Lucky Universe: Lucky's Marines | Book One

by Joshua James

  “Tango up!” Lucky yelled over all-comm.

  A moment later he heard the raucous exchange of energy beams and pulse fire.

  “Covering!” Jiang said.

  “I’m in!” Dawson replied a second later.

  “Two at your nine o’clock,” Jiang said.

  “Covering fire!” yelled Lucky as he rolled out from behind the ore rock he was hiding against.

  A blast of heat washed over the top of his head, and for the third time in as many minutes he sensed an energy beam slice over his head.

  He crawled fast, using the large gray slabs of the collapsed wall as cover.

  Nico was right where Rocky’s drones had triangulated him. Lucky grabbed him by the leg and turned around.

  His spiders plucked hard at his side, and he swung his rifle arm up wildly, firing off a pulse toward the ragged fringe of the collapsed wall.

  The kid was heavy as hell to drag in all his combat armor. Then suddenly he wasn’t, and Lucky toppled forward over a boulder as yet another blue beam blasted past.

  He felt a dull pain in his side.

  He glanced back to see he was holding the kid’s combat boot, sliced cleanly off at the shin.

  He threw it down.

  “Same one,” Rocky noted wryly.

  “Not now!”

  He rolled back and grabbed the kid’s other leg and started dragging again.

  A Union drone dropped out of nowhere, but one of the locusts kamikazied into it, and both spun away into the debris field.

  Lucky launched Nico into the crushed little ship like a live grenade, then lunged in after him.

  Lucky spotted blood spewing from his own flank.

  Malby had stationed himself at the opening of the ship, firing away without hitting much of anything.

  “We have zero tactical advantage here!” he screamed over the sound of his own pulse rifle.

  “You don’t say.”

  With the air temporarily cleared of drones, they’d become easier targets for those Union sharpshooters firing down from the jagged edge of the partially collapsed hanger wall.

  Then Lucky felt his spiders go berserk and he looked up to see the battle platforms start moving.

  In front of them, three-dozen Union troopers in full battle gear were navigating a descent down the pile of debris.

  “Malby—”

  But the rock Malby was leaning against exploded, and he fell back awkwardly.

  The troops advanced openly now, free of Malby’s pulses and shielded from Jiang and Dawson’s fire.

  Lucky was about to ask Rocky if she had any more drones hiding out in the other ships when he looked down.

  The shielded container was intact, he noted.

  So was the orb.

  “Jiang,” Lucky said into the all-comm. “I have a really bad idea.”

  “I like it already,” she replied through the sound of pulse fire.

  “Be over in a sec.”

  “Wait, what?”

  41

  Two-Step

  “I take it back,” she said over the all-comm.

  “Too late,” Lucky said.

  He’d emerged slowly from the rubble of the fallen wall, clutching the T’ket’ka orb in his right hand above his head.

  In his left hand he held his pulse rifle with the barrel shoved into the soft bottom of the orb, compressing a deep dimple into it.

  A warm wash of electricity spilled down his hand as if someone had left an energy spout open. His head buzzed.

  He stopped at the summit of the pile, squeezed his eyes shut, and waited to get shot.

  Malby hid just behind the debris-strewn lip of the ship, perched ready to grab Lucky and haul him back if the Union soldiers called his bluff.

  Lucky wouldn’t bet five credits on himself lasting another five seconds.

  One.

  Here it comes.

  Two.

  He clenched his teeth.

  Three.

  Any second.

  Four.

  Or maybe—

  Five.

  He opened one eye.

  Then the other.

  He felt his ass unclench the tiniest amount.

  Then he shoved harder into the side of the orb and started easing the trigger on his rifle.

  Even if the Union understood what he had there—and their retrofitting of their destroyers seemed to indicate they did—there was no guarantee these monkeys with guns would know better than to just shoot him. If he were in their shoes he would shoot first and ask forgiveness later.

  Luckily for Lucky, his counterpart wasn’t out there.

  There was a shuffling somewhere along the Union line. What might have been a yell. Then several of the large energy beam rifles wavered and disappeared.

  The battle troopers came to a stop.

  “Ummm. I didn’t really plan for success.”

  “Have you ever?”

  “Fair point.”

  He inched slowly back toward Malby, careful to keep the orb between himself and the wall of Union soldiers.

  “You’re up, sport.”

  Malby stayed crouched in his spot behind the debris. “No way, man.”

  “Way.”

  “What about them?” he said, hooking his thumb back at the scientists in the smashed ship.

  “Nico can hang back with them while his foot regens,” he said. “Orton will have to be carried, anyway, and I don’t trust Vlad.”

  He didn’t voice his other thought, which was that if this went south, it was all academic anyway.

  “In the meantime, you’ll be tactically useful over there.”

  He slowly rotated back around and backed his ass into Malby’s personal space. “So come kiss my ass.”

  Malby cursed under his breath.

  “Nuts to butt, Marine. That’s an order.”

  Malby stood quickly and grabbed Lucky in a bear hug from behind. He bumped up against Lucky’s arms, and for one terrifying moment Lucky thought he would drop the orb.

  “Goddammit, Malby,” he hissed. “Do you not understand the concept of no sudden movements?”

  “Sorry,” he said, way too loud right in Lucky’s ear.

  This was going to be the longest walk of his life.

  He started to edge slowly across the hangar toward Jiang’s ship with Malby draped over him, one deliberate step at a time, the orb and rifle above his head as the soldiers swiveled their own rifles to follow his path. Lucky could feel their operators measuring up the risk of taking a shot.

  “I know we might all die here today,” said Jiang over all-comm. “But this may just be the highlight of my life.”

  In the silence of the cavernous hangar, Lucky could hear three things;

  The sound of his and Malby’s two-step across the hangar.

  The metallic scraping of battle gear as several dozen rifles followed.

  And the stifled laughter of Dawson and Jiang.

  “I feel there’s a dick joke here I’m missing,” Rocky added.

  “Goddamned Marines,” he muttered under his breath.

  Five minutes and three-hundred excruciating steps later, he shoved Malby into the second container ship while holding the orb high in the air.

  A battle trooper dropped to a knee and swung his barrel across the opening to the ship.

  Lucky shoved the barrel of his gun even farther into the orb until he thought the material must surely burst. He again began depressing the trigger.

  The trooper hesitated, then slowly stood back and slid his barrel away.

  Lucky exhaled.

  The buzzing in his head was growing louder. It was getting hard to hear and harder to think.

  He felt a red mist floating at the edges of his vision. Something murderous crossed his mind. Having the orb this close for this long was a mistake.

  “Rocky, I feel Him. He’s close.”

  He strained to hear Rocky’s voice but couldn’t make out the words. She sounded so far away.

  Ma
lby, Jiang and Dawson were safely ensconced within the rock ore outer shell of the other ship. Nothing he’d seen so far from the Union soldiers suggested they could blast through that. Their energy beam rifles only seemed able to chip away at it. Better than their pulse rifles could muster, but still not enough to dislodge them.

  That could change at any moment, however, so they needed to work fast.

  All he had to do now was get everyone else over to that other ship, activate it with the orb, and get the hell into the fold and the fuck out of dodge.

  “This is going to work,” he said over his shoulder, reaching the lip of the mangled ship and backing into it, holding his precious orb out in front of him.

  He turned to find Vlad and Nico exchanging angry whispers while Orton lay sprawled on the ground.

  Lucky was surprised Orton was still out cold, though he didn’t have the high-end biobots the Marines did, just cheap, off-the-shelf crap that civvies got.

  Then he looked closer and realized Orton’s head was cocked at an unnatural angle.

  Broken neck. How did I miss that earlier?

  Nico and Vlad stopped talking. Vlad looked angry. Nico looked tired.

  “I think we can all go as a group this time. If they were going to shoot, they would have done it by now.”

  Nico was wearing another fix bag on his right foot where his biobots worked furiously to rebuild the lost limb.

  “Might be your first jump, rookie, but you already hold a record,” Lucky said. “I’ve never known anyone to lose the same limb twice in a single mission.”

  Nico flashed him a thin smile. “Thanks.”

  The kid’s eyes were sunken. He looked older. Sounded it, too. A few combat engagements would do that.

  “Or just one really screwed-up one,” said Rocky.

  Lucky doubted he himself looked much better. He was on the upper range of his stimulant cocktail limits. “You got this,” he said.

  This time Nico didn’t smile.

  Vlad’s eyelids started fluttering again, accessing something in her mind. He knew that as a scientist she had a different data directory from him, but Orton had never done that. In fact, the only other person he had seen do it was—

  An explosion boomed, and the ship lurched at a sharp angle.

  Lucky felt the orb waver and slip from his grasp.

  42

  Introductions

  He dove forward, arms outstretched, his rifle clattering away.

  The orb slipped through his fingers, thudded against the floor of the ship, then rolled back into his hands.

  He clenched his teeth, waiting for the world to end.

  Nothing happened. He exhaled.

  And then he was jerked over backward as the floor lurched a final time. This time, it slanted at a hard angle and stayed that way as everything in the small ship shifted to one side.

  They slid into a pile at the back of the ship, Lucky comically holding the orb aloft with his outstretched arm.

  As the three of them scrambled to their feet, Lucky carefully placed the orb back into the shielded array box in the center of the ship’s floor and sighed a heavy but relieved breath.

  Poor Orton, he thought, looking at the crumpled body of the scientist. And Cheeky. And Sarge.

  What a cluster.

  He grabbed his pulse rifle and nodded over at Nico, who was mobile now though still on one leg. He hopped over to the lip of the ship, bracing his rifle on the edge.

  “What the hell’s going on, Rocky?”

  Rocky sent a drone image into his mind’s eye. It was just pulling back from one of the other little ships still cluttering the hangar. As the field of view grew, Lucky’s heart sank.

  A hole had opened up and swallowed the ship holding Jiang, Dawson, and Malby.

  “They blew the floor.”

  Just like they blew the wall, he thought.

  “How did they rig it that fast?”

  This whole plan of coming to the hangar had been a disaster. They couldn’t have ended up in a worse place if the Union had chosen it.

  That thought hung in the air.

  He turned to Vlad.

  Maybe they had.

  “You,” he snarled.

  She turned as Lucky reached her, and he grabbed her by the throat, slamming her back against the bulkhead.

  Someone was going to start paying for this. He needed answers. Now!

  “Talk.”

  But she couldn’t talk because Lucky was squeezing her throat so hard she was choking.

  He tried to ease back, but he couldn’t. The red mist was clouding his vision now.

  “No,” he whispered. Not here, not now, not yet.

  He fought it, fought it with every fiber of his being. Fought Him.

  He felt Nico’s arm grasp his shoulder, shaking him.

  He had to keep The Hate in the bottle. If it got loose here, he would kill Vlad before he got his answers. And he would kill Nico just because. And then he would kill all those Union soldiers up there.

  “So, pros and cons,” noted Rocky.

  The sarcasm worked. He felt the hate ebb. It was Rocky’s doing, he knew, but he felt like he had something to do with holding back The Hate.

  God I need a drink.

  He was finally able to release his grasp on Vlad’s throat. She slid down the bulkhead and slumped to her ass.

  In the confusion of the melee in his mind, the spiders had gone berserk again. What were they seeing now?

  Nico still had his arm on Lucky’s shoulder.

  “It’s okay, I think I have it—”

  A fire ignited in his back, blossoming instantly across his entire body. He felt it right down to his dura-alloy skeleton. It burned across his neural network and danced over a trillion nanobots in his bloodstream.

  And then he felt nothing.

  His body completely rigid.

  He sensed his augmented systems were dark. All those Empire goodies that he relied upon so much.

  “Rocky?” he tried to echo. It didn’t work. Even though it was only ever a mental construct, he could feel the echo connection was gone. His mind’s eye was gone.

  There was nothing left in his mind but him.

  His head hung down. He was drooling.

  Then a black combat boot hopped into view. A hand grabbed him by the chin and gently lifted his face.

  The sunken eyes of a cool, composed professional killer stood before him.

  Nico.

  “Hello, Lucky,” he said.

  Over his shoulder Vlad stood and rubbed her throat, a menacing smile on her face.

  She patted Nico on the shoulder, and he stepped aside.

  “So you want me to talk?” she said. She nodded at Nico as their eyelids danced in rapid succession. “I’ll be happy to.”

  Lucky heard movement outside. Three union soldiers stepped inside the ship, weapons at their side.

  A dozen more loitered outside the ship.

  “My name is Do’ock Kun,” she said. “But you can just call me Queen Mother.” She paused, eyeballing Lucky. “Of the Da’hune.”

  43

  Family

  The Queen Mother slid the smooth, hard exoskeleton of her talon through a set of quantum beams. She did not understand how her people had devised this. Her clever daughter had explained, and she had nodded along patiently. She looked at her now. She was so smart, so beautiful. She would one day rule the Da’hune, along with her brother, and the elders would bow to them.

  But for now the elders were oblivious, like so many on both sides of the Great Corridor.

  Soon enough, she thought.

  Soon enough, her clan would spill the blood that honor demanded, and they would never again laugh at her for taking the name of the ancient queen of the Da’hune. Her people had lost their way. Her children would return them to the path.

  For now, she saw through the eyes of her human surrogate, the one they called Vladlena Alyona.

  At long last, they had the key. The gifted one th
ey thought they had lost.

  She felt pride for her daughter. Clever Do’ock Kelia. Her surrogate, Nico, had been brilliant. She had guided the gifted one to the ancient place and kept him safe while they tested the gift.

  To see the ancient power harnessed had made her shell quiver. To see how easily the gifted one could navigate the tiny, pathetic corridor the humans had made with their soft, useless hands.

  At last, they would traverse the Great Corridor and bring their people home.

  Her son entered and showed his fangs to his sister.

  He was as brutal as she was cunning.

  But both would be needed. One had done her part. Now it was the other’s turn.

  These are the two minds that a great ruler must know, and that her children must learn.

  All rulers sue for peace, but it is won with rivers of blood.

  They were coming home to reclaim a universe that had once been theirs, and theirs alone.

  Soon, it would be again.

  44

  The Vessel

  Lucky woke up and just wanted to breathe.

  He was drowning. There was green-yellow liquid over his face, filling his eyes, his nose, his mouth.

  He tried to reach up, but his hands wouldn’t move.

  He tried to yell, but his mouth wouldn’t open.

  He was frozen inside a tank of gel, staring upward into a vast open space.

  It was his nightmare, he thought.

  He was back in the experiments.

  And then Vlad’s face appeared floating above him, and he knew it wasn’t.

  “This must be all too familiar,” she said knowingly. “But trust me—this is no dream.”

  She held an umbilical cord with hundreds of wires wrapped in a fine mesh.

  “You say you aren’t special just because you lived, but that isn’t true, Lucky,” she said. “Oh sure, when we first gave you the gift, you weren’t special. Just another Empire Marine we captured and experimented on. But then you did something no one else did. You survived. So really, just living is exactly what makes you special.” She shrugged and paused a moment. “Okay, so the logic is a little circular.”