by B. V. Larson
More Books by David VanDyke:
Plague Wars Series:
(in chronological order)
The Eden Plague
Reaper's Run
Skull’s Shadows
The Demon Plagues
The Reaper Plague
The Orion Plague
Cyborg Strike
Comes the Destroyer
Visit DavidVandykeAuthor.com for more information
More Books by B. V. Larson:
The Undying Mercenaries Series:
Steel World
Dust World
Tech World
Visit BVLarson.com for more information
EXILE
(Star Force Series #11)
by
B. V. Larson and David Vandyke
STAR FORCE SERIES:
(in chronological order)
Swarm
Extinction
Rebellion
Conquest
Army of One (Novella published in Planetary Assault)
Battle Station
Empire
Annihilation
Storm Assault
The Dead Sun
Outcast
Exile
Copyright © 2014 by Fireball Press.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.
Contents
Books by David VanDyke
Title Page
STAR FORCE SERIES
Copyright
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From the Authors
-1-
Klaxons whooped, dragging me out of bed. I rolled onto my feet in the darkness.
“Lights, dim,” I said to Valiant’s brainbox, and then I could see. Pulling on my uniform, I bolted out the door leaving Adrienne as she sat up on the bed rubbing her eyes.
“What the hell’s going on?” I asked as I entered Valiant’s bridge.
My exec and second-in-command Chief Warrant Officer Hansen was standing watch, his bald head reflecting the light of displays. He pointed at the holotank. “Something—three somethings—popped out of one of the windows, and they’re chasing Marvin.”
Windows were what we called the openings in the surfaces of the Square: the weird construct the Ancients left behind. The Square lay a mile from our grounded location. Some of these things we called windows acted like ‘rings,’ portals to elsewhere. Others showed odd effects such as warping space and time. Marvin and our scientists had spent weeks investigating them and they’d hardly scratched the surface of their secrets.
“Somethings? Give me a better report than that.” I looked at the holotank but all I saw was the usual representation of the surrounding area plus four icons, one of which was my favorite crazy robot.
Hansen scowled. “They’re big biotics and they’re trying to eat Marvin.”
“But this planet has no atmosphere. How do they breathe?”
“Ask the critters. They don’t seem to care.”
“Any of our other people out there?”
“No. It’s the middle of the night,” Hansen said with faint sarcasm.
I ignored his tone and zoomed the tank in on the other icons. “Give me a real-time view.”
Soon I saw nightmare creatures with eight legs, a lot of spines and armor plates, like insectoid armadillos scaled up to a hundred feet long. Marvin was ground-bound, his many tentacles churning as he dodged this way and that. It appeared he was trying to reach his small ship Greyhound, which was parked past the things, but the monsters seemed to sense the robot’s intent and moved in concert to block him. They hunted Marvin like a pack, and they were moving faster than he was.
“Oh, hell,” I said. As I ran out the door I yelled, “Hansen, you have the ship. Valiant, alert Kwon and all on-duty marines to suit up, anti-armor weapons mix, and clear me a route!” Using my full speed I raced through the corridors, internal doors and hatches to the marine deck. There I threw myself into my battlesuit.
“Welcome, Cody Riggs,” the suit said as my biometrics activated it.
“Suit, seal and prep for combat mission. Close range load-out.” As soon as three tons of powered armor had closed around me, I stomped over to the armory with my boots clanging on the heavy-duty deck plates.
Sergeant Major Kwon, his legs now nanite-regrown, had beaten me there and handed me a heavy laser as I approached. “What’s going on?” he asked with a big eager smile while passing out weapons to his marines as they filed past in armor.
“Monster hunt,” I said. “Some insect-like things came through a window and are trying to eat Marvin.”
Kwon laughed as he kept handing out gear. “Serves the bastard right. You sure we don’t want to let them get in a bite or two? Maybe he could afford to lose a few tentacles, eh? Might make him act more normal.”
I checked out my beamer and slung it. “Tempting, but you know he’s too useful, and they might swallow him whole. Make sure we take plenty of armor-piercing rockets. These things look tough.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, turning away from me to roar at a dozen marines. “All right Pigs, drop your cocks and grab your socks! We got us some bugs to hunt!”
Kwon ran for the assault airlock and I followed. The assault airlock was a new modification he had requested. It allowed thirty or more armored troops to exit at once. Half the size of a tennis court, it had been fitted with special fast-moving doors and no safety protocols, so whoever was in there had better be suited up or they’d learn how to breathe vacuum the hard way.
As soon as we’d entered, the portal behind us slammed shut. Valiant immediately opened a smart-metal iris in the hull releasing a brief rush of warm gas. This wasted some oxygen, but we hardly had to slow down before we leaped four abreast onto the rocky airless surface of Orn Six.
“Fly on repellers, but land before we get into the Square,” I ordered. We’d found using any sort of gravity control near the Square was dangerous, causing unpredictable effects.
“Woo-hoo!” Corporal Fuller cried as he flew up about fifty feet and led the squad. Repellers were fun, but they also made marines vulnerable. There was a reason they called grunts “ground-pounders.” It was a lot safer to stay low where you could hug the dirt if you had to. I figured it was safe enough as these monsters didn’t appear to have any ranged weapons.
Damn, but was I ever wrong. As we neared the Square and were just about to land, Fuller bounced backward in midair and fell to the rocky airless surface. “Something hit him!” I said via com-link. “Get down and stay low.”
I bounded over to Fuller, curious as to what we faced. The corporal rolled to his feet and checked his systems. “I’m all right,” he said.
“Yes,
but look at that dent.” I pointed at his arm, which showed a deep ding. “If you’d been hit in the face you might be dead.” Faceplates were hardened, but not as tough as the rest of the armor. “Don’t get cocky, people,” I said on the local net. “Stay low and be smart. Spread out and shoot anything except Marvin.”
We lined up and advanced cautiously as Valiant fed information to my HUD from a drone circling off to the side. “Bradley, you on?” I asked, trying to reach my Commander, Aerospace Group, or CAG.
“Here, sir.”
“Can you strafe the things with a two-ship?”
“No, sir. Remember what happened the last time we flew drones near the Square?” The small ships had gone crazy with one of them tumbling until it escaped over the horizon and another firing wildly in all directions before it crashed. “We’ve been taking some long-range laser shots, but our targeting systems don’t work right in this area.”
“Sounds like you need to add manual target practice to the training schedule.”
“Don’t worry about it, sir,” Kwon broke in. “We’ll take them down.”
I knew they could, but I’d always rather substitute long-range firepower for close combat. “Right. One of them is just beyond this next corner.” As I spoke, we rounded one of the many cubes our heavy beamers at the ready. We caught our first sight of it and fired immediately, green lasers lancing out to splash against its armored hide.
Close up I could see the thing resembled a segmented rhinoceros beetle with a hornlike projection on its huge face. Jumping as if startled as our beams stung it, the monster turned toward us and fired. I suppose “fired” is an accurate word because out of its tubular horn something blasted, striking the dirt in front of us and throwing up a cloud of dust and rock shrapnel. This wasn’t any threat to our armor, but suddenly we went blind.
“Fall back and switch to active sensors,” I said, telling my suit to turn on its tiny radar. We backed out of the dust cloud firing, afraid the critter would charge at us and stomp someone before we could see it. I could see more of the enemy shots impacting here and there, throwing up debris and keeping us from seeing it. This must be a defensive tactic—suppressive fire.
Unfortunately my radar returned a complete jumble. My HUD looked like a cubist Picasso painting. It must be interference from the Square. “Switch to passive thermal,” I ordered, and suddenly I could see the outlines of the nearby cubes by their heat signatures.
The monster was nowhere to be found, and the bombardment near us had stopped. Checking my tactical feed, I saw that Marvin was playing hide-and-seek with two of the creatures while the third had circled around to our right. “Bogey at three o’clock,” I called, getting our firing line oriented. “Valiant,” I called, “feed all marine HUDs a synthetic view of the three biotics and Marvin based on all inputs including overhead recon.”
A moment later, wireframe targets manifested inside our faceplates, representing where the critters and the robot were. At least this would keep us from getting surprised, though it was useless for sighting and shooting.
“This sucks,” Kwon grumbled. “Can’t fly, can’t see to shoot, no air support.”
“Welcome to the Star Force Marines. You’re getting soft, old man,” I said with a grin. “Just be glad you’re not back in the South American jungle with no armor and a hundred-pound generator on your back.”
“Okay, you win,” Kwon said. “There it is!” He took a shot with his laser. “Come on, marines, flank it!” The big man strode forward, beaming at the half-seen armored monster that moved among the golden cubes.
I stayed near Kwon and fired whenever I had something to shoot at. We hurried onward driving one monster back farther into the Square. The creature must have come from one of the larger windows, but there were several big enough to fit bugs like this. Was it trying to go back home? It didn’t matter. These aliens had attacked us first, and now they had to pay.
We cornered one, driving it into a spot between two intersecting cubes. With nowhere to go, it stood on its back legs and tried to climb the smooth golden surfaces. But the surfaces were very slick, almost frictionless. “Rockets!” Kwon roared, and several marines with anti-armor missiles launched them to impact on the thing’s exposed back, blowing out chunks of segmented carapace and spraying bloody brown ichor all over the walls. The glop ran down like raw eggs to puddle in the dirt.
The big beetle wasn’t finished yet. With a sudden turning lunge and a hop, it jumped for the closest marine: our point man Corporal Fuller. Six or seven blazing green beams intersected it cutting smoking lines in the thing’s shell. That didn’t stop it from stepping on Fuller with an elephantine, clawed foot. The man’s HUD icon winked out as the monster collapsed, crushing him under hundreds of tons of dead meat.
“Dammit!” I yelled. “Cut this piece of shit open!” I began to laser methodically through the creature’s shell. “Some of you pull the parts off.” If we were going to lose another marine, it wouldn’t be because we didn’t do our best to save him.
A moment later I saw a foot poking out of the greasy guts. Kwon spotted it at the same time and dropped his weapon to grab the armored limb. He dragged Fuller out of there, stretched him on the ground, and began scraping the goo off. The corporal’s chest plate had caved in but hadn’t been breached.
I stepped up and reached for Fuller’s breastplate releases. “Leave me one guy to watch my back and the rest of you go kill the other two of these things,” I ordered Kwon.
“Sergeant Moranian, take the squad and go bug hunting. I’ll stay with the captain,” Kwon said.
The woman sketched a salute in my direction. “Aye, aye, Sergeant Major. Let’s go, marines, follow me. Move it!” They bounced off in the low gravity.
Kwon picked up his laser and stood watch. “Boss, you can’t open him up here. There’s no air.”
I pulled Fuller’s chest releases anyway. “He can survive for a minute or two with no air, but not with his heart and lungs compressed against his spine.” I lifted off his caved-in chest plate. “He’s got his skinsuit on so he won’t freeze right away. Retract your gauntlets, give him CPR and tell his suit to pump some air into his lungs through his helmet.”
Knowing Kwon would do his best to follow my instructions I placed the chest plate on the ground with the inside facing up. Then with my full strength and the mass of the battlesuit I stomped repeatedly on the dent, forcing the armor back into a rough semblance of its original configuration. As soon as it was close to normal, I picked it back up, turned it over and snapped it into place on Fuller’s suit locking the releases down. Smart metal filled in the gaps where it no longer fit.
“Suit, transmit command override to Corporal Fuller’s battlesuit and initiate resuscitation mode.” Now that the breastplate wasn’t putting crushing pressure on the man’s chest, he should be able to breathe and his heart could beat—if he wasn’t dead already.
After a long moment and several defibrillator shocks, Fuller’s heart started and I could see he was breathing. I checked my HUD for the tactical situation and saw the rest of the squad moving in on the second monster, leaving only the one left that was still determinedly chasing Marvin.
So far Marvin had managed to evade it by dint of his superior local knowledge. He’d swarmed over some of the lower cubes with his flexible tentacles and squeezed through tight alleyways where the beetle couldn’t follow. The thing was eventually going to get him, if we didn’t perform a robot rescue.
“We’ll have to leave Fuller here and hope his suit and nanites pull him through if we’re going to save Marvin,” I said.
“Screw Marvin,” Kwon replied. “We need to get Fuller back to a med-bay.”
“You’re half right. I’ll go save Marvin, and you take Fuller to the ship.”
“Hell no, sir. I made a promise to your father that I’d watch your back, and that’s what I’m going to do.”
“When did he tell you that?”
“I got a private, encrypted mes
sage from Colonel Riggs you were coming out to Valiant—and then you showed up. Oh crap… I forgot. Wasn’t supposed to tell you. Sorry, boss.”
“Forget it. I should have known my old man would have figured out where I was heading before I did.”
This little revelation made me wonder what was going on back on Earth and if Dad was going to come out of retirement to get involved in the world again. He’d refused all political or military offers and stayed on our farm as a private citizen for the last twenty-three years, but sometimes I got the feeling he missed being in the thick of the action.
Forcing my mind back to the situation at hand, I stood up. “Well then, big man, now is when you get to earn your Sergeant Major stripes. Marvin is just as much one of my people as you or Fuller. I’m going to rescue Marvin the same as I’d do for anyone else. Fuller is your marine. Take him to the ship and help save him or come with me and watch my back. You’re all grown up: you choose.” With that, I grabbed my rifle and started running toward Marvin.
I could hear Kwon cursing me on the short-range com-link but I didn’t have time to play Freud while he decided where his true responsibilities lay. For me, it was obvious. Fuller had a better chance to live if he got to a med-bay. Marvin was going to get killed. If we wanted to accomplish two things, Kwon and I would have to split up and do one each. Despite my oversized guardian’s desire to protect me, I was actually tougher than he was, so I took the more dangerous mission.
Looking at my tactical HUD, I saw Kwon’s and Fuller’s icons moving together toward the ship. Good. That simplified things. Switching my attention to Marvin, I saw he was just about to get cornered in a courtyard with high walls and no way out. I wondered if he knew what he was doing or if he’d made a mistake. I could’ve sworn the robot had mapped the whole area in detail over the last three months. So why had he gone that way?
“Marvin, I’m coming to help. Just keep running!” I yelled, hoping he could pick up my words.
As I rounded the final corner, I saw the monster reach for him. He had nowhere to go, except… Turning suddenly, Marvin leaped with two tentacles to catch the sill of a small window. Yanking himself upward in one smooth motion, he vanished into the inky blackness.