“Excuse me, sir, isn’t nu-flesh hugely expensive?”, asked Virginia as she and the other marines exchanged confused glances. “I thought only elites and management could afford that kind of medical treatment.”
“Yeah, I figured they’d just stick an auto-inflator in there and be done with it,” said Ben, “Our standard Reaper policies don’t cover nu-flesh.”
“They don’t, Takeda, and yes, Tillman, the nu-flesh organs are top of the line bio-ware, and Jada is going to have a mountain of debt to pay off for medical treatments outside of her standard plan,” agreed Boss Marsters as he sat down in one of the uncomfortable waiting room chairs and began to rub his temples, revealing the fatigue of the last several days, “And before you ask, yes, I was the one who authorized the procedure. Pursuant to REAPER Battlefield Protocol 16, the commanding officer assumes decision making responsibilities for a marine’s medical care if that marine is in critical condition and unable to communicate with the attending medical staff.”
“So you just decided that she was going to incur another debt that she’s got to pay back?” asked Samuel, with more heat in his voice than was wise considering who he was speaking with. Wynn Marsters’ face darkened instantly with anger.
“Hyst, and the rest of you, had better listen up,” said Boss Marsters in a low growl, “Until your time with the Reapers ends, your lives are in the hands of your squad leaders, and believe it or not we want you to survive.’ He paused and drew a breath before speaking again.
“Let’s say I decided to save Jada some money and she got the auto-inflator. We all know those things are fragile and prone to breakdown, so she’d have to get it replaced every year or so, and the standard plan doesn’t cover replacements. That means that she would either incur more debt buying the replacements or she would just go on living with one lung. I need a marine who isn’t going to get winded and out of breath in the middle of an engagement. I need a marine who isn’t going to take a few slugs to the chest and pass out because the armor impacts disrupted the inflator. And believe me, Jada doesn’t want that either, even if it means she’ll have to put in more time on the job to pay it down.”
Boss Marsters stood up and stormed away, but just before he reached the exit the squad leader turned around. His expression softened and he said, “We are soldiers, and that means that people get killed and people get hurt. Everyone knows that the standard Reaper plan is garbage and everything else is astronomically expensive. There is no middle ground. That’s life in the Grotto Corporation, and this is the gamble we make to earn the Reaper pay rate. None of us would be here if we were satisfied with our workforce assignments, so remember that we all chose to be here and to assume the risk.”
After Boss Marsters left the room the three marines were grimly silent, each lost in their own thoughts, until George Tuck emerged from the interior waiting room.
“Hey guys, glad you came to check in. I figure you heard what Marsters did?” asked George as he joined the small group.
“Just told us, crazy stuff man, but he’s got a point,” said Virginia as she put an arm around George to comfort him. “She’s going to pull through just fine, and so what if there will be a ton more credits hanging over her head. We could all die tomorrow.”
“You have a weird way of trying to comfort people,” laughed Ben as he started walking towards the door. “Tuck, we’re gonna hit the cantina, you should come.”
“Seriously, George, this is going to be our one night of leisure before that space hulk consumes our very existence,” grumbled Virginia amiably as George nodded his head and let the marines lead him away from med-bay.
Samuel hung back, staying a few paces behind the rest of the marines, lost in thought. Mag had warned him about the medical risks one took when getting wounded on the battlefield, though he couldn’t fault Boss Marsters for wanting the best for his wounded marine.
Jada had not been the only casualty of Tango Platoon in the last twenty-four hours. The new guy to Squad Taggart, whom Samuel had found out from Mag was named Kristoph, had bought it along with Oliver during the fight for the landing zone. He’d watched Andrea Baen gunned down right before his eyes, while both Lucinda Ulanti and Spencer Green had been sent to med-bay with various cuts, bruises, and bullet holes. He tried to solace himself with the knowledge that it would take some time, but Jada, Spencer, and Boss Ulanti would all be back on duty soon enough, he thought to himself as he followed his friends.
He understood the desire to have a few strong drinks, especially after the harrowing twenty-four hours he had just experienced. It wasn’t until the debriefing that it had really sunk into his mind just how incredibly lucky he, or any of them for that matter, had been to survive.
While the salvage marines had been fighting their way through the Praxis Mundi ship, one of the concealed pirate cruisers had fired up its engines and launched a counter-attack on the Reaper tug. The pirate vessel was not sufficiently armed to do any crippling damage to the heavily armored tug ship, though it certainly could have prevented the second wave of assault craft that were ramping up to launch. Without the second wave for support, the first boarding force of marines would most certainly have run out of ammunition, suffered horrible casualties, and likely have been swallowed by the hulk.
If the hulk was not taken in a boarding action, the Reaper fleet would have had to pull back and wait for a Grotto warship to arrive with artillery capable of simply blasting the hulk to pieces. Doing so might preserve the lives of hundreds of marines, but a boarding action was the only way to secure the hulk for proper salvage.
During the artillery exchange between the pirate cruiser and the Reaper security frigate that moved to intercept it, there was an explosion. At the time of the debriefing it was not known whether the explosion was caused by ordinance from the nearby void battle between the cruiser and the frigate. It might have been charges placed by the pirates to intentionally render the Praxis Mundi unsalvageable, or perhaps simply a mechanical accident. Regardless of the cause, the ship was ripped from its moorings by the explosion and had tumbled through space, losing its artificial gravity, followed only minutes later by power, and thus life support.
The furious zero gravity combat had raged on for several more minutes. When the lights went out the fight was done in sickeningly close quarters. Samuel, even many hours later, still found his hands shaking at the thought of what it had been like fighting the last pirate, out of ammunition and his combat rifle forgotten somewhere in the darkness of the ship. Spears of light shining through the viewports of the central deck, in addition to the sporadic flashes and lights from the receding void battle offered the only occasional glimpses of the battle.
Samuel still had his light in one hand and his boarding knife in the other when a pirate barreled into him from behind. The two men had careened through the deck as each slashed and stabbed at the other with his respective blade. After a few intense moments, Samuel was able to score a deep gouge through the man’s inner thigh. The pirate’s arterial wound had sprayed blood that that instantly crystallized and it was the sight of scarlet crystals shattering against his helmet’s faceplate that had chilled Samuel to the core.
Mag had always warned him that it was the little details that would drive a man crazy if he didn’t deal with them. So that night Samuel was determined to tell his friends the story and get it out into the open. By the time he did, everyone was drunk enough to laugh about it. There were more psychologically responsible ways to cope with such things, Samuel had found himself thinking, but this was certainly more fun.
The marines enjoyed their time in the cantina, knowing that at the start of the next day cycle the salvage of the space hulk would begin.
Rough tonnage estimates, not accounting for unknown factors or additional resource discoveries, placed the salvage time at six standard months. The marines would be swapping out their battle armor and combat rifles for hazard suits, welders, and lifters. There would still be security patrols, since the massive
structure no doubt still housed pockets of pirates and squatters who were not killed in the fighting, or had chosen not to turn themselves in.
Samuel knew that most of the pirates and squatters would end up being shipped to one of the many penal colonies operated by Grotto. Even the humans who called the space hulk home were considered revenue-generating resources to be salvaged, tallied, and redistributed.
At the end of six months, where the impossibly large space hulk had once drifted through space, there was little more than a small cloud of debris.
TETRA PRIME
Samuel was jostled in his seat as the combat speeder wove its way through the ravine; a jagged furrow torn through the land by eons of flowing currents. The waters of the planet known as Tetra Prime had long since been siphoned away, leaving the former sea beds to bake in the punishing light of the triple suns that illuminated the Tetra star system.
From his seat Samuel could see through a small viewport and his breath caught in his throat as the combat speeder exited the ravine to reveal hundreds of miles of sandy valley floor below. The mission briefing had educated him on the history of the planet and current military objectives, but the sheer power of humanity’s ability to change a planet had not been presented to him so dramatically as it was in that moment.
As Samuel looked out at the valley it was hard to believe that only one hundred twenty-seven standard years ago this planet was a single vast ocean, the only surface land being a handful of wave-battered islands.
According to the briefing, Grotto purchased the planet, along with half of the rest of the Tetra system, from Rubicon Enterprises at a bargain price. Rubicon had liquidated the entire system to fund a distant trade war and expansion campaign several galaxies away. Rubicon had been using Tetra Prime as an untapped water reserve, and though they had leased fishing rights to several small operations, the impact on the marine population was minimal considering the size of the planet.
When Grotto Corporation took over the planet, the resource giant had bought out the fishing leases and installed a number of pipeline hubs on the scattered islands. These pipeline hubs drew raw water from the oceans, filtered out the rocks, sediment, and marine life from the water and stored it in massive containers. The containers would be loaded onto cargo haulers that would move back and forth between the hubs and the truly gargantuan deep space transport ships for which Grotto was famous. The transports would then move the water throughout Grotto space to feed the various needs of the company.
With corporations engaging in business across such vast tracts of mapped space there were billions of thirsty citizens, hydro-electric plants, and various other industrial efforts that required staggering amounts of the precious liquid.
Grotto Corporation, which had a well-deserved reputation as a voracious destroyer of worlds, cared little for engaging in sustainable environmental practices. In as few as ninety two years the entire planet’s oceans were sucked dry and as much as ninety five percent of the planet’s water had been harvested and taken off-world. The rapid change in the planet’s mass had altered its gravitational and magnetic properties. What had once been a planet with a relative fifty percent sunlight and fifty percent darkness relationship with its triple sun swiftly tilted on its axis. The new orbital pattern bathed the majority of the planet in the scorching light of at least one of the three suns at all times, leaving a small portion of the planet in perpetual freezing darkness. With the marine life extinct, no standing water beyond a few frozen lakes on the dark side of the planet, and nothing else left to take, Grotto had abandoned the planet.
The speeder came to a stop at the mouth of the ravine to wait for the rest of the column to enter the ravine and muster at the mouth. The engines of the speeders caused too much vibration for more than one to go through the ravine without causing seismic signatures that could be read by the security sensors likely being used by the enemy to defend their newly seized prize.
Samuel looked down at the center of the valley and took in the sight of the colony. The name of the colony was unknown to him beyond the designation RLC5611, which stood for “Red Listed Colony”, this one being the five thousand six hundred and eleventh recorded by Grotto. Samuel doubted that many of those recorded colonies still stood since it was the standard policy for Reapers to forcibly remove them from salvage sites.
Though he had participated in driving out a number of squatter communities from valuable salvage sites during his time with Hive Fleet 822, many more were recorded that later disappeared into the void or were taken by pirates.
Red List ships and settlements were notoriously difficult to keep track of, especially since few in the corporate world cared much about their presence, unless, as was the case on Tetra Prime, those Red Listers were squatting on something of value.
According to the brief, the people of RLC5611 had settled on the planet for reasons unknown, but in the process of establishing their colony, had discovered micro-deposits of nefadrite ore in the scorched silt dunes that now covered the planet.
The colony had been positioned in this particular valley due to the prevailing wind patterns. With a series of massive turbines they churned through the wind to separate the nefadrite ore from the rest of the silt. When nefadrite began to appear on the black market several companies took interest, and investigators went to work tracking the ore back to its source.
A Helion investigator had found the link between the purchase of the turbines to the Red Listed colonists. Helion, much like Grotto, was a galaxy spanning mega-corporation with interests across the universe and the relationship between Helion and Grotto was somewhat poor at present.
Though every company in the universe was engaged in some manner of trade war with one or more opponents, most military engagements were clandestine and only rarely would formal war be declared. In fact, the last formal wars had been fought between Grotto, Aegis, and the now defunct Wageri corporations nearly a century prior.
In those hard years, entire cities were drawn into the conflict. Many administrators and educators insisted that now, war was a more civilized affair and violence only occurred on actual work sites and resource locations.
It was a convenient narrative to spin for the masses, thought Samuel as he looked down on the colony, some of its buildings still smoking from the Helion occupation.
When Helion battle forces stormed the settlement Samuel imagined that the colonists would disagree with the official corporate historians. According to available intelligence a sizeable Helion battle force had entered Grotto space and seized the colony roughly seventy-two hours prior.
Grotto Corporation had become aware of the nefadrite deposits and turbine colony thanks only to the invasion causing the Grotto investigators to finally put two and two together. The corporation was engaged in several mining and gas harvesting operations on other planets and moons in the Tetra Prime system and it was deemed an Alpha Priority to drive out the Helion invaders. Not just to push them out of a Grotto system in general, but also to protect the existing infrastructure of the colony so that once under Grotto control the nefadrite extraction could continue.
The rest of Squad Taggart was strapped into seats alongside Samuel. The new marine was Bianca Kade, and though she’d been with the squad for the last three years, having replaced the marine lost back on the space hulk, Samuel couldn’t help but think of her as Aaron’s replacement.
Aaron Baen had died back on M5597, sitting against a wall and forgotten by his comrades during the furious firefight. Samuel had always felt it was his fault that Aaron had been allowed to bleed out.
Plenty of other marines had insisted to Samuel that these sorts of things happened on the battlefield, that while Aaron lay bleeding Samuel was fighting for his own life.
Samuel knew this to be true, but he had not been able to shake that feeling of responsibility and guilt for years. Aaron was his first medic patient and the first casualty of Squad Taggart since the founding on Baen 6. Samuel had figured that was why he had
so much trouble learning the names of Aaron’s replacements. It wasn’t until Bianca joined the squad that he’d finally gotten over it. Granted, Samuel had to admit to himself, that was likely also, in part, to he and Bianca having taken to each other’s bed several times over the last few years.
The marine carried a great deal of guilt about his multiple infidelities since joining the Reapers. He knew that one day he had to come clean with Sura. He wondered how he could possibly communicate to her the raw need for human contact that rose up within him, within most all of the marines, when they survived a particularly harrowing engagement.
Samuel’s first time had been with Jada after the fight with the monsters on M5597. As for Bianca, she’d come to him for comfort after the two of them had spent nearly an hour pinned down and exchanging sniper fire with a mob of armed squatters who refused to leave a decommissioned refinery during the Hive Fleet 822 campaign.
Samuel knew about plenty of other relationships and trysts within Tango Platoon and with other platoons. It was next to impossible to keep secrets on board the Reaper tug, and most people didn’t even attempt to hide anything.
Each marine carried with them the burdens of their debts, some the responsibility for their families, and all of them the knowledge that each mission could be their last.
Only a small handful of marines in the Reaper ranks were without some family connection planetside, like Boss Marsters, so even in their infidelity, there was a common bond between the marines and their comrades.
As he thought of comrades, Samuel’s gaze fell upon the other people in the combat speeder. In addition to Squad Taggart there were three elite troopers who perched in the onboard launch tubes. They were members of the Folken, a mercenary force contracted by Grotto to lead the assault on RLC5611.
Salvage Marines (Necrospace Book 1) Page 9