His tactical exoframe kit’s moisture reclamation system would take care of it but had been deactivated with all other non-essential systems. It wouldn’t be switched back on for hours. The TEK’s waste system could hold fluids until then, but if something tore during orbital injection, inside the suit would reek of piss until he could take it apart.
The ship shuddered, knocking him from his reverie.
“Plasma waves, from the systems sun,” Garcia said from the pod next to Lynch. “Nothing to worry about.”
Her voice held its usual clinical edge, but Grimshaw swore he detected a little uncertainty.
The Narwhal rocked more violently and a deep moan tore through the bowels of the ship.
“Hey, Lynch,” Sledge said. “You served with Sarge before all this. Where did he really get the name the North Star?”
Sledge grinned as though he thought it the most ridiculous nickname he’d ever heard. Grimshaw expected the Corporal to tell the heavy gunner to shut it but was surprised when she answered.
“As far as I know, people been calling him that long before I knew him. One of the guys in our old unit claimed he singlehandedly took down a Krag back when the war started. Saved a bunch of colonists out on the Fringe.”
Sledge snorted. “Do you buy it?”
Lynch shrugged as much as one could shrug inside a TEK held in place with harnesses.
“I heard that happened on Tarthooga,” Garcia said.
“Isn’t that the colony with the man-eating plants?” Perez said in the pod before her, his voice ending in a nervous high pitch as the bomber shook again.
Garcia nodded. “Over twenty colonists survived in those jungles for months until help arrived. All because of Sarge. Probably why they wanted him for Gorthore. All that jungle down there.”
“I’ll believe that when I read the reports,” Sledge said with derision.
“You gotta learn to read first,” Lynch mocked.
The others laughed.
“Point is he got the name for some reason,” Chao said from the far end of the tiny bay. “And one way or another, that reason was big.”
Chao was the quiet one on the team and usually only spoke when something needed to be said.
Everyone but Sledge nodded in agreement.
“Did anyone else hear that?” Perez said.
Grimshaw and some of the others looked at him confused.
“Hear what,” Garcia said.
“Never mind,” Perez said. “Speakers in my helmet acting up is all.”
“Sandy,” Sledge said, nodding to Sanderson at the end of the line opposite Chao. “Your head is screwed on most of the time. Do you really think the Sarge did all the things people say he did?”
“Could have,” Sandy said with his slow Jovian drawl. “He was made captain pretty young, wasn’t he? Pulling off the kind of shit in those stories would explain that.”
“Pah!” Sledge spat. “I thought you had more sense, Sandy. Stories is all they are. He probably made captain because he got in with the right officers. That’s how it always works. Anyway, I’d rather know why he got demoted. Word on the SS Hermes was he got caught fooling around with a General’s wife.”
Several Marines snickered.
“You’re being awfully quiet, Grimshit,” Sledge said. “What do you think?”
Grimshaw wasn’t sure how to respond but figured it was an opportunity to act like he was actually part of the team. “I heard it was a General’s daughter.”
A loud clank to his right drew everyone’s attention and silence fell.
Sergeant Richards emerged from the maintenance tube and stretched. “What did I miss?”
Grimshaw was relieved he hadn’t heard, but blood rushed to his face all the same, and he broke out in a cold sweat.
“Sergeant on deck,” Lynch announced.
Never one to break protocol, she looked ahead as if at attention, as much as one could be inside a torpedo. The rest of the squad followed her lead.
“As you were,” Sarge said with a wave. He made his way to the torpedo opposite Grimshaw and slipped inside with graceful ease, the straps wrapping around his chest as though they’d been waiting for him the entire time.
His eyes swept across the pods and stopped on Grimshaw.
“I wanted to share mission details earlier, but command wouldn’t greenlight it. The briefing covered the guts of it. Here’s the rest.”
“As you know, the Confederation recently discovered that Krags don’t stay dead when you kill them.”
“I saw a squad of Marines take one down before,” Sledge said. “Looked pretty dead to me.”
Lynch shot him a warning glare.
“Their bodies die, but their minds live on,” Sarge continued undeterred. “The Confederation Science Division have been studying the phenomenon for months. They still don’t know much, but they believe that Krag minds somehow maintain a subspace connection to a network that stretches all the way back to Kragaknar. When a Krag body dies, its mind travels through that network until it reaches the nearest hub…usually a specialized vessel hidden behind the attacking fleet. They suspect the Krag’s mind loads into a new body, one kept as a backup.”
“Explains why they’re so fearless and reckless,” Lynch said.
Sledge nodded, but Grimshaw knew he got lost when the Sarge started using words like phenomenon.
Sarge continued. “The Fury Drives the CSD put inside your head will temporarily sharpen your mind and strengthen your body. But that isn’t enough to beat the Krags. Not at this point in the war. If we don’t deliver a fatal blow, they’ll reach Earth in less than a decade. Their troopers are too strong. Their ships are too powerful. They easily intercept our warheads. Hell, we’re lucky to have reached this far inside Krag space.” He paused for a moment, letting the point sink in. “Our Fury Drives have also been loaded with a virus. Intel believes the temple on Gorthore acts as a central hub for their regeneration network. Taking that down will ensure that when a Krag gets put down, it stays put down. Our primary objective is to get inside the temple, find a Krag regeneration pod, and sync a Fury Drive to their network. The virus will take care of the rest. With a bit of luck, the Confederation will be able to turn back the tide. Or at the very least hold out long enough until they can convince the Galactic Council to lend their aid.”
“Fucking aristocrats,” Sledge spat.
“Our secondary objective is to download as much as we can onto our Fury Drives then get the hell out of dodge.” Sarge checked his SIG. “In t-minus thirty we run completely silent. Ten minutes after that we drop.”
“Fleet Six will distract them with drops of their own at sixteen hundred. Giving the Krags an hour to react takes us to seventeen hundred. If we approach too soon, there will be too many Krags at the temple. Leave it too late, and we risk the Krags realizing something is up. Intel says seventeen’s the magic number. We hit the ground on the edge of the dark side around thirteen hundred. That gives us four hours to gather our gear, regroup, and sneak up on the temple compound. The temple is a half-day fast march from the drop point. It’ll be tight, but if we drop any closer, they’ll see us coming.”
“When you hit the ground, equip the gear stored inside your pod immediately. Activate your beacon and move to the rendezvous point marked on your map. Your beacon will emit a low-level frequency and allow us to find anyone inside three miles. When we’ve rendezvoused, we head for the temple. When we’re done there, we head to Area C5 marked on your maps where evac will pick us up at 2400.”
There likely wouldn’t be any need for an extraction. Everyone knew it. No one said it.
Delivering a virus to a Krag temple on one of their most heavily guarded planets was a suicide mission. But someone had to do it. Even if someone did manage to make it off Gorthore, a Krag ship would intercept them before they could so much as break orbit.
Grimshaw knew what he was getting himself into when he signed up for the mission. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
He had nothing to lose. No friends. No family. The Krags had seen to that. The operation on Gorthore was a chance to strike back at the invaders. A chance for revenge. Part of Grimshaw wondered whether he was being a fool. He was in his early twenties with over a hundred years ahead of him if he reached life expectancy. The other part knew that with the Krags on a rampage, such a life wouldn’t be worth living anyway. Giving his life for a chance that others might live seemed like the logical thing to do.
Either way, too late for doubts now.
The mission also offered an opportunity to make a name for himself. He wasn’t overly interested in that aspect, but Richards kept banging on about it.
“Earth and all her colonies will forever remember your names,” Sarge said as though reading his mind. “They’ll remember that you delivered humanity in her darkest hour.”
He had Grimshaw believing that to a degree. He had that effect on people.
“Sergeant Richards,” a voice crackled on the intercom. “LR picking up a Krag dreadnought.”
Palpable tension filled the cramped hold.
“Have they spotted us?”
“I don’t think so. We’re burning cold and still in the Gorthore’s shadow. But their current trajectory will bring them too close. We need to initiate orbital injection.”
“What about the margin for error?” Sarge objected. “The nav systems in these things are archaic.”
“The chances of pods reaching their designations will be sixty-nine percent instead of eighty-four.”
“That’s too low. We need to wait.”
“Orders from Fleet Six are to leave if we spot the enemy before they see us. Return for another run later. We can deploy your pods now or bring you with us. Your call, but you need to make it now.”
Sarge’s eyes swept across those in the hold once more, and everyone nodded, even Grimshaw.
“Drop us off, Captain,” Sarge said. “Launch in five.”
“Rodger. Prepping launch sequence. Launch in five.”
“Any questions?” Sarge said.
No one spoke up.
“That’s what I like to hear. Now let’s drop on those sumbitches like angels of death. Pods closed.”
“You heard the Sergeant,” Lynch said. “Lock ‘em up.”
Marines pulled the levers above their heads and torpedo covers slid into place, clicking as they sealed their occupants inside.
Sarge got a hold of his lever and nodded at Grimshaw. “For the record, it was the General’s wife and daughter.”
His pod shut before Grimshaw could respond, leaving him looking at two rows of nondescript torpedoes. Anyone walking into the room would never know there were Marines inside. He guessed that was the whole idea.
He drew a deep breath and pulled on his own lever.
It wouldn’t budge.
A low buzz rang at the end of the bay and the red strip lights flashed once. The two torpedoes furthest from Grimshaw dropped into their launch tubes with a pop, hurtling Sandy and Chao at Gorthore. Two rows of four torpedoes became two rows of three.
Grimshaw pulled frantically on his lever. It still wouldn’t budge.
The buzz rang out again. The red light flashed.
Pop.
Garcia and Perez were gone.
Grimshaw pulled the lever with both hands, but it didn’t move so much as an inch.
Buzz.
Flash.
Pop.
Lynch and Sledge vanished.
Grimshaw pounded the lever hard and pulled with everything he had.
A sharp screech echoed through the bay. He gritted his teeth and growled as the pod slowly closed. The seal finally hissed, and he was enveloped in darkness.
There was a dull buzz followed by a loud pop.
The pod barely jolted as it launched into space. At least he thought it had launched. For all the darkness, he could have still been aboard the Narwhal.
He breathed hard, from exertion as much as anything else.
He blinked a bead of cold sweat out of his eye. Another clung to the tip of his nose. He blew his nose. It made little difference.
Great, he thought. 4 hours in a tin can with an itch I can’t scratch. 4 hours until we start dying, providing we even make it that long.
He turned his mind away from that, and told himself to focus on the mission, but even then, negativity bore its way into his thoughts.
They’d been dubbed Zeta Team for a reason. The last letter in the alphabet. The Confederation’s last-ditch effort to save humanity from annihilation.
2
Angel of Death
Grimshaw had spent most of his flourishing military career inside a TEK, which was pretty much a metal enclosure, and he’d seen his share of pod drops in training. But none of that prepared him for being delivered to an enemy planet in a glorified envelope.
There was something terrifying yet visceral about knowing only a few thin sheets of metal lay between you and space’s freezing embrace…or roasting embrace if you got caught in a radiation flare or plasma ejection from a nearby star.
Not that the improvised pod offered much protection from either of those things. Torpedo casings were built to withstand cosmic radiation to a degree. They had advanced onboard guidance systems and other electronics to protect. But they weren’t designed to carry humans. And that was before considering Krag planetary defenses. According to intel, the drop site was beyond the range of orbital weaponry, and the improvised pods were small enough to bypass orbital mine fields, but intel wasn’t always right.
At least if orbital weaponry takes me out, it’ll be quick.
The Narwhal missile had been stripped down to the bear necessities to make it difficult to detect. It consisted of a shell, a semi-analogue flight guidance board, and a parachute. The propulsion systems had been reduced to secondary steering thrusters and stabilizers. Even then, there were no guarantees. Little was known about the Kragak, and almost nothing was known about the planetary technology they possessed.
The pod rocked violently, startling Grimshaw, and making him wonder whether the stabilizers hadn’t been ripped out too.
Part of him couldn’t wait to have Gorthore’s sure surface under his feet. A small part…but part of him, nonetheless. He wasn’t much for religion, but he found himself praying that his squaddies were okay and that everyone would make it to their respective landing zones.
The rocking eventually ceased, and the sense of weightlessness abated. Or maybe not. It was difficult to tell with so much sensory deprivation.
He closed his eyes and unwittingly imagined the torpedo case splitting and hurling him through Gorthore’s sky. With no safety measures in place, it was well within the realms of possibility. The pod could enter the atmosphere at the wrong angle and burn up. The ancient navigation system could fail, landing him in the middle of an ocean, desert, or frozen tundra. The parachutes might not deploy in time…or at all.
He turned his mind away from all that and embraced the present. Fleet Six had made it deep into Krag space without being detected. Team Zeta was heading to Gorthore where they would deliver the Krags a fatal blow. They would turn back the Krag tide. There was something to be said for still being alive despite all the invaders had thrown at humanity.
He remembered his family on Earth. Back before the Krags sent their missiles.
The pod juddered more violently than before. More weight returned to his body as he was tossed against his harness one way then another. A hissing noise grew as the pod plummeted through Gorthore’s atmosphere.
Time sped by.
He was suddenly thrown upwards, the harness the only thing holding him down. His chute had fired.
A loud crack issued from below. He expected a thud or some other indication that the pod had stopped.
The pod twisted and tumbled, throwing him about like a washing machine.
It bounced a few more times before becoming still.
It took his mind a moment to stop spinning. He shook the dizzin
ess away and found all his weight was leaning forward on the straps. No, not forward. Down.
The pod had landed on its front. Opening the cover would be a nightmare.
Dammit.
Nothing ever worked out the way it was supposed to.
He activated his TEK. The suit booted up with a satisfying hiss. A solid green light inside the left of his visor showed that all essential systems were back online. His kinetic barrier and shields would take a few minutes to charge, but battery levels also looked good.
At least my TEK is holding up.
His eyes rolled back in his head as he relieved himself. Motors whirred as the moisture reclamation system kicked in, sucking the liquid into the waste treatment system where it would be filtered and returned to the IV port under his SIG. Heating came back online, and warmth gradually worked its way back into his extremities, driving numbness from his digits. The nav system, various levels, and a plethora of other dials lit up the inside of his helmet.
He moved his fingers, relieved to find his joints moved easily again with power.
He almost turned on his vox to check in on the others when he remembered they were supposed to maintain radio silence until rendezvous.
He tapped his SIG and the navigation grid on his visor zoomed in. He activated his beacon and a pulsing orange dot appeared in the center of the grid. The map of the surrounding area remained empty. He refreshed his nav screen, but the map appeared blank again. Either entry had done something to his navigation system, or he’d veered off course more than anticipated.
He opened a low band frequency on his SIG. Someone would have to be within a hundred feet to hear him, but it was worth a try. And there wouldn’t be Krags that close. At least he hoped as much.
“Grimshaw reporting,” he said on the vox. “Anyone read me?”
Crackling answered followed by silence. He waited a while before trying again.
“Grimshaw reporting. Does anyone read?”
Still nothing.
Am I the only one who made it?
The Galactic Sentinel: Ultimate Edition: 4 Books with 2000+ Pages of Highly Entertaining Sci-Fi Space Adventure Page 117