Master Sergeant Read online

  DEDICATION

  For my sons, Shiloh and Chandler, who enjoy a good war story set in outer space

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For my amazing editor, Kelly O’Connor, who made this a much better book.

  And to my agent, Ethan Ellenberg, for always having my back.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ONE

  Azure Mist Tavern

  Space Station DSC-24L19

  Loki 19 (Makaum)

  LEO 332.7 kilometers

  0142 Hours Zulu Time

  The official report stated that Master Sergeant Frank Nolan Sage, 3rd Battalion/Fort York/Loki 19 (Makaum), acted with “impaired judgment” before he reached planetside. Other military personnel who witnessed the incident stated that Sage had “perhaps enjoyed one refreshment too many” while “adjusting to the native hooch.”

  And there were others—one of the hostesses at the Azure Mist Tavern—who insisted he was a hero.

  Personally, Sage knew his give-a-damn meter about rules regarding engaging the corporation security sector had cycled dry after he’d gotten a bellyful of the crap spewed by one of DawnStar Corp private sec bashhounds. He’d come to Makaum to get back in the fight against the Phrenorian Empire after a six-year assignment training troops. The bashhound had just ended up as collateral damage along the way.

  What really happened was this:

  “YOU KNOW THEY got other names for Loki 19 than Makaum. That’s just what the natives call it.” Corporal Trevor Anders dangled a brown bottle of local beer between his fingers as he watched one of the serving girls hustling drinks. Anders was young enough to be Sage’s son and had a narrow face, intense blue eyes, and short blond hair. Like Sage, he wore camo-colored ACU pants and a beige ARMY tee shirt. “The corp’s zenobiologists call the place ‘Macabre’ because of all the weird plants and creatures. Any soldier that’s been on the ground in those jungles calls it the ‘Green Hell’ because most of those plants and creatures try to kill you.”

  Sage grinned at that and tipped his bottle back. The beer had an odd mushroom-and-wood-pulp taste that had taken some getting used to, but it was growing on him. The alcoholic effects were stronger than anything he’d had outside of Sergeant Welker’s home brew on Ganatol. One batch had caused temporary blindness in four soldiers that had required some creative paperwork and help from the medical teams to keep the incident under wraps.

  Sage and Anders sat at one of the small round tables packed into the Azure Mist Tavern, supposedly named after the rainy season planetside. The décor was a mix of highly polished black and blue-green tiles. The tables and chairs were flat black. Nearly three hundred people sat inside the bar, and the cumulative conversation bordered on deafening, taxing the capabilities of the white noise generators at each table.

  Anders looked at Sage again. “They have lizards on Makaum that are as big as dinosaurs. I heard Terran scientists got excited when they first heard about them, then got disappointed when they found out they weren’t much different than what we had back home.”

  “Just bigger.”

  “Exactly. A whole lot bigger.” Anders grew more animated in the telling, leaning in closer. “And a whole lot more predatory. Then there’s the bugs. They say a saber spider can take out an attack chopper, and that you’ll never see one of them coming.”

  Sage shrugged, a small movement but one that was easily read. As sergeant, he’d learned body language shorthand. Troops had to pick up screens of information from small movements. Combat required economy. Sparse movements. Sparser words. He knew his craft. “Guys on the ground always tell newbies horror stories.”

  “Yeah, but there’s vid floating around out there on MilNet. Shows a helicopter fighting off a saber spider. You seen that?”

  “A lot of other things are on MilNet too. Not all of those things are true either.” The military ComNet kept the Terran Army rolling, but even the top encryption specialists couldn’t keep canny and bored grunts from cannibalizing bandwidth for personal projects, porn, and the grapevine.

  “How many planets you been to, Top?”

  It was a question Sage had often been asked. The greenies were always curious, but he couldn’t blame them. They didn’t realize that war zones tended to blur after a while when a soldier stayed juiced on adrenaline and combat sense enhancers while wearing an AKTIVsuit. The Armored-Kinetic-Tactical-Intelligence-Vestment boosted strength and speed, and had an array of chemstims. “Kid, you learn to stop counting.”

  “But you’ve never been here before?” Anders squinted, like he was trying to work some really hard math problem.

  “Nope.” Sage shifted in his chair, trying to get comfortable and failing. There were too many moving parts around him, too many voices, and the zone hadn’t been clearly defined or secured. He didn’t much care for being around the corp muscle. Those guys always lit up his personal security radar.

  The corporal hesitated. “Makaum is a backwater, Top. Why would somebody with your field-service record be assigned to a nowhere place like this?”

  “I volunteered. You greenies need somebody to keep you alive.” With a friendly grin, Sage tilted his bottle back and took another sip. The pleasant buzz rolled in his head and he didn’t intend to talk about why he was there anymore. His options had been limited, by the military and by his own sense of honor. Makaum was the only destination available on his particular career path at the moment. He was hoping to change his luck. If not, going primitive for a while suited him. There would be less top brass to worry about.

  Looking disappointed, Anders shook his head. “I volunteered too. But not for this. For the Khustal System worlds. The war with the Phrenorians is hot out there. Since the Pagor System fell, we need a toehold somewhere out here. Somewhere that we can push back against the Sting-Tails. I wanted to make a difference.”

  “The Phrenorians are here too, kid. Don’t forget that. You forget that, you’re next door to dead.” Sage was serious, and his flat, hard voice captured the younger man’s attention instantly. “You don’t have to travel far to find enemies this far out in the Systems. And you can make a difference no matter where you are.” That was Mil-speak. He didn’t believe it anymore himself, but the words came to his lips without his even thinking about them. He still wanted to believe them, and he didn’t know if he was being innocent or desperate. It amounted to the same thing, he supposed.

  “Guess not.” Anders rolled his empty bottle between his palms and shot an irritated glance around the bar. “I need another beer. Tomorrow I get dumped planetside on a dropship. The long fall. I hate that ride. Always makes my guts churn. I’d rather not spend my last night here sober.”

  Because he knew he’d spoken gruffly and probably a little harder than the corporal was ready to d
eal with, Sage nodded and placed his empty on the table. “Me neither. This round’s on me.”

  Anders looked around glumly. “Got better service last night, but tonight the bashhounds and corps execs are slumming.”

  The servers had focused on the corp execs and their bashhound security teams. Everyone in the space-station bar knew the private sector had all the big creds. Developers and merchants were making a killing in pharmaceuticals discovered on the planet. They spent cred like water among the little people.

  The bar crowd sat in separate camps. Private enterprise hung on one side of the room and outnumbered the Terran Army soldiers on the other side by nearly three to one.

  Sage watched the two groups while he waited to catch the eye of a passing server. Both camps had uniforms. The Terran military forces sported light and dark green AKTIVsuits meant for disappearing in Makaum’s jungles. DawnStar, Silver Spin, Tri-Cargo, and other corp entities wore a lot of black. The sec teams also wore their guns in shoulder holsters because they went armed all the time.

  The military wasn’t allowed to do that because the space station was built by the private sector, DawnStar Corp to be exact. As a result, the Terran Army was there by invitation, and the invitation meant not having to construct a geosynchronous habitat themselves. The various corps had provided funding to DawnStar, then had taken out long-time leases. According to the rules of engagement, the Terran Army was there as a peacekeeping force to aid in the civil strife racking the planet’s populace. But they were paying a long-term lease as well. Contact with an interstellar species wasn’t going swimmingly on Makaum.

  Less kind observers would say that the Terran military was on Makaum to safeguard corps and their financial investments from hostile elements on the planet. Bashhounds handled personal protection for the execs and regular army maintained law and order. And maybe they protected the planet from the Phrenorians. The Sting-Tails had exhibited interest in the planet on several occasions, and there had been some bloody exchanges.

  Sage turned his attention to the large trid displays behind the bar. The three-dimensional broadcasts showed a football game and an ultimate fighter competition from Terra that were months old. Sage didn’t have any interest in those. He’d seen the football game live back on Terra before he’d been reassigned to Loki 19.

  The other screen showed the verdant planet below, interrupted by documentaries regarding various corps, market interests and advertising. The space station stayed in geosynchronous orbit directly above the large, sprawling urban maze that was Makaum. Only one true city existed on the planet, but dozens of pocket communities existed, barely staying one step ahead of the planet’s predators and the verdant growth that spewed from the jungle and required incineration at least every other day.

  Humans weren’t the dominant species. In fact, humans hadn’t even evolved on the planet naturally and their continued survival had been difficult. The “native” human race comprised the descendants of a generational colony starship that had crash-landed there more than four hundred years ago. The survivors had thrived and established a civilization and now numbered too many to simply relocate. They were an obligation for the Terran Alliance, a target for the Sting-Tails, and a convenient market and cheap labor force for the corps who were after the rich natural resources.

  Jungles consumed the planet to the point that it seemed all the plant life would suck the world dry. However, the oceans ran deep, the rivers and swamps were plentiful and contained myriad botanical marvels, and the northern and southern poles regularly calved glaciers that floated down into the oceans that could be harvested for fresh water. Loki 19 ran according to its own bio clock, and everything that thrived there learned to kill prey while remaining alive. It was an ongoing exercise of Darwin’s Law: survival of the fittest.

  The lack of human or otherwise sentient habitation rendered the planet one fat prize for the corporations that had the capital to invest in the recovery of natural resources. The only fly in the ointment was the spillover from the continuous war with the Phrenorians. The hauls the corps took from Makaum tended to be vulnerable to the Sting-Tail space vessels. The military was on hand to keep the peace and manage assets on the ground and keep the Phrenorians from plopping down illegal planet bases, which translated to making sure they kept their cut of those assets earmarked for military use. That didn’t stop the corps from trying to shortchange Terran military taxes.

  One of the primary exports from the planet was oxygen. Loki 19 was oxygen rich and the starships used fresh oxygen whenever they could get it because scrubbers could only extend oxygen so far. Gypsy traders hauled oxygen out from Loki 19 and traded it to asteroid miners working near Loki 27, the gas giant that kept the Loki system primarily swept of space debris because of its gravitational field. The asteroid belt around Lodestone, as it was known in the vernacular, was thick and rich with heavy metals.

  Sage had fought on jungle worlds before, but he’d never faced anything like Loki 19. On Terra, right after he’d enlisted, he’d fought in South America. His mother had been born in one of those war-torn countries, brought away by his father when he’d been in the Terran military. As a result, Sage’s skin was a rich walnut color, his eyes even darker, and his hair—high and tight—was as black as a raven’s wing. His Norwegian father had given him his size and heft, 195 centimeters and 113 kilos, broad shouldered and narrow waisted.

  One of the serving women shrieked in protest and backed away from a black-suited sec guard, who laughed at her. His friends joined in. Sage watched with interest but hadn’t seen the inciting incident.

  One of the young privates spoke up from a nearby table. “Hey, keep your hands to yourself. The lady’s just here to do her job.”

  Thick bodied and in his late twenties, the bashhound swiveled his gaze to the young private. “Maybe you should keep your nose in your own business, junior.”

  The young private’s face turned red. “Just leave her alone.”

  “You got a crush, junior? Is that it?”

  Sage sat up a little straighter in his chair and shook off some of the effects of the alcohol. He wasn’t sober, but his blood beat a little faster and his body warmed.

  The private turned away from the bashhound.

  Scowling, the bashhound got up from his table and crossed over to the table where the young private sat with two of his buddies. “I’m talking to you, snowflake. You broadcast pretty loud when I was sitting over there. Maybe you aren’t quite as brave up close.”

  Sage waited to see if one of the bashhound’s companions would stand him down. That was what should have happened. There was no need for the situation to turn physical. But they smelled the blood in the air and they were looking forward to it like jackals waiting for a fresh kill.

  “Just calm down.” The petite server was back and made the mistake of stepping between the two men. “Let me buy you a drink, mister.”

  “I don’t want a drink. I want soldier boy here to apologize for raising his voice to me.”

  The server tried to take the man by the arm. Before she could blink, the bashhound slapped her hard enough to make her stumble back. Blood showed at the corner of her mouth and trickled from her nose.

  Anders cursed.

  Sage waited for the bar’s bouncers to do something. But the three men hung back. Either they were afraid of mixing it up with the bashhound or they drew part of their pay from the corp he represented.

  The young private vaulted up from the chair and took up a fighting stance. He didn’t even have his feet set before the bashhound swept his guard away with one hand and punched him in the face with the other. Bone broke with an audible snap and blood rained in droplets over the surrounding area. As the private fell backward, the bashhound stayed on him, hitting him two more times in the face before the private’s friends tried to jump him.

  Moving so swiftly and smoothly that Sage knew at once the man was cybered up, hardwired with programmed reflexes, the bashhound turned and pirouetted on
the ball of his foot. He kicked one soldier in the head and put him down, then caught the other one by the wrist when he threw a punch. Spinning again, the bashhound hurled the soldier over one hip and broke his arm.

  By then Sage was out of his chair and crossing the floor in long strides, blood humming in his temples. He’d never tolerated bullies.

  The bashhound looked at Sage and grinned. “You want something, Grandpa?”

  Sage ignored the insult and stopped just out of the man’s reach. He had maybe fifteen years on the man, not enough to be his grandfather. “I just came to get these men out of harm’s way.”

  “You looking for trouble?”

  Sage stood there, arms at his sides, feet comfortably spread, well balanced. He kept his voice low, nonthreatening and emotionless. “No. Two of these men need an infirmary.”

  “What if I tell you that you can’t have them? Maybe I’m not through with them.”

  Sage didn’t say anything.

  Lost in an alcoholic haze and preening, the bashhound looked back at the table where his friends sat. “Terran mil. Bunch of gutless wonders is what we have here.”

  Taking advantage of the bashhound’s momentary lapse of attention, Sage hammered the man in the side of the neck hard enough to take his breath away. The bashhound stumbled and almost went down, but the cyberware kicked in and kept him upright. He even took another step back and dropped into a crouch as his programming moved him into an attack position.

  The martial arts the bashhound was programmed with needed space to operate. Sage stepped into the man, bumping into his opponent and taking that space away. He headbutted the man in the face, breaking the guy’s nose, then rocked his opponent’s head back with a solid jab that fired off his shoulder, followed it with two more that were on target as well.

  Dazed and nearly unconscious on his feet, the man staggered back, fighting the cyberware now and trying to retreat. That was the problem with the programming: it didn’t let a man think for himself when his faculties were partially off-line. And programming didn’t react to survival instinct or feel pain. Survival became a secondary thing and winning was the only strategy. If that didn’t happen, a programmed warrior died.