Soldier

by David Ryker

  Soldier

  Iron Legion | Book 2

  David Ryker

  Daniel Morgan

  Ryker’s Rogues

  Contents

  Available Now

  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

  Available Now

  Available Now

  Check out all the other titles currently available in the Iron Legion series, and download your FREE copy of the Iron Legion Novella, Veteran!

  But that’s not all, if you’re a fan of military science fiction, why not check out my other series, Fugitive Marines, co-written with Douglas Scott. It’s the A-Team, in space, and the first three books are available now!

  Iron Legion

  Veteran - Get your free copy

  Recruit - Book 1

  Soldier - Book 2

  Fugitive Marines

  Framed - Prequel

  Breakout - Book 1

  Wanted - Book 2

  Lockdown - Book 3

  Prologue

  Just hours after the remainder of the Free resistance had been quashed at their base of operations on Draven, the cavalry arrived. I stared up at it, a tiny rowboat in the vast ocean of blue sky, and grappled with the fact that we might be obliterated at any moment.

  The FS Oberon Mansoon was a Class 2 Federation Destroyer, and was one of the newest and most deadly ships in the Federation’s Galactic Armada.

  It was over seven hundred and fifty meters long and was armed with enough firepower to lay waste to a planet without breaking a sweat. Railguns. Nuclear warheads. EM Pulse Rays. Gravity Cannons. There wasn’t a ship or base in the universe that could stand up to it, and as such, it roved space like a shark, swimming lazily through the endless darkness as everything else scurried out of its path. It’d been on patrol a couple systems over when the call came in about the Regent Falmouth and Draven.

  It had just so happened, though, that despite moving pretty slowly most of the time, all things considered, should the need arise, it was capable of wormhole traversal. The amount of energy required to create a tear in the fabric of space was far too large for smaller vessels, but the Oberon Mansoon was just the right size to create one, slip through, and then obliterate whatever it was that it had come to obliterate — and had Acting Commander Annelise Volchec not been among the survivors of the attack on the Regent Falmouth above Draven, and able to broadcast from the Free’s base using her encrypted authentication code, instructing the incoming FS Oberon Mansoon of the current situation — that would have been us, along with about two hundred kilometers in every direction, you know, just to make sure.

  But she was, and it hadn’t. And as we stared up at the minute flash in the clear blue sky that denoted the arrival of the Federation destroyer, Alice’s hand in mine, our jaws set, breathing slowly, standing on the tarmac of the Free base’s main runway, surrounded by more than a thousand Free soldiers, waiting for an impending strike, we watched it drift in the sea of pale blue, no more than a white speck in the distance. My grip tightened on hers, my heart humming in my chest. We’d see a cannon glow first, then feel the heat, and then there’d be nothing. There was nothing to be done, and there was a certain serenity in that. I turned my head and looked at her, eyes full and shining in the morning sun, and I felt okay with it.

  It hung there like a distant blip, tiny in the distance, drifting. The captured Free soldiers all sat solemnly in rows, with Federation rifles trained on their backs as we waited for the hit to come, all wondering if she’d get through in time, or if we’d all be turned to dust where we stood.

  Minutes passed, our hands locked together, and slowly, people started to talk. The silence faded and the blip became less ominous. If it was going to strike, it would have by now. Volchec must have reached them.

  I sighed and Alice and I looked at each other, relief washing over us. She put her arms around my neck and squeezed. I laced mine around her ribs and pressed my face into her shoulder.

  We were going to be okay, we knew that then. What we didn’t know was that that moment was going to change everything for us, setting us down a path from which there was no return. But in that instant, it didn’t matter. Nothing else mattered.

  1

  Two days later…

  “Knock, knock,” I said quietly, tapping on the doorframe of room 202 on the Oberon Mansoon’s Medical Deck.

  Everett looked at me from the hospital bed and smiled, her mouth half obscured by the reconstructive webbing laid across her face. “Maddox,” she croaked, throat raw from the smoke inhalation. She looked beaten up, all the youthful hardness she’d worn so proudly before now stripped away. There was none of the quiet confidence, or the reserved power. She lay there in the bed, hair burnt down to the scalp, one eye obscured, the other bloodshot and swollen, various body parts in differing states of disrepair. A broken leg, a dislocated shoulder, a crushed tibia on the left side, a shattered ulna on the right. A punctured lung, perforated eardrums, ruptured spleen. The doctor told me that she wasn’t lucky to be alive, but that it was simply unbelievable. She’d been pulled from the wreckage of a dropship that had been shot down making a run for the surface. Those who survived said that she’d rounded up as many recruits and ground troops as she could and organized an escape, piloting the dropship herself. That sounded like her, even if this didn’t look like her. I took solace in that and forced down the lump in my throat as I stepped in, keeping my cheeks locked in a forced smile. She’d supposedly told everyone to bail out as she made an attempt to lure the ships giving chase away, and had then been shot down. When the troops got down, they made for the crash site and pulled her out, doing what they could to stabilize her. The doctor said that he’d never seen anyone cling to life so aggressively, and that it was nothing short of superhuman. I thought it was an odd choice of words, but I didn’t say anything. The medical droid assisting him had a more pragmatic answer: that those who provided first aid did a remarkable job of treating her immediate wounds and keeping her sedated until real medical help arrived.

  Whatever the reasons for her living were, I couldn’t help but feel glad to see her. “Everett,” I said, grinning. I stepped into the room in full Federation dress, ready for our meeting with Commander Volchec and General Greenway — the acting commander during the attack, and some stuffy Federation general flown in to oversee the aftermath of what was proving to be one of the largest tragedies in recent Federation history. But I couldn’t not stop in first. It’d been a few days since we’d been brought aboard the Mansoon, and things were cramped, to say the least. I was glad to get out of my room. They were already running with a full crew, and taking on another thousand soldiers was making things snug.

  “Where are you going, all dressed up?” She coughed hoarsely and winced.

  I took my dress cap off and smirked. If I’d have thought that she would have listened I would have told her not to talk — to conserve her strength, and rest, but if she’d come through what she came through, I doubted she would roll over that easy on my word. “We’ve been called in to sit down with Greenway and Volchec.”

  “Parker Greenway?” She raised what was left of her right eyebrow. �
��What’s he doing onboard the…” She looked around, eyes bleary from the pain meds. “What’s this ship called?”

  “The Oberon Mansoon.”

  She swallowed with difficulty. “Right. It’s under the command of…”

  “Admiral Hodge.” I supplied her with the answer.

  “I knew that,” she croaked, narrowing her good eye at me.

  I smiled and nodded. “I know.” I turned my hat between my hands and sighed. “I wanted to call in and see how you were doing. When things got crazy, I was—”

  She flicked the fingers on her right hand, unable to lift it. “You owed me nothing. We all did what we could.” She shuddered and tried to move in bed. I moved forward but she flicked her fingers again. “I can do it.”

  I nodded and pulled in a slow breath, willing myself not to look away. She was a goddamn mess and it twisted my guts up to see her like this. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

  She tried to laugh but whimpered instead. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “Doc says you’re going to make a full recovery.”

  “Maybe. But then what? I won’t go back to active duty,” she sighed, dropping to a sullen mutter. “They’ll throw me behind a desk, or discharge me altogether.”

  “Honorably.”

  “Forcibly.”

  I swallowed. “You don’t want out?”

  “This is my life.” She turned her head and looked away, her voice thin. “Without it…”

  I looked down to see that I’d screwed my hat into a gnarled mess. Silence hung in the sterile air. The plastic flowers that sat in the corner of the white room on the unit there glowed brightly in colors too violent to be real. I didn’t finish her sentence this time. I didn’t know how to and felt like anything I added would just be a platitude.

  “I have to go,” I said after a while. “But I’ll check in on you when I can.”

  She didn’t reply, and I could tell that the moment I left, she’d let out a sob. She looked pained holding it back as long as she was.

  “It was good to see you, Everett. I’m glad you’re alive.”

  “Demeter,” she half whispered. “My name’s Demeter.”

  I let a smile settle on my lips. “Alright. Demeter.”

  I stepped onto the Fourth Officer’s Deck and into a regal-looking room adorned with pictures of famed Federation admirals, all of whom had presided over their own destroyer or warship, had committed heroic deeds or acts of genocide, or both, depending on what side you were on. They seemed to be one and the same most of the time.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Alice asked, standing up from the chair next to a tall set of dark wooden double doors.

  I pulled my crumpled cap on. “Called in to see an old friend,” I said, smiling. They didn’t know Everett, so there was no point saying her name, and I didn’t really want to get into it just then. I wasn’t sure if Mac had asked me if I would have responded the same way. I shook that thought off and broadened my grin.

  She narrowed her eyes at me and flexed them, wondering who the hell I meant, because she thought I didn’t have any. “Just be glad they haven’t called us in yet. If they had, and you hadn’t been here, we’d be screwed already.”

  She headed back to the chair and slumped down. Mac moved his arm out of the way so she didn’t knock him with her elbow as she did, and then grumbled under his breath. He looked bored and more than a little pissed off. He had his arms folded, his rusty-colored hair recently shaved on the sides, and his mouth set in a wide grimace. He was miserable at best, but a good guy who’d laid it all down on Draven. I had a lot of respect for him for that, even if he was a chronic complainer. Fish, on the other hand, sitting one seat to the left, was stoic, picking at his teeth with one of his hooked nails. His orb-like eyes stared into the opposite wall and he made no attempt to look up at me. I didn’t take it personally, though. That was just Eshellites for you.

  “This is horseshit,” Mac muttered, shaking his head. “They’re going to give us disciplinaries for risking our rigs, I know it.”

  Alice rolled her eyes and sighed, staring at me like she was annoyed I’d left her with the two of them — the cynic and the mute fish-man. She seemed prickly. More so than usual. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Maybe we were just out of sync. In truth, I’d not seen any of them for two days, and the last time I had, we were all waiting to be obliterated. When we’d come aboard, we’d been split up. Mac, unscathed and of a higher rank than us, had been directed to one of the upper decks. Alice and I had been taken to Medical to get checked out. By the time they were done putting my forehead back together, she was gone. I was told by the droid on the desk that she’d been given her quarters and had headed up with a course of painkillers and orders to rest her knee, and, like all Federation vessels, quarters weren’t co-ed. She hadn’t waited for me, so I assumed she wanted some space. Chasing after her might have seemed desperate.

  The Mansoon wasn’t a training ship, so there were no recruits — no classes, no dormitories or separate training decks. Hell, this wasn’t a troop carrier at all. There was no hangar, no launch pads, no mech, and no Mech Corps. The carriers that ferried the troops around were stacked to the rafters with soldiers to launch and mech to drop, but destroyers were filled with crewmen, manning the guns and weaponry from right here onboard. It was a different world, a different type of warfare. A different experience.

  My cabin was a solid steel box with a double bunk and a sink, and that was it. I’d been thrown in with a human who’d survived the crash, too, but he was far from talkative and spent next to no time in there. I’d barely seen him, or anyone. I’d tried to introduce myself, but he’d just grunted and then ignored me. I didn’t make any more attempts after that.

  They weren’t standing on ceremony, and all guest-crew, which meant the survivors, were on indefinite leave until we could be transferred to an appropriate vessel, though no one could say where or when that would be. In the meantime, we were all instructed to write a report recounting what had happened leading up to the attack, and then following it. Mine had run into quite a few pages, considering all that had happened, and had dominated most of my cabin-time.

  I’d tried to look for Alice when I wasn’t writing but couldn’t find her. Our old ship, the Regent Falmouth, was a sprawling mess of corridors and levels, but I’d never appreciated how spacious and well signposted they were until I found myself fumbling through tight pipe-laden tunnels and up and down ladders. What the Mansoon made up for in firepower and ferocity, it certainly lacked in creature comforts.

  “Red,” Alice said, snapping me out of the daydream.

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you going to sit down, or just stand there with that stupid look on your face?” She was wringing her hands nervously. She was on edge. I could tell she thought something bad was coming our way. The big bad Federation brass didn’t like people acting on their own accord — that being without explicitly approved orders. It showed that they could think for themselves, and that scared them more than a little.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but before any sound came out, the door opened and Volchec stuck her close-cropped head out. She looked from Alice to me and back and then motioned us in. It was the first time I’d ever seen her, and I’d only heard her voice once — strained and scared and yet comforting in those moments over the airwaves on the Falmouth, telling us to abandon ship. I didn’t know why — I thought she’d be taller.

  Alice went first, followed by me. Mac trailed after and Fish brought up the rear.

  Volchec circled the desk and stood at the left of the guy we had to assume was Greenway. We were in Hodge’s office, as he was acting admiral of the Mansoon, but Greenway had taken it over, along with a team of yes men who’d arrived the day after we’d been brought aboard from the surface. Volchec had assumed command of the Regent Falmouth when it had been attacked following the death of Commander Yang in one of the initial waves. But she was actually third in command before it happened
, second to a guy called Fennick, who’d also been killed while making for the bridge. She’d ordered the evacuation, but of course, like everything the Federation did, there had to be a paper trail — proper channels and all that shit. Greenway was one of the Federation’s top brass, and had been sent out on a Federation transport vessel to assess the situation and the field reports to see whether anyone was at fault for the attack, the lack of defense, and ultimately the wreck of the Falmouth. The Mansoon was orbiting Draven until such time as he was satisfied, and then it would go back to cruising space looking for unsuspecting prey.

  He’d been trying to sort out everything, and apparently, only after two full days at it, had he come to a report that outlined how two pilots and two recruits mounted a land-assault on a Free base of operations with no more than four Federation Mechs, no ground forces, and next to no intel, risking not only their own lives, but also around twenty million credits worth of Federation machinery — and all without sanction from an officer. I had my hands clenched behind my back, wondering if they were going to throw the book at us, and if so how they could justify it considering how many lives we’d saved.

  He stared up at us over thin glasses, report quivering in his hands, jowls hanging from his lined cheeks like old testicles. Volchec stood beside him, slim and short, but built like a boxer with low shoulders and an athletic physique. Her dark skin was smooth, the sides of her head shaved and the top cut short and scraped back. She looked indifferently over my right shoulder, not making eye contact with any of us while Greenway breathed and sighed his way into his monologue. I could see she’d already been reprimanded. It was plain to see on her face. That didn’t bode well for us.