by M. R. Forbes
Hell’s Rejects
Chaos of the Covenant, Book One
M.R. Forbes
Published by Quirky Algorithms
Seattle, Washington
This novel is a work of fiction and a product of the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by M.R. Forbes
All rights reserved.
Cover illustration by Tom Edwards
tomedwardsdesign.com
Acknowledgments
THANK YOU to my readers. Whether this is the first book of mine you have read or the twentieth (or anywhere in-between), your support is immensely appreciated. I hope you’ll be back for the next one.
THANK YOU to my beta readers, Julie, Tom, and Mike, whose sharp eyes certainly saved me some embarrassment.
THANK YOU to my wife, whose everlasting support has allowed me to live a childhood dream.
1
“First time in a dropship, Lieutenant?”
Lieutenant Abigail Cage glanced over at the Master Sergeant running the mission, a burly Curlatin who looked even more alien inside the shell of a Republic Marine battlesuit than he did outside of one. She wondered absently if the padded actuators in the flexible metal skin tugged at the abundance of hair the race was famous for before spitting out a quick response.
“My tour is up at the end of this deployment, Sergeant. I’m willing to bet I have more drop experience than you and your platoon combined.”
She kept her eyes locked on the Sergeant, knowing that her words were being translated to his language through the implant that was standard issue for any government employee who would be heading off-world and every soldier in the Republic. She waited for his large round eyes to narrow slightly through the tinted glass of the battlesuit before pointedly looking away.
“My. My apologies, Lieutenant,” Sergeant Coli said, clearly taken off-guard by the ferocity of her reply. “I meant no decrease.”
Decrease? She hated when the translator fragged words as much as she hated being questioned on her drop experience. She suddenly felt like a bitch for biting at the Sergeant. She had mistaken his intentions, more accustomed to being attached to battalions filled with overly aggressive bouncers than genuinely curious chiefs.
Besides, the question itself wasn’t totally out of bounds. Not all Breakers had the good fortune to ride the vomit comet into the shit. She was too accustomed to soldiers assuming she was nothing more than a desk monkey just because she held a commissioned officer’s rank, an advanced degree, and a specialty in the relatively passive fields of linguistics and computer science. Most non-HSOCs didn’t understand that while Breakers were commissioned officers, they were also the elastic in the Republic military’s structural rigidity. Her training had been anything but typical, to the extent that she wasn’t cleared to divulge even half of what she had learned.
“It’s my fault, Sergeant,” she replied. “I’m always a little defensive around a new crew.”
“It must be difficult being shuffled from one part of the universe to another,” Coli replied. “I am grateful to remain with my troop.”
He motioned to the platoon arranged on either side of the dropship behind them, sixteen soldiers in nearly identical battlesuits holding fast to the walls of the craft to save them from getting too roughed up during the ingress. Coli was the largest of them, though Abbey knew there were two more Curlatins in the mix, along with a Fezzig.
“It can be,” she said. “The upside is that I’ve seen a lot more worlds than most-” She paused before she said “people.” There were a number of different species in the Republic, a network of nearly five hundred planets, and “people" was generally translated to mean humans. “Individuals,” she finished.
“Have you been to Curlat?” Coli asked, hopefully.
“No, sir,” Abbey replied. “I’ve spent a lot more time on the Fringe. That’s where all the trouble seems to be these days.”
Sergeant Coli emitted a heavy, monotone sound that the translator informed her was laughter. “Trouble is everywhere, Lieutenant. The Fringe is the worst of it. We have spent a lot of time out here ourselves. Enough that I would question your assertion that your experience is greater than ours.”
“Fair enough. I guess there’s always enough trouble to go around as long as the Outworlders keep pushing our borders.”
“Indubitably.”
Abbey winced at the word the software had chosen. She would have to tweak her implant to handle the Quiri dialect better when they got back to the Nova. It wasn’t wrong, but it was annoying.
A loud tone interrupted the conversation, a signal to the platoon that they had reached the upper atmosphere of Gradin and things were about to get a little bumpy.
Abbey reached back, locating the attachments to her suit on the inner wall of the dropship. Unlike the rest of the soldiers, she was wearing a softsuit, a less bulky, more agile version of the standard powered armor. Hers contained a special issue embedded system on a chip and extra tightpacks to carry the tools of her trade. What it didn’t have were magnetic connectors to stick her to the hull, and so she had to hook in manually.
No sooner had she gotten the last hook strapped to the suit than the dropship began shaking, rapidly rising and falling as it slammed into the planet’s turbulent atmosphere.
Screw a little bumpy. She felt her arms strain against the tight material of the softsuit and her stomach shift with each jostle.
“Intel said it was going to be rough, but this is insane,” she said.
“Affirmative,” Coli agreed. “The storm must be more intense than the nerds on the Nova predicted. I’ve been in worse.”
“So have I,” Abbey replied, not to be outdone. And she had. Gradin was a Stage Four terraform, a planet with a breathable atmosphere and individuals already on the ground despite the continued output of the huge generators that created the powerful storms as a side effect of their atmospheric processing. She had been to a Stage Two before, three or four years earlier. The dropship had suffered extensive damage to the stabilizers on the way in, and it was a miracle they had been able to climb back out.
And that was with the Republic techs claiming the Spirit-class hoppers could handle Stage Two. Assholes.
She turned her head, watching the rest of the soldiers in the platoon. She knew how to identify different combat personalities by the way they reacted to a drop, though not because of the turbulence. While the shaking they were experiencing wasn’t typical, it also shouldn’t have been enough to unnerve any but the greenest cadet, and there were no green cadets in the Third Battalion. She was the closest in that regard, having only been transferred to the Nova two weeks prior.
Most of the male and females in the group were silent and static, riding out the rough seas without a hint of discomfort. Two had their eyes closed, and she shifted her eyes to manipulate her Tactical Command Unit, marking the bouncers with a small tilde. Closed eyes usually meant they would be the first to break or freeze if things went bad.
One of the soldiers, an average-sized grunt near the back, was smiling, and looking a little too pleased with himself. Abbey marked him with a karat, giving his suit a closer look so she would know how to find him. If she needed someone to do something crazy or stupid, he was the mark.
“Tell me, Lieutenant,” Sergeant Coli said, nonplussed by the rocking. “Why did you volunteer for this drop? Gradin is a rock, and the colony here is composed of the worst kind of scum.”
“Allegedly,” Abbey said, smiling behind her helmet. “Let’s just say I believe individuals are innocent until proven guilty.”
“General Kett has been proven guilty,” Coli replied, his large eyes lowering in distaste. “Not only of aiding the Outworlds, but of misappropriation of funds, embezzlement, and treason.”
“The forensic evidence is questionable.”
Coli shrugged, not wanting to get into an argument. “I only know what I’ve read on the Milnet.”
Of course, you do.
Abbey looked away so the Sergeant wouldn’t catch her rolling her eyes. The Third Battalion wasn’t the military police. Neither was she, for that matter. But the support request in the Milnet had been for a Breaker, and when she had seen the job was to raid a purported Outworlder compound connected to the disgraced officer, her personal curiosity had gotten the better of her. She had seen and read the same media reports as Coli, but she had also read the full forensic breakdowns moving through intelligence. In her mind, all of the data didn’t quite line up, and if there was a chance to either prove her hunch or resolve her own doubts, she was going to take it.
She had never quite been able to make up her mind if that tenacity was a gift or a flaw. It had gotten her into HSOC training, and it had helped make her one of the top Breakers in the Republic, but it had also cost her a husband and more than one friendship. She just hoped Gavin was taking good care of Hayley. Her daughter was the one and only reason she was giving up the military after a single tour, a situation that was especially rare among Breakers. Six years of intense training for only six years of active duty? She had made a mistake getting involved and getting pregnant, but it was her fault, not Hayley’s. There was no reason she had to pay for her mother’s indiscretion.
This was her last shot to satisfy her need to know. She wasn’t going to waste it.
A new tone sounded in the rear of the dropship, signaling that they were closing in on the target. Sergeant Coli reached out and put a hand on her shoulder, dragging her from her head. Then he released himself from his tether, letting the battlesuit help him maintain balance as he made his way between the platoon to the back of the craft.
“Check your squad channels,” he said over the platoon line. “One One, check.”
Abbey didn’t hear Sergeant Ray’s squad check. She was attached to Coli’s team.
“One Nine, check,” she said, ensuring the others could hear her. The rest of the squad followed suit until they had all confirmed their links.
“We went over this back on the Nova, but here’s the reminder for the morons in our midst,” Coli said. “Sergeant Ray’s squad is going to provide support while we make our move against the compound. Our job is to get Lieutenant Cage to a terminal so she can pull whatever intel she deems important. In exchange, the Lieutenant is going to get us into the compound in the first place. Do you copy?”
“Aye, sir,” they all responded, including Abbey.
“Good.”
They waited another ten seconds or so, for a third tone to sound in the rear of the ship.
“Form up!” Coli shouted over the platoon line.
Both squads detached themselves from their magnetic connectors. It took Abbey a few seconds more to get the softsuit unhooked, but she joined the ranks in plenty of time.
“Sergeant,” Captain Yung, their pilot, said over the channel. “We’ve got incoming fire from the compound. We’re going in hot. I repeat, we’re going in hot.”
“Roger,” Coli said. “You’re all Marines. You all know what to do.”
“Ooh-rah,” the platoon replied.
The dropship began to shake again. Not from the turbulence now, but from evasive maneuvers. They could hear the slugs pinging off the thick armor plating, followed by the high-pitched whine of the automated defense system spitting out thousands of pea-sized rounds to counter incoming missiles.
“Hot, Sarge?” The soldier she had marked with the karat, Private Illiard said. “These madar ghahbe aren’t supposed to know we’re coming.”
“I didn’t tell them,” Coli replied.
A fourth tone sounded a dozen seconds later, and the soldiers instinctively braced themselves as the dropship decelerated sharply, the roar of thrusters growing so loud it made it through the armor and into the space. A second noise followed: the sound of the dropship’s three chainguns laying down cover fire as they made a quick descent.
Abbey felt her stomach lifting in response to the maneuver, the artificial gravity of the dropship having slowly adjusted to give them a natural transition to the planet. She ignored the sensation, reaching back and finding her rifle, swinging it forward in unison with the rest of the platoon.
The hatch in front of them slid open with a sharp hiss, revealing wet, muddy, and rocky terrain layered in dense fog and being pummeled with heavy rain. Tracers from the dropship streaked out ahead of them, keeping their exodus clear. Her helmet’s HUD switched at Coli’s command, the TCU giving everyone in the unit marks for every tango the dropship’s onboard computer had identified on the way in.
“Signal back for pickup, Sarge,” Captain Yung said. “Good hunting.”
“Roger,” Coli replied.
He didn’t need to give the command. The Marines were already on the move. Abbey followed as they charged from the cover of the dropship and out into the elements, making the five-meter leap from the ship to the surface. Their battlesuits made the height easy to manage, but her softsuit required a little more finesse. She pushed her rifle onto her back again, grabbing at her waist as she reached the lip of the dropship, hooking her fingers onto small straps there and pulling up and out.
Two gossamer wings spread from her as she dropped, catching the air and slowing her descent, allowing her to land gracefully behind the Sergeant. She released the line the moment she was down, the wings snapping back against her sides while she retrieved her rifle again.
One last time, and then she was going home.
2
Now that the platoon was out of the dropship, their advance on the target was steady. Second Squad moved to the flank, finding some poorly defended high ground and setting up a sniper position there, while First Squad made their way forward, bouncing from rock formation to rock formation, their battlesuits giving them all the power they needed to make it from one cover to the next in a long jump.
Abbey’s jumps were shorter but quicker, aided by her own fit physique. She didn’t as much bounce as skip across the terrain, making fifty meters in a low arc that put her out in the open for a split second before her boots brushed the surface and she sprang off again. That instant gave her a good view of the front of the compound, which was part of the original below ground bunker where the first round of colonists had made their home before the terraforming had given them air to breathe.
The individuals defending it weren’t soldiers, at least not in the sense that the Republic Marines were soldiers. They didn’t have powered armor, and they didn’t look very organized. They were firing hand-me-down weapons, machine guns with low RPS scores and small magazines and ballistics that weren’t even guided. It was the sort of cheap shit that was common among the Outworlds, mainly because it was cheap shit. It was the kind of thing that always left her wondering how the hell the war was coming up on its thirtieth year.
Oh, yeah. Because of the Shrikes.
The Outworld’s ship-killers were faster and deadlier than anything in the Republic, and a handful of the things could break down a Goliath class battleship like the Nova in under two minutes. Meaning that it didn’t matter too much if the units on the ground were inferior, because the Republic had a severe shortage of missions that made it to the ground.
“One Nine, watch your bounce,” one of her squadmates said over the shared channel. “They’re painting you.”
“Roger,” Abbey replied, taking a moment to peek out from behind the cover before making her next jump. Most of the squad was already across, holding position and waiting for her. “Two One, I’ll pop them out, you cap them off.”
“Roger,” Sergeant Ray said. “We’re in position.”
Abbey took a breath before bending her knees and snapping her ankles, activating the thin strands of synthetic musculature attached to the inner side of the softsuit. They added their strength to her own, sending her out into the rain and fog. She kept her eyes to her left, to the compound there. Her helmet assisted her vision through the crap weather, allowing her to pinpoint the tangos popping from cover to shoot at her.
She tucked her body, adjusting her arc as the bullets whipped past her and below her, sending wet splatters up and around. She hit the ground on her shoulder, rolling, the mics in her gear picking up the two sharp cracks as Squad Two’s snipers did their work. She came up, pushing off again, heading for cover and the rest of her team.
No more bullets followed behind her.
“One Nine, clear,” Sergeant Ray said.
“Two One, thank you, thank you,” she replied, hitting the ground again beside Sergeant Coli.
“We’re four hundred meters,” Coli said. “Four bounces to the base. It looks like that last hit convinced the tangos they’re safer inside.” He turned and looked at Abbey, his large eyes conveying his amusement. “They aren’t, are they, Lieutenant?”
“No, sir,” Abbey replied, patting one of the tightpacks on her thigh.
“One One, opposition is holed up in the target,” Sergeant Ray said a moment later, confirming the Sergeant’s observation.
“Roger,” Coli said. “Two One, hold position. Squad one, standard leapfrog, reconvene at the front door. One Nine, line up behind me.”
“Aye, sir,” the squad replied.
“Aye, sir,” Abbey said.
Coli went first, bouncing away, a long, high arc that brought him down closer to the front of the base. Abbey followed him, taking three quick hops to make the same distance. The rest of the squad trailed them, the second section pivoting and making an immediate second jump to the next available forward cover. They repeated the pattern until they were at the base of the compound, staring at a heavy blast door three meters in diameter.