Ice and Monsters (The Lost Book 1) Read online

  Contents

  Foreword

  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

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Epilogue

  The Lost Book 1

  by

  Peter Nealen

  An imprint of Galaxy’s Edge Press

  PO BOX 534

  Puyallup, Washington 98371

  Copyright © 2021 by Galaxy’s Edge, LLC

  All rights reserved.

  www.forgottenruin.com

  www.wargatebooks.com

  Foreword

  When Jason Anspach and I first wrote the Forgotten Ruin series, we shared with some fellow authors what we were up to because we felt it was the kind of storytelling people wanted and weren’t getting. Forgotten Ruin became a big hit, and the desire for WarGate stories is going strong.

  We’re beyond excited for Peter Nealen to be the first of those authors. He’s a great guy, a U.S. Marine veteran, and an excellent storyteller.

  But maybe you’re wondering, what is WarGate fiction?

  We’ve got an answer ready for you. WarGate is an exciting new genre that blends fantasy, military fiction, and science fiction in a unique way.

  A WarGate title is set in fantasy world, you’ll find wonderful allusions to Norse Mythology in Ice and Monsters while our own Forgotten Ruin series is a blend of the traditional Lord of the Rings and (old school) Dungeons and Dragons fantasy settings.

  The next concept we add is a modern military unit. For us it was U.S. Army Rangers, while Peter, a former Marine, went with a U.S. Marine Recon unit—a highly specialized, highly skilled, and highly motivated group of Marines who do a very specific task and do it well.

  The third element in a WarGate novel is what we call The Perpetual Taco Machine. To keep a modern military unit acting like a modern military unit in a fantasy world, you’ve got to keep them equipped. We asked ourselves how we keep the Rangers, Marines, or Special Forces guys fighting through the savage age of Conan from having to turn into just sword-wielding warriors who happen to share the same knowledge of pop culture as you and I.

  Ammunition doesn’t last forever. Equipment breaks down… and where do you find a can of Rip It in country? It’s not like the ye old shop keep keeps skins of coffee and energy drinks next to the wine and health potions, right?

  The Perpetual Taco machine keep the ammo from going black and even provides mortars and the occasional Karl Gustav round to keep the trolls, frost giants, and all the other monsters around at bay. That’s not as crazy as it sounds. Even now, the United States and other countries are pushing the limits of what can be 3D printed. In WarGate, we just advance the technology out to a point that might make hard sci-fi junkies roll their eyes into the back of their heads and have epileptic fits.

  But the end results we’re all after is fun. So without further delay, enjoy Ice and Monsters… it’s a hell of a ride!

  Nick Cole & Jason Anspach

  P.S. – If you did have a perpetual taco machine, you’d definitely make tacos with it, hence the name. Even the hard sci-fi readers agree with us there.

  Chapter 1

  Looking back on it all, given how weird the rest of the world had gotten, taking the Zodiacs into that fog bank was a bad idea. By that time, the government had formally acknowledged that UFOs were real. They hadn’t been able to cover up Senator Casimir’s exsanguination along with his children. Or his wife having disappeared like a ghost.

  Let’s not even get into some of the weird stuff I’d seen in the shadows in Syria.

  Fog in the summertime, when every atmospheric condition was against it, should have been a warning sign. It definitely hadn’t been in the “Situation” part of the brief, either during the Warning Order or in the full, five-paragraph order that Captain Sorenson gave just before we climbed into the CH-53s and took off, the boats partially deflated and “tacoed” so they’d fit with us and our rucks.

  Still, looking back, I’m glad we’d been issued a full combat load. The exercise was supposed to end in a live-fire range. We were loaded out. We went without body armor—and boy howdy had that been a tough sell—so we carried the standard Recon loadout of twelve mags on the body and one in the gun.

  That would come in handy. The body armor would have, too, but in the long run, I’d take bullets over plates.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. Everything seemed normal at first. The helocast went by the numbers—in fact, the pilot was one of the best I’d ever seen. The helos had flared about three klicks off the Norwegian coast, the pilots holding an almost perfect hover ten feet off the water while we shoved the boats out and followed them two at a time, then jumped into the still-frigid water feet-first and swam to the boats.

  It was almost too dark to see the Norwegian coast ahead as we bobbed on the ocean, getting the engines mounted and the boats fully inflated, but we could see the Pyotr Velikiy battlegroup’s navigation lights off to the north clearly enough. The Russians weren’t too happy about this round of joint exercises between the US Marine Corps and the Norwegians, and they weren’t making it a secret.

  “Ready, Conor.” Captain Sorenson would probably have frowned if he’d heard Rodeffer call me by my first name. To him, the Marine Corps demanded that my team call me Staff Sergeant McCall. But sometimes Recon operates a little differently from the rest of the Marine Corps.

  I glanced forward as I took the tiller. The team was in the boat, rucks secured, fins clipped to chest rigs, suppressed M4s—thoroughly drenched in silicone spray to keep the salt water from eating them—pointed outboard. To our right and left, the platoon’s other Zodiacs bobbed on the waves, dark and glistening in the dying light.

  Bailey, Team 3’s team leader, waved at me from the boat off to the left. I returned the signal, then turned my attention toward the CO’s boat in the middle. They were a little behind still, and I fancied for a moment that I could see the steam rising from Gunny Taylor’s ears where he was riding with Zimmerman out on the far end of the line of boats.

  Finally, everyone was ready to go, and the Captain started their engine and sent the lead Zodiac putting toward the Norwegian coast. The rest of us followed, spreading out into a rough wedge.

  I looked up at the sky as we went. The stars were out, but there was still some faint, pinkish light in the west. We weren’t going to have a lot of darkness to work in, not at that time of year. Which was a good thing as well as a bad thing.

  Recon likes darkness. It hides us and lets us sneak around into places we’re not supposed to be. But at the same time, we were a lot farther north than most of us were used to, and the North Sea is bitterly cold, even in the summer. The more sunlight there was up to warm things up, the bett
er. I was glad we’d decided to wear drysuits on insert.

  We hadn’t gotten far before that fog bank rolled up out of nowhere.

  I’ll admit, I didn’t think it was that weird to start with. Fog is fog. And we were all pretty good at nautical navigation that far into the float. I had my compass board on the gunwale, sure that I was holding course. So, we were fine. Sure, the night was supposed to have been clear. But who really trusts the weather forecasts in the “Situation” paragraph one hundred percent?

  The fog got thicker, and I eased off on the throttle. Within a couple dozen yards, I couldn’t even see the boats on either side of us, though I could still hear them. I glanced down at the compass, which was still rock-steady. We were good. We just had to go carefully because of the reduced visibility.

  At least, that was what I thought until we were still chugging through the waves, shrouded by fog, well after the time we should have been at the beach landing site.

  I started to question my judgement, but it wasn’t like we had a lot of reference points in this soup. The bearing had been spot on since we headed in. I’d chosen to be patient. Maybe we’d slowed down more than I thought.

  A sound… almost a moan.

  My head came up, and I stared hard into the mists. Other heads came up off the gunwales, too. I hadn’t been the only one to notice something.

  “You hear that?” Farrar was my RTO, and as usual, his voice was slightly too loud, even in a whisper. He’d never quite perfected the Recon quiet.

  Santos shushed him. “We all heard it, moron. Shut up.” My assistant team leader wasn’t exactly the soul of tact, but Farrar brought out the acid in him fast, quick, and in a hurry. Especially when he couldn’t be quiet.

  But the noise had been weird enough that Santos wasn’t going to ignore it just to spite Farrar, either. “What the hell was that? A whale?” His voice was still a low whisper that wouldn’t carry far.

  “Never heard of a whale making a noise like that before, let alone on the surface.” I searched the mist around us again. I couldn’t see any of the other boats, but nobody had started yelling for help yet. If this had been a real-world combat mission, that might or might not be advisable, depending on the emergency, but since it was a training op, I figured that if anything went wrong with one of the boats, we’d have to go admin to fix it.

  The fog was as thick as ever, and the darkness seemed to be even more impenetrable than it had been before. The radios were all in waterproof cascade bags in the rucks; immediate communications without visual contact would be limited to yelling.

  And for some reason I couldn’t put my finger on, after hearing that strange moan out in the dark, I didn’t feel like yelling was going to be a good idea.

  “Rodeffer! Stanley! You see anything up there?” I kept my voice to a low hiss projected toward the bow where my point man and slack man were lying on the gunwale, their eyes forward, peering over their rifles.

  Rodeffer shook his head, his NVGs sticking out under his bump helmet as he scanned the water around us.

  Stanley then said, “Nothing, Staff Sergeant.” He was the low man on the totem pole, not only on the team, but also in the platoon. He’d just lat-moved from Supply to Recon and had finished the BRC—Basic Reconnaissance Course—pipeline just in time to join the workup for this float. He might be a Sergeant with six years under his belt, but he was a boot to us, even to Rodeffer, who had just pinned on his third stripe.

  Stanley also still had some Big Marine Corps habits. One of the first things Santos had told him when he’d arrived at the Company was not to get a haircut for the next two weeks. Recon don’t do that screaming high-and-tight shit.

  The moan came again, followed by a soft splash somewhere behind us.

  Santos swiveled around and craned his neck to look behind us while still lying on the gunwale. “What the hell?”

  I let off on the throttle. From the sounds of it, the other boats had as well. Which told me that we’d all heard it.

  Letting us drift a little, I turned and looked behind us. Nothing but dark waves disappearing into the fog a few yards away.

  Or was there something more out there? Something big and creepy.

  I blinked, then stared hard. My NVGs didn’t have a lot of light to work with, and they need some ambient light to amplify. Even our PVS-15s couldn’t see squat in the pitch black. And the fog wasn’t exactly letting a lot of starlight down.

  Then something broached the surface. Not by much, but just enough that I knew it was there. And it didn’t look right. It looked almost…human.

  I blinked hard and stared at the empty stretch of water I’d just observed.

  I couldn’t have seen it right. For a moment, I told myself that I’d just experienced the same thing the old sailors who said they’d seen mermaids had. They’d seen a sea cow and thought they’d seen a half-fish, half-hot chick in a shell bikini.

  To be honest, I’d never quite bought that explanation. Ever seen a sea cow? Nobody who’s not high as a kite is going to mistake that for a hot chick. Didn’t make sense the first time I heard the theory, and I wasn’t buying it right then, either.

  I was right not to.

  Something hit the boat from underneath. Hard. We all froze for a second.

  Then they were coming up out of the water all around us.

  I caught a good look at the closest one as it grabbed the gunwale right next to me, avoiding the shrouded pumpjet propulsor on the outboard. Its arm was a little too long, its fingers slender and bony, with webbing between them running from knuckle almost clear to the claws at their ends. Its head was blunt and earless, its eyes too big for its head, luminous and practically glowing in my NVGs.

  The thing had a mouth wider than the rest of its head, and when it gaped, I saw rows of glassy fangs that looked like they belonged on an anglerfish.

  As I stared at the sea monster that was trying to crawl up onto my Zodiac, the first thing that I thought was that I regretted that we’d jumped out of the helicopter into the ocean with our rifles in Condition Four. Which meant that I had an unloaded weapon in front of me when I needed to shoot this thing.

  Fortunately, I had a knife.

  Actually, I had two with me, but the Bowie that I brought on every op was in my ruck, waterproofed and secured. The titanium dive knife on my vest, however, was easily accessible. I yanked it out of its scabbard, still holding onto the tiller with my other hand as the slimy thing lunged out of the water, its fangs reaching for my throat.

  If I’d been thinking straight, I sure wouldn’t have tried to hold onto the tiller while getting in a knife fight. But when a sea monster comes up out of the water and tries to grab you, thinking straight kind of goes out the window.

  I jabbed at it as it lunged at me, but my blade skittered off its scaly hide, and then it was on top of me, pinning my knife hand against the gunwale, its jaws gnashing for my throat. I let go of the tiller and barely got my arm under its throat, keeping that toothy frog mouth away from my face by inches. I could hear the snap of its teeth and feel a cold breath on my face. That close. I twisted around and threw myself back against the outboard, suddenly scared as hell that this thing was going to drag me off the boat and into the water.

  I tried to shove it off me while I fought to get my knife hand free. It kept snapping at my face, but while it was horribly strong, I was a Recon Marine.

  For a brief few moments, my entire universe shrank to the stern of the boat as the monster tried to crush me, bite me, or drag me into the water. I was vaguely aware of the noise around me as the rest of the team tried to fight their own attackers, but I couldn’t spare the attention.

  I hit it with a knee, then an elbow, but none of my blows seemed to faze it. It gurgled and hissed as it pawed and bit at me. It took a swipe at me with its free hand, and I used the momentum to pull my knife out from under its paw and started st
abbing.

  Have you ever tried to stab a fish? It’s harder than it looks; the scales make the skin tough, and the flesh beneath it is rubbery. Without a lot of force, the point just kind of bounces.

  My first two stabs didn’t go in more than a fraction of an inch. Then I got mad and got one under its armpit, which sank to the hilt.

  The thing groaned and reared back. I grabbed hold of the tendrils that hung from the corners of its inhumanly wide mouth. I let it haul me up to where I could straddle the gunwale again, and then I went to town.

  Holding it by that tendril, I stabbed it over and over in the neck, trying to do as much damage as possible. Its blows and struggles got desperate, as my hands and my blade got covered in blood, scales, and slime, and I tore open the thing’s neck, my knife grinding against its backbone a couple of times. A stench like fish and rotting meat filled my nostrils, and I almost gagged.

  It finally went limp. I let it slide into the dark water, where it bobbed on the surface for a moment before it disappeared. I turned toward the bow, my heart hammering and my chest heaving.

  Farrar and Smith were still grappling with one of the things in the bottom of the boat. Santos was clubbing another one with his rifle. Rodeffer had his knife out and was trying to get at the one that Farrar and Smith were fighting.

  There was no sign of Stanley. His side of the gunwale was empty.

  I was about to wade into the fight in the bottom of the boat when Farrar got his dive knife past the thing’s desperately flailing limbs and plunged it to the hilt in its eye. The eyeball popped, and viscous and faintly luminous fluid sprayed from the wound. Farrar twisted the knife, grinding it against bone as he cored out the creature’s brain, or whatever it had in its place. The monster went limp, its last breath coming out with a disgusting gurgle.

  Santos had driven his attacker off and rolled back into the boat, almost landing on Smith. He immediately reached into his vest, pulled out a magazine, and loaded his M4. “Go Condition One, while we’ve got a minute.”