by Jamie Sawyer
Javovich grappled a console, hauling herself away from the command terminal at which Doltrane still sat.
Another impact shook the spaceframe.
The thing outside had grown in proportion, had become so massive that it seemed to absorb space around it…
“You were so right, Katrina,” Doltrane whispered.
CHAPTER ONE
JACKALS AT BAY
I collapsed into the cot, panting hard, trying to catch my breath. A sheen of musky sweat—already cooling—had formed across my skin.
“Third time’s a charm, eh?” Riggs said.
“You’re getting better at it, is all I’ll say.”
Riggs tried to hug me from behind as though we were actual lovers. His body was warm and muscled, but I shrugged him off. We were just letting off steam before a drop, doing what needed to be done. There was no point in dressing it up
“Watch yourself,” I said. “You need to be out of here in ten minutes.”
“How do you handle this?” Riggs asked. He spoke Standard with an accented twang, being from Tau Ceti V, a descendant of North American colonists who had, generations back, claimed the planet as their own. “The waiting feels worse than the mission.”
“It’s your first combat operation,” I said. “You’re bound to feel a little nervous.”
“Do you remember your first mission?”
“Yeah,” I said, “but only just. It was a long time ago.”
He paused, as though thinking this through, then asked, “Does it get any easier?”
“The hours before the drop are always the worst,” I said. “It’s best just not to think about it.”
The waiting was well recognised as the worst part of any mission. I didn’t want to go into it with Riggs, but believe me when I say that I’ve tried almost every technique in the book.
It basically boils down to two options.
Option One: Find a dark corner somewhere and sit it out. Even the smaller strikeships that the Alliance relies upon have private areas, away from prying eyes, away from the rest of your squad or the ship’s crew. If you’re determined, you’ll find somewhere private enough and quiet enough to sit it out alone. But few troopers that I’ve known take this approach, because it rarely works. The Gaia-lovers seem to prefer this method; but then again, they’re often fond of self-introspection, and that isn’t me. Option One leads to anxiety, depression, and mental breakdown. There aren’t many soldiers who want to fill the hours before death—even if it is only simulated—with soul-searching. Time slows to a trickle. Psychological time-dilation, or something like it. There’s no drug that can touch that anxiety.
Riggs was a Gaia Cultist, for his sins, but I didn’t think that explaining Option One was going to help him. No, Riggs wasn’t an Option One sort of guy.
Option Two: Find something to fill the time. Exactly what you do is your choice; pretty much anything that’ll take your mind off the job will suffice. This is what most troopers do. My personal preference—and I accept that it isn’t for everyone—is hard physical labour. Anything that really gets the blood flowing is rigorous enough to shut down the neural pathways.
Which led to my current circumstances. An old friend once taught me that the best exercise in the universe is that which you get between the sheets. So, in the hours before we made the drop to Daktar Outpost, I screwed Corporal Daneb Riggs’ brains out. Not literally, you understand, because we were in our own bodies. I’m messed up, or so the psychtechs tell me, but I’m not that twisted.
“Where’d you get that?” Riggs asked me, probing the flesh of my left flank. His voice was still dopey as a result of post-coital hormones. “The scar, I mean.”
I laid on my back, beside Riggs, and looked down at the white welt to the left of my stomach. Although the flesh-graft had taken well enough, the injury was still obvious; unless I paid a skintech for a patch, it always would be. There seemed little point in bothering with cosmetics while I was still a line trooper. Well-healed scars lined my stomach and chest—nothing to complain about, but reminders nonetheless. My body was a roadmap of my military service.
“Never you mind,” I said. “It happened a long time ago.” I pushed Riggs’ hand away, irritated. “And I thought I made it clear that there would be no talking afterwards. That term of the arrangement is non-negotiable.”
Riggs got like this after a session. He got chatty, and he got annoying. But as far as I was concerned, his job was done, and I was already feeling detachment from him. Almost as soon as the act was over, I started to feel jumpy again, felt my eyes unconsciously darting to my wrist-comp. The tiny cabin—stinking of sweat and sex—had started to press in around me.
I untangled myself from the bedsheets that were pooled at the foot of the cot. Pulled on a tanktop and walked to the view-port in the bulkhead. There was nothing to see out there except another anonymous sector of deep-space. We were in what had once been known as the Quarantine Zone—that vast tranch of deep-space that was the divide between us and the Krell Empire. A holo-display above the port read 1:57:03 UNTIL DROP. Less than two hours until we reached the assault point. Right now, the UAS Bainbridge was slowing down—her enormous sublight engines ensuring that when we reached the appointed coordinates, we would be travelling at just the right velocity. The starship’s inertial damper field meant that I would never be able to physically feel the deceleration, but the mental weight was another matter.
“Get dressed,” I said, matter-of-factly. “We’ve got work to do.”
I tugged on the rest of my duty fatigues, pressed down the various holo-tabs on my uniform tunic. The identifier there read “210.” Those numbers made me a long-termer of the Simulant Operations Programme—sufferer of an effective two hundred and ten simulated deaths.
“I want you down on the prep deck, overseeing simulant loading,” I said, dropping into command-mode.
“The Jackals are primed and ready to drop,” Riggs said. “The lifer is marking the suits, and I ordered Private Feng to check on the ammunition loads—”
“Feng’s no good at that,” I said. “You know that he can’t be trusted.”
“‘Trusted’?”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” I corrected. “Just get dressed.”
Riggs detected the change in my voice; he’d be an idiot not to. While he wasn’t exactly the sharpest tool in the box, neither was he a fool.
“Affirmative,” he said.
I watched as he put on his uniform. Riggs was tall and well-built, his chest a wall of muscle, neck almost as wide as my waist. Hair dark and short, nicely messy in a way that skirted military protocol. The tattoo of a winged planet on his left bicep indicated that he was a former Off-World Marine aviator, while the blue-and-green globe on his right marked him as a paid-up Gaia Cultist. The data-ports on his chest, shoulders, and neck stood out against his tanned skin, the flesh around them still raised. He looked new, and he looked young. Riggs hadn’t yet been spat out by the war machine.
“So we’re being deployed against the Black Spiral?” he asked, velcroing his tunic in place. The holo-identifier on his chest flashed “10”; and sickeningly enough, Riggs was the most experienced trooper on my team. “That’s the scuttlebutt.”
“Maybe,” I said. “That’s likely.” I knew very little about the next operation, because that was how Captain Heinrich—the Bainbridge’s senior officer—liked to keep things. “It’s need to know.”
“And you don’t need to know,” Riggs said, nodding to himself. “Heinrich is such an asshole.”
“Talk like that’ll get you reprimanded, Corporal.” I snapped my wrist-computer into place, the vambrace closing around my left wrist. “Same arrangement as before. Don’t let the rest of the team know.”
Riggs grinned. “So long as you don’t either—”
The cabin lights dipped. Something clunked inside the ship. At about the same time, my wrist-comp chimed with an incoming priority communication: an officers-only alert.
> EARLY DROP, it said.
The wrist-comp’s small screen activated, and a head-and-shoulders image appeared there. A young woman with ginger hair pulled back from a heavily freckled face. Early twenties, with anxiety-filled eyes. She leaned close into the camera at her end of the connection. Sergeant Zoe Campbell, more commonly known as Zero.
“Lieutenant, ma’am,” she babbled. “Do you copy?”
“I copy,” I said.
“Where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you for the last thirty minutes. Your communicator was off. I tried your cube, but that was set to private. I guess that I could’ve sent someone down there, but I know how you get before a drop and—”
“Whoa, whoa. Calm down, Zero. What’s happening?”
Zero grimaced. “Captain Heinrich has authorised immediate military action on Daktar Outpost.”
Zero was the squad’s handler. She was already in the Sim Ops bay, and the image behind her showed a bank of operational simulator-tanks, assorted science officers tending them. It looked like the op was well underway rather than just commencing.
“Is Heinrich calling a briefing?” I asked, hustling Riggs to finish getting dressed, trying to keep him out of view of the wrist-comp’s cam. I needed him gone from the room, pronto.
Zero shook her head. “Captain Heinrich says there isn’t time. He’s distributed a mission plan instead. I really should’ve sent someone down to fetch you…”
“Never mind about that now,” I said. Talking over her was often the only way to deal with Zero’s constant state of anxiety. “What’s our tactical situation? Why the early drop?”
At that moment, a nasal siren sounded throughout the Bainbridge’s decks. Somewhere in the bowels of the ship, the engines were cutting, the gravity field fluctuating just a little to compensate.
The ship’s AI began a looped message: “This is a general alert. All operators must immediately report to the Simulant Operations Centre. This is a general alert…”
I could already hear boots on deck around me, as the sixty qualified operators made haste to the Science Deck. My data-ports—those bio-mechanical connections that would allow me to make transition into my simulant—were beginning to throb.
“You’d better get down here and skin up,” Zero said, nodding at the simulator behind her. “Don’t want to be late.” Added: “Again…”
“I’m on it,” I said, planting my feet in my boots. “Hold the fort.”
Zero started to say something else, but before she could question me any further I terminated the communication.
“Game time, Corporal,” I said to Riggs. “Look alive.”
Dressed now, Riggs nodded and made for the hatch. We had this down to a T: if we left my quarters separately, it minimised the prospect of anyone realising what was happening between us.
“You’re beautiful,” he said. “You do know that, right?”
“You know that was the last time,” I said, firmly.
“You said that last time…”
“Well this time I mean it, kemo sabe.”
Riggs nodded, but that idiot grin remained plastered across his face. “See you down there, Jenkins,” he said.
Here we go again, I thought. New team. New threat. Same shit.
The UAS Bainbridge was a big old strikeship, and had been patrolling the Quarantine Zone for several months. Sure, we’d met some trouble on Praidor V. And we’d almost been deployed on Triton IV to counter a pirate ring. But neither of those had been hot deployments, and Jenkins’ Jackals hadn’t earned a combat extraction yet. The three-month deployment had started to drag, and the Bainbridge was spoiling for a fight.
On Daktar Outpost, she was going to find it.
I met Zero at the threshold to the Simulant Operations Centre.
“Where have you been, ma’am?” she asked.
“Sort of busy,” I said, pushing past other operators.
“Come on. The team’s ready to skin.”
I was two decades and then some older than Zero, but she was undeniably the squad’s mother hen. Although she didn’t like her nickname—“Zero”—I expected that during compulsory education the names had been even less kind. She had the bearing of science staff more than of a soldier, and in her current role she was a little of both.
The SOC was filled with troopers, all eager to claim their slice of the glory. The chamber was subdivided into a bay for each squad on the deployment, with a science and medical team attached to every squad. Our corner of the SOC was taken up by five simulator-tanks, each marked with the Jackal dog-head symbol and trooper designations. Operators from some simulant teams—the Hayden Walkers, Jay’s Angels, Phoenix Squad—were already climbing into their simulators, handlers giving the countdown to transition. Cross-operation statistics were displayed on a monitor overhead. That was like a speedball stadium scoreboard, showing the number of effective transitions and extractions per operator: Phoenix Squad in pole position, the Jackals on the bottom rung.
Four troopers in states of undress stood in the Jackals’ dedicated operations bay. As I approached, they fell into a ragged line and saluted disharmoniously. They were greener than green, the freshest meat on the ship.
“As you were, Jackals,” I said, with as much gusto as I could manage.
“Yes, ma’am,” the group chorused back. Riggs winked at me, though no one else noticed.
It was hard to feel any enthusiasm when I looked at the group of misfits that was apparently my squad. How little they looked like soldiers in their real skins. Not one of the Jackals was over twenty-five years, Earth standard, but then there was very little standard about them. Only Novak was of Old Earth origin, and his roots were so far removed from my own that we barely shared any common ancestry. The rest were Core Worlders—drawn from those planets that had become the heart of the Alliance territory.
In a futile attempt to shake out of it, I ordered, “Let’s get stripped and mounted in two; I want transition in three.” I began to undress myself, and a medtech came to activate my tank. As I worked, I called over to Zero, “Give me a summary of the briefing packet. What’s the op?”
“Command believes that it’s going to be an effective drop,” Zero said, reading from her data-slate.
“A combat drop?” Riggs asked. He was half-undressed now. The callsign JOCKEY was stencilled onto his tank—a particularly literal name the rest of the team had thought up as a result of his background as a rocket jockey. Yeah, it had to be said that the callsigns left something to be desired.
“There’s a ninety per cent probability of combat,” Zero said. “Daktar Outpost stopped reporting two days ago. The reason for this failure has since been confirmed as a hostile takeover by the Black Spiral.”
“Told you so,” Riggs said to me.
“There are no prizes for being an asshole,” I said, cutting Riggs down. I didn’t want the rest of the Jackals getting wind of any private conversations I might be having with Riggs. “Then what’s our assignment, Zero?”
“Captain Heinrich has assigned us to scout duty,” Zero said. Her use of the word “us” was telling. Although she wasn’t going anywhere, Zero’s command console—from which she would remotely handle the squad, and would be our eyes and ears—sat in the middle of our SOC bay.
“Scout duty again?” asked PFC Gabriella Lopez. “Our last scout drop was a complete waste of time.”
“It was a waste of time for everyone, Lopez,” I said. “No one got any action on Praidor.”
“At least the rest of the strike team got to conduct search-and-seizure,” Lopez said. “All we got to do was freeze our asses off. That’s scout duty for you.”
Lopez had been recruited into the Jackals straight out of Army basic training, assigned to the team by the battalion’s supervising officer, Colonel Draven himself. Twenty-something, and from a lifetime of privilege on Proxima Centauri. The callsign SENATOR had been stencilled onto her tank. Lopez was far from happy about that, but like I said: these guys were
literal in their descriptions, if nothing else.
“You think they trust you with real combat-suit?” asked Leon Novak. He spoke Standard with a blunt Slavic accent, forming the words slowly and with intent. “And what do you mean ‘again’? You have no deaths yet.”
“Transitions,” Lopez said. “The word is transitions, idiot. And I have six, just like the rest of you.”
“Am not idiot,” Novak countered. “Do not call me that.”
“I’d say that was a pretty accurate description,” Riggs joined in. “But you’re wrong about one thing, Lopez. I have ten, actually. Let’s not forget that.”
“Those weren’t combat extractions,” Feng added. “So they don’t count.”
“You’re all idiots,” Lopez said.
She stumbled out of her fatigues, putting a hand to her breasts as though we hadn’t seen all this before. Lopez was slight-bodied and beautiful, with a perfect golden complexion that suggested her South American heritage, and long dark curly hair that I couldn’t recall ever having seen out of place. All of that was ruined by her personality. Lopez had a hell of a mouth on her, and she was hard work.
Novak sneered. “Whatever. Deaths, transitions, extractions. Is all same.”
A small disc-shaped security-drone, silver and chrome, a couple of feet across, hovered at his shoulder.
“Security protocol suspected during operation,” the drone bleated.
Novak’s callsign was CONVICT, and he was just that: a convicted felon and a life-termer, given a chance of reprieve out in the void. I wasn’t sure of exactly what Novak had done to earn his term, but I knew that it must’ve been bad. So many military bases had been hit during the Krell War that the Alliance had found themselves with a serious shortage of simulant operators. They’d trawled the prisons for compatible recruits, had offered prisoners the opportunity to commute life terms to a period of military service. That was how Novak had earned himself a lifetime spot on the Programme, each extraction knocking a little time off his sentence.
Novak was an enormous, bear-like man, shoulders dominated by a winged skull tattoo that stretched across the blades. The word BRATVA was stencilled beneath in faded blue ink. The choice of word was a particularly bad joke, because this man didn’t even know the meaning of the word “brotherhood.” He was nothing more than an outcast from the Siberian prison-hubs—a killer that even the Russian Federation had been glad to disown. Whatever Command thought they had made Leon Novak into, this was the real man.