretty women in bikinis anymore. Even though the Moon wasn’t made of cheese, we now had some real incentive. Mankind also figured out faster-than-light travel by using something called “Shorr space,” basically a parallel dimension we could slip in and out of, and when we did that we would be closer to our destination. But because it was another dimension, it put us closer to the real problem.
All that happened while we were sleeping.
Some SOG scientists thawed us out. In case you don’t know the SOG, it’s the Social Organizational Governance. A bunch of jack-booted thugs who worship socialism, social controls, and top-down command. They make historical figures like Hitler, Mao, and Stalin look like friendly and primitive sock puppets. Run by a Central Committee of Hitler wannabes, they were nasty people. We didn’t realize just how bad they were until after we shot most of them, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
We got thawed out of stasis by these Governance jackboots, who decided they were going to kill us. They found us in the outer reaches of the Solar System, way out there, near a super-secret research facility. They were researching some boxes they had found in some secret alien facility.
Well. Turns out those boxes kept demons and other nasty creatures from coming into our dimension. These low IQ jackboots released the first demon—or as the Aesir and Vanir like to call them, the Jotun, or Jotnar, which is plural. Our allies from the Vapaus Republic have a lot of words and terms I still haven’t figured out.
In case you haven’t discovered it yet, there aren’t a lot of intelligent species running around our galaxy. Not sure if you call it the Fermi Paradox, but we do. Some dude named Fermi had a calculator and figured that our galaxy should be swarming with intelligent, super-advanced aliens. It isn’t. We found ruins on planets but we were mostly alone. Shorr space and the demons are the reason why.
Turns out our galaxy goes through phases. During these phases, our dimension comes close to or passes through other dimensions. When this happens, there is crossover. The things from those dimensions come to ours, and they like to eat faces and souls. When they cross over to our dimension, they bring their laws of physics with them and that lets them do some weird, unexplainable stuff in ours. It also explains ghosts, demons, and other mythological creatures from our history, dragons, werewolves, vampires, zombies, and maybe Elvis. They were all temporary crossovers. When the crossover was complete, or the dimensions finally drifted apart, the laws of physics re-asserted themselves and erased any proof we had been visited, so when the shit hit the fan, we had no clue because we were confident our science had everything figured out.
Now it makes sense. Back when we got thawed out, it didn’t. A crossing was happening again, and the station we were trapped on had ripped open that wall between dimensions and a demon came through. It took us a while to skull stomp that dude, or actually Sergeant Levin managed to Ka-Bar klunk it, but that was later.
Anyway, these stupid scientists ripped the dimension open and let a demon through. That gave us incentive to escape our prison and meet up with some space Vikings that were trying to figure out what was going on there. It was all so far-fetched we still didn’t have a clue, but now we had a way off the station and some new allies.
The SOG had known a little about this cross-dimensional issue because it was becoming problematic. With us awake, it seemed to get a lot worse. So, of course, we got blamed. Led by Gunny Mathison and the over-muscled Viking babe Skadi, we were able to discover two weapons to help us fight the demons, or vanhat as the Vikings were calling them. One weapon was an Inkeri generator. A complex little item that stabilized the laws of physics in our dimension. This made life difficult or impossible for the vanhat crossing over to eat faces. It robbed them of their cross-dimensional juju. Another critical weapon was the d-bomb, or dimensional bomb. That is, just a burst of raw energy that restabilizes our dimension and is very destructive to the vanhat.
While we were running around trying to figure all this out and collecting weapons, the Social Organizational Governance collapsed. Sol hid behind trillions of automated weapons platforms, and they left the rest of the colonies and sectors to fend for themselves without the oppressive boot heel of the Central Committee to crush their neck. This wasn’t the greatest thing because a lot of junior Hitlers came to power. Outside of Sol, the Governance became a chaotic mess of rebelling sector fleets and marauding vanhat. And then there were the alien Torag and Voshka that the SOG had been fighting against. A real mess.
Of course, the biggest problem was that the more time vanhat spent in our dimension, the stronger they became. They had this way of absorbing people, make them slaves and such, eat their souls or something, and that give the vanhat strength and staying ability. The more faces they ate, the more powerful they became, and they could find people anywhere in space with their voodoo-like senses.
Sol, the cradle of humanity, was the largest concentration of people. The vanhat who conquered Sol would become the most powerful. When we discovered that, we realized what we had to do, and we infiltrated the most secure system in the galaxy.
We discovered a small colony of humans led by our old commanding officer, General Becket, who was now president of the United States. But the president was now a few rounds short of a magazine and his scope was not even close to being zeroed. Not only did he have a SCBI, but he had something, or someone, else in his head. He was a relic of the AI wars in so many ways. We’re still trying to figure that out.
We escaped him and made it to the Zvezda Two, the secret and well-guarded heart of the Governance. Like all paranoid jack-booted regimes, they had centralized controls and management there in their Lunar fortress. A little of this, a little of that, and we killed off the Central Committee and took control. All in a day’s work for US Marines, though I could have gone without Commissar Feng’s pretend betrayal and that Viking vampire special ops killer Hermod. Sif, Skadi, and Vili managed to kick a demon named Luciferius back to his home dimension, and once again the US Marines saved the day, though we had to share some of that glory with the Aesir. That is okay; I like them.
“The only easy day was yesterday” is one of the things the SEALS like to say. Those stuck-up squidberts know what they are talking about, though.
Not sure if the rest of the story is relevant, but I don’t have much time.
With the emperor down and the empress chewing on a shit sandwich, it’s up to me and Admiral Winters. We’re Marines though. It’s what we do. The empress will hold things together ’til we get back.
We’ve lost the battle for Earth, and the Moon, and Saturn, and Mars but we haven’t lost the war. It ain’t looking good, and now I have to finish up this recording because I have to pee.
I am Zale Stathis, the first and last commandant of Wolf’s Legion. We are off to outer space to save the human race. Because if we don’t, our species will disappear. And if we return? Well, that’s a big if. Don’t hold your breath. Unless you’re a bug-eyed alien, then hold your breath. We could be back any minute.
Semper Fi and good luck!
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Chapter Two: Time to Leave
Time to Leave
General Becket, Commandant USMC, President of the USA
Earth was dying. Humanity was dying and that worried Becket for several reasons. Decagon had shared projections with Becket and Sun Tzu. The addition of the Republic’s new weapons did not change the end result, only extended it, like the hallway Becket was walking down. The end was inevitable, just not in sight yet.
The corridor seemed to go on forever. Cracks, black mold, dripping water, and water-stained concrete were the only variations Becket saw as he strode down a corridor that frequently turned left and right. If there had been branches and other passages, Becket could almost believe he was in an underground maze. The sensors in his helmet let him see in complete darkness. He passed several Collective-designed warbots that remained silent and motionless, ignoring their master and the two slaves.
No human had built this hallway, and Becket knew he was the only human to come this way. Not even he had known this corridor was here. A master did not give its slave all the information. What else had Decagon created that Becket didn’t know about? How long ago had this been created?
The vanhat were unstoppable, like the Collective, and humanity was just an annoyance to them both. Just because Earth’s and the Sol System’s demise had been delayed didn’t mean it would survive. There were over two hundred other planets in the Governance that the vanhat could scour and eradicate. There were other fleets, including the Torag and Voshka, which could be absorbed by the invaders, and Decagon was sure they would not ignore Sol in the long term. The war could last one year or a hundred. Time was on the vanhat’s side. They would only grow more powerful, and humanity was already weakened. It was a war of attrition, and humanity had already lost.
Projections and data gleaned from the SOG systems showed the vanhat could, and would, redirect entire asteroids, maybe even planetoids, to bombard and eradicate all life from Earth and any other human installations.
Planetary life was so fragile, and life on Earth was barely hanging on by its fingernails.
It was the Governance’s belief that the ancient aliens had nuked their own worlds to combat the vanhat. Decagon knew differently because it was not restricted by human bias, perceptions, or misconceptions. The storm was coming to sweep sentient life from the galaxy like it had done countless times in the past. Humanity would not halt the vanhat agenda for long.
