Master Sergeant Read online

  “All right, people. Relax.” Terracina dropped his rifle to rest in front of him and stepped out of the shadows. He nodded toward the pile of dead bashhounds. “You killed them. This is your mess to clean up.”

  The alien’s chelicerae twitched and formed an eerie semblance of a smile. Expressions weren’t native to the Phrenorians either, but they’d learned to read those of humans and to mimic them. “Of course.”

  “I’m going to report this.”

  The chelicerae twitched again. “My name is Captain Zhoh GhiCemid of the Brown Spyrl. For your report.”

  Sage studied the alien, marking the creature’s profile and taking in the wound on the left side of his face. That would take time to heal, and by that time—if Zhoh insisted on being around—Sage would know his enemy better. In time, he would get to know them all.

  “Sure.” Terracina waved to his men while he and Sage kept them covered. Once they were safely in the alley, Terracina assigned a pointman and wings and someone to walk slack. He and Sage stayed in the center of the group.

  The Phrenorians ignored the pile of human scrap in the middle of the street and continued on. Reluctantly, Terracina ordered his men to sort out the dead. They took IDs and contraband, and notified the Green Dragon corp before leaving.

  The private walking beside Sergeant Wireman spoke quietly. “So that was Zhoh GhiCemid?” She shook her head. “You ask me, he didn’t look like much.”

  “You’re green, Private. You got a lot of years ahead of you before you can start making calls like that. GhiCemid’s got a rep as a killer. One of the Phrenorians’ top warriors.”

  Sage pulled up the Fort York database and accessed the Phrenorian intel. Zhoh GhiCemid was a known entity. An acknowledged warrior among the Phrenorians and a veteran of several of the bloodiest battles in the war. Sage logged onto a private frequency with Terracina. The files must have been out of date or wrong because they identified GhiCemid as a major. “Did you know GhiCemid was here?”

  “No. But now that we know he is, you can bet a lot of the brass is going to want to know what he’s doing here. We’ve heard about him, but he’s never been on the ground here, or anywhere near Makaum.” Terracina shot Sage a mirthless grin. “Your tour is already looking interesting.”

  “Yeah.” Sage kept focused on the shadows around them as they headed back to the crawler.

  EIGHT

  Enlisted Barracks

  Charlie Company

  Fort York

  Loki 19 (Makaum)

  0308 Hours Zulu Time

  Sage woke before Terracina reached his bunk. They’d assigned him personal quarters in the Quonset hut Charlie Company occupied. His quarters were next door to Terracina’s. For the next few days, they would be sharing an office while Terracina transferred responsibilities over to Sage and managed the transition prior to rotating home.

  “You awake?” Terracina’s voice was calm, controlled, but there was a hint of tension in his words.

  “Yeah.” Sage lay still and didn’t take his hand from the revolver under his pillow.

  “I know it’s just your first night here. Thought about letting you sleep in. Then I considered how maybe you’d be miffed if we rolled without you tonight.”

  The blood sang in Sage’s head. The only thing that had ever made sense to him had been going into battle. Whenever he’d been in combat, he’d felt most alive, felt most sure of himself. Living or dying didn’t leave much room for confusion, and not a lot of missed opportunities. It all played out right there. “I would have been.”

  Terracina grinned in the darkness and his teeth flashed white in the soft glow of lights in the outer room. “How long will it take you to get ready?”

  “Two minutes.” Sage threw his feet over the side of the bed and reached under for the go-bag he kept packed with equipment. Then he was moving, getting prepared to go into the fray with the old rhythm that he would have thought he’d forgotten after being locked down in training for so long.

  God help him, he was looking forward to whatever was going to happen.

  Fort York Military Airport

  0312 Hours Zulu Time

  Dressed in his AKTIVsuit, info flickering across his faceshield as more data dropped into place, Sage jogged toward one of the waiting jumpcopters. His heart beat low and controlled and the air tasted sweeter as he breathed it in. Maybe it was the higher oxygen index onplanet, but he didn’t think so. The doldrums from the long trip sloughed off him and his blood whispered through his veins. He was here to make a difference.

  The boxy aircraft were the mainstay of the Terran military onplanet deployments. Stubby wings equipped with jets to assist in quick takeoffs and firmpoints for an array of armament stuck out on either side of each jumpcopter. Capable of transporting fifty soldiers at a time, or sixteen heavy powersuits that were the equivalent of walking light tanks, the jumpcopters also broadcast continuous power to the AKTIVsuits and the weapons.

  Sage stayed a step behind Terracina, listening to the man bark orders. The troops reacted, but they didn’t have the crispness of combat readiness that Sage would have wanted. He divided his attention between scrambling onto the jumpcopter and pulling up maps of the area Terracina had designated as their destination.

  The target site was 157 klicks from the fort, a 314-klick roundtrip that was comfortably within the jumpcopter’s range. Estimated flight time to the target zone was forty-eight minutes from the time they were airborne.

  Sage glanced around at the men seated on the small transport benches, then spoke on private frequency to Terracina. “Going in heavy.”

  “Intel suggests that this is a big drug lab. Or maybe a biopirate harvesting station.” Terracina glanced at the datafeed juicing through his faceshield. The letters and numbers glowed gently on his features but remained encrypted, indecipherable to anyone viewing them from outside. “Either way, the bad guys put that much hardware on the ground, they’re going to protect it. Out here, we go in hot, ask questions later.”

  Sage nodded and sat back against the throbbing bulkhead. He started going over the terrain maps of the area and felt they were woefully limited. “Lot of undiscovered territory out there.”

  “Trust me. Even if you map an area out in the Green Hell, you can wait a week and go back only to find that everything’s changed. The environment constantly develops and shifts. This planet is one big stewpot of vicious plant, insect, and reptile life-forms that takes no prisoners. Some new species of tree or brush or grass or foliage can crop up and kill out the other plants—or us. And that’s without the offplanet stuff tracked in by the corps and the pirates causing all kinds of hybridizations and mutations with the work they’re doing.”

  The jumpcopter shuddered as the engines powered up, then it leaped into the air with screaming jets. Sage felt like he’d gained thirty or forty kilos, then the pressure lifted as the jumpcopter leveled off. He flicked onto the command frequency allowed in his helmet and streamed in the audio and visual feeds from the jumpcopter and the three scout drones that searched the territory ahead of the craft.

  The jungle below them passed in a haze of dark greens and ochre steeped in dark shadows. Leaves and branches swayed beneath the jumpcopter’s whirling rotors, looking like ripples spreading across the surface of an ocean.

  Sage leaned back and waited, mesmerized by the wealth of trees that paraded across his faceshield. It was no wonder the planet was so oxygen rich or that mineral strikes were turning up veins of iron and other precious metals that could be used to manufacture weapons and vehicles on asteroid-based plants. Makaum was a deadly paradise. All the Terrans or Phrenorians had to do was get those resources offplanet to make a fortune.

  Or to supply a war.

  West-southwest of Makaum City

  0356 Zulu Time

  The jumpcopters made good time, beating the ETA by a few minutes. The pilot kept the craft low, barely skirting the tops of the tallest trees as she closed in on the target site. Dronecraft ahead of
the jumpcopters streaked through the airspace above the lab area and sent back video, audio, and radar scans.

  Sage flicked through the drone data streaming to the jumpcopter, assessing the images quickly. Ramshackle prefab buildings blended into the surrounding jungle, almost absorbed by the encroaching vegetation. Several trails snaked through the jungle and showed bare patches of ground that were the result of defoliants. However, even those were starting to be reclaimed by the verdant growth.

  The main building that Sage could see measured one hundred meters by forty meters, but he was certain more structures or huts for personnel existed under the fringe of the trees.

  There was no sign of vehicles, and that was the second thing that alerted Sage to the trap. The first was that innate sense of his that always came to life on the battlefield. Whenever something wasn’t quite right, even before he could identify what was wrong, unease drifted over him and pricked at the nape of his neck, putting him on alert.

  “Break off the approach.” Sage spoke over the private link he had to Terracina, unable to communicate directly with the jumpcopter pilots.

  Terracina turned his head to look at him, but he was already giving the order. Confusion knotted his eyebrows. “Pull up. All aircraft, pull up.” He focused on Sage and used their private link. “What’s wrong?”

  Sage was going to point out that no thermal signatures had registered on the drones’ sensors, that nothing human was there, and that the lab was a ghost town and probably bait in a trap. He’d figured out that much by then.

  But that was when the surface-to-air missile slammed into the jumpcopter and turned the world into whirling maelstrom of cracking thunder and fiery lightning. The aircraft’s warning systems had flared red, sending the same warning lights into Sage’s helmet. He’d prepared himself for the hit, knowing they were vulnerable.

  Knocked on its axis by the blast, the jumpcopter flipped end over end at least twice by Sage’s estimation, the ablative armor plating holding together and responding with counter-explosives to absorb part of the missile strike. His senses whirled, cotton filled his ears from the multiple detonations despite the helmet’s dampening program, and the feeling of free-falling spiraled in his stomach.

  Sage held onto the restraining straps and planted his boots solidly to brace his back against the hull. Some of the soldiers slid free of the restraints and dangled by straps or slammed into other soldiers or the floor or ceiling of the jumpcopter.

  The aircraft jerked and shuddered as the pilots fired the jets in an effort to gain control of the rotation. A moment later, the jumpcopter stopped spinning and went into another minor free fall that made Sage think they were about to crash. Instead, the fall halted at the end of fifteen or twenty meters and the craft sprang back like a yo-yo at the end of a string.

  Terracina cursed and freed himself from his restraints. He brought his rifle up and charged for the cargo door at the back of the jumpcopter.

  Shrugging free of his restraints, Sage followed the sergeant across the slanted floor. Soldiers fought free of the benches to join them. Several of them were panicked, filling the commlink with useless chatter.

  “What’s going on?” Sage cycled into the jumpcopter’s external cams and pulled up images that flickered through his faceshield.

  “We hit a web.” Curling his left hand into a fist, Terracina banged the cargo hatch’s release button.

  Servos cranked into motion with pneumatic hisses and the cargo door fell open, but only partially. Something held the door tilted at a sharp angle.

  The darkness outside the jumpcopter made vision difficult. If they’d lit up the aircraft, they’d have been spotlighted for their attackers. The drones were already buzzing around, tracking enemy fire back to their origins and marking the spots. Barely visible, the strands of the massive orb web that had caught the jumpcopter came into view.

  Spiders on Makaum were huge. Sage had read that. However, the reading—even the video—hadn’t prepared him for the creatures’ immensity. At the far end of the web, the arachnid scrambled forward, causing the web to dance under its weight. The spider was fifteen meters across, from front legs to rear legs, and almost that wide. Stiff, coarse hair covered the reddish black body as well as the inky black legs. Yellow-green ichor pearled on the mandibles in the moonslight. The spiders, called kifrik in the Makaum language, carried deadly, paralytic venom that could down a man in less than twenty seconds. If an antivenin wasn’t delivered, the victim’s lungs stopped working and he suffocated within minutes. Provided the spider didn’t crack open the AKTIVsuit and drain him dry before he expired.

  Shifting on the treacherous web, Sage brought the gauss rifle to his shoulder and aimed at the kifrik’s center mass. He pulled the trigger and the accelerated uranium round struck the creature’s abdomen just beneath the quivering mandibles and tore through. The kifrik staggered only for an instant, then lunged forward again.

  Sage fired once more and watched as smoke rose from the half-meter-wide wound. The kifrik gathered its limbs and sprang, leaping over Sage and Terracina to land on the jumpcopter lying half on its side. Bending down, the predator grabbed a soldier by her head and shoulders with one of its front legs, then caught another soldier by his left arm with the other.

  Swiveling, Sage fired again, scoring another hit but not doing any appreciable damage because the spider continued its attack undeterred. Slinging the gauss rifle as the kifrik sank its fangs in the first soldier’s body, Sage drew the .500 Magnum and aimed at the spider’s head.

  The smartlink built into the Magnum’s butt connected with the helmet’s targeting system and a silver reticle formed on the faceshield. Sage fired quickly, sending all five hollow point rounds into the kifrik’s face, shattering the exoskeleton and pulping the head.

  The kifrik shuddered, then sagged and went limp atop the jumpcopter. The soldier held by his arm tumbled free, tried to get up, and fell through the widely spaced web strands. As he plummeted into the leafy darkness below, the man’s screams echoed through the commlink.

  Balancing on the crossed strands of the web, Sage shook the empty brass from the .500 Magnum, refilled the chambers with a Speedloader, and leathered the pistol. He pulled the gauss rifle into his arms again and looked at Terracina. “Do they come one to a web? Or do they have bunk buddies?”

  “One web, one spider. Like back on Terra.” Terracina cursed and knelt by the injured soldier lying under the collapsed spider. She wasn’t moving. As soon as Terracina touched her, her stats flowed into his data, then into Sage’s.

  Her heart and respiration had crashed. Terracina reached into the medpack he carried and pulled out a slap patch filled with antivenin. He slid the woman’s helmet off as a rocket flared through the sky and took out another of the jumpcopters. Flaming soldiers blew free of the stricken aircraft, arms and legs pinwheeling as frantic cries filled the frequency. Terracina applied the slap patch to the woman’s neck.

  Sage pulled up the datafeed streaming from the drones. Suspended ninety-three meters above the jungle floor, the soldiers on the web were sitting ducks for the ambush team swarming through brush below. He roared orders. “Get lines out of the jumpcopter. We need to get down on the deck. Now.”

  The soldiers reacted slowly, trying to figure out who was supposed to take charge. Sage realized they hadn’t been prepared for extraction teams or triage effort. Their attention was divided between the ambushers closing in on them, the dead kifrik, salvaging the supplies in the jumpcopter, and the soldiers that had been injured during the landing.

  Sage strode forward, picking out individual soldiers’ names from the datapack that had been dumped into his helmet. Some had been trained as combat medics and others had been through survival training that included rappelling.

  The antivenin slap patch didn’t stop the poison. The venom-stricken soldier’s KIA status blinked into place on Sage’s HUD, accompanied by several others.

  Terracina abandoned the dead soldier and turned his
attention to the survivors. He bellowed orders, calling on many of the soldiers who he’d identified from the intel he had. “Schaub, get your unit together. Lay down suppressive fire. Hoyer, evacuate those jumpcopter supplies. Dasgupta, get the wounded clear of this web.”

  The team knew what to do, but the training wasn’t second nature, the way it should have been. Sage watched the jungle, knowing that whoever had attacked them wasn’t just going to walk away when they were exposed.

  Then a jumppak-equipped enemy rose up out of the darkness and targeted Terracina with a rocket launcher. Sage’s HUD screamed the alert, but he was almost out in front of it, alerted by his own visual, already tracking the attack.

  Wheeling with his rifle, Sage took aim and put three gauss bursts into the man’s face, burning through the lightweight armor with the first two and cooking the man’s brain with the third. Jumppaks were designed for individuals, snipers with minimal armor.

  Out of control, the jumppak-assisted corpse shot skyward briefly before being targeted by the jumpcopter’s AI-driven onboard machine guns. Seven-point-sixty-two millimeter rounds shredded the dead man’s body and blew up the jumppak in a bright blister of yellow-white flame.

  Terracina staggered back as the initial rocket blast knocked him backward. He slipped through the web strands and fell, but somehow managed to grab hold with one hand. The AKTIVsuit augmented his strength and helped him hold on, but he dangled helplessly, unable to recover. His biometric readouts revealed he’d been grievously wounded and couldn’t be coherently tracking.

  A nearby soldier crossed over to Terracina and reached down. “I got you, Top. I got you.” The soldier’s voice sounded young and scared.

  As Terracina turned his head to look up, Sage spotted the pitted damage left from the first explosion, but he also spotted the glistening four-millimeter tube that had penetrated the sergeant’s faceshield and bloody cheek. The rocket had been a sabot, designed with a secondary charge meant to breach the armor and deliver a lethal finish to the soldier inside the suit. Somehow the faceshield had managed to prevent full penetration.