Master Sergeant

by Mel Odom

  “How did you do?” The speaker was a middle-aged Asian male with a shock of black hair that sported a blue stripe on the right side. He wore armor and appeared alert.

  Sage captured an image of the man with the ParaSights and recognized it from the database they’d set up for the operation. During their surveillance, they’d gotten several hits almost instantaneously. Most of the pirates were high-end criminals with long histories of violent behavior.

  Suthep Worachaisawad had been born in Thailand, but he’d shipped out only a few years later to follow in the footsteps of his career-criminal father. Suthep had outstanding warrants on several planets, and had been thought to be somewhere on Hejar, in the Cha’ard system. DawnStar had a large presence in the Cha’ard System, taking advantage of cheap local labor to manufacture products they Gated to other systems. All four planets in that system were known for poverty and crime.

  The database confirmed the presence of three other people—Ivan Lebedev of Moscow, Oora Uito of Turbel, in the Cha’ard system; and Darrd Kycus of Ineestend, in the Zardet system—before the driver of the third crawler opened his door and said, “What’s wrong with Hobed? He’s not answering his comm.”

  Sethup hammered the side of the third crawler with a fist as he walked to the rear of the vehicle. “Hobed. Are you asleep again, you pox-ridden ton’or?”

  Hobed was evidently the Wedoid male slumped at the plasma mini-cannon in the third crawler. As big as he was, he nearly filled the gunner blister. Blood painted the back wall of the compartment, but that was hardly visible in the darkness trapped in the blister. If it weren’t for the fact that Hobed’s head was MIA, people might have thought he was merely relaxing in the self-adjusting seat.

  At the rear of the crawler, staring at the blister, Suthep cursed in his native language, which Sage’s hardsuit near-AI translated easily, and swung his Vais plasma subgun up. “Weps ready! Now! Somebody’s—”

  Sage released his hold on the crawler and dropped to the hard stone floor with a thump. He peeled a couple of anti-personnel grenades from his combat harness, activated them, then fanned his arms out to the sides to throw the grenades out into the cave.

  “Fire in the hole!” he called out in warning.

  TWENTY-SIX

  West-southwest of Makaum City

  2128 Zulu Time

  The penetration team stayed put in their position under the crawler, waiting for the explosions, but they readied their weps. Sage took up the Roley and counted down.

  “There’s somebody out there!” One of the guards at the front of the cave took cover and lifted her Iseld needle rifle. “I saw someone out there!”

  Most of the pirates in the cave carried Iseld weapons. Iseld was a knockoff munitions corporation that specialized in reverse engineering weapons. The corporation was one of Green Dragon Industrial Trade’s shell businesses. Sage thought maybe the weapons were carried to create confusion as to who the lab belonged to. On the other hand, GDIT was good at getting illegal weapons out to different systems.

  “Grenade!” someone yelled as one of the anti-personnel munitions Sage had thrown bounced off the leg of a table.

  By then it was too late. The grenade exploded and a cloud of shrapnel filled the cave. A few of the sharp metal shards slammed into Sage’s hardsuit with tiny pings! but the armor held. His helmet blocked the sound of the detonations.

  Several of the biopirates went down as the razor-edged shrapnel tore through their light armor and flesh. Some of them were ripped to pieces and others went down flailing at wounds.

  “We’re inbound,” Murad radioed.

  “Roger that,” Sage replied as he readied the Roley. “Confirmed there are no civilians on-site. All are hostiles, and there are eight more than we counted.”

  “Understood.”

  “Pen Team go!” Sage rolled to his right, coming to a rest in the prone position on his elbows with the Roley up and ready. He settled the sights over the man in front of him, squeezed the trigger as the guy tried to swing his weapon around. Plasma bolts singed the air over Sage’s head and cooked the crawler’s side. Then Sage squeezed the Roley’s trigger and the gauss burst short-circuited the man’s heart and blew it through his back.

  One of the other fireteam soldiers rolled into position behind Sage while the other three took up positions on the other side of the crawler.

  Sage swung his rifle around and picked off two more traffickers. Getting to his feet, he kept track of the enemy forces through the overlapping vision provided by the ParaSights.

  He checked the soldier behind him and saw that she was moving as well, staying on his six, and headed for the lab equipment, intending to seek out shelter there. His armor held up against most of the small-arms fire, but some of the plasma bolts tore into it, peeling away layers that would have to be regrown by nanobots later. His suit gyros helped him withstand the hydrostatic shock of solid ammo rounds slamming into him, but he was dodging and moving, putting lab tables and other equipment between him and his opponents.

  A plasma bolt struck a chemical canister atop one of the tables. The canister’s contents erupted and flames splashed in all directions. A hot concussive wave slapped into Sage and nearly knocked him from his feet.

  Relying on the hardsuit to keep him safe even though part of the spill had enveloped his arms in fire, Sage sighted in on the female pirate who had shot at him and squeezed the trigger. The blast hit her dead center and hammered her body over one of the tables. Shifting the rifle, Sage aimed for one of the pirates manning a heavy plasma cannon at the cave mouth and squeezed the trigger again. He slid the Roley slightly to the right and picked up another gunner standing at the cave entrance, then squeezed the trigger.

  He turned on the suit’s PA and started the pre-recorded address as he pulled back to look for more targets. “This is the Terran Army. Drop your weapons and surrender.”

  The warning only drew a sudden salvo of firepower that chased Sage into brief retreat behind a loading mech. Private Charity Fleming went down under the barrage of hostile fire.

  Trapped for the moment, Sage searched his surroundings. “Fleming? You still with me?”

  “Yes.” Her voice sounded thready and distant. “I’m leaking blood and I can’t feel my legs.”

  “Hang in there and keep your head down, Private. Help’s on the way.”

  “Roger that.”

  Sage didn’t know how badly wounded the private was, but he was pinned down and couldn’t get to her. He spotted a ten-liter canister of the same chemicals that had nearly exploded in his face earlier, which sat on a shelf within arm’s reach. Holding the Roley in one hand, he grabbed the canister by the looped handle, set himself, then heaved the ten-liter container in the direction of the group of traffickers taking cover behind the lead crawler’s nose.

  The canister banged into the side of the crawler near the front and ricocheted only slightly, starting to fall toward the ground. Sage fired by instinct, placing a blast into the canister, which erupted into cascades of flames that fell over the traffickers, setting them ablaze. As they broke cover, Sage dropped three of them with quick bursts. Two fell, succumbing to the fire that clung to them.

  The other three soldiers took up positions on the other side of the crawlers and used the equipment there for cover as they opened fire. Return fire chopped into the equipment and Private Pete Bowden went down as a near miss from a gel grenade launcher blew him off his feet.

  Two pirates fired at Sage as they ran between the ends of two tables seeking cover. Sage rounded the other end of one table, put a hand on it, and shoved, getting the AKTIVsuit’s muscle behind the effort. The table zipped across the floor and smacked into both pirates, trapping them between that table and the next.

  Sage fired at them point-blank. He grabbed another canister from a nearby shelf and slid it along the seven-meter table, knocking lab equipment and other containers out of the way. Less than a meter from the two struggling pirates, he shot the canister and deto
nated the contents in a liquid, fiery rush.

  Suthep clambered into the rear crawler and slid behind the steering wheel. The electromagnetic turbines cycled to life and he engaged the transmission. Once he had it in reverse, he floored the accelerator and backed over his own people in his rush to get out of the cave. Other pirates had the presence of mind to leap onto the escaping vehicle, or at least get out of the way.

  Stepping out around the table he’d shoved, Sage sighted on the crawler’s windshield and hammered it with bursts from the Roley. The impact-resistant clearplas fractured but held.

  Sage opened the comm to his team as he stood over Fleming and guarded her. All of the pirates inside the lab were down. Sage and two of his team remained standing.

  “Meacham,” Sage called.

  “Here, Top.”

  “You’ve got one crawler headed in your direction.”

  Outside the crawler was taking fire from Murad’s advancing team. Some of the pirates clinging to the vehicle’s sides returned fire, but they weren’t accurate as they struggled to hold on to the crawler. A coilgun burst ripped one of them away. Before the pirate could get back up from the ground, Suthep backed over him.

  Pulling on the steering wheel, Suthep cut hard to bring the crawler around, then he engaged the forward gears and plunged through the surrounding brush. Small trees went down before the crawler as it gained speed.

  “I see him, Top.” Brittney Meacham was a grenadier on one of the fireteams Sage had led into battle. She carried a gel grenade launcher. She’d seen combat against the Phrenorians on Kimrilu before the Terrans had been forced to retreat from that system. She’d seemed like a solid soldier, but she’d been rotated to Makaum because she was good with languages and had specialized in working with agrarian worlds.

  The crawler raced along, picking up speed rapidly and leaving a hole chewed through the jungle. White scars showed on the dark trees where bark was torn away and brush splintered.

  “There are no friendlies on the vehicle.” Sage turned and went back to Private Fleming. He signaled to the other two members of his team inside the cave and had them set up a defensive perimeter.

  “Roger that. No friendlies.” Meacham sounded totally calm.

  Kneeling beside Fleming, Sage placed a hand on her suit and kept watch on the fleeing crawler through the ParaSights.

  A line of gel grenades suddenly plopped onto the crawler. Two of the biopirates clinging to the vehicle recognized the danger they were in. One of them dropped from the crawler and the other tried tearing the gel grenades free.

  Linked for detonation, the gel grenades exploded all at the same time, ripping a hole in the crawler’s side and tipping it over. The crawler skidded for a few meters and smashed to a halt against a rocky outcropping, leaving broken tree stumps in its wake. Flames sprouted up and gray smoke lifted into the dark sky.

  Meacham and the remaining half of the fireteams advanced on the stricken crawler. A pirate covered in flames struggled to crawl from the cab, didn’t quite make it, and tumbled over the side to lay still.

  “Fleming, you still with me?” Sage brought up the soldier’s vital signs on his faceshield, then glanced through the damage reports.

  “Still with you, Top.” Fleming sounded pained.

  “Relax, soldier. You’re going to be fine.”

  “You’d tell me that even if I was dying.”

  That was the truth. Sage had been forced to do that before. The young ones always seemed to know they were dying and often remained calm about that. Older, more seasoned soldiers who’d seen a lot of action tended to deny dying until the end.

  “I would,” Sage agreed. “But that’s not the case here. Looks like a couple nerve clusters in your back are traumatized. Swelling’s cutting off nerve relay.”

  “I can’t move my legs, Top.”

  “Once we get the swelling under control, you’ll get your legs back. I’ve seen this kind of injury before. In the meantime, I’m going to have your suit give you something for the pain and release nanites to work on the injury.” Sage sent those commands into her suit.

  “Okay.”

  “Until we get ready to transport you out of here, I want you to lay still and just breathe.”

  “Roger that.”

  Sage checked her bio readouts again and saw the meds and the nanites were already at work. Her respiration and heart rate dropped steadily toward more acceptable levels. “I’m going to check on Bowden.”

  “I’ll be here, Top.”

  At the front of the cave, Murad and Kiwanuka secured the perimeter.

  “Top?” Murad called.

  “Yes sir.” Sage knelt down beside Private Bowden. The man’s left leg had been taken off just below the knee. At first Sage thought the suit had amputated the limb, then he saw there was no blood. Even with the hardsuit shutting down the bleeding, there would have been some blood.

  “Are your people all right?”

  “Two wounded, sir. Working on them now.” Sage put a hand on Bowden’s scorched hardsuit and tapped into his med info. “You with me, Private Bowden?”

  “Affirmative, Top. Just catching my breath.”

  “It appears you’ve lost a leg.”

  “Look around. Maybe you’ll find it.”

  Sage glanced at the boot and armor encased lower limb lying under a pile of lab equipment. “Found it.”

  “Still in once piece?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “If you don’t mind, maybe you could bring it over here. If it’s not damaged too badly, the bionic nanites might be able to reattach it.”

  “Either way, you’re going to need another boot.”

  Bowden laughed, but the effort was strained. Despite the fact that the limb was cybernetic, the young private had suffered a lot of blunt force trauma. “Yeah, I will, Top.”

  “If I give you something for the pain, can the leg still heal?”

  “Roger that. System runs itself. Give me a few hours and, since the joints are still pretty much intact, and I’ll be good as new.”

  “Glad to hear it.” Sage released meds into the young soldier’s system, then fetched the cyber leg and guided it back into place. He twisted it so that the ends fit together, more or less. As he did, a message crawled across his HUD.

  CYBER REPAIR BOWDEN, PRIVATE PETER RINGO ONLINE. IMPLEMENT PROGRAM?

  Sage acknowledged the question and watched as gleaming strands suddenly started drifting between the two sections of Bowden’s leg. In just seconds, a web of cyber muscle and tissues were woven into a gleaming latticework.

  “You good, Private?”

  “I’m good, Top.” Bowden sounded slightly dreamy from the meds in his system.

  “I’m here if you need me.” Sage patted the young man reassuringly on the shoulder and stood.

  DIAGNOSTIC SUGGESTS REPAIRS ARE NECESSARY TO HARDSUIT.

  The near-AI’s announcement scrolled across Sage’s HUD.

  IMPLEMENT?

  “Roger that,” Sage commanded. “Implement.”

  Nanites programmed into the hardsuit began patching up the armor, pulling replacement materials from resource packs in the combat harness. Sage added an item on his post-combat to-do list:

  RESTOCK ARMOR MATERIALS.

  Murad stood in the center of the cave and started breaking the area down into search grids, assigning personnel from the team to cover the sections.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Training Area

  Charlie Company

  Fort York

  0543 Zulu Time

  Following the successful op out in the bush, after the spec ops team was blooded, Sage turned part of his attention to the training ground and started pushing the soldiers at Fort York. Terracina had broken up the PT units and left the soldiers to their own devices. As a result, many of them weren’t as organized and diligent about drill and training.

  Sage broke the schedule down himself, settling the soldiers into three sections, and he oversaw it all him
self, mixing the original drill instructors in with the squads. Some of them would come back out to resume their roles with a stronger work ethic. Others would be rotated back down to grunt status.

  When he finished, there would be no slackers.

  The hardest part of the schedule was the mornings. Sage arranged for early reveille for the day shift, got them up at 0500, put them through their paces, had breakfast with them, then took the soldiers from night shift and trained with them at 0800.

  He got up at 0300 himself to tend to the fort’s paperwork. Major Finkley didn’t like the fact that Sage wasn’t there at his morning briefings and made an issue of it on the first day. A call from Colonel Halladay set the major straight on that.

  In the evening, Sage met with his spec ops team and they pooled intel, then planned and executed strikes within the jungle, taking down targets as they found them. Most of the labs were small, not like the big one they had hit first. But all of those operations added up. Tension ratcheted up in the black market.

  The drug profiteers, and the corps working with them, wanted Sage dead, but none of them dared attack him. Halladay had insisted on a personal security detachment around Sage anytime he went into the sprawl. Sage didn’t like it, but acquiesced, bargaining to take only his own people to watch over him.

  Mostly these days, he trained the troops, pushing and pulling, breaking and building.

  Those back-to-back drills in the morning were draining, in the planet’s humidity, and Sage often discovered he’d lost between two and four kilos of water weight during those times. During his training post, Sage had kept himself in better shape than any of the soldiers he’d instructed. Some of the young ones tried outrunning him during the hikes, but by the time they hit the end of the 10K, Sage was passing them up.

  “Becoming an effective soldier is about dedication and stamina,” Sage told them later as they stood around huffing and puffing. He wouldn’t allow them to fall out immediately. “And you want to be an effective soldier because an effective soldier is one who lives longer.”

  The grunts hated him. He saw that in their eyes as they watched him. He was pushing them past their endurance, taking time out of their day, and he was breaking them down psychologically, making them see how lacking they were.