Forged to Lead

by James David Victor

  Forged to Lead

  A Jack Forge, Fleet Marine Story

  James David Victor

  Fairfield Publishing

  Copyright © 2017 Fairfield Publishing

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Except for review quotes, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the written consent of the author.

  This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Thank You

  Prologue

  Bill Harts was not awake. He was not asleep. He was unconscious, yet he was aware. He was fixed in place, unable to move. He was captive.

  The cold hung over his skin and penetrated his bones. He felt every chill moment, but his body did not shiver. The tentacles writhed over his skin. They held him in place and touched him lightly. Cold and sticky, rough and smooth.

  Harts saw himself held in the mass of tentacles. He watched as if in a dream, a nightmare. He urged himself to move, to break free from the tentacles that held him, but his muscles would not respond. He tried to cry for help, but his mouth remained closed, his voice lodged in his throat. His face appeared relaxed, no muscles tensed. He screamed in his sleeping mind.

  A mass of tentacles covered his unconscious head and felt their way across his sleeping face. He felt their touch and yelled out. No sound came from his relaxed body. A tentacle slipped between his limp lips and into his mouth that tried desperately to yell and holler and scream. He imagined how good it would be to bite down hard and sever that black and purple slime-covered tentacle. He dreamed that he would fight back and hurt the beast that had given him such pain and fear.

  A tentacle slipped around his throat. It stretched out, growing thinner and thinner. The tip thinned to a fine thread that flicked across the view of his sleeping, all-seeing eyes.

  The thread reached toward Harts’s eye. His eyelids flickered with the nightmare. The tentacle thread slipped under the eyelid and sought out the pupil. The thread slipped into the pupil and reached down to the nerve at the back.

  Bill Harts tried to pull away. He tried to lash out with his arms and kick out with his feet, but he was stuck. His arms and leg remained static, limp and unmoving.

  More tentacles thinned down to fine threads. They slid in to his ears and up his nostrils. He felt their cold slime feeling their way through his brain, triggering memory and thought.

  The noise was deafening as he heard the Chitin voice. The Chitins wanted to know who he was. They wanted to know how they could use him. They wanted to know how to control him.

  Bill Harts knew he was betraying mankind as he told the Chitins everything he knew. He could not resist. He was not in control of his body or his mind. The tentacles found what they wanted and what they needed. Bill Harts was conscious of his own mind giving up every scrap of information it had. The Chitins drew it from him as easily as they could draw blood from an artery. They discovered the knowledge that Bill Harts didn’t even know he had. Every sight and sound and smell that he had ever experienced was drawn out by the thin black tentacles that threaded their way through every part of his being.

  The Chitins rejected useless information. His childhood was discarded as worthless. Harts felt the loss as all memory of his early days faded away, the color of his existence washed out of the fabric of his being.

  The Chitins found the memories of life in the Fleet Marines. Every moment was studied and analyzed in minute detail. Bill became aware of nothing else. His existence was a tableau of frozen images. A ship of the fleet…a pulse rifle…a Fleet Marine parade…a commanding officer…a control panel of a landing craft. The information was drained from Bill Harts as the tentacle turned his mind on like a faucet and drained information as if it was pouring water.

  Bill Harts was aware of one last thing, and that was the tear that welled up in the corner of his eye as utter helplessness overwhelmed him.

  As the Chitins probed his being, he became more aware of their mind. He saw their home in the massive oceans far below the clouds of their gas giant world. He saw their spawning grounds. He watched them grow, learn, build, attack. Harts became aware of their previous attempts to drain knowledge from captured humans, aware of the traumatic, fatal attempts to probe the hundreds of individuals captured and dragged here. Harts was aware of the million memories of all those people captured by the Chitins, captured from ships both military and civilian, captured from facilities on moons and asteroids through the system. Lives, both young and old, all broken and ended by the Chitin tentacles in their attempt to study humans. He knew their ultimate goal: to control a human and to occupy a human mind.

  Every attempt until this moment had led to an improvement in their technique. And now, success.

  Bill Harts was free. He was awake. Aware. The tentacles were gone. His body was clothed. His mind was alert. He was alive. He remembered everything. He remembered nothing. Bill Harts was ready to return to world he’d left. He was ready to return to the fleet.

  1

  The debrief room was lit by a harsh white light emanating from the translucent ceiling. A brushed metal table and chairs sat in the middle of the room. Jack Forge sat uncomfortably on one of the chairs.

  The Fleet Marine 6th Squad was being interviewed following their mission on Kratos, the outer moon of the gas giant planet, Penthus. Jack was waiting for his turn. He’d been waiting for some time. Over an hour, he guessed.

  Jack stared at the door until he knew every last scratch and stain. He didn’t know what he could say about the destruction of the Chitin Leviathan. All he knew was that somehow, they had turned an energy transfer device into a weapon capable of destroying a Chitin Leviathan, one of their most destructive craft.

  The fleet was buzzing excitedly with rumors that the fleet was testing new weapons that could destroy the Chits once and for all. Jack didn’t know how it had worked. It had been Sarah Reyes’s plan. Maybe she knew, but the last Jack had heard of Reyes was that she was being held in isolation in the Scorpio’s med bay.

  The door burst open. Jack stood, his hands at his sides. The woman who entered was dressed in the severe dark uniform of a military intelligence officer. She pulled her chair out, scraping it across the floor, and dropped a computer tablet on the metal table with a thump. She sat down.

  “Sit, Marine.” It was an order.

  Jack sat down. His heart pounded in his chest. This was an agent. She wasn’t here to interview Jack and write a report on the Battle of Kratos Fuel Station. An agent was always deployed to keep a battalion in line, to sniff out disobedience, dereliction, and possible collusion with the enemy.

  “I am Agent Visser. I will be frank with you, Marine. You need to be frank with me. If I am not satisfied with your responses, I will deploy more forceful techniques. We will know the truth.”

  There was one truth Jack could not reveal. He suddenly knew why Agent Visser was here.

  “When did you last see Commander Finch?” Visser asked with no hint of emotion in her cold voice
.

  Realizing immediately that any movement or flicker of emotion could give him away, Jack answered calmly. “When we scouted the Chitin construction site on Kratos.”

  “Yes,” Visser said. She tapped on the tablet in front of her. “You were flogged during your training. Do you have a problem with authority, Marine?”

  Jack could suddenly feel the raised scars on his back touching his shirt. The pain of the flogging never went away, but what hurt most was the realization that his loyalty to the Fleet Marines would always be questioned.

  “I follow orders,” he said coolly.

  “You like to give them too.” Visser flicked her fingers across the small tablet screen. A hologram of Jack talking to Squad Leader Torent appeared. It was a recent surveillance recording of Jack in a vocal and animated disagreement with Torent. Jack watched the recording and remembered the argument over tactics in a training simulation. He remembered the moment well. Torent pulling rank and Jack arguing loudly. Jack knew his approach would be best. Torent usually listened, but on this occasion, he had dug in his heels and was being obstinate.

  Jack looked past the image to Agent Visser. She had her eyes fixed on him.

  “That’s just the way we talk to each other sometimes.” Jack shrugged and smiled.

  “That is the way you talk to your squad leader, with such familiarity and contempt for his leadership position?”

  “We are old friends.”

  Visser scrolled across her tablet and presented another hologram. This was from the bunkhouse on training moon, taken just days before the training squad’s battle with the Chits. It was the moment Jack accused Torent of stealing his family’s watch. Jack was challenging Torent. The pair were snarling at each other. The fight quickly erupted.

  “You don’t look very friendly,” Visser said, sitting back in her chair. The hologram paused with Jack and Torent fully engaged in their fistfight. The image flickered. Jack could make out the figure of Bill Harts sitting on his bunk. It had been Harts who had created the bad feeling between Jack and Torent by stealing Jack’s watch and planting it on Torent. The hologram showed the delight on Harts’s face as Jack and Torent slugged it out.

  “That was a long time ago,” Jack said, slumping back angrily into his own chair.

  “I’ve compiled a lot of hologramatic surveillance data from onboard the Scorpio. Having studied the data, I’ve been able to quickly establish that you and Commander Finch were not friends.”

  It was true. Jack had hated Finch. The Commander of Cobra Company had been an arrogant idiot. He was a poor tactician. He had a poor understanding of the Marines under his command. And in the end, Jack had discovered that Finch was a coward.

  “No, sir,” Jack said firmly. “We were not friends. He was my commanding officer.”

  “Did you like Commander Finch?”

  “To be frank?” Jack asked.

  Visser fixed Jack with her cold blue eyes. “Be frank.”

  “No, sir. I did not like Commander Finch. He was not a good officer.”

  “Your commanding officers don’t last very long after meeting you, Marine.”

  Jack felt his heart in his mouth. If the agent suspected Jack of killing an officer, the penalty would be a slow and painful death. It was true that his training commander had died during the battle of training moon and Finch had died... Jack pushed the thought of Finch’s death from his mind. His story was that Finch had gone missing, which was at least partly true.

  “Sir?” Jack said as mildly as he could. “I liked Lieutenant Crippin. She was a good instructor. I was sorry when she was killed. She was a good Marine.”

  Visser tapped her tablet and played a hologram of Crippin’s death. Jack looked away as the fine, whip-like plasma threads slashed at Crippin and Sergeant Hacker as they fought a battling retreat. Jack had been there and had seen it from afar; he couldn’t stand to watch it again.

  “And now Commander Finch has been lost. You were the last person to be seen with him. Have you got anything to add to your report?”

  “No, sir.” Jack felt his chest tighten. If Agent Visser had hologram recordings of his training camp bunkhouse fight with Torent and the deaths of Crippin and Hacker, they must surely have recordings of Commander Finch and his last moments. If he was going to get called out for lying, it would be now. He would be in serious trouble, and certainly face another flogging that would tear up his already badly scarred back, but he would probably not face the noose. Reyes, on the other hand, would stand trial for the murder of an officer. Such trials were short, sentences brutal, and execution of the sentence was usually carried out on the same day. Jack held his breath.

  “So we have to accept your account and your account only, as there were no other witnesses. You and Commander Finch performed a reconnaissance of the Chitin position. On your return to the Marine landing craft, Finch lost his composure. I’m quoting from your report now, Marine. Finch lost his composure when it was clear the Scorpio was leaving orbit and that he then ran off through the sand tree structures of Kratos, yelling for the Scorpio to come back. You then encountered maintenance technician Sarah Reyes piloting a Chitin suit. An eventful reconnoiter.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Anything to add to the official report?” Visser sat up slowly. She stood and leaned on the table, leaning in closer to Jack. “Last chance, Marine.”

  “If I think of anything important...” Jack began.

  “Everything is important in my investigation, Marine.” Visser turned and walked toward the door.

  “You didn’t ask me about Bill Harts,” Jack called out, quickly adding, “sir.”

  Visser stopped in her tracks. She turned and walked around the table. She grabbed Jack’s collar and pulled him close. “I don’t know what happened on that moon, but if I find out you are hiding something from me, we will meet again. You will be sorry if we do.”

  Visser dropped Jack back into his chair and left the room. The door remained open, swinging gently on its hinges. Jack hadn’t received orders to leave the debrief room. He swung back on his chair, hands behind his head, and looked out through the open door. Hopefully, someone would spot him and tell him to leave. Until then, he was under orders to stay where he was.

  Agent Visser obviously had no evidence against him, or Reyes. If there was a holoimage showing Reyes attacking Finch and the resulting fatal stab wound, she would be executed for causing the death of an officer, whether she was comatose or not. She would probably be medically revived long enough to hear the sentence and maybe long enough to experience some of the horror of her brutal execution. They would not wait for her to fully recover before ending her life.

  Jack needed to speak to Reyes. She had no way of knowing the account that Jack had given. It was true, at least steeped in truth. Finch had lost his cool and been lost under the sands of Kratos. His body might be recovered one day, but it would probably be impossible to tell how he had died, thanks to the corrosive nature of the thin Kratos atmosphere. His body was probably already corroded away to dust. But if Reyes woke and gave a story that deviated from Jack’s in even the slightest, they would both be under investigation.

  Fleet Intelligence was as brutal as they were thorough. Jack would have to get to Reyes first. The corridor outside the debrief room was quiet. Jack stood up from his chair and quietly walked to the open door. He risked a peek out into the corridor. It was empty.

  “If anyone asks,” he said to himself, “I’ll say I thought the interview was over.”

  Jack walked out of the interview room. The Scorpio was a big ship and it would take him a while to get to the med bay. If he was lucky, Reyes would be awake and waiting for him so he could speak to her before Agent Visser did.

  Jack moved quickly and quietly.

  2

  The white walls of the med bay were supposed to suggest cleanliness, but now they just showed the grime that covered every surface of the ship. The clear composite panels that separated various sections of
the med bay had the streaked and milky appearance of any unwashed clear composite surface.

  The nurses’ station was unoccupied, only plastic cups of stale coffee on the table top gave any signs that it was ever occupied. Jack passed by.

  The beds behind the clear composite panels were occupied by the sick and wounded of the ship’s company. A ship the size of the Scorpio had so many personnel that an understaffed med bay always had more bodies than it could deal with.

  Walking along the line of compartments, Jack looked for Reyes. She had been in a coma when they had been rescued by the Scorpio. Most of 6th squad had been brought to the med bay for treatment after the Battle of Kratos Fuel Station. Jack had only been treated for dehydration and a touch of hypothermia. Torent had received extensive treatment for a heavy laceration to his left shoulder. Reyes had been rushed away as a medical emergency. She’d been in the med bay for several days.

  At the far end of the paneled corridor, Jack saw two Marines from Adder Company standing on either side of the entrance to Reyes’s compartment. They were in utility uniform with a pulse pistol strapped to their right leg. The heavy white baton each held was their main weapon of deterrence. Jack knew that anyone attempting to pass the Marine guard would be beaten back by those batons. The pulse pistols were the final fatal alternative.

  The Marines noticed Jack’s approach. One tapped his baton against his boot, while the other held his across his shoulders.