There was no point in arguing with Liang; he was just doing his job, so I dismissed any more thoughts of harassing the man. I had barely fifteen minutes left before I had to report and the message was now flashing red in my INAS.
I entered the giant military complex that stretched for miles in all directions as platoons of soldiers marched around me in unison. Recruits, almost all of them. Fresh meat for the meat grinder. Three years had already passed, but the surrounding still felt familiar. Although I hated to admit it, coming here again felt like discovering a long-lost lover. An abusive, tiring, deadly lover, but I wasn’t the type of man who would settle for someone safe and boring. Not with my past.
A new message popped up in my INAS to report to Major Wesley at her office. Strange. Usually, deployment meant that you were tied into your hibernation capsule and catapulted across the stars immediately. I assumed it was one of the perks of my rank and experience. I proved to be right: there was no deployment. It was a ruse to get me to panic and show up. At least that’s what another sergeant told me when I sat down in the foyer to Major Wesley’s office.
It was all a cheap trick that I hadn’t really expected from the military, but they were known to do worse on occasion. If I had time to say goodbye to my friends or family, they might have changed my mind to the point I’d become an outlaw. It wasn’t all that uncommon. However, this cast another shadow over the whole situation. Was the military this desperate?
A forty-something sergeant was leaving the office of the major when I got there. There was a rather horrifying expression plastered to his face as he waved me in. Such a big man, and such fear radiating off him. It wasn’t very encouraging.
Major Wesley was a woman in her early hundreds. Although she seemed fragile at first glance, the combined war machine of thirty human worlds projected from her composure and tone of voice. When someone like that told you to sit, you sat; when she told you to dance, you danced; and when she told you to charge into a squad of Doomguard-armored Aloi Templars, you charged. And died, of course. Horribly.
“Sergeant Stavos. I’ll make this brief.”
“Ma’am,” I said and nodded as a form of greeting.
“You’ve been recalled to the war effort in the Ulyx Cluster. Your full rank has been reinstated, and you’ll be assigned a squad before you leave.”
“Ma’am,” I said again in confirmation, but the expression on my face was nothing but obvious confusion.
Having picked up on it, the major spoke with a much milder but still commanding tone.
“I know you think you did your time, soldier. And honestly, given your record, it pains me to send you in again, but we need every able body we can find.” Then, as if she felt bad for giving into her empathy, her voice turned serious again. “You’ll be briefed en-route. Your squad members are waiting for you at Launchpad 8 together with the rest of your regiment. One thing though. You won’t be reporting to the colonel, you and your squad will report directly to Captain Tailor.”
No surprise there as one troopship usually carried some 100,000 soldiers and that made up a regiment led by a colonel. Although specialist squads were formally part of regiments, they were usually rather autonomous on the battlefield. There were up to a hundred specialist squads per regiment ranging in size between three and seven soldiers of different classes and skills, all coordinated through a captain.
I looked down at my civilian clothes and the major almost smirked.
“Sir?”
“You will be given a standard gel-suit before launch and the rest of your uniform upon arrival at Alpha Station, don’t worry.”
“What? Alpha Station?” I blurted out without thinking. The Major cleared her throat and narrowed her eyes.
“What was that, Sergeant?”
“Excuse me, Major, I… I wasn’t expecting to…”
“I’ll overlook this outburst once. You’ll be briefed en-route, Technomancer.”
She emphasized my class almost too much to my liking. Alpha Station, though, was a deathly place at the very spearhead of the entire war. Alpha Station wasn’t just in orbit of the biggest B-class star in the cluster. It wasn’t just the most populated star system. It was the jumping-off point to…
“It can’t—”
“Yes, Technomancer, Detera,” Major Wesley said, her face stern with a hint of underlying compassion.
There was nothing I could or wanted to add. To be sent to Detera was to be sent into the lion’s maw—a death sentence. I was completely terrified of the idea, and that’s coming from someone who had already died once.
The Ulyx Cluster was the only place where you could find detrium and almost 90% of it was on the super-planet known as Detera. Detrium was what made the Galaxy turn. It was a substance so complex and powerful that not even the Ka fully understood it. Without the damn thing, there was no interstellar travel unless you were on a generation ship. There was also no magic-level tech that made the Ka and Imminy civilizations virtually immortal and godlike in their abilities.
Since humankind joined the Commonwealth, Detera had been under the control of the Ka and Imminy while the Alois Hegemony made do with what was left. For decades the Alois races pushed into the sector and attacked the planet, but it seemed like the Federation had it under control. I guessed the Hegemony had become very desperate and hence very serious about wrestling control from us.
There was no way around it, though. Just like this morning’s call to arms, I accepted my mission with feigned cool-headedness and proceeded to Launchpad 8 where I was about to meet my new squad.
The major asked me to call in the next sucker waiting for the good news she’d just told me, so I waved the next guy in, trying to hide any emotion, but instead of horror, I had this stupid smirk on my face. Sometimes bad news did that to me and knowing someone else would get the same as I was slightly comforting.
The air in Neo Carolina was a mixture of exhaust fumes, heavy industry pollution, and an over-capacitated sewage system. While most of us were very used to it, being in the heart of the beast pushed one’s tolerance to the very limits. Maybe it was a good thing I’d be gone for a while. At least I’d get my lungs straight.
I turned on my INAS to scan the soldiers around me, but I was left less than impressed. Fledgling recruits marched around me wherever I looked. It wasn’t uncommon that most soldiers were new to war at HQ, but it worried me that even platoon sergeants rarely had any combat experience. Have they been spending people that quickly?
It wasn’t until I reached Launchpad 6 that my INAS detected a squad of three soldiers with proper combat experience. I stared at them like a little girl who had just seen a real-life unicorn. Two of them were Brawler-class monsters in full Guardian-armor, standing at more than eight feet in height. On their backs sat two-handed Nas-swords that crackled with electric discharges. The swords alone weighed over a hundred pounds each, but the magnetic sheaths in which they sat weighed fifty more. Those war-machines could easily take on an entire company of soldiers.
The higher the level and power difference, the less accurate the INAS was with showing their full stats. In this case, all I got were the basics.
The third soldier, however, was the one that really caught my eye. He was a Technomancer in Fyre armor. The same type of armor that had saved my life a dozen times or so. To the untrained eye, it looked like any other high-tier armor, but if you looked closely you could see it move, shift around as millions of nanites adjusted and readjusted themselves constantly. It took a lot of control to keep them as dormant as he did, so I knew the man was a pro. It was a testament to the Technomancer’s skill.
The man was a corporal, one rank beneath mine, but those ranks would mean very little were we to test our prowess against each other. My INAS flared up in bright red as I started to read his statistics almost on instinct: Corporal Rice, Adept Technomancer, 32 deployments.
I turned my INAS off, feeling a sensation I hadn’t in a very long time. It wasn’t envy, no, I became app
rehensive.
I never wanted to return to war, and over the last years, I was sure I wasn’t going to, but life did things even if you didn’t want it to. It threw you back to the bridges you thought you’d crossed, and I was still angry that they tore me away from my peaceful life on Persei Prime, but the feeling of pity was slowly being replaced by anxiety to become once again what I knew I could. To rule the battlefield like a god. My thoughts of self-grandeur were interrupted by the Technomancer himself as he nodded in my direction.
“Sir,” he said with the most arrogant smirk one could imagine.
“Corporal,” I nodded back. He was scanning me with his INAS.
It hurt. I couldn’t say it didn’t, but that was part of it all. The nanites enabled us to acquire levels of power that would have been godlike to people of the past. With such power—almost uniformly—came a certain level of arrogance. Of course, this Technomancer would never even dream to assert such a position in front of a general, but a puny level-five sergeant like me had to swallow his pride and then work his way up again so he could someday level the playing field. Luckily for me I’d already been there once, so getting there again was going to be much easier with the support the navy would provide.
I took a deep breath of acrid air and jumped on a floater that took me to Launchpad 8 with a whole platoon of uniformed recruits. They saluted me with respect, and I answered in kind. There was a mix of anticipation and fear painted on their faces: The ‘wha-wha’ we called it because recruits kept saying, “What?” to almost everything that happened around them.
I sometimes thought about the mental implications of being sent into such a war. A thousand years ago, picking up a sword or an ax to defend your lord’s honor on the battlefield must have been quite terrifying, but to be thrown into the Ulyx Cluster where you joined a virtually endless war between dozens of species both on the ground, air, and space was a completely different dimension altogether. Whatever you expected before launch wasn’t even the tip of the iceberg of what you would see. To us humans, it was like joining gods on their quest for ultimate power. But I’d already been there once, and I couldn’t quite say whether it was better not to know.
The last batches of able bodies were marching into the jaws of Carrier 8 as we arrived. My INAS detected Captain Tailor at the entrance: Captain Tailor CO, Huntmaster Commando, 41 deployments.
I was relieved to see the captain’s statistics. It meant he’d been recently in the fray, which of course meant he knew what he was doing. It wasn’t too uncommon for commissioned officers to be desk jockeys who sent their men into war without ever truly having tasted the smell of battle.
Captain Tailor was a high-level veteran, so it was no wonder he was assigned to lead the special forces. The man was a square-jawed army type if you ever saw one. He wasn’t wearing any armor; instead he was clothed in a plain officer’s uniform, but the bulging muscles beneath his shirt spoke of a man you wouldn’t want to argue with.
“Sergeant Stavos, glad to have you on board again,” he said, offering me a handshake as I walked up to him.
“Glad to be here, Captain,” I answered sincerely.
“Glad? Really? Who’s glad to go to die?”
He caught me by surprise, as I didn’t expect him to be cynical about the whole thing.
“We all are, sir. Don’t we all want to serve humanity the best way we can?”
“Nobody is glad to be here except for psychopaths and morons who can’t even imagine what awaits them, Sergeant.” He flashed me a smile that looked pretty sincere. “Hey, you!” he yelled at one of the recruits boarding the carrier as his head snapped around. “Wipe that damn smile off your face, wha-wha, before I kick your teeth into your damn throat!”
The recruit’s face quickly went from a big smile to a frown and then changed to terror in less than a second.
“See what I mean?” I shrugged, trying to hide a smile of my own.
He looked me up and down, analyzing my stats with his INAS.
“A shame, Stavos. Someone like you going civilian and losing all their hard-earned powers. Why did you pussy-out?”
“I… There were multiple reasons.”
The question that I never wanted to answer came much quicker than I thought it would have. I knew someone would ask sooner or later, but guys like Tailor had little compassion for us drop-outs. Tailor was the type of guy who would leave the army in a casket or not at all, and they harbored a special type of resentment toward guys like me, or so I thought.
“Tell me.”
“After the rebirth, something clicked in me, sir. Especially after being told I wasn’t going to get nanite injections so I couldn’t go back on the field for a while, I just…”
His stare was like a blade. I hated uttering these weak excuses before a man like Tailor, but they were true. There was no other reason for leaving the army than me not being able to cope with war anymore after becoming… ordinary.
Rebirth was a stressful process that took its toll on your psyche like nothing else in life. For years I’d been trying to get rid of the guilt for leaving my squad, my platoon, and my captain behind… but it never went away.
“Whatever it was that made you quit, you better leave it behind, son,” he said sternly. “I don’t need a sergeant who will shit himself in the middle of a battle. I know the higher-ups sent you here unwillingly, so I’ll ask you one time and one time only: are you ready for this? Because if you’re not, I’ll make sure you have an ‘accident’ in your hibernation capsule so you reach the Ulyx Cluster more soup than man.”
More soup than man… He meant he’d mess with the gravity-gel in my suit so that my body didn’t get any cushioning from the massive g-forces that happened during faster-than-light travel. It was a horrifying thought, but it wasn’t the reason I answered the way I did.
“I’m very ready, Captain,” I replied.
He looked me straight in the eyes for a good five seconds, testing and prodding my soul for weakness. I knew there was none. This day was a hell of a ride, but as it moved toward deployment, I was becoming more confident in what I truly wanted to do, what I needed to do. You will find no weakness in me, I thought almost out loud.
“All right then, Sergeant. I believe you.” As he said those words my whole body relaxed and I could breathe again. “But know this, if you screw me over, I’ll spread your bones across Detera myself before any of those Aloi shits gets to you.”
Ah, yes, the good ol’ ‘I’ll kill you myself’ routine. If you were in the Federation forces, you were sure to get one of those treatments on every other mission.
“Sir, yes sir!”
“Good, meet your teammates. Their position is uploaded in your INAS so you can contact them right now. It wouldn’t be too bad if they get to know you before launch. Gives them something to dream about in hibernation. Don’t go easy on these wha-whas, Sergeant. They need to learn some discipline before they die.”
The captain walked away toward the ship, and I exhaled a deep breath. I liked the man; he was my kind of captain. Stern, smart, and with a no-bullshit attitude, a man you could trust in the field. I felt relief. At least this part of the whole charade had gone well so far.
I turned up my INAS and contacted my squad. Two soldiers, both lowbies like myself. One was a Brawler and the other a Commando/Medic. Fine. That was a good mix of classes. We would supplement each other well, but that thought only went so far until I read the names.
A mixture of anger and evil glee climbed its way up my spine. The two young soldiers paced toward me as soon as I sent the message over my INAS. Good, that was a starting point. With their hands behind their backs standing firmly at attention, Layla Alexeyeva and Leo Madrigo saluted me. Leo definitely looked surprised but tried to hide it while Layla’s face looked nothing short of dismal. I had to use all my willpower not to laugh. Leo couldn’t help himself though, and finally broke.
“Sergeant,” he began, but I stopped him immediately.
“D
o not address me unless I ask you something, wha-wha,” I hissed, staring him down. He bowed his head in acknowledgment. “My name is Sergeant Richard Stavos of the Commonwealth Federation, and I will be your superior officer and squad leader on this mission, is that clear?”
“Yes, Sergeant!” both cried.
“Do I hear any objections?” I said leaning into Layla’s face. She was an inch taller than me, but I knew that in her mind’s eye I stood as tall as Mount Tai.
“No, Sergeant!”
“We’re embarking on a high-risk mission in the Ulyx Cluster. I need to know right now if you’re going to have my back. If there is the slightest of objections to my command, I want to hear them now and never again so I’ll make this clear: are you ready to die for me in the field, soldiers?”
“Yes, Sergeant!”
I felt there was no lack of honesty in the answer so I was relieved—but not completely. People could be unpredictable, but for now, I’d give them the benefit of the doubt. After all, they were in the army now.
“If I feel, not see, feel that I can’t rely on you out there, I will take you out myself before the Aloi shits have even the chance to smell you, is that clear?”
“Yes, Sergeant!”
“Get your stuff together and board the ship.”
The two saluted me and picked up their duffel bags, but just before they turned away, Layla stopped and seemed to want to say something.
“What is it, wha-wha? You have something on your mind?”
“Sergeant, I…”
“What?”
“I’m sorry, for…”
“For what, soldier? Being knocked unconscious? You should work on your spatial awareness if you want to survive Detera! Now piss off.”
“Yes, Sergeant!”
Starblood: A Military Space Opera Series (War Undying Book 1) Page 3