“I’m sorry, Mr. Remington.” Taylor held his eyes on the floor. “I appreciate the kind words. Really, I do. And in another life, I’d have taken your offer 10 minutes ago. Unfortunately, this ain’t that life, and I must respectfully decline.”
Remington drummed his fingers on the edge of the bar. “You mentioned my employer’s reputation for luring talent earlier. Well, if you know him, then you also know his reputation for something else: philanthropy. Swamp Eagle Security left a mark on this city—on the American South, for that matter—that will never be forgotten. At a time when outsiders came from as far out as Great Britain to seize on Floridian promise, here were five men who rose from these very swamps to conquer the world and build lives for themselves that few can even imagine. Yet no matter the heights they soared to nor the money they made, the Eagles never lost sight of those roots. Anyone who doubts that need only look to their leader for assurance.”
Taylor smiled at the memory.
“Terry was the quintessential Southern Man,” Remington said. “Fiery, charismatic, sometimes even brash, but driven as hell and loyal as a hound to anyone he called friend. These were the traits that defined him and his company, be that in the hell fires of an alien battlefield or a pep rally in his high school gymnasium. Terry’s only flaw, as far as I can see, was his inability to care for his own interests with the same fervor he cared for those of others.”
On that, Remington had a point. For all his savvy as an entrepreneur, Terry had made one critical error: he’d neglected to leave a proper will in the event of his passing. Taylor had cursed his brother for that, especially when they’d lost the house. Still, how many single guys with no kids worry about wills at age twenty-nine?
“You asked why Mr. Dominic wants you for this position,” Remington said. “Well, if I had to guess I’d say it’s because he knows what I learned when I started digging into you. There are others who could lead Swamp Eagle Security. But in the end, you’re the only one who should.”
Taylor held there, speechless.
“All right then.” The redhead glanced at his watch. “I really must be going.”
“Whoa, what?” Taylor piped up. “You sure I can’t get you another drink? It’s on the house.”
Remington shook his head and fished out a business card, laying it on the bar. “I’m staying at the Duke’s Club near Sawgrass until the morning. That’s when my flight leaves for New Orleans. You should know that while your brother’s company is Mr. Dominic’s first choice for this venture, there are others, as well as a timetable we must adhere to. I’d therefore urge you to make your decision quickly.” He tapped the card for emphasis. “Fate has dealt you an opportunity to change your future forever, mate. I suppose the only question now is, do you have the intestinal fortitude to take it?” And with that, the stranger strolled from the room with the same careless ease he’d entered with.
Taylor stood motionless for a long moment, head spinning like a top with all that’d been said. There was so much to consider, from his brother’s legacy to the promise he’d made his mother in the wake of Terry’s accident. There was also her health to factor in, plus the mountain of medical debt that was already threatening to overwhelm their finances.
Finally, Taylor’s thoughts turned to the resident superhero of his life. Rita. She deserved so very much more than she had. And yet no matter how bad things had gotten, she’d never once complained. Not one time. She just sucked it up and soldiered on, because that’s what heroes do. Still, even heroes have their limits, and at the rate Rita was going—three jobs plus her role as their mother’s primary caregiver—Taylor knew it was only a matter of time before she burned out.
Something had to change.
“Yo, hillbilly!” a voice called.
Taylor turned to see Rex standing in the doorframe to The Hell House’s corner office.
“You got a call,” the metal-head said.
Now what? Heaving a sigh, Taylor headed for the space and waited for his co-worker to take his leave. Once Rex had gone, he closed the door for privacy and placed a thumb to the aging comm’s respond key. “Van Zant here.”
# # # # #
GO FOR BAIT by T.C. Bucher
“This is Cochkala shit, Chief,” the young, female noncom’s voice rang in Mackey’s earpiece. “Guarding an underground maglev station on some backwater, crap-smelling farm planet.”
The transport door opened, and Mackey squinted against the harsh sunlight of a 48-degree Celsius day on Geomide II. It was less than an hour until full dark, and the air still felt like the inside of an exhaust port. At least it would be dark soon, and they would get a little respite from the heat.
Mackey jumped down from the back of the transport into 10 centimeters of powdery soil the consistency of volcanic ash. Behind him, three squads piled out, sending up clouds of dust that would wreak havoc on the platoon’s equipment. The dust had an acrid, metallic smell similar to copper. It tasted worse. Mackey unlatched his vapor mask and spit, but it did little to remove the gritty film already coating his teeth and tongue.
“Why do we get all the shit jobs?” the female noncom asked.
Mackey could correct Thavy for her attitude, but decided against it. She was young for a squad leader and hot tempered. If he reprimanded her, she’d only bottle it up until she exploded on her soldiers later. Might as well let her vent what the rest of the platoon was thinking. Soldiers have always been the same. They don’t care if you have the ability to change things, only that you acknowledge their complaints. Besides, she was the only one pinned in the platoon, and it was never a good idea to piss off the communications specialist, especially when she was the one pinlinked to your recon drones.
Mara, the Third Squad leader, was the last soldier to exit the transport. “Would you look at this place?”
For endless kilometers in every direction, the fields around them were littered with scattered and broken pod shells left behind by harvester machines. The broken shells were thicker than Mackey’s thigh, and more than a few were the size of the transport. In the distance, four-hundred-ton harvesters inched their way across the horizon, sucking up soil and shattering the massive pods to get at the crystalized murculite inside. Behind each, ejected soil and shell fragments swirled with the power of an F5 tornado. The only manmade structures visible in any direction, besides the entrance to the transfer station where they’d landed, were the scattered dumpchutes the harvesters used to drop their cargo onto underground conveyors.
“LT says this mission is important to our contract, so we do it.” He pointed up. “What’s the PRD show?”
Thavy flicked down the SyncSlate embedded in the front of her combat armor. The screen lit up with an aerial view from the platoon reconnaissance drone two kilometers overhead. She cycled through sensors—thermal, infrared, movement tracking, k- and x-band, ultraviolet, hydrometric—without touching a button. The display was all for him. Thavy had no need of the slate. She processed the images raw through her pinplants.
“All clear, Chief.”
“And the AMWARN?”
On screen, he could see her run a diagnostic on the system. It lit up green. The AMWARN would give them five or six seconds’ warning prior to incoming artillery or missiles. The insurgents didn’t have any missiles as far as Mackey knew, but he wasn’t taking any chances.
Satisfied with their systems, Mackey moved to the maintenance entrance for the transfer station. The door was only half a meter tall. The indigenous population were short, furred, and sported long flat front teeth—sort of like walking rodents without the ears or tails. Shaking hands with one of their long-clawed employers had been like shaking hands with a large, exotic pet. Mackey shook his head. This place must have had one hell of a strange ecosystem for them to wind up on top of the food chain. But as long as they paid, who was he to judge? Legionaries Inc. certainly didn’t care.
He wiped dust from a keypad next to the door and punched in a code. It beeped at him, but the door di
dn’t move. He frowned and punched it again. Nothing happened. “Friggin locals. Useless,” he mumbled. He wrapped his knuckles on the door. The muted thud told him they weren’t going to force it open. That changed things. LT wanted a squad belowground guarding the transfer station.
Mackey backed up and looked toward the top of the structure. About 30 meters wide and 10 tall, the fibercrete walls of the facility rose up like a round culvert stood on its end. The top was capped, and the small door was the only blemish on the smooth surface. Stenciled above the door was the number 17. He flipped his com switch so the whole platoon could hear him speak. “All the dropchutes you see lead to a transfer station below us where the murculite gets dumped into maglev cars. From here, it runs to a refinement center on the coast. Intel says the rebels plan on hitting it tonight. If they destroy the transfer station, they shut down the whole region.”
“If it’s so important, why isn’t the LT here?” Mara asked.
“Shut it, Mara.” While Mackey believed in the age-old soldier mantra of reward in public, chastise in private, Mara was more experienced and knew better than to mouth off on the platoon net. He was also good enough to get his own platoon if he’d just learn to shut up and color when told. “LT’s at a briefing with the boss and the rest of the company officers. He’ll be here with fourth squad when it’s over.”
Mara said something into his mic, but it wasn’t on the platoon frequency. Several of his squad members laughed.
Mackey would have a little talk with Mara later. Right now, it was time for business. There was something about this place that had him on edge, although he couldn’t have said what it was exactly. Glitches, like the door code not working, always came in threes, and when little things went wrong, big things tended to follow. “Change of plans. Thavy, your squad has the transport and the main gun. Taber, you have zero to one-eighty. Mara, you have the other side. Fifty meters out and dig in. Crew-served weapons set at cardinal directions. I want the second PRD up and circling 20 kays out.” He thumbed toward the fibercrete structure. “And put a sniper team on top of that thing. We’ll worry about getting inside when the LT shows up.”
There were a few grumbles at the command to “dig in,” but they would do it. They were professionals. While most company hires called themselves mercs, the Legionaries considered themselves soldiers—a class above the rest. For the most part, they were right.
Mackey pulled off his helmet and ran a hand over his close-cropped, gray hair. His hand came away gritty and wet with sweat. Beside him, Thavy threw a pack down and dug around for something. She had a jagged scar running from her temple, across her left eye, and over the bridge of her nose. The eye had been replaced with an implant, and she’d gone with one that made no attempt to hide the loss. It looked like someone shoved a crude, chrome-ringed camera lens into the socket. This close to her, he could hear it whir and click as it zoomed in and out.
Behind Thavy, her squad prepped the transport for combat support, opening ports on each side and mounting weapons. The transport didn’t have the armor to make it a true armored personnel carrier, it was really more of a souped-up flyer, but it sported plates thick enough to stop the local projectile weapons. It also had a 20mm magnetic accelerator cannon that would level any platform the insurgents could muster against them. At least that’s what the Trade Guild intel said in the contract.
So why did he feel like a cat in a room full of rocking chairs? After the three-jump trip to Geomide in cramped quarters, maybe it was simply the wide-open space that gave him the heebie-jeebies. Still, he would’ve felt more relaxed with a few CASPers to augment the platoon. Unfortunately, the company didn’t have the resources to waste CASPers on guard duty.
Thavy found what she was looking for and pulled out a water pouch. “Hydrate or die, Chief,” she said and winked with her good eye, making light of the company motto Pugna eul Morietur—Latin for Fight or Die. She pulled out a second water pouch for him.
It bothered the others when she winked like that—it made her look inhuman—but not Mackey. All he cared about was that she was good at her job, and she was tops.
He wiped the sweat from his hand onto his combat armor, leaving a grimy streak, and took the pouch from Thavy. She was all smiles and dimples under a face full of freckles. If it weren’t for the scar and the eye, she’d be the sweetest, most innocent-looking killer you’d ever meet.
He held the water pouch up in a mock toast. “Hydrate or die, it is.”
* * *
The blare of the AMWARN startled Mackey. He leapt up from where he dozed against the fibercrete—exactly the opposite of hitting the dirt like a good soldier should when under artillery or missile attack—and flipped his goggles to night vision. A blinking icon told him the direction of the single incoming projectile.
“I’m on it, Chief,” Thavy called out over the com.
A missile streaked up from the transport, quickly followed by a second. The counter-missile missiles were small, but the flare still turned Mackey’s vision white.
“Intercept in three...two...damn. Countermeasures. Changing the second CMM to k-band. Locked...and...impact.” There was an explosion a thousand meters or so out. “Take that, polla-fucker!”
“What’d they send at us?” He had no idea what a polla was, but he didn’t ask.
“Hell if I know, Chief. Some kind of advanced missile. Thought you said these rebels only had projectile weapons.”
The return of the AMWARN cut off his response.
“Two more inbound. Launching CMMs.”
Again his vision flared white as, one after another, four more CMMs streaked off toward the incoming missiles.
“K-band is jammed. Let’s try...got you.”
There was a detonation in the distance, closer than the last one.
“Better hide your asses. The second one’s going to be close,” Thavy said over the net.
Mackey knelt low to the ground. Around him soldiers disappeared into fighting positions like frightened groundhogs scurrying back into their dens. Two more CCMs streaked away from the transport.
There was an eerie moment of quite before an explosion blossomed no more than a hundred meters away.
“Hope they don’t have too many more of those babies. You’d think—”
“Cut the chatter.” The transport had a basic load of twenty CCMs, normally enough to protect it from a few missiles while the pilot hunted and killed whoever launched them. That meant only twelve left. “Do you have a fix on the shooter?”
“Negative, Chief. Missiles came out of thin air at Mach 2. I don’t read anything other than the harvesters moving out there. Either they’ve got a soft launch system and they’re hiding, or they’re using a platform with ghosting equipment more sophisticated than our sensors.”
Mackey flipped down his own SyncSlate and pulled off his goggles. “Give me the harvesters and the missile tracks. Play it through from the first missile.” A few seconds later, Mackey frowned.
“Looks like they’re using the harvesters to mask the launch.”
That wasn’t quite right. “Maybe...look up instead of at the ground. Zoom to max width.” Aside from more harvesters, the slate remained blank. He looked at the time. It was near mid-night on a planet with a twenty-seven-point-four hour rotation.
“That’s out to a hundred kays, Chief. According to both the PRD and the transport’s LIDAR, there’s nothing flying out there.”
“Have you sent up a situation report?”
“Yeah, I sent a sitrep about point-three seconds after the attack.” He could hear irritation in her voice. She was impatient with those who weren’t pinned. “No response from Lieutenant Shale or Ops.”
Of course the comms would be out—glitch number two. “What’s the LT’s ETA?”
“Her pilot pinged me when they launched. ETA of zero-one-thirty, so ninety-four minutes out.”
Mackey did the math in his head. “We’ll be able to pick her up with sensors in sixty minutes.”
“Sixty-four-point three, to be exact.”
Two clocks appeared on Mackey’s slate—one for the LT’s time to sensor range and one for time to arrival.
“Keep pinging the LT and Ops. Let me know when either one responds.”
“Yes, Chief.”
Mackey switched over to the platoon net.
“Listen up. LT and fourth squad are about ninety minutes out. Kill the rest plan. Everyone stays on full alert ‘til she arrives. Intel said these rebels used only civilian flyers and projectile weapons. Looks like intel was wrong. Nothing new there. I would love to use the transport to go H&K whoever launched those missiles, but I’m not moving our only protection away from this facility. I’ve a feeling we’re going to need it again before the LT gets here. Thavy, send the second PRD out around those harvesters. Put a 20mm round through anything that moves.”
Each of the three squad leaders acknowledged his orders. Damn, he hated being on the defense. It gave all the advantages to whoever was out there in the dark.
* * *
Sixty-six minutes and two missile attacks later, neither the LT nor Ops had responded. Nothing showed on the sensors.
“LT could be out there, Chief. There’s a lot of interference from the dust.”
She was grasping at straws. He had a hunch things were about to go south.
Mackey flipped down his slate. “Pull up the first missile tracks again and overlay the next two attacks.”
For a Few Credits More: More Stories from the Four Horsemen Universe (The Revelations Cycle Book 7) Page 32