Odin: A Military Sci-Fi Series
Author: Devon C. Ford
Date: 2021-12-20 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction
Description: Both sides take a step back to regroup, after a desperate battle over one system leaves the Combines States and the New Russian Confederacy reeling from heavy losses. Utilizing the might of their allies, the Combined States push for control over systems that would cut the NRC’s supply lines and force them to sue for peace. Now a fledgling member of the elite Special Operations Group, Sergeant Mike Barton finds himself attached to Odin Nine-Five for a mission to shatter the food supply lines of their enemies in the outer reaches.

SCOURGE

©2021 DEVON C. FORD

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Contents

ALSO IN SERIES

Prologue

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

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Epilogue

Thank you for reading Scourge

ALSO IN SERIES

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ALSO IN SERIES

Scourge

Hades

Odin

For Mike, Michael, Mark and Mike, or as I like to call them, Mmmm…

Prologue

My head rang like a damn bell. My chest burned, my armor was dented and scorched from taking direct hits, and I had no fucking idea where my rifle was. I smelled cooked meat, like when someone left sausages in a pan for too long, and it took me a few more seconds to figure out the smell was coming from me.

My fingers touched the right side of my neck and made me shy away from the stab of pain. Looking down at my gloved fingertips, I saw a kind of sticky goo on them.

Am I… melting? What the fuck? I don’t want to die on this back-ass planet!

“Get up! Get up, now!”

The words were shouted; I knew that from the way the new kid’s face twisted and how he put all the effort he could into it, but the sound was dulled, quieter than it should be, like I was underwater. I know that’s a cliché but it’s one of those that’s actually true.

“What happened?” I asked, the words coming out of my mouth sounding like a bugle played slowly.

“Get up! Move, marine!” the kid screamed desperately as he dropped to one knee and took his last magazine from the carrier on his chest plate.

I tried to get up like I was told, only my legs didn’t want to respond. He shouted at me again and again, his face red and veins bulging in his neck, but I couldn’t even answer him I was so fucked up. My legs didn’t do what I told them to, my skin was melting, my armor was screwed, and I’d lost my rifle. My head spun even worse and all I could think of is the corrective training I was going to catch for getting messed up and losing my rifle.

Man, the staff sergeant’s going to have. My. Ass.

Shots punched the air above my head, making fast forward noises like a tiny ground transport zipping by too fast to see. The kid raised his Mk6 and started thumping rounds back downrange, just like he’d been taught to, and the sight of him mesmerized me for a second.

Fuck yeah, marine. Get some! Get the sons of bitches.

My stunned moment of admiration shattered when he took a round to the right hip that sent him bending and turning before a second hit took him in the left shoulder to flatten him out hard on his back. His legs were bent under his ass and his torso was twisted to the left grotesquely.

Grotesquely? Why the hell am I using big words? He looks like shit and fell down like a bag of damn bones.

His rifle fell beside him and I looked at it, feeling somehow as though he’d still be alive if only I could pick it up and keep that part of him in the fight.

My legs twitched but still didn’t want to do what I told them, so I started to drag my sorry ass toward it with my hands. Pain lanced throughout my whole body and my vision started to go all fucking fuzzy at the edges, but I kept crawling toward it as the air around me filled with the sound of… thrumming, angry zipping noises.

Tungsten bullets, my brain told me, like the kind of munitions mattered when I was half paralyzed and only had busted armor and a sidearm to my name.

The screaming whine of turbojets drowned out the sound of the rounds as the dull, yellow light from the system’s sun was blocked out by the arrival of a rapid transport that slammed into the dirt to raise a cloud of grit and dust all around me, making my shitty day even worse with a face full of sand.

HeliMedics jumped down, scattering out of the open side as the door gunner cranked back on the Mod 1 Heavy and started to stitch bursts behind me. A medic, the red cross on the shoulder plate of his armor looking as if it had been drawn in blood like a damn finger painting, stopped to check the kid. He shook his head and pointed at me, joining another of his HeliMed buddies as they yanked me up under my armpits.

“My rifle,” I said weakly, my voice sounding like someone else’s. “Can’t… lose… my rifle…”

The medic under my left arm cursed, but I didn’t hear the words. I mean, I totally got his point—there he was risking his ass to save some dumb grunt who’s all like, “Hey, can we swing by my place to grab a few things?”

What the fuck? You’re losing it, Barton.

He bent to scoop up the kid’s rifle in his hand and the two of them propelled me toward the transport where they threw me in behind the door gunner. He was still hammering away like he only paid for a half hour and wanted his money’s worth.

I didn’t see what he was shooting at. I didn’t want to see what the fuck he was shooting at but I knew what they were. At least I knew what they looked like, but I didn’t have the first fucking clue what they were. Not anymore.

It wasn’t possible, but sure as shit that’s what went down. I saw it with my own eyes. I didn’t know what happened, or how it happened, but I knew it was real because I’d been there and seen it myself.

The guy I thought was the crew chief dragged me in and threw a strap over me, forcing the rifle into my hand and squeezing my gloved fingers to shout in my face and tell me not to let it go. He pushed up off me and raised a submachine gun to fire out the open hatch.

His armor was different. His shoulder didn’t bear the medic’s sigil but had crossed axes and no rank badges.

That was the last thing I saw before the world went dark and the pain stopped.

Chapter 1

Six Hours Earlier

Corporal Mike Barton, CSMC

“Barton, get your lazy ass up! Move!” Staff Sergeant Wendel Havelock bawled about an eighth of an inch from my ear. Whether I was an acting squad leader or not, the guy was skating on thin fucking ice with how he talked to people. If he’d been a sergeant or I hadn’t still been a corporal, I’d have considered reading the guy his damn horoscope in some dark corner, but if life had taught me one thing, it was to pick my battles. Out here, this far away from Earth, assholes like that got away with treating people like shit, right up until the moment they didn’t.

“I’m up,” I groaned, flopping my head forward and counting down from three until I forced my eyes open one at a time, then both together to curse the day I fell for the recruiter’s bullshit. Man, I hated jump sleep, even if I did get to “see the galaxy.” Every wake-up felt like the biggest, craziest bachelor party ever.

In fact, I’d been on a bachelor party where I’d woken up not knowing where the hell I was, only to find out a few of us actually crossed the border into Mexico without our passports, but this was still worse. Every damn time.

It didn’t get easier at all, in spite of the bullshit we were sold when we signed on. Even the older guys gave up telling us we’d get used to it, because it fucked them up just as much every time.

“Now, Corporal Barton, you piece of shit! Move, move, move!”

I moved. I didn’t even feel hurt by that particular insult because I felt like a piece of shit. Anyone who described jump sleep like a light hangover was an asshole. The staff sergeant barking in my face was an asshole. Hell, I was an asshole for signing up in the first damn place.

“Moving, Staff Sergeant,” I answered, working my lips and running my tongue over my teeth like they were stuck together with peanut butter, imagining the day I could sign my way right out of the corps and frame my DD two-fourteen on a wall somewhere permanent.

Preferably somewhere I could see it when I woke up naturally with nobody screaming in my face, so I probably shouldn’t marry a stripper in a hurry.

Maybe “moving” wasn’t all that accurate. I was stumbling, like the ship’s artificial gravity was off and it was trying to pull me in a sideways loop, like if I was in an open space and not enclosed in there, I’d just keep going in a big circle.

Slamming into my locker, I opened it on the third try like a drunk trying to get in the house quietly and reached inside for my cammies. Already the cold of the floor was burning my feet through my socks and making me do a little dance from one foot to the other so they didn’t get too cold. They kept our sleep tubes at a temperature that a human could survive when the ship was locked down, but everywhere else dropped down real low and took a long time to level out. Space is seriously fucking cold.

Trousers and blouse on, I sat on the cold floor to slip on my boots and nearly tripped the guy stumbling past me.

“Hey, Corporal, you trying to kill me?” PFC Cooke said as he tried to avoid my legs and ended up spinning off to slam into the tube I’d been taking a nap in.

“Sorry kid,” I said, dragging myself to my feet and tugging him back upright.

“You know, it would make more sense if they let us come around in our own time. I mean, an hour wouldn’t kill anybody, right? You think the officers get screamed at until they’re recovered?” Cooke complained, his Boston accent making the complaint sound even more indignant.

He had a point, but seeing as how he’d come out on the last batch of recruits to join the company, he was still in the mindset of being on Earth where a marine could run a grievance up the chain of command and not find himself guarding the female head wearing just his shorts for eighteen months straight.

“This is the Combined States Marine Corps, don’t confuse it with an organization that gives a fuck what you think makes sense, kid,” I told him as I propelled him ahead of me into the parade deck. It wasn’t actually used for parades, but it was where the three squads of our platoon assembled. In two other sections of the ship, another six squads were gathering and probably feeling just as fucked up as we were.

“What are you waiting for, a signed invitation? Move your fat ass, PFC Cooke, before I spit on my dick and remind you of your uncle visiting at Christmas!” Staff Sergeant Havelock yelled, perpetuating the myth that the son of a bitch could hear people talking shit about his beloved corps through a vacuum.

Cooke perked up and jogged ahead of me like he’d drunk too much and only slept for an hour before morning PT. I knew that jog because I’d done it more than once in my life. Every marine had.

The kid was new, but he was smart. This was his first time afloat, so I cut him some slack because he was one hundred percent right about nobody else having to wake up to threats of violence. I mean, we were a resource, so it didn’t pay to intentionally screw up one of your resources just because you didn’t feel like giving it five minutes to get its bearings, right?

It was one of those things. Like the fact that I’d ended up leading a squad by default in an unhappy platoon under a baby-faced butter bar LT and a staff sergeant with a permanent hard-on for making us sweat. It was like the motherfucker fed on being hated.

We fell in, the other marines of our squad looking just as queasy as we did, and tried to stand still as Havelock paced along our line with a straight back wearing boots, cammie trousers, dog tags and an expression of pure fucking hatred.

“Sorry excuses for marines,” he growled, trying to sound disappointed but unable to hide the fact that he loved every second spent giving us shit. “You take a three-week-long nap, and all I ask of you is that you get your well-rested asses out of bed to stand on my ready line when I say so.”

“Attention on deck!” a voice barked from behind him, but he was already stamping to attention like he had an inbuilt electronic warfare suite that could detect an officer from half a click away. That’s what I hated about Havelock the most. He was an evil son of a bitch to everyone below his rank, and that included second lieutenants unless another officer was around.

“At ease,” Captain Prescott said as he strode in confidently, walking fast ahead of the lieutenants and the first sergeant. “Listen up. As of zero-eight-forty-one, we entered an active conflict zone. A little over three weeks ago, a colony on some back-ass planet out here sent a distress call on wideband frequency. Our good friends in the NRC did us a favor and responded first, but they haven’t been heard from after mission deployment six days ago. Total radio silence.”

I kept my face neutral while my mind raced. I’d heard the scuttlebutt about this being an SOS investigation before we took a nap—that was simple enough to understand—but finding out we had troops from the New Russian Confederacy in the mix did not make me feel very comfortable. Honestly, I preferred the deployments where we didn’t have to do anything, not even stand guard and open up on whatever natural predator took too close of an interest in the colonists.

“To be clear, there is no indication that the NRC are hostile in this sector, as the claims here are undisputed; but we will deploy, we will investigate, and we will respond accordingly. Gear up, we drop in two hours.” He turned away, leaving the first sergeant to call us to attention.

Eyeballing each squad in turn, he bawled the words to dismiss us and followed the officers.

“Carry on.”

Immediately our platoon leaders started barking at us, hurrying us up to get into our gear.

“Come on, kid, with me,” I said, turning the boot and propelling him to the ready lockers.

Our depleted uranium armor was designed to be put on by the user in quick time without assistance. Now, anyone who served knew that obviously meant that it was impossible to get it right by yourself unless you had, like, four fucking elbows or something and you could see through your ass, which is why we’d perfected the buddy system through hours and hours of endless repetitive drills.

Good, old-fashioned, honest-to-God, mind-numbing, never-ending fucking drills.

The kid slipped on his vest and arm bracers, all shiny and new, leaving them unfastened while he pulled the leg pads up over his boots to cover his thighs. I did the same, not bothering to even attempt the clips out of experience until we were both standing there with our protective gear hanging off us like we’d slept in it.

“So how come you’re the squad leader now?” Cooke asked. I saw a couple other guys intentionally look away, but I knew they’d be listening to my response.

“Because Sergeant Foxall contracted an incurable communicable infection,” I told him, not looking up as I spoke in case I smiled.

“What, like an alien cold or something?”

“No, kid, it’s the kind of disease you catch from going behind enemy lines…”

“Wait, he was deployed? When did we get deployed? Did they leave me asleep?”

“He got a fuckin’ dose, kid,” Ramirez said from his locker a half dozen paces away, ending the torment of having to explain the birds and the bees to the new recruit.

“A dose of what?” Cooke answered, proving to me again that an education didn’t necessarily mean intelligence.

“A dose,” I said. “Dick rot? Crotch-critters? He ordered the clam chowder, you know what I’m saying, kid?”

He looked at me dumfounded for a second before a childish smirk crossed his face and he colored up while trying to hide a laugh.

“Guess he missed that safety brief,” Cooke muttered, not quite having the guts to crack a joke out loud. “Dude went into battle without a combat cover?”

“Worse than that, kid,” Ramirez laughed having heard him anyway. “You shoulda seen the fuckin’ size of what he stuck his d—”

“You geared up yet, Ramirez?” I barked, fixing him with a look until he shut up talking and just muttered to himself quiet enough so I could ignore it.

“… had about four and half teeth and an ass like a motherfuckin’ dropship…”

We took turns clipping the shoulder and arm sections onto our vests, tightening it all up afterward so that it looked how it was supposed to. The downside of it being in the right place to protect as much of my upper body as it could while still allowing me to move meant that I could breathe at about eighty percent capacity.

Perfect. I mean, come on, it wasn’t like the people we worked for liked to make us run everywhere carrying heavy gear or anything.

Well, not perfect. If you wanted perfection, you should’ve recruited a few actual marines who’d been in combat and asked them how a new armor system should work, instead of asking a bunch of guys looking at the bottom line what they thought a marine in the field might need if he was the conscientious type who was mindful of budgetary concerns. The kind of people who had to be shown what a marine actually was. You know the type. Back-office assholes.

Spoiler alert: apparently the marine in the field needed awkward-to-fit armor made in the cheapest way from the thinnest DU possible. But whatever, I digress.

When the upper body sections were strapped on tight, we pulled out our belts that incorporated the groin plate and strapped the thigh plates to them before taking an awkward knee and strapping on the lower leg guards that covered our boots right down to the steel alloy toes.

The usual round of dick slapping happened while everyone had a real good laugh at the groin protection. Yeah, they looked dumb, but the thought of taking a round where it was? I’d rather take one to the face.

Me and the kid stood opposite each other, checking one another out and adjusting straps until the other looked like they were supposed to. Both of us had an empty pistol holster on our right thigh plates, mag carriers for the Mk30 sidearm on the left, and the half dozen pouches on the chest plates were ready to take Mk6 spare rifle ammo.

“You good?” I asked, reaching into his locker and pulling out his combat cover. After handing him the helmet as he tried a few test flexes, he looked me right in the eye and I swore he was about to shit his skivvies.

“I’m good, Corporal, thanks,” he said as he hauled his mostly empty pack onto one shoulder.

“Kid, you want the staff sergeant to put his foot in your ass?” I said, reaching back into his locker and pulling out the plasma knife that was missing from the sheath on his chest. He smiled nervously, apologizing like it affected me and not him, and shot a glance at my own.

Like a lot of the guys who’d been in a real fight, I wore mine upside down and a little higher on my chest. It was personal preference and one of the few things the corps didn’t have a damn regulation about. I mean, they did, obviously, but it was one that wasn’t really enforced unless we were on parade somewhere.

Dressed for war we still had about an hour and fifty minutes until the reported drop time, and I knew almost all of that would be spent rushing to wait while a tiny portion of it would be spent actually preparing for a drop, and even less time would be informing us what the fuck was going on down on the surface of buttfuck-nowhere-random-number planet.

“Armory, move your asses,” Havelock yelled, cuffing marines over their heads if they weren’t wearing their covers as they filed past.

“You pussies need a lie in? Wanna talk about your damn feelings because the corps is too tough for your gender-neutral asses?” he screamed as if his malice could make us move faster, when marines in armor took up a lot of space when they bottlenecked through a single doorway. “You wanna sit on a bean bag and talk about your mommy’s titties breastfeeding you?” Havelock added, ramping up the abuse like he couldn’t stop himself.

I hated that man, not because he gave me shit but because of the way he went after the younger guys. The kids fresh out of school, straight into boot, and packed off out to… wherever the fuck we were, before they even needed to shave. A guy like that back on Earth or in the core planets would find himself neck deep in shit, so long as the platoon had an officer who gave a fuck about their people. In that respect, we’d drawn another short straw and won the lottery with some fucking nine-year-old, or however the hell old the LT was.

But I’d have felt different about it if I’d been one of those kids who hadn’t seen the galaxy much before joining up.

Now, I hadn’t joined straight out of high school like a lot of the guys had. I’d gone to college. Yeah, I know, why in the fuck was I not giving orders instead of taking them and blah-fuckin’-blah? I’m a dumbass, okay. I mean, not literally, but I’d made a few life choices I regretted from time to time. Point is, I didn’t know a damn place in the galaxy where a supervisor could make statements like that and not find themselves looking for alternative employment pretty fast unless they were in the military. Here, shit, here everything was fair game whether it was relevant or not.

We fell in line and I kept the kid in front of me. He’d trained for this just like we all had, but unlike the rest of our squad, he’d never done a real drop before, and I knew from bitter experience how that changed things in just about every way possible.

The armory, basically a weapons locker the size of a fast-food drive-thru window serving our three platoons, was in the least obvious and useful place possible. I handed over my MOS card to collect my weapon from where it was locked away in transit. After the guy behind the counter matched the number to the right spot on the rack, he handed over my Mk6. I knew that serial number as well as I knew my own right hand, and after being out in the far reaches for long enough… well, you know. I knew my hand intimately but I knew that weapon better.

For all the bullshit people believed about the corps, that rifle was a part of me. I had seven magazines for the weapon, and at the next window, I filled them fast using the speedloader machines we never saw in training. I mean, that made sense, right? Train to hand-load all your magazines because you’d never actually do it for real?

Slotting six of them with the tungsten projectiles pointing down and tips facing my right in my pouches, I had to awkwardly hold the last one in my not free hand. Why? Well, because loading a rifle right there would get me so far up on everyone’s shit list, I’d be lucky to get out of any punishment without ending up pregnant. With twins.

The next guy handed over a Mk30 pistol and I loaded my three magazines for it. Two spares went bullets down and points facing backward in the thigh pouches on my left while the gun went in the holster on my right leg, and the last magazine jostled in my left hand with the rifle mag. It was important to orientate my mags so I could just trust my muscle memory to get it right if I was concentrating on other stuff and needed to reload.

All of this was like muscle memory, because I’d done it so many times and never had to use either weapon. That kind of thing could make a marine complacent unless he had his head screwed on right.

Shit like that they taught you, but until you’ve been crapping your pants and trying to make yourself small enough to fit inside your own ballsack to avoid incoming rounds, the last thing you wanted to be doing was thinking about which damn way the magazine went in the rifle. Trust me.

Putting both mags down on the last counter, I slung my rifle and pulled around my pack to fill it with the other shit I had to carry. The radio came next and I had to plug it into my gear, switch it to whatever channel was written in pen on the filthy square of white that held the channel digits, and run a quick test. The guy nodded to say he’d heard me and pointed at the second set of digits to give me the deployment squad net.

“EW pack, too,” I told the guy handing out the gear. He pulled a package off the shelf and lifted the flap to flick a switch. I knew he’d gotten green lights on it because he flicked the switch again and dropped the flap before sliding it to me.

The electronic warfare projector, or jammer as the old-timers called it, stayed in my pack along with water and a forty-eight-hour ration pack that was standard deployment gear.

If we were down there any longer, the support units would land—gently, like civilized people and not basically thrown out in orbit like the unwanted kids we were—and set up a FOB.

I hoped I’d be back on board before that ration pack was even opened because… well, because they put a few wet wipes in there like eating the stuff in the pouches would actually make you need them, but that wasn’t always the case. There was a reason people called them “back-up” packs.

The last items were the two thorium micro reactors, that powered both weapons, which went into a separate, tightly secured pouch. Then I filed off to hurry my ass up and wait, eventually filing my way to the front where, under the supervision of a gunnery sergeant, because nobody trusted us to do anything right unless we were being watched, I loaded both weapons with the barrels pointed into the safety bucket before fitting the reactors to them and heading for my boomerang.

Chapter 2

Barton

“Standby for drop,” the driver’s voice said over the speakers in the boomerang—that’s what everyone called the modular orbital deployment craft because the ship threw them out and they just came back.

“Man, I fucking hate this part,” a marine opposite me cursed, locked into his standing harness as if we were all about to go on a fairground ride none of us had volunteered for. The driver didn’t hear, or he just ignored it, because he started counting down from ten, probably just to make the anticipation even more agonizing.

The boomerangs weren’t actual ships, so the pilots were drivers and not real zoomies like the ones who’d deployed from the ship to run the combat air patrol around the carrier. I’d heard them being deployed over the boomerang’s radio speaker, but their reports were obviously sent via a different channel so us mere mortals didn’t get to hear any real-time intel come back.

“Seven… Six…”

I pulled a mouthguard out of a pouch and fitted it to my top teeth, moving my lips in exaggerated ways to work it in comfortably before I bit down on it.

“Three… Two…”

Beside me, Ramirez let fly with his usual rapid-fire prayer in Spanish so fluidly strung together that it was a single sound bite.

“One… Drop!”

My balls headed north for the summer and my teeth clenched so hard that the mouthguard flattened a little under the pressure. My first training drop had resulted in a three-day exercise being cut short by forty-eight hours because I’d cracked a molar from clenching so hard. The drill instructor decided to call me Keith the Teeth after that, which was a hell of a lot better than some of the names he’d given to the other guys.

The navy dentist gave me a thirty-second blast on some gas, then told me he’d take a look before gripping the two broken halves together and ripping them out. No expense spared, literally none. I remember thinking that dentist must’ve been the bravest guy in the whole Combined States military, because while everyone else spent their lives gearing us up to kill in various and creative ways, there was this asshole testing our self-control. It was like he wanted one of us to jump up and kill him with his own damn pliers or something.

Two spots to my left, PFC Cooke, the “kid” as everyone called him, was locked in and he seemed okay with everything, the little prick. His head was pressed back as per the manual and his mouth held slightly open. I hoped he didn’t bite his tongue off when we hit atmosphere because that would be a shitty way to end your first deployment. If they couldn’t reattach it properly, they’d give him three months’ pay and drop him off at the nearest star port with a travel warrant to get home. Eventually.

Pushing that thought out of my head, I focused on not throwing up, which meant tensing my stomach muscles hard. Only I couldn’t keep that up for the amount of time it took to accelerate toward the atmosphere, so I had to count to thirty and take a big gulp of air before I tensed up again.

That gulp was the dangerous part, because if my stomach contents really wanted out, that was when they were going to make a break for it.

“Ten seconds to atmosphere,” the driver’s voice said, still sounding cool and collected like he did this shit all the time and was already thinking about sinking a nice, cold beer when he got back. I tried to count down the ten seconds but was way off, because when I thought the word “two,” the pressure forcing me up into the padded harness reversed to slam the part where my balls should’ve been into the support between my legs, which only served to jam the groin armor into my thigh. If I was a, uh, bigger man that might’ve posed more of a risk of serious injury.

The rumbling of the boomerang intensified and the temperature inside our section doubled in a second to make my skin prickle with the sudden heat. Of all the millions of dollars the corps could spend, I just wished a single one of them went on something, just one damn thing, that made my life even just a little easier.

The intense rumbling as we cooked our way through the atmosphere went on for long enough that I started to breathe faster, like a dog panting to cool down, only I didn’t open my mouth and stick my tongue out because I wanted to keep it. It stopped just as suddenly, but that meant we’d broken through in one piece and the wind resistance kicked in to bounce us around like we were going to shake apart.

Three minutes of enduring that was enough to make anyone want to get off, so when the driver started calling out a countdown to landing, I braced myself for the worst part since the initial drop from the carrier.

This guy favored the four-stage flare approach, I noticed, as I fought the simultaneous urges to throw up and shit my pants at the same time. That was better than the jackoffs who liked to pull a two-stage flare, or the “tactical landing” as they called it, because that was a lot of pressure to take in the groin, whether I was wearing a dick plate or not.

When the last flare made me certain I was now a half inch shorter than when I’d started, I was grateful to hit the dirt on whatever shithole, back-ass colony planet this was so I could get shit done and get the fuck off it.

“Alright ladies, what are you waiting for? A dick punch? Move your asses!” Havelock yelled, like he’d just woken up after the drop had lulled him to sleep. The fact that there actually was one female in the squad and four in just our platoon seemed to make no difference to him. It was almost as if he wanted to get court-martialed just so he could get out.

I hit the red button above my head with a shaking hand to release the locking mechanism and adjusted my groin plate and balls. I stepped out of the harness and retrieved my rifle from the secure rack beside my seat before strapping it on. Havelock hustled us out of the boomerang and ordered us to dress up as a squad, but the captain strolled out of the nearest boomerang and ordered our LT to take the high ground.

The LT gave his orders, pretty much repeating what the captain had told him word for word, only without any of the confidence and at least one octave higher. I felt sorry for the kid, reckoning I was the only one who did. He was young, given a bunch of training seminars telling him he was in charge, and then he landed his baby smooth ass in a unit where guys his own age were hardened killers and the men supposedly under his command made it obvious they didn’t think he knew a goddam thing.

“You heard the… man, ready your weapons and move your asses!” Havelock screamed at us like we were the ones who’d had the idea to line up nice and straight instead of getting the job done.

We ran, moving as fast as we could under the loving overwatch of the world’s angriest staff sergeant who felt it was his mission to be on our collective case every second of every day. It was tough going, and I guessed I’d missed the part in the briefing where they warned us the gravity was a little heavier than Earth’s and the atmosphere was a little lighter on oxygen than I liked.

The other two squads of our platoon did the same, our three units moving independently with the same goal in mind. It felt good to run, to stretch my lungs and my legs after sleeping for so long and waking up to massive tension. Every time we dropped like this, so soon after waking up, inevitably there was a complaint of excessive force or a suspect shooting. Each of those incidents was investigated and usually swept aside, but as I ran, I wondered how many of those would never have happened if they’d just given us another hour to wake up and maybe an extra cup of coffee before they launched us with high stress levels.

The high ground was where a trio of wind turbines sat beside a central convertor unit. Taking cover automatically, we scanned the ground all around us, and I saw nothing weird.

I mean, at first I saw nothing weird, then it dawned on me that I saw nothing at all which in itself was seriously weird.

“Staff Sergeant? How many people are supposed to live here?” I asked.

“Excuse me for just a minute while I head down and take a damn census, Corporal. How in the hell should I know?”

I ignored Havelock’s generic abuse in response to the fact that he didn’t have an answer and tried to work it out myself.

Housing units lined the north road heading out of the little town. I could see processing units and what I guessed was a quarry in the middle distance, based on the massive dump truck abandoned in the flattened dirt that passed for a main road. So far as I could see, this looked like some version of the wild west in the outer regions of the galaxy, only instead of land and gold, it was…

“Hey, what do they mine here?” I asked Cooke.

“Neodymium, Corporal,” he said, like I had a clue whatever that was. I guessed it was rare and valuable, otherwise why would whichever corporation that backed this colony have invested the billions of dollars it would take to set up shop here? “And tungsten,” he added, giving the magazine of his rifle a loving pat.

“Staff Sergeant Havelock, take your squad and clear the buildings from the eastern edge. Corporal Barton, do the same and take one side of the street each,” the lieutenant ordered. Havelock glared at the officer for a second before giving a nod and turning his frustration on his squad and mine, like he didn’t think I was up to the task of leading them and he felt responsible for both units.

No matter what we did, it wasn’t done fast enough. No matter how fast we did something, it wasn’t done well enough. I’d served long enough to know that his job was to strive to make us work harder and smarter, but damn if he couldn’t vary his approach just once, you know? Try a little carrot instead of all stick. If he just took a few of the guys aside occasionally and helped them out instead of tearing them new assholes for fucking up, then he might earn a little respect. I guessed he was happy enough being feared instead.

We moved, tactically this time as we bounded forward and took cover until the squad eventually stacked up on a wall at the very eastern edge.

“No bangs,” Havelock ordered as he took his squad to the other side of the wide street and counted it down on his fingers. When the fingers had all folded down into a fist, he pumped it down.

And we went to work.

This was what we trained for. We drilled in the dark, we drilled in the light, we drilled in simulated gravity. We trained room clearance so much that any marine with more than three years’ service could conduct those drills in their sleep.

I stepped in behind the lead marine, rifle butt out of my shoulder and elbow up high to brace the weapon in case I had to fire it, wishing they’d allow us to carry the shorter barrel version for exactly this kind of situation. I mean, shorter barrel meant less metal and that would save them money, right? Obviously not.

We swept the room, finding it empty in a way that made me think it wasn’t so much abandoned, but more like the people had just… gone. The next rooms were even smaller so I slung the Mk6 and drew my Mk30 pistol so I could move easier.

“Clear!” rang out from all around and we filed back out to stack up and hit the next building in the line. Then the next, and the next and so on until we were breathing heavily and sweating. We had maybe ten more housing units to clear before the height and size of the buildings changed, but what got me the most was that these places were so basic. It felt more familiar to the kind of places we slept instead of where civilians rested their heads.

There was a small sitting room, two bedrooms that looked like they belonged in a fifty-dollar motel, and a bathroom to match. No kitchen, no real sense of individuality or comfort. I pushed that out of my head as we worked, clearing the rest of the houses and finding all of them the same.

Empty.

No signs of forced entry, no signs of a struggle anywhere and nothing to say that people had packed up and gone anywhere.

“Clear,” Havelock called out from the other side of the road.

“Clear,” I called back. He signaled us to move to his side of the street and run the drills on the next building. It needed the whole squad because, unlike the little living quarters, this one had two floors

Once inside I went left, PFC Cooke on my shoulder as we entered a room that felt familiar. It was a ready room, and it looked the same all over the galaxy. The gun rack stood empty save for a single colonial Mod 18, which was the stripped-down civilian version of what we carried, and the small arms locker was left open.

“Check that,” I told Cooke, pointing at the locker.

“Empty,” he said. “No ammo.”

That didn’t sit right with me at all. I guessed this was the place where the colony had their own little mercenary squad like almost all of them did; mostly these guys were former army or marines, but a lot of them were security washouts or police department failures from all over who told stories about conflicts they hadn’t fought in.

I’d met more than a few mercs in my service and the sheer number of them who intimated they were former SOG added up to more tier one guys bouncing around the galaxy than there were marines or army grunts combined. Mostly they claimed they were part of the Stonemeyer Embassy siege back in 2301, which meant that of the six guys the footage showed on the balcony, there must’ve been closer to six hundred.

The fact that they had a merc house here wasn’t strange at all, because a hell of a lot of these colony planets had wildlife issues to deal with before any roving gangs of pirates, but the fact that it was empty and had been cleaned out of all their weapons and ammunition was pretty suss.

“Secure it,” I said, hitting the transmit button and calling Havelock.

“Send it,” the staff sergeant’s voice came back; even just being called on the radio apparently making him angry.

“We’ve got a weapons cache cleaned out. No sign of trouble, over.”

“Secure it, move on,” he ordered. I said nothing past an acknowledgement and carried on clearing the building.

We moved upstairs, again the familiar shapes we had to make with our bodies feeling natural, until the empty corridor showed me a couple of closed doors.

“El pendejo, you smell that?” Ramirez said behind me, but I’d already detected the delightful aroma he was talking about.

It was not a nice smell.

I gave hand signals for my squad to move, and resisting the urge to go straight for the closed doors, we worked our way methodically toward them until the first blocked door leaked the intensified smell through the half dozen bullet holes punched through it.

I tried the handle and shook my head, stepping back for Ramirez to breach it.

He had some specialist gear in his ruck to do that, but being the testosterone-fueled marine he was, he tried the hero method first.

It was just an internal door so it should’ve given in to a boot. It most definitely should’ve given in to the boot Ramirez delivered, but instead of flying open it just broke around the lock and caved in on impact, but stayed firmly shut.

Ramirez kicked again, and again and again until the door began to break down in pieces.

“Barricaded,” I said, stepping back to give him more room to work with the tools he carried.

We maintained protection on the corridor until Ramirez tore the door out in two parts and stepped away.

I moved in, weapon up and scanning as I kicked the remaining parts of the barricade aside only for the smell of shit and ammonia to hit me so hard in the face my eyes watered.

Another smell overrode that. It was spoiled meat mixed with shit and piss, and I knew what I’d find in there even before I laid eyes on it.

The rest of my guys were in behind me, calling the place clear through choked words from the smell.

“Kid, secure that weapon,” I told Cooke. To his credit he didn’t flinch, just lowered his rifle and stepped close to pull the gun out of a dead woman’s hand. She was dressed in the filthy remnants of a colony uniform, but not a set of miner’s coveralls. The vest she wore was way too big for her so I guessed she wasn’t one of the mercs, otherwise her gear would fit. She had shoulder-length hair which was probably a dirty blonde when it was washed, but it was caked in filth and black blood now.

Ramirez leaned over Cooke to see her better, muttering another prayer and crossing himself.

“Shame. Looks like she was hot,” he said, making me feel a little sick.

“Yeah, he’d probably still fuck her even now,” Bayle said from the doorway.

“You’re sick, man,” Ramirez countered. “Maybe a couple weeks ago though—”

“Weapon’s empty,” the kid announced, changing the subject before I had to say something to shut the others up. I knew they wouldn’t talk like that in front of one of the sergeants, and it pissed me off. I didn’t want to be the hardass and chew them out, but the time for shit talk was not there and not then.

“Next room,” I said, dwelling on the fact that the woman had evidently opened up on someone trying to get in before saving the last round for herself.

Ramirez breached the next door a little more easily but found nothing. I called up to report the find on the comm.

“Secure it and move on,” the lieutenant ordered.

We carried on going door to door until we reached the square at the center of the little town, where the captain stood and took the verbal reports from his lieutenants.

“Hey,” Cooke said beside me. I leaned back on the wall, hurrying up to be ready to do the next thing they told us.

“What?”

“What went on down here? Everyone just disappeared.”

I shrugged like it didn’t matter to me. It did, only not enough to make me worry about it. “Not everyone.”

“Yeah, but everyone else did, right? What the hell would make them do that? What was after her that she did herself like that?” he asked insistently, as if the mysteries of the galaxy had to be unraveled by him or else he’d never sleep.

“Don’t sweat it, kid. Not our place to lose sleep about it,” I told him.

“Yeah… but…”

“Hey, you see those guys there?” I asked, nodding my head toward the captain. “They’re paid to stress about it, not us.”

“So ours is not to reason why?” he intoned loftily. “You really believe that shit?”

I shot him a look designed to remind him that we weren’t buddies, and if he didn’t want his ass on a punishment detail, he better watch how he talked.

“Corporal,” he muttered by way of apology.

“Hey, you wanna cause yourself trouble you go right ahead, just don’t involve me in it, okay? That means you do it on your own goddam time and not mine,” I told him harshly, hoping he’d stop trying to think too much and just shut up.

He pushed himself off the wall like he was going to argue but he didn’t say a word. Following the line of his gaze, I saw the lieutenant walking in our direction.

“Our objective is the quarry,” he said, somehow making it sound like a question instead of a damn order.

“Time to suck it up, kid,” I told Cooke, as Havelock was already screaming abuse at his squad to move.

The quarry was further away than it looked from the high ground, but I guessed that was why we did PT until we were sucking oxygen through our asses every day.

The call to hold rippled down the line at the same time it came over the squad net into our helmets. I stopped, waiting to see if we were waiting for the LT to check which way we had to go or if there was actually something that might interest me, like the need to seek cover from fire in the immediate future.

Experience having taught me to preempt these things, I glanced around and chose a small dump truck that had a solid-enough-looking gear block I could hide behind if the need arose.

“Hey, Corporal,” Cooke hissed at me, making my eyes roll. I wished the kid would attach himself to someone else because his need to ask so many questions was already starting to piss me off.

“Barton!”

I turned to him, my best “shut the fuck up” already chambered with the safety off, but one look at his eyes made me stop. He pointed past my feet and I turned my head automatically in that direction but couldn’t see what had gotten him spooked. And he was most definitely spooked, with wide eyes and such a pathetic, open-mouthed look on his face that I took note.

“What?”

“Right there!” he hissed. I looked but still didn’t see what the fuck he was so concerned about.

“Staff Sergeant?” he called out in a voice that made him sound even younger than he was, making me wince that he was actually inviting the kind of punishment that would bring with it.

“No, PFC Cooke, you cannot use the damn head. You should’ve thought about that before we deployed,” Havelock barked as he stomped down the middle of the dusty road toward him. Cooke didn’t waver, just kept his left hand out straight and pointing at something.

“What’s the matter You see a bug? You upset because its dick is bigger than yours—”

Havelock froze, his mouth halfway open as whatever vile abuse he was about to deliver was forgotten.

“Romeo, Blue One,” he growled into his radio, accidentally transmitting it over our squad net and fumbling to switch to the platoon channel before repeating himself.

“You need to see this,” was all he reported to the lieutenant, who promptly came jogging back down from the head of the advance.

I’d had enough of the suspense at that point and walked toward Cooke, turning back to see what he was looking at from his perspective.

Holy fucking shitballs, was that… was that an arm?

It was. It was an arm, complete with a chunk of shoulder and a uniform sleeve in what looked like black material. Dropping down on my knees and slinging my rifle behind my back, I reached in and grabbed the material with finger and thumb to drag it out from under the dump truck, dropping it on the dirt near Havelock’s feet.

The lieutenant looked like he was going to cry. Or hurl. Or both, but what he didn’t do was anything useful.

“Cover,” Havelock barked, if only to send the three squads of gawping marines away to look outward. I moved to stand up but something on the sleeve of the severed arm caught my attention. Drawing my plasma knife, but not activating the burn feature, I flipped it over with the point like it might still come to life and get me...

Hey, would you really want to touch a severed arm even with gloves on? No, didn’t think so. Shut up.

“Ho-ly shit,” I said when the thing that caught my attention revealed itself. The material wasn’t black, it was dark red soaked in old blood. The patch on the sleeve revealed Cyrillic letters that I couldn’t read, but the old-world emblem of a parachute was impossible to miss.

“Staff Sergeant, looks like we have NRC paratroopers in the AO,” I said.

“Not all of them,” Havelock answered, peering closer at the severed limb as if it could provide answers.

The lieutenant finally reacted and started doing something, walking a short distance away and speaking rapidly into his radio before coming back to give his orders.

“Advance to the quarry and secure the objective.”

Chapter 3

Lieutenant Colonel John J. Desoto, CSMC

CSS Forthright Ground Combat Information Center

“Sir, all orbital pods safely on the ground. Troops are deploying,” the naval lieutenant reported. Desoto, running the GCIC onboard the carrier CSS Forthright, acknowledged her report with a nod and watched the screens, waiting for video to come online while his brain multitasked.

“Any sign of that NRC ship yet?”

“Sir, no sir,” a naval rating refreshing the ground combat information center’s sensor feed answered. Desoto frowned, not at the thought of conflict but at the idea that he didn’t know if there even was a danger to counter.

Desoto hated being a lieutenant colonel. He’d hated being a major before that, but the Combined States Marine Corps made it clear to him that he couldn’t remain a captain forever, and that he had to choose between promotion or leaving the corps.

“Marines don’t belong behind desks, sir,” was what he’d told the major general who summoned him to give that ultimatum. The fact that the general himself was behind a desk made his words risky, but the old man had assured him he understood the predicament even if he was making the man choose there and then if he was going up or going out.

Promotion was the lesser of those two evils, but Desoto longed for the days when he was back in the thick of it as a captain. He could still run things, still take responsibility for the lives of his men while he risked his own alongside them, but sitting up in orbit and acting as the coach on the sidelines instead of being the quarterback on the field of play made his blood boil.

“What do we know about it?” he asked, not sure which officer or rating in the GCIC would give that information but trusting them to recognize if the question was directed at them.

“Voin-class cruiser, sir, the Atlant. Well-armed and a heck of a lot faster than our carrier,” a marine lieutenant wearing the insignia of the intelligence activity on his uniform reported, adding an unnecessary accent to the Russian words.

Desoto patiently explained that he knew very well that a light cruiser had the edge on them in terms of speed and maneuverability, and that that wasn’t the question he’d asked. He wanted to know what that particular ship had been doing before they had responded to the colony distress call.

“Sir, intel indicates they were a deep system patrol boat with half a battalion of paratroopers assigned to her,” another officer said. “Last sighting has them passing a jump lane junction near Midway Station’s territory in late March.”

Desoto ran the basic numbers in his head, figuring that the last time anyone in the allied nations had seen the confederate ship had been over half a year before.

“Safe to assume they were working out of Ascension?” he asked, meaning the British outpost almost a week’s jump from Midway and eleven days from their current location.

Nobody answered, mostly because his reputation surrounding guesswork was less than kind.

“Come on, people, no wrong answers here. Let’s formulate a hypothesis,” he said to spur them on.

“Safe assumption, sir,” a female lieutenant answered. “Although there aren’t any active conflicts or territory challenges in the courts in this sector so their ‘deep system patrol’ would be taking them pretty darn close to Combined States space.”

Desoto swallowed to cover the response he wanted to blurt out. Of course, he knew that none of the planets in the handful of systems the nearest jump lane covered was currently having its ownership contested in the Earth courts, but biting off the head of someone he’d just invited to speak wouldn’t do his reputation any favors, nor would it increase the efficiency of his command. He hated the fact that, because of his senior rank, everyone under his relatively new command assumed he was unaware of how things were on the ground.

He wasn’t concerned about the Russian cruiser taking a shot at them because he knew the carrier had two wings of ready fighters in their launch tubes waiting to support the CAP already looping their massive ship for such an occurrence. If the NRC opened fire, they’d barely live long enough to reach the conclusion that it was a bad idea.

He didn’t control those fighters, however. The ship’s CIC under naval control managed that, leaving him to control the ground operation and request additional support from the captain of the ship should he need it. He thought of those pilots of the combat air patrol out in the dark and cold, running slow laps through empty space in case shit went down. He had no sympathy for them, and as with any career grunt, he held a deep-seated dislike of the zoomies, mostly born of jealousy for their fancy chow and comfortable beds and how they attracted female attention in a disproportionate ratio, even if they had a face like the shaved ass of a French pug.

The fact that they were naval aviators and not air force made zero difference to him because a zoomie was a zoomie to a grunt, no matter what color their uniform.

The only thing he could think of was that the NRC ship had put itself in orbit around the sun or any of the five other planets or moons nearby to shield their signature. Only he wouldn’t do that if he was them, because it would put him too far away to respond to his troops should they need orbital assistance.

“Keep scanning all active sensors,” he ordered the GCIC, “and recommend the bridge send out a welcome hail in English and Russian, just in case they feel like talking.”

He paced back toward the command chair and sat, waiting for the troops to deploy on the surface so many miles below them.

Hurry up and wait, just like if he was on the ground with his boys and girls. Only this time he was hurrying up and waiting in a safe, air-conditioned, combat information suite with coffee being brought to him every time he emptied his battered tin mug.

“Sir, Captain Prescott on the horn now, wishing to speak to you directly,” the ensign on comms reported. Desoto nodded and lifted the handset locked into the arm of his chair for the call to be connected.

“Desoto,” he growled as a greeting. All eyes in the GCIC watched him unless they were glued to the tasks that required constant monitoring. His facial muscles didn’t move as he acknowledged the report implacably.

“Understood, Captain, get me live feed and secure your AO, then report back. Out.”

Returning the handset to the cradle, he stood and drained the last dregs of cold coffee from the mug, then walked along the bank of monitors until one showed what he expected to see.

“Confirmed, sir,” the marine intelligence officer said confidently, “that’s the emblem of the 12th Guards Airborne Brigade.”

“What was their last posting?” Desoto asked, but the officer was already working on it.

“Last intelligence shows they were deployed nine months ago onboard various ships to patrol this sector past Ascension.”

“Hmmm,” Desoto growled again, not sure what revelations identifying the unit that had arrived ahead of them could’ve brought. “Signal the bridge, request a formal report be sent back to Midway for sanitization and dissemination to the NRC forces at Ascension. Tell them we’ve arrived at the colony and have found no sign of the ship that responded to the distress call.”

“Sir?” an ensign manning the monitoring stations said hesitantly. His finger was raised to point at the displays as half of them began to show scrolling static before blinking out.

“Ours?” Desoto asked, questioning if it was the marines who had activated their own EW countermeasures or if the troops were actively being blocked by an outside force.

“Not sure, sir…”

“Comm, signal the ground teams and request a report on electronic interference,” Desoto ordered, but the communications officer was already on it.

“They believe neodymium deposits in the quarry are interfering with signals, sir,” he reported. “Ground teams report no active jammers.”

“Is the BFT still active?” Desoto asked, prompting an officer to bring up a satellite image display with clusters of blue dots all over it.

“Blue force tracking system still operational, Colonel,” she said.

Desoto relaxed, almost wishing the NRC paratroopers would take a swing at them so they could break the deadlock of the cold war that had tied their hands for the last five years.

War got in the way of expansion and profits, but Lieutenant Colonel Desoto didn’t give a crap about business or politics. When the businesses couldn’t handle things with their little mercenary armies and the politicians couldn’t bribe, threaten, or otherwise convince someone to do what they wanted, that was where he and his marines came in.

“Sir, sensors detecting some minor seismic activity at the target site!”

Desoto turned to the speaker and had covered half the distance to his terminal when the comm officer’s voice erupted behind him.

“Sir! Jump lane buoys reporting three—no, four—NRC ships entering the sector!”

He almost gave orders, almost forgot that the captain of the ship was in another room like that one, ready to deal with all of the things he was suddenly panicking over. He lifted the handset beside his command chair to listen to the bridge where the captain gave the orders he wanted to hear.

“Request CIC launch ready birds and order all other fighters to standby, CAP to push out and blockade their approach to prevent them from launching any troops to the surface. Comm, get m—”

“Colonel!” the ensign monitoring the screens cried out. Desoto turned back to see through the static, not believing for a second what he saw.

Chapter 4

Barton

I’d found a few weird things on deployment. Mostly it was drugs, cash or more often than you’d think, a buttload of sex toys—pun very much intended—but a severed arm was right up there at the top of my list.

Moving into the bowl where the quarry sides began to slope down, the squad net glitched and sent a god-awful noise through my brain. I flinched, turning the volume down so it didn’t do that shit again, as did everyone else.

“EW check,” Havelock ordered angrily. I dropped to one knee and unstrapped my pack, dragging out the countermeasure bundle to show him that it was switched off. EW countermeasures were great, but they blinded us as much as they blinded the enemy, and almost every time we’d suffered the kind of glitch we just had, it was because some dumb grunt hadn’t secured his shit properly and the switch got flipped inside someone’s ruck.

Mistakes like that had a nasty habit of earning “prizes” for the entire platoon.

Unable to find the culprit among us, Havelock stomped up and down to double check none of us had fucked up the simple operation of a switch.

“It’s probably the mineral deposits inside the quarry, Staff Sergeant,” the lieutenant explained within my earshot. “They’re playing havoc with the electromagnetic pulses in this area. We’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way.”

“You heard the lieutenant,” Havelock barked at the platoon. “Eyes and ears open, unless you need me to staple them to your skulls.”

I looked at the digital readout on my rifle. I saw the charge was still active so I knew there couldn’t have been any kind of EMP. I was grateful for that, because if some big Russian paratrooper had already gotten his arm ripped off, I didn’t much feel like being down here with just a knife and my charming personality.

“Move out!” the order came down from the front. I moved, weapon up and senses frosty, until my boots sank into the soft grit that filled the quarry floor.

Mineshafts led off in four directions, no doubt following the natural lines of the deposits after the surface amount had been mined, and something about the lack of light inside them made me feel about ten years old and afraid of the dark.

Four mineshafts. Three squads.

“Barton, take your squad and clear that shaft. Go.” Havelock pointed his bladed hand straight at the furthest mine shaft and moved on to corral his own people to take the nearest tunnel.

I led the way over the soft surface, my boots digging in like I was on vacation and dressed all wrong for the beach, before the entrance to the underground tunnel loomed ahead of us.

“IR on sights,” I ordered, in case any of my marines felt like they could see in the dark. I flicked the selector on my weapon’s integrated targeting sights to infrared mode and saw nothing inside the mine shaft.

Nothing was good, but it was also bad because my mind told me whatever was going to go down would happen deeper inside and further away from the dull yellow glow of sunlight.

The ground rumbled after we’d gone maybe thirty paces inside, making me freeze and want to run back for the safety outside in case we got crushed by a cave-in.

“Corporal?” Cooke’s voice drifted to me, reminding me that he was barely out of school.

“Eye to your scope, kid. Move up.”

We made it another thirty paces before the ground shook again and I decided that was close enough. One shake was a scare, two shakes was a damn warning from the universe for my ass not to be underground.

“Move, move!” I snapped, sending my squad back to the surface. The sound of screams came faintly to me, at least I thought they were screams, and I took a knee to listen.

Hearing nothing, I risked the squad radio but only got the painful static that made me switch it off in the first place. Just when I was about to get up and run over to the tunnel where Havelock’s squad had gone, I heard the screams again, this time answered by a long burst of automatic fire as if someone was banging two steel hammers onto an anvil like a damn drum roll.

Marines erupted out of the tunnels and ran, some of them stopping to give covering fire but abandoning the action as there were too many of their own people in the way.

“Out of the quarry!” the lieutenant screamed, his young voice lacking the bass of Havelock’s but his words still hitting home. “Get to high ground, move, move, mooove!”

I ran, stopping only long enough to drag Cooke to his feet after he’d tripped and launched him ahead of me. My intention was to stay on his heels to make sure he made it out, but that little fucker had maybe six or seven years on me, so he ran faster than he would if his high school girlfriend had just sent him a picture of a pack of condoms with the caption that her parents were out.

I sprinted to keep up as gunfire hammered away behind me. It was answered by more gunfire, this time not sounding like the heavy hammering of our Mk6s banging out tungsten rounds, but the sharper, more rapid thunder of a different weapon.

I ran, listening to the odd conversation the two weapons exchanged until more lethal voices joined in to make it a full-blown argument. Reaching the higher ground out of the bowl of the quarry, I took a knee behind a boulder the size of three marines and readied my weapon.

“Bayle, DMR up,” I yelled, wanting him to provide better covering fire with the marksman rifle. He was already there, lying flat on top of a big rock to my right and banging rounds downrange.

“Russians,” Cooke said, his voice shrill and his breathing rapid. “It’s the Russians.”

I didn’t care. I didn’t care if it was the Russians or the British or the Chinese or a mercenary group; someone was shooting at marines and that meant they had to fucking die.

I lined up a dark figure coming out of the nearest tunnel and aimed over the heads of the last of the marines still running for the higher ground.

It shambled. It didn’t run, or even walk, but moved like it was having a fit and the movements just happened to make it walk by accident.

In its right hand was a rifle, and occasionally it lifted the gun to spray bullets in the direction of the last of our guys to offer a running rearguard.

I saw two of them go down just as I saw three rounds hit the shooter, but unlike the marines this guy didn’t go down.

A puff of pink mist exploded out the left side of his head and he staggered, but still didn’t drop. Beside and above me, I heard Brown mutter a curse after scoring a headshot with no effect on target.

“What the hell are those things?” Cooke asked, slapping his second magazine into his rifle.

I said nothing. It didn’t matter what they were, only that they were attacking us. I sighted down my rifle and started pumping double taps into it, just as everyone else did the same, and the thing jerked like it was dancing before it dropped to the dirt.

The shooting didn’t stop. In fact it intensified, and I took my eye away from the scope to see that all the tunnels were spewing out these jerking, shambling people who moved at different speeds but all in the same direction.

Our direction.

The two hit marines were already being dragged backward, both of them still firing as their asses skidded over the dirt until they reached our position. Havelock was nowhere to be seen or heard, which was new, but I didn’t need to shout orders as our whole squad was lined up behind cover on the ridge to pour fire into the things.

I heard the electronic vvvvvhumph sound of a grenade leaving an under-barrel launcher, and a second later the spray of dirt and flung body parts fountained out of the impact site. Ragged cheers and shouts went up, all variations on how much we loved killing, but the morale boost was a great feeling. Everyone who had the grenades was sending them downrange now, spewing out clods of shattered limbs and dirt as the attackers condensed to filter up the slope where the road left the quarry.

“Concentrate fire,” I yelled, not sure if it was the right thing to do or even if anyone heard me as I began thumping bursts into the front ranks. Dropping out a spent mag, I slapped in a fresh one and emptied all forty rounds in twenty seconds, but I already knew the plan wasn’t going to work.

These things, these people dressed in a mixture of NRC uniform, civilian clothing, and miners’ coveralls, still came at us unless they were blown apart or had their heads taken off. A few heavies would cut them down, but because we’d been dropped to do recon, nobody had wanted to hump the massive crew-served guns, their tripods, or the three hundred pounds of linked ammo for it.

I lined up on a mercenary; at least I guessed he was a merc based on the way he was still dressed for a tacti-cool fancy-dress party and carried a Mod 18 with some dumb, useless attachments nobody ever actually needed which he waved in our direction. I squeezed off three bursts, most of which took him high in the chest and neck, and put him down. I moved my sight to the next closest asshole and let rip again, and again and again until my magazine was spent and I had to reload.

With my eye away from the scope, I could see the bigger picture and I knew we weren’t going to stop them before they swarmed over us.

The lieutenant, either through the same realization or through fear, was already yelling at us to withdraw.

“Fall back!” he shrieked, tugging at armored shoulders and slapping his gloved hand on top of helmets. “Fall ba—”

He froze, his head snapping back like he’d gotten whiplash, before he fell like a tree to slam face down into the dust. As if dying was the most effective way to make his orders heard, marines started to break off and run back down the road. They didn’t panic and run away, they conducted a fighting withdrawal that made me feel hopeful we’d see the day out.

I was one of the last to break cover, pausing only long enough to reach inside the lieutenant’s chest plate and snap off his tag before I grabbed his three remaining spare magazines, and followed the surviving marines of our platoon.

Catching up to those guys at the spot where the dump truck had hidden the severed arm, I called a halt and ordered observation of the road. Pulling my radio out of the pouch, I slid the dial to the platoon net and pressed the button.

“Blue Three, Blue Three to Romeo, over.” I repeated it twice but got nothing back.

“Squad net’s still screwed up. I doubt it’s transmitting,” Cooke said, sounding pretty cool for being in his first firefight.

“You,” I snapped, singling out a pair of marines furthest away from where the fight was about to be. “Run back to the town and report contact. Tell them Blue and Red One and Two are down.”

I checked around me again to make sure I was right, and that I wasn’t giving orders when there was still a sergeant there to rip me a new one.

“Tell them we need heavy support and medivac. Marines are down in the quarry and we need exfil. Go!” I watched them go, running fast before a burst of fire chased them down the dusty track and threw them both into the ground. I was shocked, stunned into inaction for a second, knowing that I’d just killed them by giving orders I had no authority to give in the first damn place.

A bullet hit the plate on my left shoulder and spun me around to force my head back into the fight.

“Muscle up, buttercups,” a marine shouted as he readied his weapon to fire. I looked back down the road toward the quarry and saw the horizon fill with a dirty smear of shambling attackers behind the first wave heading right for us. Rifles spat bullets in both directions, and after spending way too long complaining of a bad back when the corps made me hump two hundred and eighty rifle rounds with me everywhere I went, I wished for the first time I had more.

Running out of ammo was not a pleasant feeling, I thought as I tried to conserve what I had left and take more careful single shots at heads. I nearly called the retreat then, but I hoped I could hold them off long enough for the other platoons to come and triple our numbers so we could win.

“Last mag!” Cooke yelled beside me. I glanced down, seeing that I’d be out too if I hadn’t relieved the lieutenant of everything I could grab in a hurry. Pulling one out, I handed it to him wordlessly. He reloaded and carried on hammering away before the world turned upside down and inside out all at once.

Then, like someone turned off the sound and the gravity, I was flung through the air to land in a mess on the road. All around me the shitty colony planet flashed red and white and the sound of battle was replaced by a high-pitched scream louder than anything I’d ever heard in my life.

“Get up! Get up!” a voice screamed at me, but I couldn’t hear it, not really. I didn’t even know if it was real.

Bullets hit my armor, denting it in and leaving me with no idea if I’d been shot through. My right hand fluttered to find my rifle, but I couldn’t feel it on my sling. It was torn, gone, and I was heading straight for destination fucked.

Chapter 5

CSS Forthright – Carrier in Orbit of Colony Planet BG-192

The medics, on standby to board their light, fast transports, hustled and whooped as they ran to deploy. It didn’t reflect a blasé attitude. It was just how they hyped themselves up for the danger they were about to run straight into.

The corridor between their ready lounge and the hangar bay was short, and the only rooms off that corridor were the head and a storage locker that had been commandeered by three members of an Odin team—operators of the special operations group—who were hitching a ride back to Midway from some mission out on another back-ass rock.

The operators, Mike Anders and Mike MacMillan, both staff sergeants in the Combined States Marine Corps and both former special reconnaissance, were deployed by the SOG wherever they were needed. They were Odin, and the only thing more impressive than their abilities were the wild stories and rumors about what the operators who wore the crossed axes did.

On the most recent occasion, it had been to conduct intelligence reconnaissance with an optional direct-action package on a mining world where there was far too much talk of unionizing.

On the whole, the government didn’t involve itself in matters such as that, but when the government was the primary shareholder of that particular venture and relied on that world for a vast majority of the tungsten and agriculture it required, it was forced to take a more active interest.

Unionization was fine, but when intel uncovered the move was financed and backed by the NRC, it changed the game.

With the target intel secured and the threat confirmed, they had executed the mark and left the planet on a small trading vessel shuttle, which on the outside looked like a beat-up old piece of shit.

Under the hood, that old trader was modern and clean, as was the third member of their team, Captain Hayley Edwards. The pilot was seconded to the SOG support group from the Combined States Air Force, and although she wasn’t an operator herself, she was as much part of the team as the others. Their ride home to Midway Station became extended when the carrier they’d linked up with was diverted to investigate an SOS call.

“What the hell was that about?” MacMillan asked Edwards.

“Probably a new hair gel just arrived,” Anders answered, being predictably unkind even if it wasn’t accurate. The fast response medical extraction teams, universally known as the HeliMedics or HeliMeds, were an oddly brave breed of soldier who did their best to get into the thickest of any action going, only to perform field surgery in the open like they didn’t acknowledge incoming enemy bullets or recognize their legitimacy.

A disproportionate number of SOG recruits came through that route, and neither of the recon marines had seen many of their brothers display the kind of planet-sized balls that job demanded.

“Hey, what’s the deal?” Edwards asked, poking her head out of their cabin and flagging down one of the HeliMed pilots.

“Fastball op on the planet. Casevac under fire,” he said without stopping.

Anders looked at MacMillan and both immediately stood to start throwing on their armor. Neither had anything other than personal weapons, but their modified Mk30 Mod 1s with full auto capability and extended magazines were good for close quarter work, along with their signature weapons in the form of a bearded plasma axe each.

They had rifles and an Mk20 marksman system, but they were packed away for the journey with no time to retrieve them.

Bundling out of the cabin half dressed for battle, they jogged to the hangar bay and ran to the last bird readying to launch.

“Room for two more?” Anders asked. The pilot looked him up and down, taking in the dark armor and the crossed axes of the SOG insignia before nodding.

“Strap yourselves in, boys, this ain’t gonna be a smooth ride.”

“That’s how we like it,” MacMillan answered, dragging the extending strap over his torso beside Anders, while the two awkwardly connected each other’s armor plates on the fly.

“Standby, launch in three, two, one…”

Both were thrown flat against the rear bulkhead as the hangar bay doors decompressed rapidly and the combined forces of that decompression and the engines of the fast transport kicked in to induce a nauseating amount of G-force.

The pilot burned hard to get away from the carrier before he turned the nose down into a spiral turn that would take them through the atmosphere with an eye on speed over comfort. Opposite the two operators, the pair of medics seemed unconcerned by the violence of the launch and both SOG men were silently impressed by their courage.

This was what they did. Just as the operators trained hard for whatever eventuality they would be faced with, the HeliMeds trained for fast launches into hot zones where they performed life-saving medical procedures under fire.

Anders waved for their attention, pointing to his radio and being given the correct channel number by raised fingers, because the roar of the engines and the buffeting of the outer atmosphere made speaking impossible.

“What’s the situation?” he asked when he’d keyed in the right digits and joined their channel.

“Marines in contact on the surface. Went to check out an SOS call after the NRC got there first,” the medic answered.

“Contact with the NRC?” MacMillan asked, earning a shrug from the medic.

It didn’t matter. Contact was contact and enemies were enemies. If it turned out to be goatherders firing old powder munitions at them, the outcome would still be the same; they’d engage, extract the marines, and secure the AO if possible until more infantry arrived.

The ride through atmosphere was rough, bouncing them all around as the heat inside the fast bird intensified, until it suddenly dissipated to be replaced by the roar and buffeting of atmosphere.

“Atmo breached, proceeding to extraction coordinates,” the pilot reported with as much concern as telling a waiter how he liked his steak.

That was the odd thing about the HeliMed guys. They were Combined States Army, aboard a naval ship heading to extract a company of marines. The fact that both operators were former CSMC was a coincidence, because their group was made up of men and women from all five branches of the Combined States Military. The only official requirement for entry was fitness and aptitude, and although the ranks of the SOG were heavy with marines and army operators, there were plenty of SEALS, air force, and even some coastguard personnel.

The majority of their support group was air force, naturally, as that department usually handled their transportation needs.

“Thirty seconds out,” the pilot said coolly.

Anders pointed the barrel of his Mk30 Mod 1 at the door and fitted the thorium micro reactor to bring the lethal little package online as MacMillan did the same. Neither of the medics carried anything other than the standard issue Mk30 pistol, but their primary job wasn’t to fight.

“We’re a guy short,” one of them said into the radio. “Volunteers to man the door gun so we can do our thing?”

“Oh, I’m all over that shit,” Anders said with an evil grin. He loved squad weapons and the chance to let rip on a Mod 1 Heavy was not one he’d let slip by.

“Standby for landing,” the pilot announced.

“I’ll push out to give you cover,” MacMillan told the medics just as the engines roared and the deck pushed up when the pilot flared the engines to arrest their steep dive. As the landing struts thumped into the dirt, the door slid up to let in the screams and gunfire of battle. Anders spun, rolling upright and laying hands on the big weapon to haul back on the charging lever and let rip.

PANG-PANG-PANG-PANG, PANG-PANG-PANG-PANG.

He threw tungsten into the attack over the heads of the medics who were already out and dragging a wounded marine toward the bird. MacMillan stitched three bursts from his modified SMG into heads, and holstered the weapon to take the stumbling marine off their hands. The medics handed him off and went straight back out to rescue anyone else still alive in the mess of bodies in the smoking crater where they’d been providing what looked like a rearguard action.

“You’re gonna be fine, Corporal,” MacMillan soothed the marine over the sound of the heavy gunfire. He didn’t respond, so the operator pushed his helmeted head to one side and pressed two fingers to the man’s neck. Finding a pulse and seeing the gentle rise and fall of his chest armor, he secured the strap over him by yanking it tight and returned to the battle outside.

He came around a little, muttering something Macmillan couldn’t hear, so the operator slipped out the thorium reactor from the rifle to make it safe and pressed the weapon into his hands.

“Hold onto this. Don’t let it go, you hear me, marine?”

Three more marines, those not obviously dead, were dragged aboard and strapped down as the assault wavered.

“Secure! Dust off!” a medic yelled into the radio as he was still jumping through the open hatch. Anders carried on firing, pumping tungsten slugs the size of a finger into the last of the attackers still coming for them. The Mod 1 Heavy stopped firing and the hatch came down as the medics went to work.

Their helmets had scanners that detected life signs—not a full medical diagnostic because those machines were the size of a full-grown man—but enough to speed the triage process up and make administering emergency medical aid a faster process.

While the real-world application of battlefield triage had evolved in the hundreds of years since it was first used in a war on Earth, the concept remained the same. Medics sorted their casualties into immediate, urgent, and non-urgent categories which, to the untrained eye, might have seemed brutal.

One marine screamed, repeatedly filling and expelling the air in his lungs in roars of agony as he clutched at the shattered ruin of his right knee. As bad as that injury looked, it wasn’t life threatening, and one of the medics jammed a device into his neck to administer a sedative-and-pain-relief mix to stop the screaming.

“Not urgent,” he said, taking a quick look at the cauterized mess that would probably result in the guy getting a prosthetic lower leg from the thigh down.

“He’s gone,” he said, pointing at the next marine and moving on without a second of emotion interfering with his job.

“H-hey…” the other medic said, bent over, kneeling on the deck. Anders checked him out, seeing the medic’s khaki glove come away from the left side of his upper chest covered in blood. The other medic abandoned the triage of the marines and jumped to his side, almost tripping over the unconscious marine that MacMillan had strapped down.

“You’re good, buddy, you’re aaaall good,” he said as he unclipped the armor and pulled it away to reveal a nasty through-and-through close to his armpit. Tearing away the fabric of his uniform and slapping a coagulating wound dressing patch on the bloody tear through his flesh, the medic moved with fast, practiced hands.

“Rib’s broken,” the wounded medic said, diagnosing himself and holding the dressing tight to his side, leaning back to elevate his legs and fight the risk of shock. “Talk to me.”

“We need to get you—”

“I’ll live. Tell me about the casualties,” the wounded man insisted through clenched teeth.

“One major trauma lower limb, cauterized,” the uninjured medic reported.

“Not urgent.”

“One dead… one unconscious, standby,” the medic said, shouting the report to his buddy as if working their minds collectively.

“Hey, I’m med-qual,” Anders said after securing the heavy.

“Good,” the injured medic gasped. “Check his injuries.”

Before either could work the unconscious marine down from head to toe, the other injured guy half sat up against the restraining strap and yelled in agony before he jerked like electricity was running through him.

“Get his armor off,” the medic shouted, steadying himself as the pilot leveled out their bird. Anders and MacMillan tore at the guy’s straps and buckles, and the medic lifted his uniform to run a small, curved plasma knife down it to expose the muscled chest underneath.

“Vitals are haywire,” the medic shouted. “He’s in VF, stand back,” he tore open a Velcro pouch and removed a device the size of his palm to slap it onto the skin in the center of the guy’s chest. Prongs shot out of it and dug into the marine’s flesh before a countdown beep warned them not to touch the patient.

Three times it shocked him with no effect, each shock getting stronger as his entire body convulsed until the device powered down to signify no chance of resuscitation.

A tortured groan came from the guy with the shattered knee as he tried to stand on it, fighting against the restraining strap and the fact that his leg bent outwards; he only succeeding in flopping over the ruined leg at an unnatural angle. That wasn’t the shocking thing, though. What really turned their stomachs was the fact that his mouth opened, and he drooled a black, oily substance out over his chest armor.

The two medics and the two operators stared at him, not wanting to believe what they were seeing, but the marine clumsily drew his sidearm and took a groggy, lazy aim at the injured medic.

“No!” the guy yelled, left hand out as if it could stop a bullet as his right still clutched the field dressing tightly to his wound.

MacMillan didn’t hesitate. His left hand slapped the gun down to the deck as he launched his entire body weight through his right elbow to strike a glancing blow across the marine’s jaw.

With a crack audible over the engines, he slumped, chin on his chest as the black gore continued to trickle onto his chest plate.

MacMillan turned to face Anders, both operators wearing an expression that needed no subtitles to clearly convey their collective “what the fuck?”

“What’s going on back there?” the pilot asked.

“Not sure,” the shocked medic not sporting a bullet hole said. “We have one priority, one non-urgent and one… I don’t know what the fuck to call that. Get us upstairs for emergency treatment.”

“Can you drop us off first?” MacMillan asked, concerned that there were still marines in contact dirtside.

“No need, GCIC just ordered a full evac via boomerang,” the pilot answered. “Everyone’s bugging out now. Whatever the hell happened down there, it’s over. For us at least.”

Chapter 6

CSS Carrier Forthright – Bridge

“Attention all NRC vessels, this is Captain Brannan of the CSS Forthright. Stand down all weapons and respond to hails immediately,” Brannan said with a finger pointed at the comm officer, who knew what he wanted without him requesting it.

“Translate and repeat that until we get a resp—”

“Attention CSS Forthright,” came the accented response over the comm. “I am Commander Drozdov in control of the NRC cruiser Atlant. You are to stand down and remove yourself from orbit. This planet has been designated hostile by NRC command. I say again, remove yourself from orbit and do not interfere with our efforts to recover our forces.”

“Commander, our people are currently engaged with a hostile force on the surface of the planet. Might I remind you that this sector is not contested territory and our two nations are at a ceasefire here. This is Combined States space, Commander, and you are encroaching. I urge you to stand down weapons and maintain safe distance until we can discuss the matter in full,” Brannan said sternly. When no response came, he held a finger vertically over his lips at the comm officer who responded with a thumbs up to say the connection was muted.

“Sir, I’m reading one cruiser and two light frigates. Attempting to identify from signal emissions…”

“There were four contacts from the jump lane, but that’s only three vessels, Lieutenant,” the captain patiently informed his signals intelligence officer.

“Sir… the fourth contact… it’s not there. It left the lane but…”

“Scan for gravitational distortions at their arrival coordinates,” Brannan ordered, suspecting he knew why there was no fourth ship but wanting to be sure before he started to panic internally.

“Scanning…” the lieutenant answered, head bent close to his terminal.

“Take your time, son,” Brannan said kindly, fighting the rising terror inside.

“Sir! Gravitational distortion detected!”

“All hands, set condition one,” Brannan said, still calm but with a finger pointed at the comm officer again. “People, we have a stealth sub in the system. Open that channel to the NRC again.”

He waited as the comm officer finished declaring the alert condition over the ship-wide channel and hit the icons on the display to open the link again.

“Commander Drozdov, this is Captain Brannan. I say again, I need all four of your vessels to stand down and power down weapons. When you do that I will withdraw my fighters and we can discuss what’s occurring on the surface. I assure you, Commander, we have no intention of starting anything here, but we will defend ourselves if your vessels threaten us. Over.”

A long pause followed, during which Brannan held up a hand to prevent any of his bridge crew from speaking. He’d said what he needed to, and to add to that would only make him appear weak or desperate.

Ten agonizing seconds ticked by until the Russian commander responded. “Withdraw your fighters and we will stand down our weapons systems.”

Brannan smiled, expecting some kind of compromise in which the hostile leader of the small battle group could save face.

The cruiser and two light frigates would be annihilated by three flights of fighter craft and the carrier’s heavy guns, but there would be heavy losses and the presence of a stealth sub in their AO put one hell of a wrinkle in any potential proceedings.

“Withdrawing fighters now, Commander. I’ll prepare a report on our surface activity and send it to you shortly. Forthright out.”

“Sir, inbound medevac craft requesting priority docking,” the comm officer announced.

“Grant it. Mister Evans, you have the con,” he said to his second-in-command, walking off the bridge to head for the GCIC and get some explanations for what the hell was going on.

* * *

“John, tell me what I’m seeing,” Brannan said quietly to his marine colonel as the two senior officers reviewed clips of footage taken from the helmet software of recovered marines.

“Sir, two squads deployed to the nearest mine north of the town and encountered resistance,” Desoto said.

“Resistance?”

“They were attacked.”

“Who attacked them?” Brannan asked, his legendary patience nowhere near tested yet.

“A mixture of NRC combatants and colonists, only…” To better explain, Desoto showed a sketchy and distorted five-second clip of an advancing horde of people, black gore staining their chests as they walked on stiff limbs straight into fire. Bullets tore through them but only when their bodies were broken did their suicidal advance end.

Some fired weapons, only without the professionalism of trained soldiers because they appeared drunk or drugged.

“Ever seen an NRC paratrooper fire their weapon like that?” Brannan asked Desoto.

“No sir, I have not. He’d probably get a sharpened shovel thrown at his dome for that kind of poor discipline.”

“Sirs, first HeliMed birds are docking,” an aide informed them. Both senior men straightened and headed aft to the medical bay where any survivors would be taken.

“Are all our forces off the surface?” Brannan asked.

“They should be in the next few minutes,” Desoto assured him.

“And the bill?”

Desoto frowned at the casual way the naval officer enquired about the number of casualties but responded dutifully.

“Looks like we lost almost an entire platoon, sir.”

“Dammit… I’m sorry, John. Not a good day out.”

The understatement carried them in silence until they reached the med bay where their first impressions were not hopeful.

Six armored bodies lay on gurneys with their faces covered by white sheets, blood soaked through the fabric in various places. One marine, his armor strewn about the deck as the medics worked on his near naked body, jerked and twitched.

“Get me an IV line in and prep for brain scan,” the doctor ordered. “I’m concerned about the flash damage to his neck and face, so I need to see brain activity ASAP.”

“Attention on deck!” a marine in uniform but no armor cried out, annoying both Brannan and Desoto because the formality would slow down the life-saving work.

“As you were,” both officers barked in unison, sending the few junior ranks scurrying back to their duties. The arrival of senior officers in any situation had a nasty habit of slowing down the real work, and neither captain nor lieutenant colonel thought themselves worthy of stopping the medics working by their mere presence.

Brannan stepped to one bed where the patient was sitting up, protesting that he needed to assist.

“Son, you’ve been shot,” Brannan said in a fatherly tone. “Best you lie down and let these fine soldiers take care of you.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell him, Captain,” another dust-stained medic answered as he prepped an injector to give to his teammate.

“How was it down there?” Desoto asked quietly. “Did you see…”

The medic’s face dropped and paled even further before he answered.

“Yes, Colonel, we saw alright. We saw it happen inside our damn bird,” he said. “We’d probably all be dead if it wasn’t for the SOG guys.”

Desoto straightened up, his brain pulling up the recent information in search of when he’d ordered special operations troops to be deployed. He knew he hadn’t because for one thing he had no SOG under his command, and for another he’d need sector command authority to deploy them on any mission not designated on their docket.

“What SOG guys?” he asked.

The medic, distracted by his job and not observing the formalities in a way that both men forgave unquestioningly, turned and jutted his chin at the two guys in dark armor loitering at the back of the med bay over a gurney. Both wore plastic surgical gowns and transparent face shields, which struck him as odd.

Desoto led the way to them with Brannan following. On seeing them approach, the nearest soldier raised a flat hand in warning.

“Sir, recommend you stay back. Medics are in the process of quarantining this casualty.”

Desoto’s feet locked him to the deck so fast that Brannan almost rear-ended him.

“Quarantine? Explain,” the marine colonel ordered.

“Sir, this marine was injured, pretty badly, but it looks like he was infected with something on the surface,” the other SOG operator said. Desoto noticed the plastic ties keeping the marine’s wrists attached to the gurney and the way the operator’s hand stayed on the grip of his weapon. If a marine operating at the level he was accustomed to felt that twitchy, then the colonel took it as a sign to keep back.

The conversation was cut short by the arrival of a medical team in full protective gear who wheeled the unconscious marine away to an isolation chamber.

“You two follow me,” a medical officer ordered the two operators. “You’ll need to be fully decontaminated before you go anywhere. Sirs?” She turned to the two senior officers wearing a distinctly unimpressed look. “You shouldn’t be in here.”

Taking the hint they retreated, Desoto calling out to the operators as he backpedaled.

“I’ll have someone debrief you properly when you’re done here,” he said, earning nods of agreement from the men.

Back out in the corridor, Brannan turned to Desoto and asked the difficult question. “How in the hell am I going to explain that to the Russians?”

“With the truth, sir. No two ways about it, but I’d prefer to understand the situation a little better before we have that conversation,” Desoto told him.

“Me too. I need a remote recovery unit on the surface to find out what went down. Can you see to it?”

“No can do, sir,” Desoto answered. “I was already planning to deploy the bots, but the interference won’t allow any wireless signals. I just wished I’d thought to do that the first time.”

“Not your fault, Colonel,” Brannan assured him. “You ever see anything like that before?”

“No sir. No, I have not.”

Chapter 7

CSS Forthright

Captain Edwards hung around and listened to the comm traffic from the pilot’s lounge where the HeliMed teams hung out. Feeling like, as the members of her Odin team would put it, a spare prick at an orgy did not sit well with her.

There were pilots down there risking their lives to get their crews safely on the ground and recover injured marines, making her jealous of their deployment, guilty that she wasn’t sacrificing her own safety as others like her were doing, and pissed that she was left behind with nothing to do.

When MacMillan and Anders didn’t come back with the first HeliMed guys she held her tongue, not wanting to break the veil of silence and secrecy that surrounded SOG and the dedicated support group attached to them. But the looks on the faces of the medics and the pilots turned her blood cold.

“What happened?” she asked, leaving out the unasked question about her guys.

A pilot—an army captain—dropped himself into a chair heavily and accepted a can of soda from a medic.

“Not a fucking clue,” he answered her, popping the top and taking a long pull. “Colonists were hiding in the mines and came out shooting.”

“Yeah, but that wasn’t right. And it wasn’t just colonists either,” the medic said as he paced the ready lounge, still wound up from the deployment.

“What does that mean?” Edwards asked.

“It means the NRC were there too, in the mines; but the way they moved…” the pilot trailed off, shaking his head.

“And that shit coming out of their mouths? What the fuck was all that?” the medic asked, not receiving an answer as the rest of the HeliMed team filed in.

“Where’s Lemmy and Burns?” the medic asked a pilot.

“Lemmy took a round to the side—he’s fine, before you throw a fit,” the other pilot said, taking a drink from the cooler and slumping down opposite Edwards. “Burns is still with him, but they’re both in quarantine with the SOG guys.”

Oh, thank fuck, thought Edwards.

“The SOG guys? They dropped with you?” the other pilot asked.

“Yeah, good thing they did too,” the pilot said enthusiastically. “The second we hit dirtside the fuckers tried to swarm my bird. We grabbed a few guys and dusted off, but one of them started spewing black stuff and tried to gun Lemmy down in the back. I shit you not.”

A chorus erupted in the room with a general consensus of “what the fuck.”

“Yeah, her guy knocked him out like he’d swung a ball hammer and tied him up,” the pilot said with a nod to Edwards. “They’re quarantining him until they know what the hell’s going on, but I heard they’re going to deploy remote units to start picking over the colony site, so you better get to essential maintenance on your birds if you don’t want to get caught up in taxi duty.”

“And my guys?” Edwards asked, unable to keep silent any longer. “They’re what, infected?”

The pilot shook his head as he stood and stripped off the upper body of his flight suit to tie the sleeves around his waist. “No, at least it doesn’t look like it. They’re getting scrubbed down through de-con but they should be good.”

Edwards couldn’t hide her relief at that. Not just because she felt happy in the company of the two quiet men who were like her weird, older stepbrothers, but because she wouldn’t be taking an empty bird back to SOG sector command at Midway to report a mission success but a total loss of her team.

* * *

Stripped naked, the two operators stood with their arms out and held their breath as the chemicals were sprayed over their bodies. Turning around, they felt the cold jets cover their backs as the automated arms of bots ran up and down them to ensure the cleansing solution hit every part of their bodies.

When the robotic arm bearing the jet fired vertically upward between Anders’ legs, he couldn’t help but blurt out, “Whoa there, buy me a drink first!” which made MacMillan laugh and inhale the fumes coming off the solution.

Both coughing, they emerged into another chamber where they air dried and dressed in simple white scrubs to wait the hour deemed necessary by the medical team to be sure they didn’t manifest symptoms.

That hour, it seemed, was not to be spent relaxing.

“Marines,” a captain dressed in fatigues and sporting intelligence emblems said as he activated a speaker on the other side of the observation glass. “Identify yourselves for the record.”

“Staff Sergeant Michael Anders.”

“Staff Sergeant Michael MacMillan.”

“And your duty aboard this ship?” the marine captain went on.

“Just passengers, sir,” Anders answered.

“From where to where?”

MacMillan shot Anders a knowing look but kept his mouth closed.

“Heading for Midway, sir. Sorry, that’s all we can tell you,” Anders said, hoping the officer got the point and didn’t ask anything else.

“Marines, it’s imperative that you understand the gravity of what happened here today. I need to know where you were coming from for my report.”

Anders sagged and groaned, disappointed that the young man didn’t know when to flex and when to fold, as if the two bars on his chest somehow made him a big deal.

“Captain,” MacMillan said patiently. “You cannot put our names in any report, just as we can’t tell you where we were prior to hitching a ride.”

“Marine, I do this for a living,” the captain said condescendingly. “I will redact your names from any official report sent outside this ship, which mean—”

“All due respect, Captain, you redact our names and that immediately raises red flags. Those reports inevitably end up on someone’s desk who pulls rank and wants to know what the little black boxes mean, for no good reason other than to measure their own dick, and that leads back to us being here, which in turn leads to us being traced back to an incident that may or may not have occurred near this sector and that points the finger straight at SOG for backlash from the potential fallout that may or may not be coming,” MacMillan explained, his rationale ending with a deep intake of breath to underline how exhaustive his explanation had been.

“What he’s saying, Captain, is that we’re not here. We were never here, and nobody can prove we were here unless you write a report that won’t get censored before it’s too late. Hopefully.”

“The captain of the ship wanted to cite you for medals,” the officer tried, seeing if their vanity would divert their strict code of secrecy and give him the win.

It backfired as both operators laughed.

“Sorry, sir,” Anders answered. “We don’t get medals. We get medals, people ask what we got them for. Then there’s a record, and we’re right back to square one. Those HeliMed guys though, they deserve medals.”

“Especially the guy who got shot. That’s a Purple Head right there,” MacMillan chimed in.

“You mean a Purple Heart, marine,” the captain corrected him sternly.

“Whatever you say, sir,” Anders answered with amusement.

“You think being injured in the line of duty is funny, Staff Sergeant?” the captain snapped.

“No sir, I don’t. Having been shot a few times myself, I can tell you from personal experience it is not funny,” Anders answered, somehow implying that the captain wouldn’t understand anything other than the theory.

“It’s just what we call a Purple Heart,” Macmillan explained for his benefit. “You wear one of those on your chest out in the civilian world and it’s good for a little attention from the opposite sex, you know what I’m saying?” He added a gesture with his right hand and a twitch of his eyebrows to embarrass the captain into dropping the questions.

Silence ensued, during which the intelligence officer looked like he was going to burst with frustration or cry.

“Your report on what happened on the surface,” he said finally, not phrasing a question, but if it was an order it came out a little too weak to make either marine answer.

“Off the record, sir?” Anders asked hopefully. “We saw what happened, but we can't have that on record against our names.”

“Fine,” the captain said, snapping the cover closed on his tablet. “Just tell me and I’ll work it in elsewhere.”

The two recon marines exchanged another glance, this time waiting to see which one was volunteering to put their memories into words and make them real.

“Sir, we saw a mixed force of civilians, mercenary troops, and NRC paratroopers,” Anders said. “They all appeared to be under some unknown influence that made them attack with no regard for their personal safety—”

“In what way?”

“In the way that people in their right minds don’t advance straight into gunfire, sir, not even the Russians.”

The officer nodded uncomfortably and made a note before gesturing for him to continue.

“And they all had some kind of substance coming out of their mouths, like oil,” Anders said.

“And the incident onboard the medical evac transport? What happened for you to justify striking and restraining an injured marine?”

“Because that black shit started coming out of his mouth and he was going to shoot one of the HeliMed guys,” MacMillan answered as patiently as he could.

“I see. Anything else?” the captain asked.

“No sir,” the two operators chorused.

Barton

My eyes opened. Well, my left eye opened, but my right eye was covered with something so I couldn’t see out of that side, which made me panic for a minute until my brain registered some kind of dressing up that side of my face.

I tried to sit up, feeling like the carrier’s gravity generator had cut out and the ship was going into either a nosedive or a steep climb, depending on which way was relative up.

Either way, I didn’t know what was up or down, and the urge to throw up—or down—was absolutely overwhelming. If I thought getting yelled at to wake up from jump sleep was bad, this was like jump sleep, all the hangovers I’d ever experienced, and a serious ass kicking all rolled into one.

“Easy now, soldier, relax,” a female voice said as pressure gently exerted itself on the skin of my chest.

The pressure came through warm, slender fingers and told me I was at least half naked. I lay back as I was told and tried to figure out where I was.

Deployment, yeah I remember that… the drop—ugh—the empty town… holy fuck…

“Where’s my squad?” I half yelled, trying to sit up again.

“You’ve suffered a serious injury, soldier, quite a few actually, so you need to lie down and relax.”

“Marine,” I mumbled, the right side of my mouth not working properly.

“What?”

“I’m a marine. A corporal.”

“My apologies, Corporal. My name is Doctor Lara Veigh. Like I said, you’ve been injured and you need to take time to adjust t—”

“Oh Jesus!” I yelled. For some reason her words made me think I’d lost my legs and she was building up to the reveal. I sat up, feeling the same dizzying nausea but gripping the sides of the bed and pulling until I could see my bare feet.

I wiggled the toes on each foot in turn until I’d convinced myself they were actually mine, like someone else’s fucking feet would be in my bed, and slumped back in pain.

My left eye, when my vision swam back into focus, showed me a white coat with a fatigue uniform underneath. The rank flash on her chest belonged to a major but she looked about my age and was small enough to be carried in my ruck.

“Major?” I said, not meaning to but unable to keep all of my thoughts inside my head.

“I’m a doctor first, major second,” she said kindly, wearing the kind of smile I’d never seen on any sawbones before. It dawned on me then that she wasn’t a medical doctor.

“You’re a shrink?”

“I’m a forensic clinical psychologist with the CS army,” she said, her accent odd until I could place it.

Canadian?

“You’ve been injured, but I’m told you should make a full physical recovery. I want to talk to you about what you saw and how it affected you.”

Who the hell was this woman? I’m a marine. We don’t talk about how things make us feel; we wait for shore leave and get drunk, get into a fight, then we forget about it! What the fuck did she expect me to say?

“How bad?” I muttered, the pain starting to wash over me again and bringing back the dizziness like it had gone for reinforcements. I gripped the sides of the bed so I didn’t fall off.

“Physically? I think the official diagnosis is that you’re pretty badly banged up. You’ll need some surgery and skin grafts, and I’m also told you’ve been subjected to some mild radiation whi—”

“Radiation? Doc, am I gonna grow an extra ball—”

“No, Corporal Barton, the radiation exposure I’m assured was mild. It apparently came from a thorium reactor explosion.”

So that’s what blew me up, I thought. Damn, I thought it was a grenade.

My fingers automatically went up to the right side of my neck where I thought I’d been melting.

“My squad,” I asked. It hit me like a missile when I remembered them. “How did I get out? How many made it?”

“Corporal, I have to inform you that of the three squads in contact on the surface, only you survived.”

Boom. There it was.

The dick punch she hit me with was hard, and right on the damn money.

I wanted to throw up, wanted to cry, wanted to drop right back to the surface and pick up where I had left off.

Hell, I wanted to have died down there with everyone, because my mind was telling me that the sole survivor is usually the coward who’d run the furthest away from the enemy.

“You were extracted by an army HeliMed crew,” she said. “You’re back aboard the Forthright but we need to transfer you to Midway for surgery.”

I didn’t respond.

The whole platoon was gone? Ramirez? The LT? Havelock? The kid? The corps hadn’t suffered losses like that since the territory wars with the NRC…

“You need to rest now. The medical doctors will give you something to help with that,” she said before I sensed her step back and someone else move in.

“I sent two guys back. They were supposed to…”

“I’m sorry, Corporal. Other than you, nobody else from the quarry survived,” she said soothingly, like there was a nice way to give that kind of information. As soon as she’d started talking I remembered seeing those two marines thrown down by gunfire, and the guilt of sending them to their death started to crush my chest and made the machines behind my head beep faster.

A cold sensation washed up my right arm, growing warmer until I passed out again.

Chapter 8

CSS Forthright – Bridge

“Sir, Midway sector command’s on the horn requesting your immediate attention,” the comm officer said. Brannan stood, walking to the briefing room attached to the bridge with a nod to his senior commander to take over.

Sitting down and signing in on the terminal with his handprint, he saw the scrolling icon of an incoming message decrypting. The screen blinked to life to show a female admiral in dress uniform.

“Captain Brannan,” she greeted him.

“Admiral.”

“We’ve received your interim report and I have to say this concerns me greatly… I’m sending additional ships to your location but I need the Forthright to remain in situ and quarantine that planet.”

“Admiral, the position here is tenuous. The NRC have a small flotilla and we strongly suspect the presence of a stealth sub—”

“It’s a Normandy class which we believe is the HMS Assassin. We’re sending you a resource to counter that threat but what I need from you is intel, Captain. I understand there were survivors from the mission? Survivors who had close contact with the… anomalies.”

The British supporting the NRC? That was unwelcome thought, even if it wasn’t exactly unexpected.

“Yes, Admiral. One marine who’d been in contact made it off the surface. He’s badly injured and requires surgery that my medical team aren’t sure they can perform fully here,” Brannan answered before pausing uncomfortably. “As for the other marine, I’m afraid he passed away not long after we’d isolated him.”

“Very well, I need that injured marine back at Midway while you maintain the integrity of that planet. Nothing in or out, Captain. At all. I’ve diverted the CSS Buenos Aires to your location—by sheer luck it’s the closest vessel to you in this sector—and they will return your marine to Midway along with the, err, other survivor and the special operations element you’re transporting. Expect them in your AO within five hours and the support group elements to begin arriving in four days with the last coming from Midway to be with you in eight. I expect you’re preparing to send a robotic unit to the surface to investigate, but I want you to hold off on that until reinforcements arrive and a decision is made about how we approach the problem.”

“Admiral, I’d be much happier if the Buenos Aires stayed with the Forthright to counter the NRC threat.”

“Negative, Captain, the retrieval of those two assets is our highest priority. Diplomatic channels will resolve the other issue.”

“Admiral, the NRC forces here are going to want to send their own reconnaissance team to the surface to investigate. Without taking direct action and starting a conflict, I’m not confident I can win without heavy losses. I’m afraid I just don’t see how that’s possible,” Brannan said insistently, annoyed that he’d have to belay his orders to prepare a roving probe unit to the surface.

“You let us worry about that, Captain. We’re currently in negotiations with NRC command at Ascension with an eye on a truce in that sector so we can investigate the incident jointly,” she said, her lips tightening into a straight line as she spoke to hold back her real thoughts on the matter.

Brannan kept his own expression neutral, knowing from experience that the NRC were happy enough to call a truce until they felt it was in their interests to do otherwise.

“Understood, Admiral. Forthright will maintain quarantine over the planet. Am I authorized to discuss this with the NRC commander in charge in this system?”

“Only what we’ve discussed, Captain. Our respective governments are working on a diplomatic solution to what appears to be a joint problem, and until such time as those details are ironed out, I need everyone to keep their fingers off their triggers.”

Brannan understood, responding with a confirmation of his orders before the encrypted comm link was severed.

Walking back out onto the bridge, Commander Evans stood from the captain’s chair, but Brannan waved him back down.

“Orders are to quarantine the planet with nothing in or out. The Combined States government is in negotiations with the NRC and, I suspect, with the United Kingdom of Britain. We are expecting reinforcements imminently but make no mistake, people, we are on a hair trigger here and must not start a conflict unless we have no choice. Comm?”

The lieutenant at the communications station acknowledged him.

“Signal Commander Drozdov and inform him that we are expecting a vessel in the AO to recover injured personnel. Assure him that it is not a tactical reinforcement. Carry on.”

He left the bridge, heading for the medical bay to give his orders personally because that was how he led his ship. A marine officer stopped in the corridor and stood aside to let him pass, tablet clutched under one arm, and Brannan stopped to talk to him.

“Have you debriefed our special operations friends, Captain?” he asked.

“Sir, yes sir, I have.”

“Are they medically cleared to leave the ship?”

“Not sure, sir. That’s a question for the doctors,” the captain answered, clearly in some kind of mood.

“As you were,” Brannan said, resuming his journey until he reached the medical bay and asked for an update on their survivor.

“He’s not in great shape, sir,” the doctor in charge of his care answered. “He needs surgery that we could do here, but it would be safer to stabilize him and transport him back to Midway.”

“Do that,” Brannan ordered. “I want him prepped and ready to go. What about the two…” he hesitated, unsure what terminology to use to the doctor, but the man knew who he was referring to.

“They’re in a quarantine cell but neither show any abnormal signs. I’ll be happy to clear them to leave with the patient unless you prefer them to remain there.”

Brannan nodded, happy that the man understood where he was going with it, then shook his head to indicate he didn’t want them kept locked up.

“Good. Tell them that the Buenos Aires is en route to recover them and the casualty, and pass on my thanks for their intervention.”

The doctor acknowledged the orders and excused himself, leaving Brannan standing in the emergency treatment bay where the blood was being washed away and the pieces of discarded armor were being collected. Shaking his head at the bloody nature of his day, he returned to the bridge to keep one eye on the clock and another on the NRC contacts that he could see.

The presence of a British attack submarine out there in the inky black troubled him greatly, as it would any captain of a large ship. It was like swimming in murky water after someone had shouted “shark.”

* * *

“Mike check, one, two!” captain Edwards said as her passengers arrived back at the cabin assigned to them. “You good?”

Both marines smiled at her use of the catchphrase she’d coined for greeting them.

“All good,” Anders answered, pulling off the white shirt and digging in his locker for fatigues.

MacMillan dropped the two boxes beside a cot that he lay down on and pulled out a new pair of boots which he began lacing up. “I hate breaking in new boots,” he complained. “Damn quarantine.”

“At least they didn’t lock us down for a whole month,” Anders responded as he dropped his pants and made Edwards suddenly find something interesting on the opposite wall. Slipping his feet into fresh skivvies, he dressed before sitting on the cot beside MacMillan and retrieving his own pair of new replacement boots drawn from the carrier’s stores, his last pair probably already undergoing incineration.

Edwards’ tablet chirped an incoming call, making her sit up and straighten her hair before she hit the icon to answer it.

“Captain Edwards,” she said, just in case the person who called her directly had made a mistake.

“Edwards, Commander Evans on the bridge. You need to prep for disembark. CSS Buenos Aires is en route to withdraw your team and escort an injured marine to Midway.”

“Understood, sir. What’s the ETA?”

“Four hours. Bridge out.”

“You hear that?” she asked, seeing both operators watching her.

“Yeah, any idea why?” Anders asked.

“My guess is they want us out of here before it gets hot,” MacMillan answered. “Easier to get us out on a medevac than explaining to the Russians where a shuttle’s going.”

“Yeah, makes sense,” Anders said, dropping a boot on the deck and shoving his foot inside before lacing it up. MacMillan finished lacing both of his boots before he stood and retrieved fresh clothing, sparing their younger pilot her blushes by stepping out of sight behind a locker to change his pants.

Stepping back out into the center of the small cabin and pulling a shirt over his muscled body, he frowned in thought. “Unless SOGCOM want a debrief. Makes sense they’d be deploying at least a standby unit given what went down dirtside.”

“My guess is the team guys at Midway will already be shipping out,” Anders said. “Which means we need to get back there so we can get redeployed back here—make it all official.”

“Grab your gear then,” Edwards said. “I’ll go prep the bird.”

* * *

The CSS Buenos Aires, its crew of forty pulled from a routine patrol to respond to an emerging threat as fast as they could move, dropped out of the jump lane and immediately engaged silent running.

Their hull was designed to be as invisible to the naked eye as it was to any ship’s sensors, but it lacked the sleekness of the Russian or British stealth vessels as the design was much older.

Where the Combined States Navy had invested in heavy carriers and long-range battleships to bring to the forefront of human technology, other nations with smaller standing military forces had favored sneak attacks in opposition to the CS’s official large-and-in-charge posture.

Even if she was old and technologically inferior by a small margin, the Buenos Aires was fast and heavily armed with a dedicated crew led by efficient staff officers.

It wasn’t a great surprise to learn that their mission was to act as a fast, lethal taxicab because that kind of mission was precisely what the British referred to as the bread and butter of stealth boat work. Infiltration and exfiltration of covert units, special operations teams, and remote comm intercept buoys was what they did best, but they could also take out ships ten times their size by slowly creeping close enough to launch torpedoes and missiles at a range impossible to avoid.

Breaking their silence, the ship hailed the carrier looming impossibly large ahead of them, in orbit of a dust bowl of a planet with little surface water. They went dark again and moved into position above the wide dorsal section that they still referred to as the flat top, harking back hundreds of years to when surface ships launched old sub-atmo planes from their decks by launching them like missiles.

They didn’t dock. Instead they waited with their own small hangar bay door open as a tiny transport shuttle drifted up and away from the carrier at low speed because of their proximity to two larger ships. The hangar bay doors opened and the internal lights made it appear as if the rectangle of light just hung in space. The pilot of the little transport expertly, casually even, rotated the vessel by thrustors to keep the nose where it was and swung the rear of the craft around before it slid horizontally to fit inside the bay perfectly.

The Buenos Aires was not a large vessel by any means and was utterly dwarfed by the imposing carrier Forthright, so the hangar bays weren’t large enough to carry anything bigger than a fast transport, which made it a tight fit for the apparently civilian trader sliding aboard.

Magnetic clamps engaged, and the outer door slid shut to close off that odd rectangle of light before the interior pressurized to give the occupants a green light.

“We’re good,” Edwards said, flipping switches to power down the ship completely. The rear ramp descended and the team of two medical ratings and a doctor rolled two gurneys out to be met by other medical personnel of the ship now carrying them. One gurney carried the unconscious marine they’d pulled out and the other a sealed sleep tube with a sheet strapped tight over the observation glass.

Watching as the gurney rolled away out of the hangar, Anders and MacMillan looked on with sadness.

“Cheer up,” Edwards told them as she carried her two packs down the ramp. “That guy’s only alive because you two couldn’t mind your business.”

They both let her levity go because they knew that she knew they wouldn’t sit out a fight, especially one where marines were at risk, but their sadness was more for the fact that the marine was going to keep suffering for a while because he was far from out of the woods, and that was the curse they’d given him by saving his life.

“Poor bastard,” Anders said. Before any response could come, a female NCO with three chevrons under crossed anchors approached, looking the two men up and down for any indication of rank. When she saw none, as none of the operators wore their rank unless in formal dress uniform, she was left with the choice of ordering them around or acting like they could order her around.

Edwards also didn’t wear any rank badges as she was deployed in civilian clothing, but the obvious fact that she was a servicewoman and pilot made her an officer. The petty officer from the Buenos Aires settled on the fence by being polite but making her suggestions sound like they were non-negotiable.

“This way, please,” she said, stopping by the hangar door as a marine in cammies kept his hand down by his side near the grip of his holstered Mk30. “You’ll be confined to quarters, the galley, and the head for the duration of the journey back to Midway,” she told them. “Just the way it has to be. Sorry.”

She wasn’t even one bit sorry. All three of them knew that, but the dangerously jealous level of secrecy they encountered when traveling on a stealth vessel was nothing new.

The people aboard couldn’t contact home, couldn’t receive email, or access a comm channel unless they were designated on shore leave, because the purpose of those boats was to remain untraceable and not advertise their presence with a wide band “Hey, Mom and Dad” hail coming from them.

“Fine by us,” Anders said, switching his ruck from one shoulder to the other. They were shown to an empty cabin about the size of a public bathroom with two bunks on either side of a space not large enough to fit a third. Their packs went on the top bunk on the left side after all three had dug into them for another layer, as the boats always ran cold to minimize the chance of a heat spike alerting a potential enemy to their presence.

They weren’t so cold it was dangerous, but cold enough to be uncomfortable until they grew accustomed to it. It was like going on vacation somewhere warm and heading home only to step off the transport and feel like you were inside a freezer.

“Head is two doors aft on your port and galley is one deck up. Everywhere else is off limits and your assigned DC is the hangar bay you just exited. Questions?” the petty officer asked, looking at all of them in turn to be sure they understood their limitations and damage control expectations should they encounter trouble.

“Medical bay?” Anders asked.

“Off limits unless you are injured, in which case you will be escorted there. Y’all stay shipshape and we don’t have a problem. See you in eight days when we hit Midway.”

Chapter 9

Barton

Midway Station

My first thought when I came around was that the deckhead I was staring at was not the one I’d been staring at back in the medical bay of the carrier.

Specifically, this one was painted black while most things on the Forthright were painted a kind of light gray that needed a lot of cleaning. With a crew that size and a company of marines aboard, cleaning was a big part of everyone’s lives.

My second thought, one which took a few seconds to kick in, was holy fucking shit, I hurt everywhere.

I let out a strangled cry like a wounded animal and tensed up so hard I thought I was going to either shit my pants or pass out again. I heard shouts and people running over to me before a warm feeling went down my spine and relaxed me more than that first beer after a deployment.

“I want him under. We can’t keep him sedated this way for a week; it’s not safe,” a voice said.

“Doc,” I said. Only I didn’t say it. I kinda went, “Buuurgh” because my lips weren’t responding, and instead of words I just let out a string of drool. I didn’t know what the hell they’d given me, but I was pretty sure the rest of the squad would try it on our next shore leave just for fun.

We’d probably have a sedative-powered football match in the barracks and trash the place, before spending all our leave on a full redecoration out of our own pockets; then, naturally, the first sergeant to come in would make us watch him trash the place all over again.

You don’t have a squad, idiot. They’re all fucking dead, my brain told me, adding emotional pain to go with everything else.

“Tube is prepped,” someone else said. I tried to lift my hand to tell them I’d be okay, that I just needed a little time to wake up, but my hand just flopped off the bed like I’d misjudged and given it too long before attempting The Old Stranger technique.

“The sedative should last,” the first guy said again, his voice sounding slower than it should. They lifted me up, which was weird because I felt like I weighed a couple tons, and lowered me into a sleep tube. I knew it was a sleep tube because literally nothing else in the galaxy feels like that. Unless they planned on burying me in a coffin, that was.

The gel that pulsed to move my muscles felt wet, which made me think I’d pissed my pants, and that padding pinched my shoulders in, like I was the last guy in an elevator who should’ve just waited or taken the stairs.

I tried to talk again but nothing happened, not even drool. Then a mask was held over my mouth and nose, and I was out.

* * *

“Corporal Barton? Corporal Barton?”

“Huh?” I croaked, my eyes still closed and my mouth so dry I felt like I’d never be able to swallow again.

“Corporal Barton, you’re in the hospital wing on Midway Station. You were injured on deployment and require some surgery, so you just lie back and let us help you out, okay?” a woman in scrubs said as she leaned her face over mine to give me a front-row view right up her nose.

“I know,” I tried to say, not sure if the sounds came out right because my mouth still felt numb and my ears felt like they needed to pop. What I experienced was worse than the usual fogginess coming out of a jump sleep, and I credited whatever meds they’d pumped me full of.

I worried that I was banged up worse than I thought, because if she thought I didn’t know where I’d been and what the hell had happened, then I must be in worse shape than I thought.

I fell back on following orders and closed my eyes, because my life in the Combined States Marines didn’t often include being paid to sleep.

* * *

When I opened my eyes again, I couldn’t figure out where the hell I was or what the hell was happening. There was glass or something right in front of my face, and when I let out a gasp of air, it fogged up so I couldn’t see a thing. Lifting my right hand automatically to wipe the mist from my visor, I paused, wondering why my hand felt so heavy and slow moving.

Looking down at my hand, I frowned. Now, a few times in my life I’d described something the same as being underwater, like when I couldn’t hear after the explosion on the surface of that dusty dumpster they dropped us on, but this was different. I was actually underwater this time, which freaked me out and made me panic and kick for the surface.

“Corporal, calm down,” a voice ordered in my right ear, sounding tinny and wrong. I turned to face that direction but saw nothing as the voice snapped at me again.

“You’re in a suspension fluid to heal, it’s imperative that you stay still and don’t pull any of the tubes or you could disrupt your air supply!”

I froze, the fear of drowning being a strong motivator to get a grip of my shit.

“I… suspension fluid?” I asked, guessing that if I could hear them then they could hear me from the glass bubble my head was in. My fingertips carefully explored my neck and found a flexible seal stuck to my skin as far down as my collar bones, which reassured me for some reason.

“My name is Doctor Ransom, CS Navy Medical Corps. I’ve removed two bullet fragments and a handful of shrapnel from you, and you might also feel some soreness to your right buttock and thigh where I took some skin to graft the right side of your neck and cheek,” the doctor said.

Cool. Ass hair on my neck, I thought.

“I have to say, Corporal, your tolerance for basic analgesia is quite high…” the doctor said, something in his voice accusatory as the fog inside my bubble cleared enough for me to see a thin guy with hair around the sides of his head, even though he didn’t look much over forty-five.

“I’m on a prescription of anti-inflammatories and SITFU from the company medic,” I said groggily, seeing him shake his head in confusion as he tried to work it out. That expression turned into a smile when he got it.

“Suck it the fuck up is about right,” he agreed happily. “One of my favorite prescriptions.”

“Hey, Doc, any chance I can get out of here?” I asked, not enjoying floating upright like some alien abductee about to get butt probed.

“We’re beginning the decanting process now, Corporal. I ask that you stay as still as possible and prepare to take your own weight. It’ll be difficult to begin with, but you’ll adjust soon enough.”

I waited, feeling some serious cold when the water level dropped below my chest and the air hit me after however long spent floating in warm water. When it dropped below my waist, I really felt the cold and was grateful they’d at least left me with some dignity, even if it came in the form of a pair of tiny trunks.

He wasn’t joking about standing up being difficult. It was like getting off a fairground ride drunk and not being sure if the gravity was lighter or heavier than Earth. It was weird, but without the water surrounding me, I felt claustrophobic inside the clear tank, so when the lid was popped I was close to tearing at the flexible seal around my neck.

They sprayed something on it that made my skin tingle as the stuff melted away. That tingling made the panic return quicker because it brought back the feeling of my skin coming off.

“You’re all good, marine. Get yourself dressed,” the nurse said, pointing at a folded stack of cammies on a chair. I did, shivering a little from the cold after being so still for… however fucking long I’d been under. The boots were new and stiff but being dressed again made me feel better. It also exhausted the hell out of me, and left me sitting down on the chair to catch my breath as a marine major and two lieutenants walked in.

Struggling to my feet, I stood to attention and hoped I wouldn’t tip over.

“As you were,” the major said, sounding pissed that I’d done what I was supposed to do. He didn’t talk to me but looked right by me and spoke to the medics.

“Is he fit to be released?”

“No sir, we still need to run tests to make sure he’s—”

“How do you feel, marine?” he asked, finally looking at me and speaking with a tone that made it pretty damn obvious there was only one way I could respond.

“Good to go, sir,” I answered dutifully, even if my lips moved at a different speed to my words, so I sounded like I was swearing under oath that I hadn’t touched a drop. He nodded, shot a look at the doc that said a swift “fuck you,” and turned for the door.

I followed, moving as fast as I could without losing my balance, with the two lieutenants walking behind me. Not close enough to help me if I fell, but close enough to get a good view of me smashing my face into the deck.

The major was pissed that I wasn’t moving fast enough, but at least he didn’t curse me out for it. He slowed down a little, but I was running out of breath fast and had to lean on the bulkhead to keep going. Just when I thought I couldn’t make it, he stopped and gestured for me to enter a compartment.

Inside the dingy room was a desk, with two chairs on the side nearest the door and one very lonely chair on the opposite side. I guessed this would be the part where they tore my story to shreds and made me sign the official version they wanted to get on record. I went around to the single chair and sat, expecting the major to walk in behind me but he just shut the door to reveal a guy leaning against the corner. His face was lit by the dull glow from a tablet.

“Corporal Barton, Michael E. Born July 5th—hah, almost—2289 on Earth… don’t see that much these days, in New York City of all places. How is that filthy hellhole nowadays?” I opened my mouth to answer, to say that I hadn’t been there in a while, but he carried on talking like it was a rhetorical question.

“Mother is a shipping clerk and father works at the same company, aww, but they left Earth after you joined the corps to work together on a frontier sector. Livin’ the dream, huh?”

Already this asshole, telling me details about my life that anyone could find out but making it sound like he knew what my net browser history contained.

I said nothing, not wanting to show him he’d gotten under my skin inside of ten seconds.

“Let’s see here,” the guy said as he flicked through stuff on the screen in front of him, and took a seat. He was wearing civilian clothing but the army airborne ink showing from under his rolled-up sleeves and the way he held himself made it clear to me this guy wasn’t totally retired. “Service record looks clean; one NiPLOC for late back off shore-leave… I’m guessing there’s a story behind that because there always is…” he said, sounding bored to the point of being an asshole.

“There’s your civilian criminal record, obviously, but—”

“That’s sealed,” I said before my brain could tell me to shut the fuck up. The guy just smiled, like nothing was really “sealed” when it came to him.

“For a jarhead, you’ve kept your nose clean. I’d expect most of you guys to wash out or get a medical discharge with crotch-rot by the time they’d be knocking on the door of sergeant rank, but here you are…” He put the tablet down and eyeballed me. I was pissed and he probably knew it.

“So tell me, Barton, Michael E. Corporal CSMC, what the fuck makes you so damned special?”

“Okay, first off, there is one hell of a story behind that Ninja Punch,” I said, talking to the guy in the same manner he was talking to me because I was leaning heavily on him not being part of any official chain of command. “Secondly, my non-punitive letter of caution never went on my permanent record and stayed with my CO, so I don’t know what you're reading there but it sure as shit ain’t my service record.”

“Perhaps I’d better start that part over,” he said, smiling like he was enjoying seeing me get even a little mad. “I’m part of SOG here at Midway. The purpose of this debrief is not to tell you what you saw but to find out what you really saw, okay? I guess my question should’ve been, how in the hell did only you make it out alive?”

I worked my hands into fists under the table and tried to keep my face from showing how much I wanted to punch the asshole in the face.

“I don’t know. I went down after an explosion and the HeliMeds lifted me out.”

“It wasn’t just the HeliMeds, you know that, right?”

I frowned, thinking until my brain played back over the things I didn’t much feel like going over until the image of crossed axes on an armored shoulder came to me.

“It was an SOG guy who pulled me out?” I asked.

“Two of them, actually. They told us what they saw but they didn’t know what went down before that. We’re hoping you can tell us.”

I took a breath and relaxed my hands. I wanted water. I wanted food and a bed, but I knew I didn’t have much of a story to tell so I just spat it out.

“If you’re SOG, then you can read the reports.”

“I have. I want you to tell me,” he said. I took a long breath before I spoke, giving him the details short and sharp.

“LZ was empty. We cleared the east side of the compound door to door and got ordered up to the quarry after finding an apparent suicide case behind a barricade. En route we found the severed arm of an NRC paratrooper. I led a squad into one of four tunnels when the shooting started. Then we were ordered to make for high ground. We took fire from the enemy and the lieutenant, staff sergeant and another sergeant went down. I ordered a rearguard action and got blown up.”

“Wow, heavy on detail there, marine,” he said without a trace of humor. “Tell me about the enemy.”

There it is, I thought. Do I lie? Are they going to kick me out on a failed psych eval if I tell them what I saw?

“You’ve seen the footage, right?” I asked, stalling for time and hoping the guy had at least some corroboration of what I wanted to say.

“Some kind of distortion killed the recording and transmission feeds. That’s why I’m talking to you.”

I took a breath, forgetting the rivalry and the taunts because my mind was replaying something way worse. With my eyes closed, I started to speak again.

“They… they walked like they weren’t in full control of their bodies and when they took rounds, they didn’t go down—not unless they took headshots—and…”

“And what?” he asked quietly.

“And they had stuff like… like tar coming out of their mouths. Whatever the hell they were, they weren’t people anymore, you know?” I said, not sure if I’d just opened my mouth too far and ended my career.

“And this was the NRC military forces you’re talking about?”

“No,” I shook my head emphatically. “It was the NRC, the colony’s miners, mercs, and civilians.”

“The miners were armed?” he asked.

“No, I mean, not all of them… They just walked with the others like they weren’t scared of bullets. Who does that?”

“People who aren’t scared of bullets,” he answered flatly, saying nothing more and leaving a silence that hung around like a bad smell before he finally spoke.

“I’m guessing you want to know what happens next, am I right?” I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

“Well, the injuries you received would earn a Purple Heart and a discharge with honors. I think the corps would pay you a generous amount of compensation and you can walk away right now, only that option comes with a non-disclosure agreement that has some real teeth to it,” he said, his lips moving but his eyes not leaving mine.

“The kind where I get branded a traitor if I repeat what I just told you, right? Lock me up and throw away the key kind of thing?”

He smiled darkly, the skin around his eyes crinkling like he was enjoying whatever thought he was having inside his head. “No, the kind that ends up with kid porn being found on your server, and where you take an overdose before your trial. You feelin’ me, marine?”

“And what’s behind door number two?” I asked, thinking that if that was the carrot and the stick then there might be another option.

“What makes you think there’s a door number two?” he asked.

“Because neither of those scenarios involves me staying in the corps and still signing that disclosure agreement,” I told him, forgetting how tired, thirsty, hungry, and pissed I was.

“What makes you think the Combined States military still wants an injured marine with a mission recall that’s pretty indicative of some serious post traumatic emotional disorder?”

I laughed, not in the way that I found what he said funny, but because to me, even though the guy was SOG, it sounded naïve.

“You show me a marine with more than five years’ service who doesn’t have some form of PTED.”

It was his turn to laugh before he got serious.

“Fine. You want to know what’s behind door number two? We’re going back there, because our guys saw most of what you saw and right now there’s a bunch of eggheads dissecting a guy who was infected by whatever shit that was down there.”

“And where do I fit in to that?” I asked.

Chapter 10

CSS Buenos Aires. Open Space Between Midway and Ascension.

The Buenos Aires, given a generous three hours to replenish their supplies and run maintenance before they were ordered to depart again, hit a jump lane that took them out of CS-controlled territory and toward the part of the galaxy claimed by the British and Russian powers back on Earth.

The contested area had been under Chinese allied territories dominion sixty years earlier, the Chinese having sailed the furthest from Earth as the gold rush first sparked off, but they’d conceded it to the British in some trade deal that literally left hundreds of thousands of civilians facing the choice between uprooting their lives or living under the rule of a hostile government.

That British territory had, in turn, been conceded or sold off to the Combined States some time during the last galaxy-wide conflict.

“Approaching coordinates, Admiral,” the captain of the boat said. He sounded curt, but that wasn’t to say he was angry at his orders. He was well accustomed to doing the shady work of covert transportation, but his prevailing manner was to appear permanently pissed, and having an admiral on board made no difference.

“Good. Drop us out of the jump lane and maintain stealth. Move us fifty thousand kilometers from the exit mark and go silent,” she said, reminding him that she had commanded boats like this one in her time before the admiralty called her up to the command structure of Midway. It was also totally against all manners and protocol for her to give orders to his bridge crew, but he didn’t let it rub him up the wrong way.

He did enjoy a small moment of satisfaction when his helmswoman turned in her chair to get his nod of approval before disengaging the jump lane phase drive and dropping their boat out of the interstellar currents that carried their ships over impossible distances.

“Going silent,” she announced, as other members of the bridge crew flipped switches and tapped at glass consoles to put the ship into its quietest mode.

Hushed voices passed information for the next forty minutes. The oddity of this was that it was unnecessary because a raised voice could hardly carry through the hull to alert any other ships nearby, but something about the concept of silent running made it feel right.

“Jump lane active,” the officer on the sensor array said. “Ship emerging…”

“Communications,” the admiral said, again circumventing the captain’s authority.

“They’re broadcasting. Identifying themselves as the battlecruiser Khabarov and requesting a response,” the officer reported with a vacant expression as he translated what came through his earpiece.

“Open a channel to them directly,” the admiral said as she stood and straightened her crisply pressed fatigues. The comm officer tapped at icons and gave her a nod to signify that the channel was open.

“This is Admiral Elena Arias of the Combined States Navy. To whom am I speaking?”

The line was silent for a second before a drawling, accented English response came through the speakers.

“Admiral Arias. I am Major General Victor Rudneva of the New Russian Confederacy’s naval forces. Please accept our invitation to board this ship and discuss the urgent matter your communication spoke of.”

The voice, be it intentional or a chance by-product of the accent, dripped with malice. The captain of the Buenos Aires looked at the admiral, expecting to see fear in the harsh woman’s expression but instead he saw a slight smile.

“I am glad you could make this meeting so soon, Major General, but please accept our invitation to come aboard and talk,” she said, hitting the return shot with a little topspin like a game of political ping pong.

“No, no, I insist that you be our guests, Admiral,” Rudneva answered, his own voice bearing the same level of implied threat as before, only this time tinged with amusement as though he’d known they were going to play this game all along.

“As we both seem to want to be the gracious hosts, how about we meet in the middle. I assume you have a zhuk-class shuttle onboard?” she said, her investment in the correct pronunciation intense.

“And I presume your patriot-class patrol boat is carrying how you call your Runner shuttles which is compatible with the zhuk docking seals,” Rudneva responded coolly. “Might I suggest one pilot and one aide each?”

* * *

Major General Rudneva strode onto the rear deck of the admiral’s shuttle like he owned both vessels. Strode was the correct terminology in so much that he had to duck significantly to get underneath the rim of the two mated airlocks.

“Now we have done how you call, measuring our dicks, shall we agree what we are needing to?” he said, offering a hand to the much smaller admiral and treating her to charming smile.

He was rough-skinned and bearded, looking more like an old Earth sailor from half a millennium ago than a man senior enough to engage in negotiations with another nation they were mostly observing a truce against.

“Major General,” the admiral said, shaking the offered hand. “I’m happy to cut out the bullshit if you are.”

Rudneva turned and jerked his head to the officer loitering behind him, dismissing the man without a word. The admiral, perhaps in deliberate contrast to her counterpart’s actions, politely asked the naval commander from her staff to give them a moment alone.

“Very well, we are talking down to brass tacks,” Rudneva said. “The colony planet is now under the control of the New Russian Confederacy until we have recovered our troops. We will provide your Combined States with comprehensive report of our findings. After this, planet will remain under our protection.”

“How very kind of you, Major General, bu—”

“Call me Victor, Admiral…?”

“Arias,” she said, laying a hint of a slap down on his informality. “Major General, that is truly a kind and generous offer. However, there are two things you have failed to take into account. One, the planet is already under the protection of the Combined States government being well within our borders; and two, CS military personnel lost their lives responding to the same distress call your people failed to investigate properly, so we will investigate and provide you with a detailed report of the situation.”

She glared at him, waiting for him to crack and bend to the threatened might of the combined military power of her nation. To her annoyance, not that she let it show, Rudneva smiled.

“This is new word I learn from British,” he said in a tone that sounded like she hadn’t just fired a broadside past him. “They say to haggle a thing, do you know this word, Admiral? Haggle?”

“You mean barter, right?”

“No, I do not think this is same thing. You see, the British seem to enjoy this kind of negotiation, but they also want it to end very quickly so that they can complain about the other person to their friends. You say a high number that is insult to me, I say low number that is insult to you, then we are both knowing where the other person is starting, yes?”

“So then I say a lower number and you say a higher number?” Arias asked. “That’s bartering.”

“However you say, but point is that I am not wanting this negotiation to last very long, so I wish to haggle with you. Compromise is to make joint task force and maintain planetary quarantines with equal number of vessels.”

Arias suppressed a smile at his inability to say the word right in English, wondering why an admiral of twenty-eight years’ service found the word wessuls so amusing.

“A joint task force is agreeable to my government,” she said, knowing that the only authority she needed was her own, given how far from Earth space the planet was. The fact that the colony miners were all presumed dead made any feedback on losing the planet, either to whatever had happened down there or to the NRC, negligible.

“This is good. You see, we are haggling like the British do. Now, big question… who is in charge of task force?”

Chapter 11

Barton

It turned out that my posting involved a strict regime of good meds and a whole lot of sleep. With every advancement humanity had made in medical science, there was still no substitute for sleeping fifteen hours a day to make a body heal.

Given that healing was literally the only thing I could do to avoid a pocket full of cash and a couple of medals to keep me company as a civilian, I gave it my all.

I woke around nine the next morning in the private room they’d kindly set aside for me in the medical unit, took my pills, and got a shot that I didn’t even ask what was in it, then I ate a small breakfast before the urge to take a nap hit me.

Two hours later, I was given more food and some kind of fizzy electrolyte drink that tasted like ass to wash down some different pills before I took another nap.

The afternoon consisted of some light exercise, which was like the remedial stuff rehab guys who’d lost limbs were forced to do when they were learning how to fully integrate with their prosthetics.

That exhausted me, more than I liked to admit, so after more pills and another shot, I gulped down about a half-gallon of water and put my feet up, before another meal arrived and the last dose of meds that made me want to sleep before I’d even finished eating.

I crashed out, waking around the same time the next morning, but instead of a nurse with a tray of food and half a drug store with her, there was guy sitting in the chair in my room.

I sat up, bleary eyed and with the worst cotton mouth ever, to grab the bottle of water on the nightstand before I could speak.

He just sat there wearing such a calm smile on his face that it made me think his heart beat once every few minutes.

“You’re looking better than the last time I saw you,” he said after I’d drunk some water, hitting me with an accent that was Kentucky or Alabama, only a little off like so many regional accents were now that Earth’s population had spread over the galaxy.

“I… have we…?” I said before it dawned on me. Everything about this guy, from the civilian clothes to the obvious muscles hiding underneath to the stone-cold look in his eyes screamed professional soldier to me. He had the look of an operator, and by that I meant his crazy eyes and half smile made me think he’d killed more people than malaria and still slept just fine. I took a leap and blurted out my first thought. “You’re one of the SOG guys who pulled me out.”

He closed his eyes as his head nodded slowly. “Call me Mac. I wanted to check in on you, seeing as how I hear you’re coming with us?” The way he spoke, phrasing it like a question, made me think he wasn’t one hundred percent certain that I was going.

“That’s the plan,” I told him as confidently as I could manage, even though my head was swimming and I felt like the cotton mouth had become cotton brain. “Just need to heal up a little first.”

Mac leaned to one side and smiled as he peered at the pink wrinkles of ass skin on my neck.

“Yeah, thanks for the radiation exposure,” he said without dropping the smile. “Had to get two shots in my butt morning and night for a week.”

“Sorry, I… wait, did you say a week?”

“Well yeah, how far did you think we were from Midway when that shit went down?” he said.

The honest answer was that I didn’t have the first frikkin’ clue. We were way out beyond the back of somewhere when the order to hit the sleep tubes came in, and I knew that was a three-week nap but other than that, well let’s just say they didn’t exactly keep us grunts updated with our current interstellar position.

“How long?” I asked, not sure which part I wanted explained but doing the best I could when I was operating on half power.

“It’s been a little over two weeks since it went down. We shipped you over to a stealth boat and hit the jump lane to get here fast. They dropped you in a sleep pod, so your injuries didn’t deteriorate but, man… I don’t mind telling you that was one boring-ass ride.”

I didn’t know what to say so I said nothing at first before I just blurted out the biggest thing on my mind.

“You saw it too, right? What happened on the planet?”

“We did,” Mac answered, his amused smile melting away to show an expression harder than neosteel underneath. “I guess they offered you the ‘we’ll make you look crazy and kick your ass out’ deal?”

“That was one option,” I admitted. “I chose the other.”

“Ah, payback, a marine after my own fuckin’ heart.”

“You’re a marine?” I asked, getting that sense from him like we were somehow connected through service.

“Force recon, before SOG invited us to apply. We both were.”

“Both?” I asked, confused.

“My buddy Anders and me were both on that bird that pulled you out. He was the guy playing whack-a-mole with the heavy,” Mac said. I had to admit to feeling a little special right then. Not one but two special ops guys saved my ass. I felt like a damn celebrity.

“Not like the jerk who gave me the ultimatum,” I said, seeing his eyebrows go up in question. “Army guy, said he was with SOG. Real asshole.”

“Yeah, no… that was Mark. Don’t be fooled by the army officer thing because the guy is hardcore,” Mac said defensively.

“Oh, I, err…”

“Don’t sweat it. If he was an asshole, it was because he needed to be. He might be an intelligence major, but he was one of us before.”

“One of us?” I asked, more confused than when I’d first woken up.

“He was a marine. Moved over to the army to take a commission. Worked with SOG a lot on the intel side and liked what he saw so…” Mac shrugged, as if explaining that someone who just waltzed into special operations so casually was even a thing.

“Sorry, I didn’t—”

“But the good thing, is that he’s on the mission with us,” Mac went on, making me realize it was already too late to keep my mouth shut. “What about you?”

“What about me?” I asked, not sure what he was getting at.

“You’re young. You’re obviously pretty fit. Don’t you wanna be MARSOC? Even SOG?”

“Oh, sure… I mean, I thought about MARSOC a few times,” I admitted, feeling like a dumb kid talking about my special operations aspirations to a real-life snake eater. Truth be told I think everyone thought about MARSOC or SOG after about a year deployed, wondering if endless drills and shitty deployments was all we had to look forward to until we walked.

“Good for you, kid. After this, maybe you should just go for it, you know?”

I smiled, not sure what to say in case the encouragement wasn’t genuine, so I changed the subject back.

“You said that was the good thing. What’s the bad thing?” I asked, trying to join in the joke, but what I said must’ve struck a nerve, seeing how uncomfortable he looked. “Wait, is there really a bad thing?”

“I wouldn’t say bad so much as potentially fucking catastrophic,” he said as he stood to leave. “You get yourself together and I’ll swing by later and see if I can’t fill in a few blanks for you.”

* * *

After my visitor, I didn’t feel much like napping again. The nurse came in with my meds a minute after the SOG guy left, but I asked her to lower the dose so I was more alert. She frowned, clearly pissed at me for either making her work harder or because she thought I thought I’d become a doctor overnight and could decide on my own pharmaceutical regime.

The doc had to sign off on it, but he was happy enough to remove the sedative and swap out the painkillers for something that didn’t make me feel drowsy.

I did my mandated exercises but didn’t feel like I’d punished myself enough, so I added fifty pushups to it that left me face down on the deck and panting for air.

Blinking away the exhaustion, I opened my eyes to see a pair of boots in the doorway, but they weren’t standard issue, nor were they standing at parade rest. One foot leaned at an angle while the other rested the toe cap on the deck.

“You sure he’s ready? He doesn’t look ready to me…”

I pushed myself up once more and groaned out the words, “One hundred… and ten,” lowering myself back down and pushing back up again.

“One… hundred and… eleve—”

“Asshole, I was here when you collapsed at thirty-eight,” the voice said. I sat up and shot a glare at the speaker.

Then I struggled to my feet and stood to attention.

“Sir,” I said, aiming for my best “fuck you” through a little malicious compliance.

“At ease,” he said, pushing himself off the doorframe he was leaning on and slumping into the chair.

“First rule, no salutes. No “sirs.” None of that bullshit because it marks you out as just a dumb grunt. You are just a dumb grunt, but we’re not, so if you do that shit it makes all of us look bad. My name is Mark.”

I fought to keep my face from showing the army officer how much I disliked him.

“Mac, you sure this guy’s good to go?”

I looked back to the door, seeing the guy I spoke to earlier also wearing civilian clothing like the officer but in a style that made it both look like they were still in uniform even out of it.

“He looks good to me,” Mac said, giving me a nod as he spoke.

“Fine, whatever, we’ve got enough damn tourists already on this gig as it is, so one more won't hurt. Kid, you’re temporarily attached to Odin Nine-Five, effective immediately. We’re heading back to the planet to conduct an exploration mission to determine exactly what went down.”

“Yes si—” He glared at me so I changed my response. “Got it.”

“There’s a wrinkle,” Mark said. “There’s a few wrinkles as it happens, but the main wrinkle, other than the number of tourists we have to take, is that our Odin isn't going alone. Pack up your shit, if you have any, and be onboard the Buenos Aires in thirty-six hours.”

He walked out, leaving me still panting so much I had to lean on the bed.

“Grab a shower first then I’ll open our candy shop for you,” Mike said.

“Candy…?” I said, missing the point completely.

“Sure. If you’re coming with us, I don’t want you in those damn wet paper towels the corps calls armor,” he answered, but my mind was already wandering elsewhere. “And another thing, you can’t use your first name with the team.”

“Oh, is that, what, a secrecy thing? Do I get, like, a new identity or something?” I asked, feeling like a kid about to get a peek behind the curtain at a magic show.

“No, dumbass,” Mac laughed. “I’m Mike MacMillan. The other guy who pulled you out’s Mike Anders. You…?” He smiled in anticipation of some fresh meat for the haze grinder. “I guess the team will find a way of telling us apart soon enough, but for now you’re just Barton.”

Showered and dressed in fresh cammies I felt better, at least I felt better because the doc had agreed to write me another script for what he described as “basically amphetamine,” which I took to be like real coffee in pill form.

Still not walking with the speed or confidence I was accustomed to, I followed Mac down the corridors from the med bay to a cargo lift that bore signage telling me what level and area of Midway station we were in.

“We like to keep to ourselves. I’m sure you’ve seen that before,” he explained to me, like it wasn’t common knowledge that wherever SOG guys were deployed they took over some dark corner and made it their own. It was never formally anywhere that we were told was out of bounds, but even in the marines, I’d never met anyone dumb enough to wander into a special operations barracks uninvited.

The cargo elevator took us down three levels, making me feel like a bug in a jar because the thing was large enough to move a tank, with room to move around the outside. When the doors opened, Mac stepped out and turned hard left, pointing at doors he passed.

“Chow, gear storage, ops planning,” he said pointing at the first three, the last of which looked like it had a reinforced neosteel doorframe and a bio-sec locking panel. “Here is where we hang out and sleep.” He stopped at the last door so I could peer inside.

From the gloom, four faces looked back at me and only one of them smiled.

“Good to see you’re still breathing,” one man said. Guessing he was the other Mike and the guy partly responsible for saving my life, I gave him a little wave.

“Yeah, thanks for that,” I said, feeling instantly like I’d rode the short transport to school back home.

“Anytime, anywhere,” he answered with a smirk. I thought Mike—Mac—was going to introduce the others but he walked on, calling me to catch up with him. I gave a hesitant smile to the room of special operators before I hurried to catch up.

“That’s the head, and the gym,” he went on, pointing at the next doors until I stopped in the frame of the last and watched.

Well, stared is a more accurate way to describe it. At first I was observing the lifter’s good form, but my eyes roved up from them going ass to grass in a deep squat with two plates on each side of the bar digging into defined back muscles.

When that ass went up, I saw the shape of the hips and the pinch of the waist that shifted my stare at their correct form into full-on pervert territory. The bar slammed back down onto the rack and the lifter ducked out under it, having seen me in the mirror opposite.

Tall, with impressive muscles and an undercut, an unexpectedly pretty face shot me a look that made my balls say “nope” and retreat like I was doing another orbital drop.

“Get a good look?” she asked, more amusement in her voice than anger.

“I… I, err…” I said, adding stupid to the list of things she probably already thought I was.

“I was watching your form,” I answered weakly, not realizing when I’d said it that I wasn’t digging myself out of any trouble by talking, so I shut my mouth to limit the damage I’d already done.

“Is that what you call it? Keep that one for free,” she said, looking me up and down and not indicating that she was in any way impressed by what she saw. “Take it out on the showers later.”

Without another word she turned, gripped the bar with each hand in turn, and ducked underneath it to set her feet and lift the bar again.

“Come on,” Mac said, laughing. “That’s Beth Coates. Don’t, whatever the fuck you do, use her first name though, okay?”

“She corps too?” I asked for the sake of having something to say.

“Coates? Nah man, she’s army. Came up through HeliMed and Combat Search and Rescue before she came over to us. Word of warning, she’ll need to prove that her dick’s bigger than yours so don’t try to outdrink or outlift her.”

“That… that doesn’t seem like…” I said, my nerve abandoning me before I could finish.

“What? Part of the team? Trust me, in the field she turns all that hate to face out. I think that’s how she got her nickname…”

I held my tongue for five seconds hoping that he’d just say it, but my curiosity made me ask.

“Come on, what is it?”

“Claymore. It’ll make sense when you see her armor. Speaking of which…” He stopped at another door and scanned his right palm over the reader before punching in an eight- or ten-digit code so fast I couldn’t even count the number of numbers.

The door popped open and the lights came on automatically, revealing a small wall rack of weapons with armor stacked in alcoves opposite. Feeling in less than ideal health meant nothing as the concept of the candy shop finally made sense.

“Like I said, if you’re with us then no more BLBS.”

Base-level bullshit. That’s what we called the armor and gear we were given in the corps. I knew it wasn’t just us, because the army, the navy, and the air force—and, yeah, the coastguard in their cushy jobs close to home—all got issued with the same crap.

SOG… man, they were a different animal.

Chapter 12

Undisclosed Planet in Kingdom of Britain Territory

Spetsial Operatzii Directorate, Alpha Group, or simply spets as they were known among the New Russian Confederacy troops, were different from any Combined States military unit altogether.

One of the vagaries of special forces culture all over the galaxy was that soldiers with the same former units tended to gravitate toward one another in the special operations underworld. Where MARSOC marines worked together in SOG, the elite naval operators all hung out together and the air force guys all played at the same golf courses and enjoyed visits to the same massage parlors.

The British recruited their special forces predominantly from para-drop or stealth recon units, perhaps linked to their very inception in an old Earth war where countries from the same nations all fought one another over tiny tracts of land. The Europeans did the same, usually para units, while other countries—like the Middle East and Africa—modeled their special operations more on Navy SEALS or elite CS army units.

The Russians, unlike a lot of Earth military forces, didn’t cherry pick their prospective top-tier troops but instead they selected the fittest and cruelest of raw recruits and formed them into what they needed.

Rumors had swept around the galaxy for years about what they were put through in order to prove their worth, not only at the grueling physical standards that were equal to that of the British or the combined states of the Americas and Canada, but to the extent that their mental conditioning was, at best, inhumane. At worst, it contravened pretty much every international and interstellar law there was.

For the four men selected from DKP, the deployment meant an end to the tedium of their current mission sitting on a frontier protecting the walled mining enclave from vicious animal life indigenous to that planet. That world, with its thinner-than-Earth atmosphere and its heavier-than-Earth gravity, left the troops stationed there in a state of constant fatigue. It wasn’t even under NRC control, but the British Kingdom forces who had claimed the system had allowed their allies to establish a mining colony there, and the NRC troops moved freely within British Empire space, since their public alliance had been announced at the end of the last open conflict.

The four men, still referred to as the spets by their comrades, showed no emotion when the commanding officer of the base passed on their orders to deploy spaceside for a covert mission, but when the officer left—so obviously unimpressed with their lax attitudes toward straight lines and neatness in their barracks—the four men received punches from the others for their luck and to provide an outpouring for their frustrations.

Aleksander Komarov, a captain in the army of the New Russian Confederacy and in command of the detachment of special forces, took one particularly hard blow to the chin that rocked him almost off his feet.

Almost, but not quite. The occupants of the dark room froze, waiting to see what his response would be, unsure if he would beat the man or pull a weapon. They were all on standby ready to intervene, because unit memory was still raw when multiple groups had been forcibly disbanded a few years prior for deaths resulting from just this kind of activity.

Komarov laughed. A deep, rumbling belly laugh that started low down in his tall frame and exploded out of his mouth. It was infectious. The others all started to laugh until the barracks was filled with raucous laughter that was abruptly cut short by a savage elbow strike that flattened the man who had struck him.

The man crumpled back down to the cot he’d been lying on before the base CO had walked in, and the nearest soldier to him yanked his left arm over his body to turn his torso so he didn’t choke on his own blood as he slept.

He pointed at three men, which came as no surprise to the rest of the unit as the senior man chose his closest friends. Mikhail Ashurov, Yuri Akimova, and Oleg Pasternak all stood with smiles and picked up their packs and rifles.

The orders had been for Captain Komarov to report to the shuttle pad with three men for a mission, and he knew from long experience that no more details would be given by anyone not inside the internal security protectorate.

They found a shuttle waiting for them, and all four men walked up the loading ramp to dump their heavy packs beside the secure luggage racking, and sat to stare at the naval rating. He struggled to haul the huge packs containing their armor and gear into the shelves and then fitted the netting to stop it floating free when they broke away from the planet’s atmosphere.

The manufacture and fitment of such comforts like gravity on mere troop transport vessels was not something the NRC wasted time and resources on, and two of the four men had even spent time onboard an earlier model stealth vessel that had forgone the installation of a gravity emitter, on the basis of the electrical signature it generated interfering with the primary purpose of the boat.

Holding their personal weapons, they strapped in, watching the rating hesitate as if he wanted to tell them they had to stow their rifles, but he fled instead of speaking.

Reputation, Komarov believed, was key.

If their own forces feared them and their allies were wary of them, then their enemies in the Combined States military would be terrified of them. That was half of the battle already won, and it was also why their armor was coated in a blood-red color that sported their proud logo of spread black wings across their upper chests. They had to be instantly recognizable on the battlefield in order to use that psychological advantage to the full.

Any enemy seeing their arrival in a conflict zone would have their resolve sapped and their confidence destroyed, as was proved in the earlier territory wars when entire companies retreated on seeing them deploy.

The official ceasefire five years earlier had ended those conflicts that none of the involved nations could afford to perpetuate, but that left men like Komarov with a full toolkit and very few projects to work on.

The flight was bumpy as the shuttle passed through the atmosphere but none of the four men appeared concerned, a feature which mirrored another part of their public persona. To show fear over something as trivial as burning up in atmosphere was a weakness that the NRC’s Alpha Group could not tolerate among its members.

Docking to the orbiting cruiser, the four men were shown to quarters with two bunks on either bulkhead and nowhere near enough space to stow even half of their gear.

Komarov claimed the bottom bunk nearest the door by throwing his pack on it and the others followed suit until the last man through the door, Akimova, tossed his pack onto the top bunk under the conduit pipes and jumped up to pull a cleaning kit from a pouch.

Working the action on his rifle, he stripped the few removable parts and cleaned them with a well-used rag to pass the time, as the others lay in silence in the absence of anything better to do.

No matter where soldiers in any form came from, no matter what flag they swore their allegiance to, the ability to sleep or find food whenever the opportunity arose was a core skill.

An hour passed before a small, thin officer bearing the dark field uniform of the internal security protectorate entered their cabin and gave curt orders to follow him.

They did, leaving their gear and weapons on their bunks, and took seats at a table in a sealed compartment in anticipation of a briefing.

“Comrades,” the officer said, speaking in a voice far lower than his small frame led them to expect. It wasn’t like Komarov’s low rumble, but more of a deep bass voice that should have belonged to a far bigger man.

“The directorate orders you to BG-192. This is a mining colony planet owned by the government of the Combined States of the Americas and Canada. On this planet is a civilian mining colony digging for neodymium and tungsten. Ownership of this planet was not previously contested, but a distress beacon was detected over a month ago by the Atlant and on orders from the government, they deployed their entire contingent of the 193rd airborne guards.”

“How many men?” Komarov interrupted.

“Two companies,” the intelligence officer answered without hesitation.

“Two full companies?” Ashurov, their group’s second-in-command, asked.

“One hundred eighty-three soldiers,” the officer answered without a trace of emotion. “No support elements or artillery because the Atlant held none. This force—”

“Why have they not been reinforced?” Komarov enquired acidly.

“Because they sent only two reports from the surface before all transmissions ceased. The Atlant did not carry sufficient personnel to investigate, so it retreated and sent a report back to Ascension for orders. By the time those orders had been relayed and reinforcements sent, a CS naval carrier had arrived and deployed their own forces to the surface.”

“Have they been heard from?” Komarov asked, leaning forward in his chair to see if the officer would betray himself with any emotion in his answer.

“They have, but they lost many of their marines to an uncategorized enemy.”

“What does this mean, uncategorized?” Pasternak said.

“I do not have this information,” the officer admitted, meaning that whatever had caused their rapid redeployment had been classified to a higher level than his own. “Your orders are to be part of a joint task force with the Combined States military and escort a scientific exploration team to the surface. Our ships are maintaining orbital quarantine with their ships already, but nobody is allowed to or from the surface until your team deploys. We rendezvous with the battlecruiser Khabarov in nineteen hours and you will receive further orders there.”

* * *

“Comrades,” Major General Rudneva said, entering the room and sitting down before they rose to show him military respect. “Do not think this is an easy mission, because your hardest task here will be to not kill our enemies. This is footage given to us by the Combined States government,” he said, turning and nodding to an aide who hurried to activate the terminal and play the clip.

“They say communications were jammed by unknown methods, but we do not believe what they say. Two companies of our airborne soldiers were deployed to this planet after we receive distress call. It only requested military assistance to resolve uprising, but we do not think this is true either. Communications with our people were lost after one hour.”

He turned to see if the footage was ready to be played yet and let out an annoyed growl when the aide asked for another minute. Turning back to the four scruffy, piratical-looking soldiers, he continued to fill the gap.

“Americans claim they sent down their marines and lost two of their squads, but they do not know what it was that killed them. This is most they will show us…”

He turned again, waiting impatiently until the display wall blinked to life and bouncing footage began to play. The legend overlaid on the footage still showed time and date stamps, but the name of the marine the camera was attached to had been obscured.

“Where is the audio?” Rudneva asked politely, but with an edge that told the aide his career depended on the audio being turned up immediately.

Soft but clear calls filled the room through the speakers as American voices chimed the word “clear” to one another.

They watched as the helmet-mounted camera showed empty room after empty room and Akimova leaned toward Komarov.

“A child could beat them clearing rooms that way,” he murmured, hoping to spark a humored response from his team leader, but Koramov was all business now. He actually thought the marines ran their drills well, but not so well that he found himself admiring the forces of their enemy.

Truth be told, Komarov respected his enemy, even if he spoke derisively of them in front of others. The fact that there was a stalemate between their nations so the matter of colonizing for profit could be focused on was of no concern to him. Only the fight mattered, and he found himself forced yet again to play politics until he could show his true nature.

“After this,” Rudneva explained as the footage still played, “they went to the mines where they report…” He paused to snap his fingers for a tablet the aide was carrying under his arm and waited until the correct report was handed to him.

“They report that a mixed force of colony miners, civilian mercenaries, and NRC paratroopers attacked them from the tunnels,” he said, reading the words at arm’s length and peering down his nose at the tablet.

“Were our forces ordered to take the colony?” Komarov asked, not caring either way but needing to know his government’s stance on the settlement.

“Our forces were deployed to offer assistance to the colonists sending distress calls. After that? Is not up for us to make decisions.”

Komarov understood. The NRC had deployed troops intending to quell whatever rebellion was happening in the colony and would likely extract a heavy toll in mining or airspace rights in recompense.

“This is not all,” Rudneva said, sounding severe and ominous. “Their marines say that the enemy did not fall to bullets unless hit directly in the skull. They say enemy kept coming at them and walked into heavy fire without taking cover. They say their people were overwhelmed and had to be evacuated, and that enemy appeared to be infected with black fluid running from mouth and nose.”

The four operators stayed silent. They knew if the major general had any further intelligence on their enemy, then he would’ve given it then and not waited to be asked a specific question.

“Like with old zombie story? The uh… the…” Pasternak snapped his fingers as he thought, trying to recall the old TV show on his mind. “Army of Deads? With big man who have head like coconut?” he asked hopefully, looking around the table for support. Everyone ignored him, not wanting to admit that they had watched American movies even if such things were no longer enforced, and all eyes subtly shifted to Komarov in anticipation of his next words.

“So what is our mission, sir?”

“Your mission is to be part of joint task force with Combined States military and to escort two of our scientists to collect samples from the surface and bring them back to analyze. You will be permitted the four of you, two pilots to fly shuttle and keep base security, but no more.”

“And the Americans?” Komarov asked, wanting to know if the other side to the coin was equally handicapped.

“They will bring a team of four people, two pilots and two scientists, just as we will,” Rudneva said sternly. “Any breach of this will make our agreement with them void.”

“Why a small force?” Komarov asked, his dark eyebrows pinching closer together and rising up a little.

“Because large numbers of troops have already attracted much attention. It is our opinion that smaller force will be able to see more, plus with more soldiers on the ground there is more chance of fight breaking out with wrong enemy.”

It made sense to Komarov. No doubt the Americans would send the best people they had in the sector, which is why part of his Alpha group had been whisked away to get involved, but moreover, he suspected that the scientists and pilots would also operate in the shady underworld that they did.

“Overall mission parameters, Major General?” he asked, wanting the bottom line so he could start reviewing the topography and planetary information, and formulate a plan. Rudneva leaned over the table to glare directly at Komarov so that nothing became lost in his words.

“Work with the Americans, find out what happened down there, don’t start a war, and never forget that they are not our allies.”

The team of operators were dismissed, but Rudneva called Komarov back at the door. Waiting until they were sealed inside the compartment alone, the major general informed the captain of the second part of the briefing.

“What is not widely known, is that many of our people were recovered from the planet before the Atlant returned to Ascension station. These men were infected with something which we believe is biological weapon. Only all of them died before extraction and the substance becomes inert after host death. We need living samples of this before Americans are finding it and using it against us.”

“This is the real mission?” Komarov asked Rudneva.

“It is. One last thing, Captain,” he said as he sat and relaxed his sense of formality. “We must discuss the contingency plan.”

Chapter 13

Barton

“Here, this should fit,” Mac said as he tossed me a set of coveralls that looked more like a thin wetsuit than anything else. I fumbled the catch, mainly because it was about twice the weight I expected it to be, and earned a disapproving sound from behind me where the other Mike, Anders, was leaning on the frame watching.

“Careful, that’s worth about a hundred and eighty thousand bucks,” he said, making my eyes go wide as I picked it up carefully.

“Imagine the deduction from your pay for that,” I said, cursing myself internally as I hadn’t thought about the deductions I’d suffer after losing my entire gear. Injured or not, hell, dead or not, the cost of your operational losses would still be deducted from your final paycheck or widow’s pension. That left a lot of recently retired strippers disappointed with the monthly check they got from the government.

I held up the coverall and frowned at it. First off, it weighed a ton, like it was soaked in water, so it was hard to hold up for long. Second, it had a weird feel to it. It was scaly like a snake instead of the rubbery material that lined the inside.

“Ablative nano-weave underlayer,” Mac said.

“What?”

“Ablative nano-weave underlayer,” Mac repeated patiently.

“Oh, dude, I heard the words you said, it’s just that they don’t make sense,” I told him, earning a laugh from both operators.

“It goes under your armor, and anything getting through hits that layer… it kinda… flakes off and dissipates the energy of any projectile hitting it. We’ve been prototyping it for a while to use when doing close protection or HVT extraction,” Anders explained. My fingers ran over the weird fabric again and I wondered, if they had this kind of stuff in production then why in the hell were marines like me still wearing recycled depleted uranium plates? Shit, we might as well be wearing Kevlar and carrying around fifteen pounds of ceramic in our damn gear.

Oh yeah, a hundred and eighty thousand bucks is why. Which was stupid, because if they added up even ten years’ pay, training costs, living, transport… it made sense to me to invest in people. But I didn’t control any budget, not even my own.

“Try it on?” Mac told me. I stripped off my cammies and bent stiffly to undo my boots before stepping in one foot at a time, using the bulkhead to keep me upright. Pulling it up over my shoulders as I slipped one arm in after the other, I yanked the zipper from crotch to neck and folded over the flap of material to cover it.

That flap alone could’ve paid for enough beers to get a couple companies drunk but I was more interested in how I felt fifteen pounds heavier.

“You’ll get used to it,” Mac said. “And trust me, the inbuilt software will literally save your life if you need it.” I shook my head at the information overload and worked my arms around before I slipped my feet into the boots again. The layer covering my feet was thinner, or at least it felt thinner, so my boots still fit easy enough.

“Be easier if the planet had lighter than Earth gravity,” I said dourly, wondering how I’d be able to keep up with the elite when we landed.

“Muscle stims help,” Anders said. “Especially in your condition right now, but we’re told the eggheads are working on an integrated exoskeleton for it.”

I said nothing. I’d given up paying attention to the rumors that we were all getting mech suits in the next phase rollout of blah blah and yadda yadda. The same exoskeleton footage did the rounds every few years, right up until some asshole pointed out they’d seen the same thing a year and a half before and called bullshit. Like the robotic sniffer dogs and mech suits everyone wanted, shit like that was more fiction than science. They’d have to make a lot of advancements before it became cheaper to build robots and AIs than it did to keep a couple hundred part-time alcoholics armed and ready to fuck shit up.

Those next gen advancements never came through so after a couple years’ service I stopped caring, resigned to my fate that I’d be humping the same shit they deployed marines with even before the territory wars.

“You’ll want one of these,” Mac went on, handing me a duty belt with an attached groin plate. I took it, dreading the added weight but found it much lighter than I was expecting. Mac saw my expression and let me in on the secret.

“You still wore DU. This is ceramic-coated neosteel. Half the thickness, a third of the weight, and easily the same protection.”

I strapped it on and gave a little jiggle, letting them fit the chest and back plates on me and still not feeling any heavier. The nano-whatever suit underneath seemed like a good deal now that I wasn’t going to feel any heavier for the armor.

The shoulders, arm greaves, thigh plates, and combination knee and shin pads all went on far easier than the old gear, with speed clips in place of the more finnicky buckles, until I was standing there wearing prototype tech worth way more than I was.

“You’re right-handed?” Anders asked, stepping to a rack opposite the armor sections. I nodded and accepted the Mk30 pistol holster; only the weapon he handed me to go in it wasn’t the same as I was used to.

The mag that followed was the extended version and under the barrel was an integrated IR light and grip, with a tiny stock that extended on a piston.

“Mod 1. It’s what we carry most of the time for shadow work,” Mac explained, laughing when he saw my face. “Don’t sweat it. We’ll get an hour on the range before we deploy to field test everything.”

The custom clips on my left thigh plate held four mags for the weapon but they didn’t give me any spares, same as the four double-stacked on the chest plate.

“This should be easier for you,” Anders said, lifting a rifle off the rack and showing me an empty chamber before handing it over. He was right. It was easier for me because the Mk6 was the same as the weapon I’d trained with and carried my whole service. The special operations variant of the weapon had a shorter barrel and a foregrip that just made the reduced length easier to live with and made the whole thing feel lighter and easier to move around.

“You’ll feel a little more kick because it weighs less than what you’re used to,” Anders told me. “Other than that, it’s all the same. I-T sights are the same as you get in the corps.”

That surprised me a little. I thought all their gear would be like the armor suit and light years ahead of the crap we were given, but in terms of weapons, either they were behind the curve or we were at the front of it too. Maybe it was a slow-moving curve.

They took back the armor and weapons, storing them in an empty spot which was obviously mine for now, while I got back into my fresh cammies, and Mac handed me a standard duty belt with a Mk30c in a holster. The compact version was usually used by MPs and civilian law enforcement, but like everything else it was all pretty standard. The micro reactor to fit the grip gave me a shudder I tried and failed to suppress as the skin up the right side of my neck seemed to pucker and tingle.

“You go armed until we deploy,” Mac said. “There’s always a chance of shit going down, and if you get that in your head, you’ll be good.”

I frowned at that. Midway was a safe station in CS-controlled space, so why in the hell did they think they needed to be armed here? It was where we all got drunk and tried not to be identified—or worse, arrested—when on shore leave. Come to think of it, the reason we never went armed there was because it was where we got drunk. That would never go well, and there was probably a story out there about a marine who tried to play Russian roulette with an automatic.

“Come on, meet the rest of the team before the briefing,” Anders said, turning and heading out of the door that Mac secured behind us and made sure was locked.

There wasn’t time to be paraded in front of the others because Mark, as sullen and mocking as he’d been both times I’d met him, yelled from a doorway opposite.

“On me, one minute!”

The two Mikes shrugged and headed into the briefing room where they sat down without acknowledging their officer. I hesitated, not sure if I was supposed to wait until I was told to sit down after being told not to salute him earlier.

As the others filed in I just sat down, taking the risk of being chewed out over looking like an ass in front of them.

“Okay, you all know why we’re here and what we need to do on the surface,” Mark said, taking a seat and leaning back.

Uh, where’s the slideshow? Where’s the robotic mission brief being repeated? my brain asked me, almost as if it was as nervous as I was.

“We’re deploying in ten days from now which means we’re in transit in two days, oh-six-fifteen ship time,” Mark said.

“Why the delay?” Coates asked. “We’re good to deploy now.”

“Two reasons. One, we’re waiting on a two-person science team arriving from another sector, and our NRC counterparts from Ascension,” he answered, smiling as the room erupted in questions. He let them all yell at once, just grinning at them as if he was enjoying their stress, until he’d had enough and lifted a finger which silenced them immediately.

“This is so far above everyone’s paygrade—mine included—that we just need to suck it up, accept it, and move the fuck on. It’s happening, people, and yes that complicates things but it’s the mission and we need to get it done.”

“Who are they sending?” Mac asked.

“Best guess, a four-man special operations team same as we are. My guess is they’ll probably disguise themselves as regular airborne troops, but we’ll know, same as they will, which is why we’re not rolling out covert.”

“Loud and proud?” Anders asked.

“That’s the CS of A way, brother,” Mac answered proudly, stopping short of offering a fist bump or something equally homoerotic.

“So why the tourist?” Coates asked, not even looking at me but making it obvious she drew a line between us and them.

“Corporal Barton has been assigned to us for multiple reasons. First off, he’s a trained and capable marine who will be an asset to our deployment,” Mark said, tongue in cheek as he recited the words he’d probably been given by an officer running the official vocabulary guidelines.

“Second, Corporal Barton has been on the ground and faced the enemy personally.”

“So have they,” Coates said, waving a hand at the two operators sitting next to me.

“Third, I want him on this mission and that’s the end of it,” Mark finished, surprising me because I got the distinct impression he thought I was a nobody.

“But—”

“That… is the end of it,” Mark snapped, silencing the angry woman.

“So I’ll stay in the car and bark at strangers while he runs my damn spot. Got it,” Coates said nastily, still not looking at me, but at least now I understood why she hated my guts.

“Okay, I’ve already told you this but let’s get it out there for everyone to know,” Mark said, his voice rising a little and adding some steel to it. “The deployment is limited to a security detail of four, two pilots to maintain base security and two scientists. Now, you’re a pilot,” he gestured at Coates, “so it makes sense to have an operator on fire watch instead of a zoomie—no offense—Barton takes the spot on the team, which makes four.” He’d shot a brief smile at the blonde woman and the balding guy when he’d apologized for the mild insult to their trader, which made me guess they were the team’s pilots. Then it dawned on me that one of them was going to have to sit out a deployment because someone, somewhere, wanted me back on planet whatever.

“The NRC,” Anders asked. “They have the same personnel and brief?” Mark nodded and carried on with the briefing, which was more of an open discussion that anything formal that I’d seen before. I didn’t even recognize it as a briefing, it seemed more like an off-duty session to my sheltered ass.

“Yeah, but knowing them, their scientists were probably taken away as kids and trained as commandos before going to high school,” the blonde pilot said, earning a small laugh because it was probably true.

She was hot, but I tried not to think of that right then. If my life wasn’t bullets and bullshit, it was beers and boobs, so I had to remind myself it was still the first one on that list and that I should most definitely keep it in my pants.

“Barton,” Mark said, snapping my attention back to the briefing. He slid a tablet over the table to me which bore detailed imagery of the LZ that was replicated on the display wall behind him. “Talk us through your deployment.”

I picked up the tablet, using two fingers to zoom out and then pinch the display back in to where my boomerang had landed.

“Two squads from my platoon deployed here…” My fingers moved the display up to show the high ground overlooking the colony settlement. “Ordered up the hill, then down to sweep the east street door to door.”

My fingertips moved the display again, switching it into a 3D view that looked right down the residential street we’d spent forty minutes clearing.

“Every house was empty with no signs of disturbance. It was like everyone just… walked out and shut their doors behind them,” I explained as I moved the map back to a bird’s-eye view and centered it on the middle of the small town.

“Company reports show the same in the eastern edge of town,” Mark said. “Education, retail, food distribution, colony administration, all of it a ghost town.”

I hesitated, taking in what he’d just said because I’d never even considered what the other platoons had found.

“We found what I think was the merc base house or something. Weapons locker cleared out and just one Mod 18 left behind with zero ammo. In a room upstairs, we found a woman behind a barricade…”

“There was a survivor from the colonists?” Anders asked, but I pulled that “’fraid not” face and shook my head.

“She was behind a barricade. Reckon she’d fired most of a pistol mag though the door before she turned the gun on herself. Looked like she’d been in there a while because there was…” I hesitated, feeling a little stupid because I didn’t want to explain it in front of people—okay, women—I didn’t know. I tried to find the words but ended up just spitting it out like a caveman.

“She’d been shitting in a waste basket, so she’d been holed up in there a while.”

Nobody said anything to that, so Mark asked me what happened next.

“We were ordered north to the quarry site,” I said.

“Which quarry? There are eight on the list,” Coates asked, probably just to try and screw with me.

“The one nearest to town to the north,” I answered as I moved the map out again to show the road. I stopped when the earthmover came into focus, explaining that the youngest member of my squad saw something under it.

“Ripped off or cut off?” Mac asked. I thought that was an odd thing to ask but I guess it made sense.

“It looked… it looked like it was just ripped out of the joint. Definitely not a clean cut. Had chunks of flesh still on it.”

I carried on scrolling the map until a small, blackened crater appeared beside the road. I faltered, fighting down a wave of nausea as the memory of what happened there flooded back to me.

“This was where we pulled Barton out with the HeliMed,” Anders said, saving me from freezing up in front of everyone and earning a grunt of pride from Coates. “Lucky round from the enemy struck a weapon’s micro reactor is our best guess.”

“Why in the hell was it out of the housing?” Coates asked, her derision at the mistake obvious. The grips of the weapons were armored and rated for direct kinetic strike from a heavy, which means that someone must’ve had theirs out of the chamber for it to go off like it did.

“Could’ve been an attempt to use it as an IED in place of available explosives, or it could’ve been panic and hitting the wrong button on the rifle. Either way, it happened, move on,” Mark said, heading off any army versus marines fight that loomed on the horizon.

“Before that, we made it into the quarry,” I said, moving the map again and seeing the smaller explosion signatures of the grenades we’d fired. “We encountered some kind of EW or interference that screwed our comms. I took a fire team down into the west tunnel when the shooting started.”

“Then space zombies started barfing up tar and chased you off,” Coates said with mock sympathy as she treated me to a scornful look.

“Pretty much, yeah,” I answered. “I hit one from thirty meters out with three to the center mass and she didn’t drop. I just blew holes through her until another shot took the left side of her skull off, then she dropped. You’ve seen that, right? From the bodies recovered?”

Confused looks were exchanged around the table until they rested on Mark, who shrugged and carefully explained in case I wasn’t on the same page.

“Barton, the only personnel recovered from the surface either weren’t in contact or were on the HeliMed birds. When they said you were the only survivor, they meant it. Nobody’s been back down since because the planet’s been in complete lockdown.”

“That’s… that’s not possible,” I said, moving the map back to the detonation site where I’d been pulled out. “There were fifty or sixty bodies down on that road so if they haven’t been recovered by us, where the fuck are they?”

Chapter 14

Barton

The trip back to… whatever the fuck the colony planet was called—I forget—was dedicated mainly to sleeping.

We’d hitched a ride on a destroyer, the CSS Johnson, which I later realized was actually diverted from joining the rest of the carrier strike group in system for the sole purpose of getting our team there.

The ship’s doctor evidently knew the Midway doctor, and the attitude that I was being reckless with my recovery transferred over easier than our gear did. I was still being hit with pills and shots four times a day, but on my insistence none of them made me drowsy. Eventually the doc went to Mark, who ordered me into a sleep tube for five days so they could pump the meds into me and promote the healing process as much as possible before we deployed.

I’d tried to argue, tried to say that I needed to go over everything with the team so I wouldn’t be a burden, but mostly I was trying to force my fitness back up so I didn’t look like a useless jackass.

Whether he insisted on being addressed like a major or not, I couldn’t fail to mistake the fact that Mark was giving me an order. With or without a “sir” on the end of how people spoke to him, he made it damn clear he was in charge and pretty much threatened to knock me the fuck out and leave me in a tube until it was all over unless I fell in and did what I was told.

Given that kind of choice, and the fact that I believed one hundred percent that he would actually drop me and leave me behind, I went voluntarily and experienced a whole new side of life when I was brought around gently on the other end, instead of waking up to new and creative threats of violence.

My thoughts then went straight to the kid, PFC Cooke, and my mood took a nosedive so severe I actually felt like crying. I knew it was part of the waking-up process, the overly emotional response side of it, but I felt like shit for leaving him behind, along with the rest of the squad.

Hell, I even felt bad for Havelock for a minute, even if he was the rustiest bullet hole I’d ever met.

“Rise and shine, dickless, we’re here,” Coates said, strolling into the medical bay and planting her feet apart with her hands on her hips. “I’m not kidding, move your ass!”

So much for waking up like a civilized person, I complained internally as I settled my feet on the deck and worked at making my toes respond to the impulses my brain sent down.

“Hurry up and put on some pants. Nobody wants to see your little mangina,” Coates added, enjoying every second I couldn’t answer back with any kind of coherence.

“What…” I croaked, stopping as the two Mikes walked in behind her.

“Let him be, Coates,” Mac said.

“Nobody needs to wake up next to your face,” Anders added, although he was well outside of swinging range when he said it.

I blinked away some of the fog caused by being under for more than a day. Mac handed me a small cup of water and Anders picked up the tablet from the holder on the end of my tube and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. His expression turned to one of great concern as he glanced back up at me then back to the tablet.

“What is it?” I asked, my voice still hoarse and weak from not being used.

“I’m sorry, marine,” Anders said solemnly, “but the results don’t lie. I’m afraid… I’m afraid it’s confirmed that you do have a tiny dick.”

“Fuck off,” I groaned, relieved there wasn’t actually anything wrong with me and pissed at myself that he’d gotten me like that. I was about to mumble some kind of response and show him the results were wrong, but a female nurse stepped into view.

Plus, I wasn’t in a position to actually prove him wrong. Not right then, anyways.

Seeing two scruffy-looking operators laughing and a groggy marine with his hands full of his junk did not impress her, and she had no problem letting that show.

“You two, unless your training includes a medical degree, get out.”

“It does,” Anders answered, sounding hurt. “I’m a certified podiatrist.” She looked temporarily taken aback by his hurt assertion, but Mac’s laughter made her frown again because she suspected she was being made a fool of.

“By that he means he’s got a foot fetish. Seriously, you should see the weird porn he downloads, uuurgh,” Mac explained deadpan and conspiratorially as if he was disturbed by the thought of pornography, adding a repulsed shudder for effect.

“Out. Now,” she said, verbally stamping her foot and pointing at the door with her chin in the air until they left.

“Catch you later,” Mac shot back over his shoulder. “Briefing in two hours.”

I lay back on the gel cushioning of the tube and closed my eyes again as the nurse began poking at me.

“Five more minutes, mom,” I moaned.

* * *

I actually felt a whole lot better after a half hour and some coffee that tasted way better than I expected it to. Maybe because I’d had time to wake up, or maybe because my body had used up everything it had been given to repair itself, I was seriously hungry and went via the galley to get myself a burger and fries.

Yeah, I know, not exactly breakfast food, but… just… fuck off. Don’t judge me.

I ignored the green, leafy shit they insisted on putting on my plate because a good burger didn’t need a flower show in my opinion, and dove in, feeling myself recover even more with each chew. Just as I was considering heading up to grab myself a dessert, Mark walked in and locked eyes with me, making a point of looking at his watch and tapping it before he filled a coffee pot and walked out.

I took the hint, dumping my tray in the collector bin and following him aft and down to where their team—our team—had set up shop.

Sitting down at the table as Mark poured black coffee into cups and slid them across the top to each of us, I tried to ignore the next logical step in my body’s reaction to the food and sat uncomfortably, waving away the second cup of coffee in case that, err, accelerated things in the gastric department.

“Science team is shipping over to the Forthright now and we’re following after this. Our Russian friends have declined our invitation to base themselves there with us, extending the invitation back for us to move over to the Admiral Ivanov—” Groans interrupted him from the three other operators and the pilot present, and Mark held up both hands to appease them.

“I know, deal with it, move on,” he said. “Anyway, obviously we aren’t going to accept, so the plan is to perform a simultaneous launch and touch down so that neither nation claims first boots on the ground and blah blah.”

“What’s the issue with the Russian carrier?” I asked, having heard of the big NRC ship like anyone in the CS military had, but I’d never heard people react like that.

“I’ll tell you later,” Mac said, eager to get on with the briefing.

“You all know your roles, you all know the intel, and you all know what the goal is. Diplomacy, people. Diplomacy. The first motherfucker to start a fist fight with a Russian will be on my shit list for the foreseeable future, is that understood?”

Mumbles of agreement went around the table until Mark lowered his pose and stared directly into Coates’ eyes.

“Is that understood?” he asked again, directing the question solely at her.

“Understood,” she answered sweetly, shooting back a smile that would have earned her about a year of fire watch in a regular military unit.

“Alright, get your gear and move to the ship. We cross in ten,” Mark said, leaning his head back to toss the rest of his coffee down.

“Can we make it fifteen?” I asked, nervous enough as it was but knowing there was no way I was going out in zero-g carrying the payload I had onboard.

“Go drop your deuce fast, or I swear I’ll leave you behind,” he said, already halfway out the door.

With a spring in my step that couldn’t be obtained by anything other than a wholly successful bomb drop, I grabbed my gear and followed everyone to the ship to stow it, strap in, and pick up the headset above my seat. I picked up the comm traffic halfway through a transmission and heard the pilot, Edwards, talking to airspace control.

“…requesting priority docking to Forthright, over.”

“Roger, Super Seven-Five, you are cleared for docking port side eight-three. Safe flight.”

“Acknowledged, Forthright. Super Seven-Five out,” she said, and I heard a click in the headset before she spoke to us. “Alright, estimated flight time is nine and a half minutes. Strap in and try not to puke inside my bird.”

I smiled, having heard so many different versions of that speech it made me feel like the elite were every bit as human as us mere mortals.

“She means you, boot,” Coates’ voice came over the channel. “You barf in it, you clean it.”

“You done?” Mark’s voice answered. “I’d rather get to the surface instead of tugging each other off up here.”

The flight was nine and a half minutes of me trying my damn hardest not to vomit burger and fries. The coffee sat heavy in my stomach and gave me acid reflux like never before, so it was safe to say I didn’t enjoy the time Edwards spent on a ten-second burn before she moved the small ship on thrustors. Near on ten minutes later, we slid into an open docking bay and clanged to the deck to wait for the outer door to seal and for the atmospheric pressure to equalize.

Getting to my feet unsteadily, I leaned against the gear rack for a second before hauling my pack out and struggling down the rear ramp with it.

Behind me, the other three guys who’d adopted me into their team with varying degrees of willingness seemed to be carrying their gear with much more ease, even though I looked bigger than them. It put the notion that strength wasn’t size, and size wasn’t strength into perspective, because these guys had to be part ant to carry all the shit they deployed with.

“Alright, gear up,” Mark said, dropping his own pack and pulling out the armor suit to start stripping right there in the hangar bay. I did the same, zipping my own up and laying out the rest to put it on with a lot more ease than my old stuff. Mac helped me with the straps, making sure they were tight, so the plates overlapped where they were supposed to, but he hesitated when he looked at the crossed axe logo on my right shoulder.

“Sorry,” I said, hating myself for not having thought to cover it or scrape it off because I hadn’t earned it. It felt too much like stolen valor to me, and that turned my guts around worse than zero-g did.

“Relax, just imagine you’re undercover,” he told me with a smile that I wasn’t sure I believed. Adding the helmet, I activated the comm channel and hit transmit.

“Mic check, one, two.”

“One,” Mac answered.

“Two,” Anders added, before I heard a chuckle that sounded like it came from Edwards.

“That’s what she calls us,” Mac explained over the channel as he lifted out his modified Mk6 with more attachments than a charm bracelet.

“Uh, three?” I added cautiously, seeing smiles from Mac and Anders before Mark and Coates called up to acknowledge.

I smiled and lowered the helmet’s visor over my eyes to make sure the light filters were still working after the last time I’d checked before we left the destroyer that we’d hitched a ride on.

I patted the pouch where the micro reactors for my weapons sat, reassuring myself that they were still there for when we hit dirtside. But to my horror, I saw Anders fitting his to his Mk30 and then his rifle before checking both were online and chambering a tungsten round.

Mac was doing the same, as was Mark, and the three of them seemed to notice me staring.

“Part of being in Odin is not accidentally firing your weapon,” Mark explained. “If you can trust yourself not to do that, then ready your weapons.”

Of course I could do that, only I was never permitted the opportunity not to fuck up like that, because safety rules were made to cater to the lowest IQs.

I did it, loading the micro reactors into both and chambering rounds before making both safe and holstering the SMG on my thigh. I settled my rifle on the single point sling that clipped onto my armor and looked up as Anders was loading bombs into the EOL—explosive ordnance launcher—strapped underneath the barrel of his weapon, and I watched as he reached into his pack to pull out something I hadn’t expected to see.

It looked part wood-chopping axe, part climbing axe, and part ornamental. The short polymer handle was curved slightly, but the rippling sheen on the curved edge of the blade made it look more like a tool than a prop. He lifted it over his right shoulder and locked it in place to the back plate of his armor so just a short section of handle protruded for him to grab.

Mac finished loading his launcher and pulled out his own, this one with a swirling pattern engraved on the metal head and a darker handle. I looked down at the marine service issue blade on the upper left side of my chest and felt like a kid invited to play with the grown-ups.

Mark already had his axe in a loop on his belt when he lifted up the longer barreled version of our weapons. Recognizing the dedicated marksman version of the Mk6, I realized I hadn’t considered how a squad’s fighting strength could be boiled down to just four guys.

Three, dumbass. My brain told me. You’re a spectator.

I told myself to shut the fuck up as Mark caught me eyeing the rifle.

“Your record didn’t have you down as sniper trained, and seeing as how our sniper is playing pretend pilot, I guess that falls on me,” he explained. I nodded but my eyes roved down to the axe on his hip, the handle hanging down behind the grip of his standard issue Mk30, which I thought was odd because the others carried the SMG variant they’d given to me.

“You might be wearing the armor but these…” He slung the rifle and lifted the axe off the loop with a flick to catch the handle at waist height. When he gripped the handle the blade’s edge lit up like a plasma knife. “These are earned.”

I nodded, not sure what to say, when the door to the docking bay opened up and saved me from having to continue the conversation.

“Attention on deck!” a voice barked, making me shoot upright out of nothing but self-preservation and ingrained habit. I immediately felt like an asshole because none of the others did anything more than turn to face the direction of the man who’d shouted.

An officer walked in, uniform pressed and back straight as he walked right up to Mark and offered a hand.

“Good to see you again,” Lieutenant Colonel Desoto said.

“Likewise, Colonel. You remember MacMillan and Anders?”

Desoto turned to treat the rest of us with a smile until his gaze rested on me. The smile dropped, but more in confusion as if he was trying to place me. I remained at attention, with no idea what to do. By rights I should’ve saluted the man, but I was too confused to figure it out fast enough.

“Sir, this is Corporal Barton. He’s assigned to us for the duration,” Mark explained.

“Barton… Barton…” Desoto said, frowning as he tried to place my name like he’d heard it before.

“Sir, I was the only survivor from the platoon we lost,” I said, blurting it out before both of us ended up embarrassed. Desoto’s face dropped into an expression of angry sadness, and to my surprise he offered me his hand.

I took it, returning the strong grip just enough.

“Damn shame for our brothers to go down like that,” he said. “Glad you made it out, son.”

“Me too, sir,” I answered, adding that to the list of dumb shit I’ve said in my life. The colonel turned away to look at Mark as he got back to business.

“I wish I was dropping with you, but my fighting has to be done behind a desk these days,” he said.

“You could always bite the bullet and come over to the dark side,” Mark answered with a rueful smile, betraying the fact that the two men clearly knew each other well. “Genuine offer, you know you only need to say the word.”

“You know, if they try to send me to Midway to look over reports for the rest of my career, I might just do that… Now, our Russian friends are standing by to perform this “simultaneous drop” for the glory of the motherland’s goat or whatever,” he said, waving a hand in a gesture that looked a lot like he was stroking one out, and like our cold war enemy practiced some kind of voodoo.

He turned to wave two people forward, both wearing military clothing but looking like it didn’t belong on them. Just like I didn’t belong in the armor I was wearing but they didn’t seem to notice that.

“This is Doctor Laghari and Doctor King,” Desoto said. “They’ve been fully briefed and know to do as they’re told when it comes to safety matters.”

I looked at them, seeing a short woman wearing body armor over a navy fatigue blouse that was still too big for her even though it was probably the smallest size available, and a tall black guy wearing a wide smile and looking like the uniform belonged on him.

“Pleasure to make your acquaintances, gentlemen,” King said in a rich, melodic accent I placed as Alabama in a heartbeat. He lowered his pack and offered a hand to Mark. “Please, call me Travis,” he said, shaking hands with the other two before he got to me.

“We’re mightily excited to be here, isn’t that right, Sharon?” he said, turning to the unhappy looking woman who appeared anything other than excited.

“Call me Doctor Laghari,” she said, setting her stall out early. “If you’ll load the equipment we need?” she said, making the question sound distinctly like a direct order as she stomped up the rear ramp of our bird and disappeared inside.

“Sharon—Doctor Laghari—is okay,” King said, still smiling. “She’ll come around when she has work in which to immerse herself. Just doesn’t much enjoy the peculiarities and vagaries of outer space.”

“Not sure any of us do, Doc,” Mac said. “That’s Mark, I’m Mac, Anders, and Barton.” King nodded to everyone again as the introductions were made.

“Our pilots are Edwards and Coates,” Mark said, gesturing for King to board before turning back to Desoto and raising an eyebrow with an accompanying smirk.

“Which one’s IOA?” I heard him ask quietly, earning a reciprocal smile from the colonel. It hadn’t dawned on me that the intelligence operations activity would put their own scientists on the mission, but then I chided myself for being naïve that they wouldn’t.

“Both, but only one of them is genuinely pleased to be on this mission. I’ll let you figure out which,” Desoto said.

Mark laughed as ratings began running sealed crates up the loading ramp and securing them to the fixing bolts on the open rear deck and throwing cargo nets over them that contracted to keep them secure when the gravity was turned off.

The sailors then jogged clear while trying not to look at the special operators and their gear.

I realized with a shock that they were looking at me the same way.

“Bottom line, John,” Mark said, further revealing that the two men enjoyed a shared history. “What else do I need to know?”

“King’s solid, but Laghari was ordered here under protest. My guess is she’ll look for a way to call abort if she can get away with it.”

“What’s her problem?” Mark asked.

“She wanted an entire battalion sent down to protect her. Doesn’t think an Odin team is enough for her,” Desoto answered.

“Well, I look forward to that conversation,” Mark answered, offering his hand again for the colonel to shake. “See you on the other side.”

“I’ll be in GCIC, waiting for your call,” Desoto answered, turning to leave the docking bay.

We loaded up again, my now empty gear ruck getting stuffed inside the top pouch of my other still in the rack. Then I replaced the cargo net and took a seat before Edwards spoke through the comm channel in my helmet.

“Drop coordinated with NRC vessel. Stand by for zero gravity in five, four, three…”

I closed my eyes and held my breath as the outer doors opened and the ship slid out sideways. The zero-g lasted for a few seconds until we’d powered far enough away from the carrier, and then the engines burned and I was slammed into the back of my seat. I cursed myself for not replacing the mouthguard on Midway when I had the chance, but at least this wasn’t a boomerang drop, so hopefully the atmospheric entry would be smoother.

To my surprise, and probably because a SOG pilot would be expected to have more than a little skill in that department, we cut through atmo like a knife with only mildly violent shaking involved. With the wind rushing past the hull, we flew down, heading right back to the place where I’d almost died.

Chapter 15

Barton

Quarantined Mining Colony, Planet BG-192

As soon as the landing struts thumped into the dust at the LZ, both Mikes were up and out of their seats to stack up by the lowering rear ramp. Mark hovered behind my right shoulder, the barrel of his rifle pointing past my head as I took a knee and waited for the ramp to drop.

Weapon up and scanning, running the drills as I knew how, I pushed out to secure the LZ as Anders and Mac went ahead and Mark went right. We were supposed to land at the same time, but seeing four guys in full armor leaning against the landing struts of an NRC dropship like they’d been waiting for us… well, it pissed me off, not gonna lie.

“Welcome, my American friends,” an accented voice boomed from the tallest one of them as he walked toward us, arms wide like he was coming in for a bear hug.

“Captain Komarov, my name is Major Harlan. On beha—”

“Your government should have told my government they were sending a major, that way they would have made me a colonel!” Komarov boomed, laughing and slapping a hand on Mark’s shoulder hard enough to rock him on the balls his feet. “Come, we will talk.”

Mark looked back over his shoulder and gave his orders before walking away from both ships with the enemy captain.

“Put out a three sixty. Clear the LZ and get drones up.”

I nodded, pushing further out to check behind stacks of crates that had been knocked over beside the LZ.

Boot prints covered the dusty ground, and I could still see the scorch marks where the boomerang’s engines had flared before landing and cooked the sand into a thin puddle of glass. My heart rate increased, and I started to feel the beginnings of panic creep up from my gut.

What the fuck is wrong with you? Suck it the fuck up, marine!

“Hey, Barton?” Mac’s voice asked over the comm. I turned to locate him as I answered.

“Yeah?”

“You might wanna move, man,” he said, pointing up. I craned my neck, seeing six pinpricks of bright orange high above. I stared at it for a second until I realized a boomerang was coming straight down.

I broke into a jog, not wanting to become another puddle on the hard top of the LZ and took myself back under the shadow of the ship’s wing as the automated boomerang dropped.

I mean, I assumed it was automated, otherwise we’d be breaking the agreed rules on how many people we were allowed to have on the surface. I walked back to the ramp just as Coates was walking down it carrying a sealed crate in both hands and making out like it wasn’t heavy. She bumped past me, her own armor freshly sprayed with the insignia of an army aviator and the two bars of a captain beside the HeliMed logo.

“What’s wrong, snuggles? Didn’t know I was an officer?”

“No… I…”

She didn’t hang around for any answer. She just walked out into the settling dust cloud and dumped the crate down before unclipping the lid and throwing it open. She hit a few switches inside and a cloud of palm-sized drones flew up and zipped away into the sky to give us a combat overview.

Mac walked up beside me, his rifle held low but his eyes glued to the three red-armored Russians eyeballing our ship.

“She’s not. She’s a sergeant but the HeliMed pilots are all officers,” he said quietly, adding a shrug to explain the cover story.

“I get it,” I said.

“Get what?” Coates’ voice snapped over the channel. “You wanna talk shit, then switch off your mic first, boot.”

Mac shook his head to signal me not to respond and pulled a tablet from his pack. The screen came to life and showed a shimmering top-down view of the LZ. I’d seen footage like that from briefing packets before, but I’d never deployed with the linking drones, which made me think they were too expensive for us lowly marines to have.

Either that or they thought we’d eat them or start our own drone racing tournament. I had to admit the latter was pretty certain, but either way we’d definitely break them.

The boomerang to my far left had powered down completely, but nobody approached it because the hull would still be too hot to touch after burning through the atmosphere. The hull split open with a pneumatic hiss, and sections spread out to extend the interior.

“Mobile command center,” Mac explained, his voice coming back through the comm channel now. “Gives us secure living quarters and the eggheads a place to work.”

I nodded, lost for anything else to say or do. My eyes turned to the high ground that obscured the small colony settlement from view, and I took in the solar and wind array on top of it.

“Are we jacking their power board?” I asked. Mac followed my gaze and shook his head.

“Nah, ship should have enough juice to run things.”

“What about an OP?” I suggested for lack of anything better to do.

“Drones have it covered,” Coates interrupted. “They’ll auto-alert for movement.”

I looked around the LZ until my eyes came to rest on the three remaining Russian soldiers. While Coates was undercover as a pilot, Mark had argued the case that the NRC would know we weren’t sending any basic units to the surface, which was why we all wore the SOG armor with Odin insignia, but the guess was that the Russians would send their own special ops people dressed as regular troops.

That was wrong, because these guys were wearing the bulky armor painted blood red with black wings on the chest. Their armor was scarred by impact strikes that were clearly from bullets, and one had a stripe down his helmet that linked up with a faint scar running from cheek to chin that looked to me a little like a mark left by a plasma bayonet.

If it was, then the person who left it was very likely dead, and the grin on the Russian’s face made me think he’d enjoyed it. As if they could hear my thoughts, I heard a deep, rumbling laugh from the one who’d walked away with Mark.

“Creepy-ass bastards,” I muttered, forgetting again that the channel was open and I didn’t have to press to transmit anything.

“We’d have taken the Admiral Ivanov if it wasn’t for those psychos,” Anders answered, guessing who I was talking about.

“What the hell happened on that carrier?” I asked for the second time since I’d seen their collective reactions to the name.

“Later. Mark’s coming back,” Anders said. “Aaand he does not look happy…”

* * *

Komarov’s approach was expected. He was loud, large and forceful but he spoke with a smile, so he didn’t come over like a bully. Mark, expecting the Russian to attempt to ride roughshod over him, returned the smile and stayed quiet as the enemy officer reeled off the propaganda about their two proud nations working together and how they and their men would bring glory to their people by finding a new enemy and killing them together.

“Captain, you’re aware this is a fact-finding mission, right?” Mark asked carefully.

“Of course. We find these facts, find out who did this thing, and we kill them.”

“That’s not… look, the way I see it is that we both have a job to do, and both of our governments need to see that we worked together,” Mark said, adopting the tactic of laying everything out on the table.

“Perhaps this is what your government wants, but this is not the mission I have been given. We will do what we are here to do, and you will do the same…” He leaned down into Mark’s face. “So you will not get in our way.”

The way he spoke, like he was just repeating simple facts, was an intimidation tactic all on its own. He didn’t need to make threats, didn’t need to explain the consequences of Mark’s team getting in his way, because those consequences were implicit in everything about him, from his size to his confidence to the short-handled shovel strapped to his back plate.

“Or perhaps you wish to be my friend?” Komarov asked, the smirk on his face turning cruel as he looked the smaller American up and down. “Perhaps you come eat our food and we all live together? Perhaps, after this all over, you come home and fuck on my sister?”

Mark smiled, happy that the handcuffs of diplomacy were about to be removed by mutual agreement.

“If she looks and smells like you, then hard pass, asshole,” Mark said, returning the hard gaze with his hands on his hips in case the plasma axe was about to be needed. “That’s fine by me. We conduct our investigation, and you do… whatever it is you want to do. What we both need to do, is make it look like we’re working together for everyone upstairs.”

Komarov eyeballed him for a few seconds, like he was going to rip the sharpened trenching tool from his back and decapitate him, before that expression of malice evaporated and the Russian erupted in a deep, roaring laugh that left Mark confused as to what was so damn funny. Just as he was deciding whether or not to walk away, the laughter stopped just as abruptly as it had started, and the Russian became all business again.

“This is acceptable, Major Harlan. May I suggest you and I meet at the end of the days to share what we are finding? That way we can tell our people upstairs that we are working together and have become best of friends, but let me tell you something, American…”

Mark waited, his expression impatient.

“Well?” he asked after no follow up came.

“If I am finding out that this was the fault of your people, you and me will have final discussion.”

“It’s you and I, but again, fine by me,” Mark said with a smile that said he’d look forward to it.

“My English is not good enough for you, American?” Komarov growled, still wearing a half smile that wasn’t at all friendly.

“Valkov bayatsa—v lyes ni hadit,” Komarov intoned menacingly. “You know what this means, American? It means if little boys like you are afraid of wolf, you should not go into woods.”

“Bud’ shto budyet,” Mark answered, adding a wink before turning his back on the shocked Russian.

What shall be, will be, he translated for himself, feeling the knot of worry tighten in his gut.

* * *

Barton

Mark came back to the ship wearing a look that made me worry someone was going to get it. Stupidly, I worried that person was going to be me.

“Okay, Coates and Edwards keep the ship locked down and work another set of drones over us. You three, on me,” he added, turning to me and the others. “I want to hit the colony administration block before they get there.”

I listened to the round of acknowledgements, adding my own instinctive growl of “Kill!” to the responses. I knew other squads had cleared the western edge of town while we were hitting the residential streets, but it dawned on me that I hadn’t heard what they’d found there, if anything. I knew only marines dropped last time, so I doubted anyone had managed to unlock the colony database or anything because we were clearing fast to look for bodies. I guess the plan was for support teams to drop after and do all that stuff, but shit went down before we reached that phase.

“Hey,” Mac said quietly to me with his mic muted. “Hit a stim before we move out. Can’t have you lagging behind, okay?”

I nodded, not answering out loud because I hadn’t got the hang of muting the open mic whenever I wanted to talk without transmitting to everyone.

“Drones up,” Coates answered. “Orbiting the team now… I have eyeball.”

“Roger that, Claymore, I want two moved north keeping eyeball on that quarry approach. Moving out,” Mark answered, heading away from the LZ at a jog, with his long rifle slung over his back and the Mk30 in both hands. Anders went next, knees bent and weapon stock in his shoulder as his head swiveled in all directions, and I followed, trying to keep up as much as I was trying to keep watch. Mac followed up in the rear, spending half the time running backward to keep an eye on our six.

“Mission is now two-fold,” Mark announced, barely out of breath in spite of running in full war gear. “The priority is still to investigate the cause of the issues, but we need to maintain security and watch on the NRC contingent. It’s clear they aren’t here in the spirit of the agreement, and I think they’re looking for a reason to mix it up.”

“I’ve got three drones with audio-visual coverage on their ship,” Coates said back. “Want me to deploy drones to track their team?”

“No, too risky, but maintain a higher altitude to see where they go,” Mark answered. “Keep an eye out for them tracking us, though. We’ll check in when we get there.”

We moved, keeping up a brutal pace that was all I could do to maintain. The stim I’d taken with one of the pain pills kicked in after about a quarter mile and made my heart beat faster and the run suddenly easier. Stopping at the eastern edge of the settlement, we stacked up on the side of a building, ready to move in.

“Street check,” Mark said over the channel and the reply came from Edwards.

“Clear. No movement.”

“And our buddies?” Mark said, peering out and around to confirm the drone feed with the old Mk1.

“East side, emptying houses,” Coates answered. “Looks more like looting than investigating.”

“For glory of Motherland,” Mac said, in a passable impression of a fanatical NRC soldier.

“Push out. Admin building is ahead and left, thirty meters,” Mark said, ignoring the comment and stepping into the street with his gun raised and scanning. He moved, sidestepping fast to reach the other side of the street with Anders on his six while I moved around and hugged the nearest wall to mirror their advance on the other side of the street.

Mac moved behind me, tapping my left shoulder whenever I stopped to tell me he was there. The admin building stood open, the industrial plastiglass and steel-framed double doors wide after a marine had forced it open before.

Just like on the other side of the colony, the street just seemed… empty. Like everyone had dropped what they were doing and shut up shop at some signal.

We paused until Mark gave the nod to move in and announced it over the channel.

“Entering admin building.”

“Got you on feed, maintaining external watch,” Coates responded.

We worked, clearing room to room just like I was used to, only finding it a lot easier with a few inches taken off the end of my rifle’s barrel.

Nothing. Empty, and not even a sign that people had left in a hurry. It was weird as shit and made me uneasy, even more than it had the last time because I knew where those people had gone.

We moved upstairs, clearing all the other offices there until we stacked up on the last room that had a secure lock on it.

“Anders,” Mark muttered, stepping back for the marine to take a knee in front of it and use a micro tool to remove the access panel. Attaching a small box by wire clips he ran a diagnostic, green text rolling up on the small black screen until each line had shortened to eight digits.

He punched in the numbers and pulled the box free to pull the handle, but nothing happened. He pulled it again, the door opening a fraction but sticking.

“Try it again,” Mark said.

“It’s not the lock. It’s blocked from the inside,” I answered, looking through the tiny gap in the door and seeing what looked like an electrical cable tied on the inside. I stepped closer, reeling back at the putrid air coming from the inside.

“What is it?” Mac asked, having to step back when I turned my head away from the stink.

“Body. Inside,” I said, shaking my face and pulling the thin scarf around my neck up over my face. “I got it.”

I brought up my weapon, making sure I had space before I hit the button to activate the plasma bayonet. Eight inches of neosteel shot out of the side of the barrel and lit up with a crackling hum. The metal of the frame heated up and added to the smell as I slid it through the gap and worked it back and forth to cut whatever was holding the door shut.

Anders kept pressure on the door handle, pulling it back until the cable inside gave way and the door flew wide to suck out a gust of rancid air that made all four of us reel back and cover our faces.

“Jesus,” Mac groaned as we swept in to clear the room.

“Hands!” I yelled automatically on seeing a guy sitting in an office chair. As soon as I’d called it I knew there was no way he was going to put them up. The wall behind him, including the comm array and the security screens covering the colony, even the ceiling above me were spattered with dark and sticky stuff that, for a second, I thought was the black shit the… things… had coming out of them, but my brain caught up and told me it was dried blood and brain matter.

“Yeah, he ain’t a threat,” Mac said, leaning down to take the civilian model pistol from the fingers and dropping out the magazine.

The guy’s skin was black with rot and the puddle under his chair was like some kind of foul-smelling glue. Mark rolled the chair away, the wheels making a slurping noise as they ran through the gloop, and Anders stepped in to find a port on the console that wasn’t plugged up with brain matter.

Using his tablet, he hit the screen before finding somewhere clean to rest it down.

“That’s gonna take about twelve hours to decrypt,” he said. “It’ll remote upload and wipe after.”

“Can it be hacked? By the Russians, I mean,” Mark asked.

Anders shook his head. “Any interference either of the encrypted digital data channel or the physical interface will shut it down.”

“Either way, I want that door secured again and I want to know if they get inside this building,” Mark said, busy checking the rest of the office, looking for a suicide note or something, I guessed, but coming up empty.

“Looks like he’s been here since the start. Coates, I’m sending you a feed for the science team to look at. Confirm our guess that this guy’s been toast since the time of the distress call.”

“Roger that,” Coates answered distantly, as if she was talking and concentrating on something else.

We went back out, securing the door by the same method we’d got in. Getting an update on where the Russians were and finding that they were still tearing apart the eastern edge of the colony, we cleared the rest of the street and met up in the square.

Mark abandoned cover, seeming annoyed that we were skulking in the shadows when there was nothing threatening us, and stood tall to look up at the yellow sun.

“Four hours of daylight left,” Mac said, anticipating his question.

“Too late to check the quarry,” Mark answered. “Back to the LZ and set up the post.”

“Wanna check in with the reds?” Anders asked.

“Fuck ’em. They’re probably looking for something to kill and eat raw. I’ll check in with them later.”

“We going to tell them about the colony control room?” I asked.

“Tell them what? Let’s see what the download says so we know if there’s something to share,” Mark answered. “I’d rather know more and have some auto turrets set up before we talk next.”

Chapter 16

Barton

The automated boomerang had cooled down pretty fast after it had landed. I’d seen a few of the mobile command centers before, mainly on big training exercises, but I’d never actually been inside one.

The crew from the ship had moved to the command center, and as I entered, I took a slow three-sixty to take in the four extended sections. One had equipment set up on benches where both scientists worked, one was filled with stacked gear, another had communications and monitoring stuff set up—Edwards worked two of the consoles by switching between them in turn—and the fourth had bunks set up.

There were eight of us and only six cots, but hot bunking and taking turns on fire watch was nothing new to me. Hell, it was my life.

“Are we up?” Mark asked, stacking his rifle on a rack by the door that closed behind us.

“We’re up,” Coates answered, climbing out from under a workbench. “Four guns online and tracking, drones in place and showing live. It’s all good.”

“Which means something’s about to get FUBAR,” Mac complained.

“Screw Murphy,” Mark said. “We make our own luck. What have the Russians been doing?”

“Brought a lot of stuff back from the east side of the colony—mostly souvenirs by the look of it—but they’ve deployed two large surveillance drones over the LZ and the settlement and two rovers north,” Edwards reported.

“What are they doing now? The rovers, I mean,” Anders asked, stowing his own rifle and bending down to look at the display screens.

“Just sitting on the high ground above the quarry, watching,” Edwards said, pointing at a display that showed two tracked bots outlined in red on the drone feed display.

“What’s their play?” I asked, speaking before I’d thought it through and hoping I didn’t make an ass of myself.

“My guess is they’re waiting for us to make a move before they jump on it. Remember, we don’t know if they shared everything they knew from their troops landing here before,” Mark answered.

I thought about it, asking the logical question as it came to me. “You think they know more? Or they pulled some of their people off the surface and didn’t share that?”

“Possible,” Mark said, deep in thought as he moved to the next extension and checked in with King. “You getting anything from the decryption download yet?”

“Nah, I need to download all of it before I can decrypt. Otherwise, I could fragment the data and have to piece it all together afterwards like a damn puzzle.”

“Stay on it, let me know the second you get anything concrete,” Mark said before he turned to Laghari. “You got the footage of the guy we found?”

“Yes. Your estimate that he killed himself around the time of the distress call is accurate, given the state of decomposition,” she answered without turning to look at him. “If you want any more accuracy, I’ll need to physically examine the body.”

“Yeah, I’m not comfortable with taking you out into the field just yet,” Mark told her, earning a scornful glance as if his concern over her safety was a personal insult, which I found odd given how she’d demanded a larger escort.

I wandered over to the micro command suite as they talked, looking at four feeds with enhanced views and data icons running vertically down the right side of the screens.

They moved, roving from left to right, with the tip of a wide barrel in the low center telling me they were the gun feeds, and for a second I imagined the feed filling with flying tracer rounds.

Four heavies could’ve saved my squad the last time I was here, but it is what it is…

“Alright, I want one more patrol to the high ground to check on the power situation before we lose the light, and I guess I better make nice with the carnivores,” Mark said with a resigned sigh at having to interact with the NRC again.

I went back to the rack and picked up my rifle, digging into a pouch to chew down another pain pill and a stim for good luck.

“No, you stay here. Mac and Anders can handle the hill,” Mark said when he saw me preparing to move out.

“I’ll go with you, then, for backup,” I argued, almost adding the automatic “sir” but stopping myself.

Damn, it was easy to forget when I wasn’t in a large unit, I thought, not sure if I liked it or hated the apparent lack of discipline.

“Fine, but you say nothing. Just stand still and look tough, okay?”

“Got it,” I said, nodding to Mac and Anders as Mac hit the door release and headed out to climb the hill.

Mark left his rifle inside the boomerang, but I kept mine strapped on and carried it in the low, ready as we walked in silence to cover the two hundred paces to where the NRC ship sat with the rear ramp open. Mics muted but the channel still in our ears, we approached their ship as the smell of burning meat hit my nose.

Now I tried to keep my opinion from showing on my face, but I couldn’t help the feeling that we’d traveled over to the fun side of the LZ. They were playing some kind of shouty, synthesized metal music and had an honest to god barbecue going by the foot of the tail ramp.

They’d taken off their helmets but still wore their armor and carried weapons, like they were all good to party but were always ready to kill something. The one burning the steaks and poking them with a knife as long as my forearm turned and shouted something up the ramp in Russian.

“You have come to tell me you have found something, American?” Komarov rumbled as he stepped down the ramp with a metal mug in one hand.

“No, I’ve come to see if you had anything to tell me,” Mark answered, his eyes narrowing at something behind the big man. I leaned around and saw a combined states flag, which made my fucking blood boil. We were down here getting the mission done and these assholes were just looting for trophies.

“My team have found nothing of any value,” Komarov said, tilting his head up to look at the rapidly darkening sky. “Tomorrow we search the quarry. You are welcome to watch?”

Mark ignored the attempt to goad him and turned to leave but Komarov hadn’t finished.

“You call yourself Odin,” he said mockingly, the hand holding the cup extending to point his index finger at the axe on Mark’s belt. “Why is this? Why do you steal a mythology that is not your own?”

“Actually, the Norse colonized the North American continent before the Europeans did. Check your history,” Mark answered as he began to walk away but froze at the sound of the cup being tossed to the dirt. That sound was followed by a metallic shhnick and I turned to crouch into a firing pose and level my rifle at the guy’s chest.

He didn’t even seem to notice, or at least he might’ve noticed but just didn’t give a shit, and just stood there holding the short-handled trenching tool in his hand like it weighed nothing. He hefted it, inspecting the obviously sharpened edge as he spoke.

“This may be so, but does your axe beat my shovel?”

“Maybe one day we’ll find out,” Mark answered flatly. “But not today, because we both have a job to do.”

“I have one, you know? I sent it home to my family to show them. Do you know where I got it, American?” Komarov asked, ignoring Mark’s response.

Mark said nothing, but I could see the muscles in his jaw working up and down like he wanted to take the guy out right there and then.

“I took it from an Odin I killed, so it is mine now. Would you like to try and take this?” he asked, twirling the shovel with ease.

“Listen, Jerkoffski,” I said, unable to keep my mouth shut any longer. “You might want to file down the sharp edges on that thing because the way your mouth’s running, it’s likely to get shoved up your ass before too long.”

Komarov smiled at Mark before he turned to face me.

“And where is your axe? Are you not good enough to have one?”

“I left it at your mom’s place last time I was there. Ask her to mail it to me, would ya?” I said, turning away as my heart started to thump in my chest like a point defense cannon. Mark walked with me, ignoring the shouted insults in Russian behind us until we were halfway back to the boomerang.

“You left it… at his mom’s place…” Mark said slowly.

“Listen, I err…”

“Jerkoffski?” he asked.

“Well, I just…”

“And you threatened to shove his weapon up his ass?”

“Well, when you say it like that…”

“You know, Barton, I wasn’t sure I’d like you!” Mark laughed.

I said nothing, just walked beside him as he chuckled and shook his head, making me think I’d either been cool or dumb to the point of suicidal.

Back inside the boomerang, Mark still laughed occasionally to himself and I couldn’t help but smile. As one-liners went, I thought I’d handled the situation well, so I grabbed two bottles of water and handed one to Mark, who was sitting and working on a tablet.

“What’s the deal with the NRC carrier?” I asked, having been unable to let it go since I’d first seen their collective reaction to it. Mark killed the tablet, returning it to a black screen and accepted the water.

“Where were you at the end of the territory wars?” he asked.

“Finishing boot and deploying to sector four.”

“You see any action?”

“Some night attacks on fire watch. Not much,” I admitted. By the time I was in the field after a massive recruitment drive back in the home system, the war was all but drawing to a close after all the involved nations ran out of resources, leaving the CS and a few allies fighting the Russian Confederacy and the British Empire in maybe three systems.

The truce had followed, but everyone knew it was going to break out into all-out galactic war in the future after everyone had consolidated and upgraded their tech levels.

“I was in the thick of it not far from here,” Mark said, distance being a relative thing this far out. “At the time, we had nothing that could get near this massive NRC combined fleet. The British blew anything we had out of the sky with their packs of stealth boats and we were stretched thin on too many fronts. Some genius came up with the idea for a covert mission to scuttle the Admiral Ivanov based on some reports by a defector who turned himself in at Midway.”

“And let me guess, it was a trap?”

“No, the intel was solid,” Mark said with a sadness I felt in my core. “One of the guys had a void suit malfunction crossing over. I mean, getting twelve operators across twenty kilometers of space isn’t an easy task on any day but we lost two before we got there—”

“Two? I thought only one suit malfunctioned?” I asked, wrapped up in the story.

“The guy who vectored to help him got hit and they both veered too far off course. Anyway, we got there and cut through the weak point the intel gave us. Long story short, we were supposed to set charges on the aft reactor, but Murphy fucked us in the ass and there was something going on nearby which attracted NRC sailors. We ended up in a firefight with a platoon of Spets that took eight of us down. We busted out, vented half the deck and floated in space until we got picked up. Two more guys bought it while we floated, so yeah, the goddammed Admiral Fucking Ivanov is a bit of a by-word for a bad day out for us.”

“Wait, were you there? You said “we,” but I didn’t know if you meant your guys or…”

“No, I was there. There weren’t many of us in sector and it was mostly the former SEALS guys because they were the deep dive experts. Funny thing was, all the guys who died in the void were all specialists, and I’d only been in void once since training. My… my brother didn’t make it off the carrier, so we never recovered his axe.”

“Shit…” I said, lost for anything better to say. “Why don’t I know that story?”

“Really? Come on, kid. You think we advertise the shit we do?”

“Like the Stonemeyer Embassy siege?” I asked, earning an exaggerated eye roll from Mark. “Wait, were you there too?”

“I’m one of the few people who wasn’t, if you listen to bullshit,” he said. “Although I genuinely do know one of the guys who was.”

“I must’ve met at least fifteen guys who said they were there,” I told him with a laugh.

“Then you met fifteen liars, because none of them would admit it to a…”

“To just some grunt?” I asked, sensing his awkwardness at forgetting I wasn’t really one of them.

“I was gonna say to a dumbass who threatens to do butt stuff to a Russian spec ops captain with his own damn trenching tool, but whatever,” he corrected me before King interrupted our moment.

“Um, Major, I’m getting the first decryptions through now…”

“Mike check, one, two,” Mark said into the channel, getting a response from Mac straight away. “Haul ass back here, we’ve got a movie to watch.”

They got back in ten, both sweating from the run in full gear in heavier gravity than we were designed for, and both stripped their gear to rehydrate and cool off.

“Okaaaay,” King said as he put down a cup of something emitting steam and thundered his fingertips over the rubberized keyboard. “We are still unpacking half of it, but I can give you colony logs from eight days prior to the distress call.”

“Why eight days?” Mark asked.

“Because that’s when they found something. In the mine,” King answered. “I don’t have any video—not yet at least—but I do have some basic reports…” He flicked the screen of a tablet down with three long swipes to make me think he was going far enough back that I’d have to really pay attention. This kind of thing required me to use my brain more than the usual “stand in a straight line and follow orders” life I was used to; or more than that allowed me to use… whatever. Anyway.

“Report from mining team Kilo Eight, dated eight days prior to distress call,” King read out. “Kilo Eight was a pathfinder team that tracked the neodymium deposits and bored through for the recovery teams to mine and shore up the tunnels. The report refers to a routine drilling operation that hit an unexpected void and totaled the drill.”

“How?” Mac asked. “Those things can literally drill through diamond.”

“True, but they can't survive a twenty-foot drop onto their asses, which is what happened. Kilo Eight called in Oscar Five—the on-duty rescue and medivac team—and they recovered the team.”

“Go on,” Mark prompted him.

“Next day Oscar Six deployed with Kilo One and X-Ray One to assess the damage to the drill and see if they could repair it in place, but it looks like they started exploring the cave instead,” King told us.

“These things are normal for mining ops, though, right?” I asked. “They hit natural voids all the time and just work around it.”

“That’s right, but who said this was a natural void?” King answered with a knowing smirk. I shut up and let him talk.

“They reference certain ‘artifacts’ found there but don’t go into any kind of detail or further explanation. In fact, from here on in, the reports got real short, like nobody wanted to make them.”

“And where are these ‘artifacts’ now?” Mark asked.

“Your guess is as good as mine, but I am unable to foresee any way that this isn't either strongly linked to, or a direct cause of what transpired here,” King said, just as a soft ping came from his terminal.

“Aha, here we are… the last colony command log recorded just decrypted. Y’all just sit tight and I’ll get the popcorn,” King said as he swiped his tablet toward a large monitor that he turned around to face us.

The screen blinked on, showing a guy who looked pale and drawn with dark rings around both eyes.

“This is Dean Parker, former sergeant first class, CS army and now working for Emmet Interstellar Industries on BG-One-Ninety-Two at a neodymium mining colony. Eight days ago, miners uncovered unknown items buried in the rock and brought them back to the colony. Since then, all order has gone and the civilians are… are…” He stopped, rubbing his stubbled face with both hands and looking just about ready to give up.

“The colonists have begun acting in a strange manner, and all normal means of communication is useless. I’m barricaded inside the colony control room and I’ve remotely activated the distress beacon, but without a direct link to the array, I can’t send out this recording. They’ve… they’ve cut the lines somehow, which is weird because they don’t seem able to talk or respond anymore. I’m trapped in here an—” He flinched as the door behind him shook under a heavy impact. “I’m trapped in here. I have water and food to last a few days but…” He started to break down. His watery eyes glistened up close to the camera and his bottom lip started to tremble, before he ducked down out of shot and sobbed. A second later the feed stopped, leaving us all sitting in silence.

“Well… shit…” Mark said finally.

“There’s more,” King said, his face a mask of concentration. “Getting it now, hold on just a second…”

The screen flickered to life again to show the same guy, looking like he hadn’t slept in a month and sporting enough stubble to start calling it a beard.

“I ran out of water over forty-eight hours ago. I haven’t eaten since… since… I don’t even know what day it is. I can’t think straight. The NRC responded to the distress beacon. I… I can't communicate directly with them but they’re saying they’ll assist if we contract part of the consignment of mined materials to them. I… I can’t warn them… They’re coming… God help them…” He stood, staggering into the desk and knocking the camera so that it faced up toward the ceiling of the control room. I heard noises in the background, and he sobbed a few more times before the crashing in the squeaky chair again.

There was silence, then a loud bang and a spray of bright pink passing the camera as the guy’s brains painted the ceiling.

The screen stayed there, just waiting for drips to fall before it went black again and the temperature seemed to drop.

“That’s when he killed himself, Major,” Laghari said quietly, for the first time seeming frightened instead of angry. “I mean, it’s obvious that’s what he did, I’m just saying your guess as to when was accurate.”

“And the NRC got what they deserved,” Anders spat. “Who rolls up on a distress beacon and is all like, ‘Nyet, we will not help unless you are to be giving us all of your moneys?’ Assholes. No, pirates, that’s what they are, fucking pirates.”

“No argument from me there,” I said, still staring at the screen and imagining the blood dripping off the ceiling and down the walls.

“That’s settled,” Mark said as he stood. “We hit the quarry with drones tomorrow. In the meantime, I want this spot locked down tight. Seal it up, set all the perimeter alarms, and I want two on watch at all times. I’ll go first.”

“I’ll take a watch,” I said, getting up.

“No, you rest. You’re still not a hundred percent and tomorrow might shape up to be tasty,” Mark said.

“I’m fine, really, and the pills the doc gave me are st—”

“I said rest,” Mark snapped at me. “Don’t let our relaxed attitude toward discipline give you the wrong impression about things. To be clear, I say do something, you fucking do it, you got that, marine?”

“Sir, yes sir,” I answered woodenly, heading for a cot so I could lie awake and seethe.

Chapter 17

Barton

Morning came two hours into my watch, which meant I was already fired up with pills and caffeine when the others joined. I wanted to point out to Mark that if I’d taken first watch I’d be better rested, but I took what he said to heart and had to stop thinking of him as “Mark” and replace that inside my head with “Major Harlan.”

It wasn’t just what he’d said but it was how he’d said it that pissed me off, because he’d made it damn clear that as much as I was on this mission, I was most definitely not one of them.

Both Mikes went out as soon as the sky was light enough to retrieve the gear we’d left in the admin block before it found its way into NRC hands.

“Two choices,” Mark said as he geared up. “Share the relevant information from the recording with our friendskis or not?” It appeared that the question was put to the team as a whole for their opinions, but I kept my mouth shut.

“What’s in there that’s sensitive?” Coates asked.

“Nothing. At least not to us, but they might not see themselves depicted very well,” Mac said.

“Apart from the whole alien artifact stuff,” Anders chimed in, earning what I can only describe as “looks” from the others. “Hey, I’m just saying it as I see it,” he argued.

“Whether they are extra-terrestrial to this planet or not, it makes no difference. Up to the moment we know what they are, we treat them as live bioweapons until we know they’re rendered safe,” Mac pointed out, as if any of us was eager to literally get our hands on them.

“Next question: where are they?” Mark asked, getting silence in response as they all thought about it.

Fuck it. It’s not like they don’t think I’m a dumb grunt anyway.

“I don’t think they’re in the settlement,” I said, earning their full attention.

“It speaks,” Coates said mockingly.

“Something you should consider doing less of sometimes,” Mark shot back at her. “Explain?”

“If these… artifacts are in the town, then where’s the guard? Where are the people with it? We’ve cleared all the buildings and unless there’s something underground that isn’t on the schematics, my guess is that they’re at the quarry or off-site somewhere else,” I said.

“Logical,” Mac agreed with me. “If the shit they found caused all the trouble, then they wouldn’t leave it alone, would they? Plus, we know from Barton’s last visit, the… people were in the quarry tunnels.”

“So, we move to the quarry and send drones in to the tunnels until we find something. Rinse and repeat,” Anders said simply.

“Any objections?” Mark asked.

“Not from us,” Coates said after looking around and leaving her gaze to loiter on me with something resembling disgust. “But there might be from the Russian spec ops team sitting a couple hundred meters away and devouring their breakfast of the bodies of their enemies.”

“Travis, can you put those reports and video logs on a transfer stick with barely enough memory to upload it?” Mark asked as he turned over one shoulder to look at King, who was sipping coffee and stretching his back awkwardly.

“I can configure a stick to upload slow, if that’s what you mean?” he asked.

“That’s what I mean,” Mark told him. “Keep them glued to their readouts while we get a jump on them hitting the quarry and just nuking it or something.”

“You might want to hurry it up then,” Edwards cut in with a finger pointed at a screen. I leaned over to look, seeing the roving displays of two gun cameras swivel toward the Russian dropship and zoom in on the movement the AI program had detected.

“I’ll run it over to them now,” Mark said. I got up, not intending to offer backup but he must have got that impression from me.

“You stay here, Barton. I can insult him and imply I banged his mom without your help this time,” he said, totally deadpan, before he pressed the door release and slipped out into the dull yellow dawn.

“Um, what was that about?” Mac asked, smiling at me.

“The guy was talking shit about us,” I said with a shrug. “So I just fed him a little back.”

“By involving his mom? Nuclear option, dude, nuclear,” Mac said as the smile grew wider. “Let’s hope we don’t end up tussling with them, because that guy’s definitely coming for your nutsack.”

I shrugged again, as if the concept of having my balls ripped off by an angry Russian soldier was just what I called a Tuesday, but inside I was worrying a little more than I had been throughout the night.

The sound and vibration of a crate slamming on the table behind me made me jump, and I turned to see Coates smirking like she’d just exposed my nervousness. She unclasped it and lifted the lid.

“You’ve got three. Don’t break them and don’t try to eat them,” she said.

“Three what?” I asked, leaning up to peer over the lip of the crate.

“Someone mind getting junior here a book to eat or something? He’s getting in the way of grown-up talk,” Coates said, sounding like a fed-up mom being asked why clouds were called clouds.

“Drones,” Mac said, ignoring Coates and lifting one out. It had a surface that looked like brushed aluminum, only darker, and shaped like two large dinner plates stacked the wrong way to make a bulging disc. He brought out his tablet and started syncing the device to it as Anders started doing the same with another.

“Mark will have to do the third, given how you brought a tourist along,” Coates added with her trademark lazy snark as she turned away to lift her armor off a crate and put it on.

I’d had enough of her rapid-fire shit and wanted it on the table, right there and then.

“What’s your problem with me?” I asked. She froze for a second before continuing to strap on her back and chest plates.

“My problem? My problem is that you shouldn’t be here, but you are, which means that three quarters of my team has to go out there and face off with NRC spec ops and whatever the hell else is out there, all the while looking out for your ass instead of covering their own. That’s my problem.”

She turned on me, the last shoulder clip on her armor snapping into place to show me the raised stenciling on the chest plate that read “FRONT TOWARD ENEMY.” I smiled, getting the nickname, but that only wound her up tighter.

“This is funny to you, asshole?” I snapped.

“Funny? No. Not one damn bit of this is funny to me. I didn’t ask for this, but I was given a choice. I chose to come, and if you don’t like that, I suggest you take it up with someone who isn't me. I lost my whole fucking squad here—my entire platoon, in fact—so if you think I’m here as a tourist, you damn well better check your attitude!”

I was left panting and angry after I’d let fly at her, silencing the inside of the boomerang while everyone watched the fireworks. Mac had worked his way in behind Coates as I shouted at her, probably to step in if she decided to take my head off, but the woman just looked me up and down with scorn.

“I hope I’m wrong about you, I really do, but when you fuck up and get someone killed, just know you won't be leaving this rock in one piece, mmkay?” she said, adding a smiling head tilt and a sickly sarcastic voice to match.

“Whatever. Mac, think you could show me how that drone works?” I asked, turning away from her like the argument was a waste of my damn time, because it was.

“You got any drone-quals already?” he asked, checking my experience so he could pitch the instructions at the right level. I shook my head, not bothering to explain that the corps taught me how to fight but not much else, but that didn’t faze him.

The lesson took me a few minutes after I’d gotten used to the simple controls on the tablet, and I resisted the urge to say it was just like playing a video game. By the time I reckoned I had it down, Mark walked back in.

“Good news and bad news,” he announced as he snatched up his rifle.

“Bad news first,” Mac said as he stuffed the drone into his pack and rushed to be ready.

“They aren’t all that interested in the report and are headed for the quarry soon.”

“And the good news?” Anders asked.

“Just got word that we’re authorized for Thor protocol,” he said with a smile that was infectious, even if I didn’t know what it meant.

“You mean…” Mac said, unable to get his words out for laughing at the joke he hadn’t made yet. “You mean we’re auThorized?”

“I knew you were gonna say that, jackass,” Coates complained with a groan.

“Dad joke, up top!” Anders said, high-fiving Mac at the door.

“We good to go?” Mark asked, smiling but not passing comment on the joke. We replied that we were before a thought struck me and gave me a jolt of panic.

“Wait, aren’t we taking any heavier firepower?”

“No need,” Mark assured me, changing the subject before I could ask why.

“Coates, Edwards, keep us in sight and keep an eye on them.” He jutted his chin at the wall in the direction of the NRC dropship. “Travis, keep working on the decryption for anything else you can dig out, and Doctor Laghari?”

The small woman gave him an expectant look from behind her perpetually pinched expression.

“Keep an eye on what we’re recording on our drones when we get there. Let us know anything you think is relevant.”

We moved at a pretty fast pace, making me sweat before we’d passed through the settlement.

“One mile out,” Coates said over the channel. “Skies are clear and the road’s deserted.”

“Roger, cast ahead to confirm quarry clear,” Mark answered. “Edwards, report.”

“All four operators are in the settlement. Looks like they’re going for the administration offices, probably confirming what we told them,” the pilot responded.

“Understood. Anders, confirm all our tech was removed?”

“Affirmative.”

The exchange took us up to the heavy earth mover where Cooke had found the severed arm, so I called it out and Mark halted us to scan around. Just up ahead I could see the shallow, blackened crater where I’d been blown up and irradiated a little.

Like that shit’s on a sliding scale. I laughed at myself. You either got blown up or you didn’t. Ain’t no “little bit blown up.”

As much as I hated the attitude I got from Coates, I was starting to worry more that she was right. These guys were fitter than me, slicker than me, smarter than me… If it came down to the wire, I’d be lucky to keep up, let alone save one of them if shit hit the fan.

That worrying kept my brain active all the way past the spot where I could still see the marks the HeliMed bird had left in the dust as my mind tried not to replay the images from the last time I was there.

“Where are the guns? There would’ve been a lot of gear dropped here,” Anders said.

“No linkage from the heavy either,” Mac reported. “You laid a lot of pipe from the door gun.”

“Something’s picked the place clean,” I said. “No other explanation.”

“Coates, check the marines’ BFT and signal Forthright to check orbital imagery again for movement at this location.” She acknowledged, coming back a few seconds later to confirm that no signals were showing.

“Just Barton,” she reported, not bothering with an insult and using my actual name this time.

“You aren’t chipped?” I asked, figuring it was a stupid question but an obvious one to ask.

“Kinda defeats the object, dudn’t it?” Mac answered with a smile as we reached the lip of high ground overlooking the bowl of the quarry.

“Deploy,” Mark ordered, settling himself into a comfortable position to bring the rifle to bear over the quarry. We dropped behind cover, and I slipped off my pack to pull out the drone and settle it on the ground before activating it with the tablet application.

It rose up, hovering with a buzzing whine that made me think of mosquitos, and stayed in the air at head height.

“One up,” Mac said.

“Two up,” Anders reported.

“Three up,” I echoed, scrolling through the visual spectrums on the display.

“I have overwatch,” Mark said. “One, two, three from the left. Deploy.”

“Deploying,” Mac and Anders chorused before I did the same a second later and started flying my drone toward the third tunnel from the left. As the dark hole grew larger on the display, I started to feel the stress building up inside me, but the screen flickered distractingly with horizontal lines of static.

I glanced up at Mac, who was hitting the side of his own tablet with a gloved palm as if that had ever made tech work any better. Anders’ voice came over the channel as his drone had the shortest distance to cover.

“One down. No feed.”

“Hold position,” Mark said. “Mac?”

“I’m getting interference on my f—dammit! Two down.”

“Three still up, but interference is pretty bad,” I reported.

“Pull the drone back,” Mark ordered. “Shit, I was worried about this…”

“It’s not a signal blocker,” I said. “At least, I don’t think it is. We lost communications and uplinks when we went into the quarry last time.”

“Whatever it is, it’s screwing with the drone links big time,” Anders said, having stood to look through his scope and locate the downed tech.

“Reckon a tracked rover would make it?” Mac asked.

“They already thought of that before we dropped. They’d have to make something to hardwire it and it didn’t happen,” Mark said.

“You’d need a mile of cable,” I guessed, “but even then, I don’t see a guarantee that you’d be able to get a visual.”

“Mk1 it is then,” Mark said.

Great. Eyeball wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for.

“Heads up, NRC coming up on your six, a half mile out,” Edwards reported.

“Not much of a heads-up, but acknowledged,” Mark chided her.

“Do we wait for them or make a move?” Mac asked.

“Screw it, we didn’t come down here to get ourselves killed through pride. We wait, share the knowledge, and go in together,” Mark answered.

We didn’t have long to wait. The four-man team of NRC pipe-hitters came jogging up on us in a few minutes, but instead of stopping, they ran right past us and took up cover positions twenty paces further into the quarry before Komarov turned and stuck the thumb of his right hand through the fingers in the middle of his fist.

He shook it, looking like a little old guy telling us to get off his yard, but it obviously meant something to Mark.

“Oh, fuck that guy, let them find out the hard way. Deploy to the first tunnel on the left. Edwards, you’re going to lose us, so take the larger surveillance drone to higher altitude and maximum zoom.”

I listened to the acknowledgement as we moved out, hearing the channel break out into static just like before. I hoped this time wouldn’t go the same as before, but I had literally nothing other than hope to base that on.

Shit or bust, this was happening. Again.

Chapter 18

BG-192 LZ. Command Center Boomerang

Hayley Edwards stood and watched a half dozen monitors, concentrating on the largest screen as well, rocking her body weight from foot to foot because she didn’t want to take a break away from the displays at the crucial moment.

The biggest type of surveillance drone was what she controlled now, having spaced the smaller automated units in a perimeter outside the range of whatever was jamming their wireless signals. The larger drone was far above any interference, but Mark had said maximum altitude so that’s where she took it.

The display was zoomed in close enough that if one of them turned to face the sky and started talking, she could zoom in a little more and read their lips; but that wouldn’t help when they went underground, however, which was precisely what was about to happen.

“Forthright, Odin Nine-Five command center,” Coates said into a channel that linked her directly with the GCIC onboard the carrier.

“Nine-Five, reading you clear, over.”

“Be advised, team out of comm range due to interference. We still have eyes in the sky but we’re losing visual contact imminently,” Coates said, hearing the acknowledgment and letting out a frustrated sigh that she was watching from a distance.

“Did they say Thor protocol was still online?” Edwards asked, betraying her nervousness.

“They didn’t say it wasn’t,” Coates answered, her tone still hostile even though Barton wasn’t there for her to direct her anger. Edwards knew she hated being left off the front line, but as none of the others were certified behind the controls of a dropship, there was no other sensible option than to leave her behind on the carrier.

She’d tried to vent to the pilot before the mission, tried to make it a gender thing when she was the only one who saw it that way, but when Edwards had responded with logical answers, Coates had given up and taken out her frustration on the weights instead.

She knew it had nothing to do with what was under her armor, and she hated herself for even thinking of playing the gender card, but her anger had made her say things she didn’t necessarily mean.

Still, Edwards thought, leaving behind the only two females inside the protected command center with the scientists did look a little 20th Century, but so long as they didn’t have to get dinner on the table for when the team got back, she’d let it slide.

“Aaaand they’re underground,” Edwards said. “Keeping eyes on all tunnel entrances… setting movement alarms… and we’re done. Hurry up and wait time.”

“What are these assholes doing?” Coates asked, double thumping a fingertip onto a screen to zoom in the display.

“Trying to establish radio contact is my guess,” Edwards answered after peering at the display and seeing an armored Russian yelling and cupping his left hand to his ear.

“Communication blackout is American propaganda,” Coates said in an impression of the foreign operators that was about as heavy a racial stereotype as was possible. “Is fake news reportings to frighten brave children of Confederacy!” she added, shaking an angry fist in the air to emphasize her act.

“Would you trust an intel report from them?” King asked, earning the unwelcome attention of both women. He shrugged apologetically.

“I’m just saying, if it was the other way around, would you trust anything they’d said? You’d check, right?”

He pointed at the display, stepping forward to look closer. “You see? They’re checking for electronic interference, probably to see if it’s us doing it.”

“Good point,” Edwards admitted. “I mean, if they’d said there was interference from the quarry, you wouldn’t just take them at their word.”

They watched as the four operators worked their equipment before the tallest one, their leader, called a stop to the checking and led the way toward one of the tunnels. Edwards ran her fingers over the trackpad to zoom out, before hitting a sequence of controls for the drone to automatically track their movement.

“Miss Coates, might I ask you a question?” King asked, his southern manners making a refusal impossible. She frowned, appearing uncomfortable, but nodded.

“You appear to present a profound and recognizable repugnance for a member of your team, young Mister Barton? Is there any problem in particular that is the direct cause of your consternation? Perhaps something in which I may be of some small assistance?”

“Doc, I’m not exactly just a pilot, you know what I’m saying?” Coates answered.

“That much was both obviously and arguably apparent from the get-go,” King said with a warm smile. “I guess what I’m saying is that it might be of some cathartic benefit to you if you voiced your concerns instead of lettin’ them bottle up inside you in a manner not dissimilar to an active and angry volcano.”

Coates stared at him for a second, converting his words into a condensed sentence that she could replay and understand more easily.

“Barton… Barton isn’t part of this team,” she said. “Just as you two aren’t—no offense—but the politics involved meant I got relegated to backing singer when my place is there.” Coates pointed without looking, her finger aimed at a display that showed an empty tunnel mouth, but the point was made well enough.

“I understand, Miss Coates, I truly do, but if may be so bold as to offer an opinion on the matter?” When Coates said nothing, King carried on with a soft smile. “It appears to me that Barton may well be an outsider here much the same as myself and Doctor Laghari—”

“I’d call myself more of a compliant kidnapping victim. Onset of Stockholm syndrome or something,” Laghari cut in from across the command center.

“Much the same as we are,” King carried on to pick up the train of thought in spite of the interruption. “But I do genuinely and sincerely believe in my heart of hearts that treating him as a welcome member of this mission would both improve the general mood and increase the mission effectiveness in multiple ways.”

“So I should lay off him because he didn’t ask for this?” Coates said, her confused frown deepening as her anger returned. “Because he had a choice. He could’ve stayed behind. He could’ve rested up, gone home, cashed out… but he didn’t. He came here, took a spot on a team that makes him a liability to the rest of us!”

“Coates…” Edwards said behind her. Coates held up a hand to stop her from verbally holding her back.

“I’m not going to lay off him, because he shouldn’t be here. You know why you don’t meet any sole survivors? You think the government’s going to trust him to keep his mouth shut after all this?”

“Coates!” Edwards interrupted. “Beth!”

Coates turned, eyes wide at the images of two teams running from the tunnels like the beasts of hell were on their heels, and snatched up the comm headset.

“Forthright, Odin Nine-Five command center priority!”

“Nine-Five clear copy on priority. Send.”

“Nine-Five command reporting visual on Nine-Five in apparent contact. Standby Thor protocol, repeat, standby Thor protocol for immediate deployment.”

Chapter 19

Barton

Quarry Tunnels, BG-192

I’ll be honest, going back underground in the quarry didn’t fill me with happy feelings.

Quite the opposite, in fact, because each step deeper down the gentle slope not only made the world a darker and colder place but changed the odds of what would happen first.

I tried to raise the subject of seismic activity like I’d felt last time, but to press that subject would only highlight my fear and weakness. Besides, Mark said that there hadn’t been any more tremors recorded so that was apparently the end of it.

Right then, it was a straight tie between shitting my pants and throwing up, with fifty to one on a complete mental breakdown which would likely involve me throwing up and shitting my pants anyway.

Bravery, though, was something you couldn’t show unless you felt fear. At least that was some bullshit that guys who’d never been in combat, or who “almost served” wore on t-shirts.

Now fear is a very real motivator. It dumps all kinds of stuff into your bloodstream to sharpen your senses and prepare your muscles to get you the hell out of a situation or to fight so hard you won. It was like running an engine at a hundred and thirty percent for a short time, and like an engine, a body needed upgraded heat syncs to be able to cope, which was probably why I was leaking sweat like someone had left a hose on.

“Hold,” Mark said as he took a knee, switched the larger rifle for the sidearm, and flipped down the helmet visor. I did the same, showing me IR on the left side and leaving my right eye free to aim my weapon, but instead of moving off, Mark put his right hand flat on the rough ground of the tunnel.

“What is it?” Mac asked, earning a sharp noise to hush him.

“There’s movement,” Mark said confidently. “Not close, but something’s moving down here.”

I did not like the sound of that. Not at all. I was about to suggest that maybe we ran the half mile back up the gentle slope to get out of there when Mark stood and gestured the team onward.

My feet went with him, completely betraying the rest of me that wanted to voice a number of counter arguments in favor of going home.

“Four hundred colonists, eighty NRC paratroopers,” Mark said. “How many do you think your guys took out again?” It took me a second to realize he was talking to me.

“Oh, err, had to be close to a hundred, I reckon.”

“Mac? Anders?” Mark asked, obviously wanting a second opinion.

“Sounds right,” Mac said. “Probably more after I hit them on the heavy.”

I wanted to point out that those numbers still left us at almost a hundred to one, but it seemed like I could either move my feet or talk at that point, not do both.

“Anders?” Mark asked, stopping and holding out a hand behind him. Anders stepped up and put a device in his outstretched palm that looked very much like it wasn’t standard issue. Mark saw me looking at it with horror and held it up for me to see.

“Early on in the territory wars we were getting into contacts in the streets while normal people went about their business. We had IEDs on every transit route and got shelled every night while we slept,” he explained. I said nothing, not sure where the story was going and not entirely able to concentrate on said story while underground in a place that almost killed me not too long ago.

“We learned to disarm them, so they learned to booby trap them. We countered their booby traps, so they remote detonated them. We used EW packets to stop them remote detonating them, so they installed hidden timer switches. They laid dummies to get our attention while the real devices were set where we’d take cover, so we changed tactics. They radicalized people and made victim-worn shit, so we started training to take out brainstems with one shot and so on and so forth. In the end we got so good at taking them apart that we knew how to make them. You heard about the NRC invasion of the Vega system?”

I nodded. Everyone had heard about it, because for a while everyone thought we’d be wading in there to start another war with them after they annexed a smaller nation under allied Indian control who’d laid claim to their own little corner of the galaxy.

“Well, there was a little concern from the NRC, and they actually reached out to us. Turns out the people in Vega had all this IED tech that looked a lot like the stuff we’d been seeing back in the day…” He left the sentence unfinished and raised his eyebrows along with the smirk he had on his face.

“I get it. Reverse engineering?” I said, trying to sound like I had more than eight brain cells.

“No, dumbass, they shipped about a hundred of us into the system so we could teach them how to make the good stuff without going through years of trial and error,” Mark answered. “You know how to tell a bomb maker? Check if they’ve got all of their fingers.”

I nodded, still not sure what the relevance of story time was other than to explain that they were accomplished amateur bomb makers. Knowing that, and seeing how he didn’t seem to be handling the device in his hand with any reassuring kind of care, made me worry even more.

Mark twisted the dial taped to the… thing… and tossed it far down the tunnel before turning and heading back up toward the light at a sedate pace.

I followed, pivoting to check my six every ten paces, until I began to feel the warmth outside cutting through the chill of being under dense rock.

Mark checked his watch and nodded, heading out of the quarry when gunfire echoed from across the other side of the wide-open bowl.

“Fuck. That ain't good,” Mac said.

Tang-tang-tang-tang… tang-tang-tang-tang-tang!

“Trust them to start shit,” Mark complained. “Anders, we got time to go b—”

A sharp crack and rumble came from deep inside the tunnel before a wave of hot air gusted out toward us carrying dust and the smell of burning plastic.

“I’d say that’s a negative,” Anders answered.

“Dammit,” Mark cursed, looking around and deciding what the best thing was to do. “High ground, quarry entrance, go!”

We ran, giving me a sense of déjà vu I really could’ve done without. At least this time I knew what was coming out of the tunnels. At least this time I wouldn’t waste ammo hitting center mass and could concentrate on headshots.

As we ran, I saw Mac dropping things about the size of his fist on the ground, spacing them out every thirty paces or more and throwing them left and right off our course. I didn’t ask what they were because I was busy. Running for my life. Out of the quarry. Again.

“Boomerang, Nine-Five, come in,” Mac said into the radio as we ran closer to the higher ground in case the communications had come back to life yet.

“Set up,” Mark shouted as he unslung his pack and dropped it on a boulder to use it as a firing platform. Immediately he started scanning for targets and pulled the trigger on his weapon to send a tungsten slug downrange. I dropped behind cover, thankfully on the opposite side of the track and higher up than the last time, which made me feel better until I realized this was where Havelock had been, and he hadn’t exactly come home without a scratch.

I pushed that thought away, sick of feeling sorry for myself when I’d survived what he hadn’t, and brought up my weapon to take in the zoomed view of the quarry below, noticing that there were nowhere near as many coming as last time.

Last time all four tunnels had been spewing out bodies but this time only two were—the one where we’d set off whatever that thing had been and the one where I’d guessed the NRC assholes had gone down.

“Nine-Five Alpha, Boomerang,” the channel erupted with only a hint of static now that we were out of the quarry.

“Alpha, go ahead,” Mark answered, sounding annoyingly unconcerned with the situation.

“Forthright reports Thor protocol online and ready on channel. We have eyeball.”

“Acknowledged and appreciated. Maintain eyeball,” Mark said coolly before announcing what he saw for the rest of us. “Heads up, one o’clock. Looks like our NRC buds have gotten themselves in a pickle.”

I moved the barrel of my weapon a few inches to point it in the right direction, and sure enough I saw the NRC guys conducting a fighting withdrawal with enemy close. They fired and moved in two pairs, one staying tall while the second took a knee and the others made a bound forward to drop and lay down cover fire. They were far from at risk of being overwhelmed by the slow pursuit, which made me wonder what the fuck they were doing when one guy slung his weapon and whipped the trenching tool off his belt to start running at the enemy and laying into the ragged front rank like he was paid by the scalp.

“Psycho son of a bitch,” I muttered to myself.

“Who?” Mac asked over the channel.

“Crazy Russian lumberjerk down there, chopping heads off with a damn spade,” I said.

“They need to get the hell out of there,” Mark said, suddenly sounding fearful. From his perspective it was clear as day what was about to happen, but for the NRC down in the bowl, they couldn’t see the danger until it would become too late.

The enemy numbers drawn from the tunnel we’d ventured into were coming on steadily, but the commotion caused by the NRC team taking their time was starting to pull some of them off course from our direction toward them instead. Not only that, if they didn’t move their asses, then they’d be cut off by the second tunnel occupants anyway.

“Assholes,” Mark said as he intensified his rate of fire and cycled the first empty magazine from the weapon. “Anders, get them on the horn if you can and tell them to get out of there.”

Anders tried, getting nothing either through the interference from the quarry or just being ignored. I took shots, aiming for heads and hitting one in three to take them down for good, but as they started to mass and threaten to cut off the NRC, I doubled my rate of fire and started using the tungsten bullets to shatter legs and take away their ability to walk.

They fell, forming a rolling mound that slowed the ones behind even more so that I could switch between heads and legs easy enough to make the barricade higher and more effective. It had a compounding effect when Mac saw what I was doing and concentrated his fire there too while Anders yelled into the radio and Mark took heads off.

“Screw them. Anders, roll Thor protocol,” Mark barked before putting his eye back to the sights. It looked like they’d realized they were thick in the shit now, because the NRC team started to intensify their own kill rate in a bid to get out of the quarry in one piece.

Anders laughed.

“Standby for a little rod from God,” he said before dialing in his professional voice and talking to someone miles above in orbit.

“Forthright, Odin Nine-Five calling Thor protocol on killbox one-echo, over.”

“Odin Nine-Five, be advised one-echo is locked in. Repeat killbox one-echo is firm. Confirm package, over.”

“Four-man team due south of target coordinates. Four-man friendly near to target. Strike package alpha, killbox one-echo. Danger close. Fire mission, fire mission.”

“Odin Nine-Five be advised that terrain is untested and unstable. Recommend retreat out of the quarry and call a package,” the operator called back. Mac rose from cover and hammered three long bursts into a pack of them that had moved faster than the rest and threatened our position.

“Yeah, that ain’t an option,” Anders said into the comm. “Strike package alpha on those damn coordinates, danger real close.”

A pause on the other end.

“Strike package alpha on designated coordinates of killbox one-echo. Standby. Munitions are inbound, over.”

“Grab some dirt!” Anders yelled after standing to unload his entire magazine in bursts. He tucked himself small, just as Mac did, but for some reason I found myself looking up, like I’d be able to see the tungsten kinetic munitions rocketing down out of orbit.

I’d never seen them, not for real, and the footage I had seen had been them taking down entire buildings, so exactly why the fuck I thought it would be a good idea to watch that shit land after someone had used the words “danger real close” was beyond me.

Mark slid off the rock and grabbed me by the top of my chest plate before throwing me down and jumping on top of me hard enough to drive the air out of my lungs.

One, two, three… four, five, six… the slams shook the ground hard enough to make my teeth rattle. It was like rolling thunder and an earthquake all in one, and I still couldn’t understand how something the size of a beach ball could wreak that kind of havoc without any kind of explosive.

Like tossing a football out of a top floor window and taking the building down when it landed.

My ears rang, my vision was blurred, and for a horrible second, I thought I was back in time when that micro reactor blew and took me out.

Gunfire started up again, controlled and intense, as the other two resumed firing. Mark lifted his weight off me and dragged me to my feet.

“Downrange!” he yelled, pointing me in the direction of the enemy through the dust after I’d gotten turned around and tried to advance in the wrong direction.

I got my gun up, aiming at the shapes running through the maelstrom, and was about to squeeze the trigger when the shape started bawling in Russian and ran through me so hard I spun around and hit the dirt again.

“You try to kill me, mudak?” Komarov roared, bending down to grab me by the armor and lift me up with more ease than I liked. My rifle hung down my chest as he pulled me on tiptoes close to his face, but my right hand was free to draw the Mk30 from the thigh holster.

Before I could bring it up, the murky air flashed bright with the crackling line of a plasma axe that made me turn my face away. Komarov didn’t, letting the head of the axe come so close to his face that his beard singed.

“You are going to kill me, American?” he snarled over his shoulder. “You could not be killing me from orbit, so why are you thinking you can do it up close?”

“If he was trying to kill you, you’d be dead,” Mark told him. “Now put him down and get your damn guns in the fight!”

Komarov glared at me, his eyes red from the dust, but he still didn’t let go. I tapped the barrel of the SMG in my right hand against the groin plate of his armor and gave him my own smile.

“You wanna keep hugging or fight?” I asked.

He looked down, growled again, and dropped me, shoving me aside to bring his weapon up and yell orders to his three men. They all turned, adding their fire to our own for thirty intense seconds until Mark called a ceasefire.

“Forthright, Odin Nine-Five, standby strike package Charlie at killbo—”

He stopped talking as Komarov shoved him and started rattling off orders in his own language. Something came back, the words indistinct, but Komarov’s response made it clear that they’d heard him right the first time.

“Keep your little meteors, American, we have Kuvalda.”

The sky filled with the thrumming noise of falling munitions, not the precision strikes of the Odin team but the heavy, unfocused savagery of brute force. The NRC’s hammer to their scalpel.

I felt the impacts, felt them vibrating through my body, but I brought my rifle up and watched the dust for any sign of the enemy getting through.

Chapter 20

Barton

North Quarry, BG-192

I kept watch beside a Russian guy who looked like a ghoul. He was pale as milk and bald as an egg, but his eyes looked like someone was squeezing him too hard and that freaked me the fuck out.

I tried not to look at him, mainly because there was still the occasional shape staggering through the swirls of dust through the mostly settled air. Those that made it through didn’t do so unaffected. The sheer force of a kinetic munition made the need for high-yield explosives irrelevant, because achieving the same kind of destructive power from a ball of metal was preferable to an irradiated planet you’d have to abandon for eighty years until it was safe to come back.

Anders was still on the comm, getting reports from orbit, and Mac was talking to Coates on another channel while Mark and the big guy, Komarov, argued.

It was minor as arguments went, especially between guys like that, because neither of them had tried to kill the other recently, which was significant.

They’d both called ceasefires to their respective carriers, but both blamed the other for screwing up the mission. The NRC blamed us for using kinetic munitions first, and our side blamed them for using a payload twice the size for literally no good reason other than to whip it out and prove it was bigger than ours.

“Heads up, Yankee-Doodle,” the Russian ghoul said beside me. We’d already defined arcs of fire after he’d been taking pot shots at targets in front of me. Not that it was an ego thing but because he was looking at my area of responsibility more than he was his own just to prove… you know.

I didn’t see what he’d called out for at first, then a shambling shape came into view slowly. When I say slowly, I mean it. The reason this… person? was so far behind the curve was because the kinetic strikes must have caught it on the periphery of lethal effect. Instead of destroying the body, which I couldn’t identify because it inexplicably had no clothes on at all, it had pulverized the left arm and shoulder to make it hang down like some kind of pudding in a bag.

“I got it,” I answered, muttering “prick” to myself as an afterthought.

The thing shambled closer, like a damn zombie—which was a word nobody used yet as far as I knew, but I was going to damn well call it what it was—until I could make out details I’d rather not have seen.

Lining up the optics with the enhanced sight showing me yet more unpleasantness, I lined up on the open mouth that spewed black liquid when it saw me ahead of it. I pulled the trigger once, feeling the thump of the recoil as the barrel bucked and obscured the sight of it—her—falling to the dust.

“Booyah! Right in the dome, Yankee!” Ghoul said, congratulating me like we were buddies on some kind of dumbass safari.

“Fuck you very much,” I answered politely, keeping my eyes scanning the ground ahead.

“Roger, confirm our visibility on the ground is reduced to approximately thirty feet, over,” Anders said as he stepped within earshot of me and spoke over a channel I wasn’t connected to.

“Barton, Coates,” the speaker beside my ear said crisply. I jumped a little because I didn’t expect it, but the harsh professionalism in her tone told me this was business and not ball-busting.

“Here, send it.”

“Concentration of three, all ambulatory, heading to your position from your right. Sixty-five degrees.”

I turned my body, aiming it just past the two o’clock mark, and froze as the terrain was outside of the low ground of the quarry. All assumptions had been that the enemy, what was left of them, would be coming from inside the quarry, which made the high ground relatively safe.

I raised the weapon in my hands, pulling it tight into me and scanning through the square optic as I flicked my thumb to cycle enhancement modes. Three heat signatures approached, and by the way they moved, I knew they weren’t here to borrow a cup of damn sugar.

“Got ’em, thanks,” I answered before I took three measured shots and dropped them.

I turned an enquiring glance at the ghoul but he was concentrating on his own sector and taking aim. He pulled the trigger twice in rapid succession, which meant he’d either taken out two fast or he’d missed with his first shot. The fact that he was even here at all made me think it was the former.

“Understood,” Mark said as he walked up behind me. “Barton, you took some down outside the quarry?”

In response, I pointed with a flat hand in the direction of the bodies. Mark made a noise behind me that I took as something crossed between an acknowledgement and a huff.

“Orbital showed a half dozen heat signatures blown clear of the strikes. Sent them over the edges of the quarry. Coates has the live image now and—”

“Barton, one more at your two,” Coates said over the channel, cutting Mark’s words off and negating the need for his explanation. I turned and aimed, but Mark already had his sidearm up and his legs bent slightly to take the shots before I did, dropping both with sharp double-taps.

“Keep it up. Reassess when this dust clears,” he told me, slapping a gloved hand on my shoulder plate as he holstered his weapon and went back to his Russian discussion.

The bodies he’d dropped were close enough that I could take a look without leaving my post, even though I didn’t want to get close enough to touch one of them and risk catching whatever the hell they had—if they had anything at all.

“Barton, keep your distance,” Mark warned over the channel, having somehow sensed what I was doing. I stopped, acknowledging him but staring at the body because something was moving there.

It was black, only about the size of the palm of my hand, and whatever it was the fucking thing ran straight at me on more legs than I could count.

Now I hadn’t taken much notice of the local wildlife report because we always got a warning when we were dropping somewhere with venomous or poisonous shit on the surface, and this place didn’t have anything like that on the books. Regardless, I stomped that little leggy bastard into the dirt and felt it go flat with a crunch.

“Err, guys? I’ve got a… kinda… spider thing here?”

“Barton? Does it have a shiny carapace? Six legs?” Doctor Laghari’s voice came at me over the channel. I looked down to the dust at the mess I’d made and answered that I was pretty sure it did. Or at least it used to. It wasn’t what I’d call an intact specimen anymore.

“Disregard it. Indigenous scavenger,” he said. I shrugged and went back to my watch.

It took almost an hour for the dust to clear enough that the floor of the quarry was visible from my position, and during that hour, we’d collectively mopped up more than thirty survivors. That wasn’t the right word for them, but I didn’t know what else to think.

The NRC guys had dragged a body into our position, one of the last to get shot in the head by their ghoul on watch, and knelt beside him to plunder his corpse.

At least that was what it looked like, but I saw they were checking the damage to the armor of one of their own paratroopers, which stopped me in time before I started another international incident and had to make good on my promise to show the main dude’s shovel a good time.

“Tunnels one and three are collapsed, at least on the surface,” Mark reported with his eye pressed to the zoom optic on his longer-barreled rifle.

“This leaves one each to explore,” the big Russian said as he stood and closed his eyes for a moment looking down at the trooper. Emerging from that fraction of a second when he wasn’t an angry asshole, he turned a sick grin on Mark.

“My people,” he pointed a finger lazily upward, “say we have killed more than three hundred with orbital strike. This is leaving only some to be still in the tunnels, yes?”

“A few? It could be two hundred, so I guess it depends on your personal assessment. That might leave close to a third of them.”

Komarov made a dismissive noise and waved a hand like the concept of over a hundred enemy was nothing.

“They are not so hard to kill,” he bragged. “I am not understanding how your marines could not—”

“Hey, asshole, they were shooting at us last time. How many of these fucks had guns?” I snarled, talking from emotion and not common sense because he—everybody—turned to look at me. Guessing that the cat was out of the bag, I just shrugged and told them how it was.

“They didn’t just shamble around like that, there were hundreds of them, and we were taking fire.”

Komarov stared at me for a second before he turned his gaze slowly to Mark, who kept his own expression plain as oatmeal.

“And where did they get these guns? Were you hiding military base out here, American?” Komarov asked Mark quietly.

“We weren’t the ones who dumped a company of paratroopers on the surface and hightailed it as soon as they got in hot water,” Mark answered, his right hand outstretched to point at the shattered, blackened body of the NRC soldier.

Komarov stared again, his body twitching restlessly, and I tightened the grip on my weapon with one eye on his other guys in case this got unprofessional. They were thinking the same, because the ghoul guy moved away from the other two to give himself a different angle and separate them as targets.

“I think both our people have made mistakes here, Major, but we must be seeing past this and work as one, together,” Komarov said tactfully.

“In what way?” Mark asked, not bothering to hide his suspicion, seeing as how we were getting it all out in the open.

“Unless your government is allowing me to bring reinforcements, I am thinking that the mission will be delayed as four men cannot search these tunnels so fast, yes?”

“And your government won’t permit us to bring down more soldiers,” Mark answered. “So the logical response is that we work together and find the source of all this shit.”

Komarov smiled like he was proud of Mark and suddenly happy that he’d understood a basic concept.

“You see, Yuri?” he said, turning to glance at a malevolent-looking member of his team. “They are not so stupid as people are telling us.”

“You get that was the original plan all along, right?” Mark asked, ignoring the comment.

“Yes, but then your government is sending a man to outrank me, so it is clear that they do not want to work with us but want us to work for them.”

“This is what it’s about? Rank? Forget rank, okay? We can work as two fireteams, does that work for you?”

“And who is making the decisions?” Komarov asked, leveling his gaze at Mark in a direct challenge.

Mark smiled. “How about we wait until we have a decision to make and see who has the better idea.”

* * *

The choice to take tunnel two or tunnel four was the first obstacle, but given how we’d already gone down one and the NRC guys had been down four, and of the remaining two, one was collapsed, we all took tunnel two.

Getting there was a problem, at least for the first part that was littered with dead bodies, and I found myself picking my way through as occasional shots cut the air when one of them was still moving. I had a moment’s thought about helping them, but Mark’s orders made it clear we weren’t sending any of these people back upstairs and that made me think the other guy they’d mentioned either didn’t play nice or posed some risk other than the obvious.

“Shouldn’t we be wearing HAZ-EV suits for this?” Mac asked quietly as he stepped past a body on the way into the quarry, transmitting over just our channel. I had to admit, he posed a really good point that deserved an answer.

“Avoid direct contact,” Mark ordered us helpfully, before the channel came alive from the LZ.

“Gentlemen, Doctor King here. I’d urge and implore you all to take that order very seriously and with great sobriety. I do indeed recommend you all wear hazardous environment suits for the duration of this mission at any and all times while outside the safety of this command structure. However, I am also acutely aware of the time-sensitive nature of proceedings.”

“So… you’re saying we should or we shouldn’t retreat and suit up?” Mac asked. I’ll be honest, I enjoyed the way King spoke because it was like an elderly southern gentleman singing a slow song, but most of what he said got lost in his synonyms.

Yeah, I know what a synonym is. College, remember?

“I’m merely advising you that you should consider the correct application of personal protective equipment. I’m in no position to give any such person here orders or in any way organize people,” King answered, leaving me a little dizzy.

I guessed the advice was that we should be wearing full gimp suits, but that meant withdrawing a few clicks to suit up, and by that point we’d lose the daylight.

Damn zombies, I thought eying two more. Their busted limbs prevented them from getting up but their growls and moans freaked me out as the black stuff continued coming out of them. I slugged the last two as we finished our sweep of the battlefield, which cleared the way to the tunnel we were headed for.

It felt the same as the last time, with the temperature dropping as soon as we got out of the pale sunlight that was finally penetrating the mile-high cloud of dust caused by both forces’ orbital bombardment.

Just as the temperature fell, my nerves started to jangle like a junkie overdue a fix. Every step on the gentle slope, every ridge from the drill that my boot soles found and amplified through my legs, every breath of cold, thin air made me certain that something bad was about to happen.

“Hey, psst, Yankee,” the ghoul—apparently called Pasternak—hissed at me from the other side of the tunnel and slightly behind.

“Fuck off,” I whispered back, making sure I pronounced the words clearly so he could understand me.

“Yankee, you are not spetsial operatzii,” he said, making a statement and not asking a question.

“That’s not what your mom said,” I answered.

“My mother is dead, Yankee. Do not make joke on her name,” he warned me.

“Sister?” I asked, hopeful I could carry on insulting him.

“Why are you here, Yankee?” he asked, undeterred. “You are not like the others. Comrade Komarov thinks you are a spy.”

“You’re all spies,” I said after a pause, missing my chance to answer with something cool.

“But we do not pretend to be anything that we are not,” he said, not letting it go.

“Heat source ahead,” Mac announced from twenty paces ahead, thankfully ending the conversation with the goggle-eyed prick who wouldn’t shut up.

“Hold. Mac, push ahead with me,” Mark said.

“No, I will go with him,” Komarov said forcefully. Mark thought about it for a second and nodded, barely visible in the low light permeating so far down the tunnel. I was already using an IR filter on my weapon sight and was messing with the buttons on the side of my helmet to make the visor go into night vision mode.

The two of them pushed forward, leaving me with the distinct impression of being asked to wait with an unwanted stepbrother while our parents got a quickie wedding at some dive of an off-world resort.

“Move up,” Mark said over the channel after a few minutes. It made me jump because I was already drifting off into a daydream about the fact that our comms worked underground but not at a distance. That screamed electronic warfare to me, and I kicked myself for paying only enough attention in the training to skate along with the bare minimum of thinking involved.

I got off my knee, starting to feel the ache and the stiffness coming back and reminded myself to hit some more pain pills when I could.

The tunnel opened out into a wide, high chamber that was instantly warmer than the tunnel I’d just come from. I pushed out to the right, dropping to one knee, and pointed the barrel of my weapon over the shadows with the different light spectrums to ensure that nothing was lurking there. That alone made my head pound, like being danger-close to damn orbital strike wasn’t bad enough, and now that we’d slowed down I was starting to feel the weight of the mission physically.

I knew I wasn’t up to it, not even before was I at the level of fitness the Odin guys probably expected, but I was in a regrowth tube only a couple weeks ago. I’d be damned if that shouldn’t have been worth at least a month off, and maybe I could take it after the mission?

Get your head out of your ass, marine! I told myself, for some inexplicable reason, in Wendel Havelock’s voice. It ain't a goddam hat!

“Clear,” Anders announced out loud, giving it to me in stereo through the channel with barely any delay.

“Okay, Anders I want EW sweeps. Tell me what’s stopping us communicating with upstairs. Mac, Barton, look for another way out of this chamber and sing out if you find one.”

Komarov turned to his team and rattled off orders in Russian so fast I couldn’t detect a break. Ghoul dropped to one knee and yanked a tough laptop out of his pack, punching at keys in a way that made me think he not only knew what he was doing but was damn good at it.

The other two guys started around the chamber, guns up and IR torches roving over the cavern walls, as Mark and Komarov walked to the center of the open space and looked at the main attraction.

It was a plinth or a podium or… I don’t know what the right word was. Lectern? But whatever the fuck it was, it sure as shit didn’t belong in an underground cave in some back-ass mining colony. It certainly shouldn’t have been glowing under IR and radiating heat.

“This thing’s kicking out some serious activity,” Anders said, waving a machine over it that I hadn’t seen before.

“Like what?” Mark asked.

“VHF, SHF, Medium and low… some digital and electromagnetic stuff too. Jesus, Mark, I can’t even begin to decipher what I’m seeing here. This needs a tech team and a month to start figuring it out.”

“Got something,” Mac said. I turned to face the direction his voice had come from and my visor showed me the darker tunnel leading out of the chamber.

“It goes down. Look,” Mac went on, pointing at the ground where so many boot prints overlapped to make the dust a mess where people had climbed down.

“Alright, I want everyone back to the surface. We call it in, leave eyes up high and watch the place overnight, then start fresh tomorrow morning,” Mark said, turning to face Komarov and fix him with a look. “Agreed?”

“Why wait?” Komarov asked. “We still have the daylight outside but down here it does not matter.”

“Because we have had a significant encounter with an unknown enemy today and we don’t yet know their nocturnal habits. What if instead of stumbling around they’re more alert? Or faster?”

“You are frightened of the dark, American?” Komarov asked with a smile that made me want to smack that shitty beard right off his face.

“That’s what we’re doing,” Mark said, heading for the tunnel with the rest of us falling in with him.

“I got pictures and a resonance scan of the chamber,” Anders reported. “That shaft goes down deep.”

“How deep?” I asked.

“Deep enough that we need climbing gear from the boomerang to be safe,” Anders said.

“Well, we take it slow. Upstairs will want to know a little more information after they just bombarded a contested planet with kinetic munitions, so it’s actually a good job they called in their own orbital. Makes it easy to explain if we both felt it necessary,” Mark said as we jogged up the tunnel.

Near the exit we took a knee, long enough for me to throw two pills into my mouth and chew them up before sucking water from the tube leading to my pack. Mark pushed out to the quarry floor, all churned up into craters by the TKMs, and his words made me unsure if I was happy or not.

“No movement, bodies still here,” he reported.

Great. I get to pick my way back through shattered bodies. I half hoped that whatever mysterious shit happened the first time had gone down again and the human wreckage had been cleared up. Then my common sense kicked my ass internally and slapped me around like I was a red-headed step-kid, thinking why in the shit would I want to be there for that?

“—ine-Five, Odi… …ceiving me, over?” Coates’ intense voice came through my helmet as we neared the slope leading out of the quarry.

“Here, send it,” Mark said.

“Get your asses out of there now!” she ordered forcefully. “Eyes in the sky are picking up mass movement overland in your direction.”

“Direction and distance,” Mark snapped, stopping and bringing his rifle to his shoulder.

“North by north-east, bearing three-three-five degrees. Distance three miles, estimating arrival in eleven minutes,” Coates answered, making Mark pause as he worked out the timing.

“Okay, back down that tunnel and inform the NRC. If they move now they should make it. Edwards?” he said, speaking into the channel and switching the subject. She acknowledged. “Prep the ship for dust off, be ready to evac both teams from this location.”

“Roger. There in ninety seconds if you call,” she answered.

“Three miles in eleven minutes?” Mac said as we ran for the tunnel. “That’s fast. That ain’t human.”

I didn’t have time to think about that as we ran, heading back down the tunnel with Mark calling out for the others.

“Komarov!” he bawled, his voice carrying far down the tunnel and bouncing back. “Komarov!”

“American?” the Russian’s voice came back as silhouettes appeared at the edge of the chamber.

“Incoming, moving fast, we need to exfil now!” Mark told him. I expected an argument, expected some more dick measuring, but to his credit, the guy snapped an order in Russian and the four of them climbed out and started to run behind us.

Emerging out into the pale sunlight I was struck by two things. The first was the stink of decay that, despite the bodies lying all over the quarry, hadn’t been there before.

This was like a chemical smell. Eye-stinging and unpleasant, like some foul-smelling cleaning fluid mixed with piss.

The second thing I noticed was the sound of heavy rainfall, which was weird because it wasn’t raining, until I realized the rainfall wasn’t rainfall but the sound of about a million little feet.

Chapter 21

Barton

If I’d run before, what I was doing now was like I’d unlocked some previously undiscovered human ability. I’d been in contact before a few times, and I’d spent plenty of tours doing pest control, but even the worst shit I’d had to do didn’t come close to the fear I felt about bugs.

Not even people who didn’t go down unless you shot them in the head.

My mind leaped to the spider thing I’d stomped out earlier, only that was so small it couldn’t actually have audible footfalls, could it? What about a thousand of them? What about ten thousand? What if that one was just a baby?

Whatever the hell was going on, it didn’t make me feel all that good, until something Mac said made me feel relieved.

“They’re going for the bodies,” he said. “Look!”

I didn’t really want to, but my neck didn’t get the message, so it turned my head in the direction of the noises and showed me what looked like a rolling, shiny, black carpet swarming over the shattered bodies thrown down in all directions by the kinetic munitions. They flowed over them like water, obscuring them completely in seconds as more washed around them and carried on in search of yet more bodies. I didn’t know if they were eating them or what, but I sure as shit didn’t want to hang around in the damn quarry to find out.

They moved faster than us, so by the time our ragged bunch of eight guys reached the slope leading us out of the bowl, the little bastards were starting to encroach on our exit.

Mark yelled into the comm as he ran, but from how he was repeating himself and sounding more and more pissed, I guessed he wasn’t getting an answer.

“Yuri, granata!” Komarov said, pointing his finger ahead for a few beats. The guy I guessed was called Yuri—the one with the tactical scar down his face and helmet—answered with a few words I didn’t understand and pulled a launcher off his thigh where normal people carried a sidearm. It wasn’t much larger than an SMG, being basically a frame and receiver bolted around a box magazine, but the rate of fire was impressive as it spat out little bombs with a satisfying ffung-ffung-ffung for them to launch ahead of us and begin exploding with little pops and clouds of dust in a line that cleared our exit of the bugs.

Yuri kept firing until the mag was empty, but by that point, we were close enough to the top of the slope to think we could get out of there. We ran, none of us caring where anyone was from or who their bosses or motherland or anything was—we were just people, human beings, running away from bugs which were creepy as shit, no matter if they were roaches back on Earth or these bony little spidery fuckers on whatever the hell this shit hole was called.

Just as we made it out, the channel came to life with what sounded like the finish of a scream coming from the other end, only I realized with the feedback it was actually my own yell of fear coming back to me too loud. I shut up, kept running, and heard Coates’ voice through the speaker by my ear.

“They’re not chasing you,” she said, sounding like she’d been repeating herself in frustration after watching us run from something for no reason. Whether it looked like they were chasing us or not was irrelevant as far as I was concerned, because I was creeped out enough by seeing one of the little bastards earlier and didn’t exactly feel like getting swarmed by about a billion of them.

“High ground,” Mark ordered, pointing us toward a pile of rocks and scrambling up the side. I followed, imagining a chittering little army of bugs running up the backs of my legs with every step, but when I’d clawed my way up about fifteen feet, I turned and brought my weapon to bear.

Sure enough, Coates was right, and they weren’t following us. They were all still in the quarry, rolling over moving mounds of bugs with what I imagined was the bodies underneath. With something resembling relief, I lay back and gasped for air, suddenly feeling about thirty years older than I was and in serious need of a nap.

“What... the fuck?” Mark asked into the channel, and to my surprise got a response from an unexpected voice.

“Did none of you read the local wildlife reports prior to this mission?” Doctor Laghari asked. “These creatures are carrion scavengers and are almost exclusively located near the marshlands to the north.”

“Fascinating, Doc, but why are all five million of them here?” Mark answered.

“That I cannot answer, but I don’t think you’re in any danger from them. There are no recorded instances of them attacking any living creature, and this colony has been here for more than two years,” Laghari explained.

“There was a swarm of a billion flesh-eating bugs in the AO, and nobody thought that was relevant intel?” Mac asked.

“Estimated numbers are far less than there actually appears to be,” Laghari said, sounding almost awestruck by the footage she was seeing from the drones high above us. “In fact, the population was believed to be very small and limited to wet areas only.”

“None of which helps us right now, but thanks anyway,” Mark answered as he stood and looked down at the quarry floor with a frown. I stood up too, seeing the tide of tiny dark bodies retreating back up the quarry to head north.

“Okay, that answers the question about where the bodies went,” I said. “But what about the equipment and weapons?”

“They are taking all of the things. Not just the dead,” the ghoul—Pasternak—said. He had his eye glued to the scope of his weapon and watched intently.

“It’s possible that there are biological materials on weapons and equipment,” Laghari reported over the channel. “I doubt creatures such as these would be able to differentiate between blood on a piece of clothing and a severed limb. They’re purely instinctive and not cognitive.”

At the mention of a severed limb, I blanched a little, but Mark spoke before that unwelcome memory could grab a hold of me.

“They aren’t going down the tunnels. They’re just walking north overland.”

“Spiders that do not like dark tunnels?” Komarov asked.

“Please, tell your NRC counterpart that they aren’t believed to be subterranean in nature. They have been observed making large nests of secreted resin in dense foliage near to running water sources. Also, please explain that they are not, in fact, arachnid in nature but are most similar to a crustacean, specifically cardisoma crissum, or a kind of land crab that can also breathe underwater.”

Mark looked confused, annoyed even, before he answered.

“Doc, you know an awful lot about—”

“I’m reading it from the planetary briefing package, Major,” Laghari snapped.

“Understood. So they aren’t a threat to us at all and they aren’t in the tunnels?” Mac asked, heading off a potential exchange of harshness over the channel, as beside and slightly above me, Komarov was giving a curt report over his own comms.

“I see no evidence to support either,” Laghari answered, sounding a little snooty about it.

Whatever, I wasn’t going to take chances with cardiwhat’s-it-crabs, that was for damn sure.

Mark looked at his watch, looked up at the sky, then turned to face Komarov.

“Captain, I’d like to fall back for the day and start this fresh at first light with both our teams working together. I appreciate you wanted to make a move now, but I think it’s safer if w—”

“Safer?” he interrupted. “Safety is not our concern, American. You say these spiders are of no danger to us and our own people agree, so what is there to wait for?”

“Crabs. And more equipment, for one thing,” Mark said as he cast an eye over the rest of the NRC team. “I don’t see a single one of your men geared out for cave diving or rock climbing, and I suspect both will happen down there. The water table is less than a hundred feet from that chamber, you know that?”

“Go and rest in your bed, American,” Komarov sneered. “My soldiers and I will get this job done for you.”

He turned and called out to his team in Russian and the four of them sauntered back down the quarry slope, laughing softly at something one of them said, probably about us.

“Seriously, we should withdraw for the night and start again first thing tomorrow,” Mark insisted. Something in his tone made Komarov stop and slowly rotate his big head back around to face us.

I didn’t like the look on his face one little bit, and I guessed neither did Mac or Anders because they both fanned out a little and held their rifles a little readier than normal.

“Are you telling me no, American? Are you in command of me and my men?” The threat was obvious, but Mark was no fool and he knew how to dance in more ways than in a fight.

“I’m saying, Komarov, that we should both deal with this tomorrow when we have more daylight and we’re fully rested. Whatever’s down there isn’t going anywhere, and we still have a lot of people down here unaccounted for.”

Just when I thought shit was about to get messy, the radio channel came to life.

“Nine-Five, we have movement in the colony. East side, main street.” Coates’ voice leaned toward concerned, maybe worried.

Komarov’s eyes glazed over, and he bent his head a little, giving off that telltale body language that said someone was listening to a transmission nobody else could hear.

“Have you called in Thor protocol?” Mark asked.

“Negative. Thor not authorized for use near or inside the colony. Collateral losses are off the cards,” Coates answered. I was pissed that the policy makers, the ones deciding not just who lived or died but assigned acceptable numbers to how many, did all this from their comfortable offices so far away from any actual fighting that the motherfuckers might as well be playing a goddam video game.

“Number and location?’ Marks asked intently, twirling his right index finger in the air and setting off back toward the colony.

I was happy with that, not sure how I’d have felt about him if he’d been planning on leaving these new others to face off with another tar-gargling zombie suicide squad, in favor of watching four Russians. So we set off fast to catch him up.

“East side still. Drone footage is showing me maybe eighty. No friggin’ clue where they popped up from,” Coates said, sounding angry at herself, like she’d dropped the ball.

Behind us, still bent over a little to hear the transmission in his helmet, Komarov stood on the edge of the quarry with his team, not doing anything.

“What about them?” Anders asked, meaning the four assholes I’d twisted around to look at.

“They won’t get far on their own, and we have civilians to protect. Mission objectives still stand,” Mark snapped back, short on breath now that we were properly running down the flattened track that was the colony road.

“Where are they now?” Mark demanded.

“Still east. Strolling down the main street like some goddam zombie cosplay gang. Mark, if they’re heading for the LZ, they’ll make it here before you do,” she answered. It was obvious to me she was saying we should hold back, but that meant putting trust in the command pod defenses while we stayed at a safe distance.

I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be the only one who didn’t like that.

“Negative, we can make it back, you—” Mark said but Coates cut him off.

“NRC shuttle is dusting off!”

“Forthright, Odin Nine-Five Alpha,” Mark said.

“Go for Forthright,” came the immediate and crisp response.

“I need you to track that NRC shuttle. We’re pulling back to the LZ with incoming hostile forces, and we do not have eyes on the NRC team, over,” he said, amazing me that he could still get clear words out with how damn fast we were running.

“Acknowledged, Nine-Five.”

“Request again for Thor protocol on enemy, over,” he barked back, making it pretty obvious he didn’t like the answer they gave Coates.

“Negative, Nine-Five, be advised orbital munitions are not authorized near to colony buildings, over.” The answer came just as the Russian shuttle streaked overhead like it was running from the fight. Only it was heading in the direction of the team, so my guess was that it was playing cab when it could’ve been helping, oh, I don’t know, maybe mow down the damn company of enemy heading for our people?

“Fucking assholes,” Mark snapped back, but he’d already cut the link to the orbiting carrier and was calling Coates again.

“Where are they now? We’re approaching the colony from the north?”

“Stand down! Stand down! If you carry on, you’ll run right into them,” Edwards called out over the channel, sounding far removed from her usual cool-as-hell pilot’s persona.

“Fuck,” Mark snarled, slowing and looking left and right as we approached the straight line of dirty buildings. He focused on something to the right, pointing and leading the way in the direction which should take us ahead of the advancing whatever-the-hells—the Z-words—and I worried for a few seconds that he was going to line us up across main street like it was high noon and “we done taken exception to something they said.”

Before any of that shit in my head could get rearranged enough to come out of my mouth as coherent words, he pointed us up an external frame ladder where we could access a first-floor roof.

We climbed, one after the other, and when I got to the top last, I really didn’t like what I saw.

They were walking like they were drunk, unable to maintain a straight line, and they just seemed to, sorta, bounce along the road between the buildings like slow pinballs bumping into one another. I had no idea how they were even all heading in the same direction with how strangely they moved. The ones who’d attacked us seemed a little more hyped up than these guys and—

Mac yanked me down, breaking my train of thought before all four of us spread out over the rooftop ledge to watch.

“Coates, I count seventy-eight,” Anders said. Before any answer could come, I heard the mosquito whine of a drone hovering nearby and turned to face it.

Now, I didn’t know if Coates was controlling that drone personally or if it was just a coincidence, but the little bastard seemed to look me up and down, then just turn away like I wasn’t important. While that was still pissing me off, I heard sounds coming from the street below and looked back over the side to see that the drunken stumbling had been replaced with something a lot more… angry.

Seriously, I could feel, like, a collective sense of being really pissed coming from below me and the sound did not make it easy to keep the contents of my bladder inside me.

Almost as one, with no obvious leader and no kind of order given, they hooked a left and made for the LZ ahead of us.

“Should we take them out?” I asked, regretting speaking immediately because it made me sound greener than snot.

As if answering for me, the air filled with what sounded like heavy machinery ramping up with so much spinning metal nearby, I felt like I was about to get up close and personal with a bad storm.

Chapter 22

Command Boomerang, LZ, BG-192

Coates, being a lover of heavy weapons and destruction as much as the next girl, punched in her personal security clearance codes to authorize the autoguns sprouting from the top of their little bunker pod.

They were effectively a smaller version of a ship’s point defense guns, only instead of hammering little asteroids and other hazardous space debris to prevent it damaging a hull, these were about to play butcher.

The lead edge of the infected colonists and NRC paratroopers rounded the junction and came into sight of the LZ, but the spinning turrets didn’t open up at that distance because Coates had programmed the geofence perimeter to activate at fifty meters.

The long time it took them to progress over the open ground between the colony buildings and the LZ was agonizing for both the team stranded on a nearby rooftop as well as those locked down inside the command pod, but eventually the first of them—a woman wearing torn coveralls who was so dirty she looked like the place had been mining coal and not precious metal—stepped over that invisible threshold.

Two of the guns, their rotary barrels already spinning, spat a burst each which tore the woman’s body apart like she’d swallowed a grenade and coughed up the pin.

Her upper and lower body, what was left of both parts, fell in opposing directions but the guns didn’t stop to admire their destructive power because more bodies were stepping over the line.

More bursts burped out, and all four cannons swiveled fast between targets as they hammered out a handful of rounds at each body encroaching onto their killing ground until the place took on a pink hue from all the atomized blood hanging in the dusty air.

The guns slowed, then stopped, but for Coates who was watching the external feeds closely, it did not signify anything good.

“Holy fucking shit. Mark?”

“Send it.”

“I’d say you need to see this, but it might be better if you boys just stay where you are. They’re retreating from the LZ,” she said.

“Wait, retreating? As in they’re falling back from fire?” Mark asked. I shot Mac a look and he mirrored my own with his best whiskey-tango-foxtrot.

“Affirmative. They are retreating from the geofence. I’ve got maybe fifty standing ten meters out of range.”

“What are they doing?” Mark asked. I could see from the look on his face that he really wanted to get eyes on what was happening, as like all control freaks he didn’t like relying on someone else’s descriptions.

“Nothing. They’re just… They’re just fucking standing there,” Coates responded.

“How many?” Mac asked, probably gauging whether or not we could drop to street level and help out.

“Estimate thirty to thirty-five. Can’t be sure because they keep shuffling around each other outside the perimeter,” she answered.

Just then a shrieking sound filled the comm on our end as the NRC shuttle appeared over the LZ and lowered itself to the ground.

“Great, that’s all we need. Coates? Can you open a comm to our allies?”

There was silence for a while as she obviously tried on a frequency we weren’t patched into, but when she came back her voice was full of strained anger.

“They’re not responding,” she said.

“Assholes,” Mark hissed. “Okay, patch me into that channel.”

A click over the comm told me the channels had been switched and I heard Mark’s officer voice loud and clear.

“Komarov, this is Harlan. Request assistance dealing with this threat, over.”

Nothing.

“Komarov, you just landed in a hot LZ and my people are at risk. Request assistance, over!”

“Coates, kill the link,” he growled after another silence, waiting for the click before he spoke to us again.

“Looks like we’re doing this on our own.”

Barton

Now, I had questions at this point. I mean, I had a lot of fucking questions, but the first one I wanted to ask came out of my mouth before I could engage the safety on my brain.

“How the fuck do they know where the geofence is?”

Mac and Anders turned to look at me like some awful synchronized swim team but Mark stared dead ahead as he answered.

“Perhaps it’s because anyone closer than them to the boomerang just got shot?”

Okay, solid logic.

“What I meant to say is, how are they even able to make that decision? They’re mindless, aren’t they?” I tried, hoping they wouldn’t continue to think I was a complete idiot.

“Coates, push geofence out another ten meters,” Mark ordered, waiting for the silence to be broken again by thunderous gunfire.

“Holy shitsticks, they backed up. They actually backed up!” came the unexpected response, making my head spin even more. They must’ve done it so fast the guns didn’t even spin up because not one single shot sounded over the silent ghost town that was the colony.

Guess my dumb question doesn’t seem so dumb now, huh?

“Push it out another fifty and—”

“That puts the NRC shuttle inside the kill zone,” Edwards interrupted. I didn’t think that was such a bad thing, but Mark obviously did because he let fly with a few curse words I hadn’t heard in a long time, especially not coming out of the mouth of a major.

“Can you override manually?” Mark asked hopefully.

“Negative. Can’t get past the safety protocol. Doctor King’s even taken a swing at it. Stand by, I want to try something with a drone,” Edwards answered, but behind her I could hear Coates cursing up a storm at something.

We waited for a few minutes until Edwards was back on, giving us live updates about the drone she was manually piloting.

“Okay, you guys ever heard of the pied piper? That’s it… Follow me, come on… thaaaat’s it—god fucking dammit!”

“Report,” Mark said urgently.

“They see the drone, but they won't follow it. They’re ignoring it completely. I’ve even rammed one of them with it and she didn’t even flinch.

I tried not to imagine what the tiny turbofans would do to human flesh before I remembered the fans on the little surveillance drones from the command module were enclosed.

“Screw this. Bring the geofence back to fifteen meters and stand by. We’re moving in,” he said, standing and heading for the ladder to hit the street. Anders and Mac followed without a hint of hesitation on their faces, but I’ll admit to having, what’s the word? Doubts? Yeah, I had doubts.

“What’s the matter, kid?” Mac asked me quietly.

“I… you sure this is a good idea?” I asked, hoping he’d come up with a better solution to the problem than just walking in and shooting them.

“We’ve only got to take out eight or nine each and it’s all square,” Mark said, demonstrating an uncanny ability to hear a whispered conversation.

“Exactly, and we could be ten to one without backup or a place to defend. Why don’t we draw them here? Take them out from the high ground?” I asked. As soon as I said it, I had this flash of premonition where it was going, and the look on my face told them I knew it.

Mark smiled at me before he spoke and confirmed just how much I’d shot myself in the foot.

“Haven’t you learned anything, marine? Didn’t anyone ever tell you never to volunteer?”

* * *

Three minutes later I was at street level, creeping up a building line feeling about as exposed as I was that time I had to make it back into camp without any clothes on.

It happens, no judgement.

When I reached the corner and took a tactical glance around it, the first thing that annoyed me was why the ring of people were focused on our boomerang and were ignoring the NRC shuttle which was just sitting there totally dark, like they’d switched off the light and hid behind the sofa when someone came knocking.

As far as tactics went it was pretty lame, but pretty effective given how our people were effectively under siege and theirs weren’t.

“In position,” I said, taking a knee and bringing up the rifle to seat it in my shoulder comfortably.

“As soon as they’ve taken the bait, get your ass out of there,” Mark warned me again. I acknowledged him but he really didn’t need to tell me twice, because I didn’t feel much like whipping out a lawn chair and watching the boomerang’s defense turrets light them up as far as the safety perimeter would allow.

I also wanted to be safely up on the roof before I was reenacting some old zombie movie and trying to outrun a horde.

I took my time, lined up a skull in the optic and timed it just right. I didn’t have to worry about overpenetration because the backdrop to my sights was literally something rated to pass through atmosphere, so one little tungsten bullet wasn’t going to hurt it.

“One down,” I reported, my voice cold and calm and a little distorted from how my cheek was welded into the weapon.

“Two... Three…” I said as I moved my targeting reticule and dropped two more.

“They’re taking it,” Coates warned from inside the boomerang, but I could see that pretty clearly for myself as the other heads started to slowly turn in my direction like they weren’t exactly quick on the uptake.

That’s when shit went downhill real fast.

You’ve seen those old movies, right? Where the monsters are slow and shambling and walk like they’re drunk as an E-2 in a Tijuana strip club? Yeah, those ones. Based on what I’d already seen, that’s what I was expecting, only these assholes were the other kind. You know, the motherfuckers who can run.

I dropped two more as they seemed to be looking for the source of the new interruption, but when they’d figured out where I was, they came after me like I was an exposed quarterback behind the worst defensive line in the history of the game.

“Fuck, fuck, fuuuuck,” I said involuntarily as I ran, desperate to maintain my lead and get my ass off the street before they caught up to me.

Fuckin’ pied piper my ass! I thought as I ran, feeling like some green kid fresh out of boot for getting myself talked into being the bait.

“Got you visual, Barton, keep coming,” Mac said in my ear, cool as anything. That pissed me off, if I was being honest. I mean, I loved the fact that the guy was calm under pressure, but the pressure was one hundred percent bearing down on me from behind and snarling like a pack of dogs.

Shots rang out, single bullets aimed with precision, and I imagined the leaders behind me going down to trip the others following too close to avoid their flailing limbs.

“Holy shit, you see that?” Anders asked, with all the nonchalance of a guy out for a breath of fresh air and seeing something interesting.

“What? See what?” I yelled back, not wanting to risk a fall by looking behind me.

“Nothing,” Mac said, only his tone said more like “nothing you need to worry about right now” as opposed to it really being nothing. I concentrated on running fast, feeling the weight of my body catching up with me, because I really needed to pop a few pain pills and sleep. But adrenaline does weird shit to the human body, and I carried on running like there was a reserve tank of some high-octane fossil fuel stored inside me.

Reaching the building we were using as a firing platform, I ducked low in case any of the incoming rounds were passing close by and slammed into the side of the building to start hauling myself up the ladder.

Reaching the top, I saw all three of them standing and drilling shots almost straight down at the group surrounding the building, so I turned and aimed my rifle down to see something I really didn’t want to see.

Skin pale and drawn, eyes glazed over like someone so drunk they were about to pass out, one of the fuckers was actually climbing up to get me.

I’m no scientist. I didn’t know how to fix whatever infection these people were suffering from, but I knew one sure way to cure any ailment.

Taking a hundred and fifty grain tungsten pill to the forehead was pretty instant as far as cures went, and the thing didn’t even looked surprised about it as it fell back to bounce off three more who were coming up.

Flicking the selector to automatic, I started stitching bursts into them until the half dozen who’d followed me around the side lay dead or twitching. Behind me the firing had stopped, so I turned to see what the others were doing.

“We get ’em all?” I asked, hopeful that they would say yes, and we could all go grab a hot cocoa.

Mac burst that bubble for me right away. “Got maybe ten went back into cover.”

“Coates, you got eyes on?” Mark asked, but Edwards came back with the answer.

“Negative, switching imaging spectrums but nothing showing.” Mark waited for about a second before he made a decision and slung his rifle diagonally over his armored torso.

“We go. Stay tight, stay low, move fast,” he said, heading for the ladder where I was standing and glancing down to see the destruction I’d caused.

“Major Harlan?” King’s voice asked tentatively over the comm.

“Send it,” Mark said, already swinging out over the edge of the roof to get back down to ground level.

“Major, am I correct and exact in my assumption that you are in possession of hazardous material recovery kits?”

“Affirmative,” Mark answered with a hint of reluctance in his words. I half expected to get volunteered for that task too, only I was reminded that I wasn’t working with a regular military unit at all.

“In that case, Major, I would be indebted and obliged if you could recover a tissue sample from one of the afflicted,” King said, as if he was asking us to grab another six pack from the store on our way over.

Reaching the ground, we fanned out to put up a perimeter before Mark ordered us to cover him and reached into a pouch for some piece of gear I hadn’t seen before.

It looked like a field dressing kit, but when he tore it open, I saw thick gloves and a sample pot like the kind the navy nurses make you piss in after shore leave to make sure you hadn’t been snorting or smoking things you shouldn’t.

He put on a clear face shield, making me think we should be deployed wearing hazard suits anyway, and pulled the gloves on before opening the pot and rolling over the nearest of my kills.

He rolled the head from side to side and then it looked like he was getting the dead body to drink something from the pot.

“Eyes on the fucking perimeter,” Mac said reprovingly because I was staring at Mark and not looking outward for more threats. I kicked myself for the rookie mistake and focused my attention over the top of my optic for anything moving.

Mark sealed up the pot and dropped it into a clear bag, then put all that into another before stuffing it back into the pouch and dumping the gloves and the rest of the kit where he knelt.

Drawing his sidearm, he nodded once to Mac who set off on point with Anders close behind. I delayed proceedings again by not knowing what he wanted me to do and scurried to catch up to Anders while Mark dropped in behind me.

Now, unless we were stacking up to clear rooms there was no way we’d be this close together out in the open. We moved like a short worm sprouting guns in all directions, and I cursed myself for being there because Coates would’ve known where she was meant to be, and I looked even more like I didn’t belong there.

Even though I’d run like hell through the route we backtracked, it still seemed like we had an extra click to cover, and the tension was building with every step.

It felt like the four of us should’ve had at least a company out there with us, but I forced myself to stay calm and focused. I knew it was because all I’d known was deploying in numbers, never less than a platoon, but that didn’t help fight the fear and the feeling of exposure.

Suck it the fuck up, marine, I told myself, feeling a little better for the pep talk right up until movement showed ahead and Coates called a warning over the comm.

All fear, every little stress of being exposed like we were just vanished when it was time to go to work. I lit them up alongside the others like I belonged there, and when we threw them down before they even got close, I started to even believe I might be good enough to be one of them.

When the gunfire started behind us we all spun, rifles up, only to find the outline of the Russian bear and his damn goblins behind us. I almost let off a shot but the sight of three more bodies between us and them stopped me, just as the butcher’s sound of meat and bone parting under a blade filled my ears.

“You fail to protect your back, American,” Komarov boomed, jerking the trenching tool from the skull of a pale body wearing torn mining coveralls. I expected some more back and forth, more macho bullshit, but the bastard just said nothing and walked right by me.

He held up the weapon a little too close to my face as he passed, and when I reeled back so he didn’t get any infected person juice on me, the bastard laughed. Turning to look at Mark as he passed, Komarov’s voice rumbled right through me.

“You are correct, American, it seems you cannot do this alone and you need our help. We will talk tomorrow.”

Chapter 23

Barton

Command Boomerang, LZ

Far from getting a cup of hot cocoa, we stripped down and decontaminated our gear while Doctor King retrieved the bagged sample from Mark with careful, gloved hands and took it to a clear box with the thick gloves built into it.

I’d never seen anything like that for real, so when the scientist treated the little plastic package like it was unstable explosives, I backed up a few steps.

“You have my sincere and profound gratitude for recovering this, Major Harlan. Perhaps we can begin to understand the nature of this substance with a view to truly comprehending what occurred here,” King said, eyes still fixed on the source of his fear and excitement as he sealed the box and peeled off the gloves inside out to put them carefully inside a biohazard containment box.

Placing his hands inside the gloves built into the glass case, he began to peel open the layers until the vial contained something that looked a little like coffee grounds in oil.

I suppressed a shudder, because the last time I’d seen that stuff it was…

“Hey, anyone see that coming outta their mouths this time?” I asked. Mac and Anders looked at each other before both shook their heads.

“I noticed none of the bastards were shooting at us this time. That’s a plus,” Anders said. I had to agree with that part, but none of this shit made sense to me.

King worked, apparently ignoring us talking but still listening because he spoke in that distracted way of someone whose brain is doing three different things at once.

“The perplexing peculiarities of unexpected behavior are hard enough to comprehend without the inclusion of an altered reality,” he said. I was about to ask what the hell he was talking about when the other scientist translated for us.

“He means his working theory is that this substance is somehow controlling those infected with it. Either that or it’s connecting them to some administrative consciousness,” Laghari said.

“And we might be able to tell somethiiiing… now,” King said, spinning away from the box and hitting keys on a terminal to bring up an image on a screen that looked like dots in water to me.

“Nothing. Completely inanimate,” King said with evident disappointment.

“Perhaps it requires a living host to animate?” Laghari offered.

“Or perhaps whatever it is dies with the host,” King answered, turning to face Mark with his mouth open ready to speak.

“No!” Mark snapped, softening his harsh tone with a small smile before trying again a little more calmly. “I’m sorry, Doctor, but this facility isn’t equipped to capture one of the colonists, even if we could find one of them still… moving…”

King held up his hands and dropped his head as if to accept that his scientist brain had overtaken his human conscience.

“My apologies, Major, truly I am an excitable and oft times mercurial soul when faced with a previously undiscovered scientific conundrum. You’re correct, these things can indeed wait.”

“We need a microscope with at least double the power of this one, for a start,” Laghari said, bending low to peer closely at the screen as if she could make something more out.

“So, you’re saying that sample is effectively dead, right?” I asked, not entirely sure why I was getting my dumb ass involved in the conversation.

“That’s right,” Laghari said without looking up. I saw King beam a smile at me like a high school teacher who just got the unfortunate kid in the class to take notice of what he was teaching.

“So we need to find the source of that stuff before the assholes over there do,” I said, turning to Mark and waving a hand in the unseen direction of the NRC shuttle.

“Yeah, I guess so. And the best bet is to get back down those tunnels and check out the stuff that shouldn’t be there,” Mark said tiredly, taking a seat and leaning back. Mac tossed him an MRE, which he caught with his right hand and sat up a little taller to break it open.

“I’ve prepped a report for upstairs, want to check it first?” Coates asked Mark, who nodded and took the tablet from her. He read fast before handing it back with a nod for her to transmit it.

“Grab some shut-eye,” Mark said to Mac, then turned to me and asked if I’d take the first watch. I did, taking my MRE to the observation screens and settling in to watch the proximity alarms and the NRC picking over the corpses our autoguns had created on the LZ.

Bastards will already know what we know, I told myself, feeling it right down in the pit of my gut that they weren’t here for the same reasons we were.

* * *

“Movement!” Mac called out. I sat up like I’d been electrocuted, grateful I’d left my boots on, and ran to see what had spooked him into waking us.

“It’s the cardicrabs,” he said, pointing at the screen to show an ethereal view of shiny black bodies crawling over the LZ where we’d dropped the colonists.

“Anything inside the geofence?” Mark asked, looking up at Edwards who was stretching out to work the keys on the next console over.

“Negative. Want me to push it out to include them?”

“I’d recommend not doing that,” Laghari said, sitting up and rubbing both hands into her eyes.

“Agreed. They haven’t shown us any interest or hostility as yet, and I don’t feel like changing that in a hurry,” Mark responded.

“Pretty sure they’re just on biological matter cleanup duty,” Anders said, peering at the screen with a pained expression at how the creatures moved.

“Unless there’s a chance to…” King said, trailing off as heads turned to him. He shook his own, waving his hands as if to erase the words he’d just spoken.

I guessed he was about to suggest someone heading out to snatch an alien crab with a serious chubby for dead bodies, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to volunteer for that one.

“What do you think? Just leave them to it?” Mac asked Mark, who seemed to consider it for about a second before he shrugged.

“They’re not interested in us,” he said, making the decision to settle us in for the rest of the dark hours.

* * *

We were up and out at dawn, right about the same time the NRC team were stretching off outside the open ramp of their shuttle. I braced myself for more shit talk, but it seemed our new best buddies weren’t up for it.

“Did you see your spiders here last night, American?” Komarov asked.

“Crabs, and yeah,” Mark said. “I propose we check the other tunnels this morning. We should leave the cavern we found for our science teams to look over. Secure the other places first so we know there aren’t any other surprises waiting for us.”

“This is acceptable plan,” Komarov said darkly, eyes on me like he was distracted from the conversation by his desire to pull my arms off and beat me to death with them.

Damn, those NRC Spets guys are animals, I thought, suppressing another shudder at the way the asshole looked at me.

We moved out, both teams walking on either side of the road in column like we were in some goofy movie where there were alternate versions of our characters.

I got stuck with the ghoul again, and in full daylight his ugly face made me wonder if his parents had tossed him out when he was born. I guessed being that, uh, unfortunate as my mother might say because it wasn’t in her nature to be unkind to anyone, might make the guy perfect for special ops work. I mean, he had a lifetime of anger to tap into just based on his reflection.

Stopping at the edge of the quarry again, Komarov turned to talk to Mark.

“I suggest we take one place each and meet back here in four hours,” he said. Mark nodded, giving the man an easy win but choosing the tunnel closest to the one where we’d already found something.

We moved, finding again that there was nothing, no trace at all, of our fight right where we stood only hours before.

Splitting off to separate tunnels, we found we had to dig a little rubble clear to get inside. I honestly wasn’t all that happy about going back underground, but it seemed like the collapse was only partial and only at the surface, so the actual bore hole going down at a slope was pretty much untouched, even given how much of a pounding the bowl of the quarry took the day before.

We headed down cautiously, until we reached another cavern with uneven sides but this one was most definitely man-made.

“Looks like they took a pretty big mineral deposit out of here,” Anders said as he inspected the machine-cut sides of the rock.

“And no sign of any alien goo,” Mac added. “No sign of anything.”

“Check everywhere. See if there’s another exit shaft,” Mark ordered. So I set off clockwise around the cave with my hand on the stone. I didn’t feel any kind of draft to indicate there was another tunnel anywhere, but accepting the absence of a clue wasn’t the same as double checking with my own eyes, so I carried on.

When I’d worked my way back to the start and confirmed we were in a dead end, Mark checked his watch and called the retreat.

“Head back up. Meet the NRC and check if they've found anything,” he said, setting off in the lead. I was pretty happy to be heading topside after a couple hours underground, and when we reached the surface, I had to squint my eyes against the weird orange glow that passed for sunlight on this shitty rock.

It wasn’t like the bright light of Earth’s sun, but more like a bright sunset in the middle of the day when the star was right overhead. Every world I’d ever set foot on had been so close to Earth’s conditions that weird things like that always threw me. Even the slightly heavier gravity didn’t knock me out of sync as much as the damn sun being wrong like it was here.

“Odin Nine-Five, Odin Nine-Five, GCIC, over,” said a smooth voice over the channel as soon as we’d climbed out of the quarry’s bowl. Something about the ambient noise behind the words made me instantly know they were speaking from orbit, even if the ground combat information center acronym wasn’t a dead giveaway.

“Nine-Five Alpha, send it.”

“Odin Nine-Five actual, switch to encryption zulu-nine, over,” came the instruction. Mark frowned but pulled the comm device from a pouch and keyed in the encryption passwords he’d obviously memorized. I hadn’t even been told about a separate encrypted channel, so I guessed this was a boss-level thing, which seemed to be right as I watched Mark walking around and answering questions with yes and no answers for a while.

Finishing up with an “Understood, sir. Out,” he walked back, reconnecting the comm channel to the rest of us and tucking the device away again.

“Change of plan. We stay on the NRC. Intel indicates that they’re under orders to recover alien artifacts and transport them off the surface against any and all opposition,” he said.

“Wait, they’re planning on finding what caused this and stealing it?” I asked, not sure why I was shocked that one person’s tragedy was another person’s biological weapon of mass destruction.

“That’s what they’re thinking upstairs,” Mark answered. “At the least, we need both parties to leave the planet with a sample so we both have whatever technology this is.”

I felt tired. Not suddenly tired, but more like I’d allowed it to build up and instead of reaching the crest of a hill I was climbing, I’d just found out there was still another mile of slope to walk up, and my body wanted to turn on me and say a big, loud nope.

“And if they don’t want us to take a sample or don’t like us watching them?” Mac asked.

“SOGCOM was pretty explicit about it. They don’t want to come out of this at a loss and they don’t want loose ends,” Mark said, flicking a glance at me before looking away fast.

Okay, what the hell was that?

“What happened down here is either going to be a secret of the Combined States or a secret jointly held between us and the NRC,” Mark explained.

“Or the start of another damn territory war between us and them,” Anders said.

“And their allies,” Mac added. “Can’t forget the damn Brits and the rest of their Empire.”

“Yeah, so it’s either diplomacy or an ass-kickin’. Their choice,” Mark said as he led the way back down into the now clean quarry and back down the tunnel shaft to catch up to the Russians, who’d just gone underground.

Mark called back to the boomerang as we moved. “Coates, Edwards, I want that location in lockdown. Secure the ship, secure the command center and keep the autoguns spun up ready to go.”

“Understood. What’s going on?” Coates answered.

“Intel from upstairs. Apparently, the NRC is under orders to get a live sample off this rock,” Mark answered. Turning back, he cast his eyes over the quarry, waiting for the NRC team to show up.

“Roger that, be advised they returned topside about fifteen ago. They went back to the tunnel you went down yesterday,” Coates answered, making Mark’s eyes go wide and his feet start moving back into the quarry.

* * *

Admiral Arias leaned back in her chair and let out a long breath to steady her nerves. Slowly, unexpectedly, a smile spread up from the corners of her mouth in anticipation of what this meant.

The sour taste in her mouth from the meeting with the NRC still lingered, and she considered that she might be wrong about what she planned to do. She doubted it, but she wouldn’t be doing her job if she didn’t consider the other options.

If she was wrong, it might mean her resignation. If it backfired badly, she might end up facing the ignominious end to her career by way of facing charges. Regardless of the personal risk, she had to play it out.

Having just received the encrypted report from SOGCOM, who had covert operatives all over the galaxy, the degree of certainty behind the intel was high enough to pull the trigger on a plan she’d been honing and tweaking for near on three years.

The intel implied that the NRC and the British were massing their forces, albeit quietly, and the only viable reason for a force of that size was to contest a system. The only system of interest was the one where both nations had boots on the ground, and if the Admiral’s almost three decades of service had taught her anything, it was that the NRC had zero conscience problems when it came to breaking a deal or sacrificing troops for the greater good. The more she thought about it, the more certain she was that the agreement for a joint task force had been nothing more than a delaying tactic for the NRC to get their dangerous little ducks in a row.

She had relayed that intel to the task force, making it clear that it was the official position of the Combined States military that the NRC were intending immediate hostilities in that area of operations, before she made her next calls.

She called first the sector command posts and ordered fleet resources be sent to Midway, including the fleet flagship that would dwarf even the Forthright. Her next call was to her peer at CS Navy headquarters on Earth, which woke her counterpart, although the disturbance didn’t seem to trouble him.

“Elena, how can I help?” the admiral asked after rubbing the sleep from his eyes and squinting at the time.

“Sorry to wake you, Tom,” she said, not sounding in the slightest bit sorry. “I need official lines of communication open to allied nations and I need them fast.”

She filled him in, forwarding the encrypted report on NRC activity for him to read after he’d had coffee.

“It’s happening then?” he asked. “I thought it would take longer if I’m being honest.”

“Really? I’ve been expecting this for years.”

“We all know you have, Elena, believe me. I have to ask, you’re sure this isn't jumping the gun and starting something we don’t need to just now?” he said, looking at her directly to gauge her response.

“Absolutely not,” she answered confidently. “I think this is going down whether we like it or not, and I’d rather jump the gun than be left on the receiving end of biowarfare tech we don’t possess. If I’m wrong then I’m wrong, and nobody gets hurt as a result, but if I’m right? Now, get me those contacts?”

Chapter 24

Barton

Tunnel One, North Quarry

We caught up with them maybe halfway down the shaft, which told me they’d put a burst of speed on as soon as they were out of sight from the surface. I expected a little pushing and shoving with these guys, but finding out we might actually need to take them on made me regret some recent life choices that mostly centered around mom jokes.

“You want the honor of going first, American? Is that why you no longer wish to wait?” Komarov’s voice boomed before we’d even exited the tunnel.

We hit the open space and fanned out to check it, finding nothing different from the day before.

“Something like that, Komarov,” Mark said as he scanned the chamber again and stared at the central plinth that registered as a heat source. “Barton, Mac, head down.”

I looked at the shaft leading off the chamber, specifically at how it was only about twice as wide as I was, and I didn’t have high hopes of it staying that way. It also got me wondering why we hadn’t brought ropes and climbing gear, but I didn’t want hump all this shit around and we weren’t supposed to be doing this right now.

Something about the tension inside the cavern was different, just as off-putting as the sun outside being wrong, and it was like the NRC assholes knew we knew why they were really here. We were like neighborhood cats circling each other not willing to make the first move and start a fight.

I looked at the little shaft, then looked back at Mark and saw a glimmer of disappointment on his face before I smiled with a confidence I most definitely did not possess. I handed off my rifle to Anders and patted the modified SMG pistol on my right thigh to show I had enough firepower just in case.

Two of the NRC guys had already headed down, going down headfirst, which I thought was a little dumb as I sat on my ass and shuffled my feet inside the entrance to begin sliding down like I was on a kid’s play park. And it went like that for about two hundred meters, or to put it in time, what felt like about eighty-four years spent in a hot, dark and dusty coffin.

I could see the lights of the other guys ahead, could hear them talking to each other in Russian, which I suddenly regretted not learning to speak, before the lights disappeared each time the tunnel took a turn like it did every thirty meters. Nothing drastic, just like a little jink sideways so I kept losing line of sight with them ahead and Mac behind. Thankfully, the gradient stayed the same, as did the width of the tunnel, which gave me an odd feeling it was created artificially instead of formed naturally.

I mean, duh, the sides were smooth like they’d been drilled by an exploration drone, and that made me realize I might be starting to lose my mind by being underground.

The gradient, just after I’d thought about it being nice and smooth, dropped away sharply to the extent that I was pressing my hands into the tunnel walls to stop me from sliding down. Ahead of me the Russians had gone, which made me smile and imagine them falling out into another chamber to break their falls with their faces instead of landing on their feet like genius me was going to.

“Hold up, kid,” Mac hissed down from above me, but the gradient was too steep, and I wasn’t able to hold on because the walls were crumbling under my touch. I took my hands away, terrified of a cave-in that would leave me trapped a couple hundred meters underground with zero chance of getting the hell out before I suffocated, but the result of that was an acceleration in my ass-sliding that I couldn’t stop without pressing too hard into the walls and risking the cave-in scenario.

As my brain was rolling this unwinnable situation around and adding the subtitles of “shit, shit, fuckin’ shit,” my feet shot out into thin air and gravity slammed my ass down, so I landed about eight feet down flat on my back. Coughing, cursing the planet for the hundredth time for having heavier gravity than Earth, I rolled over because I didn’t want to add another injury from Mac landing on me if he dropped out of the hole before I got clear.

I got to my knees and looked up, but Mac didn’t follow. Just as I was figuring that out, I heard a crunch behind me—soft and distorted by the echo inside the dark cavern—but it was unmistakably the sound of someone or something moving.

I half turned, mouth open to call out to the Russians, when another sound reached my brain.

Shhnick.

I ducked, going with my forward momentum and rolling to get my body out of the way. The air behind my head sung with a kind of resonating vibration as the sharpened edge of the shovel crackled and lit up with the signature sound of a plasma blade.

Whatever I did, it wasn’t fast enough, and a solid blow rocked my head on my neck and sent me sprawling in a different direction. My visor died, the software or the power supply ruined by the hit, but I didn’t think I was hurt.

The cold, blue light from the weapon’s glowing edge threw insane shadows over the cave and disorientated me. I rolled again, changing direction again blindly out of some instinct I hadn’t unlocked before, and came back to my knees to draw the SMG from my right thigh. The stock extended and I tucked in the little weapon hard to line up on the shape partly illuminated by the plasma burning on the edge of the trenching tool.

“Drop it!” I snapped, shouting a warning out of some other kind of instinct. The kind that kept me out of punishment parades and didn’t want to start up the war with the NRC and their allies again. The fact that this asshole was coming at me with a lethal weapon didn’t register, not in that way, but I only thought about the depth of shit I could land in if I pulled the trigger without justification.

He didn’t drop it, but he did deactivate it to plunge the cavern back into total darkness.

I fired, sending a burst of shots into the impression of the silhouette I could still see after the light was shut off. Sparks lit up the wall thirty paces away and the whine of two ricochets made me flinch, but I knew I’d missed him. I also knew I had no clue where he was, and just as that thought was sinking in, I remembered there were two of the bastards and I was effectively blind.

A shrill thrumming noise filled the cavern, and I threw myself aside again as something metal clattered hard into the wall behind me. I sent two pairs of shots in different directions, as much to keep their heads down as to try and hit either of them, but with the noise of the reports and the darkness and the ringing in my dome, I knew I was going to go down in seconds if I didn’t change the game.

I let go of the SMG with my left hand but kept the extended stock tucked into my shoulder with my right. My left hand drew the plasma knife, awkwardly because I carried it high on my left so I could draw it with my strong hand. I spun it so I held the blade pointing down and rested my left wrist under the end of the stubby barrel before I squeezed the grip to activate the plasma.

The dull light gave me a couple of meters view and I moved, not wanting to illuminate myself as a target, sidestepping across the cavern and making so much noise I couldn’t hear anything other than my boots scuffing up the dust.

I killed the plasma knife with another squeeze and sank low, moving back in the direction I’d come from as quiet as I could. It worked, because another spark of light appeared where I’d just been as one of the NRC team swung a burning plasma blade at the spot where he expected me to be.

I love being underestimated, I thought as I let fly with a burst from the SMG. The sound of the bullets leaving the weapon sounded in unison with the dull dunk-dunk-dunk-dunk of the guy’s armor soaking up the hits until the force of the bullets up close sent him down on his ass.

“Barton! Barton!” Mac yelled, just before he dropped out of the hole and landed on his feet hard enough to pitch him forward before he got upright.

That stumble saved his life, because the burning plasma blade swung for where his chin would’ve been. Instead, right in front of my eyes, I saw the trenching tool bury itself under his armor above his left hip. With a strangled cry he dropped, and in the light of the glowing weapon, I saw the bulging eyes and bald complexion of Pasternak, who looked more like a ghoul than before with the way the light shadowed his face. He snarled at me, or it might’ve been a smile. I couldn’t tell because the fucker was so ugly, and he ripped the trenching tool free to wind up a shot at my head.

I was faster. I stepped to my left, rammed the plasma knife out low and felt it bite deep above the thigh armor. His swing still came at me but it was weaker and his grip must’ve gotten weak on the handle because the burning plasma cut out before it slammed into my right arm just below the shoulder.

I went down, blinded by the dark and disorientated by pain and fear. I lay half on my back, gun up in a wavering hand because my entire right arm was numb.

I saw nothing. Heard nothing.

Then I heard Mac groan behind me and I turned, unable to see him in the dark but stretching out my left hand in search of him.

“Motherfuckers… mother…. fuckers,” he groaned through gritted teeth.

“Mac! Mac, you okay?” I whispered, spinning back to face my front at the sound of running. Nothing happened, and it took a second for my brain to figure out that the sounds were the NRC assholes running away.

Must be another way out of here, I thought.

“Son of a bitch,” Mac snarled, in obvious pain.

“I can’t see you,” I said, pulling off my helmet and feeling the jagged edge of the damaged visor. The damn thing was dead, so the hit must’ve screwed up the power, which made me wish for something simple like a damn flashlight.

“I’m here,” Mac groaned.

“How bad are you hurt?” I asked, worried about getting him out of there even if I could keep us both alive in the dark.

“Not… not penetrated the suit,” he said. “Got some… got some busted ribs…” He pulled a small tube from his rifle with one hand and clicked a switch on it to bathe the cavern in low, red light. I snatched it off him and spun around, finding out that the place was a lot smaller than I imagined it to be. Seeing that we were alone and seeing that another tunnel led off, which was where those bastards had to have gone, I turned back to Mac and shone the red light over him.

The suit had done its job and stopped the burning blade from penetrating, but the material on his left flank was thin and had lost the sheen that the rest of it still showed. That meant the ablative whatever had gone, been hammered away by burning plasma, and a second hit would’ve probably ripped him in half.

I put a hand on it, earning a sharp hiss of pain and a muttered curse from Mac as my hand felt the heat coming off the injury. I knew it was probably more than a few busted ribs, because a hit that hard would’ve caused internal bleeding—it had to have done—and that meant I needed to get him the hell out of there fast.

“Here,” I said, fumbling to pull the blister pack of pills out of a pouch. I gave him four, with no idea about the dosage but I didn’t think four would kill him. If it did, that was probably better than dying of internal bleeding underground with only a beat-up marine for backup. I added a couple of the stim pills to go with it, hoping that could get him at least partially on his feet so I didn’t have to carry him out.

“We need to move,” Mac said.

“What about the others? We need to warn them.”

“Radio’s out,” he said with another grunt of pain.

Fuck this shit, let’s do it the old-fashioned way, I thought as I stood up and cupped my hands to my mouth in the direction of the tunnel I’d fallen out of.

“Mark! NRC ambush!” I screamed, hoping the words would carry and they weren’t caught with their pants down by the two Russians who would’ve heard that just like they did.

“Come on, kid,” Mac said, struggling to his feet and handing me his rifle. I slung his right arm over my shoulders and took the weapon, holding it out in front of me so I could see part of the way ahead through the optic.

Mac directed me toward the tunnel, and we set off after the assholes who tried to fuck us up in the dark like a pair of cowards. Just when we’d made it out of the cavern, a faint noise echoed down to us that sounded like an explosion.

Chapter 25

Alien Cavern, North Quarry

“What was that?” Mark snapped. “Sounded like gunfire?”

“No, it was man dropping equipment,” Komarov said looking sure of himself. More sounds drifted up from the tunnel mouth and Mark stepped closer, turning on the tall Russian.

“That sounded like gunfire to me,” he said accusingly.

“Perhaps they find more of your crabs down there?” Komarov explained with a shrug, sounding so unconvincing and unconcerned that it was almost laughable. No special operator lived long if they accepted their first guess at the easiest explanation.

A voice shouted up from below, too quiet and distorted to hear, but the accent was American and the tone was urgent.

“Your man says they are okay,” Komarov said with a reassuring smile.

“Sure,” Mark said, stepping back to give himself enough space to draw a weapon.

Komarov saw it, no matter how subtle he’d been, and stood fast to close the gap between them. Mark backed up faster, keeping the reactionary gap between them but his back slammed into the warm podium and stopped him dead just as Komarov pulled back a meaty fist to slam into his face. Mark squirmed, ducking under the incoming blow as Anders and the other NRC soldier yelled at the same time.

Komarov jumped back, bringing up his weapon and firing on automatic from the hip as Mark spun and threw himself clear. The bullets slammed into the podium, sparking off the stone and filling the air with a humming whine to add to the clatter of gunfire. The stone cracked, spilling heat as it broke apart, and the channel in Mark’s helmet came to life a few seconds after.

“Nine-Five, we hear gunshots but have no visual! We didn’t see you come back above ground…” Coates said, sounding so concerned her words came out angry.

Mark didn’t answer. He was vaguely aware of Anders fighting with the other guy, but his attention was dominated by Komarov standing over him and bringing the rifle up into his shoulder.

He rolled, flat on his back with the long rifle stuck between him and the ground, and angled his right leg so that his knee pointed up at the NRC commander.

He grabbed the Mk30’s grip, not bothering to waste time drawing it, and pulled the trigger three times. The small tungsten slugs hit Komarov in the chest, each shot climbing higher as Mark adjusted for effect and tried to get a bullet under his exposed chin to blow his head off but Komarov stepped aside and lashed out a boot to kick Mark in the thigh hard enough to shock his nerves.

“Nine-Five, report!” Coates barked in his ear.

“Ambush—” Mark tried to shout, having his words shut off by a second kick to the side of his helmet. Komarov stamped down, again and again, savagely stomping on his chest to disorientate him.

On the other side of the cave Anders was too consumed by his task to even hear the words over the channel.

Komarov had called the guy Yuri, he thought absently as he ducked and dodged the savage swings of the trenching tool that the soldier tried to take his head off with; not that the man’s name was relevant but it just came to him then. The footing was treacherous, and each desperate step back made his boots skid on the sandy surface. Anders moved, waiting for his opportunity to turn defense into a counterattack.

When Yuri swung too hard and tipped his body weight forward, Anders brought a knee up into the unprotected face of his attacker so hard that both of them tumbled. Anders rolled over the top of him and rose to his feet on the other side to whip the axe off his back, gripping it both hands and putting everything he had into the downward chop.

The back of the helmet deflected some of the blow, but even in the poor light against a moving target, his aim had been good enough to let the brute force behind the blow work for him. The burning blade scorched the armored helmet as it slid off it to bite through the skin, muscle and bone that kept his head attached to his body.

Just as the Russian was trying to decapitate him, Anders returned the favor in a masterclass of how it should be done.

The head rolled as the body stayed where it was on hands and knees, just swaying for a second before it slumped back onto its haunches and flopped to one side.

“Yuriiiiii!” Komarov screamed, making Anders dive for cover as bullets tore the air and hit the body of the man he’d just killed.

Outnumbered two to one, Komarov pulled a device off his chest and tossed it over his shoulder as he ran for the exit with a speed nobody would have believed from a man his size.

Anders saw it tumbling end over end as it sailed through the air, the enhancement of his helmet’s visor showing him minor details like the blinking light that signified something all too ominous.

He opened his mouth to shout, to warn Mark, but the thing flared in sudden light and went boom.

* * *

“Dammit, anybody!” Coates yelled into the channel before she growled in frustration and hit another switch.

“Forthright, Odin Nine-Five, be advised we have an unknown hostile situation unfolding here. Radio contact lost after sounds of a firefight. Advise, over,” she said before switching back to talking over the other channel and trying to raise the team again.

“Odin Nine-Five, confirm the nature of the hostile situation, over.”

“Sounded like the team were in a firefight, then the channel went dead after a loud noise, possibly an explosion,” she answered. “Request reinforcements and air suppor—”

“Negative, Odin Nine-Five, any and all reinforcements can only be authorized by fleet command.”

“Fuck you,” Coates answered, not transmitting the words but feeling better for saying them.

“I’ve got a visual,” Edwards called out, grabbing Coates’ attention and pointing at the screen showing a video feed from a drone. She saw the NRC commander, alone, running across the quarry. He stopped, turning to point his weapon at the tunnel he’d just exited like he feared pursuit. He carried on running, his lips moving like he was shouting, and Coates snatched up the comm link to the orbiting ships again.

“Odin Nine-Five, requesting Thor strike package delta at”—she zoomed out and punched the controls to overlay a grid of green lines over the display—“killbox three-foxtrot. Confirm, strike package delta at killbox three-foxtrot, over.”

“Negative, Odin Nine-Five, strike package would hit friendly forces. Command request sitrep, over.”

Coates’ face twisted like she wanted to scream in frustrated rage and her hand gripped the comm so hard it creaked. Just as she was about to repeat herself, she saw three of the display screens all move at once, and all of them showed the rear ramp of the NRC ship lowering in the distance.

“Forthright, be advised NRC forces on the surface are hostil—”

“Odin Nine-Five, munitions fired by NRC ships. Evac! Evac!”

Coates didn’t say a word. She turned and grabbed the nearest scientist by her collar and propelled her at the exit before sending King after her with a little less force given that he was twice Laghari’s size. Edwards flipped open a switch cover and pressed her thumb on the red button underneath, which authorized the autoguns to engage before she ran after them, snatching her ready bag and a rifle from the rack.

They sprinted across the open space toward their ship as the gun turrets on the boomerang lit up to send scorching tracer rounds at the troops spilling down the ramp of the NRC dropship. Bodies were thrown down in bloody ruin but none of them stopped to appreciate the devastation their guns brought because getting airborne was a greater priority.

A whooshing, rumbling sound grew louder until the ground beneath their feet shook so violently it made doctor Laghari lose her footing.

A rush of hot air and dust followed the deafening noise until it blocked out their hearing completely. Turning back, Coates saw their boomerang—or the place where their boomerang had been—turned into a crater. They still ran for the ship but another whooshing noise grew louder. She yelled, pushing the others and forcing them to change direction and run away from the ship. She redirected them just quickly enough to avoid the fireball that the ship had turned into after the second orbital strike reduced their escape plan to a smoking crater of burning wreckage that plumed smoke a hundred meters into the air.

“Go, go!” Coates screamed, barely able to hear her own words for the violent ringing in her ears, but it was what she couldn’t hear that bothered her the most. With the destruction of the boomerang went their defensive capabilities, leaving them stranded with only personal weapons to defend themselves against the troops still coming from the NRC dropship.

“Bastards,” she snarled. “Sneaky, double-crossing bastards!”

“What?” Laghari yelled. Her face was covered in dust and her eyes were wide in terror and confusion.

“Run,” Coates shouted back, pointing her toward the bluff of high ground separating the LZ from the eastern edge of the settlement and giving her a helpful shove in the back to get her moving.

They ran, Edwards at the tail overloaded with pack and rifle, and Coates running alongside the two scientists like some worried sheepdog. They made it as far as the lower slopes of the small hill before the air above their heads began to fill with the thrum and zip of passing rounds. Dirt spewed upward from the ground to their right in a stitching line of impacts.

“Go!” Coates yelled, her voice sounding louder this time because her hearing had begun to return after the deafening impacts of the kinetic munitions. They ran, spurred on by the pursuit while all the time Coates expected to hear a few seconds of the thunderous whining of another strike from orbit before their lives were snuffed out in the blink of an eye.

But none came. After she’d corralled her few remaining people around the edge of the higher ground and broken line of sight contact with any pursuit, she took a breath and checked on the others.

Laghari was a mess, with hair plastered to her face and the pale brown skin around her eyes reddened from the dust and tears. King, although exhausted, with his chest heaving after the effort of running, gave her a nod and a raised thumb to signify that he was onboard but just needed a second to catch his breath.

Edwards, pink cheeked and panting, was looking over the sights of her short-barreled rifle as she scanned the terrain and waited to be told what she could do. Her training as a ground soldier had been minimal, but being stranded in hostile terrain after losing a bird was something the special operations group had made a point of thoroughly training their pilots in. She was in SERE mode, with her mind on survival, evasion, resistance, and escape.

Coates had that on her mind too, but she also had three members of her team missing, a bucket full of NRC operators on the ground and no guarantee of help from upstairs. Add to that, she had two VIPs to protect, a pilot to keep out of trouble, her team to reunite with, and an asshole to find, but then again marine Barton was the furthest thing down her priority list when it came to the personnel involved.

She dropped her pack, unzipping it to pull a weapon stock built on the same kind of platform as their standard rifles, only this one had a collapsed buttstock and the long barrel removed. She pulled it out, extending it to its full length before locking the barrel, bipod attached, in place with a twist and a click, then took a magazine from her chest pouches and slapped it home. Zipping up the bag and returning it to her back, she ordered the others to stay where they were until she came back, then ran up the slope a short way before traversing along the edge until the edge of the LZ and the burning wreckage of their ship came into view.

Settling herself down and allowing the gas struts of the bipod to auto-level the weapon on the uneven slope, she peered through the optic and used the small wheel beside the grip to toggle the zoom until she saw movement.

She tracked her targets, going from left to right as she lined up each of the four of them in turn and let the optics calculate the required lead. The optics only did part of the job, and she knew she’d have to get it right to land the hits, but getting it right was what she’d always done.

One, two, three… four, she whispered to herself as she practiced the rapid shots she was gearing up to take. One, two, three, four… Satisfied, she moved the targeting reticule back to the lead NRC soldier and made her own adjustments for wind, terrain, and distance so that her targets effectively killed themselves by running into her bullet.

“One, two, three, four,” she counted out, pulling the trigger with each number and watching as they fell in the order she’d named them; except the last one spun instead of dropping like a rock before the agonized scream reached her ears over the long distance.

She bent her head to the optic again, made a new calculation, and watched for the targeting symbol to flash red before squeezing the trigger one last time. The screaming stopped, but she had no time to congratulate herself for the display of marksmanship because more shapes were coming into view from the direction of the LZ.

A whole platoon of NRC soldiers approached by the look of it, and she wondered how they’d been kept so quiet, crammed into a dropship for days waiting for the orders to attack. Then she remembered that their ship was gone and the second shape at the LZ was another NRC dropship. That was when she realized why there weren’t any further orbital strikes; they had their own people in the AO now.

She fired, not counting out her targets or practicing like before to make perfect shots, just concentrating on throwing as much tungsten downrange as she could to keep their heads down and make them wary of following her. She changed magazines and carried on firing, sending round after round their way every second with devastating results.

She knew her skill with a rifle over distance was a psychological weapon as much as a literal one, and during the conflicts over contested systems, she’d received a very quiet citation following a captured enemy reporting that they’d been pinned down by an entire company, when in fact it was just her and her spotter.

That man was dead now, lost on a covert mission in British-held territory, but Coates and her rifle were still taking heads.

“We need to move! I’ve bought us some time, but we need to get into cover now,” she said as she scrambled down the slope and slung the long rifle diagonally over her torso before retrieving the shorter version from beside Edwards. The others seemed to have recovered from the short break during which Coates had killed no fewer than twelve of the enemy.

She led them, checking behind her every few paces like the sheepdog she was, into the eastern edge of the settlement where she cleared the first two floors of a larger building and paused to take stock of the deep shit they were all in.

Chapter 26

CSS Forthright, Orbit of BG-192

“Forthright, be advised NRC forces on the surface are hostil—”

“Odin Nine-Five, munitions fired by NRC ships. Evac! Evac!” the officer on comm yelled, cutting her off.

Colonel Desoto’s eyes went wide, and he fought down the urge to reprimand the man for allowing panic to spread via communications.

Panic was a virus. It was a disease, and he knew all too well from experience what happened when troops in combat heard panic in their ears.

On the other hand, he entirely forgave the outburst after the words the man yelled broke through to tell him that their day had just gotten a whole lot more dangerous.

“Report!” he snapped, cold and professional even though his heart hammered in his chest the way a heavy used to hammer in his hands back when he was permitted to do the fighting himself, and not forced to watch from safety miles away.

“Sir, unidentified stealth ship near to our orbit just opened fire on the LZ.”

“On the LZ? What targets?”

“Unknown yet, sir, but I thought the guys on the ground might want a heads up,” the comm officer answered with an air of hopefulness in his voice.

“You did right,” Desoto said curtly. “Alright, keep trying to raise the ground team. I want eyes on their positions and signal the ready company to prep for drop,” he said, sitting down and picking up the secure line that got straight through to the captain’s chair on the bridge.

“I’m a little busy, John,” Brannan said as the sound of a dozen people doing their jobs flat out filled the closed channel.

“Understood. Permission to launch relief troops?” Desoto asked, just wanting a yes-or-no response and hoping for a yes.

“Negative, stand by all ground elements until we’ve made contact with the NRC. This might be a legitimate support strike and we don’t yet… know…” He trailed off, leaving Desoto hanging on for the rest.

“Sir, the last communication from our team said the NRC were hostile—”

“And, as yet, we have no confirmation of this,” Brannan said with a forced patience he seemed to hate himself for.

“Confirmed! Impacts on LZ boomerang and dropship. Repeat, NRC fired on our command center and dropship,” someone cried out, making him pull the receiver away from his ear momentarily.

“John?” Brannan said, before the ship rumbled and shook like the sudden outbreak of a thunderstorm had snuck up on them.

“I’m here, sir,” Desoto said.

“I’m sorry, John, but that’s direct from Midway. No more boots on the ground. Stand by for further orders.”

The line crackled, flickered, and went out for a second before being replaced with red emergency lighting. The comm line was cut, either by whatever attack had just been launched on them or by Brannan hanging up the receiver because he had more important things to do.

“Sir, no further contact with ground elements. Do we have a drop authorized?” an officer asked him. As much as he wanted to say yes, to assume Brannan’s orders, the last thing he’d been told was to stand by and to assume would be to make the decision himself.

Right or wrong, he followed orders.

“Negative, keep them ready but do not authorize a drop without explicit instructions.”

The ship shook again, slamming him into the side of his chair three times in a row as the impacts rocked him. He looked up, catching the eye of the man who was still looking at him in shock at not giving the order to drop reinforcements.

“Order all troops to prepare for deployment,” Desoto said confidently. “In the event that the ship may be compromised and unable to deploy if significant damage is sustained, company commanders are permitted to evacuate the Forthright.”

The officer nodded and turned to relay the information. Desoto knew where they were, buried deep in the heart of the ship, as was the bridge. They were unlikely to suffer much from whatever battle raged far beyond his four walls, but the marines onboard were housed close enough to the belly of the carrier to be vulnerable to impacts.

He snatched up the receiver again, needing to listen in on the bridge activities, as he sat in his chair feeling utterly useless to anyone.

* * *

“Attention all NRC vessels, this is Captain Brannan of the CSS Forthright. Cease all hostilities immediately and stand down weapons or we will retaliate.”

The only response came in the form of more impacts that shook the carrier, so the captain wasted no more time on necessary warnings.

“Rotate to port thirty degrees and return fire,” Brannan ordered in response to the attack report, rolling the ship so that more guns could be brought to bear on the ships firing at them. None of the stealth vessels bore active transponders, but from the power and weapon signatures, he was fairly certain what was going on.

“Target coordinates…” He paused, looking at the display in front of him and applying the combined experience and intuition of a man who had been to war in the inky black of space many times. He shouted out the numbers, waiting for them to be repeated back in case of any errors in communication. “Give me buckshot,” he said, his crew knowing what he meant and targeting their munitions in a wide pattern spread.

He gave them a few seconds before the words rang out over the bridge.

“Weapons ready.”

“Fire!”

Brannan invested the word with all the anger and emotion it deserved. The ship rumbled with rolling booms as the tubes ejected their payloads toward the expected position of their hidden enemy.

Brannan had cut his teeth on this kind of blind warfare for thirty years, since he was a junior officer manning a sensor station onboard a minesweeper in the Epsilon Eridani system, ever since the British started hunting their trade and resupply ships beyond the jump lane exits with packs of stealth submarines.

More than a few times in his career he had been surrounded by the invisible killers, and only the sheer size of the larger ships he’d been on had saved the crews from destruction.

It was like a nature program, with protected species of whale back on Earth surrounded by hungry sharks. On their own, they were so small that the whale wouldn’t even acknowledge them, but when they massed together, they could combine their attacks to exhaust the whale and force it to float on the surface where they could effectively eat it alive.

The Forthright, so large it had almost no natural predators, was similarly surrounded by what Brannan suspected was a pack of British subs. Only they planned to keep circling him and prevent him from running the fight that raged all around the planet.

“Negative effect,” came the response from the officer on sensors.

“Adjust pattern forty degrees and fire again when ready,” Brannan ordered. The ship shook a second time in ripping waves as the munitions scattered out from the carrier; but this time they struck something.

“Target, correction two targets identified!”

“Paint them and continue with the buckshot,” Brannan ordered calmly.

Twice more the ship scattered kinetic munitions of a small size and explosive munitions with low-yield warheads, and twice more those shots located stealth targets.

“Cease fire, launch CAP,” he ordered, sending out the carrier’s complement of void fighter-bombers to annihilate and harass the stealth subs, and drive them back down to skulk in the deep dark where they belonged.

Now that the immediate concerns were addressed and he temporarily handed over responsibility for the fight outside to others, he looked down to see the light blinking, indicating that the comm link to his ground combat information center was live.

“Run a sensor sweep for any craft launched to the surface by NRC vessels,” he ordered, hearing the acknowledgement and waiting patiently for the scan to be conducted.

“Negative any surface craft, Captain.”

“Understood. Alert me if you detect any,” Brannan said as he turned to face his communications officer, noticing that the light on the GCIC line had gone out.

Thank you, John, he thought, respecting the marine for not harassing him and understanding what he’d overheard, even though they’d all missed the single dropship coming in from the other side of the planet as soon as the attack had begun.

“Announce fleetwide,” he ordered, waiting for a nod of confirmation that the channel was open. “Attention all CS vessels, this is Captain Brannan of the Forthright. NRC forces have announced their intentions to be hostile. Defend yourselves to the best of your abilities. Be advised we have detected NRC allied forces in the AO utilizing stealth—engage and destroy those vessels as you encounter them. Good hunting.” He slashed the fingers of his right hand across his throat and the channel was cut.

He leaned forward, using both hands to expand the holographic display, and watched as red and white icons blinked out along with some green ones.

Twice the losses of Combined States naval ships were reported to him and twice he silently and stoically recalled the number of souls aboard, vowing revenge on the treacherous NRC for their underhand, dishonorable tactics.

Not that they hadn’t made their own arrangements for a hostile turn of events, because for every NRC ship that dropped out the nearby jump lane, at least one CS ship joined the fray so that the Russians and their hidden allies never fully gained an advantage.

Brannan sat back, like a chess master assessing the board and thinking five moves ahead, as he demonstrated mastery at the one thing Colonel John Desoto struggled to manage; he controlled the board and didn’t get wrapped up in the individual duels that made the battle.

Picking up the receiver beside him, still with his eyes and most of his attention on the display before him, Desoto’s voice came back to him inside of a second.

“Update me on the surface situation, Colonel.”

Chapter 27

Barton

“That sounded like a grenade,” I said, still half carrying Mac and looking through the optic at the dark tunnel ahead.

“Yep.”

“I mean, we should go back, right? If the others are in trouble?” I tried, worried that he was hurt worse than it seemed because he didn’t act like he cared much about the others.

“How, kid? You gonna climb back up that tunnel and drag me after you?”

He had me on that one, so I carried on moving us forward and supporting his weight for him.

“That tunnel we came down seemed more like a vent shaft to me,” Mac went on, like I knew what a vent shaft was. “My money’s on this leading to another main shaft we can use to get back outside. Can you smell it?”

I couldn’t smell anything, well apart from the dank dusty smell that made me think of a pair of wet boxers left to dry in the corner of a room, so I changed the subject to something a little more pressing.

“What about the Russians?” I asked.

“What about them?”

“Aren’t we going after them?”

“Oh, sure, just as soon as I stop bleeding out,” Mac said like it was a joke.

I looked at his injury under the red torchlight and saw the flesh underneath the suit bulging unnaturally. I suddenly didn’t think it was funny, because I was pretty sure that was what was happening inside his abdomen. I needed to get him the hell out of there and in a medevac bird fast. I’d had some basic field medicine training like all marines, but I didn’t have the first clue what to do if his blood pressure dropped so low he lost consciousness.

“Anything on comms?” I asked, wanting to change the subject and keep him focused on anything I could.

“Nothing. Too deep, I reckon.”

“Just… let me know if you hear anything,” I said, cursing the loss of my helmet for both the ability to see and hear.

“Will do,” Mac answered drily as if the concept of keeping things to himself had been an option.

Thirty paces became fifty, became a hundred, with rolling turns that made me hug the wall and slice the pie, so I didn’t get surprised by an asshole with a shovel. Mac started to grunt when I moved him, muttering things I couldn’t hear.

“Hey, stay with me, marine,” I snapped with an authority I didn’t feel in my bones.

“I’m glad you came along,” Mac said, sounding a little drunk. “Better than the alternative.”

“What was the alternative?” I asked, still peering into the dark ahead and trying to keep us both moving.

“Loose end, brother, loose end,” he muttered, making my heart go cold at the suggestion that they were going to disappear me if I didn’t come along.

Shit, they’re probably planning to do it anyway.

“Is that still the plan? Take out the kid before he tells anyone what he saw?” I asked casually, thinking fast and referring to myself in the third person to take advantage of his confusion.

“Nah, man, you’re cool,” he mumbled, and before I could press him for more, I saw lights up ahead and heard a voice. I killed the red lamp and whispered to Mac to stay quiet.

“Here,” he said, groaning too loud for my liking and fluttering his hands up to his neck. I grabbed at them to try and keep them still as I shushed him.

“Get the fuck off me, dumbass,” he whispered, proving that he wasn’t as confused as I’d suspected. I let him go and he grabbed the handle of his axe, drawing it awkwardly as I rested him against the tunnel wall. He pushed it into my hands and pulled me closer to hear him.

“Take this… and chop that motherfucker’s hands off… and put it back in my hand… before I die,” he said, slumping down exhausted after he got the words out. I held the axe in my left hand and Mac’s modified rifle in my right, looking down in the dark at him and feeling suddenly very alone. I slid the axe handle through my belt, rested the rifle against the wall as carefully as possible and apologized in a whisper as I took his helmet and slipped it over my skull so I could see better to get the job done.

“You got it, brother,” I said, lowering his head gently so that he lay down to rest.

Standing up, anger rising in me like something I couldn’t contain—just like I couldn’t contain the tears that leaked out of my eyes—I turned to face down the tunnel and listen to the voices that now argued in their language.

I moved, my surroundings starting to make sense when I looked at them. I wasn’t in a cave at all. This was a bunker or something, definitely not natural. No cave I’d ever seen had straight cut walls and rectangular doorways.

With the visor dialed in to heat signature detection I could see them, both throwing their arms around as they snapped angrily at each other. Whatever had them riled up was perfect for me, because neither heard me coming.

Right up until my left boot kicked a rock the size of my fist along the deck to clatter it toward them.

Both reacted immediately, throwing themselves in different directions and sending rounds in my general direction more to disorientate me than try to kill me.

I dropped to one knee, lining up on the one to the right and squeezing off a burst before he went out of sight. I stood, moving fast and hugging the wall before they could react and kill me before I found cover, to reveal the guy switching magazines at the wrong moment.

Wrong for him, just fine for me.

I drilled him with a dozen rounds center mass, hitting him back hard just like I had with one of them back in the last cave, only this time the rounds were longer and fatter and moved a hell of a lot faster. He went down, body jerking like I was hitting him with taser rounds, just as the left periphery of my visor filled with a spectrum of light when the other one tried to make his move.

He slammed me in the helmet with the butt of his rifle and turned it to point the barrel at my face, but I was just as fast, slapping it aside and throwing out the hand-to-hand combat manual.

I fought like a marine, not with the cold professionalism that the uninitiated expected, but with a violence and savagery reserved for those who didn’t survive to tell the story. I slammed an armored knee into his armored groin and jammed my fingers in his face hoping to get his eyes. He slammed me with the rifle again and rammed it against my chest to drive me back into the wall and pin me there. I dropped my own weapon on the sling and pushed back to stop him choking me out with it, but the bastard was stronger than he looked and I couldn’t break free.

My fingers fluttered against his weapon as I searched for the right button before my brain kicked in to tell me it was on the other side. I found the magazine release catch and dropped it out, catching it as it fell and jamming the open end up under his chin once, twice, three times until he cried out and reeled backward. He lifted the rifle and fired the single shot that was chambered before the gun clicked empty and I pushed away from the wall to throw the magazine at him as hard as I could. It clattered off his armor but succeeded in confusing him long enough for me to reach down to my right for the backup weapon I went for on instinct.

Before my hand found the grip of the Mk30, it touched something else. I drew the axe by the head, dragging it straight up and letting it go in midair to snatch the handle low down so that I had the maximum swing for power.

He had the same idea, and his hand was already on the grip of his pistol as his body dropped into the shooter’s pose that came as naturally as breathing to people like us.

In a straight race between the two different weapons, time seemed to slow. I knew that sounded like another cliché, but it was true. It was so true that I had time to break it down into rational, scientific explanation.

Not only was my system flushed with stims, I think I was experiencing the biggest single dose of adrenaline ever. Seriously, it was probably dangerous. It was like the amount they’d give someone to restart their heart, and all that chemical goodness made my senses so alert, made my metabolism run on afterburners or overclocking or something, and that slowed the world down enough for me to see the gun coming up and the barrel tilting.

The son of a bitch was close enough to get away with firing from the hip, tilting his hips away like some ancient quick-draw gunslinger about to put me down for some bullshit crime I committed like it was the wild west.

Even as the heat vision of my visor registered the hot hand around the cold metal of the gun, another sight swooped in faster than his hands were moving. That bright light of blue heat, the curve of the plasma edge, cleaved through his clothes, skin, muscle and bone at his wrist to make the gun drop to the dirt still with the hand clamped around it.

A scream tore the air in the tunnels. A scream filled with agony and rage. A scream that I cut short with the backswing of the axe right up under his chin that crunched and dropped him like a pile of meat.

Time came back to me, along with a huge need for oxygen that made me bend over double and gasp for air. I yanked the axe free, finally working it loose from the scorched flesh on the third attempt and felt around on the ground before I stumbled back to where Mac lay.

“Here you go, brother,” I said reverently, putting the axe in his grip and dropping the severed hand and forearm beside him. I stood, staggered a little, and set off back toward the cave where they’d been arguing over whatever it was.

“Jesus, kid, you… You’re a fuckin’ animal!” Mac said, disbelief in his words.

What the fuck? How is this guy not dead?

I turned back to face him in shock, illuminating him in the red glow of the torch to take in his shocked expression at the severed limb in his hand.

“I said hands. Hands. Plural. Shit, if you can’t follow a simple instruction, I don’t know what kind of future you have, son.”

I said nothing, just walked back to the corpse in a trance and yanked the trenching tool off his back.

“Kid, no, wait,” Mac slurred. I turned to look at him, trenching tool in one hand and the body at my feet.

“What? I wasn’t gonna—”

“That’s not cool, man. I mean, he’s already dead…”

“Mac, seriously, I wasn’t—”

I didn’t get to finish what I was going to say because the wall beside my head erupted in a shower of dust and rock splinters before I heard what sounded like an insult in Russian and a figure ran down another tunnel.

It turned out the guy I’d filled with tungsten hadn’t actually died, which pissed me off for not even checking, but I’d had other things requiring my immediate attention, like the other asshole trying to kill me.

“Go, get after the son of a bitch,” Mac groaned as he fought his way to his feet unsteadily. He gripped the axe in one hand and the… hand in the other, like he didn’t know what to do with it for a second before he dropped it in the dust.

“I’m not leaving you down here,” I said stubbornly, feeling surprised when Mac didn’t give me the hero stare and tell me to go on without him, that the mission was more important than anything else.

“Aw, shit. I’m glad you said that. Come on,” he said, beckoning me toward him so he could drape his arm over my shoulder and let me take his weight again. “The stims are kicking in but I feel like pan-fried, hammered dog shit.”

I grunted in agreement, knowing the feeling because I was almost there myself, only I hoped without the same kind of internal bleeding. We headed toward the dull gray glow of the tunnel where the other guy had run but Mac stopped me.

“Wait, what the hell is that?”

I looked, seeing a flexible bag with some kind of vial sealed inside. It looked like a biohazard sample bag, only with lettering I couldn’t read on it, which made me think it was Russian for “glorious sample bag of biohazardous material” or something.

Screw it, you only live once, right?

I bent and snatched up the bag without looking too hard at the contents, although I couldn’t help seeing it had a thick, black liquid inside. I’d seen close enough what I thought that was, and I didn’t exactly want to be holding it unless I really had to, but I guessed I really had to if we were getting out of this with anything useful for the eggheads to play with.

I was careful on the corners, Mac not able to help me because I carried both the rifle with the optic and I had the helmet with the active visor on. But the guy ahead of us wasn’t looking to lay any kind of ambush. That made me think he already had what they wanted from down here and that wasn’t good.

The absence of darkness ahead—not a light as such but a dull shine on the blackness that gave me a sense of which way was out—led me closer to the surface. When I could see without the optics, Mac was going limp on me and muttering again, so it came as no real surprise when I turned to face him and saw that he was so pale he seemed gray. His lips were going blue around the edges and he struggled to keep his head upright.

“Come on, stay with me buddy,” I gasped, barely able to suck in enough oxygen to carry myself let alone Mac as well.

He groaned, muttering something I couldn’t catch when the helmet speaker came back to life.

“Odin Nine-Five, Odin Nine-Five, do any of you copy, over?” came the insistent voice on the other end.

“Odin… Nine-Five… Barton here, I need… HeliMed to my position…”

“Nine-Five, give me a grid for evac, over.”

I didn’t respond, just dragged Mac by the loop on the back of his armor after he slipped off my shoulder and finally lost consciousness.

“Nine-Five, repeat, I need a grid for HeliMed, copy?”

“Copy… standby…” I gasped, dragging Mac toward the dull sunlight and dropping him as soon as I felt the heat of it on my skin. I swept my rifle up, hands shaking from a lack of oxygen and overexertion, to see a small dust trail far ahead inside the dusty bowl I’d emerged into.

The quarry, duh!

“Odin Nine-Five, HeliMed to killbox one. Single casualty north of green smoke,” I said, infused with purpose as I pulled the thumb-sized pellet from a belt pouch and turned to Mac, hoping I’d gotten him out in time. I popped smoke and tossed it toward the far slope leading toward the settlement.

I turned back to him, dragging him to sit upright and lifting his legs up onto his pack. In a flash of inspiration, I shoved the sample bag in his pack and shouted at him that he had to hand it over. He tried to nod but his head lolled to the side and the axe fell from his grip. I picked it up, clamping his fingers around it so he couldn’t let it go again.

I started running, going after the son of a bitch with way too much head start on me and following the only idea I had. To do something instead of nothing.

I made it fifty paces away before I heard the channel come to life again.

“Odin Nine-Five, confirm we have your smoke. HeliMed inbound ETA eleven minutes, out.”

Chapter 28

Cavern, North Quarry

Mark coughed, inhaling more dust than he’d expelled to spark more coughing until he’d ended up in a worse situation than before.

He came around to find himself buried under a slope of heavy sand covering his legs and waist. The odd angle he’d been left in by the partial cave collapse made extricating himself difficult, and in the end, he was forced to rock from side to side in an attempt to dislodge enough sand to wriggle free.

“Anders. Anders!” he yelled in between coughing fits.

“I’m alive, I think…” Anders answered, his response muted by the collapsed material separating them.

Mark cursed himself for letting Komarov get away, for letting him drop the cave roof on them, but also leaving Barton and Mac down the hole with no idea if they could get out.

Partial transmissions came through the comm channel and he tried to respond, switching between different channels in case any of them could hear him, but none could.

“Piece of crap,” he complained.

“What?”

“Goddam radio transmits through the atmosphere, but it won’t cut through a few feet of rock,” he told Anders.

“Depends on the rock,” Anders said conversationally as he climbed over a mound of loose sand and offered a dusty, exhausted smile to Mark.

“You okay?” Mark asked.

“I’m good. Yuri… not so much.”

Mark gave him a smirk as he wriggled his feet free and spilled down the side of the slope trapping him. Standing beside one another in a gap between piles of rock and sand, they looked around.

“Down isn’t an option,” Anders said, pointing to the spot where the smaller tunnel had been that was now obscured by a landslide of rocks.

“Up isn’t going to be easy either,” Mark answered, pointing up the large slope of sand to the small gap on the larger tunnel.

It wasn’t easy. For every three inches they climbed up, lying flat on their bellies, they slid down two and froze to arrest their descent. In the end, they’d dug more of a shallow trench toward the gap instead of climbing over it, and both were utterly exhausted from the effort it took by the time they slid to the cool floor of the tunnel on the other side.

As both lay flat on their backs, the radio crackled into life.

“Odin Nine-Five, confirm we have your smoke. HeliMed inbound ETA eleven minutes, out.”

* * *

“Edwards, clear next level,” Coates ordered, sending the petite pilot bounding up the stairs while she secured the door, wedged a metal chair under the handle, and kicked it to make sure it was stuck solid.

The metallic clang filled the musty air in the room and made Laghari flinch and tuck herself closer to King.

Of the two of them, Laghari had acted almost exactly as Coates had expected, but King had been a different animal entirely and had asked for a weapon. Coates didn’t hesitate and handed him a spare sidearm from her gear, leaving her with the marksman rifle, the shorter barreled version and the Mod 1 SMG on her right thigh, so she guessed she could spare the Mk30.

Coates looked around, seeing an empty hi-ball glass on a table and snatched it up. She drew a grenade and charged the primer with a twist but kept the safety lever clamped tight in her hand. Carefully lowering it into the glass, she let it go tenderly with her fingertips and held her breath as the glass kept the spoon in place.

Gently resting the glass on top of the wide metal lip of the doorframe, she looked around to see a string of decorative lights resting over a picture frame on one wall. Pulling them down, she looped one end loosely around the door handle and the other around the glass holding the grenade.

“Clear!” Edwards called down from upstairs as she returned to the first landing. “Got line of sight in both directions from up here and no rear exit. Should be good.”

Coates agreed with everything apart from the dubious merits of the lack of an alternative exit. Sure, they didn’t have the numbers to protect two points of entry, but it did mean that this would be their final stand one way or another. She only hoped the enemy couldn’t reestablish orbital strikes, because even the smallest kinetic munition would level the building they were in and a half dozen more around it.

Pushing the thought of weaponized tungsten meteors out of her mind, she pointed to King, then to the first bend in the stairs, the door she’d blocked, and back to her eyes, waiting until the scientist nodded his understanding of what was required of him. She ran up the stairs taking them three at a time until she found the room Edwards had discovered that offered a view both east and west through large windows.

Coates dropped down and pulled the plasma knife from her chest to cut a long rectangle out the bottom of the plastiglass window and give herself a wide angle for prone shooting. Edwards copied what she was doing on the other side until a warm breeze ran through the room between the convenient gaps.

“It’s mirrored on the outside,” Edwards said. “Should be good to move a little without being seen.”

Coates knew that, having observed the fact when she’d assessed the building from the outside and had chosen it with the large mirrored windows as a priority for selection, but she said nothing because undermining the confidence of her pilot served zero purpose.

Edwards no doubt thought of herself as part of the team, but in reality she was a gifted pilot who’d been given the best level of additional training and had been selected for her psychological profile, not her fighting ability. Coates knew the difference between special operations group support and special operations group operators, but right then she needed everything she could get and that included keeping the woman’s confidence high.

“West side,” Edwards said. “Four moving along the building line.”

“Cover east,” Coates ordered her, turning to lie flat on the deck facing the direction of trouble. Manually adjusting the gas struts of the bipod to depress the angle of the barrel, she lined up on the NRC troops as they went door to door down one side of the street.

Coates watched patiently, seeing them cross from side to side as they zigzagged the street, which told her there weren’t yet enough of them to hit both sides at once. That was a good thing, and it also made her feel better for taking the time to drop as many of their pursuers as she could when they’d crossed the open ground like idiots all bunched up together. That was the kind of lesson you only got to learn once.

She waited, sensing the nervous impatience of Edwards behind her and ignoring it, until the four-person team—one was without doubt a woman from the way she moved—stacked up ready to kick open a door and move in.

Four trigger pulls in a second and a half dropped all of them almost at once, sending them spilling to the ground in a crumpled heap together. Coates watched, checking further west for the overwatch any sensible search team would have in place, but she saw none.

That meant that the NRC either didn’t have the numbers, or that they assumed they were chasing pilots and scientists and didn’t feel the need to follow the manual and keep their people safe. Speed over safety was an NRC tactic that worked in her favor right then.

Mistake, she thought. Never underestimate an enemy. She treated this strung-out, hurried assault as if each NRC trooper she saw was a tier one operator, and that way she left very little to chance when it came to killing them.

She watched through the scope, scanning back to the dead search team to find they weren’t all dead, as one of them was raising a shaking hand to point directly up at her. She didn’t hesitate, sending another round into the small gap in the armor where the exposed neck was. Right where the sniper school instructors had taught her to hit, before a single word from Edwards made her look up in fear from her optic.

“Rocket!”

* * *

Komarov staggered into the settlement and grabbed an NRC paratrooper officer by the top of his chest armor.

“Where are they?” he demanded. The officer blanched but pointed east in the direction of sporadic gunfire. Komarov stomped away but the officer called after him, warning him that there was a sniper in play.

Komarov gave his opinion on the warning with three words and a gesture, all of which undermined the man’s authority in front of his remaining troops. His government had sent him there to recover alien material—not the kind they’d found on so many other worlds that were more like the fossilized remains of dinosaurs on Earth—but the kind that had what he called real-world applications, and the insistence of the Combined States team’s involvement had been a political interference.

His orders gave him some lateral movement on that, but the ultimate goal was to recover the alien material at whatever cost, and that included starting a war with the Combined States and their allies, so Komarov knew it was the highest priority.

One unimportant planet and a few soldiers and ships was nothing when compared with the losses they could face if their enemies gained an advantage like the bioweapon. Furthermore, it was a mere drop in the ocean of those the NRC would kill to gain control of key systems in the galaxy.

Now, with one of his men killed in front of him and two more buried underground, he had no option but to take the planet entirely and bring more troops in to secure the alien ship the reconnaissance force had located underground before all contact with them was lost. He had roared his orders over the channel to the cruiser in orbit, but as yet, no more reinforcements had come because the ships in space had their own problems to contend with.

On a personal level, to make up for the losses and the failures, Komarov fell back on violent vengeance as a soothing activity.

“Give me that, coward,” he snarled as he strode angrily down the street, passed soldiers, and snatched a launcher from the shoulder of one man peering nervously out from cover. Standing with his feet wide in the middle of the street, he watched two brave soldiers returning fire as the sniper came closer and closer to getting one of them.

“Khuy tebe!” he yelled, giving an additional fuck you to accompany his words by way of the rocket igniting and leaving the tube. It streaked through the air toward the mirrored glass that obscured the aim of the soldiers. Dropping the spent launcher, he unslung his rifle and ran for the door before anyone inside could react.

* * *

Mark and Anders ran up the tunnel, shedding sand as they moved and coughing up all the dust and dirt they’d inhaled during the collapse and their escape from the cavern.

“Anyone copy?” Mark said intermittently, transmitting over the team channel and getting nothing back. He didn’t have the breath to curse their comms, only to drag himself as fast as possible into the open.

Snippets of traffic came back to them, but either the enemy were actively jamming their communications or else whatever had been blocking any wireless signal was up and running again.

Reaching the surface, Mark heard gunfire coming from the distant settlement and looked up to his left to see the tiny glow of a dropship’s engines burning to reach escape velocity. He didn’t have the time to wonder who of his people were in that bird but when their comms came back online, he had other concerns.

“Forthright, Nine-Five, contact in settlement. Request fire mission”—Coates’ voice broke off to cough violently and the transmission cut for a few seconds—“west of town square, enemy in the open, danger close.”

“Negative strike package at this time, Odin Nine-Five, out of position for orbital cover. Stand by.”

That wasn’t the answer he hoped or expected to hear, and it meant that the carrier had broken their geostationary orbit, which meant either that they were leaving or that they were fighting their own battle up in the void. Either way, their bad day had just gotten worse.

“Nine-Five actual, update situation and medevac details,” he transmitted.

“It’s Mac, he’s hurt bad… but I got him out,” Barton answered, making Mark and Anders look at each other with a mix of concern and shock.

“Barton, current location?” Mark said.

“Almost… back to the settlement…” he answered, sounding out of breath as he ran.

“Contact! Contact! Enemy—bang—in the open with heavy weapons, request—bang—immediate reinforcement—bang—west of town square,” Coates shouted over the punctuation of a rifle firing.

“Forthright, Nine-Five Alpha, request strike package and air support,” Mark barked into the channel.

“Negative, Nine-Five Alpha, unable to deploy at this time. Stand by.”

“Stand by what, fucking jerk,” Anders grumbled to himself as the two of them began running back for the quarry exit and toward the distant gunfight.

“Coates, just hold on,” Mark said. “We’re coming. Barton? You’ll get there first, just wait for us.”

* * *

Coates heard Mark’s transmission telling Barton to wait for them. As much as she disliked the marine on principle, and as much as she knew he was by far the most expendable of them in terms of the bigger picture, even the help of one lonely marine sounded like music to her ears.

“Barton, Coates,” she said as she moved her optic from left to right to try and catch one of the two NRC troops taking pot shots at the shattered window and ducking back into cover before she could tag them. She fired, missing one by half a foot and clicking the gun dry.

She rolled to her side and dropped the empty magazine from the gun and reached for the stacked pouches on her chest to find she was down to her last one.

She loaded it, pulled back the lever to chamber a round, and rolled back to her front to look for targets again.

“Here, couple minutes out,” Barton answered. “Be advised you’ve got at least one of the operators heading your way.”

Coates ignored that last fact, because one more person to outnumber them didn’t exactly make much of a difference to their current situation.

“Come in from the west and approach from the enemy’s rear. We’ve taken incoming heavy weapons and are low on ammo.”

“Understood,” Barton said, ignoring Mark’s orders to wait for him just as Coates had.

Coates looked back through her scope, but the attack had been organized now and there were too many in the street to take them out one by one. She emptied the magazine fast, snap-shooting at targets and dropping more than half of them as she realized there were far more soldiers on the ground than she’d suspected.

A shout of alarm sounded from behind her at the same time as the deep, dull, resonating sound of a boot connecting with the metal door; her enemy within seconds now of entering the building.

“King, get upstairs!” she shouted as her confidence in the plan to have him defend their rear failed. Edwards still fired at the advancing troops, her accuracy sufficient to keep their heads down and slow the advance but not to devastate their numbers as Coates had been able to do. Coates slung the rifle, tossed her last grenade out through the shattered window, and hefted the smaller rifle to fire her remaining ammunition in bursts before it clicked dry and forced her to resort to the modified SMG on her right leg.

Downstairs the door thundered again and again, and she feared the assault would shake loose her final “fuck you” to their attackers, but no explosion came.

All four of them retreated to the top of the stairs and waited, making their final stand with a handful of personal weapons and hope for a rescue.

* * *

Far behind Komarov’s entry to the settlement, Mikhail Ashurov stumbled along the road connecting the settlement to the quarry. His breathing was labored and his legs struggled to keep him upright, but at least his armor had held its integrity, and the savage onslaught of bullets had failed to find his vital organs and kill him.

Being shot up close twice in one day was a personal record for him but not one he’d want to repeat. Ashurov was certain that he’d suffered some internal injury far more serious than the superficial wounds where bullets had grazed him or passed through non-vital areas, but the man who could’ve assessed him had been killed before his eyes. He’d barely regained consciousness when Pasternak had fallen, hand severed, and his head half removed by the American who had moved with a speed he had never witnessed before and fought with a savagery he had understood only too well.

Spets operators of the NRC’s alpha group did not scare easily, but Ashurov had chosen to run instead of fighting that American. He told himself it was the mission that he prioritized, but he knew he had to face the fact that he had run out of fear.

Torn between revenge for his comrade and the highest priority of their mission, he clutched the recovered bio sample to his chest and fled for the surface, blindly running through the tunnels in the direction of the weak light until he’d made it out into the open.

He called for emergency extraction by dropship, but after wasting half a minute on yelling into the radio, he’d realized it had been damaged by the assaults, leaving him able to hear most of the transmissions but denying him the ability to transmit.

So he ran back toward the settlement.

Reaching the edge of the quarry with no sign of pursuit, he smiled, finding some victory in the violence and confusion caused by politicians waging war. If he had been the one making decisions, they would’ve put everything they had into destroying the Americans, but he wasn’t making the decisions back then. Now, anyone he saw that wasn’t dedicated to the motherland would be killed on sight.

Ashurov ran as fast as he could toward the settlement to regroup with the rest of their forces, where he collapsed and sat with his back leaning against a wall to let an NRC medic check his injuries.

“He needs a medical scan, and I cannot do this here, sir,” the man reported to the junior officer standing over him. The woman was young but the look on her face was fierce. She nodded and ordered four men to guard the injured operator, adding that what he carried was important for the future glory of their people and a weapon that would make the CS and all of their allies fear them.

Komarov, instead of guarding the mission priority, had stormed off with his mind set on vengeance. Ashurov felt the same, but the impact of the bullets on his armor and body had left him weakened and damaged, so he was no help to his commander.

Gunfire raged in the streets. An explosion drowned out everything for a while until shots sounded again, only far fewer this time, which gave Ashurov another smile of satisfaction as he imagined the last of the Americans dying at the hands of his countrymen.

Chapter 29

Barton

North Edge of the Colony

“Understood,” I said into the radio—Mac’s radio—as I lifted Mac’s rifle and checked that the stolen trenching tool could easily slip out of my belt should I need it in a hurry. I had no intention of listening to Coates, Edwards, and the two eggheads die while I was a good boy and did as I was told, and I half expected Mark to come back over the channel and tear me a new one or threaten me with something if I didn’t wait.

Only he didn’t, which meant that either he was confirming what I’d suspected all along and that I was an expendable loose end that probably wouldn’t survive the mission in the first place, or because he knew that waiting was the pussy thing to do and he wouldn’t do it himself. Maybe he didn’t think he could ask me to do it alone because he didn’t think I was good enough, or maybe he couldn’t ask or order me to because I wasn’t one of them.

I hadn’t earned the crossed axes on the shoulder of my armor, but I was a fucking Combined States marine, and I wasn’t going to stand by and let things unfold badly if I had a chance of changing them.

I moved through the streets, keeping low and going fast as I worked my way to the right of the quarry road and headed for the sounds of gunshots.

I stopped at a corner and shot my head out to take a snapshot, ducking back and counting four from the image in my mind. I took a few breaths to steady myself and stepped out from cover, drilling the first two before anyone even knew I was there. One of the others switched aim to fire back at me, so I ducked out of sight again as chunks of metal and plastic erupted from where I’d been seconds before as the rounds homed in on my position.

I ran, moving around the back of the next building to check the street and slip out to appear behind the surviving two who were moving after where they thought I’d gone.

Two more shots, both to the vulnerable parts between armor and helmet, put them down and cleared my way to where the rest were massing on a door that was being kicked by a man I recognized.

With a sneer of hate I lined up on Komarov, but my shot was blocked by others who raised their weapons and fired through the door, adding the tortured sounds of twisted metal to the gunshots.

Komarov roared something at them as they piled inside and I geared up to go in after them, only for an explosion to spew dust, debris, and flames out into the street. My ears sang that familiar, high-pitched shriek at me and I saw Komarov staggering in the street and shaking his head as the dust and smoke began to clear. He kicked at soldiers on the ground and yelled in his guttural voice. I imagined him telling them to get up, to fight for the glory of whatever and all that shit.

I stood, opening up on him and hitting his armor to drive him back. He looked in my direction, murder and hate in his eyes, but as animalistic as he was, he was still no fool and ran for the cover of an alleyway on the other side of the street.

Shots from behind me made me duck and turn to return fire, when Coates’ voice came to me from the channel and from the real world above me.

“Barton! Ammo!”

I didn’t hesitate. I pulled the pouches off the front of my armor and tossed them up through the shattered windows of the floor above me while I moved and carried on shooting at the approaching troops.

My rifle—Mac’s rifle—ran dry and I unclipped it as I got into cover to leave it there and pull the SMG I still had two full magazines for. I looked up at the far side of the road, seeing Coates, Edwards, and King sending shots down the street at the confused rearguard who found the front and middle of their formation shattered inside of thirty seconds.

“You got this?” I yelled up to Coates, forgetting the channel because I could see her. She turned to look at me, speaking quietly into the radio so that I saw her lips move but heard what she said in my ear.

“Go get that son of a bitch,” she told me, then turned back to pump shot after shot into the last of the NRC soldiers.

I nodded, not that she saw me, but it was partly to psych myself up for it. I slipped into the alleyway and guessed that Komarov had maybe fifteen or twenty seconds on me. I spared a thought for the fact that it hadn’t been him ahead of us in the tunnel, so there had to be another one of the red-armored bastards around here somewhere, but right then I wanted him.

I didn’t have to wait long, because he hadn’t run far. As soon as I stepped out of cover to look, a hail of bullets came my way and one hit me in the helmet hard enough to tip me off balance and send me toppling to my ass back in the alley.

“You are predictable, American,” he said, that deep, booming voice still seeming like it belonged to some kind of sea monster and not the tall man.

“And you’re a pussy,” I shouted back, still unable to control my mouth from shit-talking even after he’d shot me in the head. Intermittent static came from the radio, which told me the hit hadn’t killed me, but it had fucked my comms. The visor was stuck down and wouldn’t roll back up into the helmet, so he’d hit me hard with the shot and I knew I was lucky it hadn’t killed me.

That’s twice, you lucky son of a bitch, I told myself, vowing to stop getting shot in the head if I ever made it off this rock alive.

He laughed, which was more worrying than I expected it to be, like he was planning on enjoying what was about to happen.

I moved, going low to peer out again and fire a burst from the SMG in the direction of the laugh but he’d moved silently, closing the gap between us and slamming his trenching tool down onto my weapon to knock it out of my grip.

I spun away desperately, not sure if I’d lost any fingers with how close the chop had come to my gloved hands, and I scrambled backward in case he came after me.

“As I say, American, predictable,” he laughed again, and I wanted to stomp on his face so much it became a life goal.

“And you’re still a pussy. You know the rest of your team’s dead, right?” I cried out as I got to my feet and drew my plasma knife and felt the hum of it crackling to life in my left hand as my right flipped the little stolen shovel off my belt.

“As is yours, I suspect. Do you know what is happening right now up there, in space? Your ships are being blown out of the skies by my people and our allies.”

“That’s what you think. We’re actually kicking your asses up there. It’s true, I heard it all,” I answered, buying time with bullshit now that we were about five feet away from each other separated by the corner of a building.

“If this is true, where are your people now? Why are they not coming down to help you?”

I’d had enough of his shit, by which I knew that my nerves were shot, and I had to act before I fell apart. I ran for the corner, slowing as I got there and planning to swing the shovel at neck height as soon as I reached it, but the motherfucker wasn’t there. A metallic thrumming noise spun my head before his own weapon hit me right in the chest and sent me crashing to the ground without a clue which way was up.

I gasped a breath in, smelling the stink of burning metal and looking at the smoking dent in the middle of my chest plate.

I saw him running then, stooping to scoop up his thrown weapon, and wondered how the hell he moved so fast for his size and how anyone could throw a shovel with the accuracy of a bullet. I mean, come on, a fucking shovel!

He piled on top of me, driving all the air out of my body with his weight, and put his face so close to mine that the bristly hairs of his wild beard tickled my lips. I struggled, pushing back as hard as I could but it was a one-way thing and I had to lie there under him.

“You are pathetic, American,” he snarled. I said nothing on account of the massive bastard crushing the life out of me.

“What? No jokes, little man? No smart comeback?”

“If you want my come back, you better check your sister’s hair,” I choked, unable to stop running my mouth for even a second.

I expected him to lose his shit, but instead the bastard just smiled at me.

“I might not kill you,” he growled as the smile faded to a look of cold hatred. “I might cut a few pieces from you and take you back to my people so they can test our new technologies on you. You know what we call this alien thing that happened here, American? We call it bich. You know what this means?”

“What everyone calls your mom?” I grunted, still unable to stop running my mouth even at the very end. Komarov smiled again, not in a nice way, and corrected me.

“It means what you say scourge. You know this word?”

I said nothing as I still struggled to find a way out from under his weight.

“We have encountered this before, only not on this scale. We will use it to destroy your worlds and take them for our own,” he told me.

“You know,” I said, barely able to breathe, “you talk too much.” I was struck by how fucking corny that sounded but I shoved back with everything I had, managing to free my left arm enough to grab the handle of my knife and slash the crackling blade across his body as he reared back. The knife tore a smoking, burning gash through his right arm near the inside of his elbow and he reeled back to roar in pain. Looking down at the injury with anger, he turned a snarl on me and raised his weapon as he activated the plasma edge to cut pieces off me just like he’d promised, only he saw what I held in my right hand for the first time and froze.

“Where are you getting this?” he demanded, kicking me hard in the side.

“Your mom sent the wrong weapon when I asked for my axe back,” I said, sounding suicidally brave when I was actually shitting myself. He slammed another boot into my side and half flipped me onto my side.

“Where?” he snarled again.

“Oh, this?” I asked, having leaned over with the kick to my right and pretending I was hurt worse than I was. “I cut your man’s hand off and buried an axe in his skull.”

I lashed out with the trenching tool, slashing him on the left leg between the thigh and knee pads of his armor to send him back further. I leaped up, slashing and chopping again as I drove him backward with each hit that he fought desperately to defend against until his feet tripped on the broken weapon he’d smashed from my hands.

He pitched backward to drop on his back and I fell on top of him, hammering down with the shovel in both hands to smash the flat of the blade into his helmet, his face, his chest until he could do nothing but gargle his own blood.

I pounded him with it in a rage, smashing down like I was trying to chop wood with a baseball bat until his hands stopped fighting back at me.

Finally raising the shovel up like a flagpole I was driving into newly claimed territory, I activated the plasma edge and saw something in his eyes I’d never seen before.

Fear.

I drove it down, right through his neck with so much force that I felt the tip trying to burn its way through the concrete underneath. I left it burning inside him as blood boiled dry and the flesh cauterized and sizzled with the gagging and gargling noises he made.

Blood bubbled up out of his open mouth to stain the wiry beard and his eyes went dull as all the malice just faded away with his dark soul.

Staggering to my feet and gasping for breath, I fell backward and my hand brushed against the handle of the weapon he’d been going to use to cut me up. As a final insult to him I took it, then stumbled back to where the last few gunshots rang out.

* * *

“Barton! Barton!” Mark was shouting into the radio by the time I’d made it back to the building with the doors blown out.

“I’m here,” I said, leaning against a wall as he and Anders rushed to me. I was bleeding from a dozen places and felt like I’d been hit by a ground transport, but for some reason I couldn’t help smiling.

“Barton, talk to me, brother,” Anders said with so much concern that I worried it looked like I was dying instead of just beat to shit.

“I’m okay,” I said weakly.

“And Mac?” Mark asked.

“He was pretty bad, but I got him out. He had the sample they took.”

“Who took a sample? What are you talking about?” Mark said as Anders checked my pupils to see if I was talking shit because of head trauma.

“The black oil stuff from the ship underground. They knew what it was. Komarov said they’d found it before on a smaller scale. It’s some kind of alien bioweapon they planned on using against us in a push for territory or something.”

“And Komarov just told you this?” Mark asked, no longer concerned that I was dying but pissed off that he didn’t know what I was talking about.

“He thought he had a captive audience,” I said, still not sure why I was being a smartass and put it down to either the stress, head trauma, or some kind of psychotic break.

“Where is he? Did he escape?” Mark asked. In answer I just held up the second stolen enemy weapon and gave a weak smile before my legs gave out and I stumbled a little.

“And Mac?” Anders asked, concern lacing his voice.

“Took a pretty hard hit but the armor held. He reckoned he had internal bleeding. I got him out on a HeliMed bird from the quarry with the sample.”

“We’re trying to reestablish comms with the ships in orbit,” Mark said. “The NRC are jamming us somehow so only intermittent traffic gets through.”

I nodded, pretending I cared about anything other than wanting to go to sleep even though I was more wired than I’d ever been in my life. Mark stopped and turned back to me wearing a deep frown.

“Wait, what ship?”

Chapter 30

CSS Forthright

“Sir, sensors show ships exiting the jump lane!”

Brannan turned to the officer who’d spoken and frowned at the incomplete information. He hated wasting time, even more so in a combat situation, and forcing him to ask for the relevant knowledge slowed down everything.

“Jumping in or out, Lieutenant? And who are they?”

“In, sir, and… and they’re ours! They’re firing on the NRC fleet!”

Brannan smiled and pointed a finger at the comm officer who was already turning to face him.

“Sir, I have Admiral Arias on comm.”

Brannan nodded, and the channel clicked to life. “Glad you could join us, Admiral. I see you’ve brought friends to the party?”

“We certainly have, Captain. Got some priority items to fill you in on later, but how about we mop up this rabble first?” Arias asked confidently, cutting the comm as another announcement filled the bridge speakers.

“Attention all NRC and British Kingdom vessels, this is Admiral Arias of the supercarrier Jupiter. We’ve entered the system with fifteen fighting ships from the Combined States Navy, the Japanese Fleet Navy, and the Federal Fleet of Africa. Stand down immediately and we will accept your surrender.”

Brannan waited, getting his answer in the form of three shuddering impacts to the ship and a report of a stealth vessel sending explosive munitions up their stern. He nodded to accept the information, letting the combat patrol of fighters be directed to the location of the attack and open up until they reported a target identified.

“Sir, they’re running for the jump lane,” he was told.

“My compliments to the Admiral. If she could spare some ships to block the lane I’d be obliged,” he said, waiting for the message to be relayed and hearing the acknowledgement.

“How many enemy remaining, Commander?” he asked, leaning forward to peer at the display in front of him.

“Eight still fighting, sir, but it seems that another three have already powered down their weapons and are surrendering.”

“Target the ones still firing. Send a spread of class four munitions at them when the skies are clear of our fighters. Fire when ready,” he ordered, waiting for the coordinates to be calculated and locked in before the ship shook with the launches of the tungsten balls, each the size of a full-grown person, fired at impossible velocities from the accelerator tubes.

“Good hits on three,” came the report. “One target is dead in the water and dropping out of orbit.”

Brannan smiled, sitting back, proud of his fighters that hunted down the remaining British stealth boats, as he watched the other ships of their dominating new fleet disable the NRC battleships to force them into submission.

It took four more minutes before the lead surviving NRC battleship signaled its surrender. Their forces were outnumbered, cut off from reinforcement or retreat, and the only sensible option remaining would be to throw in the towel.

“Sir, we have sensor readings indicating multiple vessels fleeing the system,” an officer announced.

“Sir, we have the Constellation and Vancouver blockading the jump lane near to those readings,” another officer reported, offering the solution to the problem of escaping enemies.

Brannan nodded to acknowledge the information before he ordered those cruisers be left in position, not bothering to explain that he wanted that jump lane sealed up tight. By the time the ships, which he suspected to be fleeing British stealth boats, reached the next jump lane, they would have had ships waiting there for almost a month. That left their enemy with the option of capture sooner or capture later, which either way wasn’t his primary concern.

“Prepare damage control and rescue teams,” he said. “Prioritize with the worst damaged NRC vessels and those without power or navigation. Marines to escort those personnel, if you please.”

His orders were acknowledged and relayed while he sat, waiting for the damage report to his own vessel and that of the others under his command, and noticed the red light in the handset beside him. Picking it up, he spoke in a tone much calmer than he felt inside after the rush of adrenaline.

“Report, Colonel Desoto.”

“Sir, radio contact established with the ground team now. Whatever was messing with the comm intermittently seems to have stopped,” Desoto answered, not adding his own theory that the NRC possessed proprietary jamming capabilities that they did not.

“And the ground mission?”

“Sir, NRC operatives have been prevented from leaving the surface with the alien biosample,” Desoto responded flatly.

“And we have the sample?”

“Yes sir, we do.”

“Excellent work, Colonel. My compliments to the team on the ground,” Brannan said, meaning every word.

“Thank you, sir. Permission to deploy more troops to secure the AO?”

“Sir?” the bridge comm officer called for Brannan’s attention. “Admiral Arias requesting priority comm.” Brannan nodded and went back to his discussion with Desoto.

“Hold that thought, Desoto. Stand by for further orders.”

The marine colonel acknowledged the naval captain and replaced the handset before turning to his combat information center and giving his orders.

“Okay, I want evac birds on the deck to retrieve our people. No further surface deployment without express authority. Get a quarantine team on standby to get our people processed.”

* * *

Desoto sat, letting out the tense breath he’d been holding for what felt like a month. He hated not being on the ground, knowing that about himself already, but just as he thought he was growing accustomed to being up in orbit playing virtual quarterback, he realized there was even more information above his already high level that he didn’t know.

He considered picking up the comm again and asking to be part of the meeting with the admiral, who he knew was in command of the entire sector from Midway; because one thing he knew for certain was that the skirmish they’d had here was far from over.

A nothing, backwater mining colony had been wiped out along with a sizeable number of marines and NRC, but the consequences of their brief conflict would ignite the galaxy into another war over power and territory. The only saving grace was that the technological edge was hopefully out of play, with the NRC now being denied the bioweapon.

He’d been born into the last iteration of that conflict, and his father before him had served in the conflicts before which had led to entire continents joining forces and combining resources to rush for the riches in outer space made accessible with the discovery of the interstellar jump lanes.

He’d cut his teeth on dozens of planets, leading marines against the Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, as well as the British, Spanish, Austrian and French militaries that had allied to make one huge European continental force back on Earth.

Now, reaching the dizzying heights of command level, he realized he was just as ignorant of so many things as the day he first put on the uniform, and that pissed him off. He was done, he decided, playing chess from orbit with the lives of his men and women. He wanted more, wanted to be closer to the tip of the spear again, and he only knew one way to do that.

Picking up his own tablet, he began composing a priority message without encrypting it, selecting a named recipient from a dropdown list that became ever more sparsely populated with each letter he typed.

Adding the message subject of “The Dark Side,” he typed a simple message in the field below.

“Got any job openings?” he wrote, hitting send without a second’s hesitation.

* * *

“My compliments, Captain,” Admiral Elena Arias said as she shook Brannan’s hand. The cleanup had taken close to an hour before the last of the enemy ships were located and boarded. Under international conventions the prize seizures alone were worth an incredible amount, so much so that both career naval officers joked about the days when that money was paid to the captains who captured the ships.

The airlock behind them cycled again and a tall, olive-skinned man with a shaved head and wearing a deep-blue uniform uncharacteristically uncluttered by medals, as was often the way with foreign militaries, stepped out to greet them with a smile.

“Captain Brannan of the Forthright, this is Captain Abdallah of the Federal Fleet of Africa.” Brannan smiled back, shaking the man’s hand and nodding a greeting to his following aide, placing the men as probably Egyptian in origin. That he still thought in terms of individual countries just showed his age.

Behind them came two more people in stark contrast to the African naval officers. Brannan placed the Japanese admiral at a shade over five feet, which made immediate sense when he saw from her insignia that she had served on stealth boats that were renowned for their cramped interiors.

“Captain Brannan, Admiral Hitomi Okamoto of the Japanese Fleet navy.” Hitomi was a woman whose severe looks made her seem ruthless. She gave a curt bow which Brannan returned, his bow only slightly lower than hers to show deference to her senior rank.

“Somewhere we can talk, Captain?” Arias said lightly, but Brannan could hear the urgency hidden in her good manners.

He led them toward the briefing room near the bridge, foregoing the usual facts and figures speech he’d given to so many visiting officers and dignitaries in the four years he’d commanded the carrier. He even dispensed with the offer of refreshments until after the admiral said what she needed to, waving away the attending officers to leave the senior officers of the combined fleet alone in the large room.

“I’ll get right to it. The NRC have pulled British Kingdom and European Union assets away from key locations and moved them into strategic positions in and around this sector,” Arias said, glancing between them all as she spoke. “It is our opinion that the rest of the governments with a strategic interest in denying the NRC and their allies a significant external technological advantage should combine to ensure the new NRC threat is negated. Fast.”

“External technological advantage?” Hitomi asked. “Admiral, do you mean the alien biological weapons?”

“If that’s actually what they are, then yes. We have science teams en route now and our aim is to seal off this system until we know exactly what we’re dealing with here,” Arias answered.

“And you need our assistance to maintain such a large fighting presence this far from your Midway station,” Abdallah said, finishing the logical train of thought.

Arias nodded. “Protected supply lines, jump lane blockades, system patrols, and security reaction forces… to maintain that alone would stretch the Combined States too thin to maintain the security and integrity of our other key systems.”

“My government insists, Admiral, that your Combined States of America and Canada share all knowledge equally, including any technological advantage that can be made from the study of artifacts.”

“And that is something my government agrees with entirely. The purpose of this alliance is to prevent the NRC and their allies from gaining a military or technological advantage over us, just as I’m certain their goal is to force us into retreat, surrender, and subservience to them by gaining that advantage before we do. Let’s be clear, people, we’ve all made discoveries of extraterrestrial artifacts before, but this is different. We need crypto biologists, not crypto paleontologists this time. This is real, recent, and not evidence of something hundreds of thousands of years old.”

That got their attention, not so much for the facts she relayed but the way that Arias spoke with such passion.

“We genuinely believe that buried on that planet is at least the partial remains of an alien space-faring craft. The technology we could uncover there represents an opportunity for a more significant leap in our collective advancements than the discovery of the jump lanes,” she said, taking a seat and looking up at the two senior officers from friendly nations.

She knew there was very little in it between picking sides as the CS and NRC were far too evenly matched in ability and force projection, but she hoped that her confidence—and the fact that they had just won the first engagement—would keep them firmly in the CS camp.

“I imagine you’ll both want to communicate with your governments, but before you do, let me underline our assurances. You will both be treated as equal partners in this endeavor, and you will both be fully apprised of any and all discoveries made, to the extent that we invite you to send your own science teams to work on the find. Just so long as the agreement swings both ways.”

Abdallah smiled, showing impossibly white teeth, and spread his arms wide. “We already have a fully staffed science research ship on its way here.”

Arias smiled back and faced Hitomi. She didn’t know the woman personally, but an aide had provided her with the highlights of the fierce woman’s career along with any personal intelligence they possessed. Single and childless by choice, Hitomi was seen as a brutally competitive officer who had served in a number of minor conflicts and skirmishes with an exemplary service history. She played efficiently by the rules, and that told Arias that she was so honest, so… two-dimensional in her logical approach to combat and negotiation that she thought the woman incapable of subterfuge. In short, if Hitomi was going to stab her, it would be to her face and not in her back.

Hitomi nodded. “I will communicate with Tokyo but in principle, our agreement stands,” she said, taking a seat and clasping her hands woodenly in front of her on the table.

Brannan sat too, looking up at Abdallah who joined them around the table and projected an air of expectation, as if the four of them were about to start a new chapter for millions of people all over the galaxy.

“Good. Now we’ve got that all stowed away, let me fill you in on the rest of the Earth’s governments,” Arias said.

“The Chinese are staying neutral for now,” Abdallah said. “And their south pacific allies are all falling in line with that approach until they are told otherwise.”

“We know the British have allied with the NRC, but where does the rest of Europe officially stand?” Hitomi asked, directing her attention to the Egyptian and revealing her confidence in their intelligence network.

“Standing in a neat line behind them,” Abdallah answered.

“Meaning that the only other major players in the game are Iran and India,” Arias said, shooting a smile at Abdallah as if in friendly challenge. “What do you know about their intentions?”

“Iran will lean towards supporting the NRC, but they will wait to see what the Indian government decides as they will not want to be in a sandwich between us and another ally. As for India? They are the same, with China and her allies undecided. They do not want to be stuck in the middle.”

“Stupid how we still think that way,” Brannan said. “I mean, out here it hardly matters, does it?”

“This is the problem with having governments based back on Earth,” Arias admitted. “They don’t think of strategy and territory as we do out here.”

“But we do, Admiral,” Hitomi said. “The most profitable and successful systems we have colonized require free passage through British held space. To side with you is to pose a significant risk to our military and our civilians.”

“A risk that we take very seriously,” Arias answered. “Because we also have systems that are bordered by British, NRC, and European-held systems.”

She leaned over the desk on her elbows and fixed them all with a look in turn which made Brannan wonder why he was being treated to the full show along with the officers of other nations.

“Make no mistake, if they don’t stand down, we are talking about declaring war on a nation with significant reach and capabilities. Now, we all know they won’t do that unless they accept that the opposition they might be facing is too strong for them to beat, and even then, history hasn’t exactly shown that they know when to quit. We have to show them all of our teeth so that they don’t fight back,” she said, banging a clenched fist lightly on the table as she finished.

“So we must declare war, risk a war, to prevent war,” Abdallah said, making Arias unsure if he was questioning her logic or agreeing with it.

“That’s the way of it,” Arias said. “So, are we doing this?”

Chapter 31

Barton

BG-192

The boomerangs came first, landing an entire company of marines away from the destroyed LZ to the north of the settlement for them to immediately flood the settlement and set up a secure perimeter.

Dropships came after that, deploying construction machinery and materials to begin building a secure compound that bore none of the hallmarks of temporary structures.

Sitting on a bluff of high ground just north of the town, with one eye on the quarry road and another on the hive of activity, the remaining members of our team waited for a ride.

One dropship landed closer to us than the sections of perimeter wall in progress, and down the ramp jogged a group of people who were all dressed in military uniform. But from the way they ran to the fact that none of them carried a weapon, it was clear that they were not military personnel.

The two scientists recognized them when they got closer, and immediately the group surrounded King and Laghari with hurried conversation.

“Out of our hands now,” Mark said to us. “We’ve done our part.”

“What was that, exactly?” Anders asked. He’d fallen into a quiet, morose attitude over the last hour and I guessed it was over Mac’s condition.

“We played politics, we stalled for time, and we put our lives on the line so that the NRC could show what they’re really about. Now we know, and the significance of what happened here will change a lot of lives.”

“So it was all bullshit,” Coates said. “Either our government or the NRC wanted a fight regardless and we were just dropped in the middle of it?”

“No, I don’t think of it like that,” Mark said patiently. “If you’re pissed about being expendable then, sorry to say it, but you might be in the wrong line of work.”

I shot him a look, letting him know that I knew I’d pissed in the gazpacho by not dying and ridding the CS government, the military, and the marine corps of an unwelcome witness that someone higher up thought they couldn’t trust. Well fuck them, because they could trust me and instead of just asking, they engineered a situation where I’d volunteer to get myself killed.

Joke’s on them, I thought as my fingers brushed the shaft of the trenching tool sticking out of my pack. I’d collapsed the extending handle of the other one, hoping I could get in back aboard the carrier and hide it in my personal gear before someone found it and made me give it up. This one I had other plans for, but the timing wasn’t right just now.

“And there speaks the intelligence officer,” Coates said sourly, as if a weak personal insult could make his words less true.

“You think they always knew it was going to go south?” Edwards asked as she fidgeted with the dressing on her thigh where the pants of her uniform had been sliced vertically. I tried not to look at the flesh around the cut but probably failed miserably.

“Potentially,” Mark answered before he frowned and gave an answer he believed more. “Most likely. But I think the joint task force was the only way to go, politically speaking, until one side did something that justified the other going kinetic.”

“And behind the scenes everyone was packing their gear to go to war,” Anders added.

“We’re soldiers, not politicians,” Coates argued.

“You’re wrong,” I said, not sure where I was going with it but letting it run anyway, given how I had everyone’s attention. “We’re political tools. The idea of politics is about getting what you want without having to fight for it, but to do that you need to have the ability to fight, and that means you need to be ready to fight to avoid a fight. What good is it threatening to knock someone the fuck out if you don’t have any damn arms?”

“Yeah, asshole here hit his head a little too hard,” Coates said, only without the disdain she treated me with before. It was like I’d taken a step down the road toward being cool with her, but only the first step.

“No, he’s right,” Mark agreed, surprising me. “We’re the stick. The politicians need other politicians to see how big and mean their stick is, so they don’t have to use it and prove the point. The way we’ve existed for years—hundreds of years—is by having the same-sized stick as everyone else.”

“So this was a chance for someone to get a bigger stick?” Edwards asked.

“Yeah, with barbed wire wrapped around it,” Anders answered.

“And a couple nails in the end,” Mark added, looking at the sealed bag containing the vial in his hand. “Think about it, if this crap infects and makes people into damn zombies that attack everyone, and the NRC got it and managed to replicate it somehow, how many worlds do you think would hold out against them? How many times would they have to use it before everyone just rolled over to them and gave up all the best planets in the damn galaxy?”

“And they’d do that? I mean, kinda risky for them, isn’t it?” Edwards asked.

“They wouldn’t drop it on a battalion of marines,” Mark said with a slow shake of his head. “They’d infect civilian populations and mop up after they tore themselves apart. Wouldn’t be the first time either of us has tried to eradicate the other that way.”

Coates huffed, probably thinking back to high school history class about the generations that lived through global pandemics that nobody realized were political and economic weapons of mass misinformation.

“And what’s to stop us doing the same? Why wouldn’t we wipe out their colonies like that?” I asked.

“Moral substance,” Mark answered, earning a laugh from Coates and Anders. “I’m not kidding. We should one hundred percent develop this as a potential weapon just like they would—just like they will eventually—and promise not to use it unless they make us.”

“Like old nuclear weapons,” Anders said.

“Exactly. We can destroy you just as fast as you can destroy us,” Mark said, adding a dark chuckle. “Huh… funny how it’s the same two countries doing it again, hundreds of years later.”

“I don’t see how any of this is funny,” Edwards said as she tried feebly to make the ripped pants leg stay together and not flash a significant portion of her ass. “We’re going to be at war now until both sides agree that they can annihilate the other and we go back to almost fighting with each other over territory.”

“We were always going to be at war, Hayley,” Mark said as he stood with a groan and dusted off his pants. “Sooner or later, it was always going to happen, and until we face a threat from outside our own species, I doubt that pattern will stop any time soon.”

“Here we go again,” Anders said as he pulled a face, crossing his eyes under contorted eyebrows, and held both hands in front of him to pause dramatically. “Aliens…”

I had to smile because it was funny. Mark laughed, obviously enjoying the old joke again, and turned to face Anders.

“You saw what we saw down here. You know what this is, or at least that it isn't something natural to this planet, so that means that yes, I believe there are still aliens active in our galaxy and not just the fossils we found on other planets.”

“We’ve seen plenty of aliens,” I said. “Every other damn deployment is a safari or a bug hunt.”

“And how many of those bugs have space craft and biological weapons?” Mark asked, before his eyes glazed over with his distracted concentration. “Copy, send it,” he said in his professional voice again, waiting for the message I couldn’t hear to be relayed.

I thought back about the gear I’d lost, having left two weapons on this planet, along with the loss of one set of marine corps armor and one special ops helmet with a bullet lodged in it somewhere underground.

Wondering if I’d find my pay deducted for those things, I watched the scientists finish their conversation and turn back toward us.

“Copy. Standing by,” Mark said into the channel as the others stood and dusted themselves off. I got up, shooting one last look up the quarry road and wondering how in the hell my life had changed so much in the short time since I’d first walked up it.

“We’re going to stay here and get the team up to speed,” Laghari said, her attitude totally different from the first time she’d met us. I didn’t know if it was because she had something interesting to do or because she was finally free of us, but she was so much more attractive in every sense now that she wasn’t scowling.

“Thank you, for everything,” she said, surprising all of us by landing an ambush on Coates in the form of an awkward embrace that left the scientist on tiptoes and the operator frozen as if she didn’t know what to do.

Edwards was next, returning the hug warmly and accepting the gratitude for keeping her alive. The doctor nodded to the rest of us, and King made his own loquacious and heartfelt speech of thanks before he smiled and turned away, hesitated, then turned back to return the borrowed sidearm like it was contagious. Coates took it, checked the weapon and made it safe before stuffing it away, and we all watched the precious cargo of two doctors walk away talking animatedly with others of their kind.

“Here’s our ride,” Mark said with his head tilted upward and his right hand blocking out the dull sunlight.

“Back to the cold,” Coates said glumly.

“Back to reality,” I added, feeling suddenly sad that I had to go back. I was going back home, which was to say that I was going back to the company of other marines, but that home was somehow damaged now. It was damaged by what I’d been through, by losing the marines I knew the best, but it was also marred by the fact that I’d peered behind the curtain and liked what I’d seen.

The dropship landed and took us straight back to the carrier in orbit. The pilot filled us in on what had gone down while we were fighting the NRC troops, and it sounded like they’d had their asses kicked upstairs as bad as they had dirtside. I said nothing, just let the ride take me along with it as I switched between being slammed down and back into my seat to floating free as far as the restraining straps allowed.

I was pretty sure that if the journey back up to the ship had been longer, I’d have taken a nap.

After we docked, we were directed to a glass booth which sealed behind us, and given the groans coming from Anders, I was glad I’d been unconscious the last time I’d been through quarantine.

I stood and waited, watching the door on the other side of the glass open as a marine colonel walked in with a bunch of others who followed a senior officer like flies.

“Barton, right?” the colonel said, looking me up and down like he was a little bit proud but mainly confused.

“Sir, yes sir,” I said, keeping it short and sweet. All I wanted was sleep. Maybe some food and a beer. And a shower. But mostly I wanted to close my eyes and just sleep.

“Hell, son, last time I saw you it looked like they were doing a damn autopsy and now look at you, kickin’ ass!”

I smiled, not wanting to parrot another yes sir at him in case it sounded like I was a moron.

“Well, no doubt you need some rest after all that, so I won’t keep you…” He frowned, peering around me like he was trying to make something out. I turned, trying to see what had caused him to look but he tutted.

“No, son, the thing you have in your pack, what is that?”

“Oh… Sorry, sir, it’s a…” I turned an embarrassed look toward Mark before I spoke. “Well, it’s a gift for Major Harlan, sir. To, er, to replace one for his family.”

Desoto smiled. “May I?” he asked, holding out a hand for the weapon as if he wanted to hold it, but the glass separating us confused me. I took the entrenching tool out of my pack and held it up to turn it around slowly, watching how Desoto eyed it with a mix of amusement and care as he inspected it.

“You know, I’d heard the NRC spetsial operatsii were rather attached to these.”

“The guy who used to own it was pretty attached to it, sir,” I said, letting the boast speak for itself and feeling like a bit of an ass for bragging.

“Like we are to ours, sir,” Anders said, reaching up to pat the handle of his own axe and giving Mark a look.

“And you say Major Harlan is missing a family item that this might hope to replace?” Desoto asked, turning to look at Mark, who just stared at me wearing an expression I couldn’t read.

“I don’t know about that, sir, but I hoped it might go some of the way to making something right,” I answered.

“Enigmatic and confusing as the rest of them!” Desoto said with a wide smile as he handed the tool back to me. “You’ll fit in just fine, I think.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I smiled until he dismissed me, and I dragged myself through decontamination where they took all of my equipment including the two entrenching tools.

“I can get those back, right?” I asked, worried they’d just be incinerated to ensure they weren’t carrying any infectious substance.

“Sure,” the guy wearing a full protection suit answered. “We’ll blast everything with enough gamma radiation to break down anything with DNA, but you’ll get it all back.”

I smiled and nodded my thanks, knowing I wouldn’t be allowed to keep the armor or the modified weapons because that would give anyone more senior than me a shit-fit when I got back to real life.

Eventually I found myself in a bland cabin at an impasse staring between a fresh cot and the shower. Even though I’d been decontaminated, I still felt like I needed to be cleaner than I was. Finally choosing good sense over selfish comfort I took a long shower, managed to towel myself off, and had just slipped in fresh PT gear ready to pass out when someone knocked at the door twice.

“Yeah,” I said, not getting up because I was way too tired. Mark walked in, dressed in fresh army fatigues with a major’s oak leaf on the center of his chest, looking like he’d just got up after a normal day’s work. I tried to stand, falling back down once and staying there as he told me not to bother.

He sat on the chair opposite the cot and smiled at me.

“Mac’s fine. He needed surgery to fix the internal bleeding, but the doctors say he made it in time. That’s on you, so thank you. I mean it… you saved his life.”

I didn’t know if he’d have been in danger if he’d gone down that tunnel with one of his own, but I didn’t say that. I had my own guilt issues to work out already without Mac’s life or death on my conscience.

“That’s good news,” I said, meaning it.

“It is. Now, you got something for me?”

It was my turn to smile, and I stood to walk the short distance to where they’d left my decontaminated gear. I lifted up the shovel by the handle and passed it to him.

“That was Komarov’s,” I said, even though I wasn’t one hundred percent sure as they both looked the same now they were cleaned. “What he said about owning an Odin’s axe… that… that pissed me off, so if his family has one on the wall back in Whereverfuckinstan, then this goes some way to even the score.”

He smiled, testing the weight of the weapon before offering it back to me.

“You deserve to keep this,” he said. “You took it, you killed the son of a bitch, it should be yours.”

“Oh, I’m good. Seriously,” I said as I reached back into the bag and pulled out another. “Did I mention I took out half that team by myself?”

“Three quarters,” Mark corrected me. “The other guy was injured and taken prisoner in the colony, so I think that counts.”

I shrugged, trying to make light of it but by any stretch it was worth bragging about. I wouldn’t, because I wasn’t an ass like that, but it was still pretty cool. The only problem was by telling that story to anyone else, I might as well have told them I was one of the guys on the balcony at the Stonemeyer Embassy.

Mark looked at the tool and gripped it hard, thanking me again.

“Thought about what you’re going to do now?” he asked. “That offer of a nice little lump sum and a medical retirement is still on the table.”

I blinked at him, shocked, because I hadn’t thought for one second about getting out. “No sir, I guess I’ll go back to the corps, wherever they’ll decide to put me. Who knows, we might end up in the same place again if the NRC want to play rough.”

“I guess we might, marine,” Mark said as he shook my hand and turned for the door. “You rest up, I think you might need it.”

Chapter 32

Bg-192

The planet was quarantined, with a ring of ships surrounding it and more flooding the system to blockade the entrance to the jump lane effectively, should any sizeable force manage to make it there undetected.

Japanese fast destroyers ranged deeper into the void as their sensor range was by far superior to all other ships in the combined flotilla, hunting down the British ships they suspected were still lurking in the system.

Elsewhere, systems were being reinforced, military installations that were key to the security of all nations were hardened, and supply ships ran with escorts wherever they went.

The few neutral systems erupted into conflict first, with civilians being protected or evacuated while NRC forces pushed for territory against their former neighbors. Those skirmishes were over fast, because governments abandoned their claims on those systems in view of the bigger picture and the promise of more territory as the end result.

On the surface of the planet, deep within the protected facility that had become part of the commandeered settlement, two Combined States scientists of the Intelligence Operations Agency crowded around a sample box of toughened plexiglass.

“And we’re certain it’s been affected by the substance?” Sharon Laghari asked.

“Apparently so,” Travis King said, passing on the assurances he’d been given by the biologists on their team.

“I agree,” said a voice from behind them. Both turned to see the Japanese scientist, Ito Akiro, an expert in virology, pointing at a second sample box which held an almost identical-sized creature. “Look at the behavior?”

They looked, comparing the two animals to see that one appeared agitated and confused by the transparent cage it was held in, whereas the other remained still and calmly watched the scientists. While one ran between the invisible walls and rebounded to do the same on the other side, the other just seemed to be waiting for something.

“And the two were taken from different areas?” King asked.

“This one was taken from another continent,” Ito explained, gesturing at the panicked creature.

“Meaning that the spread is limited to this area,” Laghari said.

“Apparently so,” Ito answered.

“But the behavior, from what we have surmised, is the opposite to the effect it had on humans,” King said with a worried tone. “The affected humans were aggressive and hostile. This one is the other way around.”

“There are a number of potential explanations for this,” Ito said. “It could be that these creatures have a much simpler physiology and no cognitive brain function such as we do.”

“So we’re too complex to handle the bonding of the substance to our neural connections?” Laghari asked.

Ito pulled a face and tilted his head to one side in a kind of shrug. “I would suggest further tests on various organic substances and organisms, but it appears that that the level of cognition may be a factor. There are too many variables to say for sure.”

The three scientists looked at the two clear cages in silence as the implications sank in for all of them.

“Are the excavations complete yet?” Ito asked, changing the subject.

“They’ve assured me it will be today,” King said, looking up at the sound of insistent knocking on the sealed door to their laboratory. King walked over, punching in a code to a physical keypad on the inner door which formed part of the security procedures and ensured whatever biological agent they were dealing with stayed inside.

“Sir, we just got word from the dig site. They’re ready,” the scientist reported eagerly, prompting King to turn back to the others.

“Speak of the devil,” he said, earning a confused look from his Japanese colleague.

A sub-atmosphere shuttle transported them to the site in under a minute, lowering to settle down a hundred paces away from the massive excavation that was wide and deep. It dwarfed the original quarry, because the purpose was to uncover the buried treasure beneath and not simply to chase the rich deposits of valuable ores and minerals.

“If you wouldn’t mind,” a man in a protective suit said, directing the science team toward a shelter where they put on the same equipment and waited.

“What’s the hold-up?” King asked after twenty minutes spent in tense inactivity.

“Just waiting for someone to come down from orbit,” the man waiting with them explained, cocking his head at the growing sounds of engines. That sound intensified and dust whipped through the opening to the shelter before the engines were cut, and three more people walked in behind Captain Brannan, the man in nominal charge of the entire operation.

“Thanks for waiting,” he said. “Appreciated.” The scientists said nothing, having not been given a choice in the matter, and they waited even while the naval officers suited up and began the tour down a covered tunnel through more guarded airlock systems until they were beneath the ground.

“This is what we believe is a communal kind of living area,” the technician leading the tour said for the benefit of the military personnel.

“Large compartments for a ship, wouldn’t you say?” Brannan noted as if to himself. “No airlocks to get in and out?”

“We haven’t found anything like that yet, sir,” the technician answered.

“What does that mean?” Brannan asked. “Didn’t they intend it to fly outside of atmosphere?”

“We don’t know what it means yet, Captain,” King said with an edge of finality in his words. He hated useless speculation and found it distracted scientists who, in his opinion, were invariably too focused on finding what they wanted to find and not objectively looking for anything else.

“As it is, we know nothing of the physiology or biology of the beings that built this ship,” Laghari went on. “For all we know, their species might not require an atmosphere to breathe, so vacuum could present different challenges to them than it does for us.”

“The list of things we don’t know is very long, Captain,” King said with finality. “What we’ve been waiting for is this…”

They stopped walking through the cavernous interior at a crossroads, an intersection between two paths where off to one side, bright lights illuminated the rippling pattern of the walls. Brannan put out a hand to run his gloved fingertips over the texture, commenting with surprise as he pulled his hand back.

“It’s warm. Like it’s… like it’s alive…”

“Residual heat from the perpetual power source,” King said with a dismissive chuckle. “Nothing quite so grand as a living ship.”

“The reports indicated there was another device, like a kind of… stone?” Brannan asked.

“Yes, in another chamber further up from here. We’ve excavated that and we’re working on the link,” one of the technicians answered.

“What link?”

“The link to the ship. The artifact is undoubtedly alien in nature,” King explained.

“How long do you think it’s been here?” Brannan asked.

“Geological studies estimate this area’s features were changed dramatically in the last two hundred years. Volcanic activity changed the shape of the northern part of the continent, and all this, we believe, was under water maybe a hundred and sixty years ago. The earth here is sandy and loose, so effectively what the miners were digging through was a sedimentary lakebed.”

“And they knew that before they started mining?” Brannan asked.

“They did. The orbital geological survey gave this as a site with high probabilities of rare minerals, given that recent geological change.”

“And they were right,” King said as he led the way past where the bright lights were set up, looking down at an open vat of black liquid that bubbled every few seconds. Brannan saw it and stepped back sharply, pulling at the arm of an officer to keep him away also.

“It’s quite alright, Captain, I assure you,” Laghari said. “All our tests indicate that the only way the substance can have an effect on a biological organism is for them to ingest it.”

“Got it. No eating the black goo,” Brannan answered, trying to sound relaxed through humor and failing. “This is the main event?” he added hopefully, wanting to be anywhere but in front of something that he could only inaccurately describe as infectious.

“Not at all,” King answered, leading the way back to the other side of the four connected chambers, but Brannan stopped, pointing at the ground to his left.

“What happened here? Those are bullet casings,” he said, changing direction and walking toward the glinting metal.

“That’s where the reconnaissance team, um, contaminated the find,” the technician answered.

“Contaminated it how?” Brannan asked, his voice already registering amusement at what the Odin team could’ve done there. Taken a piss in a corner? Graffitied the walls? Written something about Wagner and his penchant for cock in a bathroom stall?

“They… they cut an NRC soldier’s hand off,” the technician answered.

“And most of his head,” King added. “Which I’m inclined to believe was entirely necessary and justified. Now, this way?”

Brannan followed, looking back to the minor evidence of what sounded like a brutal death. He’d read the report, adding the facts to the location to think of Marine Corporal Barton with something like a mixture of pride and horror.

“Now, here is the main event,” the technician said, spreading his arms wide at the pulsating column rising out of the center of the chamber that hummed with a power they could feel deep within their bones.

“We’re yet to understand how it works, what powers it, what the interfaces do, and what systems it powers, but it most definitely powers the ship,” King said. “The mounds of sand we walked past being sifted outside came from here, which tells me that the ship’s integrity was compromised when it crashed here, mostly likely in the water a long time ago.”

“So, wait, this thing crashed into the sea—”

“A large inland lake,” Laghari corrected him.

“—a large inland lake, took on water, and sank at least a hundred and sixty years ago and it’s still got working power?”

In answer, King merely gestured at the thrumming column to make his point.

“Un-be-lievable,” Brannan said in awe, looking up at the central column. “So, the colonists found it, didn’t report it, and the black… stuff… affected them and made them aggressive and non-communicative?”

King and Laghari exchanged a concerned look before King answered.

“In a nutshell, but like I said earlier, there are a lot of things we don’t know, so it’s imperative that we don’t jump to any conclusion, especially if it’s one that we want to—”

“I need this analyzed, piece by piece, to see what we can do with it,” Brannan said forcefully, cutting him off. “I need this entire ship excavated, all schematics uploaded with holo-imagery at the earliest possible time, and if you locate anything, anything, that looks like it might be a weapon, I need to be notified immediately, day or night. Is that understood?”

“Understood, sir,” the technician answered like a dutiful dog.

“Sir, I must urge caution,” King began, earning the sudden and full attention of the naval captain.

“Doctor King, while I appreciate your efforts down here, I’m afraid we cannot exercise caution to the extent you might prefer. The reason for that is speed. I need speed, and slow is cautious. The longer we wait to exploit and recreate a technological advantage over our enemies, the more people—innocent people—will die all over the galaxy.”

King opened his mouth but closed it again, knowing that the response he was going to give would be wasted on intentionally deaf ears.

“Understood, Captain,” he answered, giving up on any kind of pointless protest.

Brannan left, stripping off the protective gear to dump it in the bins provided before offering hurried thanks to the scientists and engineers excavating their prize. Still smiling, he stepped back onboard the shuttle with his attending officers and dropped the public face, ordering the pilot to burn hard for the Forthright.

Storming through the shuttle bay as soon as it had pressurized, ignoring the extreme temperature of the shuttle’s hull, he walked directly to his quarters off the bridge so fast that he didn’t even acknowledge the commander standing up for him.

He punched in the codes to access the encrypted channel linking him directly to IOA and SOGCOM at Midway station. Then he reported directly to admiral Arias and could barely contain his excitement when he told her what they’d found.

“It’s better than we expected,” he said, breathless with disbelief. “A perpetual energy source? One so robust it can be under the ocean for over a century and a half and still work?”

“And you’re confident there’s a weaponizable application?” Arias asked.

“How could there not be?”

“I guess… What about the bio-weapon?”

“Still no firm answer as to what it is,” Brannan answered. “This is the real prize.”

“And the aliens? What do we know about them?”

“Nothing as yet. The science teams can’t even say anything about their physiology, but I’m confident for more answers when the ship is fully excavated, and they’ve run all their tests.”

“Any sign of enemy activity?” Arias asked.

“None. We’ve got this system sealed up tight. Trust me, nothing’s getting in.”

Chapter 33

Barton

Three weeks later, long after the SOG guys disappeared in the night and I was finally allowed that sick leave to properly recover, I found myself reporting to Captain Prescott back with my old company.

The squads had been moved around to distribute the experience, and the only plus side to losing so many of us before was that my promotion to sergeant came a few months ahead of schedule to put me in charge of another squad in a platoon I hadn’t worked with before.

Rumors about me spread like wildfire, most of which I let slide because they made me sound way more interesting than I was. However, though it ultimately made my job easier with the men and women, it made it harder with the senior NCOs because nobody liked a rock star climbing the ranks, and that’s what they thought I was. A rock star who killed three NRC special operators with his bare hands, apparently. Probably bit their faces off and drank rum from the skull of one of them. I didn’t want to correct anyone and say I did it with an Odin axe, a couple magazines of tungsten rounds, and a trenching tool, because the truth was actually a little more badass than the rumors.

We rotated off the Forthright after a week, replaced by an entire battalion, and were dropped at an outpost protecting yet another damn mining colony, where we mixed safari fire watch with training, given how many new boots we had.

The increased enemy activity reports in the sector had people on edge, and just as I was about to take a breath and settle down into this next chapter of my life, we found ourselves rousted in the middle of the night.

Typical of any grunts screamed out of bed to gear up, we milled around not knowing what the fuck was happening for long enough that everyone started to think it was just another drill.

“What do you think it is, Sergeant?” a kid in my squad asked. I say kid, but he was probably twenty-two and had goofy teeth which gave him the constant look of being excited about something.

“Probably just another drill, O’Hara. Eyes front and mouth shut,” I told him, starting to feel the cold of the night creeping in on me and wishing I still had that armored underlayer that cost more than my entire squad’s gear combined.

I didn’t, obviously. It was gone, along with all the other fancy toys that made doing my job easier and safer, and I was cast back down into obscurity where I probably belonged.

We occupied a reinforced trench on the side of the outpost where there wasn’t a wall, and I cursed my luck again for not being deployed behind the massive blocks of concrete that had the natural ability to absorb tungsten rounds.

Above us, the thin mesh of neosteel designed to block any incoming mortar rounds worryingly swayed in the strong breeze.

“Blue one,” I heard the lieutenant say from about eight meters away as he paced down the trench in my direction. I dialed up the volume on my comm, but he must’ve been on another channel because I didn’t hear the transmission.

“Understood. Out,” he said, peering through the dark to see my face.

“What have we got, sir?” I asked, grateful I’d been rotated into a squad where the platoon officer knew what the fuck he was doing.

“British forces dropped onto the planet about forty minutes ago,” he told me, shaking me out of the dull reality I’d expected by not saying the exercise was over and that we could stand down.

I opened my mouth to ask if we had orbital cover, but unless something major had changed, I knew we didn’t. All we had were automated anti-air emplacements within the outpost and a company of marines all hyped up.

“They’re establishing forward operations bases on two continents, and the nearest one to us is about eighty miles south,” he said, making me turn instinctively in that direction as if I could see that far in the dark.

“Numbers?” I asked, wanting to know if we were looking at a fair fight.

“Intel reports up to a battalion,” the LT told me, making me feel all the better at being outnumbered ten to one. He must’ve sensed that because his next words came fast to stop me overreacting.

“Priority request for orbital support has been sent up the line, but for now we have orders to move up to the colony and secure it.”

I knew that meant we wouldn’t be sleeping for the next few days, because entrenching a civilian colony against vastly superior numbers wasn’t a job you could do in a morning, and it was pretty damn urgent that we moved out and did it before the brits started moving into the colony and doing the same thing.

“We move out in twenty. One platoon stays here to maintain security and two are moving out to secure the colony,” he finished.

“What about the other continent, sir?” I asked.

“What?”

“You said the British landed on two continents. What are they doing at the other one?”

The lieutenant shrugged as if he didn’t know and it wasn’t his business to find out right then, which I guessed was right, but it still pissed me off not to know the full facts.

He pulled out a tablet that lit up the interior of the trench with a harsh glow, making me shield my eyes and reach over him to dial it down a little. His fingers moved over the screen to show a top-down view of the colony, and it struck me then how damn similar it was in layout to the one I’d most recently been deployed to.

“We take the south end of the place, start laying defenses, and set up observation. I need your squad to handle that while I deal with the evacuation of the colonists,” he said.

“Where to?”

“They have a contingency being this far out. Their earliest mine has been hardened into a bunker with water and supplies,” the lieutenant answered, making me suppress a shudder at the mention of going down mine shafts.

It wasn’t like that shit came up in my dreams every other night or anything.

“Any armor?” I asked, earning another shrug from the LT.

“Best guess is that they’ll have APCs, probably the modular design kind, but nothing solid on intel yet.”

I wanted to ask why the British had landed so far away from the colony, which was only about half a mile south of our outpost anyway, but the question didn’t seem relevant to the minor part of the task I’d been given to oversee.

Turning away, I called up three of my people by name and took a knee for them to run to me and crouch down. Filling them in fast with just the facts, I gave orders for what I needed to happen.

“I need you to raid stores for every mine, claymore, and every M28 Snake you can get your hands on. Use the LT’s name to get all that from the locker. We don’t have any engineers to lay them, so you three are it. There’s a battalion of British troops south of the colony setting up a little camping trip and you can bet your assess they aren’t here to play nice.”

“You want a full lethal package?” Martin asked. He was a corporal, and a guy who kept his head down and just got on with whatever bullshit was asked of him. I liked the guy, but I thought he lacked the ruthlessness in leadership to lead a squad. I felt bad for thinking that but pushed it aside.

“You feel much like becoming a guest of his Majesty for the remainder of this war?” I asked in answer to the question. He nodded, deciding that a lethal package of the linked anti-personnel mines was probably a good idea.

“Wilson, I need anti-tank traps on the vehicle routes. Stagger them and plant secondary devices at any choke points you create to catch anything going around an obstacle,” I said, earning a curt nod from the man who was probably already planning how to dig in the remote detonated charges so they’d blow straight up with a shaped charge designed to cut through neosteel and depleted uranium armor.

“Levitt, I want you to take Chandler and set up on the highest spot on the south end. Get us eyes on the south and keep them peeled. Grab any of the other guys you need to help,” I said.

“What about the miners?” Levitt asked. Being my squad’s dedicated marksman, he was that cold, calm guy who could put rounds downrange with an efficiency any grunt feared.

“The LT’s clearing them out into a bunker. Rest of our platoon and another are fixing up defenses elsewhere, but looks like we’ve got the sharp end. Got it?”

“Any reinforcements? Any orbital support?” Martin asked, making me shake my head.

“Not yet. We’re it for now, but you know reinforcements are coming. Ready to kill?”

The chorus of rah swelled a little pride in me and I slapped helmets to send them off to make their requests for all the boom they could get their hands on.

I filled in the rest of my squad, but the word had already passed from marine to marine down the line until most of them knew a version of events that was close enough to the truth.

We deployed, using a single transport truck to get all the gear we could carry over the short distance to the colony while we patrolled beside it.

As soon as we entered the colony from the north, I saw activity that I could only describe as panicked. Civilians ran around carrying bags, carrying kids, and some of the colony leaders were there wearing their reflective orange vests as a sign of authority.

Being a marine, I had a deep-seated hatred of high-visibility clothing in any form, but I guessed it made them feel better in the absence of wearing armor and carrying a rifle.

That thought led me back to the shitty armor I was wearing, still shiny and new after it had been issued to me on my return to the company, and the long-barreled, heavy rifle I carried made me long for the shorter, suppressed version I’d been given when I was with Odin Nine-Five.

When the colonists saw us rolling in, I thought they were more scared than before, which was odd on account of us being the ones preparing to face the enemy while they hid underground.

Same story on any planet; people hate seeing the military until they need us, and then they just get scared about the fact that they need us.

“Hold up there,” a voice said from the side of the street. I turned to see a big guy, easy six-three or six-four and built with it, walking up to us. He held a rifle on a sling with his right index finger pressed straight down the side of the ejection port and his gloved left hand was up in a gesture designed to stop us.

“You in charge?” he asked me, seeing the stripes painted on the chest plate of my armor. I looked around, not seeing anyone senior, and turned back to him with a nod. Everything about him screamed merc, from his black uniform to the purchased gear and the pants tucked into his boots.

“Okay, I’m gonna need your people to back up and go around so you don’t interfere with the evacuation process,” he said, full of the authority of whatever plastic badge and made-up title he’d been given.

“Yeah, not gonna happen. In fact, I need you to clear us a path so we can get our transport to the south end of the colony,” I told him. The look I gave him told him there was no point in getting his dick out to measure against mine, but to my surprise, he took two steps back and whistled loudly before calling out a name.

Another tacti-cool guy ran up and the two bent their heads together before he ran off, no doubt to find someone who had the authority to make me do what he wanted.

“Sergeant Barton, what’s the hold-up?” the LT asked from behind me as he arrived with the other two squads which went left and right to do whatever they were tasked with.

“Sir, I was just requesting a path be cleared for our squad to move south and carry out our orders. He wants us to go back and circle around so we don’t disrupt the evacuation process,” I said, turning back to look up at the big guy who was now crossing meaty arms over his armored chest like he wasn’t letting me into a club on account of not liking my shoes.

“Stand aside and let my marines pass,” the LT said simply, not blustering the man because none of us had the time for his shit.

“What’s the hold up?” another voice called out from behind us, echoing the lieutenant’s words with more volume and authority. I knew Captain Prescott’s voice instantly and suppressed a smile at how the guy was about to get chewed out.

“Sir, colony security won't permit my squad through the evac route. Wants them to go around,” the LT reported.

“That’s a reasonable request, Sergeant. Don’t waste time arguing about it,” Prescott said, walking away like the matter was closed as far as he was concerned.

Mister Mercenary took his turn to smile then, and because I was both a mature adult and didn’t have the time to fuck around, I ordered my guys to head back and loop around.

The LT walked away to speak to the other squad sergeants, leaving me alone with the ox blocking the path. I spun back to him and gestured him to bend down to me like I was about to whisper something in his ear. He did, and he did it condescendingly, but I wiped the smile off his face.

“We’re about to throw down with a battalion of British forces. Remember that when you’re safe inside your bunker,” I told him, spinning on my heel and walking off before he could hit me with any smartass comeback.

“Fuck was that guy’s problem?” Martin asked as I gritted my teeth and fought the urge to about turn and hit him with “and another thing…”

“Screw him. Man thinks his job’s more important than ours, but we know the truth,” I said.

“Fuckin’ mercs,” Chandler added, loud enough for the man to hear.

We went around, but we still saw plenty of activity as the colonists packed up everything they thought was valuable and humped it in the direction of the transport trucks waiting to take them somewhere safe.

Reaching the southern part of the colony, I looked around and deployed my marksman and his spotter to the highest point of a two-story building via the external escape ladders.

Looking at the ground ahead of me, I noticed it was flat, like Kansas flat. So flat I could make out the curvature of the planet from the rising sun coming up to my right.

My squad gathered around me as I stared out, thinking, until I clapped my hands together.

“Right, this is what I need…”

Chapter 34

Barton

I didn’t know if the British or even the NRC had anything as nasty as the M28 Snake anti-personnel defense system, but I was pretty sure they’d have something comparable.

I’d faced off against some IED shit along with a few older model claymores, but the Snake was pretty fresh out of the box.

We were lucky, because if this had been going down even half a year earlier, we wouldn’t have had it because until recently only the engineers had been trained to set it up. But one of my guys, Martin, had managed to get himself volunteered to go on a three-week deployment and orientation course, meaning he could lay them on his own in a pinch.

Given that a pinch was a real polite way of describing our current situation, he was it.

With overwatch up and a little more guidance from the lieutenant about our squad’s exact area of operations, Martin explained what he planned to do.

Because the ground was so stupidly flat, I put the call up for the outpost to deliver some obstacles in the form of concrete blocks, so any incoming vehicle traffic was forced into choke points.

The lieutenant passed it to the captain and the captain authorized it, so one of the few shuttles on base started running relays to drop the blocks under Martin’s guidance through me.

By the time the sun was fully up, the ground leading away to the south looked like a giant had gotten all of its teeth knocked out and just spat them everywhere. It didn’t look like organized defensive lines, which was deliberate, but any enemy APC driver not suffering a stroke of genius wouldn’t see it coming and would hopefully drive right on in to where we wanted them.

Under Martin’s watchful oversight, I had six of my squad digging shallow trenches between those obstacles for the dozen M28 devices to be rested down and mostly buried in the dark soil that smelled like stagnant water. The snaking trenches that wound their way between the devices was probably how it got the nickname, but I’d yet to see anything other than a graphics render of how the thing worked.

When that was done, Martin opened up the heavy, rubberized control box and showed me what he was thinking.

“Okay, I’ve got devices here,” he said, tapping his finger at the icons showing up on the grid display. “I’ve marked the vehicle obstacles manually so they’re a little approximate, but the focus is keeping any vehicles on the road.” I nodded along, not really needing the whole situation to be explained to me but letting the man work.

“Any infantry that moves through the obstacles will be automatically targeted by the M28,” he said, as if it was just that easy.

“And the vehicle mines?” I asked, watching as Wilson leaned over my shoulder to point at the section of the road that was left mostly open, but forced anything on wheels or tracks to slow down like it was navigating a chicane on a racetrack.

“Secondaries to either side and set back, in case we take one out and someone behind makes a break for the gaps,” he explained. I told him he’d done a good job, slapping him on the armored shoulder for added effect, but his smile was more polite than genuine. Just like Martin’s was.

These guys didn’t know me, all they knew was my reputation, which was recent and comprised mainly of gossip and bullshit. They didn’t know if I was in it for the right reasons or if I was looking to make a name for myself.

Guys like that were dangerous, because they tended to make dumb calls in combat and got people killed in search of a citation for bravery.

I wasn’t that guy, but telling my squad that was pointless. They needed to see that I could be trusted to keep them alive to the best of my ability, and I was about to be presented with a pretty solid opportunity to show that I wasn’t.

“Can you guys set up claymores on the building line in case any of them get through?” I asked, getting nods back from both men as I called up my observation nest for an update.

“Nothing. Landscape’s as bare as a stripper’s coochie,” Chandler answered on behalf of him and Levitt. I ignored the indiscipline over the squad net, even though I shouldn’t have, because tension made people do and say weird things. Like making mom jokes to the face of an NRC special operator.

I acknowledged him in a tone that said I didn’t approve but I let it slide. So long as the guy did his job when it came down to it, I didn’t really give a fuck.

Calling up the entire squad on comm, I deployed them into the buildings to take up firing positions when a call over my shoulder made me turn.

Kierney, another squad sergeant, was walking my way with a dozen marines in tow. They pulled carts bearing the short tubes that made me feel suddenly a whole lot better.

“What you got?” she asked when she got close.

“Anti-vehicle munitions laid on and around the pinch point in the road. M28 laid out all along the obstacles. Some of my guys are setting up claymores close to the buildings now, so as long as your people stay this side of the wire, you should be all good,” I told her.

“You hear that? Nobody step foot beyond the building line and you won't get blown to shit,” she said, turning her head to look at her people before addressing me again.

“Got some trucks being driven down to provide cover,” she said, but I was staring at the dull green tubes stacked on the carts, thinking that they must’ve pulled almost everything we had on this rock out of the weapons locker.

That made me nervous, but I tried not to let it show.

“Relax, Barton. Soon as those fuckers walk up in their bowler hats and we start sending rockets down their throats, they’ll turn tail just like they did on Yavin Five,” she said with a smile.

I wished I shared her confidence, but I also knew that the British invasion of that planet about a hundred years ago was met with massed field artillery and three battalions of marines, not two platoons with shoulder-fired rockets.

The trucks arrived and were placed intentionally to block the main road into the heart of the little colony, and as Kierney set her people up with a ready supply of their own boom, I took up position in a second-floor window just before the lieutenant called up looking for me.

I told him where I was and waited as he climbed the stairs and found me. Running through what we’d put together, I was expecting to have to make a couple changes just because that’s what officers did, but he just looked at what we’d achieved while he was managing other things and nodded.

“Outstanding, Sergeant. Word just came down that a half battalion of army reinforcements are inbound. With any luck they’ll arrive just in time to clean up after us.”

“Any word on orbital, sir?” I asked, evidently pissing him off by not jumping on his joke about the army, which he made to keep the minds of my marines off the sheer numbers involved.

He jerked his head and walked back toward a corner of the empty room I’d taken over so Martin couldn’t overhear us from his spot managing the explosive defenses.

“It’s just a troop carrier, there’s nothing bigger in this sector right now. Looks like the NRC moved in on something with half their damn navy and our guys had to pull back to boost the numbers. At least the good news is that the enemy doesn’t have that kind of fire support,” he said, actually looking a little worried now that he wasn’t playing up for the other marines.

That was seriously fucking bad news, because even with a few hundred army soldiers landing we were still outnumbered, and we didn’t know what else was coming, but another question hit me and jumped the queue.

“Why here, LT? Why this system?” I asked. I knew we weren’t located near any major jump lanes and the stuff mined from the quarry here was the same as on fifty other planets. He just shrugged to ass off my question.

“Above everyone’s paygrade I’m guessing, but if they want this system then you can guarantee it isn’t for anything we’ll like. The captain’s ordered every spare bullet we have issued, so send a couple of your guys back to get as much as they can. Hold the line, Sergeant. Hold the line.”

With that he was gone, leaving me a little shocked that we’d gone from dying of boredom to looking at actually dying from a British bullet in the space of half a day.

“You all good, Sergeant?” Martin asked, making me realize I was still standing in the empty corner all by myself. I snapped out of it and even if I couldn’t bring myself to smile, I at least put on my game face and did everything I could to make sure we made it out.

This was how entire companies got wiped out. This was how systems were lost because the damn bureaucrats and politicians didn’t see worlds like this as strategically important to their campaigns. This was how two generations of colonists went missing, or else found themselves working the same jobs as slaves for their new damn overlords.

“Wilson?” I called into the comm, earning an instant response.

“Grab two guys and head back into the colony, see if you can’t rustle up a few thousand rounds of ammunition for us.”

He acknowledged the order, but Martin was looking at me with serious concern in his eyes now. I forced the smile onto my face and said something I hoped sounded flippant and bloodthirsty enough.

“Hey, I’d hate to run out of bullets when those assholes march up on us.”

* * *

Wilson, God love him, did find some more ammunition. He pulled a cart behind him with another marine walking awkwardly beside it to prevent the Heavy Mod 1 from falling off.

“Wilson, you beautiful bastard,” I said as I met him at street level.

“What, this old thing? I just found it left unattended,” he said with a smile that told me he was joking—at least I hoped to hell he was joking—but the bravado made everyone smile.

“How many rounds for it?” I asked, leaning around him to count the five ammo boxes for the big gun and hoped twelve hundred and fifty rounds would make our day far more enjoyable at the expense of the enemy.

Having to advance over dead-flat terrain toward a defended, entrenched position, all the while facing off against heavy machine gun fire and incoming rocket barrages was likely to put a dampener on their day. I said that much to Wilson who corrected me.

“I think they’d say it would piss on their chips,” he said in an attempt at a British accent so bad it was almost good.

“That they would, Corporal. She’s yours. Set her up in that building?” I suggested, nodding at the window beneath where Levitt and Chandler had lay down flat in the sun all morning to keep watch on the south.

He nodded, calling up a couple of his guys to carry the big gun away and come back for the boxes of linked ammo to feed the beast.

He’d also found a couple crates of grenades and two speedloaders to replenish our spent rifle magazines, which meant we could perform reloads in seconds instead of having to fall back or rely on someone bringing us loaded spares. Also, although I was pretty sure the heavy had been deployed to our sector of the defensive line, I wasn’t convinced the speedloader hadn’t been a gift left adrift, if you knew what I meant.

Fuck it, we were going to need it if the feeling in my bones was anything to go by.

At least the enemy had some fighting vehicles and greater numbers, even if they weren’t afforded orbital support. I guessed resources being as strung out as they were meant neither side got to play with the expensive toys, like actual battleships.

Being in a system so far from the real fight, where hundreds of ships were deployed and constantly redeployed to outmaneuver the opposition, both us and the British were obviously the cheapest resources our respective sides had to deploy.

I didn’t mind that, not really, but what bugged me was the pointlessness of it, because I sure as shit couldn’t see the strategic value in taking this system with a half-assed invasion.

We settled in, ate MREs from the pouch and took it in turns to stand fire watch.

In the afternoon I ordered Levitt and Chandler to stand down for a couple hours but to stay on station, deploying someone else to keep a set of optics glued on the horizon.

The lieutenant came back around a few times, checking on each position under his command, and each time he had no more news to give.

“What about our ships, sir? Hasn’t anything got a visual on them?” I asked, allowing a little impatience to creep into my voice. He shot me a sharp look but answered anyway.

“The only ship we had in this system provided as much intelligence as they could before they had to bug out. They aren’t armed, so they couldn’t exactly get in close and do anything about it, sergeant.”

I took his tone as a mild warning and backed off, but I was pissed we had all this damn technology at our fingertips and were effectively as blind as soldiers hundreds of years before us, just waiting for the enemy to show up over the brow of a damn hill or something.

“They’ll come soon enough, Barton,” the lieutenant said, mistaking my apprehension for eagerness to start shooting something.

He was wrong on that account. I was ready to start shooting things, but I’d much rather be calling up an orbital strike package.

Not for the first time since I started a new chapter of my old life, I found myself missing that glimpse I’d had of how the elite went about their warfare.

Night fell, and so ensued another ten hours of waiting for ten times our number of enemy to appear on our doorstep and demand the keys to our house.

Chapter 35

Barton

The attack started slow, which fucking infuriated me.

Word came down that the enemy were moving on us, and although I had no clue how they knew that, it was good enough for me to sit my ass up and chew down a stim pill, effectively just concentrated caffeine and sugar with some other shit I didn’t really know how to pronounce. Then I called up my squad on the comm until I was happy everyone was awake and pointing a rifle in the right direction.

“Kierney, you good?” I called out, leaning my head out of the open window to look down to the street below where the colony suddenly ended, and the flat moonscape of boggy dirt began.

Her response was an affirmative, with bonus elements of anticipation and some mild prejudice toward the enemy, but I was satisfied that our heavy weapons support was awake and good to go.

I looked out of the window south, seeing the same weak sunrise I’d laid eyes on when we first got there about twenty-four hours previously, but there was nothing moving in my field of view.

I called up Wilson, annoying him by reminding the marine he was to hold off on firing the heavy until the enemy got close enough to shatter their assault with the element of surprise.

I was mindful that the enemy would have rockets too, and if the machine gun opened up too soon it would just attract fire and get taken out before it could hurt them too much.

I paced, fighting the urge to keep talking because I knew it made me seem nervous. My marines didn’t need to see a nervous squad leader who they didn’t know and hadn’t fought with before, and I did everything I could not to undermine their confidence in me.

The longer I waited for the enemy to come, the more I felt like I was literally wasting my life.

Why hadn’t I taken the fucking payout and the medical retirement? Why did my dumb ass look for a way to get back into the fight?

These questions and more besides took over my thoughts until I had to shake my head to clear it, because there was an enemy coming and they meant business.

I’d never faced off against the British before, and the fact that they were out here meant either the NRC were using them as proxy troops or there was something bigger at play. Maybe even something our side didn’t know about; but then again, if they did know, that didn’t exactly mean they were going to tell the likes of me.

Fuck it, come what may. I was there and I had a job to do.

“Eyes up, stay sharp,” I said to my squad, as if my marines needed any encouragement to kill.

That was when the sound first hit me, tickling the edges of my hearing like a mosquito was buzzing around the room somewhere. It grew louder until the buzz became a falling whistle that carried with it a whole lot of things, and none of them good.

“Incoming!” someone yelled nearby, treating me to stereo shouts as it came over the comm too.

“Cover!” I yelled back, doing the same to everyone else as I’d just suffered, and tucked myself into a ball in the corner of the room just as the first mortar round fell.

It landed behind our position, only it was close enough to shake the damn building and send a shower of loosened dust down on us. Bomb after bomb fell, detonations blasting off in a steady rhythm, until a break in the onslaught gave me chance to breathe.

I called my squad up to check everyone was still whole before Levitt gave me a sitrep from his spot on the roof.

“Main attack looks like it’s veering east. Got a line of light armor heading right for us with infantry in support, over.”

“Range?” I asked nervously, cursing myself for sounding so green.

“Eighteen hundred and closing.”

“Engage at fifteen hundred,” I ordered him, knowing that none of our other weapons would be effective at that range. He knew his job well enough, and I knew he’d be looking for anyone giving orders or looking like they were in charge to degrade their numbers, leadership, and morale before they got closer.

The rifles the rest of us carried weren’t effective at anything over a third of the distance they were at right now, and the dark didn’t help us because the sights on our rifles were a little distorted in different modes unless you were up close and personal.

Another salvo landed, and I switched channel to listen as other squads were getting hit harder than us. I felt bad for them, but I tried to stay focused on what we could do—what I could do—and stressing out about other positions wasn’t going to help anyone.

We waited, we endured, and thank God we didn’t take any casualties. I poked my head out of cover during one lull in the bombardment to check on Kierney’s people down in the street, but she’d had the good sense to order them under the transport trucks and tuck up until they could get in the fight.

It felt like a long time, and it also felt like seconds, but above the whistling and the explosions I heard Levitt’s rifle start cranking out bullets, which told me the enemy were getting closer.

I put my head up over the ledge of the nearest window but couldn’t see a damn thing, so I got to my feet and moved back to bring my rifle up and use the optics. I saw them then, advancing pretty fast right up the middle with infantry behind two armored fighting vehicles with their heads down. The rangefinder built in told me they were at nine hundred meters, which was still outside my rifle’s effective range, but they were walking right into the trap we’d built.

I tried to look for more enemy behind them, tried to imagine the ways our defense would fail, but I had to take cover again as one last, massive salvo of mortar rounds came at us.

Tucking back up in the corner, I waited, sensing that this was the last big attempt to keep our heads down before the attack hit us for real. But I couldn’t afford to miss when they reached the lines.

Martin was up on his knees, eyes glued to a window to my left with a handheld optic pressed to his face. He didn’t seem to care that there were bombs falling. He just focused on his role and reached a hand down to the control box as the heavy gun turret on the lead vehicle lit up the night.

“Thirty more meters,” Martin said, and I could hear his breath shaking as he spoke. I held mine, waiting for the boom that was about to happen so we could start giving back what we’d been taking for the last God only knew how long.

And man, was I in no way disappointed.

The first armored vehicle rolled over the mine laid in the track we’d left open, and lifted clean off the ground in a flash that accompanied a bang so loud it just blocked out my hearing and replaced it with a squealing sound.

I didn’t need to tell anyone what to do, because the vehicle getting taken out was the agreed signal to unleash everything we had.

Just like we’d anticipated, the second wagon tried to go around the burning, flipped hull of the lead AFV, and took the path left oh so subtly open to it. Martin activated the second mine, catching it under the left side tracks to flip it onto its right side before activating the M28.

All along the line of obstacles illuminated by two burning AFVs, the system came alive. I wished I’d seen it. Not the catastrophic injuries the thing dished out, but just to witness firsthand the destructive power it had..

Sensors built into the snaking tubes activated and fired burning shrapnel straight up into the advancing infantry, as the control boxes sent munition after munition to where it detected them.

Added to that sudden terror of the ground beneath their feet coming alive with explosives, our entire squad opened up with rifle fire to complement the marksmanship from the roof and the steady barrage of shoulder-fired rockets coming from the street below.

That wasn’t to say the enemy were helpless lambs coming to the slaughter, because someone alive down there had their head screwed on tight. Organized gunfire came back at us, spraying the building and taking out the windows. All around me I could hear glass shattering and the heavy impact of tungsten against concrete, but it was a matter of which side could kill the other the quickest. Seeing as how we had elevation and cover and they had two fucked up AFVs and were out in the open, my money was on us.

I cycled my weapon, dropping out a spent magazine, and slapping in a fresh one to start hammering bursts at the enemy positions. The fuckers were using the only real available cover, which meant that the obstacles we’d had dropped into the field were now hiding five or six British soldiers who popped up to fire at us before ducking back down.

“Wilson! Where’s that heavy?” I called over the comm but got nothing back. I tried again and again, but when he didn’t answer me the third time, I knew something was wrong. The big gun hadn’t fired even a single shot, and we needed that overwhelming fire support if we were going to end this little part of the battle anytime soon.

Martin was up firing his weapon through the shattered window, as the M28’s control box was abandoned on the deck now that it had done its thing.

“Stay here, I’m going for the heavy,” I told him, accidentally transmitting through the mic I still held open onto the squad channel. He didn’t look away but nodded, so I ran for the stairs and threw myself down them as fast as I could go.

I was sweating like crazy, gasping for breath, and had to force myself to calm the fuck down. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be any use to my squad or anyone else.

I mentally planned to pause in the doorway before getting out onto the street and running across the road like my ass was on fire, but that plan was screwed on account of the doorway leading out being a pile of broken concrete and jagged steel supports.

Climbing over the rubble and running zigzagged like a drunk on fast forward, I reached the building on the other side. Behind me, Kierney and her people fired their rifles now that the supply of rockets had been spent, and I thought that if I was her, I’d be sending my people into better cover.

But then I remembered I wasn’t her, and she’d been doing the job longer than I had, so I mentally shut the fuck up and just ran.

The building was intact, which was a good start, but when I made for the stairs and my boot slipped in something that felt like oil, I knew what was happening.

“Wilson!” I yelled as I got back up and climbed the stairs, only to find him flat on his back in a bare room laid out like he was ready for crucifixion. The blood ran from the back of his head and pooled on the landing where it had dripped down onto the stairs, and the other guy in the room was so covered in dust I couldn’t even tell who it was.

The front of his armor was scorched black, and his eyes were so swollen they wouldn’t open, so I called into the channel like a robot for a medic to get to my position.

“It’s okay, you’re gonna be okay,” I said, pulling him by the boots to the doorway so I could get him out of there. He yelled in fright, really fucking loudly, and I saw what had happened inside the room like a flash of inspiration.

The hole in the ceiling, burn marks, and flash damage told me a mortar round had cut right through the roof above and detonated inside the little room. It was a damn miracle this guy hadn’t taken more damage, but Wilson hadn’t been so lucky. It wasn’t a bullet that got him, but a chunk of shrapnel the size of my thumb that had embedded itself in his neck and let out all the blood.

A pair of marines arrived and took the guy away, leaving me on my own in the room with only Wilson’s body and an unfired Heavy Mod 1. One of those things was of use, so I did what I knew how and cranked back the handle to start lighting up the enemy positions.

I blasted away in long bursts, feeling my entire body shake with the sheer force of the thing going like a jackhammer, and it wasn’t until the first box of linked ammo was expended that I realized I was yelling while I fired.

I dropped to one knee, hearing a few shots come back in my direction now the big gun had gone quiet, and fumbled to release the empty box and hook on a fresh one before I cranked it back and started up again.

I fired three boxes before I heard the orders come down. We were to cease fire and take cover unless we could withdraw. My brain didn’t register what that meant at first, but the familiar sound of incoming orbital kinetic munitions snapped me out of the bloodlust I was in and sent my ass running for the stairs.

I didn’t make it in time; instead, I curled up in a ball and hoped to God the building didn’t come down on me as the ground shook like an earthquake and a massive thunderstorm had a baby, and it was here for a play date.

Four, five, six massive impacts shook my entire world and transported me back to a quarry in the ass end of nowhere beside special operators calling in Thor protocol, only these impacts were much, much bigger.

I don’t know how long I lay there afterward. It might’ve been minutes, or it might’ve been an hour. I was so shook up by the concussive impacts that I felt drunk, so much so that I rolled onto my knees and puked up the lumpy slop that looked… Well, it looked pretty much like it had when I’d eaten it.

“Barton? Sergeant Barton?”

“Yeah,” I croaked, clearing my throat and trying again, louder this time. “Yeah! In here.”

I got to my feet, not wanting anyone to find me rolling around in the contents of my gut, but all I managed was a kind of half upright position before I needed to rest my head against the wall and stay still.

“Barton! Fuck, man, didn’t you get the word to fall back?”

“I was busy,” I slurred back at the lieutenant, who seemed pretty amused at my appearance. He looked me up and down once more, shaking his head like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

“That you were, Sergeant. That you were.”

My hearing started to come back after about a minute, and I could still make out the sound of gunfire coming from the east side of the colony. I tried to stand upright but kept tipping over the other way too far until I corrected myself and the lieutenant shot a hand out to stop me going down again.

“Barton, you need to rest up. The rest of the platoon is mopping up here,” he told me, leaning back out of the shattered doorway to call out two names. Marines jogged over and I didn’t resist as they were told to escort me back to a medic.

I went, but one last look over my shoulder at the flat ground we’d turned into a warzone reminded me just how damn destructive a few people could be.

Chapter 36

Barton

Took me a while to come around fully, and by that point the medic was pretty much done with me. Besides, they had more important cases to deal with, so I didn’t feel like waiting around in a temporary field hospital just because I got a little too close to an orbital strike.

Which reminded me, we weren’t supposed to have any orbital capability, and that made me head back down to the south end and lie to the lieutenant that I was fine.

The fact that he visibly recoiled from how loud I shouted the words told him I wasn’t one hundred percent, but he had too much to do and losing a squad sergeant right then wasn’t ideal.

From what I could get, and by that I meant what I could actually hear and understand because he kept turning his face when he talked, was that the army troop carrier was retrofitted with a small strike package designed for close-in defense in the void, but it also doubled up as an orbital bombardment capability if push came to shove.

Well, push had definitely been shoving, and when I asked how he knew, he just jerked a thumb over his shoulder at a group of army guys.

“Dammit, Yang, who told you to put that over there?” he said, breaking back into character and walking off to tear a strip off a marine who was doing something dumb. He wasn’t part of my squad, so I permitted myself the luxury of not getting involved.

Walking toward the army guys and swallowing repeatedly to try and make my ears pop, I interrupted their little meeting with some heartfelt and genuine thanks.

“Took you long enough to get here!”

The guy nearest me turned and smiled like he had a dozen jokes about marines just loaded and ready to go. “Hey, it’s all in the timing. If we showed up any earlier, you wouldn’t know we were your saviors! Hey, Ortiz, what’s that thing you say about the marines?”

Ortiz, a head shorter than me and built like the concrete obstacles we’d had dropped in the field, scowled at me.

“Yeah, something tells me this one won’t see the funny side right now,” he said, just as a voice boomed across the street, and the army guys all turned and smartened up.

“You finished discussing your needlework? Go help out bravo team clear those bodies.”

The guys moved like they meant it and I turned to see the guy who’d given the orders, seeing the same insignia on the shoulder of his armor as the others before my brain made the connection.

“You’re Drop Cav?” I asked, earning a savage look at how I was addressing what I now saw was the unit’s first sergeant. Maybe the asshole didn’t like answering to marines, or maybe I was so deaf from the incoming that he didn’t like me yelling in his face. The savage look softened when it became obvious to him I’d been through the damn ringer, and he let it slide.

“We are, Sergeant. Dropped half our forces here and the other half on the enemy position. They surrendered right after their attacks on this location were pushed back.”

I nodded, not sure what to say because I was still pretty damn dizzy, but I saw Levitt walking toward me and excused myself from the senior NCO’s presence.

“You okay?” he asked me, but all I could do was nod.

“You hear about Wilson?” I asked, giving Levitt his turn to nod back at me.

“Heard about it? Damn mortar round punched through the deck right behind me. Felt the whole fucking roof lift up when it went off.” He put his head down sadly and I was lost for what to say to him. These guys had known each other a hell of a lot longer than they’d known me, and it was hard to be in charge when I didn’t have that bond and they didn’t know me.

I thought of the people I’d lost in the last few months, like my entire platoon, and something inside me said that this was just the beginning. That there’d be a whole world of shit to come before it was over again.

“Army guys are relieving us on this end. LT wants us back in the town in thirty,” he said, having evidently been given the orders in my absence. I thanked him, told him he’d done a good job, and organized my people to fall back from the ass end of a colony settlement in the middle of nowhere, where a whole load of people had died for no good reason I could imagine.

Heading back for a couple hours of stand down, I took the opportunity to rest my eyes behind my combat cover for a while, until we were ordered back to the outpost to resume guard rotations so the fresh platoon could march into the colony and secure it.

What bothered me, I mean apart for the reason the British attacked in the first place, was the fact that they didn’t bring enough to make sure it could be done right first time.

They had to know there was a marine unit based here, otherwise their intel network sucked more dick than everyone thought, but if they knew that, then they should’ve made sure by hitting the outpost from orbit instead of just walking up on us like they did.

I voiced that in private to my lieutenant who did that thing all people did when they were planning to say shit they shouldn’t. He looked over both shoulders before leaning in close to me and talking in a quieter voice. “Scuttlebutt is that there was an NRC agent in the colony. Says they sent word out that the colony was pretty much unguarded.”

“Pretty much?” I asked, offended on behalf of the corps, but the lieutenant was shaking his head.

“That was before we were deployed here. Before that, this place was mostly mothballed because the merc units handled the wildlife easy enough,” he said.

“Then why? I mean, why even fight for this rock?”

“Think about it. If the British or the NRC get a supply station out here so they can base patrol ships, it means the Japanese have to go around the sector, and that could put them a few weeks behind on re-up runs,” he told me, and even though it made sense, I still saw the attack as futile when I considered how few troops they’d sent to secure the place.

“It gets better,” the lieutenant said with a smile. “Turns out the NRC agent came clean and turned on their own side. Agreed to send a message to say the place was unguarded so they committed their forces here.”

The scale of the gamble made me want to fucking punch something. What if they’d sent a full battle fleet? What if they’d committed twice the numbers or added sub-atmo bombers to the manifest? That anger showed on my face and the LT spoke to calm me down.

“You don’t repeat a word of this, Sergeant, clear?”

“Yes sir.”

“And besides, there was more in play than just a turned agent. This came from SOGCOM,” he said, a hint of boyish admiration in his voice when he spoke of the special operations command.

I didn’t give a shit if it had come from the king of England. It was a gamble and marines had died just so the enemy thought they were facing an easily defeated resistance, and that pissed me off. SOGCOM could go fuck themselves, I thought, until the sensible part of my brain reminded me that I was being a dumb piece of shit.

Marines, soldiers, sailors, airmen… We all signed up knowing that our lives were numbers on a report. Those numbers were used by senior officers and politicians like pieces on a game board, and sometimes a number just came up.

Wilson’s had. A dozen other marines had died too, and that didn’t take into account the hundreds of British infantry who’d been similarly fucked over by their own command.

I was sick of it, sick of being a number, and not for the first time I considered myself already halfway out of the door. Then I remembered the whole galaxy was at war, and the chances of me getting out now were zero. I’d either have to get hurt really bad, and I’d already missed that boat, or I’d have to die to escape the machine.

* * *

Midway Station

Weeks of jump lane travel away, licking his own proverbial wounds, a staff sergeant of the Combined States Marine Corps stretched his body before the pain started to subside.

His lower ribs and the left side of his abdomen were still mottled purple and yellow as the massive hemorrhaging inside him started to have all evidence of the trauma removed by the process of healing.

Dressing in PT sweats, he walked out of his room and into the bathroom to slowly and carefully do what he needed to, before finding a clean cup and warm coffee in a pot.

Checking his watch again, he saw he was about an hour and a half past the time he usually got up, and by now he’d normally have put in a solid workout and showered, ready for the day.

Being on technical leave to recuperate didn’t mean that Mac considered himself off duty at all, and as the others joined him one by one, he leaned back and tapped a spoon against the side of his cup for their attention like he was about to propose a toast.

“I got something to say,” he announced, ignoring the round of expected insults.

“You’re finally having the operation? Good for you, man. Nobody should have to live with a dick that small,” Coates said in her most mockingly reassuring voice.

“Still wouldn’t be as big as yours, Claymore,” Anders put in by way of defending his best friend before adding his own comment.

“This is a safe space, Mac. Just go ahead and say you want to transfer to the air force.”

“Hey!” Edwards countered, putting up the weakest of defenses for her own origins.

“You fuckers done?” Mac asked, only his smile said that he was happy just to be there and suffer their attempts at comedy.

A theme of surrender went around the table before Mark invited him to say what he wanted to say.

“I know we haven’t done this before, and I know it isn’t really how things even are done, but I want to put up a nomination,” he said, looking at the other four in turn to check if they saw where he was going.

“You want Barton to get his shot,” Mark said, stating the fact simply. Mac nodded, and Anders mimicked the gesture beside him already in total agreement.

Mark, as was his way, voiced the opposing factors. “Not an easy thing to do, especially not now with the war heating up. A lot of units will put a stop on anyone leaving to keep the teams coherent.”

“And SOGCOM will want more recruits because our mission capabilities are probably at about half the demand,” Coates argued back, earning a nod of concession from their leader.

“How do we even go about that?” Edwards asked, creating a few seconds of silence as the other four around the table knew she had no real say in the matter, as she wasn’t an operator.

Only those who had been through Hades and come out successful could nominate candidates, and none of them had even heard of a nominee making it through selection before. In fact, none of them had even heard of anyone being nominated as they were proposing to do. But then again, the secrecy surrounding their world didn’t mean it hadn’t happened.

“I can draw something up and send it to the selection administrators, only it’ll have to be ratified by Hades command and that really means Landry has to sign off on it,” Mark said.

Both Mac and Anders hissed noises that said there might be a problem with that, but Coates cut in to silence them. “That’s not an automatic no, especially if someone calls in a favor,” she said, fixing Mark with a look which he held for as long as she could bear it.

“How long have you known me?” Mark asked the table. “Long enough to know I’ve never cashed in a favor like this, and long enough to know I’d never trade on my family name. The fact that we’re even discussing circumventing the process like this goes against the grain.”

“Hold on there, boss, nobody’s talking about circumventing anything. I’m just saying he deserves a shot, right? What he did down on that planet, how he did it, I say he deserves a shot. Whether he makes it or not is up to him,” Mac said to murmurs of agreement.

“Alright, I’ll send it down. If, and I mean if he gets there, it’s one hundred percent on him, and nobody is to interfere. Agreed?”

They did, but Coates added a little shade to contradict her earlier opinion. “Old man Landry’s not gonna go easy on him if we do this. In fact, by getting him to Hades this way, we might actually make it a little harder.”

Epilogue

Barton

I got called in to see the captain as I was showering off that morning’s PT.

I marched into his office, stood to attention, and fired off a salute which I knew Prescott would like because he was a punctilious bastard.

“First off, Sergeant, good work. You and your squad performed well.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said woodenly. Prescott frowned and looked at me like he was trying to figure something out, so I just stared at the spot above his head and let him say what he needed to.

“Sergeant Barton, I take it you’re settling into the new squad nicely?” he asked, but his tone of voice didn’t hope for anything nice on my behalf, that much was sure. I was naively expecting some kind of citation, maybe even a medal nomination, but that arrogance blinded me to the dark look on his face as he spoke.

“Yes sir,” I answered, given how that was the only correct answer to the question, and tried to ignore the hurt look on my platoon lieutenant’s face.

“Which makes me a little surprised that you’ve applied to leave us,” Prescott said, getting right to the point. I shot him a confused look and he spun a tablet around to slide it over his desk at me. I caught it before it fell off the edge and read the comm on screen.

But that couldn’t be right. I hadn’t applied. Prescott had to know I hadn’t expressed an interest because he’d have had to countersign it and send it off, but the orders were right there, plain as day.

“Sergeant Barton, you have enough leave accrued to take the eighteen days off between now and your transport, which I’m guessing you’ll want to spend in physical preparation for this.”

I nodded, not sure what words would come out if I tried to speak.

“I have to warn you, Hades is no joke. I’ve had friends who went on SOG selection and came back broken, permanently, so you can’t just expect to waltz in there and breeze through the course, because you’ll be going up against not just MARSOC but Rangers and SEALS and a whole raft of other specialists. This is SOG, and I want you to know that when—if—you fail to pass selection, we can find a place for you back here. Although it may not be in charge of a squad by then,” Prescott said, resisting the urge to smile for laying out his punishment for my obvious delusions of grandeur well in advance of any failure.

“I understand, sir, thank you.” I whipped up another salute and marched out so precisely that I doubt he noticed I was still holding his tablet. I marched away, ducking behind a building to read the orders again.

I had eighteen days to build up as much strength and fitness as possible before shit got real. That was fine, I could do that, but what I really wanted was some A1 advice.

I went into the command hub and grabbed an empty terminal to key in the code I’d memorized. A minute later the screen came to life and a familiar smile greeted me.

“I was wondering when you’d call,” Mac said. “And I’m guessing you want me to tell you everything I know about SOG selection.”

* * *

Light years away, after a similar summons, a bull of a man stepped off a transport vessel into customs at Ascension station.

“Identification,” the British customs officer demanded in a bored tone without looking up from the tablet he was reading.

A meaty hand slapped a plastiglass ID card onto the counter with a thud loud enough to startle the officer away from their show and look out at their customer. The eyes fixed on a partly bare chest where two corners of solid meat met under a neck covered in tattoos.

The hand slid the ID across the counter with an ominous scrape before it reached into a pocket and added another chip which the officer took nervously, scanning both.

The identification chip told the customs officer that one Komarov, Viktor, a major in the NRC armed forces, wanted to enter the sovereign space of the Kingdom of Britain.

The second chip, one that held the man’s travel authority, flashed a simple warning over the customs officer’s terminal. It ordered the traveler be admitted without search, bearing a tag that implied the internal security services were aware that the chip had been read. That read would show precisely who scanned the chip, and also where it was scanned, so the officer swiped the ID card through and authorized it by using an override code that would land him in front of his supervisor within the hour.

“Welcome to Ascension station, enjoy your st—”

“Shut your mouth, little man,” Viktor Komarov snarled as he pushed through the barrier that had switched from red to green. He pushed past a line of people queuing up for the next shuttle transport to the very front and stepped onboard the train, heedless of the muttered comments, tutting, and whispers about his manners. Komarov rode the train for two stops before he stepped off, turning to give a rude gesture to everyone staring at him with distaste, and walked toward a building proudly flying the flag of his beloved confederation.

Inside the embassy he was treated with more fear couched in humility, finding himself seated in the grand office of the NRC ambassador with a small glass of vodka in front of him.

The ambassador, a man of renown as an infamous marksman among the special operators of the NRC, sat down opposite him and lifted a glass.

“Tvoye zdorovye,” he said, offering a toast to Komarov’s health. Both men threw back their drinks and banged their glasses on the desk noisily. The ambassador poured again, holding his glass up with glistening eyes as he spoke.

“I knew your brother. He was the bravest of men and a fearless warrior.”

“I want to see his body,” Komarov said flatly. “And send his shovel home to our mother.”

“One I can do, the other I cannot.”

“What do you mean?” Komarov asked slowly, every word laced with danger.

“His body was recovered, but not his weapon. Our doctors believe that it was this that killed him.”

“Someone… killed him with his own weapon?”

The ambassador nodded darkly, feeling the pain and humiliation of a brave family with generations of prestigious military service to their names. For a man at the pinnacle of dealing out death, to meet his fate at the hands of someone who killed him with his own weapon was both a shock and an insult to all of them who formed the brotherhood.

“I want to know where the Americans are. All of them.”

The ambassador nodded again, lifting the glass and offering a final toast.

“Vechnava pamyat,” he said—let him be remembered forever—and he drained his glass.

“Zemlya pukhom,” Komarov responded—let the ground in which he rests be as goose down—and slammed back the drink to further fuel his need for revenge.

THE STORY CONTINUES IN BOOK 2,

HADES

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ALSO IN SERIES

Scourge

Hades

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