Murphy's Lawless: A Terran Republic Novel

by Charles E. Gannon

  And me, too, maybe. Murphy reached for his water bulb in the low gravity, affected a bored, roving stare as he sipped. But behind his (hopefully) duty-dulled eyes, he assessed the faces in the ops center. Which of them might have orders to cut their Family’s losses if the insertion fails? It was no secret that many of the leading Families among the SpinDogs had felt it better to go to ground—hide hard and deep—rather than try to go planetside in an attempt to silence the remaining interlopers from the Jrar system.

  There were a lot of flaws with their “hide and do nothing” strategy, of course. If the thugs, failed rent-a-cops, and contractor wannabes now on R’Bak made like E.T. and phoned home, there’d be little to zero chance of the SpinDogs and RockHounds remaining undetected. But if one or more Families had a contingency for that, had maybe decided to sell out the others in order to become spaceside satraps who swore service to the overlords on Kulsis, well, in that case…

  Murphy finished scanning the room as he returned the water bulb to its holder. He wasn’t sure what signs of incipient treachery he’d hoped to detect. None of them wore facial hair, so any unrevealed villains among them didn’t have greasy mustachios to twirl. Still, it stood to reason that if one or more Families had a contingency plan for mission failure, it probably involved either a cover-up or selling out directly to the Kulsians. Either way, that put every Terran in the system at risk, Dornaani promises of return and reward—or retribution—notwithstanding. For the SpinDogs and RockHounds, alien promises and threats were a distant maybe; a visit from the bloodthirsty and ruthless Kulsians was an already-established, in-your-face fact.

  But how could he be sure if such contingency plans even existed? Or if there was only one such plan? Or which of the faces in the ops center would be the expediters? Hell, I’m an infantry officer, not James-friggin-Bond. I can’t tell who they are—

  But…but maybe I don’t have to.

  Murphy stood into the one-third gee, looked at his watch for theatrical purposes. “In the event that the mission is a failure, I will need your collective cooperation on comms.”

  The most stone-hearted Hardliner didn’t keep all the contempt out of his voice. “You mean, to inform the rest of your men of their comrades’ tragic sacrifice in a timely fashion?”

  “No, in order to ensure that the Dornaani microsat net does not self-destruct.”

  All around the ops center, hooded eyes opened wide. An overseer from one of the Expansionist Families stood. “What do you mean?”

  Murphy checked his watch again. “There is little time to explain. Briefly: in addition to me, my cadre were all given failsafe implants. If we die, the implant ceases to signal. When it stops, the net self-destructs.”

  “We have detected no such signals during—”

  Murphy rode over the top of that and other nascent objections. “Since the signal frequency and interval are not known to anyone—even us—but are preprogrammed into the Dornaani satellites and control elements, there is no way to know if we would have seconds or days before the next failsafe check. In order to maintain the tactical advantages—” to put it lightly “—conferred by the microsat network, I will need to act with all haste. Please stand ready to re-task your lascom links to the coordinates I shall provide. If it becomes necessary.”

  Murphy sat. The ops center was silent for a long moment, and then a distempered buzz of murmurs and whispers rose up. He could guess the content: that the Terran major was lying; that he was not lying; that he was bluffing; that this duplicity was expected; that it was wholly unanticipated; that even Dornaani technology was not capable of sustaining such a subtle failsafe system over such extraordinary distances; that if the microsat net were lost, the SpinDogs and RockHounds would be blind to events on R’Bak just when they needed to see them more than ever.

  But Murphy didn’t care which they believed, because at the base of it all, they would realize that any contingency plans to disappear the rest of the Lost Soldiers or present them as a bloody gift to the captains of Kulsis, now had to be paused. For a few days, at the very least. Maybe permanently. And that would give Murphy time enough to pull another plan or ploy out of his ass.

  He hoped.

  It wasn’t pure fabrication; the Dornaani had rigged their microsats with a failsafe. It just wasn’t arranged along the lines that Murphy had drawn for his suddenly sullen and mistrustful audience.

  The now fury-faced Hardliner looked up again. “Signal received from the dropship; capsules have been deployed. Now entering upper atmosphere. Telemetry and instrumentation nominal.”

  Murphy held in a sigh of relief, thought it might burst out of his gut or lungs. So, in order to maintain an expression of calm, almost bored composure, he reached out for the logbook and scanned down for his last entry:

  Day 028 Dropship confirmed all parameters are nominal; mission on track.

  He erased the concluding words, and wrote instead:

  Day 028 Dropship confirmed all parameters are nominal; orbital insertion confirmed.

  He leaned back again, fought against the downward drag of his suddenly heavy eyelids, and wondered how long it would be before the op team would be able to make contact.

  If they survive the drop, that is.

  * * * * *

  Part Two: Tapper

  Chapter Twelve

  R’Bak

  Damn. I’ve heard of getting the shakes during a drop, but this is ridiculous.

  The insertion capsule was shuddering violently as it slowed, plunging deeper into the gravity well of the new planet. Despite all the precautions, both his limited equipment and body were rattling uncomfortably against the improvised padding and alloy bracing, creating a rapid thrumming. The little cone-shaped ship had stubby wings, but the thin atmosphere at high altitude denied them purchase. Dynamic forces snapped the vehicle back and forth across several degrees of pitch and yaw every second, resembling a ride inside the paint mixer of his father’s hardware store. The very worst of the uncomfortable oscillations made his vision gray out. Harry tried to relax, deliberately inhaling through his mouth and exhaling through his nose, as the rapid vibration created an ever louder metallic banging which was growing alarming. He had no idea if this was normal or not.

  It was his first space drop.

  Lieutenant Harold Tapper, formerly of the United States Navy, fought to clear his vision as he scanned the scant handful of monochromatic screens facing his acceleration cradle. A red peanut light began to blink as the adjacent display flashed a block of alternating black and gray text. The accompanying warning siren was mostly drowned out by the hammering sounds made by the tortured hull of the ship. His blurring eyesight made the mostly incomprehensible alien script useless, not that it would have made any difference during the meteoric insertion via a scratch-built pod. Regardless, he was pretty sure the alarm wasn’t a good sign.

  Unfortunately for Harry, his automated single person craft was lean on comfort and instruments, sharing those qualities with his last ride on the UH-60 Blackhawk which had ferried him out of Mogadishu almost one hundred and fifty years ago. Of course, that helicopter had been built in a proper factory. This thing had exposed fasteners and there were parts simply glued together. On the other hand, there wasn’t a window from which to see his surroundings. If he wanted a better view, he’d have to wait until this sorry excuse for a spaceship came apart around him. Which was, come to think of it, the last thing he remembered from that Blackhawk ride.

  An especially severe bit of turbulence rattled his teeth together for a moment. Some things never changed. He was still a passenger, entirely at the mercy of a product from the lowest bidder and the whim of the gods.

  Harry felt a change as the automated systems won out against the high-altitude winds, orienting his craft on the drop zone far below. Abruptly, the ride calmed. Even better, Harry’s earpiece pinged an alert as the networked systems aboard the other two aeroshells automatically re-established contact.

  “Seeker Six, this i
s Five,” Rodriguez said, reporting in. Sergeant First Class Marco Rodriguez was the only other Terran on this trip. “Hey, boss, everything okay over there? This ride is fucking number ten, like a Saigon boom-boom gi—”

  “Five, this is Six,” Harry replied, stepping on the Green Beret’s transmission, using their new shared language instead of his mother tongue. “No English. Ktoran only. I’m good. How about you, over?”

  “Well, there ain’t no red lights flashing anymore,” Rodriguez replied, using the language they shared with the third member of their team. “Now all I need is to wake up from this dream and find myself in the land of the Big PX.”

  “Copy that, Marco. Break, Four, this is Six, come in.”

  “I hear you, Lieutenant,” an accented tenor voice answered him in perfect English, no doubt making a point to the primitives from Earth. Volo Zobulakos’ English was better than Harry’s High Ktor, despite the forced learning program many of the Terrans had endured during their brief time awake on the Dornaani cruiser. He continued in the clipped syllables of his own language. “Passing thirty-five thousand meters. All systems nominal. Tracking directly for the principal LZ. Parachute deployment in two hundred and twenty seconds.”

  Harry acknowledged the transmission and ran through his sparsely populated landing checklist. Despite having nothing to do but wait for nearly four minutes, Harry compulsively scanned the inside of his capsule for the hundredth time. The stealthy re-entry vehicles were the product of the space-faring civilization to which Volo belonged. In fact, his entire people, nicknamed the SpinDogs, were now entirely based off-planet and had been for hundreds of years. Technologically, they were far, far ahead of the re-usable space shuttles which had been the state of art in America when Harry had deployed to Operation RESTORE HOPE in Somalia. However, this disposable and stealthy one-man capsule wasn’t the way he’d expected to be inserted. Harry had seen myriad craft in use around the SpinDogs’ habitats. From the single person scooters used to prospect in the asteroid clusters to large intra-system shuttlecraft, the SpinDogs had plenty of options for delivering the little team. However, the small, space-based civilization was paranoid to the point of making the average Explosive Ordinance Demolition tech seem careless.

  Rather than risk the detection and possible destruction of the dropship Hidden Knife, they’d eschewed a landing and chosen the simpler option of dropping individual personnel capsules in the vicinity of the target. If the mission succeeded, they could recover and recycle the aeroshells at leisure. If the mission failed, the SpinDogs were out three unpowered craft, two Lost Soldiers, and one very expendable scion of an upstart House.

  Harry expected that the Terrans didn’t count, of course.

  He watched the shiny digital altimeter count down as they fell toward the surface, just like a normal parachute jump. Instead of the old-school HALO method all SEALs practiced, back when there had been SEALs, this was something Major Murphy had dubbed an “OILO,” or Orbital Insertion Low Opening operation. It seemed unlikely any of the Kulsian raiders which had survived the strike against their orbital assets and planetary comm would be maintaining a radar net, but the clandestine drop also reduced the likelihood of visual detection. Much like the spec ops mission profiles back on Earth, Harry’s little team would survive by using discretion and craft, not brute firepower.

  That was a good thing because his current mission wasn’t even half-baked. Harry still wasn’t convinced this was the best Earth’s supposed allies and keepers of some high and mighty interstellar compact, the Dornaani, could do. Dump six dozen archaic humans on an enemy-occupied planet in order to secure a fallback point for a larger-scale mission which was itself just shy of being a forlorn hope? Entrust opening negotiations to an unproven local and a pair of junior military personnel? Convince your new allies to risk everything for strangers?

  And yet, here he was, hurtling downward like so much cargo.

  Harry looked intently at one of the few manual controls in the vehicle. The big red lever located between his knees was labeled in blocky Ktor script, but next to it some helpful wag among his English-speaking comrades had taped a label, “Manual Deployment. Not For Use Underwater. Activate Only In Atmosphere!” The next panel over included an electronic warfare warning menu which would warn of potentially hostile radar. Mercifully, it remained blank. That suggested the close approach of the drop ship had gone unnoticed.

  Something was going right, anyway. So much for Murphy’s Law.

  At which point a second red light began to blink as the previously blank EW alert flashed. The capsule abruptly turned, loading so many gees on Harry he didn’t have time to register surprise, let alone make a last radio call, before blacking out.

  He came to an unknown time later, but the ride was back to being smooth. The radio comms weren’t.

  “—ome in! Seeker Six, come in!”

  “This is Six. What the hell, over?” Harry replied muzzily.

  “Parachute deployment in thirty seconds!” Volo said urgently.

  Harry shook his head and yawned, then looked at the instruments. Crap, they were very nearly on the surface! There was no time to be surprised; he needed to work the problem. The shortness of the landing checklist didn’t make his situation any less dire.

  “Ten seconds!” Volo said, unnecessarily warning both Terrans. “Prepare for manual deployment.”

  If Marco Rodriguez was anything like Harry, he was watching the altimeter with growing apprehension. An impatient SpinDog technician had carefully repeated the instructions to an audience he doubtless regarded as incapable of using tools more sophisticated than rocks and sharp sticks. In theory, each craft would use a flicker laser to sense the minimum height-over-ground required for deployment of the chute to guarantee a safe landing. If he didn’t feel the automated systems deploy the capsule’s drogue and parachute combination, he’d have less than two seconds to mechanically initiate that critical step. Harry placed both hands on the pebbly surface of the L-shaped lever and took a deep breath. He watched his displays intently, counting down internally.

  In three, two, o—

  He was interrupted by the audible pop of the drogue ribbon launching over his head. One of his screens flashed the corresponding message, as the drogue gave his capsule a single, hard jerk, pressing him heavily into his couch. After dramatically slowing the freefall to a speed the twin parachutes could withstand, the drogue detached. A second, mushier jerk announced the canopies’ successful opening.

  The capsule had barely steadied underneath the green and brown parachutes before the capsule crashed to a painful stop. The scant padding on the seat might have prevented any serious injury, but Harry still ached all over. But like the pain caused by a misaligned crotch strap during a regular jump, this was a good sort of pain to have. The parachute had worked, and the capsule was down. The cone shaped vehicle came to rest on its side, however. Getting out was going to require a bit of scrambling.

  “Four, Five, this is Six,” he said, trusting the hands-free microphone on his helmet while hanging sideways in his straps. “Sound off.”

  “Five on the ground. Mind the first step, it’s a doozy,” Rodriguez said jauntily.

  “I’ve opened the hatch already, Lieutenant,” Volo answered. “It’s daylight, and we must cover the ships immediately.”

  “Copy,” Harry said, releasing his chest strap. He fell heavily against one of the instrument panels, painfully bruising his arm. He suppressed a heartfelt curse.

  “Popping the hatch.”

  He reached for the door lever, now inconveniently located over his head. After a pause, the capsule verified his intent, requiring a second yank before it obediently ejected the hatch outward with a percussive bang. Instantly, a cold wind filled his capsule, making him shiver. He poked his head outside and surveyed a bleak and rocky landscape which was partially obscured by the capsule’s billowing parachute.

  After donning a hooded parka from a storage cabinet underneath his feet, he withdre
w his personal equipment and weapon. Then, with an athleticism he didn’t feel, Harry used an inner handhold to swing outside. On either side of his aeroshell, the terrain rose several meters in elevation, forming a shallow canyon. His ‘chute was tangled in some stunted gray-green trees that bordered the drop zone. Knee-high, rust-colored spiky grass poked up in between the fist-sized stones covering much of the ground. The breeze smelled wet and musty, but the ground appeared dry. A football field distant, Harry could make out another capsule, and began trotting over. It was supposed to be dusk on R’Bak, but the overcast diffused the light. Out of reflex, he checked his wristwatch, which rode alongside a new gadget doubling as a short-range radio and compass. Both were still set to SpinDog station time, adopted during the mission prep. He supposed he could check with Volo. It didn’t matter yet. Experience had taught the SEAL exactly what time it was.

  The local hour is half past “your ass is in a sling.” My team is untested and outnumbered, the local population is mostly hostile, the wildlife carnivorous, and, in two years, the local star is going to approach its binary twin, boiling the oceans and scorching the land. Oh, and your extract off-planet depends entirely on mission success, so don’t screw up.

  Welcome to R’Bak.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Thirteen

  R’Bak

  Harry couldn’t even hear the noise of the Mog, anymore. Just Sara’s voice and stateside sounds low in the background. He tried to get his ear closer to the phone without being aware of it in his hand.