by Meg Buchanan
Sniper
Squad
Book 2- Trojan Gene Series
Meg Buchanan
Range Road Press
New Zealand
Published in NZ by Range Road Press, 2019
Copyright © Meg Buchanan 2019
The author inserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.
All characters in this book are fictitious,
and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead,
is purely coincidental.
Cover designed by Kura Carpenter
Chapter 1
THE SQUAD SAT IN THE HOVER. At the back of the quivering metal hull, Jack waited for the signal from Captain Leach and had that heightened, let’s get this done feeling.
A whomp, whomp, whomp vibrated the back of the seat, the strapping of the harness, and up through the floor and the soles of his boots.
He felt pumped, adrenalin surging, ready to go do what he’d been trained to.
He looked around and the others, all in full combat gear, long black leather coats, helmets, black visors, boots to their knees and compression gloves as soft and flexible as skin, were leaning forward ready too.
Across from him, Jeron sat, forearms crossed, laser on his knees, studying nothing, waiting for the hover to settle and the wings to lift so they could get started. He couldn’t see Jeron’s eyes through his visor, but then Jeron grinned at him and he heard the rhythm change, the click of the mechanism as the doors unlocked.
“Showtime,” Jeron mouthed silently. He undid his harness then rested his gloves on his laser. Jack prepared to move too when he was given the order.
First, the VTroopers would stream out and form a perimeter. But his squad were specialists, same gear as everyone else, but different skills, trained to work in pairs, track the target, get into position and wait until they had it in their sights.
The rest of the troopers were trained to work as a solid mass, a relentless overpowering machine, marching straight at the threat and crushing it.
Ten pairs of eyes watched the Captain. He’d led the training, could do it all himself and could beat any of them at everything. Now he was leading this mission. And after a year of being trained by him, Jack thought if ever they were on the same side, he’d follow him to hell and back.
Leach peered out under the wing, holding onto the top of the opening and watched the VTroopers. He waited for the perimeter to form then gave the signal and swung out through the door. The squad followed, carrying their lasers at the ready until they reached the cover of the parking building.
They were in hell. Bodies and dust and chunks of concrete, tiles, tortured steel and a suffocating noise came from all directions and surrounded them.
Leach signalled, ‘Halt’. The squad stopped and their long coats slapped around their legs. Eleven guys in a bunch.
Two StealthHovers, a Mamba transporter that could move three hundred VTroopers and then the Viper, smaller, more mobile, used for Leach’s team.
“You know the drill,” said Leach. He nodded at Jack and Jeron. “Fraser and Donovan take the east building, get up to the roof and find a vantage point that will cover right to the MonoRail.” He waved his arm at the rail as a train went by, frightened faces flickered behind the glass.
“Yes, sir.” Jack had his visor raised, stood ramrod straight, felt that suppressed, this is it, energy. He waited with Jeron while Leach directed the rest of the squad.
“Sharpe and Hood take the west. Levi lead the others, it’s your job to search beyond the perimeter and flush them out.”
“Yes, sir,” the rest of the team chorused.
“Party time,” said Leach.
Jack and Jeron took off to the east, Sharpe and Hood to the west. Levi and the others jogged in a bunch at the nearest VTroopers.
Jack followed Jeron to the building. It all looked real this time, not a cardboard cut-out that they’d used in training, in sight, and the smell of death and that smothering noise surrounded them. Dust and bodies and chunks of building and debris lay around right up to the entrance. DroneCams everywhere, even surveillance seemed stepped up.
Jeron crouched beside wide glass doors. Jack covered him. The building towered above, gleaming white polished marble, darkened windows reflecting the buildings and the bit of shattered corner of the Admin block. The sensor picked them up. The doors opened with a whisper.
No blast.
No gunfire.
No voices.
Jeron slid along the wall like a shadow, laser held out in front.
He glanced into the foyer, then pulled back. “Clear.”
They eased into the building side by side, backs to the wall, lasers held ready. Pale grey tiles stretched out across the floor. A curve of polished steel snaked around the reception area. It was one of those buildings where the foyer soared the full twenty storeys and glass bridges connected the rooms.
A couple of the girls dressed the way Ela used to, tiny look but don’t touch clothes, stood near the desk area, eyes wide, faces pale, frightened. That was something he hadn’t expected when Jacob forced him to join up, that the Elite would be afraid of the VTroopers too. Vector was supposed to be the Protector of the World’s Cradle. That wasn’t the way they were seen.
Jack watched Jeron ignore protocol and not shoot the girls. Instead, he shouted at them, “How do you get to the roof?” He had his laser held vertical still.
One of the girls pointed to the lifts, the other to a service door at the side. Jack and Jeron ignored the lift and took off up the service stairs.
They made it to the top of the building without meeting any resistance. Maybe the residents heard the hovers arrive and decided to stay out of the way.
They took position near the parapet. It gave them a clear view of the city to the east. They set up the lasers, extended the tripod legs, lined the guns up like the arrows on a clock, hands showing ten to two.
They dropped their backpacks, shrugged off their coats, folded them behind the stocks, then lay face down, feet almost touching, elbows resting on the padding.
Jack pushed up his visor and looked over at Jeron. The light from the City reflected the sun back at him, and it bounced off the tiles and glass of the buildings. The noise around them still suffocated and that smell was overwhelming.
A SkyVid started up, a couple of Humicrib babies bumbled across the skyscape. The words ‘Humicrib, the Cradle of the World’ followed.
Stretched out beside Jeron, Jack scanned his segment through the laser sights, ninety degrees each. He prayed he wouldn’t see any suspicious movement, just the perimeter of VTroopers pushing relentlessly wider and wider like a ripple.
He couldn’t see Levi and the others, must be under the buildings searching for the saboteurs. The streets were deserted, just the trains on the Monorail flashing past every few minutes.
He focused on the shattered building, then spotted Sharpe and Hood on the opposite side of the hospital site, settled now like him and Jeron. Below bodies were lying in the carpark and on the street. People had been just walking to their ESDs or the train station and the bomb went off and boom, they were gone.
“Who do you think did it?” Jeron asked still staring through the scope.
A DroneCam buzzed past. Jack pushed through the insistent noise that seemed to be coming at him from all sides. “Radical insurgents, extremists, militants, nuts, enemies of the human race,” he said, making fun of the indoctrination. But it had to be Locals doing this, didn’t it? Who else would? It wasn’t the Elite’s genes getting harvested. So, it had to be Locals randomly killing civilians for no good reason.
Another SkyVid of the Humicrib babies marched across the skyline through a field of Genus6. Text slid around th
em. ‘Welcome to the New Eden, the Cradle of the World’
Jeron watched the babies bumble past. “One of the cradles.”
Jack smirked. Yeah, New Zealand wasn’t the only country in the world that made babies. There were four others he knew of, four other countries that didn’t have Genus6, all above or below 35 degrees latitude like here so Genus6 couldn’t survive. He went back to scoping the quadrant, and prayed he never had to do what he’d been trained to and what Jacob had told him to do. Jacob said never to hold back if he was ordered to kill.
Never step out of line.
Never show what he felt.
Never disobey an order.
Never stand out.
Watch, listen.
Report back.
And if it was Locals doing this, then it was Locals he was meant to kill.
And he wasn’t sure if any of this was worth killing for.
“Got anything?” asked Jeron.
“Nah, nothing happening here.” Jack went back to sweeping the area, watching beyond the crosshairs praying he didn’t see anyone where they weren’t meant to be. And if he saw someone, that it wouldn’t be someone he knew.
Then something moved at the edge of the crosshair. He swung his laser around. “Three clicks,” he said and waited while Jeron matched the coordinates, all the time praying it wouldn’t be someone he went to school with, or whose father used to drink in the pub his mum owned, or someone he’d met at a party.
“A kid,” Jeron confirmed. And they watched this little kid run out onto the road chasing a ball. The drone in his ears got louder and louder and more insistent. A woman in a blue cloak raced over to the kid. Elite adults wore light coloured clothes with a long blue cloak over top and the kids wore bright colours. Only the Vector Troopers wore black.
The mother scooped the kid up, then stood there holding him looking up at them eyes accusing. Then she ducked back wherever she came from.
Jack rested his forehead against the stock. Thank God she moved out of the way.
Jeron asked. “You all right?”
‘Yeah,” he said. “Just resting my eyes, got a bit of glare.”
“Use the googles.” Jeron twisted to reach in his backpack, got out the goggles and tossed them over.
They lay there another twenty minutes or so and saw nothing else. If anything was happening, the ground search team were dealing with it.
Then the Com on his wrist lit up. The recall.
“Time to go?” asked Jeron.
“Yeah.” Jack stood and started gathering up their gear.
In their room at the Barracks, Jeron leaned on the doorframe. The room was all white tiles and stainless-steel like everything in the City. “What do you think?” he asked.
Jack sat on the end of his bed still in full combat gear. “About what?” He took his helmet off and put it and his gloves down.
“About today.” Jeron went to his locker and put his helmet and visor on the top shelf then undid the wrist strap of his left glove. “Do you think it was the real thing?”
Jack shook his head. “Training exercise,” he said and bent down and ripped open the top strap of his boot. “Nothing about that felt real.” At first it had all looked right, but once they got inside the building, the noise, the smell, the debris, the minimal damage to the building had made it feel like they were at a Vid.
“Yeah.” Jeron took off the glove, flapped it on top off the first and put them both in the locker by the helmet. “I figure they did it with ImageMakers and a few trucks of rocks.” He undid the dome on his collar, then unzipped the leather coat from collar to thigh. He shrugged out of it and hung it up under the helmet and gloves.
“And that noise.” Jack ripped his way down the outside of his boot then started on the other one. “It didn’t make sense.” He picked up the helmet and gloves, went to the locker, stuck them on the shelf then got rid of the coat.
Jeron sat on the end of his bed. “Yeah. Couldn’t figure out where that was coming from.” He looked up. Eyes nearly black, hair as dark as his eyes. Jeron looked Hispanic, even had the olive skin. He was born in South America and there was a little patch there where Humicrib harvested genes. Jeron’s parents were part of the Administration there when they wanted a kid and must have got one with the Local colouring.
Jeron started on his boots. “If you’d been sure it was a training exercise, would you have shot the kid and the mum to keep Leach off your back?” he asked.
“Nah.” When that kid and mum ran out onto the road, something had kicked in and fought against all the training he’d been through for the last year and he couldn’t fire. He flopped back onto his bed. “Leach needs to know there are some things I won’t do.” Not firing would get him in the shit but he didn’t care.
He picked up his Com from the side locker, and pressed the Unlock with his thumb, then slid to the picture of Ela he took that last day in Jacob’s shed. “What about the girls in the foyer?” he asked Jeron. Ela was smiling, and her hair was a mess because she’d just pulled the Swandri on.
Jeron stood up, pulled off his vest then peeled off the compression suit underneath. “Same. I’m not shooting bloody girls who look like they’ve just stepped off the beach.” He wandered to the locker again, a long ripple of muscle head to toe.
Jack studied Ela’s picture and tried to convince himself he kept it on his Com because Jacob said to fight all this by going back to what he believed in. But it wasn’t the truth. He kept it on the Com because he still wanted to be with her more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life and keeping the picture kept that feeling alive.
Jeron nodded at the Com. “Who is she? You look like that every time you pick that thing up.”
“Nobody.”
“Yeah, right,” said Jeron. He pulled out the black BDUs the unit wore around base and dumped them on his bed, then went back to the locker to grab a towel and turned back.
“If I were you, Jack, I wouldn’t let the captain see you looking at Nobody on your Com like that. You’d be in Re-Education so fast you wouldn’t know what hit you.”
Jack grinned. Vector Troopers were celibate, focused, and respectful, they were the Protectors of the Cradle, that was what the ‘protect and respect’ creed said anyway.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”. Because there was no way he wanted to spend a couple of days sitting in a room filled with Holograms and so pumped full of Abhor he’d never look at a female again.
“Just thought I’d mention it.”
“Thanks.”
Jeron grinned then headed for the showers.
Once Jeron was gone, Jack swiped to the messages and read the Com-Screen. Three missed Connects, Jacob must want him to make contact.
He’d need to do that soon. He needed to tell him how Leach handled today, and to not authorise anything until he knew about response times. And Jacob needed to find out what intel Vector had that would have caused this escalation in urban training for the squad.
He slid back to the picture of Ela then tried a Connect just in case. Maybe after a year he’d finally be allowed to contact her. He’d done everything Jacob wanted. He’d joined Vector, he’d passed on any info he came across.
The Connect clawed at the shields on Ela’s Com then came back as usual. No change there. He figured they were still the same shields Jacob erected when he first forced him to join up. Jacob must have left them there as a warning.
He slid his finger across the screen and checked Ela’s Status page because Jacob didn’t think to shield Status. Only kids used Status. Anyone over twenty couldn’t figure out how it worked anyway. He knew Ela had been accepted for Med School and her second year was nearly over.
He read the screen, but she hadn’t posted anything new. She’d been to school and been shopping with Isabelle as usual. She was back with her old crowd. Had been for months.
Where did Amon fit in now? Was she back with him too?
He went to the picture again, tou
ched the screen and outlined the shape of her face with his thumb. He only met her because he’d been working for Jacob, and she was Jacob’s grandkid and had come to stay with him, and they’d fallen in love.
But she hadn’t tried to Connect with him even once. He should have told her he loved her that day in the shed. He knew she wanted him to but couldn’t make the words come out.
Jeron came back through the door, hair wet, and towel tied around his waist. Jack turned the Com off and put it back on the side locker. Jacob’s rules. “If you have friends, make sure they’re Elite, you have to look and act like they’ve turned you, no Locals.”
Not too hard to obey that rule, Locals were thin on the ground in Vector. Jeron was all right, and since he was Elite, he fitted the bill.
Jeron shook out the pants of the BDUs, stuck his feet in and pulled them on with a little bounce. Then picked up the t-shirt. “Coming to the Rec after the debriefing?” he asked as his head appeared. “When Leach is done telling us what we did wrong there should be an hour or so before we eat.” Jeron sat again.
“Nah,” said Jack. “I’ll go for a run.” It would give him time to contact Jacob and pass on what he’d found out.
“Okay.” He hauled on his boots and did them up. “Now get moving, or you’re going to be late for debriefing.”
“Five minutes.” Jack swung off the bed, headed for the showers and made it to the debrief room just before Leach got there.
Chapter 2
AT THE DEBRIEF Leach stood up front near the VidScreen, dressed the same as the rest of them, black BDUs.
But Leach looked taller, wider and stronger than anyone else. And young, not much older than they were, maybe mid-twenties, built and fit, with dark hair, silver eyes like steel when you didn’t perform, charcoal if you looked like you might argue with him. And he didn’t waste words and really pushed following orders without question and staying in line.