by Jack Colrain
But Earth’s landscape lies scored by destruction after the most recent round of alien attacks, and humanity is still vulnerable.
Lieutenant Daniel West understands this, which is why his recruits are the most highly trained the military puts out—regardless of the physical and mental costs it takes to make them that way. Any soldier in the newly created Special Warfare Task Force must plan and prepare for every possible scenario.
After all, the return of the Gresians isn’t just inevitable. It’s imminent.
Assigned to the United Earth Ship Shenzhen, Daniel is chosen to command a platoon to protect a team of elite colonists traveling to LTT-8270. But it isn’t until their arrival that the true mission becomes evident, and Daniel discovers an even more horrifying truth. One that will make him question whether humanity’s survival will come at too high a cost…
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EXCERPT
Chapter One
PFC Mary Jefferson could hear movement out among the trees. It was largely muffled by the gentle hiss of rain and the water dripping from leaves and branches, but it was there. The OpFor were trying to hide their numbers and direction.
She turned to Sergeant Charles Cory, wondering what he thought they were up to, but Cory put a finger to his lips. On the far side of a metaled road glistening with surface water, the forest sloped away from a ditch filled with overgrown bramble-like strands of some kind. The growth looked like rusty barbed wire, and Mary felt sure it would hurt just as much if she tried to get through it.
A thunderclap shook the trees, and what started off sounding like an explosion somehow didn’t end like one. It kept going, a steady deafening roar. Smoke rose beyond the Maglev line a couple of hundred meters beyond the road. Something was blazing up there, throwing the high-gain antennae on top of the terminal into stark relief. As she watched, a large surface-to-air missile hauled itself into the sky.
“Bravo Team, Alpha Actual,” Lieutenant Benjamin Wiesniewksi’s voice came over the comms, barely audible even in Jefferson’s earpiece over the roar of the launch. “Proceed to RP Two. Use the noise.”
“Copy,” Cory sent back, and he gestured to Jefferson and the other soldiers with him, stabbing a hand in the direction of the rally point. One of the soldiers scrambled along beside him, and pointed. ‘It’s over there, Sarge. About forty meters.’
“Good eyes, kid.” Cory signaled to a couple of other soldiers. “Hodge, get word back to the COB. Give ‘em the map reference and tell them Tango Site is active and firing at high altitude targets, and we need more support. A couple of gunbirds would be nice.”
“Right, Sarge,” a voice replied quietly. Jefferson thought the conversation had been quiet enough to be safe, but she was wrong. The distinctive clatter of AK-fire burst from among the trees without warning, full-auto rounds blasting splinters from trees with some burying themselves in the ground. All six soldiers in the squad flung themselves into cover. A couple of the soldiers yelled in pain and Mary felt something slash across her leg with searing heat. Two of the soldiers rose to their knees to return fire toward where they thought the shots had come from.
The shouts were audible even over the crack of rifle fire. Suddenly, they came out of the woods. There were two indistinct, dark figures, like semi-transparent walking smudges of soot and oil that were largely hidden by leaves and rain, and hard to keep one’s eyes on. Mary flung herself into the mud and brambles as shots cracked overhead, snapping branches. She could hear Sergeant Cory and some of the other soldiers in her cadre. Not for the first time in her career, she wished she had a different weapon, something other than an M110 sniper rifle. At least the real soldiers could shoot back from where they were; she needed a good vantage point, or a tougher weapon with a larger magazine. That said, the M110 had auto capability, so she flipped it to three-round bursts and took aim at the smoke-like head of the first figure. She fired, putting three rounds neatly through her targeted head. The figure stumbled, fell bloodlessly, and moved no more.
In return, a burst of assault rifle fire chewed up a log next to her head while another SAM rocket launched itself into the sky. Suddenly, a hand grabbed Mary’s collar and dragged her to her feet. She twisted her arm around her assailant’s, and was halfway to completing the move that would dislocate his arm when she realized it was Cory. The sturdy sergeant pushed her forward. “Come on; they’re flanking us! Let’s do it back to them.”
Another figure of grey-black haze dropped to the ground in front of them, raising an arm that was wrapped in a sheath of glistening technology and had long rails protruding forward of a spiked ruff around the wrist. It was too close to bring such a long weapon to bear, and Mary was too close to stop in time, and so both of them tumbled to the ground. Being shorter gave Mary a slight advantage in using aikido to throw the figure off balance—it may have looked insubstantial, but was thoroughly solid to the touch. The figure bounced into a clump of nettles, and Mary drew her M92F sidearm and shot it twice in the head.
The figure lay still, flickering slightly in the rain. No wound showed in its head, but then, no face or features showed, either. What the hell had she got herself into?
Rapid fire passed over Lieutenant Wiesniewski’s head with very little sound as he gasped for breath in the shelter of a fallen tree. All around, the rest of the squad returned fire. Not that their M27s would do any good against the emplacements built into the far side of the launch bunker, but at least they’d discourage any enemy personnel from venturing outside. So he hoped, anyway.
His sodden uniform had long since lost its ability to wick water away, and he wondered if the enemy had the same issues with their gear. He also wondered where Cory’s team had gotten to. Wiesniewski risked a look over the fallen trunk. Cahill, Jonas, and Dexter were crouched in the hundred-foot strip of open ground that separated the edge of the woods from the enemy position. Wade hadn’t even gotten that far; he was holding his breath while one of the shade-like figures on patrol prowled around the truck he lay sprawled beneath.
Wiesniewski sighted on the blurry figure, and gave it a two-second burst from his Squad Automatic Weapon. It was quick, leaping atop the truck in time to avoid his’ fire, but in the process it left itself open for Wade to slide out from below and fire a burst up the length of its spine. It fell, bloodlessly and insubstantially.
As Wiesniewski fumbled for a new box for his SAW, someone fired a 40mm grenade at the bunker doorway, but the ground was too wet to bounce it far enough and it exploded several yards short. The enemy fire didn’t let up, and further bolts tore at the branches around Wiesniewski as Calvin Harris dived into cover beside him. “Any luck from the other side of the slope?”
Harris shook his head. “The road’s mined, L-T. We’d never get round that way.”
“Damn.”
On a bank of flat-screen monitors, the squads were being tracked by camera drones, with each soldier’s identity flagged by telemetry from their Exo-suits. When they vanished under cover or were otherwise not directly visible, the marker tags remained on screen, revealing their positions. Other tags marked the positions and movements of opposition forces on patrol around the target zone, though no such figures appeared in the drones’ camera views even when they were flagged as walking around on the open roof of the
simple, squat, flat-roofed bunker. It had no decoration bar, and a safety rail just high enough to prevent anyone from toppling off the edge.
Lieutenant Daniel West watched, his head slightly cocked, as the two squads—six soldiers in each—made their way towards the bunker from two different directions.
He was six feet tall, and as athletic as anyone would expect a young officer to be. His brown hair was regulation length, though he eschewed a clear part, while his eyes were green. Beside him sat an ebony-skinned, thick-set Sergeant, Jackson Stewart, who was a couple of inches shorter than Daniel, but had twenty pounds on him, all of it muscle. A couple of twidgets—the t
echnicians who ran the computers and sensors—were there, too, but paying more attention to the instruments than to the screens. In particular, they paid attention to a pair of slate-gray cubes at the center of the room. These were familiar to Daniel as Mozari Library computers, and they were networked into the PCs and monitors surrounding the room.
“They’re not gonna make it,” Stewart said. “Splitting their force was a good plan, but now that the bad guys are wise to them... Divide and conquer. They’re boned.”
“If they can lure the guards out, they can deal with them in a crossfire, one or two at a time.”
“Yes, sir. But ten to’ one that they don’t. Unless you want to call them and tell them to do that.” Daniel merely furrowed his brow, his left foot jiggling and tapping on the floor as he focused on the screens.
Cory and Jefferson darted out from the trees, angling left in hopes of getting to the easternmost launch bunker while the guards were occupied with Wiesniewski’s squad. They moved as quietly as they could, zipping through the woods almost as quickly and silently as their enemies.
Cory kept glancing around, watching for any sign of the shadowy opposition, while Jefferson kept her focus on the bunker ahead. They leapt across a small stream in a movement that needed little effort as they gravitated across to the opposite bank. Jefferson was just thinking how good it felt, and how they were surely about to reach their objective unseen, when an AK clattered and she felt a rapid beat of sudden thuds against her breastbone; it knocked the breath from her. She fell back uncomfortably just as Cory turned to the side and fired back at the blurred motion sweeping around them in a wide curve. It fell, and then Cory was kneeling over her.
“You OK?” he asked.
She sat up, wincing a little but otherwise unharmed. She patted her chest. “A little winded, but the suit is holding up fine.” She opened one button on her battledress, checking that the Mozari-designed Exo-suit she wore was indeed undamaged, and would have been repairing her if necessary. She couldn’t help letting out an exultant breath, the adrenaline giving her an almost inappropriate rush. Nothing felt so good as not quite dying. “It feels good to be an superhero.”
Cory sat back into a crouch. “That’s a thought, Private. That’s a thought...”
“What is?”
“Invulnerability...” He used his own suit to activate his comms, and quietly called, “Bravo Actual for Alpha Actual...”
Camp Peary, VA.
The day had started much more quietly, before sun-up. The platoon had been assembled at 05:00 for a briefing in the back of a deuce-and-a-half six-wheeled truck. There, Lieutenant West and Sergeant Stewart had brought up a map and satellite image on a tablet computer, taking them through recon pictures of the facility to which they were now getting so close.
Wiesniewski and Cory had pored over the images, sharing them with their squads as West had explained the situation. “Your mission objective is this SAM launch complex. The launch control bunker is heavily fortified, with the launcher systems themselves in three ancillary emplacements adjoining the control center. You’ll recognize the control bunker by the high-gain antennae and tracking radar antennae on the roof. The complex is not unguarded, of course, so there is an OpFor. There are appropriate black-hat troops for a SAM site, both on duty at the site and with sentries around the perimeter, as well as the three ancillary bunkers. The SAM launchers are easily capable of knocking down a shuttle on a descent path from orbit, so Helos bringing in additional troop deployments in this scenario would be easy prey to them. Victory conditions are the destruction of the three launchers and either the destruction or securing of the central control bunker.”
Lieutenant Calvin Harris, a balding man of average height and fit build, had raised a hand. “Can’t we call in a Wild Weasel strike with HARM missiles to take out the bunker at stand-off?”
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BLURB
911 operator Jim Parker wants—more than anything—to be useful again. When a catastrophic EMP strikes, and he’s the last person a kidnapped girl speaks to before the lines go dead, he knows he can’t let her down. Especially when the circumstances are so similar to his own daughter’s disappearance. With the world falling apart around him, he wants to do nothing more than retreat to his prepper cabin. But with a fresh lead on his daughter, and another innocent girl’s life on the line, the disgraced cop will do everything in his power to track them down.
Finn Meyers has lost Ava, her best, and only, friend in the world, but she knows where the missing young woman might be—and perhaps Parker’s long lost daughter. Now, Parker must form an uneasy alliance and tackle his own internal demons as the two begin a perilous journey that will take them to the headquarters of a mysterious cult in Indiana.
But what they find along the way will shatter all their preconceptions—and threaten the world as they know it. Can a has-been and a has-not save the innocent, and stop a disaster from happening?
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EXCERPT
CHAPTER 1
Southern Indiana, 2306 hours
Countdown: 25 seconds until Event.
James Parker rubbed the sandy grit out of his eyes and stared at the monitors in front of him. Three screens—low light, supposedly easy on the eyes—sat at his station along with a computer, telephone, and emergency communications radio. He was suffering from a hangover headache pounding dully behind his temples, and it hurt to use his eyes, even in such dim lighting.
His hand, big and calloused, massaged a five o’clock shadow rapidly heading towards full-on homeless scruff. He wanted another Vicodin, but had promised himself not to take too many at work. Mostly, he kept that promise. Mostly.
The light in the room was muted, more a soft ambience with the illumination designed to be easy on an operator’s eyes, and the soft glow of computers reflected like silvered mirrors from each station. From all around him, the white noise of the call center was a light murmur of background conversations punctuated by the alerts of incoming calls. Parker leaned back in his comfortable chair and eyed the clock.
Fifteen minutes to quitting time.
He lifted a hand to Kevin Oaks in a lazy gesture of greeting as the man, his relief, came in through the door of the “vault” and meandered towards the coffee maker on the table in the corner.
Right behind him, though, Parker’s supervisor Annie Klein burst through the door, resembling a squat lead ball fired from a musket. An old, not well taken care of musket. Her arms, pudgy bowling pins topped by raptor claws of fingers, clutched her iPhone and a thick pile of official manila folders.
Avoiding eye contact, Parker sat up and spun around to more fully face his row of monitors. His conversations with the indefatigable Ms. Klein inevitably ended in a poor fashion. He’d already earned two written warnings for insubordination, and HR had informed the union that he was currently under investigation. Yay.
He couldn’t afford to lose another job. His pension and retirement benefits were closely tied to his employment with the city. After how he’d left the department, getting fired from this job would vastly reduce his options. Besides, when the factories had closed down and moved to Mexico, they’d taken the greater part of employment options with them. Try as he might, he couldn’t see himself working as a barista, jumping to fetch absurd coffees for uppity IT techs half his age.
He sighed. “Because I’m old,” he muttered.
An indicator light blinked on. He moved his foot and nudged the pedal, opening the line.
“911,” he said into his headset mic. “What is the nature of your emergency?”
“Please help!” a young woman’s voice cried into the line. “Please help, something horrible is going to happen!”
“Calm down, miss,” he said. “Let me help you.” He’d taken enough calls by now to know whether it was the real thing or not. This felt real.
Automatically, his voice went down a regi
ster, sliding from gravely baritone to an almost basso profundo. It was a habit left over from working domestic disputes and suicide interventions as a law enforcement officer. It helped in his new career.
He went on, “I need your name, ma’am.”
His eyes went to his screen and he quietly cursed. She was on a cell; the caller locator software had the 812 area code, but that was it so far. He could have figured that much out on his own by her southern Indiana accent alone. Go Hoosiers, he thought.
“They’re going to do something at Stapleton Mall, the Church!” the girl half-sobbed.
He winced internally at the location, the reminder of his daughter, but pushed the feeling away quickly. He possessed an instinct, a residue left over from working patrol. This girl was fighting to hold it together; he could hear it in the timbre of her voice. She wanted to be brave, she was fighting to be brave, but she was utterly terrified.
“They’ve already killed a girl... I guess you’d call them a cult,” she went on. “The Church kidnapped me, and Casey, Jesus, they killed Casey!” The words burned through the signal into his ear and he heard the raw anguish and terror in her voice.
Parker’s stomach clenched. This was no hoax.
He eyed the caller ID screen—nothing. Goddamn satellites. He frowned. He inhaled through his nose, calming himself. Since Sara had disappeared, such actions were only effective at work. Outside of the call center, it took Ativan, 4mgs at a time, to calm him. Usually with a Steel City Lager chaser. Sometimes something stronger.
“Tell me your name,” he repeated. His voice remained steady, calm. He might be all this girl had until he could dispatch officers to her 20. He didn’t want to fail her. Didn’t want to fail another girl the way he’d failed Sara.